by Walter Pater
By way of counterpoise, there were admirable surprises in man. That cross-play of human tendencies determined from time to time in the forces of unique and irresistible character, “moving all together,” pushing the world around it to phenomenal good or evil. For such as “make it their business to oversee human actions, it seems impossible they should proceed from one and the same person.” Consolidation of qualities supposed, this did but make character, already the most attractive, because the most dynamic, phenomenon of experience, more interesting still. So tranquil a spectator of so average a world, a too critical minimiser, it might seem, of all that pretends to be of importance, Montaigne was constantly, gratefully, announcing his contact, in life, in books, with undeniable power and greatness, with forces full of beauty in their vigour, like lightning, the sea, the torrents: — overpowering desire augmented, yet victorious, by its very difficulty; the bewildering constancy of martyrs; single-hearted virtue not to be resolved into anything less surprising than itself; the devotion of that famed, so companionable, wife, dying cheerfully by her own act along with the sick husband “who could do no better than kill himself”; the grief, the joy, of which men suddenly die; the unconscious Stoicism of the poor; that stern self-control with which Jacques Bonhomme goes as usual to his daily labour with a heart tragic for the dead child at home; nay! even the boldness and strength of “those citizens who sacrifice honour and conscience, as others of old sacrificed their lives, for the good of their country.” So carefully equable, his mind nevertheless was stored with, and delighted in, incidents, personalities, of barbarous strength — Esau, in all his phases — the very rudest children or “our great and powerful mother, nature.” As Plato had said, “’twas to no purpose for a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy,” or, if truth were spoken, of any other high matter of doing or making. That was consistent with his sympathetic belief in the capability of mere impetuous youth as such. Even those unexpected traits in ordinary people which seem to hint at larger laws and deeper forces of character, disconcerting any narrow judgment upon them, he welcomed as akin to his own indolent, but suddenly kindling, nature: — the mere self-will of men, the shrewd wisdom of an unlettered old woman, the fount of goodness in a cold or malicious heart. “I hear every day fools say things far from foolish.” Those invincible prepossessions of humanity, or of the individual, which Bacon reckoned “idols of the cave,” are no offence to him; are direct informations, it may be, beyond price, from a kindly spirit of truth in things.
For him there had been two grand surprises, two pre-eminent manifestations of the power and charm of man, not to be explained away, — one, within the compass of general and public observation: the other, a matter of special intimacy to himself. There had been the greatness of the old Greek and Roman life, so greatly recorded: there had been the wisdom and kindness of Etienne de la Boetie, as made known in all their fulness to him alone. That his ardent devotion to the ancients had been rewarded with minute knowledge concerning them, was the privilege of the age in which he was born, late in the Revival of Letters. But the classical reading, which with others was often but an affectation, seducing them from the highest to a lower degree of reality, from men and women to their mere shadows in old books, had been for him nothing less than personal contact. “The qualities and fortunes” of the old Romans, especially, their wonderful straight ways through the world, the straight passage of their armies upon them, the splendour of their armour, of their entire external presence and show, their “riches and embellishments,” above all, “the suddenness of Augustus,” in that grander age for which decision was justifiable because really possible, had ever been “more in his head than the fortunes of his own country.” If “we have no hold even on things present but by imagination,” as he loved to observe, — then, how much more potent, steadier, larger, the imaginative substance of the world of Alexander and Socrates, of Virgil and Caesar, than that of an age, which seemed to him, living in the midst of it, respectable mainly by its docility, by an imitation of the ancients which after all left untouched the real sources of their greatness. They had been indeed great, at the least dramatically, redeemed in part by magnificent courage and tact, in their very sins. “Our force is no more able to reach them in their vicious than in their virtuous qualities; for both the one and the other proceed from a vigour of soul which was without comparison greater in them than in us.”
And yet, thinking of his friendship with the “incomparable Etienne de la Boetie, so perfect, inviolate and entire, that the like is hardly to be found in story,” he had to confess that the sources of greatness must still be quick in the world. That had remained with him as his one fixed standard of value in the estimate of men and things. On this single point, antiquity itself had been surpassed; the discourses it had left upon friendship seeming to him “poor and flat in comparison of the sense he had of it.” For once, his sleepless habit of analysis had been checked by the inexplicable, the absolute; amid his jealously guarded indifference of soul he had been summoned to yield, and had yielded, to the magnetic power of another. “We were halves throughout, so that methinks by outliving him I defraud him of his part. I was so grown to be always his double in all things that methinks I am no more than half of myself. There is no action or thought of mine wherein I do not miss him, as I know that he would have missed me.” Tender yet heroic, impulsive yet so wise, he might have done what the survivor (so it seemed to himself) was but vainly trying to do. It was worth his while to become famous, if that hapless memory might but be embalmed in one’s fame. It had been better than love, — that friendship! to the building of which so much “concurrence” had been requisite, that “’twas much if fortune brought the like to pass once in three ages.” Actually, we may think, the “sweet society” of those four years, in comparison with which the rest of his so pleasant life “was but smoke,” had touched Montaigne’s nature with refinements it might otherwise have lacked. He would have wished “to speak concerning it, to those who had experience” of what he said, could such have been found. In despair of that, he loved to discourse of it to all comers, — how it had come about, the circumstances of its sudden and wonderful growth. Yet after all were he pressed to say why he had so loved Etienne de la Boetie, he could but answer, “Because it was He! Because it was I!”
