The parallels cannot be taken too far. For one thing, Shakespeare was a dramatist rather than an essayist. He can divide his contradictions between characters and put them into conflict on stage; Montaigne must contain all contradictions within himself. Another difference is that Montaigne does not sit all alone on top of the canon in his native land as Shakespeare does in England. He has therefore attracted less jealousy, and no iconoclasts have come to push him off his pedestal by claiming that he did not write his own Essays, as has so often happened with Shakespeare.
Or almost no one. Among the few exceptions is one of the major nineteenth-century “anti-Stratfordians,” or Shakespeare-doubters: Ignatius Donnelly. At the end of a large opus arguing that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, Donnelly adds extra chapters proving that Bacon also wrote Montaigne’s Essays, as well as Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and all of Christopher Marlowe’s work. He finds clues planted throughout the Essays, such as a passage in which Montaigne writes, “Whoever shall cure a child of an obstinate aversion to bread, bacon, or garlic, will cure him of all kind of delicacy.” The name Francis occurs several times in the text, admittedly always in the French form François and generally denoting the French king François I. No matter; this too is a clue. To clinch matters, Donnelly cites a discovery made by a Mrs. Pott, who alerted him to the frequent mention, in Shakespeare’s plays, of mountains, or Mountaines. Since Bacon wrote Shakespeare, any reference to Montaigne in the plays must suggest that he wrote the Essays too. “Can anyone believe that all this is the result of accident?” asks Donnelly.
He confesses himself baffled by some sections of the Essays that seem pregnant with clues, but which are harder to interpret, notably the story of a young woman who beat her white breasts after her brother was slain. Donnelly gives up:
Who is the young lady? There is nothing more about her in the text. And is it the white breasts that have slain her brother? … And where did the bullet come from? Was it from the white breasts? It is all nonsense … And there are hundreds of such passages.
The Essays’ being in French might seem to pose a problem—but not for Donnelly. His explanation is that Bacon wanted to publish a book of skeptical, religiously unorthodox opinions, yet dared not do so in England, so he arranged for it to appear in the guise of a translation. As luck would have it, Francis Bacon’s brother Anthony was in France at the time and knew Montaigne. He persuaded Montaigne to lend his name to the ruse, while someone else persuaded Florio to play the part of translator. Thus, Bacon wrote it; Montaigne signed it; Florio, presumably, actually translated it—but from English to French. “Montaigne” was indeed an Englishman, in a more literal way than Lord Halifax or William Hazlitt ever dreamed of.
One aspect of the story has some basis in fact: Anthony Bacon did know Montaigne, and visited him twice, once in the early 1580s and again in 1590. He could easily have brought a copy of the Essays back for his brother, which means that Francis could have read it (in French) before publishing his own collection of Essays in 1597. That would explain something that has often puzzled people: how did Bacon and Montaigne come up with the same book title within a few years of each other?
It must be said, however, that the title is almost the only point of similarity. All the qualities that suggest “Englishness” in Montaigne are resoundingly absent from his English counterpart. Bacon wrote with more intellectual rigor than Montaigne. He was more incisive, more philosophical, and a lot more boring. When he tackled subjects like reading or traveling, he issued orders. This is what you should read, and that is what you must visit on a journey. If ever a subject allowed of division into subtopics, he would so divide it, and he would announce each subdivision in advance before marching through them till he got to the end. One thing you can be sure of with Montaigne is that he will never do this to you.
Once the ice had been broken by Florio and Bacon, innumerable English books appeared with the word Essays in their title. Some were overtly inspired by Florio’s Montaigne, others by Bacon, but in almost every case it was from Montaigne that they took their style of writing and thinking. Very few English essays after the early seventeenth century were philosophically rigorous stabs of thought on important topics; almost all were delightful rambles about nothing in particular. Typical were the works of William Cornwallis, who read Florio in an early manuscript draft and published sequences of Essayes in 1600, 1601, 1616 and 1617, exploring such topics as “Of Sleepe,” “Of Discontentments,” “Of Fantasticknesse,” “Of Alehouses,” and “Of the Observation, and Use of Things.”
Even those who did not use the title often wrote in a recognizably digressive, personal way. While French literature became ever more poised and formal, England produced a series of oddballs such as Robert Burton, who described his way of writing, in his vast treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy, as coursing “like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees.” Even stranger was Sir Thomas Browne, who produced essayistic investigations into medicine, gardens, burial methods, imaginary libraries, and much more in a convoluted baroque style so unlike anyone else’s (even Florio’s) that any Browne sentence is instantly recognizable as his.
