VII

THE POTENCY OF MONTAIGNE

IT is to Montaigne, then, that we now come, in terms of our preliminary statement of evidence. When Florio's translation was published, in 1603, Shakespeare was thirty-seven years old, and he had written or refashioned KING JOHN, HENRY IV, RICHARD II, HENRY V, THE MERCHANT OF VENICE, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, TWELFTH NIGHT, AS YOU LIKE IT, ROMEO AND JULIET, THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, and JULIUS CÆSAR. It is very likely that he knew Florio, being intimate with Jonson, who was Florio's friend and admirer; and the translation, long on the stocks, must have been discussed in his hearing. Hence, presumably, his immediate perusal of it. Portions of it, as we

have seen, he may very well have read or heard of before it was fully printed (necessarily a long task in the then state of the handicraft); but in the book itself, we have seen abundant reason to believe, he read largely in 1603-4.

Having inductively proved the reading, and at the same time the fact of the impression it made, we may next seek to realise deductively what kind of impression it was fitted to make. We can readily see what North's Plutarch could be and was to the sympathetic and slightlycultured playwright: it was nothing short of a new world of human knowledge; a living vision of two great civilisations, giving to his universe a vista of illustrious realities beside which the charmed gardens of Renaissance romance and the bustling fields of English chronicle-history were as pleasant dreams or noisy interludes. He had done wonders with the chronicles; but in presence of the long muster-rolls of Greece and Rome he must have felt their insularity; and he never returned to them in the old spirit. But if Plutarch could do so much for him, still greater could be the service rendered by Montaigne. The difference, broadly speaking, is very much as the difference in philosophic reach between JULIUS CASAR and HAMLET, between CORIOLANUS and LEAR.

For what was in its net significance Montaigne's manifold book, coming thus suddenly, in a complete and vigorous translation, into English life and into Shakespeare's ken? Simply

the most living literature then existing in Europe. This is not the place in which to attempt a systematic estimate of the most enduring of French writers, who has stirred to their best efforts some of the ablest of French critics; but I must needs try to indicate briefly, as I see it, his significance in general European culture. 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; he is so as against Erasmus, because Erasmus also is a framer of artificial compositions in a dead language, where Montaigne writes with absolute spontaneity in a language not only living but growing. Only Chaucer, and he only in the CANTERBURY TALES, can be thought of as a true modern before Montaigne; and Chaucer is there too English to be significant for all Europe. The high figure of Dante is decisively medieval: it is the central point in later medieval literature. Montaigne was not only a new literary phenomenon in his

own day he remains so still; for his impressionism, which he carried to such lengths in originating it, is the most modern of literary inspirations; and all our successive literary and artistic developments are either phases of the same inspiration or transient reactions against it. Where literature in the mass has taken centuries to come within sight of the secret that the most intimate form of truth is the most interesting, he went, in his one collection of essays, so far towards absolute self-expression that our practice is still in the rear of his, which is quite too unflinching for contemporary nerves. Our bonne foi is still sophisticated in comparison with that of the great Gascon. Of all essayists who have yet written, he is the most transparent, the most sincere even in his stratagems, the most discursive, the most free-tongued, and therefore the most alive. A classic commonplace becomes in his hands a new intimacy of feeling: where verbal commonplaces have, as it were, glazed over the surface of our sense, he probes through them to rouse anew the living nerve. 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 Shakespeare'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 it spoke to one for whom, as player and as playwright, it had come to be an imperative need to substitute a living and lifelike speech for the turgid and unreal rhetoric of the would-be academics who had created the English drama as he found it; one who, after his narrative poems had won success, turned his back once for all on the prolixities of the school of Spenser.

I have said above that we seem to see passing from Montaigne to Shakespeare 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. Some such 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 Shake