Il faut accommoder mon histoire à l’heure. A history that must “be fitted to the present” is a history that must of necessity abjure the highest form of literary ambition that the Renaissance inherited from the ancient world, namely, the epic. Where the epic is governed by an overarching design, the essay embraces contingency; where the epic invokes gods and heroes, the essays deal with a private individual in a world without supernatural intervention; where the epic appeals for inspiration to the Muses, the essays eschew not only divine aid but even the more modest shaping power of human art. In the design of their lives, the great figures of epic—Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas—are forever wedded to their passions and to their fates. The essays by contrast steadfastly resist the narrative design of all life stories.
Hence, Montaigne writes in the essay “Of the Inconstancy of Our Actions,” “even good authors do ill and take a wrong course, willfully to opinionate themselves about framing a constant and solid contexture of us.” Humans are in reality programmatically inconsistent: “We float and waver between diverse opinions: we will nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.”
All the same, Montaigne was, of course, engaged in giving an account of himself. No one has ever done it more magnificently. But his “object,” as he puts it, would not stay still, and his account was deliberately composed without a shape:
If I speak diversely of myself, it is because I look diversely upon myself.... Shamefaced, bashful, insolent, chaste, luxurious, peevish, prattling, silent, fond, doting, labourious, nice, delicate, ingenious, slow, dull, froward, humorous, debonaire, wise, ignorant, false in words, true-speaking, both liberal, covetous, and prodigal. All these I perceive in some measure or other to be in mine, according as I stir or turn myself.
This sounds at first like a matter of perspective: The angle at which one regards an object, even so intimately familiar an object as oneself, would necessarily change the terms of a depiction. But it is not only a matter of the shifting position of the beholder; rather it is the inner life of the self, as well as the position of the viewer, that is constantly in motion.
However the essays originated, whether as random notes, casual musings, or collections of quotations he found interesting, they evolved into what we may call a life-form. His goal, Montaigne writes in his preface to the reader, is to enable people who care about him to recover, after he is gone, some “lineaments” of his “conditions and humours” and thereby to keep the knowledge they have had of him “more whole, and more lively” (plus entière and plus vive).2 The essays are driven by Montaigne’s determination to preserve the recollection of himself entire and hence to remain, as he puts it, alive. But the only way for him to do so is to be true to the restless and irregular movements of his mind and, as far as possible, completely candid.
There are, he acknowledges, some limits to his candor. His was a profoundly intolerant age that allowed at least in print little room for refusing the ferocious seriousness, the sense of all-or-nothing, that characterized both Catholic and Protestant polemicists. On all questions of belief the voices of authority thundered that salvation was at stake and that one’s fate both in this world and in the life to come lay in the orthodoxy of one’s response. There was little willingness to accept the legitimacy of multiple structures of belief, patterns of behavior, or systems of rule. Instead there was a pervasive sense of a massive, irreconcilable alternative: God or the Devil, Christ or Antichrist. No one in Montaigne’s repressive, conflict-ridden world would have grasped, let alone honored, the concept of freedom of speech. “I speak truth,” Montaigne writes in “Of Repenting,” “not my belly-full, but as much as I dare.”
Quite apart from political and religious censorship, deep-rooted social codes of shame and embarrassment, then as now, proved extremely difficult to break. Yet Montaigne tried valiantly: “I am resoluted,” he writes in the sexually frank essay “Upon Some Verses of Virgil,” “to dare speak whatsoever I dare do.” The rich sense of intimacy that the essays have produced in his own time and in the centuries that have followed make good on Montaigne’s claim in his “The Author to the Reader,” with a longing glance at depictions of the New World natives, that had he lived “among those nations which yet are said to live under the sweet liberty of Nature’s first and uncorrupted laws, I assure thee I would most willingly have portrayed myself fully and naked.”
The force of this desire in a public figure—and the lord of Montaigne was inescapably a public figure, however much he vaunted his privacy—would have seemed all the more remarkable in the Renaissance, obsessed as it was with the fetishism of dress. In the sixteenth century the particular clothes one wore carried a significant measure of one’s identity. To forgo that mode of securing a place in the world was to repudiate much of what at the time constituted the very notion of a “person”—a term that derives from the Latin word for a mask. Montaigne longed to strip away the mask and display what lay hidden beneath. It is not that he thought that whatever he would thus show the world was heroic or beautiful; he did not imagine himself as the idealized nude of a classical statue. But he was determined to leave a vivid trace of his actual self, in all its particularity, and he argued—against virtually all the moral philosophers of his age and of centuries past—that this particularity was what actually mattered. “Authors communicate themselves unto the world by some special and strange mark; I the first by my general disposition, as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian, or a poet, or lawyer.” Did this mean that he therefore abandoned the hope of reaching beyond the tiny circle of his family and friends? Not at all. “Every man,” he wrote, “beareth the whole stamp of human condition.”
