How to Live (44 page)

Which is remarkably like what Montaigne says about the Tupinambá, in Florio’s translation:

Ever since this obvious parallel was spotted by Edward Capell in the late eighteenth century, it has become a popular sport to hunt out signs of influence in other Shakespeare plays. The most promising is certainly
Hamlet
, for its hero often sounds like a Montaigne given a dramatic dilemma to solve and set upon a stage.
When Montaigne writes, “We are, I know not how, double within ourselves,” or describes himself with the incoherent torrent of adjectives “bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; tough, delicate; clever, stupid; surly, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant, liberal, miserly, and prodigal,” he could be voicing a monologue from the play. He also observes that anyone who thinks too much about all the circumstances and consequences of an action makes it impossible to do anything at all—a neat summary of Hamlet’s main problem in life.

The similarities may just be because both writers were attuned to the
atmosphere of their shared late-Renaissance world, with all its confusion and irresolution.
Montaigne and Shakespeare have each been held up as the first truly
modern
writers, capturing that distinctive modern sense of being unsure where you belong, who you are, and what you are expected to do. The Shakespearean scholar J. M. Robertson believed that all literature since these two authors could be interpreted as an elaboration of their joint theme: the discovery of self-divided consciousness.

The parallels cannot be taken too far. For one thing, Shakespeare was a dramatist rather than an essayist. He can divide his contradictions between characters and put them into conflict on stage; Montaigne must contain all contradictions within himself. Another difference is that Montaigne does not sit all alone on top of the canon in his native land as Shakespeare does in England. He has therefore attracted less jealousy, and no iconoclasts have come to push him off his pedestal by claiming that he did not write his own
Essays
, as has so often happened with Shakespeare.

Or almost no one. Among the few exceptions is one of the major nineteenth-century “anti-Stratfordians,” or Shakespeare-doubters: Ignatius Donnelly. At the end of a large opus arguing that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, Donnelly adds extra chapters proving that Bacon also wrote Montaigne’s
Essays
, as well as Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy
and all of Christopher Marlowe’s work.
He finds clues planted throughout the
Essays
, such as a passage in which Montaigne writes, “Whoever shall cure a child of an obstinate aversion to bread,
bacon
, or garlic, will cure him of all kind of delicacy.” The name Francis occurs several times in the text, admittedly always in the French form François and generally denoting the French king François I. No matter; this too is a clue. To clinch matters, Donnelly cites a discovery made by a Mrs. Pott, who alerted him to the frequent mention, in Shakespeare’s plays, of mountains, or
Mountaines
. Since Bacon wrote Shakespeare, any reference to Montaigne in the plays must suggest that he wrote the
Essays
too. “Can anyone believe that all this is the result of accident?” asks Donnelly.

He confesses himself baffled by some sections of the
Essays
that seem pregnant with clues, but which are harder to interpret, notably the story of a young woman who beat her white breasts after her brother was slain. Donnelly gives up:

The
Essays’
being in French might seem to pose a problem—but not for Donnelly. His explanation is that Bacon wanted to publish a book of skeptical, religiously unorthodox opinions, yet dared not do so in England, so he arranged for it to appear in the guise of a translation.
As luck would have it, Francis Bacon’s brother Anthony was in France at the time and knew Montaigne. He persuaded Montaigne to lend his name to the ruse, while someone else persuaded Florio to play the part of translator. Thus, Bacon wrote it; Montaigne signed it; Florio, presumably, actually translated it—but from English to French. “Montaigne” was indeed an Englishman, in a more literal way than Lord Halifax or William Hazlitt ever dreamed of.

One aspect of the story has some basis in fact: Anthony Bacon did know Montaigne, and visited him twice, once in the early 1580s and again in 1590. He could easily have brought a copy of the
Essays
back for his brother, which means that Francis could have read it (in French) before publishing his own collection of
Essays
in 1597. That would explain something that has often puzzled people: how did Bacon and Montaigne come up with the same book title within a few years of each other?

It must be said, however, that the title is almost the only point of similarity. All the qualities that suggest “Englishness” in Montaigne are resoundingly absent from his English counterpart. Bacon wrote with more intellectual rigor than Montaigne. He was more incisive, more philosophical, and a lot more boring. When he tackled subjects like reading or traveling, he issued orders.
This
is what you should read, and
that
is what you must visit on a journey. If ever a subject allowed of division into subtopics, he would so divide it, and he would announce each subdivision in advance before marching through them till he got to the end. One thing you can be sure of with Montaigne is that he will never do this to you.

Once the ice had been broken by Florio and Bacon, innumerable English books appeared with the word
Essays
in their title. Some were overtly inspired by Florio’s Montaigne, others by Bacon, but in almost every case it
was from Montaigne that they took their style of writing and thinking. Very few English essays after the early seventeenth century were philosophically rigorous stabs of thought on important topics; almost all were delightful rambles about nothing in particular. Typical were the works of William Cornwallis, who read Florio in an early manuscript draft and published sequences of
Essayes
in 1600, 1601, 1616 and 1617, exploring such topics as “Of Sleepe,” “Of Discontentments,” “Of Fantasticknesse,” “Of Alehouses,” and “Of the Observation, and Use of Things.”

