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The Essays of Montaigne
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 1.
Preface
The Life of Montaigne
The Letters of Montaigne
PREFACE.
The present publication is intended to supply a recognised deficiency in
our literature--a library edition of the Essays of Montaigne. This great
French writer deserves to be regarded as a classic, not only in the land
of his birth, but in all countries and in all literatures. His Essays,
which are at once the most celebrated and the most permanent of his
productions, form a magazine out of which such minds as those of Bacon
and Shakespeare did not disdain to help themselves; and, indeed, as
Hallam observes, the Frenchman’s literary importance largely results from
the share which his mind had in influencing other minds, coeval and
subsequent. But, at the same time, estimating the value and rank of the
essayist, we are not to leave out of the account the drawbacks and the
circumstances of the period: the imperfect state of education, the
comparative scarcity of books, and the limited opportunities of
intellectual intercourse. Montaigne freely borrowed of others, and he
has found men willing to borrow of him as freely. We need not wonder at
the reputation which he with seeming facility achieved. He was, without
being aware of it, the leader of a new school in letters and morals. His
book was different from all others which were at that date in the world.
It diverted the ancient currents of thought into new channels. It told
its readers, with unexampled frankness, what its writer’s opinion was
about men and things, and threw what must have been a strange kind of new
light on many matters but darkly understood. Above all, the essayist
uncased himself, and made his intellectual and physical organism public
property. He took the world into his confidence on all subjects. His
essays were a sort of literary anatomy, where we get a diagnosis of the
writer’s mind, made by himself at different levels and under a large
variety of operating influences.
Of all egotists, Montaigne, if not the greatest, was the most
fascinating, because, perhaps, he was the least affected and most
truthful. What he did, and what he had professed to do, was to dissect
his mind, and show us, as best he could, how it was made, and what
relation it bore to external objects. He investigated his mental
structure as a schoolboy pulls his watch to pieces, to examine the
mechanism of the works; and the result, accompanied by illustrations
abounding with originality and force, he delivered to his fellow-men in a
book.
Eloquence, rhetorical effect, poetry, were alike remote from his design.
He did not write from necessity, scarcely perhaps for fame. But he
desired to leave France, nay, and the world, something to be remembered
by, something which should tell what kind of a man he was--what he felt,
thought, suffered--and he succeeded immeasurably, I apprehend, beyond his
expectations.
It was reasonable enough that Montaigne should expect for his work a
certain share of celebrity in Gascony, and even, as time went on,
throughout France; but it is scarcely probable that he foresaw how his
renown was to become world-wide; how he was to occupy an almost unique
position as a man of letters and a moralist; how the Essays would be
read, in all the principal languages of Europe, by millions of
intelligent human beings, who never heard of Perigord or the League, and
who are in doubt, if they are questioned, whether the author lived in the
sixteenth or the eighteenth century. This is true fame. A man of genius
belongs to no period and no country. He speaks the language of nature,
which is always everywhere the same.
The text of these volumes is taken from the first edition of Cotton’s
version, printed in 3 vols. 8vo, 1685-6, and republished in 1693, 1700,
1711, 1738, and 1743, in the same number of volumes and the same size.
In the earliest impression the errors of the press are corrected merely
as far as page 240 of the first volume, and all the editions follow one
another. That of 1685-6 was the only one which the translator lived to
see. He died in 1687, leaving behind him an interesting and little-known
collection of poems, which appeared posthumously, 8vo, 1689.
It was considered imperative to correct Cotton’s translation by a careful
collation with the ‘variorum’ edition of the original, Paris, 1854,
4 vols. 8vo or 12mo, and parallel passages from Florin’s earlier
undertaking have occasionally been inserted at the foot of the page. A
Life of the Author and all his recovered Letters, sixteen in number, have
also been given; but, as regards the correspondence, it can scarcely be
doubted that it is in a purely fragmentary state. To do more than
furnish a sketch of the leading incidents in Montaigne’s life seemed, in
the presence of Bayle St. John’s charming and able biography, an attempt
as difficult as it was useless.
The besetting sin of both Montaigne’s translators seems to have been a
propensity for reducing his language and phraseology to the language and
phraseology of the age and country to which they belonged, and, moreover,
inserting paragraphs and words, not here and there only, but constantly
and habitually, from an evident desire and view to elucidate or
strengthen their author’s meaning. The result has generally been
unfortunate; and I have, in the case of all these interpolations on
Cotton’s part, felt bound, where I did not cancel them, to throw them
down into the notes, not thinking it right that Montaigne should be
allowed any longer to stand sponsor for what he never wrote; and
reluctant, on the other hand, to suppress the intruding matter entirely,
where it appeared to possess a value of its own.
Nor is redundancy or paraphrase the only form of transgression in Cotton,
for there are places in his author which he thought proper to omit, and
it is hardly necessary to say that the restoration of all such matter to
the text was considered essential to its integrity and completeness.
My warmest thanks are due to my father, Mr Registrar Hazlitt, the author
of the well-known and excellent edition of Montaigne published in 1842,
for the important assistance which he has rendered to me in verifying and
retranslating the quotations, which were in a most corrupt state, and of
which Cotton’s English versions were singularly loose and inexact, and
for the zeal with which he has co-operated with me in collating the
English text, line for line and word for word, with the best French
edition.
By the favour of Mr F. W. Cosens, I have had by me, while at work on this
subject, the copy of Cotgrave’s Dictionary, folio, 1650, which belonged
to Cotton. It has his autograph and copious MSS. notes, nor is it too
much to presume that it is the very book employed by him in his
translation.
W. C. H.
KENSINGTON, November 1877.
BOOK THE FIRST.
CHAP.
I. That men by various ways arrive at the same end.
II. Of Sorrow.
III. That our affections carry themselves beyond us.
IV. That the soul discharges her passions upon false objects, where
the true are wanting.
V. Whether the governor of a place besieged ought himself to go out
to parley.
VI. That the hour of parley is dangerous.
VII. That the intention is judge of our actions
VIII. Of idleness.
IX. Of liars.
X. Of quick or slow speech.
XI. Of prognostications.
XII. Of constancy.
XIII. The ceremony of the interview of princes.
XIV. That men are justly punished for being obstinate in the defence
of a fort that is not in reason to be defended.
XV. Of the punishment of cowardice.
XVI. A proceeding of some ambassadors.
XVII. Of fear.
XVIII. That men are not to judge of our happiness till after death.
XIX. That to study philosophy is to learn to die.
XX. Of the force of imagination.
XXI. That the profit of one man is the damage of another.
XXII. Of custom, and that we should not easily change a law received.
XXIII. Various events from the same counsel.
XXIV. Of pedantry.
XXV. Of the education of children.
XXVI. That it is folly to measure truth and error by our own capacity.
XXVII. Of friendship.
XXVIII. Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de la Boetie.
XXIX. Of moderation.
XXX. Of cannibals.
XXXI. That a man is soberly to judge of the divine ordinances.
XXXII. That we are to avoid pleasures, even at the expense of
life.
XXXIII. That fortune is oftentimes observed to act by the rule of reason.
XXXIV. Of one defect in our government.
XXXV. Of the custom of wearing clothes.
XXXVI. Of Cato the Younger.
XXXVII. That we laugh and cry for the same thing.
XXXVIII. Of solitude.
XXXIX. A consideration upon Cicero.
XL. That the relish of good and evil depends in a great measure upon
the opinion we have of them.
XLI. Not to communicate a man’s honour.
XLII. Of the inequality amongst us.
XLIII. Of sumptuary laws.
XLIV. Of sleep.
XLV. Of the battle of Dreux.
XLVI. Of names.
XLVII. Of the uncertainty of our judgment.
XLVIII. Of war-horses, or destriers.
XLIX. Of ancient customs.
L. Of Democritus and Heraclitus.
LI. Of the vanity of words.
LII. Of the parsimony of the Ancients.
LIII. Of a saying of Caesar.
LIV. Of vain subtleties.
LV. Of smells.
LVI. Of prayers.
LVII. Of age.
THE LIFE OF MONTAIGNE
[This is translated freely from that prefixed to the ‘variorum’ Paris
edition, 1854, 4 vols. 8vo. This biography is the more desirable that
it contains all really interesting and important matter in the journal of
the Tour in Germany and Italy, which, as it was merely written under
Montaigne’s dictation, is in the third person, is scarcely worth
publication, as a whole, in an English dress.]
The author of the Essays was born, as he informs us himself, between
eleven and twelve o’clock in the day, the last of February 1533, at the
chateau of St. Michel de Montaigne. His father, Pierre Eyquem, esquire,
was successively first Jurat of the town of Bordeaux (1530), Under-Mayor
1536, Jurat for the second time in 1540, Procureur in 1546, and at
length Mayor from 1553 to 1556. He was a man of austere probity, who had
“a particular regard for honour and for propriety in his person and
attire . . . a mighty good faith in his speech, and a conscience and
a religious feeling inclining to superstition, rather than to the other
extreme.” [Essays, ii. 2.] Pierre Eyquem bestowed great care on the
education of his children, especially on the practical side of it. To
associate closely his son Michel with the people, and attach him to those
who stand in need of assistance, he caused him to be held at the font by
persons of meanest position; subsequently he put him out to nurse with a
poor villager, and then, at a later period, made him accustom himself to
the most common sort of living, taking care, nevertheless, to cultivate
his mind, and superintend its development without the exercise of undue
rigour or constraint. Michel, who gives us the minutest account of his
earliest years, charmingly narrates how they used to awake him by the
sound of some agreeable music, and how he learned Latin, without
suffering the rod or shedding a tear, before beginning French, thanks to
the German teacher whom his father had placed near him, and who never
addressed him except in the language of Virgil and Cicero. The study of
Greek took precedence. At six years of age young Montaigne went to the
College of Guienne at Bordeaux, where he had as preceptors the most
eminent scholars of the sixteenth century, Nicolas Grouchy, Guerente,
Muret, and Buchanan. At thirteen he had passed through all the classes,
and as he was destined for the law he left school to study that science.
He was then about fourteen, but these early years of his life are
involved in obscurity. The next information that we have is that in 1554
he received the appointment of councillor in the Parliament of Bordeaux;
in 1559 he was at Bar-le-Duc with the court of Francis II, and in the
year following he was present at Rouen to witness the declaration of the
majority of Charles IX. We do not know in what manner he was engaged on
these occasions.
Between 1556 and 1563 an important incident occurred in the life of
Montaigne, in the commencement of his romantic friendship with Etienne de
la Boetie, whom he had met, as he tells us, by pure chance at some
festive celebration in the town. From their very first interview the two
found themselves drawn irresistibly close to one another, and during six
years this alliance was foremost in the heart of Montaigne, as it was
afterwards in his memory, when death had severed it.
Although he blames severely in his own book [Essays, i. 27.] those who,
contrary to the opinion of Aristotle, marry before five-and-thirty,
Montaigne did not wait for the period fixed by the philosopher of
Stagyra, but in 1566, in his thirty-third year, he espoused Francoise de
Chassaigne, daughter of a councillor in the Parliament of Bordeaux. The
history of his early married life vies in obscurity with that of his
youth. His biographers are not agreed among themselves; and in the
same degree that he lays open to our view all that concerns his secret
thoughts, the innermost mechanism of his mind, he observes too much
reticence in respect to his public functions and conduct, and his social
relations. The title of Gentleman in Ordinary to the King, which he
assumes, in a preface, and which Henry II. gives him in a letter, which
we print a little farther on; what he says as to the commotions of
courts, where he passed a portion of his life; the Instructions which he
wrote under the dictation of Catherine de Medici for King Charles IX.,
and his noble correspondence with Henry IV., leave no doubt, however, as
to the part which he played in the transactions of those times, and we
find an unanswerable proof of the esteem in which he was held by the most
exalted personages, in a letter which was addressed to him by Charles at
the time he was admitted to the Order of St. Michael, which was, as he
informs us himself, the highest honour of the French noblesse.
According to Lacroix du Maine, Montaigne, upon the death of his eldest
brother, resigned his post of Councillor, in order to adopt the military
profession, while, if we might credit the President Bouhier, he never
discharged any functions connected with arms. However, several passages
in the Essays seem to indicate that he not only took service, but that he
was actually in numerous campaigns with the Catholic armies. Let us add,
that on his monument he is represented in a coat of mail, with his casque
and gauntlets on his right side, and a lion at his feet, all which
signifies, in the language of funeral emblems, that the departed has been
engaged in some important military transactions.
However it may be as to these conjectures, our author, having arrived at
his thirty-eighth year, resolved to dedicate to study and contemplation
the remaining term of his life; and on his birthday, the last of February
1571, he caused a philosophical inscription, in Latin, to be placed upon
one of the walls of his chateau, where it is still to be seen, and of
which the translation is to this effect:--“In the year of Christ . . .
in his thirty-eighth year, on the eve of the Calends of March, his
birthday, Michel Montaigne, already weary of court employments and public
honours, withdrew himself entirely into the converse of the learned
virgins where he intends to spend the remaining moiety of the to allotted
to him in tranquil seclusion.”
At the time to which we have come, Montaigne was unknown to the world of
letters, except as a translator and editor. In 1569 he had published a
translation of the “Natural Theology” of Raymond de Sebonde, which he had
solely undertaken to please his father. In 1571 he had caused to be
printed at Paris certain ‘opuscucla’ of Etienne de la Boetie; and these
two efforts, inspired in one case by filial duty, and in the other by
friendship, prove that affectionate motives overruled with him mere
personal ambition as a literary man. We may suppose that he began to
compose the Essays at the very outset of his retirement from public
engagements; for as, according to his own account, observes the President
Bouhier, he cared neither for the chase, nor building, nor gardening, nor
agricultural pursuits, and was exclusively occupied with reading and
reflection, he devoted himself with satisfaction to the task of setting
down his thoughts just as they occurred to him. Those thoughts became a
book, and the first part of that book, which was to confer immortality on
the writer, appeared at Bordeaux in 1580. Montaigne was then
fifty-seven; he had suffered for some years past from renal colic and
gravel; and it was with the necessity of distraction from his pain, and
the hope of deriving relief from the waters, that he undertook at this
time a great journey. As the account which he has left of his travels in
Germany and Italy comprises some highly interesting particulars of his
life and personal history, it seems worth while to furnish a sketch or
analysis of it.
“The Journey, of which we proceed to describe the course simply,” says
the editor of the Itinerary, “had, from Beaumont-sur-Oise to Plombieres,
in Lorraine, nothing sufficiently interesting to detain us . . . we
must go as far, as Basle, of which we have a description, acquainting us
with its physical and political condition at that period, as well as with
the character of its baths. The passage of Montaigne through Switzerland
is not without interest, as we see there how our philosophical traveller
accommodated himself everywhere to the ways of the country. The hotels,
the provisions, the Swiss cookery, everything, was agreeable to him; it
appears, indeed, as if he preferred to the French manners and tastes
those of the places he was visiting, and of which the simplicity and
freedom (or frankness) accorded more with his own mode of life and
thinking. In the towns where he stayed, Montaigne took care to see the
Protestant divines, to make himself conversant with all their dogmas. He
even had disputations with them occasionally.
“Having left Switzerland he went to Isne, an imperial then on to Augsburg
and Munich. He afterwards proceeded to the Tyrol, where he was agreeably
surprised, after the warnings which he had received, at the very slight
inconveniences which he suffered, which gave him occasion to remark that
he had all his life distrusted the statements of others respecting
foreign countries, each person’s tastes being according to the notions of
his native place; and that he had consequently set very little on what he
was told beforehand.
“Upon his arrival at Botzen, Montaigne wrote to Francois Hottmann, to say
that he had been so pleased with his visit to Germany that he quitted it
with great regret, although it was to go into Italy. He then passed
through Brunsol, Trent, where he put up at the Rose; thence going to
Rovera; and here he first lamented the scarcity of crawfish, but made up
for the loss by partaking of truffles cooked in oil and vinegar; oranges,
citrons, and olives, in all of which he delighted.”
After passing a restless night, when he bethought himself in the morning
that there was some new town or district to be seen, he rose, we are
told, with alacrity and pleasure.
His secretary, to whom he dictated his Journal, assures us that he never
saw him take so much interest in surrounding scenes and persons, and
believes that the complete change helped to mitigate his sufferings in
concentrating his attention on other points. When there was a complaint
made that he had led his party out of the beaten route, and then returned
very near the spot from which they started, his answer was that he had no
settled course, and that he merely proposed to himself to pay visits to
places which he had not seen, and so long as they could not convict him
of traversing the same path twice, or revisiting a point already seen, he
could perceive no harm in his plan. As to Rome, he cared less to go
there, inasmuch as everybody went there; and he said that he never had a
lacquey who could not tell him all about Florence or Ferrara. He also
would say that he seemed to himself like those who are reading some
pleasant story or some fine book, of which they fear to come to the end:
he felt so much pleasure in travelling that he dreaded the moment of
arrival at the place where they were to stop for the night.
We see that Montaigne travelled, just as he wrote, completely at his
ease, and without the least constraint, turning, just as he fancied, from
the common or ordinary roads taken by tourists. The good inns, the soft
beds, the fine views, attracted his notice at every point, and in his
observations on men and things he confines himself chiefly to the
practical side. The consideration of his health was constantly before
him, and it was in consequence of this that, while at Venice, which
disappointed him, he took occasion to note, for the benefit of readers,
that he had an attack of colic, and that he evacuated two large stones
after supper. On quitting Venice, he went in succession to Ferrara,
Rovigo, Padua, Bologna (where he had a stomach-ache), Florence, &c.; and
everywhere, before alighting, he made it a rule to send some of his
servants to ascertain where the best accommodation was to be had. He
pronounced the Florentine women the finest in the world, but had not an
equally good opinion of the food, which was less plentiful than in
Germany, and not so well served. He lets us understand that in Italy
they send up dishes without dressing, but in Germany they were much
better seasoned, and served with a variety of sauces and gravies. He
remarked further, that the glasses were singularly small and the wines
insipid.
After dining with the Grand-Duke of Florence, Montaigne passed rapidly
over the intermediate country, which had no fascination for him, and
arrived at Rome on the last day of November, entering by the Porta del
Popolo, and putting up at Bear. But he afterwards hired, at twenty
crowns a month, fine furnished rooms in the house of a Spaniard, who
included in these terms the use of the kitchen fire. What most annoyed
him in the Eternal City was the number of Frenchmen he met, who all
saluted him in his native tongue; but otherwise he was very comfortable,
and his stay extended to five months. A mind like his, full of grand
classical reflections, could not fail to be profoundly impressed in the
presence of the ruins at Rome, and he has enshrined in a magnificent
passage of the Journal the feelings of the moment: “He said,” writes his
secretary, “that at Rome one saw nothing but the sky under which she had
been built, and the outline of her site: that the knowledge we had of her
was abstract, contemplative, not palpable to the actual senses: that
those who said they beheld at least the ruins of Rome, went too far, for
the ruins of so gigantic a structure must have commanded greater
reverence-it was nothing but her sepulchre. The world, jealous of her,
prolonged empire, had in the first place broken to pieces that admirable
body, and then, when they perceived that the remains attracted worship
and awe, had buried the very wreck itself.--[Compare a passage in one
of Horace Walpole’s letters to Richard West, 22 March 1740 (Cunningham’s
edit. i. 41), where Walpole, speaking of Rome, describes her very ruins
as ruined.]--As to those small fragments which were still to be seen on
the surface, notwithstanding the assaults of time and all other attacks,
again and again repeated, they had been favoured by fortune to be some
slight evidence of that infinite grandeur which nothing could entirely
extingish. But it was likely that these disfigured remains were the
least entitled to attention, and that the enemies of that immortal
renown, in their fury, had addressed themselves in the first instance to
the destruction of what was most beautiful and worthiest of preservation;
and that the buildings of this bastard Rome, raised upon the ancient
productions, although they might excite the admiration of the present
age, reminded him of the crows’ and sparrows’ nests built in the walls
and arches of the old churches, destroyed by the Huguenots. Again, he
was apprehensive, seeing the space which this grave occupied, that the
whole might not have been recovered, and that the burial itself had been
buried. And, moreover, to see a wretched heap of rubbish, as pieces of
tile and pottery, grow (as it had ages since) to a height equal to that
of Mount Gurson,--[In Perigord.]--and thrice the width of it, appeared to
show a conspiracy of destiny against the glory and pre-eminence of that
city, affording at the same time a novel and extraordinary proof of its
departed greatness. He (Montaigne) observed that it was difficult to
believe considering the limited area taken up by any of her seven hills
and particularly the two most favoured ones, the Capitoline and the
Palatine, that so many buildings stood on the site. Judging only from
what is left of the Temple of Concord, along the ‘Forum Romanum’, of
which the fall seems quite recent, like that of some huge mountain split
into horrible crags, it does not look as if more than two such edifices
could have found room on the Capitoline, on which there were at one
period from five-and-twenty to thirty temples, besides private dwellings.
But, in point of fact, there is scarcely any probability of the views
which we take of the city being correct, its plan and form having changed
infinitely; for instance, the ‘Velabrum’, which on account of its
depressed level, received the sewage of the city, and had a lake, has
been raised by artificial accumulation to a height with the other hills,
and Mount Savello has, in truth, grown simply out of the ruins of the
theatre of Marcellus. He believed that an ancient Roman would not
recognise the place again. It often happened that in digging down into
earth the workmen came upon the crown of some lofty column, which, though
thus buried, was still standing upright. The people there have no
recourse to other foundations than the vaults and arches of the old
houses, upon which, as on slabs of rock, they raise their modern palaces.
It is easy to see that several of the ancient streets are thirty feet
below those at present in use.”
Sceptical as Montaigne shows himself in his books, yet during his sojourn
at Rome he manifested a great regard for religion. He solicited the
honour of being admitted to kiss the feet of the Holy Father, Gregory
XIII.; and the Pontiff exhorted him always to continue in the devotion
which he had hitherto exhibited to the Church and the service of the Most
Christian King.
“After this, one sees,” says the editor of the Journal, “Montaigne
employing all his time in making excursions bout the neighbourhood on
horseback or on foot, in visits, in observations of every kind. The
churches, the stations, the processions even, the sermons; then the
palaces, the vineyards, the gardens, the public amusements, as the
Carnival, &c.--nothing was overlooked. He saw a Jewish child
circumcised, and wrote down a most minute account of the operation. He
met at San Sisto a Muscovite ambassador, the second who had come to Rome
since the pontificate of Paul III. This minister had despatches from his
court for Venice, addressed to the ‘Grand Governor of the Signory’. The
court of Muscovy had at that time such limited relations with the other
powers of Europe, and it was so imperfect in its information, that it
thought Venice to be a dependency of the Holy See.”
Of all the particulars with which he has furnished us during his stay at
Rome, the following passage in reference to the Essays is not the least
singular: “The Master of the Sacred Palace returned him his Essays,
castigated in accordance with the views of the learned monks. ‘He had
only been able to form a judgment of them,’ said he, ‘through a certain
French monk, not understanding French himself’”--we leave Montaigne
himself to tell the story--“and he received so complacently my excuses
and explanations on each of the passages which had been animadverted upon
by the French monk, that he concluded by leaving me at liberty to revise
the text agreeably to the dictates of my own conscience. I begged him,
on the contrary, to abide by the opinion of the person who had criticised
me, confessing, among other matters, as, for example, in my use of the
word fortune, in quoting historical poets, in my apology for Julian, in
my animadversion on the theory that he who prayed ought to be exempt from
vicious inclinations for the time being; item, in my estimate of cruelty,
as something beyond simple death; item, in my view that a child ought to
be brought up to do everything, and so on; that these were my opinions,
which I did not think wrong; as to other things, I said that the
corrector understood not my meaning. The Master, who is a clever man,
made many excuses for me, and gave me to suppose that he did not concur
in the suggested improvements; and pleaded very ingeniously for me in my
presence against another (also an Italian) who opposed my sentiments.”
Such is what passed between Montaigne and these two personages at that
time; but when the Essayist was leaving, and went to bid them farewell,
they used very different language to him. “They prayed me,” says he,
“to pay no attention to the censure passed on my book, in which other
French persons had apprised them that there were many foolish things;
adding, that they honoured my affectionate intention towards the Church,
and my capacity; and had so high an opinion of my candour and
conscientiousness that they should leave it to me to make such
alterations as were proper in the book, when I reprinted it; among other
things, the word fortune. To excuse themselves for what they had said
against my book, they instanced works of our time by cardinals and other
divines of excellent repute which had been blamed for similar faults,
which in no way affected reputation of the author, or of the publication
as a whole; they requested me to lend the Church the support of my
eloquence (this was their fair speech), and to make longer stay in the
place, where I should be free from all further intrusion on their part.
It seemed to me that we parted very good friends.”
Before quitting Rome, Montaigne received his diploma of citizenship, by
which he was greatly flattered; and after a visit to Tivoli he set out
for Loretto, stopping at Ancona, Fano, and Urbino. He arrived at the
beginning of May 1581, at Bagno della Villa, where he established
himself, order to try the waters. There, we find in the Journal, of his
own accord the Essayist lived in the strictest conformity with the
regime, and henceforth we only hear of diet, the effect which the waters
had by degrees upon system, of the manner in which he took them; in a
word, he does not omit an item of the circumstances connected with his
daily routine, his habit of body, his baths, and the rest. It was no
longer the journal of a traveller which he kept, but the diary of an
invalid,--[“I am reading Montaigne’s Travels, which have lately been
found; there is little in them but the baths and medicines he took, and
what he had everywhere for dinner.”--H. Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, June
8, 1774.]--attentive to the minutest details of the cure which he was
endeavouring to accomplish: a sort of memorandum book, in which he was
noting down everything that he felt and did, for the benefit of his
medical man at home, who would have the care of his health on his return,
and the attendance on his subsequent infirmities. Montaigne gives it as
his reason and justification for enlarging to this extent here, that he
had omitted, to his regret, to do so in his visits to other baths, which
might have saved him the trouble of writing at such great length now; but
it is perhaps a better reason in our eyes, that what he wrote he wrote
for his own use.
We find in these accounts, however, many touches which are valuable as
illustrating the manners of the place. The greater part of the entries
in the Journal, giving the account of these waters, and of the travels,
down to Montaigne’s arrival at the first French town on his homeward
route, are in Italian, because he wished to exercise himself in that
language.
The minute and constant watchfulness of Montaigne over his health and
over himself might lead one to suspect that excessive fear of death which
degenerates into cowardice. But was it not rather the fear of the
operation for the stone, at that time really formidable? Or perhaps he
was of the same way of thinking with the Greek poet, of whom Cicero
reports this saying: “I do not desire to die; but the thought of being
dead is indifferent to me.” Let us hear, however, what he says himself
on this point very frankly: “It would be too weak and unmanly on my part
if, certain as I am of always finding myself in the position of having to
succumb in that way,--[To the stone or gravel.]--and death coming nearer
and nearer to me, I did not make some effort, before the time came, to
bear the trial with fortitude. For reason prescribes that we should
joyfully accept what it may please God to send us. Therefore the only
remedy, the only rule, and the sole doctrine for avoiding the evils by
which mankind is surrounded, whatever they are, is to resolve to bear
them so far as our nature permits, or to put an end to them courageously
and promptly.”
He was still at the waters of La Villa, when, on the 7th September 1581,
he learned by letter that he had been elected Mayor of Bordeaux on the
1st August preceding. This intelligence made him hasten his departure;
and from Lucca he proceeded to Rome. He again made some stay in that
city, and he there received the letter of the jurats of Bordeaux,
notifying to him officially his election to the Mayoralty, and inviting
him to return as speedily as possible. He left for France, accompanied
by young D’Estissac and several other gentlemen, who escorted him a
considerable distance; but none went back to France with him, not even
his travelling companion. He passed by Padua, Milan, Mont Cenis, and
Chambery; thence he went on to Lyons, and lost no time in repairing to
his chateau, after an absence of seventeen months and eight days.
We have just seen that, during his absence in Italy, the author of the
Essays was elected mayor of Bordeaux. “The gentlemen of Bordeaux,” says
he, “elected me Mayor of their town while I was at a distance from
France, and far from the thought of such a thing. I excused myself; but
they gave to understand that I was wrong in so doing, it being also the
command of the king that I should stand.” This the letter which Henry
III. wrote to him on the occasion:
MONSIEUR, DE MONTAIGNE,--Inasmuch as I hold in great esteem your fidelity
and zealous devotion to my service, it has been a pleasure to me to learn
that you have been chosen mayor of my town of Bordeaux. I have had the
agreeable duty of confirming the selection, and I did so the more
willingly, seeing that it was made during your distant absence; wherefore
it is my desire, and I require and command you expressly that you proceed
without delay to enter on the duties to which you have received so
legitimate a call. And so you will act in a manner very agreeable to me,
while the contrary will displease me greatly. Praying God, M. de
Montaigne, to have you in his holy keeping.
“Written at Paris, the 25th day of November 1581.
“HENRI.
“A Monsieur de MONTAIGNE,
Knight of my Order, Gentleman in Ordinary of my
Chamber, being at present in Rome.”
Montaigne, in his new employment, the most important in the province,
obeyed the axiom, that a man may not refuse a duty, though it absorb his
time and attention, and even involve the sacrifice of his blood. Placed
between two extreme parties, ever on the point of getting to blows, he
showed himself in practice what he is in his book, the friend of a middle
and temperate policy. Tolerant by character and on principle, he
belonged, like all the great minds of the sixteenth century, to that
political sect which sought to improve, without destroying, institutions;
and we may say of him, what he himself said of La Boetie, “that he had
that maxim indelibly impressed on his mind, to obey and submit himself
religiously to the laws under which he was born. Affectionately attached
to the repose of his country, an enemy to changes and innovations, he
would have preferred to employ what means he had towards their
discouragement and suppression, than in promoting their success.” Such
was the platform of his administration.
He applied himself, in an especial manner, to the maintenance of peace
between the two religious factions which at that time divided the town of
Bordeaux; and at the end of his two first years of office, his grateful
fellow-citizens conferred on him (in 1583) the mayoralty for two years
more, a distinction which had been enjoyed, as he tells us, only twice
before. On the expiration of his official career, after four years’
duration, he could say fairly enough of himself that he left behind him
neither hatred nor cause of offence.
In the midst of the cares of government, Montaigne found time to revise
and enlarge his Essays, which, since their appearance in 1580, were
continually receiving augmentation in the form of additional chapters or
papers. Two more editions were printed in 1582 and 1587; and during this
time the author, while making alterations in the original text, had
composed part of the Third Book. He went to Paris to make arrangements
for the publication of his enlarged labours, and a fourth impression in
1588 was the result. He remained in the capital some time on this
occasion, and it was now that he met for the first time Mademoiselle de
Gournay. Gifted with an active and inquiring spirit, and, above all,
possessing a sound and healthy tone of mind, Mademoiselle de Gournay had
been carried from her childhood with that tide which set in with
sixteenth century towards controversy, learning, and knowledge. She
learnt Latin without a master; and when, the age of eighteen, she
accidentally became possessor of a copy of the Essays, she was
transported with delight and admiration.
She quitted the chateau of Gournay, to come and see him. We cannot do
better, in connection with this journey of sympathy, than to repeat the
words of Pasquier: “That young lady, allied to several great and noble
families of Paris, proposed to herself no other marriage than with her
honour, enriched with the knowledge gained from good books, and, beyond
all others, from the essays of M. de Montaigne, who making in the year
1588 a lengthened stay in the town of Paris, she went there for the
purpose of forming his personal acquaintance; and her mother, Madame de
Gournay, and herself took him back with them to their chateau, where, at
two or three different times, he spent three months altogether, most
welcome of visitors.” It was from this moment that Mademoiselle de
Gournay dated her adoption as Montaigne’s daughter, a circumstance which
has tended to confer immortality upon her in a far greater measure than
her own literary productions.
Montaigne, on leaving Paris, stayed a short time at Blois, to attend the
meeting of the States-General. We do not know what part he took in that
assembly: but it is known that he was commissioned, about this period, to
negotiate between Henry of Navarre (afterwards Henry IV.) and the Duke of
Guise. His political life is almost a blank; but De Thou assures us that
Montaigne enjoyed the confidence of the principal persons of his time.
De Thou, who calls him a frank man without constraint, tells us that,
walking with him and Pasquier in the court at the Castle of Blois, he
heard him pronounce some very remarkable opinions on contemporary events,
and he adds that Montaigne had foreseen that the troubles in France could
not end without witnessing the death of either the King of Navarre or of
the Duke of Guise. He had made himself so completely master of the views
of these two princes, that he told De Thou that the King of Navarre would
have been prepared to embrace Catholicism, if he had not been afraid of
being abandoned by his party, and that the Duke of Guise, on his part,
had no particular repugnance to the Confession of Augsburg, for which the
Cardinal of Lorraine, his uncle, had inspired him with a liking, if it
had not been for the peril involved in quitting the Romish communion. It
would have been easy for Montaigne to play, as we call it, a great part
in politics, and create for himself a lofty position but his motto was,
‘Otio et Libertati’; and he returned quietly home to compose a chapter
for his next edition on inconveniences of Greatness.
The author of the Essays was now fifty-five. The malady which tormented
him grew only worse and worse with years; and yet he occupied himself
continually with reading, meditating, and composition. He employed the
years 1589, 1590, and 1591 in making fresh additions to his book; and
even in the approaches of old age he might fairly anticipate many happy
hours, when he was attacked by quinsy, depriving him of the power
utterance. Pasquier, who has left us some details his last hours,
narrates that he remained three days in full possession of his faculties,
but unable to speak, so that, in order to make known his desires, he was
obliged to resort to writing; and as he felt his end drawing near, he
begged his wife to summon certain of the gentlemen who lived in the
neighbourhood to bid them a last farewell. When they had arrived, he
caused mass to be celebrated in apartment; and just as the priest was
elevating the host, Montaigne fell forward with his arms extended in
front of him, on the bed, and so expired. He was in his sixtieth year.
It was the 13th September 1592.
Montaigne was buried near his own house; but a few years after his
decease, his remains were removed to the church of a Commandery of St.
Antoine at Bordeaux, where they still continue. His monument was
restored in 1803 by a descendant. It was seen about 1858 by an English
traveller (Mr. St. John).’--[“Montaigne the Essayist,” by Bayle St.
John, 1858, 2 vols. 8vo, is one of most delightful books of the kind.]--
and was then in good preservation.
In 1595 Mademoiselle de Gournay published a new edition of Montaigne’s
Essays, and the first with the latest emendations of the author, from a
copy presented to her by his widow, and which has not been recovered,
although it is known to have been in existence some years after the date
of the impression, made on its authority.
Coldly as Montaigne’s literary productions appear to have been received
by the generation immediately succeeding his own age, his genius grew
into just appreciation in the seventeenth century, when such great
spirits arose as La Bruyere, Moliere, La Fontaine, Madame de Sevigne.
“O,” exclaimed the Chatelaine des Rochers, “what capital company he is,
the dear man! he is my old friend; and just for the reason that he is
so, he always seems new. My God! how full is that book of sense!”
Balzac said that he had carried human reason as far and as high as it
could go, both in politics and in morals. On the other hand, Malebranche
and the writers of Port Royal were against him; some reprehended the
licentiousness of his writings; others their impiety, materialism,
epicureanism. Even Pascal, who had carefully read the Essays, and gained
no small profit by them, did not spare his reproaches. But Montaigne has
outlived detraction. As time has gone on, his admirers and borrowers
have increased in number, and his Jansenism, which recommended him to the
eighteenth century, may not be his least recommendation in the
nineteenth. Here we have certainly, on the whole, a first-class man, and
one proof of his masterly genius seems to be, that his merits and his
beauties are sufficient to induce us to leave out of consideration
blemishes and faults which would have been fatal to an inferior writer.
THE LETTERS OF MONTAIGNE.
I.
To Monsieur de MONTAIGNE
[This account of the death of La Boetie begins imperfectly. It first
appeared in a little volume of Miscellanies in 1571. See Hazlitt, ubi
sup. p. 630.]--As to his last words, doubtless, if any man can
give good account of them, it is I, both because, during the whole of his
sickness he conversed as fully with me as with any one, and also because,
in consequence of the singular and brotherly friendship which we had
entertained for each other, I was perfectly acquainted with the
intentions, opinions, and wishes which he had formed in the course of his
life, as much so, certainly, as one man can possibly be with those of
another man; and because I knew them to be elevated, virtuous, full of
steady resolution, and (after all said) admirable. I well foresaw that,
if his illness permitted him to express himself, he would allow nothing
to fall from him, in such an extremity, that was not replete with good
example. I consequently took every care in my power to treasure what was
said. True it is, Monseigneur, as my memory is not only in itself very
short, but in this case affected by the trouble which I have undergone,
through so heavy and important a loss, that I have forgotten a number of
things which I should wish to have had known; but those which I recollect
shall be related to you as exactly as lies in my power. For to represent
in full measure his noble career suddenly arrested, to paint to you his
indomitable courage, in a body worn out and prostrated by pain and the
assaults of death, I confess, would demand a far better ability than
mine: because, although, when in former years he discoursed on serious
and important matters, he handled them in such a manner that it was
difficult to reproduce exactly what he said, yet his ideas and his words
at the last seemed to rival each other in serving him. For I am sure
that I never knew him give birth to such fine conceptions, or display so
much eloquence, as in the time of his sickness. If, Monseigneur, you
blame me for introducing his more ordinary observations, please to know
that I do so advisedly; for since they proceeded from him at a season of
such great trouble, they indicate the perfect tranquillity of his mind
and thoughts to the last.
On Monday, the 9th day of August 1563, on my return from the Court, I
sent an invitation to him to come and dine with me. He returned word
that he was obliged, but, being indisposed, he would thank me to do him
the pleasure of spending an hour with him before he started for Medoc.
Shortly after my dinner I went to him. He had laid himself down on the
bed with his clothes on, and he was already, I perceived, much changed.
He complained of diarrhoea, accompanied by the gripes, and said that he
had it about him ever since he played with M. d’Escars with nothing but
his doublet on, and that with him a cold often brought on such attacks.
I advised him to go as he had proposed, but to stay for the night at
Germignac, which is only about two leagues from the town. I gave him
this advice, because some houses, near to that where he was ping, were
visited by the plague, about which he was nervous since his return from
Perigord and the Agenois, here it had been raging; and, besides, horse
exercise was, from my own experience, beneficial under similar
circumstances. He set out, accordingly, with his wife and M.
Bouillhonnas, his uncle.
Early on the following morning, however, I had intelligence from Madame
de la Boetie, that in the night he had fresh and violent attack of
dysentery. She had called in physician and apothecary, and prayed me to
lose no time coming, which (after dinner) I did. He was delighted to see
me; and when I was going away, under promise to turn the following day,
he begged me more importunately and affectionately than he was wont to
do, to give him as such of my company as possible. I was a little
affected; yet was about to leave, when Madame de la Boetie, as if she
foresaw something about to happen, implored me with tears to stay the
night. When I consented, he seemed to grow more cheerful. I returned
home the next day, and on the Thursday I paid him another visit. He had
become worse; and his loss of blood from the dysentery, which reduced his
strength very much, was largely on the increase. I quitted his side on
Friday, but on Saturday I went to him, and found him very weak. He then
gave me to understand that his complaint was infectious, and, moreover,
disagreeable and depressing; and that he, knowing thoroughly my
constitution, desired that I should content myself with coming to see him
now and then. On the contrary, after that I never left his side.
It was only on the Sunday that he began to converse with me on any
subject beyond the immediate one of his illness, and what the ancient
doctors thought of it: we had not touched on public affairs, for I found
at the very outset that he had a dislike to them.
But, on the Sunday, he had a fainting fit; and when he came to himself,
he told me that everything seemed to him confused, as if in a mist and in
disorder, and that, nevertheless, this visitation was not unpleasing to
him. “Death,” I replied, “has no worse sensation, my brother.” “None so
bad,” was his answer. He had had no regular sleep since the beginning of
his illness; and as he became worse and worse, he began to turn his
attention to questions which men commonly occupy themselves with in the
last extremity, despairing now of getting better, and intimating as much
to me. On that day, as he appeared in tolerably good spirits, I took
occasion to say to him that, in consideration of the singular love I bore
him, it would become me to take care that his affairs, which he had
conducted with such rare prudence in his life, should not be neglected at
present; and that I should regret it if, from want of proper counsel, he
should leave anything unsettled, not only on account of the loss to his
family, but also to his good name.
He thanked me for my kindness; and after a little reflection, as if he
was resolving certain doubts in his own mind, he desired me to summon his
uncle and his wife by themselves, in order that he might acquaint them
with his testamentary dispositions. I told him that this would shock
them. “No, no,” he answered, “I will cheer them by making out my case to
be better than it is.” And then he inquired, whether we were not all
much taken by surprise at his having fainted? I replied, that it was of
no importance, being incidental to the complaint from which he suffered.
“True, my brother,” said he; “it would be unimportant, even though it
should lead to what you most dread.” “For you,” I rejoined, “it might be
a happy thing; but I should be the loser, who would thereby be deprived
of so great, so wise, and so steadfast a friend, a friend whose place I
should never see supplied.” “It is very likely you may not,” was his
answer; “and be sure that one thing which makes me somewhat anxious to
recover, and to delay my journey to that place, whither I am already
half-way gone, is the thought of the loss both you and that poor man and
woman there (referring to his uncle and wife) must sustain; for I love
them with my whole heart, and I feel certain that they will find it very
hard to lose me. I should also regret it on account of such as have, in
my lifetime, valued me, and whose conversation I should like to have
enjoyed a little longer; and I beseech you, my brother, if I leave the
world, to carry to them for me an assurance of the esteem I entertained
for them to the last moment of my existence. My birth was, moreover,
scarcely to so little purpose but that, had I lived, I might have done
some service to the public; but, however this may be, I am prepared to
submit to the will of God, when it shall please Him to call me, being
confident of enjoying the tranquillity which you have foretold for me.
As for you, my friend, I feel sure that you are so wise, that you will
control your emotions, and submit to His divine ordinance regarding me;
and I beg of you to see that that good man and woman do not mourn for my
departure unnecessarily.”
He proceeded to inquire how they behaved at present. “Very well,” said
I, “considering the circumstances.” “Ah!” he replied, “that is, so long
as they do not abandon all hope of me; but when that shall be the case,
you will have a hard task to support them.” It was owing to his strong
regard for his wife and uncle that he studiously disguised from them his
own conviction as to the certainty of his end, and he prayed me to do the
same. When they were near him he assumed an appearance of gaiety, and
flattered them with hopes. I then went to call them. They came, wearing
as composed an air as possible; and when we four were together, he
addressed us, with an untroubled countenance, as follows: “Uncle and
wife, rest assured that no new attack of my disease, or fresh doubt that
I have as to my recovery, has led me to take this step of communicating
to you my intentions, for, thank God, I feel very well and hopeful; but
taught by observation and experience the instability of all human things,
and even of the life to which we are so much attached, and which is,
nevertheless, a mere bubble; and knowing, moreover, that my state of
health brings me more within the danger of death, I have thought proper
to settle my worldly affairs, having the benefit of your advice.” Then
addressing himself more particularly to his uncle, “Good uncle,” said he,
“if I were to rehearse all the obligations under which I lie to you, I am
sure that I never should make an end. Let me only say that, wherever I
have been, and with whomsoever I have conversed, I have represented you
as doing for me all that a father could do for a son; both in the care
with which you tended my education, and in the zeal with which you pushed
me forward into public life, so that my whole existence is a testimony of
your good offices towards me. In short, I am indebted for all that I
have to you, who have been to me as a parent; and therefore I have no
right to part with anything, unless it be with your approval.”
There was a general silence hereupon, and his uncle was prevented from
replying by tears and sobs. At last he said that whatever he thought for
the best would be agreeable to him; and as he intended to make him his
heir, he was at liberty to dispose of what would be his.
Then he turned to his wife. “My image,” said he (for so he often called
her, there being some sort of relationship between them), “since I have
been united to you by marriage, which is one of the most weighty and
sacred ties imposed on us by God, for the purpose of maintaining human
society, I have continued to love, cherish, and value you; and I know
that you have returned my affection, for which I have no sufficient
acknowledgment. I beg you to accept such portion of my estate as I
bequeath to you, and be satisfied with it, though it is very inadequate
to your desert.”
Afterwards he turned to me. “My brother,” he began, “for whom I have so
entire a love, and whom I selected out of so large a number, thinking to
revive with you that virtuous and sincere friendship which, owing to the
degeneracy of the age, has grown to be almost unknown to us, and now
exists only in certain vestiges of antiquity, I beg of you, as a mark of
my affection to you, to accept my library: a slender offering, but given
with a cordial will, and suitable to you, seeing that you are fond of
learning. It will be a memorial of your old companion.”
Then he addressed all three of us. He blessed God that in his extremity
he had the happiness to be surrounded by those whom he held dearest in
the world, and he looked upon it as a fine spectacle, where four persons
were together, so unanimous in their feelings, and loving each other for
each other’s sake. He commended us one to the other; and proceeded thus:
“My worldly matters being arranged, I must now think of the welfare of my
soul. I am a Christian; I am a Catholic. I have lived one, and I shall
die one. Send for a priest; for I wish to conform to this last Christian
obligation.” He now concluded his discourse, which he had conducted with
such a firm face and with so distinct an utterance, that whereas, when I
first entered his room, he was feeble, inarticulate in his speech, his
pulse low and feverish, and his features pallid, now, by a sort of
miracle, he appeared to have rallied, and his pulse was so strong that
for the sake of comparison, I asked him to feel mine.
I felt my heart so oppressed at this moment, that I had not the power to
make him any answer; but in the course of two or three hours, solicitous
to keep up his courage, and, likewise, out of the tenderness which I had
had all my life for his honour and fame, wishing a larger number of
witnesses to his admirable fortitude, I said to him, how much I was
ashamed to think that I lacked courage to listen to what he, so great a
sufferer, had the courage to deliver; that down to the present time I had
scarcely conceived that God granted us such command over human
infirmities, and had found a difficulty in crediting the examples I had
read in histories; but that with such evidence of the thing before my
eyes, I gave praise to God that it had shown itself in one so excessively
dear to me, and who loved me so entirely, and that his example would help
me to act in a similar manner when my turn came. Interrupting me, he
begged that it might happen so, and that the conversation which had
passed between us might not be mere words, but might be impressed deeply
on our minds, to be put in exercise at the first occasion; and that this
was the real object and aim of all philosophy.
He then took my hand, and continued: “Brother, friend, there are many
acts of my life, I think, which have cost me as much difficulty as this
one is likely to do; and, after all, I have been long prepared for it,
and have my lesson by heart. Have I not lived long enough? I am just
upon thirty-three. By the grace of God, my days so far have known
nothing but health and happiness; but in the ordinary course of our
unstable human affairs, this could not have lasted much longer; it would
have become time for me to enter on graver avocations, and I should thus
have involved myself in numberless vexations, and, among them, the
troubles of old age, from which I shall now be exempt. Moreover, it is
probable that hitherto my life has been spent more simply, and with less
of evil, than if God had spared me, and I had survived to feel the
thirst for riches and worldly prosperity. I am sure, for my part, that
I now go to God and the place of the blessed.” He seemed to detect in
my expression some inquietude at his words; and he exclaimed, “What, my
brother, would you make me entertain apprehensions? Had I any, whom
would it become so much as yourself to remove them?”
The notary, who had been summoned to draw up his will, came in the
evening, and when he had the documents prepared, I inquired of La Boetie
if he would sign them. “Sign them,” cried he; “I will do so with my own
hand; but I could desire more time, for I feel exceedingly timid and
weak, and in a manner exhausted.” But when I was going to change the
conversation, he suddenly rallied, said he had but a short time to live,
and asked if the notary wrote rapidly, for he should dictate without
making any pause. The notary was called, and he dictated his will there
and then with such speed that the man could scarcely keep up with him;
and when he had done, he asked me to read it out, saying to me, “What a
good thing it is to look after what are called our riches.” ‘Sunt haec,
quoe hominibus vocantur bona’. As soon as the will was signed, the
chamber being full, he asked me if it would hurt him to talk. I
answered, that it would not, if he did not speak too loud. He then
summoned Mademoiselle de Saint Quentin, his niece, to him, and addressed
her thus: “Dear niece, since my earliest acquaintance with thee, I have
observed the marks of, great natural goodness in thee; but the services
which thou rendered to me, with so much affectionate diligence, in my
present and last necessity, inspire me with high hopes of thee; and I am
under great obligations to thee, and give thee most affectionate thanks.
Let me relieve my conscience by counselling thee to be, in the first
place, devout, to God: for this doubtless is our first duty, failing
which all others can be of little advantage or grace, but which, duly
observed, carries with it necessarily all other virtues. After God, thou
shouldest love thy father and mother--thy mother, my sister, whom I
regard as one of the best and most intelligent of women, and by whom I
beg of thee to let thy own life be regulated. Allow not thyself to be
led away by pleasures; shun, like the plague, the foolish familiarities
thou seest between some men and women; harmless enough at first, but
which by insidious degrees corrupt the heart, and thence lead it to
negligence, and then into the vile slough of vice. Credit me, the
greatest safeguard to female chastity is sobriety of demeanour. I
beseech and direct that thou often call to mind the friendship which was
betwixt us; but I do not wish thee to mourn for me too much--an
injunction which, so far as it is in my power, I lay on all my friends,
since it might seem that by doing so they felt a jealousy of that blessed
condition in which I am about to be placed by death. I assure thee, my
dear, that if I had the option now of continuing in life or of completing
the voyage on which I have set out, I should find it very hard to choose.
Adieu, dear niece.”
Mademoiselle d’Arsat, his stepdaughter, was next called. He said to her:
“Daughter, you stand in no great need of advice from me, insomuch as you
have a mother, whom I have ever found most sagacious, and entirely in
conformity with my own opinions and wishes, and whom I have never found
faulty; with such a preceptress, you cannot fail to be properly
instructed. Do not account it singular that I, with no tie of blood to
you, am interested in you; for, being the child of one who is so closely
allied to me, I am necessarily concerned in what concerns you; and
consequently the affairs of your brother, M. d’Arsat, have ever been
watched by me with as much care as my own; nor perhaps will it be to your
disadvantage that you were my step-daughter. You enjoy sufficient store
of wealth and beauty; you are a lady of good family; it only remains for
you to add to these possessions the cultivation of your mind, in which I
exhort you not to fail. I do not think necessary to warn you against
vice, a thing so odious in women, for I would not even suppose that you
could harbour any inclination for it--nay, I believe that you hold the
very name in abhorrence. Dear daughter, farewell.”
All in the room were weeping and lamenting; but he held without
interruption the thread of his discourse, which was pretty long. But
when he had done, he directed us all to leave the room, except the women
attendants, whom he styled his garrison. But first, calling to him my
brother, M. de Beauregard, he said to him: “M. de Beauregard, you have
my best thanks for all the care you have taken of me. I have now a thing
which I am very anxious indeed to mention to you, and with your
permission I will do so.” As my brother gave him encouragement to
proceed, he added: “I assure you that I never knew any man who engaged in
the reformation of our Church with greater sincerity, earnestness, and
single-heartedness than yourself. I consider that you were led to it by
observing the vicious character of our prelates, which no doubt much
requires setting in order, and by imperfections which time has brought
into our Church. It is not my desire at present discourage you from
this course, for I would have no one act in opposition to his conscience;
but I wish, having regard to the good repute acquired by your family from
its enduring concord--a family than which none can be dearer to me; a
family, thank God! no member of which has ever been guilty of dishonour
--in regard, further, to the will of your good father to whom you owe so
much, and of your, uncle, I wish you to avoid extreme means; avoid
harshness and violence: be reconciled with your relatives; do not act
apart, but unite. You perceive what disasters our quarrels have brought
upon this kingdom, and I anticipate still worse mischiefs; and in your
goodness and wisdom, beware of involving your family in such broils; let
it continue to enjoy its former reputation and happiness. M. de
Beauregard, take what I say in good part, and as a proof of the
friendship I feel for you. I postponed till now any communication with
you on the subject, and perhaps the condition in which you see me address
you, may cause my advice and opinion to carry greater authority.” My
brother expressed his thanks to him cordially.
On the Monday morning he had become so ill that he quite despaired of
himself; and he said to me very pitifully: “Brother, do not you feel pain
for all the pain I am suffering? Do you not perceive now that the help
you give me has no other effect than that of lengthening my suffering?”
Shortly afterwards he fainted, and we all thought him gone; but by the
application of vinegar and wine he rallied. But he soon sank, and when
he heard us in lamentation, he murmured, “O God! who is it that teases
me so? Why did you break the agreeable repose I was enjoying? I beg of
you to leave me.” And then, when he caught the sound of my voice, he
continued: “And art thou, my brother, likewise unwilling to see me at
peace? O, how thou robbest me of my repose!” After a while, he seemed
to gain more strength, and called for wine, which he relished, and
declared it to be the finest drink possible. I, in order to change the
current of his thoughts, put in, “Surely not; water is the best.” “Ah,
yes,” he returned, “doubtless so;--(Greek phrase)--.” He had now become,
icy-cold at his extremities, even to his face; a deathly perspiration was
upon him, and his pulse was scarcely perceptible.
This morning he confessed, but the priest had omitted to bring with him
the necessary apparatus for celebrating Mass. On the Tuesday, however,
M. de la Boetie summoned him to aid him, as he said, in discharging the
last office of a Christian. After the conclusion of Mass, he took the
sacrament; when the priest was about to depart, he said to him:
“Spiritual father, I implore you humbly, as well as those over whom you
are set, to pray to the Almighty on my behalf; that, if it be decreed in
heaven that I am now to end my life, He will take compassion on my soul,
and pardon me my sins, which are manifold, it not being possible for so
weak and poor a creature as I to obey completely the will of such a
Master; or, if He think fit to keep me longer here, that it may please
Him to release my present extreme anguish, and to direct my footsteps in
the right path, that I may become a better man than I have been.” He
paused to recover breath a little; priest was about to go away, he called
him back and proceeded: “I desire to say, besides, in your hearing this:
I declare that I was christened and I have lived, and that so I wish to
die, in the faith which Moses preached in Egypt; which afterwards the
Patriarchs accepted and professed in Judaea; and which, in the course of
time, has been transmitted to France and to us.” He seemed desirous of
adding something more, but he ended with a request to his uncle and me to
send up prayers for him; “for those are,” he said, “the best duties that
Christians can fulfil one for another.” In the course of talking, his
shoulder was uncovered, and although a man-servant stood near him, he
asked his uncle to re-adjust the clothes. Then, turning his eyes towards
me, he said, “Ingenui est, cui multum debeas, ei plurimum velle debere.”
M. de Belot called in the afternoon to see him, and M. de la Boetie,
taking his hand, said to him: “I was on the point of discharging my debt,
but my kind creditor has given me a little further time.” A little while
after, appearing to wake out of a sort of reverie, he uttered words which
he had employed once or twice before in the course of his sickness:
“Ah well, ah well, whenever the hour comes, I await it with pleasure and
fortitude.” And then, as they were holding his mouth open by force to
give him a draught, he observed to M. de Belot: “An vivere tanti est?”
As the evening approached, he began perceptibly to sink; and while I
supped, he sent for me to come, being no more than the shadow of a man,
or, as he put it himself, ‘non homo, sed species hominis’; and he said to
me with the utmost difficulty: “My brother, my friend, please God I may
realise the imaginations I have just enjoyed.” Afterwards, having waited
for some time while he remained silent, and by painful efforts was
drawing long sighs (for his tongue at this point began to refuse its
functions), I said, “What are they?” “Grand, grand!” he replied. “I
have never yet failed,” returned I, “to have the honour of hearing your
conceptions and imaginations communicated to me; will you not now still
let me enjoy them?” “I would indeed,” he answered; “but, my brother,
I am not able to do so; they are admirable, infinite, and unspeakable.”
We stopped short there, for he could not go on. A little before, indeed,
he had shown a desire to speak to his wife, and had told her, with as gay
a countenance as he could contrive to assume, that he had a story to tell
her. And it seemed as if he was making an attempt to gain utterance;
but, his strength failing him, he begged a little wine to resuscitate it.
It was of no avail, for he fainted away suddenly, and was for some time
insensible. Having become so near a neighbour to death, and hearing the
sobs of Mademoiselle de la Boetie, he called her, and said to her thus:
“My own likeness, you grieve yourself beforehand; will you not have pity
on me? take courage. Assuredly, it costs me more than half the pain I
endure, to see you suffer; and reasonably so, because the evils which we
ourselves feel we do not actually ourselves suffer, but it certain
sentient faculties which God plants in us, that feel them: whereas what
we feel on account of others, we feel by consequence of a certain
reasoning process which goes on within our minds. But I am going away”
--That he said because his strength was failing him; and fearing that he
had frightened his wife, he resumed, observing: “I am going to sleep.
Good night, my wife; go thy way.” This was the last farewell he took of
her.
After she had left, “My brother,” said he to me, “keep near me, if you
please;” and then feeling the advance of death more pressing and more
acute, or else the effect of some warm draught which they had made him
swallow, his voice grew stronger and clearer, and he turned quite with
violence in his bed, so that all began again to entertain the hope which
we had lost only upon witnessing his extreme prostration.
At this stage he proceeded, among other things, to pray me again and
again, in a most affectionate manner, to give him a place; so that I was
apprehensive that his reason might be impaired, particularly when, on my
pointing out to him that he was doing himself harm, and that these were
not of the words of a rational man, he did not yield at first, but
redoubled his outcry, saying, “My brother, my brother! dost thou then
refuse me a place?” insomuch that he constrained me to demonstrate to
him that, as he breathed and spoke, and had his physical being, therefore
he had his place. “Yes, yes,” he responded, “I have; but it is not that
which I need; and, besides, when all is said, I have no longer any
existence.” “God,” I replied, “will grant you a better one soon.”
“Would it were now, my brother,” was his answer. “It is now three days
since I have been eager to take my departure.”
Being in this extremity, he frequently called me, merely to satisfy him
that I was at his side. At length, he composed himself a little to rest,
which strengthened our hopes; so much so, indeed, that I left the room,
and went to rejoice thereupon with Mademoiselle de la Boetie. But, an
hour or so afterwards, he called me by name once or twice, and then with
a long sigh expired at three o’clock on Wednesday morning, the 18th
August 1563, having lived thirty-two years, nine months, and seventeen
days.
II.
To Monseigneur, Monseigneur de MONTAIGNE.
[This letter is prefixed to Montaigne’s translation of the “Natural
Theology” of Raymond de Sebonde, printed at Paris in 1569.]
In pursuance of the instructions which you gave me last year in your
house at Montaigne, Monseigneur, I have put into a French dress, with my
own hand, Raymond de Sebonde, that great Spanish theologian and
philosopher; and I have divested him, so far as I could, of that rough
bearing and barbaric appearance which you saw him wear at first; that, in
my opinion, he is now qualified to present himself in the best company.
It is perfectly possible that some fastidious persons will detect in the
book some trace of Gascon parentage; but it will be so much the more to
their discredit, that they allowed the task to devolve on one who is
quite a novice in these things. It is only right, Monseigneur, that the
work should come before the world under your auspices, since whatever
emendations and polish it may have received, are owing to you. Still I
see well that, if you think proper to balance accounts with the author,
you will find yourself much his debtor; for against his excellent and
religious discourses, his lofty and, so to speak, divine conceptions, you
will find that you will have to set nothing but words and phraseology; a
sort of merchandise so ordinary and commonplace, that whoever has the
most of it, peradventure is the worst off.
Monseigneur, I pray God to grant you a very long and happy life. From
Paris, this 18th of June 1568. Your most humble and most obedient son,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
III.
To Monsieur, Monsieur de LANSAC,--[This letter appears to belong to
1570.]--Knight of the King’s Order, Privy Councillor, Sub-controller of
his Finance, and Captain of the Cent Gardes of his Household.
MONSIEUR,--I send you the OEconomics of Xenophon, put into French by the
late M. de la Boetie,--[Printed at Paris, 8vo, 1571, and reissued, with
the addition of some notes, in 1572, with a fresh title-page.]--a present
which appears to me to be appropriate, as well because it is the work of
a gentleman of mark,--[Meaning Xenophon.]--a man illustrious in war and
peace, as because it has taken its second shape from a personage whom I
know to have been held by you in affectionate regard during his life.
This will be an inducement to you to continue to cherish towards his
memory, your good opinion and goodwill. And to be bold with you,
Monsieur, do not fear to increase these sentiments somewhat; for, as you
had knowledge of his high qualities only in his public capacity, it rests
with me to assure you how many endowments he possessed beyond your
personal experience of him. He did me the honour, while he lived, and I
count it amongst the most fortunate circumstances in my own career, to
have with me a friendship so close and so intricately knit, that no
movement, impulse, thought, of his mind was kept from me, and if I have
not formed a right judgment of him, I must suppose it to be from my own
want of scope. Indeed, without exaggeration, he was so nearly a prodigy,
that I am afraid of not being credited when I speak of him, even though I
should keep much within the mark of my own actual knowledge. And for
this time, Monsieur, I shall content myself with praying you, for the
honour and respect we owe to truth, to testify and believe that our
Guienne never beheld his peer among the men of his vocation. Under the
hope, therefore, that you will pay him his just due, and in order to
refresh him in your memory, I present you this book, which will answer
for me that, were it not for the insufficiency of my power, I would offer
you as willingly something of my own, as an acknowledgment of the
obligations I owe to you, and of the ancient favour and friendship which
you have borne towards the members of our house. But, Monsieur, in
default of better coin, I offer you in payment the assurance of my desire
to do you humble service.
Monsieur, I pray God to have you in His keeping. Your obedient servant,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.
IV.
To Monsieur, Monsieur de MESMES, Lord of Roissy and Malassize, Privy
Councillor to the King.
MONSIEUR,--It is one of the most conspicuous follies committed by men,
to employ the strength of their understanding in overturning and
destroying those opinions which are commonly received among us, and which
afford us satisfaction and content; for while everything beneath heaven
employs the ways and means placed at its disposal by nature for the
advancement and commodity of its being, these, in order to appear of a
more sprightly and enlightened wit, not accepting anything which has not
been tried and balanced a thousand times with the most subtle reasoning,
sacrifice their peace of mind to doubt, uneasiness, and feverish
excitement. It is not without reason that childhood and simplicity have
been recommended by holy writ itself. For my part, I prefer to be quiet
rather than clever: give me content, even if I am not to be so wide in my
range. This is the reason, Monsieur, why, although persons of an
ingenious turn laugh at our care as to what will happen after our own
time, for instance, to our souls, which, lodged elsewhere, will lose all
consciousness of what goes on here below, yet I consider it to be a great
consolation for the frailty and brevity of life, to reflect that we have
the power of prolonging it by reputation and fame; and I embrace very
readily this pleasant and favourable notion original with our being,
without inquiring too critically how or why it is. Insomuch that having
loved, beyond everything, the late M. de la Boetie, the greatest man, in
my judgment, of our age, I should think myself very negligent of my duty
if I failed, to the utmost of my power, to prevent such a name as his,
and a memory so richly meriting remembrance, from falling into oblivion;
and if I did not use my best endeavour to keep them fresh. I believe
that he feels something of what I do on his behalf, and that my services
touch and rejoice him. In fact, he lives in my heart so vividly and so
wholly, that I am loath to believe him committed to the dull ground, or
altogether cast off from communication with us. Therefore, Monsieur,
since every new light I can shed on him and his name, is so much added to
his second period of existence, and, moreover, since his name is ennobled
and honoured by the place which receives it, it falls to me not only to
extend it as widely as I can, but to confide it to the keeping of persons
of honour and virtue; among whom you hold such a rank, that, to afford
you the opportunity of receiving this new guest, and giving him good
entertainment, I decided on presenting to you this little work, not for
any profit you are likely to derive from it, being well aware that you do
not need to have Plutarch and his companions interpreted to you--but it
is possible that Madame de Roissy, reading in it the order of her
household management and of your happy accord painted to the life, will
be pleased to see how her own natural inclination has not only reached
but surpassed the theories of the wisest philosophers, regarding the
duties and laws of the wedded state. And, at all events, it will be
always an honour to me, to be able to do anything which shall be for the
pleasure of you and yours, on account of the obligation under which I lie
to serve you.
Monsieur, I pray God to grant you a long and happy life. From Montaigne,
this 30th April 1570. Your humble servant,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.
V.
To Monsieur, Monsieur de L’HOSPITAL, Chancellor of France
MONSEIGNEUR,--I am of the opinion that persons such as you, to whom
fortune and reason have committed the charge of public affairs, are not
more inquisitive in any point than in ascertaining the character of those
in office under you; for no society is so poorly furnished, but that, if
a proper distribution of authority be used, it has persons sufficient for
the discharge of all official duties; and when this is the case, nothing
is wanting to make a State perfect in its constitution. Now, in
proportion as this is so much to be desired, so it is the more difficult
of accomplishment, since you cannot have eyes to embrace a multitude so
large and so widely extended, nor to see to the bottom of hearts, in
order that you may discover intentions and consciences, matters
principally to be considered; so that there has never been any
commonwealth so well organised, in which we might not detect often enough
defect in such a department or such a choice; and in those systems, where
ignorance and malice, favouritism, intrigue, and violence govern, if any
selection happens to be made on the ground of merit and regularity, we
may doubtless thank Fortune, which, in its capricious movements, has for
once taken the path of reason.
This consideration, Monseigneur, often consoled me, when I beheld M.
Etienne de la Boetie, one of the fittest men for high office in France,
pass his whole life without employment and notice, by his domestic
hearth, to the singular detriment of the public; for, so far as he was
concerned, I may assure you, Monseigneur, that he was so rich in those
treasures which defy fortune, that never was man more satisfied or
content. I know, indeed, that he was raised to the dignities connected
with his neighbourhood--dignities accounted considerable; and I know
also, that no one ever acquitted himself better of them; and when he died
at the age of thirty-two, he enjoyed a reputation in that way beyond all
who had preceded him.
But for all that, it is no reason that a man should be left a common
soldier, who deserves to become a captain; nor to assign mean functions
to those who are perfectly equal to the highest. In truth, his powers
were badly economised and too sparingly employed; insomuch that, over and
above his actual work, there was abundant capacity lying idle which might
have been called into service, both to the public advantage and his own
private glory.
Therefore, Monseigneur, since he was so indifferent to his own fame (for
virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together), and since he
lived in an age when others were too dull or too jealous to witness to
his character, I have it marvellously at heart that his memory, at all
events, to which I owe the good offices of a friend, should enjoy the
recompense of his brave life; and that it should survive in the good
report of men of honour and virtue. On this account, sir, I have been
desirous to bring to light, and present to you, such few Latin verses as
he left behind. Different from the builder, who places the most
attractive, portion of his house towards the street, and to the draper,
who displays in his window his best goods, that which was most precious
in my friend, the juice and marrow of his genius, departed with him, and
there have remained to us but the bark and the leaves.
The exactly regulated movements of his mind, his piety, his virtue, his
justice, his vivacity, the solidity and soundness of his judgment, the
loftiness of his ideas, raised so far above the common level, his
learning, the grace which accompanied his most ordinary actions, the
tender affection he had for his miserable country, and his supreme and
sworn detestation of all vice, but principally of that villainous traffic
which disguises itself under the honourable name of justice, should
certainly impress all well-disposed persons with a singular love towards
him, and an extraordinary regret for his loss. But, sir, I am unable to
do justice to all these qualities; and of the fruit of his own studies it
had not entered into his mind to leave any proof to posterity; all that
remains, is the little which, as a pastime, he did at intervals.
However this may be, I beg you, sir, to receive it kindly; and as our
judgment of great things is many times formed from lesser things, and as
even the recreations of illustrious men carry with them, to intelligent
observers, some honourable traits of their origin, I would have you form
from this, some knowledge of him, and hence lovingly cherish his name and
his memory. In this, sir, you will only reciprocate the high opinion
which he had of your virtue, and realise what he infinitely desired in
his lifetime; for there was no one in the world in whose acquaintance and
friendship he would have been so happy to see himself established, as in
your own. But if any man is offended by the freedom which I use with the
belongings of another, I can tell him that nothing which has been written
or been laid down, even in the schools of philosophy, respecting the
sacred duties and rights of friendship, could give an adequate idea of
the relations which subsisted between this personage and myself.
Moreover, sir, this slender gift, to make two throws of one stone at the
same time, may likewise serve, if you please, to testify the honour and
respect which I entertain for your ability and high qualities; for as to
those gifts which are adventitious and accidental, it is not to my taste
to take them into account.
Sir, I pray God to grant you a very happy and a very long life. From
Montaigne, this 30th of April 1570.--Your humble and obedient servant,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.
To Monsieur, Monsieur de Folx, Privy Councillor, and Ambassador of His
Majesty to the Signory of Venice.--[ Printed before the ‘Vers Francois’
of Etienne de la Boetie, 8vo, Paris, 1572.]
SIR,--Being on the point of commending to you and to posterity the memory
of the late Etienne de la Boetie, as well for his extreme virtue as for
the singular affection which he bore to me, it struck me as an
indiscretion very serious in its results, and meriting some coercion from
our laws, the practice which often prevails of robbing virtue of glory,
its faithful associate, in order to confer it, in accordance with our
private interests and without discrimination, on the first comer; seeing
that our two principal guiding reins are reward and punishment, which
only touch us properly, and as men, through the medium of honour and
dishonour, forasmuch as these penetrate the mind, and come home to our
most intimate feelings: just where animals themselves are susceptible,
more or less, to all other kinds of recompense and corporal chastisement.
Moreover, it is well to notice that the custom of praising virtue, even
in those who are no longer with us, impalpable as it is to them, serves
as a stimulant to the living to imitate their example; just as capital
sentences are carried out by the law, more for the sake of warning to
others, than in relation to those who suffer. Now, commendation and its
opposite being analogous as regards effects, we cannot easily deny
the fact, that although the law prohibits one man from slandering the
reputation of another, it does not prevent us from bestowing reputation
without cause. This pernicious licence in respect to the distribution of
praise, has formerly been confined in its area of operations; and it may
be the reason why poetry once lost favour with the more judicious.
However this may be, it cannot be concealed that the vice of falsehood is
one very unbecoming in gentleman, let it assume what guise it will.
As for that personage of whom I am speaking to you, sir he leads me far
away indeed from this kind of language; for the danger in his case is
not, lest I should lend him anything, but that I might take something
from him; and it is his ill-fortune that, while he has supplied me, so
far as ever a man could, with just and obvious opportunities for
commendation, I find myself unable and unqualified to render it to him
--I, who am his debtor for so many vivid communications, and who alone
have it in my power to answer for a million of accomplishments,
perfections, and virtues, latent (thanks to his unkind stars) in so noble
a soul. For the nature of things having (I know not how) permitted that
truth, fair and acceptable--as it may be of itself, is only embraced
where there are arts of persuasion, to insinuate it into our minds, I see
myself so wanting, both in authority to support my simple testimony, and
in the eloquence requisite for lending it value and weight, that I was on
the eve of relinquishing the task, having nothing of his which would
enable me to exhibit to the world a proof of his genius and knowledge.
In truth, sir, having been overtaken by his fate in the flower of his
age, and in the full enjoyment of the most vigorous health, it had been
his design to publish some day works which would have demonstrated to
posterity what sort of a man he was; and, peradventure, he was
indifferent enough to fame, having formed such a plan in his head, to
proceed no further in it. But I have come to the conclusion, that it was
far more excusable in him to bury with him all his rare endowments, than
it would be on my part to bury also with me the knowledge of them which I
had acquired from him; and, therefore, having collected with care all the
remains which I found scattered here and there among his papers, I intend
to distribute them so as to recommend his memory to as many persons as
possible, selecting the most suitable and worthy of my acquaintance, and
those whose testimony might do him greatest honour: such as you, sir, who
may very possibly have had some knowledge of him during his life, but
assuredly too slight to discover the perfect extent of his worth.
Posterity may credit me, if it chooses, when I swear upon my conscience,
that I knew and saw him to be such as, all things considered, I could
neither desire nor imagine a genius surpassing his.
I beg you very humbly, sir, not only to take his name under your general
protection, but also these ten or twelve French stanzas, which lay
themselves, as of necessity, under shadow of your patronage. For I will
not disguise from you, that their publication was deferred, upon the
appearance of his other writings, under the pretext (as it was alleged
yonder at Paris) that they were too crude to come to light. You will
judge, sir, how much truth there is in this; and since it is thought that
hereabout nothing can be produced in our own dialect but what is
barbarous and unpolished, it falls to you, who, besides your rank as the
first house in Guienne, indeed down from your ancestors, possess every
other sort of qualification, to establish, not merely by your example,
but by your authoritative testimony, that such is not always the case:
the more so that, though ‘tis more natural with the Gascons to act than
talk, yet sometimes they employ the tongue more than the arm, and wit in
place of valour.
For my own part; sir, it is not in my way to judge of such matters; but I
have heard persons who are supposed to understand them, say that these
stanzas are not only worthy to be presented in the market-place, but,
independently of that, as regards beauty and wealth of invention, they
are full of marrow and matter as any compositions of the kind, which have
appeared in our language. Naturally each workman feels himself more
strong in some special part his art, and those are to be regarded as most
fortunate, who lay hands on the noblest, for all the parts essential to
the construction of any whole are not equally precious. We find
elsewhere, perhaps, greater delicacy phrase, greater softness and harmony
of language; but imaginative grace, and in the store of pointed wit, I do
not think he has been surpassed; and we should take the account that he
made these things neither his occupation nor his study, and that he
scarcely took a pen in his hand more than once a year, as is shown by the
very slender quantity of his remains. For you see here, sir, green wood
and dry, without any sort of selection, all that has come into my
possession; insomuch that there are among the rest efforts even of his
boyhood. In point of fact, he seems to have written them merely to show
that he was capable of dealing with all subjects: for otherwise,
thousands of times, in the course of ordinary conversation, I have heard
things drop from him infinitely more worthy of being admired, infinitely
more worthy of being preserved.
Such, sir, is what justice and affection, forming in this instance a rare
conjunction, oblige me to say of this great and good man; and if I have
at all offended by the freedom which I have taken in addressing myself to
you on such a subject at such a length, be pleased to recollect that the
principal result of greatness and eminence is to lay one open to
importunate appeals on behalf of the rest of the world. Herewith, after
desiring you to accept my affectionate devotion to your service,
I beseech God to vouchsafe you, sir, a fortunate and prolonged life.
From Montaigne, this 1st of September 1570.--Your obedient servant,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.
To Mademoiselle de MONTAIGNE, my Wife.--[Printed as a preface to the
“Consolation of Plutarch to his Wife,” published by Montaigne, with
several other tracts by La Boetie, about 1571.]
MY WIFE,--You understand well that it is not proper for a man of the
world, according to the rules of this our time, to continue to court and
caress you; for they say that a sensible person may take a wife indeed,
but that to espouse her is to act like a fool. Let them talk; I adhere
for my part the custom of the good old days; I also wear my hair as it
used to be then; and, in truth, novelty costs this poor country up to the
present moment so dear (and I do not know whether we have reached the
highest pitch yet), that everywhere and in everything I renounce the
fashion. Let us live, my wife, you and I, in the old French method.
Now, you may recollect that the late M. de la Boetie, my brother and
inseparable companion, gave me, on his death-bed, all his books and
papers, which have remained ever since the most precious part of my
effects. I do not wish to keep them niggardly to myself alone, nor do I
deserve to have the exclusive use of them; so that I have resolved to
communicate them to my friends; and because I have none, I believe, more
particularly intimate you, I send you the Consolatory Letter written by
Plutarch to his Wife, translated by him into French; regretting much that
fortune has made it so suitable a present you, and that, having had but
one child, and that a daughter, long looked for, after four years of your
married life it was your lot to lose her in the second year of her age.
But I leave to Plutarch the duty of comforting you, acquainting you with
your duty herein, begging you to put your faith in him for my sake; for
he will reveal to you my own ideas, and will express the matter far
better than I should myself. Hereupon, my wife, I commend myself very
heartily to your good will, and pray God to have you in His keeping.
From Paris, this 10th September 1570.--Your good husband,
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE.
VIII.
To Monsieur DUPUY,--[This is probably the Claude Dupuy, born at Paris in
1545, and one of the fourteen judges sent into Guienne after the treaty
of Fleix in 1580. It was perhaps under these circumstances that
Montaigne addressed to him the present letter.]--the King’s Councillor in
his Court and Parliament of Paris.
MONSIEUR,--The business of the Sieur de Verres, a prisoner, who is
extremely well known to me, deserves, in the arrival at a decision,
the exercise of the clemency natural to you, if, in the public interest,
you can fairly call it into play. He has done a thing not only
excusable, according to the military laws of this age, but necessary and
(as we are of opinion) commendable. He committed the act, without doubt,
unwillingly and under pressure; there is no other passage of his life
which is open to reproach. I beseech you, sir, to lend the matter your
attentive consideration; you will find the character of it as I represent
it to you. He is persecuted on this crime, in a way which is far worse
than the offence itself. If it is likely to be of use to him, I desire
to inform you that he is a man brought up in my house, related to several
respectable families, and a person who, having led an honourable life,
is my particular friend. By saving him you lay me under an extreme
obligation. I beg you very humbly to regard him as recommended by me,
and, after kissing your hands, I pray God, sir, to grant you a long and
happy life. From Castera, this 23d of April [1580]. Your affectionate
servant,
MONTAIGNE.
IX.
To the Jurats of Bordeaux.--[Published from the original among the
archives of the town of Bordeaux, M. Gustave Brunet in the Bulletin du
Bibliophile, July 1839.]
GENTLEMEN,--I trust that the journey of Monsieur de Cursol will be of
advantage to the town. Having in hand a case so just and so favourable,
you did all in your power to put the business in good trim; and matters
being so well situated, I beg you to excuse my absence for some little
time longer, and I will abridge my stay so far as the pressure of my
affairs permits. I hope that the delay will be short; however, you will
keep me, if you please, in your good grace, and will command me, if the
occasion shall arise, in employing me in the public service and in yours.
Monsieur de Cursol has also written to me and apprised me of his journey.
I humbly commend myself to you, and pray God, gentlemen, to grant you
long and happy life. From Montaigne, this 21st of May 1582. Your humble
brother and servant,
MONTAIGNE.
X.
To the same.--[The original is among the archives of Toulouse.]
GENTLEMEN,--I have taken my fair share of the satisfaction which you
announce to me as feeling at the good despatch of your business, as
reported to you by your deputies, and I regard it as a favourable sign
that you have made such an auspicious commencement of the year. I hope
to join you at the earliest convenient opportunity. I recommend myself
very humbly to your gracious consideration, and pray God to grant you,
gentlemen, a happy and long life. From Montaigne, this 8th February
1585. Your humble brother and servant,
MONTAIGNE.
XI.
To the same.
GENTLEMEN,--I have here received news of you from M. le Marechal. I will
not spare either my life or anything else for your service, and will
leave it to your judgment whether the assistance I might be able to
render by my presence at the forthcoming election, would be worth the
risk I should run by going into the town, seeing the bad state it is in,
--[This refers to the plague then raging, and which carried off 14,000
persons at Bordeaux.]--particularly for people coming away from so fine
an air as this is where I am. I will draw as near to you on Wednesday as
I can, that is, to Feuillas, if the malady has not reached that place,
where, as I write to M. de la Molte, I shall be very pleased to have the
honour of seeing one of you to take your directions, and relieve myself
of the credentials which M. le Marechal will give me for you all:
commending myself hereupon humbly to your good grace, and praying God to
grant you, gentlemen, long and happy life. At Libourne, this 30th of
July 1585. Your humble servant and brother,
MONTAIGNE.
XII.--[“According to Dr. Payen, this letter belongs to 1588. Its
authenticity has been called in question; but wrongly, in our opinion.
See ‘Documents inedits’, 1847, p. 12.”--Note in ‘Essais’, ed. Paris,
1854, iv. 381. It does not appear to whom the letter was addressed.]
MONSEIGNEUR,--You have heard of our baggage being taken from us under our
eyes in the forest of Villebois: then, after a good deal of discussion
and delay, of the capture being pronounced illegal by the Prince. We
dared not, however, proceed on our way, from an uncertainty as to the
safety of our persons, which should have been clearly expressed on our
passports. The League has done this, M. de Barrant and M. de la
Rochefocault; the storm has burst on me, who had my money in my box. I
have recovered none of it, and most of my papers and cash--[The French
word is hardes, which St. John renders things. But compare Chambers’s
“Domestic Annals of Scotland,” 2d ed. i. 48.]--remain in their
possession. I have not seen the Prince. Fifty were lost . . . as for
the Count of Thorigny, he lost some ver plate and a few articles of
clothing. He diverged from his route to pay a visit to the mourning
ladies at Montresor, where are the remains of his two brothers and his
grandmother, and came to us again in this town, whence we shall resume
our journey shortly. The journey to Normandy is postponed. The King has
despatched MM. De Bellieure and de la Guiche to M. de Guise to summon him
to court; we shall be there on Thursday.
From Orleans, this 16th of February, in the morning [1588-9?].--Your very
humble servant,
MONTAIGNE.
XIII.
To Mademoiselle PAULMIER.--[This letter, at the time of the publication
of the variorum edition of 1854, appears to have been in private hands.
See vol. iv. p. 382.]
MADEMOISELLE,--My friends know that, from the first moment of our
acquaintance, I have destined a copy of my book for you; for I feel that
you have done it much honour. The courtesy of M. Paulmier would deprive
me of the pleasure of giving it to you now, for he has obliged me since a
great deal beyond the worth of my book. You will accept it then, if you
please, as having been yours before I owed it to you, and will confer on
me the favour of loving it, whether for its own sake or for mine; and I
will keep my debt to M. Paulmier undischarged, that I may requite him, if
I have at some other time the means of serving him.
XIV.
To the KING, HENRY IV.--[The original is in the French national library,
in the Dupuy collection. It was first discovered by M. Achille Jubinal,
who printed it with a facsimile of the entire autograph, in 1850. St.
John gives the date wrongly as the 1st January 1590.]
SIRE, It is to be above the weight and crowd of your great and important
affairs, to know, as you do, how to lend yourself, and attend to small
matters in their turn, according to the duty of your royal dignity, which
exposes you at all times to every description and degree of person and
employment. Yet, that your Majesty should have deigned to consider my
letter, and direct a reply to be made to it, I prefer to owe, less to
your strong understanding, than to your kindness of heart. I have always
looked forward to your enjoyment of your present fortune, and you may
recollect that, even when I had to make confession of itto my cure, I
viewed your successes with satisfaction: now, with the greater propriety
and freedom, I embrace them affectionately. They serve you where you are
as positive matters of fact; but they serve us here no less by the fame
which they diffuse: the echo carries as much weight as the blow. We
should not be able to derive from the justice of your cause such powerful
arguments for the maintenance and reduction of your subjects, as we do
from the reports of the success of your undertaking; and then I have to
assure your Majesty, that the recent changes to your advantage, which you
observe hereabouts, the prosperous issue of your proceedings at Dieppe,
have opportunely seconded the honest zeal and marvellous prudence of M.
the Marshal de Matignon, from whom I flatter myself that you do not
receive day by day accounts of such good and signal services without
remembering my assurances and expectations. I look to the next summer,
not only for fruits which we may eat, but for those to grow out of our
common tranquillity, and that it will pass over our heads with the same
even tenor of happiness, dissipating, like its predecessors, all the fine
promises with which your adversaries sustain the spirits of their
followers. The popular inclinations resemble a tidal wave; if the
current once commences in your favour, it will go on of its own force to
the end. I could have desired much that the private gain of the soldiers
of your army, and the necessity for satisfying them, had not deprived
you, especially in this principal town, of the glorious credit of treating
your mutinous subjects, in the midst of victory, with greater clemency
than their own protectors, and that, as distinguished from a passing and
usurped repute, you could have shown them to be really your own, by the
exercise of a protection truly paternal and royal. In the conduct of
such affairs as you have in hand, men are obliged to have recourse to
unusual expedients. It is always seen that they are surmounted by their
magnitude and difficulty; it not being found easy to complete the
conquest by arms and force, the end has been accomplished by clemency and
generosity, excellent lures to draw men particularly towards the just and
legitimate side. If there is to be severity and punishment, let it be
deferred till success has been assured. A great conqueror of past times
boasts that he gave his enemies as great an inducement to love him, as
his friends. And here we feel already some effect of the favourable
impression produced upon our rebellious towns by the contrast between
their rude treatment, and that of those which are loyal to you. Desiring
your Majesty a happiness more tangible and less hazardous, and that you
may be beloved rather than feared by your people, and believing that your
welfare and theirs are of necessity knit together, I rejoice to think that
the progress which you make is one towards more practicable conditions of
peace, as well as towards victory!
Sire, your letter of the last of November came to my hand only just now,
when the time which it pleased you to name for meeting you at Tours had
already passed. I take it as a singular favour that you should have
deigned to desire a visit from so useless a person, but one who is wholly
yours, and more so even by affection than from duty. You have acted very
commendably in adapting yourself, in the matter of external forms, to
your new fortunes; but the preservation of your old affability and
frankness in private intercourse is entitled to an equal share of praise.
You have condescended to take thought for my age, no less than for the
desire which I have to see you, where you may be at rest from these
laborious agitations. Will not that be soon at Paris, Sire? and may
nothing prevent me from presenting myself there!--Your very humble and
very obedient servant and subject,
MONTAIGNE.
From Montaigne, this 18th of January [1590].
XV.
To the same.--[ This letter is also in the national collection, among the
Dupuy papers. It was first printed in the “Journal de l’Instruction
Publique,” 4th November 1846.]
SIRE,--The letter which it pleased your majesty to write to me on the
20th of July, was not delivered to me till this morning, and found me
laid up with a very violent tertian ague, a complaint very common in this
part of the country during the last month. Sire, I consider myself
greatly honoured by the receipt of your commands, and I have not omitted
to communicate to M. the Marshal de Matignon three times most
emphatically my intention and obligation to proceed to him, and even so
far as to indicate the route by which I proposed to join him secretly, if
he thought proper. Having received no answer, I consider that he has
weighed the difficulty and risk of the journey to me. Sire, your Majesty
dill do me the favour to believe, if you please, that I shall never
complain of the expense on occasions where I should not hesitate to
devote my life. I have never derived any substantial benefit whatever
from the bounty of kings, which I have neither sought nor merited; nor
have I had any recompense for the services which I have performed for
them: whereof your majesty is in part aware. What I have done for your
predecessors I shall do still more readily for you. I am as rich, Sire,
as I desire to be. When I shall have exhausted my purse in attendance on
your Majesty at Paris, I will take the liberty to tell you, and then, if
you should regard me as worthy of being retained any longer in your
suite, you will find me more modest in my claims upon you than the
humblest of your officers.
Sire, I pray God for your prosperity and health. Your very humble and
very obedient servant and subject,
MONTAIGNE.
From Montaigne, this 2d of September [1590].
XVI.
To the Governor of Guienne.
MONSEIGNEUR,--I have received this morning your letter, which I have
communicated to M. de Gourgues, and we have dined together at the house
of M.[the mayor] of Bourdeaux. As to the inconvenience of transporting
the money named in your memorandum, you see how difficult a thing it is
to provide for; but you may be sure that we shall keep as close a watch
over it as possible. I used every exertion to discover the man of whom
you spoke. He has not been here; and M. de Bordeaux has shown me a
letter in which he mentions that he could not come to see the Director of
Bordeaux, as he intended, having been informed that you mistrust him.
The letter is of the day before yesterday. If I could have found him, I
might perhaps have pursued the gentler course, being uncertain of your
views; but I entreat you nevertheless to feel no manner of doubt that I
refuse to carry out any wishes of yours, and that, where your commands
are concerned, I know no distinction of person or matter. I hope that
you have in Guienne many as well affected to you as I am. They report
that the Nantes galleys are advancing towards Brouage. M. the Marshal de
Biron has not yet left. Those who were charged to convey the message to
M. d’Usee say that they cannot find him; and I believe that, if he has
been here, he is so no longer. We keep a vigilant eye on our gates and
guards, and we look after them a little more attentively in your absence,
which makes me apprehensive, not merely on account of the preservation of
the town, but likewise for your oven sake, knowing that the enemies of
the king feel how necessary you are to his service, and how ill we should
prosper without you. I am afraid that, in the part where you are, you
will be overtaken by so many affairs requiring your attention on every
side, that it will take you a long time and involve great difficulty
before you have disposed of everything. If there is any important news,
I will despatch an express at once, and you may conclude that nothing is
stirring if you do not hear from me: at the same time begging you to bear
in mind that movements of this kind are wont to be so sudden and
unexpected that, if they occur, they will grasp me by the throat, before
they say a word. I will do what I can to collect news, and for this
purpose I will make a point of visiting and seeing men of every shade of
opinion. Down to the present time nothing is stirring. M. de Londel has
seen me this morning, and we have been arranging for some advances for
the place, where I shall go to-morrow morning. Since I began this
letter, I have learnt from Chartreux that two gentlemen, describing
themselves as in the service of M. de Guise, and coming from Agen, have
passed near Chartreux; but I was not able to ascertain which road they
have taken. They are expecting you at Agen. The Sieur de Mauvesin came
as far as Canteloup, and thence returned, having got some intelligence.
I am in search of one Captain Rous, to whom . . . wrote, trying to
draw him into his cause by all sorts of promises. The rumour of the two
Nantes galleys ready to descend on Brouage is confirmed as certain; they
carry two companies of foot. M. de Mercure is at Nantes. The Sieur de
la Courbe said to M. the President Nesmond that M. d’Elbeuf is on this
side of Angiers, and lodges with his father. He is drawing towards Lower
Poictou with 4000 foot and 400 or 500 horse, having been reinforced by
the troops of M. de Brissac and others, and M. de Mercure is to join him.
The report goes also that M. du Maine is about to take the command of all
the forces they have collected in Auvergne, and that he will cross Le
Foret to advance on Rouergue and us, that is to say, on the King of
Navarre, against whom all this is being directed. M. de Lansac is at
Bourg, and has two war vessels, which remain in attendance on him. His
functions are naval. I tell you what I learn, and mix up together the
more or less probable hearsay of the town with actual matter of fact,
that you may be in possession of everything. I beg you most humbly to
return directly affairs may allow you to do so, and assure you that,
meanwhile, we shall not spare our labour, or (if that were necessary) our
life, to maintain the king’s authority throughout. Monseigneur, I kiss
your hands very respectfully, and pray God to have you in His keeping.
From Bordeaux, Wednesday night, 22d May (1590-91).--Your very humble
servant,
MONTAIGNE.
I have seen no one from the king of Navarre; they say that M. de Biron
has seen him.
THE AUTHOR TO THE READER.--[Omitted by Cotton.]
READER, thou hast here an honest book; it doth at the outset forewarn
thee that, in contriving the same, I have proposed to myself no other
than a domestic and private end: I have had no consideration at all
either to thy service or to my glory. My powers are not capable of any
such design. I have dedicated it to the particular commodity of my
kinsfolk and friends, so that, having lost me (which they must do
shortly), they may therein recover some traits of my conditions and
humours, and by that means preserve more whole, and more life-like, the
knowledge they had of me. Had my intention been to seek the world’s
favour, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties: I
desire therein to be viewed as I appear in mine own genuine, simple, and
ordinary manner, without study and artifice: for it is myself I paint.
My defects are therein to be read to the life, and any imperfections and
my natural form, so far as public reverence hath permitted me. If I had
lived among those nations, which (they say) yet dwell under the sweet
liberty of nature’s primitive laws, I assure thee I would most willingly
have painted myself quite fully and quite naked. Thus, reader, myself am
the matter of my book: there’s no reason thou shouldst employ thy leisure
about so frivolous and vain a subject. Therefore farewell.
From Montaigne, the 12th June 1580--[So in the edition of 1595; the
edition of 1588 has 12th June 1588]
From Montaigne, the 1st March 1580.
--[See Bonnefon, Montaigne, 1893, p. 254. The book had been
licensed for the press on the 9th May previous. The edition of 1588
has 12th June 1588;]--
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
Arts of persuasion, to insinuate it into our minds
Help: no other effect than that of lengthening my suffering
Judgment of great things is many times formed from lesser thing
Option now of continuing in life or of completing the voyage
Two principal guiding reins are reward and punishment
Virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
BOOK THE FIRST
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 2.
I. That Men by Various Ways Arrive at the Same End.
II. Of Sorrow.
III. That our affections carry themselves beyond us.
IV. That the soul discharges her passions upon false objects, where
the true are wanting.
V. Whether the governor of a place besieged ought himself to go
out to parley.
VI. That the hour of parley is dangerous.
VII. That the intention is judge of our actions.
VIII. Of idleness.
IX. Of liars.
X. Of quick or slow speech.
XI. Of prognostications.
XII. Of constancy.
CHAPTER I
THAT MEN BY VARIOUS WAYS ARRIVE AT THE SAME END.
The most usual way of appeasing the indignation of such as we have any
way offended, when we see them in possession of the power of revenge,
and find that we absolutely lie at their mercy, is by submission, to move
them to commiseration and pity; and yet bravery, constancy, and
resolution, however quite contrary means, have sometimes served to
produce the same effect.--[Florio’s version begins thus: “The most
vsuall waie to appease those minds wee have offended, when revenge lies
in their hands, and that we stand at their mercie, is by submission to
move them to commiseration and pity: Nevertheless, courage, constancie,
and resolution (means altogether opposite) have sometimes wrought the
same effect.”--] [The spelling is Florio’s D.W.]
Edward, Prince of Wales [Edward, the Black Prince. D.W.] (the same who
so long governed our Guienne, a personage whose condition and fortune
have in them a great deal of the most notable and most considerable parts
of grandeur), having been highly incensed by the Limousins, and taking
their city by assault, was not, either by the cries of the people, or the
prayers and tears of the women and children, abandoned to slaughter and
prostrate at his feet for mercy, to be stayed from prosecuting his
revenge; till, penetrating further into the town, he at last took notice
of three French gentlemen,--[These were Jean de Villemure, Hugh de la
Roche, and Roger de Beaufort.--Froissart, i. c. 289. {The city was
Limoges. D.W.}]--who with incredible bravery alone sustained the power
of his victorious army. Then it was that consideration and respect unto
so remarkable a valour first stopped the torrent of his fury, and that
his clemency, beginning with these three cavaliers, was afterwards
extended to all the remaining inhabitants of the city.
Scanderbeg, Prince of Epirus, pursuing one of his soldiers with purpose
to kill him, the soldier, having in vain tried by all the ways of
humility and supplication to appease him, resolved, as his last refuge,
to face about and await him sword in hand: which behaviour of his gave a
sudden stop to his captain’s fury, who, for seeing him assume so notable
a resolution, received him into grace; an example, however, that might
suffer another interpretation with such as have not read of the
prodigious force and valour of that prince.
The Emperor Conrad III. having besieged Guelph, Duke of Bavaria,--[In
1140, in Weinsberg, Upper Bavaria.]--would not be prevailed upon, what
mean and unmanly satisfactions soever were tendered to him, to condescend
to milder conditions than that the ladies and gentlewomen only who were
in the town with the duke might go out without violation of their honour,
on foot, and with so much only as they could carry about them. Whereupon
they, out of magnanimity of heart, presently contrived to carry out, upon
their shoulders, their husbands and children, and the duke himself;
a sight at which the emperor was so pleased, that, ravished with the
generosity of the action, he wept for joy, and immediately extinguishing
in his heart the mortal and capital hatred he had conceived against this
duke, he from that time forward treated him and his with all humanity.
The one and the other of these two ways would with great facility work
upon my nature; for I have a marvellous propensity to mercy and mildness,
and to such a degree that I fancy of the two I should sooner surrender my
anger to compassion than to esteem. And yet pity is reputed a vice
amongst the Stoics, who will that we succour the afflicted, but not that
we should be so affected with their sufferings as to suffer with them.
I conceived these examples not ill suited to the question in hand, and
the rather because therein we observe these great souls assaulted and
tried by these two several ways, to resist the one without relenting, and
to be shook and subjected by the other. It may be true that to suffer a
man’s heart to be totally subdued by compassion may be imputed to
facility, effeminacy, and over-tenderness; whence it comes to pass that
the weaker natures, as of women, children, and the common sort of people,
are the most subject to it but after having resisted and disdained the
power of groans and tears, to yield to the sole reverence of the sacred
image of Valour, this can be no other than the effect of a strong and
inflexible soul enamoured of and honouring masculine and obstinate
courage. Nevertheless, astonishment and admiration may, in less generous
minds, beget a like effect: witness the people of Thebes, who, having put
two of their generals upon trial for their lives for having continued in
arms beyond the precise term of their commission, very hardly pardoned
Pelopidas, who, bowing under the weight of so dangerous an accusation,
made no manner of defence for himself, nor produced other arguments than
prayers and supplications; whereas, on the contrary, Epaminondas, falling
to recount magniloquently the exploits he had performed in their service,
and, after a haughty and arrogant manner reproaching them with
ingratitude and injustice, they had not the heart to proceed any further
in his trial, but broke up the court and departed, the whole assembly
highly commending the high courage of this personage.--[Plutarch, How
far a Man may praise Himself, c. 5.]
Dionysius the elder, after having, by a tedious siege and through
exceeding great difficulties, taken the city of Reggio, and in it the
governor Phyton, a very gallant man, who had made so obstinate a defence,
was resolved to make him a tragical example of his revenge: in order
whereunto he first told him, “That he had the day before caused his son
and all his kindred to be drowned.” To which Phyton returned no other
answer but this: “That they were then by one day happier than he.” After
which, causing him to be stripped, and delivering him into the hands of
the tormentors, he was by them not only dragged through the streets of
the town, and most ignominiously and cruelly whipped, but moreover
vilified with most bitter and contumelious language: yet still he
maintained his courage entire all the way, with a strong voice and
undaunted countenance proclaiming the honourable and glorious cause of
his death; namely, for that he would not deliver up his country into the
hands of a tyrant; at the same time denouncing against him a speedy
chastisement from the offended gods. At which Dionysius, reading in his
soldiers’ looks, that instead of being incensed at the haughty language
of this conquered enemy, to the contempt of their captain and his
triumph, they were not only struck with admiration of so rare a virtue,
but moreover inclined to mutiny, and were even ready to rescue the
prisoner out of the hangman’s hands, he caused the torturing to cease,
and afterwards privately caused him to be thrown into the sea.--[Diod.
Sic., xiv. 29.]
Man (in good earnest) is a marvellous vain, fickle, and unstable subject,
and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.
For Pompey could pardon the whole city of the Mamertines, though
furiously incensed against it, upon the single account of the virtue and
magnanimity of one citizen, Zeno,--[Plutarch calls him Stheno, and also
Sthemnus and Sthenis]--who took the fault of the public wholly upon
himself; neither entreated other favour, but alone to undergo the
punishment for all: and yet Sylla’s host, having in the city of Perugia
--[Plutarch says Preneste, a town of Latium.]--manifested the same
virtue, obtained nothing by it, either for himself or his
fellow-citizens.
And, directly contrary to my first examples, the bravest of all men, and
who was reputed so gracious to all those he overcame, Alexander, having,
after many great difficulties, forced the city of Gaza, and, entering,
found Betis, who commanded there, and of whose valour in the time of this
siege he had most marvellous manifest proof, alone, forsaken by all his
soldiers, his armour hacked and hewed to pieces, covered all over with
blood and wounds, and yet still fighting in the crowd of a number of
Macedonians, who were laying on him on all sides, he said to him, nettled
at so dear-bought a victory (for, in addition to the other damage, he had
two wounds newly received in his own person), “Thou shalt not die, Betis,
as thou dost intend; be sure thou shall suffer all the torments that can
be inflicted on a captive.” To which menace the other returning no other
answer, but only a fierce and disdainful look; “What,” says Alexander,
observing his haughty and obstinate silence, “is he too stiff to bend a
knee! Is he too proud to utter one suppliant word! Truly, I will
conquer this silence; and if I cannot force a word from his mouth, I
will, at least, extract a groan from his heart.” And thereupon
converting his anger into fury, presently commanded his heels to be bored
through, causing him, alive, to be dragged, mangled, and dismembered at a
cart’s tail.--[Quintus Curtius, iv. 6. This act of cruelty has been
doubted, notwithstanding the statement of Curtius.]--Was it that the
height of courage was so natural and familiar to this conqueror, that
because he could not admire, he respected it the less? Or was it that he
conceived valour to be a virtue so peculiar to himself, that his pride
could not, without envy, endure it in another? Or was it that the
natural impetuosity of his fury was incapable of opposition? Certainly,
had it been capable of moderation, it is to be believed that in the sack
and desolation of Thebes, to see so many valiant men, lost and totally
destitute of any further defence, cruelly massacred before his eyes,
would have appeased it: where there were above six thousand put to the
sword, of whom not one was seen to fly, or heard to cry out for quarter;
but, on the contrary, every one running here and there to seek out and to
provoke the victorious enemy to help them to an honourable end. Not one
was seen who, however weakened with wounds, did not in his last gasp yet
endeavour to revenge himself, and with all the arms of a brave despair,
to sweeten his own death in the death of an enemy. Yet did their valour
create no pity, and the length of one day was not enough to satiate the
thirst of the conqueror’s revenge, but the slaughter continued to the
last drop of blood that was capable of being shed, and stopped not till
it met with none but unarmed persons, old men, women, and children, of
them to carry away to the number of thirty thousand slaves.
CHAPTER II
OF SORROW
No man living is more free from this passion than I, who yet neither like
it in myself nor admire it in others, and yet generally the world, as a
settled thing, is pleased to grace it with a particular esteem, clothing
therewith wisdom, virtue, and conscience. Foolish and sordid guise!
--[“No man is more free from this passion than I, for I neither love nor
regard it: albeit the world hath undertaken, as it were upon covenant, to
grace it with a particular favour. Therewith they adorne age, vertue,
and conscience. Oh foolish and base ornament!” Florio, 1613, p. 3]
--The Italians have more fitly baptized by this name--[La tristezza]--
malignity; for ‘tis a quality always hurtful, always idle and vain; and
as being cowardly, mean, and base, it is by the Stoics expressly and
particularly forbidden to their sages.
But the story--[Herodotus, iii. 14.]--says that Psammenitus, King of
Egypt, being defeated and taken prisoner by Cambyses, King of Persia,
seeing his own daughter pass by him as prisoner, and in a wretched habit,
with a bucket to draw water, though his friends about him were so
concerned as to break out into tears and lamentations, yet he himself
remained unmoved, without uttering a word, his eyes fixed upon the
ground; and seeing, moreover, his son immediately after led to execution,
still maintained the same countenance; till spying at last one of his
domestic and familiar friends dragged away amongst the captives, he fell
to tearing his hair and beating his breast, with all the other
extravagances of extreme sorrow.
A story that may very fitly be coupled with another of the same kind, of
recent date, of a prince of our own nation, who being at Trent, and
having news there brought him of the death of his elder brother, a
brother on whom depended the whole support and honour of his house, and
soon after of that of a younger brother, the second hope of his family,
and having withstood these two assaults with an exemplary resolution; one
of his servants happening a few days after to die, he suffered his
constancy to be overcome by this last accident; and, parting with his
courage, so abandoned himself to sorrow and mourning, that some thence
were forward to conclude that he was only touched to the quick by this
last stroke of fortune; but, in truth, it was, that being before brimful
of grief, the least addition overflowed the bounds of all patience.
Which, I think, might also be said of the former example, did not the
story proceed to tell us that Cambyses asking Psammenitus, “Why, not
being moved at the calamity of his son and daughter, he should with so
great impatience bear the misfortune of his friend?” “It is,” answered
he, “because only this last affliction was to be manifested by tears, the
two first far exceeding all manner of expression.”
And, peradventure, something like this might be working in the fancy of
the ancient painter,--[Cicero, De Orator., c. 22 ; Pliny, xxxv. 10.]--
who having, in the sacrifice of Iphigenia, to represent the sorrow of the
assistants proportionably to the several degrees of interest every one
had in the death of this fair innocent virgin, and having, in the other
figures, laid out the utmost power of his art, when he came to that of
her father, he drew him with a veil over his face, meaning thereby that
no kind of countenance was capable of expressing such a degree of sorrow.
Which is also the reason why the poets feign the miserable mother, Niobe,
having first lost seven sons, and then afterwards as many daughters
(overwhelmed with her losses), to have been at last transformed into a
rock--
“Diriguisse malis,”
[“Petrified with her misfortunes.”--Ovid, Met., vi. 304.]
thereby to express that melancholic, dumb, and deaf stupefaction, which
benumbs all our faculties, when oppressed with accidents greater than we
are able to bear. And, indeed, the violence and impression of an
excessive grief must of necessity astonish the soul, and wholly deprive
her of her ordinary functions: as it happens to every one of us, who,
upon any sudden alarm of very ill news, find ourselves surprised,
stupefied, and in a manner deprived of all power of motion, so that the
soul, beginning to vent itself in tears and lamentations, seems to free
and disengage itself from the sudden oppression, and to have obtained
some room to work itself out at greater liberty.
“Et via vix tandem voci laxata dolore est.”
[“And at length and with difficulty is a passage opened by grief for
utterance.”--AEneid, xi. 151.]
In the war that Ferdinand made upon the widow of King John of Hungary,
about Buda, a man-at-arms was particularly taken notice of by every one
for his singular gallant behaviour in a certain encounter; and, unknown,
highly commended, and lamented, being left dead upon the place: but by
none so much as by Raisciac, a German lord, who was infinitely enamoured
of so rare a valour. The body being brought off, and the count, with the
common curiosity coming to view it, the armour was no sooner taken off
but he immediately knew him to be his own son, a thing that added a
second blow to the compassion of all the beholders; only he, without
uttering a word, or turning away his eyes from the woeful object, stood
fixedly contemplating the body of his son, till the vehemency of sorrow
having overcome his vital spirits, made him sink down stone-dead to the
ground.
“Chi puo dir com’ egli arde, a in picciol fuoco,”
[“He who can say how he burns with love, has little fire”
--Petrarca, Sonetto 137.]
say the Innamoratos, when they would represent an ‘insupportable passion.
“Misero quod omneis
Eripit sensus mihi: nam simul te,
Lesbia, aspexi, nihil est super mi,
Quod loquar amens.
Lingua sed torpet: tenuis sub artus
Flamma dimanat; sonitu suopte
Tintinant aures; gemina teguntur
Lumina nocte.”
[“Love deprives me of all my faculties: Lesbia, when once in thy
presence, I have not left the power to tell my distracting passion:
my tongue becomes torpid; a subtle flame creeps through my veins; my
ears tingle in deafness; my eyes are veiled with darkness.”
Catullus, Epig. li. 5]
Neither is it in the height and greatest fury of the fit that we are in a
condition to pour out our complaints or our amorous persuasions, the soul
being at that time over-burdened, and labouring with profound thoughts;
and the body dejected and languishing with desire; and thence it is that
sometimes proceed those accidental impotencies that so unseasonably
surprise the lover, and that frigidity which by the force of an
immoderate ardour seizes him even in the very lap of fruition.
--[The edition of 1588 has here, “An accident not unknown to myself.”]--
For all passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are
but moderate:
“Curae leves loquuntur, ingentes stupent.”
[“Light griefs can speak: deep sorrows are dumb.”
--Seneca, Hippolytus, act ii. scene 3.]
A surprise of unexpected joy does likewise often produce the same effect:
“Ut me conspexit venientem, et Troja circum
Arma amens vidit, magnis exterrita monstris,
Diriguit visu in medio, calor ossa reliquit,
Labitur, et longo vix tandem tempore fatur.”
[“When she beheld me advancing, and saw, with stupefaction, the
Trojan arms around me, terrified with so great a prodigy, she
fainted away at the very sight: vital warmth forsook her limbs: she
sinks down, and, after a long interval, with difficulty speaks.”--
AEneid, iii. 306.]
Besides the examples of the Roman lady, who died for joy to see her son
safe returned from the defeat of Cannae; and of Sophocles and of
Dionysius the Tyrant,--[Pliny, vii. 53. Diodorus Siculus, however (xv.
c. 20), tells us that Dionysius “was so overjoyed at the news that he
made a great sacrifice upon it to the gods, prepared sumptuous feasts, to
which he invited all his friends, and therein drank so excessively that
it threw him into a very bad distemper.”]--who died of joy; and of
Thalna, who died in Corsica, reading news of the honours the Roman Senate
had decreed in his favour, we have, moreover, one in our time, of Pope
Leo X., who upon news of the taking of Milan, a thing he had so ardently
desired, was rapt with so sudden an excess of joy that he immediately
fell into a fever and died.--[Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, vol.
xiv.]--And for a more notable testimony of the imbecility of human
nature, it is recorded by the ancients--[Pliny, ‘ut supra’]--that
Diodorus the dialectician died upon the spot, out of an extreme passion
of shame, for not having been able in his own school, and in the presence
of a great auditory, to disengage himself from a nice argument that was
propounded to him. I, for my part, am very little subject to these
violent passions; I am naturally of a stubborn apprehension, which also,
by reasoning, I every day harden and fortify.
CHAPTER III
THAT OUR AFFECTIONS CARRY THEMSELVES BEYOND US
Such as accuse mankind of the folly of gaping after future things, and
advise us to make our benefit of those which are present, and to set up
our rest upon them, as having no grasp upon that which is to come, even
less than that which we have upon what is past, have hit upon the most
universal of human errors, if that may be called an error to which nature
herself has disposed us, in order to the continuation of her own work,
prepossessing us, amongst several others, with this deceiving
imagination, as being more jealous of our action than afraid of our
knowledge.
We are never present with, but always beyond ourselves: fear, desire,
hope, still push us on towards the future, depriving us, in the meantime,
of the sense and consideration of that which is to amuse us with the
thought of what shall be, even when we shall be no more.--[Rousseau,
Emile, livre ii.]
“Calamitosus est animus futuri auxius.”
[“The mind anxious about the future is unhappy.”
--Seneca, Epist., 98.]
We find this great precept often repeated in Plato, “Do thine own work,
and know thyself.” Of which two parts, both the one and the other
generally, comprehend our whole duty, and do each of them in like manner
involve the other; for who will do his own work aright will find that his
first lesson is to know what he is, and that which is proper to himself;
and who rightly understands himself will never mistake another man’s work
for his own, but will love and improve himself above all other things,
will refuse superfluous employments, and reject all unprofitable thoughts
and propositions. As folly, on the one side, though it should enjoy all
it desire, would notwithstanding never be content, so, on the other,
wisdom, acquiescing in the present, is never dissatisfied with itself.
--[Cicero, Tusc. Quae., 57, v. 18.]--Epicurus dispenses his sages from
all foresight and care of the future.
Amongst those laws that relate to the dead, I look upon that to be very
sound by which the actions of princes are to be examined after their
decease.--[Diodorus Siculus, i. 6.]-- They are equals with, if not
masters of the laws, and, therefore, what justice could not inflict upon
their persons, ‘tis but reason should be executed upon their reputations
and the estates of their successors--things that we often value above
life itself. ‘Tis a custom of singular advantage to those countries
where it is in use, and by all good princes to be desired, who have
reason to take it ill, that the memories of the wicked should be used
with the same reverence and respect with their own. We owe subjection
and obedience to all our kings, whether good or bad, alike, for that has
respect unto their office; but as to esteem and affection, these are only
due to their virtue. Let us grant to political government to endure them
with patience, however unworthy; to conceal their vices; and to assist
them with our recommendation in their indifferent actions, whilst their
authority stands in need of our support. But, the relation of prince and
subject being once at an end, there is no reason we should deny the
expression of our real opinions to our own liberty and common justice,
and especially to interdict to good subjects the glory of having
reverently and faithfully served a prince, whose imperfections were to
them so well known; this were to deprive posterity of a useful example.
And such as, out of respect to some private obligation, unjustly espouse
and vindicate the memory of a faulty prince, do private right at the
expense of public justice. Livy does very truly say,--[xxxv. 48.]--
“That the language of men bred up in courts is always full of vain
ostentation and false testimony, every one indifferently magnifying his
own master, and stretching his commendation to the utmost extent of
virtue and sovereign grandeur.” Some may condemn the freedom of those
two soldiers who so roundly answered Nero to his beard; the one being
asked by him why he bore him ill-will? “I loved thee,” answered he,
“whilst thou wert worthy of it, but since thou art become a parricide, an
incendiary, a player, and a coachman, I hate thee as thou dost deserve.”
And the other, why he should attempt to kill him? “Because,” said he,
“I could think of no other remedy against thy perpetual mischiefs.”
--[Tacitus, Annal., xv. 67.]--But the public and universal testimonies
that were given of him after his death (and so will be to all posterity,
both of him and all other wicked princes like him), of his tyrannies and
abominable deportment, who, of a sound judgment, can reprove them?
I am scandalised, that in so sacred a government as that of the
Lacedaemonians there should be mixed so hypocritical a ceremony at the
interment of their kings; where all their confederates and neighbours,
and all sorts and degrees of men and women, as well as their slaves, cut
and slashed their foreheads in token of sorrow, repeating in their cries
and lamentations that that king (let him have been as wicked as the
devil) was the best that ever they had;--[Herodotus, vi. 68.]--by this
means attributing to his quality the praise that only belongs to merit,
and that of right is due to supreme desert, though lodged in the lowest
and most inferior subject.
Aristotle, who will still have a hand in everything, makes a ‘quaere’
upon the saying of Solon, that none can be said to be happy until he is
dead: “whether, then, he who has lived and died according to his heart’s
desire, if he have left an ill repute behind him, and that his posterity
be miserable, can be said to be happy?” Whilst we have life and motion,
we convey ourselves by fancy and preoccupation, whither and to what we
please; but once out of being, we have no more any manner of
communication with that which is, and it had therefore been better said
by Solon that man is never happy, because never so, till he is no more.
“Quisquam
Vix radicitus e vita se tollit, et eicit;
Sed facit esse sui quiddam super inscius ipse,
Nec removet satis a projecto corpore sese, et
Vindicat.”
[“Scarcely one man can, even in dying, wholly detach himself from
the idea of life; in his ignorance he must needs imagine that there
is in him something that survives him, and cannot sufficiently
separate or emancipate himself from his remains”
--Lucretius, iii. 890.]
Bertrand de Guesclin, dying at the siege of the Castle of Rancon, near
unto Puy, in Auvergne, the besieged were afterwards, upon surrender,
enjoined to lay down the keys of the place upon the corpse of the dead
general. Bartolommeo d’Alviano, the Venetian General, happening to die
in the service of the Republic in Brescia, and his corpse being to be
carried through the territory of Verona, an enemy’s country, most of the
army were inclined to demand safe-conduct from the Veronese; but Theodoro
Trivulzio opposed the motion, rather choosing to make his way by force of
arms, and to run the hazard of a battle, saying it was by no means fit
that he who in his life was never afraid of his enemies should seem to
apprehend them when he was dead. In truth, in affairs of the same
nature, by the Greek laws, he who made suit to an enemy for a body to
give it burial renounced his victory, and had no more right to erect a
trophy, and he to whom such suit was made was reputed victor. By this
means it was that Nicias lost the advantage he had visibly obtained over
the Corinthians, and that Agesilaus, on the contrary, assured that which
he had before very doubtfully gained over the Boeotians.--[Plutarch,
Life of Nicias, c. ii.; Life of Agesilaus, c. vi.]
These things might appear strange, had it not been a general practice in
all ages not only to extend the concern of ourselves beyond this life,
but, moreover, to fancy that the favour of Heaven does not only very
often accompany us to the grave, but has also, even after life, a concern
for our ashes. Of which there are so many ancient examples (to say
nothing of those of our own observation), that it is not necessary I
should longer insist upon it. Edward I., King of England, having in the
long wars betwixt him and Robert, King of Scotland, had experience of how
great importance his own immediate presence was to the success of his
affairs, having ever been victorious in whatever he undertook in his own
person, when he came to die, bound his son in a solemn oath that, so soon
as he should be dead he should boil his body till the flesh parted from
the bones, and bury the flesh, reserving the bones to carry continually
with him in his army, so often as he should be obliged to go against the
Scots, as if destiny had inevitably attached victory, even to his
remains. John Zisca, the same who, to vindication of Wicliffe’s
heresies, troubled the Bohemian state, left order that they should flay
him after his death, and of his skin make a drum to carry in the war
against his enemies, fancying it would contribute to the continuation of
the successes he had always obtained in the wars against them. In like
manner certain of the Indians, in their battles with the Spaniards,
carried with them the bones of one of their captains, in consideration of
the victories they had formerly obtained under his conduct. And other
people of the same New World carry about with them, in their wars, the
relics of valiant men who have died in battle, to incite their courage
and advance their fortune. Of which examples the first reserve nothing
for the tomb but the reputation they have acquired by their former
achievements, but these attribute to them a certain present and active
power.
The proceeding of Captain Bayard is of a better composition, who finding
himself wounded to death with an harquebuss shot, and being importuned to
retire out of the fight, made answer that he would not begin at the last
gasp to turn his back to the enemy, and accordingly still fought on, till
feeling himself too faint and no longer able to sit on his horse, he
commanded his steward to set him down at the foot of a tree, but so that
he might die with his face towards the enemy, which he did.
