The Complete Essays

by Michel de Montaigne

  Volgivagaque vagus venere ante recentia cures

  [unless you befuddle those first wounds by new ones, effacing the first by roaming as a rover through vagrant Venus.]

  Once upon a time I was touched by a grief, powerful on account of my complexion and as justified as it was powerful. I might well have died from it if I had merely trusted to my own strength. I needed a mind-departing distraction to divert it; so by art and effort I made myself fall in love, helped in that by my youth. Love comforted me and took me away from the illness brought on by that loving-friendship. The same applies everywhere: some painful idea gets hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it. If I cannot substitute an opposite one for it, I can at least find a different one. Change always solaces it, dissolves it and dispels it. If I cannot fight it, I flee it; and by my flight I made a diversion and use craft; by changing place, occupation and company I escape from it into the crowd of other pastimes and cogitations, in which it loses all track of me and cannot find me.

  That is Nature’s way when it grants us inconstancy; for Time, which she has given us as the sovereign doctor of our griefs,15 above all achieves its ends by furnishing our power of thought with ever more different concerns, so dissolving and breaking up the original concept however strong it may be. A wise man can see his dying friend scarcely less clearly after five-and-twenty years than after the first year, [C] and according to Epicurus not a jot less, for he attributed no lessening of our sufferings either to our anticipating them or to their growing old.16 [B] But so many other thoughts cut across the first one that in the end it grows tired and weary.

  To change the direction of current gossip Alcibiades lopped off the ears and tail of his beautiful dog and then chased it out into the square, so that by giving the populace something else to chatter about they would leave his other activities in peace.17 I have known women too who have hidden their true affections under pretended ones, in order to divert people’s opinions and conjectures and to mislead the gossips. But one I knew got well and truly caught: by feigning a passion, she quitted her original one for the feigned one. From her I learned that lovers who are well received ought not to consent to such mummery: since overt greetings and meetings are reserved for that decoy of a suitor, believe you me he will not be very clever if he does not eventually take your place and give you his. [C] That really is cobbling and stitching a shoe for another to wear.

  [B] We can be distracted and diverted by small things, since small things are capable of holding us. We hardly ever look at great objects in isolation: it is the trivial circumstances, the surface images, which strike us – the useless skins which objects slough off,

  Folliculos ut nunc teretes æstate cicadæ

  Linquunt.

  [such as those smooth eggshells which the cicadas cast off in summer.]18

  Even Plutarch laments his daughter by recalling her babyish tricks as a child.19 We can be afflicted by the memory of a farewell, of a gesture of some special charm or a last request. Caesar’s toga threw all Rome into turmoil – something which his death did not achieve. Take the forms of address which stay ringing in our ears – ‘My poor Master’; or ‘My dear friend’; or ‘Dear papa’ or ‘My darling daughter’: if I examine them closely when their repetition grips me, I discover that the grief lies in grammar and phonetics! What affects me are the words and the intonation (just as it is not the preacher’s arguments which most often move a congregation but his interjections – like the pitiful cry of a beast being slaughtered for our use); during that time I cannot weigh the mass of my subject or penetrate to its real essence:

  His se stimulis dolor ipse lacessit;

  [With goads such as these grief wounds its own self;]20

  yet they are the foundations of our grief.

  [C] The stubborn nature of my stones, especially when in my prick, has sometimes forced me into prolonged suppressions of urine during three or four days; they bring me so far into death that, given the cruelty of the strain which that condition entails, it would have been madness to hope to avoid dying or even to want to do so. (Oh what a past master of the art of torment was that fair Emperor who used to bind his criminals’ pricks and make them die for want of pissing!)21 Having got that far I would consider how light were the stimuli and the objects of my thought which could nurse a regret for life in me, and what minutiae served to construct in my soul the weight and difficulty of her departure; I would consider how frivolous are the images we find room for in so great a matter – a hound, a horse, a book, a wine-glass and what-not had their role in my loss. Others have their ambitious hopes, their money-bags or their erudition, which to my taste are no less silly. When I looked upon death as the end of my life, universally, then I looked upon it with indifference. Wholesale, I could master it: retail, it savaged me; the tears of a manservant, the distributing of my wardrobe, the known touch of a hand, a routine word of comfort discomforted me and made me weep.

  [B] In the same way we disturb our souls with fictional laments; the plaints of Dido and Ariadne in Virgil and Catullus arouse the feelings of the very people who do not believe in them. [C] To experience no emotion from them is to be like Polemon (of whom that is told as a miracle) and to serve as an example of a hard and inflexible heart – but Polemon of course did not even blench when a mad dog chewed off his calf!22

  [B] By inquiry no wisdom can draw so close towards understanding the condition of a living, total grief but that it will be drawn closer still by physical presence, when ears and eyes (organs which can be stirred by inessentials only) can play their part.

