BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF 1S91 Adi.74.f...3. ,Jl>f.f./Jf'il Jnlversity Library PQ 1643.L91 Michel de Montaigne: 3 1924 027 968 480 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027968480 MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE. aonDon: C. J. CLAY and SONS, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE, AVE MARIA LANE. ffilaaaoto: 263, ARGYLE STREET. Htmie: F. A. BROCKHAUS. i^tilJ lot*: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. ISombas: E. SEYMOUR HALE. MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE A BIOGRAPHICAL STUDY BY M. E. LOWNDES. CAMBRIDGE : AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 1898 [AU Rights reserved.^ A.I 177^3 CambrtBge : PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. To E. S. " Je sfais que I'amitie a les bras assez longs pour se tenir et se joindre d'un coing de monde a I'aultre." PREFACE. THE Essays are, and must remain, the chief source of our knowledge about their author. They are a source, however, whose very wealth of detail renders it not wholly superfluous to pick out and reproduce the more essential elements. And, now, the very number and variety of the reproductions that have been based upon that full original, make it necessary to compare with it the second authentic, though more meagre, portrait given in the external evidence of his life and actions. Above all, it is necessary to restore, as scrupu- lously as may be, the original accessories of time and place. Only by viewing the Essayist in the light of his age, can we recover, without distorting, his peculiar and significant features. There is no single fund of external information about Montaigne. But there is now, thanks chiefly to the untiring labours of an enthusiast, M. le docteur Payen, an accumulation of tiny facts and documents of slight significance that makes up a fair sum-total. M. Payen gave his discoveries to the world — or rather to his friends — in the form of pamphlets, printed in small number and already rare. Much of their contents has viii PREFACE. passed into more accessible places ; — the valuable Notice Bibliographique is prefixed to the edition of the Essays in the Pantheon Litt^raire : the several letters then first made public may now be read, in company with the re- mainder of Montaigne's unquestionably authentic letters, in MM. Courbet et Royer's edition of the Essays of 1595. The most important of all these Documents InMits is Nmnber 3, 1855, reproducing the entries by Montaigne in a copy of Beuther's Ephemerides, and giving a few fixed points amid so much that must remain conjecture. Connected also with the name of M. Payen are the several papers of his friends, addressed to him or elicited by his inquiries : — Montaigne chez lui, by MM. Galy et Lapeyre (i 861), giving the results of the first careful examination of the inscriptions in the Library: the Leqons InMites (1844) utilizing the Bordeaux annotated copy of the Essays, by M. Gustave Brunet : the Re- cherches of M. Dezeimeris, Sur I'Auteur des Epitaphes de Montaigne (1861), and Sur la Recension du Texte Posthume des Essais de Montaigne (1866), the first expending great ingenuity upon a point rather of local curiosity than real importance, the second a most valuable contribution to the history of the Essays. And M. Payen has a final claim upon the gratitude of students in his rich collection of works and docu- ments relating to the Essayist, now incorporated, as a separate _/o«c/j — the Collection Payen — in the Bibliotheque Nationale. In the matter of ' finds ' about Montaigne, the chief honour rests, perhaps, not with M. Payen but with PREFACE. IX M. Malvezin, who published in his Michel de Montaigne, Son Origine, Sa Famille {iZy i)), documents that finally settle the vexed question of the Essayist's claim to noble birth — nothing, probably, will settle that of how far the Essayist himself pretended to it. Whether with Montaigne directly in view or no, the activity of antiquarian and documentary research has been so great in Bordeaux — the town with which he was mainly connected — that it is reasonable to assume that little more will come to light. TBat research has been of service, even where it has not touched directly upon Montaigne, in helping to restore the closer scenes amid which his life was passed, — notably by the several Chroniques du Parlement and other publications of the Sociiti des Bibliophiles de Guyenne, and by numerous contemporary letters and documents published in the Archives Historiques de la Gironde. And the paucity, when all is said and done, of our information about the Essayist's outer hfe, is in some measure compensated by the wealth of the sources for a general acquaintance with his times. It is no small help, in estimating the reflection of events in the Essays, to have for purposes of comparison their reflection in the narratives of the rough but loyal Monluc, of the turbulent reformer d'Aubign^ and of almost all kinds and conditions of men down to the sober, if uncritical, De Thou and Pasquier. The very absence of any single and adequate ex- ternal source for our knowledge of Montaigne, the X PREFACE. fragmentary nature of the evidence — lending to the task of repiecing it something of the fascination of a puzzle — may easily lead one to lay too much stress upon his external career. His biographer M. Griin has been reproached, not without justice, for writing La Vie Publique of a man who was essentially a private person. The interest of determining his points of contact with outside events is, nevertheless, great, — not because of any importance in his own rdle, but because of the influence of events upon him and upon the Essays. In trying to recover these points of contact, I have been largely guided by the above-named biography of M. Griin {La Vie Publique de Montaigne, 1855) and by the more recent work of M. Bonnefon (Montaigne, V Homme et I'CEuvre, 1893'). The extent of these and other debts is indicated in the notes. Two works only call for special mention here, since they have been useful to me rather for the insight they afford into the general tendencies of the times than for any direct bearing upon the subject, of a kind that can be acknow- ledged in a note. These are the Essai sur Francois Hotman (1849), by M. Dareste, and Les Tliiories sur le Pouvoir Royal en France pendant les Guerres de Religion (1892), by M. Georges Weill. The latter especially, with its masterly analysis of the current political ideas, renders the political attitude of Montaigne at once simple and intelligible. In its first intention, this present study was not a 1 Republished this year (1898), with additional chapters upon La Boetie, Charron, and Mile de Gournay, under the title Montaigne, et Ses Amis. PREFACE. XI biography, but a general ' appreciation ' of the Essayist. But the large number and variety of such appreciations convinced me of the futility, now, of any fresh one, unless presented in and through the data upon which it is grounded. Their variety is indeed so great — proof, it may be, of the success with which, in depict- ing himself, Montaigne epitomized human nature — as to form a special episode in the tale of the diversity of human judgement. I am myself indebted to none of them so much as to that of Sainte-Beuve (Port- Royal, Bk. III., chs. II. III.), — not, at any rate not consciously, for conclusions, but for all that stimulating of mental activity which is the highest function of criti- cism. In one respect, at least, the stimulus has been that of opposition. For Sainte-Beuve, sympathetic as is his criticism, was led — I think, by looking at the Essay- ist in the light of a different age — to accentuate out of all recognition his distinctive features. He interpreted the " franchise, simplesse et nalvet6 " of Montaigne as "art et finesse," and saw in him not merely — what he certainly was — one of nature's sceptics, but a sceptic by deliberate choice and parti pris. Later writers, reacting against that undue accentuating of his scep- ticism, tend on the other hand, so it seems to me, to lose sight of the underlying reality, with its significance and import. A word, finally, as to editions of the Essays. The greatest of services to our knowledge of Montaigne has been rendered by MM. Dezeimeris et Barckhausen in XU PREFACE. their reprint of the Essays of 1580 (with variants of 1582 and 1587). With this, and the edition by MM. Motheau et Jouaust of the Essays of 1588 and that by MM. Courbet et Royer of the Essays of 1595, the reader has the authentic text of the Essays in their three main stages of growth. For purposes of reference, I have used these more critical editions (that of MM. Motheau et Jouaust in its smaller 7 vol. form), wherever it has been of interest to distinguish between the stages of the Essayist's thought. In general, and wherever it is not otherwise specified, 1 have used the so-called Mition variorum of M. Louandre, — a convenient text, as likely, I imagine, as any other, to be in the hands of the reader. As regards the translation of passages, I have not scrupled to borrow an occasional word or turn of phrase from Florio, and should have made a freer use of him had he himself not made so free with the author he professedly translates. SwABiNG, Munich, April, i8g8. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGES Introductory . ... . i-ir CHAPTER II. Birth and Early Training. The Essay on Education . 16-45 CHAPTER III. Legal Studies. Views on Jurisprudence . . . 46-59 CHAPTER IV. Montaigne as Magistrate . .... 60-77 CHAPTER V. Acquaintance with Court Life. Friendship with La Boetie 78-94 CHAPTER VI. Years (1563-1571) from La Boetie's death to retirement . 95-111 xiv CONTENTS. CHAPTER VII. PAGES Montaigne in retirement. The Library . . . . 112-133 CHAPTER VIII. The Essays of 1580 I34-IS4 CHAPTER IX. Publication of the Essays. Self-portraiture. Journey to Italy 155-174 CHAPTER X. Mayor of Bordeaux. The Political Situation. Relations with Henry of Navarre 175-188 Chapter xi. Remaining years. Essays of 1588 .... 189-209 CHAPTER XII. Montaigne's death. £'wayjof 1595. Gamaches. Charron. Descartes. Pascal. Conclusion .... 210-231 Notes 233-286 CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. "7^ loge chez moi dans une tour." The Essays of Montaigne, though they were written in an age prolific in personal narrative, are distinguished from all earlier and contemporary- literature by their personal and familiar intimacy./ The writers of Merhoirs found their detail justified 5 by the importance of the events they witnessed or played a part in ; for the Essayist, the importance of events lay in their relation to himself, — a relation that sufficed to dignify the most trivial detail. He lapses even, sometimes, into a record of preferences lo and habits so insignificant as to rouse the impatient question, " Que diable a-t-on a faire de savoir ce qu'il aime ?" But, broadly, it must be said of him that he touched, for the first time, the secret of the final — the human — interest in things. The period in which 15 he lived is one of special interest to the historian ; transmuted into human character, reflected in the mind of a disengaged spectator, it has an interest L. M. I 2 MONTAIGNE. profounder and more universal. If his occasional old-age garrulity partly excuses the irritation of superficial critics, his real self-portrayal well accounts for his speedy popularity and sustained fame. Of all 5 who have followed in the line of self-analysis, none have left so genial and warm an image as this first Essayist, venturing upon a "strange and extravagant design," deliberately seeking to paint himself "au vif," in "the only book of its kind in the world." 10 None perhaps has had so genial and warm a person- ality to portray, nor thoughts to record, so unwarped by prejudice, so full of wholesome common-sense and human wisdom. Montaigne has given us besides, in the description IS of his tower-library, the pleasantest of settings to that candid image of himself The tower served him as retreat and sanctum. Thither he withdrew from private as from public care. " C'est la," he says, " mon siege : j'essaye a m'en rendre la domination 20 pure, et a soustraire ce seul coing k la communaute et conjugate, et filiale, et civile...." Yet it was not so remote but that he could overlook his household : — " Je suis sur I'entree, et veois soubs moy mon jardin, ma basse-court, ma court, et dans la pluspart des 25 membres de ma maison." The library, to which the rest was mere appendage, was on the third floor. The first floor contained his chapel, the second, an apartment (une chambre et sa suitte), where he slept when he wished to be alone ; up above, there was a 30 lumber room (une grande garderobbe). Leading out of the library was "a tidy little room (un cabinet assez poly), admitting of a fire in winter, and very INTRODUCTORY. 3 pleasantly windowed." For the library itself, "The form of it," he tells us, " is round, with only so much straight as is needed for my table and my chair ; and presents to my view, as it curves, all my books at once. It has three outlooks with full and free 5 prospect, and is sixteen feet in diameter." There, then, in facility and ease, he could pursue the third of his chosen commerces — " La je feuillette k cette heure un livre, k cette heure un autre, sans ordre et sans desseing, a pieces descousues. Tantost 10 je resve ; tantost j'enregistre et dicte, en me pro- menant, mes songes que voicy..." As the scene of this inditing of his reveries, as the birthplace of the Essays, the tower has come to be inevitably associated with Montaigne. It saw the slow engendering and 15 gradual growth, not in travail indeed and strenuous effort, but with a light heart and unlaborious pen, of those offspring of his mind, — more his own than the infants whose premature death he bore " sinon sans regret, au moins sans fascherie," or the one 20 surviving daughter whose education he resigned to the mysterious ways of women. The connection, however inseparable, might seem, in its more obvious aspect, a very freak of fortuitous association. Certainly it was no spirit of a recluse 25 that drove Montaigne, philosopher of life as he vaunted himself, to make his retreat within a tower ; nor was it a scholar's passion that made a library his chosen home. He retired at thirty-nine, "long wearied with the servitude of courts and public 30 functions, to take refuge wholly " — so the inscription runs — "within the arms of the learned maidens"; but 4 MONTAIGNE. the reference to the muses must not mislead us. " I, who have no other scope than to live and be merry," he says of himself in his old age ; and, though he retired into a library and had about him all the 5 apparatus befitting a learned leisure, — although the fruit of this retirement was one of the great books of the world, — he was in no sense a scholar ; nor was he in the modern sense, with the modern implication of a striving after style, after perfection of expres- lo sion and independent elegance of language, a writer or man of letters. " Mon art et mon industrie ont este employez a me faire valoir moy mesme ; mes estudes, a m'apprendre a faire, non pas a escrire. J'ay mis tous mes efforts a former ma vie ; voyla 15 mon mestier et mon ouvrage ; je suis moins faiseur de livres, que de nulle aultre besongne..,." And the standard conception of a tower, suggesting as it does austerity, seclusion, or restraint, is incongruous enough with the genial spirit of Montaigne, — genial, "fit for 20 communication," and free, with a touch even of the vagabond. Yet, dismissing from our minds all standard and traditional notion, we shall find his actual tower, as he describes it, to have a propriety of association 25 more than accidental. Slightly difficult of access, it served to intercept the claims and intrusions of the outer world, but it admitted, with its wide prospect over homestead and adjacent country, all the pleasant sights and sounds, all the music and warmth of life. 30 And it stands thus as symbol for the inmate, who held himself just so far aloof, — " resigning all foreign solicitude and trouble and mortally shunning all INTRODUCTORY. S manner of servitude and obligation" — beyond the turmoil of the world, at a point of vantage for its survey. This relative aloofness, this detachrrient, is the distinguishing and significant feature in Montaigne. 5 It found a practical expression in his premature retirement, and in his adhesion to Pyrrhonism a philosophic basis. To express it, he adopted as his personal device a balance, thereby indicating that ■•■y^'' he weighed all things and attached himself to none. 10' • From first to last it permeates the Essays and gives a unity of colour to the most varied topics, — the diversity of subject-matter becoming but the changing field for its display. In his continual self-portraiture, it is this upon which he most insists, recording it now 15 as freedom from prejudice, now using it as a guise of irresponsibility to cover the audacity of his "human fantasies." "Je propose les fantasies humaines, et miennes, simplement comme humaines fantasies, et separeement considerees : non comme arrestees et 20 reglees par I'ordinance celeste, incapable de doubte et d'altercation ; matiere d'opinion, non matiere de foy...." Thus sitting loose as well from his own appre- hension of things as from received notions and 25 precepts of authority, Montaigne is the supreme type of a whole race of original but unconstructive minds. So, too, he struck, in the essay, upon the form of literary expression most appropriate to such free and often inconsequent thinkers ; and, as first essayist, 30 he has his very proper and distinctive place in the history of literature. 6 MONTAIGNE. But in the essayist generally, this detachment is the unconscious condition or substratum to some quaintness or gaiety of humour that rises to the surface and gives the individual tone, rather than, as S in Montaigne, the dominant quality, clearly recog- nised and consciously insisted on. Its natural effect, moreover, is to lift a writer quite aside from the main current of ideas and of events, and, though it may contribute to his absolute value and literary per- lo manence, wholly to disqualify for any place in his- torical continuity. Emancipating him from the pre- judices and passions of the moment, it saps at the same time his power of modifying them; and it isolates him also from the profounder influences of IS his age. Montaigne, on the contrary, has, precisely by virtue of his detachment, an historical significance which far outreaches any purely literary estimate. He was at once a factor in the current of events, and himself a product of deeper tendencies. Mental 20 balance, moral detachment, are with him fruits, native indeed to his own critical and independent spirit, but ripened and brought to a head by the conditions of the times. And qualities little apt, as they are, to mould thought or command action, they acquired, 25 from the timeliness of their expression, a virtue not properly inherent in them, — coming, at the close of a century spent in futile conflict and torn by every wind of controversy, with all the force of a reaction. Published eight years after the Saint Bartholomew, 30 during one of the brief interludes in a struggle where party spirit reached a perhaps unprecedented height, the Essays contributed without a doubt their quota INTRODUCTORY. 7 to the ultimate ascendency of the moderate and more liberal minority, and helped to prepare the way for the welcome at length accorded to Henry of Navarre. The more surely because unaggressively, because above all they lent themselves to the uses 5 of no party, but hit as roundly at innovation as at persecution, they would infuse a little of their easy and tolerant spirit into a bigoted and violent world. Nor was the movement of thought, upon whose 10 surface agitations the Essays acted as a modifying agent, whose deeper tendencies they embodied, a movement confined to France, but one which traversed in succession the civilised countries of Europe. It was the renascence — "the renascence, 15 with its powerful episode, the reformation " — which was stirring France throughout the whole sixteenth century. It reached her, at first, as a mere peaceful quickening of all literary activity — the direct result of intercourse with Italy, — soon, however, to take on 20 the more pronounced and acuter features of the episode. In Italy, as has been admirably said, " the revival of classical learning had occupied men's minds with the study of human character and the pursuit of 25 beauty. It had produced a temper which was irre- ligious without being anti-religious, which was curious, observant and critical without being con- structive." And this earlier temper was one which admitted of the co-existence of every contradiction, 30 of the rational deduction ex hypotJiesi of consequences the most opposed to the opinions still held as matters 8 MONTAIGNE. of faith, — which made it possible for a discussion on the mortality of the soul to be the pastime of a pope. But this preoccupation, that overlooked, rather than ignored, inherent contradiction, could not be of long S endurance. The reformation forced out all the latent oppositions, and, attaching them at once to the deeper needs of humanity and to the temporal interests of individuals, effectively dissipated, in every country where it took any hold, the earlier and lighter mood. lo The old authorities, the old routine, could no longer be followed with that irreflective adhesion which leaves, after all, so large a licence to the reasoning faculty. La Boetie might write his Servitude Volon- taire as a mere speculative thesis, remaining the 15 while at heart an honest royalist, but there were not wanting revolutionary spirits to point its moral and drive home its application. The great central conflict diffused its acrimony and its spirit of partisanship over every divergence of opinion, and recruited into 20 its ranks the most varied combatants. The theo- logians took cognizance of the purely philosophic heresies of Ramus ; the very quarrels of philologists came to be identified with the differences of religious creed. Whether in France, with her clear-cut duality 25 of parties, or in Germany, with her more complicated interests and minuter subdivisions, the position — so offensive to the Essayist — was rigidly maintained " whichever you will, so long as you choose!' Montaigne, himself free from party-spirit, had for 30 his contemplation a world where contradiction was no longer latent, but forced into exaggerated and partial form. Unblinded either by fanaticism or by INTRODUCTORY. 9 love of novelty, he passes that world through his impartial balance, and leaves it in what seems a mere confusion, but is from his outlook the true and just perspective. The reformation falls back to its proper place as an episode merely, though an integral one, of 5 the renascence. All the differences of opinion, to which the new energy of the renascence had given rise, had come to be identified with the religious dissensions ; Montaigne exhibited these dissensions as themselves merely instances of a diversity far lo more extensive. Ranging at large over the whole field presented to his view, and following, without consequence or system, each casual whim and random provocation, he dwells upon no impressive or enticing novelty, nor does he pause to insist upon the old 15 familiar landmarks; but everywhere he notes only this same general aspect of diversity. The times had, apart from the points emphasized in active controversy, their special disposition to this aspect. The new acquaintance with antiquity, 20 whatever curiosity of exploration or eagerness of partisanship it might first arouse, had provided for the unimpassioned, unarrested mind a general view where diversity was the most salient feature. Bringing into simultaneous vision the whole successive range 25 of ancient speculation, it afforded a survey of bold distinctive concepts that stood out, their nice gra- dations and subordinate intergrowth lost in the temporal (perspective, in contrast often violent one with another. What we have now learned to re- 30 cognize as a continuous growth was presented there in all the fragmentary abruptness of a disconnected lO MONTAIGNE. series. So, too, the recent discovery of the new world had brought upon the mental horizon a mass of new experiences and novel customs, without recognized homogeneity and impossible to fit into the old routine 5 of imagery. It had besides a more directly negative and disconcerting influence. Enlarging the bounds of the known earth and altering its form, it upset one of those every-day conceptions which it takes more than proof to re-adjust. And not the familiar form, only, 10 of the earth, but its place in the universe, was being freshly called in question. Daily, in brief, the old notions, the old formulas, were proving inadequate to the influx of fresh knowledge and experience, while yet that influx brought with it no new co-ordinating 15 principle. The Essays reflect this special disposition of the times. They draw from ancients and from aborigines a mass of illustration which no longer produces its eifect ; they present as mooted points much that is 20 now received as scientific truth. But the argument cuts deeper than the enumeration of differences in- cidental to the point of view. With the genuine philosophic instinct which he possessed, for all his lack of system, Montaigne goes to the real, constant, 25 problem, and tracks diversity home to its final seat in human nature. The changing events of life had for him their chief interest as the theatre of man's in- constancy ; the variety, the irreconcilable confusion, as it would seem, of ancient philosophic notions 30 points him to the unreliability of human judgment. Starting in that much-debated Apology for Raymond Sebond — the lengthy backbone of the Essays — INTRODUCTORY. 1 1 Starting there from the presumption of mankind, he arrives at the same conclusion — 'Diversity tlie most constant quality' Diversity in judgement — for want of any stable principle. Lack of stable principle, of solid foundation, because the senses — to which must s be the ultimate appeal — are themselves fluctuating and unstable. So that he. finds himself at last on common ground with the ancient Sophists, with the Pyrrhon who came to stand sponsor to the new philosophic doubt. lo Much of Montaigne's argument in the Apology is indeed reiteration of what passed current with the Sophists, and he has even been styled a reviver of their sect. But his Pyrrhonism is far from a mere ex- traneous introduction. Finding that ancient humour 15 jump with his, and the old illustrations ready to hand in completion of his own, he adopted that former vehicle for the expression of a mood and a conclusion essentially his own and of his times. Suspense of judgement, philosophic doubt, was the proper outcome 20 of a period which, for all the positive germs it intro- duced to receive, development later, was in its most essential aspect a period of dissolution — a dissolution which, reducing to flexibility the congealed lines of routine and prejudice, prepared the way certainly 25 for a new order, but had in itself no reconstructive force. At this juncture of the history of thought, philo- sophic doubt was the summation, so to speak, of discredited opinions and futile tentatives. But more 30 than this, it was the preliminary to new and better- directed effort. It gave a definite point upon which 12 MONTAIGNE. the scattered energy should concentrate ; it set the problem which in a manner has been ever since the rallying point of thought, — the problem to find a criterion of certainty, to give a test for the validity S of knowledge. The answer given to this problem has divided the schools of philosophy ; it was in the attempt to answer it that modern philosophy had its rise. Even Bacon, when maintaining the adequacy, with aids, of the senses, had before his mind the lo " Sceptics and Academics " ; while chief among the elements of failure in his vast enterprise is his in- ability to reply to them with anything more trenchant than asseveration. Descartes, to whom the title 'Father of modern philosophy' more properly be- 15 longs, derived from the current ' Pyrrhonism ' that doubt which was to yield him the root of a new certainty and to be the point of departure for a new conquest of all knowledge. For Montaigne himself, the philosophic problem, 20 though on occasion he can amply recognize it, is a matter of slight concern. The epithets Sceptic, Pyrrhonist, so often given him, are terms far too pronounced for the writer of the Essays in his habitual mood. The Inconstancy of human action, the 25 Uncertainty of human knowledge, — these titles to two of the Essays give the keynote to the whole. Diversity tlie most constant quality, is Montaigne's conclusion of the whole matter of human life and thought. But this wide conclusion is for him only 30 the basis of indulgence in a temper which had its chief affinity to that earlier temper, no longer possible in its original irreflective naivete, — one "irreligious INTRODUCTORY. 1 3 without being anti-religious, curious, observant and critical without being constructive." Reasonably based and grounded, this temper might have no longer the full freshness of its earlier manifestation, but neither was it now to be lightly dissipated at a touch of 5 interest or passion. And if distant from the spring- tide of the renascence, far more widely was it re- moved from mere fin-de-siecle weariness. To its last declination, Montaigne found life "to be both prize- able and commodious," and his constant recognition 10 of vanity, though it served to confirm a natural in- disposition to action, yet reflected upon life no sense of vapidness. In his tower, withdrawn from active participation, he yet had life about him, warm and vibrating, in all 15 its fulness. As from without it reached him, shorn only of its importunities, so within, along the rounding walls, the ' seasoned life of man ' — for such essentially to Montaigne were the books of his chosen commerce — faced him at his table ; that ' life-blood of master 20 spirits ' rendered the more precious from the memory of La Boetie, the master-spirit who had bequeathed him most of them. In himself he has the nearer field for contemplation. His past experience, cleared in memory of every perturbation, yielded the spectacle 25 of that France under the sons of Catherine of Medicis, which is thrown into such harsh relief by the back- ground, drawn from his books, of ancient and heroic Rome. His personality, displayed as well in the daily menage as in larger relations, remained an 30 unfailing piece of life as he liked it best, of life seen as human nature. 14 MONTAIGNE. And thus he, himself, is his most frequently- recurring theme. So much so, that among the reasonable grounds he manufactures for his writing is the desire to leave his friends and relatives a 5 picture of himself " Je I'ay vou6 " (his book) " £l la commodity particuliere de mes parents et amis : a ce que m'ayants perdu. . ., ils y puissent retrouver quelques traicts de mes conditions et humeurs, et que par ce moyen ils nourissent plus entiere et plus vifve la lo cognoissance qu'ils ont eue de moy c'est moy que je peinds." Mingled more largely with other matter than this warning would give his reader to expect, it is yet a complete and consistent picture that Montaigne, IS master of introspection, has given of himself, — of his whims and foibles partly, but, — more insisted on,— his real defects and qualities. Neither permitting his passions to influence his judgement, nor his judge- ment to react upon his passions, he has a clearness of 20 discriminating vision that the modern psychologist may well admire. He reports, as he says, himself, — "his essence and his cogitations, not his actions '' ; and it has been complained of him that with all his talk he gives 25 little definite information, and that little unreliable. Yet the Essays are not wholly without autobio- graphical content, and what there is of independent evidence goes to confirm, if it fail to complete, his own fragmentary statements. It serves at least to 30 substantiate the general picture, with its salient features ; the happy childhood, the unique education under the best father that ever was, the prime and INTRODUCTORY. 1 5 age of life passed in deliberate retirement and re- flective leisure, — with an intermediate youth upon whose vague and faintly tinted canvass is painted one momentous incident, the 'perfect friendship' with La Boetie. S CHAPTER II. BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING. THE ESSAY ON EDUCATION. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in 1533 the year of the opening of the College de Guyenne ; he died in 1592, some eighteen months before the reduction of Paris by Henry IV. The first event 5 purely local as its interest might appear, was a sign which marked the full tide of the literary renascence in France : the second was the iinal peaceful close, "sans sac et sans effusion de sang," to over thirty years of civil and religious war. 10 Francis the First's patronage of learning left its impress upon France by the encouragement it gave at once to education and to printing. The ' Royal Press ' and the ' College Royal de France ' remain as witness, but, though the central and most permanent, 15 they were by no means the only results of that double direction of activity. Printing-presses were, on the one hand, multiplied throughout the kingdom, while, on the other, the reform and increase of the more elementary schools came as an essential complement BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING. 1/ to the new advanced teaching from the royal chairs. In Paris it was a question of reforming old foun- dations ; in the provinces the foundations were for the most part to be createra. And the creation of such a school, elementary, yet invested to the very 5 teaching of the horn-book with a new solemnity and fervour, was at Bordeaux — the town most closely associated with the Eyquems of Montaigne — the central feature of the literary revival. It seems probable that the College de Guyenne 10 was first projected on the occasion of the visit of Francis I. to Bordeaux in 1530 — that same year in which the College de France was founded — ; but whether the scheme originated with the town, or with those advisers of the king whose constapr aim was to 15 give substantial shape to his uncertain zeal, it was in any case warmly taken up and made their own by the Bordelais. ' » ■ Bordeaux was, then as now, a town of no small importance. Then, as now, owing its prosperity to 20 commerce, it boasted an affluent and rising bourgeoisie. Its prosperity — dating from the wise enactments of Louis XI. — had already lasted long enough to have set many families beyond the need for continued effort ; already the sons and g^andsons of successful 25 merchants were overlaying thei^ hurnbler' origin with the names and arms of properties purchased from an impoverished nobility^ "In a community where this element preponderated so largely, there was at once leisure and vigour to welcome the new learning ; and 30 it was, as a fact, precisely among the middle class — relieved from the cares of money-getting and without L. M. - "2 1 8 MONTAIGNE. the tradition of arms which conduced to keep the ' haute noblesse ' ilhterate, — that the renascence took most root in France. With the genuine interest of the few in learning, co-operated more sordid motives. 