Montaigne sorrowed it a thousand times that ever the book written by Brutus on Virtue was lost. He consoles himself, however, by remembering that Brutus is so well represented in Plutarch. He would rather know what talk Brutus had with some of his familiar friends in his tent on the night before going to battle than the speech he made to his army. He had no sympathy with eloquent prefaces, or with circumlocutions that keep the reader back from the real matter of books. He does not want to hear heralds or criers. How he
would have hated the flare of trumpets that precedes the entrance of the best sellers! And the blazing "jackets," the lowest form of modern art, would have made him rip out the favourite oaths of his province with violence.
"The Romans in their religion," he says, "were wont to say 'Hoc age'; which in ours we say, 'Sursum corda.'"
He goes to a book as he goes to a good dinner; he does not care for the hors d'œuvres. Note how he rushes with rather rough weapons to the translation, by his dying father's command, of Theologia naturalis sive liber creaturarum magistri Raimondi de Sebonde. He thinks that it is a good antidote for the "new fangles" of Luther, who is leading the vulgar to think for themselves and to reject authority. His analysis of himself in the essay "Of Cruelty" is the message of a sane man to sane men; and he does not hesitate to point out the fact that no hatred is so absolute as that which Christians can cover with the cloak of Christianity. The discord between zeal for religion and the fury of nationality concerns him greatly, and he does not hesitate to read a well-deserved lesson to his contemporaries on the subject.
In Montaigne's time the theories which Machiavelli had gathered together in "The Prince," governed Europe. One can see that they do not satisfy Montaigne. To him they are nefarious.
"'The Prince,'" declares Villari, "had a more direct action on real life than any other book in the world, and a larger share in emancipating Europe from the Middle Ages."
It is a shocking confession to make, and yet the "Essays" of Michel de Montaigne give me as much pleasure, but not so much edification, as the precious sentences of Thomas à Kempis. They are foils; at first sight there seems to be no relationship between them; and yet at heart Michel de Montaigne, who was really not a skeptic, has much in common with Thomas à Kempis. If there were no persons in the world capable of being Montaignes, Thomas à Kempis would have written for God alone. He would have resembled an altar railing which I once heard Father Faber had erected. On the side toward the altar it was foliated and exquisitely carved in a manner that pleased Ruskin. On the outer side, the side toward the people and not the side toward the
Presence of God, it was entirely plain and unornamented!
The friendship of Thomas à Kempis I owe to George Eliot. Emerson might easily perish; Plato might go, and even Horace be drowned in his last supply of Falernian; Marcus Aurelius and even Rudyard Kipling might exist only in tradition; but the loss of all their works would be as nothing compared to the loss of that little volume which is a marvellous guide to life. The translations of Thomas à Kempis into English vary in value. Certain dissenters have cut out the very soul of À Kempis in deleting the passages on the Holy Eucharist. Think of Bowdlerizing Thomas à Kempis! He was, above all, a mystic, and all the philosophy of his love of Christ limps when the mystical centre of it, the Eucharist, is cut out. If that meeting in the upper room had not taken place during the paschal season, if Christ had not offered His body and blood, soul and divinity to his amazed, yet reverent, disciples, Thomas à Kempis would never have written "The Following of Christ." The Bible, even the New Testament, is full of sayings which, as St. James says of St. Paul's Epistles, are not easy sayings, but what