I must yet add another example, equally remarkable for the present
consideration with any of the former. The Emperor Maximilian,
great-grandfather to the now King Philip,--[Philip II. of Spain.]--was a
prince endowed throughout with great and extraordinary qualities, and
amongst the rest with a singular beauty of person, but had withal a
humour very contrary to that of other princes, who for the despatch of
their most important affairs convert their close-stool into a chair of
State, which was, that he would never permit any of his bedchamber, how
familiar soever, to see him in that posture, and would steal aside to
make water as religiously as a virgin, shy to discover to his physician
or any other whomsoever those parts that we are accustomed to conceal.
I myself, who have so impudent a way of talking, am, nevertheless,
naturally so modest this way, that unless at the importunity of necessity
or pleasure, I scarcely ever communicate to the sight of any either those
parts or actions that custom orders us to conceal, wherein I suffer more
constraint than I conceive is very well becoming a man, especially of my
profession. But he nourished this modest humour to such a degree of
superstition as to give express orders in his last will that they should
put him on drawers so soon as he should be dead; to which, methinks, he
would have done well to have added that he should be blindfolded, too,
that put them on. The charge that Cyrus left with his children, that
neither they, nor any other, should either see or touch his body after
the soul was departed from it,--[Xenophon, Cyropedia, viii. 7.]--I
attribute to some superstitious devotion of his; for both his historian
and himself, amongst their great qualities, marked the whole course of
their lives with a singular respect and reverence to religion.
I was by no means pleased with a story, told me by a man of very great
quality of a relation of mine, and one who had given a very good account
of himself both in peace and war, that, coming to die in a very old age,
of excessive pain of the stone, he spent the last hours of his life in an
extraordinary solicitude about ordering the honour and ceremony of his
funeral, pressing all the men of condition who came to see him to engage
their word to attend him to his grave: importuning this very prince, who
came to visit him at his last gasp, with a most earnest supplication that
he would order his family to be there, and presenting before him several
reasons and examples to prove that it was a respect due to a man of his
condition; and seemed to die content, having obtained this promise, and
appointed the method and order of his funeral parade. I have seldom
heard of so persistent a vanity.
Another, though contrary curiosity (of which singularity, also, I do not
want domestic example), seems to be somewhat akin to this, that a man
shall cudgel his brains at the last moments of his life to contrive his
obsequies to so particular and unusual a parsimony as of one servant with
a lantern, I see this humour commended, and the appointment of Marcus.
Emilius Lepidus, who forbade his heirs to bestow upon his hearse even the
common ceremonies in use upon such occasions. Is it yet temperance and
frugality to avoid expense and pleasure of which the use and knowledge
are imperceptible to us? See, here, an easy and cheap reformation. If
instruction were at all necessary in this case, I should be of opinion
that in this, as in all other actions of life, each person should
regulate the matter according to his fortune; and the philosopher Lycon
prudently ordered his friends to dispose of his body where they should
think most fit, and as to his funeral, to order it neither too
superfluous nor too mean. For my part, I should wholly refer the
ordering of this ceremony to custom, and shall, when the time comes,
accordingly leave it to their discretion to whose lot it shall fall to do
me that last office. “Totus hic locus est contemnendus in nobis, non
negligendus in nostris;”--[“The place of our sepulture is to be contemned
by us, but not to be neglected by our friends.”--Cicero, Tusc. i. 45.]--
and it was a holy saying of a saint, “Curatio funeris, conditio
sepultura: pompa exequiarum, magis sunt vivorum solatia, quam subsidia
mortuorum.”--[“The care of death, the place of sepulture, the pomps of
obsequies, are rather consolations to the living than succours to the
dead.” August. De Civit. Dei, i. 12.]--Which made Socrates answer
Crito, who, at death, asked him how he would be buried: “How you will,”
said he. “If I were to concern myself beyond the present about this
affair, I should be most tempted, as the greatest satisfaction of this
kind, to imitate those who in their lifetime entertain themselves with
the ceremony and honours of their own obsequies beforehand, and are
pleased with beholding their own dead countenance in marble. Happy are
they who can gratify their senses by insensibility, and live by their
death!”
I am ready to conceive an implacable hatred against all popular
domination, though I think it the most natural and equitable of all, so
oft as I call to mind the inhuman injustice of the people of Athens, who,
without remission, or once vouchsafing to hear what they had to say for
themselves, put to death their brave captains newly returned triumphant
from a naval victory they had obtained over the Lacedaemonians near the
Arginusian Isles, the most bloody and obstinate engagement that ever the
Greeks fought at sea; because (after the victory) they followed up the
blow and pursued the advantages presented to them by the rule of war,
rather than stay to gather up and bury their dead. And the execution is
yet rendered more odious by the behaviour of Diomedon, who, being one of
the condemned, and a man of most eminent virtue, political and military,
after having heard the sentence, advancing to speak, no audience till
then having been allowed, instead of laying before them his own cause,
or the impiety of so cruel a sentence, only expressed a solicitude for
his judges’ preservation, beseeching the gods to convert this sentence to
their good, and praying that, for neglecting to fulfil the vows which he
and his companions had made (with which he also acquainted them) in
acknowledgment of so glorious a success, they might not draw down the
indignation of the gods upon them; and so without more words went
courageously to his death.
Fortune, a few years after, punished them in the same kind; for Chabrias,
captain-general of their naval forces, having got the better of Pollis,
Admiral of Sparta, at the Isle of Naxos, totally lost the fruits of his
victory, one of very great importance to their affairs, in order not to
incur the danger of this example, and so that he should not lose a few
bodies of his dead friends that were floating in the sea, gave
opportunity to a world of living enemies to sail away in safety, who
afterwards made them pay dear for this unseasonable superstition:--
“Quaeris, quo jaceas, post obitum, loco?
Quo non nata jacent.”
[“Dost ask where thou shalt lie after death?
Where things not born lie, that never being had.”]
Seneca, Tyoa. Choro ii. 30.
This other restores the sense of repose to a body without a soul:
“Neque sepulcrum, quo recipiatur, habeat: portum corporis, ubi,
remissa human, vita, corpus requiescat a malis.”
[“Nor let him have a sepulchre wherein he may be received, a haven
for his body, where, life being gone, that body may rest from its
woes.”--Ennius, ap. Cicero, Tusc. i. 44.]
As nature demonstrates to us that several dead things retain yet an
occult relation to life; wine changes its flavour and complexion in
cellars, according to the changes and seasons of the vine from whence it
came; and the flesh of--venison alters its condition in the
powdering-tub, and its taste according to the laws of the living
flesh of its kind, as it is said.
CHAPTER IV
THAT THE SOUL EXPENDS ITS PASSIONS UPON FALSE OBJECTS, WHERE THE TRUE ARE
WANTING
A gentleman of my country, marvellously tormented with the gout, being
importuned by his physicians totally to abstain from all manner of salt
meats, was wont pleasantly to reply, that in the extremity of his fits he
must needs have something to quarrel with, and that railing at and
cursing, one while the Bologna sausages, and another the dried tongues
and the hams, was some mitigation to his pain. But, in good earnest, as
the arm when it is advanced to strike, if it miss the blow, and goes by
the wind, it pains us; and as also, that, to make a pleasant prospect,
the sight should not be lost and dilated in vague air, but have some
bound and object to limit and circumscribe it at a reasonable distance.
“Ventus ut amittit vires, nisi robore densa
Occurrant sylvae, spatio diffusus inani.”
[“As the wind loses its force diffused in void space, unless it in
its strength encounters the thick wood.”--Lucan, iii. 362.]
So it seems that the soul, being transported and discomposed, turns its
violence upon itself, if not supplied with something to oppose it, and
therefore always requires an object at which to aim, and whereon to act.
Plutarch says of those who are delighted with little dogs and monkeys,
that the amorous part that is in us, for want of a legitimate object,
rather than lie idle, does after that manner forge and create one false
and frivolous. And we see that the soul, in its passions, inclines
rather to deceive itself, by creating a false and fantastical a subject,
even contrary to its own belief, than not to have something to work upon.
After this manner brute beasts direct their fury to fall upon the stone
or weapon that has hurt them, and with their teeth a even execute revenge
upon themselves for the injury they have received from another:
“Pannonis haud aliter, post ictum saevior ursa,
Cui jaculum parva Lybis amentavit habena,
Se rotat in vulnus, telumque irata receptum
Impetit, et secum fugientem circuit hastam.”
[“So the she-bear, fiercer after the blow from the Lybian’s thong-
hurled dart, turns round upon the wound, and attacking the received
spear, twists it, as she flies.”--Lucan, vi. 220.]
What causes of the misadventures that befall us do we not invent? what
is it that we do not lay the fault to, right or wrong, that we may have
something to quarrel with? It is not those beautiful tresses you tear,
nor is it the white bosom that in your anger you so unmercifully beat,
that with an unlucky bullet have slain your beloved brother; quarrel with
something else. Livy, speaking of the Roman army in Spain, says that for
the loss of the two brothers, their great captains:
“Flere omnes repente, et offensare capita.”
[“All at once wept and tore their hair.”-Livy, xxv. 37.]
‘Tis a common practice. And the philosopher Bion said pleasantly of the
king, who by handsful pulled his hair off his head for sorrow, “Does this
man think that baldness is a remedy for grief?”--[Cicero, Tusc. Quest.,
iii. 26.]--Who has not seen peevish gamesters chew and swallow the
cards, and swallow the dice, in revenge for the loss of their money?
Xerxes whipped the sea, and wrote a challenge to Mount Athos; Cyrus
employed a whole army several days at work, to revenge himself of the
river Gyndas, for the fright it had put him into in passing over it; and
Caligula demolished a very beautiful palace for the pleasure his mother
had once enjoyed there.
--[Pleasure--unless ‘plaisir’ were originally ‘deplaisir’--must be
understood here ironically, for the house was one in which she had
been imprisoned.--Seneca, De Ira. iii. 22]--
I remember there was a story current, when I was a boy, that one of our
neighbouring kings--[Probably Alfonso XI. of Castile]--having received
a blow from the hand of God, swore he would be revenged, and in order to
it, made proclamation that for ten years to come no one should pray to
Him, or so much as mention Him throughout his dominions, or, so far as
his authority went, believe in Him; by which they meant to paint not so
much the folly as the vainglory of the nation of which this tale was
told. They are vices that always go together, but in truth such actions
as these have in them still more of presumption than want of wit.
Augustus Caesar, having been tossed with a tempest at sea, fell to
defying Neptune, and in the pomp of the Circensian games, to be revenged,
deposed his statue from the place it had amongst the other deities.
Wherein he was still less excusable than the former, and less than he was
afterwards when, having lost a battle under Quintilius Varus in Germany,
in rage and despair he went running his head against the wall, crying
out, “O Varus! give me back my legions!” for these exceed all folly,
forasmuch as impiety is joined therewith, invading God Himself, or at
least Fortune, as if she had ears that were subject to our batteries;
like the Thracians, who when it thunders or lightens, fall to shooting
against heaven with Titanian vengeance, as if by flights of arrows they
intended to bring God to reason. Though the ancient poet in Plutarch
tells us--
“Point ne se faut couroucer aux affaires,
Il ne leur chault de toutes nos choleres.”
[“We must not trouble the gods with our affairs; they take no heed
of our angers and disputes.”--Plutarch.]
But we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.
CHAPTER V
WHETHER THE GOVERNOR OF A PLACE BESIEGED OUGHT HIMSELF
TO GO OUT TO PARLEY
Quintus Marcius, the Roman legate in the war against Perseus, King of
Macedon, to gain time wherein to reinforce his army, set on foot some
overtures of accommodation, with which the king being lulled asleep,
concluded a truce for some days, by this means giving his enemy
opportunity and leisure to recruit his forces, which was afterwards the
occasion of the king’s final ruin. Yet the elder senators, mindful of
their forefathers’ manners, condemned this proceeding as degenerating
from their ancient practice, which, they said, was to fight by valour,
and not by artifice, surprises, and night-encounters; neither by
pretended flight nor unexpected rallies to overcome their enemies; never
making war till having first proclaimed it, and very often assigned both
the hour and place of battle. Out of this generous principle it was that
they delivered up to Pyrrhus his treacherous physician, and to the
Etrurians their disloyal schoolmaster. This was, indeed, a procedure
truly Roman, and nothing allied to the Grecian subtlety, nor to the Punic
cunning, where it was reputed a victory of less glory to overcome by
force than by fraud. Deceit may serve for a need, but he only confesses
himself overcome who knows he is neither subdued by policy nor
misadventure, but by dint of valour, man to man, in a fair and just war.
It very well appears, by the discourse of these good old senators, that
this fine sentence was not yet received amongst them.
“Dolus, an virtus, quis in hoste requirat?”
[“What matters whether by valour or by strategem we overcome the
enemy?”--Aeneid, ii. 390]
The Achaians, says Polybius, abhorred all manner of double-dealing in
war, not reputing it a victory unless where the courage of the enemy was
fairly subdued:
“Eam vir sanctus et sapiens sciet veram esse victoriam, quae, salva fide
et integra dignitate, parabitur.”--[“An honest and prudent man will
acknowledge that only to be a true victory which shall be obtained saving
his own good faith and dignity.”--Florus, i. 12.]--Says another:
“Vosne velit, an me, regnare hera, quidve ferat,
fors virtute experiamur.”
[“Whether you or I shall rule, or what shall happen, let us
determine by valour.”--Cicero, De Offic., i. 12]
In the kingdom of Ternate, amongst those nations which we so broadly call
barbarians, they have a custom never to commence war, till it be first
proclaimed; adding withal an ample declaration of what means they have to
do it with, with what and how many men, what ammunitions, and what, both
offensive and defensive, arms; but also, that being done, if their
enemies do not yield and come to an agreement, they conceive it lawful to
employ without reproach in their wars any means which may help them to
conquer.
The ancient Florentines were so far from seeking to obtain any advantage
over their enemies by surprise, that they always gave them a month’s
warning before they drew their army into the field, by the continual
tolling of a bell they called Martinella.--[After St. Martin.]
For what concerns ourselves, who are not so scrupulous in this affair,
and who attribute the honour of the war to him who has the profit of it,
and who after Lysander say, “Where the lion’s skin is too short, we must
eke it out with a bit from that of a fox”; the most usual occasions of
surprise are derived from this practice, and we hold that there are no
moments wherein a chief ought to be more circumspect, and to have his eye
so much at watch, as those of parleys and treaties of accommodation; and
it is, therefore, become a general rule amongst the martial men of these
latter times, that a governor of a place never ought, in a time of siege,
to go out to parley. It was for this that in our fathers’ days the
Seigneurs de Montmord and de l’Assigni, defending Mousson against the
Count of Nassau, were so highly censured. But yet, as to this, it would
be excusable in that governor who, going out, should, notwithstanding,
do it in such manner that the safety and advantage should be on his side;
as Count Guido di Rangone did at Reggio (if we are to believe Du Bellay,
for Guicciardini says it was he himself) when the Seigneur de l’Escut
approached to parley, who stepped so little away from his fort, that a
disorder happening in the interim of parley, not only Monsieur de l’Escut
and his party who were advanced with him, found themselves by much the
weaker, insomuch that Alessandro Trivulcio was there slain, but he
himself follow the Count, and, relying upon his honour, to secure himself
from the danger of the shot within the walls of the town.
Eumenes, being shut up in the city of Nora by Antigonus, and by him
importuned to come out to speak with him, as he sent him word it was fit
he should to a greater man than himself, and one who had now an advantage
over him, returned this noble answer. “Tell him,” said he, “that I shall
never think any man greater than myself whilst I have my sword in my
hand,” and would not consent to come out to him till first, according to
his own demand, Antigonus had delivered him his own nephew Ptolomeus in
hostage.
And yet some have done very well in going out in person to parley, on the
word of the assailant: witness Henry de Vaux, a cavalier of Champagne,
who being besieged by the English in the Castle of Commercy, and
Bartholomew de Brunes, who commanded at the Leaguer, having so sapped the
greatest part of the castle without, that nothing remained but setting
fire to the props to bury the besieged under the ruins, he requested the
said Henry to come out to speak with him for his own good, which he did
with three more in company; and, his ruin being made apparent to him, he
conceived himself singularly obliged to his enemy, to whose discretion he
and his garrison surrendered themselves; and fire being presently applied
to the mine, the props no sooner began to fail, but the castle was
immediately blown up from its foundations, no one stone being left upon
another.
I could, and do, with great facility, rely upon the faith of another; but
I should very unwillingly do it in such a case, as it should thereby be
judged that it was rather an effect of my despair and want of courage
than voluntarily and out of confidence and security in the faith of him
with whom I had to do.
CHAPTER VI
THAT THE HOUR OF PARLEY DANGEROUS
I saw, notwithstanding, lately at Mussidan, a place not far from my
house, that those who were driven out thence by our army, and others of
their party, highly complained of treachery, for that during a treaty of
accommodation, and in the very interim that their deputies were treating,
they were surprised and cut to pieces: a thing that, peradventure, in
another age, might have had some colour of foul play; but, as I have just
said, the practice of arms in these days is quite another thing, and
there is now no confidence in an enemy excusable till the treaty is
finally sealed; and even then the conqueror has enough to do to keep his
word: so hazardous a thing it is to entrust the observation of the faith
a man has engaged to a town that surrenders upon easy and favourable
conditions, to the licence of a victorious army, and to give the soldier
free entrance into it in the heat of blood.
Lucius AEmilius Regillus, the Roman praetor, having lost his time in
attempting to take the city of Phocaea by force, by reason of the
singular valour wherewith the inhabitants defended themselves,
conditioned, at last, to receive them as friends to the people of Rome,
and to enter the town, as into a confederate city, without any manner of
hostility, of which he gave them all assurance; but having, for the
greater pomp, brought his whole army in with him, it was no more in his
power, with all the endeavour he could use, to restrain his people: so
that, avarice and revenge trampling under foot both his authority and all
military discipline, he there saw a considerable part of the city sacked
and ruined before his face.
Cleomenes was wont to say, “that what mischief soever a man could do his
enemy in time of war was above justice, and nothing accountable to it in
the sight of gods and men.” And so, having concluded a truce with those
of Argos for seven days, the third night after he fell upon them when
they were all buried in sleep, and put them to the sword, alleging that
there had no nights been mentioned in the truce; but the gods punished
this subtle perfidy.
In a time of parley also; and while the citizens were relying upon their
safety warrant, the city of Casilinum was taken by surprise, and that
even in the age of the justest captains and the most perfect Roman
military discipline; for it is not said that it is not lawful for us, in
time and place, to make advantage of our enemies’ want of understanding,
as well as their want of courage.
And, doubtless, war has naturally many privileges that appear reasonable
even to the prejudice of reason. And therefore here the rule fails,
“Neminem id agere ut ex alte rius praedetur inscitia.”--[“No one should
preys upon another’s folly.”--Cicero, De Offic., iii. 17.]--But I am
astonished at the great liberty allowed by Xenophon in such cases, and
that both by precept and by the example of several exploits of his
complete emperor; an author of very great authority, I confess, in those
affairs, as being in his own person both a great captain and a
philosopher of the first form of Socrates’ disciples; and yet I cannot
consent to such a measure of licence as he dispenses in all things and
places.
Monsieur d’Aubigny, besieging Capua, and after having directed a furious
battery against it, Signor Fabricio Colonna, governor of the town, having
from a bastion begun to parley, and his soldiers in the meantime being a
little more remiss in their guard, our people entered the place at
unawares, and put them all to the sword. And of later memory, at Yvoy,
Signor Juliano Romero having played that part of a novice to go out to
parley with the Constable, at his return found his place taken. But,
that we might not scape scot-free, the Marquess of Pescara having laid
siege to Genoa, where Duke Ottaviano Fregosa commanded under our
protection, and the articles betwixt them being so far advanced that it
was looked upon as a done thing, and upon the point to be concluded, the
Spaniards in the meantime having slipped in, made use of this treachery
as an absolute victory. And since, at Ligny, in Barrois, where the Count
de Brienne commanded, the emperor having in his own person beleaguered
that place, and Bertheville, the said Count’s lieutenant, going out to
parley, whilst he was capitulating the town was taken.
“Fu il vincer sempremai laudabil cosa,
Vincasi o per fortuna, o per ingegno,”
[“Victory is ever worthy of praise, whether obtained by valour or
wisdom.”--Ariosto, xv. I.]
But the philosopher Chrysippus was of another opinion, wherein I also
concur; for he was used to say that those who run a race ought to employ
all the force they have in what they are about, and to run as fast as
they can; but that it is by no means fair in them to lay any hand upon
their adversary to stop him, nor to set a leg before him to throw him
down. And yet more generous was the answer of that great Alexander to
Polypercon who was persuading him to take the advantage of the night’s
obscurity to fall upon Darius. “By no means,” said be; “it is not for
such a man as I am to steal a victory, ‘Malo me fortunae poeniteat, quam
victoria pudeat.’”--[“I had rather complain of ill-fortune than be
ashamed of victory.” Quint. Curt, iv. 13]--
“Atque idem fugientem baud est dignatus Oroden
Sternere, nec jacta caecum dare cuspide vulnus
Obvius, adversoque occurrit, seque viro vir
Contulit, haud furto melior, sed fortibus armis.”
[“He deigned not to throw down Orodes as he fled, or with the darted
spear to give him a wound unseen; but overtaking him, he confronted
him face to face, and encountered man to man: superior, not in
stratagem, but in valiant arms.”--AEneid, x. 732.]
CHAPTER VII
THAT THE INTENTION IS JUDGE OF OUR ACTIONS
‘Tis a saying, “That death discharges us of all our obligations.” I know
some who have taken it in another sense. Henry VII., King of England,
articled with Don Philip, son to Maximilian the emperor, or (to place him
more honourably) father to the Emperor Charles V., that the said Philip
should deliver up the Duke of Suffolk of the White Rose, his enemy, who
was fled into the Low Countries, into his hands; which Philip accordingly
did, but upon condition, nevertheless, that Henry should attempt nothing
against the life of the said Duke; but coming to die, the king in his
last will commanded his son to put him to death immediately after his
decease. And lately, in the tragedy that the Duke of Alva presented to
us in the persons of the Counts Horn and Egmont at Brussels,
--[Decapitated 4th June 1568]--there were very remarkable passages, and
one amongst the rest, that Count Egmont (upon the security of whose word
and faith Count Horn had come and surrendered himself to the Duke of
Alva) earnestly entreated that he might first mount the scaffold, to the
end that death might disengage him from the obligation he had passed to
the other. In which case, methinks, death did not acquit the former of
his promise, and that the second was discharged from it without dying.
We cannot be bound beyond what we are able to perform, by reason that
effect and performance are not at all in our power, and that, indeed, we
are masters of nothing but the will, in which, by necessity, all the
rules and whole duty of mankind are founded and established: therefore
Count Egmont, conceiving his soul and will indebted to his promise,
although he had not the power to make it good, had doubtless been
absolved of his duty, even though he had outlived the other; but the King
of England wilfully and premeditately breaking his faith, was no more to
be excused for deferring the execution of his infidelity till after his
death than the mason in Herodotus, who having inviolably, during the time
of his life, kept the secret of the treasure of the King of Egypt, his
master, at his death discovered it to his children.--[Herod., ii. 121.]
I have taken notice of several in my time, who, convicted by their
consciences of unjustly detaining the goods of another, have endeavoured
to make amends by their will, and after their decease; but they had as
good do nothing, as either in taking so much time in so pressing an
affair, or in going about to remedy a wrong with so little
dissatisfaction or injury to themselves. They owe, over and above,
something of their own; and by how much their payment is more strict and
incommodious to themselves, by so much is their restitution more just
meritorious. Penitency requires penalty; but they yet do worse than
these, who reserve the animosity against their neighbour to the last
gasp, having concealed it during their life; wherein they manifest little
regard of their own honour, irritating the party offended in their
memory; and less to their the power, even out of to make their malice die
with them, but extending the life of their hatred even beyond their own.
Unjust judges, who defer judgment to a time wherein they can have no
knowledge of the cause! For my part, I shall take care, if I can, that
my death discover nothing that my life has not first and openly declared.
CHAPTER VIII
OF IDLENESS
As we see some grounds that have long lain idle and untilled, when grown
rich and fertile by rest, to abound with and spend their virtue in the
product of innumerable sorts of weeds and wild herbs that are
unprofitable, and that to make them perform their true office, we are to
cultivate and prepare them for such seeds as are proper for our service;
and as we see women that, without knowledge of man, do sometimes of
themselves bring forth inanimate and formless lumps of flesh, but that to
cause a natural and perfect generation they are to be husbanded with
another kind of seed: even so it is with minds, which if not applied to
some certain study that may fix and restrain them, run into a thousand
extravagances, eternally roving here and there in the vague expanse of
the imagination--
“Sicut aqua tremulum labris ubi lumen ahenis,
Sole repercussum, aut radiantis imagine lunae,
Omnia pervolitat late loca; jamque sub auras
Erigitur, summique ferit laquearia tecti.”
[“As when in brazen vats of water the trembling beams of light,
reflected from the sun, or from the image of the radiant moon,
swiftly float over every place around, and now are darted up on
high, and strike the ceilings of the upmost roof.”--
AEneid, viii. 22.]
--in which wild agitation there is no folly, nor idle fancy they do not
light upon:--
“Velut aegri somnia, vanae
Finguntur species.”
[“As a sick man’s dreams, creating vain phantasms.”--
Hor., De Arte Poetica, 7.]
The soul that has no established aim loses itself, for, as it is said--
“Quisquis ubique habitat, Maxime, nusquam habitat.”
[“He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere.”--Martial, vii. 73.]
When I lately retired to my own house, with a resolution, as much as
possibly I could, to avoid all manner of concern in affairs, and to spend
in privacy and repose the little remainder of time I have to live, I
fancied I could not more oblige my mind than to suffer it at full leisure
to entertain and divert itself, which I now hoped it might henceforth do,
as being by time become more settled and mature; but I find--
“Variam semper dant otia mentem,”
[“Leisure ever creates varied thought.”--Lucan, iv. 704]
that, quite contrary, it is like a horse that has broke from his rider,
who voluntarily runs into a much more violent career than any horseman
would put him to, and creates me so many chimaeras and fantastic
monsters, one upon another, without order or design, that, the better at
leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to
commit them to writing, hoping in time to make it ashamed of itself.
CHAPTER IX
OF LIARS
There is not a man living whom it would so little become to speak from
memory as myself, for I have scarcely any at all, and do not think that
the world has another so marvellously treacherous as mine. My other
faculties are all sufficiently ordinary and mean; but in this I think
myself very rare and singular, and deserving to be thought famous.
Besides the natural inconvenience I suffer by it (for, certes, the
necessary use of memory considered, Plato had reason when he called it a
great and powerful goddess), in my country, when they would say a man has
no sense, they say, such an one has no memory; and when I complain of the
defect of mine, they do not believe me, and reprove me, as though I
accused myself for a fool: not discerning the difference betwixt memory
and understanding, which is to make matters still worse for me. But they
do me wrong; for experience, rather, daily shows us, on the contrary,
that a strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment. They do,
me, moreover (who am so perfect in nothing as in friendship), a great
wrong in this, that they make the same words which accuse my infirmity,
represent me for an ungrateful person; they bring my affections into
question upon the account of my memory, and from a natural imperfection,
make out a defect of conscience. “He has forgot,” says one, “this
request, or that promise; he no more remembers his friends; he has forgot
to say or do, or conceal such and such a thing, for my sake.” And,
truly, I am apt enough to forget many things, but to neglect anything my
friend has given me in charge, I never do it. And it should be enough,
methinks, that I feel the misery and inconvenience of it, without
branding me with malice, a vice so contrary to my humour.
However, I derive these comforts from my infirmity: first, that it is an
evil from which principally I have found reason to correct a worse, that
would easily enough have grown upon me, namely, ambition; the defect
being intolerable in those who take upon them public affairs. That, like
examples in the progress of nature demonstrate to us, she has fortified
me in my other faculties proportionably as she has left me unfurnished in
this; I should otherwise have been apt implicitly to have reposed my mind
and judgment upon the bare report of other men, without ever setting them
to work upon their own force, had the inventions and opinions of others
been ever been present with me by the benefit of memory. That by this
means I am not so talkative, for the magazine of the memory is ever
better furnished with matter than that of the invention. Had mine been
faithful to me, I had ere this deafened all my friends with my babble,
the subjects themselves arousing and stirring up the little faculty I
have of handling and employing them, heating and distending my discourse,
which were a pity: as I have observed in several of my intimate friends,
who, as their memories supply them with an entire and full view of
things, begin their narrative so far back, and crowd it with so many
impertinent circumstances, that though the story be good in itself, they
make a shift to spoil it; and if otherwise, you are either to curse the
strength of their memory or the weakness of their judgment: and it is a
hard thing to close up a discourse, and to cut it short, when you have
once started; there is nothing wherein the force of a horse is so much
seen as in a round and sudden stop. I see even those who are pertinent
enough, who would, but cannot stop short in their career; for whilst they
are seeking out a handsome period to conclude with, they go on at random,
straggling about upon impertinent trivialities, as men staggering upon
weak legs. But, above all, old men who retain the memory of things past,
and forget how often they have told them, are dangerous company; and I
have known stories from the mouth of a man of very great quality,
otherwise very pleasant in themselves, become very wearisome by being
repeated a hundred times over and over again to the same people.
Secondly, that, by this means, I the less remember the injuries I have
received; insomuch that, as the ancient said,--[Cicero, Pro Ligar.
c. 12.]--I should have a register of injuries, or a prompter, as Darius,
who, that he might not forget the offence he had received from those of
Athens, so oft as he sat down to dinner, ordered one of his pages three
times to repeat in his ear, “Sir, remember the Athenians”;--[Herod., v.
105.]--and then, again, the places which I revisit, and the books I read
over again, still smile upon me with a fresh novelty.
It is not without good reason said “that he who has not a good memory
should never take upon him the trade of lying.” I know very well that
the grammarians--[Nigidius, Aulus Gellius, xi. ii; Nonius, v. 80.]--
distinguish betwixt an untruth and a lie, and say that to tell an untruth
is to tell a thing that is false, but that we ourselves believe to be
true; and that the definition of the word to lie in Latin, from which our
French is taken, is to tell a thing which we know in our conscience to be
untrue; and it is of this last sort of liars only that I now speak. Now,
these do either wholly contrive and invent the untruths they utter, or so
alter and disguise a true story that it ends in a lie. When they
disguise and often alter the same story, according to their own fancy,
‘tis very hard for them, at one time or another, to escape being trapped,
by reason that the real truth of the thing, having first taken possession
of the memory, and being there lodged impressed by the medium of
knowledge and science, it will be difficult that it should not represent
itself to the imagination, and shoulder out falsehood, which cannot there
have so sure and settled footing as the other; and the circumstances of
the first true knowledge evermore running in their minds, will be apt to
make them forget those that are illegitimate, and only, forged by their
own fancy. In what they, wholly invent, forasmuch as there is no
contrary impression to jostle their invention there seems to be less
danger of tripping; and yet even this by reason it is a vain body and
without any hold, is very apt to escape the memory, if it be not well
assured. Of which I had very pleasant experience, at the expense of such
as profess only to form and accommodate their speech to the affair they
have in hand, or to humour of the great folks to whom they are speaking;
for the circumstances to which these men stick not to enslave their faith
and conscience being subject to several changes, their language must vary
accordingly: whence it happens that of the same thing they tell one man
that it is this, and another that it is that, giving it several colours;
which men, if they once come to confer notes, and find out the cheat,
what becomes of this fine art? To which may be added, that they must of
necessity very often ridiculously trap themselves; for what memory can be
sufficient to retain so many different shapes as they have forged upon
one and the same subject? I have known many in my time very ambitious of
the repute of this fine wit; but they do not see that if they have the
reputation of it, the effect can no longer be.
In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have
other tie upon one another, but by our word. If we did but discover the
horror and gravity of it, we should pursue it with fire and sword, and
more justly than other crimes. I see that parents commonly, and with
indiscretion enough, correct their children for little innocent faults,
and torment them for wanton tricks, that have neither impression nor
consequence; whereas, in my opinion, lying only, and, which is of
something a lower form, obstinacy, are the faults which are to be
severely whipped out of them, both in their infancy and in their
progress, otherwise they grow up and increase with them; and after a
tongue has once got the knack of lying, ‘tis not to be imagined how
impossible it is to reclaim it whence it comes to pass that we see some,
who are otherwise very honest men, so subject and enslaved to this vice.
I have an honest lad to my tailor, whom I never knew guilty of one truth,
no, not when it had been to his advantage. If falsehood had, like truth,
but one face only, we should be upon better terms; for we should then
take for certain the contrary to what the liar says: but the reverse of
truth has a hundred thousand forms, and a field indefinite, without bound
or limit. The Pythagoreans make good to be certain and finite, and evil,
infinite and uncertain. There are a thousand ways to miss the white,
there is only one to hit it. For my own part, I have this vice in so
great horror, that I am not sure I could prevail with my conscience to
secure myself from the most manifest and extreme danger by an impudent
and solemn lie. An ancient father says “that a dog we know is better
company than a man whose language we do not understand.”
“Ut externus alieno pene non sit hominis vice.”
[“As a foreigner cannot be said to supply us the place of a man.”
--Pliny, Nat. Hist. vii. I]
And how much less sociable is false speaking than silence?
King Francis I. vaunted that he had by this means nonplussed Francesco
Taverna, ambassador of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan, a man very famous
for his science in talking in those days. This gentleman had been sent
to excuse his master to his Majesty about a thing of very great
consequence, which was this: the King, still to maintain some
intelligence with Italy, out of which he had lately been driven, and
particularly with the duchy of Milan, had thought it convenient to have a
gentleman on his behalf to be with that Duke: an ambassador in effect,
but in outward appearance a private person who pretended to reside there
upon his own particular affairs; for the Duke, much more depending upon
the Emperor, especially at a time when he was in a treaty of marriage
with his niece, daughter to the King of Denmark, who is now dowager of
Lorraine, could not manifest any practice and conference with us without
his great interest. For this commission one Merveille, a Milanese
gentleman, and an equerry to the King, being thought very fit, was
accordingly despatched thither with private credentials, and instructions
as ambassador, and with other letters of recommendation to the Duke about
his own private concerns, the better to mask and colour the business; and
was so long in that court, that the Emperor at last had some inkling of
his real employment there; which was the occasion of what followed after,
as we suppose; which was, that under pretence of some murder, his trial
was in two days despatched, and his head in the night struck off in
prison. Messire Francesco being come, and prepared with a long
counterfeit history of the affair (for the King had applied himself to
all the princes of Christendom, as well as to the Duke himself, to demand
satisfaction), had his audience at the morning council; where, after he
had for the support of his cause laid open several plausible
justifications of the fact, that his master had never looked upon this
Merveille for other than a private gentleman and his own subject, who was
there only in order to his own business, neither had he ever lived under
any other aspect; absolutely disowning that he had ever heard he was one
of the King’s household or that his Majesty so much as knew him, so far
was he from taking him for an ambassador: the King, in his turn, pressing
him with several objections and demands, and challenging him on all
sides, tripped him up at last by asking, why, then, the execution was
performed by night, and as it were by stealth? At which the poor
confounded ambassador, the more handsomely to disengage himself, made
answer, that the Duke would have been very loth, out of respect to his
Majesty, that such an execution should have been performed by day. Any
one may guess if he was not well rated when he came home, for having so
grossly tripped in the presence of a prince of so delicate a nostril as
King Francis.
Pope Julius II. having sent an ambassador to the King of England to
animate him against King Francis, the ambassador having had his audience,
and the King, before he would give an answer, insisting upon the
difficulties he should find in setting on foot so great a preparation as
would be necessary to attack so potent a King, and urging some reasons to
that effect, the ambassador very unseasonably replied that he had also
himself considered the same difficulties, and had represented them to the
Pope. From which saying of his, so directly opposite to the thing
propounded and the business he came about, which was immediately to
incite him to war, the King of England first derived the argument (which
he afterward found to be true), that this ambassador, in his own mind,
was on the side of the French; of which having advertised his master, his
estate at his return home was confiscated, and he himself very narrowly
escaped the losing of his head.--[Erasmi Op. (1703), iv. col. 684.]
CHAPTER X
OF QUICK OR SLOW SPEECH
“Onc ne furent a touts toutes graces donnees.”
[“All graces were never yet given to any one man.”--A verse
in one of La Brebis’ Sonnets.]
So we see in the gift of eloquence, wherein some have such a facility and
promptness, and that which we call a present wit so easy, that they are
ever ready upon all occasions, and never to be surprised; and others more
heavy and slow, never venture to utter anything but what they have long
premeditated, and taken great care and pains to fit and prepare.
Now, as we teach young ladies those sports and exercises which are most
proper to set out the grace and beauty of those parts wherein their
chiefest ornament and perfection lie, so it should be in these two
advantages of eloquence, to which the lawyers and preachers of our age
seem principally to pretend. If I were worthy to advise, the slow
speaker, methinks, should be more proper for the pulpit, and the other
for the bar: and that because the employment of the first does naturally
allow him all the leisure he can desire to prepare himself, and besides,
his career is performed in an even and unintermitted line, without stop
or interruption; whereas the pleader’s business and interest compels him
to enter the lists upon all occasions, and the unexpected objections and
replies of his adverse party jostle him out of his course, and put him,
upon the instant, to pump for new and extempore answers and defences.
Yet, at the interview betwixt Pope Clement and King Francis at
Marseilles, it happened, quite contrary, that Monsieur Poyet, a man bred
up all his life at the bar, and in the highest repute for eloquence,
having the charge of making the harangue to the Pope committed to him,
and having so long meditated on it beforehand, as, so they said, to have
brought it ready made along with him from Paris; the very day it was to
have been pronounced, the Pope, fearing something might be said that
might give offence to the other princes’ ambassadors who were there
attending on him, sent to acquaint the King with the argument which he
conceived most suiting to the time and place, but, by chance, quite
another thing to that Monsieur de Poyet had taken so much pains about: so
that the fine speech he had prepared was of no use, and he was upon the
instant to contrive another; which finding himself unable to do, Cardinal
du Bellay was constrained to perform that office. The pleader’s part is,
doubtless, much harder than that of the preacher; and yet, in my opinion,
we see more passable lawyers than preachers, at all events in France.
It should seem that the nature of wit is to have its operation prompt and
sudden, and that of judgment to have it more deliberate and more slow.
But he who remains totally silent, for want of leisure to prepare himself
to speak well, and he also whom leisure does noways benefit to better
speaking, are equally unhappy.
‘Tis said of Severus Cassius that he spoke best extempore, that he stood
more obliged to fortune than to his own diligence; that it was an
advantage to him to be interrupted in speaking, and that his adversaries
were afraid to nettle him, lest his anger should redouble his eloquence.
I know, experimentally, the disposition of nature so impatient of tedious
and elaborate premeditation, that if it do not go frankly and gaily to
work, it can perform nothing to purpose. We say of some compositions
that they stink of oil and of the lamp, by reason of a certain rough
harshness that laborious handling imprints upon those where it has been
employed. But besides this, the solicitude of doing well, and a certain
striving and contending of a mind too far strained and overbent upon its
undertaking, breaks and hinders itself like water, that by force of its
own pressing violence and abundance, cannot find a ready issue through
the neck of a bottle or a narrow sluice. In this condition of nature,
of which I am now speaking, there is this also, that it would not be
disordered and stimulated with such passions as the fury of Cassius (for
such a motion would be too violent and rude); it would not be jostled,
but solicited; it would be roused and heated by unexpected, sudden, and
accidental occasions. If it be left to itself, it flags and languishes;
agitation only gives it grace and vigour. I am always worst in my own
possession, and when wholly at my own disposition: accident has more
title to anything that comes from me than I; occasion, company, and even
the very rising and falling of my own voice, extract more from my fancy
than I can find, when I sound and employ it by myself. By which means,
the things I say are better than those I write, if either were to be
preferred, where neither is worth anything. This, also, befalls me, that
I do not find myself where I seek myself, and I light upon things more by
chance than by any inquisition of my own judgment. I perhaps sometimes
hit upon something when I write, that seems quaint and sprightly to me,
though it will appear dull and heavy to another.--But let us leave these
fine compliments; every one talks thus of himself according to his
talent. But when I come to speak, I am already so lost that I know not
what I was about to say, and in such cases a stranger often finds it out
before me. If I should make erasure so often as this inconvenience
befalls me, I should make clean work; occasion will, at some other time,
lay it as visible to me as the light, and make me wonder what I should
stick at.
CHAPTER XI
OF PROGNOSTICATIONS
For what concerns oracles, it is certain that a good while before the
coming of Jesus Christ they had begun to lose their credit; for we see
that Cicero troubled to find out the cause of their decay, and he has
these words:
“Cur isto modo jam oracula Delphis non eduntur,
non modo nostro aetate, sed jam diu; ut nihil
possit esse contemptius?”
[“What is the reason that the oracles at Delphi are no longer
uttered: not merely in this age of ours, but for a long time past,
insomuch that nothing is more in contempt?”
--Cicero, De Divin., ii. 57.]
But as to the other prognostics, calculated from the anatomy of beasts at
sacrifices (to which purpose Plato does, in part, attribute the natural
constitution of the intestines of the beasts themselves), the
scraping of poultry, the flight of birds--
“Aves quasdam . . . rerum augurandarum
causa natas esse putamus.”
[“We think some sorts of birds are purposely created to serve
the purposes of augury.”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., ii. 64.]
claps of thunder, the overflowing of rivers--
“Multa cernunt Aruspices, multa Augures provident,
multa oraculis declarantur, multa vaticinationibus,
multa somniis, multa portentis.”
[“The Aruspices discern many things, the Augurs foresee many things,
many things are announced by oracles, many by vaticinations, many by
dreams, many by portents.”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., ii. 65.]
--and others of the like nature, upon which antiquity founded most of
their public and private enterprises, our religion has totally abolished
them. And although there yet remain amongst us some practices of
divination from the stars, from spirits, from the shapes and complexions
of men, from dreams and the like (a notable example of the wild curiosity
of our nature to grasp at and anticipate future things, as if we had not
enough to do to digest the present)--
“Cur hanc tibi, rector Olympi,
Sollicitis visum mortalibus addere curam,
Noscant venturas ut dira per omina clades?...
Sit subitum, quodcumque paras; sit coeca futuri
Mens hominum fati, liceat sperare timenti.”
[“Why, ruler of Olympus, hast thou to anxious mortals thought fit to
add this care, that they should know by, omens future slaughter?...
Let whatever thou art preparing be sudden. Let the mind of men be
blind to fate in store; let it be permitted to the timid to hope.”
--Lucan, ii. 14]
“Ne utile quidem est scire quid futurum sit;
miserum est enim, nihil proficientem angi,”
[“It is useless to know what shall come to pass; it is a miserable
thing to be tormented to no purpose.”
--Cicero, De Natura Deor., iii. 6.]
yet are they of much less authority now than heretofore. Which makes so
much more remarkable the example of Francesco, Marquis of Saluzzo, who
being lieutenant to King Francis I. in his ultramontane army, infinitely
favoured and esteemed in our court, and obliged to the king’s bounty for
the marquisate itself, which had been forfeited by his brother; and as to
the rest, having no manner of provocation given him to do it, and even
his own affection opposing any such disloyalty, suffered himself to be so
terrified, as it was confidently reported, with the fine prognostics that
were spread abroad everywhere in favour of the Emperor Charles V., and to
our disadvantage (especially in Italy, where these foolish prophecies
were so far believed, that at Rome great sums of money were ventured out
upon return of greater, when the prognostics came to pass, so certain
they made themselves of our ruin), that, having often bewailed, to those
of his acquaintance who were most intimate with him, the mischiefs that
he saw would inevitably fall upon the Crown of France and the friends he
had in that court, he revolted and turned to the other side; to his own
misfortune, nevertheless, what constellation soever governed at that
time. But he carried himself in this affair like a man agitated by
divers passions; for having both towns and forces in his hands, the
enemy’s army under Antonio de Leyva close by him, and we not at all
suspecting his design, it had been in his power to have done more than he
did; for we lost no men by this infidelity of his, nor any town, but
Fossano only, and that after a long siege and a brave defence.--[1536]
“Prudens futuri temporis exitum
Caliginosa nocte premit Deus,
Ridetque, si mortalis ultra
Fas trepidat.”
[“A wise God covers with thick night the path of the future, and
laughs at the man who alarms himself without reason.”
--Hor., Od., iii. 29.]
“Ille potens sui
Laetusque deget, cui licet in diem
Dixisse vixi! cras vel atra
Nube polum pater occupato,
Vel sole puro.”
[“He lives happy and master of himself who can say as each day
passes on, ‘I HAVE LIVED:’ whether to-morrow our Father shall give
us a clouded sky or a clear day.”--Hor., Od., iii. 29]
“Laetus in praesens animus; quod ultra est,
Oderit curare.”
[“A mind happy, cheerful in the present state, will take good care
not to think of what is beyond it.”--Ibid., ii. 25]
And those who take this sentence in a contrary sense interpret it amiss:
“Ista sic reciprocantur, ut et si divinatio sit,
dii sint; et si dii lint, sit divinatio.”
[“These things are so far reciprocal that if there be divination,
there must be deities; and if deities, divination.”--Cicero, De
Divin., i. 6.]
Much more wisely Pacuvius--
“Nam istis, qui linguam avium intelligunt,
Plusque ex alieno jecore sapiunt, quam ex suo,
Magis audiendum, quam auscultandum, censeo.”
[“As to those who understand the language of birds, and who rather
consult the livers of animals other than their own, I had rather
hear them than attend to them.”
--Cicero, De Divin., i. 57, ex Pacuvio]
The so celebrated art of divination amongst the Tuscans took its
beginning thus: A labourer striking deep with his cutter into the earth,
saw the demigod Tages ascend, with an infantine aspect, but endued with a
mature and senile wisdom. Upon the rumour of which, all the people ran
to see the sight, by whom his words and science, containing the
principles and means to attain to this art, were recorded, and kept for
many ages.--[Cicero, De Devina, ii. 23]--A birth suitable to its
progress; I, for my part, should sooner regulate my affairs by the chance
of a die than by such idle and vain dreams. And, indeed, in all
republics, a good share of the government has ever been referred to
chance. Plato, in the civil regimen that he models according to his own
fancy, leaves to it the decision of several things of very great
importance, and will, amongst other things, that marriages should be
appointed by lot; attributing so great importance to this accidental
choice as to ordain that the children begotten in such wedlock be brought
up in the country, and those begotten in any other be thrust out as
spurious and base; yet so, that if any of those exiles, notwithstanding,
should, peradventure, in growing up give any good hope of himself, he
might be recalled, as, also, that such as had been retained, should be
exiled, in case they gave little expectation of themselves in their early
growth.
I see some who are mightily given to study and comment upon their
almanacs, and produce them to us as an authority when anything has fallen
out pat; and, for that matter, it is hardly possible but that these
alleged authorities sometimes stumble upon a truth amongst an infinite
number of lies.
“Quis est enim, qui totum diem jaculans
non aliquando collineet?”
[“For who shoots all day at butts that does not sometimes hit the
white?”--Cicero, De Divin., ii. 59.]
I think never the better of them for some such accidental hit. There
would be more certainty in it if there were a rule and a truth of always
lying. Besides, nobody records their flimflams and false prognostics,
forasmuch as they are infinite and common; but if they chop upon one
truth, that carries a mighty report, as being rare, incredible, and
prodigious. So Diogenes, surnamed the Atheist, answered him in
Samothrace, who, showing him in the temple the several offerings and
stories in painting of those who had escaped shipwreck, said to him,
“Look, you who think the gods have no care of human things, what do you
say to so many persons preserved from death by their especial favour?”
“Why, I say,” answered he, “that their pictures are not here who were
cast away, who are by much the greater number.”--[Cicero, De Natura
Deor., i. 37.]
Cicero observes that of all the philosophers who have acknowledged a
deity, Xenophanes the Colophonian only has endeavoured to eradicate all
manner of divination--[Cicero, De Divin., i. 3.]--; which makes it the
less a wonder if we have now and then seen some of our princes, sometimes
to their own cost, rely too much upon these vanities. I had given
anything with my own eyes to see those two great marvels, the book of
Joachim the Calabrian abbot, which foretold all the future Popes, their
names and qualities; and that of the Emperor Leo, which prophesied all
the emperors and patriarchs of Greece. This I have been an eyewitness
of, that in public confusions, men astonished at their fortune, have
abandoned their own reason, superstitiously to seek out in the stars the
ancient causes and menaces of the present mishaps, and in my time have
been so strangely successful in it, as to make me believe that this being
an amusement of sharp and volatile wits, those who have been versed in
this knack of unfolding and untying riddles, are capable, in any sort of
writing, to find out what they desire. But above all, that which gives
them the greatest room to play in, is the obscure, ambiguous, and
fantastic gibberish of the prophetic canting, where their authors deliver
nothing of clear sense, but shroud all in riddle, to the end that
posterity may interpret and apply it according to its own fancy.
Socrates demon might, perhaps, be no other but a certain impulsion of the
will, which obtruded itself upon him without the advice or consent of his
judgment; and in a soul so enlightened as his was, and so prepared by a
continual exercise of wisdom-and virtue, ‘tis to be supposed those
inclinations of his, though sudden and undigested, were very important
and worthy to be followed. Every one finds in himself some image of such
agitations, of a prompt, vehement, and fortuitous opinion; and I may well
allow them some authority, who attribute so little to our prudence, and
who also myself have had some, weak in reason, but violent in persuasion
and dissuasion, which were most frequent with Socrates,--[Plato, in his
account of Theages the Pythagorean]--by which I have suffered myself to
be carried away so fortunately, and so much to my own advantage, that
they might have been judged to have had something in them of a divine
inspiration.
CHAPTER XII
OF CONSTANCY
The law of resolution and constancy does not imply that we ought not, as
much as in us lies, to decline and secure ourselves from the mischiefs
and inconveniences that threaten us; nor, consequently, that we shall not
fear lest they should surprise us: on the contrary, all decent and honest
ways and means of securing ourselves from harms, are not only permitted,
but, moreover, commendable, and the business of constancy chiefly is,
bravely to stand to, and stoutly to suffer those inconveniences which are
not possibly to be avoided. So that there is no supple motion of body,
nor any movement in the handling of arms, how irregular or ungraceful
soever, that we need condemn, if they serve to protect us from the blow
that is made against us.
Several very warlike nations have made use of a retreating and flying way
of fight as a thing of singular advantage, and, by so doing, have made
their backs more dangerous to their enemies than their faces. Of which
kind of fighting the Turks still retain something in their practice of
arms; and Socrates, in Plato, laughs at Laches, who had defined fortitude
to be a standing firm in the ranks against the enemy. “What!” says he,
“would it, then, be a reputed cowardice to overcome them by giving
ground?” urging, at the same time, the authority of Homer, who commends
in AEneas the science of flight. And whereas Laches, considering better
of it, admits the practice as to the Scythians, and, in general, all
cavalry whatever, he again attacks him with the example of the
Lacedaemonian foot--a nation of all other the most obstinate in
maintaining their ground--who, in the battle of Plataea, not being able
to break into the Persian phalanx, bethought themselves to disperse and
retire, that by the enemy supposing they fled, they might break and
disunite that vast body of men in the pursuit, and by that stratagem
obtained the victory.
As for the Scythians, ‘tis said of them, that when Darius went his
expedition to subdue them, he sent, by a herald, highly to reproach their
king, that he always retired before him and declined a battle; to which
Idanthyrses,--[Herod., iv. 127.]--for that was his name, returned
answer, that it was not for fear of him, or of any man living, that he
did so, but that it was the way of marching in practice with his nation,
who had neither tilled fields, cities, nor houses to defend, or to fear
the enemy should make any advantage of but that if he had such a stomach
to fight, let him but come to view their ancient places of sepulture, and
there he should have his fill.
Nevertheless, as to cannon-shot, when a body of men are drawn up in the
face of a train of artillery, as the occasion of war often requires, it
is unhandsome to quit their post to avoid the danger, forasmuch as by
reason of its violence and swiftness we account it inevitable; and many a
one, by ducking, stepping aside, and such other motions of fear, has
been, at all events, sufficiently laughed at by his companions. And yet,
in the expedition that the Emperor Charles V. made against us into
Provence, the Marquis de Guast going to reconnoitre the city of Arles,
and advancing out of the cover of a windmill, under favour of which he
had made his approach, was perceived by the Seigneurs de Bonneval and the
Seneschal of Agenois, who were walking upon the ‘theatre aux ayenes’; who
having shown him to the Sieur de Villiers, commissary of the artillery,
he pointed a culverin so admirably well, and levelled it so exactly right
against him, that had not the Marquis, seeing fire given to it, slipped
aside, it was certainly concluded the shot had taken him full in the
body. And, in like manner, some years before, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Duke
of Urbino, and father to the queen-mother--[Catherine de’ Medici, mother
of Henry III.]--laying siege to Mondolfo, a place in the territories of
the Vicariat in Italy, seeing the cannoneer give fire to a piece that
pointed directly against him, it was well for him that he ducked, for
otherwise the shot, that only razed the top of his head, had doubtless
hit him full in the breast. To say truth, I do not think that these
evasions are performed upon the account of judgment; for how can any man
living judge of high or low aim on so sudden an occasion? And it is much
more easy to believe that fortune favoured their apprehension, and that
it might be as well at another time to make them face the danger, as to
seek to avoid it. For my own part, I confess I cannot forbear starting
when the rattle of a harquebuse thunders in my ears on a sudden, and in a
place where I am not to expect it, which I have also observed in others,
braver fellows than I.
Neither do the Stoics pretend that the soul of their philosopher need be
proof against the first visions and fantasies that surprise him; but, as
to a natural subjection, consent that he should tremble at the terrible
noise of thunder, or the sudden clatter of some falling ruin, and be
affrighted even to paleness and convulsion; and so in other passions,
provided his judgment remain sound and entire, and that the seat of his
reason suffer no concussion nor alteration, and that he yield no consent
to his fright and discomposure. To him who is not a philosopher, a
fright is the same thing in the first part of it, but quite another thing
in the second; for the impression of passions does not remain
superficially in him, but penetrates farther, even to the very seat of
reason, infecting and corrupting it, so that he judges according to his
fear, and conforms his behaviour to it. In this verse you may see the
true state of the wise Stoic learnedly and plainly expressed:--
“Mens immota manet; lachrymae volvuntur inanes.”
[“Though tears flow, the mind remains unmoved.”
--Virgil, AEneid, iv. 449]
The Peripatetic sage does not exempt himself totally from perturbations
of mind, but he moderates them.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
Almanacs
Being dead they were then by one day happier than he
Books I read over again, still smile upon me with fresh novelty
Death discharges us of all our obligations
Difference betwixt memory and understanding
Do thine own work, and know thyself
Effect and performance are not at all in our power
Fantastic gibberish of the prophetic canting
Folly of gaping after future things
Good to be certain and finite, and evil, infinite and uncertain
He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere
If they chop upon one truth, that carries a mighty report
Impotencies that so unseasonably surprise the lover
Let it be permitted to the timid to hope
Light griefs can speak: deep sorrows are dumb
Look, you who think the gods have no care of human things
Nature of judgment to have it more deliberate and more slow
Nature of wit is to have its operation prompt and sudden
Nor have other tie upon one another, but by our word
Old men who retain the memory of things past
Pity is reputed a vice amongst the Stoics
Rather complain of ill-fortune than be ashamed of victory
Reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms
Say of some compositions that they stink of oil and of the lamp
Solon, that none can be said to be happy until he is dead
Strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment
Stumble upon a truth amongst an infinite number of lies
Suffer those inconveniences which are not possibly to be avoided
Superstitiously to seek out in the stars the ancient causes
Their pictures are not here who were cast away
Things I say are better than those I write
We are masters of nothing but the will
We cannot be bound beyond what we are able to perform
Where the lion’s skin is too short
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 3.
XIII. The ceremony of the interview of princes.
XIV. That men are justly punished for being obstinate in the defence
of a fort that is not in reason to be defended
XV. Of the punishment of cowardice.
XVI. A proceeding of some ambassadors.
XVII. Of fear.
XVIII. That men are not to judge of our happiness till after death.
XIX. That to study philosophy is to learn to die.
XX. Of the force of imagination.
XXI. That the profit of one man is the damage of another.
CHAPTER XIII
THE CEREMONY OF THE INTERVIEW OF PRINCES
There is no subject so frivolous that does not merit a place in this
rhapsody. According to our common rule of civility, it would be a
notable affront to an equal, and much more to a superior, to fail being
at home when he has given you notice he will come to visit you. Nay,
Queen Margaret of Navarre--[Marguerite de Valois, authoress of the
‘Heptameron’]--further adds, that it would be a rudeness in a gentleman
to go out, as we so often do, to meet any that is coming to see him, let
him be of what high condition soever; and that it is more respectful and
more civil to stay at home to receive him, if only upon the account of
missing him by the way, and that it is enough to receive him at the door,
and to wait upon him. For my part, who as much as I can endeavour to
reduce the ceremonies of my house, I very often forget both the one and
the other of these vain offices. If, peradventure, some one may take
offence at this, I can’t help it; it is much better to offend him once
than myself every day, for it would be a perpetual slavery. To what end
do we avoid the servile attendance of courts, if we bring the same
trouble home to our own private houses? It is also a common rule in all
assemblies, that those of less quality are to be first upon the place, by
reason that it is more due to the better sort to make others wait and
expect them.
Nevertheless, at the interview betwixt Pope Clement and King Francis at
Marseilles,--[in 1533.]--the King, after he had taken order for the
necessary preparations for his reception and entertainment, withdrew out
of the town, and gave the Pope two or three days’ respite for his entry,
and to repose and refresh himself, before he came to him. And in like
manner, at the assignation of the Pope and the Emperor,--[Charles V. in
1532.] at Bologna, the Emperor gave the Pope opportunity to come thither
first, and came himself after; for which the reason given was this, that
at all the interviews of such princes, the greater ought to be first at
the appointed place, especially before the other in whose territories the
interview is appointed to be, intimating thereby a kind of deference to
the other, it appearing proper for the less to seek out and to apply
themselves to the greater, and not the greater to them.
Not every country only, but every city and every society has its
particular forms of civility. There was care enough to this taken in my
education, and I have lived in good company enough to know the
formalities of our own nation, and am able to give lessons in it. I love
to follow them, but not to be so servilely tied to their observation that
my whole life should be enslaved to ceremonies, of which there are some
so troublesome that, provided a man omits them out of discretion, and not
for want of breeding, it will be every whit as handsome. I have seen
some people rude, by being overcivil and troublesome in their courtesy.
Still, these excesses excepted, the knowledge of courtesy and good
manners is a very necessary study. It is, like grace and beauty, that
which begets liking and an inclination to love one another at the first
sight, and in the very beginning of acquaintance; and, consequently, that
which first opens the door and intromits us to instruct ourselves by the
example of others, and to give examples ourselves, if we have any worth
taking notice of and communicating.
CHAPTER XIV
THAT MEN ARE JUSTLY PUNISHED FOR BEING OBSTINATE IN THE DEFENCE
OF A FORT THAT IS NOT IN REASON TO BE DEFENDED
Valour has its bounds as well as other virtues, which, once transgressed,
the next step is into the territories of vice; so that by having too
large a proportion of this heroic virtue, unless a man be very perfect in
its limits, which upon the confines are very hard to discern, he may very
easily unawares run into temerity, obstinacy, and folly. From this
consideration it is that we have derived the custom, in times of war, to
punish, even with death, those who are obstinate to defend a place that
by the rules of war is not tenable; otherwise men would be so confident
upon the hope of impunity, that not a henroost but would resist and seek
to stop an army.
The Constable Monsieur de Montmorenci, having at the siege of Pavia been
ordered to pass the Ticino, and to take up his quarters in the Faubourg
St. Antonio, being hindered by a tower at the end of the bridge, which
was so obstinate as to endure a battery, hanged every man he found within
it for their labour. And again, accompanying the Dauphin in his
expedition beyond the Alps, and taking the Castle of Villano by assault,
and all within it being put to the sword by the fury of the soldiers, the
governor and his ensign only excepted, he caused them both to be trussed
up for the same reason; as also did the Captain Martin du Bellay, then
governor of Turin, with the governor of San Buono, in the same country,
all his people having been cut to pieces at the taking of the place.
But forasmuch as the strength or weakness of a fortress is always
measured by the estimate and counterpoise of the forces that attack it
--for a man might reasonably enough despise two culverins, that would be
a madman to abide a battery of thirty pieces of cannon--where also the
greatness of the prince who is master of the field, his reputation, and
the respect that is due unto him, are also put into the balance, there is
danger that the balance be pressed too much in that direction. And it
may happen that a man is possessed with so great an opinion of himself
and his power, that thinking it unreasonable any place should dare to
shut its gates against him, he puts all to the sword where he meets with
any opposition, whilst his fortune continues; as is plain in the fierce
and arrogant forms of summoning towns and denouncing war, savouring so
much of barbarian pride and insolence, in use amongst the Oriental
princes, and which their successors to this day do yet retain and
practise. And in that part of the world where the Portuguese subdued the
Indians, they found some states where it was a universal and inviolable
law amongst them that every enemy overcome by the king in person, or by
his lieutenant, was out of composition.
So above all both of ransom and mercy a man should take heed, if he can,
of falling into the hands of a judge who is an enemy and victorious.
CHAPTER XV
OF THE PUNISHMENT OF COWARDICE
I once heard of a prince, and a great captain, having a narration given
him as he sat at table of the proceeding against Monsieur de Vervins, who
was sentenced to death for having surrendered Boulogne to the English,
--[To Henry VIII. in 1544]--openly maintaining that a soldier could not
justly be put to death for want of courage. And, in truth, ‘tis reason
that a man should make a great difference betwixt faults that merely
proceed from infirmity, and those that are visibly the effects of
treachery and malice: for, in the last, we act against the rules of
reason that nature has imprinted in us; whereas, in the former, it seems
as if we might produce the same nature, who left us in such a state of
imperfection and weakness of courage, for our justification. Insomuch
that many have thought we are not fairly questionable for anything but
what we commit against our conscience; and it is partly upon this rule
that those ground their opinion who disapprove of capital or sanguinary
punishments inflicted upon heretics and misbelievers; and theirs also who
advocate or a judge is not accountable for having from mere ignorance
failed in his administration.
But as to cowardice, it is certain that the most usual way of chastising
it is by ignominy and and it is supposed that this practice brought into
use by the legislator Charondas; and that, before his time, the laws of
Greece punished those with death who fled from a battle; whereas he
ordained only that they be for three days exposed in the public dressed
in woman’s attire, hoping yet for some service from them, having awakened
their courage by this open shame:
“Suffundere malis homims sanguinem, quam effundere.”
[“Rather bring the blood into a man’s cheek than let it out of his
body.” Tertullian in his Apologetics.]
It appears also that the Roman laws did anciently punish those with death
who had run away; for Ammianus Marcellinus says that the Emperor Julian
commanded ten of his soldiers, who had turned their backs in an encounter
against the Parthians, to be first degraded, and afterward put to death,
according, says he, to the ancient laws,--[Ammianus Marcellinus, xxiv.
4; xxv. i.]--and yet elsewhere for the like offence he only condemned
others to remain amongst the prisoners under the baggage ensign. The
severe punishment the people of Rome inflicted upon those who fled from
the battle of Cannae, and those who ran away with Aeneius Fulvius at his
defeat, did not extend to death. And yet, methinks, ‘tis to be feared,
lest disgrace should make such delinquents desperate, and not only faint
friends, but enemies.
Of late memory,--[In 1523]--the Seigneur de Frauget, lieutenant to the
Mareschal de Chatillon’s company, having by the Mareschal de Chabannes
been put in government of Fuentarabia in the place of Monsieur de Lude,
and having surrendered it to the Spaniard, he was for that condemned to
be degraded from all nobility, and both himself and his posterity
declared ignoble, taxable, and for ever incapable of bearing arms, which
severe sentence was afterwards accordingly executed at Lyons.--[In 1536]
--And, since that, all the gentlemen who were in Guise when the Count of
Nassau entered into it, underwent the same punishment, as several others
have done since for the like offence. Notwithstanding, in case of such a
manifest ignorance or cowardice as exceeds all ordinary example, ‘tis but
reason to take it for a sufficient proof of treachery and malice, and for
such to be punished.
CHAPTER XVI
A PROCEEDING OF SOME AMBASSADORS
I observe in my travels this custom, ever to learn something from the
information of those with whom I confer (which is the best school of all
others), and to put my company upon those subjects they are the best able
to speak of:--
“Basti al nocchiero ragionar de’ venti,
Al bifolco dei tori; et le sue piaghe
Conti’l guerrier; conti’l pastor gli armenti.”
[“Let the sailor content himself with talking of the winds; the
cowherd of his oxen; the soldier of his wounds; the shepherd of his
flocks.”--An Italian translation of Propertius, ii. i, 43]
For it often falls out that, on the contrary, every one will rather
choose to be prating of another man’s province than his own, thinking it
so much new reputation acquired; witness the jeer Archidamus put upon
Pertander, “that he had quitted the glory of being an excellent physician
to gain the repute of a very bad poet.--[Plutarch, Apoth. of the
Lacedaemonians, ‘in voce’ Archidamus.]--And do but observe how large and
ample Caesar is to make us understand his inventions of building bridges
and contriving engines of war,--[De Bello Gall., iv. 17.]--and how
succinct and reserved in comparison, where he speaks of the offices of
his profession, his own valour, and military conduct. His exploits
sufficiently prove him a great captain, and that he knew well enough; but
he would be thought an excellent engineer to boot; a quality something
different, and not necessary to be expected in him. The elder Dionysius
was a very great captain, as it befitted his fortune he should be; but he
took very great pains to get a particular reputation by poetry, and yet
he was never cut out for a poet. A man of the legal profession being not
long since brought to see a study furnished with all sorts of books, both
of his own and all other faculties, took no occasion at all to entertain
himself with any of them, but fell very rudely and magisterially to
descant upon a barricade placed on the winding stair before the study
door, a thing that a hundred captains and common soldiers see every day
without taking any notice or offence.
“Optat ephippia bos piger, optat arare caballus.”
[“The lazy ox desires a saddle and bridle; the horse wants to
plough.”--Hor., Ep., i. 14,43.]
By this course a man shall never improve himself, nor arrive at any
perfection in anything. He must, therefore, make it his business always
to put the architect, the painter, the statuary, every mechanic artisan,
upon discourse of their own capacities.
And, to this purpose, in reading histories, which is everybody’s subject,
I use to consider what kind of men are the authors: if they be persons
that profess nothing but mere letters, I, in and from them, principally
observe and learn style and language; if physicians, I the rather incline
to credit what they report of the temperature of the air, of the health
and complexions of princes, of wounds and diseases; if lawyers, we are
from them to take notice of the controversies of rights and wrongs, the
establishment of laws and civil government, and the like; if divines, the
affairs of the Church, ecclesiastical censures, marriages, and
dispensations; if courtiers, manners and ceremonies; if soldiers, the
things that properly belong to their trade, and, principally, the
accounts of the actions and enterprises wherein they were personally
engaged; if ambassadors, we are to observe negotiations, intelligences,
and practices, and the manner how they are to be carried on.
And this is the reason why (which perhaps I should have lightly passed
over in another) I dwelt upon and maturely considered one passage in the
history written by Monsieur de Langey, a man of very great judgment in
things of that nature: after having given a narrative of the fine oration
Charles V. had made in the Consistory at Rome, and in the presence of the
Bishop of Macon and Monsieur du Velly, our ambassadors there, wherein he
had mixed several injurious expressions to the dishonour of our nation;
and amongst the rest, “that if his captains and soldiers were not men of
another kind of fidelity, resolution, and sufficiency in the knowledge of
arms than those of the King, he would immediately go with a rope about
his neck and sue to him for mercy” (and it should seem the Emperor had
really this, or a very little better opinion of our military men, for he
afterwards, twice or thrice in his life, said the very same thing); as
also, that he challenged the King to fight him in his shirt with rapier
and poignard in a boat. The said Sieur de Langey, pursuing his history,
adds that the forenamed ambassadors, sending a despatch to the King of
these things, concealed the greatest part, and particularly the last two
passages. At which I could not but wonder that it should be in the power
of an ambassador to dispense with anything which he ought to signify to
his master, especially of so great importance as this, coming from the
mouth of such a person, and spoken in so great an assembly; and I should
rather conceive it had been the servant’s duty faithfully to have
represented to him the whole thing as it passed, to the end that the
liberty of selecting, disposing, judging, and concluding might have
remained in him: for either to conceal or to disguise the truth for fear
he should take it otherwise than he ought to do, and lest it should
prompt him to some extravagant resolution, and, in the meantime, to leave
him ignorant of his affairs, should seem, methinks, rather to belong to
him who is to give the law than to him who is only to receive it; to him
who is in supreme command, and not to him who ought to look upon himself
as inferior, not only in authority, but also in prudence and good
counsel. I, for my part, would not be so served in my little concerns.
We so willingly slip the collar of command upon any pretence whatever,
and are so ready to usurp upon dominion, every one does so naturally
aspire to liberty and power, that no utility whatever derived from the
wit or valour of those he employs ought to be so dear to a superior as a
downright and sincere obedience. To obey more upon the account of
understanding than of subjection, is to corrupt the office of command
--[Taken from Aulus Gellius, i. 13.]--; insomuch that P. Crassus, the same
whom the Romans reputed five times happy, at the time when he was consul
in Asia, having sent to a Greek engineer to cause the greater of two
masts of ships that he had taken notice of at Athens to be brought to
him, to be employed about some engine of battery he had a design to make;
the other, presuming upon his own science and sufficiency in those
affairs, thought fit to do otherwise than directed, and to bring the
less, which, according to the rules of art, was really more proper for
the use to which it was designed; but Crassus, though he gave ear to his
reasons with great patience, would not, however, take them, how sound or
convincing soever, for current pay, but caused him to be well whipped for
his pains, valuing the interest of discipline much more than that of the
work in hand.
Notwithstanding, we may on the other side consider that so precise and
implicit an obedience as this is only due to positive and limited
commands. The employment of ambassadors is never so confined, many
things in their management of affairs being wholly referred to the
absolute sovereignty of their own conduct; they do not simply execute,
but also, to their own discretion and wisdom, form and model their
master’s pleasure. I have, in my time, known men of command checked for
having rather obeyed the express words of the king’s letters, than the
necessity of the affairs they had in hand. Men of understanding do yet,
to this day, condemn the custom of the kings of Persia to give their
lieutenants and agents so little rein, that, upon the least arising
difficulties, they must fain have recourse to their further commands;
this delay, in so vast an extent of dominion, having often very much
prejudiced their affairs; and Crassus, writing to a man whose profession
it was best to understand those things, and pre-acquainting him to what
use this mast was designed, did he not seem to consult his advice, and in
a manner invite him to interpose his better judgment?
CHAPTER XVII
OF FEAR
“Obstupui, steteruntque comae et vox faucibus haesit.”
[“I was amazed, my hair stood on end, and my voice stuck in my
throat.” Virgil, AEneid, ii. 774.]
I am not so good a naturalist (as they call it) as to discern by what
secret springs fear has its motion in us; but, be this as it may, ‘tis a
strange passion, and such a one that the physicians say there is no other
whatever that sooner dethrones our judgment from its proper seat; which
is so true, that I myself have seen very many become frantic through
fear; and, even in those of the best settled temper it is most certain
that it begets a terrible astonishment and confusion during the fit.
I omit the vulgar sort, to whom it one while represents their
great-grandsires risen out of their graves in their shrouds, another while
werewolves, nightmares, and chimaeras; but even amongst soldiers, a sort
of men over whom, of all others, it ought to have the least power, how
often has it converted flocks of sheep into armed squadrons, reeds and
bullrushes into pikes and lances, friends into enemies, and the French
white cross into the red cross of Spain! When Monsieur de Bourbon took
Rome,--[In 1527]--an ensign who was upon guard at Borgo San Pietro was
seized with such a fright upon the first alarm, that he threw himself out
at a breach with his colours upon his shoulder, and ran directly upon the
enemy, thinking he had retreated toward the inward defences of the city,
and with much ado, seeing Monsieur de Bourbon’s people, who thought it
had been a sally upon them, draw up to receive him, at last came to
himself, and saw his error; and then facing about, he retreated full
speed through the same breach by which he had gone out, but not till he
had first blindly advanced above three hundred paces into the open field.
It did not, however, fall out so well with Captain Giulio’s ensign, at
the time when St. Paul was taken from us by the Comte de Bures and
Monsieur de Reu, for he, being so astonished with fear as to throw
himself, colours and all, out of a porthole, was immediately, cut to
pieces by the enemy; and in the same siege, it was a very memorable fear
that so seized, contracted, and froze up the heart of a gentleman, that
he sank down, stone-dead, in the breach, without any manner of wound or
hurt at all. The like madness does sometimes push on a whole multitude;
for in one of the encounters that Germanicus had with the Germans, two
great parties were so amazed with fear that they ran two opposite ways,
the one to the same place from which the other had fled.--[Tacit, Annal.,
i. 63.]--Sometimes it adds wings to the heels, as in the two first:
sometimes it nails them to the ground, and fetters them from moving; as
we read of the Emperor Theophilus, who, in a battle he lost against the
Agarenes, was so astonished and stupefied that he had no power to fly--
“Adeo pavor etiam auxilia formidat”
[“So much does fear dread even the means of safety.”--Quint.
Curt., ii. II.]
--till such time as Manuel, one of the principal commanders of his army,
having jogged and shaked him so as to rouse him out of his trance, said
to him, “Sir, if you will not follow me, I will kill you; for it is
better you should lose your life than, by being taken, lose your empire.”
--[Zonaras, lib. iii.]--But fear does then manifest its utmost power
when it throws us upon a valiant despair, having before deprived us of
all sense both of duty and honour. In the first pitched battle the
Romans lost against Hannibal, under the Consul Sempronius, a body of ten
thousand foot, that had taken fright, seeing no other escape for their
cowardice, went and threw themselves headlong upon the great battalion of
the enemies, which with marvellous force and fury they charged through
and through, and routed with a very great slaughter of the Carthaginians,
thus purchasing an ignominious flight at the same price they might have
gained a glorious victory.--[Livy, xxi. 56.]
The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear, that passion alone,
in the trouble of it, exceeding all other accidents. What affliction
could be greater or more just than that of Pompey’s friends, who, in his
ship, were spectators of that horrible murder? Yet so it was, that the
fear of the Egyptian vessels they saw coming to board them, possessed
them with so great alarm that it is observed they thought of nothing but
calling upon the mariners to make haste, and by force of oars to escape
away, till being arrived at Tyre, and delivered from fear, they had
leisure to turn their thoughts to the loss of their captain, and to give
vent to those tears and lamentations that the other more potent passion
had till then suspended.
“Tum pavor sapientiam omnem mihiex animo expectorat.”
[“Then fear drove out all intelligence from my mind.”--Ennius, ap.
Cicero, Tusc., iv. 8.]
Such as have been well rubbed in some skirmish, may yet, all wounded and
bloody as they are, be brought on again the next day to charge; but such
as have once conceived a good sound fear of the enemy, will never be made
so much as to look him in the face. Such as are in immediate fear of a
losing their estates, of banishment, or of slavery, live in perpetual
anguish, and lose all appetite and repose; whereas such as are actually
poor, slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk. And the
many people who, impatient of the perpetual alarms of fear, have hanged
or drowned themselves, or dashed themselves to pieces, give us
sufficiently to understand that fear is more importunate and
insupportable than death itself.
The Greeks acknowledged another kind of fear, differing from any we have
spoken of yet, that surprises us without any visible cause, by an impulse
from heaven, so that whole nations and whole armies have been struck with
it. Such a one was that which brought so wonderful a desolation upon
Carthage, where nothing was to be heard but affrighted voices and
outcries; where the inhabitants were seen to sally out of their houses as
to an alarm, and there to charge, wound, and kill one another, as if they
had been enemies come to surprise their city. All things were in
disorder and fury till, with prayers and sacrifices, they had appeased
their gods--[Diod. Sic., xv. 7]; and this is that they call panic
terrors.--[Ibid. ; Plutarch on Isis and Osiris, c. 8.]
CHAPTER XVIII
THAT MEN ARE NOT TO JUDGE OF OUR HAPPINESS TILL AFTER DEATH.
[Charron has borrowed with unusual liberality from this and the
succeeding chapter. See Nodier, Questions, p. 206.]
“Scilicet ultima semper
Exspectanda dies homini est; dicique beatus
Ante obitum nemo supremaque funera debet.”
[“We should all look forward to our last day: no one can be called
happy till he is dead and buried.”--Ovid, Met, iii. 135]
The very children know the story of King Croesus to this purpose, who
being taken prisoner by Cyrus, and by him condemned to die, as he was
going to execution cried out, “O Solon, Solon!” which being presently
reported to Cyrus, and he sending to inquire of him what it meant,
Croesus gave him to understand that he now found the teaching Solon had
formerly given him true to his cost; which was, “That men, however
fortune may smile upon them, could never be said to be happy till they
had been seen to pass over the last day of their lives,” by reason of the
uncertainty and mutability of human things, which, upon very light and
trivial occasions, are subject to be totally changed into a quite
contrary condition. And so it was that Agesilaus made answer to one who
was saying what a happy young man the King of Persia was, to come so
young to so mighty a kingdom: “‘Tis true,” said he, “but neither was
Priam unhappy at his years.”--[Plutarch, Apothegms of the
Lacedaemonians.]--In a short time, kings of Macedon, successors to that
mighty Alexander, became joiners and scriveners at Rome; a tyrant of
Sicily, a pedant at Corinth; a conqueror of one-half of the world and
general of so many armies, a miserable suppliant to the rascally officers
of a king of Egypt: so much did the prolongation of five or six months of
life cost the great Pompey; and, in our fathers’ days, Ludovico Sforza,
the tenth Duke of Milan, whom all Italy had so long truckled under, was
seen to die a wretched prisoner at Loches, but not till he had lived ten
years in captivity,--[He was imprisoned by Louis XI. in an iron cage]--
which was the worst part of his fortune. The fairest of all queens,
--[Mary, Queen of Scots.]--widow to the greatest king in Europe, did she
not come to die by the hand of an executioner? Unworthy and barbarous
cruelty! And a thousand more examples there are of the same kind; for it
seems that as storms and tempests have a malice against the proud and
overtowering heights of our lofty buildings, there are also spirits above
that are envious of the greatnesses here below:
“Usque adeo res humanas vis abdita quaedam
Obterit, et pulchros fasces, saevasque secures
Proculcare, ac ludibrio sibi habere videtur.”
[“So true it is that some occult power upsets human affairs, the
glittering fasces and the cruel axes spurns under foot, and seems to
make sport of them.”--Lucretius, v. 1231.]
And it should seem, also, that Fortune sometimes lies in wait to surprise
the last hour of our lives, to show the power she has, in a moment, to
overthrow what she was so many years in building, making us cry out with
Laberius:
“Nimirum hac die
Una plus vixi mihi, quam vivendum fuit.”
[“I have lived longer by this one day than I should have
done.”--Macrobius, ii. 7.]
And, in this sense, this good advice of Solon may reasonably be taken;
but he, being a philosopher (with which sort of men the favours and
disgraces of Fortune stand for nothing, either to the making a man happy
or unhappy, and with whom grandeurs and powers are accidents of a quality
almost indifferent) I am apt to think that he had some further aim, and
that his meaning was, that the very felicity of life itself, which
depends upon the tranquillity and contentment of a well-descended spirit,
and the resolution and assurance of a well-ordered soul, ought never to
be attributed to any man till he has first been seen to play the last,
and, doubtless, the hardest act of his part. There may be disguise and
dissimulation in all the rest: where these fine philosophical discourses
are only put on, and where accident, not touching us to the quick, gives
us leisure to maintain the same gravity of aspect; but, in this last
scene of death, there is no more counterfeiting: we must speak out plain,
and discover what there is of good and clean in the bottom of the pot,
“Nam vera; voces turn demum pectore ab imo
Ejiciuntur; et eripitur persona, manet res.”
[“Then at last truth issues from the heart; the visor’s gone,
the man remains.”--Lucretius, iii. 57.]
Wherefore, at this last, all the other actions of our life ought to be
tried and sifted: ‘tis the master-day, ‘tis the day that is judge of all
the rest, “‘tis the day,” says one of the ancients,--[Seneca, Ep., 102]--
“that must be judge of all my foregoing years.” To death do I refer the
assay of the fruit of all my studies: we shall then see whether my
discourses came only from my mouth or from my heart. I have seen many by
their death give a good or an ill repute to their whole life. Scipio,
the father-in-law of Pompey, in dying, well removed the ill opinion that
till then every one had conceived of him. Epaminondas being asked which
of the three he had in greatest esteem, Chabrias, Iphicrates, or himself.
“You must first see us die,” said he, “before that question can be
resolved.”--[Plutarch, Apoth.]--And, in truth, he would infinitely
wrong that man who would weigh him without the honour and grandeur of his
end.
God has ordered all things as it has best pleased Him; but I have, in my
time, seen three of the most execrable persons that ever I knew in all
manner of abominable living, and the most infamous to boot, who all died
a very regular death, and in all circumstances composed, even to
perfection. There are brave and fortunate deaths: I have seen death cut
the thread of the progress of a prodigious advancement, and in the height
and flower of its increase, of a certain person,--[Montaigne doubtless
refers to his friend Etienne de la Boetie, at whose death in 1563 he was
present.]--with so glorious an end that, in my opinion, his ambitious
and generous designs had nothing in them so high and great as their
interruption. He arrived, without completing his course, at the place to
which his ambition aimed, with greater glory than he could either have
hoped or desired, anticipating by his fall the name and power to which he
aspired in perfecting his career. In the judgment I make of another
man’s life, I always observe how he carried himself at his death; and the
principal concern I have for my own is that I may die well--that is,
patiently and tranquilly.
CHAPTER XIX
THAT TO STUDY PHILOSOPY IS TO LEARN TO DIE
Cicero says--[Tusc., i. 31.]--“that to study philosophy is nothing but
to prepare one’s self to die.” The reason of which is, because study and
contemplation do in some sort withdraw from us our soul, and employ it
separately from the body, which is a kind of apprenticeship and a
resemblance of death; or, else, because all the wisdom and reasoning in
the world do in the end conclude in this point, to teach us not to fear
to die. And to say the truth, either our reason mocks us, or it ought to
have no other aim but our contentment only, nor to endeavour anything
but, in sum, to make us live well, and, as the Holy Scripture says, at
our ease. All the opinions of the world agree in this, that pleasure is
our end, though we make use of divers means to attain it: they would,
otherwise, be rejected at the first motion; for who would give ear to him
that should propose affliction and misery for his end? The controversies
and disputes of the philosophical sects upon this point are merely
verbal:
“Transcurramus solertissimas nugas”
[“Let us skip over those subtle trifles.”--Seneca, Ep., 117.]
--there is more in them of opposition and obstinacy than is consistent
with so sacred a profession; but whatsoever personage a man takes upon
himself to perform, he ever mixes his own part with it.
Let the philosophers say what they will, the thing at which we all aim,
even in virtue is pleasure. It amuses me to rattle in ears this word,
which they so nauseate to and if it signify some supreme pleasure and
contentment, it is more due to the assistance of virtue than to any other
assistance whatever. This pleasure, for being more gay, more sinewy,
more robust and more manly, is only the more seriously voluptuous, and we
ought give it the name of pleasure, as that which is more favourable,
gentle, and natural, and not that from which we have denominated it. The
other and meaner pleasure, if it could deserve this fair name, it ought
to be by way of competition, and not of privilege. I find it less exempt
from traverses and inconveniences than virtue itself; and, besides that
the enjoyment is more momentary, fluid, and frail, it has its watchings,
fasts, and labours, its sweat and its blood; and, moreover, has
particular to itself so many several sorts of sharp and wounding
passions, and so dull a satiety attending it, as equal it to the severest
penance. And we mistake if we think that these incommodities serve it
for a spur and a seasoning to its sweetness (as in nature one contrary is
quickened by another), or say, when we come to virtue, that like
consequences and difficulties overwhelm and render it austere and
inaccessible; whereas, much more aptly than in voluptuousness, they
ennoble, sharpen, and heighten the perfect and divine pleasure they
procure us. He renders himself unworthy of it who will counterpoise its
cost with its fruit, and neither understands the blessing nor how to use
it. Those who preach to us that the quest of it is craggy, difficult,
and painful, but its fruition pleasant, what do they mean by that but to
tell us that it is always unpleasing? For what human means will ever
attain its enjoyment? The most perfect have been fain to content
themselves to aspire unto it, and to approach it only, without ever
possessing it. But they are deceived, seeing that of all the pleasures
we know, the very pursuit is pleasant. The attempt ever relishes of the
quality of the thing to which it is directed, for it is a good part of,
and consubstantial with, the effect. The felicity and beatitude that
glitters in Virtue, shines throughout all her appurtenances and avenues,
even to the first entry and utmost limits.
Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of
death is one of the greatest, as the means that accommodates human life
with a soft and easy tranquillity, and gives us a pure and pleasant taste
of living, without which all other pleasure would be extinct. Which is
the reason why all the rules centre and concur in this one article. And
although they all in like manner, with common accord, teach us also to
despise pain, poverty, and the other accidents to which human life is
subject, it is not, nevertheless, with the same solicitude, as well by
reason these accidents are not of so great necessity, the greater part of
mankind passing over their whole lives without ever knowing what poverty
is, and some without sorrow or sickness, as Xenophilus the musician, who
lived a hundred and six years in a perfect and continual health; as also
because, at the worst, death can, whenever we please, cut short and put
an end to all other inconveniences. But as to death, it is inevitable:--
“Omnes eodem cogimur; omnium
Versatur urna serius ocius
Sors exitura, et nos in aeternum
Exilium impositura cymbae.”
[“We are all bound one voyage; the lot of all, sooner or later, is
to come out of the urn. All must to eternal exile sail away.”
--Hor., Od., ii. 3, 25.]
and, consequently, if it frights us, ‘tis a perpetual torment, for which
there is no sort of consolation. There is no way by which it may not
reach us. We may continually turn our heads this way and that, as in a
suspected country:
“Quae, quasi saxum Tantalo, semper impendet.”
[“Ever, like Tantalus stone, hangs over us.”
--Cicero, De Finib., i. 18.]
Our courts of justice often send back condemned criminals to be executed
upon the place where the crime was committed; but, carry them to fine
houses by the way, prepare for them the best entertainment you can--
“Non Siculae dapes
Dulcem elaborabunt saporem:
Non avium cyatheaceae cantus
Somnum reducent.”
[“Sicilian dainties will not tickle their palates, nor the melody of
birds and harps bring back sleep.”--Hor., Od., iii. 1, 18.]
Do you think they can relish it? and that the fatal end of their journey
being continually before their eyes, would not alter and deprave their
palate from tasting these regalios?
“Audit iter, numeratque dies, spatioque viarum
Metitur vitam; torquetur peste futura.”
[“He considers the route, computes the time of travelling, measuring
his life by the length of the journey; and torments himself by
thinking of the blow to come.”--Claudianus, in Ruf., ii. 137.]
The end of our race is death; ‘tis the necessary object of our aim,
which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a
fit of ague? The remedy the vulgar use is not to think on’t; but from
what brutish stupidity can they derive so gross a blindness? They must
bridle the ass by the tail:
“Qui capite ipse suo instituit vestigia retro,”
[“Who in his folly seeks to advance backwards”--Lucretius, iv. 474]
‘tis no wonder if he be often trapped in the pitfall. They affright
people with the very mention of death, and many cross themselves, as it
were the name of the devil. And because the making a man’s will is in
reference to dying, not a man will be persuaded to take a pen in hand to
that purpose, till the physician has passed sentence upon and totally
given him over, and then betwixt and terror, God knows in how fit a
condition of understanding he is to do it.
The Romans, by reason that this poor syllable death sounded so harshly to
their ears and seemed so ominous, found out a way to soften and spin it
out by a periphrasis, and instead of pronouncing such a one is dead,
said, “Such a one has lived,” or “Such a one has ceased to live”
--[Plutarch, Life of Cicero, c. 22:]--for, provided there was any mention
of life in the case, though past, it carried yet some sound of
consolation. And from them it is that we have borrowed our expression,
“The late Monsieur such and such a one.”--[“feu Monsieur un tel.”]
Peradventure, as the saying is, the term we have lived is worth our
money. I was born betwixt eleven and twelve o’clock in the forenoon the
last day of February 1533, according to our computation, beginning the
year the 1st of January,--[This was in virtue of an ordinance of Charles
IX. in 1563. Previously the year commenced at Easter, so that the 1st
January 1563 became the first day of the year 1563.]--and it is now but
just fifteen days since I was complete nine-and-thirty years old; I make
account to live, at least, as many more. In the meantime, to trouble a
man’s self with the thought of a thing so far off were folly. But what?
Young and old die upon the same terms; no one departs out of life
otherwise than if he had but just before entered into it; neither is any
man so old and decrepit, who, having heard of Methuselah, does not think
he has yet twenty good years to come. Fool that thou art! who has
assured unto thee the term of life? Thou dependest upon physicians’
tales: rather consult effects and experience. According to the common
course of things, ‘tis long since that thou hast lived by extraordinary
favour; thou hast already outlived the ordinary term of life. And that
it is so, reckon up thy acquaintance, how many more have died before they
arrived at thy age than have attained unto it; and of those who have
ennobled their lives by their renown, take but an account, and I dare
lay a wager thou wilt find more who have died before than after
five-and-thirty years of age. It is full both of reason and piety, too,
to take example by the humanity of Jesus Christ Himself; now, He ended
His life at three-and-thirty years. The greatest man, that was no more
than a man, Alexander, died also at the same age. How many several ways
has death to surprise us?
“Quid quisque, vitet, nunquam homini satis
Cautum est in horas.”
[“Be as cautious as he may, man can never foresee the danger that
may at any hour befal him.”--Hor. O. ii. 13, 13.]
To omit fevers and pleurisies, who would ever have imagined that a duke
of Brittany,--[Jean II. died 1305.]--should be pressed to death in a
crowd as that duke was at the entry of Pope Clement, my neighbour, into
Lyons?--[Montaigne speaks of him as if he had been a contemporary
neighbour, perhaps because he was the Archbishop of Bordeaux. Bertrand
le Got was Pope under the title of Clement V., 1305-14.]--Hast thou not
seen one of our kings--[Henry II., killed in a tournament, July 10,
1559]--killed at a tilting, and did not one of his ancestors die by
jostle of a hog?--[Philip, eldest son of Louis le Gros.]--AEschylus,
threatened with the fall of a house, was to much purpose circumspect to
avoid that danger, seeing that he was knocked on the head by a tortoise
falling out of an eagle’s talons in the air. Another was choked with a
grape-stone;--[Val. Max., ix. 12, ext. 2.]--an emperor killed with
the scratch of a comb in combing his head. AEmilius Lepidus with a
stumble at his own threshold,--[Pliny, Nat. Hist., vii. 33.]--
and Aufidius with a jostle against the door as he entered the
council-chamber. And betwixt the very thighs of women, Cornelius Gallus
the proctor; Tigillinus, captain of the watch at Rome; Ludovico, son of
Guido di Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua; and (of worse example) Speusippus, a
Platonic philosopher, and one of our Popes. The poor judge Bebius gave
adjournment in a case for eight days; but he himself, meanwhile, was
condemned by death, and his own stay of life expired. Whilst Caius
Julius, the physician, was anointing the eyes of a patient, death closed
his own; and, if I may bring in an example of my own blood, a brother of
mine, Captain St. Martin, a young man, three-and-twenty years old, who
had already given sufficient testimony of his valour, playing a match at
tennis, received a blow of a ball a little above his right ear, which, as
it gave no manner of sign of wound or contusion, he took no notice of it,
nor so much as sat down to repose himself, but, nevertheless, died within
five or six hours after of an apoplexy occasioned by that blow.
These so frequent and common examples passing every day before our eyes,
how is it possible a man should disengage himself from the thought of
death, or avoid fancying that it has us every moment by the throat? What
matter is it, you will say, which way it comes to pass, provided a man
does not terrify himself with the expectation? For my part, I am of this
mind, and if a man could by any means avoid it, though by creeping under
a calf’s skin, I am one that should not be ashamed of the shift; all I
aim at is, to pass my time at my ease, and the recreations that will most
contribute to it, I take hold of, as little glorious and exemplary as you
will:
“Praetulerim . . . delirus inersque videri,
Dum mea delectent mala me, vel denique fallant,
Quam sapere, et ringi.”
[“I had rather seem mad and a sluggard, so that my defects are
agreeable to myself, or that I am not painfully conscious of them,
than be wise, and chaptious.”--Hor., Ep., ii. 2, 126.]
But ‘tis folly to think of doing anything that way. They go, they come,
they gallop and dance, and not a word of death. All this is very fine;
but withal, when it comes either to themselves, their wives, their
children, or friends, surprising them at unawares and unprepared, then,
what torment, what outcries, what madness and despair! Did you ever see
anything so subdued, so changed, and so confounded? A man must,
therefore, make more early provision for it; and this brutish negligence,
could it possibly lodge in the brain of any man of sense (which I think
utterly impossible), sells us its merchandise too dear. Were it an enemy
that could be avoided, I would then advise to borrow arms even of
cowardice itself; but seeing it is not, and that it will catch you as
well flying and playing the poltroon, as standing to’t like an honest
man:--
“Nempe et fugacem persequitur virum,
Nec parcit imbellis juventae
Poplitibus timidoque tergo.”
[“He pursues the flying poltroon, nor spares the hamstrings of the
unwarlike youth who turns his back”--Hor., Ep., iii. 2, 14.]
And seeing that no temper of arms is of proof to secure us:--
“Ille licet ferro cautus, se condat et aere,
Mors tamen inclusum protrahet inde caput”
[“Let him hide beneath iron or brass in his fear, death will pull
his head out of his armour.”--Propertious iii. 18]
--let us learn bravely to stand our ground, and fight him. And to begin
to deprive him of the greatest advantage he has over us, let us take a
way quite contrary to the common course. Let us disarm him of his
novelty and strangeness, let us converse and be familiar with him, and
have nothing so frequent in our thoughts as death. Upon all occasions
represent him to our imagination in his every shape; at the stumbling of
a horse, at the falling of a tile, at the least prick with a pin, let us
presently consider, and say to ourselves, “Well, and what if it had been
death itself?” and, thereupon, let us encourage and fortify ourselves.
Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of
our frail condition before our eyes, never suffering ourselves to be so
far transported with our delights, but that we have some intervals of
reflecting upon, and considering how many several ways this jollity of
ours tends to death, and with how many dangers it threatens it. The
Egyptians were wont to do after this manner, who in the height of their
feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into
the room to serve for a memento to their guests:
“Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum
Grata superveniet, quae non sperabitur, hora.”
[“Think each day when past is thy last; the next day, as unexpected,
will be the more welcome.”--Hor., Ep., i. 4, 13.]
Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere.
The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has
learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for
him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to
know, how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. Paulus
Emilius answered him whom the miserable King of Macedon, his prisoner,
sent to entreat him that he would not lead him in his triumph, “Let him
make that request to himself.”--[ Plutarch, Life of Paulus Aemilius,
c. 17; Cicero, Tusc., v. 40.]
In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard
for art and industry to perform anything to purpose. I am in my own
nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is nothing I have more
continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in
the most wanton time of my age:
“Jucundum quum aetas florida ver ageret.”
[“When my florid age rejoiced in pleasant spring.”
--Catullus, lxviii.]
In the company of ladies, and at games, some have perhaps thought me
possessed with some jealousy, or the uncertainty of some hope, whilst I
was entertaining myself with the remembrance of some one, surprised, a
few days before, with a burning fever of which he died, returning from an
entertainment like this, with his head full of idle fancies of love and
jollity, as mine was then, and that, for aught I knew, the same-destiny
was attending me.
“Jam fuerit, nec post unquam revocare licebit.”
[“Presently the present will have gone, never to be recalled.”
Lucretius, iii. 928.]
Yet did not this thought wrinkle my forehead any more than any other.
It is impossible but we must feel a sting in such imaginations as these,
at first; but with often turning and returning them in one’s mind, they,
at last, become so familiar as to be no trouble at all: otherwise, I, for
my part, should be in a perpetual fright and frenzy; for never man was so
distrustful of his life, never man so uncertain as to its duration.
Neither health, which I have hitherto ever enjoyed very strong and
vigorous, and very seldom interrupted, does prolong, nor sickness
contract my hopes. Every minute, methinks, I am escaping, and it
eternally runs in my mind, that what may be done to-morrow, may be done
to-day. Hazards and dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our
end; and if we consider how many thousands more remain and hang over our
heads, besides the accident that immediately threatens us, we shall find
that the sound and the sick, those that are abroad at sea, and those that
sit by the fire, those who are engaged in battle, and those who sit idle
at home, are the one as near it as the other.
“Nemo altero fragilior est; nemo in crastinum sui certior.”
[“No man is more fragile than another: no man more certain than
another of to-morrow.”--Seneca, Ep., 91.]
For anything I have to do before I die, the longest leisure would appear
too short, were it but an hour’s business I had to do.
A friend of mine the other day turning over my tablets, found therein a
memorandum of something I would have done after my decease, whereupon I
told him, as it was really true, that though I was no more than a
league’s distance only from my own house, and merry and well, yet when
that thing came into my head, I made haste to write it down there,
because I was not certain to live till I came home. As a man that am
eternally brooding over my own thoughts, and confine them to my own
particular concerns, I am at all hours as well prepared as I am ever like
to be, and death, whenever he shall come, can bring nothing along with
him I did not expect long before. We should always, as near as we can,
be booted and spurred, and ready to go, and, above all things, take care,
at that time, to have no business with any one but one’s self:--
“Quid brevi fortes jaculamur avo
Multa?”
[“Why for so short a life tease ourselves with so many projects?”
--Hor., Od., ii. 16, 17.]
for we shall there find work enough to do, without any need of addition.
One man complains, more than of death, that he is thereby prevented of a
glorious victory; another, that he must die before he has married his
daughter, or educated his children; a third seems only troubled that he
must lose the society of his wife; a fourth, the conversation of his son,
as the principal comfort and concern of his being. For my part, I am,
thanks be to God, at this instant in such a condition, that I am ready to
dislodge, whenever it shall please Him, without regret for anything
whatsoever. I disengage myself throughout from all worldly relations;
my leave is soon taken of all but myself. Never did any one prepare to
bid adieu to the world more absolutely and unreservedly, and to shake
hands with all manner of interest in it, than I expect to do. The
deadest deaths are the best:
“‘Miser, O miser,’ aiunt, ‘omnia ademit
Una dies infesta mihi tot praemia vitae.’”
[“‘Wretch that I am,’ they cry, ‘one fatal day has deprived me of
all joys of life.’”--Lucretius, iii. 911.]
And the builder,
“Manuet,” says he, “opera interrupta, minaeque
Murorum ingentes.”
[“The works remain incomplete, the tall pinnacles of the walls
unmade.”--AEneid, iv. 88.]
A man must design nothing that will require so much time to the
finishing, or, at least, with no such passionate desire to see it brought
to perfection. We are born to action:
“Quum moriar, medium solvar et inter opus.”
[“When I shall die, let it be doing that I had designed.”
--Ovid, Amor., ii. 10, 36.]
I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to
extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me
planting my cabbages, indifferent to him, and still less of my gardens
not being finished. I saw one die, who, at his last gasp, complained of
nothing so much as that destiny was about to cut the thread of a
chronicle he was then compiling, when he was gone no farther than the
fifteenth or sixteenth of our kings:
“Illud in his rebus non addunt: nec tibi earum
jam desiderium rerum super insidet una.”
[“They do not add, that dying, we have no longer a desire to possess
things.”--Lucretius, iii. 913.]
We are to discharge ourselves from these vulgar and hurtful humours.
To this purpose it was that men first appointed the places of sepulture
adjoining the churches, and in the most frequented places of the city, to
accustom, says Lycurgus, the common people, women, and children, that
they should not be startled at the sight of a corpse, and to the end,
that the continual spectacle of bones, graves, and funeral obsequies
should put us in mind of our frail condition:
“Quin etiam exhilarare viris convivia caede
Mos olim, et miscere epulis spectacula dira
Certantum ferro, saepe et super ipsa cadentum
Pocula, respersis non parco sanguine mensis.”
[“It was formerly the custom to enliven banquets with slaughter, and
to combine with the repast the dire spectacle of men contending with
the sword, the dying in many cases falling upon the cups, and
covering the tables with blood.”--Silius Italicus, xi. 51.]
And as the Egyptians after their feasts were wont to present the company
with a great image of death, by one that cried out to them, “Drink and be
merry, for such shalt thou be when thou art dead”; so it is my custom to
have death not only in my imagination, but continually in my mouth.
Neither is there anything of which I am so inquisitive, and delight to
inform myself, as the manner of men’s deaths, their words, looks, and
bearing; nor any places in history I am so intent upon; and it is
manifest enough, by my crowding in examples of this kind, that I have a
particular fancy for that subject. If I were a writer of books, I would
compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who
should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live.
Dicarchus made one, to which he gave that title; but it was designed for
another and less profitable end.
Peradventure, some one may object, that the pain and terror of dying so
infinitely exceed all manner of imagination, that the best fencer will be
quite out of his play when it comes to the push. Let them say what they
will: to premeditate is doubtless a very great advantage; and besides, is
it nothing to go so far, at least, without disturbance or alteration?
Moreover, Nature herself assists and encourages us: if the death be
sudden and violent, we have not leisure to fear; if otherwise, I perceive
that as I engage further in my disease, I naturally enter into a certain
loathing and disdain of life. I find I have much more ado to digest this
resolution of dying, when I am well in health, than when languishing of a
fever; and by how much I have less to do with the commodities of life,
by reason that I begin to lose the use and pleasure of them, by so much I
look upon death with less terror. Which makes me hope, that the further
I remove from the first, and the nearer I approach to the latter, I shall
the more easily exchange the one for the other. And, as I have
experienced in other occurrences, that, as Caesar says, things often
appear greater to us at distance than near at hand, I have found, that
being well, I have had maladies in much greater horror than when really
afflicted with them. The vigour wherein I now am, the cheerfulness and
delight wherein I now live, make the contrary estate appear in so great a
disproportion to my present condition, that, by imagination, I magnify
those inconveniences by one-half, and apprehend them to be much more
troublesome, than I find them really to be, when they lie the most heavy
upon me; I hope to find death the same.
Let us but observe in the ordinary changes and declinations we daily
suffer, how nature deprives us of the light and sense of our bodily
decay. What remains to an old man of the vigour of his youth and better
days?
“Heu! senibus vitae portio quanta manet.”
[“Alas, to old men what portion of life remains!”---Maximian, vel
Pseudo-Gallus, i. 16.]
Caesar, to an old weather-beaten soldier of his guards, who came to ask
him leave that he might kill himself, taking notice of his withered body
and decrepit motion, pleasantly answered, “Thou fanciest, then, that thou
art yet alive.”--[Seneca, Ep., 77.]--Should a man fall into this
condition on the sudden, I do not think humanity capable of enduring such
a change: but nature, leading us by the hand, an easy and, as it were, an
insensible pace, step by step conducts us to that miserable state, and by
that means makes it familiar to us, so that we are insensible of the
stroke when our youth dies in us, though it be really a harder death than
the final dissolution of a languishing body, than the death of old age;
forasmuch as the fall is not so great from an uneasy being to none at
all, as it is from a sprightly and flourishing being to one that is
troublesome and painful. The body, bent and bowed, has less force to
support a burden; and it is the same with the soul, and therefore it is,
that we are to raise her up firm and erect against the power of this
adversary. For, as it is impossible she should ever be at rest, whilst
she stands in fear of it; so, if she once can assure herself, she may
boast (which is a thing as it were surpassing human condition) that it is
impossible that disquiet, anxiety, or fear, or any other disturbance,
should inhabit or have any place in her:
“Non vulnus instants Tyranni
Mentha cadi solida, neque Auster
Dux inquieti turbidus Adriae,
Nec fulminantis magna Jovis manus.”
[“Not the menacing look of a tyrant shakes her well-settled soul,
nor turbulent Auster, the prince of the stormy Adriatic, nor yet the
strong hand of thundering Jove, such a temper moves.”
--Hor., Od., iii. 3, 3.]
She is then become sovereign of all her lusts and passions, mistress of
necessity, shame, poverty, and all the other injuries of fortune. Let
us, therefore, as many of us as can, get this advantage; ‘tis the true
and sovereign liberty here on earth, that fortifies us wherewithal to
defy violence and injustice, and to contemn prisons and chains:
“In manicis et
Compedibus saevo te sub custode tenebo.
Ipse Deus, simul atque volam, me solvet. Opinor,
Hoc sentit; moriar; mors ultima linea rerum est.”
[“I will keep thee in fetters and chains, in custody of a
savage keeper.--A god will when I ask Him, set me free.
This god I think is death. Death is the term of all things.”
--Hor., Ep., i. 16, 76.]
Our very religion itself has no surer human foundation than the contempt
of life. Not only the argument of reason invites us to it--for why
should we fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented?
--but, also, seeing we are threatened by so many sorts of death, is it not
infinitely worse eternally to fear them all, than once to undergo one of
them? And what matters it, when it shall happen, since it is inevitable?
To him that told Socrates, “The thirty tyrants have sentenced thee to
death”; “And nature them,” said he.--[Socrates was not condemned to death
by the thirty tyrants, but by the Athenians.-Diogenes Laertius, ii.35.]--
What a ridiculous thing it is to trouble ourselves about taking the only
step that is to deliver us from all trouble! As our birth brought us the
birth of all things, so in our death is the death of all things included.
And therefore to lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence,
is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.
Death is the beginning of another life. So did we weep, and so much it
cost us to enter into this, and so did we put off our former veil in
entering into it. Nothing can be a grievance that is but once. Is it
reasonable so long to fear a thing that will so soon be despatched?
Long life, and short, are by death made all one; for there is no long,
nor short, to things that are no more. Aristotle tells us that there are
certain little beasts upon the banks of the river Hypanis, that never
live above a day: they which die at eight of the clock in the morning,
die in their youth, and those that die at five in the evening, in their
decrepitude: which of us would not laugh to see this moment of
continuance put into the consideration of weal or woe? The most and the
least, of ours, in comparison with eternity, or yet with the duration of
mountains, rivers, stars, trees, and even of some animals, is no less
ridiculous.--[ Seneca, Consol. ad Marciam, c. 20.]
But nature compels us to it. “Go out of this world,” says she, “as you
entered into it; the same pass you made from death to life, without
passion or fear, the same, after the same manner, repeat from life to
death. Your death is a part of the order of the universe, ‘tis a part of
the life of the world.
“Inter se mortales mutua vivunt
................................
Et, quasi cursores, vitai lampada tradunt.”
[“Mortals, amongst themselves, live by turns, and, like the runners
in the games, give up the lamp, when they have won the race, to the
next comer.--” Lucretius, ii. 75, 78.]
“Shall I exchange for you this beautiful contexture of things? ‘Tis the
condition of your creation; death is a part of you, and whilst you
endeavour to evade it, you evade yourselves. This very being of yours
that you now enjoy is equally divided betwixt life and death. The day of
your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave:
“Prima, qux vitam dedit, hora carpsit.”
[“The first hour that gave us life took away also an hour.”
--Seneca, Her. Fur., 3 Chor. 874.]
“Nascentes morimur, finisque ab origine pendet.”
[“As we are born we die, and the end commences with the beginning.”
--Manilius, Ast., iv. 16.]
“All the whole time you live, you purloin from life and live at the
expense of life itself. The perpetual work of your life is but to lay
the foundation of death. You are in death, whilst you are in life,
because you still are after death, when you are no more alive; or, if you
had rather have it so, you are dead after life, but dying all the while
you live; and death handles the dying much more rudely than the dead, and
more sensibly and essentially. If you have made your profit of life, you
have had enough of it; go your way satisfied.
“Cur non ut plenus vita; conviva recedis?”
[“Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast?
“Lucretius, iii. 951.]
“If you have not known how to make the best use of it, if it was
unprofitable to you, what need you care to lose it, to what end would you
desire longer to keep it?
“‘Cur amplius addere quaeris,
Rursum quod pereat male, et ingratum occidat omne?’
[“Why seek to add longer life, merely to renew ill-spent time, and
be again tormented?”--Lucretius, iii. 914.]
“Life in itself is neither good nor evil; it is the scene of good or evil
as you make it.’ And, if you have lived a day, you have seen all: one day
is equal and like to all other days. There is no other light, no other
shade; this very sun, this moon, these very stars, this very order and
disposition of things, is the same your ancestors enjoyed, and that shall
also entertain your posterity:
“‘Non alium videre patres, aliumve nepotes
Aspicient.’
[“Your grandsires saw no other thing; nor will your posterity.”
--Manilius, i. 529.]
“And, come the worst that can come, the distribution and variety of all
the acts of my comedy are performed in a year. If you have observed the
revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth,
the virility, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part,
and knows no other art but to begin again; it will always be the same
thing:
“‘Versamur ibidem, atque insumus usque.’
[“We are turning in the same circle, ever therein confined.”
--Lucretius, iii. 1093.]
“‘Atque in se sua per vestigia volvitur annus.’
[“The year is ever turning around in the same footsteps.”
--Virgil, Georg., ii. 402.]
“I am not prepared to create for you any new recreations:
“‘Nam tibi prxterea quod machiner, inveniamque
Quod placeat, nihil est; eadem sunt omnia semper.’
[“I can devise, nor find anything else to please you: ‘tis the same
thing over and over again.”--Lucretius iii. 957]
“Give place to others, as others have given place to you. Equality is
the soul of equity. Who can complain of being comprehended in the same
destiny, wherein all are involved? Besides, live as long as you can, you
shall by that nothing shorten the space you are to be dead; ‘tis all to
no purpose; you shall be every whit as long in the condition you so much
fear, as if you had died at nurse:
“‘Licet quot vis vivendo vincere secla,
Mors aeterna tamen nihilominus illa manebit.’
[“Live triumphing over as many ages as you will, death still will
remain eternal.”--Lucretius, iii. 1103]
“And yet I will place you in such a condition as you shall have no reason
to be displeased.
“‘In vera nescis nullum fore morte alium te,
Qui possit vivus tibi to lugere peremptum,
Stansque jacentem.’
[“Know you not that, when dead, there can be no other living self to
lament you dead, standing on your grave.”--Idem., ibid., 898.]
“Nor shall you so much as wish for the life you are so concerned about:
“‘Nec sibi enim quisquam tum se vitamque requirit.
..................................................
“‘Nec desiderium nostri nos afficit ullum.’
“Death is less to be feared than nothing, if there could be anything less
than nothing.
“‘Multo . . . mortem minus ad nos esse putandium,
Si minus esse potest, quam quod nihil esse videmus.’
“Neither can it any way concern you, whether you are living or dead:
living, by reason that you are still in being; dead, because you are no
more. Moreover, no one dies before his hour: the time you leave behind
was no more yours than that was lapsed and gone before you came into the
world; nor does it any more concern you.
“‘Respice enim, quam nil ad nos anteacta vetustas
Temporis aeterni fuerit.’
[“Consider how as nothing to us is the old age of times past.”
--Lucretius iii. 985]
Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists
not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived
long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present
with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to
have a sufficient length of life. Is it possible you can imagine never
to arrive at the place towards which you are continually going? and yet
there is no journey but hath its end. And, if company will make it more
pleasant or more easy to you, does not all the world go the self-same
way?
“‘Omnia te, vita perfuncta, sequentur.’
[“All things, then, life over, must follow thee.”
--Lucretius, iii. 981.]
“Does not all the world dance the same brawl that you do? Is there
anything that does not grow old, as well as you? A thousand men, a
thousand animals, a thousand other creatures, die at the same moment that
you die:
“‘Nam nox nulla diem, neque noctem aurora sequuta est,
Quae non audierit mistos vagitibus aegris
Ploratus, mortis comites et funeris atri.’
[“No night has followed day, no day has followed night, in which
there has not been heard sobs and sorrowing cries, the companions of
death and funerals.”--Lucretius, v. 579.]
“To what end should you endeavour to draw back, if there be no
possibility to evade it? you have seen examples enough of those who have
been well pleased to die, as thereby delivered from heavy miseries; but
have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying? It must,
therefore, needs be very foolish to condemn a thing you have neither
experimented in your own person, nor by that of any other. Why dost thou
complain of me and of destiny? Do we do thee any wrong? Is it for thee
to govern us, or for us to govern thee? Though, peradventure, thy age
may not be accomplished, yet thy life is: a man of low stature is as much
a man as a giant; neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell.
Chiron refused to be immortal, when he was acquainted with the conditions
under which he was to enjoy it, by the god of time itself and its
duration, his father Saturn. Do but seriously consider how much more
insupportable and painful an immortal life would be to man than what I
have already given him. If you had not death, you would eternally curse
me for having deprived you of it; I have mixed a little bitterness with
it, to the end, that seeing of what convenience it is, you might not too
greedily and indiscreetly seek and embrace it: and that you might be so
established in this moderation, as neither to nauseate life, nor have any
antipathy for dying, which I have decreed you shall once do, I have
tempered the one and the other betwixt pleasure and pain. It was I that
taught Thales, the most eminent of your sages, that to live and to die
were indifferent; which made him, very wisely, answer him, ‘Why then he
did not die?’ ‘Because,’ said he, ‘it is indifferent.’--[Diogenes
Laertius, i. 35.]--Water, earth, air, and fire, and the other parts of
this creation of mine, are no more instruments of thy life than they are
of thy death. Why dost thou fear thy last day? it contributes no more to
thy dissolution, than every one of the rest: the last step is not the
cause of lassitude: it does not confess it. Every day travels towards
death; the last only arrives at it.” These are the good lessons our
mother Nature teaches.
I have often considered with myself whence it should proceed, that in war
the image of death, whether we look upon it in ourselves or in others,
should, without comparison, appear less dreadful than at home in our own
houses (for if it were not so, it would be an army of doctors and whining
milksops), and that being still in all places the same, there should be,
notwithstanding, much more assurance in peasants and the meaner sort of
people, than in others of better quality. I believe, in truth, that it
is those terrible ceremonies and preparations wherewith we set it out,
that more terrify us than the thing itself; a new, quite contrary way of
living; the cries of mothers, wives, and children; the visits of
astounded and afflicted friends; the attendance of pale and blubbering
servants; a dark room, set round with burning tapers; our beds environed
with physicians and divines; in sum, nothing but ghostliness and horror
round about us; we seem dead and buried already. Children are afraid
even of those they are best acquainted with, when disguised in a visor;
and so ‘tis with us; the visor must be removed as well from things as
from persons, that being taken away, we shall find nothing underneath but
the very same death that a mean servant or a poor chambermaid died a day
or two ago, without any manner of apprehension. Happy is the death that
deprives us of leisure for preparing such ceremonials.
CHAPTER XX
OF THE FORCE OF IMAGINATION
“Fortis imaginatio generat casum,” say the schoolmen.
[“A strong imagination begets the event itself.”--Axiom. Scholast.]
I am one of those who are most sensible of the power of imagination:
every one is jostled by it, but some are overthrown by it. It has a very
piercing impression upon me; and I make it my business to avoid, wanting
force to resist it. I could live by the sole help of healthful and jolly
company: the very sight of another’s pain materially pains me, and I
often usurp the sensations of another person. A perpetual cough in
another tickles my lungs and throat. I more unwillingly visit the sick
in whom by love and duty I am interested, than those I care not for, to
whom I less look. I take possession of the disease I am concerned at,
and take it to myself. I do not at all wonder that fancy should give
fevers and sometimes kill such as allow it too much scope, and are too
willing to entertain it. Simon Thomas was a great physician of his time:
I remember, that happening one day at Toulouse to meet him at a rich old
fellow’s house, who was troubled with weak lungs, and discoursing with
the patient about the method of his cure, he told him, that one thing
which would be very conducive to it, was to give me such occasion to be
pleased with his company, that I might come often to see him, by which
means, and by fixing his eyes upon the freshness of my complexion, and
his imagination upon the sprightliness and vigour that glowed in my
youth, and possessing all his senses with the flourishing age wherein I
then was, his habit of body might, peradventure, be amended; but he
forgot to say that mine, at the same time, might be made worse. Gallus
Vibius so much bent his mind to find out the essence and motions of
madness, that, in the end, he himself went out of his wits, and to such a
degree, that he could never after recover his judgment, and might brag
that he was become a fool by too much wisdom. Some there are who through
fear anticipate the hangman; and there was the man, whose eyes being
unbound to have his pardon read to him, was found stark dead upon the
scaffold, by the stroke of imagination. We start, tremble, turn pale,
and blush, as we are variously moved by imagination; and, being a-bed,
feel our bodies agitated with its power to that degree, as even sometimes
to expiring. And boiling youth, when fast asleep, grows so warm with
fancy, as in a dream to satisfy amorous desires:--
“Ut, quasi transactis saepe omnibu rebu, profundant
Fluminis ingentes, fluctus, vestemque cruentent.”