  Is it right for the arts to serve our natural weakness and to let them profit from our inborn animal-stupidity? The orator (says Rhetoric) when acting out his case will be moved by the sound of his own voice and by his own feigned indignation; he will allow himself to be taken in by the emotion he is portraying. By acting out his part as in a play he will stamp on himself the essence of true grief and then transmit it to the judges (who are even less involved in the case than he is); it is like those mourners who are rented for funerals and who sell their tears and grief by weight and measure: for even though they only borrow their signs of grief, it is nevertheless certain that by habitually adopting the right countenance they often get carried away and find room inside themselves for real melancholy.

  With several other of his friends I once had to escort the body of the Sieur de Gramont from La Fère, where he was killed in the siege, to Soissons.23 I reflected that wherever we passed it was by the sheer display of the pomp of our procession that we filled the populace with tears and lamentations, since they had never even heard of his name!

  [C] Quintilian says that he had known actors to be so involved in playing the part of a mourner that they were still shedding tears after they had returned home; and of himself he says that, having accepted to arouse grief in somebody else, he had so wedded himself to that emotion that he found himself surprised not only by tears but by pallor of face and by the stoop of a man truly weighed down by grief.24

  [B] In a country place hard by our mountains the women play both priest and clerk, like Father Martin. They magnify their grief for their lost husbands by recalling their good and agreeable qualities but at the same time (to counterbalance this, it seems, and to divert their pitiful feelings towards contempt) they also list and proclaim all their failings – [C] with far better grace than we have when we lose a mere acquaintance and pride ourselves on bestowing on him novel and fictitious praises, turning him, once he is lost to sight, into something quite different from what he appeared to be when we used to see him – as though regret taught us something new and tears could lave our minds and bring enlightenment to them. Here and now I renounce any flattering eulogies you may wish to make of me, not because I shall not have deserved them but because I shall then be dead!

  [B] If you ask that man over there, ‘How does this siege concern you?’ he will reply: ‘I am concerned to give an example of routine obedience to my Prince
; I do not expect to gain any benefit from it. And as for glory, I know what a small share of it can concern a private individual like me. I feel no passion; I make no claims.’ Yet look at him the following morning; there he is, ready for the assault in his place in the ranks; he is entirely changed, boiling, flushed with yellow bile. What has sent this new determination and hatred coursing through his veins is the glint of so much steel, the flashes of our cannon and the din of our kettle-drums.

  ‘A frivolous cause,’ you will say. What do you mean, cause? To excite our souls we need no causes: they can be controlled and excited by some raving disembodied fancy based on nothing. When I throw myself into building castles in the air my imagination forges me pleasures and comforts which give real delight and joy to my soul. How often do we encumber our spirits with yellow bile or sadness by means of such shadows? And we put ourselves into fantastical rages, deleterious to our souls and bodies! [C] What confused, ecstatic, madly laughing grimaces can be brought to our faces by such ravings! What jerkings of our limbs and trembling of our voices! That man over there is on his own, but does he not seem to be deceived by visions of a crowd of other men whom he has to deal with, or else to be persecuted by some devil within him?25

  [B] Ask yourself where is the object which produced such an alteration: apart from us men, is there anything in nature which is sustained by inanities or over which they have such power? Cambyses dreamt in his sleep that his brother was to become King of Persia; so he killed him – a beloved brother whom he had always relied on! Aristodemus, King of the Messenians, on account of an idea put into his head of some ill omen read into the howling of his dogs, killed himself. King Midas did the same, disturbed and worried by some unpleasant dream he had had.26

  Abandoning your life for a dream is to value it for exactly what it is worth.27 Listen [C] though [B] to our soul triumphing over her wretched body and its frailty, as the butt of all indispositions and degradations. A fat lot of reason she has to talk!

  O prima infælix fingenti terra Prometheo!

  Ille parum cauti pectoris egit opus.

  Corpora disponens, mentem non vidit in arte;

  Recta animi primum debuit esse via.

  [O wretched clay which Prometheus first moulded! How unwisely he wrought! By his art he arranged the body but saw not the mind. The right way would have been to start off with the soul.]28

