Letter writing … is a kind of work in which my friends think I have some ability. And I would have preferred to adopt this form in which to publish my sallies, if I had had someone to talk to. I needed what I once had, a certain relationship to lead me on, sustain me, and raise me up.… I would have been more attentive and confident, with a strong friend to address, than I am now, when I consider the tastes of a whole public. And if I am not mistaken, I would have been more successful.
(Translated by Donald M. Frame)
But writing letters to imaginary correspondents, to “traffic with the wind, as some others have done,” would not satisfy Montaigne. With his “humorous and familiar style … not proper for public business, but like the language I speak, too compact, irregular, abrupt, and singular” he had to create a form of his own. And so came the Essays, which marked a new path for authors in future centuries.
This synopsis of Montaigne’s personal incentives to create the modern essay leaves out the broad currents of life in his time and the frustrations of public life that also played their part. From his grief at the death of La Boétie, Montaigne sought relief in marriage. “Needing some violent diversion to distract me from it, by art and study I made myself fall in love, in which my youth helped me. Love solaced me and withdrew me from the affliction caused by friendship.” The object of this factitious love was the twenty-year-old daughter of an eminent Catholic family of Bordeaux. He boasted that the decision was not made by himself. “We do not marry for ourselves, whatever we say; we marry just as much for our posterity, for our family.… Therefore I like this fashion of arranging it rather by a third hand than by our own, and by the sense of others rather than by our own. How opposite is all this to the conventions of love!” In 1565, two years after he lost his friend, he married Françoise de la Chassaigne. By conventional standards it seemed a good marriage, although of the six children she bore him only one survived more than a few months after birth. Montaigne still insisted that friendship, not love, should be the bond of marriage.
Meanwhile, life in Montaigne’s France did not encourage a firm religious faith. In religious wars tainted by political intrigue and dynastic feuds it was seldom clear whether the parties were fighting for their king or for their God, and they were inclined to confuse the two. Just as Montaigne’s relation to La Boétie had bred habits of honest self-revelation, so the spectacle of the “wars of the three Henrys” bred a skeptical frame of mind. The word “Huguenot” now entered the French language for the Protestant sect that was widening its appeal, especially to the nobility of southwestern France. The year when Montaigne began writing his essays, 1572, was the year of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. The devious Catherine de’ Medici took advantage of the assemblage of nobles in Paris for the wedding of her daughter to Henry of Navarre (later Henry IV) to order the assassination of the Huguenot leader Coligny and many others. The butchery in Bordeaux, too, was terrifying, and nobody knows how many thousands were massacred across the provinces. For this bloody victory of the faith Pope Gregory XIII celebrated a thanksgiving Mass in Rome.
The volatile religious spirit was symbolized in Henry IV, a Protestant who vainly tried to pacify the country and save his life by his pretended conversion to Catholicism (1593). His conciliatory Edict of Nantes (1598) which offered Huguenots in some places political and religious freedom only sparked another cycle of civil wars, and led to his own assassination. Still, Montaigne’s father, an enemy of forced convictions, had been tolerant in the family, allowing his children to follow their own faiths. Two of Michel’s brothers were Protestant. Montaigne himself, though professing to be a Catholic, was a trusted adviser and chamberlain to Henry, the leading Protestant. The moderation of his faith made him suspect on both sides.
Even before the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Montaigne had decided to withdraw from public life. He had served thirteen years in the Bordeaux Parlement and had spent much of the last seven years reverently tracking down and editing the writings of La Boétie. He marked the occasion of his retirement, on his thirty-eighth birthday, with a Latin inscription near the entrance to his library-study:
… Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, returned to the bosom of the learned Muses, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life.… and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.
The pleasures of the library were, of course, not new to Montaigne. The past year, as a task of filial piety, he had worked at translating from Latin into French a little-known work of theology. The Spanish scholar Raymond Sebond’s Book of Creatures, or Natural Theology, published some one hundred fifty years before, had caught his father’s fancy as an antidote to Protestantism. His father had instructed Michel to translate it, and he dedicated the translation to his father on the very day of his father’s death.
The enduring product of this act of piety was not what the elder Montaigne had hoped for. Michel’s own “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” became the longest and most philosophically explicit of his essays. While exploring the role and the limits of reason and pretending to defend Sebond, Montaigne expounded his own skepticism. Ironically, his act of filial piety had provided him with a way to dispose of his father’s faith. Montaigne’s message here too is still in the spirit of the Essays, which he sums up in his famous motto “What do I know?” (Que sais-je?) Montaigne purports to prove that “Man is nothing without God,” but the burden of his argument is that since Man has no knowledge, skepticism is the only wisdom.
