The Complete Essays (37 page)

That is what Menander replied when the day came for his promised comedy and people chided him for not yet putting it in hand: ‘It is already
composed,’ he said. ‘All I have to do is to put it into verse.’
⁸⁶
Having thought the things through and arranged them in his mind, he attached little importance to the remainder. Since Ronsard and Du Bellay have brought renown to our French poetry, every little apprentice I know is doing more or less as they do, using noble words and copying their cadences. [C]
‘Plus sonat quam valet.’
[‘More din than sense.’]
⁸⁷
[A] Ordinary people think there never have been so many poets. But easy as it has proved to copy their rhymes they all fall short when it comes to imitating the rich descriptions of the one and the delicate invention of the other.

‘Yes. But what will he do when they harass him with some sophistical syllogistic subtlety:

Bacon makes you drink;
Drinking quenches your thirst:
Therefore bacon quenches your thirst?

[C] Let him simply laugh at it: it is cleverer to laugh at it than to answer it. Or let him borrow Aristippus’s amusing rejoinder: ‘Why should I unravel that? It is bad enough all knotted up!’ Someone challenged Cleanthes with dialectical trickeries; Chrysippus said to him: ‘Go and play those conjuring tricks on children: do not interrupt the serious thoughts of a grown-up.’
⁸⁸
[A] If this verbal jugglery – [C]
‘contorta et aculeata sophismata’
[these contorted prickly sophisms]
⁸⁹
– [A] should persuade him to accept an untruth, that is dangerous: but if they do not result in action and simply move him to laughter, I really do not see why he should pay attention to them.

Some people are so daft that they will go a mile or so out of their way to hunt for a good word: [C]
‘aut qui non verba rebus aptant, sed res extrinsecus arcessunt, quibus verba conveniant!’
[they do not fit words to things but look for irrelevant things to fit to their words!] Or again:
‘Sunt qui alicujus verbi decore placentis vocentur ad id quod non proposuerant scribere.’
[There are authors who are led by the beauty of some attractive word to write what they never intended.]
⁹⁰
I myself am more ready to distort
a fine saying in order to patch it on to me than to distort the thread of my argument to go in search of one.

[A] It is, on the contrary, for words to serve and to follow: if French cannot get there, let Gascon do so. I want
things
to dominate, so filling the thoughts of the hearer that he does not even remember the words. I like the kind of speech which is simple and natural, the same on paper as on the lip; speech which is rich in matter, sinewy, brief and short; [C] not so much titivated and refined as forceful and brusque –

Haec demum sapiet dictio, quae feriet

[The good style of speaking is the kind which strikes home]
⁹¹
–

[A] gnomic rather than diffuse, far from affectation, uneven, disjointed and bold – let each bit form a unity – not schoolmasterly, not monkish, not legalistic, but soldierly, rather as Sallust described Julius Caesar’s [C] (though I do not quite see why he did so).
⁹²
[B] I like to imitate the unruly negligence shown by French youth in the way they are seen to wear their clothes,
⁹³
[C] with their mantles bundled round their neck, their capes tossed over one shoulder or [B] with a stocking pulled awry: it manifests a pride contemptuous of the mere externals of dress and indifferent to artifice. But I find it even better applied to speech. [C] All affectation is unbecoming in a courtier, especially given the hearty freedom of the French: and under a monarchy every gentleman is inevitably schooled in court manners. So we do well to lean towards the careless and natural. [A] I have no love for textures where the joins and seams all show (just as you ought not to be able to count the ribs or the veins in a beautiful body). [C]
‘Quae veritati operam dat oratio, incomposita sit et simplex.’
[Speech devoted to truth should be straightforward and plain.]
⁹⁴
‘Quis accurate loquitur, nisi qui vult putide loqui?’
[Who can speak carefully unless he wants to sound affected?]
⁹⁵

When eloquence draws attention to itself it does wrong by the substance of
things
.

Just as in dress it is the sign of a petty mind to seek to draw attention by some personal or unusual fashion, so too in speech; the search for new expressions and little-known words derives from an adolescent schoolmasterish ambition. If only I could limit myself to words used in Les Halles in Paris! That grammarian Aristophanes did not know the first thing about it when he criticized Epicurus for his simple words and for having perspicuity of language as his sole rhetorical aim.
⁹⁶

To imitate speech is easy: an entire nation can do it: to imitate judgement and the research for your material takes rather more time! Most readers think similar styles, when they find them, clothe similar bodies. But you cannot borrow strength or sinews: you can borrow mantles and finery. Most of the people who haunt my company talk like these
Essays
:
⁹⁷
I cannot tell whether they think like them…

[A] Athenians (says Plato) take copious and elegant speech as their share; Spartans, brevity; Cretans, fecundity of thought not speech – and they are the best.
⁹⁸
Zeno said that he had two sorts of followers: those he termed
philologous
, who cared for real learning (they were his favourites) and those he termed
logophilous
, whose concern was with words.
⁹⁹

That does not mean that speaking well is not a fine thing or a good thing, but that it is not as good as we make it out to be. It irritates me that our life is taken up by it. I would prefer first to know my own language well and then that of the neighbours with whom I have regular dealings.

