I have already described my environments and my mode of life, and out
of both I contrive to extract a very tolerable amount of satisfaction.
Love in a cottage, with a broken window to let in the rain, is not my
idea of comfort; no more is Dignity, walking forth richly clad, to whom
every head uncovers, every knee grows supple. Bruin in winter-time
fondly sucking his own paws, loses flesh; and love, feeding upon
itself, dies of inanition. Take the candle of death in your hand, and
walk through the stately galleries of the world, and their splendid
furniture and array are as the tinsel armour and pasteboard goblets of
a penny theatre; fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the
melancholy blazon on a coffin lid. We argue fiercely about happiness.
One insists that she is found in the cottage which the hawthorn shades.
Another that she is a lady of fashion, and treads on cloth of gold.
Wisdom, listening to both, shakes a white head, and considers that "a
good deal may be said on both sides."
There is a wise saying to the effect that "a man can eat no more than
he can hold." Every man gets about the same satisfaction out of life.
Mr. Suddlechops, the barber of Seven Dials, is as happy as Alexander at
the head of his legions. The business of the one is to depopulate
kingdoms, the business of the other to reap beards seven days old; but
their relative positions do not affect the question. The one works
with razors and soap-lather the other with battle-cries and
well-greaved Greeks. The one of a Saturday night counts up his shabby
gains and grumbles; the other on _his_ Saturday night sits down and
weeps for other worlds to conquer. The pence to Mr. Suddlechops are as
important as are the worlds to Alexander. Every condition of life has
its peculiar advantages, and wisdom points these out and is contented
with them. The varlet who sang--
"A king cannot swagger
Or get drunk like a beggar,
Nor be half so happy as I"--
had the soul of a philosopher in him. The harshness of the parlour is
revenged at night in the servants' hall. The coarse rich man rates his
domestic, but there is a thought in the domestic's brain, docile and
respectful as he looks, which makes the matter equal, which would
madden the rich man if he knew it--make him wince as with a shrewdest
twinge of hereditary gout. For insult and degradation are not without
their peculiar solaces. You may spit upon Shylock's gaberdine, but the
day comes when he demands his pound of flesh; every blow, every insult,
not without a certain satisfaction, he adds to the account running up
against you in the day-book and ledger of his hate--which at the proper
time he will ask you to discharge. Every way we look we see
even-handed nature administering her laws of compensation. Grandeur
has a heavy tax to pay. The usurper rolls along like a god, surrounded
by his guards. He dazzles the crowd--all very fine; but look beneath
his splendid trappings and you see a shirt of mail, and beneath _that_
a heart cowering in terror of an air-drawn dagger. Whom did the memory
of Austerlitz most keenly sting? The beaten emperor? or the mighty
Napoleon, dying like an untended watch-fire on St. Helena?
Giddy people may think the life I lead here staid and humdrum, but they
are mistaken. It is true, I hear no concerts, save those in which the
thrushes are performers in the spring mornings. I see no pictures,
save those painted on the wide sky-canvas with the colours of sunrise
and sunset. I attend neither rout nor ball; I have no deeper
dissipation than the tea-table; I hear no more exciting scandal than
quiet village gossip. Yet I enjoy my concerts more than I would the
great London ones. I like the pictures I see, and think them better
painted, too, than those which adorn the walls of the Royal Academy;
and the village gossip is more after my turn of mind than the scandals
that convulse the clubs. It is wonderful how the whole world reflects
itself in the simple village life. The people around me are full of
their own affairs and interests; were they of imperial magnitude, they
could not be excited more strongly. Farmer Worthy is anxious about the
next market; the likelihood of a fall in the price of butter and eggs
hardly allows him to sleep o' nights. The village doctor--happily we
have only one--skirrs hither and thither in his gig, as if man could
neither die nor be born without his assistance. He is continually
standing on the confines of existence, welcoming the new-comer, bidding
farewell to the goer-away. And the robustious fellow who sits at the
head of the table when the Jolly Swillers meet at the Blue Lion on
Wednesday evenings is a great politician, sound of lung metal, and
wields the village in the taproom, as my Lord Palmerston wields the
nation in the House. His listeners think him a wiser personage than
the Premier, and he is inclined to lean to that opinion himself. I
find everything here that other men find in the big world. London is
but a magnified Dreamthorp.
