The Complete Essays (29 page)

Heu patior telis vulnera facta meis
.
[Alas, I suffer wounds made by my own arrows.]
³⁹

[C] Those [B] who shake
⁴⁰
the State are easily the first to be engulfed in its destruction. [C] The fruits of dissension are not gathered by the one who began it: he stirs and troubles the waters for other men to fish in. [B] Once the great structure of the monarchy is shaken by novelty and its interwoven bonds torn asunder – especially in its old age – the gates are opened as wide as you wish to similar attacks. [C] It is
harder for Regal Majesty, said an ancient, to decline from the summit to a middling place than to plunge from there to the very bottom.
⁴¹

But if innovators do most harm, those who copy them are more at fault for rushing to follow examples after they have experienced the horror of them and punished them. And if there are degrees of honour even in the doing of evil, then they must concede to the others the glory of innovation and the courage to make the first attempt.

[B] From this first and abundant source all kinds of new depravity go [C] happily [B] drawing ideas and models for disturbing our system of government. In the very laws which were made to remedy the original evil we can find introductions to all sorts of wicked actions and excuses for them: what is happening to us is what Thucydides said of the civil wars of his own time: that to flatter public vices and to justify them, gentler names were given to them, rejecting true indictments of them as spurious or else mitigating them.
⁴²
Yet the intention is to reform our consciences and our beliefs!
‘Honesta oratio est!’
[The plea is fine enough!]
⁴³
But even the best of [C] pretexts [B] for novelty are exceedingly dangerous: [C]
‘adeo nihil motum ex antiquo probabile est’
[so true is it that no change from ancient ways can be approved].
⁴⁴

[B] To speak frankly, it seems to me that there is a great deal of self-love and arrogance in judging so highly of your opinions that you are obliged to disturb the public peace in order to establish them, thereby introducing those many unavoidable evils and that horrifying moral corruption which, in matters of great importance, civil wars and political upheavals bring in their wake – introducing them moreover into your own country. [C] Is it not bad husbandry to encourage so many definite and acknowledged vices in order to combat alleged and disputable error? Is there any kind of vice more wicked than those which trouble the naturally recognized sense of community?

When the Roman Senate had differences with the people about the service of their religion it dared to palm them off with this evasion:
‘Ad deos id magis quam ad se pertinere, ipsos visuros ne sacra sua polluantur.’
[That this was less a matter for them than for the gods, who would see that their rites were not profaned.]
⁴⁵
That concurs with what the oracle replied to
the men of Delphi in their war against the Medes: fearing a Persian invasion they asked the god what they should do with the holy treasures in his temple, hide them or bear them away. He told them to move nothing; they should look after themselves: he was able to provide for his own.
⁴⁶

[B] The Christian religion bears all the signs of the highest justice and utility, but none is more obvious than the specific injunction to obey the powers that be and to uphold the civil polity.
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What a wondrous example was bequeathed to us by the Wisdom of God
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when, in order to establish the salvation of the human race and forward his glorious victory over death and sin, he willed to do so only within the context of our political order. He submitted the course and conduct of so sublime an enterprise, so rich in salvation, to the blind injustice of our human usages and custom, permitting the innocent blood of so many of the Elect, his favoured ones, to flow; he suffered many long years to be lost in order to bring that inestimable fruit to ripeness.

There is a huge gulf between the man who follows the conventions and laws of his country and the man who sets out to regiment them and to change them.

In excuse the former can cite simplicity, obedience and example: whatever he may do, it cannot be from ill-will, only (at worse) from misfortune; [C]
‘Quis est enim quem non moveat clarissimis monumentis testata consignataque antiquitas?’
[Who would not be moved by the most illustrious records witnessed and sealed by antiquity?] – apart from what Isocrates said, that imperfection has a greater interest in moderation than excess does.
⁴⁹

[B] The other is in a much tougher position,
⁵⁰
[C] since anyone who undertakes to chop and change usurps the right to judge and must pride himself on seeing the defect in what he would get rid of and the good in what he would bring in. The following principles are banal
enough but they did strengthen me in my position and even put a bridle on my rasher youth: never to load my shoulders with the heavy burden of claiming knowledge of so important a science;
⁵¹
Never to venture to do in such a matter what I would never dare to do in the easiest of those disciplines in which I had been instructed and where facile decisions do no harm, seeming to me as it does to be most iniquitous to wish to submit immovable public regulations and observances to the instability of private ideas (private reasoning having jurisdiction only in private matters) and to undertake against divine ordinances something that no State would tolerate against civil ones (even though human reason is far more involved in civil law, the Law is the sovereign judge of its judges; judicial discretion is limited to explaining and extending accepted usage: it cannot deflect it or make innovations). Though divine Providence has sometimes passed beyond the rules to which we are bound by necessity, it was not dispensing us from them. Such cases are blows from God’s hand which we are not to imitate but to greet with amazement; they are inordinate examples, expressly marked by signs of special approval, the same in kind as the miracles which Providence gives us in witness of his omnipotence, miracles far above our order-of-being and our capacities which it is madness and impiety to assay to imitate. We are required not to follow them but to contemplate them in ecstasy. They are acts of his Person, not ours.
⁵²

