While the good ship France is taking a somewhat haphazard course,
getting into unknown seas, and preparing to double what the pilots
(if there is a pilot) call the Stormy Cape, while the look-out at
the mast-head thinks he sees the spectre of the giant Adamastor
rising on the horizon, many honourable and peaceable men continue
their work and studies all the same, and follow out to the end, or
as far as they can, their favourite hobbies. I know, at the present
time, a learned man who is collating more carefully than has ever
yet been done the different early editions of Rabelais--editions,
mark you, of which only one copy remains, of which a second is not
to be found: from the careful collation of the texts some literary
and maybe philosophical result will be derived with regard to the
genius of the French Lucian-Aristophanes. I know another scholar
whose devotion and worship is given to a very different man--to
Bossuet: he is preparing a complete, exact, detailed history of the
life and works of the great bishop. And as tastes differ, and "human
fancy is cut into a thousand shapes" (Montaigne said that),
Montaigne also has his devotees, he who, himself, was so little of
one: a sect is formed round him. In his lifetime he had Mademoiselle
de Gournay, his daughter of alliance, who was solemnly devoted to
him; and his disciple, Charron, followed him closely, step by step,
only striving to arrange his thoughts with more order and method. In
our time amateurs, intelligent men, practice the religion under
another form: they devote themselves to collecting the smallest
traces of the author of the Essays, to gathering up the slightest
relics, and Dr. Payen may be justly placed at the head of the group.
For years he has been preparing a book on Montaigne, of which the
title will be--"Michel de Montaigne, a collection of unedited or
little known facts about the author of the Essays, his book, and his
other writings, about his family, his friends, his admirers, his
detractors."
While awaiting the conclusion of the book, the occupation and
amusement of a lifetime, Dr. Payen keeps us informed in short
pamphlets of the various works and discoveries made about Montaigne.
If we separate the discoveries made during the last five or six
years from the jumble of quarrels, disputes, cavilling, quackery,
and law-suits (for there have been all those), they consist in this-
-
In 1846 M. Mace found in the (then) Royal Library, amongst the
"Collection Du Puys," a letter of Montaigne, addressed to the king,
Henri IV., September 2, 1590.
In 1847 M. Payen printed a letter, or a fragment of a letter of
Montaigne of February 16, 1588, a letter corrupt and incomplete,
coming from the collection of the Comtesse Boni de Castellane.
But, most important of all, in 1848, M. Horace de Viel-Castel found
in London, at the British Museum, a remarkable letter of Montaigne,
May 22, 1585, when Mayor of Bordeaux, addressed to M. de Matignon,
the king's lieutenant in the town. The great interest of the letter
is that it shows Montaigne for the first time in the full discharge
of his office with all the energy and vigilance of which he was
capable. The pretended idler was at need much more active than he
was ready to own.
M. Detcheverry, keeper of the records to the mayoralty of Bordeaux,
found and published (1850) a letter of Montaigne, while mayor, to
the Jurats, or aldermen of the town, July 30, 1585.
M. Achille Jubinal found among the manuscripts of the National
Library, and published (1850), a long, remarkable letter from
Montaigne to the king, Henri IV., January 18, 1590, which happily
coincides with that already found by M. Mace.
Lastly, to omit nothing and do justice to all, in a "Visit to
Montaigne's Chateau in Perigord," of which the account appeared in
1850, M. Bertrand de Saint-Germain described the place and pointed
out the various Greek and Latin inscriptions that may still be read
in Montaigne's tower in the third-storey chamber (the ground floor
counting as the first), which the philosopher made his library and
study.
M. Payen, collecting together and criticising in his last pamphlet
the various notices and discoveries, not all of equal importance,
allowed himself to be drawn into some little exaggeration of praise;
but we cannot blame him. Admiration, when applied to such noble,
perfectly innocent, and disinterested subjects, is truly a spark of
the sacred fire: it produces research that a less ardent zeal would
quickly leave aside, and sometimes leads to valuable results.
