inconsequence: only, "the soul looks upon things with another eye,
and represents them to itself with another kind of face: for
everything has many faces and several aspects. There is nothing
single and rare in respect of itself, but only in respect of our
knowledge, which is a wretched foundation whereon to ground our
rules, and one that represents to us a very false image of things."
Ah! even in so "dear" a matter as bodily health, immunity from
physical pain, what doubts! what variations of experience, of learned
opinion! Already, in six years of married life, of four children
treated so carefully, never, for instance, roughly awaked from sleep,
"wherein," he would observe, "children are much more profoundly
involved than we,"--of four children, [103] two were dead, and one
even now miserably sick. Seeing the doctor depart one morning a
little hastily, on the payment of his fee, he was tempted to some
nice questions as to the money's worth. "There are so many maladies,
and so many circumstances, presented to the physician, that human
sense must soon be at the end of its lesson:--the many complexions in
a melancholy person; the many seasons in winter; the many nations in
the French; the many ages in age; the many celestial mutations in the
conjunction of Venus and Saturn; the many parts in man's body, nay,
in a finger. And suppose the cure effected, how can we assure
ourselves that it was not because the disease was arrived at its
period, or an effect of chance, or the operation of something else
that the child had eaten, drunk, or touched that day, or by virtue of
his mother's prayers? We suppose we see one side of a thing when we
are really looking at another. As for me, I never see all of
anything; neither do they who so largely promise to show it to
others. Of the hundred faces that everything has I take one, and am
for the most part attracted by some new light I find in it."
And that new light was sure to lead him back very soon to his
"governing method, ignorance"--an ignorance "strong and generous, and
that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge; an ignorance,
which to conceive requires no less knowledge than to conceive [104]
knowledge itself"--a sapient, instructed, shrewdly ascertained
ignorance, suspended judgment, doubt everywhere.--Balances, very
delicate balances; he was partial to that image of equilibrium, or
preponderance, in things. But was there, after all, so much as
preponderance anywhere? To Gaston there was a kind of fascination,
an actually aesthetic beauty, in the spectacle of that keen-edged
intelligence, dividing evidence so finely, like some exquisite steel
instrument with impeccable sufficiency, always leaving the last word
loyally to the central intellectual faculty, in an entire
disinterestedness. If on the one hand he was always distrustful of
things that he wished, on the other he had many opinions he would
endeavour to make his son dislike, if he had one. What if the truest
opinions were not always the most commodious to man, "being of so
wild a composition"? He would say nothing to one party that he might
not on occasion say to the other, "with a little alteration of
accent." Yes! Doubt, everywhere! doubt in the far background, as
the proper intellectual equivalent to the infinite possibilities of
things: doubt, shrewdly economising the opportunities of the present
hour, in the very spirit of the traveller who walks only for the
walk's sake,--"every day concludes my expectation, and the journey of
my life is carried on after the same fashion": doubt, finally, as
"the best of pillows to sleep on." And in fact Gaston did sleep well
after [105] those long days of physical and intellectual movement, in
that quiet world, till the spring came round again.
But beyond and above all the various interests upon which the
philosopher's mind was for ever afloat, there was one subject always
in prominence--himself. His minute peculiarities, mental and
physical, what was constitutional with him as well as his transient
humours, how things affected him, what they really were to him,
Michael, much more than man, all this Gaston came to know, as the
world knew it afterwards in the Essays, often amused, sometimes
irritated, but never suspicious of postures, or insincerity.
Montaigne himself admitted his egotism with frank humour:--"in favour
of the Huguenots, who condemn our private confession, I confess
myself in public." And this outward egotism of manner was but the
symptom of a certain deeper doctrinal egotism:--"I have no other end
in writing but to discover myself." And what was the purport, what
the justification, of this undissembled egotism? It was the
recognition, over against, or in continuation of, that world of
floating doubt, of the individual mind, as for each one severally, at
once the unique organ, and the only matter, of knowledge,--the
wonderful energy, the reality and authority of that, in its absolute
loneliness, conforming all things to its law, without witnesses as
without judge, without appeal, save to itself. [106] Whatever truth
there might be, must come for each one from within, not from without.