Although it be no new thing to see horns grown in a night on the forehead
of one that had none when he went to bed, notwithstanding, what befell
Cippus, King of Italy, is memorable; who having one day been a very
delighted spectator of a bullfight, and having all the night dreamed that
he had horns on his head, did, by the force of imagination, really cause
them to grow there. Passion gave to the son of Croesus the voice which
nature had denied him. And Antiochus fell into a fever, inflamed with
the beauty of Stratonice, too deeply imprinted in his soul. Pliny
pretends to have seen Lucius Cossitius, who from a woman was turned into
a man upon her very wedding-day. Pontanus and others report the like
metamorphosis to have happened in these latter days in Italy. And,
through the vehement desire of him and his mother:
“Volta puer solvit, quae foemina voverat, Iphis.”
Myself passing by Vitry le Francois, saw a man the Bishop of Soissons
had, in confirmation, called Germain, whom all the inhabitants of the
place had known to be a girl till two-and-twenty years of age, called
Mary. He was, at the time of my being there, very full of beard, old,
and not married. He told us, that by straining himself in a leap his
male organs came out; and the girls of that place have, to this day, a
song, wherein they advise one another not to take too great strides, for
fear of being turned into men, as Mary Germain was. It is no wonder if
this sort of accident frequently happen; for if imagination have any
power in such things, it is so continually and vigorously bent upon this
subject, that to the end it may not so often relapse into the same
thought and violence of desire, it were better, once for all, to give
these young wenches the things they long for.
Some attribute the scars of King Dagobert and of St. Francis to the force
of imagination. It is said, that by it bodies will sometimes be removed
from their places; and Celsus tells us of a priest whose soul would be
ravished into such an ecstasy that the body would, for a long time,
remain without sense or respiration. St. Augustine makes mention of
another, who, upon the hearing of any lamentable or doleful cries, would
presently fall into a swoon, and be so far out of himself, that it was in
vain to call, bawl in his ears, pinch or burn him, till he voluntarily
came to himself; and then he would say, that he had heard voices as it
were afar off, and did feel when they pinched and burned him; and, to
prove that this was no obstinate dissimulation in defiance of his sense
of feeling, it was manifest, that all the while he had neither pulse nor
breathing.
‘Tis very probable, that visions, enchantments, and all extraordinary
effects of that nature, derive their credit principally from the power of
imagination, working and making its chiefest impression upon vulgar and
more easy souls, whose belief is so strangely imposed upon, as to think
they see what they do not see.
I am not satisfied whether those pleasant ligatures--[Les nouements
d’aiguillettes, as they were called, knots tied by some one, at a
wedding, on a strip of leather, cotton, or silk, and which, especially
when passed through the wedding-ring, were supposed to have the magical
effect of preventing a consummation of the marriage until they were
untied. See Louandre, La Sorcellerie, 1853, p. 73. The same
superstition and appliance existed in England.]--with which this age of
ours is so occupied, that there is almost no other talk, are not mere
voluntary impressions of apprehension and fear; for I know, by
experience, in the case of a particular friend of mine, one for whom I
can be as responsible as for myself, and a man that cannot possibly fall
under any manner of suspicion of insufficiency, and as little of being
enchanted, who having heard a companion of his make a relation of an
unusual frigidity that surprised him at a very unseasonable time; being
afterwards himself engaged upon the same account, the horror of the
former story on a sudden so strangely possessed his imagination, that he
ran the same fortune the other had done; and from that time forward, the
scurvy remembrance of his disaster running in his mind and tyrannising
over him, he was subject to relapse into the same misfortune. He found
some remedy, however, for this fancy in another fancy, by himself frankly
confessing and declaring beforehand to the party with whom he was to have
to do, this subjection of his, by which means, the agitation of his soul
was, in some sort, appeased; and knowing that, now, some such
misbehaviour was expected from him, the restraint upon his faculties grew
less. And afterwards, at such times as he was in no such apprehension,
when setting about the act (his thoughts being then disengaged and free,
and his body in its true and natural estate) he was at leisure to cause
the part to be handled and communicated to the knowledge of the other
party, he was totally freed from that vexatious infirmity. After a man
has once done a woman right, he is never after in danger of misbehaving
himself with that person, unless upon the account of some excusable
weakness. Neither is this disaster to be feared, but in adventures,
where the soul is overextended with desire or respect, and, especially,
where the opportunity is of an unforeseen and pressing nature; in those
cases, there is no means for a man to defend himself from such a
surprise, as shall put him altogether out of sorts. I have known some,
who have secured themselves from this mischance, by coming half sated
elsewhere, purposely to abate the ardour of the fury, and others, who,
being grown old, find themselves less impotent by being less able; and
one, who found an advantage in being assured by a friend of his, that he
had a counter-charm of enchantments that would secure him from this
disgrace. The story itself is not, much amiss, and therefore you shall
have it.
A Count of a very great family, and with whom I was very intimate, being
married to a fair lady, who had formerly been courted by one who was at
the wedding, all his friends were in very great fear; but especially an
old lady his kinswoman, who had the ordering of the solemnity, and in
whose house it was kept, suspecting his rival would offer foul play by
these sorceries. Which fear she communicated to me. I bade her rely
upon me: I had, by chance, about me a certain flat plate of gold, whereon
were graven some celestial figures, supposed good against sunstroke or
pains in the head, being applied to the suture: where, that it might the
better remain firm, it was sewed to a ribbon to be tied under the chin; a
foppery cousin-german to this of which I am speaking. Jaques Pelletier,
who lived in my house, had presented this to me for a singular rarity.
I had a fancy to make some use of this knack, and therefore privately
told the Count, that he might possibly run the same fortune other
bridegrooms had sometimes done, especially some one being in the house,
who, no doubt, would be glad to do him such a courtesy: but let him
boldly go to bed. For I would do him the office of a friend, and, if
need were, would not spare a miracle it was in my power to do, provided
he would engage to me, upon his honour, to keep it to himself; and only,
when they came to bring him his caudle,--[A custom in France to bring the
bridegroom a caudle in the middle of the night on his wedding-night]--
if matters had not gone well with him, to give me such a sign, and leave
the rest to me. Now he had had his ears so battered, and his mind so
prepossessed with the eternal tattle of this business, that when he came
to’t, he did really find himself tied with the trouble of his
imagination, and, accordingly, at the time appointed, gave me the sign.
Whereupon, I whispered him in the ear, that he should rise, under
pretence of putting us out of the room, and after a jesting manner pull
my nightgown from my shoulders--we were of much about the same height--
throw it over his own, and there keep it till he had performed what I had
appointed him to do, which was, that when we were all gone out of the
chamber, he should withdraw to make water, should three times repeat such
and such words, and as often do such and such actions; that at every of
the three times, he should tie the ribbon I put into his hand about his
middle, and be sure to place the medal that was fastened to it, the
figures in such a posture, exactly upon his reins, which being done, and
having the last of the three times so well girt and fast tied the ribbon
that it could neither untie nor slip from its place, let him confidently
return to his business, and withal not forget to spread my gown upon the
bed, so that it might be sure to cover them both. These ape’s tricks are
the main of the effect, our fancy being so far seduced as to believe that
such strange means must, of necessity, proceed from some abstruse
science: their very inanity gives them weight and reverence. And,
certain it is, that my figures approved themselves more venereal than
solar, more active than prohibitive. ‘Twas a sudden whimsey, mixed with
a little curiosity, that made me do a thing so contrary to my nature; for
I am an enemy to all subtle and counterfeit actions, and abominate all
manner of trickery, though it be for sport, and to an advantage; for
though the action may not be vicious in itself, its mode is vicious.
Amasis, King of Egypt, having married Laodice, a very beautiful Greek
virgin, though noted for his abilities elsewhere, found himself quite
another man with his wife, and could by no means enjoy her; at which he
was so enraged, that he threatened to kill her, suspecting her to be a
witch. As ‘tis usual in things that consist in fancy, she put him upon
devotion, and having accordingly made his vows to Venus, he found himself
divinely restored the very first night after his oblations and
sacrifices. Now women are to blame to entertain us with that disdainful,
coy, and angry countenance, which extinguishes our vigour, as it kindles
our desire; which made the daughter-in-law of Pythagoras--[Theano, the
lady in question was the wife, not the daughter-in-law of Pythagoras.]--
say, “That the woman who goes to bed to a man, must put off her modesty
with her petticoat, and put it on again with the same.” The soul of the
assailant, being disturbed with many several alarms, readily loses the
power of performance; and whoever the imagination has once put this trick
upon, and confounded with the shame of it (and she never does it but at
the first acquaintance, by reason men are then more ardent and eager, and
also, at this first account a man gives of himself, he is much more
timorous of miscarrying), having made an ill beginning, he enters into
such fever and despite at the accident, as are apt to remain and continue
with him upon following occasions.
Married people, having all their time before them, ought never to compel
or so much as to offer at the feat, if they do not find themselves quite
ready: and it is less unseemly to fail of handselling the nuptial sheets,
when a man perceives himself full of agitation and trembling, and to
await another opportunity at more private and more composed leisure, than
to make himself perpetually miserable, for having misbehaved himself and
been baffled at the first assault. Till possession be taken, a man that
knows himself subject to this infirmity, should leisurely and by degrees
make several little trials and light offers, without obstinately
attempting at once, to Force an absolute conquest over his own mutinous
and indisposed faculties. Such as know their members to be naturally
obedient, need take no other care but only to counterplot their
fantasies.
The indocile liberty of this member is very remarkable, so importunately
unruly in its tumidity and impatience, when we do not require it, and so
unseasonably disobedient, when we stand most in need of it: so
imperiously contesting in authority with the will, and with so much
haughty obstinacy denying all solicitation, both of hand and mind. And
yet, though his rebellion is so universally complained of, and that proof
is thence deduced to condemn him, if he had, nevertheless, feed me
to plead his cause, I should peradventure, bring the rest of his
fellow-members into suspicion of complotting this mischief against him,
out of pure envy at the importance and pleasure especial to his
employment; and to have, by confederacy, armed the whole world against
him, by malevolently charging him alone, with their common offence. For
let any one consider, whether there is any one part of our bodies that
does not often refuse to perform its office at the precept of the will,
and that does not often exercise its function in defiance of her command.
They have every one of them passions of their own, that rouse and awaken,
stupefy and benumb them, without our leave or consent. How often do the
involuntary motions of the countenance discover our inward thoughts, and
betray our most private secrets to the bystanders. The same cause that
animates this member, does also, without our knowledge, animate the
lungs, pulse, and heart, the sight of a pleasing object imperceptibly
diffusing a flame through all our parts, with a feverish motion. Is
there nothing but these veins and muscles that swell and flag without the
consent, not only of the will, but even of our knowledge also? We do not
command our hairs to stand on end, nor our skin to shiver either with
fear or desire; the hands often convey themselves to parts to which we do
not direct them; the tongue will be interdict, and the voice congealed,
when we know not how to help it. When we have nothing to eat, and would
willingly forbid it, the appetite does not, for all that, forbear to stir
up the parts that are subject to it, no more nor less than the other
appetite we were speaking of, and in like manner, as unseasonably leaves
us, when it thinks fit. The vessels that serve to discharge the belly
have their own proper dilatations and compressions, without and beyond
our concurrence, as well as those which are destined to purge the reins;
and that which, to justify the prerogative of the will, St. Augustine
urges, of having seen a man who could command his rear to discharge as
often together as he pleased, Vives, his commentator, yet further
fortifies with another example in his time,--of one that could break wind
in tune; but these cases do not suppose any more pure obedience in that
part; for is anything commonly more tumultuary or indiscreet? To which
let me add, that I myself knew one so rude and ungoverned, as for forty
years together made his master vent with one continued and unintermitted
outbursting, and ‘tis like will do so till he die of it. And I could
heartily wish, that I only knew by reading, how often a man’s belly, by
the denial of one single puff, brings him to the very door of an
exceeding painful death; and that the emperor,--[The Emperor Claudius,
who, however, according to Suetonius (Vita, c. 32), only intended to
authorise this singular privilege by an edict.]--who gave liberty to let
fly in all places, had, at the same time, given us power to do it. But
for our will, in whose behalf we prefer this accusation, with how much
greater probability may we reproach herself with mutiny and sedition, for
her irregularity and disobedience? Does she always will what we would
have her to do? Does she not often will what we forbid her to will, and
that to our manifest prejudice? Does she suffer herself, more than any
of the rest, to be governed and directed by the results of our reason? To
conclude, I should move, in the behalf of the gentleman, my client, it
might be considered, that in this fact, his cause being inseparably and
indistinctly conjoined with an accessory, yet he only is called in
question, and that by arguments and accusations, which cannot be charged
upon the other; whose business, indeed, it is sometimes inopportunely to
invite, but never to refuse, and invite, moreover, after a tacit and
quiet manner; and therefore is the malice and injustice of his accusers
most manifestly apparent. But be it how it will, protesting against the
proceedings of the advocates and judges, nature will, in the meantime,
proceed after her own way, who had done but well, had she endowed this
member with some particular privilege; the author of the sole immortal
work of mortals; a divine work, according to Socrates; and love, the
desire of immortality, and himself an immortal demon.
Some one, perhaps, by such an effect of imagination may have had the good
luck to leave behind him here, the scrofula, which his companion who has
come after, has carried with him into Spain. And ‘tis for this reason
you may see why men in such cases require a mind prepared for the thing
that is to be done. Why do the physicians possess, before hand, their
patients’ credulity with so many false promises of cure, if not to the
end, that the effect of imagination may supply the imposture of their
decoctions? They know very well, that a great master of their trade has
given it under his hand, that he has known some with whom the very sight
of physic would work. All which conceits come now into my head, by the
remembrance of a story was told me by a domestic apothecary of my
father’s, a blunt Swiss, a nation not much addicted to vanity and lying,
of a merchant he had long known at Toulouse, who being a valetudinary,
and much afflicted with the stone, had often occasion to take clysters,
of which he caused several sorts to be prescribed him by the physicians,
acccording to the accidents of his disease; which, being brought him, and
none of the usual forms, as feeling if it were not too hot, and the like,
being omitted, he lay down, the syringe advanced, and all ceremonies
performed, injection alone excepted; after which, the apothecary being
gone, and the patient accommodated as if he had really received a
clyster, he found the same operation and effect that those do who have
taken one indeed; and if at any time the physician did not find the
operation sufficient, he would usually give him two or three more doses,
after the same manner. And the fellow swore, that to save charges (for
he paid as if he had really taken them) this sick man’s wife, having
sometimes made trial of warm water only, the effect discovered the cheat,
and finding these would do no good, was fain to return to the old way.
A woman fancying she had swallowed a pin in a piece of bread, cried and
lamented as though she had an intolerable pain in her throat, where she
thought she felt it stick; but an ingenious fellow that was brought to
her, seeing no outward tumour nor alteration, supposing it to be only a
conceit taken at some crust of bread that had hurt her as it went down,
caused her to vomit, and, unseen, threw a crooked pin into the basin,
which the woman no sooner saw, but believing she had cast it up, she
presently found herself eased of her pain. I myself knew a gentleman,
who having treated a large company at his house, three or four days after
bragged in jest (for there was no such thing), that he had made them eat
of a baked cat; at which, a young gentlewoman, who had been at the feast,
took such a horror, that falling into a violent vomiting and fever, there
was no possible means to save her. Even brute beasts are subject to the
force of imagination as well as we; witness dogs, who die of grief for
the loss of their masters; and bark and tremble and start in their sleep;
so horses will kick and whinny in their sleep.
Now all this may be attributed to the close affinity and relation betwixt
the soul and the body intercommunicating their fortunes; but ‘tis quite
another thing when the imagination works not only upon one’s own
particular body, but upon that of others also. And as an infected body
communicates its malady to those that approach or live near it, as we see
in the plague, the smallpox, and sore eyes, that run through whole
families and cities:--
“Dum spectant oculi laesos, laeduntur et ipsi;
Multaque corporibus transitione nocent.”
[“When we look at people with sore eyes, our own eyes become sore.
Many things are hurtful to our bodies by transition.”
--Ovid, De Rem. Amor., 615.]
--so the imagination, being vehemently agitated, darts out infection
capable of offending the foreign object. The ancients had an opinion of
certain women of Scythia, that being animated and enraged against any
one, they killed him only with their looks. Tortoises and ostriches
hatch their eggs with only looking on them, which infers that their eyes
have in them some ejaculative virtue. And the eyes of witches are said
to be assailant and hurtful:--
“Nescio quis teneros oculus mihi fascinat agnos.”
[“Some eye, I know not whose is bewitching my tender lambs.”
--Virgil, Eclog., iii. 103.]
Magicians are no very good authority with me. But we experimentally see
that women impart the marks of their fancy to the children they carry in
the womb; witness her that was brought to bed of a Moor; and there was
presented to Charles the Emperor and King of Bohemia, a girl from about
Pisa, all over rough and covered with hair, whom her mother said to be so
conceived by reason of a picture of St. John the Baptist, that hung
within the curtains of her bed.
It is the same with beasts; witness Jacob’s sheep, and the hares and
partridges that the snow turns white upon the mountains. There was at my
house, a little while ago, a cat seen watching a bird upon the top of a
tree: these, for some time, mutually fixing their eyes one upon another,
the bird at last let herself fall dead into the cat’s claws, either
dazzled by the force of its own imagination, or drawn by some attractive
power of the cat. Such as are addicted to the pleasures of the field,
have, I make no question, heard the story of the falconer, who having
earnestly fixed his eyes upon a kite in the air; laid a wager that he
would bring her down with the sole power of his sight, and did so, as it
was said; for the tales I borrow I charge upon the consciences of those
from whom I have them. The discourses are my own, and found themselves
upon the proofs of reason, not of experience; to which every one has
liberty to add his own examples; and who has none, let him not forbear,
the number and varieties of accidents considered, to believe that there
are plenty of them; if I do not apply them well, let some other do it for
me. And, also, in the subject of which I treat, our manners and motions,
testimonies and instances; how fabulous soever, provided they are
possible, serve as well as the true; whether they have really happened or
no, at Rome or Paris, to John or Peter, ‘tis still within the verge of
human capacity, which serves me to good use. I see, and make my
advantage of it, as well in shadow as in substance; and amongst the
various readings thereof in history, I cull out the most rare and
memorable to fit my own turn. There are authors whose only end and
design it is to give an account of things that have happened; mine, if I
could arrive unto it, should be to deliver of what may happen. There is
a just liberty allowed in the schools, of supposing similitudes, when
they have none at hand. I do not, however, make any use of that
privilege, and as to that matter, in superstitious religion, surpass all
historical authority. In the examples which I here bring in, of what I
have heard, read, done, or said, I have forbidden myself to dare to alter
even the most light and indifferent circumstances; my conscience does not
falsify one tittle; what my ignorance may do, I cannot say.
And this it is that makes me sometimes doubt in my own mind, whether a
divine, or a philosopher, and such men of exact and tender prudence and
conscience, are fit to write history: for how can they stake their
reputation upon a popular faith? how be responsible for the opinions of
men they do not know? and with what assurance deliver their conjectures
for current pay? Of actions performed before their own eyes, wherein
several persons were actors, they would be unwilling to give evidence
upon oath before a judge; and there is no man, so familiarly known to
them, for whose intentions they would become absolute caution. For my
part, I think it less hazardous to write of things past, than present, by
how much the writer is only to give an account of things every one knows
he must of necessity borrow upon trust.
I am solicited to write the affairs of my own time by some, who fancy I
look upon them with an eye less blinded with passion than another, and
have a clearer insight into them by reason of the free access fortune has
given me to the heads of various factions; but they do not consider, that
to purchase the glory of Sallust, I would not give myself the trouble,
sworn enemy as I am to obligation, assiduity, or perseverance: that there
is nothing so contrary to my style, as a continued narrative, I so often
interrupt and cut myself short in my writing for want of breath; I have
neither composition nor explanation worth anything, and am ignorant,
beyond a child, of the phrases and even the very words proper to express
the most common things; and for that reason it is, that I have undertaken
to say only what I can say, and have accommodated my subject to my
strength. Should I take one to be my guide, peradventure I should not be
able to keep pace with him; and in the freedom of my liberty might
deliver judgments, which upon better thoughts, and according to reason,
would be illegitimate and punishable. Plutarch would say of what he has
delivered to us, that it is the work of others: that his examples are all
and everywhere exactly true: that they are useful to posterity, and are
presented with a lustre that will light us the way to virtue, is his own
work. It is not of so dangerous consequence, as in a medicinal drug,
whether an old story be so or so.
CHAPTER XXI
THAT THE PROFIT OF ONE MAN IS THE DAMAGE OF ANOTHER
Demades the Athenian--[Seneca, De Beneficiis, vi. 38, whence nearly the
whole of this chapter is taken.]--condemned one of his city, whose trade
it was to sell the necessaries for funeral ceremonies, upon pretence that
he demanded unreasonable profit, and that that profit could not accrue to
him, but by the death of a great number of people. A judgment that
appears to be ill grounded, forasmuch as no profit whatever can possibly
be made but at the expense of another, and that by the same rule he
should condemn all gain of what kind soever. The merchant only thrives
by the debauchery of youth, the husband man by the dearness of grain, the
architect by the ruin of buildings, lawyers and officers of justice by
the suits and contentions of men: nay, even the honour and office of
divines are derived from our death and vices. A physician takes no
pleasure in the health even of his friends, says the ancient Greek comic
writer, nor a soldier in the peace of his country, and so of the rest.
And, which is yet worse, let every one but dive into his own bosom, and
he will find his private wishes spring and his secret hopes grow up at
another’s expense. Upon which consideration it comes into my head, that
nature does not in this swerve from her general polity; for physicians
hold, that the birth, nourishment, and increase of every thing is the
dissolution and corruption of another:
“Nam quodcumque suis mutatum finibus exit,
Continuo hoc mors est illius, quod fuit ante.”
[“For, whatever from its own confines passes changed, this is at
once the death of that which before it was.”--Lucretius, ii. 752.]
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
Accommodated my subject to my strength
Affright people with the very mention of death
All I aim at is, to pass my time at my ease
All think he has yet twenty good years to come
Apprenticeship and a resemblance of death
Become a fool by too much wisdom
Both himself and his posterity declared ignoble, taxable
Caesar: he would be thought an excellent engineer to boot
Courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study
Dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our end
Death can, whenever we please, cut short inconveniences
Death has us every moment by the throat
Death is a part of you
Denying all solicitation, both of hand and mind
Did my discourses came only from my mouth or from my heart
Die well--that is, patiently and tranquilly.
Discover what there is of good and clean in the bottom of the po
Downright and sincere obedience
Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it.
Fear is more importunate and insupportable than death itself
Fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented?
Fear: begets a terrible astonishment and confusion
Feared, lest disgrace should make such delinquents desperate
Give these young wenches the things they long for
Have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying?
How many more have died before they arrived at thy age
How many several ways has death to surprise us?
How much more insupportable and painful an immortal life
I have lived longer by this one day than I should have done
I take hold of, as little glorious and exemplary as you will
If nature do not help a little, it is very hard
In this last scene of death, there is no more counterfeiting
Inclination to love one another at the first sight
Indocile liberty of this member
Insensible of the stroke when our youth dies in us
Live at the expense of life itself.
Much better to offend him once than myself every day
Nature, who left us in such a state of imperfection
Neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell
No man more certain than another of to-morrow.--Seneca
No one can be called happy till he is dead and buried
Not certain to live till I came home
Not melancholic, but meditative
Nothing can be a grievance that is but once
Philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die
Premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty
Profit made only at the expense of another
Rather prating of another man’s province than his own
Same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago
Slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk
some people rude, by being overcivil in their courtesy
The day of your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave
The deadest deaths are the best
The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear
There is no long, nor short, to things that are no more
Thing at which we all aim, even in virtue is pleasure
Things often appear greater to us at distance than near at hand
To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die
Utility of living consists not in the length of days
Valour has its bounds as well as other virtues
Valuing the interest of discipline
Well, and what if it had been death itself?
What may be done to-morrow, may be done to-day.
Who would weigh him without the honour and grandeur of his end.
Willingly slip the collar of command upon any pretence whatever
Woman who goes to bed to a man, must put off her modesty
You must first see us die
Young and old die upon the same terms
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 4.
XXII. Of custom, and that we should not easily change a law received
XXIII. Various events from the same counsel.
XXIV. Of pedantry.
CHAPTER XXII
OF CUSTOM, AND THAT WE SHOULD NOT EASILY CHANGE A LAW RECEIVED
He seems to me to have had a right and true apprehension of the power of
custom, who first invented the story of a country-woman who, having
accustomed herself to play with and carry a young calf in her arms, and
daily continuing to do so as it grew up, obtained this by custom, that,
when grown to be a great ox, she was still able to bear it. For, in
truth, custom is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She, by
little and little, slily and unperceived, slips in the foot of her
authority, but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the
benefit of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and
tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage or the
power so much as to lift up our eyes. We see her, at every turn, forcing
and violating the rules of nature:
“Usus efficacissimus rerum omnium magister.”
[“Custom is the best master of all things.”
--Pliny, Nat. Hist.,xxvi. 2.]
I refer to her Plato’s cave in his Republic, and the physicians, who so
often submit the reasons of their art to her authority; as the story of
that king, who by custom brought his stomach to that pass, as to live by
poison, and the maid that Albertus reports to have lived upon spiders.
In that new world of the Indies, there were found great nations, and in
very differing climates, who were of the same diet, made provision of
them, and fed them for their tables; as also, they did grasshoppers,
mice, lizards, and bats; and in a time of scarcity of such delicacies, a
toad was sold for six crowns, all which they cook, and dish up with
several sauces. There were also others found, to whom our diet, and the
flesh we eat, were venomous and mortal:
“Consuetudinis magna vis est: pernoctant venatores in nive:
in montibus uri se patiuntur: pugiles, caestibus contusi,
ne ingemiscunt quidem.”
[“The power of custom is very great: huntsmen will lie out all
night in the snow, or suffer themselves to be burned up by the sun
on the mountains; boxers, hurt by the caestus, never utter a
groan.”--Cicero, Tusc., ii. 17]
These strange examples will not appear so strange if we consider what we
have ordinary experience of, how much custom stupefies our senses. We
need not go to what is reported of the people about the cataracts of the
Nile; and what philosophers believe of the music of the spheres, that the
bodies of those circles being solid and smooth, and coming to touch and
rub upon one another, cannot fail of creating a marvellous harmony, the
changes and cadences of which cause the revolutions and dances of the
stars; but that the hearing sense of all creatures here below, being
universally, like that of the Egyptians, deafened, and stupefied with the
continual noise, cannot, how great soever, perceive it--[This passage is
taken from Cicero, “Dream of Scipio”; see his De Republica, vi. II. The
Egyptians were said to be stunned by the noise of the Cataracts.]--
Smiths, millers, pewterers, forgemen, and armourers could never be able
to live in the perpetual noise of their own trades, did it strike their
ears with the same violence that it does ours.
My perfumed doublet gratifies my own scent at first; but after I have
worn it three days together, ‘tis only pleasing to the bystanders. This
is yet more strange, that custom, notwithstanding long intermissions and
intervals, should yet have the power to unite and establish the effect of
its impressions upon our senses, as is manifest in such as live near unto
steeples and the frequent noise of the bells. I myself lie at home in a
tower, where every morning and evening a very great bell rings out the
Ave Maria: the noise shakes my very tower, and at first seemed
insupportable to me; but I am so used to it, that I hear it without any
manner of offence, and often without awaking at it.
Plato--[Diogenes Laertius, iii. 38. But he whom Plato censured was not
a boy playing at nuts, but a man throwing dice.]--reprehending a boy for
playing at nuts, “Thou reprovest me,” says the boy, “for a very little
thing.” “Custom,” replied Plato, “is no little thing.” I find that our
greatest vices derive their first propensity from our most tender
infancy, and that our principal education depends upon the nurse.
Mothers are mightily pleased to see a child writhe off the neck of a
chicken, or to please itself with hurting a dog or a cat; and such wise
fathers there are in the world, who look upon it as a notable mark of a
martial spirit, when they hear a son miscall, or see him domineer over a
poor peasant, or a lackey, that dares not reply, nor turn again; and a
great sign of wit, when they see him cheat and overreach his playfellow
by some malicious treachery and deceit. Yet these are the true seeds and
roots of cruelty, tyranny, and treason; they bud and put out there, and
afterwards shoot up vigorously, and grow to prodigious bulk, cultivated
by custom. And it is a very dangerous mistake to excuse these vile
inclinations upon the tenderness of their age, and the triviality of the
subject: first, it is nature that speaks, whose declaration is then more
sincere, and inward thoughts more undisguised, as it is more weak and
young; secondly, the deformity of cozenage does not consist nor depend
upon the difference betwixt crowns and pins; but I rather hold it more
just to conclude thus: why should he not cozen in crowns since he does it
in pins, than as they do, who say they only play for pins, they would not
do it if it were for money? Children should carefully be instructed to
abhor vices for their own contexture; and the natural deformity of those
vices ought so to be represented to them, that they may not only avoid
them in their actions, but especially so to abominate them in their
hearts, that the very thought should be hateful to them, with what mask
soever they may be disguised.
I know very well, for what concerns myself, that from having been brought
up in my childhood to a plain and straightforward way of dealing, and
from having had an aversion to all manner of juggling and foul play in my
childish sports and recreations (and, indeed, it is to be noted, that the
plays of children are not performed in play, but are to be judged in them
as their most serious actions), there is no game so small wherein from my
own bosom naturally, and without study or endeavour, I have not an
extreme aversion from deceit. I shuffle and cut and make as much clatter
with the cards, and keep as strict account for farthings, as it were for
double pistoles; when winning or losing against my wife and daughter,
‘tis indifferent to me, as when I play in good earnest with others, for
round sums. At all times, and in all places, my own eyes are sufficient
to look to my fingers; I am not so narrowly watched by any other, neither
is there any I have more respect to.
I saw the other day, at my own house, a little fellow, a native of
Nantes, born without arms, who has so well taught his feet to perform the
services his hands should have done him, that truly these have half
forgotten their natural office; and, indeed, the fellow calls them his
hands; with them he cuts anything, charges and discharges a pistol,
threads a needle, sews, writes, puts off his hat, combs his head, plays
at cards and dice, and all this with as much dexterity as any other could
do who had more, and more proper limbs to assist him. The money I gave
him--for he gains his living by shewing these feats--he took in his foot,
as we do in our hand. I have seen another who, being yet a boy,
flourished a two-handed sword, and, if I may so say, handled a halberd
with the mere motions of his neck and shoulders for want of hands; tossed
them into the air, and caught them again, darted a dagger, and cracked a
whip as well as any coachman in France.
But the effects of custom are much more manifest in the strange
impressions she imprints in our minds, where she meets with less
resistance. What has she not the power to impose upon our judgments and
beliefs? Is there any so fantastic opinion (omitting the gross
impostures of religions, with which we see so many great nations, and so
many understanding men, so strangely besotted; for this being beyond the
reach of human reason, any error is more excusable in such as are not
endued, through the divine bounty, with an extraordinary illumination
from above), but, of other opinions, are there any so extravagant, that
she has not planted and established for laws in those parts of the world
upon which she has been pleased to exercise her power? And therefore
that ancient exclamation was exceeding just:
“Non pudet physicum, id est speculatorem venatoremque naturae,
ab animis consuetudine imbutis petere testimonium veritatis?”
[“Is it not a shame for a natural philosopher, that is, for an
observer and hunter of nature, to seek testimony of the truth from
minds prepossessed by custom?”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., i. 30.]
I do believe, that no so absurd or ridiculous fancy can enter into human
imagination, that does not meet with some example of public practice, and
that, consequently, our reason does not ground and back up. There are
people, amongst whom it is the fashion to turn their backs upon him they
salute, and never look upon the man they intend to honour. There is a
place, where, whenever the king spits, the greatest ladies of his court
put out their hands to receive it; and another nation, where the most
eminent persons about him stoop to take up his ordure in a linen cloth.
Let us here steal room to insert a story.
A French gentleman was always wont to blow his nose with his fingers (a
thing very much against our fashion), and he justifying himself for so
doing, and he was a man famous for pleasant repartees, he asked me, what
privilege this filthy excrement had, that we must carry about us a fine
handkerchief to receive it, and, which was more, afterwards to lap it
carefully up, and carry it all day about in our pockets, which, he said,
could not but be much more nauseous and offensive, than to see it thrown
away, as we did all other evacuations. I found that what he said was not
altogether without reason, and by being frequently in his company, that
slovenly action of his was at last grown familiar to me; which
nevertheless we make a face at, when we hear it reported of another
country. Miracles appear to be so, according to our ignorance of nature,
and not according to the essence of nature the continually being
accustomed to anything, blinds the eye of our judgment. Barbarians are
no more a wonder to us, than we are to them; nor with any more reason, as
every one would confess, if after having travelled over those remote
examples, men could settle themselves to reflect upon, and rightly to
confer them, with their own. Human reason is a tincture almost equally
infused into all our opinions and manners, of what form soever they are;
infinite in matter, infinite in diversity. But I return to my subject.
There are peoples, where, his wife and children excepted, no one speaks
to the king but through a tube. In one and the same nation, the virgins
discover those parts that modesty should persuade them to hide, and the
married women carefully cover and conceal them. To which, this custom,
in another place, has some relation, where chastity, but in marriage, is
of no esteem, for unmarried women may prostitute themselves to as many as
they please, and being got with child, may lawfully take physic, in the
sight of every one, to destroy their fruit. And, in another place, if a
tradesman marry, all of the same condition, who are invited to the
wedding, lie with the bride before him; and the greater number of them
there is, the greater is her honour, and the opinion of her ability and
strength: if an officer marry, ‘tis the same, the same with a labourer,
or one of mean condition; but then it belongs to the lord of the place to
perform that office; and yet a severe loyalty during marriage is
afterward strictly enjoined. There are places where brothels of young
men are kept for the pleasure of women; where the wives go to war as well
as the husbands, and not only share in the dangers of battle, but,
moreover, in the honours of command. Others, where they wear rings not
only through their noses, lips, cheeks, and on their toes, but also
weighty gimmals of gold thrust through their paps and buttocks; where, in
eating, they wipe their fingers upon their thighs, genitories, and the
soles of their feet: where children are excluded, and brothers and
nephews only inherit; and elsewhere, nephews only, saving in the
succession of the prince: where, for the regulation of community in goods
and estates, observed in the country, certain sovereign magistrates have
committed to them the universal charge and overseeing of the agriculture,
and distribution of the fruits, according to the necessity of every one
where they lament the death of children, and feast at the decease of old
men: where they lie ten or twelve in a bed, men and their wives together:
where women, whose husbands come to violent ends, may marry again, and
others not: where the condition of women is looked upon with such
contempt, that they kill all the native females, and buy wives of their
neighbours to supply their use; where husbands may repudiate their wives,
without showing any cause, but wives cannot part from their husbands, for
what cause soever; where husbands may sell their wives in case of
sterility; where they boil the bodies of their dead, and afterward pound
them to a pulp, which they mix with their wine, and drink it; where the
most coveted sepulture is to be eaten by dogs, and elsewhere by birds;
where they believe the souls of the blessed live in all manner of
liberty, in delightful fields, furnished with all sorts of delicacies,
and that it is these souls, repeating the words we utter, which we call
Echo; where they fight in the water, and shoot their arrows with the most
mortal aim, swimming; where, for a sign of subjection, they lift up their
shoulders, and hang down their heads; where they put off their shoes when
they enter the king’s palace; where the eunuchs, who take charge of the
sacred women, have, moreover, their lips and noses cut off, that they may
not be loved; where the priests put out their own eyes, to be better
acquainted with their demons, and the better to receive their oracles;
where every one makes to himself a deity of what he likes best; the
hunter of a lion or a fox, the fisher of some fish; idols of every human
action or passion; in which place, the sun, the moon, and the earth are
the ‘principal deities, and the form of taking an oath is, to touch the
earth, looking up to heaven; where both flesh and fish is eaten raw;
where the greatest oath they take is, to swear by the name of some dead
person of reputation, laying their hand upon his tomb; where the
newyear’s gift the king sends every year to the princes, his vassals, is
fire, which being brought, all the old fire is put out, and the
neighbouring people are bound to fetch of the new, every one for
themselves, upon pain of high treason; where, when the king, to betake
himself wholly to devotion, retires from his administration (which often
falls out), his next successor is obliged to do the same, and the right
of the kingdom devolves to the third in succession: where they vary the
form of government, according to the seeming necessity of affairs: depose
the king when they think good, substituting certain elders to govern in
his stead, and sometimes transferring it into the hands of the
commonality: where men and women are both circumcised and also baptized:
where the soldier, who in one or several engagements, has been so
fortunate as to present seven of the enemies’ heads to the king, is made
noble: where they live in that rare and unsociable opinion of the
mortality of the soul: where the women are delivered without pain or
fear: where the women wear copper leggings upon both legs, and if a louse
bite them, are bound in magnanimity to bite them again, and dare not
marry, till first they have made their king a tender of their virginity,
if he please to accept it: where the ordinary way of salutation is by
putting a finger down to the earth, and then pointing it up toward
heaven: where men carry burdens upon their heads, and women on their
shoulders; where the women make water standing, and the men squatting:
where they send their blood in token of friendship, and offer incense to
the men they would honour, like gods: where, not only to the fourth, but
in any other remote degree, kindred are not permitted to marry: where the
children are four years at nurse, and often twelve; in which place, also,
it is accounted mortal to give the child suck the first day after it is
born: where the correction of the male children is peculiarly designed to
the fathers, and to the mothers of the girls; the punishment being to
hang them by the heels in the smoke: where they circumcise the women:
where they eat all sorts of herbs, without other scruple than of the
badness of the smell: where all things are open the finest houses,
furnished in the richest manner, without doors, windows, trunks, or
chests to lock, a thief being there punished double what they are in
other places: where they crack lice with their teeth like monkeys, and
abhor to see them killed with one’s nails: where in all their lives they
neither cut their hair nor pare their nails; and, in another place, pare
those of the right hand only, letting the left grow for ornament and
bravery: where they suffer the hair on the right side to grow as long as
it will, and shave the other; and in the neighbouring provinces, some let
their hair grow long before, and some behind, shaving close the rest:
where parents let out their children, and husbands their wives, to their
guests to hire: where a man may get his own mother with child, and
fathers make use of their own daughters or sons, without scandal: where,
at their solemn feasts, they interchangeably lend their children to one
another, without any consideration of nearness of blood. In one place,
men feed upon human flesh; in another, ‘tis reputed a pious office for a
man to kill his father at a certain age; elsewhere, the fathers dispose
of their children, whilst yet in their mothers’ wombs, some to be
preserved and carefully brought up, and others to be abandoned or made
away. Elsewhere the old husbands lend their wives to young men; and in
another place they are in common without offence; in one place
particularly, the women take it for a mark of honour to have as many gay
fringed tassels at the bottom of their garment, as they have lain with
several men. Moreover, has not custom made a republic of women
separately by themselves? has it not put arms into their hands, and made
them raise armies and fight battles? And does she not, by her own
precept, instruct the most ignorant vulgar, and make them perfect in
things which all the philosophy in the world could never beat into the
heads of the wisest men? For we know entire nations, where death was not
only despised, but entertained with the greatest triumph; where children
of seven years old suffered themselves to be whipped to death, without
changing countenance; where riches were in such contempt, that the
meanest citizen would not have deigned to stoop to take up a purse of
crowns. And we know regions, very fruitful in all manner of provisions,
where, notwithstanding, the most ordinary diet, and that they are most
pleased with, is only bread, cresses, and water. Did not custom,
moreover, work that miracle in Chios that, in seven hundred years, it was
never known that ever maid or wife committed any act to the prejudice of
her honour?
To conclude; there is nothing, in my opinion, that she does not, or may
not do; and therefore, with very good reason it is that Pindar calls her
the ruler of the world. He that was seen to beat his father, and
reproved for so doing, made answer, that it was the custom of their
family; that, in like manner, his father had beaten his grandfather, his
grandfather his great-grandfather, “And this,” says he, pointing to his
son, “when he comes to my age, shall beat me.” And the father, whom the
son dragged and hauled along the streets, commanded him to stop at a
certain door, for he himself, he said, had dragged his father no farther,
that being the utmost limit of the hereditary outrage the sons used to
practise upon the fathers in their family. It is as much by custom as
infirmity, says Aristotle, that women tear their hair, bite their nails,
and eat coals and earth, and more by custom than nature that men abuse
themselves with one another.
The laws of conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature,
proceed from custom; every one, having an inward veneration for the
opinions and manners approved and received amongst his own people,
cannot, without very great reluctance, depart from them, nor apply
himself to them without applause. In times past, when those of Crete
would curse any one, they prayed the gods to engage him in some ill
custom. But the principal effect of its power is, so to seize and
ensnare us, that it is hardly in us to disengage ourselves from its
gripe, or so to come to ourselves, as to consider of and to weigh the
things it enjoins. To say the truth, by reason that we suck it in with
our milk, and that the face of the world presents itself in this posture
to our first sight, it seems as if we were born upon condition to follow
on this track; and the common fancies that we find in repute everywhere
about us, and infused into our minds with the seed of our fathers, appear
to be the most universal and genuine; from whence it comes to pass, that
whatever is off the hinges of custom, is believed to be also off the
hinges of reason; how unreasonably for the most part, God knows.
If, as we who study ourselves have learned to do, every one who hears a
good sentence, would immediately consider how it does in any way touch
his own private concern, every one would find, that it was not so much a
good saying, as a severe lash to the ordinary stupidity of his own
judgment: but men receive the precepts and admonitions of truth, as
directed to the common sort, and never to themselves; and instead of
applying them to their own manners, do only very ignorantly and
unprofitably commit them to memory. But let us return to the empire of
custom.
Such people as have been bred up to liberty, and subject to no other
dominion but the authority of their own will, look upon all other form of
government as monstrous and contrary to nature. Those who are inured to
monarchy do the same; and what opportunity soever fortune presents them
with to change, even then, when with the greatest difficulties they have
disengaged themselves from one master, that was troublesome and grievous
to them, they presently run, with the same difficulties, to create
another; being unable to take into hatred subjection itself.
‘Tis by the mediation of custom, that every one is content with the place
where he is planted by nature; and the Highlanders of Scotland no more
pant after Touraine; than the Scythians after Thessaly. Darius asking
certain Greeks what they would take to assume the custom of the Indians,
of eating the dead bodies of their fathers (for that was their use,
believing they could not give them a better nor more noble sepulture than
to bury them in their own bodies), they made answer, that nothing in the
world should hire them to do it; but having also tried to persuade the
Indians to leave their custom, and, after the Greek manner, to burn the
bodies of their fathers, they conceived a still greater horror at the
motion.--[Herodotus, iii. 38.]--Every one does the same, for use veils
from us the true aspect of things.
“Nil adeo magnum, nec tam mirabile quidquam
Principio, quod non minuant mirarier omnes Paullatim.”
[“There is nothing at first so grand, so admirable, which by degrees
people do not regard with less admiration.”--Lucretius, ii. 1027]
Taking upon me once to justify something in use amongst us, and that was
received with absolute authority for a great many leagues round about us,
and not content, as men commonly do, to establish it only by force of law
and example, but inquiring still further into its origin, I found the
foundation so weak, that I who made it my business to confirm others, was
very near being dissatisfied myself. ‘Tis by this receipt that Plato
--[Laws, viii. 6.]--undertakes to cure the unnatural and preposterous
loves of his time, as one which he esteems of sovereign virtue, namely,
that the public opinion condemns them; that the poets, and all other
sorts of writers, relate horrible stories of them; a recipe, by virtue of
which the most beautiful daughters no more allure their fathers’ lust;
nor brothers, of the finest shape and fashion, their sisters’ desire; the
very fables of Thyestes, OEdipus, and Macareus, having with the harmony
of their song, infused this wholesome opinion and belief into the tender
brains of children. Chastity is, in truth, a great and shining virtue,
and of which the utility is sufficiently known; but to treat of it, and
to set it off in its true value, according to nature, is as hard as ‘tis
easy to do so according to custom, laws, and precepts. The fundamental
and universal reasons are of very obscure and difficult research, and our
masters either lightly pass them over, or not daring so much as to touch
them, precipitate themselves into the liberty and protection of custom,
there puffing themselves out and triumphing to their heart’s content:
such as will not suffer themselves to be withdrawn from this original
source, do yet commit a greater error, and subject themselves to wild
opinions; witness Chrysippus,--[Sextus Empiricus, Pyyrhon. Hypotyp., i.
14.]--who, in so many of his writings, has strewed the little account he
made of incestuous conjunctions, committed with how near relations
soever.
Whoever would disengage himself from this violent prejudice of custom,
would find several things received with absolute and undoubting opinion,
that have no other support than the hoary head and rivelled face of
ancient usage. But the mask taken off, and things being referred to the
decision of truth and reason, he will find his judgment as it were
altogether overthrown, and yet restored to a much more sure estate. For
example, I shall ask him, what can be more strange than to see a people
obliged to obey laws they never understood; bound in all their domestic
affairs, as marriages, donations, wills, sales, and purchases, to rules
they cannot possibly know, being neither written nor published in their
own language, and of which they are of necessity to purchase both the
interpretation and the use? Not according to the ingenious opinion of
Isocrates,--[Discourse to Nicocles.]--who counselled his king to make
the traffics and negotiations of his subjects, free, frank, and of profit
to them, and their quarrels and disputes burdensome, and laden with heavy
impositions and penalties; but, by a prodigious opinion, to make sale of
reason itself, and to give to laws a course of merchandise. I think
myself obliged to fortune that, as our historians report, it was a Gascon
gentleman, a countryman of mine, who first opposed Charlemagne, when he
attempted to impose upon us Latin and imperial laws.
What can be more savage, than to see a nation where, by lawful custom,
the office of a judge is bought and sold, where judgments are paid for
with ready money, and where justice may legitimately be denied to him
that has not wherewithal to pay; a merchandise in so great repute, as in
a government to create a fourth estate of wrangling lawyers, to add to
the three ancient ones of the church, nobility, and people; which fourth
estate, having the laws in their own hands, and sovereign power over
men’s lives and fortunes, makes another body separate from nobility:
whence it comes to pass, that there are double laws, those of honour and
those of justice, in many things altogether opposite one to another; the
nobles as rigorously condemning a lie taken, as the other do a lie
revenged: by the law of arms, he shall be degraded from all nobility and
honour who puts up with an affront; and by the civil law, he who
vindicates his reputation by revenge incurs a capital punishment: he who
applies himself to the law for reparation of an offence done to his
honour, disgraces himself; and he who does not, is censured and punished
by the law. Yet of these two so different things, both of them referring
to one head, the one has the charge of peace, the other of war; those
have the profit, these the honour; those the wisdom, these the virtue;
those the word, these the action; those justice, these valour; those
reason, these force; those the long robe, these the short;--divided
betwixt them.
For what concerns indifferent things, as clothes, who is there seeking to
bring them back to their true use, which is the body’s service and
convenience, and upon which their original grace and fitness depend; for
the most fantastic, in my opinion, that can be imagined, I will instance
amongst others, our flat caps, that long tail of velvet that hangs down
from our women’s heads, with its party-coloured trappings; and that vain
and futile model of a member we cannot in modesty so much as name, which,
nevertheless, we make show and parade of in public. These
considerations, notwithstanding, will not prevail upon any understanding
man to decline the common mode; but, on the contrary, methinks, all
singular and particular fashions are rather marks of folly and vain
affectation than of sound reason, and that a wise man, within, ought to
withdraw and retire his soul from the crowd, and there keep it at liberty
and in power to judge freely of things; but as to externals, absolutely
to follow and conform himself to the fashion of the time. Public society
has nothing to do with our thoughts, but the rest, as our actions, our
labours, our fortunes, and our lives, we are to lend and abandon them to
its service and to the common opinion, as did that good and great
Socrates who refused to preserve his life by a disobedience to the
magistrate, though a very wicked and unjust one for it is the rule of
rules, the general law of laws, that every one observe those of the place
wherein he lives.
[“It is good to obey the laws of one’s country.”
--Excerpta ex Trag. Gyaecis, Grotio interp., 1626, p. 937.]
And now to another point. It is a very great doubt, whether any so
manifest benefit can accrue from the alteration of a law received, let it
be what it will, as there is danger and inconvenience in altering it;
forasmuch as government is a structure composed of divers parts and
members joined and united together, with so strict connection, that it is
impossible to stir so much as one brick or stone, but the whole body will
be sensible of it. The legislator of the Thurians--[Charondas; Diod.
Sic., xii. 24.]--ordained, that whosoever would go about either to
abolish an old law, or to establish a new, should present himself with a
halter about his neck to the people, to the end, that if the innovation
he would introduce should not be approved by every one, he might
immediately be hanged; and he of the Lacedaemonians employed his life to
obtain from his citizens a faithful promise that none of his laws should
be violated.--[Lycurgus; Plutarch, in Vita, c. 22.]--The Ephoros who so
rudely cut the two strings that Phrynis had added to music never stood to
examine whether that addition made better harmony, or that by its means
the instrument was more full and complete; it was enough for him to
condemn the invention, that it was a novelty, and an alteration of the
old fashion. Which also is the meaning of the old rusty sword carried
before the magistracy of Marseilles.
For my own part, I have a great aversion from a novelty, what face or
what pretence soever it may carry along with it, and have reason, having
been an eyewitness of the great evils it has produced. For those which
for so many years have lain so heavy upon us, it is not wholly
accountable; but one may say, with colour enough, that it has
accidentally produced and begotten the mischiefs and ruin that have since
happened, both without and against it; it, principally, we are to accuse
for these disorders:
“Heu! patior telis vulnera facta meis.”
[“Alas! The wounds were made by my own weapons.”
--Ovid, Ep. Phyll. Demophoonti, vers. 48.]
They who give the first shock to a state, are almost naturally the first
overwhelmed in its ruin the fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed
by him who was the first motor; he beats and disturbs the water for
another’s net. The unity and contexture of this monarchy, of this grand
edifice, having been ripped and torn in her old age, by this thing called
innovation, has since laid open a rent, and given sufficient admittance
to such injuries: the royal majesty with greater difficulty declines from
the summit to the middle, then it falls and tumbles headlong from the
middle to the bottom. But if the inventors do the greater mischief, the
imitators are more vicious to follow examples of which they have felt and
punished both the horror and the offence. And if there can be any degree
of honour in ill-doing, these last must yield to the others the glory of
contriving, and the courage of making the first attempt. All sorts of
new disorders easily draw, from this primitive and ever-flowing fountain,
examples and precedents to trouble and discompose our government: we read
in our very laws, made for the remedy of this first evil, the beginning
and pretences of all sorts of wicked enterprises; and that befalls us,
which Thucydides said of the civil wars of his time, that, in favour of
public vices, they gave them new and more plausible names for their
excuse, sweetening and disguising their true titles; which must be done,
forsooth, to reform our conscience and belief:
“Honesta oratio est;”
[“Fine words truly.”--Ter. And., i. I, 114.]
but the best pretence for innovation is of very dangerous consequence:
“Aden nihil motum ex antiquo probabile est.”
[“We are ever wrong in changing ancient ways.”--Livy, xxxiv. 54]
And freely to speak my thoughts, it argues a strange self-love and great
presumption to be so fond of one’s own opinions, that a public peace must
be overthrown to establish them, and to introduce so many inevitable
mischiefs, and so dreadful a corruption of manners, as a civil war and
the mutations of state consequent to it, always bring in their train, and
to introduce them, in a thing of so high concern, into the bowels of
one’s own country. Can there be worse husbandry than to set up so many
certain and knowing vices against errors that are only contested and
disputable? And are there any worse sorts of vices than those committed
against a man’s own conscience, and the natural light of his own reason?
The Senate, upon the dispute betwixt it and the people about the
administration of their religion, was bold enough to return this evasion
for current pay:
“Ad deos id magis, quam ad se, pertinere: ipsos visuros,
ne sacra sua polluantur;”
[“Those things belong to the gods to determine than to them; let the
gods, therefore, take care that their sacred mysteries were not
profaned.”--Livy, x. 6.]
according to what the oracle answered to those of Delphos who, fearing to
be invaded by the Persians in the Median war, inquired of Apollo, how
they should dispose of the holy treasure of his temple; whether they
should hide, or remove it to some other place? He returned them answer,
that they should stir nothing from thence, and only take care of
themselves, for he was sufficient to look to what belonged to him.
--[Herodotus, viii. 36.].--
The Christian religion has all the marks of the utmost utility and
justice: but none more manifest than the severe injunction it lays
indifferently upon all to yield absolute obedience to the civil
magistrate, and to maintain and defend the laws. Of which, what a
wonderful example has the divine wisdom left us, that, to establish the
salvation of mankind, and to conduct His glorious victory over death and
sin, would do it after no other way, but at the mercy of our ordinary
forms of justice subjecting the progress and issue of so high and so
salutiferous an effect, to the blindness and injustice of our customs
and observances; sacrificing the innocent blood of so many of His elect,
and so long a loss of so many years, to the maturing of this inestimable
fruit? There is a vast difference betwixt the case of one who follows
the forms and laws of his country, and of another who will undertake to
regulate and change them; of whom the first pleads simplicity, obedience,
and example for his excuse, who, whatever he shall do, it cannot be
imputed to malice; ‘tis at the worst but misfortune:
“Quis est enim, quem non moveat clarissimis monumentis
testata consignataque antiquitas?”
[“For who is there that antiquity, attested and confirmed by the
fairest monuments, cannot move?”--Cicero, De Divin., i. 40.]
besides what Isocrates says, that defect is nearer allied to moderation
than excess: the other is a much more ruffling gamester; for whosoever
shall take upon him to choose and alter, usurps the authority of judging,
and should look well about him, and make it his business to discern
clearly the defect of what he would abolish, and the virtue of what he is
about to introduce.
This so vulgar consideration is that which settled me in my station, and
kept even my most extravagant and ungoverned youth under the rein, so as
not to burden my shoulders with so great a weight, as to render myself
responsible for a science of that importance, and in this to dare, what
in my better and more mature judgment, I durst not do in the most easy
and indifferent things I had been instructed in, and wherein the temerity
of judging is of no consequence at all; it seeming to me very unjust to
go about to subject public and established customs and institutions, to
the weakness and instability of a private and particular fancy (for
private reason has but a private jurisdiction), and to attempt that upon
the divine, which no government will endure a man should do, upon the
civil laws; with which, though human reason has much more commerce than
with the other, yet are they sovereignly judged by their own proper
judges, and the extreme sufficiency serves only to expound and set forth
the law and custom received, and neither to wrest it, nor to introduce
anything, of innovation. If, sometimes, the divine providence has gone
beyond the rules to which it has necessarily bound and obliged us men,
it is not to give us any dispensation to do the same; those are
masterstrokes of the divine hand, which we are not to imitate, but to
admire, and extraordinary examples, marks of express and particular
purposes, of the nature of miracles, presented before us for
manifestations of its almightiness, equally above both our rules and
force, which it would be folly and impiety to attempt to represent and
imitate; and that we ought not to follow, but to contemplate with the
greatest reverence: acts of His personage, and not for us. Cotta very
opportunely declares:
“Quum de religione agitur, Ti. Coruncanium, P. Scipionem,
P. Scaevolam, pontifices maximos, non Zenonem, aut Cleanthem,
aut Chrysippum, sequor.”
[“When matter of religion is in question, I follow the high priests
T. Coruncanius, P. Scipio, P. Scaevola, and not Zeno, Cleanthes, or
Chrysippus.”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., iii. 2.]
God knows, in the present quarrel of our civil war, where there are a
hundred articles to dash out and to put in, great and very considerable,
how many there are who can truly boast, they have exactly and perfectly
weighed and understood the grounds and reasons of the one and the other
party; ‘tis a number, if they make any number, that would be able to give
us very little disturbance. But what becomes of all the rest, under what
ensigns do they march, in what quarter do they lie? Theirs have the same
effect with other weak and ill-applied medicines; they have only set the
humours they would purge more violently in work, stirred and exasperated
by the conflict, and left them still behind. The potion was too weak to
purge, but strong enough to weaken us; so that it does not work, but we
keep it still in our bodies, and reap nothing from the operation but
intestine gripes and dolours.
So it is, nevertheless, that Fortune still reserving her authority in
defiance of whatever we are able to do or say, sometimes presents us with
a necessity so urgent, that ‘tis requisite the laws should a little yield
and give way; and when one opposes the increase of an innovation that
thus intrudes itself by violence, to keep a man’s self in so doing, in
all places and in all things within bounds and rules against those who
have the power, and to whom all things are lawful that may in any way
serve to advance their design, who have no other law nor rule but what
serves best to their own purpose, ‘tis a dangerous obligation and an
intolerable inequality:
“Aditum nocendi perfido praestat fides,”
[“Putting faith in a treacherous person, opens the door to
harm.”--Seneca, OEdip., act iii., verse 686.]
forasmuch as the ordinary discipline of a healthful state does not
provide against these extraordinary accidents; it presupposes a body that
supports itself in its principal members and offices, and a common
consent to its obedience and observation. A legitimate proceeding is
cold, heavy, and constrained, and not fit to make head against a
headstrong and unbridled proceeding. ‘Tis known to be to this day cast
in the dish of those two great men, Octavius and Cato, in the two civil
wars of Sylla and Caesar, that they would rather suffer their country to
undergo the last extremities, than relieve their fellow-citizens at the
expense of its laws, or be guilty of any innovation; for in truth, in
these last necessities, where there is no other remedy, it would,
peradventure, be more discreetly done, to stoop and yield a little to
receive the blow, than, by opposing without possibility of doing good,
to give occasion to violence to trample all under foot; and better to
make the laws do what they can, when they cannot do what they would.
After this manner did he--[Agesilaus.]--who suspended them for
four-and-twenty hours, and he who, for once shifted a day in the
calendar, and that other--[Alexander the Great.]--who of the month of
June made a second of May. The Lacedaemonians themselves, who were so
religious observers of the laws of their country, being straitened by
one of their own edicts, by which it was expressly forbidden to choose
the same man twice to be admiral; and on the other side, their affairs
necessarily requiring, that Lysander should again take upon him that
command, they made one Aratus admiral; ‘tis true, but withal, Lysander
went general of the navy; and, by the same subtlety, one of their
ambassadors being sent to the Athenians to obtain the revocation of some
decree, and Pericles remonstrating to him, that it was forbidden to take
away the tablet wherein a law had once been engrossed, he advised him to
turn it only, that being not forbidden; and Plutarch commends
Philopoemen, that being born to command, he knew how to do it, not only
according to the laws, but also to overrule even the laws themselves,
when the public necessity so required.
CHAPTER XXIII
VARIOUS EVENTS FROM THE SAME COUNSEL
Jacques Amiot, grand almoner of France, one day related to me this story,
much to the honour of a prince of ours (and ours he was upon several very
good accounts, though originally of foreign extraction),--[The Duc de
Guise, surnamed Le Balafre.]--that in the time of our first commotions,
at the siege of Rouen,--[In 1562]--this prince, having been advertised
by the queen-mother of a conspiracy against his life, and in her letters
particular notice being given him of the person who was to execute the
business (who was a gentleman of Anjou or of Maine, and who to this
effect ordinarily frequented this prince’s house), discovered not a
syllable of this intelligence to any one whatever; but going the next day
to the St. Catherine’s Mount,--[An eminence outside Rouen overlooking the
Seine. D.W.]--from which our battery played against the town (for it
was during the time of the siege), and having in company with him the
said lord almoner, and another bishop, he saw this gentleman, who had
been denoted to him, and presently sent for him; to whom, being come
before him, seeing him already pale and trembling with the conscience of
his guilt, he thus said, “Monsieur,” such an one, “you guess what I have
to say to you; your countenance discovers it; ‘tis in vain to disguise
your practice, for I am so well informed of your business, that it will
but make worse for you, to go about to conceal or deny it: you know very
well such and such passages” (which were the most secret circumstances of
his conspiracy), “and therefore be sure, as you tender your own life,
to confess to me the whole truth of the design.” The poor man seeing
himself thus trapped and convicted (for the whole business had been
discovered to the queen by one of the accomplices), was in such a taking,
he knew not what to do; but, folding his hands, to beg and sue for mercy,
he threw himself at his prince’s feet, who taking him up, proceeded to
say, “Come, sir; tell me, have I at any time done you offence? or have
I, through private hatred or malice, offended any kinsman or friend of
yours? It is not above three weeks that I have known you; what
inducement, then, could move you to attempt my death?” To which the
gentleman with a trembling voice replied, “That it was no particular
grudge he had to his person, but the general interest and concern of his
party, and that he had been put upon it by some who had persuaded him it
would be a meritorious act, by any means, to extirpate so great and so
powerful an enemy of their religion.” “Well,” said the prince, “I will
now let you see, how much more charitable the religion is that I
maintain, than that which you profess: yours has counselled you to kill
me, without hearing me speak, and without ever having given you any cause
of offence; and mine commands me to forgive you, convict as you are, by
your own confession, of a design to kill me without reason.--[Imitated by
Voltaire. See Nodier, Questions, p. 165.]--Get you gone; let me see you
no more; and, if you are wise, choose henceforward honester men for your
counsellors in your designs.”--[Dampmartin, La Fortune de la Coup, liv.
ii., p. 139]
The Emperor Augustus,--[This story is taken from Seneca, De Clementia,
i. 9.]--being in Gaul, had certain information of a conspiracy L. Cinna
was contriving against him; he therefore resolved to make him an example;
and, to that end, sent to summon his friends to meet the next morning in
counsel. But the night between he passed in great unquietness of mind,
considering that he was about to put to death a young man, of an
illustrious family, and nephew to the great Pompey, and this made him
break out into several passionate complainings. “What then,” said he,
“is it possible that I am to live in perpetual anxiety and alarm, and
suffer my would-be assassin, meantime, to walk abroad at liberty? Shall
he go unpunished, after having conspired against my life, a life that I
have hitherto defended in so many civil wars, in so many battles by land
and by sea? And after having settled the universal peace of the whole
world, shall this man be pardoned, who has conspired not only to murder,
but to sacrifice me?”--for the conspiracy was to kill him at sacrifice.
After which, remaining for some time silent, he began again, in louder
tones, and exclaimed against himself, saying: “Why livest thou, if it be
for the good of so many that thou shouldst die? must there be no end of
thy revenges and cruelties? Is thy life of so great value, that so many
mischiefs must be done to preserve it?” His wife Livia, seeing him in
this perplexity: “Will you take a woman’s counsel?” said she. “Do as
the physicians do, who, when the ordinary recipes will do no good, make
trial of the contrary. By severity you have hitherto prevailed nothing;
Lepidus has followed Salvidienus; Murena, Lepidus; Caepio, Murena;
Egnatius, Caepio. Begin now, and try how sweetness and clemency will
succeed. Cinna is convict; forgive him, he will never henceforth have
the heart to hurt thee, and it will be an act to thy glory.” Augustus
was well pleased that he had met with an advocate of his own humour;
wherefore, having thanked his wife, and, in the morning, countermanded
his friends he had before summoned to council, he commanded Cinna all
alone to be brought to him; who being accordingly come, and a chair by
his appointment set him, having ordered all the rest out of the room, he
spake to him after this manner: “In the first place, Cinna, I demand of
thee patient audience; do not interrupt me in what I am about to say, and
I will afterwards give thee time and leisure to answer. Thou knowest,
Cinna,--[This passage, borrowed from Seneca, has been paraphrased in
verse by Corneille. See Nodier, Questions de la Literature llgale, 1828,
pp. 7, 160. The monologue of Augustus in this chapter is also from
Seneca. Ibid., 164.]--that having taken thee prisoner in the enemy’s
camp, and thou an enemy, not only so become, but born so, I gave thee thy
life, restored to thee all thy goods, and, finally, put thee in so good a
posture, by my bounty, of living well and at thy ease, that the
victorious envied the conquered. The sacerdotal office which thou madest
suit to me for, I conferred upon thee, after having denied it to others,
whose fathers have ever borne arms in my service. After so many
obligations, thou hast undertaken to kill me.” At which Cinna crying out
that he was very far from entertaining any so wicked a thought: “Thou
dost not keep thy promise, Cinna,” continued Augustus, “that thou wouldst
not interrupt me. Yes, thou hast undertaken to murder me in such a
place, on such a day, in such and such company, and in such a manner.”
At which words, seeing Cinna astounded and silent, not upon the account
of his promise so to be, but interdict with the weight of his conscience:
“Why,” proceeded Augustus, “to what end wouldst thou do it? Is it to be
emperor? Believe me, the Republic is in very ill condition, if I am the
only man betwixt thee and the empire. Thou art not able so much as to
defend thy own house, and but t’other day was baffled in a suit, by the
opposed interest of a mere manumitted slave. What, hast thou neither
means nor power in any other thing, but only to undertake Caesar? I quit
the throne, if there be no other than I to obstruct thy hopes. Canst
thou believe that Paulus, that Fabius, that the Cossii and the Servilii,
and so many noble Romans, not only so in title, but who by their virtue
honour their nobility, would suffer or endure thee?” After this, and a
great deal more that he said to him (for he was two long hours in
speaking), “Now go, Cinna, go thy way: I give thee that life as traitor
and parricide, which I before gave thee in the quality of an enemy. Let
friendship from this time forward begin betwixt us, and let us show
whether I have given, or thou hast received thy life with the better
faith”; and so departed from him. Some time after, he preferred him to
the consular dignity, complaining that he had not the confidence to
demand it; had him ever after for his very great friend, and was, at
last, made by him sole heir to all his estate. Now, from the time of
this accident which befell Augustus in the fortieth year of his age, he
never had any conspiracy or attempt against him, and so reaped the due
reward of this his so generous clemency. But it did not so happen with
our prince, his moderation and mercy not so securing him, but that he
afterwards fell into the toils of the like treason,--[The Duc de Guise
was assassinated in 1563 by Poltrot.]--so vain and futile a thing is
human prudence; throughout all our projects, counsels and precautions,
Fortune will still be mistress of events.
We repute physicians fortunate when they hit upon a lucky cure, as if
there was no other art but theirs that could not stand upon its own legs,
and whose foundations are too weak to support itself upon its own basis;
as if no other art stood in need of Fortune’s hand to help it. For my
part, I think of physic as much good or ill as any one would have me:
for, thanks be to God, we have no traffic together. I am of a quite
contrary humour to other men, for I always despise it; but when I am
sick, instead of recanting, or entering into composition with it, I
begin, moreover, to hate and fear it, telling them who importune me to
take physic, that at all events they must give me time to recover my
strength and health, that I may be the better able to support and
encounter the violence and danger of their potions. I let nature work,
supposing her to be sufficiently armed with teeth and claws to defend
herself from the assaults of infirmity, and to uphold that contexture,
the dissolution of which she flies and abhors. I am afraid, lest,
instead of assisting her when close grappled and struggling with disease,
I should assist her adversary, and burden her still more with work to do.
Now, I say, that not in physic only, but in other more certain arts,
fortune has a very great part.
The poetic raptures, the flights of fancy, that ravish and transport the
author out of himself, why should we not attribute them to his good
fortune, since he himself confesses that they exceed his sufficiency and
force, and acknowledges them to proceed from something else than himself,
and that he has them no more in his power than the orators say they have
those extraordinary motions and agitations that sometimes push them
beyond their design. It is the same in painting, where touches shall
sometimes slip from the hand of the painter, so surpassing both his
conception and his art, as to beget his own admiration and astonishment.
But Fortune does yet more evidently manifest the share she has in all
things of this kind, by the graces and elegances we find in them, not
only beyond the intention, but even without the knowledge of the workman:
a competent reader often discovers in other men’s writings other
perfections than the author himself either intended or perceived, a
richer sense and more quaint expression.
As to military enterprises, every one sees how great a hand Fortune has
in them. Even in our counsels and deliberations there must, certainly,
be something of chance and good-luck mixed with human prudence; for all
that our wisdom can do alone is no great matter; the more piercing,
quick, and apprehensive it is, the weaker it finds itself, and is by so
much more apt to mistrust itself. I am of Sylla’s opinion;--[“Who freed
his great deeds from envy by ever attributing them to his good fortune,
and finally by surnaming himself Faustus, the Lucky.”--Plutarch, How far a
Man may praise Himself, c. 9.]--and when I closely examine the most
glorious exploits of war, I perceive, methinks, that those who carry them
on make use of counsel and debate only for custom’s sake, and leave the
best part of the enterprise to Fortune, and relying upon her aid,
transgress, at every turn, the bounds of military conduct and the rules
of war. There happen, sometimes, fortuitous alacrities and strange
furies in their deliberations, that for the most part prompt them to
follow the worst grounded counsels, and swell their courage beyond the
limits of reason. Whence it happened that several of the great captains
of old, to justify those rash resolutions, have been fain to tell their
soldiers that they were invited to such attempts by some inspiration,
some sign and prognostic.
Wherefore, in this doubt and uncertainty, that the shortsightedness of
human wisdom to see and choose the best (by reason of the difficulties
that the various accidents and circumstances of things bring along with
them) perplexes us withal, the surest way, in my opinion, did no other
consideration invite us to it, is to pitch upon that wherein is the
greatest appearance of honesty and justice; and not, being certain of the
shortest, to keep the straightest and most direct way; as in the two
examples I have just given, there is no question but it was more noble
and generous in him who had received the offence, to pardon it, than to
do otherwise. If the former--[The Duc de Guise.]--miscarried in it, he
is not, nevertheless, to be blamed for his good intention; neither does
any one know if he had proceeded otherwise, whether by that means he had
avoided the end his destiny had appointed for him; and he had, moreover,
lost the glory of so humane an act.
You will read in history, of many who have been in such apprehension,
that the most part have taken the course to meet and anticipate
conspiracies against them by punishment and revenge; but I find very few
who have reaped any advantage by this proceeding; witness so many Roman
emperors. Whoever finds himself in this danger, ought not to expect much
either from his vigilance or power; for how hard a thing is it for a man
to secure himself from an enemy, who lies concealed under the countenance
of the most assiduous friend we have, and to discover and know the wills
and inward thoughts of those who are in our personal service. ‘Tis to
much purpose to have a guard of foreigners about one, and to be always
fenced about with a pale of armed men; whosoever despises his own life,
is always master of that of another man.--[Seneca, Ep., 4.]--And
moreover, this continual suspicion, that makes a prince jealous of all
the world, must of necessity be a strange torment to him. Therefore it
was, that Dion, being advertised that Callippus watched all opportunities
to take away his life, had never the heart to inquire more particularly
into it, saying, that he had rather die than live in that misery, that he
must continually stand upon his guard, not only against his enemies, but
his friends also;--[Plutarch, Apothegms.]--which Alexander much more
vividly and more roundly manifested in effect, when, having notice by a
letter from Parmenio, that Philip, his most beloved physician, was by
Darius’ money corrupted to poison him, at the same time he gave the
letter to Philip to read, drank off the potion he had brought him. Was
not this to express a resolution, that if his friends had a mind to
despatch him out of the world, he was willing to give them opportunity to
do it? This prince is, indeed, the sovereign pattern of hazardous
actions; but I do not know whether there be another passage in his life
wherein there is so much firm courage as in this, nor so illustrious an
image of the beauty and greatness of his mind.
Those who preach to princes so circumspect and vigilant a jealousy and
distrust, under colour of security, preach to them ruin and dishonour:
nothing noble can be performed without danger. I know a person,
naturally of a very great daring and enterprising courage, whose good
fortune is continually marred by such persuasions, that he keep himself
close surrounded by his friends, that he must not hearken to any
reconciliation with his ancient enemies, that he must stand aloof, and
not trust his person in hands stronger than his own, what promises or
offers soever they may make him, or what advantages soever he may see
before him. And I know another, who has unexpectedly advanced his
fortunes by following a clear contrary advice.
Courage, the reputation and glory of which men seek with so greedy an
appetite, presents itself, when need requires, as magnificently in
cuerpo, as in full armour; in a closet, as in a camp; with arms pendant,
as with arms raised.
This over-circumspect and wary prudence is a mortal enemy to all high and
generous exploits. Scipio, to sound Syphax’s intention, leaving his
army, abandoning Spain, not yet secure nor well settled in his new
conquest, could pass over into Africa in two small ships, to commit
himself, in an enemy’s country, to the power of a barbarian king, to a
faith untried and unknown, without obligation, without hostage, under the
sole security of the grandeur of his own courage, his good fortune, and
the promise of his high hopes.--[ Livy, xxviii. 17.]
“Habita fides ipsam plerumque fidem obligat.”
[“Trust often obliges fidelity.”--Livy, xxii. 22.]
In a life of ambition and glory, it is necessary to hold a stiff rein
upon suspicion: fear and distrust invite and draw on offence. The most
mistrustful of our kings--[ Louis XI.]--established his affairs
principally by voluntarily committing his life and liberty into his
enemies’ hands, by that action manifesting that he had absolute
confidence in them, to the end they might repose as great an assurance in
him. Caesar only opposed the authority of his countenance and the
haughty sharpness of his rebukes to his mutinous legions in arms against
him:
“Stetit aggere fulti
Cespitis, intrepidus vultu: meruitque timeri,
Nil metuens.”
[“He stood on a mound, his countenance intrepid, and merited to be
feared, he fearing nothing.”--Lucan, v. 316.]
But it is true, withal, that this undaunted assurance is not to be
represented in its simple and entire form, but by such whom the
apprehension of death, and the worst that can happen, does not terrify
and affright; for to represent a pretended resolution with a pale and
doubtful countenance and trembling limbs, for the service of an important
reconciliation, will effect nothing to purpose. ‘Tis an excellent way to
gain the heart and will of another, to submit and intrust one’s self to
him, provided it appear to be freely done, and without the constraint of
necessity, and in such a condition, that a man manifestly does it out of
a pure and entire confidence in the party, at least, with a countenance
clear from any cloud of suspicion. I saw, when I was a boy, a gentleman,
who was governor of a great city, upon occasion of a popular commotion
and fury, not knowing what other course to take, go out of a place of
very great strength and security, and commit himself to the mercy of the
seditious rabble, in hopes by that means to appease the tumult before it
grew to a more formidable head; but it was ill for him that he did so,
for he was there miserably slain. But I am not, nevertheless, of
opinion, that he committed so great an error in going out, as men
commonly reproach his memory withal, as he did in choosing a gentle and
submissive way for the effecting his purpose, and in endeavouring to
quiet this storm, rather by obeying than commanding, and by entreaty
rather than remonstrance; and I am inclined to believe, that a gracious
severity, with a soldierlike way of commanding, full of security and
confidence, suitable to the quality of his person, and the dignity of his
command, would have succeeded better with him; at least, he had perished
with greater decency and, reputation. There is nothing so little to be
expected or hoped for from this many-headed monster, in its fury, as
humanity and good nature; it is much more capable of reverence and fear.
I should also reproach him, that having taken a resolution (in my
judgment rather brave than rash) to expose himself, weak and naked, in
this tempestuous sea of enraged madmen, he ought to have stuck to his
text, and not for an instant to have abandoned the high part he had
undertaken; whereas, coming to discover his danger nearer hand, and his
nose happening to bleed, he again changed that demiss and fawning
countenance he had at first put on, into another of fear and amazement,
filling his voice with entreaties and his eyes with tears, and,
endeavouring so to withdraw and secure his person, that carriage more
inflamed their fury, and soon brought the effects of it upon him.
It was upon a time intended that there should be a general muster of
several troops in arms (and that is the most proper occasion of secret
revenges, and there is no place where they can be executed with greater
safety), and there were public and manifest appearances, that there was
no safe coming for some, whose principal and necessary office it was to
review them. Whereupon a consultation was held, and several counsels
were proposed, as in a case that was very nice and of great difficulty;
and moreover of grave consequence. Mine, amongst the rest, was, that
they should by all means avoid giving any sign of suspicion, but that the
officers who were most in danger should boldly go, and with cheerful and
erect countenances ride boldly and confidently through the ranks, and
that instead of sparing fire (which the counsels of the major part tended
to) they should entreat the captains to command the soldiers to give
round and full volleys in honour of the spectators, and not to spare
their powder. This was accordingly done, and served so good use, as to
please and gratify the suspected troops, and thenceforward to beget a
mutual and wholesome confidence and intelligence amongst them.
I look upon Julius Caesar’s way of winning men to him as the best and
finest that can be put in practice. First, he tried by clemency to make
himself beloved even by his very enemies, contenting himself, in detected
conspiracies, only publicly to declare, that he was pre-acquainted with
them; which being done, he took a noble resolution to await without
solicitude or fear, whatever might be the event, wholly resigning himself
to the protection of the gods and fortune: for, questionless, in this
state he was at the time when he was killed.
A stranger having publicly said, that he could teach Dionysius, the
tyrant of Syracuse, an infallible way to find out and discover all the
conspiracies his subjects could contrive against him, if he would give
him a good sum of money for his pains, Dionysius hearing of it, caused
the man to be brought to him, that he might learn an art so necessary to
his preservation. The man made answer, that all the art he knew, was,
that he should give him a talent, and afterwards boast that he had
obtained a singular secret from him. Dionysius liked the invention, and
accordingly caused six hundred crowns to be counted out to him.
--[Plutarch, Apothegms.]--It was not likely he should give so great a
sum to a person unknown, but upon the account of some extraordinary
discovery, and the belief of this served to keep his enemies in awe.
Princes, however, do wisely to publish the informations they receive of
all the practices against their lives, to possess men with an opinion
they have so good intelligence that nothing can be plotted against them,
but they have present notice of it. The Duke of Athens did a great many
foolish things in the establishment of his new tyranny over Florence:
but this especially was most notable, that having received the first
intimation of the conspiracies the people were hatching against him, from
Matteo di Morozzo, one of the conspirators, he presently put him to
death, to suppress that rumour, that it might not be thought any of the
city disliked his government.
I remember I have formerly read a story--[In Appian’s Civil Wars, book
iv..]--of some Roman of great quality who, flying the tyranny of the
Triumvirate, had a thousand times by the subtlety of as many inventions
escaped from falling into the hands of those that pursued him. It
happened one day that a troop of horse, which was sent out to take him,
passed close by a brake where he was squat, and missed very narrowly of
spying him: but he considering, at this point, the pains and difficulties
wherein he had so long continued to evade the strict and incessant
searches that were every day made for him, the little pleasure he could
hope for in such a kind of life, and how much better it was for him to
die once for all, than to be perpetually at this pass, he started from
his seat, called them back, showed them his form,--[as of a squatting
hare.]--and voluntarily delivered himself up to their cruelty, by that
means to free both himself and them from further trouble. To invite a
man’s enemies to come and cut his throat, seems a resolution a little
extravagant and odd; and yet I think he did better to take that course,
than to live in continual feverish fear of an accident for which there
was no cure. But seeing all the remedies a man can apply to such a
disease, are full of unquietness and uncertainty, ‘tis better with a
manly courage to prepare one’s self for the worst that can happen, and to
extract some consolation from this, that we are not certain the thing we
fear will ever come to pass.
CHAPTER XXIV
OF PEDANTRY
I was often, when a boy, wonderfully concerned to see, in the Italian
farces, a pedant always brought in for the fool of the play, and that the
title of Magister was in no greater reverence amongst us: for being
delivered up to their tuition, what could I do less than be jealous of
their honour and reputation? I sought indeed to excuse them by the
natural incompatibility betwixt the vulgar sort and men of a finer
thread, both in judgment and knowledge, forasmuch as they go a quite
contrary way to one another: but in this, the thing I most stumbled at
was, that the finest gentlemen were those who most despised them; witness
our famous poet Du Bellay--
“Mais je hay par sur tout un scavoir pedantesque.”
[“Of all things I hate pedantic learning.”--Du Bellay]
And ‘twas so in former times; for Plutarch says that Greek and Scholar
were terms of reproach and contempt amongst the Romans. But since, with
the better experience of age, I find they had very great reason so to do,
and that--
“Magis magnos clericos non sunt magis magnos sapientes.”
[“The greatest clerks are not the wisest men.” A proverb given in
Rabelais’ Gargantua, i. 39.]
But whence it should come to pass, that a mind enriched with the
knowledge of so many things should not become more quick and sprightly,
and that a gross and vulgar understanding should lodge within it, without
correcting and improving itself, all the discourses and judgments of the
greatest minds the world ever had, I am yet to seek. To admit so many
foreign conceptions, so great, and so high fancies, it is necessary (as a
young lady, one of the greatest princesses of the kingdom, said to me
once, speaking of a certain person) that a man’s own brain must be
crowded and squeezed together into a less compass, to make room for the
others; I should be apt to conclude, that as plants are suffocated and
drowned with too much nourishment, and lamps with too much oil, so with
too much study and matter is the active part of the understanding which,
being embarrassed, and confounded with a great diversity of things, loses
the force and power to disengage itself, and by the pressure of this
weight, is bowed, subjected, and doubled up. But it is quite otherwise;
for our soul stretches and dilates itself proportionably as it fills; and
in the examples of elder times, we see, quite contrary, men very proper
for public business, great captains, and great statesmen very learned
withal.
And, as to the philosophers, a sort of men remote from all public
affairs, they have been sometimes also despised by the comic liberty of
their times; their opinions and manners making them appear, to men of
another sort, ridiculous. Would you make them judges of a lawsuit, of
the actions of men? they are ready to take it upon them, and straight
begin to examine if there be life, if there be motion, if man be any
other than an ox;--[“If Montaigne has copied all this from Plato’s
Theatetes, p.127, F. as it is plain by all which he has added
immediately after, that he has taken it from that dialogue, he has
grossly mistaken Plato’s sentiment, who says here no more than this, that
the philosopher is so ignorant of what his neighbour does, that he scarce
knows whether he is a man, or some other animal:--Coste.”]--what it is to
do and to suffer? what animals law and justice are? Do they speak of
the magistrates, or to him, ‘tis with a rude, irreverent, and indecent
liberty. Do they hear their prince, or a king commended? they make no
more of him, than of a shepherd, goatherd, or neatherd: a lazy Coridon,
occupied in milking and shearing his herds and flocks, but more rudely
and harshly than the herd or shepherd himself. Do you repute any man the
greater for being lord of two thousand acres of land? they laugh at such
a pitiful pittance, as laying claim themselves to the whole world for
their possession. Do you boast of your nobility, as being descended from
seven rich successive ancestors? they look upon you with an eye of
contempt, as men who have not a right idea of the universal image of
nature, and that do not consider how many predecessors every one of us
has had, rich, poor, kings, slaves, Greeks, and barbarians; and though
you were the fiftieth descendant from Hercules, they look upon it as a
great vanity, so highly to value this, which is only a gift of fortune.
And ‘twas so the vulgar sort contemned them, as men ignorant of the most
elementary and ordinary things; as presumptuous and insolent.
But this Platonic picture is far different from that these pedants are
presented by. Those were envied for raising themselves above the common
sort, for despising the ordinary actions and offices of life, for having
assumed a particular and inimitable way of living, and for using a
certain method of high-flight and obsolete language, quite different from
the ordinary way of speaking: but these are contemned as being as much
below the usual form, as incapable of public employment, as leading a
life and conforming themselves to the mean and vile manners of the
vulgar:
“Odi ignava opera, philosopha sententia.”
[“I hate men who jabber about philosophy, but do nothing.”
--Pacuvius, ap Gellium, xiii. 8.]
For what concerns the philosophers, as I have said, if they were in
science, they were yet much greater in action. And, as it is said of the
geometrician of Syracuse,--[Archimedes.]--who having been disturbed from
his contemplation, to put some of his skill in practice for the defence
of his country, that he suddenly set on foot dreadful and prodigious
engines, that wrought effects beyond all human expectation; himself,
notwithstanding, disdaining all his handiwork, and thinking in this he
had played the mere mechanic, and violated the dignity of his art, of
which these performances of his he accounted but trivial experiments and
playthings so they, whenever they have been put upon the proof of action,
have been seen to fly to so high a pitch, as made it very well appear,
their souls were marvellously elevated, and enriched by the knowledge of
things. But some of them, seeing the reins of government in the hands of
incapable men, have avoided all management of political affairs; and he
who demanded of Crates, how long it was necessary to philosophise,
received this answer: “Till our armies are no more commanded by fools.”
--[Diogenes Laertius, vi. 92.]--Heraclitus resigned the royalty to his
brother; and, to the Ephesians, who reproached him that he spent his time
in playing with children before the temple: “Is it not better,” said he,
“to do so, than to sit at the helm of affairs in your company?” Others
having their imagination advanced above the world and fortune, have
looked upon the tribunals of justice, and even the thrones of kings, as
paltry and contemptible; insomuch, that Empedocles refused the royalty
that the Agrigentines offered to him. Thales, once inveighing in
discourse against the pains and care men put themselves to to become
rich, was answered by one in the company, that he did like the fox, who
found fault with what he could not obtain. Whereupon, he had a mind, for
the jest’s sake, to show them to the contrary; and having, for this
occasion, made a muster of all his wits, wholly to employ them in the
service of profit and gain, he set a traffic on foot, which in one year
brought him in so great riches, that the most experienced in that trade
could hardly in their whole lives, with all their industry, have raked so
much together.--[Diogenes Laertius, Life of Thales, i. 26; Cicero, De
Divin., i. 49.]--That which Aristotle reports of some who called both
him and Anaxagoras, and others of their profession, wise but not prudent,
in not applying their study to more profitable things--though I do not
well digest this verbal distinction--that will not, however, serve to
excuse my pedants, for to see the low and necessitous fortune wherewith
they are content, we have rather reason to pronounce that they are
neither wise nor prudent.
But letting this first reason alone, I think it better to say, that this
evil proceeds from their applying themselves the wrong way to the study
of the sciences; and that, after the manner we are instructed, it is no
wonder if neither the scholars nor the masters become, though more
learned, ever the wiser, or more able. In plain truth, the cares and
expense our parents are at in our education, point at nothing, but to
furnish our heads with knowledge; but not a word of judgment and virtue.
Cry out, of one that passes by, to the people: “O, what a learned man!”
and of another, “O, what a good man!”--[Translated from Seneca, Ep.,
88.]--they will not fail to turn their eyes, and address their respect
to the former. There should then be a third crier, “O, the blockheads!”
Men are apt presently to inquire, does such a one understand Greek or
Latin? Is he a poet? or does he write in prose? But whether he be
grown better or more discreet, which are qualities of principal concern,
these are never thought of. We should rather examine, who is better
learned, than who is more learned.
We only labour to stuff the memory, and leave the conscience and the
understanding unfurnished and void. Like birds who fly abroad to forage
for grain, and bring it home in the beak, without tasting it themselves,
to feed their young; so our pedants go picking knowledge here and there,
out of books, and hold it at the tongue’s end, only to spit it out and
distribute it abroad. And here I cannot but smile to think how I have
paid myself in showing the foppery of this kind of learning, who myself
am so manifest an example; for, do I not the same thing throughout almost
this whole composition? I go here and there, culling out of several
books the sentences that best please me, not to keep them (for I have no
memory to retain them in), but to transplant them into this; where, to
say the truth, they are no more mine than in their first places. We are,
I conceive, knowing only in present knowledge, and not at all in what is
past, or more than is that which is to come. But the worst on’t is,
their scholars and pupils are no better nourished by this kind of
inspiration; and it makes no deeper impression upon them, but passes from
hand to hand, only to make a show to be tolerable company, and to tell
pretty stories, like a counterfeit coin in counters, of no other use or
value, but to reckon with, or to set up at cards:
“Apud alios loqui didicerunt non ipsi secum.”
[“They have learned to speak from others, not from themselves.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes, v. 36.]
“Non est loquendum, sed gubernandum.”
[“Speaking is not so necessary as governing.”--Seneca, Ep., 108.]
Nature, to shew that there is nothing barbarous where she has the sole
conduct, oftentimes, in nations where art has the least to do, causes
productions of wit, such as may rival the greatest effect of art
whatever. In relation to what I am now speaking of, the Gascon proverb,
derived from a cornpipe, is very quaint and subtle:
“Bouha prou bouha, mas a remuda lous dits quem.”
[“You may blow till your eyes start out; but if once you offer to
stir your fingers, it is all over.”]
We can say, Cicero says thus; these were the manners of Plato; these are
the very words of Aristotle: but what do we say ourselves? What do we
judge? A parrot would say as much as that.
And this puts me in mind of that rich gentleman of Rome,--[Calvisius
Sabinus. Seneca, Ep., 27.]--who had been solicitous, with very great
expense, to procure men that were excellent in all sorts of science, whom
he had always attending his person, to the end, that when amongst his
friends any occasion fell out of speaking of any subject whatsoever, they
might supply his place, and be ready to prompt him, one with a sentence
of Seneca, another with a verse of Homer, and so forth, every one
according to his talent; and he fancied this knowledge to be his own,
because it was in the heads of those who lived upon his bounty; as they
also do, whose learning consists in having noble libraries. I know one,
who, when I question him what he knows, he presently calls for a book to
shew me, and dares not venture to tell me so much, as that he has piles
in his posteriors, till first he has consulted his dictionary, what piles
and what posteriors are.
We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust; which is an idle
and superficial learning. We must make it our own. We are in this very
like him, who having need of fire, went to a neighbour’s house to fetch
it, and finding a very good one there, sat down to warm himself without
remembering to carry any with him home.--[Plutarch, How a Man should
Listen.]--What good does it do us to have the stomach full of meat, if
it do not digest, if it be not incorporated with us, if it does not
nourish and support us? Can we imagine that Lucullus, whom letters,
without any manner of experience, made so great a captain, learned to be
so after this perfunctory manner?--[Cicero, Acad., ii. I.]--We suffer
ourselves to lean and rely so strongly upon the arm of another, that we
destroy our own strength and vigour. Would I fortify myself against the
fear of death, it must be at the expense of Seneca: would I extract
consolation for myself or my friend, I borrow it from Cicero. I might
have found it in myself, had I been trained to make use of my own reason.
I do not like this relative and mendicant understanding; for though we
could become learned by other men’s learning, a man can never be wise but
by his own wisdom:
[“I hate the wise man, who in his own concern is not wise.”
--Euripides, ap. Cicero, Ep. Fam., xiii. 15.]
Whence Ennius:
“Nequidquam sapere sapientem, qui ipse sibi prodesse non quiret.”
[“That wise man knows nothing, who cannot profit himself by his
wisdom.”--Cicero, De Offic., iii. 15.]
“Si cupidus, si
Vanus, et Euganea quantumvis mollior agna.”
[“If he be grasping, or a boaster, and something softer than an
Euganean lamb.”--Juvenal, Sat., viii. 14.]
“Non enim paranda nobis solum, sed fruenda sapientia est.”
[“For wisdom is not only to be acquired, but to be utilised.”
--Cicero, De Finib., i. I.]
Dionysius--[It was not Dionysius, but Diogenes the cynic. Diogenes
Laertius, vi. 27.]--laughed at the grammarians, who set themselves to
inquire into the miseries of Ulysses, and were ignorant of their own;
at musicians, who were so exact in tuning their instruments, and never
tuned their manners; at orators, who made it a study to declare what is
justice, but never took care to do it. If the mind be not better
disposed, if the judgment be no better settled, I had much rather my
scholar had spent his time at tennis, for, at least, his body would by
that means be in better exercise and breath. Do but observe him when he
comes back from school, after fifteen or sixteen years that he has been
there; there is nothing so unfit for employment; all you shall find he
has got, is, that his Latin and Greek have only made him a greater
coxcomb than when he went from home. He should bring back his soul
replete with good literature, and he brings it only swelled and puffed up
with vain and empty shreds and patches of learning; and has really
nothing more in him than he had before.--[Plato’s Dialogues: Protagoras.]
These pedants of ours, as Plato says of the Sophists, their
cousin-germans, are, of all men, they who most pretend to be useful to
mankind, and who alone, of all men, not only do not better and improve
that which is committed to them, as a carpenter or a mason would do, but
make them much worse, and make us pay them for making them worse, to
boot. If the rule which Protagoras proposed to his pupils were followed
--either that they should give him his own demand, or make affidavit upon
oath in the temple how much they valued the profit they had received
under his tuition, and satisfy him accordingly--my pedagogues would find
themselves sorely gravelled, if they were to be judged by the affidavits
of my experience. My Perigordin patois very pleasantly calls these
pretenders to learning, ‘lettre-ferits’, as a man should say,
letter-marked--men on whom letters have been stamped by the blow of a
mallet. And, in truth, for the most part, they appear to be deprived even
of common sense; for you see the husbandman and the cobbler go simply and
fairly about their business, speaking only of what they know and
understand; whereas these fellows, to make parade and to get opinion,
mustering this ridiculous knowledge of theirs, that floats on the
superficies of the brain, are perpetually perplexing, and entangling
themselves in their own nonsense. They speak fine words sometimes, ‘tis
true, but let somebody that is wiser apply them. They are wonderfully
well acquainted with Galen, but not at all with the disease of the
patient; they have already deafened you with a long ribble-row of laws,
but understand nothing of the case in hand; they have the theory of all
things, let who will put it in practice.
I have sat by, when a friend of mine, in my own house, for sport-sake,
has with one of these fellows counterfeited a jargon of Galimatias,
patched up of phrases without head or tail, saving that he interlarded
here and there some terms that had relation to their dispute, and held
the coxcomb in play a whole afternoon together, who all the while thought
he had answered pertinently and learnedly to all his objections; and yet
this was a man of letters, and reputation, and a fine gentleman of the
long robe:
“Vos, O patricius sanguis, quos vivere par est
Occipiti caeco, posticae occurrite sannae.”
[“O you, of patrician blood, to whom it is permitted to live
with(out) eyes in the back of your head, beware of grimaces at you
from behind.”--Persius, Sat., i. 61.]
Whosoever shall narrowly pry into and thoroughly sift this sort of
people, wherewith the world is so pestered, will, as I have done, find,
that for the most part, they neither understand others, nor themselves;
and that their memories are full enough, but the judgment totally void
and empty; some excepted, whose own nature has of itself formed them into
better fashion. As I have observed, for example, in Adrian Turnebus, who
having never made other profession than that of mere learning only, and
in that, in my opinion, he was the greatest man that has been these
thousand years, had nothing at all in him of the pedant, but the wearing
of his gown, and a little exterior fashion, that could not be civilised
to courtier ways, which in themselves are nothing. I hate our people,
who can worse endure an ill-contrived robe than an ill-contrived mind,
and take their measure by the leg a man makes, by his behaviour, and so
much as the very fashion of his boots, what kind of man he is. For
within there was not a more polished soul upon earth. I have often
purposely put him upon arguments quite wide of his profession, wherein I
found he had so clear an insight, so quick an apprehension, so solid a
judgment, that a man would have thought he had never practised any other
thing but arms, and been all his life employed in affairs of State.
These are great and vigorous natures,
“Queis arte benigna
Et meliore luto finxit praecordia Titan.”
[“Whom benign Titan (Prometheus) has framed of better clay.”
--Juvenal, xiv. 34.]
that can keep themselves upright in despite of a pedantic education. But
it is not enough that our education does not spoil us; it must, moreover,
alter us for the better.
Some of our Parliaments, when they are to admit officers, examine only
their learning; to which some of the others also add the trial of
understanding, by asking their judgment of some case in law; of these the
latter, methinks, proceed with the better method; for although both are
necessary, and that it is very requisite they should be defective in
neither, yet, in truth, knowledge is not so absolutely necessary as
judgment; the last may make shift without the other, but the other never
without this. For as the Greek verse says--
[“To what use serves learning, if understanding be away.”
--Apud Stobaeus, tit. iii., p. 37 (1609).]
Would to God that, for the good of our judicature, these societies were
as well furnished with understanding and conscience as they are with
knowledge.
“Non vita, sed scolae discimus.”
[“We do not study for life, but only for the school.”
--Seneca, Ep., 106.]
We are not to tie learning to the soul, but to work and incorporate them
together: not to tincture it only, but to give it a thorough and perfect
dye; which, if it will not take colour, and meliorate its imperfect
state, it were without question better to let it alone. ‘Tis a dangerous
weapon, that will hinder and wound its master, if put into an awkward and
unskilful hand:
“Ut fuerit melius non didicisse.”
[“So that it were better not to have learned.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 4.]
And this, peradventure, is the reason why neither we nor theology require
much learning in women; and that Francis, Duke of Brittany, son of John V.,
one talking with him about his marriage with Isabella the daughter of
Scotland, and adding that she was homely bred, and without any manner of
learning, made answer, that he liked her the better, and that a woman was
wise enough, if she could distinguish her husband’s shirt from his
doublet. So that it is no so great wonder, as they make of it, that our
ancestors had letters in no greater esteem, and that even to this day
they are but rarely met with in the principal councils of princes; and if
the end and design of acquiring riches, which is the only thing we
propose to ourselves, by the means of law, physic, pedantry, and even
divinity itself, did not uphold and keep them in credit, you would, with
doubt, see them in as pitiful a condition as ever. And what loss would
this be, if they neither instruct us to think well nor to do well?
“Postquam docti prodierunt, boni desunt.”
[Seneca, Ep., 95. “Since the ‘savans’ have made their appearance
among us, the good people have become eclipsed.”
--Rousseau, Discours sur les Lettres.]
All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of
goodness.
But the reason I glanced upon but now, may it not also hence proceed,
that, our studies in France having almost no other aim but profit, except
as to those who, by nature born to offices and employments rather of
glory than gain, addict themselves to letters, if at all, only for so
short a time (being taken from their studies before they can come to have
any taste of them, to a profession that has nothing to do with books),
there ordinarily remain no others to apply themselves wholly to learning,
but people of mean condition, who in that only seek the means to live;
and by such people, whose souls are, both by nature and by domestic
education and example, of the basest alloy the fruits of knowledge are
immaturely gathered and ill digested, and delivered to their recipients
quite another thing. For it is not for knowledge to enlighten a soul
that is dark of itself, nor to make a blind man see. Her business is not
to find a man’s eyes, but to guide, govern, and direct them, provided he
have sound feet and straight legs to go upon. Knowledge is an excellent
drug, but no drug has virtue enough to preserve itself from corruption
and decay, if the vessel be tainted and impure wherein it is put to keep.
Such a one may have a sight clear enough who looks asquint, and
consequently sees what is good, but does not follow it, and sees
knowledge, but makes no use of it. Plato’s principal institution in his
Republic is to fit his citizens with employments suitable to their
nature. Nature can do all, and does all. Cripples are very unfit for
exercises of the body, and lame souls for exercises of the mind.
Degenerate and vulgar souls are unworthy of philosophy. If we see a
shoemaker with his shoes out at the toes, we say, ‘tis no wonder; for,
commonly, none go worse shod than they. In like manner, experience often
presents us a physician worse physicked, a divine less reformed, and
(constantly) a scholar of less sufficiency, than other people.
Old Aristo of Chios had reason to say that philosophers did their
auditors harm, forasmuch as most of the souls of those that heard them
were not capable of deriving benefit from instruction, which, if not
applied to good, would certainly be applied to ill:
[“They proceeded effeminate debauchees from the school of
Aristippus, cynics from that of Zeno.”
--Cicero, De Natura Deor., iii., 31.]
In that excellent institution that Xenophon attributes to the Persians,
we find that they taught their children virtue, as other nations do
letters. Plato tells us that the eldest son in their royal succession
was thus brought up; after his birth he was delivered, not to women, but
to eunuchs of the greatest authority about their kings for their virtue,
whose charge it was to keep his body healthful and in good plight; and
after he came to seven years of age, to teach him to ride and to go
a-hunting. When he arrived at fourteen he was transferred into the hands
of four, the wisest, the most just, the most temperate, and most valiant
of the nation; of whom the first was to instruct him in religion, the
second to be always upright and sincere, the third to conquer his
appetites and desires, and the fourth to despise all danger.
It is a thing worthy of very great consideration, that in that excellent,
and, in truth, for its perfection, prodigious form of civil regimen set
down by Lycurgus, though so solicitous of the education of children,
as a thing of the greatest concern, and even in the very seat of the
Muses, he should make so little mention of learning; as if that generous
youth, disdaining all other subjection but that of virtue, ought to be
supplied, instead of tutors to read to them arts and sciences, with such
masters as should only instruct them in valour, prudence, and justice;
an example that Plato has followed in his laws. The manner of their
discipline was to propound to them questions in judgment upon men and
their actions; and if they commended or condemned this or that person or
fact, they were to give a reason for so doing; by which means they at
once sharpened their understanding, and learned what was right.
Astyages, in Xenophon, asks Cyrus to give an account of his last lesson;
and thus it was, “A great boy in our school, having a little short
cassock, by force took a longer from another that was not so tall as he,
and gave him his own in exchange: whereupon I, being appointed judge of
the controversy, gave judgment, that I thought it best each should keep
the coat he had, for that they both of them were better fitted with that
of one another than with their own: upon which my master told me, I had
done ill, in that I had only considered the fitness of the garments,
whereas I ought to have considered the justice of the thing, which
required that no one should have anything forcibly taken from him that is
his own.” And Cyrus adds that he was whipped for his pains, as we are in
our villages for forgetting the first aorist of------.
[Cotton’s version of this story commences differently, and includes
a passage which is not in any of the editions of the original before
me:
“Mandane, in Xenophon, asking Cyrus how he would do to learn
justice, and the other virtues amongst the Medes, having left all
his masters behind him in Persia? He made answer, that he had
learned those things long since; that his master had often made him
a judge of the differences amongst his schoolfellows, and had one
day whipped him for giving a wrong sentence.”--W.C.H.]
My pedant must make me a very learned oration, ‘in genere demonstrativo’,
before he can persuade me that his school is like unto that. They knew
how to go the readiest way to work; and seeing that science, when most
rightly applied and best understood, can do no more but teach us
prudence, moral honesty, and resolution, they thought fit, at first hand,
to initiate their children with the knowledge of effects, and to instruct
them, not by hearsay and rote, but by the experiment of action, in lively
forming and moulding them; not only by words and precepts, but chiefly by
works and examples; to the end it might not be a knowledge in the mind
only, but its complexion and habit: not an acquisition, but a natural
possession. One asking to this purpose, Agesilaus, what he thought most
proper for boys to learn? “What they ought to do when they come to be
men,” said he.--[Plutarch, Apothegms of the Lacedamonians. Rousseau
adopts the expression in his Diswuys sur tes Lettres.]--It is no wonder,
if such an institution produced so admirable effects.
They used to go, it is said, to the other cities of Greece, to inquire
out rhetoricians, painters, and musicians; but to Lacedaemon for
legislators, magistrates, and generals of armies; at Athens they learned
to speak well: here to do well; there to disengage themselves from a
sophistical argument, and to unravel the imposture of captious
syllogisms; here to evade the baits and allurements of pleasure, and with
a noble courage and resolution to conquer the menaces of fortune and
death; those cudgelled their brains about words, these made it their
business to inquire into things; there was an eternal babble of the
tongue, here a continual exercise of the soul. And therefore it is
nothing strange if, when Antipater demanded of them fifty children for
hostages, they made answer, quite contrary to what we should do, that
they would rather give him twice as many full-grown men, so much did they
value the loss of their country’s education. When Agesilaus courted
Xenophon to send his children to Sparta to be bred, “it is not,” said he,
“there to learn logic or rhetoric, but to be instructed in the noblest of
all sciences, namely, the science to obey and to command.”--[Plutarch,
Life of Agesilaus, c. 7.]
It is very pleasant to see Socrates, after his manner, rallying Hippias,
--[Plato’s Dialogues: Hippias Major.]--who recounts to him what a world
of money he has got, especially in certain little villages of Sicily, by
teaching school, and that he made never a penny at Sparta: “What a
sottish and stupid people,” said Socrates, “are they, without sense or
understanding, that make no account either of grammar or poetry, and only
busy themselves in studying the genealogies and successions of their
kings, the foundations, rises, and declensions of states, and such tales
of a tub!” After which, having made Hippias from one step to another
acknowledge the excellency of their form of public administration, and
the felicity and virtue of their private life, he leaves him to guess at
the conclusion he makes of the inutilities of his pedantic arts.
Examples have demonstrated to us that in military affairs, and all others
of the like active nature, the study of sciences more softens and
untempers the courages of men than it in any way fortifies and excites
them. The most potent empire that at this day appears to be in the whole
world is that of the Turks, a people equally inured to the estimation of
arms and the contempt of letters. I find Rome was more valiant before
she grew so learned. The most warlike nations at this time in being are
the most rude and ignorant: the Scythians, the Parthians, Tamerlane,
serve for sufficient proof of this. When the Goths overran Greece, the
only thing that preserved all the libraries from the fire was, that some
one possessed them with an opinion that they were to leave this kind of
furniture entire to the enemy, as being most proper to divert them from
the exercise of arms, and to fix them to a lazy and sedentary life.
When our King Charles VIII., almost without striking a blow, saw himself
possessed of the kingdom of Naples and a considerable part of Tuscany,
the nobles about him attributed this unexpected facility of conquest to
this, that the princes and nobles of Italy, more studied to render
themselves ingenious and learned, than vigorous and warlike.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A parrot would say as much as that
Agesilaus, what he thought most proper for boys to learn?
But it is not enough that our education does not spoil us
Conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature
Culling out of several books the sentences that best please me
“Custom,” replied Plato, “is no little thing”
Education
Examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned
Fear and distrust invite and draw on offence
Fortune will still be mistress of events
Fox, who found fault with what he could not obtain
Fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed
Gave them new and more plausible names for their excuse
Give me time to recover my strength and health
Great presumption to be so fond of one’s own opinions
Gross impostures of religions
Hoary head and rivelled face of ancient usage
Hold a stiff rein upon suspicion
I have a great aversion from a novelty
Knowledge is not so absolutely necessary as judgment
Laws do what they can, when they cannot do what they would
Man can never be wise but by his own wisdom
Memories are full enough, but the judgment totally void
Miracles appear to be so, according to our ignorance of nature
Nothing noble can be performed without danger
Only set the humours they would purge more violently in work
Ought not to expect much either from his vigilance or power
Ought to withdraw and retire his soul from the crowd
Over-circumspect and wary prudence is a mortal enemy
Physic
Physician worse physicked
Plays of children are not performed in play
Present himself with a halter about his neck to the people
Rome was more valiant before she grew so learned
Study to declare what is justice, but never took care to do it.
Testimony of the truth from minds prepossessed by custom?
They neither instruct us to think well nor to do well
Think of physic as much good or ill as any one would have me
Use veils from us the true aspect of things
Victorious envied the conquered
We only labour to stuff the memory
We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust
Weakness and instability of a private and particular fancy
What they ought to do when they come to be men
Whosoever despises his own life, is always master
Worse endure an ill-contrived robe than an ill-contrived mind
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 5.
XXV. Of the education of children.
XXVI. That it is folly to measure truth and error by our own
capacity.
CHAPTER XXV
OF THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN
TO MADAME DIANE DE FOIX, Comtesse de Gurson
I never yet saw that father, but let his son be never so decrepit or
deformed, would not, notwithstanding, own him: not, nevertheless, if he
were not totally besotted, and blinded with his paternal affection, that
he did not well enough discern his defects; but that with all defaults he
was still his. Just so, I see better than any other, that all I write
here are but the idle reveries of a man that has only nibbled upon the
outward crust of sciences in his nonage, and only retained a general and
formless image of them; who has got a little snatch of everything and
nothing of the whole, ‘a la Francoise’. For I know, in general, that
there is such a thing as physic, as jurisprudence: four parts in
mathematics, and, roughly, what all these aim and point at; and,
peradventure, I yet know farther, what sciences in general pretend unto,
in order to the service of our life: but to dive farther than that, and
to have cudgelled my brains in the study of Aristotle, the monarch of all
modern learning, or particularly addicted myself to any one science,
I have never done it; neither is there any one art of which I am able to
draw the first lineaments and dead colour; insomuch that there is not a
boy of the lowest form in a school, that may not pretend to be wiser than
I, who am not able to examine him in his first lesson, which, if I am at
any time forced upon, I am necessitated in my own defence, to ask him,
unaptly enough, some universal questions, such as may serve to try his
natural understanding; a lesson as strange and unknown to him, as his is
to me.
I never seriously settled myself to the reading any book of solid
learning but Plutarch and Seneca; and there, like the Danaides, I
eternally fill, and it as constantly runs out; something of which drops
upon this paper, but little or nothing stays with me. History is my
particular game as to matter of reading, or else poetry, for which I have
particular kindness and esteem: for, as Cleanthes said, as the voice,
forced through the narrow passage of a trumpet, comes out more forcible
and shrill: so, methinks, a sentence pressed within the harmony of verse
darts out more briskly upon the understanding, and strikes my ear and
apprehension with a smarter and more pleasing effect. As to the natural
parts I have, of which this is the essay, I find them to bow under the
burden; my fancy and judgment do but grope in the dark, tripping and
stumbling in the way; and when I have gone as far as I can, I am in no
degree satisfied; I discover still a new and greater extent of land
before me, with a troubled and imperfect sight and wrapped up in clouds,
that I am not able to penetrate. And taking upon me to write
indifferently of whatever comes into my head, and therein making use of
nothing but my own proper and natural means, if it befall me, as
oft-times it does, accidentally to meet in any good author, the same heads
and commonplaces upon which I have attempted to write (as I did but just
now in Plutarch’s “Discourse of the Force of Imagination”), to see myself
so weak and so forlorn, so heavy and so flat, in comparison of those
better writers, I at once pity or despise myself. Yet do I please myself
with this, that my opinions have often the honour and good fortune to
jump with theirs, and that I go in the same path, though at a very great
distance, and can say, “Ah, that is so.” I am farther satisfied to find
that I have a quality, which every one is not blessed withal, which is,
to discern the vast difference between them and me; and notwithstanding
all that, suffer my own inventions, low and feeble as they are, to run on
in their career, without mending or plastering up the defects that this
comparison has laid open to my own view. And, in plain truth, a man had
need of a good strong back to keep pace with these people. The
indiscreet scribblers of our times, who, amongst their laborious
nothings, insert whole sections and pages out of ancient authors, with a
design, by that means, to illustrate their own writings, do quite
contrary; for this infinite dissimilitude of ornaments renders the
complexion of their own compositions so sallow and deformed, that they
lose much more than they get.
The philosophers, Chrysippus and Epicurus, were in this of two quite
contrary humours: the first not only in his books mixed passages and
sayings of other authors, but entire pieces, and, in one, the whole Medea
of Euripides; which gave Apollodorus occasion to say, that should a man
pick out of his writings all that was none of his, he would leave him
nothing but blank paper: whereas the latter, quite on the contrary, in
three hundred volumes that he left behind him, has not so much as one
quotation.--[Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Chyysippus, vii. 181, and
Epicurus, x. 26.]
I happened the other day upon this piece of fortune; I was reading a
French book, where after I had a long time run dreaming over a great many
words, so dull, so insipid, so void of all wit or common sense, that
indeed they were only French words: after a long and tedious travel, I
came at last to meet with a piece that was lofty, rich, and elevated to
the very clouds; of which, had I found either the declivity easy or the
ascent gradual, there had been some excuse; but it was so perpendicular
a precipice, and so wholly cut off from the rest of the work, that by the
first six words, I found myself flying into the other world, and thence
discovered the vale whence I came so deep and low, that I have never had
since the heart to descend into it any more. If I should set out one of
my discourses with such rich spoils as these, it would but too evidently
manifest the imperfection of my own writing. To reprehend the fault in
others that I am guilty of myself, appears to me no more unreasonable,
than to condemn, as I often do, those of others in myself: they are to be
everywhere reproved, and ought to have no sanctuary allowed them. I know
very well how audaciously I myself, at every turn, attempt to equal
myself to my thefts, and to make my style go hand in hand with them, not
without a temerarious hope of deceiving the eyes of my reader from
discerning the difference; but withal it is as much by the benefit of my
application, that I hope to do it, as by that of my invention or any
force of my own. Besides, I do not offer to contend with the whole body
of these champions, nor hand to hand with anyone of them: ‘tis only by
flights and little light attempts that I engage them; I do not grapple
with them, but try their strength only, and never engage so far as I make
a show to do. If I could hold them in play, I were a brave fellow; for I
never attack them; but where they are most sinewy and strong. To cover a
man’s self (as I have seen some do) with another man’s armour, so as not
to discover so much as his fingers’ ends; to carry on a design (as it is
not hard for a man that has anything of a scholar in him, in an ordinary
subject to do) under old inventions patched up here and there with his
own trumpery, and then to endeavour to conceal the theft, and to make it
pass for his own, is first injustice and meanness of spirit in those who
do it, who having nothing in them of their own fit to procure them a
reputation, endeavour to do it by attempting to impose things upon the
world in their own name, which they have no manner of title to; and next,
a ridiculous folly to content themselves with acquiring the ignorant
approbation of the vulgar by such a pitiful cheat, at the price at the
same time of degrading themselves in the eyes of men of understanding,
who turn up their noses at all this borrowed incrustation, yet whose
praise alone is worth the having. For my own part, there is nothing I
would not sooner do than that, neither have I said so much of others, but
to get a better opportunity to explain myself. Nor in this do I glance
at the composers of centos, who declare themselves for such; of which
sort of writers I have in my time known many very ingenious, and
particularly one under the name of Capilupus, besides the ancients.
These are really men of wit, and that make it appear they are so, both by
that and other ways of writing; as for example, Lipsius, in that learned
and laborious contexture of his Politics.
But, be it how it will, and how inconsiderable soever these ineptitudes
may be, I will say I never intended to conceal them, no more than my old
bald grizzled likeness before them, where the painter has presented you
not with a perfect face, but with mine. For these are my own particular
opinions and fancies, and I deliver them as only what I myself believe,
and not for what is to be believed by others. I have no other end in
this writing, but only to discover myself, who, also shall, peradventure,
be another thing to-morrow, if I chance to meet any new instruction to
change me. I have no authority to be believed, neither do I desire it,
being too conscious of my own inerudition to be able to instruct others.
Some one, then, having seen the preceding chapter, the other day told me
at my house, that I should a little farther have extended my discourse on
the education of children.--[“Which, how fit I am to do, let my friends
flatter me if they please, I have in the meantime no such opinion of my
own talent, as to promise myself any very good success from my
endeavour.” This passage would appear to be an interpolation by Cotton.
At all events, I do not find it in the original editions before me, or in
Coste.]--
Now, madam, if I had any sufficiency in this subject, I could not
possibly better employ it, than to present my best instructions to the
little man that threatens you shortly with a happy birth (for you are too
generous to begin otherwise than with a male); for, having had so great a
hand in the treaty of your marriage, I have a certain particular right
and interest in the greatness and prosperity of the issue that shall
spring from it; beside that, your having had the best of my services so
long in possession, sufficiently obliges me to desire the honour and
advantage of all wherein you shall be concerned. But, in truth, all I
understand as to that particular is only this, that the greatest and most
important difficulty of human science is the education of children. For
as in agriculture, the husbandry that is to precede planting, as also
planting itself, is certain, plain, and well known; but after that which
is planted comes to life, there is a great deal more to be done, more art
to be used, more care to be taken, and much more difficulty to cultivate
and bring it to perfection so it is with men; it is no hard matter to get
children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude,
and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up. The symptoms of
their inclinations in that tender age are so obscure, and the promises so
uncertain and fallacious, that it is very hard to establish any solid
judgment or conjecture upon them. Look at Cimon, for example, and
Themistocles, and a thousand others, who very much deceived the
expectation men had of them. Cubs of bears and puppies readily discover
their natural inclination; but men, so soon as ever they are grownup,
applying themselves to certain habits, engaging themselves in certain
opinions, and conforming themselves to particular laws and customs,
easily alter, or at least disguise, their true and real disposition; and
yet it is hard to force the propension of nature. Whence it comes to
pass, that for not having chosen the right course, we often take very
great pains, and consume a good part of our time in training up children
to things, for which, by their natural constitution, they are totally
unfit. In this difficulty, nevertheless, I am clearly of opinion, that
they ought to be elemented in the best and most advantageous studies,
without taking too much notice of, or being too superstitious in those
light prognostics they give of themselves in their tender years, and to
which Plato, in his Republic, gives, methinks, too much authority.
Madam, science is a very great ornament, and a thing of marvellous use,
especially in persons raised to that degree of fortune in which you are.
And, in truth, in persons of mean and low condition, it cannot perform
its true and genuine office, being naturally more prompt to assist in the
conduct of war, in the government of peoples, in negotiating the leagues
and friendships of princes and foreign nations, than in forming a
syllogism in logic, in pleading a process in law, or in prescribing a
dose of pills in physic. Wherefore, madam, believing you will not omit
this so necessary feature in the education of your children, who yourself
have tasted its sweetness, and are of a learned extraction (for we yet
have the writings of the ancient Counts of Foix, from whom my lord, your
husband, and yourself, are both of you descended, and Monsieur de
Candale, your uncle, every day obliges the world with others, which will
extend the knowledge of this quality in your family for so many
succeeding ages), I will, upon this occasion, presume to acquaint your
ladyship with one particular fancy of my own, contrary to the common
method, which is all I am able to contribute to your service in this
affair.
