The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  Moreover I would be compromising your sense of duty and soliciting you to do something ugly: it is not for any supplications of mine to persuade you, but for pure and solid reasons of justice to do so. You have sworn to the gods to bear yourselves thus: it would seem that I were wishing to bring a counter-indictment, suspecting you of not believing that there are any gods! And I too would bear witness against myself, showing that I did not believe in them as I ought to, either, since I distrusted their governance and did not entrust my case entirely to their hands. I have complete trust in them, convinced as I am that they will act in this matter as will be best for me and for you.

  Good men, whether living or dead, have nothing to fear from the gods.60

  [B] As a plea is that not [C] crisp and sensible, yet naïve and lowly,61 [B] unimaginably sublime, [C] true, frank and incomparably right [B] – and made in such an hour of need! [C] It was reasonable indeed of Socrates to prefer it to the one which the great orator Lysias had written out for him, excellently couched in lawyers’ language but unworthy of so noble an accused.62 Should one ever hear a word of supplication from the lips of Socrates! Should such proud virtue strike sail precisely when it was being most vigorously displayed! Should his nature, noble and puissant, have entrusted his defence to art, and when it was being most highly assayed have renounced truth and simplicity, which were the ornaments of his speech, in order to bedizen itself with the cosmetic figures and fictions of a prepared address?

  He acted most wisely and in keeping with himself by not corrupting the tenor of an incorruptible life, or so august a concept of the form of humankind, in order to prolong his old age by a year and so betray the immortal memory of that glorious end.

  His duty in life was not to himself but to be an example to the world: would it not have been a public catastrophe if he had ended his life in some idle obscure manner?

  [B] Indeed such a detached and quiet way of rating his death deserved that posterity should rate it more highly for him. And it did so. In the whole of justice nothing is more just than what Fortune ordained for its glory. The Athenians held those who were responsible for it in such loathing that they shunned them as persons accursed: anything which they touched was held to be polluted; no one would bathe in the public baths with them; no one greeted them; no one approached them; so that, finally, no longer able to bear such public opprobrium, they went and hanged themselves.63

  If anyone reckons that I chose a bad example from among so many of Socrates’ speeches which could have served my purpose, and if he judges that Socrates’ reasoning here is far above the opinion of common men, well, I chose it on purpose. For I judge otherwise and maintain that his reasoning here holds a more modest rank than even common opinions and that its naïve simplicity is less elevated; [C] within an unspoiled boldness quite without artifice, and with a childlike assurance, [B] it exhibits Nature’s pure and primary [C] stamp and simplicity.64 [B] While it is credible that we should have a natural fear of pain, it is not credible that we should fear dying as such, which is a part of the essence of our being, no less than living is. For what purpose would Nature have engendered within us a loathing and horror of dying, seeing that dying rates as something extremely useful, in that it ensures succession and substitution within Nature’s works and also, within the [C] commonwealth [B] of this world,65 serves birth and increase more than loss and destruction.

  Sic return summa novatur

  [Thus is totality renewed]

  [C] Mille animas una necata dedit.

  [One death gives rise to a thousand lives.]

  [B] The failing of one life is the gate to a thousand other lives.66 [C] Nature has stamped on the beasts a concern for themselves and their own conservation. They can get as far as being afraid of harm from knocking against things and so hurting themselves and of our tying them up and beating them – things which are within their sensations and experience. What they cannot fear is that we may kill them: they do not have the faculty of imagining death or thinking about it. In addition it is said that [B] one can see them not merely suffering death gladly (most horses whinny when dying, while swans [C] sing at [B] their deaths)67 but even seeking it when necessary, as is shown by several examples of elephants.68

  Moreover is not the style of argument which Socrates uses here one which stuns us equally by its simplicity and its ecstatic force? In truth it is far easier to talk like Aristotle and to live like Caesar than both to talk like Socrates and live like Socrates. In him is lodged the highest degree of perfection and of difficulty. Art cannot reach it. Moreover our own faculties are not trained that way. We neither assay them nor understand them: we clothe ourselves in those of others and allow our own to lie unused – and some may say that about me, asserting that I have merely gathered here a big bunch of other men’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the string to hold them together.

  I have indeed made a concession to the taste of the public with these borrowed ornaments which accompany me. But I do not intend them to cover me up or to hide me: that is the very reverse of my design: I want to display nothing but my own – what is mine by nature. If I had had confidence to do what I really wanted, I would have spoken utterly alone, come what may. [C] Yet despite my projected design and my original concept (but following the whim of the age and the exhortation of others) I burden myself with more and more of them every day. That may not become me well: I think it does not, but never mind: it might be useful to somebody else.

  [B] There are men who quote Plato and Homer without ever setting eyes on them. (I too have often taken my quotations not from the originals but from elsewhere.) Since in the place where I write I am surrounded by one thousand volumes, I could easily, if I wanted to, now borrow without trouble or scholarship, from a dozen of the kind of botchers whose pages I hardly ever turn, quite enough to [C] put an enamel gloss on [B] this treatise69 about physiognomy. To cram myself full of quotations all I would need would be the preliminary epistle of some German! And that is the way we go seeking tidbits of glory with which to diddle this foolish world!

