The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [A] Since men are not intelligent enough to be adequately paid in good coin let counterfeit coin be used as well. That method has been employed by all the lawgivers. And there is no polity which has not brought in some vain ceremonial honours, or some untruths, to serve as a bridle to keep the people to their duties; that is why most of them have fables about their origins and have beginnings embroidered with supernatural mysteries. That is what has lent credence to bastard religions and led them to find favour among men of understanding; and it explains why Numa and Sertorius fed men on the following idiotic tales to make them put more trust in them: the former, that the nymph Egeria, the latter, that a white hind of his, brought them counsels from the gods, which they then followed.

  [C] And the same authority which Numa gave to his laws by citing the patronage of the goddess Egeria was given to him by Zoroaster, the lawgiver of the Bactrians and the Persians, in the name of his god Oromasis; by Trismegistus, the lawgiver of the Egyptians, in the name of Mercury; by Zamolxis, the lawgiver of the Scythians, in the name of Vesta; by Charondas, the lawgiver of the Chalcidians, in the name of Saturn; by Minos, the lawgiver of the people of Candy, in the name of Juppiter; by Lycurgus, the lawgiver of Sparta, in the name of Apollo; and by Draco and Solon, lawgivers of the Athenians, in the name of Minerva. And all polities have a god at their head, truly so in the case of the one drawn up by Moses for the people of Judaea on leaving Egypt;52 the rest, falsely so.

  [A] The religion of the Bedouins, as the Sire de Joinville relates, had as one of its beliefs that each one of them who died for his monarch went straight into a more blessed body, stronger and more beautiful; because of this they were much more ready to hazard their lives:

  [B] In ferrum mens prona viris, animæque capaces

  Mortis, et ignavum est redituræ parcere vitæ.

  [The minds of these warriors defy the iron blade; their hearts embrace their deaths; it is for them cowardice to save lives which are to be given back to them.]53

  [A] There you have a belief which, however vain it may be, results in much good. Every nation can provide its own similar examples; but that subject would merit separate treatment.

  To add just one word more on my original topic: I do not advise ladies to call their duty honour: [C] ‘ut enim consuetudo loquitur, id solum dicitur honestum quod est populari fama gloriosum;’ [just as in everyday speech, the term ‘honourable’ is used only for what brings glory in the opinion of the people;]54 their duty is the core: their honour, only the skin. [A1] Nor do I advise them to pay us for their refusals by citing honour as an excuse: [A] for I suppose that their intentions, their desire and their will (which are qualities which their reputation has nothing to do with since they are in no wise apparent on the surface) are even better moderated than their acts:

  Quæ, quia non liceat, non facit, illa facit.

  [She who does not do it ‘because it’s not allowed’ does it really.]

  The offence against God and their conscience would be just as great if they wanted to do it as if they had carried it out.55 And then we are dealing with an activity which is in itself hidden and secret; it would be quite easy for ladies to hide one such case from the knowledge of those other people on which their ‘honour’ depends, if they did not also have regard for their duty and a love leading to chastity for its own sake.

  [C] Any honourable person prefers to sully his honour than to sully his conscience.56

  17. On presumption

  [Montaigne moves straight from glory to vainglory. Presumption is a mark of vainglory and of vicious self-love (philautia, as it was called): so Montaigne describes himself honestly, without that blindness to his faults or distortion of home-truths associated with self-love. His self-portrait, with all its honesty, is associated (as was Du Bellay’s in the Regrets,), with the Latin satirists, the father of whom was Lucilius. Through knowledge of himself Montaigne sought also a wider knowledge of Man.]

  [A] There is another kind of ‘glory’: the over-high opinion we conceive of our own worth. It is an imprudent affection by which we hold our own self dear, presenting ourself to ourself other than we are, just as passionate love lends, grace and beauty to the person it embraces and leads to those who are enraptured by it being disturbed and confused in their judgement, so finding their Beloved other than she is, and more perfect.

  Now I have enjoyed no wish that a man should underestimate himself for fear of erring in this direction, nor that he should think he is worth less than he is. In all matters our judgement must maintain its rights. It is reasonable that, in this as in any other matter, it should perceive whatever truth presents it with. If he is Caesar, then let him frankly acknowledge that he is the greatest Captain in all the world. We are nothing but etiquette. We are carried away by it and neglect the substance; we cling to branches and let go of trunk and body. We have taught ladies to blush at the mere mention of something which they do not have the slightest fear of doing. We dare not call our private parts by their proper names yet are not afraid to use them for all sorts of debauchery. Etiquette forbids us from expressing in words things which are licit and natural: and we believe it. Reason forbids us to do things which are bad and illicit: and nobody believes it. Here I find myself bogged down in the laws of etiquette, which do not allow a man to speak well of himself nor ill of himself. I shall put all that aside for a while.