The charge of the tutor you shall provide for your son, upon the choice
of whom depends the whole success of his education, has several other
great and considerable parts and duties required in so important a trust,
besides that of which I am about to speak: these, however, I shall not
mention, as being unable to add anything of moment to the common rules:
and in this, wherein I take upon me to advise, he may follow it so far
only as it shall appear advisable.
For a, boy of quality then, who pretends to letters not upon the account
of profit (for so mean an object is unworthy of the grace and favour
of the Muses, and moreover, in it a man directs his service to and
depends upon others), nor so much for outward ornament, as for his own
proper and peculiar use, and to furnish and enrich himself within, having
rather a desire to come out an accomplished cavalier than a mere scholar
or learned man; for such a one, I say, I would, also, have his friends
solicitous to find him out a tutor, who has rather a well-made than a
well-filled head;--[“‘Tete bien faite’, an expression created by
Montaigne, and which has remained a part of our language.”--Servan.]--
seeking, indeed, both the one and the other, but rather of the two to
prefer manners and judgment to mere learning, and that this man should
exercise his charge after a new method.
‘Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their pupil’s
ears, as they were pouring into a funnel, whilst the business of the
pupil is only to repeat what the others have said: now I would have a
tutor to correct this error, and, that at the very first, he should
according to the capacity he has to deal with, put it to the test,
permitting his pupil himself to taste things, and of himself to discern
and choose them, sometimes opening the way to him, and sometimes leaving
him to open it for himself; that is, I would not have him alone to invent
and speak, but that he should also hear his pupil speak in turn.
Socrates, and since him Arcesilaus, made first their scholars speak, and
then they spoke to them--[Diogenes Laertius, iv. 36.]
“Obest plerumque iis, qui discere volunt,
auctoritas eorum, qui docent.”
[“The authority of those who teach, is very often an impediment to
those who desire to learn.”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., i. 5.]
It is good to make him, like a young horse, trot before him, that he may
judge of his going, and how much he is to abate of his own speed, to
accommodate himself to the vigour and capacity of the other. For want of
which due proportion we spoil all; which also to know how to adjust, and
to keep within an exact and due measure, is one of the hardest things I
know, and ‘tis the effect of a high and well-tempered soul, to know how
to condescend to such puerile motions and to govern and direct them.
I walk firmer and more secure up hill than down.
Such as, according to our common way of teaching, undertake, with one and
the same lesson, and the same measure of direction, to instruct several
boys of differing and unequal capacities, are infinitely mistaken; and
‘tis no wonder, if in a whole multitude of scholars, there are not found
above two or three who bring away any good account of their time and
discipline. Let the master not only examine him about the grammatical
construction of the bare words of his lesson, but about the sense and let
him judge of the profit he has made, not by the testimony of his memory,
but by that of his life. Let him make him put what he has learned into a
hundred several forms, and accommodate it to so many several subjects, to
see if he yet rightly comprehends it, and has made it his own, taking
instruction of his progress by the pedagogic institutions of Plato. ‘Tis
a sign of crudity and indigestion to disgorge what we eat in the same
condition it was swallowed; the stomach has not performed its office
unless it have altered the form and condition of what was committed to it
to concoct. Our minds work only upon trust, when bound and compelled to
follow the appetite of another’s fancy, enslaved and captivated under the
authority of another’s instruction; we have been so subjected to the
trammel, that we have no free, nor natural pace of our own; our own
vigour and liberty are extinct and gone:
“Nunquam tutelae suae fiunt.”
[“They are ever in wardship.”--Seneca, Ep., 33.]
I was privately carried at Pisa to see a very honest man, but so great an
Aristotelian, that his most usual thesis was: “That the touchstone and
square of all solid imagination, and of all truth, was an absolute
conformity to Aristotle’s doctrine; and that all besides was nothing but
inanity and chimera; for that he had seen all, and said all.” A position,
that for having been a little too injuriously and broadly interpreted,
brought him once and long kept him in great danger of the Inquisition at
Rome.
Let him make him examine and thoroughly sift everything he reads, and
lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust.
Aristotle’s principles will then be no more principles to him, than those
of Epicurus and the Stoics: let this diversity of opinions be propounded
to, and laid before him; he will himself choose, if he be able; if not,
he will remain in doubt.
“Che non men the saver, dubbiar m’ aggrata.”
[“I love to doubt, as well as to know.”--Dante, Inferno, xi. 93]
for, if he embrace the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, by his own reason,
they will no more be theirs, but become his own. Who follows another,
follows nothing, finds nothing, nay, is inquisitive after nothing.
“Non sumus sub rege; sibi quisque se vindicet.”
[“We are under no king; let each vindicate himself.”
--Seneca, Ep.,33]
Let him, at least, know that he knows. It will be necessary that he
imbibe their knowledge, not that he be corrupted with their precepts;
and no matter if he forget where he had his learning, provided he know
how to apply it to his own use. Truth and reason are common to every
one, and are no more his who spake them first, than his who speaks them
after: ‘tis no more according to Plato, than according to me, since both
he and I equally see and understand them. Bees cull their several sweets
from this flower and that blossom, here and there where they find them,
but themselves afterwards make the honey, which is all and purely their
own, and no more thyme and marjoram: so the several fragments he borrows
from others, he will transform and shuffle together to compile a work
that shall be absolutely his own; that is to say, his judgment:
his instruction, labour and study, tend to nothing else but to form that.
He is not obliged to discover whence he got the materials that have
assisted him, but only to produce what he has himself done with them.
Men that live upon pillage and borrowing, expose their purchases and
buildings to every one’s view: but do not proclaim how they came by the
money. We do not see the fees and perquisites of a gentleman of the long
robe; but we see the alliances wherewith he fortifies himself and his
family, and the titles and honours he has obtained for him and his. No
man divulges his revenue; or, at least, which way it comes in but every
one publishes his acquisitions. The advantages of our study are to
become better and more wise. ‘Tis, says Epicharmus, the understanding
that sees and hears, ‘tis the understanding that improves everything,
that orders everything, and that acts, rules, and reigns: all other
faculties are blind, and deaf, and without soul. And certainly we render
it timorous and servile, in not allowing it the liberty and privilege to
do anything of itself. Whoever asked his pupil what he thought of
grammar and rhetoric, or of such and such a sentence of Cicero? Our
masters stick them, full feathered, in our memories, and there establish
them like oracles, of which the letters and syllables are of the
substance of the thing. To know by rote, is no knowledge, and signifies
no more but only to retain what one has intrusted to our memory. That
which a man rightly knows and understands, he is the free disposer of at
his own full liberty, without any regard to the author from whence he had
it, or fumbling over the leaves of his book. A mere bookish learning is
a poor, paltry learning; it may serve for ornament, but there is yet no
foundation for any superstructure to be built upon it, according to the
opinion of Plato, who says, that constancy, faith, and sincerity, are the
true philosophy, and the other sciences, that are directed to other ends;
mere adulterate paint. I could wish that Paluel or Pompey, those two
noted dancers of my time, could have taught us to cut capers, by only
seeing them do it, without stirring from our places, as these men pretend
to inform the understanding without ever setting it to work, or that we
could learn to ride, handle a pike, touch a lute, or sing without the
trouble of practice, as these attempt to make us judge and speak well,
without exercising us in judging or speaking. Now in this initiation of
our studies in their progress, whatsoever presents itself before us is
book sufficient; a roguish trick of a page, a sottish mistake of a
servant, a jest at the table, are so many new subjects.
And for this reason, conversation with men is of very great use and
travel into foreign countries; not to bring back (as most of our young
monsieurs do) an account only of how many paces Santa Rotonda--[The
Pantheon of Agrippa.]--is in circuit; or of the richness of Signora
Livia’s petticoats; or, as some others, how much Nero’s face, in a statue
in such an old ruin, is longer and broader than that made for him on some
medal; but to be able chiefly to give an account of the humours, manners,
customs, and laws of those nations where he has been, and that we may
whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them against those of others. I
would that a boy should be sent abroad very young, and first, so as to
kill two birds with one stone, into those neighbouring nations whose
language is most differing from our own, and to which, if it be not
formed betimes, the tongue will grow too stiff to bend.
And also ‘tis the general opinion of all, that a child should not be
brought up in his mother’s lap. Mothers are too tender, and their
natural affection is apt to make the most discreet of them all so
overfond, that they can neither find in their hearts to give them due
correction for the faults they may commit, nor suffer them to be inured
to hardships and hazards, as they ought to be. They will not endure to
see them return all dust and sweat from their exercise, to drink cold
drink when they are hot, nor see them mount an unruly horse, nor take a
foil in hand against a rude fencer, or so much as to discharge a carbine.
And yet there is no remedy; whoever will breed a boy to be good for
anything when he comes to be a man, must by no means spare him when
young, and must very often transgress the rules of physic:
“Vitamque sub dio, et trepidis agat
In rebus.”
[“Let him live in open air, and ever in movement about something.”
--Horace, Od. ii., 3, 5.]
It is not enough to fortify his soul; you are also to make his sinews
strong; for the soul will be oppressed if not assisted by the members,
and would have too hard a task to discharge two offices alone. I know
very well to my cost, how much mine groans under the burden, from being
accommodated with a body so tender and indisposed, as eternally leans and
presses upon her; and often in my reading perceive that our masters, in
their writings, make examples pass for magnanimity and fortitude of mind,
which really are rather toughness of skin and hardness of bones; for I
have seen men, women, and children, naturally born of so hard and
insensible a constitution of body, that a sound cudgelling has been less
to them than a flirt with a finger would have been to me, and that would
neither cry out, wince, nor shrink, for a good swinging beating; and when
wrestlers counterfeit the philosophers in patience, ‘tis rather strength
of nerves than stoutness of heart. Now to be inured to undergo labour,
is to be accustomed to endure pain:
“Labor callum obducit dolori.”
[“Labour hardens us against pain.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 15.]
A boy is to be broken in to the toil and roughness of exercise, so as to
be trained up to the pain and suffering of dislocations, cholics,
cauteries, and even imprisonment and the rack itself; for he may come by
misfortune to be reduced to the worst of these, which (as this world
goes) is sometimes inflicted on the good as well as the bad. As for
proof, in our present civil war whoever draws his sword against the laws,
threatens the honestest men with the whip and the halter.
And, moreover, by living at home, the authority of this governor, which
ought to be sovereign over the boy he has received into his charge, is
often checked and hindered by the presence of parents; to which may also
be added, that the respect the whole family pay him, as their master’s
son, and the knowledge he has of the estate and greatness he is heir to,
are, in my opinion, no small inconveniences in these tender years.
And yet, even in this conversing with men I spoke of but now, I have
observed this vice, that instead of gathering observations from others,
we make it our whole business to lay ourselves open to them, and are more
concerned how to expose and set out our own commodities, than how to
increase our stock by acquiring new. Silence, therefore, and modesty are
very advantageous qualities in conversation. One should, therefore,
train up this boy to be sparing and an husband of his knowledge when he
has acquired it; and to forbear taking exceptions at or reproving every
idle saying or ridiculous story that is said or told in his presence; for
it is a very unbecoming rudeness to carp at everything that is not
agreeable to our own palate. Let him be satisfied with correcting
himself, and not seem to condemn everything in another he would not do
himself, nor dispute it as against common customs.
“Licet sapere sine pompa, sine invidia.”
[“Let us be wise without ostentation, without envy.”
--Seneca, Ep., 103.]
Let him avoid these vain and uncivil images of authority, this childish
ambition of coveting to appear better bred and more accomplished, than he
really will, by such carriage, discover himself to be. And, as if
opportunities of interrupting and reprehending were not to be omitted, to
desire thence to derive the reputation of something more than ordinary.
For as it becomes none but great poets to make use of the poetical
licence, so it is intolerable for any but men of great and illustrious
souls to assume privilege above the authority of custom:
“Si quid Socrates ant Aristippus contra morem et consuetudinem
fecerunt, idem sibi ne arbitretur licere: magnis enim illi et
divinis bonis hanc licentiam assequebantur.”
[“If Socrates and Aristippus have committed any act against manners
and custom, let him not think that he is allowed to do the same; for
it was by great and divine benefits that they obtained this
privilege.”--Cicero, De Offic., i. 41.]
Let him be instructed not to engage in discourse or dispute but with a
champion worthy of him, and, even there, not to make use of all the
little subtleties that may seem pat for his purpose, but only such
arguments as may best serve him. Let him be taught to be curious in the
election and choice of his reasons, to abominate impertinence, and
consequently, to affect brevity; but, above all, let him be lessoned to
acquiesce and submit to truth so soon as ever he shall discover it,
whether in his opponent’s argument, or upon better consideration of his
own; for he shall never be preferred to the chair for a mere clatter of
words and syllogisms, and is no further engaged to any argument whatever,
than as he shall in his own judgment approve it: nor yet is arguing a
trade, where the liberty of recantation and getting off upon better
thoughts, are to be sold for ready money:
“Neque, ut omnia, qux praescripta et imperata sint,
defendat, necessitate ulla cogitur.”
[“Neither is their any necessity upon him, that he should defend
all things that are prescribed and enjoined him.”
--Cicero, Acad., ii. 3.]
If his governor be of my humour, he will form his will to be a very good
and loyal subject to his prince, very affectionate to his person, and
very stout in his quarrel; but withal he will cool in him the desire of
having any other tie to his service than public duty. Besides several
other inconveniences that are inconsistent with the liberty every honest
man ought to have, a man’s judgment, being bribed and prepossessed by
these particular obligations, is either blinded and less free to exercise
its function, or is blemished with ingratitude and indiscretion. A man
that is purely a courtier, can neither have power nor will to speak or
think otherwise than favourably and well of a master, who, amongst so
many millions of other subjects, has picked out him with his own hand to
nourish and advance; this favour, and the profit flowing from it, must
needs, and not without some show of reason, corrupt his freedom and
dazzle him; and we commonly see these people speak in another kind of
phrase than is ordinarily spoken by others of the same nation, though
what they say in that courtly language is not much to be believed.
Let his conscience and virtue be eminently manifest in his speaking, and
have only reason for their guide. Make him understand, that to
acknowledge the error he shall discover in his own argument, though only
found out by himself, is an effect of judgment and sincerity, which are
the principal things he is to seek after; that obstinacy and contention
are common qualities, most appearing in mean souls; that to revise and
correct himself, to forsake an unjust argument in the height and heat of
dispute, are rare, great, and philosophical qualities.
Let him be advised, being in company, to have his eye and ear in every
corner; for I find that the places of greatest honour are commonly seized
upon by men that have least in them, and that the greatest fortunes are
seldom accompanied with the ablest parts. I have been present when,
whilst they at the upper end of the chamber have been only commenting the
beauty of the arras, or the flavour of the wine, many things that have
been very finely said at the lower end of the table have been lost and
thrown away. Let him examine every man’s talent; a peasant, a
bricklayer, a passenger: one may learn something from every one of these
in their several capacities, and something will be picked out of their
discourse whereof some use may be made at one time or another; nay, even
the folly and impertinence of others will contribute to his instruction.
By observing the graces and manners of all he sees, he will create to
himself an emulation of the good, and a contempt of the bad.
Let an honest curiosity be suggested to his fancy of being inquisitive
after everything; whatever there is singular and rare near the place
where he is, let him go and see it; a fine house, a noble fountain, an
eminent man, the place where a battle has been anciently fought, the
passages of Caesar and Charlemagne:
“Qux tellus sit lenta gelu, quae putris ab aestu,
Ventus in Italiam quis bene vela ferat.”
[“What country is bound in frost, what land is friable with heat,
what wind serves fairest for Italy.”--Propertius, iv. 3, 39.]
Let him inquire into the manners, revenues, and alliances of princes,
things in themselves very pleasant to learn, and very useful to know.
In this conversing with men, I mean also, and principally, those who only
live in the records of history; he shall, by reading those books,
converse with the great and heroic souls of the best ages. ‘Tis an idle
and vain study to those who make it so by doing it after a negligent
manner, but to those who do it with care and observation, ‘tis a study of
inestimable fruit and value; and the only study, as Plato reports, that
the Lacedaemonians reserved to themselves. What profit shall he not reap
as to the business of men, by reading the Lives of Plutarch? But,
withal, let my governor remember to what end his instructions are
principally directed, and that he do not so much imprint in his pupil’s
memory the date of the ruin of Carthage, as the manners of Hannibal and
Scipio; nor so much where Marcellus died, as why it was unworthy of his
duty that he died there. Let him not teach him so much the narrative
parts of history as to judge them; the reading of them, in my opinion,
is a thing that of all others we apply ourselves unto with the most
differing measure. I have read a hundred things in Livy that another has
not, or not taken notice of at least; and Plutarch has read a hundred
more there than ever I could find, or than, peradventure, that author
ever wrote; to some it is merely a grammar study, to others the very
anatomy of philosophy, by which the most abstruse parts of our human
nature penetrate. There are in Plutarch many long discourses very worthy
to be carefully read and observed, for he is, in my opinion, of all
others the greatest master in that kind of writing; but there are a
thousand others which he has only touched and glanced upon, where he only
points with his finger to direct us which way we may go if we will, and
contents himself sometimes with giving only one brisk hit in the nicest
article of the question, whence we are to grope out the rest. As, for
example, where he says’--[In the Essay on False Shame.]--that the
inhabitants of Asia came to be vassals to one only, for not having been
able to pronounce one syllable, which is No. Which saying of his gave
perhaps matter and occasion to La Boetie to write his “Voluntary
Servitude.” Only to see him pick out a light action in a man’s life, or
a mere word that does not seem to amount even to that, is itself a whole
discourse. ‘Tis to our prejudice that men of understanding should so
immoderately affect brevity; no doubt their reputation is the better by
it, but in the meantime we are the worse. Plutarch had rather we should
applaud his judgment than commend his knowledge, and had rather leave us
with an appetite to read more, than glutted with that we have already
read. He knew very well, that a man may say too much even upon the best
subjects, and that Alexandridas justly reproached him who made very good.
but too long speeches to the Ephori, when he said: “O stranger! thou
speakest the things thou shouldst speak, but not as thou shouldst speak
them.”--[Plutarch, Apothegms of the Lacedamonians.]--Such as have lean
and spare bodies stuff themselves out with clothes; so they who are
defective in matter endeavour to make amends with words.
Human understanding is marvellously enlightened by daily conversation
with men, for we are, otherwise, compressed and heaped up in ourselves,
and have our sight limited to the length of our own noses. One asking
Socrates of what country he was, he did not make answer, of Athens, but
of the world;--[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 37; Plutarch, On Exile, c. 4.]--
he whose imagination was fuller and wider, embraced the whole world for
his country, and extended his society and friendship to all mankind;
not as we do, who look no further than our feet. When the vines of my
village are nipped with the frost, my parish priest presently concludes,
that the indignation of God has gone out against all the human race, and
that the cannibals have already got the pip. Who is it that, seeing the
havoc of these civil wars of ours, does not cry out, that the machine of
the world is near dissolution, and that the day of judgment is at hand;
without considering, that many worse things have been seen, and that in
the meantime, people are very merry in a thousand other parts of the
earth for all this? For my part, considering the licence and impunity
that always attend such commotions, I wonder they are so moderate, and
that there is no more mischief done. To him who feels the hailstones
patter about his ears, the whole hemisphere appears to be in storm and
tempest; like the ridiculous Savoyard, who said very gravely, that if
that simple king of France could have managed his fortune as he should
have done, he might in time have come to have been steward of the
household to the duke his master: the fellow could not, in his shallow
imagination, conceive that there could be anything greater than a Duke of
Savoy. And, in truth, we are all of us, insensibly, in this error, an
error of a very great weight and very pernicious consequence. But
whoever shall represent to his fancy, as in a picture, that great image
of our mother nature, in her full majesty and lustre, whoever in her face
shall read so general and so constant a variety, whoever shall observe
himself in that figure, and not himself but a whole kingdom, no bigger
than the least touch or prick of a pencil in comparison of the whole,
that man alone is able to value things according to their true estimate
and grandeur.
This great world which some do yet multiply as several species under one
genus, is the mirror wherein we are to behold ourselves, to be able to
know ourselves as we ought to do in the true bias. In short, I would
have this to be the book my young gentleman should study with the most
attention. So many humours, so many sects, so many judgments, opinions,
laws, and customs, teach us to judge aright of our own, and inform our
understanding to discover its imperfection and natural infirmity, which
is no trivial speculation. So many mutations of states and kingdoms, and
so many turns and revolutions of public fortune, will make us wise enough
to make no great wonder of our own. So many great names, so many famous
victories and conquests drowned and swallowed in oblivion, render our
hopes ridiculous of eternising our names by the taking of half-a-score of
light horse, or a henroost, which only derives its memory from its ruin.
The pride and arrogance of so many foreign pomps, the inflated majesty of
so many courts and grandeurs, accustom and fortify our sight without
closing our eyes to behold the lustre of our own; so many trillions of
men, buried before us, encourage us not to fear to go seek such good
company in the other world: and so of the rest Pythagoras was want to
say,--[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 3.]--that our life resembles the great
and populous assembly of the Olympic games, wherein some exercise the
body, that they may carry away the glory of the prize: others bring
merchandise to sell for profit: there are also some (and those none of
the worst sort) who pursue no other advantage than only to look on, and
consider how and why everything is done, and to be spectators of the
lives of other men, thereby the better to judge of and regulate their
own.
To examples may fitly be applied all the profitable discourses of
philosophy, to which all human actions, as to their best rule, ought to
be especially directed: a scholar shall be taught to know--
“Quid fas optare: quid asper
Utile nummus habet: patrix carisque propinquis
Quantum elargiri deceat: quern te Deus esse
Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re;
Quid sumus, et quidnam victuri gignimur.”
[“Learn what it is right to wish; what is the true use of coined
money; how much it becomes us to give in liberality to our country
and our dear relations; whom and what the Deity commanded thee to
be; and in what part of the human system thou art placed; what we
are ant to what purpose engendered.”--Persius, iii. 69]
what it is to know, and what to be ignorant; what ought to be the end and
design of study; what valour, temperance, and justice are; the difference
betwixt ambition and avarice, servitude and subjection, licence and
liberty; by what token a man may know true and solid contentment; how far
death, affliction, and disgrace are to be apprehended;
“Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem.”
[“And how you may shun or sustain every hardship.”
--Virgil, AEneid, iii. 459.]
by what secret springs we move, and the reason of our various agitations
and irresolutions: for, methinks the first doctrine with which one should
season his understanding, ought to be that which regulates his manners
and his sense; that teaches him to know himself, and how both well to dig
and well to live. Amongst the liberal sciences, let us begin with that
which makes us free; not that they do not all serve in some measure to
the instruction and use of life, as all other things in some sort also
do; but let us make choice of that which directly and professedly serves
to that end. If we are once able to restrain the offices of human life
within their just and natural limits, we shall find that most of the
sciences in use are of no great use to us, and even in those that are,
that there are many very unnecessary cavities and dilatations which we
had better let alone, and, following Socrates’ direction, limit the
course of our studies to those things only where is a true and real
utility:
“Sapere aude;
Incipe; Qui recte vivendi prorogat horam,
Rusticus exspectat, dum defluat amnis; at ille
Labitur, et labetur in omne volubilis oevum.”
[“Dare to be wise; begin! he who defers the hour of living well is
like the clown, waiting till the river shall have flowed out: but
the river still flows, and will run on, with constant course, to
ages without end.”--Horace, Ep., i. 2.]
‘Tis a great foolery to teach our children:
“Quid moveant Pisces, animosaque signa Leonis,
Lotus et Hesperia quid Capricornus aqua,”
[“What influence Pisces have, or the sign of angry Leo, or
Capricorn, washed by the Hesperian wave.”--Propertius, iv. I, 89.]
the knowledge of the stars and the motion of the eighth sphere before
their own:
[“What care I about the Pleiades or the stars of Taurus?”
--Anacreon, Ode, xvii. 10.]
Anaximenes writing to Pythagoras, “To what purpose,” said he, “should I
trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or
slavery continually before my eyes?” for the kings of Persia were at that
time preparing to invade his country. Every one ought to say thus,
“Being assaulted, as I am by ambition, avarice, temerity, superstition,
and having within so many other enemies of life, shall I go ponder over
the world’s changes?”
After having taught him what will make him more wise and good, you may
then entertain him with the elements of logic, physics, geometry,
rhetoric, and the science which he shall then himself most incline to,
his judgment being beforehand formed and fit to choose, he will quickly
make his own. The way of instructing him ought to be sometimes by
discourse, and sometimes by reading; sometimes his governor shall put the
author himself, which he shall think most proper for him, into his hands,
and sometimes only the marrow and substance of it; and if himself be not
conversant enough in books to turn to all the fine discourses the books
contain for his purpose, there may some man of learning be joined to him,
that upon every occasion shall supply him with what he stands in need of,
to furnish it to his pupil. And who can doubt but that this way of
teaching is much more easy and natural than that of Gaza,--[Theodore
Gaza, rector of the Academy of Ferrara.]--in which the precepts are so
intricate, and so harsh, and the words so vain, lean; and insignificant,
that there is no hold to be taken of them, nothing that quickens and
elevates the wit and fancy, whereas here the mind has what to feed upon
and to digest. This fruit, therefore, is not only without comparison,
much more fair and beautiful; but will also be much more early ripe.
‘Tis a thousand pities that matters should be at such a pass in this age
of ours, that philosophy, even with men of understanding, should be,
looked upon as a vain and fantastic name, a thing of no use, no value,
either in opinion or effect, of which I think those ergotisms and petty
sophistries, by prepossessing the avenues to it, are the cause. And
people are much to blame to represent it to children for a thing of so
difficult access, and with such a frowning, grim, and formidable aspect.
Who is it that has disguised it thus, with this false, pale, and ghostly
countenance? There is nothing more airy, more gay, more frolic, and I
had like to have said, more wanton. She preaches nothing but feasting
and jollity; a melancholic anxious look shows that she does not inhabit
there. Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot
of philosophers set chatting together, said to them,--[Plutarch, Treatise
on Oracles which have ceased]--“Either I am much deceived, or by your
cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no, very deep
discourse.” To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied:
“Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of
the verb ------ is spelt with a double A, or that hunt after the
derivation of the comparatives ----- and -----, and the superlatives ----
and ------, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science: but
as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those
that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad.”
“Deprendas animi tormenta latentis in aegro
Corpore; deprendas et gaudia; sumit utrumque
Inde habitum facies.”
[“You may discern the torments of mind lurking in a sick body; you
may discern its joys: either expression the face assumes from the
mind.”--Juvenal, ix. 18]
The soul that lodges philosophy, ought to be of such a constitution of
health, as to render the body in like manner healthful too; she ought to
make her tranquillity and satisfaction shine so as to appear without, and
her contentment ought to fashion the outward behaviour to her own mould,
and consequently to fortify it with a graceful confidence, an active and
joyous carriage, and a serene and contented countenance. The most
manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like
that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.
‘Tis Baroco and Baralipton--[Two terms of the ancient scholastic
logic.]--that render their disciples so dirty and ill-favoured, and not
she; they do not so much as know her but by hearsay. What! It is she
that calms and appeases the storms and tempests of the soul, and who
teaches famine and fevers to laugh and sing; and that, not by certain
imaginary epicycles, but by natural and manifest reasons. She has virtue
for her end, which is not, as the schoolmen say, situate upon the summit
of a perpendicular, rugged, inaccessible precipice: such as have
approached her find her, quite on the contrary, to be seated in a fair,
fruitful, and flourishing plain, whence she easily discovers all things
below; to which place any one may, however, arrive, if he know but the
way, through shady, green, and sweetly-flourishing avenues, by a
pleasant, easy, and smooth descent, like that of the celestial vault.
‘Tis for not having frequented this supreme, this beautiful, triumphant,
and amiable, this equally delicious and courageous virtue, this so
professed and implacable enemy to anxiety, sorrow, fear, and constraint,
who, having nature for her guide, has fortune and pleasure for her
companions, that they have gone, according to their own weak imagination,
and created this ridiculous, this sorrowful, querulous, despiteful,
threatening, terrible image of it to themselves and others, and placed it
upon a rock apart, amongst thorns and brambles, and made of it a
hobgoblin to affright people.
But the governor that I would have, that is such a one as knows it to be
his duty to possess his pupil with as much or more affection than
reverence to virtue, will be able to inform him, that the poets have
evermore accommodated themselves to the public humour, and make him
sensible, that the gods have planted more toil and sweat in the avenues
of the cabinets of Venus than in those of Minerva. And when he shall
once find him begin to apprehend, and shall represent to him a Bradamante
or an Angelica--[Heroines of Ariosto.]--for a mistress, a natural,
active, generous, and not a viragoish, but a manly beauty, in comparison
of a soft, delicate, artificial simpering, and affected form; the one in
the habit of a heroic youth, wearing a glittering helmet, the other
tricked up in curls and ribbons like a wanton minx; he will then look
upon his own affection as brave and masculine, when he shall choose quite
contrary to that effeminate shepherd of Phrygia.
Such a tutor will make a pupil digest this new lesson, that the height
and value of true virtue consists in the facility, utility, and pleasure
of its exercise; so far from difficulty, that boys, as well as men, and
the innocent as well as the subtle, may make it their own; it is by
order, and not by force, that it is to be acquired. Socrates, her first
minion, is so averse to all manner of violence, as totally to throw it
aside, to slip into the more natural facility of her own progress; ‘tis
the nursing mother of all human pleasures, who in rendering them just,
renders them also pure and permanent; in moderating them, keeps them in
breath and appetite; in interdicting those which she herself refuses,
whets our desire to those that she allows; and, like a kind and liberal
mother, abundantly allows all that nature requires, even to satiety, if
not to lassitude: unless we mean to say that the regimen which stops the
toper before he has drunk himself drunk, the glutton before he has eaten
to a surfeit, and the lecher before he has got the pox, is an enemy to
pleasure. If the ordinary fortune fail, she does without it, and forms
another, wholly her own, not so fickle and unsteady as the other. She
can be rich, be potent and wise, and knows how to lie upon soft perfumed
beds: she loves life, beauty, glory, and health; but her proper and
peculiar office is to know how to regulate the use of all these good
things, and how to lose them without concern: an office much more noble
than troublesome, and without which the whole course of life is
unnatural, turbulent, and deformed, and there it is indeed, that men may
justly represent those monsters upon rocks and precipices.
If this pupil shall happen to be of so contrary a disposition, that he
had rather hear a tale of a tub than the true narrative of some noble
expedition or some wise and learned discourse; who at the beat of drum,
that excites the youthful ardour of his companions, leaves that to follow
another that calls to a morris or the bears; who would not wish, and find
it more delightful and more excellent, to return all dust and sweat
victorious from a battle, than from tennis or from a ball, with the prize
of those exercises; I see no other remedy, but that he be bound prentice
in some good town to learn to make minced pies, though he were the son of
a duke; according to Plato’s precept, that children are to be placed out
and disposed of, not according to the wealth, qualities, or condition of
the father, but according to the faculties and the capacity of their own
souls.
Since philosophy is that which instructs us to live, and that infancy has
there its lessons as well as other ages, why is it not communicated to
children betimes?
“Udum et molle lutum est; nunc, nunc properandus, et acri
Fingendus sine fine rota.”
[“The clay is moist and soft: now, now make haste, and form the
pitcher on the rapid wheel.”--Persius, iii. 23.]
They begin to teach us to live when we have almost done living.
A hundred students have got the pox before they have come to read
Aristotle’s lecture on temperance. Cicero said, that though he should
live two men’s ages, he should never find leisure to study the lyric
poets; and I find these sophisters yet more deplorably unprofitable.
The boy we would breed has a great deal less time to spare; he owes but
the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life to education; the
remainder is due to action. Let us, therefore, employ that short time in
necessary instruction. Away with the thorny subtleties of dialectics;
they are abuses, things by which our lives can never be amended: take the
plain philosophical discourses, learn how rightly to choose, and then
rightly to apply them; they are more easy to be understood than one of
Boccaccio’s novels; a child from nurse is much more capable of them, than
of learning to read or to write. Philosophy has discourses proper for
childhood, as well as for the decrepit age of men.
I am of Plutarch’s mind, that Aristotle did not so much trouble his great
disciple with the knack of forming syllogisms, or with the elements of
geometry; as with infusing into him good precepts concerning valour,
prowess, magnanimity, temperance, and the contempt of fear; and with this
ammunition, sent him, whilst yet a boy, with no more than thirty thousand
foot, four thousand horse, and but forty-two thousand crowns, to
subjugate the empire of the whole earth. For the other acts and
sciences, he says, Alexander highly indeed commended their excellence and
charm, and had them in very great honour and esteem, but not ravished
with them to that degree as to be tempted to affect the practice of them
In his own person:
“Petite hinc, juvenesque senesque,
Finem ammo certum, miserisque viatica canis.”
[“Young men and old men, derive hence a certain end to the mind,
and stores for miserable grey hairs.”--Persius, v. 64.]
Epicurus, in the beginning of his letter to Meniceus,--[Diogenes
Laertius, x. 122.]--says, “That neither the youngest should refuse to
philosophise, nor the oldest grow weary of it.” Who does otherwise,
seems tacitly to imply, that either the time of living happily is
not yet come, or that it is already past. And yet, a for all that, I
would not have this pupil of ours imprisoned and made a slave to his
book; nor would I have him given up to the morosity and melancholic
humour of a sour ill-natured pedant.
I would not have his spirit cowed and subdued, by applying him to the
rack, and tormenting him, as some do, fourteen or fifteen hours a day,
and so make a pack-horse of him. Neither should I think it good, when,
by reason of a solitary and melancholic complexion, he is discovered to
be overmuch addicted to his book, to nourish that humour in him; for that
renders him unfit for civil conversation, and diverts him from better
employments. And how many have I seen in my time totally brutified by an
immoderate thirst after knowledge? Carneades was so besotted with it,
that he would not find time so much as to comb his head or to pare his
nails. Neither would I have his generous manners spoiled and corrupted
by the incivility and barbarism of those of another. The French wisdom
was anciently turned into proverb: “Early, but of no continuance.” And,
in truth, we yet see, that nothing can be more ingenious and pleasing
than the children of France; but they ordinarily deceive the hope and
expectation that have been conceived of them; and grown up to be men,
have nothing extraordinary or worth taking notice of: I have heard men of
good understanding say, these colleges of ours to which we send our young
people (and of which we have but too many) make them such animals as they
are.--[Hobbes said that if he Had been at college as long as other people
he should have been as great a blockhead as they. W.C.H.] [And Bacon
before Hobbe’s time had discussed the “futility” of university teaching.
D.W.]
But to our little monsieur, a closet, a garden, the table, his bed,
solitude, and company, morning and evening, all hours shall be the same,
and all places to him a study; for philosophy, who, as the formatrix of
judgment and manners, shall be his principal lesson, has that privilege
to have a hand in everything. The orator Isocrates, being at a feast
entreated to speak of his art, all the company were satisfied with and
commended his answer: “It is not now a time,” said he, “to do what I can
do; and that which it is now time to do, I cannot do.”--[Plutarch,
Symp., i. I.]--For to make orations and rhetorical disputes in a company
met together to laugh and make good cheer, had been very unreasonable and
improper, and as much might have been said of all the other sciences.
But as to what concerns philosophy, that part of it at least that treats
of man, and of his offices and duties, it has been the common opinion of
all wise men, that, out of respect to the sweetness of her conversation,
she is ever to be admitted in all sports and entertainments. And Plato,
having invited her to his feast, we see after how gentle and obliging a
manner, accommodated both to time and place, she entertained the company,
though in a discourse of the highest and most important nature:
“Aeque pauperibus prodest, locupletibus aeque;
Et, neglecta, aeque pueris senibusque nocebit.”
[“It profits poor and rich alike, but, neglected, equally hurts old
and young.”--Horace, Ep., i. 25.]
By this method of instruction, my young pupil will be much more and
better employed than his fellows of the college are. But as the steps we
take in walking to and fro in a gallery, though three times as many, do
not tire a man so much as those we employ in a formal journey, so our
lesson, as it were accidentally occurring, without any set obligation of
time or place, and falling naturally into every action, will insensibly
insinuate itself. By which means our very exercises and recreations,
running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, riding, and fencing, will
prove to be a good part of our study. I would have his outward fashion
and mien, and the disposition of his limbs, formed at the same time with
his mind. ‘Tis not a soul, ‘tis not a body that we are training up, but
a man, and we ought not to divide him. And, as Plato says, we are not to
fashion one without the other, but make them draw together like two
horses harnessed to a coach. By which saying of his, does he not seem to
allow more time for, and to take more care of exercises for the body, and
to hold that the mind, in a good proportion, does her business at the
same time too?
As to the rest, this method of education ought to be carried on with a
severe sweetness, quite contrary to the practice of our pedants, who,
instead of tempting and alluring children to letters by apt and gentle
ways, do in truth present nothing before them but rods and ferules,
horror and cruelty. Away with this violence! away with this compulsion!
than which, I certainly believe nothing more dulls and degenerates a
well-descended nature. If you would have him apprehend shame and
chastisement, do not harden him to them: inure him to heat and cold, to
wind and sun, and to dangers that he ought to despise; wean him from all
effeminacy and delicacy in clothes and lodging, eating and drinking;
accustom him to everything, that he may not be a Sir Paris,
a carpet-knight, but a sinewy, hardy, and vigorous young man. I have
ever from a child to the age wherein I now am, been of this opinion, and
am still constant to it. But amongst other things, the strict
government of most of our colleges has evermore displeased me;
peradventure, they might have erred less perniciously on the indulgent
side. ‘Tis a real house of correction of imprisoned youth. They are
made debauched by being punished before they are so. Do but come in
when they are about their lesson, and you shall hear nothing but the
outcries of boys under execution, with the thundering noise of their
pedagogues drunk with fury. A very pretty way this, to tempt these
tender and timorous souls to love their book, with a furious
countenance, and a rod in hand! A cursed and pernicious way of
proceeding! Besides what Quintilian has very well observed, that this
imperious authority is often attended by very dangerous consequences,
and particularly our way of chastising. How much more decent would it
be to see their classes strewed with green leaves and fine flowers, than
with the bloody stumps of birch and willows? Were it left to my
ordering. I should paint the school with the pictures of joy and
gladness; Flora and the Graces, as the philosopher Speusippus did his.
Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too. Such
viands as are proper and wholesome for children, should be sweetened
with sugar, and such as are dangerous to them, embittered with gall.
‘Tis marvellous to see how solicitous Plato is in his Laws concerning
the gaiety and diversion of the youth of his city, and how much and
often he enlarges upon the races, sports, songs, leaps, and dances: of
which, he says, that antiquity has given the ordering and patronage
particularly to the gods themselves, to Apollo, Minerva, and the Muses.
He insists long upon, and is very particular in, giving innumerable
precepts for exercises; but as to the lettered sciences, says very
little, and only seems particularly to recommend poetry upon the account
of music.
All singularity in our manners and conditions is to be avoided, as
inconsistent with civil society. Who would not be astonished at so
strange a constitution as that of Demophoon, steward to Alexander the
Great, who sweated in the shade and shivered in the sun? I have seen
those who have run from the smell of a mellow apple with greater
precipitation than from a harquebuss-shot; others afraid of a mouse;
others vomit at the sight of cream; others ready to swoon at the making
of a feather bed; Germanicus could neither endure the sight nor the
crowing of a cock. I will not deny, but that there may, peradventure,
be some occult cause and natural aversion in these cases; but, in my
opinion, a man might conquer it, if he took it in time. Precept has in
this wrought so effectually upon me, though not without some pains on my
part, I confess, that beer excepted, my appetite accommodates itself
indifferently to all sorts of diet. Young bodies are supple; one should,
therefore, in that age bend and ply them to all fashions and customs: and
provided a man can contain the appetite and the will within their due
limits, let a young man, in God’s name, be rendered fit for all nations
and all companies, even to debauchery and excess, if need be; that is,
where he shall do it out of complacency to the customs of the place.
Let him be able to do everything, but love to do nothing but what is
good. The philosophers themselves do not justify Callisthenes for
forfeiting the favour of his master Alexander the Great, by refusing to
pledge him a cup of wine. Let him laugh, play, wench with his prince:
nay, I would have him, even in his debauches, too hard for the rest of
the company, and to excel his companions in ability and vigour, and that
he may not give over doing it, either through defect of power or
knowledge how to do it, but for want of will.
“Multum interest, utrum peccare ali quis nolit, an nesciat.”
[“There is a vast difference betwixt forbearing to sin, and not
knowing how to sin.”--Seneca, Ep., 90]
I thought I passed a compliment upon a lord, as free from those excesses
as any man in France, by asking him before a great deal of very good
company, how many times in his life he had been drunk in Germany, in the
time of his being there about his Majesty’s affairs; which he also took
as it was intended, and made answer, “Three times”; and withal told us
the whole story of his debauches. I know some who, for want of this
faculty, have found a great inconvenience in negotiating with that
nation. I have often with great admiration reflected upon the wonderful
constitution of Alcibiades, who so easily could transform himself to so
various fashions without any prejudice to his health; one while outdoing
the Persian pomp and luxury, and another, the Lacedaemonian austerity and
frugality; as reformed in Sparta, as voluptuous in Ionia:
“Omnis Aristippum decuit color, et status, et res.”
[“Every complexion of life, and station, and circumstance became
Aristippus.”--Horace, Ep., xvii. 23.]
I would have my pupil to be such an one,
“Quem duplici panno patentia velat,
Mirabor, vitae via si conversa decebit,
Personamque feret non inconcinnus utramque.”
[“I should admire him who with patience bearing a patched garment,
bears well a changed fortune, acting both parts equally well.”
--Horace Ep., xvii. 25.]
These are my lessons, and he who puts them in practice shall reap more
advantage than he who has had them read to him only, and so only knows
them. If you see him, you hear him; if you hear him, you see him. God
forbid, says one in Plato, that to philosophise were only to read a great
many books, and to learn the arts.
“Hanc amplissimam omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinam,
vita magis quam literis, persequuti sunt.”
[“They have proceeded to this discipline of living well, which of
all arts is the greatest, by their lives, rather than by their
reading.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 3.]
Leo, prince of the Phliasians, asking Heraclides Ponticus--[It was not
Heraclides of Pontus who made this answer, but Pythagoras.]--of what art
or science he made profession: “I know,” said he, “neither art nor
science, but I am a philosopher.” One reproaching Diogenes that, being
ignorant, he should pretend to philosophy; “I therefore,” answered he,
“pretend to it with so much the more reason.” Hegesias entreated that he
would read a certain book to him: “You are pleasant,” said he; “you
choose those figs that are true and natural, and not those that are
painted; why do you not also choose exercises which are naturally true,
rather than those written?”
The lad will not so much get his lesson by heart as he will practise it:
he will repeat it in his actions. We shall discover if there be prudence
in his exercises, if there be sincerity and justice in his deportment, if
there be grace and judgment in his speaking; if there be constancy in his
sickness; if there be modesty in his mirth, temperance in his pleasures,
order in his domestic economy, indifference in palate, whether what he
eats or drinks be flesh or fish, wine or water:
“Qui disciplinam suam non ostentationem scientiae, sed legem vitae
putet: quique obtemperet ipse sibi, et decretis pareat.”
[“Who considers his own discipline, not as a vain ostentation of
science, but as a law and rule of life; and who obeys his own
decrees, and the laws he has prescribed for himself.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 4.]
The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine. Zeuxidamus,
to one who asked him, why the Lacedaemonians did not commit their
constitutions of chivalry to writing, and deliver them to their young men
to read, made answer, that it was because they would inure them to
action, and not amuse them with words. With such a one, after fifteen or
sixteen years’ study, compare one of our college Latinists, who has
thrown away so much time in nothing but learning to speak. The world is
nothing but babble; and I hardly ever yet saw that man who did not rather
prate too much, than speak too little. And yet half of our age is
embezzled this way: we are kept four or five years to learn words only,
and to tack them together into clauses; as many more to form them into a
long discourse, divided into four or five parts; and other five years, at
least, to learn succinctly to mix and interweave them after a subtle and
intricate manner let us leave all this to those who make a profession of
it.
Going one day to Orleans, I met in that plain on this side Clery, two
pedants who were travelling towards Bordeaux, about fifty paces distant
from one another; and, a good way further behind them, I discovered a
troop of horse, with a gentleman at the head of them, who was the late
Monsieur le Comte de la Rochefoucauld. One of my people inquired of the
foremost of these masters of arts, who that gentleman was that came after
him; he, having not seen the train that followed after, and thinking his
companion was meant, pleasantly answered, “He is not a gentleman; he is a
grammarian; and I am a logician.” Now we who, quite contrary, do not
here pretend to breed a grammarian or a logician, but a gentleman, let us
leave them to abuse their leisure; our business lies elsewhere. Let but
our pupil be well furnished with things, words will follow but too fast;
he will pull them after him if they do not voluntarily follow. I have
observed some to make excuses, that they cannot express themselves, and
pretend to have their fancies full of a great many very fine things,
which yet, for want of eloquence, they cannot utter; ‘tis a mere shift,
and nothing else. Will you know what I think of it? I think they are
nothing but shadows of some imperfect images and conceptions that they
know not what to make of within, nor consequently bring out; they do not
yet themselves understand what they would be at, and if you but observe
how they haggle and stammer upon the point of parturition, you will soon
conclude, that their labour is not to delivery, but about conception, and
that they are but licking their formless embryo. For my part, I hold,
and Socrates commands it, that whoever has in his mind a sprightly and
clear imagination, he will express it well enough in one kind of tongue
or another, and, if he be dumb, by signs--
“Verbaque praevisam rem non invita sequentur;”
[“Once a thing is conceived in the mind, the words to express it
soon present themselves.” (“The words will not reluctantly follow the
thing preconceived.”)--Horace, De Arte Poetica. v. 311]
And as another as poetically says in his prose:
“Quum res animum occupavere, verbs ambiunt,”
[“When things are once in the mind, the words offer themselves
readily.” (“When things have taken possession of the mind, the
words trip.”)--Seneca, Controvers., iii. proem.]
and this other.
“Ipsae res verbs rapiunt.”
[“The things themselves force the words to express them.”
--Cicero, De Finib., iii. 5.]
He knows nothing of ablative, conjunctive, substantive, or grammar, no
more than his lackey, or a fishwife of the Petit Pont; and yet these will
give you a bellyful of talk, if you will hear them, and peradventure
shall trip as little in their language as the best masters of art in
France. He knows no rhetoric, nor how in a preface to bribe the
benevolence of the courteous reader; neither does he care to know it.
Indeed all this fine decoration of painting is easily effaced by the
lustre of a simple and blunt truth; these fine flourishes serve only to
amuse the vulgar, of themselves incapable of more solid and nutritive
diet, as Aper very evidently demonstrates in Tacitus. The ambassadors
of Samos, prepared with a long and elegant oration, came to Cleomenes,
king of Sparta, to incite him to a war against the tyrant Polycrates;
who, after he had heard their harangue with great gravity and patience,
gave them this answer: “As to the exordium, I remember it not, nor
consequently the middle of your speech; and for what concerns your
conclusion, I will not do what you desire:”--[Plutarch, Apothegms of the
Lacedaemonians.]--a very pretty answer this, methinks, and a pack of
learned orators most sweetly gravelled. And what did the other man say?
The Athenians were to choose one of two architects for a very great
building they had designed; of these, the first, a pert affected fellow,
offered his service in a long premeditated discourse upon the subject of
the work in hand, and by his oratory inclined the voices of the people in
his favour; but the other in three words: “O Athenians, what this man
says, I will do.”--[Plutarch, Instructions to Statesmen, c. 4.]--
When Cicero was in the height and heat of an eloquent harangue, many were
struck with admiration; but Cato only laughed, saying, “We have a
pleasant (mirth-making) consul.” Let it go before, or come after, a good
sentence or a thing well said, is always in season; if it neither suit
well with what went before, nor has much coherence with what follows
after, it is good in itself. I am none of those who think that good
rhyme makes a good poem. Let him make short long, and long short if he
will, ‘tis no great matter; if there be invention, and that the wit and
judgment have well performed their offices, I will say, here’s a good
poet, but an ill rhymer.
“Emunctae naris, durus componere versus.”
[“Of delicate humour, but of rugged versification.”
--Horace, Sat, iv. 8.]
Let a man, says Horace, divest his work of all method and measure,
“Tempora certa modosque, et, quod prius ordine verbum est,
Posterius facias, praeponens ultima primis
Invenias etiam disjecti membra poetae.”
[“Take away certain rhythms and measures, and make the word which
was first in order come later, putting that which should be last
first, you will still find the scattered remains of the poet.”
--Horace, Sat., i. 4, 58.]
he will never the more lose himself for that; the very pieces will be
fine by themselves. Menander’s answer had this meaning, who being
reproved by a friend, the time drawing on at which he had promised a
comedy, that he had not yet fallen in hand with it; “It is made, and
ready,” said he, “all but the verses.”--[Plutarch, Whether the Athenians
more excelled in Arms or in Letters.]--Having contrived the subject, and
disposed the scenes in his fancy, he took little care for the rest.
Since Ronsard and Du Bellay have given reputation to our French poesy,
every little dabbler, for aught I see, swells his words as high, and
makes his cadences very near as harmonious as they:
“Plus sonat, quam valet.”
[“More sound than sense”--Seneca, Ep., 40.]
For the vulgar, there were never so many poetasters as now; but though
they find it no hard matter to imitate their rhyme, they yet fall
infinitely short of imitating the rich descriptions of the one, and the
delicate invention of the other of these masters.
But what will become of our young gentleman, if he be attacked with the
sophistic subtlety of some syllogism? “A Westfalia ham makes a man
drink; drink quenches thirst: ergo a Westfalia ham quenches thirst.”
Why, let him laugh at it; it will be more discretion to do so, than to go
about to answer it; or let him borrow this pleasant evasion from
Aristippus: “Why should I trouble myself to untie that, which bound as
it is, gives me so much trouble?”--[Diogenes Laertius, ii. 70.]--
One offering at this dialectic juggling against Cleanthes, Chrysippus
took him short, saying, “Reserve these baubles to play with children,
and do not by such fooleries divert the serious thoughts of a man of
years.” If these ridiculous subtleties,
“Contorta et aculeata sophismata,”
as Cicero calls them, are designed to possess him with an untruth, they
are dangerous; but if they signify no more than only to make him laugh,
I do not see why a man need to be fortified against them. There are some
so ridiculous, as to go a mile out of their way to hook in a fine word:
“Aut qui non verba rebus aptant, sed res extrinsecus
arcessunt, quibus verba conveniant.”
[“Who do not fit words to the subject, but seek out for things
quite from the purpose to fit the words.”--Quintilian, viii. 3.]
And as another says,
“Qui, alicujus verbi decore placentis, vocentur ad id,
quod non proposuerant scribere.”
[“Who by their fondness of some fine sounding word, are tempted to
something they had no intention to treat of.”--Seneca, Ep., 59.]
I for my part rather bring in a fine sentence by head and shoulders to
fit my purpose, than divert my designs to hunt after a sentence. On the
contrary, words are to serve, and to follow a man’s purpose; and let
Gascon come in play where French will not do. I would have things so
excelling, and so wholly possessing the imagination of him that hears,
that he should have something else to do, than to think of words. The
way of speaking that I love, is natural and plain, the same in writing as
in speaking, and a sinewy and muscular way of expressing a man’s self,
short and pithy, not so elegant and artificial as prompt and vehement;
“Haec demum sapiet dictio, qux feriet;”
[“That has most weight and wisdom which pierces the ear.” (“That
utterance indeed will have a taste which shall strike the ear.”)
--Epitaph on Lucan, in Fabricius, Biblioth. Lat., ii. 10.]
rather hard than wearisome; free from affectation; irregular,
incontinuous, and bold; where every piece makes up an entire body; not
like a pedant, a preacher, or a pleader, but rather a soldier-like style,
as Suetonius calls that of Julius Caesar; and yet I see no reason why he
should call it so. I have ever been ready to imitate the negligent garb,
which is yet observable amongst the young men of our time, to wear my
cloak on one shoulder, my cap on one side, a stocking in disorder, which
seems to express a kind of haughty disdain of these exotic ornaments, and
a contempt of the artificial; but I find this negligence of much better
use in the form of speaking. All affectation, particularly in the French
gaiety and freedom, is ungraceful in a courtier, and in a monarchy every
gentleman ought to be fashioned according to the court model; for which
reason, an easy and natural negligence does well. I no more like a web
where the knots and seams are to be seen, than a fine figure, so
delicate, that a man may tell all the bones and veins:
“Quae veritati operam dat oratio, incomposita sit et simplex.”
[“Let the language that is dedicated to truth be plain and
unaffected.--Seneca, Ep. 40.]
“Quis accurat loquitur, nisi qui vult putide loqui?”
[“For who studies to speak accurately, that does not at the same
time wish to perplex his auditory?”--Idem, Ep., 75.]
That eloquence prejudices the subject it would advance, that wholly
attracts us to itself. And as in our outward habit, ‘tis a ridiculous
effeminacy to distinguish ourselves by a particular and unusual garb or
fashion; so in language, to study new phrases, and to affect words that
are not of current use, proceeds from a puerile and scholastic ambition.
May I be bound to speak no other language than what is spoken in the
market-places of Paris! Aristophanes the grammarian was quite out, when
he reprehended Epicurus for his plain way of delivering himself, and the
design of his oratory, which was only perspicuity of speech.
The imitation of words, by its own facility, immediately disperses itself
through a whole people; but the imitation of inventing and fitly applying
those words is of a slower progress. The generality of readers, for
having found a like robe, very mistakingly imagine they have the same
body and inside too, whereas force and sinews are never to be borrowed;
the gloss, and outward ornament, that is, words and elocution, may. Most
of those I converse with, speak the same language I here write; but
whether they think the same thoughts I cannot say. The Athenians, says
Plato, study fulness and elegancy of speaking; the Lacedaemonians affect
brevity, and those of Crete to aim more at the fecundity of conception
than the fertility of speech; and these are the best. Zeno used to say
that he had two sorts of disciples, one that he called cy-----ous,
curious to learn things, and these were his favourites; the other,
aoy---ous, that cared for nothing but words. Not that fine speaking is
not a very good and commendable quality; but not so excellent and so
necessary as some would make it; and I am scandalised that our whole life
should be spent in nothing else. I would first understand my own
language, and that of my neighbours, with whom most of my business and
conversation lies.
No doubt but Greek and Latin are very great ornaments, and of very great
use, but we buy them too dear. I will here discover one way, which has
been experimented in my own person, by which they are to be had better
cheap, and such may make use of it as will. My late father having made
the most precise inquiry that any man could possibly make amongst men of
the greatest learning and judgment, of an exact method of education, was
by them cautioned of this inconvenience then in use, and made to believe,
that the tedious time we applied to the learning of the tongues of them
who had them for nothing, was the sole cause we could not arrive to the
grandeur of soul and perfection of knowledge, of the ancient Greeks and
Romans. I do not, however, believe that to be the only cause. So it is,
that the expedient my father found out for this was, that in my infancy,
and before I began to speak, he committed me to the care of a German, who
since died a famous physician in France, totally ignorant of our
language, and very fluent and a great critic in Latin. This man, whom he
had fetched out of his own country, and whom he entertained with a great
salary for this only one end, had me continually with him; he had with
him also joined two others, of inferior learning, to attend me, and to
relieve him; these spoke to me in no other language but Latin. As to the
rest of his household, it was an inviolable rule, that neither himself,
nor my mother, nor valet, nor chambermaid, should speak anything in my
company, but such Latin words as each one had learned to gabble with me.
--[These passages are, the basis of a small volume by the Abbe Mangin:
“Education de Montaigne; ou, L’Art d’enseigner le Latin a l’instar des
meres latines.”]--It is not to be imagined how great an advantage this
proved to the whole family; my father and my mother by this means learned
Latin enough to understand it perfectly well, and to speak it to such a
degree as was sufficient for any necessary use; as also those of the
servants did who were most frequently with me. In short, we Latined it
at such a rate, that it overflowed to all the neighbouring villages,
where there yet remain, that have established themselves by custom,
several Latin appellations of artisans and their tools. As for what
concerns myself, I was above six years of age before I understood either
French or Perigordin, any more than Arabic; and without art, book,
grammar, or precept, whipping, or the expense of a tear, I had, by that
time, learned to speak as pure Latin as my master himself, for I had no
means of mixing it up with any other. If, for example, they were to give
me a theme after the college fashion, they gave it to others in French;
but to me they were to give it in bad Latin, to turn it into that which
was good. And Nicolas Grouchy, who wrote a book De Comitiis Romanorum;
Guillaume Guerente, who wrote a comment upon Aristotle: George Buchanan,
that great Scottish poet: and Marc Antoine Muret (whom both France and
Italy have acknowledged for the best orator of his time), my domestic
tutors, have all of them often told me that I had in my infancy that
language so very fluent and ready, that they were afraid to enter into
discourse with me. And particularly Buchanan, whom I since saw attending
the late Mareschal de Brissac, then told me, that he was about to write a
treatise of education, the example of which he intended to take from
mine; for he was then tutor to that Comte de Brissac who afterward proved
so valiant and so brave a gentleman.
As to Greek, of which I have but a mere smattering, my father also
designed to have it taught me by a device, but a new one, and by way of
sport; tossing our declensions to and fro, after the manner of those who,
by certain games of tables, learn geometry and arithmetic. For he,
amongst other rules, had been advised to make me relish science and duty
by an unforced will, and of my own voluntary motion, and to educate my
soul in all liberty and delight, without any severity or constraint;
which he was an observer of to such a degree, even of superstition, if I
may say so, that some being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the
brains of children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch
them violently--and over-hastily from sleep (wherein they are much more
profoundly involved than we), he caused me to be wakened by the sound of
some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a musician for that
purpose. By this example you may judge of the rest, this alone being
sufficient to recommend both the prudence and the affection of so good a
father, who is not to be blamed if he did not reap fruits answerable to
so exquisite a culture. Of this, two things were the cause: first, a
sterile and improper soil; for, though I was of a strong and healthful
constitution, and of a disposition tolerably sweet and tractable, yet I
was, withal, so heavy, idle, and indisposed, that they could not rouse me
from my sloth, not even to get me out to play. What I saw, I saw clearly
enough, and under this heavy complexion nourished a bold imagination and
opinions above my age. I had a slow wit that would go no faster than it
was led; a tardy understanding, a languishing invention, and above all,
incredible defect of memory; so that, it is no wonder, if from all these
nothing considerable could be extracted. Secondly, like those who,
impatient of along and steady cure, submit to all sorts of prescriptions
and recipes, the good man being extremely timorous of any way failing in
a thing he had so wholly set his heart upon, suffered himself at last to
be overruled by the common opinions, which always follow their leader as
a flight of cranes, and complying with the method of the time, having no
more those persons he had brought out of Italy, and who had given him the
first model of education, about him, he sent me at six years of age to
the College of Guienne, at that time the best and most flourishing in
France. And there it was not possible to add anything to the care he had
to provide me the most able tutors, with all other circumstances of
education, reserving also several particular rules contrary to the
college practice; but so it was, that with all these precautions, it was
a college still. My Latin immediately grew corrupt, of which also by
discontinuance I have since lost all manner of use; so that this new way
of education served me to no other end, than only at my first coming to
prefer me to the first forms; for at thirteen years old, that I came out
of the college, I had run through my whole course (as they call it), and,
in truth, without any manner of advantage, that I can honestly brag of,
in all this time.
The first taste which I had for books came to me from the pleasure in
reading the fables of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; for, being about seven or
eight years old, I gave up all other diversions to read them, both by
reason that this was my own natural language, the easiest book that I was
acquainted with, and for the subject, the most accommodated to the
capacity of my age: for as for the Lancelot of the Lake, the Amadis of
Gaul, the Huon of Bordeaux, and such farragos, by which children are most
delighted with, I had never so much as heard their names, no more than I
yet know what they contain; so exact was the discipline wherein I was
brought up. But this was enough to make me neglect the other lessons
that were prescribed me; and here it was infinitely to my advantage,
to have to do with an understanding tutor, who very well knew discreetly
to connive at this and other truantries of the same nature; for by this
means I ran through Virgil’s AEneid, and then Terence, and then Plautus,
and then some Italian comedies, allured by the sweetness of the subject;
whereas had he been so foolish as to have taken me off this diversion,
I do really believe, I had brought away nothing from the college but a
hatred of books, as almost all our young gentlemen do. But he carried
himself very discreetly in that business, seeming to take no notice, and
allowing me only such time as I could steal from my other regular
studies, which whetted my appetite to devour those books. For the chief
things my father expected from their endeavours to whom he had delivered
me for education, were affability and good-humour; and, to say the truth,
my manners had no other vice but sloth and want of metal. The fear was
not that I should do ill, but that I should do nothing; nobody
prognosticated that I should be wicked, but only useless; they foresaw
idleness, but no malice; and I find it falls out accordingly:
The complaints I hear of myself are these: “He is idle, cold in the
offices of friendship and relation, and in those of the public, too
particular, too disdainful.” But the most injurious do not say, “Why has
he taken such a thing? Why has he not paid such an one?” but, “Why does
he part with nothing? Why does he not give?” And I should take it for a
favour that men would expect from me no greater effects of supererogation
than these. But they are unjust to exact from me what I do not owe, far
more rigorously than they require from others that which they do owe.
In condemning me to it, they efface the gratification of the action, and
deprive me of the gratitude that would be my due for it; whereas the
active well-doing ought to be of so much the greater value from my hands,
by how much I have never been passive that way at all. I can the more
freely dispose of my fortune the more it is mine, and of myself the more
I am my own. Nevertheless, if I were good at setting out my own actions,
I could, peradventure, very well repel these reproaches, and could give
some to understand, that they are not so much offended, that I do not
enough, as that I am able to do a great deal more than I do.
Yet for all this heavy disposition of mine, my mind, when retired into
itself, was not altogether without strong movements, solid and clear
judgments about those objects it could comprehend, and could also,
without any helps, digest them; but, amongst other things, I do really
believe, it had been totally impossible to have made it to submit by
violence and force. Shall I here acquaint you with one faculty of my
youth? I had great assurance of countenance, and flexibility of voice
and gesture, in applying myself to any part I undertook to act: for
before--
“Alter ab undecimo tum me vix ceperat annus,”
[“I had just entered my twelfth year.”--Virgil, Bucol., 39.]
I played the chief parts in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, Guerente,
and Muret, that were presented in our College of Guienne with great
dignity: now Andreas Goveanus, our principal, as in all other parts of
his charge, was, without comparison, the best of that employment in
France; and I was looked upon as one of the best actors. ‘Tis an
exercise that I do not disapprove in young people of condition; and I
have since seen our princes, after the example of some of the ancients,
in person handsomely and commendably perform these exercises; it was even
allowed to persons of quality to make a profession of it in Greece.
“Aristoni tragico actori rem aperit: huic et genus et
fortuna honesta erant: nec ars, quia nihil tale apud
Graecos pudori est, ea deformabat.”
[“He imparted this matter to Aristo the tragedian; a man of good
family and fortune, which neither of them receive any blemish by
that profession; nothing of this kind being reputed a disparagement
in Greece.”--Livy, xxiv. 24.]
Nay, I have always taxed those with impertinence who condemn these
entertainments, and with injustice those who refuse to admit such
comedians as are worth seeing into our good towns, and grudge the people
that public diversion. Well-governed corporations take care to assemble
their citizens, not only to the solemn duties of devotion, but also to
sports and spectacles. They find society and friendship augmented by it;
and besides, can there possibly be allowed a more orderly and regular
diversion than what is performed m the sight of every one, and very often
in the presence of the supreme magistrate himself? And I, for my part,
should think it reasonable, that the prince should sometimes gratify his
people at his own expense, out of paternal goodness and affection; and
that in populous cities there should be theatres erected for such
entertainments, if but to divert them from worse and private actions.
To return to my subject, there is nothing like alluring the appetite and
affections; otherwise you make nothing but so many asses laden with
books; by dint of the lash, you give them their pocketful of learning to
keep; whereas, to do well you should not only lodge it with them, but
make them espouse it.
CHAPTER XXVI
THAT IT IS FOLLY TO MEASURE TRUTH AND ERROR BY OUR OWN CAPACITY
‘Tis not, perhaps, without reason, that we attribute facility of belief
and easiness of persuasion to simplicity and ignorance: for I fancy I
have heard belief compared to the impression of a seal upon the soul,
which by how much softer and of less resistance it is, is the more easy
to be impressed upon.
“Ut necesse est, lancem in Libra, ponderibus impositis,
deprimi, sic animum perspicuis cedere.”
[“As the scale of the balance must give way to the weight that
presses it down, so the mind yields to demonstration.”
--Cicero, Acad., ii. 12.]
By how much the soul is more empty and without counterpoise, with so much
greater facility it yields under the weight of the first persuasion. And
this is the reason that children, the common people, women, and sick
folks, are most apt to be led by the ears. But then, on the other hand,
‘tis a foolish presumption to slight and condemn all things for false
that do not appear to us probable; which is the ordinary vice of such as
fancy themselves wiser than their neighbours. I was myself once one of
those; and if I heard talk of dead folks walking, of prophecies,
enchantments, witchcrafts, or any other story I had no mind to believe:
“Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
Nocturnos lemures, portentaque Thessala,”
[“Dreams, magic terrors, marvels, sorceries, Thessalian prodigies.”
--Horace. Ep. ii. 3, 208.]
I presently pitied the poor people that were abused by these follies.
Whereas I now find, that I myself was to be pitied as much, at least,
as they; not that experience has taught me anything to alter my former
opinions, though my curiosity has endeavoured that way; but reason has
instructed me, that thus resolutely to condemn anything for false and
impossible, is arrogantly and impiously to circumscribe and limit the
will of God, and the power of our mother nature, within the bounds of my
own capacity, than which no folly can be greater. If we give the names
of monster and miracle to everything our reason cannot comprehend, how
many are continually presented before our eyes? Let us but consider
through what clouds, and as it were groping in the dark, our teachers
lead us to the knowledge of most of the things about us; assuredly we
shall find that it is rather custom than knowledge that takes away their
strangeness--
“Jam nemo, fessus saturusque videndi,
Suspicere in coeli dignatur lucida templa;”
[“Weary of the sight, now no one deigns to look up to heaven’s lucid
temples.”--Lucretius, ii. 1037. The text has ‘statiate videnai’]
and that if those things were now newly presented to us, we should think
them as incredible, if not more, than any others.
“Si nunc primum mortalibus adsint
Ex improviso, si sint objecta repente,
Nil magis his rebus poterat mirabile dici,
Aute minus ante quod auderent fore credere gentes.”
[Lucretius, ii. 1032. The sense of the passage is in the preceding
sentence.]
He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the
sea; and the greatest things that have fallen within our knowledge, we
conclude the extremes that nature makes of the kind.
“Scilicet et fluvius qui non est maximus, ei’st
Qui non ante aliquem majorem vidit; et ingens
Arbor, homoque videtur, et omnia de genere omni
Maxima quae vidit quisque, haec ingentia fingit.”
[“A little river seems to him, who has never seen a larger river, a
mighty stream; and so with other things--a tree, a man--anything
appears greatest to him that never knew a greater.”--Idem, vi. 674.]
“Consuetudine oculorum assuescunt animi, neque admirantur,
neque requirunt rationes earum rerum, quas semper vident.”
[“Things grow familiar to men’s minds by being often seen; so that
they neither admire nor are they inquisitive about things they daily
see.”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., lib. ii. 38.]
The novelty, rather than the greatness of things, tempts us to inquire
into their causes. We are to judge with more reverence, and with greater
acknowledgment of our own ignorance and infirmity, of the infinite power
of nature. How many unlikely things are there testified by people worthy
of faith, which, if we cannot persuade ourselves absolutely to believe,
we ought at least to leave them in suspense; for, to condemn them as
impossible, is by a temerarious presumption to pretend to know the utmost
bounds of possibility. Did we rightly understand the difference betwixt
the impossible and the unusual, and betwixt that which is contrary to the
order and course of nature and contrary to the common opinion of men, in
not believing rashly, and on the other hand, in not being too
incredulous, we should observe the rule of ‘Ne quid nimis’ enjoined by
Chilo.
When we find in Froissart, that the Comte de Foix knew in Bearn the
defeat of John, king of Castile, at Jubera the next day after it
happened, and the means by which he tells us he came to do so, we may be
allowed to be a little merry at it, as also at what our annals report,
that Pope Honorius, the same day that King Philip Augustus died at
Mantes, performed his public obsequies at Rome, and commanded the like
throughout Italy, the testimony of these authors not being, perhaps, of
authority enough to restrain us. But what if Plutarch, besides several
examples that he produces out of antiquity, tells us, he knows of certain
knowledge, that in the time of Domitian, the news of the battle lost by
Antony in Germany was published at Rome, many days’ journey from thence,
and dispersed throughout the whole world, the same day it was fought;
and if Caesar was of opinion, that it has often happened, that the report
has preceded the incident, shall we not say, that these simple people
have suffered themselves to be deceived with the vulgar, for not having
been so clear-sighted as we? Is there anything more delicate, more
clear, more sprightly; than Pliny’s judgment, when he is pleased to set
it to work? Anything more remote from vanity? Setting aside his
learning, of which I make less account, in which of these excellences do
any of us excel him? And yet there is scarce a young schoolboy that does
not convict him of untruth, and that pretends not to instruct him in the
progress of the works of nature. When we read in Bouchet the miracles of
St. Hilary’s relics, away with them: his authority is not sufficient to
deprive us of the liberty of contradicting him; but generally and offhand
to condemn all suchlike stories, seems to me a singular impudence. That
great St. Augustin’ testifies to have seen a blind child recover sight
upon the relics of St. Gervasius and St. Protasius at Milan; a woman at
Carthage cured of a cancer, by the sign of the cross made upon her by a
woman newly baptized; Hesperius, a familiar friend of his, to have driven
away the spirits that haunted his house, with a little earth of the
sepulchre of our Lord; which earth, being also transported thence into
the church, a paralytic to have there been suddenly cured by it; a woman
in a procession, having touched St. Stephen’s shrine with a nosegay, and
rubbing her eyes with it, to have recovered her sight, lost many years
before; with several other miracles of which he professes himself to have
been an eyewitness: of what shall we excuse him and the two holy bishops,
Aurelius and Maximinus, both of whom he attests to the truth of these
things? Shall it be of ignorance, simplicity, and facility; or of malice
and imposture? Is any man now living so impudent as to think himself
comparable to them in virtue, piety, learning, judgment, or any kind of
perfection?
“Qui, ut rationem nullam afferrent,
ipsa auctoritate me frangerent.”
[“Who, though they should adduce no reason, would convince me with
their authority alone.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes, i. 21.]
‘Tis a presumption of great danger and consequence, besides the absurd
temerity it draws after it, to contemn what we do not comprehend. For
after, according to your fine understanding, you have established the
limits of truth and error, and that, afterwards, there appears a
necessity upon you of believing stranger things than those you have
contradicted, you are already obliged to quit your limits. Now, that
which seems to me so much to disorder our consciences in the commotions
we are now in concerning religion, is the Catholics dispensing so much
with their belief. They fancy they appear moderate, and wise, when they
grant to their opponents some of the articles in question; but, besides
that they do not discern what advantage it is to those with whom we
contend, to begin to give ground and to retire, and how much this
animates our enemy to follow his blow: these articles which they select
as things indifferent, are sometimes of very great importance. We are
either wholly and absolutely to submit ourselves to the authority of our
ecclesiastical polity, or totally throw off all obedience to it: ‘tis not
for us to determine what and how much obedience we owe to it. And this I
can say, as having myself made trial of it, that having formerly taken
the liberty of my own swing and fancy, and omitted or neglected certain
rules of the discipline of our Church, which seemed to me vain and
strange coming afterwards to discourse of it with learned men, I have
found those same things to be built upon very good and solid ground and
strong foundation; and that nothing but stupidity and ignorance makes us
receive them with less reverence than the rest. Why do we not consider
what contradictions we find in our own judgments; how many things were
yesterday articles of our faith, that to-day appear no other than fables?
Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to
thrust our noses into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything
doubtful and undecided.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A child should not be brought up in his mother’s lap
Acquiesce and submit to truth
Affect words that are not of current use
Anything appears greatest to him that never knew a greater
Appetite to read more, than glutted with that we have
Applaud his judgment than commend his knowledge
Attribute facility of belief to simplicity and ignorance
Away with this violence! away with this compulsion!
Bears well a changed fortune, acting both parts equally well
Belief compared to the impression of a seal upon the soul
cloak on one shoulder, my cap on one side, a stocking disordered
College: a real house of correction of imprisoned youth
Disgorge what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed
Education ought to be carried on with a severe sweetness
Eloquence prejudices the subject it would advance
Fear was not that I should do ill, but that I should do nothing
Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul
Hobbes said that if he had been at college as long as others--
Inquisitive after everything
Insert whole sections and pages out of ancient authors
It is no hard matter to get children
Learn what it is right to wish
Least touch or prick of a pencil in comparison of the whole
Let him be satisfied with correcting himself
Let him examine every man’s talent
Light prognostics they give of themselves in their tender years
Living well, which of all arts is the greatest
Lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust
Man may say too much even upon the best subjects
Miracle: everything our reason cannot comprehend
Morosity and melancholic humour of a sour ill-natured pedant
Mothers are too tender
Negligent garb, which is yet observable amongst the young men
Nobody prognosticated that I should be wicked, but only useless
Not having been able to pronounce one syllable, which is No!
O Athenians, what this man says, I will do
Obstinacy and contention are common qualities
Occasion to La Boetie to write his “Voluntary Servitude”
Philosophy has discourses proper for childhood
Philosophy is that which instructs us to live
Philosophy looked upon as a vain and fantastic name
Preface to bribe the benevolence of the courteous reader
Reading those books, converse with the great and heroic souls
Silence, therefore, and modesty are very advantageous qualities
So many trillions of men, buried before us
Sparing and an husband of his knowledge
The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine
The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness
Their labour is not to delivery, but about conception
There is nothing like alluring the appetite and affections
They begin to teach us to live when we have almost done living
Things grow familiar to men’s minds by being often seen
To condemn them as impossible, is by a temerarious presumption
To contemn what we do not comprehend
To go a mile out of their way to hook in a fine word
To know by rote, is no knowledge
Tongue will grow too stiff to bend
Totally brutified by an immoderate thirst after knowledge
Unbecoming rudeness to carp at everything
Unjust to exact from me what I do not owe
Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too
Who by their fondness of some fine sounding word
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 6.
XXVII. Of friendship.
XXVIII. Nine-and-twenty sonnets of Estienne de la Boetie.
XXIX. Of moderation.
XXX. Of cannibals.
XXXI. That a man is soberly to judge of the divine ordinances.
XXXII. That we are to avoid pleasures, even at the expense of life.
XXXIII. That fortune is oftentimes observed to act by the rule of
reason.
XXXIV. Of one defect in our government.
XXXV. Of the custom of wearing clothes.
XXXVI. Of Cato the Younger.
XXXVII. That we laugh and cry for the same thing.
XXXVIII. Of solitude.
CHAPTER XXVII
OF FRIENDSHIP
Having considered the proceedings of a painter that serves me, I had a
mind to imitate his way. He chooses the fairest place and middle of any
wall, or panel, wherein to draw a picture, which he finishes with his
utmost care and art, and the vacuity about it he fills with grotesques,
which are odd fantastic figures without any grace but what they derive
from their variety, and the extravagance of their shapes. And in truth,
what are these things I scribble, other than grotesques and monstrous
bodies, made of various parts, without any certain figure, or any other
than accidental order, coherence, or proportion?
“Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne.”
[“A fair woman in her upper form terminates in a fish.”
--Horace, De Arte Poetica, v. 4.]
In this second part I go hand in hand with my painter; but fall very
short of him in the first and the better, my power of handling not being
such, that I dare to offer at a rich piece, finely polished, and set off
according to art. I have therefore thought fit to borrow one of Estienne
de la Boetie, and such a one as shall honour and adorn all the rest of my
work--namely, a discourse that he called ‘Voluntary Servitude’; but,
since, those who did not know him have properly enough called it “Le
contr Un.” He wrote in his youth,--[“Not being as yet eighteen years
old.”--Edition of 1588.] by way of essay, in honour of liberty against
tyrants; and it has since run through the hands of men of great learning
and judgment, not without singular and merited commendation; for it is
finely written, and as full as anything can possibly be. And yet one may
confidently say it is far short of what he was able to do; and if in that
more mature age, wherein I had the happiness to know him, he had taken a
design like this of mine, to commit his thoughts to writing, we should
have seen a great many rare things, and such as would have gone very near
to have rivalled the best writings of antiquity: for in natural parts
especially, I know no man comparable to him. But he has left nothing
behind him, save this treatise only (and that too by chance, for I
believe he never saw it after it first went out of his hands), and some
observations upon that edict of January--[1562, which granted to the
Huguenots the public exercise of their religion.]--made famous by our
civil-wars, which also shall elsewhere, peradventure, find a place.
These were all I could recover of his remains, I to whom with so
affectionate a remembrance, upon his death-bed, he by his last will
bequeathed his library and papers, the little book of his works only
excepted, which I committed to the press. And this particular obligation
I have to this treatise of his, that it was the occasion of my first
coming acquainted with him; for it was showed to me long before I had the
good fortune to know him; and the first knowledge of his name, proving
the first cause and foundation of a friendship, which we afterwards
improved and maintained, so long as God was pleased to continue us
together, so perfect, inviolate, and entire, that certainly the like is
hardly to be found in story, and amongst the men of this age, there is no
sign nor trace of any such thing in use; so much concurrence is required
to the building of such a one, that ‘tis much, if fortune bring it but
once to pass in three ages.
There is nothing to which nature seems so much to have inclined us, as to
society; and Aristotle , says that the good legislators had more respect
to friendship than to justice. Now the most supreme point of its
perfection is this: for, generally, all those that pleasure, profit,
public or private interest create and nourish, are so much the less
beautiful and generous, and so much the less friendships, by how much
they mix another cause, and design, and fruit in friendship, than itself.
Neither do the four ancient kinds, natural, social, hospitable, venereal,
either separately or jointly, make up a true and perfect friendship.
That of children to parents is rather respect: friendship is nourished by
communication, which cannot by reason of the great disparity, be betwixt
these, but would rather perhaps offend the duties of nature; for neither
are all the secret thoughts of fathers fit to be communicated to
children, lest it beget an indecent familiarity betwixt them; nor can the
advices and reproofs, which is one of the principal offices of
friendship, be properly performed by the son to the father. There are
some countries where ‘twas the custom for children to kill their fathers;
and others, where the fathers killed their children, to avoid their being
an impediment one to another in life; and naturally the expectations of
the one depend upon the ruin of the other. There have been great
philosophers who have made nothing of this tie of nature, as Aristippus
for one, who being pressed home about the affection he owed to his
children, as being come out of him, presently fell to spit, saying, that
this also came out of him, and that we also breed worms and lice; and
that other, that Plutarch endeavoured to reconcile to his brother:
“I make never the more account of him,” said he, “for coming out of the
same hole.” This name of brother does indeed carry with it a fine and
delectable sound, and for that reason, he and I called one another
brothers but the complication of interests, the division of estates, and
that the wealth of the one should be the property of the other, strangely
relax and weaken the fraternal tie: brothers pursuing their fortune and
advancement by the same path, ‘tis hardly possible but they must of
necessity often jostle and hinder one another. Besides, why is it
necessary that the correspondence of manners, parts, and inclinations,
which begets the true and perfect friendships, should always meet in
these relations? The father and the son may be of quite contrary
humours, and so of brothers: he is my son, he is my brother; but he is
passionate, ill-natured, or a fool. And moreover, by how much these are
friendships that the law and natural obligation impose upon us, so much
less is there of our own choice and voluntary freedom; whereas that
voluntary liberty of ours has no production more promptly and; properly
its own than affection and friendship. Not that I have not in my own
person experimented all that can possibly be expected of that kind,
having had the best and most indulgent father, even to his extreme old
age, that ever was, and who was himself descended from a family for many
generations famous and exemplary for brotherly concord:
“Et ipse
Notus in fratres animi paterni.”
[“And I myself, known for paternal love toward my brothers.”
--Horace, Ode, ii. 2, 6.]
We are not here to bring the love we bear to women, though it be an act
of our own choice, into comparison, nor rank it with the others. The
fire of this, I confess,
“Neque enim est dea nescia nostri
Qux dulcem curis miscet amaritiem,”
[“Nor is the goddess unknown to me who mixes a sweet bitterness
with my love.”---Catullus, lxviii. 17.]
is more active, more eager, and more sharp: but withal, ‘tis more
precipitant, fickle, moving, and inconstant; a fever subject to
intermissions and paroxysms, that has seized but on one part of us.
Whereas in friendship, ‘tis a general and universal fire, but temperate
and equal, a constant established heat, all gentle and smooth, without
poignancy or roughness. Moreover, in love, ‘tis no other than frantic
desire for that which flies from us:
“Come segue la lepre il cacciatore
Al freddo, al caldo, alla montagna, al lito;
Ne piu l’estima poi the presa vede;
E sol dietro a chi fugge affretta il piede”
[“As the hunter pursues the hare, in cold and heat, to the mountain,
to the shore, nor cares for it farther when he sees it taken, and
only delights in chasing that which flees from him.”--Aristo, x. 7.]
so soon as it enters unto the terms of friendship, that is to say, into a
concurrence of desires, it vanishes and is gone, fruition destroys it,
as having only a fleshly end, and such a one as is subject to satiety.
Friendship, on the contrary, is enjoyed proportionably as it is desired;
and only grows up, is nourished and improved by enjoyment, as being of
itself spiritual, and the soul growing still more refined by practice.
Under this perfect friendship, the other fleeting affections have in my
younger years found some place in me, to say nothing of him, who himself
so confesses but too much in his verses; so that I had both these
passions, but always so, that I could myself well enough distinguish
them, and never in any degree of comparison with one another; the first
maintaining its flight in so lofty and so brave a place, as with disdain
to look down, and see the other flying at a far humbler pitch below.
As concerning marriage, besides that it is a covenant, the entrance into
which only is free, but the continuance in it forced and compulsory,
having another dependence than that of our own free will, and a bargain
commonly contracted to other ends, there almost always happens a thousand
intricacies in it to unravel, enough to break the thread and to divert
the current of a lively affection: whereas friendship has no manner of
business or traffic with aught but itself. Moreover, to say truth, the
ordinary talent of women is not such as is sufficient to maintain the
conference and communication required to the support of this sacred tie;
nor do they appear to be endued with constancy of mind, to sustain the
pinch of so hard and durable a knot. And doubtless, if without this,
there could be such a free and voluntary familiarity contracted, where
not only the souls might have this entire fruition, but the bodies also
might share in the alliance, and a man be engaged throughout, the
friendship would certainly be more full and perfect; but it is without
example that this sex has ever yet arrived at such perfection; and, by
the common consent of the ancient schools, it is wholly rejected from it.
That other Grecian licence is justly abhorred by our manners, which also,
from having, according to their practice, a so necessary disparity of age
and difference of offices betwixt the lovers, answered no more to the
perfect union and harmony that we here require than the other:
“Quis est enim iste amor amicitiae? cur neque deformem
adolescentem quisquam amat, neque formosum senem?”
[“For what is that friendly love? why does no one love a deformed
youth or a comely old man?”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 33.]
Neither will that very picture that the Academy presents of it, as I
conceive, contradict me, when I say, that this first fury inspired by the
son of Venus into the heart of the lover, upon sight of the flower and
prime of a springing and blossoming youth, to which they allow all the
insolent and passionate efforts that an immoderate ardour can produce,
was simply founded upon external beauty, the false image of corporal
generation; for it could not ground this love upon the soul, the sight of
which as yet lay concealed, was but now springing, and not of maturity to
blossom; that this fury, if it seized upon a low spirit, the means by
which it preferred its suit were rich presents, favour in advancement to
dignities, and such trumpery, which they by no means approve; if on a
more generous soul, the pursuit was suitably generous, by philosophical
instructions, precepts to revere religion, to obey the laws, to die for
the good of one’s country; by examples of valour, prudence, and justice,
the lover studying to render himself acceptable by the grace and beauty
of the soul, that of his body being long since faded and decayed, hoping
by this mental society to establish a more firm and lasting contract.
When this courtship came to effect in due season (for that which they do
not require in the lover, namely, leisure and discretion in his pursuit,
they strictly require in the person loved, forasmuch as he is to judge of
an internal beauty, of difficult knowledge and abstruse discovery), then
there sprung in the person loved the desire of a spiritual conception;
by the mediation of a spiritual beauty. This was the principal; the
corporeal, an accidental and secondary matter; quite the contrary as to
the lover. For this reason they prefer the person beloved, maintaining
that the gods in like manner preferred him too, and very much blame the
poet AEschylus for having, in the loves of Achilles and Patroclus, given
the lover’s part to Achilles, who was in the first and beardless flower
of his adolescence, and the handsomest of all the Greeks. After this
general community, the sovereign, and most worthy part presiding and
governing, and performing its proper offices, they say, that thence great
utility was derived, both by private and public concerns; that it
constituted the force and power of the countries where it prevailed, and
the chiefest security of liberty and justice. Of which the healthy loves
of Harmodius and Aristogiton are instances. And therefore it is that
they called it sacred and divine, and conceive that nothing but the
violence of tyrants and the baseness of the common people are inimical to
it. Finally, all that can be said in favour of the Academy is, that it
was a love which ended in friendship, which well enough agrees with the
Stoical definition of love:
“Amorem conatum esse amicitiae faciendae
ex pulchritudinis specie.”
[“Love is a desire of contracting friendship arising from the beauty
of the object.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., vi. 34.]
I return to my own more just and true description:
“Omnino amicitiae, corroboratis jam confirmatisque,
et ingeniis, et aetatibus, judicandae sunt.”
[“Those are only to be reputed friendships that are fortified and
confirmed by judgement and the length of time.”
--Cicero, De Amicit., c. 20.]
For the rest, what we commonly call friends and friendships, are nothing
but acquaintance and familiarities, either occasionally contracted, or
upon some design, by means of which there happens some little intercourse
betwixt our souls. But in the friendship I speak of, they mix and work
themselves into one piece, with so universal a mixture, that there is no
more sign of the seam by which they were first conjoined. If a man
should importune me to give a reason why I loved him, I find it could no
otherwise be expressed, than by making answer: because it was he, because
it was I. There is, beyond all that I am able to say, I know not what
inexplicable and fated power that brought on this union. We sought one
another long before we met, and by the characters we heard of one
another, which wrought upon our affections more than, in reason, mere
reports should do; I think ‘twas by some secret appointment of heaven.
We embraced in our names; and at our first meeting, which was
accidentally at a great city entertainment, we found ourselves so
mutually taken with one another, so acquainted, and so endeared betwixt
ourselves, that from thenceforward nothing was so near to us as one
another. He wrote an excellent Latin satire, since printed, wherein he
excuses the precipitation of our intelligence, so suddenly come to
perfection, saying, that destined to have so short a continuance, as
begun so late (for we were both full-grown men, and he some years the
older), there was no time to lose, nor were we tied to conform to the
example of those slow and regular friendships, that require so many
precautions of long preliminary conversation: This has no other idea than
that of itself, and can only refer to itself: this is no one special
consideration, nor two, nor three, nor four, nor a thousand; ‘tis I know
not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, seizing my whole will,
carried it to plunge and lose itself in his, and that having seized his
whole will, brought it back with equal concurrence and appetite to plunge
and lose itself in mine. I may truly say lose, reserving nothing to
ourselves that was either his or mine.--[All this relates to Estienne de
la Boetie.]
When Laelius,--[Cicero, De Amicit., c. II.]--in the presence of the
Roman consuls, who after thay had sentenced Tiberius Gracchus, prosecuted
all those who had had any familiarity with him also; came to ask Caius
Blosius, who was his chiefest friend, how much he would have done for
him, and that he made answer: “All things.”--“How! All things!” said
Laelius. “And what if he had commanded you to fire our temples?”--“He
would never have commanded me that,” replied Blosius.--“But what if he
had?” said Laelius.--“I would have obeyed him,” said the other. If he
was so perfect a friend to Gracchus as the histories report him to have
been, there was yet no necessity of offending the consuls by such a bold
confession, though he might still have retained the assurance he had of
Gracchus’ disposition. However, those who accuse this answer as
seditious, do not well understand the mystery; nor presuppose, as it was
true, that he had Gracchus’ will in his sleeve, both by the power of a
friend, and the perfect knowledge he had of the man: they were more
friends than citizens, more friends to one another than either enemies or
friends to their country, or than friends to ambition and innovation;
having absolutely given up themselves to one another, either held
absolutely the reins of the other’s inclination; and suppose all this
guided by virtue, and all this by the conduct of reason, which also
without these it had not been possible to do, Blosius’ answer was such as
it ought to be. If any of their actions flew out of the handle, they
were neither (according to my measure of friendship) friends to one
another, nor to themselves. As to the rest, this answer carries no worse
sound, than mine would do to one that should ask me: “If your will should
command you to kill your daughter, would you do it?” and that I should
make answer, that I would; for this expresses no consent to such an act,
forasmuch as I do not in the least suspect my own will, and as little
that of such a friend. ‘Tis not in the power of all the eloquence in the
world, to dispossess me of the certainty I have of the intentions and
resolutions of my friend; nay, no one action of his, what face soever it
might bear, could be presented to me, of which I could not presently,
and at first sight, find out the moving cause. Our souls had drawn so
unanimously together, they had considered each other with so ardent an
affection, and with the like affection laid open the very bottom of our
hearts to one another’s view, that I not only knew his as well as my own;
but should certainly in any concern of mine have trusted my interest much
more willingly with him, than with myself.
Let no one, therefore, rank other common friendships with such a one as
this. I have had as much experience of these as another, and of the most
perfect of their kind: but I do not advise that any should confound the
rules of the one and the other, for they would find themselves much
deceived. In those other ordinary friendships, you are to walk with
bridle in your hand, with prudence and circumspection, for in them the
knot is not so sure that a man may not half suspect it will slip. “Love
him,” said Chilo,--[Aulus Gellius, i. 3.]--“so as if you were one day to
hate him; and hate him so as you were one day to love him.” This
precept, though abominable in the sovereign and perfect friendship I
speak of, is nevertheless very sound as to the practice of the ordinary
and customary ones, and to which the saying that Aristotle had so
frequent in his mouth, “O my friends, there is no friend,” may very fitly
be applied. In this noble commerce, good offices, presents, and
benefits, by which other friendships are supported and maintained, do not
deserve so much as to be mentioned; and the reason is the concurrence of
our wills; for, as the kindness I have for myself receives no increase,
for anything I relieve myself withal in time of need (whatever the Stoics
say), and as I do not find myself obliged to myself for any service I do
myself: so the union of such friends, being truly perfect, deprives them
of all idea of such duties, and makes them loathe and banish from their
conversation these words of division and distinction, benefits,
obligation, acknowledgment, entreaty, thanks, and the like. All things,
wills, thoughts, opinions, goods, wives, children, honours, and lives,
being in effect common betwixt them, and that absolute concurrence of
affections being no other than one soul in two bodies (according to that
very proper definition of Aristotle), they can neither lend nor give
anything to one another. This is the reason why the lawgivers, to honour
marriage with some resemblance of this divine alliance, interdict all
gifts betwixt man and wife; inferring by that, that all should belong to
each of them, and that they have nothing to divide or to give to each
other.
If, in the friendship of which I speak, one could give to the other, the
receiver of the benefit would be the man that obliged his friend; for
each of them contending and above all things studying how to be useful to
the other, he that administers the occasion is the liberal man, in giving
his friend the satisfaction of doing that towards him which above all
things he most desires. When the philosopher Diogenes wanted money, he
used to say, that he redemanded it of his friends, not that he demanded
it. And to let you see the practical working of this, I will here
produce an ancient and singular example. Eudamidas, a Corinthian, had
two friends, Charixenus a Sicyonian and Areteus a Corinthian; this man
coming to die, being poor, and his two friends rich, he made his will
after this manner. “I bequeath to Areteus the maintenance of my mother,
to support and provide for her in her old age; and to Charixenus I
bequeath the care of marrying my daughter, and to give her as good a
portion as he is able; and in case one of these chance to die, I hereby
substitute the survivor in his place.” They who first saw this will made
themselves very merry at the contents: but the legatees, being made
acquainted with it, accepted it with very great content; and one of them,
Charixenus, dying within five days after, and by that means the charge of
both duties devolving solely on him, Areteus nurtured the old woman with
very great care and tenderness, and of five talents he had in estate, he
gave two and a half in marriage with an only daughter he had of his own,
and two and a half in marriage with the daughter of Eudamidas, and on one
and the same day solemnised both their nuptials.
This example is very full, if one thing were not to be objected, namely
the multitude of friends for the perfect friendship I speak of is
indivisible; each one gives himself so entirely to his friend, that he
has nothing left to distribute to others: on the contrary, is sorry that
he is not double, treble, or quadruple, and that he has not many souls
and many wills, to confer them all upon this one object. Common
friendships will admit of division; one may love the beauty of this
person, the good-humour of that, the liberality of a third, the paternal
affection of a fourth, the fraternal love of a fifth, and so of the rest:
but this friendship that possesses the whole soul, and there rules and
sways with an absolute sovereignty, cannot possibly admit of a rival.
If two at the same time should call to you for succour, to which of them
would you run? Should they require of you contrary offices, how could
you serve them both? Should one commit a thing to your silence that it
were of importance to the other to know, how would you disengage
yourself? A unique and particular friendship dissolves all other
obligations whatsoever: the secret I have sworn not to reveal to any
other, I may without perjury communicate to him who is not another, but
myself. ‘Tis miracle enough certainly, for a man to double himself, and
those that talk of tripling, talk they know not of what. Nothing is
extreme, that has its like; and he who shall suppose, that of two, I love
one as much as the other, that they mutually love one another too, and
love me as much as I love them, multiplies into a confraternity the most
single of units, and whereof, moreover, one alone is the hardest thing in
the world to find. The rest of this story suits very well with what I
was saying; for Eudamidas, as a bounty and favour, bequeaths to his
friends a legacy of employing themselves in his necessity; he leaves them
heirs to this liberality of his, which consists in giving them the
opportunity of conferring a benefit upon him; and doubtless, the force of
friendship is more eminently apparent in this act of his, than in that of
Areteus. In short, these are effects not to be imagined nor comprehended
by such as have not experience of them, and which make me infinitely
honour and admire the answer of that young soldier to Cyrus, by whom
being asked how much he would take for a horse, with which he had won the
prize of a race, and whether he would exchange him for a kingdom?
--“No, truly, sir,” said he, “but I would give him with all my heart,
to get thereby a true friend, could I find out any man worthy of that
alliance.”--[Xenophon, Cyropadia, viii. 3.]--He did not say ill in
saying, “could I find”: for though one may almost everywhere meet with
men sufficiently qualified for a superficial acquaintance, yet in this,
where a man is to deal from the very bottom of his heart, without any
manner of reservation, it will be requisite that all the wards and
springs be truly wrought and perfectly sure.
In confederations that hold but by one end, we are only to provide
against the imperfections that particularly concern that end. It can be
of no importance to me of what religion my physician or my lawyer is;
this consideration has nothing in common with the offices of friendship
which they owe me; and I am of the same indifference in the domestic
acquaintance my servants must necessarily contract with me. I never
inquire, when I am to take a footman, if he be chaste, but if he be
diligent; and am not solicitous if my muleteer be given to gaming, as if
he be strong and able; or if my cook be a swearer, if he be a good cook.
I do not take upon me to direct what other men should do in the
government of their families, there are plenty that meddle enough with
that, but only give an account of my method in my own:
“Mihi sic usus est: tibi, ut opus est facto, face.”
[“This has been my way; as for you, do as you find needful.
--“Terence, Heaut., i. I., 28.]
For table-talk, I prefer the pleasant and witty before the learned and
the grave; in bed, beauty before goodness; in common discourse the ablest
speaker, whether or no there be sincerity in the case. And, as he that
was found astride upon a hobby-horse, playing with his children,
entreated the person who had surprised him in that posture to say nothing
of it till himself came to be a father,--[Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus,
c. 9.]--supposing that the fondness that would then possess his own
soul, would render him a fairer judge of such an action; so I, also,
could wish to speak to such as have had experience of what I say: though,
knowing how remote a thing such a friendship is from the common practice,
and how rarely it is to be found, I despair of meeting with any such
judge. For even these discourses left us by antiquity upon this subject,
seem to me flat and poor, in comparison of the sense I have of it, and in
this particular, the effects surpass even the precepts of philosophy.
“Nil ego contulerim jucundo sanus amico.”
[“While I have sense left to me, there will never be anything more
acceptable to me than an agreeable friend.”
--Horace, Sat., i. 5, 44.]
The ancient Menander declared him to be happy that had had the good
fortune to meet with but the shadow of a friend: and doubtless he had
good reason to say so, especially if he spoke by experience: for in good
earnest, if I compare all the rest of my life, though, thanks be to God,
I have passed my time pleasantly enough, and at my ease, and the loss of
such a friend excepted, free from any grievous affliction, and in great
tranquillity of mind, having been contented with my natural and original
commodities, without being solicitous after others; if I should compare
it all, I say, with the four years I had the happiness to enjoy the sweet
society of this excellent man, ‘tis nothing but smoke, an obscure and
tedious night. From the day that I lost him:
“Quern semper acerbum,
Semper honoratum (sic, di, voluistis) habebo,”
[“A day for me ever sad, for ever sacred, so have you willed ye
gods.”--AEneid, v. 49.]
I have only led a languishing life; and the very pleasures that present
themselves to me, instead of administering anything of consolation,
double my affliction for his loss. We were halves throughout, and to
that degree, that methinks, by outliving him, I defraud him of his part.
“Nec fas esse ulla me voluptate hic frui
Decrevi, tantisper dum ille abest meus particeps.”
[“I have determined that it will never be right for me to enjoy any
pleasure, so long as he, with whom I shared all pleasures is away.”
--Terence, Heaut., i. I. 97.]
I was so grown and accustomed to be always his double in all places and
in all things, that methinks I am no more than half of myself:
“Illam meae si partem anima tulit
Maturior vis, quid moror altera?
Nec carus aeque, nec superstes
Integer? Ille dies utramque
Duxit ruinam.”
[“If that half of my soul were snatch away from me by an untimely
stroke, why should the other stay? That which remains will not be
equally dear, will not be whole: the same day will involve the
destruction of both.”]
or:
[“If a superior force has taken that part of my soul, why do I, the
remaining one, linger behind? What is left is not so dear, nor an
entire thing: this day has wrought the destruction of both.”
--Horace, Ode, ii. 17, 5.]
There is no action or imagination of mine wherein I do not miss him; as I
know that he would have missed me: for as he surpassed me by infinite
degrees in virtue and all other accomplishments, so he also did in the
duties of friendship:
“Quis desiderio sit pudor, aut modus
Tam cari capitis?”
[“What shame can there, or measure, in lamenting so dear a friend?”
--Horace, Ode, i. 24, I.]
“O misero frater adempte mihi!
Omnia tecum una perierunt gaudia nostra,
Quae tuus in vita dulcis alebat amor.
Tu mea, tu moriens fregisti commoda, frater;
Tecum una tota est nostra sepulta anima
Cujus ego interitu tota de menthe fugavi
Haec studia, atque omnes delicias animi.
Alloquar? audiero nunquam tua verba loquentem?
Nunquam ego te, vita frater amabilior
Aspiciam posthac; at certe semper amabo;”
[“O brother, taken from me miserable! with thee, all our joys have
vanished, those joys which, in thy life, thy dear love nourished.
Dying, thou, my brother, hast destroyed all my happiness. My whole
soul is buried with thee. Through whose death I have banished from
my mind these studies, and all the delights of the mind. Shall I
address thee? I shall never hear thy voice. Never shall I behold
thee hereafter. O brother, dearer to me than life. Nought remains,
but assuredly I shall ever love thee.”--Catullus, lxviii. 20; lxv.]
But let us hear a boy of sixteen speak:
--[In Cotton’s translation the work referred to is “those Memoirs
upon the famous edict of January,” of which mention has already been
made in the present edition. The edition of 1580, however, and the
Variorum edition of 1872-1900, indicate no particular work; but the
edition of 1580 has it “this boy of eighteen years” (which was the
age at which La Boetie wrote his “Servitude Volontaire”), speaks of
“a boy of sixteen” as occurring only in the common editions, and it
would seem tolerably clear that this more important work was, in
fact, the production to which Montaigne refers, and that the proper
reading of the text should be “sixteen years.” What “this boy
spoke” is not given by Montaigne, for the reason stated in the next
following paragraph.]
“Because I have found that that work has been since brought out, and with
a mischievous design, by those who aim at disturbing and changing the
condition of our government, without troubling themselves to think
whether they are likely to improve it: and because they have mixed up his
work with some of their own performance, I have refrained from inserting
it here. But that the memory of the author may not be injured, nor
suffer with such as could not come near-hand to be acquainted with his
principles, I here give them to understand, that it was written by him in
his boyhood, and that by way of exercise only, as a common theme that has
been hackneyed by a thousand writers. I make no question but that he
himself believed what he wrote, being so conscientious that he would not
so much as lie in jest: and I moreover know, that could it have been in
his own choice, he had rather have been born at Venice, than at Sarlac;
and with reason. But he had another maxim sovereignty imprinted in his
soul, very religiously to obey and submit to the laws under which he was
born. There never was a better citizen, more affectionate to his
country; nor a greater enemy to all the commotions and innovations of his
time: so that he would much rather have employed his talent to the
extinguishing of those civil flames, than have added any fuel to them;
he had a mind fashioned to the model of better ages. Now, in exchange of
this serious piece, I will present you with another of a more gay and
frolic air, from the same hand, and written at the same age.”
CHAPTER XXVIII.
NINE AND TWENTY SONNETS OF ESTIENNE DE LA BOITIE
TO MADAME DE GRAMMONT, COMTESSE DE GUISSEN.
[They scarce contain anything but amorous complaints, expressed in a
very rough style, discovering the follies and outrages of a restless
passion, overgorged, as it were, with jealousies, fears and
suspicions.--Coste.]
[These....contained in the edition of 1588 nine-and-twenty sonnets
of La Boetie, accompanied by a dedicatory epistle to Madame de
Grammont. The former, which are referred to at the end of Chap.
XXVIL, do not really belong to the book, and are of very slight
interest at this time; the epistle is transferred to the
Correspondence. The sonnets, with the letter, were presumably sent
some time after Letters V. et seq. Montaigne seems to have had
several copies written out to forward to friends or acquaintances.]
CHAPTER XXIX.
OF MODERATION
As if we had an infectious touch, we, by our manner of handling, corrupt
things that in themselves are laudable and good: we may grasp virtue so
that it becomes vicious, if we embrace it too stringently and with too
violent a desire. Those who say, there is never any excess in virtue,
forasmuch as it is not virtue when it once becomes excess, only play upon
words:
“Insani sapiens nomen ferat, aequus iniqui,
Ultra quam satis est, virtutem si petat ipsam.”
[“Let the wise man bear the name of a madman, the just one of an
unjust, if he seek wisdom more than is sufficient.”
--Horace, Ep., i. 6, 15.]
[“The wise man is no longer wise, the just man no longer just, if he
seek to carry his love for wisdom or virtue beyond that which is
necessary.”]
This is a subtle consideration of philosophy. A man may both be too much
in love with virtue, and be excessive in a just action. Holy Writ agrees
with this, Be not wiser than you should, but be soberly wise.--[St.
Paul, Epistle to the Romans, xii. 3.]--I have known a great man,
--[“It is likely that Montaigne meant Henry III., king of France.
The Cardinal d’Ossat, writing to Louise, the queen-dowager, told
her, in his frank manner, that he had lived as much or more like a
monk than a monarch (Letter XXIII.) And Pope Sextus V., speaking of
that prince one day to the Cardinal de Joyeuse, protector of the
affairs of France, said to him pleasantly, ‘There is nothing that
your king hath not done, and does not do so still, to be a monk, nor
anything that I have not done, not to be a monk.’”--Coste.]
prejudice the opinion men had of his devotion, by pretending to be devout
beyond all examples of others of his condition. I love temperate and
moderate natures. An immoderate zeal, even to that which is good, even
though it does not offend, astonishes me, and puts me to study what name
to give it. Neither the mother of Pausanias,
--[“Montaigne would here give us to understand, upon the authority of
Diodorus Siculus, that Pausanias’ mother gave the first hint of the
punishment that was to be inflicted on her son. ‘Pausanias,’ says
this historian, ‘perceiving that the ephori, and some other
Lacedoemonians, aimed at apprehending him, got the start of them,
and went and took sanctuary m Minerva’s temple: and the
Lacedaemonians, being doubtful whether they ought to take him from
thence in violation of the franchise there, it is said that his own
mother came herself to the temple but spoke nothing nor did anything
more than lay a piece of brick, which she brought with her, on the
threshold of the temple, which, when she had done, she returned
home. The Lacedaemonians, taking the hint from the mother, caused
the gate of the temple to be walled up, and by this means starved
Pausanias, so that he died with hunger, &c. (lib. xi. cap. 10., of
Amyot’s translation). The name of Pausanias’ mother was Alcithea,
as we are informed by Thucydides’ scholiast, who only says that it
was reported, that when they set about walling up the gates of the
chapel in which Pausanias had taken refuge, his mother Alcithea laid
the first stone.”--Coste.]
who was the first instructor of her son’s process, and threw the first
stone towards his death, nor Posthumius the dictator, who put his son to
death, whom the ardour of youth had successfully pushed upon the enemy a
little more advanced than the rest of his squadron, do appear to me so
much just as strange; and I should neither advise nor like to follow so
savage a virtue, and that costs so dear.
--[“Opinions differ as to the truth of this fact. Livy thinks he
has good authority for rejecting it because it does not appear in
history that Posthumious was branded with it, as Titus Manlius was,
about 100 years after his time; for Manlius, having put his son to
death for the like cause, obtained the odious name of Imperiosus,
and since that time Manliana imperia has been used as a term to
signify orders that are too severe; Manliana Imperia, says Livy,
were not only horrible for the time present, but of a bad example to
posterity. And this historian makes no doubt but such commands
would have been actually styled Posthumiana Imperia, if Posthumius
had been the first who set so barbarous an example (Livy, lib. iv.
cap. 29, and lib. viii. cap. 7). But, however, Montaigne has Valer.
Maximus on his side, who says expressly, that Posthumius caused his
son to be put to death, and Diodorus of Sicily (lib. xii. cap.
19).”--Coste.]
The archer that shoots over, misses as much as he that falls short, and
‘tis equally troublesome to my sight, to look up at a great light, and
to look down into a dark abyss. Callicles in Plato says, that the
extremity of philosophy is hurtful, and advises not to dive into it
beyond the limits of profit; that, taken moderately, it is pleasant and
useful; but that in the end it renders a man brutish and vicious, a
contemner of religion and the common laws, an enemy to civil
conversation, and all human pleasures, incapable of all public
administration, unfit either to assist others or to relieve himself, and
a fit object for all sorts of injuries and affronts. He says true; for
in its excess, it enslaves our natural freedom, and by an impertinent
subtlety, leads us out of the fair and beaten way that nature has traced
for us.
The love we bear to our wives is very lawful, and yet theology thinks fit
to curb and restrain it. As I remember, I have read in one place of St.
Thomas Aquinas,--[Secunda Secundx, Quaest. 154, art. 9.]--where he
condemns marriages within any of the forbidden degrees, for this reason,
amongst others, that there is some danger, lest the friendship a man
bears to such a woman, should be immoderate; for if the conjugal
affection be full and perfect betwixt them, as it ought to be, and that
it be over and above surcharged with that of kindred too, there is no
doubt, but such an addition will carry the husband beyond the bounds of
reason.
Those sciences that regulate the manners of men, divinity and philosophy,
will have their say in everything; there is no action so private and
secret that can escape their inspection and jurisdiction. They are best
taught who are best able to control and curb their own liberty; women
expose their nudities as much as you will upon the account of pleasure,
though in the necessities of physic they are altogether as shy. I will,
therefore, in their behalf:
--[Coste translates this: “on the part of philosophy and theology,”
observing that but few wives would think themselves obliged to
Montaigne for any such lesson to their husbands.]--
teach the husbands, that is, such as are too vehement in the exercise of
the matrimonial duty--if such there still be--this lesson, that the very
pleasures they enjoy in the society of their wives are reproachable if
immoderate, and that a licentious and riotous abuse of them is a fault as
reprovable here as in illicit connections. Those immodest and debauched
tricks and postures, that the first ardour suggests to us in this affair,
are not only indecently but detrimentally practised upon our wives. Let
them at least learn impudence from another hand; they are ever ready
enough for our business, and I for my part always went the plain way to
work.
Marriage is a solemn and religious tie, and therefore the pleasure we
extract from it should be a sober and serious delight, and mixed with a
certain kind of gravity; it should be a sort of discreet and
conscientious pleasure. And seeing that the chief end of it is
generation, some make a question, whether when men are out of hopes as
when they are superannuated or already with child, it be lawful to
embrace our wives. ‘Tis homicide, according to Plato.--[Laws, 8.]--
Certain nations (the Mohammedan, amongst others) abominate all conjunction
with women with child, others also, with those who are in their courses.
Zenobia would never admit her husband for more than one encounter, after
which she left him to his own swing for the whole time of her conception,
and not till after that would again receive him:--[Trebellius Pollio,
Triginta Tyran., c. 30.]--a brave and generous example of conjugal
continence. It was doubtless from some lascivious poet,--[The lascivious
poet is Homer; see his Iliad, xiv. 294.]--and one that himself was in
great distress for a little of this sport, that Plato borrowed this
story; that Jupiter was one day so hot upon his wife, that not having so
much patience as till she could get to the couch, he threw her upon the
floor, where the vehemence of pleasure made him forget the great and
important resolutions he had but newly taken with the rest of the gods in
his celestial council, and to brag that he had had as good a bout, as
when he got her maidenhead, unknown to their parents.
The kings of Persia were wont to invite their wives to the beginning of
their festivals; but when the wine began to work in good earnest, and
that they were to give the reins to pleasure, they sent them back to
their private apartments, that they might not participate in their
immoderate lust, sending for other women in their stead, with whom they
were not obliged to so great a decorum of respect.--[Plutarch, Precepts
of Marriage, c. 14.]--All pleasures and all sorts of gratifications
are not properly and fitly conferred upon all sorts of persons.
Epaminondas had committed to prison a young man for certain debauches;
for whom Pelopidas mediated, that at his request he might be set at
liberty, which Epaminondas denied to him, but granted it at the first
word to a wench of his, that made the same intercession; saying, that it
was a gratification fit for such a one as she, but not for a captain.
Sophocles being joint praetor with Pericles, seeing accidentally a fine
boy pass by: “O what a charming boy is that!” said he. “That might be
very well,” answered Pericles, “for any other than a praetor, who ought
not only to have his hands, but his eyes, too, chaste.”--[Cicero, De
Offic., i. 40.] AElius Verus, the emperor, answered his wife, who
reproached him with his love to other women, that he did it upon a
conscientious account, forasmuch as marriage was a name of honour and
dignity, not of wanton and lascivious desire; and our ecclesiastical
history preserves the memory of that woman in great veneration, who
parted from her husband because she would not comply with his indecent
and inordinate desires. In fine, there is no pleasure so just and
lawful, where intemperance and excess are not to be condemned.
But, to speak the truth, is not man a most miserable creature the while?
It is scarce, by his natural condition, in his power to taste one
pleasure pure and entire; and yet must he be contriving doctrines and
precepts to curtail that little he has; he is not yet wretched enough,
unless by art and study he augment his own misery:
“Fortunae miseras auximus arte vias.”
[“We artificially augment the wretchedness of fortune.”
--Properitius, lib. iii. 7, 44.]
Human wisdom makes as ill use of her talent, when she exercises it in
rescinding from the number and sweetness of those pleasures that are
naturally our due, as she employs it favourably and well in artificially
disguising and tricking out the ills of life, to alleviate the sense of
them. Had I ruled the roast, I should have taken another and more
natural course, which, to say the truth, is both commodious and holy, and
should, peradventure, have been able to have limited it too;
notwithstanding that both our spiritual and corporal physicians, as by
compact betwixt themselves, can find no other way to cure, nor other
remedy for the infirmities of the body and the soul, than by misery and
pain. To this end, watchings, fastings, hair-shirts, remote and solitary
banishments, perpetual imprisonments, whips and other afflictions, have
been introduced amongst men: but so, that they should carry a sting with
them, and be real afflictions indeed; and not fall out as it once did to
one Gallio, who having been sent an exile into the isle of Lesbos, news
was not long after brought to Rome, that he there lived as merry as the
day was long; and that what had been enjoined him for a penance, turned
to his pleasure and satisfaction: whereupon the Senate thought fit to
recall him home to his wife and family, and confine him to his own house,
to accommodate their punishment to his feeling and apprehension. For to
him whom fasting would make more healthful and more sprightly, and to him
to whose palate fish were more acceptable than flesh, the prescription of
these would have no curative effect; no more than in the other sort of
physic, where drugs have no effect upon him who swallows them with
appetite and pleasure: the bitterness of the potion and the abhorrence of
the patient are necessary circumstances to the operation. The nature
that would eat rhubarb like buttered turnips, would frustrate the use and
virtue of it; it must be something to trouble and disturb the stomach,
that must purge and cure it; and here the common rule, that things are
cured by their contraries, fails; for in this one ill is cured by
another.
This belief a little resembles that other so ancient one, of thinking to
gratify the gods and nature by massacre and murder: an opinion
universally once received in all religions. And still, in these later
times wherein our fathers lived, Amurath at the taking of the Isthmus,
immolated six hundred young Greeks to his father’s soul, in the nature of
a propitiatory sacrifice for his sins. And in those new countries
discovered in this age of ours, which are pure and virgin yet, in
comparison of ours, this practice is in some measure everywhere received:
all their idols reek with human blood, not without various examples of
horrid cruelty: some they burn alive, and take, half broiled, off the
coals to tear out their hearts and entrails; some, even women, they flay
alive, and with their bloody skins clothe and disguise others. Neither
are we without great examples of constancy and resolution in this affair
the poor souls that are to be sacrificed, old men, women, and children,
themselves going about some days before to beg alms for the offering of
their sacrifice, presenting themselves to the slaughter, singing and
dancing with the spectators.
The ambassadors of the king of Mexico, setting out to Fernando Cortez the
power and greatness of their master, after having told him, that he had
thirty vassals, of whom each was able to raise an hundred thousand
fighting men, and that he kept his court in the fairest and best
fortified city under the sun, added at last, that he was obliged yearly
to offer to the gods fifty thousand men. And it is affirmed, that he
maintained a continual war, with some potent neighbouring nations, not
only to keep the young men in exercise, but principally to have
wherewithal to furnish his sacrifices with his prisoners of war. At a
certain town in another place, for the welcome of the said Cortez, they
sacrificed fifty men at once. I will tell you this one tale more, and I
have done; some of these people being beaten by him, sent to acknowledge
him, and to treat with him of a peace, whose messengers carried him three
sorts of gifts, which they presented in these terms: “Behold, lord, here
are five slaves: if thou art a furious god that feedeth upon flesh and
blood, eat these, and we will bring thee more; if thou art an affable
god, behold here incense and feathers; but if thou art a man, take these
fowls and these fruits that we have brought thee.”
CHAPTER XXX
OF CANNIBALS
When King Pyrrhus invaded Italy, having viewed and considered the order
of the army the Romans sent out to meet him; “I know not,” said he,
“what kind of barbarians” (for so the Greeks called all other nations)
“these may be; but the disposition of this army that I see has nothing of
barbarism in it.”--[Plutarch, Life of Pyrrhus, c. 8.]--As much said the
Greeks of that which Flaminius brought into their country; and Philip,
beholding from an eminence the order and distribution of the Roman camp
formed in his kingdom by Publius Sulpicius Galba, spake to the same
effect. By which it appears how cautious men ought to be of taking
things upon trust from vulgar opinion, and that we are to judge by the
eye of reason, and not from common report.
I long had a man in my house that lived ten or twelve years in the New
World, discovered in these latter days, and in that part of it where
Villegaignon landed,--[At Brazil, in 1557.]--which he called Antarctic
France. This discovery of so vast a country seems to be of very great
consideration. I cannot be sure, that hereafter there may not be
another, so many wiser men than we having been deceived in this. I am
afraid our eyes are bigger than our bellies, and that we have more
curiosity than capacity; for we grasp at all, but catch nothing but wind.
