The Common Reader
minds are weak, soft and without power of resistance. They must be told
what it is expedient for them to know. It is not for them to face facts
as they are. The truth can only be known by the well-born soul—“l’âme
bien née”. Who, then, are these well-born souls, whom we would imitate,
if only Montaigne would enlighten us more precisely?
But no. “Je n’enseigne poinct; je raconte.” After all, how could he
explain other people’s souls when he could say nothing “entirely simply
and solidly, without confusion or mixture, in one word”, about his own,
when indeed it became daily more and more in the dark to him? One
quality or principle there is perhaps—that one must not lay down rules.
The souls whom one would wish to resemble, like Étienne de La Boétie,
for example, are always the supplest. “C’est estre, mais ce n’est pas
vivre, que de se tenir attaché et obligé par nécessité à un seul
train.” The laws are mere conventions, utterly unable to keep touch with
the vast variety and turmoil of human impulses; habits and customs are a
convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow
their souls free play. But we, who have a private life and hold it
infinitely the dearest of our possessions, suspect nothing so much as an
attitude. Directly we begin to protest, to attitudinise, to lay down
laws, we perish. We are living for others, not for ourselves. We must
respect those who sacrifice themselves in the public service, load them
with honours, and pity them for allowing, as they must, the inevitable
compromise; but for ourselves let us fly fame, honour, and all offices
that put us under an obligation to others. Let us simmer over our
incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotch-potch of
impulses, our perpetual miracle—for the soul throws up wonders every
second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is
death; conformity is death: let us say what comes into our heads, repeat
ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and
follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or
thinks or says. For nothing matters except life; and, of course, order.
This freedom, then, which is the essence of our being, has to be
controlled. But it is difficult to see what power we are to invoke to
help us, since every restraint of private opinion or public law has been
derided, and Montaigne never ceases to pour scorn upon the misery, the
weakness, the vanity of human nature. Perhaps, then, it will be well to
turn to religion to guide us? “Perhaps” is one of his favourite
expressions; “perhaps” and “I think” and all those words which qualify
the rash assumptions of human ignorance. Such words help one to muffle
up opinions which it would be highly impolitic to speak outright. For
one does not say everything; there are some things which at present it
is advisable only to hint. One writes for a very few people, who
understand. Certainly, seek the Divine guidance by all means, but
meanwhile there is, for those who live a private life, another monitor,
an invisible censor within, “un patron au dedans”, whose blame is much
more to be dreaded than any other because he knows the truth; nor is
there anything sweeter than the chime of his approval. This is the judge
to whom we must submit; this is the censor who will help us to achieve
that order which is the grace of a well-born soul. For “C’est une vie
exquise, celle qui se maintient en ordre jusques en son privé”. But he
will act by his own light; by some internal balance will achieve that
precarious and everchanging poise which, while it controls, in no way
impedes the soul’s freedom to explore and experiment. Without other
guide, and without precedent, undoubtedly it is far more difficult to
live well the private life than the public. It is an art which each must
learn separately, though there are, perhaps, two or three men, like
Homer, Alexander the Great, and Epaminondas among the ancients, and
Étienne de La Boétie among the moderns, whose example may help us. But
it is an art; and the very material in which it works is variable and
complex and infinitely mysterious—human nature. To human nature we must
keep close. “. . . il faut vivre entre les vivants”. We must dread any
eccentricity or refinement which cuts us off from our fellow-beings.
Blessed are those who chat easily with their neighbours about their
sport or their buildings or their quarrels, and honestly enjoy the talk
of carpenters and gardeners. To communicate is our chief business;
society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire
knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond
our own time and province. Such wonders there are in the world; halcyons
and undiscovered lands, men with dogs’ heads and eyes in their chests,
and laws and customs, it may well be, far superior to our own. Possibly
we are asleep in this world; possibly there is some other which is
apparent to beings with a sense which we now lack.
Here then, in spite of all contradictions and of all qualifications, is
something definite. These essays are an attempt to communicate a soul.
On this point at least he is explicit. It is not fame that he wants; it
is not that men shall quote him in years to come; he is setting up no
statue in the market-place; he wishes only to communicate his soul.
Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is
happiness. To share is our duty; to go down boldly and bring to light
those hidden thoughts which are the most diseased; to conceal nothing;
to pretend nothing; if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends
to let them know it.
“. . . car, comme je scay par une trop certaine expérience, il n’est
aucune si douce consolation en la perte de nos amis que celle que nous
aporte la science de n’avoir rien oublié à leur dire et d’avoir eu
avec eux une parfaite et entière communication.”