However, it would be well for those who, following M. Payen's
example, intelligently understand and greatly admire Montaigne, to
remember, even in their ardour, the advice of the wise man and the
master. "There is more to do," said he, speaking of the commentators
of his time, "in interpreting the interpretations than in
interpreting the things themselves; and more bdoks about books than
on any other subject. We do nothing, but everything swarms with
commentators; of authors there is a great rarity." Authors are of
great price and very scared at all times--that is to say, authors
who really increase the sum of human knowledge. I should like all
who write on Montaigne, and give us the details of their researches
and discoveries, to imagine one thing,--Montaigne himself reading
and criticising them. "What would he think of me and the manner in
which I am going to speak of him to the public?" If such a question
was put, how greatly it would suppress useless phrases and shorten
idle discussions! M. Payen's last pamphlet was dedicated to a man
who deserves equally well of Montaigne--M. Gustave Brunet, of
Bordeaux. He, speaking of M. Payen, in a work in which he pointed
out interesting and various corrections of Montaigne's text, said:
"May he soon decide to publish the fruits of his researches: he will
have left nothing for future Montaignologues" Montaignologues! Great
Heaven! what would Montaigne say of such a word coined in his
honour? You who occupy yourselves so meritoriously with him, but who
have, I think, no claim to appropriate him to yourselves, in the
name of him whom you love, and whom we all love by a greater or
lesser title, never, I beg of you, use such words; they smack of the
brotherhood and the sect, of pedantry and of the chatter of the
schools--things utterly repugnant to Montaigne.
Montaigne had a simple, natural, affable mind, and a very happy
disposition. Sprung from an excellent father, who, though of no
great education, entered with real enthusiasm into the movement of
the Renaissance and all the liberal novelties of his time, the son
corrected the excessive enthusiasm, vivacity, and tenderness he
inherited by a great refinement and justness of reflection; but he
did not abjure the original groundwork. It is scarcely more than
thirty years ago that whenever the sixteenth century was mentioned
it was spoken of as a barbarous epoch, Montaigne only excepted:
therein lay error and ignorance. The sixteenth century was a great
century, fertile, powerful, learned, refined in parts, although in
some aspects it was rough, violent, and seemingly coarse. What it
particularly lacked was taste, if by taste is meant the faculty of
clear and perfect selection, the extrication of the elements of the
beautiful. But in the succeeding centuries taste quickly became
distaste. If, however, in literature it was crude, in the arts
properly so-called, in those of the hand and the chisel, the
sixteenth century, even in France, is, in the quality of taste, far
greater than the two succeeding centuries: it is neither meagre nor
massive, heavy nor distorted. In art its taste is rich and of fine
quality,--at once unrestrained and complex, ancient and modern,
special to itself and original. In the region of morals it is
unequal and mixed. It was an age of contrasts, of contrasts in all
their crudity, an age of philosophy and fanaticism, of scepticism
and strong faith. Everything was at strife and in collision; nothing
was blended and united. Everything was in ferment; it was a period
of chaos; every ray of light caused a storm. It was not a gentle
age, or one we can call an age of light, but an age of struggle and
combat. What distinguished Montaigne and made a phenomenon of him
was, that in such an age he should have possessed moderation,
caution, and order.
Born on the last day of February, 1533, taught the ancient languages
as a game while still a child, waked even in his cradle by the sound
of musical instruments, he seemed less fitted for a rude and violent
epoch than for the commerce and sanctuary of the muses. His rare
good sense corrected what was too ideal and poetical in his early
education; but he preserved the happy faculty of saying everything
with freshness and wit. Married, when past thirty, to an estimable
woman who was his companion for twenty-eight years, he seems to have
put passion only into friendship. He immortalised his love for
Etienne de la Boetie, whom he lost after four years of the sweetest
and closest intimacy. For some time counsellor in the Parliament of
Bordeaux, Montaigne, before he was forty, retired from public life,
and flung away ambition to live in his tower of Montaigne, enjoying
his own society and his own intellect, entirely given up to his own
observations and thoughts, and to the busy idleness of which we know
all the sports and fancies. The first edition of the Essays appeared
in 1580, consisting of only two books, and in a form representing
only the first rough draft of what we have in the later editions.
