We, who are interested rather in literature than in the history of
literature, and rather in the reaction produced upon ourselves by
great original geniuses than in any judicial estimate of their actual
achievements, can afford to regard with serene indifference the
charges of arbitrariness and caprice brought against us by
professional students.
Let these professional students prove to us that, in addition to their
learning, they have receptive senses and quickly stimulated
imagination, and we will accept them willingly as our guides.
We have already accepted Pater, Brandes, de Gourmont, critics who
have the secret of combining immense erudition with creative
intelligence, and it is under the power and the spell of these
authoritative and indisputable names that we claim our right to the
most personal and subjective enjoyment, precisely as the occasion
and hour calls, of the greatest figures in art and letters.
Most of all we have a right to treat Montaigne as we please, even
though that right includes the privilege of _not_ reading every word
of the famous Essays, and of only reverting--in our light return to
them--to those aspects and qualities which strike an answering chord
in ourselves.
This was, after all, what he--the great humanist--was always doing;
he the unscrupulous, indiscriminate and _casual_ reader; and if we
treat him in the same spirit as that in which he treated the classical
authors he loved most, we shall at least be acting under the cloak of
his approval, however much we annoy the Calvins and Scaligers of
our age.
The man must have been a colossal genius. No human writer has
done quite what he did, anticipating the methods and spiritual
secrets of posterity, and creating for himself, with sublime
indifference to contemporary usage and taste, the sort of intellectual
atmosphere that suited him.
When one thinks how sensitive we all are to the intellectual
environments in which we move--how we submit for instance, at
this very moment, without being able to help ourselves, to the ideas
set in motion by Nietzsche, say, or Walt Whitman--it seems
impossible to overrate as a sheer triumph of personal force, the thing
that Montaigne did in disentangling himself from the tendencies of
his age, and creating almost "in vacuo," with nothing to help him but
his own temperament and the ancient classics, a new emotional
attitude toward life, something that might without the least
exaggeration be called "a new soul."
The magnitude of his spiritual undertaking can best be estimated if
we conceive ourselves freeing our minds, at this moment, from the
influences of Nietzsche and Dostoievsky and Whitman and Pater
and Wilde, and launching out into some completely original attitude
toward existence, fortified it may be by the reading of Sophocles or
of Lucretius, but with so original a mental vista that we leave every
contemporary writer hopelessly behind.
Suppose we looked about us with a view to the undertaking of so
huge an intellectual venture, where should we go to discover the
original impetus, the first embryonic germ, of the new way?
In ourselves? In our own temperament? Ah! that is the crux of the
whole matter. It was in his temperament that he found the force and
inexhaustible riches to carry the matter through--but have we got
such power at our disposal? It is doubtful. It is hard to even dream
that we have. And yet--consider the simplicity of what he did!
He just took himself, Michael de Montaigne, as he was, in the plain
unvarnished totality of his vigorous self-conscious temperament,
and jotted down, more for his own amusement than for that of
posterity, carelessly, frankly, nonchalantly, his tastes, his vices, his
apathies, his antipathies, his prejudices and his pleasures.
In doing this--though there is a certain self-revelation in Augustine's
confessions and a certain autobiographical frankness in the writings
of many of the classical authors--he did what had never been done
by any one before his time, and what, not forgetting Rousseau and
Heine and Casanova and Charles Lamb, has never been so well done
since. But whether, in these latter days, we can achieve this thing as
Montaigne achieved it, the fact remains that this is what we are all at
the present time trying hard to do.
The "new soul," which he was permitted by the gods to evoke out of
the very abyss, has become, in the passionate subjectivity of our age,
the very life-blood of our intellect. Not one among our most
interesting artists and writers but does his utmost to reveal to the
world every phase and aspect of his personal identity. What was but
a human necessity, rather concealed and discouraged than reveled in
and exploited before Montaigne, has, after Montaigne, become the
obsession and preoccupation of us all. We have got the secret, the
great idea, the "new soul." It only remains for us to incarnate it in
beautiful and convincing form.
Ah! it is just there where we find the thing so hard. It is easy to
say--"Find yourself, know yourself, express yourself!" It is extremely
difficult to do any of these things.
No one who has not attempted to set down in words the palpable
image and body of what he is, or of what he seems to himself, can
possibly conceive the difficulty of the task.
