How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  If one reverses chronology and imagines Montaigne settling down in his armchair to read Rousseau, it is intriguing to wonder how far he would have followed this before tossing the book from him. In the early stages of this passage, he might have felt enchanted; here was a writer with whom he was in perfect harmony. A few paragraphs later, one imagines him faltering and frowning. “Though I don’t know …” he might murmur, as the wave of Rousseau’s rhetoric keeps swelling. Montaigne would want to pause and examine it all from alternative angles. Does society really make us callous? he would ask. Are we not better in company? Is man really born free; is he not filled with weaknesses and imperfections from the start? Do sociability and slavery go together? And by the way, could anyone really throw a stone powerfully enough to kill something at a distance without a slingshot?

  Rousseau never stops or reverses direction. He sweeps along, and sweeps many readers with him too: he became the most popular author of his day. Reading a few pages of Rousseau makes one realize just how different he is from Montaigne, even when the latter seems to have been a source for his ideas. Montaigne is saved from flights of primitivist fantasy by his tendency to step aside from whatever he says even as he is saying it. His “though I don’t know” always intervenes. Moreover, his overall purpose is different from Rousseau’s. He does not want to show that modern civilization is corrupt, but that all human perspectives on the world are corrupt and partial by nature. This applies to the Tupinambá visitors, gazing at the French in Rouen, just as much as to Léry or Thevet in Brazil. The only hope of emerging from the fog of misinterpretation is to remain alert to its existence: that is, to become wise at one’s own expense. But even this only provides an imperfect solution. We can never escape our limitations altogether.

  Writers like Diderot and Rousseau were drawn not only to the “cannibal” Montaigne, but to all the passages in which he wrote of simple and natural ways of life. The book in which Rousseau seems to have borrowed most from the Essays is Émile, a hugely successful pedagogical novel which changed the lives of a whole generation of fashionably educated children by promoting a “natural” upbringing. Parents and tutors should bring up children gently, he suggested, letting them learn about the world by following their own curiosity while surrounding them with opportunities for travel, conversation, and experience. At the same time, like little Stoics, they should also be inured to tough physical conditions. This is clearly traceable to Montaigne’s essay on education, although Rousseau mentions Montaigne only occasionally in the book, usually to attack him.

  He insults Montaigne again at the outset of his autobiography, the Confessions—a work which might be thought to owe something to Montaigne’s project of self-portraiture. In his original preface (often omitted in later editions), Rousseau wards off such accusations by writing, “I place Montaigne foremost among those dissemblers who mean to deceive by telling the truth. He portrays himself with defects, but he gives himself only lovable ones.” If Montaigne, misleads the reader, then it is not he but Rousseau who is the first person in history to write an honest and full account of himself. This frees Rousseau to say, of his own book, “This is the only portrait of a man, painted exactly according to nature and in all its truth, that exists and will probably ever exist.”

  The works do differ, and not just because the Confessions is a narrative, tracing a life from childhood on rather than capturing everything at once as the Essays does. There is also a difference of purpose. Rousseau wrote the book because he considered himself so exceptional, both in brilliance and sometimes in wickedness, that he wanted to capture himself before this unique combination of features was lost to the world.

  I know men. I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that exist … As to whether Nature did well or ill to break the mold in which I was cast, that is something no one can judge until after they have read me.

  Montaigne, by contrast, saw himself as a thoroughly ordinary man in every respect, except for his unusual habit of writing things down. He “bears the entire form of the human condition,” as everyone does, and is therefore happy to cast himself as a mirror for others—the same role he bestows on the Tupinambá. That is the whole point of the Essays. If no one could recognize themselves in him, why would anyone read him?

  Some contemporaries noticed suspicious similarities between Rousseau and Montaigne. Rousseau was overtly accused of theft: a tract by Dom Joseph Cajot, bluntly called Rousseau’s Plagiarisms on Education, opined that the only difference was that Montaigne gushed less than Rousseau and was more concise—surely the only time the latter quality has ever been attributed to Montaigne. Another critic, Nicolas Bricaire de la Dixmerie, invented a dialogue in which Rousseau admits to having copied ideas from Montaigne, but argues that they have nothing in common because he writes “in inspiration” while Montaigne writes “coldly.”

  Rousseau lived in an era when gushing, inspiration, and heat were admired. They meant, precisely, that you were in touch with “Nature,” rather than being a slave to the frigid requirements of civilization. You were savage and sincere; you had cannibal chic.

  Eighteenth-century readers who embraced Montaigne for his praise of the Tupinambá, and for all his writings on nature, were gradually blossoming into full Romantics—a breed who would dominate the late years of that century and the early years of the following one. And Montaigne would never be quite the same again once the Romantics had finished with him.

  From its beginning in the form of a mildly rebellious, open-minded answer to the question of living well, “Wake from the sleep of habit” gradually metamorphosed into something much more rabble-rousing and even revolutionary. After Romanticism, it would no longer be easy to see Montaigne as a cool, gracious source of Hellenistic wisdom. From now on, readers would persist in trying to warm him up. He would, for evermore, have a wild side.

