lover of style), collected in the first instance for the help of an
irregular memory, were becoming, in the quaintly labelled drawers,
with labels of wise old maxim or device, the primary, rude stuff, or
"protoplasm," of his intended work, and already gave token of its
scope and variety. "All motion discovers us"; if to others, so also
to ourselves. Movement, rapid movement of some kind, a ride, the
hasty survey of a shelf of books, best of all a conversation like
this morning's with a visitor for the first time,--amid the
felicitous chances of that, at some random turn by the way, he would
become aware of shaping purpose: the beam of light or heat would
strike down, to illuminate, to fuse and organise the coldly
accumulated matter, of reason, of experience. Surely, some
providence over thought and speech led one finely through those
haphazard journeys! But thus dependent to so great a degree on
external converse for the best fruit of his own thought, he was also
an efficient evocator of the thought of another--himself an original
spirit more than tolerating [87] the originality of others,--which
brought it into play. Here was one who (through natural
predilection, reinforced by theory) would welcome one's very self,
undistressed by, while fully observant of, its difference from his
own--one's errors, vanities, perhaps fatuities. Naturally eloquent,
expressive, with a mind like a rich collection of the choice things
of all times and countries, he was at his best, his happiest, amid
the magnetic contacts of an easy conversation. When Gaston years
afterwards came to read the famous Essays, he found many a delightful
actual conversation re-set, and had the key we lack to their
surprises, their capricious turns and lapses.--Well! Montaigne had
opened the letter, had forthwith passed his genial criticism on the
writer, and then, characteristically, forgetting all about it, turned
to the bearer as if he had been intimate with him from childhood.
And the feeling was mutual. Gaston in half an hour seemed to have
known his entertainer all his life.
In unimpeded talk with sincere persons of what quality soever--there,
rather than in shadowy converse with even the best books--the flower,
the fruit, of mind was still in life-giving contact with its root.
With books, as indeed with persons, his intercourse was apt to be
desultory. Books!--He was by way of asserting his independence of
them, was their very candid friend:--they were far from being [88]
an unmixed good. He would observe (the fact was its own scornful
comment) that there were more books upon books than upon any other
subject. Yet books, more than a thousand volumes, a handsome library
for that day, nicely representative not only of literature but of the
owner's taste therein, lay all around; and turning now to this, now
to that, he handled their pages with nothing less than tenderness: it
was the first of many inconsistencies which yet had about them a
singularly taking air, of reason, of equity. Plutarch and Seneca
were soon in the foreground: they would "still be at his elbow to
test and be tested": masters of the autumnal wisdom that was coming
to be his own, ripe and placid--from the autumn of old Rome, of life,
of the world, the very genius of second thoughts, of exquisite tact
and discretion, of judgment upon knowledge.
But the books dropped from his hands in the very midst of
enthusiastic quotation; and the guest was mounting a little turret
staircase, was on the leaden roof of the old tower, amid the fat,
noonday Gascon scenery. He saw, in bird's-eye view, the country he
was soon to become closely acquainted with, a country (like its
people) of passion and capacity, though at that moment emphatically
lazy. Towards the end of life some conscientious pangs seem to have
touched Montaigne's singularly humane and sensitive spirit, when he
looked back on the [89] long intellectual entertainment he had had,
in following, as an inactive spectator, "the ruin of his country,"
through a series of chapters, every one of which had told
emphatically in his own immediate neighbourhood. With its old and
new battlefields, its business, its fierce changes, and the old
perennial sameness of men's ways beneath them all, it had been
certainly matter of more assiduous reading than even those choice,
incommensurable, books, of ancient Greek and Roman experience. The
variableness, the complexity, the miraculous surprises of man,
concurrent with the variety, the complexity, the surprises of nature,
making all true knowledge of either wholly relative and provisional;
a like insecurity in one's self, if one turned thither for some ray
of clear and certain evidence; this, with an equally strong sense all
the time of the interest, the power and charm, alike of man and
nature and of the individual mind;--such was the sense of this open
book, of all books and things. That was what this quietly
enthusiastic reader was ready to assert as the sum of his studies;
disturbingly, as Gaston found, reflecting on his long unsuspicious
sojourn there, and detaching from the habits, the random traits of
character, his concessions and hints and sudden emphatic statements,
the soul and potency of the man.