The same year Montaigne set out on a voyage to Switzerland and
Italy. It was during that voyage that the aldermen of Bordeaux
elected him mayor of their town. At first he refused and excused
himself, but warned that it would be well to accept, and enjoined by
the king, he took the office, "the more beautiful," he said, "that
there was neither renunciation nor gain other than the honour of its
performance." He filled the office for four years, from July 1582 to
July 1586, being re-elected after the first two years. Thus
Montaigne, at the age of fifty, and a little against his will, re-
entered public life when the country was on the eve of civil
disturbances which, quieted and lulled to sleep for a while, broke
out more violently at the cry of the League. Although, as a rule,
lessons serve for nothing, since the art of wisdom and happiness
cannot be taught, let us not deny ourselves the pleasure of
listening to Montaigne; let us look on his wisdom and happiness; let
him speak of public affairs, of revolutions and disturbances, and of
his way of conducting himself with regard to them. We do not put
forward a model, but we offer our readers an agreeable recreation.
Although Montaigne lived in so agitated and stormy a time, a period
that a man who had lived through the Terror (M. Daunou) called the
most tragic century in all history, he by no means regarded his age
as the worst of ages. He was not of those prejudiced and afflicted
persons, who, measuring everything by their visual horizon, valuing
everything according to their present sensations, alway declare that
the disease they suffer from is worse than any ever before
experienced by a human being. He was like Socrates, who did not
consider himself a citizen of one city but of the world; with his
broad and full imagination he embraced the universality of countries
and of ages; he even judged more equitably the very evils of which
he was witness and victim. "Who is it," he said, "that, seeing the
bloody havoc of these civil wars of ours, does not cry out that the
machine of the world is near dissolution, and that the day of
judgment is at hand, without considering that many worse revolutions
have been seen, and that, in the mean time, people are being merry
in a thousand other parts of the earth for all this? For my part,
considering the license and impunity that always attend such
commotions, I admire they are so moderate, and that there is not
more mischief done. To him who feels the hailstones patter about his
ears, the whole hemisphere appears to be in storm and tempest." And
raising his thoughts higher and higher, reducing his own suffering
to what it was in the immensity of nature, seeing there not only
himself but whole kingdoms as mere specks in the infinite, he added
in words which foreshadowed Pascal, in words whose outline and
salient points Pascal did not disdain to borrow: "But whoever shall
represent to his fancy, as in a picture, that great image of our
mother nature, portrayed in her full majesty and lustre, whoever in
her face shall read so general and so constant a variety, whoever
shall observe himself in that figure, and not himself but a whole
kingdom, no bigger than the least touch or prick of a pencil in
comparison of the whole, that man alone is able to value things
according to their true estimate and grandeur."
Thus Montaigne gives us a lesson, a useless lesson, but I state it
all the same, because among the many unprofitable ones that have
been written down, it is perhaps of greater worth than most. I do
not mean to underrate the gravity of the circumstances in which
France is just now involved, for I believe there is pressing need to
bring together all the energy, prudence, and courage she possesses
in order that the country may come out with honour [Footnote: This
essay appeared April 28, 1851]. However, let us reflect, and
remember that, leaving aside the Empire, which as regards internal
affairs was a period of calm, and before 1812 of prosperity, we who
utter such loud complaints, lived in peace from 1815 to 1830,
fifteen long years; that the three days of July only inaugurated
another order of things that for eighteen years guaranteed peace and
in dustrial prosperity; in all, thirty-two years of repose. Stormy
days came; tempests burst, and will doubtless burst again. Let us
learn how to live through them, but do not let us cry out every day,
as we are disposed to do, that never under the sun were such storms
known as we are enduring. To get away from the present state of
feeling, to restore lucidity and proportion to our judgments, let us
read every evening a page of Montaigne.
A criticism of Montaigne on the men of his day struck me, and it
bears equally well on those of ours. Our philosopher says somewhere
that he knows a fair number of men possessing various good
qualities--one, intelligence; another, heart; another, address,
conscience or knowledge, or skill in languages, each has his share:
"but of a great man as a whole, having so many good qualities
together, or one with such a degree of excellence that we ought to
admire him, or compare him with those we honour in the past, my
fortune has never shown me one." He afterwards made an exception in
favour of his friend Etienne de la Boetie, but he belonged to the
company of great men dead before attaining maturity, and showing
promise without having time to fulfil it. Montaigne's criticism
called up a smile. He did not see a true and wholly great man in his
time, the age of L'Hopital, Coligny, and the Guises. Well! how does
ours seem to you? We have as many great men as in Montaigne's time,
one distinguished for his intellect, another for his heart, a third
for skill, some (a rare thing) for conscience, many for knowledge
and language. But we too lack the perfect man, and he is greatly to
be desired. One of the most intelligent observers of our day
recognised and proclaimed it some years ago: "Our age," said M. de
Remusat, "is wanting in great men." [Footnote: Essais de
Philosophie, vol. i, p. 22]
How did Montaigne conduct himself in his duties as first magistrate
of a great city? If we take him literally and on a hasty first
glance we should believe he discharged them slackly and languidly.
