as 1579; and there were many others. Any one who will compare CORIOLANUS with North's translation will see that Shakespeare has followed the text down to the most minute and supererogatory details, even to the making of blunders by putting the biographer's remarks in the mouths of the characters. The comparison throws a flood of light on Shakespeare's mode of procedure; but it tells us nothing of his perusal of Montaigne. Rather it suggests a return from the method of the revised HAMLET, with its play of reverie, to the more strictly dramatic method of the chronicle histories, though with a new energy and concision of presentment. The real clue to Montaigne's influence on Shakespeare beyond HAMLET, as we have seen, lies not in the Roman plays, but in MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

There is a misconception involved, again, in M. Chasles's picture of an abrupt transition from Shakespeare's fantastic youthful method to that of HAMLET and the Roman plays. He overlooks the intermediate stages represented by such plays as ROMEO AND JULIET, HENRY IV, HENRY V, KING JOHN, TWELFTH NIGHT, MUCH ADO, the MERCHANT OF VENICE, and As You LIKE IT,

1 Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1885, P. 497.

all of which exhibit a great advance on the methods of LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST, with its rhymes and sonnets and "concetti." The leap suggested by M. Chasles is exorbitant: such a headlong development would be unintelligible. Shakespeare had first to come practically into touch with the realities of life and character before he could receive from Montaigne the full stimulus he actually did undergo. Plastic as he was, he none the less underwent a normal evolution; and his early concreteness and verbalism and externality had to be gradually transmuted into a more inward knowledge of life and art before there could be superimposed on that the mood of the thinker, reflectively aware of the totality of what he had passed through.

Finally, the most remarkable aspect of Shakespeare's mind is not that presented by CORIOLANUS and ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, which with all their intense vitality represent rather his marvellous power of reproducing impressions than the play of his own criticism on the general problem of life. For the full revelation of this

we must look

rather in the great tragedies, notably in LEAR, and thereafter in the subsiding movement of the later serious plays. There it is that we learn to give exactitude to our con

ception of the influence exerted upon him by Montaigne, and to see that, even as in the cases of Pascal and Montesquieu, Rousseau and Emerson, what happened was not a mere transference or imposition of opinions, but a living stimulus, a germination of fresh intellectual life, which developed under new forms. It would be strange if the most receptive and responsive of all the intelligences which Montaigne has touched should not have gone on differentiating itself from his.

VIII

SHAKESPEARE'S RELATION TO MONTAIGNE

WHAT then is the general, and what the final relation of Shakespeare's thought to that of Montaigne? How far did the younger man approve and assimilate the ideas of the elder; how far did he reject them, how far modify them? In some respects this is the most difficult part of our inquiry, were it only because Shakespeare is firstly and lastly a dramatic writer. But he is not only that he is at once the most subjective, the most sympathetic, and the most self-withholding of dramatic writers. Conceiving all situations, all epochs, in terms of his own perception and his own psychology, he is yet the furthest removed from all dogmatic design on the opinions of his listeners; and it is only after a most vigilant process of moral logic that we can ever be justified in attributing to him this or that thesis of any one of his personages, apart from the general ethical sympathies which must be taken for granted.

Much facile propaganda has been made by the device of crediting him in person with every religious utterance found in his plays-even in the portions which analytical criticism proves to have come from other hands. Obviously we

must look to his general handling of the themes with which the current religion deals, in order to surmise his attitude to that religion. And in the same way we must compare his general handling of tragic and moral issues, in order to gather his general attitude to the doctrine of Montaigne.

At the very outset, we must make a clean sweep of the strange proposition of Mr. Jacob Feis-that Shakespeare deeply disliked the philosophy of Montaigne, and wrote HAMLET to discredit it. It is hard to realise how such a hopeless misconception can ever have arisen in the mind of any one capable of making the historic research on which Mr. Feis seeks to found his assertion. If there were no other argument against it, the bare fact that the tragedy of HAMLET existed before Shakespeare, and that he was, as usual, simply working over a play already on the boards, should serve to dismiss such a wild hypothesis. And from every other point of view, the notion is equally preposterous. No human being in Shakespeare's day could have gathered