The Common Reader
creed upon the swarm and variety of the Elizabethan dramatists, and yet
it implies some timidity if we take it for granted that a whole
literature with common characteristics is a mere evaporation of high
spirits, a money-making enterprise, a fluke of the mind which, owing to
favourable circumstances, came off successfully. Even in the jungle and
the wilderness the compass still points.
“Lord, Lord, that I were dead!”
they are for ever crying.
O thou soft natural death that art joint-twin
To sweetest slumber——
The pageant of the world is marvellous, but the pageant of the world
is vanity.
glories
Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams
And shadows soon decaying: on the stage
Of my mortality my youth hath acted
Some scenes of vanity——
To die and be quit of it all is their desire; the bell
that tolls throughout the drama is death and disenchantment.
All life is but a wandering to find home,
When we’re gone, we’re there.
Ruin, weariness, death, perpetually death, stand grimly to confront the
other presence of Elizabethan drama which is life: life compact of
frigates, fir trees and ivory, of dolphins and the juice of July
flowers, of the milk of unicorns and panthers’ breath, of ropes of
pearl, brains of peacocks and Cretan wine. To this, life at its most
reckless and abundant, they reply
Man is a tree that hath no top in cares,
No root in comforts; all his power to live
Is given to no end but t’ have power to grieve.
It is this echo flung back and back from the other side of the play
which, if it has not the name, still has the effect of the presence of
the Gods.
So we ramble through the jungle, forest, and wilderness of Elizabethan
drama. So we consort with Emperors and clowns, jewellers and unicorns,
and laugh and exult and marvel at the splendour and humour and fantasy
of it all. A noble rage consumes us when the curtain falls; we are bored
too, and nauseated by the wearisome old tricks and florid bombast. A
dozen deaths of full-grown men and women move us less than the suffering
of one of Tolstoi’s flies. Wandering in the maze of the impossible and
tedious story suddenly some passionate intensity seizes us; some
sublimity exalts, or some melodious snatch of song enchants. It is a
world full of tedium and delight; pleasure and curiosity, of extravagant
laughter, poetry, and splendour. But gradually it comes over us, what
then are we being denied? What is it that we are coming to want so
persistently that unless we get it instantly we must seek elsewhere? It
is solitude. There is no privacy here. Always the door opens and some
one comes in. All is shared, made visible, audible, dramatic. Meanwhile,
as if tired with company, the mind steals off to muse in solitude; to
think, not to act; to comment, not to share; to explore its own
darkness, not the bright-lit-up surfaces of others. It turns to Donne,
to Montaigne, to Sir Thomas Browne—the keepers of the keys of solitude.
_Montaigne_
Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which René, King of Sicily,
had painted of himself, and asked, “Why is it not, in like manner,
lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a
crayon?” Off-hand one might reply, Not only is it lawful, but nothing
could be easier. Other people may evade us, but our own features are
almost too familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we attempt the task,
the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter of profound, mysterious,
and overwhelming difficulty.
After all, in the whole of literature, how many people have succeeded in
drawing themselves with a pen? Only Montaigne and Pepys and Rousseau
perhaps. The _Religio Medici_ is a coloured glass through which darkly
one sees racing stars and a strange and turbulent soul. A bright
polished mirror reflects the face of Boswell peeping between other
people’s shoulders in the famous biography. But this talking of oneself,
following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and
circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its
imperfection—this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne. As the
centuries go by, there is always a crowd before that picture, gazing
into its depths, seeing their own faces reflected in it, seeing more the
longer they look, never being able to say quite what it is that they
see. New editions testify to the perennial fascination. Here is the
Navarre Society in England reprinting in five fine volumes[3] Cotton’s
translation; while in France the firm of Louis Conard is issuing the
complete works of Montaigne with the various readings in an edition to
which Dr. Armaingaud has devoted a long lifetime of research.
To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is
not easy.
We hear of but two or three of the ancients who have beaten this road
[said Montaigne]. No one since has followed the track; ’tis a rugged
road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain,
as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate
internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble
motions; ’tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us
from the common and most recommended employments of the world.
