The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  in tarn diversa magister,

  Ventus et unda trahunt.44

  Whoever does not gape after the favours of princes as something he cannot live without is not greatly stung by the coldness of their reception nor the fickleness of their wills. A man who does not brood over his children or his honours with. [C] slavish [B] propensity45 does not cease to live comfortably after he has lost them. Whoever acts well mainly for his own satisfaction is not much put out when he sees men judging his deeds contrary to his merit. A quarter of an ounce of endurance can provide for such discomforts. I find that the remedy which works for me is, from the outset, to purchase my freedom at the cheapest price I can get; I know that I have by this means escaped much travail and hardship. With very little effort I stop the first movement of my emotions, giving up whatever begins to weigh on me before it bears me off. [C] If you do not stop the start, you will never stop the race. If you cannot slam the door against your emotions you will never chase them out once they have got in. If you cannot struggle through the beginning, you will never get through the end; nor will you withstand the building’s fall, if you cannot stand its being shaken. ‘Etenim ipsœ se impellunt ubi semel a ratione discessum est; ipsaque sibi imbecillitas indulget, in altutnque provehitur imprudens, nec repent locum consistendi.’ [Once they have departed from reason the emotions drive themselves on; their very weakness indulges itself, venturing imprudently on to the deep and finding no place in which it can heave to.]46

  [B] I can feel in time the tiny breezes which come fondling me and rustling within me, as forerunners of gales: [C] ‘Animus, multo antequam opprimatur, quatitur.’ [The mind is lashed well before it is engulfed.]

  [B] Ceu flamina prima

  Cum deprensa fremunt sylvis, et cœca volutant

  Murmura, venturos nautis prodentia ventos.

  [Thus when the light breeze is pent up in the woodlands, it swirls about and makes a sullen roar, warning seamen that a storm is nigh.]47

  How frequently have I done myself an evident injustice so as to avoid the risk of receiving a worse one from the judges after years of agony and of vile and base machinations which are more hostile to my nature than the rack or pyre. [C] ‘convenit a litibus quantum licet, et nescio an paulo plus etiam quam licet, abhorrentem esse. Est enim non modo liberale, paululum nonnunquam de suo jure decedere, sed interdum etiam fructuosum.’ [It is seemly to avoid lawsuits as far as you should, and even a little bit further. It is not only gentlemanly to waive one’s rights a little it is sometimes also profitable.]48 If we were truly wise we should delight in it and boast about it, like the innocent son of a great house whom I heard happily welcoming each guest with, ‘Mother has just lost her case!’ as though her case were a cough or a fever or some other thing which it is grievous to have. Even such advantages as Fortune has favoured me with – namely kinships and ties with men who have supreme authority over matters of that kind – I have consciously striven hard to avoid exploiting to the detriment of anyone else or to inflate my rights beyond their rightful worth. In short [B] I am happy to say that I have spent all my days virgin of lawsuits (even though they have not failed frequently to offer themselves to my service on many a just pretext if only I would listen) and virgin of actions against me. So I shall soon have spent a long life without serious harm given or received, and without being called anything worse than my name: a rare gift of Heaven.

  Our greatest commotions arise from laughable principles and causes. What ruin befell our last Duke of Burgundy because of an action against him for a cartload of sheep-skins. And was not the engraving on a seal the original and main cause of the most horrifying disaster that the fabric of this world has ever suffered?49 (For Pompey and Caesar are only side-shoots, consequent upon the first two rivals.) And in my own day I have seen the wisest heads in this Kingdom assembled with great ceremony and at great public expense to make treaties and agreements, while the details of them depended on sovereign chatter in the ladies’ drawing-room and on the inclination of some slip of a woman. [C] The poets understood that rightly enough when they put all Greece and Asia to fire and bloody strife for the sake of an apple.50

  [B] Think why that man over there takes his sword and dagger and risks his life and honour; let him tell you the source of the quarrel: the occasion was so trivial that he cannot tell you of it without blushing. When it is starting to ferment, all you need is a little wisdom. Once you have embarked, all the hawsers pull tight: then, great precautions are needed, much more difficult and important ones.

