jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune_), you see me now
["at near seventy years of age," his translator says], hale and
cheery, as sound as a bell, and ready to drink, if you will.
It is impossible to exaggerate the mad, rollicking humor, sticking at
nothing, either in thought or in expression, with which especially this
last book of Rabelais's work is written. But we have no more space for
quotation.
Coleridge's theory of interpretation for Rabelais's writings is hinted
in his "Table Talk," as follows: "After any particularly deep thrust ...
Rabelais, as if to break the blow and to appear unconscious of what he
has done, writes a chapter or two of pure buffoonery."
The truth seems to us to be, that Rabelais's supreme taste, like his
supreme power, lay in the line of humorous satire. He hated monkery, and
he satirized the system as openly as he dared--this, however, not so
much in the love of truth and freedom as in pure fondness for exercising
his wit. That he was more than willing to make his ribald drollery the
fool's mask from behind which he might aim safely his shafts of ridicule
at what he despised and hated is, indeed, probable. But in this is
supplied to him no sufficient excuse for his obscene and blasphemous
pleasantry. Nor yet are the manners of the age an excuse sufficient.
Erasmus belonged to the same age, and he disliked the monks not less.
But what a contrast, in point of decency, between Rabelais and Erasmus.
IV.
MONTAIGNE.
1533-1592.
Montaigne is signally the author of one book. His "Essays" are the whole
of him. He wrote letters, to be sure, and he wrote journals of travel
undertaken in quest of health and pleasure. But these are chiefly void
of interest. Montaigne the Essayist alone is emphatically the Montaigne
that survives. "Montaigne the Essayist"--that has become, as it were, a
personal name in literary history.
The "Essays" are one hundred and seven in number, distributed in three
books. They are very unequal in length: and they are on the most various
topics--topics often the most whimsical in character. We give a few of
his titles, taking them as found in Cotton's translation:
That men by various ways arrive at the same end; Whether the governor
of a place ought himself to go out to parley; Of liars; Of quick or
slow speech; A proceeding of some ambassadors; Various events from the
same counsel; Of cannibals; That we laugh and cry from the same thing;
Of smell; That the mind hinders itself; Of thumbs; Of virtue; Of
coaches; Of managing the will; Of cripples; Of experience.
Montaigne's titles cannot be trusted to indicate the nature of the
essays to which they belong. The author's pen will not be bound. It runs
on at its own pleasure. Things the most unexpected are incessantly
turning up in Montaigne--things, probably, that were as unexpected to
the writer when he was writing as they will be to the reader when he is
reading. The writing, on whatever topic, in whatever vein, always
revolves around the writer for its pivot. Montaigne, from no matter what
apparent diversion, may constantly be depended upon to bring up in due
time at himself. The tether is long and elastic, but it is tenacious,
and it is securely tied to Montaigne. This, as we shall presently let
the author himself make plain, is no accident of which Montaigne was
unconscious. It is the express idea on which the "Essays" were written.
Montaigne, in his "Essays," is a pure and perfect egotist, naked and not
ashamed. Egotism is Montaigne's note, his _differentia_, in the world of
literature. Other literary men have been egotists--since. But Montaigne
may be called the first, and he is the greatest; by no means the most
monstrous, but the greatest.
Montaigne was a Gascon, and Gasconisms adulterate the purity of his
French. But his style--a little archaic now, and never finished to the
nail--had virtues of its own which have exercised a wholesome influence
on classic French prose. It is simple, direct, manly, genuine. It is
fresh and racy of the writer. It is flexible to every turn, it is
sensitive to every rise or fall, of the thought. It is a steadfast
rebuke to rant and fustian. It quietly laughs to scorn the folly of that
style which writhes in an agony of expression, with neither thought nor
feeling present to be expressed. Montaigne's "Essays" have been a great
and a beneficent formative force in the development of prose style in
French.
For substance, Montaigne is rich in practical wisdom, his own by
original reflection or by discreet purveyal. He had read much, he had
observed much, he had experienced much. The result of all, digested in
brooding thought, he put into his "Essays." These grew as he grew. He
got himself transferred whole into them. Out of them, in turn, the world
has been busy ever since dissolving Montaigne.
Montaigne's "Essays" are, as we have said, himself. Such is his own way
of putting the fact. To one admiring his essays to him, he frankly
replied, "You will like me if you like my essays, for they are myself."
