philosophers; Fenelon, in saints; Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the
haughty language in which Plato and the Platonists speak of all men
who are not devoted to their own shining abstractions: other men are
rats and mice. The literary class is usually proud and exclusive. The
correspondence of Pope and Swift describes mankind around them as
monsters; and that of Goethe and Schiller, in our own time, is scarcely
more kind.
It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The genius is a genius by
the first look he casts on any object. Is his eye creative? Does he
not rest in angles and colors, but beholds the design--he will presently
undervalue the actual object. In powerful moments, his thought has
dissolved the works of art and nature into their causes, so that the
works appear heavy and faulty. He has a conception of beauty which the
sculptor cannot embody. Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steam-engine,
existed first in an artist's mind, without flaw, mistake, or friction,
which impair the executed models. So did the church, the state, college,
court, social circle, and all the institutions. It is not strange that
these men, remembering what they have seen and hoped of ideas, should
affirm disdainfully the superiority of ideas. Having at some time seen
that the happy soul will carry all the arts in power, they say, Why
cumber ourselves with superfluous realizations? and, like dreaming
beggars, they assume to speak and act as if these values were already
substantiated.
On the other part, the men of toil and trade and luxury,--the animal
world, including the animal in the philosopher and poet also,--and the
practical world, including the painful drudgeries which are never
excused to philosopher or poet any more than to the rest,--weigh heavily
on the other side. The trade in our streets believes in no metaphysical
causes, thinks nothing of the force which necessitated traders and a
trading planet to exist; no, but sticks to cotton, sugar, wool, and
salt. The ward meetings, on election days, are not softened by any
misgivings of the value of these ballotings. Hot life is streaming in
a single direction. To the men of this world, to the animal strength
and spirits, to the men of practical power, whilst immersed in it, the
man of ideas appears out of his reason. They alone have reason.
Things always bring their own philosophy with them, that is, prudence.
No man acquires property without acquiring with it a little arithmetic,
also. In England, the richest country that ever existed, property
stands for more, compared with personal ability, than in any other.
After dinner, a man believes less, denies more; verities have lost
some charm. After dinner, arithmetic is the only science; ideas are
disturbing, incendiary, follies of young men, repudiated by the solid
portion of society; and a man comes to be valued by his athletic and
animal qualities. Spence relates, that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey
Kneller one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came in. "Nephew,"
said Sir Godfrey, "you have the honor of seeing the two greatest men
in the world." "I don't know how great men you may be," said the Guinea
man, "but I don't like your looks. I have often bought a man much
better than both of you, all muscles and bones, for ten guineas. Thus,
the men of the senses revenge themselves on the professors, and repay
scorn for scorn. The first had leaped to conclusions not yet ripe, and
say more than is true; the others make themselves merry with the
philosopher, and weigh man by the pound.--They believe that mustard
bites the tongue, that pepper is hot, friction-matches are incendiary,
revolvers to be avoided, and suspenders hold up pantaloons; that there
is much sentiment in a chest of tea; and a man will be eloquent, if
you give him good wine. Are you tender and scrupulous,--you must eat
more mince-pie. They hold that Luther had milk in him when he said,
"Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib, und Gesang Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben
lang,"
and when he advised a young scholar perplexed with fore-ordination and
free-will, to get well drunk. "The nerves," says Cabanis, "they are
the man." My neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the tavern bar-room, thinks
that the use of money is sure and speedy spending. "For his part," he
says, "he puts his down his neck, and gets the good of it."
The inconvenience of this way of thinking is, that it runs into
indifferentism, and then into disgust. Life is eating us up. We shall
be fables presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a hundred years
hence. Life's well enough; but we shall be glad to get out of it, and
they will all be glad to have us. Why should we fret and drudge? Our
meat will taste to-morrow as it did yesterday, and we may at last have
had enough of it. "Ah," said my languid gentleman at Oxford, "there's
nothing new or true,--and no matter."
With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans: our life is like an
ass led to market by a bundle of hay being carried before him: he sees
nothing but the bundle of hay. "There is so much trouble in coming
into the world," said Lord Bolingbroke, "and so much more, as well as
meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worth while to be here
at all." I knew a philosopher of this kidney, who was accustomed briefly
to sum up his experience of human nature in saying, "Mankind is a
damned rascal:" and the natural corollary is pretty sure to
follow,--"The world lives by humbug, and so will I."
