The Complete Essays (112 page)

[A] That I find my own work pardonable is not so much for itself or its true worth as from a comparison with other writings which are worse – things which I can see people taking seriously. I envy the happiness of those who can find joy and satisfaction in their own works, for it is an easy way to give oneself pleasure, [B] deriving as it does from oneself, [C] especially if they show a little confidence in their self-deception. I know one poet to whom, in both the crowd and in his drawing-room, the mighty, the humble and the very earth and heavens all cry out that he knows nothing about poetry. For all that he will not in any way lower the status which he has carved out for himself: he is for ever beginning again, having second thoughts, never giving up, all the more strong in his opinion, all the more inflexible, since he has to maintain it all alone.

[A] My own works, far from smiling on me, irritate me every single time I go over them again:

[B]
Cum relego, scripsisse pudet, quia plurima cerno,
Me quoque qui feci judice, digna lini
.                

[When I read it over, I am ashamed to have written it, because even I who wrote it judge it worth erasing.]
⁸

[A] I always have in my soul an Ideal form, [C] some vague pattern, [A] which presents me, [C] as in a dream, [A] with a better form than the one I have employed; but I can never grasp it nor make use of it. And [C] even that Ideal is only of medium rank. I argue from this that the products of [A] those great fertile minds
⁹
of former times greatly surpass the farthest stretch of my imagination and my desires. Their writings do not merely satisfy me and leave me replete: they leave me thunderstruck and throw me into an ecstasy of wonder. I can judge their beauty and can see it, if not through and through at least penetrating so deep that I know it is impossible for me to aspire that far. No matter what I undertake, I owe a sacrifice to the Graces to gain their favour (as Plutarch says of someone or other).

Si quid enim placet,
Si quid dulce hominum sensibus influit,
Debentur lepidis omnia gratiis
.                 

[If anything pleases, if it infuses any delight into the minds of men, all is owed to the elegant Graces.]
¹⁰

But the Graces are always deserting me. In my case everything is coarse: there is a lack of charm and beauty. I cannot manage to give things their full worth; and my style adds nothing to my matter. That is why I need my matter to be solid, with plenty to get hold of, matter shining in its own right.

[C] When I seize upon more popular or more cheerful matter it is to follow my own bent: I have no love as the world has for gloomy formal wisdom; I do it to cheer up myself not to cheer up my style, which prefers grave and serious matters – that is if I ought to use the term style for my formless way of speaking, free from rules and in the popular idiom,
proceeding without definitions, subdivisions and conclusions, confused like that of Amafanius and Rabirius.
¹¹
[A] I have no idea how to please, delight or titillate; the best tale in the world withers in my hand and loses its sparkle. I can talk only when I am in earnest; I am quite devoid of that fluent discourse which I notice in many of my companions who are able to entertain every newcomer, to keep an entire crowd in suspense or to gain the ear of a monarch on all sorts of topics without boring him and without ever running out of things to say, because of their gift of exploiting the first matter which comes along, by adapting it to the humour and intelligence of those with whom they are dealing. [B] Princes are not very fond of solid arguments: and I am not very fond of spinning yarns. [A] Take the easiest and the most basic arguments (which are also usually the most readily grasped): I have no ideas how to use them – [C] I am bad at preaching to the common man. On any topic I like starting with my conclusions. Cicero reckons that the hardest part of a philosophical treatise is the beginning.
¹²
Since that is so I tackle the end. [A] Yet we have to [C] tune [A] our string to all kinds of modes: and the most acute mode is the one which is most infrequently played. There is at least as much achievement in enhancing an empty subject as in bearing up under a weighty one. Sometimes we must treat only the surface arguments; at other times we must go deeper. I am well aware that most men keep to that lower level because they are unable to conceive anything beyond the outer skin; but I am also aware that the greatest masters such as [C] Xenophon and [A] Plato can often be found slackening their string for that baser, more popular style of speaking and of treating their subjects, sustaining their style with their never-failing graces.

Meanwhile there is nothing fluent or polished about my language; it is rough [C] and disdainful, [A] with rhetorical arrangements which are free and undisciplined. And I like it that way, [C] by inclination if not by judgement. [A] But I fully realize that I sometimes let myself go too far in that direction, striving to avoid artificiality and affectation only to fall into them at the other extreme:

Brevis esse laboro:
obscurus fio
.                                 
[I try to be brief and become obscure.]
¹³

[C] Plato says that neither length nor concision are properties which add anything to one’s language or detract from it.

[A] Even if I were to try to follow that other smooth-flowing well-ordered style I could never get there; and though the abrupt cadences of Sallust best correspond to my humour, I nevertheless find Caesar a greater writer and one less easy to reproduce stylistically. Although my own bent leads me to imitate rather the spoken style of Seneca, I nevertheless esteem Plutarch’s more highly. In doing as in writing, I simply follow my natural form: which perhaps explains why I am better at speaking than I am at writing. Gestures and movements animate words, especially in the case of those who gesticulate brusquely as I do and who get excited. Our bearing, our facial expressions, our voice, our dress and the way we stand can lend value to things which in themselves are hardly worth more than chatter. In Tacitus Messala complains of the restrictive accoutrements of his time and the construction of the benches which orators had to speak from which weakened their eloquence.
¹⁴

[A1] In pronunciation, among other things, my French is corrupted by home-grown barbarisms; I have never known a man from our part of the world who did not obviously reek of dialect and who did not offend pure French ears. Yet that is not because I have a wide knowledge of my local Périgordian speech, for I am no more fluent in that than in German; it does not concern me much. [C] It is a dialect like the others here and there around me – those of Poitou, Saintonge, Angoûmois, Limoges and the Auvergne – soft, drawling and squittering. [A] Towards the mountains way above where we live there is indeed a form of Gascon which I find singularly beautiful, dry, concise and expressive, a language more truly manly and soldierly than any other I know, [C] as sinewy, forceful and direct as French is graceful, refined and ample.

