CORNELL 
 
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 FROM 
 
 The H^st^-tG of 
 ■^reserved ?Ti th 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PQ 1643.S56 
 
 Michel de Montaigne 
 
 3 1924 027 969 009 
 
The original of this book is in 
 the Cornell University Library. 
 
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 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027969009 
 
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE 
 
WORKS B7 MISS EDITH SICHEL 
 
 THE LATER YEARS OF CATHERINE 
 DE MEDICI ' 
 
 CATHERINE DE MEDICI 
 
 MEN AND WOMEN OF THE FRENCH 
 RENAISSANCE 
 
 HOUSEHOLD OF THE LAFAYETTES 
 
 GATHERED LEAVES 
 
 From the prose of Mary E. Coleridge 
 
 CONSTABLE & COMPANY LTD 
 
-Miiiii'.i, HE Mr)\iAn;\K. 
 
 /•V,'w Iht M:,sr, Con,/,' ,,t Ch.ialillv. 
 
MICHEL 
 DE MONTAIGNE 
 
 BY 
 
 EDITH SICHEL 
 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 LONDON 
 
 COU^^STA'BLE & COMTANT LTD 
 
 10 Orange Street Leicester Square 
 
 191 1 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Montaigne the Man .... 3 
 
 Montaigne the Philosopher . . .163 
 
 Bibliographical Note .... 259 
 Index ...... 265 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Michel de Montaigne. French Sdiool of the 
 second half of the i6th century. Musee de Conde 
 a Chantilly, . . . . Frontispiece 
 
 {From a photograph by M, Giraudon.) 
 
 Various Signatures, Seals, Etc., . . To face page 32 
 
 The Tower of Montaigne's House as it was 
 
 in 1823, . . . . . . „ „ 51 
 
 Frontispiece of Montaigne's 'Voyage en 
 
 Italie.' First published in 1774, . . „ „ 102 
 
 [Engraved hy Saint-Aubin.) 
 
 Marie Le Jars de Gournay. From the Frontispiece 
 chosen by herself for her book ' Advis et Preseus,' 
 16+1. ■ ■ . . . . „ „ 125 
 
 {From a photograph by M. Gixavdon.) 
 
 Michel Seigneur de Montaigne. From an 
 Anonymous Portrait at Bordeaux, old but not con- 
 temporary, although very likely based upon an 
 older picture, . . . . . „ „ 163 
 
 Page from Montaigne's 'Essais' in the Edition 
 
 of 1588 NOW PRESERVED AT BORDEAUX. Show- 
 ing his Annotation to Chapter xvii. Book 11., 'De 
 la Presomption,' and the cross below at the place 
 where, in the edition of 1595, the praise of Mile, 
 de Gournay was inserted, ... „ „ 249 
 
TO 
 
 AUGUSTA FRESHFIELD 
 
 Dear Friend, dear Louver of Books — 
 
 Montaigne said: ' T/ie intercourse of books is safest and most our awn. 
 . . . It helpeth us at all points ; it consoleth our age and solitude . . . 
 and blunteth the stabs of pain. For hooks recei've us e'ver <with the same 
 countenance ; . . . nor can I say honxi reposefully I diuell in the thought 
 that they are by my side to gi'ue me pleasure luhen my moment for them 
 comes — honu gratefully I acknotvledge the succour they lend my life, for, 
 in truth, they are the best pro-vision I ha've found upon this human 
 •voyaged 
 
 To luhom better than to you should I dedicate this my inadequate study 
 of the man nuho nurote thus ? 
 
 He also said: 'We do not li-ve, njue only exist, if 'uie hold oursehues 
 bound by necessity to follotv one course alone. The finest spirits are those 
 that possess the largest choice, the greatest suppleness? 
 
 This is another, and a -warmer, reason for my dedication to you, -who 
 possess so large a choice — the charitable listener, 'who kno'W so -well honu 
 to li-ve the life of understanding and sympathy. 
 
 EDITH SICHEL. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In publishing this little study of Montaigne, 
 I should like to express my gratitude to M. 
 Fortunat Strowski for the invaluable help I 
 have had from him in choosing and getting 
 my illustrations, and for his kind gift of the 
 photograph of a page of the manuscript of 
 the Essays from which my last illustration is 
 taken. 
 
 Also to M. Steinheil for so generously giving 
 me the prints from the illustrations of his 
 own collection of portraits of Montaigne, etc., 
 from which all my illustrations, excepting 
 the frontispiece and the print of the page of 
 the Essays, are reproduced. 
 
 I wish also to offer my warmest thanks to 
 Mr. Thomas Seccombe for all the assistance 
 he has given me in my Bibliography, which 
 is, indeed, his rather than mine. I had only 
 made a bare list of authorities ; the scholarly 
 comments are entirely due to his knowledge 
 and his kindness. 
 
 E. S. 
 
 Hambledon, April 191 1. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 Michel de Montaigne was born in 1533. 
 His mother was from Toulouse — a Made- 
 moiselle de Lopez, a Protestant lady of Jewish 
 blood, for her forefathers were Spanish Jews 
 from Villanova, near Toledo.^ His father, 
 Sieur Pierre d'Ayquem (de Montaigne), was 
 a Gascon gentleman, and a very remarkable 
 man. Montaigne used to say that there was 
 also an English strain in the family, and that 
 during the English occupation of Guienne 
 the Ayquems had intermarried with the con- 
 querors. However that may be, the Sieur 
 Pierre's immediate ancestors were of the 
 merchant class. His grandfather, Raymon 
 d'Ayquem, was a seller of dried fish and a 
 wine-exporter at Bordeaux ; Raymon's son, 
 Grimon, kept on the business and married 
 well, so that his son, Pierre, started auspi- 
 ciously, and had a gentleman's education. He 
 was a man of parts, a man of taste, who, 
 when he was seventeen, got a name for the 
 Latin verses that he published. He mastered 
 
 1 Some authorities trace the family to Portugal, not to Spain, 
 
 3 
 
4 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 Spanish and German ; he dabbled in Renais- 
 sance speculations ; he also went to the Italian 
 wars, married his wife on the way home, and 
 settled down to wine-selling. 
 
 In after days a love of building grew 
 upon him, and he spent a great part of his 
 time in improving his estate of Montaigne. 
 Here it was that his boy was educated. From 
 earliest days the child lived in an atmosphere 
 of religious toleration. He himself, we gather 
 from his pages, was brought up as a Catholic, 
 like his father ; but his brother, Thomas de 
 Beauregard, and his sister (later Madame de 
 Lestonnac) both followed the faith of their 
 mother. That Protestants and Catholics of 
 one family could live together under the same 
 roof in peace and unity is an astonishing 
 consideration for the student of that age of 
 frequent persecution ; but history has natur- 
 ally to be the record of signal cases, since the 
 rest pass unchronicled, and there were prob- 
 ably, especially in the provinces, many houses 
 like that of the Ayquems. In their case, there 
 was no fervent conviction to embitter them. 
 Michel's father had inherited his creed ; his 
 mother's race most likely imbued her with 
 the need of religion before dogma, and with 
 an instinct for philosophic tolerance. It seems 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN i; 
 
 as if she could not have much affected her 
 son's life, for, strange to say, he makes no 
 mention of her — he who wrote so much 
 about his father, and loved him with such 
 enduring affection. We need go no further 
 than the Essays for a full-length portrait of 
 Pierre d'Ayquem. 
 
 ' For his demeanour, it was of a gentle 
 gravity, humble and very modest. And he 
 took marvellous thought for the decency and 
 comeliness of his person and his clothes, 
 whether he was on foot or on horseback. In 
 his speech he kept such scrupulous good faith 
 as to be excessive ; his conscience and his 
 religion were generally, in truth, nearer to 
 superstition than to the other extreme. As a 
 man he was little of figure, full of energy, of 
 upright and well-proportioned stature. His 
 face was pleasant, rather brown. And he was 
 exquisitely skilful in every noble exercise. . . . 
 I have seen him, when he was sixty, making 
 mock of our agility — now throwing himself, 
 just as he was, in his furred robe, upon the 
 back of a horse, now going round the table 
 on his thumb. And he hardly ever went up 
 to his room without bounding over two or 
 three steps at a time.^ 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 8 : ' De I'Art de conferer.' 
 
6 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 ' In all the arrangements of my domestic 
 affairs I love to use his rules and his example, 
 and I shall try and pledge those who follow 
 me to use them likewise. If I could do 
 better for him, I would. I glory in the 
 thought that his will still acts in me and thus 
 goes on in the world. God grant that my 
 hands may not fail in fashioning some image 
 of his life — some reflection of so good a 
 father.' ^ 
 
 Pierre d'Ayquem, the dilettante, was a true 
 man of the age. He had his own scheme of 
 education — a fantastic scheme, yet based upon 
 common sense, and not without effect upon 
 the ideas of Michel. This was probably 
 because it succeeded and left agreeable recol- 
 lections. His father, in his own way, was a 
 democrat. He chose poor people to be the 
 baby's sponsors, and he was sent to live with 
 a family of peasants in a neighbouring village, 
 so that from the first he might be trained 
 up to simplicity and hardihood. Before his 
 infancy was really over he returned to Mon- 
 taigne, and his education began in good 
 earnest upon his father's delightful system. 
 It was a system which, foreshadowing Kinder- 
 garten methods, was founded upon the avoid- 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 9 : 'De la Vanit^.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 7 
 
 ance of tears. All nervous shocks were to 
 be eschewed. The child was to be awakened 
 by music, that his return to consciousness 
 might be happiness. The rod was hung up, 
 it was seldom if ever to be used, and the chief 
 traits that his father sought in those who had 
 him in their charge were, he tells us, ' an easy 
 temper and amenity.' The first, the only 
 language that he was to speak and hear in his 
 early years was Latin. For this purpose his 
 parents, the chosen tutor who held him in 
 his arms, all the servants of the Montaigne 
 household, and even the villagers, learned 
 Latin. More than a hundred years later 
 stray words of that tongue still lingered on 
 in the hamlet of Montaigne. All his baby 
 prattle was in Latin, and he knew no French 
 until he was six years old — it seemed to him 
 like a difficult dialect. The purity of his 
 speech, indeed, remained intact until school 
 learning corrupted it ; and soon after he went 
 to school, his masters confessed that they 
 felt rather timid of addressing him in Latin, 
 because, while his words flowed naturally, 
 they still had to hesitate in finding theirs. 
 Greek, too, he began to learn through play, 
 till class routine broke, too soon, into his 
 studies. It was a pity. The home teaching 
 
8 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 must have been good, for his sister understood 
 enough Greek to take in a conversation in 
 that tongue vv^hich, in later times, she over- 
 heard between her husband and an official ; 
 they had reasons for not wishing to be under- 
 stood, for she found his counsel so bad that 
 she peremptorily turned him out of her house. 
 But it was a Latin poet, not a Greek one, 
 who revealed to Montaigne the enchantment 
 of books. At eight years old, or thereabouts, 
 he happened upon Ovid. 
 
 ' The first relish that I conceived for any 
 book came of the pleasure that I had from 
 the fables in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. For 
 when I was some seven or eight years old, I 
 slipped away from all other distractions that 
 I might read it ; the more so that it was 
 written in my mother-tongue, and that it was 
 the easiest book I knew, and the best suited 
 in its matter to my tender years. As for 
 Lancelot of the Lake, and the Amadises and 
 the Huons of Bordeaux, I had not even heard 
 their names. 
 
 ' 1 
 
 We know little of him at this time, except- 
 ing his fame as an actor of twelve years old 
 in the plays given at his Grammar School, 
 the College de Guienne. But he constantly 
 
 1 Essais, i. z6 : 'De I'lnstitution des Enfants.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 9 
 
 tells us that he was not brilliant — on the 
 contrary, inert and apathetic. 
 
 ' Albeit my health was sure and whole, and 
 my nature gentle and tractable, I was withal 
 so heavy, limp, and drowsy that none could 
 pluck me out of my idleness, not even for the 
 sake of play. What I saw I saw well, and 
 beneath this ponderous disposition I nourished 
 bold imaginations, and opinions beyond my 
 years. My mind was slow, and moved only 
 when it was impelled, my understanding was 
 behind-hand, my invention slack. I had no 
 vices but laziness and languor. The danger 
 was not that I should do wrong, but that I 
 should do nothing. And thus in truth hath 
 it happened. The complaints that ring in 
 my ears are of that description : idle, cold in 
 the offices of friendship and relationship, and 
 over-fastidious in public service. The most 
 insulting folk do not say, " Why hath he 
 taken this, why hath he not paid that ? " but, 
 " Why doth he not send a receipt ? "^ and 
 " Why doth he not give ? " ' ^ 
 
 Nevertheless he took in a good deal. He 
 gained a knowledge of Terence, Plautus, 
 Virgil ; he worked with private tutors at 
 home — with the Scottish poet and historian 
 
 1 Eisais, i. 26 : ' De I'lnstitution des Enfants.' 
 
lo MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 George Buchanan, with the learned authors, 
 Nicholas Grouchy, Guillaume Guerente, and 
 Marc Antoine Muret. As early as thirteen 
 he left school, and for the next ten years 
 we know nothing of him. We can, how- 
 ever, be pretty certain that he studied at 
 Toulouse, the great centre for those who were 
 learning law, for we find that he knew the 
 chief students and professors of the period. 
 He must have heard Cujas, the great jurist, 
 give his first law-lecture — must have had 
 Etienne Pasquier, the poet, for fellow-student, 
 since he it was who chronicled that lecture 
 as one of the events of his life. His days of 
 pupilage ended, Montaigne went to Bordeaux, 
 which alternated with Montaigne as his home ; 
 and in this city it was that, in 1548, he 
 witnessed the terrible revolt against the tax 
 of the Gabelle,^ the murder of the governor, 
 the dire punishment of the town, from which 
 all its civic rights were taken. These rights 
 played a part in the Montaigne records ; for 
 later, when Pierre Ayquem, after filling 
 various official functions, was made mayor, 
 he travelled to Paris to negotiate for some 
 remission of the penalty, and characteristic- 
 
 1 The revolt originated at Saintonge, and was instigated by 
 its inhabitants. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN ii 
 
 ally took with him several ' pipes ' of good 
 wine to make his task the easier. About this 
 time he bought a magistracy, with the idea, 
 most likely, that it would revert to his son. 
 In due season Montaigne became a magis- 
 trate of the Court of Perigueux, which was 
 subsequently merged in the Parlement of 
 Bordeaux, and at this administrative assembly 
 he and his fellow-councillors duly registered 
 its decrees. The religious persecutions of 
 1562, following on the Edict of January, 
 went directly against Montaigne's views, yet 
 he voluntarily came forward to take the oath 
 of orthodoxy ; whether as a protest against 
 lawlessness, or, as is more probable, from 
 motives of worldly prudence, who shall say ? 
 It is all of a piece with the man who 
 would 'carry a candle for St. Michael in 
 one hand, and a candle for his Dragon in the 
 other.' ^ 
 
 However that may be, we may be sure that 
 Montaigne was always a magistrate who 
 worked rather by experience of life than by 
 the letter of the law. Experience was what 
 he sought — and found. To him that hath 
 shall be given, and Montaigne's eyes were 
 always open, his curiosity was insatiable. 
 
 1 Essais, iii. i : ' De I'Utile et de I'Honnete.' 
 
12 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 Shortly afterwards he went to Rouen, and 
 there he came into the midst of the sensation 
 that was caused by the discovery of a plot 
 against the life of Fran9ois, the great Due de 
 Guise. What is more, he witnessed the 
 Duke's splendid pardon of the criminal. A 
 few months later. Guise lay murdered by 
 another assassin's hand. To Montaigne, con- 
 spiracies were little more than a class of 
 human phenomena to be set down in his 
 encyclopedic note-book. He took a much 
 warmer interest in three Brazilian aborigines 
 whom he discovered at Rouen, men of 
 dignity, ' although they wore no breeches,' 
 who were trying to find ' the wisdom of 
 Europe,' and had the luck to find Montaigne. 
 
 But these were minor incidents. They 
 counted for nothing beside the great event of 
 his life, which had meanwhile changed his 
 outlook. Three years before this time, in 
 1557, he met Etienne de la Boetie. 
 
 Montaigne was twenty-four. He had lived 
 — he had read — yet we cannot speak of him 
 as complete before he made this friendship. 
 The trend of his mind was no doubt set, his 
 scheme of life formulated ; but the finer note, 
 the warmer touch, was wanting ; and the 
 sense of a nature above his own, the faculty 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 13 
 
 for admiration, the intense feeling of solitude 
 after La Boetie's death, the apprehension of 
 mystery which it brought him — all his best 
 hours, the richer parts of his nature, would 
 have been absent. 
 
 What manner of man, indeed, was the 
 Montaigne whom we see before us in 
 
 As far as his looks are concerned, he has 
 painted his own picture. ' My height,' he 
 says, 'is rather below the average. This 
 defect hath not only the drawback of ugliness, 
 but, in addition, that of inconvenience. . . . 
 A beautiful figure, in truth, is the only beauty 
 allowed to men. . . . For the rest, my figure 
 is strong and well-set, my face not fat but 
 full, my complexion — between the jovial and 
 the melancholy — showeth moderately sanguine 
 and of tempered heat. For my health, it is 
 steady and gay.' ^ 
 
 The last few lines, describing his constitu- 
 tion, describe as much of his character as 
 depended upon it, and that was a good deal — 
 till La Boetie appeared, almost the whole. 
 By that time Montaigne was what he re- 
 mained : the Hedonist without low tastes, the 
 Epicurean without high instincts, the fastidi- 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 17: ' De la Pr&omption.' 
 
14 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 ous critic of all excess, the lover of ease and 
 spontaneity, the upholder of human dignity, 
 the votary of security, the apostle of his own 
 inborn cheerfulness, the armed foe of gloom 
 and avoidable sorrow — and he taught that most 
 sorrow was avoidable if men looked at things 
 as they were. 
 
 Up to this Montaigne stepped La Boetie, 
 two years older than he, his complement in 
 all things, his opposite in many — the Arthur 
 Hallam of the Renaissance, calm yet fervent, 
 walking like Montaigne upon a level path, 
 but a path across the heights. To Montaigne, 
 outward beauty, as he tells us, was all-im- 
 portant. ' It holds,' he wrote, ' the highest 
 rank in human intercourse — it reduces and 
 possesses our judgment, with great authority 
 and wondrous power to impress.' ^ La Boetie 
 was ugly.^ Montaigne was prose — La Boetie 
 was a poet. Montaigne had no taste for ties, 
 and when he took a wife, it was purely for 
 conventional reasons ; La Boetie had made 
 a happy marriage, and enjoyed the bonds that 
 he had formed. Both men desired to be of 
 public service — Montaigne only so long as it 
 involved no risk to himself ; La Boetie at any 
 
 ' Essais, iii. 12: ' De la Physionomie.' 
 2 Ibil 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 15 
 
 cost that was demanded. Both were disgusted 
 with politics, but again for different reasons : 
 Montaigne with the disgust of the cynic, who 
 says ' leave ill alone ' and retires into the 
 comfort of seclusion ; La Boetie with the 
 disgust of disillusionment resulting from effort 
 that has failed. And both were opposed to 
 innovation — Montaigne because he disliked 
 its discomfort and distrusted reform ; La 
 Boetie because, like a prodigal son, he had 
 tasted of revolt and found it barren. For, 
 unlike Montaigne, La Boetie had begun life 
 as a rebel, though the pen was his sole 
 weapon. His pamphlet of Contre-un, which 
 made a great sensation, was directed against 
 monarchic tyranny. It might have been 
 composed by a Girondin,^ and, in spite of the 
 author's professed Catholicism, was penned in 
 so Protestant a spirit that Calvin embodied it 
 in a treatise of his own. It was written when 
 La Boetie was little more than twenty — 
 although Montaigne asserts that he wrote it 
 at sixteen, and cautiously saw fit to apologise 
 for it on the score of his friend's youth. The 
 error was perhaps prompted by his wishes, for 
 the pamphlet was the only fact in La Boetie's 
 life of which Montaigne disapproved. And 
 
 1 Montaigne: Dowden. 
 
1 6 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 yet it was this work which had first brought 
 his friend's name before him. He admired it 
 long before he knew him. 
 
 ' There was,' he says, ' I know not what 
 predestined and inexplicable force which 
 effected this union. We sought one another 
 before we had set eyes on one another, and 
 because of the reports that each had heard 
 of each. I think that by some ordinance of 
 heaven we embraced one another by our 
 names. And at our first encounter, which 
 came about by accident, in a crowd at a great 
 city festival, we found ourselves so taken one 
 with the other, so familiar, so mutually bound, 
 that thenceforward nothing could be nearer 
 than I to him and he to me. . . . For that 
 we had so little time before us, having begun 
 so late, and both being men of set habit — he 
 older by several years than I was — our friend- 
 ship had no time to lose, nor could it regulate 
 itself upon the pattern of soft and conventional 
 friendships, the which demand all the pre- 
 cautions of a long preliminary intercourse. 
 This our friendship had no idea but of itself, 
 and can only be compared to itself. It is not 
 made up of one consideration, or two, or 
 three, or a thousand. It is I know not what 
 quintessence of all ties, this mingled feeling. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 17 
 
 the which having taken my whole will by 
 storm, impelled him also to plunge — to lose 
 himself in me. " Lose," I say, and I speak 
 truly, for we . . . had no mine and thine.^ 
 . . . What we customarily call friends and 
 friendship, are but acquaintances, are but 
 intimacies formed now by chance, now for 
 convenience.^ ... But this companionship 
 that we cherished as long as God willed, we 
 keeping the same perfect and entire . . . 
 findeth no parallel. The building up thereof 
 demandeth so many happy chances that it 
 is much if fortune can achieve it once in three 
 centuries.^ . . . And if I am pressed to say 
 why I loved him, I feel I can but express 
 myself by answering — " because he was he, 
 because I was I.'" * 
 
 There never has been such a votary of 
 friendship as Montaigne ; none made such 
 big claims upon it, or had them so adequately 
 fulfilled. ' As for comparing thereunto the 
 love for women, this,' he said, ' cannot be 
 attempted. That fire, well I know it, is 
 more restless, more scorching, more arid. But 
 it is forked fire and changeful — the fire of 
 fever . . . and holdeth us but by one corner. 
 
 1 Essais, i. 28 : ' De I'Amitie.' = Ibid. 
 
 3 Ibid. * Ibid. 
 
 B 
 
1 8 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 ... As soon as it entereth upon terms of 
 friendship ... it languisheth and fainteth. 
 Contrariwise, friendship . . . increaseth only 
 when it is enjoyed, for that it is of the spirit, 
 and that by use the soul is sharpened.' ^ 
 
 This kind of conversion to friendship fixed 
 Montaigne's attitude towards baser passions, 
 as far as he himself was concerned. He put 
 them in their place ; he had small value for 
 them, but he did not give them up. All that 
 he demanded of himself by the light of this 
 new feeling was to know how to appraise. It 
 was outlook that mattered, not action. 
 
 'These two sorts of passion,' he says, 
 'entered into me in full cognisance the one 
 of the other, but never in comparison. For the 
 first kept on its course, superbly on haughty 
 wing, watching the other disdainfully as it 
 gave its stabs far below.' ^ For Montaigne 
 this friendship represented his Decalogue, 
 his code of morals. 'The one and only 
 friendship, it annuls all other obligations ' ; 
 it absolves a man from the oath of secrecy, 
 since his friend 'is no other, is myself.' It 
 was, indeed, more than morality — it was re- 
 ligion, the only religion Montaigne had. He 
 lost himself in Etienne de la Boetie. It is 
 
 1 Essais, i. 28: 'De I'Amiti^.' 2 /&V. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 19 
 
 not surprising that he should have chosen him. 
 La Boetie's mind was one of great distinction, 
 singularly harmonious, and his life, strange to 
 say, matched his thought. He was even of 
 mood, yet as ardent as if he were not even. 
 He had studied under the heretical Du Bourg 
 at Orleans, and, after that, his life had few 
 events till his marriage with Madame de 
 Carles, a widow with two children. His wife 
 adored him ; he repaid her feeling, and perhaps 
 the name. Ma Semblance, which he gave her, 
 is the surest symbol of their happiness. He 
 grew, too, in public estimation, was sent on 
 more than one mission of importance to the 
 State, and was appointed as a magistrate at 
 Bordeaux. Montaigne, naturally, thought 
 him underrated — ' Knowing as I do,' he said, 
 ' that Etienne de la Boetie, one of the men 
 best suited to the needs of France, was left to 
 grope among the cinders of his hearth to the 
 great loss of our common weal. As for him, 
 ... he was so richly furnished with the goods 
 and treasures that defy fortune, that never did 
 a happier or more contented man tread the 
 earth, . . . but then that is no reason why a 
 noble captain should remain in the ranks.' ^ 
 La Boetie's honours, it is true, were mainly 
 
 1 Lettres de Montaigne : A Monsieur de l'H6pital. 
 
20 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 local, but he had no distaste for being a pro- 
 phet in his own country, and his last action 
 before his mortal illness was to prepare for 
 the defence of Bordeaux against an expected 
 attack of the Huguenots. He had, besides, 
 many compensations. His social life was a 
 full one. He seems to have had a gift for 
 friendship. At Orleans he formed a close tie 
 with Danou, who later figured as a Reformer. 
 The poet Baif was another intimate, and so, 
 probably, was Dorat, for one of La Boetie's 
 poems is written upon the clock of Charlotte 
 Laval, who was Dorat's first wife. He at- 
 tracted the best men of his day, and he had 
 the honour to defend Ronsard from the attacks 
 of a certain councillor who puritanically con- 
 demned him for putting earthly love before 
 the love of God. ' There are many more 
 ways than one of praising God,' said La Boetie, 
 . . . ' Let Ronsard celebrate Him in his own 
 divine verse ; the councillor, for his part, may 
 praise God hardly less by his silence.' But all 
 these lesser interests paled before his devotion 
 to Montaigne — as warm, as sudden, as Mon- 
 taigne's feeling for him. Intellectually speak- 
 ing, one could, if one would, account in some 
 sort for the affinity. Montaigne admired his 
 friend's power of equilibrium and the well- 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 21 
 
 adjusted balance of his qualities almost more 
 than any of his characteristics. But there 
 was love at first sight on either side, although 
 La Boetie, perhaps, influenced Montaigne 
 more than Montaigne influenced him. 
 
 ' Having loved,' he says, ' above all else on 
 earth, the feu Monsieur de la Boetie, the 
 greatest man, to my mind, of our age, I 
 should think I had failed sorely in my duty 
 if, knowingly, I allowed so rich a name as his 
 to perish. . . .' ^ 
 
 ' While he lived he did me the honour — 
 and I count it among my greatest blessings — 
 to set up betwixt us a bond of friendship so 
 close and tied so fast that there has been no 
 hidden spring in his soul that I have not been 
 able to know and contemplate, unless, indeed, 
 now and then I proved shortsighted. And. 
 without exaggeration he is, take him all in 
 all, so nearly a miracle that ... in order not 
 to be disbelieved, I am forced when I talk 
 about him to draw in and to understate my 
 knowledge of him.' ^ ' By the grace of God, 
 I have passed my life softly and smoothly, 
 and but for the loss of such a friend, free from 
 heavy sorrow, in full tranquillity of spirit. 
 
 1 Lettres de Montaigne : A Monsieur de Mesmes. 
 
 2 Lettres de Montaigne : A Monsieur de Lansac. 
 
22 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 And I have accepted as my wage the natural 
 comforts that are born with us, without seeking 
 for others. And yet, in truth, if I compare all 
 the rest of this my life ... to the four years^ 
 given me in the which to enjoy this being's 
 sweet company ... it is but smoke, but a 
 dark and tedious night. From the day I lost 
 him ... I can only drag on wearily, and 
 even the pleasures which come to me, instead 
 of consoling, redouble my grief for his loss. 
 We went halves in all things. It seemeth to 
 me that I rob him of his share. ... So used 
 was I to be second everywhere, that now I 
 feel I am no more than half a man.' * 
 
 Montaigne transmits his sorrow. La Boetie's 
 early death still fills us with regret — for his 
 friend, for his own unfulfilled promise. His 
 poetry was not what Montaigne thought it ; 
 it is no more than verse of a high average. It 
 is his life that has the power to move us. And 
 his death was of a piece with his life. Mon- 
 taigne's words, from a letter to his own father, 
 make the tragedy seem as of yesterday. 
 
 ' As I came back from the law-courts, on 
 Monday the 9th August 1563, I sent to ask 
 him to come and dine with me. He returned 
 me his thanks, but s;aid that he felt rather 
 
 / 
 
 1 In reality six years. ' 2 Essats^ i. 28: " De TAmitid^ 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 23 
 
 unwell, and that I should be giving him a 
 pleasure if I would go round and spend an 
 hour with him before he set out for Medor.^ 
 I went directly after dinner. He was lying 
 down ready dressed — but, already, there was 
 I know not what alteration in his face.' ^ 
 
 He told his friend that the day before, too 
 thinly clad ' in silk,' he had played at some 
 game with M. d'Escars and had caught a chill. 
 Montaigne begged him to defer his departure. 
 But as the pestilence had infected neighbour- 
 ing houses, he advised him to move out of the 
 town. So La Boetie rode to Germignan, two 
 leagues from Bordeaux, in company with his 
 wife and uncle. Next day Madame (called 
 Mademoiselle, according to the then prevail- 
 ing fashion) sent for Montaigne early in the 
 morning. Serious symptoms had set in ; she 
 had summoned a doctor and an apothecary. 
 When Montaigne came, La Boetie ' seemed 
 overjoyed ' to see him, and when he said good- 
 bye, promising to return next day, ' he begged 
 with more affection and insistence than I had 
 ever seen him use, that I would be with him 
 as much as I could. I was deeply touched ; 
 nevertheless I was departing, whien Made- 
 
 1 Probably M6doc, 
 
 2 Lettres de Montaigne : A Monseigneur de Montaigne. 
 
24 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 moiselle de la Boetie, who had I know not 
 what forebodings, came to me, with tears in 
 her eyes and implored me not to stir that 
 night. So she stopped me, and he was glad.' 
 Is it the simplicity of Montaigne's speech, 
 the lingering love with which he follows 
 every detail of those days, that makes us feel 
 as if we knew that last sad watch, with its 
 faint flickerings of hope, its dull despond- 
 encies, its momentary relief in ministration to 
 the wants of the sufferer ? Montaigne came 
 and went. At the end of the week La Boetie 
 told him that 'his complaint was said to be 
 rather infectious, that anyhow it was gloomy 
 and unpleasant.' ' He knew my temperament 
 so well,' he said, ' that he begged me only to 
 come on short visits, but as often as I could. 
 I did not leave him again.' Whoever has 
 measured the depths of Montaigne's caution 
 will measure his friendship by that sentence, 
 and will not find it wanting. Death had not 
 yet been mentioned between them. They 
 had spoken of little, indeed, save the illness, 
 for 'from the first, he showed himself disgusted 
 with public affairs.' But the next day, a 
 Sunday, he fainted, and ' when he came to 
 himself he told me that he had seemed to be 
 in universal confusion and to see nothing but 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 25 
 
 a thick dark cloud and fog, in the which all 
 things appeared to be pell-mell, and yet felt 
 he no whit displeased throughout this accident. 
 " Death hath nothing worse than that, my 
 brother " — so I said. " It hath nothing so bad," 
 was the answer he gave me.' That same day 
 he grew worse, and Montaigne begged him to 
 tell him any wishes he might have concerning 
 his affairs. It would, he urged, ill befit a true 
 friend, who had always known him to be of 
 good judgment, to allow him to leave business 
 troubles behind him. La Boetie complied, 
 and when the task was accomplished he asked 
 for his wife and uncle that he might tell them 
 what was in his will. ' I shall console them 
 and make them of better cheer about my health 
 than I myself feel,' he pleaded, when Mon- 
 taigne demurred at his request. Montaigne 
 told him the bad symptoms were nothing. 
 ' In truth they are nothing,' he rejoined, ' even 
 should what you fear happen.' ' That would 
 be pure happiness for you,' said his friend ; 
 ' the pain would be for me, who lose the 
 company of a great and wise and faithful 
 friend, such as I know I can never find again.' 
 'That may well be, brother,' the dying man 
 replied . . . 'but, however these things 
 stand, I am ready to depart when God wills. 
 
26 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 . . . And as for you, my friend, I know you 
 possess such wisdom that, whatever your 
 personal claims, you will submit willingly and 
 patiently to all that it pleases His Divine 
 Majesty to order of me. And I entreat you 
 to take care that the sorrow for my loss does 
 not push that good man and that good woman 
 (his uncle and his wife) beyond the bounds of 
 reason.' 
 
 Until that time he had hidden his real 
 state from them, putting on the gayest of 
 countenances. Even now when he summoned 
 them, he said that he had no fear of death, but 
 that, since human affairs were unstable, he 
 wished to settle his in good time. His uncle 
 had been to him a father — he made him his 
 heir. He begged his wife, his Semblance., to take 
 what he could give, although it was far below 
 her worth. And to Montaigne, ' chosen 
 from among so many, . . . for that a friendship 
 such as theirs was hardly known even in 
 antiquity,' he bequeathed his entire library. 
 Then speaking to all three, ' he praised God 
 that in his extreme need he was accompanied 
 by those that he loved best in the world ; he 
 thought it a noble sight, he told them, to see 
 a circle so firmly bound together in friendship.' 
 Presently he called for a priest ; ' he had 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 27 
 
 lived,' he said, 'a Christian and a Catholic, 
 and so he would end.' When he had begun 
 to speak, he had seemed a dying man ; but as 
 he talked his colour returned, his pulse grew 
 stronger. Montaigne, his heart wrung with 
 grief, had not been able to answer him. Later 
 he apologised. 
 
 ' I blushed for shame,' he said to him, ' that 
 my courage failed me . . . and I hardly 
 believed that God could give a man such 
 courage over mortal accidents (as you have 
 shown) . . . but I praised Him that I had 
 found it in one who loved me so greatly and 
 who was so dearly loved by me. . . . Then, 
 taking my hand, " My brother," quoth he, " I 
 assure you that many things in my life have 
 been quite as hard and troublesome to do as 
 this. And, when all is said, I have long been 
 prepared for it — I have long known my lesson 
 by heart. Have I not, at my age, lived long 
 enough ? I am nearly thirty-three. ... As 
 for myself, I am certain that I am going to 
 God and the dwelling-place of the blessed." 
 Then, because I showed even in my counten- 
 ance the trouble that his words awoke in me : 
 " What, brother ! " said he, " do you want to 
 make me feel fear ? If I felt it, whose business 
 would it be to rid me thereof but yours ? " ' 
 
28 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 Towards evening he made his will ; 
 summoned, in turn, his favourite niece and 
 his young step-daughter, and, after giving 
 them good counsel for their lives, he took his 
 leave of them. ' I wish you, I implore you, 
 to remember me,' he said to his niece, 'for 
 the sake of the friendship I have borne you 
 and not because of . . . your mourning for 
 my death ; as far as in me lies, I forbid that to 
 all my friends. . . . And, dear girl, I assure 
 you that if God at this hour let me choose 
 whether I might return to life, or finish the 
 voyage I have begun, I should find the choice 
 very hard. Farewell, my niece and my friend.' 
 He went on speaking, although the room was 
 full of the sound of weeping. But at last he 
 asked the company to depart, and only desired 
 to see Montaigne's brother, M. de Beauregard, 
 a follower of the Protestant faith. ' Would 
 you like me to say something that I have it 
 on my mind to tell you ? ' he began, after 
 thanking him for coming. Beauregard 
 begged that he would. There was no one, 
 said La Boetie, in whose single-minded zeal 
 for religion he believed as strongly as in that 
 of Beauregard. He knew that the abuses of 
 the Church, sorely needing correction, had 
 prompted his course. ' For the moment,' he 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 29 
 
 went on, ' I have no wish to move you from 
 your path ; in truth I would ask no man to do 
 anything whatever against his conscience. But 
 I want to warn you ... to flee from ex- 
 tremes ; be not so grim or so violent; form no 
 band, no body, apart ; unite all together. . . . 
 Take what I say in good part . . . for to say 
 it have I reserved myself to this hour, that, 
 perchance, considering my condition, you 
 might give more weight to my words.' 
 
 The next day began his last agony. Even 
 his courage yielded for a moment. He called 
 Montaigne ' piteously.' ' My brother,' he 
 said, ' have you no pity for all the torments 
 that I suffer ? ' But even then, when Mon- 
 taigne quoted Pindar, he was able to give a 
 counter-quotation. 
 
 On Tuesday he received Extreme Unction, 
 professed his faith and his humility, and, 
 when the priest had gone, begged Montaigne 
 and his uncle to pray for him — 'the best 
 office,' he added, ' that one Christian can do 
 for another.' His uncle placed a coverlet 
 upon him. ' It belongs to a noble heart to 
 desire to owe more to one to whom he already 
 owes much,' he said, citing Cicero's Epistles. 
 He often reminds us of Sir Thomas More. 
 Shortly afterwards he said to one near him — 
 
30 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 ' My good friend, I was here on earth on 
 purpose to pay a debt, but I have found a 
 kind creditor who has remitted it ' ; and later, 
 as he woke from sleep with a start — ' Good, 
 good, let it come when it will ; I wait for it 
 gaily, standing upright.' 
 
 While Montaigne was at supper that even- 
 ing, he was suddenly sent for. ' I am,' said 
 La Boetie, ' no longer a man, I am only of the 
 human species ' ; and, indeed, adds Montaigne, 
 ' he was no more than the image and shadow 
 of a man.' But he was upheld — the best 
 moment of his life was the last. ' Brother, 
 friend,' he cried, ' please God that I may 
 behold the reality of the imaginations that 
 I have just had ! ' After a long silence, ' for 
 his tongue began to refuse to do its work,' 
 ' What are they, brother ? ' asked Montaigne. 
 ' Great, great,' he replied. ' There has been 
 no time in my life,' said Montaigne, ' when I 
 have not had the honour to share in every 
 imagination that passed through you ; do you 
 not still wish me to enjoy them ? ' 'I am 
 one with you in this,' answered he, ' but, my 
 brother, I cannot tell them — they are wonder- 
 ful, infinite, inexpressible.' ' And we got no 
 farther,' added Montaigne — ' he could say no 
 more.' Death came nearer ; he heard the 
 sobs of his wife. A little while before, he had 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 31 
 
 still kept a smiling face for her, had called 
 her, said he had a story to tell her, and then 
 stopped, unable to speak. Now again he tried 
 to encourage her. ^ Ma Semblance,' said he, 
 ' " why torment yourself before the time ? will 
 you not have pity on me ? Take courage, 
 for in truth the half of my distress is for the 
 grief I see you suffer. ... As for the ills we 
 feel in ourselves, it is not, strictly speaking, 
 we ourselves who feel them, but certain senses 
 that God has put in us ; but what we feel for 
 others, we feel through our understanding. . . . 
 But I am going ! " (This he said because 
 faintness had seized him.) Then, fearing he 
 had frightened his wife, he caught himself up. 
 " I am going to sleep," he said, " good-night, 
 my wife ; go from me." This was the last 
 leave he took of her.' 
 
 When she went, he begged Montaigne to 
 stay near him. ' The thrusts of death grew 
 sharper and more urgent ; his voice became 
 louder.' He entreated Montaigne again and 
 again to give him ' some place to be in.' 
 Montaigne thought he was delirious. ' Since 
 you breathe and speak, and have a body, you 
 have a place,' he said. 
 
 ' True, true, it is so,' he exclaimed, ' but it 
 is not the place I desire ; besides, when all is 
 said, I no longer have a being.' ' God will 
 
32 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 soon give you a better place,' said Montaigne. 
 ' Would I were there ! ' he answered — ' these 
 three days I have longed to be gone.' ' After 
 that he often called me,' adds Montaigne, 
 ' only to make sure that I was near him. And 
 an hour afterwards, or thereabouts, saying my 
 name once or twice, and heaving a great sigh, 
 he gave up the ghost.' ^ 
 
 So died Etienne de la Boetie, before he was 
 thirty-four, and with him died, perhaps, the 
 best part of Montaigne. It seems right to 
 dwell long upon this episode, even at the 
 sacrifice of due proportion, because of the 
 immense difference it made in Montaigne's 
 life. It cut it into two halves. It was not 
 only his friend's death that made the mark ; 
 it was the manner of his dying. The impres- 
 sion left by his deathbed, most of all by those 
 unexpressed visions, helped Montaigne to keep 
 something alive that might else have shrunk, 
 or even withered. But his heart contracted. 
 After he had lost him, love had little to do 
 with his life. He knew, indeed, only two 
 real affections — that for his father, which had 
 always been there ; that for the friend he had 
 chosen. And it was the friend, and the friend 
 alone, in whom he was able to forget himself. 
 
 1 Lettres de Montaigne : A Monseigneur, Monseigneur de 
 Montaigne for the description of La Bo^tie's death. 
 
^fia wm 
 
 Su;na'1'ure ov Etienne de i,a Boktie. 
 
 SivETCH OF THE ClIATEAU J)E MONTAIGNE, TAKEi\ ABOUT I7S9 
 
 BY M. Lacour. 
 
 Signature of Michel de Montaigne. 
 
 Seal with the arms of Montaigne. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 33 
 
 II 
 
 The finest side of the next two years of 
 Montaigne's life was his loyahy to Madame 
 de la Boetie — his faithful efforts to console her. 
 But he found the task impossible : ' he could 
 not,' he said, ' lay his axe to the root.' She 
 remained inconsolable. These years are best 
 left unrecorded. Maddened by grief, Mon- 
 taigne deliberately sought distraction through 
 his senses ; but, like many intellectual people, 
 his vices were the result of curiosity rather 
 than temperament, and his curiosity came to 
 an end. He thought himself very reasonable. 
 Even in his vices he ' did not,' he said, 
 ' venture far from home.' ^ And after the two 
 years he married Mademoiselle Fran9oise de 
 Chassaigne, a lady of Bordeaux. He makes 
 no secret of his reasons for marrying. He 
 believed in the institution of the family, and 
 he wished to be made comfortable. He did 
 not care whether he loved his wife or not. 
 He did not care for children, but he cared for 
 his name and his estate. His heart had still 
 
 1 Eisais, iii. 2 . ' Du Repentir,' 
 
34 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 no room for any feeling but regret ; his wife 
 was bound to be, in some measure, the victim 
 of his sorrow for La Boetie, 
 
 ' Will any one ever compute,' he asked, 
 ' the value of a friend compared with these 
 civil unions ? ... As I know by too sure an 
 experience, there is no consolation for the loss 
 of our friends so soothing as the knowledge 
 that we forgot to tell them nothing we wished 
 to tell — that we held with them perfect con- 
 verse and entire. Oh, my friend ! Am I the 
 better for having loved such intercourse ? or 
 the worse ? Surely I am much the better. 
 My grief for him is my comfort and my 
 honour. Is it not the sweet and pious office 
 of my life for evermore to celebrate his 
 obsequies ? Is there an enjoyment in the 
 world which is worth my privation ? ' ^ 
 
 All the same, in spite of this indiiference to 
 his wife, he was faithful to her. It was part 
 of his code of manly honesty, and, on the 
 score of morality, Madame de Montaigne had 
 nothing to complain of. On other scores, 
 needful to her heart, who knows ? But 
 Montaigne shall speak for himself. 
 