At the height of this high-quirkiness phase of Montaigne’s English reception, a new translator came along to straighten things out a little: Charles Cotton, whose new version appeared in 1685 and 1686, not long after the Essays went on the Index in France. Cotton was more accurate than Florio, and he brought a new generation of English readers to the Essays. Surprisingly, the author of this more restrained translation was personally a more wayward and dilettantish character than Florio. Cotton’s main claim to fame in his own day was his scatological burlesque poems. He once described himself as a “Northern clod” whose favorite occupation was drinking ale in the pub all evening before retiring to his library to
Write lewd epistles, and sometimes translate
Old Tales of Tubs, of Guyen[n]e, and Provence,
And keep a clutter with th’old Blades of France.
After his death, Charles Cotton’s posthumous reputation went through transformations as strange as those of Montaigne or Shakespeare, though on a smaller scale. The nineteenth century considered his comic verse obnoxious, and admired him instead for lyrical nature poetry which his own contemporaries had ignored. Later, this too slipped into obscurity. People celebrated him rather for a chapter on trout-tickling which he had contributed to Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler—a highly Montaignean work in itself. Today this relic of Cotton is forgotten in most quarters—though not among trout-ticklers—and he is remembered as much for his Montaigne work as anything.
(illustration credit i16.2)
Cotton’s remained the standard translation of the Essays for over two centuries, and it brought Montaigne to a new breed of less baroque writers, more interested in capturing the psychological realities of everyday life than spinning webs of fantasy. The poet Alexander Pope noted in his copy of Cotton, “This is (in my Opinion) the very best Book for Information of Manners, that has been writ; This Author says nothing but what every one feels att the Heart.” A piece in the literary magazine the Spectator praised Montaigne’s habit of weaving personal experiences and qualities into his book, a practice that might be self-indulgent but was entertaining. As the French critic Charles Dédéyan remarked, the English were happy to let a writer go on about himself, so long as he did it agreeably.
From now on, there would be no shortage of English personal essayists doing just that. They were all of what the critic Walter Pater called “the true family of Montaigne”: they showed “that intimacy, that modern subjectivity, which may be called the Montaignesque element in literature.” Among them was the popular essayist Leigh Hunt, who filled his copy of the Essays with underlinings and marginal comments—often rather fatuous. When Montaigne tells a story about seeing a boy lacking hands who wielded a heavy sword and cracked a whip as well as any cart-driver in France, Hunt carefully writes in the margin: “With his arms, of
course. Still it is very surprising.”
An intellectually sharper admirer was William Hazlitt: he who praised Montaigne for not setting up for a philosopher. Hazlitt’s assessment of what makes a good essayist exemplifies what the English now tended to look for in Montaigne. Such writers, says Hazlitt, collect curiosities of human life just as natural history enthusiasts collect shells, fossils, or beetles as they stroll along a forest path or seashore. They capture things as they really are rather than as they should be. Montaigne was the finest of them all because he allowed everything to be what it was, including himself, and he knew how to look at things. For Hazlitt, an ideal essay
takes minutes of our dress, air, looks, words, thoughts, and actions; shews us what we are, and what we are not; plays the whole game of human life over before us, and by making us enlightened spectators of its many-colored scenes, enables us (if possible) to become tolerably reasonable agents in the one in which we have to perform a part.
In other words, the essay is the genre that—more than any novel or biography—helps us to learn how to live.
Hazlitt’s son, also called William Hazlitt, would edit Cotton’s translation together with copies of Montaigne’s letters, his Italian travel journal, and a brief biography, to produce a Complete Works in 1842. This became the standard edition in Britain over the coming years; it was revised yet again by his son in 1877—producing Hazlitt’s Hazlitt’s Cotton’s Montaigne. Between them, the Hazlitts defined the English Montaigne even more lastingly than Florio. This new Montaigne was loved, above all, for those Hazlittesque virtues: his alertness to everyday life as it really was, and his ability to write pleasingly about it without formal literary constraints.
This tradition has continued, from the nineteenth century through the twentieth, and it looks set to carry on into the twenty-first. Every era has produced fresh English Montaigneans; the tradition continues today through the countless ephemeral essayists and weekend newspaper columnists who, knowingly or not, keep the “Montaignesque element in literature” alive.
Of all Montaigne’s cross-Channel heirs, the one who deserves the last word is an Anglo-Irishman: Laurence Sterne, eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy. His great novel, if it can be so classified, is an exaggerated Montaignesque ramble, containing several explicit nods to its French predecessor, and filled with games, paradoxes, and digressions. Dedications and prologues, which ought to be at the beginning, appear all over the place in the wrong order. “The Author’s Preface” turns up in volume 3, chapter 20. At one point, a blank page is supplied, so readers can contribute a picture of a character according to their own imagination. Another page presents a series of line diagrams purporting to summarize the pattern of the book’s digressions so far.
The book teeters constantly on the edge of dissolution. Whatever plot had appeared to be promised at the outset evaporates; the breaks and detours in the narrative take over entirely. “Have I not promised the world a chapter of knots?” Sterne reflects at one point. “Two chapters upon the right and the wrong end of a woman? a chapter upon whiskers? a chapter upon wishes?—a chapter of noses?—No, I have done that:—a chapter upon my uncle Toby’s modesty: to say nothing of a chapter upon chapters, which I will finish before I sleep.” It is like Montaigne on speed.
