Michel de Montaigne

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Preface

The study of Montaigne during the nineteenth century falls into three periods. The somewhat barren period of the Eulogies {&loges), in the earlier years of the century, was succeeded by a period of research; documents were discovered; the facts of Montaigne's life were carefully investigated; and the great collection of Dr. Payen, now preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale, was brought together. Finally, with further research, directed especially to ascertaining the text of the Essays (Essais) (1580-1588-1595) in its various forms, came the period when results were co-ordinated. In this third period the name of M. Bonnefon is of high distinction. No one can write on Montaigne without being his debtor. I desire here to acknowledge my own debt to many of my predecessors, and in particular to M. Bonnefon. But M. Bonnefon was able to assume an acquaintance with the Essays on the part of his readers which I hkve not assumed in those for whom I write; and accordingly I have had to proportion the parts of this book on a principle different from that which guided Montaigne's French biographer.

S

PREFACE

All dates of writings given are those of first publication, unless otherwise stated. The date, 1580-1588-159S, refers to three successive editions of the Essays. The titles of books and other writings have been translated into English, except in cases where translation would be misleading; but the original French titles follow the translated titles in parentheses, the first time each occurs.

I have endeavoured as far as possible to go to the sources, but my chief source has been the Essays themselves. I have interwoven them with my narrative in many places. The Bibliography, derived almost exclusively from books on my own shelves, may assure the reader that I have not written without much preparatory study. Whatever its merits or defects may be, I believe it would not be presumptuous to say of this volume Montaigne's word : " C'est icy un Livre de bonne foy, Lecteur."

Edward Dowden.

University of Dublin, December, 1904.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I — Childhood and Education 9

II — The Magistracy and the Court 39

Chapter I

Montaigne is still a challenge to criticism. He has made the public his confidant, and we seem to know him as well and ill as we know ourselves, or as we know human nature. He comes to greet us as a simple Gascon gentleman, frank and loyal, yet he eludes us at first and much more afterwards. We imagine that we shall make acquaintance with an individual, and we find by and by that we have to study a population of spirits, moods, humours, tempers. Is it humanity itself, so undulant and various, with its strength and its weakness, its elevations and its mediocrities, its generosities and its egoism, its eternal doubt, its eternal credulities, its sociability and its central solitude, its craving for action, its longing for repose, its piety and its mockeries, its wisdom and its humorous follies — is it humanity itself that we are coming to know through this curious exemplar of the race ? How shall we draw the lines which change at every moment ? How shall we capture Proteus, and induce him to sit for his portrait? And what should a portrait of Proteus resemble, whose unity consists in his being manifold?

Was there an earlier and a later Montaigne? Did he undergo a philosophical, if not a religious, conversion? And are some of the seeming — seeming, but perhaps also real — inconsistencies of his opinions and his temperament to be explained as belonging to the successive Montaignes of different epochs? We must attempt to control the impressions produced on a reader of the Essays bycollating these writh the facts of the writer's life, for the philosopher was also a magistrate, a courtier, a traveller, a man of affairs. Perhaps we shall find that the sceptic was a believer, if not a dogmatist; that the Jpver of retirement was not without worldly ambition; that the egoist was a citizen possessed by a sense of public duty, and prepared for a certain degree of sacrifice ; that the seeker for balance and moderation was capable of passionate enthusiasm; that the pursuer of the wise mean was naturally a man of ardour, if not a man of extremes. To understand Montaigne aright we must view him not merely as the occupant of the philosophic tower, with its chapel below, and its Stoics, its Epicureans, its Pyrrhonists in the library above, but also in connection with his province, his country, and his times.

