The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  [C] When a man is commonplace in discussion yet valued for what he writes that shows that his talents lie in his borrowed sources not in himself. A learned man is not learned in all fields: but a talented man is talented in all fields, even in ignorance. [B] Here, my book and I go harmoniously forward at the same pace. Elsewhere you can commend or condemn a work independently of its author; but not here: touch one and you touch the other. Anyone who criticizes it without knowing that will harm himself more than me; anyone who does know it has satisfied me completely. I shall be blessed beyond my merit if public approval will allow me this much: that I have made intelligent people realize that I would have been capable of profiting from learning if I had had any and that I deserved more help from my memory.

  Let me justify here what I often say: that I rarely repent [C] and that my conscience is happy with itself – not as the conscience of an angel is nor of a horse, but as behoves the conscience of a man4 – [B] ever adding this refrain (not a ritual one but one of simple and fundamental submission): that I speak as an ignorant questioning man: for solutions I purely and simply abide by the common lawful beliefs.5 I am not teaching, I am relating.

  There is no vice that is truly a vice which is not odious and which a wholesome judgement does not condemn; for there is so much evident ugliness and impropriety in it that perhaps those philosophers are right who maintain that it is principally the product of stupidity and ignorance, so hard it is to imagine that anyone could recognize it without loathing it.6 [C] Evil swallows most of its own venom and poisons itself. [B] Vice leaves repentance in the soul like an ulcer in the flesh which is forever scratching itself and bleeding.7 For reason can efface other griefs and sorrows, but it engenders those of repentance which are all the more grievous for being born within us, just as the chill and the burn of our fevers are more stinging than such as come to us from outside. I hold to be vices (though each according to its measure) not only those vices which are condemned by reason and nature but even those which have been forged by the opinions of men, even when false or erroneous, provided that law and custom lend them their authority.

  Likewise there is no goodness which does not rejoice a well-born nature. There is an unutterable delight in acting well which makes us inwardly rejoice; a noble feeling of pride accompanies a good conscience. A soul courageous in its vice can perhaps furnish itself with composure but it can never provide such satisfaction and happiness with oneself. It is no light pleasure to know oneself to be saved from the contagion of a corrupt age and to be able to say of oneself: ‘Anyone who could see right into my soul would even then not find me guilty of any man’s ruin or affliction, nor of envy nor of vengeance, nor of any public attack on our laws, nor of novelty or disturbance, nor of breaking my word. And even though this licentious age not only allows it but teaches it to each of us, I have nevertheless not put my hand on another Frenchman’s goods or purse but have lived by my own means, in war as in peace; nor have I exploited any man’s labour without due reward.’ Such witnesses to our conscience are pleasant; and such natural rejoicing is a great gift: it is the only satisfaction which never fails us.

  Basing the recompense of virtuous deeds on another’s approbation is to accept too uncertain and confused a foundation – [C] especially since in a corrupt and ignorant period like our own to be in good esteem with the masses is an insult: whom would you trust to recognize what was worthy of praise! May God save me from being a decent man according to the self-descriptions which I daily see everyone give to honour themselves: ‘Quae fuerant vitia, mores sunt.’ [What used to be vices have become morality.]8

  Some of my friends have occasionally undertaken to lay bare my heart, to charge me and put me through the assizes, either on their own initiative or else summoned by me; of all the offices of friendship that is not only the most useful for a well-turned mind but also the sweetest. I have always welcomed it with the most courteous and grateful of embraces. But speaking of it now in all conscience I have often found such false measure in their praise and blame that, judging from their standards, I would not have been wrong to do wrong rather than right.

  [B] Especially in the case of people like us who live private lives which only go on parade before ourselves, we must establish an inner model to serve as touchstone of our actions, by which we at times favour ourselves or flog ourselves. I have my own laws and law-court to pass judgement on me and I appeal to them rather than elsewhere. I restrain my actions according to the standards of others, but I enlarge them according to my own. No one but you knows whether you are base and cruel, or loyal and dedicated. Others never see you: they surmise about you from uncertain conjectures; they do not see your nature so much as your artifice. So do not cling to their sentence: cling to your own. [C] ‘Tuo tibique judicio est utendum.’ [You must use your own judgement of yourself.]9‘Virtutis et vitiorum grave ipsius conscientiae pondus est: qua sublata, jacent omnia.’ [Your own conscience gives weighty judgement on your virtues and vices: remove that, and all lies sprawling.]

  [B] Yet the saying that ‘repentance follows hard upon the sin’ does not seem to me to concern sin in full apparel, when lodged in us as in its own home. We can disown such vices as take us by surprise and towards which we are carried away by our passions; but such vices as are rooted and anchored in a will which is strong and vigorous brook no denial. To repent is but to gainsay our will and to contradict our ideas; it can lead us in any direction. It makes that man over there disown his past virtue and his continence!

  Quæ mens est hodie, cur eadem non puero fuit?