More--oh, so much more--is needed than the mere saying, "I like
honey and milk better than meat and wine" or "I like girls who are
plump and fair better than those who are slim and dark." That is why
so much of modern autobiographical and confessional writing is dull
beyond words. Even impertinence will not save our essays upon
ourselves from being tedious--nor will shamelessness in the
flaunting of our vices. Something else is required than a mere wish
to strip ourselves bare; something else than a mere desire to call
attention to ourselves. And this "something else" is genius, and
genius of a very rare and peculiar kind. It is not enough to say, "I am
this or that or the other." The writer who desires to give a
convincing picture of what he is must diffuse the essence of his soul
not merely into his statements about himself but into the style in
which these statements are made.
Two men may start together to write confessions, and one of the two
may dissect every nerve and fibre of his inmost soul, while the other
may ramble carelessly on about the places he has seen, and the
people he has met; yet in the ultimate result it may turn out that it is
the latter rather than the former who has revealed his identity.
Human personalities--the strange and subtle differences which
separate us from one another--refuse to give up the secrets of their
quality save at the magical summons of what we call "style." Mr.
Pepys was a quaint fellow and no Goethean egotist; but he managed
to put a peculiar flavour of style--with a rhythm and a colour all its
own--into his meticulous gossip.
Montaigne's essays are not by any means of equal value. The more
intimately they deal with his own ways and habits, the more
_physiological_ they become in their shameless candour, the better
do they please us. They grow less interesting to my thinking where
they debouch into quotations, some of them whole pages in length,
from his favourite Roman writers.
He seems to have kept voluminous scrap-books of such quotations,
and, like many less famous people, to have savoured a peculiar
satisfaction from transcribing them. One can imagine the deliberate
and epicurean way he would go about this task, deriving from the
mere bodily effort of "copying out" these long and carefully chosen
excerpts, an almost sensual pleasure; the sort of pleasure which the
self-imposed observance of some mechanical routine in a leisured
person's life is able to produce, not unaccompanied by agreeable
sensations of physical well-being.
But what, after all, is this "new soul" which Montaigne succeeded in
putting into our western civilisation at the very moment when
Catholic and Protestant were so furiously striving for the mastery?
What is this new tone, this new temper, this new temperamental
atmosphere which, in the intervals of his cautious public work and
his lazy compiling of scrap-books from the classics, he managed to
fling abroad upon the air?
It is a spiritual ingredient, composed, when one comes to analyse it,
of two chemical elements; of what might be called aesthetic egoism
and of what we know as philosophic scepticism. Let us deal with the
former of these two elements first.
Egoism, in the new psychological sense of the word, may be
regarded as the deliberate attempt in an individual's life to throw the
chief interest and emphasis of his days upon the inward, personal,
subjective impressions produced by the world, rather than upon
outward action or social progress. Egoism does not necessarily
imply the invidious stigma of selfishness. Goethe, the greatest of all
egoists, was notoriously free from such a vice. "Who," cried
Wieland, when they first met at Weimar, "who can resist the
_unselfishness_ of this man?"
Egoism does not necessarily imply "egotism," though it must be
confessed that in Montaigne's case, though not in Goethe's, there
may have been a touch of that less generous attribute.
Egoism is an intellectual gesture, a spiritual attitude, a
temperamental atmosphere. It is a thing which implies a certain
definite philosophical mood in regard to the riddle of existence;
though, of course, between individual egoists there may be wide
gulfs of personal divergence.
Between Montaigne and Goethe, for instance, there is an immense
difference. Goethe's egoism was creative; Montaigne's receptive.
Goethe's was many-sided; driven forward by a tremendous
_demonic_ urge toward the satisfaction of a curiosity which was
cosmic and universal. Montaigne's was in a certain sense narrow,
limited, cautious, earth-bound. It had nothing of the large poetic
sweep, nothing of the vast mystical horizons and huge imaginative
vistas of the great German. But on the other hand, it was closer to
the soil, homelier, more humorous, in a certain measure more
natural, normal and human.
This "cult of egoism" is obviously not entirely modern. Traces of it,
aspects of it, fragments and morsels of it, have existed from all time.
It was the latent presence of this quality in his great Romans, much
more than their mere "outward triumphs," which led him to brood so
incessantly upon their memories.
But Montaigne himself was the first of all writers to give palpable
intellectual shape to this diffused spiritual temper.