And just as the Rev. Mr. White took note of the ongoings of the seasons
in and around Hampshire Selborne, watched the colonies of the rooks in
the tall elms, looked after the swallows in the cottage and rectory
eaves, played the affectionate spy on the private lives of chaffinch
and hedge-sparrow, was eaves-dropper to the solitary cuckoo; so here I
keep eye and ear open; take note of man, woman, and child; find many a
pregnant text imbedded in the commonplace of village life; and, out of
what I see and hear, weave in my own room my essays as solitary as the
spider weaves his web in the darkened corner. The essay, as a literary
form, resembles the lyric, in so far as it is moulded by some central
mood--whimsical, serious, or satirical. Give the mood, and the essay,
from the first sentence to the last, grows around it as the cocoon
grows around the silkworm. The essay-writer is a chartered libertine,
and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the
infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit,
are all that the essayist requires to start business with. Jacques, in
"As You Like It," had the makings of a charming essayist. It is not
the essayist's duty to inform, to build pathways through metaphysical
morasses, to cancel abuses, any more than it is the duty of the poet to
do these things. Incidentally he may do something in that way, just as
the poet may, but it is not his duty, and should not be expected of
him. Skylarks are primarily created to sing, although a whole choir of
them may be baked in pies and brought to table; they were born to make
music, although they may incidentally stay the pangs of vulgar hunger.
The essayist is a kind of poet in prose, and if questioned harshly as
to his uses, he might be unable to render a better apology for his
existence than a flower might. The essay should be pure literature as
the poem is pure literature. The essayist wears a lance, but he cares
more for the sharpness of its point than for the pennon that flutters
on it, than for the banner of the captain under whom he serves. He
plays with death as Hamlet plays with Yorick's skull, and he reads the
morals--strangely stern, often, for such fragrant lodging--which are
folded up in the bosoms of roses. He has no pride, and is deficient in
a sense of the congruity and fitness of things. He lifts a pebble from
the ground, and puts it aside more carefully than any gem; and on a
nail in a cottage-door he will hang the mantle of his thought, heavily
brocaded with the gold of rhetoric. He finds his way into the Elysian
fields through portals the most shabby and commonplace.
The essayist plays with his subject, now whimsical, now in grave, now
in melancholy mood. He lies upon the idle grassy bank, like Jacques,
letting the world flow past him, and from this thing and the other he
extracts his mirth and his moralities. His main gift is an eye to
discover the suggestiveness of common things; to find a sermon in the
most unpromising texts. Beyond the vital hint, the first step, his
discourses are not beholden to their titles. Let him take up the most
trivial subject, and it will lead him away to the great questions over
which the serious imagination loves to brood,--fortune, mutability,
death,--just as inevitably as the runnel, trickling among the summer
hills, on which sheep are bleating, leads you to the sea; or as,
turning down the first street you come to in the city, you are led
finally, albeit by many an intricacy, out into the open country, with
its waste places and its woods, where you are lost in a sense of
strangeness and solitariness. The world is to the meditative man what
the mulberry plant is to the silkworm. The essay-writer has no lack of
subject-matter. He has the day that is passing over his head; and, if
unsatisfied with that, he has the world's six thousand years to
depasture his gay or serious humour upon. I idle away my time here,
and I am finding new subjects every hour. Everything I see or hear is
an essay in bud. The world is everywhere whispering essays, and one
need only be the world's amanuensis. The proverbial expression which
last evening the clown dropped as he trudged homeward to supper, the
light of the setting sun on his face, expands before me to a dozen
pages. The coffin of the pauper, which to-day I saw carried carelessly
along, is as good a subject as the funeral procession of an emperor.
Craped drum and banner add nothing to death; penury and disrespect take
nothing away. Incontinently my thought moves like a slow-paced hearse
with sable nodding plumes. Two rustic lovers, whispering between the
darkening hedges, is as potent to project my mind into the tender
passion as if I had seen Romeo touch the cheek of Juliet in the
moon-light garden. Seeing a curly-headed child asleep in the sunshine
before a cottage door is sufficient excuse for a discourse on
childhood; quite as good as if I had seen infant Cain asleep in the lap
of Eve with Adam looking on. A lark cannot rise to heaven without
raising as many thoughts as there are notes in its song. Dawn cannot
pour its white light on my village without starting from their dim lair
a hundred reminiscences; nor can sunset burn above yonder trees in the
west without attracting to itself the melancholy of a lifetime. When
spring unfolds her green leaves I would be provoked to indite an essay
on hope and youth, were it not that it is already writ in the carols of
the birds; and I might be tempted in autumn to improve the occasion,
were it not for the rustle of the withered leaves as I walk through the
woods. Compared with that simple music, the saddest-cadenced words
have but a shallow meaning.
