THE FOUNDER

Cyril O. Houle

The arts, like the sciences, almost always move forward along some line of progression. Influences can be traced, early efforts lead finally to supreme masterpieces, or schools of thought evolve their principles collectively. Seldom does a new art form – full, complete, and enduring – arise from the work of a single person and establish itself so permanently that while many later followers use the same pattern, they never equal the power of the original. I know of only two examples: Homer in the creation of the epic poem and Montaigne in the establishment of the essay. We cannot be sure about Homer, for he may have had many precursors now lost in antiquity. But Montaigne was a man of modern times, we know more about him than about most other literary figures, he knew he was creating a form like none then in existence, and we can trace forward into history, beginning with Francis Bacon, the powerful influence which he continues to exert. Yet even to-day, almost 400 years and thousands of authors later, Montaigne’s body of work has never been paralleled in quality.

The literary structure he shaped is the relatively short, discursive paper, intended to whet interest and provoke thought. To such a work he gave the modest, whimsical name by which it has been known ever since, the “essai” – that is to say the attempt, the trial, the exploration. It is intended to be tentative, interesting, stimulating, personal, but never definitive or complete. As we of the Chicago Literary Club gather together on thirty or so Monday evenings each year, we pay an unspoken debt to Michel de Montaigne by using the literary form which he invented. As we begin the year which leads into our second century, let us look back at our true founder. Next week we shall hear about the possessor of the noble Roman head at which we gaze at each of our meetings, whose presence enhances the appearance of the speaker, the secretary, and, if such a thing is possible, the president. Let us to-night salute the short, thick-set, dark, bald figure of Montaigne, he whom Virginia Woolf called the “subtle, half smiling, half melancholy man, with the heavy-lidded eyes and the dreamy, quizzical expression.” In a tower on a hill in Gascony, he spent a major part of his life, surrounded by his thousand books, sometimes leaning back in his chair to read, his legs as high as his seat or higher, sometimes jumping up to pace about or to dip into books – but always coming back to write a passage which men still read.

His works achieved fame almost at once in both France and England. The Encyclopaedia Britannica refers to the essay form as “a peculiarly English thing” and as “one of the glories of English literature” but admits that it was not native but naturalized. The first French edition of Montaigne appeared in 1580; in 1597, Bacon’s first ten essays were issued. In 1603, Florio’s English translation of Montaigne appeared and, for a long while, almost every year found some new author entering the field. Shakespeare was deeply indebted to the observations and anecdotes he found in Montaigne and both his and Ben Jonson’s copies survive. And in every era since, though particularly in the twentieth century, Montaigne has had his followers and admirers. In the nineteenth century, Sainte-Beuve called him “the wisest Frenchman who ever lived,” and, in the twentieth, T. S. Eliot said he was the most essential author in the history of French thought.

For Montaigne, matter and form are wholly interlocked. Boiling up within him were countless ideas and he felt the urge to write them down. “Let me begin with whatever subject I please, for all subjects are linked together.” (III-5) But jottings alone were not enough; they must have some form, some unity. He found his theme, or pretended to have done so, in an anecdote: “One day at Bar-le-Duc I saw King Francis II presented, in remembrance of René, king of Sicily, with a portrait that this king had made of himself. Why is it not permissible in the same way for each man to portray himself with the pen, as he portrayed himself with the pencil?” (II:17) In his preface, he says “I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray.” Such a desire did not fit into any existing forms of discourse. It requires directness of speech; Emerson would observe three centuries later, “Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.” It requires a constant shift of position and of ideas, for men change as they grow older and they do not think logically but by a stream of associations. And, for Montaigne, if he were to express his own personality, it meant vividness, irony, paradox, and the constant use of imagery. “We are all patchwork,” he said, “and there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.” (II:1)