The originality, the creative character and force of the "Essays" lies
in this autobiographical quality in them. Their fascination, too,
consists in the revelation they contain. This was, first,
self-revelation on the part of the writer; but no less it becomes, in
each case, self-revelation in the experience of the reader. For, as face
answereth to face in the glass, so doth the heart of man to man--from
race to race and from generation to generation. If Montaigne, in his
"Essays," held the mirror up to himself, he, in the same act, held up
the mirror to you and to me. The image that we, reading, call Montaigne,
is really ourselves. We never tire of gazing on it. We are all of us
Narcissuses. This is why Montaigne is an immortal and a universal
writer.
Here is Montaigne's preface to his "Essays"--"The Author to the Reader,"
it is entitled:
Reader, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset forewarn
thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other
than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all
either to thy service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any
such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my
kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do
shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and
humours, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like,
the knowledge they had of me. Had my intention been to seek the
world's favor, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed
beauties. I desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own
genuine, simple, and ordinary manner, without study and artifice; for
it is myself I paint. My defects are therein to be read to the life,
and my imperfections and my natural form, so far as public reverence
hath permitted me. If I had lived among those nations which (they say)
yet dwell under the sweet liberty of nature's primitive laws, I assure
thee I would most willingly have painted myself quite fully, and quite
naked. Thus, reader, myself am the matter of my book. There's no
reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure about so frivolous and vain a
subject. Therefore, farewell.
From Montaigne, the 12th of June, 1580.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, our author, as the foregoing date will have
suggested, derived his most familiar name from the place at which he was
born and at which he lived. Readers are not to take too literally
Montaigne's notice of his dispensing with "borrowed beauties." He was,
in fact, a famous borrower. He himself warns his readers to be careful
how they criticise him; they may be flouting unawares Seneca, Plutarch,
or some other, equally redoubtable, of the reverend ancients. Montaigne
is perhaps as signal an example as any in literature of the man of
genius exercising his prescriptive right to help himself to his own
wherever he may happen to find it. But Montaigne has in turn been freely
borrowed from. Bacon borrowed from him, Shakespeare borrowed from him,
Dryden, Pope, Hume, Burke, Byron--these, with many more, in England;
and, in France, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Voltaire, Rousseau--directly
or indirectly, almost every writer since his day. No modern writer,
perhaps, has gone in solution into subsequent literature more widely
than Montaigne. But no writer remains more solidly and insolubly entire.
We go at once to chapter twenty-five of the first book of the "Essays,"
entitled, in the English translation, "On the Education of Children."
The translation we use henceforth throughout is the classic one of
Charles Cotton, in a text of it edited by Mr. William Carew Hazlitt. The
"preface," already given, Cotton omitted to translate. We have allowed
Mr. Hazlitt to supply the deficiency. Montaigne addresses his
educational views to a countess. Several others of his essays are
similarly inscribed to women. Mr. Emerson's excuse of Montaigne for his
coarseness--that he wrote for a generation in which women were not
expected to be readers--is thus seen to be curiously impertinent to the
actual case that existed. Of a far worse fault in Montaigne than his
coarseness--we mean his outright immorality--Mr. Emerson makes no
mention, and for it, therefore, provides no excuse. We shall ourselves,
in due time, deal more openly with our readers on this point.
It was for a "boy of quality" that Montaigne aimed to adapt his
suggestions on the subject of education. In this happy country of ours
all boys are boys of quality; and we shall go nowhere amiss in selecting
from the present essay:
For a boy of quality, then, I say, I would also have his friends
solicitous to find him out a tutor who has rather a well-made than a
well-filled head, seeking, indeed, both the one and the other, but
rather of the two to prefer manners and judgment to mere learning, and
that this man should exercise his charge after a new method.
'Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their
pupil's ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the business
of the pupil is only to repeat what the others have said: now, I
would have a tutor to correct this error, and that, at the very first,
he should, according to the capacity he has to deal with, put it to
the test, permitting his pupil himself to taste things, and of himself
to discern and choose them, sometimes opening the way to him, and
sometimes leaving him to open it for himself; that is, I would not
have him alone to invent and speak, but that he should also hear his
pupil speak in turn.... Let him make him put what he has learned into
a hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several
subjects, to see if he yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it his
own.... 'Tis a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat
in the same condition it was swallowed: the stomach has not performed
its office, unless it have altered the form and condition of what was
committed to it to concoct....
Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift every thing he reads and
lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust,
Aristotle's principles will then be no more principles to him than
those of Epicurus and the stoics: let this diversity of opinions be
propounded to, and laid before, him; he will himself choose, if he be
able; if not, he will remain in doubt.
"Che, non men che saper, dubbiar m'aggrata."
DANTE, _Inferno_, xl, 93.
["That doubting pleases me, not less than knowing."
LONGFELLOW'S _Translation_.]
For, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own
reason they will no more be theirs, but become his own. Who follows
another follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is inquisitive after
nothing. "Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se vindicet." ["We are
under no king; let each look to himself."--SENECA, _Ep._ 33.] Let him,
at least, know that he knows. It will be necessary that he imbibe
their knowledge, not that he be corrupted with their precepts; and no
matter if he forget where he had his learning, provided he know how to
apply it to his own use. Truth and reason are common to every one, and
are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them after;
'tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both he
and I equally see and understand them. Bees cull their several sweets
from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they find
them; but themselves afterward make the honey, which is all and purely
their own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the several fragments he
borrows from others he will transform and shuffle together, to compile
a work that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment:
his instruction, labor, and study tend to nothing else but to form
that.... Conversation with men is of very great use, and travel into
foreign countries, ... to be able chiefly to give an account of the
humors, manners, customs, and laws of those nations where he has been,
and that we may whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them against
those of others....
In this conversing with men, I mean also, and principally, those who
live only in the records of history: he shall, by reading those books,
converse with the great and heroic souls of the best ages.
It is difficult to find a stopping-place in discourse so wise and so
sweet. We come upon sentences like Plato for height and for beauty. An
example: "The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness;
her state is like that of things in the regions above the moon, always
clear and serene." But the genius of Montaigne does not often soar,
though even one little flight like that shows that it has wings.
Montaigne's garnishes of quotation from foreign tongues are often a
cold-blooded device of afterthought with him. His first edition was
without them in many places where subsequently they appear. Readers
familiar with Emerson will be reminded of him in perusing Montaigne.
Emerson himself said, "It seemed to me [in reading the 'Essays' of
Montaigne], as if I myself had written the book in some former life, so
sincerely it spoke to my thoughts and experience." The rich old English
of Cotton's translation had evidently a strong influence on Emerson, to
mold his own style of expression. Emerson's trick of writing "'tis," was
apparently caught from Cotton. The following sentence, from the present
essay of Montaigne, might very well have served Mr. Emerson for his own
rule of writing: "Let it go before, or come after, a good sentence, or a
thing well said, is always in season; if it neither suit well with what
went before, nor has much coherence with what follows after, it is good
in itself." Montaigne, at any rate, wrote his "Essays" on that easy
principle. The logic of them is the logic of mere chance association in
thought. But, with Montaigne--whatever is true of Emerson--the
association at least is not occult; and it is such as pleases the reader
not less than it pleased the writer. So this Gascon gentleman of the
olden time never tires us, and never loses us out of his hand. We go
with him cheerfully where he so blithely leads.
Montaigne tells us how he was himself trained under his father. The
elder Montaigne, too, had his ideas on education--the subject which his
son, in this essay, so instructively treats. The essayist leads up to
his autobiographical episode by an allusion to the value of the
classical languages, and to the question of method in studying them. He
says:
In my infancy, and before I began to speak, he [my father] committed
me to the care of a German,... totally ignorant of our language, but
very fluent, and a great critic, in Latin. This man, whom he had
fetched out of his own country, and whom he entertained with a very
great salary, for this only end, had me continually with him: to him
there were also joined two others, of inferior learning, to attend me,
and to relieve him, who all of them spoke to me in no other language
but Latin. As to the rest of his family, it was an inviolable rule,
that neither himself nor my mother, man nor maid, should speak any
thing in my company but such Latin words as every one had learned only
to gabble with me. It is not to be imagined how great an advantage
this proved to the whole family: my father and my mother by this means
learned Latin enough to understand it perfectly well, and to speak it
to such a degree as was sufficient for any necessary use, as also
those of the servants did who were most frequently with me. In short,
we Latined it at such a rate that it overflowed to all the neighboring
villages, where there yet remain, that have established themselves by
custom, several Latin appellations of artisans and their tools. As for
what concerns myself, I was above six years of age before I understood
either French or Perigordin ["Perigordin" is Montaigne's name for the
dialect of his province, Perigord (Gascony)], any more than Arabic;
and, without art, book, grammar, or precept, whipping, or the expense
of a tear, I had, by that time, learned to speak as pure Latin as my
master himself, for I had no means of mixing it up with any other.
We are now to see how, helped by his wealth, the father was able to
gratify a pleasant whimsey of his own in the nurture of his boy. Highly
aesthetic was the matin _reveille_ that broke the slumbers of this
hopeful young heir of Montaigne:
Some being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the brains of
children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch them
violently and over-hastily from sleep, wherein they are much more
profoundly involved than we, he [the father] caused me to be wakened
by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a
musician for that purpose.... The good man, being extremely timorous
of any way failing in a thing he had so wholly set his heart upon,
suffered himself at last to be overruled by the common opinions:...
he sent me, at six years of age, to the College of Guienne, at that
time the best and most flourishing in France.