Plato brings in Solon,--[In Timaeus.]--telling a story that he had
heard from the priests of Sais in Egypt, that of old, and before the
Deluge, there was a great island called Atlantis, situate directly at the
mouth of the straits of Gibraltar, which contained more countries than
both Africa and Asia put together; and that the kings of that country,
who not only possessed that Isle, but extended their dominion so far into
the continent that they had a country of Africa as far as Egypt, and
extending in Europe to Tuscany, attempted to encroach even upon Asia, and
to subjugate all the nations that border upon the Mediterranean Sea, as
far as the Black Sea; and to that effect overran all Spain, the Gauls,
and Italy, so far as to penetrate into Greece, where the Athenians
stopped them: but that some time after, both the Athenians, and they and
their island, were swallowed by the Flood.
It is very likely that this extreme irruption and inundation of water
made wonderful changes and alterations in the habitations of the earth,
as ‘tis said that the sea then divided Sicily from Italy--
“Haec loca, vi quondam et vasta convulsa ruina,
Dissiluisse ferunt, quum protenus utraque tellus
Una foret”
[“These lands, they say, formerly with violence and vast desolation
convulsed, burst asunder, where erewhile were.”--AEneid, iii. 414.]
Cyprus from Syria, the isle of Negropont from the continent of Beeotia,
and elsewhere united lands that were separate before, by filling up the
channel betwixt them with sand and mud:
“Sterilisque diu palus, aptaque remis,
Vicinas urbes alit, et grave sentit aratrum.”
[“That which was once a sterile marsh, and bore vessels on its
bosom, now feeds neighbouring cities, and admits the plough.”
--Horace, De Arte Poetica, v. 65.]
But there is no great appearance that this isle was this New World so
lately discovered: for that almost touched upon Spain, and it were an
incredible effect of an inundation, to have tumbled back so prodigious a
mass, above twelve hundred leagues: besides that our modern navigators
have already almost discovered it to be no island, but terra firma, and
continent with the East Indies on the one side, and with the lands under
the two poles on the other side; or, if it be separate from them, it is
by so narrow a strait and channel, that it none the more deserves the
name of an island for that.
It should seem, that in this great body, there are two sorts of motions,
the one natural and the other febrific, as there are in ours. When I
consider the impression that our river of Dordogne has made in my time on
the right bank of its descent, and that in twenty years it has gained so
much, and undermined the foundations of so many houses, I perceive it to
be an extraordinary agitation: for had it always followed this course,
or were hereafter to do it, the aspect of the world would be totally
changed. But rivers alter their course, sometimes beating against the
one side, and sometimes the other, and some times quietly keeping the
channel. I do not speak of sudden inundations, the causes of which
everybody understands. In Medoc, by the seashore, the Sieur d’Arsac, my
brother, sees an estate he had there, buried under the sands which the
sea vomits before it: where the tops of some houses are yet to be seen,
and where his rents and domains are converted into pitiful barren
pasturage. The inhabitants of this place affirm, that of late years the
sea has driven so vehemently upon them, that they have lost above four
leagues of land. These sands are her harbingers: and we now see great
heaps of moving sand, that march half a league before her, and occupy the
land.
The other testimony from antiquity, to which some would apply this
discovery of the New World, is in Aristotle; at least, if that little
book of Unheard of Miracles be his--[one of the spurious publications
brought out under his name--D.W.]. He there tells us, that certain
Carthaginians, having crossed the Atlantic Sea without the Straits of
Gibraltar, and sailed a very long time, discovered at last a great and
fruitful island, all covered over with wood, and watered with several
broad and deep rivers, far remote from all terra firma; and that they,
and others after them, allured by the goodness and fertility of the soil,
went thither with their wives and children, and began to plant a colony.
But the senate of Carthage perceiving their people by little and little
to diminish, issued out an express prohibition, that none, upon pain of
death, should transport themselves thither; and also drove out these new
inhabitants; fearing, ‘tis said, lest’ in process of time they should so
multiply as to supplant themselves and ruin their state. But this
relation of Aristotle no more agrees with our new-found lands than the
other.
This man that I had was a plain ignorant fellow, and therefore the more
likely to tell truth: for your better-bred sort of men are much more
curious in their observation, ‘tis true, and discover a great deal more;
but then they gloss upon it, and to give the greater weight to what they
deliver, and allure your belief, they cannot forbear a little to alter
the story; they never represent things to you simply as they are, but
rather as they appeared to them, or as they would have them appear to
you, and to gain the reputation of men of judgment, and the better to
induce your faith, are willing to help out the business with something
more than is really true, of their own invention. Now in this case, we
should either have a man of irreproachable veracity, or so simple that he
has not wherewithal to contrive, and to give a colour of truth to false
relations, and who can have no ends in forging an untruth. Such a one
was mine; and besides, he has at divers times brought to me several
seamen and merchants who at the same time went the same voyage. I shall
therefore content myself with his information, without inquiring what the
cosmographers say to the business. We should have topographers to trace
out to us the particular places where they have been; but for having had
this advantage over us, to have seen the Holy Land, they would have the
privilege, forsooth, to tell us stories of all the other parts of the
world beside. I would have every one write what he knows, and as much as
he knows, but no more; and that not in this only but in all other
subjects; for such a person may have some particular knowledge and
experience of the nature of such a river, or such a fountain, who, as to
other things, knows no more than what everybody does, and yet to give a
currency to his little pittance of learning, will undertake to write the
whole body of physics: a vice from which great inconveniences derive
their original.
Now, to return to my subject, I find that there is nothing barbarous and
savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting, that
every one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use
in his own country. As, indeed, we have no other level of truth and
reason than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the place
wherein we live: there is always the perfect religion, there the perfect
government, there the most exact and accomplished usage of all things.
They are savages at the same rate that we say fruits are wild, which
nature produces of herself and by her own ordinary progress; whereas, in
truth, we ought rather to call those wild whose natures we have changed
by our artifice and diverted from the common order. In those, the
genuine, most useful, and natural virtues and properties are vigorous and
sprightly, which we have helped to degenerate in these, by accommodating
them to the pleasure of our own corrupted palate. And yet for all this,
our taste confesses a flavour and delicacy excellent even to emulation of
the best of ours, in several fruits wherein those countries abound
without art or culture. Neither is it reasonable that art should gain
the pre-eminence of our great and powerful mother nature. We have so
surcharged her with the additional ornaments and graces we have added to
the beauty and riches of her own works by our inventions, that we have
almost smothered her; yet in other places, where she shines in her own
purity and proper lustre, she marvellously baffles and disgraces all our
vain and frivolous attempts:
“Et veniunt hederae sponte sua melius;
Surgit et in solis formosior arbutus antris;
Et volucres nulls dulcius arte canunt.”
[“The ivy grows best spontaneously, the arbutus best in shady caves;
and the wild notes of birds are sweeter than art can teach.
--“Propertius, i. 2, 10.]
Our utmost endeavours cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of
the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much
as the web of a poor spider.
All things, says Plato,--[Laws, 10.]--are produced either by nature, by
fortune, or by art; the greatest and most beautiful by the one or the
other of the former, the least and the most imperfect by the last.
These nations then seem to me to be so far barbarous, as having received
but very little form and fashion from art and human invention, and
consequently to be not much remote from their original simplicity. The
laws of nature, however, govern them still, not as yet much vitiated with
any mixture of ours: but ‘tis in such purity, that I am sometimes
troubled we were not sooner acquainted with these people, and that they
were not discovered in those better times, when there were men much more
able to judge of them than we are. I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato
had no knowledge of them; for to my apprehension, what we now see in
those nations, does not only surpass all the pictures with which the
poets have adorned the golden age, and all their inventions in feigning a
happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy and even the wish and desire
of philosophy itself; so native and so pure a simplicity, as we by
experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination,
nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained
with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato that it
is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of
letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political
superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no
successions, no dividends, no properties, no employments, but those of
leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no clothing, no agriculture,
no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very words that signify lying,
treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, detraction, pardon, never heard
of.
--[This is the famous passage which Shakespeare, through Florio’s
version, 1603, or ed. 1613, p. 102, has employed in the “Tempest,”
ii. 1.]
How much would he find his imaginary Republic short of his perfection?
“Viri a diis recentes.”
[“Men fresh from the gods.”--Seneca, Ep., 90.]
“Hos natura modos primum dedit.”
[“These were the manners first taught by nature.”
--Virgil, Georgics, ii. 20.]
As to the rest, they live in a country very pleasant and temperate, so
that, as my witnesses inform me, ‘tis rare to hear of a sick person, and
they moreover assure me, that they never saw any of the natives, either
paralytic, bleareyed, toothless, or crooked with age. The situation of
their country is along the sea-shore, enclosed on the other side towards
the land, with great and high mountains, having about a hundred leagues
in breadth between. They have great store of fish and flesh, that have
no resemblance to those of ours: which they eat without any other
cookery, than plain boiling, roasting, and broiling. The first that rode
a horse thither, though in several other voyages he had contracted an
acquaintance and familiarity with them, put them into so terrible a
fright, with his centaur appearance, that they killed him with their
arrows before they could come to discover who he was. Their buildings
are very long, and of capacity to hold two or three hundred people, made
of the barks of tall trees, reared with one end upon the ground, and
leaning to and supporting one another at the top, like some of our barns,
of which the covering hangs down to the very ground, and serves for the
side walls. They have wood so hard, that they cut with it, and make their
swords of it, and their grills of it to broil their meat. Their beds are
of cotton, hung swinging from the roof, like our seamen’s hammocks, every
man his own, for the wives lie apart from their husbands. They rise with
the sun, and so soon as they are up, eat for all day, for they have no
more meals but that; they do not then drink, as Suidas reports of some
other people of the East that never drank at their meals; but drink very
often all day after, and sometimes to a rousing pitch. Their drink is
made of a certain root, and is of the colour of our claret, and they
never drink it but lukewarm. It will not keep above two or three days;
it has a somewhat sharp, brisk taste, is nothing heady, but very
comfortable to the stomach; laxative to strangers, but a very pleasant
beverage to such as are accustomed to it. They make use, instead of
bread, of a certain white compound, like coriander seeds; I have tasted
of it; the taste is sweet and a little flat. The whole day is spent in
dancing. Their young men go a-hunting after wild beasts with bows and
arrows; one part of their women are employed in preparing their drink the
while, which is their chief employment. One of their old men, in the
morning before they fall to eating, preaches to the whole family, walking
from the one end of the house to the other, and several times repeating
the same sentence, till he has finished the round, for their houses are
at least a hundred yards long. Valour towards their enemies and love
towards their wives, are the two heads of his discourse, never failing in
the close, to put them in mind, that ‘tis their wives who provide them
their drink warm and well seasoned. The fashion of their beds, ropes,
swords, and of the wooden bracelets they tie about their wrists, when
they go to fight, and of the great canes, bored hollow at one end, by the
sound of which they keep the cadence of their dances, are to be seen in
several places, and amongst others, at my house. They shave all over,
and much more neatly than we, without other razor than one of wood or
stone. They believe in the immortality of the soul, and that those who
have merited well of the gods are lodged in that part of heaven where the
sun rises, and the accursed in the west.
They have I know not what kind of priests and prophets, who very rarely
present themselves to the people, having their abode in the mountains.
At their arrival, there is a great feast, and solemn assembly of many
villages: each house, as I have described, makes a village, and they are
about a French league distant from one another. This prophet declaims to
them in public, exhorting them to virtue and their duty: but all their
ethics are comprised in these two articles, resolution in war, and
affection to their wives. He also prophesies to them events to come, and
the issues they are to expect from their enterprises, and prompts them to
or diverts them from war: but let him look to’t; for if he fail in his
divination, and anything happen otherwise than he has foretold, he is cut
into a thousand pieces, if he be caught, and condemned for a false
prophet: for that reason, if any of them has been mistaken, he is no more
heard of.
Divination is a gift of God, and therefore to abuse it, ought to be a
punishable imposture. Amongst the Scythians, where their diviners failed
in the promised effect, they were laid, bound hand and foot, upon carts
loaded with firs and bavins, and drawn by oxen, on which they were burned
to death.--[Herodotus, iv. 69.]--Such as only meddle with things
subject to the conduct of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best
they can: but those other fellows that come to delude us with assurances
of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding, ought they not to
be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise, and
for the temerity of their imposture?
They have continual war with the nations that live further within the
mainland, beyond their mountains, to which they go naked, and without
other arms than their bows and wooden swords, fashioned at one end like
the head of our javelins. The obstinacy of their battles is wonderful,
and they never end without great effusion of blood: for as to running
away, they know not what it is. Every one for a trophy brings home the
head of an enemy he has killed, which he fixes over the door of his
house. After having a long time treated their prisoners very well, and
given them all the regales they can think of, he to whom the prisoner
belongs, invites a great assembly of his friends. They being come, he
ties a rope to one of the arms of the prisoner, of which, at a distance,
out of his reach, he holds the one end himself, and gives to the friend
he loves best the other arm to hold after the same manner; which being.
done, they two, in the presence of all the assembly, despatch him with
their swords. After that, they roast him, eat him amongst them, and send
some chops to their absent friends. They do not do this, as some think,
for nourishment, as the Scythians anciently did, but as a representation
of an extreme revenge; as will appear by this: that having observed the
Portuguese, who were in league with their enemies, to inflict another
sort of death upon any of them they took prisoners, which was to set them
up to the girdle in the earth, to shoot at the remaining part till it was
stuck full of arrows, and then to hang them, they thought those people of
the other world (as being men who had sown the knowledge of a great many
vices amongst their neighbours, and who were much greater masters in all
sorts of mischief than they) did not exercise this sort of revenge
without a meaning, and that it must needs be more painful than theirs,
they began to leave their old way, and to follow this. I am not sorry
that we should here take notice of the barbarous horror of so cruel an
action, but that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so
blind to our own. I conceive there is more barbarity in eating a man
alive, than when he is dead; in tearing a body limb from limb by racks
and torments, that is yet in perfect sense; in roasting it by degrees; in
causing it to be bitten and worried by dogs and swine (as we have not
only read, but lately seen, not amongst inveterate and mortal enemies,
but among neighbours and fellow-citizens, and, which is worse, under
colour of piety and religion), than to roast and eat him after he is
dead.
Chrysippus and Zeno, the two heads of the Stoic sect, were of opinion
that there was no hurt in making use of our dead carcasses, in what way
soever for our necessity, and in feeding upon them too;--[Diogenes
Laertius, vii. 188.]--as our own ancestors, who being besieged by
Caesar in the city Alexia, resolved to sustain the famine of the siege
with the bodies of their old men, women, and other persons who were
incapable of bearing arms.
“Vascones, ut fama est, alimentis talibus usi
Produxere animas.”
[“‘Tis said the Gascons with such meats appeased their hunger.”
--Juvenal, Sat., xv. 93.]
And the physicians make no bones of employing it to all sorts of use,
either to apply it outwardly; or to give it inwardly for the health of
the patient. But there never was any opinion so irregular, as to excuse
treachery, disloyalty, tyranny, and cruelty, which are our familiar
vices. We may then call these people barbarous, in respect to the rules
of reason: but not in respect to ourselves, who in all sorts of barbarity
exceed them. Their wars are throughout noble and generous, and carry as
much excuse and fair pretence, as that human malady is capable of; having
with them no other foundation than the sole jealousy of valour. Their
disputes are not for the conquest of new lands, for these they already
possess are so fruitful by nature, as to supply them without labour or
concern, with all things necessary, in such abundance that they have no
need to enlarge their borders. And they are, moreover, happy in this,
that they only covet so much as their natural necessities require: all
beyond that is superfluous to them: men of the same age call one another
generally brothers, those who are younger, children; and the old men are
fathers to all. These leave to their heirs in common the full possession
of goods, without any manner of division, or other title than what nature
bestows upon her creatures, in bringing them into the world. If their
neighbours pass over the mountains to assault them, and obtain a victory,
all the victors gain by it is glory only, and the advantage of having
proved themselves the better in valour and virtue: for they never meddle
with the goods of the conquered, but presently return into their own
country, where they have no want of anything necessary, nor of this
greatest of all goods, to know happily how to enjoy their condition and
to be content. And those in turn do the same; they demand of their
prisoners no other ransom, than acknowledgment that they are overcome:
but there is not one found in an age, who will not rather choose to die
than make such a confession, or either by word or look recede from the
entire grandeur of an invincible courage. There is not a man amongst
them who had not rather be killed and eaten, than so much as to open his
mouth to entreat he may not. They use them with all liberality and
freedom, to the end their lives may be so much the dearer to them; but
frequently entertain them with menaces of their approaching death, of the
torments they are to suffer, of the preparations making in order to it,
of the mangling their limbs, and of the feast that is to be made, where
their carcass is to be the only dish. All which they do, to no other
end, but only to extort some gentle or submissive word from them, or to
frighten them so as to make them run away, to obtain this advantage that
they were terrified, and that their constancy was shaken; and indeed, if
rightly taken, it is in this point only that a true victory consists:
“Victoria nulla est,
Quam quae confessor animo quoque subjugat hostes.”
[“No victory is complete, which the conquered do not admit to be
so.--“Claudius, De Sexto Consulatu Honorii, v. 248.]
The Hungarians, a very warlike people, never pretend further than to
reduce the enemy to their discretion; for having forced this confession
from them, they let them go without injury or ransom, excepting, at the
most, to make them engage their word never to bear arms against them
again. We have sufficient advantages over our enemies that are borrowed
and not truly our own; it is the quality of a porter, and no effect of
virtue, to have stronger arms and legs; it is a dead and corporeal
quality to set in array; ‘tis a turn of fortune to make our enemy
stumble, or to dazzle him with the light of the sun; ‘tis a trick of
science and art, and that may happen in a mean base fellow, to be a good
fencer. The estimate and value of a man consist in the heart and in the
will: there his true honour lies. Valour is stability, not of legs and
arms, but of the courage and the soul; it does not lie in the goodness of
our horse or our arms but in our own. He that falls obstinate in his
courage--
“Si succiderit, de genu pugnat”
[“If his legs fail him, he fights on his knees.”
--Seneca, De Providentia, c. 2.]
--he who, for any danger of imminent death, abates nothing of his
assurance; who, dying, yet darts at his enemy a fierce and disdainful
look, is overcome not by us, but by fortune; he is killed, not conquered;
the most valiant are sometimes the most unfortunate. There are defeats
more triumphant than victories. Never could those four sister victories,
the fairest the sun ever be held, of Salamis, Plataea, Mycale, and
Sicily, venture to oppose all their united glories, to the single glory
of the discomfiture of King Leonidas and his men, at the pass of
Thermopylae. Who ever ran with a more glorious desire and greater
ambition, to the winning, than Captain Iscolas to the certain loss of a
battle?--[Diodorus Siculus, xv. 64.]--Who could have found out a more
subtle invention to secure his safety, than he did to assure his
destruction? He was set to defend a certain pass of Peloponnesus against
the Arcadians, which, considering the nature of the place and the
inequality of forces, finding it utterly impossible for him to do, and
seeing that all who were presented to the enemy, must certainly be left
upon the place; and on the other side, reputing it unworthy of his own
virtue and magnanimity and of the Lacedaemonian name to fail in any part
of his duty, he chose a mean betwixt these two extremes after this
manner; the youngest and most active of his men, he preserved for the
service and defence of their country, and sent them back; and with the
rest, whose loss would be of less consideration, he resolved to make good
the pass, and with the death of them, to make the enemy buy their entry
as dear as possibly he could; as it fell out, for being presently
environed on all sides by the Arcadians, after having made a great
slaughter of the enemy, he and his were all cut in pieces. Is there any
trophy dedicated to the conquerors which was not much more due to these
who were overcome? The part that true conquering is to play, lies in the
encounter, not in the coming off; and the honour of valour consists in
fighting, not in subduing.
But to return to my story: these prisoners are so far from discovering
the least weakness, for all the terrors that can be represented to them,
that, on the contrary, during the two or three months they are kept, they
always appear with a cheerful countenance; importune their masters to
make haste to bring them to the test, defy, rail at them, and reproach
them with cowardice, and the number of battles they have lost against
those of their country. I have a song made by one of these prisoners,
wherein he bids them “come all, and dine upon him, and welcome, for they
shall withal eat their own fathers and grandfathers, whose flesh has
served to feed and nourish him. These muscles,” says he, “this flesh and
these veins, are your own: poor silly souls as you are, you little think
that the substance of your ancestors’ limbs is here yet; notice what you
eat, and you will find in it the taste of your own flesh:” in which song
there is to be observed an invention that nothing relishes of the
barbarian. Those that paint these people dying after this manner,
represent the prisoner spitting in the faces of his executioners and
making wry mouths at them. And ‘tis most certain, that to the very last
gasp, they never cease to brave and defy them both in word and gesture.
In plain truth, these men are very savage in comparison of us; of
necessity, they must either be absolutely so or else we are savages; for
there is a vast difference betwixt their manners and ours.
The men there have several wives, and so much the greater number, by how
much they have the greater reputation for valour. And it is one very
remarkable feature in their marriages, that the same jealousy our wives
have to hinder and divert us from the friendship and familiarity of other
women, those employ to promote their husbands’ desires, and to procure
them many spouses; for being above all things solicitous of their
husbands’ honour, ‘tis their chiefest care to seek out, and to bring in
the most companions they can, forasmuch as it is a testimony of the
husband’s virtue. Most of our ladies will cry out, that ‘tis monstrous;
whereas in truth it is not so, but a truly matrimonial virtue, and of the
highest form. In the Bible, Sarah, with Leah and Rachel, the two wives
of Jacob, gave the most beautiful of their handmaids to their husbands;
Livia preferred the passions of Augustus to her own interest;
--[Suetonius, Life of Augustus, c. 71.]--and the wife of King Deiotarus,
Stratonice, did not only give up a fair young maid that served her to her
husband’s embraces, but moreover carefully brought up the children he had
by her, and assisted them in the succession to their father’s crown.
And that it may not be supposed, that all this is done by a simple and
servile obligation to their common practice, or by any authoritative
impression of their ancient custom, without judgment or reasoning, and
from having a soul so stupid that it cannot contrive what else to do, I
must here give you some touches of their sufficiency in point of
understanding. Besides what I repeated to you before, which was one of
their songs of war, I have another, a love-song, that begins thus:
“Stay, adder, stay, that by thy pattern my sister may draw the
fashion and work of a rich ribbon, that I may present to my beloved,
by which means thy beauty and the excellent order of thy scales
shall for ever be preferred before all other serpents.”
Wherein the first couplet, “Stay, adder,” &c., makes the burden of the
song. Now I have conversed enough with poetry to judge thus much that
not only there is nothing barbarous in this invention, but, moreover,
that it is perfectly Anacreontic. To which it may be added, that their
language is soft, of a pleasing accent, and something bordering upon the
Greek termination.
Three of these people, not foreseeing how dear their knowledge of the
corruptions of this part of the world will one day cost their happiness
and repose, and that the effect of this commerce will be their ruin, as I
presuppose it is in a very fair way (miserable men to suffer themselves
to be deluded with desire of novelty and to have left the serenity of
their own heaven to come so far to gaze at ours!), were at Rouen at the
time that the late King Charles IX. was there. The king himself talked
to them a good while, and they were made to see our fashions, our pomp,
and the form of a great city. After which, some one asked their opinion,
and would know of them, what of all the things they had seen, they found
most to be admired? To which they made answer, three things, of which I
have forgotten the third, and am troubled at it, but two I yet remember.
They said, that in the first place they thought it very strange that so
many tall men, wearing beards, strong, and well armed, who were about the
king (‘tis like they meant the Swiss of the guard), should submit to obey
a child, and that they did not rather choose out one amongst themselves
to command. Secondly (they have a way of speaking in their language to
call men the half of one another), that they had observed that there were
amongst us men full and crammed with all manner of commodities, whilst,
in the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors, lean and
half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they thought it strange that
these necessitous halves were able to suffer so great an inequality and
injustice, and that they did not take the others by the throats, or set
fire to their houses.
I talked to one of them a great while together, but I had so ill an
interpreter, and one who was so perplexed by his own ignorance to
apprehend my meaning, that I could get nothing out of him of any moment:
Asking him what advantage he reaped from the superiority he had amongst
his own people (for he was a captain, and our mariners called him king),
he told me, to march at the head of them to war. Demanding of him
further how many men he had to follow him, he showed me a space of
ground, to signify as many as could march in such a compass, which might
be four or five thousand men; and putting the question to him whether or
no his authority expired with the war, he told me this remained: that
when he went to visit the villages of his dependence, they planed him
paths through the thick of their woods, by which he might pass at his
ease. All this does not sound very ill, and the last was not at all
amiss, for they wear no breeches.
CHAPTER XXXI
THAT A MAN IS SOBERLY TO JUDGE OF THE DIVINE ORDINANCES
The true field and subject of imposture are things unknown, forasmuch as,
in the first place, their very strangeness lends them credit, and
moreover, by not being subjected to our ordinary reasons, they deprive us
of the means to question and dispute them: For which reason, says Plato,
--[In Critias.]--it is much more easy to satisfy the hearers, when
speaking of the nature of the gods than of the nature of men, because the
ignorance of the auditory affords a fair and large career and all manner
of liberty in the handling of abstruse things. Thence it comes to pass,
that nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know; nor any people
so confident, as those who entertain us with fables, such as your
alchemists, judicial astrologers, fortune-tellers, and physicians,
“Id genus omne.”
[“All that sort of people.”--Horace, Sat., i. 2, 2.]
To which I would willingly, if I durst, join a pack of people that take
upon them to interpret and control the designs of God Himself, pretending
to find out the cause of every accident, and to pry into the secrets of
the divine will, there to discover the incomprehensible motive, of His
works; and although the variety, and the continual discordance of events,
throw them from corner to corner, and toss them from east to west, yet do
they still persist in their vain inquisition, and with the same pencil to
paint black and white.
In a nation of the Indies, there is this commendable custom, that when
anything befalls them amiss in any encounter or battle, they publicly ask
pardon of the sun, who is their god, as having committed an unjust
action, always imputing their good or evil fortune to the divine justice,
and to that submitting their own judgment and reason. ‘Tis enough for a
Christian to believe that all things come from God, to receive them with
acknowledgment of His divine and inscrutable wisdom, and also thankfully
to accept and receive them, with what face soever they may present
themselves. But I do not approve of what I see in use, that is, to seek
to affirm and support our religion by the prosperity of our enterprises.
Our belief has other foundation enough, without going about to authorise
it by events: for the people being accustomed to such plausible arguments
as these and so proper to their taste, it is to be feared, lest when they
fail of success they should also stagger in their faith: as in the war
wherein we are now engaged upon the account of religion, those who had
the better in the business of Rochelabeille,--[May 1569.]--making great
brags of that success as an infallible approbation of their cause, when
they came afterwards to excuse their misfortunes of Moncontour and
Jarnac, by saying they were fatherly scourges and corrections that they
had not a people wholly at their mercy, they make it manifestly enough
appear, what it is to take two sorts of grist out of the same sack, and
with the same mouth to blow hot and cold. It were better to possess the
vulgar with the solid and real foundations of truth. ‘Twas a fine naval
battle that was gained under the command of Don John of Austria a few
months since--[That of Lepanto, October 7, 1571.]--against the Turks;
but it has also pleased God at other times to let us see as great
victories at our own expense. In fine, ‘tis a hard matter to reduce
divine things to our balance, without waste and losing a great deal of
the weight. And who would take upon him to give a reason that Arius and
his Pope Leo, the principal heads of the Arian heresy, should die, at
several times, of so like and strange deaths (for being withdrawn from
the disputation by a griping in the bowels, they both of them suddenly
gave up the ghost upon the stool), and would aggravate this divine
vengeance by the circumstances of the place, might as well add the death
of Heliogabalus, who was also slain in a house of office. And, indeed,
Irenaeus was involved in the same fortune. God, being pleased to show
us, that the good have something else to hope for and the wicked
something else to fear, than the fortunes or misfortunes of this world,
manages and applies these according to His own occult will and pleasure,
and deprives us of the means foolishly to make thereof our own profit.
And those people abuse themselves who will pretend to dive into these
mysteries by the strength of human reason. They never give one hit that
they do not receive two for it; of which St. Augustine makes out a great
proof upon his adversaries. ‘Tis a conflict that is more decided by
strength of memory than by the force of reason. We are to content
ourselves with the light it pleases the sun to communicate to us, by
virtue of his rays; and who will lift up his eyes to take in a greater,
let him not think it strange, if for the reward of his presumption, he
there lose his sight.
“Quis hominum potest scire consilium Dei?
Aut quis poterit cogitare quid velit Dominus?”
[“Who of men can know the counsel of God? or who can think what the
will of the Lord is.”--Book of Wisdom, ix. 13.]
CHAPTER XXXII
THAT WE ARE TO AVOID PLEASURES, EVEN AT THE EXPENSE OF LIFE
I had long ago observed most of the opinions of the ancients to concur in
this, that it is high time to die when there is more ill than good in
living, and that to preserve life to our own torment and inconvenience is
contrary to the very rules of nature, as these old laws instruct us.
[“Either tranquil life, or happy death. It is well to die when life
is wearisome. It is better to die than to live miserable.”
--Stobaeus, Serm. xx.]
But to push this contempt of death so far as to employ it to the removing
our thoughts from the honours, riches, dignities, and other favours and
goods, as we call them, of fortune, as if reason were not sufficient to
persuade us to avoid them, without adding this new injunction, I had
never seen it either commanded or practised, till this passage of Seneca
fell into my hands; who advising Lucilius, a man of great power and
authority about the emperor, to alter his voluptuous and magnificent way
of living, and to retire himself from this worldly vanity and ambition,
to some solitary, quiet, and philosophical life, and the other alleging
some difficulties: “I am of opinion,” says he, “either that thou leave
that life of thine, or life itself; I would, indeed, advise thee to the
gentle way, and to untie, rather than to break, the knot thou hast
indiscreetly knit, provided, that if it be not otherwise to be untied,
thou resolutely break it. There is no man so great a coward, that had
not rather once fall than to be always falling.” I should have found
this counsel conformable enough to the Stoical roughness: but it appears
the more strange, for being borrowed from Epicurus, who writes the same
thing upon the like occasion to Idomeneus. And I think I have observed
something like it, but with Christian moderation, amongst our own people.
St. Hilary, Bishop of Poictiers, that famous enemy of the Arian heresy,
being in Syria, had intelligence thither sent him, that Abra, his only
daughter, whom he left at home under the eye and tuition of her mother,
was sought in marriage by the greatest noblemen of the country, as being
a virgin virtuously brought up, fair, rich, and in the flower of her age;
whereupon he wrote to her (as appears upon record), that she should
remove her affection from all the pleasures and advantages proposed to
her; for that he had in his travels found out a much greater and more
worthy fortune for her, a husband of much greater power and magnificence,
who would present her with robes and jewels of inestimable value; wherein
his design was to dispossess her of the appetite and use of worldly
delights, to join her wholly to God; but the nearest and most certain way
to this, being, as he conceived, the death of his daughter; he never
ceased, by vows, prayers, and orisons, to beg of the Almighty, that He
would please to call her out of this world, and to take her to Himself;
as accordingly it came to pass; for soon after his return, she died, at
which he expressed a singular joy. This seems to outdo the other,
forasmuch as he applies himself to this means at the outset, which they
only take subsidiarily; and, besides, it was towards his only daughter.
But I will not omit the latter end of this story, though it be for my
purpose; St. Hilary’s wife, having understood from him how the death of
their daughter was brought about by his desire and design, and how much
happier she was to be removed out of this world than to have stayed in
it, conceived so vivid an apprehension of the eternal and heavenly
beatitude, that she begged of her husband, with the extremest
importunity, to do as much for her; and God, at their joint request,
shortly after calling her to Him, it was a death embraced with singular
and mutual content.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THAT FORTUNE IS OFTENTIMES OBSERVED TO ACT BY THE RULE OF REASON
The inconstancy and various motions of Fortune
[The term Fortune, so often employed by Montaigne, and in passages
where he might have used Providence, was censured by the doctors who
examined his Essays when he was at Rome in 1581. See his Travels,
i. 35 and 76.]
may reasonably make us expect she should present us with all sorts of
faces. Can there be a more express act of justice than this? The Duc de
Valentinois,--[Caesar Borgia.]--having resolved to poison Adrian,
Cardinal of Corneto, with whom Pope Alexander VI., his father and
himself, were to sup in the Vatican, he sent before a bottle of poisoned
wine, and withal, strict order to the butler to keep it very safe.
The Pope being come before his son, and calling for drink, the butler
supposing this wine had not been so strictly recommended to his care,
but only upon the account of its excellency, presented it forthwith to
the Pope, and the duke himself coming in presently after, and being
confident they had not meddled with his bottle, took also his cup; so
that the father died immediately upon the spot--[Other historians assign
the Pope several days of misery prior to death. D.W.]--, and the son,
after having been long tormented with sickness, was reserved to another
and a worse fortune.
Sometimes she seems to play upon us, just in the nick of an affair;
Monsieur d’Estrees, at that time ensign to Monsieur de Vendome, and
Monsieur de Licques, lieutenant in the company of the Duc d’Ascot, being
both pretenders to the Sieur de Fougueselles’ sister, though of several
parties (as it oft falls out amongst frontier neighbours), the Sieur de
Licques carried her; but on the same day he was married, and which was
worse, before he went to bed to his wife, the bridegroom having a mind to
break a lance in honour of his new bride, went out to skirmish near St.
Omer, where the Sieur d’Estrees proving the stronger, took him prisoner,
and the more to illustrate his victory, the lady was fain--
“Conjugis ante coacta novi dimittere collum,
Quam veniens una atque altera rursus hyems
Noctibus in longis avidum saturasset amorem,”
[“Compelled to abstain from embracing her new spouse in her arms
before two winters pass in succession, during their long nights had
satiated her eager love.”--Catullus, lxviii. 81.]
--to request him of courtesy, to deliver up his prisoner to her, as he
accordingly did, the gentlemen of France never denying anything to
ladies.
Does she not seem to be an artist here? Constantine, son of Helena,
founded the empire of Constantinople, and so many ages after,
Constantine, the son of Helen, put an end to it. Sometimes she is
pleased to emulate our miracles we are told, that King Clovis besieging
Angouleme, the walls fell down of themselves by divine favour and Bouchet
has it from some author, that King Robert having sat down before a city,
and being stolen away from the siege to go keep the feast of St. Aignan
at Orleans, as he was in devotion at a certain part of the Mass, the
walls of the beleaguered city, without any manner of violence, fell down
with a sudden ruin. But she did quite contrary in our Milan wars; for,
le Capitaine Rense laying siege for us to the city Arona, and having
carried a mine under a great part of the wall, the mine being sprung, the
wall was lifted from its base, but dropped down again nevertheless, whole
and entire, and so exactly upon its foundation, that the besieged
suffered no inconvenience by that attempt.
Sometimes she plays the physician. Jason of Pheres being given over by
the physicians, by reason of an imposthume in his breast, having a mind
to rid himself of his pain, by death at least, threw himself in a battle
desperately into the thickest of the enemy, where he was so fortunately
wounded quite through the body, that the imposthume broke, and he was
perfectly cured. Did she not also excel the painter Protogenes in his
art? who having finished the picture of a dog quite tired and out of
breath, in all the other parts excellently well to his own liking, but
not being able to express, as he would, the slaver and foam that should
come out of its mouth, vexed and angry at his work, he took his sponge,
which by cleaning his pencils had imbibed several sorts of colours, and
threw it in a rage against the picture, with an intent utterly to deface
it; when fortune guiding the sponge to hit just upon the mouth of the
dog, it there performed what all his art was not able to do. Does she
not sometimes direct our counsels and correct them? Isabel, Queen of
England, having to sail from Zealand into her own kingdom,--[in 1326]--
with an army, in favour of her son against her husband, had been lost,
had she come into the port she intended, being there laid wait for by the
enemy; but fortune, against her will, threw her into another haven, where
she landed in safety. And that man of old who, throwing a stone at a
dog, hit and killed his mother-in-law, had he not reason to pronounce
this verse:
[“Fortune has more judgement than we.”--Menander]
Icetes had contracted with two soldiers to kill Timoleon at Adrana in
Sicily.--[Plutarch, Life of Timoleon, c. 7.]--They took their time to do
it when he was assisting at a sacrifice, and thrusting into the crowd,
as they were making signs to one another, that now was a fit time to do
their business, in steps a third, who, with a sword takes one of them
full drive over the pate, lays him dead upon the place and runs away,
which the others see, and concluding himself discovered and lost, runs to
the altar and begs for mercy, promising to discover the whole truth,
which as he was doing, and laying open the full conspiracy, behold the
third man, who being apprehended, was, as a murderer, thrust and hauled
by the people through the press, towards Timoleon, and the other most
eminent persons of the assembly, before whom being brought, he cries out
for pardon, pleading that he had justly slain his father’s murderer;
which he, also, proving upon the spot, by sufficient witnesses, whom his
good fortune very opportunely supplied him withal, that his father was
really killed in the city of Leontini, by that very man on whom he had
taken his revenge, he was presently awarded ten Attic minae, for having
had the good fortune, by designing to revenge the death of his father,
to preserve the life of the common father of Sicily. Fortune, truly, in
her conduct surpasses all the rules of human prudence.
But to conclude: is there not a direct application of her favour, bounty,
and piety manifestly discovered in this action? Ignatius the father and
Ignatius the son being proscribed by the triumvirs of Rome, resolved upon
this generous act of mutual kindness, to fall by the hands of one
another, and by that means to frustrate and defeat the cruelty of the
tyrants; and accordingly with their swords drawn, ran full drive upon one
another, where fortune so guided the points, that they made two equally
mortal wounds, affording withal so much honour to so brave a friendship,
as to leave them just strength enough to draw out their bloody swords,
that they might have liberty to embrace one another in this dying
condition, with so close and hearty an embrace, that the executioner cut
off both their heads at once, leaving the bodies still fast linked
together in this noble bond, and their wounds joined mouth to mouth,
affectionately sucking in the last blood and remainder of the lives of
each other.
CHAPTER XXXIV
OF ONE DEFECT IN OUR GOVERNMENT
My late father, a man that had no other advantages than experience and
his own natural parts, was nevertheless of a very clear judgment,
formerly told me that he once had thoughts of endeavouring to introduce
this practice; that there might be in every city a certain place assigned
to which such as stood in need of anything might repair, and have their
business entered by an officer appointed for that purpose. As for
example: I want a chapman to buy my pearls; I want one that has pearls to
sell; such a one wants company to go to Paris; such a one seeks a servant
of such a quality; such a one a master; such a one such an artificer;
some inquiring for one thing, some for another, every one according to
what he wants. And doubtless, these mutual advertisements would be of no
contemptible advantage to the public correspondence and intelligence: for
there are evermore conditions that hunt after one another, and for want
of knowing one another’s occasions leave men in very great necessity.
I have heard, to the great shame of the age we live in, that in our very
sight two most excellent men for learning died so poor that they had
scarce bread to put in their mouths: Lilius Gregorius Giraldus in Italy
and Sebastianus Castalio in Germany: and I believe there are a thousand
men would have invited them into their families, with very advantageous
conditions, or have relieved them where they were, had they known their
wants. The world is not so generally corrupted, but that I know a man
that would heartily wish the estate his ancestors have left him might be
employed, so long as it shall please fortune to give him leave to enjoy
it, to secure rare and remarkable persons of any kind, whom misfortune
sometimes persecutes to the last degree, from the dangers of necessity;
and at least place them in such a condition that they must be very hard
to please, if they are not contented.
My father in his domestic economy had this rule (which I know how to
commend, but by no means to imitate), namely, that besides the day-book
or memorial of household affairs, where the small accounts, payments, and
disbursements, which do not require a secretary’s hand, were entered, and
which a steward always had in custody, he ordered him whom he employed to
write for him, to keep a journal, and in it to set down all the
remarkable occurrences, and daily memorials of the history of his house:
very pleasant to look over, when time begins to wear things out of
memory, and very useful sometimes to put us out of doubt when such a
thing was begun, when ended; what visitors came, and when they went; our
travels, absences, marriages, and deaths; the reception of good or ill
news; the change of principal servants, and the like. An ancient custom,
which I think it would not be amiss for every one to revive in his own
house; and I find I did very foolishly in neglecting it.
CHAPTER XXXV
OF THE CUSTOM OF WEARING CLOTHES
Whatever I shall say upon this subject, I am of necessity to invade some
of the bounds of custom, so careful has she been to shut up all the
avenues. I was disputing with myself in this shivering season, whether
the fashion of going naked in those nations lately discovered is imposed
upon them by the hot temperature of the air, as we say of the Indians and
Moors, or whether it be the original fashion of mankind. Men of
understanding, forasmuch as all things under the sun, as the Holy Writ
declares, are subject to the same laws, were wont in such considerations
as these, where we are to distinguish the natural laws from those which
have been imposed by man’s invention, to have recourse to the general
polity of the world, where there can be nothing counterfeit. Now, all
other creatures being sufficiently furnished with all things necessary
for the support of their being--[Montaigne’s expression is, “with needle
and thread.”--W.C.H.]--it is not to be imagined that we only are brought
into the world in a defective and indigent condition, and in such a state
as cannot subsist without external aid. Therefore it is that I believe,
that as plants, trees, and animals, and all things that have life, are
seen to be by nature sufficiently clothed and covered, to defend them
from the injuries of weather:
“Proptereaque fere res omnes ant corio sunt,
Aut seta, ant conchis, ant callo, ant cortice tectae,”
[“And that for this reason nearly all things are clothed with skin,
or hair, or shells, or bark, or some such thing.”
--Lucretius, iv. 936.]
so were we: but as those who by artificial light put out that of day, so
we by borrowed forms and fashions have destroyed our own. And ‘tis plain
enough to be seen, that ‘tis custom only which renders that impossible
that otherwise is nothing so; for of those nations who have no manner of
knowledge of clothing, some are situated under the same temperature that
we are, and some in much colder climates. And besides, our most tender
parts are always exposed to the air, as the eyes, mouth, nose, and ears;
and our country labourers, like our ancestors in former times, go with
their breasts and bellies open. Had we been born with a necessity upon
us of wearing petticoats and breeches, there is no doubt but nature would
have fortified those parts she intended should be exposed to the fury of
the seasons with a thicker skin, as she has done the finger-ends and the
soles of the feet. And why should this seem hard to believe? I observe
much greater distance betwixt my habit and that of one of our country
boors, than betwixt his and that of a man who has no other covering but
his skin. How many men, especially in Turkey, go naked upon the account
of devotion? Some one asked a beggar, whom he saw in his shirt in the
depth of winter, as brisk and frolic as he who goes muffled up to the
ears in furs, how he was able to endure to go so? “Why, sir,” he
answered, “you go with your face bare: I am all face.” The Italians have
a story of the Duke of Florence’s fool, whom his master asking how, being
so thinly clad, he was able to support the cold, when he himself, warmly
wrapped up as he was, was hardly able to do it? “Why,” replied the fool,
“use my receipt to put on all your clothes you have at once, and you’ll
feel no more cold than I.” King Massinissa, to an extreme old age, could
never be prevailed upon to go with his head covered, how cold, stormy, or
rainy soever the weather might be; which also is reported of the Emperor
Severus. Herodotus tells us, that in the battles fought betwixt the
Egyptians and the Persians, it was observed both by himself and by
others, that of those who were left dead upon the field, the heads of the
Egyptians were without comparison harder than those of the Persians, by
reason that the last had gone with their heads always covered from their
infancy, first with biggins, and then with turbans, and the others always
shaved and bare. King Agesilaus continued to a decrepit age to wear
always the same clothes in winter that he did in summer. Caesar, says
Suetonius, marched always at the head of his army, for the most part on
foot, with his head bare, whether it was rain or sunshine, and as much is
said of Hannibal:
“Tum vertice nudo,
Excipere insanos imbres, coelique ruinam.”
[“Bareheaded he marched in snow, exposed to pouring rain and the
utmost rigour of the weather.”--Silius Italicus, i. 250.]
A Venetian who has long lived in Pegu, and has lately returned thence,
writes that the men and women of that kingdom, though they cover all
their other parts, go always barefoot and ride so too; and Plato very
earnestly advises for the health of the whole body, to give the head and
the feet no other clothing than what nature has bestowed. He whom the
Poles have elected for their king,--[Stephen Bathory]--since ours came
thence, who is, indeed, one of the greatest princes of this age, never
wears any gloves, and in winter or whatever weather can come, never wears
other cap abroad than that he wears at home. Whereas I cannot endure to
go unbuttoned or untied; my neighbouring labourers would think themselves
in chains, if they were so braced. Varro is of opinion, that when it was
ordained we should be bare in the presence of the gods and before the
magistrate, it was so ordered rather upon the score of health, and to
inure us to the injuries of weather, than upon the account of reverence;
and since we are now talking of cold, and Frenchmen used to wear variety
of colours (not I myself, for I seldom wear other than black or white, in
imitation of my father), let us add another story out of Le Capitaine
Martin du Bellay, who affirms, that in the march to Luxembourg he saw so
great frost, that the munition-wine was cut with hatchets and wedges, and
delivered out to the soldiers by weight, and that they carried it away in
baskets: and Ovid,
“Nudaque consistunt, formam servantia testae,
Vina; nec hausta meri, sed data frusta, bibunt.”
[“The wine when out of the cask retains the form of the cask;
and is given out not in cups, but in bits.”
--Ovid, Trist., iii. 10, 23.]
At the mouth of Lake Maeotis the frosts are so very sharp, that in the
very same place where Mithridates’ lieutenant had fought the enemy
dryfoot and given them a notable defeat, the summer following he obtained
over them a naval victory. The Romans fought at a very great
disadvantage, in the engagement they had with the Carthaginians near
Piacenza, by reason that they went to the charge with their blood
congealed and their limbs numbed with cold, whereas Hannibal had caused
great fires to be dispersed quite through his camp to warm his soldiers,
and oil to be distributed amongst them, to the end that anointing
themselves, they might render their nerves more supple and active, and
fortify the pores against the violence of the air and freezing wind,
which raged in that season.
The retreat the Greeks made from Babylon into their own country is famous
for the difficulties and calamities they had to overcome; of which this
was one, that being encountered in the mountains of Armenia with a
horrible storm of snow, they lost all knowledge of the country and of the
ways, and being driven up, were a day and a night without eating or
drinking; most of their cattle died, many of themselves were starved to
death, several struck blind with the force of the hail and the glare of
the snow, many of them maimed in their fingers and toes, and many stiff
and motionless with the extremity of the cold, who had yet their
understanding entire.
Alexander saw a nation, where they bury their fruit-trees in winter to
protect them from being destroyed by the frost, and we also may see the
same.
But, so far as clothes go, the King of Mexico changed four times a day
his apparel, and never put it on again, employing that he left off in his
continual liberalities and rewards; and neither pot, dish, nor other
utensil of his kitchen or table was ever served twice.
CHAPTER XXXVI
OF CATO THE YOUNGER
[“I am not possessed with this common errour, to judge of others
according to what I am my selfe. I am easie to beleeve things
differing from my selfe. Though I be engaged to one forme, I do not
tie the world unto it, as every man doth. And I beleeve and
conceive a thousand manners of life, contrary to the common sorte.”
--Florio, ed. 1613, p. 113.]
I am not guilty of the common error of judging another by myself. I
easily believe that in another’s humour which is contrary to my own; and
though I find myself engaged to one certain form, I do not oblige others
to it, as many do; but believe and apprehend a thousand ways of living;
and, contrary to most men, more easily admit of difference than
uniformity amongst us. I as frankly as any one would have me, discharge
a man from my humours and principles, and consider him according to his
own particular model. Though I am not continent myself, I nevertheless
sincerely approve the continence of the Feuillans and Capuchins, and
highly commend their way of living. I insinuate myself by imagination
into their place, and love and honour them the more for being other than
I am. I very much desire that we may be judged every man by himself, and
would not be drawn into the consequence of common examples. My own
weakness nothing alters the esteem I ought to have for the force and
vigour of those who deserve it:
“Sunt qui nihil suadent, quam quod se imitari posse confidunt.”
[“There are who persuade nothing but what they believe they can
imitate themselves.”--Cicero, De Orator., c. 7.]
Crawling upon the slime of the earth, I do not for all that cease to
observe up in the clouds the inimitable height of some heroic souls.
‘Tis a great deal for me to have my judgment regular and just, if the
effects cannot be so, and to maintain this sovereign part, at least, free
from corruption; ‘tis something to have my will right and good where my
legs fail me. This age wherein we live, in our part of the world at
least, is grown so stupid, that not only the exercise, but the very
imagination of virtue is defective, and seems to be no other but college
jargon:
“Virtutem verba putant, ut
Lucum ligna:”
[“They think words virtue, as they think mere wood a sacred grove.”
--Horace, Ep., i. 6, 31.]
“Quam vereri deberent, etiam si percipere non possent.”
[“Which they ought to reverence, though they cannot comprehend.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quas., v. 2.]
‘Tis a gewgaw to hang in a cabinet or at the end of the tongue, as on the
tip of the ear, for ornament only. There are no longer virtuous actions
extant; those actions that carry a show of virtue have yet nothing of its
essence; by reason that profit, glory, fear, custom, and other suchlike
foreign causes, put us on the way to produce them. Our justice also,
valour, courtesy, may be called so too, in respect to others and
according to the face they appear with to the public; but in the doer it
can by no means be virtue, because there is another end proposed, another
moving cause. Now virtue owns nothing to be hers, but what is done by
herself and for herself alone.
In that great battle of Plataea, that the Greeks under the command of
Pausanias gained against Mardonius and the Persians, the conquerors,
according to their custom, coming to divide amongst them the glory of the
exploit, attributed to the Spartan nation the pre-eminence of valour in
the engagement. The Spartans, great judges of virtue, when they came to
determine to what particular man of their nation the honour was due of
having the best behaved himself upon this occasion, found that
Aristodemus had of all others hazarded his person with the greatest
bravery; but did not, however, allow him any prize, by reason that his
virtue had been incited by a desire to clear his reputation from the
reproach of his miscarriage at the business of Thermopylae, and to die
bravely to wipe off that former blemish.
Our judgments are yet sick, and obey the humour of our depraved manners.
I observe most of the wits of these times pretend to ingenuity, by
endeavouring to blemish and darken the glory of the bravest and most
generous actions of former ages, putting one vile interpretation or
another upon them, and forging and supposing vain causes and motives for
the noble things they did: a mighty subtlety indeed! Give me the
greatest and most unblemished action that ever the day beheld, and I will
contrive a hundred plausible drifts and ends to obscure it. God knows,
whoever will stretch them out to the full, what diversity of images our
internal wills suffer under. They do not so maliciously play the
censurers, as they do it ignorantly and rudely in all their detractions.
The same pains and licence that others take to blemish and bespatter
these illustrious names, I would willingly undergo to lend them a
shoulder to raise them higher. These rare forms, that are culled out by
the consent of the wisest men of all ages, for the world’s example,
I should not stick to augment in honour, as far as my invention would
permit, in all the circumstances of favourable interpretation; and we may
well believe that the force of our invention is infinitely short of their
merit. ‘Tis the duty of good men to portray virtue as beautiful as they
can, and there would be nothing wrong should our passion a little
transport us in favour of so sacred a form. What these people do, on the
contrary, they either do out of malice, or by the vice of confining their
belief to their own capacity; or, which I am more inclined to think, for
not having their sight strong, clear, and elevated enough to conceive the
splendour of virtue in her native purity: as Plutarch complains, that in
his time some attributed the cause of the younger Cato’s death to his
fear of Caesar, at which he seems very angry, and with good reason; and
by this a man may guess how much more he would have been offended with
those who have attributed it to ambition. Senseless people! He would
rather have performed a noble, just, and generous action, and to have had
ignominy for his reward, than for glory. That man was in truth a pattern
that nature chose out to show to what height human virtue and constancy
could arrive.
But I am not capable of handling so rich an argument, and shall therefore
only set five Latin poets together, contending in the praise of Cato;
and, incidentally, for their own too. Now, a well-educated child will
judge the two first, in comparison of the others, a little flat and
languid; the third more vigorous, but overthrown by the extravagance of
his own force; he will then think that there will be room for one or two
gradations of invention to come to the fourth, and, mounting to the pitch
of that, he will lift up his hands in admiration; coming to the last, the
first by some space’ (but a space that he will swear is not to be filled
up by any human wit), he will be astounded, he will not know where he is.
And here is a wonder: we have far more poets than judges and interpreters
of poetry; it is easier to write it than to understand it. There is,
indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well
enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine
poesy is above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of
it with the most assured and most steady sight, sees no more than the
quick reflection of a flash of lightning: it does not exercise, but
ravishes and overwhelms our judgment. The fury that possesses him who is
able to penetrate into it wounds yet a third man by hearing him repeat
it; like a loadstone that not only attracts the needle, but also infuses
into it the virtue to attract others. And it is more evidently manifest
in our theatres, that the sacred inspiration of the Muses, having first
stirred up the poet to anger, sorrow, hatred, and out of himself, to
whatever they will, does moreover by the poet possess the actor, and by
the actor consecutively all the spectators. So much do our passions hang
and depend upon one another.
Poetry has ever had that power over me from a child to transpierce and
transport me; but this vivid sentiment that is natural to me has been
variously handled by variety of forms, not so much higher or lower (for
they were ever the highest of every kind), as differing in colour.
First, a gay and sprightly fluency; afterwards, a lofty and penetrating
subtlety; and lastly, a mature and constant vigour. Their names will
better express them: Ovid, Lucan, Virgil.
But our poets are beginning their career:
“Sit Cato, dum vivit, sane vel Caesare major,”
[“Let Cato, whilst he live, be greater than Caesar.”
--Martial, vi. 32]
says one.
“Et invictum, devicta morte, Catonem,”
[“And Cato invincible, death being overcome.”
--Manilius, Astron., iv. 87.]
says the second. And the third, speaking of the civil wars betwixt
Caesar and Pompey,
“Victrix causa diis placuit, set victa Catoni.”
[“The victorious cause blessed the gods, the defeated one Cato.
--“Lucan, i. 128.]
And the fourth, upon the praises of Caesar:
“Et cuncta terrarum subacta,
Praeter atrocem animum Catonis.”
[“And conquered all but the indomitable mind of Cato.”
--Horace, Od., ii. 1, 23.]
And the master of the choir, after having set forth all the great names
of the greatest Romans, ends thus:
“His dantem jura Catonem.”
[“Cato giving laws to all the rest.”--AEneid, viii. 670.]
CHAPTER XXXVII
THAT WE LAUGH AND CRY FOR THE SAME THING
When we read in history that Antigonus was very much displeased with his
son for presenting him the head of King Pyrrhus his enemy, but newly
slain fighting against him, and that seeing it, he wept; and that Rene,
Duke of Lorraine, also lamented the death of Charles, Duke of Burgundy,
whom he had himself defeated, and appeared in mourning at his funeral;
and that in the battle of D’Auray (which Count Montfort obtained over
Charles de Blois, his competitor for the duchy of Brittany), the
conqueror meeting the dead body of his enemy, was very much afflicted at
his death, we must not presently cry out:
“E cosi avven, the l’animo ciascuna
Sua passion sotto ‘l contrario manto,
Ricopre, con la vista or’chiara, or’bruna.”
[“And thus it happens that the mind of each veils its passion under
a different appearance, and beneath a smiling visage, gay beneath a
sombre air.”--Petrarch.]
When Pompey’s head was presented to Caesar, the histories tell us that he
turned away his face, as from a sad and unpleasing object. There had
been so long an intelligence and society betwixt them in the management
of the public affairs, so great a community of fortunes, so many mutual
offices, and so near an alliance, that this countenance of his ought not
to suffer under any misinterpretation, or to be suspected for either
false or counterfeit, as this other seems to believe:
“Tutumque putavit
Jam bonus esse socer; lacrymae non sponte cadentes,
Effudit, gemitusque expressit pectore laeto;”
[“And now he thought it safe to play the kind father-in-law,
shedding forced tears, and from a joyful breast discharging sighs
and groans.”--Lucan, ix. 1037.]
for though it be true that the greatest part of our actions are no other
than visor and disguise, and that it may sometimes be true that
“Haeredis fletus sub persona rises est,”
[“The heir’s tears behind the mask are smiles.”
--Publius Syrus, apud Gellium, xvii. 14.]
yet, in judging of these accidents, we are to consider how much our souls
are oftentimes agitated with divers passions. And as they say that in
our bodies there is a congregation of divers humours, of which that is
the sovereign which, according to the complexion we are of, is commonly
most predominant in us: so, though the soul have in it divers motions to
give it agitation, yet must there of necessity be one to overrule all the
rest, though not with so necessary and absolute a dominion but that
through the flexibility and inconstancy of the soul, those of less
authority may upon occasion reassume their place and make a little sally
in turn. Thence it is, that we see not only children, who innocently
obey and follow nature, often laugh and cry at the same thing, but not
one of us can boast, what journey soever he may have in hand that he has
the most set his heart upon, but when he comes to part with his family
and friends, he will find something that troubles him within; and though
he refrain his tears yet he puts foot in the stirrup with a sad and
cloudy countenance. And what gentle flame soever may warm the heart of
modest and wellborn virgins, yet are they fain to be forced from about
their mothers’ necks to be put to bed to their husbands, whatever this
boon companion is pleased to say:
“Estne novis nuptis odio Venus? anne parentum
Frustrantur falsis gaudia lachrymulis,
Ubertim thalami quasi intra limina fundunt?
Non, ita me divi, vera gemunt, juverint.”
[“Is Venus really so alarming to the new-made bride, or does she
honestly oppose her parent’s rejoicing the tears she so abundantly
sheds on entering the nuptial chamber? No, by the Gods, these are
no true tears.”--Catullus, lxvi. 15.]
[“Is Venus really so repugnant to newly-married maids? Do they meet
the smiles of parents with feigned tears? They weep copiously
within the very threshold of the nuptial chamber. No, so the gods
help me, they do not truly grieve.”--Catullus, lxvi. 15.]--
[A more literal translation. D.W.]
Neither is it strange to lament a person dead whom a man would by no
means should be alive. When I rattle my man, I do it with all the mettle
I have, and load him with no feigned, but downright real curses; but the
heat being over, if he should stand in need of me, I should be very ready
to do him good: for I instantly turn the leaf. When I call him calf and
coxcomb, I do not pretend to entail those titles upon him for ever;
neither do I think I give myself the lie in calling him an honest fellow
presently after. No one quality engrosses us purely and universally.
Were it not the sign of a fool to talk to one’s self, there would hardly
be a day or hour wherein I might not be heard to grumble and mutter to
myself and against myself, “Confound the fool!” and yet I do not think
that to be my definition. Who for seeing me one while cold and presently
very fond towards my wife, believes the one or the other to be
counterfeited, is an ass. Nero, taking leave of his mother whom he was
sending to be drowned, was nevertheless sensible of some emotion at this
farewell, and was struck with horror and pity. ‘Tis said, that the light
of the sun is not one continuous thing, but that he darts new rays so
thick one upon another that we cannot perceive the intermission:
“Largus enim liquidi fons luminis, aetherius sol,
Irrigat assidue coelum candore recenti,
Suppeditatque novo confestim lumine lumen.”
[“So the wide fountain of liquid light, the ethereal sun, steadily
fertilises the heavens with new heat, and supplies a continuous
store of fresh light.”--Lucretius, v. 282.]
Just so the soul variously and imperceptibly darts out her passions.
Artabanus coming by surprise once upon his nephew Xerxes, chid him for
the sudden alteration of his countenance. He was considering the
immeasurable greatness of his forces passing over the Hellespont for the
Grecian expedition: he was first seized with a palpitation of joy, to see
so many millions of men under his command, and this appeared in the
gaiety of his looks: but his thoughts at the same instant suggesting to
him that of so many lives, within a century at most, there would not be
one left, he presently knit his brows and grew sad, even to tears.
We have resolutely pursued the revenge of an injury received, and been
sensible of a singular contentment for the victory; but we shall weep
notwithstanding. ‘Tis not for the victory, though, that we shall weep:
there is nothing altered in that but the soul looks upon things with
another eye and represents them to itself with another kind of face; for
everything has many faces and several aspects.
Relations, old acquaintances, and friendships, possess our imaginations
and make them tender for the time, according to their condition; but the
turn is so quick, that ‘tis gone in a moment:
“Nil adeo fieri celeri ratione videtur,
Quam si mens fieri proponit, et inchoat ipsa,
Ocius ergo animus, quam res se perciet ulla,
Ante oculos quorum in promptu natura videtur;”
[“Nothing therefore seems to be done in so swift a manner than if
the mind proposes it to be done, and itself begins. It is more
active than anything which we see in nature.”--Lucretius, iii. 183.]
and therefore, if we would make one continued thing of all this
succession of passions, we deceive ourselves. When Timoleon laments the
murder he had committed upon so mature and generous deliberation, he does
not lament the liberty restored to his country, he does not lament the
tyrant; but he laments his brother: one part of his duty is performed;
let us give him leave to perform the other.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
OF SOLITUDE
Let us pretermit that long comparison betwixt the active and the solitary
life; and as for the fine sayings with which ambition and avarice
palliate their vices, that we are not born for ourselves but for the
public,--[This is the eulogium passed by Lucan on Cato of Utica, ii.
383.]--let us boldly appeal to those who are in public affairs; let them
lay their hands upon their hearts, and then say whether, on the contrary,
they do not rather aspire to titles and offices and that tumult of the
world to make their private advantage at the public expense. The corrupt
ways by which in this our time they arrive at the height to which their
ambitions aspire, manifestly enough declares that their ends cannot be
very good. Let us tell ambition that it is she herself who gives us a
taste of solitude; for what does she so much avoid as society? What does
she so much seek as elbowroom? A man many do well or ill everywhere; but
if what Bias says be true, that the greatest part is the worse part, or
what the Preacher says: there is not one good of a thousand:
“Rari quippe boni: numero vix sunt totidem quot
Thebarum portae, vel divitis ostia Nili,”
[“Good men forsooth are scarce: there are hardly as many as there
are gates of Thebes or mouths of the rich Nile.”
--Juvenal, Sat., xiii. 26.]
the contagion is very dangerous in the crowd. A man must either imitate
the vicious or hate them both are dangerous things, either to resemble
them because they are many or to hate many because they are unresembling
to ourselves. Merchants who go to sea are in the right when they are
cautious that those who embark with them in the same bottom be neither
dissolute blasphemers nor vicious other ways, looking upon such society
as unfortunate. And therefore it was that Bias pleasantly said to some,
who being with him in a dangerous storm implored the assistance of the
gods: “Peace, speak softly,” said he, “that they may not know you are
here in my company.”--[Diogenes Laertius]--And of more pressing
example, Albuquerque, viceroy in the Indies for Emmanuel, king of
Portugal, in an extreme peril of shipwreck, took a young boy upon his
shoulders, for this only end that, in the society of their common danger
his innocence might serve to protect him, and to recommend him to the
divine favour, that they might get safe to shore. ‘Tis not that a wise
man may not live everywhere content, and be alone in the very crowd of a
palace; but if it be left to his own choice, the schoolman will tell you
that he should fly the very sight of the crowd: he will endure it if need
be; but if it be referred to him, he will choose to be alone. He cannot
think himself sufficiently rid of vice, if he must yet contend with it in
other men. Charondas punished those as evil men who were convicted of
keeping ill company. There is nothing so unsociable and sociable as man,
the one by his vice, the other by his nature. And Antisthenes, in my
opinion, did not give him a satisfactory answer, who reproached him with
frequenting ill company, by saying that the physicians lived well enough
amongst the sick, for if they contribute to the health of the sick, no
doubt but by the contagion, continual sight of, and familiarity with
diseases, they must of necessity impair their own.
Now the end, I take it, is all one, to live at more leisure and at one’s
ease: but men do not always take the right way. They often think they
have totally taken leave of all business, when they have only exchanged
one employment for another: there is little less trouble in governing a
private family than a whole kingdom. Wherever the mind is perplexed, it
is in an entire disorder, and domestic employments are not less
troublesome for being less important. Moreover, for having shaken off
the court and the exchange, we have not taken leave of the principal
vexations of life:
“Ratio et prudentia curas,
Non locus effusi late maris arbiter, aufert;”
[“Reason and prudence, not a place with a commanding view of the
great ocean, banish care.”--Horace, Ep., i. 2.]
ambition, avarice, irresolution, fear, and inordinate desires, do not
leave us because we forsake our native country:
“Et
Post equitem sedet atra cura;”
[“Black care sits behind the horse man.”
--Horace, Od., iii. 1, 40].
they often follow us even to cloisters and philosophical schools; nor
deserts, nor caves, hair-shirts, nor fasts, can disengage us from them:
“Haeret lateri lethalis arundo.”
[“The fatal shaft adheres to the side.”--AEneid, iv. 73.]
One telling Socrates that such a one was nothing improved by his travels:
“I very well believe it,” said he, “for he took himself along with him”
“Quid terras alio calentes
Sole mutamus? patriae quis exsul
Se quoque fugit?”
[“Why do we seek climates warmed by another sun? Who is the man
that by fleeing from his country, can also flee from himself?”
--Horace, Od., ii. 16, 18.]
If a man do not first discharge both himself and his mind of the burden
with which he finds himself oppressed, motion will but make it press the
harder and sit the heavier, as the lading of a ship is of less
encumbrance when fast and bestowed in a settled posture. You do a sick
man more harm than good in removing him from place to place; you fix and
establish the disease by motion, as stakes sink deeper and more firmly
into the earth by being moved up and down in the place where they are
designed to stand. Therefore, it is not enough to get remote from the
public; ‘tis not enough to shift the soil only; a man must flee from the
popular conditions that have taken possession of his soul, he must
sequester and come again to himself:
“Rupi jam vincula, dicas
Nam luctata canis nodum arripit; attamen illi,
Quum fugit, a collo trahitur pars longa catenae.”
[“You say, perhaps, you have broken your chains: the dog who after
long efforts has broken his chain, still in his flight drags a heavy
portion of it after him.”--Persius, Sat., v. 158.]
We still carry our fetters along with us. ‘Tis not an absolute liberty;
we yet cast back a look upon what we have left behind us; the fancy is
still full of it:
“Nisi purgatum est pectus, quae praelia nobis
Atque pericula tunc ingratis insinuandum?
Quantae connscindunt hominem cupedinis acres
Sollicitum curae? quantique perinde timores?
Quidve superbia, spurcitia, ac petulantia, quantas
Efficiunt clades? quid luxus desidiesque?”
[“But unless the mind is purified, what internal combats and dangers
must we incur in spite of all our efforts! How many bitter
anxieties, how many terrors, follow upon unregulated passion!
What destruction befalls us from pride, lust, petulant anger!
What evils arise from luxury and sloth!”--Lucretius, v. 4.]
Our disease lies in the mind, which cannot escape from itself;
“In culpa est animus, qui se non effugit unquam,”
--Horace, Ep., i. 14, 13.
and therefore is to be called home and confined within itself: that is
the true solitude, and that may be enjoyed even in populous cities and
the courts of kings, though more commodiously apart.
Now, since we will attempt to live alone, and to waive all manner of
conversation amongst them, let us so order it that our content may depend
wholly upon ourselves; let us dissolve all obligations that ally us to
others; let us obtain this from ourselves, that we may live alone in good
earnest, and live at our ease too.
Stilpo having escaped from the burning of his town, where he lost wife,
children, and goods, Demetrius Poliorcetes seeing him, in so great a ruin
of his country, appear with an undisturbed countenance, asked him if he
had received no loss? To which he made answer, No; and that, thank God,
nothing was lost of his.--[Seneca, Ep. 7.]--This also was the meaning of
the philosopher Antisthenes, when he pleasantly said, that “men should
furnish themselves with such things as would float, and might with the
owner escape the storm”;--[Diogenes Laertius, vi. 6.] and certainly a
wise man never loses anything if he have himself. When the city of Nola
was ruined by the barbarians, Paulinus, who was bishop of that place,
having there lost all he had, himself a prisoner, prayed after this
manner: “O Lord, defend me from being sensible of this loss; for Thou
knowest they have yet touched nothing of that which is mine.”--[St.
Augustin, De Civit. Dei, i. 10.]--The riches that made him rich and the
goods that made him good, were still kept entire. This it is to make
choice of treasures that can secure themselves from plunder and violence,
and to hide them in such a place into which no one can enter and that is
not to be betrayed by any but ourselves. Wives, children, and goods must
be had, and especially health, by him that can get it; but we are not so
to set our hearts upon them that our happiness must have its dependence
upon them; we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free,
wherein to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.
And in this we must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves,
and so privately that no exotic knowledge or communication be admitted
there; there to laugh and to talk, as if without wife, children, goods,
train, or attendance, to the end that when it shall so fall out that we
must lose any or all of these, it may be no new thing to be without them.
We have a mind pliable in itself, that will be company; that has
wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not
then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity.
“In solis sis tibi turba locis.”
[“In solitude, be company for thyself.”--Tibullus, vi. 13. 12.]
Virtue is satisfied with herself, without discipline, without words,
without effects. In our ordinary actions there is not one of a thousand
that concerns ourselves. He that thou seest scrambling up the ruins of
that wall, furious and transported, against whom so many harquebuss-shots
are levelled; and that other all over scars, pale, and fainting with
hunger, and yet resolved rather to die than to open the gates to him;
dost thou think that these men are there upon their own account? No;
peradventure in the behalf of one whom they never saw and who never
concerns himself for their pains and danger, but lies wallowing the while
in sloth and pleasure: this other slavering, blear-eyed, slovenly fellow,
that thou seest come out of his study after midnight, dost thou think he
has been tumbling over books to learn how to become a better man, wiser,
and more content? No such matter; he will there end his days, but he
will teach posterity the measure of Plautus’ verses and the true
orthography of a Latin word. Who is it that does not voluntarily
exchange his health, his repose, and his very life for reputation and
glory, the most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes current
amongst us? Our own death does not sufficiently terrify and trouble us;
let us, moreover, charge ourselves with those of our wives, children, and
family: our own affairs do not afford us anxiety enough; let us undertake
those of our neighbours and friends, still more to break our brains and
torment us:
“Vah! quemquamne hominem in animum instituere, aut
Parare, quod sit carius, quam ipse est sibi?”
[“Ah! can any man conceive in his mind or realise what is dearer
than he is to himself?”--Terence, Adelph., i. I, 13.]
Solitude seems to me to wear the best favour in such as have already
employed their most active and flourishing age in the world’s service,
after the example of Thales. We have lived enough for others; let us at
least live out the small remnant of life for ourselves; let us now call
in our thoughts and intentions to ourselves, and to our own ease and
repose. ‘Tis no light thing to make a sure retreat; it will be enough
for us to do without mixing other enterprises. Since God gives us
leisure to order our removal, let us make ready, truss our baggage, take
leave betimes of the company, and disentangle ourselves from those
violent importunities that engage us elsewhere and separate us from
ourselves.
We must break the knot of our obligations, how strong soever, and
hereafter love this or that, but espouse nothing but ourselves: that is
to say, let the remainder be our own, but not so joined and so close as
not to be forced away without flaying us or tearing out part of our
whole. The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he is
his own. ‘Tis time to wean ourselves from society when we can no longer
add anything to it; he who is not in a condition to lend must forbid
himself to borrow. Our forces begin to fail us; let us call them in and
concentrate them in and for ourselves. He that can cast off within
himself and resolve the offices of friendship and company, let him do it.
In this decay of nature which renders him useless, burdensome, and
importunate to others, let him take care not to be useless, burdensome,
and importunate to himself. Let him soothe and caress himself, and above
all things be sure to govern himself with reverence to his reason and
conscience to that degree as to be ashamed to make a false step in their
presence:
“Rarum est enim, ut satis se quisque vereatur.”
[“For ‘tis rarely seen that men have respect and reverence enough
for themselves.”--Quintilian, x. 7.]
Socrates says that boys are to cause themselves to be instructed, men to
exercise themselves in well-doing, and old men to retire from all civil
and military employments, living at their own discretion, without the
obligation to any office. There are some complexions more proper for
these precepts of retirement than others. Such as are of a soft and dull
apprehension, and of a tender will and affection, not readily to be
subdued or employed, whereof I am one, both by natural condition and by
reflection, will sooner incline to this advice than active and busy
souls, which embrace: all, engage in all, are hot upon everything, which
offer, present, and give themselves up to every occasion. We are to use
these accidental and extraneous commodities, so far as they are pleasant
to us, but by no means to lay our principal foundation there; ‘tis no
true one; neither nature nor reason allows it so to be. Why therefore
should we, contrary to their laws, enslave our own contentment to the
power of another? To anticipate also the accidents of fortune, to
deprive ourselves of the conveniences we have in our own power, as
several have done upon the account of devotion, and some philosophers by
reasoning; to be one’s own servant, to lie hard, to put out our own eyes,
to throw our wealth into the river, to go in search of grief; these, by
the misery of this life, aiming at bliss in another; those by laying
themselves low to avoid the danger of falling: all such are acts of an
excessive virtue. The stoutest and most resolute natures render even
their seclusion glorious and exemplary:
“Tuta et parvula laudo,
Quum res deficiunt, satis inter vilia fortis
Verum, ubi quid melius contingit et unctius, idem
Hos sapere et solos aio bene vivere, quorum
Conspicitur nitidis fundata pecunia villis.”
[“When means are deficient, I laud a safe and humble condition,
content with little: but when things grow better and more easy, I
all the same say that you alone are wise and live well, whose
invested money is visible in beautiful villas.”
--Horace, Ep., i. 15, 42.]
A great deal less would serve my turn well enough. ‘Tis enough for me,
under fortune’s favour, to prepare myself for her disgrace, and, being at
my ease, to represent to myself, as far as my imagination can stretch,
the ill to come; as we do at jousts and tiltings, where we counterfeit
war in the greatest calm of peace. I do not think Arcesilaus the
philosopher the less temperate and virtuous for knowing that he made use
of gold and silver vessels, when the condition of his fortune allowed him
so to do; I have indeed a better opinion of him than if he had denied
himself what he used with liberality and moderation. I see the utmost
limits of natural necessity: and considering a poor man begging at my
door, ofttimes more jocund and more healthy than I myself am, I put
myself into his place, and attempt to dress my mind after his mode;
and running, in like manner, over other examples, though I fancy death,
poverty, contempt, and sickness treading on my heels, I easily resolve
not to be affrighted, forasmuch as a less than I takes them with so much
patience; and am not willing to believe that a less understanding can do
more than a greater, or that the effects of precept cannot arrive to as
great a height as those of custom. And knowing of how uncertain duration
these accidental conveniences are, I never forget, in the height of all
my enjoyments, to make it my chiefest prayer to Almighty God, that He
will please to render me content with myself and the condition wherein I
am. I see young men very gay and frolic, who nevertheless keep a mass of
pills in their trunk at home, to take when they’ve got a cold, which they
fear so much the less, because they think they have remedy at hand.
Every one should do in like manner, and, moreover, if they find
themselves subject to some more violent disease, should furnish
themselves with such medicines as may numb and stupefy the part.
The employment a man should choose for such a life ought neither to be a
laborious nor an unpleasing one; otherwise ‘tis to no purpose at all to
be retired. And this depends upon every one’s liking and humour. Mine
has no manner of complacency for husbandry, and such as love it ought to
apply themselves to it with moderation:
[“Endeavour to make circumstances subject to me,
and not me subject to circumstances.”
--Horace, Ep., i. i, 19.]
Husbandry is otherwise a very servile employment, as Sallust calls it;
though some parts of it are more excusable than the rest, as the care of
gardens, which Xenophon attributes to Cyrus; and a mean may be found out
betwixt the sordid and low application, so full of perpetual solicitude,
which is seen in men who make it their entire business and study, and the
stupid and extreme negligence, letting all things go at random which we
see in others
“Democriti pecus edit agellos
Cultaque, dum peregre est animus sine corpore velox.”
[“Democritus’ cattle eat his corn and spoil his fields, whilst his
soaring mind ranges abroad without the body.”
--Horace, Ep., i, 12, 12.]
But let us hear what advice the younger Pliny gives his friend Caninius
Rufus upon the subject of solitude: “I advise thee, in the full and
plentiful retirement wherein thou art, to leave to thy hinds the care of
thy husbandry, and to addict thyself to the study of letters, to extract
from thence something that may be entirely and absolutely thine own.” By
which he means reputation; like Cicero, who says that he would employ his
solitude and retirement from public affairs to acquire by his writings an
immortal life.
“Usque adeone
Scire tuum, nihil est, nisi to scire hoc, sciat alter?”
[“Is all that thy learning nothing, unless another knows
that thou knowest?”--Persius, Sat., i. 23.]
It appears to be reason, when a man talks of retiring from the world,
that he should look quite out of [for] himself. These do it but by
halves: they design well enough for themselves when they shall be no more
in it; but still they pretend to extract the fruits of that design from
the world, when absent from it, by a ridiculous contradiction.
The imagination of those who seek solitude upon the account of devotion,
filling their hopes and courage with certainty of divine promises in the
other life, is much more rationally founded. They propose to themselves
God, an infinite object in goodness and power; the soul has there
wherewithal, at full liberty, to satiate her desires: afflictions and
sufferings turn to their advantage, being undergone for the acquisition
of eternal health and joy; death is to be wished and longed for, where it
is the passage to so perfect a condition; the asperity of the rules they
impose upon themselves is immediately softened by custom, and all their
carnal appetites baffled and subdued, by refusing to humour and feed
them, these being only supported by use and exercise. This sole end of
another happily immortal life is that which really merits that we should
abandon the pleasures and conveniences of this; and he who can really and
constantly inflame his soul with the ardour of this vivid faith and hope,
erects for himself in solitude a more voluptuous and delicious life than
any other sort of existence.
Neither the end, then, nor the means of this advice pleases me, for we
often fall out of the frying-pan into the fire.--[or: we always relapse
ill from fever into fever.]--This book-employment is as painful as any
other, and as great an enemy to health, which ought to be the first thing
considered; neither ought a man to be allured with the pleasure of it,
which is the same that destroys the frugal, the avaricious, the
voluptuous, and the ambitious man.
[“This plodding occupation of bookes is as painfull as any other,
and as great an enemie vnto health, which ought principally to be
considered. And a man should not suffer him selfe to be inveagled
by the pleasure he takes in them.”--Florio, edit. 1613, p. 122.]
The sages give us caution enough to beware the treachery of our desires,
and to distinguish true and entire pleasures from such as are mixed and
complicated with greater pain. For the most of our pleasures, say they,
wheedle and caress only to strangle us, like those thieves the Egyptians
called Philistae; if the headache should come before drunkenness, we
should have a care of drinking too much; but pleasure, to deceive us,
marches before and conceals her train. Books are pleasant, but if, by
being over-studious, we impair our health and spoil our goodhumour, the
best pieces we have, let us give it over; I, for my part, am one of those
who think, that no fruit derived from them can recompense so great a
loss. As men who have long felt themselves weakened by indisposition,
give themselves up at last to the mercy of medicine and submit to certain
rules of living, which they are for the future never to transgress; so he
who retires, weary of and disgusted with the common way of living, ought
to model this new one he enters into by the rules of reason, and to
institute and establish it by premeditation and reflection. He ought to
have taken leave of all sorts of labour, what advantage soever it may
promise, and generally to have shaken off all those passions which
disturb the tranquillity of body and soul, and then choose the way that
best suits with his own humour:
“Unusquisque sua noverit ire via.”
In husbandry, study, hunting, and all other exercises, men are to proceed
to the utmost limits of pleasure, but must take heed of engaging further,
where trouble begins to mix with it. We are to reserve so much
employment only as is necessary to keep us in breath and to defend us
from the inconveniences that the other extreme of a dull and stupid
laziness brings along with it. There are sterile knotty sciences,
chiefly hammered out for the crowd; let such be left to them who are
engaged in the world’s service. I for my part care for no other books,
but either such as are pleasant and easy, to amuse me, or those that
comfort and instruct me how to regulate my life and death:
“Tacitum sylvas inter reptare salubres,
Curantem, quidquid dignum sapienti bonoque est.”
[“Silently meditating in the healthy groves, whatever is worthy
of a wise and good man.”--Horace, Ep., i. 4, 4.]
Wiser men, having great force and vigour of soul, may propose to
themselves a rest wholly spiritual but for me, who have a very ordinary
soul, it is very necessary to support myself with bodily conveniences;
and age having of late deprived me of those pleasures that were more
acceptable to me, I instruct and whet my appetite to those that remain,
more suitable to this other reason. We ought to hold with all our force,
both of hands and teeth, the use of the pleasures of life that our years,
one after another, snatch away from us:
“Carpamus dulcia; nostrum est,
Quod vivis; cinis, et manes, et fabula fies.”
[“Let us pluck life’s sweets, ‘tis for them we live: by and by we
shall be ashes, a ghost, a mere subject of talk.”
--Persius, Sat., v. 151.]
Now, as to the end that Pliny and Cicero propose to us of glory, ‘tis
infinitely wide of my account. Ambition is of all others the most
contrary humour to solitude; glory and repose are things that cannot
possibly inhabit in one and the same place. For so much as I understand,
these have only their arms and legs disengaged from the crowd; their soul
and intention remain confined behind more than ever:
“Tun’, vetule, auriculis alienis colligis escas?”
[“Dost thou, then, old man, collect food for others’ ears?”
--Persius, Sat., i. 22.]
they have only retired to take a better leap, and by a stronger motion to
give a brisker charge into the crowd. Will you see how they shoot short?
Let us put into the counterpoise the advice of two philosophers, of two
very different sects, writing, the one to Idomeneus, the other to
Lucilius, their friends, to retire into solitude from worldly honours and
affairs. “You have,” say they, “hitherto lived swimming and floating;
come now and die in the harbour: you have given the first part of your
life to the light, give what remains to the shade. It is impossible to
give over business, if you do not also quit the fruit; therefore
disengage yourselves from all concern of name and glory; ‘tis to be
feared the lustre of your former actions will give you but too much
light, and follow you into your most private retreat. Quit with other
pleasures that which proceeds from the approbation of another man: and as
to your knowledge and parts, never concern yourselves; they will not lose
their effect if yourselves be the better for them. Remember him, who
being asked why he took so much pains in an art that could come to the
knowledge of but few persons? ‘A few are enough for me,’ replied he;
‘I have enough with one; I have enough with never an one.’--[Seneca, Ep.,
7.]--He said true; you and a companion are theatre enough to one
another, or you to yourself. Let the people be to you one, and be you
one to the whole people. ‘Tis an unworthy ambition to think to derive
glory from a man’s sloth and privacy: you are to do like the beasts of
chase, who efface the track at the entrance into their den. You are no
more to concern yourself how the world talks of you, but how you are to
talk to yourself. Retire yourself into yourself, but first prepare
yourself there to receive yourself: it were a folly to trust yourself in
your own hands, if you cannot govern yourself. A man may miscarry alone
as well as in company. Till you have rendered yourself one before whom
you dare not trip, and till you have a bashfulness and respect for
yourself,
“Obversentur species honestae animo;”
[“Let honest things be ever present to the mind”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 22.]
present continually to your imagination Cato, Phocion, and Aristides, in
whose presence the fools themselves will hide their faults, and make them
controllers of all your intentions; should these deviate from virtue,
your respect to those will set you right; they will keep you in this way
to be contented with yourself; to borrow nothing of any other but
yourself; to stay and fix your soul in certain and limited thoughts,
wherein she may please herself, and having understood the true and real
goods, which men the more enjoy the more they understand, to rest
satisfied, without desire of prolongation of life or name.” This is the
precept of the true and natural philosophy, not of a boasting and prating
philosophy, such as that of the two former.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A man must either imitate the vicious or hate them
Abhorrence of the patient are necessary circumstances
Acquire by his writings an immortal life
Addict thyself to the study of letters
Always the perfect religion
And hate him so as you were one day to love him
Archer that shoots over, misses as much as he that falls short
Art that could come to the knowledge of but few persons
Being over-studious, we impair our health and spoil our humour
By the misery of this life, aiming at bliss in another
Carnal appetites only supported by use and exercise
Coming out of the same hole
Common friendships will admit of division
Dost thou, then, old man, collect food for others’ ears?
Either tranquil life, or happy death
Enslave our own contentment to the power of another?
Entertain us with fables: astrologers and physicians
Everything has many faces and several aspects
Extremity of philosophy is hurtful
Friendships that the law and natural obligation impose upon us
Gewgaw to hang in a cabinet or at the end of the tongue
Gratify the gods and nature by massacre and murder
He took himself along with him
He will choose to be alone
Headache should come before drunkenness
High time to die when there is more ill than good in living
Honour of valour consists in fighting, not in subduing
How uncertain duration these accidental conveniences are
I bequeath to Areteus the maintenance of my mother
I for my part always went the plain way to work.
I love temperate and moderate natures.
Impostures: very strangeness lends them credit
In solitude, be company for thyself.--Tibullus
In the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors
Interdict all gifts betwixt man and wife
It is better to die than to live miserable
Judge by the eye of reason, and not from common report
Knot is not so sure that a man may not half suspect it will slip
Lascivious poet: Homer
Laying themselves low to avoid the danger of falling
Leave society when we can no longer add anything to it
Little less trouble in governing a private family than a kingdom
Love we bear to our wives is very lawful
Man (must) know that he is his own
Marriage
Men should furnish themselves with such things as would float
Methinks I am no more than half of myself
Must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves
Never represent things to you simply as they are
No effect of virtue, to have stronger arms and legs
Not in a condition to lend must forbid himself to borrow
Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know
O my friends, there is no friend: Aristotle
Oftentimes agitated with divers passions
Ordinary friendships, you are to walk with bridle in your hand
Ought not only to have his hands, but his eyes, too, chaste
Our judgments are yet sick
Perfect friendship I speak of is indivisible
Philosophy
Phusicians cure by by misery and pain
Prefer in bed, beauty before goodness
Pretending to find out the cause of every accident
Reputation: most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes
Reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free
Rest satisfied, without desire of prolongation of life or name
Stilpo lost wife, children, and goods
Stilpo: thank God, nothing was lost of his
Take two sorts of grist out of the same sack
Taking things upon trust from vulgar opinion
Tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments
The consequence of common examples
There are defeats more triumphant than victories
They can neither lend nor give anything to one another
They have yet touched nothing of that which is mine
They must be very hard to please, if they are not contented
Things that engage us elsewhere and separate us from ourselves
This decay of nature which renders him useless, burdensome
This plodding occupation of bookes is as painfull as any other
Those immodest and debauched tricks and postures
Though I be engaged to one forme, I do not tie the world unto it
Title of barbarism to everything that is not familiar
To give a currency to his little pittance of learning
To make their private advantage at the public expense
Under fortune’s favour, to prepare myself for her disgrace
Vice of confining their belief to their own capacity
We have lived enough for others
We have more curiosity than capacity
We still carry our fetters along with us
When time begins to wear things out of memory
Wherever the mind is perplexed, it is in an entire disorder
Who can flee from himself
Wise man never loses anything if he have himself
Wise whose invested money is visible in beautiful villas
Write what he knows, and as much as he knows, but no more
You and companion are theatre enough to one another
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 7.
XXXIX. A consideration upon Cicero.
XL. That the relish of good and evil depends in a great measure
upon opinion.
XLI. Not to communicate a man’s honour.
XLII. Of the inequality amongst us.
XLIII. Of sumptuary laws.
XLIV. Of sleep.
XLV. Of the battle of Dreux.
XLVI. Of names.
XLVII. Of the uncertainty of our judgment.
CHAPTER XXXIX
A CONSIDERATION UPON CICERO
One word more by way of comparison betwixt these two. There are to be
gathered out of the writings of Cicero and the younger Pliny (but little,
in my opinion, resembling his uncle in his humours) infinite testimonies
of a beyond measure ambitious nature; and amongst others, this for one,
that they both, in the sight of all the world, solicit the historians of
their time not to forget them in their memoirs; and fortune, as if in
spite, has made the vanity of those requests live upon record down to
this age of ours, while she has long since consigned the histories
themselves to oblivion. But this exceeds all meanness of spirit in
persons of such a quality as they were, to think to derive any great
renown from babbling and prating; even to the publishing of their private
letters to their friends, and so withal, that though some of them were
never sent, the opportunity being lost, they nevertheless presented them
to the light, with this worthy excuse that they were unwilling to lose
their labours and lucubrations. Was it not very well becoming two
consuls of Rome, sovereign magistrates of the republic that commanded
the world, to spend their leisure in contriving quaint and elegant
missives, thence to gain the reputation of being versed in their own
mother-tongues? What could a pitiful schoolmaster have done worse, whose
trade it was thereby to get his living? If the acts of Xenophon and
Caesar had not far transcended their eloquence, I scarce believe they
would ever have taken the pains to have written them; they made it their
business to recommend not their speaking, but their doing. And could the
perfection of eloquence have added a lustre suitable to a great
personage, certainly Scipio and Laelius had never resigned the honour of
their comedies, with all the luxuriances and elegances of the Latin
tongue, to an African slave; for that the work was theirs, its beauty and
excellence sufficiently declare; Terence himself confesses as much, and I
should take it ill from any one that would dispossess me of that belief.
‘Tis a kind of mockery and offence to extol a man for qualities
misbecoming his condition, though otherwise commendable in themselves,
but such as ought not, however, to be his chief talent; as if a man
should commend a king for being a good painter, a good architect, a good
marksman, or a good runner at the ring: commendations that add no honour,
unless mentioned altogether and in the train of those that are properly
applicable to him, namely, justice and the science of governing and
conducting his people both in peace and war. At this rate, agriculture
was an honour to Cyrus, and eloquence and the knowledge of letters to
Charlemagne. I have in my time known some, who by writing acquired both
their titles and fortune, disown their apprenticeship, corrupt their
style, and affect ignorance in so vulgar a quality (which also our nation
holds to be rarely seen in very learned hands), and to seek a reputation
by better qualities. Demosthenes’ companions in the embassy to Philip,
extolling that prince as handsome, eloquent, and a stout drinker,
Demosthenes said that those were commendations more proper for a woman,
an advocate, or a sponge, than for a king’:
“Imperet bellante prior, jacentem
Lenis in hostem.”
[“In the fight, overthrow your enemy, but be merciful to him when
fallen.--“Horace, Carm. Saec., v. 51.]
‘Tis not his profession to know either how to hunt or to dance well;
“Orabunt causas alii, coelique meatus
Describent radio, et fulgentia sidera dicent;
Hic regere imperio populos sciat.”
[“Let others plead at the bar, or describe the spheres, and point
out the glittering stars; let this man learn to rule the nations.”
--AEneid, vi. 849.]
Plutarch says, moreover, that to appear so excellent in these less
necessary qualities is to produce witness against a man’s self, that he
has spent his time and applied his study ill, which ought to have been
employed in the acquisition of more necessary and more useful things.
So that Philip, king of Macedon, having heard that great Alexander his
son sing once at a feast to the wonder of the best musicians there: “Art
thou not ashamed,” said he to him, “to sing so well?” And to the same
Philip a musician, with whom he was disputing about some things
concerning his art: “Heaven forbid, sir,” said he, “that so great a
misfortune should ever befall you as to understand these things better
than I.” A king should be able to answer as Iphicrates did the orator,
who pressed upon him in his invective after this manner: “And what art
thou that thou bravest it at this rate? art thou a man at arms, art thou
an archer, art thou a pikeman?”--“I am none of all this; but I know how
to command all these.” And Antisthenes took it for an argument of little
value in Ismenias that he was commended for playing excellently well upon
a flute.
I know very well, that when I hear any one dwell upon the language of my
essays, I had rather a great deal he would say nothing: ‘tis not so much
to elevate the style as to depress the sense, and so much the more
offensively as they do it obliquely; and yet I am much deceived if many
other writers deliver more worth noting as to the matter, and, how well
or ill soever, if any other writer has sown things much more materials or
at all events more downright, upon his paper than myself. To bring the
more in, I only muster up the heads; should I annex the sequel, I should
trebly multiply the volume. And how many stories have I scattered up and
down in this book that I only touch upon, which, should any one more
curiously search into, they would find matter enough to produce infinite
essays. Neither those stories nor my quotations always serve simply for
example, authority, or ornament; I do not only regard them for the use I
make of them: they carry sometimes besides what I apply them to, the seed
of a more rich and a bolder matter, and sometimes, collaterally, a more
delicate sound both to myself who will say no more about it in this
place, and to others who shall be of my humour.
But returning to the speaking virtue: I find no great choice betwixt not
knowing to speak anything but ill, and not knowing to speak anything but
well.
“Non est ornamentum virile concimitas.”
[“A carefully arranged dress is no manly ornament.”
--Seneca, Ep., 115.]
The sages tell us that, as to what concerns knowledge, ‘tis nothing but
philosophy; and as to what concerns effects, nothing but virtue, which is
generally proper to all degrees and to all orders.
There is something like this in these two other philosophers, for they
also promise eternity to the letters they write to their friends; but
‘tis after another manner, and by accommodating themselves, for a good
end, to the vanity of another; for they write to them that if the concern
of making themselves known to future ages, and the thirst of glory, do
yet detain them in the management of public affairs, and make them fear
the solitude and retirement to which they would persuade them, let them
never trouble themselves more about it, forasmuch as they shall have
credit enough with posterity to ensure them that were there nothing else
but the letters thus written to them, those letters will render their
names as known and famous as their own public actions could do. And
besides this difference, these are not idle and empty letters, that
contain nothing but a fine jingle of well-chosen words and delicate
couched phrases, but rather replete and abounding with grand discourses
of reason, by which a man may render himself not more eloquent, but more
wise, and that instruct us not to speak, but to do well. Away with that
eloquence that enchants us with itself, and not with actual things!
unless you will allow that of Cicero to be of so supreme a perfection as
to form a complete body of itself.
I shall farther add one story we read of him to this purpose, wherein his
nature will much more manifestly be laid open to us. He was to make an
oration in public, and found himself a little straitened for time to make
himself ready at his ease; when Eros, one of his slaves, brought him word
that the audience was deferred till the next day, at which he was so
ravished with joy that he enfranchised him for the good news.
Upon this subject of letters, I will add this more to what has been
already said, that it is a kind of writing wherein my friends think I can
do something; and I am willing to confess I should rather have chosen to
publish my whimsies that way than any other, had I had to whom to write;
but I wanted such a settled intercourse, as I once had, to attract me to
it, to raise my fancy, and to support me. For to traffic with the wind,
as some others have done, and to forge vain names to direct my letters
to, in a serious subject, I could never do it but in a dream, being a
sworn enemy to all manner of falsification. I should have been more
diligent and more confident had I had a judicious and indulgent friend
whom to address, than thus to expose myself to the various judgments of a
whole people, and I am deceived if I had not succeeded better. I have
naturally a humorous and familiar style; but it is a style of my own, not
proper for public business, but, like the language I speak, too compact,
irregular, abrupt, and singular; and as to letters of ceremony that have
no other substance than a fine contexture of courteous words, I am wholly
to seek. I have neither faculty nor relish for those tedious tenders of
service and affection; I believe little in them from others, and I should
not forgive myself should I say to others more than I myself believe.
‘Tis, doubtless, very remote from the present practice; for there never
was so abject and servile prostitution of offers: life, soul, devotion,
adoration, vassal, slave, and I cannot tell what, as now; all which
expressions are so commonly and so indifferently posted to and fro by
every one and to every one, that when they would profess a greater and
more respectful inclination upon more just occasions, they have not
wherewithal to express it. I mortally hate all air of flattery, which is
the cause that I naturally fall into a shy, rough, and crude way of
speaking, that, to such as do not know me, may seem a little to relish of
disdain. I honour those most to whom I show the least honour, and where
my soul moves with the greatest cheerfulness, I easily forget the
ceremonies of look and gesture, and offer myself faintly and bluntly to
them to whom I am the most devoted: methinks they should read it in my
heart, and that the expression of my words does but injure the love I
have conceived within. To welcome, take leave, give thanks, accost,
offer my service, and such verbal formalities as the ceremonious laws of
our modern civility enjoin, I know no man so stupidly unprovided of
language as myself; and I have never been employed in writing letters of
favour and recommendation, that he, in whose behalf it was written, did
not think my mediation cold and imperfect. The Italians are great
printers of letters; I do believe I have at least an hundred several
volumes of them; of all which those of Annibale Caro seem to me to be the
best. If all the paper I have scribbled to the ladies at the time when
my hand was really prompted by my passion, were now in being, there
might, peradventure, be found a page worthy to be communicated to our
young inamoratos, that are besotted with that fury. I always write my
letters post-haste--so precipitately, that though I write intolerably
ill, I rather choose to do it myself, than to employ another; for I can
find none able to follow me: and I never transcribe any. I have
accustomed the great ones who know me to endure my blots and dashes, and
upon paper without fold or margin. Those that cost me the most pains,
are the worst; when I once begin to draw it in by head and shoulders,
‘tis a sign that I am not there. I fall too without premeditation or
design; the first word begets the second, and so to the end of the
chapter. The letters of this age consist more in fine edges and prefaces
than in matter. Just as I had rather write two letters than close and
fold up one, and always assign that employment to some other, so, when
the real business of my letter is dispatched, I would with all my heart
transfer it to another hand to add those long harangues, offers, and
prayers, that we place at the bottom, and should be glad that some new
custom would discharge us of that trouble; as also of superscribing them
with a long legend of qualities and titles, which for fear of mistakes,
I have often not written at all, and especially to men of the long robe
and finance; there are so many new offices, such a dispensation and
ordering of titles of honour, that ‘tis hard to set them forth aright
yet, being so dearly bought, they are neither to be altered nor forgotten
without offence. I find it equally in bad taste to encumber the fronts
and inscriptions of the books we commit to the press with such.
CHAPTER XL
THAT THE RELISH FOR GOOD AND EVIL DEPENDS IN GREAT MEASURE UPON THE
OPINION WE HAVE OF THEM
Men (says an ancient Greek sentence)--[Manual of Epictetus, c. 10.]--
are tormented with the opinions they have of things and not by the things
themselves. It were a great victory obtained for the relief of our
miserable human condition, could this proposition be established for
certain and true throughout. For if evils have no admission into us but
by the judgment we ourselves make of them, it should seem that it is,
then, in our own power to despise them or to turn them to good. If
things surrender themselves to our mercy, why do we not convert and
accommodate them to our advantage? If what we call evil and torment is
neither evil nor torment of itself, but only that our fancy gives it that
quality, it is in us to change it, and it being in our own choice, if
there be no constraint upon us, we must certainly be very strange fools
to take arms for that side which is most offensive to us, and to give
sickness, want, and contempt a bitter and nauseous taste, if it be in our
power to give them a pleasant relish, and if, fortune simply providing
the matter, ‘tis for us to give it the form. Now, that what we call evil
is not so of itself, or at least to that degree that we make it, and that
it depends upon us to give it another taste and complexion (for all comes
to one), let us examine how that can be maintained.
If the original being of those things we fear had power to lodge itself
in us by its own authority, it would then lodge itself alike, and in like
manner, in all; for men are all of the same kind, and saving in greater
and less proportions, are all provided with the same utensils and
instruments to conceive and to judge; but the diversity of opinions we
have of those things clearly evidences that they only enter us by
composition; one person, peradventure, admits them in their true being,
but a thousand others give them a new and contrary being in them. We
hold death, poverty, and pain for our principal enemies; now, this death,
which some repute the most dreadful of all dreadful things, who does not
know that others call it the only secure harbour from the storms and
tempests of life, the sovereign good of nature, the sole support of
liberty, and the common and prompt remedy of all evils? And as the one
expect it with fear and trembling, the others support it with greater
ease than life. That one complains of its facility:
“Mors! utinam pavidos vitae subducere nolles.
Sed virtus to sola daret!”
[“O death! wouldst that thou might spare the coward, but that
valour alone should pay thee tribute.”--Lucan, iv. 580.]
Now, let us leave these boastful courages. Theodorus answered
Lysimachus, who threatened to kill him, “Thou wilt do a brave feat,” said
he, “to attain the force of a cantharides.” The majority of philosophers
are observed to have either purposely anticipated, or hastened and
assisted their own death. How many ordinary people do we see led to
execution, and that not to a simple death, but mixed with shame and
sometimes with grievous torments, appear with such assurance, whether
through firm courage or natural simplicity, that a man can discover no
change from their ordinary condition; settling their domestic affairs,
commending themselves to their friends, singing, preaching, and
addressing the people, nay, sometimes sallying into jests, and drinking
to their companions, quite as well as Socrates?
One that they were leading to the gallows told them they must not take
him through such a street, lest a merchant who lived there should arrest
him by the way for an old debt. Another told the hangman he must not
touch his neck for fear of making him laugh, he was so ticklish. Another
answered his confessor, who promised him he should that day sup with our
Lord, “Do you go then,” said he, “in my room [place]; for I for my part
keep fast to-day.” Another having called for drink, and the hangman
having drunk first, said he would not drink after him, for fear of
catching some evil disease. Everybody has heard the tale of the Picard,
to whom, being upon the ladder, they presented a common wench, telling
him (as our law does some times permit) that if he would marry her they
would save his life; he, having a while considered her and perceiving
that she halted: “Come, tie up, tie up,” said he, “she limps.” And they
tell another story of the same kind of a fellow in Denmark, who being
condemned to lose his head, and the like condition being proposed to him
upon the scaffold, refused it, by reason the girl they offered him had
hollow cheeks and too sharp a nose. A servant at Toulouse being accused
of heresy, for the sum of his belief referred himself to that of his
master, a young student, prisoner with him, choosing rather to die than
suffer himself to be persuaded that his master could err. We read that
of the inhabitants of Arras, when Louis XI. took that city, a great many
let themselves be hanged rather than they would say, “God save the King.”
And amongst that mean-souled race of men, the buffoons, there have been
some who would not leave their fooling at the very moment of death. One
that the hang man was turning off the ladder cried: “Launch the galley,”
an ordinary saying of his. Another, whom at the point of death his
friends had laid upon a bed of straw before the fire, the physician
asking him where his pain lay: “Betwixt the bench and the fire,” said he,
and the priest, to give him extreme unction, groping for his feet which
his pain had made him pull up to him: “You will find them,” said he, “at
the end of my legs.” To one who being present exhorted him to recommend
himself to God: “Why, who goes thither?” said he; and the other
replying: “It will presently be yourself, if it be His good pleasure.”
“Shall I be sure to be there by to-morrow night?” said he. “Do, but
recommend yourself to Him,” said the other, “and you will soon be there.”
“I were best then,” said he, “to carry my recommendations myself.”
In the kingdom of Narsingah to this day the wives of their priests are
buried alive with the bodies of their husbands; all other wives are burnt
at their husbands’ funerals, which they not only firmly but cheerfully
undergo. At the death of their king, his wives and concubines, his
favourites, all his officers, and domestic servants, who make up a whole
people, present themselves so gaily to the fire where his body is burnt,
that they seem to take it for a singular honour to accompany their master
in death. During our late wars of Milan, where there happened so many
takings and retakings of towns, the people, impatient of so many changes
of fortune, took such a resolution to die, that I have heard my father
say he there saw a list taken of five-and-twenty masters of families who
made themselves away in one week’s time: an incident somewhat resembling
that of the Xanthians, who being besieged by Brutus, fell--men, women,
and children--into such a furious appetite of dying, that nothing can be
done to evade death which they did not to avoid life; insomuch that
Brutus had much difficulty in saving a very small number.--[“Only fifty
were saved.”--Plutarch, Life of Brutus, c. 8.]
Every opinion is of force enough to cause itself to be espoused at the
expense of life. The first article of that valiant oath that Greece took
and observed in the Median war, was that every one should sooner exchange
life for death, than their own laws for those of Persia. What a world of
people do we see in the wars betwixt the Turks and the Greeks, rather
embrace a cruel death than uncircumcise themselves to admit of baptism?
An example of which no sort of religion is incapable.
The kings of Castile having banished the Jews out of their dominions,
John, King of Portugal, in consideration of eight crowns a head, sold
them a retreat into his for a certain limited time, upon condition that
the time fixed coming to expire they should begone, and he to furnish
them with shipping to transport them into Africa. The day comes, which
once lapsed they were given to understand that such as were afterward
found in the kingdom should remain slaves; vessels were very slenderly
provided; and those who embarked in them were rudely and villainously
used by the passengers, who, besides other indignities, kept them
cruising upon the sea, one while forwards and another backwards, till
they had spent all their provisions, and were constrained to buy of them
at so dear a rate and so long withal, that they set them not on shore
till they were all stripped to the very shirts. The news of this inhuman
usage being brought to those who remained behind, the greater part of
them resolved upon slavery and some made a show of changing religion.
Emmanuel, the successor of John, being come to the crown, first set them
at liberty, and afterwards altering his mind, ordered them to depart his
country, assigning three ports for their passage. He hoped, says Bishop
Osorius, no contemptible Latin historian of these later times, that the
favour of the liberty he had given them having failed of converting them
to Christianity, yet the difficulty of committing themselves to the mercy
of the mariners and of abandoning a country they were now habituated to
and were grown very rich in, to go and expose themselves in strange and
unknown regions, would certainly do it. But finding himself deceived in
his expectation, and that they were all resolved upon the voyage, he cut
off two of the three ports he had promised them, to the end that the
length and incommodity of the passage might reduce some, or that he might
have opportunity, by crowding them all into one place, the more
conveniently to execute what he had designed, which was to force all the
children under fourteen years of age from the arms of their fathers and
mothers, to transport them from their sight and conversation, into a
place where they might be instructed and brought up in our religion. He
says that this produced a most horrid spectacle the natural affection
betwixt the parents and their children, and moreover their zeal to their
ancient belief, contending against this violent decree, fathers and
mothers were commonly seen making themselves away, and by a yet much more
rigorous example, precipitating out of love and compassion their young
children into wells and pits, to avoid the severity of this law. As to
the remainder of them, the time that had been prefixed being expired,
for want of means to transport them they again returned into slavery.
Some also turned Christians, upon whose faith, as also that of their
posterity, even to this day, which is a hundred years since, few
Portuguese can yet rely; though custom and length of time are much more
powerful counsellors in such changes than all other constraints whatever.
In the town of Castelnaudari, fifty heretic Albigeois at one time
suffered themselves to be burned alive in one fire rather than they would
renounce their opinions.
“Quoties non modo ductores nostri, sed universi etiam exercitus,
ad non dubiam mortem concurrerunt?”
[“How often have not only our leaders, but whole armies, run to a
certain and manifest death.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 37.]
I have seen an intimate friend of mine run headlong upon death with a
real affection, and that was rooted in his heart by divers plausible
arguments which he would never permit me to dispossess him of, and upon
the first honourable occasion that offered itself to him, precipitate
himself into it, without any manner of visible reason, with an obstinate
and ardent desire of dying. We have several examples in our own times of
persons, even young children, who for fear of some little inconvenience
have despatched themselves. And what shall we not fear, says one of the
ancients--[Seneca, Ep., 70.]--to this purpose, if we dread that which
cowardice itself has chosen for its refuge?
Should I here produce a long catalogue of those, of all sexes and
conditions and sects, even in the most happy ages, who have either with
great constancy looked death in the face, or voluntarily sought it, and
sought it not only to avoid the evils of this life, but some purely to
avoid the satiety of living, and others for the hope of a better
condition elsewhere, I should never have done. Nay, the number is so
infinite that in truth I should have a better bargain on’t to reckon up
those who have feared it. This one therefore shall serve for all:
Pyrrho the philosopher being one day in a boat in a very great tempest,
shewed to those he saw the most affrighted about him, and encouraged
them, by the example of a hog that was there, nothing at all concerned at
the storm. Shall we then dare to say that this advantage of reason, of
which we so much boast, and upon the account of which we think ourselves
masters and emperors over the rest of all creation, was given us for a
torment? To what end serves the knowledge of things if it renders us
more unmanly? if we thereby lose the tranquillity and repose we should
enjoy without it? and if it put us into a worse condition than Pyrrho’s
hog? Shall we employ the understanding that was conferred upon us for
our greatest good to our own ruin; setting ourselves against the design
of nature and the universal order of things, which intend that every one
should make use of the faculties, members, and means he has to his own
best advantage?
But it may, peradventure, be objected against me: Your rule is true
enough as to what concerns death; but what will you say of indigence?
What will you, moreover, say of pain, which Aristippus, Hieronimus, and
most of the sages have reputed the worst of evils; and those who have
denied it by word of mouth have, however, confessed it in effect?
Posidonius being extremely tormented with a sharp and painful disease,
Pompeius came to visit him, excusing himself that he had taken so
unseasonable a time to come to hear him discourse of philosophy.
“The gods forbid,” said Posidonius to him, “that pain should ever have
the power to hinder me from talking,” and thereupon fell immediately upon
a discourse of the contempt of pain: but, in the meantime, his own
infirmity was playing his part, and plagued him to purpose; to which he
cried out, “Thou mayest work thy will, pain, and torment me with all the
power thou hast, but thou shalt never make me say that thou art an evil.”
This story that they make such a clutter withal, what has it to do,
I fain would know, with the contempt of pain? He only fights it with
words, and in the meantime, if the shootings and dolours he felt did not
move him, why did he interrupt his discourse? Why did he fancy he did so
great a thing in forbearing to confess it an evil? All does not here
consist in the imagination; our fancies may work upon other things: but
here is the certain science that is playing its part, of which our senses
themselves are judges:
“Qui nisi sunt veri, ratio quoque falsa sit omnis.”
[“Which, if they be not true, all reasoning may also be false.
--“Lucretius, iv. 486.]
Shall we persuade our skins that the jerks of a whip agreeably tickle us,
or our taste that a potion of aloes is vin de Graves? Pyrrho’s hog is
here in the same predicament with us; he is not afraid of death, ‘tis
true, but if you beat him he will cry out to some purpose. Shall we
force the general law of nature, which in every living creature under
heaven is seen to tremble under pain? The very trees seem to groan under
the blows they receive. Death is only felt by reason, forasmuch as it is
the motion of an instant;
“Aut fuit, aut veniet; nihil est praesentis in illa.”
[“Death has been, or will come: there is nothing of the present in
it.”--Estienne de la Boetie, Satires.]
“Morsque minus poenae, quam mora mortis, habet;”
[“The delay of death is more painful than death itself.”
--Ovid, Ep. Ariadne to Theseus, v. 42.]
a thousand beasts, a thousand men, are sooner dead than threatened. That
also which we principally pretend to fear in death is pain, its ordinary
forerunner: yet, if we may believe a holy father:
“Malam mortem non facit, nisi quod sequitur mortem.”
[“That which follows death makes death bad.”
--St. Augustin, De Civit. Dei, i. ii.]
And I should yet say, more probably, that neither that which goes before
nor that which follows after is at all of the appurtenances of death.
We excuse ourselves falsely: and I find by experience that it is rather
the impatience of the imagination of death that makes us impatient of
pain, and that we find it doubly grievous as it threatens us with death.
But reason accusing our cowardice for fearing a thing so sudden, so
inevitable, and so insensible, we take the other as the more excusable
pretence. All ills that carry no other danger along with them but simply
the evils themselves, we treat as things of no danger: the toothache or
the gout, painful as they are, yet being not reputed mortal, who reckons
them in the catalogue of diseases?
But let us presuppose that in death we principally regard the pain; as
also there is nothing to be feared in poverty but the miseries it brings
along with it of thirst, hunger, cold, heat, watching, and the other
inconveniences it makes us suffer, still we have nothing to do with
anything but pain. I will grant, and very willingly, that it is the
worst incident of our being (for I am the man upon earth who the most
hates and avoids it, considering that hitherto, I thank God, I have had
so little traffic with it), but still it is in us, if not to annihilate,
at least to lessen it by patience; and though the body and the reason
should mutiny, to maintain the soul, nevertheless, in good condition.
Were it not so, who had ever given reputation to virtue; valour, force,
magnanimity, and resolution? where were their parts to be played if
there were no pain to be defied?
“Avida est periculi virtus.”
[“Courage is greedy of danger.”--Seneca, De Providentia, c. 4]
Were there no lying upon the hard ground, no enduring, armed at all
points, the meridional heats, no feeding upon the flesh of horses and
asses, no seeing a man’s self hacked and hewed to pieces, no suffering a
bullet to be pulled out from amongst the shattered bones, no sewing up,
cauterising and searching of wounds, by what means were the advantage we
covet to have over the vulgar to be acquired? ‘Tis far from flying evil
and pain, what the sages say, that of actions equally good, a man should
most covet to perform that wherein there is greater labour and pain.
“Non est enim hilaritate, nec lascivia, nec risu, aut joco
comite levitatis, sed saepe etiam tristes firmitate et
constantia sunt beati.”
[“For men are not only happy by mirth and wantonness, by laughter
and jesting, the companion of levity, but ofttimes the serious sort
reap felicity from their firmness and constancy.”
--Cicero, De Finib. ii. 10.]
And for this reason it has ever been impossible to persuade our
forefathers but that the victories obtained by dint of force and the
hazard of war were not more honourable than those performed in great
security by stratagem or practice:
“Laetius est, quoties magno sibi constat honestum.”
[“A good deed is all the more a satisfaction by how much the more
it has cost us”--Lucan, ix. 404.]
Besides, this ought to be our comfort, that naturally, if the pain be
violent, ‘tis but short; and if long, nothing violent:
“Si gravis, brevis;
Si longus, levis.”
Thou wilt not feel it long if thou feelest it too much; it will either
put an end to itself or to thee; it comes to the same thing; if thou
canst not support it, it will export thee:
[“Remember that the greatest pains are terminated by death; that
slighter pains have long intermissions of repose, and that we are
masters of the more moderate sort: so that, if they be tolerable,
we bear them; if not, we can go out of life, as from a theatre, when
it does not please us”--Cicero, De Finib. i. 15.]
That which makes us suffer pain with so much impatience is the not being
accustomed to repose our chiefest contentment in the soul; that we do not
enough rely upon her who is the sole and sovereign mistress of our
condition. The body, saving in the greater or less proportion, has but
one and the same bent and bias; whereas the soul is variable into all
sorts of forms; and subject to herself and to her own empire, all things
whatsoever, both the senses of the body and all other accidents: and
therefore it is that we ought to study her, to inquire into her, and to
rouse up all her powerful faculties. There is neither reason, force, nor
prescription that can anything prevail against her inclination and
choice. Of so many thousands of biases that she has at her disposal, let
us give her one proper to our repose and conversation, and then we shall
not only be sheltered and secured from all manner of injury and offence,
but moreover gratified and obliged, if she will, with evils and offences.
She makes her profit indifferently of all things; error, dreams, serve
her to good use, as loyal matter to lodge us in safety and contentment.
‘Tis plain enough to be seen that ‘tis the sharpness of our mind that
gives the edge to our pains and pleasures: beasts that have no such
thing, leave to their bodies their own free and natural sentiments, and
consequently in every kind very near the same, as appears by the
resembling application of their motions. If we would not disturb in our
members the jurisdiction that appertains to them in this, ‘tis to be
believed it would be the better for us, and that nature has given them a
just and moderate temper both to pleasure and pain; neither can it fail
of being just, being equal and common. But seeing we have enfranchised
ourselves from her rules to give ourselves up to the rambling liberty of
our own fancies, let us at least help to incline them to the most
agreeable side. Plato fears our too vehemently engaging ourselves with
pain and pleasure, forasmuch as these too much knit and ally the soul to
the body; whereas I rather, quite contrary, by reason it too much
separates and disunites them. As an enemy is made more fierce by our
flight, so pain grows proud to see us truckle under her. She will
surrender upon much better terms to them who make head against her: a man
must oppose and stoutly set himself against her. In retiring and giving
ground, we invite and pull upon ourselves the ruin that threatens us. As
the body is more firm in an encounter, the more stiffly and obstinately
it applies itself to it, so is it with the soul.
But let us come to examples, which are the proper game of folks of such
feeble force as myself; where we shall find that it is with pain as with
stones, that receive a brighter or a duller lustre according to the foil
they are set in, and that it has no more room in us than we are pleased
to allow it:
“Tantum doluerunt, quantum doloribus se inseruerunt.”
[“They suffered so much the more, by how much more they gave way to
suffering.”--St. Augustin, De Civit. Dei, i. 10.]
We are more sensible of one little touch of a surgeon’s lancet than of
twenty wounds with a sword in the heat of fight. The pains of
childbearing, said by the physicians and by God himself to be great, and
which we pass through with so many ceremonies--there are whole nations
that make nothing of them. I set aside the Lacedaemonian women, but what
else do you find in the Swiss among our foot-soldiers, if not that, as
they trot after their husbands, you see them to-day carry the child at
their necks that they carried yesterday in their bellies? The
counterfeit Egyptians we have amongst us go themselves to wash theirs,
so soon as they come into the world, and bathe in the first river they
meet. Besides so many wenches as daily drop their children by stealth,
as they conceived them, that fair and noble wife of Sabinus, a patrician
of Rome, for another’s interest, endured alone, without help, without
crying out, or so much as a groan, the bearing of twins.--[Plutarch, On
Love, c. 34.]--A poor simple boy of Lacedaemon having stolen a fox (for
they more fear the shame of stupidity in stealing than we do the
punishment of the knavery), and having got it under his coat, rather
endured the tearing out of his bowels than he would discover his theft.
