The Complete Essays (57 page)

52. On the frugality of the Ancients

[Frugality in public and private matters was admired by the sterner Ancients (cf. Seneca,
Epistulae morales
, I, 5, etc.). This is an example of one of the earlier compilations of Montaigne which failed to grow into a larger chapter.]

[A] Attilius Regulus, the commander-in-chief of the Roman Army in Africa, at the height of his reputation for his victories over the Carthaginians wrote to the Roman State saying that one of his ploughmen whom he had left in sole charge of his estates (which consisted of some seven acres of land all told) had run off with his farm equipment: he asked for leave to go home and see to things, lest his wife and children should suffer want. (The Senate decided to appoint another man to manage the property and to make good what had been stolen, and decreed that his wife and children should be cared for at public expense.)

The elder Cato, when returning as Consul from Spain, sold his working horse to spare the expense of shipping it back to Italy; and when he was Governor of Sardinia he made his inspections on foot; his retinue consisted of one officer-of-state bearing his robes and a sacrificial vessel; and most of the time he carried his baggage himself. He was proud of never having any clothing which cost more than ten crowns and of never having spent more than tenpence a day in the market; and as for his houses in the country, not one was pointed and plastered on the outside.

Scipio Aemilianus, after having had two Triumphs and two Consulships, went on an embassy with just ten servants. They say that Homer only had one; Plato, three; Zeno the head of the Stoic sect, not even one.

[B] When Tiberius Gracchus went on an official government mission he was voted fivepence-halfpenny a day: he was then the highest man in Rome.
¹

53. On one of Caesar’s sayings

[This short chapter, concerned as it is with that
contextura corporis,
that ‘bodily structure’, which interested Lucretius, is one of many which contributed thoughts and ideas to ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’ (II, 12).]

[A] If we were occasionally to linger over an examination of ourselves and were to save the time which we spend on finding out about others and in learning about externals so as to use it to make soundings of ourselves, we would soon realize how this structure of ours is made up of weak and deficient elements. Is it not a peculiar sign of our imperfections that we cannot settle our happiness on any single thing, and that even in our wishes and our thoughts we are incapable of choosing the things which we need? Corroboration of this fact is provided by that great dispute which has ever divided philosophers over Man’s sovereign good: it still goes on, and will go on for ever, with no conclusion and no agreement:

[B]
dum abest quod avemus, id exuperare videtur
Cætera; post aliud cum contigit illud avemus,
Et sitis æqua tenet
,

[as long as we do not have it, the object of our desire seems greater than anything else: as soon as we enjoy it, we long for something different with an equal craving.]
¹

[A] No matter what falls within our knowledge, no matter what we enjoy, it fails to make us content and we go gaping after things outside our knowledge, future things, since present goods never leave us satisfied – not in my judgement because they are inadequate to satisfy us but because we clasp them in a sick and immoderate grip:

[B]
Nam, cum vidit hic, ad usum quæ flagitat usus,
Omnia jam ferme mortalibus esse parata,
Divitiis homines et honore et laude potentes
Affluere, atque bona natorum excellere fama,
Nec minus esse domi cuiquam tamen anxia corda
,

Atque animum infestis cogi servire querelis:
Intellexit ibi vitium vas efficere ipsum,
Omniaque illius vitio corrumpier intus,
Quæ collata foris et commoda quæque venirent
.

[For when Epicurus saw that almost everything necessary for Man’s life is at his disposal; when he saw men who were replete with honour and wealth and reputation and who were proud of their sons’ good fame, not one of whom was not full of inner anxiety or whose mind was not racked by grievous lamentations: then he realized that the fault was in the vessel itself, corrupting internally any good which came in to it from the outside.]
²

[A] Our appetite lacks decision and is uncertain: it can neither have anything nor enjoy anything in the proper way. Man, reckoning that the defect lies in those things themselves, feeds to the full on other things which he neither knows nor understands, and honours and reveres them; as Caesar says:
‘Communi fit vitio naturæ ut invisis, latitantibus atque incognitis rebus magis confidamus, vehementiusque exterreamur.’
[By a defect of nature common to all men, we place our trust, rather, in things unseen, hidden and unknown, and are terrified to distraction by them.]
³

54. On vain cunning devices

[Montaigne is brought to wonder what his
Essays
are worth and to draw an important distinction between good naïf Christians or good Christian mystics (who both make excellent believers) and the middling mediocre minds which do so much harm but might appreciate his
Essays.
The background of his distinction between good Christians and mediocre ones derives from the vital commonplaces of Christian ‘folly’.]

[A] There are those kinds of cunning devices, frivolous and vain, through which a reputation is sought by some men, such as those poets who compose entire works from lines all beginning with the same letter; and we can see that by increasing or shortening the length of their lines the ancient Greeks would form poems of various shapes such as eggs, balls, wings and axe-heads.
¹
Of such a kind was the art of the man who spent his time counting the number of ways in which he could arrange the letters of the alphabet and found that they came to that incredible number we can find in Plutarch.
²

I agree with the opinion of the man to whom was presented another man who was an expert at throwing grains of millet so cleverly that they infallibly went through the eye of a needle; he was asked afterwards to bestow a reward for such a rare ability: whereupon he commanded – very amusingly and correctly, if you ask me – that the man who did it should be given two or three baskets of millet so that so fine a skill should not remain unpractised!
³
It is a [C] wonderful [A] testimony of the weakness of Man’s judgement that things which are neither good nor useful it values on account of their rarity, novelty and, even more, their difficulty.