5 A better education facihtated the entrance to the magistracy and to public offices, which formed a bridge over to the envied rank of the 'petite noblesse.' And at Bordeaux there came into play perhaps a certain municipal ambition, — the desire to make the 10 town, of first order as a commercial centre, a centre also of culture, worthy to rank with her near rivals Toulouse and Poitiers. The University, of ancient foundation, had been wholly unable to compete with that of Toulouse, and its two faculties, both medical 15 and legal, were almost deserted. Nor did an in- efficient and neglected Grammar school afford any better provision for the more elementary education of the youth of Bordeaux. Parents, resolute to obtain for their children a better teaching, had begun to 20 send them to Paris, at great expense, and to the detriment, it was found, of their health, so far from home surveillance. The new school thus answered to a conscious want, — a want which it was very amply to satisfy. 25 The jurade — an elective body answering broadly to our town-councils — who were entrusted with the execution of the scheme, displayed an admirable zeal. The buildings of the old Grammar school were adapted and enlarged, funds were guaranteed, a 30 principal and staff of teachers found; and in 1533 the college courses opened. A year later the first principal, whose unaccommodating temper was already BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING. 19 disorganising the staff, was dismissed with signal promptitude and replaced by the man who was to approve himself at Bordeaux "the greatest principal," and to make the College de Guyenne "the best school," in all France. 5 Andre de Gouv6a had already, as principal of the Paris college of Ste. Barbe, a certain reputation as a schoolmaster ; he was known too in the republic of contemporary learning. And while retaining the pick of his predecessor's staff, he was able at 10 Bordeaux to gather round him men who repre- sented fairly all the varied culture of the times. Antoine Gouv^a, brother of the principal, 'poet, ^' philosopher and jurist ' ; Jacques de Teyve, historian of the Conquest of Diu by the Portuguese ; Grouchy, 15 " who wrote De Comitiis Romanorum'' and whose disputatious writings and learned lectures (he was singular in using Greek instead of Latin in com- menting upon Aristotle) won him a wide renown, — these three, with Guerente, writer of Latin plays, 20 came with Gouv^a from Paris. A little later came Mathurin Cordier, who had been the master, and was to become later the friend, of Calvin, — whose zeal for teaching and love of children found expression in his Latin Colloquies and in his Civilite Puerile. Fabricius 25 and Britannus, ' Ciceronians ' both, represented the more exclusive literary side of the new classicism ; and the letters of the said Britannus, originally pre- served doubtless for their pure Latinity rather than for their contents, are of interest now for their many and 3° enthusiastic references to Gouv^a and to the school. To Bordeaux, the merit of the masters meant 20 MONTAIGNE. more than the assurance of an excellent school. A body of men of this calibre, — a few years later the Scotch historian and poet, '' poetarum nostri smculi facile princeps" George Buchanan, was added to the S numbei;, and later still (1547) the young Muret, whose eloquence and poetical gift won him an even greater contemporary fame than his erudition has preserved, — brought with them, in the language of the day, all the muses to the town. Grouchy's lectures upon rhetoric, 10 open to the public, attracted a wide circle of auditors ; Antoine Gouvea was envied even by Cujas for his knowledge of jurisprudence, and would be especially welcome to the magistracy, among whom were already jurists of distinction. And, still more than in their 15 several proper spheres, the newcomers would give a stimulus to all that general concomitant activity, antiquarian and imitative, that made so large a part of the literary revival. With their concurrence in the fashionable rivalry of verse-making, for ' tumbeaux ' 20 and other ' several occasions,' with their interchange of complimentary — or insulting — epigrams, they would doubtless bring provincial culture, as they had brought the local school, to bear comparison with Paris. In the year (1530) when the college was first 25 proposed, Pierre Eyquem de Montaigne, father of the Essayist, was " premier jurat " at Bordeaux, and must have come in this capacity, as in the various municipal offices which he held successively, up to his. mayoralty in 1554 — 6, into close connexion with the 30 scheme. Pierre Eyquem, sketched by his son with a touch deepened here by feeling, is a personality full of BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING. 21 warmth and colour ; realised in his environment, these qualities are but enhanced. He belonged to precisely that class of well-to-do bourgeois that made the strength of the community. The Eyquems of Montaigne reckoned, from the Essayist back, but 5 four generations. "Michel de Montaigne, son of Pierre, grandson of Grimond, great-grandson of Raimond," is the genealogical record on his tomb. Raimond Eyquem or Ayquem, a simple Bordeaux merchant of wine, dried fish and pastil, — the staple 10 commodities then of Bordeaux commerce — , acquired by purchase in 1477, towards the close of his own life, that property "of Montaigne and Belbeys...with the vines, woods, lands, fields and mills thereto pertaining,'' whose title was to be first annexed to, 15 and at length to supersede, the humbler name of Eyquem. Grimond continued his father's business, extending at the same time his property, and ac- quiring, it would seem, by his wealth and the advan- tageous alliances he made for himself and for his 20 family, something of the character of a local magnate. The line of purely mercantihf activity was broken first by Pierre, who followed for many years the wars in Italy. Yet even he, when he returned at the age of thirty-three to marry and settle quietly in his native 25 town, so far kept up the family tradition as himself to ^" sell, in the town commercial house at Bordeaux, the wine grown upon his country property. , The family of the Essayist was thus not at all, as the amiable ignorance of Sainte Marthe reports it, a 30 family that from father to son had followed the career of arms. Rather was Joseph Scaliger near the literal 22 MONTAIGNE. truth, when he called Montaigne the "son of a herring- monger." " Son pere etoit vendeur de harenc.'' Yet truth, if sometimes humbler, is almost always more interesting than fiction. Montaigne may himself have 5 had a weakness for the more gentlemanly status, but to the biographer he has, as the offspring of this progressive bourgeoisie, a new interest and intelligi- bility. His practical good sense and refusal to be ' paid with words ' may be seen as the apotheosis, in a 10 manner, of the sterling bourgeois qualities, altered only by extension to matters commonly judged by prejudice and preconceived opinion. He owed at least his integrity and love of truth to a race "fameuse en preud'hommie," in an age when pilfering and lying IS were common aristocratic vices. It was his bourgeois origin, moreover, that brought Montaigne into natural relations with the intellectual current of his century. He himself, in spite of his distaste for public affairs, might at one time, had 2o fortune tempted him, have well been drawn into the public service ; while his father, the Pierre Eyquem in question, was of an active, rather than reflective, temperament. A simple and loyal nature, full of energy and delighting to expend it even to old age 25 in feats of physical strength and in the service of his fellow-citizens, he might readily, one must suppose, have been absorbed in the career of arms which the nobility regarded as their proper vocation. As it was, called to the less stirring life of country-gentle- 30 man and citizen in a provincial town, his energies were free to assimilate the new ideas and to expend themselves in part upon schemes of education for his BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING. 23 son. His share in the Italian wars was but an episode, — those campaigns affording then an occasion for the Wanderjahre of all adventurous youth, much as later it became the fashion to spend several years in better regulated travel. The one warlike trace we 5 find in him, after his campaigning, is the turn he gave to the improvement of his property, — replacing, in the year 1554, the ancient chateau by a new fortified building, better suited to the disordered times. 10 But from Italy he brought back the fire of the new learning. " My house," writes Montaigne, " has been open for many a long day to men of learning, and is well known to them ; for my father, who ruled it fifty years and more, kindled with that new ardour, 15 wherewith King Francis the First embraced letters and set them in fashion, did search out the ac- quaintance of learned men at great pains and cost, entertaining them as holy persons, and as having some peculiar inspiration of divine wisdom, gathering 20 up their sayings, and their discourses, as oracles, and with the more reverence and piety for the less he had of means to judge of them ; for he had no knowledge of letters, no more than his predecessors." This ignorance of letters was not, it would seem, 25 so great but that he could turn a schoolboy kind of Latin verse ; but at the least — and it is this that makes him so interesting a figure — it was not in such fashionable and puerile form of literary activity that his enthusiasm lost itself From the elder Montaigne 30 we win a pleasanter image of the working of the new ardour than from all the laborious industry of imitation 24 MONTAIGNE. and research that gained praise from the century's biographers. His simple reverence for learning — the greater from his want of means to measure it — has in its naivete a flavour of that first enthusiasm, whose 5 larger indefinite hopes bore the literary revival on to its real, though more limited, achievement. Rome and Greece were looked to as the repositories of all knowledge and, more than that, as renovating powers for life. " We are persuaded " — so runs the privilege 10 for the royal printing-press — "that these sound studies will give birth in our kingdom to theologians who shall teach the sacred doctrines of religion ; to magi- strates who shall administer justice without partiality and in the spirit of public equity ; and finally to IS skilled administrators, the lustre of a state, who will be capable of sacrificing their private interest to affection for the public good- "Such are among the benefits that may reasonably be looked for from sound studies and from them almost exclusively.". 2o Hopes such as these, perhaps not often so clearly formulated, gave its prestige to learning, — a prestige which the linguistic feats of scholars, and e^en their gradual conquest of philological and historical know- ledge, were powerless to sustain. Such hopes went 25 to the foundation of the new colleges. " This," the privilege continues, " is why we have but recently assigned liberal salaries to distinguished scholars for the instruction of our youth in the tongues and sciences, and for their training in the no less precious 30 exercise of good manners." And we find it con- fidently anticipated by Lefebre d'Etables at an earlier date, that the proper use of riches will result from the BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING. 25 college courses. "If," he makes the masters say of an imaginary pupil, child of a rich merchant, " he leave our hand wise and learned, he will make a proper, just, and generous use of the wealth which Polyphragmon " (the father) " has acquired with such 5 labour, watching, danger and fatigue." The elder Montaigne, bringing his enthusiasm back from Italy into a community touched with a like fervour, and about to give it, in the foundation of a school, just this practical turn, might well have 10 followed in the general current. Both as the public- spirited citizen he soon approved himself, and as devotee of learning, he must have favoured a scheme so evidently beneficial to the town and attracting to it men of so great and varied acquirements. And 15 there are, as a fact, tiny indications which show him to have been on friendly terms with the masters, and ready, when occasion offered, to promote the interests of Gouv6a. But he was so far from devoting all his zeal to 20 the college that his interest in learning rather shows itself in contrast to the current movement. There is no individual mention of his name, as there is of others among the jurade, in connection with the care of the buildings, or the funds ; and this evidence of 25 reserve, purely negative and of the less value from the fragmentary nature of the records, is yet signi- ficant in view of his determination not to rely on the college teaching for his son. His mind indeed was already possessed by other notions. He had brought 30 with him from Italy, so his son narrates, a scheme more thorough-going than any college. Making 26 MONTAIGNE. all diligent inquiry among men of learning and understanding, he had been assured that the sole hindrance to attaining "la grandeur d'ame et de cognoissance des anciens Grecs et Remains" was 5' the length of time expended in acquiring languages, which the ancients themselves had possessed at no cost. To the next generation was reserved the ironic comment " I do not believe that to be the sole cause." 10 The simple faith of Pierre Eyquem busied itself only to devise a remedy for a defect which, to less enter- prising minds, would seem inseparable from difference of birth and country. Eminently practical, he was of that uncompromising sort of practical nature which IS goes to the making alike of pioneers and of Utopian speculators, — a nature that rather runs to interesting experiments than helps on the lumbering car of steady progress. Since his son could not be born an ancient Roman, he must needs latinise his nursery, 2o and even indeed the whole neighbourhood, that the Roman language might at least be more familiar to him than his native one. The brief space that intervened before the first loosing of the child's tongue, he had already utilised 25 to attain, by like heroic measure, another object which he had at heart. With the aim, partly, of hardening him, but also of knitting him by affection with the common people, he sent him from the cradle to be nurtured in a poor village and after the roughest 30 manner, and to the same end had him held at the font by persons "of the lowliest condition." But the little Michel had not yet learned to lisp BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING. 2^ when he was given in charge to a German, wholly ignorant of French and "very well' versed in Latin." This tutor, brought over for the express purpose and at a high salary, had the child always about him. Two others, less learned but yet speaking with their 5 charge no tongue but Latin, acted as assistants. "As for the rest of the household," Montaigne relates, " it was an inviolable rule that neither he" (the father) " himself, nor my mother, nor valet nor maid-servant, should utter in my company anything save such Latin 10 words as each had learned in order to prattle with me. It is wonderful what a fruit every one had of it ; my father and mother learned by that means enough Latin to understand it, and acquired the tongue sufficiently well to make use of it on occasion, 15 and so did those of the servants that had most to do with me. In fine, we were all so Latinised, that it even overflowed to our villages, where sundry Latin names of workmen and of tools may still be heard, and have indeed taken firm foothold by usage. As for me, 20 I was more than six years old before I could under- stand any more French or Perigordic than Arabic J and had learned without art, book, grammar, or precept, without the whip, and without tears, a Latin as pure as that known by my teacher ; for I had no means of 25 mingling or corrupting it.'' Greek he was to learn by way of game and pastime, in anticipation of modern kindergarten methods, 'playing with his declensions' — "pelotions nos declinaisons a la maniere de ceux qui, par certains 30 jeux de tablier" (check-board) "apprennent I'arith- metique et la geometrie." 28 MONTAIGNE. The moral regimen was in still more decided contrast, than the mental, to the system then in vogue. The case of Montaigne may have been the only one in which the native French was quite 5 tabooed, but it was a common endeavour among contemporary scholars to make Latin the medium of spoken as of written intercourse. The family of the Estiennes spoke habitually Latin ; Latin was the language of the colleges out of school hours as well lo as in them; the eight year old Mary Tudor, afterwards Queen of England, had playfellows of her own age recommended to her to the sole end that she should exercise her Latin. The same ideal of the day finds expression in Mathurin Cordier's account of a well- 15 prepared child of five, an account that might almost have been written with Montaigne in view. The singularity of the Essayist's early Latinising rests only in its uncompromising thoroughness, and in its institution by a parent who was no scholar but a 20 country squire of very moderate acquirements. The gentleness of discipline ran, on the other hand, directly counter to traditional opinion. In an age when the use of the rod was carried to brutality, the youthful Michel " tasted the whip but twice, and that 25 very slightly." And to so extreme a point did his father carry his dread of violence that he had the child always roused from his morning slumbers by the sound of music — "keeping a spinett-player ex- pressly to that end." 30 Though bold to institute his scheme, and consistent in its execution, the elder Montaigne was not proof against its apparent failure. The gentle suasion of BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING. 29 music and perpetual pastime failed to stir a nature "so heavy, dull and drowsy" ("si poisant, mol et endormy"), that it could not be "torn from idleness, not even to go and play." " Ce que je veoyois," says the Essayist, "je le veoyois bien ; et, soubs cette com- s plexion lourde, nourrissois des imaginations hardies, et des opinions au dessus de mon aage. L'esprit, je I'avoy lent, et qui n'alloit qu'autant qu'on le menoit; I'appre- hension, tardifve : I'invention, lasche ; et, aprez tout, un incroyable default de memoire." And the " bon- 10 homme," his father, " fearing exceeding to fail in a matter he had so much at heart, allowed himself to be carried away by popular opinion, which always follows, like the cranes, those that have led the way, yielded to custom," and sent the child to school. 15 The pressure of public opinion was the greater no doubt from the success of the College de Guyenne, " tres-florrissant pour lors" and already approved, after three or four years of Gouvea's rule, " the best college in France." Montaigne's school-days coincided, in- 20 deed, with the school's most brilliant period. He came under the direct supervision of Grouchy, Guerente, Buchanan, Muret, — playing a part too in the Latin plays which Guerente and Muret composed, according to the fashion, for the boys to act. His father took 25 the utmost pains to secure for him competent tutors (" precepteurs de chambre "), having regard before all else to their "debonnairet^ et facilite de complexion"; and, so far from an unconditional surrender of his theories, he hedged the child round with all manner 30 of precautions " contrary to the custom of colleges," as to the manner of his nurture. 30 MONTAIGNE. It may have been to meet the known wishes of the father that a tutor of intelligence fostered in him a love of surreptitious reading. The first taste he had for books came to him, about the 5 age of seven or eight, " from the pleasure of the fables of Ovid's Metamorphoses.'' " I robbed myself of all other pleasure " so he tells us, " in order to read them ; the more that this was my mother tongue, and that it was the easiest book I knew, and, from lo the matter, the best suited to my tender years ; for the Lancelots of the Lake, the Amadis, the Huons of Bordeaux and other such rabble (fatras) of books as please children, were unknown to me even by name... so nice was my discipline. I became the 15 more negligent in the study of my prescribed tasks. Here it fell to my lot with singular timeliness to have to do with a tutor of intelligence, who cleverly connived at this debauch of mine and at other such — for I passed at one bound to the Aeneid of 20 Virgil, then to Terence, to Plautus and the Italian comedies, lured on always by the sweetness of the subject... He (the tutor) behaved ingeniously, making as though he noticed nothing ; he sharpened my ap- petite, permitting me to feast only surreptitiously 25 upon these books and keeping a lax hold upon me in respect of the regular studies." This gentle regimen did nothing to supply the missing strenuousness of character. The danger re- mained, not that the child would do ill, but that he 30 would do nothing. Yet Montaigne does not the less commend this article in his education. For himself, he is of opinion that his mind would have utterly BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING. 3 1 refused to yield to force and violence, as in general theory he blames all rigour in the upbringing of a young mind, " qu'on dresse pour I'honneur et la . liberty." In the matter of learning he holds that, but for 5 his tutor's judicious blindness, he would have brought back from college, "in common with the most of the noblesse," nothing but a hatred of letters. Even with this modifying influence " c'^toit toujours college." His fine Latin speedily deteriorated, and of other 10 knowledge he gained but a smattering of all things in general "a la frangaise" and nothing to the purpose in particular. " For, at the age of thirteen, when I left the college, I had finished my course (as they call it), and, to say the truth, without any profit 15 that I can turn now to account." The experience of the son thus confirms the tentative distrust of the father for those places of education, to whose making had gone so much zeal and enterprise, and which we, looking back, reckon 20 high among the fruits of progress. The truth seems to be, that, while they were but cumbersome and dilatory expedients to that ulterior purpose which made so much of the earlier motive-force, they were quite admirably adapted to their immediate end. 25 The elder Montaigne, who had that ulterior purpose near in view, might hesitate to send his son to the College which lay, so to speak, at his very door ; Jules C6sar Scaliger, representative figure of the more definite culture of the day ; " qui tint de son 30 temps le souverain empire de bonnes lettres," was, on the contrary, at no small pains to procure that 32 MONTAIGNE. same training for his children. The young Joseph Scaliger, together with his brother, was sent from Agen, under the charge of a preceptor or pedagogue, to receive at that same school, where Montaigne tasted 5 but the ' paring ' of knowledge, the seeds of his exact linguistic learning. The programme of studies instituted by Gouv^a, and recapitulated in 1583 by the then principal, Elie Vinet, who had been a member of Gouvea's staff, 10 gives us a close insight into the defects and merits of the school. In its first intention, the teaching embraced ' the three tongues' (Latin, Greek and Hebrew), which made then the full measure of linguistic achievement, 15 as also the "seven arts." In actual working the school aimed primarily, as the programme very simply states, at the teaching of Latin (ut Latino sermoni cognoscendo haec schola in priinis destinata est). Hebrew was not taught at all. Gouv^a had never succeeded in finding 20 a professor, and both he and his successor Gelida were exempted from their undertaking to provide one. Greek was taught in the upper classes, but much less exhaustively than Latin, while the Arts, which formed a sort of supplementary course (for 25 which residence was not required), seem to have been kept in strict subordination to the languages (Latin and Greek) in which they were couched, and to the lan- guage {Latin usually — in the single glorious instance of Grouchy's lectures on Aristotle, Greek) in which 30 they were expounded. Out of class, too, the children were expected to talk Latin, a process — to judge from the specimens of their dog-Latin given by Cordier — , BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING. 33 eminently adapted to corrupt the fine Latinity of the young Montaigne. Latin the college undertook to teach from the very elements to a full mastery, to this end receiving children of seven years and under. In the loth, or 5 lowest, division, they learnt to repeat the alphabet, the Lord's Prayer and the seven psalms, together with the easy inflexions of nouns and verbs, as contained in the horn-book {Libellus Pueroruni). Seated on long benches, the more advanced in the 10 front rows, they repeated their lesson, word by word, syllable by syllable, letter by letter, after the teacher. The authority of Quintilian had suggested for these infants what we have reached by dint of theories and systems — that bare repetition, without the learning 15 by heart, suffices to impress the youthful memory. " This is so tender an age," recalls the programme, "it must not be too rigorously pressed, nor a com- plete work be at once exacted from it... For this reason the children of this class are not obliged to 20 learn by heart, but that which is often repeated to them imprints itself by nature upon their memory. Now, among other things, the flexions of nouns and verbs are repeated to them... "And as an example of a lesson, the master takes the fourth 25 of the seven psalms and pronouncing the word miserere the children repeat after him, miserere. Then the master spells the word, pronouncing first the letters, then the syllables. Thus the master m. i. mi, and the scholars after him, m. i. mi ; the 30 master s. e. mise, the scholars s. e. mise, and so through the whole of the lesson, the scholars L. M. 3 34 MONTAIGNE. repeating in successive groups of two and three, till they have all had their turn. And then with a single voice the whole class repeats — always after the master — miserere mei Deus, secundum magnam 5 misericordiam. These youngest children learnt also the first use of the pen, an exercise which called for another considerate remark. " If, as often happens, it should come into a child's head to draw on his paper a man, 10 a dog, a horse, a tree, etc., he must not be beaten for it — unless indeed he should have neglected the pre- scribed task. For... the art of drawing is very useful, and, as Pliny says, the first thing taught throughout all Greece to the children of freedmen." 15 The admonition, its utilitarian apology notwith- standing, calls up a pleasanter image of the college life than that which Montaigne gives of " most of our colleges," with their trembling pupils and class-rooms adorned with bloody rods. The controlling spirit 20 seems indeed, whether later under Eli Vinet, or in the early days under Gouv^a, to have been one of comparative mildness. The pedagogues, or inferior masters, were entirely forbidden the use of the rod. In the next class, the children learnt to read 25 and write correctly, in both French and Latin, and thenceforward, to the end of the regular course, the main business is reading and writing Latin, with text-books of increasing difficulty ; — Cato, Cicero, again and again Cicero, seasoned in the upper forms 30 with Terence, Ovid, and with Virgil, serving the turn of modern standard-readers. French was the medium merely for rendering the Latin texts intelligible, and BIRTH AND EARLY TRAINING. 35 for setting themes to be translated into Latin,— Montaigne, from his ignorance of the French lan- guage, requiring his themes to be set, as he relates, in bad Latin to turn to good. Greek and mathe- matics were relegated to the public courses, open to 5 all the children but compulsory only upon the upper forms, Greek upon the upper five. Mathematics upon the upper two, — and occupying a very small proportion of the time. In Greek, Demosthenes and Homer were the text-books, Homer taking somewhat the place of 10 Cicero in Latin. And always it is the same method, — repetition after the teacher, verbal and grammatical explanation. Since Latin was at that time, not only the key to antiquity, but also the language of almost all current 15 literature and the instrument of all, save the rudest, written communication, the college, in its prepon- derating care for that tongue, answered the purpose practically of a school of primary education. And it is in such an institution — in our modern board-school, 20 rather than in our public-schools,— that the method of teaching finds its closest analogy. The analogy extends, quaintly enough, even down to the minor practice of setting the children to sing in the "spare moments"; — one is tempted to find it again in the 25 exaggerated hopes entertained, by the pioneers in either educational movement, as to the power of reading and writing, whether in Latin or in English, to disseminate virtues which experience rather shows to remain with the unlettered peasant. 30 The general method, — repetition after the teacher, verbal and grammatical explanation, — is one admirably 3—2 36 MONTAIGNE. adapted, with its exercise of the mechanical faculties, to the acquirement of a language. Under such a system the young Henri de Mesmes learned, in eighteen months of college life, to recite Homer 5 from end to end, to compose Latin and Greek discourses for public recitation, together with Latin verses and two thousand Greek verses " faicts selon I'aage." Nor were his faculties stunted in the process, for he passed on brilliantly through the law schools, 10 and, while retaining always his scholarly tastes, became in after-life an accomplished diplomat and courtier. But often enough, doubtless, Montaigne's contempt for these " latineurs de college " must have been well justified by their exclusive head-knowledge. IS Montaigne himself, who was no such docile pupil, and who, moreover, had acquired his Latin at less cost, remembered only the weariness of the process. " On ne cesse," he complains, " de criailler k nos aureilles, comme qui verseroit dans un entonnoir ; et 2onostre charge, ce n'est que redire ce qu'on nous a diet." The English scholar Bentley brought, two centuries later, a similar complaint against the Wake- field Grammar-school, where his "dunces" of teachers could not see that he was more busily engaged in 2S fixing his lesson in his memory than if he had been "bawUng it out with the rest." Montaigne, who seems at no time to have struggled with his defective verbal memory, would have made no such claim. His complaint cuts deeper, and is directed against 30 the whole waste of time and the abuse, as he esteems it, of mental activity. " On nous tient," he laments again, " quatre ou cinq ans k entendre les mots, et les THE ESSAY ON EDUCATION. 37 coudre en clauses ; encores autant a en proportionner un grand corps, estendu en quatre ou cinq parties ; aultres cinq, pour le moins, a les sgavoir briefvement mesler et entrelacer de quelque subtile fa^on," — there is not so much time to be spared for the study of 5 words. Montaigne's reminiscences of his early teaching occur in the Essay De V Institution des Enfants, and are incidental to his mature views upon the training proper to the youthful mind. Nothing exposes, 10 better than these views, the positive contents of the Essays, and nothing better marks the place of the Essayist in the line of positive and progressive thought. The classical revival was to drop, by an inevitable 15 process, those more living and present hopes which had borne it on to a firm foothold. The outcome of learning was to be, not a return to the wisdom and virtue of the ancients, but the conquest by slow degrees, through the patient researches of philo- 20 legists, through the persevering reconstructions of historians, of a sounder knowledge of antiquity. Scholarship became more and more an end in itself, — a separate field which, yielding its more succulent fruits only to a few elect spirits, of penetrating vision 25 and infinite persistence, provided a vast surface dust for the picking over of the duller labourer. France was the home, in the latter half of the i6th century, of much genuine research and solid learning, but, at the same time, of a vast amount of pedantry. The 30 real scholars were almost swamped in a shoal of imitators, disputants and commentators, who may 38 MONTAIGNE. be counted over by the score in the contemporary biographical dictionaries of La Croix du Maine and Verdier, or their ubiquity more pleasantly realized from. Montaigne's story of the " man of letters and of 5' reputation," replying in sober earnest to the farrago lof nonsense strung together as a joke, or from his picture of the blear-eyed scholar losing health and I'eyesight in the effort, not to become a wiser man, but to learn the scansion of a Latin verse. 10 The pedantry of the age was peculiarly fitted to ,' turn away from learning the quicker spirits, — nor indeed has even genuine scholarship, with its infinite pains and its tardy recompenses, at any time the qualities that engage the sympathies, and hold the 15 interests, of the plain and practical man. The more vital interests, — the curiosity about the universe, the search for a rule of life or government, — were not to wait for the piecing up of Greek and Latin texts. Rather was it gradually recognized that antiquity 20 was furnishing, in the words of Gibbon, " fetters, and not wings, for the human mind." The consciousness of this was to result, later, in the complete revolt against authority, and to find a popular expression in the controversy between the Ancients and the 25 Moderns, to which we, in England, owe the Battle of the Books. But already in the i6th century a measure of self-assertion, in the face of the Ancients, was beginning. While successful imitation of Virgil or of Ovid was still the general standard of a poet's 30 merit, there were certain admirers of Ronsard and du Bartas who were bold to claim for these writers a more real equality with their ancient models. THE ESSAY ON EDUCATION. 39 And — what is of more significance — a certain scientific independence in the investigation of nature had arisen out of the very study, at first wholly servile, of the classical authors. In the study, for instance, of anatomy, the example of the ancients led s to the use of personal observation, to confirm their discoveries first but then to correct their errors, until at length nature came to supersede the text-books. The very year that the Essays were first published (1580) there appeared too those Discours Admirables, 10 where Bernard Palissy challenges the mockery of those who hold it impossible for a man ignorant of Latin to penetrate the secrets of nature, by an appeal, to no ancient author, but to his cabinet of curiosities. 