[A] Now these examples seem to me to be even more to the point in that souls which have been assaulted and assayed by both those methods can be seen to resist one without flinching only to bow to the other.
It could be said that for one’s mind to yield to pity is an effect of affability, gentleness – and softness (that is why weaker natures such as those of women, children and the common-people are more subject to them) – whereas, disdaining [C] tears [A] and supplications3 and then yielding only out of respect for the holy image of valour is the action of a strong, unbending soul, reserving its good-will and honour for stubborn, masculine vigour. Yet ecstatic admiration and amazement can produce a similar effect in the less magnanimous. Witness the citizens of Thebes: they had impeached their captains on capital charges for having extended their mandates beyond the period they had prescribed and preordained for them; they were scarcely able to pardon Pelopidas, who, bending beneath the weight of such accusations, used only petitions and supplications in his defence, whereas on the contrary when Epaminondas came and gloriously related the deeds he had done and reproached the people with them proudly [C] and arrogantly, [A] they had no heart for even taking the ballots into their hands: the meeting broke up, greatly praising the high-mindedness of that great figure.
[C] The elder Dionysius had captured, after long delays and extreme difficulties, the town of Rhegium together with its commander Phyton, an outstanding man who had stubbornly defended it. He resolved to make him into a terrible example of vengeance. Dionysius first told him how he had, the previous day, drowned his son and all his relations. Phyton merely replied that they were happier than he was, by one day. Next he had him stripped, seized by executioners and dragged through the town while he was flogged, cruelly and ignominiously, and plied with harsh and shameful insults. But Phyton’s heart remained steadfast and he did not give way; on the contrary, with his face set firm he loudly recalled the honourable and glorious cause of his being condemned to death – his refusal to surrender his country into the hands of a tyrant – and he threatened Dionysius with swift punishment from the gods. Dionysius read in the eyes of the mass of his soldiers that, instead of being provoked by the taunts which this vanquished enemy made at the expense of their leader and of his triumph, they were thunder-struck by so rare a valour, beginning to soften, wondering whether to mutiny, and ready to snatch Phyton from the hands of his guards; so he brought Phyton’s martyrdom to an end and secretly sent him to be drowned in the sea.
[A] Man is indeed an object miraculously vain, various and wavering. It is difficult to found a judgement on him which is steady and uniform. Here you have Pompey pardoning the entire city of the Mamertines, against whom he was deeply incensed, out of consideration for the valour and great-heartedness of Zeno,4 a citizen who assumed full responsibility for the public wrong-doing and who begged no other favour than alone to bear the punishment for it. Yet that host of Sylla showed similar bravery in the city of Perugia and gained nothing thereby, neither for himself nor for the others.
[B] And, directly against my first examples, Alexander, the staunchest of men and the most generous towards the vanquished, stormed, after great hardship, the town of Gaza and came across Betis who commanded it; of his valour during the siege he had witnessed staggering proofs; now Betis was alone, deserted by his own men, his weapons shattered; all covered with blood and wounds, he was still fighting in the midst of several Macedonians who were slashing at him on every side. Alexander was irritated by so dearly won a victory (among other losses he had received two fresh wounds in his own body); he said to him: ‘You shall not die as you want to, Betis! Take note that you will have to suffer every kind of torture which can be thought up against a prisoner!’ To these menaces Betis (not only looking assured but contemptuous and proud) replied not a word. Then Alexander, seeing his haughty and stubborn silence said: ‘Has he bent his knee? Has he let a word of entreaty slip out? Truly I will overcome that refusal of yours to utter a sound: if I cannot wrench a word from you I will at least wrench a groan.’ And as his anger turned to fury he ordered his heels to be pierced5 and, dragging him alive behind a cart, had him lacerated and dismembered.
Was it because [C] bravery was so usual for him6 that [B] he was never struck with wonder by it and therefore respected it less? [C] Or was it because he thought bravery to be so properly his own that he could not bear to see it at such a height in anyone else without anger arising from an emotion of envy; or did the natural violence of his anger allow of no opposition? Truly if his anger could ever have suffered a bridle it is to be believed that it would have done so during the storming and sack of Thebes, at seeing so many valiant men put to the sword, men lost and with no further means of collective defence. For a good six thousand of them were killed, none of whom was seen to run away or to beg for mercy; on the contrary all were seeking, here and there about the streets, to confront the victorious enemy and to provoke them into giving them an honourable death. None was so overcome with wounds that he did not assay with his latest breath to wreak revenge and to find consolation for his own death in the death of an enemy. Yet their afflicted valour evoked no pity; a day was not long enough to slake the vengeance of Alexander: this carnage lasted until the very last drop of blood remained to be spilt; it spared only those who were disarmed – the old men, women and children – from whom were drawn thirty thousand slaves.
2. On sadness
[Chapters 2–18 (in their [A] version) seem to date from the earliest period, reflecting the influence of books which Montaigne was reading about 1572 – Guicciardini’s History of Italy, Jean Bouchet’s Mémoires d’Aquitaine and the Mémoires of the Du Bellay brothers. ‘On sadness’ shows Montaigne’s concern with ecstasies produced by strong emotions and his impatience with merely fashionable tristesse (sadness) which sought to ape the abstracted, pensive depths of melancholy genius (as portrayed, for example, by Dürer).]