And another offering incense at a sacrifice, suffered himself to be
burned to the bone by a coal that fell into his sleeve, rather than
disturb the ceremony. And there have been a great number, for a sole
trial of virtue, following their institutions, who have at seven years
old endured to be whipped to death without changing their countenance.
And Cicero has seen them fight in parties, with fists, feet, and teeth,
till they have fainted and sunk down, rather than confess themselves
overcome:
[“Custom could never conquer nature; she is ever invincible; but we
have infected the mind with shadows, delights, negligence, sloth;
we have grown effeminate through opinions and corrupt morality.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 27.]
Every one knows the story of Scaevola, that having slipped into the
enemy’s camp to kill their general, and having missed his blow, to repair
his fault, by a more strange invention and to deliver his country, he
boldly confessed to Porsenna, who was the king he had a purpose to kill,
not only his design, but moreover added that there were then in the camp
a great number of Romans, his accomplices in the enterprise, as good men
as he; and to show what a one he himself was, having caused a pan of
burning coals to be brought, he saw and endured his arm to broil and
roast, till the king himself, conceiving horror at the sight, commanded
the pan to be taken away. What would you say of him that would not
vouchsafe to respite his reading in a book whilst he was under incision?
And of the other that persisted to mock and laugh in contempt of the
pains inflicted upon him; so that the provoked cruelty of the
executioners that had him in handling, and all the inventions of tortures
redoubled upon him, one after another, spent in vain, gave him the
bucklers? But he was a philosopher. But what! a gladiator of Caesar’s
endured, laughing all the while, his wounds to be searched, lanced, and
laid open:
[“What ordinary gladiator ever groaned? Which of them ever changed
countenance? Which of them not only stood or fell indecorously?
Which, when he had fallen and was commanded to receive the stroke of
the sword, contracted his neck.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 17.]
Let us bring in the women too. Who has not heard at Paris of her that
caused her face to be flayed only for the fresher complexion of a new
skin? There are who have drawn good and sound teeth to make their voices
more soft and sweet, or to place the other teeth in better order. How
many examples of the contempt of pain have we in that sex? What can they
not do, what do they fear to do, for never so little hope of an addition
to their beauty?
“Vallere queis cura est albos a stirpe capillos,
Et faciem, dempta pelle, referre novam.”
[“Who carefully pluck out their grey hairs by the roots, and renew
their faces by peeling off the old skin.”--Tibullus, i. 8, 45.]
I have seen some of them swallow sand, ashes, and do their utmost to
destroy their stomachs to get pale complexions. To make a fine Spanish
body, what racks will they not endure of girding and bracing, till they
have notches in their sides cut into the very quick, and sometimes to
death?
It is an ordinary thing with several nations at this day to wound
themselves in good earnest to gain credit to what they profess; of which
our king, relates notable examples of what he has seen in Poland and done
towards himself.--[Henry III.]--But besides this, which I know to have
been imitated by some in France, when I came from that famous assembly of
the Estates at Blois, I had a little before seen a maid in Picardy, who
to manifest the ardour of her promises, as also her constancy, give
herself, with a bodkin she wore in her hair, four or five good lusty
stabs in the arm, till the blood gushed out to some purpose. The Turks
give themselves great scars in honour of their mistresses, and to the end
they may the longer remain, they presently clap fire to the wound, where
they hold it an incredible time to stop the blood and form the cicatrice;
people that have been eyewitnesses of it have both written and sworn it
to me. But for ten aspers--[A Turkish coin worth about a penny]--there
are there every day fellows to be found that will give themselves a good
deep slash in the arms or thighs. I am willing, however, to have the
testimonies nearest to us when we have most need of them; for Christendom
furnishes us with enough. After the example of our blessed Guide there
have been many who have crucified themselves. We learn by testimony very
worthy of belief, that King St. Louis wore a hair-shirt till in his old
age his confessor gave him a dispensation to leave it off; and that every
Friday he caused his shoulders to be drubbed by his priest with five
small chains of iron which were always carried about amongst his night
accoutrements for that purpose.
William, our last Duke of Guienne, the father of that Eleanor who
transmitted that duchy to the houses of France and England, continually
for the last ten or twelve years of his life wore a suit of armour under
a religious habit by way of penance. Foulke, Count of Anjou, went as far
as Jerusalem, there to cause himself to be whipped by two of his
servants, with a rope about his neck, before the sepulchre of our Lord.
But do we not, moreover, every Good Friday, in various places, see great
numbers of men and women beat and whip themselves till they lacerate and
cut the flesh to the very bones? I have often seen it, and ‘tis without
any enchantment; and it was said there were some amongst them (for they
go disguised) who for money undertook by this means to save harmless the
religion of others, by a contempt of pain, so much the greater, as the
incentives of devotion are more effectual than those of avarice.
Q. Maximus buried his son when he was a consul, and M. Cato his when
praetor elect, and L. Paulus both his, within a few days one after
another, with such a countenance as expressed no manner of grief. I said
once merrily of a certain person, that he had disappointed the divine
justice; for the violent death of three grown-up children of his being
one day sent him, for a severe scourge, as it is to be supposed, he was
so far from being afflicted at the accident, that he rather took it for a
particular grace and favour of heaven. I do not follow these monstrous
humours, though I lost two or three at nurse, if not without grief, at
least without repining, and yet there is hardly any accident that pierces
nearer to the quick. I see a great many other occasions of sorrow, that
should they happen to me I should hardly feel; and have despised some,
when they have befallen me, to which the world has given so terrible a
figure that I should blush to boast of my constancy:
“Ex quo intelligitur, non in natura, sed in opinione,
esse aegritudinem.”
[“By which one may understand that grief is not in nature, but in
opinion.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iii. 28.]
Opinion is a powerful party, bold, and without measure. Who ever so
greedily hunted after security and repose as Alexander and Caesar did
after disturbance and difficulties? Teres, the father of Sitalces, was
wont to say that “when he had no wars, he fancied there was no difference
betwixt him and his groom.” Cato the consul, to secure some cities of
Spain from revolt, only interdicting the inhabitants from wearing arms, a
great many killed themselves:
“Ferox gens, nullam vitam rati sine armis esse.”
[“A fierce people, who thought there was no life without war.”
--Livy, xxxiv. 17.]
How many do we know who have forsaken the calm and sweetness of a quiet
life at home amongst their acquaintance, to seek out the horror of
unhabitable deserts; and having precipitated themselves into so abject a
condition as to become the scorn and contempt of the world, have hugged
themselves with the conceit, even to affectation. Cardinal Borromeo, who
died lately at Milan, amidst all the jollity that the air of Italy, his
youth, birth, and great riches, invited him to, kept himself in so
austere a way of living, that the same robe he wore in summer served him
for winter too; he had only straw for his bed, and his hours of leisure
from affairs he continually spent in study upon his knees, having a
little bread and a glass of water set by his book, which was all the
provision of his repast, and all the time he spent in eating.
I know some who consentingly have acquired both profit and advancement
from cuckoldom, of which the bare name only affrights so many people.
If the sight be not the most necessary of all our senses, ‘tis at least
the most pleasant; but the most pleasant and most useful of all our
members seem to be those of generation; and yet a great many have
conceived a mortal hatred against them only for this, that they were too
pleasant, and have deprived themselves of them only for their value:
as much thought he of his eyes that put them out. The generality and
more solid sort of men look upon abundance of children as a great
blessing; I, and some others, think it as great a benefit to be without
them. And when you ask Thales why he does not marry, he tells you,
because he has no mind to leave any posterity behind him.
That our opinion gives the value to things is very manifest in the great
number of those which we do, not so much prizing them, as ourselves, and
never considering either their virtues or their use, but only how dear
they cost us, as though that were a part of their substance; and we only
repute for value in them, not what they bring to us, but what we add to
them. By which I understand that we are great economisers of our
expense: as it weighs, it serves for so much as it weighs. Our opinion
will never suffer it to want of its value: the price gives value to the
diamond; difficulty to virtue; suffering to devotion; and griping to
physic. A certain person, to be poor, threw his crowns into the same sea
to which so many come, in all parts of the world, to fish for riches.
Epicurus says that to be rich is no relief, but only an alteration, of
affairs. In truth, it is not want, but rather abundance, that creates
avarice. I will deliver my own experience concerning this affair.
I have since my emergence from childhood lived in three sorts of
conditions. The first, which continued for some twenty years, I passed
over without any other means but what were casual and depending upon the
allowance and assistance of others, without stint, but without certain
revenue. I then spent my money so much the more cheerfully, and with so
much the less care how it went, as it wholly depended upon my
overconfidence of fortune. I never lived more at my ease; I never had
the repulse of finding the purse of any of my friends shut against me,
having enjoined myself this necessity above all other necessities
whatever, by no means to fail of payment at the appointed time, which
also they have a thousand times respited, seeing how careful I was to
satisfy them; so that I practised at once a thrifty, and withal a kind of
alluring, honesty. I naturally feel a kind of pleasure in paying, as if
I eased my shoulders of a troublesome weight and freed myself from an
image of slavery; as also that I find a ravishing kind of satisfaction in
pleasing another and doing a just action. I except payments where the
trouble of bargaining and reckoning is required; and in such cases; where
I can meet with nobody to ease me of that charge, I delay them, how
scandalously and injuriously soever, all I possibly can, for fear of the
wranglings for which both my humour and way of speaking are so totally
improper and unfit. There is nothing I hate so much as driving a
bargain; ‘tis a mere traffic of cozenage and impudence, where, after an
hour’s cheapening and hesitating, both parties abandon their word and
oath for five sols’ abatement. Yet I always borrowed at great
disadvantage; for, wanting the confidence to speak to the person myself,
I committed my request to the persuasion of a letter, which usually is no
very successful advocate, and is of very great advantage to him who has a
mind to deny. I, in those days, more jocundly and freely referred the
conduct of my affairs to the stars, than I have since done to my own
providence and judgment. Most good managers look upon it as a horrible
thing to live always thus in uncertainty, and do not consider, in the
first place, that the greatest part of the world live so: how many worthy
men have wholly abandoned their own certainties, and yet daily do it, to
the winds, to trust to the inconstant favour of princes and of fortune?
Caesar ran above a million of gold, more than he was worth, in debt to
become Caesar; and how many merchants have begun their traffic by the
sale of their farms, which they sent into the Indies,
“Tot per impotentia freta.”
[“Through so many ungovernable seas.”--Catullus, iv. 18.]
In so great a siccity of devotion as we see in these days, we have a
thousand and a thousand colleges that pass it over commodiously enough,
expecting every day their dinner from the liberality of Heaven.
Secondly, they do not take notice that this certitude upon which they so
much rely is not much less uncertain and hazardous than hazard itself.
I see misery as near beyond two thousand crowns a year as if it stood
close by me; for besides that it is in the power of chance to make a
hundred breaches to poverty through the greatest strength of our riches
--there being very often no mean betwixt the highest and the lowest
fortune:
“Fortuna vitrea est: turn, quum splendet, frangitur,”
[“Fortune is glass: in its greatest brightness it breaks.”
--Ex Mim. P. Syrus.]
and to turn all our barricadoes and bulwarks topsy-turvy, I find that, by
divers causes, indigence is as frequently seen to inhabit with those who
have estates as with those that have none; and that, peradventure, it is
then far less grievous when alone than when accompanied with riches.
These flow more from good management than from revenue;
“Faber est suae quisque fortunae”
[“Every one is the maker of his own fortune.”
--Sallust, De Repub. Ord., i. I.]
and an uneasy, necessitous, busy, rich man seems to me more miserable
than he that is simply poor.
“In divitiis mopes, quod genus egestatis gravissimum est.”
[“Poor in the midst of riches, which is the sorest kind of poverty.”
--Seneca, Ep., 74.]
The greatest and most wealthy princes are by poverty and want driven to
the most extreme necessity; for can there be any more extreme than to
become tyrants and unjust usurpers of their subjects’ goods and estates?
My second condition of life was to have money of my own, wherein I so
ordered the matter that I had soon laid up a very notable sum out of a
mean fortune, considering with myself that that only was to be reputed
having which a man reserves from his ordinary expense, and that a man
cannot absolutely rely upon revenue he hopes to receive, how clear soever
the hope may be. For what, said I, if I should be surprised by such or
such an accident? And after such-like vain and vicious imaginations,
would very learnedly, by this hoarding of money, provide against all
inconveniences; and could, moreover, answer such as objected to me that
the number of these was too infinite, that if I could not lay up for all,
I could, however, do it at least for some and for many. Yet was not this
done without a great deal of solicitude and anxiety of mind; I kept it
very close, and though I dare talk so boldly of myself, never spoke of my
money, but falsely, as others do, who being rich, pretend to be poor, and
being poor, pretend to be rich, dispensing their consciences from ever
telling sincerely what they have: a ridiculous and shameful prudence.
Was I going a journey? Methought I was never enough provided: and the
more I loaded myself with money, the more also was I loaded with fear,
one while of the danger of the roads, another of the fidelity of him who
had the charge of my baggage, of whom, as some others that I know, I was
never sufficiently secure if I had him not always in my eye. If I
chanced to leave my cash-box behind me, O, what strange suspicions and
anxiety of mind did I enter into, and, which was worse, without daring to
acquaint anybody with it. My mind was eternally taken up with such
things as these, so that, all things considered, there is more trouble in
keeping money than in getting it. And if I did not altogether so much as
I say, or was not really so scandalously solicitous of my money as I have
made myself out to be, yet it cost me something at least to restrain
myself from being so. I reaped little or no advantage by what I had, and
my expenses seemed nothing less to me for having the more to spend; for,
as Bion said, the hairy men are as angry as the bald to be pulled; and
after you are once accustomed to it and have once set your heart upon
your heap, it is no more at your service; you cannot find in your heart
to break it: ‘tis a building that you will fancy must of necessity all
tumble down to ruin if you stir but the least pebble; necessity must
first take you by the throat before you can prevail upon yourself to
touch it; and I would sooner have pawned anything I had, or sold a horse,
and with much less constraint upon myself, than have made the least
breach in that beloved purse I had so carefully laid by. But the danger
was that a man cannot easily prescribe certain limits to this desire
(they are hard to find in things that a man conceives to be good), and to
stint this good husbandry so that it may not degenerate into avarice: men
still are intent upon adding to the heap and increasing the stock from
sum to sum, till at last they vilely deprive themselves of the enjoyment
of their own proper goods, and throw all into reserve, without making any
use of them at all. According to this rule, they are the richest people
in the world who are set to guard the walls and gates of a wealthy city.
All moneyed men I conclude to be covetous. Plato places corporal or
human goods in this order: health, beauty, strength, riches; and riches,
says he, are not blind, but very clear-sighted, when illuminated by
prudence. Dionysius the son did a very handsome act upon this subject;
he was informed that one of the Syracusans had hid a treasure in the
earth, and thereupon sent to the man to bring it to him, which he
accordingly did, privately reserving a small part of it only to himself,
with which he went to another city, where being cured of his appetite of
hoarding, he began to live at a more liberal rate; which Dionysius
hearing, caused the rest of his treasure to be restored to him, saying,
that since he had learned to use it, he very willingly returned it back
to him.
I continued some years in this hoarding humour, when I know not what good
demon fortunately put me out of it, as he did the Syracusan, and made me
throw abroad all my reserve at random, the pleasure of a certain journey
I took at very great expense having made me spurn this fond love of money
underfoot; by which means I am now fallen into a third way of living (I
speak what I think of it), doubtless much more pleasant and regular,
which is, that I live at the height of my revenue; sometimes the one,
sometimes the other may perhaps exceed, but ‘tis very little and but
rarely that they differ. I live from hand to mouth, and content myself
in having sufficient for my present and ordinary expense; for as to
extraordinary occasions, all the laying up in the world would never
suffice. And ‘tis the greatest folly imaginable to expect that fortune
should ever sufficiently arm us against herself; ‘tis with our own arms
that we are to fight her; accidental ones will betray us in the pinch of
the business. If I lay up, ‘tis for some near and contemplated purpose;
not to purchase lands, of which I have no need, but to purchase pleasure:
“Non esse cupidum, pecunia est; non esse emacem, vertigal est.”
[“Not to be covetous, is money; not to be acquisitive, is revenue.”
--Cicero, Paradox., vi. 3.]
I neither am in any great apprehension of wanting, nor in desire of any
more:
“Divinarum fructus est in copia; copiam declarat satietas.”
[“The fruit of riches is in abundance; satiety declares abundance.”
--Idem, ibid., vi. 2.]
And I am very well pleased that this reformation in me has fallen out in
an age naturally inclined to avarice, and that I see myself cleared of a
folly so common to old men, and the most ridiculous of all human follies.
Feraulez, a man that had run through both fortunes, and found that the
increase of substance was no increase of appetite either to eating or
drinking, sleeping or the enjoyment of his wife, and who on the other
side felt the care of his economics lie heavy upon his shoulders, as it
does on mine, was resolved to please a poor young man, his faithful
friend, who panted after riches, and made him a gift of all his, which
were excessively great, and, moreover, of all he was in the daily way of
getting by the liberality of Cyrus, his good master, and by the war;
conditionally that he should take care handsomely to maintain and
plentifully to entertain him as his guest and friend; which being
accordingly done, they afterwards lived very happily together, both of
them equally content with the change of their condition. ‘Tis an example
that I could imitate with all my heart; and I very much approve the
fortune of the aged prelate whom I see to have so absolutely stripped
himself of his purse, his revenue, and care of his expense, committing
them one while to one trusty servant, and another while to another, that
he has spun out a long succession of years, as ignorant, by this means,
of his domestic affairs as a mere stranger.
The confidence in another man’s virtue is no light evidence of a man’s
own, and God willingly favours such a confidence. As to what concerns
him of whom I am speaking, I see nowhere a better governed house, more
nobly and constantly maintained than his. Happy to have regulated his
affairs to so just a proportion that his estate is sufficient to do it
without his care or trouble, and without any hindrance, either in the
spending or laying it up, to his other more quiet employments, and more
suitable both to his place and liking.
Plenty, then, and indigence depend upon the opinion every one has of
them; and riches no more than glory or health have other beauty or
pleasure than he lends them by whom they are possessed.
Every one is well or ill at ease, according as he so finds himself; not
he whom the world believes, but he who believes himself to be so, is
content; and in this alone belief gives itself being and reality.
Fortune does us neither good nor hurt; she only presents us the matter
and the seed, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies
as she best pleases; the sole cause and sovereign mistress of her own
happy or unhappy condition. All external accessions receive taste and
colour from the internal constitution, as clothes warm us, not with their
heat, but our own, which they are fit to cover and nourish; he who would
shield therewith a cold body, would do the same service for the cold, for
so snow and ice are preserved. And, certes, after the same manner that
study is a torment to an idle man, abstinence from wine to a drunkard,
frugality to the spendthrift, and exercise to a lazy, tender-bred fellow,
so it is of all the rest. The things are not so painful and difficult of
themselves, but our weakness or cowardice makes them so. To judge of
great, and high matters requires a suitable soul; otherwise we attribute
the vice to them which is really our own. A straight oar seems crooked
in the water it does not only import that we see the thing, but how and
after what manner we see it.
After all this, why, amongst so many discourses that by so many arguments
persuade men to despise death and to endure pain, can we not find out one
that helps us? And of so many sorts of imaginations as have so prevailed
upon others as to persuade them to do so, why does not every one apply
some one to himself, the most suitable to his own humour? If he cannot
digest a strong-working decoction to eradicate the evil, let him at least
take a lenitive to ease it:
[“It is an effeminate and flimsy opinion, nor more so in pain than
in pleasure, in which, while we are at our ease, we cannot bear
without a cry the sting of a bee. The whole business is to commend
thyself.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 22.]
As to the rest, a man does not transgress philosophy by permitting the
acrimony of pains and human frailty to prevail so much above measure; for
they constrain her to go back to her unanswerable replies: “If it be ill
to live in necessity, at least there is no necessity upon a man to live
in necessity”: “No man continues ill long but by his own fault.” He who
has neither the courage to die nor the heart to live, who will neither
resist nor fly, what can we do with him?
CHAPTER XLI
NOT TO COMMUNICATE A MAN’S HONOUR
Of all the follies of the world, that which is most universally received
is the solicitude of reputation and glory; which we are fond of to that
degree as to abandon riches, peace, life, and health, which are effectual
and substantial goods, to pursue this vain phantom and empty word, that
has neither body nor hold to be taken of it:
La fama, ch’invaghisce a un dolce suono
Gli superbi mortali, et par si bella,
E un eco, un sogno, anzi d’un sogno un’ombra,
Ch’ad ogni vento si dilegua a sgombra.”
[“Fame, which with alluring sound charms proud mortals, and appears
so fair, is but an echo, a dream, nay, the shadow of a dream, which
at every breath vanishes and dissolves.”
--Tasso, Gerus., xiv. 63.]
And of all the irrational humours of men, it should seem that the
philosophers themselves are among the last and the most reluctant to
disengage themselves from this: ‘tis the most restive and obstinate of
all:
“Quia etiam bene proficientes animos tentare non cessat.”
[“Because it ceases not to assail even well-directed minds”
--St. Augustin, De Civit. Dei, v. 14.]
There is not any one of which reason so clearly accuses the vanity; but
it is so deeply rooted in us that I dare not determine whether any one
ever clearly discharged himself from it or no. After you have said all
and believed all has been said to its prejudice, it produces so intestine
an inclination in opposition to your best arguments that you have little
power to resist it; for, as Cicero says, even those who most controvert
it, would yet that the books they write about it should visit the light
under their own names, and seek to derive glory from seeming to despise
it. All other things are communicable and fall into commerce: we lend
our goods and stake our lives for the necessity and service of our
friends; but to communicate a man’s honour, and to robe another with a
man’s own glory, is very rarely seen.
And yet we have some examples of that kind. Catulus Luctatius in the
Cimbrian war, having done all that in him lay to make his flying soldiers
face about upon the enemy, ran himself at last away with the rest, and
counterfeited the coward, to the end his men might rather seem to follow
their captain than to fly from the enemy; which was to abandon his own
reputation in order to cover the shame of others. When Charles V. came
into Provence in the year 1537, ‘tis said that Antonio de Leva, seeing
the emperor positively resolved upon this expedition, and believing it
would redound very much to his honour, did, nevertheless, very stiffly
oppose it in the council, to the end that the entire glory of that
resolution should be attributed to his master, and that it might be said
his own wisdom and foresight had been such as that, contrary to the
opinion of all, he had brought about so great an enterprise; which was to
do him honour at his own expense. The Thracian ambassadors coming to
comfort Archileonida, the mother of Brasidas, upon the death of her son,
and commending him to that height as to say he had not left his like
behind him, she rejected this private and particular commendation to
attribute it to the public: “Tell me not that,” said she; “I know the
city of Sparta has many citizens both greater and of greater worth than
he.” In the battle of Crecy, the Prince of Wales, being then very
young, had the vanguard committed to him: the main stress of the battle
happened to be in that place, which made the lords who were with him,
finding themselves overmatched, send to King Edward to advance to their
relief. He inquired of the condition his son was in, and being answered
that he was alive and on horseback: “I should, then, do him wrong,” said
the king, “now to go and deprive him of the honour of winning this battle
he has so long and so bravely sustained; what hazard soever he runs, that
shall be entirely his own”; and, accordingly, would neither go nor send,
knowing that if he went, it would be said all had been lost without his
succour, and that the honour of the victory would be wholly attributed to
him.
“Semper enim quod postremum adjectum est,
id rem totam videtur traxisse.”
[“For always that which is last added, seems to have accomplished
the whole affair.”--Livy, xxvii. 45.]
Many at Rome thought, and would usually say, that the greatest of
Scipio’s acts were in part due to Laelius, whose constant practice it was
still to advance and support Scipio’s grandeur and renown, without any
care of his own. And Theopompus, king of Sparta, to him who told him the
republic could not miscarry since he knew so well how to command, “Tis
rather,” answered he, “because the people know so well how to obey.”
As women succeeding to peerages had, notwithstanding their sex, the
privilege to attend and give their votes in the trials that appertained
to the jurisdiction of peers; so the ecclesiastical peers,
notwithstanding their profession, were obliged to attend our kings in
their wars, not only with their friends and servants, but in their own
persons. As the Bishop of Beauvais did, who being with Philip Augustus
at the battle of Bouvines, had a notable share in that action; but he did
not think it fit for him to participate in the fruit and glory of that
violent and bloody trade. He with his own hand reduced several of the
enemy that day to his mercy, whom he delivered to the first gentleman he
met either to kill or receive them to quarter, referring the whole
execution to this other hand; and he did this with regard to William,
Earl of Salisbury, whom he gave up to Messire Jehan de Nesle. With a
like subtlety of conscience to that I have just named, he would kill but
not wound, and for that reason ever fought with a mace. And a certain
person of my time, being reproached by the king that he had laid hands on
a priest, stiffly and positively denied he had done any such thing: the
meaning of which was, he had cudgelled and kicked him.
CHAPTER XLII
OF THE INEQUALITY AMOUNGST US.
Plutarch says somewhere that he does not find so great a difference
betwixt beast and beast as he does betwixt man and man; which he says in
reference to the internal qualities and perfections of the soul. And, in
truth, I find so vast a distance betwixt Epaminondas, according to my
judgment of him, and some that I know, who are yet men of good sense,
that I could willingly enhance upon Plutarch, and say that there is more
difference betwixt such and such a man than there is betwixt such a man
and such a beast:
[“Ah! how much may one man surpass another!”
--Terence, Eunuchus, ii. 2.]
and that there are as many and innumerable degrees of mind as there are
cubits betwixt this and heaven. But as touching the estimate of men,
‘tis strange that, ourselves excepted, no other creature is esteemed
beyond its proper qualities; we commend a horse for his strength and
sureness of foot,
“Volucrem
Sic laudamus equum, facili cui plurima palma
Fervet, et exsultat rauco victoria circo,”
[“So we praise the swift horse, for whose easy mastery many a hand
glows in applause, and victory exults in the hoarse circus.
--“Juvenal, viii. 57.]
and not for his rich caparison; a greyhound for his speed of heels, not
for his fine collar; a hawk for her wing, not for her gesses and bells.
Why, in like manner, do we not value a man for what is properly his own?
He has a great train, a beautiful palace, so much credit, so many
thousand pounds a year: all these are about him, but not in him. You
will not buy a pig in a poke: if you cheapen a horse, you will see him
stripped of his housing-cloths, you will see him naked and open to your
eye; or if he be clothed, as they anciently were wont to present them to
princes to sell, ‘tis only on the less important parts, that you may not
so much consider the beauty of his colour or the breadth of his crupper,
as principally to examine his legs, eyes, and feet, which are the members
of greatest use:
“Regibus hic mos est: ubi equos mercantur, opertos
Inspiciunt; ne, si facies, ut saepe, decora
Molli fulta pede est, emptorem inducat hiantem”
[“This is the custom of kings: when they buy horses, they have open
inspection, lest, if a fair head, as often chances, is supported by
a weak foot, it should tempt the gaping purchaser.”
--Horace, Sat., i. 2, 86.]
why, in giving your estimate of a man, do you prize him wrapped and
muffled up in clothes? He then discovers nothing to you but such parts
as are not in the least his own, and conceals those by which alone one
may rightly judge of his value. ‘Tis the price of the blade that you
inquire into, not of the scabbard: you would not peradventure bid a
farthing for him, if you saw him stripped. You are to judge him by
himself and not by what he wears; and, as one of the ancients very
pleasantly said: “Do you know why you repute him tall? You reckon withal
the height of his pattens.”--[Seneca, Ep. 76.]--The pedestal is no part
of the statue. Measure him without his stilts; let him lay aside his
revenues and his titles; let him present himself in his shirt. Then
examine if his body be sound and sprightly, active and disposed to
perform its functions. What soul has he? Is she beautiful, capable, and
happily provided of all her faculties? Is she rich of what is her own,
or of what she has borrowed? Has fortune no hand in the affair? Can
she, without winking, stand the lightning of swords? is she indifferent
whether her life expire by the mouth or through the throat? Is she
settled, even and content? This is what is to be examined, and by that
you are to judge of the vast differences betwixt man and man. Is he:
“Sapiens, sibique imperiosus,
Quern neque pauperies, neque mors, neque vincula terrent;
Responsare cupidinibus, contemnere honores
Fortis; et in seipso totus teres atque rotundus,
Externi ne quid valeat per laeve morari;
In quem manca ruit semper fortuna?”
[“The wise man, self-governed, whom neither poverty, nor death,
nor chains affright: who has the strength to resist his appetites
and to contemn honours: who is wholly self-contained: whom no
external objects affect: whom fortune assails in vain.”
--Horace, Sat., ii. 7,]
such a man is five hundred cubits above kingdoms and duchies; he is an
absolute monarch in and to himself:
“Sapiens, . . . Pol! ipse fingit fortunam sibi;”
[“The wise man is the master of his own fortune,”
--Plautus, Trin., ii. 2, 84.]
what remains for him to covet or desire?
“Nonne videmus,
Nil aliud sibi naturam latrare, nisi ut, quoi
Corpore sejunctus dolor absit, mente fruatur,
Jucundo sensu, cura semotu’ metuque?”
[“Do we not see that human nature asks no more for itself than
that, free from bodily pain, it may exercise its mind agreeably,
exempt from care and fear.”--Lucretius, ii. 16.]
Compare with such a one the common rabble of mankind, stupid and
mean-spirited, servile, instable, and continually floating with the
tempest of various passions, that tosses and tumbles them to and fro, and
all depending upon others, and you will find a greater distance than
betwixt heaven and earth; and yet the blindness of common usage is such
that we make little or no account of it; whereas if we consider a peasant
and a king, a nobleman and a vassal, a magistrate and a private man, a
rich man and a poor, there appears a vast disparity, though they differ
no more, as a man may say, than in their breeches.
In Thrace the king was distinguished from his people after a very
pleasant and especial manner; he had a religion by himself, a god all his
own, and which his subjects were not to presume to adore, which was
Mercury, whilst, on the other hand, he disdained to have anything to do
with theirs, Mars, Bacchus, and Diana. And yet they are no other than
pictures that make no essential dissimilitude; for as you see actors in a
play representing the person of a duke or an emperor upon the stage, and
immediately after return to their true and original condition of valets
and porters, so the emperor, whose pomp and lustre so dazzle you in
public:
“Scilicet grandes viridi cum luce smaragdi
Auto includuntur, teriturque thalassina vestis
Assidue, et Veneris sudorem exercita potat;”
[“Because he wears great emeralds richly set in gold, darting green
lustre; and the sea-blue silken robe, worn with pressure, and moist
with illicit love (and absorbs the sweat of Venus).”
--Lucretius, iv. 1123.]
do but peep behind the curtain, and you will see no thing more than an
ordinary man, and peradventure more contemptible than the meanest of his
subjects:
“Ille beatus introrsum est, istius bracteata felicitas est;”
[“The one is happy in himself; the happiness of the other is
counterfeit.”--Seneca, Ep., 115.]
cowardice, irresolution, ambition, spite, and envy agitate him as much as
another:
“Non enim gazae, neque consularis
Submovet lictor miseros tumultus
Mentis, et curas laqueata circum
Tecta volantes.”
[“For not treasures, nor the consular lictor, can remove the
miserable tumults of the mind, nor cares that fly about panelled
ceilings.”--Horace, Od., ii. 16, 9.]
Care and fear attack him even in the centre of his battalions:
“Re veraque metus hominum curaeque sequaces
Nec metuunt sonitus armorum, nee fera tela;
Audacterque inter reges, rerumque potentes
Versantur, neque fulgorem reverentur ab auro.”
[“And in truth the fears and haunting cares of men fear not the
clash of arms nor points of darts, and mingle boldly with great
kings and men in authority, nor respect the glitter of gold.”
--Lucretius, ii. 47.]
Do fevers, gout, and apoplexies spare him any more than one of us? When
old age hangs heavy upon his shoulders, can the yeomen of his guard ease
him of the burden? When he is astounded with the apprehension of death,
can the gentlemen of his bedchamber comfort and assure him? When
jealousy or any other caprice swims in his brain, can our compliments and
ceremonies restore him to his good-humour? The canopy embroidered with
pearl and gold he lies under has no virtue against a violent fit of the
colic:
“Nee calidae citius decedunt corpore febres
Textilibus si in picturis, ostroque rubenti
Jactaris, quam si plebeia in veste cubandum est.”
[“Nor do burning fevers quit you sooner if you are stretched on a
couch of rich tapestry and in a vest of purple dye, than if you be
in a coarse blanket.”--Idem, ii. 34.]
The flatterers of Alexander the Great possessed him that he was the son
of Jupiter; but being one day wounded, and observing the blood stream
from his wound: “What say you now, my masters,” said he, “is not this
blood of a crimson colour and purely human? This is not of the
complexion of that which Homer makes to issue from the wounded gods.”
The poet Hermodorus had written a poem in honour of Antigonus, wherein
he called him the son of the sun: “He who has the emptying of my
close-stool,” said Antigonus, “knows to the contrary.” He is but a man
at best, and if he be deformed or ill-qualified from his birth, the
empire of the universe cannot set him to rights:
“Puellae
Hunc rapiant; quidquid calcaverit hic, rosa fiat,”
[“Let girls carry him off; wherever he steps let there spring up a
rose!”--Persius, Sat., ii. 38.]
what of all that, if he be a fool? even pleasure and good fortune are
not relished without vigour and understanding:
“Haec perinde sunt, ut ilius animus; qui ea possidet
Qui uti scit, ei bona; illi, qui non uritur recte, mala.”
[“Things are, as is the mind of their possessor; who knows how to
use them, to him they are good; to him who abuses them, ill.”
--Terence, Heart., i. 3, 21.]
Whatever the benefits of fortune are, they yet require a palate to relish
them. ‘Tis fruition, and not possession, that renders us happy:
[“‘Tis not lands, or a heap of brass and gold, that has removed
fevers from the ailing body of the owner, or cares from his mind.
The possessor must be healthy, if he thinks to make good use of his
realised wealth. To him who is covetous or timorous his house and
estate are as a picture to a blind man, or a fomentation to a
gouty.”--Horace, Ep., i. 2, 47.]
He is a sot, his taste is palled and flat; he no more enjoys what he has
than one that has a cold relishes the flavour of canary, or than a horse
is sensible of his rich caparison. Plato is in the right when he tells
us that health, beauty, vigour, and riches, and all the other things
called goods, are equally evil to the unjust as good to the just, and the
evil on the contrary the same. And therefore where the body and the mind
are in disorder, to what use serve these external conveniences:
considering that the least prick with a pin, or the least passion of the
soul, is sufficient to deprive one of the pleasure of being sole monarch
of the world. At the first twitch of the gout it signifies much to be
called Sir and Your Majesty!
“Totus et argento conflatus, totus et auro;”
[“Wholly made up of silver and gold.”--Tibullus, i. 2, 70.]
does he not forget his palaces and girandeurs? If he be angry, can his
being a prince keep him from looking red and looking pale, and grinding
his teeth like a madman? Now, if he be a man of parts and of right
nature, royalty adds very little to his happiness;
“Si ventri bene, si lateri est, pedibusque tuffs, nil
Divitix poterunt regales addere majus;”
[“If it is well with thy belly, thy side and thy feet, regal wealth
will be able to add nothing.”--Horace, Ep., i. 12, 5.]
he discerns ‘tis nothing but counterfeit and gullery. Nay, perhaps he
would be of King Seleucus’ opinion, that he who knew the weight of a
sceptre would not stoop to pick it up, if he saw it lying before him, so
great and painful are the duties incumbent upon a good king.--[Plutarch,
If a Sage should Meddle with Affairs of Stale, c. 12.]--Assuredly it can
be no easy task to rule others, when we find it so hard a matter to
govern ourselves; and as to dominion, that seems so charming, the frailty
of human judgment and the difficulty of choice in things that are new and
doubtful considered, I am very much of opinion that it is far more easy
and pleasant to follow than to lead; and that it is a great settlement
and satisfaction of mind to have only one path to walk in, and to have
none to answer for but a man’s self;
“Ut satius multo jam sit parere quietum,
Quam regere imperio res velle.”
[“‘Tis much better quietly to obey than wish to rule.”
--Lucretius, V, 1126.]
To which we may add that saying of Cyrus, that no man was fit to rule but
he who in his own worth was of greater value than those he was to govern;
but King Hiero in Xenophon says further, that in the fruition even of
pleasure itself they are in a worse condition than private men; forasmuch
as the opportunities and facility they have of commanding those things at
will takes off from the delight that ordinary folks enjoy:
“Pinguis amor, nimiumque patens, in taedia nobis
Vertitur, et, stomacho dulcis ut esca, nocet.”
[“Love in excess and too palpable turns to weariness, and, like
sweetmeats to the stomach, is injurious.”--Ovid, Amoy., ii. 19, 25.]
Can we think that the singing boys of the choir take any great delight in
music? the satiety rather renders it troublesome and tedious to them.
Feasts, balls, masquerades and tiltings delight such as but rarely see,
and desire to see, them; but having been frequently at such
entertainments, the relish of them grows flat and insipid. Nor do women
so much delight those who make a common practice of the sport. He who
will not give himself leisure to be thirsty can never find the true
pleasure of drinking. Farces and tumbling tricks are pleasant to the
spectators, but a wearisome toil to those by whom they are performed.
And that this is so, we see that princes divert themselves sometimes in
disguising their quality, awhile to depose themselves, and to stoop to
the poor and ordinary way of living of the meanest of their people.
“Plerumque gratae divitibus vices
Mundaeque parvo sub lare pauperum
Coenae, sine aulaeis et ostro,
Soliicitam explicuere frontem.”
[“The rich are often pleased with variety; and the plain supper in a
poor cottage, without tapestry and purple, has relaxed the anxious
brow.”--Horace, Od., iii. 29, 13.]
Nothing is so distasteful and clogging as abundance. What appetite would
not be baffled to see three hundred women at its mercy, as the grand
signor has in his seraglio? And, of his ancestors what fruition or taste
of sport did he reserve to himself, who never went hawking without seven
thousand falconers? And besides all this, I fancy that this lustre of
grandeur brings with it no little disturbance and uneasiness upon the
enjoyment of the most tempting pleasures; the great are too conspicuous
and lie too open to every one’s view. Neither do I know to what end a
man should more require of them to conceal their errors, since what is
only reputed indiscretion in us, the people in them brand with the names
of tyranny and contempt of the laws, and, besides their proclivity to
vice, are apt to hold that it is a heightening of pleasure to them, to
insult over and to trample upon public observances. Plato, indeed, in
his Goygias, defines a tyrant to be one who in a city has licence to do
whatever his own will leads him to do; and by reason of this impunity,
the display and publication of their vices do ofttimes more mischief than
the vice itself. Every one fears to be pried into and overlooked; but
princes are so, even to their very gestures, looks and thoughts, the
people conceiving they have right and title to be judges of them besides
that the blemishes of the great naturally appear greater by reason of the
eminence and lustre of the place where they are seated, and that a mole
or a wart appears greater in them than a wide gash in others. And this
is the reason why the poets feign the amours of Jupiter to be performed
in the disguises of so many borrowed shapes, and that amongst the many
amorous practices they lay to his charge, there is only one, as I
remember, where he appears in his own majesty and grandeur.
But let us return to Hiero, who further complains of the inconveniences
he found in his royalty, in that he could not look abroad and travel the
world at liberty, being as it were a prisoner in the bounds and limits of
his own dominion, and that in all his actions he was evermore surrounded
with an importunate crowd. And in truth, to see our kings sit all alone
at table, environed with so many people prating about them, and so many
strangers staring upon them, as they always are, I have often been moved
rather to pity than to envy their condition. King Alfonso was wont to
say, that in this asses were in a better condition than kings, their
masters permitting them to feed at their own ease and pleasure, a favour
that kings cannot obtain of their servants. And it has never come into
my fancy that it could be of any great benefit to the life of a man of
sense to have twenty people prating about him when he is at stool; or
that the services of a man of ten thousand livres a year, or that has
taken Casale or defended Siena, should be either more commodious or more
acceptable to him, than those of a good groom of the chamber who
understands his place. The advantages of sovereignty are in a manner but
imaginary: every degree of fortune has in it some image of principality.
Caesar calls all the lords of France, having free franchise within their
own demesnes, roitelets or petty kings; and in truth, the name of sire
excepted, they go pretty far towards kingship; for do but look into the
provinces remote from court, as Brittany for example; take notice of the
train, the vassals, the officers, the employments, service, ceremony, and
state of a lord who lives retired from court in his own house, amongst
his own tenants and servants; and observe withal the flight of his
imagination; there is nothing more royal; he hears talk of his master
once a year, as of a king of Persia, without taking any further
recognition of him, than by some remote kindred his secretary keeps in
some register. And, to speak the truth, our laws are easy enough, so
easy that a gentleman of France scarce feels the weight of sovereignty
pinch his shoulders above twice in his life. Real and effectual
subjection only concerns such amongst us as voluntarily thrust their
necks under the yoke, and who design to get wealth and honours by such
services: for a man that loves his own fireside, and can govern his house
without falling by the ears with his neighbours or engaging in suits of
law, is as free as a Duke of Venice.
“Paucos servitus, plures servitutem tenent.”
[“Servitude enchains few, but many enchain themselves to
servitude.”--Seneca, Ep., 22.]
But that which Hiero is most concerned at is, that he finds himself
stripped of all friendship, deprived of all mutual society, wherein the
true and most perfect fruition of human life consists. For what
testimony of affection and goodwill can I extract from him that owes me,
whether he will or no, all that he is able to do? Can I form any
assurance of his real respect to me, from his humble way of speaking and
submissive behaviour, when these are ceremonies it is not in his choice
to deny? The honour we receive from those that fear us is not honour;
those respects are due to royalty and not to me:
“Maximum hoc regni bonum est
Quod facta domini cogitur populus sui
Quam ferre, tam laudare.”
[“‘Tis the greatest benefit of a kingdom that the people is forced
to commend, as well as to bear the acts of the ruler.”
--Seneca, Thyestes, ii. i, 30.]
Do I not see that the wicked and the good king, he that is hated and he
that is beloved, have the one as much reverence paid him as the other?
My predecessor was, and my successor shall be, served with the same
ceremony and state. If my subjects do me no harm, ‘tis no evidence of
any good affection; why should I look upon it as such, seeing it is not
in their power to do it if they would? No one follows me or obeys my
commands upon the account of any friendship, betwixt him and me; there
can be no contracting of friendship where there is so little relation and
correspondence: my own height has put me out of the familiarity of and
intelligence with men; there is too great disparity and disproportion
betwixt us. They follow me either upon the account of decency and
custom; or rather my fortune, than me, to increase their own. All they
say to me or do for me is but outward paint, appearance, their liberty
being on all parts restrained by the great power and authority I have
over them. I see nothing about me but what is dissembled and disguised.
The Emperor Julian being one day applauded by his courtiers for his exact
justice: “I should be proud of these praises,” said he, “did they come
from persons that durst condemn or disapprove the contrary, in case I
should do it.” All the real advantages of princes are common to them
with men of meaner condition (‘tis for the gods to mount winged horses
and feed upon ambrosia): they have no other sleep, nor other appetite
than we; the steel they arm themselves withal is of no better temper than
that we also use; their crowns neither defend them from the rain nor the
sun.
Diocletian, who wore a crown so fortunate and revered, resigned it to
retire to the felicity of a private life; and some time after the
necessity of public affairs requiring that he should reassume his charge,
he made answer to those who came to court him to it: “You would not
offer,” said he, “to persuade me to this, had you seen the fine order of
the trees I have planted in my orchard, and the fair melons I have sown
in my garden.”
In Anacharsis’ opinion, the happiest state of government would be where,
all other things being equal, precedence should be measured out by the
virtues, and repulses by the vices of men.
When King Pyrrhus prepared for his expedition into Italy, his wise
counsellor Cyneas, to make him sensible of the vanity of his ambition:
“Well, sir,” said he, “to what end do you make all this mighty
preparation?”--“To make myself master of Italy,” replied the king.
“And what after that is done?” said Cyneas. “I will pass over into Gaul
and Spain,” said the other. “And what then?”--“I will then go to subdue
Africa; and lastly, when I have brought the whole world to my subjection,
I will sit down and rest content at my own ease.”
“For God sake, sir,” replied Cyneas, “tell me what hinders that you may
not, if you please, be now in the condition you speak of? Why do you not
now at this instant settle yourself in the state you seem to aim at, and
spare all the labour and hazard you interpose?”
“Nimirum, quia non cognovit, qux esset habendi
Finis, et omnino quoad crescat vera voluptas.”
[“Forsooth because he does not know what should be the limit of
acquisition, and altogether how far real pleasure should increase.”
--Lucretius, v. 1431]
I will conclude with an old versicle, that I think very apt to the
purpose:
“Mores cuique sui fingunt fortunam.”
[“Every man frames his own fortune.”
--Cornelius Nepos, Life of Atticus]
CHAPTER XLIII
OF SUMPTUARY LAWS
The way by which our laws attempt to regulate idle and vain expenses in
meat and clothes, seems to be quite contrary to the end designed. The
true way would be to beget in men a contempt of silks and gold, as vain,
frivolous, and useless; whereas we augment to them the honours, and
enhance the value of such things, which, sure, is a very improper way to
create a disgust. For to enact that none but princes shall eat turbot,
shall wear velvet or gold lace, and interdict these things to the people,
what is it but to bring them into a greater esteem, and to set every one
more agog to eat and wear them? Let kings leave off these ensigns of
grandeur; they have others enough besides; those excesses are more
excusable in any other than a prince. We may learn by the example of
several nations better ways of exterior distinction of quality (which,
truly, I conceive to be very requisite in a state) enough, without
fostering to this purpose such corruption and manifest inconvenience.
‘Tis strange how suddenly and with how much ease custom in these
indifferent things establishes itself and becomes authority. We had
scarce worn cloth a year, in compliance with the court, for the mourning
of Henry II., but that silks were already grown into such contempt with
every one, that a man so clad was presently concluded a citizen: silks
were divided betwixt the physicians and surgeons, and though all other
people almost went in the same habit, there was, notwithstanding, in one
thing or other, sufficient distinction of the several conditions of men.
How suddenly do greasy chamois and linen doublets become the fashion in
our armies, whilst all neatness and richness of habit fall into contempt?
Let kings but lead the dance and begin to leave off this expense, and in
a month the business will be done throughout the kingdom, without edict
or ordinance; we shall all follow. It should be rather proclaimed, on
the contrary, that no one should wear scarlet or goldsmiths’ work but
courtesans and tumblers.
Zeleucus by the like invention reclaimed the corrupted manners of the
Locrians. His laws were, that no free woman should be allowed any more
than one maid to follow her, unless she was drunk: nor was to stir out of
the city by night, wear jewels of gold about her, or go in an embroidered
robe, unless she was a professed and public prostitute; that, bravos
excepted, no man was to wear a gold ring, nor be seen in one of those
effeminate robes woven in the city of Miletus. By which infamous
exceptions he discreetly diverted his citizens from superfluities and
pernicious pleasures, and it was a project of great utility to attract
then by honour and ambition to their duty and obedience.
Our kings can do what they please in such external reformations; their
own inclination stands in this case for a law:
“Quicquid principes faciunt, praecipere videntur.”
[“What princes themselves do, they seem to prescribe.”
--Quintil., Declam., 3.]
Whatever is done at court passes for a rule through the rest of France.
Let the courtiers fall out with these abominable breeches, that discover
so much of those parts should be concealed; these great bellied doublets,
that make us look like I know not what, and are so unfit to admit of
arms; these long effeminate locks of hair; this foolish custom of kissing
what we present to our equals, and our hands in saluting them, a ceremony
in former times only due to princes. Let them not permit that a
gentleman shall appear in place of respect without his sword, unbuttoned
and untrussed, as though he came from the house of office; and that,
contrary to the custom of our forefathers and the particular privilege of
the nobles of this kingdom, we stand a long time bare to them in what
place soever, and the same to a hundred others, so many tiercelets and
quartelets of kings we have got nowadays and other like vicious
innovations: they will see them all presently vanish and cried down.
These are, ‘tis true, but superficial errors; but they are of ill augury,
and enough to inform us that the whole fabric is crazy and tottering,
when we see the roughcast of our walls to cleave and split.
Plato in his Laws esteems nothing of more pestiferous consequence to his
city than to give young men the liberty of introducing any change in
their habits, gestures, dances, songs, and exercises, from one form to
another; shifting from this to that, hunting after novelties, and
applauding the inventors; by which means manners are corrupted and the
old institutions come to be nauseated and despised. In all things,
saving only in those that are evil, a change is to be feared; even the
change of seasons, winds, viands, and humours. And no laws are in their
true credit, but such to which God has given so long a continuance that
no one knows their beginning, or that there ever was any other.
CHAPTER XLIV
OF SLEEP
Reason directs that we should always go the same way, but not always at
the same pace. And, consequently, though a wise man ought not so much to
give the reins to human passions as to let him deviate from the right
path, he may, notwithstanding, without prejudice to his duty, leave it to
them to hasten or to slacken his speed, and not fix himself like a
motionless and insensible Colossus. Could virtue itself put on flesh and
blood, I believe the pulse would beat faster going on to assault than in
going to dinner: that is to say, there is a necessity she should heat and
be moved upon this account. I have taken notice, as of an extraordinary
thing, of some great men, who in the highest enterprises and most
important affairs have kept themselves in so settled and serene a calm,
as not at all to break their sleep. Alexander the Great, on the day
assigned for that furious battle betwixt him and Darius, slept so
profoundly and so long in the morning, that Parmenio was forced to enter
his chamber, and coming to his bedside, to call him several times by his
name, the time to go to fight compelling him so to do. The Emperor Otho,
having put on a resolution to kill himself that night, after having
settled his domestic affairs, divided his money amongst his servants, and
set a good edge upon a sword he had made choice of for the purpose, and
now staying only to be satisfied whether all his friends had retired in
safety, he fell into so sound a sleep that the gentlemen of his chamber
heard him snore. The death of this emperor has in it circumstances
paralleling that of the great Cato, and particularly this just related
for Cato being ready to despatch himself, whilst he only stayed his hand
in expectation of the return of a messenger he had sent to bring him news
whether the senators he had sent away were put out from the Port of
Utica, he fell into so sound a sleep, that they heard him snore in the
next room; and the man, whom he had sent to the port, having awakened him
to let him know that the tempestuous weather had hindered the senators
from putting to sea, he despatched away another messenger, and composing
again himself in the bed, settled to sleep, and slept till by the return
of the last messenger he had certain intelligence they were gone. We may
here further compare him with Alexander in the great and dangerous storm
that threatened him by the sedition of the tribune Metellus, who,
attempting to publish a decree for the calling in of Pompey with his army
into the city at the time of Catiline’s conspiracy, was only and that
stoutly opposed by Cato, so that very sharp language and bitter menaces
passed betwixt them in the senate about that affair; but it was the next
day, in the forenoon, that the controversy was to be decided, where
Metellus, besides the favour of the people and of Caesar--at that time of
Pompey’s faction--was to appear accompanied with a rabble of slaves and
gladiators; and Cato only fortified with his own courage and constancy;
so that his relations, domestics, and many virtuous people of his friends
were in great apprehensions for him; and to that degree, that some there
were who passed over the whole night without sleep, eating, or drinking,
for the danger they saw him running into; his wife and sisters did
nothing but weep and torment themselves in his house; whereas, he, on the
contrary, comforted every one, and after having supped after his usual
manner, went to bed, and slept profoundly till morning, when one of his
fellow-tribunes roused him to go to the encounter. The knowledge we have
of the greatness of this man’s courage by the rest of his life, may
warrant us certainly to judge that his indifference proceeded from a soul
so much elevated above such accidents, that he disdained to let it take
any more hold of his fancy than any ordinary incident.
In the naval engagement that Augustus won of Sextus Pompeius in Sicily,
just as they were to begin the fight, he was so fast asleep that his
friends were compelled to wake him to give the signal of battle: and this
was it that gave Mark Antony afterwards occasion to reproach him that he
had not the courage so much as with open eyes to behold the order of his
own squadrons, and not to have dared to present himself before the
soldiers, till first Agrippa had brought him news of the victory
obtained. But as to the young Marius, who did much worse (for the day of
his last battle against Sylla, after he had marshalled his army and given
the word and signal of battle, he laid him down under the shade of a tree
to repose himself, and fell so fast asleep that the rout and flight of
his men could hardly waken him, he having seen nothing of the fight), he
is said to have been at that time so extremely spent and worn out with
labour and want of sleep, that nature could hold out no longer. Now,
upon what has been said, the physicians may determine whether sleep be so
necessary that our lives depend upon it: for we read that King Perseus of
Macedon, being prisoner at Rome, was killed by being kept from sleep; but
Pliny instances such as have lived long without sleep. Herodotus speaks
of nations where the men sleep and wake by half-years, and they who write
the life of the sage Epimenides affirm that he slept seven-and-fifty
years together.
CHAPTER XLV
OF THE BATTLE OF DREUX
[December 19, 1562, in which the Catholics, under the command of the
Duc de Guise and the Constable de Montmorenci, defeated the
Protestants, commanded by the Prince de Conde. See Sismondi, Hist.
des Francais, vol. xviii., p. 354.]
Our battle of Dreux is remarkable for several extraordinary incidents;
but such as have no great kindness for M. de Guise, nor much favour his
reputation, are willing to have him thought to blame, and that his making
a halt and delaying time with the forces he commanded, whilst the
Constable, who was general of the army, was racked through and through
with the enemy’s artillery, his battalion routed, and himself taken
prisoner, is not to be excused; and that he had much better have run the
hazard of charging the enemy in flank, than staying for the advantage of
falling in upon the rear, to suffer so great and so important a loss.
But, besides what the event demonstrated, he who will consider it without
passion or prejudice will easily be induced to confess that the aim and
design, not of a captain only, but of every private soldier, ought to
regard the victory in general, and that no particular occurrences, how
nearly soever they may concern his own interest, should divert him from
that pursuit. Philopoemen, in an encounter with Machanidas, having sent
before a good strong party of his archers and slingers to begin the
skirmish, and these being routed and hotly pursued by the enemy, who,
pushing on the fortune of their arms, and in that pursuit passing by the
battalion where Philopoemen was, though his soldiers were impatient to
fall on, he did not think fit to stir from his post nor to present
himself to the enemy to relieve his men, but having suffered these to be
chased and cut in pieces before his face, charged in upon the enemy’s
foot when he saw them left unprotected by the horse, and notwithstanding
that they were Lacedaemonians, yet taking them in the nick, when thinking
themselves secure of the victory, they began to disorder their ranks; he
did this business with great facility, and then put himself in pursuit of
Machanidas. Which case is very like that of Monsieur de Guise.
In that bloody battle betwixt Agesilaus and the Boeotians, which
Xenophon, who was present at it, reports to be the sharpest that he had
ever seen, Agesilaus waived the advantage that fortune presented him, to
let the Boeotian battalions pass by and then to charge them in the rear,
how certain soever he might make himself of the victory, judging it would
rather be an effect of conduct than valour, to proceed that way; and
therefore, to show his prowess, rather chose with a marvellous ardour of
courage to charge them in the front; but he was well beaten and well
wounded for his pains, and constrained at last to disengage himself, and
to take the course he had at first neglected; opening his battalion to
give way to this torrent of Boeotians, and they being passed by, taking
notice that they marched in disorder, like men who thought themselves out
of danger, he pursued and charged them in flank; yet could not so prevail
as to bring it to so general a rout but that they leisurely retreated,
still facing about upon him till they had retired to safety.
CHAPTER XLVI
OF NAMES
What variety of herbs soever are shufed together in the dish, yet the
whole mass is swallowed up under one name of a sallet. In like manner,
under the consideration of names, I will make a hodge-podge of divers
articles.
Every nation has certain names, that, I know not why, are taken in no
good sense, as with us, John, William, Benedict. In the genealogy of
princes, also, there seem to be certain names fatally affected, as the
Ptolemies of Egypt, the Henries in England, the Charleses in France, the
Baldwins in Flanders, and the Williams of our ancient Aquitaine, from
whence, ‘tis said, the name of Guyenne has its derivation; which would
seem far fetched were there not as crude derivations in Plato himself.
Item, ‘tis a frivolous thing in itself, but nevertheless worthy to be
recorded for the strangeness of it, that is written by an eyewitness,
that Henry, Duke of Normandy, son of Henry II., king of England, making a
great feast in France, the concourse of nobility and gentry was so great,
that being, for sport’s sake, divided into troops, according to their
names, in the first troop, which consisted of Williams, there were found
an hundred and ten knights sitting at the table of that name, without
reckoning the ordinary gentlemen and servants.
It is as pleasant to distinguish the tables by the names of the guests as
it was in the Emperor Geta to distinguish the several courses of his meat
by the first letters of the meats themselves; so that those that began
with B were served up together, as brawn, beef, bream, bustards,
becca-ficos; and so of the others. Item, there is a saying that it is a
good thing to have a good name, that is to say, credit and a good repute;
but besides this, it is really convenient to have a well-sounding name,
such as is easy of pronunciation and easy to be remembered, by reason
that kings and other great persons do by that means the more easily know
and the more hardly forget us; and indeed of our own servants we more
frequently call and employ those whose names are most ready upon the
tongue. I myself have seen Henry II., when he could not for his heart
hit of a gentleman’s name of our country of Gascony, and moreover was
fain to call one of the queen’s maids of honour by the general name of
her race, her own family name being so difficult to pronounce or
remember; and Socrates thinks it worthy a father’s care to give fine
names to his children.
Item, ‘tis said that the foundation of Notre Dame la Grande at Poitiers
took its original from hence that a debauched young fellow formerly
living in that place, having got to him a wench, and, at her first coming
in, asking her name, and being answered that it was Mary, he felt himself
so suddenly pierced through with the awe of religion and the reverence to
that sacred name of the Blessed Virgin, that he not only immediately sent
the girl away, but became a reformed man and so continued the remainder
of his life; and that, in consideration of this miracle, there was
erected upon the place where this young man’s house stood, first a chapel
dedicated to our Lady and afterwards the church that we now see standing
there. This vocal and auricular reproof wrought upon the conscience, and
that right into the soul; this that follows, insinuated itself merely by
the senses. Pythagoras being in company with some wild young fellows,
and perceiving that, heated with the feast, they comploted to go violate
an honest house, commanded the singing wench to alter her wanton airs;
and by a solemn, grave, and spondaic music, gently enchanted and laid
asleep their ardour.
Item, will not posterity say that our modern reformation has been
wonderfully delicate and exact, in having not only combated errors and
vices, and filled the world with devotion, humility, obedience, peace,
and all sorts of virtue; but in having proceeded so far as to quarrel
with our ancient baptismal names of Charles, Louis, Francis, to fill the
world with Methuselahs, Ezekiels, and Malachis, names of a more spiritual
sound? A gentleman, a neighbour of mine, a great admirer of antiquity,
and who was always extolling the excellences of former times in
comparison with this present age of ours, did not, amongst the rest,
forget to dwell upon the lofty and magnificent sound of the gentleman’s
names of those days, Don Grumedan, Quedregan, Agesilan, which, but to
hear named he conceived to denote other kind of men than Pierre, Guillot,
and Michel.
Item, I am mightily pleased with Jacques Amyot for leaving, throughout a
whole French oration, the Latin names entire, without varying and
garbling them to give them a French cadence. It seemed a little harsh
and rough at first; but already custom, by the authority of his Plutarch,
has overcome that novelty. I have often wished that such as write
histories in Latin would leave our names as they find them and as they
are; for in making Vaudemont into Vallemontanus, and metamorphosing names
to make them suit better with the Greek or Latin, we know not where we
are, and with the persons of the men lose the benefit of the story.
To conclude, ‘tis a scurvy custom and of very ill consequence that we
have in our kingdom of France to call every one by the name of his manor
or seigneury; ‘tis the thing in the world that the most prejudices and
confounds families and descents. A younger brother of a good family,
having a manor left him by his father, by the name of which he has been
known and honoured, cannot handsomely leave it; ten years after his
decease it falls into the hand of a stranger, who does the same: do but
judge whereabouts we shall be concerning the knowledge of these men. We
need look no further for examples than our own royal family, where every
partition creates a new surname, whilst, in the meantime, the original of
the family is totally lost. There is so great liberty taken in these
mutations, that I have not in my time seen any one advanced by fortune to
any extraordinary condition who has not presently had genealogical titles
added to him, new and unknown to his father, and who has not been
inoculated into some illustrious stem by good luck; and the obscurest
families are the most apt for falsification. How many gentlemen have we
in France who by their own account are of royal extraction? more, I
think, than who will confess they are not. Was it not a pleasant passage
of a friend of mine? There were, several gentlemen assembled together
about the dispute of one seigneur with another; which other had, in
truth, some preeminence of titles and alliances above the ordinary
gentry. Upon the debate of this prerogative, every one, to make himself
equal to him, alleged, this one extraction, that another; this, the near
resemblance of name, that, of arms; another, an old worm-eaten patent;
the very least of them was great-grandchild to some foreign king. When
they came to sit down, to dinner, my friend, instead of taking his place
amongst them, retiring with most profound conges, entreated the company
to excuse him for having hitherto lived with them at the saucy rate of a
companion; but being now better informed of their quality, he would begin
to pay them the respect due to their birth and grandeur, and that it
would ill become him to sit down among so many princes--ending this farce
with a thousand reproaches: “Let us, in God’s name, satisfy ourselves
with what our fathers were contented with, with what we are. We are
great enough, if we rightly understand how to maintain it. Let us not
disown the fortune and condition of our ancestors, and let us lay aside
these ridiculous pretences, that can never be wanting to any one that has
the impudence to allege them.”
Arms have no more security than surnames. I bear azure powdered with
trefoils or, with a lion’s paw of the same armed gules in fesse. What
privilege has this to continue particularly in my house? A son-in-law
will transport it into another family, or some paltry purchaser will make
them his first arms. There is nothing wherein there is more change and
confusion.
But this consideration leads me, perforce, into another subject. Let us
pry a little narrowly into, and, in God’s name, examine upon what
foundation we erect this glory and reputation for which the world is
turned topsy-turvy: wherein do we place this renown that we hunt after
with so much pains? It is, in the end, Peter or William that carries it,
takes it into his possession, and whom it only concerns. O what a
valiant faculty is hope, that in a mortal subject, and in a moment, makes
nothing of usurping infinity, immensity, eternity, and of supplying its
master’s indigence, at its pleasure, with all things he can imagine or
desire! Nature has given us this passion for a pretty toy to play
withal. And this Peter or William, what is it but a sound, when all is
done? or three or four dashes with a pen, so easy to be varied that I
would fain know to whom is to be attributed the glory of so many
victories, to Guesquin, to Glesquin, or to Gueaquin? and yet there would
be something of greater moment in the case than in Lucian, that Sigma
should serve Tau with a process; for
“Non levia aut ludicra petuntur
Praemia;”
[“They aim at no slight or jocular rewards.”--AEneid, xii. 764.]
the chase is there in very good earnest: the question is, which of these
letters is to be rewarded for so many sieges, battles, wounds,
imprisonments, and services done to the crown of France by this famous
constable? Nicholas Denisot--[Painter and poet, born at Le Mans,1515.]--
never concerned himself further than the letters of his name, of which he
has altered the whole contexture to build up by anagram the Count
d’Alsinois, whom he has handsomely endowed with the glory of his poetry
and painting. The historian Suetonius was satisfied with only the
meaning of his name, which made him cashier his father’s surname, Lenis,
to leave Tranquillus successor to the reputation of his writings. Who
would believe that Captain Bayard should have no honour but what he
derives from the deeds of Peter Terrail; and that Antonio Iscalin should
suffer himself to his face to be robbed of the honour of so many
navigations and commands at sea and land by Captain Paulin and the Baron
de la Garde? Secondly, these are dashes of the pen common to a thousand
people. How many are there, in every family, of the same name and
surname? and how many more in several families, ages, and countries?
History tells us of three of the name of Socrates, of five Platos, of
eight Aristotles, of seven Xenophons, of twenty Demetrii, and of twenty
Theodores; and how many more she was not acquainted with we may imagine.
Who hinders my groom from calling himself Pompey the Great? But after
all, what virtue, what authority, or what secret springs are there that
fix upon my deceased groom, or the other Pompey, who had his head cut off
in Egypt, this glorious renown, and these so much honoured flourishes of
the pen, so as to be of any advantage to them?
“Id cinerem et manes credis curare sepultos?”
[“Do you believe the dead regard such things?”--AEneid, iv. 34.]
What sense have the two companions in greatest esteem amongst me,
Epaminondas, of this fine verse that has been so many ages current in his
praise,
“Consiliis nostris laus est attrita Laconum;”
[“The glory of the Spartans is extinguished by my plans.
--“Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 17.]
or Africanus, of this other,
“A sole exoriente supra Maeotis Paludes
Nemo est qui factis me aequiparare queat.”
[“From where the sun rises over the Palus Maeotis, to where it sets,
there is no one whose acts can compare with mine”--Idem, ibid.]
Survivors indeed tickle themselves with these fine phrases, and by them
incited to jealousy and desire, inconsiderately and according to their
own fancy, attribute to the dead this their own feeling, vainly
flattering themselves that they shall one day in turn be capable of the
same character. However:
“Ad haec se
Romanus Graiusque, et Barbaras induperator
Erexit; caucus discriminis atque laboris
Inde habuit: tanto major famae sitis est, quam
Virtutis.”
[“For these the Roman, the Greek, and the Barbarian commander hath
aroused himself; he has incurred thence causes of danger and toil:
so much greater is the thirst for fame than for virtue.”
--Juvenal, x. 137.]
CHAPTER XLVII
OF THE UNCERTAINTY OF OUR JUDGMENT
Well says this verse:
[“There is everywhere much liberty of speech.”--Iliad, xx. 249.]
For example:
[“Hannibal conquered, but knew not how to make the best use of his
victorious venture.”--Petrarch, Son., 83.]
Such as would improve this argument, and condemn the oversight of our
leaders in not pushing home the victory at Moncontour, or accuse the King
of Spain of not knowing how to make the best use of the advantage he had
against us at St. Quentin, may conclude these oversights to proceed from
a soul already drunk with success, or from a spirit which, being full and
overgorged with this beginning of good fortune, had lost the appetite of
adding to it, already having enough to do to digest what it had taken in:
he has his arms full, and can embrace no more: unworthy of the benefit
fortune has conferred upon him and the advantage she had put into his
hands: for what utility does he reap from it, if, notwithstanding, he
give his enemy respite to rally and make head against him? What hope is
there that he will dare at another time to attack an enemy reunited and
recomposed, and armed anew with anger and revenge, who did not dare to
pursue them when routed and unmanned by fear?
“Dum fortuna calet, dum conficit omnia terror.”
[“Whilst fortune is fresh, and terror finishes all.”
--Lucan, vii. 734.]
But withal, what better opportunity can he expect than that he has lost?
‘Tis not here, as in fencing, where the most hits gain the prize; for so
long as the enemy is on foot, the game is new to begin, and that is not
to be called a victory that puts not an end to the war. In the encounter
where Caesar had the worst, near the city of Oricum, he reproached
Pompey’s soldiers that he had been lost had their general known how to
overcome; and afterwards clawed him in a very different fashion when it
came to his turn.
But why may not a man also argue, on the contrary, that it is the effect
of a precipitous and insatiate spirit not to know how to bound and
restrain its coveting; that it is to abuse the favours of God to exceed
the measure He has prescribed them: and that again to throw a man’s self
into danger after a victory obtained is again to expose himself to the
mercy of fortune: that it is one of the greatest discretions in the rule
of war not to drive an enemy to despair? Sylla and Marius in the social
war, having defeated the Marsians, seeing yet a body of reserve that,
prompted by despair, was coming on like enraged brutes to dash in upon
them, thought it not convenient to stand their charge. Had not Monsieur
de Foix’s ardour transported him so furiously to pursue the remains of
the victory of Ravenna, he had not obscured it by his own death. And yet
the recent memory of his example served to preserve Monsieur d’Anguien
from the same misfortune at the battle of Serisoles. ‘Tis dangerous to
attack a man you have deprived of all means to escape but by his arms,
for necessity teaches violent resolutions:
“Gravissimi sunt morsus irritatae necessitatis.”
[“Irritated necessity bites deepest.”--Portius Latro., Declam.]
“Vincitur haud gratis, jugulo qui provocat hostem.”
[“He is not readily beaten who provokes the enemy by shewing
his throat.”--or: “He who presents himself to his foe, sells his
life dear.”--Lucan, iv. 275.]
This was it that made Pharax withhold the King of Lacedaemon, who had won
a battle against the Mantineans, from going to charge a thousand Argians,
who had escaped in an entire body from the defeat, but rather let them
steal off at liberty that he might not encounter valour whetted and
enraged by mischance. Clodomir, king of Aquitaine, after his victory
pursuing Gondemar, king of Burgundy, beaten and making off as fast as he
could for safety, compelled him to face about and make head, wherein his
obstinacy deprived him of the fruit of his conquest, for he there lost
his life.
In like manner, if a man were to choose whether he would have his
soldiers richly and sumptuously accoutred or armed only for the necessity
of the matter in hand, this argument would step in to favour the first,
of which opinion was Sertorius, Philopcemen, Brutus, Caesar, and others,
that it is to a soldier an enflaming of courage and a spur himself in
brave attire; and withal a motive to be more obstinate in fight, having
his arms, which are in a manner his estate and whole inheritance to
defend; which is the reason, says Xenophon, why those of Asia carried
their wives and concubines, with their choicest jewels and greatest
wealth, along with them to the wars. But then these arguments would be
as ready to stand up for the other side; that a general ought rather to
lessen in his men their solicitude of preserving themselves than to
increase it; that by such means they will be in a double fear of
hazarding their persons, as it will be a double temptation to the enemy
to fight with greater resolution where so great booty and so rich spoils
are to be obtained; and this very thing has been observed in former
times, notably to encourage the Romans against the Samnites. Antiochus,
shewing Hannibal the army he had raised, wonderfully splendid and rich in
all sorts of equipage, asked him if the Romans would be satisfied with
that army? “Satisfied,” replied the other, “yes, doubtless, were their
avarice never so great.” Lycurgus not only forbad his soldiers all
manner of bravery in their equipage, but, moreover, to strip their
conquered enemies, because he would, as he said, that poverty and
frugality should shine with the rest of the battle.
At sieges and elsewhere, where occasion draws us near to the enemy, we
willingly suffer our men to brave, rate, and affront him with all sorts
of injurious language; and not without some colour of reason: for it is
of no little consequence to take from them all hopes of mercy and
composition, by representing to them that there is no fair quarter to be
expected from an enemy they have incensed to that degree, nor other
remedy remaining but in victory. And yet Vitellius found himself
deceived in this way of proceeding; for having to do with Otho, weaker in
the valour of his soldiers, long unaccustomed to war and effeminated with
the delights of the city, he so nettled them at last with injurious
language, reproaching them with cowardice and regret for the mistresses
and entertainments they had left behind at Rome, that by this means he
inspired them with such resolution as no exhortation had had the power to
have done, and himself made them fall upon him, with whom their own
captains before could by no means prevail. And, indeed, when they are
injuries that touch to the quick, it may very well fall out that he who
went but unwillingly to work in the behalf of his prince will fall to’t
with another sort of mettle when the quarrel is his own.
Considering of how great importance is the preservation of the general of
an army, and that the universal aim of an enemy is levelled directly at
the head, upon which all the others depend, the course seems to admit of
no dispute, which we know has been taken by so many great captains, of
changing their habit and disguising their persons upon the point of going
to engage. Nevertheless, the inconvenience a man by so doing runs into
is not less than that he thinks to avoid; for the captain, by this means
being concealed from the knowledge of his own men, the courage they
should derive from his presence and example happens by degrees to cool
and to decay; and not seeing the wonted marks and ensigns of their
leader, they presently conclude him either dead, or that, despairing of
the business, he is gone to shift for himself. And experience shows us
that both these ways have been successful and otherwise. What befell
Pyrrhus in the battle he fought against the Consul Levinus in Italy will
serve us to both purposes; for though by shrouding his person under the
armour of Megacles and making him wear his own, he undoubtedly preserved
his own life, yet, by that very means, he was withal very near running
into the other mischief of losing the battle. Alexander, Caesar, and
Lucullus loved to make themselves known in a battle by rich accoutrements
and armour of a particular lustre and colour: Agis, Agesilaus, and that
great Gilippus, on the contrary, used to fight obscurely armed, and
without any imperial attendance or distinction.
Amongst other oversights Pompey is charged withal at the battle of
Pharsalia, he is condemned for making his army stand still to receive the
enemy’s charge; by “reason that” (I shall here steal Plutarch’s own
words, which are better than mine) “he by so doing deprived himself of
the violent impression the motion of running adds to the first shock of
arms, and hindered that clashing of the combatants against one another
which is wont to give them greater impetuosity and fury; especially when
they come to rush in with their utmost vigour, their courages increasing
by the shouts and the career; ‘tis to render the soldiers’ ardour, as a
man may say, more reserved and cold.” This is what he says. But if
Caesar had come by the worse, why might it not as well have been urged by
another, that, on the contrary, the strongest and most steady posture of
fighting is that wherein a man stands planted firm without motion; and
that they who are steady upon the march, closing up, and reserving their
force within themselves for the push of the business, have a great
advantage against those who are disordered, and who have already spent
half their breath in running on precipitately to the charge? Besides
that an army is a body made up of so many individual members, it is
impossible for it to move in this fury with so exact a motion as not to
break the order of battle, and that the best of them are not engaged
before their fellows can come on to help them. In that unnatural battle
betwixt the two Persian brothers, the Lacedaemonian Clearchus, who
commanded the Greeks of Cyrus’ party, led them on softly and without
precipitation to the charge; but, coming within fifty paces, hurried them
on full speed, hoping in so short a career both to keep their order and
to husband their breath, and at the same time to give the advantage of
impetuosity and impression both to their persons and their missile arms.
Others have regulated this question as to their armies thus if your enemy
come full drive upon you, stand firm to receive him; if he stand to
receive you, run full drive upon him.
In the expedition of the Emperor Charles V. into Provence, King Francis
was put to choose either to go meet him in Italy or to await him in his
own dominions; wherein, though he very well considered of how great
advantage it was to preserve his own territory entire and clear from the
troubles of war, to the end that, being unexhausted of its stores, it
might continually supply men and money at need; that the necessity of war
requires at every turn to spoil and lay waste the country before us,
which cannot very well be done upon one’s own; to which may be added,
that the country people do not so easily digest such a havoc by those of
their own party as from an enemy, so that seditions and commotions might
by such means be kindled amongst us; that the licence of pillage and
plunder (which are not to be tolerated at home) is a great ease and
refreshment against the fatigues and sufferings of war; and that he who
has no other prospect of gain than his bare pay will hardly be kept from
running home, being but two steps from his wife and his own house; that
he who lays the cloth is ever at the charge of the feast; that there is
more alacrity in assaulting than defending; and that the shock of a
battle’s loss in our own bowels is so violent as to endanger the
disjointing of the whole body, there being no passion so contagious as
that of fear, that is so easily believed, or that so suddenly diffuses
itself; and that the cities that should hear the rattle of this tempest
at their gates, that should take in their captains and soldiers yet
trembling and out of breath, would be in danger in this heat and hurry to
precipitate themselves upon some untoward resolution: notwithstanding all
this, so it was that he chose to recall the forces he had beyond the
mountains and to suffer the enemy to come to him. For he might, on the
other hand, imagine that, being at home and amongst his friends, he could
not fail of plenty of all manner of conveniences; the rivers and passes
he had at his devotion would bring him in both provisions and money in
all security, and without the trouble of convoy; that he should find his
subjects by so much the more affectionate to him, by how much their
danger was more near and pressing; that having so many cities and
barriers to secure him, it would be in his power to give the law of
battle at his own opportunity and advantage; and that, if it pleased him
to delay the time, under cover and at his ease he might see his enemy
founder and defeat himself with the difficulties he was certain to
encounter, being engaged in a hostile country, where before, behind, and
on every side war would be made upon him; no means to refresh himself or
to enlarge his quarters, should diseases infest them, or to lodge his
wounded men in safety; no money, no victuals, but at the point of the
lance; no leisure to repose and take breath; no knowledge of the ways or
country to secure him from ambushes and surprises; and in case of losing
a battle, no possible means of saving the remains. Neither is there want
of example in both these cases.
Scipio thought it much better to go and attack his enemy’s territories in
Africa than to stay at home to defend his own and to fight him in Italy,
and it succeeded well with him. But, on the contrary, Hannibal in the
same war ruined himself by abandoning the conquest of a foreign country
to go and defend his own. The Athenians having left the enemy in their
own dominions to go over into Sicily, were not favoured by fortune in
their design; but Agathocles, king of Syracuse, found her favourable to
him when he went over into Africa and left the war at home.
By which examples we are wont to conclude, and with some reason, that
events, especially in war, for the most part depend upon fortune, who
will not be governed by nor submit unto human reasons and prudence,
according to the poet:
“Et male consultis pretium est: prudentia fallit
Nec fortune probat causas, sequiturque merentes,
Sed vaga per cunctos nullo discrimine fertur.
Scilicet est aliud, quod nos cogatque regatque
Majus, et in proprias ducat mortalia leges.”
[“And there is value in ill counsel: prudence deceives: nor does
fortune inquire into causes, nor aid the most deserving, but turns
hither and thither without discrimination. Indeed there is a
greater power which directs and rules us, and brings mortal affairs
under its own laws.”--Manilius, iv. 95.]
But, to take the thing right, it should seem that our counsels and
deliberations depend as much upon fortune as anything else we do, and
that she engages also our arguments in her uncertainty and confusion.
“We argue rashly and adventurously,” says Timaeus in Plato, “by reason
that, as well as ourselves, our discourses have great participation in
the temerity of chance.”
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
“Art thou not ashamed,” said he to him, “to sing so well?”
As great a benefit to be without (children)
Away with that eloquence that enchants us with itself
Because the people know so well how to obey
Blemishes of the great naturally appear greater
Change is to be feared
Cicero: on fame
Confidence in another man’s virtue
Dangerous man you have deprived of all means to escape
Depend as much upon fortune as anything else we do
Fame: an echo, a dream, nay, the shadow of a dream
Far more easy and pleasant to follow than to lead
He who lays the cloth is ever at the charge of the feast
I honour those most to whom I show the least honour
In war not to drive an enemy to despair
My words does but injure the love I have conceived within.
Neither the courage to die nor the heart to live
Never spoke of my money, but falsely, as others do
No great choice betwixt not knowing to speak anything but ill
No man continues ill long but by his own fault
No necessity upon a man to live in necessity
No passion so contagious as that of fear
Not a victory that puts not an end to the war
Not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice
Only secure harbour from the storms and tempests of life
Opinions they have of things and not by the things themselves
People conceiving they have right and title to be judges
Pyrrho’s hog
Repute for value in them, not what they bring to us
Satisfaction of mind to have only one path to walk in
That which cowardice itself has chosen for its refuge
The honour we receive from those that fear us is not honour
The pedestal is no part of the statue
There is more trouble in keeping money than in getting it.
There is nothing I hate so much as driving a bargain
Thou wilt not feel it long if thou feelest it too much
Tis the sharpnss of our mind that gives the edge to our pains
Titles being so dearly bought
Twenty people prating about him when he is at stool
Valour whetted and enraged by mischance
What can they not do; what do they fear to do (for beauty)
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 8.
XLVIII. Of war-horses, or destriers.
XLIX. Of ancient customs.
L. Of Democritus and Heraclitus.
LI. Of the vanity of words.
LII. Of the parsimony of the Ancients.
LIII. Of a saying of Caesar.
LIV. Of vain subtleties.
LV. Of smells.
LVI. Of prayers.
LVII. Of age.
CHAPTER XLVIII
OF WAR HORSES, OR DESTRIERS
I here have become a grammarian, I who never learned any language but by
rote, and who do not yet know adjective, conjunction, or ablative. I
think I have read that the Romans had a sort of horses by them called
‘funales’ or ‘dextrarios’, which were either led horses, or horses laid
on at several stages to be taken fresh upon occasion, and thence it is
that we call our horses of service ‘destriers’; and our romances commonly
use the phrase of ‘adestrer’ for ‘accompagner’, to accompany. They also
called those that were trained in such sort, that running full speed,
side by side, without bridle or saddle, the Roman gentlemen, armed at all
pieces, would shift and throw themselves from one to the other,
‘desultorios equos’. The Numidian men-at-arms had always a led horse in
one hand, besides that they rode upon, to change in the heat of battle:
“Quibus, desultorum in modum, binos trahentibus equos, inter
acerrimam saepe pugnam, in recentem equum, ex fesso, armatis
transultare mos erat: tanta velocitas ipsis, tamque docile
equorum genus.”
[“To whom it was a custom, leading along two horses, often in the
hottest fight, to leap armed from a tired horse to a fresh one; so
active were the men, and the horses so docile.”--Livy, xxiii. 29.]
There are many horses trained to help their riders so as to run upon any
one, that appears with a drawn sword, to fall both with mouth and heels
upon any that front or oppose them: but it often happens that they do
more harm to their friends than to their enemies; and, moreover, you
cannot loose them from their hold, to reduce them again into order, when
they are once engaged and grappled, by which means you remain at the
mercy of their quarrel. It happened very ill to Artybius, general of the
Persian army, fighting, man to man, with Onesilus, king of Salamis, to be
mounted upon a horse trained after this manner, it being the occasion of
his death, the squire of Onesilus cleaving the horse down with a scythe
betwixt the shoulders as it was reared up upon his master. And what the
Italians report, that in the battle of Fornova, the horse of Charles
VIII., with kicks and plunges, disengaged his master from the enemy that
pressed upon him, without which he had been slain, sounds like a very
great chance, if it be true.
[In the narrative which Philip de Commines has given of this battle,
in which he himself was present (lib. viii. ch. 6), he tells us
of wonderful performances by the horse on which the king was
mounted. The name of the horse was Savoy, and it was the most
beautiful horse he had ever seen. During the battle the king was
personally attacked, when he had nobody near him but a valet de
chambre, a little fellow, and not well armed. “The king,” says
Commines, “had the best horse under him in the world, and therefore
he stood his ground bravely, till a number of his men, not a great
way from him, arrived at the critical minute.”]
The Mamalukes make their boast that they have the most ready horses of
any cavalry in the world; that by nature and custom they were taught to
know and distinguish the enemy, and to fall foul upon them with mouth and
heels, according to a word or sign given; as also to gather up with their
teeth darts and lances scattered upon the field, and present them to
their riders, on the word of command. ‘T is said, both of Caesar and
Pompey, that amongst their other excellent qualities they were both very
good horsemen, and particularly of Caesar, that in his youth, being
mounted on the bare back, without saddle or bridle, he could make the
horse run, stop, and turn, and perform all its airs, with his hands
behind him. As nature designed to make of this person, and of Alexander,
two miracles of military art, so one would say she had done her utmost to
arm them after an extraordinary manner for every one knows that
Alexander’s horse, Bucephalus, had a head inclining to the shape of a
bull; that he would suffer himself to be mounted and governed by none but
his master, and that he was so honoured after his death as to have a city
erected to his name. Caesar had also one which had forefeet like those
of a man, his hoofs being divided in the form of fingers, which likewise
was not to be ridden, by any but Caesar himself, who, after his death,
dedicated his statue to the goddess Venus.
I do not willingly alight when I am once on horseback, for it is the
place where, whether well or sick, I find myself most at ease. Plato
recommends it for health, as also Pliny says it is good for the stomach
and the joints. Let us go further into this matter since here we are.
We read in Xenophon a law forbidding any one who was master of a horse to
travel on foot. Trogus Pompeius and Justin say that the Parthians were
wont to perform all offices and ceremonies, not only in war but also all
affairs whether public or private, make bargains, confer, entertain, take
the air, and all on horseback; and that the greatest distinction betwixt
freemen and slaves amongst them was that the one rode on horseback and
the other went on foot, an institution of which King Cyrus was the
founder.
There are several examples in the Roman history (and Suetonius more
particularly observes it of Caesar) of captains who, on pressing
occasions, commanded their cavalry to alight, both by that means to take
from them all hopes of flight, as also for the advantage they hoped in
this sort of fight.
“Quo baud dubie superat Romanus,”
[“Wherein the Roman does questionless excel.”--Livy, ix. 22.]
says Livy. And so the first thing they did to prevent the mutinies and
insurrections of nations of late conquest was to take from them their
arms and horses, and therefore it is that we so often meet in Caesar:
“Arma proferri, jumenta produci, obsides dari jubet.”
[“He commanded the arms to be produced, the horses brought out,
hostages to be given.”--De Bello Gall., vii. II.]
The Grand Signior to this day suffers not a Christian or a Jew to keep a
horse of his own throughout his empire.
Our ancestors, and especially at the time they had war with the English,
in all their greatest engagements and pitched battles fought for the most
part on foot, that they might have nothing but their own force, courage,
and constancy to trust to in a quarrel of so great concern as life and
honour. You stake (whatever Chrysanthes in Xenophon says to the
contrary) your valour and your fortune upon that of your horse; his
wounds or death bring your person into the same danger; his fear or fury
shall make you reputed rash or cowardly; if he have an ill mouth or will
not answer to the spur, your honour must answer for it. And, therefore,
I do not think it strange that those battles were more firm and furious
than those that are fought on horseback:
“Caedebant pariter, pariterque ruebant
Victores victique; neque his fuga nota, neque illis.”
[“They fought and fell pell-mell, victors and vanquished; nor was
flight thought of by either.”--AEneid, x. 756.]
Their battles were much better disputed. Nowadays there are nothing but
routs:
“Primus clamor atque impetus rem decernit.”
[“The first shout and charge decides the business.”--Livy, xxv. 41.]
And the means we choose to make use of in so great a hazard should be as
much as possible at our own command: wherefore I should advise to choose
weapons of the shortest sort, and such of which we are able to give the
best account. A man may repose more confidence in a sword he holds in
his hand than in a bullet he discharges out of a pistol, wherein there
must be a concurrence of several circumstances to make it perform its
office, the powder, the stone, and the wheel: if any of which fail it
endangers your fortune. A man himself strikes much surer than the air
can direct his blow:
“Et, quo ferre velint, permittere vulnera ventis
Ensis habet vires; et gens quaecumque virorum est,
Bella gerit gladiis.”
[“And so where they choose to carry [the arrows], the winds allow
the wounds; the sword has strength of arm: and whatever nation of
men there is, they wage war with swords.”--Lucan, viii. 384.]
But of that weapon I shall speak more fully when I come to compare the
arms of the ancients with those of modern use; only, by the way, the
astonishment of the ear abated, which every one grows familiar with in a
short time, I look upon it as a weapon of very little execution, and hope
we shall one day lay it aside. That missile weapon which the Italians
formerly made use of both with fire and by sling was much more terrible:
they called a certain kind of javelin, armed at the point with an iron
three feet long, that it might pierce through and through an armed man,
Phalarica, which they sometimes in the field darted by hand, sometimes
from several sorts of engines for the defence of beleaguered places; the
shaft being rolled round with flax, wax, rosin, oil, and other
combustible matter, took fire in its flight, and lighting upon the body
of a man or his target, took away all the use of arms and limbs. And
yet, coming to close fight, I should think they would also damage the
assailant, and that the camp being as it were planted with these flaming
truncheons, would produce a common inconvenience to the whole crowd:
“Magnum stridens contorta Phalarica venit,
Fulminis acta modo.”
[“The Phalarica, launched like lightning, flies through
the air with a loud rushing sound.”--AEneid, ix. 705.]
They had, moreover, other devices which custom made them perfect in
(which seem incredible to us who have not seen them), by which they
supplied the effects of our powder and shot. They darted their spears
with so great force, as ofttimes to transfix two targets and two armed
men at once, and pin them together. Neither was the effect of their
slings less certain of execution or of shorter carriage:
[“Culling round stones from the beach for their slings; and with
these practising over the waves, so as from a great distance to
throw within a very small circuit, they became able not only to
wound an enemy in the head, but hit any other part at pleasure.”
--Livy, xxxviii. 29.]
Their pieces of battery had not only the execution but the thunder of our
cannon also:
“Ad ictus moenium cum terribili sonitu editos,
pavor et trepidatio cepit.”
[“At the battery of the walls, performed with a terrible noise,
the defenders began to fear and tremble.”--Idem, ibid., 5.]
The Gauls, our kinsmen in Asia, abominated these treacherous missile
arms, it being their use to fight, with greater bravery, hand to hand:
[“They are not so much concerned about large gashes-the bigger and
deeper the wound, the more glorious do they esteem the combat but
when they find themselves tormented by some arrow-head or bullet
lodged within, but presenting little outward show of wound,
transported with shame and anger to perish by so imperceptible a
destroyer, they fall to the ground.”---Livy, xxxviii. 21.]
A pretty description of something very like an arquebuse-shot. The ten
thousand Greeks in their long and famous retreat met with a nation who
very much galled them with great and strong bows, carrying arrows so long
that, taking them up, one might return them back like a dart, and with
them pierce a buckler and an armed man through and through. The engines,
that Dionysius invented at Syracuse to shoot vast massy darts and stones
of a prodigious greatness with so great impetuosity and at so great a
distance, came very near to our modern inventions.
But in this discourse of horses and horsemanship, we are not to forget
the pleasant posture of one Maistre Pierre Pol, a doctor of divinity,
upon his mule, whom Monstrelet reports always to have ridden sideways
through the streets of Paris like a woman. He says also, elsewhere, that
the Gascons had terrible horses, that would wheel in their full speed,
which the French, Picards, Flemings, and Brabanters looked upon as a
miracle, “having never seen the like before,” which are his very words.
Caesar, speaking of the Suabians: “in the charges they make on
horseback,” says he, “they often throw themselves off to fight on foot,
having taught their horses not to stir in the meantime from the place,
to which they presently run again upon occasion; and according to their
custom, nothing is so unmanly and so base as to use saddles or pads, and
they despise such as make use of those conveniences: insomuch that, being
but a very few in number, they fear not to attack a great many.” That
which I have formerly wondered at, to see a horse made to perform all his
airs with a switch only and the reins upon his neck, was common with the
Massilians, who rid their horses without saddle or bridle:
“Et gens, quae nudo residens Massylia dorso,
Ora levi flectit, fraenorum nescia, virga.”
[“The Massylians, mounted on the bare backs of their horses,
bridleless, guide them by a mere switch.”--Lucan, iv. 682.]
“Et Numidae infraeni cingunt.”
[“The Numidians guiding their horses without bridles.”
--AEneid, iv. 41.]
“Equi sine fraenis, deformis ipse cursus,
rigida cervice et extento capite currentium.”
[“The career of a horse without a bridle is ungraceful; the neck
extended stiff, and the nose thrust out.”--Livy, xxxv. II.]
King Alfonso,--[Alfonso XI., king of Leon and Castile, died 1350.]--
he who first instituted the Order of the Band or Scarf in Spain, amongst
other rules of the order, gave them this, that they should never ride
mule or mulet, upon penalty of a mark of silver; this I had lately out of
Guevara’s Letters. Whoever gave these the title of Golden Epistles had
another kind of opinion of them than I have. The Courtier says, that
till his time it was a disgrace to a gentleman to ride on one of these
creatures: but the Abyssinians, on the contrary, the nearer they are to
the person of Prester John, love to be mounted upon large mules, for the
greatest dignity and grandeur.
Xenophon tells us, that the Assyrians were fain to keep their horses
fettered in the stable, they were so fierce and vicious; and that it
required so much time to loose and harness them, that to avoid any
disorder this tedious preparation might bring upon them in case of
surprise, they never sat down in their camp till it was first well
fortified with ditches and ramparts. His Cyrus, who was so great a
master in all manner of horse service, kept his horses to their due work,
and never suffered them to have anything to eat till first they had
earned it by the sweat of some kind of exercise. The Scythians when in
the field and in scarcity of provisions used to let their horses blood,
which they drank, and sustained themselves by that diet:
“Venit et epoto Sarmata pastus equo.”
[“The Scythian comes, who feeds on horse-flesh”
--Martial, De Spectaculis Libey, Epigr. iii. 4.]
Those of Crete, being besieged by Metellus, were in so great necessity
for drink that they were fain to quench their thirst with their horses
urine.--[Val. Max., vii. 6, ext. 1.]
To shew how much cheaper the Turkish armies support themselves than our
European forces, ‘tis said that besides the soldiers drink nothing but
water and eat nothing but rice and salt flesh pulverised (of which every
one may easily carry about with him a month’s provision), they know how
to feed upon the blood of their horses as well as the Muscovite and
Tartar, and salt it for their use.
These new-discovered people of the Indies [Mexico and Yucatan D.W.],
when the Spaniards first landed amongst them, had so great an opinion
both of the men and horses, that they looked upon the first as gods and
the other as animals ennobled above their nature; insomuch that after
they were subdued, coming to the men to sue for peace and pardon, and to
bring them gold and provisions, they failed not to offer of the same to
the horses, with the same kind of harangue to them they had made to the
others: interpreting their neighing for a language of truce and
friendship.
In the other Indies, to ride upon an elephant was the first and royal
place of honour; the second to ride in a coach with four horses; the
third to ride upon a camel; and the last and least honour to be carried
or drawn by one horse only. Some one of our late writers tells us that
he has been in countries in those parts where they ride upon oxen with
pads, stirrups, and bridles, and very much at their ease.
Quintus Fabius Maximus Rullianus, in a battle with the Samnites, seeing
his horse, after three or four charges, had failed of breaking into the
enemy’s battalion, took this course, to make them unbridle all their
horses and spur their hardest, so that having nothing to check their
career, they might through weapons and men open the way to his foot, who
by that means gave them a bloody defeat. The same command was given by
Quintus Fulvius Flaccus against the Celtiberians:
[“You will do your business with greater advantage of your horses’
strength, if you send them unbridled upon the enemy, as it is
recorded the Roman horse to their great glory have often done; their
bits being taken off, they charged through and again back through
the enemy’s ranks with great slaughter, breaking down all their
spears.”--Idem, xl. 40.]
The Duke of Muscovy was anciently obliged to pay this reverence to the
Tartars, that when they sent an embassy to him he went out to meet them
on foot, and presented them with a goblet of mares’ milk (a beverage of
greatest esteem amongst them), and if, in drinking, a drop fell by chance
upon their horse’s mane, he was bound to lick it off with his tongue.
The army that Bajazet had sent into Russia was overwhelmed with so
dreadful a tempest of snow, that to shelter and preserve themselves from
the cold, many killed and embowelled their horses, to creep into their
bellies and enjoy the benefit of that vital heat. Bajazet, after that
furious battle wherein he was overthrown by Tamerlane, was in a hopeful
way of securing his own person by the fleetness of an Arabian mare he had
under him, had he not been constrained to let her drink her fill at the
ford of a river in his way, which rendered her so heavy and indisposed,
that he was afterwards easily overtaken by those that pursued him. They
say, indeed, that to let a horse stale takes him off his mettle, but as
to drinking, I should rather have thought it would refresh him.
Croesus, marching his army through certain waste lands near Sardis, met
with an infinite number of serpents, which the horses devoured with great
appetite, and which Herodotus says was a prodigy of ominous portent to
his affairs.
We call a horse entire, that has his mane and ears so, and no other will
pass muster. The Lacedaemonians, having defeated the Athenians in
Sicily, returning triumphant from the victory into the city of Syracuse,
amongst other insolences, caused all the horses they had taken to be
shorn and led in triumph. Alexander fought with a nation called Dahas,
whose discipline it was to march two and two together armed on one horse,
to the war; and being in fight, one of them alighted, and so they fought
on horseback and on foot, one after another by turns.
I do not think that for graceful riding any nation in the world excels
the French. A good horseman, according to our way of speaking, seems
rather to have respect to the courage of the man than address in riding.
Of all that ever I saw, the most knowing in that art, who had the best
seat and the best method in breaking horses, was Monsieur de Carnavalet,
who served our King Henry II.
I have seen a man ride with both his feet upon the saddle, take off his
saddle, and at his return take it up again and replace it, riding all the
while full speed; having galloped over a cap, make at it very good shots
backwards with his bow; take up anything from the ground, setting one
foot on the ground and the other in the stirrup: with twenty other ape’s
tricks, which he got his living by.
There has been seen in my time at Constantinople two men upon one horse,
who, in the height of its speed, would throw themselves off and into the
saddle again by turn; and one who bridled and saddled his horse with
nothing but his teeth; an other who betwixt two horses, one foot upon one
saddle and the other upon another, carrying the other man upon his
shoulders, would ride full career, the other standing bolt upright upon
and making very good shots with his bow; several who would ride full
speed with their heels upward, and their heads upon the saddle betwixt
several scimitars, with the points upwards, fixed in the harness. When I
was a boy, the prince of Sulmona, riding an unbroken horse at Naples,
prone to all sorts of action, held reals--[A small coin of Spain, the
Two Sicilies, &c.]--under his knees and toes, as if they had been nailed
there, to shew the firmness of his seat.
CHAPTER XLIX
OF ANCIENT CUSTOMS
I should willingly pardon our people for admitting no other pattern or
rule of perfection than their own peculiar manners and customs; for ‘tis
a common vice, not of the vulgar only, but almost of all men, to walk in
the beaten road their ancestors have trod before them. I am content,
when they see Fabricius or Laelius, that they look upon their countenance
and behaviour as barbarous, seeing they are neither clothed nor fashioned
according to our mode. But I find fault with their singular indiscretion
in suffering themselves to be so blinded and imposed upon by the
authority of the present usage as every month to alter their opinion, if
custom so require, and that they should so vary their judgment in their
own particular concern. When they wore the busk of their doublets up as
high as their breasts, they stiffly maintained that they were in their
proper place; some years after it was slipped down betwixt their thighs,
and then they could laugh at the former fashion as uneasy and
intolerable. The fashion now in use makes them absolutely condemn the
other two with so great resolution and so universal consent, that a man
would think there was a certain kind of madness crept in amongst them,
that infatuates their understandings to this strange degree. Now, seeing
that our change of fashions is so prompt and sudden, that the inventions
of all the tailors in the world cannot furnish out new whim-whams enow to
feed our vanity withal, there will often be a necessity that the despised
forms must again come in vogue, these immediately after fall into the
same contempt; and that the same judgment must, in the space of fifteen
or twenty years, take up half-a-dozen not only divers but contrary
opinions, with an incredible lightness and inconstancy; there is not any
of us so discreet, who suffers not himself to be gulled with this
contradiction, and both in external and internal sight to be insensibly
blinded.
I wish to muster up here some old customs that I have in memory, some of
them the same with ours, the others different, to the end that, bearing
in mind this continual variation of human things, we may have our
judgment more clearly and firmly settled.
The thing in use amongst us of fighting with rapier and cloak was in
practice amongst the Romans also:
“Sinistras sagis involvunt, gladiosque distringunt,”
[“They wrapt their cloaks upon the left arm, and drew their
swords.”--De Bello Civili, i. 75.]
says Caesar; and he observes a vicious custom of our nation, that
continues yet amongst us, which is to stop passengers we meet upon the
road, to compel them to give an account who they are, and to take it for
an affront and just cause of quarrel if they refuse to do it.
At the Baths, which the ancients made use of every day before they went
to dinner, and as frequently as we wash our hands, they at first only
bathed their arms and legs; but afterwards, and by a custom that has
continued for many ages in most nations of the world, they bathed stark
naked in mixed and perfumed water, looking upon it as a great simplicity
to bathe in mere water. The most delicate and affected perfumed
themselves all over three or four times a day. They often caused their
hair to be pinched off, as the women of France have some time since taken
up a custom to do their foreheads,
“Quod pectus, quod crura tibi, quod brachia veilis,”
[“You pluck the hairs out of your breast, your arms, and thighs.”
--Martial, ii. 62, i.]
though they had ointments proper for that purpose:
“Psilotro nitet, aut acids latet oblita creta.”
[“She shines with unguents, or with chalk dissolved in vinegar.”
--Idem, vi. 93, 9.]
They delighted to lie soft, and alleged it as a great testimony of
hardiness to lie upon a mattress. They ate lying upon beds, much after
the manner of the Turks in this age:
“Inde thoro pater AEneas sic orsus ab alto.”
[“Thus Father AEneas, from his high bed of state, spoke.”
--AEneid, ii. 2.]
And ‘tis said of the younger Cato, that after the battle of Pharsalia,
being entered into a melancholy disposition at the ill posture of the
public affairs, he took his repasts always sitting, assuming a strict and
austere course of life. It was also their custom to kiss the hands of
great persons; the more to honour and caress them. And meeting with
friends, they always kissed in salutation, as do the Venetians:
“Gratatusque darem cum dulcibus oscula verbis.”
[“And kindest words I would mingle with kisses.”
--Ovid, De Pont., iv. 9, 13]
In petitioning or saluting any great man, they used to lay their hands
upon his knees. Pasicles the philosopher, brother of Crates, instead of
laying his hand upon the knee laid it upon the private parts, and being
roughly repulsed by him to whom he made that indecent compliment:
“What,” said he, “is not that part your own as well as the other?”
--[Diogenes Laertius, vi. 89.]--They used to eat fruit, as we do, after
dinner. They wiped their fundaments (let the ladies, if they please,
mince it smaller) with a sponge, which is the reason that ‘spongia’ is a
smutty word in Latin; which sponge was fastened to the end of a stick, as
appears by the story of him who, as he was led along to be thrown to the
wild beasts in the sight of the people, asking leave to do his business,
and having no other way to despatch himself, forced the sponge and stick
down his throat and choked himself.--[Seneca, Ep., 70.] They used to
wipe, after coition, with perfumed wool:
“At tibi nil faciam; sed Iota mentula lana.”
They had in the streets of Rome vessels and little tubs for passengers to
urine in:
“Pusi saepe lacum propter se, ac dolia curta.
Somno devincti, credunt extollere vestem.”
[“The little boys in their sleep often think they are near the
public urinal, and raise their coats to make use of it.”
--Lucretius, iv.]
They had collation betwixt meals, and had in summer cellars of snow to
cool their wine; and some there were who made use of snow in winter, not
thinking their wine cool enough, even at that cold season of the year.
The men of quality had their cupbearers and carvers, and their buffoons
to make them sport. They had their meat served up in winter upon chafing
dishes, which were set upon the table, and had portable kitchens (of
which I myself have seen some) wherein all their service was carried
about with them:
“Has vobis epulas habete, lauti
Nos offendimur ambulante caena.”
[“Do you, if you please, esteem these feasts: we do not like the
ambulatory suppers.”--Martial, vii. 48, 4.]
In summer they had a contrivance to bring fresh and clear rills through
their lower rooms, wherein were great store of living fish, which the
guests took out with their own hands to be dressed every man according to
his own liking. Fish has ever had this pre-eminence, and keeps it still,
that the grandees, as to them, all pretend to be cooks; and indeed the
taste is more delicate than that of flesh, at least to my fancy. But in
all sorts of magnificence, debauchery, and voluptuous inventions of
effeminacy and expense, we do, in truth, all we can to parallel them;
for our wills are as corrupt as theirs: but we want ability to equal
them. Our force is no more able to reach them in their vicious, than in
their virtuous, qualities, for both the one and the other proceeded from
a vigour of soul which was without comparison greater in them than in us;
and souls, by how much the weaker they are, by so much have they less
power to do either very well or very ill.
The highest place of honour amongst them was the middle. The name going
before, or following after, either in writing or speaking, had no
signification of grandeur, as is evident by their writings; they will as
soon say Oppius and Caesar, as Caesar and Oppius; and me and thee, as
thee and me. This is the reason that made me formerly take notice in the
life of Flaminius, in our French Plutarch, of one passage, where it seems
as if the author, speaking of the jealousy of honour betwixt the
AEtolians and Romans, about the winning of a battle they had with their
joined forces obtained, made it of some importance, that in the Greek
songs they had put the AEtolians before the Romans: if there be no
amphibology in the words of the French translation.
The ladies, in their baths, made no scruple of admitting men amongst
them, and moreover made use of their serving-men to rub and anoint them:
“Inguina succinctus nigri tibi servus aluta
Stat, quoties calidis nuda foveris aquis.”
[“A slave--his middle girded with a black apron--stands before you,
when, naked, you take a hot bath.”--Martial, vii. 35, i.]
They all powdered themselves with a certain powder, to moderate their
sweats.
The ancient Gauls, says Sidonius Apollinaris, wore their hair long before
and the hinder part of the head shaved, a fashion that begins to revive
in this vicious and effeminate age.
The Romans used to pay the watermen their fare at their first stepping
into the boat, which we never do till after landing:
“Dum aes exigitur, dum mula ligatur,
Tota abit hora.”
[“Whilst the fare’s paying, and the mule is being harnessed, a whole
hour’s time is past.”--Horace, Sat. i. 5, 13.]
The women used to lie on the side of the bed next the wall: and for that
reason they called Caesar,
“Spondam regis Nicomedis,”
[“The bed of King Nicomedes.”--Suetonius, Life of Caesar, 49.]
They took breath in their drinking, and watered their wine
“Quis puer ocius
Restinguet ardentis Falerni
Pocula praetereunte lympha?”
[“What boy will quickly come and cool the heat of the Falernian
wine with clear water?”--Horace, Od., ii. z, 18.]
And the roguish looks and gestures of our lackeys were also in use
amongst them:
“O Jane, a tergo quern nulls ciconia pinsit,
Nec manus, auriculas imitari est mobilis albas,
Nec lingua, quantum sitiat canis Appula, tantum.”
[“O Janus, whom no crooked fingers, simulating a stork, peck at
behind your back, whom no quick hands deride behind you, by
imitating the motion of the white ears of the ass, against whom no
mocking tongue is thrust out, as the tongue of the thirsty Apulian
dog.”--Persius, i. 58.]
The Argian and Roman ladies mourned in white, as ours did formerly and
should do still, were I to govern in this point. But there are whole
books on this subject.
CHAPTER L
OF DEMOCRITUS AND HERACLITUS
The judgment is an utensil proper for all subjects, and will have an oar
in everything: which is the reason, that in these Essays I take hold of
all occasions where, though it happen to be a subject I do not very well
understand, I try, however, sounding it at a distance, and finding it too
deep for my stature, I keep me on the shore; and this knowledge that a
man can proceed no further, is one effect of its virtue, yes, one of
those of which it is most proud. One while in an idle and frivolous
subject, I try to find out matter whereof to compose a body, and then to
prop and support it; another while, I employ it in a noble subject, one
that has been tossed and tumbled by a thousand hands, wherein a man can
scarce possibly introduce anything of his own, the way being so beaten on
every side that he must of necessity walk in the steps of another: in
such a case, ‘tis the work of the judgment to take the way that seems
best, and of a thousand paths, to determine that this or that is the
best. I leave the choice of my arguments to fortune, and take that she
first presents to me; they are all alike to me, I never design to go
through any of them; for I never see all of anything: neither do they who
so largely promise to show it others. Of a hundred members and faces
that everything has, I take one, onewhile to look it over only, another
while to ripple up the skin, and sometimes to pinch it to the bones: I
give a stab, not so wide but as deep as I can, and am for the most part
tempted to take it in hand by some new light I discover in it. Did I
know myself less, I might perhaps venture to handle something or other to
the bottom, and to be deceived in my own inability; but sprinkling here
one word and there another, patterns cut from several pieces and
scattered without design and without engaging myself too far, I am not
responsible for them, or obliged to keep close to my subject, without
varying at my own liberty and pleasure, and giving up myself to doubt and
uncertainty, and to my own governing method, ignorance.
All motion discovers us: the very same soul of Caesar, that made itself
so conspicuous in marshalling and commanding the battle of Pharsalia, was
also seen as solicitous and busy in the softer affairs of love and
leisure. A man makes a judgment of a horse, not only by seeing him when
he is showing off his paces, but by his very walk, nay, and by seeing him
stand in the stable.
Amongst the functions of the soul, there are some of a lower and meaner
form; he who does not see her in those inferior offices as well as in
those of nobler note, never fully discovers her; and, peradventure, she
is best shown where she moves her simpler pace. The winds of passions
take most hold of her in her highest flights; and the rather by reason
that she wholly applies herself to, and exercises her whole virtue upon,
every particular subject, and never handles more than one thing at a
time, and that not according to it, but according to herself. Things in
respect to themselves have, peradventure, their weight, measures, and
conditions; but when we once take them into us, the soul forms them as
she pleases. Death is terrible to Cicero, coveted by Cato, indifferent
to Socrates. Health, conscience, authority, knowledge, riches, beauty,
and their contraries, all strip themselves at their entering into us, and
receive a new robe, and of another fashion, from the soul; and of what
colour, brown, bright, green, dark, and of what quality, sharp, sweet,
deep, or superficial, as best pleases each of them, for they are not
agreed upon any common standard of forms, rules, or proceedings; every
one is a queen in her own dominions. Let us, therefore, no more excuse
ourselves upon the external qualities of things; it belongs to us to give
ourselves an account of them. Our good or ill has no other dependence
but on ourselves. ‘Tis there that our offerings and our vows are due,
and not to fortune she has no power over our manners; on the contrary,
they draw and make her follow in their train, and cast her in their own
mould. Why should not I judge of Alexander at table, ranting and
drinking at the prodigious rate he sometimes used to do?
Or, if he played at chess? what string of his soul was not touched by
this idle and childish game? I hate and avoid it, because it is not play
enough, that it is too grave and serious a diversion, and I am ashamed to
lay out as much thought and study upon it as would serve to much better
uses. He did not more pump his brains about his glorious expedition into
the Indies, nor than another in unravelling a passage upon which depends
the safety of mankind. To what a degree does this ridiculous diversion
molest the soul, when all her faculties are summoned together upon this
trivial account! and how fair an opportunity she herein gives every one
to know and to make a right judgment of himself? I do not more
thoroughly sift myself in any other posture than this: what passion are
we exempted from in it? Anger, spite, malice, impatience, and a vehement
desire of getting the better in a concern wherein it were more excusable
to be ambitious of being overcome; for to be eminent, to excel above the
common rate in frivolous things, nowise befits a man of honour. What I
say in this example may be said in all others. Every particle, every
employment of man manifests him equally with any other.
Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first,
finding human condition ridiculous and vain, never appeared abroad but
with a jeering and laughing countenance; whereas Heraclitus commiserating
that same condition of ours, appeared always with a sorrowful look, and
tears in his eyes:
“Alter
Ridebat, quoties a limine moverat unum
Protuleratque pedem; flebat contrarius alter.”
[“The one always, as often as he had stepped one pace from his
threshold, laughed, the other always wept.”--Juvenal, Sat., x. 28.]
[Or, as Voltaire: “Life is a comedy to those who think;
a tragedy to those who feel.” D.W.]
I am clearly for the first humour; not because it is more pleasant to
laugh than to weep, but because it expresses more contempt and
condemnation than the other, and I think we can never be despised
according to our full desert. Compassion and bewailing seem to imply
some esteem of and value for the thing bemoaned; whereas the things we
laugh at are by that expressed to be of no moment. I do not think that
we are so unhappy as we are vain, or have in us so much malice as folly;
we are not so full of mischief as inanity; nor so miserable as we are
vile and mean. And therefore Diogenes, who passed away his time in
rolling himself in his tub, and made nothing of the great Alexander,
esteeming us no better than flies or bladders puffed up with wind, was a
sharper and more penetrating, and, consequently in my opinion, a juster
judge than Timon, surnamed the Man-hater; for what a man hates he lays to
heart. This last was an enemy to all mankind, who passionately desired
our ruin, and avoided our conversation as dangerous, proceeding from
wicked and depraved natures: the other valued us so little that we could
neither trouble nor infect him by our example; and left us to herd one
with another, not out of fear, but from contempt of our society:
concluding us as incapable of doing good as evil.
Of the same strain was Statilius’ answer, when Brutus courted him into
the conspiracy against Caesar; he was satisfied that the enterprise was
just, but he did not think mankind worthy of a wise man’s concern’;
according to the doctrine of Hegesias, who said, that a wise man ought to
do nothing but for himself, forasmuch as he only was worthy of it: and to
the saying of Theodorus, that it was not reasonable a wise man should
hazard himself for his country, and endanger wisdom for a company of
fools. Our condition is as ridiculous as risible.
CHAPTER LI
OF THE VANITY OF WORDS
A rhetorician of times past said, that to make little things appear great
was his profession. This was a shoemaker, who can make a great shoe for
a little foot.--[A saying of Agesilaus.]--They would in Sparta have
sent such a fellow to be whipped for making profession of a tricky and
deceitful act; and I fancy that Archidamus, who was king of that country,
was a little surprised at the answer of Thucydides, when inquiring of
him, which was the better wrestler, Pericles, or he, he replied, that it
was hard to affirm; for when I have thrown him, said he, he always
persuades the spectators that he had no fall and carries away the prize.
--[Quintilian, ii. 15.]--The women who paint, pounce, and plaster up
their ruins, filling up their wrinkles and deformities, are less to
blame, because it is no great matter whether we see them in their natural
complexions; whereas these make it their business to deceive not our
sight only but our judgments, and to adulterate and corrupt the very
essence of things. The republics that have maintained themselves in a
regular and well-modelled government, such as those of Lacedaemon and
Crete, had orators in no very great esteem. Aristo wisely defined
rhetoric to be “a science to persuade the people;” Socrates and Plato
“an art to flatter and deceive.” And those who deny it in the general
description, verify it throughout in their precepts. The Mohammedans
will not suffer their children to be instructed in it, as being useless,
and the Athenians, perceiving of how pernicious consequence the practice
of it was, it being in their city of universal esteem, ordered the
principal part, which is to move the affections, with their exordiums and
perorations, to be taken away. ‘Tis an engine invented to manage and
govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble, and that never is made use of,
but like physic to the sick, in a discomposed state. In those where the
vulgar or the ignorant, or both together, have been all-powerful and able
to give the law, as in those of Athens, Rhodes, and Rome, and where the
public affairs have been in a continual tempest of commotion, to such
places have the orators always repaired. And in truth, we shall find few
persons in those republics who have pushed their fortunes to any great
degree of eminence without the assistance of eloquence.
Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, Lucullus, Lentulus, Metellus, thence took their
chiefest spring, to mount to that degree of authority at which they at
last arrived, making it of greater use to them than arms, contrary to the
opinion of better times; for, L. Volumnius speaking publicly in favour of
the election of Q. Fabius and Pub. Decius, to the consular dignity:
“These are men,” said he, “born for war and great in execution; in the
combat of the tongue altogether wanting; spirits truly consular. The
subtle, eloquent, and learned are only good for the city, to make
praetors of, to administer justice.”--[Livy, x. 22.]
Eloquence most flourished at Rome when the public affairs were in the
worst condition and most disquieted with intestine commotions; as a free
and untilled soil bears the worst weeds. By which it should seem that a
monarchical government has less need of it than any other: for the
stupidity and facility natural to the common people, and that render them
subject to be turned and twined and, led by the ears by this charming
harmony of words, without weighing or considering the truth and reality
of things by the force of reason: this facility, I say, is not easily
found in a single person, and it is also more easy by good education and
advice to secure him from the impression of this poison. There was never
any famous orator known to come out of Persia or Macedon.
I have entered into this discourse upon the occasion of an Italian I
lately received into my service, and who was clerk of the kitchen to the
late Cardinal Caraffa till his death. I put this fellow upon an account
of his office: when he fell to discourse of this palate-science, with
such a settled countenance and magisterial gravity, as if he had been
handling some profound point of divinity. He made a learned distinction
of the several sorts of appetites; of that a man has before he begins to
eat, and of those after the second and third service; the means simply to
satisfy the first, and then to raise and actuate the other two; the
ordering of the sauces, first in general, and then proceeded to the
qualities of the ingredients and their effects; the differences of salads
according to their seasons, those which ought to be served up hot, and
which cold; the manner of their garnishment and decoration to render them
acceptable to the eye. After which he entered upon the order of the
whole service, full of weighty and important considerations:
“Nec minimo sane discrimine refert,
Quo gestu lepores, et quo gallina secetur;”
[“Nor with less discrimination observes how we should carve a hare,
and how a hen.” or, (“Nor with the least discrimination relates how
we should carve hares, and how cut up a hen.)”
--Juvenal, Sat., v. 123.]
and all this set out with lofty and magnificent words, the very same we
make use of when we discourse of the government of an empire. Which
learned lecture of my man brought this of Terence into my memory:
“Hoc salsum est, hoc adustum est, hoc lautum est, parum:
Illud recte: iterum sic memento: sedulo
Moneo, qux possum, pro mea sapientia.
Postremo, tanquam in speculum, in patinas,
Demea, Inspicere jubeo, et moneo, quid facto usus sit.”
[“This is too salt, that’s burnt, that’s not washed enough; that’s
well; remember to do so another time. Thus do I ever advise them to
have things done properly, according to my capacity; and lastly,
Demea, I command my cooks to look into every dish as if it were a
mirror, and tell them what they should do.”