 ' I should deliberately have fled from a 
 marriage with Wisdom herself — that is, if she 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 8 : ' De I'AfFection des pJres aux enfants.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 35 
 
 would have had me. But talk as you will, 
 custom and the common habit of life are too 
 strong for us. For instance, the greater part 
 of my actions are not directed by my choice. 
 At all events, I was led hereunto [to marriage] 
 for reasons outside myself, and came to it 
 certainly worse prepared and more hostile 
 than I am now, when I have tried it. For 
 all that men think me so licentious, I have, in 
 truth, more severely observed the marriage- 
 laws than I had either promised or hoped. 
 Directly one hath submitted to an obligation, 
 one must keep one's neck under the yoke of 
 common duty, or, at least, one must try to do 
 so. For if one doth not always fulfil one's 
 duty, at least one must always love it ; and 
 one must recognise the treachery of marrying 
 without espousing one another. . . . Marriage 
 hath for its share, usefulness, justice, honour, 
 and constancy — a flat pleasure but a universal 
 one. Love is founded upon delight alone, 
 and giveth it, truly, of a kind more poignant, 
 more caressive, more vital. ^ 
 
 ' A man doth not marry for himself, what- 
 ever people say ; he marrieth, quite as much, 
 if not more, for his posterity and his family. 
 The uses and interests of marriage concern our 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 5 : ' Sur des vers de Virgile,' 
 
36 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 race, they reach far beyond ourselves. Never- 
 theless, I like the fashion of arranging marriages 
 by a third hand rather than by one's own — by 
 the judgment of others, not by oneself. How 
 far is all this from the conventional love affair ! ' 
 . . . ' A happy marriage, if there be such, 
 rejecteth the company and conditions of love.' ^ 
 
 ' Marriage is a bargain full of so many 
 thorny circumstances, that it is hard for the 
 will of a woman to keep to it long, with her 
 whole self. The married state of men is a 
 little better than that of women, yet even 
 they find it a hard enough business.' ^ 
 
 Montaigne barely tried to clear the thorns for 
 his wife. Chivalry was not what he made for. 
 He gave her a free hand, but a dull existence. 
 
 ' The most useful and honourable knowledge 
 and occupation for the mother of a family is 
 knowledge concerning her household. . . . 
 Experience hath taught me to demand of a 
 married woman, above all other virtues, the 
 virtue of household economy. I give her 
 scope, for by my absence I leave all domestic 
 government in her hands. In more homes 
 than one I see — and I see it with anger — that 
 Monsieur comes back about noon in the sulks, 
 
 * Essais, iii. 5 : ' Sur des vers de Virgile.' 
 2 Essais, ii. 35 : ' De trois bonnes femmes.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 37 
 
 boiling over with business worries, to find 
 Madame still doing her hair and dressing up 
 in her closet. That is a fashion only for 
 queens. ... It is absurd and unjust that the 
 idleness of our women should be nourished on 
 our sweat and our labour. If the husband 
 provide the substance, Nature herself demands 
 that woman should provide the form. . . .' 
 ' Marriage meaneth a kind of converse which 
 easily cooleth through propinquity — a con- 
 verse which is harmed by assiduity. Every 
 strange woman seemeth unto us a comely 
 woman ; and every man knoweth by experi- 
 ence that the continual sight of one another 
 cannot give the pleasure which cometh of 
 taking and leaving by fits and starts. As for 
 me, these interruptions fill me with a fresh 
 love towards my family, and restore me in 
 pleasanter fashion to the groove of my home. 
 . . • And I know that kindliness hath arms 
 long enough to stretch and join across from 
 one corner of the world to another — more 
 especially this married sort of kindliness, in 
 the which there existeth a constant intercom- 
 munication of services which awaken obliga- 
 tion and remembrance.^ 
 
 Montaigne, it will be seen, took various 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanit6.' 
 
38 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 measures to avoid this ' continual sight of one 
 another,' chief among them the tower that he 
 built for himself, into which his wife might not 
 enter. That she might find his restrictions te- 
 dious never troubled his head. He graciously 
 allowed her, it is true, to dabble in a little 
 village doctoring. In his own home, he 
 wrote, it happened that his wife had a store of 
 ' paltry ' drugs and medicines for the benefit 
 of the people, and she ' used the same 
 medicine for fifty different maladies ' — 
 medicines that she would not take- herself; 
 then she 'triumphed in the wonderful results.'^ 
 
 From all this, however, it is hard to gather 
 their permanent relations to one another. 
 That they were not warm is apparent. .When 
 , Montaigne says that the best treatment for 
 feminine grievances is indulgent but unremit- 
 ting silence, the advice is too particular not to 
 be personal. And so is such a comment as — 
 
 ' Folk say that Gascon heads have this pre- 
 rogative — that you can more easily make a 
 man bite hot iron, than make a Gascon 
 woman loose her teeth from an opinion 
 that she has conceived in temper. And blows 
 and compulsion exasperate her.' ^ 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 37 : ' De la Ressemblance des enfants aux p^res.' 
 ^ Essais, ii. 32 : 'Defence de S6n^que et de Plutarque.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 39 
 
 Madame de Montaigne was probably some- 
 thing of a scold, and was undeterred by her 
 husband's formidable speechlessness — ' Very 
 virtuous, though not always able to listen to 
 virtue,' to quote his words. ' The fault is 
 committed, God forgive me ! ' was an entry 
 said to be in his diary, in which, it is reported, 
 he confessed that in one of the Essays,^ ' for this 
 once only he had taken his wife for a subject.' 
 
 As time went on they evidently got used 
 to one another and arrived at a modus vivendi. 
 At any rate, we find him dedicating to her 
 La Boetie's French version of Plutarch's 
 ' Letter of Consolation to his Wife,' a fact 
 which has significance, as it followed close 
 upon the death of their eldest child. ' My 
 wife,' it runs, 'you understand well enough 
 that according to present fashions it is not the 
 right thing for a man of the world still to 
 court and to caress you ; for men say that a 
 clever man can quite well take a woman to 
 himself, but that it is a fool's part to marry 
 her. Let them talk ; I, for my part, cling 
 to the simple ways of old times. It is for 
 love of them that I trim my hair as I do. . . , 
 Let us live — you and I, my wife — in the old 
 French fashion.' 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 31 : 'De la Colere.' 
 
40 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 He follows this by reminding her of 
 La Boetie's writings ; and then, ' a wish took 
 me,' he continued, ' to communicate them to 
 my friends. And because I have, I think, 
 none more familiar than you, I send you the 
 consolatory letter of Plutarch to his wife . . . 
 vexed as I am that fortune hath made this gift 
 so appropriate to you. ... I leave to Plutarch 
 the office of consoling you and of showing 
 you what is your duty.' ^ 
 
 It was a softer moment than usual when 
 Montaigne, the witness of her sorrow, wrote 
 these words. But, at other times, he was not 
 without consideration for her. Some years later, 
 when he had a fall from his horse, and she 
 hearing the news, hastened out to meet him, 
 and beheld him stretched helpless upon a litter, 
 his first thought on returning to consciousness 
 was that a horse should be provided for her, 
 lest the rough road should fatigue her feet. 
 
 She was no doubt an excellent nurse. But 
 she was also evidently a conventional woman, 
 and Montaigne, although he demanded de- 
 corum, had no use for conventionality. When 
 he found that his only daughter, Lenor, had 
 the same ordinary disposition, he abandoned 
 her education to her mother, leaving every- 
 
 1 Lettres de Montaigne : ' A ma femme.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 41 
 
 thing in her hands, excepting the matter of 
 truthfulness. lainov\ franchise he looked after 
 himself. But it must be admitted that he 
 had no natural paternal feeling. Six girls 
 were born to him, of whom only one survived 
 infancy. When he was asked how many 
 children he had had, he could not remember, 
 and he misdated the death of his eldest 
 daughter. ' I know nothing,' he says, ' of that 
 strong tie which is said to bind men to the 
 future by the children who transmit their 
 name and their honour. . . . Already, of 
 myself, I cling only too much to this life and 
 to the world ; I am quite contented to be in 
 the hands of fortune by reason of all the essential 
 facts of being, without otherwise prolonging 
 her jurisdiction over me ; and I have never 
 thought that to be without children was a 
 lack which would make life less complete or 
 less contented. The vocation of sterility 
 certainly has its advantages.' ^ 
 
 ' Now if we grant this simple fact, that we 
 love our children because we have engendered 
 them, wherefore we call them our other selves, 
 it seemeth as if there were another kind of pro- 
 geny which Cometh forth from us, the which 
 is of no less value. For the beings that we 
 
 » Essait, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanitd' 
 
42 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 engender by our souls, the birth of our spirit, 
 our courage, our intelligence, are produced by 
 a part of us nobler than the body. They are 
 still more our own ; in this act of generation 
 we are both father and mother to them. This 
 offspring costs us much dearer and bringeth 
 us in more honour — that is if they show any- 
 thing of good. The worth of our other chil- 
 dren is a great deal more theirs than ours, the 
 part we have in them is a very slight one ; 
 but of these others, all the beauty and the 
 grace and the price are our own. And so they 
 represent and record us by far more vitally 
 than the rest.' ^ 
 
 There is no apathy here. Montaigne leaves 
 us in no doubt about his love for his works — 
 the children of his brain. Would he have 
 said the same things of his other children if 
 he had had a son f 
 
 It is pleasant to remember that when he 
 was on his travels among the Alps, his only 
 comment upon a certain walk that he took 
 was that it would not have been too much 
 for his little girl. To remember her thus she 
 must have pleased him. But he did not take 
 an interest in her. His interest was all in 
 mind and character ; he seemed too intel- 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 8 : ' De I'Affection des p^res aux enfants.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 43 
 
 lectual to be a father — too intellectual and 
 too lazy, for he could make no effort over his 
 natural inclinations. Perhaps, too, he had too 
 poor an idea of woman to draw much out of 
 a daughter. Indulgent contempt does not 
 make a very fruitful atmosphere, and it was 
 with indulgent contempt that Montaigne sur- 
 rounded his womankind. This, not confi- 
 dence, was the motive which prompted him 
 to leave Lenor's upbringing to her mother. 
 
 ' It is only reasonable,' he writes, ' to allow 
 the administration of affairs to mothers before 
 their children reach the age prescribed by law 
 at which they themselves can be responsible. 
 But that father would have reared them ill 
 who could not hope that in their maturity 
 they would have more wisdom and more com- 
 petence than his wife.'^ 
 
 ' We train them [girls] from childhood up- 
 wards, for the enterprises of love. Their grace, 
 their dress, their knowledge, their speech, all 
 their education, concerns this end, and this 
 alone. Their governesses impress nothing on 
 them but the face of this love — even when 
 they do so thus continually for the purpose of 
 giving them a distaste for it. My daughter, 
 the only child I have, is now of an age to 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 8 : ' De I'Affection des peres aux enfants.' 
 
44 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 marry. She is of a slow constitution, thin and 
 namby-pamby. She has been brought up in 
 this fashion by her mother, and is only now 
 just beginning to put away the simple follies 
 of childhood. The other day, while I was 
 present, she was reading a French book, and 
 the word fouteau turned up — the name of a 
 well-known tree.^ Her governess stopped her 
 rather roughly and made her slur over this 
 difficult place. I left her alone, that I might 
 not disturb their rules and regulations, for I 
 never meddle with this government of theirs. 
 Feminine policy has a mysterious course, and 
 we must just let them go on their way ; but 
 if I am not mistaken, the conversation of 
 twenty lackeys would not have done as much 
 to imprint upon her imagination the under- 
 standing and the use of these sealed syllables 
 as the reprimand of that old woman. '^ 
 
 Montaigne would always have preferred 
 the company of lackeys to that of the old 
 woman, for his daughter as well as for himself. 
 Had she been more of a character, she might 
 have interested him. We know little of her 
 later, excepting that after her father's death 
 she gave all his books to the Grand- Vicar of the 
 Archbishopric of Auch, a detail which does not 
 
 1 Beech tree. 2 ^ssaU, iii. 5 : ' Sur des vers de Virgile.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 45 
 
 raise her in our esteem. She was probably for- 
 mal and correct. And yet in spite of the father's 
 cold words, it is a pleasant picture : that of the 
 panelled parlour, and the dull young girl reading 
 her book, and the stiff governess, probably most 
 anxious to conceal her ignorance before Mon- 
 taigne ; and the philosopher himself, leaning 
 back in his armchair, dressed in black (he 
 wore nothing but black or white), his fur- 
 trimmed cap upon his head, Virgil or Plu- 
 tarch's Lives in his hand, as he watched from 
 under his eyes, and kept his formidable smile 
 — his yet more formidable silence. 
 
 After all, if Montaigne's marriage was not 
 ideal, it was not entirely his fault. Had he 
 known nobler or more intelligent women, his 
 standard would probably have altered. His 
 friendship at the end of his life with the intel- 
 lectual Mademoiselle de Gournay, his Jille 
 d'' alliance, although it involved the flattery of 
 a young girl's adulation of a great man already 
 growing old, was not devoid of significance. 
 Nor was he without his notions of happy 
 marriage : for him it would always have lain 
 in friendship. But women, he complains, are 
 incapable of this sort of feeling. 
 
 ' Apart from the fact that marriage is a 
 bargain, the which hath nothing free but the 
 
46 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 entrance into it ; apart from the time that it 
 lasteth, its compulsory character, its dependence 
 on things other than our wills (and it is a 
 bargain which is struck for ends beyond 
 itself) ; apart from all this, I say, there are a 
 thousand unforeseen rockets to ward off, each 
 enough to snap the thread and disturb the 
 course of a warm affection. In marriage 
 such things happen where, in friendship, 
 intercourse concerneth friendship's self alone. 
 But, truth to say, the normal woman is not 
 capable of the converse — the companionship, 
 which is the nurse of that holy bond ; nor 
 doth her soul seem strong enough to sustain the 
 pressure of a knot so close and so enduring. 
 Otherwise, if there could but exist a free and 
 voluntary relationship, wherein not only the 
 spirit would have entire enjoyment, but also 
 the body . . . wherein the whole man would 
 be engaged — if this might be, then it is 
 certain that friendship would thereby be made 
 stronger and fuller. But we have no instance 
 that this sex hath ever achieved anything of 
 the kind.' ^ 
 
 And yet, if she did, ' No woman who had 
 relished the taste thereof would fill the post 
 of mistress to her husband. If she be lodged 
 
 1 Essais, iv 28 : 'De I'Amitid' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 47 
 
 in his affection as his wife, she is far more 
 safely and more honourably lodged. . . . The 
 fact that happy marriage is so rare is a sign of 
 its value. When we fashion it finely and take 
 it the right way, there is no nobler institution 
 in society.' ^ 
 
 With his strange power of intellectual im- 
 partiality, Montaigne could even look at 
 women's circumstances with justice ; he was 
 almost a champion of their rights. 
 
 ' Women,' he says, ' are not the least in the 
 wrong when they refuse the rules of life 
 obtaining in the world ; it is the men who 
 made these laws without them.' ^ 
 
 ' Male and female are cast in the same 
 mould ; excepting for habits and institutions, 
 the difference is not considerable. Plato 
 invites the one and the other indifferently 
 to companionship in all studies, all forms of 
 exercise and offices, all vocations in his Re- 
 public, whether warlike or peaceful ; and the 
 philosopher Antisthenes admitted no distinc- 
 tion between their virtue and ours. It is 
 much easier to accuse one sex than to excuse 
 another.' ® 
 
 To be just is the next best thing to being 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 5 : ' Sur des vers de Virgile.' 
 
 2 Ibid. * Ibid. 
 
48 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 chivalrous, and Montaigne was eminently just. 
 He was never a bully ; what is more, he was 
 nearly always good tempered. But when he 
 lost control, he lost it handsomely. ' When 
 I get angry, I get violently angry, but as 
 quickly and secretly as I can. . . . I go about 
 scattering indiscriminately all the insulting 
 words I can find, never seeing whether my 
 arrows hit pertinently where I compute they 
 would hurt most — for I usually use nothing 
 but my tongue. ... In proportion as age 
 maketh my temper sharper, I study how I may 
 resist it, and I shall contrive henceforth, if I 
 can, so that I become the less morose and 
 hard to please the more excuse and inclination 
 I have to be so.' ^ 
 
 With his servants, he tells us, he occasion- 
 ally became deliberately enraged, ' for the sake 
 of the proper discipline of the household ' ; 
 but such gusts passed in a moment. He made 
 a rule of ' economising anger instead of lavish- 
 ing it at any price, for to do that taketh away 
 its weight and its effect ; shrill screaming, 
 grown common . . . becometh a habit, and 
 every one treateth it with contempt. If you 
 cry out upon a servant for a theft, he will not 
 mind at all if he hath heard you use the same 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 31 : ' De la Colore.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 49 
 
 tone a hundred times when he hath only 
 placed a seat wrongly, or when he hath not 
 rinsed a glass out well. And people must 
 never get vaguely angry ; they must take care 
 that reproof reacheth the person of whom 
 they complain ; for usually they begin to 
 shout at him before he hath come into their 
 presence, and they go on shouting for an age 
 after he hath left it.' ^ 
 
 He was an indulgent master, probably rather 
 lax about the servants' conduct, so long as 
 they did their work well. ' I make few in- 
 quiries,' he said, ' about a footman's morals, I 
 find out whether he is industrious. And I am 
 not so much afraid of a muleteer who gambleth 
 as of one who is an imbecile ; or of a cook 
 who sweareth as of one who is ignorant.' ^ 
 
 And he trusted his servants — more from 
 indolence, perhaps, than from any confidence 
 he had in their honour : 
 
 ' Whoso hath charge of my purse on a 
 journey, hath entire charge, free from control. 
 ... I lend a hand to my own ignorance, 
 and purposely keep a confused and uncertain 
 account of my money ; up to a certain point 
 I am glad to feel doubtful on this matter. 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 31 : ' De la Colere.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. 28 : ' De I'Amiti^.' 
 
 D 
 
50 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 One must leave a little room for the disloyalty 
 or imprudence of one's valet. If w^e ourselves 
 have enough money left, in all, to do what Mre 
 want ... we can leave some margin for his 
 benefit — the portion of the gleaner.' ^ 
 
 He therefore had as few attendants as was 
 then possible ; a retinue oppressed him. 
 
 ' The most foolish figure that a man can 
 cut in his own house is when we see him 
 hampered by the arrangements of his house- 
 hold — whispering in the ear of one footman, 
 threatening another with his eye. A house- 
 hold should glide on by imperceptible means 
 and keep an ordinary course. 
 
 ' To my mind, if we make any mention to 
 our guests of the hospitality that we are giving 
 them — whether to boast or to apologise — we 
 are guilty of ugly manners.' ^ 
 
 Of Montaigne's household, hospitaUty, and 
 habits we probably know more homely detail 
 than we do concerning those of any private 
 man, excepting, perhaps, Dr. Johnson. It is 
 a fascinating game to imagine these two 
 apostles of common sense discussing, in Elysian 
 fields, the ideal manner of life. They were 
 at opposite ends of the pole. What would 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 9 : 'De la Vanitd.' 
 
 2 Ibid. 
 
TiiF. TowKK iw Muxtaigxe's ikk'se IX 1S2 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 51 
 
 Johnson have said to Montaigne's tower ? 
 But Montaigne's tower was the centre of his 
 whole scheme of existence ; it made his house 
 a symbol of his creed ; to know him, we 
 must begin by entering it. 
 
 ' Every man,' he wrote, ' should have a 
 back-shop all his own ... in the which he 
 can establish his true liberty, his chief refuge, 
 his best solitude. And here it is that he must 
 hold his ordinary intercourse with himself.' ^ 
 
 ' Miserable, to my way of thinking, is he 
 who hath no place where he can be at home 
 to himself; where he can privily court him- 
 self; where he can hide himself. To me, 
 it is much more bearable to be always alone 
 than never.' ^ 
 
 So, on one side of his dwelling-house, he 
 built himself a tower to which he could 
 retire to live at ease ; and here he spent most 
 of his days. The average man, when he is 
 bored by family existence, goes into the world, 
 and distracts himself by politics or business. 
 Montaigne said that he had used all his store 
 of ambition for La Boetie, and had none left 
 for himself. But the truth was that he was 
 naturally indolent, and even had he not had a 
 
 1 Essais, i. 39 : 'De la Solitude.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 3 : ' De trois Commerces.' 
 
52 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 distaste for affairs, it suited him better to have 
 one minute's walk to his refuge than to seek 
 it outside with any effort. 
 
 Nobody might enter his tower, least of all 
 his wife. As for friends, no doubt his cronies 
 and fellow-scholars were permitted to find him 
 there, but his visitors had to come on his own 
 terms. He never escorted them to the door. 
 He knew, he said, that they liked it, but it 
 went against his grain, and he thought it 
 better to offend people whom he only saw 
 occasionally, than to offend himself every day. 
 On the third floor of his tower he had a 
 bedroom in which to rest, or spend the night, 
 should he desire to escape from home. On 
 the ground floor was his chapel, so that he 
 could hear Mass thence in comfort, as he lay 
 in bed above. There was a picture here of 
 St. Michael and the Dragon — the picture 
 which, no doubt, supplied the opportunist, 
 Montaigne, with his analogy, when he wrote 
 about his willingness to carry a candle in one 
 hand for St. Michael, and a candle for the 
 Dragon in the other. But it was the floor 
 above the chapel — the second floor — which 
 was the important one. This was the floor 
 of the library — the raison d'etre of the ' back- 
 shop.' Another small chamber led out of it. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 53 
 
 a warmer place where Montaigne could avoid 
 draughts, an annex of the larger room, added 
 later. And yet it was more than an annex — 
 it was a complement. We must look at it 
 before we linger in the library — it has its own 
 significance ; it was Montaigne's closet of 
 recreation ; it represented his tastes. The 
 walls were decorated with such works as 
 pleased him : pictures of subjects taken from 
 Ovid — of Venus, Mars, and Vulcan, of Cymon 
 and Pero ; over the door was Venus reposing, 
 below it a mysterious picture of two ships, 
 the one almost foundering, the other in full 
 sail, while some swimmers are making towards 
 the shore. Might not this doorway with its 
 paintings stand for the entrance into Mon- 
 taigne's thought — for its symbol ? Pleasure at 
 rest in security, presiding over the ship of 
 philosophy — Hedonist philosophy — which is 
 making safe way over the sea ; while its unwise 
 fellow-ship — the ship, who knows of what 
 dream or ideal ? — sinks with all its crew, 
 unless it be for a few desperate strugglers who 
 try for land they may never reach. Perhaps 
 the other ornaments of Montaigne's cabinet, 
 a collection of barbaric instruments of music, 
 add the finishing touch to the image, and 
 stand for that untiring curiosity about every 
 
54 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 form of life — the stranger the better — which 
 was an integral part of Montaigne's code. 
 They were more characteristic than the in- 
 scription that went round the room, for the in- 
 scription was what Montaigne thought himself 
 to be, not what he was. ' In the year of our 
 Lord, 1 57 1,' it ran, ' at the age of thirty-eight, 
 on the last day of February, being the anni- 
 versary of his birth. Monsieur de Montaigne, 
 long weary of the service of the Court and of 
 public employments [this meant no more than 
 his magistracy and two or three public 
 missions, besides a few visits to Royalty — for 
 he was not made a mayor till eleven years 
 later], 'while still in his full vigour, betook 
 himself to the bosom of the learned Virgins, 
 where, if the fates permit, he may pass in calm 
 and freedom from all cares what little shall 
 yet remain of his allotted time, now more 
 than half run out. This his ancestral abode 
 and sweet retreat he hath consecrated to his 
 freedom, tranquillity, and leisure.' ^ 
 
 So much for the closet. We may close its 
 door and enter the library. Here, over the 
 shelves of choice editions, a thousand in all — 
 tooled volumes, red, brown, and gold — there 
 ran, round the frieze, a different legend — one 
 
 1 Montaigne : Dowden. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 55 
 
 from the heart. This hall of letters, this home 
 of Montaigne's mind, was dominated by the 
 memory of La Boetie. ' Inasmuch,' it stood 
 written, ' as he desired that there should be some 
 unique memorial of his most sweet, most dear, 
 and most close companion, than whom our 
 age hath seen none better, none more learned, 
 none more graceful, none more absolutely 
 perfect, Michel de Montaigne, unhappily 
 bereft of so beloved a guardian of his life, 
 mindful of their mutual affection and of the 
 kindly feeling which united them, hath set 
 up, since nought more expressive could be 
 found, this learned shelf, a special laboratory 
 for the mind, in the which is his delight.' 
 
 The bare rafters above the frieze were a 
 library in themselves, a book of aphorisms 
 which summed up Montaigne's mind, for 
 they were covered by fifty-four sayings from 
 Homer, Plato, St. Paul, the Psalms, Ecclesi- 
 astes, Epictetus, Herodotus, Terence, Persius, 
 Horace, Pliny, Lucretius, Martial, and 
 L'Hopital, the one modern among them. 
 ' Who knoweth if what men call dying be 
 not living, what men call living be not 
 dying ? ' is one sentence ; ' The for and the 
 against are both possible,' is another. And 
 here are a few more from the collection : — 
 
56 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 ' Men are perturbed not by things them- 
 selves, but by the opinions they have of 
 things.' 
 
 ' The judgments of the Lord are like the 
 great deep.' 
 
 ' Be not wise in your own conceit : God 
 made man like to a shadow, of which who 
 shall judge when the sun hath set ? ' 
 
 ' Be not wise above that which is usual, 
 but be soberly wise.' 
 
 ' Guiding ourselves by custom and the 
 senses.' 
 
 ' Rejoice in those things that are present — 
 all else is beyond thee.' 
 
 ' It may be and it may not be.' 
 
 ' I determine nothing. I do not compre- 
 hend things, I suspend judgment, I examine.' 
 
 Or this briefer summary of true agnosti- 
 cism : 
 
 ' In equilibrium.' 
 
 Or these words from Terence : 
 
 ' I am a man, and nothing human is alien 
 to me.' 
 
 The books that La Boetie had left him 
 formed the nucleus of the library ; the rest, 
 and they were many, had been added. They 
 were scattered we know not when, and only 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 57 
 
 seventy-six have been re-discovered, among 
 them Ccesar's Commentaries with Montaigne's 
 name inside it, bought for ninepence on the 
 quays of Paris. Some of them are annotated 
 by him, in some he has written a final criti- 
 cism. Nearly half of them are history ; 
 thirty-one are works in Latin, two in Greek. 
 There is a large proportion of modern poets : 
 Baif (he put great faith in the Pleiade), 
 Petrarch, Boccaccio. There must also have 
 been an Ariosto — his fine comparison of him 
 with Virgil proves his knowledge. There 
 were probably, too, manuscripts of ballads — 
 of the ' popular, purely national poetry ' which 
 has, he says, ' graces and simplicities in the 
 which it may compare with the chief beau- 
 ties of the perfect poetry of art.' ^ For medio- 
 crity alone he had no houseroom. ' Mediocre 
 poetry, which sticks between the two, is a 
 thing for scorn, dishonoured and worthless.' ^ 
 . . . ' We have many more poets,' he adds, ' than 
 judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier 
 to make it than to know it.' ^ 
 
 And certainly there was a Rabelais ; he knew 
 his writing well and misunderstood him. Was 
 
 1 Essais, i. 54 : ' Des vaines subtilites.' 
 
 2 Ibid. 
 
 5 Essais, i. 37 : ' Du jeune Caton.' 
 
58 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 Montaigne too near him to see his meaning ? 
 Like Ronsard, he treated him as a buffoon. 
 Other authors, more admired by him, had evi- 
 dently a place in his shelves. He was versed in 
 modern history, had read Guicciardini and found 
 his cynicism shallow, was steeped in Com- 
 mines and had unbounded admiration for his 
 moral force. But his favourites were always 
 among the classics. Plutarch, Seneca, Virgil, 
 were the three gods of his adoration ; Homer 
 was almost their rival, Ccesar's Commentaries ran 
 them close, and Terence and Lucan followed 
 after. Tacitus was to him ' a nursery-garden 
 of discourses political and ethical ' ; ^ Cicero 
 he disliked, because he was eloquent for the 
 sake of eloquence. 
 
 But Montaigne was at his best with Plu- 
 tarch and with Virgil. Plutarch's Lives were 
 his Bible, as far as he had any Bible — the 
 book in which he sometimes recognised the 
 higher possibilities of human nature. ' He 
 is,' he wrote, 'so full, so universal, that on 
 every occasion he fits himself to your business 
 and holds out to you a generous hand — a 
 hand inexhaustible in its gifts of wealth and 
 of beauty.' ^ As for Virgil, he filled him with 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 8 : 'De I'Art de conKrer.' 
 ^ Essais, iii. 5 : ' Sur des vers de Virgile.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 59 
 
 a kind of passionate enchantment. It is curi- 
 ous that Montaigne, who had not the poet's 
 temperament, should have been such an ardent 
 reader of poetry. It had the power to carry 
 him away. Only ' to a low degree can it be 
 judged by set precepts and by art. But the 
 good, the excessive, the divine, is above rules 
 and above reason. Whoever looketh upon her 
 beauty with steady, unwinking sight, seeth her 
 no more than he would see the splendour of a 
 flash of lightning. She doth not exercise our 
 judgment, she ravisheth, she raVageth it. . . . 
 From my earliest childhood, poetry hath had 
 this power — the power to pierce me through 
 and to transport me.' ^ And of all the poets, 
 Virgil ' pierced ' him deepest — Virgil, ' who 
 soareth aloft with full-spread wings, ever follow- 
 ing his point with a high pitch and a strong ' 
 — while Ariosto (with whom he contrasts 
 him) is fain, ' for fear his breath should fail 
 him, to sit down at every field's end.' No 
 modern literary gourmet could be more sensi- 
 tive than Montaigne was about Virgil. He 
 brooked no banalities. There was nothing 
 that irritated him more than the O^, que cest 
 beau ! which generally followed, he says, the 
 reading of the Mneid. Concerning all the 
 
 1 Essais, i. 37 : 'Dujeune Caton.' 
 
6o MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 ancients, indeed, his enthusiasm is untiring, 
 and his criticism of delicate penetration. ' I 
 can see,' he writes, ' that Latin allureth me by 
 its gracious dignity more than it hath the right 
 to do — just as if I were a child or an illiterate 
 person.' 
 
 And of the Greeks : ' Their writings do 
 not only fill and satisfy me, but they . . . 
 transfix me with admiration. I judge of their 
 beauty ; I behold it, if not completely, to its 
 utmost bounds, at least so far that it is impos- 
 sible for me to aspire thereunto.' ^ 
 
 ' What glory can compare with that of 
 Homer ? There is nothing which liveth on 
 the lips of men like unto his name and his 
 works ; nothing so widely known and wel- 
 comed as Troy and Helen and her wars, the 
 which very likely never happened.' ^ 
 
 His judgment of these classics is larger and 
 finer than it is of later authors. 
 
 ' The constant intercourse I hold with the 
 humours of the ancients, and the image of 
 these rich spirits of bygone times, doth (he 
 writes), perchance, disgust me with other 
 people and with myself.' ^ 
 
 ' Essais, ii. 17 : ' De la Presomption.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. 36 : ' Des plus excellents hommes.' 
 
 ^ Essais, ii. 17 : ' De la Pr&omption. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 6i 
 
 ' When I put myself by the side of those 
 men, and see how feeble and puny I am, how 
 heavy, how asleep, I feel pity — or contempt — 
 for myself. And yet there is one thing that 
 gratifieth me — that my opinions have the 
 honour very often to coincide with theirs, 
 and that if I see, at least I see with their 
 vision, however far I lag behind them. And 
 then I have the power — not vouchsafed to 
 every man — to know the extreme difference 
 that existeth between them and me. . . . He 
 must have very strong legs who undertaketh 
 to walk abreast of those people.' ^ 
 
 ' I knew the Capitol and the map thereof 
 before I knew the Louvre ; and the Tiber 
 before the Seine. I have borne in mind the 
 circumstances and fortunes of LucuUus, Me- 
 tellus, and Scipio more continually than those 
 of any men now among us. . . . In truth, 
 my humour leadeth me to be more zealous 
 to serve the dead ; they can no longer help 
 themselves, and so, it seemeth to me, they 
 need my help all the more. . . . Since I find 
 myself of no use to this mine own age, I 
 throw myself back upon that other.' ^ 
 
 The ancients were no dead authors to 
 
 1 Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'Institution des Enfants.' 
 
 2 Essah, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanit6.' 
 
62 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 Montaigne. In this, he is a modern of the 
 moderns. His love, his knowledge of them 
 were so vivid that they nourished him, became 
 part of his daily life. He used them not 
 remotely, but colloquially, borrowing their 
 words and translating them into the idiom 
 of his day. This, to him, seemed their true 
 use, such plagiarism his right as their lover. 
 Plagiarism, indeed, did not exist for him any 
 more than it did for Shakespeare. But Mon- 
 taigne took more consciously than Shake- 
 speare, and professed plagiarism as his creed. 
 He passed his own laws. It was his business 
 to loot only what he could assimilate and thus 
 transform and make his own. 
 
 ■■ I fly here and there, pecking off from 
 books the sentences that please me, not to 
 keep them, for I have no cupboards, but to 
 transport them.' ^ 
 
 ' He (the reader) must drink up their 
 moisture, not learn their precepts. He may, 
 if he likes, forget boldly whence he hath 
 them, so long as he knoweth how to appro- 
 priate them. Truth and reason are common 
 to all men, and belong no more to him who 
 spake them first than to him who spake them 
 afterwards. Such and such a saying is no more 
 
 1 Essais, i. 25: 'Du Pddantisme.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 63 
 
 Plato's than it is mine, sith that he and I see 
 and understand in the same fashion. The 
 bees pillage the flowers, here, there, every- 
 where, but then they make honey from their 
 takings, and the honey is all theirs : it is no 
 longer thyme or marjoram. And thus it 
 standeth with him who borroweth from other 
 authors. He will fuse them and transform 
 them, to make thereof a venture all his 
 own.' ^ 
 
 Thus Montaigne spent his hours — sipping, 
 settling, flitting with deliberation through his 
 library. Here, too, he jotted down and re- 
 wrote his Essays — the harvest from his books 
 and from his life. He took his labours easily, 
 and we need by no means picture him as 
 always reading or writing in his hermitage. 
 He loved idling there by himself, or with 
 no other companion than his cat. This cat 
 he delighted in watching, much as Anatole 
 France likes to watch his dog. 
 
 ' When,' he says, ' I play with my cat, who 
 knoweth whether she is using me as a way of 
 passing her time even more than I use her 
 for the same purpose ? We entertain one 
 another reciprocally with our cunning tricks. 
 
 1 Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'Institution des Enfants.' 
 
64 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 If I have my hour for advancing or refusing, 
 so hath she.' ^ 
 
 Montaigne was not merely amused by 
 animals, he had a real love for them, ' Con- 
 sidering,' he said, ' that the same Master hath 
 given us lodging in this palace for his service, 
 and that they belong, like us, to his family. 
 Nature hath good reason to enjoin upon us 
 some kind of esteem and affection towards 
 them. . . . Indeed, when all is said, there 
 existeth a common human duty, a certain 
 respect the which attacheth us not only to the 
 beasts who have life and sentiment, but even 
 to the trees and plants. We owe justice 
 to men, and grace and benignity to the other 
 creatures, who are not capable of justice. 
 There is a sort of intercourse between them 
 and us, and a sort of mutual obligation.' ^ 
 
 We hear nothing of Montaigne's dog, if he 
 had one, but his horse played a part in his 
 life ; riding was his favourite form of exercise, 
 even when he was ill and in pain. But for 
 sport he did not care at all, nor for any species 
 of athletics. He did not, he said, take after 
 his agile father. ' There was no man of his 
 age to be found,' he tells us, ' who could rival 
 
 1 Essais, ,ii. 12:' Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. 1 1 : ' De la Cruaute.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 65 
 
 him in bodily exercise, just as I hardly ever 
 find any one who cannot outdo me, save in 
 running, in the which I used to have a 
 mediocre success. ... In dancing and tennis, 
 in wrestling, I have never been able to acquire 
 more than a very slight and ordinary effici- 
 ency; in swimming, fencing, vaulting, and 
 jumping, none at all.' ^ 
 
 Accomplishments were not in Montaigne's 
 line: no one could teach him to play on any 
 instrument, and his voice was what he called 
 ' inept.' ' My hands,' he says, ' are so clumsy 
 that I cannot even write properly myself, so 
 that when I have finished a scrawl, I had 
 rather rewrite it than give myself the trouble 
 of deciphering it ; and my reading is very 
 little better. . . . Although otherwise a good 
 clerk, I do not know how to close up a letter 
 rightly.' ^ . , . ' I would rather compose two 
 letters than fold one, and always leave this 
 task to some one else.' ^ , . . Nor have I ever 
 been able to cut a pen, nor carve decently at 
 table, nor harness a horse, nor carry a bird on 
 my wrist and let it loose, nor speak to dogs, or 
 birds, or horses. My bodily conditions agree, 
 in brief, with those of my soul ; they show 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 17 : 'De la Pr6somption.' ^ Ibid. 
 
 ^ Essais, i. 40 : ' Consideration sur Cicdron.' 
 E 
 
66 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 nothing gay and alert, only a full and steady 
 vigour. I stand hardship well ; but I stand 
 it only so far as my own desires lead me there- 
 unto ; otherwise, unless my palate is tickled by 
 some pleasure involved therein, if I have no 
 other guide than just my will, I am no good 
 at it at all. . . . And as up to this hour I have 
 known no commander, no mastering force, I 
 have marched pretty straight forward at what 
 pace I liked. This hath slackened my fibre 
 and made me useless for the service of others, 
 and no good excepting to myself. ... It hath 
 made me delicate of temperament and in- 
 capable of worry — to such a point that I like 
 people to hide from me my losses and any 
 kind of disturbance that may aiFect me. I 
 allow in my current expenses for what my 
 nonchalance costeth me in food and mainten- 
 ance ; and I like not to know the sum I have 
 in hand, that I may feel my losses the less 
 exactly. As for those who live with me, I 
 pray of them, when affection for me faileth 
 them, together with all its kind results, to 
 take me in with pleasant seemings. For want, 
 indeed, of sufficient strength to suffer the 
 importunity of the adverse accidents to the 
 which we are subject, and because I do not 
 hold myself called to regulate and order our 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 67 
 
 affairs, I abandon myself to fortune, and 
 nourish within myself — as far as I can — this 
 opinion : that it is best to take all things at 
 their worst, and, as for that worst, to resolve 
 to bear it gently and patiently.' ^ 
 
 It was characteristic of Montaigne that he 
 not only knew, but enjoyed his limitations. 
 His own frankness amused him. ' I have 
 not,' he says, 'like Socrates, corrected my 
 natural temperament by the force of reason, 
 and I have not disturbed my instincts by any 
 arts. As I came, so I let myself go on.' ^ 
 If he exaggerated, it was not on the side of 
 his virtues. Some foibles that he describes 
 are hard to believe in. Was his talk, for 
 instance, so dull as he makes out ? ' In con- 
 versation,' he tells us, ' I feel myself weighing 
 heavy on my listeners.' ^ . . . ' If I grow so 
 bold as to break my thread ever so little, I 
 never fail to lose it altogether, and that makes 
 my speech dry and crabbed and constrained 
 . . . my mind is slow and woolly, the least 
 want of clearness sendeth me off my point — 
 any subtlety, howso trivial, will hinder me. 
 My apprehension is slow and confused, but 
 
 1 Essais, ii, 17 : ' De la Pr^omption.' 
 * Essais, iii. 12 : ' De la Physionomie.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. 17 : ' De la Pr6omption.' 
 
68 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 what it hath once grasped, it graspeth well, 
 and embraceth it very closely and deeply and 
 widely, so long as it keepeth hold thereof.' ^ 
 
 He was evidently the constant victim of his 
 own absence of mind, and that was partly the 
 result of that amazingly bad memory to which 
 he devotes such vivid pages. When some- 
 thing that he wanted in his library came 
 into his head, he had to ' confide his need to 
 some one else ' — even when it was something 
 he wanted to write about — for fear of forget- 
 ting it while he crossed the courtyard between 
 his tower and the house. He took three 
 hours to learn two verses of poetry. When 
 he called his servants, he called them by the 
 names of their functions or their countryside, 
 because he could not remember other names. 
 It came easier to him, he said, to know that a 
 name had three syllables, or an ugly sound, or 
 ended with such and such a letter, ' than to 
 recall it'; 'and if,' he adds, 'I should have a 
 long life, I believe that I should forget my 
 own name. So greatly do I excel in forget- 
 fulness, that even my writings . . . are for- 
 gotten with the rest. The public dealeth me 
 blows about them, and I do not feel them.' ^ 
 
 Montaigne was made up of little tastes and 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 17 : ' De la Pr^somption.' 2 /^y^_ 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 69 
 
 habits, not one of which has he left un- 
 chronicled, even to the way in which he 
 rubbed his ears, ' scratching being one of 
 Nature's sweetest gratifications.' ... 'I move 
 with difficulty,' he wrote, ' and am dilatory 
 in all things : in getting up, in going to bed, 
 at my meals. Seven o'clock is early for me, 
 and where I am master I never dine before 
 eleven, or sup till after six.^ . . . 
 
 These were his only two meals ; he re- 
 quired nine hours for sleep, but he never 
 napped in the day ; he was particular about 
 going booted and braced. ' I like,' he says, 
 ' to be shaved after dinner, and find it as diffi- 
 cult to leave off my gloves as my chemise ; 
 nor can I do without washing when I rise, 
 and when I get up from table ; or without 
 the ceiling and curtains of my bed — things 
 very necessary to me. ... I wear no more 
 covering on my leg or thigh in winter than 
 in summer. ... I would willingly dine 
 without a tablecloth, but I should not at all 
 like to dine without a napkin such as they 
 use in Germany. I soil it more than 
 either Germans or Italians, and seek but little 
 help from spoon or fork ; and I regret that 
 we do not still follow a fashion that I once 
 
 ^ Essais, ii. 17: ' De la Pr&omption.' 
 
