The Complete Essays (169 page)

Having been asked by a neighbouring Prince with whom he had
formerly been at war for permission to pass through his domains, he
granted it to him, affording him passage through the Peleponnesus:
and not only did he not take him prisoner nor poison him, despite
having him thus at his mercy, but he welcomed him courteously
without doing him injury.
¹³⁶

Given the characters of people then, such things were taken for granted: elsewhere, and at other times, men will tell of the noble frankness and magnanimity of that deed! Why, our be-caped baboons of the Collège de Montaigue would laugh at him for it, so little does our French integrity resemble that of the Spartans. We still have men of virtue… but by our norms.
¹³⁷
Whoever has morals fixed to rules above the standards of his time must either distort and blunt his rules or (as I would advise him, rather) draw apart and having nothing to do with us. What would he gain from us?

Egregium sanctumque virum si cerno, bimembri
Hoc monstrum puero, et miranti jam sub aratro
Piscibus inventis, et fœtœ comparo mulœ
.

[When I come across an outstandingly moral man, he seems to me like a kind of freak, like a two child, like fish turning up under an astonished farmer’s ploughshare, or like a pregnant mule.]
¹³⁸

We can regret better times but we cannot escape from the present; we can wish for better men to govern us but we must nevertheless obey those we have. There is perhaps more merit in obeying the bad than the good. While the ghost of the traditional ancient laws of this our monarchy glows in a corner somewhere, you will see me planted there. If those laws should, to our misfortune, become mutually exclusive or contradictory, producing a hard and dubious choice between two factions, my preference would be for hiding and escaping from that tempest. In the meanwhile, Nature may lend me a hand so may the hazards of war.

Between Caesar and Pompey I would have declared myself frankly. But if the choice lay between those three crooks who came after them,
¹³⁹
then I would either have fled into hiding or gone the way the wind blew (which I judge to be legitimate, once reason no longer guides us).

Quo diversus abis?
[Where are you heading, so far off course?]
¹⁴⁰

This padding is rather off my subject. I get lost, but more from licence than carelessness. My ideas do follow on from each other, though sometimes at a distance, and have regard for each other, though somewhat obliquely. [C] I have just looked through one of Plato’s dialogues.
¹⁴¹
It is particoloured,
a motley of ideas: the top deals with love and all the bottom with rhetoric. They were not afraid of such changes, and have a marvellous charm when letting themselves be blown along by the wind, or appearing to be so. [B] The names of my chapters do not always encompass my subject-matter: often they merely indicate it by some token, like those other [C] titles,
Andria
or
The Eunuch
, or like those other [B] names Sylla, Cicero and Torquatus.
¹⁴²

I love the gait of poetry, all jumps and tumblings. [C] Poetry, says Plato, is an art which is light, winged and inspired by daemons.
¹⁴³
There are works of Plutarch in which he forgets his theme, or in which the subject is treated only incidentally, since they are entirely padded out with extraneous matter: witness how he proceeds in
The Daemon of Socrates
. My God! what beauty there is in such flights of fancy and in such variation, especially when they appear fortuitous and casual. It is the undiligent reader who loses my subject not I. In a corner somewhere you can always find a word or two on my topic, adequate despite being squeezed in tight. [B] I change subject violently and chaotically. [C] My pen and my mind both go a-roaming. [B] If you do not want more dullness you must accept a touch of madness, [C] so say the precepts of our past masters and, even more so, their example. [B] There are hundreds of poets who drag and droop prosaically, but the best of ancient prose – [C] and I scatter prose here no differently from verse – [B] sparkles throughout with poetic power and daring, and presents the characteristics of its frenzy. We must certainly cede to poetry the mastery and preeminence in prattle. [C] The poet, says Plato, seated on the tripod of the Muses, pours out in rapture, like the gargoyle of a fountain, all that comes to his lips, without weighing it or chewing it; from him there escape things of diverse hue, contrasting substance and jolting motion.
¹⁴⁴
Plato
himself is entirely poetic; and the scholars say that the ancient theology was poetry, as also the first philosophy.
¹⁴⁵
Poetry is the original language of the gods.

[B] I intend my subject-matter to stand out on its own: it can show well enough where changes occur, where the beginnings are and the ends, and where it picks up again, without an intricate criss-cross of words, linking things and stitching them together for the benefit of weak and inattentive ears, and without my glossing myself. Where is the author who would rather not be read at all than to be dozed through or dashed through? [C]
‘Nihil est tam utile, quod in transitu prosit.’
[Nothing really useful can be casually treated.]
¹⁴⁶
If taking up books were to mean taking them in; if glancing at them were to mean seeing into them; and skipping through them to mean grasping them: then I would be wrong to make myself out to be quite so totally ignorant as I am.

[B] Since I cannot hold my reader’s attention by my weight,
manco male
[it is no bad thing] if I manage to do so by my muddle. ‘Yes, but [C] afterwards [B] he will be sorry he spent time over it.’ I suppose so: but still he would have done it! And there are humours so made that they despise anything which they can understand and which will rate me more highly when they do not know what I mean. They will infer the depth of my meaning from its obscurity – a quality which (to speak seriously now) I hate [C] most strongly; [B] I would avoid it if there were a way of [C] avoiding [B] myself.
¹⁴⁷
[B] Aristotle somewhere congratulates himself on affecting it: a depraved [C] affectation!
¹⁴⁸

Because the very frequent division into chapters which I first adopted seemed to me to break the reader’s attention before it was aroused and to loosen its hold so that it did not bother for so slight a cause to apply itself and to concentrate, I started making longer chapters which require a decision to read them and time set aside for them. In this kind of occupation, whoever is not prepared to give a man one hour is prepared to give him nothing; and you do nothing for a man if you only do it while doing something else. Besides I may perhaps have some personal quality
which obliges me to half-state matters and to speak confusedly and incompatibly.