15 Montaigne stood at the parting of the ways. He does not in the least anticipate the rise of that scientific spirit which was finally to supplant autho- rity. He does not apprehend the significance, even, of the positive discoveries of the age ; accounting 20 them as but so many new varieties of human opinion. Thus he fails apparently to recognize that the circumnavigation of the earth had really di- minished the likelihood of finding new worlds. Nor does he direct his imaginary pupil to the observation 25 of physical nature. Pupil and governor alike must derive their science, such as it is, from the ancient text-books, — the sole advance of his method, in this respect, upon that in vogue, lying in the greater regard he would have paid to the " marrow and 30 substance," rather than the words. It is, however, only concessively, and as a I 40 MONTAIGNE. supplementary exercise, that the acquirement of positive knowledge enters at all into Montaigne's curriculum. The end of education is, in his view, the practical conduct of life. " Le gaing de nostre S estude, c'est en estre devenu meilleur et plus sage " ; the child whom he elects as imaginary pupil is to turn out a ' man of capacity ' rather than a ' man of learning.' And far from him indeed is any such grasp of science as could suggest the practical uses of geo- lo metry or of astronomy which Rousseau, applying in the light of a different century the same funda- mental precepts, would enforce upon his Emile. Even had such uses of the sciences been within his compass, Montaigne — a landed proprietor who scarce 15 knew the difference between wheat and barley — would have perhaps despised them as basely utili- tarian rather than practical in his larger sense. It is not there, at any rate, that his concern lay. For, to the " great humanist," as Pater aptly calls him, " le 20 grand monde," which is to be his pupil's book, is not the inert material, framework but the active scene of human life, — his practical end is not the conquest of the physical environment but, at its lowest, the conduct of affairs, and at its highest, the worthy "savoir 25 vivre '' of a man among his fellows. " Cette grande image de nostre mere nature" presented to Montaigne a picture very different from that which it calls up to us, with our conception of interlacing effect and cause, or than it called up already to Pascal, who 30 re-echoes the Essayist's thought in one of the most famous of the Pensies. What Montaigne read upon the face of nature was not her immensity, nor the THE ESSAY ON EDUCATION. 4 1 immutability of all-embracing law, but the variety, endless and universal, of humours, sects and judge- ments, of opinions, laws and customs, — and these it is that he will have his pupil study, to the end that he may judge soberly and soundly of his S own. In the Essayist's theory of education there is operative, in fact, that same largely practical sense which made so distinctive a feature in his father's character ; only the naifve reliance upon almost occult 10 properties in Greek and Latin has here yielded to a very definite apprehension of means and conse- quences. Carrying forward the early hopes of a more fructifying culture, he dissociates them from the lin- guistic studies to which they had been subordinated. 15 The classics are to him still the main body of what mankind has said or thought, and contain, — more directly to his purpose, — the record of the best that mankind has done. His pupil is to draw a part, even the chief part, of his experience of men, from those 20 that live only in the memory of books, — and, first among books, he is to draw from Plutarch. But the virtue that Montaigne finds in Plutarch is as re- corded life and not as language, and can be studied as well in the translation of Amyot as in the original 25 Greek. And above all, not as language, nor even as facts, to commit to memory, but as material for the exercise of judgement ; — " que mon guide se sou- vienne ou vise sa charge ; et qu'il n'imprime pas tant a son disciple la date de la ruyne de Carthage, que 3° les moeurs de Hannibal et de Scipion ; ny tant oii mourut Marcellus, que pourquoy il feut indigne de son 42 MONTAIGNE. debvoir qu'il mourust la. Qu'il ne luy apprenne pas tant les histoires, qu'a en juger." Nor is the history of the more heroic past to be the only field of study. Rather must the past be 5 viewed in the light always of the present. All things, — "la malice d'un page,...un propos de table" — , are food for judgement. The immediate circum- stances and environment, the events of daily life — judgement is to be exercised on these, and with 10 judgement, observation. The field too of present ob- servation is to be so far as possible enlarged. The child must travel, see other manners, practise other customs, not with the purpose either of the tourist or the young gallant — " not to gather from it only, 15 after the manner of our French nobility, how many paces the Santa Rotonda measures, or how rich are the hosen of the Signora Livia ; or, as others, by how far the countenance of Nero, in some old ruin there, is longer or broader than in some similar medal ; but 20 to gather principally the humours of these nations and their manners, and to polish and point our wit against that of others." Shifting thus the burden from the memory to the judgement, Montaigne at once advocates an inde- 25 pendence in the face of antiquity, none the less real for going hand in hand with admiration, and, always within the compass of his interest, anticipates the free use of observation, differing from the scientific only in its subject-matter and final aim. In one 30 passage of the later essays, he seems indeed to recognize the fruitfulness of direct observation for the acquirement of knowledge as wen_ as in the THE ESSAY ON EDUCATION. 43 conduct of life. Mocking at the pedantic habit of quoting the ancients in support of the most obvious facts — " as though it were nobler to borrow from the stores of Vascosan or of Plantin than to take what is to be seen in our village " — he adds that, in his 5 opinion, '' des plus ordinaires choses et plus com- munes et cogneues, si nous s^avions trouver leur jour, se peuvent former les plus grands miracles de nature, et les plus merveilleux examples, notamment sur le subjet des actions humaines." 10 If, in seeking to bring education to bear on life, Montaigne was fixing in more definite lines an earlier ideal of the Renascence, he was also echoing, almost certainly, a contemporary discontent with actual results. Writing in England a little earlier, Roger 15 Ascham already had call to resent " that lewde and spiteful proverbc.that the greatest clerks be not the wisest men," — and his report of the English boys who go to school as "little children" and leave it as " great lubbers," is the counterpart to the complaint 20 which Montaigne had, as he says, from " men of understanding," that it is the colleges which blight the fair promise of the " little children in France." Above all, the school training, proper enough perhaps to breed the recluse and silent scholar, was found 25 unapt to fit young men for public affairs or for life at a court ever more and more exacting in its demands on a ready wit and habit of the world. It was to meet a recognized want that La Noue, turning over in prison his country's needs, and 30 hoping to redress to virtue a corrupt nobility, devised his scheme of Academies for children of gentle birth. 44 MONTAIGNE. This scheme, which was to avert the moral dangers of apprenticeship to arms, or in a nobleman's house- hold, without incurring the social disabilities of college life, has in its reasonable common sense — 5 the care, for instance, of body as well as mind — a certain correspondence with Montaigne's own views. But La Noue was concerned to reform the state, and takes into account the general practicability. Montaigne, who was no innovator, falls back, as lo alternative for the colleges which he disapproves, upon a plan in vogue already among the few who could afford it — the appointment of a governor with, if required, a more learned tutor under him. The method was one suitable enough for the 15 child — as yet, by the way, unborn — who serves as occasion to the Essay, and Montaigne is regardless of the fact that but few could profit by it. But while La Noue's treatise loses freshness, from its very excellence for the purpose in hand, with the circum- 20 stances of time and place that called for it, the Essay of Montaigne has, from under its straiter specific detail, the preserving touch upon the universal. Of the Essays it may certainly be said that " philosophy has the grivilege of mingling with everything," — not 25 that mere moral doctrine in which from time to time the Essayist preaches moderatipn and the golden mean, but the philosophy which consists in viewing broadly humanity and life. Education is for Mon- taigne the problem to train, to make a man, and— 30 unless to the specialist in pedagogy — the Essay keeps its virtue rather for the human wisdom than for the pedagogic scheme. THE ESSAY ON EDUCATION. 45 To the student of Montaigne himself, it is signi- ficant that the irresponsible writer, who recommends with a flourish, at the outset, the high practical use of learning to conduct a war, command a nation, negotiate with princes or foreign people, lapses 5 before he leaves his subject into a more feeling praise of the " spectator at the Olympic games," and avows that, "if the governor be of his humour," he will not engage his charge at all in the cares of public life. These passages, though they are amongst the 10 innumerable after-thoughts which swelled the bulk of the Essays subsequently to their first appearance, fall properly in place amid advice which, giving all the weight to judgement, provides the judgement with diversity as its sole food, and leaves it, for the 15 conclusion of the whole matter as in each several instance, to decide if it can for either side, if not, to remain in doubt. CHAPTER III. LEGAL STUDIES. VIEWS ON JURISPRUDENCE. Among the grounds which Montaigne alleges for bringing education to bear more closely upon life, is the brevity of the time allotted then to learning. "The child affords to pedagogy but the first fifteen 5 or sixteen years of his life, the remainder he must give to action." And a knowledge of the customary allotment of the years is almost our sole guide in tracing the Essayist's own career from his schooldays to his entrance upon the scene as magistrate. lo He left school at thirteen and, thanks to the nursery latinizing, had passed, in that stay of seven years, through the complete course. So much we know from his own statement. The 'course' refers, in all probability, to the course of grammar which, as IS we have seen, was the more peculiar aim and object of the school. Enabled by his precocious knowledge of Latin to skip the abecedarian classes, the young Michel would be brought, by the customary yearly move, to the topmost of the ten grammar classes in LEGAL STUDIES. 47 just about seven years. Then, though his residence at the college ceased, he continued his studies, it is plausibly conjectured, for two or three years by at- tending as a day-boy the courses of rhetoric and dialectic. He would thus come quite naturally under s the tuition of Miiret, whom he claims for one of his domestic tutors, and could naturally have acted in Muret's Latin plays. Later, since he was destined for the magistracy, he must have qualified by special legal studies at one lo or other of the Universities. The probabilities lie between the ancient, but neglected. University of Bordeaux, and that of Toulouse, then widely famous for its law-schools. Montaigne's biographer Griin, and more recently M. Bonnefon, give the balance 15 to Toulouse, and, though the point cannot be settled definitely, the bare possibility that he studied in that hotbed of juristic activity enhances the interest of his mature reflections upon jurisprudence. The age of Montaigne was the age of Ctijas, 20 Duaren, Hotman, — the age when the science of juris- prudence attracted a number of the best intellects in France and, in their train, an almost innumerable host of lesser men. The revival of learning had opened a new era in the study of the Roman Law. 25 "The century from the year 1500 brought us," as Etienne Pasquier records, " a new study of the laws, which lay in the intermarriage of the study of juris- prudence with humane letters through the medium of a precise and polished Latin tongue." 3° Inaugurated in France by Bud4 the new study, as Pasquier goes on to narrate, found an eager; 48 MONTAIGNE. following..." in the town of Toulouse a Corras and du Ferrier,...in Valence an Aemilius Ferretus, in Cahors a Govdan,...in Grenoble, and in Orleans a Jean Robert, and Guillaume Fournier ; in Bourges, Baron, 5 Duaren,...and especially the great Cujas...." So opens a long account, which has yet no pretensions to be exhaustive. The new efforts tended in part to the restoration of corrupt readings ; in part to the reinstatement of lo the Roman Law — conceived hitherto with the irre- fragable authority of the dead hand — back under the conditions and circumstances which had given it life ; and again in part they took a certain philosophic rationalizing turn. But all had the common merit of :S returning from the voluminous subtleties of the com- mentators to the actual text, of studying " the law in the law itself" The new school, whatever the divergencies, and indeed very acrid quarrels, of its several professors among themselves, made a single 20 crusade against the obscurantist party, who held still faithful to the commentators with their barbarous Latin, their lack of method, their endless refinements one upon the other, to the total neglect of the original text. 25 The Universities were filled with enthusiastic stu- dents. The biographies of the time yield such incidents as that of the first meeting of the friends Loisel and Pithou in a book-shop, where the young Pithou, discussing a difficult passage, " approved him- 30 self the more admirable in that he was so young as to be commonly called ' le petit Pithou '." Or again as that of Alciat's generous pride in his pupil Pibrac, LEGAL STUDIES. 49 who argued so skilfully in a public discussion of an ob- scure passage that the great Alciat " was not ashamed to own openly before the whole audience that he yielded up his arms to this young champion." And Etienne Pasquier counted it " one of the best pieces of s fortune that befell him in his youth," that he began to study law the very day that Hotman and Balduin opened their courses in Paris. At Toulouse, famed for its law schools long before the rise of the new jurisprudence, the Bartolists made 10 a braver stand than elsewhere. Birthplace of Cujas, it was there that Cujas was lecturing in the very years that Montaigne must have been going through his course. But, to the triumph of the obscurantists and the enduring obloquy of Toulouse, the occurrence is which, rather than his birth, connects the name of Cujas with that town, is his rejection for a professor- ship, in 1554, in favour of the Bartolist Forcatel. None the lesshe had there his following of students, the more ardent doubtless for the stimulus of opposition. 20 As a child at school Montaigne had shown none of the premature zeal which really, it would seem, was not uncommon in his day, and which he was singular — among men at least with any claim to letters — in condemning. Neither as a youth was he 25 moved by the obscurities of the law to the current ardour of elucidation. There was indeed a reverse to that picture of eager students vying with one another to unravel difficulties^ — a reverse forcibly set before us by one of the most eminent among the new jurists, 30 by Francois Hotman himself. In his Antitribonian, Hotman describes the intricacies of the existing law L. M. 4 50 MONTAIGNE. in France, and the sorrows of the law-students. He exposes the corrupt state of the Roman law, as received through the treatises of Justinian and Tri- bonian ; the vast expenditure of mere grammatical 5 labour required before its meaning can be mastered ; its frequent inapplicability, when mastered, to present conditions ; — and demands, " What profit falls to the French youth from their great and sustained labour?" " What are they indebted to those who oblige them to 10 spend their time in the study of things which are of no profit or usage in human life, and of ancient fables (as Justinian calls them)." In the study of the laws, for instance, of succession, "instead of grasping the law of direct succession... one is constrained to rack 15 one's brain and understanding in searching out this whole long discourse about the most ancient laws, scattered and dispersed in so many different passages, and very often wrapped up in subtleties and knotty questions which serve only to torture (gehenner) the 20 minds and understandings of the poor students. But another and greater evil is, that, after having thoroughly racked one's head, one finds that in the greater part of France the right and usage of succession is entirely different." 25 Hotman's vigorous treatise does far more than echo the complaints, current with the newer school of jurists, against the hairsplitting of the commentators. He has indeed his tale of the famous Andr6 Tiraqueau, who "ofttime in his treatises, enriched as they were 30 with a prodigious number of these allegations and chaffering authorities, after having piled up the testi- monies and concurrences of a hundred, or of six LEGAL STUDIES. 5 I hundred doctors of the one opinion, would add some such remark as this : 'And that you may know, gentle reader, that there is nothing in all our law which is not ambiguous and matter for dispute and contro- versy, I will now set forth as many or more who hold 5 the contrary opinion.'" But he recognises perfectly that, from the point of view of discipline and practice, the ancient evils have only been augmented by the new union of jurisprudence with polite learning. For not only were the law schools divided into "two sorts 10 and as it were sectaries (partialitez) of lawyers, of which the one set are styled " pettifoggers; Bartolists and barbarians,'' the other " humanists, purists, and grammarians...," but within the second set the subtle- ties of the commentators were but exchanged for the is minutiae of the grammarians. The anecdote of Andr^ Gouvea caps that of Tiraqueau. For Gouvea, after having published a work on an abstruse question, " about ten years after made a retractation of his book and prefaced his discourse with — 'Just as heretofore 20 no man... has understood the question de jure accre- scendi, so I own that I for my part had not myself understood it until this day.'" "And yet," says Hotman, "all their tragedies are but grounded on certain questions of Latin grammar " ; the books of 25 Duaren and Gouvea "are entirely filled with these questions pertaining rather to a good grammarian, practised in Cicero, Terence and other Latin authors, than to a political philosopher arguing of reason and equity, such as should be a jurist." 30 It is little wonder, he concludes, that many of the youth " called thus to consume the flower of their age 4—2 52 MONTAIGNE. in the study of these books... the greater parts of which are either wholly abolished and dropped out of use, or filled with disorder and confusion, or stuffed with contrarieties and antinomies, or chequered by 5 mistakes and errors, or brought into doubt and dis- pute by the daily corrections and changes, — it is little wonder that an infinity of these young men, even such as are of a generous and noble nature, should turn with disgust from the study of the law lo to some other calling — or, if held to it by external circumstance, should shirk it so much as they can (s'en desrobent le plus souvent qu'ils peuvent), and employ their time more willingly in reading some philosopher or historian, or generally in some other ij study." Certainly it is among this latter youth, rather than with the Loisels and Pithous, that we must place Montaigne. The passages in the Essays that treat of jurisprudence echo much of the complaint of 20 Hotman, with a flavour of more personal disgust. "Why is it that our vulgar tongue, so simple in all other uses, becomes obscure and unintelligible in contract and testament ; and that he who can express himself as plainly as he likes, in whatsoever else he say 25 and write, may not find in that any mode of declaring his mind which is not subject to doubt and alter- cation ; unless it be that the princes of this art, applying themselves with peculiar attention to pick out solemn words and frame artistic clauses, have 30 so weighed every syllable, so primely sifted out (espeluch^) every species of connecting link, that it has come to be thus entangled and embroiled in an VIEWS ON JURISPRUDENCE. 53 infinity of figures, and in divisions so minute that they can no longer be brought under any rule and prescription.... Subdividing these subtilties, they teach men to multiply doubts ; they set us upon the ex- tending and diversifying of difficulties, they draw 5 them out, they disperse them.... We doubted over Ulpian, and doubted again over Bartolus and Baldus. The need had been to efface the trace of this in- numerable diversity of opinion, and not to deck themselves out with it, and fill with it the heads of 10 posterity." " We open the matter, and spread while diluting it ; of one subject we make a thousand, and fall again, with our multiplying and subdividing, into the infinity of the atoms of Epicurus.... Consider the form of this justice which controls us ; it is a very 15 testimony of human imbecility. Such contradiction and error is there in it." Notwithstanding that "no quality is so universal... as diversity and variety," Montaigne will not accept the opinion of him " that thought by the multitude 20 of laws to curb the authority of judges, en leur taillant leurs morceaux!' He perceived that the number of the laws could never rival "the infinite diversity of human accidents," that " the multiplying of our inven- tions shall never come to the variation of examples." 25 "Add a hundred times as many unto them, yet shall it not follow, that of events to come, there be any one found, that in all this great number of thousands of selected and enregistered events, shall meet with one, to which it may so exactly join and match, but 30 some circumstance and diversity will remain, that may require a diverse consideration of judgement. 54 MONTAIGNE. There is but little relation between our actions, that are in perpetual mutation, and these fixed and im- moveable laws : the most to be desired are the rarest, the simplest and most general ; and yet I 5 believe, it were better to have none at all, than so infinite a number as we have." In holding thus, for his ideal, that the best laws are the rarest, simplest and most general, Montaigne is again at one with Hotman, as too in his desire, 10 expressed elsewhere, that more freedom of discretion should be left to the individual judge, who should be chosen, moreover, for his natural parts rather than for his learning. Hotman's proposed reform is to just the same tenour. He would leave the settling 15 of disputes to " men of natural good sense and God- fearing, rather than to learned and subtle doctors of jurisprudence." " At the same time, not to loose the rein too much to an uncontrolled license of judging in all causes, it would be easy (so it seems to me), 20 and chiefly at this time when it has pleased God to lend us a Solon in our France, who is the great Michel de I'Hospital, to assemble a number of jurists, together; with sundry statesmen, and as many of the more notable advocates and lawyers (praticiens) of 25 this kingdom, and to give to them charge to m.ake a common report of what they should have recom- mended and extracted, as well from the books of Justinian as from the books of philosophy ; and finally from the experience they may have acquired 30 in the treatment of affairs." And Hotman would have the law, thus sifted and selected, drawn up clearly in the vulgar tongue. VIEWS ON JURISPRUDENCE. 55 Hotman wrote his Antitribonian at the instigation, it is said, of the Chancellor I'Hdpital, and in the view certainly, and hope, of a practical reform. How near at heart I'Hdpital had such reform appears from his posthumous Traits de la Reformation de Justice ; and 5 although that treatise, penned in retirement, was the expression of hopes which already had proved abortive, it is evident that, under his rule, the drastic measures advocated by Hotman had been held to be within the scope of practical politics. Ramus ex- lo pressed, in 1567, similar views: "The laws of the Romans were written," he observed, " in their native tongue and drawn up in twelve tables, which the children learned by heart. The French, in place of these twelve tables, have myriads of laws, set forth in 15 a foreign tongue. Is there none among so many jurists, who will undertake to clear up and simplify this chaos } Why should Cujas, to name but one, find the task beyond his powers ? And you, Michel de I'Hospital, you that have the power, why do you 20 not procure for your country so great a benefit .-' " With I'Hdpital's loss of power all question of realizing this benefit ceased. He himself wrote his treatise in retirement, with merely retrospective reference to his own policy, and with vaguely philo- 25 sophic generalizing rather than with definite hopes. And by the time the Essays appeared, the Saint Bartholomew had long since closed the door to all conciliatory policy and all peaceful reform. Whether in his earlier years Montaigne came ever 30 into personal contact with this or some similar scheme it is impossible to say. The passages already cited S6 MONTAIGNE. show conclusively enough that, in such a case, the practical man in him would have sympathized with the end proposed. And yet his part, if he played one, would far more probably have been among those S raisers of difficulties whom Hotman hastens to refute. We may well suppose him, half in earnest, half by way of jest, hampering the enthusiasts with "the ancient saying of Alcibiades, that, of all men, those live in most security who put up with their laws and 10 customs, even though there should be something to complain of," or recalling " that Plato says often, that it is very pernicious for youth to be accustomed to dispute about the laws accepted in their country." Already he might have been among those who argued 15 the disorders of the times and danger of making things worse ; still more it would have been in his vein to have pointed out the wider application of the argument ; to have urged " that it will not do to reject the books of Tribonian by reason of the debates and 20 contentions that follow upon their interpretation ; in as much that, for the same reason, it would be necessary to condemn Philosophy, Medicine, and, what is more, the study of Theology, in the which there is more of quarrelling and dissension, and much 25 more dangerous, than in all other sciences and pro- fessions." L'Hdpital moreover, and with him Hotman, were guided in their hope of reform by certain philosophic notions in which Montaigne, though at times he 30 appears to adopt them, yet saw, with the implacable keenness of his insight, all the inherent flaws. Of all the ancient thoughts revived at the VIEWS ON JURISPRUDENCE. 57 Renascence, none took more ready root, among the soberer Frenchmen of the i6th century, than the stoical notion of a universal reason and of immutable moral laws, or laws of nature. L'Hdpital could believe firmly, amid all the chaos of actual legis- 5 lation, that " reason should be the soul of the law," that "divine justice and actual right are the same for the savage of America and the Christian of Europe": that " the rule of justice, — render to God what is due to Him, and do unto others as you would they should 10 do unto you, — is common to all men living by the simple light of nature and possessing reason." And so too Hotman would have brought into the body of the law, as he desires it, such of the legislation of Moses as is "based upon that natural justice 15 (droiture), reason, and equity, to which all the habitants of the world... are and remain subjected by nature : the which rights of nature the ancient Pagans styled the right of gens or peoples." It would seem in direct answer to such a faith as 20 this that Montaigne pronounces, " But they are merry, that say, when they would give something of certitude to laws, there be certain forms, perpetual and im- mutable, which they call natural, which are imprinted upon the human race by the condition of their proper 25 being, and, of these, give the number now of three, now of four, now more, now less : token that it is a mark as doubtful as the rest. Now, they are so ill- fortuned (for what else can I call it than ill-fortune .'' that, of so infinite a number of laws, there is not to 30 be met with even one that fortune has permitted to be universally received by the consent of all nations), 58 MONTAIGNE. they are, I say, so unhappy that, of these three or four selected laws, there is not a single one that be not contradicted and disavowed, not by one nation, but by several. Now, the only presumptive token 5 whereby they can argue any natural laws, is this of universality of acceptance ; for what nature really ordains us, we should follow doubtless with a common consent...." If even so direct and practical a scheme could not 10 command Montaigne's assent, far less had he any sympathy with the slow, laborious work of systemati- zation and amending to which Hotman, scholar and grammarian as well as practical reformer, lent so ready a hand. Slow and laborious as it was, and ill- 15 adapted to the young practitioner and student, the work of the sixteenth century jurists was really in the line of clearance and of synthesis. It is possible even that this preliminary work of reducing to unity, of re- moving much of the lumber of centuries, was essential 2o before the reform contemplated by Hotman could be satisfactorily executed. And Hotman, far keener than Montaigne for a short cut to reform, was yet content, failing that, to lend his learning as gram- marian to the emending and elucidating of the texts. 25 Montaigne, on the contrary, was never drawn into the work of systematization, had not even a share in the reduction of local customs, which was carried on side by side with the more learned study of the Roman law. 30 The disagreements and quarrels of the new, as of earlier, jurists went doubtless to augment his distaste for such labour, and his sense of its futility. To him. VIEWS ON JURISPRUDENCE. 59 in the meantime, the diversities of legislation as of custom, were an abundant field for his mature re- flections upon the uncertainty of human judgement. " There is nothing so extreme," he can declare, " that is not accepted in the practice of some nation or 5 other." And his conclusion of the matter is, that " les loix prennent leur authorite de la possession et de I'usage ; il est dangereux de les ramener a leur naissance : elles grossissent et s'annoblissent, en rou- lant, comme nos rivieres." 10 CHAPTER IV. MONTAIGNE AS MAGISTRATE. The changes which I'Hopital proposed to make in the legislature were, in his eyes, but subsidiary to an all-embracing reform in the administration of justice. The evil which he most regarded, in the 5 existing complexity of the law, was not the time wasted in its study, but the handle lent to the cor- ruption of magistrates and to the idle hairsplitting of pleaders. As Montaigne also notes, the licence of interpretation left more " questions for a friend " than 10 would a reasonable liberty of judgement. The abuse and sale of justice was indeed the crying evil of the time. The venality of offices introduced by Francis I. had brought about so rapidly the multiplication of posts, and of suits, 15 that the country could, not without reason, be styled a very "kingdom of litigation." The post of magi- • strate, a reward previously of merit, had become the natural purchase of any parent anxious to start his son in life. Pasquier mentions it as a signal merit in 20 the president Augustin de Thou that " whereas it was MONTAIGNE AS MAGISTRATE. 6 1 the custom of the wealthiest families of Paris to allow no leisure for their children to look about them (de se recognoistre), but to promote them, immediately on their return from the University, by money to a post, especially of judicature ; yet this worthy man 5 permitted neither this son, nor his second... to rise by this means, but rather by the steps of merit, which are based upon a long patience, and desired that the one and the other should go to the bar." The president, Augustin de Thou, father of that lo president de Thou whose life Pasquier is recording, belonged already to a bygone generation. By the time Montaigne had qualified for the magistracy, such scruples must have become still more rare. Even the oath, which was still exacted, that no money 15 had passed in the transaction, had become one of those pure formulas which the most truthful men seem able at all times to repeat without a strain upon the conscience. In the case of Montaigne it would seem that his father bought in 1554, not directly for 20 his son but for himself, a post as magistrate in the newly formed Cour-des-Aides at P6rigeux, and that then, called in the very same year to the mayoralty of Bordeaux, he at once resigned it to the young Michel. That the son would not yet have reached the 25 regulation age of twenty-three, presents no serious diffi- culty, since that rule was one frequently overlooked. But whether it was in 1554 or a little later that Montaigne was invested with the dignity of magis- trate, in any case he was one of that body transferred 30 wholesale to Bordeaux in 1557, to fo"""! there first a species of auxiliary court and later to be quite simply 62 MONTAIGNE. fused with the ' Parlement ' proper. His name figures second in the list of ' conseillers.' It figures too several years later, in certain disputes about prece- dence to which the fusion of the two courts gave rise. 5 The Bordeaux Parlement had resented sharply the erection of a Cour-des-Aides at Pdrigeux, diverting its ' custom,' as, under a system which made justice a commodity to sell, lawsuits actually were regarded. It resented again the intrusion of the P^rigeux mem- 10 bers into its own body, whether in the form of auxiliary court or of simple additional magistrates; and after futile attempts to gain redress from the king, it fell back upon petty annoyances to the new- comers — grudging them room to sit in, treating them IS as inferior in position to any magistrate elected, however recently, directly to Bordeaux. Montaigne has recorded, in the Essays, his sense of the incongruity of the whole system of justice, as then administered. " What is there more barbarous 2o than to see a nation where, as a legitimate practice, the charge of judging is sold, where judgements are paid for in plain ready money, and where justice is refused, legitimately, to whoever cannot pay for it " ; and again, "what thing can be stranger, than to see a 25 people obliged to the observance of laws, which it does not in the smallest understand ; tied in all its domestic matters, in its marriages, donations, testa- ments, in its selling and buying, to rules which it cannot know, they being neither written nor published 30 in its language, and whose interpretation and usage must of necessity be bought .? " And the manner in which he was received into the Bordeaux Parlement MONTAIGNE AS MAGISTRATE. 