In his later days, his point of view shifted for, as Montaigne came to realize, in describing himself, he was to some degree, describing mankind. His final book of essays is built on the formula “Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate.” (III:2) For example, he was a licentious man and professed not to be able to remember when he lost his virginity. He dwells frequently and vividly on the delights of Venus, recounting, for example, the story “of a woman who had passed through the hands of some soldiers: ‘God be praised,’ she said, ‘that at least once in my life I have had my fill without sin!’” Emerson fretted about Montaigne’s directness of speech and excused it on the ground that in the sixteenth century, only men read books, ignoring the fact that the dedications of the essays were to women. Library copies of Montaigne sometimes open almost automatically to the most explicit essay on sex. (If you have your own copy, let me save you a trip to the library by telling you that the essay is called “On Some Verses of Virgil.”) But Montaigne came to believe that all mankind is or would like to be licentious. He wrote: “I know well that very few people will frown at the license of my writings who do not have more to frown at in the license of their thoughts.” (III-5). If posterity disagreed with him, he noted at another place, “I shall have a neat revenge; for they will never be able to be so indifferent to me as I shall then be to them.”

As insights grew with age and experience, he moved into the world of universals, not particulars, while still insisting that he had not moved at all. As T. S. Eliot observed, “What makes Montaigne a very great figure is that he succeeded, God knows how . . . in giving expression to the scepticism of every human being.” Eliot thought that the author himself “very likely did not know how he had done it – it is not the sort of thing that men can observe about themselves, for it is essentially bigger than the individual’s consciousness.” But one may wonder. This seemingly simple man who dwells often on his laziness, his short attention span, his hungers, his rural habits, his bowel movements, and other trivia can, almost before one notes the change, flash forth with a noble sentiment or a penetrating insight. Should we accept Montaigne at face value as a pedestrian self-teacher accidentally scaling the heights of grandeur and catching glimpses far beneath the apparent surface of reality? Or did he know precisely what he was doing in building a majestic edifice of thought with a scope and a sweep paralleled in French literature only by Balzac and Proust? The debate has gone on for four centuries. It will not be concluded to-night.

The epithet most often applied to Montaigne is “skeptic” and Emerson treats him as the prototype of this point of view. The skeptic is the natural enemy of the true believer of a doctrine. During Montaigne’s life and for some time after it, his ideas seemed safe from attack, but conflict was sure to come. In those days, its most likely arena was in religion. Montaigne was a professing Roman Catholic all his days but his Essays left room for the belief that his observance was not necessarily supported by belief. Certain ambiguous observations, indeed certain lengthy passages, gave rise to doubts, and the subtle minds of learned doctors of the Church could detect conscious or unconscious heresies. Pascal, for one, believed that Montaigne’s ideas must be destroyed and set out to do so, but as Eliot justly observed, “You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences; or if he reasons you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument.”

At length, the matter was disposed of. In 1676, eighty-four years after Montaigne’s death, his work as placed on the Church’s Index of prohibited books. This fact gave rise centuries later to an ironic event. A cherished niece of his, Jeanne, was in danger of following her mother into Calvinism. Montaigne intervened decisively, had her removed from her mother, and saw to it that she was brought up as a Catholic. In due course, after many miraculous works in the three hundred years after her death, she was canonized in 1949. On that occasion, Pius XII expressed the hope that some day the work of the new saint’s uncle might be stricken from the Index. After all, the Pope said, “it is thanks to him that the little girl became a Catholic.”

III

The family of this complex man has been traced back as far as the tenth century, since when, as part of the rising middle class of Bordeaux, they had grown increasingly prosperous. Michel’s great-grandfather amassed a sufficient fortune to buy the castle of Montaigne and thereby, as a landowner, rose somewhat above the bourgeois class. For four later generations, the family name of Eyquem was retained; Michel was the first to drop it and to emerge with the full grandeur of nobility. The family were Gascons, and the people of that region have long been famous for the extravagance of their pretensions; the word “gasconade” was coined to describe their manner. D’Artagnan of “The Three Musketeers” was a Gascon and Bergerac, from whence came the famous Cyrano, is only five leagues from Montaigne. (II:29).