Did not Horace, doing the honours to himself, say that in war he one
day let his shield fall (relicta non bene parmula)? We must not be
in too great a hurry to take too literally the men of taste who have
a horror of over-estimating themselves. Minds of a fine quality are
more given to vigilance and to action than they are apt to confess.
The man who boasts and makes a great noise, will, I am almost sure,
be less brave in the combat than Horace, and less vigilant at the
council board than Montaigne.
On entering office Montaigne was careful to warn the aldermen of
Bordeaux not to expect to find in him more than there really was; he
presented himself to them without affectation. "I represented to
them faithfully and conscientiously all that I felt myself to be,--a
man without memory, without vigilance, without experience, and
without energy; but also, without hate, without ambition, without
avarice, and without violence." He should be sorry, while taking the
affairs of the town in hand, that his feelings should be so strongly
affected as those of his worthy father had been, who in the end had
lost his place and health. The eager and ardent pledge to satisfy an
impetuous desire was not his method. His opinion was "that you must
lend yourself to others, and only give yourself to yourself." And
repeating his thought, according to his custom in all kinds of
metaphors and picturesque forms, he said again that if he some times
allowed himself to be urged to the management of other men's
affairs, he promised to take them in hand, not "into my lungs and
liver." We are thus forewarned, we know what to expect. The mayor
and Montaigne were two distinct persons; under his role and office
he reserved to himself a certain freedom and secret security. He
continued to judge things in his own fashion and impartially,
although acting loyally for the cause confided to him. He was far
from approving or even excusing all he saw in his party, and he
could judge his adversaries and say of them: "He did that thing
wickedly, and this virtuously." "I would have," he added, "matters
go well on our side; but if they do not, I shall not run mad. I am
heartily for the right party; but I do not affect to be taken notice
of for an especial enemy to others." And he entered into some
details and applications which at that time were piquant. Let us
remark, however, in order to explain and justify his somewhat
extensive profession of impartiality, that the chiefs of the party
then in evidence, the three Henris, were famous and considerable men
on several counts: Henri, Duke of Guise, head of the League; Henri,
King of Navarre, leader of the Opposition; and the King Henri III.
in whose name Montaigne was mayor, who wavered between the two. When
parties have neither chief nor head, when they are known by the body
only, that is to say, in their hideous and brutal reality, it is
more difficult and also more hazardous to be just towards them and
to assign to each its share of action.
The principle which guided him in his administration was to look
only at the fact, at the result, and to grant nothing to noise and
outward show: "How much more a good effect makes a noise, so much I
abate of the goodness of it." For it is always to be feared that it
was more performed for the sake of the noise than upon the account
of goodness: "Being exposed upon the stall, 'tis half sold." That
was not Montaigne's way: he made no show; he managed men and affairs
as quietly as he could; he employed in a manner useful to all alike
the gifts of sincerity and conciliation; the personal attraction
with which nature endowed him was a quality of the highest value in
the management of men. He preferred to warn men of evil rather than
to take on himself the honour of repressing it: "Is there any one
who desires to be sick that he may see his physician's practice? And
would not that physician deserve to be whipped who should wish the
plague amongst us that he might put his art into practice?" Far from
desiring that trouble and disorder in the affairs of the city should
rouse and honour his govern ment, he had ever willingly, he said,
contributed all he could to their tranquillity and ease. He is not
of those whom municipal honours intoxicate and elate, those
"dignities of office" as he called them, and of which all the noise
"goes from one cross-road to another." If he was a man desirous of
fame, he recognised that it was of a kind greater than that. I do
not know, however, if even in a vaster field he would have changed
his method and manner of proceed ing. To do good for the public
imperceptibly would always seem to him the ideal of skill and the
culminating point of happiness. "He who will not thank me," he said,
"for the order and quiet calm that has accompanied my administration,
cannot, however, deprive me of the share that belongs to me by the
title of my good fortune." And he is inexhaustible in describing in
lively and graceful expressions the kinds of effective and imperceptible
services he believed he had rendered--services greatly superior to
noisy and glorious deeds: "Actions which come from the workman's
hand carelessly and noiselessly have most charm, that some honest
man chooses later and brings from their obscurity to thrust them into
the light for their own sake." Thus fortune served Montaigne to
perfection, and even in his administration of affairs, in difficult
conjunctures, he never had to belie his maxim, nor to step very far
out of the way of life he had planned: "For my part I commend a gliding,
solitary, and silent life." He reached the end of his magistracy almost
satisfied with himself, having accomplished what he had promised
himself, and much more than he had promised others.
