Michel de Montaigne’s greatest successor in the tradition of the essay, William Hazlitt, said ‘Montaigne was the first to have the courage to say as an author what he felt as a man.’ This hits the nail on the head. There is no neater encapsulation of what is special about Montaigne: the frankness and directness of his self-revelation, his lack of pretension and conceit, and his amused but generous view of all things human, make him a wonderfully refreshing personality – and it is his personality that comes direct from the page along with the fruits of his wide reading and his liberal attitudes. He was fascinated by the world of human experience, and writing about it was his way of meditating on it.
After inheriting his father’s rich estate in the lush interior of Aquitaine, Montaigne decided to quit public life as a magistrate in the parlement of Bordeaux, and devote himself to leisurely study. Instead of leading to the Horatian idyll of self-cultivation that Montaigne expected, the inactivity and desultory reading gave him a nervous breakdown. It was to steady himself that he began to write.
When I lately retired to my own house, with a resolution, as much as possibly I could, to avoid all manner of concern in affairs, and to spend in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live, I fancied I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth do, as being by time become more settled and mature; but I find that, quite contrary, it is like a horse that has broke from his rider, who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman would put him to, and creates me so many chimaeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without order or design, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself.
Since he was neither a military man nor a man of affairs, Montaigne’s only subject matter was himself; so he resolved to try (essayer) to assay himself, his nature, his opinions, his attitudes and reactions, pretending nothing and confessing all. ‘I am myself the matter of my book,’ he wrote; and he knew that he was engaged in something wholly original by being so. The result is a classic that has been admired, imitated and enjoyed ever since.
Others form Man; I give an account of Man and sketch a picture of a particular one of them who is very badly formed and who, if I could, I would truly make very different from what he is; but that’s past recalling … I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: ’tis all one; all moral philosophy may as well be applied to a common and private life, as to one of richer composition: every man carries the entire form of human condition. Authors communicate themselves to the people by some especial and extrinsic mark; I, the first of any, by my universal being; as Michel de Montaigne, not as a grammarian, a poet, or a lawyer.
A major reason for the enduring attraction of Montaigne’s Essays is that they do what all classics do: they illuminate the universal in the particular. In one way this should be a surprise, because Montaigne was a highly individual man, and by his own account a rather unsuccessful one. He frankly confessed his inabilities and shortcomings, his dislike of business, his yearning for solitude, his regret at being forgetful and not very clever, his physical lacks (he was short and had, he tells us, a small penis). Yet his frankness is refreshing and full of human truth.
Now I am something lower than the middle stature, a defect that not only borders upon deformity, but carries withal a great deal of inconvenience along with it … Little men, says Aristotle, are pretty, but not handsome …
Is it reasonable that, being so particular in my way of living, I should pretend to recommend myself to the public knowledge? And is it also reason that I should produce to the world, where art and handling have so much credit and authority, crude and simple effects of nature, and of a weak nature to boot?
Nevertheless Montaigne found a method of writing suited to the character of his mind – an aleatory, divagatory, exploratory method which meanders along with his thoughts, making his essays unsystematic and random, full of unexpected and invariably entertaining detours.
His great question was Socrates’ question: ‘how should one live?’ and this makes him a contemporary for all times. Scholars like to emphasise the respects in which he was of his epoch, rooting him in the turbulent mixture of Renaissance and Reformation that made it possible for him to write as a pagan while in the midst of the sixteenth century’s bitter Wars of Religion. His own family was divided between the Protestant and Catholic causes, but, following the example of Justus Lipsius, Montaigne himself remained scrupulously orthodox to outward view as a Catholic, though every indication in his writings tells us that he was a sceptic in religion as in everything else, and had – as Pascal critically noted – a pagan attitude to death as the end of one’s existence. But when we allow him his universality we see why he speaks with equal clarity to his contemporaries at the end of the sixteenth century, to Voltaire in the eighteenth century, to William Hazlitt in the nineteenth, and to us today.
The two keys to Montaigne are his sympathetic imagination, and his scepticism. Like Hazlitt after him, Montaigne recognised that understanding human nature and the human condition is crucially a matter of entering sympathetically into the experience of others.
I am one of those who are most sensible of the power of imagination: every one is jostled by it, but some are overthrown by it. It has a very piercing impression upon me … I could live by the sole help of healthful and jolly company: the very sight of another’s pain materially pains me, and I often usurp the sensations of another person. A perpetual cough in another tickles my lungs and throat. I more unwillingly visit the sick in whom by love and duty I am interested, than those I care not for, to whom I less look. I take possession of the disease I am concerned at, and take it to myself.
The other key to Montaigne is scepticism, the scepticism of the ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis, as recorded by Sextus Empiricus. Pyrrho argued that because the arguments for and against any proposition are equally good or bad, one must suspend judgement (a state known as acatalepsia). This open-minded, non-committal, often ambiguous stance suited Montaigne. He accordingly chose as his motto Que sais-je? What do I know? said with a shrug of the shoulders. But there’s a nuance here that was well spotted by the great late-nineteenth-century Montaigne scholar Pierre Villey: that Montaigne was a true Pyrrhonian only in his middle period – the period of Book Two of the Essays. In Book One he was a Stoic, that is, one who believes that we must resign ourselves with courage to face life’s inevitabilities, but must master ourselves with respect to what lies under our own control: namely our appetites and fears and desires. By the time of Book Three, written a decade after the publication of the first two books, Montaigne had come to accept what the Chinese philosopher Mencius before him, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau after him, independently believed: that man is naturally good.