70 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 saw started, in imitation of royalty — that we 
 should have our napkins changed like our 
 plates, after every course.^ ... A crowd of 
 dishes and courses displeaseth me, as crowds 
 always do. I am easily satisfied with a few. 
 I usually eat salted meats, and I prefer bread 
 without salt. My household baker, contrary 
 to custom hereabouts, makes no other sort for 
 me.^ ... I am not excessively fond of salads 
 or of fruits, excepting melons. My father 
 hated every kind of sauce ; I love them all. 
 ... I am greedy about fish. My Jours maigres 
 turn into my jours gras, and fast-days are my 
 feast-days. ... As for fasting, I used to 
 practise it to keep my vigour in good con- 
 dition for some activity of mind or body. 
 For repletion, in my case, hath a cruelly 
 sluggish efi^ect upon activity. Above all, I 
 detest a foolish marriage between this healthy 
 happy little goddess (of appetite) with that 
 roasting little god of indigestion, all puffed 
 out with fumes of his own wine. . . .' ^ 'It 
 is most unseemly, besides being injurious to 
 health, even to pleasure, to gobble as I do. I 
 often bite my tongue, sometimes my fingers, 
 from sheer haste. . . . There were men at 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 13 : 'De I'Explrience.' 
 
 2 /^«V. s 73,v, 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 71 
 
 Rome who taught graceful mastication, like 
 graceful walking. In my hurry, I lose leisure 
 for talk — that pleasant seasoning of the dinner- 
 table.^ 
 
 As for intercourse at meal-times : 
 
 ' I hate the idea of being compelled to 
 have my mind in the clouds, while I have 
 my body at table . . . when I dance, I 
 dance ; when I sleep, I sleep : in like fashion, 
 when I take a stroll alone in a beautiful 
 orchard, if for part of the time my thoughts 
 are taken up with other topics, for another 
 part I bring them back to my walk, to the 
 orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and 
 to myself.' ^ 
 
 But he did not set out for this walk upon 
 getting up from table. His gastronomies 
 foreshadow those of men to come — of future 
 Herbert Spencers — and he had his code for 
 conduct after meals. 
 
 ' I like to rest a long time after them, 
 and to hear other folk talk, provided I have 
 nothing to do with it. For I grow fatigued, 
 and harm myself by talking with a full stomach 
 — as much as I gain by the exercise of shout- 
 ing and arguing before a meal, the which 
 habit I find most wholesome and pleasant. . . . 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 13 : 'De I'Experience.' ^ Ibid. 
 
72 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 I like a hard bed, and I never use a warming- 
 pan ; but since I have grown old, they give 
 me blankets to warm my feet and stomach. 
 . . . And I like to take my rest, whether 
 lying down or sitting, with my legs as high 
 as the seat, or higher.' ^ 
 
 His orchard strolls were never connected 
 with business. He left the management of 
 the estate to his wife, on the plea that he 
 knew nothing of affairs. 
 
 ' I was born and reared,' he tells us, ' among 
 the fields. ... I have not a notion how to 
 reckon, either in my head or with my pen. 
 There is hardly a coin that I can recognise ; I 
 do not know one grain from another, whether 
 still growing or in the granary, unless the 
 difference is very marked ; and I barely know 
 the difference between the cabbage and 
 lettuce of my garden. I do not even under- 
 stand the names of the most elementary house- 
 hold utensils, or the crudest principle of agri- 
 culture, such as every child hath by heart.^ 
 'And what would I not do rather than 
 read a contract — rather than go on shaking 
 dusty papers, making myself the serf of my 
 affairs, or, worse still, of the affairs of others, 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 13 : ' De I'Experience.' 
 * Essais, ii. 1 7 : ' De la Pr&omption/ 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 73 
 
 as so many men do, if they are paid for it ? 
 My one aim is to turn myself into a cow and 
 a don't-care.' ^ . . . 
 
 ' My father loved to build Montaigne, 
 where he was born, and in all the arrangement 
 of my household I like making use of his 
 example and his rules, and I shall bind my 
 successors, as far as I can, unto the same. . . . 
 If I have attempted to finish some old bit of a 
 wall or repair some piece of the building, it 
 hath been out of respect to him rather than for 
 my own contentment. . . . For as far as my 
 private inclinations go, neither this pleasure in 
 building — the which is said to be so attractive 
 — nor hunting, nor gardens, nor any other joys 
 of a secluded life, have much power to amuse 
 me. I would rather be a good groom than a 
 good logician.' 
 
 ' One of my wishes at this moment is to 
 find a son-in-law who would know how to 
 soothe and cosset my old age, and into whose 
 hands I could abdicate . . . the government 
 and use of my property.' " 
 
 This Montaigne painted by Montaigne, 
 this man, slow and sluggish, must none 
 the less have had a potent charm which 
 drew men to him — the unconscious charm 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanite.' ^ liiJ. 
 
74 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 of genius. It showed in his looks, and what 
 he deemed the ' frankness ' of his face twice 
 acted as a talisman and saved his life. The 
 first time was during the wars of religion, when 
 every man's hand was] against every man, and 
 a treacherous friend of Montaigne's asked 
 him for shelter for himself and his followers, 
 meaning to make the hospitality for which 
 he begged the pretext for taking the chateau. 
 Montaigne's boast was that his house was as 
 open as his face, and even in this time of civil 
 war he kept it undefended. He got scent of 
 the plot, yet he did nothing, and when the 
 traitor arrived he opened his doors. But 
 there was something in the host's candid 
 countenance that converted the guest, and 
 when his soldiers marched in after him they 
 were amazed at his order to follow him at 
 once and depart. The second time, a few 
 years later, Montaigne, travelling not far from 
 Paris, fell into the hands of robbers. They 
 took his purse and papers, they were about 
 to take his life, when this same something 
 in his face disarmed them. They restored his 
 stolen goods, they spoke to him courteously 
 and let him go. 
 
 One would like to know more about the 
 circle upon whom Montaigne's power was 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN -js 
 
 exercised. It was a restricted one. After 
 losing the one perfect friend, he chose to have 
 few others. 
 
 ' We live,' he says, ' in an age which only 
 bringeth forth mediocrities, so much so that 
 I find nothing worthy of great admiration. 
 And thus it is that I hardly know any men 
 intimately enough to be able to judge of them. 
 Those among whom my circumstances gene- 
 rally throw me are, for the most part, persons 
 who care little for the cultivation of the in- 
 tellect — who have been shown no ideal of 
 happiness but honour, no perfection except- 
 ing that of valiance.'^ 
 
 And of these few, like other lazy, self-con- 
 tented persons, he preferred those below to 
 those above him. 
 
 ' I willingly give myself to small folk, 
 whether it be because that way there lieth 
 more glory, or else through natural compas- 
 sion, the which hath infinite power over 
 
 me. 
 
 There were two or three of the great folk 
 whom he also affected, men like the noble Min- 
 ister, Michel de I'Hopital, or that most mag- 
 netic Prince, Henri de Navarre. And there 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 17 : 'De la Prdsomption.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 13: ' De I'Experience.' 
 
76 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 were old friends — Councillor Lansac, to whom 
 he inscribed La Boetie's translation of Xeno- 
 phon ; or Henri de Mesme, to whom he dedi- 
 cated his friend's version of Plutarch's Rules 
 of Marriage, in the hope that Madame de 
 Mesme might see how her goodness had made 
 laws for itself which the greatest philosophers 
 could not surpass ; and ' Mademoiselle ' Le 
 Paulmier (born de Chaumont), a note to whom 
 remains as a proof that he could show all the 
 drawing-room graces when he wished to do so. 
 ' Mademoiselle,' it runs, ' my friends know 
 that from the first moment that I saw you I 
 destined one of my books for you, for I felt 
 you had done them great honour. But the 
 courtesy of Monsieur Paulmier made it impos- 
 sible for me to give it to you, for that he hath 
 since then laid me under obligations much 
 greater than the worth of my book. You 
 will please accept it as being yours before I 
 owed it as a debt ; and you will do me this 
 grace — to love it either for the love of him, 
 or for the love of me. And I meanwhile shall 
 keep entire the debt I owe to Monsieur 
 Paulmier, so as to avenge it — that is, if I can — 
 by doing him some kind of service.' ^ 
 
 Mademoiselle Le Paulmier was not alone. 
 
 1 Lettres de Montaigne : A Mademoiselle Paulmier. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN jj 
 
 'Among the hundreds and hundreds of 
 ladies I have known,' was one of Montaigne's 
 phrases. And he is free with his mention of 
 '■bouillons made of Eryngium and Turkish 
 grass,' which he had ' swallowed two or three 
 times to please the ladies who offered him 
 half of their portion, with a manner more sweet 
 than my complaint was sour.' The bouillons, 
 he adds, were as ' easy to take as they were use- 
 less in effect,' ^ but the ladies did not know 
 that he thought so. Who were they all ? 
 Was one the widow against whom he warns 
 beholders ? ' Take no notice,' he says, ' of 
 those moist eyes, that piteous voice ; look 
 rather at her bearing, her complexion, the 
 roundness of her cheeks below her long veils ; 
 through these it is that she talks her native 
 French.'^ Had she tried her native French 
 upon Montaigne ? 
 
 Women were probably charmed and sub- 
 jugated by his sunny selfishness — a steady reli- 
 able selfishness, better than the common sort, 
 since it recognised that it should pay for its 
 privileges by good temper. 
 
 ' And for the friendship each man oweth 
 unto himself,' he says, ' whoso knoweth and 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 13 : ' De l'Exp6rience.' 
 
 ^ Essais, ii. 35 : ' De trois bonnes femmes.' 
 
7% MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 practiseth the duties thereof, he belongeth to 
 the Privy Closet of the Muses.' ^ 
 
 ' As if our own death did not give us enough 
 to fear, we load ourselves with that of our 
 wives, our children, our servants. As if our 
 own business did not bother us sufficiently, 
 we have to set about tormenting ourselves and 
 splitting our heads over the concerns of our 
 friends and neighbours. . , .' 
 
 ' And in that natural decline which maketh 
 man importunate and burdensome to others, 
 let him beware of being importunate and 
 burdensome to himself. . . . Let him flatter 
 and caress himself — above all things, let him 
 be his own governor.'^ 
 
 ' The singular affection that I bear myself, 
 as one who bringeth all back to himself and 
 hardly spendeth anything outside,' so he de- 
 fines his attitude. . . . ' All that other men dis- 
 tribute to an infinite multitude of friends and 
 acquaintance, for their glory or their great- 
 ness, / carry home for myself and the repose 
 of my spirit.' ^ 
 
 ' I flee from melancholy humours and care- 
 worn men, as I would flee from men stricken 
 
 1 Esiais, iii. lo : ' De manager sa volont^.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. 39 : ' De la Solitude.' 
 
 ' Essais, ii. 17 : ' De la Presomption.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 79 
 
 by the plague ; and, unless I am forced 
 thereto by duty, I never mix myself up in 
 subjects which I cannot treat without getting 
 interested, or feeling emotion.' ^ 
 
 This sounds bad enough ; but Montaigne 
 knew himself when he wrote, ' I see much 
 more clearly in serene weather.' ^ His happi- 
 ness depended upon a calm, and his behaviour 
 depended upon his happiness. ' To me,' he 
 wrote, ' happiness is a singularly potent spur 
 to moderation and to modesty.'^ His happi- 
 nesses were many, his sense of enjoyment as 
 acute as that of youth. ' Others feel the 
 pleasure of content and prosperity. So do 
 I, but not as a something fleeting that 
 slippeth past us. It must be chewed and 
 studied, it is stuff for rumination. . . . And 
 so that even my sleep should not thus stupidly 
 escape me, I used to arrange to be disturbed, 
 that I might at least half apprehend the joys 
 thereof.'* 
 
 The crown of Montaigne's happiness — ac- 
 cording to himself — was characteristic : it was 
 the remembrance of other men's misfortunes. 
 
 'What a fine thing it is for the mind to 
 
 1 Essais, ii 
 
 * Essais, ii 
 
 * Essais, ii 
 ^ Essais, ii 
 
 10 ; ' De manager sa volont6.' 
 2 : ' Du Repentir.' 
 9 : ' De la Vanitd.' 
 13 : De I'Experience.' 
 
8o MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 find itself poised at such a point that no fear 
 or doubt disturbeth the air — no difficulty past, 
 present, or future, over which the imagination 
 can flit, yet take no harm. This thought 
 borroweth great lustre from comparison with 
 other people's circumstances. And so I am 
 always picturing, under a thousand forms, the 
 lives of those whom fortune or their own 
 mistakes have tossed and submerged.' ^ 
 
 Montaigne's fancy was of a strangely literal 
 kind — of near kin to curiosity. Yet it be- 
 longed to the artist side of him — the side that 
 gave him so much trouble. 
 
 He needed his own indulgence, for he 
 found it no easy task to rule himself. Mon- 
 taigne was, indeed, a dozen Montaignes, a 
 man of impressions, of shifting moods. 
 
 ' My feet are so unsteady, so unsure, so 
 ready to totter and to feel the earth crumble 
 beneath them — my eyesight is so ill-regulated 
 — that when I fast, I am another man than 
 he who hath eaten a repast ; if health and the 
 radiance of a fine day smile upon me, there I 
 stand — a well-behaved man. If I have a corn 
 pressing upon my heel, there I stand — glum, 
 disagreeable, inaccessible.' ^ 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 13: ' De rExp^rience.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. 12 : ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 8i 
 
 Moral effort he thought a waste of nervous 
 force. 
 
 ' I have never put myself to great pains to 
 curb the desires by the which I have found 
 myself beset. My virtue is a virtue, or rather 
 an innocence, which is purely random and 
 accidental. . . . By lucky chance I come of 
 a race famous for its honour, and of an excel- 
 lent father. I know not whether some part 
 of his tastes have passed into me ; or whether 
 home example, and the good teaching I had 
 in childhood, have helped me without my 
 being aware ; or else whether I was born thus ; 
 but, anyhow, I hold most vices in abhor- 
 rence. ... In more than one matter I find 
 more steadiness and law in my morals than 
 in my opinions : my appetites are less corrupt 
 than my reason.' ^ 
 
 ' Among other vices, I cruelly hate cruelty, 
 both by nature and by my judgment, as the 
 extreme of all wickedness ; I carry my feeling 
 to such a degree of softness that I cannot 
 see the neck of a fowl wrung without dis- 
 pleasure, and cannot bear to hear the wail 
 of a hare caught by my hounds, although 
 riding to the chase is one of my excessive 
 pleasures.'^ 
 
 1 £ssais, ii. 1 1 : ' De la Cruaut^.' ^ liit^. 
 
 F 
 
82 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 But Montaigne continued to hunt. To 
 give up an enjoyment for the sake of a prin- 
 ciple would have seemed to him mere arrog- 
 ance. His pride v^as of another kind. 
 
 ' I remember that from my tenderest years, 
 my people said that I showed I know not 
 what in my port and gestures the which bore 
 witness to a vain and foolish pride. ... I 
 am lavish enough of cappings and bowings, 
 notably in the summer-time, and I never re- 
 ceive one without returning it, whatever the 
 quality of the saluter, unless he be a person in 
 my pay.' ^ 
 
 It was what made Montaigne so piquant, 
 this medley of familiar ease and ceremonious- 
 ness — his power to be as inconsistent as a 
 woman, while he remained as virile as a man. 
 But his pride was only skin-deep. He had 
 not the slightest love of rule. ' I would rather 
 be third in Perigueux than first in Paris ; or, 
 at least, as I do not want to lie, third in Paris 
 than first in office. I am impelled to keep to 
 the middle story, as by my fate, so likewise 
 by my taste.' ^ 
 
 If Montaigne was not precisely humble, he 
 was modest. Humility may be said to belong 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 17: ' De la Pr&omption.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 7 : ' De I'Incommoditd de la Grandeur.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 83 
 
 to the region of morals, but modesty is rather 
 concerned with taste — with the breeding of 
 the mind — with good manners. Montaigne, 
 who never disliked self-satisfaction, was always 
 irritated by a want of modesty. And he 
 carried this favourite virtue to its logical con- 
 clusion, to a kind of policy of masterly neglect. 
 
 ' Abstinence from action is often as generous 
 as action, but it is less evident. All the little 
 good I am worth is of this kind. And I am 
 made in such a fashion that I would as lief be 
 happy as good, and would as soon owe my 
 success to the grace of God only, as to any 
 interference of my own.' ^ This negative 
 attitude had its drawbacks, and he suffered 
 for his good taste — or was it for his want of 
 conviction ? 
 
 ' I encountered,' he says, ' all the inconveni- 
 ences that moderation bringeth in its train. 
 ... I was pommelled on every hand. The 
 Ghibelines thought me a Guelph, and the 
 Guelphs thought me a Ghibelin.' ^ 
 
 However, as he despised both Guelphs and 
 Ghibelines there was not much harm done. 
 And he had rich compensations. Modesty and 
 curiosity are amusing qualities ; they make a 
 
 ^ Essais, iii. lo : ' De m&ager sa volont^.' 
 ? Essais, iii. 12 : 'De la Physionomie.' 
 
84 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 man into a good spectator. Pythagoras, he 
 tells us, said that ' Life was like a great crowd 
 gathered together to see the Olympic Games. 
 Some are exercising their bodies to win glory 
 in the games ; others are hawking their wares 
 for profit. And there are some, by no means 
 the worst, who seek no other gain than freedom 
 to look how and why everything happeneth, 
 and to be spectators of the life of other men, 
 that thereby they may judge and govern their 
 
 own.' ^ 
 
 Spectatorship must be made into a fine art ; 
 it must never be tinged with professionalism. 
 Professionalism was Montaigne's bugbear ; a 
 specialist to him was anathema (to him, who 
 said that he ' could not examine a child of the 
 middle classes in its first lesson'),^ and a 
 ' literary man ' was worse than all. 
 
 ' Mon Dieu ! ' he cries, ' how I should hate to 
 be commended for being a clever writer, and 
 be a nobody and a fool in other characters. I 
 would rather be a fool in all things than have so 
 ill chosen, and so ill-used my market value.' ^ 
 
 ' There is as much vanity and weakness of 
 understanding in those who profess to be 
 
 ^ Essais, i. 26 : * De I'Institution des Enfants.' 
 
 s Ibid. 
 
 * Essaii, ii. 37 : ' De la Ressemblance des enfants aux peres.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 85 
 
 superior-minded, who are concerned with 
 literary work and such offices as depend upon 
 letters, as in any sort of people — either 
 because more is expected of them and because 
 ordinary faults in them are inexcusable, or 
 because a reputation for knowledge lendeth 
 them greater boldness in producing themselves 
 and in giving themselves away excessively, 
 whereby they betray their interests and fall to 
 pieces.' ^ 
 
 No shibboleths for Montaigne. Dilettantisme 
 oblige was his motto. And dilettantism must 
 not be an insipid business. ' No wind maketh 
 for him who hath no desti^ned port,' ^ he once 
 wrote, and he steered straight for knowledge 
 — rich, haphazard knowledge of human life. 
 
 He may say what he will about his slow- 
 ness, intercourse with him must have been 
 enchanting. The talk which himself he so 
 depreciated was probably not brilliant, but to 
 the point ; desultory, perhaps, but always pithy. 
 And he liked plainness of speech in return. 
 ' Whoso answereth what I say answereth well 
 enough, and more than well, for me,'^ he says. 
 Some one to answer him, however, he needed, 
 and for other purposes than those of digestion. 
 
 ^ Essais, ii. 17 : ' De la Presomption.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. I : 'De I'Inconstance de nos actions.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 8 : ' L'Art de conferer.' 
 
86 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 Whatever he may have done in his tower, he 
 could not get on without conversation. ' The 
 occasion, the company, the agitation of my own 
 voice, draw forth from my mind (he says) more 
 than I discover when I. sound it and use it by 
 myself.' But he laid down strict laws for his 
 interlocutor. ' By how much,' he writes, ' is 
 false speech less companionable than silence ! ' ^ 
 ' One must not always say everything, for that 
 would be folly ; but what one does say must be 
 what one thinks ; otherwise it turns into evil.'^ 
 
 ' Perfect agreement in conversation is of all 
 things the most tiresome.' 
 
 Any laying down of the law he disliked 
 still more. ' I never make it my business,' he 
 writes, ' to tell the world what it ought to do ; 
 there are enough meddlers already. . . . With 
 company I associate talk — and able talk, with- 
 out squeamishness.' ' As for the subject, I 
 don't care a pin ; to me all opinions are one, 
 and victory pretty indifferent. I could fight 
 peaceably for a whole day, if the debate were 
 conducted with due order ; it is not so much 
 force or subtlety that I demand — it is order.' ^ 
 'Even among pertinent talkers, I see some 
 
 1 Essais, i. 9 : ' Des Menteurs.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. 17 : ' De la Pr6somption.' 
 
 s Essais, iii. 8 : ' De I'Art de conKrer.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 87 
 
 who cannot give up their course. While 
 they ... are actually trying to end their 
 journey . . . they go on turning somersaults 
 and dawdling, like men who have lost their 
 strength. , . . Old men are the most 
 dangerous, for they still remember past things 
 and do not forget that they have told them. 
 . . . And next to this in importance, Heaven 
 grant I may never remember the offences 
 that I have received ! ' ^ 
 
 Montaigne's aims in conversation were often 
 deeper than they seemed. It is true that in 
 general he talked for no weightier end than 
 amusement, but his subjects were never con- 
 ventional, nor did he promote conventionality 
 in others. 
 
 ' Conventionality sweeps us along with it — 
 we abandon the substance of things. . . . 
 Conventionality forbids us to express in words 
 things natural and lawful, and we believe it ; 
 reason forbids us to do things unlawful and 
 evil, and no one believes it.' ^ 
 
 'To express in words things lawful and 
 natural ' — that phrase is no bad summary of 
 Montaigne's idea of conversation. 
 
 ^ Essais, 1.9:' Des Menteurs.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. 17 : 'De la Presomption. 
 
88 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 III 
 
 Montaigne himself believed that his life of 
 seclusion was mainly due to his disgust with 
 public affairs. 
 
 This was perhaps not quite so true as he 
 believed, but there was no doubt about his 
 disillusionment. 
 
 ' The corruption of the age is made by the 
 individual contribution of each one of us. 
 Some give treachery, some injustice, irreligion, 
 tyranny, avarice, or cruelty, according to their 
 power ; the feebler sort bring foolishness, 
 vanity, idleness. And of this race am I. It 
 seemeth to me this is the period of vain 
 things ... a time when evil-doing is so 
 common that useless - doing hath become 
 matter for praise.' ^ 
 
 The wars of religion, the senseless violence 
 on either side, the universal rottenness, dis- 
 mayed him. 
 
 In 1570, he even gave up his magistracy, 
 his one real link with Government. He felt 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanitl.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 89 
 
 no patriotism — he almost grew to dislike 
 France. He was, he says, a Parisian, not a 
 Frenchman, and he left his tower willingly 
 for no place but Paris. There he was in 1570, 
 superintending the printing of La Boetie's 
 works. Thither, too, he must have travelled 
 occasionally, now on business, now to Court, to 
 practise his precepts concerning intercourse and 
 to rub his mind against the minds of others. 
 
 ' I must not,' he says, ' forget that I never 
 so far mutiny against France as not to look 
 favourably upon Paris. From my child- 
 hood upwards, she hath had my heart, and 
 it hath happened to me, as it always doth 
 with what is excellent, that the more beauti- 
 ful towns I have seen, the more power hath 
 this one over my affections. I love her for 
 herself. ... I love her tenderly — even to 
 her moles and blemishes. I am a French- 
 man only by the grace of this great city, 
 great in inhabitants, great in prosperity, but, 
 above all, great and incomparable in her 
 variety and divers conveniencies . . . one 
 of the noblest ornaments of the world. . . . 
 As long as she endureth, I shall not want a 
 retreat to growl in. . . .' ^ 
 
 At home he had worries which, doubtless, 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanite.' 
 
90 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 he found it hard to elude, even in his tower. 
 His father's death, in 1566, left a young 
 brother of eight in his guardianship. There 
 was another brother, Thomas — the same 
 Huguenot to whom La Boetie gave his dying 
 counsels — and he also had to be provided for. 
 Montaigne presented him with the estate of 
 Beauregard, apparently upon no easy terms, for 
 he shifted on to Thomas's shoulders the lion's 
 share of responsibility for his three sisters and 
 their fortunes. 
 
 Pierre d'Ayquem's death left a mark upon 
 his eldest son. We owe to it, also, one of his 
 masterpieces. For it was due to his father that 
 we have the ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' ^ 
 Some time before his death, Pierre begged his 
 son to translate for him a Latin work given 
 him by a valued friend : Natural Theology , 
 the Book of Creatures^ a. confession of belief, 
 written by Raimond Sebond, an author of 
 uncertain nationality — some say a Spaniard 
 — but, in any case, a great Latinist of the 
 fifteenth century, and a known physician, 
 teaching at Toulouse. The volume was not 
 lost to posterity ; it was read both by Pascal 
 and by Leibnitz, and in its own age it 
 attracted attention. It was a defence of the 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 1 2 : • Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 91 
 
 Faith. But if Pierre d'Ayquem, as has been 
 supposed, set his son to work in the hope that 
 Sebond's arguments would help him towards 
 orthodoxy, he made a blunder. The great 
 Essay that Montaigne wrote later upon the 
 book remains as one of the strongest bulwarks of 
 sceptical thought. Meanwhile, he performed 
 his pious task, the beginning of which his 
 father had seen and approved before he died. 
 It took more than two years to finish ; and 
 it was not till 1568 that Montaigne sent the 
 translation to press, carefully inscribed with the 
 date, June i8th — a personal touch, for that 
 day was the anniversary of his father's death. 
 
 The labour had been one of filial love. It 
 was also, we feel, a refuge from the world he 
 hated. That world he hardly looked at, even 
 from the safe, high windows of his tower — and 
 they were windows that, at best, could show 
 him little of the ravaged country outside. He 
 ignored public events. Considering his con- 
 fidential prolixity about himself and his house- 
 hold, it is wonderful to consider the paucity 
 and shortness of his allusions to what was 
 going on in his day — his bare notice even of 
 the leading personages, the most startling 
 incidents that stirred his generation. He 
 speaks of the wars of religion — he refers to 
 
92 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 the execution of Horn ^ and Egmont — he just 
 mentions the recent execution of Mary Queen 
 of Scots.^ And the only great man among 
 his contemporaries upon whom he dwells 
 with any vivid appreciation was Henri iv., 
 his intellectual disciple, his beau-ideal, his 
 friend, one of the few, too, who had known 
 how to subjugate him by personal fascination. 
 
 ' The which master,' says Montaigne, ' once 
 described himself to me thus : as one who 
 seeth as clearly as any man the dire force of 
 accident. But as to those vicissitudes for the 
 which there is no remedy, he immediately re- 
 solveth that he will suffer them ; as to the other 
 kind, when he hath ordered the necessary pro- 
 vision wherewith to meet them, and hath done 
 all that, thanks to his vivid mind, he can do 
 promptly, then, in calm, he awaiteth the 
 event. . . . He seemeth to me greater and 
 more capable in evil fortune than in good. 
 He maketh his losses more glorious than 
 his victories, and his mourning more splendid 
 than his triumph.' ^ 
 
 But Montaigne was moved by no desire to 
 
 1 Essais, i. 7 : ' Que I'Intention juge nos actions.' 
 
 2 Essah, i. 19 : 'Qu'il ne faut juger de notre heur qu'apres 
 la mort.' 
 
 3 Essais, iii. 10 : ' De m&ager sa volenti.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 93 
 
 aid his favourite prince. He was content to 
 admire. Indeed, he disliked all action, more 
 especially when it assumed new shapes. He 
 distrusted reforms as much as he distrusted 
 popular grievances, and the Reformation was 
 in his eyes the embodiment of human folly 
 and pretentiousness. Innovation he resented. 
 If he did not say, whatever is, is right, he did 
 say whatever is not yet, is more likely to be 
 wrong than that which is. As for political 
 convictions, he had none. 
 
 ' I regard our kings,' he said, ' with a merely 
 civil aiFection ruled by law, and neither moved 
 nor removed by private interest, for the which 
 fact I am well pleased with myself. No more 
 doth the righteous Popular Cause attract me, 
 except in moderation, without fever.' ^ 
 
 His creed was purely negative, unless it be 
 too paradoxical to say that his hatred of change 
 amounted to a positive principle. It was his 
 dominant idea, and one which comfortably re- 
 conciled his instinct with his moral standards. 
 
 ' We take,' he wrote, ' a world already made, 
 and bent to certain customs — we do not en- 
 gender it. And whatever means we use to 
 make it lawful that we should reform and 
 rearrange it, we shall hardly drag it out of 
 
 1 Essais, iii. I : ' De I'Utilc et de I'Honnete.' 
 
94 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 its accustomed rut without smashing every- 
 thing.'^ 
 
 ' It is very easy to accuse a government of 
 imperfections, for all things mortal are full of 
 them. It is very easy to breed in a people 
 the scorn of its ancient observances. No 
 man hath ever undertaken such a task without 
 achieving it. But as for the establishment of 
 a better state in the place of that which hath 
 been ruined, why, truly, in this enterprise 
 many adventurers have foundered.' "^ 
 
 ' The laws have saved me a great deal of 
 trouble ; they have chosen my party and have 
 given me a master. Every other kind of 
 superiority and obligation must be restricted 
 and relative, compared to theirs. Our wills 
 and desires make their own laws ; our actions 
 have to accept those commanded by State 
 ordinance.' ^ 
 
 ' For whoso meddleth with choosing and 
 changing, usurpeth authority to judge, and 
 must profess to see the faults in that which 
 he abolisheth and the good of that which he 
 introduceth. This common consideration hath 
 given me a firmer seat, and held my bold 
 
 1 Eisais, iii. 19 : ' De la Vanit^.' 
 
 2 Essah, ii. 17: 'De la Presomption.' 
 
 8 Essiis, iii. I : ' De I'Utile et de I'Honnete. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 95 
 
 youth on the curb, that I might not load my 
 shoulders with so heavy a burden as to make 
 myself answerable for such an all-important 
 branch of knowledge, and that I might not 
 dare to do in this what my sane judgment 
 would not allow me to venture in the easiest 
 sciences the which I have been taught — those 
 in which a rash judgment doth no harm. It 
 seemeth to me very baneful to wish to submit 
 immutable public laws and public observance 
 to the instabilities of private fancy. Private 
 judgment hath only private jurisdiction. . . . 
 But all that other crowd, whither doth it 
 wander ? Under what flag doth it rush for 
 shelter ? It happeneth with the remedies of 
 these men as it doth with other futile, ill- 
 applied medicines — the humours that they 
 desired to purge in us, they do but heat.' . . . 
 ' For, in truth, in these last necessities, where 
 there is nothing to be done, it were perchance 
 wiser to bow the head and somewhat bend 
 before the blow, than to hurl aside the idea 
 of yielding any jot and so give violence its 
 chance of trampling all under foot.'^ 
 
 ' Is it not bad economy to advance so many 
 well-known and proven vices in order to fight 
 
 ^ Essais, i. 23 : 'De la coutume et de ne changer aisdment 
 une loi re5ue.' 
 
96 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 errors the which are dubious and debatable ? 
 Is there a worse kind of vice than that which 
 shocketh our own conscience and knowledge ? ' ^ 
 
 Yet ' whatsoever we already know and 
 enjoy, we feel that it doth not satisfy us, and 
 we go gaping after things unknown and still 
 to be. . . . For that the things present do 
 not satisfy us, is not to my mind because they 
 have not wherewithal to do so, but because 
 we take hold of them with a hand that is 
 diseased and ill-controlled.' ^ 
 
 Although Montaigne neglected his country, 
 that country took pains to seek him out. In 
 1574, we find him stirring. The Due de 
 Montpensier sent him upon a mission from 
 the Royalist camp to the Parlement of 
 Bordeaux ; he made a stay in Paris, and re- 
 ceived the Order of St. Michael — no great 
 distinction, perhaps, since Guise had made 
 it common, but still a tribute to a pro- 
 vincial magistrate who was not important in 
 the State and was not yet known as a writer. 
 Fresh honours came upon him. After 
 Henri iii.'s accession in 1576, he was made 
 Gentleman of the Bedchamber, an office not 
 needfully implying residence at Court, but 
 
 1 Essais, i. 23 : 'De la coutume et de ne changer ais^ment 
 une loi re9ue.' ^ Enais, i. 53 : 'D'un mot de C£sar.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 97 
 
 giving convenient access to the King. And 
 in 1577, the same post was given him by 
 Henri de Navarre. This last appointment 
 came to him as a surprise ; he had no idea 
 that he was to receive it till the letter con- 
 ferring it was in his hands. He had once 
 been instrumental in reconciling Navarre with 
 Guise — he had negotiated between the Due 
 de Montpensier and the Bordeaux Farlement 
 — he had helped a nobleman to what he 
 wanted from Chancellor L'Hopital : these 
 diplomatic achievements found their reward. 
 
 It was between 1571 and 1588 that he wrote 
 his Essays — those masterpieces of colossal 
 ease, those desultory good-natured fragments 
 of a complete and formidable philosophy. 
 We know how he came to write them. 
 Habit was too strong for him ; he had grown 
 unwilling to leave his library, and yet his 
 solitude had become irksome. ' It was,' he 
 says, ' a melancholy humour, and so a humour 
 very adverse to my nature, one produced by 
 the depression of that solitude in which, for 
 some years, I had wrapped myself, the which 
 first put into my head the notion that I should 
 meddle with the art of writing. And then, 
 for that I found my mind destitute and en- 
 tirely empty of other matter, I presented 
 
 Q 
 
98 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 myself to myself for argument and for sub- 
 ject.' 1 
 
 He knew no other man so well. He had 
 indeed observed himself as closely and imper- 
 sonally as a naturalist observes a moth, and he 
 enjoyed recording his observations. But he 
 was quite without the literary man's desire to 
 paint a picture of himself ; he had not the 
 susceptibilities of what we now call the artist's 
 temperament — perhaps his portrait is the 
 truer for that. And the portrait, in its turn, 
 affected him. 
 
 ' I have no more made my book than my 
 book hath made me,' he says.^ The Essays 
 may, indeed, have helped him to avoid the 
 foibles he chronicled. The omission of one 
 emotional phrase of his : ' Oh for a friend ! ' 
 which stands in the first edition, but is left 
 out of the last, is by no means without signifi- 
 cance. The first complete edition was pub- 
 lished in 1588, but the first two Books had 
 already appeared in 1580, the third being 
 added later. And this third is of especial inter- 
 est ; it bears the marks of his experience ; it is 
 often coloured by the severe illness from which 
 he suffered in 1580, and from which he wrung 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 8 : ' De I'Affection des p6res aux enfants,' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. i8 ; ' Du D^mentir,' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 99 
 
 a new philosophy — the philosophy of physical 
 endurance. There was yet another, a last 
 edition, which only appeared in 1595, three 
 years after his death. 
 
 Thus the Essays took him seventeen years 
 of reading, registering, writing, in his tower : 
 of writing and rewriting, for that supreme ease 
 was not won without effort ; his maijiuscript is 
 scored with corrections. 
 
 During these seventeen years, other things 
 were happening to Montaigne. Was it now, 
 was it earlier, that he gained that experience 
 of military life of which there is evidence 
 in his pages ? He may not have fought — he 
 must have known a soldier's existence ; but 
 when this was remains in the vague. What- 
 ever the period, it could have been but a brief 
 one, a parenthesis in his long years of seclusion, 
 maybe a passing phase of his youth. The 
 desire for the excitement of battle found no 
 place in Montaigne's nature. On the other 
 hand, he felt strongly the desire for the stir of 
 travel. It was characteristic that the spirit of 
 adventure in him should take a merely intel- 
 lectual form — that of curiosity — and his 
 appetite grew the keener for being so long 
 unsatisfied. But the moment came. His 
 serious illness, in 1580, provided him with a 
 
loo MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 pretext. He would try the Baths of Lucca, 
 and his journey thither would serve as a 
 motive for protracted wanderings. 
 
 Montaigne was a born traveller, in mind, 
 in body, in tastes ; casual, observant, and 
 cosmopolitan. His hatred of any kind of 
 provincialism made him set out in the true 
 travelling spirit. 
 
 ' I am ashamed,' he says, ' to see our 
 countrymen tipsy with that silliest kind of 
 conceit — a scare concerning forms that are\ 
 the contrary of their own. They seem to 
 be out of their element directly they are out 
 of their village. Wherever they go, they 
 stick to their habits and abominate foreign 
 ways. If they find a Frenchman in Hungary, 
 they hold high festival over the adventure ; 
 in an instant they cling together, they tie 
 themselves up in a knot, they condemn 
 all the barbarous manners and customs they 
 come across — for why should they not be 
 called barbarous since they are not French ? 
 Most of them like going forth for the sake of 
 coming back ; they travel tightly buttoned, 
 and covered up with a taciturn incommuni- 
 cable prudence, defending themselves against 
 the contagion of an unknown climate. ... I, 
 on the contrary, set out very sick of our 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN loi 
 
 fashions, not to look for Gascons in Sicily — I 
 have left enough of them at home — I rather 
 seek for Greeks and for Persians.' ^ 
 
 'Intercourse with other men, and seeing 
 foreign countries, is wonderfully good, and for 
 this reason : not only to bring home in one's 
 head the exact number of the steps at Santa 
 Rotunda, or a computation of the richness of 
 Santa Lucia's linen ; or, like some others, to 
 know by how much the face of Nero found 
 (on a coin) in some old ruin near by, is longer 
 or broader than that on another medal ; but 
 to bring home the humours of nations and 
 their fashions, and to rub . . . our brains 
 against the brains of other men. From its 
 tenderest years onwards, I should like a child 
 to be taken abroad.' ^ 
 
 Anything better than the 'cackle of a 
 burgh.' ' Thou seest nothing,' he tells the 
 average man, ' but the order and the govern- 
 ment of this little cave where thou lodgest. 
 Thou proclaimest but a municipal law : thou 
 knowest not which is the universal.' ^ 
 
 So Montaigne departed, determined to be 
 all things to all foreigners. We have a vivid 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanitd' 
 
 * Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'lnstitution des Enfants.' 
 
 8 Essais, ii. 12 : ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
I02 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 picture of his start. Greatly as he had wished 
 it, and little though he felt at leaving his 
 family, when the moment came he was 
 invaded by the melancholy of departure. He 
 did not weep, he says, but he was filled with 
 depression, as ' with sad countenance ' he put 
 his foot in the stirrup, dressed, doubtless, in 
 his favourite black or white. The weather 
 was warm, but his long 'coat of no fashion 
 trimmed with rough hair,' and the two caps 
 that he wore one over the other, cannot have 
 been far off, for he was a chilly person, and 
 always provided against the cold. With him 
 went his younger brother, Bertrand, Sieur de 
 Mattecoulon, two nobles and his secretary, to 
 whom must be added the Sieur d'Etissac, who 
 met them later on their way — a son, he was, of 
 a lady to whom Montaigne dedicated an essay. 
 It was June, 1580, when they set out, it was 
 November, 1 5 8 1 , when they returned. They 
 set out for nowhere, except that at some 
 indefinite date they were to reach the Baths 
 of Lucca. For it was one of Montaigne's 
 stipulations that he was to be bound neither 
 by time nor place. If some traveller's fancy 
 took him, if he felt a sudden wish to visit or 
 revisit a spot, he should, he announced, obey 
 his whim, going and coming at his own 
 
Frontispjece of Mon'ivvine\s ''A'oya(;r en Itai.ie. 
 
 Engraved by Saint Auhin. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 103 
 
 season, and the rest might follow him, or not, 
 as they would. 
 
 He began with France, first going to Paris, 
 and then to visit the Royalist camp at La 
 Fere. This northern town was being besieged 
 by the great Matignon, and here Montaigne 
 lingered about six weeks. Here it was, say 
 some, that he presented his Essays to Henri iii. 
 They contained, he told the complimenting 
 King, nothing but discourses concerning his 
 own life. Here, too, he wktched the death 
 of Grammont, the husband of La belle 
 Corisande, Diane d'Andouins, that mistress of 
 Henri de Navarre to whom Montaigne had 
 dedicated the early love-sonnets of La Boetie. 
 
 At Plombieres he visited Andelot — the one 
 survivor of the great Coligny trio : his face, 
 he says, was still blanched from the shock of 
 the Admiral's murder, eight years before. 
 And so he reached Switzerland, came to Basel, 
 where he saw Hotman, the famous pam- 
 phleteer, and went on through Germany and 
 the Tyrol towards the South. Unlike most 
 Epicurean hermits, Montaigne had given up 
 his well-loved habits from the outset. He 
 exacted nothing from his landlords but clean- 
 liness, and decent beds and hangings, with 
 tolerable supplies of wine and food — crayfish if 
 
I04 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 possible. One of the few complaints that he 
 vented was the absence of crayfish in Rovere. 
 'As to food,' writes his secretary, 'we had 
 here no crayfish, which thing M. de Mon- 
 taigne found very strange, seeing that ever 
 since we left Plombieres, a distance of two 
 hundred leagues, this dish had been put before 
 us at every meal.' -^ 
 
 As to company, we know that he avoided 
 that of his fellow-countrymen, and, above the 
 rest, he shunned those who ' talked discom- 
 forts,' to his mind the dullest talk of all. 
 Nothing annoyed him more than to be guilty 
 of unwittingly offending local feelings, as 
 when, rather naturally, in Augsburg, he held 
 a handkerchief to his nose, and heard that his 
 gesture had been noticed by the burghers. He 
 liked, as far as possible, to become one of the 
 men among whom he was living, and, per- 
 haps to make up for the handkerchief, he 
 hastened to buy a new fur cap of the Augs- 
 burg fashion, that he might look like an Augs- 
 burg citizen. In Italy he danced at a ball in 
 order not to be conspicuous. And, wherever 
 he stayed, he left behind him, as was the 
 custom among well-born lodgers, his coat-of- 
 
 1 The Journal of Montaigne^ s Travels, edited by W. G. Waters, 
 vol. i. p. 187. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 105 
 
 arms finely emblazoned, to be hung up as a 
 tribute to his landlord. 
 
