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