[B] I am among those who are most free from this emotion; [C] I neither like it nor think well of it, even though the world, by common consent, has decided to honour it with special favour. Wisdom is decked out in it; so are Virtue and Conscience – a daft and monstrous adornment. More reasonably it is not sadness but wickedness that the Italians have baptised tristezza,1 for it is a quality which is ever harmful, ever mad. The Stoics forbid this emotion to their sages as being base and cowardly.
[A] But a story is told about Psammenitus, a King of Egypt. When he was defeated and captured by Cambises the King of Persia he showed no emotion as he saw his daughter walk across in front of him, dressed as a servant and sent to draw water. All his friends were about him, weeping and lamenting: he remained quiet, his eyes fixed on the ground. Soon afterwards he saw his son led away to execution; he kept the same countenance. But when he saw one of his household friends brought in among the captives, he began to beat his head and show grief.2
You can compare that with what we recently saw happen to one of our princes.3 He was at Trent: first he heard the news of the death of his very special elder brother, the support and pride of his whole family; then came the death of his younger brother, their second hope. He bore both these blows with exemplary fortitude; yet, when a few days later one of his men happened to die, he let himself be carried away by this event; he abandoned his resolute calm and gave himself over to grief and sorrow – so much so that some argued that only this last shock had touched him to the quick. The truth is that he was already brimful of sadness, so the least extra burden broke down the barriers of his endurance.
We could, I suggest, put the same interpretation on the story of Psammenitus, except that the account goes on to tell us that Cambises asked him why he had remained unmoved by the fate of his son and daughter yet showed such emotion at the death of his friend. ‘Only the last of these misfortunes can be expressed by tears’, he replied; ‘the first two are way beyond any means of expression.’
That may explain the solution adopted by a painter in antiquity.4 He had to portray th
e grief shown on the faces of the people who were present when Iphigenia was sacrificed, giving each of them the degree of sorrow appropriate to his feelings of involvement in the death of that fair and innocent young woman. By the time he came to portray the father of Iphigenia he had exhausted all the resources of his art, so he painted him with his face veiled over, as though no countenance could display a grief so intense.
That is why the poets feign that when Niobe lost seven sons and then seven daughters she was overcome by such bereavements and was finally turned into a rock:
Diriguisse malis.
[Petrified by such misfortunes.]5
By this they expressed that sad, deaf, speechless stupor which seizes us when we are overwhelmed by tragedies beyond endurance.
The force of extreme sadness inevitably stuns the whole of our soul, impeding her freedom of action. It happens to us when we are suddenly struck with alarm by some really bad news: we are enraptured, seized, paralysed in all our movements in such a way that, afterwards, when the soul lets herself go with tears and lamentations, she seems to have struggled loose, disentangled herself and become free to range about as she wishes:
[B] Et via vix tandem voci laxata dolore est.
[And then, at length, his grief can just force open a channel for his voice.]6
[C] In the war which King Ferdinand waged near Buda against the widow of King John of Hungary, there was a German officer called Raïsciac. As he saw men bringing back the body of a soldier slung across a horse, he joined in the general mourning for the man who had shown exceptional bravery in the clash of battle. Like the others he was curious to know who the man was. When they took off the armour he recognized his son. Amid all the public tears he alone stood dry-eyed, saying nothing, his gaze fixed on his son until the violent strain of that sadness froze his vital spirits and, just as he was, toppled him dead to the ground.7
[A] Chi puo dir com’ egli arde e in picciol fuoco –
[He who can describe how his heart is ablaze is burning on a small pyre]8 –
that is what lovers say when they want to express an unbearable passion.
misero quod omnes
Eripit sensus mihi. Nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi
Quod loquar amens.
Lingua sed torpet, tenuis sub artus
Flamma dimanat, sonitu suopte
Tinniunt aures, gemina teguntur
Lumina nocte.
[How pitiable I am. Love snatches my senses from me. As soon as I see you, Lesbia, I can say nothing to you; I am out of my mind; my tongue sticks in my mouth; a fiery flame courses through my limbs; my ears are ringing and darkness covers both my eyes.]9
[B] We cannot display our grief or our convictions during the living searing heat of the attack; the soul is then burdened by deep thought and the body is cast down, languishing for love. [A] That is the source of the occasional impotence which sometimes comes so unseasonably upon men when making love, and of that chill produced, in the very lap of their delight by excessive ardour. For pleasures to be tasted and then digested they must remain moderate:
Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent.
[Light cares can talk: huge one are struck dumb.]10
[B] We can be equally stunned when surprised by joy unhoped for:
Ut me conspexit venientem, et Troïa circum
Arma amens vidit, magnis exterrita monstris,
Diriguit visu in medio, calor ossa reliquit,
Labitur, et longo vix tandem tempore fatur.
