The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  I gladly come back to the theme of the absurdity of our education: its end has not been to make us good and wise but learned. And it has succeeded. It has not taught us to seek virtue and to embrace wisdom: it has impressed upon us their derivation and their etymology. We know how to decline the Latin word for virtue: we do not know how to love virtue. Though we do not know what wisdom is in practice or from experience we do know the jargon off by heart. Yet we are not content merely to know the stock, kindred and intermarriages of our neighbours: we want to love them and to establish commerce and communication with them: our education has taught us the definitions, divisions and subdivisions of virtue as though they were the surnames and the branches of a family-tree, without any concern for establishing between us and it any practice of familiarity or personal intimacy. For our apprenticeship it has not prescribed the books which contain the soundest and truest opinions but those which are written in the best Greek and Latin, and in the midst of words of beauty it has poured into our minds the most worthless humours of Antiquity. A good education changes a boy’s judgement and morals, as happened in the case of a dissipated young Greek called Polemon who happened to attend a lecture [C] by Xenocrates [A] and who did not only take note of the eloquence and expertise of the lectures nor merely go back home bearing some knowledge of a beautiful subject but bearing more evident and solid fruit, namely the sudden change and amendment of his former life. Who has ever experienced a similar effect from the way we are taught?

  faciasne quod olim

  Mutatus Polemon? ponas insignia morbi,

  Fasciolas, cubital, focalia, potus ut ille

  Dicitur ex collo furtim carpsisse coronas,

  Postquam est impransi correptus voce magistri?

  [would you do what was formerly done by Polemon on his conversion? Would you cast aside the marks of your distemper, that is your padded legs, your cushioned elbows and your cissy scarves, as he quietly ripped the garland from his drunken neck when the words of his fasting teacher chided him?]53

  [C] It seems to me that the sorts of men who are simple enough to occupy the lowest rank are the least worthy of contempt and that they show us relationships which are better ordered. The morals and the speech of the peasants I find to be more in conformity with the principles of true philosophy than those of the philosophers: ‘Plus sapit vulgus, quia tantum quantum opus est sapit.’ [The common people know best: they know as much as they need to.]54

  [A] The men whom I have judged most notable from their outward appearances (for to judge them my own way would entail seeing them more closely in a better light) are: in war and military ability, the Duc de Guise who died at Orleans and the late Marshal Strozzi; for men of ability and uncommon virtue, François Olivier and Michel de l’Hôpital, both Chancellors of France. Poetry too, it seems to me, has had its successes in our times. We have had plenty of good craftsmen in that mystery: Dorat, Beza, Buchanan, Michel de l’Hôpital, Montaureus and Turnebus. As for poets writing in French, I think that they have raised poetry as high as it ever will be and that in those qualities in which Ronsard and Du Bellay excel I find them close to the perfection of the Ancients. Adrian Turnebus knew more, and knew it better, than any man of his own day and for many a long year. [B] The lives of the Duke of Alva who died recently and of our own Constable Montmorency were noble ones and in some ways unusually similar in their fortunes: but the beauty and glory of the death of the Constable, in full view of Paris and of his King while serving them against his nearest kinsmen at the head of an army which he had led to victory – a victory coming suddenly as it did in his extreme old age – seems worthy to me of a place among the most notable events of our time. [C] So too the constant goodness, gentleness of manners and scrupulous courtesy of Monsieur de La Noue, who had been brought up amidst the injustice one finds among armed factions (a real school of treachery, inhumanity and brigandage) yet was a great and experienced warrior.55

  *

  [’95] I have been delighted to declare in several places the hopes I put in my adopted daughter Marie de Gournay, who is loved by me with a more than fatherly love and included in my solitary retirement as one of the better parts of my being. She is the only person in the world I have regard for. If youth is any omen her soul will be capable of great things one day – among other things of that most perfect hallowed loving-friendship to which (so we read) her sex has yet been unable to aspire: the purity and solidity of her morals already suffice for this and her love for me is more than overflowing, such, in short, as to leave nothing to desire, if only the dread of my death (seeing that I was fifty-five when I first met her) were to torment her less cruelly. The judgement she made on my original Essays, she, a woman, in this century, so young and the only one to do so in her part of the country, as well as the known enthusiasms of her long love for me and her yearning to meet me simply on the strength of the esteem she had for me before she even knew me, are particulars worthy of special consideration.

  *

  [A] The other virtues are little valued nowadays, or not valued at all, but bravery has become commonplace through our Civil Wars: where that quality is concerned there are among us men whose souls are perfectly unshakeable, so numerous indeed that no selection is possible. That is all that I have come across till now of uncommon and exceptional greatness.