How imperceptibly had darkness crept over them, effacing everything
but the interior of [90] the great circular chamber, its book-shelves
and enigmatic mottoes and the tapestry on the wall,--Circe and her
sorceries, in many parts--to draw over the windows in winter. Supper
over, the young wife entered at last. Always on the lookout for the
sincerities of human nature (sincerity counting for life-giving form,
whatever the matter might be) as he delighted in watching children,
Montaigne loved also to watch grown people when they were most like
children; at their games, therefore, and in the mechanical and
customary parts of their existence, as discovering the real soul in
them. Abstaining from the dice himself, since for him such "play was
not play enough, but too grave and serious a diversion," and
remarking that "the play of children is not performed in play, but to
be judged as their most serious action," he set Gaston and the
amiable, unpedantic, lady to play together, where he might observe
them closely; the game turning still, irresistibly, to conversation,
the last and sweetest if somewhat drowsy relics of this long day's
recreations.--Was Circe's castle here? If Circe could turn men into
swine, could she also release them again? It was frailty, certainly,
that Gaston remained here week after week, scarce knowing why; the
conversation begun that morning lasting for nine months, over books,
meals, in free rambles chiefly on horseback, as if in the waking
intervals of a long day-sleep.
V. SUSPENDED JUDGMENT
[91] The diversity, the undulancy, of human nature!--so deep a sense
of it went with Montaigne always that himself too seemed to be ever
changing colour sympathetically therewith. Those innumerable
differences, mental and physical, of which men had always been aware,
on which they had so largely fed their vanity, were ultimate. That
the surface of humanity presented an infinite variety was the tritest
of facts. Pursue that variety below the surface!--the lines did but
part further and further asunder, with an ever-increasing divergency,
which made any common measure of truth impossible. Diversity of
custom!--What was it but diversity in the moral and mental view,
diversity of opinion? and diversity of opinion, what but radical
diversity of mental constitution? How various in kind and degree had
he found men's thoughts concerning death, for instance, "some (ah
me!) even running headlong upon it, with [92] a real affection"?
Death, life; wealth, poverty; the whole sum of contrasts; nay! duty
itself,--the relish of right and wrong"; all depend upon the opinion
each one has of them, and "receive no colour of good or evil but
according to the application of the individual soul." Did Hamlet
learn of him that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking
makes it so"?--What we call evil is not so of itself: it depends only
upon us, to give it another taste and complexion.--Things, in respect
of themselves, have peradventure their weight, measure, and
conditions; but when once we have taken them into us, the soul forms
them as she pleases.--Death is terrible to Cicero, courted by Cato,
indifferent to Socrates.--Fortune, circumstance, offers but the
matter: 'tis the soul adds the form.--Every opinion, how fantastic
soever to some, is to another of force enough to be espoused at the
risk of life."
For opinion was the projection of individual will, of a native
original predilection. Opinions!--they are like the clothes we wear,
which warm us, not with their heat, but with ours. Track your way
(as he had learned to do) to the remote origin of what looks like
folly; at home, on its native soil, it was found to be justifiable,
as a proper growth of wisdom. In the vast conflict of taste,
preference, conviction, there was no real inconsistency. It was but
that the soul looked "upon things with [93] another eye, and
represented them to itself with another kind of face; reason being a
tincture almost equally infused into all our manners and opinions;
though there never were in the world two opinions exactly alike."
And the practical comment was, not as one might have expected,
towards the determination of some common standard of truth amid that
infinite variety, but to this effect rather, that we are not bound to
receive every opinion we are not able to refute, nor to accept
another's refutation of our own; these diversities being themselves
ultimate, and the priceless pearl of truth lying, if anywhere, not in
large theoretic apprehension of the general, but in minute vision of
the particular; in the perception of the concrete phenomenon, at this
particular moment, and from this unique point of view--that for you,
this for me--now, but perhaps not then.
Now; and not then! For if men are so diverse, not less disparate are
the many men who keep discordant company within each one of us,
"every man carrying in him the entire form of human condition."
"That we taste nothing pure:" the variancy of the individual in
regard to himself: the complexity of soul which there, too, makes
"all judgments in the gross" impossible or useless, certainly
inequitable, he delighted to note. Men's minds were like the
grotesques which some artists of that day loved to joint together, or
like one of his own [94] inconstant essays, never true for a page to
its proposed subject. "Nothing is so supple as our understanding: it
is double and diverse; and the matters are double and diverse, too."