But Michel was not true to type. His father, “the best father that ever was,” (II:12) was far more boisterous. His son said of him that he was “very well suited to the service of the ladies, both by nature and by art” and said he was: “A small man, full of vigor, and straight and well proportioned in statute. An attractive face, inclining to brown. Adroit and distinguished in all gentlemanly exercises. I have even seen some canes filled with lead, with which they say he exercised his arms to prepare for throwing the bar or the stone, or for fencing, and some shoes with leaded soles to train him to be lighter in running and jumping. . . . I have seen him, past sixty, put our agility to shame: leap into the saddle in his furred gown, do a turn over the table on his thumb, hardly ever go up to his room without taking three or four steps at a time.” (II.2)

This remarkable man married remarkably. His wife was a Sephardic Jew whose family had been expelled from Spain in 1492, had prospered, had been converted to Catholicism, and had Gallicized its name from Lopez to Louppes. Of her, as of his own wife, Montaigne says almost nothing (a remarkable silence for one so quick to describe himself and others), but surely, either genetically or culturally, he was profoundly influenced by being part Gascon, part Jew.

Somewhere, Michel’s father had picked up remarkable theories about child-rearing. In the child’s infancy, he was sent to live with rough peasants so that he would absorb a feeling for the common people. Later, to alleviate the rudeness of awakening each morning, he was roused by the sound of a musical instrument. When it came time for him to learn to speak, his tutor was fluent in Latin, and the boy was allowed to hear and speak only that language until he was six. His parents, his other relatives, the servants, and the peasants with whom he came in contact all had to learn at least a rudimentary Latin and he later observed, with amusement, that the Gascon dialect spoken around his home long remained contaminated by the ancient language.

When Michel began more serious studies, his father put him in charge of tutors chosen chiefly for their good natures and easy-going dispositions. “The first taste I had for books,” said Michel later, “came to me from my pleasure in the fables of the Metamorphoses of Ovid. For at about seven or eight years of age I would steal away from any other pleasure to read them, inasmuch as this language was my mother tongue, and it was the easiest book I knew and the best suited by its content to my tender age.” As a consequence, he read none of the children’s books of his time. More important, he began, even so young, to escape the confinement of his own century and to accept as contemporaries men who had lived fifteen hundred years before. “At that point,” he said, “I happened by remarkable good fortune to come in contact with a tutor who was an understanding man, who knew enough to connive cleverly at this frivolity of mine and others like it. For by this means I went right through Virgil’s Aeneid, and then Terence, and then Plautus, and some Italian comedies, always lured on by the pleasantness of the subject. If he had been foolish enough to break this habit, I think I should have got nothing out of school but a hatred of books, as do nearly all our noblemen. He went about it cleverly. Pretending to see nothing, he whetted my appetite, letting me gorge myself with these books only in secret, and gently keeping me at my work on the regular studies.” (I:26) Later Montaigne encountered enough pedants to give him evidence for theories about education which are based, as so many are, chiefly on admonitions of what not to do.

His choice of a career, taking for granted that, as Lord of Montaigne, he must be an overseer of property, were limited to arms, the Church, or the law. His father judged that the third of these best fitted his temperament. Somewhere, perhaps at Toulouse, he studied jurisprudence, and sometime I his early youth, he started visiting Paris, which became his most deeply beloved city. For thirteen years, beginning at the age of 23, he was a Councillor in the Parlement of Bordeaux and somehow began to achieve that access to the seats of power which was to be a growing part of his future life. He was later to serve as Mayor of Bordeaux, as his father had before him, and had the rare honor of a second term. But essentially he worked behind the scenes as confidant, emissary, advocate, and negotiator. He knew and was trusted by Catherine de Medici and her three kingly sons, by Mary Queen of Scots when she was queen of France, by Pope Gregory XIII, and by Henry IV. Most of Montaigne’s life was taken up either with official duties or with political intrigues, and the notion that he was a recluse reader, absent from the world of affairs, was never true, however much its image persists.

