The Complete Essays (163 page)

Now let us gaze all round us: all about us is collapsing; take all the great States which we know, in Christendom and elsewhere, and look at them: you will find a manifest threat of change and collapse:

Et sua sunt illis incommoda, parque per omnes
Tempestas
.

[They too have their misfortunes and a similar tempest threatening them all.]
⁵²

The astrologers have an easy time warning us as they do of great changes and mutations soon to come; what they foretell is present and palpable: no need to turn to the heavens for that! We should not only derive consolation from this universal fellowship in evil and menace: we should derive some hope that our State will endure, since in nature, when everything falls in unison, nothing falls. Universal illness means individual health. Uniformity is a quality hostile to disintegration. Personally I am not reduced to despair and it seems to me that there are ways of saving us:

                
Deus hœc fortasse benigna
Reducet in sedem vice
.                

[Perhaps God of his kindness will restore things to their former state.]
⁵³

Who knows whether God’s will may not be that the same should happen to us as to bodies which are purged and restored to a better state by those long and grievous maladies which bring to them a fuller purer health than what they took away?

What depresses me most is that when I run through the symptoms of
our malady I find as many natural ones and as many sent by the heavens and proper to that malady as ones attributable to our disorder and unwisdom. [C] It seems that the very stars ordain that we have lasted beyond the normal limits. And what also depresses me is that the most immediate evil which threatens us is not change
within
the whole solid lump, but our ultimate dread: disintegration and tearing asunder.

[B] In these ravings of mine, what I fear is that my treacherous memory should make me inadvertently record the same thing twice. I hate going over my writings and only unwillingly probe a topic again once it has got away. I have no freshly learned doctrines; these are my normal ideas. Having doubtless conceived them a hundred times I am afraid that I may have mentioned them already. Repetition is always a bore, even if it were in Homer, but it is disastrous in works which only make a superficial and passing impression. I hate persistent admonition even when it serves a purpose as in Seneca, [C] and I dislike the practice of the Stoic School of repeating copiously and at length, for each individual subject, the principles and postulates which apply over all, ever citing afresh their general arguments and universal reasons.

[B] My memory is growing cruelly worse every day:

Pocula Lethœos ut si ducentia somnos
Arente fauce traxerim
.

[As though my parched throat had drunk long draughts of the forgetful waters of Lethe.]
⁵⁴

Now – for thank God nothing has gone wrong up till now – whereas others seek time and occasion to think over what they have to say, I avoid preparation for fear of assuming an obligation from which I then have to extricate myself. I get lost when I am under an obligation, as I do when I depend on an instrument as feeble as my memory.

I never read the following account without being struck by a proper and natural resentment. Lyncestes was accused of conspiring against Alexander. On the day that he was brought to appear before the army, as was customary, to be heard in his defence, he, having learned off by heart a prepared speech, stammered out a few hesitant words. As he became more and more confused, fumbling and struggling with his memory, he was suddenly struck dead by blows from the pikes of the nearest soldiers who believed he had convicted himself. His dazed silence served them as a confession. Since he had time in prison to prepare himself, it was not his
memory that was defective, they thought, but a case of guilt bridling his tongue and making him so feeble.
⁵⁵
What a good argument! Even when you merely aim to speak well you can be dazed by the place, the audience and their expectations. What can happen when you have to make an harangue on which your life depends!