  18. On giving the lie

  [The first version of this chapter (which is indebted to the Roman satirists) insists that the self-portrait of Montaigne is destined for friends and descendants. It has been printed not for the public but because printing is more easy than copying manuscripts. The additions in [C] take a different line, as will the chapter ‘On repenting’ (III, 2): Montaigne insists on the moral value of his work and of telling the truth.]

  [A] Yes. But somebody will tell me that my project of using myself as a subject to write about would be pardonable in exceptional, famous men who by their reputations had given us the desire to know them. That is certainly true: I admit it; I am aware that a mere craftsman will scarcely glance up from his work to look at a man of the common mould, whereas shops and work-places are emptied to look at a great and famous personality arriving in town. It is unseemly for anyone to make himself known except he who can provide some example and whose life and opinions can serve as a model. Caesar and Xenophon could firmly base their narrations on the greatness of their achievements which formed a just and solid foundation. So we can regret the loss of the diaries of Alexander the Great and of the commentaries on their own actions which Augustus, [C] Cato, [A] Sylla, Brutus and others left behind them. We love to study the faces of such men even in bronze and stone.

  That rebuke is very true: but it hardly touches on me:

  Non recito cuiquam, nisi amicis, idque rogatus,

  Non ubivis, coramve quibuslibet. In medio qui

  Scripta foro recitent, sunt multi, quique lavantes.

  [I do not read this to anyone except my friends; even then they have to ask me; I do not do so anywhere or to anyone. Some men read their works to the public in the Forum or in the baths!]1

  I am not preparing a statue to erect at a city crossroads nor in a Church or some other public place:

  [B] Non equidem hoc studeo, bullatis ut mihi nugis

  Pagina turgescat.

  Secreti loquimur.

  [I do not intend to puff up my pages with inflated trifles: we are talking in private.]

  [A] It is [C] for some corner of a library and as a pastime [A] for a neighbour,2 a relative or a friend who will find pleasure in meeting me and frequenting me again through this portrait. Those others took heart to speak of themselves because they found their subject rich and worthwhile: I on the contrary because I find it so sterile and meagre that no suspicion of ostentation can fall upon me. [C] I readily make judgements on other men’s actions: I give little grounds for judging mine because of their nothingness. [B] I do not find so much good in me that I may not tell of it without blushing.

  [A] What happiness it would afford
me to hear someone giving me such an account of the manners, [B] the look and the expressions, the ordinary talk [A] and the fortunes of my forebears! How attentive I would be. It would indeed come from an evil nature if we were to despise the actual portraits of our beloved ancestors, [C] the style of their clothes and their armour. I preserve the escritoire, the seal, the prayer-book and a special sword which they used, and I have never banished from my own room the long canes that my father used to hold in his hands. ‘Paterna vestis et annulus tanto charior est posteris, quanto erga parentes major affectus.’ [A father’s clothes or ring are dearer to his descendants the more they loved him.]3

  [A] However, if my own descendants have different tastes, I shall have the means of giving as good as I get, since when that time comes they cannot possibly have less concern for me than I will for them! The only commerce I have with the public at large is my borrowing their printing-tools, which are more ready and convenient.4 In exchange [C] I may provide wrapping-paper to stop some slab of butter from melting in the market:

  [A] Ne toga cordyllis, ne penula desit olivis;

  [Lest they are short of wrappings for their tunny-fish or their olives;]

  [B] Et laxas scombris saepe dabo tunicas.

  [And I shall often provide a loose garment to wrap up their mackerel.]

  [C] Even if nobody reads me, have I wasted my time when I have entertained myself during so many idle hours with thoughts so useful and agreeable?

  Since I was modelling this portrait on myself, it was so often necessary to prepare myself and to pose so as to draw out the detail that the original has acquired more definition and has to some extent shaped itself. By portraying myself for others I have portrayed my own self within me in clearer colours than I possessed at first. I have not made my book any more than it has made me – a book of one substance with its author, proper to me and a limb of my life. Have I wasted my time by so continuously and carefully telling myself of myself? Those who merely think and talk about themselves occasionally do not examine the basics and do not go as deep as one who makes it his study, his work and his business, who with all good faith and with all his might binds himself to keeping a long-term account. The most delightful of pleasures are inwardly digested: they refuse to leave their spoor behind and refuse to be seen not only by the many but even by one other. How frequently has this task diverted me from painful thoughts! And all trivial thoughts should be counted as painful. Nature has vouchsafed us a great talent for keeping ourselves occupied when alone and often summons us to do so in order to teach us that we do owe a part of ourselves to society but that the best part we owe to ourselves. With the aims of teaching my mental faculty even to rave with some order and direction and so as to stop it losing its way and wandering in the wind, I need simply to give it body and to keep detailed accounts of my petty thoughts as they occur to me. How often when I have been irritated by some action which politeness and prudence forbid me from openly censuring have I unburdened myself here – not without the design of giving a public reproof.5 And, indeed, those scourgings by the poet –

  Zon dessus l’euil, zon sur le groin

  Zon sur le dos du Sagoin.