As the names just mentioned suggest, Montaigne lived in a horrible and bloody time. Constant battles between Catholics and Protestants split families, laid waste to the countryside, encouraged assassination, and reached a peak in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. The bubonic plague was recurrent, as were other pestilences. Montaigne’s was an agitated, stormy, and anarchic period, with no sure refuge and no certain way to tell a friend from an enemy. He said “I have gone to bed a thousand times in my own home, imagining that someone would betray me and slaughter me that very night.” (III-9) One of the most ghastly attributes of the times was the hardening of antagonism into callousness, then cruelty, then sadism. The greatest favor of life, Montaigne said, was to permit an enemy to “die suddenly and insensibly.” (II:27) At another place, he says, “we see in the ancient histories nothing more extreme than what we experience . . . every day. But that has not reconciled me to it at all. I could hardly be convinced, until I saw it, that there were souls so monstrous that they could commit murder for the mere pleasure of it; hack and cut off other men’s limbs; sharpen their wits to invent unaccustomed torments and new forms of death, without enmity, without profit, and for the sole purpose of enjoying the pleasing spectacle of the pitiful gestures and movements, the lamentable groans and cries, of a man dying in anguish.” (II:11)

Some extraordinary mildness or nobility of manner seemed to protect Montaigne himself. He left his house completely open and unguarded. He likened himself to Lycurgus, the Athenian, “who was the general depositary and guardian of his fellow citizens’ purses.” (III:9) “Amid so many fortified houses, I alone of my rank in France, as far as I know, have entrusted purely to heaven the protection of mine.” (II:15) “Any defense bears the aspect of war.” (II:15) Twice Montaigne was the victim of plots designed to kill him and capture his treasures. Those who seized him (and once his entire household) could have done anything they wished. Yet in both cases, his demeanor was such that at the last moment, just before the sword-thrust ended everything, they suddenly withdrew, scrupulously giving back to him not only his life but all his possessions. (III:12) He has no explanation of this behavior other than his innocence of manner. Search as we may, we have no alternative suggestion. “Death of old age,” he said, “is a rare, singular, and extraordinary death,” yet, at the end, it was to be his, as he faded away at his castle, his family at his side, with the mass being sung for him.

His last years were gravely afflicted, however, not from without but from within. Michel’s father had developed kidney stones, after which he dragged out an agonizing existence for seven years until his death. Montaigne developed a horror of this malady, one of the most feared of all the torments in antiquity and in his own time. Montaigne quotes Pliny as saying that “there are only three kinds of diseases that a man may rightfully kill himself to escape from: the fiercest of all is the kidney stone when the urine is held back by it.” (II:3) Michel was sure that though he was 25 years old when his father had his first attack, the ailment was inherited and in a passage remarkably prescient of modern genetics (though there may be doubt about its application in this case), he asks “where was the propensity to this infirmity hatching all this time? And when [at my birth, my father] was so far from the ailment, how did this slight bit of his substance, with which he made me, bear so great an impression of it for its share? And moreover, how did it remain so concealed that I began to feel it forty-five years later?” (II:37)

From this affliction came much pain but also a deeper sense of himself: if I can bear this pain, I can bear anything. Others might not have the same iron control but on the whole, he thought most people did. From the very fierceness of the desire for life springs the indomitable quality of mankind. Early editions of his essays lack this spirit; later ones are filled with it. They are filled, too, with the insights which his travels brought him, and that travel was intended chiefly to find the spa whose waters would give him most relief. The travel journal kept for his own remembrance and not intended for publication is filled with keen observations of people and places and also with highly clinical details of his ailments which have fascinated modern medical historians and led them to give him excellent advice about what he should have done.

Montaigne would have paid no attention for he had also inherited from his paternal ancestors unto the fourth generation an antipathy to physicians. The essay called “Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers” is an excellent piece of good-natured but telling invective on the subject. An abundance of anecdotes is used. A Greek, for example, “was asked what had made him live healthy so long. ‘Ignorance of medicine,’ he replied.” An unskilled wrestler became a doctor. “‘Take heart,’ Diogenes said to him, ‘you are right! Now you will bring down those who brought you down before.’” And, in an epigram from Martial

“Last night he bathed and dined and laughed with us;

Today we learn Andragoras is dead.

How came his sudden end, you wonder? Thus:

He dreamed his doctor sat beside his bed”

Why has this complex, wandering, influential, busy, and ailing man come down to us as a bookish hermit in a tower? The answer seems to be that the results of that part of his existence were so powerful that they swallowed up the other things he did. He feared that such would be the case and said again and again how little and how sporadically he read and how often and eagerly he left his tower. But on this – as on other matters – he contradicted himself, a fact which is made most fully evident by the Essays themselves.