--Terence, Adelph., iii. 3, 71.]
And yet even the Greeks themselves very much admired and highly applauded
the order and disposition that Paulus AEmilius observed in the feast he
gave them at his return from Macedon. But I do not here speak of
effects, I speak of words only.
I do not know whether it may have the same operation upon other men that
it has upon me, but when I hear our architects thunder out their bombast
words of pilasters, architraves, and cornices, of the Corinthian and
Doric orders, and suchlike jargon, my imagination is presently possessed
with the palace of Apollidon; when, after all, I find them but the paltry
pieces of my own kitchen door.
To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors, and allegories, and other
grammar words, would not one think they signified some rare and exotic
form of speaking? And yet they are phrases that come near to the babble
of my chambermaid.
And this other is a gullery of the same stamp, to call the offices of our
kingdom by the lofty titles of the Romans, though they have no similitude
of function, and still less of authority and power. And this also, which
I doubt will one day turn to the reproach of this age of ours, unworthily
and indifferently to confer upon any we think fit the most glorious
surnames with which antiquity honoured but one or two persons in several
ages. Plato carried away the surname of Divine, by so universal a
consent that never any one repined at it, or attempted to take it from
him; and yet the Italians, who pretend, and with good reason, to more
sprightly wits and sounder sense than the other nations of their time,
have lately bestowed the same title upon Aretin, in whose writings, save
tumid phrases set out with smart periods, ingenious indeed but
far-fetched and fantastic, and the eloquence, be it what it may, I see
nothing in him above the ordinary writers of his time, so far is he from
approaching the ancient divinity. And we make nothing of giving the
surname of great to princes who have nothing more than ordinary in them.
CHAPTER LII
OF THE PARSIMONY OF THE ANCIENTS
Attilius Regulus, general of the Roman army in Africa, in the height of
all his glory and victories over the Carthaginians, wrote to the Republic
to acquaint them that a certain hind he had left in trust with his
estate, which was in all but seven acres of land, had run away with all
his instruments of husbandry, and entreating therefore, that they would
please to call him home that he might take order in his own affairs, lest
his wife and children should suffer by this disaster. Whereupon the
Senate appointed another to manage his business, caused his losses to be
made good, and ordered his family to be maintained at the public expense.
The elder Cato, returning consul from Spain, sold his warhorse to save
the money it would have cost in bringing it back by sea into Italy; and
being Governor of Sardinia, he made all his visits on foot, without other
train than one officer of the Republic who carried his robe and a censer
for sacrifices, and for the most part carried his trunk himself. He
bragged that he had never worn a gown that cost above ten crowns, nor had
ever sent above tenpence to the market for one day’s provision; and that
as to his country houses, he had not one that was rough-cast on the
outside.
Scipio AEmilianus, after two triumphs and two consulships, went an
embassy with no more than seven servants in his train. ‘Tis said that
Homer had never more than one, Plato three, and Zeno, founder of the sect
of Stoics, none at all. Tiberius Gracchus was allowed but fivepence
halfpenny a day when employed as public minister about the public
affairs, and being at that time the greatest man of Rome.
CHAPTER LIII
OF A SAYING OF CAESAR
If we would sometimes bestow a little consideration upon ourselves, and
employ the time we spend in prying into other men’s actions, and
discovering things without us, in examining our own abilities we should
soon perceive of how infirm and decaying material this fabric of ours is
composed. Is it not a singular testimony of imperfection that we cannot
establish our satisfaction in any one thing, and that even our own fancy
and desire should deprive us of the power to choose what is most proper
and useful for us? A very good proof of this is the great dispute that
has ever been amongst the philosophers, of finding out man’s sovereign
good, that continues yet, and will eternally continue, without solution
or accord:
“Dum abest quod avemus, id exsuperare videtur
Caetera; post aliud, quum contigit illud, avemus,
Et sitis aequa tenet.”
[“While that which we desire is wanting, it seems to surpass all the
rest; then, when we have got it, we want something else; ‘tis ever
the same thirst”--Lucretius, iii. 1095.]
Whatever it is that falls into our knowledge and possession, we find that
it satisfies not, and we still pant after things to come and unknown,
inasmuch as those present do not suffice for us; not that, in my
judgment, they have not in them wherewith to do it, but because we seize
them with an unruly and immoderate haste:
“Nam quum vidit hic, ad victum qux flagitat usus,
Et per quae possent vitam consistere tutam,
Omnia jam ferme mortalibus esse parata;
Divitiis homines, et honore, et laude potentes
Aflluere, atque bona natorum excellere fama;
Nec minus esse domi cuiquam tamen anxia corda,
Atque animi ingratis vitam vexare querelis
Causam, quae infestis cogit saevire querelis,
Intellegit ibi; vitium vas efficere ipsum,
Omniaque, illius vitio, corrumpier intus,
Qux collata foris et commoda quomque venirent.”
[“For when he saw that almost all things necessarily required for
subsistence, and which may render life comfortable, are already
prepared to their hand, that men may abundantly attain wealth,
honour, praise, may rejoice in the reputation of their children, yet
that, notwithstanding, every one has none the less in his heart and
home anxieties and a mind enslaved by wearing complaints, he saw
that the vessel itself was in fault, and that all good things which
were brought into it from without were spoilt by its own
imperfections.”--Lucretius, vi. 9.]
Our appetite is irresolute and fickle; it can neither keep nor enjoy
anything with a good grace: and man concluding it to be the fault of the
things he is possessed of, fills himself with and feeds upon the idea of
things he neither knows nor understands, to which he devotes his hopes
and his desires, paying them all reverence and honour, according to the
saying of Caesar:
“Communi fit vitio naturae, ut invisis, latitantibus
atque incognitis rebus magis confidamas,
vehementiusque exterreamur.”
[“‘Tis the common vice of nature, that we at once repose most
confidence, and receive the greatest apprehensions, from things
unseen, concealed, and unknown.”--De Bello Civil, xi. 4.]
CHAPTER LIV
OF VAIN SUBTLETIES
There are a sort of little knacks and frivolous subtleties from which men
sometimes expect to derive reputation and applause: as poets, who compose
whole poems with every line beginning with the same letter; we see the
shapes of eggs, globes, wings, and hatchets cut out by the ancient Greeks
by the measure of their verses, making them longer or shorter, to
represent such or such a figure. Of this nature was his employment who
made it his business to compute into how many several orders the letters
of the alphabet might be transposed, and found out that incredible number
mentioned in Plutarch. I am mightily pleased with the humour of him,
[“Alexander, as may be seen in Quintil., Institut. Orat., lib.
ii., cap. 20, where he defines Maratarexvia to be a certain
unnecessary imitation of art, which really does neither good nor
harm, but is as unprofitable and ridiculous as was the labour of
that man who had so perfectly learned to cast small peas through the
eye of a needle at a good distance that he never missed one, and was
justly rewarded for it, as is said, by Alexander, who saw the
performance, with a bushel of peas.”--Coste.]
who having a man brought before him that had learned to throw a grain of
millet with such dexterity and assurance as never to miss the eye of a
needle; and being afterwards entreated to give something for the reward
of so rare a performance, he pleasantly, and in my opinion justly,
ordered a certain number of bushels of the same grain to be delivered to
him, that he might not want wherewith to exercise so famous an art. ‘Tis
a strong evidence of a weak judgment when men approve of things for their
being rare and new, or for their difficulty, where worth and usefulness
are not conjoined to recommend them.
I come just now from playing with my own family at who could find out the
most things that hold by their two extremities; as Sire, which is a title
given to the greatest person in the nation, the king, and also to the
vulgar, as merchants, but never to any degree of men between. The women
of great quality are called Dames, inferior gentlewomen, Demoiselles, and
the meanest sort of women, Dames, as the first. The cloth of state over
our tables is not permitted but in the palaces of princes and in taverns.
Democritus said, that gods and beasts had sharper sense than men, who are
of a middle form. The Romans wore the same habit at funerals and feasts.
It is most certain that an extreme fear and an extreme ardour of courage
equally trouble and relax the belly. The nickname of Trembling with
which they surnamed Sancho XII., king of Navarre, tells us that valour
will cause a trembling in the limbs as well as fear. Those who were
arming that king, or some other person, who upon the like occasion was
wont to be in the same disorder, tried to compose him by representing the
danger less he was going to engage himself in: “You understand me ill,”
said he, “for could my flesh know the danger my courage will presently
carry it into, it would sink down to the ground.” The faintness that
surprises us from frigidity or dislike in the exercises of Venus are also
occasioned by a too violent desire and an immoderate heat. Extreme
coldness and extreme heat boil and roast. Aristotle says, that sows of
lead will melt and run with cold and the rigour of winter just as with a
vehement heat. Desire and satiety fill all the gradations above and
below pleasure with pain. Stupidity and wisdom meet in the same centre
of sentiment and resolution, in the suffering of human accidents. The
wise control and triumph over ill, the others know it not: these last
are, as a man may say, on this side of accidents, the others are beyond
them, who after having well weighed and considered their qualities,
measured and judged them what they are, by virtue of a vigorous soul leap
out of their reach; they disdain and trample them underfoot, having a
solid and well-fortified soul, against which the darts of fortune, coming
to strike, must of necessity rebound and blunt themselves, meeting with a
body upon which they can fix no impression; the ordinary and middle
condition of men are lodged betwixt these two extremities, consisting of
such as perceive evils, feel them, and are not able to support them.
Infancy and decrepitude meet in the imbecility of the brain; avarice and
profusion in the same thirst and desire of getting.
A man may say with some colour of truth that there is an Abecedarian
ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes
after it: an ignorance that knowledge creates and begets, at the same
time that it despatches and destroys the first. Of mean understandings,
little inquisitive, and little instructed, are made good Christians, who
by reverence and obedience simply believe and are constant in their
belief. In the average understandings and the middle sort of capacities,
the error of opinion is begotten; they follow the appearance of the first
impression, and have some colour of reason on their side to impute our
walking on in the old beaten path to simplicity and stupidity, meaning us
who have not informed ourselves by study. The higher and nobler souls,
more solid and clear-sighted, make up another sort of true believers, who
by a long and religious investigation of truth, have obtained a clearer
and more penetrating light into the Scriptures, and have discovered the
mysterious and divine secret of our ecclesiastical polity; and yet we see
some, who by the middle step, have arrived at that supreme degree with
marvellous fruit and confirmation, as to the utmost limit of Christian
intelligence, and enjoy their victory with great spiritual consolation,
humble acknowledgment of the divine favour, reformation of manners, and
singular modesty. I do not intend with these to rank those others, who
to clear themselves from all suspicion of their former errors and to
satisfy us that they are sound and firm, render themselves extremely
indiscreet and unjust, in the carrying on our cause, and blemish it with
infinite reproaches of violence and oppression. The simple peasants are
good people, and so are the philosophers, or whatever the present age
calls them, men of strong and clear reason, and whose souls are enriched
with an ample instruction of profitable sciences. The mongrels who have
disdained the first form of the ignorance of letters, and have not been
able to attain to the other (sitting betwixt two stools, as I and a great
many more of us do), are dangerous, foolish, and importunate; these are
they that trouble the world. And therefore it is that I, for my own
part, retreat as much as I can towards the first and natural station,
whence I so vainly attempted to advance.
Popular and purely natural poesy
[“The term poesie populaire was employed, for the first time, in the
French language on this occasion. Montaigne created the expression,
and indicated its nature.”--Ampere.]
has in it certain artless graces, by which she may come into comparison
with the greatest beauty of poetry perfected by art: as we see in our
Gascon villanels and the songs that are brought us from nations that have
no knowledge of any manner of science, nor so much as the use of writing.
The middle sort of poesy betwixt these two is despised, of no value,
honour, or esteem.
But seeing that the path once laid open to the fancy, I have found, as it
commonly falls out, that what we have taken for a difficult exercise and
a rare subject, prove to be nothing so, and that after the invention is
once warm, it finds out an infinite number of parallel examples. I shall
only add this one--that, were these Essays of mine considerable enough to
deserve a critical judgment, it might then, I think, fall out that they
would not much take with common and vulgar capacities, nor be very
acceptable to the singular and excellent sort of men; the first would not
understand them enough, and the last too much; and so they may hover in
the middle region.
CHAPTER LV
OF SMELLS
It has been reported of some, as of Alexander the Great, that their sweat
exhaled an odoriferous smell, occasioned by some rare and extraordinary
constitution, of which Plutarch and others have been inquisitive into the
cause. But the ordinary constitution of human bodies is quite otherwise,
and their best and chiefest excellency is to be exempt from smell. Nay,
the sweetness even of the purest breath has nothing in it of greater
perfection than to be without any offensive smell, like those of
healthful children, which made Plautus say of a woman:
“Mulier tum bene olet, ubi nihil olet.”
[“She smells sweetest, who smells not at all.”
--Plautus, Mostel, i. 3, 116.]
And such as make use of fine exotic perfumes are with good reason to be
suspected of some natural imperfection which they endeavour by these
odours to conceal. To smell, though well, is to stink:
“Rides nos, Coracine, nil olentes
Malo, quam bene olere, nil olere.”
[“You laugh at us, Coracinus, because we are not scented; I would,
rather than smell well, not smell at all.”--Martial, vi. 55, 4.]
And elsewhere:
“Posthume, non bene olet, qui bene semper olet.”
[“Posthumus, he who ever smells well does not smell well.”
--Idem, ii. 12, 14.]
I am nevertheless a great lover of good smells, and as much abominate the
ill ones, which also I scent at a greater distance, I think, than other
men:
“Namque sagacius unus odoror,
Polypus, an gravis hirsutis cubet hircus in aliis
Quam canis acer, ubi latest sus.”
[“My nose is quicker to scent a fetid sore or a rank armpit, than a
dog to smell out the hidden sow.”--Horace, Epod., xii. 4.]
Of smells, the simple and natural seem to me the most pleasing. Let the
ladies look to that, for ‘tis chiefly their concern: amid the most
profound barbarism, the Scythian women, after bathing, were wont to
powder and crust their faces and all their bodies with a certain
odoriferous drug growing in their country, which being cleansed off, when
they came to have familiarity with men they were found perfumed and
sleek. ‘Tis not to be believed how strangely all sorts of odours cleave
to me, and how apt my skin is to imbibe them. He that complains of
nature that she has not furnished mankind with a vehicle to convey smells
to the nose had no reason; for they will do it themselves, especially to
me; my very mustachios, which are full, perform that office; for if I
stroke them but with my gloves or handkerchief, the smell will not out a
whole day; they manifest where I have been, and the close, luscious,
devouring, viscid melting kisses of youthful ardour in my wanton age left
a sweetness upon my lips for several hours after. And yet I have ever
found myself little subject to epidemic diseases, that are caught, either
by conversing with the sick or bred by the contagion of the air, and have
escaped from those of my time, of which there have been several sorts in
our cities and armies. We read of Socrates, that though he never
departed from Athens during the frequent plagues that infested the city,
he only was never infected.
Physicians might, I believe, extract greater utility from odours than
they do, for I have often observed that they cause an alteration in me
and work upon my spirits according to their several virtues; which makes
me approve of what is said, that the use of incense and perfumes in
churches, so ancient and so universally received in all nations and
religions, was intended to cheer us, and to rouse and purify the senses,
the better to fit us for contemplation.
I could have been glad, the better to judge of it, to have tasted the
culinary art of those cooks who had so rare a way of seasoning exotic
odours with the relish of meats; as it was particularly observed in the
service of the king of Tunis, who in our days--[Muley-Hassam, in 1543.]
--landed at Naples to have an interview with Charles the Emperor. His
dishes were larded with odoriferous drugs, to that degree of expense that
the cookery of one peacock and two pheasants amounted to a hundred ducats
to dress them after their fashion; and when the carver came to cut them
up, not only the dining-room, but all the apartments of his palace and
the adjoining streets were filled with an aromatic vapour which did not
presently vanish.
My chiefest care in choosing my lodgings is always to avoid a thick and
stinking air; and those beautiful cities, Venice and Paris, very much
lessen the kindness I have for them, the one by the offensive smell of
her marshes, and the other of her dirt.
CHAPTER LVI
OF PRAYERS
I propose formless and undetermined fancies, like those who publish
doubtful questions, to be after a disputed upon in the schools, not to
establish truth but to seek it; and I submit them to the judgments of
those whose office it is to regulate, not my writings and actions only,
but moreover my very thoughts. Let what I here set down meet with
correction or applause, it shall be of equal welcome and utility to me,
myself beforehand condemning as absurd and impious, if anything shall be
found, through ignorance or inadvertency, couched in this rhapsody,
contrary to the holy resolutions and prescriptions of the Catholic
Apostolic and Roman Church, into which I was born and in which I will
die. And yet, always submitting to the authority of their censure, which
has an absolute power over me, I thus rashly venture at everything, as in
treating upon this present subject.
I know not if or no I am wrong, but since, by a particular favour of the
divine bounty, a certain form of prayer has been prescribed and dictated
to us, word by word, from the mouth of God Himself, I have ever been of
opinion that we ought to have it in more frequent use than we yet have;
and if I were worthy to advise, at the sitting down to and rising from
our tables, at our rising from and going to bed, and in every particular
action wherein prayer is used, I would that Christians always make use of
the Lord’s Prayer, if not alone, yet at least always. The Church may
lengthen and diversify prayers, according to the necessity of our
instruction, for I know very well that it is always the same in substance
and the same thing: but yet such a privilege ought to be given to that
prayer, that the people should have it continually in their mouths; for
it is most certain that all necessary petitions are comprehended in it,
and that it is infinitely proper for all occasions. ‘Tis the only prayer
I use in all places and conditions, and which I still repeat instead of
changing; whence it also happens that I have no other so entirely by
heart as that.
It just now came into my mind, whence it is we should derive that error
of having recourse to God in all our designs and enterprises, to call Him
to our assistance in all sorts of affairs, and in all places where our
weakness stands in need of support, without considering whether the
occasion be just or otherwise; and to invoke His name and power, in what
state soever we are, or action we are engaged in, howsoever vicious. He
is indeed, our sole and unique protector, and can do all things for us:
but though He is pleased to honour us with this sweet paternal alliance,
He is, notwithstanding, as just as He is good and mighty; and more often
exercises His justice than His power, and favours us according to that,
and not according to our petitions.
Plato in his Laws, makes three sorts of belief injurious to the gods;
“that there are none; that they concern not themselves about our affairs;
that they never refuse anything to our vows, offerings, and sacrifices.”
The first of these errors (according to his opinion, never continued
rooted in any man from his infancy to his old age); the other two, he
confesses, men might be obstinate in.
God’s justice and His power are inseparable; ‘tis in vain we invoke His
power in an unjust cause. We are to have our souls pure and clean, at
that moment at least wherein we pray to Him, and purified from all
vicious passions; otherwise we ourselves present Him the rods wherewith
to chastise us; instead of repairing anything we have done amiss, we
double the wickedness and the offence when we offer to Him, to whom we
are to sue for pardon, an affection full of irreverence and hatred.
Which makes me not very apt to applaud those whom I observe to be so
frequent on their knees, if the actions nearest to the prayer do not give
me some evidence of amendment and reformation:
“Si, nocturnus adulter,
Tempora Santonico velas adoperta cucullo.”
[“If a night adulterer, thou coverest thy head with a Santonic
cowl.”--Juvenal, Sat., viii. 144.--The Santones were the people
who inhabited Saintonge in France, from whom the Romans derived the
use of hoods or cowls covering the head and face.]
And the practice of a man who mixes devotion with an execrable life seems
in some sort more to be condemned than that of a man conformable to his
own propension and dissolute throughout; and for that reason it is that
our Church denies admittance to and communion with men obstinate and
incorrigible in any notorious wickedness. We pray only by custom and for
fashion’s sake; or rather, we read or pronounce our prayers aloud, which
is no better than an hypocritical show of devotion; and I am scandalised
to see a man cross himself thrice at the Benedicite, and as often at
Grace (and the more, because it is a sign I have in great veneration and
continual use, even when I yawn), and to dedicate all the other hours of
the day to acts of malice, avarice, and injustice. One hour to God, the
rest to the devil, as if by composition and compensation. ‘Tis a wonder
to see actions so various in themselves succeed one another with such an
uniformity of method as not to interfere nor suffer any alteration, even
upon the very confines and passes from the one to the other. What a
prodigious conscience must that be that can be at quiet within itself
whilst it harbours under the same roof, with so agreeing and so calm a
society, both the crime and the judge?
A man whose whole meditation is continually working upon nothing but
impurity which he knows to be so odious to Almighty God, what can he say
when he comes to speak to Him? He draws back, but immediately falls into
a relapse. If the object of divine justice and the presence of his Maker
did, as he pretends, strike and chastise his soul, how short soever the
repentance might be, the very fear of offending the Infinite Majesty
would so often present itself to his imagination that he would soon see
himself master of those vices that are most natural and vehement in him.
But what shall we say of those who settle their whole course of life upon
the profit and emolument of sins, which they know to be mortal? How many
trades and vocations have we admitted and countenanced amongst us, whose
very essence is vicious? And he that, confessing himself to me,
voluntarily told me that he had all his lifetime professed and practised
a religion, in his opinion damnable and contrary to that he had in his
heart, only to preserve his credit and the honour of his employments, how
could his courage suffer so infamous a confession? What can men say to
the divine justice upon this subject?
Their repentance consisting in a visible and manifest reparation, they
lose the colour of alleging it both to God and man. Are they so impudent
as to sue for remission without satisfaction and without penitence?
I look upon these as in the same condition with the first: but the
obstinacy is not there so easy to be overcome. This contrariety and
volubility of opinion so sudden, so violent, that they feign, are a kind
of miracle to me: they present us with the state of an indigestible agony
of mind.
It seemed to me a fantastic imagination in those who, these late years
past, were wont to reproach every man they knew to be of any
extraordinary parts, and made profession of the Catholic religion, that
it was but outwardly; maintaining, moreover, to do him honour forsooth,
that whatever he might pretend to the contrary he could not but in his
heart be of their reformed opinion. An untoward disease, that a man
should be so riveted to his own belief as to fancy that others cannot
believe otherwise than as he does; and yet worse, that they should
entertain so vicious an opinion of such great parts as to think any man
so qualified, should prefer any present advantage of fortune to the
promises of eternal life and the menaces of eternal damnation. They may
believe me: could anything have tempted my youth, the ambition of the
danger and difficulties in the late commotions had not been the least
motives.
It is not without very good reason, in my opinion, that the Church
interdicts the promiscuous, indiscreet, and irreverent use of the holy
and divine Psalms, with which the Holy Ghost inspired King David. We
ought not to mix God in our actions, but with the highest reverence and
caution; that poesy is too holy to be put to no other use than to
exercise the lungs and to delight our ears; it ought to come from the
conscience, and not from the tongue. It is not fit that a prentice in
his shop, amongst his vain and frivolous thoughts, should be permitted to
pass away his time and divert himself with such sacred things. Neither
is it decent to see the Holy Book of the holy mysteries of our belief
tumbled up and down a hall or a kitchen they were formerly mysteries, but
are now become sports and recreations. ‘Tis a book too serious and too
venerable to be cursorily or slightly turned over: the reading of the
scripture ought to be a temperate and premeditated act, and to which men
should always add this devout preface, ‘sursum corda’, preparing even the
body to so humble and composed a gesture and countenance as shall
evidence a particular veneration and attention. Neither is it a book for
everyone to fist, but the study of select men set apart for that purpose,
and whom Almighty God has been pleased to call to that office and sacred
function: the wicked and ignorant grow worse by it. ‘Tis, not a story to
tell, but a history to revere, fear, and adore. Are not they then
pleasant men who think they have rendered this fit for the people’s
handling by translating it into the vulgar tongue? Does the
understanding of all therein contained only stick at words? Shall I
venture to say further, that by coming so near to understand a little,
they are much wider of the whole scope than before. A pure and simple
ignorance and wholly depending upon the exposition of qualified persons,
was far more learned and salutary than this vain and verbal knowledge,
which has only temerity and presumption.
And I do further believe that the liberty every one has taken to disperse
the sacred writ into so many idioms carries with it a great deal more of
danger than utility. The Jews, Mohammedans, and almost all other
peoples, have reverentially espoused the language wherein their mysteries
were first conceived, and have expressly, and not without colour of
reason, forbidden the alteration of them into any other. Are we assured
that in Biscay and in Brittany there are enough competent judges of this
affair to establish this translation into their own language? The
universal Church has not a more difficult and solemn judgment to make.
In preaching and speaking the interpretation is vague, free, mutable, and
of a piece by itself; so ‘tis not the same thing.
One of our Greek historians age justly censures the he lived in, because
the secrets of the Christian religion were dispersed into the hands of
every mechanic, to expound and argue upon, according to his own fancy,
and that we ought to be much ashamed, we who by God’s especial favour
enjoy the pure mysteries of piety, to suffer them to be profaned by the
ignorant rabble; considering that the Gentiles expressly forbad Socrates,
Plato, and the other sages to inquire into or so much as mention the
things committed to the priests of Delphi; and he says, moreover, that
the factions of princes upon theological subjects are armed not with zeal
but fury; that zeal springs from the divine wisdom and justice, and
governs itself with prudence and moderation, but degenerates into hatred
and envy, producing tares and nettles instead of corn and wine when
conducted by human passions. And it was truly said by another, who,
advising the Emperor Theodosius, told him that disputes did not so much
rock the schisms of the Church asleep, as it roused and animated
heresies; that, therefore, all contentions and dialectic disputations
were to be avoided, and men absolutely to acquiesce in the prescriptions
and formulas of faith established by the ancients. And the Emperor
Andronicus having overheard some great men at high words in his palace
with Lapodius about a point of ours of great importance, gave them so
severe a check as to threaten to cause them to be thrown into the river
if they did not desist. The very women and children nowadays take upon
them to lecture the oldest and most experienced men about the
ecclesiastical laws; whereas the first of those of Plato forbids them to
inquire so much as into the civil laws, which were to stand instead of
divine ordinances; and, allowing the old men to confer amongst themselves
or with the magistrate about those things, he adds, provided it be not in
the presence of young or profane persons.
A bishop has left in writing that at the other end of the world there is
an isle, by the ancients called Dioscorides, abundantly fertile in all
sorts of trees and fruits, and of an exceedingly healthful air; the
inhabitants of which are Christians, having churches and altars, only
adorned with crosses without any other images, great observers of fasts
and feasts, exact payers of their tithes to the priests, and so chaste,
that none of them is permitted to have to do with more than one woman in
his life--[What Osorius says is that these people only had one wife at a
time.]--as to the rest, so content with their condition, that environed
with the sea they know nothing of navigation, and so simple that they
understand not one syllable of the religion they profess and wherein they
are so devout: a thing incredible to such as do not know that the Pagans,
who are so zealous idolaters, know nothing more of their gods than their
bare names and their statues. The ancient beginning of ‘Menalippus’, a
tragedy of Euripides, ran thus:
“O Jupiter! for that name alone
Of what thou art to me is known.”
I have also known in my time some men’s writings found fault with for
being purely human and philosophical, without any mixture of theology;
and yet, with some show of reason, it might, on the contrary, be said
that the divine doctrine, as queen and regent of the rest, better keeps
her state apart, that she ought to be sovereign throughout, not
subsidiary and suffragan, and that, peradventure, grammatical,
rhetorical, logical examples may elsewhere be more suitably chosen, as
also the material for the stage, games, and public entertainments, than
from so sacred a matter; that divine reasons are considered with greater
veneration and attention by themselves, and in their own proper style,
than when mixed with and adapted to human discourse; that it is a fault
much more often observed that the divines write too humanly, than that
the humanists write not theologically enough. Philosophy, says St.
Chrysostom, has long been banished the holy schools, as an handmaid
altogether useless and thought unworthy to look, so much as in passing
by the door, into the sanctuary of the holy treasures of the celestial
doctrine; that the human way of speaking is of a much lower form and
ought not to adopt for herself the dignity and majesty of divine
eloquence. Let who will ‘verbis indisciplinatis’ talk of fortune,
destiny, accident, good and evil hap, and other suchlike phrases,
according to his own humour; I for my part propose fancies merely human
and merely my own, and that simply as human fancies, and separately
considered, not as determined by any decree from heaven, incapable of
doubt or dispute; matter of opinion, not matter of faith; things which I
discourse of according to my own notions, not as I believe, according to
God; after a laical, not clerical, and yet always after a very religious
manner, as children prepare their exercises, not to instruct but to be
instructed.
And might it not be said, that an edict enjoining all people but such as
are public professors of divinity, to be very reserved in writing of
religion, would carry with it a very good colour of utility and justice
--and to me, amongst the rest peradventure, to hold my prating? I have
been told that even those who are not of our Church nevertheless amongst
themselves expressly forbid the name of God to be used in common
discourse, nor so much even by way of interjection, exclamation,
assertion of a truth, or comparison; and I think them in the right: upon
what occasion soever we call upon God to accompany and assist us, it
ought always to be done with the greatest reverence and devotion.
There is, as I remember, a passage in Xenophon where he tells us that we
ought so much the more seldom to call upon God, by how much it is hard to
compose our souls to such a degree of calmness, patience, and devotion as
it ought to be in at such a time; otherwise our prayers are not only vain
and fruitless, but vicious: “forgive us,” we say, “our trespasses, as we
forgive them that trespass against us”; what do we mean by this petition
but that we present to God a soul free from all rancour and revenge? And
yet we make nothing of invoking God’s assistance in our vices, and
inviting Him into our unjust designs:
“Quae, nisi seductis, nequeas committere divis”
[“Which you can only impart to the gods, when you have gained them
over.”--Persius, ii. 4.]
the covetous man prays for the conservation of his vain and superfluous
riches; the ambitious for victory and the good conduct of his fortune;
the thief calls Him to his assistance, to deliver him from the dangers
and difficulties that obstruct his wicked designs, or returns Him thanks
for the facility he has met with in cutting a man’s throat; at the door
of the house men are going to storm or break into by force of a petard,
they fall to prayers for success, their intentions and hopes of cruelty,
avarice, and lust.
“Hoc igitur, quo to Jovis aurem impellere tentas,
Dic agedum Staio: ‘proh Jupiter! O bone, clamet,
Jupiter!’ At sese non clamet Jupiter ipse.”
[“This therefore, with which you seek to draw the ear of Jupiter,
say to Staius. ‘O Jupiter! O good Jupiter!’ let him cry. Think
you Jupiter himself would not cry out upon it?”--Persius, ii. 21.]
Marguerite, Queen of Navarre,--[In the Heptameron.]--tells of a young
prince, who, though she does not name him, is easily enough by his great
qualities to be known, who going upon an amorous assignation to lie with
an advocate’s wife of Paris, his way thither being through a church, he
never passed that holy place going to or returning from his pious
exercise, but he always kneeled down to pray. Wherein he would employ
the divine favour, his soul being full of such virtuous meditations,
I leave others to judge, which, nevertheless, she instances for a
testimony of singular devotion. But this is not the only proof we have
that women are not very fit to treat of theological affairs.
A true prayer and religious reconciling of ourselves to Almighty God
cannot enter into an impure soul, subject at the very time to the
dominion of Satan. He who calls God to his assistance whilst in a course
of vice, does as if a cut-purse should call a magistrate to help him, or
like those who introduce the name of God to the attestation of a lie.
“Tacito mala vota susurro
Concipimus.”
[“We whisper our guilty prayers.”---Lucan, v. 104.]
There are few men who durst publish to the world the prayers they make to
Almighty God:
“Haud cuivis promptum est, murmurque, humilesque susurros
Tollere de templis, et aperto vivere voto”
[“‘Tis not convenient for every one to bring the prayers he mutters
out of the temple, and to give his wishes to the public ear.
--“Persius, ii. 6.]
and this is the reason why the Pythagoreans would have them always public
and heard by every one, to the end they might not prefer indecent or
unjust petitions as this man:
“Clare quum dixit, Apollo!
Labra movet, metuens audiri: Pulcra Laverna,
Da mihi fallere, da justum sanctumque videri;
Noctem peccatis, et fraudibus objice nubem.”
[“When he has clearly said Apollo! he moves his lips, fearful to be
heard; he murmurs: O fair Laverna, grant me the talent to deceive;
grant me to appear holy and just; shroud my sins with night, and
cast a cloud over my frauds.”--Horace, Ep., i. 16, 59.--(Laverna
was the goddess of thieves.)]
The gods severely punished the wicked prayers of OEdipus in granting
them: he had prayed that his children might amongst themselves determine
the succession to his throne by arms, and was so miserable as to see
himself taken at his word. We are not to pray that all things may go as
we would have them, but as most concurrent with prudence.
We seem, in truth, to make use of our prayers as of a kind of jargon, and
as those do who employ holy words about sorceries and magical operations;
and as if we reckoned the benefit we are to reap from them as depending
upon the contexture, sound, and jingle of words, or upon the grave
composing of the countenance. For having the soul contaminated with
concupiscence, not touched with repentance, or comforted by any late
reconciliation with God, we go to present Him such words as the memory
suggests to the tongue, and hope from thence to obtain the remission of
our sins. There is nothing so easy, so sweet, and so favourable, as the
divine law: it calls and invites us to her, guilty and abominable as we
are; extends her arms and receives us into her bosom, foul and polluted
as we at present are, and are for the future to be. But then, in return,
we are to look upon her with a respectful eye; we are to receive this
pardon with all gratitude and submission, and for that instant at least,
wherein we address ourselves to her, to have the soul sensible of the
ills we have committed, and at enmity with those passions that seduced us
to offend her; neither the gods nor good men (says Plato) will accept the
present of a wicked man:
“Immunis aram si terigit manus,
Non sumptuosa blandior hostia
Mollivit aversos Penates
Farre pio et saliente mica.”
[“If a pure hand has touched the altar, the pious offering of a
small cake and a few grains of salt will appease the offended gods
more effectually than costly sacrifices.”
--Horace, Od., iii. 23, 17.]
CHAPTER LVII
OF AGE
I cannot allow of the way in which we settle for ourselves the duration
of our life. I see that the sages contract it very much in comparison of
the common opinion: “what,” said the younger Cato to those who would stay
his hand from killing himself, “am I now of an age to be reproached that
I go out of the world too soon?” And yet he was but eight-and-forty
years old. He thought that to be a mature and advanced age, considering
how few arrive unto it. And such as, soothing their thoughts with I know
not what course of nature, promise to themselves some years beyond it,
could they be privileged from the infinite number of accidents to which
we are by a natural subjection exposed, they might have some reason so to
do. What am idle conceit is it to expect to die of a decay of strength,
which is the effect of extremest age, and to propose to ourselves no
shorter lease of life than that, considering it is a kind of death of all
others the most rare and very seldom seen? We call that only a natural
death; as if it were contrary to nature to see a man break his neck with
a fall, be drowned in shipwreck, be snatched away with a pleurisy or the
plague, and as if our ordinary condition did not expose us to these
inconveniences. Let us no longer flatter ourselves with these fine
words; we ought rather, peradventure, to call that natural which is
general, common, and universal.
To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular, and,
therefore, so much less natural than the others; ‘tis the last and
extremest sort of dying: and the more remote, the less to be hoped for.
It is, indeed, the bourn beyond which we are not to pass, and which the
law of nature has set as a limit, not to be exceeded; but it is, withal,
a privilege she is rarely seen to give us to last till then. ‘Tis a
lease she only signs by particular favour, and it may be to one only in
the space of two or three ages, and then with a pass to boot, to carry
him through all the traverses and difficulties she has strewed in the way
of this long career. And therefore my opinion is, that when once forty
years we should consider it as an age to which very few arrive. For
seeing that men do not usually proceed so far, it is a sign that we are
pretty well advanced; and since we have exceeded the ordinary bounds,
which is the just measure of life, we ought not to expect to go much
further; having escaped so many precipices of death, whereinto we have
seen so many other men fall, we should acknowledge that so extraordinary
a fortune as that which has hitherto rescued us from those eminent
perils, and kept us alive beyond the ordinary term of living, is not like
to continue long.
‘Tis a fault in our very laws to maintain this error: these say that a
man is not capable of managing his own estate till he be five-and-twenty
years old, whereas he will have much ado to manage his life so long.
Augustus cut off five years from the ancient Roman standard, and declared
that thirty years old was sufficient for a judge. Servius Tullius
superseded the knights of above seven-and-forty years of age from the
fatigues of war; Augustus dismissed them at forty-five; though methinks
it seems a little unreasonable that men should be sent to the fireside
till five-and-fifty or sixty years of age. I should be of opinion that
our vocation and employment should be as far as possible extended for the
public good: I find the fault on the other side, that they do not employ
us early enough. This emperor was arbiter of the whole world at
nineteen, and yet would have a man to be thirty before he could be fit to
determine a dispute about a gutter.
For my part, I believe our souls are adult at twenty as much as they are
ever like to be, and as capable then as ever. A soul that has not by
that time given evident earnest of its force and virtue will never after
come to proof. The natural qualities and virtues produce what they have
of vigorous and fine, within that term or never,
“Si l’espine rion picque quand nai,
A pene que picque jamai,”
[“If the thorn does not prick at its birth,
‘twill hardly ever prick at all.”]
as they say in Dauphin.
Of all the great human actions I ever heard or read of, of what sort
soever, I have observed, both in former ages and our own, more were
performed before the age of thirty than after; and this ofttimes in the
very lives of the same men. May I not confidently instance in those of
Hannibal and his great rival Scipio? The better half of their lives they
lived upon the glory they had acquired in their youth; great men after,
‘tis true, in comparison of others; but by no means in comparison of
themselves. As to my own particular, I do certainly believe that since
that age, both my understanding and my constitution have rather decayed
than improved, and retired rather than advanced. ‘Tis possible, that
with those who make the best use of their time, knowledge and experience
may increase with their years; but vivacity, promptitude, steadiness, and
other pieces of us, of much greater importance, and much more essentially
our own, languish and decay:
“Ubi jam validis quassatum est viribus aevi
Corpus, et obtusis ceciderunt viribus artus,
Claudicat ingenium, delirat linguaque, mensque.”
[“When once the body is shaken by the violence of time,
blood and vigour ebbing away, the judgment halts,
the tongue and the mind dote.”--Lucretius, iii. 452.]
Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind; and I have
seen enough who have got a weakness in their brains before either in
their legs or stomach; and by how much the more it is a disease of no
great pain to the sufferer, and of obscure symptoms, so much greater is
the danger. For this reason it is that I complain of our laws, not that
they keep us too long to our work, but that they set us to work too late.
For the frailty of life considered, and to how many ordinary and natural
rocks it is exposed, one ought not to give up so large a portion of it to
childhood, idleness, and apprenticeship.
[Which Cotton thus renders: “Birth though noble, ought not to share
so large a vacancy, and so tedious a course of education.” Florio
(1613) makes the passage read as-follows: “Methinks that,
considering the weakness of our life, and seeing the infinite number
of ordinary rocks and natural dangers it is subject unto, we should
not, so soon as we come into the world, allot so large a share
thereof unto unprofitable wantonness in youth, ill-breeding
idleness, and slow-learning prentisage.”]
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
Advise to choose weapons of the shortest sort
An ignorance that knowledge creates and begets
Ashamed to lay out as much thought and study upon it
Can neither keep nor enjoy anything with a good grace
Change of fashions
Chess: this idle and childish game
Death is terrible to Cicero, coveted by Cato
Death of old age the most rare and very seldom seen
Diogenes, esteeming us no better than flies or bladders
Do not to pray that all things may go as we would have them
Excel above the common rate in frivolous things
Expresses more contempt and condemnation than the other
Fancy that others cannot believe otherwise than as he does
Gradations above and below pleasure
Greatest apprehensions, from things unseen, concealed
He did not think mankind worthy of a wise man’s concern
Home anxieties and a mind enslaved by wearing complaints
How infirm and decaying material this fabric of ours is
I do not willingly alight when I am once on horseback
Led by the ears by this charming harmony of words
Little knacks and frivolous subtleties
Men approve of things for their being rare and new
Must of necessity walk in the steps of another
Natural death the most rare and very seldom seen
Not to instruct but to be instructed.
Present Him such words as the memory suggests to the tongue
Psalms of King David: promiscuous, indiscreet
Rhetoric: an art to flatter and deceive
Rhetoric: to govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble
Sitting betwixt two stools
Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind
Stupidity and facility natural to the common people
The Bible: the wicked and ignorant grow worse by it.
The faintness that surprises in the exercises of Venus
Thucydides: which was the better wrestler
To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular
To make little things appear great was his profession
To smell, though well, is to stink
Valour will cause a trembling in the limbs as well as fear
Viscid melting kisses of youthful ardour in my wanton age
We can never be despised according to our full desert
When we have got it, we want something else
Women who paint, pounce, and plaster up their ruins
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 9.
I. Of the inconstancy of our actions.
II. Of drunkenness.
III. A custom of the Isle of Cea.
IV. To-morrow’s a new day.
V. Of conscience.
VI. Use makes perfect.
ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE
BOOK THE SECOND
CHAPTER I
OF THE INCONSTANCY OF OUR ACTIONS
Such as make it their business to oversee human actions, do not find
themselves in anything so much perplexed as to reconcile them and bring
them into the world’s eye with the same lustre and reputation; for they
commonly so strangely contradict one another that it seems impossible
they should proceed from one and the same person. We find the younger
Marius one while a son of Mars and another a son of Venus. Pope Boniface
VIII. entered, it is said, into his Papacy like a fox, behaved himself in
it like a lion, and died like a dog; and who could believe it to be the
same Nero, the perfect image of all cruelty, who, having the sentence of
a condemned man brought to him to sign, as was the custom, cried out,
“O that I had never been taught to write!” so much it went to his heart
to condemn a man to death. All story is full of such examples, and every
man is able to produce so many to himself, or out of his own practice or
observation, that I sometimes wonder to see men of understanding give
themselves the trouble of sorting these pieces, considering that
irresolution appears to me to be the most common and manifest vice of our
nature witness the famous verse of the player Publius:
“Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest.”
[“‘Tis evil counsel that will admit no change.”
--Pub. Mim., ex Aul. Gell., xvii. 14.]
There seems some reason in forming a judgment of a man from the most
usual methods of his life; but, considering the natural instability of
our manners and opinions, I have often thought even the best authors a
little out in so obstinately endeavouring to make of us any constant and
solid contexture; they choose a general air of a man, and according to
that interpret all his actions, of which, if they cannot bend some to a
uniformity with the rest, they are presently imputed to dissimulation.
Augustus has escaped them, for there was in him so apparent, sudden, and
continual variety of actions all the whole course of his life, that he
has slipped away clear and undecided from the most daring critics. I can
more hardly believe a man’s constancy than any other virtue, and believe
nothing sooner than the contrary. He that would judge of a man in detail
and distinctly, bit by bit, would oftener be able to speak the truth. It
is a hard matter, from all antiquity, to pick out a dozen men who have
formed their lives to one certain and constant course, which is the
principal design of wisdom; for to comprise it all in one word, says one
of the ancients, and to contract all the rules of human life into one,
“it is to will, and not to will, always one and the same thing: I will
not vouchsafe,” says he, “to add, provided the will be just, for if it be
not just, it is impossible it should be always one.” I have indeed
formerly learned that vice is nothing but irregularity, and want of
measure, and therefore ‘tis impossible to fix constancy to it. ‘Tis a
saying of. Demosthenes, “that the beginning oh all virtue is
consultation and deliberation; the end and perfection, constancy.” If we
would resolve on any certain course by reason, we should pitch upon the
best, but nobody has thought on’t:
“Quod petit, spernit; repetit, quod nuper omisit;
AEstuat, et vitae disconvenit ordine toto.”
[“That which he sought he despises; what he lately lost, he seeks
again. He fluctuates, and is inconsistent in the whole order of
life.”--Horace, Ep., i. I, 98.]
Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, be
it to the left or right, upwards or downwards, according as we are wafted
by the breath of occasion. We never meditate what we would have till the
instant we have a mind to have it; and change like that little creature
which receives its colour from what it is laid upon. What we but just
now proposed to ourselves we immediately alter, and presently return
again to it; ‘tis nothing but shifting and inconsistency:
“Ducimur, ut nervis alienis mobile lignum.”
[“We are turned about like the top with the thong of others.”
--Idem, Sat., ii. 7, 82.]
We do not go, we are driven; like things that float, now leisurely, then
with violence, according to the gentleness or rapidity of the current:
“Nonne videmus,
Quid sibi quisque velit, nescire, et quaerere semper
Commutare locum, quasi onus deponere possit?”
[“Do we not see them, uncertain what they want, and always asking
for something new, as if they could get rid of the burthen.”
--Lucretius, iii. 1070.]
Every day a new whimsy, and our humours keep motion with the time.
“Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse
Juppiter auctificas lustravit lumine terras.”
[“Such are the minds of men, that they change as the light with
which father Jupiter himself has illumined the increasing earth.”
--Cicero, Frag. Poet, lib. x.]
We fluctuate betwixt various inclinations; we will nothing freely,
nothing absolutely, nothing constantly. In any one who had prescribed
and established determinate laws and rules in his head for his own
conduct, we should perceive an equality of manners, an order and an
infallible relation of one thing or action to another, shine through his
whole life; Empedocles observed this discrepancy in the Agrigentines,
that they gave themselves up to delights, as if every day was their last,
and built as if they had been to live for ever. The judgment would not
be hard to make, as is very evident in the younger Cato; he who therein
has found one step, it will lead him to all the rest; ‘tis a harmony of
very according sounds, that cannot jar. But with us ‘t is quite
contrary; every particular action requires a particular judgment. The
surest way to steer, in my opinion, would be to take our measures from
the nearest allied circumstances, without engaging in a longer
inquisition, or without concluding any other consequence. I was told,
during the civil disorders of our poor kingdom, that a maid, hard by the
place where I then was, had thrown herself out of a window to avoid being
forced by a common soldier who was quartered in the house; she was not
killed by the fall, and therefore, repeating her attempt would have cut
her own throat, had she not been prevented; but having, nevertheless,
wounded herself to some show of danger, she voluntarily confessed that
the soldier had not as yet importuned her otherwise; than by courtship,
earnest solicitation, and presents; but that she was afraid that in the
end he would have proceeded to violence, all which she delivered with
such a countenance and accent, and withal embrued in her own blood, the
highest testimony of her virtue, that she appeared another Lucretia; and
yet I have since been very well assured that both before and after she
was not so difficult a piece. And, according to my host’s tale in
Ariosto, be as handsome a man and as worthy a gentleman as you will, do
not conclude too much upon your mistress’s inviolable chastity for having
been repulsed; you do not know but she may have a better stomach to your
muleteer.
Antigonus, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favour
and esteem for his valour, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him
of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished,
and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than
before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: “Yourself, sir,”
replied the other, “by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of
my life.” Lucullus’s soldier having been rifled by the enemy, performed
upon them in revenge a brave exploit, by which having made himself a
gainer, Lucullus, who had conceived a good opinion of him from that
action, went about to engage him in some enterprise of very great danger,
with all the plausible persuasions and promises he could think of;
“Verbis, quae timido quoque possent addere mentem”
[“Words which might add courage to any timid man.”
--Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 1, 2.]
“Pray employ,” answered he, “some miserable plundered soldier in that
affair”:
“Quantumvis rusticus, ibit,
Ibit eo, quo vis, qui zonam perdidit, inquit;”
[“Some poor fellow, who has lost his purse, will go whither you
wish, said he.”--Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 39.]
and flatly refused to go. When we read that Mahomet having furiously
rated Chasan, Bassa of the Janissaries, because he had seen the
Hungarians break into his squadrons, and himself behave very ill in the
business, and that Chasan, instead of any other answer, rushed furiously
alone, scimitar in hand, into the first body of the enemy, where he was
presently cut to pieces, we are not to look upon that action,
peradventure, so much as vindication as a turn of mind, not so much
natural valour as a sudden despite. The man you saw yesterday so
adventurous and brave, you must not think it strange to see him as great
a poltroon the next: anger, necessity, company, wine, or the sound of the
trumpet had roused his spirits; this is no valour formed and established
by reason, but accidentally created by such circumstances, and therefore
it is no wonder if by contrary circumstances it appear quite another
thing.
These supple variations and contradictions so manifest in us, have given
occasion to some to believe that man has two souls; other two distinct
powers that always accompany and incline us, the one towards good and the
other towards ill, according to their own nature and propension; so
abrupt a variety not being imaginable to flow from one and the same
source.
For my part, the puff of every accident not only carries me along with it
according to its own proclivity, but moreover I discompose and trouble
myself by the instability of my own posture; and whoever will look
narrowly into his own bosom, will hardly find himself twice in the same
condition. I give to my soul sometimes one face and sometimes another,
according to the side I turn her to. If I speak variously of myself, it
is because I consider myself variously; all the contrarieties are there
to be found in one corner or another; after one fashion or another:
bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate;
ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant;
liberal, covetous, and prodigal: I find all this in myself, more or less,
according as I turn myself about; and whoever will sift himself to the
bottom, will find in himself, and even in his own judgment, this
volubility and discordance. I have nothing to say of myself entirely,
simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion. ‘Distinguo’ is the
most universal member of my logic. Though I always intend to speak well
of good things, and rather to interpret such things as fall out in the
best sense than otherwise, yet such is the strangeness of our condition,
that we are often pushed on to do well even by vice itself, if well-doing
were not judged by the intention only. One gallant action, therefore,
ought not to conclude a man valiant; if a man were brave indeed, he would
be always so, and upon all occasions. If it were a habit of valour and
not a sally, it would render a man equally resolute in all accidents; the
same alone as in company; the same in lists as in a battle: for, let them
say what they will, there is not one valour for the pavement and another
for the field; he would bear a sickness in his bed as bravely as a wound
in the field, and no more fear death in his own house than at an assault.
We should not then see the same man charge into a breach with a brave
assurance, and afterwards torment himself like a woman for the loss of a
trial at law or the death of a child; when, being an infamous coward, he
is firm in the necessities of poverty; when he shrinks at the sight of a
barber’s razor, and rushes fearless upon the swords of the enemy, the
action is commendable, not the man.
Many of the Greeks, says Cicero,--[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 27.]--
cannot endure the sight of an enemy, and yet are courageous in sickness;
the Cimbrians and Celtiberians quite contrary;
“Nihil enim potest esse aequabile,
quod non a certa ratione proficiscatur.”
[“Nothing can be regular that does not proceed from a fixed ground
of reason.”--Idem, ibid., c. 26.]
No valour can be more extreme in its kind than that of Alexander: but it
is of but one kind, nor full enough throughout, nor universal.
Incomparable as it is, it has yet some blemishes; of which his being so
often at his wits’ end upon every light suspicion of his captains
conspiring against his life, and the carrying himself in that inquisition
with so much vehemence and indiscreet injustice, and with a fear that
subverted his natural reason, is one pregnant instance. The
superstition, also, with which he was so much tainted, carries along with
it some image of pusillanimity; and the excess of his penitence for the
murder of Clytus is also a testimony of the unevenness of his courage.
All we perform is no other than a cento, as a man may say, of several
pieces, and we would acquire honour by a false title. Virtue cannot be
followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some
other purpose, she presently pulls it away again. ‘Tis a vivid and
strong tincture which, when the soul has once thoroughly imbibed it, will
not out but with the piece. And, therefore, to make a right judgment of
a man, we are long and very observingly to follow his trace: if constancy
does not there stand firm upon her own proper base,
“Cui vivendi via considerata atque provisa est,”
[“If the way of his life is thoroughly considered and traced out.”
--Cicero, Paradox, v. 1.]
if the variety of occurrences makes him alter his pace (his path, I mean,
for the pace may be faster or slower) let him go; such an one runs before
the wind, “Avau le dent,” as the motto of our Talebot has it.
‘Tis no wonder, says one of the ancients, that chance has so great a
dominion over us, since it is by chance we live. It is not possible for
any one who has not designed his life for some certain end, it is
impossible for any one to arrange the pieces, who has not the whole form
already contrived in his imagination. Of what use are colours to him
that knows not what he is to paint? No one lays down a certain design
for his life, and we only deliberate thereof by pieces. The archer ought
first to know at what he is to aim, and then accommodate his arm, bow,
string, shaft, and motion to it; our counsels deviate and wander, because
not levelled to any determinate end. No wind serves him who addresses
his voyage to no certain, port. I cannot acquiesce in the judgment given
by one in the behalf of Sophocles, who concluded him capable of the
management of domestic affairs, against the accusation of his son, from
having read one of his tragedies.
Neither do I allow of the conjecture of the Parians, sent to regulate the
Milesians sufficient for such a consequence as they from thence derived
coming to visit the island, they took notice of such grounds as were best
husbanded, and such country-houses as were best governed; and having
taken the names of the owners, when they had assembled the citizens, they
appointed these farmers for new governors and magistrates; concluding
that they, who had been so provident in their own private concerns, would
be so of the public too. We are all lumps, and of so various and inform
a contexture, that every piece plays, every moment, its own game, and
there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and
others:
“Magnam rem puta, unum hominem agere.”
[“Esteem it a great thing always to act as one and the same
man.”--Seneca, Ep., 150.]
Since ambition can teach man valour, temperance, and liberality, and even
justice too; seeing that avarice can inspire the courage of a shop-boy,
bred and nursed up in obscurity and ease, with the assurance to expose
himself so far from the fireside to the mercy of the waves and angry
Neptune in a frail boat; that she further teaches discretion and
prudence; and that even Venus can inflate boys under the discipline of
the rod with boldness and resolution, and infuse masculine courage into
the heart of tender virgins in their mothers’ arms:
“Hac duce, custodes furtim transgressa jacentes,
Ad juvenem tenebris sola puella venit:”
[“She leading, the maiden, furtively passing by the recumbent
guards, goes alone in the darkness to the youth.”
--Tibullus, ii. 2, 75.]
‘tis not all the understanding has to do, simply to judge us by our
outward actions; it must penetrate the very soul, and there discover by
what springs the motion is guided. But that being a high and hazardous
undertaking, I could wish that fewer would attempt it.
CHAPTER II
OF DRUNKENNESS
The world is nothing but variety and disemblance, vices are all alike, as
they are vices, and peradventure the Stoics understand them so; but
although they are equally vices, yet they are not all equal vices; and he
who has transgressed the ordinary bounds a hundred paces:
“Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum,”
[“Beyond or within which the right cannot exist.”
--Horace, Sat., i, 1, 107.]
should not be in a worse condition than he that has advanced but ten, is
not to be believed; or that sacrilege is not worse than stealing a
cabbage:
“Nec vincet ratio hoc, tantumdem ut peccet, idemque,
Qui teneros caules alieni fregerit horti,
Et qui nocturnus divum sacra legerit.”
There is in this as great diversity as in anything whatever. The
confounding of the order and measure of sins is dangerous: murderers,
traitors, and tyrants get too much by it, and it is not reasonable they
should flatter their consciences, because another man is idle,
lascivious, or not assiduous at his devotion. Every one overrates the
offence of his companions, but extenuates his own. Our very instructors
themselves rank them sometimes, in my opinion, very ill. As Socrates
said that the principal office of wisdom was to distinguish good from
evil, we, the best of whom are vicious, ought also to say the same of the
science of distinguishing betwixt vice and vice, without which, and that
very exactly performed, the virtuous and the wicked will remain
confounded and unrecognised.
Now, amongst the rest, drunkenness seems to me to be a gross and brutish
vice. The soul has greater part in the rest, and there are some vices
that have something, if a man may so say, of generous in them; there are
vices wherein there is a mixture of knowledge, diligence, valour,
prudence, dexterity, and address; this one is totally corporeal and
earthly. And the rudest nation this day in Europe is that alone where it
is in fashion. Other vices discompose the understanding: this totally
overthrows it and renders the body stupid:
“Cum vini vis penetravit . . .
Consequitur gravitas membrorum, praepediuntur
Crura vacillanti, tardescit lingua, madet mens,
Nant oculi; clamor, singultus, jurgia, gliscunt.”
[“When the power of wine has penetrated us, a heaviness of the limbs
follows, the legs of the tottering person are impeded; the tongue
grows torpid, the mind is dimmed, the eyes swim; noise, hiccup, and
quarrels arise.--“Lucretius, i. 3, 475.]
The worst state of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and
government of himself. And ‘tis said amongst other things upon this
subject, that, as the must fermenting in a vessel, works up to the top
whatever it has in the bottom, so wine, in those who have drunk beyond
measure, vents the most inward secrets:
“Tu sapientum
Curas et arcanum jocoso
Consilium retegis Lyaeo.”
[“Thou disclosest to the merry Lyacus the cares and secret
counsel of the wise.”--Horace, Od., xxi. 1, 114.]
[Lyacus, a name given to Bacchus.]
Josephus tells us that by giving an ambassador the enemy had sent to him
his full dose of liquor, he wormed out his secrets. And yet, Augustus,
committing the most inward secrets of his affairs to Lucius Piso, who
conquered Thrace, never found him faulty in the least, no more than
Tiberias did Cossus, with whom he intrusted his whole counsels, though we
know they were both so given to drink that they have often been fain to
carry both the one and the other drunk out of the Senate:
“Hesterno inflatum venas ut semper, Lyaeo.”
[“Their veins full, as usual, of yesterday’s wine.”
--Virgil, Egl., vi. 15.]
And the design of killing Caesar was as safely communicated to Cimber,
though he would often be drunk, as to Cassius, who drank nothing but
water.
[As to which Cassius pleasantly said: “What, shall I bear
a tyrant, I who cannot bear wine?”]
We see our Germans, when drunk as the devil, know their post, remember
the word, and keep to their ranks:
“Nec facilis victoria de madidis, et
Blaesis, atque mero titubantibus.”
[“Nor is a victory easily obtained over men so drunk, they can
scarce speak or stand.”--Juvenal, Sat., xv. 47.]
I could not have believed there had been so profound, senseless, and dead
a degree of drunkenness had I not read in history that Attalus having,
to put a notable affront upon him, invited to supper the same Pausanias,
who upon the very same occasion afterwards killed Philip of Macedon,
a king who by his excellent qualities gave sufficient testimony of his
education in the house and company of Epaminondas, made him drink to such
a pitch that he could after abandon his beauty, as of a hedge strumpet,
to the muleteers and servants of the basest office in the house. And I
have been further told by a lady whom I highly honour and esteem, that
near Bordeaux and about Castres where she lives, a country woman, a
widow of chaste repute, perceiving in herself the first symptoms of
breeding, innocently told her neighbours that if she had a husband she
should think herself with child; but the causes of suspicion every day
more and more increasing, and at last growing up to a manifest proof, the
poor woman was reduced to the necessity of causing it to be proclaimed in
her parish church, that whoever had done that deed and would frankly
confess it, she did not only promise to forgive, but moreover to marry
him, if he liked the motion; whereupon a young fellow that served her in
the quality of a labourer, encouraged by this proclamation, declared that
he had one holiday found her, having taken too much of the bottle, so
fast asleep by the chimney and in so indecent a posture, that he could
conveniently do his business without waking her; and they yet live
together man and wife.
It is true that antiquity has not much decried this vice; the writings
even of several philosophers speak very tenderly of it, and even amongst
the Stoics there are some who advise folks to give themselves sometimes
the liberty to drink, nay, to drunkenness, to refresh the soul:
“Hoc quoque virtutum quondam certamine, magnum
Socratem palmam promeruisse ferunt.”
[“In this trial of power formerly they relate that the great
Socrates deserved the palm.”--Cornet. Gallus, Ep., i. 47.]
That censor and reprover of others, Cato, was reproached that he was a
hard drinker:
“Narratur et prisci Catonis
Saepe mero caluisse virtus.”
[“And of old Cato it is said, that his courage was often warmed with
wine.”--Horace, Od., xxi. 3, 11.--Cato the Elder.]
Cyrus, that so renowned king, amongst the other qualities by which he
claimed to be preferred before his brother Artaxerxes, urged this
excellence, that he could drink a great deal more than he. And in the
best governed nations this trial of skill in drinking is very much in
use. I have heard Silvius, an excellent physician of Paris, say that
lest the digestive faculties of the stomach should grow idle, it were not
amiss once a month to rouse them by this excess, and to spur them lest
they should grow dull and rusty; and one author tells us that the
Persians used to consult about their most important affairs after being
well warmed with wine.
My taste and constitution are greater enemies to this vice than my
discourse; for besides that I easily submit my belief to the authority of
ancient opinions, I look upon it indeed as an unmanly and stupid vice,
but less malicious and hurtful than the others, which, almost all, more
directly jostle public society. And if we cannot please ourselves but it
must cost us something, as they hold, I find this vice costs a man’s
conscience less than the others, besides that it is of no difficult
preparation, nor hard to be found, a consideration not altogether to be
despised. A man well advanced both in dignity and age, amongst three
principal commodities that he said remained to him of life, reckoned to
me this for one, and where would a man more justly find it than amongst
the natural conveniences? But he did not take it right, for delicacy and
the curious choice of wines is therein to be avoided. If you found your
pleasure upon drinking of the best, you condemn yourself to the penance
of drinking of the worst. Your taste must be more indifferent and free;
so delicate a palate is not required to make a good toper. The Germans
drink almost indifferently of all wines with delight; their business is
to pour down and not to taste; and it’s so much the better for them:
their pleasure is so much the more plentiful and nearer at hand.
Secondly, to drink, after the French fashion, but at two meals, and then
very moderately, is to be too sparing of the favours of the god. There
is more time and constancy required than so. The ancients spent whole
nights in this exercise, and ofttimes added the day following to eke it
out, and therefore we are to take greater liberty and stick closer to our
work. I have seen a great lord of my time, a man of high enterprise and
famous success, that without setting himself to’t, and after his ordinary
rate of drinking at meals, drank not much less than five quarts of wine,
and at his going away appeared but too wise and discreet, to the
detriment of our affairs. The pleasure we hold in esteem for the course
of our lives ought to have a greater share of our time dedicated to it;
we should, like shopboys and labourers, refuse no occasion nor omit any
opportunity of drinking, and always have it in our minds. Methinks we
every day abridge and curtail the use of wine, and that the after
breakfasts, dinner snatches, and collations I used to see in my father’s
house, when I was a boy, were more usual and frequent then than now.
Is it that we pretend to a reformation? Truly, no: but it may be we are
more addicted to Venus than our fathers were. They are two exercises
that thwart and hinder one another in their vigour. Lechery weakens our
stomach on the one side; and on the other sobriety renders us more spruce
and amorous for the exercise of love.
‘Tis wonderful what strange stories I have heard my father tell of the
chastity of that age wherein he lived. It was for him to say it, being
both by art and nature cut out and finished for the service of ladies.
He spoke well and little: ever mixing his language with some illustration
out of authors most in use, especially in Spanish, and among the Spanish
he whom they called Marcus Aurelius--[ Guevara’s Golden Book of Marcus
Aurelius Antoninus.]--was ordinarily in his mouth. His behaviour was
gently grave, humble, and very modest; he was very solicitous of neatness
and propriety both in his person and clothes, whether on horseback or
afoot, he was monstrously punctual in his word; and of a conscience and
religion generally tending rather towards superstition than otherwise.
For a man of little stature, very strong, well proportioned, and well
knit; of a pleasing countenance inclining to brown, and very adroit in
all noble exercises. I have yet in the house to be seen canes poured
full of lead, with which they say he exercised his arms for throwing the
bar or the stone, or in fencing; and shoes with leaden soles to make him
lighter for running or leaping. Of his vaulting he has left little
miracles behind him: I have seen him when past three score laugh at our
exercises, and throw himself in his furred gown into the saddle, make the
tour of a table upon his thumbs and scarce ever mount the stairs into his
chamber without taking three or four steps at a time. But as to what I
was speaking of before; he said there was scarce one woman of quality of
ill fame in the whole province: he would tell of strange confidences, and
some of them his own, with virtuous women, free from any manner of
suspicion of ill, and for his own part solemnly swore he was a virgin at
his marriage; and yet it was after a long practice of arms beyond the
mountains, of which wars he left us a journal under his own hand, wherein
he has given a precise account from point to point of all passages, both
relating to the public and to himself. And he was, moreover, married at
a well advanced maturity, in the year 1528, the three-and-thirtieth year
of his age, upon his way home from Italy. But let us return to our
bottles.
The incommodities of old age, that stand in need of some refreshment and
support, might with reason beget in me a desire of this faculty, it being
as it were the last pleasure the course of years deprives us of. The
natural heat, say the good-fellows, first seats itself in the feet: that
concerns infancy; thence it mounts into the middle region, where it makes
a long abode and produces, in my opinion, the sole true pleasures of
human life; all other pleasures in comparison sleep; towards the end,
like a vapour that still mounts upward, it arrives at the throat, where
it makes its final residence, and concludes the progress. I do not,
nevertheless, understand how a man can extend the pleasure of drinking
beyond thirst, and forge in his imagination an appetite artificial and
against nature; my stomach would not proceed so far; it has enough to do
to deal with what it takes in for its necessity. My constitution is not
to care for drink but as following eating and washing down my meat, and
for that reason my last draught is always the greatest. And seeing that
in old age we have our palate furred with phlegms or depraved by some
other ill constitution, the wine tastes better to us as the pores are
cleaner washed and laid more open. At least, I seldom taste the first
glass well. Anacharsis wondered that the Greeks drank in greater glasses
towards the end of a meal than at the beginning; which was, I suppose,
for the same reason the Germans do the same, who then begin the battle of
drink.
Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age, and to get drunk
till forty; but, after forty, gives them leave to please themselves, and
to mix a little liberally in their feasts the influence of Dionysos, that
good deity who restores to younger men their gaiety and to old men their
youth; who mollifies the passions of the soul, as iron is softened by
fire; and in his Lazes allows such merry meetings, provided they have a
discreet chief to govern and keep them in order, as good and of great
utility; drunkenness being, he says, a true and certain trial of every
one’s nature, and, withal, fit to inspire old men with mettle to divert
themselves in dancing and music; things of great use, and that they dare
not attempt when sober. He, moreover, says that wine is able to supply
the soul with temperance and the body with health. Nevertheless, these
restrictions, in part borrowed from the Carthaginians, please him: that
men forbear excesses in the expeditions of war; that every judge and
magistrate abstain from it when about the administrations of his place or
the consultations of the public affairs; that the day is not to be
employed with it, that being a time due to other occupations, nor the
night on which a man intends to get children.
‘Tis said that the philosopher Stilpo, when oppressed with age, purposely
hastened his end by drinking pure wine. The same thing, but not designed
by him, despatched also the philosopher Arcesilaus.
But ‘tis an old and pleasant question, whether the soul of a wise man can
be overcome by the strength of wine?
“Si munitae adhibet vim sapientiae.”
To what vanity does the good opinion we have of ourselves push us? The
most regular and most perfect soul in the world has but too much to do to
keep itself upright, and from being overthrown by its own weakness.
There is not one of a thousand that is right and settled so much as one
minute in a whole life, and that may not very well doubt, whether
according to her natural condition she ever can be; but to join constancy
to it is her utmost perfection; I mean when nothing should jostle and
discompose her, which a thousand accidents may do. ‘Tis to much purpose
that the great poet Lucretius keeps such a clatter with his philosophy,
when, behold! he goes mad with a love philtre. Is it to be imagined
that an apoplexy will not stun Socrates as well as a porter? Some men
have forgotten their own names by the violence of a disease; and a slight
wound has turned the judgment of others topsy-turvy. Let him be as wise
as he will, after all he is but a man; and than that what is there more
frail, more miserable, or more nothing? Wisdom does not force our
natural dispositions,
“Sudores itaque, et pallorem exsistere toto
Corpore, et infringi linguam, vocemque aboriri,
Caligare oculos, sonere aures, succidere artus,
Demque concidere, ex animi terrore, videmus.”
[“Sweat and paleness come over the whole body, the tongue is
rendered powerless, the voice dies away, the eyes are darkened,
there is ringing in the ears, the limbs sink under us by the
influence of fear.”--Lucretius, iii. 155.]
he must shut his eyes against the blow that threatens him; he must
tremble upon the margin of a precipice, like a child; nature having
reserved these light marks of her authority, not to be forced by our
reason and the stoic virtue, to teach man his mortality and our weakness;
he turns pale with fear, red with shame, and groans with the cholic, if
not with desperate outcry, at least with hoarse and broken voice:
“Humani a se nihil alienum putet.”
[“Let him not think himself exempt from that which is incidental to
men in general.”--Terence, Heauton, i. 1, 25.]
The poets, that feign all things at pleasure, dare not acquit their
greatest heroes of tears:
“Sic fatur lacrymans, classique immittit habenas.”
[“Thus he speaks, weeping, and then sets sail with his fleet.”
--Aeneid, vi. i.]
‘Tis sufficient for a man to curb and moderate his inclinations, for
totally to suppress them is not in him to do. Even our great Plutarch,
that excellent and perfect judge of human actions, when he sees Brutus
and Torquatus kill their children, begins to doubt whether virtue could
proceed so far, and to question whether these persons had not rather been
stimulated by some other passion.--[Plutarch, Life of Publicola, c. 3.]
--All actions exceeding the ordinary bounds are liable to sinister
interpretation, for as much as our liking no more holds with what is
above than with what is below it.
Let us leave that other sect, that sets up an express profession of
scornful superiority--[The Stoics.]--: but when even in that sect,
reputed the most quiet and gentle, we hear these rhodomontades of
Metrodorus:
“Occupavi te, Fortuna, atque cepi: omnesque aditus tuos
interclusi ut ad me aspirare non posses;”
[“Fortune, I have got the better of thee, and have made all the
avenues so sure thou canst not come at me.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 9.]
when Anaxarchus, by command of Nicocreon the tyrant of Cyprus, was put
into a stone mortar, and laid upon with mauls of iron, ceases not to say,
“Strike, batter, break; ‘tis not Anaxarchus, ‘tis but his sheath that you
pound and bray so”; when we hear our martyrs cry out to the tyrant from
the middle of the flame, “This side is roasted enough, fall to and eat,
it is enough done; fall to work with the other;” when we hear the child
in Josephus’ torn piece-meal with pincers, defying Antiochus, and crying
out with a constant and assured voice: “Tyrant, thou losest thy labour,
I am still at ease; where is the pain, where are the torments with which
thou didst so threaten me? Is this all thou canst do? My constancy
torments thee more than thy cruelty does me. O pitiful coward, thou
faintest, and I grow stronger; make me complain, make me bend, make me
yield if thou canst; encourage thy guards, cheer up thy executioners;
see, see they faint, and can do no more; arm them, flesh them anew, spur
them up”; truly, a man must confess that there is some phrenzy, some
fury, how holy soever, that at that time possesses those souls. When we
come to these Stoical sallies: “I had rather be mad than voluptuous,” a
saying of Antisthenes. When Sextius tells us, “he had rather be fettered
with affliction than pleasure”: when Epicurus takes upon him to play with
his gout, and, refusing health and ease, defies all torments, and
despising the lesser pains, as disdaining to contend with them, he covets
and calls out for others sharper, more violent, and more worthy of him;
“Spumantemque dari, pecora inter inertia, votis
Optat aprum, aut fulvum descendere monte leonem:”
[“And instead of timid beasts, wishes the foaming boar or tawny lion
would come from the mountain.”--AEneid, iv. 158.]
who but must conclude that these are wild sallies pushed on by a courage
that has broken loose from its place? Our soul cannot from her own seat
reach so high; ‘tis necessary she must leave it, raise herself up, and,
taking the bridle in her teeth, transport her man so far that he shall
afterwards himself be astonished at what he has done; as, in war, the
heat of battle impels generous soldiers to perform things of so infinite
danger, as afterwards, recollecting them, they themselves are the first
to wonder at; as it also fares with the poets, who are often rapt with
admiration of their own writings, and know not where again to find the
track through which they performed so fine a Career; which also is in
them called fury and rapture. And as Plato says, ‘tis to no purpose for
a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy: so Aristotle says, that
no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness; and he has reason
to call all transports, how commendable soever, that surpass our own
judgment and understanding, madness; forasmuch as wisdom is a regular
government of the soul, which is carried on with measure and proportion,
and for which she is to herself responsible. Plato argues thus, that the
faculty of prophesying is so far above us, that we must be out of
ourselves when we meddle with it, and our prudence must either be
obstructed by sleep or sickness, or lifted from her place by some
celestial rapture.
CHAPTER III
A CUSTOM OF THE ISLE OF CEA
[Cos. Cea is the form of the name given by Pliny]
If to philosophise be, as ‘tis defined, to doubt, much more to write at
random and play the fool, as I do, ought to be reputed doubting, for it
is for novices and freshmen to inquire and to dispute, and for the
chairman to moderate and determine.
My moderator is the authority of the divine will, that governs us without
contradiction, and that is seated above these human and vain
contestations.
Philip having forcibly entered into Peloponnesus, and some one saying to
Damidas that the Lacedaemonians were likely very much to suffer if they
did not in time reconcile themselves to his favour: “Why, you pitiful
fellow,” replied he, “what can they suffer who do not fear to die?” It
being also asked of Agis, which way a man might live free? “Why,” said
he, “by despising death.” These, and a thousand other sayings to the
same purpose, distinctly sound of something more than the patient
attending the stroke of death when it shall come; for there are several
accidents in life far worse to suffer than death itself. Witness the
Lacedaemonian boy taken by Antigonus, and sold for a slave, who being by
his master commanded to some base employment: “Thou shalt see,” says the
boy, “whom thou hast bought; it would be a shame for me to serve, being
so near the reach of liberty,” and having so said, threw himself from the
top of the house. Antipater severely threatening the Lacedaemonians,
that he might the better incline them to acquiesce in a certain demand of
his: “If thou threatenest us with more than death,” replied they, “we
shall the more willingly die”; and to Philip, having written them word
that he would frustrate all their enterprises: “What, wilt thou also
hinder us from dying?” This is the meaning of the sentence, “That the
wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can; and that the
most obliging present Nature has made us, and which takes from us all
colour of complaint of our condition, is to have delivered into our own
custody the keys of life; she has only ordered, one door into life, but a
hundred thousand ways out. We may be straitened for earth to live upon,
but earth sufficient to die upon can never be wanting, as Boiocalus
answered the Romans.”--[Tacitus, Annal., xiii. 56.]--Why dost thou
complain of this world? it detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the
cause, if thou livest in pain. There needs no more to die but to will to
die:
“Ubique mors est; optime hoc cavit deus.
Eripere vitam nemo non homini potest;
At nemo mortem; mille ad hanc aditus patent.”
[“Death is everywhere: heaven has well provided for that. Any one
may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death. To death
there are a thousand avenues.”--Seneca, Theb:, i, I, 151.]
Neither is it a recipe for one disease only; death is the infallible cure
of all; ‘tis a most assured port that is never to be feared, and very
often to be sought. It comes all to one, whether a man give himself his
end, or stays to receive it by some other means; whether he pays before
his day, or stay till his day of payment come; from whencesoever it
comes, it is still his; in what part soever the thread breaks, there’s
the end of the clue. The most voluntary death is the finest. Life
depends upon the pleasure of others; death upon our own. We ought not to
accommodate ourselves to our own humour in anything so much as in this.
Reputation is not concerned in such an enterprise; ‘tis folly to be
concerned by any such apprehension. Living is slavery if the liberty of
dying be wanting. The ordinary method of cure is carried on at the
expense of life; they torment us with caustics, incisions, and
amputations of limbs; they interdict aliment and exhaust our blood; one
step farther and we are cured indeed and effectually. Why is not the
jugular vein as much at our disposal as the median vein? For a desperate
disease a desperate cure. Servius the grammarian, being tormented with
the gout, could think of no better remedy than to apply poison to his
legs, to deprive them of their sense; let them be gouty at their will, so
they were insensible of pain. God gives us leave enough to go when He is
pleased to reduce us to such a condition that to live is far worse than
to die. ‘Tis weakness to truckle under infirmities, but it’s madness to
nourish them. The Stoics say, that it is living according to nature in a
wise man to, take his leave of life, even in the height of prosperity,
if he do it opportunely; and in a fool to prolong it, though he be
miserable, provided he be not indigent of those things which they repute
to be according to nature. As I do not offend the law against thieves
when I embezzle my own money and cut my own purse; nor that against
incendiaries when I burn my own wood; so am I not under the lash of those
made against murderers for having deprived myself of my own life.
Hegesias said, that as the condition of life did, so the condition of
death ought to depend upon our own choice. And Diogenes meeting the
philosopher Speusippus, so blown up with an inveterate dropsy that he was
fain to be carried in a litter, and by him saluted with the compliment,
“I wish you good health.” “No health to thee,” replied the other,
“who art content to live in such a condition.”
And in fact, not long after, Speusippus, weary of so languishing a state
of life, found a means to die.
But this does not pass without admitting a dispute: for many are of
opinion that we cannot quit this garrison of the world without the
express command of Him who has placed us in it; and that it appertains to
God who has placed us here, not for ourselves only but for His Glory and
the service of others, to dismiss us when it shall best please Him, and
not for us to depart without His licence: that we are not born for
ourselves only, but for our country also, the laws of which require an
account from us upon the score of their own interest, and have an action
of manslaughter good against us; and if these fail to take cognisance of
the fact, we are punished in the other world as deserters of our duty:
“Proxima deinde tenent maesti loca, qui sibi letum
Insontes peperere manu, lucemque perosi
Proiecere animas.”
[“Thence the sad ones occupy the next abodes, who, though free
from guilt, were by their own hands slain, and, hating light,
sought death.”--AEneid, vi. 434.]
There is more constancy in suffering the chain we are tied to than in
breaking it, and more pregnant evidence of fortitude in Regulus than in
Cato; ‘tis indiscretion and impatience that push us on to these
precipices: no accidents can make true virtue turn her back; she seeks
and requires evils, pains, and grief, as the things by which she is
nourished and supported; the menaces of tyrants, racks, and tortures
serve only to animate and rouse her:
“Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus
Nigrae feraci frondis in Algido,
Per damma, percmdes, ab ipso
Ducit opes, animumque ferro.”
[“As in Mount Algidus, the sturdy oak even from the axe itself
derives new vigour and life.”--Horace, Od., iv. 4, 57.]
And as another says:
“Non est, ut putas, virtus, pater,
Timere vitam; sed malis ingentibus
Obstare, nec se vertere, ac retro dare.”
[“Father, ‘tis no virtue to fear life, but to withstand great
misfortunes, nor turn back from them.”--Seneca, Theb., i. 190.]
Or as this:
“Rebus in adversis facile est contemnere mortem
Fortius ille facit, qui miser esse potest.”
[“It is easy in adversity to despise death; but he acts more
bravely, who can live wretched.”--Martial, xi. 56, 15.]
‘Tis cowardice, not virtue, to lie squat in a furrow, under a tomb, to
evade the blows of fortune; virtue never stops nor goes out of her path,
for the greatest storm that blows:
“Si fractus illabatur orbis,
Impavidum ferient ruinae.”
[“Should the world’s axis crack, the ruins will but crush
a fearless head.”--Horace, Od., iii. 3, 7.]
For the most part, the flying from other inconveniences brings us to
this; nay, endeavouring to evade death, we often run into its very mouth:
“Hic, rogo, non furor est, ne moriare, mori?”
[“Tell me, is it not madness, that one should die for fear
of dying?”--Martial, ii. 80, 2.]
like those who, from fear of a precipice, throw themselves headlong into
it;
“Multos in summa pericula misfit
Venturi timor ipse mali: fortissimus ille est,
Qui promptus metuenda pati, si cominus instent,
Et differre potest.”
[“The fear of future ills often makes men run into extreme danger;
he is truly brave who boldly dares withstand the mischiefs he
apprehends, when they confront him and can be deferred.”
--Lucan, vii. 104.]
“Usque adeo, mortis formidine, vitae
Percipit humanos odium, lucisque videndae,
Ut sibi consciscant moerenti pectore lethum
Obliti fontem curarum hunc esse timorem.”
[“Death to that degree so frightens some men, that causing them to
hate both life and light, they kill themselves, miserably forgetting
that this same fear is the fountain of their cares.”
--Lucretius, iii. 79.]
Plato, in his Laws, assigns an ignominious sepulture to him who has
deprived his nearest and best friend, namely himself, of life and his
destined course, being neither compelled so to do by public judgment,
by any sad and inevitable accident of fortune, nor by any insupportable
disgrace, but merely pushed on by cowardice and the imbecility of a
timorous soul. And the opinion that makes so little of life, is
ridiculous; for it is our being, ‘tis all we have. Things of a nobler
and more elevated being may, indeed, reproach ours; but it is against
nature for us to contemn and make little account of ourselves; ‘tis a
disease particular to man, and not discerned in any other creatures, to
hate and despise itself. And it is a vanity of the same stamp to desire
to be something else than what we are; the effect of such a desire does
not at all touch us, forasmuch as it is contradicted and hindered in
itself. He that desires of a man to be made an angel, does nothing for
himself; he would be never the better for it; for, being no more, who
shall rejoice or be sensible of this benefit for him.
“Debet enim, misere cui forti, aegreque futurum est,
Ipse quoque esse in eo turn tempore, cum male possit
Accidere.”
[“For he to whom misery and pain are to be in the future, must
himself then exist, when these ills befall him.”
--Idem, ibid., 874.]
Security, indolence, impassability, the privation of the evils of this
life, which we pretend to purchase at the price of dying, are of no
manner of advantage to us: that man evades war to very little purpose who
can have no fruition of peace; and as little to the purpose does he avoid
trouble who cannot enjoy repose.
Amongst those of the first of these two opinions, there has been great
debate, what occasions are sufficient to justify the meditation of
self-murder, which they call “A reasonable exit.”--[ Diogenes Laertius,
Life of Zeno.]--For though they say that men must often die for trivial
causes, seeing those that detain us in life are of no very great weight,
yet there is to be some limit. There are fantastic and senseless humours
that have prompted not only individual men, but whole nations to destroy
themselves, of which I have elsewhere given some examples; and we further
read of the Milesian virgins, that by a frantic compact they hanged
themselves one after another till the magistrate took order in it,
enacting that the bodies of such as should be found so hanged should be
drawn by the same halter stark naked through the city. When Therykion
tried to persuade Cleomenes to despatch himself, by reason of the ill
posture of his affairs, and, having missed a death of more honour in the
battle he had lost, to accept of this the second in honour to it, and not
to give the conquerors leisure to make him undergo either an ignominious
death or an infamous life; Cleomenes, with a courage truly Stoic and
Lacedaemonian, rejected his counsel as unmanly and mean; “that,” said he,
“is a remedy that can never be wanting, but which a man is never to make
use of, whilst there is an inch of hope remaining”: telling him, “that
it was sometimes constancy and valour to live; that he would that even
his death should be of use to his country, and would make of it an act of
honour and virtue.” Therykion, notwithstanding, thought himself in the
right, and did his own business; and Cleomenes afterwards did the same,
but not till he had first tried the utmost malevolence of fortune. All
the inconveniences in the world are not considerable enough that a man
should die to evade them; and, besides, there being so many, so sudden
and unexpected changes in human things, it is hard rightly to judge when
we are at the end of our hope:
“Sperat et in saeva victus gladiator arena,
Sit licet infesto pollice turba minax.”
[“The gladiator conquered in the lists hopes on, though the
menacing spectators, turning their thumb, order him to die.”
--Pentadius, De Spe, ap. Virgilii Catadecta.]
All things, says an old adage, are to be hoped for by a man whilst he
lives; ay, but, replies Seneca, why should this rather be always running
in a man’s head that fortune can do all things for the living man, than
this, that fortune has no power over him that knows how to die?
Josephus, when engaged in so near and apparent danger, a whole people
being violently bent against him, that there was no visible means of
escape, nevertheless, being, as he himself says, in this extremity
counselled by one of his friends to despatch himself, it was well for him
that he yet maintained himself in hope, for fortune diverted the accident
beyond all human expectation, so that he saw himself delivered without
any manner of inconvenience. Whereas Brutus and Cassius, on the
contrary, threw away the remains of the Roman liberty, of which they were
the sole protectors, by the precipitation and temerity wherewith they
killed themselves before the due time and a just occasion. Monsieur
d’Anguien, at the battle of Serisolles, twice attempted to run himself
through, despairing of the fortune of the day, which went indeed very
untowardly on that side of the field where he was engaged, and by that
precipitation was very near depriving himself of the enjoyment of so
brave a victory. I have seen a hundred hares escape out of the very
teeth of the greyhounds:
“Aliquis carnifici suo superstes fuit.”
[“Some have survived their executioners.”--Seneca, Ep., 13.]
“Multa dies, variusque labor mutabilis nevi
Rettulit in melius; multos alterna revisens
Lusit, et in solido rursus fortuna locavit.”
[“Length of days, and the various labour of changeful time, have
brought things to a better state; fortune turning, shews a reverse
face, and again restores men to prosperity.”--AEneid, xi. 425.]
Piny says there are but three sorts of diseases, to escape which a man
has good title to destroy himself; the worst of which is the stone in the
bladder, when the urine is suppressed.
[“In the quarto edition of these essays, in 1588, Pliny is said to
mention two more, viz., a pain in the stomach and a headache, which,
he says (lib. xxv. c. 9.), were the only three distempers almost
for which men killed themselves.”]
Seneca says those only which for a long time are discomposing the
functions of the soul. And some there have been who, to avoid a worse
death, have chosen one to their own liking. Democritus, general of the
AEtolians, being brought prisoner to Rome, found means to make his escape
by night: but close pursued by his keepers, rather than suffer himself to
be retaken, he fell upon his own sword and died. Antinous and Theodotus,
their city of Epirus being reduced by the Romans to the last extremity,
gave the people counsel universally to kill themselves; but, these
preferring to give themselves up to the enemy, the two chiefs went to
seek the death they desired, rushing furiously upon the enemy, with
intention to strike home but not to ward a blow. The Island of Gozzo
being taken some years ago by the Turks, a Sicilian, who had two
beautiful daughters marriageable, killed them both with his own hand, and
their mother, running in to save them, to boot, which having done,
sallying out of the house with a cross-bow and harquebus, with two shots
he killed two of the Turks nearest to his door, and drawing his sword,
charged furiously in amongst the rest, where he was suddenly enclosed and
cut to pieces, by that means delivering his family and himself from
slavery and dishonour. The Jewish women, after having circumcised their
children, threw them and themselves down a precipice to avoid the cruelty
of Antigonus. I have been told of a person of condition in one of our
prisons, that his friends, being informed that he would certainly be
condemned, to avoid the ignominy of such a death suborned a priest to
tell him that the only means of his deliverance was to recommend himself
to such a saint, under such and such vows, and to fast eight days
together without taking any manner of nourishment, what weakness or
faintness soever he might find in himself during the time; he followed
their advice, and by that means destroyed himself before he was aware,
not dreaming of death or any danger in the experiment. Scribonia
advising her nephew Libo to kill himself rather than await the stroke of
justice, told him that it was to do other people’s business to preserve
his life to put it after into the hands of those who within three or four
days would fetch him to execution, and that it was to serve his enemies
to keep his blood to gratify their malice.
We read in the Bible that Nicanor, the persecutor of the law of God,
having sent his soldiers to seize upon the good old man Razis, surnamed
in honour of his virtue the father of the Jews: the good man, seeing no
other remedy, his gates burned down, and the enemies ready to seize him,
choosing rather to die nobly than to fall into the hands of his wicked
adversaries and suffer himself to be cruelly butchered by them, contrary
to the honour of his rank and quality, stabbed himself with his own
sword, but the blow, for haste, not having been given home, he ran and
threw himself from the top of a wall headlong among them, who separating
themselves and making room, he pitched directly upon his head;
notwithstanding which, feeling yet in himself some remains of life, he
renewed his courage, and starting up upon his feet all bloody and wounded
as he was, and making his way through the crowd to a precipitous rock,
there, through one of his wounds, drew out his bowels, which, tearing and
pulling to pieces with both his hands, he threw amongst his pursuers, all
the while attesting and invoking the Divine vengeance upon them for their
cruelty and injustice.
Of violences offered to the conscience, that against the chastity of
woman is, in my opinion, most to be avoided, forasmuch as there is a
certain pleasure naturally mixed with it, and for that reason the dissent
therein cannot be sufficiently perfect and entire, so that the violence
seems to be mixed with a little consent of the forced party. The
ecclesiastical history has several examples of devout persons who have
embraced death to secure them from the outrages prepared by tyrants
against their religion and honour. Pelagia and Sophronia, both
canonised, the first of these precipitated herself with her mother and
sisters into the river to avoid being forced by some soldiers, and the
last also killed herself to avoid being ravished by the Emperor
Maxentius.
It may, peradventure, be an honour to us in future ages, that a learned
author of this present time, and a Parisian, takes a great deal of pains
to persuade the ladies of our age rather to take any other course than to
enter into the horrid meditation of such a despair. I am sorry he had
never heard, that he might have inserted it amongst his other stories,
the saying of a woman, which was told me at Toulouse, who had passed
through the handling of some soldiers: “God be praised,” said she, “that
once at least in my life I have had my fill without sin.” In truth,
these cruelties are very unworthy the French good nature, and also, God
be thanked, our air is very well purged of them since this good advice:
‘tis enough that they say “no” in doing it, according to the rule of the
good Marot.
“Un doulx nenny, avec un doulx sourire
Est tant honneste.”--Marot.
History is everywhere full of those who by a thousand ways have exchanged
a painful and irksome life for death. Lucius Aruntius killed himself, to
fly, he said, both the future and the past. Granius Silvanus and Statius
Proximus, after having been pardoned by Nero, killed themselves; either
disdaining to live by the favour of so wicked a man, or that they might
not be troubled, at some other time, to obtain a second pardon,
considering the proclivity of his nature to suspect and credit
accusations against worthy men. Spargapises, son of Queen Tomyris, being
a prisoner of war to Cyrus, made use of the first favour Cyrus shewed
him, in commanding him to be unbound, to kill himself, having pretended
to no other benefit of liberty, but only to be revenged of himself for
the disgrace of being taken. Boges, governor in Eion for King Xerxes,
being besieged by the Athenian army under the conduct of Cimon, refused
the conditions offered, that he might safe return into Asia with all his
wealth, impatient to survive the loss of a place his master had given him
to keep; wherefore, having defended the city to the last extremity,
nothing being left to eat, he first threw all the gold and whatever else
the enemy could make booty of into the river Strymon, and then causing a
great pile to be set on fire, and the throats of all the women, children,
concubines, and servants to be cut, he threw their bodies into the fire,
and at last leaped into it himself.
Ninachetuen, an Indian lord, so soon as he heard the first whisper of the
Portuguese Viceroy’s determination to dispossess him, without any
apparent cause, of his command in Malacca, to transfer it to the King of
Campar, he took this resolution with himself: he caused a scaffold, more
long than broad, to be erected, supported by columns royally adorned with
tapestry and strewed with flowers and abundance of perfumes; all which
being prepared, in a robe of cloth of gold, set full of jewels of great
value, he came out into the street, and mounted the steps to the
scaffold, at one corner of which he had a pile lighted of aromatic wood.
Everybody ran to see to what end these unusual preparations were made;
when Ninachetuen, with a manly but displeased countenance, set forth how
much he had obliged the Portuguese nation, and with how unspotted
fidelity he had carried himself in his charge; that having so often,
sword in hand, manifested in the behalf of others, that honour was much
more dear to him than life, he was not to abandon the concern of it for
himself: that fortune denying him all means of opposing the affront
designed to be put upon him, his courage at least enjoined him to free
himself from the sense of it, and not to serve for a fable to the people,
nor for a triumph to men less deserving than himself; which having said
he leaped into the fire.
Sextilia, wife of Scaurus, and Paxaea, wife of Labeo, to encourage their
husbands to avoid the dangers that pressed upon them, wherein they had no
other share than conjugal affection, voluntarily sacrificed their own
lives to serve them in this extreme necessity for company and example.
What they did for their husbands, Cocceius Nerva did for his country,
with less utility though with equal affection: this great lawyer,
flourishing in health, riches, reputation, and favour with the Emperor,
had no other cause to kill himself but the sole compassion of the
miserable state of the Roman Republic. Nothing can be added to the
beauty of the death of the wife of Fulvius, a familiar favourite of
Augustus: Augustus having discovered that he had vented an important
secret he had entrusted him withal, one morning that he came to make his
court, received him very coldly and looked frowningly upon him. He
returned home, full of, despair, where he sorrowfully told his wife that,
having fallen into this misfortune, he was resolved to kill himself: to
which she roundly replied, “‘tis but reason you should, seeing that
having so often experienced the incontinence of my tongue, you could not
take warning: but let me kill myself first,” and without any more saying
ran herself through the body with a sword. Vibius Virrius, despairing of
the safety of his city besieged by the Romans and of their mercy, in the
last deliberation of his city’s senate, after many arguments conducing to
that end, concluded that the most noble means to escape fortune was by
their own hands: telling them that the enemy would have them in honour,
and Hannibal would be sensible how many faithful friends he had
abandoned; inviting those who approved of his advice to come to a good
supper he had ready at home, where after they had eaten well, they would
drink together of what he had prepared; a beverage, said he, that will
deliver our bodies from torments, our souls from insult, and our eyes and
ears from the sense of so many hateful mischiefs, as the conquered suffer
from cruel and implacable conquerors. I have, said he, taken order for
fit persons to throw our bodies into a funeral pile before my door so
soon as we are dead. Many enough approved this high resolution, but few
imitated it; seven-and-twenty senators followed him, who, after having
tried to drown the thought of this fatal determination in wine, ended the
feast with the mortal mess; and embracing one another, after they had
jointly deplored the misfortune of their country, some retired home to
their own houses, others stayed to be burned with Vibius in his funeral
pyre; and were all of them so long in dying, the vapour of the wine
having prepossessed the veins, and by that means deferred the effect of
poison, that some of them were within an hour of seeing the enemy inside
the walls of Capua, which was taken the next morning, and of undergoing
the miseries they had at so dear a rate endeavoured to avoid. Jubellius
Taurea, another citizen of the same country, the Consul Fulvius returning
from the shameful butchery he had made of two hundred and twenty-five
senators, called him back fiercely by name, and having made him stop:
“Give the word,” said he, “that somebody may dispatch me after the
massacre of so many others, that thou mayest boast to have killed a much
more valiant man than thyself.” Fulvius, disdaining him as a man out of
his wits, and also having received letters from Rome censuring the
inhumanity of his execution which tied his hands, Jubellius proceeded:
“Since my country has been taken, my friends dead, and having with my own
hands slain my wife and children to rescue them from the desolation of
this ruin, I am denied to die the death of my fellow-citizens, let me
borrow from virtue vengeance on this hated life,” and therewithal drawing
a short sword he carried concealed about him, he ran it through his own
bosom, falling down backward, and expiring at the consul’s feet.
Alexander, laying siege to a city of the Indies, those within, finding
themselves very hardly set, put on a vigorous resolution to deprive him
of the pleasure of his victory, and accordingly burned themselves in
general, together with their city, in despite of his humanity: a new kind
of war, where the enemies sought to save them, and they to destroy
themselves, doing to make themselves sure of death, all that men do to
secure life.
Astapa, a city of Spain, finding itself weak in walls and defence to
withstand the Romans, the inhabitants made a heap of all their riches and
furniture in the public place; and, having ranged upon this heap all the
women and children, and piled them round with wood and other combustible
matter to take sudden fire, and left fifty of their young men for the
execution of that whereon they had resolved, they made a desperate sally,
where for want of power to overcome, they caused themselves to be every
man slain. The fifty, after having massacred every living soul
throughout the whole city, and put fire to this pile, threw themselves
lastly into it, finishing their generous liberty, rather after an
insensible, than after a sorrowful and disgraceful manner, giving the
enemy to understand, that if fortune had been so pleased, they had as
well the courage to snatch from them victory as they had to frustrate and
render it dreadful, and even mortal to those who, allured by the
splendour of the gold melting in this flame, having approached it,
a great number were there suffocated and burned, being kept from retiring
by the crowd that followed after.
The Abydeans, being pressed by King Philip, put on the same resolution;
but, not having time, they could not put it ‘in effect. The king, who
was struck with horror at the rash precipitation of this execution (the
treasure and movables that they had condemned to the flames being first
seized), drawing off his soldiers, granted them three days’ time to kill
themselves in, that they might do it with more order and at greater ease:
which time they filled with blood and slaughter beyond the utmost excess
of all hostile cruelty, so that not so much as any one soul was left
alive that had power to destroy itself. There are infinite examples of
like popular resolutions which seem the more fierce and cruel in
proportion as the effect is more universal, and yet are really less so
than when singly executed; what arguments and persuasion cannot do with
individual men, they can do with all, the ardour of society ravishing
particular judgments.
The condemned who would live to be executed in the reign of Tiberius,
forfeited their goods and were denied the rites of sepulture; those who,
by killing themselves, anticipated it, were interred, and had liberty to
dispose of their estates by will.
But men sometimes covet death out of hope of a greater good. “I desire,”
says St. Paul, “to be with Christ,” and “who shall rid me of these
bands?” Cleombrotus of Ambracia, having read Plato’s Pheedo, entered
into so great a desire of the life to come that, without any other
occasion, he threw himself into the sea. By which it appears how
improperly we call this voluntary dissolution, despair, to which the
eagerness of hope often inclines us, and, often, a calm and temperate
desire proceeding from a mature and deliberate judgment. Jacques du
Chastel, bishop of Soissons, in St. Louis’s foreign expedition, seeing
the king and whole army upon the point of returning into France, leaving
the affairs of religion imperfect, took a resolution rather to go into
Paradise; wherefore, having taken solemn leave of his friends, he charged
alone, in the sight of every one, into the enemy’s army, where he was
presently cut to pieces. In a certain kingdom of the new discovered
world, upon a day of solemn procession, when the idol they adore is drawn
about in public upon a chariot of marvellous greatness; besides that many
are then seen cutting off pieces of their flesh to offer to him, there
are a number of others who prostrate themselves upon the place, causing
themselves to be crushed and broken to pieces under the weighty wheels,
to obtain the veneration of sanctity after death, which is accordingly
paid them. The death of the bishop, sword in hand, has more of
magnanimity in it, and less of sentiment, the ardour of combat taking
away part of the latter.
There are some governments who have taken upon them to regulate the
justice and opportunity of voluntary death. In former times there was
kept in our city of Marseilles a poison prepared out of hemlock, at the
public charge, for those who had a mind to hasten their end, having
first, before the six hundred, who were their senate, given account of
the reasons and motives of their design, and it was not otherwise lawful,
than by leave from the magistrate and upon just occasion to do violence
to themselves.--[Valerius Maximus, ii. 6, 7.]--The same law was also
in use in other places.
Sextus Pompeius, in his expedition into Asia, touched at the isle of Cea
in Negropont: it happened whilst he was there, as we have it from one
that was with him, that a woman of great quality, having given an account
to her citizens why she was resolved to put an end to her life, invited
Pompeius to her death, to render it the more honourable, an invitation
that he accepted; and having long tried in vain by the power of his
eloquence, which was very great, and persuasion, to divert her from that
design, he acquiesced in the end in her own will. She had passed the age
of four score and ten in a very happy state, both of body and mind; being
then laid upon her bed, better dressed than ordinary and leaning upon her
elbow, “The gods,” said she, “O Sextus Pompeius, and rather those I leave
than those I go to seek, reward thee, for that thou hast not disdained to
be both the counsellor of my life and the witness of my death. For my
part, having always experienced the smiles of fortune, for fear lest the
desire of living too long may make me see a contrary face, I am going, by
a happy end, to dismiss the remains of my soul, leaving behind two
daughters of my body and a legion of nephews”; which having said, with
some exhortations to her family to live in peace, she divided amongst
them her goods, and recommending her domestic gods to her eldest
daughter, she boldly took the bowl that contained the poison, and having
made her vows and prayers to Mercury to conduct her to some happy abode
in the other world, she roundly swallowed the mortal poison. This being
done, she entertained the company with the progress of its operation, and
how the cold by degrees seized the several parts of her body one after
another, till having in the end told them it began to seize upon her
heart and bowels, she called her daughters to do the last office and
close her eyes.
Pliny tells us of a certain Hyperborean nation where, by reason of the
sweet temperature of the air, lives rarely ended but by the voluntary
surrender of the inhabitants, who, being weary of and satiated with
living, had the custom, at a very old age, after having made good cheer,
to precipitate themselves into the sea from the top of a certain rock,
assigned for that service. Pain and the fear of a worse death seem to me
the most excusable incitements.
CHAPTER IV
TO-MORROW’S A NEW DAY
I give, as it seems to me, with good reason the palm to Jacques Amyot of
all our French writers, not only for the simplicity and purity of his
language, wherein he excels all others, nor for his constancy in going
through so long a work, nor for the depth of his knowledge, having been
able so successfully to smooth and unravel so knotty and intricate an
author (for let people tell me what they will, I understand nothing of
Greek; but I meet with sense so well united and maintained throughout his
whole translation, that certainly he either knew the true fancy of the
author, or having, by being long conversant with him, imprinted a vivid
and general idea of that of Plutarch in his soul, he has delivered us
nothing that either derogates from or contradicts him), but above all, I
am the most taken with him for having made so discreet a choice of a book
so worthy and of so great utility wherewith to present his country. We
ignorant fellows had been lost, had not this book raised us out of the
dirt; by this favour of his we dare now speak and write; the ladies are
able to read to schoolmasters; ‘tis our breviary. If this good man be
yet living, I would recommend to him Xenophon, to do as much by that;
‘tis a much more easy task than the other, and consequently more proper
for his age. And, besides, though I know not how, methinks he does
briskly--and clearly enough trip over steps another would have stumbled
at, yet nevertheless his style seems to be more his own where he does not
encounter those difficulties, and rolls away at his own ease.
I was just now reading this passage where Plutarch says of himself, that
Rusticus being present at a declamation of his at Rome, there received a
packet from the emperor, and deferred to open it till all was done: for
which, says he, all the company highly applauded the gravity of this
person. ‘Tis true, that being upon the subject of curiosity and of that
eager passion for news, which makes us with so much indiscretion and
impatience leave all to entertain a newcomer, and without any manner of
respect or outcry, tear open on a sudden, in what company soever, the
letters that are delivered to us, he had reason to applaud the gravity of
Rusticus upon this occasion; and might moreover have added to it the
commendation of his civility and courtesy, that would not interrupt the
current of his declamation. But I doubt whether any one can commend his
prudence; for receiving unexpected letters, and especially from an
emperor, it might have fallen out that the deferring to read them might
have been of great prejudice. The vice opposite to curiosity is
negligence, to which I naturally incline, and wherein I have seen some
men so extreme that one might have found letters sent them three or four
days before, still sealed up in their pockets.
I never open any letters directed to another; not only those intrusted
with me, but even such as fortune has guided to my hand; and am angry
with myself if my eyes unawares steal any contents of letters of
importance he is reading when I stand near a great man. Never was man
less inquisitive or less prying into other men’s affairs than I.
In our fathers’ days, Monsieur de Boutieres had like to have lost Turin
from having, while engaged in good company at supper, delayed to read
information that was sent him of the treason plotted against that city
where he commanded. And this very Plutarch has given me to understand,
that Julius Caesar had preserved himself, if, going to the Senate the day
he was assassinated by the conspirators, he had read a note which was
presented to him by, the way. He tells also the story of Archias, the
tyrant of Thebes, that the night before the execution of the design
Pelopidas had plotted to kill him to restore his country to liberty, he
had a full account sent him in writing by another Archias, an Athenian,
of the whole conspiracy, and that, this packet having been delivered to
him while he sat at supper, he deferred the opening of it, saying, which
afterwards turned to a proverb in Greece, “Business to-morrow.”
A wise man may, I think, out of respect to another, as not to disturb the
company, as Rusticus did, or not to break off another affair of
importance in hand, defer to read or hear any new thing that is brought
him; but for his own interest or particular pleasure, especially if he be
a public minister, that he will not interrupt his dinner or break his
sleep is inexcusable. And there was anciently at Rome, the consular
place, as they called it, which was the most honourable at the table, as
being a place of most liberty, and of more convenient access to those who
came in to speak to the person seated there; by which it appears, that
being at meat, they did not totally abandon the concern of other affairs
and incidents. But when all is said, it is very hard in human actions to
give so exact a rule upon moral reasons, that fortune will not therein
maintain her own right.
CHAPTER V
OF CONSCIENCE
The Sieur de la Brousse, my brother, and I, travelling one day together
during the time of our civil wars, met a gentleman of good sort. He was
of the contrary party, though I did not know so much, for he pretended
otherwise: and the mischief on’t is, that in this sort of war the cards
are so shuffled, your enemy not being distinguished from yourself by any
apparent mark either of language or habit, and being nourished under the
same law, air, and manners, it is very hard to avoid disorder and
confusion. This made me afraid myself of meeting any of our troops in a
place where I was not known, that I might not be in fear to tell my name,
and peradventure of something worse; as it had befallen me before, where,
by such a mistake, I lost both men and horses, and amongst others an
Italian gentleman my page, whom I bred with the greatest care and
affection, was miserably slain, in whom a youth of great promise and
expectation was extinguished. But the gentleman my brother and I met
had so desperate, half-dead a fear upon him at meeting with any horse,
or passing by any of the towns that held for the King, that I at last
discovered it to be alarms of conscience. It seemed to the poor man as
if through his visor and the crosses upon his cassock, one would have
penetrated into his bosom and read the most secret intentions of his
heart; so wonderful is the power of conscience. It makes us betray,
accuse, and fight against ourselves, and for want of other witnesses, to
give evidence against ourselves:
“Occultum quatiens animo tortore flagellum.”
[“The torturer of the soul brandishing a sharp scourge within.”
--Juvenal, iii. 195.]
This story is in every child’s mouth: Bessus the Paeonian, being
reproached for wantonly pulling down a nest of young sparrows and killing
them, replied, that he had reason to do so, seeing that those little
birds never ceased falsely to accuse him of the murder of his father.
This parricide had till then been concealed and unknown, but the
revenging fury of conscience caused it to be discovered by him himself,
who was to suffer for it. Hesiod corrects the saying of Plato, that
punishment closely follows sin, it being, as he says, born at the same
time with it. Whoever expects punishment already suffers it, and whoever
has deserved it expects it. Wickedness contrives torments against
itself:
“Malum consilium consultori pessimum.”
[“Ill designs are worst to the contriver.”
--Apud Aul. Gellium, iv. 5.]
as the wasp stings and hurts another, but most of all itself, for it
there loses its sting and its use for ever,
“Vitasque in vulnere ponunt.”
[“And leave their own lives in the wound.”
--Virgil, Geo., iv. 238.]
Cantharides have somewhere about them, by a contrariety of nature, a
counterpoison against their poison. In like manner, at the same time
that men take delight in vice, there springs in the conscience a
displeasure that afflicts us sleeping and waking with various tormenting
imaginations:
“Quippe ubi se multi, per somnia saepe loquentes,
Aut morbo delirantes, protraxe ferantur,
Et celata diu in medium peccata dedisse.”
[“Surely where many, often talking in their sleep, or raving in
disease, are said to have betrayed themselves, and to have given
publicity to offences long concealed.”--Lucretius, v. 1157.]
Apollodorus dreamed that he saw himself flayed by the Scythians and
afterwards boiled in a cauldron, and that his heart muttered these words
“I am the cause of all these mischiefs that have befallen thee.”
Epicurus said that no hiding-hole could conceal the wicked, since they
could never assure themselves of being hid whilst their conscience
discovered them to themselves.
“Prima est haec ultio, quod se
Judice nemo nocens absohitur.”
[“Tis the first punishment of sin that no man absolves himself.” or:
“This is the highest revenge, that by its judgment no offender is
absolved.”--Juvenal, xiii. 2.]
As an ill conscience fills us with fear, so a good one gives us greater
confidence and assurance; and I can truly say that I have gone through
several hazards with a more steady pace in consideration of the secret
knowledge I had of my own will and the innocence of my intentions:
“Conscia mens ut cuique sua est, ita concipit intra
Pectora pro facto spemque metumque suo.”
[“As a man’s conscience is, so within hope or fear prevails, suiting
to his design.”--Ovid, Fast., i. 485.]
Of this are a thousand examples; but it will be enough to instance three
of one and the same person. Scipio, being one day accused before the
people of Rome of some crimes of a very high nature, instead of excusing
himself or flattering his judges: “It will become you well,” said he,
“to sit in judgment upon a head, by whose means you have the power to
judge all the world.” Another time, all the answer he gave to several
impeachments brought against him by a tribune of the people, instead of
making his defence: “Let us go, citizens,” said he, “let us go render
thanks to the gods for the victory they gave me over the Carthaginians as
this day,” and advancing himself before towards the Temple, he had
presently all the assembly and his very accuser himself following at his
heels. And Petilius, having been set on by Cato to demand an account of
the money that had passed through his hands in the province of Antioch,
Scipio being come into the senate to that purpose, produced a book from
under his robe, wherein he told them was an exact account of his receipts
and disbursements; but being required to deliver it to the prothonotary
to be examined, he refused, saying, he would not do himself so great a
disgrace; and in the presence of the whole senate tore the book with his
own hands to pieces. I do not believe that the most seared conscience
could have counterfeited so great an assurance. He had naturally too
high a spirit and was accustomed to too high a fortune, says Titius
Livius, to know how to be criminal, and to lower himself to the meanness
of defending his innocence. The putting men to the rack is a dangerous
invention, and seems to be rather a trial of patience than of truth.
Both he who has the fortitude to endure it conceals the truth, and he who
has not: for why should pain sooner make me confess what really is, than
force me to say what is not? And, on the contrary, if he who is not
guilty of that whereof he is accused, has the courage to undergo those
torments, why should not he who is guilty have the same, so fair a reward
as life being in his prospect? I believe the ground of this invention
proceeds from the consideration of the force of conscience: for, to the
guilty, it seems to assist the rack to make him confess his fault and to
shake his resolution; and, on the other side, that it fortifies the
innocent against the torture. But when all is done, ‘tis, in plain
truth, a trial full of uncertainty and danger what would not a man say,
what would not a man do, to avoid so intolerable torments?
“Etiam innocentes cogit mentiri dolor.”
[“Pain will make even the innocent lie.”--Publius Syrus, De Dolore.]
Whence it comes to pass, that him whom the judge has racked that he may
not die innocent, he makes him die both innocent and racked. A thousand
and a thousand have charged their own heads by false confessions, amongst
whom I place Philotas, considering the circumstances of the trial
Alexander put upon him and the progress of his torture. But so it is
that some say it is the least evil human weakness could invent; very
inhumanly, notwithstanding, and to very little purpose, in my opinion.
Many nations less barbarous in this than the Greeks and Romans who call
them so, repute it horrible and cruel to torment and pull a man to pieces
for a fault of which they are yet in doubt. How can he help your
ignorance? Are not you unjust, that, not to kill him without cause, do
worse than kill him? And that this is so, do but observe how often men
prefer to die without reason than undergo this examination, more painful
than execution itself; and that oft-times by its extremity anticipates
execution, and perform it. I know not where I had this story, but it
exactly matches the conscience of our justice in this particular. A
country-woman, to a general of a very severe discipline, accused one of
his soldiers that he had taken from her children the little soup meat she
had left to nourish them withal, the army having consumed all the rest;
but of this proof there was none. The general, after having cautioned
the woman to take good heed to what she said, for that she would make
herself guilty of a false accusation if she told a lie, and she
persisting, he presently caused the soldier’s belly to be ripped up to
clear the truth of the fact, and the woman was found to be right. An
instructive sentence.
CHAPTER VI
USE MAKES PERFECT
‘Tis not to be expected that argument and instruction, though we never so
voluntarily surrender our belief to what is read to us, should be of
force to lead us on so far as to action, if we do not, over and above,
exercise and form the soul by experience to the course for which we
design it; it will, otherwise, doubtless find itself at a loss when it
comes to the pinch of the business. This is the reason why those amongst
the philosophers who were ambitious to attain to a greater excellence,
were not contented to await the severities of fortune in the retirement
and repose of their own habitations, lest he should have surprised them
raw and inexpert in the combat, but sallied out to meet her, and
purposely threw themselves into the proof of difficulties. Some of them
abandoned riches to exercise themselves in a voluntary poverty; others
sought out labour and an austerity of life, to inure them to hardships
and inconveniences; others have deprived themselves of their dearest
members, as of sight, and of the instruments of generation, lest their
too delightful and effeminate service should soften and debauch the
stability of their souls.
But in dying, which is the greatest work we have to do, practice can give
us no assistance at all. A man may by custom fortify himself against
pain, shame, necessity, and such-like accidents, but as to death, we can
experiment it but once, and are all apprentices when we come to it.
There have, anciently, been men so excellent managers of their time that
they have tried even in death itself to relish and taste it, and who have
bent their utmost faculties of mind to discover what this passage is, but
they are none of them come back to tell us the news:
“Nemo expergitus exstat,
Frigida quern semel est vitai pausa sequuta.”
[“No one wakes who has once fallen into the cold sleep of death.”
--Lucretius, iii. 942]
Julius Canus, a noble Roman, of singular constancy and virtue, having
been condemned to die by that worthless fellow Caligula, besides many
marvellous testimonies that he gave of his resolution, as he was just
going to receive the stroke of the executioner, was asked by a
philosopher, a friend of his: “Well, Canus, whereabout is your soul now?
what is she doing? What are you thinking of?”--“I was thinking,” replied
the other, “to keep myself ready, and the faculties of my mind full
settled and fixed, to try if in this short and quick instant of death, I
could perceive the motion of the soul when she parts from the body, and
whether she has any sentiment at the separation, that I may after come
again if I can, to acquaint my friends with it.” This man philosophises
not unto death only, but in death itself. What a strange assurance was
this, and what bravery of courage, to desire his death should be a lesson
to him, and to have leisure to think of other things in so great an
affair:
“Jus hoc animi morientis habebat.”
[“This mighty power of mind he had dying.”-Lucan, viii. 636.]
And yet I fancy, there is a certain way of making it familiar to us, and
in some sort of making trial what it is. We may gain experience, if not
entire and perfect, yet such, at least, as shall not be totally useless
to us, and that may render us more confident and more assured. If we
cannot overtake it, we may approach it and view it, and if we do not
advance so far as the fort, we may at least discover and make ourselves
acquainted with the avenues. It is not without reason that we are taught
to consider sleep as a resemblance of death: with how great facility do
we pass from waking to sleeping, and with how little concern do we lose
the knowledge of light and of ourselves. Peradventure, the faculty of
sleeping would seem useless and contrary to nature, since it deprives us
of all action and sentiment, were it not that by it nature instructs us
that she has equally made us to die as to live; and in life presents to
us the eternal state she reserves for us after it, to accustom us to it
and to take from us the fear of it. But such as have by violent accident
fallen into a swoon, and in it have lost all sense, these, methinks, have
been very near seeing the true and natural face of death; for as to the
moment of the passage, it is not to be feared that it brings with it any
pain or displeasure, forasmuch as we can have no feeling without leisure;
our sufferings require time, which in death is so short, and so
precipitous, that it must necessarily be insensible. They are the
approaches that we are to fear, and these may fall within the limits of
experience.
Many things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect; I have
passed a good part of my life in a perfect and entire health; I say, not
only entire, but, moreover, sprightly and wanton. This state, so full of
verdure, jollity, and vigour, made the consideration of sickness so
formidable to me, that when I came to experience it, I found the attacks
faint and easy in comparison with what I had apprehended. Of this I have
daily experience; if I am under the shelter of a warm room, in a stormy
and tempestuous night, I wonder how people can live abroad, and am
afflicted for those who are out in the fields: if I am there myself, I do
not wish to be anywhere else. This one thing of being always shut up in
a chamber I fancied insupportable: but I was presently inured to be so
imprisoned a week, nay a month together, in a very weak, disordered, and
sad condition; and I have found that, in the time of my health, I much
more pitied the sick, than I think myself to be pitied when I am so, and
that the force of my imagination enhances near one-half of the essence
and reality of the thing. I hope that when I come to die I shall find it
the same, and that, after all, it is not worth the pains I take, so much
preparation and so much assistance as I call in, to undergo the stroke.
But, at all events, we cannot give ourselves too much advantage.
In the time of our third or second troubles (I do not well remember
which), going one day abroad to take the air, about a league from my own
house, which is seated in the very centre of all the bustle and mischief
of the late civil wars in France; thinking myself in all security and so
near to my retreat that I stood in need of no better equipage, I had
taken a horse that went very easy upon his pace, but was not very strong.
Being upon my return home, a sudden occasion falling out to make use of
this horse in a kind of service that he was not accustomed to, one of my
train, a lusty, tall fellow, mounted upon a strong German horse, that had
a very ill mouth, fresh and vigorous, to play the brave and set on ahead
of his fellows, comes thundering full speed in the very track where I
was, rushing like a Colossus upon the little man and the little horse,
with such a career of strength and weight, that he turned us both over
and over, topsy-turvy with our heels in the air: so that there lay the
horse overthrown and stunned with the fall, and I ten or twelve paces
from him stretched out at length, with my face all battered and broken,
my sword which I had had in my hand, above ten paces beyond that, and my
belt broken all to pieces, without motion or sense any more than a stock.
