The Complete Essays (168 page)

I love living a private life because I do so by my own choice, not because
I am unsuited to a public one (which doubtless equally accords with my complexion). I serve my Prince all the more happily because that is the free choice of my judgement and reason, [C] without any private obligation, [B] and because I am not constrained or forced back to it by being unacceptable to all the other parties or disliked by them. And so on. I detest such helpings as necessity carves for me. Any advantage would have me by the throat if I had to rely on it alone.

Alter remus aquas, alter mihi radat arenas
.
[Let one oar sweep the water and the other sweep the strand.]
¹²¹

One cord is never enough to hold me in place.

‘There is vanity,’ you say, ‘in such a pastime.’ – Yes. Where is there not? Those fine precepts are all vanity, and all wisdom is vanity: [C]
‘Dominus novit cogitationes sapientium, quoniam vanae sunt.’
[The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.]
¹²²
[B] Those exquisite subtleties are only good for sermons: they are themes which seek to drive us into the next world like donkeys. But life is material motion in the body, an activity, by its very essence, imperfect and unruly: I work to serve it on its own terms.

Quisque suos patimur manes
.
[Each suffers his own torments.]
¹²³

[C]
‘Sic est faciendum ut contra naturam universam nihil coritendamus; ea tamen conservata, propriam sequamur.’
[We must so live as not to struggle against Nature in general; having safeguarded such things, we should follow our own nature.]

[B] What is the use of those high philosophical peaks on which no human being can settle and those rules which exceed our practice and our power? I am well aware that people often expound to us ideas about life which neither the speaker nor the hearers have any hope of following or (what is more) any desire. The judge filches a bit of the very same paper on which he has just written the sentence on an adulterer in order to send a
billet-doux to the wife of a colleague. [C] The woman you have just been having an illicit tumble with will soon, in your very presence, be screaming harsher condemnations of a similar fault in a friend of hers than Portia would. [B] Some condemn people to death for crimes which they do not actually believe to be even mistakes. When I was a youth I saw a fine gentleman offering to the public, with one hand, poetry excelling in beauty and eroticism both, and with the other, at the same instant, the most cantankerous reformation of theology that the world has had for breakfast for many a long year.
¹²⁴

That is the way humans proceed. We let the laws and precepts go their own way: we take another – not only because of unruly morals but often because of contrary opinions and judgement. Listen to the recital of a philosophical discourse: its invention, eloquence and appositeness at once strike your attention and move your emotions. But there is nothing there which stings or pricks your conscience: it was not addressed to it, was it? Yet Ariston said that neither a bath nor a lecture bears any fruit unless they cleanse you and get the filth off.
¹²⁵
You can linger over the hide, but only after extracting the marrow, just as it is only after we have drunk the wine that we examine the engravings and workmanship of a beautiful goblet.

In all the chambers of the ancient philosophers you will find that the same author, at the same time, publishes rules for temperance and works of love and debauchery. [C] Xenophon wrote against Aristippus’ concept of pleasure while lying in the lap of Clinias. [B] Those were not miraculous conversions sweeping over them in waves. First it is Solon presenting himself in the guise of a lawgiver, and then as himself: at one time he is speaking for the many, at another for himself alone and (certain as he is that he is firmly and totally well) he takes for himself the free and natural rules:

Curentur dubii medicis majoribus ægri!
[Let the dangerously ill call in great doctors!]
¹²⁶

[C] Antisthenes allows his sage to like anything he finds appropriate, and to do it in his own fashion without heeding the laws, since he has a better judgement than they do and a greater knowledge of virtue. His disciple Diogenes said that we should counter perturbations by reason; fortune, by
courage; laws, by nature.
¹²⁷
[B] It is for tender stomachs that we have restricted, artificial diets: [C] sound ones simply follow the prescriptions of their natural appetite. [B] Thus do our doctors eat melons and drink cool wine while keeping their patients on syrups and pap.

‘I know nothing of their books,’ said Laïs the courtesan, ‘nor of their wisdom and philosophy, but those fellows come knocking at my door as often as anyone.’
¹²⁸
Since our licence always takes us beyond what is lawful and permissible, we have often made the precepts and laws for our lives stricter than universal reason requires.

Nemo satis credit tantum delinquere quantum
Permittas
.

[Nobody thinks that his own transgressions exceed what is allowable.]
¹²⁹

It would be preferable if there were more proportion between commands and obedience. A target we cannot reach appears unfair. No man is so moral but that, if he submitted his deeds and thoughts to cross-examination by the laws, he would be found worthy of hanging on ten occasions in his lifetime – yes, even the kind of man whom it would be a great scandal to punish and a great injustice to execute.

Olle, quid ad te
De cute quid faciat ilk, vel illa sua?

[What concern is it of yours, Ollus, what he does with his own skin and she with hers?]

And one who deserves no praise as a man of virtue [C] and whom philosophy could most justly cause to be flogged [B] may well break no laws, so confused and unfair is the correspondence between law and virtue. We do not care to be decent folk by the standards of God: we could never be so by our own. Human wisdom has never managed to live up to the duties which it has prescribed for itself; and if it had done so, it would have prescribed itself more, further beyond them still, towards which it could continue to strive and aspire, so hostile is our condition to immobility. [C] Man commands himself to be necessarily at fault. It is not
very clever of him to tailor his obligations to the standards of a different kind of being. He expects no one to do it, so whom is he prescribing it for? Is it wrong of Man not to do what is impossible for him to do? The very laws which condemn us to be unable blame us for being so.