The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each
other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there
arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two,
the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He
labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. He will not
go beyond his card. He sees the one-sidedness of these men of the
street; he will not be a Gibeonite; he stands for the intellectual
faculties, a cool head, and whatever serves to keep it cool; no
unadvised industry, no unrewarded self-devotion, no loss of the brains
in toil. Am I an ox, or a dray?--You are both in extremes, he says.
You that will have all solid, and a world of pig-lead, deceive
yourselves grossly. You believe yourselves rooted and grounded on
adamant; and, yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowledge, you
are spinning like bubbles in a river, you know not whither or whence,
and you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions.
Neither will he be betrayed to a book, and wrapped in a gown. The
studious class are their own victims; they are thin and pale, their
feet are cold, their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, the
day a fear of interruption,--pallor, squalor, hunger, and egotism. If
you come near them, and see what conceits they entertain,--they are
abstractionists, and spend their days and nights in dreaming some
dreams; in expecting the homage of society to some precious scheme
built on a truth, but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of
justness in its application, and of all energy of will in the schemer
to embody and vitalize it.
But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I know that human
strength is not in extremes, but in avoiding extremes. I, at least,
will shun the weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. What is the
use of pretending to powers we have not? What is the use of pretending
to assurances we have not, respecting the other life? Why exaggerate
the power of virtue? Why be an angel before your time? These strings,
wound up too high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, and
no evidence, why not say just that? If there are conflicting evidences,
why not state them? If there is not ground for a candid thinker to
make up his mind, yea or nay,--why not suspend the judgment? I weary
of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine, who deny the
dogmas. I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the case. I am
here to consider,--to consider how it is. I will try to keep the balance
true. Of what use to take the chair, and glibly rattle off theories
of societies, religion, and nature, when I know that practical
objections lie in the way, insurmountable by me and by my mates? Why
so talkative in public, when each of my neighbors can pin me to my
seat by arguments I cannot refute? Why pretend that life is so simple
a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is? Why think
to shut up all things in your narrow coop, when we know there are not
one or two only, but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike? Why
fancy that you have all the truth in your keeping? There is much to
say on all sides.
Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that there is no practical
question on which anything more than an approximate solution can be
had? Is not marriage an open question when it is alleged, from the
beginning of the world, that such as are in the institution wish to
get out, and such as are out wish to get in? And the reply of Socrates,
to him who asked whether he should choose a wife, still remains
reasonable, "that, whether he should choose one or not, he would repent
it." Is not the state a question? All society is divided in opinion
on the subject of the state. Nobody loves it; great numbers dislike
it, and suffer conscientious scruples to allegiance: and the only
defense set up, is, the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. Is it
otherwise with the church? Or, to put any of the questions which touch
mankind nearest,--shall the young man aim at a leading part in law,
in politics, in trade? It will not be pretended that a success in
either of these kinds is quite coincident with what is best and inmost
in his mind. Shall he, then, cutting the stays that hold him fast to
the social state, put out to sea with no guidance but his genius? There
is much to say on both sides. Remember the open question between the
present order of "competition," and the friends of "attractive and
associated labor." The generous minds embrace the proposition of labor
shared by all; it is the only honesty; nothing else is safe. It is
from the poor man's hut alone, that strength and virtue come; and yet,
on the other side, it is alleged that labor impairs the form, and
breaks the spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, "We have
no thoughts." Culture, how indispensable! I cannot forgive you the
want of accomplishment; and yet, culture will instantly destroy that
chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent is culture for a savage;
but once let him read in the book, and he is no longer able not to
think of Plutarch's heroes. In short, since true fortitude of
understanding consists "in not letting what we know be embarrassed by
what we do not know," we ought to secure those advantages which we can
command, and not risk them by clutching after the airy and unattainable.
Come, no chimeras! Let us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us
learn, and get, and have, and climb. "Men are a sort of moving plants,
and, like trees, receive a great part of their nourishment from the
air. If they keep too much at home, they pine." Let us have a robust,
manly life; let us know what we know, for certain; what we have, let
it be solid, and seasonable, and our own. A world in the hand is worth
two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men and women, and not
with skipping ghosts.