[A] As for Latin, which was vouchsafed me as my mother-tongue, I have through lack of practice lost the readiness I had for talking it – [C] yes, and for writing it too, for which I was once called clever Johnny. [A] Which shows what little I am worth from that angle.

In commerce between men beauty is a quality of great price; it is the first means of reconciling men to each other; there is no man so barbarous or uncouth as not to feel himself at least a little struck by its sweetness. The
body is a major part of our being; it ranks greatly within it; that is why the way it is built up and composed is most justly worth attention. Those who wish to take our two principal pieces apart and to sequester one from the other are wrong. We must on the contrary couple and join them closely together. We must command the soul not to withdraw to its quarters, not to entertain itself apart, not to despise and abandon the body (something which it cannot do anyway except by some monkey-like counterfeit) but to rally to it, take it in its arms and cherish it, help it, look after it, counsel it, and when it strays set it to rights and bring it back home again. It should in short marry the body and serve as its husband, so that what they do should not appear opposed and divergent but harmonious and uniform. Christians have their own special teaching about this bonding, for they know that God’s justice embraces this joint fellowship of body and soul (going so far as to make the body able to enjoy everlasting rewards) and that God sees the deeds of the whole man, willing that the whole man should receive rewards or punishments according to his merits.
¹⁵

[C] The Peripatetic School, the school most concerned with civility attributes to wisdom only one task: to obtain and procure the common good of these two parts in fellowship; it demonstrates that the other schools, by not being adequately devoted to the concerns of this liaison, have taken sides, one for the body the other for the soul, equally erroneous in having pulled apart their object (which is Man) and their Guide (which, for the genus Man, they swear to be Nature).

[A] The first sign of distinction among men and the first consideration which gave some of them pre-eminence over others was in all likelihood superior beauty.

          [B]
Agros divisere atque dedere
Pro facie cujusque et viribus ingenióque:
Nam facies multum valuit viresque vigebant
.

[They divided up their lands and granted them to each according to his beauty, his strength and his intelligence; for beauty had great power, and strength was respected.]
¹⁶

[A] Now my build is a little below the average. This defect is not only ugly but unbecoming, especially in those who hold commands and commissions since they lack the authority given by a handsome presence and a majestic body. [C] Gaius Marius never willingly accepted soldiers who were under six foot. For the gentleman whom he is grooming Il
Cortegiano
is quite right to desire a medium height rather than any other, and to reject for him any oddity which made him conspicuous. But when that medium is lacking, to go and choose that he should fall short of it rather than exceed it is something I would not do in the case of a fighting-man. Aristotle says a small man may well be pretty but not beautiful;
¹⁷
as a great soul is manifested in its greatness, so beauty is known from a body great and tall. [A] ‘The Ethiopians and Indians,’ he says, ‘when they select their kings and magistrates take account of the beauty and height of the individuals.’
¹⁸
And they were right, for a man’s followers feel respect and the enemy feels dismay upon seeing a leader with a splendid beautiful stature marching at the head of his troops:

[B]
Ipse inter primos præstanti corpore Turnus
Vertitur, arma tenens, et toto vertice supra est
.

[Turnus himself, outstanding in body, is in the foremost rank, weapon in hand, head and shoulders above the others.]

Our great and holy heavenly King, every circumstance of whom should be noted with care, devotion and reverence, did not spurn the advantage of bodily beauty:
‘speciosus forma præ filiis hominum’
. [fairer than the children of men.] [C] And as well as temperance and fortitude, Plato desired beauty in the guardians of his Republic.
¹⁹

[A] It is highly irritating if you are asked in the midst of your own servants, ‘Where is your Master?’ and if, when hats are doffed, you get only the tail-end of it, after your barber or your secretary. As happened to the wretched [A1] Philopoemen.
²⁰
[A] When he was the first of his
troops to arrive where he was to lodge and where he was expected, his hostess, who did not recognize him and saw him looking rather shabby, made him go and help her women-folk to draw water and to poke the fire, ‘to prepare things for [A1] Philopoemen’! [A] When the gentlemen of his entourage arrived, came upon him labouring at this handsome task (for he had not failed to obey the orders given him) and asked him what he was up to, he replied, ‘I am paying the price of my ugliness.’ Other beauties are for the women: the only masculine beauty is beauty of stature. When a man is merely short, neither the breadth and smoothness of a forehead nor the soft white of an eye nor a medium nose nor the small-ness of an ear or mouth nor the regularity or whiteness of teeth nor the smooth thickness of a beard, brown as the husk of a chestnut, nor curly hair nor the correct contour of a head nor freshness of hue nor a pleasing face nor a body without smell nor limbs justly proportioned can make him beautiful.

Meanwhile my build is tough and thick-set, my face is not fat but full; my complexion is [B] between the jovial and the melancholic, moderately [A] sanguine and hot;

Unde rigent setis mihi crura, et pectora villis;
[Whence my hairy legs and my hirsute chest;]

my health is sound and vigorous and until now, when I am well on in years, [B] rarely troubled by illness – [A] I used to be like that, for I am not considering myself as I am now that I have entered the approaches to old age, having [A1] long since [A] passed forty.