Representative Men: Seven Lectures
the opinion of an invincible probity grows into every reader's mind.
"When I the most strictly and religiously confess myself, I find that
the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid
that Plato, in his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and perfect a
lover of virtue of that stamp as any other whatever), if he had
listened, and laid his ear close to himself, would have heard some
jarring sound of human mixture; but faint and remote, and only to be
perceived by himself."
Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color or pretense of any
kind. He has been in courts so long as to have conceived a furious
disgust at appearances; he will indulge himself with a little cursing
and swearing; he will talk with sailors and gypsies, use flash and
street ballads; he has stayed indoors till he is deadly sick; he will
to the open air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much of
gentlemen of the long robe, until he wishes for cannibals; and is so
nervous, by factitious life, that he thinks, the more barbarous man
is, the better he is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, and
grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. Whatever you get here, shall smack
of the earth and of real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes
no hesitation to entertain you with the records of his disease; and
his journey to Italy is quite full of that matter. He took and kept
this position of equilibrium. Over his name, he drew an emblematic
pair of scales, and wrote, _Que sais-je?_ under it. As I look at
his effigy opposite the title-page, I seem to hear him say, "You may
play old Poz, if you will; you may rail and exaggerate,--I stand here
for truth, and will not, for all the states, and churches, and revenues,
and personal reputations of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see
it; I will rather mumble and prose about what I certainly know,--my
house and barns; my father, my wife, and my tenants; my old lean bald
pate; my knives and forks; what meats I eat, and what drinks I prefer;
and a hundred straws just as ridiculous,--than I will write, with a
fine crow-quill, a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and
winter weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, and think an undress,
and old shoes that do not pinch my feet, and old friends who do not
constrain me, and plain topics where I do not need to strain myself
and pump my brains, the most suitable. Our condition as men is risky
and ticklish enough. One cannot be sure of himself and his fortune an
hour, but he may be whisked off into some pitiable or ridiculous plight.
Why should I vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballasting,
the best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at least, I live within
compass, keep myself ready for action, and can shoot the gulf, at last,
with decency. If there be anything farcical in such a life, the blame
is not mine; let it lie at fate's and nature's door."
The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining soliloquy on every random
topic that comes into his head; treating everything without ceremony,
yet with masculine sense. There have been men with deeper insight;
but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thoughts; he
is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader
care for all that he cares for.
The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences. I know
not anywhere the book that seems less written. It is the language of
conversation transferred to a book. Cut these words, and they would
bleed; they are vascular and alive. One has the same pleasure in it
that we have in listening to the necessary speech of men about their
work, when any unusual circumstance give momentary importance to the
dialogue. For blacksmiths and teamsters do not trip in their speech;
it is a shower of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct themselves,
and begin again at every half-sentence, and, moreover, will pun, and
refine too much, and swerve from the matter to the expression. Montaigne
talks with shrewdness, knows the world, and books, and himself, and
uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays; no
weakness, no convulsion, no superlative; does not wish to jump out of
his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time; but is stout
and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain, because it makes
him feel himself, and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know
that we are awake. He keeps the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes
to feel solid ground, and the stones underneath. His writing has no
enthusiasms, no aspiration; contented, self-respecting, and keeping
the middle of the road. There is but one exception,--in his love for
Socrates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek flushes, and his style
rises to passion.
Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty, in 1592. When he came
to die, he caused the mass to be celebrated in his chamber. At the age
of thirty-three, he had been married. "But," he says, "might I have
had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if she would
have had me; but 'tis to much purpose to evade it, the common custom
and use of life will have it so. Most of my actions are guided by
example, not choice." In the hour of death he gave the same weight to
custom. _Que sais-je?_ What do I know.
This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed, by translating it into
all tongues, and printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe; and
that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen, namely, among courtiers,
soldiers, princes, men of the world, and men of wit and generosity.
Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right and
permanent expression of the human mind, on the conduct of life?