He reveals man’s delusion of superiority over other animals. Yet reason, knowledge, and imagination, which seem to distinguish man from the other animals, seldom add to his happiness. Our memory is as often a pain as a comfort. “For memory sets before us, not what we choose, but what it pleases. Indeed, there is nothing that imprints a thing so vividly on our memory as the desire to forget it.” Montaigne divides philosophers into three classes: those who claim to have found the truth; those who deny that truth can be found; and those like Socrates who confess their ignorance and go on searching. Only the last are wise. All others make the mistake of believing that truth and error can be measured by man’s capacities. Our senses are our only contact with the world, and they tell us nothing but what the senses can tell. How can we know what is really out there? Montaigne still professes that he supports the Catholic religion, which is beyond the reach of reason or the senses. Yet his father would not have been happy to see that he was supporting the Faith “as the rope supports the hanging man.”
Montaigne was not as successful as he had hoped in his efforts to withdraw completely from public life. He continued to be enlisted in the battles and diplomacy of the religious wars. But he had begun writing essays soon after his retirement in 1571. By 1578 he had found, or invented, “Essays” as the title for his literary creation. Perhaps it came, somehow, from a literary competition in 1540 at the Floral Games in Toulouse, his mother’s hometown. To break the tie among the leading competitors in the poetry contest, a last line would be supplied to which each contestant “tried” to supply the best opening lines. The idea of “trial” or “experiment” is essential to Montaigne’s new literary creation. He is aiming not to construct a philosophy or prescribe a morality, but only “to spy on himself from close up. This is not my teaching, this is my study; and it is not a lesson for others, it is for me.” “These are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed.”
The ninety-four essays of varying length published in his first two volumes in 1580 were delightfully miscellaneous, with all the charm of randomness. “I am myself the substance of my book,” his Preface explained. “Whatever these absurdities may be, I have had no intention of concealing them, any more than I would a bald and graying portrait of myself, in which the painter had drawn not a perfect face, but mine.” Their very heterogeneity testified to frankness. “Of Idleness” is f
ollowed by “Of Liars” and “Of Prompt or Slow Speech.” “Of the Uncertainty of Our Judgment” precedes “Of War Horses,” and “Of Smells” before “Of Prayers.” “Of the Greatness of Rome” comes just before “Not to Counterfeit Being Sick,” and “Of Thumbs.” There is no effort at chronology, at the development of arguments, ideas, or narrative, no attempt to deny the flux, or to insist that flux can know flux. “I do not portray being: I portray passing … from day to day, from minute to minute.… This is a record … of irresolute and, when it so befalls, contradictory ideas; whether I am different myself, or whether I take hold of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects.” With his Essays, Montaigne had discovered and begun to explore himself, then he created a self in words. When these volumes were published in Bordeaux he observed with his usual self-deprecation that the farther away the readers were, the better they would like his work. At home “they think it droll to see me in print.”
One of his most outlandish and most influential essays revealed that Montaigne could use his self-explorations to help others illuminate the world. “Of Cannibals” urges caution before we stigmatize any people as “barbarous,” a term that the Greeks indiscriminately applied to all strange ways. “We see from this how chary we must be of subscribing to vulgar opinions; we should judge them by the test of reason, and not by common report.” He describes the savagery of torturing heretics, prisoners, and criminals, which really seems to him a way of “eating a man alive.” “I consider it more barbarous to eat a man alive than to eat him dead; to tear by rack and torture a body still full of feeling, to roast it by degrees, and then give it to be trampled and eaten by dogs and swine—a practice which we have not only read about but seen within recent memory, not between ancient enemies, but between neighbours and fellow-citizens, and what is worse, under the cloak of piety and religion—than to roast and eat a man after he is dead.” But his reflections on cannibals would have a more cheerful afterlife when Shakespeare, who probably read this passage in Florio’s translation, himself translated these charitable sentiments into The Tempest.
It was at the conclusion of this work of nine years that Montaigne wrote his familiar self-disparaging preface. His book was only “to amuse a neighbor, a relative, a friend.” He sought his well-earned respite in Italy, where he visited the watering places seeking relief from the kidney stone that never ceased to plague him. At Rome, where “every man shares in the ecclesiastical idleness,” he was courteously received by the same Pope Gregory XIII who had celebrated the grateful Mass for the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day. His Essays, which had been reviewed by a papal censor who could not read French, were, to his surprise, only mildly “corrected.” Gone only a year, he received an urgent message to return to Bordeaux, where he had been elected mayor. A Catholic loyalist respected by the Protestants who now surrounded Bordeaux, he might be useful in trying to keep the peace. He reluctantly accepted the call, and after serving creditably he was allowed to return to his study in 1585. There he revised Books I and II of his essays and worked on Book III. The religious war heated up again, with the Holy Catholic League in the ascendant. Now Montaigne, suspect for not having joined the Catholic army, and with a Protestant brother and sister and friends among the heretics, was in constant peril. “I incurred the disadvantages that moderation brings in such maladies. I was belabored from every quarter: to the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, to the Guelph a Ghibelline.… It was mute suspicions that were current secretly.”
An epidemic of the plague that drove him and his family for six months from his château decimated the neighborhood. Wherever they went, the terror followed them, “having to shift their abode as soon as one of the group began to feel pain in the end of his finger.”