 Over mountain passes, through smiling 
 valleys, the party rode on to Innsbruck — with 
 never a mention of Nature, excepting topo- 
 graphical allusions, or references, of w^hich 
 there are plenty, to altitudes and produce, to 
 the bareness or fertility of the land. Mon- 
 taigne noted any great building, any curiosity, 
 any fragment of antiquity ; he noted the ugli- 
 ness of the German women ; he took what he 
 found in the way of people, he hobnobbed 
 indifferently with the inmates of taverns, or 
 palaces ; he lingered in hovels, he dined 
 with prelates ; he conversed with priests and 
 heretical ministers ; he would have liked to 
 converse with princes, but at Innsbruck the 
 Archduke refused to receive him because he 
 was a Frenchman — his only grievance on the 
 trip — and he had to put up with the Arch- 
 duchess, whom he entertained at dinner. And 
 so he crossed the frontier into Italy. Again 
 no mention of its beauties, only frequent de- 
 scriptions of the grottos, and waterworks, and 
 ingenuities of the princely villas that he saw 
 on his road. He was struck with the differ- 
 ences from Germany ; with the way in which, 
 outside the walls of a city, a crowd of ' Guides ' 
 
io6 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 would ride out to meet him, each recom- 
 mending his inn, and all together screaming 
 and gesticulating till they entered the town, 
 where they fell silent, in fear, most likely, of 
 the police. Montaigne quizzed them — they 
 greatly amused him, as things still amuse 
 tourists in Italy to-day. He consorted with 
 celebrities. At Florence, he dined with 
 the Duke and Bianca Capella ; at Venice, 
 Veronica Franca, that most notorious, most 
 Titianesque of ladies, sent him her little effort 
 in literature, the volume of her Lettere diverse. 
 At Ferrara, he visited Tasso in his pathetic 
 confinement in a monastery. And at last he 
 came to Rome — Rome, to him ever the centre 
 of the world. When he got there, it was 
 strangely familiar to him. 
 
 ' The State,' he says, ' of that ancient Rome, 
 free, righteous, and flourishing (for I love 
 neither its birth nor its old age), interests, 
 impassions me. However many times I might 
 see the lie of its streets, of its houses, or those 
 ruins whose bases are hid as deep as the anti- 
 podes, I should never be weary of them. Is 
 it by nature, or is it some error of fancy that 
 the sight of places the which we know to 
 have been haunted and inhabited by persons 
 of glorious memory moves us in some strange 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 107 
 
 fashion, more than when we hear the story of 
 their deeds, or read their writings ? . . . I 
 turn these great names over and over upon my 
 tongue, and make them resound in my ears.' ^ 
 
 This is the most emotional reference that 
 Montaigne made to his travels. He says in 
 prose what Joachim Du Bellay said in poetry, 
 and he was invaded with the same overpower- 
 ing sense of a past which dwarfs and dulls the 
 present. The Rome of the Renaissance did not 
 please him. ' He declared that the buildings 
 of this bastard Rome, which were now being 
 joined on to the ancient masonry . . . reminded 
 him exactly of the nests the martins and crows 
 were building in the roofs and on the walls 
 of the French churches which the Huguenots 
 had destroyed.' ^ 
 
 Yet this despised present was alive enough to 
 him. Cardinals fetched him in their coaches 
 and showed him the sights. He soon, how- 
 ever, found his way about alone. He had at 
 first engaged a Frenchman as guide, but ' this 
 fellow took himself oif in some ridiculous fit 
 of ill-humour, whereupon M. de Montaigne 
 prided himself on mastering by his own efforts 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanit^.' 
 
 2 The Journal of Montaigne's Travels, edited by W. G. Waters, 
 vol. ii. p. 97. 
 
io8 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 the arts of a guide. In the evening, he would 
 study certain books and maps, and next day 
 repair to the spot ... so that in a few days 
 he could have shown his guide the way.' ^ 
 
 He was admitted to the Vatican Library, and 
 delighted in the editions of Virgil, Plutarch, 
 and Seneca that he found there, noting, also, 
 that the handwriting of St. Thomas Aquinas 
 was even worse than his own. Everything 
 was food for his curiosity. ' There were 
 sermons to be listened to at all seasons, or 
 disputes in theology ' ; or else he sought ' diver- 
 sion ' with notorious ladies, for no other reason 
 than the ' privilege of simple conversation 
 (. . . desiring to hear them talk, and to take 
 part in their play of wit) ' ; but this amuse- 
 ment he had to give up on the ground of 
 economy, because the ladies ' charged ' so ' ex- 
 tor tionately.' He was fond of life in streets and 
 churches. He witnessed a miracle of exorcism 
 in ' a small chapel ' that he chanced to enter. 
 He saw the races in the Corso, and got a 
 seat in the best stand for three crowns. He 
 was present at the Mass at Christmas in St. 
 Peter's, and heard legends of poison in the 
 Pyx. The chatter of the attendant prelates 
 
 1 The Journal of Montaigne' 1 Travels, edited by W. G. Waters, 
 vol. ii. p. 95. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 109 
 
 shocked him — as much as he could be shocked. 
 He witnessed a great Papal procession, and 
 he had audience of Pope Gregory xiii., who 
 graciously extended his scarlet shoe, with its 
 white cross, slightly upwards, so that Mon- 
 taigne might reach it more easily. 
 
 The action might be taken symbolically. 
 The Vatican was prepared to stretch a point, 
 and make things easy for Montaigne. Before 
 he had done with Rome, the first two Books 
 of his Essays were found in his trunk, and 
 carried off to the Censor, and he himself 
 was summoned before a council of prelates. 
 When the volume was sent back to him 
 he found it ' expurgated and brought into 
 harmony with the opinions of the monkish 
 doctors. The Maestro del Sacro Palazzo could 
 only pronounce judgment on it from the report 
 of a certain French monk, for he himself was 
 ignorant of our language ; but he was so fully 
 satisfied with the explanation I gave him of 
 all those passages to which exception had 
 been taken by the Frenchman, that he left 
 to me the task of correcting, according to my 
 conscience, everything which might appear 
 wanting in good taste.' ^ 
 
 1 The Journal of Montaigne's Travels, edited by W. G. Waters, 
 vol. ii. p. 139. 
 
no MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 The Maestro's confidence was large, and 
 Montaigne did not work his conscience very 
 hard on the subject. He was accused of attri- 
 buting everything to fortune ; of mentioning 
 the poetry of Beze, the heretic ; of praising 
 Julian the Apostate ; of saying (strange sin) 
 that a man must be purged from vice before 
 he prayed ; of stating that ' it is cruelty to 
 inflict . . . more pain than is necessary to kill 
 men,' and that 'children should be brought 
 up to examine all sides of a question.' Mon- 
 taigne characteristically got off by averring that 
 these were only his private opinions and not 
 his opinions as a Catholic. He was asked to 
 amend the dubious points in his next edition, 
 and he promised to do so. But the ' Maestro, 
 who was a man of parts, completely exonerated 
 me, and was anxious to let me see that he set 
 small value on these emendations.' When the 
 new edition appeared they were not there, and 
 all was the same as before. 
 
 Montaigne seems, indeed, to have been very 
 popular in Rome. He found no difficulty in 
 gaining the one honour which he really cared 
 to have, and which he sought, as he tells us, 
 'with all his five natural senses.' This was 
 the citizenship of Rome, which had to be 
 conferred by a Papalg Bull. Why he thus 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 1 1 1 
 
 sought a prize so useless to him it is difficult 
 to say. Did he perhaps like to practise his 
 Plutarch, and fancy himself a Roman citizen 
 of ancient days ? Whatever his motive, he 
 got what he wanted. The Pope's major- 
 domo helped him, the right powers were 
 approached, and, before he departed, he had 
 the distinction that he coveted. 
 
 Montaigne left Rome with regret ; his only 
 complaint was that he met too many French- 
 men there. But the season for the Baths of 
 Lucca had come, and he set out to take his 
 cure. On the way he stopped at Loreto, to 
 visit its great shrine and to deposit within its 
 walls three silver statues — of himself, of his 
 wife, and of Lenor. But once at the Baths, 
 no more sight-seeing for him ; he gave himself 
 up to the business in hand — to careful, clinical 
 observation of the results of the waters, and 
 much note-taking about the merits of his lodg- 
 ings. And he participated in the life going 
 on around him — the life of a fashionable 
 watering-place — deliberately, for purposes of 
 hygiene. ' He who doth not bring spirits 
 enough to enjoy the company he ftndeth there 
 . . . without doubt loseth the best and surest 
 part of their effect.' ^ 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 37 : 'De la Ressemblance des enfants aux peres,' 
 
112 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 So Montaigne even went the length of 
 giving a ball to the people of the town. He 
 was anxious, he said, to give the first of the 
 season. It began in the Piazza and ended in 
 the Palazzo Buonvisi. There were a hundred 
 guests. He engaged five pipers, and bought 
 ' nineteen prizes for the ladies ' (in this case 
 for the peasant ladies — the richer people only 
 took part in the dancing), and he hung up his 
 prizes in a richly decked hoop. There were 
 bombazine aprons and netted head-dresses and 
 pearl necklaces. ' I went about,' adds this 
 connoisseur of the graces, ' glancing now at 
 this damsel and now at that, never failing to 
 allow due credit for beauty and charm.' He 
 would not permit a ' damsel ' who ' was not 
 over well-favoured ' to receive a prize at all. 
 However, he was kinder at the banquet which 
 followed ; for ' I found,' he writes, ' a place at 
 table for Divizia, a poor peasant woman who 
 lives about two miles from the Baths, un- 
 married, and with no other support than her 
 handiwork. She is ugly, about thirty-seven 
 years of age, with a swollen throat, and unable 
 either to read or write.' ^ But Divizia had had 
 an uncle who constantly read aloud Ariosto 
 
 1 The Journal of Montaigne" s Travels, edited by W. G. Waters, 
 vol. iii. p. 7Z-3. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 113 
 
 ' and others of the poets ' ; and, finding ' a 
 natural delight in poetry,' she had taken to 
 making verses herself. She recited some now, 
 in her host's honour, and Montaigne, good 
 humouredly content with this rather un- 
 attractive Muse, felt his ball to have been a 
 great success. 
 
 He made two stays at the Baths, although 
 he had no great belief in getting cured, and, 
 following no rules but his own, chose to 
 take the waters as he thought best. It was 
 towards the end of his second visit, on Sep- 
 tember 7th, 1 58 1, that he received a letter 
 which changed his prospects. It came from 
 Bordeaux, and it told him that, a month before, 
 he had been elected mayor of that city. The 
 open foe of responsibility, he now put his pre- 
 cepts in practice, and his first answer was that 
 he ' wished to be excused.' Five days later he 
 was on his way to Rome, but when he got there 
 he found a letter from the Bordeaux authorities 
 urging his return. He obeyed, leaving his 
 brother and Etissac behind him, and on Octo- 
 ber ist, he started homewards by way of Mont 
 Cenis, now on horseback, now carried in a 
 litter. The journey took him two months, 
 and it was not till November 30th, that he 
 arrived at Montaigne. 
 
 H 
 
114 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 He was not to be allowed to rest there. 
 Shortly before he reached home, the king 
 himself had written ordering him to accept 
 the appointment if he did not wish to incur 
 His Majesty's displeasure. There was nothing 
 for it but to yield, and Montaigne the philo- 
 sopher became Montaigne the mayor. 
 
 It must have consoled him that his fathers 
 had held the office before him. His election 
 was generally popular. His predecessor, the 
 great Marechal de Biron, a vehement man, 
 none too judicious, had fallen out with king 
 and people, and the new mayor's moderation 
 was a relief. So great, indeed, was his 
 success that at the end of his two-years 
 tenure of office he was re-elected, and was 
 thus mayor for four years, from 1581 to 1585. 
 
 But the story of Montaigne's mayoralty 
 makes perhaps the dullest chapter of his life. 
 He was just the official he would lead us to 
 expect, performing all the duties required of 
 him and something more, but doing nothing 
 signal or heroic. His first and his last acts 
 were in defence of the weak and helpless : his 
 first, an attempt to amend the treatment of 
 the foundling children neglected by their 
 proper guardians, the Jesuits ; his last, to 
 protest against the imprisonment of women 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 115 
 
 and children. And he lightened the miseries 
 of the poor by refusing to allow the rich to 
 be exempt from taxation — by trying, too, to 
 make the religious houses take their part, and 
 every parish bear its own burdens. Nor did 
 he want for other activities. He busied 
 himself with the reconstruction of a light- 
 house where the Gironde meets the sea ; he 
 did his best to promote free navigation ; he 
 was concerned with education, and improved 
 the College of the Jesuits, as well as his own 
 old school, the College de Guienne. With 
 his great dislike of making an effect, he was 
 more prone to underrate his deeds than other- 
 wise. When he first came home, he warned 
 the electors of his failings ; he was ' without 
 memory, without vigilance, without experi- 
 ence, and without vigour ; but also without 
 hatred, without ambition, without avarice, 
 and without violence.' ' He might,' he told 
 them, 'lend himself to the public, but give 
 himself he would not, and could not.' ^ Yet 
 he probably did more by courage and serenity 
 than others achieve by qualities more showy. 
 
 During his first two years he was present at 
 the opening of a new Court of Justice — the 
 Court of Guienne — instituted to negotiate 
 
 1 Montaigne : Dowden. 
 
ii6 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 between the hostile factions in the province. 
 It was held at Bordeaux, although its members 
 were drawn from elsewhere, and the most 
 interesting thing about it is that one of its 
 members, De Thou (the grandson of I'Hopital), 
 who was to be a famous historian, and was 
 then a young man of twenty-one, gives us his 
 impression of Montaigne : ' a man,' he calls 
 him, ' of frank and open nature, hostile to all 
 constraint, one who had entered into no cabal, 
 well versed, moreover, in our affairs, chiefly 
 in those of Guienne, his native province.' 
 
 Meanwhile, the country was disturbed from 
 other causes than those arising from the wars. 
 The domestic affairs of Henri de Navarre 
 were setting the south of France by the ears. 
 In 1583, Henri in. expelled his sister, Mar- 
 guerite de Navarre, from Paris, and her 
 husband, who had also cast her out, saw that 
 he would have once more to receive her. In 
 vengeance on the king, who had reduced him 
 to this disagreeable necessity, he seized the 
 town of Mont-de-Marsan and held it. It 
 was policy to stand well with Montaigne, the 
 mayor of the chief town in Guienne, and he 
 bade Du Plessis M or nay write him a series of 
 letters seeking to win his suffrage. Mon- 
 taigne, in a tight place, between this prince 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 117 
 
 and Matignon, the governor of the province 
 and thus the representative of the Crown, got 
 out of the difficulty by evasion : he only 
 corresponded virith Matignon, he did not meet 
 him ; and the next year, 1584, events them- 
 selves came to his aid. Henri iii.'s brother, 
 the Due d'Anjou, v\rho stood next to the 
 French throne, died, and his cousin, Navarre, 
 became the heir. Navarre had to change his 
 tactics, and, from the first, Montaigne attached 
 himself to him, without weakening his allegi- 
 ance to the king. 
 
 The alliance was cemented in 1584. Mon- 
 taigne had been attempting to arrange matters 
 between Matignon and the King of Navarre; 
 that sovereign was at no great distance from 
 the chateau of Montaigne, and, inspired no 
 doubt by curiosity, he invited himself to stay 
 there with forty followers. He remained for 
 two days, and Montaigne made for him the 
 only sacrifice of his personal ease that we can 
 discover in his life — he gave him his own bed 
 to sleep in. The visit was a diplomatic 
 victory, for all difficulties were satisfactorily 
 settled, and Montaigne ended it by providing 
 Henri with two days' hunting in the neighbour- 
 hood. The philosopher was no doubt fasci- 
 nated by the prince. Three years later, after 
 
ii8 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 the battle of Coutras, we find him again a 
 guest at the chateau. 
 
 The feuds of the Ligue — that combination 
 of Guise and the Catholic nobles against the 
 throne — were harder to deal with. There 
 came a time, not long after, when Bordeaux 
 was threatened both by the Ligueurs and the 
 Huguenots. Montaigne kept watch one 
 whole night in the port, because his fears had 
 been aroused by the presence there of an 
 armed vessel. But, with Matignon's help, he 
 warded off the peril. 
 
 The close of his term of office was not a 
 glorious one. At the end of his time the 
 plague broke out in the city, and, with a good 
 sense which was rather ignominious, Mon- 
 taigne fled outside its walls and asked to 
 tender his resignation to Matignon at a safe 
 distance from the town. Bordeaux itself 
 wished to re-elect him, but he had decided 
 to retire, and Matignon was chosen as his 
 successor. The ex-mayor withdrew to his 
 tower, and for two or three years we hear 
 little of him. 
 
 One friendship, made while he was mayor, 
 meant much to him. It was during this 
 time that he learned to know Francis Bacon's 
 brother, Anthony, who spent twelve years in 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 119 
 
 France, and a great part of them at Bordeaux. 
 Here he constantly stayed between 1583 and 
 1 59 1, and here he became intimate with 
 Montaigne. After he returned to England, 
 they corresponded till Montaigne's death. 
 No doubt Francis Bacon often saw the letters 
 from France and listened to his brother's 
 stories of their writer — of what he said, and 
 how he lived. Montaigne left him other 
 bequests than that word ' Essays,' which he 
 had made so glorious. 
 
 Anthony Bacon's letters were probably 
 events to Montaigne. Another pleasure came 
 to him in these later days : a great wish of his 
 was fulfilled. He had long desired a disciple 
 — a friend of his intellect — and such a one 
 appeared. This was Pierre Charron, a scepti- 
 cal ecclesiastic of pleasant countenance and 
 gay, easy-going manners, an ardent admirer 
 of Montaigne, and inspired with a keen wish 
 to make his personal acquaintance. In 1586, 
 he came to stay in the chateau. His admira- 
 tion warmed Montaigne's heart, his com- 
 panionship stimulated him ; and, what is 
 more, Charron's learning, more methodical 
 than that of Montaigne, helped him towards 
 some ordering of his thoughts. It may well 
 be that Charron's influence went for some- 
 
I20 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 thing in the writing of the Third Book of 
 the Essays. 
 
 This was finished by 1588, and Montaigne 
 went to Paris to superintend the publication 
 of the first edition. On this journey it was 
 that the robbers, at least fifteen in number, 
 took him prisoner, and then, charmed by his 
 countenance, set him free. He reached Paris 
 safely, but probably he did not enjoy it long. 
 Most historians agree that this must have 
 been the time that he had the dangerous ill- 
 ness mentioned by one who knew him, the 
 poet, Pierre de Brach. ' He conquered death 
 by contemning it,' said this friend ; but, what- 
 ever the remedy, he recovered. 
 
 He had come to a world distraught by 
 revolution. Paris was torn by the struggle 
 between the King and the Ligue, and it was 
 during Montaigne's sojourn that the crisis 
 supervened, and the King left Paris to Guise 
 and his partisans. Montaigne was loyal to 
 the Crown and followed Henri out of the 
 city, and when, soon upon this, he returned, he 
 was clapped by the Ligueurs into the Bastille. 
 It was discovered that this act of violence was 
 mere retaliation — a form of revenge for Henri's 
 imprisonment of a Normandy gentleman — and 
 after a few hours' confinement (the shortest 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 121 
 
 confinement perhaps on record) he was re- 
 leased by express order of Catherine de' Medici 
 — the fitting deliverer of such a captive. This 
 seems to be the only occasion on which the 
 two great opportunists came into direct rela- 
 tion with one another, and it bore no fruit of 
 subsequent intercourse. Nor did it affect 
 Montaigne otherwise. But the episode was 
 his nearest approach to martyrdom, and its 
 brevity is characteristic. 
 
 The next year still found him away from 
 home and following the movements of the 
 Court. He was present at the fateful opening 
 of the Etats de Blois ; we know that he 
 talked to De Thou there, and to the royal 
 geographer, Laval ; we know, too, that he 
 and the poet, Etienne Pasquier, had a con- 
 versation about, the Essays. Pasquier cavilled 
 at the Gasconisms he found in them ; critic-like, 
 he was sure he had made an impression upon 
 the author. But when the edition of 1595 
 appeared, not a word that he questioned had 
 been changed. Montaigne, however, did not 
 stay on at Blois ; he was not there for the final 
 catastrophe. The news of Henri's murder of 
 Guise reached him at Montaigne ; so did the 
 tidings, not long after, of the assassination of 
 the King. 
 
122 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 That event largely altered Montaigne's pro- 
 spects, for it put his friend, Navarre, upon the 
 throne. It was yet three years before he 
 established his position and France formally 
 acknowledged him as Henri iv. ; but in point 
 of fact, he was king from the first moment. 
 
 Had Montaigne lived long into his reign, 
 his influence would have left strong traces. 
 As it was, in the three years before his death, 
 he was not without effect upon the royal 
 counsels. 
 
 ' I have,' he wrote to him in 1590, ' always 
 beheld in you this same dignity of fortune the 
 which you have reached ; and you may re- 
 member that even when I had to confess as 
 much to my cure^ I did not for a moment 
 leave off considering your successes with 
 approval. Nowadays when I have more reason 
 and more liberty I embrace your triumphs 
 with a complete affection.' 
 
 And later in the same year he makes bold 
 to reprove him : 
 
 ' I should have wished that the private 
 gains of the soldiers of your army, and the 
 need to content them had not deprived 
 you in this capital city of a noble name for 
 having, in the midst of victory, treated 
 your mutinous subjects with greater indul- 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 123 
 
 gence than is used by their protectors. And 
 would that, instead of an ill-gotten, transitory 
 reputation, you had shown that they were 
 yours by your truly royal, fatherly protec- 
 tion. To conduct such affairs as you have 
 in hand, you must use means that are out 
 of the common. . . . There was a great 
 conqueror of the past who was wont to boast 
 that he had given to the foes whom he had 
 conquered as much cause to love him as to 
 his friends.' 
 
 The king would never have been offended 
 with anything that Montaigne said. A strong 
 personal affection had grown up between them. 
 ' I take it as a singular favour that His Majesty 
 hath deigned to let me feel that he would care 
 to see me ' — thus he wrote when he had, too 
 late, received a summons to meet the king at 
 Tours — ' A futile person I am, indeed, yet his, 
 rather by affection than by duty.' 
 
 And the affection was wholly disinterested. 
 When Henri wrote to him asking what reward 
 he would like for his services, Montaigne's 
 reply was that he had all that he wanted, and 
 wished for nothing but the payment of such 
 expenses as might leave him out of pocket 
 when he should be in attendance upon the 
 king. And the king, who understood him. 
 
124 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 acquiesced, and only repaid him with his 
 confidence. 
 
 What a wonderful reign it would have 
 been had Henri iv. had Montaigne for Prime 
 Minister. Many things would have happened 
 that did happen — some would not have been 
 allowed to happen — considerably more would 
 have been added. And how richly these two 
 past-masters in savoir-faire would have enter- 
 tained one another ! 
 
Marik Jaiis ije Gournay. 
 
 F}VIN tIn/rojitis/>ii-cc chosen I'v lici'sdi'ror /„ r /■,.,./.■ ■•A,-/z'!s ,1 Prysrus 
 I BiMitif/i.yii,- Xatioim/i: ) 
 
 [I- 1 0,11 a /:/,ologi;i/>h I'V .1/. Ctt-aii.loil. ) 
 
 in tlio edition of ib^l. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 125 
 
 IV 
 
 It was typical of Montaigne's life that per- 
 haps its most amusing episode should have 
 been kept for the last. His friendship with 
 Mademoiselle Marie le Jars de Gournay was the 
 spice at the close of the feast : the first friend- 
 ship in the modern spirit between an admiring 
 young woman and a man of letters who likes 
 to be admired. Admiration seems, indeed, 
 too mild a word for Marie de Gournay's senti- 
 ment : it was nearer hero-worship. And 
 Montaigne, the scorner of women, would 
 not have been a man had he not enjoyed it. 
 Who can tell what would have happened 
 had he met her earlier in life ? His very 
 contempt of her sex was based upon his feel- 
 ing of what women might be if they could 
 but cultivate the mind. When he finally 
 met one who was intellectual, he gave her 
 companionship upon equal terms. And there 
 were no looks to allure him. Like La 
 Boetie, she was rather ugly than otherwise, 
 with a round face and prominent eyes. In- 
 
126 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 deed, in later years, when some baseless scandal 
 was spread abroad concerning her, it was said 
 that her best defence would be to show her- 
 self. There must have been a rare force 
 of mind, distinction, a vivid intelligence, in 
 the woman who so attracted Montaigne. She 
 did not only respond, she contributed. Yet 
 the intellect was not the only element in her 
 relations with him ; they were Platonic, but 
 they were personal. He was an elderly man, 
 she was young and she was feminine ; he 
 was an author, she a reader ; there was 
 flattery in her attitude, and he was getting 
 jaded — perhaps in need of flattery. There are 
 too many obvious reasons for their friendship 
 to make it any sure test of Montaigne's standards. 
 And, strange to say, her feeling was for the 
 author more than for the man. She had an 
 inborn faculty for letters which had inspired 
 her lonely life long before she knew him. 
 She was born in 1565, thirty-two years after 
 Michel de Montaigne, and she had lived 
 in the compulsory solitude of the family 
 chateau in Picardy, thrown back upon her 
 own resources. She quickly developed a taste 
 — a passionate taste — for learning ; it served 
 her instead of human intercourse, for of this 
 she had none. Her father died early in her 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 127 
 
 life. Her mother, an eccentric lady of rank, 
 had no sympathy with her daughter, and the 
 greatest contempt for every branch of know- 
 ledge. Marie had a remarkable will as well 
 as a remarkable brain. For her the moral 
 and intellectual became one in her arduous 
 scheme of discipline. She had no teachers — 
 she taught herself. By means of ponderous 
 translations she mastered Latin enough, in 
 after days, to translate Virgil ; she studied 
 Greek ; she pored over grammar ; she steeped 
 herself in criticism and poetry. She also 
 absorbed herself in chemistry and in alchemy, 
 over which, later on, she was rash enough to 
 spend large sums. She had, she tells us, ' a 
 boiling-hot temper ' ; she did not easily forget 
 an injury ; she was impetuous ; she had a 
 trenchant wit ; her mind was not inclined 
 to piety. To her it seemed presumptuous 
 that a mortal should dare to adore the Deity. 
 
 Le fini I'infini ? L'ouvrage son Auteur ? 
 Un atome, un neant, I'unique Createur ? ^ 
 
 Thus she questioned. And this sixteenth- 
 century Mary Wollstonecraft was full of 
 theories about the heart. Unlike the more 
 modern woman, she proclaimed that she had 
 no need of the love that is ordinarily given 
 
 1 Peinture des Maun : Mademoiselle de Gournay. 
 
128 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 to her sex ; she pleaded for a spiritualised 
 passion. When Montaigne arrived, he only 
 embodied a long-cherished idea. It was in 
 1583, or 1584, that she came across the 
 first two Books of the Essays. She read 
 with such excitement that her relations had 
 to administer hellebore as a sedative to her 
 nerves ; it was only her resolve to culti- 
 vate calm like Montaigne that had power 
 to tranquillise her. She had, she tells us, but 
 one desire — she ' began to wish to know the 
 author more than anything else in the world.' 
 Two or three years after, she heard a rumour 
 of his death, 'from the which she suffered 
 an extreme sorrow, for it seemed to her that 
 all the glory and happiness and riches of her 
 soul were mown down like grass by the loss 
 of the companionship and converse she had 
 promised herself to hold with his mind.' The 
 report was contradicted — she breathed again. 
 Not long after, she came to Paris with her 
 mother ; he was there. She took her 
 chance ; she sent a letter ' to salute him,' and 
 he also lost no time, but came the next day to 
 see her. The effect was instantaneous : he 
 felt like a father towards her ; he hailed 
 her as his ' adopted daughter,' ' the which 
 affection she received with the more plaudits 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 129 
 
 for that she was astonished at the predestined 
 sympathy between their geniuses, she having 
 in her heart, after first reading his book, 
 foretold just such a friendship upon his side, 
 both because of the difference in their ages 
 and the outlook of their souls upon life and 
 morals.' 
 
 This rather high-flown, practical Egeria, 
 when she got what she wanted made the most 
 of it. It is easy to think her overstrained and 
 pompous. If no charm of presence or of 
 nature transmits itself from her to us through 
 the centuries, so much the more noteworthy 
 is her survival as a memorable person, apart 
 from her master. For with her strong 
 character, she wrested content from adverse 
 circumstances and eventually won happiness. 
 It was something like a miracle to emerge 
 from her straitened solitude to find Montaigne ; 
 to discover that her dream of knowing him had 
 come true beyond her fondest imaginations ; 
 to realise that her solitude was broken, and 
 broken by such a companion. She does not 
 inspire sentiment in posterity, and yet there is 
 something like pathos in the strangely sudden 
 change in her existence, in the brevity of her 
 brilliant fortune. She lost no day of her happi- 
 ness, for she spent eight or nine months in 
 
 I 
 
I30 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 Montaigne's company at Paris, discussing with 
 him all the thoughts and subjects over which 
 she had brooded in her seclusion ; and, after 
 that, he paid her a three months' visit in the 
 chateau in Picardy. How the mother regarded 
 her daughter's literary romance, how she 
 behaved, remains unknown. Mademoiselle 
 seems to have taken her own way, like the 
 most modern of young women. 
 
 And, like other modern young women of 
 twenty-four, she wrote a novel, a very dull 
 one, the story of a Persian Princess. It was 
 written at Montaigne's instigation. One day 
 he and she had been reading Plutarch together ; 
 they had been discussing tales of tragic love 
 and the fatal results of passion. Montaigne 
 advised her to write a romance — he no doubt 
 often revived the subject upon their daily 
 walks about the countryside. And when 
 he had gone, she consoled herself by obeying 
 his suggestion. She set to work with a rather 
 drastic energy, and, the manuscript once 
 finished, she sent it off by express messenger 
 to Gascony. It was bulky, and it was called 
 Le Proumenoir de M. de Montaigne, in memory 
 of the occasions that inspired it ; but though 
 M. de Montaigne may have felt flattered, he 
 can hardly have felt amused. There remains 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 131 
 
 no record to tell us whether or no he regretted 
 his advice. 
 
 Her aphorisms were more interesting than 
 her long works. A few of these adages survive, 
 strongly flavoured with Montaigne, yet bold 
 and sufficiently her own to show why her 
 mind suited his. ' A good man,' she said, 
 ' will sometimes, may often, forgive a folly ; a 
 fool will not forgive wisdom.' 
 
 ' The soul is only useful to the common 
 herd as salt is useful to the pig — to keep it 
 from corruption.' 
 
 ' Whoever should take from man the virtues 
 that he practiseth by compulsion, by interest, 
 or by chance and mere inadvertence, will place 
 him nearer to the animals than I dare confess.' 
 
 ' When I consider the filthy stains, the 
 nothingness of men, I sometimes long to 
 believe that Heaven's design was to found 
 each of our great towns for ten souls only, 
 and that all the rest were created to serve as 
 candles to these few and as material for their 
 divers virtues.' 
 
 ' Whoso doth not perceive his virtues will 
 never perceive his vices.' 
 
 ' The sun, very great though it be, seemeth 
 to enter whole into a mere drop of water, 
 and man appeareth likewise to enter whole 
 
132 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 into one action, and that often the least bril- 
 liant of his life.' 
 
 She was a critic of style, as well as 
 of conduct. Her own taste, like that of 
 her master, made her prefer the simple and 
 sincere. She instinctively disliked all preten- 
 sion. ' Mon Dieu,' she wrote of some inferior 
 authors, ' what glory and what diadems ! 
 How much looking for Palestine a hundred 
 miles the other side of Jordan ! ' 
 
 These sayings belong to a later period of 
 Mademoiselle de Gournay's existence, but the 
 woman who could think and express herself 
 thus saliently was no unworthy companion for 
 Montaigne. Their main subject of conversa- 
 tion, whether upon their strolls or at home, 
 was not, however. Mademoiselle de Gournay 
 or her writing. It was Montaigne, and Mon- 
 taigne's Essays. She offered criticisms — 
 Montaigne delighted in them. His feeling 
 for her increased till it almost amounted to 
 a passion. ' I have,' he says in one of the 
 Essays^ ' taken pleasure in proclaiming in 
 various places the hopes that I entertain of 
 Marie de Gournay le Jars, my adopted 
 daughter, surely loved by me with much more 
 than a fatherly love, and treasured in my lonely 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 17 ; ' De la Pr^somption.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 133 
 
 retreat as one of the most precious parts of 
 my own being. I look to no one but to her 
 now in the world. If youth can give any 
 presage, this soul of hers will one day be 
 capable of the noblest things. The criticisms 
 that she made of my first Essays — she a 
 woman, so young, so solitary in her country- 
 side, and living in such an age — the devotion 
 that she pledged me merely on the good 
 opinion that she formed of me long before 
 she saw me, are incidents well worthy of 
 meditation.' 
 
 It was thus that Marie de Gournay, the 
 literary confidante of Montaigne, the recipient 
 of his wishes about the Essays, of his notes 
 or verbal injunctions concerning changes and 
 amendments, became his editor after his 
 death. Of this calamity she only heard 
 through a friend, some eight months after it 
 had happened. It would have plunged her 
 in despair had she not had her great task to 
 sustain her. It was no easy one. Her 
 material, it is true, was within reach. She 
 had the manuscript of the edition of 1588, 
 which Madame de Montaigne had put into 
 the hands of Montaigne's friend, Pierre de 
 Brach, who, in his turn, gave it to Made- 
 moiselle de Gournay. And there were 
 
134 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 scholars enough if she wanted guidance. 
 But she was taking a bold step ; she was, per- 
 haps, the first woman editor, in an age when 
 editing was a fine art. And she, who alone 
 knew the many alterations that Montaigne 
 had intended to make, found herself con- 
 fronted with no mean difficulties. She 
 showed courage and patience, she showed 
 great diligence. She often had to work up- 
 on rough notes and indications, to recall 
 words, to decide between variants — she labori- 
 ously translated all Montaigne's classical quota- 
 tions — and this at a time when her natural 
 vigour was dulled by her sorrow. ' I with 
 him, and I without him,' she said, ' are two 
 absolutely different beings.' But she did not 
 rest until she had done ; the edition appeared 
 in 1595. It was only then that she felt free 
 to seek repose. And she found it at the 
 chateau of Montaigne, the home that she 
 had never seen in her master's lifetime, 
 whither she now journeyed to make acquaint- 
 ance with his widow and his daughter. It is 
 to the credit of all three women that they 
 became close friends, and that Mademoiselle 
 de Gournay, who was addicted to long visits, 
 stayed with them for fifteen months. It is 
 also to her credit that in the later edition 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 135 
 
 which, in 1635, in her old age, she presented 
 to RicheHeu, she cut down Montaigne's 
 eulogium of herself.^ 
 
 After Montaigne's death, she had freedom, 
 her mother having died a year before him. 
 And, with the acquisition of freedom, she lost 
 some of her force, and narrowed down into 
 the literary lady. She was left well-off and in- 
 dependent, with a young brother and sister in 
 her charge, and she lost no time in coming 
 with them to Paris, with the purpose of 
 cultivating men of letters and moving in dis- 
 tinguished society. She delighted in keeping 
 up elaborate correspondences with celebrated 
 scholars. Justus Lipsius, a famous savant, 
 living in the Netherlands, exchanged periods 
 with her. When her ' adopted father ' died, 
 Lipsius offered, with many learned scrolls and 
 flourishes, to become her ' adopted brother.' 
 In such amenities, fit for a Minerva, her soul 
 delighted. And, after her own fashion, she 
 
 1 M. Mario SchifF thinks that in the edition of 1595 Made- 
 moiselle de Gournay has indulged her romantic imagination, 
 and that she actually invented and inserted the high-flown 
 praises of herself which, in 1635, she omitted. It must be 
 owned that the omission is mysterious. Modesty is not enough 
 to account for it, for modesty would have impelled her to leave 
 out the passage altogether. (See Marie de Gournay : Mario 
 Schiff.) 
 
136 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 enjoyed the world. Like other prisoners 
 suddenly set at liberty, she gave way, she 
 tells us, to extravagance. But she does not 
 seem to have done anything much more 
 unbridled than keep a coach — which was 
 almost a necessity, considering the condition 
 of Paris pavements — and two footmen where 
 she need only have had one. She also had a 
 page, and a page well-suited to a votaress of 
 literature, for he was the illegitimate son of 
 Ronsard's page, Amadis Jamyn, and so, as 
 it were, a kind of indirect grandson of the 
 Pleiade. In many ways Mademoiselle was 
 something of a Spartan. She slept on 
 a woollen mattress ; she had no women 
 servants, only, for some months, a girl who 
 played to her on the lute to dispel her melan- 
 choly ; her table was simple for her day, and 
 she never invited more than a few guests. 
 
 A choice circle gathered round her. She 
 threw herself into public affairs, and, gradually 
 giving up scholarship, she became a well- 
 known pamphleteer. And a very audacious 
 one. Although her pages are full of quota- 
 tions and reflections from Montaigne, in this 
 she was the opposite of him — that she was, 
 to use modern parlance, a born revolu- 
 tionary. Had he lived, she might have 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 137 
 
 remained a Conservative, but, with her bold 
 instincts, this is not Hkely. Her treatise on 
 the education of princes might easily have 
 sent her to the Bastille. 'All men,' it 
 proclaims, ' are born under the laws of 
 equality. Each one of those who will 
 some day live beneath thy [the prince's] 
 sceptre is capable of becoming what thou art.' 
 The pamphlet was never even answered. 
 No more was her defence of equal rights for 
 women, in Grief des Dames and in F^galite des 
 hommes et des femmes — wine new enough to 
 burst the old bottles. Quite as heterodox also 
 was her Avis aux gens d'Eglise. In these 
 matters she was in advance of her time. But 
 her chief title to fame lay not in politics, it 
 lay in her writings on the French language, 
 and here she changed her role. She did not 
 desire the new. The reforms she made for 
 were only revivals ; she wished to preserve 
 old words, to resuscitate many long since 
 disused. It has been supposed that she was 
 the herald of the innovating Hotel de Ram- 
 bouillet, but this is far from the truth. She 
 was not a pioneer, she was a conserver. Like 
 most originals, she was laughed at, especially 
 for the old words that she tried to restore. 
 Saint-Evremond wrote a play to ridicule her, 
 
138 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 and Richelieu, with questionable taste, paid 
 her a sardonic compliment, couched in anti- 
 quated terms taken from her works. Her 
 spirited retort, ' You are laughing at a poor old 
 woman, but laugh, great genius, laugh on — 
 every one must contribute to your amusement,' 
 found favour with the Minister. Never was 
 repartee better paid. ' The Cardinal, surprised 
 at the old maid's presence of mind, asked her 
 pardon.' Presently he told his follower, Bois- 
 robert, that ' something must be done for her ' 
 — she should have a pension of two hundred 
 crowns. 
 
 ' " But she has servants," said Boisrobert. 
 " Who are they ? " answered, the Cardinal. 
 " Mademoiselle Jamyn," replied Boisrobert, 
 the bastard of Amadis Jamyn, the page of 
 Ronsard." " I give him fifty livres a year," 
 said the Cardinal. " Then there is Madame 
 Paillon," added Boisrobert — " that is the cat." 
 " I give her twenty livres a year," rejoined his 
 Eminence, " on condition that she has kittens." 
 " But, monseigneur, she has had kittens," said 
 Boisrobert. The Cardinal added one pistole 
 more for the kittens.' ^ 
 
 , Those who laughed at her, and they were 
 many, were not usually as kind as the Minister. 
 
 1 Historiettes ie Tallemant des Reaux. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 139 
 
 The little Academic which, together with 
 a colleague or two, she founded to further 
 her ideas concerning language, did not make 
 them laugh the less. From 1637 onwards, 
 it met in her salon, an Academie in name, 
 but in fact no more than a small group of 
 poetasters and grammarians. The poetasters 
 and grammarians of other groups used her as 
 their target. And it must be owned that she 
 gave them opportunity. She indulged in 
 literary mystifications ; proposed to publish 
 a complete edition of Ronsard's poems ; 
 doctored them with long interpolations of 
 her own — supposed improvements — ' to 
 rescue him from oblivion.' The publication 
 of this work was mercifully prevented, but it 
 did not add to her reputation. Her conceit 
 was naif, impregnable. 
 
 When she showed her epigrams to a well- 
 known poet of the day, and he told her that 
 they were worthless and without point, she 
 merely answered that they were epigrams a la 
 Grecque, and, in such, point was out of place. 
 Her faults and her virtues, alike innocent, did 
 not age well, they attracted ridicule. Nor did 
 she mend matters by her gallant defence of 
 the then unpopular Jesuits. Her quixotism, 
 her undiscerning generosity, her exactingness 
 
HO MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 and self-satisfaction, were not the qualities 
 that appealed to her generation. ' Luckily 
 we missed the Damoiselle de Montaigne, M. 
 Courart and I, when we went to call upon 
 her a week, ago,' wrote the poet, Chapelain — 
 ' I pray God that we may always do this 
 when we go to see her.' She became a 
 kind of butt for the merciless wits of Paris, 
 and they played practical jokes upon her 
 which may well, in after years, have inspired 
 Moliere. The versifier, Racan, was one day 
 going to call and see her for the first time, 
 and two wags, getting wind of this, reached her 
 house before him, and, in turn, impersonated 
 him to her, so that when the real man arrived 
 she, utterly bewildered, ejected him, with cries 
 of ' Au voleur ! ' The same tasteless jesters 
 sent her a letter, supposed to come from an 
 English cleric, to beg her to write her Life 
 for a collection of biographies of illustrious 
 men and women which James i. had ordered 
 to be made. She took six weeks over 
 her autobiography, and despatched it to 
 England, to the complete mystification of the 
 recipient. But James evidently kept it with 
 some respect, for there is a record of his 
 taking it from his cabinet and showing it to 
 the French ambassador. Even such tricks 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 141 
 
 as these are not, however, so unkind as the 
 note that the man of letters, Balzac, sent to 
 Chapelain, when she lay dying. 
 
 ' Last time she wrote,' he said, ' she warned 
 me it was for the last time, and that she did 
 not think she would have leisure to await my 
 answer in this world, I thought her a woman 
 of her word, and imagined her already inhabit- 
 ing the Elysian fields ; for, as you know, she has 
 had no acquaintance with Abraham's bosom, 
 and never had much of a passion for Paradise.' 
 
 Balzac, Chapelain, Racan, had shallower 
 hearts, probably, than she, as well as more 
 brilliant tongues. She was lonely, but she 
 had consolations in her solitude. She corre- 
 sponded with St. Francois de Sales ; Justus 
 Lipsius remained faithful to her. And, after 
 all, what mattered pedants, poetasters, satirists, 
 whether her friends or her foes ? She had 
 had the love of Montaigne, and that was the 
 thought which must have been with her 
 when she died in 1645. 
 
 Montaigne's death took place more than 
 half a century before hers, in the year 1592. 
 His life had known few outward changes. 
 Lenor, his daughter, had married, and had, 
 let us hope, provided him with the son-in-law 
 
142 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 whom he desired. But he did not live to see 
 the birth of his grandchild. He died, as he 
 would have wished, at Montaigne, enjoying 
 existence almost to the end. 
 
 ' I want men,' he said, ' to act, to prolong 
 the offices of life as long as possible ; and I 
 should like Death to find me planting my 
 cabbages, indiffisrent to his coming, and still 
 more to my imperfect garden.' ^ 
 
 He had mastered the art of indiffisrence. 
 He was the supreme pessimist : he loved the 
 moment. Yet he sat loose to life — and he 
 practised his precepts. 
 
