Mr. Emerson, in his “Representative Men,” makes Montaigne stand for The Skeptic. Skeptic, Montaigne was. He questioned, he considered, he doubted. He stood poised in equilibrium, in indifference, between contrary opinions. He saw reasons on this side, but he saw reasons also on that, and he did not clear his mind. “Que sçai-je?” was his motto (“What know I?”), a question as of hopeless ignorance—nay, as of ignorance also void of desire to know. His life was one long interrogation, a balancing of opposites, to the end.
Such, speculatively, was Montaigne. Such, too, speculatively, was Pascal. The difference, however, was greater than the likeness, between these two minds. Pascal, doubting, gave the world of spiritual things the benefit of his doubt. Montaigne, on the other hand, gave the benefit of his doubt to the world of sense. He was a sensualist, he was a glutton, he was a lecher. He, for his portion, chose the good things of this life. His body he used, to get him pleasures of the body. In pleasures of the body he sunk and drowned his conscience, if he ever had a conscience. But his intelligence survived. He became, at last—if he was not such from the first—almost pure sense, without soul.
Yet we have no doubt Montaigne was an agreeable gentleman. We think we should have got on well with him as a neighbor of ours. He was a tolerably decent father, provided the child were grown old enough to be company for him. His own lawful children, while infants, had to go out of the house for their nursing; so it not unnaturally happened that all but one died in their infancy. Five of such is the number that you can count in his own journalistic entries of family births and deaths. But, in his “Essays,” speaking as “moral philosopher,” he says, carelessly, that he had lost “two or three” “without repining.” This, perhaps, is affectation. But what affectation!
Montaigne was well-to-do; and he ranked as a gentleman, if not as a great nobleman. He lived in a castle, bequeathed to him, and by him bequeathed—a castle still standing, and full of personal association with its most famous owner. He occupied a room in the tower, fitted up as a library. Over the door of this room may still, we believe, be read Montaigne’s motto, “Que sçai-je?” Votaries of Montaigne perform their pious pilgrimages to this shrine of their idolatry, year after year, century after century.
For, remember, it is now three centuries since Montaigne wrote. He was before Bacon and Shakespeare. He was contemporary with Charles IX., and with Henry of Navarre. But date has little to do with such a writer as Montaigne. His quality is sempiternal. He overlies the ages, as the long hulk of a great steamship overlies the waves of the sea, stretching from summit to summit. Not that, in the form of his literary work, he was altogether independent of time and of circumstance. Not that he was uninfluenced by his historic place, in the essential spirit of his work. But, more than often happens, Montaigne may fairly be judged out of himself alone. His message he might, indeed, have delivered differently; but it would have been substantially the same message, had he been differently placed, in the world, and in history. We need hardly, therefore, add any thing about Montaigne’s outward life. His true life is in his book.
Montaigne the Essayist is the consummate, the ideal, expression, practically incapable of improvement, of the spirit and wisdom of the world. This characterization, we think, fairly and sufficiently sums up the good and the bad of Montaigne. We might seem to describe no very mischievous thing. But to have the spirit and wisdom of this world expressed, to have it expressed as in a last authoritative form, a form to commend it, to flatter it, to justify it, to make it seem sufficient, to erect it into a kind of gospel—that means much. It means hardly less than to provide the world with a new Bible—a Bible of the world’s own, a Bible that shall approve itself as better than the Bible of the Old and New Testaments. Montaigne’s “Essays” constitute, in effect, such a book. The man of the world may—and, to say truth, does—in this volume, find all his needed texts. Here is viaticum—daily manna—for him, to last the year round, and to last year after year; an inexhaustible breviary for the church of this world! It is of the gravest historical significance that Rabelais and Montaigne, but especially that Montaigne, should, to such an extent, for now three full centuries, have been furnishing the daily intellectual food of Frenchmen.
Pascal, in an interview with M. de Saci (carefully reported by the latter), in which the conversation was on the subject of Montaigne and Epictetus contrasted—these two authors Pascal acknowledged to be the ones most constantly in his hand—said gently of Montaigne, “Montaigne is absolutely pernicious to those who have any inclination toward irreligion, or toward vicious indulgences.” We, for our part, are disposed, speaking more broadly than Pascal, to say that, to a somewhat numerous class of naturally dominant minds, Montaigne’s “Essays” in spite of all that there is good in them—nay, greatly because of so much good in them—are, by their subtly insidious persuasion to evil, upon the whole quite the most powerfully pernicious book known to us in literature either ancient or modern.
V.