Cotta’s testimony is relevant here:
‘Quum de religione agitur T
.
Coruncanium, P. Scipionem, P. Scævolam, pontifices maximos, non Zenonem aut Cleanthem aut Chrysippum sequor.’
[In matters of religion I do not follow Zeno, Cleanthes or Chrysippus but Titus Coruncanius, Publius Scipio, Publius Scaevola and the Supreme Pontiffs.]
⁵³

[B] God does know, in our present quarrel, when a hundred articles of religion are to be removed or restored – great and profound ones – how many men are there who can proudly claim to have mastered in detail the reasons and fundamental positions of both sides. They amount to a number (if you could call them a number!) who would not have much power to disturb us. But all the rest of the crowd, where are they heading for? They rush to take sides, but under what banner? Their remedy is like other remedies when weak and badly prescribed: those humours in us which it
was meant to purge have been inflamed, irritated and aggravated by the conflict: yet the potion remains in the body. It could not purge us: it was too weak; but it has weakened us. So we cannot evacuate it, yet all we get out of its workings on our inwards is prolonged pain.

[A] Nevertheless Fortune ever reserves her authority far above our arguments; she sometimes presents us with a need so pressing that the laws simply must find room for it. [B] If you are resisting the growth of an innovation which has recently been introduced by violence, it is a dangerous and unfair obligation to be restrained by rules everywhere and all the time in your struggle against those who run loose, for whom anything is licit which advances their cause, and for whom law and order means seeking their own advantage: [C]
‘Aditum nocendi perfido praestat fides.’
[To trust an untrustworthy man is to give him power to harm.]
⁵⁴
[B] The normal restraints in a healthy State do not provide for such abnormal occurrences: they presuppose a body where the main links and functions cohere together, as well as a common consent to acknowledge and obey it. [C] The way of the law is weighty, cold and constrained; it is no good for resisting ways which are lawless and wild.

[A] We all know that two great figures in two civil wars – Octavius against Sylla and Cato against Caesar – are still reproached for having preferred to let their country suffer any extremity rather than to come to its aid by changing anything whatever at the expense of the law. For truly in dire extremities, when it is impossible to hold on, it would perhaps be wiser to bow your head a little and to let the blow fall, rather than to cling impossibly on, refusing to concede anything whatsoever and so giving violence the occasion to trample everything underfoot; it would be better, since the Laws cannot do what they wish, to force them to wish what they can do.
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That was the solution of the man who ordered them to go to sleep for four-and-twenty hours,
⁵⁶
and of that other man who made a second May out of the month of June.
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The Spartans religiously observed the ordinances of their country, but, when they were caught between a law forbidding them to elect the same admiral twice and a pressing emergency requiring Lysander to reassume that office, even they elected someone
called Aracus as Admiral and Lysander as ‘Superintendent of the Navy’!
⁵⁸
And similar acuteness was shown by a Spartan ambassador who was dispatched to the Athenians to negotiate a change in one of their laws, only to find Pericles testifying that it was forbidden to remove a tablet once a law had been inscribed on it: he counselled him – since
that
was not forbidden – simply to turn the tablet round.

Plutarch praises Philopoemen for being born to command, knowing how to issue commands by the laws and, when public necessity required it, to the laws.
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24. Same design: differing outcomes

[This chapter, while continuing to stress the uncertainty in all human affairs, shows Montaigne’s concern with the role of Fortune in all human arts, not only in the art of Medicine but in the ecstatic creativity found in the fine arts and in the art of war. In conception it owes something to Plutarch’s
Parallel Lives.
]