There is, in the first place, the difficulty of expression. We all
indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it
comes to saying, even to some one opposite, what we think, then how
little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of
the window before we can lay salt on its tail, or slowly sinking and
returning to the profound darkness which it has lit up momentarily with
a wandering light. Face, voice, and accent eke out our words and impress
their feebleness with character in speech. But the pen is a rigid
instrument; it can say very little; it has all kinds of habits and
ceremonies of its own. It is dictatorial too: it is always making
ordinary men into prophets, and changing the natural stumbling trip of
human speech into the solemn and stately march of pens. It is for this
reason that Montaigne stands out from the legions of the dead with such
irrepressible vivacity. We can never doubt for an instant that his book
was himself. He refused to teach; he refused to preach; he kept on
saying that he was just like other people. All his effort was to write
himself down, to communicate, to tell the truth, and that is a “rugged
road, more than it seems”.
For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme
difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means
agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what
she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people
say. Other people, for instance, long ago made up their minds that old
invalidish gentlemen ought to stay at home and edify the rest of us by
the spectacle of their connubial fidelity. The soul of Montaigne said,
on the contrary, that it is in old age that one ought to travel, and
marriage, which, rightly, is very seldom founded on love, is apt to
become, towards the end of life, a formal tie better broken up. Again
with politics, statesmen are always praising the greatness of Empire,
and preaching the moral duty of civilising the savage. But look at the
Spanish in Mexico, cried Montaigne in a burst of rage. “So many cities
levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated . . . and the
richest and most beautiful part of the world turned upside down for the
traffic of pearl and pepper! Mechanic victories!” And then when the
peasants came and told him that they had found a man dying of wounds and
deserted him for fear lest justice might incriminate them, Montaigne
asked:
What could I have said to these people? ’Tis certain that this office of
humanity would have brought them into trouble. . . . There is nothing so
much, nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty as the laws.
Here the soul, getting restive, is lashing out at the more palpable
forms of Montaigne’s great bugbears, convention and ceremony. But watch
her as she broods over the fire in the inner room of that tower which,
though detached from the main building, has so wide a view over the
estate. Really she is the strangest creature in the world, far from
heroic, variable as a weathercock, “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful;
prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic,
pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and
prodigal”—in short, so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little
to the version which does duty for her in public, that a man might spend
his life merely in trying to run her to earth. The pleasure of the
pursuit more than rewards one for any damage that it may inflict upon
one’s worldly prospects. The man who is aware of himself is henceforward
independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he
is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip
past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do
because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and
faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness;
dull, callous, and indifferent.
Surely then, if we ask this great master of the art of life to tell us
his secret, he will advise us to withdraw to the inner room of our tower
and there turn the pages of books, pursue fancy after fancy as they
chase each other up the chimney, and leave the government of the world
to others. Retirement and contemplation—these must be the main elements
of his prescription. But no; Montaigne is by no means explicit. It is
impossible to extract a plain answer from that subtle, half smiling,
half melancholy man, with the heavy-lidded eyes and the dreamy,
quizzical expression. The truth is that life in the country, with one’s
books and vegetables and flowers, is often extremely dull. He could
never see that his own green peas were so much better than other
people’s. Paris was the place he loved best in the whole world—“jusques
à ses verrues et à ses tâches”. As for reading, he could seldom read
any book for more than an hour at a time, and his memory was so bad that
he forgot what was in his mind as he walked from one room to another.
Book learning is nothing to be proud of, and as for the achievements of
science, what do they amount to? He had always mixed with clever men,
and his father had a positive veneration for them, but he had observed
that, though they have their fine moments, their rhapsodies, their
visions, the cleverest tremble on the verge of folly. Observe yourself:
one moment you are exalted; the next a broken glass puts your nerves on
edge. All extremes are dangerous. It is best to keep in the middle of
the road, in the common ruts, however muddy. In writing choose the
common words; avoid rhapsody and eloquence—yet, it is true, poetry is
delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
It appears, then, that we are to aim at a democratic simplicity. We may
enjoy our room in the tower, with the painted walls and the commodious
bookcases, but down in the garden there is a man digging who buried his
father this morning, and it is he and his like who live the real life
and speak the real language. There is certainly an element of truth in
that. Things are said very finely at the lower end of the table. There
are perhaps more of the qualities that matter among the ignorant than
among the learned. But again, what a vile thing the rabble is! “the
mother of ignorance, injustice, and inconstancy. Is it reasonable that
the life of a wise man should depend upon the judgment of fools?” Their