We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and
effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through
all things; all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and men, and events,
and life, come to us, only because of that thread; they pass and repass,
only that we may know the direction and continuity of that line. A
book or statement which goes to show that there is no line, but random
and chaos, a calamity out of nothing, a prosperity and no account of
it, a hero born from a fool, a fool from a hero,--dispirits us. Seen
or unseen, we believe the tie exists. Talent makes counterfeit ties;
genius finds the real ones. We hearken to the man of science, because
we anticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which he uncovers. We
love whatever affirms, connects, preserves; and dislike what scatters
or pulls down. One man appears whose nature is to all men's eyes
conserving and constructive; his presence supposes a well-ordered
society, agriculture, trade, large institutions, and empire. If these
did not exist, they would begin to exist through his endeavors.
Therefore, he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this in him very
readily. The nonconformist and the rebel say all manner of unanswerable
things against the existing republic, but discover to our sense no
plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, though the town, and
state, and way of living, which our counselor contemplated, might be
a very modest or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for him, and
reject the reformer, so long as he comes only with axe and crowbar.
But though we are natural conservers and causationists, and reject a
sour, dumpish unbelief, the skeptical class, which Montaigne represents,
have reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. Every superior
mind will pass through this domain of equilibration,--I should rather
say, will know how to avail himself of the checks and balances in
nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration and formalism of
bigots and blockheads.
Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the student in relation to the
particulars which society adores, but which he sees to be reverent
only in their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied by the skeptic
is the vestibule of the temple. Society does not like to have any
breath of question blown on the existing order. But the interrogation
of custom at all points is an inevitable stage in the growth of every
superior mind, and is the evidence of its perception of the flowing
power which remains itself in all changes.
The superior mind will find itself equally at odds with the evils of
society, and with the projects that are offered to relieve them. The
wise skeptic is a bad citizen; no conservative; he sees the selfishness
of property, and the drowsiness of institutions. But neither is he fit
to work with any democratic party that ever was constituted; for parties
wish every one committed, and he penetrates the popular patriotism.
His politics are those of the "Soul's Errand" of Sir Walter Raleigh;
or of Krishna, in the Bhagavat, "There is none who is worthy of my
love or hatred;" while he sentences law, physic, divinity, commerce,
and custom. He is a reformer: yet he is no better member of the
philanthropic association. It turns out that he is not the champion
of the operative, the pauper, the prisoner, the slave. It stands in
his mind, that our life in this world is not of quite so easy
interpretation as churches and school-books say. He does not wish to
take ground against these benevolences, to play the part of devil's
attorney, and blazon every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for
him. But he says, There are doubts.
I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the calendar-day of our Saint
Michel de Montaigne, by counting and describing these doubts or
negations. I wish to ferret them out of their holes, and sun them a
little. We must do with them as the police do with old rogues, who are
shown up to the public at the marshal's office. They will never be so
formidable, when once they have been identified and registered. But
I mean honestly by them--that justice shall be done to their terrors.
I shall not take Sunday objections, made up on purpose to be put down.
I shall take the worst I can find, whether I can dispose of them, or
they of me.
I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. I know the quadruped
opinion will not prevail. 'Tis of no importance what bats and oxen
think. The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity of intellect;
as if it were fatal to earnestness to know much. Knowledge is the
knowing that we cannot know. The dull pray; the geniuses are light
mockers. How respectable is earnestness on every platform! but intellect
kills it. Nay, San Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, one of the
most penetrating of men, finds that all direct ascension, even of lofty
piety, leads to this ghastly insight, and sends back the votary
orphaned. My astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and saints
infected. They found the ark empty; saw, and would not tell; and tried
to choke off their approaching followers, by saying, "Action, action,
my dear fellows, is for you!" Bad as was to me this detection by San
Carlo, this frost in July, this blow from a brick, there was still a
worse, namely, the cloy or satiety of the saints. In the mount of
vision, ere they have yet risen from their knees, they say, "We discover
that this our homage and beatitude is partial and deformed; we must
fly for relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect, to the
Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the gymnastics of latent."
This is hobgoblin the first; and, though it has been the subject of
much elegy, in our nineteenth century, from Byron, Goethe, and other
poets of less fame, not to mention many distinguished private
observers,--I confess it is not very affecting to my imagination; for
it seems to concern the shattering of baby-houses and crockery-shops.
What flutters the church of Rome, or of England, or of Geneva, or of
Boston, may yet be very far from touching any principle of faith. I