The essayist who feeds his thoughts upon the segment of the world which
surrounds him cannot avoid being an egotist; but then his egotism is
not unpleasing. If he be without taint of boastfulness, of
self-sufficiency, of hungry vanity, the world will not press the charge
home. If a man discourses continually of his wines, his plate, his
titled acquaintances, the number and quality of his horses, his
men-servants and maid-servants, he must discourse very skilfully indeed
if he escapes being called a coxcomb. If a man speaks of death--tells
you that the idea of it continually haunts him, that he has the most
insatiable curiosity as to death and dying, that his thought mines in
churchyards like a "demon-mole"--no one is specially offended, and that
this is a dull fellow is the hardest thing likely to be said of him.
Only, the egotism that overcrows you is offensive, that exalts trifles
and takes pleasure in them, that suggests superiority in matters of
equipage and furniture; and the egotism is offensive, because it runs
counter to and jostles your self-complacency. The egotism which rises
no higher than the grave is of a solitary and a hermit kind--it crosses
no man's path, it disturbs no man's _amour propre_. You may offend a
man if you say you are as rich as he, as wise as he, as handsome as he.
You offend no man if you tell him that, like him, you have to die. The
king, in his crown and coronation robes, will allow the beggar to claim
that relationship with him. To have to die is a distinction of which
no man is proud. The speaking about one's self is not necessarily
offensive. A modest, truthful man speaks better about himself than
about anything else, and on that subject his speech is likely to be
most profitable to his hearers. Certainly, there is no subject with
which he is better acquainted, and on which he has a better title to be
heard. And it is this egotism, this perpetual reference to self, in
which the charm of the essayist resides. If a man is worth knowing at
all, he is worth knowing well. The essayist gives you his thoughts,
and lets you know, in addition, how he came by them. He has nothing to
conceal; he throws open his doors and windows, and lets him enter who
will. You like to walk round peculiar or important men as you like to
walk round a building, to view it from different points, and in
different lights. Of the essayist, when his mood is communicative, you
obtain a full picture. You are made his contemporary and familiar
friend. You enter into his humours and his seriousness. You are made
heir of his whims, prejudices, and playfulness. You walk through the
whole nature of him, as you walk through the streets of Pompeii,
looking into the interior of stately mansions, reading the satirical
scribblings on the walls. And the essayist's habit of not only giving
you his thoughts, but telling you how he came by them, is interesting,
because it shows you by what alchemy the ruder world becomes transmuted
into the finer. We like to know the lineage of ideas, just as we like
to know the lineage of great earls and swift race-horses. We like to
know that the discovery of the law of gravitation was born of the fall
of an apple in an English garden on a summer afternoon. Essays written
after this fashion are racy of the soil in which they grow, as you
taste the larva in the vines grown on the slopes of Etna, they say.
There is a healthy Gascon flavour in Montaigne's Essays; and Charles
Lamb's are scented with the primroses of Covent Garden.