[A] I was given the following true account by Jacques Amyot, the Grand Almoner of France. (It is to the honour of one of our Princes, who is entitled to be counted as ‘one of ours’ even though he was born abroad.)
¹
At the siege of Rouen during the first of our civil commotions this Prince had been warned by the Queen Mother
²
of a plot hatched against him; he was specifically informed by letter of the name of the nobleman who was to carry it out – a nobleman from Anjou or Maine who was frequenting the household of this Prince for this very purpose. Our Prince, telling nobody of this warning, was on Saint Catherine’s Mount: our cannon-fire was being directed from there against Rouen, for it was during the siege of that town.
³
Walking with the Grand Almoner and another Bishop he espied this nobleman (who had been pointed out to him) and summoned him to appear before him. When the man was in his presence the Prince saw him turn suddenly pale and begin to tremble as his conscience alarmed him; ‘My Lord So-and-so,’ the Prince said to him, ‘you know well enough what I want you for: your face shows it. There is nothing you can hide from me: I am so thoroughly informed of your enterprise that if you assay covering things up you will make a bad bargain bargain worse. You know quite well such-and-such a thing – and this too (mentioning the salient points of the most secret elements of the conspiracy); for your very life you had better tell me the whole truth about this scheme.’ When the wretched man realized he had been caught and found out (for one of his accomplices had revealed everything to the Queen) all he could do was to clasp his hands together and pray the Prince for pardon and
mercy; he intended to throw himself at his feet but the Prince stopped him, going on to say: ‘Come here! Have I ever done you wrong? Have I, out of private hatred, ever done any wrong to any of your family? I have known you for a mere three weeks: what reason can have induced you to plot my death?’ The nobleman replied that he had no private cause only the general interest of his faction, since some had persuaded him that eradicating so mighty an enemy of their religion
⁴
would be a deed full of piety, no matter how it was done. ‘Now,’ continued the Prince, ‘I would like to show you how much milder is the religion I hold than the one you profess. Your religion counsels you to kill me, unheard, even though I have done you no wrong: mine commands me to forgive you, guilty though you are of having wanted to murder me without cause. Get out. Clear off! Let me never set eyes on you again. And from now on, if you are wise you will seek men of better counsel to guide your actions.’

When the Emperor Augustus was in Gaul he received conclusive evidence of a conspiracy that Lucius Cinna was cooking up against him.
⁵
He decided to avenge himself and called a Council of his friends for the following morning. But he spent the night in great distress, reflecting that the young man to be put to death was of a good family, the nephew of Pompey the Great. He groaned out contradictory arguments like this: ‘What! Shall men say that I live in fear, for ever on my guard, leaving the man who would murder me to go about at his ease? I have safely borne this head of mine through so many battles on land and sea: shall he go scot-free despite his attempt against me? And now that I have brought peace to the whole world, shall he be left free, after having determined not merely to murder me but to make a sacrificial victim of me?’ – (The conspiracy was to kill him while performing a sacrifice.) – He remained silent for a while and then berated himself in a firmer voice: ‘Why go on living if it matters to so many people that you should die? Will there never be an end of your cruel acts of vengeance? Is your life so valuable that such great harm must be done to preserve it?’

His wife, Livia, perceived his anguish and asked, ‘Will you accept womanly advice? Do what the doctors do when the usual remedies fail to work; they then assay contrary ones. Up till now severity has profited you nothing: after Salvidienus there was Lepidus; after Lepidus, Murena; after
Murena, Caepio; after Caepio, Egnatius. Begin again and find out how mildness and clemency succeed. Cinna is found guilty: grant him pardon. He can harm you no more, but he can contribute to your glory.’

Augustus was happy indeed to have found an advocate after his own heart; having thanked his wife he rescinded the order for his friends to come to Council and commanded Cinna to appear before him quite alone. Having made everyone else leave the Council chamber, he had a chair provided for Cinna and addressed him thus: ‘In the first place I ask you, Cinna, to hear me out in silence. Do not interrupt what I have to say: I will allow you time and give you leave to reply. You are aware, Cinna, that I plucked you from the camp of my enemies, you who were not merely turned into my enemy but born an enemy; yet I saved you and handed all your goods back to you. In short I helped you and eventually made you so prosperous that the victors envied the condition of the vanquished. You asked to be appointed Pontifex: I granted that to you, although I had refused it to others whose fathers had always fought at my side. I have bound you so strongly to me: yet you have planned to kill me.’

At this, Cinna exclaimed that he was far from any such a wicked thought.

Augustus continued: ‘You are not keeping your promise: you assured me that I would not be interrupted. Yes, you have planned to kill me, in such-and-such a place, in such-and-such a time, in such-and-such company and in such-and-such a manner.’

Cinna was paralysed by this news, remaining silent – not so as to keep his bargain but because his conscience was overwhelmed. Augustus saw this; he added: ‘Why do such a thing? Is it to become Emperor? The State must truly be in a bad way if there is nothing but myself between you and the Imperial office. You cannot even look after your own household, having recently lost a lawsuit through the intervention of a mere freedman. Are you able to do nothing except take on Caesar? If I am the only one frustrating your hopes, then I give up. Do you believe you will be tolerated by Paulus? by Fabius? by the Cossii and the Servilii, or by that great band of noblemen who are not merely noble in name but who honour nobility itself by their deeds?’

He said a great deal more, speaking to him for a good two hours; then he added:

‘Now go, Cinna. I once gave you your life as an enemy: I give it you now as a traitor and a parricide. From this day forth let there be loving-friendship between us: let us see who acts in better faith, I, in granting you your life, or you in accepting it.’

