The Complete Essays (180 page)

[C] Those meat-pies stuffed with commonplaces by which so many eke out their studies on the cheap are useless except for commonplace topics; they can be used to show off, but not for right conduct – just such a laughable fruit of learning as served as knock-about amusement for Socrates against Euthydemus.
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I have known books made out of materials which have never been studied or understood, the author having entrusted the research for this and that needed to construct it to divers learned friends, being content for his part with having thought up the project and then having made an industrious compilation out of that bundle of unknown materials. At least the ink and paper are his. In all conscience that is not writing a book but purchasing one, borrowing one. It shows men – something of which they might have remained in doubt – that you are unable to write one. [B] A presiding judge boasted in my presence that he had amassed two hundred or so borrowed commonplaces and worked them into one of his presidential rescripts.
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[C] By declaring that fact to all and sundry he seemed to me to be nullifying the glory he was being given for it. [B] A petty and ridiculous vanity for my taste in such a subject and in such a person.
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[C] Among my many borrowings I take delight in being able to conceal the occasional one, masking it and distorting it to serve a new purpose. At the risk of letting people say that it is because I failed to understand any of the meanings in context, I give that one some peculiar slant with my own hand, so that they may all be less purely and simply someone else’s. [B] But those others put their larcenies on parade and into their accounts, thereby acquiring a better claim in law than I do! [C] Followers of Nature like me reckon that, in honour, invention takes incomparably higher precedence over quotation.

[B] If I had wanted to speak from erudition I would have done so sooner: I would have written at a time closer to my studies when I had more memory and Nous. And if I had wanted to make a trade out of writing I would have had more confidence in myself at that age than I do now. [C] Moreover one particular favour which Fortune may have
granted me by means of this book would then have occurred at a more propitious season. [B] Two of my acquaintances, men of great scholarship, have in my opinion lost half their value by declining to publish at forty and waiting until they were [C] sixty.
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[B] Like youth, maturity has its defects: worse ones. And old age is as unsuited to work of that nature as to any other. Whoever submits his senile mind to the presses is mad if he hopes to extract anything which does not stink of a man who is ugly, raving and half-asleep. Our mind as it ages becomes constipated and squat. I reveal my ignorance with copious pomp: I reveal my learning meagrely and pitifully – [C] the latter as an accessory, a by-product: the former, as explicit and primary. Strictly, I treat nothing except nothing, and I treat not science but nescience. [B] I have selected the time when my life (which I have to portray) is laid out before me: whatever remains over has more to do with dying. The only news which I would willingly still give to the public as I pack my bags would concern my dying, if I found it, as others do, to be loquacious.

It vexes me that Socrates, who was the perfect exemplar of all the great qualities, should have chanced to have so ugly a face and body (as they say he did), one so unbecoming to the beauty of his soul, [C] he who was so much in love, so madly in love, with beauty. Nature did him an injustice there. [B] There is nothing more probable than the conformity and correspondence of the body and the mind.
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[C]
‘Ipsi animi magni refert quali in corpore locati sint: multa enim e corpore existunt quœ acuant mentem, multa quœ obtundant.’
[It matters much to souls in what sort of body they are lodged; for many of the body’s qualities serve to sharpen the mind, and many others make it obtuse.]
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The author here is talking about unnatural ugliness and physical deformity. But we also use ugliness to mean an immediately recognizable uncomeliness, which is lodged primarily in the face and which we often find distasteful for quite trivial causes: for its colouring, a spot, a coarse expression or for some inexplicable reason even when the limbs are well-proportioned and whole. In that category was the ugliness which clothed the most beautiful soul of La Boëtie. Such surface ugliness, imperious though it may be, is less harmful in its effects on a man’s mind and is not, in people’s opinion, by any means a certain prognostic. The other kind, which is strictly speaking deformity, is more
substantial and more inclined to turn its effects inwards. The shape of the foot is revealed not only by a shoe of fine polished leather but by any close-fitting one. [B] As Socrates said of his own ugliness: it would have revealed quite justly the ugliness of his soul, had he not corrected his soul by education.
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[C] But in saying it I hold that he was jesting as usual: never did so excellent a soul make itself.

[B] I cannot repeat often enough how highly I rate beauty, which is a powerful and most beneficial quality. (Socrates called it a ‘brief tyranny’ [C] and Plato ‘a privilege of Nature’.)
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[B] We have no other qualities which surpass it in repute. It holds the highest rank in human intercourse: it runs ahead of the others, carries off our judgement and biases it with its great authority and its wondrous impact. [C] Phryne would have lost her case even in the hands of an excellent advocate if she had not corrupted her judges by the brilliance of her beauty as she parted her garment.
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And I find that Cyrus, Alexander and Caesar, those three lords of the world, did not neglect it in order to execute their great endeavours. Nor did the elder Scipio. In Greek one and the same word embraces the beautiful and the good. And the Holy Ghost often calls things good when He means beautiful.
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I would readily defend the hierarchy of goods taken
from an ancient poem and song which Plato says was popular: health, beauty, wealth.
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.

Aristotle says that the right to command belongs to the beautiful and that, whenever there are persons whose beauty approaches that of the portraits of the gods, like veneration is due to them. When someone asked him why men haunt the company of the beautiful both longer and more often, he replied: ‘Only a blind man should ask that.’
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Most of the philosophers, and the greatest, paid for their tuition and acquired their wisdom by the favour and agency of their beauty.