This development in his attitude (it was not strictly speaking a change of view) is interesting. Montaigne retired from public life in 1568, the year that he inherited his estate. His nervous breakdown occurred around 1570. He wrote the essays comprising Book One in the first half of the 1570s, and the essays of Book Two in the second half of the 1570s. They were published together in 1580, and became an immediate best-seller. Montaigne then travelled for his health to the spas of Germany and Italy, keeping a journal; and in the late 1580s he wrote the essays comprising Book Three. These are far longer than the earlier essays, and to me they suggest a return to Stoicism – a revised, modified, sceptical Stoicism to be sure, but a form of Stoicism nonetheless, filtered through an even more intensely personal and modest self-examination. Remember his words, quoted earlier: ‘Others form Man; I give an account of Man and sketch a picture of a particular one of them who is very badly formed and who, if I could, I’d truly make very different from what he is.’ The journey to this mature reconciliation with himself came courtesy of his profound belief that anything viewed from the long perspective of history, or from vantage points quite different from one’s own habitual attitudes, would put everything into perspective, making both enthusiasm and anxiety impossible. And he therefore arrived at the conclusion that, although ‘badly formed’, he did not need to remake himself differently even if he could.
Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have lived it; I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future; and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that I am without.
That is the voice of someone who has come to terms with himself, showing that the process of writing the essays had achieved its intended effect after all.
But it was not only self-understanding and the desire to cure a nervous breakdown that motivated Montaigne. He found that the whole human spectacle demanded contemplation too, and he applied his ideal of Olympian neutrality, formed from his Stoic and Sceptic inclinations, to make sense of it. A controversial example is his reaction to the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the violent sectarian hatreds that both unleashed and followed it. The Massacre was that awful event in France in 1572 in which Roman Catholics murdered thousands of Huguenots, an assault that began on St Bartholomew’s Day, 23 August, and continued in different French cities over several months.
These events occurred even as Montaigne was writing the first book of his essays, and his reaction to them was Stoic detachment, an attitude that made some of his later readers temper their admiration – especially the Romantics of the nineteenth century, who found him too dispassionate, too cool, in contrast to their style of enthusiasm. But those who had learned enough from life to understand the saying ‘in youth I loved Ovid, in age I love Horace’ well understood his point. Take for example Stefan Zweig as just such a reader; before his suicide in 1942 Zweig listed the general propositions that Montaigne, despite his sceptic acatalepsia, came to assert as convictions, all on the theme of being free: free from vanity, from partisanship, from ambition, from the fear of death.
Montaigne assumed the role of detached spectator of the human comedy, and advised having an intimately private ‘room behind the shop’ as he put it – rather like Virginia Woolf’s ‘Room of One’s Own’ – where one could commune with oneself in peace and solitude. This, he said, was a necessary condition for his plan of exploring humanity by exploring himself.
For this design of mine, ’tis convenient for me to write at home, in a wild country, where I have nobody to assist or relieve me; where I hardly see a man who understands the Latin of the Paternoster, and of French little less. I might have done it better elsewhere, but then the work would have been less my own; and its principal end and perfection is to be exactly mine.
But although Montaigne extolled the virtues of solitude, he also advised conviviality and friendship, and the profound lifelong love he felt for the friend he lost early in life, the poet Étienne de la Boétie, demonstrates that he understood this on his pulses. That is an attractive feature of the man, and goes a long way to explaining the ingenuousness, modesty and sanity of his account of himself, offered as a self-portrait of humanity; for it is not possible to know oneself without knowing others, any more than one can know one’s own country properly without having travelled abroad.
An important aspect of knowing others is the generosity and sympathy with which one views them. I’ve mentioned both characteristics already as defining features of Montaigne’s attitude. They meant that he could, with a tinge of mischief sometimes, illuminate one idea by a very different idea. Thus, talking about how our desires and ambitions are augmented by the difficulties we encounter in pursuing them, he uses the example of how the lawgiver of ancient Sparta, Lycurgus, made it a rule that married couples should behave towards each other like secret adulterous lovers:
To keep love in breath, Lycurgus made a decree that the married people of Lacedaemon should never enjoy one another but by stealth; and that it should be as great a shame to take them in bed together as committing with others. The difficulty of assignations, the danger of surprise, the shame of the morning, these are what give the piquancy to the sauce … Pleasure itself seeks to be heightened with pain: it is much sweeter when it smarts and the skin is rippled. The courtesan Flora said she never lay with Pompey but that she made him wear the prints of her teeth. And so it is in everything: difficulty gives all things their estimation.
That is a prime example of Montaigne’s entertaining, insightful, rambling way with the subjects he wrote about. He sought to instruct by amusing, and invariably succeeds. He is a conversationalist in print, and it makes him a very good companion. He died in 1592 at the age of 61, not a bad age for that era, and bequeathed to us a literary and philosophical gem which, four centuries later, gleams as brilliantly as ever.