Mirabor, vitæ via si conversa decebit,
Personámque feret non inconcinnus utramqué.
[One who is patiently clad in rags yet could also adapt to the opposite extreme, playing both roles becomingly: him I will admire admire.]67
Such are my lessons.68 [C] For him who draws most profit from them, they are acts, not facts. To see his deeds is to hear his word: to hear his word is to see his deeds. ‘God forbid,’ says someone in Plato,69 ‘that philosophy should mean learning a lot of things and then talking about the arts: ‘Hanc amplissimam omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinam vita magis quam literis persequuti sunt’. [The fullest art of all – that of living good lives – they acquired more from life than from books.]70
Prince Leon of the Phliasians inquired of Heraclides of Pontus which art or science he professed. ‘I know none of them’, he replied; ‘I am a philosopher.’ Diogenes was reproached for being ignorant yet concerned with philosophy. ‘My concern is all the more appropriate,’ he replied. When Hegesias begged him to read a certain book he replied, ‘How amusing of you. You prefer real figs to painted ones, so why not true and natural deeds to written ones?’71
My pupil will not say his lesson: he will do it. He will rehearse his lessons in his actions. You will then see whether he is wise in what he takes on, good and just in what he does, gracious and sound in what he says, resilient in illnesses, modest in his sports, temperate in his pleasures, [A] indifferent to the taste of his food, be it fish or flesh, wine or water; [C] orderly in domestic matters: ‘Qui disciplinam suam, non ostentationem scientiæ, sed legem vitæ putet, quique obtemperet ipse sibi, et decretis pareat’ [as a man who knows how to make his education into a rule of life not a means of showing off; who can control himself and obey his own principles].72 The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives.
[A] To a man who asked him why the Spartans never drew up written rules of bravery and gave them to their children, Zeuxidamus replied that they wished to accustom them to deeds not [C] words. [A] After73 fifteen or sixteen years compare with that one of our college latinizers who has spent precisely as long simply learning to talk!
The world is nothing but chatter: I have never met a man who does not say more than he should rather than less. Yet half of our life is spent on that; they keep us four or five years learning the meanings of words and stringing them into sentences; four or five more in learning how to arrange them into a long composition, divided into four parts or five; then as many again in plaiting and weaving them into verbal subtleties.
Let us leave all that to those who make it their express profession.
When I was travelling to Orleans one day, on the plain this side of Cléry I met two college tutors who were coming from Bordeaux; there was about fifty yards between them; I could also make out some troops further away still, led by their officer (who was the Count de la Rochefoucault). One of my men asked the first of these tutors who was ‘that gentleman coming behind him’? The tutor had not noticed the party following behind them and thought they were talking about his companion: ‘He is not a gentleman,’ he amusingly replied, ‘but a grammarian. And I am a logician.’ Now we who, on the contrary, are trying to form a gentleman not a grammarian or a logician should let them waste their own time: we have business to do elsewhere. Provided that our student be well furnished with things, words will follow only too easily: if they do not come easily, then he can drag them out slowly.
I sometimes hear people who apologize for not being able to say what they mean, maintaining that their heads are so full of fine things that they cannot deliver them for want of eloquence. That is moonshine. Do you know what I think? It is a matter of shadowy notions coming to them from some unformed concepts which they are unable to untangle and to clarify in their minds: consequently they cannot deliver them externally. They themselves do not yet know what they mean. Just watch them giving a little stammer as they are about to deliver their brain-child: you can tell that they have labouring-pains not at childbirth [C] but during conception! [A] They are merely licking an imperfect lump into shape.74 For my part I maintain – [C] and Socrates is decisive – [A] that whoever has one clear living thought in his mind will deliver it even in Bergamask.75 Or if he is dumb he will do so by signs.
Verbaque prævisam rem non invita sequentur.
