The Complete Essays (156 page)

8. On the art of conversation

[French children know that Pascal referred to Montaigne as ‘the incomparable author of “The art of conversation” ’. That has given this chapter a special place in French culture. It is further valued for the light it throws on to Montaigne’s character. The conversation in this chapter turns to Tacitus and shows us how Montaigne had conversations with himself about the books he was reading.]

[B] It is a custom of our justice to punish some as a warning to others. [C] For to punish them for
having done
wrong would, as Plato says, be stupid: what is done cannot be undone. The intention is to stop them from repeating the same mistake or to make others avoid their error.
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[B] We do not improve the man we hang: we improve others by him. I do the same. My defects are becoming natural and incorrigible, but as fine gentlemen serve the public as models to follow I may serve a turn as a model to avoid:

Nonne vides Albi ut male vivat filius, utque
Barrus inops? magnum documentum, ne patriam rem
Perdere quis velit

[You can see, can’t you, how wretchedly Albus’ son is living and how poor Barrus is? An excellent lesson in not squandering your inheritance.]
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The act of publishing and indicting my imperfections may teach someone how to fear them. (The talents which I most esteem in myself derive more [C] honour [B] from
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indicting me than praising me.) That is why I so often return to it and linger over it. Yet, when all has been said, you never talk about yourself without loss: condemn yourself and you are always believed: praise yourself and you never are.

There may be others of my complexion who learn better by counter-example than by example, by eschewing not pursuing. That was the sort of
instruction which the Elder Cato was thinking of when he said that the wise have more to learn from the fools than the fools from the wise;
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as also that lyre-player in antiquity who, Pausanias says, used to require his students to go and listen to some performer who lived across the street so that they would learn to loathe discords and faulty rhythms.
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My horror of cruelty thrusts me deeper into clemency than any example of clemency ever could draw me. A good equerry does not make me sit up straight in the saddle as much as the sight of a lawyer or a Venetian out riding, and a bad use of language corrects my own better than a good one. Every day I am warned and counselled by the stupid deportment of someone. What hits you affects you and wakes you up more than what pleases you. We can only improve ourselves in times such as these by walking backwards, by discord not by harmony, by being different not by being like. Having myself learned little from good examples I use the bad ones, the text of which is routine. [C] I strove to be as agreeable as others were seen to be boring; as firm as others were flabby; as gentle as others were sharp. But I was setting myself unattainable standards.
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[B] To my taste the most fruitful and most natural exercise of our minds is conversation. I find the practice of it the most delightful activity in our lives. That is why, if I were now obliged to make the choice, I think I would rather lose my sight than my powers of speech or hearing. In their academies the Athenians, and even more the Romans, maintained this exercise in great honour. In our own times the Italians retain some vestiges of it – greatly to their benefit, as can be seen from a comparison of their intelligence and ours. Studying books has a languid feeble motion, whereas conversation provides teaching and exercise all at once. If I am sparring with a strong and solid opponent he will attack me on the flanks, stick his lance in me right and left; his ideas send mine soaring. Rivalry, competitiveness and glory will drive me and raise me above my own level. In conversation the most painful quality is perfect harmony.

Just as our mind is strengthened by contact with vigorous and well-ordered minds, so too it is impossible to overstate how much it loses and deteriorates by the continuous commerce and contact we have with mean and ailing ones. No infection is as contagious as that is. I know by
experience what that costs by the ell. I love arguing and discussing, but with only a few men and for my own sake: for to serve as a spectacle to the great and indulge in a parade of your wits and your verbiage is, I consider, an unbecoming trade for an honourable gentleman.

Stupidity is a bad quality: but to be unable to put up with it, to be vexed and ground down by it (as happens to me) is another, hardly worse in its unmannerliness than stupidity. And that is what at present I wish to condemn in myself.

I embark upon discussion and argument with great ease and liberty. Since opinions do not find in me a ready soil to thrust and spread their roots into, no premise shocks me, no belief hurts me, no matter how opposite to my own they may be. There is no idea so frivolous or odd which does not appear to me to be fittingly produced by the mind of man. Those of us who deprive our judgement of the right to pass sentence look gently on strange opinions; we may not lend them our approbation but we do readily lend them our ears. When one scale in the balance is quite empty I will let the other be swayed by an old woman’s dreams: so it seems pardonable if I choose the odd number rather than the even, or Thursday rather than Friday; if I prefer to be twelfth or fourteenth at table rather than thirteenth; if I prefer on my travels to see a hare skirting my path rather than crossing it, and offer my left foot to be booted before the right. All such lunacies (which are believed among us) at least deserve to be heard. For me they only outweigh an empty scale, but outweigh it they do. Similarly the weight of popular and unfounded opinions has a natural existence which is more than nothing. A man who will not go that far perhaps avoids the vice of superstition by falling into the vice of stubbornness.