  Vel cur his animis incolumes non redeunt genæ

  [Alas! Why did I not want to do as a young man what I want to do now? Or why, thinking as I do now, cannot my radiant cheeks return?]10

  Rare is the life which remains ordinate even in privacy. Anyone can take part in a farce and act the honest man on the trestles: but to be right-ruled within, in your bosom, where anything is licit, where everything is hidden – that’s what matters. The nearest to that is to be so in your home, in your everyday actions for which you are accountable to nobody; there is no striving there, no artifice.11 That is why Bias when portraying an excellent family state said it was one where the head of the family was of his own volition, the same indoors as he was outdoors for fear of the law and the comments of men: and it was a worthy retort of Julius Drusus to the builders who offered for three thousand crowns to re-plan his house so that his neighbours could no longer see in as they did: ‘I will give you six thousand, and you can arrange for them to see in everywhere!’ We comment with honour on Agesilas’ practice of taking up lodgings in the temples when on a journey, so that the people and the very gods could see what he did in private.12 A man may appear to the world as a marvel: yet his wife and his manservant see nothing remarkable about him. Few men have been wonders to their families.

  [C] ‘No man has been a prophet not only in his own home but in his own country,’ says the experience of history.13 The same applies to trivialities. You can see an image of greater things in the following lowly example: in my own climate of Gascony they find it funny to see me in print; I am valued the more the farther from home knowledge of me has spread. In Guienne I pay my printers: elsewhere, they pay me. That consideration is the motive of those who hide away when alive and present, so as to enjoy a reputation when they are dead and gone. I would rather have a lesser one: I throw myself upon the world for the one that I can enjoy now. Once I am gone I acquit the world of its debt.

  [B] That man over there is escorted to his door ecstatically by a public procession: he doffs that role when he doffs his robes; the higher he has climbed the lower he falls. Once at home he is all tumult and baseness within. And even if right-rule is to be found in him, you need a quick and highly selected judgement to perceive it in his humble private actions. Besides, to be ordinate is a glum and sombre virtue. Storming a breach, conducting an embassy, ruling a nation are glittering deeds. Rebuking, laughing, buying, selling, loving, hati
ng and living together gently and justly with your household – and with yourself – not getting slack nor belying yourself, is something more remarkable, more rare and more difficult. Whatever people may say, such secluded lives sustain in that way duties which are at least as hard and as tense as those of other lives. [C] And Aristotle says that private citizens serve virtue as highly and with as much difficulty as those who hold office.14 [B] We prepare ourselves for great occasions more for the glory than for good conscience. [C] The quickest road to glory would be to do for conscience what we do for glory. [B] And the virtue of Alexander seems to me to act out less virtue on its stage than that of Socrates in his humble obscure role. I can easily conceive of Socrates in Alexander’s place: but Alexander in Socrates’ place, I cannot. Ask Alexander what he can do and he will reply: ‘Subdue the whole world.’ Ask Socrates, and he will answer, ‘Live the life of man in conformity with his natural condition’: knowledge which is much more general, onerous and right.

  The soul’s value consists not in going high but in going ordinately. [C] Its greatness is not displayed in great things but in the Mean.

  Just as those who judge us by the touchstone of our motives do not rate highly the sparkle of our public deeds and see that it is no more than thin fine jets of water spurting up from the depths (which are moreover heavy and slimy), so too those who judge us from our brave outward show conclude that our inward disposition corresponds to it: they cannot couple ordinary talents just like their own with those other talents, so far beyond their ken, which amaze them. That is why we give savage shapes to demons. And who does not give Tamberlane arching eyebrows, gaping nostrils, a ghastly face and an immense size proportionate to the idea we have conceived of him from the spreading of his name? Once, if anyone had brought me to meet Erasmus it would have been hard for me not to take for adages and apophthegms everything he said to his manservant or to his innkeeper’s wife. We can with more seemliness imagine an artisan on his jakes or on his wife than a great lord chancellor venerated for his dignity and wisdom. It seems to us that they never come down from their lofty thrones, even to live.

  [B] As vicious souls are often incited to do good by some outside instigation, so are virtuous souls to do evil. We must therefore judge souls in their settled state, when they are at home with themselves – if they ever are – or at least when they are nearest to repose in their native place. Natural tendencies are helped and reinforced by education, but they can hardly be said to be altered or overmastered. In my lifetime hundreds of natures have escaped towards virtue, or vice, despite teaching to the contrary:

  Sic ubi desuetæ silvis in carcere clausæ

  Mansuevere feræ, et vultus posuere minaces,

  Atque hominem didicere pati, si torrida parvus

  Venit in ora cruor, redeunt rabiesque furorque,

  Admonitæque tument gustato sanguine fauces;

  Fervet, et a trepido vix abstinet ira magistro.

  [As when wild beasts, shut up in a cage, forget their forests and are tamed, losing their menacing looks and learning to be ruled by men, yet if a tiny drop of blood falls on their avid lips, back come their snarls and their ragings; they have tasted blood; their jaws yawn wide; they are in turmoil and can hardly be stopped from venting their wrath on their trembling tamer.]15

  You cannot extirpate the qualities we are originally born with: you can cover them over and you can hide them. Latin is a native tongue for me: I understand it better than French; yet it is forty years now since I used it for speaking or writing. Nevertheless on those two or three occasions in my life when I have suffered some extreme and sudden emotion – one was when my perfectly healthy father collapsed back on to me in a dead faint – the first words which I have dredged up from my entrails have always been in Latin – [C] nature, against long nurture, breaking forcibly out and finding expression. [B] And this example applies to many others.