  11. Q. How to live? A. Live temperately

  RAISING AND LOWERING THE TEMPERATURE

  IN MANY WAYS, readers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries found it easy to like the Montaigne they constructed for themselves. As well as appreciating his praise for the Americans, they responded to his openness about himself, his willingness to explore the contradictions of his character, his disregard for convention, and his desire to break out of fossilized habits. They liked his interest in psychology, especially his sense of the way different impulses could coexist in a single mind. Also—and they were the first generation of readers to feel this way in great numbers—they enjoyed his writing style, with all its exuberant disorder. They liked the way he seemed to blurt out whatever was on his mind at any moment, without pausing to set it into neat array.

  Romantic readers were particularly taken by Montaigne’s intense feeling for La Boétie, because it was the only place where he showed strong emotion. The tragic ending of the love story, with La Boétie’s death, made it more beautiful. Montaigne’s simple answer to the question of why they loved each other—“Because it was he, because it was I”—became a catchphrase, denoting the transcendent mystery in all human attraction.

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  In her autobiography, the Romantic writer George Sand related how she became obsessed with Montaigne and La Boétie in her youth, as the prototype of spiritual friendship she herself longed to find—and did, in later life, with writer friends such as Flaubert and Balzac. The poet Alphonse de Lamartine felt similarly. In a letter, he wrote of Montaigne: “All that I admire in him is his friendship for La Boétie.” He had already borrowed Montaigne’s formula to describe his own feelings in an earlier letter to the same friend: “Because it is you, because it is I.” He embraced Montaigne himself as such a companion, writing of “friend Montaigne, yes: friend.”

  The new highly charged or heated quality of such responses to Montaigne can be measured in the increase, during this era, in pilgrimages to his tower. Visitors called on the Montaigne estate, drawn by curiosity, but once th
ere they lost their heads; they stood rapt in meditation, feeling Montaigne’s spirit all around them like a living presence. Often, they felt almost as though they had become him, for a few moments.

  There had been little of this in previous centuries. Montaigne’s descendants lived at the estate until 1811, and for most of this time no one interfered with them while they converted the ground floor of the tower into a potato store and the first-floor bedroom sometimes to a dog kennel, sometimes to a chicken coop. This changed only after a trickle of early Romantic visitors turned into a regular flow, until eventually the potatoes and chickens gave way to an organized re-creation of his working environment.

  This all seemed self-explanatory to the Romantics. Naturally, if you responded to Montaigne’s writing, you must want to be there in person: to gaze out of his window at the view he would have seen every day, or to hover behind the place where he might have sat to write, so you could look down and almost see his ghostly words appear before your eyes. Taking no account of the hubbub that would really have been going on in the courtyard below, and probably in his room too, you were free to imagine the tower as a monastic cell, which Montaigne inhabited like a hermit. “Let us hasten to cross the threshold,” wrote one early visitor, Charles Compan, of the tower library:

  If your heart beats like mine with an indescribable emotion; if the memory of a great man inspires in you this deep veneration which one cannot refuse to the benefactors of humanity—enter.

  The pilgrimage tradition outlived the Romantic era proper. When the marquis de Gaillon wrote of his visit to the tower in 1862, he summoned up the pain of departure in lover’s language:

  But at last one must leave this library, this room, this dear tower. Farewell, Montaigne! for to leave this place is to be separated from you.

  The problem with all such passionate swooning into Montaigne’s arms has always been Montaigne himself. To fantasize about him in this way is to set oneself at odds with his own way of doing things. Blocking out parts of the Essays that interfere with one’s chosen interpretation is a timeless activity, but the hot-blooded Romantics had a harder task than most. They were constantly brought up against things like this:

  I have no great experience of these vehement agitations, being of an indolent and sluggish disposition.

  I like temperate and moderate natures.

  My excesses do not carry me very far away. There is nothing extreme or strange about them.

  The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.

  The poet Alphonse de Lamartine was one such frustrated reader. When he first came across Montaigne he hero-worshiped him, and kept a volume of the Essays always in his pocket or on his table so he could seize it whenever he had the urge. But later he turned against his idol with equal vehemence: Montaigne, he now decided, knew nothing of the real miseries of life. He explained to a correspondent that he had only been able to love the Essays when he was young—that is, about nine months earlier, when he first began to enthuse about the book in his letters. Now, at twenty-one, he had been weathered by pain, and found Montaigne too cool and measured. Perhaps, he wondered, he might return to Montaigne many years later, in old age, when even more suffering had dried his heart. For now, the essayist’s sense of moderation made him feel positively ill.

  George Sand also wrote that she was “not Montaigne’s disciple” when it came to his Stoical or Skeptical “indifference”—his equilibrium or ataraxia, a goal that had now gone out of fashion. She had loved his friendship with La Boétie, as the one sign of warmth, but it was not enough and she tired of him.