 ' I am at this hour in such condition, thanks 
 to God, that I am ready to flit when it pleaseth 
 Him, without a single regret for anything, 
 unless it be for life itself. ... I am busy 
 untying myself everywhere ; my farewells are 
 half made to one and all, excepting to myself. 
 Never hath man prepared himself to leave the 
 world with freer, fuller heart ; never hath he 
 more universally lost hold than I am now 
 setting myself to do.' ^ 
 
 He had, indeed, no dread of death, but he 
 had a great dread of dying. Not of pain, but 
 of paraphernalia ; of the ' army of doctors and 
 
 1 Essais, i. 20 : ' Que philosopher c'est apprendre a mourir.' 
 
 2 Ibid. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 143 
 
 weepers,' who alone, he thought, made death 
 terrible. Doctors he covered with his serene 
 scorn. ' I do not quarrel with them,' he says, 
 ' but with their art ; nor do I blame them 
 much for making their profit out of our 
 foolishness. . . , Many other vocations, better 
 and worse than theirs, have no foundation or 
 support except in public abuses. I summon 
 them when I am ill, if they happen to be 
 there at the right moment. . . . They may 
 choose whether my soup shall be made of 
 hotch-potch vegetables or of lettuces, they 
 can order me white wine or claret ; and so 
 with all other things that are merely indifferent 
 to my appetite.' ^ 
 
 This was all he found to say for the Faculty. 
 As for the 'weepers,' they made him long 
 that he might end in battle, far from home, 
 or among simple village folk who took death 
 as a matter of course. 
 
 ' It is,' he says, ' the dreadful looks, the grim 
 apparatus with which we surround Death, that 
 affright us. Quite a new aspect of life — the 
 cries of mothers, of wives, of children, visits 
 from dazed, heart-broken people; the pre- 
 sence of numbers of pale footmen, their eyes 
 swollen with crying ; a dark room, lighted 
 
 ' Essais, ii. 37 : ' De la Ressemblance des enfants aux p^res. 
 
144 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 tapers, our couch besieged by physicians and 
 preachers — in short, every kind of horror and 
 alarm around us. There we are — already dead 
 and buried. Children are afraid of their 
 friends even, when they see them masked. So 
 are we. We must unmask things as well as 
 people. And whoso will take this mask away 
 will find nothing underneath but the same 
 Death whom a lackey or a simple housemaid 
 passed by the other day without fear.'^ 
 
 Montaigne fulfilled his dearest wish — he 
 died naturally. ' In this last piece played 
 between Death and you,' he had once said, 
 ' there is no more pretending ; you must 
 speak French ; you must show what you 
 really have of good and clean at the bottom 
 of the pot.' ^ 
 
 He spoke French, he was Montaigne, to 
 the close. The accounts of his end differ. 
 His friend, Pierre de Brach, has recorded that 
 during his last illness he had no one near him 
 to whom to talk out his soul ; yet somebody 
 there probably was, for the historian, Flori- 
 mond de Raymond, mentions his power of 
 talking philosophy between bouts of suffering. 
 
 1 Essais, 1. 20 : ' Que philosopher c'est apprendre a mourir.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. 19 : ' Qu'il ne faut juger de notre heur qu'apr^s la 
 mort.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 145 
 
 Pasquier, again, describes him as speech- 
 less for the last three days, and only able to 
 talk with his pen. All three pictures are 
 characteristic, and all three were probably 
 true at some moment or another of that 
 time. But there is one record which con- 
 vinces us concerning the last moments of all. 
 He rose, it was told, from his bed and got 
 into his dressing-gown ; he threw open his 
 closet ; he bade enter a waiting crowd of 
 servants and legatees, and then and there him- 
 self gave them his bequests. He summoned 
 a few of his neighbours, country gentlemen, 
 his comrades and companions. The priest 
 came ; he administered the Sacraments ; the 
 dying man was fully conscious ; at the Eleva- 
 tion of the Host he made a pious sign of 
 recognition — and, as he made it, his spirit 
 passed away. He departed as he had lived, 
 decorously, with due observance, uninspired 
 by any spiritual vision. 
 
 France mourned for his death, and the first 
 report we have of the general sorrow is, 
 strange to say, in a letter to an Englishman. 
 Pierre de Brach had known Anthony Bacon 
 intimately at Bordeaux, and it is to this old 
 friend of Montaigne's, in England, that Brach 
 
 K 
 
146 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 turns in the first days of their loss — the more 
 so, as the last letter that Montaigne read 
 before his illness was one from Anthony, who 
 had not allowed their intercourse to lapse. 
 
 ' I am,' wrote Brach, ' so touched to the 
 quick by a new sorrow, by the tidings of the 
 death of M. de Montaigne, that I no more 
 belong to myself. In him I have lost my 
 best friend ; France, the mind the most whole 
 and the most vital that ever she hath possessed ; 
 and the world the true pattern and mirror of 
 pure philosophy, to the which he hath borne 
 witness as well beneath the stroke of death as 
 in what he wrote during his lifetime ; nor, so 
 far as I have heard, did the great last scene 
 in any way belie his noble words. The last 
 letter that he received was from you, the 
 which I sent him. He hath not answered it, 
 because he had to answer Death. Yet Death 
 could only take what was Death's ; the rest, 
 and the better part, his name and his memory, 
 will only die with the death of all things, and 
 will stand firm.' ^ 
 
 It is not unfitting that Montaigne's life 
 should end upon the note of friendship. 
 
 ^ The French Renaissance in England, Sidney Lee. Letter 
 quoted in note on p. 173, from Anthony Bacon's MSS. at 
 Lambeth (British Museum Additional MSS. 4610, f. 123). 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 H7 
 
 Montaigne died, but he survived. Never, 
 perhaps, has great man died less than he. He 
 has left himself body and soul behind him, 
 in the Essays. We have already heard how 
 and why he wrote them. There is no self- 
 portraiture more deliberate, or more desultory. 
 It was a safety-valve for his experience of life 
 — an outlet for his need of expression. ' No 
 pleasure,' he tells us, ' hath any savour for me 
 unless I can communicate it. And if it be 
 no more than a gay thought the which hath 
 come into my head, I feel vexed to produce it 
 all alone and to have no one to whom to offer 
 it.'i 
 
 ' Had I found some one to talk to I would 
 gladly, had I been able, have chosen the form 
 of conversation as a means of setting forth my 
 notions. I needed what I once used to have, 
 a certain kind of intercourse which attracted, 
 which sustained, which uplifted me. For to 
 
 1 Essaii, iii. 9 : 'De la Vanite.' 
 
148 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 hold negotiations with the wind, as others do, 
 I could not do it. . . . I, the enemy of all 
 falsification, I should have been more careful, 
 more sure-footed, could I but have addressed 
 myself to a staunch friend, than I am when I 
 have to direct my words to a many-headed 
 public' ^ 
 
 And yet, besides this casual expansiveness, 
 he had, as we know, a set purpose in writing his 
 Essays, a serious purpose, however gaily he 
 I ^dressed it. He desired to "• mould life ' by 
 j living — on paper, as in real existence ; and 
 since he could probe no life so truly as his 
 1 own, he exposed it without scruple and with- 
 out vanity. For his self-revelation is a state- 
 ment — cheerful, cold, sane, and free from any 
 puling element, any luxury of self-pity or 
 self-interest. It is difficult to guess how far 
 he gauged his own dimensions. ' At one 
 moment I place them high, at another low,' ^ 
 he says of the Essays. He would have us 
 believe in their haphazardness. But the loose- 
 ness of his form implied no vagueness of 
 thought ; it concealed, indeed, a more de- 
 liberate design than he wished the random 
 reader to suspect. ' The subjects,' he writes, 
 
 1 Essais, i. 40 : ' Consideration sur Ciceron,' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 8 : ' De I'Art de conKrer.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 149 
 
 ' are all linked the one to the other.' ^ And 
 if he also writes that he ' found it strange ' 
 that ' persons of intellect should trouble their 
 heads ' to provide him with a system, that 
 was only because he wanted to hit the 
 Schoolmen, to teach them that formality 
 is not one with form, that order can be 
 maintained without headings, that ease is 
 not ignorance, but mastery ; because, of 
 malice prepense^ he desired to lead all pedants 
 astray. 
 
 His desultoriness was also a matter of style, 
 a part of his conception of autobiography. 
 And there is no autobiographer in the world 
 who would not profit by reading Montaigne. 
 The Essays are a kind of epitome of the art of 1 
 self-revelation, and an art, as he gives it us, so i 
 modern that we can hardly believe he lived in 
 his century. The classical tradition of adula- 
 tion in Renaissance, Greek, and Latin, the 
 tedium of heroics and of oraisons furitbres 
 revolted him. He broke with all such ante- 
 cedents, and returned to Nature. Before all 
 things, he demanded truth — unvarnished, but 
 neither sour-faced nor puritanic. ' I have not 
 the slightest wish to be better loved and 
 respected when I am dead than in my life- 
 
 1 Essais, iii. J : ' Sur des vers de Virgile.' 
 
 I! 
 
ISO MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 time,' ^ he said. ' I am hungry to make 
 myself known. . . . All the world recogniseth 
 me in my book and my book in me.' ^ 
 
 ' I am not setting up a statue to stand in 
 the chief square of a town, or in a church, or 
 in any public place. ... It is rather for the 
 corner of a library and the amusement of a 
 neighbour, a relation, a friend, who will enjoy 
 recovering my acquaintance, frequenting me 
 once more in this my image. Other men 
 have taken courage to talk about themselves, 
 for that they found the theme a worthy and a 
 rich one. I have chosen it contrariwise — for 
 that I have found it thin and sterile to such a 
 degree that no one can suspect me of ostenta- 
 tion. ... I do not, indeed, find so much 
 good in myself that I cannot tell it without 
 blushing.' ^ 
 
 ' If I speak of myself diversely, it is because 
 I think of myself diversely. By some trick, 
 in some fashion, every contradiction meeteth in 
 me. I am shamefaced and insolent ; chaste 
 and luxurious ; a prater and taciturn ; laborious 
 and delicate ; clever and stupid ; peevish and 
 good-humoured ; a liar and a truth-teller ; 
 
 1 Esiais, ii. 37 : 'De la Ressemblance dcs enfants aux pSres.' 
 ^ Essais, iii. 5 : ' Sur dcs vers de Virgile.' 
 * Essais, ii. 18: ' Du D6mentir.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 151 
 
 learned and ignorant . . . miserly and 
 extravagant.' ^ ' I would gladly come back 
 from the other world to give the lie to him 
 who tried to make me other than I was, 
 although he were trying to do me honour. I 
 feel that even living men are spoken of as 
 diiFerent from what they are, and if I had not, 
 with all my force, kept hold of the friend 
 whom I have lost, I should have had his true 
 countenance split up into a thousand other 
 countenances.' ^ 
 
 ' Whatever my ineptitudes, I have no more 
 mind to hide them than I should have to hide 
 a portrait of myself with bald head and hair 
 turning grey — a portrait in which the painter 
 had drawn a face not perfect, but mine own. 
 For the humours and opinions I set down 
 here belong to me. I give them because I 
 believe them, not because they are what ought 
 to be believed, I have no aim but to discover 
 myself — and to-morrow myself will peradven- 
 ture be another, if some new apprenticeship 
 chance to change me. I bear no authority 
 that would make men believe me, nor do I 
 desire it : I feel myself too ill-taught to teach 
 others.' ^ 
 
 1 Essais, ii. i : 'De I'Inconstance de nos actions.' 
 
 ^ Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanite.' 
 
 ^ Essais, i 26 : ' De I'lnstitution dcs Enfants.' 
 
152 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 ' And as for the public, the only relation I 
 hold with it herein is that I borrow from it 
 the topis it useth for writing. ... In com- 
 pensation, it may be that I shall keep some 
 pat of butter from melting in the market ' ^ — 
 (because it might be wrapped in a fragment 
 of his Essays) . 
 
 ' In painting myself for others, I have painted 
 myself for myself in colours more decided 
 than the real ones.' ^ . . . ' As Michel de 
 Montaigne, not as a grammarian, or a poet, 
 or a lawyer. And if the world should complain 
 that I talk too much of myself, I complain 
 that it does not even know ^ow to talk of 
 itself.' 3 
 
 ' It is custom which hath made it criminal 
 to speak of oneself and hath obstinately 
 forbidden it, hating the sense of brag, the 
 which seemeth ever to attach to such as 
 furnish their own testimonials. Instead of 
 blowing the child's nose as you ought, you 
 take away its nostrils. I think that there is 
 more harm than good in this remedy. ... If 
 I say what I really believe, I hold that custom 
 is wrong to condemn wine because some men 
 
 1 Esiais, ii. i8 : ' Du Ddmentir.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 2 : ' Du Repentir.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 153 
 
 get drunk upon it ; it is only good things 
 which can be abused.' ^ 
 
 Candour even to crudity, happy confession 
 without repentance or the smallest need of 
 absolution, such is Montaigne's notion of 
 autobiography. The one thing he exacted 
 from himself was never to make copy out of 
 himself ; was to be a man first, a writer after- 
 wards — a man as complete as might be on all 
 sides. This was a capital clause of his creed. 
 
 ' Whatever I be,' he says, ' I wish to be that 
 thing elsewhere than on paper. I have used 
 my art and my industry that I might make 
 myself felt ; my studies that I might learn to 
 do, not to write. Every effort of mine has only 
 been directed to form my life. That is my trade 
 and my work. I am less a maker of books 
 than of anything. I have always desired just 
 enough of a fortune to satisfy real and pressing 
 conveniences, not to turn such a competence 
 into a magazine and store for my heirs.' ^ 
 
 Style was essential to him — the primal 
 equipment of a writer. By culling here and 
 there in the Essays we could easily collect a 
 perfect compendium for authors, an anthology 
 for critics. He has said most things that can 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 6 : 'De I'Exercitation.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. 37 : ' De la Ressemblance des enfants aux p^res.' 
 
154 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 be said on style. And style, as he conceived 
 it, could not exist without two qualities — 
 clearness and simplicity. ' It was,' he wrote, 
 ' with good reason that childhood and sim- 
 plicity were so much commended by Truth 
 itself';^ and the words, though they bore no 
 literary import, might be taken as a definition 
 of Montaigne's literary ideal. 
 
 ' I hear people excuse themselves,'^ he says 
 elsewhere, ' for not being able to express them- 
 selves ; they make a show of having their 
 heads full of a great many fine things, but for 
 lack of eloquence, say they, they cannot bring 
 them out. That is humbug. Do you know 
 what in my opinion all these fine things are ? 
 They are shadows which come from a few 
 shapeless conceptions, and since they can 
 neither disentangle nor clear them up inside 
 themselves, they cannot produce them outside : 
 they do not yet understand themselves. . . . 
 For my part, I hold . . . that whoso hath 
 in his mind a vital and lucid thought, will 
 produce it.' ^ 
 
 And he will produce it vitally and lucidly. 
 Montaigne tells him how to do so. 
 
 ' The kind of speech that I like,' he writes, 
 
 1 Lettres de Montaigne: A M. de Mesmes. 
 
 2 Essaii, i. 26 : ' De I'Instiiution des Enfants.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 155 
 
 ' is a simple, nai'f speech, the same upon paper 
 as upon the lips — a succulent, nervous speech, 
 short and compressed, not so much combed and 
 curled and coddled as vehement and brusque.' 
 
 ' Force and nerves cannot be borrow^ed ; 
 you can only borrow^ cloaks and furbelows.' ^ 
 
 ' Those w^ho have a thin body, stuff it out 
 w^ith padding ; those who have thin subject- 
 matter swell it out with words.' ^ 
 
 Words — Montaigne's idols and his bugbears, 
 according to their behaviour. They are, he 
 thinks, the great danger of the second-rate ; 
 they help him to swim on in mere cleverness. 
 He greatly disliked too much cleverness — the 
 slightest suspicion of a superior manner or 
 conscious brilliance. What was not spontane- 
 ous seemed to him dull. ' I find,' he says, 
 ' no great difference between being unable to 
 say things well and being able only to say 
 them well.' ^ What was said was unimportant 
 so long as it was aptly and sincerely said. ' A 
 man who telleth truth can be as great a fool 
 as he who telleth lies — for we are now upon 
 the manner, not the matter of our utterance.'* 
 
 ^ Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'lnstitution des Enfants.' 
 
 2 Hid. 
 
 3 Essais, i. 40 : ' Consideration sur Cic^ron.' 
 * Essais, iii. 8 : 'De I'Art de conferer.' 
 
156 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 And if matter be there, we need not trouble — 
 it will mould the manner from within. 
 
 ' One must not always say everything, for 
 that would be folly ; but what one doth say 
 must be just what one thinketh ; otherwise it 
 turneth into evil.' ^ 
 
 The greatest evil of all, in Montaigne's eyes, 
 was a departure from the obvious — affectation, 
 pedantry, pursuit of novelty. 
 
 'Just as in our clothes it is a vanity to try 
 to attract attention by some particular and 
 unusual fashion, so is it in the matter of lan- 
 guage. The search for new-fangled phrases 
 and little-known words cometh from a pe- 
 dantic, puerile ambition. May I only use 
 such as are in use in the Halles of Paris ! ' ^ 
 
 ' No man is exempt from the utterance of 
 insipidities. The misfortune is when he 
 uttereth them in an out-of-the-way fashion.' ^ 
 
 ' A great many of our French writers of 
 to-day . . . are bold and contemptuous enough 
 not to follow the high-road ; but their lack of 
 invention and discretion ruineth them. You 
 can find nothing in them but a miserable 
 assumption of strangeness, of cold and absurd 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 17: ' De la Pr(?somption.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. z6 : ' De I'lnstitution des Enfants.' 
 
 3 Essais, iii. i : ' De I'Utile et de I'HonnSte. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 157 
 
 disguises, the which, instead of lifting the 
 subject, drag it down. So long as they 
 are strutting about pranked out in novelty, 
 they do not care a jot for efficacy ; and for 
 the sake of getting hold of a new word, they 
 leave the ordinary one, the which is often 
 stronger and more nervous.' ^ 
 
 For such newsmongers — for the throng of 
 professional authors and poetasters — for all 
 men who wrote for writing's sake and not 
 from the needs of a rich vitality, he has un- 
 bounded contempt. His Jeremiads seem to 
 fit our own day even better than his. 
 
 ' Some law should be passed,' he says, 'against 
 inept and useless writers, like the laws against 
 vagrants and ne'er-do-weels. In this fashion, the 
 popular vote would banish me and a hundred 
 others. This is no joke. Scribbling seemeth, 
 indeed, to be the symptom of an unstrung 
 generation. When have we written so much 
 as since all our civil agitations ? When did 
 the Romans write so much as at the time 
 of their ruin ? When minds become more 
 pointed and subtle, it doth not mean that they 
 grow more wise.'^ 
 
 It was Montaigne's distaste for subtleties, 
 
 ' Essais, iii. i; : ' Sur des vers de Virgile.' 
 ^ Essais, iii. 9 : 'De la Vanite.' 
 
158 MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 and their bad effect, as he thought, upon 
 man's mind, that made him lay such strong 
 stress upon frankness. An over-strong stress 
 sometimes, almost amounting to fanaticism, 
 and driving frankness over the bounds of 
 decency. Yet his frankness had a serious 
 purpose — it v\ras not devoid of its own 
 austerities. 
 
 ' I have,' he wrote, ' commanded myself to 
 say all that I dare to do. I am displeased even 
 with such thoughts as are unpublishable. The 
 worst of my deeds and moral states do not 
 seem to me as ugly as the ugliness and 
 cowardice of not being able to acknowledge 
 them. He who would force himself to say 
 everything would force himself to do none of 
 the things one is now constrained to do. God 
 grant that this excess of licence on my part 
 may draw the men of our time towards liberty, 
 the which is far above those mincing, cowardly 
 virtues born of our imperfections.' ^ 
 
 There is a goodness greater than virtue, 
 
 . j stronger and more immutable than the shifting 
 
 jj moralities of men. That it existed was not 
 
 '^Montaigne's discovery — it was the discovery 
 
 ; of the human race. It has preserved that race, 
 
 it has led it, through all its blind errors of 
 
 ' Essais, iii. 5 : ' Sur des vers de Virgile.' 
 
MONTAIGNE THE MAN 159 
 
 faith and reason — its bigotries, its heresies, its 
 fanaticisms — through the stormy clash of in- 
 stinct and idea — through its dark gropings after 
 truth, towards the light. This fundamental 
 goodness Montaigne recognised, although he 
 seldom said so ; he believed in it, although 
 his belief most often took the form of a pro- 
 test against current virtues and accepted moral 
 standards. He believed in it more than he 
 knew — too much, perhaps, to give it a name. 
 
 The scope of Montaigne's Essays, indeed, 
 far transcended his ken. He once called them 
 ' a heap of flowers from abroad, to which I 
 have added nothing of mine own but the 
 thread which bindeth them ' ; but the flowers 
 have faded, while the thread remains. His 
 book is more his than most men's books are 
 theirs, and to it might well be applied his 
 own words concerning quotations : 
 
 ' I do not only regard them from the point 
 of view of the use to which I put them. 
 Often, outside the limits of my subject, they 
 bear in them the seed of some richer and more 
 daring matter ; they strike a subtler undernote 
 — both for me who had no wish to express so 
 many things, and for those who may chance 
 upon my tune.' ^ 
 
 1 Essais, i. 40 : ' Consideration sur Ciceron.' 
 
i6o MONTAIGNE THE MAN 
 
 Who chances on that tune is forced to 
 listen, whether he will or no. And it is not 
 one to please the majority. We can but lend 
 Montaigne a close attention, and turn to the 
 Essays themselves. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE PHILOSOPHER 
 
** uaanoW^-' 
 
 
 
 
 " m^r Hv^t^anf 
 
 
 Michel Seigneur de-AIon 'rACXF, 
 
 likily bas:d uf'0>i ^{n i'lihr f'ictiirf. 
 
MONTAIGNE THE PHILOSOPHER 
 
 Montaigne is the typical Frenchman — an 
 epitome of his country. His pellucid matter- 
 of-factness — his crystal conceptions — his scepti- 
 cism born of irony and modesty — his sunny 
 materialism — his Titanic common-sense, brave, 
 unwinking, confident — his knowledge of the 
 road — his indifference to the heavens, except- 
 ing as they rained or shone, caused him comfort 
 or discomfort — his forcible, stinging insight, 
 which, when condensed, became epigram — his 
 stoical humour — his austere good-taste — his 
 width of view for every day — his limited out- 
 look on futurity — his acknowledgment of the 
 appetites as legitimate sons of the house, to be 
 Vfelcomed, even encouraged, as the means of 
 cheering life — his respect for facts before 
 imaginative truth — all these gifts and defects 
 are the heritage of France — of La Roche- 
 foucauld, of Voltaire, of Anatole France, as 
 well as of Michel de Montaigne. From all 
 these points of view he stands as the monu- 
 mental Frenchman — the monumental critic. 
 
 les 
 
1 64 MONTAIGNE 
 
 For criticism is the genius of France, and 
 Montaigne made criticism creative. He is the 
 first representative of a splendid dynasty ; just as 
 Shakespeare is perennially the type of English 
 genius — of creative imagination. Rabelais, 
 Montaigne's great predecessor, was not a 
 critic but an innovator. He gave birth to new 
 ideas, instead of, like Montaigne, giving a new 
 colour to thought. Rabelais, the giant, as he 
 rose rebellious from Chaos, scattered mud 
 from the road as he strode forward, but there 
 was that within him which could not be 
 besmirched — there was the poet. Montaigne 
 had no touch of the poet in his composition — 
 his means were always adequate to his end. 
 And here we come to his strange limitation. 
 Montaigne was ignorant of the power of an 
 idea, ignorant of its very existence. To live 
 for an idea was a possibility outside his 
 consciousness. To die for an idea seemed to 
 him a mere offence against reason, a madness, 
 an act of nervous derangement. 'Excess of 
 virtue,' he tells us, appeared in his eyes worse 
 than ' excess of vice' ; an ideal, a spendthrift 
 frivolity ; an aspiration, a sin of ignorant 
 presumption and self-indulgence. And in 
 this, too, he was not least a Frenchman. 
 The statement sounds like a paradox in a 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 165 
 
 country where the Terror itself was the debauch 
 of an idea, and where men, revolutionists and 
 sectarians, have so often marched to ruin for 
 the sake of a Cause. But if we look closer, 
 we shall see that their fall has generally come 
 from ignorance of the nature of an idea, not 
 from devotion to it. They do not know that 
 an idea is so big that men cannot walk to the 
 end of it ; they do not know that its horizon 
 must be mist. From Calvin and Pascal to 
 Rousseau, they have treated an idea as finite ; 
 they have believed that by the use of logic 
 they can come out on the other side. And 
 Montaigne was but the ne plus ultra of this 
 tendency. He was devoid of spiritual wish 
 or outlook ; he knew everything about 
 Monday and nothing at all about Sunday. 
 
 But here, again, he was not consistent. 
 There was one point at which he became a 
 poet, an idealist. It was friendship. In 
 friendship, Montaigne was higher than his 
 stature. His love for La Boetie lifted him to 
 another plane — it taught him hero-worship. 
 Montaigne, in whose creed self-preservation 
 was almost the first article, who, although he 
 was mayor of Bordeaux, would not enter the 
 plague-stricken city, refused to leave his 
 friend's bedside, in spite of a warning that the 
 
, 1 66 MONTAIGNE 
 
 illness was contagious. Montaigne, to whom 
 excessive feeling was as a sin, was so dominated 
 by sorrow that twenty years after La Boetie's 
 death, as he sat one day alone at the Baths of 
 Lucca, the sense of his loss suddenly swept 
 over him with the freshness of a grief of 
 yesterday. It haunts his Essays y it haunted 
 him. One feels there were few days when he 
 did not wake and say with the same shock of 
 surprise, ' La Boetie is dead ! ' No one has 
 written as nobly as he has done about friend- 
 ship — not even Shakespeare ; for La Boetie had 
 no attraction of good looks, and Montaigne 
 dwells only on his inner beauty. 
 
 ' In true friendship, in the which I am an 
 expert, I give myself to my friend even more 
 than I draw him unto me. Not only had I 
 liefer do him good than that he should do it 
 unto me ; but, furthermore, that he should do 
 good to himself rather than to me. In past 
 days I was wont to gather gain and use from 
 our separation ; we fulfilled the better the 
 measure of life, we widened its borders, when 
 we were parted one from the other ; he lived, 
 he enjoyed, he saw for me, and I for him, as 
 fully as if he had been there ; one part of us 
 remained idle when we were together — we 
 were fused the one in the other. Division in 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 167 
 
 space rendered more rich the conjunction of 
 our wills. That insatiate hunger for bodily 
 presence doth, in truth, somewhat proclaim a 
 weakness in the true enjoyment of souls.' ^ 
 
 Or again : ' In this friendship whereof I 
 speak, our souls commingle and confound 
 themselves the one with the other in a fusion 
 so entire that they lose themselves each in 
 each, and can no longer find the seam which 
 joined them. ... In this noble commerce 
 those services and kindnesses which feed other 
 friendships are not worthy to be reckoned. . . . 
 For all, indeed, is common between them . . . 
 wills, thoughts, judgments, possessions . . . 
 life and honour. . . . If . . . one could give 
 to the other, it would be he who received the 
 benefaction who would do good to his com- 
 panion.^ . . . And our spirits, his and mine, 
 were so closely yoked together, considering 
 one another with an ardent affection . . . 
 which so lay bare the very entrails of being, 
 that not only did I know his soul as I knew 
 mine, but I would certainly have trusted 
 myself more willingly to his hands than to 
 
 mme own.' ^ 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanite.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. 28: ' DeJ'Amiti6.' 
 « Ibid. 
 
1 68 MONTAIGNE 
 
 How warm this rings, how it glows, by 
 the side of Bacon's praise of friendship as an 
 excellent intellectual investment — an advan- 
 tageous partnership by which, if a man be 
 careful, he may make mental capital ! 
 
 Montaigne's sorrow struck him when he 
 was over thirty, at the sharpest moment of 
 experience, when he was too old to have life 
 still before him, and young enough to feel 
 the mortal pain of a gun-shot that left him 
 maimed for the rest of his days. 
 
 His friend's death coloured his existence 
 more than any event in it ; it recurs oftener 
 than any in his pages. This it was, no 
 doubt, that accentuated another almost poetic 
 tendency in him. He was haunted by death, 
 and had been from his youth onwards. The 
 omnipresence of the image of mortality was 
 common enough in his day. Death and 
 danger were always before men's eyes ; they 
 lived close to war and pestilence ; close, too, 
 to the Latin classics and their reflections 
 upon the transitoriness of life. But Mon- 
 taigne's attitude towards death was not theirs 
 — it was more intense. His thought was 
 pitched in a higher key than was usual with 
 him. As a young man, so he tells us, when 
 he was returning from wild midnight revels, 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 169 
 
 from feasting and wit and all enchantments, 
 the sense of finality would suddenly sweep 
 over him without warning, would pursue him 
 through the dark streets, and blot out thought, 
 and crush the pleasure to lose which he 
 regarded as moral suicide. 
 
 The six years of union were unclouded, and, 
 when they were over, the task of editing his 
 friend's writings was his one consolation. 
 Montaigne's love even got the better of his 
 strong disbelief in immortality. ' I have tried,' 
 he said, ' with these fragments to . . . bring 
 him back to life. I think that in some fashion 
 he feeleth this, and that these good offices of 
 mine touch him and rejoice his spirit. But, 
 in truth, he still lodgeth within me so living 
 and so whole that I can neither believe the 
 earth to lie heavy upon him, nor that he 
 can be far removed from our companion- 
 ship.' 1 
 
 These patches of warmer, finer feeling, even 
 while they ennoble him, seem unnatural. We 
 ask ourselves why they are there to perturb 
 his equanimity. Does the answer, or part of 
 it, lie in the mixed strain of his blood ? For 
 Montaigne was a Gascon and Montaigne was 
 a Jew, and the fusion of Jew and Frenchman 
 
 1 Lettres de Montaigne: A M. de Mesmes. 
 
I/O MONTAIGNE 
 
 suggests a conflict of irreconcilable elements. 
 Perhaps the thoughts and qualities that seem 
 incongruous in him, the baffling contradic- 
 tions which run like multi-coloured threads 
 through his nature, may be, to some degree, 
 explained by the strange mixture. The 
 elements are such that the threads are bound 
 to remain separate ; to run alongside of each 
 other without meeting. 
 
 Montaigne's Jewish descent, indeed, tells in 
 more ways than one, in the lesser as well as 
 the greater. To Frenchmen, their patriotism 
 is a sine qua non, the love of their country an 
 essential force. But Montaigne, for all his 
 Gallic-ness, was a deliberate cosmopolitan. 
 ' It is not,' he writes, ' for that Socrates hath 
 said it, but rather that it is mine own humour 
 — peradventure even to some excess — that I 
 consider all men my compatriots ; and I 
 embrace a Pole as gladly as I would a French- 
 man, subordinating the natural bond to that 
 which is common and universal. Nature sent 
 us free into the world and unshackled ; it is 
 we who imprison ourselves in narrow straits.' ^ 
 
 Nor is Montaigne's philosophy devoid of 
 the Jewish element. We need stretch no 
 point to detect it. There is often a kind of 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanite.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 171 
 
 intensity in his power of balance which con- 
 trasts with his general coolness and with the 
 temperament of his day. And now and then, 
 though rarely, his scepticism is touched with 
 emotion — an emotion which, again, is foreign 
 to him ; his prose assumes the style of an 
 opportunist prophet, if such there be. As 
 here, for instance : 
 
 ' For this world is a very holy temple into 
 the which man is ushered, there to look upon 
 divers images, carven by no mortal hand, but 
 such as the Divine Thought hath fashioned 
 to be apprehended of the senses : the sun, the 
 stars, the waters, and the earth, the which are 
 symbols of the invisible truth that is to be 
 apprehended by the intelligence alone.' ^ 
 
 Such a passage comes almost like a shock 
 in the midst of Montaigne's fat pasture-lands 
 of utilitarianism. 
 
 ' Transcendent humours,' he says elsewhere 
 (and he says it not once but often), 'affright 
 me like unto high and inaccessible places ; 
 and I find nothing hard to swallow in the life 
 of Socrates except his ecstasies, and what he 
 telleth us concerning his " Daimon." . . . To 
 my mind, the finest lives are those which are 
 cut upon the common human pattern, orderly, 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 12 : 'Apologic de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
172 MONTAIGNE 
 
 without miracle or extravagancy.^ All actions 
 that are in the least extraordinary are subject 
 to wrong interpretation, for that our will 
 reacheth no more nearly what is above it than 
 what is below it.' ^ 
 
 Yet another day, the apostle of a complete 
 content with incompleteness can write — like 
 Shakespeare or Browning — 
 
 ' The world is but one perennial motion ; 
 all things in it move unceasingly, the earth, 
 the boulders of the Caucasus, the pyramids of 
 Egypt — each with the universal motion no 
 less than with its own ; constancy itself is no 
 other than a more languid motion, . . . Could 
 my soul but take root, I should no longer 
 make experiment, I should resolve ; but my 
 soul is bound apprentice, and stands on trial 
 for evermore.'^ 
 
 What tide in his breast compelled Mon- 
 taigne to make a statement so far outside him- 
 self ? His normal point of view is strangely 
 different. 
 
 ' He who walketh in the crowd must swerve 
 aside and draw in his elbows, must retreat or 
 advance, must even leave the straight road, 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 13: ' De TExp^rience.' 
 ^ Essais, ii. 2 : ' De I'lvrognerie.' 
 ' Essais, iii. 2 : ' Du Repentir.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 173 
 
 according to what he meeteth upon his 
 way, . . .' ^ 
 
 ' For tender stomachs there is need of arti- 
 ficial ordinances and constraint ; good stomachs 
 simply make use of the ordinances prescribed 
 by natural appetites.' ^ This is his creed, con- 
 stantly reiterated under many shapes. We have 
 but to open the Essays at random — we shall 
 hardly fail to light upon some such passage. 
 
 Montaigne's contribution to the forces of 
 life, his unique legacy to the world, is not 
 fresh thought, it is fresh form. It is difficult 
 to separate the two, or to overestimate the 
 value of a new mode of expression that exists 
 not for an age, but for all time. A gift such 
 as this needs just a Montaigne — a creative 
 critic, not a poet ; and so Montaigne invented 
 the Essay. 
 
 Many of his thoughts were there before him. 
 Rabelais had stood up as the champion of 
 ' Dame Nature ' against asceticism, had shifted 
 the boundary-lines of morality, had laughed 
 pedantry to scorn with his huge laughter. 
 Erasmus and Reuchlin had broken blades for 
 tolerance ; Dolet had died for free-thought ; 
 the French mystics, with the saints and the 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanite.' 
 
 2 Ibid. 
 
174 MONTAIGNE 
 
 Book of Ecclesiastes at their back, had belittled 
 human knowledge ; Ronsard had trumpeted 
 Hedonism, and, together with many Renais- 
 sance cardinals, submitted his words to 
 Mother Church, and reinstated Paganism in 
 his actions ; while, as a body, the Humanists 
 made war upon the stupid, and started en- 
 lightened systems of education. The bullion 
 was ready on the quay, but Montaigne found 
 the means of transit. Who knows how long 
 the gold might not have lain there ? He 
 made it into current coin — not only, as it 
 hitherto had been, for the intellectual, but 
 also for the common and the ignorant. He 
 stood upon no height, but came down in 
 working clothes into the market-place, and 
 loitered, as it were, among his audience. 
 When, in speaking of the education of chil- 
 dren, he wrote that every schoolroom should be 
 strewn with flowers, he said what all parents 
 could understand, and said it so pleasurably 
 that he inclined them to follow his advice, 
 effecting more than a score of the treatises on 
 education then in vogue. 
 
 Montaigne, indeed, invented the art of criti- 
 cism of life — and, inventing the Essay with 
 it, he gave that art the only mode informal 
 enough to express it — deliberately informal, 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 175 
 
 in spite of his insistence on his carelessness. 
 He was the father of all essayists and aphorists 
 to come — of La Rochefoucauld, of La Bruyere, 
 of Addison, of Lamb, of Hazlitt. He was, 
 indeed, the first man of letters, as we conceive 
 such. He fulfilled the great function of 
 literature : he made wisdom attractive. 
 
 And if he was the father of the essayists, he 
 was also the father of the modern novelist. 
 For Montaigne may be said to have been the 
 initiator of psychology — of a subtle personal 
 note in his study of life and men that was 
 unknown before him, a study made at closer 
 quarters with his kind than any ventured by 
 his predecessors. Until his day, the scholars 
 and literati of the Renaissance aimed at 
 uniformity, at an even style, even in their 
 letters — a standard fostered by the general use 
 of Latin as a literary medium. The intrusion 
 of the individual element was regarded as a 
 sin against taste — a natural style was a vulgar 
 one. The current conception of literature 
 and the art of writing was that it should be 
 elegant and non-natural. For a Rabelais it 
 was easier to transgress these laws, because his 
 thought took the shape of satire, and he spoke 
 through the mouth of certain dramatis personce. 
 For Montaigne the task was harder, because 
 
176 MONTAIGNE 
 
 hitherto unattempted. The one book of his 
 day that resembles him in its modernness, its 
 familiar human touch, is the Memoirs of 
 Marguerite de Navarre, and it is only when 
 we have read his Essays that we realise how 
 much she was his disciple — a disciple from 
 kinship, not from mere imitation. The same 
 may be said of her letters and those of his 
 other great pupil, her husband, Henri iv. — 
 letters in both cases so fresh and racy, so 
 distinct from all sixteenth-century correspon- 
 dence, that they seem to mark a frontier-line 
 between the old and the new ; to leave the 
 past behind them and reach towards us, 
 bridging over the gulf of time. 
 
 ' Others form men, I record them,' ^ Mon- 
 taigne said. . . . ' We know of none but two 
 or three ancients who have cut out this path. 
 . . , None since then have dared to tread in their 
 footsteps. It is a thorny adventure, more even 
 than appeareth, to follow a course so vagabond 
 as that of the mind, to dive down into the 
 opaque depths of its innermost recesses, to 
 arrest in their flight the light breezes that 
 perturb it. This is, in truth, a new and 
 passing strange amusement, and one which 
 withdraweth us from the common business of 
 
 ^ Essais, iii. 2 : ' Du Repentir.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 177 
 
 the world.' ^ This ' amusement ' led him 
 straight to the point. 'There existeth as 
 great a difference between us and ourselves as 
 between us and others.' ^ So Montaigne said 
 nearly a century before Pascal, in his Pensees, 
 wrote, ' No man is so different from another 
 as one man is from himself.' ' It appertaineth 
 not,' he goes on, 'to a well-balanced under- 
 standing to judge ourselves simply by our 
 outward actions. We must sound the inner 
 depths and search out what springs cause the 
 motion ; but, for that it is a hazardous and 
 high emprise, I should wish that fewer persons 
 concerned themselves therein.' ^ 
 
 Here is the secret of the knowledge of 
 character — the secret of the novelist and 
 playwright, the knowledge that Montaigne 
 acquired so richly. And in what region did 
 he acquire it ? That was another of his 
 inventions. He found the knowledge in him- 
 self, the one safe method of getting at the 
 truth. He discovered himself like an America 
 — a new world, strange and yet his own, full 
 of endless interest to feed his curiosity. 
 
 ' For some years I have had no one but 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 6 : 'De I'Exercitation.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. I : ' De I'lnconstance de nos actions.' 
 « Ibid. 
 
 M 
 
178 MONTAIGNE 
 
 myself as an object for my thoughts ; I have 
 controlled, I have studied none other ; and if 
 ever I study something else, it is that I may 
 turn it on, or, rather, into myself. Nor can 
 I think myself w^rong if I behave as I do with 
 other sciences . . . and impart my learning, 
 however ill-pleased I be with my progress. 
 There is no description so difficult to make as 
 the description of oneself, nor one so useful.' ^ 
 . . . ' At least I have this much of discipline — 
 that never man treated subject that he under- 
 stood . . . better than I do mine, and that 
 herein I am the most learned scholar alive.' ^ 
 . . . ' And I do not love myself so indiscreetly, 
 nor am I so . . . commingled with myself 
 that I cannot . . . consider myself apart, as 
 if I were a neighbour or a tree.' ^ . . . 
 
 There is no corner of himself that Mon- 
 taigne keeps from us — no secret of vice or virtue 
 that he leaves unrevealed. His Essays are the 
 frankest — perhaps the only frank — autobio- 
 graphy in existence. The one other record as 
 confidential, for worse as well as for better, is the 
 Confessions of Rousseau. But Rousseau's self- 
 revelations, sordid or noble, do not carry con- 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 6 : ' De I'Eiercitation.' 
 
 ^ Essais, iii. 2 : ' Du Repentir.' 
 
 8 Essais, iii. 8 : ' De I'Art de conferer.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 179 
 
 viction like those of Montaigne. We feel that 
 his immoderate egoism, his poisonous vanity, 
 made him love to exaggerate the evil that vsras 
 in him as well as — even more than — the good ; 
 that he wzs neither so bad nor so high-minded 
 as he makes out. He cannot look at himself 
 for a moment without tears ; every page is 
 garbled by emotion. He is his own Galatea, 
 with whom, great artist that he is, he falls 
 in love as he works. And he works for 
 the artist's end alone — to leave a picture, 
 to make the impression that he desires to 
 make. 
 
 Montaigne's motive is widely different. 
 His aim is scientific before all else. An egoist 
 he is in one sense — the sense of literal people 
 — but his egoism is, so to speak, impersonal. 
 He is exclusively preoccupied with himself 
 because he wants to throw light upon human 
 nature, and self-knowledge is his only sure 
 means of obtaining scientific results. He re- 
 gards himself with cool curiosity, without com- 
 ment, more especially without the comment of 
 emotion. Montaigne is never moved about 
 himself, and so his account remains authentic. 
 Unhistrionic, uncondemning, uncondoning, he 
 states himself. An artist he is in his self- 
 painting as well as a scientific man, but it is 
 
i8o MONTAIGNE 
 
 with the art of the Dutch School — positive, 
 unerring, impartial, rich in detail — an art 
 which implies the cult of science. 
 
 That Montaigne did not originate ideas but 
 rather lent them form and colour, was a fact 
 that did not prevent him from transforming 
 them. He put old conceptions in such a 
 fresh aspect that he changed their nature, he 
 threw a light upon them which altered pro- 
 portions and made them unrecognisable. He 
 renewed their vitality — they were born again. 
 By giving a novel touch to worn terms, he 
 added pages to the dictionary of life. If 
 Montaigne's thought was not creative, it was 
 original. 
 
