J. M. Robertson

“ It is thus by culture and experience—culture limited but concentrated, and experience limited but intense—that the man Shakspere has been intelligibly made into the dramatist Shakspere as we find him when he comes to his greatest tasks. For the formation of the supreme artist there was needed alike the purely plastic organism and the special culture to which it was so uniquely fitted to respond; culture that came without search, and could be undergone as spontaneously as the experience of life itself; knowledge that needed no more wooing than Ann Hathaway, or any dubious angel in the sonnets. ”

“ I have said above that we seem to see passing from Montaigne to Shakspere a vibration of style as well as of thought; and it would be difficult to overstate the importance of such an influence. A writer affects us often more by the pulse and pressure of his speech than by his matter. Such an action is indeed the secret of all great literary reputations; and in no author of any age are the cadence of phrases and the beat of words more provocative of attention than in Montaigne. They must have affected Shakspere as they have done so many others ”

“ He represents industry in art without inspiration. The two contrasted pictures, of Jonson writing out his harangues in prose in order to turn them into verse, and of Shakspere giving his lines unblotted to the actors—speaking in verse, in the white heat of his cerebration, as spontaneously as he breathed—these historic data, which happen to be among the most perfectly certified that we possess concerning the two men, give us at once half the secret of one and all the secret of the other. Jonson had the passion for book knowledge, the patience for hard study, the faculty for plot-invention ”

“ In sum, his philosophy is just Montaigne's, turned to the needs of a broken spirit instead of a confident one—to the purposes of a chagrined and exhausted convertite instead of a theist of the stately school of Cicero and Seneca and Plutarch. Without Montaigne, one feels, the Pensées might never have been written: they represent to-day, for all vigilant readers, rather the painful struggles of a wounded intelligence to fight down the doubts it has caught from contact with other men's thought than any coherent or durable philosophic construction. ”

“ For the swift and penetrating flash of Montaigne, which either goes to the heart of a matter once for all or opens up a far vista of feeling and speculation, leaving us newly related to our environment and even to our experience, Seneca can but give us a conscientious examination of the ground, foot by foot, with a policeman's lantern, leaving us consciously footsore, eyesore, and ready for bed. ”

“ And there is no theme on which he does not some time or other dart his sudden and searching glance. It is truly said of him by Emerson that "there have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts: he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for. Cut these words and they bleed; they are vascular and alive." Such a voice, speaking at Shakspere's ear in an English nearly as racy and nervous as the incomparable old-new French of the original, was in itself a revelation. ”

“ And I would put it that Montaigne is really, for the civilised world at this day, what Petrarch has been too enthusiastically declared to be—the first of the moderns. He is so as against even the great Rabelais, because Rabelais misses directness, misses universality, misses lucidity, in his gigantic mirth; he is so as against Petrarch, because he is emphatically an impressionist where Petrarch is a framer of studied compositions ”

“ Thou hast no youth nor age, But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, Dreaming on both: for all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich, Thou hast neither heat, affection, limbs, nor beauty, To make thy riches pleasant. ”

“ It is impossible to put into fewer and fuller words the story, many a year long, of sordid compulsion laid on an artistic nature to turn its own inner life into matter for the stage. But he who can read Shakspere might be expected to divine that it needed, among other things, even some such discipline as that to give his spirit its strange universality of outlook. ”

“ In Othello we have indeed a very strictly dramatic array of the forces of wrong—weakness, blind passion, and pitiless egoism; but there is already a full suggestion of the overwhelming energy of the element of evil; and in Lear the conception is worked out with a desperate insistence which carries us far indeed from the sunny cynicism and prudent scepticism of Montaigne. Nowhere in the essays do we find such a note of gloom as is struck in the lines:
"As flies to wanton boys are we to the Gods: They kill us for their sport." ”

“ Now death, which some of all horrible things call the most horrible, who knows not how others call it the only haven of this life's torments? the sovereign good of nature? the only stay of our liberty? ”

“ Years before, in Hamlet, he had dramatically caught the force of Montaigne's frequent thought that daylight life might be taken as a nightmare, and the dream life as the real. It was the kind of thought to recur to the dramatist above all men, even were it not pressed upon him by the essayist's reiterations:
"Those which have compared our life unto a dream, have happily had more reason so to do than they were aware. ”

“ Under no stress of satisfaction from his best finds can we be moved to call him a man of genius, which is just what we call Montaigne after a few pages. It is the broad difference between industry and inspiration, between fecundity and pregnancy, between Jonson and Shakspere. And, though a man of genius is not necessarily dependent on other men of genius for stimulus, we shall on scrutiny find reason to believe that in Shakspere's case the nature of the stimulus counted for a great deal. ”

“ Compare the following extracts from Florio's translation:—
"The Dæmon of Socrates were peradventure a certain inpulsion or will which without the advice of his discourse presented itself unto him. In a mind so well purified, and by continual exercise of wisdom and virtue so well prepared as his was, it is likely his inclinations (though rash and inconsiderate) were ever of great moment, and worthy to be followed. Every man feeleth in himself some image of such agitations, of a prompt, vehement, and casual opinion. It is in me to give them some authority, that afford so little to our wisdom. ”

“ The mind which could thus easily pierce below the inveterate fallacy of three thousand years of conventional speech may well be presumed capable of rounding Montaigne's philosophy wherever it collapses, and of setting it aside wherever it is arbitrary. Certain it is that we can never convict Shakspere of bad reasoning in person; and in his later plays we never seem to touch bottom in his thought. The poet of Venus and Adonis seems to have deepened beyond the plummet-reach even of the deep-striking intelligence that first stirred him to philosophise. ”