63 brought him more especially in contact with the petty and mercenary spirit of that body. And yet the Bordeaux Court of justice, for all the admixture of a trivial and mercenary element, was still far from the days when it could be said of the 5 members generally that "their only care was who should walk first in the procession." When Montaigne joined the Parlement, there were many magistrates of more than local reputation for learning or for public zeal. The Arnaud de Ferron, who was allied in 10 friendship with La Boetie, was well known for his work alike in jurisprudence and in 'belles lettres.' Even the president Roffignac, who represented the party of extreme bigotry and narrow-mindedness, had contributed his share towards the clearing up of 15 the laws, while his rival Lagebaston would seem to have been the counterpart, in a smaller sphere, of the Chancellor I'Hfipital, with his tolerance and public spirit. And Montaigne, though, as a member from P^rigeux, at a certain disadvantage, must have found 20 himself at Bordeaux in a very nest of friends and relatives. His uncle, Raymond Eyquem de Montaigne, was an old and respected magistrate there ; the La Chassaigne, whose daughter he afterwards married, was of an ancient magisterial family. Lagebaston 25 himself, he could claim as a friend of his and " of all members of the house of Eyquem," — a fact which transpires in the course of a dispute. And while the ordinary legislative duties were perhaps at Bordeaux, from the wide area and variety 30 of local customs coming under its jurisdiction, of more than common tedium or intricacy, the disordered 64 MONTAIGNE. State of the country lent at this juncture a quite special weight to the function of a magistrate. In 1 548, at a time when Montaigne was probably still attending classes at the College de Guyenne, S there had been already an outbreak at Bordeaux which clearly exposed the turbulent elements at work and was, in its brutal circumstance, only too faithful an epitome of the troubles to come. The revolt against the gabelle, or salt-tax, remained, through the 10 ensuing horrors of the civil wars, a stain upon the history of the town. The discontent was general throughout the province — it had its rise, it would seem, in that Saintonge which was also a birthplace of the Reformation — but came to a head only at 15 Bordeaux. There the authorities were quite unable to hold the populace in check. The revenue officer was atrociously butchered and the king's lieutenant, de Moneins, induced by La Chassaigne, then president of the Parlement, to face the mob, met with a like 20 fate. La Chassaigne himself was forced to accompany the rioters about the town, and gained at last a certain control over them only by apparent acquies- cence in their movements. The punishment that followed was even more disastrous to the town. The 25 Connetable de Montmorency, sent to quell the re- bellion, arrived when it was already over, but treated the town nevertheless with all the rigour of a con- queror. The humiliated inhabitants were compelled to dig up the hastily buried corpse of the lieutenant — 30 history says with their finger-nails ; — the bells which had rung to revolt were taken down ; the privileges of the city were curtailed ; for a time even the MONTAIGNE AS MAGISTRATE. 65 court of justice was suspended and its members — La Chassaigne in particular, who had involuntarily assisted in the riot — were subjected to trial at Toulouse. How deep the impression made upon the town, appears in the very exaggerations of a contemporary writer, who 5 reports Montmorency as entering, not by the gates, but by a breach effected in the walls. It appears too in the fact that the famous Contr'un of La Boetie was thought, by some at least of his contemporaries, to have had its origin in the indignation of the youthful 10 author at Montmorency's rigour. As late as 1556, the city was still agitating for the full recovery of its privileges, — the elder Montaigne travelling, in his capacity as mayor, to Paris in order to soften the heart of the king by his entreaties, and by a present is of the town's best wine. This revolt against the salt-tax, though to all appearances an isolated incident, and for all its purely secular cause, is yet, within its narrow focus, repre- sentative of what was to become, from the religious 20 differences, the general history of the province. The town of Bordeaux remained, perhaps from the salutary recollection of that incident, fairly within its duty during the civil wars, but the province that came under its jurisdiction was a very hotbed of dis- 25 affection, and the constant scene of punishment. The fate of De Moneins was rivalled by that of De Fumel at the hands of his Lutheran dependants ; the vengeance of Montmorency upon Bordeaux in 154s pales before the progress of Monluc in 1562-3,30 with his two familiar laquais, throughout Guyenne. It was indeed in closest ' connaissance de cause ' that L. M. 5 66 MONTAIGNE. Montaigne describes his home as "assis dans le mofau de tout le trouble des guerres civiles de France," — that district serving from first to last as a main platform of the civil wars. S Long before open hostilities broke out, the Bordeaux Parlement was concerned with the punish- ment and restraint of heresy. The Reformation had taken a very early hold in Guyenne, and could claim in Bordeaux, — though that town was never, like Agen, 10 one of its strongholds, — many of the more notable citizens as adherents. The Parlement itself was not exempt, while at the College de Guyenne several of the regents — Buchanan, Cordier, Budin — belonged openly to the reformed faith. It would even seem IS that the contagion had spread among the scholars. They were suspected so early as 1542 of sympathy with the young Aymon de la Voye, burned almost at the door of the college, and at that age sympathy with a victim is barely separable from party spirit for 20 a cause. Montaigne was a child then at the college, and may well have been moved with his school- fellows, — perhaps even, in that extreme youth, actually tempted for a moment by " the danger of the enter- prise." Later, as magistrate, he came into more 25 responsible connexion with these matters. The court ?it Bordeaux was, when he joined it, divided into a lenient party and an intolerant, the one centering round the first president Lagebaston, the other headed by the second, Roffignac. The case, graphically 30 narrated by De Thou, of the burning of heretics in 1556, shows clearly the divided judgement of the magistrates and the tension of spirits at the time. MONTAIGNE AS MAGISTRATE. 6"] Several heretics were burned that year — a certain Jerosme Casobone, Bearnais, is mentioned by name — so far as appears, without let or hindrance. But with Arnaud Monier and Jean de Caze, natives of Libourne, the affair did not pass so lightly. The youth, partly, s of the offenders awakened sympathy. The opinion of the judges was divided ; some were for pain of death ; others argued, more humanely, that it sufficed to send the accused for two months or longer to some monastery, where they could meditate upon, and lo perhaps renounce, their error. The comparative novelty of this immediate condemnation of heretics was urged — neither the Scriptures nor the Fathers warranted it — , and again that no strong measures should be taken until the general oecumenical council, 15 then sitting, should have pronounced upon all doubtful points. The opinion of the tolerant minority was however overridden ; and, at the prompting chiefly of Roffignac, the sentence of death, by strangling and burning, was pronounced. 20 The sentence was executed with the town-gates shut, and all precautions taken against a popular rising— of which there must have been some rumour; — and yet so great was the tension, that it needed but a clumsy accident on the part of the hangman to set 25 up a veritable panic. The ladder slipped as the noose was being adjusted, the hangman fell, the strangling was not effected, and Monier was burned alive, to the loud horror of the nearer spectators, not yet inured — as the whole of France was later — to such scenes. 30 There followed a general stampede as if the enemy had been in pursuit. " Even the archers and the 5—2 68 MONTAIGNE. other officers of justice deserted their posts to seek refuge in the neighbouring houses, imploring whoever they met to save their lives and give them shelter." This condemnation, which remains somewhat in- S explicable in the horror it excited, occurred the year before the Cour-des-Aides was moved from Perigeux to Bordeaux, so that Montaigne, though not actually present at the scene, must have heard it freely enough discussed. The scandal did not hinder the con- 10 demnation to a like sentence, in the following year, of at least one heretic — the preacher Philip Hamelin. From time to time the Parlement deputed members to visit, too, the more distant places under its juris- diction, or sometimes even single persons suspected 15 of heresy — Jules C^sar Scaliger receiving thus a domiciliary visit. The alarming proportions which heresy had assumed in the Saintonge, called in 1559 for the more elaborate remedy of " les grands jours," an assize which was distinguished, under the presidency 20 of Rofifignac, by great severity. And during the early years of Montaigne's office at Bordeaux the punish- ment of heretics continued, with alternating severity and leniency, according as the voice fell to tolerant or to bigoted members, according in some measure also 25 to the pressure of public events in France. Already in 1556 Henry II. had written to his Parlement at Bordeaux to urge a greater rigour against heretics. From the year 1559, matters assumed a graver aspect. The peace of Citeau Cambr^sis, 30 while it left the kings of France and Spain free to turn their thoughts to the rooting out of heresy in their respective kingdoms, brought back at the same r MONTAIGNE AS MAGISTRATE. 69 time to France much turbulent hot blood, for which the foreign wars had served as safety-valve, to swell now the little head of peaceful reform. The civil troubles date practically from this peace. Henry announced at once his home policy by the 5 attack upon his Paris Parlement, which ended in the impeachment of so many notable members and in the burning, finally, of Anne du Bourg. His death in that same year left the kingdom to the rule of a minor, and to the regency of Catherine of Medicis, with 10 the rival families of Guise and Bourbon contending for the place nearest to the throne. In close succession came the conspiracy of Amboise, where, round jealousy of the Guises, gathered all the national discontent — desire for reform, for freedom of religion, with, it was 15 rumoured, an element of democratic scheming ; — then the imprisonment of Cond6, the apparent triumph of the Guises. The death of Francis H. gave another revolution to the wheel ; there followed the release of Cond^, the discomfiture of the Guises, the ascendancy 20 for a time of I'Hopital and a peaceful policy. The brief interlude before the outbreak in grim earnest of the civil wars was occupied by the holding of assemblies and the attempt to enforce order by edicts, with the result, mainly, of giving the discordant 25 elements time and opportunity to range themselves, and of exposing the weakness of the executive. At the assembly of Fontainebleau (1560) Coligny spoke for the Protestants with a boldness that testified to his knowledge of forces at his back ; at the Etats- 30 Gen^raux of Orleans and Meaux, an amazing freedom was on all hands shown in laying bare abuses. But ■JO MONTAIGNE. the clear apprehension of abuses was unaccompanied by any adequate sense of a remedy or power to enforce one. The Etats-G6neraux might be ready with suggestions, might be bold to retail grievances, but S had no sanction or authority to enforce reform — so that, while they provided a legitimate voice to the general discontent, they did nothing towards obviating it. The attempt to smooth over the religious dif- ferences with the Colloquy of Poissy was still vainer, 10 serving only to accentuate the cleft between Catholics and Protestants, and to reveal divergences among the Protestants themselves. Meanwhile the favour shown by Catherine to the reformers, her apparent inclination to their doctrine, aroused the fears of even the more 15 moderate Catholics and detached the Connetable Montmorency from his ancient friendship with Coligny. In this exasperated state of spirits, it was inevitable that the edicts, whether that of July (1561), repressing heresy, or that of January (1562), embodying the 20 principles of a reasonable tolerance, should fail in their execution. The Protestants were already too strong, and too well organized, to submit to the severer law ; the milder encountered a tacit resistance from the very bodies whose business it was to enforce 25 it. The Parlement of Paris — strangely altered from the brave face it had shown to Henry II. — led the way in obstruction, declining, until roughly recalled to its duty by I'Hdpital, to register the January edict. The provinces reflected, with local variations, the 30 central current of events. At Bordeaux the Parlement had scandals and outrages to deal with, after the more passive offences. The registers record the MONTAIGNE AS MAGISTRATE. 7 1 defacing of images in the churches, the defihng of holy water, insults offered to the Holy Sacrament, a cross destroyed in the public place, — things slight enough in themselves, but serving, in the disturbed state of the country, to set on edge all the alarm and s irritation of the citizens. A number of letters, written in 1 560-1, demon- strate clearly enough the general disquiet. Sent, some by members of the Parlement to the Guises and to the king, some by the lieutenant-general, to De Burie, and others by the governor, De Lansac, to the king and queen-mother, they vary, according to the writer, in the representation of the danger. But they are all agreed as to the alarm experienced. And if not in the town itself, there was ample cause 15 for alarm in the news from the country round. As often as the fears of the Bordelais would spare him, De Burie went to now one, now another of the dis- affected places. He visited thus Marmande, taking with him two magistrates, — of whom Raymond 20 Eyquem de Montaigne, the Essayist's uncle, was one, — to assist him in doing justice. Thence it was that he wrote, in the January of 15.61, that the forces at his command were wholly inadequate to restore order. In the autumn of that same year things reached at 25 Marmande a climax, in an attack of the Huguenots upon the Franciscan monks. And just at this time the Parlement decided to report the disorders, as well to the king as to De Burie, sending the news to Paris by the medium of one of its members, " M. 30 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne," " s'en allant a la cour pour d'autres affaires." 72 MONTAIGNE. The veteran Blaise de Monluc had at this juncture rejoined the Court, which was at St Germain-en-Laye, after a brief visit to his home at Agen. He narrates in his Commeritaires how, in the course of the five 5 days that he was at the Court, there came news " that the Huguenots had risen at Marmande and had killed the monks of Saint Francis and burned the monastery ; suddenly other news of the massacre which the Catholics had executed at Cahors upon the 10 Huguenots, then that at Grenada near Toulouse. Then, afterwards, arrived the news of the death of Monsieur de Fumel, who was slaughtered very cruelly by his own dependants, who were Huguenots." The massacre at Grenada near Toulouse was attend- 15 ed by circumstances of singular atrocity. De Burie gives the closer details in his report ; and Montaigne had probably this incident in his mind when he made the comparison between his countrymen and the cannibals — to the advantage of the cannibals. But 20 what, more than all the rest, touched the queen- mother, was, so Monluc informs us, the murder of De Fumel, — a rising, not merely of Huguenots against a Catholic, but of retainers against their lord. It was this which determined her to send Monluc to 25 Guyenne, and it was with vengeance upon De Fumel's murderers that he began a progress to be marked by the bodies of Huguenots left hanging on the trees. He was still dealing out his rough punishment — only not sullied by the deliberate cruelties of Des Adrets 30 later among the Huguenots — , when the news that Conde had invested Orleans changed it into open warfare. MONTAIGNE AS MAGISTRATE. "Jl The mention of Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, opportunely travelling to the Court, in 1561, is one of the few allusions to him that have been traced in the judicial records. The rest are, for the most part, bare notices of absence. Montaigne would seem, 5 indeed, to have been but a lukewarm magistrate. The duties were uncongenial to him, and he lost no opportunity of deserting them for visits to that capital which had always his affections. Far remote from him was the pragmatical activity 10 of such a magistrate as he describes, keeping in check his self-gratulation, after the unravelling of a tangle of trivial law, with the murmured '^Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriani'.' It is more indicative of a real slackness, — ' lithernesse,' as Florio 15 has it, — in his character, that he should not have found an incentive to activity in the extra magisterial duties entailed by the religious and civil troubles. There was still doubtless more than enough un- ravelling of ancient laws, and futile brain-splitting 20 over minute and insignificant matters ; but in only too many instances the court dealt with matters of life and death. And in a body of such divided constituents, any member must have been able to make his influence felt in favour of tolerance or of 25 severity. Votes were at least counted, even if, as I'Hopital complained later, the virtue of the voter was not weighed. The rnagistrates had moreover an extended duty. It fell to them to provide, in great measure, for the security of the town, — even, on more 30 than one occasion, to patrol in person at the head of armed companies ; while, under the vacillating policy 74 MONTAIGNE. of the Valois, the Parlement acquired by its privilege of delaying the registration of an edict, as by its license in interpreting and applying it, a genuine legislative force. 5 Under such conditions, the office of magistrate, if it gave little opportunity for great distinction, yet provided at least a useful career in the public service. The complement to Montaigne as magistrate is given in his friend La Boetie. Montaigne might regret 10 later that distance from the centre of action had prevented the full display of his friend's virtue, but within the measure of his opportunity La Boetie comes down to posterity as the model citizen and magistrate. More diligent and exact than was 15 Montaigne in the fulfilment of the regular magisterial drudgery, he had won the confidence of the Parle- ment sufficiently to be entrusted with missions of a certain importance. In 1561 he was signalled out by De Burie to be his coadjutor in the delicate task of 20 restoring order in the Agenais, where the Huguenots had passed all bounds. "Fort docte et homme de bien," as De Burie describes him, he acquitted himself with an admirable firmness in the interests of law and order. The memoranda which he wrote upon 25 the working of the tolerant Edict of January have been unhappily lost ; but there is evidence enough without them of his constant and wise preoccupation with his country's troubles. They engaged his thoughts even as they filled the mind of I'Hdpital; and as 30 I'Hdpital died broken-hearted after the St Bartholo- mew, at the shipwreck of his country, so La Boetie died, at an earlier juncture, regretting the services MONTAIGNE AS MAGISTRATE. 75 that, with more years, he might have rendered to the commonwealth. Montaigne too is of opinion that the public service is the proper end of Hfe and action. But, for himself, he had neither the constraining sense of duty nor the 5 practical active impulse that persuade to the fulfilment of tedious and uncongenial work. The patient waiting upon opportunity that characterized his older and graver friend, was as remote from him as was the pettifogging activity of that other magistrate. 10 There can be no question but that he gave his voice, when called upon, in favour of tolerance and humanity. "When occasion has summoned me," he records, "to criminal sentences I have rather fallen short of justice.... The ordinary judgement is whetted 15 to punishment by horror of the misdeed ; that same cools mine down ; horror of the first murder makes me dread a second ; and the hideousness of the first cruelty makes me abhor all imitation." Above all he has in detestation the barbarous ingenuity of torture. 20 In an age when it was common enough for de- capitation to be preceded by dismemberment, for criminals to be whipped first and hanged afterwards, for their tongues to be pierced or torn out by the executioner, Montaigne writes emphatically, " As for 25 me, in justice itself, all that goes beyond simple death seems to me pure cruelty." The question by torture he condemns as well for its stupidity as its cruelty, — though here the psychologist in him searches out the little grain of reasonableness, in its working upon a 30 guilty conscience. But Montaigne's humanity, which leads him thus 76 MONTAIGNE. to inveigh against the whole brutal judicial machinery of his age, was even more an effect of nature than of judgement. He carried his softness so far as to be unable to attend unmoved at the execution of the 5 most righteous sentences — such attendance was custo- mary among the Bordeaux magistrates ; he could not, though a sportsman, endure the cry of a hare torn by his dogs, and he always restored their liberty to animals taken alive. This softness of nature, 10 closely allied to the fastidiousness about smells and unpleasant sights, which surprises the modern reader of the Essays, would doubtless urge him rather to the avoidance of painful duties than to the endeavour — which must have been too often futile— to give the 15 law a more lenient turn. Nor was his tolerance reinforced by any active sympathy with the Protestants, who were the most frequent, though by no means the only, victims of the law's severity. He recognised, with all the sober 20 section of the community, the need for reforming ecclesiastical abuses and for purging the church of its grosser superstitions. But all innovation that went beyond these aims at once outstripped his sympathy and appeared to him beside the mark. " Ceulx," he 25 writes, " qui ont essayd de r'adviser les moeurs du monde, de mon temps, par nouvelles opinions, re- forment les vices de I'apparence ; ceulx de I'essence, ils les laissent la, s'ils ne les augmentent : et I'aug- mentation y est a craindre ; on se sejourne volontiers 30 de tout aultre bienfaire, sur ces reformations externes, arbitraires, de moindre coust et de plus grand merite ; et satisfaict on a bon march6, par la, les aultres vices MONTAIGNE AS MAGISTRATE. TJ naturels, consubstantiels et intestins." The virtues of the reformers were indeed as little congenial to him as their vices. Their strictness of moral — passing over into straitlacedness — made no appeal to his laxer temperament ; their pedantry and assertiveness 5 vi^ere the failings peculiarly obnoxious to him. The intolerance shown towards them did not blind him either to their own intolerant capacity, nor their common attack upon the established order to their internal discords and points of disagreement. If he 10 thought it presumptuous to kill a man for his opinions, he was to the full as conscious of the arrogance involved in the subversion, for mere opinion's sake, of the public order. " Si me semble il, a le dire franche- ment, qu'il y a grand amour de soy et presumption, 15 d'estimer ses opinions jusques la que, pour les establir, il faille renverser une paix publicque, et introduire tant de maulx inevitables, et une si horrible corruption de moeurs que les guerres civiles apportent, et les mutations d'estat en chose de tel poids, et les in- 20 troduire en son pais propre." CHAPTER V. ACQUAINTANCE WITH COURT LIFE : FRIENDSHIP WITH LA BOETIE. In the very midst of a defence for his aloofness from affairs, Montaigne acknowledges that there were certain more congenial paths to public service and to personal advancement which, had fortune called him S to them in his youth, he would have followed, spite of all his precepts. He does not specify more closely; yet it may fairly be assumed that it was with hopes, perhaps not definitely formulated, of a career more to his mind, that he absented himself so often from 10 his magisterial duties, to haunt the Court at Paris. Fortune, however, did not offer him advancement, and his was not the nature to lay violent siege to her. He found meanwhile undoubted consolation, and food for the lighter side of his nature, in the easy 15 intercourse and gay life of that most voluptuous court of the Valois. This must have been the first of the three stages which the Essayist describes in his life, the period when something of uncertainty about ACQUAINTANCE WITH COURT LIFE. 79 his revenue made him the more lavish in his ex- penditure, when he borrowed without scruple from his friends, though scrupulous always to repay. He participated freely then in the pleasures of youth, took pleasure in fine clothing and found that it 5 became him, and pursued with zest the adventures of gallantry that were so much in vogue. Montaigne dwells in his old age with a certain self-complacency upon his youthful sufficiency and success in love-making. But he affirms too that he lo passed his youth with a measure of orderliness, " selon lui" and we may add, undoubtedly, according to the standard of his times. And always he kept his judgement sane and disengaged. For even in this " the most licentious season of his life," through 15 all his participation in the pleasures of youth, the Essayist's peculiar bias betrayed itself He was not indeed melancholic, but " songe-creux," touched already, not to sadness, but to a certain freedom, by the irony of things. When his companions thought 20 him drawn aside to digest a rebuff from his mistress, or to nurse his jealousy of a rival, he was in reality musing over the sudden death of a boon companion. The pomp of the court, the vanities and intrigues of the Parisian women, set him thinking on the poor 25 ends and trivial springs of human action. Standing about, as the custom was, among the crowd of courtiers, while the king sat alone at meals, Mon- taigne rather pitied the monarch's isolation than envied his state. And the power of endurance of 30 even his favourite Romans was cheapened by the recollection that a like endurance could be shown by 8o MONTAIGNE. women, for the mere purpose of enhancing their beauty. Who at Paris had not heard of the lady who let herself be skinned to improve her complexion? " Et Ten surnommoit on Madame I'Escorch^e." 5 Montaigne's acquaintance with the "agitation of courts" dates back, it would seem from references in the Essays, to the time of Henri II. ; we know him to have been at Bar-le-duc, in 1559, with the Court of Francis II. But the visit — whether con- 10 tinuous or not — from the year 1561 to the year 1563, to the Court of Charles IX., has the deeper interest 01 coinciding with one of the most critical moments in that most critical period of French history. Bringing news of fresh disorders in Guyenne, to the Court, in 15 the November of 1561, Montaigne must have reached St Germain-en-Laye shortly before the meeting of that assembly of deputies at which I'Hopital laid down the principles of civil toleration, and where he succeeded in passing his tolerant ' Edict of January.' 20 Montaigne had no official place in that assembly (the representatives for Bordeaux were Lagebaston, Arnaud de Perron, Lescure) but he must have heard the pros and cons discussed, and he perhaps laid there the seeds of his respect for I'Hdpital. He 25 would still be at Court at the time when the queen- mother's complacency towards the Protestants gave general uneasiness, when for a moment there seemed a possibility that France might become a Protestant country. There is evidence of his presence at Paris 30 in that summer of 1562, for on June the loth he obtained admission to the Paris Parlement, after taking the oath of orthodoxy then first exacted. He ACQUAINTANCE WITH COURT LIFE. 8 1 was witness therefore at Paris of all the disorders occasioned by the exercise of ' reformed ' ceremonies in the midst of a bigoted and fanatic populace. He witnessed, finally, the definite outbreak of the Civil Wars, must have seen the Duke of Guise enter Paris s after the massacre of Vassy, and heard the reports, that rapidly reached the Court, of the investiture of Orleans by the Protestants under Cond^ : of the successes now of one, now of the other, party : of the battle, decisive for a breathing-space, at Dreux. He lo seems to have felt, as did indeed La Boetie, some- thing of the popular enthusiasm for Francois de Guise ; he brings his contribution in one of his first essays to the much-vexed question of the battle of Dreux. In the March of 1563 he followed the Court 15 to Rouen, when that town was recaptured by the Catholics, and the young Charles IX. entered at the head of the besieging army. To this event there is, for once, a definite autobiographical reference in the Essays. Montaigne does not recount the grievous 20 three days' sack to which the town was put. Nor does he touch on the death there of the king of Navarre. But he notes the comments made on the occasion by some so-called 'savages,' enticed from the New World to see the wonders of the Old. 25 In the summer of 1563, Montaigne was again at Bordeaux, and engaged in his magisterial duties. We know it from the date he himself gives, in the letter describing La Boetie's death. On Monday the 9th of August, 1563, he sent, upon leaving 30 the Courts of Justice, to beg La Boetie to dine with him, and received in return the first news L. M. 6 82 MONTAIGNE. of his friend's illness. This year, his thirtieth, — which he marks as the turn of his vigour — saw the close of that too brief intercourse with a mind ' cast,' as he describes it, " in the antique mould." 5 The friendship of La Boetie and Montaigne is the most famous friendship of a period when famous friendships, in imitation of antiquity, were a good deal in fashion. The two appear together in the contemporary biographies and, greatly as the fame of lothe younger has now outstripped that of the older friend, La Boetie's name remains an inseparable pendant to the Essayist's. It is a pendant which materially helps out our judgement of him. Of La Boetie we know at once much more and much less 15 than of Montaigne. The thousand and one details that the Essayist gives of himself are lacking, but the self-revelation, so faithfully reported, of La Boetie's death-bed, outpasses these in emphasis and fulness. All that we know of him too is of a piece, and goes 20 to show a character at once stronger and more simple, a character at the same time mellowed by a rare grace and sweetness. Montaigne describes his friend's last illness and leave-takings. If we keep in mind that these last 25 words are of a man barely entering on his thirty-third year, overtaken by a casual malady — it was a sort of dysentery, one of the sicknesses lumped together then as the pestilence — in the full vigour of his manhood, and scarce breathed for public life, we may well assent 30 to Montaigne's claim that they witness to a mind "full of repose, assurance and tranquillity." Con- cealing from all save Montaigne — his "intime frere FRIENDSHIP WITH LA BOETIE. 83 et inviolable ami" — his sense of the fatal nature of his illness, La Boetie set his affairs in order with a quiet composure, and expressed, to his several friends and relatives, his last wishes and advice with the frankness authorized by the approach of death. He 5 shows himself admirable in every relation of life ; in the warmth of his gratitude to the uncle who had stood him in stead of a father, in his consideration for his wife — his 'semblance' as he called her, "for some ancient kinship that was between them — ," in 10 his discreet avoidance of all assumption of parental authority over Mile d'Arsac, his step-daughter. Above all the tactful graciousness of the man appears in his advice to de Beauregard, the brother of the Essayist, who had joined the party of the Reformation. "Mon- 15 sieur de Beauregard," he said to him, "I thank you greatly for the trouble you take for me. Would you wish me to discover to you something that I have on the mind to say to you.'' Whereupon when my brother" (Montaigne loquitur) "had given him the 20 assurance, he pursued thus: — I give you my faith that, of all those who have applied themselves to the reformation of the Church, there is not one whom I have ever thought to have so applied himself with better zeal than you, or with an affection more entire, 25 sincere and simple ; and I believe surely that only the vices of our prelates, which have without doubt need of a great correcting, and sundry imperfections which the course of time has brought into our Church, have moved you to it. I do not want, at this time, to 30 dissuade you from it; for neither do I willingly urge anybody to do whatsoever it may be against his 6—2 84 MONTAIGNE. conscience; but I do want to warn you that you should have regard to the good repute which the house you come of has acquired by a continuous concord — a house that I hold as dear as any in the world (God, 5 what a house, from which none have sprung save men of worth!) — that you should have regard to the will of your father, that good father to whom you owe so much, to your good uncle, to your brothers, — and should shun these extremes ; do not be so harsh and 10 violent; meet them half-way (accomodez vous a eulx), do not form band and body apart ; make common cause together. You see what ruin these dissentions have brought into the kingdom ; and I can answer for it they will bring much more and greater. And, 15 as you are good and sober, beware of bringing these incommodities into your family, lest you should lose it the fame and happiness it has enjoyed up to now. Take what I have said in good part, M. de Beauregard, and as a sure testimony of the friendship I bear you ; 20 for to this end I have abstained from saying it, until this moment ; and, peradventure, saying it to you in the state you see me in, you will attach more weight and authority to my words." "My brother," adds Montaigne, "thanked him very warmly." 