What Montaigne meant by this celebrated phrase had nothing to do with finding a universal essence beneath the accidents of individuality. Pagan philosophers, particularly Plato and his followers, had dreamed of employing dialectical reasoning to pass through Becoming to a realm of pure Being. And Christianity inherited from Judaism a faith in the transcendent Being of God, beyond the accidents of the physical universe. Even the Incarnation did not substantially modify this faith: The Word may have become flesh, but it did not remain flesh. The Son returned to heaven, to reside for eternity at the side of the Father, and the faithful await their own freedom through death from the entrapment of the body and of nature. All this Montaigne knew very well. Yet his essays sweep aside two millennia of nausea at the mutability of the existential world.
There were in Montaigne’s time, as in our own, certain familiar psychological, social, or spiritual patterns through which lives could be readily understood: the prodigal son, the faithful servant, the warrior, the pilgrim, the courtier, the Stoic sage, the wise judge, the libertine, the repentant sinner, and so forth. It was almost impossible not to fall into one or another of these patterns, and yet Montaigne somehow manages to elude them all. The conviction that life’s inevitable sufferings were a valuable lesson was virtually inescapable, but not for Montaigne: “Crosses and afflictions make me do nothing but curse them; they are for people that cannot be awaked but by the whip.” So too the confession of sins, along with the desire to make amends, was part of the essential spiritual structure of virtually everyone, but not Montaigne: “Were I to live again, it should be as I have already lived.” In place of a striving for reformation or transcendence, the essays cheerfully embrace imperfection, indeterminacy, and ceaseless change.
That change is recorded powerfully, even unnervingly, in the publication history of the essays. In 1580 Montaigne personally saw to the publication of the first two books. In a world in which the elite often avoided appearing in print—preferring the more socially genteel form of manuscript circulation—such direct, unembarrassed involvement was already unusual. Montaigne did not even pretend, as wellborn authors often did, that the work had been made public without his permission. There is no reason, he jauntily warned the readers, “thou shouldst employ thy time about so frivolous and vain a subject,” but he made clear that he was respon
sible for what had been printed. A few months after its publication, he presented a copy to the king, Henri III. So, too, in 1587, he went to Paris to arrange a new edition published the next year, this time with the thirteen new chapters of Book III and with some six hundred alterations to Books I and II. What is peculiar about these alterations is that they are all additions. That is, they are not corrections or substitutions, not attempts to stabilize and fix the text, but sentences or paragraphs inserted into the existing essays. In other words, when he returned to the essays he had already written, he found that he had many new opinions or further quotations he wished to cite, often in direct contradiction to views he had earlier expressed, but instead of canceling those views, he simply added more.
He was by no means finished. In the years that followed he continued to reread and rethink what he published, jotting down innumerable further thoughts in the margins of his copy of the 1588 edition or on slips of paper. He evidently carried on this work more or less constantly during times in which he was traveling with the royal court or struggling with excruciating episodes of kidney stones or working behind the scenes to keep his region of Bordeaux loyal to Henri de Navarre or corresponding with friends. In 1592, Montaigne, who had managed to survive a number of illnesses, contracted a throat infection from which, on September 13, he died peacefully in his bed. The book in which he had recorded his new material—amounting to about one-fourth of the entire length of the essays—went to Marie de Gournay, a devoted admirer whom Montaigne had made his literary executrix. De Gournay carefully transcribed all that Montaigne had added and published a new edition of the essays, the first complete edition, in 1595.
De Gournay did not signal the presence of new material, any more than Montaigne had done. Whatever was added simply appeared in the great flow of the essays, whose impression of unbroken improvisation was intensified by the fact that they were originally printed without paragraph breaks. Only in 1919, with the first systematic modern edition of the essays, were the distinct levels of the text sorted out and labeled, so that it was possible to track what was originally published in 1580, what was newly inserted in 1588, and what was added yet again after 1588.
It is fascinating by this means to track Montaigne’s revisions and rethinking, but readers should be aware that he had no interest in making this tracking possible. On the contrary, he clearly took pleasure in the strange effect of an open-ended text in which the passage of time was present yet unmarked, and in which it would be almost impossible to distinguish with any certainty between early opinions and those which had come to contradict them. The effect for Montaigne’s original readers, including Shakespeare, would have been a single self that contained multitudes, a personal stage in which strikingly different voices, past and present, jostled for attention.
Against the grain of Montaigne’s own confounding of the distinctions, scholars who study the successive levels have identified shifts in his basic orientation. The early essays share many of the preoccupations of Stoicism, with its central desire to free the core of the self from vulnerability and terror. Appalling things may happen in the course of a life, and everyone without exception must confront death, but pagan moralists like Plutarch and Seneca taught themselves to face the worst and to find freedom from fear in the soul’s calm acceptance of necessity. “The premeditation of death,” Montaigne wrote in his 1580 essay “That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die,” “is a fore-thinking of liberty. He who hath learned to die, hath unlearned to serve.”