“ When youth fails in us, we feel, nay we perceive, no shaking or transchange at all in ourselves: which is essence and verity is a harder death than that of a languishing and irksome life, or that of age. ”

“ Rightly to be great, Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw. When honour is at stake....
....to my shame I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That for a fantasy and trick of fame, Go to their graves like beds; fight for a plot Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause...."
Montaigne has the same general idea in the essay Of Diversion:
"If one demand that fellow, what interest he hath in such a siege: The interest of example (he will say) and common obedience of the Prince: I nor look nor pretend any benefit thereby ... ”

“ Is it not surprising to see Julius Cæsar and Coriolanus suddenly taken up by the man who has just (tout à l'heure) been describing in thirty-six stanzas, like Marini, the doves of the car of Venus? And does not one see that he comes fresh from the reading of Montaigne, who never ceased to translate, comment, and recommend the ancients...? The dates of Shakspere's Coriolanus, Cleopatra, and Julius Cæsar are incontestable. These dramas follow on from 1606 to 1608, with a rapidity which proves the fecund heat of an imagination still moved. ”

“ The author of the scene of the grave-diggers must have felt the savour and retained the impression of this thought, humid and cold as the grave: 'The heart and the life of a great and triumphant emperor are but the repast of a little worm.' The translation of Plutarch, or rather of Amyot, by Thomas North, and that of Montaigne by Florio, had together a great and long vogue in the English society of the seventeenth century."5
So modest a claim, coming from the French side, can hardly be blamed on the score of that very modesty. ”

“ The faculty, in short, which could produce those 3,000 fluent lines on the bare data of the stories of Venus and Adonis and Tarquin and Lucrece, with only the intellectual material of a rakish Stratford lad's schooling and reading, and the culture coming of a few years' association with the primitive English stage and its hangers-on, was capable of broadening and deepening, with vital experience and vital culture, into the poet of Lear and Macbeth. But the vital culture must come to it, like the experience: this was not a man who would go out of his way to seek the culture. ”

“ When we dream, our soul liveth, worketh, and exerciseth all her faculties, even and as much as when it waketh.... We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. In my sleep I see not so clear, yet can I never find my waking clear enough, or without dimness.... ”

“ What emerges for us thus far is the conception of a very plastic intelligence, a good deal led and swayed by immediate circumstances; but at bottom very sanely related to life, and so possessing a latent faculty for controlling its destinies; not much cultured, not profound, not deeply passionate; not particularly reflective though copious in utterance; a personality which of itself, if under no pressure of pecuniary need, would not be likely to give the world any serious sign of mental capacity whatever. ”

“ For Montaigne stands out among all the humanists of the epochs of the Renaissance and the Reformation in respect of the peculiar directness of his contact with Latin literature. Other men must have come to know Latin as well as he; and hundreds could write it with an accuracy and facility which, if he were ever capable of it, he must, by his own confession, have lost before middle life,150 though he read it perfectly to the last. But he is the only modern man whom we know to have learned Latin as a mother tongue ”

“ How often do we pester our spirits with anger or sadness by such shadows, and entangle ourselves into fantastical passions which alter both our mind and body?... Enquire of yourself, where is the object of this alteration? Is there anything but us in nature, except subsisting nullity? ”

“ Of all creatures man is the most miserable and frail, and therewithal the proudest and disdainfullest. Who perceiveth himself placed here, amidst the filth and mire of the world ... and yet dareth imaginarily place himself above the circle of the Moon, and reduce heaven under his feet. It is through the vanity of the same imagination that he dare equal himself to God."
The passage in brackets is left here in its place, not as suggesting anything in Hamlet's speech, but as paralleling a line in Measure for Measure, to be dealt with immediately. ”

“ Needless to say, the influence is from the very start of that high sort in which he that takes becomes co-thinker with him that gives, Shakspere's absorption of Montaigne being as vital as Montaigne's own assimilation of the thought of his classics. The process is one not of surface reflection, but of kindling by contact; and we seem to see even the vibration of the style passing from one intelligence to the other ”

“ But that retirement, rounding with peace the career of manifold and intense experience, is a main fact in Shakspere's life, and one of our main clues to his innermost character. Emerson, never quite delivered from Puritan prepossessions, avowed his perplexity over the fact "that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos—that he should not be wise for himself: it must even go into the world's history that the best poet led an obscure (!) ”

“ Save for the sexual attraction of the subjects, on the commercial side of which the poet had obviously reckoned in choosing them, these performances could have no unstudious readers in our day and few warm admirers in their own, so little sign do they give of any high poetic faculty save the two which singly go so often without any determining superiority of mind—inexhaustible flow of words and endless observation of concrete detail. ”

“ Shall we employ the intelligence Heaven hath bestowed upon us for our greatest good, to our ruin, repugning nature's design and the universal order and vicissitude of things, which implieth that every man should use his instrument and means for his own commodity? ”

“ And yet again the thought crops up in the Apology of Raimond Sebonde:
"This horror-causing array of so many thousands of armed men, so great fury, earnest fervour, and undaunted courage, it would make one laugh to see on how many vain occasions it is raised and set on fire.... The hatred of one man, a spite, a pleasure ... causes which ought not to move two scolding fishwives to catch one another, is the soul and motive of all this hurly-burly."
XII. Yet one more of Hamlet's sayings peculiar to the revised form of the play seems to be an echo of a thought of Montaigne's. ”