Here, as it seemed to Gaston, was one for whom exceptions had taken
the place of law: the very genius of qualification followed him
through all his keen, constant, changeful consideration of men and
things. How many curious moral variations he had to show!--"vices
that are lawful": vices in us which "help to make up the seam in our
piecing, as poisons are useful for the conservation of health":
"actions good and excusable that are not lawful in themselves": "the
soul discharging her passions upon false objects where the true are
wanting": men doing more than they propose, or they hardly know what,
at immense hazard, or pushed to do well by vice itself, or working
for their enemies: "condemnations more criminal than the crimes they
condemn": the excuses that are self-accusations: instances, from his
own experience, of a hasty confidence in other men's virtue which
"God had favoured": and how, "even to the worst people, it is sweet,
their end once gained by a vicious act, to foist into it some show of
justice." In the presence of this indefatigable analyst of act and
motive all fixed outlines seemed to vanish away. The healthful
pleasure of motion, of thoughts in motion!--Yes! Gaston felt them,
the oldest of [95] them, moving, as he listened, under and away from
his feet, as if with the ground he stood on. And this was the vein
of thought which oftenest led the master back contemptuously to
emphasise the littleness of man.--"I think we can never be despised
according to our full desert."
By way of counterpoise, there were admirable surprises in man. That
cross-play of human tendencies determined from time to time in the
forces of unique and irresistible character, "moving all together,"
pushing the world around it to phenomenal good or evil. For such as
"make it their business to oversee human actions, it seems impossible
they should proceed from one and the same person." Consolidation of
qualities supposed, this did but make character, already the most
attractive, because the most dynamic, phenomenon of experience, more
interesting still. So tranquil a spectator of so average a world, a
too critical minimiser, it might seem, of all that pretends to be of
importance, Montaigne was constantly, gratefully, announcing his
contact, in life, in books, with undeniable power and greatness, with
forces full of beauty in their vigour, like lightning, the sea, the
torrents:--overpowering desire augmented, yet victorious, by its very
difficulty; the bewildering constancy of martyrs; single-hearted
virtue not to be resolved into anything less surprising than itself;
the devotion of that famed, so companionable, wife, dying cheerfully
[96] by her own act along with the sick husband "who could do no
better than kill himself"; the grief, the joy, of which men suddenly
die; the unconscious Stoicism of the poor; that stern self-control
with which Jacques Bonhomme goes as usual to his daily labour with a
heart tragic for the dead child at home; nay! even the boldness and
strength of "those citizens who sacrifice honour and conscience, as
others of old sacrificed their lives, for the good of their country."
So carefully equable, his mind nevertheless was stored with, and
delighted in, incidents, personalities, of barbarous strength--Esau,
in all his phases--the very rudest children or "our great and
powerful mother, nature." As Plato had said, "'twas to no purpose
for a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy," or, if truth
were spoken, of any other high matter of doing or making. That was
consistent with his sympathetic belief in the capability of mere
impetuous youth as such. Even those unexpected traits in ordinary
people which seem to hint at larger laws and deeper forces of
character, disconcerting any narrow judgment upon them, he welcomed
as akin to his own indolent, but suddenly kindling, nature:--the mere
self-will of men, the shrewd wisdom of an unlettered old woman, the
fount of goodness in a cold or malicious heart. "I hear every day
fools say things far from foolish." Those invincible prepossessions
of humanity, or of the [97] individual, which Bacon reckoned "idols
of the cave," are no offence to him; are direct informations, it may
be, beyond price, from a kindly spirit of truth in things.
For him there had been two grand surprises, two pre-eminent
manifestations of the power and charm of man, not to be explained
away,--one, within the compass of general and public observation: the
other, a matter of special intimacy to himself. There had been the
greatness of the old Greek and Roman life, so greatly recorded: there
had been the wisdom and kindness of Etienne de la Boetie, as made
known in all their fulness to him alone. That his ardent devotion to
the ancients had been rewarded with minute knowledge concerning them,
was the privilege of the age in which he was born, late in the
Revival of Letters. But the classical reading, which with others was
often but an affectation, seducing them from the highest to a lower
degree of reality, from men and women to their mere shadows in old
books, had been for him nothing less than personal contact. "The
qualities and fortunes" of the old Romans, especially, their
wonderful straight ways through the world, the straight passage of
their armies upon them, the splendour of their armour, of their
entire external presence and show, their "riches and embellishments,"
above all, "the suddenness of Augustus," in that grander age for
which decision was justifiable because really [98] possible, had ever
been "more in his head than the fortunes of his own country." If "we
have no hold even on things present but by imagination," as he loved
to observe,--then, how much more potent, steadier, larger, the
imaginative substance of the world of Alexander and Socrates, of
Virgil and Caesar, than that of an age, which seemed to him, living
in the midst of it, respectable mainly by its docility, by an
imitation of the ancients which after all left untouched the real
sources of their greatness. They had been indeed great, at the least
dramatically, redeemed in part by magnificent courage and tact, in
their very sins. "Our force is no more able to reach them in their
vicious than in their virtuous qualities; for both the one and the
other proceed from a vigour of soul which was without comparison
greater in them than in us."