25 The harder parting from life was reserved for Montaigne to witness. There were moments of physical weakness when it was the turn of the younger to sustain and cheer. The two friends faced here together the approach of death, for which they 30 seem to have prepared, half speculatively, half stoic- ally, in their intercourse. Montaigne, too moved to respond at once to La Boetie's direct address to FRIENDSHIP WITH LA BOETIE. 85 him and to his bequest of Hbrary and books to be " fivqfioa-vvov sui sodalis" himself forgot, later, all personal considerations in his concern for his friend's honour, in his desire that La Boetie's courage should endure without flagging through the last enterprise 5 of a brave death. In his friendship with La Boetie, Montaigne rises for once above the 'happy mean,' which serves him as everyday standard, and touches the high places of humanity. By La Boetie's bedside there is no more 10 question of indulging the temper which ' shuns a melancholy complexion like the plague' and dreads ■■ the anguish of the sight of others' anguish.' " I am more unwilling," he tells us, " to visit the sick duty doth engage me unto, than those to whom I am little 15 beholden and regard least"; but, when relating how La Boetie, "knowing his complexion, begged him to be with him only piecemeal, though as often as he could, and not continuously, because his illness was a little contagious and disagreeable and melancholy withal " 20 —Montaigne adds with grave simplicity, "Je ne I'abandonnay plus." And it was to Montaigne that La Boetie looked for the last and nearest ofifices of affection, that he entrusted the consolation and forti- fying of his wife ; to Montaigne, that " had he felt 25 fear, he would have looked to have it removed." The strength latent under Montaigne's fastidious delicateness comes to the surface in this account, pre- fixed to La Boetie's ' literary remains,' of his friend's sickness and death — an account which betrays, in 30 its grave fidelity of record, both self-restraint and self-forgetfulness ; the essay which celebrates their 86 MONTAIGNE. friendship breathes, through its sustained and simple eloquence, a romance and self-abandonment singularly- impressive in their setting of common-sense sobriety. " We sought each other," he says, " before we had seen 5 one another, and by the reports we heard the one of the other, which wrought a greater force in our affection, than the reason of the reports may well bear out ; I think by some decree of heaven. We embraced each other by our names ; and at our first meeting, which 10 was by chance at a great feast and meeting of the town, we were so taken up, so at home and beholden between ourselves, that from thenceforward, nothing was so near unto us, as one unto the other It is I wot not what quintessence, of all this admixture,'' (of IS the several considerations and grounds of friendship) " which having seized all my will, induced the same to plunge and lose itself in his ; which likewise having seized all his will, induced it to plunge and lose itself in mine, with a mutual greed, and with a like con- 20 currence." And this miracle was worked in no mere enthusiastic boys, but in grown men and magistrates — La Boetie the senior by two and a half years. For which very reason, "having so short a time to continue and having begun so late," they dispensed with the 25 preliminaries and cautious testing of the ground, good usually in friendship, and let this fervour of their first acquaintance solidify at once into a mutual confidence and trust — ' passing the love of brothers.' By the nam.e of brother they addressed one another, 30 failing a term to embrace the full measure of their sentiment. In this friendship alone, Montaigne, content to FRIENDSHIP WITH LA BOETIE. 8/ admire and not to emulate the heroic virtue of the ancients, feels he has outstripped antiquity. " For even the discourses which antiquity hath left us on this subject, seem to me forceless in respect of the feeling I have of it ; and, in this point, the real effects 5 surpass even the precepts of philosophy For, truly, if I compare all the rest of my life unto the four years I so happily enjoyed the sweet company and society of that person, it is nought but a vapour, nought but a dark and irksome night." 10 The predisposition of spirit was helped, on Mon- taigne's side, by the reading of the Servitude Volon- taire, or Contr'un, that youthful effort of rhetoric to which chance brought afterwards so singular a destiny, and, one is tempted to add, so exaggerated 15 a fame. Read in the same impersonal spirit with which it was written — one must accept the statement of Montaigne — it is easily comprehensible that its noble sentiment, together with its literary qualities, should have secured the work a high place among 20 the innumerable ' essays ' — imitations for the most part, in verse or prose, of the ancients — which it was the fashion to pass from hand to hand. As a work of youthful rhetoric the Contr'un is full of promise ; as an early endeavour to treat a sustained 25 subject in pure and polished French, it is a contri- bution to literature. But it is not for a moment to be reckoned as a serious effort of thought. There is not the remotest inkling of the social or political laws, whose obscure recognition makes the contemporary 30 Bodin so interesting a writer. The argument is of an infantine naivete : the very sentiment remains 88 MONTAIGNE. among the commonplaces of rhetoric. And there is, as critics have pointed out, an absolute lack of clima?i, of logical conclusion. In place of the rank anarchy to which the reasoning properly tends, 5 there is substituted a weakly recommendation to monarchs to be humane, — while the French mon- archy is specially exempted from all reproach. Without a question, the subjection of the many to the one was to La Boetie, as to Montaigne, 10 only one of those paradoxes of the social order which — though an excellent occasion for the exercise of ingenuity — no more prevented the acceptance of that order, than the many paradoxes of nature pre- vented the frank acquiescence in her universal order. IS In abstract theory La Boetie preferred a republic to a monarchy, "would have sooner been born at Venice than at Sarlat," but "he had supremely impressed upon his soul another maxim — to obey and submit religiously to the laws under which he was born. 20 Never was there a better citizen, nor one more affectioned to the tranquillity of his country, nor more opposed to the disturbances and innovations of his times ; rather would he have employed his capacity to extinguish them, than to provide them 25 with fresh fuel ; he had a mind cut after the pattern of centuries other than the present." The conclusion that La Boetie did not draw was drawn, however, for him by more seditious spirits. The Contr'un, written with such simplicity of good 30 intention, was turned later into an instrument of party warfare. In the Reveille-matin des Francois, one of the earliest expressions of that fury of revolt roused FRIENDSHIP WITH LA BOETIE. 89 by the massacre of St Bartholomew, the Contrun acquires an application pointed enough. It acquires too, a new eloquence. The dormant force of time- worn platitudes revived at that outrage upon the fundamental decencies of human intercourse. " But 5 I protest indeed," so the anonymous writer — Eusebe Philadelphe, cosmopolite, by pseudonym — introduces the passage, " that I will not speak of it as the Huguenots speak, they are too mild and too servile ; I will speak of it roundly like a genuine and native 10 Frenchman, and as a man may speak of matters subject to his judgement, yea, to the common sense of all men ; so that all our Catholics, our compatriots, and good neighbours, and all the remainder of the French that are treated worse than brute beasts, may 15 be roused for once to recognize their wretchedness, and to take council all together how to remedy their misfortunes. To say sooth, my comrade, it is a strange thing...," — and so full into the swing of the Contf'un. 20 This diversion to party purposes, though it has undoubtedly aided, by the adventitious fire and force which it lent to the treatise. La Boetie's literary renown, came very malapropos in the eyes of Montaigne, who was more concerned for his friend's 25 repute as a citizen and subject. The untimely publication of the Contt'tm, in the Reveille-matin, diverted him from his intention of printing it him- self; he had already written his exordium, which puts so different a- colour upon the matter, — "Oions3o un peu parler ce garson de dixhuict ans." The same fear that his friend would be misjudged, or perhaps that 90 MONTAIGNE. his moderate views could serve no useful purpose in the aggravated state of the public evil, led him to suppress the report upon the Edict of January. In compensation, he gathered together, and published, 5 every scrap of La Boetie's verse, whether French or Latin, that could be recovered, "sans choix et sans triage," together with his few prose translations, the Mesnagerie of Xenophon, the Regies de Mariage of Plutarch. 10 La Boetie had added, as Montaigne tells us, to his natural parts by skill and industry ; and he was, as a fact, a man of general culture, according to the best culture of the day. His philological knowledge, if not profound, was at least accurate and solid. He IS had shared with the elder magistrate, Arnaud de Ferron, the task of translating into Latin the 'Ejow- TiKO'i of Plutarch, and his notes and emendations are said to show a genuine, if not brilliant, scholarship. His French translations bear a like stamp of sober 20 scholarship, and, though without the verve and force that makes translation, in the hands of Amyot, itself creative, they are on a sustained level of ease and elegance. His verses again, if they barely entitle him to the name of poet, if Montaigne let his affection 25 for once mislead his judgement in the high rank he assigns to them, are at least of a merit far above the mass of occasional verses which the world then took so seriously. And — supreme virtue in that age, admirable trait in the eyes of Montaigne, — those 30 creditable verses and scholarly translations were neither written with solemnity, nor preserved with care. " So fast as each sally came into his head, he FRIENDSHIP WITH LA BOETIE. 9 1 discharged it," Montaigne relates, "upon the first paper that came to hand, without farther care for its preservation," — with the consequence that a number of his earlier verses were irretrievably lost. And so far from aiming at publicity, there was nothing of his 5 "that he would have hoped to bring to light, nor that he even thought worthy of bearing his name in public." It was due only to his early decease, and to Montaigne's pious care, that his purely literary works were printed ; while his contributions to 10 scholarship were merged in a translation whose credit went to De Ferron. But yet La Boetie's scholarship and his poetic turn, for all that he subordinated both to the public life which he esteemed his proper end, brought 15 him into relations with the contemporary world of letters ; — with the learned republic, over which Jules- Cesar Scaliger presided, on the one hand ; with the new school of poets, which looked to Ronsard as its prophet, on the other. Made known to Jules-C&ar 20 by a mutual friend, we find him exchanging verses with the autocrat, dexterously passing off an exaggerated compliment. With the Pleiad he was connected through friendship with Balf, and whether he had or not a personal acquaintance with Ronsard, he 25 partook at least of the full enthusiasm for the master. Staid mentor as he could show himself on occasion to Montaigne, he defends the love-poems of Ronsard — for all their looseness — against the puritan scruples of a fellow-magistrate, who would have had 30 the poet use his gifts rather in the service of the Faith. 92 MONTAIGNE. In his literary, as in his magisterial activity, La Boetie is a complementary figure to Montaigne. Sharing in the best culture of the day, but not in the least imbued with the current pedantry, he is an 5 admirable product of the literary revival. Montaigne, as free from pedantry, rejected, with the bad, also the good in contemporary discipline. His knowledge of the classics has no scholarly flavour. Greek, which called for his maturer effort, he was content never to 10 command : Latin, made by external care into his mother-tongue, was never more to him than a medium for reaching the contents of the Roman authors. Even his love of those authors was nourished by no diligent study, but by truant reading 15 in his school-days, in after life by the desultory turning over of his books. So far he was amenable to current usage as to have tried his hand at Latin verses — never it seems at French — 7 ; but he abandoned the attempt in disgust at a trick of easy imitativeness, 20 which the critics of the day would have rather found a virtue. And in consequence, partly, of this in- difference to philological research, so frequent an occasion then of epistolary intercourse, and of this critical standard for even occasional verse, Montaigne 25 had — so far as can be traced — no place at all in that republic of letters which gave La Boetie a cordial welcome. In his old age, after his essays had con- strained recognition by their popularity, Lipsius might hail him in hyperbolic praise as the "eighth 30 sage," the ' Thales of France ' ; but when the Essays] first appeared, the scholars seem to have noticed them,' only to point out inaccuracies in names or in citations. FRIENDSHIP WITH LA BOETIE. 93 His good friend, Pasquier, who writes so warmly of him after his death, was free enough to criticise the Gasconisms in the Essays when he met their author so late even as the Etats de Blois of 1588, and in all his voluminous correspondence on the topics, literary and 5 other, of the day, he never once addresses himself to Montaigne. The letters of the younger Scaliger come very near him, embracing so small a philologist as his now-forgotten brother-in-law, the Geoffrey de la Chassaigne who had translated Seneca. But the 10 Essays were outside the great scholar's range, and Scaliger could dismiss Montaigne contemptuously, as an " hardi ignorant." " What intercourse Montaigne, until his old age, had with scholars or men of letters — the genuses 15 were not then sharply differentiated — seems to have been accidental and in other than their literary ^character. With Pasquier, his acquaintance would be primarily with the magistrate. Amyot, he knew while following with the court to Rouen ; Buchanan 20 had been his teacher ; Jacques Peletier, who stayed with him, was brought to Bordeaux, and probably into relations with Montaigne, as school-master and not as author. He was acquainted with Turnebus, and appreciated him. But the ground of their inter- 25 course lay in the latter's power of setting aside his learning, and proving himself as shrewd a judge in practical matters as on points of scholarship. " II y veoyoit si clair, d'une apprehension si prompte, d'un jugement si sain, qu'il sembloit qu'il n'eust 30 jamais faict aultre mestier que la guerre et affaires d'estat." 94 MONTAIGNE. " Je suis moins faiseur de livres, que de nulle autre besongne," asserts the Essayist of himself. It seems at least indisputable, that, throughout this earlier part of his career, he was of any profession rather than 5 the literary, and, in the eyes of his contemporaries, : without the pretensions even of an amateur. CHAPTER VI. YEARS (1563 — 1571) FROM LA BOETIE'S DEATH TO RETIREMENT. There is, throughout the Essays, a recurrent deeper strain which testifies to the influence of La Boetie upon the Essayist, to something in the Essayist which could respond to La Boetie's graver temperament. His meditations in particular upon 5 death, although from youth he had been prone to them, and although his resolve to divest that uni- versal enemy of the strangeness, which is half its terror, was one very proper to his humour, took on, from the recollection, we may well suppose, of La 10 Boetie's brave end, an heroic tone that rises in several passages to eloquence. And the memory of his friend remained with Montaigne all his life, making other friendships seem little worth, casting him twenty years after into 'very painful revery.' 15 Yet it is characteristic, if of all poor human nature, more particularly of Montaigne's proper tem- perament — better at a heat than in endurance, 96 MONTAIGNE. impatient of all restraint and check, — that the im- mediate consolation which he sought was not in philosophic precept, but in diversion of the mind. It would seem that so too, by diverting her mind, he 5 fulfilled his trust of consoling La Boetie's widow, after trying first, without success, the ordinary argu- j ments of comfort. For himself, he changed the ! colour of his emotions by falling in love. He does i not state with whom, but, if he was true to his views ! 10 on the inappropriateness of love in marriage, it was not with the lady he shortly after wedded. Whether with or without love, marriage, with its ties and obligations, was wholly alien to his natural humour. "Of my own free motion," he avers, "I would not have 15 married Wisdom herself, had she wanted me." But in this, as generally in the conduct of life, he let himself be guided by custom and the common humour. In 1565 — his thirty-third year — he married Fran9oise de la Chassaigne, the daughter of a fellow-magistrate. 20 Montaigne speaks little, in the Essays, of his wife. His views upon matrimony are prosaic, his opinion of ' the sex ' a poor one. Nevertheless, he would seem, in this as in other matters, to have been better in his practice of life than in his theory. His very un- 25 readiness to marry must be attributed in part to his love of honest dealing, that would not permit him to marry " sans espouser," that made him regard the step more seriously than most of his contemporaries. He was, as a fact, more faithful in his married life " than 30 he had either promised or hoped " ; he was certainly, — if his warm letter to his wife after their first child's death, if his instinctive care for her comfort, if, finally, FROM LA BOETIE'S DEATH TO RETIREMENT. 97 his widow's pious regard for his memory, may be taken as evidence, — a kind and considerate husband. Frangoise de la Chassaigne was, for her part, an excellent wife. She was not apparently a woman of intellectual power. There is no evidence that she 5 took any interest in the Essays. But when her husband left home for an absence of nearly two years, he found his property and household, owing to her care, in admirable order, — and, even when he was present in person, there is little doubt that her 10 practical energies supplemented to good effect his laxer supervision. Mademoiselle de Montaigne, as custom entitled her, belonged to one of the oldest magisterial families in Bordeaux. It was her grandfather, Geoffrey de la 15 Chassaigne, who had been so unhappily implicated in the revolt of 1 548 ; and whose re-instalment in a presidency could be opposed upon the ground of the great number of his relatives in the Parlement. By his marriage Montaigne was thus more than ever 20 linked with the Bordeaux magistracy. He does not, for that, seem to have attended any the more diligently to his duties. For seven years after La Boetie's death he remained a magistrate, but, while his presence or absence is occasionally noted, the only 25 record of his activity is the incidental mention of him, already quoted, in the affair between Descars and Lagebaston, which took place in the autumn following La Boetie's death. The events of those seven years were stirring 30 enough. There was indeed, from the close of the 'first troubles' by the peace of Amboise, in 1563, to L. M. 7 98 MONTAIGNE. the outbreak of the 'second' in 1567, a suspense of actual civil war. But there was no pause given to local quarrels and reprisals. The Catholics were exasperated by the sight of demohshed images, of 5 churches and convents razed or turned to other uses, by the arrogance, too, of the reformers in all places where they had acquired ascendancy. The Pro- testants, on their part, were more harassed by the peace than by the war. The Catholic party still 10 attacked and persecuted them. At Bordeaux there was a veritable cabal, led and instigated by the great family of De Foix, and in which "la pltlpart des grands" — Descars among the number — were said to be implicated. Troops were levied and, under pre- 15 text that the edicts were infringed, and that several Catholics had been treacherously slaughtered, a species of war was declared against the Protestants. The mischief was checked at the outset by a timely warning, given to the king by the premier president, 20 Lagebaston, who was aware perhaps of some special enmity to himself covered by this design. Montaigne, though a friend of Descars, and united in friendship with the noble family of De Foix, was far too much ' enemy to all cabal ' to have viewed 25 these designs with any favour. Nor was his the spirit to have been persuaded or intimidated from the exercise of an equal justice. But the extent to which many of his fellow magistrates were at this time moved by considerations either of fear or favour, 30 appears from the speech — the reprimand — which I'Hopital addressed in the following year (1565) to the Parlement. " You are timid too and fearful," he FROM LA BOETIE'S DEATH TO RETIREMENT. 99 admonishes them, after rebuking their factiousness and the liberties they take in interpreting the edicts, " for when I asked why such and such things were not done, I was answered — and not by one amongst you, but by five or six — we dared not do them. And 5 who is there could do violence to you, and the king not shelter you ? Why should the king's lieutenants be feared, or the powerful nobles of the district ? " The occasion of this address was the visit of the young king, the queen-mother and the Court, to 10 Bordeaux in the course of the royal progress of the year 1554 — S, undertaken for the purpose of at once inspecting and pacifying the kingdom. They were received at Bordeaux with particular pomp, a pro- cession of masques, representing all known nations — 15 the cannibals, of course, among them, — doing homage to the king. A petition from the Protestants, which the king had received with favour in the previous year, but which the Parlement had declined to ratify, was now, in compliment to the king, admitted, — 20 though with a change, calculated to diminish its authority, in the usual forms. From Bordeaux the Court passed to Bayonne, where, amid revelling and feasting, the queen-mother listened to Ronsard's flattering tale of the country 25 after her passage : " Morts sont ces mots, Papaux at Huguenots ! Le prestre vit en tranquille repos, Le vieil soldat se tient a son mesnage, L'artisan chante en faisant son ouvrage, 30 Les marchez sont frequentez des marchands, Las laboureurs sans peur sement les champs, 7—2 100 MONTAIGNE. Le pasteur saute auprfes d'une fontaine, Le marrinier par la mer se promeine Sans craindre rien : car par terre et par mer Vous avez peu toute chose calmer." 5 And at the same time she planned, so it was said, with the due d'Albe a general extermination of heretics, which d'Albe sought at once to realize in the Netherlands, but for which Catherine found no fitting opportunity until the St Bartholomew, seven years 10 later. Meanwhile the Protestant forces were recuperated and their patience was exhausted. In 1567 the ' second troubles ' began, to be followed, with so brief interludes and so vain semblances of intervening 15 peace, by the 'third' and 'fourth,' as to form prac- tically a continuous civil war. Montaigne himself, narrating an incident that went near to costing him his life, cannot remember if it took place in the second troubles or the third. The incident, told to 20 show the easy approaches of death, illustrates too the extreme disorder of the country. He was close to his home, having ridden out ill-mounted and slightly attended, with but little thought of danger, when, iri some sudden skirmish, the "little man on the little 25 horse " was overthrown, not by an assailant, but through the awkward zeal of one of his own servants on a heavy and unruly charger. He was picked up insensible and carried home — to the family chateau, presumably, whether he was already or not the 30 owner. The chateau of Montaigne was indeed at this time more than ever in the very thick of the fighting. FROM LA BOETIE'S DEATH TO RETIREMENT. 10 1 Bergerac, the nearest town, served for centre whence the local hero on the Protestant side, Clermond de Piles, ravaged the P^rigord, in revenge for the previous discomfiture of De Mouvans in that same locality. At the same time detachments of Monluc's infantry were s at Sainte Foy and Libourne; the royalist troops under Montpensier had made Perigueux their head- quarters. The Saintonge, after sustaining one of Monluc's campaigns, became subject to De Piles ; — its stronghold, La Rochelle, remaining to the end lo the great Protestant fortress. The battle of Jarnac (1569) which, with the death of Conde, turned again the current of events, was fought in Montaigne's near neighbourhood, — as, twenty years later, that of Coutras. And although Bordeaux itself enjoyed a 15 singular immunity from protestant attack, Blaye on the Garonne, which served it in a manner as a port, was taken by the Huguenot Pardaillan, and sundry of the Bordeaux magistrates, — La Chassaigne, Mon- taigne's father-in-law among the number, — were 20 captured and held there in hostage. The terror into which this seizure of Blaye cast the Parlement is reported by Monluc, to whom they sent for protection, and who, in return, exhorted all able- bodied magistrates to arm and prepare to defend 25 the town. The lively interest with which Montaigne followed the events — both main and local — of this time, is reilected in the Essays. A number of his illustrations are taken from these second, third and fourth troubles. 30 The death of the aged Montmorency, at the battle of St Denis in 1 567, was, with the conduct of La Noue, I02 MONTAIGNE. the "most notable matter" of his day. The taking of Mussidan, and the massacre, contrary to engagement, of the garrison, is the occasion of the essay L'Heure des parlements, dangereuse. The dilemma of the S Protestants, who, having claimed their success at La Rocheabeille as evidence of the divine favour, were reduced, after Moncontour and Jarnac, to fall back on the notion of fatherly chastisement, aptly illustrates the thesis Qiiil fault sobretnent se tnesler de juger des 10 ordonnances divines. The error of the royalists after Moncontour opens the essay De l' incertitude de nostre jugement. Still a magistrate, Montaigne could scarcely have taken any active part in the hostilities, save in such IS incidental self-defence as the disorders rendered necessary, and perhaps in that preparation for attack which Monluc enjoined upon the Parlement. Such activity as we can trace was of a different kind. Private affairs, in the first place, occupied him. In 20 the June of 1568, during the 'petite paix' which, as Monluc says aptly, was a truce rather than a peace, his father died, leaving him, as eldest son, heir to the property of Montaigne and head of a numerous family. The settlement and division of a large 25 property among the several children must have entailed formalities enough. A deed of August 2nd, 1568, shows the younger sons formally renouncing all claims upon the family estate proper, and receiving in exchange their several smaller properties — Beaure- 30 gard. La Brousse, and some possessions in the Isle of Macau. Three of the children, two daughters and the son who was afterwards invested with the name FROM LA BOETIE'S DEATH TO RETIREMENT. I03 and estate of Mattecoulon, were so young — the boy indeed but eight — as to be left in ward to Michel, jointly with his mother, uncle, and brother next in age. His mother — who lived to an extreme old age, and survived him — retained too the right of residence 5 at the family chdteau, while renouncing all share in its control and management. Montaigne was thus, although as yet without children of his own, already provided with a family and its attendant cares. He busied himself, too, in lo executing a last wish of his father's, which brought him for the iirst time, and in a manner singular enough, upon the field of literature. Pierre Eyquem had received many years previously, " at a time when the heresies of Luther were only beginning to spread" 15 in France, the present of a little work, part theolo- gical, part metaphysical — the Theologia Naturalis of Remond Sebond. This work, given to him, after a visit, by the famous Latinist Pierre Bunel of Toulouse, was in a Latin so mixed with Spanish and Italian 20 terminations that the donor thought his host's ac- quaintance with those languages would enable him to read it, even if his Latin failed. But whether Pierre Eyquem had never deciphered the work, or whether, having read it, he wished to re-read it with 25 more ease, so it was that, chancing upon the book "some few days before his death," he begged his son Michel to put it for him into French. Montaigne "could refuse nothing to the best father that ever was," and though the task was " one strange to him," 30 he executed it — if his account is to be. accepted literally — with a quite remarkable speed. For his I04 ' MONTAIGNE. father, who made the request " only a few days before his death," was yet able to read and approve and ordain that the translation should be published. It was printed, accordingly, the following year in Paris. S If the task of translating was one strange to Montaigne, far stranger was the chance tjiat selected this Theologia Naturalis to make his literary d^but, — as indeed it is strange enough that the work sh'ould have been ever thought, as was the case, a possible 10 weapon against the encroaching Lutheranism. A sort of abstract, it appears, of St Thomas Aquinas — one of a not uncommon kind of theological summary — the Theologia Naturalis is intended, not at all as a substitute for revealed religion, but to be comple- 15 mentary to it, as the book of nature is complementary to the book of Holy Scripture. The argument is largely metaphysical, plays with the terms being and non-being, discusses the several kinds of causes, deduces unity of creator from unity of order, and 20 brings indeed into a narrow compass, and in close company with the most puerile fancies, a number of the eternal metaphysical concepts. But " les belles imaginations " of Remond Sebond, and his argument, with its pell-mell of metaphysical 25 notions, from the order of nature to the whole divine order of the universe, are far enough from that hold upon reality which makes the metaphysical systems of the great masters — of Spinoza or of Leibniz — into vast imaginative stretches of actual science. And — 30 what for pur purpose is of more note, — the conception which he draws from, or rather perhaps fits on to, nature, is one which is of all conceptions the most FROM LA BOETIE'S DEATH TO RETIREMENT. 105 opposed to Montaigne's habits of mind and thought. Remond Sebond conceives nature as an ordered hierarchy, — visible nature as composed of four steps, four orders, of which man, by virtue of his free-will, is the chief. With man diversity (which is to be 5 found, though in lessening degree, within each of the three lower orders), wholly ceases ; all things in the world are made for the commodity of man ; " Nature humaine vaut beaucoup"; — it was surely a singular irony that set Montaigne, the depreciator par ex- 10 cellence of humanity, whose humour was to note incessantly the vanity of events and the diversity of motive in human action, that set him to translate a system of which these are some of the essential postulates. 15 It is little matter for surprise if, in the Apology, which, rather than the translation, has kept alive the name of Remond Sebond, Montaigne has the air of revenging himself for a by-gone tedium, by wholesale destruction of his own client's arguments. Yet there 20 is probably little, if any, spice of malice. Remond Sebond having served the occasion, Montaigne pursues in the Apology his own natural course, with even more than wonted freedom of rein, and is rather entirely disregardful of Remond's fate than bent wilfully on 25 overturning him. His ostensible conclusion is, after all, the same. The book of nature may be read in many ways, and to those who bring already faith to the reading, one way leads as well as another to the dogmas of the church. Remond Sebond could deduce 30 the authority of the pope, and the existence of God, from the ordered hierarchy he saw in nature, and I06 MONTAIGNE. from the supremacy of man ; Montaigne's light inconsequence — as later Pascal's fervour — could find an argument for faith, in the incompetence of reason, in the rudderless tossing of humanity, in the trackless S diversity of nature. With whatever mental commentary or reserve of judgement he accompanied it, Montaigne executed his task with abundant gravity. He prefixed to the translation a dedicatory letter to his father, dating it, lo not from when he wrote it, but from the actual day (June 1 8, 1568) of his father's death. More careful to express his sentiment of filial piety than to avoid discrepancy of statement, he ignores, while thus dating, the opening of the letter, " Suyvant la charge 15 que vous me donnastes I'annee passee..." Nor do the time and place of dating — from Paris — coincide, for Montaigne was surely not in Paris at the actual time of his father's death. He may very well have been there when the translation actually appeared — 20 at the beginning of the following year, — though he did not see it through the press to the satisfactory elimination of errors. He was there certainly a year and a half later, when, having carried out his father's last wishes, 25 having disembarrassed himself too of the magistracy, he attended to the publication of La Boetie's poems and translations. With this purpose in hand, Mon- taigne was in Paris for several months, perhaps for the whole autumn and winter of 1570-1. The stay 30 would seem to have been somewhat of a fixing-point in his career. He had inherited his property in 1568; had quitted the magistracy by the summer of 1570, FROM LA BOETIE'S DEATH TO RETIREMENT. I07 when his successor, Florimond de Remond, was ap- pointed. But the tablet which marks his retirement to his chiteau, and to the arms of the Muses, dates only from 1571. It thus commemorates more prob- ably a ' psychological moment ' than an actual event ; 5 and the brief intervening visit to the capital may be taken as finally changing his youthful readiness for more congenial public service, into the definite back- wardness of his later years. Montaigne, reviewing, half ironically, his capa- 10 bilities for the public service, declares himself cut out only for the part of ' candid servant ' to his prince. The part was one he could have had no thought of acting to Charles IX., — " nostre pauvre feu roi," as he alludes to him later. And the times, at this particu- 15 lar juncture, were singularly unpropitious, — offering less and less scope to moderate men. Henri de Mesmes was negotiating a peace, it is -true, in this very year, but it required no great political insight to see that this peace — ' boiteuse et malassise ' — would 20 be of no long endurance. The State — as Montaigne writes to his wife — was not yet done with the troubles brought by innovation, and he declares that he him- self renounces in everything the side of novelty. All the signs pointed to further aggravation of the dis- 25 orders. The Guises were in the height of favour; the Protestants too powerful to submit quietly to the strong hand. L'Hopital was already in retirement, without a vestige of political influence. And yet it is to I'Hopital that Montaigne ad- 30 dresses La Boetie's Latin verses; and this, not in virtue of the author's respect alone, but also of his I08 MONTAIGNE. I own (Montaigne's) admiration for the great qualities I of that upright statesman. " Moreover, Monsieur," he writes at the close of a long letter, "to kill two birds with one stone, this little gift may serve also, S by your leave, to bear witness to the respect and reverence I have for your capacity, and for the notable qualities that are native to you. For as to the accidental and foreign, it is not my habit to take them in account." This letter to I'Hdpital expressive 10 of respect, together with that to his wife declaring against innovation, show clearly Montaigne's poli- tical sympathies. He must be reckoned among those ] moderate men who, while faithful to the established order and religion, were yet disposed to tolerance, 15 and deeply averse to civil war. Only later, when legitimacy and liberality met in the person of Henry IV., and only after long habit had confirmed the Essayist in his aloofness from public affairs, were these so-called 'politiques' to acquire political 20 influence. At the present time, though the term 'politique' was already used to cast opprobrium upon the lukewarm adherents of either side, there was no possible leader, or centre of action, to bind these neutrals into a third party. 