The Complete Essays (2 page)

Montaigne is one of the great sages of that modern world which in a sense began with the Renaissance. He is a bridge linking the thought of pagan antiquity and of Christian antiquity with our own. Colourful, practical and direct, and never intentionally obscure, he sets before us his modestly named
Essays
, his ‘attempts’ at sounding himself and the nature and duties of Man so as to discover a sane and humane manner of living. He enjoys a place apart among French Renaissance authors. Men and women of all sorts are fascinated by what they find in him. Many read him for his wisdom and humanity, for which he may be quoted in a newspaper as readily as in a history of philosophy. He writes about himself, but is no egocentric and is never a bore. He treats the deepest subjects in the least pompous of manners and in a style often marked by dry humour. His writings are vibrant with challenge; they are free from jargon and unnecessary technicalities. In the seventeenth century, Pascal, the great Jansenist author of the
Pensées
(‘Thoughts’ which owe much to Montaigne), was converted partly by reading him and was soon discussing the
Essays
at Port-Royal with his director, LeMaistre de Sacy (who had his reservations). Pascal gained, it is said, thirty years by reading Montaigne, thirty years of study and reflection.
¹
Others, too, have felt the same. For Montaigne gives his readers the fruits of his own reading and of his own reflections upon it, all measured against his personal experience during a period of intellectual ferment and of religious and political disarray. Montaigne never let himself be limited by his office or station. As husband, father, counsellor, mayor, he kept a critical corner of himself to himself, from which he could judge in freedom and seek to be at peace with himself. He does not crush his reader under the authority of the great philosophers: he tries out their opinions and sees whether they work for him or for others. For he knew that opinions are not certainties, and that most human ‘certainties’ are in fact opinions.

Traces of Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Cicero, St Augustine or his own contemporaries can be found in every page he wrote, but they are skilfully
interwoven into his own discourse, being renewed and humanized in the process. And he hardly ever names them when making such borrowings. That was because he was delighted to know that critics would be condemning an idea of Plato, Aristotle or Seneca, say, when they thought they were attacking merely an opinion of his own unimportant self.

After his beloved father died (18 June 1568), he succeeded to the title and the estates at Montaigne, in south-west France. (Provisions were made for his mother.) He was thirty-five, and three years married. Soon (1570) he was able to sell his charge as counsellor in the Parlement of Bordeaux (a legal office). His plan was, like cultured gentlemen in Ancient Roman times, to devote himself to learned leisure. He marked the event with a Latin inscription in his château – he had a taste for inscriptions, covering the beams and walls of his library with some sixty sayings in Greek and Latin, many of which figure in the
Essays
. His rejoicing at leaving
negotium
(business) for
otium
(leisure) was tempered by grief at the death of his friend, Etienne de la Boëtie (1563). (His children all died young, too, except a daughter, Léonor, who was deeply loved but could not, for a nobleman, replace a son and heir.)

Montaigne’s project of calm study soon went wrong. He fell into an unbalanced melancholy; his spirit galloped off like a runaway horse; his mind, left fallow, produced weeds not grass. The terms he uses are clear: his complexion was unbalanced by an increase of melancholy ‘humour’. His natural ‘complexion’ – the mix of his ‘humours’ – was a stable blend of the melancholic and the sanguine. So that sudden access of melancholy humour (brought on by grief and isolation) was a serious matter, for such an increase in that humour was indeed inimical to his complexion, tipping it towards chagrin, a depression touched by madness. Such chagrin induced
rêveries
, a term which then, and long afterwards, meant not amiable poetic musings but ravings. (The
Rêveries
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, are his ‘ravings’, not his ‘day-dreams’.) So at the outset
otium
brought Montaigne not happy leisure and wisdom but instability. Writing the
Essays
was, at one period, a successful attempt to exorcize that demon. To shame himself, he tells us, he decided to write down his thoughts and his rhapsodies. That was the beginning of his
Essays.
²
But he was not a professional scholar: he had no ‘subject’ to write about. He was not a statesman or a general. He soon decided to write about himself, the only subject he might know better than anyone else. This was a revolutionary decision, made easier, no doubt, by his bout of melancholy, for that
humour encouraged an increased self-awareness. No one in Classical Antiquity had done anything like it. In the history of the known world only a handful of authors had ever broken the taboo against writing primarily about oneself, as an ordinary man. St Augustine had written about himself, but as a penitent in the
Confessions
; during the Renaissance, Girolamo Cardano wrote
On his Life
and
On his Books
, and Joachim Du Bellay lamented his Roman ‘exile’ in his poetic
Regrets
. But those works bear no resemblance to what the
Essays
were to become for Montaigne – ‘tentative attempts’ to ‘assay’ the value of himself, his nature, his habits and of his own opinions and those of others – a hunt for truth, personality and a knowledge of humanity through an exploration of his own reactions to his reading, his travels, his public and his private experience in peace and in Civil War, in health and in sickness. The
Essays
are not a diary but are of ‘one substance’ with their author: ‘I am myself the matter of my book.’ In the case of a questioning and questing mind like his this study became not a book on a ‘subject’ but Assays of Michel de Montaigne – ‘assays’ of himself by himself.

These essays were first divided into two books (a third followed later). Each book contains many chapters and each chapter contains many ‘assays’. He himself never referred to his chapters as essays; his chapters were convenient groupings of several assays – primarily ‘assays’ of a man called Michel de Montaigne. He soon discovered that very short chapters did not allow him enough scope for all the assays he wanted to make. He let his chapters grow longer. In the process he discovered the joys of digression and freedom from an imposed order. And he found he could tackle deeper subjects more exhaustively.