His mature study began when he was 38 years old. The groundwork was prepared earlier during his four-year friendship with Etienne de la Boétie, the closest relationship of his life other than that with his father. Le Boétie was slightly older than he, married, a scholar, and author of a treatise attacking tyranny. The friendship of the two young men was instantaneous and complete, one which, Montaigne says, “together we fostered, as long as God willed, so entire and so perfect that certainly you will hardly read of the like, and among men of today you see no trace of it in practice.” On what was this friendship based? Montaigne examined all the obvious possibilities, including homosexuality, and rejected them all. In the first edition of the essays, he concludes this inquiry by saying “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed,” but, in his old age, he added “except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.” (I:28)

La Boétie’s death, caused by an infection, was described in minute detail by Montaigne in a letter to his father, and was the great trauma of his life, one from which he never wholly recovered. The event threw him immediately into two years spent in those practices which are supposed to bring forgetfulness, particularly to young men. Then, following his father’s advice, he entered into an arranged marriage. Three years after that, his father died and Michel became Lord of Montaigne. Giving up his position in the Bordeaux Parlement, he returned home, taking with him the library of La Boétie who had bequeathed it to him, as Michel said, “with loving recommendation, with death in his throat.” (I:28) There, in the famous tower, in a study next to the library, he caused the following inscription in Latin to be placed on the wall:

In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the [Muses], where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.

Fortunately for us, this devout wish was not to be carried out. Though dutiful, he was not house-proud enough to “complete this abode,” particularly since the improvements the old house needed might invite pillage and ruin. And, lethargic though he pretended to be, he could not spend all his time in reading. In that direction, he told himself irritably, lay idleness or pedantry. Unless, he said, you keep minds “busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination.” (I:9) To rid himself of wildness, ineptitude, and strangeness he concluded that he must “put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.”

What was he to write? Formal and didactic treatises, long or short, would limit his freedom of thought. He had no intimates to whom he might write letters. He did not wish to undertake the discipline of poetry. Moreover, he wanted, as he said, to “consider the various tastes of a whole public.” (I:40) And so, choosing some topic that occurred to him – in meditation, in discourse, in a dream, or in action – he set down his ideas, weaving in with them quotations from the authors he had been avidly reading since he was seven, and sometimes pacing his rooms or riding his horse until he could get a thought clear and stated with crispness and wit. These were not rounded and finished works. “My language is in every way,” he confessed, “too compact, disorderly, abrupt, individual.” (I:40) His writings were trials, attempts, efforts. They were essays.

In the centuries of world-wide scholarship based on Montaigne’s work, many over-all plans, themes, and progressions of viewpoint have been proposed for the Essays, but the author himself denied that he had any conscious structural design. Sometimes he explored a new topic, sometimes an old one, letting, as he says, “chance itself furnish me with subjects, since they are all equally good to me; and moreover I do not undertake to develop them completely and to the bottom of the vat. Of a thousand aspects that they each have, I take the one I please. I am prone to grasp them by some unusual and fanciful angle.” That beginning might be a witticism. He starts his essay “Of Three Good Women,” with the observation “As everyone knows, they don’t come by the dozen.” He opens his essay “Of the Disadvantages of Greatness” by the comment that “Since we cannot attain it, let us take our revenge by speaking ill of it.” The essay “Of Names” starts disarmingly with the observation that “I am here going to whip up a hodgepodge of various items.” And often he uses an anecdote, as when in “Of the Vanity of Words,” he gives the response of a Greek when asked whether he or Pericles was the better wrestler.” ‘That’ he said ‘would be hard to establish; for when I have thrown him at wrestling, he persuades those who saw it happen that he did not fall, and he wins the prize.’”