  [C] How much easier it is never to get in than to get yourself out! [B] We should act contrary to the reed which, when it first appears, throws up a long straight stem but afterwards, as though it were exhausted and had lost its wind, makes several dense nodules, as so many respites which indicate that it no longer has its original vigour and drive.51 We must rather begin gently and coolly, saving our breath for the encounter and our vigorous thrusts for finishing the job off. In their beginnings it is we who guide affairs and hold them in our power; but once they are set in motion, it is they which guide us and sweep us along and we who have to follow.

  [C] Yet that does not mean that this stratagem of mine has relieved me of all difficulties or that I have not often found it very hard to master or bridle my emotions. They cannot always be restrained to the measure of their causes, and even their beginnings can be harsh and aggressive. Nevertheless there are fair savings to be derived from it, and some fruits too except by those whom no fruit can satisfy when no honour is to be had. For in truth such an action can only be valued by each man himself. You yourself are happier but you are not more esteemed, since you reformed yourself before you took to the floor, before the matter could be seen. However there is this as well: not merely in this case but in all other of life’s duties, the way of those who aim at honour is different indeed from that followed by those whose objective is the ordinate and reasonable.

  [B] I find that some dash thoughtlessly and furiously into the lists only to slow down during the charge. Plutarch says that those who suffer from excessive diffidence readily and easily agree to anything but also readily break their word and go back on what they have said; so, similarly, anyone who enters lightly upon a quarrel is liable to be equally light in getting out of it.52 The same difficulty which stops me from broaching anything would spur me on once I was heated and excited. What a bad way to do it: once you are in, you must go on or burst! [C] ‘Undertake relaxedly,’ said Bias, ‘but pursue hotly.’53

  [B] But what is even less tolerable, for want of wisdom we decline into want of bravery.

  Today most settlements of our disputes are shameful and lying: we merely seek to save appearances, while betraying and disowning our true thoughts. We plaster over facts; we know how we said it and what we meant by it; the bystanders know it; so do our friends to whom we wished to prove our superiority. We disavow our thoughts at the expense of our frankness and our reputation for courage, seeking bolt-holes in falsehoods so as to reach a conciliation. We give the lie to ourselves in order to get out the fact that we gave the lie to somebody else. You ought not to be considering whether your gesture or words may be given a different meaning: from now on it is your true and honest meaning that you should be seeking to defend, no matter what the cost. At stake are your morality and your honour: those are not qualities for you to protect behind a mask. Let us leave such servile shifts and expediences to the chicanery of the law-courts. Every day I see excuses and reparations made to purge an indiscretion which seem uglier to me than the indiscretion itself. It would be better to offend your adversary afresh than to commit an offence against yourself by making him such a reparation as that. You were moved to anger when you defied him: now that you are cooler and more sensible, you are going to appease him and fawn on him! That way, you retreat further than you ever advanced. I reckon that nothing which a gentleman says can seem worse than the shame of his unsaying it under duress from authority: stubbornness in a gentleman is more pardonable th
an pusillanimity.

  For me passions are as easy to avoid as hard to moderate: [C] ‘Abscinduntur facilius animo quam temperantur.’ [They are more easily cut out from the mind than tempered.]54

  [B] If a man cannot attain to that noble Stoic impassibility, let him hide in the lap of this peasant insensitivity of mine. What Stoics did from virtue I teach myself to do from temperament. Storms lodge in the middle regions; philosophers and country bumpkins – the two extremes – meet in peace of mind and happiness.

  Fœlix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,

  Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum

  Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari.

  Fortunatus et ille Deos qui novit agrestes,

  Panaque, sylvanumque senem, nymphasque sorores.