The essayist does not usually appear early in the literary history of a
country: he comes naturally after the poet and the chronicler. His
habit of mind is leisurely; he does not write from any special stress
of passionate impulse; he does not create material so much as he
comments upon material already existing. It is essential for him that
books should have been written, and that they should, at least to some
extent, have been read and digested. He is usually full of allusions
and references, and these his reader must be able to follow and
understand. And in this literary walk, as in most others, the giants
came first: Montaigne and Lord Bacon were our earliest essayists, and,
as yet, they are our best. In point of style, these essays are
different from anything that could now be produced. Not only is the
thinking different--the manner of setting forth the thinking is
different also. We despair of reaching the thought, we despair equally
of reaching the language. We can no more bring back their turns of
sentence than we can bring back their tournaments. Montaigne, in his
serious moods, has a curiously rich and intricate eloquence; and
Bacon's sentence bends beneath the weight of his thought, like a branch
beneath the weight of its fruit. Bacon seems to have written his
essays with Shakspeare's pen. There is a certain want of ease about
the old writers which has an irresistible charm. The language flows
like a stream over a pebbled bed, with propulsion, eddy, and sweet
recoil--the pebbles, if retarding movement, giving ring and dimple to
the surface, and breaking the whole into babbling music. There is a
ceremoniousness in the mental habits of these ancients. Their
intellectual garniture is picturesque, like the garniture of their
bodies. Their thoughts are courtly and high mannered. A singular
analogy exists between the personal attire of a period and its written
style. The peaked beard, the starched collar, the quilted doublet,
have their correspondences in the high sentence and elaborate ornament
(worked upon the thought like figures upon tapestry) of Sidney and
Spenser. In Pope's day men wore rapiers, and their weapons they
carried with them into literature, and frequently unsheathed them too.
They knew how to stab to the heart with an epigram. Style went out
with the men who wore knee-breeches and buckles in their shoes. We
write more easily now; but in our easy writing there is ever a taint of
flippancy: our writing is to theirs, what shooting-coat and wide-awake
are to doublet and plumed hat.
Montaigne and Bacon are our earliest and greatest essayists, and
likeness and unlikeness exist between the men. Bacon was
constitutionally the graver nature. He writes like one on whom presses
the weight of affairs, and he approaches a subject always on its
serious side. He does not play with it fantastically. He lives
amongst great ideas, as with great nobles, with whom he dare not be too
familiar. In the tone of his mind there is ever something imperial.
When he writes on building, he speaks of a palace with spacious
entrances, and courts, and banqueting-halls; when he writes on gardens,
he speaks of alleys and mounts, waste places and fountains, of a garden
"which is indeed prince-like." To read over his table of contents, is
like reading over a roll of peers' names. We have, taking them as they
stand, essays treating _Of Great Place, Of Boldness, Of Goodness, and
Goodness of Nature, Of Nobility, Of Seditions and Troubles, Of Atheism,
Of Superstition, Of Travel, Of Empire, Of Counsel_,--a book plainly to
lie in the closets of statesmen and princes, and designed to nurture
the noblest natures. Bacon always seems to write with his ermine on.
Montaigne was different from all this. His table of contents reads, in
comparison, like a medley, or a catalogue of an auction. He was quite
as wise as Bacon; he could look through men quite as clearly, and
search them quite as narrowly; certain of his moods were quite as
serious, and in one corner of his heart he kept a yet profounder
melancholy; but he was volatile, a humourist, and a gossip. He could
be dignified enough on great occasions, but dignity and great occasions
bored him. He could stand in the presence with propriety enough, but
then he got out of the presence as rapidly as possible. When, in the
thirty-eighth year of his age, he--somewhat world-weary, and with more
scars on his heart than he cared to discover--retired to his chateau,
he placed his library "in the great tower overlooking the entrance to
the court," and over the central rafter he inscribed in large letters
the device--"I DO NOT UNDERSTAND; I PAUSE; I EXAMINE." When he began
to write his Essays he had no great desire to shine as an author; he
wrote simply to relieve teeming heart and brain. The best method to
lay the spectres of the mind is to commit them to paper. Speaking of
the Essays, he says, "This book has a domestic and private object. It
is intended for the use of my relations and friends; so that, when they
have lost me, which they will soon do, they may find in it some
features of my condition and humours; and by this means keep up more
completely, and in a more lively manner, the knowledge they have of
me." In his Essays he meant to portray himself, his habits, his modes
of thought, his opinions, what fruit of wisdom he had gathered from
experience sweet and bitter; and the task he has executed with
wonderful fidelity. He does not make himself a hero. Cromwell would
have his warts painted; and Montaigne paints his, and paints them too
with a certain fondness. He is perfectly tolerant of himself and of
everybody else. Whatever be the subject, the writing flows on easy,
equable, self-satisfied, almost always with a personal anecdote
floating on the surface. Each event of his past life he considers a
fact of nature; creditable or the reverse, there it is; sometimes to be
speculated upon, not in the least to be regretted. If it is worth
nothing else, it may be made the subject of an essay, or, at least, be
useful as an illustration. We have not only his thoughts, we see also
how and from what they arose. When he presents you with a bouquet, you
notice that the flowers have been plucked up by the roots, and to the
roots a portion of the soil still adheres. On his daily life his
Essays grew like lichens upon rocks. If a thing is useful to him, he
is not squeamish as to where he picks it up. In his eye there is
nothing common or unclean; and he accepts a favour as willingly from a
beggar as from a prince. When it serves his purpose, he quotes a
tavern catch, or the smart saying of a kitchen wench, with as much
relish as the fine sentiment of a classical poet, or the gallant _bon
mot_ of a king. Everything is important which relates to himself.