In recent times, some of the most fascinating of our literary guides
have been philosophical egotists. Whitman, Matthew Arnold,
Emerson, Pater, Stendhal, Maurice Barrès (in his earlier work), de
Gourmont, D'Annunzio, Oscar Wilde--are all, in their widely
different ways, masters of the same cult.
The out-looking activities and the out-looking social interests of
Voltaire or Renan, or Anatole France, give to these great writers
quite a different psychological tone. The three I have just mentioned
are all too inveterately spirits of mockery even to take seriously
_their own_ "sensations and ideas"; and however ironical and
humorous an egoist may be with regard to other people's
impressions, with regard to his own he is grave, intent, preoccupied,
almost solemn.
When one thinks of it, there is a curious solemnity of preoccupation
with themselves and their own sensations about Wilde, Pater,
Whitman, Stendhal, D'Annunzio and Barrès. And this "gravity of
egoism" is precisely the thing which, for all his humorous humanity,
distinguished the great Montaigne and which his early critics found
so irritating.
"What do I care--what does any one care," grumbled the learned
Scaliger, "whether he prefers white wine to red wine?"
The second element in the compound chemistry of the "modern
temper" introduced into the world by Montaigne may be found in his
famous scepticism. The formidable levity of that notorious "que
sais-je?" "What do I know?" writes itself nowadays across our
whole sky. This also--"this film of white light," as some one has
called it, floating waveringly beneath each one of our most
cherished convictions was, not unknown before his time.
All the great sophists--Protagoras especially, with his "man the
measure of all things"--were, in a sense, professional teachers of a
refined scepticism.
Plato himself, with his wavering and gracious hesitations, was more
than touched by the same spirit.
Scepticism as a natural human philosophy--perhaps as the only
natural human philosophy--underlies all the beautiful soft-coloured
panorama of pagan poetry and pagan thought. It must have been the
habitual temper of mind in any Periclean symposium or Caesarean
salon. It is, pre-eminently and especially, the _civilised_ attitude of
mind; the attitude of mind most dominant and universal in the great
races, the great epochs, the great societies.
It is for this reason that France, among all modern nations, is the
most sceptical.
Barbarian peoples are rarely endowed with this quality. The crude
animal energy, which makes them successful! in business, and even
sometimes in war, is an energy which, for all its primitive force, is
destructive of civilisation. Civilisation, the rarest work of art of our
race's evolution, is essentially a thing created in restraint of such
crude energies; as it is created in restraint of the still cruder energies
of nature itself.
The Protestant Reformation springing out of the soul of the
countries "beyond the Alps" is, of course, the supreme example of
this uncivilised force. One frequently encounters sceptical-minded
Catholics, full of the very spirit of Montaigne--who died in the
Catholic faith--but it is rare to meet a Protestant who is not, in a
most barbarous sense, full of dogmatic and argumentative "truth."
So uncivilised and unlovely is this controversial mood that
free-thinkers are often tempted to be unfair to the Reformation. This is a
fault; for after all it is something, even for ingrained sceptics
prepared to offer incense at any official altar, to be saved from the
persecuting alliance of church and state.
It is not pleasant to meet argumentative revivalists, and the Puritan
influence upon art and letters is no less than deadly; but it is better to
be teased with impertinent questions about one's soul than to be led
away to the stake for its salvation.
The mention of the situation, in which in spite of Shakespeare and
the rest poor modern sceptics still find themselves, is an indication
of how hopelessly illusive all talk of "progress" is. Between Calvin
on the one hand and the Sorbonne on the other, Montaigne might
well shuffle home from his municipal duties and read Horace in his
tower. And we, after three hundred odd years, have little better to do.
Heine, impish descendant of this great doubter, took refuge from
human madness at the feet of Venus in the Louvre. Machiavel--for
all his crafty wisdom--was driven back to his books and his
memories. Goethe built up the "pyramid of his existence" among
pictures and fossils and love affairs, leaving the making of history to
others, and keeping "religious truth" at a convenient distance.