This was not only the teaching of pagans; it was, Montaigne recognized, also linked to one of the central strains of his own religion: “Our religion hath had no surer human foundation than the contempt of life.” Therefore, he acknowledged, he fully shared in his culture’s widespread fascination with accounts of the ways people met their ends and with what was called the ars moriendi, the “art of dying.” “There is nothing I desire more to be informed of than of the death of men: that is to say, what words, what countenance, and what face they show at their death.” But there were cracks in the Stoics’ armor. Montaigne could never forget that even his beloved friend de La Boétie, who so ardently pursued the perfect liberty proferred by Stoicism, had on his deathbed writhed with sudden violence and, raising his voice, made a final, desperate appeal to his friend: “My brother, my brother, do you refuse me a place?” Montaigne gently reminded La Boétie that “since he was breathing and speaking and had a body, consequently he had his place.” Yet his dying friend’s strange words haunted Montaigne and seemed to undermine the Stoical arguments of the early essays, even as he piled them up.
Already by 1576 Montaigne had read the work of one of the great classical skeptics, Sextus Empiricus, and the philosophical doubts he encountered in this work, resonating deep in him, helped shape the longest and probably the most influential of his essays, “An Apology of Raymond Sebond.” This essay began as a gesture of filial piety toward his father—“the best father that ever was”—who, shortly before his death, had asked his son to translate the Spanish theologian Sebond’s treatise Natural Theology into French. Sebond’s old book, which attempted to establish all of the articles of the Christian faith on the foundation of human reason, had come under sharp criticism. The “Apology” begins as a response to this criticism, but it soon veers in a direction that could only further undermine, indeed devastate, the theological confidence that Sebond hoped to instill.
Montaigne expresses disgust at man’s absurd presumption: “Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as this miserable and wretched creature, which is not so much as master of himself, exposed and subject to offences of all things, and yet dareth call himself master and emperour of the universe?” In their insufferable vanity, humans imagine themselves to be superior to all creatures on earth, but in fact almost every one of man’s vaunted talents is shared with the other animals, many of whom are clearly better endowed than we are. If at least the imagination is a distinctly human attribute, it is nothing to brag about; rather, it is one of the sources of our misery and folly. We think we occupy the center of the stage, but, as Montaigne famously asks, “When I am playing with my cat, who knows whether she have more sport in dallying with me than I have in gaming with her?”
Sebond had thought to found faith itself on our reason, but in fact our reason gets us nowhere. There are no underlying laws, no secure first principles on which the mind can construct stable knowledge, or if there are such laws and principles the human intellect cannot take hold of them. Both the universe and the mind of man are in flux, and as a result we cannot hope to know anything: “We have no communication with being.” All the great intellectual schemes that humans have devised tumble in ruins, and the best we can do is to follow the course of the ancient skeptic Pyrrho, as described by Sextus Empiricus, “ever to waver, to doubt, and to inquire, never to be assured of anything, nor to take any warrant of himself.”
“Never to be assured of anything”: Montaigne recognizes that the declarative structure of French (or English) makes it very difficult for skeptics to reach a state of absolute doubt, since “when they say ‘I doubt,’ you have them fast by the sleeve to make them avow that at least you are assured and know that they doubt.” The best you can do is to switch from an affirmation to a question: Que sais-je?, What do I know?—or, as Florio renders it, “What can I tell?”
Yet even in this expression of his most thoroughgoing skepticism, Montaigne allows a glimpse of something less corrosive than relentless, perpetually renewed doubt. He praises the day-laborer—someone he might have contemplated from the windows of his tower—who does not spend his life in tormenting anticipation of woes to come but simply “follows his natural appetites.” This reflection leads him in turn to reflect on the stories reaching France about the natives of Brazil who are said to die not through disease but only through age. Though some impute this good health “to the clearness and calmness of their air,” Montaigne attributes it to “the calmness and clearness of their m
inds, void and free from all passions, cares, toiling, and unpleasant labours, as a people that pass their life in a wonderful kind of simplicity and ignorance without letters, or laws, and without kings or any religion.”
There are traces in this primitivist fantasy of the earlier Stoical ideal—“void and free from all passions”—and many marks of radical skepticism: “without letters, or laws, and without kings or any religion.” But there are also notes that look forward to the celebration of freedom, pleasure, and natural simplicity that characterizes Montaigne’s later essays.
The fullest expression of this celebration comes in the magnificent “Of Experience” where Montaigne reflects on “the miserable condition of so many men” who are constrained by the law and cannot move freely in the world. In his tower, surrounded by his beloved books, the essayist may have found much of what he most needed for his pleasure, but he was not one of those meditative souls who could declare himself happy even in confinement. “I am so besotted unto liberty,” he wrote, “that should any man forbid me the access unto any one corner of the Indies, I should in some sort live much discontented.”
Still, it is not in gadding about and observing the varied ways of the world that Montaigne found the greatest fascination. It was in himself, in the ordinary, seemingly trivial features of his everyday existence:
I am not over-much or greedily desirous of sallets or of fruits, except melons. My father hated all manner of sauces; I love them all....I have heretofore found radish-roots to be very good for me, then very hurtful, and now again very well agreeing with my stomach. In diverse other things I feel my appetite to change and my stomach to diversify from time to time. I have altered my course of drinking, sometimes from white to claret wine, and then from claret to white again.
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