[B] Immunis aram si tetigit manus,
Non sumptuosa blandior hostia
Mollivit aversos Penates,
Farre pio et saliente mica.
[If the hands which have touched the altar are undefiled, then, even when they are not commended by some costly sacrifice, they can appease the hostile household gods with a simple cake of meal sprinkled with salt.]30
57. On the length of life
[Montaigne, who published the first two books of his Essays when he was forty-seven, looks back at youth and sees thirty as the watershed dividing vigour from decline. The last word of this chapter, and so of Book I, is ‘apprenticeship’. At thirty a wise man’s ‘apprenticeship’ should doubtless be over, but, for those who make good use of their time, can knowledge and experience grow with the years?]
[A] I cannot accept the way we determine the span of our lives.1 I note that wise men shorten it considerably compared to the common opinion. ‘What!’ said Cato the Younger to those who wanted to stop him killing himself: ‘Am I still at the age when you can accuse me of leaving life too soon?’2 Yet he was only forty-eight. He reckoned, considering how few men reach it, that his age was fully mature and well advanced. And those who keep themselves going with the thought that some span of life or other which they call ‘natural’ promises them a few years more could only do so provided that there was some ordinance exempting them personally from those innumerable accidents (which each one of us comes up against and is subject to by nature) which can rupture the course of life which they promise themselves.
What madness it is to expect to die of that failing of our powers brought on by extreme old age and to make that the target for our life to reach when it is the least usual, the rarest kind of death. We call that death, alone, a natural death, as if it were unnatural to find a man breaking his neck in a fall, engulfed, engulfed in a shipwreck, surprised by plague or pleurisy, and as though our normal condition did not expose us to all of those harms. Let us not beguile ourselves with such fine words: perhaps we ought, rather, to call natural anything which is generic, common to all and universal. Dying of old age is a rare death, unique and out of the normal order and therefore less natural than the others. It is the last, the uttermost way of dying; the farther it is from us, the less we can hope to reach it; it is indeed the limit beyond which we shall not go and which has been prescribed by Nature’s law as never to be crossed: but it is a very rare individual law of hers which makes us last out till then. It is an exemption which she grants as an individual favour to one man in the space of two or three centuries, freeing him from the burden of those obstacles and difficulties which she strews along the course of that long progress.
Therefore my opinion is that we should consider whatever age we have reached as an age reached by few. Since in the normal course of events men never reach that far, it is a sign of that we are getting on. And since we have crossed the accustomed limits – and that constitutes the real measure of our days – we ought not to hope to get much farther beyond them; having escaped those many occasions of death which have tripped up all the others, we ought to admit that an abnormal fortune such as that which has brought us so far is indeed beyond the usual procedure and cannot last much longer.
It is a defect in our very laws to hold that false idea, for they do not admit that a man be capable of managing his affairs before the age of twenty-five, yet he can scarcely manage to make his life last that long! Augustus lopped five years off the old Roman ordinances and decreed that it sufficed to be thirty for a man to assume the office of judge. Servius Tullius exempted knights who had passed the age of forty-seven from obligatory war-service; Augustus remitted it at forty-five.3 Sending men into inactivity before fifty-five or sixty does not seem very right to me. I would counsel extending our vocations and employments as far as we could in the public interest; the error is on the other side, I find: that of not putting us to work soon enough. The man who had power to decide everything in the whole world at nineteen4 wanted a man to be thirty before he could decide where to place a gutter!
Personally I reckon that our souls are free from their bonds at the age of twenty, as they ought to be, and that by then they show promise of all they are capable of. No soul having failed by then to give a quite evident pledge of her power ever gave proof of it afterwards. By then – or never at all – natural qualities and capacities reveal whatever beauty or vigour they possess.
[B] Si l’espine nou pique quand nai,
A peine que piqu jamai
[If a thorn pricks not at its birth,
It will hardly prick at all]
as they say in Dauphiné.
[A] Of all the fair deeds of men in ancient times and in our own which have come to my knowledge, of whatever kind they may be, I think it would take me longer to enumerate those which were made manifest before the age of thirty than after. [C] Yes, and often in the lives of the very same men: may I not say that with total certainty in the case of Hannibal and his great adversary Scipio? They lived a good half of their lives on the glory achieved in their youth: they were great men later compared with others, but not great compared with themselves. [A] As for me, I am convinced that, since that age, my mind and my body have not grown but diminished, and have retreated not advanced.
It may well be that (for those who make good use of their time) knowledge and experience grow with the years but vitality, quickness, firmness and other qualities which are more truly our own, and more important, more ours by their essence, droop and fade.
[B] Ubi jam validis quassatum est viribus ævi
Corpus, et obtusis ceciderunt viribus artus,
Claudicat ingenium, delirat linguaque mensque.
[When the body is shattered by the mighty blows of age and our limbs shed their blunted powers, our wits too become lame and our tongues and our minds start to wander.]5
Sometimes it is the body which is the first to surrender to old age, sometimes too the soul; and I have known plenty of men whose brains grew weak before their stomachs or their legs; and it is all the more dangerous an infirmity in that the sufferer is hardly aware of it and its symptoms are not clear ones.
