Chapter 6

Those essays, as happens with epoch-marking books, were themselves a life, the power which [84] makes them what they are having been accumulated in them imperceptibly by a thousand repeated modifications, like character in a person: at the moment when Gaston presented himself, to go along with the great "egotist" for a season, that life had just begun. Born here, at the place whose name he took, Montaigne--the acclivity--of Saint Michael, just thirty-six years before, brought up simply, earthily, at nurse in one of the neighbouring villages, to him it was doubled strength to return thither, when, disgusted with the legal business which had filled his days hitherto, seeing that "France had more laws than all the rest of the world," and was what one saw, he began the true work of his life, a continual journey in thought, "a continual observation of new and unknown things," his bodily self remaining, for the most part, with seeming indolence at home.

It was Montaigne's boast that throughout those invasive times his house had lain open to all comers, that his frankness had been rewarded by immunity from all outrages of war, of the crime war shelters: and openness--that all was wide open, searched through by light and warmth and air from the soil--was the impression it made on Gaston, as he passed from farmyard to garden, from garden to court, to hall, up the wide winding stair, to the uppermost chamber of the great round tower; in which sun-baked place the studious man still lingered over a late [85] breakfast, telling, like all around, of a certain homely epicureanism, a rare mixture of luxury with a preference for the luxuries that after all were home-grown and savoured of his native earth.

Sociable, of sociable intellect, and still inclining instinctively, as became his fresh and agreeable person, from the midway of life, towards its youthful side, he was ever on the alert for a likely interlocutor to take part in the conversation, which (pleasantest, truly! of all modes of human commerce) was also of ulterior service as stimulating that endless inward converse from which the essays were a kind of abstract. For him, as for Plato, for Socrates whom he cites so often, the essential dialogue was that of the mind with itself; but this dialogue throve best with, often actually needed, outward stimulus--physical motion, some text shot from a book, the queries and objections of a living voice.--"My thoughts sleep, if I sit still." Neither "thoughts," nor "dialogues," exclusively, but thoughts still partly implicate in the dialogues which had evoked them, and therefore not without many seemingly arbitrary transitions, many links of connexion to be supposed by the reader, constituting their characteristic difficulty, the Essays owed their actual publication at last to none of the usual literary motives--desire for fame, to instruct, to amuse, to sell--but to the sociable desire for a still wider range of conversation with others. [86] He wrote for companionship, "if but one sincere man would make his acquaintance"; speaking on paper, as he "did to the first person he met."--"If there be any person, any knot of good company, in France or elsewhere, who can like my humour, and whose humours I can like, let them but whistle, and I will run!"

Notes of expressive facts, of words also worthy of note (for he was a lover of style), collected in the first instance for the help of an irregular memory, were becoming, in the quaintly labelled drawers, with labels of wise old maxim or device, the primary, rude stuff, or "protoplasm," of his intended work, and already gave token of its scope and variety. "All motion discovers us"; if to others, so also to ourselves. Movement, rapid movement of some kind, a ride, the hasty survey of a shelf of books, best of all a conversation like this morning's with a visitor for the first time,--amid the felicitous chances of that, at some random turn by the way, he would become aware of shaping purpose: the beam of light or heat would strike down, to illuminate, to fuse and organise the coldly accumulated matter, of reason, of experience. Surely, some providence over thought and speech led one finely through those haphazard journeys! But thus dependent to so great a degree on external converse for the best fruit of his own thought, he was also an efficient evocator of the thought of another--himself an original spirit more than tolerating [87] the originality of others,--which brought it into play. Here was one who (through natural predilection, reinforced by theory) would welcome one's very self, undistressed by, while fully observant of, its difference from his own--one's errors, vanities, perhaps fatuities. Naturally eloquent, expressive, with a mind like a rich collection of the choice things of all times and countries, he was at his best, his happiest, amid the magnetic contacts of an easy conversation. When Gaston years afterwards came to read the famous Essays, he found many a delightful actual conversation re-set, and had the key we lack to their surprises, their capricious turns and lapses.--Well! Montaigne had opened the letter, had forthwith passed his genial criticism on the writer, and then, characteristically, forgetting all about it, turned to the bearer as if he had been intimate with him from childhood. And the feeling was mutual. Gaston in half an hour seemed to have known his entertainer all his life.