This, then, is the right ground of the skeptic,--this of consideration,
of self-containing; not at all of unbelief; not at all of universal
denying, nor of universal doubting,--doubting even that he doubts;
least of all, of scoffing and profligate jeering at all that is stable
and good. These are no more his moods than are those of religion and
philosophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking in sail, counting
stock, husbanding his means, believing that a man has too many enemies,
than that he can afford to be his own; that we cannot give ourselves
too many advantages, in this unequal conflict, with powers so vast and
unweariable ranged on one side, and this little, conceited, vulnerable
popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and down into every danger, on the
other. It is a position taken up for better defense, as of more safety,
and one that can be maintained; and it is one of more opportunity and
range; as, when we build a house, the rule is, to set it not too high
nor too low, under the wind, but out of the dirt.
The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and mobility. The Spartan
and Stoic schemes are too stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory
of Saint John, and of non-resistance, seems, on the other hand, too
thin and aerial. We want some coat woven of elastic steel, stout as
the first, and limber as the second. We want a ship in these billows
we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would be rent to chips and
splinters, in this storm of many elements. No, it must be tight, and
fit to the form of man, to live at all; as a shell is the architecture
of a house founded on the sea. The soul of man must be the type of our
scheme, just as the body of man is the type after which a dwelling-house
is built. Adaptiveness is the peculiarity of human nature. We are
golden averages, volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors,
houses founded on the sea. The wise skeptic wishes to have a near view
of the best game, and the chief players; what is best in the planet;
art and nature, places and events, but mainly men. Everything that is
excellent in mankind,--a form of grace, an arm of iron, lips of
persuasion, a brain of resources, every one skilful to play and win,--he
will see and judge.
The terms of admission to this spectacle are, that he have a certain
solid and intelligible way of living of his own; some method of
answering the inevitable needs of human life; proof that he has played
with skill and success; that he has evinced the temper, stoutness, and
the range of qualities which, among his contemporaries and countrymen,
entitle him to fellowship and trust. For, the secrets of life are not
shown except to sympathy and likeness. Men do not confide themselves
to boys, or coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. Some wise
limitation, as the modern phrase is; some condition between the
extremes, and having itself a positive quality; some stark and
sufficient man, who is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to
the world to do justice to Paris or London, and, at the same time, a
vigorous and original thinker, whom cities cannot overawe, but who
uses them,--is the fit person to occupy this ground of speculation.
These qualities meet in the character of Montaigne. And yet, since the
personal regard which I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great,
I will, under the shield of this prince of egotists, offer, as an
apology for electing him as the representative of skepticism, a word
or two to explain how my love began and grew for this admirable gossip.
A single odd volume of Cotton's translation of the Essays remained to
me from my father's library, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until,
after many years, when I was newly escaped from college, I read the
book, and procured the remaining volumes. I remember the delight and
wonder in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I had myself
written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke to my
thought and experience. It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in
the cemetery of Pere le Chaise, I came to a tomb of Augustus Collignon,
who died in 1830, aged sixty-eight years, and who, said the monument,
"lived to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on the Essays of
Montaigne." Some years later, I became acquainted with an accomplished
English poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my correspondence,
I found that, from a love of Montaigne, he had made a pilgrimage to
his chateau, still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, after
two hundred and fifty years, had copied from the walls of his library
the inscriptions which Montaigne had written there. That Journal of
Mr. Sterling's, published in the Westminster Review, Mr. Hazlitt has
reprinted in the Prolegomenae to his edition of the Essays. I heard
with pleasure that one of the newly-discovered autographs of William
Shakspeare was in a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne. It is
the only book which we certainly know to have been in the poet's
library. And, oddly enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, which the
British Museum purchased, with a view of protecting the Shakspeare
autograph (as I was informed in the Museum), turned out to have the
autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh Hunt relates of Lord
Byron, that Montaigne was the only great writer of past times whom he
read with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not needful to be
mentioned here, concurred to make this old Gascon still new and immortal
for me.
In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, then thirty-eight years
old, retired from the practice of law, at Bordeaux, and settled himself
on his estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure, and sometimes a
courtier, his studious habits now grew on him, and he loved the compass,
staidness, and independence of the country gentleman's life. He took
up his economy in good earnest, and made his farms yield the most.
