The Complete Essays (68 page)

[B] I condemn all violence in the education of tender minds which are being trained for honour and freedom. In rigour and constraint there is always something servile, and I hold that you will never achieve by force what you cannot achieve by reason, intelligence and skill.
⁹

That was the way I was brought up. They tell me that I tasted the [C] rod [B] only twice
¹⁰
during all my childhood, and that was but lightly. I owed the same treatment to the children born to me; they all die, though, before they are weaned. But [C] Leonor, [B] an only daughter who has escaped that calamity, has reached the age of six or more (her mother’s gentleness readily predisposing her that way) without our having used in her upbringing and in the punishment of her childish faults anything but words – gentle ones at that. And even if my hopes for her turn out to be frustrated, there are other causes in plenty to blame for that without finding fault with my method of upbringing, which I know to be just and natural.

I would have been even more punctilious with boys, who are less born to serve and whose mode-of-being is freer: I would have loved to make their hearts overflow with openness and frankness. I have never seen caning achieve anything except making souls more cowardly or more maliciously stubborn.

[A] Do we want to be loved by our children? Do we want to remove any occasion for their wishing us dead? – though no occasion for so horrible a wish could ever be right or pardonable: [C]
‘nullum scelus rationem habet’
[no crime has rational justification]
¹¹
– then let us within reason enrich their lives with whatever we have at our disposal. To achieve that we ought not to get married so young that our adult years almost become confounded with theirs. Such unseemliness can plunge us into many great difficulties – I mean especially in the case of the nobility, whose way of life is one of leisure and who can live, as we say, on their income. In other cases, where life is a struggle for money, the fellowship of a great many children is a help to the whole family; they are so many new ways and means of helping to enrich it.

[B] I was thirty-three when I married; and I approve of thirty-five – the opinion attributed to Aristotle. [C] Plato does not want any man to marry before thirty; he is also right to laugh at spouses who lie together after fifty-five, judging their offspring unworthy to live and eat.
¹²

It was Thales who gave the right ages; his mother pressed him to get married when he was young: ‘Too soon,’ he said. When he was older: ‘Too late!’ Accept no time as opportune for any inopportune activity!

[A] The Ancient Gauls reckoned it to be extremely reprehensible for a man to lie with a woman before he was twenty, particularly advising those who wanted to train for war to remain chaste well into adulthood, [A1] because sexual intercourse makes minds soft and deflects them.

Ma hor congiunto a giovinetta sposa,
Lieto homai de’ figli, era invilito
Ne gli affetti di padre e di marito
.

[But now, married to a young wife, happy to have children, he was weakened by his love as father and husband.]
¹³

[C] The history of Greece notes how Iccus of Tarentum, Chryso, Astylus, Diopompus and others deprived themselves of any sort of sexual activity during all the time they were getting their bodies in trim for the races, wrestling and other contests at the Olympic Games.
¹⁴

Muley Hassan, the Dey of Tunis (the one whom the Emperor Charles V restored to his throne) was critical of his father’s memory because he was always with his wives, calling him a weak effeminate spawner of children.

[B] In a certain province in the Spanish Indies men were allowed to marry only after forty, yet girls could marry at ten.
¹⁵

[A] If a nobleman is only thirty-five it is too soon for him to make way for a twenty-year-old son: he has still got to achieve a reputation in military expeditions or at the Court of his monarch: he needs his cash; he should allow his son a share but not forget himself. Such a man can rightly give the answer which fathers often have on their lips: ‘I have no wish to be stripped bare before I go and lie down’. But a father who is brought low by age and illness, whose weakness and ill-health deprive him of ordinary human fellowship, does wrong to himself and to his family if he broods over a great pile of riches. If he is wise, he has reached the period when he really ought to want to get stripped and lie down – not stripped to his shirt but down to a nice warm dressing-gown. He has no more use for all the remaining pomp: he should give it all away as a present to those whom it ought to belong to by Nature’s ordinance.

It is right that he should let them use what Nature deprives him of: otherwise there is certainly an element of malice and envy. The finest gesture the Emperor Charles V ever made was when, [C] in imitation of some ancient holders of his rank, [A] he was able to recognize that reason clearly commands us to strip off our garments when they weigh us down and get in our way, and to go and lie down when our legs fail us.
¹⁶
Once he began to feel deficient in the strength and energy needed to continue to conduct his affairs with the glory he had earned, he handed over his wealth, his rank and his power to his son:

Solve senescentem mature sanus equum, ne
Peccet ad extremum ridendus, et ilia ducat
.

[Be wise enough to unharness that tired old nag lest it ends up short-winded, stumbling while men jeer at it.]
¹⁷

This defect of not realizing in time what one is, of not being aware of the extreme decline into weakness which old age naturally brings to our bodies and our souls – to them equally in my opinion unless the soul actually has the larger share – has ruined the reputation of most of the world’s great men. I have seen in my lifetime and intimately known great men in authority who had clearly declined amazingly from their former
capacities, which I knew of from the reputation they had acquired in their better years. For their honour’s sake I would deeply have wished that they had withdrawn to their estates, dropping the load of public or military affairs which were no longer meant for their shoulders.