And what times those were of change, of trouble, of terror, of advances, alarms, retreats ! The ,- philosophy of the Middle Age, under whose shelter or whose tyranny man so long found repose, had crumbled, but the ruins still stood and were , threatening. The first period of the Renaissance in France was passing into the second, when the high hopes of dawning science and of a return to nature were sobered or touched with a sense of disillusion, when the enthusiasms of classical culture had somewhat stiffened and hardened* into pedantry, and when the new passion for art and for , beauty had in some degree sunk into the lust of J luxury, with its curiosities of artificial refinement./ Rabelais's cry of cheer, his gross laughter in the onset, were growing faint. " Do that which you will" no longer sounded like a complete code of morals and breviary of wisdom. The Renaissance, with its possibilities of a liberal sanity, was caught in the toils of the urgent religious contention. A new dogmatism of new interpreters of the Bible was at odds with the old dogmatism of the Church. Calvin, ruler of Geneva under Christ, was geometrising a Protestant theology. On the other side the bands arrayed on behalf of the counter-Reformation were accomplishing themselves in the drill of Loyola and his tactics of spiritual warfare. The Council of Trent was formulating the inspirations of the Holy Ghost in chapter and section. Unhappy France must needs have her wars of religion, illustrated by perfidies, butcheries, rapes, pillage, conflagration. The zeal of God's House culminated — even if only by accident — in the St. Bartholomew massacre. Was it a deliberate design ? Was it the chance-medley of religious fury? " Everywhere," wrote Father Panicarola in great joy to Rome, " we have seen rivers of blood, and mountains of dead bodies." A medal, struck by Pope Gregory XIII., commemorated the glorious triumph of the faith. " He who in our days," says Montaigne, " is but a parricide and a sacrilegious person is a man of worth and of honour."

At such a time to be temperate, loyal, truthful, \ tolerant, humane was not a little. Not being able to govern events, a man might find some gain in governing himself. ) To plead for justice, probity, charity, to honour the wise of past ages, to celebrate the joy of friendship, to set forth the principles of a sane education, to study the springs of good and evil in human nature, to observe, reflect, and grow wise, to leave for future generations a treasury of good sense, good temper, good humour, was perhaps to do much, f The tower of Montaigne might seem a pharos of illumination, as we look back upon it, in the midst of this wide welter of passions, crimes, and follies. \ There he might bring together a heritage for the better France of coming years. " I call Montaigne," says Sainte-Beuve, in the closing words of one of his studies, " the wisest Frenchman that ever lived." His wisdom has been an influence making for sanity during upwards of three centuries.

The wisest of men, as Montaigne was aware, may have some grains of folly in his composition. It was a pardonable infirmity that he wished his family to be considered more honourable from a social point of view than the facts warranted. When Joseph Scaliger described the father of Montaigne as a vendor of herring, he perverted the truth only by the error of one generation. The ancestry of the essayist can be traced back to the early years of the fifteenth century, when his great grandfather Ramon Eyquem (or Ayquem) was a considerable merchant in the city of Bordeaux. He exported wines and sold pastel (woad) and dried fish. Heir to his maternal uncle Ramon de Gaujac, and married to an heiress, Isabeau de Ferraignes, Ramon increased in worldly goods through his own industry, and added field to field and house to house. In 1477, when he was halfway between seventy and eighty years old, he purchased the noble mansion and property of Montaigne and Belbeys, " with the vines, woods, lands, fields, and mills, thereto pertaining" — a purchase made rather in the spirit of the founder of a family than through any personal ambition or vanity. The house stood on the right bank of the Dordogne, in the department of that name, upon an elevation not remote from the Lidoire, which winds in a great curve among its sunny meadows and below its grassy heights. From the terrace a wide prospect, rich in rural incidents, is visible. The country breathes an air of tranquillity, and across the tranquil spaces comes floating now and again the sound of a bell from some distant church-spire. The overlord to whom the Seigneur de Montaigne did homage was the Archbishop of Bordeaux. A year after his purchase, just as he was preparing to set forth on a pilgrimage to St. James of Compostella (ii June, 1478), Ramon Eyquem died.

His son, Grimon, born about 1450, continued to maintain the business in the Rue de la Rousselle, and extended it in various directions. He became a person of no small importance in Bordeaux, occupying municipal positions of distinction, which serve as evidences of a public esteem based upon a knowledge of his integrity of character and soundness of judgment. And again a marriage with the daughter of a wealthy merchant, Grimon du Four, added to the family dignity and prosperity. In 1 5 18 Grimon Eyquem died at the age of sixty-nine, leaving behind him four sons and two daughters. Tliejeldest of th ese. §o nswas the father of Michel de Montaigne, the Essayist.