25 It must be borne in mind how essentially this civil warfare was a party conflict. Never in France was there, as later in the English civil wars, that clear-cut strife between the 'public reason of a parliament' and the caprices of a king. The Etats- 30 GMraux were called indeed more than once in the course of the long struggle, but only as an extreme remedy and to be, (so far as not wholly futile), an FROM LA BOETIE'S DEATH TO RETIREMENT. 109 instrument in the hands of the party strongest at the moment. The contention was between rival religions in part, far more seriously between rival claimants for political power. When the drama concentrated in the personages of the younger Guise and of Henry 5 of Navarre, the finally imposing representatives of their rival families, Montaigne, who played some undefined part in negotiating between the two, per- fectly recognised that, with the one as with the other, religion was a mere word of party. Nor was it much lo more than weakness, that made tolerance and re- ligious freedom the watchword of the Protestants. There were instances in the course of the disorders, where the Protestants, locally dominant, put down the worship and closed the churches of their erewhile 15 oppressors. And the ministers, discussing terms of peace, were careful, — in their anxiety, partly, to be uncompromised, but partly also in their real abhor- rence of the bolder flights of unfettered thought, — to mark the exact limits where tolerance should cease. 20 Atheists, anabaptists, were to receive no quarter ; and, but for internal disagreements of the party, the Confession of Augsburg would have been made as rigidly confining for the Protestants as, for the Catholics, the decisions of the church. --^5 Only by a small minority, of whom I'Hdpital is ' the central figure, were the principles of a reasonable tolerance and religious freedom in any measure ap- prehended. And with these principles at heart, with the care, not for the interests of either party, but for 30 the administration throughout the country of an equal justice and for the general welfare of the people. I lO MONTAIGNE. I'Hdpital himself had no better pohcy than to balance one side against the other, and to guide the fears and jealousies of the queen-mother into the safety of an enlightened middle course. 5 With THopital's decline, all hope of such a via media had fallen utterly away, and it is difficult to see how even the more strenuous La Boetie, had he lived, could, at this juncture, have found his opportunity of serving his unhappy country. Remembering that, 10 in their dread, not so much perhaps of personal con- sequences, as of the total ruin and subversion of the monarchy, such men as Christophe de Thou, and Guy du Faur de Pibrac, were led presently to condone and defend the St Bartholomew, one is fain to vote the IS Essayist's the more opportune and happier temper. \ Even while still ready to engage, if called upon, in j public affairs, he was so little eager, as to preserve [ always an unpledged judgement ; while his lack of 1 eagerness was soon to become a reasoned and de- 20 liberate backwardness. ! The policy to which Montaigne inclined was certainly the tolerance of two religions in the state. But he held even this opinion with an unwillingness to "prophesy until after the event" rather than with 25 an operative confidence. And it is not so much his positive principles that make him a 'politique' as sheer inability to choose between the contending parties. Between Caesar and Pompey he felt he could have chosen, and later he had no hesitation 30 between the League and Henry IV. In the mean- while, his very inability to choose threw him back, ostensibly, upon that party which, being his already FROM LA BOETIES DEATH TO RETIREMENT. Ill I by external circumstances, involved the lesser choice. \ To all outward seeming and effect, he was thus an adherent of the Catholic and loyal party. But he was an adherent whose affections were disengaged, and whose judgement was not blinded to the defects 5 ; of his own, nor to the merits of the opposing, side. Just so far did his judgement reinforce in him the tenets imposed by custom and the existing laws, as to convince him of the evil, for the time at least, ! of change and innovation. His most characteristic lo utterance upon the subject is in the Essay On Pre- sumption. " And yet, to my mind, in public affairs, there is no bent so mischievous (if that age and constancy be joined unto it) that is not better than change and agitation (remuement). Our manners 15 are exceedingly corrupt, and lean with a marvellous incline towards worse and worse. Of our laws and usages, many are barbarous and monstrous ; notwith- standing, by reason of the difficulty in reducing us to a better estate and the danger of this shaking down 20 (crollement), if I could set a peg in our wheel and stay it where it now is, I would do so gladly 1 , Instability is the worst that I find in our state, and i that our laws, no more than our garments, can take no settled form." 25 CHAPTER VII. 1 57 1 — 1580. MONTAIGNE IN RETIREMENT. THE LIBRARY. To his contemporaries, Montaigne's abandonment of the magistracy appeared not so much a retirement as an exchange of the 'robe longue' for the sword. The natural occupation for a country gentleman of 5 leisure — and as such Montaigne was certainly accepted, for all his commercial origin — was, in those disordered times, to take up arms for the one side or the other. And we find, as a fact, that his withdrawal from active life did not wholly preclude such exercise. 10 At the very outset of his retirement, he was invested with the military order of St Michael, — an honour which would intimate that he had shown some readi- ness for service. That order, in its earlier dignity bestowed, as the Essayist affirms, for generalship 15 rather than for mere display of valour, could not, even in the degradation it had sustained through the supposed exigencies of the civil wars, have been given, as Brantdme ill-naturedly hints, in simple jest. Since not for past services, it must have been given 20 in hope at least of services to come, and perhaps to MONTAIGNE IN RETIREMENT. II3 secure for the king's side a partisan whose dislike of extreme measures, and outspoken respect for the qualities of his opponents, may well have roused suspicion in minds not subject to such refinements. Owner of a considerable property in the most dis- 5 affected quarter of the country, Montaigne must have seemed an adherent worth securing. And it is clear, from allusions in the Essays, that in his private capacity he did actually bear arms. If of no great military enterprise, he could boast, at least, a cool 10 head and confident bearing, that helped him once to the orderly conduct of a retreat. There is outside evidence for his participation in the campaign of 1574. In the May of that critical year, — when Charles IX. lay at the point of death, 15 with the country still under the exasperation of feeling that followed on the St Bartholomew — , the royalist general, Montpensier, sent a message from his camp in Poitou to the Bordeaux Parlement. The bearer of this message was Michel de Montaigne, 20 once'conseiller' in the said Parlement, and permitted by virtue of his former office to deliver his message before the court. Neither the object of his mission, nor the 'long speech' in which he clothed it, has been recorded, but it is reasonably conjectured to have 25 had reference to the threatened dangers from the Protestants and their English allies. The transit of the country at this time must have been not without danger, the direct road lying by several of the pro- testant strongholds ; and it may have been now 30 that Montaigne had the company of the timorous gentleman, whose fears betrayed him. L. M. 8 1 14 MONTAIGNE. At what, if at any, other time Montaigne was personally engaged, it is impossible to say. But it does not need the unkind testimony of Brant6me to convince the reader of the Essays that his services in 5 this kind were not extensive. Not only was his adhesion to the party the mere lukewarm compliance with custom, but the conduct besides of the warfare was not such as to engage deeply a partisan pricked neither by personal greed 10 nor by fanaticism. Montaigne will allow, whether in irony or in mere hopelessness of a better issue, that massacre and treason may be necessary in these evil times ; but he demands, with a fine enough disdain, that other agents shall be found to execute them. 15 And the incidents of breach of faith, of wholesale slaughter, — not of garrisons merely but of the women too and children, — are too frequent in the detailed contemporary histories for the justice of his reproach to be called in question. The general colour of the 20 religious wars tones only too well with the central scene. Avoiding singularity, conforming his outward actions to the order of what was customary, Mon- taigne holds himself free to set the older customs, as 25 he understands them, of good-faith and honesty, above the current mode of time-serving and intrigue. " Vivons," he had said to his wife, in a lesser matter, " a la vieille frangaise," and of this ' ancient French,' he shared the current view, a view which, even for 30 the antiquaries — for Hotman, Pithou, or Pasquier, — fused all antiquity, French or Roman, into one ideal state of primitive virtue. MONTAIGNE IN RETIREMENT. II5 A copy has survived of Beuther's Ephem^rides, — a sort of Whitaker's Almanack, — in which the Essayist, as well as some other members of his family, had entered events of interest. Three entries, besides the sparse notices of family births, deaths and marriages, s find a place in the years between his retirement (1571) and the first appearance of the Essays (1580). These are: October 28, 1571, the bestowal of the order of St Michael: May 11, 1574, the honourable reception afforded him, on the occasion already 10 mentioned, by the Bordeaux Parlement : November 29, 1577, the unsolicited, perhaps unwelcome, honour paid him by the king, Henry, of Navarre, who made him at this time Gentleman of the Chamber. (He was already, be it noted. Gentleman of the Chamber 15 to the king of France.) The entry runs thus: "1577, Henry de Bourbon roy de Navarre sans men sceu et moi absant me fit depecher a Leitoure lettres patantes de gentillhome de sa chabre." Events had not stood still, during these years, how- 20 ever slight Montaigne's own part in them. The general scene remained the Civil Wars, but with a great shifting of the personages. The^ massacre of St Bar- tholomew took place in the year (1572) following his retreat, reaching Bordeaux last among the chief 25 towns and affecting it least, though cruelly enough. Two years again later, in 1574 — the year that we positively know him to have been engaged, — the crown passed from Charles IX. to the king of ill- grounded hopes, his brother Henry. The immediate 30 errors of that monarch, in judgement and in govern- ment, drove many of the moderate Catholics, with 8—2 Il6 MONTAIGNE. the due d'Alengon, to favour the reformers. Of more vital help to the Protestant party was the escape, from the Court, of Henry of Navarre, and his appear- ance as their leader. From that moment to the final 5 close, the Bearnais is the central figure of the drama. At the time he made the overture, if such it was, to Montaigne, he was already recognised— by his opponents at any rate, his own side having long a lurking preference for Condi's sterner qualities — as 10 the real strength of the Protestants. To meet his dangerous facility, the Guises had framed a counter- weapon from the fanaticism of the nation, — had instituted the League. Already in the previous year (1576) they had evoked from the Etats held at Blois 15 the unequivocal demand for a single tolerated faith. Henry HI. nevertheless, tired of the warfare and fretted at the Guises' arrogance, had negotiated with his cousin of Navarre, to the result of the peace, in October 1577, of Poitiers. It was in the second 20 month of this peace that Navarre made Montaigne a gentleman of his chamber. Then and during a great part of the preliminary negotiations, Navarre was quartered at Bergerac, Montaigne's nearest town (Bordeaux refused, at this as at other junctures, to 25 receive him) ; the due de Montpensier, under whom as we saw Montaigne had served, was one of the chief agents of negotiation. It is possible that the Essayist himself played some obscure part in the negotiating; he must almost certainly have come into 30 personal relations with Navarre. Nurtured, as Montaigne would have his imaginary pupil, upon the Lives of Plutarch, {Macchiavelli was MONTAIGNE IN RETIREMENT. II 7 the text book of the Valois), simple and open in bearing, and embracing his fortunes with a straight- forward gaiety that covered no small astuteness, the B^arnais was a prince after Montaigne's own mind. How frank his liking, appears from letters that passed s between them later, when the cause of the Bdarnais became the cause of loyal subjects. In the meanwhile, his affection, if it added a point to his neutrality, did not move him from the party that upheld the ancient religion and laws, — the party, for him, of the lesser 10 choice. These indications of the Essayist's outside relations are slight enough, but they serve to show him no hermit in his retreat. He was the head too of a numerous family, — had mother, sisters and brother 15 living with him, as well as wife and one little daughter. And during those ten years from 1570 — 1580, four children were born to him and died in infancy, — their premature death awakening in him certainly no deep abiding sorrow, yet occupying his mind presumably 20 with passing regrets and moving him to try and console his wife. He did not take much part in the training of the surviving daughter, yet so far con- cerned himself as to veto the then customary rod, finding his views well seconded by his wife's native 25 gentleness. Nor can it be doubted that the care of his property, with its woods and vineyards, engaged him to some degree. Though without the taste or the genius of his father for domestic economy, he nevertheless made it a point of honour and of filial 30 piety to keep the property from decline. And how- ever well his wife, his mother, or a steward, may have Il8 MONTAIGNE. seconded him, his success in this respect proves him to have been himself not wholly careless. We must suppose him, for all the statements that imply a greater negligence, to have followed at the outset that 5 middle course, which he himself commends, " entre ce bas et vil soing, tendu et plein de solicitude... et cette profonde et extreme nonchalance laissant tout aller a I'abandon." There is strong evidence too that Montaigne took 10 his part in all neighbourly intercourse and friendship. He speaks of himself as experienced in the commoner kinds of good-fellowship, although he holds them light in comparison with his one supreme friendship. The Comte de Grammond, who died in 1580 at the 15 siege of Fhre, was his 'very good friend '; one of the Essays is dedicated to the Comtesse,his wife, 'la belle Corisande.' He breaks off in the middle of an essay to insert an address to Mme de Duras, who had visited him as he was writing ; he dedicates another essay to 20 Mile Diane de Foix, and to Mme d'Estissac that on the Affection of Fathers for their Children. He accosts these ladies with a neighbourly intimacy, while in the latter essay he illustrates freely, though not by name, from this, that, and another, of his 25 acquaintance. We see him there called in to remon- strate with a youth addicted to the vice, then very prevalent among the noblesse, of thieving ; on another occasion volunteering the counsel to an elderly father that he should give place to his children. He records 30 in the same essay a most touching and human trait in the grim Monluc, that veteran's lament over his own hardness to his dead son, — with whom Montaigne, MONTAIGNE IN RETIREMENT. II9 by the way, would seem to have been Hnked by some common rights of patronage. Montaigne's days of ' leisure ' would thus seem to have been well filled enough. And neither was it from absorbing duties that he had withdrawn. His 5 retirement was not the abrupt break and abandonment of a life's policy — as was the retreat of I'Hdpital, — nor was the change so marked as that made by Henri de Mesmes, upon his unmerited disgrace, when he turned from public office to the pursuit, really more congenial 10 to him, of literature and culture. Still less was there the marked contrast between the active stirring life of Tavannes, and his retreat, while still in the prime of life, to write his memoirs and remarry. Montaigne resigned only the magistracy, 'long wearied,' and he 15 might have added 'neglectful,' of duties which had never been congenial to him. And though he retired nominally to devote himself to the Muses, it was to no such diligent and laborious service as that rendered by I'Hdpital and by De Mesmes. One hour's con- 20 tinuous reading was, for him, much. And he esteemed all knowledge dearly purchased at the expense of health and of light-heartedness. Montaigne's retirement was nevertheless intended seriously, and must be so interpreted. He com- 25 memorated it by a tablet giving the precise day — "the eve of the calends of March, his birthday," on which he "Michel de Montaigne, already long wearied of the servitude of the law-courts and of public office, retired, with faculties still entire, to the arms of the 30 learned maidens, there to pass, in all quiet and security, such length of days as remained to him, etc." 120 MONTAIGNE. And indeed, although lacking the sharp change and contrast that would have called the attention of contemporaries, this withdrawal was, in a more intimate sense, the central and decisive act of his S career. It was his conscious acceptance and com- pletion of what nature, aided by circumstances, had begun in him, — of his mental aloofness and his personal detachment. Permitting custom and the natural course of things to determine in great lo measure his outside action and his mode of life, this was yet, ' even in his private capacity,' with a definite ' holding back,' and always without the entanglement of his desires or the sacrifice of his independence. Hitherto he had come across no IS pursuit that stirred his slack affections as worth living for ; henceforth he deliberately turned his mind to live 'for himself,' to be mainly spectator in the game of life, or, in so far as an actor, without ever absorbing or sinking himself in his party. "The 20 greatest thing in the world," he declares in his Essay on Solitude, "is to know how to possess one's self (de sgavoir estre k soy). There are some complexions more proper for this precept than others. They that have a faint and yielding apprehension, and a delicate 25 affection and will, that do not readily take fire, — of the which 1 am, both of my natural condition and by reasoning, — they ply themselves more easily to this advice than do active and impressionable spirits, who embrace all and pledge themselves everywhere, who 30 empassion themselves for everything, who offer them- selves, present themselves, and bestow themselves on all occasions." MONTAIGNE IN RETIREMENT. 121 It is this Essay on Solitude that gives Montaigne's philosophy of retirement. He dismisses first the popular cant phrase, — ("ce beau mot de quoy se couvre I'ambition et I'avarice,") — "that we are born for the public, not for ourselves," with an appeal to s those who are " en la danse," who cannot con- scientiously deny that each individual rather seeks to turn the public to his own particular profit. "The ill means by which, in our century, they promote it, shows well that the end is of no value." The answer lo would not have served against La Boetie, nor against La Noue, who has a hard word for those who hold aloof from their country's quarrels. Nor, it would seem, did it settle all Montaigne's own misgivings, since he fortifies himself from time to time with ij other arguments. But it was doubtless answer enough for the general run of combatants. The arguments of ambition are lightly dismissed. Ambition, says the Essayist, seeks after all the same goal. It would escape the press, obtain more elbow room, only its 20 route is longer and more arduous. " The end," he takes it, " is all one, to live more at leisure and at ease ; only the road is not always rightly looked for." It is not enough to quit public affairs for private : — these latter are " less important, 25 but not for that the less importunate"; — "it is not enough to be withdrawn from the populace ; it is not enough to shift one's place : one must withdraw from the popular conditions that are within us...." Neither indeed is privacy an indispensable condition, though 3° an aid, to what Montaigne understands by solitude. " Our malady has hold on our soul. Now that cannot 122 MONTAIGNE. escape from itself. In culpa est animus qui se non effugit unquam. Therefore it must be brought back and withdrawn into itself; this is the true solitude, and may be enjoyed in the midst of cities and of the 5 courts of kings, but is more commodiously enjoyed apart." As Montaigne understands it, this ' recueillement,' this ' possession of the soul,' is chiefly negative, — lies in freedom from all constraining obligation, from all lo absorbing ties, from narrowing aim or limiting prejudice. " One must have wife, children, posses- sions, and above all health, if one can, but not hold to these things so that our happiness depends upon them One must disavow these over strong obliga- 15 tions, and love indeed this or that, but espouse nothing save oneself...." Not at all that he has any admixture of asceticism. " One must avail oneself of these accidental commodities, that lie outside our- selves, in so far as we find them pleasant, but without 2.0 making them our chief support ; they are not so : neither reason nor nature point to it." But, as he is conscious of the vanity, so he fears the tyranny, of all favourite pursuits. " In household cares, in study, in the chase and in all other exercise, one must indulge 25 to the limits of pleasure and beware of pledging oneself more deeply, where pain begins to inter- mingle. We must retain only just so much of business (d'enbesoingnement) and occupation as is necessary to keep us breathed, and to guarantee us 30 against those incommodities which the other extreme of a dull and deadening idleness brings in its train." For which reasons, he shuns serious study. " Books MONTAIGNE IN RETIREMENT. 1 23 are pleasant ; but if, by frequenting them, we lose at length gaiety and health, our best possessions, let us leave them ; I am one of those who think their fruit cannot counter-vail this loss " Both the austerity and the egoism of much of the 5 expression in this essay is apparent rather than real, and due largely to his borrowed arguments and illustrations from the Stoics. They go, one feels, a little beyond his aim and accord ill enough, in their indifference, with his advice "...to hold tooth and nail 10 to the practice of the pleasures of life," — doing injustice too, by their self-absorption, to the warm alacrity and interest that he evinces in things that touch him personally not at all. And beyond his persistent aim, even if he has a rare glimpse of it as 15 an ideal, is that " vraye et naifve " philosophy, which he commends in contrast to the vainglorious Cicero and Pliny, who would draw honour from their very retreat, — the philosophy that sets Cato, Phocion, and Aristides, as silent mentors to purge and raise the 20 mind in solitude. Montaigne, if he had ever a dream \ of such self-discipline, of gaining thus ' possession of the soul ' by the gradual schooling of it to a high and 1 innate ideal, had it certainly only as a passing dream. '; In general he is content to admire, without emulating, 25 , the ancient virtue; he has not even repentance for his recognised shortcomings. The Michel de Mon- taigne that he reports to us is himself, as nature and circumstances made him, not as his reason would approve him ; — and it is his easy self-acceptance that 30 gives his account an unique value as a human document. Had he, after emancipating his thoughts //* 124 MONTAIGNE. and observations from the bonds of customary notions, straightway forced them into the mould of an ideal, the Essays might have become more edifying but they would probably have lost their enduring flavour. 5 In this kind it is enough for us to have the moral treatises of Montaigne's contemporary Du Vair, — like Montaigne a magistrate, — the representative for his times of that very stoical philosophy which the Essayist is content to quote and to admire. 10 Montaigne found his solitude, so mitigated as it was, breed in him a sort of melancholy, " very foreign to his natural humour," — a kind of desceuvrement, perhaps, such as the break in regular work operated for a moment even in the born idler, Lamb. What- ever its nature, he fell, in order, as he says, to dislodge it, upon this trick of writing. This is but one among many reasons that he gives for the writing of the Essays ; the desire to control the vagaries of his thoughts, to leave his descendants a picture of himself, 2o — even some purpose of reforming his generation, — all serve him at different times. Probably enough now one, now another, cause appeared to him to give the motive. This trick of writing came to be, whatever the determining motive, more and more the employment 2$ of his leisure. Carried on side by side with the handling of his favourite authors, it answered doubtless the requirements he has set down, — " The occupation that must be chosen for such a life, must be an occupation neither arduous (penible) nor tedious." 30 It was certainly, as he followed it, a leisurely pursuit, — nine years passing before the Essays, then a suf- ficiently small book, first saw the light. THE LIBRARY. 1 25 Only when at home, and at home only in his library, did Montaigne write his essays. The library was his ' arriere-boutique.' There he had all his books about him — "a. goodly show for a village library," — the nucleus bequeathed, as an inscription 5 duly commemorated, by his friend La Boetie. And I although he did not study in order to write the Essays, it was his books that supplied the most i frequent incentive to their writing, that set on foot I his cogitations, just as later the Essays, when written, 10 ' were in their turn an incentive to the fresh turning , over, for corroboratory instances, of his books. " I have not studied," he says in his later years, "in order to make a book, yet have I somewhat studied, because I have made one." 15 The books were of course preponderatingly those of the ancients. It was a classical library, presumably, that La Boetie had left to him, and it was inevitable that Montaigne — in search above all else of a broad human wisdom — should find what he looked for, in 20 the ancients rather than in contemporary literature. The moderns were, however, not ill-represented. In the matter of history, or rather 'historiography,' which was his especial study, his " vray gibier " — all writers indiscriminately were grist to his mill. For 25 from one and all he could learn something of the "nature and conditions of different men," of the " customs of different nations," — " the true subject," as he held, " of moral science." " En ce genre d'estude des histoires, il faut feuilleter, sans distinction, toutes 30 sortes d'autheurs, et viels et nouveaus, et barragouins et Frangois, pour y apprendre les choses dequoy 126 MONTAIGNE. diversement ils traitent." He draws largely on Froissard for his instances, and he signals out for special mention Guicciardini, Comines, du Bellay, repeating in the essay on Books the several brief 5 summaries he had made at the end of each to refresh his deficient memory. Many of the actual books that the Essayist possessed have been preserved. Although his library was dispersed very soon after his death, — his daughter took the first step by 10 bequeathing them to ,a priest — , a certain number, some seventy-six, have been recovered by the piety of collectors. Of these, nearly half are works of history, — the histories of Aretino, Villani, Paulo Jovio : the Annates et Chroniques of Nicole Gilles : 15 the Chronique de Flandres by Denis Sauvage : the Spanish version of Castaneda's History of the Portuguese Conquest of the Indies, and others. Again arriong the moderns he gratified his some- what curious liking for Letters, a liking to be explained 20 perhaps by the informality and freedom of this mode of composition — forerunner to some degree of the Essay — but still strange, in view of the frequent wordiness and lack of substance of such collections. Whatever it may have been that appealed to him in 25 them, he had a large number, giving the preference to the Italians, and among the Italians to Annibal Caro. The modern poets too, whether Italian, French or Latin, had a place upon his shelves. His copies of 30 the poems of Balf and of Beze have survived, as also his Petrarch, bearing his familiar motto Mentre si puo, and Riletto assai volte, also perhaps in his hand. THE LIBRARY. 1 27 Montaigne both professes a strong taste for poetry and gives evidence, in his incidental comments, of a finely discriminative sense. Even while giving to the nation's laureate, Ronsard, and to du Bellay, the full measure of his admiration, he accompanies his 5 praise with a proper qualification, comparing them with the ancients in those parts only in which they excel. And he is conscious throughout, as even Ronsard and du Bellay were probably not conscious, of the worthlessness of all mere imitation, however lo ingenious and close, whether of the ancients or of the great Ronsard in his turn. Food more proper to the Essayist's special humour was supplied by the abounding works of controversy, political or religious. He makes his profit of the 15 turncoat arguments of the pamphleteers, as of the variety of interpretations drawn already from passages of scripture. It was one of the many satires on the Cardinal of Lorraine — comparing him to Seneca, in order to complete the analogy between Nero's reign 20 and Charles the Ninth's — that set him upon his Defence of Seneca. Two more moderate political treatises — De Republica bene instituenda by Montano, and the Examen du discours publie centre la maison royalle de France by Pierre du Belloy, the latter 25 representing very fairly the views of the ' politiques ' at the time of its publication, — are preserved with his signature. Bodin, whom he read and appreciated, was, as he says, a writer of another stamp from any, even the better, of these controversialists. 3° Religious controversy is represented, among the books that are preserved, by two heretical satires, — 128 MONTAIGNE. // Catechismo, o vero institutione Christiana di M. Bernardino Ochino da Siena, and the Disputa intorno alia presenza del corpo di Giesu Christo nel sacramento della Cena, by the same author. These two heretical 5 works were very probably purchased on his Italian journey, ten years later than his retirement. In the Disputa, the interrogation of a heretic ends in the only answer, condemnation to the flames, that the interrogator can find to his arguments. In the Cate- 10 chismo Montaigne has inscribed Liber prohibitus, and a further inscription shows that he made a present of the work, in 1586, to his admirer Charron. These and other of his books bear out the evidence of the Essays as to his ready interest in the topics of 15 the day. His personal detachment seems but to have quickened his alertness as spectator, " La solitude locale," he says, " m'estend plustot, et m'eslargit au dehors." His library must, on the other hand, have been deficient in what made the most characteristic 20 feature of contemporary collections. Montaigne, neither philologist nor antiquarian, took no part in the current search for Greek and Latin manuscripts. And even commentaries would appeal to him only in so far as they facilitated the reading of the 25 authors ; with textual criticism, as such, he had no concern. Concerned primarily to reach the meaning of the author, he welcomed, however, translations, not from the Latin, which early habit had made as familiar to 30 him as French, but from the Greek, which he never adequately mastered. Only "since he became French" — in that French dress given him by Amyot — did THE LIBRARY. 