[B] It remains for me to add that I wish no good to that chattering buffoon of a reason, and that, while those fantastic speculations and those oh-so-subtle notions may contain some truth, I find it too dear and too troublesome.
¹⁴⁹
I, on the contrary, strive to give worth to vanity itself – [C] to doltishness – if it affords me pleasure, [B] and I follow my natural inclinations without accounting for them thus closely.

– I have ‘already seen elsewhere ruined palaces and sculptures of things in heaven and on earth: and it is ever the work of Man’. That is quite true. Yet, however often I were to revisit the tomb of that great and mighty City, I would feel wonder and awe. We are enjoined to care for the dead: and since infancy I was brought up with those dead. I knew about the affairs of Rome long before those of my family; I knew of the Capitol and its site long before I knew of the Louvre, and of the Tiber before the Seine. My head was full of the characters and fortunes of Lucullus, Metellus and Scipio rather than of any of our own men. – ‘They are
dead
!’ So is my father, every bit as dead as they: in eighteen years he has gone as far from life and me as they have done in sixteen hundred, yet I do not cease to cherish his memory nor experience his love and fellowship in a perfect union, fully alive. Indeed, of my own humour, it is to the dead that I am most dutiful: since they can no longer help themselves I consider that they need my help the more. It is precisely then that gratitude shines forth resplendent. I favour is less richly bestowed when it can be returned or reflected back.

When Arcesilaus was visiting the [C] ailing Ctesibius,
¹⁵⁰
[B] he realized that he was badly off, so he gave him money, slipping it under his pillow. By concealing it from him he was also giving him a quittance from
a debt of gratitude. Those who have deserved my love and thanks have never lost anything for being no longer with me: I have repaid them better and more punctiliously when they were absent and unaware. I speak all the more affectionately of those I love when they no longer have any way of knowing it. So I have begun dozens of quarrels in defence of Pompey or the cause of Brutus. Acquaintanceship still endures between us; why, even things present are grasped only by a faculty of the mind.

Finding myself useless for this present age I fall back on that one. I am such a silly baboon about it that the state of Ancient Rome, free and just and flourishing (for I like neither its birth nor its decline), is of passionate concern to me. That is why I could never so often revisit the site of their streets and their palaces, and their ruins stretching down to the Antipodes, without lingering over them. [C] Is it by nature or an aberrant imagination that the sight of places which we know to have been frequented or inhabited by those whose memory we hold dear moves us somewhat more than hearing a recital of their deeds or reading their writings?
¹⁵¹
‘Tanta vis admonitionis inest in locis. Et id quidem in hac urbe infinitum: quacunque enim ingredimur in aliquam historiam vestigium ponimus.’
[Such powers of evocation are inherent in those places […] And in this City there is no end to them: wherever we go we walk over history.]

[B] I like thinking about their faces, their bearing and their clothing. I mutter their great names between my teeth and make them resound in my ears. [C]
‘Ego illos veneror et tantis nominibus semper assurgo.’
[I venerate them, and on hearing such names I leap always to my feet.]
¹⁵²
[B] Whenever there are qualities in things which are great and awesome, I feel awe for their ordinary ones as well. I would love to see those men talking, walking and eating. It would be ungrateful to neglect the remains and ghosts of so many honoured and valiant men whom I have watched live and die and who, by their example, provide us with instructions in what is good if we know how to follow them.

And then this very Rome, the one that we see now, deserves our love as having been so long and by so many titles an ally of our Crown and the only city common to all men and universal. The sovereign magistrate who rules there is similarly acknowledged everywhere; it is the mother city of all Christian peoples: both Frenchman and Spaniard are at home there. To become princes of that state you merely need to belong to Christendom,
no matter where. There is nowhere here below upon which the heavens have poured influences so constantly favourable. Even in ruins it is glorious and stately:

[C]
Laudandis preciosior ruinis
.
[More precious for her ruins which deserve our praise.]
¹⁵³

[B] Even in her tomb she still retains the signs and ghost of empire:

[C]
‘ut palam sit uno in loco gaudentis opus esse naturae’
[so that it should be obvious that in this one place Nature delights in her work].

[B] A man might condemn himself and inwardly rebel for feeling stirred by so vain a pleasure. Yet our humours, if they do afford pleasure, are not too vain; whatever they may be, if they afford constant delight to a man capable of common feelings, I would be of no mind to feel sorry for him.

I am deeply indebted to Fortune in that, up to present, she has done me no outrage, [C] at least, none above what I can bear.
¹⁵⁴
[B] (Might it not be her style to leave in peace those who do not pester her?)

Quanto quisque sibi plura negaverit,
A Diis, plura feret. Nil cupientium
Nudus castra peto…

… Multa petentibus
Desunt multa
.

[The more a man denies himself, the more he will receive from the gods. I am naked but put myself in the camp of those who want nothing… Those who want much, lack much.]
¹⁵⁵

If she continues she will dispatch me content and well satisfied:

nihil supra
Deos lacesso
.

[for nothing more do I harass the gods.]

But watch out for the snag! Hundreds founder within the harbour.