 His practical philosophy has a thousand 
 facets. Men have felt and written more 
 differently about him, perhaps, than about any 
 other author, according as one facet pleased 
 them more than another. They have, maybe, 
 tried too strenuously to make a connected 
 system from the verdicts of one who boasted 
 of human inconsistency and himself said : ' It 
 seemeth to me strange when I see men of 
 mind — as I sometimes do — giving themselves 
 a world of pains to make order out of these 
 stray pieces.' ^ To follow in the steps of his 
 
 1 Essais, ii. I : ' De I'lnconstance de nos actions.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER i8i 
 
 many commentators may be little better than 
 repetition. But each new venturer in the 
 field must see that, among the terms and con- 
 ceptions that he regenerated, there are some 
 more essential than the rest, and by grasping 
 the significance he gave to these we get the 
 key to the significance of all. Every 
 one must bring his own light, and, how- 
 ever inadequate it be, it may yet suffice 
 to throw a ray upon some unobserved 
 angle which has hitherto been hidden in 
 obscurity. 
 
 If we understand Montaigne's version of 
 the word moderation, and his attitude towards 
 nature and knowledge, we shall understand 
 the character of Montaigne's mind, for his 
 views of nature and of knowledge involve his 
 conception of religion. 
 
 The truth most widely known about him is 
 probably his love of moderation. The Via 
 Media was the one road he would travel on, 
 and he insisted on good inns by the way, with 
 a proper provision of crayfish and clean linen. 
 He was a past-master of the map ; he knew 
 the topography of the highway, and he made 
 sure beforehand that it offered no pretence of 
 leading him to any New Jerusalem. But his 
 interpretation of temperance was hardly what 
 
1 82 MONTAIGNE 
 
 at first it appears. Montaigne was passive, 
 but he was not resigned : no mere jog-trot, 
 pessimist traveller content with pis-allers. He 
 was bent upon enjoyment — the enjoyment of 
 the spectator, but none the less real for that. 
 His Via Media, unlike most roads of that 
 name, was full of vitality and colour ; his 
 moderation was not negative, it was positive, 
 and the importance of his choosing such a 
 creed lay not in the choice itself, but in the 
 motives that impelled it. 
 
 For Montaigne's temperance is largely the 
 temperance of the Hedonist who dreads 
 defeat, who learns that self-control adds 
 flavour to pleasure, and that "■ sweets grown 
 common lose their dear delights.' ' Intemper- 
 ance,' he says, ' is the pestilence which killeth 
 pleasure ; and temperance is not the flail of 
 pleasure, it is the seasoning thereof.' ^ He 
 disliked excessive vice, because it injured health 
 and sanity ; he disliked excessive virtue more, 
 because he understood it less, and it irritated 
 him as no fault of the senses did. He could 
 not see any real motive in the conduct of 
 heroes and martyrs, unless they belonged to 
 the ancients, and he despised people who 
 neglected safety. But he went further. He 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 13: ' De I'Expdrience.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 183 
 
 also despised the young man who could not 
 be dissolute and did not know where to stop. 
 He not only wanted him to feel temptation, he 
 wanted him to yield to it so that he might 
 acquire the art of drawing in the rein. And 
 he preferred him to be bad in good company. 
 ' He may,' he said, ' laugh and frolic with a 
 prince, he may even be dissolute in such 
 society, but I desire that in his very dissolute- 
 ness he should excel his comrades in firmness 
 and vigour, and that he should not cease 
 from doing evil from any lack of strength 
 or knowledge, but rather from a lack ot 
 inclination.' ^ 
 
 ' There is, in truth,' says another Essay, ' no 
 course of life so feeble and so foolish as a life 
 led by system and by discipline. A young 
 man should often plunge even into excesses ; 
 otherwise the least vice will ruin him, and 
 he becomes tiresome and inconvenient in con- 
 versation.' ^ 
 
 Montaigne's counsels were not due to prin- 
 ciple alone. The fact is that, like Shakespeare, 
 he demanded before all things that a man 
 should be a man. They both delighted in the 
 ' proper man,' the splendid animal who was 
 
 1 Essais, i. z6 : ' De I'Institution des Enfants.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 13 : ' De I'Exp^rience.' 
 
184. MONTAIGNE 
 
 the child of Nature before he was the child of 
 Art. Montaigne, the spectator in his armchair, 
 with a mind of colder colour, loved the dash 
 of scarlet in others, and especially in the young. 
 But the scarlet must stop short — there must 
 be no disturbance of the peace. And ever and 
 again he comes back to his constant refrain — 
 there must never be zeal. ' Immoderateness,' 
 he says, ' even in what is good, if it doth not 
 actually offend me, astoundeth me and leaveth 
 me at a loss for a name wherewith to baptize 
 it.' ^ ' We may grasp at virtue in such fashion 
 as to make her vicious — if, that is, we desire 
 to embrace her with too great suddenness and 
 violence.' ^ ' The archer who overshooteth the 
 mark doth the same as he who falleth short. . . . 
 Callicles, in Plato, saith that the extreme of 
 philosophy is harmful. ... He saith true, for 
 by its excess it enslaveth our natural freedom, 
 and, by its importunate subtleties, it putteth 
 us out of the beautiful broad high road, the 
 which Nature hath mapped out for us.' ^ 
 
 ' Prove all things, hold fast that which is 
 convenient,' might well stand as the summary 
 of Montaigne's code of moderation. His was 
 
 1 Essais, i. 30: ' Dc la Moderation.' 
 
 2 Ibid. 
 
 3 Hid. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 185 
 
 not the temperance of self-conquest or of a 
 high-minded wisdom ; considering the wide 
 margin that he allowed for the enjoyment of 
 the senses, he had little temptation to with- 
 stand. His dispassionate contemplation of 
 various vicious forms of self-indulgence, his 
 appraisement of them merely as they were 
 pleasurable and hygienic, or unrepaying and 
 unhealthy, are mere matters of an orderly ex- 
 pediency. Like all accomplished ambassadors, 
 Montaigne wanted to keep peace in the 
 kingdom he represented — the kingdom of 
 human nature : peace it was at almost any 
 price, especially in his own domains, because 
 emotion was disturbing and disagreeable. But 
 of private enemies, we repeat, he had few to 
 contend with. The only thing in which he 
 was immoderate was his moderation, and even 
 here he was aware of his danger. ' Temper- 
 ance . . . drags me too far backwards,' he 
 says, 'it even drags me into stupidity. I 
 wish to be master of myself in every sense. 
 Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need 
 of moderation than folly.' ^ He was perhaps 
 a little intemperate, too, in his curiosity. He 
 garnered every fact he could lay hands on with 
 the lavishness and credulity of the collector ; 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 5 : ' Sur des vers de Virgile.' 
 
1 86 MONTAIGNE 
 
 he was greedy for any sort of sensation. But 
 he was so quick a reader of Life that he 
 plucked the meaning out of a page in a 
 moment, and had done with each experience 
 before it hurt him. 
 
 Montaigne's moderation, if he had but 
 known it, was largely made of good taste, and 
 had he been born two centuries later, and used 
 his taste in literary criticism, he would have 
 stood as the greatest master of that art. 
 
 But good taste implies more than literary 
 criticism. There is a kind of moral taste 
 which is dignity, and of this quality Montaigne 
 had rich store. ' Withdraw into yourself, but 
 first prepare yourself to receive yourself,' ^ 
 he said, and this was a central article of his 
 creed. Self-control was one of the few virtues 
 that he preached, but self-control in his 
 vocabulary was hardly distinguishable from 
 self-preservation. The power of restraint in- 
 cluded, indeed, his highest point of view and 
 his lowest — on the one hand, his care to 
 preserve seemly, even noble proportions, his 
 need of an often austere self-discipline ; on 
 the other, his cold determination to avoid dis- 
 turbance, and his willingness to take refuge in 
 any hovel that would give him shelter. 
 
 1 Essais, i. 39 : 'De la Solitude.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 187 
 
 ' Few passions have troubled my sleep,' he 
 says, . . . ' I gladly avoid steep and slippery 
 slopes, and plunge into beaten tracks : and I 
 choose thereof the muddiest and the swampiest, 
 so that I cannot sink below it. Thus seek I 
 safety.'^ 'As to such affections as distract 
 me from myself and attach me elsewhere, to 
 these, in faith, I am opposed with all my 
 strength. For I hold that we must lend 
 ourselves to others and only give ourselves to 
 ourselves.' ^ 
 
 ' The prize for which the soul maketh, is 
 not to walk on the heights, but to walk 
 orderly. It practiseth not its greatness in 
 greatness but in mediocrity.'^ 
 
 His system of spiritual insurance was 
 universal. It extended impartially to our most 
 instinctive affections and our most cultivated 
 ambitions. 
 
 ' He who doth not cherish either his 
 children or his honours with slavish inclina- 
 tion, may make sure of living comfortably 
 when he hath lost them.' * 
 
 When, however, he turns his thoughts to 
 th^ politics he so despised, his prudence often 
 
 ^ Essais, ii. 17 : ' De la Pr&omption.' 
 
 ^ Essais, iii. 10 : 'De m&ager sa volontd.' 
 
 ^ Essais, iii. 2 : ' Du Repentir.' 
 
 * Essais, iii. lo: ' De menager sa volontd. 
 
1 88 MONTAIGNE 
 
 becomes enlightenment. ' It is better,' he 
 says, ' to make the laws desire what they can 
 do, since they cannot do what they desire,' ^ 
 Anything seems to him better than quick 
 changes, because of the agitation that must 
 precede them. But here, again, his moderation 
 leads him very near the extravagance of 
 sobriety that he deplores — of the kind, too, 
 that almost touches cowardice. Reform was 
 to him anathema : it became the symbol of 
 intellectual arrogance and unnecessary dis- 
 comfort. 
 
 ' As long,' he wrote, ' as the image of the 
 ancient laws received by this monarchy shineth 
 on in any hole or corner, in that hole or 
 corner do I plant myself. But if by evil 
 fortune it should happen that they fall out 
 among themselves, contravening one the other, 
 so that two parties are produced difficult and 
 doubtful of choice, then my decision will be 
 gladly to escape and to get quit of the 
 tempest.' ^ 
 
 At its best, Montaigne's creed of self- 
 preservation often reminds us of that of 
 Goethe. Both were dominated by good taste 
 and good sense, which, with Montaigne some- 
 
 ^ Essais, i. 23 : 'De la coutume et de ne changer ais6ment 
 une loi re9ue.' ^ Essaii, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanite.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 189 
 
 times, with Goethe often, rose to wisdom ; 
 and both were almost tyrannised over by 
 prudence, which they too often took for 
 philosophy ; both again, first by nature, then 
 on principle, made something like a cult of 
 mental equilibrium. Both were beneficent 
 and cold — both loved security and hated any 
 break in their calm. It was a natural con- 
 sequence that both should dislike party politics 
 and abstain from public affairs — and that both 
 should have been able to provide the best 
 moral reasons for doing so. Goethe would 
 have sympathised with Montaigne in his first 
 rejection of the mayorship of Bordeaux, no 
 less than with his civic dignity in the subse- 
 quent fulfilment of his functions ; would have 
 sympathised, also^, with his avoidance of in- 
 fection when the town was smitten by the 
 plague. As nearly as possible, these two men 
 were * purely intellectual — intellectual before 
 they were human — and such as these (and 
 they are few) must always distrust the warmer 
 qualities and care most for the maintenance 
 of proportion. Both, indeed, were men of 
 positive science — though Goethe had the 
 more creative genius, and, living in a scientific 
 age, could better bring his gifts to the birth. 
 Both again, to sum up, were born Pagans — 
 
190 MONTAIGNE 
 
 of the strongest kind, unconscious of their 
 Paganism. But in Goethe's case, the poet in 
 him ennobled the rest — his love of beauty 
 enriched him — his worship of Nature helped 
 him to an ideal Pantheism ; while Montaigne, 
 who had little sense of beauty beyond that 
 required of all Renaissance gentlemen, and 
 whose attitude to Nature, on his travels, was 
 a matter of curiosity or of geography, had no 
 transmuting processes for his materialism. He 
 remained a practical Pagan, absorbed in the 
 problem before him : that of the union of 
 prudence with the due enjoyment of the senses. 
 In speaking of Montaigne we must never 
 forget his strong individual temperament. 
 There was in him one great force which must 
 be reckoned with. It was, as it were, a force 
 in solution, which permeated all his views and 
 unconsciously directed his decisions. This 
 was his hatred of pedantry — Montaigne's 
 Pedanterie, which included most offences 
 against naturalness. To him, pedantry was 
 the devil, to be fought with the whole 
 human armoury. It was the feeling that he 
 shared with Shakespeare — that, and a bound- 
 less curiosity, an appetite for experience, 
 all alike parts of the equipment of a rich 
 humanity. We cannot help a vain desire 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 191 
 
 that Montaigne could have known Malvolio. 
 For the pedantry of virtue — any Puritanism 
 — lashed Montaigne into his most stinging 
 irony, and this hostility it is v^rhich colours his 
 idea of moderation. Excessive or fastidious 
 morality — ' reforms ' — Huguenotteries — asceti- 
 cism — warmed him into anger, into action. 
 Above all, asceticism, for that was a sin 
 against Nature, Rabelais had been in the 
 lists before him, had shown up the bitterly 
 hated monks, had built his Abbey of Thelema 
 and written Fais ce que voudras over its portal. 
 Rabelais had been the pioneer. But Mon- 
 taigne brought fresh vigour to the warfare, 
 subtler and more modern weapons. And it 
 is his conception of Nature which governs all 
 the rest of his scheme. Like every other 
 writer, he means a dozen different things 
 when he says Nature. Yet his outlook upon 
 them all is the same. ' We must judge,' he 
 says, ' with more reverence of this infinite 
 power of Nature — with more acknowledg- 
 ment of our ignorance and weakness.' ^ 
 
 The various meanings he gives to the 
 general term may be gathered up under three 
 main headings. Of Nature in the Words- 
 
 1 Essais, i. 27 : ' C'est folie de rapporter le vrai et le faux a 
 notre suffisance.' 
 
192 MONTAIGNE 
 
 worthian sense, of a great and consoling being, 
 a world of beauty beyond ourselves, he knew 
 nothing — such a notion was outside his period. 
 But of natural phenomena and natural facts, 
 of natural law, of natural instinct, he knew 
 much. He observed patiently and impartially 
 — he observed without emotion or prejudice 
 — he observed in the critical spirit. ' There 
 is nothing useless in Nature,' he said, ' not 
 even uselessness.' -^ His vision of natural facts 
 and phenomena was bound to be hampered in 
 that pre-scientific age. But it was not the 
 strength of the vision that failed, only the means 
 of investigation. What he saw, he saw as clearly 
 and fearlessly as any modern, and whatever 
 allusion he makes in this direction is always 
 amazingly advanced on the path of science — 
 sometimes almost three centuries ahead. 
 
 ' Concerning animals,' he says, ' this truth 
 also holdeth, witness the sheep of Jacob, and 
 partridges and hares, the which the snow 
 whitens on the mountains. At my place, a 
 short while ago, a cat was seen watching a 
 bird at the top of a tree, and after they had 
 for awhile stared fixedly one at the other, the 
 bird let itself drop like a dead thing between 
 the paws of the cat, intoxicated by its own 
 
 1 Essais, iii. i : ' Dc I'Utile et de I'Honnete.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 193 
 
 observation, or drawn by some attractive force 
 in the cat.' ^ 
 
 It is, however, when we come to his study 
 of man that we find Montaigne at his boldest. 
 
 ' The laws of conscience that we say are 
 born of nature are really born of custom,' he 
 writes — ' Every man holdeth in veneration 
 the opinions and morals approved and received 
 by those around him, nor can he depart from 
 them without remorse, nor practise them 
 without self-applause.' ^ 
 
 If Montaigne had been made to be a martyr, 
 his whole conception of natural law might 
 well have brought him to the stake. His 
 nonchalance saved him — that and the form 
 of the Essay, which covered heresies so care- 
 lessly and colloquially that no one discovered 
 them. 
 
 ' It is probable,' he says, ' that the chief 
 credit of miracles, of visions, and spells, and 
 such abnormal effects, hath its source in the 
 power of imagination, acting principally upon 
 the minds of the vulgar, the which are softer 
 than others. Their belief has been so strongly 
 got hold of, that they think they see what 
 
 ^ Essais, i. 20 : ' De la Force de I'Imagination.' 
 2 Essais, i. 22 : ' De la coutume et de ne changer aisement 
 vine loi re^ue.' 
 
 N 
 
194 MONTAIGNE 
 
 they do not see,' ^ . . . ' There are some who 
 ascribe the scars of King Dagobert and of St. 
 Francis to the strength of the imagination,' ^ 
 
 ' Miracles exist according to our ignorance 
 of nature, not according to nature's true 
 being. Custom drugs the sap of our judg- 
 ment. Savages are no more wonderful to us 
 than we to them, nor with better cause — as 
 every one would acknowledge, if, after letting 
 his mind rove among all these new specimens, 
 he knew how to come home and look at the 
 things he found there, and order them sanely. 
 Human reason is a dye, coloured in about 
 equal proportion by all our opinions and 
 moralities, whatever shape they assume : 
 infinite in matter, infinite in variety.' ^ 
 
 But the resistance of man's reason to miracles 
 is not to be made a source of pride. He does 
 not forget to hit the ' superior ' person. If he 
 allows that the ' vulgar ' are more credulous, 
 he hastens to assure us that the vices of 
 credulity are preferable to those of incredulity. 
 
 ' Children and vulgar folk, and women, and 
 sick people are apter to be led by the nose. 
 But then, on the other hand, it is a foolish 
 presumption to go scorning and condemning 
 
 1 Essais, i. 20 : ' De la force dc I'Imagination.' ^ Ibid. 
 
 * Essais, i. 22 : ' De la coutume et de ne changer ais6ment 
 une loi reyue.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 195 
 
 as false that which doth not seem probable to 
 ourselves. This is a vice which is common 
 among those who think that they have some 
 kind of competence above the ordinary. . . . 
 Nor has experience ever shown me anything 
 higher than my first beliefs — no blame to my 
 curiosity. But reason has taught me that thus 
 resolutely to condemn a thing as false and 
 impossible is to give oneself the privilege of 
 laying down in one's head set limits to the 
 will of God and the power of our mother. 
 Nature ; and there is no more notable folly in 
 the world than to reduce these to the measure- 
 ments of our capacities and our sufficiency.' ^ 
 
 ' We must not judge of that which is 
 possible or impossible according to what is 
 credible to our senses.'^ ' 
 
 ' What we call monsters are not such to 
 God, Who seeth in the immensity of His 
 handiwork the infinity of forms the which 
 He hath comprised therein. From His All- 
 Wisdom proceedeth nothing but what is good, 
 and common, and lawful ; but we see neither 
 the order nor the relation of what is created.'^ 
 
 1 Essais, i. 27 : ' C'est folie de rapporter le vrai et le faux a 
 notre suffisance.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. 32 : ' Defence de Sdneque et de Plutarque.' 
 
 3 Essais, ii. 30 : * D'un enfant monstrueux.' 
 
196 MONTAIGNE 
 
 Here, again, peeps out his aversion to the 
 pedant, to whatever pretence divides any man 
 from the high-road and the common herd. 
 It is curious to find this kind of democratic 
 notion in two of the greatest conservatives the 
 world has produced — in Shakespeare and in 
 Montaigne. It was born of their passion for 
 the obvious and their hatred of presumption, 
 natural perhaps to minds so greatly sane in 
 that day of the late Renaissance when intel- 
 lectual pride had led men into decadent depths 
 of vice, and the rich lived hedged in by an 
 insolent state. For though Shakespeare and 
 Montaigne were both of them aristocrats at 
 heart, they were even more strongly humour- 
 ists, and much though both disliked the mob, 
 they disliked pomp and circumstance still 
 more. And both of them loved, or believed 
 they loved, the poor and humble, though 
 perhaps what they really loved was poverty, 
 because they thought that it meant simplicity. 
 
 But here Montaigne, at least, was guilty of 
 a great fallacy, and one which falsifies a good 
 deal of his thought. In confounding poverty 
 with simplicity, and crudeness with sincerity, 
 he made much the same mistake as Rousseau. 
 Each advocated a return to Nature, and each 
 took nature and naturalness to mean the same 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 197 
 
 thing. They dreamed that the presence of 
 artificial conditions was responsible for human 
 depravity. 
 
 ' We have abandoned Nature,' says Mon- 
 taigne, "v/e wish ourselves to teach her her 
 lessons — to her who led us so happily and so 
 safely. Our wisdom might from the very 
 beasts get the most useful knowledge concern- 
 ing the greatest, most essential functions of 
 our life : we might learn how to live, to die, 
 to manage our property, to love and to educate 
 our children, and to maintain justice.' ^ 
 
 Even Rousseau would not have wished little 
 
 r 
 
 Emile to be brought up like the young of the 
 lion, but then Montaigne and Rousseau chose 
 different representatives of their ideal state. 
 Rousseau, the eighteenth-century idyllist, trans- 
 formed the peasant ; Montaigne, the Renais- 
 sance discoverer, transformed the savage. It 
 was not that Montaigne did not admire 
 peasants ; we have seen that his infancy was 
 passed with them, and in his own scheme of 
 education he warmly advocated the cultivation 
 of their habits. But the savage appealed to 
 him. He had talked to two aborigines at 
 Rouen, to others, doubtless, on occasion, yet the 
 real savage was as unknown to him as the real 
 
 1 Essais, iii. iz: 'De la Physionomie.' 
 
198 MONTAIGNE 
 
 peasant to Rousseau. Both peasant and savage 
 were in the air of their respective centuries : 
 Rousseau's peasants, because men were sated 
 with pleasure and civilisation and demanded 
 something new to revive them; Montaigne's 
 savages, because his generation had grown 
 corrupted by old institutions and by book- 
 learning, because, worn with civil war and 
 schism, it was easy to lay the blame on systems 
 and functionaries, and to imagine that the 
 absence of such evils would bring the longed- 
 for peace and prosperity. Yet it is strange to 
 compare Montaigne's usual caution with his 
 anarchic Utopia. Because he scorned the 
 fripperies of the law, and savages have no 
 magistrates, he leaped to the conclusion that 
 their condition was the perfect one. His great 
 essay, Des Cannibales, is full of such argu- 
 ments — not casuistries like those of the Contrat 
 Social, but naive, almost childish blunders. 
 
 ' Those who return from that New World 
 which was discovered in the time of our 
 fathers can bear me witness that these people, 
 without laws or magistrates, live far more 
 lawfully and regularly than we do here, where 
 there are more officials than there are other 
 men, and more laws than there are actions.' ^ 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 12: ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 199 
 
 And, again, he uses his aborigines as weapons 
 against prudery, conceit, and provincialism. 
 
 ' Now,' he says, ' to come back to my 
 subject, I find, by all reports, that this race 
 showeth no trace of savagery or barbarism — 
 unless every man calleth barbarism that to 
 which he is not accustomed ; and, in truth, it 
 seemeth that we have no other mirror of 
 truth and reason than the example of the 
 views and usages of the country in which we 
 live. 
 
 ' There we have always the perfect religion, 
 the perfect government, the perfect and accom- 
 plished administration of all things. . . . But 
 this race of which I speak ... is one which 
 hath no kind of commerce ; no knowledge of 
 letters ; no science of numbers ; no title of 
 magistrate or of any political superiority ; no 
 tradition of service ; of riches or of poverty ; 
 no contracts ; no successions ; no partition of 
 possessions ; no occupations excepting idle 
 ones ; no respect of relationship, save what is 
 common ; no clothing ; no agriculture ; no 
 metal ; no use of wine or corn. . . . There 
 is nothing so very bad in all this. But, then, 
 they wear no tops to their breeches.' ^ 
 
 A return to Nature is always the return of 
 
 > Essais, i. 31: ' Des Cannibales.' 
 
200 MONTAIGNE 
 
 the Prodigal, and the setting up the savage 
 or the peasant as the type of perfection is a 
 form of disgust with corruption. But Mon- 
 taigne meant something more than this — 
 something of far deeper significance. He is 
 tilting against the human intellect — against 
 its presumptions, its duperies, its disillusion- 
 ment, its failure to help or guide mankind, 
 its impotence in the face of life and death. 
 And he was answered. For it seems as if, 
 for once, we may believe with some show of 
 certainty that Shakespeare rose to hold the 
 brief for the mind and for civilised man. It 
 is well known that the last quoted passage 
 (for which reason we have used Florio's words 
 in the version which Shakespeare used) was 
 the passage which he reproduced in Gonzalo's 
 famous speech in the Tempest, ^ — words 
 which show that he had been reading ' Con- 
 cerning Cannibals.' And Caliban is his 
 
 ^ I' the commonwealth I would by contraries 
 Execute all things ; for no kind of traffic 
 Would I admit ; no name of magistrate ; 
 Letters should not be known ; riches, poverty. 
 And use of service, none ; contract, succession. 
 Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none ; 
 No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil ; 
 No occupation ; all men idle, all ; 
 And women too ; but innocent and pure ; 
 No sovereignty. . . . 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 201 
 
 answer — his laughing answer, most think — to 
 Montaigne. But there is grave irony below 
 the mirth. Montaigne accuses the white man 
 of depraving the wise and innocent savage. 
 Prospero desired to transform the life of bestial 
 discomfort until he found that his efforts were 
 of no use. It was not the princely Prospero 
 who affected Caliban ; it was Trinculo and 
 Stephano, the scum of their kind, the nearest 
 to him, who made him their creature through 
 the bottle. The play seems to hover round 
 the question of conquered natives, of the con- 
 queror's rights, of the good he can do ; but 
 it would appear that Shakespeare meant even 
 more than that. Intellect, Montaigne says, is 
 vanity : Shakespeare created Prospero. We 
 should not dare, says Montaigne, to meddle 
 with our fellow-men ; there is no such thing 
 as an inferior race ; where we think to bring 
 order, we bring vice. Prospero takes possession 
 of the island ; he discovers and uses its 
 resources ; he discovers and uses Caliban — he 
 
 All things in common nature should produce 
 Without sweat or endeavour : treason, felony. 
 Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine, 
 Would I not have ; but nature should bring forth. 
 Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance, 
 To feed my innocent people. 
 
 Tempest, Act ii. Scene i. 
 
202 MONTAIGNE 
 
 does not torture him. Caliban hates him as 
 he was bound to hate his superior, but 
 Prosper o subjugates him — as he subjugates 
 Trinculo and Stephano, and the base con- 
 spirators, and the very elements — by his mind, 
 his vast, creating mind. May it be that the 
 contrast drawn between Ferdinand's noble love 
 and his endurance of Prospero's hard test, 
 with Caliban's ugly passion for Miranda, is 
 Shakespeare's answer to Montaigne's ' no re- 
 spect of relationship save what is in common ' ? 
 At any rate, it is to the disembodied Ariel, 
 the spirit of imagination, the minister to his 
 intellect, that Prospero gives the best reward 
 he has to give — freedom. 
 
 Montaigne, like all great geniuses, is incon- 
 sistent. His conception of Nature necessarily 
 includes his practical conception of natural 
 ties, apart from aboriginal Edens or the ideal 
 example of the animals. We might expect to 
 find his general notions in accordance with 
 these instances, but not at all. No purely 
 natural bond is to count. ' Father and son,' 
 he says, ■• may be of widely different tempera- 
 ments, and brothers also. This is my son, 
 this is my parent, but he is a surly man or an 
 unkind one, or a fool ! Besides, in proportion 
 as these friendships are commanded to us by 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 203 
 
 law and by natural obligation, so much the 
 less have they of our individual choice and 
 free-will.' ^ ' Voluntary friendship,' he re- 
 iterates, ' is the only tie worth possessing. The 
 passion of love is nothing beside it — and no 
 marriage can be happy unless imitating it.' '^ 
 'A happy marriage, if such there be, refuses 
 the company of love.' ^ And he is just as 
 untrue to Nature in his comparison of the 
 sexes : ' I say that male and female are cast in 
 the same mould ; saving for custom and insti- 
 tution, the difference between them is not 
 great.' * And this is said by a despiser of 
 woman as he had found her. But his incon- 
 sistencies are not as mysterious as they look. 
 They are due to the same cause — his feeling 
 for La Boetie. It is the personal note that 
 interferes with his logic — the higher strain 
 in him which is speaking. For him, friend- 
 ship had made all other intercourse seem stale 
 — he would esteem none but this. Neither 
 his wife nor his daughter had much chance 
 with him. Even had they been different, 
 they would have found it hard to satisfy him, 
 
 1 Essds, i. 28 : ' De rAmiti6.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 5 : ' Sur des vers de Virgil^.' 
 
 3 Ibid. 
 * Ibid. 
 
204 MONTAIGNE 
 
 for his natural affections were the weakest of 
 his instincts. Love was in his eyes mere 
 dissipation, a something to be used and thrown 
 away ; and in the relations of the sexes he 
 could only see indiscriminate licence — a pre- 
 destined havoc and warfare. ' There is,' he 
 says, ' a natural feud, a fray, between us and 
 them [women] ; the closest agreement that 
 we have with them is none the less turbulent 
 and stormy.' ^ There he comes back to one 
 of his true visions of Nature. He does not 
 hold her up for imitation, he simply states 
 her. And far from blaming, he never criticises 
 her. To him she is the fertilising force of 
 life, and must be accepted altogether. Good 
 and bad are not words in his vocabulary any 
 more than in hers : he only has advisable and 
 inadvisable. Judicially, relentlessly, disinter- 
 estedly, he passes in review all the vices and 
 vagaries of vice to which she has subjected 
 mortal man, but his comments are no more 
 than those of an expert who says what is safe 
 and what is harmful. And throughout he 
 never swerves from his allegiance — he remains 
 Nature's subject, Nature's champion. 
 
 His championship is never quite so splendid 
 as when he takes arms against asceticism. It 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 5 : ' Sur des vers de Virgile.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 205 
 
 was to him, one more, an all-important form 
 of arrogance and pedantry, the setting up of 
 man's will against the gods. 
 
 ' Nature not being herself, compels the mind 
 to suffer with the body,' says Shakespeare in 
 King Lear. ' All these things,' says Mon- 
 taigne, ' may be accounted for by that narrow 
 seam between mind and body, which twain 
 do intercommunicate their fortunes.' ^ And 
 it is on this ' narrow seam ' that he is always 
 dwelling. ' As for me,' he says, "■ who only 
 deal with common earth, I hate this inhuman 
 wisdom which tries to make us scorners and 
 enemies of all care of the body. In my 
 judgment, it is quite as unjust to entertain a 
 dislike of natural passions as to embrace them 
 too closely.' ^ 
 
 When Montaigne touches upon the exact 
 relations of mind and matter, he reaches almost 
 his highest level. His loathing of the mischief 
 the monks had wrought, of all hypocrisies 
 and furbelows — his power of looking Nature 
 straight in the face, of admiring a spade for 
 being a spade — and his firm determination 
 never to separate spirit from the senses, give 
 his utterances a kind of intense sanity. He 
 
 1 Essais, i. 20 : ' De la force de I'lmagination.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii, 13: ' De I'Expdrience.' 
 
2o6 MONTAIGNE 
 
 proclaims what Rabelais proclaimed before 
 him, what Browning proclaimed after him, 
 the absolute interdependence of body and soul 
 — the inability of either to live or work whole- 
 somely without the other — the ruin that results 
 from their separation. And in one passage, at 
 least, he allows the mastery of the soul. But 
 that passage must not mislead us. Because 
 Montaigne's favourite subject warmed him 
 into fervid speech, and worked upon that 
 higher quality which existed within him, we 
 must not be persuaded to imagine that his 
 import was, like that of Browning, the spiritual 
 evolution of man. Even in the fine sentences 
 below, he is recognising the soul rather as the 
 protector of the body's interests than as the 
 lord of her destiny. And what he makes for 
 all along is to demonstrate the evil due to the 
 soul's neglect of the body, not that which 
 results from the body's neglect of the soul. 
 This would have been a process with which 
 his common sense would have felt Sympathy, 
 but he hardly takes it into account. There is, 
 however, no need to do more than let him 
 speak for himself, to take a few out of the 
 reiterated utterances that he has left us on the 
 subject. 
 
 'Those do wrong who wish to disjoin our 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 207 
 
 two great halves, and isolate them one from 
 the other. They should, on the contrary, be 
 joined and re-united. The soul must be 
 commanded not to draw aside, to keep itself 
 apart, to despise and desert the body — indeed, 
 it cannot possibly do so excepting through 
 some ill-shaped apish trick. Rather should 
 the soul strike fresh alliance with the body, 
 embrace it, cherish it, control and counsel it, 
 re-establish it and bring it back when it 
 swerveth. In short, the soul should marry 
 the body and serve it as a husband, to the 
 end that their property should not appear to be 
 different and contrary, but one and the same.' ^ 
 ' Nature is a pleasing guide. ... I seek 
 out her track wherever I go : we have blurred 
 it with artificial footprints. For what reason 
 do we dismember and tear asunder the two 
 parts of an edifice built of masonry so closely 
 cemented ? Let us rather re-unite them by 
 dint of mutual services ; let the spirit awaken 
 and vivify the heaviness of the body, the 
 body check and fix the lightness of the spirit. 
 There is no part of us unworthy of our care 
 in this gift which God hath given us. To 
 the last hair, we owe Him an account of it. 
 And this order which biddeth him administer 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 17 : ' De la Presomption.' 
 
2o8 MONTAIGNE 
 
 his human nature according to its estate 
 is no order of discharge ; it is an express 
 commission, simple, very essential, and the 
 Creator has charged us with it seriously and 
 severely.' ^ 
 
 ' Between ourselves I have constantly ob- 
 served that there are two things which, strange 
 to say, always go together : super-celestial 
 feeling and subterranean morals. Such as 
 dwell on the soul apart from the body design 
 to get beyond themselves and escape from 
 humanity. It is folly ; instead of transform- 
 ing themselves into angels, they transform 
 themselves into beasts.'^ 
 
 ' I find nothing so mortal in the life of Alex- 
 ander as his fancies concerning immortality.'^ 
 
 ' That opinion which disdaineth our natural 
 life is ridiculous, for, after all, our life is our 
 being, our all. It is against Nature that we 
 should despise ourselves and set ourselves not 
 to care about ourselves. This is a peculiar 
 malady. No other creature is known to hate 
 and despise itself ; and it is for a like vanity 
 that we desire to be different from what we are.' * 
 
 The 'different,' the supernatural, was to 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 13: ' De I'Experience.' 
 
 2 Ibid. 3 im 
 
 ^ Essais, ii. 3 : < Coutume de I'He de Q6a' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 209 
 
 MontaigJie always mere foolishness — 'fancies 
 concerning immortality ' — and his prejudice 
 was enhanced by his strong sense of the unity 
 of Nature. ■• It is ever,' he says, ' one and the 
 same Nature who roUeth on her course. He 
 who hath thoroughly learned to know her 
 estate in the present can safely conclude there- 
 from all the future and all the past.' ^ 
 
 But who, according to Montaigne, has 
 ' learned to know her estate in the present ' ? 
 This brings us to his attitude towards human 
 knowledge and to the worth which he set 
 upon it. His views were no new ones ; they are 
 shared by the author of Ecclesiastes, by all the 
 saints and all the cynics. They are diametri- 
 cally opposed to those of Rabelais. Montaigne 
 disbelieved in intellect as much as Rabelais 
 believed in it. Yet for its academical pro- 
 fessors, for pundits and bigwigs, Rabelais 
 nourished as sarcastic an aversion as his 
 successor. Who can forget the law-officers 
 and the Schoolmen in Pantagruel ? But he 
 was idealist enough to win through their fogs 
 and follies ; to see that they were the abusers 
 of knowledge, not its representatives ; to 
 apprehend, like Shakespeare, the glorious 
 possibilities of mind. The concrete Mon- 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 12 : ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' 
 O 
 
2IO MONTAIGNE 
 
 taigne judged knowledge too much by the 
 knowers, and the knowers exasperated him. 
 His annoyance entered into his valuation of 
 man's powers, though other elements were there 
 besides, chief among them a large pessimistic 
 modesty which coloured many of his verdicts. 
 Once more we find the old refrain. He 
 regards presumption and pedantry as the two 
 arch-enemies to real knowledge, and to these 
 he seems to see no end as long as the world 
 goes on. He did not become a sceptic, he 
 was born one, and so, innocent of any intel- 
 lectual process, he gave no name to the result 
 and was able to tack on to his free-thought 
 any form of orthodoxy that he chose. 
 
 'It is only the fools who are certain and 
 decided.' ^ 
 
 ' He who wishes to be cured of ignorance 
 must confess it.' ^ 
 
 ' We put out our arms to embrace every- 
 thing, but we only clasp the wind.' ^ 
 
 'We condemn all that seemeth strange to 
 us and all that we do not understand.' * 
 
 These four sayings give us the keynote 
 of Montaigne's thought. And his attitude 
 
 1 Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'lnstitution des Enfants.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 11 : 'Des Boitcux.' 
 
 3 Essais, i. 3 1 : ' Des Cannibales.' 
 
 * Essais, ii. 1 2 : ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 211 
 
 towards religious services was significant of 
 his scorn of the human intellect. The com- 
 prehension of words could only harm men 
 and sow the seeds of arrogance. He mistook 
 mystification for mystery, and believed it would 
 have the same effect. 
 
 ' Droll people ' (he says of the translators of 
 the Bible), ' who think that they have made it 
 fit for the use of the people by putting it into 
 popular language. Is it only because of the 
 words that they do not understand all that 
 they find written ? I could say more. By 
 bringing them this inch nearer to the Word, 
 they have taken them farther away.' ^ . . . 
 ' Nothing is so firmly believed as that which 
 is least known.' ^ 
 
 So much for the common congregation. 
 The preachers and the thinkers had their turn. 
 
 'And to these' (pretentious persons), 'did 
 I dare, I would gladly join a crowd of people, 
 the interpreters and controllers-in-ordinary of 
 the designs of God, who profess to discover 
 the causes of every accident and to detect in 
 the secrets of the Divine Will the incompre- 
 hensible motives of His works. . . . Hard it 
 
 1 Essais, i. 56 : ' Des Pri^res.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. 32 : ' Qu'il faut sobrement se meler de juger des 
 ordonnances divines.' 
 
212 MONTAIGNE 
 
 is, indeed, to bring down things divine to be 
 weighed in our scales, without finding that 
 they have suffered debasement. . . . We must 
 be content with the light which it pleaseth 
 the sun to impart to us through its rays. 
 And whosoever would lift his eyes to take 
 into himself a greater draught thereof, let 
 him not think it strange if, as a penalty for 
 his arrogance, he should lose his sight.' ^ 
 
 ' For why should not a goose speak thus : 
 every part of the universe concerneth me. 
 The earth serveth for me to walk upon, the 
 sun to light me, the stars to exhale their 
 influences upon me. I get this use from the 
 winds, that from the waters ; there is nothing 
 that the vault of heaven looketh upon so 
 favourably as myself. I am the darling of 
 Nature. Is it not man who nourisheth me, 
 and lodgeth me, and serveth me ? It is for 
 me that he causeth sowing and grinding. 
 If he eateth me, he also doth the same by 
 his fellow-man ; and even so do I eat the 
 worms which kill and devour him.' ^ ' We 
 do right when we set the tightest barriers that 
 we can round the human mind. In its studies, 
 
 1 Essais, i. 32: 'Qu'il faut sobrement se meler de juger des 
 ordonnances divines.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. 12: ' Apologic de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 213 
 
 as elsewhere, we must count, we must regulate 
 its steps.' ^ 
 
 ' Whosoever seeketh something, he cometh 
 at last to this point : either that he saith he 
 hath found it ; or that it cannot be found ; or 
 that it is still being sought for. All philosophy 
 is divided into these three kinds.' ^ ' It can 
 with truth be said that first there is the primal 
 ABC kind of ignorance which precedeth 
 knowledge, then the professional ignorance 
 which foUoweth upon knowledge, the which 
 this same knowledge maketh and engendereth, 
 just as she maketh and destroyeth the first 
 kind.' 3 
 
 ' We are not,' he concludes, ' as full of evil 
 as of inanity.' * This admission (reminding us 
 of Anatole France's ' tender contempt ' for his 
 kind) is the utmost measure of indulgence that 
 he vouchsafes us. And what is the conclusion 
 of the whole matter ? 
 
 ' If it be true that man, alone of all the 
 animals, hath this liberty of imagination, 
 showeth this disordered tangle of thoughts, 
 figuring to him that which is, that which is 
 not, and that which he desireth, whether it be 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 12 : ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
 ^ Ibid. ^ Essais, i. 54 : ' Des vaines subtilites. 
 
 * Essais, i. 50: 'De Democritus et Heraclitus.' 
 
214 MONTAIGNE 
 
 true or false — then it is a privilege the which 
 he buyeth dear, and whereof he hath little 
 cause to boast. For from it there springeth 
 the main source of the evils which press upon 
 him — sin, disease, irresolution, agitation, 
 despair. I repeat, then, that we have no 
 reason to believe that the animals do by 
 natural and compelling instinct the same 
 things that we do from choice and industry. 
 From like effects we ought to deduce like 
 faculties . . . and so to confess that this same 
 understanding, this same ground that we cling 
 to as of our own peculiar tillage, is also 
 possessed by the animals — that, or, indeed, 
 some better region. Why should we imagine 
 them to be bound by natural constraint, we 
 who feel no such effect in ourselves ? Besides 
 which ... it were safer to leave the reins 
 in Nature's hands than in our own. It is the 
 vanity of our presumption that maketh us like 
 to owe our competency to our own strength, 
 rather than to God's liberality.' ^ 
 
 In understanding, then, we are lower than 
 the animals, as well as in virtue lower than 
 the savages. Is it only an encouraging fancy 
 that here again Shakespeare has answered 
 Montaigne ? Florio's translation of the Essays 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 12 : ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 215 
 
 was published for the first time in 1603, and 
 1603 is the date to which the authorities 
 ascribe the completed version of Hamlet} 
 
 Shakespeare, we know, read Florio ; what 
 is more, he probably met him, for Florio was 
 tutor to the Earl of Southampton, and also 
 the friend of Ben Jonson, and the appearance 
 of the Essays in England must have been an 
 event of importance. The passage last quoted 
 comes out of the longest and most essential of 
 all Montaigne's Essays — the ' Apologie de 
 Raimond Sebond ' — the confession of his 
 own belief, or disbelief. Now let us listen to 
 the well-worn words of Hamlet. 
 
 'What a piece of work is a man ! how noble 
 in reason ! how infinite in faculty ! in form 
 and moving how express and admirable ! in 
 action how like an angel ! in apprehension 
 how like a god ! the beauty of the world ! 
 the paragon of animals ! ' 
 
 The contrast is the more marked that 
 Hamlet, in the mood of the deepest disgust 
 with life, is only meditating on man's glories 
 to contrast them with his mortality — with 
 
 1 Although it is pretty certain that the play had existed in 
 some form a year or two earlier, it is equally true that Florio's 
 book was entered in the Stationers' Register for 1599. While 
 Shakespeare was at work upon Hamlet, he could therefore 
 easily have read Florio in manuscript. 
 
