It is now hot here: I suppose something [like] February in Andalusia. Do you find Madrid Climate as bad as Rose and others describe it? He has also a very pleasant [chapter] about the Lavanderas of the Manzanares. What delightful words!
To W. A. Wright.
[1878.]
On looking into my dear old Montaigne, I find a passage which may have rustled in Shakespeare’s head while doing Othello: it is about the pleasures of Military Life in the Chapter ‘De l’Expérience’ beginning ‘Il n’est occupation plaisante comme la militaire, etc.’ in course of which occurs in Florio, ‘The courageous minde-stirring harmonic of warlike music, etc.’ What a funny thing is that closing Apostrophe to Artillery—but this is not Æsthetic.
Bacon’s appropriation you know of C’est bien choisir de ne choisir pas’ (De la Vanité, I think).
Woodbridge. June 11, [1878]
My dear Wright,
If you do not remember the passage in Bacon’s Essays [251] about ‘not to decide, etc.’ I must have fancied it. I am glad you recognize the Othello
bit of Montaigne. You know, as I know, the nonsense of talking of Shakespeare stealing such things: one is simply pleased at finding his footsteps in the Books he read, just as one is in walking over the fields he walked about Stratford and seeing the Flowers, and hearing the Birds, he heard and saw, and told of. My Canon is, there is no plagiarism when he who adopts has proved that he could originate what he adopts, and a great deal more: which certainly absolves Shakespeare from any such Charge—even ‘The Cloud capt Towers, etc.’ That Passage in Othello about the Propontic and the Hellespont, was, I have read, an afterthought, after reading some Travel: and, like so many Afterthoughts, I must think, a Blunder: breaking the Torrent of Passion with a piece of Natural History. One observes it particularly when acted: the actor down on his Knees, etc. Were I to act Othello (there’d be many a Bellow
From Pit, Boxes, etc., on that occasion) [252]