  [Blessed the man who can find out causes, who can trample down all fears of inexorable Fate and the howls of the close-fisted Underworld: blessed, too, he who knows the rustic gods, Pan, old Sylvanus and the sister nymphs.]55

  The infancies of all things are feeble and weak. We must keep our eyes open at their beginnings; you cannot find the danger then because it is so small: once it has grown, you cannot find the cure. While chasing ambition I would have had to face, every day, thousands of irritations harder to digest than the difficulty I had in putting a stop to my natural inclination towards it.

  jure perhorrui

  Late conspicuum tollere verticem.

  [I was right to abhor raising my head and attracting attention.]56

  All public deeds are liable to ambiguous and diverse interpretations since so many heads are judging them. Now about this municipal office of mine (and I am delighted to say a word about it, not that it is worth it but to show how I behave in such matters): some say that I bore myself as a man who shows too little passion and whose zeal was too slack. As far as appearances go, they were not all that wrong: I assay keeping my soul and my thoughts in repose: [C] ‘Cum semper natura, tum etiam aetate jam quietus’ [Always tranquil by nature, I now am also so by my age];57 [B] if they turn riotous from some deep and disturbing impression that, in truth, is against my intention. Yet from this natural languor of mine one should not draw evidence of incapacity (since lack of worry and lack of wit are two different things) and even less of ingratitude or of lack of appreciation towards those citizens who went to every available extreme to please me, both before and after they knew me – for they did far more for me in re-electing me to office than in electing me in the first place. I wish them all possible good: and indeed, if the occasion had arisen, there is nothing that I would have spared in their service. I bestirred myself as much for them as I do for myself. They are a fine people, good brave fighting-men, able therefore to accept discipline and obedience and to serve a good cause when well led.

  People also say that my period of office passed without trace or mark. Good. They accuse me of being dilatory at a time when nearly everyone else was convicted of doing too much. I [C] paw the ground when my will bolts away with me: [B] but that trait58 is the enemy of perseverance. Should anyone wish to use me as I am, let him give me tasks which require vigour and frankness, as well as straightforward, brief and hazardous execution. I could do something then. But if it needs to be subtle, toilsome, clever and tortuous, better ask somebody else.

  Not all important commissions are difficult. I would have been prepared to work a little harder had that been very necessary: I am capable of doing somewhat more than I do or like to do. To the best of my knowledge I never left undone any action that duty seriously required of me; but I readily overlooked those where ambition mingles with duty and uses it as a pretext it is those which, more often than not, fill men’s eyes and ears and please them; they are satisfied not with realities but appearances. If they do not hear a sound they think you are asleep! My own humours are opposed to noisy ones: I could certainly remain undisturbed while quelling a disturbance, and could punish a riot without losing my temper. Should I need a little choler and fire, then I borrow some to mask me. My manners are unabrasive, more insipid than sharp: I do not bring actions against an official who dozes, provided that those whom he administers can doze quietly with him. That is the way the laws doze.

  Personally I favour an obscure mute life which slips by: [C] ‘neque submissam et abjectam, neque se efferentem’ [neither submissive and mean nor puffed up].59 [B] That is how my Fortune wills it: I was born into a family which has flowed on without brilliance or turbulence, one long remembered as being particularly ambitious for probity. Nowadays men are so conditioned to bustle and ostentation that we have lost the feel of goodness, moderation, even-temper, steadfastness and other such [C] quiet [B] and unpretentious60 qualities; rough objects make themselves felt: smooth ones can be handled without sensation. Illness is felt: good health, little or not at all; neither do we feel things which flatter us, compared with those which batter us.

  If we postpone something which could be done in the council-chamber until it is done in the market-square, keeping back till noon something which could have been finished the night before, or if we are anxious to do personally something which a colleague could have done just as well, then we are acting for the sake of our own reputation and for private advantage, not for the Good. (That is what some barber-surgeons used to do in ancient Greece, performing their operations on a daïis in view of passers-by so as to enlarge their practices and the number of patients.)61 They think that good regulations can only be heard when announced with a fanfare.