This scepticism of Montaigne is a much rarer quality among men of
genius than the egoism with which it is so closely associated. I am
inclined to regard it as the sanest of all human moods. What
distinguishes it from other intellectual attitudes is the fact that it is
shared by the very loftiest with the very simplest minds. It is the
prevailing temper of shepherds and ploughmen, of carters and
herdsmen, of all honest gatherers at rustic taverns who discuss the
state of the crops, the prospects of the weather, the cattle market and
the rise and fall of nations. It is the wisdom of the earth itself;
shrewd, friendly, full of unaccountable instincts; obstinate and
capricious, given up to irrational and inexplicable superstitions;
sluggish, suspicious, cautious, hostile to theory, enamoured of
inconsistencies, humorously critical of all ideals, realistic, empirical,
wayward, ready to listen to any magical whisper, to any faint
pipings of the flutes of Pan, but grumblingly reluctant to follow the
voices of the prophets and the high doctrines of the leaders of men.
Its wisdom is the wisdom of lazy noons in spacious corn-fields; of
dewy mornings in misty lanes and moss-grown paths; of dreamy
shadows in deep grass when the apple boughs hang heavily
earthward, and long nights of autumn rain have left amber-coloured
pools in the hollow places of the trees and in the mud trodden by the
cattle.
Its sanity is the sanity of farm-yards and smoking dung-heaps and
Priapian jests beneath wintry hedges, and clear earth-sweet
thoughtless laughter under large, liquid, mid-summer stars.
The nonchalant "What do I know?"--"What does any one know?"--of
this shrewd pagan spirit has nothing in it of the ache of
pessimistic disillusion. It has never had any illusions. It has taken
things as they appear, and life as it appears, and it is so close to the
kindly earth-mud beneath our feet that it is in no fear of any
desperate fall.
What lends the sceptical wisdom of Montaigne such massive and
enduring weight is the very fact of its being the natural pagan
wisdom of generations of simple souls who live close to the earth.
No wonder he was popular with the farmers and peasants of his
countryside and with the thrifty burgesses of his town. He must have
gathered much wisdom from his wayfaring among the fields, and
many scandalous sidelights upon human nature as he loitered among
the streets and wharfs of the city.
It is indeed the old joyous, optimistic, pagan spirit, full of courage
and gaiety; full too, it must be confessed, of a humorous terror now
and then, and yet capable enough sometimes of looking very
formidable antagonists squarely in the face and refusing to quit the
quiet ways it has marked out and the shrewd middle path it has
chosen!
Turning over the pages of Cotton's translation--it is my fancy to
prefer this one to the more famous Florio's--there seems to me to
arise from these rambling discourses, a singularly wholesome savour.
I seem to see Montaigne's massive and benignant countenance as he
jogs home, wrapped against the wind in the cloak that was once his
father's, along the muddy autumn lanes, upon his strong but not
over-impetuous nag. Surely I have seen that particular cast of
features in the weather-beaten face of many a farm labourer, and
listened too, from the same lips, to just as relishing a commentary
upon the surprising ways of providence with mortal men.
Full of a profound sense of a physical well-being, which the
troublesome accidents of chance and time only served to intensify,
Montaigne surveyed the grotesque panorama of human life with a
massive and indelible satisfaction.
His optimism, if you can call it by such a name, is not the optimism
of theory; it is not the optimism of faith, far less is it that mystic and
transcendental optimism which teases one, in these later days, with
its swollen words and windy rhetoric. It is the optimism of simple,
shrewd, sane common sense, the optimism of the poor, the optimism
of sound nerves, the optimism of cab-men and bus drivers, of
fishermen and gardeners, of "tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors,
apothecaries and thieves."
What Montaigne really does is to bring into the courts of philosophy
and to heighten with the classic style of one who was "brought up
upon Latin," the sheer, natural, incorrigible love of life, of such
persons, rich or poor, as have the earth in their blood and the shrewd
wisdom of the earth and the geniality of the earth, and the
mischievous wantonness of the earth, and the old, sly chuckling
malice of the earth, in their blood and in their soul.
He can record, and does often record, in those queer episodic dips
into his scrap-book, the outrageous stories of a thousand freaks of
nature. He loves these little impish tricks of the great careless gods.
He loves the mad, wicked, astounding, abnormal things that are
permitted to happen as the world moves round. He reads Tacitus and
Plutarch very much as a Dorsetshire shepherd might read the
_Western Gazette,_ and makes, in the end, much of the same
commentary.
In a certain sense Montaigne is the most human of all great geniuses.