There are people who, when they travel, wrap themselves up “se
défendans de la contagion d’un air incogneu” in silence and suspicion.
When they dine they must have the same food they get at home. Every
sight and custom is bad unless it resembles those of their own village.
They travel only to return. That is entirely the wrong way to set about
it. We should start without any fixed idea where we are going to spend
the night, or when we propose to come back; the journey is everything.
Most necessary of all, but rarest good fortune, we should try to find
before we start some man of our own sort who will go with us and to whom
we can say the first thing that comes into our heads. For pleasure has
no relish unless we share it. As for the risks—that we may catch cold
or get a headache—it is always worth while to risk a little illness for
the sake of pleasure. “Le plaisir est des principales espèces du
profit.” Besides if we do what we like, we always do what is good for
us. Doctors and wise men may object, but let us leave doctors and wise
men to their own dismal philosophy. For ourselves, who are ordinary men
and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every
one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible;
turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full
before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a
beautiful voice singing Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days
and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that
deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and
the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one’s own
orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind.
Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two fingers’ breadth from
goodness. So, in the name of health and sanity, let us not dwell on the
end of the journey. Let death come upon us planting our cabbages, or on
horseback, or let us steal away to some cottage and there let strangers
close our eyes, for a servant sobbing or the touch of a hand would break
us down. Best of all, let death find us at our usual occupations, among
girls and good fellows who make no protests, no lamentations; let him
find us “parmy les jeux, les festins, faceties, entretiens communs et
populaires, et la musique, et des vers amoureux”. But enough of death;
it is life that matters.
It is life that emerges more and more clearly as these essays reach not
their end, but their suspension in full career. It is life that becomes
more and more absorbing as death draws near, one’s self, one’s soul,
every fact of existence: that one wears silk stockings summer and
winter; puts water in one’s wine; has one’s hair cut after dinner; must
have glass to drink from; has never worn spectacles; has a loud voice;
carries a switch in one’s hand; bites one’s tongue; fidgets with one’s
feet; is apt to scratch one’s ears; likes meat to be high; rubs one’s
teeth with a napkin (thank God, they are good!); must have curtains to
one’s bed; and, what is rather curious, began by liking radishes, then
disliked them, and now likes them again. No fact is too little to let it
slip through one’s fingers and besides the interest of facts themselves,
there is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the
imagination. Observe how the soul is always casting her own lights and
shadows; makes the substantial hollow and the frail substantial; fills
broad daylight with dreams; is as much excited by phantoms as by
reality; and in the moment of death sports with a trifle. Observe, too,
her duplicity, her complexity. She hears of a friend’s loss and
sympathises, and yet has a bitter-sweet malicious pleasure in the
sorrows of others. She believes; at the same time she does not believe.
Observe her extraordinary susceptibility to impressions, especially in
youth. A rich man steals because his father kept him short of money as a
boy. This wall one builds not for oneself, but because one’s father
loved building. In short the soul is all laced about with nerves and
sympathies which affect her every action, and yet, even now in 1580, no
one has any clear knowledge—such cowards we are, such lovers of the
smooth conventional ways—how she works or what she is except that of
all things she is the most mysterious, and one’s self the greatest
monster and miracle in the world. “. . . plus je me hante et connois,
plus ma difformité m’estonne, moins je m’entens en moy.” Observe,
observe perpetually, and, so long as ink and paper exist, “sans cesse et
sans travail” Montaigne will write.
But there remains one final question which, if we could make him look up
from his enthralling occupation, we should like to put to this great
master of the art of life. In these extraordinary volumes of short and
broken, long and learned, logical and contradictory statements, we have
heard the very pulse and rhythm of the soul, beating day after day, year
after year through a veil which, as time goes on, fines itself almost to
transparency. Here is some one who succeeded in the hazardous enterprise
of living; who served his country and lived retired; was landlord,
husband, father; entertained kings, loved women, and mused for hours
alone over old books. By means of perpetual experiment and observation
of the subtlest he achieved at last a miraculous adjustment of all these
wayward parts that constitute the human soul. He laid hold of the beauty
of the world with all his fingers. He achieved happiness. If he had had
to live again, he said, he would have lived the same life over. But, as
we watch with absorbed interest the enthralling spectacle of a soul
living openly beneath our eyes, the question frames itself, Is pleasure
the end of all? Whence this overwhelming interest in the nature of the