The Complete Essays (71 page)

10. On books

[Montaigne gives himself to us in this chapter; especially the [C] additions show how he had moved from studying himself as a particular man to studying also Man in general, and how he, as a man, should live. The framework of his judgement on books (which is clearly implied but was then so well-known that it did not need to be spelled out) was Horace’s division of good authors in his
Ars Poetica
into the author who ‘simply delights’ us and the very great one
‘qui miscuit utile dulci’ –
who ‘mixes the useful with the sweet’. This notion was so current in the Renaissance that great authors such as Rabelais and Ronsard were often called
utiles-doux
(‘useful-delightful’). In this context
, useful
always meant ‘useful for learning moral lessons’. For Montaigne all good historians are both delightful and useful, in this sense, but there are very few of them.]

[A] I do not doubt that I often happen to talk of things which are treated better in the writings of master-craftsmen, and with more authenticity. What you have here is purely an assay of my natural, not at all of my acquired, abilities. Anyone who catches me out in ignorance does me no harm: I cannot vouch to other people for my reasonings: I can scarcely vouch for them to myself and am by no means satisfied with them. If anyone is looking for knowledge let him go where such fish are to be caught: there is nothing I lay claim to less. These are my own thoughts, by which I am striving to make known not matter but me. Perhaps I shall master that matter one day; or perhaps I did do so once when Fortune managed to bring me to places where light is thrown on it. But [C] I no longer remember anything about that. I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.
¹

[A] So I guarantee you nothing for certain, except my making known
²
[Al] what point I have so far reached in my knowledge
³
[C] of it. Do not linger over the matter but over my fashioning of it. Where my borrowings are concerned, see whether I have been able to select something which improves my theme: I get others to say what I cannot put so well myself, sometimes because of the weakness of my language and sometimes because of the weakness of my intellect. I do not count my borrowings: I weigh them; if I had wanted them valued for their number I would have burdened myself with twice as many. They are all, except for very, very few, taken from names so famous and ancient that they seem to name themselves without help from me. In the case of those reasonings and original ideas which I transplant into my own soil and confound with my own, I sometimes deliberately omit to give the author’s name so as to rein in the temerity of those hasty criticisms which leap to attack writings of every kind, especially recent writings by men still alive and in our vulgar tongue which allow anyone to talk about them and which seem to convict both their conception and design of being just as vulgar. I want them to flick Plutarch’s nose in mistake for mine and to scald themselves by insulting the Seneca in me. I have to hide my weakness beneath those great reputations. I will love the man who can pluck out my feathers – I mean by the perspicacity of his judgement and by his sheer ability to distinguish the force and beauty of the topics. Myself, who am constantly unable to sort out my borrowings by my knowledge of where they came from, am quite able to measure my reach and to know that my own soil is in no wise capable of bringing forth some of the richer flowers that I find rooted there and which all the produce of my own growing could never match.

[A] What I am obliged to answer for is for getting myself tangled up, or if there is any inanity or defect in my reasoning which I do not see or which I am incapable of seeing once it is pointed out to me. Faults can often escape our vigilance: sickness of judgement consists in not perceiving them when they are revealed to us. Knowledge and truth can lodge within us without judgement; judgement can do so without them: indeed, recognizing
our ignorance is one of the surest and most beautiful witnesses to our judgement that I can find.

I have no sergeant-major to marshal my arguments other than Fortune. As my ravings present themselves, I pile them up; sometimes they all come crowding together: sometimes they drag along in single file. I want people to see my natural ordinary stride, however much it wanders off the path. I let myself go along as I find myself to be; anyway the matters treated here are not such that ignorance of them cannot be permitted nor talking of them casually or rashly. I would very much love to grasp things with a complete understanding but I cannot bring myself to pay the high cost of doing so. My design is to spend whatever life I have left gently and unlaboriously. I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even for learning’s sake however precious it may be. From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime: or if I do study, I seek only that branch of learning which deals with knowing myself and which teaches me how to live and die well:

[B]
Has meus ad metas sudet oportet equus
.

[This is the winning-post towards which my sweating horse must run.]
⁴

[A] If I come across difficult passages in my reading I never bite my nails over them: after making a charge or two I let them be. [B] If I settled down to them I would waste myself and my time, for my mind is made for the first jump. What I fail to see during my original charge I see even less when I stubborn it out.

I can do nothing without gaiety: persistence [C] and too much intensity [B] dazzle my judgement, making it sad and weary. [C] My vision becomes confused and dissipated: [B] I must tell it to withdraw and then make fresh glancing attacks, just as we are told to judge the sheen of scarlet-cloth by running our eyes over it several times, catching various glimpses of it, sudden, repeated and renewed.

[A] If one book wearies me I take up another, applying myself to it only during those hours when I begin to be gripped by boredom at doing nothing. I do not have much to do with books by modern authors, since the Ancients seem to me to be more taut and ample; nor with books in Greek, since my judgement [C] cannot do its job properly on the basis of a schoolboy, apprenticed [A] understanding.
⁵

[A] Among books affording plain delight, I judge that the
Decameron
of Boccaccio, Rabelais and the
Basia
of Johannes Secundus (if they are to be placed in this category)
⁶
are worth spending time on. As for the
Amadis
and such like, they did not have enough authority to captivate me even in childhood.
⁷
I will also add, boldly or rashly, that this aged heavy soul of mine can no longer be tickled by good old Ovid (let alone Ariosto): his flowing style and his invention, which once enraptured me, now hardly have the power of holding my attention.

