When one thinks of it, there is a curious solemnity of preoccupation with themselves and their own sensations about Wilde, Pater, Whitman, Stendhal, D'Annunzio and Barrès. And this "gravity of egoism" is precisely the thing which, for all his humorous humanity, distinguished the great Montaigne and which his early critics found so irritating.
"What do I care—what does any one care," grumbled the learned Scaliger, "whether he prefers white wine to red wine?"
The second element in the compound chemistry of the "modern temper" introduced into the world by Montaigne may be found in his famous scepticism. The formidable levity of that notorious "que sais-je?" "What do I know?" writes itself nowadays across our whole sky. This also—"this film of white light," as some one has called it, floating waveringly beneath each one of our most cherished convictions was, not unknown before his time.
All the great sophists—Protagoras especially, with his "man the measure of all things"—were, in a sense, professional teachers of a refined scepticism.
Plato himself, with his wavering and gracious hesitations, was more than touched by the same spirit.
Scepticism as a natural human philosophy—perhaps as the only natural human philosophy—underlies all the beautiful soft-coloured panorama of pagan poetry and pagan thought. It must have been the habitual temper of mind in any Periclean symposium or Caesarean salon. It is, pre-eminently and especially, the civilised attitude of mind; the attitude of mind most dominant and universal in the great races, the great epochs, the great societies.
It is for this reason that France, among all modern nations, is the most sceptical.
Barbarian peoples are rarely endowed with this quality. The crude animal energy, which makes them successful! in business, and even sometimes in war, is an energy which, for all its primitive force, is destructive of civilisation. Civilisation, the rarest work of art of our race's evolution, is essentially a thing created in restraint of such crude energies; as it is created in restraint of the still cruder energies of nature itself.
The Protestant Reformation springing out of the soul of the countries "beyond the Alps" is, of course, the supreme example of this uncivilised force. One frequently encounters sceptical-minded Catholics, full of the very spirit of Montaigne—who died in the Catholic faith—but it is rare to meet a Protestant who is not, in a most barbarous sense, full of dogmatic and argumentative "truth."
So uncivilised and unlovely is this controversial mood that free-thinkers are often tempted to be unfair to the Reformation. This is a fault; for after all it is something, even for ingrained sceptics prepared to offer incense at any official altar, to be saved from the persecuting alliance of church and state.