[Once you have mastered the things the words will come freely.]76
And as another said just as poetically though in prose: ‘Cum res animum occupavere, verba ambiunt.’ [When things have taken hold of the mind, the words come crowding forth.]77 [C] And another one: ‘Ipsae res verba rapiunt.’ [The things themselves ravish the words.]78
[A] ‘But he does not know what an ablative is, a conjunctive, a substantive: he knows no grammar!’ Neither does his footman or a Petit-Pont fishwife79 yet they will talk you to death if you let them and will probably no more stumble over the rules of their own dialect than the finest Master of Arts in France.
‘But he knows no rhetoric nor how to compose an opening captatio benevolentiae for his gentle reader!’80 He does not need to know that. All those fine ‘colours of rhetoric’ are in fact easily eclipsed by the light of pure and naïve truth. Those elegant techniques (as Afer shows in Tacitus) merely serve to entertain the masses who are unable to [C] take [A] heavier solid meat.81
Ambassadors from Samos came to King Cleomenes of Sparta with a long prepared speech to persuade him to go to war against Polycrates the Tyrant. He let them have their say and then replied: ‘As for your preamble and preface, I no longer remember it; nor of course your middle bit. As for your conclusion, I will do none of it.’82 An excellent answer, it seems to me, with a blow on the nose of those speechifiers.
[B] And what about this other case. The Athenians had to choose between two architects to take charge of a large building project. The first one was the more fly and presented himself with a fine prepared speech about the job to be done; he won the favour of the common people. The other architect merely spoke two or three words: ‘Gentlemen of Athens: what he said, I will do.’83
[A] At the height of his eloquence Cicero moved many into ecstasies of astonishment. But Cato merely laughed:‘Quite an amusing consul we have,’ he said.84
Now a useful saying or a pithy remark is always welcome wherever it is put. [C] If it is not good in the context of what comes before it or after it, it is good in itself. [A] I am not one of those who hold that good scansion makes a good poem: let the poet lengthen a short syllable if he wants to. That simply does not count. If the invention of his subject-matter is happy and if his wit and judgement have done their jobs, then I shall say: ‘Good poet: but bad versifier.’
Emunctæ naris, durus componere versus.
[He has the flair, though his verses are harsh.]
Take his work (says Horace) and pull its measured verse apart at the seams –
[B] Tempora certa modosque, et quod prius ordine verbum est,
Posterius facias, præponens ultima primis,
Invenias etiam disjecti membra poetæ
[Take away rhythm and measure; change the order of the words putting the first last and the last first: you will still find the poet in those scattered remains] –
[A] he will still not belie himself for all that: even bits of it will be beautiful.85
That is what Menander replied when the day came for his promised comedy and people chided him for not yet putting it in hand: ‘It is already composed,’ he said. ‘All I have to do is to put it into verse.’86 Having thought the things through and arranged them in his mind, he attached little importance to the remainder. Since Ronsard and Du Bellay have brought renown to our French poetry, every little apprentice I know is doing more or less as they do, using noble words and copying their cadences. [C] ‘Plus sonat quam valet.’ [‘More din than sense.’]87 [A] Ordinary people think there never have been so many poets. But easy as it has proved to copy their rhymes they all fall short when it comes to imitating the rich descriptions
of the one and the delicate invention of the other.
‘Yes. But what will he do when they harass him with some sophistical syllogistic subtlety:
Bacon makes you drink;
Drinking quenches your thirst:
Therefore bacon quenches your thirst?
[C] Let him simply laugh at it: it is cleverer to laugh at it than to answer it. Or let him borrow Aristippus’s amusing rejoinder: ‘Why should I unravel that? It is bad enough all knotted up!’ Someone challenged Cleanthes with dialectical trickeries; Chrysippus said to him: ‘Go and play those conjuring tricks on children: do not interrupt the serious thoughts of a grown-up.’88 [A] If this verbal jugglery – [C] ‘contorta et aculeata sophismata’ [these contorted prickly sophisms]89 – [A] should persuade him to accept an untruth, that is dangerous: but if they do not result in action and simply move him to laughter, I really do not see why he should pay attention to them.