1 29 Plutarch take rank, with Seneca, as Montaigne's favourite author. In the Essay on Books, Montaigne gives a kind of survey of his reading, and literary tastes. His judgements upon books ' merely pleasant,' as he 5 classifies them, show a certain range of reading and an independent power of literary criticism. One is surprised, it is true, to find Rabelais in this category, sandwiched in between Boccaccio and the Baisers de Jean Second; — but among his Latin 10 authors Montaigne distinguishes with more nicety, and has always a ground to give for his preference. He shows the courage of his opinions more especially, however, in his criticism of Cicero, who, save for a very few dissentient voices, was held as above all 15 criticism. From authors read for profit as well as pleasure — it is under this category that he treats of Cicero — Montaigne requires above all that they should come straight to the point, and he votes the manner of Cicero — burying his substance in "prefaces, 20 digressions, definitions, partitions and etymologies "^ — • to be feeble and wearisome. " I desire discourses that charge at once into the thick of the difficulty ; his beat about the bush : they are well enough for the school, for the bar, or for a sermon, where we have 25 leisure to doze, and are in time enough a quarter of an hour later to catch up the thread of the discourse." It is in this matter of directness that he gives the preference to Seneca and Plutarch, adding also to them Pliny. And he likes their disjointed com- 30 position, the Letters of the one, the brief Opuscules of the other, requiring no continuous study. But L. M. 9 I30 MONTAIGNE. they commend themselves, too, by their actual opinions, their moral philosophy. So far as Mon- taigne looked, in his reading, beyond the pleasure of the moment, he sought — so he tells us — only wisdom S for the conduct of hfe. "Je ne cherche aux livres qu'a m'y. donner du plaisir par un honneste amuse- ment ; ou, si j'estudie, je n'y cherche que la science qui traicte de la connoissance de moy mesme, et qui m'instruise a bien mourir et a bien vivre." And of 10 all philosophy, the doctrines of Seneca and Plutarch are in his opinion the best. " Plutarque est plus uniforme et constant : Seneque, plus ondoyant et divers. Cetuy-cy se peine, se roidit et se tend pour armer la vertu contre la foiblesse, la crainte et les 15 vitieus appetits; I'autre semble n'estimer pas tant leur effort, et desdaigner d'en haster son pas et se mettre sur sa targue. Plutarque a les opinions Platoniques, douces et accommodables a la societe civile; I'autre les a Stoiques et Epicurienes, plus 20 esloignees de I'usage commun, mais plus commodes et plus fermes." But from Plutarch, the Essayist had more than a ready-made philosophy. Besides the Opuscules there were the Lives — the richest source whence he should 25 draw his own philosophy, should derive his own view of human nature. The raw material, ' human actions and conditions,' is the proper subject-matter of moral philosophy ; and each new student of that subject- matter must exercise his judgement upon it straight, 30 rather than take at second-hand the fruits that another has gathered. Such certainly was the method of Montaigne. He may take pleasure, by a somewhat THE LIBRARY. 13I extraneous humour, in the doctrines of Seneca and Plutarch ; may admire and approve, even give in a passing or intermittent adhesion, — but he neither applies them really to the conduct of his own life, nor lets them colour his own observation. Rather, in 5 the license of his cogitations, he resolves again their doctrines into raw material, setting them at a distance, to be weighed, with the vast and varied conglomerate of human opinion, in his impartial scales. For all, as well thought as action, opinion as 10 well as custom, all that is part and parcel of humanity, comes within the range of survey of the moral philosopher. And, in the end, the conclusion that Montaigne draws from life, from the survey of human action and of human thought, accords not so well 15 with the tempered Stoicism of Seneca, or with the Platonic doctrines of Plutarch, as with the sceptic philosophy of Sextus Empiricus. It is this work — the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus — which it is of interest, finally, to trace among his books, not through 20 his own mention nor by the chance survival of his copy, but by his quotation from it in the Essays, and, yet more significantly, in the sentences that adorned his ceiling. Whereas Montaigne's books were soon dispersed, 25 and have been only painfully and in small part recovered, the actual room that housed them has been preserved intact. There are still traces of the painting which, in the manner of that renascence period, decorated both walls and ceiling. The 30 pictures on the walls would seem to have been mainly illustrations of Ovid's Metamorphoses; that 9—2 132 MONTAIGNE. over the fireplace in his cabinet shows still a ship and waves and may perhaps have illustrated the concluding lines of the Ode to Pyrrha. The sentences written upon the beams of the 5 ceiling have a graver import. They are in Greek or Latin, the greater number drawn from Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, the Florilegium of Stobaeus, the Hypotyposes of Sextus Empiricus. But whether from profane or sacred writers, they have the common tendency to lo decry humanity, to show the folly and ignorance of man. From St Paul is taken such advice as " Be not wise in your own conceit" " Be not wiser than yoic should, but be soberly wise " ; from the Florilegium are selected such phrases as " The wind puffs out empty 15 skins, presumption puffs oiit the man withotit judgement" " He who reckons upon his loftiness will be overturned by the first chance!' Or again from the elder Pliny, " There is nothing certain but that nothing is certain, and nothing at once more wretched and m.ore proud than 20 m,any This, with scarce an exception, is the burden of the sentences. Two indeed — ^ hr^aQov ayaarov, from Plato, and "Hom.o sum, humani a me nihil alietium puto," from Terence, — rather point to the catholicity of Montaigne's interests than heighten the sense of 25 human vanity. But for the rest, even phrases that admit of a different interpretation, — that from Epictetus, " Men are tormented by the opinion they have of things, and not by the things themselves" or from the Psalms, " The judgements of the Lord are a 30 vast abyss" — come, when read in the light of the others, to bear out the general tenour. Most trenchant of all are the Pyrrhonian maxims, the brief extracts THE LIBRARY. 1 33 from the Hypotyposes — " No man has ever known, or ever will know, any thing certain" : "It may be, it may not be" : "No reason without its contrary": and these, indicative of the Essayist's own attitude, Ovhev opi^w — Ov KaTaXaiMJSdvco — 'Ette;;^© — ^Keirrofiai — 5 More duce et sensu — ^ Kppeir&'i, "without inclining to either side." Montaigne in his Essay on Friendship draws a comparison between his writing and this decorative painting. Contemplating the rtianner in which the 10 artist executed his task, how he chose out the large spaces for a complete and excellent picture, and filled up the interstices and smaller spaces with grotesques and arabesques, it struck him that he, in the Essays, emulated very well the second and minor 15 part of the work — " for what are they indeed but grotesques and monstrous bodies without clear form, and with no order, sequence or proportion save fortuitous" — but that he failed in the other and better part. " For my sufficiency," he says, " does not go so 20 far as to dare to undertake a rich and finished picture, formed according to rules of art." He had proposed to supply this central piece with La Boetie's ContrUn, had not the circumstances prevented it. We may appropriate his simile, and take it that the 25 central picture of the Essays, the essential and most proper substance of his thought, is represented in those sentences upon the beams. CHAPTER VIII. THE ESSAYS OF 1580. Few books, as Teissier remarked nearly two centuries ago, have given rise to so voluminous and so varied criticism as Montaigne's Essays. They have been taken as the epitome of good sense and 5 reasonable morals, their author described as the Christian Seneca ; they have been widely condemned for their looseness and their impiety, and were indeed subjected, almost at once, to expurgation. They have been argued into a defence of Christianity, and into a 10 malicious attempt to undermine it. By a judicious selection of passages any one of these positions may be maintained, — an apparent paradox, which the manner of composition renders readily intelligible. The Essays are the accumulated 15 reflexions, if not of a lifetime, at least of a whole maturity and age, — reflexions not modified one by another, nor moulded to a dominant scheme, but set down as occasioned by all variety of incitement, and at often considerable intervals of time. Already on 20 their first appearance in 1580, they had extended in THE ESSAYS OF 1580. 1 35 the writing over some eight to nine years ; already towards the close of the second book Montaigne informs the reader that he does not correct his first thoughts by his second, that he desires to present the progress of his humours, and that each piece shall be 5 seen as it was produced. In the later editions, in the posthumous one especially which is the present vulgate, that 'progress of his humours' is obscured, not by amendment, but by interpolation, by redupli- cation of later upon earlier thoughts. Montaigne 10 added a third book to the two first published, but he also swelled the bulk of the original two, annotating them copiously with new thoughts — sometimes to illustrate, but as often to distinguish and present another view, — and interpolating the new matter with 15 but slight regard for sequence or uniformity of tone, and without marking the distinction between new and old. The outcome, the Essays as we read them commonly, is a very labyrinth, a " fagotage de 20 diverses pieces." "Judgement" — it is the opinion of Montaigne — "is an instrument proper to every subject," and he leaves his own, single-edged as it is and analytic, to the direction of every chance encounter. Now a sentence or an incident in an ancient author, 25 now news brought from the land of the cannibals, now an event in his immediate neighbourhood, would set his mind to work. And he comments upon what he has read, or heard, or seen, ' speaking to paper as to the first man he met' 30 The table of contents reads, for any propriety of order, like the fabulous dinner of the Essays, — 136 MONTAIGNE. " mouton, marcassin, merlus, marsoin," at a course, — and without even the external alphabetical link. An essay on Thumbs is cheek by jowl with one on Cowardice ; a Monstrous Child comes jostling up 5 against Seneca and Plutarch. A particular instance — the Battle of Dreux, a Trait of certain ambassadors — serves as well to give the heading as more general notions — Friendship, Fear, or Solitude. Sometimes there is Pyrrhonism in the very title, — How the soul 10 dischargeth her passions upon false objects, when the true fail it: Of the uncertainty of our judgement : Of the inconstancy of hum.an action : We taste nothing purely. Others reflect his turn to Stoicism, To flee voluptuous- ness, at the price of life : To philosophise is to learn to 15 die : That the taste of good things and of ill rests, in great m.easure, on the opinion we have of them. And this variety of title is but indicative of a far greater variety of topic. As Montaigne himself admits, he wanders far enough away from his set subject, in- 20 troducing themes which may, as he says, have always their affinity, but where the connection is often far enough to seek. He had, as his friend Pasquier explains, a ' peculiar liberty ' in this respect, a liberty which grew upon him singularly with indulgence. 25 And yet, though Montaigne's extreme freedom of digression, or rather — for it would often be hard to say from what he is digressing — the entire irrelevancy of subject-matter, is a liberty peculiar to himself, we shall overestimate its boldness if we do not take into 30 account the great license of digression permitted in contemporary literature. Brantdme, for example, keeps closer to his subject in hand, only because the THE ESSAYS OF 1580. 1 37 range of his interests is more limited. The Grands Capitaines Frangais deals chiefly with the exploits, or with incidents in the lives, of great chiefs, and the book breathes throughout a military atmosphere, — but the particular Captain who heads a section often 5 figures as little in the body of it, as the title of an Essay resolves the contents. The variety, again, of topics is paralleled in contemporary publications of Letters or of Discourses. The " headings to the Discours non plus melancholiques que divers, of Bon- 10 aventure des Periers, read, so far as diversity goes, for all the world like the contents of the Essays. How sugar is made follows upon The quantity of syllables and the emenders of Tei'ence ; A good answer that the ambassador from Gaul made to Alexander the 15 Great upon Tlie profit that we have in books and letters. It would seem to be in such Discourses, even more than in the equally informal Letters, that the Essays had their prototype, — a relation recognised in their 20 first translations. It was as Discourses that a selection of the Essays passed into Italian in 1590 — Discorsi morali, politici, e militari, — a title echoed in Florio's first English version. The Essayes or morali, politicke and militarie discourses of Lo : Michaell de Mon- ze, taigne. And to certain of the earlier Essays — to those perhaps which had in Montaigne's own judgement a foreign flavour — this title is not so inappropriate. There is no reason why that on the Battle of Dreux should not be called a military discourse as much 30 as La Noue's paper on the same subject. Montaigne did not, with the Essay, so much 138 MONTAIGNE. invent a literary form, — he was not, as we have seen already in his plan of education, externally inventive, — he gave fortune rather, and a name, to a manner of loose writing common from the mere lack 5 of any standard of prose, a manner which, had it not been arrested and fixed in the appropriate and genial use, would probably have vanished wholly before the growing sense of literary law and measure. His liberty was 'peculiar' in its felicity rather than in 10 its license. It really did for him, in great measure, what the fine sense of literary proportion does for the modern Frenchman, — it saved him from the tedium of almost all his contemporary writers. The literary artist so treats his subject as to keep alive and fresh IS the interest of his reader. Montaigne left his subject without scruple the moment his own interest flagged ; did not, when he lost the 'air of his first imagination,' laboriously beat about till he recovered it, but went off with equal zest upon another tack, and, in doing 20 so, he seldom fails to carry his reader with him. For this reason also, that under all his light inconsequence he touches on the universal ; that the most varied, most trivial topics, come in his pages to be parts and instances of the one great theme — the only adequate 25 subject-matter for a method so inconclusive, so suggestive — the large theme of human life and human nature. The Essays of 1580 show more clearly than can the later editions, so fully worked over, the growth 30 and expansion of the Essay, from those earlier strings of instances, which "smack somewhat of the stranger," to the longer and freer ventings of his humour. The THE ESSAYS OF 1580. 1 39 order of the Essays, as we have them, must in large measure be fortuitous. It would seem, however, to correspond to some extent with the order of com- position. The nineteenth Essay of the First Book was written in 1572, just fifteen days after the 5 Essayist had completed his thirty-ninth year ; the thirty-first of the same book was not earlier than I574i since Charles IX. is already spoken of as " le feu roi," — and the E^ssay which closes the Second Book was clearly written last, the writer having aged lo some seven or eight years since he began, and having exchanged his sound health for an hereditary and inter- mittent malady. It is reasonable also to suppose that the Second Book is, as a whole, later than the First, the break between the two marking presumably a longer 15 interval than usual in setting pen to paper, — a longer absence, perhaps, from home. There is no ostensible reason for this division, which is awkward enough, into books of unequal length, the second much longer than the first. 20 Yet throughout both these books (never in the third and later), there occurs what would seem to be the primitive essay, the mere bringing together of several instances, with or without accompanying moral. Chapters xxii. and xxvi. of the Second 25 Book, Des Posies and Des Ponces, are the merest jottings of matters which had struck him in his reading, the first of no apparent point, the second whimsical as a brief list of different customs. The chapter on Julius Caesar (il. xxxiv.) is again 30 notes from his reading, treating really, as the Italian translation claims for the Essays, of the high matters I40 MONTAIGNE. "di guerra." The equally military essay on the Battle of Dreux (l. xlv.) is a comment on a contemporary event, characteristic of Montaigne rather than of the other writers who noted the singularities of that much 5 discussed combat, only in the ready comparison with an incident from Plutarch. In these two essays there is not even apparent that intent of public correction, which was a recurrent, though subordinate, motive in the Essayist's comparison of modern with ancient 10 times, and which appears amply in the early essays, Whether the Captain of a place besieged ought to sally forth to parley, and The Hour of parlies dangerous. The latter is again a comment on an actual occurrence in the Civil Wars, this time in Montaigne's immediate IS neighbourhood — a disclaimer, with covert irony, of the accusation of treason brought against the besieg- ing royalists. In another century, Montaigne admits, there might have been some colour in the accusation, but for the present one " Nos fa9ons sont entierement 20 eslogndes de ces reigles. Et ne se doit attandre fiance des ungs aux autres, que le dernier seau d'obligation n'y soit passe ; encore y a il lors asses affaire'.' And though, in 1580, he passes no judgement himself, he concludes with the opinion of the philo- 25 sopher Chrysippos " that those who run a race may rightly put forth all their powers of speed, but that it is in no way permissible for them to set a hand on their rival for the purpose of checking him, nor to stretch out a leg to make him stumble." Later, in 30 1588, he endorses this opinion with his own. This same corrective purpose appears in the longer essay on the Cannibals, and in the comparison of modern THE ESSAYS OF 1580. I4I manners, not now with ancient heroism, but with the simple savage. The irony in this Essay, written as the allusion to " le feu roi Charles IX." makes clear, after the Saint Bartholomew, is more openly biting. " I hold," writes Montaigne, " that there is more 5 barbarity in devouring a living man than a dead, in tearing, by torments and by torture, a body still full of feeling, roasting it at a slow fire, giving it to dogs and swine to rend and wound, — as we have, not read merely, but seen within recent memory, not among 10 ancient enemies, but among neighbours and fellow- citizens, and, what is worse, under pretext of piety and of religion — than to roast and eat it after it has ceased to breathe " Philosophic opinion may be found to justify even cannibalism. "But no opinion 15 is to be found so disordered as to excuse treason, disloyalty, tyranny, cruelty, which are our everyday failings. We may call them (the cannibals) barbarous in respect of the laws of reason, but not in respect of ourselves, who exceed them in all manner of 20 barbarity." This same essay on the Cannibals evinces a quaint liking on Montaigne's part for the simple savage, a liking which he extends to the unlettered peasant. Almost he displays faith in human nature, so it be 25 human nature unspoiled by culture. And he is willing to grant that in this primitive state there may actually reign the ' natural laws,' which he fails to detect in more sophisticated society. " Les lois naturelles leur commandent encore, fort peu abas- 3° tardies par les nostres." But this half-whimsical bent of Montaigne's is far enough from being an anticipation 142 MONTAIGNE. of Rousseau. He would have been the first to mock at that expansion of his caprice into a doctrine. It is a caprice, moreover, sufficiently at variance with his general habits of thought. 5 The aspect of humanity that struck him persis- tently and constantly was, not its natural excellence, but its universal vanity, its ignorance and unreliabi- lity. Primitive virtue and ancient heroism, in the pages of Montaigne, are rather foils to set this off lo than exceptions to qualify it. The note is already struck in the first essay. By diverse means we reach the same end. There the several instances conclude in the moral " Certes c'est un subject merveilleusemant vain, divers, et ondoyant 15 que I'homme. II est malais6 d'y fonder et establir nul jugemant constant et uniforme." The second. Upon Sadness, provides again a notable "tesmoignage de I'imbecilit^ naturelle." And constantly, even when the moral is not drawn, the mere choice and juxta- 20 position of instances tends to the same effect. So that the headings of two essays, The inconstancy of human action : The uncertainty of human judgement, might stand really as title to the Essays as a whole. But, so far as it is possible at all to track the growth 25 of the Essayist's humours, it seems clear that this particular humour was one which grew upon him ; that more and more this aspect of humanity over- shadowed every other. Not only do the later editions produce this sense of diversity and vanity more than 30 the first, — this in part from the mere multiplying of instances and frequent coming back upon earher thoughts, — but even within the first edition, one THE ESSAYS OF 1580. I43 seems to discern the deepening of this, his most proper, humour. Thus his faith in the more positive side of Stoicism, in its validity for the conduct of life, yields in large measure to the sense of uncertainty evoked by the very discussion of the sovereign good. 5 In Chapter xiv. of Book I., he discusses in all sobriety the precept of Epictetus, That the taste of good things and ill depends in great measure upon the opinion we have of them, — a precept which, as we have seen, adorned his ceiling, — and there he gives the last 10 word to philosophy. " Au demeurant, on n'eschape pas a la philosophic, pour faire valoir outre mesure I'aspretd des douleurs. Car on la contraint de nous donner en paiement cecy: s'il est mauvais de vivre en necessite, au moins de vivre en necessity il n'est nulle 15 necessite." Later there occurs to him a last sad human dilemma, with which even this doctrine is powerless to cope, — " cet accident ou, chez un philosophe, une ame devient I'ame d'un fol, troublde, renvers^e et perdue." 20 In the recurring intent of public correction we may see perhaps the permanent trace of La Boetie's influence upon Montaigne; the stoical bias is witnessed to the last in his constant admiration for the display of Roman fortitude. But as practical philosophy, 25 Stoicism gave place to the more really congenial doctrine of moderation and the happy mean, — though even while preaching this he is conscious of the misery of man, who, so soon as his natural condition puts it in his power to taste one single pleasure whole 30 and pure, must needs retrench it by reasoning. That the influence of Stoicism, whose strength lies 144 MONTAIGNE. SO much more in discipline than in doctrine, should decline, in an adherent who admired but did not emulate, was indeed inevitable. It was inevitable too that the more sceptic humour, if it did not 5 change, should grow. " Si philosopher c'est doubter, comme ils disent, k plus forte raison," declares Mon- taigne, "niaiser et fantastiquer, comme je fais, doibt estre doubter." And to a mind of his analytic turn, singularly keen to detect a flaw, apt to perceive a lo difference, but without any active co-ordinating im- pulse, the constant handling of the diverse matter of all experience was of necessity ' to doubt,' and to grow in doubt. In the longest and most elaborate of all the IS essays, the so-called Apology for Remond Sebond, this humour gathers to a head. To apply again Montaigne's own simile, the Apology may be taken as the central and significant painting, and the other essays as the space-filling arabesques. And in this, 20 the twelfth essay of the Second Book, may be found embedded almost every one of the sentences upon the ceiling. On the pretext of defending the Theologia Na- turalis, which he had translated, Montaigne replies 25 in turn, with more show of method than is his wont, to two several objections brought against that work. In answer to the first, — that the Christian should rely on faith alone, and on divine revelation, — he bitingly exposes the present state of the Christians who make 30 so proud a claim, and concludes, from the actual fruits of Christianity, that it is held but as other religions are held, by custom and the law of the THE ESSAYS OF 1580. I45 country. Against the second objection, — that Se- bond's reasons are inadequate to the purpose, and con- trovertible — , he responds that they are as good as any that can be advanced against them, for human reason never has proved, and never can prove, anything, 5 In replying to arguments of so opposite a tenour, Montaigne leaves Christianity, it is true, as well as Remond Sebond, without a leg to stand upon. He demolishes the arguments of Sebond with the rest of human presumption, and allows Christianity, neither 10 held by faith nor provable by reason, to fall between the two stools. But this twist to his argument is more malicious in effect than in design. The logical subtlety, of deliberately landing his readers in the sceptical inference, is as far removed from his general 15 method of writing, following the whim of the moment and regardless of sequence, as the implied hypocrisy is alien to his independent and upright character. For Montaigne professes himself a Catholic, faithful to the religion in which he was born and bred, — has 20 lapses even into more fervent expressions of faith. And the general tenour of his life, as well as the testimony of his contemporaries, witnesses to his honesty. The anti-Christian inference is a mere accident of the double argument, — an accident, more- 25 over, which it was left to the subtler and more scoffing spirit of a later generation to discover. In the sixteenth century, there was no party to whom Montaigne's reproaches against professing Christians could serve as weapon ; and he could direct his irony 30 against them and vent his spleen at their combined bigotry and hypocrisy, while honestly making his L. M. 10 146 MONTAIGNE. reservation of ' the faith ' as exempt from the un- certainty of knowledge. Faith with Montaigne was certainly no operative force, but his adhesion to the religion of his fathers, if an unreasoning conformity,. 5 was as honest at least as bare conformity, to a religion that makes supreme claims, can ever be. It is in the second part of the Apology that Montaigne gives free rein to his humour, and in this second part that lies the broader interest. Remond 10 Sebond and Christianity alike are soon lost sight of. He sets himself to " consider, for the time being, man in himself, without foreign aid, armed only with his proper weapons and despoiled of the grace and divine knowledge which makes all his honour, his strength IS and the foundation of his being." And with man thus as fair game before him, he tracks him in all his strongholds and exposes his every secret weakness, — the weakness more especially of his boasted gift of reason. " Voyons donq si I'homme a en sa puissance 20 d'autres raisons plus fortes que celles de Sebond : voire s'il est en luy d'arriver a nulle certitude par argument et par discours." The first point of attack is man's pretension to be the centre of the universe. The round of argument 25 is familiar and commonplace enough, — in the main still cogent, though some minor detail is applicable only to long past habits of thought. Man is still impotent in the face of nature, the advance of science notwithstanding ; but that impotence is no longer 30 conceived as dependence upon the planets. The tales drawn, not from Montaigne's own observation, but from Pliny or from Plutarch, of the virtues of THE ESSAYS OF 1580. I47 animals — the magnanimous dog, the repentant ele- phant, the clement tiger — would no longer find place in a serious argument. And yet man has, still more effectively, if on other grounds, been brought under " one fortune and one law " with the brute creation. 5 But, shifting the attack, Montaigne leaves to man his boasted advantages of " reason, knowledge, dignity," and examines into the value of these. With usefulness for the conduct of life as test, he exposes the evils that result to man from his gift of reason : 10 how knowledge and imagination serve to aggravate, rather than assuage, human pain and suffering : how the precepts of philosophy are idle words, subduing at most the appearance and expression of pain, whereas ignorance and habit effect a real insensi- 15 bility. As in the Essay on the Cannibals, so here, the preference is given to the natural man, as opposed to the man of culture. Montaigne quotes the ' ataraxy ' of the philosopher as a return merely to the native 20 insensibility of the peasant. And he claims the support of philosophy itself, and of course religion, for his praise of ignorance. He claims philosophy, too, as proving that reason, useless in the conduct of life, is also incapable of 25 attaining to any truth or certain knowledge. The professed sceptics are here of course to the fore, but even Aristotle, 'prince' though he be 'of dogmatists,' Montaigne declares to preach really Pyrrhonism, " under a resolutive form." For the self-contradiction 30 and variety of opinion of the ancient philosophers proves that they regarded their art but " as a toy 148 MONTAIGNE. for anyone to play with" (un jouet a toutes mains), and that they " sported with reason as with a vain and frivolous instrument." " Par cete varietd et instability d'opinions, ilz nous menent comme par la main, S tacitemant, a c^te resolution de leur irresolution." By the "variety and instability of opinions'' Montaigne in his turn leads up to the conclusion of inconclusiveness. The long array of ancient judge- ments, on things human and things divine, on the 10 nature of God, of man, of the world, — set forth pell- mell, with a contrary for every positive, for each assertion a denial, — may well serve to rouse in the most dogmatic mind the sense of futility and doubt. It has this more peculiar interest that, as Montaigne IS presents it to his readers, so antiquity was presented to him and to his age. Aristotle had been dethroned from his seat of unquestioned authority, and, if for the moment it would seem to be in favour of a rival, the inevitable broader consequence was to deprive 20 him of his pontificate without advancing to it any other. So that the philosophers were on a dead level, their doctrines offered concurrently on their in- trinsic merits. And it is little matter for surprise if, while this or the other philosopher found personal 25 adherents, — Plato an advocate in Ramus, Epictetus a disciple in Du Vair — , the larger outcome was un- certainty and suspense of judgement. The less that this too could draw a name and an authority from among the ancients, could claim Pyrrhon as its 30 founder, and make the Hypoiyposes of Sextus Em- piricus into its text-book. It is of interest, again, to note how the real THE ESSAYS OF 1580. 1 49 discoveries and scientific beginnings of the age went to swell this sense of general uncertainty. There was first the meddling of the astronomers with the place of the earth in the universe. " Those who doubt of everything," says Montaigne, " doubt also whether s the skies are over our head." ..." The heavens and the stars have pursued their course," he says again, " these three thousand years. All the world believed it so, until, some fifteen hundred years ago, it oc- curred to someone to declare that it was the earth 10 that moved. And, in our day, Copernicus has so solidly established this doctrine, as to make use of it quite systematically for all the astrological conse- quences. What do we gather, if not that there is no certainty, in the one view or in the other ? For 15 who knows but a third opinion, between this and a thousand years, may not overturn the two preceding ones .■"" And again in the science of medicine : "They say that a new-comer, Paracelsus by name, is changing and upsetting the whole order of the ancient rules, 20 and maintains that, up to the present time, it has served only to kill people. That" adds Montaigne, "I believe he may easily establish; but I conceive it were small wisdom to commit my life to the mercy of his new experimenting." And in the matter of 25 navigation: "One of this profession of novelties and reforms said to me, a little while ago, that every one of the ancients had clearly miscalculated as to the nature and movements of the winds, and that he would point me out their error, if I would listen to 30 him. After exercising a little patience in hearing his arguments, which were full of likelihood, — I I50 MONTAIGNE. observed to him, What ! did those who navigated by the laws of Theophrastus go west, when they steered east, or sideways, or backwards? It was a matter of luck, he replied, but in any case they mis- S calculated. I answered him that I would rather follow the result than the reason. Now these," the Essayist continues, "are things that often run counter. And I have been told that in geometry (which claims to have attained the highest certitude among the 10 sciences) there are to be found inevitable demon- strations subverting the truth of experience. Thus Jacques Peletier said, at my house, that he had found two lines converging towards one another, so as • they should meet, which he yet could verify would IS never, to all infinity, succeed in touching." Again : "A thousand years ago, it would have been to Pyrrhonize, to cast doubt upon the science of cosmography, and the opinions then received of everyone. Behold ! in our century, there has just been discovered an infinite 20 extent of solid earth, — not an island or single country, but a portion very nearly equal in size to that we were acquainted with. The geographers of this present day do not fail to assert that now all is found and all seen ... Resolve me, if Ptolemy was 25 heretofore deceived in the grounds of his reasoning, whether it were not folly for me to put confidence in what these latter say." The conclusion was legitimate enough. For science, proclaiming herself already by results, by 30 one result at least of no small splendour, was as yet unconscious of her method. So that while her results, taken in themselves, only swelled the vast THE ESSAYS OF 1580. 