And the surprises there are in man, his complexity, his variancy, were symptomatic of the changefulness, the confusion, the surprises, of the earth under one’s feet, of the whole material world. The irregular, the unforeseen, the inconsecutive, miracle, accident, he noted lovingly: it had a philosophic import. It was habit rather than knowledge of them that took away the strangeness of the things actually about one. How many unlikely matters there were, testified by persons worthy of faith, “which, if we cannot persuade ourselves to believe, we ought at least to leave in suspense. — Though all that had arrived by report of past time should be true, it would be less than nothing in comparison of what is unknown.”
On all sides we are beset by the incalculable — walled up suddenly, as if by malign trickery, in the open field, or pushed forward senselessly, by the crowd around us, to good-fortune. In art, as in poetry, there are the “transports” which lift the artist out of, as they are not of, himself; for orators also, “those extraordinary motions which sometimes carry them above their design.” Himself, “in the necessity and heat of combat,” had sometimes made answers, that went “through and through,” beyond hope. The work, by its own force and fortune, sometimes outstrips the workman. And then, in defiance of the proprieties, whereas poets sometimes “flag, and languish in a prosaic manner,” prose will shine with the lustre, vigour and boldness, with “the fury” of poetry.
And as to “affairs,” — how spasmodic the mixture, collision or coincidence, of the mechanic succession of things with men’s volition! Mere rumour, so large a factor in events, — who could trace out its ways? Various events (he was never tired of illustrating the fact) “followed from the same counsel.”
Fortune, chance, that is to say, the incalculable contribution of mere matter to man, “would still be mistress of events”; and one might think it no un-wisdom to commit everything to fortuity. But no! “fortune too is oft-times observed to act by the rule of reason: chance itself comes round to hold of justice;” war, above all, being a matter in which fortune was inexplicable, though men might seem to have made it the main business of their lives. If “the force of all counsel lies in the occasion,” that is because things perpetually shift. If man — his taste, his very conscience — change with the habit of time and place, that is because habit is the emphatic determination, the tyranny, of changing external and material circumstance. So it comes about that every one gives the name of barbarism to what is not in use round about him, excepting perhaps the Greeks and Romans, somewhat conventionally; and Montaigne was fond of assuring people, suddenly, that could we have those privileged Greeks and Romans actually to sit beside us for a while, they would be found to offend our niceties at a hundred points. We have great power of taking ourselves in, and “pay ourselves with words.” Words too, language itself, and therewith the more intimate physiognomy of thought, “slip every day through our fingers.” With his eye on his own labour, wistfully, he thought on the instability of the French language in particular — a matter, after all, so much less “perennial than brass.” In no respect was nature more stable, more consecutive, than man.
In nature, indeed, as in one’s self, there might be no ultimate inconsequence: only, “the soul looks upon things with another eye, and represents them to itself with another kind of face: for everything has many faces and several aspects. There is nothing single and rare in respect of itself, but only in respect of our knowledge, which is a wretched foundation whereon to ground our rules, and one that represents to us a very false image of things.” Ah! even in so “dear” a matter as bodily health, immunity from physical pain, what doubts! what variations of experience, of learned opinion! Already, in six years of married life, of four children treated so carefully, never, for instance, roughly awaked from sleep, “wherein,” he would observe, “children are much more profoundly involved than we,” — of four children, two were dead, and one even now miserably sick. Seeing the doctor depart one morning a little hastily, on the payment of his fee, he was tempted to some nice questions as to the money’s worth. “There are so many maladies, and so many circumstances, presented to the physician, that human sense must soon be at the end of its lesson: — the many complexions in a melancholy person; the many seasons in winter; the many nations in the French; the many ages in age; the many celestial mutations in the conjunction of Venus and Saturn; the many parts in man’s body, nay, in a finger. And suppose the cure effected, how can we assure ourselves that it was not because the disease was arrived at its period, or an effect of chance, or the operation of something else that the child had eaten, drunk, or touched that day, or by virtue of his mother’s prayers? We suppose we see one side of a thing when we are really looking at another. As for me, I never see all of anything; neither do they who so largely promise to show it to others. Of the hundred faces that everything has I take one, and am for the most part attracted by some new light I find in it.”