In short, as in the case of Mr. Tulliver, the world was "too many" for
Eyquem _pere_; and, in the education of his son, the stout Gascon,
having started out well as dissenter, fell into dull conformity at last.
We ought to give some idea of the odd instances, classic and other, with
which Montaigne plentifully bestrews his pages. He is writing of the
"Force of Imagination." He says:
A woman, fancying she had swallowed a pin in a piece of bread, cried
and lamented as though she had an intolerable pain in her throat,
where she thought she felt it stick; but an ingenious fellow that was
brought to her, seeing no outward tumor nor alteration, supposing it
to be only a conceit taken at some crust of bread that had hurt her as
it went down, caused her to vomit, and, unseen, threw a crooked pin
into the basin, which the woman no sooner saw, but, believing she had
cast it up, she presently found herself eased of her pain....
Such as are addicted to the pleasures of the field have, I make no
question, heard the story of the falconer, who, having earnestly fixed
his eyes upon a kite in the air, laid a wager that he would bring her
down with the sole power of his sight, and did so, as it was said; for
_the tales I borrow, I charge upon the consciences of those from whom
I have them_.
We italicize the last foregoing words, to make readers see that
Montaigne is not to be read for the truth of his instances. He uses what
comes to hand. He takes no trouble to verify. "The discourses are my
own," he says; but even this, as we have hinted, must not be pressed too
hard in interpretation. Whether a given reflection of Montaigne's is
strictly his own, in the sense of not having been first another's, who
gave it to him, is not to be determined except upon very wide reading,
very well remembered, in all the books that Montaigne could have got
under his eye. That was full fairly his own, he thought, which he had
made his own by intelligent appropriation. And this, perhaps, expresses
in general the sound law of property in the realm of mind. At any rate,
Montaigne will wear no yoke of fast obligation. He will write as pleases
him. Above all things else, he likes his freedom.
Here is one of those sagacious historical scepticisms, in which
Montaigne was so fond of poising his mind between opposite views. It
occurs in his essay entitled, "Of the Uncertainty of our Judgments:"
Amongst other oversights Pompey is charged withal at the battle of
Pharsalia, he is condemned for making his army stand still to receive
the enemy's charge, "by reason that" (I shall here steal Plutarch's
own words, which are better than mine) "he by so doing deprived
himself of the violent impression the motion of running adds to the
first shock of arms, and hindered that clashing of the combatants
against one another, which is wont to give them greater impetuosity
and fury, especially when they come to rush in with their utmost
vigor, their courages increasing by the shouts and the career; 'tis to
render the soldiers' ardor, as a man may say, more reserved and cold."
This is what he says. But, if Caesar had come by the worse, why might
it not as well have been urged by another, that, on the contrary, the
strongest and most steady posture of fighting is that wherein a man
stands planted firm, without motion; and that they who are steady upon
the march, closing up, and reserving their force within themselves for
the push of the business, have a great advantage against those who are
disordered, and who have already spent half their breath in running on
precipitately to the charge? Besides that, an army is a body made up
of so many individual members, it is impossible for it to move in this
fury with so exact a motion as not to break the order of battle, and
that the best of them are not engaged before their fellows can come on
to help them.
The sententiousness of Montaigne may be illustrated by transferring here
a page of brief excerpts from the "Essays," collected by Mr. Bayle St.
John in his biography of the author. The apothegmatic or proverbial
quality in Montaigne had a very important sequel of fruitful influence
on subsequent French writers, as chapters to follow in this volume will
abundantly show. In reading the sentences sub-joined, you will have the
sensation of coming suddenly upon a treasure-trove of coined proverbial
wisdom:
Our minds are never at home, but ever beyond home.
I will take care, if possible, that my death shall say nothing that my
life has not said.
Life in itself is neither good nor bad: it is the place of what is
good or bad.
Knowledge should not be stuck on to the mind, but incorporated in it.
Irresolution seems to me the most common and apparent vice of our
nature.
Age wrinkles the mind more than the face.
Habit is a second nature.
Hunger cures love.
It is easier to get money than to keep it.
Anger has often been the vehicle of courage.
It is more difficult to command than to obey.
A liar should have a good memory.
Ambition is the daughter of presumption.
To serve a prince, you must be discreet and a liar.
We learn to live when life has passed.
The mind is ill at ease when its companion has the colic.
We are all richer than we think, but we are brought up to go
a-begging.
The greatest masterpiece of man is ... to be born at the right time.
We append a saying of Montaigne's not found in Mr. St. John's
collection:
There is no so good man, who so squares all his thoughts and actions
to the laws, that he is not faulty enough to deserve hanging ten times
in his life.