151 sea of human opinion, she had no answer to give to the challenge, re-echoed from antiquity, for some sure sign, or criterion, of their validity. Or, if so far mistress of her method as to point, in place of authority, to experience, it was as yet without s sufficient right. Indeed the most notable result of the age's science, the Copernican doctrine, rested not so directly on experience as on those geometrical reasonings which, as Montaigne observes, were often in contradiction with obvious experience. And it 10 was itself opposed to the plain evidence of every- body's senses. It needed a more prophetic eye than was Montaigne's, to anticipate the large results that were to come of the patient and methodic study of experience. His more natural sentiment was 15 impatience at those who, ' knowing something of the nature of a river or a fountain' — one suspects an al- lusion to Bernard Palissy — presumed on the strength of it to claim a wider judgement. Nor indeed would Montaigne, interested chiefly in those ultimate 20 questions of life and, death to which science at length admits herself unequal, have been so much impressed even had he foreseen the whole structure of ex- periential knowledge. This argument, in the Apology, from diversity of 25 results, is further reinforced by the closer argument of the feebleness of the instrument. Is not reason, Montaigne asks, at the mercy of every accident ? Is it not coloured by passion, clouded by illness, affected by a change even in the weather ? And, finally, are 30 not the senses, to which we look for the material of reasoning, subject to constant alteration, and without 152 MONTAIGNE. any test or standard whereby we may say when they are to be relied upon and when not ? (Old familiar difficulties, but familiar because of their difficulty.) Given first principles, given a starting point, we may 5 erect as proud an edifice of knowledge as we will ; but it is precisely to first principles that man cannot attain. Cannot attain, unless indeed, — it is the Essayist's saving clause — , the divinity reveals them. But Montaigne is considering man devoid of all lo such supernatural aid. And, thus divested, the weak- ness of his human weapons throws him back, by the most reasonable counsel, upon the laws and customs of his country. But not for that upon a better assurance of unanimity. For, varied as are the IS opinions based on reasoning, of a like variety are irrational prejudices ; as diverse are the customs of different countries, as mutable their laws. So that neither here is man allowed an occasion of boasting, nor a solid basis, even, for conduct. And the Essayist 20 returns to his saving clause. Quoting the words of Epictetus, " How vile and abject a thing is man, unless he raise himself above the level of humanity," he declares in conclusion of the Apology, "He will raise himself, if God lend him a hand ; he will raise 25 himself if he abandon and renounce his own help, and leave himself to be lifted and upraised by the divine grace ; but not otherwise." The saving clause, though honest enough, is but perfunctory. He excepts revealed religion from the 30 general uncertainty, but rules it out of court. And this not only in the argument of the Apology, but in his habitual review of humanity and life. Of the THE ESSAYS OF 1580. I S3 two resources open to a mind imbued with a sense of the vanity of knowledge and the instability of life, Montaigne adopts, not a more ardent faith, but a tolerant suspense of judgement. The consciousness of his own instability, leaves him, it is true, with a 5 certain constancy in his opinions. "Car, quelque apparence qu'il y ait en la nouvelete, je ne change pas aisement, de peur que j'ay de perdre au change : et puis que je ne suis pas capable de choisir, je pren le chois d'autruy, et me tiens en I'assiete ou Dieu 10 m'a mis ; autrement je ne me s^auroy pas garder de rouler sans cesse." But, while adhering to his first opinions, he held to them lightly, as opinions merely and not as doctrine, and he welcomed, instead of resenting, the expression of opinions contrary to his 15 own. This first edition of the Essays concludes with the assurance; "I do not at all hate fantasies contrary to my own. I am so far from taking alarm when I see the discordance between my judgements and those of others, and from being unable to accommodate 20 myself to the society of other men, because their opinion is other than my own, that, on the contrary, since variety is the most general form that nature has followed, I find it more novel and more rare when our humours and our fantasies accord. And, 25 peradventure, there never were in the world two opinions wholly and exactly alike, no more than two faces. Their most proper quality is diversity and discordance." And to Montaigne in the Apology may be applied 30 his own later reflection upon Socrates. " II m'est advis qu'en Platon et en Xenophon, Socrates dispute 154 MONTAIGNE. plus en faveur des disputants qu'en faveur de la dispute, et pour instruire Euthydemus et Protagoras de la cognoissance de leur impertinence, plus que de I'impertinence de leur art.'' He is not so much 5 concerned to show the weakness of human reason as to trouble the presumption of those who pride themselves upon it, and think themselves wiser than their neighbours. His raillery is directed against the 'solemn ass' in every form, — as well the bigot who, 10 under pretext of his religion, does everything most contrary to it, as the rash innovator, who, detecting a flaw in the established order, thinks to set his own ready-made system in its place. CHAPTER IX. PUBLICATION OF THE ESSAYS. SELF-PORTRAITURE. JOURNEY TO ITALY. The Essays were published in 1580 at Bordeau.x:, where Simon Millanges, a former master of the Col- lege de Guyenne, had set up a printing-press. They appeared without the customary dedicatory letter, and without the bad verses which printers were 5 in the habit of prefixing to the works they issued. Montaigne condemns this practice, and speaks with resentment of the doggerel lines attached to his trans- lation of Remond Sebond. His own preface to the Essays is brief enough to be given in full. "You 10 have here, reader, a book of good faith. It warns you on the threshold that I have proposed to myself no other end than private and domestic ; I have had in consideration neither thy service nor my glory ; such design is beyond my powers. I have devoted it 15 to the particular accommodation of my relatives and friends ; to the end that, having lost me (as they soon must) they may there recover sundry traits of my conditions and my humours, and that, by this means, IS6 MONTAIGNE. they may cherish more whole and quick the know- ledge they have of me. Were my purpose to look for the world's favour, I had adorned myself with borrowed beauties, or had strained and sustained S myself at my best pace. I wish to be seen in my simple, natural, and ordinary style, without artifice or study : for it is myself that I paint. My defects may be read there to the life, my imperfections and natural form as fully as the respect due to the public permits 10 it. Had I been among those nations that are said to live still in the gentle liberty of the first laws of nature, I assure thee that I would very gladly have painted myself entire and naked. Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book : it is against reason 15 that thou shouldst employ thy time upon so vain and frivolous a subject. Therefore farewell. From Montaigne, this first of March 1580." Nevertheless, it is only with a large license of interpretation that Montaigne can be said to be 20 himself the subject-matter of his book. Of actual self-portraiture there is far less — less even in pro- portion to the total bulk — in this than in the later editions ; while even the later essays are no more a close and continuous confession than they are an 25 autobiography. The story, current in the Essayist's lifetime, of his reply to Henry HI., who assured him that he liked the Essays, — " then your Majesty must like me too, for my book is nothing but a discourse of my life and of my actions," — is obviously fabricated, 30 or, at best, a distorted version of the repartee. Only in a sense at once looser and more subtle can the Essays be called self-portraiture, only when the 'self SELF-PORTRAITURE. 157 is taken to embrace and comprehend all personal opinions and private judgements. In this sense they are true self-portraiture, Montaigne giving all his judgements as ' poor things but his own.' There is, however, one actual and detailed portrait. 5 In the Essay on Presumption, Montaigne deliberately sets aside those laws of etiquette, that forbid alike self-praise and self-depreciation, and describes his qualities and his defects for whom it may concern. The judgement which he passes on himself at this 10 season, after he had sufficiently weighed himself in the leisure of his retirement but before old age had entangled him in its garrulity, is of particular interest. He describes his person : below middle height, thick set and strong, of a ruddy complexion, full but 15 not fat in face, vigorous and capable of endurance but without dexterity or address, — sadly degenerate from his father, he tells us, in this last respect. His in- tellectual gifts he rates very low ; nothing that he can write satisfies him. But to restore the balance of 20 candour, he admits that there are worse things which are yet esteemed. His standard of comparison is with his own ideal, with the " idea that he has in his mind," or with those ancient writers, who overtop even his ideal. He has, singular as it seems to us 25 now, his powers as a poet more especially in view, while passing this judgement. Like the rest of his generation, he tried his hand at verse-making; unlike his generation, he was not lightly satisfied with the result. " One may play the fool in all else, but not in 30 poetry," is at once his self-condemnation and the condemnation of the mass of contemporary versifiers, 158 MONTAIGNE. alike in French and Latin. In prose Montaigne felt himself freer, and must at least have suspected his power of language, with its graphic force so akin to the merits he saw in that pure Gascon of the hills, 5 " un langage href, signifiant, et presse," — " masle et militaire." He acknowledges, indeed, that his own language, with nothing " soft or fluent " about it, but " dry and thorny, having its free and ill-regulated turns," pleased him as it was. But he is at the same 10 time conscious that his lack of order and method, though he cannot amend it, lands him sometimes in obscurity. " Mais je sens bien que par fois je m'y laisse trop aller, et qu'a force de vouloir eviter I'art et Taffectation, j'y retumbe d'un autre part : 15 Brevis esse laboro Obscurus fio.'" So far son of the renascence, that he must needs have his ancient model, he declares "encore que les coupures et cadences de Saluste reviennent plus a 20 mon humeur, si est-ce que je treuve Caesar et plus admirable et moins aysd a imiter." To us, it is of more interest to note his other aim — that of following, so far as he could, " a simple and popular manner of speech." For the committal to paper of all the wealth 25 of the spoken tongue, with its everyday metaphors and its proverbial turns, is an ingredient — one of the few analyzable ingredients — in the supreme literary merit of the Essays. Turning to gold, with his singularly pictorial imagination, that spoken lan- 30 guage, Montaigne derives his imagery from daily life, draws his vocabulary from current usage. He employs terms of falconry, not by a deliberate search SELF-PORTRAITURE. 1 59 for sources, such as that carried on by Henri Estienne, but because he was a sportsman ; if his speech is coloured by the Latin, it is not from pedantry, but because the Latin was his nursery tongue. So that the Latinisms — as again the Gasconisms that betray 5 his origin, — are assimilated into the substance of his writing rather than appended as foreign elements. The richness and nervous force of language in the Essays may well be held to compensate for the lack, as yet, of literary measure and restraint. For this lo " parler informe et sans regie," this "jargon populaire," as he describes it later, was to provide the great storehouse of vocabulary for ensuing literature. " Le maniement et employte des beaux esprits donne prix a la langue ; non pas I'innovant, tant, comme la rem- 15 pHssant de plus vigoreux et divers services, I'estirant et ployant : ils n'y apportent point de mots, mais ils enrichissent les leurs, appesantissent et enfoncent leur signification et leur usage, luy apprennent des mouvements inaccoustumez, mais prudemment et 20 ingenieusement." To but few, as the Essayist says, is this given ; to none perhaps has it been more signally given than to himself In his literary, as in his physical energy, Mon- taigne acknowledges only pleasure and allurement, 25 not rule and measure, as his guide. What he has to say, he says with all his force, but the art of playing with a topic for the sake of playing, and of recom- mending it merely by its treatment, is alien to him. Even in conversation, where he claims to be better 30 than in writing, Montaigne declares himself without this skill. Not by reason of his bad handwriting l6o MONTAIGNE. only, does he prefer to rewrite rather than amend or aher. If his statement " j'adjouste, mais je ne corrige pas," must be taken cum grano, in view of later amendments to the wording of the Essays, it is 5 broadly and substantially a correct account of his , manner of writing. And the inamenability to con- straint and rule coloured all his character. Physically and mentally, he required to be lured on by pleasure, to move at the free pace of his own will, or he was lo good for nothing. " I am come to this," he writes, at an age nearer forty than fifty, " that there is nothing, save health and life, that I would purchase at the cost of mental torment and of constraint." This semi- inertia, semi-independence, was fostered in him, as he 15 recognizes, by the softness and liberty of his up- bringing, and by the circumstances in which fortune had placed him. He had not in himself the springs of ambition, and his station was not such as to entail the responsibility of public office, or to make military 20 enterprise a duty. Himself a simple country gentle- man, his family traditions went back rather to the gathering of wealth by commerce; the record that his ancestors could boast was ' prud'homie ' and ' probitd.' Montaigne reaped the fruits of their in- 25 dustry, and lacked the spur of poverty. He had, as he says elsewhere, more to lose than to gain by shifting his seat. And so little had he inherited the careful spirit of his ancestors, so " incapable de solici- tude " had he become, that he preferred not even to 30 know of losses and unsatisfactory affairs. He counted the indulgence of his negligence as a special item of expenditure, and, finding himself incapable of SELF-PORTRAITURE. l6l regulating affairs and overlooking them, he cherished in himself this careless humour, " cet opinion de les laisser aller a I'abandon." The further evidence that he gives of his careless- ness and incapacity in practical matters is scarcely to s be credited. Born and bred in the fields, with the cultivation of an estate depending on him, he did not know the difference between the several grains, and scarce between a cabbage and a lettuce. He could j not reckon — a reflection this upon the exclusively io\ classical training of the colleges — either on paper or in his head, and was ignorant of the greater number \ of the coins in actual currency. More intelligible are his defects of memory, his inability to recall names, his need for making immediate memoranda of what 15 he wished to attend to. A defective verbal memory was proper enough to his type of mind, unconcerned with external and specific detail. What remained to him of his reading was that only of which his judge- ment had taken hold. He forgot incontinently the 20 imagery and language that clothed it, the author, place, and other circumstances. Of a piece, too, is his mental bluntness and slowness ("J'ai I'esprit tardif et mousse"), by which he seems to mean merely a want of ready ingenuity, of the kind useful for solving 25 puzzles ; and sufficiently of a piece is his " slow and clouded apprehension," that yet held "firmly and comprehensively" what it once had seized. But a characteristic more essential to him is one which he ushers in with a final apology for its public 30 avowal, — "it is irresolution, a vice very incommodious for the transaction of the world's affairs." He was L. M. II l6z MONTAIGNE. incapable of taking part in a dubious enterprise because he saw always -the reasons on both sides — , so that he reserved his judgement until occasion forced his hand, and then, he confesses candidly, he S mostly flung reason to the wind and followed the lead of circumstance and chance. He dwells upon his indecision more especially, as is natural, in relation to political affairs, bringing forward this disability in apology, partly, for his aloofness. 10 Equally unfit for the public service, under actual circumstances at least, he declares the few moral virtues with which nature had endowed him, — the honesty and uprightness that he had in heritage from his ancestors : his inability to flatter or dissemble, 15 were it in the service of a prince. As out of place too in the century, he notes his mildness and placa- bility. " The facility of my manners, they would call cowardice and weakness ; faith and conscience would there be found scrupulous and superstitious ; candour 20 and fteedom, importunate, ill-considered and over- bold." And so he falls, from self-portraiture, to invective against the age. He detests chiefly "this new virtue of feigning and dissimulation, so high in credit at the moment. I hate it supremely (capitale- 25 ment)," he declares, " and, of all vices, I find none that so testifies to meanness and baseness of heart. 'Tis a coward humour, and a servile, to go in disguise, hiding under a mask, not daring to show oneself as one is, and not daring to display one's face in public." 30 The professed Machiavellianism of the Court, he denounces, as well for its folly as its baseness. "I know not what commodity they await from this SELF-PORTRAITURE. 163 ceaseless feigning and counter-feigning ; it is a thing may deceive one while or twice : but to make pro- fession of keeping in covert, and to boast, as some of our princes have done, that they would fling their shirt into the fire did it partake their counsel, and that s he who knows not how to feign knows not how to reign, — this is to fore-warn those that have affair with them, that all they say is but trickery and falsehood. It were a great simplicity in whoso should let himself be duped whether by the countenance or the words 10 of him who makes express practice of being other outwardly than he is within ; and I know not what part such persons can have in the. commerce of men, setting forth nothing that may be accepted as current coin." And, with a return to himself, "for my part, 15 I had rather be importunate and indiscreet than a flatterer and dissimulator." As final item in his self-characterization, Montaigne names his judgement, "that in which no man yet deemed himself deficient," as the sole thing in himself 20 which he esteems. " An ordinary, common, and popular recommendation, for who ever conceived himself lacking in judgement .■•" " I think that my opinions are good and sound," he remarks, " but who is there that does not believe as much of his .-' " The 25 best proof that he has to advance is, he takes it, the poor opinion he has of himself, since it shows that his judgement is unbiassed by his peculiar self-love, — peculiar, in that, while other men lose themselves in external objects, he refers back everything to himself 30 as centre. 1 64 MONTAIGNE. In the very last Essay, upon The Resemblance of Children to their Parents, there is again much personal detail, though of a more external kind. As a some- what melancholy close to this first series of his 5 cogitations, Montaigne narrates how, after enjoying all his life an "alaigre sant6," he has been at length overtaken by the hereditary malady, the stone. He puts however a cheerful face upon even this matter, finds in it fresh evidence of the accommodating force of lo habit, and makes it the occasion for a diatribe against the uncertainties of the medical science. His aversion to medicine was a family heritage, as well as his malady, but he brings reason in to fortify and defend what would otherwise be a mere instinctive prejudice. IS He does not, however, take so wide a ground as in the Apology. He admits the possibility, and even likelihood, of such an art, — "that there may be, among so many works of nature, things proper to the conservation of our health." He professes to be 20 attacking only the science of medicine as in vogue and actual repute. But he does, as a fact, extend his ground, adducing the testimony of the ancients, and showing plainly enough that he is no more disposed to put faith in the new science of Paracelsus and 25 Fioravanti than in that of the orthodox practitioner. " Since those ancient mutations in medicine, there have been an infinite number more, down to our times, and, the more often, mutations whole and universal, such as are those that are being made in our day by 30 Paracelsus, Fioravanti and Argenterius : for they do not alter merely a drug or a prescription, but, by what I am told, the whole contexture and police of JOURNEY TO ITALY. 165 the body of medicine, accusing of ignorance and trickery all those who before them have made it a profession. I leave you to imagine what becomes of the poor patient." The one form of treatment which Montaigne 5 practised, though even this without much faith, was the taking waters at the various cures then in repute. He had already, when he wrote this concluding Essay, visited the nearer watering-places of the Pyrenees. And with health in view partly, and to 10 visit the baths of Germany and Italy, he made a longer journey directly after the publication of the Essays. He may have been urged to it, even, by medical advice, and have had his own case in view when he gives, as a last hit at the doctors, their 15 ingenuity in getting rid of a patient, whom they have failed to cure, by sending him to make vows, drink waters, or travel in foreign lands. The journal which he kept, for the benefit presumably of his wife and domestic circle, contains pages of full and wearisome 20 detail concerning the progress of his malady, and the effect upon it of the waters of Plombi^res, Baden and Lucca. But while health was one motive, it was not the only one that set him upon the journey. He tells us 25 of the satisfaction with which he left out of view, for a time, the spectacle of his unhappy country, and again of his pleasure in shaking off the cares, lightly as they sat upon him, of his household and estate. And, besides, he escorted to Italy his young ward and 3° brother, Bertrand de Mattecoulon, then of an age to complete his education by foreign travel, and with 1 66 MONTAIGNE. him a M. de Cazelis, probably a young relative by marriage, who remained behind in Padua. The Journal, discovered and printed only in the 1 8th century (1774), is incomplete, wanting two leaves 5 at the beginning. But, connecting the dates with an entry in the Ephemerides, which reports him present at the siege of La F^re, in the August of 1580, it seems evident that Montaigne began his 'grand tour' by way of Paris, proceeding thence to the siege. He 10 presented, doubtless, at this time his Essays to the King, receiving in return his compliments. Thence he passed through France, via Beaumont, Meaux, etc.... to Plombi^res, the young d'Estissac joining him at Beaumont, to share expenses, as the journal records, 15 and presumably for companionship. From Plombieres, after a ten days' stay to take the waters, the party passed on, by way of Bale to Baden, and then again through Schaffhausen, Constance, Kempten, Munich , over the Tirol into Italy. 20 Rome was to be the extreme point. But the Essayist, although we may well accredit him with curiosity to see the cradle and home of Roman greatness, would yet willingly, for the mere pleasure of travelling, have prolonged and deviated his route 25 thither. The servant, or secretary, who wrote half the journal for him, records that, " in his belief," had Montaigne "been alone with his own party (avec les siens) he would have gone to Cracovie or to Greece by land instead of turning off to Italy ; but he could 30 not impart to any one of his companions — who each wanted to reach his destination — the pleasure that he took in visiting foreign lands, a pleasure so grateful JOURNEY TO ITALY. 167 as to make him forget his age and his health. Indeed he was in the habit of saying that when, after a restless night, he recollected in the morning that he had a town or a new country to see, he rose with expectancy and eagerness....! never saw him," con- s tinues the scribe, "less tired or less complaining of his sufferings, with his mind so on the stretch, whether by the way or at home, for all he should see, and so searching out every opportunity to converse with strangers, that I believe all this diverted his malady. 10 When the complaint was made to him that he often conducted the party by deviating and contrary ways. . ., often getting back close to the place he had started from (as he did either because he had heard of some- thing worth seeing, or changing his mind according 15 to the occasion), he replied that, for his part, he had no other destination than the place where he chanced to be, and that he could not go wrong, or out of his way, having no other end in view than to reside in new localities.... As for Rome , he desired to see 20 it so much the less than other places, because it was common property, — and there was not a lackey but could give them information about Florence or Ferrara. He said, again, that he felt like those who read a very pleasant tale, or a fine book, and fear to come 25 too soon to the end of it ; he, in like manner, took so great pleasure in travelling that he hated the neighbourhood of the place where he was to rest, and proposed sundry plans for travelling at his ease if he could be alone." 30 This witness to Montaigne's Bohemianism and capacity — not of his times — for purposeless light- l68 MONTAIGNE. hearted wandering, is one of the more interesting points in a journal which as a whole, as a literary- document at any rate, is disappointing. Its com- parative triviality may be largely due to the fact 5 that a third of it was written in this manner by a secretary, and a third again, for practice, in a foreign tongue. Montaigne's knowledge of Italian, though fluent enough, had naturally none of the intimacy and force of his native French, and could I o serve him as vehicle only of his surface thoughts. But even the intermediate portion of this "belle besoigne," which the departure of his secretary obliged Montaigne to carry on himself, written as it was in French, and much of it during his stay 15 in Rome, is comparatively poor in interest. The slight sense of daily compulsion, which attends the keeping of a journal, may have been a check upon his reveries; the constant stimulus and outlet of change and movement — the very absence in Rome 20 of the ' two mortal enemies, ennui and idleness,' — may have detained his mind upon the surface. But, whatever the cause, Montaigne confines himself for the most part to a descriptive record, without com- ment, of his experiences. And, as a record, there is 25 much of the merest triviality, — the respective comfort of the inns, the state of his health, the means of conveyance, etc. The objects of note, again, that he sets down, are mentioned with a tourist's surface interest, and without more than a tourist's descriptive 30 faculty. In Rome, chance and his insignificance, as he says, opened to him the Vatican Library, and gave him the handling of manuscripts, which M. d'Abain JOURNEY TO ITALY. 1 69 (Louis de la Chasteignerie), ambassador at Rome, — the friend of Joseph Scaliger and of Muret, — had tried in vain to get a sight of. But beyond a special satisfaction in seeing the manuscripts of Seneca and of Plutarch's Opuscules, Montaigne's interest in the 5 several objects of note is, even here, that of the ordinary tourist. As for the antiquities and ruins, which it was the fashion of that day, as of ours, to make the object of research, Montaigne was without the antiquarian 10 instinct. He enjoyed wandering among the ruins, as in the vineyards, but has scarce an individual mention of a monument. The vanity of the attempt to reconstruct in imagination ancient Rome from the actual remains, — which are not so much, he says, the 15 ruins, as the sepulchre, of Rome — is as patent to him as most other vanities. "He said," his secretary writes, presumably taking down verbatim what is the most elaborate reflection in the journal, "he said that nothing was to be seen of Rome, save the sky beneath which 20 she had lain and the plan of her site; that those who said the ruins, at least, of Rome were to be seen, said too much, for the ruins of so terriiic an engine would report more honour and reverence to her memory ; for all that they saw was no more than 25 her sepulchre; that the buildings of this bastard Rome which were now being added on to that ancient masonry, notwithstanding that they were enough to ravish the actual age, called to his mind the nests which, in France, the sparrows and swallows hang 30 upon the vaults and roofs of the churches recently demolished by the Huguenots." The simile is as I70 MONTAIGNE. descriptive of the actual state of France as of Rome ! This judgement upon Rome, which extends to some length, is of an eloquence more rounded and rhetorical than is customary with Montaigne. In the Journal S it stands as an isolated effort. The general style there, as the matter, is homely enough, its plainness of colour having no merit, unless that of realism, to claim. He takes up the pen himself on the departure of lo his amanuensis, to describe an attempted exorcism that he witnessed. The devil was an obstinate one and no miracle attended the efforts of the priest, — the sobriety of the account contrasts strikingly enough with other contemporary reports of exorcisms. Of 15 more personal interest is the account of his dinner, with Muret and other savants, at his friend the am- bassador's ; and of his attempted defence of Amyot's Plutarch. Montaigne argued that, even where Amyot had failed to render Plutarch, he had substituted an 20 apparent sense that hung well with the context ; but he could not maintain his ground against the more learned proofs brought forward by the others. Unable to dispute their premises, as to the true sense of certain passages, he was obliged to admit "de bone 25 foi " their conclusion — that the translator had given a lame and tortured meaning in place of one clear and easy. And very piquant is the narrative of his affair with the ecclesiastical censorship. All the books he brought with him were retained for examination, — 30 so lengthy a business that, as he observes, a man who had anything else to do might well take them as lost, — a Book of Hours, because of Paris not of Rome, JOURNEY TO ITALY. I71 and the books of certain German ecclesiastics against the heretics, because in combating their errors they made mention of them, being held especially as suspicious. Montaigne was moved to congratulate himself, in view of his curiosity, and of the fact that s he had just come through Germany, that he had no prohibited book about him. But even the Essays, which he had witji him, were not to escape without correction. The points disapproved of were " the use of the word fortune, the mention of heretical poets, xo the defence of the Emperor Julian, and the anim- adversion upon the need for one who prays to be, for the time, exempt from vicious desires ; item, to esteem all that goes beyond simple killing to be cruelty ; item, that a child should be brought up to 15 do everything, and other such things." The author was bold to maintain these points, which he enume- rates, as his real opinions, and to contend, as regards others which he does not specify, that the censor had misunderstood him, — with the result that the ' maestro 20 del sacro palazzo,' who, knowing no French, had relied on the report of a French monk, ended by leaving it to Montaigne's own conscience to amend whatever he should find ill-judged (de mauvais gout). And, as a conclusion of the whole matter, when the Essayist 25 came to take his leave of Rome, and of his censors, the said major-domo and his colleague begged him to pay no attention to the censure, which contained — they had learned from other Frenchmen — sundry " sottises." " II me sembla," Montaigne concludes, 30 " les laisser fort contans de moi ; et pour s'excuser de ce qu'ils avoient einsi curieusemant veu mon 172 MONTAIGNE. Livre et condamme en quelques choses, m'allegarent plusieurs Livres de notre tamps de Cardinaus et Religieus de tr6s-bone reputation, censures pour quel- ques teles imperfections, qui ne touchoint nulemant 5 la reputation de I'authur ny de I'euvre en gros ; me priarent d'eider a I'Eglise par mon 61oquance (ce sent leurs mots de courtoisie), et de faire demure en cete ville paisible et hors de trouble avecques eus. Ce sont persones de grande authority et cardinalables." 10 The pope, Gregory XIII., had addressed to him, at his audience, somewhat similar " mots de courtoisie." The Essayist was not content to leave Rome without obtaining an 'empty honour,' as he recognised it, but upon which he had set his heart, — the title of IS Roman citizen, sometimes still conferred on illustrious strangers. He records this honour, and gives at length the Bull conferring it, in the later Essay Upon Vanity. It was a childish humour, as he admits, that made him thus desire to be enrolled, by barren title, with the 20 heroes of antiquity. A childish humour, yet scarcely a foolish one, and in keeping with that vein of senti- ment that made him like to wear his father's old black cloak, and to put up commemorative tablets. Other slight incidents recorded in the Journal have been 25 thought to indicate a more vulgar vanity — without the redeeming romantic touch. He showed a some- what unphilosophic readiness in conforming with the custom of leaving his coat-of-arms — the Montaigne coat-of-arms — to adorn the inns where he had been 30 well served. On one occasion he amused himself, too, by counterfeiting a greater dignity than he possessed, — causing the burghers of Augsburg, who JOURNEY TO ITALY. 1 73 had mistaken him and his company for noblemen, to be left under their wrong impression. Again childish, but innocent enough and nafvely recorded in the Journal. Montaigne would seem, indeed, to have had a superficial tinge of vanity — not, surely, a 5 'whole dye.' It betrayed itself in his childhood, he tells us himself, by a strutting gait and vain-glorious gesture ; and it is a quality that well accords with his easy, surface self-contentment, and with his pleasure in standing well with his company, whether that of 10 ecclesiastics and ' cardinalables ' or of his guests at the dance he gave, on his return journey, at the Baths of Lucca. But the yi??