  5. On some lines of Virgil

  [Montaigne now breaks totally new ground. A concern for marriage and human sexuality was widespread in the Renaissance, partly because of the Reformation with its respect for marriage and the demands made on it, partly because of ferment within the Roman Catholic Church, the universities, legal and medical circles and among moralists. (A good example of such ferment in a comic setting is The Third Book of Pantagruel by Rabelais.) Montaigne’s achievement can be compared and contrasted with that of a friend of Rabelais, the great jurisconsult Andreas Tiraquellus in his ever-expanding Latin Laws of Marriage. But Montaigne is partly making a general confession; partly (for the first time ever) giving a self-portrait in which the sexual drive is openly portrayed; partly showing how old age may come to terms with dwindling physical potency yet powerful erotic dreams and memories. The development of sexuality in his own time from (in Montaigne’s view) the courteous chastity of his father’s days to his own youth with its tolerance of the courtly service of love in extramarital love-affairs (especially between young unmarried gentlemen and married ladies) to the brutality which he believed to mark French sexuality in his declining years was doubtless (if true) one of the results of the moral collapse brought about by the Wars of Religion. Montaigne, as usual, sees men and women as body-plus-‘soul’ (or ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’). Love-affairs, primarily but by no means exclusively, concern the body. The love, amour, which Montaigne discusses here is not amitié, that loving-friendship proper to marriage at its best; after his own wedding he himself was much more loyal to his marriage-vows than he had ever dreamt possible. Virgil and Lucretius lead him to stress the poetry of erotic love and to contrast and compare it with the outspoken quasi-pornographic verses of the classical Priapics and their Renaissance imitators, who included religious leaders such as Beza. The chapter is marked by statements of anti-feminism and of jaundiced views of marriage: these are in fact often humorous in ways not always clear to modern readers. Medieval and Renaissance convention often made such attitudes comic or ironical: there is much of that here; but Horace is cited: ‘What can stop us from telling the truth with a laugh!’ Montaigne was warned before publication that his ironies might be taken seriously. That did not worry him: this is a self-portrait and he was indeed given to irony. But while Montaigne presents men and women as a case of of ‘us’ and ‘them’, he frequently gives examples of men to support a statement of allegedly female vice or virtue, and of women to exemplify allegedly masculine ones. In Rabelais or Tiraquellus, men and women are almost different creatures, their sexual drives deriving from different causes and producing different effects (men being able to control their sexuality without risk to life and health, women not). Montaigne goes back to the very passage of Plato’s Timaeus where doctors had for a millennium and a half found justification for that conviction and quietly shows that Plato made men and women equally subject to analogous sexual drives. The conclusion of Montaigne is an arresting one: women should be allowed more freedom: men and women share a common ‘mould’ – both have the common form of human kind. And that is nowhere more obvious than in our sexuality.

  The element of confession in this chapter is emphasized by Montaigne’s reminder that God sees through society’s conventions and what are nowadays called taboos, seeing us not clad in evasive words but in the cankered nakedness of soul and body, ‘with our tattered rags ripped off our pudenda.]

  [B] The more our moral thoughts are abundant and solid the more engrossing they are and oppressive. Vice, death, poverty, illness are weighty subjects and they do indeed weigh on us. We need our Soul to be instructed in the means of sustaining evils and of fighting them off, instructed too in the rules of right-living and right-believing; and we need to awaken her to practise so fine an endeavour. But in the case of a soul of the common sort this must be done with moderation and some laxity: keep her continually tensed and you drive her mad. In my youth I needed to arouse myself and counsel myself if I were to remain dutiful: liveliness and good-health do not agree all that well, [C] they say, [B] with serious and sagacious discourse. Nowadays. I am in a different state: the properties of old age give me too many counsels, making me wise and preaching at me. I have fallen from excessive gaiety into excessive seriousness which is more bothersome. That is why I deliberately go in for a bit of debauchery at times by employing my Soul on youngish wanton thoughts over which she can linger a while. From now on I am all too stale, heavy and ripe. Every day the years read me lectures on lack of ardour and on temperance. My body flees from excess: it is afraid of it. It is its turn now to guide my mind towards amendment of life. It is its turn now to act the professor, and it does so more harshly and imperiously. For one single hour, sleeping or waking, it never allows me to take time off from learning about death, suffering and penitence. I now defend myself against temperance as I used to do against voluptuousness. Now it is my body which pulls me back, to the point of numbness. Yet I want to be in every way master of myself. Wisdom has its excesses and has no less need of moderation than folly. So, fearing that in the intervals which my ills allow me, I may be desiccated, dried up and weighed down by wisdom –

  mens intenta suis ne siet usque malis

  [Lest my mind should dwell intensely on its ills]1

  I turn very gently aside and make my eyes steal away from such stormy, cloud-wracked skies as lie before me: which, thanks be to God, I can contemplate without terror but not without strain and effort; and I find myself spending my time recalling periods of my past youth:

  animus quod perdidit optat,

  Atque in præterita se totus imagine ver
sat

  [My mind prefers what it has lost and gives itself entirely over to by-gone memories.]

  Let babes look ahead, old age behind: is that not what was meant by the double face of Janus?2 The years can drag me along if they will, but they will have to drag me along facing backwards. While my eyes can still make reconnaissances into that beautiful season now expired, I will occasionally look back upon it. Although it has gone from my blood and veins at least I have no wish to tear the thought of it from my memory by the roots:

  hoc est

  Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui.

  [To be able to enjoy your former life again is to live twice.]3

  [C] Plato tells old men to go and watch the exercises, dancing and sports of the young, to enjoy in others that beauty and suppleness of body which they have no longer and to recall to their memory the grace and privileges of those years of bloom; and he desires that they should award the victory in those sports to the young man who has given most joy and gladness to the greatest number of the old.

  [B] Once upon a time I used to mark as exceptional the dark, depressing days: those days are now my routine ones; it is the ones which are beautiful and serene which are extraordinary now. I am close to the point when I shall jump for joy and accept anything which does not actually hurt as some new favour. Tickle myself I may, but cannot force a laugh out of this vile body. I make myself delight in dream and fantasy so as to divert by ruse the chagrin of old age. But it would take a different remedy to cure it. What a feeble struggle of art against nature!