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But of course, says Sterne, no story that really pays attention to the world as it is could be otherwise. It cannot go straight from its starting point to its destination. Life is complicated; there is no one track to follow.
Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,—straight forward;—for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left,—he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end;—but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: For, if he is a man of the least spirit he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make.
Like Montaigne on his Italian trip, Sterne cannot be accused of straying from his path, for his path is the digressions. His route lies, by definition, in whichever direction he happens to stray.
Tristram Shandy started an Irish tradition that would reach its most extreme point with James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a novel which divides into offshoots and streams of association over hundreds of pages until, at the end, it loops around on itself: the last half-sentence hooks on to the half-sentence with which the book began. This is much too tidy for Sterne, or for Montaigne, who avoided neat wrap-ups. For both of them, writing and life should be allowed just to flow on, even if that means branching further and further into digressions without ever coming to any resolution. Sterne and Montaigne both engage constantly with a world which always generates more things to write about—so why stop? This makes them both accidental philosophers: naturalists on a field trip into the human soul, without maps or plans, and having no idea where they will end up, or what they will do when they get there.
17. Q. How to live? A. Reflect on everything; regret nothing
JE NE REGRETTE RIEN
SOME WRITERS JUST write their books. Others knead them like clay, or construct them by accumulation. James Joyce was among the latter: his Finnegans Wake evolved through a series of drafts and published editions, until the fairly normal sentences of the first version—
Who was the first that ever burst?
became weird mutants—
Waiwhou was the first thurever burst?
Montaigne did not smear his words around like Joyce, but he did work by revisiting, elaborating, and accreting. Although he returned to his work constantly, he hardly ever seemed to get the urge to cross things out, only to keep adding more. The spirit of repentance was alien to him in writing, just as it was in life, where he remained firmly wedded to amor fati: the cheerful acceptance of whatever happens.
This was at odds with the doctrines of Christianity, which insisted that you must constantly repent of your past misdeeds, in order to keep wiping clean the slate and giving yourself fresh beginnings. Montaigne knew that some of the things he had done in the past no longer made sense to him, but he was content to presume that he must have been a different person at the time, and leave it at that. His past selves were as diverse as a group of people at a party. Just as he would not think of passing judgment on a roomful of acquaintances, all of whom had their own reasons and points of view to explain what they had done, so he would not think of judging previous versions of Montaigne. “We are all patchwork,” he wrote, “and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.” No overall point of view existed from which he could look back and construct the one consistent Montaigne that he would have liked to be. Since he did not try to airbrush his previous selves out of life, there was no reason for him to do it in his book either. The Essays had grown alongside him for twenty years; they were what they were, and he was happy to let them be.
His refusal to repent did not stop him rereading his book, however, and frequently adding to it. He never reached the point where he could lay down his pen and announce, “Now, I, Montaigne, have said everything I wanted to say. I have preserved myself on paper.” As long as he lived, he had to keep writing. The process could have gone on forever:
Who does not see that I have taken a road along which I shall go, without stopping and without effort, as long as there is ink and paper in the world?
The only thing that stopped him at last was his death. As Virginia Woolf wrote, the Essays came to a halt because they reached “not their end, but their suspension in full career.”
Some of this continuing labor may have been in response to encouragement by publishers. The early editions had sold so well that the market for new, bigger, and better ones was obvious. And Montaigne had plenty to add in 1588, after his Grand Tour and his experiences as mayor. He wrote even more in the years after that, when new thoughts must have come to mind following his disturbing experiences at t
he court of the refugee king: not necessarily thoughts to do with French current affairs, but to do with moderation, good judgment, worldly imperfections, and many of his other favorite themes.
The title page of the 1588 edition, which was published by the prestigious Paris firm of Abel L’Angelier rather than his earlier Bordeaux publisher, presented the work as “enlarged by a third book and by six hundred additions to the first two.” This is about right, but it underplays the real extent of the increase: the 1588 Essays was almost twice as long as the 1580 version. Book III added thirteen long chapters, and, of the existing essays in the first two books, hardly any remained untouched.
The new Montaigne of 1588, which hit the world as the real Montaigne was trailing around after Henri III and planning his recuperation with his new friend Marie de Gournay in Picardy, showed a startling new degree of confidence. As befitted someone who rejected the notion of undoing his sins, he was unrepentant about the digressive and personal nature of the book. Nor did he hesitate to make demands on anyone who entered his world. “It is the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I,” he wrote now, of his tendency to ramble. The pretense of writing for family and friends alone disappeared; he knew what he had, and scorned any notion of diluting it, hiding it, or streamlining it to fit convention.
How to Live Page 31