The first two volumes of the Essays, which had gone through four editions in Bordeaux, were finally being published in Paris, and were respectfully received by scholars. This encouraged him to go on. His third volume with thirteen essays appeared in 1588, with additions to the earlier volumes. Volume III offered more in the “essay” spirit. “This essay of myself” is more emphatic in his opinions and more self-conscious. “I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero.” Again he is free with self-doubts and self-criticism. “Stupidity is a bad quality” he observes in “On the Art of Conversation,” “but to be unable to bear it, to be vexed and fretted by it, as is the case with me, is another kind of disease that is hardly less troublesome.” “I often risk some intellectual sallies of which I am suspicious, and certain verbal subtleties, which make me shake my head. But I let them go at a venture. I see that some are praised for such things; it is not for me alone to judge. I present myself standing and lying down, front and back, facing left and right, and in all my natural attitudes.” “Our follies do not make me laugh, our wisdom does.”
Montaigne never ceased to yearn for another living partner in his conversations about himself. His Essays still seemed only a substitute for spoken revelations to his departed friend. In 1588, in this third volume, a quarter century after the death of La Boétie, he is still plaintively reaching out:
Amusing notion: many things that I would not want to tell anyone, I tell the public; and for my most secret knowledge and thoughts I send my most faithful friends to a bookseller’s shop.…
If by such good signs I knew of a man who was suited to me, truly I would go very far to find him; for the sweetness of harmonious and agreeable company cannot be bought too dearly, in my opinion. Oh, a friend!
(Translated by Donald M. Frame)
Nor would he reach in vain.
The answer to his prayer was almost as surprising and puzzling as his relationship with La Boétie. Early in 1588, when he was in Paris on one of his diplomatic missions, he met the brilliant and learned Marie de Gournay (1566–1645), a young woman of twenty-two who had so admired his Essays that she had written asking to meet him. As her father had died ten years before, she now became his fille d’alliance, his informally adopted daughter. The term had no legal significance but described a soul mate to whom one had no blood tie. The adoration may have been more on her side than on his, but ailing and “friendless” he welcomed her literary intimacy. He lived at her house for some months while he dictated passages of the Essays to her, and he designated her his literary executor. After painful bouts with a kidney stone and other ailments, when Montaigne died in his château in 1592, his wife and family welcomed de Gournay and embraced her. She was responsible for the belated shorter 1635 edition of the Essays, incorporating some of her own omissions and some new passages she attributed to him.
Marie de Gournay took the occasion in her 1635 edition to tone down Montaigne’s references to her. But her emendations revealed her desire to obscure a relationship that may have been more than filial. Montaigne had written that he loved her “more than a daughter” but she substituted “as a daughter.” She omitted, among others, his statement that “she is the only person I still think about in the world.” The rest of her life (she died in 1645) she spent editing, “improving,” and defending Montaigne’s works.
Montaigne’s enduring legacy was not a philosophy, however appealing his tolerant skepticism has remained. His afterlife was a rare creation, a new form for literature, a new catalyst for literary conversation, self-exploration, and doubt. “A loose sally of the mind;” Dr. Johnson defined “essay” in his Dictionary (1755), “an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.” No other Western author unwittingly created so vivid a witness as did Montaigne to the congenital rigidity of thought and the power of artistic archetypes. How astonishing that anyone should have had to “create” a literary form to dignify the loose sallies of the mind!
Few literary creators, Western adventurers of the word, have had so widespread or so interstitial an influence as Montaigne. The spirit of the essay has survived the obsolescence of Montaigne’s faiths and the irrelevance of his doubts. He lived on in the courageous freedom of his example. His essay quest to put in
words the self in all its vagueness and contradiction has become ever more appealing.
“Essay,” which for Montaigne was a term of self-deprecation, for confessions of the elusive self, in later centuries became a banner for assertions, declarations, and bold exploration. Like the novel and biography, it would become a vehicle and a catalyst of modernity. The essay would be at once a vehicle of self-discovery, an affirmation of the writing individual, and a way of sharing the individuality of others. Every essay implied the need for experiment, for incremental random thoughts.
It is no accident that the pioneer English essayist Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was also a pioneer in the experimental, incremental approach to science. Bacon’s political ambitions and his temperament led him to make his essays “Counsells, Civil and Morall” (1597, 1612, 1625). This put him in the tradition of Plutarch’s Moralia, lacking the whimsicality and randomness of Montaigne. The essay became more intimately tied to everyday concerns by the new vogue of periodical publications, facilitated by printing presses and a reading public. Richard Steele’s Tatler (1709–11) appeared three times a week, and the Spectator (1711–12), with Joseph Addison, appeared daily. Journalism, the current press, was the essayist’s natural ally. The journalist had to be an essayist, in every new issue hoping to make a better try, needing to shift subjects continually, to treat topics briefly, and to compete for the attention of impatient readers. The newspaper would be a bundle of essays, now not about the self but about the world.
The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination Page 79