  The worst sticking-point for Romantic readers was a passage in which Montaigne described visiting the famous poet Torquato Tasso in Ferrara, on his Italian travels in 1580. Tasso’s most celebrated work, the epic Gerusalemme liberata, enjoyed immense success on its publication that same year, but the poet himself had lost his mind and was confined to a madhouse, where he lived in atrocious conditions surrounded by distressed lunatics. Passing through Ferrara, Montaigne called on him, and was horrified by the encounter. He felt sympathy, but suspected that Tasso had driven himself into this condition by spending too long in states of poetic ecstasy. The radiance of his inspiration had brought him to unreason: he had let himself be “blinded by the light.” Seeing genius reduced to idiocy saddened Montaigne. Worse, it irritated him. What a waste, to destroy oneself in this way! He was aware that writing poetry required a certain “frenzy,” but what was the point of becoming so frenzied that one could never write again? “The archer who overshoots the target misses as much as the one who does not reach it.”

  Looking back at two such different writers as Montaigne and Tasso, and admiring both, Romantics were prepared to go along with Montaigne’s belief that Tasso had blown his own mind with poetry. They could understand Montaigne’s sadness about it. What they could neither understand nor forgive was his irritation. Romantics did blinding brilliance; they did melancholy; they did intense imaginative identification. They did not do irritation.

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  Montaigne is obviously “no poet,” spat one such reader, Philarète Chasles. Jules Lefèvre-Deumier deplored what he saw as Montaigne’s “stoic indifference” to another man’s sufferings—which seems a misreading of Montaigne’s passage about Tasso. The real problem was that Romantics took sides. They identified with Tasso in this encounter, not with Montaigne, who represented the uncomprehending world they felt was always opposing them, too. As Nietzsche could have warned Montaigne:

  Moderation sees itself as beautiful; it is unaware that in the eye of the immoderate it appears black and sober, and consequently ugly-looking.

  Actually, in this situation, it was Montaigne who was playing the rebel. By singing the praises of moderation and equanimity, and doubting the value of poetic excess, Montaigne was bucking the trend of his own time as much as that of the Romantics. Renaissance readers fetishized extreme states: ecstasy was the only state in which to write poetry, just as it was the only way to fight a battle and the only way to fall in love. In all three pursuits, Montaigne seems to have had an inner thermostat which switched him off as soon as the temperature rose beyond a certain point. This was why he so admired Epaminondas, the one classical warrior who kept his head when the sound of clashing swords rang out, and why he valued friendship more than passion. “Transcendental humors frighten me,” he said. The qualities he valued were curiosity, sociability, kindness, fellow-feeling, adaptability, intelligent reflection, the ability to see things from another’s point of view, and “goodwill”—none of which is compatible with the fiery furnace of inspiration.

  Montaigne even went so far as to claim that true greatness of the soul is to be found “in mediocrity”—a shocking remark and even, paradoxically, an extreme one. Most moderns have been so trained to regard mediocrity as a poor, limited condition that it is hard to know what to think when he says this. Is he playing games with the reader again, as some suspect he does when he writes of having a bad memory and a slow intellect? Perhaps he is, to some extent, yet he seems to mean it too. Montaigne distrusts godlike ambitions. For him, people who try to rise above the human manage only to sink to the subhuman. Like Tasso, they seek to transcend the limits, and instead lose their ordinary human faculties. Being truly human means behaving in a way that is not merely ordinary, but ordinate, a word the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “ordered, regulated; orderly, regular, moderate.” It means living appropriately, or à propos, so that one estimates things at their right value and behaves in the way correctly suited to each occasion. This is why, as Montaigne puts it, living appropriately is “our great and glorious masterpiece”—grandiose language, but used to describe a quality that is anything but grandiose. Mediocrity, for Montaigne, does not mean the dullness that comes from not bothering to think things through, or from lacking the imagination to see beyond one’s own viewpoint. I
t means accepting that one is like everyone else, and that one carries the entire form of the human condition. This could not be further removed from Rousseau and his feeling that he is set apart from all humanity. For Montaigne:

  There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.

  He knew, all the same, that human nature does not always conform to this wisdom. Alongside the wish to be happy, emotionally at peace and in full command of one’s faculties, something else drives people periodically to smash their achievements to pieces. It is what Freud called the thanatos principle: the drive towards death and chaos. The twentieth-century author Rebecca West described it thus:

  Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

  West and Freud both had experience of war, and so did Montaigne: he could hardly fail to notice this side of humanity. His passages about moderation and mediocrity must be read with one eye always to the French civil wars, in which transcendental extremism brought about subhuman cruelties on an overwhelming scale. The third “trouble” ended in August 1570, and a two-year peace ensued during the period when Montaigne lived on his estate and began work on the Essays. But, long before he had finished that work, the peace came to an abrupt and shocking end, with an event that could leave no one in doubt about the dark side of human nature.