So contradictory judgements neither offend me nor irritate me: they merely wake me up and provide me with exercise. We avoid being corrected: we ought to come forward and accept it, especially when it comes from conversation not a lecture. Whenever we meet opposition, we do not look to see if it is just but how we can get out of it, rightly or wrongly. Instead of welcoming arms we stretch out our claws. I can put up with being roughly handled by my friends: ‘You are an idiot! You are raving!’ Among gentlemen I like people to express themselves heartily, their words following wherever their thoughts lead. We ought to toughen and fortify our ears against being seduced by the sound of polite words. I like a strong, intimate, manly fellowship, the kind of friendship which rejoices in sharp vigorous exchanges just as love rejoices in bites and scratches which draw blood. [C] It is not strong enough nor
magnanimous enough if it is not argumentative, if all is politeness and art; if it is afraid of clashes and walks hobbled.
‘Neque enim disputari sine reprehensione potest.’
[It is impossible to debate without refuting.]
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[B] When I am contradicted it arouses my attention not my wrath. I move towards the man who contradicts me: he is instructing me. The cause of truth ought to be common to us both. – What will his answer be? The passion of anger has already wounded his judgement. Turbulence has seized it before reason can. – It would be a useful idea if we had to wager on the deciding of our quarrels, useful if there were a material sign of our defeats so that we could keep tally on them and my manservant say: ‘Last year your ignorance and stubbornness cost you one hundred crowns on twenty occasions.’

I welcome truth, I fondle it, in whosesoever hand I find it; I surrender to it cheerfully, welcoming it with my vanquished arms as soon as I see it approaching from afar. [C] And provided that they do not set about it with too imperious and schoolmasterish a frown I will put my shoulder to the wheel to help along the criticisms that people make of my writings: I have often made changes more for reasons of politeness than to effect reasonable corrections, preferring to please and encourage people’s freedom to criticize me by my readiness to give way – yes, even when it cost me something. Yet it is difficult to attract men to do that in our days. They have no stomach for correcting because they have no stomach for suffering correction, always dissembling when talking in each other’s presence.

I take such great pleasure in being judged and known that it is virtually indifferent to me which of the two forms it takes. My thought so often contradicts and condemns itself that it is all one to me if someone else does so, seeing that I give to his refutation only such authority as I please. But I fall out with anyone who is too high-handed, like one man I know who laments the fact that he gave you advice if you do not accept it and takes it as an insult if you shy at following it.

Socrates always laughingly welcomed contradictions made to his arguments. It could be said that since his arguments were the stronger the advantage would always fall to him and that he welcomed them as matter for fresh triumphs: but we, on the contrary, find that there is nothing which makes us more susceptible than convictions about our own surpassing excellence, our contempt for our adversary, and about its being reasonable
for the weaker to be willing to accept refutations which set him back on his feet and redress him.

[B] I do truly seek to frequent those who manhandle me rather than those who are afraid of me. It is a bland and harmful pleasure to have to deal with people who admire us and defer to us. Antisthenes commanded his sons never to give thanks or show gratitude to anyone who praised them.
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I feel far prouder of the victory I win over myself when I make myself give way beneath my adversary’s powers of reason in the heat of battle than I ever feel gratified by the victory I win over him through his weakness. In short I admit and acknowledge any attacks, no matter how feeble, if they are made directly, but I am all too impatient of attacks which are not made in due form. I care little about what we are discussing; all opinions are the same to me and it is all but indifferent to me which proposition emerges victorious. I can go on peacefully arguing all day if the debate is conducted with due order. [C] It is not so much forceful and subtle argument that I want as order – the kind of order which can be found every day in disputes among shepherds and shop-assistants yet never among us. If they go astray it is in lack of courtesy. So do we. But their stormy intolerance does not make them stray far from their theme: their arguments keep on course. They interrupt each other. They jostle, but at least get the gist. To answer the point is, in my judgement, to answer very well. [B] But when the discussion becomes turbulent and lacks order, I quit the subject-matter and cling irritably and injudiciously to the form, dashing into a style of debate which is stubborn, ill-willed and imperious, one which I have to blush for later.

[C] It is impossible to argue in good faith with a fool. Not only my judgement is corrupted at the hands of so violent a master, so is my sense of right and wrong. Our quarrels ought to be outlawed and punished as are other verbal crimes. Since they are always ruled and governed by anger, what vices do they not awaken and pile up on each other? First we feel enmity for the arguments and then for the men. In debating we are taught merely how to refute arguments; the result of each side’s refuting the other is that the fruit of our debates is the destruction and annihilation of the truth.
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That is why Plato in his
Republic
prohibits that exercise to ill-endowed minds not suited to it.
¹⁰

[B] You are in quest of [C] what
is
.
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[B] Why on earth do you set out to walk that road with a man who has neither pace nor style? We do no wrong to the subject-matter if we depart from it in order to examine the way to treat it – I do not mean a scholastic donnish way, I mean a natural way, based on a healthy intellect. But what happens in the end? One goes east and the other west; they lose the fundamental point in the confusion of a mass of incidentals. After a tempestuous hour they no longer know what they are looking for. One man is beside the bull’s eye, the other too high, the other too low. One fastens on a word or a comparison; another no longer sees his opponent’s arguments, being too caught up in his own train of thought: he is thinking of pursuing his own argument not yours. Another, realizing he is too weak in the loins, is afraid of everything, denies everything and, from the outset, muddles and [C] confuses the argument, or else, at the climax of the debate he falls into a rebellious total silence, affecting, out of morose ignorance, a haughty disdain or an absurdly modest desire to avoid contention. [B] Yet
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another does not care how much he drops his own guard provided that he can hit you. Another counts every word and believes they are as weighty as reasons. This man merely exploits the superior power of his voice and lungs. And then there is the man who sums up against himself; and the other who deafens you with useless introductions and digressions. [C] Another is armed with pure insults and picks a groundless ‘German quarrel’ so as to free himself from the company and conversation of a mind which presses hard on his own.