And yet, thinking of his friendship with the "incomparable Etienne de
la Boetie, so perfect, inviolate and entire, that the like is hardly
to be found in story," he had to confess that the sources of
greatness must still be quick in the world. That had remained with
him as his one fixed standard of value in the estimate of men and
things. On this single point, antiquity itself had been surpassed;
the discourses it had left upon friendship seeming to him "poor and
flat in comparison of the sense he had of it." For once, his
sleepless habit of analysis had been checked by the inexplicable, the
absolute; [99] amid his jealously guarded indifference of soul he had
been summoned to yield, and had yielded, to the magnetic power of
another. "We were halves throughout, so that methinks by outliving
him I defraud him of his part. I was so grown to be always his
double in all things that methinks I am no more than half of myself.
There is no action or thought of mine wherein I do not miss him, as I
know that he would have missed me." Tender yet heroic, impulsive yet
so wise, he might have done what the survivor (so it seemed to
himself) was but vainly trying to do. It was worth his while to
become famous, if that hapless memory might but be embalmed in one's
fame. It had been better than love,--that friendship! to the
building of which so much "concurrence" had been requisite, that
"'twas much if fortune brought the like to pass once in three ages."
Actually, we may think, the "sweet society" of those four years, in
comparison with which the rest of his so pleasant life "was but
smoke," had touched Montaigne's nature with refinements it might
otherwise have lacked. He would have wished "to speak concerning it,
to those who had experience" of what he said, could such have been
found. In despair of that, he loved to discourse of it to all
comers,--how it had come about, the circumstances of its sudden and
wonderful growth. Yet after all were he pressed to say why he had so
loved Etienne de la Boetie, he [100] could but answer, "Because it
was He! Because it was I!"
And the surprises there are in man, his complexity, his variancy,
were symptomatic of the changefulness, the confusion, the surprises,
of the earth under one's feet, of the whole material world. The
irregular, the unforeseen, the inconsecutive, miracle, accident, he
noted lovingly: it had a philosophic import. It was habit rather
than knowledge of them that took away the strangeness of the things
actually about one. How many unlikely matters there were, testified
by persons worthy of faith, "which, if we cannot persuade ourselves
to believe, we ought at least to leave in suspense.--Though all that
had arrived by report of past time should be true, it would be less
than nothing in comparison of what is unknown."
On all sides we are beset by the incalculable--walled up suddenly, as
if by malign trickery, in the open field, or pushed forward
senselessly, by the crowd around us, to good-fortune. In art, as in
poetry, there are the "transports" which lift the artist out of, as
they are not of, himself; for orators also, "those extraordinary
motions which sometimes carry them above their design." Himself, "in
the necessity and heat of combat," had sometimes made answers, that
went "through and through," beyond hope. The work, by its own force
and fortune, sometimes outstrips the workman. And then, in [101]
defiance of the proprieties, whereas poets sometimes "flag, and
languish in a prosaic manner," prose will shine with the lustre,
vigour and boldness, with "the fury" of poetry.
And as to "affairs,"--how spasmodic the mixture, collision or
coincidence, of the mechanic succession of things with men's
volition! Mere rumour, so large a factor in events,--who could trace
out its ways? Various events (he was never tired of illustrating the
fact) "followed from the same counsel." Fortune, chance, that is to
say, the incalculable contribution of mere matter to man, "would
still be mistress of events"; and one might think it no un-wisdom to
commit everything to fortuity. But no! "fortune too is oft-times
observed to act by the rule of reason: chance itself comes round to
hold of justice;" war, above all, being a matter in which fortune was
inexplicable, though men might seem to have made it the main business
of their lives. If "the force of all counsel lies in the occasion,"
that is because things perpetually shift. If man--his taste, his
very conscience--change with the habit of time and place, that is
because habit is the emphatic determination, the tyranny, of changing
external and material circumstance. So it comes about that every one
gives the name of barbarism to what is not in use round about him,
excepting perhaps the Greeks and Romans, somewhat conventionally; and
Montaigne was fond of assuring people, [102] suddenly, that could we
have those privileged Greeks and Romans actually to sit beside us for
a while, they would be found to offend our niceties at a hundred
points. We have great power of taking ourselves in, and "pay
ourselves with words." Words too, language itself, and therewith the
more intimate physiognomy of thought, "slip every day through our
fingers." With his eye on his own labour, wistfully, he thought on
the instability of the French language in particular--a matter, after
all, so much less "perennial than brass." In no respect was nature
more stable, more consecutive, than man.