[B] If the worst comes to the worst, that deformed licence to present themselves in two ways, their actions in one fashion and their rhetoric in another, may be conceded to those who tell of
things
: it cannot apply to those who tell of themselves as I do my pen must go the same way as my feet. I life lived in society must bear some relationship to other lives. Cato’s virtue was excessively rigorous by the standards of his age; and in a man occupied in governing others and destined to serve the commonwealth, we could say that his justice, if not unjust, was at least vain and unseasonable. [C] My own manners deviate from current morality by hardly more than an inch, yet even that makes me untractable for this age and unsociable. I do not know whether I am unreasonable in losing my taste for the society I frequent, but I do know that it would be unreasonable if I complained that it had lost its taste for me more than I for it.

[B] The virtue allotted to this world’s affairs is a virtue with many angles, crinkles and corners so that it can be applied and joined to our human frailty; it is complex and artificial, not straight, clear-cut, constant, nor purely innocent. To this very day our annals criticize one of our kings for allowing himself to be too naively influenced by the persuasions which his confessor addressed to his conscience.
¹³⁰
Affairs of state have their own bolder precepts:

exeat aula
Qui vult esse pius
.

[he who would be pious should quit the court.]
¹³¹

Once I made an assay at using in the service of some political manoeuvrings, such opinions and rules of life as were born in me or instilled into me by education – rough, fresh, unpolished and unpolluted ones, the virtues of a schoolboy or a novice, which I practise, [C] if not [B] conveniently [C] at least surely, [B] in my private life. I found that they were inapplicable and dangerous. Anyone who goes into the throng must be prepared to side-step, to squeeze in his elbows, to dodge to and fro and, indeed, to abandon the straight path according to
what he encounters; he must live not so much by his norms but by those of others; not so much according to what he prescribes to himself but to what others prescribe to him, and according to the time, according to the men, according to the negotiations…
¹³²

[C] Plato says that anyone who escapes with unsmirched linen from the management of the world’s affairs does so by a miracle. He also says that when he laid it down that his philosopher should rule the state he was not speaking of corrupt polities such as that of Athens (and even less of ones like our own, faced with which even Wisdom would forget her Latin), since a seedling transplanted into a soil very different in character from itself conforms itself to it rather than reforming it.
¹³³

[B] If I had thoroughly to prepare myself for such occupations, I know that I would need many changes and adjustments. Even if I could manage it (and why should I not do so, given time and trouble?) I would not want to. The little I have assayed of such a vocation was quite enough to put me off. Sometimes I do feel some temptations towards ambition smouldering in my soul, but I tense myself and obstinately resist.

At tu, Catulle, obstinatus obdura!
[Come on Catullus! Be obstinately obdurate!]
¹³⁴

I am rarely summoned: and I just as seldom volunteer. [C] My master qualities, liberty and laziness, are qualities which are diametrically opposed to such a trade. [B] We do not know how to distinguish the faculties of men: they have fine divisions and their boundaries are hard to select. To infer a capacity for the affairs of State from a capacity for private affairs is to make I bad inference. A man may control himself but not others, [C] being able to produce Essays but nothing effective; another [B] may organize a good siege but not a battle he may speak well in private but badly in public or before his prince. Indeed, evidence that he can do one perhaps suggests that he cannot do the other.

[C] I find that higher intellects are hardly less suited to lowlier matters than lowly intellects are to the higher. Who would ever have expected Socrates to have furnished the Athenians with a good laugh at his expense because he was never able to add up the votes of his tribe and report them
to the Council?
¹³⁵
The veneration that I feel for the perfections of that great man certainly deserves that it should be his fortune to supply such a magnificent example to excuse my chief imperfections!

[B] Our ability is chopped up into little bits. My own has no breadth, and is also numerically weak. Saturninus said to those who had conferred on him the supreme command: ‘You have lost a fine captain, Comrades, to make a poor general.’

Anyone who, in an ailing time like ours, boasts that he can bring a naïve and pure virtue to this world’s service either has no idea what virtue is, since our opinions are corrupted along with our morals – indeed, just listen to them describing it; listen to most of them vaunting of their deeds and formulating their rules: instead of describing virtue they are describing pure injustice and vice, and they present it, thus falsified, in the education of princes – or else, if he does have some notion of it, he boasts wrongfully and, say what he will, does hundreds of things for which his conscience condemns him. In similar circumstances Seneca’s account of his experience I would readily believe, provided that he would talk to me about it unreservedly. In such straits the most honourable mark of goodness consists in freely acknowledging your defects and those of others, while using your powers to resist and retard the slide towards evil, having to be dragged down that slope, while hoping for improvement and desiring improvement.

During the divisions into which we are fallen, tearing France limb from limb, each man, I notice, strives to defend his cause, but even the best of them with deception and lies. Anyone who wrote bluntly about it would do so inadequately and ill-advisedly, since even the juster party is itself a limb of that rotten, worm-eaten body. Yet in such a body the least affected limb is termed healthy – rightly so: since our qualities are valid only by comparison, civil integrity is measured according to time and place. I would like to see, I must say, Agesilaus praised as follows in Xenophon!