The Complete Essays (72 page)

Better than any other way this idea as I conceive it can be understood from a comparison between the
Aeneid
and the
Orlando furioso
. We can see the
Aeneid
winging aloft with a firm and soaring flight, always pursuing its goal: the
Orlando furioso
we see hopping and fluttering from tale to tale as from branch to branch, never trusting its wings except to cross a short distance, seeking to alight on every hedge lest its wind or strength should give out,

Excursusque breves tentat
.

[Trying out its wings on little sorties.]
¹⁵

So much, then, for the authors who delight me most on that kind of subject.

As for my other category of books (that which mixes a little more usefulness with the delight
¹⁶
and from which I learn how to control my humours and my qualities), the authors whom I find most useful for that are Plutarch (since he has become a Frenchman)
¹⁷
and Seneca. They both are strikingly suited to my humour in that the knowledge that I seek from them is treated in pieces not sewn together (and so do not require me to bind myself to some lengthy labour, of which I am quite incapable). Such are the
Moral Works
of Plutarch, as well as the
Epistles
of Seneca which are the most beautiful part of his writings and the most profitable. I do not need a great deal of preparation to get down to them and I can drop them whenever I like, for one part of them does not really lead to another. Those two authors are in agreement over most useful and true opinions; they were both fated to be born about the same period; both to be the tutors of Roman Emperors; both came from foreign lands and both were rich and powerful.
¹⁸
Their teachings are some of the cream of philosophy and are presented in a simple and appropriate manner. Plutarch is more
uniform and constant: Seneca is more diverse and comes in waves. Seneca stiffens and tenses himself, toiling to arm virtue against weakness, fear and vicious appetites; Plutarch seems to judge those vices to be less powerful and to refuse to condescend to hasten his step or to rely on a shield. Plutarch holds to Plato’s opinions, which are gentle and well-suited to public life: Seneca’s opinions are Stoic and Epicurean, farther from common practice but in my judgement more suited [C] to the individual [A] and firmer. It seems that Seneca bowed somewhat to the tyranny of the Emperors of his day, for I hold it for certain that his judgement was under duress when he condemned the cause of those great-souled murderers of Caesar; Plutarch is a free man from end to end. Seneca is full of pithy phrases and sallies; Plutarch is full of matter. Seneca enflames you and stirs you: Plutarch is more satisfying and repays you more. [B] Plutarch leads us: Seneca drives us.

[A] As for Cicero, the works of his which are most suitable to my projects are those which above all deal with moral philosophy. But to tell the truth boldly (for once we have crossed the boundaries of insolence there is no reining us in) his style of writing seems boring to me, and so do all similar styles. For his introductory passages, his definitions, his sub-divisions and his etymologies eat up most of his work; what living marrow there is in him is smothered by the tedium of his preparations. If I spend an hour reading him (which is a lot for me) and then recall what pith and substance I have got out of him, most of the time I find nothing but wind, for he has not yet got to the material which serves my purposes and to the reasoning which actually touches on the core of what I am interested in. For me, who am only seeking to become more wise not more learned [C] or more eloquent, [A] all those marshallings of Aristotelian logic are irrelevant; I want authors [C] to begin with their conclusion: [A] I know
¹⁹
well enough what is meant by death or voluptuousness: let them not waste time dissecting them; from the outset I am looking for good solid reasons which teach me how to sustain their attacks. Neither grammatical subtleties nor ingenuity in weaving words or arguments help me in that. I want arguments which drive home their first attack right into the strongest point of doubt: Cicero’s hover about the pot and languish. They are all right for the classroom, the pulpit or the Bar where we are free to doze off and find ourselves a quarter of an hour later still with time to pick up the thread of the argument. You have to talk like
that to judges whom you want to win over whether you are right or wrong, or to schoolboys and the common people [C] to whom you have to say the lot and see what strikes home. [A] I do not want authors to strive to gain my attention by crying
Oyez
fifty times like our heralds. The Romans in their religion used to cry
Hoc age!
[This do!], [C] just as in our own we cry
Sursum corda
[Lift up your hearts];
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[A] for me they are so many wasted words. I leave home fully prepared: I need no sauce or appetizers: I can eat my meat quite raw; and instead of whetting my appetite with those preliminaries and preparations they deaden it for me and dull it.

[C] Will the licence of our times excuse my audacious sacrilege in thinking that even Plato’s
Dialogues
drag slowly along stifling his matter, and in lamenting the time spent on those long useless preparatory discussions by a man who had so many better things to say? My ignorance may be a better excuse, since I can see none of the beauty of his language.

In general I ask for books which use learning not those which trim it up.

[A] My first two, as well as Pliny and their like, have no
Hoc age:
they want to deal with people who are already on the alert – or if they do have one it is an
Hoc age
of substance with its own separate body.

I also like reading Cicero’s
Letters to Atticus,
²¹
not only because they contain much to teach us about the history and affairs of his time but, even more, so as to find out from them his private humours. For as I have said elsewhere I am uniquely curious about my authors’ soul and native judgement. By what their writings display when they are paraded in the theatre of the world we can indeed judge their talents, but we cannot judge them as men nor their morals.