In unimpeded talk with sincere persons of what quality soever--there, rather than in shadowy converse with even the best books--the flower, the fruit, of mind was still in life-giving contact with its root. With books, as indeed with persons, his intercourse was apt to be desultory. Books!--He was by way of asserting his independence of them, was their very candid friend:--they were far from being [88] an unmixed good. He would observe (the fact was its own scornful comment) that there were more books upon books than upon any other subject. Yet books, more than a thousand volumes, a handsome library for that day, nicely representative not only of literature but of the owner's taste therein, lay all around; and turning now to this, now to that, he handled their pages with nothing less than tenderness: it was the first of many inconsistencies which yet had about them a singularly taking air, of reason, of equity. Plutarch and Seneca were soon in the foreground: they would "still be at his elbow to test and be tested": masters of the autumnal wisdom that was coming to be his own, ripe and placid--from the autumn of old Rome, of life, of the world, the very genius of second thoughts, of exquisite tact and discretion, of judgment upon knowledge.

But the books dropped from his hands in the very midst of enthusiastic quotation; and the guest was mounting a little turret staircase, was on the leaden roof of the old tower, amid the fat, noonday Gascon scenery. He saw, in bird's-eye view, the country he was soon to become closely acquainted with, a country (like its people) of passion and capacity, though at that moment emphatically lazy. Towards the end of life some conscientious pangs seem to have touched Montaigne's singularly humane and sensitive spirit, when he looked back on the [89] long intellectual entertainment he had had, in following, as an inactive spectator, "the ruin of his country," through a series of chapters, every one of which had told emphatically in his own immediate neighbourhood. With its old and new battlefields, its business, its fierce changes, and the old perennial sameness of men's ways beneath them all, it had been certainly matter of more assiduous reading than even those choice, incommensurable, books, of ancient Greek and Roman experience. The variableness, the complexity, the miraculous surprises of man, concurrent with the variety, the complexity, the surprises of nature, making all true knowledge of either wholly relative and provisional; a like insecurity in one's self, if one turned thither for some ray of clear and certain evidence; this, with an equally strong sense all the time of the interest, the power and charm, alike of man and nature and of the individual mind;--such was the sense of this open book, of all books and things. That was what this quietly enthusiastic reader was ready to assert as the sum of his studies; disturbingly, as Gaston found, reflecting on his long unsuspicious sojourn there, and detaching from the habits, the random traits of character, his concessions and hints and sudden emphatic statements, the soul and potency of the man.

How imperceptibly had darkness crept over them, effacing everything but the interior of [90] the great circular chamber, its book-shelves and enigmatic mottoes and the tapestry on the wall,--Circe and her sorceries, in many parts--to draw over the windows in winter. Supper over, the young wife entered at last. Always on the lookout for the sincerities of human nature (sincerity counting for life-giving form, whatever the matter might be) as he delighted in watching children, Montaigne loved also to watch grown people when they were most like children; at their games, therefore, and in the mechanical and customary parts of their existence, as discovering the real soul in them. Abstaining from the dice himself, since for him such "play was not play enough, but too grave and serious a diversion," and remarking that "the play of children is not performed in play, but to be judged as their most serious action," he set Gaston and the amiable, unpedantic, lady to play together, where he might observe them closely; the game turning still, irresistibly, to conversation, the last and sweetest if somewhat drowsy relics of this long day's recreations.--Was Circe's castle here? If Circe could turn men into swine, could she also release them again? It was frailty, certainly, that Gaston remained here week after week, scarce knowing why; the conversation begun that morning lasting for nine months, over books, meals, in free rambles chiefly on horseback, as if in the waking intervals of a long day-sleep.

V. SUSPENDED JUDGMENT

[91] The diversity, the undulancy, of human nature!--so deep a sense of it went with Montaigne always that himself too seemed to be ever changing colour sympathetically therewith. Those innumerable differences, mental and physical, of which men had always been aware, on which they had so largely fed their vanity, were ultimate. That the surface of humanity presented an infinite variety was the tritest of facts. Pursue that variety below the surface!--the lines did but part further and further asunder, with an ever-increasing divergency, which made any common measure of truth impossible. Diversity of custom!--What was it but diversity in the moral and mental view, diversity of opinion? and diversity of opinion, what but radical diversity of mental constitution? How various in kind and degree had he found men's thoughts concerning death, for instance, "some (ah me!) even running headlong upon it, with [92] a real affection"? Death, life; wealth, poverty; the whole sum of contrasts; nay! duty itself,--the relish of right and wrong"; all depend upon the opinion each one has of them, and "receive no colour of good or evil but according to the application of the individual soul." Did Hamlet learn of him that "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so"?--What we call evil is not so of itself: it depends only upon us, to give it another taste and complexion.--Things, in respect of themselves, have peradventure their weight, measure, and conditions; but when once we have taken them into us, the soul forms them as she pleases.--Death is terrible to Cicero, courted by Cato, indifferent to Socrates.--Fortune, circumstance, offers but the matter: 'tis the soul adds the form.--Every opinion, how fantastic soever to some, is to another of force enough to be espoused at the risk of life."

