The Complete Essays (159 page)

Now, if you come and clarify and reinforce it for them, they immediately take advantage of your interpretation and rob you of it: ‘That is what I was about to say,’ or, ‘That is how I understand it, exactly,’ or, ‘If I did not put it that way it was because I could not find the right words.’ – Bluster on! We should use even cunning to punish such arrogant stupidity.

[C] Hegesias’ principle that we should neither hate nor blame but instruct is right elsewhere but not here.
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[B] There is neither justice nor kindness in helping a man to get up who does not know how to use your help and who is all the worse for it. I like to let them sink deeper in the mire and to get even more entangled – so deeply that, if possible, even they finally realize it!

You cannot cure silliness and unreasonableness by one act of warning. [C] Of that sort of cure we can properly say what Cyrus replied to the man who urged him to give an exhortation to his troops at the moment of battle: that men are not made courageous warriors on the battlefield by a good harangue any more than you can become a good musician by hearing a good song.
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Apprenticeships must be served, before you set hand to anything, by long and sustained study.

[B] It is to our own folk that we owe this obligation to be assiduous in correcting and instructing; but to go preaching at the first passer-by or to read lectures on ignorance and silliness to the first man we come across is a practice which I loathe. I rarely do it during discussions in which I am involved; I prefer to let it all go by rather than to resort to such remote and donnish lecturing. [C] My humour is unsuited, both in speaking and writing, to those who are learning first principles. [B] But however false or absurd I judge things to be which are said in company or before a third party, I never leap in to interrupt them by word or gesture.

Meanwhile nothing in stupidity irritates me more than its being much more pleased with itself than any reasonableness could reasonably be. It is a
disaster that wisdom forbids you to be satisfied with yourself and always sends you away dissatisfied and fearful, whereas stubbornness and foolhardiness fill their hosts with joy and assurance. It is the least clever of men who look down at others over their shoulders, always returning from the fray full of glory and joyfulness. And as often as not their haughty language and their happy faces win them victory in the eyes of the bystanders who are generally feeble in judging and incapable of discerning real superiority. [C] The surest proof of animal-stupidity is ardent obstinacy of opinion. Is there anything more certain, decided, disdainful, contemplative, grave and serious, than a donkey?

[B] Perhaps we may include in the category of conversation and discussion those short pointed exchanges which happiness and intimacy introduce among friends when pleasantly joking together and sharply mocking each other. That is a sport for which my natural gaiety makes me rather well-suited; and if it is not as tensely serious as the other sport I have just described, it is no less keen and clever, [C] nor, as it seemed to Lycurgus, any less useful.
⁴⁴
Where I am concerned I contribute more licence than wit, being more happy in that than in finding my material; but I am a perfect target, for I can put up with retaliation without getting angry not merely when sharp but even when rude. When I am suddenly attacked, if I cannot at once find a good repartee I do not waste time following up that thrust with vague boring contestations akin to stubbornness but I let it go by, cheerfully flapping down my ears and waiting for a better moment to get my own back. No huckster wins every haggle.

Most people, when their arguments fail, change voice and expression, and instead of retrieving themselves betray their weaknesses and susceptibility by an unmannerly anger. In the excitement of jesting we can sometimes nip those secret chords of one another’s imperfections which we cannot even pluck without offence when we are calm; we warn each other profitably of each other’s faults. There are other sports, physical ones, rash and harsh in the French manner, which I hate unto death. I am touchy and sensitive about such things: in my lifetime I have seen two princes of the blood [C] royal [B] laid in their graves because of them. [C] It is an ugly thing to fight for fun.
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[B] In addition when I want to judge another man I ask him to what extent he is himself satisfied; how far he is happy with what he has said or written. I want him to avoid those fine excuses: ‘I was only playing at it’ –

Ablatum mediis opus est incudibus istud
[It was taken off the anvil only half finished]
⁴⁶

– ‘I only spent an hour on it’; ‘I have not seen it since’.– ‘All right,’ I say: ‘let us leave those examples. Show me something which does represent you entirely, something by which you are happy to be measured.’ And then I say ‘What do you consider the most beautiful aspect of your work? Is it this quality or that quality? Is it its gracious style, its subject-matter, your discovery of the material, your judgement, your erudition?’