Despite Montaigne’s intentions recorded on his wall, most of his active career as political leader, negotiator, and traveller lay before him. But he kept steadily at work for twenty-one years until his final illness and death in 1592. His first two books of essays were published in 1580 but even as he worked on the third, he kept adding to the earlier versions, and these changes were incorporated into subsequent editions. When in 1588, all three books were published, the first two were far more substantial than they had earlier been, and the third book had both a largeness of conception and a depth of penetration that the earlier ones lacked. But Montaigne was far from finished for, from 1688 until very near his death, he kept adding to his own copy of his work, sometimes only a word or two, sometimes an apt quotation he had just discovered, sometimes a whole passage. He seldom deleted anything and sometimes the new passages were digressions, unwieldy distentions, or contradictions. Thus one of his earliest essays is entitled “That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die” (I:20), but later he wrote that “it is philosophy that teaches us to live.” Diversity of viewpoint can be tolerated in an essay and the reader of Montaigne must expect to find it, for this final personal version has become the definitive copy.

Modern editions, the best in English being that of Donald Frame, all distinguish in some fashion the material published before 1588, the material added in that year, and the material written by Montaigne on the margins of his own copy or on slips of paper. His writing grew more subtle and requires the reader to pay closer attention. Thus, part of Libya, he says, is so promiscuous that the only way to determine paternity is to see toward what man in the crowd, a child takes his first steps. “I believe,” added Montaigne, “that this must lead to frequent mistakes.” (II:8) It is worth while to read at least one of the substantial essays three times, concentrating on each version separately. In later versions, tightness of structure is diminished and so is clarity of perspective but the gain lies in the qualities which made Montaigne great: profundity of insight, brilliance of expression, vividness of imagery and anecdote, and sharpness of wit. He constantly grew as a result of both his experience and his reading; his education was essentially an adult one. In the ten years beginning with his thirty-eighth birthday, he learned to be great; in the next eleven years he learned to be immortal.

Both experience and literature were woven into his works, but since modern man can share only the books, let us concentrate upon his use of them. What books meant to Montaigne is hard to determine for he has, in accommodating fashion, provided a text for every position possible, and scholars, with doctorates or tenure to earn, have followed up every lead. As for myself, I shall make no elaborate textual exegeses, attributions to sources, nor estimates about how much of the author’s work was original and how much was derived. Montaigne’s motto was “What do I know?” and I shall say only what I am sure I know. Ultimately it can all be bound up in three propositions. Montaigne’s thought was deeply rooted in literature, particularly classical literature. He used it for adornment, for evidence, and for authority. His greatness arises because he brought to that literature his experience, his contemplation, and his literary skill.

As already noted, Montaigne had been steeped in literature from an early age. In his youth, he had the resources to range widely in his reading. Books were precious objects in those early days of printing and anyone who took them seriously usually became thoroughly immersed in them. His friendship with La Boétie was based on their common love of literature. “I do not travel without books,” he said, “either in peace or in war. . . I cannot tell you what ease and repose I find when I reflect that they are at my side to give me pleasure at my own time, and when I recognize how much assistance they bring to my life.” (III:3) He was familiar with the vagaries of language, having translated (before he began to write his own works) the thousand pages of Raymond Sebond’s Theologia Naturalis, for his father, a man he though to have “very clear judgment for one who was aided only by experience and nature” and not by reading. (I:35)

Almost every page of Montaigne’s Essays sparkle with quotations. As time went on and revision followed revision, new jewels were constantly added. One might turn against him his anecdote about Diogenes who, when asked what sort of wine he liked best, answered “Other people’s.” (III:9) Sometimes other people’s comments are from new books; more often they are from old ones for, as their user observed “Books that I revisit always smile at me with a fresh newness.” (I:9) “In my youth,” he also said, “I studied for ostentation; later, a little to gain wisdom, now, for recreation; never for gain.” (III:3) A reader might be suspicious that all these thousands of quotations, inserted with steadily increasing skill in the body of his own work, might have been employed for all of these four ends. Montaigne, at that moment, would not agree. Yet, at another he would begin an essay on Seneca and Plutarch by saying that his own work had been “built up purely from their spoils.” (II:32)

