Popular, purely natural poetry has simplicities and graces comparable with the eminent beauty of poetry artistically perfect, as is evident in the Gascon villanelles and in songs brought to us from illiterate peoples. Mediocre poetry, which is neither the one nor the other, is disdained, without honor or even esteem (I. liv).
Dismissing in a scornful phrase “the Spanish and Petrarchist fanciful elevations” (II. x), he exactly estimates the Latin poets of his time as “good artisans in that craft” (II. xvii). Perhaps a certain significance, therefore, attaches to his repeating the current complacency with regard to French poetry.
I think it has been raised to the highest degree it will ever attain; and in those directions in which Ronsard and Du Bellay excel I find them hardly below the ancient perfection (II. xvii).
Elsewhere, and habitually, Montaigne’s attitude toward the classics was quite different from the habit of the Renaissance. He sought not so much the Augustans as Seneca and the Plutarch of Amyot.
Je n’ay dressé commerce avec aucun livre solide sinon Plutarque et Seneque, où je puyse comme les Danaides, remplissant et versant sans cesse (I. xxvi).
These, and even Cicero and Vergil, he sought not for style, but for philosophy and morals. That sounder classicism of composition which, through the Italian tradition of history, had animated Renaissance essayists of the stricter sort he put aside. He was not interested in the ancient rhetoric of composition, nor, to judge from his slight attention to it, in that field of ancient poetic. He quotes both Dante and Tasso, but not in that aspect. He is not interested in the growing appreciation of Aristotle’s Poetic. In this disregard of composition, indeed, he was of the Renaissance; but he rejected and even repudiated Renaissance pursuit of classicism in style. There he adopted the sound doctrine of Quintilian and scornfully, to use his own word, abjured borrowed plumes and decorative dilation. If we use the word classical in its typical Renaissance connotation, we must call Montaigne, as well as Rabelais, anti-classical. Unlike as they are otherwise, they agree in satirizing Renaissance classicism.
The positive aspect of this rejection is Montaigne’s homely concreteness. Trying to teach his readers, not to dazzle them, he is very carefully specific. To leave no doubt of his meaning, he will have it not merely accepted, but felt. Therefore he is more than specific; he is concrete. Imagery for him is not mythology; it is of native vintage.
“In this last scene between death and us there is no more pretending. We have to speak French; we have to show how much that is good and clean is left at the bottom of the pot” (I. xix). Such expression strikes us not as wit, not as an aristocrat’s catering to the new public, but as the sincere use of sensory terms to animate ideas. If it reminds us sometimes of popular preaching, that is because Montaigne was a sage.