For I normally find that men are as wrong in judging their own work as other people’s, not simply because their emotions are involved but because they lack the ability to understand it and to analyse it. The work itself, by its own momentum and fortune, can favour the author beyond his own understanding and research; it can run ahead of him. There is no work that I can judge with less certainty than my own: the
Essays
I place – very hesitantly and with little assurance – sometimes low, sometimes high.

Many books are useful for their subject-matter: their authors derive little glory from them. And there are good books which as far as good workmanship is concerned are a disgrace to their authors. I could write about our style of feasting, about our clothing – and I could write it gracelessly; I could publish contemporary edicts and the letters of princes which come into the public domain; I could make an abridgement of a good book (and every abridgement of a good book is a daft one) and then the book itself could chance to get lost. Things like that. From such compilations posterity would derive unique assistance: but what honour would I derive from them except for being lucky? A good proportion of famous books fall in that category.

When I was reading a few years ago Philippe de Commines – a very good author, certainly – I noted the following saying as being above average: ‘We should be wary of doing such great services to our master that we render him unable to reward them justly.’ I should have praised not him but his discovery of a topic. Not long ago I came upon this
sentence in Tacitus:
‘Beneficia eo usque læta sunt dum videntur exolvi posse; ubi multum antevenere, pro gratia odium redditur.’
[Good turns are pleasing only in so far as they seem repayable. Much beyond that we repay with hatred not gratitude.] [C] Seneca puts it forcefully:
‘Nam qui putat esse turpe non reddere, non vult esse cui reddat.’
[He for whom not to repay is a disgrace wants his benefactor dead.] Quintus Cicero, with a laxer turn of phrase, writes:
‘Qui se non putat satisfacere, amicus esse nullo modo potest.’
[He who cannot repay his debt to you can in no wise love you.]
⁴⁷

[B] An author’s subject can, when appropriate, show him to be erudite or retentive, but if you are to judge what qualities in him most truly belong to him and are the most honourable (I mean the force and beauty of his soul) you must know what is really his and what definitely is not; and in that which is not, how much we are indebted to him for his selection, disposition, ornamentation and the literary quality of what he had contributed. Supposing he has taken somebody else’s matter and then ruined the style, as often happens! People like us who have little experience of books are in difficulties when we come across some fine example of ingenuity in a modern poet or some strong argument in a preacher. We dare not praise them for it before we have learned from a scholar whether that item is original to them or taken from another. Until I have done that I remain suspicious.

I have just read through at one go Tacitus’
History
(something which rarely happens to me: it is twenty years since I spent one full hour at a time on a book. I did it on the recommendation of a nobleman highly esteemed in France both for his own virtue and for that sustained quality of ability and goodness which he is seen to share with his many brothers). I know of no author who combines a chronicle of public events with so much reflection on individual morals and biases.
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[C] And it appears to me (contrary to what appears to him) that, as he has the particular task of following the careers of the contemporary Emperors (men so odd and so extreme in their various characters) as well as the noteworthy deeds which they provoked in their subjects above all by their cruelty, he has a more striking and interesting topic to relate and discourse upon than if he had to tell of battles and world revolutions. Consequently I find
him unprofitable when he dashes through those fair, noble deaths as though he were afraid of tiring us by accounts both too long and too numerous.