To that wonderful microcosm of the individual soul, of which, for
each one, all other worlds are but elements,--to himself,--to what
was apparent immediately to him, what was "properly of his own having
and substance": he confidently dismissed the inquirer. His own
egotism was but the pattern of the true intellectual life of every
one. "The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he
is his own. If the world find fault that I speak too much of myself,
I find fault that they do not so much as think of themselves." How
it had been "lodged in its author":--that, surely, was the essential
question, concerning every opinion that comes to one man from
another.
Yet, again, even on this ultimate ground of judgment, what undulancy,
complexity, surprises!--"I have no other end in writing but to
discover myself, who also shall peradventure be another thing to-
morrow." The great work of his life, the Essays, he placed "now
high, now low, with great doubt and inconstancy." "What are we but
sedition? like this poor France, faction against faction, within
ourselves, every piece playing every moment its own game, with as
much difference between us and ourselves as between ourselves and
others. Whoever will look narrowly into his own bosom will hardly
find himself twice in the same condition. [107] I give to myself
sometimes one face and sometimes another, according to the side I
turn to. I have nothing to say of myself, entirely and without
qualification. One grows familiar with all strange things by time.
But the more I frequent myself and the better I know myself, the less
do I understand myself. If others would consider themselves as I do,
they would find themselves full of caprice. Rid myself of it I
cannot without making myself away. They who are not aware of it have
the better bargain. And yet I know not whether they have or no!"
One's own experience!--that, at least, was one's own: low and earthy,
it might be; still, the earth was, emphatically, good, good-natured;
and he loved, emphatically, to recommend the wisdom, amid all doubts,
of keeping close to it. Gaston soon knew well a certain threadbare
garment worn by Montaigne in all their rides together, sitting
quaintly on his otherwise gallant appointments,--an old mantle that
had belonged to his father. Retained, as he tells us, in spite of
its inconvenience, "because it seemed to envelope me in him," it was
the symbol of a hundred natural, perhaps somewhat material, pieties.
Parentage, kinship, relationship through earth,--the touch of that
was everywhere like a caress to him. His fine taste notwithstanding,
he loved, in those long rambles, to partake of homely fare, paying
largely for it. Everywhere it was as if the earth in him turned
kindly to [108] earth. "Under the sun," the sturdy purple thistles,
the blossoming burrs also, were worth knowing. Let us grow together
with you! they seem to say. Himself was one of those whom he thought
"Heaven favoured" in making them die, so naturally, by degrees. "I
shall be blind before I am sensible of the decay of my sight, with
such kindly artifice do the Fatal Sisters entwist our lives. I melt,
and steal away from myself. How variously is it no longer I!" It
was not he who would carry a furry robe at midsummer, because he
might need it in the winter.--"In fine, we must live among the
living, and let the river flow under the bridge without our care,
above all things avoiding fear, that great disturber of reason. The
thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear."
And still, health, the invincible survival of youth, "admonished him
to a better wisdom than years and sickness." Was there anything
better, fairer, than the beautiful light of health? To be in health
was itself the sign, perhaps the essence, of wisdom--a wisdom, rich
in counsels regarding all one's contacts with the earthy side of
existence. And how he could laugh!--at that King of Thrace, for
instance, who had a religion and a god all to himself, which his
subjects might not presume to worship; at that King of Mexico, who
swore at his coronation not only to keep the laws, but also to make
the sun run his annual course; at those followers [109] of Alexander,
who all carried their heads on one side as Alexander did. The
natural second-best, the intermediate and unheroic virtue (even the
Church, as we know, by no means requiring "heroic" virtue), was
perhaps actually the best, better than any kind of heroism, in an age
whose very virtues were apt to become insane; an age "guilty and
extravagant" in its very justice; for which, as regards all that
belongs to the spirit, the one thing needful was moderation. And it
was characteristic of Montaigne, a note of the real helpfulness there
was in his thoughts, that he preferred to base virtue on low, safe,
ground. "The lowest walk is the safest: 'tis the seat of constancy."