  People whom Fortune (good or bad, whichever you want to call it) has caused to live their lives in some exalted position or other bear witness to themselves by their public deeds; but those whom Fortune has set to work merely among the crowd [C] and whom no one would ever talk about if they did not talk about themselves, [A] can be excused if they do indeed dare to talk about themselves for the sake of those who have an interest in getting to know them, following the example of Lucilius:

  Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim

  Credebat libris, neque, si male cesserat, usquam

  Decurrens alio, neque si bene: quo fit ut omnis

  Votiva pateat veluti descripta tabella

  Vita senis.

  [He used to confide his secrets to his books as to trusted companions; he never turned anywhere else, whether things went well or ill; so that when he was old his entire life lay revealed as though written down on votive tablets.]

  Lucilius committed to paper his deeds and his thoughts and portrayed himself as he knew himself to be. [C] ‘Nec id Rutilio et Scauro citra fidem aut obtrectationi fuit.’ [Neither were Rutilius and Scaurus disbelieved nor vilified for doing so.]1

  [A] I can remember, then, that from my tenderest childhood people noticed in me some indefinable way of holding myself and some gestures which bore witness to a sort of of vain silly pride. But first of all I would like to say this: it is not inappropriate that we should have some characteristics and propensities so proper to us and so physically part of us that we ourselves have no means of being aware of them nor of recognizing them; and such innate dispositions produce, without our knowledge or consent, a kind of bodily quirk. It was a certain mannerism appropriate to their beauty that made the head of Alexander lean a little to one side and Alcibiades to speak with a slight lisp; Julius Caesar used to scratch his head with his finger – which is the comportment of a man overflowing with troublesome thoughts; and Cicero, I seem to recall, used to wrinkle his nose – which signifies an innate tendency to mockery. Such gestures can root themselves in us imperceptibly.

  There are also other gestures which are cultivated – and I am certainly not talking about them – such as bowing to people and ways of greeting them, by which we acquire, as often as not wrongly, the honour of being thought humble and courteous: [C] you can be humble out of pride! [B] I am fairly lavish with raising my hat, especially in summer, and I never receive such a greeting without returning it whatever the social status of the man may be, unless I pay his wages. I could wish that some princes whom I know were more sparing and discriminating over this, for such gestures lose all meaning when they are spread
about without distinction. If they are made with no regard for status they are without effect.

  Among odder affectations [A] let us not overlook the haughty mien of Constantius (the Emperor) who always held his head quite straight in public, neither turning it to right or left nor inclining it even to acknowledge those who were bowing to him from the side, keeping his body fixed and unmoving, without even swaying with the motion of his coach, without daring to spit or to wipe his nose or mop his brow in front of other people.2

  I do not know whether those gestures which were noticed in me were characteristics of that first kind nor whether I really did have some hidden propensity to that vice of pride, as may well be the case; I cannot answer for the activities of my body; as for those of my soul, I want to confess now what I know about them.

  In this kind of ‘glory’ there are two parts: namely, to rate oneself too high and to rate others too low. As for the former [C] I think we should take account of the following consideration: I am aware that I am troubled by an aberration of my soul which displeases me as iniquitous and even more as inappropriate; I make assays at correcting it, but as for eradicating it, I cannot: it consists in diminishing the real value of the things which I possess, simply because it is I who possess them, and in overvaluing whatever things are foreign to me, lacking in me or are not mine. This is a very widespread humour. Thus the man’s prerogative of authority leads husbands to regard their own wives with a vicious disdain and leads many fathers to do the same to their own children; so too with me: out of two equal achievements I always come down against my own. It is not so much that a jealous concern to do better or to amend my ways disturbs my judgement and stops me from being satisfied with myself as that our mastery over anything engenders a contempt for what we hold under our sway. I am impressed by remote systems of government and of manners; so too for languages: I am aware that Latin by its dignity seduces me to favour it beyond what is appropriate to it, as it does in the case of children and the common people. My neighbour’s domestic arrangements, his house and his horse, though equal to my own are better than my own because they are not mine.

  Besides, I am most ignorant about myself. I marvel at the assurance and confidence everyone has about himself, whereas there is virtually nothing that I know that I know and which I would dare to guarantee to be able to perform. I do not have my capacities listed and classified; I only find out about them after the event, being full of doubt about myself as about everything else. The result is that if I happen to do a job in a praise-worthy fashion, I attribute that more to my good fortune than to my ability, especially since all my plans for it were made haphazardly and tentatively.

  So too, [A] in a general way, the following applies to me as well: of all the opinions which [C] grosso modo, [A] Antiquity held about Man, the ones which I most readily embrace and to which I am most firmly attached are those which most despise us men, bring us low and treat us as nought. Philosophy never seems to me to have a better hand to play than when she battles against our presumption and our vanity; when in good faith she acknowledges her weakness, her ignorance and her inability to reach conclusions. It seems to me that the false opinion which is the mother suckling all the others, both in public and private, is the over-high opinion which Man has of himself. Those people who perch astride the epicycle of Mercury, [C] and who see so far into the heavens, [A] are an excruciating pain in the neck: for in the study that I am undertaking, the subject of which is Man, I find such extreme variation of judgement, such a deep labyrinth of difficulties one on top of another, so much disagreement and uncertainty in the very School of Wisdom, that you will understand that, since those fellows have not been able to reach any knowledgeable conclusions about themselves and their own mode of being (which is continuously before their eyes and which is within them) and since they do not understand the motions which they themselves set in action, nor how to describe and decipher the principles which they themselves hold in their hands: I cannot believe them, can I, about the cause3 of the ebb and flow of the Nile!