But now [A] I am complaining not that the laws allow us to work so late but that they are so late in putting us to work.
It seems to me that, considering the frailty of our life and the number of natural hazards to which it is exposed, we should not allow so large a place in it to being born, to leisure and to our apprenticeship.6
BOOK II
1. On the inconstancy of our actions
[In Montaigne’s French inconstance is a term which includes fickleness and variability as well as inconsistency of conduct. In Latin, constantia (inner consistency and steadfast constancy) were the ideals of Stoic philosophy. Montaigne, having finished Book I with the notion of apprenticeship, now moves more boldly into new areas of exploration of himself and the nature of Man, both of which he finds subject to fickleness and marked by inconsistent qualities.]
[A] Those who strive to account for a man’s deeds are never more bewildered than when they try to knit them into one whole and to show them under one light, since they commonly contradict each other in so odd a fashion that it seems impossible that they should all come out of the same shop. Young Marius now acts like a son of Mars, now as a son of Venus. They say that Pope Boniface VIII took up his duties like a fox, bore them like a lion and died like a dog. And who would ever believe that it was Nero, the very image of cruelty, who when they presented him with the death-sentence of a convicted criminal to be duly signed replied, ‘Would to God that I had never learned to write!’ so much it oppressed his heart to condemn a man to death?1
Everything is so full of such examples (indeed each man can furnish so many from himself) that I find it strange to find men of understanding sometimes taking such trouble to match up the pieces, seeing that vacillation seems to me to be the most common and blatant defect of our nature: witness the famous line of Publius the author
of farces:
Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest!
[It’s a bad resolution which can never be changed!]2
[B] It seems reasonable enough to base our judgement of a man on the more usual features of his life: but given the natural inconstancy of our behaviour and our opinions it has often occurred to me that even sound authors are wrong in stubbornly trying to weave us into one invariable and solid fabric.
They select one universal character, then, following that model, they classify and interpret all the actions of a great man; if they cannot twist them the way they want they accuse the man of insincerity. Augustus did get away from them: for there is in that man throughout his life a diversity of actions so clear, so sudden and so uninterrupted that they had to let him go in one piece, with no verdict made on him by even the boldest judges. Of Man I can believe nothing less easily than invariability: nothing more easily than variability. Whoever would judge a man in his detail, [C] piece by piece, separately, [B] would hit on the truth more often.
[A] It is difficult to pick out more than a dozen men in the whole of Antiquity who groomed their lives to follow an assured and definite course, though that is the principal aim of wisdom. To sum it all up and to embrace all the rules of Man’s life in one word, ‘Wisdom,’ said an Ancient, ‘is always to want the same thing, always not to want the same thing.’ I would not condescend to add, he said, ‘provided that your willing be right. For if it is not right, it is impossible for it to remain ever one and the same.’3
I was once taught indeed that vice is no more than a defect and irregularity of moderation, and that consequently it is impossible to tie it to constancy. There is a saying attributed to Demosthenes: the beginning of all virtue is reflection and deliberation: its end and perfection, constancy. If by reasoning we were to adopt one definite way, the way we chose would be most beautiful of all; but nobody has thought of doing that.
Quod petiit, spernit, repetit quod nuper omisit;
Æstuat, et vitae disconvenit ordine toto.
[Judgement scorns what it yearned for, yearns again for what it recently spurned; it shifts like the tide and the whole of life is disordered.]4
Our normal fashion is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, left and right, up and down, as the winds of occasion bear us along. What we want is only in our thought for the instant that we want it: we are like that creature which takes on the colour of wherever you put it. What we decided just now we will change very soon; and soon afterwards we come back to where we were: it is all motion and inconstancy:
Ducimur ut nervis alienis mobile lignum.
[We are led like a wooden puppet by wires pulled by others.]
We do not go: we are borne along like things afloat, now bobbing now lashing about as the waters are angry or serene.
[B] Nonne videmus
Quid sibi quisque velit nescire, et quærere semper,
Commutare locum, quasi onus deponere possit?
[Surely we see that nobody knows what he wants, that he is always looking for something, always changing his place, as though he could cast off his burden?]
[A] Every day a new idea: and our humours change with the changes of weather:
Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse
Juppiter auctifero lustravit lumine terras.
[The minds of men are such as Father Juppiter changes them to, as he purifies the world with his fruitful rays.]5
[C] We float about among diverse counsels: our willing of anything is never free, final or constant.
[A] If a man were to prescribe settled laws for a settled government established over his own brain, then we would see, shining throughout his whole life, a calm uniformity of conduct and a faultless interrelationship between his principles and his actions.
– [C] (The defect in the Agrigentines noted by Empedocles was their abandoning themselves to pleasure as though they were to die the next day, while they built as though they would never die at all.)6 –
[A] It would be easy enough to explain the character of such a man; that can be seen from the younger Cato: strike one of his keys and you have struck them all; there is in him a harmony of sounds in perfect concord such as no one can deny. In our cases on the contrary every one of our actions requires to be judged on its own: the surest way in my opinion would be to refer each of them to its context, without looking farther and without drawing any firm inference from it.