Some people are so daft that they will go a mile or so out of their way to hunt for a good word: [C] ‘aut qui non verba rebus aptant, sed res extrinsecus arcessunt, quibus verba conveniant!’ [they do not fit words to things but look for irrelevant things to fit to their words!] Or again: ‘Sunt qui alicujus verbi decore placentis vocentur ad id quod non proposuerant scribere.’ [There are authors who are led by the beauty of some attractive word to write what they never intended.]90 I myself am more ready to distort a fine saying in order to patch it on to me than to distort the thread of my argument to go in search of one.
[A] It is, on the contrary, for words to serve and to follow: if French cannot get there, let Gascon do so. I want things to dominate, so filling the thoughts of the hearer that he does not even remember the words. I like the kind of speech which is simple and natural, the same on paper as on the lip; speech which is rich in matter, sinewy, brief and short; [C] not so much titivated and refined as forceful and brusque –
Haec demum sapiet dictio, quae feriet
[The good style of speaking is the kind which strikes home]91 –
[A] gnomic rather than diffuse, far from affectation, uneven, disjointed and bold – let each bit form a unity – not schoolmasterly, not monkish, not legalistic, but soldierly, rather as Sallust described Julius Caesar’s [C] (though I do not quite see why he did so).92 [B] I like to imitate the unruly negligence shown by French youth in the way they are seen to wear their clothes,93 [C] with their mantles bundled round their neck, their capes tossed over one shoulder or [B] with a stocking pulled awry: it manifests a pride contemptuous of the mere externals of dress and indifferent to artifice. But I find it even better applied to speech. [C] All affectation is unbecoming in a courtier, especially given the hearty freedom of the French: and under a monarchy every gentleman is inevitably schooled in court manners. So we do well to lean towards the careless and natural. [A] I have no love for textures where the joins and seams all show (just as you ought not to be able to count the ribs or the veins in a beautiful body). [C] ‘Quae veritati operam dat oratio, incomposita sit et simplex.’ [Speech devoted to truth should be straightforward and plain.]94‘Quis accurate loquitur, nisi qui vult putide loqui?’ [Who can speak carefully unless he wants to sound affected?]95
When eloquence draws attention to itself it does wrong by the substance of things.
Just as in dress it is the sign of a petty mind to seek to draw attention by some personal or unusual fashion, so too in speech; the search for new expressions and little-known words derives from an adolescent schoolmasterish ambition. If only I could limit myself to words used in Les Halles in Paris! That grammarian Aristophanes did not know the first thing about it when he criticized Epicurus for his simple words and for having perspicuity of language as his sole rhetorical aim.96
To imitate speech is easy: an entire nation can do it: to imitate judgement and the research for your material takes rather more time! Most readers think similar styles, when they find them, clothe similar bodies. But you cannot borrow strength or sinews: you can borrow mantles and finery. Most of the people who haunt my company talk like these Essays:97 I cannot tell whether they think like them…
[A] Athenians (says Plato) take copious and elegant speech as their share; Spartans, brevity; Cretans, fecundity of thought not speech – and they are the best.98 Zeno said that he had two sorts of followers: those he termed philologous, who cared for real learning (they were his favourites) and those he termed logophilous, whose concern was with words.99
That does not mean that speaking well is not a fine thing or a good thing, but that it is not as good as we make it out to be. It irritates me that our life is taken up by it. I would prefer first to know my own language well and then that of the neighbours with whom I have regular dealings.