Montaigne’s method of writing makes it sometimes puzzling for the reader to follow the linkings of his thought. His chapters are not arranged in order of their composition. Within each chapter sentences and phrases written at widely different times were printed without any hint of dating. Moreover each chapter, no matter how long, was presented as one continuous slab of text. That was quite usual then, but for us it leads to a kind of intellectual indigestion. Modern editors introduce paragraphs as well as quotation marks, italics and a now more usual punctuation. That has been done here too. It makes it easier to pick up Montaigne and to put him down. That is a great advantage for what is one of Europe’s great bedside books. But Montaigne warned us that we should be prepared to give him an hour or so at a stretch when necessary. Even that is easier when there are paragraphs, as well as some indication of what was written when.

As edition followed edition Montaigne changed a word here, a phrase
there, but above all he added more examples, more quotations and more arguments, as well as thoughts upon the thoughts he had formerly written. These all became more numerous in 1588 and even more so in the edition he was preparing for the press when he died (13 September 1592).

Until modern times there was no easy means of distinguishing the various layers of Montaigne’s text. Pierre Villey pointed the way in his great edition. Now almost every editor uses [A] [B] [C] or similar signs to help the reader through the marquetry-cum-maze that the
Essays
eventually became. That has been done here. Knowing at least approximately what came when can make Montaigne not only more easy to follow but far more enjoyable.

Few noblemen knew Latin as Montaigne did. It was his native tongue. As soon as he was weaned his loving father had arranged for him to hear nothing but pure Classical Latin. As a child he at first spoke neither Gascon nor French. At an age when others delighted in tales of chivalry and rambling novels of love and adventure translated from the Spanish, he devoured Ovid’s
Metamorphoses.
When he was eventually sent to school at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux he chattered away in Latin so fluently that he scared the wits out of his schoolmasters, distinguished scholars though they were. One of them was so understanding, though, that he allowed his young pupil to read anything he liked, provided that he first did his prep.

Montaigne never acquired a similar fluency in Greek, so that even Plato and Aristotle (who influenced him deeply) he read in the Latin translations used throughout Europe. (Robert Burton, the author of
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, was to do the same.)

Montaigne revelled in the Latin poets. Quotations from them are strewn throughout the
Essays
, making wry points, opening windows on to beauty, providing authority or contrast or jests. Less obvious now – that is why footnotes are there to point them out – are Montaigne’s numerous quiet, unheralded debts to the Classical moralists, philosophers, biographers, historians and statesmen. Since he read Latin with pleasure and such ease it was to Latin works above all that he turned for moral guidance and for insight into what human nature really is. But he did not turn to them exclusively: all historians delighted him, even naïve ones; not least he studied his near-contemporaries writing not only in Latin but in French, Italian or Spanish. It was in the light of such reading that he judged his own opinions and his own wide experience and sought to find out more about himself, about the ‘human condition’ (that is, about the characteristics which mankind was created with) and about the limits of human nature.

Montaigne was first, it seems as we read him, a Stoic, then a Sceptic, then an Epicurean. In fact he could hold all three philosophies in a kind of taut harmony. He realized that he was so open to influences from the sages of Antiquity that he took on the colour of whichever one he had just read. There is certainly a shift in his thought from a melancholic and stoic concern with dying to a full and joyful acceptance of life; a change of emphasis away from Seneca and towards the happier eclecticism of Cicero who, despite his verbosity, came close to guiding his maturer thought. But for Montaigne no author ever definitively banished or superseded any other; authors are not infallible; they can help us make ‘assays’ but they resolve nothing. Even the sage whom Montaigne most admired, Socrates, is eventually stripped of that saintly authority that Erasmus vested him with.

Gradually Montaigne realized that by studying and questioning the greater and lesser authors in the light of his own opinions and experience he was studying himself. Encouraged by the Classical sayings, which, in Erasmus’
Adages
for example, lie clustered around the commandment of the Delphic Oracle, ‘Know Thyself’, Montaigne was led to study his own self, as Socrates did his, coolly, probingly and without self-love. He was acutely aware that when doing so he was not gazing at a solid, stationary object, an evidently unified Ego, but at something ever-changing, ever-flowing. The self he discovered consisted in endless variations set in time, in series upon series of thoughts, feelings, desires, actions and reactions. Plato and Aristotle as then interpreted were excellent guides when he came to face up to that fact. Plato emphasized the primacy of the soul and yet, at least in some of his moods, did not despise the body. Aristotle taught Montaigne that individual persons belong to a genus and a species; so each man and woman individually possesses ‘generic’ and ‘specific’ qualities; and each of them has a specific human soul (or ‘form’); it could vary in quality but not in nature. So any man or woman who remained human could at least partially understand any other, since all possessed a like soul. No virtue or no vice known to any individual human who remains sane should be totally incomprehensible to any other. Even the virtue of Socrates can be momentarily glimpsed, and indeed momentarily shared in, by a lesser member of his species. So too could the cruelties of a Tamberlane be understood by better men. All individual human beings (as the scholastic philosophers put it) bore in themselves the entire ‘form’ of the human race. To study one man is in a sense to study them all. Not that all are identical, but all are inter-related by species. And (more remarkably) Montaigne discovered that to think about women and their sexuality could also tell
you much about men and vice versa, since men and women are cast in the same mould: a quite revolutionary idea as Montaigne holds it.