One essay which seems remarkably free of quotation is his description of cannibals, one of whom had recently been brought to France and subjected to the author’s close scrutiny. Here, scholars have said, is the pure Montaigne, building his conclusions from his own experience. Not so, said the modern scholar, Bernard Weinberg. Going back into the literature available to Montaigne, Weinberg discovered the work of an author who had lived in Brazil, from whose writings two other authors, also once resident there, had borrowed heavily for their own books. Montaigne, in turn, had used all three. Hardly a passage of his essay is not close in content or language to one of theirs, and yet his emphasis and balance is consistently different from theirs. As Weinberg says, “He cares less than they about cannibalism, gore, items of idle curiosity; he cares more about morals, virtue, and a way of life that might illustrate the philosophical points that he was making.” But that he used the books, though without citing them, there can be no doubt. Weinberg concludes “Whether he went back to his books by rereading and consulting, or whether he made reference only through the memory as stimulated by . . . conversations, I cannot be sure. But I think that both probably took place.”[1] And, unfair though that fact may seem, what Montaigne brought to his reading has made his essay immortal, while his three sources are known only to a few specialists.

When I began my reading for this essay, I thought that Montaigne, one of the best-known readers of all time, must have had a consistent theory about reading. On other subjects – such as the evils of medicine – he certainly did. But on books and their study and enjoyment, his is a spectrum of views. In one of my readings of his Essays, I jotted down more than a hundred aphoristic statements which deal generally with books and readings, ignoring for the moment observations on particular authors or on such literary areas as history or poetry. Here are a few of these statements, ranged, as it were from left to right:

“The study of books is a languishing and feeble activity.” (III:8)

“How many men I have seen in my time made stupid by rash avidity for learning.” (I:26)

“When I write I prefer to do without the company and remembrance of books, for fear they may interfere with my style” (III:5)

“I go about cadging from books here and there the sayings that please me, not to keep them, for I have no storehouses, but to transport them into this one” (I:25)

“I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well” (II:10)

“They are the best provisions I have found for this human journey.”

“My books are my delights.”

For each of these points of view, a case could be built. Yet those who have studied Montaigne most deeply in all is varied and shimmering patterns of belief have usually found books central to this thought. Bayle St. John, an Englishmen writing in 1858, observed simply “Montaigne, then was essentially a reader.”[2] And R. A. Sayce, an American writing in 1972, agreed that “If his own mind and the world refracted through it care Montaigne’s subjects, the instrument he uses to measure and grasp them are primarily books.”[3]

The ultimate truth seems to be that, for Montaigne, reading was – and always has been – an activity as natural and necessary as eating. Some books were better than others, some suited his tastes while others did not, and variety was best of all. When one had not been able to read for a time, books were seized on ravenously; when one was satiated, one turned away from them to some other resource or experience. Some were aesthetically pleasing, some adorned the table, and some gave solid and necessary nourishment. But life could not be sustained without them, the mind could not grow in their absence, and the hunger for them lead to periodic and systematic demands. It is repugnant to think that we live to eat or to read, but Montaigne, at least, could not live if he did not do both.

I have called him the founder of this Club, since he created and perfected the literary form we use, but if he had been alive in 1874, he would have declined, initially at least, to join our company. As he said “I have promised myself henceforth never again to take up the task of speaking on formal occasions. For, as for reading one’s speech, besides being unnatural, it is a great disadvantage for those who naturally have some power of gesture. And as for throwing myself on the mercy of my improvisation, that is even less desirable; mine is sluggish and confused, and could not meet sudden and important emergencies.” (III:9) Eventually we might have prevailed by persuading him that gestures are insignificant to us and that sudden and important emergencies seldom occur; even questions of the speaker have been forbidden since 1875. Certainly to-day as we move into our second century, Montaigne shares our views. He chose as the epigraph of the culminating edition of his work: “He acquires strength as he goes.” And so do we.

Cyril O. Houle

[1] Bernard Weinberg, “Montaigne’s Readings for Des Cannibals” in Renaissance and Other Studies in Honor of William Leon Wiley, George Bernard Daniel, editor. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

[2] Bayle St. John. Montaigne, the Essayist. London: Chapman and Hall, 1858. Vol. II.

[3] R. A. Sayce. The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration. Northwestern University Press, 1972. p. 25.