The letter lately discovered by M. Horace de Viel-Castel
corroborates the chapter in which Montaigne exhibits and criticises
himself in the period of his public life. "That letter," says M.
Payen, "is entirely on affairs. Montaigne is mayor; Bordeaux, lately
disturbed, seems threatened by fresh agitations; the king's
lieutenant is away. It is Wednesday, May 22, 1585; it is night,
Montaigne is wakeful, and writes to the governor of the province."
The letter, which is of too special and local an interest to be
inserted here, may be summed up in these words:--Montaigne regretted
the absence of Marshal de Matignon, and feared the consequences of
its prolongation; he was keeping, and would continue to keep, him
acquainted with all that was going on, and begged him to return as
soon as his circumstances would permit. "We are looking after our
gates and guards, and a little more carefully in your absence. . . .
If anything important and fresh occurs, I shall send you a messenger
immediately, so that if you hear no news from me, you may consider
that nothing has happened." He begs M. de Matignon to remember,
however, that he might not have time to warn him, "entreating you to
consider that such movements are usually so sudden, that if they do
occur they will take me by the throat without any warning." Besides,
he will do everything to ascertain the march of events beforehand.
"I will do what I can to hear news from all parts, and to that end
shall visit and observe the inclinations of all sorts of men."
Lastly, after keeping the marshal informed of everything, of the
least rumours abroad in the city, he pressed him to return, assuring
him "that we spare neither our care, nor, if need be, our lives to
preserve everything in obedience to the king." Montaigne was never
prodigal of protestations and praises, and what with others was a
mere form of speech, was with him a real undertaking and the truth.
Things, however, became worse and worse: civil war broke out;
friendly or hostile parties (the difference was not great) infested
the country. Montaigne, who went to his country house as often as he
could, whenever the duties of his office, which was drawing near its
term, did not oblige him to be in Bordeaux, was exposed to every
sort of insult and outrage. "I underwent," he said, "the
inconveniences that moderation brings along with it in such a
disease. I was pitied on all hands; to the Ghibelline I was a
Guelph, and to the Guelph a Ghibelline." In the midst of his
personal grievances he could disengage and raise his thoughts to
reflections on the public misfortunes and on the degradation of
men's characters. Considering closely the disorder of parties, and
all the abject and wretched things which developed so quickly, he
was ashamed to see leaders of renown stoop and debase themselves by
cowardly complacency; for in those circumstances we know, like him,
"that in the word of command to march, draw up, wheel, and the like,
we obey him indeed; but all the rest is dissolute and free." "It
pleases me," said Montaigne ironically, "to observe how much
pusillanimity and cowardice there is in ambition; by how abject and
servile ways it must arrive at its end." Despising ambition as he
did, he was not sorry to see it unmasked by such practices and
degraded in his sight. However, his goodness of heart overcoming his
pride and contempt, he adds sadly, "it displeases me to see good and
generous natures, and that are capable of justice, every day
corrupted in the management and command of this confusion. . . . We
had ill-contrived souls enough without spoiling those that were
generous and good." He rather sought in that misfortune an
opportunity and motive for fortifying and strengthening himself.