So far, in tracing Montaigne's ancestry, we 14 have been among members of the prosperous rflid- ^le class. Energy, steadfastness, good sense seem terhave-been virtues of the race. Our Montaigne, of the legend — a legend in the formation of which he himself assisted — is indolent and idle; he was, in fact, a man of energy like his ancestors; even in his retirement his brain at least was indefatigably agile. His retirement was, indeed, itself an act of energetic decision ; and in his tower, as year succeeded year, he was steadfast, amid all the vicissitudes of his thoughts and what he might style his reveries or whimsies, steadfast in accomplishing a considerable task, which was — as our tasks should be — a great pleasure. The good sense of a successful merchant, mingling with other and widely different qualities, is elevated by Montaigne into the good sense of a moralist and a philosopher.*

With Montaigne's father, Pierre Eyquem, we pass from bourgeois surroundings to a wider field of experience and adventure. In him we find not merely the middle-class steadfastness, but a certain originality of character and of ideas. Pierre,

^Idest child of Grimon Eyquem, was born in SrMontaigne — the only Eyquem born or

* Montaigne's notion that his ancestry was in part of English origin cannot be established as true, but some connections of the kind supposed may have been formed during the English occupation of Guyenne.

IS buried there, however it may have pleased the Essayist to allude to the birthplace or the tombs of his ancestors. On December 30, 1519, Pierre did homage for his estates, presented his pair of white gloves, and received the Archbishop's gracious embrace. Montaigne, who reverenced his father, has represented him as deficient in the gifts of education; but, though afterwards he may have forgotten his classics, Latin verses written by Pierre were printed when he was a lad of seventeen years of age, and at a later time he was familiar with Italian and Spanish. His younger brothers, Pierre the younger, a churchman, and Raymond, advocate and councillor, were men of distinguished culture. It was a time when the Italian wars opened up brilliant possibilities for an adventurous spirit. Pierre, though low of stature, was well-shaped, full of force and dexterity, dark-complexioned, pleasant to look on, a lover of manly exercises. He chose to open his oyster, the world, with a sword rather than a pen. France had need of gallant service from her sons both before and after the disastrous battle of Pavia. We do not know the precise date at which Pierre Eyquem's sieges, surprises, encounters, retreats began, but we know that he was in Italy during many years and that by January, 1528, he had returned to France. His son assures us that he kept a journal of the incidents and events of 16 his life as a soldier; unhappily no such manuscript is now known to be in existence. He brought back from Italy a love of culture, a faith in certain new ideas, and a profound reverence — at which his son smiles, but in no unkindly spirit — for men of learning, " sacred persons", whose sentences he regarded as oracles, and to whom his hospitable doors were ever open.

On his way home from Italy Pierre Eyquem, whose adventurous life had included no dishonorable love-adventure, was married at the age of thirty-three (15 January, 1528) to Antoinette de Louppes, daughter of Pierre de Louppes, a wealthy merchant of Toulouse. The original name of the family was Lopes; it came from Villanova, near Toledo, and there is little doubt that its members, settled in Toulouse and Bordeaux as merchants and physicians, were among the expelled Jews, who had embraced a real or a professed Christian faith under the stress of persecution — the " New Christians", as they were commonly designated. Thus a Spanish and a Jewish strain qualified J:he Gascon blood of Montaigney"^ It was not without an influence on his mind that diversity should be his birthright. His temper could not but be affected by the fact that the religious differences of the time existed in his own family, among those whom he esteemed and loved. His father was a devout member of the 2 17