2i6 MONTAIGNE 
 
 the end of 'this quintessence of dust,' But 
 that does not affect his view of man's possi- 
 bilities. To Shakespeare, man is the paragon 
 of the animals ; to Montaigne, the animal is 
 the paragon of man. Hamlet's pessimism 
 overshadows his life — it is the pessimism of 
 disillusionment, he can see no horizon. Mon- 
 taigne's pessimism, born with him, is always 
 cheerful ; he thinks little of men so long as 
 they amuse him. The present is the only tense 
 worth having ; the good of life is unattain- 
 able ; let us make for the attainable — daily 
 comfort. 
 
 But when Montaigne speaks of the vanity 
 of knowledge, he often uses ' knowledge ' for 
 ' learning,' and even the ' learned ' for the 
 learners. What he means is that he regards 
 that knowledge as contemptible which packs 
 the head with useless matter, and he called 
 most things useless which could not be directly 
 applied to daily existence. Thought for 
 thought's sake he abhorred, but for practical 
 wisdom he had great reverence. 
 
 ' Simple peasants,' he says, ' are honest folk, 
 and honest folk, too, are the philosophers, or 
 rather (according to the utterance of our day), 
 they should not be called philosophers, but 
 men of strong and lucid natures, enriched by 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 217 
 
 a wide study of the useful sciences. The 
 middle folk who despise the first stage, the 
 ignorance of letters, and have not got as far 
 as the other . . . are dangerous, inept, impor- 
 tunate ; they disturb the world.' ^ 
 
 Among the ' middle folk ' he put professors 
 of learning — pedagogues, schoolmen, theo- 
 logians, savants. Never is his eye more 
 true, or his wit more trenchant than when he 
 uses it to hit them. ' If you have mistaken 
 one of the Scipios for the other, what can 
 you still say that has any value ? Accord- 
 ing to them, he who doth not know about 
 Aristotle knoweth nothing about himself.'^ 
 And his sayings are more than brilliant irony ; 
 they are of deep and serious import. He 
 arraigns his victims as guilty of some of the 
 chief evils of human existence. ' For the 
 most part the causes of the troubles of the 
 world are made by the grammarians,^ he says. 
 ' Difficulty is the coin that the learned use, 
 like conjurers, so that they may not reveal 
 the inanity of their art — a coin which human 
 stupidity easily accepts as payment.'* 
 
 Words have not only made quarrels, they 
 
 1 Essais, i. 54 : ' Des vaines subtiHt&.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. 17: 'De la Presomption .' 
 
 5 Essais, ii. i a : ' Apologia de Raimond Sebond.' * Ibid. 
 
2i8 MONTAIGNE 
 
 have made traditions ; and traditions have made 
 conventional people who depend upon others 
 for their thoughts and opinions. ' Whoso 
 foUovi^eth another, folio weth nothing.'^ 
 
 ' We pay heed to the opinions and the 
 knowledge of others, and that is all. We 
 ought to make these things our own. . . . We 
 lean so heavily upon the arms of others that 
 we annihilate our own strength. Do I wish 
 to steel myself against the fear of death ? I 
 do so at the expense of Seneca, Do I wish 
 to get consolation for myself, or for another ? 
 I borrow it from Cicero. I should have 
 drawn it from myself had I been exercised in 
 the art of so doing. I do not like this begged 
 and borrowed sufficiency.^ 
 
 ' We know how to say, Cicero speaks 
 thus ; these are the words of Plato ; these 
 the very words of Aristotle. But we, what 
 do we say of ourselves ? What are our 
 judgments ? What do we do ? ' ^ 
 
 ' Our souls only move on the credit system, 
 bound and constrained by the wills of other 
 men's caprices, enslaved and imprisoned be- 
 neath the yoke of other men's teaching. I 
 
 ^ Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'Institution des Enfants.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. 25 : ' Du P^dantisme.' 
 
 3 Ibid. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 219 
 
 used to see, privily, at Pisa, a worthy man, 
 but such an Aristotelian that the widest of 
 his dogmas was this : that the test and rule 
 of all solid imaginations and all truth was 
 conformity to the doctrines of Aristotle — that 
 outside them we find only dreams and inanity 
 — that he has seen everything and said all 
 that there is to say.' ^ 
 
 ' I know people like the man who, if I 
 inquire of him what he knoweth, asketh for a 
 book that he may show me.' ^ ' What a tedious 
 cleverness is purely bookish cleverness ! ' ^ 
 ■• We know how to decline virtue even though 
 we do not live it.' * ' If you should call out 
 concerning one who passeth in the street, 
 " Oh, what a learned man ! " and, concerning 
 another, " Oh, what a good man ! " you 
 would find that every one will turn their eyes 
 and their respect towards the former. A 
 third shouter would be wanted to shout out, 
 " Oh, the blockheads ! " We eagerly ask, 
 " Doth he know Greek or Latin ? Doth he 
 write in verse or prose ? " but the important 
 matter is whether he hath grown wiser or 
 
 1 Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'Institution des Enfants.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. 25 : 'Du P&lantisme.' 
 
 5 Essais, i. 26: ' De I'Institution des Enfants.' 
 * Essais, ii. 17: ' De la Presomption.' 
 
220 MONTAIGNE 
 
 better, and the answer to that lags behind. 
 We ought to ask who knoweth best, not who 
 knoweth most.' ^ 
 
 Traditions also make certain names into 
 shibboleths and certain processes into un- 
 written laws ; they exalt particular kinds of 
 people till — the worst crime in Montaigne's 
 eyes — they think themselves different from 
 les autres. 
 
 'A mind richly stored with knowledge of 
 many things doth not therefore become more 
 alive or more awake, and a common mind of 
 coarse fibre can harbour, without refining 
 itself, the same views and judgments as the 
 best minds that the earth has borne.' ^ 
 
 *One sees the peasant and the cobbler go 
 their ways candidly and simply, talking of 
 what they know, while these others because 
 they want to puff and be-police themselves 
 with the learning that floats about in the 
 shallows of their brains, flounder along 
 without a pause, stumbling, and clogging 
 themselves.'^ 'I see men . . . who pontificate 
 even on their hearths and in their own insides, 
 dragging the pomp of office into their very 
 
 1 Essats, i. 25 : 'Du Pedantisme.' 
 
 2 Hid. s jiij 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 221 
 
 dressing-closets. I cannot teach them to 
 distinguish the cappings and bowings given 
 to themselves, from those that are due to their 
 functions or their suite or their mules. The 
 mayor and Montaigne have always been two 
 persons — and most clearly divided.' ^ 
 
 ' It is for the stupid to look down from a 
 platform upon other men — for ever to return 
 from the fight, self-satisfied and full of vain- 
 glory.'^ That is the note to which Mon- 
 taigne always returns — one could quote on 
 continuously. The intellect is nowhere as an 
 asset in life ; it deceives us as to our real 
 nature ; it makes us aspire to be better than 
 we can be, and this sows in us the seed of 
 pride and discontent, preventing us, too, from 
 getting the enjoyment that we might get 
 from our actual condition : the natural ease, 
 the comfortable pleasures, which the poor and 
 stupid know how to appreciate. It may be 
 argued that Montaigne's practice was different 
 from his preaching, that he passed his days 
 among his books, reading poetry and philo- 
 sophy. But he had a case. He might have 
 answered us something after this fashion : ' I 
 read only to please myself, not for profit or 
 
 1 Essais, iii. lo : 'De menager sa volonte.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 8 : ' De I'Art de conferer.' 
 
222 MONTAIGNE 
 
 for any pretence of learning. The use to 
 which I put my studies is a practical one — 
 the formation of character for the exigences 
 of life as we find it. That use I respect, 
 and, for that reason, my favourite and most 
 thumbed volumes are the Lives of Plutarch 
 and the works of Seneca.' He could not be 
 quite consistent, he was too big for that, but 
 in the main his answer would be a true one. 
 ' Learn to live,' is the only lesson he cares to 
 give us — not to live nobly, but to live 
 adaptably, to live cheerfully. 
 
 ' The great, the glorious masterpiece achiev- 
 able by man is to live a propos. It is the small 
 souls, buried below the weight of their busi- 
 ness, who are not able to throw it off, to leave 
 it there and then resume it.' ^ 
 
 And it is these "• dmelettes^ stunted and 
 sickly, who are Montaigne's aversion, be- 
 cause they do not know how to live. They 
 belong to two sorts — to the fools and to the 
 pedants ; to the fools, because ' nothing irritates 
 me so much in foolishness as the fact that it is 
 more pleased with itself than any reason could 
 reasonably be';^ to the pedants, for all the 
 
 1 Essds^ iii. 13 : ' De I'Experience.' 
 
 2 Ends, iii. 8 : ' De I'Art de conferer.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 223 
 
 causes he has already given us — with one 
 added : 
 
 ' To how many human beings in my time 
 has a cold and taciturn countenance acted as 
 a pass to a reputation for prudence and 
 capacity.' ^ 
 
 And what is the best school in which to 
 
 learn how to live ? Life, replies Montaigne, 
 
 is the only school. ' Man gets wonderful 
 
 light for his judgment by frequenting the 
 
 world of men. We are all confined and 
 
 huddled up within ourselves, and cut our 
 
 vision short according to the length of our 
 
 noses.' ^ Before we learn anything else, we 
 
 must learn to get rid of self-importance. 
 
 ' In this school of intercourse with men, I 
 
 have often noticed this vice — that instead of 
 
 gaining information about others, we labour 
 
 only to give it about ourselves, and take more 
 
 pains to make profit out of our old wares than 
 
 to acquire new ones .... Let us fly from this 
 
 puerile ambition to appear to be more subtle 
 
 than our kind, merely so as to seem different 
 
 from them and win reputation by our 
 
 fastidiousness and our whim-whams,' ^ 
 
 1 Eisais, iii. 8 : 'De I'Art de confdrer.' Compare La Roche- 
 foucauld : ' La gravite est un mystere du corps qui cache 
 souvent I'absence de I'esprit.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'lnstitution des Enfants.' » 7^V. 
 
224 MONTAIGNE 
 
 When we have mastered this elementary 
 science of modesty, taught always by Mon- 
 taigne through the head and not the heart — 
 for the heart is a factor he leaves out — we 
 shall have a chance of gaining other know- 
 ledge. Our minds once empty of all learning, 
 we shall be fit to get wisdom. 
 
 ' As plants are choked by too much moisture, 
 and lamps by too much oil, so the action of 
 the mind is choked by too much stuff of 
 study, the which so, blocks it up that ... it 
 loses the faculty of mixing. . . . But without 
 this, all is different, for the more the mind is 
 filled, the more space it possesseth.' ^ 
 
 And when the mind fills and widens, what 
 is the final fruit we gather ? 
 
 ' There hath happened to the people of real 
 knowledge what happeneth to ears of corn. 
 As long as they are empty, they go on growing 
 high and lifting up their heads straight and 
 proud ; but when they are full, and swelled 
 with ripened grain, they begin to humble 
 themselves and to bow their spikes. Like- 
 wise men, having tried all things, sounded all 
 things, and having found in this heap of 
 science nothing solid and massive, notJhing, 
 indeed, but vanity, altogether renounce their 
 
 ^ Essais, i. 25 : • Du Pedantisme.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 225 
 
 presumption and recognise their natural con- 
 dition.' ^ 
 
 Humility is their harvest — intellectual 
 humility, which equips them for the task of 
 living sanely. But oftenest they do not get 
 this art till long experience has imparted it. 
 ' We are taught to live when life is past,' says 
 Montaigne — yet ' a child when it first leaveth 
 its nurse is much more capable of learning this 
 lesson than of learning to read or write.' ^ 
 
 But it is never too late to begin, as it is 
 never too early. ' We may at all times con- 
 tinue to study, but not to sit in school,' ^ he 
 says, he who had sat as short a time in school 
 as was possible. Nevertheless, education was 
 one of the subjects on which he had thought 
 most, and about which he had written one 
 of his fullest and finest essays, De P Institution 
 des Enfants. It was dedicated to Madame de 
 Grammont, for the child that was to be born, 
 and enforces, as we might expect, a bold 
 programme, at least two hundred years ahead 
 of its day. It is easy from the foregoing 
 quotations to understand what Montaigne's 
 final aim would be in this direction. Any 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 12 : ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'lnstitution des Enfants.' 
 
 ^ Essais, ii. 28 : ' Toutes choses ont leur saison.' 
 P 
 
226 MONTAIGNE 
 
 child about whom he concerned himself was 
 to, have no special education in this study or 
 that, but he was to be trained as an efficient 
 human being. No pedant, no man of jargon, 
 was to come near him ; he was to be taught 
 by men of the world how to observe and to 
 perceive, and, fresh from the hand of chosen 
 tutors, he was to enter the University of Life. 
 ' Now for this apprenticeship, everything 
 we chance to see serveth us as an all-sufficient 
 book ; the malice of a page, the folly of a 
 footman, a topic at table, all these make so 
 much new matter for experience. . . . And 
 he [the lad who is being educated] will be 
 told that,' when he is in company, he must 
 have his eyes everywhere at once. Generally 
 the best seats at the dinner-table are seized, I 
 find, by people of inferior intelligence . . . and 
 I have watched men sitting at the high end 
 of the table talking on about the beauty of a 
 hanging, or the taste of the Malvoisie, and 
 missing excellent stories at the lower end. 
 He should sound the depths of every one 
 he meeteth. Bullock-breeder, stone-mason, 
 passer-by — he must get something from each 
 and all, and borrow from every one according 
 to his wares, for there is nothing that doth 
 not come in useful for a household ; the very 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 227 
 
 follies and foibles of others will serve him for 
 instruction. ... A closet, a garden, the table, 
 his bed, solitude, society, morning, evening — 
 all hours will be one to him, every place will 
 be to him a study.' ^ 
 
 We cannot but feel that young Shakespeare 
 — keen to act in the fray, as well as to look on 
 and make his profit — would have plucked more 
 of the heart from the bullock-breeder than 
 Montaigne with his busy curiosity. But the 
 knowledge that comes of sympathy was not 
 given to him, nor did he desire it. And he 
 never recommends it to old or young. The 
 young, however, are to have the wish to please. 
 . Thus much he says for what might be 
 called the University training of youth. But 
 the years of childhood and early boyhood 
 come before this, and Montaigne does not 
 leave these aside. Nor does he wish, as we 
 might logically expect, that these years should 
 be passed in pure ignorance. Far from it. 
 He becomes delightfully personal and incon- 
 sistent. His own training, he tells us, was 
 never thorough ; he remembered nothing but 
 ' a vague and shapeless countenance of know- 
 ledge : a little of everything and nothing of 
 anything, a /ajranfaise.' And he proceeds to 
 
 '^ Essais, i. 26 : *De I'Institution des Enfants.' 
 
228 MONTAIGNE 
 
 draw up a captivating scheme of education. 
 It is not so illogical either. For when we 
 look into it more closely, we shall find that 
 his plans all help his final end and bear upon 
 the conduct of life. 
 
 The New Learning, the re-discovery of the 
 classics, had given fresh impetus to education, 
 and educational treatises were in vogue. The 
 Humanists were very fond of writing them, 
 and dull enough they usually are. Happily 
 Rabelais wrote one too : his letter of counsel 
 to Gargantua, on the bringing-up of Prince 
 Pantagruel, is one of the noblest discourses 
 that has ever been printed on the subject. It 
 is nobler than the utterances of Montaigne, 
 because it is warmed by fire from the heart, 
 not only by light from the head. Yet 
 different roads make for the same goals. No 
 one who has read it is likely to forget Rabe- 
 lais' glorious morning scamper of wit — his 
 dissertation, his exuberant tilting against the 
 Sorbonne and the Schoolmen. One he is also 
 with Montaigne in his splendid pursuit of 
 sincerity — his insistence that, from the outset, 
 human beings must learn to think for them- 
 selves. But where Rabelais trumpets, Mon- 
 taigne speaks. We are not deafened by noise 
 and by laughter ; we can hear, and hear well. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 229 
 
 And where Rabelais tells a fable, Montaigne 
 has no disguise. He speaks to us direct, 
 without distraction. Besides, if Rabelais goes 
 deeper, Montaigne is more modern, not only 
 in his ideas, but in the way he expresses them. 
 In his conceptions of indulgent discipline, of 
 scientific methods, of knowledge without 
 tears, he is centuries in front of himself: 
 nearer to Maria Edgeworth and Goethe's ideal 
 school in Wilhelm Meister, than to Rabelais 
 and Pantagruel ; near, too, in his notions of 
 hygiene, of simple life and hardy habits, 
 to the JEmile of Rousseau. Montaigne really 
 went beyond them all — not, perhaps, in 
 the things he made for first, but in giving 
 them the first place. Rousseau, Goethe, 
 Miss Edgeworth, made for the same ends, 
 but these were involved and hidden in other 
 issues : with Rousseau in the emotions ; with 
 Goethe in moral processes ; with Miss Edge- 
 worth in the dialectics of schoolroom reason. 
 Montaigne had no wrappings. 
 
 'There is no help for it,' he says ; 'whoso 
 desireth for certain to make an efficient man, 
 he must in nowise spare him in his youth. 
 He must often shock professors and all their 
 rules.' ^ ' Let divers judgments be set before 
 
 1 Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'Institution des Enfants.' 
 
23© MONTAIGNE 
 
 him [the child] ; he will choose, if he can. 
 If not, he will remain in doubt.' ^ These two 
 adages are the central truths of Montaigne's 
 system. But he also gives two negative 
 ordinances. The teacher must, above all, 
 avoid scholasticism, he must avoid severity, 
 ' I disapprove,' writes Montaigne, ' of any 
 violence in the education of a tender spirit, 
 the which one traineth up to honour and to 
 liberty. There is I know not what of 
 servility in restriction and in rigour, and I 
 believe that what cannot be wrought by 
 reason and good sense can never be brought 
 about by force. ... I should always try by 
 sweet-tempered converse to nourish in my 
 children a living friendship and unfeigned kind- 
 ness towards myself ; and these one gaineth 
 easily from well-born natures.'^ 'There 
 is nothing like tickling the appetite and the 
 affection [for learning] ; otherwise one only 
 creates donkeys loaded with books. They are 
 well thrashed to keep their little panniers full 
 of knowledge. But to get knowledge truly, 
 we must not only give her lodging within us, 
 we must marry her.' ^ 
 
 1 Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'Institution des Enfants.' 
 
 2 Essais, ii. 8 : ' De I'AfFection des pSres aux enfants.' 
 5 Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'Institution des Enfants.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 
 
 231 
 
 Spare the rod and the child will not be 
 spoilt — and so back again to the arch-enemy. 
 Pedagogues alone have made learning disagree- 
 able. Montaigne remembers his own child- 
 hood. 'They never ceased to scream in one's 
 ears as if they were pouring something into a 
 barrel and one's task was only to repeat 
 what was told one. I should like to see 
 all this kind of thing mended, and to make 
 a teacher begin at once according to the 
 reach of the mind he has to handle — to 
 put a child on the alert, impelling him to 
 taste and discern things and to choose from 
 among them for himself, sometimes opening 
 a way for him, sometimes letting him find it. 
 I do not wish the teacher alone to talk and to 
 invent ; I want him to hear his disciple talk 
 in his turn. ... It is the sign of a high 
 soul, and a strong one, to know how to 
 condescend to the ways of children and to 
 guide them. One's step is more at home 
 on one's own hillside than in the valley 
 below.' ^ 
 
 The perfect teacher, then, must know how to 
 be a child. Montaigne, as far as we know, was 
 the first person to discover that truth. And 
 the next important thing to grasp is how to 
 
 1 Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'lnstitution des Enfants.' 
 
232 MONTAIGNE 
 
 make lessons living. Wisdom, he says, should 
 have a smiling face. 
 
 ' It is very wrong to paint her as inaccessible 
 to children, of a shrew^ish countenance, bushy- 
 eyebrov\red and terrible. Who has given her 
 this false, pale, hideous mask ? There is 
 nothing gayer, or more gallant, or more frolic — 
 I w^as almost going to say rollicking. For she 
 preacheth nought but feasting and good times. '^ 
 
 Wisdom must be taught by means of history. 
 ' Here I mean to include (and that chiefly) 
 such men as only live because books remember 
 them. By means of history, he [the teacher] 
 will deal with these great spirits of the best ages. 
 It is, if you like, a vain study ; but if you like, 
 also, it is a study the which beareth priceless 
 fruit. . . . And may the guide remember whither 
 his work really tendeth ! Nor must he take 
 such pains to impress upon his pupil the date 
 of the ruin of Carthage, as the manner of man 
 that Hannibal was, or Scipio.'^ If this be 
 done, the child (or, as Montaigne points out, 
 about one child in a hundred) will grow wise. 
 He may forget ; the body of fact may decay ; 
 but the soul of knowledge will remain, and all 
 else is worthless. 
 
 ' For if his spirit gaineth no better balance, 
 
 1 Essais, i. 26 : ' De I'Institution des Enfants.' 2 j^ij 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 
 
 =33 
 
 if his judgment be no saner, I had as Hef that 
 my scholar had passed his time in playing at 
 tennis — at least his body would then be the 
 brisker. For he who should bring back a full 
 soul from learning doth in this way but bring 
 it back stuffed ; he hath but swollen it instead 
 of making it larger.' ^ Pretences, indeed, 
 weaken the mind, as too many clothes weaken 
 the body. Sincerity is strength. And to 
 fashion character, to hammer it into shape, is 
 the one important goal of the educator. 'I 
 would rather forge my soul than furnish it,' ^ 
 Montaigne wrote of himself — he wished young 
 spirits to be forged before they were furnished. 
 The sources of help which Montaigne used 
 for this forging of his soul do not seem far to 
 seek. For he found them chiefly in himself. 
 The sense of religion was not natural to him. 
 And yet here, in a sense, he is puzzling. His 
 confession of faith, ' L'Apologie de Raimond 
 Sebond,' which makes a pamphlet in itself, 
 does not at first sight fit in with the rest of 
 him. But it is only at first sight. If we 
 probe farther into his meaning, we shall find 
 that in the main he is the same. And what 
 he is, the passages from the Essays have 
 
 1 Essais, i. 25 : ' Du Pedantisme.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 3 : ' De trois Commerces.' 
 
234 MONTAIGNE 
 
 already shown us. At his best he is a Pagan 
 sceptic — a happy sceptic — at his worst a 
 colloquial opportunist, naked and rather un- 
 ashamed. 
 
 'I am not,' he said, 'subject to these 
 intimate and piercing pledge-givings and 
 mortgagings of my soul. ... I would 
 follow the good cause to the stake, and 
 the fire, but not into it if I could help 
 it. Let Montaigne leap into the abyss if 
 there be need, but if there be no need I shall 
 be most beholden to Fortune if he can get 
 off.i . . . 
 
 ' I say nothing to one that at the right 
 hour I cannot say to the other, only with the 
 accent a little changed.' ^ 
 
 And if our convictions do not much matter, 
 we must also be indulgent towards our actions. 
 Too much has been asked of us by our Creator, 
 Who has not provided us with adequate 
 means to carry out His will. ' It is to be 
 wished that there were more proportion 
 between the commandment and our power 
 to obey. It seemeth unjust to set up Tor us 
 a goal that we cannot reach. . . , How can 
 we strive to be good according to God's law 
 
 1 Essais, iii. I : ' De I'Utile et de I'Honnete.' 
 
 2 Uid. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 235 
 
 when we are not able to be good according 
 to our own ? Human wisdom hath never yet 
 compassed the duties it prescribed to itself; 
 and even had it done so, it would then 
 prescribe fresh duties beyond, to which it 
 would aspire. So hostile to consistency is 
 our nature ! Is it, after all, so unrighteous 
 of man not to achieve what is impossible ? ' ^ 
 
 The best we can do is to follow the best 
 that is in ourselves, 
 
 ' People, more especially such as we are, 
 who live a private life only known to 
 ourselves, should have an abiding standard 
 written within, by the which we should test 
 all our actions. And according thereunto, 
 we should at one moment fondle, and at 
 another chasten ourselves. I have my own 
 laws and my own law-courts, the which will 
 judge of me ; and I address myself to them 
 rather than elsewhere. I may restrain my 
 deeds according to other people, but I only j 
 understand them according to myself.' ^ 
 
 He understood them so well that he found 
 that he had small use for repentance — of the 
 ordinary kind — nor, considering our moral 
 helplessness, did he think repentance desir- 
 
 ' Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanite.' 
 * Essais, iii. 2 : ' Du Repentir.' 
 
236 MONTAIGNE 
 
 able. ' Forgive,' he wrote, ' my repeating 
 what I have so often said — that I seldom 
 repent, and that my conscience is satisfied 
 with itself, not as with the conscience either 
 of an angel, or of a horse, but as with the 
 conscience of a human man.' ^ 
 
 ' My actions are ruled by and suited to 
 what I am and to my actual condition, I 
 can do no better — and repentance has really 
 no concern with such matters as lie outside 
 our moral strength.' ^ It is words such as 
 these which filled Pascal, Montaigne's great 
 antagonist, with bitter enmity. Montaigne 
 hated conviction of sin as a poisonous dis- 
 turber of the peace, invented by presumptuous 
 priests and purists. To Pascal it was the 
 breath of life — a terrible life and a fiery 
 breath blowing from the wilderness, but sent 
 by God as the only scourge strong enough 
 to drive us to Him. Without the conviction 
 of sin, Pascal could not have believed in 
 virtue. To Montaigne it made virtue im- 
 possible. To Pascal natural virtue was as 
 bad as sin, while Montaigne thought it the 
 only virtue worth having. And yet this does 
 not mean that Montaigne altogether discarded 
 repentance — he reserved it. The offences he 
 
 1 Essais, iii. z : ' Du Repentir.' 2 /^/^_ 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 237 
 
 thought worthy of it are few ; but when he 
 repented, it must be whole repentance ; no 
 mere word fossiHsed by frequent use, no mere 
 plumage of remorse, but a repentance like 
 that of the Psalmist. 
 
 ' I know no superficial, moderate repentance 
 — no mere formality. It must touch me at every 
 point before I give it the name. Then let it 
 burn into my marrow ; let my sufferings pierce 
 me as deep and as universally as the eye of God.' ^ 
 
 In the case of Montaigne, the sense of folly 
 took the place of the sense of sin — as it does for 
 so many ironical thinkers. Sins of belief did 
 not exist for him, only the follies of believers. 
 ' After all,' he says, ' it is setting a high value 
 upon our conjectures to have a man roasted 
 alive for them.'^ 'If truth, like falsehood, 
 had only one countenance, we should stand on 
 clearer ground. For we should take the 
 opposite of what the liar says as a certainty. 
 But the reverse side of truth has a hundred 
 thousand faces and a boundless field.' ^ 
 
 No worse stab than this denial of the fixity 
 of falsehood and of truth was given by 
 Montaigne to the creed of his successor. 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 2 : ' Du Repentir.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 11:' Des Boiteux.' 
 * Essais, i. 9 : ' Des Menteurs.' 
 
238 MONTAIGNE 
 
 Pascal, too, had stumbled and groped among 
 the shifting sands of thought — had stumbled, 
 and almost sunk. That was the great gulf be- 
 tween them. Pascal had wandered despairingly 
 where Montaigne had strolled agreeably ; and 
 where Montaigne, the Hedonist, watched the 
 horizon disappear into the sea with no more 
 painful sensation than an active and impartial 
 curiosity, Pascal, the sufferer, felt his whole 
 happiness at stake, and knowing that the waves 
 would else devour him, he clung to the one 
 vessel that was, it seemed to him, strong 
 enough to weather the ocean — the vessel of 
 mystery and authority, the vessel of the Church. 
 Montaigne, we shall see, had his place in 
 the same ship, but for other reasons. For as 
 far as his real faith was concerned, his ideas 
 were but those of a Pagan who happened to 
 be born a Catholic. And this applies even to 
 his finer utterances — to those, for instance, 
 upon death, a subject which nearly always 
 lifted him to a higher plane. 'The present- 
 ment of death is the presentment of liberty ; 
 whoso hath learned to die hath unlearned 
 servitude.'^ 'For that God giveth us the 
 leisure to order our flitting, let us prepare for 
 the same. Let us roll up our baggage and 
 
 1 Essais, i, 20 : ' Que philosopher c'est apprendre k mourir.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 239 
 
 take leave of the company in good time. . . . 
 We must loosen strong obligations and hence- 
 forth we may love here and love there, but 
 we must only wed ourselves.' ^ ' Earth, air, 
 fire and water — all the component parts of 
 this my edifice — are no more the instruments 
 of life than they are of death. Why dost thou 
 fear thy last day ? . . . The last step doth not 
 make weariness, it only declareth it. All days 
 travel towards death : the last arriveth.' ^ ' It 
 is an action full of reason and of piety to take 
 example from the very humanity of Jesus 
 Christ. Now he ended his life at three-and- 
 thirty years old. The greatest man — simply 
 man — Alexander, also died at this age.' ^ 
 
 Montaigne's human dignity was not dis- 
 turbed by any thought of what dreams might 
 come. To discuss them was to him but one 
 more exercise of human presumption. And 
 in any form of personal continuity he dis- 
 believed. 
 
 ' If the pleasures,' he says, ' that you 
 promise us in another life are such as 
 those that I have felt here below, then they 
 have nothing in common with infinity. Sup- 
 
 1 Essais, i. 39 : ' De la Solitude.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. 20 : ' Que philosopher c'est appendre a mourir.' 
 » Ibid. 
 
240 MONTAIGNE 
 
 posing all my five natural senses were over- 
 powered by enjoyment, and this my soul 
 were possessed by all contentments it could 
 hope for and desire, yet we know what even 
 its utmost Cometh to. It is as nothing. For 
 in all this there may be something of me, but 
 there is nothing divine. . . . All mortal satis- 
 faction is mortal. As for the recognition of 
 parents, children, friends, if it could touch or 
 charm us in the other world — if we still set 
 any store by such a pleasure — we should still 
 be lying among the flesh-pots of things finite. 
 We cannot worthily conceive the greatness of 
 these high and God-like promises if we con- 
 ceive them at all ; to imagine them adequately, 
 we must imagine them unimaginable, un- 
 speakable, incomprehensible — perfectly dif- 
 erent from those of our miserable experience 
 . . . and if to make us fit for them, our being 
 must be changed and re -moulded, as thou 
 thinkest, O Plato, by thy purifications, then 
 the change would be so vast and universal 
 that, according to the teaching of physics, it 
 would no longer be ourselves.' ^ 
 
 So spoke Montaigne, and yet entertained no 
 doubt that he was a good Catholic. He had, as 
 we said, his place in the same ship as Pascal, 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 12 : ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 241 
 
 for on all this Pyrrhonism — this, we were 
 going to say, heterodoxy, but we should rather 
 say no-doxy — Montaigne confidently grafted 
 orthodoxy. Since truth and falsehood are not 
 fixed;, fix them : let men believe like their 
 forefathers. Since reason has failed, substitute 
 authority. 
 
 ' Our faith is not our acquisition. ... It is 
 neither through our intellect nor our under- 
 standing that we have received our religion ; 
 it is through authority and by an external 
 command. The weakness of our judgment 
 helpeth us here better than its strength, and 
 blindness more than clear vision. ... It is not 
 surprising that our natural and earthly powers 
 cannot conceive a knowledge supernatural and 
 celestial. Let us bring thereunto nothing of 
 ourselves save obedience and submission.' ^ 
 
 ' We see every day that when human nature 
 swerveth, however slightly, from the main 
 road, and wandereth from the beaten track 
 traced out by the Church, in an instant it 
 misseth its turnings and loseth its way, it 
 groweth confused and entangleth itself, drift- 
 ing hither and thither, aimless, unbridled, 
 in this vast sea of tossing waves, the sea 
 of opinion. As soon as it departeth from 
 
 I Esjais, ii. 12 : 'Apologie de Raimond Sebond,' 
 Q 
 
242 MONTAIGNE 
 
 the great high road, it goeth on, dwind- 
 ling and scattering itself on many different 
 paths.' ^ 
 
 ' " What shall I choose ? " " What you 
 like, provided that you do choose." That is a 
 foolish answer, yet it seemeth that it is the 
 answer of all dogma — the which alloweth us 
 in no wise to be ignorant about our ignorance.'^ 
 ' Thus hath Divine Majesty in some fashion 
 allowed Himself for our sakes to be circum- 
 scribed by bodily limitations : His supernatural 
 sacraments are but signs of our earthly con- 
 dition ; adoration of Him expresseth itself by 
 ritual, by words made tangible to sense. For 
 it is man who prayeth and believeth.' ^ 
 
 ' Far it is from honouring Him Who 
 made us, to honour Him whom we have 
 made.' * ' Those things which come down to 
 us from heaven they alone have the right and 
 authority to persuade us, alone the mark of 
 Truth : the which, also, we behold not with 
 our eyes, neither receive it by any means of 
 ours. This great and holy image could not 
 abide in so mean a dwelling-place, if God had 
 not prepared it for this purpose.'^ 'To 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 1 2 : ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond.' 
 
 2 Hid. s /^,v. 
 * Hid. 6 /iid. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 243 
 
 make the handful greater than the hand . . . 
 to desire to stride farther than the stretch of 
 our legs alloweth — this is impossible and 
 monstrous. And so is it to imagine that man 
 should climb above himself and above human- 
 ity ; for he can only see w^ith his eyes and 
 seize as much as his grasp permitteth. He 
 will only rise if God, by grace alone, 
 lendeth him a hand ; he will only rise by re- 
 nouncing his own means and letting himself 
 be uplifted by the means of heaven, and nought 
 but heaven. It is for our Christian faith, 
 not for the virtue of the Stoic, to lay claim 
 to this divine, this miraculous transformation.'^ 
 
 And yet side by side with this confession of 
 Montaigne's strange belief, we find, asserted 
 with equal force, more passages than one like 
 the following : ' I love the virtue which is ^ 
 not made by laws and religions, but only 
 perfected and authorised thereby, the virtue 
 which feeleth that it hath within it where- 
 withal to sustain itself without aid ; the 
 virtue born in us of its own roots, by the seed 
 of universal reason — a seed which is embedded 
 in every man who hath not become unnatural.'^' / 
 
 At first the one quotation seems to contra- 
 
 1 Essais, ii. 12 : ' Apologie de Raimond Sebond,' 
 
 2 Essais, iii, 12 : 'De la Physionomie,' 
 
244 MONTAIGNE 
 
 diet the other, but if we penetrate the meaning 
 of either, we shall see that this is not so. 
 Our goodness is to be no exotic power born 
 of mysticism, but a solid force regulated by 
 the actual strength of our muscle. Faith is 
 to be its adjunct, not its source, for faith is to 
 deal with matters of belief and not of action. 
 In matters of belief we can effect nothing 
 except by the grace of God, but in matters of 
 action we have that within us 'which sus- 
 taineth itself.' 
 
 The doctrine of original sin was not for 
 Montaigne. His orthodoxy was not the fruit 
 of any spiritual need. Like Pascal, he accepted 
 the Church on the ground of all or nothing. 
 The futility of intellect, the arrogance of man 
 and of his reason, were tenets common to both. 
 But they arrived at the same destination by 
 opposite roads : Montaigne through the mind 
 that he professed to scorn, Pascal through the 
 moral sense. This, unconsciously to Pascal, 
 was perhaps the cause of their worst difference. 
 For there is no such enmity as that which 
 comes of reaching the same end by different 
 means. Any open divergence of belief is 
 more easily forgiven. Sainte - Beuve has 
 written once and for all upon the direct con- 
 flict between the two adverse creeds — that of 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 245 
 
 Montaigne's naturalism and that of Pascal's 
 fervent asceticism. It would be presumptuous 
 to re-discuss what has been already perfectly 
 said. But there is a still stronger hostility 
 between them. Not that between the abstract 
 and logical theologian, and the concrete and 
 logic-hating discourser, but a still more signal 
 opposition, an irreconcilable division : that 
 between the strenuous sufferer and the dilet- 
 tante ; between the man who has laboured for 
 his patrimony and the man who disowns his 
 father while he inherits his father's fortune. 
 
 If it be true that the faith of either man 
 discards reason, it is yet truer that the word 
 faith has a different meaning for each : that 
 to one it is a refuge from doubt ; to the other 
 a screen for scepticism — not only to the 
 world but to himself; to the one a haven 
 from life, to the other a convenient shelf on 
 which to lay mystery and keep it from 
 disturbing existence. 
 
 ' Man is so great,' says Pascal, ' that his 
 greatness appears even in the fact that he 
 knows he is miserable. A tree does not 
 know it is miserable. True is it that to 
 know oneself miserable is misery, but it is 
 also greatness. In this fashion all man's 
 miseries prove his greatness. They are 
 
246 MONTAIGNE 
 
 miseries of the Grand Seigneur, the miseries 
 of a king dethroned.' 
 
 ' As for me,' says Montaigne, ' I love life 
 and I cultivate it as I find it — just as it 
 hath pleased God to let it be. I gladly and 
 gratefully accept what Nature hath done for 
 me ; 1 am pleased — I congratulate myself.' ^ 
 Suffering is your brevet of divinity — take it 
 as your one chance of salvation, says Pascal. 
 Flee from all pain, it is unnatural not to do 
 so, says Montaigne — behave well, be cheerful, 
 and keep your sanity, it is as much as you 
 can manage. Such, rightly speaking, are the 
 summaries of these two men's creeds. A 
 world lies between them. 
 
 And yet no comparison suffices to epitomise 
 Montaigne. Concrete though he be, he can 
 elude us. And every now and then he still 
 baffles us by the glimpses he gives us of that 
 other higher self, of that strain which may 
 have come from his blood, or from elsewhere 
 — who shall tell ? Whatever the cause, it 
 remains a fact that the man who cultivated 
 self-supporting virtue was the same man who 
 said — and bade others say — the Lord's Prayer 
 often in the day ; who believed in prayer — 
 prayer, he says, before offering which, evil 
 
 1 Essais, iii. 13: ' Dc I'Expdrience.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 247 
 
 passions must be banished from the breast. 
 Nor dare we be so irreverent as to pray for 
 all things, or be guilty of ' the error which 
 maketh us resort to God in each one of our 
 designs and undertakings, and call on Him 
 for every sort of need, whenever our weakness 
 wanteth help, without considering whether 
 the occasion be just or unjust.'^ But the 
 prayer taught by Christ sufficed entirely for 
 his needs. 
 
 ' I know not,' he says, ' if I deceive myself, 
 but sith that by . . . divine goodness a certain 
 way of prayer has been prescribed to us, 
 dictated word for word by the mouth of God, 
 it hath ever seemed to me that we ought to 
 make the use thereof more ordinary than it is. 
 ... At sitting down to table and at leaving it, 
 when we rise and when we sleep, and before 
 the performance of those private actions for 
 the which it is customary to put up prayers, I 
 desire that Christians should use the Pater- 
 noster, if not alone by itself, at least always. . . . 
 That prayer should have this privilege — that 
 it should constantly be upon the lips of the 
 people ; for sure it is that it saith all that 
 is needful, and that it fitteth every occa- 
 sion. It is the one prayer that I always 
 
 1 Eisais, i. 56 : ' Des Prieres.' 
 
248 MONTAIGNE 
 
 pray, and I reiterate it rather than make a 
 
 cljange.'^ 
 
 f Montaigne is as sincere when he says this 
 
 ts he is in all his other utterances. No thinker 
 as ever been sincerer, or has woven thought 
 of such complex, many-coloured threads. It 
 would be a paradoxical task to go through all 
 the parts that he played: he, Michel de 
 Montaigne, the Stoic and the Hedonist ; the 
 orthodox heretic, and the Pagan haunted by 
 Christian prayer ; the enemy of the preacher 
 and the ascetic, who thought he knew better 
 than his neighbour ; the over-civilised believer 
 in the savage 'so simple that he under- 
 standeth not one word of the religion he so care- 
 fully observeth' ; ^ the intellect-hater, who lived 
 upon the intellect ; the satirist of presumption, 
 who said 'the most of men's vocations are far- 
 cical' ; the artist, who knew the secret that ' all 
 experience must be passed through the alembic'; 
 the moralist, who did his best to canonise 
 selfishness and raise it to the rank of self- 
 possession ; the opportunist, who proclaimed 
 that ' there are legitimate vices ' ; the philo- 
 sopher, who taught mental symmetry, and in- 
 dulgence, and a large human dignity. All this 
 Montaigne was and much more, and perhaps 
 
 1 Essais, i. 56: 'Des Prieres,' 2 /^/^ 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 249 
 
 the greatest feat that he achieved was to 
 reconcile these conflicting strands, crossing and 
 recrossing one another ; to make them into 
 an active force possessing a unity — not a unity 
 of expression, but of life. 
 
 What is it in the end that Montaigne 
 stands for ? No man w^ho has read his diatribes 
 against human conceit and inability w^ould 
 presume to try and fully answer such a 
 question. His attitude of mind cannot be 
 compressed into any final form of words : his 
 scepticism and his irony make the light and 
 atmosphere which bathed his every thought. 
 But certain of those thoughts stand out 
 positively and focus the rest. And to give 
 these central truths in his own words is the 
 only way to write Montaigne's epitaph. 
 
 ' We are never at home — we are always out 
 and abroad.' ^ 
 
 ' The greatest thing in the world is to know 
 how to belong to oneself.'^ 
 
 ' The friendship that each man oweth to 
 himself ... a beneficent, well-controlled friend- 
 ship, profitable and pleasant — he who compre- 
 hendeth and practiseth the duties thereof . . . 
 hath reached the summit of human wisdom 
 
 1 Essais, i. 3 : 'Nos affections nous emportent au dela de nous.' 
 
 2 Essais, i. 39 : ' De la Solitude.' 
 
250 MONTAIGNE 
 
 and happiness. ... He who in nowise liveth 
 for others hardly knoweth how to live for 
 himself. . . . All the same, whoso abandoneth 
 of his own accord a gay and wealthy life in 
 order to serve others, maketh, to my mind, 
 an evil and unnatural decision.' ^ 
 
 ' Save for thee, O man, . . . every creature 
 studieth itself first, and hath, according to its 
 needs, due limits to its work and its desires. 
 There is not a single one so empty and so 
 poverty-stricken as thou, and yet thou under- 
 standest the universe. Thou art the investi- 
 gator without information ; the judge without 
 power of judging — and, when all is said, 
 thou art the buffoon of the farce.' ^ 
 
 ' We do not live, we only exist, if we hold 
 ourselves bound and driven by necessity to 
 follow one course alone. The finest spirits 
 are those that show the largest choice, the 
 greatest suppleness.' ^ 
 
 ' Those who abandon the common offices of 
 life, and renounce the infinite number of thorny 
 rules — the laws which bear so many aspects — 
 which restrict a man of nice honour as a 
 citizen, are, to my mind, a good riddance, 
 
 1 Essais, iii. lo : ' De menager sa volonte.' 
 
 2 Essais, iii. 9 : ' De la Vanit^.' 
 
 3 Essais, iii. 3 : ' De trois Commerces.' 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 251 
 
 whatever private discipline they may be enjoin- 
 ing upon themselves. For what they do is, 
 as it were, to die in order to flee from the 
 trouble of living well. They may have 
 another kind of worth ; but the worth that 
 comes of grappHng with difficulty hath never 
 seemed to me to be theirs. Nor when we 
 are beset, is there aught, so I believe, to be 
 done, transcending this : that we should stand 
 holding ourselves upright amid the thronging 
 floods of the world.' ^ 
 
 This is his answer to all exceptional people 
 who act exceptionally : to martyrs more 
 especially, to Puritans, most heroes, and to 
 all ascetics. It is his great plea for Common 
 life and for the obvious — his indictment 
 of intellectual arrogance. 
 