The wind about the tower, coming who knows whence and whither?--could
one enjoy its music, unless one knew the foundations safe, twenty
feet below-ground? Always he loved to hear such words as "soften and
modify the temerity of our propositions." To say less than the truth
about it, to dissemble the absoluteness of its claim, was agreeable
to his confidence in the natural charm, the gaiety, of goodness,
"that fair and beaten path nature has traced for us," over against
any difficult, militant, or chimerical virtue.--"Never had any morose
and ill-looking physician done anything to purpose." In that age, it
was a great thing to be just blameless. Virtue had its bounds,
"which once transgressed, the next step was into the territories
[110] of vice." "All decent and honest means of securing ourselves
from harm, were not only permitted but commendable." Any man who
despises his own life, might "always be master of that of another."
He would not condemn "a magistrate who sleeps; provided the people
under his charge sleep as well as he." Though a blundering world,
in collusion with a prejudiced philosophy, has "a great suspicion of
facility," there was a certain easy taking of things which made life
the richer for others as well as for one's self, and was at least an
excellent makeshift for disinterested service to them. With all his
admiration for the antique greatness of character, he would never
commend "so savage a virtue, and one that costs so dear," as that,
for instance, of the Greek mother, the Roman father, who assisted to
put their own erring sons to death. More truly commendable was the
custom of the Lacedaemonians, who when they went to battle sacrificed
always to the Muses, that "these might, by their sweetness and
gaiety, soften martial fury." How had divine philosophy herself been
discredited by the sour mask, the sordid patches, with which, her
enemies surely! had sent her abroad into the world. "I love a gay
and civil philosophy. There is nothing more cheerful than wisdom: I
had like to have said more wanton."
Was that why his conversation was sometimes coarse? "All the
contraries are to be found in [111] me, in one corner or another"; if
delicacy, so also coarseness. Delicacy there was, certainly,--a
wonderful fineness of sensation. "To the end," he tells us, "that
sleep should not so stupidly escape from me, I have caused myself to
be disturbed in my sleep, so that I might the better and more
sensibly taste and relish it.--Of scents, the simple and natural seem
to me the most pleasing, and I have often observed that they cause an
alteration in me, and work upon my spirits according to their several
virtues. In excessive heats I always travel by night, from sunset to
sunrise. I am betimes sensible of the little breezes that begin to
sing and whistle in the shrouds, the forerunners of the storm.--When
I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts are for a while
taken up with foreign occurrences, I some part of the time call them
back again to my walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of the
solitude, and to myself.--There is nothing in us either purely
corporeal, or purely spiritual. 'Tis an inhuman wisdom that would
have us despise and hate the culture of the body. 'Tis not a soul,
'tis not a body, we are training up, but a man; and we ought not to
divide him. Of all the infirmities we have, the most savage is to
despise our being."
There was a fineness of sensation in these unpremeditated thoughts,
which to Gaston seemed to connect itself with the exquisite words he
had found to paint his two great affections, for his [112] father and
for Etienne de la Boetie,--a fineness of sensation perhaps quite
novel in that age, but still of physical sensation: and in pursuit of
fine physical sensation he came, on his broad, easy, indifferent
passage through the world, across the coarsest growths which also
thrive "under the sun," and was not revolted. They were akin to that
ruder earth within himself, of which a kind of undissembled greed was
symptomatic; the love of "meats little roasted, very high, and even,
as to several, quite gone"; while, in drinking, he loved "clear
glass, that the eye might taste too, according to its capacity"; akin
also to a certain slothfulness:--"Sleeping," he says, "has taken up a
great part of my life." And there was almost nothing he would not
say: no fact, no story, from his curious half-medical reading, he
would not find some plausible pretext to tell. Man's kinship to the
animal, the material, and all the proofs of it:--he would never blush
at them! In truth, he led the way to the immodesty of French
literature; and had his defence, a sort of defence, ready. "I know
very well that few will quarrel with the licence of my writings, who
have not more to quarrel with in the licence of their own thoughts."