Roman Communion. His mother not improbablyadhered to the Reformed Faith, adopted by her father and her uncle. That Thomas, Seigneur de Beauregard, one of his brothers, and Jeanne, his sister, who married the councillor Richard de Lestonnac, were Protestants is certain; perhaps a second sister held the same creed. The wars of religion were brought, in seriousness but without excessive bitterness, into the domestic circle. The facts of his own household cannot but have stimulated — stimulated and also checked — a critical - spirit in matters of religion. Tolerance may have been accepted as a part of household piety. And perhaps the heresy of a brother and a sister may have served to point out his own special role of theological originality, as something other than heresy, a special kind of orthodoxy, a transcendental faith, which might act as a happy substitute for scepticism, an originality of docility and submission which allowed him to pursue his own ideas in a less exalted region of the air with singular independence. How to be orthodox with the utmost economy of force was a problem skilfully solved by Montaigne.

While attached to his seigneurial property of Montaigne, Pierre Eyquem often occupied his house in the Rue de Rousselle; though the hereditary smell of dried fish may now have grown faint, he was merchant enough to sell in Bordeaux the i8 wine of his own vineyards. His fellow citizens recognised his integrity, his disinterestedness, and his vigour in public affairs, and he occupied successively all the chief municipal offices from jurat (town -councillor) to sub-mayor (1536) and mayor (1554 to 1556). Pierre Eyquem accepted his public duties in the spirit of serious diligence. " I very well remember when a boy," writes Montaigne, " to have seen him in his old age cruelly tormented in mind about these vexing public affairs, forgetting the gentle aspect (le doulx air) of his own house, to which the infirmity of his years had for long previously attached him, the management of his concerns, and his health; despising his life, which he thought to lose, engaged as he was, on behalf of others, upon long and painful journeys.*

On one of these journeys to Paris, the object of which was the recovery of certain forfeited privileges of the citizens of Bordeaux, Pierre took as his eloquent assistants a number of pipes of the country's wine, which he distributed among those in power with the happiest result. A man of limited education but with an ardent faith in learning, he occupied himself much with the advancement of education in the city, especially in connection with the recently founded College of

Guyenne (1533)- Under the principalship of the distinguished scholar, Andre de Gouvea, a " new Christian" of Portuguese origin, it became the best school in France; and it was Pierre, as sub-mayor, who had handed to Gouvea (1536) his letters of naturalisation. " Such was he," his son goes on, " and this humour of his proceeded from a great goodness of nature; never was there a spirit more charitable or more devoted to the people (populaire) ."

Bordeaux was Pierre's field of public action; but Montaigne, with its " doulx air", was the home of his intimate affection. He was constantly busy altering, improving, adding to his cherished possession :

"My father took a delight in building at Montaigne, where he was born; and in all the ordering of domestic affairs I love to follow his example and rules, and I would engage those who succeed me to do the same as far as I am able. Could I do better for him, I would; I have my pride in knowing that his will still operates and acts through me. God forbid that through my handling I should let slip any shadow of life which I could render to so good a father! When I have concerned myself to finish some old fragment of wall, or to repair some piece of illconstructed building, truly it has been more out of respect for his design than for any satisfaction of my own." *

At the close of 1554 Pierre Eyquem obtained permission from his suzerain, the Archbishop, to rebuild the chateau, and render it sufficientlystrong to resist any sudden assault, such as might not improbably be attempted in that time of social and political disturbance. There was a rare combination of great energy with great gentleness in Pierre's character ; in his bearing a sweet gravity and modesty were apparent ; he was " monr strously punctual" in keeping his word. In old age he still remained active. " I have seen him," writes his son, "when three-score make scorn of our agility, throw himself in his furred gown on horseback, make the circuit of the table on his thumb ; and seldom would he mount to his chamber without taking three or four stairs at a time." *

Montaigne's father died, i8 June, 1568, at the age of seventy-two. His memory remained as one of his son's most precious possessions. He preserved the long wands or rods which the old man was accustomed to carry in his walks; he dressed in black or white because to do so was his father's habit; and when the old cloak worn by Pierre was thrown about him as he rode, " I seem,'^ he says, with an outbreak of manly tenderness, " to wrap myself up in my father." The widowed mother of Montaigne for long survived her husband, and survived also, by several years, her son, the Essayist. She died, 23 July, 1601, at a great old age, seventy-three years from the date of her marriage. In her will she speaks with an honest pride of her prudent and successful domestic economy.