[B] This manner of history is by far the most useful. The unrolling of public events depends more on the guiding hand of Fortune: that of private ones, on our own.
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Tacitus’ work is more a judgement on historical events than a narration of them. There are more precepts than accounts. It is not a book to be read but one to be studied and learnt. It is so full of aphorisms that, apposite or not, they are everywhere. It is a seed-bed of ethical and political arguments to supply and adorn those who hold high rank in the governing of this world. He pleads his case with solid and vigorous reasons, in an epigrammatic and exquisite style following the affected manner of his century. (They were so fond of a high style that when they found no wit or subtlety in their subject-matter they resorted to witty subtle words.) He is not all that different from Seneca, but while he seems to have more flesh on him Seneca is more acute. Tacitus can more properly serve a sickly troubled nation like our own is at present: you could often believe that we were the subject of his narrating and berating. Those who doubt his good faith clearly betray that they resent him from prejudice. He has sound opinions and inclines to the right side in the affairs of Rome. I do regret though that, by making Pompey no better than Marius and Scylla only more secretive, he judged him more harshly than is suggested by the verdict of men who lived and dealt with him.
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True, Pompey’s striving to govern affairs has not been cleared of ambition nor a wish for vengeance: even his friends feared that victory might make him go out of his mind, though not to the extremes of insanity of those other two. Nothing in his life suggests to us the menace of such express tyranny and cruelty. Besides we ought never to let suspicions outweigh evidence: so on this point I do not trust Tacitus.

That the accounts which he gives are indeed simple and straight can perhaps be argued from the very fact that they do not exactly fit his concluding judgements, to which he is led by the slant he had adopted; they often go beyond the evidence which he provides – which he had not deigned to bias in the slightest degree. He needs no defence for having assented to the religion of his day, in accordance with the laws which bade
him to do so, and for being ignorant of the true religion. That is his misfortune not his fault.
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What I have chiefly been considering is his judgement: I am not entirely clear about it. For example, take these words from the letter sent to the Senate by the aged ailing Tiberius: ‘What, Sirs, should I write to you, what indeed should I not write to you at this time? I know that I am daily nearing death; may the gods and goddesses make my end worse if I know what to write.’ I cannot see why he applies them with such certainty to a poignant remorse tormenting Tiberius’ conscience. Leastways when I came across them I saw no such thing.
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It also seemed to me a bit weak of him when he was obliged to mention that he had once held an honourable magistracy in Rome to go on and explain that he was not referring to it in order to boast about it. That line seemed rather shoddy to me for a soul such as his: not to dare to talk roundly of yourself betrays a defect of thought. A man of straight and elevated mind who judges surely and soundly employs in all circumstances examples taken from himself as well as from others, and frankly cites himself as witness as well as third parties. We should jump over those plebeian rules of etiquette in favour of truth and freedom. [C] I not only dare to talk about myself but to talk of nothing but myself. I am wandering off the point when I write of anything else, cheating my subject of
me
. I do not love myself with such lack of discretion, nor am I so bound and involved in myself, that I am unable to see myself apart and to consider myself separately as I would a neighbour or a tree. The error is the same if you fail to see the limits of your worth or if you report more than you can see. We owe more love to God than to ourselves.
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We know him less, yet talk about him till we are glutted.

[B] If Tacitus’ writings tell us anything at all about his character, he was a very great man, upright and courageous, whose virtue was not of the superstitious kind but philosophical and magnanimous. You could find
some of his testimony rather rash; for example he maintains that when a soldier’s hands grew stiff with the cold while carrying a pile of wood they adhered to his load, broke away from his arms and stuck there dead.
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In similar cases my custom is to bow to the authority of such great witnesses. When he says that, by favour of Serapis the god, Vespasian cured a blind woman in Alexandria by anointing her eyes with his saliva and also performed some additional miracle or other, he was following the dutiful example of all good historians who keep a chronicle of important happenings: included among public events are popular rumours and opinions. Their role is to give an account of popular beliefs, not to account for them: which part is played by Theologians and philosophers as directors of consciences. That is why his fellow-historian, great man as he was, most wisely said:
‘Equidem plura transcribo quant credo: nam nec affirmare sustineo, de quibus dubito, nec subducere quae accepi.’
[I do indeed pass on more than I believe. I cannot vouch for the things which I doubt, nor can I omit what I have been told by tradition.] And another says:
‘Haec neque affirmare, neque refellere operae pretium est: famae rerum standum est.’
[These things are neither to be vouched for nor denied: we must cling to tradition.]
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Tacitus, writing during a period in which belief in portents was on the wane, says that he nevertheless does not wish to fail to provide a foothold for them, and so includes in his
Annals
matters accepted by so many decent people with so great a reverence for antiquity.