There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are fine and great accomplishments; but they are bought too dear. I will tell you a cheaper way of buying them: it was assayed on me. Anyone is welcome to use it. My late father, after having made all possible inquiries among the learned and the wise about the choicest form of education, was warned about the disadvantages of the current system: they told him that the length of time we spend learning languages, [C] which cost the Ancients nothing, [A] is the sole reason why we cannot attain to the greatness of mind and knowledge of those old Greeks and Romans. I do not believe that to be the sole reason. Nevertheless the expedient found by my father
was to place me, while still at the breast and before my tongue was untied, in the care of a German (who subsequently died in France as a famous doctor); he was totally ignorant of our language but very well versed in Latin. He had been brought over expressly and engaged at a very high fee: he had me continuously on his hands. There were two others with him, less learned: their task was to follow me about and provide him with some relief. They never addressed me in any other language but Latin. As for the rest of the household, it was an inviolable rule that neither he nor my mother nor a manservant nor a housemaid ever spoke in my presence anything except such words of Latin as they had learned in order to chatter a bit with me. It is wonderful how much they all got from it. My father and my mother learned in this way sufficient Latin to understand it and acquired enough to be able to talk it when they had to, as did those other members of the household who were most closely devoted to my service. In short we became so latinized that it spilled over into the neighbouring villages, where, resulting from this usage, you can still find several Latin names for tools and for artisans. As for me, I was six years old before I knew French any more than I know the
patois
of Périgord or Arabic. And so, without art, without books, without grammar, without rules, without whips and without [C] tears,
¹⁰⁰
[A] I had learned Latin as pure as that which my schoolteacher knew – for I had no means of corrupting it or contaminating it. So if they wanted me to assay writing a prose (as other boys do in the colleges by translating from French) they had to give me some bad Latin to turn into good. And Nicholas Grouchy (who wrote
De comitiis Romanorum
), Guillaume Guerente (who wrote a commentary on Aristotle), George Buchanan, that great Scottish poet, [A1] Marc-Antoine Muret [C] whom France and Italy acknowledge to be the best prose-writer in his day, [A] who were my private tutors, have often told me that as in my infancy I had that language so fluent and so ready that they were afraid to approach me.
¹⁰¹

Buchanan, whom I subsequently met in the retinue of the late Lord Marshal de Brissac, told me that he was writing a book on educating children and was taking my education as his model, for he was then the tutor of Count de Brissac whom we have since seen so valiant and brave.

As for Greek (which I scarcely understand at all) my father planned to have it taught to me as methodically, but in a new way, as a sort of game
or sport. We would bounce declensions about, rather like those who use certain board-games as a means of learning arithmetic and geometry. For among other things he had been counselled to bring me to love knowledge and duty by my own choice, without forcing my will, and to educate my soul entirely through gentleness and freedom. He was so meticulous about this that since some maintain that it disturbs the tender brains of children to wake them up with a start and to snatch them suddenly and violently out of their sleep (in which they are far more deeply plunged than we are) he would have me woken up by the sound of a musical instrument; [A1] and I was never without someone to do this for me.
¹⁰²

This example will suffice to judge all the rest by, and also to emphasize the wisdom and love of so good a father who is by no means to be criticized because he harvested no fruits worthy of so choice a husbandry. There were two causes for that: first, my soil was ill-suited and barren, for, though I enjoyed solid good health together with a quiet and amenable nature, I was, despite that, so heavy, passive and dreamy that nobody could drag me out of my idleness, not even to make me play. Whatever I could perceive I saw well and, beneath my heavy complexion, I nursed bold ideas as well as opinions old for my age. My mind was lazy and would only budge so long as it was led; I was slow to understand and my inventiveness was [C] slack.
¹⁰³
[A] To top it all, my memory was incredibly unreliable.

Considering all that it is no wonder that my father could make nothing of me.

The second reason was as follows: just as people who are frantic about finding a cure go and consult anybody, that good man was extremely frightened of failure in a matter which meant so much to him: he finally let himself be carried away by the common opinion (which always merely follows the leader as cranes do); he fell in with standard practice (no longer having about him the men who had given him his original educational ideas, which he had brought back from Italy) and sent me, at the age of six, to the Collège de Guyenne, then in full flourish as the best school in France. There too it is impossible to exaggerate the trouble he took over choosing good personal tutors for me and over all the other details of my education, preserving several idiosyncrasies opposed to the usual practices
of the College. But for all that, it was still school. My Latin was at once corrupted and, since then, I have lost all use of it from lack of practice. And all my novel education merely served to enable me to stride right into the upper forms: I left College at thirteen, having ‘completed the course’ (as they put it); and in truth I now have nothing to show for it.

My first taste for books arose from enjoying Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
; when I was about seven or eight I used to sneak away from all other joys to read it, especially since Latin was my mother-tongue and the
Metamorphoses
was the easiest book I knew and the one most suitable by its subject to my tender age. (As for
Lancelot du lac
, [B]
Amadis
, [A]
Huon de Bordeaux
and so on, trashy books which children spend time on, I did not even know their titles – and still do not know their insides – so exact was the way I was taught.)

This rendered me a bit slacker about studying my set-books. I was particularly lucky at this stage to have to deal with an understanding tutor who adroitly connived at this and other similar passions: for I read in succession Virgil (the
Aeneid
), Terence, Plautus and the Italian comedies, ever seduced by the attractiveness of their subjects. Had he been mad enough to break this succession I reckon that I would have left school hating books, as most French aristocrats do. He acted most ingeniously. Pretending not to notice anything, he sharpened my appetite by making me devour such books in secret, while gently requiring me to do my duty by the other, prescribed, books. For the chief qualities which my father looked for in those who had charge of me were affability and an easy-going complexion: and my own complexion had no vices other than sluggishness and laziness. The risk was not that I should do wrong but do nothing. Nobody forecast that I would turn out bad, only useless. What they foretold was idleness not wickedness.