For opinion was the projection of individual will, of a native original predilection. Opinions!--they are like the clothes we wear, which warm us, not with their heat, but with ours. Track your way (as he had learned to do) to the remote origin of what looks like folly; at home, on its native soil, it was found to be justifiable, as a proper growth of wisdom. In the vast conflict of taste, preference, conviction, there was no real inconsistency. It was but that the soul looked "upon things with [93] another eye, and represented them to itself with another kind of face; reason being a tincture almost equally infused into all our manners and opinions; though there never were in the world two opinions exactly alike." And the practical comment was, not as one might have expected, towards the determination of some common standard of truth amid that infinite variety, but to this effect rather, that we are not bound to receive every opinion we are not able to refute, nor to accept another's refutation of our own; these diversities being themselves ultimate, and the priceless pearl of truth lying, if anywhere, not in large theoretic apprehension of the general, but in minute vision of the particular; in the perception of the concrete phenomenon, at this particular moment, and from this unique point of view--that for you, this for me--now, but perhaps not then.

Now; and not then! For if men are so diverse, not less disparate are the many men who keep discordant company within each one of us, "every man carrying in him the entire form of human condition." "That we taste nothing pure:" the variancy of the individual in regard to himself: the complexity of soul which there, too, makes "all judgments in the gross" impossible or useless, certainly inequitable, he delighted to note. Men's minds were like the grotesques which some artists of that day loved to joint together, or like one of his own [94] inconstant essays, never true for a page to its proposed subject. "Nothing is so supple as our understanding: it is double and diverse; and the matters are double and diverse, too."

Here, as it seemed to Gaston, was one for whom exceptions had taken the place of law: the very genius of qualification followed him through all his keen, constant, changeful consideration of men and things. How many curious moral variations he had to show!--"vices that are lawful": vices in us which "help to make up the seam in our piecing, as poisons are useful for the conservation of health": "actions good and excusable that are not lawful in themselves": "the soul discharging her passions upon false objects where the true are wanting": men doing more than they propose, or they hardly know what, at immense hazard, or pushed to do well by vice itself, or working for their enemies: "condemnations more criminal than the crimes they condemn": the excuses that are self-accusations: instances, from his own experience, of a hasty confidence in other men's virtue which "God had favoured": and how, "even to the worst people, it is sweet, their end once gained by a vicious act, to foist into it some show of justice." In the presence of this indefatigable analyst of act and motive all fixed outlines seemed to vanish away. The healthful pleasure of motion, of thoughts in motion!--Yes! Gaston felt them, the oldest of [95] them, moving, as he listened, under and away from his feet, as if with the ground he stood on. And this was the vein of thought which oftenest led the master back contemptuously to emphasise the littleness of man.--"I think we can never be despised according to our full desert."

By way of counterpoise, there were admirable surprises in man. That cross-play of human tendencies determined from time to time in the forces of unique and irresistible character, "moving all together," pushing the world around it to phenomenal good or evil. For such as "make it their business to oversee human actions, it seems impossible they should proceed from one and the same person." Consolidation of qualities supposed, this did but make character, already the most attractive, because the most dynamic, phenomenon of experience, more interesting still. So tranquil a spectator of so average a world, a too critical minimiser, it might seem, of all that pretends to be of importance, Montaigne was constantly, gratefully, announcing his contact, in life, in books, with undeniable power and greatness, with forces full of beauty in their vigour, like lightning, the sea, the torrents:--overpowering desire augmented, yet victorious, by its very difficulty; the bewildering constancy of martyrs; single-hearted virtue not to be resolved into anything less surprising than itself; the devotion of that famed, so companionable, wife, dying cheerfully [96] by her own act along with the sick husband "who could do no better than kill himself"; the grief, the joy, of which men suddenly die; the unconscious Stoicism of the poor; that stern self-control with which Jacques Bonhomme goes as usual to his daily labour with a heart tragic for the dead child at home; nay! even the boldness and strength of "those citizens who sacrifice honour and conscience, as others of old sacrificed their lives, for the good of their country." So carefully equable, his mind nevertheless was stored with, and delighted in, incidents, personalities, of barbarous strength--Esau, in all his phases--the very rudest children or "our great and powerful mother, nature." As Plato had said, "'twas to no purpose for a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy," or, if truth were spoken, of any other high matter of doing or making. That was consistent with his sympathetic belief in the capability of mere impetuous youth as such. Even those unexpected traits in ordinary people which seem to hint at larger laws and deeper forces of character, disconcerting any narrow judgment upon them, he welcomed as akin to his own indolent, but suddenly kindling, nature:--the mere self-will of men, the shrewd wisdom of an unlettered old woman, the fount of goodness in a cold or malicious heart. "I hear every day fools say things far from foolish." Those invincible prepossessions of humanity, or of the [97] individual, which Bacon reckoned "idols of the cave," are no offence to him; are direct informations, it may be, beyond price, from a kindly spirit of truth in things.