-^ " I was born between eleven o'clock-aad noontide, on the last day of February, /ssj, as we reckon at present, beginning the y6aE«ivith January." Thus, with all precision, Montaigne records the fact. The place of his birth was the noble house of Montaigne. He was the third child of his parents, but of those who survived the eldest; the earlier children had probably died in their infancy.* Following a practice not infrequently adopted, Pierre Eyquem chose as godparents of the boy persons of the humblest rank, and from the name of an unknown godfather it is supposed that the Christian name — Michel — was derived.f His father's wish was to attach his son to the common people, to make him have a care rather, as Montaigne puts it, " for him who stretches his arms to me than for him who turns his back upon me." With the same intention, and also in the hope of making the boy hardy, Pierre

* The statement here made gives the conclusion generally accepted, after much discussion.

t M. Bonnefon notices that Montesquieu in Guyenne and Buffon in Bourgogne were held at the baptismal font by poor folk.

sent the infant from the cradle to a poor village on his estate — conjectured to be Papessus — to be nursed by a peasant, and reared with the utmost simplicity. The result of such an experiment might have been to give Montaigne a distaste for humble ways of living; but, as a fact, the end answered his father's expectations, and Montaigne all through his writings shows a coti^ssionate interest in the life of the peasantry and a l-espHrt~-fDrt!Tetr~manTy virtue. He remained with his foster-mother for some time after he had been weaned, and acquired a hardiness in the matter of diet which was of service to him in later years.

Pierre Eyquem was a man accessible to new ideas and disposed to put such ideas into practice. His son gives an account of a project conceived by him of a central agency or bureau of exchange in every great city, where wants could be registered and supplied, and by means of which situations could be sought and filled. His ideas on education were not only of a novel kind, but, in the instance of little Michel, were carried into effect. At a time when paternal authority was commonly exercised with harshness, Pierre Eyquem tried the discipline of gentleness. At a time when the argument of the rod determined all differences between father and son, he hung up the rod — which was only to be employed on the rarest occasions, and with a sparing hand — and chose to rule by love. In Montaigne's own opinion there are only two faults which ought to be sternly checked and, if possible, uprooted in childhood — lying and obstinacy; these, if once permitted to grow into habits, become, he believed, irreclaimable vices. The offence of lying, the greater vice of the two, he treats less as a breach of divine law than as treason against humanity. Man is a sociable being, and falsehood is an evasion of the duty and the delight of frank communication. " How much less sociable," he exclaims, " is false speaking than silence." Yet every little fault, springing up even in infancy, Montaigne felt, has in it a threat for future years. The petty cruelties of a boy are not to be encouraged by a mother as tokens of a manly temper. A father must not allow his son to domineer over a peasant or a servant, nor to overreach a playfellow by some dishonourable ingenuity. For his own part, Montaigne had the happiness to be brought up to a plain, straightforward way of dealing with others; the habits of openness and integrity became an instinctive part of his later life.

Pierre Eyquem had consulted those sacred persons, men of learning, whose acquaintance he had sought in Italy, and afterwards at Montaigne, and they had advised him to train up a child in all sweetness and liberty, without rigour 24 or constraint, so that the love of knowledge might be a spontaneous and happy blossoming of the faculties. It is almost a symbol of the whole process that every morning the boy was lifted out of the depth of a child's sleep by no rude hand, but gently, at the invitation of some musical instrument ; the tender cells of the brain were not to be shattered and the morning spoilt, but a harmonious mood should meet the harmony of the widening light.

His advisers had assured Montaigne's good father that the time spent in laboriously learning the tongues was the sole cause why the modems do not obtain the grandeur of soul and perfection of knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans. " I do not, however," comments the Essayist, smiling a little at his father's simplicity, " believe that to be the only cause."