Downright and plain-dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to
deceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense and probity. In
the civil wars of the League, which converted every house into a fort,
Montaigne kept his gates open, and his house without defense. All
parties freely came and went, his courage and honor being universally
esteemed. The neighboring lords and gentry brought jewels and papers
to him for safekeeping. Gibbon reckons, in these bigoted times, but
two men of liberality in France,--Henry IV. and Montaigne.
Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French
freedom runs into grossness; but he has anticipated all censures by
the bounty of his own confessions. In his times, books were written
to one sex only, and almost all were written in Latin; so that, in a
humorist, a certain nakedness of statement was permitted, which our
manners, of a literature addressed equally to both sexes, do not allow.
But, though a biblical plainness, coupled with a most uncanonical
levity, may shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the offence
is superficial. He parades it: he makes the most of it; nobody can
think or say worse of him than he does. He pretends to most of the
vices; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, it got in by
stealth. There is no man, in his opinion, who has not deserved hanging
five or six times; and he pretends no exception in his own behalf.
"Five or six as ridiculous stories," too, he says, "can be told of me,
as of any man living." But, with all this really superfluous frankness,
the opinion of an invincible probity grows into every reader's mind.
"When I the most strictly and religiously confess myself, I find that
the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid
that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and perfect a
lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had
listened, and laid his ear close to himself, would have heard some
jarring sound of human mixture; but faint and remote, and only to be
perceived by himself."
Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretense of any
kind. He has been in courts so long as to have conceived a furious
disgust at appearances; he will indulge himself with a little cursing
and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gypsies, use flash and
street ballads; he has stayed indoors till he is deadly sick; he will
to the open air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much of
gentlemen of the long robe, until he wishes for cannibals; and is so
nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks, the more barbarous man
is, the better he is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, and
grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get here, shall smack
of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes
no hesitation to entertain you with the records of his disease; and
his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. He took and kept
this position of equilibrium. Over his name, he drew an emblematic
pair of scales, and wrote, _Que sais-je?_ under it. As I look at
his effigy opposite the title-page, I seem to hear him say, "You may
play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate,--I stand here
for truth, and will not, for all the states, and churches, and revenues,
and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see
it; I will rather mumble and prose about what I certainly know,--my
house and barns; my father, my wife, and my tenants; my old lean bald
pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat, and what drinks I prefer;
and a hundred straws just as ridiculous,--than I will write, with a
fine crow-quill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and
winter weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, and think an undress,
and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and old friends who do not
constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself
and pump my brains, the most suitable. Our condition as men is risky
and ticklish enough. One cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an
hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight.
Why should I vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballasting,
the best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live within
compass, keep myself ready for action, and can shoot the gulf, at last,
with decency. If there be anything farcical in such a life, the blame
is not mine; let it lie at fate's and nature's door."
The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random
topic that comes into his head; treating everything without ceremony,
yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight;
but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts; he
is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader
care for all that he cares for.
The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know
not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of
conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would
bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it
that we have in listening to the necessary speech of men about their
work, when any unusual circumstance give momentary importance to the
dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech;
it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct themselves,
and begin again at every half-sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and
refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression. Montaigne
talks with shrewdness, knows the world, and books, and himself, and
uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays; no
weakness, no convulsion, no superlative; does not wish to jump out of
his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time; but is stout
and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain, because it makes
him feel himself, and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know
that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes
to feel solid ground, and the stones underneath. His writing has no
enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping
the middle of the road. There is but one exception,--in his love for
Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes, and his style
rises to passion.
Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 1592. When he came
to die, he caused the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At the age
of thirty-three, he had been married. "But," he says, "might I have
had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would
have had me; but 'tis to much purpose to evade it, the common custom
and use of life will have it so. Most of my actions are guided by
example, not choice." In the hour of death he gave the same weight to
custom. _Que sais-je?_ What do I know.
This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed, by translating it into
all tongues, and printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe; and
that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen, namely, among courtiers,
soldiers, princes, men of the world, and men of wit and generosity.
Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right and
permanent expression of the human mind, on the conduct of life?