The whole turbulent stream of the motley spectacle passes through
his consciousness and he can feel equal sympathy with the heroism
of a Roman patriot and with the terrors of a persecuted philosopher.
What pleases him best is to note the accidental little things--"life's
little ironies"--which so frequently intervene between ideal
resolutions and their results in practise and fact. He chuckles over
the unfortunate lapses in the careers of great men much as a
mischievous gossip in a tavern might chuckle over similar lapses in
the careers of local potentates.
Montaigne's scepticism is the result of his looking at the world not
through books or through the theories of books, but through his own
eyes. He is sceptical because he sees that any one who wishes to live
in harmony with the facts of life must be sceptical. Life is made up
of such evasive entangled confused elements that any other attitude
than this one is a noble madness if it is not knavish hypocrisy. The
theories, convictions, moralities, opinions, of every child of Adam
are subject to lamentable upheavals, as the incorrigible earth-gods,
with their impish malice, seize them and play nine-pins with them.
"All flows away and nothing remains," says the ancient philosopher,
and Montaigne shows clearly enough how vain it is to put our trust
in any theory or system or principle or idea.
It is a mistake to regard his scepticism as merely negative. It is far
more than that. Like all wise scepticism it is creative and
constructive; not out of theories and phrases, nor out of principles
and opinions, but out of events and persons and passions and
instincts and chances and occasions.
It is realistic--this Montaignesque method--realistic not materialistic.
It takes each occasion as it occurs, each person as he presents
himself, each passion, each instinct, each lust, each emotion, and out
of these he creates a sort of piece-meal philosophy; modest enough
and making no claim to finality, but serving us, at a pinch, as a sort
of rough-and-ready clue through the confusions of life.
It will always appear presumptuous to the dogmatic type of mind,
the mind made up of rationalistic and logical exigencies, to call
scepticism like this by the name of "philosophy." It will be still more
obscure to such a mind how it is possible for a human being to live
happily and joyfully in a complete absence of any synthetic system.
And yet one feels certain enough that amid the jolts and jars and
shocks of actual life even the most idealistic of philosophers leave
their logic to shift for itself and just drift on as they may in the
groove of traditional usages or the track of temperamental bias.
It must not, however, be for a moment supposed that the scepticism
of Montaigne is identical with the so-called "pragmatism" of
William James or with the "instinct theories" of Bergson.
Both of these modern attitudes make the assumption that a genuine
advance in our knowledge of "truth" is really possible; though
possible along quite different lines from the old absolute dogmatic
metaphysical ones. But the scepticism of Montaigne throws doubt
upon every human attempt to get behind the shifting flowing stream
of sense impressions. The rough and ready clue which it offers to the
confusions of life is not drawn from any individualistic "point
d'appui" of pseudo-psychological personal vision, as are these
modern clues to the mystery. It is drawn from nothing more
recondite than the customary traditions, usages, pieties and customs
of the generations of humanity; habits of mind and moods of hope
which have behind them, not so much the psychological insight of
clever individuals--the William Jameses and Bergsons of past
ages--as the primitive and permanent emotions of the masses of average
men and women themselves, confronting the eternal silence.
What the scepticism of Montaigne does is to clear out of the path all
the individual claims to extraordinary insight of the philosophic
great men of the world, by means of showing how, under the
pressure of obstinate and malicious reality, such explanations of the
universe break down and such great men collapse and become as
blind, helpless, groping and uncertain as all the rest of us. Prophets
and rationalists alike, logicians and soothsayers together, so collapse
and fall away; while in their place the long slow patient wisdom of
the centuries, the old shrewd superstitious wisdom of anonymous
humanity rises up out of the pagan earth, and offers us our only
solution.
Not that what we get in this humble way is really a solution at all.
Rather is it a modest working substitute for such solutions, a dim
lamp flickering in a great darkness, a faint shadow falling on a long
uncertain road; a road of which we can see neither the beginning nor
the end, and along which we have nothing better to guide us than
such pathetic "omens of the way" as old wives' tales repeat and old
traditions hand down from mouth to mouth.
To certain minds the condition of the human race under the burden
of such a twilight may well seem intolerable. To Montaigne it was
not intolerable. It was his element, his pleasant Arcadia, his natural
home. He loved the incongruities and inconsistencies of such a
world; its outrageous Rabelaisian jests, its monstrous changes and
chances, its huge irrelevancy. He loved its roguish and goblinish
refusal to give up its secret to grave and solemn intellects, taking
upon themselves the rôle of prophets. He loved a world that hides its
treasures from the "wise and prudent" and reveals them--or at any
rate all that will ever be revealed of them--to "babes and sucklings."
