The Complete Essays (114 page)

Nihil est tam populare quam bonitas
.
[Nothing is more pleasing to the people than affability.]
²⁸

[A] By such comparisons I would have found myself [C] a giant and unusual, just as I find myself a pygmy and quite commonplace in comparison with some former times in which it was indeed considered commonplace (if other stronger qualities did not accompany it) to find a man [A] moderate in revenge, slow to take offence, punctilious in keeping his word, neither treacherous nor pliant, nor accommodating his trust to the will of others and to circumstances. I would rather let affairs go hang than to warp my trustworthiness in their service.

As for that novel virtue of deceit and dissimulation that is now much honoured I hate it unto death, and among all the vices I can find none which bears better testimony to cowardice and to baseness of mind. It is an abject and a slave-like humour to go disguising and hiding yourself behind
a mask and not to dare to let yourself be seen as you are. That way, men of our time are trained for perfidy: [B] being used to utter words of falsehood, to break their word they do not scruple. [A] A noble mind must not belie its thoughts: it wants its inward parts to be seen: [C] everything there is good – or at least humane. Aristotle reckons that magnanimity has the duty to hate and to love openly, to speak with total frankness and to think nothing of other men’s approval or disapproval compared with the truth. [A1] Apollonius said that it was for slaves to lie and for free-men to speak the truth.
²⁹
[C] Truth is the first and basic part of virtue. It must be loved for its own sake. A man who tells the truth because he is otherwise bound to do so or because it serves him to do so, yet who is not afraid to tell lies when it does not matter to anyone, is not truthful enough. My soul’s complexion is such that it flees from lying and hates even to think of it. I have an inward sense of shame and a stabbing remorse if a lie escapes me – as it does sometimes, when occasions take me by surprise and disturb me unawares.

[A] We should not always say everything: that would be stupid; but what we do say must be what we think: to do otherwise is wicked. I do not know what princes expect to get out of constantly pretending and lying, except not to be believed even when they do tell the truth. It may deceive people once or twice; but to profess your dissimulation and to boast as some of our princes have done that they would toss their very shirt on to the fire if it knew of their real intentions (which is a saying of an Ancient, Metellus of Macedon); to declare that a man who knows not how to feign knows not how to reign is to forewarn those who have to deal with them that what they say is all cheating and lies.
³⁰
[C]
‘Quo quis versutior et callidior est, hoc invisior et suspectior, detracta opinione probitatis.’
[The more crafty and artful a man is, the more he is loathed and mistrusted, once he has lost his reputation for probity.] [A] A man would be very simple to let himself be deceived by the looks or words of a man who, as Tiberius did, thought it important to appear outside always different from what he was inside; and I do not know what commerce such people can have with men when they proffer nothing which you can accept at its face-value. [B] A man who is disloyal to truth is disloyal to lies as well.

[C] Those writers nowadays who, when drawing up the duties of a prince, have considered only what is good for the affairs of State, placing that before his fidelity and conscience, might have something to say to a prince whose fortune had so arranged his affairs that he could for ever secure them by one single act of deception, one failure to keep his word. But things do not happen that way: princes stumble again into similar bargains: they make more than one peace, more than one treaty in their lifetime. The profit tempts them when they first prove untrustworthy – and virtually always some profit is on offer, as in every act of wickedness (sacrilege, murder, rebellion and treachery are done for some kind of gain); but that first profit entails infinite subsequent losses, putting that prince, by his first breach of trust, beyond all negotiations, beyond any mode of agreement.

when I was a boy Suleiman, of the family of the Ottomans, a family not scrupulous in keeping promises and agreements, landed his army at Otranto and he learned that Mercurino de’ Gratinare and the citizens of Castro were, despite the stipulations in the treaty, still kept prisoner after surrendering their fortress. He ordered them to be released, saying that he was engaged in other great expeditions in that region and that even though such a breach of faith might have some appearance of present advantage it would bring upon him discredit and distrust which would be infinitely damaging in the future.
³¹

[A] Now, as for me, I prefer to be awkward and indiscreet rather than to flatter and dissemble. [B] I confess that there is an element of pride and stubbornness in remaining open and all of a piece, with no consideration for others, and it seems to me that I become a little too free when I least ought to be so and that I react to the duty of respect by growing more heated. It may also be that for lack of art I just follow my nature. When I use then that same liberty of tongue and expression that I bring to my household, I feel how much it sinks towards a lack of discretion and rudeness. But apart from the fact that I am made that way, my wit is not supple enough to dodge a sudden question and to escape down some side-road, nor to pretend that something is true. My memory is not good enough to remember that pretence nor reliable enough to maintain it: so I act the brave out of weakness. I therefore entrust myself to simplicity, always saying what I think; by temperament and by conviction I leave the
outcome to Fortune. [C] Aristippus said that to speak freely and openly to all men was the chief fruit he derived from philosophy.
³²

[A] Memory is an instrument of wondrous service, without which judgement is hard put to it to do its duty. In me it is entirely lacking. If you want to propound anything to me you must do it bit by bit. It is beyond my ability to answer propositions in which there are several heads of argument. I could not take on any commission without my jotter. And when I myself have anything of importance to propound, if it is at all long-winded I am reduced to the abject and pitiful necessity of learning off by heart, [C] word by word, [A] what I have to say: otherwise I would have neither shape nor assurance, being ever fearful that my memory would play a dirty trick on me. [C] But for me that method is no less difficult. It takes me three hours to learn three lines of verse; and then, in a composition of my own, an author’s freedom to switch the order and to change a word, forever varying the matter, makes the work harder to learn. [A] Now the more I mistrust my memory, the more confused it gets; it serves me best when I take it by surprise; I have to address requests to it somewhat indifferently, for it becomes paralysed if I try to force it, and once it has started to wobble the more I dig into it the more it gets tied up and perplexed; it serves me in its own time not in mine.