Attacked one by one by many disagreeables and evils, which he would
have endured more cheerfully in a heap--that is to say, all at once-
-pursued by war, disease, by all the plagues (July 1585), in the
course things were taking, he already asked himself to whom he and
his could have recourse, of whom he could ask shelter and
subsistence for his old age; and having looked and searched
thoroughly all around, he found himself actually destitute and
RUINED. For, "to let a man's self fall plumb down, and from so great
a height, it ought to be in the arms of a solid, vigorous, and
fortunate friendship. They are very rare, if there be any." Speaking
in such a manner, we perceive that La Boetie had been some time
dead. Then he felt that he must after all rely on himself in his
distress, and must gain strength; now or never was the time to put
into practice the lofty lessons he spent his life in collecting from
the books of the philosophers. He took heart again, and attained all
the height of his virtue: "In an ordinary and quiet time, a man
prepares himself for moderate and common accidents; but in the
confusion wherein we have been for these thirty years, every
Frenchman, whether in particular or in general, sees himself every
hour upon the point of the total ruin and overthrow of his fortune."
And far from being discouraged and cursing fate for causing him to
be born in so stormy an age, he suddenly congratulated himself: "Let
us thank fortune that has not made us live in an effeminate, idle
and languishing age." Since the curiosity of wise men seeks the past
for disturbances in states in order to learn the secrets of history,
and, as we should say, the whole physiology of the body social, "so
does my curiosity," he declares, "make me in some sort please myself
with seeing with my own eyes this notable spectacle of our public
death, its forms and symptoms; and, seeing I could not hinder it, am
content to be destined to assist in it, and thereby to instruct
myself." I shall not suggest a consolation of that sort to most
people; the greater part of mankind does not possess the heroic and
eager curiosity of Empedocles and the elder Pliny, the two intrepid
men who went straight to the volcanoes and the disturbances of
nature to examine them at close quarters, at the risk of destruction
and death. But to a man of Montaigne's nature, the thought of that
stoical observation gave him consolation even amid real evils.
Considering the condition of false peace and doubtful truce, the
regime of dull and profound corruption which had preceded the last
disturbances, he almost congratulated himself on seeing their
cessation; for "it was," he said of the regime of Henri III., "an
universal juncture of particular members, rotten to emulation of one
another, and the most of them with inveterate ulcers, that neither
required nor admitted of any cure. This conclusion therefore did
really more animate than depress me." Note that his health, usually
delicate, is here raised to the level of his morality, although what
it had suffered through the various disturbances might have been
enough to undermine it. He had the satisfaction of feeling that he
had some hold against fortune, and that it would take a greater
shock still to crush him.
Another consideration, humbler and more humane, upheld him in his
troubles, the consolation arising from a common misfortune, a
misfortune shared by all, and the sight of the courage of others.
The people, especially the real people, they who are victims and not
robbers, the peasants of his district, moved him by the manner in
which they endured the same, or even worse, troubles than his. The
disease or plague which raged at that time in the country pressed
chiefly on the poor; Montaigne learned from them resignation and the
practice of philosophy. "Let us look down upon the poor people that
we see scattered upon the face of the earth, prone and intent upon
their business, that neither know Aristotle nor Cato, example nor
precept. Even from these does nature every day extract effects of
constancy and patience, more pure and manly than those we so
inquisitively study in the schools." And he goes on to describe them
working to the bitter end, even in their grief, even in disease,
until their strength failed them. "He that is now digging in my
garden has this morning buried his father, or his son. . . . They
never keep their beds but to die." The whole chapter is fine,
pathetic, to the point, evincing noble, stoical elevation of mind,
and also the cheerful and affable disposition which Montaigne said,
with truth, was his by inheritance, and in which he had been
nourished. There could be nothing better as regards "consolation in
public calamities," except a chapter of some not more human, but of
some truly divine book, in which the hand of God should be
everywhere visible, not perfunctorily, as with Montaigne, but
actually and lovingly present. In fact, the consolation Montaigne
gives himself and others is perhaps as lofty and beautiful as human
consolation without prayer can be.
He wrote the chapter, the twelfth of the third book, in the midst of
the evils described, and before they were ended. He concluded it in
his graceful and poetical way with a collection of examples, "a heap
of foreign flowers," to which he furnished only the thread for
fastening them together.