Yet when Gaston, twenty years afterwards, heard of the seemingly
pious end of Monsieur de Montaigne, he recalled a hundred, always
quiet but not always insignificant, acts of devotion, noticeable in
those old days, on passing a village [113] church, or at home, in the
little chapel--superstitions, concessions to others, strictly
appropriate recognitions rather, as it might seem, of a certain great
possibility, which might lie among the conditions of so complex a
world. That was a point which could hardly escape so reflective a
mind as Gaston's: and at a later period of his life, at the harvest
of his own second thoughts, as he pondered on the influence over him
of that two-sided thinker, the opinion that things as we find them
would bear a certain old-fashioned construction, seemed to have been
the consistent motive, however secret and subtle in its working, of
Montaigne's sustained intellectual activity. A lowly philosophy of
ignorance would not be likely to disallow or discredit whatever
intimations there might be, in the experience of the wise or of the
simple, in favour of a venerable religion, which from its long
history had come to seem like a growth of nature. Somewhere, among
men's seemingly random and so inexplicable apprehensions, might lie
the grains of a wisdom more precious than gold, or even its priceless
pearl. That "free and roving thing," the human soul--what might it
not have found out for itself, in a world so wide? To deny, at all
events, would be only "to limit the mind, by negation."
It was not however this side of that double philosophy which
recommended itself just now to Gaston. The master's wistful
tolerance, so [114] extraordinary a characteristic in that age,
attracted him, in his present humour, not so much in connexion with
those problematic heavenly lights that might find their way to one
from infinite skies, as with the pleasant, quite finite, objects and
experiences of the indubitable world of sense, so close around him.
Over against the world's challenge to make trial of it, here was that
general licence, which his own warm and curious appetite just then
demanded of the moral theorist. For so pronounced a lover of
sincerity as Monsieur de Montaigne, there was certainly a strange
ambiguousness in the result of his lengthy inquiries, on the greatest
as well as on the lightest matters, and it was inevitable that a
listener should accept the dubious lesson in his own sense. Was this
shrewd casuist only bringing him by a roundabout way to principles he
would not have cared to avow? To the great religious thinker of the
next century, to Pascal, Montaigne was to figure as emphatically on
the wrong side, not merely because "he that is not with us, is
against us." It was something to have been, in the matter of
religious tolerance, as on many other matters of justice and
gentleness, the solitary conscience of the age. But could one really
care for truth, who never even seemed to find it? Did he fear,
perhaps, the practical responsibility of getting to the very bottom
of certain questions? That the actual discourse of so keen a thinker
appeared often inconsistent or inconsecutive, might be a [115] hint
perhaps that there was some deeper ground of thought in reserve; as
if he were really moving, securely, over ground you did not see.
What might that ground be? As to Gaston himself,--had this kindly
entertainer only been drawing the screws of a very complex piece of
machinery which had worked well enough hitherto for all practical
purposes?--Was this all that had been going on, while he lingered
there, week after week, in a kind of devout attendance on theories,
and, for his part, feeling no reverberation of actual events around
him, still less of great events in preparation? These were the
questions Gaston had in mind, as, at length, he thanked his host one
morning with real regret, and took his last look around that
meditative place, the manuscripts, the books, the emblems,--the house
of Circe on the wall.
VI. SHADOWS OF EVENTS
[116] We all feel, I suppose, the pathos of that mythic situation in
Homer, where the Greeks at the last throb of battle around the body
of Patroclus find the horror of supernatural darkness added to their
other foes; feel it through some touch of truth to our own experience
how the malignancy of the forces against us may be doubled by their
uncertainty and the resultant confusion of one's own mind--blindfold
night there too, at the moment when daylight and self-possession are
indispensable.