[As soon as she noticed me coming and saw the arms of Troy all about her, she went out of her mind. As though terrified by some dreadful portents her gaze became fixed upon them, the heat drained from her body; she fell to the ground and for a long time uttered not a word.]11
[A] There was a Roman woman who was surprised by joy on seeing her son return from the rout at Cannae and fell down dead; Sophocles and Dionysius the Tyrant died of happiness; Talva died in Corsica upon reading the news of the honours conferred on him by the Senate. Apart from these it is claimed that in our own century Pope Leo X entered into such an excess of joy upon being told of the capture of Milan (his desire for which had been extreme) that he took fever and died.
And there is an even more noteworthy witness to [C] human [A] weakness:12 the Ancients recorded that Diodorus the Dialectician ‘fell in the field’, overcome by an extreme sense of shame at being unable to refute arguments put to him in public in the presence of his followers.
[B] Violent emotions like these have little hold on me. By nature my sense of feeling has a hard skin, which I daily toughen and thicken by arguments.
3. Our emotions get carried away beyond us
[Many of the exempla in this chapter are rooted in war. They show, as do the more personal ones, how men fruitlessly worry about what happens to their bodies after death. Montaigne already states (as later he will insist) that a human being only is (only exists) when body and soul are conjoined.]
[B] Those who reproach humanity with always gaping towards the future and who teach us to grasp present goods and to be satisfied with them since we have no hold over what is to come – less hold, even, than we have over the past – touch upon the most common of human aberrations (if we dare use the word ‘aberration’ for something towards which Nature herself brings us in the service of the perpetuation of her handiwork, [C] impressing this false thought upon us as she does many others, more ardently concerned as she is for us to do than to know). [B] We are never ‘at home’: we are always outside ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be – even when we ourselves shall be no more. [C] ‘Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius’ [Wretched is a mind anxious about the future].1
‘Do what thou hast to do, and know thyself’ – that great precept is often cited by Plato;2 each clause of it embraces our entire duty, generally, and similarly embraces its fellow. Whoever would do what he has to do would see that the first thing he must learn is to know what he is and what is properly his. And whoever does know himself never considers external things to be his; above all other things he loves and cultivates himself: he rejects excessive concerns as well as useless thoughts and resolutions. ‘Ut stultitia etsi adepta est quod concupivit nunquam se tamen satis consecutam putat: sic sapientia semper eo contenta est quod adest, neque eam unquam sui poenitet.’ [Folly never thinks it has enough, even when it obtains what it desires, but Wisdom is happy with what is to hand and is never vexed with itself.]3 Epicurus frees his Wise Man from anticipation and worry about the future.4
[B] The most solid of our laws concerning the dead seems to me to be the one which requires the deeds of monarchs to be examined once their life is over. They are, if not the masters, then the companions of the laws: that which Justice could not visit upon their heads can rightly be visited upon their reputations and on the goods of their heirs – things we often prefer to life itself. It is a custom which brings many singular advantages to those peoples who observe it; it is something to be desired by good monarchs [C] who have cause to complain that the memory of the wicked is honoured just like their own. We owe subordination and obedience to all our kings equally, for that concerns their office; but we owe esteem and affection only to their virtue. Let us concede this much to the political order: to suffer kings patiently when unworthy, to hide their vices and to encourage their indifferent actions with our approbation – while their authority needs our support. But once our commerce with them is over, it is not reasonable to deprive Justice and our own freedom of the right to express our true feelings – and especially to deprive good subjects of the glory of having reverently and faithfully served a master whose imperfections were so well known to them, thus depriving posterity of so useful an example. Those who out of some private obligation wickedly espouse the memory of an unpraiseworthy monarch put private above public justice. Livy rightly says that the speech of men br
ought up under monarchies is always full of foolish pomposity and vain testimony, as each one of them elevates his king, regardless of merit, to the ultimate point of valour and sovereign greatness.5
One may reprove the greatness of soul of those two soldiers who answered Nero back to his face: one of them, when asked by Nero why he wished him ill, retorted: ‘I loved you while you deserved it; but since you have become a parricide, a fire-raiser, a mountebank and a chariot-driver, I hate you as you deserve’; the other, asked why he wanted to kill him, replied, ‘Because I can find no other remedy to your continual misdoings’; but how can anyone of sound judgement reprove those public and universal testimonies to his tyrannous and vile deeds which were rendered after his death – and always will be?6
It displeases me that such lying veneration should be found in so religious a regime as that of Sparta. On the death of their kings all their allies and neighbours and all the helots – men and women indiscriminately – slashed their foreheads in token of their grief, declaring in their cries and lamentations that the dead king was the best they had ever had, thus attributing to rank the praise which belongs to merit and attributing to the least and the lowest what belongs to the highest merit.7
Aristotle, who goes into everything, takes the saying of Solon that ‘nobody can be termed happy before he is dead’ and inquires whether even a man who has lived and died ordinately can be called happy if his reputation fares badly and if his descendants are wretched.8 While we can move we can transport ourselves by anticipation wherever we may please: but once we have gone outside our being we have no commerce with that which is. It would be better to tell Solon that no man is ever happy, therefore, since he only is so when he is no more.9
The Complete Essays Page 8