  [C] Those meat-pies stuffed with commonplaces by which so many eke out their studies on the cheap are useless except for commonplace topics; they can be used to show off, but not for right conduct – just such a laughable fruit of learning as served as knock-about amusement for Socrates against Euthydemus.70 I have known books made out of materials which have never been studied or understood, the author having entrusted the research for this and that needed to construct it to divers learned friends, being content for his part with having thought up the project and then having made an industrious compilation out of that bundle of unknown materials. At least the ink and paper are his. In all conscience that is not writing a book but purchasing one, borrowing one. It shows men – something of which they might have remained in doubt – that you are unable to write one. [B] A presiding judge boasted in my presence that he had amassed two hundred or so borrowed commonplaces and worked them into one of his presidential rescripts.71 [C] By declaring that fact to all and sundry he seemed to me to be nullifying the glory he was being given for it. [B] A petty and ridiculous vanity for my taste in such a subject and in such a person.72

  [C] Among my many borrowings I take delight in being able to conceal the occasional one, masking it and distorting it to serve a new purpose. At the risk of letting people say that it is because I failed to understand any of the meanings in context, I give that one some peculiar slant with my own hand, so that they may all be less purely and simply someone else’s. [B] But those others put their larcenies on parade and into their accounts, thereby acquiring a better claim in law than I do! [C] Followers of Nature like me reckon that, in honour, invention takes incomparably higher precedence over quotation.

  [B] If I had wanted to speak from erudition I would have done so sooner: I would have written at a time closer to my studies when I had more memory and Nous. And if I had wanted to make a trade out of writing I would have had more confidence in my
self at that age than I do now. [C] Moreover one particular favour which Fortune may have granted me by means of this book would then have occurred at a more propitious season. [B] Two of my acquaintances, men of great scholarship, have in my opinion lost half their value by declining to publish at forty and waiting until they were [C] sixty.73 [B] Like youth, maturity has its defects: worse ones. And old age is as unsuited to work of that nature as to any other. Whoever submits his senile mind to the presses is mad if he hopes to extract anything which does not stink of a man who is ugly, raving and half-asleep. Our mind as it ages becomes constipated and squat. I reveal my ignorance with copious pomp: I reveal my learning meagrely and pitifully – [C] the latter as an accessory, a by-product: the former, as explicit and primary. Strictly, I treat nothing except nothing, and I treat not science but nescience. [B] I have selected the time when my life (which I have to portray) is laid out before me: whatever remains over has more to do with dying. The only news which I would willingly still give to the public as I pack my bags would concern my dying, if I found it, as others do, to be loquacious.

  It vexes me that Socrates, who was the perfect exemplar of all the great qualities, should have chanced to have so ugly a face and body (as they say he did), one so unbecoming to the beauty of his soul, [C] he who was so much in love, so madly in love, with beauty. Nature did him an injustice there. [B] There is nothing more probable than the conformity and correspondence of the body and the mind.74 [C] ‘Ipsi animi magni refert quali in corpore locati sint: multa enim e corpore existunt quœ acuant mentem, multa quœ obtundant.’ [It matters much to souls in what sort of body they are lodged; for many of the body’s qualities serve to sharpen the mind, and many others make it obtuse.]75 The author here is talking about unnatural ugliness and physical deformity. But we also use ugliness to mean an immediately recognizable uncomeliness, which is lodged primarily in the face and which we often find distasteful for quite trivial causes: for its colouring, a spot, a coarse expression or for some inexplicable reason even when the limbs are well-proportioned and whole. In that category was the ugliness which clothed the most beautiful soul of La Boëtie. Such surface ugliness, imperious though it may be, is less harmful in its effects on a man’s mind and is not, in people’s opinion, by any means a certain prognostic. The other kind, which is strictly speaking deformity, is more substantial and more inclined to turn its effects inwards. The shape of the foot is revealed not only by a shoe of fine polished leather but by any close-fitting one. [B] As Socrates said of his own ugliness: it would have revealed quite justly the ugliness of his soul, had he not corrected his soul by education.76 [C] But in saying it I hold that he was jesting as usual: never did so excellent a soul make itself.

  [B] I cannot repeat often enough how highly I rate beauty, which is a powerful and most beneficial quality. (Socrates called it a ‘brief tyranny’ [C] and Plato ‘a privilege of Nature’.)77 [B] We have no other qualities which surpass it in repute. It holds the highest rank in human intercourse: it runs ahead of the others, carries off our judgement and biases it with its great authority and its wondrous impact. [C] Phryne would have lost her case even in the hands of an excellent advocate if she had not corrupted her judges by the brilliance of her beauty as she parted her garment.78 And I find that Cyrus, Alexander and Caesar, those three lords of the world, did not neglect it in order to execute their great endeavours. Nor did the elder Scipio. In Greek one and the same word embraces the beautiful and the good. And the Holy Ghost often calls things good when He means beautiful.79 I would readily defend the hierarchy of goods taken from an ancient poem and song which Plato says was popular: health, beauty, wealth.80.

