Montaigne and Shakspere

by J. M. Robertson

"Alas! 'tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new."

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. And he who could esteem both Shakspere and Montaigne might have been expected to note how they drew together at that very point of the final retirement, the dramatic caterer finally winning, out of his earnings, the peace and self-possession that the essayist had inherited without toil. He must, one thinks, have repeated to himself Montaigne's very words[189]: "My design is to pass quietly, and not laboriously, what remains to me of life; there is nothing for which I am minded to make a strain: not knowledge, of whatever great price it be." And when he at length took himself away to the quiet village of his birth, it could hardly be that he had not in mind those words of the essay[190] on Solitude:

"We should reserve a storehouse for ourselves ... altogether ours, and wholly free, wherein we may hoard up and establish our true liberty, the principal retreat and solitariness, wherein we must go alone to ourselves.... We have lived long enough for others, live we the remainder of all life unto ourselves.... Shake we off these violent hold-fasts which elsewhere engage us, and estrange us from ourselves. The greatest thing of the world is for a man to know how to be his own. It is high time to shake off society, since we can bring nothing to it...."

A kindred note is actually struck in the 146th Sonnet,[191] which tells of revolt at the expenditure of inner life on the outward garniture, and exhorts the soul to live aright:

"Then soul live thou upon thy servant's loss, And let that live to aggravate thy store; Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross; Within be fed; without be rich no more: So shalt thou feed on death that feeds on men, And death once dead, there's no more dying then"—

an echo of much of Montaigne's discourse, herein before cited.[192]

In perfect keeping with all this movement towards peace and contemplation, and in final keeping, too, with the deeper doctrine of Montaigne, is the musing philosophy which lights, as with a wondrous sunset, the play which one would fain believe the last of all. At the end, as at the beginning, we find the poet working on a pre-existing basis, re-making an old play; and at the end, as at the beginning, we find him picturing, with an incomparable delicacy, new ideal types of womanhood, who stand out with a fugitive radiance from the surroundings of mere humanity; but over all alike, in the Tempest, there is the fusing spell of philosophic reverie. 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. 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.... Why make we not a doubt whether our thinking and our working be another dreaming, and our waking some kind of sleeping?"[193]

"Let me think of building castles in Spain, my imagination will forge me commodities and afford means and delights wherewith my mind is really tickled and essentially gladded. 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? over whom it hath any power?... Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, killed himself upon a conceit he took of some ill presage by I know not what howling of dogs.... It is the right way to prize one's life at the right worth of it, to forego it for a dream."[194]