I have regretted hundreds of times that we have lost the book which Brutus wrote about virtue: it is a beautiful thing to learn the theory from those who thoroughly know the practice; yet seeing that the preacher and the preaching are two different things, I am just as happy to see Brutus in Plutarch as in a book of his own. I would rather have a true account of his chat with his private friends in his tent on the eve of a battle than the oration which he delivered next morning to his army, and what he did in his work-room and bedroom than what he did in the Forum or Senate.

As for Cicero, I share the common opinion that, erudition apart, there
was little excellence in his soul. He was a good citizen, affable by nature as fat jolly men like him frequently are; but it is no lie to say that his share of weakness and ambitious vanity was very great. I cannot excuse him for reckoning his poetry worth publishing; it is no great crime to write bad verses but it was an error of judgement on his part not to have known how unworthy they were of the glory of his name.

As for his eloquence it is beyond compare; I believe no one will ever equal it.
²²
The younger Cicero, who resembled his father only in name, when in command of Asia found there were several men whom he did not know seated at his table: among others there was Caestius at the foot of it, where people often sneak in to enjoy the open hospitality of the great. Cicero asked one of his men who he was and was told his name; but, as a man whose thoughts were elsewhere and who kept forgetting the replies to his questions, he asked it him again two or three times. The servant, to avoid the bother of having to go on repeating the same thing and so as to enable Cicero to identify the man by something about him, replied, ‘It is that man called Caestius who is said not to think much of your father’s eloquence compared to his own.’ Cicero, suddenly provoked by that, ordered his men to grab hold of that wretched Caestius and, in his presence, to give him a good flogging. A most discourteous host!
²³

Even among those who reckoned that his eloquence was, all things considered, beyond compare, there were some who did not omit to draw attention to some defects in it; such as his friend the great Brutus who said it was an eloquence
‘fractam et elumbem’
– ‘broken and dislocated’.
²⁴
Orators living near his own time criticized him for the persistent trouble he took to end his periods with lengthy cadences, and noted that he often used in them the words
‘esse videatur’
[it would seem to be].

Personally I prefer cadences which conclude more abruptly, cut into iambics. He too can, very occasionally, mix his rhythms quite roughly: my own ears pointed this sentence out to me:
‘Ego vero me minus diu senem esse mallem, quam esse senem, antequam essem.’
[I indeed hold being old less long better than being old before I am.]
²⁵

The historians play right into my court. They are pleasant and delightful; and at the same time
²⁶
[C] Man in general whom I seek to know appears in them more alive and more entire than in any other sort of writing, showing the true diversity of his inward qualities, both wholesale and retail, the variety of ways in which he is put together and the events which menace him.

[A] Now the most appropriate historians for me are those who write men’s lives, since they linger more over motives than events, over what comes from inside more than what happens outside. That is why, of historians of every kind, Plutarch is the man for me.

I am deeply sorry that we do not have Diogenes Laertiuses by the dozen, or that he himself did not spread himself more widely [C] or more wisely, for I consider the lives and fortunes of the great teachers of mankind no less carefully than their ideas and doctrines.
²⁷

[A] In this genre – the study of history – we must without distinction leaf our way through all kinds of authors, ancient and modern, in pidgin and in French, so as to learn about the
matter
which they treat in their divergent ways. But Caesar seems to me to deserve special study, not only to learn historical facts but on his own account, since his perfection excels that of all others, even including Sallust.

I certainly read Caesar with rather more reverence and awe than is usual for the works of men, at times considering the man himself through his deeds and the miracle of his greatness, at others the purity and the inimitable polish of his language which not only surpassed that of all other historians, as Cicero said, but [C] perhaps [A] that of Cicero himself.
²⁸
There is such a lack of bias in his judgement when he talks of his enemies
²⁹
that the only thing you can reproach him with, apart from the deceptive colours under which he seeks to hide his bad cause and the filth
of his pernicious ambition, is that he talks of himself too sparingly. For so many great things cannot have been done by him without he himself contributing more to them than he includes in his books.

I like either very simple historians or else outstanding ones. The simple ones, who have nothing of their own to contribute, merely bringing to their task care and diligence in collecting everything which comes to their attention and chronicling everything in good faith without choice or selection, leave our judgement intact for the discerning of the truth. Among others there is for example that good man Froissart who strides with such frank sincerity through his enterprise that when he has made an error he is never afraid to admit it and to correct it at whatever point he has reached when told about it; and he relates all the various rumours which were current and the differing reports that were made to him. Here is the very stuff of history, naked and unshaped: each man can draw such profit from it as his understanding allows.

The truly outstanding historians are capable of choosing what is worth knowing; they can select which of two reports is the more likely; from the endowments and humours of princes they can draw conclusions about their intentions and attribute appropriate words to them. Such historians are right to assume the authority of controlling what we accept by what they do: but that certainly belongs to very few.

Those who lie in between (as most historians do) spoil everything for us: they want to chew things over for us; they give themselves the right to make judgements and consequently bend history to their own ideas: for once our judgement leans to one side we cannot stop ourselves twisting and distorting the narration to that bias. They take on the task of choosing what is worth knowing, often hiding from us some speech or private action which would have taught us much more; they leave out things they find incredible because they do not understand them, and doubtless leave out others because they do not know how to put them into good Latin or French. Let them make a display of their rhetoric and their arguments if they dare to; let them judge as they like: but let them leave us the means of making our own judgements after them; let them not deprave by their abridgements nor arrange by their selection anything of material substance, but rather let them pass it all on to us purely and wholly, in all its dimensions.
³⁰