There is Montaigne to the life; no matter how seriously he spoke, it
was always with the utmost charm. To form an opinion on his style
you have only to open him indifferently at any page and listen to
his talk on any subject; there is none that he did not enliven and
make suggestive. In the chapter "Of Liars," for instance, after
enlarging on his lack of memory and giving a list of reasons by
which he might console himself, he suddenly added this fresh and
delightful reason, that, thanks to his faculty for forgetting, "the
places I revisit, and the books I read over again, always smile upon
me with a fresh novelty." It is thus that on every subject he
touched he was continually new, and created sources of freshness.
Montesquieu, in a memorable exclamation, said: "The four great
poets, Plato, Malebranche, Shaftesbury, Montaigne!" How true it is
of Montaigne! No French writer, including the poets proper, had so
lofty an idea of poetry as he had. "From my earliest childhood," he
said, "poetry had power over me to transport and transpierce me." He
considered, and therein shows penetration, that "we have more poets
than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write than
to understand." In itself and its pure beauty his poetry defies
definition; whoever desired to recognise it at a glance and discern
of what it actually consisted would see no more than "the brilliance
of a flash of lightning." In the constitution and continuity of his
style, Montaigne is a writer very rich in animated, bold similes,
naturally fertile in metaphors that are never detached from the
thought, but that seize it in its very centre, in its interior, that
join and bind it. In that respect, fully obeying his own genius, he
has gone beyond and some times exceeded the genius of language. His
concise, vigorous and always forcible style, by its poignancy,
emphasises and repeats the meaning. It may be said of his style that
it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor, a style that
has only been successfully employed by the French once, by Montaigne
himself. If we wanted to imitate him, supposing we had the power and
were naturally fitted for it--if we desired to write with his
severity, exact proportion, and diverse continuity of figures and
turns--it would be necessary to force our language to be more
powerful, and poetically more complete, than is usually our custom.
Style a la Montaigne, consistent, varied in the series and
assortment of the metaphors, exacts the creation of a portion of the
tissue itself to hold them. It is absolutely necessary that in
places the woof should be enlarged and extended, in order to weave
into it the metaphor; but in defining him I come almost to write
like him. The French language, French prose, which in fact always
savours more or less of conversation, does not, naturally, possess
the resources and the extent of canvas necessary for a continued
picture: by the side of an animated metaphor it will often exhibit a
sudden lacuna and some weak places. In filling this by boldness and
invention as Montaigne did, in creating, in imagining the expression
and locution that is wanting, our prose should appear equally
finished. Style a la Montaigne would, in many respects, be openly at
war with that of Voltaire. It could only come into being and
flourish in the full freedom of the sixteenth century, in a frank,
ingenious, jovial, keen, brave, and refined mind, of an unique
stamp, that even for that time, seemed free and somewhat licentious,
and that was inspired and emboldened, but not intoxicated by the
pure and direct spirit of ancient sources.
Such as he is, Montaigne is the French Horace; he is Horatian in the
groundwork, often in the form and expression, although in that he
sometimes approaches Seneca. His book is a treasure-house of moral
observations and of experience; at whatever page it is opened, and
in what ever condition of mind, some wise thought expressed in a
striking and enduring fashion is certain to be found. It will at
once detach itself and engrave itself on the mind, a beautiful
meaning in full and forcible words, in one vigorous line, familiar
or great. The whole of his book, said Etienne Pasquier, is a real
seminary of beautiful and remarkable sentences, and they come in so
much the better that they run and hasten on without thrusting them
selves into notice. There is something for every age, for every hour
of life: you cannot read in it for any time without having the mind
filled and lined as it were, or, to put it better, fully armed and
clothed. We have just seen how much useful counsel and actual
consolation it contains for an honourable man, born for private
life, and fallen on times of disturbance and revolution. To this I
shall add the counsel he gave those who, like myself and many men of
my acquaintance, suffer from political disturbances without in any
way provoking them, or believing ourselves capable of averting them.
Montaigne, as Horace would have done, counsels them, while
apprehending everything from afar off, not to be too much
preoccupied with such matters in advance; to take advantage to the
end of pleasant moments and bright intervals. Stroke on stroke come
his piquant and wise similes, and he concludes, to my thinking, with
the most delightful one of all, and one, besides, entirely
appropriate and seasonable: it is folly and fret, he said, "to take
out your furred gown at Saint John because you will want it at
Christmas."