For me the very fact of being tied down to what I have to say is enough to make me forget it. Once I have wholly committed and entrusted myself to my memory, I lean on it so heavily that I overwhelm it and it becomes afraid of its burden. As long as I rely upon it I lose control of myself, so much so that my very coherence is assayed. There was one day when I was hard put it to hide the servitude in which I was entangled, whereas my intention is always to suggest a deep indifference when speaking, making apparently fortuitous and unprepared gestures arising from the actual circumstances, preferring to say nothing at all of consequence rather than to show that I have come prepared to make a fine speech – something especially unbecoming in a man like me, a professed soldier, [C] and too much of an obligation for one who cannot retain much: preparation arouses greater hopes than it can satisfy. You often stupidly don your doublet, only to leap no better than in your smock.
‘Nihil est his qui placere volunt tam adversarium quam expectatio.’
[Nothing is more adverse to those who would please than aroused expectation.]
⁵⁶

[B] It is written of Curio the orator that after he had announced that he would divide his speech into three parts or four, or had stated the number of his arguments and reasons, he would often forget one of them or add one or two more.
⁵⁷
I have always taken care not to fall into that trap, loathing all such promises and outlines, not simply out of distrust for my memory but also because that style is too donnish: [C]
‘Simpliciora militates decent’
[In soldiers more bluntness is appropriate.]

[B] It is enough that from this day forth I have promised myself never again to accept the task of speaking in formal situations.

As for reading from a prepared script, that is not only a monstrosity but greatly to the disadvantage of those who by nature are capable of achieving anything directly. And as for throwing myself on the mercy of improvisation, that is even less acceptable: my powers of improvisation are stolid and confused and could never respond to sudden emergencies of any consequence.

Reader: just let this tentative essay, this third prolongation of my self-portrait, run its course. I make additions but not corrections: firstly, that is because when a man has mortgaged his book to the world I find it reasonable that he should no longer have any rights over it. Let him put it better elsewhere if he can, not corrupt the work he has already sold. From such folk you should buy nothing until they are dead. Let them do their thinking properly before they publish. Who is making them hurry? [C] My book is ever one: except that, to avoid the purchaser’s going away quite empty-handed when a new edition is brought out, I allow myself, since it is merely a piece of badly joined marquetry, to tack on some additional ornaments. That is no more than a little extra thrown in, which does not damn the original version but does lend some particular value to each subsequent one through some ambitious bit of precision. From this there can easily arise however some transposition of the chronological order, my tales finding their place not always by age but by opportuneness.

[B] My second reason is this: I fear that I will personally lose by the change. My mind does not always move straight ahead but backwards too. I distrust my present thoughts hardly less than my past ones and my second or third thoughts hardly less than my first. We are often as stupid when correcting ourselves as others.
⁵⁸
[C] My first edition dates from fifteen hundred and eighty: I have long since grown old but not one inch wiser. ‘I’ now and ‘I’ then are certainly twain, but which ‘I’ was better? I know nothing about that. If we were always progressing towards improvement, to be old would be a beautiful thing. But it is a drunkard’s progress, formless, staggering, like reeds which the wind shakes as it fancies, haphazardly.

Antiochus had written vigorously in support of the Academy. In old age he took a different line. Would I not be following Antiochus whichever I followed? After having established doubt he wished to establish the validity of human opinions: that amounted, did it not, to establishing doubt not validity, suggesting that if longer life were granted him he would have been ready for some new upset, not so much better as different.

[B] The approval of the public has made me a little more adventurous than I expected; but what I most fear is to surfeit. Like a certain scholar of my time, I would rather provoke than bore. Praise is always pleasant, no
matter why it comes or from whom it comes; but genuinely to delight in it you need to discover its cause: even defects have ways of finding favour. The approval of ordinary common folk rarely hits the point, and I am mistaken if, in my own time, it is not the worst books which come top in popular approbation. I am indeed grateful to those gentlemen who deign to take my feeble efforts in good part. Nowhere are defects of style more obvious than when the subject-matter itself has little to commend it.

I do not, Reader, accept responsibility for misprints which slip in through the carelessness or fantasy of the various craftsmen; each hand introduces his own. I do not concern myself with the spelling (merely telling them to follow the traditional one) nor with punctuation: I am expert in neither. Even where they completely destroy my meaning, that does not worry me over-much: they at least take some weight off me; but when (as they often do) they substitute a false meaning and deflect me towards their own conception, they destroy
me
. So whenever the thought does not measure up to my own standard a gentleman should decline to accept it as mine. Anyone who knows how little industrious I am, and how far I am cast in a mould of my own, will not find it hard to believe that I would more readily compose as many essays again than subject myself to going through them once more to make schoolboy corrections.