That his mustache, if stroked with his perfumed glove, or handkerchief,
will retain the odour a whole day, is related with as much gravity as
the loss of a battle, or the march of a desolating plague. Montaigne,
in his grave passages, reaches an eloquence intricate and highly
wrought; but then his moods are Protean, and he is constantly
alternating his stateliness with familiarity, anecdote, humour,
coarseness. His Essays are like a mythological landscape--you hear the
pipe of Pan in the distance, the naked goddess moves past, the satyr
leers from the thicket. At the core of him profoundly melancholy, and
consumed by a hunger for truth, he stands like Prospero in the
enchanted island, and he has Ariel and Caliban to do his behests and
run his errands. Sudden alternations are very characteristic of him.
Whatever he says suggests its opposite. He laughs at himself and his
reader. He builds his castle of cards for the mere pleasure of
knocking it down again. He is ever unexpected and surprising. And
with this curious mental activity, this play and linked dance of
discordant elements, his page is alive and restless, like the constant
flicker of light and shadow in a mass of foliage which the wind is
stirring.
Montaigne is avowedly an egotist; and by those who are inclined to make
this a matter of reproach, it should be remembered that the value of
egotism depends entirely on the egotist. If the egotist is weak, his
egotism is worthless. If the egotist is strong, acute, full of
distinctive character, his egotism is precious, and remains a
possession of the race. If Shakspeare had left personal revelations,
how we should value them; if, indeed, he has not in some sense left
them--if the tragedies and comedies are not personal revelations
altogether--the multiform nature of the man rushing towards the sun at
once in Falstaff, Hamlet, and Romeo. But calling Montaigne an egotist
does not go a great way to decipher him. No writer takes the reader so
much into his confidence, and no one so entirely escapes the penalty of
confidence. He tells us everything about himself, we think; and when
all is told, it is astonishing how little we really know. The
esplanades of Montaigne's palace are thoroughfares, men from every
European country rub clothes there, but somewhere in the building there
is a secret room in which the master sits, of which no one but himself
wears the key. We read in the Essays about his wife, his daughter, his
daughter's governess, of his cook, of his page, "who was never found
guilty of telling the truth," of his library, the Gascon harvest
outside his chateau, his habits of composition, his favourite
speculations; but somehow the man himself is constantly eluding us.
His daughter's governess, his page, the ripening Gascon fields, are
never introduced for their own sakes; they are employed to illustrate
and set off the subject on which he happens to be writing. A brawl in
his own kitchen he does not consider worthy of being specially set
down, but he has seen and heard everything: it comes in his way when
travelling in some remote region, and accordingly it finds a place. He
is the frankest, most outspoken of writers; and that very frankness.
and outspokenness puts the reader off his guard. If you wish to
preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness. The Essays are full of
this trick. The frankness is as well simulated as the grape-branches
of the Grecian artist which the birds flew towards and pecked. When
Montaigne retreats, he does so like a skilful general, leaving his
fires burning. In other ways, too, he is an adept in putting his
reader out. He discourses with the utmost gravity, but you suspect
mockery or banter in his tones. He is serious with the most trifling
subjects, and he trifles with the most serious. "He broods eternally
over his own thought," but who can tell what his thought may be for the
nonce? He is of all writers the most vagrant, surprising, and, to many
minds, illogical. His sequences are not the sequences of other men.