Those who read Montaigne with a natural affinity for his peculiar
turn of mind, will find themselves in a position to regard
very humorously and lightly the portentous claims of modern
philosophers whether they be rationalists or intuitivists. "There are
more things in Heaven and earth," they will retort to these scholarly
Horatios in the very vein of that Prince of Denmark who--according
to reliable critical opinion--was actually modelled on Montaigne
himself.
They will be encouraged to go on, as before, making the best of
what the traditional wisdom of the centuries brings them, but not
taking even this with more seriousness than its pathetic weight of
human experience demands, and not dreaming that, with even this to
help them, they are very closely initiated into the ultimate mystery.
They will be encouraged to go on as before, enjoying the books of
the writers with a pinch of pleasant salt, but enjoying them with
infinite zest and profit, and, at least, with full _aesthetic_
appreciation.
They will be encouraged to fall back upon the kindly possibilities
and broad hopeful vistas to which the unsophisticated heart of man
naturally and spontaneously turns.
They will be encouraged to go to the "highways and hedges" for
their omens, to the felicitous encounters of the common road for
their auguries and inspirations. They will listen reverently to the
chatter of very simple people, and catch the shadow of the wings of
fate falling upon very homely heads. The rough earth-wisdom of
ploughed fields, heavy with brown sun-lit mud, will be redolent for
them with whispers and hints and intimations of things that no
philosophy can include and no psychology explain.
Out of the coarse rankness of rude primitive natures strange sweet
mysteries will come to light, and upon the sensual lusts of satyrs,
gambolling grossly in rain-soaked leafy midnights, the moon of
tender purity will shed down her virginal benediction.
For them the grotesque roots of trees will leer magically from the
wayside to meet the uncouth gestures of the labourer and his trull;
while in the smoke-thick air of mellow tavern-corners the shameless
mirth of honest revellers philosophising upon the world will have a
smack of true divinity.
They will be encouraged--the people who read Montaigne--to sink
once more into their own souls and enjoy the rare sensations
permitted to their own physical and psychological susceptibility, as
the great world sweeps by them.
I sometimes think that the wisdom of Montaigne, with its essential
roots in physiological well-being, is best realised and understood
when on some misty autumn morning, full of the smell of leaves,
one lies, just newly awakened out of pleasant dreams, and watches
the sunshine on wall and window and floor, and listens to the traffic
of the town or the noises of the village. It is then, with the sweet
languor of awakening, that one seems conscious of some ineffable
spiritual secret to be drawn from the material sensations of the
nerves of one's body.
Montaigne, with all his gravity, is quite shameless in the assumption
that the details of his bodily habits form an important part, not by
any means to be neglected, of the picture he sets out to give of
himself.
And those who read Montaigne with sympathetic affinity will find
themselves growing into the habit of making much of the sensations
of their bodies. They will not rush foolishly and stupidly, like dull
economic machines, from bedroom to "lunch counter" and from
"lunch counter" to office. They will savour every moment which can
be called _their own_ and they will endeavour to enlarge such
moments by any sort of economic or domestic change.
They will make much of the sensations of waking and bathing and
eating and drinking and going to sleep; just as they make much of
the sensations of reading admirable books. They will cross the road
to the sunny side of the street; they will pause by the toy-shops and
the flower-shops. They will go out into the fields, before breakfast,
to look for mushrooms.
They will miss nothing of the caprices and humours and comedies of
every day of human life; for they will know that in the final issue
none of us are wiser than the day and what the day brings; none of
us wiser than the wisdom of street and field and market-place; the
wisdom of the common people, the wisdom of our mother, the earth.
In the enjoyment of life spent thus fastidiously in the cultivation of
our own sensations, and thus largely and generously in a broad
sympathy with the emotions of the masses of men, there is room for
many kinds of love. But of all the love passions which destiny offers
us, none lends itself better to the peculiar path we have chosen than
the passion of friendship. It is the love of an "alter ego," a second
self, a twin soul, which more than anything else is able to heighten
and deepen our consciousness of life.