  Ambition is not a vice fit for little fellows or for enterprises such as ours. Alexander was told: ‘Your father will leave you wide dominions, peaceful and secure.’ But that lad wanted to rival his father’s victorious and righteous government.62 He had no wish to enjoy ruling the entire world undemandingly and peacefully. [C] (Alcibiades in Plato says he prefers to die young as a beautiful, rich, noble and exceedingly learned youth than to stay fixed in those qualities.)63

  [B] Ambition is doubtless a pardonable malady in a strong and full soul such as Alexander’s. But when petty, dwarfish souls start aping them, believing that they can scatter their renown abroad by having judged one matter rightly or for having arranged the changing of the guard at the town gate, then the higher they hope to raise their heads the more they bare their arses. Such petty achievements have no body, no life; they start evaporating on the first man’s lips and never get from one street-corner to another. Have the effrontery to talk about them to your son or your manservant, like that old fellow who had nobody else to listen to his praises or to acknowledge his worth and so boasted to his chambermaid: ‘Oh, what a gallant and clever man you have for a master, Perrette!’64 If the worse comes to worst, talk about it to yourself, like a King’s Counsel I know who, having (with extreme exertion and extreme absurdity) disgorged a boatload of legal references, withdrew from the council-chamber to the court piss-house, where he was heard devoutly muttering through his teeth: ‘Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomine tuo da gloriam.’ [Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto Thy Name be the glory.]65 If you cannot get it from somebody else’s purse, get it from your own!

  Fame does not play the whore for so base a price. Those rare and exemplary deeds to which fame is due would not tolerate the company of such a countless mob of petty everyday actions. Marble can boast your titles as much as you like for having repaired a stretch of wall or cleaned up some public gutter, but men of sense will not. Renown does not ensue upon anything done well unless difficulty and unusualness are involved. Indeed, according to the Stoics, simple esteem is not due to every action born of virtue: they would not even faintly praise a man for having abstained from some sore-eyed old whore for temperance’ sake!66 [C] Those who already knew of the astonishing qualities of Scipio Africanus rejected the ‘glory’ which Panaetius gave him for refusing bribes: that glory was not his alone but belonged to his entire age.67

  [B] We have pleasures appropriate to our station: let us not usurp those of greatness: ours are more natural and ar
e the more solid and certain for being more humble. Let us reject ambition out of ambition, since we do not do so out of a sense of right and wrong; let us despise that base beggerly hunger for renown and honour which makes us solicit them from all kinds of people by abject means, no matter how vile the price: [C] ‘Quae est ista laus quae possit e macello peti?’ [What kind of praise is it that you can order from the butcher’s?]68 [B] To be honoured thus is a dishonour.

  Let us learn to be no more avid for glory than we deserve. Boasting of every useful or blameless action is for men in whom such things are rare and unusual: they want them to be valued at what it cost them! The more glittering the deed the more I subtract from its moral worth, because of the suspicion aroused in me that it was exposed more for glitter than for goodness: goods displayed are already half-way to being sold. The most elegant deeds are those which slip from the doer’s hand nonchalantly and without fuss, and which some man of honour later picks out and saves from obscurity, bringing them to light for their own sake. [C] ‘Mihi quidem laudabiliora videntur omnia, quae sine venditatione et sine populo teste fiunt’ [Personally I always find more praiseworthy whatever is done without ostentation and without public witnesses] – says the vainest man in the world!69

  [B] I had nothing to do except to preserve things and to keep them going; those are dull and unnoticeable tasks. There is a great deal of splendour in innovation, but that is under a ban nowadays when it is by novelties alone that we are oppressed, against novelties alone that we must defend ourselves. [C] Although it is less in the daylight, refraining from action is often more noble than action: what little I am worth is virtually all on that side. [B] In short, my opportunities while in office accorded with my temperament. I am most grateful to them for it. Is there any man who wants to be ill so as to provide work for his doctor? Ought we not to whip a doctor who hoped for the plague so as to practise his Art? Although that wicked humour is common enough, I have never hoped that trouble and distemper in this city might increase the glory and honour of my mayoralty. I put my shoulder loyally to the wheel to make things smooth and easy.