  Those who have sought in my time to improve the morals of the world with their new opinions reform the vices which show: the essential vices they leave us as they are – if they do not make them grow bigger. And such growth is to be feared: we are ready to take a holiday from all other good deeds on the strength of those uncertain surface reformations which cost us less and which gain us more esteem; and we thereby cheaply give satisfaction to our other vices: those which are inborn, of one substance with us and visceral.

  Just take a little look at what our own experience shows. Provided that he listen to himself there is no one who does not discover in himself a form entirely entirely his own, a master-form which struggles against his education as well as against the storm of emotions which would gainsay it. In my case I find that I am rarely shaken by shocks or agitations; I am virtually always settled in place, as heavy ponderous bodies are. If I should not be ‘at home’ I am always nearby. My indulgences do not catch me away very far: there is nothing odd or extreme about them, though I do have some sane and vigorous changes of heart.

  The real condemnation which applies to the common type of men nowadays is that their very retreat is full of filth and corruption, that their amendment of life is vague, and their repentance nearly as sickly and guilt-ridden as their sinning. Some of them are so stuck to their vices by long habit or some natural bonding that they no longer find them ugly. There are others – and I am one of that regiment – for whom vice does have some weight but who counterbalance it by the pleasure it gives or by some other factor; they put up with it and give themselves over to it, but at a definite price – viciously though and basely. Yet a vastly disproportionate measure could be imagined between the vice and the price, one where the pleasure could with justice compensate for the sin (as expediency is said to do) – not when the pleasure is incidental, forming no part of the sin, as in theft, but as in lying with women where the pleasure resides in performing the sin and where the drive is violent and, so it is said, irresistible.

  The other day when I was in Armagnac on the estates of one of my relations I met a peasant whom everybody called Pincher. He gave me this account of his life: being born to beggary and finding that he would never succeed in earning his bread and warding off indigence by the labour of his hands, he took the decision to become a thief and had spent his entire youth safely in that trade because he was so physically strong; for he used to harvest the corn and grapes on other men’s lands, but so far off and in such huge quantities that it was unthinkable that one man could have loaded so much on his back in one single night. He also took care to spread the damage equally about, so that each of his victims found the loss less hard to bear. Now, in his old age, he is rich for a man of his station – thanks to that trafficking, which he openly admits. To come to terms with God for his gains he declares that, by making free-gifts, he is always keen to compensate the heirs of all the men he robbed, and that if he does not finish this (for he simply cannot provide for all at once) he will charge his heirs to do so, based on the knowledge which he alone has of the evil he had done to each individual. From this account, be it true or false, that man regards theft as a dishonest deed; and he hates it… less than he hates poverty. He indeed repents of the theft as such, but he does not feel any repentance for its being counterbalanced and counterweighed. We do not find in this case that habitual practice which makes us fellows-incorporate with vice and brings our mind itself to conform to it; nor is it that violent gale which batters and blinds our soul and sweeps us for a while into the power of vice, judgement and all.

  My custom is to be entirely given to what I do, marching, forward all of a piece. There is hardly an emotion in me which sneaks away and hides from my reason or which is not governed by the consent of almost all my parts, without schism or inner strife. The entire blame or praise for that belongs to my judgement; and once it accepts that blame it has it for ever, because virtually since birth it has always been one: the same bent, the same route, the same strength. And as for all my general opinions, I have since childhood lodged me where I was to remain.

  T
here are sins which are violent, quick and sudden. Let us leave them aside. But as for those other sins, so often repeated, deliberated and meditated upon, those sins which are rooted in our complexions [C] and, indeed in our professions or vocations, [B] I cannot conceive that they could be rooted so long in one identical heart without the reason and conscience of him who is seized of them being constant in his willing and wanting them to be so; and the repentance which he boasts to come to him at a particular appointed instant is hard for me to imagine or conceive. [C] I cannot follow the Pythagorean dogma that men take on a new soul when they draw near to the statues of the gods to gather up their oracles, unless Pythagoras meant that their soul must actually be a new one, foreign to them and lent for the occasion, since their own soul showed so little sign of being cleansed by purification and condign for that duty.16 [B] What they do is flat contrary to the Stoics’ precepts, which do indeed command us to correct any vices or imperfections which we acknowledge to be in us but forbid us to be sorry or upset about them. But these men would have us believe that they do feel deep remorse and regret within; yet no amendment or improvement, [C] no break, [B] ever becomes apparent. But if you do not unburden yourself of the evil there has been no cure. If repentance weighed down the scales of the balance it would do away with the sin. I can find no quality so easy to counterfeit as devotion unless our morals and our lives are made to conform to it; its essence is hidden and secret: its external appearances are easy and ostentatious.