During the present debauchery of our wretched commonwealth I was told about a young woman near where I then was who had thrown herself from a high window to avoid being forced by some beggarly soldier billeted on her. She was not killed by her fall and repeated her attempt by trying to slit her own throat with a knife; she was stopped from doing so, but only after she had given herself a nasty wound. She herself admitted that the soldier had not yet gone beyond importuning her with requests, solicitations and presents, but she was afraid that he would eventually use force. And above all this, there were the words she used, the look on her face and that blood testifying to her chastity, truly like some second Lucretia. Now I learned as a fact that both before and after this event she was quite wanton and not all that hard to get. It is like the moral in that tale: ‘However handsome and noble you may be, when you fail to get your end in do not immediately conclude that your lady is inviolably chaste: it does not mean that the mule-driver is not having better luck with her.’
Antigonus had grown to love one of his soldiers for his virtue and valour and ordered his doctors to treat him for a malignant internal complaint which had long tormented him; he noticed that, once the soldier was cured, he set about his work with much less ardour and asked him who had changed him into such a coward. ‘You yourself, Sire,’ he replied, ‘by freeing me from the weight of those pains which made me think life was worth nothing.’7
Then there was the soldier of Lucullus who had been robbed of everything by the enemy and who, to get his own back, made a fine attack against them. After he had plucked enough enemy feathers to make up for his loss Lucullus, who had formed a high opinion of him, began urging some hazardous exploit upon him with all the fairest expostulations he could think of:
Verbis quae timido quoque possent addere mentem.
[With words enough to give heart to a coward.]
‘You should try urging that,’ he replied, ‘on some wretched soldier who has lost everything’ –
quantumvis rusticus ibit,
Ibit eo, quo vis, qui zonam perdidit, inquit
[yokel though he was, he replied: ‘The man who will go anywhere you like is the one who has just lost his money–belt’]–
and he absolutely refused to go.8
[C] When we read that after Mechmet9 had insulted and berated Chasan the chief of his Janissaries for allowing his line of battle to be broken by the Hungarians and for fighting faint-heartedly, Chasan’s only reply was, alone and just as he was, weapon in hand, to charge madly against the first group of enemy soldiers to come along, who promptly overwhelmed him: that may well have been not so much an act of justification as a change of heart; not so much natural bravery as a new feeling of distress.
[A] That man you saw yesterday so ready to take risks: do not think it odd if you find him craven tomorrow. What had put heart into his belly was anger, or need, or his fellows, or wine, or the sound of a trumpet. His heart had not been fashioned by reasoned argument: it was those factors which stiffened it; no wonder then if he has been made quite different by other and contrary factors.
[C] The changes and contradictions seen in us are so flexible that some have imagined that we have two souls, others two angels who bear us company and trouble us each in his own way, one turning us towards good the other towards evil, since such sudden changes cannot be accommodated to one single entity.10
[B] Not only does the wind of chance events shake me about as it lists, but I also shake and disturb myself by the instability of my stance: anyone who turns his prime attention on to himself will ha
rdly ever find himself in the same state twice. I give my soul this face or that, depending upon which side I lay it down on. I speak about myself in diverse ways: that is because I look at myself in diverse ways. Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute: timid, insolent; [C] chaste, lecherous; [B] talkative, taciturn; tough, sickly; clever, dull; brooding, affable; lying, truthful; [C] learned, ignorant; generous, miserly and then prodigal – [B] I can see something of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate; and anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself and in his very judgement this whirring about and this discordancy. There is nothing I can say about myself as a whole simply and completely, without intermingling and admixture. The most universal article of my own Logic is DISTINGUO.11
[A] I always mean to speak well of what is good, and to interpret favourably anything that can possibly be taken that way; nevertheless, so strange is our human condition that it leads to our being brought by vice itself to ‘do good’, except that ‘doing good’ is to be judged solely by our intentions. That is why one courageous action must not be taken as proof that a man really is brave; a man who is truly brave will always be brave on all occasions. If a man’s valour were habitual and not a sudden outburst it would make him equally resolute in all eventualities: as much alone as with his comrades, as much in a tilt-yard as on the battlefield; for, despite what they say, there is not one valour for the town and another for the country. He would bear with equal courage an illness in his bed and a wound in battle, and would no more fear dying at home than in an attack. We would never see one and the same man charging into the breach with brave assurance and then raging like a woman over the loss of a lawsuit or a son. [C] If he cannot bear slander but is resolute in poverty; if he cannot bear a barber-surgeon’s lancet but is unyielding against the swords of his adversaries, then it is not the man who deserves praise but the deed. Cicero says that many Greeks cannot even look at an enemy yet in sickness show constancy: the Cimbrians and the Celtiberians on the contrary; ‘nihil enim potest esse æquabile, quod non a certa ratione proficiscatur.’ [For nothing can be called constant which does not arise out of a fixed principle.]12
The Complete Essays Page 47