I freely say what I think about all things – even about those which doubtless exceed my competence and which I in no wise claim to be within my jurisdiction. When I express my opinions it is so as to reveal the measure of my sight not the measure of the thing. When I find that I have no taste for the
Axiochus
of Plato – a weak book, considering its author
⁸
– my judgement does not trust itself: it is not so daft as to oppose the authority of so many [C] other judgements, famous and ancient, which it holds as its professors and masters: rather is it happy to err with them.
⁹
[A] It blames itself, condemning itself either for stopping at the outer rind and for being unable to get right down to the bottom of things, or else for looking at the matter in some false light. My judgement is quite content merely to protect itself from confusion and unruliness: as for its weakness, it willingly acknowledges it and avows it. What it thinks it should do is to give a just interpretation of such phenomena as its power of conception presents it with: but they are feeble ones and imperfect. Most of Aesop’s fables have several senses and several ways of being understood. Those who treat them as myths select some aspect which squares well with the fable; yet [B] in most cases [A] that is only the first surface facet of them: there are other facets, more vivid, more of their essence, more inward, to which they never manage to penetrate; that is what I do.

But to get on: it has always seemed to me that in poetry Virgil,
Lucretius, Catullus and Horace rank highest by far – especially Virgil in his
Georgics
, which I reckon to be the most perfect achievement in poetry; by a comparison with it one can easily see that there are passages in the
Aeneid
to which Virgil, if he had been able, would have given a touch of the comb. [B] And in the
Aeneid
the fifth book seems to me the most perfect. [A] I also love Lucan and like to be often in his company, not so much for his style as for his own worth and for the truth of his opinions and judgements. As for that good poet Terence – the grace and delight of the Latin tongue – I find him wonderful at vividly depicting the emotions of the soul and the modes of our behaviour; [C] our own actions today constantly bring me back to him. [A] However often I read him I always find some new grace and beauty in him.

Those who lived soon after Virgil’s time complained that some put Lucretius on a par with him. My opinion is that such a comparison is indeed between unequals; yet I have quite a job confirming myself in that belief when I find myself enthralled by one of Lucretius’ finer passages. If they were irritated by that comparison what would they say of the animal stupidity and barbarous insensitivity of those who now compare Ariosto with him? And what would Ariosto himself say?

[Al]
O seclum insipiens et infacetum!

[O what a silly, tasteless age!]
¹⁰

[A] I reckon that the Ancients had even more reason to complain of those who put Plautus on a par with Terence (who savours much more of the nobleman) than of those who did so for Lucretius and Virgil. [C] It does much for Terence’s reputation and superiority that the Father of Roman Eloquence has him – alone in his class – often on his lips, and so too the verdict which the best judge among Roman poets gave of his fellow-poet.
¹¹

[A] It has often occurred to me that those of our contemporaries who undertake to write comedies (such as the Italians, who are quite good at it) use three or four plots from Terence or Plautus to make one of their own. In one single comedy they pile up five or six tales from Boccaccio. What makes them so burden themselves with matter is their lack of confidence in their ability to sustain themselves with their own graces: they need
something solid to lean on; not having enough in themselves to captivate us they want the story to detain us. In the case of my author, Terence, it is quite the reverse: the perfections and beauties of the fashioning of his language make us lose our craving for his subject: everywhere it is his elegance and his graciousness which hold us; everywhere he is so delightful –

liquidas puroque simillimus amni

[flowing exactly like a pure fountain]
¹²

– and he so fills our souls to the brim with his graces that we forget those of his plot.

Considerations like these encourage me to go further: I note that the good poets of Antiquity avoided any striving to display not only such fantastic hyperboles as the Spaniards and the Petrarchists do but even those sweeter and more restrained acute phrases which adorn all works of poetry in the following centuries. Yet not one sound judge regrets that the Ancients lacked them nor fails to admire the incomparable even smoothness and the sustained sweetness and flourishing beauty of the epigrams of Catullus above the sharp goads with which Martial enlivens the tails of his. The reason for this is the same as I stated just now, and as Martial said of himself:
‘Minus illi ingenio laborandum fuit, in cujus locum materia successerat.’
[He had less need to strive after originality, its place had been taken by his matter.]
¹³
Those earlier poets achieve their effects without getting excited and goading themselves on; they find laughter everywhere: they do not have to go and tickle themselves! The later ones need extraneous help: the less spirit they have, the more body they need. [B] They get up on their horses because they cannot stand on their own legs. [A] It is the same with our dancing: those men of low estate who teach it are unable to copy the deportment and propriety of our nobility
¹⁴
and so try to gain favour by their daring footwork and other strange acrobatics. [B] And it is far easier for ladies to cut a figure in dances which require a variety of intricate bodily movements than in certain other stately dances in which they merely have to walk with a natural step and display their native bearing and their usual graces. [A] Just as some excellent clowns whom I have seen are able to give us all the delight which can be drawn from their art
while wearing their everyday clothes, whereas to put us in a laughing mood their apprentices and those who are less deeply learned in that art have to put flour on their faces, dress up in funny clothes and hide behind silly movements and grimaces.