[A1] What I feel in the case of my memory I feel in many other aspects of myself. I flee from all orders, obligations and constraints. Even things I do easily and naturally I cannot do once I order myself to do them with an express and prescribed command. The very parts of my body which have a degree of freedom and autonomy sometimes refuse to obey me if I plan to bind them to obligatory service at a certain time and place. Such tyrannical and preordained constraint disgusts them: they cower from fear and irritation and swoon away.

[B] I was once in a place where it is barbarously rude not to drink when you are invited to do so: I was left completely free, but I tried to be a good fellow to please the ladies who by local custom were in the party. We had a fine old time: for this anticipated threat of having to make myself go beyond my nature and custom so blocked my gullet that I could not gulp down one single drop and I was even deprived of the wine I wanted for my dinner. All the drink that I had already taken in imagination had quenched my thirst and I had had enough!

[A1] This effect is more evident in those whose imagination gets strongly carried away: it is nevertheless quite natural; there is nobody who
does not feel it to some extent. An excellent bowman was condemned to death, but offered a chance to live if he would agree to demonstrate some noteworthy proof of his skill. He refused to make an assay, fearing that the excessive strain on his will would make his hand go wrong and that instead of saving his life he would also lose the reputation that he had acquired as an archer.

When a man is walking up and down anywhere, if his thoughts are on something else he will never fail – give an inch or so – to make the same number of equal strides; but if he goes to that place with the intention of counting and measuring his strides, he will find that he will never achieve so exactly by design what he had done naturally and by chance.

[A] My library, which is a fine one as village libraries go, is sited at one of the corners of my house. If an idea occurs to me which I want to go and look up or write down, I have to tell somebody else about it in case it slips out of my mind as I merely cross my courtyard. If I am rash enough to interrupt the thread of what I am saying, I never fail to lose it: which means that in talking I become constrained, dry and brief. Even my serving-men I have to call by the name of their office or the place which they come from, for it is hard for me to remember their names. [B] (I can tell you well enough that it has three syllables, is hard on the ear or begins with such and such a letter.) [A] And if I lasted for long I do not doubt that I would forget my own name, as others have done. [B] Mes-sala Corvinus lived two years without any trace of memory; [C] and the same is said of George of Trebizond;
³³
[B] so in my own interest I often chew over what sort of life they had and whether, without that faculty, there would be enough of me left to maintain my identity at all easily; and if I look at it closely I am afraid that, if this defect were complete, all the activities of my soul would be lost. [C]
‘Memoria certe non modo philosophiam, sed omnis vitæ usum omnesque artes una maxime continet.’
[It is certain that memory alone is what retains not only our philosophy but also the whole of life’s practices and all the arts and sciences.]
³⁴

[A]
Plenus rimarum sum, hac atque illac effluo
.
[I am full of cracks and leaking everywhere.]

[A1] More than once I have forgotten the password [C] for the watch [A1] which [C] but three hours previously [A1] another
man had told me or had learnt from me – [C] and, no matter what Cicero says, I have even forgotten where I had hidden my purse.
³⁵
Anything I hide away privately I am helping myself to mislay. [A] Now memory is the coffer and store-box of knowledge: mine is so defective that I cannot really complain if I know hardly anything. I do know the generic names of the sciences and what they mean, but nothing beyond that. I do not study books, I dip into them: as for anything I do retain from them, I am no longer aware that it belongs to somebody else: it is quite simply the material from which my judgement has profited and the arguments and ideas in which it has been steeped: I straightway forget the author, the source, the wording and the other particulars.

[B] I am so outstanding a forgetter that, along with all the rest, I forget even my own works and writings. People are constantly quoting me to me without my realizing it. If anyone wanted to know the sources of the verse and
exempla
that I have accumulated here, I would be at a loss to tell him, and yet I have only gone begging them at the doors of well-known and famous authors, not being satisfied with splendid material if it did not come from splendid honoured hands. In them, authority and reason coincide. [C] No wonder that my own book incurs the same fate as the others and that my memory lets go of what I write as of what I read; of what I give as of what I receive.

[A] I have other defects apart from memory which greatly contribute to my ignorance. My wits are sluggish and blunt: the slightest fog will arrest their thrust, so that (for example) they can never unravel the easiest of puzzles which I set them. The vainest of subtleties can embarrass me. I have only the roughest idea of games such as chess, cards, draughts and so on in which the wits play a part. My power of understanding is slow and confused, but once it has grasped anything, as long as it continues to do so it holds on to it well, hugging it tightly, deeply and in its entirety. My eyesight is sound, whole and good at distances, but when I work it easily tires and grows lazy. That explains why I cannot have any lengthy commerce with books except through the assistance of somebody else. Those who have not made an assay of this can learn from their Younger Pliny how much such a slowing down matters to those who are given to this occupation.
³⁶

Nobody’s soul is so brutish and wretched that, within it, some peculiar faculty cannot be seen to shine; no soul is buried so deep that some corner of it cannot break out. How it happens that a soul which is blind and dull to everything else is found to be lively, clear and outstanding in some definite activity peculiar to itself is something you will have to inquire from the experts. But the most beautiful of souls are those universal ones which are open and ready for anything, [C] untaught perhaps but not unteachable. [A] And I say that to indict my own: for whether by weakness or indifference – and it is far from being part of my beliefs that we should be indifferent to what lies at our feet, is ready to hand or closely regards the conduct of our lives – no soul is so unfit or ignorant as mine concerning many commonplace matters of which you cannot be ignorant without shame.