His writings are as full of transformations as a pantomime or a fairy
tale. His arid wastes lead up to glittering palaces, his
banqueting-halls end in a dog-hutch. He begins an essay about
trivialities, and the conclusion is in the other world. And the
peculiar character of his writing, like the peculiar character of all
writing which is worth anything, arises from constitutional turn of
mind. He is constantly playing at fast and loose with himself and his
reader. He mocks and scorns his deeper nature; and, like Shakspeare in
Hamlet, says his deepest things in a jesting way. When he is gayest,
be sure there is a serious design in his gaiety. Singularly shrewd and
penetrating--sad, not only from sensibility of exquisite nerve and
tissue, but from meditation, and an eye that pierced the surfaces of
things--fond of pleasure, yet strangely fascinated by death--sceptical,
yet clinging to what the Church taught and believed--lazily possessed
by a high ideal of life, yet unable to reach it, careless perhaps often
to strive after it, and with no very high opinion of his own goodness,
or of the goodness of his fellows--and with all these serious elements,
an element of humour mobile as flame, which assumed a variety of forms,
now pure fun, now mischievous banter, now blistering scorn--humour in
all its shapes, carelessly exercised on himself and his readers--with
all this variety, complexity, riot, and contradiction almost of
intellectual forces within, Montaigne wrote his bewildering
Essays--with the exception of Rabelais, the greatest Modern
Frenchman--the creator of a distinct literary form, and to whom, down
even to our own day, even in point of subject-matter, every essayist
has been more or less indebted.
Bacon is the greatest of the serious and stately essayists,--Montaigne
the greatest of the garrulous and communicative. The one gives you his
thoughts on Death, Travel, Government, and the like, and lets you make
the best of them; the other gives you his on the same subjects, but he
wraps them up in personal gossip and reminiscence. With the last it is
never Death or Travel alone: it is always Death one-fourth, and
Montaigne three-fourths; or Travel one-fourth, and Montaigne
three-fourths. He pours his thought into the water of gossip, and
gives you to drink. He gilds his pill always, and he always gilds it
with himself. The general characteristics of his Essays have been
indicated, and it is worth while inquiring what they teach, what
positive good they have done, and why for three centuries they have
charmed, and still continue to charm.
The Essays contain a philosophy of life, which is not specially high,
yet which is certain to find acceptance more or less with men who have
passed out beyond the glow of youth, and who have made trial of the
actual world. The essence of his philosophy is a kind of cynical
common-sense. He will risk nothing in life; he will keep to the beaten
track; he will not let passion blind or enslave him; he will gather
round him what good he can, and will therewith endeavour to be content.
He will be, as far as possible, self-sustained; he will not risk his
happiness in the hands of man, or of woman either. He is shy of
friendship, he fears love, for he knows that both are dangerous. He
knows that life is full of bitters, and he holds it wisdom that a man
should console himself, as far as possible, with its sweets, the
principal of which are peace, travel, leisure, and the writing of
essays. He values obtainable Gascon bread and cheese more than the
unobtainable stars. He thinks crying for the moon the foolishest thing
in the world. He will remain where he is. He will not deny that a new
world may exist beyond the sunset, but he knows that to reach the new
world there is a troublesome Atlantic to cross; and he is not in the
least certain that, putting aside the chance of being drowned on the
way, he will be one whit happier in the new world than he is in the
old. For his part he will embark with no Columbus. He feels that life
is but a sad thing at best; but as he has little hope of making it
better, he accepts it, and will not make it worse by murmuring. When
the chain galls him, he can at least revenge himself by making jests on
it. He will temper the despotism of nature by epigrams. He has read
Aesop's fable, and is the last man in the world to relinquish the
shabbiest substance to grasp at the finest shadow.
Of nothing under the sun was Montaigne quite certain, except that every
man--whatever his station--might travel farther and fare worse; and
that the playing with his own thoughts, in the shape of essay-writing,
was the most harmless of amusements. His practical acquiescence in
things does not promise much fruit, save to himself; yet in virtue of
it he became one of the forces of the world--a very visible agent in
bringing about the Europe which surrounds us today. He lived in the
midst of the French religious wars. The rulers of his country were
execrable Christians, but most orthodox Catholics. The burning of
heretics was a public amusement, and the court ladies sat out the play.