And with that he left him.

Some time later he granted the consulship to Cinna, reproaching him for not asking for it. Cinna subsequently became a firm friend and the sole heir to all his property.

After this incident (which occurred when Augustus was in the fortieth year of his age) there was no further plot or conspiracy against him and he received a just reward for his clemency.

But the same did not apply to our French Prince: for his mildness could not save him from falling into the snare of another similar act of treachery.
⁶
So vain and worthless is human wisdom: despite all our projects, counsels and precautions, the outcome remains in the possession of Fortune.

We talk of ‘lucky’ doctors who see a case successfully through, as though there was nothing in that Art of theirs which can stand firm, since its foundations are too fragile to hold it up by its own strength, and as though it alone needed a helping hand from Fortune to make it work. Say what you like about that Art of theirs – good or ill – and I will believe you: thank God we have nothing to do with each other. Contrary to other people, I always despise that Art when I am well but never make a truce with it when I am ill: I then begin to hate it and to fear it. I tell those who urge me to take medicine at least to wait until I am well and have got my strength back in order to have the means of resisting the hazardous effects of their potions. I let Nature run her course: I take it for granted that she is armed with teeth and claws to protect herself from attacks launched against her, so maintaining our fabric and avoiding its disintegration. Instead of going to her help when she is wrestling at close grips with the illness, I fear we help her adversary instead and load extra tasks upon her.

I maintain that not only in medicine but in many of the surer arts Fortune plays a major part. Take those creative ecstasies which transport a poet and carry him outside himself in rapture:
⁷
why do we not attribute them to good luck, since he himself confesses that they surpass his own strength and capacities, acknowledging that they come from without, being in no wise within his own power – no more than in the case of those adepts at oratory, who claim that in their art, too, there are stirrings and perturbations, outside the natural order, which impel them well beyond what they had planned. The same applies to painting, which sometimes escapes free from the brush-strokes of the painter’s hand, surpassing his
own conceptions and artistry and bringing him to an ecstasy of astonishment which leaves him thunderstruck. Why, Fortune herself reveals to us even more clearly the part she plays in all such works as these by the evidence of that grace and beauty which are found in them not only without the artist’s intention but without his knowledge. A competent reader can often find in another man’s writings perfections other than those which the author knows that he put there, and can endow them with richer senses and meanings.

As for military exploits, anyone can see that Fortune plays a major part in them: even in our very reflections and deliberations there certainly has to be an element of chance and good luck mingled in with them; all that our wisdom can do does not amount to much: the more acute and lively she is the more frailty she finds within herself and the more she distrusts herself. [A] I share Sylla’s opinion:
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[A] when I pay close attention to the most glorious exploits in war I see, I think that the leaders engage in deliberation and reflection merely as a pure formality, surrendering the best part of their undertaking to Fortune and, trusting in her aid, constantly going way beyond any bounds of rational decision. In the midst of their deliberations there comes upon them Fortune’s joyful rapture and, from beyond them, inspired frenzies which as often as not push them towards the least likely of decisions and swell their hearts above the reach of reason. That explains why many great ancient Captains, in order to lend plausibility to their bolder decisions, claimed to their men that they had been bidden to reach them by some inspiration or other, by some sign or prognostic.

That is also why, in the state of indecision and perplexity brought upon us by our inability to see what is most advantageous and to choose it (on account of the difficulties which accompany the divers unforeseeable qualities and circumstances which events bring in their train) the surest way in my opinion, even if no other considerations brought us to do so, is to opt for the course in which is found the more honourable conduct and justice; and [A1] since we doubt which is the shorter road, we should keep going straight ahead. [A] That applies to the two examples which I have just narrated: there is no doubt that it was fairer and nobler in the one who was offended not to act otherwise but to forgive. If it turned out badly for the first of them that is no reason to condemn his good intention; and we do not know, even if he had taken the opposite decision, that he would have escaped the end to which his destiny called him; but he would have lost the glory of such a memorable good deed.

History tells of many people who, faced with such fears, have chosen the way of hastening to greet any conspiracies laid against them with vengeance and punishments; yet I can see hardly any who were well served by this remedy. Many Roman Emperors bear witness to that. Anyone who finds himself in this peril should not count much on his might or his vigilance; for how hard it is to protect oneself from an enemy who is hidden behind the face of the most dutiful friend we have, or to know the inner thoughts and wishes of those who surround us! In vain does a man employ foreign nations in his personal guard, always surrounded by a hedge of armed men: anyone who holds his own life cheap is always master of the life of another man. And then the continual suspicion which leads a Prince to distrust everyone must torment him strangely. [B] Which explains why, when Dion was told that Callipus was on the lookout for ways to kill him, he had no heart to find out more, saying that he would rather die than live in the misery of having to be on guard not only against his enemies but against his friends as well.
⁹