 Had Montaigne been able to believe that 
 the faults that he attacks in these adages were 
 lessened in the world by his blows, he would 
 have died the happier. But he did not 
 believe it. Presumption, insincerity, one- 
 sidedness, the lack of self-rule and self-respect, 
 these were the foes — assuredly no windmills 
 — of this most unquixotic of assailers. And 
 presumption, as we know, included for him 
 much of what we hold most precious : the 
 
 ' Essais, ii. 33 : ' L'Histoirc de Spurina.' 
 
252 MONTAIGNE 
 
 hardly-won riches of the mind ; the dreams 
 and aspirations of the soul. But he fought 
 modestly, and he fought disinterestedly. He 
 never sought to be the hero of the field ; he 
 made for neither loot nor laurels. 
 
 ' Sir, you have wrestled well and overthrown 
 more than your enemies.' These are the 
 thanks that posterity ought to tender him, 
 and with truth. 
 
 Montaigne's wisdom is the heritage he left 
 to the world. Yet wisdom is not the secret 
 of his power, that mysterious power which 
 has stirred men of such different casts of mind 
 for more than three hundred years, which has 
 influenced, indeed, the leading minds of every 
 age. For from the beginning Montaigne was 
 the exception to the rule — he was a successful 
 genius, recognised at once and for always. 
 He has suffered no eclipse, he has always lived 
 in the full sunlight of prosperity. It was as if 
 he had ordered hi^ own career, and, snapping 
 his fingers in the face of destiny, had escaped 
 all the sufferings that genius brings. Shake- 
 speare, Bacon, Henri iv., Pascal, Voltajre, 
 Pope, Rousseau, Montesquieu — these are only 
 a few of the spirits whom he affected : the 
 four last-named Frenchmen very strongly. 
 Some thinkers went beyond him in his own 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 253 
 
 line. His opponents were no less moulded by 
 his hand. Many disliked him, none remained 
 unmoved by him. 
 
 No one could say, as it has been said of 
 Rousseau, that three-quarters of his power 
 lay in his style. Montaigne's style is vital — 
 it is easy, coloured, racy of his soil, collo- 
 quial, yet perfect in its dignity. He was the 
 first author in France, perhaps in any country, 
 who dared to talk to his readers from an arm- 
 chair. But no slipshod gown and slippers for 
 him ; he is always well dressed, and spick and 
 span in the spotless linen that he loved. His 
 manners charm us — they make us feel at home 
 and yet always in fine company, they are inti- 
 mate without being familiar. His is a style 
 which gives us appetite ; which greatly adds 
 to our enjoyment. It does not cause it. He 
 had no need of rhythm, and more use for 
 strength than for beauty. There is not about 
 Montaigne's words that final magic which 
 compels our submission, apart from the sense 
 that they convey. His secret lay in something 
 that went deeper than his gift of expression. 
 
 It lay in force not in charm, this spell which 
 makes us watch him, whether we will or no — 
 it is often no ; which captivates us while we 
 almost hate him ; which startles even those 
 
254 MONTAIGNE 
 
 of us who love him ; which holds and haunts 
 us almost painfully. For he who has read 
 Montaigne is, if he be candid, never quite the 
 same man again ; while he thinks that he is 
 only being gossiped with, he has had his 
 outlook changed. The landscape is different. 
 Certain patches that were covered up are laid 
 bare ; the undergrowth is trodden down ; the 
 lights and shadows have shifted. Why should 
 this be ? Can we discover ? 
 
 After all, what is Montaigne doing while 
 we watch him, half-aghast and half-enthralled ? 
 He is doing the impossible. Like some tiger- 
 charmer, he is playing with the wild beast. 
 Nature. He has not only tamed her, or 
 accomplished a feat in her den. He is getting 
 on well with her ; he can live with her, face 
 to face. Fascinated, repelled, she looks at 
 him ; and fascinated, repelled, we look at her 
 coerced by Montaigne's will. For this same 
 Nature is no stranger to us ; is she not the 
 wild beast that lurks in each of us — sleeping 
 in some, in most hidden, and dreaded by all ? 
 We know she is there, we have always known 
 it, but by a tacit freemasonry we do not 
 breathe the fact to one another. Like 
 children, we feel that if we do the bogey 
 may leap out on us — and then ? But here 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 255 
 
 is Montaigne unconcernedly sporting with 
 her, caressing her, treating her as a familiar. 
 How can we not stand amazed ? This is a 
 matter of personal import. If Nature is to 
 be treated as no monster, but as a recognised 
 inmate of the house, what about our laws 
 and traditions ? What becomes of accepted 
 moralities ? If we test them, how many 
 will remain ? how much of the fabric will 
 crumble ? Small wonder that Montaigne 
 possesses us, that we are dominated by his 
 thought. We are all involved in the issue. 
 
 It would be a task of absorbing interest to 
 compare Montaigne's attitude towards Nature 
 with that of his great contemporary, Bacon. 
 To Bacon she was no comrade for daily inter- 
 course : rather he wished to make her his 
 slave, the minister to his intellectual needs, a 
 mine in which to dig for knowledge. But if 
 Montaigne had wanted a living example to 
 prove his thesis — the moral ruin that comes 
 of dependence on the intellect, on the aspira- 
 tions and ambitions of the mind, he might 
 have pointed to Lord Verulam. ' Here,' he 
 might have said, 'is the man who thought 
 himself different from les autres. ' Bacon 
 wrote loftily and lived dishonourably; Mon- 
 taigne lived honourably and wrote what, if it 
 
256 MONTAIGNE 
 
 was. not low, was at least below the level of 
 his life. 
 
 The close of that life was not the close alone 
 of his existence. With Michel de Montaigne 
 died a century. And with Michel de Mon- 
 taigne there began a new age which has not 
 ended yet. 
 
 For Montaigne, like most great thinkers 
 living in the last years of a great period, was 
 a man of two tenses : he ' looked before and 
 after.' He summed up the expiring Renais- 
 sance — its war against priestcraft and monasti- 
 cism, its splendour of emancipation, its 
 almost hectic love of the classics, its generous 
 assertion of human dignity; and he fore- 
 shadowed the far future — its naturalism, its 
 rejection of romance, its fervent scientific 
 curiosity, its familiar ease of demeanour. 
 
 The types of both past and future could 
 appeal to Montaigne to justify them. 
 Catherine de' Medici, the epitome of the 
 Renaissance, might have quoted him, chapter 
 and verse, as the author of her moral indiffer- 
 ence, her inaction, her scorn of principles, her 
 cult of the doctrine of expediency. But with 
 equal justice — and perhaps with deeper signifi- 
 cance — that most modern spirit, Henri iv. 
 could have called himself Montaigne's disciple. 
 
THE PHILOSOPHER 257 
 
 His tolerance, based on human wisdom, not 
 on conviction; his human sympathies which 
 destroyed conventionalities ; his dislike of pur- 
 poseless cruelty; his critical mind, accepting 
 truth as relative ; more than all, his ironic 
 humour, which played around his life and 
 affected all he did — his public policy, his 
 private morals — these qualities are redolent 
 of the Essays. 
 
 Montaigne was even more of a modern than 
 he was a man of the Renaissance. He belongs 
 first and foremost to the future ; his relation 
 to it lay deeper than his relation to the past. 
 And it is of the future that we think as we 
 turn the last page of his book. We greet the 
 new day, and we take our leave of the old, 
 with the name of Michel de Montaigne upon 
 our lips. 
 
 R 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 § I. Text. Montaigne published the first two books 
 of his Essais in 1580 : Les Essais de messire Michel, seigneur 
 de Montaigne, Livres premier et second. Bourdeaus, par 
 Simon Millanges, 1580, sm. 8vo [Grenville, 2344]. C3ther 
 editionsof these two books appeared, Bordeaux, 1582 ; Paris, 
 1587. A so-called ■• fifth ' edition of Les Essais, augmented 
 by a third book and six hundred additions to the first two 
 books, was given to the world by Montaigne after his return 
 from his travels: Paris, Abel' I'Angelier, 1588, 410. This 
 was the last edition published during the essayist's lifetime. 
 In a sense, therefore, it affords a more authentic text than 
 any other, and we shall refer to it as text A. The 1580 text 
 was reissued by Dezeimeris et Barckhausen at Bordeaux, 
 2 vols. 8vo, 1874 (with 1582 and 1587 variants). Rein- 
 hold Dezeimeris has written several learned works on the 
 text of Montaigne. The 1588 text is reproduced (with 
 most of the 1595 addenda as footnotes) by Mothau and 
 Jouaust in their seven-volume edition of 1886-89. 
 
 Before his death in 1592 Montaigne left two copies of 
 the latest edition of the Essais (1588), with numerous and 
 diverse annotations. One of these, which forms the basis 
 of the Bordeaux text, and which we may designate text B, 
 was given by the Montaigne family to the convent of 
 Feuillants at Bordeaux, where the essayist was buried. In 
 1792, when the convent was sacked, this was removed into 
 the municipal library at Bordeaux, and it furnished the 
 material of the not very accurate reprint published by 
 Naigeon at Paris in 1802 (Didot, 4 vols., 8vo). The text 
 is difficult, as the printed pages have been slightly cropped 
 by the binder here and there, while the interpolations are 
 often almost illegible. The municipality have now given 
 
 259 
 
26o MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE 
 
 their attention to the matter, and have entrusted the work 
 of re-interpretation to M. Fortunat Strowski, whose superb 
 edition, crowned by the French Academy, and now 
 approaching completion, has formed the basis of the present 
 study (thus, in referring to the Essays in Book I., the 
 numbering ^ of the Bordeaux Edition has been followed), 
 and promises to be that of the received text of the future. 
 That place hitherto has been occupied by - 
 
 The text furnished by the second copy, with annotations, 
 found in Montaigne's library. The original (now lost) was 
 entrusted by the widow to Montaigne's fille d'' alliance^ 
 Marie de Gournay. She inserted all the interlineations, 
 and, after submitting her work to Pierre de Brach, who 
 supplied yet further additions (probably from the Bordeaux 
 or B text), brought out the fullest version of the Essais 
 that had yet seen the light (Paris, folio, 1595). This text 
 may be designated C ; the additions are authentic Mon- 
 taigne marginalia, but they sometimes confuse the text, 
 and it is more than doubtful if the author had the inten- 
 tion of incorporating them as they stand. 
 
 With its faults, this text has formed the basis of the 
 best-known and most elaborate editions of the Essais : 
 those of J. V. Le Clerc (Paris, Lefevre, 5 vols., 8vo, 1826- 
 28), Charles Louandre (Paris, Charpentier, 4 vols., i2mo, 
 1854), and MM. Courbet et Royer (Paris, Lemerre, 4 
 vols., 8vo, 1872-77). All these derive from text C. The 
 desideratum by Montaigne students at present — and now 
 that M. Strowski's work is accessible it ought soon to be 
 realised — is a careful reissue of text A (1588), with a 
 variorum apparatus embodying the additions and altera- 
 tions of texts B and C. 
 
 The Journal de Voyage of Montaigne in 1580-81 was dis- 
 covered, 1769-70, in an attic of the Chiteau de Montaigne 
 in the form of a Manuscript of 178 folios (lacking the first 
 leaf), by a Perigordian canon named Prunis. This fortunate 
 priest took it to Paris, where it was edited by M. de 
 Querlon in 1774. Its authenticity has been fully con- 
 firmed, and its importance has been progressively estimated 
 by all Montaigne scholars (new edition by A. d'Ancona, 
 1 No. 40 in Le Clerc is No. 14 in Strowski- 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 261 
 
 Citta di Castello, 1895; English translation by W. G. 
 Waters, 1903 ; with Introduction, table of proper names, 
 and version of Italian portions of text, by Louis Lautrey, 
 1906).! 
 
 § 2. English Translations. The two, both well- 
 known, translations of the Essays are those by John Florio 
 and Charles Cotton, respectively the Italian tutor to 
 James i.'s Queen Consort, and the poet who was the friend 
 of Izaak Walton. The Essayes written in French by Michael, 
 Lord of Montaigne . . . Done into English by John Florio, 
 appeared first in 1603, again in 161 3, and in 1632. Florio, 
 though by general consent a very flowery usher to his 
 Lord of Montaigne, still holds the field, and is represented 
 to-day by three serviceable editions — Nutt's Tudor Trans- 
 lation of 1892 ; Dent's Temple Classics' edition in six small 
 volumes ; and the three-volume edition published by Grant 
 Richards, 1908-9, with an 'Introductory Essay' by 
 Thomas Seccombe. Charles Cotton's version, more ac- 
 curate as a whole, but uneven, and certainly less ' resolute ' 
 than Florio's, was first published in 1685 (3rd ed., 171 1 : 
 ed. W. Hazlitt the second, with Bibliog., 1842 and 1845 ; 
 revised by W. C. Hazlitt, with Letters and Travels added, 
 in a very useful composite volume, with a Life built up like 
 a mosaic from the Essays, 1889, and, 4 vols., 1902). 
 
 § 3. Monographs. Studies of Montaigne have done 
 much to elucidate difficult points, and, with the exception 
 of Pascal's criticisms and Emerson's, those of most value 
 have appeared in France and England within the last 
 forty years. Those most in evidence are here enumer- 
 ated in chronological order, commencing with J. B. 
 Biot's essay, Montaigne, of 1812. Emerson's fine 
 estimate in Representative Men, 1850, has hardly been 
 surpassed. Alphonse Griin's fie Publique de Montaigne, 
 1855, contains valuable letters. Bayle St. John's Mon- 
 taigne the Essayist of 1858 is one of the first attempts to 
 familiarise Montaigne easily to English readers. It was 
 
 1 See Times, 8th January 1904, and Chambnm de Rosemont's Recits 
 et Impressions de Voyage au 16"" sieck. 
 
262 MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE 
 
 followed in 1878 by W. Lucas CoUins's brightly written 
 Montaigne (in Foreign Classics for English Readers). But 
 a majority of the best equipped books are recent, such as 
 Th. Malvezin's M. de Montaigne, Son Origine et sa famille, 
 1875 and 1889; Petit de Julleville's masterly Extraits 
 (numerous editions), and study in Hist. Litteraire ; F. 
 Hemon's Montaigne (1892) ; Faguet's careful appreciation 
 i,n his Seizieme Steele oi 1894; Pater's elaborate tesselation 
 in Gaston Latour, 1896; Lanusse's critical essay in the 
 Classiques Populaires, 1 895 ; Miss Lowndes's scholarly 
 Biographical Study oi 1898; Stapfer's lucid and illuminat- 
 ing ' Montaigne ' in Les Grands Ecrivains, 1 895, following 
 his book on Montaigne's Family and Friends, which was 
 surpassed in a measure by Paul Bonnefon's Montaigne et 
 ses Amis of 1898, an expansion of this same writer's 
 delightful Montaigne Vhomme et Paeuvre of 1893. Edme 
 Champion's helpful and suggestive Introduction aux Essais 
 (following Vernier) appeared in 1900, and the new century 
 has started well with the admirable monograph by Professor 
 Dowden (1905, Lippincott's French Men of Letters), 
 which covers the field, and the more technical studies of 
 Professor Lanson and Fortunat Strowski. We can merely 
 refer here to the essays by Sainte-Beuve, Langlais, Ruel, 
 Bimbenet, Jeudy, Leveaux, Gauthiez, Compayre (there is 
 quite a small literature on Montaigne's education), Betz, 
 Joseph Neyrac, Dean Church, Sir J. F. Stephen, Saints- 
 bury, Norton, Whibley, Seccombe, and the eloquent and 
 discriminating study by Warwick Bond (1906). 
 
 § 4. Special Points. On special points, and especially 
 for hitherto unpublished or unfamiliar Letters, the writer 
 must refer expressly to the following works : — A. Jubinal, 
 Lettre ine'dite de M., 1850 ; Bigorie de Laschamps, Michel 
 de Montaigne, Paris and Rennes, 1855; Lettres de Mar- 
 guerite de Falois ; Pieces du Procls de Libri (Pamphlets, 
 Bibl. de France, Lettres de Jubinal, P. Lacroix, Naudet, 
 etc.), 1849 (for Letters to Henry iv. of 1585-90); H. 
 Wendell's (1882), and Voizard's Etude sur la langue, 
 Paris, 1885 (for linguistic points); Champollion-Figeac, 
 Documents Historiques inedits ; Sidney Lee's French Renais- 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 263 
 
 sance in England^ 1910 (letter about Montaigne's death); 
 Livet's Precieux et Precieuses, Paris, 1859, ^^^ Mario Schiff's 
 La fille d' alliance de Montaigne^ Marie de Gournay, Paris, 
 191 1 (for Mile, de Gournay) ; "The Recherches a.nd Docu- 
 ments Inedits of Dr. Payen ; and the Collections (Cartons 
 926-929, Bibl. Nat.) of J. B. Bastide. For works dealing 
 with Montaigne and Shakespeare it will suffice to refer 
 to the works of P. Chasles, Feis, and J. M. Robertson 
 [Montaigne and Shakespeare, 1909). M. Villey, the now 
 well-known blind student of Montaigne, whose researches 
 into the Montaigne sources have excited so much admira- 
 tion, is preparing an essay on this subject. The derivation 
 of the term Essay from Montaigne in our literature is 
 significant. 
 
 § 5. Bibliographies. Gamier, in the fourth volume of 
 Louandre's edition, still serves as a basis, though he must 
 be supplemented now by the authorities given in Petit 
 de Julleville, Faguet, and Lanson (in their Literary His- 
 tories), and by the materials presented in Gabriel Richou's 
 Inventaire de la Collection des Ouvrages et Documents sur 
 M. de Montaigne . . . a la Bibl. Nationale ; in Nolhac and 
 Dorez, Bibl. Litt. de la Renaissance (1898); in Dowden's 
 excellent select ' Bibliography ' ; in M. Strowski's Mon- 
 taigne (in Les Grands Philosophes) ; and in W. P. Courtney's 
 invaluable Register of Bibliography. Much has been done 
 on the sources of the essayist by J. de Zangroniz, Mon- 
 taigne, Amyot and Saliat (1906) ; Bonnefon on Montaigne's 
 Library (some seventy-six books in which have survived) ; 
 and especially by Pierre Villey in his Livres d'histoire 
 utilises par Montaigne (1908), and cognate studies. 
 

 
 ^vyjifjw.': 
 
 lEStAIS- DE M. DE MONTA. 
 
 "^_;~i>v ,^P* qnteUplufieursrarcsreflemhlancesdefortune.Maislabeau- 
 r^t j|^^>^'^ gloire(Wimorcdeccttuy-cy,aIaveuedeParis,&de 
 
 ^ J v-J'd'vne'armee vidorieufe par fa conduicte, &r3'vn coup dc , 
 
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 Voy la tout ce que i'ay connu} iufques a cette 
 
 fei ^"' 
 
 
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 \'i0'' ■' ^ ' J^oflibleafairc.Voylatouccequci'ayconnuJiufquesi cett< 
 ""i''* ■ "■ P ' ' *"^ neurc, d'cxtraordinaire srandeur & non commune. 
 
 DudeHtentir. 
 
 Chap. XVlIL 
 
 '^-^ 
 
 b ,'.\ ' '- - n AiTBy^s^ iREmaisonmedira,queccdc(reindcfeferuir de 
 ^ foy-f««fi«es pour fubkiSb a efcrire,(eroit excufabie a 
 f^ J 4 l^^'^^"^ deshomtMcsrarcs &fameux,quiparlcurrepuration 
 jl jO!nauroycntdonequclqucdefirdeleurcognoiflance. Ileftcer- 
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 'k f ^<-r.nllnl1i^^fe^j)n ipeincquvnartifanlcuclcsyeuxdefa be- 
 lt voir vn perfonnage grand &: fignale,arri- 
 
 i, t commune 
 ^ongne: 1 J 
 
 jNUcr en vn'c vifi^les ouuroirs & les boutiques s'abandonncnt. 
 ■-Hi meflietatput autre dc fefoirc cognoiftre/ju'aceluyquia 
 f dequoy (cfaire imitcr;& duquel la vie & les opinions peuuec 
 
 .^{eruif d' e icempl e g ^dcpatron. C^far&Xenoph5 onteudc- 
 "IqMy fonder & fermir leurnaMtion, en la grandeur de leurs 
 "^•^gi^lsjComecnvnebazcftuflttar&folide. Aindfont afou- 
 naitctics papiers iournaux du grand Alcxindreiles commen- 
 catiS^squ'Augufte,Sylla,Brutus,& autres auoycnt laifle de 
 learsgeftes.DctellesgenSjOnaymc&eftudicles figures, en 
 cayure mefraes &" en pierre.Cettc femoftrance eft cres-vrtie, 
 maisellenemetouchcque,bienp;u; . . . i : ;r 
 
 Hon 
 
 2i_a8Uj^ 
 
 I'AllE I'RO.M MONTAir.NF/s l'',SSAY.S IN THE ("IK I( ', I X Al, EnrUON flF I5SS AF 
 
 Bordeaux, SHowi.xci iiis annotation to Ciiai'. x\ii. Hook ii, "Iie i.a 
 Presi-IMPTION," am> itie cross below at itie I'I.aie where in the 
 
 EUriTON OF I5Q5 THE FKAISE OF MDLL.E. I'E (ioURNAY WAS INSEKTEIl. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Andelot, 103. 
 
 Anjoii, Due d', death of, 117. 
 
 Aquinas, St. Thomas, handwriting 
 
 of, 108. 
 Ayquem, Grimon d', grandfather 
 of Montaigne, 3. 
 
 Pierre d' (de Montaigne) — 
 
 alhided to, 64, 70, 73, 81. 
 his ancestors, 3. 
 ' Apologie de Raymond 
 Sebond,' indirectly due to, 
 
 .90- 
 
 his business at Bordeaux, 3. 
 
 buys a magistracy, 11. 
 
 character, 5-6. 
 
 his death, 90. 
 
 his education and tastes, 3-4. 
 
 father of Michel de Mon- 
 taigne, 3. 
 
 his negotiations on behalf of 
 Bordeaux, i o- 1 1 . 
 
 his portrait by Montaigne, 5- 
 6. 
 Raymond d' — 
 
 great-grandfather of Mon- 
 taigne, 3. 
 
 Bacon, Anthony, 118-19, 145. 
 Francis, Lord, compared with 
 
 Montaigne, 168. 
 Bai'f, reference to, 20, 57. 
 Balzac, grammarian, 141. 
 Beauregard, Thomas de, 4, 28, 90. 
 Biron, Marechal de, mayor of 
 
 Bordeaux before Montaigne, 
 
 Blois, Etats de, 12:. 
 Bordeaux, Court of Guienne held 
 at, 1 1 5- 1 6. I 
 
 Bordeaux, College of Jesuits at, 
 
 115. 
 Montaigne, mayor of, 113, 
 
 114-18. 
 
 plague at, 118. 
 
 threatened by both Ligueurs 
 
 and Huguenots, 118. 
 
 revolt against Gabelle at, 10. 
 
 Brach, Pierre de, 120, 133, 145- 
 
 146. 
 Brazilian aborigines, 12. 
 Buchanan, Robert, philosopher and 
 
 poet, 10. 
 
 Calvin uses La Boetie's pamphlet, 
 
 ' Contre-un,' 15. 
 Capella, Bianca, 106. 
 Carles, Madame de. Set La 
 
 Boetie, Madame de. 
 Chapelain, 141. 
 Charron, Pierre de, friend and 
 
 disciple of Montaigne, iig. 
 Chassaigne, Fran9oise de. See 
 
 Montaigne, Madame de. 
 Chaumont, Mademoiselle de. See 
 
 Palmier de. 
 Corisande, La belle, 103. 
 Coutras, battle of, 117. 
 Cujas, lecture by, 10. 
 
 DANotr, reference to, 20. 
 
 Divizia, peasant poetess, 112. 
 
 Dolet, reference, 173. 
 
 Dorat, reference to, 20. 
 
 Du Bellay, Joachim, his poetry and 
 
 Montaigne's prose, 107. 
 Du Bourg, reference to, 1 9. 
 
 Erasmus, reference, 173. 
 
 266 
 
266 MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE 
 
 Escars, Monsieur d', La Boetie's 
 
 game with, 23. 
 Essais. See under Montaigne. 
 Etissac, Sieur d', travels with 
 
 Montaigne, 102-13. 
 
 Florio, Shakespeare's acquaint- 
 ance with, 215. 
 
 his translation of Essays, 261. 
 
 Franca, Veronica, sends 'Lettere 
 diverse' to Montaigne, 106 
 
 GiRONDE, lighthouse at mouth 
 reconstructed by Montaigne, 
 115. 
 Goethe, Montjugne and, 229. 
 Gouchet, Nicholas, tutor to Mon- 
 taigne, 10. 
 Gournay, Marie Le Jars de — 
 her adages, 131. 
 her appearance, 125-6. 
 birth and girlhood, 126. 
 character, 127, 129, 136, 139- 
 
 140. 
 a critic of style, 132. 
 self-education, 127. 
 effect of ' Essays ' on, 128. 
 fiUe d'aliiance to Montaigne, 
 
 friendship with Montaigne, 
 
 125, 126, 128, 131, 133. 
 mental powers, 126-7. 
 her mother, 127, 128-30, 
 
 '35- 
 
 her novel, 130. 
 
 time spent with Montaigne, 
 129-30. 
 Later life — 
 
 her Academie, 139. 
 
 autobiography, 140. 
 
 her cat pensioned, 138. 
 
 correspondence with Lipsius, 
 »35- 
 
 correspondence with St. Fran- 
 cois de Sales, 141. 
 
 her death (1645), 141- 
 
 her epigrams, 139. 
 
 the 'Essays' edited by, 133- 
 '35- 
 
 Gournay, Marie Le Jars de, contd.— 
 Eulogium in 'Essays,' 132-5. 
 Jesuits defended by, 139. 
 her page, 136, 138. 
 her pamphlets and treatises, 
 
 137. 
 at Pans, 135-°- 
 proposed edition of Ronsard, 
 
 139- 
 ridiculed, 137-4°- 
 Richelieu and, 135, 138. 
 visits Montaigne's widow, 
 
 134. 
 on women's rights, 137. 
 writings on French language : 
 her reforms really revivals, 
 137. 
 Grammont, death of, 103. 
 
 Mme. de. Essay on Educa- 
 tion dedicated to, 225. 
 
 Gregory xiii., Pope, his audience 
 
 to Montaigne, 109. 
 Guerente, Guillaume, Montaigne's 
 
 tutor, 10. 
 Guienne, College de, 8, 115. 
 
 Court of, 115. 
 
 Guise, Francois, Due de, 12. 
 
 Henri, Due de, 96, 97, 118, 
 
 121. 
 
 Henri hi., 96, 103, 113-14-16, 
 
 120, 121. 
 Hotman, seen by Montaigne on 
 
 travels, 103. 
 
 James i., Marie de Goumay's 
 autobiography sent to, 140. 
 
 La Bo£tie — 
 
 his appearance, 14, 125. 
 
 appointments and public ser- 
 vices, 19, 20. 
 
 books bequeathed to Mon- 
 taigne, 44. 
 
 character and mental powers, 
 14, 19. 
 
 compared with Montaigne, 
 14-15. 
 
 defends Ronsard, 20. 
 
INDEX 
 
 267 
 
 La Boetie, contd. — 
 
 his friendships, 20. 
 friendship with Montaigne, 
 
 12,32-3,51,165-8,203. 
 inscription in Montaigne's 
 
 tower to, 55. 
 marriage, 19. 
 his illness and death at 
 
 Germignan, 22-32. 
 sends for M. de Beauregard, 
 
 28. 
 studies under Du Bourg at 
 
 Orleans, 19. 
 his will, 26. 
 
 works, 16, 39-40, 76, 89, 103. 
 See also Montaigne, Michel 
 de — friends. 
 
 Madame de, 19, 23, 26, 3 1, 35. 
 
 Lansac, Councillor, friend of Mon- 
 taigne, 76. 
 Laval, Charlotte, her clock, 20. 
 Lestonnac, Madame de, sister to 
 Michel de Montaigne, Protes- 
 tant, 4. 
 
 her knowledge of Greek, 8. 
 
 L'Hopital, Chancellor, Montaigne's 
 relations with, 75-97. 
 
 his grandson De Thou, 116. 
 
 Ligue, the, 117-18-20. 
 
 Lipsius, Justin, and Marie de 
 
 Gournay, 135-41. 
 Lopez, Mademoiselle de, mother 
 of Michel de Montaigne, 3. 
 
 Ma Semblance, name given by 
 La Boetie to his wife, 19. 
 
 Mary, Queen of Scots, her execu- 
 tion mentioned by Montaigne, 
 
 Matignon, governor of Guienne 
 and mayor of Bordeaux, 103, 
 1 1 6- 1 7-1 8. 
 
 Mattecoulon, Bertrand, Sieur de, 
 younger brother of Montaigne, 
 90, 102, 113. 
 
 Medici, Catherine de', orders Mon- 
 taigne's release, 120. 
 
 Mesme, Henri de, friend of Mon- 
 taigne, 76. 
 
 Mesme, Madame de, friend of 
 
 Montaigne, 76. 
 Moliere, possibly inspired by jokes 
 played on Marie de Gournay, 
 140. 
 Mont-de-Marsan, seized by Henri 
 
 of Navarre, 116. 
 Montaigne, Chateau of — 
 
 atmosphere of religious tolera- 
 tion at, 4. 
 improved by Pierre d'Ayquem, 
 
 4, 73- 
 Marie de Gournay's visit to, 
 
 .134- 
 Michel de Montaigne educated 
 at, 4. 
 ' Montaigne,' Dowden's, referred 
 
 to, 15. 
 Montaigne, Lenor de, 40, 44, 45, 
 141. 
 
 Madame de — 
 
 character, 39-40. 
 
 as doctor, 38. 
 
 friendship with Marie de 
 
 Gournay, 134. 
 management of estate left to, 
 
 72; 
 
 marriage, 33. 
 
 Michel de — 
 
 appearance and dress, 13, 39, 
 
 45) I02- 
 awkwardness, 65. 
 bibliographies, 262. 
 his books, 54, 56-63. 
 Boyhood — 
 
 birth (1533), 3. 
 
 disposition and health in, 9. 
 
 early education and tutors, 
 6-8-9-10. 
 
 home atmosphere, 4. 
 
 love of Ovid, 8. 
 
 school — the College de 
 Guienne, 8. 
 
 school : left at thirteen, 9. 
 
 student at Toulouse, 10. 
 his brothers. See Beauregard, 
 
 Thomas de; Mattecoulon, 
 
 Bertrand, Sieur de, 
 buried at Feuillants, 259. 
 
268 MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE 
 
 Montaigne, Michel de, contd. — 
 capture by robbers, 74.-120. 
 his cat, 63. 
 Catherine de Medici and, 
 
 120-1. 
 central ideas, 249-51. 
 Character — 
 
 affection for father, 6, 73. 
 
 his artist side, go. 
 
 at twenty-four, 13-14.. 
 
 attitude to beauty, 14. 
 
 avoidance of worry, 66, 
 78-9. 
 
 personal charm, 74, 77. 
 
 compared with La Boetie, 
 
 I4-IS-. 
 cosmopolitanism, 170. 
 curiosity, 12. 
 De Thou's impressions of, 
 
 116. 
 enjoyment of his limita- 
 tions, 67. 
 enmity to change, 93-6 ; 
 
 toconventionaUty,40, 87 ; 
 
 to pedantry, 217. 
 frankness, 178. 
 hatred of cruelty, 81. 
 indifference to events of his 
 
 day, 12. 
 indolence, 51, 52, 63. 
 justice, 48. 
 La Boltie's effect on, 13, 
 
 168, 203. 
 lack of political conviction, 
 
 93- 
 
 love of animals, 64. 
 
 a man of impressions, 80. 
 
 moderation, 181-6. 
 
 an opportunist, 52. 
 
 pessimist, 142. 
 
 selfishness, 77, 87. 
 
 unathletic, 64-5. 
 
 worldly prudence, 1 1, 
 
 yielding to natural inclina- 
 tions, 43, 67, 81. 
 children of, 41. 
 his comparison of Ariosto and 
 
 Virgil, 57. 
 his conversation, 67-71. 
 
 Montaigne, Michel de, contd. — 
 his creed, 241-9. 
 his daily life, 68-74. 
 death (1592), 133, 141. 
 death, four accounts of, 144- 
 
 145. 
 dedications of La Beetle's 
 
 works, 32, 39, 40, 76. 
 descent and parentage, 3, 1 69- 
 
 170. 
 his diary, 39. 
 his dilemma between Navarre 
 
 and Matignon, 1 16-17. 
 diplomatic achievements and 
 
 their reward, 97. 
 Essays (1571-1588) — 
 
 autobiographical value of, 
 178. 
 
 ' Apologie de Raymond 
 Sebond,' 90-1. 
 
 copy presented to Richelieu, 
 
 dates of editions, 98-9, 
 
 119-20, 133-s, 259-60. 
 eulogium of Marie de 
 
 Gourriay, 132-5, and 
 
 note, 
 expurgated by Maestro del 
 
 Sacro Palazzo et Vatican, 
 
 110. 
 edited after Montaigne's 
 
 death by Marie de Gour- 
 
 nay, 133-5. 
 looseness in form deliberate, 
 
 149. 
 philosophical value of, 97. 
 Third Book, special interest 
 
 of, 98. 
 translations of, 261. 
 why vsTitten, 97, 119. 
 For Subjects, see end of 
 
 Index, 
 estimate of Rabelais, 57. 
 experience of military life, 99. 
 as father, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44. 
 his father (see Ayquem, Pierre 
 
 his favourite authors, 45, 58-9, 
 
 222. 
 
INDEX 
 
 269 
 
 Montaigne, Michel de, contd. — 
 friends. 5'^^ Bacon, Anthony; 
 Brach, Pierre de ; Charron, 
 Pierre ; Gournay, Marie 
 de ; La Boetie ; L'Hopital, 
 Michel de ; Lansac; Mesme, 
 Henri de ; Navarre, Henri 
 de ; Palmier, Mile. de. 
 gentleman of the bedchamber, 
 
 96>.97- 
 guardian of brother, 90. 
 health, 13, 98, 99, iii, 113, 
 
 120. 
 his home at Bordeaux, 10. 
 as husband, 33-40, 44-5. 
 his idea of perfect state, 198. 
 imprisonment in Bastille, 120. 
 and La Boetie — 
 
 their friendship, 12-13, ^^- 
 34, 165-69, 203. 
 
 superintends printing of 
 works by La Boetie, 89. 
 
 See also La Boetie. 
 Letters, 19, 21, 40, 76, 169. 
 literary position, 1 74-6. 
 love of ancient authors, 60-2. 
 love for Paris, 89. 
 magistrate of Perigueux, 11. 
 magistracy resigned, 88. 
 his manners, 52, 82. 
 his marriage, 14, 33, 35. 
 as master, 48, 49, 50. 
 mayor of Bordeaux, 113. 
 mayoralty at Bordeaux (1581- 
 
 15^5), 114-18- 
 
 memory, 68. 
 
 mission to Parlement of Bor- 
 deaux, 96. 
 
 monographs on, 261-2. 
 
 his mother, alluded to, 4-5. 
 
 musical instruments, 53. 
 
 his order of St. Michael, 96. 
 
 in Paris (1588), 120. 
 
 pictures, 52-3. 
 
 plagiarism, 62. 
 
 present at opening of Etats de 
 Blois, 121. 
 
 provision for brother and 
 sisters, 90. 
 
 Montaigne, Michel de, contd. — 
 and the Reformation, 93. 
 his religion, 4, 11, 93,233-48, 
 
 240-9. 
 resignation of mayoralty, 118. 
 riding his favourite exercise, 
 
 64. 
 Rouen, at, 12. 
 scheme of education, 1 74, 1 8 3, 
 
 225-33- . 
 secret of his fascination, 252- 
 
 257. 
 public services, 54, 114, 118. 
 sister. See Lestonnac, Ma- 
 dame de. 
 tower, 51-63. 
 translation of Raymond 
 
 Sebond, go-i. 
 Ira'veh — 
 
 Andelot visited at Plom- 
 bieres, 103. 
 
 Augsburg, 104. 
 
 begun June 1580, 101-2. 
 
 companions on, 102. 
 
 his dress, 102. 
 
 Grammont's death, 103. 
 
 Hotman at Basel, 103. 
 
 Innsbruck, 105. 
 
 interests on, 105, 108. 
 
 Italy, 105. 
 
 Italian celebrities, 106. 
 
 Journal discovered, 260. 
 
 Loreto, 1 1 1 . 
 
 Lucca, 111-13. 
 
 Matignon's camp before La 
 Fere, 103. 
 
 observance of local customs, 
 104. 
 
 his requirements on, 103. 
 
 return, 113. 
 
 Rome, 1 06-1 1. 
 
 Tasso, 106. 
 
 Venice and Veronica Franca, 
 106. 
 visit to Picardy, 130. 
 his withdrawal from outer 
 
 world, 91. 
 Montpensier, Due de, sends Mon- 
 taigne on mission, 96. 
 
270 MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE 
 
 Momay, Du Plessis, writes to Mon- 
 taigne by order of Henri of 
 Navarre, 116. 
 
 Muret, Marc Antoine, tutor to 
 Montaigne, 10. 
 
 Navarre, Henri de — \ 
 
 friendship with Montaighe, 
 
 92, 122-3. 
 king of France, 121. 
 magnetism of, 75. 
 Montaigne negotiates for, 97, 
 
 visit to chateau of Mon- 
 taigne, 116. 
 
 Margaret de — 
 
 expelled from Paris, 116. 
 her memoirs, 176. 
 
 Paillon, Madame, Marie de 
 
 Goumay's cat, 138. 
 Palmier, Madame de, letter from 
 
 Montaigne to, 76. 
 Paris, love of, 89. 
 Pascal, Montaigne and, 177, 236, 
 
 238, 244.-6. 
 Pasquier, Etienne — 
 
 account of Montaigne's death, 
 
 at Blois with Montaigne, 121. 
 fellow-student with Mon- 
 taigne, 10. 
 Perigueux, Court of, merged in 
 Parlement of Bordeaux, 11. 
 
 Rabelais, 164, 173, 175, 191, 
 
 205, 209, 228-9. 
 Racan and Marie de Gournay, 
 
 140-1. 
 Raymond, Florimond de, account 
 
 of Montaigne's death, 14+. 
 R^aux, Historiettes de Tallemant 
 
 de, 138. 
 Reuchlin, reference, 173. 
 Richelieu — 
 
 copy of ' Essays ' presented to, 
 
 135- 
 pensions given to Marie de 
 Gournay by, 138. 
 Ronsard — 
 
 as a Hedonist, 174. 
 proposed edition of, 139. 
 and La Boetie, 20. 
 Rousseau compared with Mon- 
 taigne, 179, 196-7-8, 229, 253. 
 
 Saint-Evremond, his play on 
 Marie Le Jars de Gournay, 137. 
 
 SchifF, Mario, 135, note. 
 
 S^bond, Raymond, account of, 90. 
 
 Shakespeare, 196, 200-2, 205, 214- 
 216. 
 
 Tasso visited in prison by Mon- 
 taigne, 106. 
 Thou, De — 
 
 his impression of Montaigne, 
 
 116. 
 at Blois with Montaigne, 121. 
 
 THE ESSAYS 
 Subjects Quoted 
 
 Anger, 48. 
 
 Ayquem, Pierre d', 5-6, 64-5, 
 73- 
 
 Book-learning, 218-22, 232-3. 
 Books, 58-63. 1 
 
 Change, 193-6. 
 Children, 41. 
 
 Compatriots, 170. 
 
 Conduct of Life, 171-2, 183-5, 
 
 234-5, 246, 249-So- 
 Conversation, 85-7. 
 Cruelty, gi. 
 Custom, 152, 193. 
 
 Death, 142-4, 238-9. 
 Doctors, 143. 
 
INDEX 
 
 271 
 
 Education, 43, 225-33. 
 
 Faiths, 24.1. 
 Frankness, 158, 177-9. 
 Friendship, 16-18, 22, 34, 166-7, 
 
 203. 
 Friendship to a man's self, 77-8, 
 
 249. 
 Future life, 169, 240. 
 
 Governesses, 4.3-4. 
 
 Himself, 8-9, 13, 33, 41,61-75, 
 78-83, 89, 93, 147-8, 149-53, 
 158, 163, 170, 171-2, 178-80, 
 187, 234-7. 
 
 His Book, 98, 149, 176. 
 
 History, 232. 
 
 Household management, 50. 
 
 Intercourse, 223. 
 
 Montaigne, Michel de— 
 absence of mind, 68. 
 hardship, 66. 
 kindliness, 37. 
 knowledge, 209-16, 223-5, 
 
 232. 
 The Lord's Prayer, 247. 
 manners, 50. 
 
 marriage, 35-6-7, 47, 203. 
 on medicines, 38, 77. 
 miracles, 193-5. 
 moderation, 184-5, 187-8. 
 
 Montaigne, Michel de, contd. — 
 modern writers, 157. 
 money, 49-50, 66. 
 
 Nature, 170, 191-215. 
 Navarre, Henri de, 92. 
 
 Philosophy, 213. 
 Poetasters, 57. 
 Prayer, 247. 
 Privacy, 51. 
 
 Quotations, 159. 
 
 Relationships, 202. 
 Repentance, 236-7. 
 Rome, 106-7. 
 
 School of Life, 223-7. 
 
 Self-study, 176-8. 
 
 Soul and Body, 205-8. 
 
 Style, 153-7. 
 
 Survival of the Dead, 6, 1 69. 
 
 Transcendent humours, 171- 
 
 172. 
 Travel, loo-i. 
 Truth, 237. 
 of portraiture, 151. 
 
 Widows, 77. 
 
 Wisdom, 232. 
 
 Women, 36-8, 46-7, 203-4. 
 
 World, the, 171-2. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press