The "love of women" has always about it something tragic and
catastrophic. It means the plunging of one's hands into frozen snow
or burning fire. It means the crossing of perilous glades in tropic
jungles. It means the "sowing of the whirlwind" on the edge of the
avalanche and the hunting of the mirage in the desert. The ecstasy
brought by it is too blinding to serve as an illumination for our days;
and for all the tremulous sweetness of its approach it leaves behind
it the poison of disillusion and the scars of rancour and remorse.
But the passion of friendship for one of one's own sex burns with a
calm clear flame. A thousand little subtleties of observation, that
would mean nothing were we alone, take to themselves a significant
and symbolic value and lead us down pleasant and flower-strewn
vistas of airy fancy. In the absence of our friend the colour of his
imagination falls like a magical light upon the saddest and dullest
scenes; while with him at our side, all the little jerks and jars and
jolts and ironical tricks of the hour and the occasion lose their
brutish emphasis and sink into humorous perspective. The sense of
having some one for whom one's weakest and least effective
moments are of interest and for whom one's weariness and unreason
are only an additional bond, makes what were otherwise intolerable
in our life easy and light to bear.
And what a delicious sense, in the midst of the open or hidden
hostilities of our struggle against the world, to feel one has some one
near at hand with whom, crouched in any "corner of the hubbub,"
we may "make game of _that_" which makes as much of us!
Love, in the sexual sense, fails us in the bitterest crisis of our days
because love, or the person loved, is the chief cause of the misery.
Scourged and lacerated by Aphrodite it is of little avail to flee to
Eros. But friendship--of the noble, rare, _absolute_ kind such as
existed between Montaigne and his sweet Etienne--is the only
antidote, the only healing ointment, the only anodyne, which can
make it possible for us to endure without complete disintegration
"the pangs of despised love" and love's bitter and withering reaction.
Love too--in the ordinary sense--implies jealousy, exclusiveness,
insatiable exactions; whereas friendship, sure of its inviolable roots
in spiritual equality, is ready to look generously and sympathetically
upon every wandering obsession or passing madness in the friend of
its choice.
With the exception of the love of a parent for a child this is the only
human love which is outward-looking and centrifugal in its gaze;
and even in the case of the love of a mother there is often something
possessive and indrawing.
How beautifully, how finally, Montaigne, in his description of this
high passion, sweeps aside at one stroke all that selfish emphasis
upon "advantage" of which Bacon makes so much, and all that
idealistic anxiety to retain one's "separate identity" in which
Emerson indulges!
"I love him because he is he and he loves me because I am I." This
is worthy to be compared with the beautiful and terrible "I _am_
Heathcliff" of the heroine in the Brontë novel.
Emerson speaks as though, having sounded the depths of one's
friend's soul, one moved off, with a wave of the hand, upon one's
lonely quest, having none but God as one's eternal companion.
This translunar preference for the "Over-soul" over every human
feeling is not Montaigne's notion of the passion of friendship. He is
more earth-bound in his proclivities.
"He is he and I am I," and as long as we are what we are, in our flesh,
in our blood, in our bones, nothing, while we live, can sever the
bond between us. And in death? Ah! how much nearer to the pagan
heart of this great mystery is the cry of the son of Jesse over the
body of his beloved than all the Ciceronian rhetoric in the
world--and how much nearer to what that loss means!
Montaigne does not really, as Pater so charmingly hints, break the
flexible consistency of his philosophic method when he loves his
friends in this unbounded manner. He is too great a sceptic to let his
scepticism stand in the way of high adventures of this sort.
The essence of his unsystematic system is that one should give
oneself freely up to what the gods throw in one's way. And if the
gods--in their inescapable predestination--have made him "for me"
and me "for him," to cling fast with cold cautious hands to the
anchor of moderation were to be false to the philosophy of the
"Eternal Now."
The whole of life is an enormous accident--a dice-throw of eternity
in the vapours of time and space. Why not then, with him we love
by our side, make richer and sweeter the nonchalant gaiety of our
amusement, in the great mad purposeless preposterous show, by the
"quips and cranks" of a companionable scepticism; canvassing all
things in earth and heaven, reverencing God and Caesar on _this
side_ of idolatry, relishing the foolish, fooling the wise, and letting
the world drift on as it will?
"What do I know?" There may be more in life than the moralists
guess, and more in death than the atheists imagine.