There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are fine and great accomplishments; but they are bought too dear. I will tell you a cheaper way of buying them: it was assayed on me. Anyone is welcome to use it. My late father, after having made all possible inquiries among the learned and the wise about the choicest form of education, was warned about the disadvantages of the current system: they told him that the length of time we spend learning languages, [C] which cost the Ancients nothing, [A] is the sole reason why we cannot attain to the greatness of mind and knowledge of those old Greeks and Romans. I do not believe that to be the sole reason. Nevertheless the expedient found by my father was to place me, while still at the breast and before my tongue was untied, in the care of a German (who subsequently died in France as a famous doctor); he was totally ignorant of our language but very well versed in Latin. He had been brought over expressly and engaged at a very high fee: he had me continuously on his hands. There were two others with him, less learned: their task was to follow me about and provide him with some relief. They never addressed me in any other language but Latin. As for the rest of the household, it was an inviolable rule that neither he nor my mother nor a manservant nor a housemaid ever spoke in my presence anything except such words of Latin as they had learned in order to chatter a bit with me. It is wonderful how much they all got from it. My father and my mother learned in this way sufficient Latin to understand it and acquired enough to be able to talk it when they had to, as did those other members of the household who were most closely devoted to my service. In short we became so latinized that it spilled over into the neighbouring villages, where, resulting from this usage, you can still find several Latin names for tools and for artisans. As for me, I was six years old before I knew French any more than I know the patois of Périgord or Arabic. And so, without art, without books, without grammar, without rules, without whips and without [C] tears,100 [A] I had learned Latin as pure as that which my schoolteacher knew – for I had no means of corrupting it or contaminating it. So if they wanted me to assay writing a prose (as other boys do in the colleges by translating from French) they had to give me some bad Latin to turn into good. And Nicholas Grouchy (who wrote De comitiis Romanorum), Guillaume Guerente (who wrote a commentary on Aristotle), George Buchanan, that great Scottish poet, [A1] Marc-Antoine Muret [C] whom France and Italy acknowledge to be the best prose-writer in his day, [A] who were my private tutors, have often told me that as in my infancy I had that language so fluent and so ready that they were afraid to approach me.101
Buchanan, whom I subsequently met in the retinue of the late Lord Marshal de Brissac, told me that he was writing a book on educating children and was taking my education as his model, for he was then the tutor of Count de Brissac whom we have since seen so valiant and brave.
As for Greek (which I scarcely understand at all) my father planned to have it taught to me as methodically, but in a new way, as a sort of game or sport. We would bounce declensions about, rather like those who use certain board-games as a means of learning arithmetic and geometry. For among other things he had been counselled to bring me to love knowledge and duty by my own choice, without forcing my will, and to educate my soul entirely through gentleness and freedom. He was so meticulous about this that since some maintain that i
t disturbs the tender brains of children to wake them up with a start and to snatch them suddenly and violently out of their sleep (in which they are far more deeply plunged than we are) he would have me woken up by the sound of a musical instrument; [A1] and I was never without someone to do this for me.102
This example will suffice to judge all the rest by, and also to emphasize the wisdom and love of so good a father who is by no means to be criticized because he harvested no fruits worthy of so choice a husbandry. There were two causes for that: first, my soil was ill-suited and barren, for, though I enjoyed solid good health together with a quiet and amenable nature, I was, despite that, so heavy, passive and dreamy that nobody could drag me out of my idleness, not even to make me play. Whatever I could perceive I saw well and, beneath my heavy complexion, I nursed bold ideas as well as opinions old for my age. My mind was lazy and would only budge so long as it was led; I was slow to understand and my inventiveness was [C] slack.103 [A] To top it all, my memory was incredibly unreliable.
Considering all that it is no wonder that my father could make nothing of me.
The second reason was as follows: just as people who are frantic about finding a cure go and consult anybody, that good man was extremely frightened of failure in a matter which meant so much to him: he finally let himself be carried away by the common opinion (which always merely follows the leader as cranes do); he fell in with standard practice (no longer having about him the men who had given him his original educational ideas, which he had brought back from Italy) and sent me, at the age of six, to the Collège de Guyenne, then in full flourish as the best school in France. There too it is impossible to exaggerate the trouble he took over choosing good personal tutors for me and over all the other details of my education, preserving several idiosyncrasies opposed to the usual practices of the College. But for all that, it was still school. My Latin was at once corrupted and, since then, I have lost all use of it from lack of practice. And all my novel education merely served to enable me to stride right into the upper forms: I left College at thirteen, having ‘completed the course’ (as they put it); and in truth I now have nothing to show for it.
The Complete Essays Page 28