I said just now that, being set in the deepest mine of that new metal,
⁵⁹
not only am I deprived of close contact with people whose manners and opinions hold them together by a bond which allows no other and which differs from mine, but I also run some risk by living among people who think that all deeds are equally lawful, most of whom have debts to pay to our justice which could not be made worse – whence arises the ultimate degree of licence. When I tot up all the details which concern me as an individual, I find that there is no man hereabouts to whom the defence of our laws costs more than it does to me, ‘either’ (as the law-clerks say) ‘in gains forgone or damages incurred’. [C] Some there are who boast of their zeal and toughness who, if you weigh things properly, do far less than I do.

[B] My house, being always open, easily approached and ever ready to welcome all men (since I have never let myself be persuaded to turn it into a tool for a war in which I play my part most willingly when it is farthest from my neighbourhood) has earned quite a lot of popular affection, so that it would be difficult to challenge me on my own dunghill. It is, I judge, a miraculous and exemplary achievement that it should remain
unspotted by blood or sack during so long a tempest and so many upheavals and changes hereabouts. For to tell the truth it would have been possible for a man of my complexion to escape the effects of pressure of any kind, provided that it was constant and continuous, but these alternating invasions and incursions, these reversals and vicissitudes of Fortune round about me have, to date, hardened the temper of the local people rather than softened it, loading upon me insurmountable dangers and hardships. I escape, but it displeases me that I do so by Fortune and, indeed, by my cleverness rather than by justice; it displeases me to be outside the safeguard of our laws and under any other protection but theirs. As things stand I live more than half by somebody else’s favour, which is a harsh obligation. I do not want to owe my safety to the bounty and good-will of great men who respect my loyalty and independence, nor to the affable manners of my forebears or of myself. Supposing I had been different! And if my conduct and the frankness of my dealings do impose obligations on my neighbours and kinsmen, there is cruelty in their being able to pay off their debt by letting me stay alive and in their being able to say: ‘We allow him
⁶⁰
[C] to continue freely to have divine service in the chapel of his house now that we have pillaged and smashed all the neighbouring churches;
⁶¹
and we allow him to keep his property and his life, [B] since, when the need arises, he protects our wives and our cattle.’ (We are old hands in my home at sharing in the praise given to Lycurgus of Athens, that he was the guardian and general depository of the purses of his fellow-citizens.)
⁶²

I maintain that we ought to live by the authority of the law, not by [C] recompense and [B] favour. How many gallant men have preferred to lose their life rather than to owe it to anyone. I avoid any sort of obligation, but above all the kind which binds me by a debt of honour. For me nothing costs dearer than what is vouchsafed to me and for which my will remains mortgaged under the title of gratitude: I prefer to receive services which are up for sale. And I should think so too! For the latter I give mere money: for the others I give myself. Such knots as bind me by the laws of honour seem tighter to me and heavier than the knots of civil constraint. A lawyer ties me in his knots more loosely than I do myself.
And is it not reasonable that my conscience should be under a far greater obligation when anyone has put simple trust in it. In other cases my trustworthiness owes them nothing: they never lent it anything. Let them seek help from the trust and reliance which they placed in others than me. I would much rather break the restrictions of walls or of laws than of my word. [C] Being nice to the point of superstition over keeping my promises, I prefer on all subjects to make them conditional and provisional. To unimportant promises I attach weight because I keep jealously to my rule, which racks me and burdens me out of concern for itself. Why, even in such undertakings as are freely and entirely my own, once I have declared my intention I feel that I have ordered myself to carry it out, and that, by letting others into the know, I have prescribed it to myself. It seems to me that to state it is to promise it. That is why I do not give much wind of my projects.