And that new light was sure to lead him back very soon to his “governing method, ignorance” — an ignorance “strong and generous, and that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge; an ignorance, which to conceive requires no less knowledge than to conceive knowledge itself” — a sapient, instructed, shrewdly ascertained ignorance, suspended judgment, doubt everywhere. — Balances, very delicate balances; he was partial to that image of equilibrium, or preponderance, in things. But was there, after all, so much as preponderance anywhere? To Gaston there was a kind of fascination, an actually aesthetic beauty, in the spectacle of that keen-edged intelligence, dividing evidence so finely, like some exquisite steel instrument with impeccable sufficiency, always leaving the last word loyally to the central intellectual faculty, in an entire disinterestedness. If on the one hand he was always distrustful of things that he wished, on the other he had many opinions he would endeavour to make his son dislike, if he had one. What if the truest opinions were not always the most commodious to man, “being of so wild a composition”? He would say nothing to one party that he might not on occasion say to the other, “with a little alteration of accent.” Yes! Doubt, everywhere! doubt in the far background, as the proper intellectual equivalent to the infinite possibilities of things: doubt, shrewdly economising the opportunities of the present hour, in the very spirit of the traveller who walks only for the walk’s sake,— “every day concludes my expectation, and the journey of my life is carried on after the same fashion”: doubt, finally, as “the best of pillows to sleep on.” And in fact Gaston did sleep well after those long days of physical and intellectual movement, in that quiet world, till the spring came round again.
But beyond and above all the various interests upon which the philosopher’s mind was for ever afloat, there was one subject always in prominence — himself. His minute peculiarities, mental and physical, what was constitutional with him as well as his transient humours, how things affected him, what they really were to him, Michael, much more than man, all this Gaston came to know, as the world knew it afterwards in the Essays, often amused, sometimes irritated, but never suspicious of postures, or insincerity. Montaigne himself admitted his egotism with frank humour:— “in favour of the Huguenots, who condemn our private confession, I confess myself in public.” And this outward egotism of manner was but the symptom of a certain deeper doctrinal egotism:— “I have no other end in writing but to discover myself.” And what was the purport, what the justification, of this undissembled egotism? It was the recognition, over against, or in continuation of, that world of floating doubt, of the individual mind, as for each one severally, at once the unique organ, and the only matter, of knowledge, — the wonderful energy, the reality and authority of that, in its absolute loneliness, conforming all things to its law, without witnesses as without judge, without appeal, save to itself. Whatever truth there might be, must come for each one from within, not from without. To that wonderful microcosm of the individual soul, of which, for each one, all other worlds are but elements, — to himself, — to what was apparent immediately to him, what was “properly of his own having and substance”: he confidently dismissed the inquirer. His own egotism was but the pattern of the true intellectual life of every one. “The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is his own. If the world find fault that I speak too much of myself, I find fault that they do not so much as think of themselves.” How it had been “lodged in its author”: — that, surely, was the essential question, concerning every opinion that comes to one man from another.
Yet, again, even on this ultimate ground of judgment, what undulancy, complexity, surprises!— “I have no other end in writing but to discover myself, who also shall peradventure be another thing to- morrow.” The great work of his life, the Essays, he placed “now high, now low, with great doubt and inconstancy.” “What are we but sedition? like this poor France, faction against faction, within ourselves, every piece playing every moment its own game, with as much difference between us and ourselves as between ourselves and others. Whoever will look narrowly into his own bosom will hardly find himself twice in the same condition. I give to myself sometimes one face and sometimes another, according to the side I turn to. I have nothing to say of myself, entirely and without qualification. One grows familiar with all strange things by time. But the more I frequent myself and the better I know myself, the less do I understand myself. If others would consider themselves as I do, they would find themselves full of caprice. Rid myself of it I cannot without making myself away. They who are not aware of it have the better bargain. And yet I know not whether they have or no!”
One’s own experience! — that, at least, was one’s own: low and earthy, it might be; still, the earth was, emphatically, good, good-natured; an
d he loved, emphatically, to recommend the wisdom, amid all doubts, of keeping close to it. Gaston soon knew well a certain threadbare garment worn by Montaigne in all their rides together, sitting quaintly on his otherwise gallant appointments, — an old mantle that had belonged to his father. Retained, as he tells us, in spite of its inconvenience, “because it seemed to envelope me in him,” it was the symbol of a hundred natural, perhaps somewhat material, pieties. Parentage, kinship, relationship through earth, — the touch of that was everywhere like a caress to him. His fine taste notwithstanding, he loved, in those long rambles, to partake of homely fare, paying largely for it. Everywhere it was as if the earth in him turned kindly to earth. “Under the sun,” the sturdy purple thistles, the blossoming burrs also, were worth knowing. Let us grow together with you! they seem to say. Himself was one of those whom he thought “Heaven favoured” in making them die, so naturally, by degrees. “I shall be blind before I am sensible of the decay of my sight, with such kindly artifice do the Fatal Sisters entwist our lives. I melt, and steal away from myself. How variously is it no longer I!” It was not he who would carry a furry robe at midsummer, because he might need it in the winter.— “In fine, we must live among the living, and let the river flow under the bridge without our care, above all things avoiding fear, that great disturber of reason. The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear.”