In that old dream-land of the Iliad such darkness is the work of a
propitiable deity, and withdrawn at its pleasure; in life, it often
persists obstinately. It was so with the agents on the terrible Eve
of St. Bartholomew, 1572, when a man's foes were those of his own
household. An ambiguity of motive and influence, a confusion of
spirit amounting, as we approach the centre of action, to physical
madness, encompasses [117] those who are formally responsible for
things; and the mist around that great crime, or great "accident," in
which the gala weather of Gaston's coming to Paris broke up, leaving
a sullenness behind it to remain for a generation, has never been
penetrated. The doubt with which Charles the Ninth would seem to
have left the world, doubt as to his own complicity therein, as well
as to the precise nature, the course and scope, of the event itself,
is still unresolved. So it was with Gaston also. The incident in
his life which opened for him the profoundest sources of regret and
pity, shaped as it was in a measure by those greater historic
movements, owed its tragic significance there to an unfriendly shadow
precluding knowledge how certain facts had really gone, a shadow
which veiled from others a particular act of his and the true
character of its motives.
For, the scene of events being now contracted very closely to Paris,
the predestined actors therein were gradually drawn thither as into
some narrow battlefield or slaughter-house or fell trap of destiny,
and Gaston, all unconsciously, along with them--he and his private
fortunes involved in those larger ones. Result of chance, or fate,
or cunning prevision, there are in the acts great and little--the
acts and the words alike--of the king and his associates, at this
moment, coincidences which give them at least superficially the
colour of an elaborate conspiracy. [118] Certainly, as men looked
back afterwards, all the seemingly random doings of those restless
months ending in the Noces Vermeilles marriage of Henry of Navarre
with Margaret of France, lent themselves agreeably to the theory of a
great plot to crush out at one blow, in the interest of the reigning
Valois, not the Huguenots only but the rival houses of Guise and
Bourbon. The word, the act, from hour to hour through what presented
itself at the time as a long-continued season of frivolity, suggested
in retrospect alike to friend and foe the close connexion of a
mathematical problem. And yet that damning coincidence of date, day
and hour apparently so exactly timed, in the famous letter to the
Governor of Lyons, by which Charles, the trap being now ready, seems
to shut all the doors upon escaping victims, is admitted even by
Huguenot historians to have been fortuitous. Gaston, recalling to
mind the actual mien of Charles as be passed to and fro across the
chimeric scene, timid, and therefore constitutionally trustful
towards older persons, filially kissing the hand of the grim Coligni-
-Mon père! Mon père!--all his câlineries in that age of courtesy and
assassinations--would wonder always in time to come, as the more
equitable sort of historians have done, what amount of guilty
foresight the young king had carried in his bosom. And this
ambiguity regarding the nearest agent in so great a crime, adding
itself to the general mystery of life, touched Gaston duly with a
sense [119] of the dim melancholy of man's position in the world. It
might seem the function of some cruel or merely whimsical power,
thus, by the flinging of mere dust through the air, to double our
actual misfortunes. However carefully the critical intelligence in
him might trim the balance, his imagination at all events would never
be clear of the more plausible construction of events. In spite of
efforts not to misjudge, in proportion to the clearness with which he
recalled the visible footsteps of the "accursed" Valois, he saw them,
irresistibly, in connexion with the end actually reached, moving to
the sounds of wedding music, through a world of dainty gestures, amid
sonnets and flowers, and perhaps the most refined art the world has
seen, to their surfeit of blood.
And if those "accursed" Valois might plead to be judged refinedly, so
would Gaston, had the opportunity come, have pleaded not to be
misunderstood. Of the actual event he was not a spectator, and his
sudden absence from Paris at that moment seemed to some of those he
left there only a cruelly characteristic incident in the great
treachery. Just before that delirious night set in, the news that
his old grandfather lay mortally sick at Deux-manoirs had snatched
him away to watch by the dying bed, amid the peaceful ministries of
the religion which was even then filling the houses of Paris with
blood. But the yellow-haired woman, light of soul, whose husband he
had become by dubious and [120] irregular Huguenot rites, the
religious sanction of which he hardly recognised--flying after his
last tender kiss, with the babe in her womb, from the ruins of her
home, and the slaughter of her kinsmen, supposed herself
treacherously deserted. For him, on the other hand, "the pity of
it," the pity of the thing supplied all that had been wanting in its
first consecration, and made the lost mistress really a wife. His
recoil from that damaging theory of his conduct brought home to a
sensitive conscience the fact that there had indeed been a measure of
self-indulgent weakness in his acts, and made him the creature for
the rest of his days of something like remorse.