" While I was still at nurse" — so Montaigne recounts the process of the experiment in education — " and before my tongue was loosed in speech, he gave me in charge to a German [probably Horstanus], who since died a famous physician in' France, wholly ignorant of our language and very well versed in Latin. This man, w4iom he had sent for expressly, and who was very highly paid, had me continually in his arms. He had with him two others, less learned, to attend upon me, and relieve the first. They spoke to me in no other language than Latin. As to the rest of the household, it was an inviolable rule that neither my father himself, nor my mother, nor valet, nor chambermaid should utter anything in my company but such Latin words as each had learnt in order to prattle with me. The gain to all of them was wonderful ; my father and my mother learnt enough Latin to understand it, and to use it themselves when there was need, as also did the servants who chiefly waited upon me. In short, we latinised at such a rate that it overflowed upon our villages all round, where there still survive, having taken root through custom, many Latin terms for workmen and their tools. As for myself, I was over six years old before I understood more of French or Perigordin than I did of Arabic; and without art, without book, without grammar or rule, without the rod and without a tear, I had learnt Latin quite as pure as my master's, for I had not the means of mingling or corrupting it. If a theme was given me, as is the way in schools, they gave it to others in French, but with me it had to be given in bad Latin to be turned into good. . . . As to Greek, of which I have almost no understanding, my father purposed to have it taught me by art, but in a new fashion, by way of sport and recreative exercise ; we rolled about our declensions, like those, who, with games upon a checker-board, learn arithmetic and geometry." *

That the result of his father's method did not in the end quite answer his expectations was caused, Montaigne supposes, partly by the fact that it was not persisted in for a sufficiently long time, partly by the fact that the s^iolarjiraajxaturally "heavy, soft, and Jethargic?^ Sound of constitution -hg- was; reasonably good-natured and tractable ; but he could not be roused even to play. And yet underneath this heavy complexion he nourished bold imaginings and opinions beyond his years. " What I saw," he says, " I saw aright"; but the slow-witted boy seemed to advance no further than he was led ; and, to make matters worse, he suffered from an incredible defect of memory. Roger Ascham, a teacher of experience, has observed that tough and tardy wits are not the worst.

The judgment of Pierre Eyquem's friends and neighbours was adverse to his experiment in education, and the good man yielded to public opinion. At the age of six years Michel was sent to the College of Guyenne, then a celebrated school, presided over by distinguished teachers. The principal, Andre de Gouvea, had come from the College of Sainte-Barbe in Paris, in the year 1534, bringing with him a staff of eminent professors. It was essentially a grammar school, having as its special, though not its exclusive, object the study of Latin. The course extended over seven years or upwards, beginning with the elements of grammar, and rising at the close to the study of ancient history and that of rhetoric, with declamations in the Latin tongue. Greek was reserved for scholars of the more advanced classes. Cicero, and again Cicero, was for all scholars the staple com- - modity, after the milk for babes had been thoroughly assimilated. But this perpetual Ciceroising was tempered by plays of Terence, and by portions of Ovid and Virgil. In consideration of his exceptional knowledge of Latin, Montaigne was at once placed in a class above that which his age would naturally indicate as suitable. Several of his masters afterwards assured him that, perceiving Latin to come to his lips as a child with perfect readiness, they, who could not but pick and choose their words, were timid of entering into discourse with him.

( Looking back from his later years upon his Icourse of training, Montaigne hardly does jusftice to a system to which he probably owed more than he was aware. He declares that his Latin grew corrupt at school, and that, after seven years of study, he brought with him from the college no kind of advantage of which he could honestly boast. Too much time, he thought, was spent over words ; the memory was overburdened ; the judgment was exercised little, or not at all. But, in truth, few other things are so important to us as words — the tools we have to handle during our entire lifetime — and the judgment can be little exercised until the mind, putting to good use the memory, has possessed itself of a certain body of facts, on which the judgment may go to work. sQie_great^ defectof Montaigne's education— was i^.jaeglect of scietitific knowledge and scientific .method. His writings might have lost something, but would have gained more, if his sinuosities of meditation had sometimes only served 28 to disguise the processes of exact and progressive thought.