Even those who did not use the title often wrote in a recognizably digressive, personal way. While French literature became ever more poised and formal, England produced a series of oddballs such as Robert Burton, who described his way of writing, in his vast treatise
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, as coursing “like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees.”
Even stranger was Sir Thomas Browne, who produced essayistic investigations into medicine, gardens, burial methods, imaginary libraries, and much more in a convoluted baroque style so unlike anyone else’s (even Florio’s) that any Browne sentence is instantly recognizable as his.

At the height of this high-quirkiness phase of Montaigne’s English reception, a new translator came along to straighten things out a little: Charles Cotton, whose new version appeared in 1685 and 1686, not long after the
Essays
went on the
Index
in France.
Cotton was more accurate than Florio, and he brought a new generation of English readers to the
Essays
. Surprisingly, the author of this more restrained translation was personally a more wayward and dilettantish character than Florio. Cotton’s main claim to fame in his own day was his scatological burlesque poems. He once described himself as a “Northern clod” whose favorite occupation was drinking ale in the pub all evening before retiring to his library to

After his death, Charles Cotton’s posthumous reputation went through transformations as strange as those of Montaigne or Shakespeare, though on a smaller scale. The nineteenth century considered his comic verse
obnoxious, and admired him instead for lyrical nature poetry which his own contemporaries had ignored. Later, this too slipped into obscurity. People celebrated him rather for a chapter on trout-tickling which he had contributed to Isaac Walton’s
The Compleat Angler
—a highly Montaignean work in itself. Today this relic of Cotton is forgotten in most quarters—though not among trout-ticklers—and he is remembered as much for his Montaigne work as anything.

(illustration credit i16.2)

Cotton’s remained the standard translation of the
Essays
for over two centuries, and it brought Montaigne to a new breed of less baroque writers, more interested in capturing the psychological realities of everyday life than spinning webs of fantasy. The poet Alexander Pope noted in his copy of Cotton, “This is (in my Opinion) the very best Book for Information of Manners, that has been writ; This Author says nothing but what every one feels att the Heart.”
A piece in the literary magazine the
Spectator
praised Montaigne’s habit of weaving personal experiences and qualities into his book, a practice that might be self-indulgent but was entertaining.
As the French critic Charles Dédéyan remarked, the English were happy to let a writer go on about himself, so long as he did it agreeably.

From now on, there would be no shortage of English personal essayists doing just that. They were all of what the critic Walter Pater called “the
true family of Montaigne”: they showed “that intimacy, that modern subjectivity, which may be called the
Montaignesque
element in literature.”
Among them was the popular essayist Leigh Hunt, who filled his copy of the
Essays
with underlinings and marginal comments—often rather fatuous.
When Montaigne tells a story about seeing a boy lacking hands who wielded a heavy sword and cracked a whip as well as any cart-driver in France, Hunt carefully writes in the margin: “With his arms, of course. Still it is very surprising.”

An intellectually sharper admirer was William Hazlitt: he who praised Montaigne for not setting up for a philosopher.
Hazlitt’s assessment of what makes a good essayist exemplifies what the English now tended to look for in Montaigne. Such writers, says Hazlitt, collect curiosities of human life just as natural history enthusiasts collect shells, fossils, or beetles as they stroll along a forest path or seashore. They capture things as they really are rather than as they should be. Montaigne was the finest of them all because he allowed everything to be what it was, including himself, and he knew how to
look
at things. For Hazlitt, an ideal essay

In other words, the essay is the genre that—more than any novel or biography—helps us to learn how to live.

Hazlitt’s son, also called William Hazlitt, would edit Cotton’s translation together with copies of Montaigne’s letters, his Italian travel journal, and a brief biography, to produce a
Complete Works
in 1842. This became the standard edition in Britain over the coming years; it was revised yet again by
his
son in 1877—producing Hazlitt’s Hazlitt’s Cotton’s Montaigne.
Between them, the Hazlitts defined the English Montaigne even more lastingly than Florio. This new Montaigne was loved, above all, for those Hazlittesque virtues: his alertness to everyday life as it really was, and his ability to write pleasingly about it without formal literary constraints.

This tradition has continued, from the nineteenth century through the twentieth, and it looks set to carry on into the twenty-first. Every era has produced fresh English Montaigneans; the tradition continues today through the countless ephemeral essayists and weekend newspaper columnists who, knowingly or not, keep the “Montaignesque element in literature” alive.

Of all Montaigne’s cross-Channel heirs, the one who deserves the last word is an Anglo-Irishman: Laurence Sterne, eighteenth-century author of
Tristram Shandy
.
His great novel, if it can be so classified, is an exaggerated Montaignesque ramble, containing several explicit nods to its French predecessor, and filled with games, paradoxes, and digressions. Dedications and prologues, which ought to be at the beginning, appear all over the place in the wrong order. “The Author’s Preface” turns up in volume 3, chapter 20. At one point, a blank page is supplied, so readers can contribute a picture of a character according to their own imagination. Another page presents a series of line diagrams purporting to summarize the pattern of the book’s digressions so far.