  Aristotle says that the right to command belongs to the beautiful and that, whenever there are persons whose beauty approaches that of the portraits of the gods, like veneration is due to them. When someone asked him why men haunt the company of the beautiful both longer and more often, he replied: ‘Only a blind man should ask that.’81 Most of the philosophers, and the greatest, paid for their tuition and acquired their wisdom by the favour and agency of their beauty.

  [B] Not only in the men but in the animals serving me I consider beauty to be only two fingers away from goodness. Yet to me it seems that those facial traits and features and those distinctive characteristics from which inner complexions are inferred as well as our future destinies are things which cannot be lodged simply and directly under the headings of beauty or ugliness: no more than in times of plague pleasant smells and a clear atmosphere can promise salubrity nor all kinds of oppressiveness and stench threaten infection.

  Those who accuse ladies of contradicting their beauty by their morals do not always strike home: a face may not be very well-shaped yet have an air of probity and dependability; just as, on the contrary, I have read behind a pair of beautiful eyes warnings of a malicious and dangerous character. Some physiognomies augur well: in the thick of victorious enemies you would immediately, from among men unknown, pick out one rather than another to surrender to and to entrust with your life: and you would not have been influenced strictly speaking by beauty. Looks are a weak guarantee, yet they have some influence.

  If my task were to administer floggings, I would do so more severely to criminals who belie and betray the promises which Nature had planted on their features: I would inflict harsher punishment on malice in a man who looked debonair. It appears that some faces are blessed, others unblessed, and there is I think an art which can distinguish between the debonair face and the simple one, the severe and the harsh the sullen and the chagrined, the arrogant and the melancholic, and such other pairs of qualities.82 Some forms of beauty are not merely proud but haughty; others are gentle, and others still are lifeless. As for forecasting the future from them, such [C] matters [B] I leave undecided.83

  As I have said already, as regards myself I have simply adopted raw that ancient precept which says that we cannot go wrong by following Nature, and that the sovereign precept is to conform to her.84 Unlike Socrates I have not corrected my natural complexions by the power of reason,85 and I have in no wise let my inclinations become confused by artifice. I let myself go as I came in: I combat nothing; my two principal parts live graciously together in peace and harmony. But, thank God, my nurse’s milk was moderately healthful and temperate.

  [C] May I say en passant that I know There is a certain scholastic concept of morality – virtually the only one current – which is held in higher esteem among us than it is worth; it is a slave to precepts and bound by hopes and fears. I like the morality which laws and religions do not make up but make perfect and authoritative, one which knows that it has the means of sustaining itself without help, one which, rooted on its own stock, is born in us from the seed of that universal reason which is stamped upon every man who is not disnatured. That Reason which straightened out Socrates’ vicious kink made him obedient to the men and the gods who commanded in his city and courageous in death not because his soul was immortal but because he himself was mortal. Any instruction which convinces people that religious belief alone, without morality, suffices to satisfy God’s justice is destructive of all government and is far more harmful than it is ingenious and subtle. Men’s practices reveal an extraordinary distinction between devotion and the sense of right and wrong.

  [B] I have a [C] bearing [B] which,86 both in beauty and as it is interpreted, is of good augury –

  Quid dixi habere? Imo habui, Chreme!

  [What am I saying, have, Chremes? I mean I had!]

  Heu tantum attriti corporis ossa vides!

  [Alas! You now see only the bones of this worn-down body!]87

  – and has an appearance contrary to that of Socrates. It has often happened that people who have had no previous acquaintance with me, people going merely by my fine air and [C] presence, [B] have put88 great trust in me either for their own affairs or my own. And in foreign countries I have received singular and rare favour because of it. The following two experiences are perhaps both worth
narrating in detail.

  There was a man who had determined to take me and my house by surprise. His trick was to come alone to my gate and to press to be admitted fairly urgently. I knew him by name and had occasion to put my trust in him as a neighbour who was to some degree related to me by marriage. I opened the gate for him [C] as I do for everyone. [B] There he was, looking quite terrified, with his horse winded and quite exhausted. He told me the following story: one of his enemies had just come across him some half a league away. (I knew that man too and had heard of their quarrel.) He said that this enemy had followed remarkably close on his heels. He, having been taken by surprise [C] in disarray [B] and being weaker [C] in numbers, [B] had rushed to my gate for safety; he was very worried about his men whom he said he supposed were dead [C] or taken.89

  [B] Very naively I assayed to strengthen, reassure and reinvigorate him. Soon after, lo and behold! four or five of his soldiers appeared, looking equally frightened and wanting to be let in. More came; then still more, until there was some twenty-five or thirty of them, all armed and well-equipped and claiming to have their enemy at their heels.

  [C] This mystery-play began to awaken my suspicions: [B] I had not forgotten what a time we were living in, nor how much my house90 might be coveted; and I knew of several cases of acquaintances of mine who had had similar bad experiences. Nevertheless, I considered that there was nothing to be gained by having started out to be welcoming if I did not go through with it; so, not being able to defeat them without smashing up everything, I allowed myself to take the simplest and most natural course (as I always do) and ordered them to come in.