[B] Not only in the men but in the animals serving me I consider beauty to be only two fingers away from goodness. Yet to me it seems that those facial traits and features and those distinctive characteristics from which inner complexions are inferred as well as our future destinies are things which cannot be lodged simply and directly under the headings of beauty or ugliness: no more than in times of plague pleasant smells and a clear atmosphere can promise salubrity nor all kinds of oppressiveness and stench threaten infection.

Those who accuse ladies of contradicting their beauty by their morals do not always strike home: a face may not be very well-shaped yet have an air of probity and dependability; just as, on the contrary, I have read behind a pair of beautiful eyes warnings of a malicious and dangerous character. Some physiognomies augur well: in the thick of victorious enemies you would immediately, from among men unknown, pick out one rather than another to surrender to and to entrust with your life: and you would not have been influenced strictly speaking by beauty. Looks are a weak guarantee, yet they have some influence.

If my task were to administer floggings, I would do so more severely to criminals who belie and betray the promises which Nature had planted on their features: I would inflict harsher punishment on malice in a man who looked debonair. It appears that some faces are blessed, others unblessed, and there is I think an art which can distinguish between the debonair face and the simple one, the severe and the harsh the sullen and the chagrined,
the arrogant and the melancholic, and such other pairs of qualities.
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Some forms of beauty are not merely proud but haughty; others are gentle, and others still are lifeless. As for forecasting the future from them, such [C] matters [B] I leave undecided.
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As I have said already, as regards myself I have simply adopted raw that ancient precept which says that we cannot go wrong by following Nature, and that the sovereign precept is to conform to her.
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Unlike Socrates I have not corrected my natural complexions by the power of reason,
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and I have in no wise let my inclinations become confused by artifice. I let myself go as I came in: I combat nothing; my two principal parts live graciously together in peace and harmony. But, thank God, my nurse’s milk was moderately healthful and temperate.

[C] May I say
en passant
that I know There is a certain scholastic concept of morality – virtually the only one current – which is held in higher esteem among us than it is worth; it is a slave to precepts and bound by hopes and fears. I like the morality which laws and religions do not make up but make perfect and authoritative, one which knows that it has the means of sustaining itself without help, one which, rooted on its own stock, is born in us from the seed of that universal reason which is stamped upon every man who is not disnatured. That Reason which straightened out Socrates’ vicious kink made him obedient to the men and the gods who commanded in his city and courageous in death not because his soul was immortal but because he himself was mortal. Any instruction which convinces people that religious belief alone, without morality, suffices to satisfy God’s justice is destructive of all government and is far more harmful than it is ingenious and subtle. Men’s practices reveal an extraordinary distinction between devotion and the sense of right and wrong.

[B] I have a [C] bearing [B] which,
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both in beauty and as it is interpreted, is of good augury –

Quid dixi habere? Imo habui, Chreme!
[What am I saying,
have
, Chremes? I mean I
had
!]

Heu tantum attriti corporis ossa vides!
[Alas! You now see only the bones of this worn-down body!]
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– and has an appearance contrary to that of Socrates. It has often happened that people who have had no previous acquaintance with me, people going merely by my fine air and [C] presence, [B] have put
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great trust in me either for their own affairs or my own. And in foreign countries I have received singular and rare favour because of it. The following two experiences are perhaps both worth narrating in detail.

There was a man who had determined to take me and my house by surprise. His trick was to come alone to my gate and to press to be admitted fairly urgently. I knew him by name and had occasion to put my trust in him as a neighbour who was to some degree related to me by marriage. I opened the gate for him [C] as I do for everyone. [B] There he was, looking quite terrified, with his horse winded and quite exhausted. He told me the following story: one of his enemies had just come across him some half a league away. (I knew that man too and had heard of their quarrel.) He said that this enemy had followed remarkably close on his heels. He, having been taken by surprise [C] in disarray [B] and being weaker [C] in numbers, [B] had rushed to my gate for safety; he was very worried about his men whom he said he supposed were dead [C] or taken.
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[B] Very naively I assayed to strengthen, reassure and reinvigorate him. Soon after, lo and behold! four or five of his soldiers appeared, looking equally frightened and wanting to be let in. More came; then still more, until there was some twenty-five or thirty of them, all armed and well-equipped and claiming to have their enemy at their heels.

[C] This mystery-play began to awaken my suspicions: [B] I had not forgotten what a time we were living in, nor how much my house
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might be coveted; and I knew of several cases of acquaintances of mine who had had similar bad experiences. Nevertheless, I considered that there was nothing to be gained by having started out to be welcoming if I did not go through with it; so, not being able to defeat them without smashing up everything, I allowed myself to take the simplest and most natural course (as I always do) and ordered them to come in.

Besides, by my nature I am neither very suspicious nor distrustful; and that is the truth. I have a strong tendency to find justifications and the kindest interpretation. I judge men according to the common order of Nature; I do not believe in perverted and disnatured tendencies, any more than in portents and miracles, unless I am forced to do so by some major piece of evidence. I am moreover a man inclined to trust myself to Fortune and to allow myself to dash into her arms. Up to the present I have had more reason to congratulate myself on that than to pity myself, and I have found Fortune [C] both better informed and better disposed towards my affairs than I am. [B] There
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have been a few deeds in my life the handling of which could rightly be called difficult or, if you wish, wise. Allow even a third of those to be due to me: but two-thirds, certainly, were abundantly due to her.

– [C] Where we go wrong, if you ask me, is in not entrusting ourselves enough to Heaven and in expecting more from our own conduct of affairs than rightly belongs to us. That explains why our schemes so often go awry. Heaven is jealous of the scope which we allow to the rights of human wisdom to the prejudice of its own: the more we extend them the more Heaven cuts them back. –