For him there had been two grand surprises, two pre-eminent manifestations of the power and charm of man, not to be explained away,--one, within the compass of general and public observation: the other, a matter of special intimacy to himself. There had been the greatness of the old Greek and Roman life, so greatly recorded: there had been the wisdom and kindness of Etienne de la Boetie, as made known in all their fulness to him alone. That his ardent devotion to the ancients had been rewarded with minute knowledge concerning them, was the privilege of the age in which he was born, late in the Revival of Letters. But the classical reading, which with others was often but an affectation, seducing them from the highest to a lower degree of reality, from men and women to their mere shadows in old books, had been for him nothing less than personal contact. "The qualities and fortunes" of the old Romans, especially, their wonderful straight ways through the world, the straight passage of their armies upon them, the splendour of their armour, of their entire external presence and show, their "riches and embellishments," above all, "the suddenness of Augustus," in that grander age for which decision was justifiable because really [98] possible, had ever been "more in his head than the fortunes of his own country." If "we have no hold even on things present but by imagination," as he loved to observe,--then, how much more potent, steadier, larger, the imaginative substance of the world of Alexander and Socrates, of Virgil and Caesar, than that of an age, which seemed to him, living in the midst of it, respectable mainly by its docility, by an imitation of the ancients which after all left untouched the real sources of their greatness. They had been indeed great, at the least dramatically, redeemed in part by magnificent courage and tact, in their very sins. "Our force is no more able to reach them in their vicious than in their virtuous qualities; for both the one and the other proceed from a vigour of soul which was without comparison greater in them than in us."

And yet, thinking of his friendship with the "incomparable Etienne de la Boetie, so perfect, inviolate and entire, that the like is hardly to be found in story," he had to confess that the sources of greatness must still be quick in the world. That had remained with him as his one fixed standard of value in the estimate of men and things. On this single point, antiquity itself had been surpassed; the discourses it had left upon friendship seeming to him "poor and flat in comparison of the sense he had of it." For once, his sleepless habit of analysis had been checked by the inexplicable, the absolute; [99] amid his jealously guarded indifference of soul he had been summoned to yield, and had yielded, to the magnetic power of another. "We were halves throughout, so that methinks by outliving him I defraud him of his part. I was so grown to be always his double in all things that methinks I am no more than half of myself. There is no action or thought of mine wherein I do not miss him, as I know that he would have missed me." Tender yet heroic, impulsive yet so wise, he might have done what the survivor (so it seemed to himself) was but vainly trying to do. It was worth his while to become famous, if that hapless memory might but be embalmed in one's fame. It had been better than love,--that friendship! to the building of which so much "concurrence" had been requisite, that "'twas much if fortune brought the like to pass once in three ages." Actually, we may think, the "sweet society" of those four years, in comparison with which the rest of his so pleasant life "was but smoke," had touched Montaigne's nature with refinements it might otherwise have lacked. He would have wished "to speak concerning it, to those who had experience" of what he said, could such have been found. In despair of that, he loved to discourse of it to all comers,--how it had come about, the circumstances of its sudden and wonderful growth. Yet after all were he pressed to say why he had so loved Etienne de la Boetie, he [100] could but answer, "Because it was He! Because it was I!"

And the surprises there are in man, his complexity, his variancy, were symptomatic of the changefulness, the confusion, the surprises, of the earth under one's feet, of the whole material world. The irregular, the unforeseen, the inconsecutive, miracle, accident, he noted lovingly: it had a philosophic import. It was habit rather than knowledge of them that took away the strangeness of the things actually about one. How many unlikely matters there were, testified by persons worthy of faith, "which, if we cannot persuade ourselves to believe, we ought at least to leave in suspense.--Though all that had arrived by report of past time should be true, it would be less than nothing in comparison of what is unknown."