At home we have just been playing at who can find most things which meet at extremes – such as
Sire
, which is the title given to the highest
person in our State, the king, and also to common folk such as tradesmen but is never used for anyone in between. Women of the nobility are called
Dames;
middle-ranking women are called
Damoiselles;
and we use
Dames
again for the lowest women of all. [B] Canopies are hung over tables only in princely houses and in taverns.

[A] Democritus said that gods and beasts have senses more acute than men, who are at the stage in between. The Romans wore the same clothes for days of mourning and for festival-days. It is certain that extreme cowardice and extreme bravery disturb the stomach and are laxative. [C] The nickname of
Trembler
given to King Sancho XII of Navarre
⁴
serves as a reminder that boldness can make your limbs shake just as much as fear. And the man whom his squires assayed to reassure by minimizing the dangers as they helped him into his armour and saw his flesh a-quiver said to them: ‘You know me badly: if my skin realized where my heart was soon to take it, it would fall flat on the ground in a faint.’

[A] That incapacity which comes over us in the sports of Venus from lack of ardour or attraction can also do so from too ecstatic an ardour or too unruly a passion. Food can be roasted and cooked by extreme cold as well as extreme heat: Aristotle says that lead ingots will melt and turn liquid with the cold in a rigorous winter as readily as in an intensely hot summer. [C] The stages above pleasure and below pleasure can be filled with pain by both desire and satiety. [A] Animal-stupidity and wisdom converge in the way they feel and resist the misfortunes men must endure: wise men bully misfortune and master it: the others ignore it; the latter are on this side of misfortune so to speak: the former are beyond it; they first weigh and consider what misfortunes are and then judge them for what they are; they leap above them by the force of a vigorous mind; they despise them and trample them underfoot; they have souls so strong and so solid that when the arrows of Fortune strike against them they can only bounce back and be blunted, having met an obstacle which they cannot dent. Men of ordinary middling capacities are lodged between these two extremes, which is where men perceive adversities, feel them and find them unbearable. Babyhood and extreme old age meet in mental imbecility; so do avarice and profligacy, in their like desire to grab and acquire.

[B] It may be plausibly asserted that [C] there is an infant-school ignorance which precedes knowledge and another doctoral ignorance which comes after it, an ignorance made and engendered by knowledge just as it
unmade and slaughtered the first kind. [B] Good Christians are made from simple minds, incurious and unlearned, which out of reverence and obedience have simple faith and remain within prescribed doctrine. It is in minds of middling vigour and middling capacity that are born erroneous opinions, for they follow the apparent truth of their first impressions and do have a case for interpreting as simplicity and animal-stupidity the sight of people like us who stick to the old ways, fixing on us who are not instructed in such matters by study. Great minds are more settled and see things more clearly: they form another category of good believers; by long and reverent research they penetrate through to a deeper, darker light of Scripture and know the sacred and mysterious secret of our ecclesiastical polity. That is why we can see some of them arrive at the highest level via the second, with wondrous fruit and comfort, reaching as it were the ultimate bounds of Christian understanding and rejoicing in their victory with alleviation of sorrow, acts of thanksgiving, reformed behaviour and great modesty. I do not intend to place in that rank those other men who, to rid themselves of the suspicion of their past errors and to reassure us about themselves, become extremists, men lacking all discretion and unjust in the way they uphold our cause, besmirching it with innumerable reprehensible acts of violence.

[C] The simple peasants are honest people; honest, too, are philosophers, insofar as we have any nowadays with natures strong and clear, enriched by wide learning in the useful sciences. Half-breeds who have turned with contempt from the first state (illiterate ignorance) and who are incapable of reaching the other (their arses between two stools, like me and lots of others) are dangerous, absurd and troublesome: such men bring disturbances to the world. That is why, for my part, I draw back as far as I can into that first and natural state, which I had vainly made an assay at leaving behind.

Popular and purely natural poetry has its naïf charms and graces by which it can stand comparison with that chief of beauties we find in artistically perfect poetry. That can be seen from our Gascony
villanelles
and from those songs which have been reported from nations which have no knowledge of any science nor even of writing. But that middling poetry which remains between the two is despised and is without honour or price.

[A] But, because I have discovered that once our mind has found an opening we have, as usual, mistaken for a difficult task and a rare topic something which is nothing of the sort, and that once our capacity for research has been aroused we can find an infinite number of like examples,
I will merely add the following: that if these
Essays
were worthy of being judged, it could turn out in my opinion that they will hardly please common vulgar minds nor unique and outstanding ones: the former would never get enough of their meaning; the latter would understand them only too easily. These
Essays
might eke out an existence in the middle region.