There was a nobleman whose house I used to frequent who was a widower, very old but still with some sap in him. He had several daughters to marry and a son already old enough to enter society, so that his house was burdened with considerable expenditure and quite a lot of outside visitors; he took little pleasure in this, not only out of concern for economy but even more because, at his age, he had adopted a mode of life far different from ours. In that rather bold way I have
¹⁸
I told him one day that it would be more becoming if he made room for us youth, leaving his principal residence to his son (for it was the only one properly equipped and furnished) and withdrew to a neighbouring estate of his where nobody would trouble his rest, since, given his children’s circumstances, there was no other way he could avoid our unsuitable company. He later took my advice and liked it.

That is not to say we should make a binding gift of our property and not be able to go back on it. I am old enough to have to play that role now, and would leave the young the use of my house and property but be free to withdraw my consent if they gave me cause. I would let them have use of them because they no longer gave me pleasure, but I would retain as much general authority over affairs as I wanted to, for I have always thought that it must be a great happiness for an old father to train his own children in the management of his affairs; he could then, during his lifetime, observe how they do it, offering advice and instruction based on his own experience in such things, and personally arranging for the ancient honour and order of his house to come into the hands of his successors, confirming in this way the hopes he could place in their future management of them.

To do this I would not avoid their company; I would like to be near so as to watch them and to enjoy their fun and festivities as much as my age permitted. Even if I did not live among them (as I could not do without embarrassing the company by the gloominess of my age and by my being subject to illnesses – and also without being forced to restrict my own rules and habits), I would at least like to live near them in some corner of my house – not the fanciest but the most comfortable. Not (as I saw a few
years ago) a dean of St-Hilaire-de-Poitiers
¹⁹
brought to such a pitch of solitude by the troublesome effects of his melancholy that, when I went into his room, he had not set foot outside it for twenty-two years; yet he could still move about freely and easily, apart from a rheumatic flux discharging into his stomach. He would let scarcely anyone in to see him even once a week; he always stayed shut up in that room all by himself except for a valet who brought him his food once a day and who merely went in and out. His only occupation was to walk about reading a book (for he had some acquaintance with literature), obstinately determined as he was to die in those conditions – as soon afterwards he did.

I would try to have gentle relations with my children and so encourage in them an active love and unfeigned affection for me, something easily achieved in children of a well-born nature; of course if they turn out to be wild beasts [C] (which our century produces in abundance) [A] then you must hate them and avoid them as such.

I am against the custom [C] of forbidding children to say ‘Father’ and requiring them to use some other, more respectful title, as though Nature had not sufficiently provided for our authority. We address God Almighty as Father and scorn to have our own children call us by that name.

It is also unjust, and mad, to [A] deprive our grown-up children of [C] easy relations [A] with their
²⁰
fathers by striving to maintain [C] an austere and contemptuous [A] frown, hoping
²¹
by that to keep them in fear and obedience. That is a quite useless farce which makes fathers loathsome to children and, what is worse, makes them ridiculous. Since youth and vigour are in their children’s hands they enjoy the current favour of the world; they treat with mockery the fierce tyrannical countenance of a man with no blood left in his veins or his heart – scarecrows in a field of flax! Even if I were able to make myself feared I would rather make myself loved.
²²

[B] There are so many drawbacks in old age, so much powerlessness; it so merits contempt that the best endowment it can acquire is the fond love of one’s family: its arms are no longer fear and commands.

I know one man who had a most imperious youth. Now that old age is
coming upon him, despite trying to accept it as well as he can, he slaps and bites and swears – [C] the stormiest master in France; [B] he frets himself with cares and watchfulness: but it is all a farce which the family conspire in; the others have access to the best part of his granary, his cellar and even his purse: meanwhile he keeps the keys in his pouch, dearer to him than sight itself. While he is happy to keep so spare and thrifty a table, in various secret places in his house all is dissipation, gambling, prodigality and tales about his fits of temper and his precautions. Everybody is on the lookout against [C] him.
²³
[B] If some wretched servant happens to become devoted to him, suspicion is immediately thrown on to him – a quality which old age is only too ready to ruminate upon. How many times has that man boasted to me of keeping his family on a tight rein, of the meticulous obedience and reverence he received because of it, and of the lucid watch he kept over his affairs:

Ille solus nescit omnia!

[He alone is unaware of the lot!]
²⁴

No man of my acquaintance can claim more qualities, natural and acquired, proper for maintaining his mastery; yet he had failed completely, like a child. That is why I have picked him out as an example from several other cases that I know.

[C] It would make a good scholastic debate: whether or not he is better off as he is. In his presence, all things defer to him; his authority runs its empty course: nobody ever resists him; they believe what he says, they fear and respect him… as much as he could wish! Should he dismiss a servant he packs his bag and is off at once – but only out of his presence. Old people’s steps are so slow and their senses so confused that the valet can live a full year in the house doing his duty without their even noticing it. At the appropriate time a letter arrives from distant parts, a pitiful one, a submissive one, full of promises to do better in the future; the valet then finds himself back in favour.

Does my Lord strike a bargain and send a missive which the family do not like? They suppress it, sometimes inventing afterwards reasons to explain the lack of action or reply. Since no letters from outside are ever brought to him first, he only sees the ones which it seems convenient for him to know. If he happens to get hold of any, he always has to rely on
somebody else to read them for him, so they invent things on the spot: they are always pretending that someone is begging his pardon in the very letter that contains abuse. In short he sees his affairs only through some counterfeit image designed to be as pleasing to him as they can make it so as not to awake his spleen or his anger.