On the queen-mother and on her miserable son lay all the blood of the
St. Bartholomew. The country was torn asunder; everywhere was battle,
murder, pillage, and such woeful partings as Mr. Millais has
represented in his incomparable picture. To the solitary humourous
essayist this state of things was hateful. He was a good Catholic in
his easy way; he attended divine service regularly; he crossed himself
when he yawned. He conformed in practice to every rule of the Church;
but if orthodox in these matters, he was daring in speculation. There
was nothing he was not bold enough to question. He waged war after his
peculiar fashion with every form of superstition. He worked under the
foundations of priestcraft. But while serving the Reformed cause, he
had no sympathy with Reformers. If they would but remain quiet, but
keep their peculiar notions to themselves, France would rest! That a
man should go to the stake for an opinion, was as incomprehensible to
him as that a priest or king should send him there for an opinion. He
thought the persecuted and the persecutors fools about equally matched.
He was easy-tempered and humane--in the hunting-field he could not bear
the cry of a dying hare with composure--martyr-burning had consequently
no attraction for such a man. His scepticism came into play, his
melancholy humour, his sense of the illimitable which surrounds man's
life, and which mocks, defeats, flings back his thought upon himself.
Man is here, he said, with bounded powers, with limited knowledge, with
an unknown behind, an unknown in front, assured of nothing but that he
was born, and that he must die; why, then, in Heaven's name should he
burn his fellow for a difference of opinion in the matter of surplices,
or as to the proper fashion of conducting devotion? Out of his
scepticism and his merciful disposition grew, in that fiercely
intolerant age, the idea of toleration, of which he was the apostle.
Widely read, charming every one by his wit and wisdom, his influence
spread from mind to mind, and assisted in bringing about the change
which has taken place in European thought. His ideas, perhaps, did not
spring from the highest sources. He was no ascetic, he loved pleasure,
he was tolerant of everything except cruelty; but on that account we
should not grudge him his meed. It is in this indirect way that great
writers take their place among the forces of the world. In the long
run, genius and wit side with the right cause. And the man fighting
against wrong to-day is assisted, in a greater degree than perhaps he
is himself aware, by the sarcasm of this writer, the metaphor of that,
the song of the other, although the writers themselves professed
indifference, or were even counted as belonging to the enemy.
Montaigne's hold on his readers arises from many causes. There is his
frank and curious self-delineation; _that_ interests, because it is the
revelation of a very peculiar nature. Then there is the positive value
of separate thoughts imbedded in his strange whimsicality and humour.
Lastly, there is the perennial charm of style, which is never a
separate quality, but rather the amalgam and issue of all the mental
and moral qualities in a man's possession, and which bears the same
relation to these that light bears to the mingled elements that make up
the orb of the sun. And style, after all, rather than thought, is the
immortal thing in literature. In literature, the charm of style is
indefinable, yet all-subduing, just as fine manners are in social life.
In reality, it is not of so much consequence what you say, as how you
say it. Memorable sentences are memorable on account of some single
irradiating word. "But Shadwell never _deviates_ into sense," for
instance. Young Roscius, in his provincial barn, will repeat you the
great soliloquy of Hamlet, and although every word may be given with
tolerable correctness, you find it just as commonplace as himself; the
great actor speaks it, and you "read Shakspeare as by a flash of
lightning." And it is in Montaigne's style, in the strange freaks and
turnings of his thought, his constant surprises, his curious
alternations of humour and melancholy, his careless, familiar form of
address, and the grace with which everything is done, that his charm
lies, and which makes the hundredth perusal of him as pleasant as the
first.
And on style depends the success of the essayist. Montaigne said the
most familiar things in the finest way. Goldsmith could not be termed
a thinker; but everything he touched he brightened, as after a month of
dry weather, the shower brightens the dusty shrubbery of a suburban
villa. The world is not so much in need of new thoughts as that when
thought grows old and worn with usage it should, like current coin, be
called in, and, from the mint of genius, reissued fresh and new. Love
is an old story enough, but in every generation it is re-born, in the
downcast eyes and blushes of young maidens. And so, although he
fluttered in Eden, Cupid is young to-day. If Montaigne had lived in
Dreamthorp, as I am now living, had he written essays as I am now
writing them, his English Essays would have been as good as his Gascon
ones. Looking on, the country cart would not for nothing have passed
him on the road to market, the setting sun would be arrested in its
splendid colours, the idle chimes of the church would be translated
into a thoughtful music. As it is, the village life goes on, and there
is no result. My sentences are not much more brilliant than the
speeches of the clowns; in my book there is little more life than there
is in the market-place on the days when there is no market.