  [Bong in the eye, bong on the snout,

  Bong on the back of Sagon the Lout.]

  are even better when imprinted on paper than on the living flesh.

  And what if I now lend a more attentive ear to the books I read, being on the lookout to see whether I can thieve something with which to decorate and support my own? I have never studied so as to write a book, but I have done some study because I have written one, if studying a little means lightly touching this author or that and tweaking his head or his foot – not so as to shape my opinions but, long after they have taken shape, to help them, to back them up and to serve them.

  [A] But during a time so debased, what man are we to trust when he speaks of himself, seeing there are few, perhaps none, whom we can trust when they speak of others, where they have less to gain from lying? The first sign of corrupt morals is the banishing of truth: for as Pindar says, being truthful is the beginning of any great virtue, [C] and it is the first item that Plato required in the governor of his Republic.6 [A] Truth for us nowadays is not what is, but what others can be brought to accept: just as we call money not only legal tender but any counterfeit coins in circulation. Our nation has long been accused of this vice: Salvianus of Massilia, who lived in the time of the Emperor Valentinian, says that lying and perjury are not a vice for the French but a figure of speech!7 If you wanted to outbid that testimony you could say that at the present time it is for them a virtue. People train themselves for it and practise for it as for some honoured pursuit: dissimulation is one of the most striking characteristics of our age. So I have often reflected on what could have given birth to our scrupulously observed custom of taking bitter offence when we are accused of that vice which is more commonplace among us than any of the others, and why for us it should be the ultimate verbal insult to accuse us of lying. Whereupon I find it natural for us to protect ourselves from those failings with which we are most sullied. It seems that by resenting the accusation and growing angry about it we unload some of the guilt; we are guilty, in fact, but at least we condemn it for show.

  [B] Could it not also be because this accusation seems to imply cowardice and faintness of heart? Is anything more expressly cowardly than to deny one’s word – nay, to deny what we ourselves know to be so?

  [A] Lying is a villein’s vice, a vice which an Ancient paints full shamefully when he says that it gives testimony to contempt for God together with fear of men.8 It is not possible to show more richly the horror of it, its vileness and its disorderliness. For what can one imagine more serf-like than to be cowardly before men and defiant towards God? Our understanding is conducted solely by means of the word: anyone who falsifies it betrays public society. It is the only tool by which we communicate our wishes and our thoughts; it is our soul’s interpreter: if we lack that, we can no longer hold together; we can no longer know each other. When words deceive us, it breaks all intercourse and loosens the bonds of our polity.

  [B] Certain peoples of the new-found Indies (and there is no point in emphasizing their names which are no more, since – an amazing example, the like of which has never been heard – the utter devastation of that Conquest extended even to the total destruction of names and of all ancient knowledge of places) used to offer to their gods human blood, drawn exclusively from their ears and tongue, in expiation of the sin of both hearing and of telling lies.9

  [A] That jolly fellow from Greece declared that boys play with knuckle-bones and men play with words.10

  As for our various conventions for giving the lie, the laws of honour governing them and the changes they have undergone, I will put off saying what I have to say about that to some other time; meanwhile I will find out if I can from what period dates our custom of exactly weighing and measuring words and making that a question of honour. For it is easy to see that it was not like that in Ancient times among the Greeks and Romans. It often seemed strange and new to me to watch them giving each other the lie and insulting each other without it starting a brawl. Their laws of duty took some other road than ours. Caesar was variously called a thief and a drunkard to his very beard.11 We can see the freedom of invective which they used against each other (and I mean by they the greatest war-leaders in both those nations) where words were avenged by words alone, with no further consequence.

  19. On freedom of conscience

  [Freedom of conscience – freedom of worship and association granted to a rival sect of Christians claiming to be the one true Church – was a new idea, only reluctantly accepted by the Kings of France (or, indeed, of England). Montaigne regards it as a pis-aller, forced on the government by the condition of France, exhausted by the Wars of Religion. Montaigne’s concern to present fairly the anti-Christian Emperor Julian the Apostate (which raised some eyebrows in the Vatican) shows how we can be just even to enemies of
our religion. In fact Montaigne’s judgement is that of the Christian poet Prudentius, whose childhood was spent under Julian. This chapter continues the reflections of the previous one on the great Ancients’ indifference to invective. It ends with a quip borrowed from Montaigne’s favourite writer of Latin comedies, Terence. It had long been going the rounds in a Pasquinade; here it applies to the stalemate which led to the proclamation of Henry III and of Catherine de’ Medici in 1576, tolerating the Huguenots, except in Paris – since they could not be crushed.]