  An eager desire to know things was given to man as a scourge, says [C] Holy [A] Writ.4

  But to come to myself as an individual, it seems to me that it would be hard for anyone to esteem himself less than I do. [C] I think that I am an ordinary sort of man, except in considering myself to be one; I am guilty of the failings of the lowest ranks of the common people but I neither disown my failings nor make excuses for them. I pride myself only on knowing what I am worth. If I have an element of vainglory it is superficial, treacherously diffused in me by my complexion but having nothing substantial enough for it to be summoned to appear before my judgement. I am sprinkled all over with it but not dyed in it. [A] For in truth, whatever form they may take, where the products of my mind are concerned nothing has come forth which has fully satisfied me – and other people’s approbation is no reward.

  My taste is discriminating and hard to please, especially where I myself am concerned: I [C] am constantly making disclaimers and [A] feel myself to be [C] everywhere [A] floating and bending from feebleness.5 Nothing of mine that I possess satisfies my judgement. My insight is clear and balanced but when I put it to work it becomes confused: I have most clearly assayed that in the case of poetry. I have a boundless love for it; I know my way well through other men’s works; but when I set my own hand to it I am truly like a child: I find myself unbearable. You may play the fool anywhere else but not in poetry:

  Mediocribus esse poetis

  Non dii, non homines, non concessere columnæ.

  [Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.]6

  Would to God that the following saying was written up above our printers’ workshops to forbid so many versifiers from getting in:

  verum

  Nil securius est malo Poeta.

  [truly nothing is more self-assured than a bad poet.]

  [C] Why are not our people like these Greeks? Dionysius (the elder) thought more highly of his poetry than of anything else of his; at the season of the Olympic Games, as well as sending chariots surpassing all others in magnificence he also sent golden awnings and royally tapestried marquees for the musicians and poets who were to recite his verses. When they were performed, the charm and excellence of the way they were recited at first attracted the attention of the people; but when a little later they came to weigh the incompetence of the work itself, they began to show contempt for it; as their judgement grew more harsh they threw themselves into a frenzy and angrily rushed to knock over all his marquees and to tear them to shreds. And the fact that his chariots achieved nothing worthwhile in the races either, and that the ship which was bringing his men home missed Sicily and was driven by the storm against the coast of Tarentum and smashed to pieces, was taken by the people as certain proof that this was the wrath of the gods, as angry as they were over that bad piece of poetry. And the very sailors who escaped the shipwreck accepted the opinion of the people, to which the oracle which had predicted his death gave some support: it declared that Dionysius’ end would be near when he had ‘vanquished those who were worth more than he was’. Dionysius took that to refer to the Carthaginians who surpassed him in strength. So whenever he had to encounter them he often avoided victory or played things down so as not to meet the fate mentioned by the oracle. But he got it wrong: for that god was referring to the time when by favour and corruption he would be preferred in Athens to tragic poets better than he was. He entered the competition with a tragedy of his called The Lenæans; he won but immediately died partly because of the excessive joy he derived from this.7

  [A] That I find my own work pardonable is not so much for itself or its true worth as from a comparison with other writings which are worse – things which I can see people taking seriously. I envy the happiness of those who can find joy and satisfaction in their own works, for it is an easy way to give oneself pleasure, [B] deriving as it does from oneself, [C] especially if they show a little confidence in their sel
f-deception. I know one poet to whom, in both the crowd and in his drawing-room, the mighty, the humble and the very earth and heavens all cry out that he knows nothing about poetry. For all that he will not in any way lower the status which he has carved out for himself: he is for ever beginning again, having second thoughts, never giving up, all the more strong in his opinion, all the more inflexible, since he has to maintain it all alone.

  [A] My own works, far from smiling on me, irritate me every single time I go over them again:

  [B] Cum relego, scripsisse pudet, quia plurima cerno,

  Me quoque qui feci judice, digna lini.

  [When I read it over, I am ashamed to have written it, because even I who wrote it judge it worth erasing.]8

  [A] I always have in my soul an Ideal form, [C] some vague pattern, [A] which presents me, [C] as in a dream, [A] with a better form than the one I have employed; but I can never grasp it nor make use of it. And [C] even that Ideal is only of medium rank. I argue from this that the products of [A] those great fertile minds9 of former times greatly surpass the farthest stretch of my imagination and my desires. Their writings do not merely satisfy me and leave me replete: they leave me thunderstruck and throw me into an ecstasy of wonder. I can judge their beauty and can see it, if not through and through at least penetrating so deep that I know it is impossible for me to aspire that far. No matter what I undertake, I owe a sacrifice to the Graces to gain their favour (as Plutarch says of someone or other).