‘Twas the only swoon I was ever in till that hour in my life. Those who
were with me, after having used all the means they could to bring me to
myself, concluding me dead, took me up in their arms, and carried me with
very much difficulty home to my house, which was about half a French
league from thence. On the way, having been for more than two hours
given over for a dead man, I began to move and to fetch my breath; for so
great abundance of blood was fallen into my stomach, that nature had need
to rouse her forces to discharge it. They then raised me upon my feet,
where I threw off a whole bucket of clots of blood, as this I did also
several times by the way. This gave me so much ease, that I began to
recover a little life, but so leisurely and by so small advances, that my
first sentiments were much nearer the approaches of death than life:
“Perche, dubbiosa ancor del suo ritorno,
Non s’assicura attonita la mente.”
[“For the soul, doubtful as to its return, could not compose itself”
--Tasso, Gierus. Lib., xii. 74.]
The remembrance of this accident, which is very well imprinted in my
memory, so naturally representing to me the image and idea of death, has
in some sort reconciled me to that untoward adventure. When I first
began to open my eyes, it was with so perplexed, so weak and dead a
sight, that I could yet distinguish nothing but only discern the light:
“Come quel ch’or apre, or’chiude
Gli occhi, mezzo tra’l sonno e l’esser desto.”
[“As a man that now opens, now shuts his eyes, between sleep
and waking.”--Tasso, Gierus. Lib., viii., 26.]
As to the functions of the soul, they advanced with the same pace and
measure with those of the body. I saw myself all bloody, my doublet
being stained all over with the blood I had vomited. The first thought
that came into my mind was that I had a harquebuss shot in my head, and
indeed, at the time there were a great many fired round about us.
Methought my life but just hung upon my, lips: and I shut my eyes, to
help, methought, to thrust it out, and took a pleasure in languishing and
letting myself go. It was an imagination that only superficially floated
upon my soul, as tender and weak as all the rest, but really, not only
exempt from anything displeasing, but mixed with that sweetness that
people feel when they glide into a slumber.
I believe it is the very same condition those people are in, whom we see
swoon with weakness in the agony of death we pity them without cause,
supposing them agitated with grievous dolours, or that their souls suffer
under painful thoughts. It has ever been my belief, contrary to the
opinion of many, and particularly of La Boetie, that those whom we see so
subdued and stupefied at the approaches of their end, or oppressed with
the length of the disease, or by accident of an apoplexy or falling
sickness,
“Vi morbi saepe coactus
Ante oculos aliquis nostros, ut fulminis ictu,
Concidit, et spumas agit; ingemit, et tremit artus;
Desipit, extentat nervos, torquetur, anhelat,
Inconstanter, et in jactando membra fatigat;”
[“Often, compelled by the force of disease, some one as
thunderstruck falls under our eyes, and foams, groans, and trembles,
stretches, twists, breathes irregularly, and in paroxysms wears out
his strength.”--Lucretius, iii. 485.]
or hurt in the head, whom we hear to mutter, and by fits to utter
grievous groans; though we gather from these signs by which it seems as
if they had some remains of consciousness, and that there are movements
of the body; I have always believed, I say, both the body and the soul
benumbed and asleep,
“Vivit, et est vitae nescius ipse suae,”
[“He lives, and does not know that he is alive.”
--Ovid, Trist., i. 3, 12.]
and could not believe that in so great a stupefaction of the members and
so great a defection of the senses, the soul could maintain any force
within to take cognisance of herself, and that, therefore, they had no
tormenting reflections to make them consider and be sensible of the
misery of their condition, and consequently were not much to be pitied.
I can, for my part, think of no state so insupportable and dreadful, as
to have the soul vivid and afflicted, without means to declare itself; as
one should say of such as are sent to execution with their tongues first
cut out (were it not that in this kind of dying, the most silent seems to
me the most graceful, if accompanied with a grave and constant
countenance); or if those miserable prisoners, who fall into the hands of
the base hangman soldiers of this age, by whom they are tormented with
all sorts of inhuman usage to compel them to some excessive and
impossible ransom; kept, in the meantime, in such condition and place,
where they have no means of expressing or signifying their thoughts and
their misery. The poets have feigned some gods who favour the
deliverance of such as suffer under a languishing death:
“Hunc ego Diti
Sacrum jussa fero, teque isto corpore solvo.”
[“I bidden offer this sacred thing to Pluto, and from that body
dismiss thee.”--AEneid, iv. 782.]
both the interrupted words, and the short and irregular answers one gets
from them sometimes, by bawling and keeping a clutter about them; or the
motions which seem to yield some consent to what we would have them do,
are no testimony, nevertheless, that they live, an entire life at least.
So it happens to us in the yawning of sleep, before it has fully
possessed us, to perceive, as in a dream, what is done about us, and to
follow the last things that are said with a perplexed and uncertain
hearing which seems but to touch upon the borders of the soul; and to
make answers to the last words that have been spoken to us, which have
more in them of chance than sense.
Now seeing I have in effect tried it, I have no doubt but I have hitherto
made a right judgment; for first, being in a swoon, I laboured to rip
open the buttons of my doublet with my nails, for my sword was gone; and
yet I felt nothing in my imagination that hurt me; for we have many
motions in us that do not proceed from our direction;
“Semianimesque micant digiti, ferrumque retractant;”
[“Half-dead fingers grope about, and grasp again the sword.”
--AEneid, x. 396.]
so falling people extend their arms before them by a natural impulse,
which prompts our limbs to offices and motions without any commission
from our reason.
“Falciferos memorant currus abscindere membra . . .
Ut tremere in terra videatur ab artubus id quod
Decidit abscissum; cum mens tamen atque hominis vis
Mobilitate mali, non quit sentire dolorem.”
[“They relate that scythe-bearing chariots mow off limbs, so that
they quiver on the ground; and yet the mind of him from whom the
limb is taken by the swiftness of the blow feels no pain.”
--Lucretius, iii. 642.]
My stomach was so oppressed with the coagulated blood, that my hands
moved to that part, of their own voluntary motion, as they frequently do
to the part that itches, without being directed by our will. There are
several animals, and even men, in whom one may perceive the muscles to
stir and tremble after they are dead. Every one experimentally knows
that there are some members which grow stiff and flag without his leave.
Now, those passions which only touch the outward bark of us, cannot be
said to be ours: to make them so, there must be a concurrence of the
whole man; and the pains which are felt by the hand or the foot while
we are sleeping, are none of ours.
As I drew near my own house, where the alarm of my fall was already got
before me, and my family were come out to meet me, with the hubbub usual
in such cases, not only did I make some little answer to some questions
which were asked me; but they moreover tell me, that I was sufficiently
collected to order them to bring a horse to my wife whom on the road,
I saw struggling and tiring herself which is hilly and rugged. This
should seem to proceed from a soul its functions; but it was nothing so
with me. I knew not what I said or did, and they were nothing but idle
thoughts in the clouds, that were stirred up by the senses of the eyes
and ears, and proceeded not from me. I knew not for all that, whence I
came or whither I went, neither was I capable to weigh and consider what
was said to me: these were light effects, that the senses produced of
themselves as of custom; what the soul contributed was in a dream,
lightly touched, licked and bedewed by the soft impression of the senses.
Notwithstanding, my condition was, in truth, very easy and quiet; I had
no affliction upon me, either for others or myself; it was an extreme
languor and weakness, without any manner of pain. I saw my own house,
but knew it not. When they had put me to bed I found an inexpressible
sweetness in that repose; for I had been desperately tugged and lugged by
those poor people who had taken the pains to carry me upon their arms a
very great and a very rough way, and had in so doing all quite tired out
themselves, twice or thrice one after another. They offered me several
remedies, but I would take none, certainly believing that I was mortally
wounded in the head. And, in earnest, it had been a very happy death,
for the weakness of my understanding deprived me of the faculty of
discerning, and that of my body of the sense of feeling; I was suffering
myself to glide away so sweetly and after so soft and easy a manner, that
I scarce find any other action less troublesome than that was. But when
I came again to myself and to resume my faculties:
“Ut tandem sensus convaluere mei,”
[“When at length my lost senses again returned.”
--Ovid, Trist., i. 3, 14.]
which was two or three hours after, I felt myself on a sudden involved in
terrible pain, having my limbs battered and ground with my fall, and was.
so ill for two or three nights after, that I thought I was once more
dying again, but a more painful death, having concluded myself as good as
dead before, and to this hour am sensible of the bruises of that terrible
shock. I will not here omit, that the last thing I could make them beat
into my head, was the memory of this accident, and I had it over and over
again repeated to me, whither I was going, from whence I came, and at
what time of the day this mischance befell me, before I could comprehend
it. As to the manner of my fall, that was concealed from me in favour to
him who had been the occasion, and other flim-flams were invented. But a
long time after, and the very next day that my memory began to return and
to represent to me the state wherein I was, at the instant that I
perceived this horse coming full drive upon me (for I had seen him at my
heels, and gave myself for gone, but this thought had been so sudden,
that fear had had no leisure to introduce itself) it seemed to me like a
flash of lightning that had pierced my soul, and that I came from the
other world.
This long story of so light an accident would appear vain enough, were it
not for the knowledge I have gained by it for my own use; for I do really
find, that to get acquainted with death, needs no more but nearly to
approach it. Every one, as Pliny says, is a good doctrine to himself,
provided he be capable of discovering himself near at hand. Here, this
is not my doctrine, ‘tis my study; and is not the lesson of another, but
my own; and if I communicate it, it ought not to be ill taken, for that
which is of use to me, may also, peradventure, be useful to another. As
to the rest, I spoil nothing, I make use of nothing but my own; and if I
play the fool, ‘tis at my own expense, and nobody else is concerned in’t;
for ‘tis a folly that will die with me, and that no one is to inherit.
We hear but of two or three of the ancients, who have beaten this path,
and yet I cannot say if it was after this manner, knowing no more of them
but their names. No one since has followed the track: ‘tis a rugged
road, more so than it seems, to follow a pace so rambling and uncertain,
as that of the soul; to penetrate the dark profundities of its intricate
internal windings; to choose and lay hold of so many little nimble
motions; ‘tis a new and extraordinary undertaking, and that withdraws us
from the common and most recommended employments of the world. ‘Tis now
many years since that my thoughts have had no other aim and level than
myself, and that I have only pried into and studied myself: or, if I
study any other thing, ‘tis to apply it to or rather in myself. And yet
I do not think it a fault, if, as others do by other much less profitable
sciences, I communicate what I have learned in this, though I am not very
well pleased with my own progress. There is no description so difficult,
nor doubtless of so great utility, as that of a man’s self: and withal, a
man must curl his hair and set out and adjust himself, to appear in
public: now I am perpetually tricking myself out, for I am eternally upon
my own description. Custom has made all speaking of a man’s self
vicious, and positively interdicts it, in hatred to the boasting that
seems inseparable from the testimony men give of themselves:
“In vitium ducit culpae fuga.”
[“The avoiding a mere fault often leads us into a greater.”
Or: “The escape from a fault leads into a vice”
--Horace, De Arte Poetics, verse 31.]
Instead of blowing the child’s nose, this is to take his nose off
altogether. I think the remedy worse than the disease. But, allowing it
to be true that it must of necessity be presumption to entertain people
with discourses of one’s self, I ought not, pursuing my general design,
to forbear an action that publishes this infirmity of mine, nor conceal
the fault which I not only practise but profess. Notwithstanding, to
speak my thought freely, I think that the custom of condemning wine,
because some people will be drunk, is itself to be condemned; a man
cannot abuse anything but what is good in itself; and I believe that this
rule has only regard to the popular vice. They are bits for calves, with
which neither the saints whom we hear speak so highly of themselves, nor
the philosophers, nor the divines will be curbed; neither will I, who am
as little the one as the other, If they do not write of it expressly, at
all events, when the occasions arise, they don’t hesitate to put
themselves on the public highway. Of what does Socrates treat more
largely than of himself? To what does he more direct and address the
discourses of his disciples, than to speak of themselves, not of the
lesson in their book, but of the essence and motion of their souls? We
confess ourselves religiously to God and our confessor; as our
neighbours, do to all the people. But some will answer that we there
speak nothing but accusation against ourselves; why then, we say all; for
our very virtue itself is faulty and penetrable. My trade and art is to
live; he that forbids me to speak according to my own sense, experience,
and practice, may as well enjoin an architect not to speak of building
according to his own knowledge, but according to that of his neighbour;
according to the knowledge of another, and not according to his own. If
it be vainglory for a man to publish his own virtues, why does not Cicero
prefer the eloquence of Hortensius, and Hortensius that of Cicero?
Peradventure they mean that I should give testimony of myself by works
and effects, not barely by words. I chiefly paint my thoughts, a subject
void of form and incapable of operative production; ‘tis all that I can
do to couch it in this airy body of the voice; the wisest and devoutest
men have lived in the greatest care to avoid all apparent effects.
Effects would more speak of fortune than of me; they manifest their own
office and not mine, but uncertainly and by conjecture; patterns of some
one particular virtue. I expose myself entire; ‘tis a body where, at one
view, the veins, muscles, and tendons are apparent, every of them in its
proper place; here the effects of a cold; there of the heart beating,
very dubiously. I do not write my own acts, but myself and my essence.
I am of opinion that a man must be very cautious how he values himself,
and equally conscientious to give a true report, be it better or worse,
impartially. If I thought myself perfectly good and wise, I would rattle
it out to some purpose. To speak less of one’s self than what one really
is is folly, not modesty; and to take that for current pay which is under
a man’s value is pusillanimity and cowardice, according to, Aristotle.
No virtue assists itself with falsehood; truth is never matter of error.
To speak more of one’s self than is really true is not always mere
presumption; ‘tis, moreover, very often folly; to, be immeasurably
pleased with what one is, and to fall into an indiscreet self-love, is in
my opinion the substance of this vice. The most sovereign remedy to cure
it, is to do quite contrary to what these people direct who, in
forbidding men to speak of themselves, consequently, at the same time,
interdict thinking of themselves too. Pride dwells in the thought; the
tongue can have but a very little share in it.
They fancy that to think of one’s self is to be delighted with one’s
self; to frequent and converse with one’s self, to be overindulgent; but
this excess springs only in those who take but a superficial view of
themselves, and dedicate their main inspection to their affairs; who call
it mere reverie and idleness to occupy one’s self with one’s self, and
the building one’s self up a mere building of castles in the air; who
look upon themselves as a third person only, a stranger. If any one be
in rapture with his own knowledge, looking only on those below him, let
him but turn his eye upward towards past ages, and his pride will be
abated, when he shall there find so many thousand wits that trample him
under foot. If he enter into a flattering presumption of his personal
valour, let him but recollect the lives of Scipio, Epaminondas; so many
armies, so many nations, that leave him so far behind them. No
particular quality can make any man proud, that will at the same time put
the many other weak and imperfect ones he has in the other scale, and the
nothingness of human condition to make up the weight. Because Socrates
had alone digested to purpose the precept of his god, “to know himself,”
and by that study arrived at the perfection of setting himself at nought,
he only was reputed worthy the title of a sage. Whosoever shall so know
himself, let him boldly speak it out.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
Addresses his voyage to no certain, port
All apprentices when we come to it (death)
Any one may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death
Business to-morrow
Condemning wine, because some people will be drunk
Conscience makes us betray, accuse, and fight against ourselves
Curiosity and of that eager passion for news
Delivered into our own custody the keys of life
Drunkeness a true and certain trial of every one’s nature
I can more hardly believe a man’s constancy than any virtue
“I wish you good health.” “No health to thee,” replied the other
If to philosophise be, as ‘tis defined, to doubt
Improperly we call this voluntary dissolution, despair
It’s madness to nourish infirmity
Let him be as wise as he will, after all he is but a man
Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting.
Look upon themselves as a third person only, a stranger
Lower himself to the meanness of defending his innocence
Much difference betwixt us and ourselves
No alcohol the night on which a man intends to get children
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness
Not conclude too much upon your mistress’s inviolable chastity
One door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out
Ordinary method of cure is carried on at the expense of life
Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age
Shame for me to serve, being so near the reach of liberty
Speak less of one’s self than what one really is is folly
Taught to consider sleep as a resemblance of death
The action is commendable, not the man
The most voluntary death is the finest
The vice opposite to curiosity is negligence
Things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect
Thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain
Tis evil counsel that will admit no change
Torture: rather a trial of patience than of truth
We do not go, we are driven
What can they suffer who do not fear to die?
Whoever expects punishment already suffers it
Wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 10.
VII. Of recompenses of honour.
VIII. Of the affection of fathers to their children.
IX. Of the arms of the Parthians.
X. Of books.
XI. Of cruelty.
XII. Apology for Raimond Sebond.
CHAPTER VII
OF RECOMPENSES OF HONOUR
They who write the life of Augustus Caesar,--[Suetonius, Life of
Augustus, c. 25.]--observe this in his military discipline, that he was
wonderfully liberal of gifts to men of merit, but that as to the true
recompenses of honour he was as sparing; yet he himself had been
gratified by his uncle with all the military recompenses before he had
ever been in the field. It was a pretty invention, and received into
most governments of the world, to institute certain vain and in
themselves valueless distinctions to honour and recompense virtue, such
as the crowns of laurel, oak, and myrtle, the particular fashion of some
garment, the privilege to ride in a coach in the city, or at night with a
torch, some peculiar place assigned in public assemblies, the prerogative
of certain additional names and titles, certain distinctions in the
bearing of coats of arms, and the like, the use of which, according to
the several humours of nations, has been variously received, and yet
continues.
We in France, as also several of our neighbours, have orders of
knighthood that are instituted only for this end. And ‘tis, in earnest,
a very good and profitable custom to find out an acknowledgment for the
worth of rare and excellent men, and to satisfy them with rewards that
are not at all chargeable either to prince or people. And that which has
always been found by ancient experience, and which we have heretofore
observed among ourselves, that men of quality have ever been more jealous
of such recompenses than of those wherein there was gain and profit, is
not without very good ground and reason. If with the reward, which ought
to be simply a recompense of honour, they should mix other commodities
and add riches, this mixture, instead of procuring an increase of
estimation, would debase and abate it. The Order of St. Michael, which
has been so long in repute amongst us, had no greater commodity than that
it had no communication with any other commodity, which produced this
effect, that formerly there was no office or title whatever to which the
gentry pretended with so great desire and affection as they did to that;
no quality that carried with it more respect and grandeur, valour and
worth more willingly embracing and with greater ambition aspiring to a
recompense purely its own, and rather glorious than profitable. For, in
truth, other gifts have not so great a dignity of usage, by reason they
are laid out upon all sorts of occasions; with money a man pays the wages
of a servant, the diligence of a courier, dancing, vaulting, speaking,
and the meanest offices we receive; nay, and reward vice with it too, as
flattery, treachery, and pimping; and therefore ‘tis no wonder if virtue
less desires and less willingly receives this common sort of payment,
than that which is proper and peculiar to her, throughout generous and
noble. Augustus had reason to be more sparing of this than the other,
insomuch that honour is a privilege which derives its principal essence
from rarity; and so virtue itself:
“Cui malus est nemo, quis bonus esse potest?”
[“To whom no one is ill who can be good?”-Martial, xii. 82.]
We do not intend it for a commendation when we say that such a one is
careful in the education of his children, by reason it is a common act,
how just and well done soever; no more than we commend a great tree,
where the whole forest is the same. I do not think that any citizen of
Sparta glorified himself much upon his valour, it being the universal
virtue of the whole nation; and as little upon his fidelity and contempt
of riches. There is no recompense becomes virtue, how great soever, that
is once passed into a custom; and I know not withal whether we can ever
call it great, being common.
Seeing, then, that these remunerations of honour have no other value and
estimation but only this, that few people enjoy them, ‘tis but to be
liberal of them to bring them down to nothing. And though there should
be now more men found than in former times worthy of our order, the
estimation of it nevertheless should not be abated, nor the honour made
cheap; and it may easily happen that more may merit it; for there is no
virtue that so easily spreads as that of military valour. There is
another virtue, true, perfect, and philosophical, of which I do not
speak, and only make use of the word in our common acceptation, much
greater than this and more full, which is a force and assurance of the
soul, equally despising all sorts of adverse accidents, equable, uniform,
and constant, of which ours is no more than one little ray. Use,
education, example, and custom can do all in all to the establishment of
that whereof I am speaking, and with great facility render it common, as
by the experience of our civil wars is manifest enough; and whoever could
at this time unite us all, Catholic and Huguenot, into one body, and set
us upon some brave common enterprise, we should again make our ancient
military reputation flourish. It is most certain that in times past the
recompense of this order had not only a regard to valour, but had a
further prospect; it never was the reward of a valiant soldier but of a
great captain; the science of obeying was not reputed worthy of so
honourable a guerdon. There was therein a more universal military
expertness required, and that comprehended the most and the greatest
qualities of a military man:
“Neque enim eaedem militares et imperatorix artes sunt,”
[“For the arts of soldiery and generalship are not the same.”
--Livy, xxv. 19.]
as also, besides, a condition suitable to such a dignity. But, I say,
though more men were worthy than formerly, yet ought it not to be more
liberally distributed, and it were better to fall short in not giving it
at all to whom it should be due, than for ever to lose, as we have lately
done, the fruit of so profitable an invention. No man of spirit will
deign to advantage himself with what is in common with many; and such of
the present time as have least merited this recompense themselves make
the greater show of disdaining it, in order thereby to be ranked with
those to whom so much wrong has been done by the unworthy conferring and
debasing the distinction which was their particular right.
Now, to expect that in obliterating and abolishing this, suddenly to
create and bring into credit a like institution, is not a proper attempt
for so licentious and so sick a time as this wherein we now are; and it
will fall out that the last will from its birth incur the same
inconveniences that have ruined the other.--[Montaigne refers to the
Order of the Saint-Esprit, instituted by Henry III. in 1578.]--The
rules for dispensing this new order had need to be extremely clipt and
bound under great restrictions, to give it authority; and this tumultuous
season is incapable of such a curb: besides that, before this can be
brought into repute, ‘tis necessary that the memory of the first, and of
the contempt into which it is fallen, be buried in oblivion.
This place might naturally enough admit of some discourse upon the
consideration of valour, and the difference of this virtue from others;
but, Plutarch having so often handled this subject, I should give myself
an unnecessary trouble to repeat what he has said. But this is worth
considering: that our nation places valour, vaillance, in the highest
degree of virtue, as its very word evidences, being derived from valeur,
and that, according to our use, when we say a man of high worth a good
man, in our court style--‘tis to say a valiant man, after the Roman way;
for the general appellation of virtue with them takes etymology from vis,
force. The proper, sole, and essential profession of, the French
noblesse is that of arms: and ‘tis likely that the first virtue that
discovered itself amongst men and has given to some advantage over
others, was that by which the strongest and most valiant have mastered
the weaker, and acquired a particular authority and reputation, whence
came to it that dignified appellation; or else, that these nations, being
very warlike, gave the pre-eminence to that of the virtues which was most
familiar to them; just as our passion and the feverish solicitude we have
of the chastity of women occasions that to say, a good woman, a woman of
worth, a woman of honour and virtue, signifies merely a chaste woman as
if, to oblige them to that one duty, we were indifferent as to all the
rest, and gave them the reins in all other faults whatever to compound
for that one of incontinence.
CHAPTER VIII
OF THE AFFECTION OF FATHERS TO THEIR CHILDREN
To Madame D’Estissac.
MADAM, if the strangeness and novelty of my subject, which are wont to
give value to things, do not save me, I shall never come off with honour
from this foolish attempt: but ‘tis so fantastic, and carries a face so
unlike the common use, that this, peradventure, may make it pass. ‘Tis a
melancholic humour, and consequently a humour very much an enemy to my
natural complexion, engendered by the pensiveness of the solitude into
which for some years past I have retired myself, that first put into
my head this idle fancy of writing. Wherein, finding myself totally
unprovided and empty of other matter, I presented myself to myself for
argument and subject. ‘Tis the only book in the world of its kind, and
of a wild and extravagant design. There is nothing worth remark in this
affair but that extravagancy: for in a subject so vain and frivolous, the
best workman in the world could not have given it a form fit to recommend
it to any manner of esteem.
Now, madam, having to draw my own picture to the life, I had omitted one
important feature, had I not therein represented the honour I have ever
had for you and your merits; which I have purposely chosen to say in the
beginning of this chapter, by reason that amongst the many other
excellent qualities you are mistress of, that of the tender love you have
manifested to your children, is seated in one of the highest places.
Whoever knows at what age Monsieur D’Estissac, your husband, left you a
widow, the great and honourable matches that have since been offered to
you, as many as to any lady of your condition in France, the constancy
and steadiness wherewith, for so many years, you have sustained so many
sharp difficulties, the burden and conduct of affairs, which have
persecuted you in every corner of the kingdom, and are not yet weary of
tormenting you, and the happy direction you have given to all these, by
your sole prudence or good fortune, will easily conclude with me that we
have not so vivid an example as yours of maternal affection in our times.
I praise God, madam, that it has been so well employed; for the great
hopes Monsieur D’Estissac, your son, gives of himself, render sufficient
assurance that when he comes of age you will reap from him all the
obedience and gratitude of a very good man. But, forasmuch as by reason
of his tender years, he has not been capable of taking notice of those
offices of extremest value he has in so great number received from you,
I will, if these papers shall one day happen to fall into his hands, when
I shall neither have mouth nor speech left to deliver it to him, that he
shall receive from me a true account of those things, which shall be more
effectually manifested to him by their own effects, by which he will
understand that there is not a gentleman in France who stands more
indebted to a mother’s care; and that he cannot, in the future, give a
better nor more certain testimony of his own worth and virtue than by
acknowledging you for that excellent mother you are.
If there be any law truly natural, that is to say, any instinct that is
seen universally and perpetually imprinted in both beasts and men (which
is not without controversy), I can say, that in my opinion, next to the
care every animal has of its own preservation, and to avoid that which
may hurt him, the affection that the begetter bears to his offspring
holds the second place in this rank. And seeing that nature appears to
have recommended it to us, having regard to the extension and progression
of the successive pieces of this machine of hers, ‘tis no wonder if, on
the contrary, that of children towards their parents is not so great.
To which we may add this other Aristotelian consideration, that he who
confers a benefit on any one, loves him better than he is beloved by him
again: that he to whom is owing, loves better than he who owes; and that
every artificer is fonder of his work, than, if that work had sense, it
would be of him; by reason that it is dear to us to be, and to be
consists in movement and action; therefore every one has in some sort a
being in his work. He who confers a benefit exercises a fine and honest
action; he who receives it exercises the useful only. Now the useful is
much less lovable than the honest; the honest is stable and permanent,
supplying him who has done it with a continual gratification. The useful
loses itself, easily slides away, and the memory of it is neither so
fresh nor so pleasing. Those things are dearest to us that have cost us
most, and giving is more chargeable than receiving.
Since it has pleased God to endue us with some capacity of reason, to the
end we may not, like brutes, be servilely subject and enslaved to the
laws common to both, but that we should by judgment and a voluntary
liberty apply ourselves to them, we ought, indeed, something to yield to
the simple authority of nature, but not suffer ourselves to be
tyrannically hurried away and transported by her; reason alone should
have the conduct of our inclinations. I, for my part, have a strange
disgust for those propensions that are started in us without the
mediation and direction of the judgment, as, upon the subject I am
speaking of, I cannot entertain that passion of dandling and caressing
infants scarcely born, having as yet neither motion of soul nor shape of
body distinguishable, by which they can render themselves amiable, and
have not willingly suffered them to be nursed near me. A true and
regular affection ought to spring and increase with the knowledge they
give us of themselves, and then, if they are worthy of it, the natural
propension walking hand in hand with reason, to cherish them with a truly
paternal love; and so to judge, also, if they be otherwise, still
rendering ourselves to reason, notwithstanding the inclination of nature.
‘Tis oft-times quite otherwise; and, most commonly, we find ourselves
more taken with the running up and down, the games, and puerile
simplicities of our children, than we do, afterwards, with their most
complete actions; as if we had loved them for our sport, like monkeys,
and not as men; and some there are, who are very liberal in buying them
balls to play withal, who are very close-handed for the least necessary
expense when they come to age. Nay, it looks as if the jealousy of
seeing them appear in and enjoy the world when we are about to leave it,
rendered us more niggardly and stingy towards them; it vexes us that they
tread upon our heels, as if to solicit us to go out; if this were to be
feared, since the order of things will have it so that they cannot, to
speak the truth, be nor live, but at the expense of our being and life,
we should never meddle with being fathers at all.
For my part, I think it cruelty and injustice not to receive them into
the share and society of our goods, and not to make them partakers in the
intelligence of our domestic affairs when they are capable, and not to
lessen and contract our own expenses to make the more room for theirs,
seeing we beget them to that effect. ‘Tis unjust that an old fellow,
broken and half dead, should alone, in a corner of the chimney, enjoy the
money that would suffice for the maintenance and advancement of many
children, and suffer them, in the meantime, to lose their’ best years for
want of means to advance themselves in the public service and the
knowledge of men. A man by this course drives them to despair, and to
seek out by any means, how unjust or dishonourable soever, to provide for
their own support: as I have, in my time, seen several young men of good
extraction so addicted to stealing, that no correction could cure them of
it. I know one of a very good family, to whom, at the request of a
brother of his, a very honest and brave gentleman, I once spoke on this
account, who made answer, and confessed to me roundly, that he had been
put upon this paltry practice by the severity and avarice of his father;
but that he was now so accustomed to it he could not leave it off. And,
at that very time, he was trapped stealing a lady’s rings, having come
into her chamber, as she was dressing with several others. He put me in
mind of a story I had heard of another gentleman, so perfect and
accomplished in this fine trade in his youth, that, after he came to his
estate and resolved to give it over, he could not hold his hands,
nevertheless, if he passed by a shop where he saw anything he liked, from
catching it up, though it put him to the shame of sending afterwards to
pay for it. And I have myself seen several so habituated to this quality
that even amongst their comrades they could not forbear filching, though
with intent to restore what they had taken. I am a Gascon, and yet there
is no vice I so little understand as that; I hate it something more by
disposition than I condemn it by reason; I do not so much as desire
anything of another man’s. This province of ours is, in plain truth, a
little more decried than the other parts of the kingdom; and yet we have
several times seen, in our times, men of good families of other
provinces, in the hands of justice, convicted of abominable thefts. I
fear this vice is, in some sort, to be attributed to the fore-mentioned
vice of the fathers.
And if a man should tell me, as a lord of very good understanding once
did, that “he hoarded up wealth, not to extract any other fruit and use
from his parsimony, but to make himself honoured and sought after by his
relations; and that age having deprived him of all other power, it was
the only remaining remedy to maintain his authority in his family, and to
keep him from being neglected and despised by all around,” in truth, not
only old age, but all other imbecility, according to Aristotle, is the
promoter of avarice; that is something, but it is physic for a disease
that a man should prevent the birth of. A father is very miserable who
has no other hold on his children’s affection than the need they have of
his assistance, if that can be called affection; he must render himself
worthy to be respected by his virtue and wisdom, and beloved by his
kindness and the sweetness of his manners; even the very ashes of a rich
matter have their value; and we are wont to have the bones and relics of
worthy men in regard and reverence. No old age can be so decrepid in a
man who has passed his life in honour, but it must be venerable,
especially to his children, whose soul he must have trained up to their
duty by reason, not by necessity and the need they have of him, nor by
harshness and compulsion:
“Et errat longe mea quidem sententia
Qui imperium credat esse gravius, aut stabilius,
Vi quod fit, quam illud, quod amicitia adjungitur.”
[“He wanders far from the truth, in my opinion, who thinks that
government more absolute and durable which is acquired by force than
that which is attached to friendship.”--Terence, Adelph., i. I, 40.]
I condemn all violence in the education of a tender soul that is designed
for honour and liberty. There is I know not what of servile in rigour
and constraint; and I am of opinion that what is not to be done by
reason, prudence, and address, is never to be affected by force. I
myself was brought up after that manner; and they tell me that in all my
first age I never felt the rod but twice, and then very slightly. I
practised the same method with my children, who all of them died at
nurse, except Leonora, my only daughter, and who arrived to the age of
five years and upward without other correction for her childish faults
(her mother’s indulgence easily concurring) than words only, and those
very gentle; in which kind of proceeding, though my end and expectation
should be both frustrated, there are other causes enough to lay the fault
on without blaming my discipline, which I know to be natural and just,
and I should, in this, have yet been more religious towards the males, as
less born to subjection and more free; and I should have made it my
business to fill their hearts with ingenuousness and freedom. I have
never observed other effects of whipping than to render boys more
cowardly, or more wilfully obstinate.
Do we desire to be beloved of our children? Will we remove from them all
occasion of wishing our death though no occasion of so horrid a wish can
either be just or excusable?
“Nullum scelus rationem habet.”
[“No wickedness has reason.”--Livy, xxviii. 28]
Let us reasonably accommodate their lives with what is in our power. In
order to this, we should not marry so young that our age shall in a
manner be confounded with theirs; for this inconvenience plunges us into
many very great difficulties, and especially the gentry of the nation,
who are of a condition wherein they have little to do, and who live upon
their rents only: for elsewhere, with people who live by their labour,
the plurality and company of children is an increase to the common stock;
they are so many new tools and instruments wherewith to grow rich.
I married at three-and-thirty years of age, and concur in the opinion of
thirty-five, which is said to be that of Aristotle. Plato will have
nobody marry before thirty; but he has reason to laugh at those who
undertook the work of marriage after five-and-fifty, and condemns their
offspring as unworthy of aliment and life. Thales gave the truest
limits, who, young and being importuned by his mother to marry, answered,
“That it was too soon,” and, being grown into years and urged again,
“That it was too late.” A man must deny opportunity to every inopportune
action. The ancient Gauls’ looked upon it as a very horrid thing for a
man to have society with a woman before he was twenty years of age, and
strictly recommended to the men who designed themselves for war the
keeping their virginity till well grown in years, forasmuch as courage is
abated and diverted by intercourse with women:
“Ma, or congiunto a giovinetta sposa,
E lieto omai de’ figli, era invilito
Negli affetti di padre et di marito.”
[“Now, married to a young wife and happy in children, he was
demoralised by his love as father and husband.”
--Tasso, Gierus., x. 39.]
Muley Hassam, king of Tunis, he whom the Emperor Charles V. restored to
his kingdom, reproached the memory of his father Mahomet with the
frequentation of women, styling him loose, effeminate, and a getter of
children.--[Of whom he had thirty-four.]--The Greek history observes of
Iccus the Tarentine, of Chryso, Astyllus, Diopompos, and others, that to
keep their bodies in order for the Olympic games and such like exercises,
they denied themselves during that preparation all commerce with Venus.
In a certain country of the Spanish Indies men were not permitted to
marry till after forty age, and yet the girls were allowed at ten.
‘Tis not time for a gentleman of thirty years old to give place to his
son who is twenty; he is himself in a condition to serve both in the
expeditions of war and in the court of his prince; has need of all his
appurtenances; and yet, doubtless, he ought to surrender a share, but not
so great an one as to forget himself for others; and for such an one the
answer that fathers have ordinarily in their mouths, “I will not put off
my clothes, before I go to bed,” serves well.
But a father worn out with age and infirmities, and deprived by weakness
and want of health of the common society of men, wrongs himself and his
to amass a great heap of treasure. He has lived long enough, if he be
wise, to have a mind to strip himself to go to bed, not to his very
shirt, I confess, but to that and a good, warm dressing-gown; the
remaining pomps, of which he has no further use, he ought voluntarily to
surrender to those, to whom by the order of nature they belong. ‘Tis
reason he should refer the use of those things to them, seeing that
nature has reduced him to such a state that he cannot enjoy them himself;
otherwise there is doubtless malice and envy in the case. The greatest
act of the Emperor Charles V. was that when, in imitation of some of the
ancients of his own quality, confessing it but reason to strip ourselves
when our clothes encumber and grow too heavy for us, and to lie down when
our legs begin to fail us, he resigned his possessions, grandeur, and
power to his son, when he found himself failing in vigour, and steadiness
for the conduct of his affairs suitable with the glory he had therein
acquired:
“Solve senescentem mature sanus equum, ne
Peccet ad extremum ridendus, et ilia ducat.”
[“Dismiss the old horse in good time, lest, failing in the lists,
the spectators laugh.”--Horace, Epist., i., I, 8.]
This fault of not perceiving betimes and of not being sensible of the
feebleness and extreme alteration that age naturally brings both upon
body and mind, which, in my opinion, is equal, if indeed the soul has not
more than half, has lost the reputation of most of the great men in the
world. I have known in my time, and been intimately acquainted with
persons of great authority, whom one might easily discern marvellously
lapsed from the sufficiency I knew they were once endued with, by the
reputation they had acquired in their former years, whom I could
heartily, for their own sakes, have wished at home at their ease,
discharged of their public or military employments, which were now grown
too heavy for their shoulders. I have formerly been very familiar in a
gentleman’s house, a widower and very old, though healthy and cheerful
enough: this gentleman had several daughters to marry and a son already
of ripe age, which brought upon him many visitors, and a great expense,
neither of which well pleased him, not only out of consideration of
frugality, but yet more for having, by reason of his age, entered into a
course of life far differing from ours. I told him one day a little
boldly, as I used to do, that he would do better to give us younger folk
room, and to leave his principal house (for he had but that well placed
and furnished) to his son, and himself retire to an estate he had hard
by, where nobody would trouble his repose, seeing he could not otherwise
avoid being importuned by us, the condition of his children considered.
He took my advice afterwards, and found an advantage in so doing.
I do not mean that a man should so instal them as not to reserve to
himself a liberty to retract; I, who am now arrived to the age wherein
such things are fit to be done, would resign to them the enjoyment of my
house and goods, but with a power of revocation if they should give me
cause to alter my mind; I would leave to them the use, that being no
longer convenient for me; and, of the general authority and power over
all, would reserve as much as--I thought good to myself; having always
held that it must needs be a great satisfaction to an aged father himself
to put his children into the way of governing his affairs, and to have
power during his own life to control their behaviour, supplying them with
instruction and advice from his own experience, and himself to transfer
the ancient honour and order of his house into the hands of those who are
to succeed him, and by that means to satisfy himself as to the hopes he
may conceive of their future conduct. And in order to this I would not
avoid their company; I would observe them near at hand, and partake,
according to the condition of my age, of their feasts and jollities.
If I did not live absolutely amongst them, which I could not do without
annoying them and their friends, by reason of the morosity of my age and
the restlessness of my infirmities, and without violating also the rules
and order of living I should then have set down to myself, I would, at
least, live near them in some retired part of my house, not the best in
show, but the most commodious. Nor as I saw some years ago, a dean of
St. Hilary of Poitiers given up to such a solitude, that at the time I
came into his chamber it had been two and twenty years that he had not
stepped one foot out of it, and yet had all his motions free and easy,
and was in good health, saving a cold that fell upon his lungs; he would,
hardly once in a week, suffer any one to come in to see him; he always
kept himself shut up in his chamber alone, except that a servant brought
him, once a day, something to eat, and did then but just come in and go
out again. His employment was to walk up and down, and read some book,
for he was a bit of a scholar; but, as to the rest, obstinately bent to
die in this retirement, as he soon after did. I would endeavour by
pleasant conversation to create in my children a warm and unfeigned
friendship and good-will towards me, which in well-descended natures is
not hard to do; for if they be furious brutes, of which this age of ours
produces thousands, we are then to hate and avoid them as such.
I am angry at the custom of forbidding children to call their father by
the name of father, and to enjoin them another, as more full of respect
and reverence, as if nature had not sufficiently provided for our
authority. We call Almighty God Father, and disdain to have our children
call us so; I have reformed this error in my family.--[As did Henry IV.
of France]--And ‘tis also folly and injustice to deprive children, when
grown up, of familiarity with their father, and to carry a scornful and
austere countenance toward them, thinking by that to keep them in awe and
obedience; for it is a very idle farce that, instead of producing the
effect designed, renders fathers distasteful, and, which is worse,
ridiculous to their own children. They have youth and vigour in
possession, and consequently the breath and favour of the world; and
therefore receive these fierce and tyrannical looks--mere scarecrows--
of a man without blood, either in his heart or veins, with mockery and
contempt. Though I could make myself feared, I had yet much rather make
myself beloved: there are so many sorts of defects in old age, so much
imbecility, and it is so liable to contempt, that the best acquisition a
man can make is the kindness and affection of his own family; command and
fear are no longer his weapons. Such an one I have known who, having
been very imperious in his youth, when he came to be old, though he might
have lived at his full ease, would ever strike, rant, swear, and curse:
the most violent householder in France: fretting himself with unnecessary
suspicion and vigilance. And all this rumble and clutter but to make his
family cheat him the more; of his barn, his kitchen, cellar, nay, and his
very purse too, others had the greatest use and share, whilst he keeps
his keys in his pocket much more carefully than his eyes. Whilst he hugs
himself with the pitiful frugality of a niggard table, everything goes to
rack and ruin in every corner of his house, in play, drink, all sorts of
profusion, making sport in their junkets with his vain anger and
fruitless parsimony. Every one is a sentinel against him, and if, by
accident, any wretched fellow that serves him is of another humour, and
will not join with the rest, he is presently rendered suspected to him,
a bait that old age very easily bites at of itself. How often has this
gentleman boasted to me in how great awe he kept his family, and how
exact an obedience and reverence they paid him! How clearly he saw into
his own affairs!
“Ille solos nescit omnia.”
[“He alone is ignorant of all that is passing.”
--Terence, Adelph., iv. 2, 9.]
I do not know any one that can muster more parts, both natural and
acquired, proper to maintain dominion, than he; yet he is fallen from it
like a child. For this reason it is that I have picked out him, amongst
several others that I know of the same humour, for the greatest example.
It were matter for a question in the schools, whether he is better thus
or otherwise. In his presence, all submit to and bow to him, and give so
much way to his vanity that nobody ever resists him; he has his fill of
assents, of seeming fear, submission, and respect. Does he turn away a
servant? he packs up his bundle, and is gone; but ‘tis no further than
just out of his sight: the steps of old age are so slow, the senses so
troubled, that he will live and do his old office in the same house a
year together without being perceived.
And after a fit interval of time, letters are pretended to come from a
great way off; very humble, suppliant; and full of promises of amendment,
by virtue of which he is again received into favour. Does Monsieur make
any bargain, or prepare any despatch that does not please? ‘tis
suppressed, and causes afterwards forged to excuse the want of execution
in the one or answer in the other. No letters being first brought to
him, he never sees any but those that shall seem fit for his knowledge.
If by accident they fall first into his own hand, being used to trust
somebody to read them to him; he reads extempore what he thinks fit, and
often makes such a one ask him pardon who abuses and rails at him in his
letter. In short, he sees nothing, but by an image prepared and designed
beforehand and the most satisfactory they can invent, not to rouse and
awaken his ill humour and choler. I have seen, under various aspects,
enough of these modes of domestic government, long-enduring, constant, to
the like effect.
Women are evermore addicted to cross their husbands: they lay hold with
both hands on all occasions to contradict and oppose them; the first
excuse serves for a plenary justification. I have seen one who robbed
her husband wholesale, that, as she told her confessor, she might
distribute the more liberal alms. Let who will trust to that religious
dispensation. No management of affairs seems to them of sufficient
dignity, if proceeding from the husband’s assent; they must usurp it
either by insolence or cunning, and always injuriously, or else it has
not the grace and authority they desire. When, as in the case I am
speaking of, ‘tis against a poor old man and for the children, then they
make use of this title to serve their passion with glory; and, as for a
common service, easily cabal, and combine against his government and
dominion. If they be males grown up in full and flourishing health, they
presently corrupt, either by force or favour, steward, receivers, and all
the rout. Such as have neither wife nor son do not so easily fall into
this misfortune; but withal more cruelly and unworthily. Cato the elder
in his time said: So many servants, so many enemies; consider, then,
whether according to the vast difference between the purity of the age he
lived in and the corruption of this of ours, he does not seem to shew us
that wife, son, and servant, are so many enemies to us? ‘Tis well for
old age that it is always accompanied by want of observation, ignorance,
and a proneness to being deceived. For should we see how we are used and
would not acquiesce, what would become of us? especially in such an age
as this, where the very judges who are to determine our controversies are
usually partisans to the young, and interested in the cause. In case the
discovery of this cheating escape me, I cannot at least fail to discern
that I am very fit to be cheated. And can a man ever enough exalt the
value of a friend, in comparison with these civil ties? The very image
of it which I see in beasts, so pure and uncorrupted, how religiously do
I respect it! If others deceive me, yet do I not, at least, deceive
myself in thinking I am able to defend myself from them, or in cudgelling
my brains to make myself so. I protect myself from such treasons in my
own bosom, not by an unquiet and tumultuous curiosity, but rather by
diversion and resolution. When I hear talk of any one’s condition, I
never trouble myself to think of him; I presently turn my eyes upon
myself to see in what condition I am; whatever concerns another relates
to me; the accident that has befallen him gives me caution, and rouses me
to turn my defence that way. We every day and every hour say things of
another that we might properly say of ourselves, could we but apply our
observation to our own concerns, as well as extend it to others. And
several authors have in this manner prejudiced their own cause by running
headlong upon those they attack, and darting those shafts against their
enemies, that are more properly, and with greater advantage, to be turned
upon themselves.
The late Mareschal de Montluc having lost his son, who died in the island
of Madeira, in truth a very worthy gentleman and of great expectation,
did to me, amongst his other regrets, very much insist upon what a sorrow
and heart-breaking it was that he had never made himself familiar with
him; and by that humour of paternal gravity and grimace to have lost the
opportunity of having an insight into and of well knowing, his son, as
also of letting him know the extreme affection he had for him, and the
worthy opinion he had of his virtue. “That poor boy,” said he, “never
saw in me other than a stern and disdainful countenance, and is gone in a
belief that I neither knew how to love him nor esteem him according to
his desert. For whom did I reserve the discovery of that singular
affection I had for him in my soul? Was it not he himself, who ought to
have had all the pleasure of it, and all the obligation? I constrained
and racked myself to put on, and maintain this vain disguise, and have by
that means deprived myself of the pleasure of his conversation, and, I
doubt, in some measure, his affection, which could not but be very cold
to me, having never other from me than austerity, nor felt other than a
tyrannical manner of proceeding.”
[Madame de Sevigne tells us that she never read this passage without
tears in her eyes. “My God!” she exclaims, “how full is this book
of good sense!” Ed.]
I find this complaint to be rational and rightly apprehended: for, as I
myself know by too certain experience, there is no so sweet consolation
in the loss of friends as the conscience of having had no reserve or
secret for them, and to have had with them a perfect and entire
communication. Oh my friend,--[La Boetie.] am I the better for being
sensible of this; or am I the worse? I am, doubtless, much the better.
I am consoled and honoured, in the sorrow for his death. Is it not a
pious and a pleasing office of my life to be always upon my friend’s
obsequies? Can there be any joy equal to this privation?
I open myself to my family, as much as I can, and very willingly let them
know the state of my opinion and good will towards them, as I do to
everybody else: I make haste to bring out and present myself to them; for
I will not have them mistaken in me, in anything. Amongst other
particular customs of our ancient Gauls, this, as Caesar reports,--[De
Bello Gall., vi. r8.]--was one, that the sons never presented
themselves before their fathers, nor durst ever appear in their company
in public, till they began to bear arms; as if they would intimate by
this, that it was also time for their fathers to receive them into their
familiarity and acquaintance.
I have observed yet another sort of indiscretion in fathers of my time,
that, not contented with having deprived their children, during their own
long lives, of the share they naturally ought to have had in their
fortunes, they afterwards leave to their wives the same authority over
their estates, and liberty to dispose of them according to their own
fancy. And I have known a certain lord, one of the principal officers of
the crown, who, having in reversion above fifty thousand crowns yearly
revenue, died necessitous and overwhelmed with debt at above fifty years
of age; his mother in her extremest decrepitude being yet in possession
of all his property by the will of his father, who had, for his part,
lived till near fourscore years old. This appears to me by no means
reasonable. And therefore I think it of very little advantage to a man,
whose affairs are well enough, to seek a wife who encumbers his estate
with a very great fortune; there is no sort of foreign debt that brings
more ruin to families than this: my predecessors have ever been aware of
that danger and provided against it, and so have I. But those who
dissuade us from rich wives, for fear they should be less tractable and
kind, are out in their advice to make a man lose a real commodity for so
frivolous a conjecture. It costs an unreasonable woman no more to pass
over one reason than another; they cherish themselves most where they are
most wrong. Injustice allures them, as the honour of their virtuous
actions does the good; and the more riches they bring with them, they are
so much the more good-natured, as women, who are handsome, are all the
more inclined and proud to be chaste.
‘Tis reasonable to leave the administration of affairs to the mothers,
till the children are old enough, according to law, to manage them; but
the father has brought them, up very ill, if he cannot hope that, when
they come to maturity, they will have more wisdom and ability in the
management of affairs than his wife, considering the ordinary weakness of
the sex. It were, notwithstanding, to say the truth, more against nature
to make the mothers depend upon the discretion of their children; they
ought to be plentifully provided for, to maintain themselves according to
their quality and age, by reason that necessity and indigence are much
more unbecoming and insupportable to them than to men; the son should
rather be cut short than the mother.
In general, the most judicious distribution of our goods, when we come to
die, is, in my opinion, to let them be distributed according to the
custom of the country; the laws have considered the matter better than we
know how to do, and ‘tis wiser to let them fail in their appointment,
than rashly to run the hazard of miscarrying in ours. Nor are the goods
properly ours, since, by civil prescription and without us, they are all
destined to certain successors. And although we have some liberty beyond
that, yet I think we ought not, without great and manifest cause, to take
away that from one which his fortune has allotted him, and to which the
public equity gives him title; and that it is against reason to abuse
this liberty, in making it serve our own frivolous and private fancies.
My destiny has been kind to me in not presenting me with occasions to
tempt me and divert my affection from the common and legitimate
institution. I see many with whom ‘tis time lost to employ a long
exercise of good offices: a word ill taken obliterates ten years’ merit;
he is happy who is in a position to oil their goodwill at this last
passage. The last action carries it, not the best and most frequent
offices, but the most recent and present do the work. These are people
that play with their wills as with apples or rods, to gratify or chastise
every action of those who pretend to an interest in their care. ‘Tis a
thing of too great weight and consequence to be so tumbled and tossed and
altered every moment, and wherein the wise determine once for all, having
above all things regard to reason and the public observance. We lay
these masculine substitutions too much to heart, proposing a ridiculous
eternity to our names. We are, moreover, too superstitious in vain
conjectures as to the future, that we derive from the words and actions
of children. Peradventure they might have done me an injustice, in
dispossessing me of my right, for having been the most dull and heavy,
the most slow and unwilling at my book, not of all my brothers only, but
of all the boys in the whole province: whether about learning my lesson,
or about any bodily exercise. ‘Tis a folly to make an election out of
the ordinary course upon the credit of these divinations wherein we are
so often deceived. If the ordinary rule of descent were to be violated,
and the destinies corrected in the choice they have made of our heirs,
one might more plausibly do it upon the account of some remarkable and
enormous personal deformity, a permanent and incorrigible defect, and in
the opinion of us French, who are great admirers of beauty, an important
prejudice.
The pleasant dialogue betwixt Plato’s legislator and his citizens will be
an ornament to this place, “What,” said they, feeling themselves about to
die, “may we not dispose of our own to whom we please? God! what
cruelty that it shall not be lawful for us, according as we have been
served and attended in our sickness, in our old age, in our affairs, to
give more or less to those whom we have found most diligent about us, at
our own fancy and discretion!” To which the legislator answers thus:
“My friends, who are now, without question, very soon to die, it is hard
for you in the condition you are, either to know yourselves, or what is
yours, according to the delphic inscription. I, who make the laws, am of
opinion, that you neither are yourselves your own, nor is that yours of
which you are possessed. Both your goods and you belong to your
families, as well those past as those to come; but, further, both your
family and goods much more appertain to the public. Wherefore, lest any
flatterer in your old age or in your sickness, or any passion of your
own, should unseasonably prevail with you to make an unjust will, I shall
take care to prevent that inconvenience; but, having respect both to the
universal interests of the city and that of your particular family, I
shall establish laws, and make it by good reasons appear, that private
convenience ought to give place to the common benefit. Go then
cheerfully where human necessity calls you. It is for me, who regard no
more the one thing than the other, and who, as much as in me lies, am
provident of the public interest, to have a care as to what you leave
behind you.”
To return to my subject: it appears to me that women are very rarely
born, to whom the prerogative over men, the maternal and natural
excepted, is in any sort due, unless it be for the punishment of such,
as in some amorous fever have voluntarily submitted themselves to them:
but that in no way concerns the old ones, of whom we are now speaking.
This consideration it is which has made us so willingly to enact and give
force to that law, which was never yet seen by any one, by which women
are excluded the succession to our crown: and there is hardly a
government in the world where it is not pleaded, as it is here, by the
probability of reason that authorises it, though fortune has given it
more credit in some places than in others. ‘Tis dangerous to leave the
disposal of our succession to their judgment, according to the choice
they shall make of children, which is often fantastic and unjust; for the
irregular appetites and depraved tastes they have during the time of
their being with child, they have at all other times in the mind. We
commonly see them fond of the most weak, ricketty, and deformed children;
or of those, if they have such, as are still hanging at the breast. For,
not having sufficient force of reason to choose and embrace that which is
most worthy, they the more willingly suffer themselves to be carried
away, where the impressions of nature are most alone; like animals that
know their young no longer than they give them suck. As to the rest, it
is easy by experience to be discerned that this natural affection to
which we give so great authority has but very weak roots. For a very
little profit, we every day tear their own children out of the mothers’
arms, and make them take ours in their room: we make them abandon their
own to some pitiful nurse, to whom we disdain to commit ours, or to some
she-goat, forbidding them, not only to give them suck, what danger soever
they run thereby, but, moreover, to take any manner of care of them, that
they may wholly be occupied with the care of and attendance upon ours;
and we see in most of them an adulterate affection, more vehement than
the natural, begotten by custom toward the foster children, and a greater
solicitude for the preservation of those they have taken charge of, than
of their own. And that which I was saying of goats was upon this
account; that it is ordinary all about where I live, to see the
countrywomen, when they want milk of their own for their children, to
call goats to their assistance; and I have at this hour two men-servants
that never sucked women’s milk more than eight days after they were born.
These goats are immediately taught to come to suckle the little children,
know their voices when they cry, and come running to them. If any other
than this foster-child be presented to them, they refuse to let it suck;
and the child in like manner will refuse to suck another goat. I saw one
the other day from whom they had taken away the goat that used to nourish
it, by reason the father had only borrowed it of a neighbour; the child
would not touch any other they could bring, and died, doubtless of
hunger. Beasts as easily alter and corrupt their natural affection as
we: I believe that in what Herodotus relates of a certain district of
Lybia, there are many mistakes; he says that the women are there in
common; but that the child, so soon as it can go, finds him out in the
crowd for his father, to whom he is first led by his natural inclination.
Now, to consider this simple reason for loving our children, that we have
begot them, therefore calling them our second selves, it appears,
methinks, that there is another kind of production proceeding from us,
that is of no less recommendation: for that which we engender by the
soul, the issue of our understanding, courage, and abilities, springs
from nobler parts than those of the body, and that are much more our own:
we are both father and mother in this generation. These cost us a great
deal more and bring us more honour, if they have anything of good in
them. For the value of our other children is much more theirs than ours;
the share we have in them is very little; but of these all the beauty,
all the grace and value, are ours; and also they more vividly represent
us than the others. Plato adds, that these are immortal children that
immortalise and deify their fathers, as Lycurgus, Solon, Minos. Now,
histories being full of examples of the common affection of fathers to
their children, it seems not altogether improper to introduce some few of
this other kind. Heliodorus, that good bishop of Trikka, rather chose to
lose the dignity, profit, and devotion of so venerable a prelacy, than to
lose his daughter; a daughter that continues to this day very graceful
and comely; but, peradventure, a little too curiously and wantonly
tricked, and too amorous for an ecclesiastical and sacerdotal daughter.
There was one Labienus at Rome, a man of great worth and authority, and
amongst other qualities excellent in all sorts of literature, who was, as
I take it, the son of that great Labienus, the chief of Caesar’s captains
in the wars of Gaul; and who, afterwards, siding with Pompey the great,
so valiantly maintained his cause, till he was by Caesar defeated in
Spain. This Labienus, of whom I am now speaking, had several enemies,
envious of his good qualities, and, tis likely, the courtiers and minions
of the emperors of his time who were very angry at his freedom and the
paternal humour which he yet retained against tyranny, with which it is
to be supposed he had tinctured his books and writings. His adversaries
prosecuted several pieces he had published before the magistrates at
Rome, and prevailed so far against him, as to have them condemned to the
fire. It was in him that this new example of punishment was begun, which
was afterwards continued against others at Rome, to punish even writing
and studies with death. There would not be means and matter enough of
cruelty, did we not mix with them things that nature has exempted from
all sense and suffering, as reputation and the products of the mind, and
did we not communicate corporal punishments to the teachings and
monuments of the Muses. Now, Labienus could not suffer this loss, nor
survive these his so dear issue, and therefore caused himself to be
conveyed and shut up alive in the monument of his ancestors, where he
made shift to kill and bury himself at once. ‘Tis hard to shew a more
vehement paternal affection than this. Cassius Severus, a man of great
eloquence and his very intimate friend, seeing his books burned, cried
out that by the same sentence they should as well condemn him to the fire
too, seeing that he carried in his memory all that they contained. The
like accident befel Cremutius Cordus, who being accused of having in his
books commended Brutus and Cassius, that dirty, servile, and corrupt
Senate, worthy a worse master than Tiberius, condemned his writings to
the flame. He was willing to bear them company, and killed himself with
fasting. The good Lucan, being condemned by that rascal Nero, at the
last gasp of his life, when the greater part of his blood was already
spent through the veins of his arms, which he had caused his physician to
open to make him die, and when the cold had seized upon all his
extremities, and began to approach his vital parts, the last thing he had
in his memory was some of the verses of his Battle of Phaysalia, which he
recited, dying with them in his mouth. What was this, but taking a
tender and paternal leave of his children, in imitation of the
valedictions and embraces, wherewith we part from ours, when we come to
die, and an effect of that natural inclination, that suggests to our
remembrance in this extremity those things which were dearest to us
during the time of our life?
Can we believe that Epicurus who, as he says himself, dying of the
intolerable pain of the stone, had all his consolation in the beauty of
the doctrine he left behind him, could have received the same
satisfaction from many children, though never so well-conditioned and
brought up, had he had them, as he did from the production of so many
rich writings? Or that, had it been in his choice to have left behind
him a deformed and untoward child or a foolish and ridiculous book, he,
or any other man of his understanding, would not rather have chosen to
have run the first misfortune than the other? It had been, for example,
peradventure, an impiety in St. Augustin, if, on the one hand, it had
been proposed to him to bury his writings, from which religion has
received so great fruit, or on the other to bury his children, had he had
them, had he not rather chosen to bury his children. And I know not
whether I had not much rather have begot a very beautiful one, through
society with the Muses, than by lying with my wife. To this, such as it
is, what I give it I give absolutely and irrevocably, as men do to their
bodily children. That little I have done for it, is no more at my own
disposal; it may know many things that are gone from me, and from me hold
that which I have not retained; and which, as well as a stranger, I
should borrow thence, should I stand in need. If I am wiser than my
book, it is richer than I. There are few men addicted to poetry, who
would not be much prouder to be the father to the AEneid than to the
handsomest youth of Rome; and who would not much better bear the loss of
the one than of the other. For according to Aristotle, the poet, of all
artificers, is the fondest of his work. ‘Tis hard to believe that
Epaminondas, who boasted that in lieu of all posterity he left two
daughters behind him that would one day do their father honour (meaning
the two victories he obtained over the Lacedaemonians), would willingly
have consented to exchange these for the most beautiful creatures of all
Greece; or that Alexander or Caesar ever wished to be deprived of the
grandeur of their glorious exploits in war, for the convenience of
children and heirs, how perfect and accomplished soever. Nay, I make a
great question, whether Phidias or any other excellent sculptor would be
so solicitous of the preservation and continuance of his natural
children, as he would be of a rare statue, which with long labour and
study he had perfected according to art. And to those furious and
irregular passions that have sometimes inflamed fathers towards their own
daughters, and mothers towards their own sons, the like is also found in
this other sort of parentage: witness what is related of Pygmalion who,
having made the statue of a woman of singular beauty, fell so
passionately in love with this work of his, that the gods in favour of
his passion inspired it with life.
“Tentatum mollescit ebur, positoque rigore,
Subsidit digitis.”
[“The ivory grows soft under his touch and yields to his fingers.”
--Ovid, Metam., x. 283.]
CHAPTER IX
OF THE ARMS OF THE PARTHIANS
‘Tis an ill custom and unmanly that the gentlemen of our time have got,
not to put on arms but just upon the point of the most extreme necessity,
and to lay them by again, so soon as ever there is any show of the danger
being over; hence many disorders arise; for every one bustling and
running to his arms just when he should go to charge, has his cuirass to
buckle on when his companions are already put to rout. Our ancestors
were wont to give their head-piece, lance and gauntlets to be carried,
but never put off the other pieces so long as there was any work to be
done. Our troops are now cumbered and rendered unsightly with the
clutter of baggage and servants who cannot be from their masters, by
reason they carry their arms. Titus Livius speaking of our nation:
“Intolerantissima laboris corpora vix arma humeris gerebant.”
[“Bodies most impatient of labour could scarce endure to wear
their arms on their shoulders.”--Livy, x. 28.]
Many nations do yet, and did anciently, go to war without defensive arms,
or with such, at least, as were of very little proof:
“Tegmina queis capitum, raptus de subere cortex.”
[“To whom the coverings of the heads were the bark of the
cork-tree.”--AEneid, vii. 742.]
Alexander, the most adventurous captain that ever was, very seldom wore
armour, and such amongst us as slight it, do not by that much harm to the
main concern; for if we see some killed for want of it, there are few
less whom the lumber of arms helps to destroy, either by being
overburthened, crushed, and cramped with their weight, by a rude shock,
or otherwise. For, in plain truth, to observe the weight and thickness
of the armour we have now in use, it seems as if we only sought to defend
ourselves, and are rather loaded than secured by it. We have enough to
do to support its weight, being so manacled and immured, as if we were
only to contend with our own arms, and as if we had not the same
obligation to defend them, that they have to defend us. Tacitus gives a
pleasant description of the men-at-arms among our ancient Gauls, who were
so armed as only to be able to stand, without power to harm or to be
harmed, or to rise again if once struck down. Lucullus, seeing certain
soldiers of the Medes, who formed the van of Tigranes’ army, heavily
armed and very uneasy, as if in prisons of iron, thence conceived hopes
with great ease to defeat them, and by them began his charge and victory.
And now that our musketeers are in credit, I believe some invention will
be found out to immure us for our safety, and to draw us to the war in
castles, such as those the ancients loaded their elephants withal.
This humour is far differing from that of the younger Scipio, who sharply
reprehended his soldiers for having planted caltrops under water, in a
ditch by which those of the town he held besieged might sally out upon
him; saying, that those who assaulted should think of attacking, and not
to fear; suspecting, with good reason, that this stop they had put to the
enemies, would make themselves less vigilant upon their guard. He said
also to a young man, who showed him a fine buckler he had, that he was
very proud of, “It is a very fine buckler indeed, but a Roman soldier
ought to repose greater confidence in his right hand than in his left.”
Now ‘tis nothing but the not being used to wear it that makes the weight
of our armour so intolerable:
“L’usbergo in dosso haveano, et l’elmo in testa,
Due di questi guerrier, de’ quali io canto;
Ne notte o di, d’ appoi ch’ entraro in questa
Stanza, gl’haveano mai messi da canto;
Che facile a portar come la vesta
Era lor, perche in uso l’havean tanto:”
[“Two of the warriors, of whom I sing, had on their backs their
cuirass and on their heads their casque, and never had night or day
once laid them by, whilst here they were; those arms, by long
practice, were grown as light to bear as a garment”
--Ariosto, Cant., MI. 30.]
the Emperor Caracalla was wont to march on foot, completely armed, at the
head of his army. The Roman infantry always carried not only a morion, a
sword, and a shield (for as to arms, says Cicero, they were so accustomed
to have them always on, that they were no more trouble to them than their
own limbs):
“Arma enim membra militis esse dicunt.”
but, moreover, fifteen days’ provision, together with a certain number of
stakes, wherewith to fortify their camp, sixty pounds in weight. And
Marius’ soldiers, laden at the same rate, were inured to march in order
of battle five leagues in five hours, and sometimes, upon any urgent
occasion, six.
Their military discipline was much ruder than ours, and accordingly
produced much greater effects. The younger Scipio, reforming his army in
Spain, ordered his soldiers to eat standing, and nothing that was drest.
The jeer that was given a Lacedaemonian soldier is marvellously pat to
this purpose, who, in an expedition of war, was reproached for having
been seen under the roof of a house: they were so inured to hardship
that, let the weather be what it would, it was a shame to be seen under
any other cover than the roof of heaven. We should not march our people
very far at that rate.
As to what remains, Marcellinus, a man bred up in the Roman wars,
curiously observes the manner of the Parthians arming themselves, and the
rather, for being so different from that of the Romans. “They had,” says
he, “armour so woven as to have all the scales fall over one another like
so many little feathers; which did nothing hinder the motion of the body,
and yet were of such resistance, that our darts hitting upon them, would
rebound” (these were the coats of mail our forefathers were so constantly
wont to use). And in another place: “they had,” says he, “strong and
able horses, covered with thick tanned hides of leather, and were
themselves armed ‘cap-a-pie’ with great plates of iron, so artificially
ordered, that in all parts of the limbs, which required bending, they
lent themselves to the motion. One would have said, that they had been
men of iron; having armour for the head so neatly fitted, and so
naturally representing the form of a face, that they were nowhere
vulnerable, save at two little round holes, that gave them a little
light, corresponding with their eyes, and certain small chinks about
their nostrils, through which they, with great difficulty, breathed,”
“Flexilis inductis animatur lamina membris,
Horribilis visu; credas simulacra moveri
Ferrea, cognatoque viros spirare metallo.
Par vestitus equis: ferrata fronte minantur,
Ferratosque movent, securi vulneris, armos.”
[“Plates of steel are placed over the body, so flexible that,
dreadful to be seen, you would think these not living men, but
moving images. The horses are similarly armed, and, secured from
wounds, move their iron shoulders.”--Claud, In Ruf., ii. 358.]
‘Tis a description drawing very near resembling the equipage of the
men-at-arms in France, with their barded horses. Plutarch says, that
Demetrius caused two complete suits of armour to be made for himself and
for Alcimus, a captain of the greatest note and authority about him, of
six score pounds weight each, whereas the ordinary suits weighed but half
as much.
CHAPTER X
OF BOOKS
I make no doubt but that I often happen to speak of things that are much
better and more truly handled by those who are masters of the trade. You
have here purely an essay of my natural parts, and not of those acquired:
and whoever shall catch me tripping in ignorance, will not in any sort
get the better of me; for I should be very unwilling to become
responsible to another for my writings, who am not so to myself, nor
satisfied with them. Whoever goes in quest of knowledge, let him fish
for it where it is to be found; there is nothing I so little profess.
These are fancies of my own, by which I do not pretend to discover things
but to lay open myself; they may, peradventure, one day be known to me,
or have formerly been, according as fortune has been able to bring me in
place where they have been explained; but I have utterly forgotten it;
and if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retention; so that I
can promise no certainty, more than to make known to what point the
knowledge I now have has risen. Therefore, let none lay stress upon the
matter I write, but upon my method in writing it. Let them observe, in
what I borrow, if I have known how to choose what is proper to raise or
help the invention, which is always my own. For I make others say for
me, not before but after me, what, either for want of language or want of
sense, I cannot myself so well express. I do not number my borrowings,
I weigh them; and had I designed to raise their value by number, I had
made them twice as many; they are all, or within a very few, so famed and
ancient authors, that they seem, methinks, themselves sufficiently to
tell who they are, without giving me the trouble. In reasons,
comparisons, and arguments, if I transplant any into my own soil, and
confound them amongst my own, I purposely conceal the author, to awe the
temerity of those precipitate censors who fall upon all sorts of
writings, particularly the late ones, of men yet living; and in the
vulgar tongue which puts every one into a capacity of criticising and
which seem to convict the conception and design as vulgar also. I will
have them give Plutarch a fillip on my nose, and rail against Seneca when
they think they rail at me. I must shelter my own weakness under these
great reputations. I shall love any one that can unplume me, that is,
by clearness of understanding and judgment, and by the sole distinction
of the force and beauty of the discourse. For I who, for want of memory,
am at every turn at a loss to, pick them out of their national livery, am
yet wise enough to know, by the measure of my own abilities, that my soil
is incapable of producing any of those rich flowers that I there find
growing; and that all the fruits of my own growth are not worth any one
of them. For this, indeed, I hold myself responsible; if I get in my own
way; if there be any vanity and defect in my writings which I do not of
myself perceive nor can discern, when pointed out to me by another; for
many faults escape our eye, but the infirmity of judgment consists in not
being able to discern them, when by another laid open to us. Knowledge
and truth may be in us without judgment, and judgment also without them;
but the confession of ignorance is one of the finest and surest
testimonies of judgment that I know. I have no other officer to put my
writings in rank and file, but only fortune. As things come into my
head, I heap them one upon another; sometimes they advance in whole
bodies, sometimes in single file. I would that every one should see my
natural and ordinary pace, irregular as it is; I suffer myself to jog on
at my own rate. Neither are these subjects which a man is not permitted
to be ignorant in, or casually and at a venture, to discourse of. I
could wish to have a more perfect knowledge of things, but I will not buy
it so dear as it costs. My design is to pass over easily, and not
laboriously, the remainder of my life; there is nothing that I will
cudgel my brains about; no, not even knowledge, of what value soever.
I seek, in the reading of books, only to please myself by an honest
diversion; or, if I study, ‘tis for no other science than what treats of
the knowledge of myself, and instructs me how to die and how to live
well.
“Has meus ad metas sudet oportet equus.”
[“My horse must work according to my step.”
--Propertius, iv.]
I do not bite my nails about the difficulties I meet with in my reading;
after a charge or two, I give them over. Should I insist upon them, I
should both lose myself and time; for I have an impatient understanding,
that must be satisfied at first: what I do not discern at once is by
persistence rendered more obscure. I do nothing without gaiety;
continuation and a too obstinate endeavour, darkens, stupefies, and tires
my judgment. My sight is confounded and dissipated with poring; I must
withdraw it, and refer my discovery to new attempts; just as, to judge
rightly of the lustre of scarlet, we are taught to pass the eye lightly
over it, and again to run it over at several sudden and reiterated
glances. If one book do not please me, I take another; and I never
meddle with any, but at such times as I am weary of doing nothing.
I care not much for new ones, because the old seem fuller and stronger;
neither do I converse much with Greek authors, because my judgment cannot
do its work with imperfect intelligence of the material.
Amongst books that are simply pleasant, of the moderns, Boccaccio’s
Decameron, Rabelais, and the Basia of Johannes Secundus (if those may be
ranged under the title) are worth reading for amusement. As to the
Amadis, and such kind of stuff, they had not the credit of arresting even
my childhood. And I will, moreover, say, whether boldly or rashly, that
this old, heavy soul of mine is now no longer tickled with Ariosto, no,
nor with the worthy Ovid; his facility and inventions, with which I was
formerly so ravished, are now of no more relish, and I can hardly have
the patience to read them. I speak my opinion freely of all things, even
of those that, perhaps, exceed my capacity, and that I do not conceive to
be, in any wise, under my jurisdiction. And, accordingly, the judgment I
deliver, is to show the measure of my own sight, and not of the things I
make so bold to criticise. When I find myself disgusted with Plato’s
‘Axiochus’, as with a work, with due respect to such an author be it
spoken, without force, my judgment does not believe itself: it is not so
arrogant as to oppose the authority of so many other famous judgments of
antiquity, which it considers as its tutors and masters, and with whom it
is rather content to err; in such a case, it condemns itself either to
stop at the outward bark, not being able to penetrate to the heart, or to
consider it by sortie false light. It is content with only securing
itself from trouble and disorder; as to its own weakness, it frankly
acknowledges and confesses it. It thinks it gives a just interpretation
to the appearances by its conceptions presented to it; but they are weak
and imperfect. Most of the fables of AEsop have diverse senses and
meanings, of which the mythologists chose some one that quadrates well to
the fable; but, for the most part, ‘tis but the first face that presents
itself and is superficial only; there yet remain others more vivid,
essential, and profound, into which they have not been able to penetrate;
and just so ‘tis with me.
But, to pursue the business of this essay, I have always thought that, in
poesy, Virgil, Lucretius, Catullus, and Horace by many degrees excel the
rest; and signally, Virgil in his Georgics, which I look upon as the most
accomplished piece in poetry; and in comparison of which a man may easily
discern that there are some places in his AEneids, to which the author
would have given a little more of the file, had he had leisure: and the
fifth book of his AEneids seems to me the most perfect. I also love
Lucan, and willingly read him, not so much for his style, as for his own
worth, and the truth and solidity of his opinions and judgments. As for
good Terence, the refined elegance and grace of the Latin tongue, I find
him admirable in his vivid representation of our manners and the
movements of the soul; our actions throw me at every turn upon him; and
I cannot read him so often that I do not still discover some new grace
and beauty. Such as lived near Virgil’s time complained that some should
compare Lucretius to him. I am of opinion that the comparison is, in
truth, very unequal: a belief that, nevertheless, I have much ado to
assure myself in, when I come upon some excellent passage in Lucretius.
But if they were so angry at this comparison, what would they say to the
brutish and barbarous stupidity of those who, nowadays, compare him with
Ariosto? Would not Ariosto himself say?
“O seclum insipiens et inficetum!”
[“O stupid and tasteless age.”--Catullus, xliii. 8.]
I think the ancients had more reason to be angry with those who compared
Plautus with Terence, though much nearer the mark, than Lucretius with
Virgil. It makes much for the estimation and preference of Terence, that
the father of Roman eloquence has him so often, and alone of his class,
in his mouth; and the opinion that the best judge of Roman poets
--[Horace, De Art. Poetica, 279.]--has passed upon his companion. I
have often observed that those of our times, who take upon them to write
comedies (in imitation of the Italians, who are happy enough in that way
of writing), take three or four plots of those of Plautus or Terence to
make one of their own, and , crowd five or six of Boccaccio’s novels into
one single comedy. That which makes them so load themselves with matter
is the diffidence they have of being able to support themselves with
their own strength. They must find out something to lean to; and not
having of their own stuff wherewith to entertain us, they bring in the
story to supply the defect of language. It is quite otherwise with my
author; the elegance and perfection of his way of speaking makes us lose
the appetite of his plot; his refined grace and elegance of diction
everywhere occupy us: he is so pleasant throughout,
“Liquidus, puroque simillimus amni,”
[“Liquid, and likest the pure river.”
--Horace, Ep., ii. s, 120.]
and so possesses the soul with his graces that we forget those of his
fable. This same consideration carries me further: I observe that the
best of the ancient poets have avoided affectation and the hunting after,
not only fantastic Spanish and Petrarchic elevations, but even the softer
and more gentle touches, which are the ornament of all succeeding poesy.
And yet there is no good judgment that will condemn this in the ancients,
and that does not incomparably more admire the equal polish, and that
perpetual sweetness and flourishing beauty of Catullus’s epigrams, than
all the stings with which Martial arms the tails of his. This is by the
same reason that I gave before, and as Martial says of himself:
“Minus illi ingenio laborandum fuit,
in cujus locum materia successerat:”
[“He had the less for his wit to do that the subject itself
supplied what was necessary.”--Martial, praef. ad lib. viii.]
The first, without being moved, or without getting angry, make themselves
sufficiently felt; they have matter enough of laughter throughout, they
need not tickle themselves; the others have need of foreign assistance;
as they have the less wit they must have the more body; they mount on
horseback, because they are not able to stand on their own legs. As in
our balls, those mean fellows who teach to dance, not being able to
represent the presence and dignity of our noblesse, are fain to put
themselves forward with dangerous jumping, and other strange motions and
tumblers tricks; and the ladies are less put to it in dance; where there
are various coupees, changes, and quick motions of body, than in some
other of a more sedate kind, where they are only to move a natural pace,
and to represent their ordinary grace and presence. And so I have seen
good drolls, when in their own everyday clothes, and with the same face
they always wear, give us all the pleasure of their art, when their
apprentices, not yet arrived at such a pitch of perfection, are fain to
meal their faces, put themselves into ridiculous disguises, and make a
hundred grotesque faces to give us whereat to laugh. This conception of
mine is nowhere more demonstrable than in comparing the AEneid with
Orlando Furioso; of which we see the first, by dint of wing, flying in a
brave and lofty place, and always following his point: the latter,
fluttering and hopping from tale to tale, as from branch to branch, not
daring to trust his wings but in very short flights, and perching at
every turn, lest his breath and strength should fail.
“Excursusque breves tentat.”
[“And he attempts short excursions.”
--Virgil, Georgics, iv. 194.]
These, then, as to this sort of subjects, are the authors that best
please me.
As to what concerns my other reading, that mixes a little more profit
with the pleasure, and whence I learn how to marshal my opinions and
conditions, the books that serve me to this purpose are Plutarch, since
he has been translated into French, and Seneca. Both of these have this
notable convenience suited to my humour, that the knowledge I there seek
is discoursed in loose pieces, that do not require from me any trouble of
reading long, of which I am incapable. Such are the minor works of the
first and the epistles of the latter, which are the best and most
profiting of all their writings. ‘Tis no great attempt to take one of
them in hand, and I give over at pleasure; for they have no sequence or
dependence upon one another. These authors, for the most part, concur in
useful and true opinions; and there is this parallel betwixt them, that
fortune brought them into the world about the same century: they were
both tutors to two Roman emperors: both sought out from foreign
countries: both rich and both great men. Their instruction is the cream
of philosophy, and delivered after a plain and pertinent manner.
Plutarch is more uniform and constant; Seneca more various and waving:
the last toiled and bent his whole strength to fortify virtue against
weakness, fear, and vicious appetites; the other seems more to slight
their power, and to disdain to alter his pace and to stand upon his
guard. Plutarch’s opinions are Platonic, gentle, and accommodated to
civil society; those of the other are Stoical and Epicurean, more remote
from the common use, but, in my opinion, more individually commodious and
more firm. Seneca seems to lean a little to the tyranny of the emperors
of his time, and only seems; for I take it for certain that he speaks
against his judgment when he condemns the action of the generous
murderers of Caesar. Plutarch is frank throughout: Seneca abounds with
brisk touches and sallies; Plutarch with things that warm and move you
more; this contents and pays you better: he guides us, the other pushes
us on.
As to Cicero, his works that are most useful to my design are they that
treat of manners and rules of our life. But boldly to confess the truth
(for since one has passed the barriers of impudence, there is no bridle),
his way of writing appears to me negligent and uninviting: for his
prefaces, definitions, divisions, and etymologies take up the greatest
part of his work: whatever there is of life and marrow is smothered and
lost in the long preparation. When I have spent an hour in reading him,
which is a great deal for me, and try to recollect what I have thence
extracted of juice and substance, for the most part I find nothing but
wind; for he is not yet come to the arguments that serve to his purpose,
and to the reasons that properly help to form the knot I seek. For me,
who only desire to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent, these
logical and Aristotelian dispositions of parts are of no use. I would
have a man begin with the main proposition. I know well enough what
death and pleasure are; let no man give himself the trouble to anatomise
them to me. I look for good and solid reasons, at the first dash, to
instruct me how to stand their shock, for which purpose neither
grammatical subtleties nor the quaint contexture of words and
argumentations are of any use at all. I am for discourses that give the
first charge into the heart of the redoubt; his languish about the
subject; they are proper for the schools, for the bar, and for the
pulpit, where we have leisure to nod, and may awake, a quarter of an hour
after, time enough to find again the thread of the discourse. It is
necessary to speak after this manner to judges, whom a man has a design
to gain over, right or wrong, to children and common people, to whom a
man must say all, and see what will come of it. I would not have an
author make it his business to render me attentive: or that he should cry
out fifty times Oyez! as the heralds do. The Romans, in their religious
exercises, began with ‘Hoc age’ as we in ours do with ‘Sursum corda’;
these are so many words lost to me: I come already fully prepared from my
chamber. I need no allurement, no invitation, no sauce; I eat the meat
raw, so that, instead of whetting my appetite by these preparatives, they
tire and pall it. Will the licence of the time excuse my sacrilegious
boldness if I censure the dialogism of Plato himself as also dull and
heavy, too much stifling the matter, and lament so much time lost by a
man, who had so many better things to say, in so many long and needless
preliminary interlocutions? My ignorance will better excuse me in that
I understand not Greek so well as to discern the beauty of his language.
I generally choose books that use sciences, not such as only lead to
them. The two first, and Pliny, and their like, have nothing of this Hoc
age; they will have to do with men already instructed; or if they have,
‘tis a substantial Hoc age; and that has a body by itself. I also
delight in reading the Epistles to Atticus, not only because they contain
a great deal of the history and affairs of his time, but much more
because I therein discover much of his own private humours; for I have a
singular curiosity, as I have said elsewhere, to pry into the souls and
the natural and true opinions of the authors, with whom I converse. A
man may indeed judge of their parts, but not of their manners nor of
themselves, by the writings they exhibit upon the theatre of the world.
I have a thousand times lamented the loss of the treatise Brutus wrote
upon Virtue, for it is well to learn the theory from those who best know
the practice.
But seeing the matter preached and the preacher are different things,
I would as willingly see Brutus in Plutarch, as in a book of his own.
I would rather choose to be certainly informed of the conference he had
in his tent with some particular friends of his the night before a
battle, than of the harangue he made the next day to his army; and of
what he did in his closet and his chamber, than what he did in the public
square and in the senate. As to Cicero, I am of the common opinion that,
learning excepted, he had no great natural excellence. He was a good
citizen, of an affable nature, as all fat, heavy men, such as he was,
usually are; but given to ease, and had, in truth, a mighty share of
vanity and ambition. Neither do I know how to excuse him for thinking
his poetry fit to be published; ‘tis no great imperfection to make ill
verses, but it is an imperfection not to be able to judge how unworthy
his verses were of the glory of his name. For what concerns his
eloquence, that is totally out of all comparison, and I believe it will
never be equalled. The younger Cicero, who resembled his father in
nothing but in name, whilst commanding in Asia, had several strangers one
day at his table, and, amongst the rest, Cestius seated at the lower end,
as men often intrude to the open tables of the great. Cicero asked one
of his people who that man was, who presently told him his name; but he,
as one who had his thoughts taken up with something else, and who had
forgotten the answer made him, asking three or four times, over and over
again; the same question, the fellow, to deliver himself from so many
answers and to make him know him by some particular circumstance; “‘tis
that Cestius,” said he, “of whom it was told you, that he makes no great
account of your father’s eloquence in comparison of his own.” At which
Cicero, being suddenly nettled, commanded poor Cestius presently to be
seized, and caused him to be very well whipped in his own presence; a
very discourteous entertainer! Yet even amongst those, who, all things
considered, have reputed his, eloquence incomparable, there have been
some, who have not stuck to observe some faults in it: as that great
Brutus his friend, for example, who said ‘twas a broken and feeble
eloquence, ‘fyactam et elumbem’. The orators also, nearest to the age
wherein he lived, reprehended in him the care he had of a certain long
cadence in his periods, and particularly took notice of these words,
‘esse videatur’, which he there so often makes use of. For my part, I
more approve of a shorter style, and that comes more roundly off. He
does, though, sometimes shuffle his parts more briskly together, but ‘tis
very seldom. I have myself taken notice of this one passage:
“Ego vero me minus diu senem mallem,
quam esse senem, antequam essem.”
[“I had rather be old a brief time, than be old before old age.
--“Cicero, De Senect., c. 10.]
The historians are my right ball, for they are pleasant and easy, and
where man, in general, the knowledge of whom I hunt after, appears more
vividly and entire than anywhere else:
[The easiest of my amusements, the right ball at tennis being that
which coming to the player from the right hand, is much easier
played with.--Coste.]
the variety and truth of his internal qualities, in gross and piecemeal,
the diversity of means by which he is united and knit, and the accidents
that threaten him. Now those that write lives, by reason they insist
more upon counsels than events, more upon what sallies from within, than
upon what happens without, are the most proper for my reading; and,
therefore, above all others, Plutarch is the man for me. I am very sorry
we have not a dozen Laertii,--[Diogenes Laertius, who wrote the Lives of
the Philosophers]--or that he was not further extended; for I am equally
curious to know the lives and fortunes of these great instructors of the
world, as to know the diversities of their doctrines and opinions. In
this kind of study of histories, a man must tumble over, without
distinction, all sorts of authors, old and new, French or foreign, there
to know the things of which they variously treat. But Caesar, in my
opinion, particularly deserves to be studied, not for the knowledge of
the history only, but for himself, so great an excellence and perfection
he has above all the rest, though Sallust be one of the number. In
earnest, I read this author with more reverence and respect than is
usually allowed to human writings; one while considering him in his
person, by his actions and miraculous greatness, and another in the
purity and inimitable polish of his language, wherein he not only excels
all other historians, as Cicero confesses, but, peradventure, even
Cicero himself; speaking of his enemies with so much sincerity in his
judgment, that, the false colours with which he strives to palliate his
evil cause, and the ordure of his pestilent ambition excepted, I think
there is no fault to be objected against him, saving this, that he speaks
too sparingly of himself, seeing so many great things could not have been
performed under his conduct, but that his own personal acts must
necessarily have had a greater share in them than he attributes to them.
I love historians, whether of the simple sort, or of the higher order.
The simple, who have nothing of their own to mix with it, and who only
make it their business to collect all that comes to their knowledge, and
faithfully to record all things, without choice or discrimination, leave
to us the entire judgment of discerning the truth. Such, for example,
amongst others, is honest Froissart, who has proceeded in his undertaking
with so frank a plainness that, having committed an error, he is not
ashamed to confess and correct it in the place where the finger has been
laid, and who represents to us even the variety of rumours that were then
spread abroad, and the different reports that were made to him; ‘tis the
naked and inform matter of history, and of which every one may make his
profit, according to his understanding. The more excellent sort of
historians have judgment to pick out what is most worthy to be known;
and, of two reports, to examine which is the most likely to be true: from
the condition of princes and their humours, they conclude their counsels,
and attribute to them words proper for the occasion; such have title to
assume the authority of regulating our belief to what they themselves
believe; but certainly, this privilege belongs to very few. For the
middle sort of historians, of which the most part are, they spoil all;
they will chew our meat for us; they take upon them to judge of, and
consequently, to incline the history to their own fancy; for if the
judgment lean to one side, a man cannot avoid wresting and writhing his
narrative to that bias; they undertake to select things worthy to be
known, and yet often conceal from us such a word, such a private action,
as would much better instruct us; omit, as incredible, such things as
they do not understand, and peradventure some, because they cannot
express good French or Latin. Let them display their eloquence and
intelligence, and judge according to their own fancy: but let them,
withal, leave us something to judge of after them, and neither alter nor
disguise, by their abridgments and at their own choice, anything of the
substance of the matter, but deliver it to us pure and entire in all its
dimensions.
For the most part, and especially in these latter ages, persons are
culled out for this work from amongst the common people, upon the sole
consideration of well-speaking, as if we were to learn grammar from them;
and the men so chosen have fair reason, being hired for no other end and
pretending to nothing but babble, not to be very solicitous of any part
but that, and so, with a fine jingle of words, prepare us a pretty
contexture of reports they pick up in the streets. The only good
histories are those that have been written themselves who held command in
the affairs whereof they write, or who participated in the conduct of
them, or, at least, who have had the conduct of others of the same
nature. Such are almost all the Greek and Roman histories: for, several
eye-witnesses having written of the same subject, in the time when
grandeur and learning commonly met in the same person, if there happen to
be an error, it must of necessity be a very slight one, and upon a very
doubtful incident. What can a man expect from a physician who writes of
war, or from a mere scholar, treating of the designs of princes? If we
could take notice how scrupulous the Romans were in this, there would
need but this example: Asinius Pollio found in the histories of Caesar
himself something misreported, a mistake occasioned; either by reason he
could not have his eye in all parts of his army at once and had given
credit to some individual persons who had not delivered him a very true
account; or else, for not having had too perfect notice given him by his
lieutenants of what they had done in his absence.--[Suetonius, Life of
Caesar, c. 56.]--By which we may see, whether the inquisition after
truth be not very delicate, when a man cannot believe the report of a
battle from the knowledge of him who there commanded, nor from the
soldiers who were engaged in it, unless, after the method of a judicial
inquiry, the witnesses be confronted and objections considered upon the
proof of the least detail of every incident. In good earnest the
knowledge we have of our own affairs, is much more obscure: but that has
been sufficiently handled by Bodin, and according to my own sentiment
--[In the work by jean Bodin, entitled “Methodus ad facilem historiarum
cognitionem.” 1566.]--A little to aid the weakness of my memory (so
extreme that it has happened to me more than once, to take books again
into my hand as new and unseen, that I had carefully read over a few
years before, and scribbled with my notes) I have adopted a custom of
late, to note at the end of every book (that is, of those I never intend
to read again) the time when I made an end on’t, and the judgment I had
made of it, to the end that this might, at least, represent to me the
character and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it;
and I will here transcribe some of those annotations.
I wrote this, some ten years ago, in my Guicciardini (of what language
soever my books speak to me in, I always speak to them in my own): “He is
a diligent historiographer, from whom, in my opinion, a man may learn the
truth of the affairs of his time, as exactly as from any other; in the
most of which he was himself also a personal actor, and in honourable
command. There is no appearance that he disguised anything, either upon
the account of hatred, favour, or vanity; of which the free censures he
passes upon the great ones, and particularly those by whom he was
advanced and employed in commands of great trust and honour, as Pope
Clement VII., give ample testimony. As to that part which he thinks
himself the best at, namely, his digressions and discourses, he has
indeed some very good, and enriched with fine features; but he is too
fond of them: for, to leave nothing unsaid, having a subject so full,
ample, almost infinite, he degenerates into pedantry and smacks a little
of scholastic prattle. I have also observed this in him, that of so many
souls and so many effects, so many motives and so many counsels as he
judges, he never attributes any one to virtue, religion, or conscience,
as if all these were utterly extinct in the world: and of all the
actions, how brave soever in outward show they appear in themselves, he
always refers the cause and motive to some vicious occasion or some
prospect of profit. It is impossible to imagine but that, amongst such
an infinite number of actions as he makes mention of, there must be some
one produced by the way of honest reason. No corruption could so
universally have infected men that some one would not escape the
contagion which makes me suspect that his own taste was vicious, whence
it might happen that he judged other men by himself.”
In my Philip de Commines there is this written: “You will here find the
language sweet and delightful, of a natural simplicity, the narration
pure, with the good faith of the author conspicuous therein; free from
vanity, when speaking of himself, and from affection or envy, when
speaking of others: his discourses and exhortations rather accompanied
with zeal and truth, than with any exquisite sufficiency; and,
throughout, authority and gravity, which bespeak him a man of good
extraction, and brought up in great affairs.”
Upon the Memoirs of Monsieur du Bellay I find this: “‘Tis always pleasant
to read things written by those that have experienced how they ought to
be carried on; but withal, it cannot be denied but there is a manifest
decadence in these two lords--[Martin du Bellay and Guillaume de Langey,
brothers, who jointly wrote the Memoirs.]--from the freedom and liberty
of writing that shine in the elder historians, such as the Sire de
Joinville, the familiar companion of St. Louis; Eginhard, chancellor to
Charlemagne; and of later date, Philip de Commines. What we have here is
rather an apology for King Francis, against the Emperor Charles V., than
history. I will not believe that they have falsified anything, as to
matter of fact; but they make a common practice of twisting the judgment
of events, very often contrary to reason, to our advantage, and of
omitting whatsoever is ticklish to be handled in the life of their
master; witness the proceedings of Messieurs de Montmorency and de Biron,
which are here omitted: nay, so much as the very name of Madame
d’Estampes is not here to be found. Secret actions an historian may
conceal; but to pass over in silence what all the world knows and things
that have drawn after them public and such high consequences, is an
inexcusable defect. In fine, whoever has a mind to have a perfect
knowledge of King Francis and the events of his reign, let him seek it
elsewhere, if my advice may prevail. The only profit a man can reap from
these Memoirs is in the special narrative of battles and other exploits
of war wherein these gentlemen were personally engaged; in some words and
private actions of the princes of their time, and in the treaties and
negotiations carried on by the Seigneur de Langey, where there are
everywhere things worthy to be known, and discourses above the vulgar
strain.”
CHAPTER XI
OF CRUELTY
I fancy virtue to be something else, and something more noble, than good
nature, and the mere propension to goodness, that we are born into the
world withal. Well-disposed and well-descended souls pursue, indeed, the
same methods, and represent in their actions the same face that virtue
itself does: but the word virtue imports, I know not what, more great and
active than merely for a man to suffer himself, by a happy disposition,
to be gently and quietly drawn to the rule of reason. He who, by a
natural sweetness and facility, should despise injuries received, would
doubtless do a very fine and laudable thing; but he who, provoked and
nettled to the quick by an offence, should fortify himself with the arms
of reason against the furious appetite of revenge, and after a great
conflict, master his own passion, would certainly do a great deal more.
The first would do well; the latter virtuously: one action might be
called goodness, and the other virtue; for methinks, the very name of
virtue presupposes difficulty and contention, and cannot be exercised
without an opponent. ‘Tis for this reason, perhaps, that we call God
good, mighty, liberal and just; but we do not call Him virtuous, being
that all His operations are natural and without endeavour.--[Rousseau,
in his Emile, book v., adopts this passage almost in the same words.]--
It has been the opinion of many philosophers, not only Stoics, but
Epicureans--and this addition--
[“Montaigne stops here to make his excuse for thus naming the
Epicureans with the Stoics, in conformity to the general opinion
that the Epicureans were not so rigid in their morals as the Stoics,
which is not true in the main, as he demonstrates at one view. This
involved Montaigne in a tedious parenthesis, during which it is
proper that the reader be attentive, that he may not entirely lose
the thread of the argument. In some later editions of this author,
it has been attempted to remedy this inconvenience, but without
observing that Montaigne’s argument is rendered more feeble and
obscure by such vain repetitions: it is a licence that ought not to
be taken, because he who publishes the work of another, ought to
give it as the other composed ft. But, in Mr Cotton’s translation,
he was so puzzled with this enormous parenthesis that he has quite
left it out”--Coste.]
I borrow from the vulgar opinion, which is false, notwithstanding the
witty conceit of Arcesilaus in answer to one, who, being reproached that
many scholars went from his school to the Epicurean, but never any from
thence to his school, said in answer, “I believe it indeed; numbers of
capons being made out of cocks, but never any cocks out of capons.”
--[Diogenes Laertius, Life of Archesilaus, lib. iv., 43.]--For, in truth,
the Epicurean sect is not at all inferior to the Stoic in steadiness, and
the rigour of opinions and precepts. And a certain Stoic, showing more
honesty than those disputants, who, in order to quarrel with Epicurus,
and to throw the game into their hands, make him say what he never
thought, putting a wrong construction upon his words, clothing his
sentences, by the strict rules of grammar, with another meaning, and a
different opinion from that which they knew he entertained in his mind
and in his morals, the Stoic, I say, declared that he abandoned the
Epicurean sect, upon this among other considerations, that he thought
their road too lofty and inaccessible;
[“And those are called lovers of pleasure, being in effect
lovers of honour and justice, who cultivate and observe all
the virtues.”--Cicero, Ep. Fam., xv. i, 19.]
These philosophers say that it is not enough to have the soul seated in
a good place, of a good temper, and well disposed to virtue; it is not
enough to have our resolutions and our reasoning fixed above all the
power of fortune, but that we are, moreover, to seek occasions wherein to
put them to the proof: they would seek pain, necessity, and contempt to
contend with them and to keep the soul in breath:
“Multum sibi adjicit virtus lacessita.”
[“Virtue is much strengthened by combats.”
or: “Virtue attacked adds to its own force.”
--Seneca, Ep., 13.]
‘Tis one of the reasons why Epaminondas, who was yet of a third sect,
--[The Pythagorean.]--refused the riches fortune presented to him by
very lawful means; because, said he, I am to contend with poverty, in
which extreme he maintained himself to the last. Socrates put himself,
methinks, upon a ruder trial, keeping for his exercise a confounded
scolding wife, which was fighting at sharps. Metellus having, of all the
Roman senators, alone attempted, by the power of virtue, to withstand the
violence of Saturninus, tribune of the people at Rome, who would, by all
means, cause an unjust law to pass in favour of the commons, and, by so
doing, having incurred the capital penalties that Saturninus had
established against the dissentient, entertained those who, in this
extremity, led him to execution with words to this effect: That it was a
thing too easy and too base to do ill; and that to do well where there
was no danger was a common thing; but that to do well where there was
danger was the proper office of a man of virtue. These words of Metellus
very clearly represent to us what I would make out, viz., that virtue
refuses facility for a companion; and that the easy, smooth, and
descending way by which the regular steps of a sweet disposition of
nature are conducted is not that of a true virtue; she requires a rough
and stormy passage; she will have either exotic difficulties to wrestle
with, like that of Metellus, by means whereof fortune delights to
interrupt the speed of her career, or internal difficulties, that the
inordinate appetites and imperfections of our condition introduce to
disturb her.
I am come thus far at my ease; but here it comes into my head that the
soul of Socrates, the most perfect that ever came to my knowledge, should
by this rule be of very little recommendation; for I cannot conceive in
that person any the least motion of a vicious inclination: I cannot
imagine there could be any difficulty or constraint in the course of his
virtue: I know his reason to be so powerful and sovereign over him that
she would never have suffered a vicious appetite so much as to spring in
him. To a virtue so elevated as his, I have nothing to oppose. Methinks
I see him march, with a victorious and triumphant pace, in pomp and at
his ease, without opposition or disturbance. If virtue cannot shine
bright, but by the conflict of contrary appetites, shall we then say that
she cannot subsist without the assistance of vice, and that it is from
her that she derives her reputation and honour? What then, also, would
become of that brave and generous Epicurean pleasure, which makes account
that it nourishes virtue tenderly in her lap, and there makes it play and
wanton, giving it for toys to play withal, shame, fevers, poverty, death,
and torments? If I presuppose that a perfect virtue manifests itself in
contending, in patient enduring of pain, and undergoing the uttermost
extremity of the gout; without being moved in her seat; if I give her
troubles and difficulty for her necessary objects: what will become of a
virtue elevated to such a degree, as not only to despise pain, but,
moreover, to rejoice in it, and to be tickled with the throes of a sharp
colic, such as the Epicureans have established, and of which many of
them, by their actions, have given most manifest proofs? As have several
others, who I find to have surpassed in effects even the very rules of
their discipline. Witness the younger Cato: When I see him die, and
tearing out his own bowels, I am not satisfied simply to believe that he
had then his soul totally exempt from all trouble and horror: I cannot
think that he only maintained himself in the steadiness that the Stoical
rules prescribed him; temperate, without emotion, and imperturbed. There
was, methinks, something in the virtue of this man too sprightly and
fresh to stop there; I believe that, without doubt, he felt a pleasure
and delight in so noble an action, and was more pleased in it than in any
other of his life:
“Sic abiit a vita, ut causam moriendi nactum se esse gauderet.”
[“He quitted life rejoicing that a reason for dying had arisen.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 30.]
I believe it so thoroughly that I question whether he would have been
content to have been deprived of the occasion of so brave an exploit; and
if the goodness that made him embrace the public concern more than his
own, withheld me not, I should easily fall into an opinion that he
thought himself obliged to fortune for having put his virtue upon so
brave a trial, and for having favoured that theif--[Caesar]--in treading
underfoot the ancient liberty of his country. Methinks I read in this
action I know not what exaltation in his soul, and an extraordinary and
manly emotion of pleasure, when he looked upon the generosity and height
of his enterprise:
“Deliberate morte ferocior,”
[“The more courageous from the deliberation to die.”
--Horace, Od., i. 37, 29.]
not stimulated with any hope of glory, as the popular and effeminate
judgments of some have concluded (for that consideration was too mean and
low to possess so generous, so haughty, and so determined a heart as
his), but for the very beauty of the thing in itself, which he who had
the handling of the springs discerned more clearly and in its perfection
than we are able to do. Philosophy has obliged me in determining that so
brave an action had been indecently placed in any other life than that of
Cato; and that it only appertained to his to end so; notwithstanding, and
according to reason, he commanded his son and the senators who
accompanied him to take another course in their affairs:
“Catoni, quum incredibilem natura tribuisset gravitatem,
eamque ipse perpetue constantia roboravisset, semperque
in proposito consilio permansisset, moriendum potius,
quam tyranni vultus aspiciendus, erat.”
[“Cato, whom nature had given incredible dignity, which he had
fortified by perpetual constancy, ever remaining of his
predetermined opinion, preferred to die rather than to look
on the countenance of a tyrant.”--Cicero, De Ofc., i. 31.]
Every death ought to hold proportion with the life before it; we do not
become others for dying. I always interpret the death by the life
preceding; and if any one tell me of a death strong and constant in
appearance, annexed to a feeble life, I conclude it produced by some
feeble cause, and suitable to the life before. The easiness then of his
death and the facility of dying he had acquired by the vigour of his
soul; shall we say that it ought to abate anything of the lustre of his
virtue? And who, that has his brain never so little tinctured with the
true philosophy, can be content to imagine Socrates only free from fear
and passion in the accident of his prison, fetters, and condemnation?
and that will not discover in him not only firmness and constancy (which
was his ordinary condition), but, moreover, I know not what new
satisfaction, and a frolic cheerfulness in his last words and actions?
In the start he gave with the pleasure of scratching his leg when his
irons were taken off, does he not discover an equal serenity and joy in
his soul for being freed from past inconveniences, and at the same time
to enter into the knowledge of the things to come? Cato shall pardon me,
if he please; his death indeed is more tragical and more lingering; but
yet this is, I know not how, methinks, finer. Aristippus, to one that
was lamenting this death: “The gods grant me such an one,” said he.
A man discerns in the soul of these two great men and their imitators
(for I very much doubt whether there were ever their equals) so perfect a
habitude to virtue, that it was turned to a complexion. It is no longer
a laborious virtue, nor the precepts of reason, to maintain which the
soul is so racked, but the very essence of their soul, its natural and
ordinary habit; they have rendered it such by a long practice of
philosophical precepts having lit upon a rich and fine nature; the
vicious passions that spring in us can find no entrance into them; the
force and vigour of their soul stifle and extinguish irregular desires,
so soon as they begin to move.
Now, that it is not more noble, by a high and divine resolution, to
hinder the birth of temptations, and to be so formed to virtue, that the
very seeds of vice are rooted out, than to hinder by main force their
progress; and, having suffered ourselves to be surprised with the first
motions of the passions, to arm ourselves and to stand firm to oppose
their progress, and overcome them; and that this second effect is not
also much more generous than to be simply endowed with a facile and
affable nature, of itself disaffected to debauchery and vice, I do not
think can be doubted; for this third and last sort of virtue seems to
render a man innocent, but not virtuous; free from doing ill, but not apt
enough to do well: considering also, that this condition is so near
neighbour to imperfection and cowardice, that I know not very well how to
separate the confines and distinguish them: the very names of goodness
and innocence are, for this reason, in some sort grown into contempt.
I very well know that several virtues, as chastity, sobriety, and
temperance, may come to a man through personal defects. Constancy in
danger, if it must be so called, the contempt of death, and patience in
misfortunes, may ofttimes be found in men for want of well judging of
such accidents, and not apprehending them for such as they are. Want of
apprehension and stupidity sometimes counterfeit virtuous effects as I
have often seen it happen, that men have been commended for what really
merited blame. An Italian lord once said this, in my presence, to the
disadvantage of his own nation: that the subtlety of the Italians, and
the vivacity of their conceptions were so great, and they foresaw the
dangers and accidents that might befall them so far off, that it was not
to be thought strange, if they were often, in war, observed to provide
for their safety, even before they had discovered the peril; that we
French and the Spaniards, who were not so cunning, went on further, and
that we must be made to see and feel the danger before we would take the
alarm; but that even then we could not stick to it. But the Germans and
Swiss, more gross and heavy, had not the sense to look about them, even
when the blows were falling about their ears. Peradventure, he only
talked so for mirth’s sake; and yet it is most certain that in war raw
soldiers rush into dangers with more precipitancy than after they have
been cudgelled*--(The original has eschauldex--scalded)
“Haud ignarus . . . . quantum nova gloria in armis,
Et praedulce decus, primo certamine possit.”
[“Not ignorant how much power the fresh glory of arms and sweetest
honour possess in the first contest.”--AEneid, xi. 154]
For this reason it is that, when we judge of a particular action, we are
to consider the circumstances, and the whole man by whom it is performed,
before we give it a name.
To instance in myself: I have sometimes known my friends call that
prudence in me, which was merely fortune; and repute that courage and
patience, which was judgment and opinion; and attribute to me one title
for another, sometimes to my advantage and sometimes otherwise. As to
the rest, I am so far from being arrived at the first and most perfect
degree of excellence, where virtue is turned into habit, that even of the
second I have made no great proofs. I have not been very solicitous to
curb the desires by which I have been importuned. My virtue is a virtue,
or rather an innocence, casual and accidental. If I had been born of a
more irregular complexion, I am afraid I should have made scurvy work;
for I never observed any great stability in my soul to resist passions,
if they were never so little vehement: I know not how to nourish quarrels
and debates in my own bosom, and, consequently, owe myself no great
thanks that I am free from several vices:
“Si vitiis mediocribus et mea paucis
Mendosa est natura, alioqui recta, velut si
Egregio inspersos reprehendas corpore naevos:”
[“If my nature be disfigured only with slight and few vices, and is
otherwise just, it is as if you should blame moles on a fair body.”
--Horatius, Sat., i. 6, 65.]
I owe it rather to my fortune than my reason. She has caused me to be
descended of a race famous for integrity and of a very good father; I
know not whether or no he has infused into me part of his humours, or
whether domestic examples and the good education of my infancy have
insensibly assisted in the work, or, if I was otherwise born so:
“Seu Libra, seu me Scorpius adspicit
Formidolosus, pars violentior
Natalis hors, seu tyrannus
Hesperive Capricornus undae:”
[“Whether the Balance or dread Scorpio, more potent over my natal
hour, aspects me, or Capricorn, supreme over the Hesperian sea.”
--Horace, Od., ii. 117.]
but so it is, that I have naturally a horror for most vices. The answer
of Antisthenes to him who asked him, which was the best apprenticeship
“to unlearn evil,” seems to point at this. I have them in horror, I say,
with a detestation so natural, and so much my own, that the same instinct
and impression I brought of them with me from my nurse, I yet retain, and
no temptation whatever has had the power to make me alter it. Not so
much as my own discourses, which in some things lashing out of the common
road might seem easily to license me to actions that my natural
inclination makes me hate. I will say a prodigious thing, but I will say
it, however: I find myself in many things more under reputation by my
manners than by my opinion, and my concupiscence less debauched than my
reason. Aristippus instituted opinions so bold in favour of pleasure and
riches as set all the philosophers against him: but as to his manners,
Dionysius the tyrant, having presented three beautiful women before him,
to take his choice; he made answer, that he would choose them all, and
that Paris got himself into trouble for having preferred one before the
other two: but, having taken them home to his house, he sent them back
untouched. His servant finding himself overladen upon the way, with the
money he carried after him, he ordered him to pour out and throw away
that which troubled him. And Epicurus, whose doctrines were so
irreligious and effeminate, was in his life very laborious and devout;
he wrote to a friend of his that he lived only upon biscuit and water,
entreating him to send him a little cheese, to lie by him against he had
a mind to make a feast. Must it be true, that to be a perfect good man,
we must be so by an occult, natural, and universal propriety, without
law, reason, or example? The debauches wherein I have been engaged, have
not been, I thank God, of the worst sort, and I have condemned them in
myself, for my judgment was never infected by them; on the contrary,
I accuse them more severely in myself than in any other; but that is all,
for, as to the rest. I oppose too little resistance and suffer myself to
incline too much to the other side of the balance, excepting that I
moderate them, and prevent them from mixing with other vices, which for
the most part will cling together, if a man have not a care. I have
contracted and curtailed mine, to make them as single and as simple as I
can:
“Nec ultra
Errorem foveo.”
[“Nor do I cherish error further.”
or: “Nor carry wrong further.”
--Juvenal, viii. 164.]
For as to the opinion of the Stoics, who say, “That the wise man when he
works, works by all the virtues together, though one be most apparent,
according to the nature of the action”; and herein the similitude of a
human body might serve them somewhat, for the action of anger cannot
work, unless all the humours assist it, though choler predominate;
--if they will thence draw a like consequence, that when the wicked man
does wickedly, he does it by all the vices together, I do not believe it
to be so, or else I understand them not, for I by effect find the
contrary. These are sharp, unsubstantial subleties, with which
philosophy sometimes amuses itself. I follow some vices, but I fly
others as much as a saint would do. The Peripatetics also disown this
indissoluble connection; and Aristotle is of opinion that a prudent and
just man may be intemperate and inconsistent. Socrates confessed to some
who had discovered a certain inclination to vice in his physiognomy, that
it was, in truth, his natural propension, but that he had by discipline
corrected it. And such as were familiar with the philosopher Stilpo
said, that being born with addiction to wine and women, he had by study
rendered himself very abstinent both from the one and the other.
What I have in me of good, I have, quite contrary, by the chance of my
birth; and hold it not either by law, precept, or any other instruction;
the innocence that is in me is a simple one; little vigour and no art.
Amongst other vices, I mortally hate cruelty, both by nature and
judgment, as the very extreme of all vices: nay, with so much tenderness
that I cannot see a chicken’s neck pulled off without trouble, and cannot
without impatience endure the cry of a hare in my dog’s teeth, though the
chase be a violent pleasure. Such as have sensuality to encounter,
freely make use of this argument, to shew that it is altogether “vicious
and unreasonable; that when it is at the height, it masters us to that
degree that a man’s reason can have no access,” and instance our own
experience in the act of love,
“Quum jam praesagit gaudia corpus,
Atque in eo est Venus,
ut muliebria conserat arva.”
[None of the translators of the old editions used for this etext
have been willing to translate this passage from Lucretius, iv.
1099; they take a cop out by bashfully saying: “The sense is in the
preceding passage of the text.” D.W.]
wherein they conceive that the pleasure so transports us, that our reason
cannot perform its office, whilst we are in such ecstasy and rapture. I
know very well it may be otherwise, and that a man may sometimes, if he
will, gain this point over himself to sway his soul, even in the critical
moment, to think of something else; but then he must ply it to that bent.
I know that a man may triumph over the utmost effort of this pleasure: I
have experienced it in myself, and have not found Venus so imperious a
goddess, as many, and much more virtuous men than I, declare. I do not
consider it a miracle, as the Queen of Navarre does in one of the Tales
of her Heptameron--[“Vu gentil liure pour son estoffe.”]--(which is a
very pretty book of its kind), nor for a thing of extreme difficulty, to
pass whole nights, where a man has all the convenience and liberty he can
desire, with a long-coveted mistress, and yet be true to the pledge first
given to satisfy himself with kisses and suchlike endearments, without
pressing any further. I conceive that the example of the pleasure of the
chase would be more proper; wherein though the pleasure be less, there is
the higher excitement of unexpected joy, giving no time for the reason,
taken by surprise, to prepare itself for the encounter, when after a long
quest the beast starts up on a sudden in a place where, peradventure, we
least expected it; the shock and the ardour of the shouts and cries of
the hunters so strike us, that it would be hard for those who love this
lesser chase, to turn their thoughts upon the instant another way; and
the poets make Diana triumph over the torch and shafts of Cupid:
“Quis non malarum, quas amor curas habet,
Haec inter obliviscitur?”
[“Who, amongst such delights would not remove out of his thoughts
the anxious cares of love.”--Horace, Epod., ii. 37.]
To return to what I was saying before, I am tenderly compassionate of
others’ afflictions, and should readily cry for company, if, upon any
occasion whatever, I could cry at all. Nothing tempts my tears but
tears, and not only those that are real and true, but whatever they are,
feigned or painted. I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them
rather; but I very much lament the dying. The savages do not so much
offend me, in roasting and eating the bodies of the dead, as they do who
torment and persecute the living. Nay, I cannot look so much as upon the
ordinary executions of justice, how reasonable soever, with a steady eye.
Some one having to give testimony of Julius Caesar’s clemency; “he was,”
says he, “mild in his revenges. Having compelled the pirates to yield by
whom he had before been taken prisoner and put to ransom; forasmuch as he
had threatened them with the cross, he indeed condemned them to it, but
it was after they had been first strangled. He punished his secretary
Philemon, who had attempted to poison him, with no greater severity than
mere death.” Without naming that Latin author,--[Suetonius, Life of
Casay, c. 74.]--who thus dares to allege as a testimony of mercy the
killing only of those by whom we have been offended; it is easy to guess
that he was struck with the horrid and inhuman examples of cruelty
practised by the Roman tyrants.
For my part, even in justice itself, all that exceeds a simple death
appears to me pure cruelty; especially in us who ought, having regard to
their souls, to dismiss them in a good and calm condition; which cannot
be, when we have agitated them by insufferable torments. Not long since,
a soldier who was a prisoner, perceiving from a tower where he was shut
up, that the people began to assemble to the place of execution, and that
the carpenters were busy erecting a scaffold, he presently concluded
that the preparation was for him, and therefore entered into a resolution
to kill himself, but could find no instrument to assist him in his design
except an old rusty cart-nail that fortune presented to him; with this he
first gave himself two great wounds about his throat, but finding these
would not do, he presently afterwards gave himself a third in the belly,
where he left the nail sticking up to the head. The first of his keepers
who came in found him in this condition: yet alive, but sunk down and
exhausted by his wounds. To make use of time, therefore, before he
should die, they made haste to read his sentence; which having done, and
he hearing that he was only condemned to be beheaded, he seemed to take
new courage, accepted wine which he had before refused, and thanked his
judges for the unhoped-for mildness of their sentence; saying, that he
had taken a resolution to despatch himself for fear of a more severe and
insupportable death, having entertained an opinion, by the preparations
he had seen in the place, that they were resolved to torment him with
some horrible execution, and seemed to be delivered from death in having
it changed from what he apprehended.
I should advise that those examples of severity by which ‘tis designed to
retain the people in their duty, might be exercised upon the dead bodies
of criminals; for to see them deprived of sepulture, to see them boiled
and divided into quarters, would almost work as much upon the vulgar, as
the pain they make the living endure; though that in effect be little or
nothing, as God himself says, “Who kill the body, and after that have no
more that they can do;”--[Luke, xii. 4.]--and the poets singularly
dwell upon the horrors of this picture, as something worse than death:
“Heu! reliquias semiustas regis, denudatis ossibus,
Per terram sanie delibutas foede divexarier.”
[“Alas! that the half-burnt remains of the king, exposing his bones,
should be foully dragged along the ground besmeared with gore.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 44.]
I happened to come by one day accidentally at Rome, just as they were
upon executing Catena, a notorious robber: he was strangled without any
emotion of the spectators, but when they came to cut him in quarters, the
hangman gave not a blow that the people did not follow with a doleful cry
and exclamation, as if every one had lent his sense of feeling to the
miserable carcase. Those inhuman excesses ought to be exercised upon the
bark, and not upon the quick. Artaxerxes, in almost a like case,
moderated the severity of the ancient laws of Persia, ordaining that the
nobility who had committed a fault, instead of being whipped, as they
were used to be, should be stripped only and their clothes whipped for
them; and that whereas they were wont to tear off their hair, they should
only take off their high-crowned tiara.’--[Plutarch, Notable Sayings of
the Ancient King.]--The so devout Egyptians thought they sufficiently
satisfied the divine justice by sacrificing hogs in effigy and
representation; a bold invention to pay God so essential a substance in
picture only and in show.
I live in a time wherein we abound in incredible examples of this vice,
through the licence of our civil wars; and we see nothing in ancient
histories more extreme than what we have proof of every day, but I
cannot, any the more, get used to it. I could hardly persuade myself,
before I saw it with my eyes, that there could be found souls so cruel
and fell, who, for the sole pleasure of murder, would commit it; would
hack and lop off the limbs of others; sharpen their wits to invent
unusual torments and new kinds of death, without hatred, without profit,
and for no other end but only to enjoy the pleasant spectacle of the
gestures and motions, the lamentable groans and cries of a man dying in
anguish. For this is the utmost point to which cruelty can arrive:
“Ut homo hominem, non iratus, non timens,
tantum spectaturus, occidat.”
[“That a man should kill a man, not being angry, not in fear, only
for the sake of the spectacle.”--Seneca, Ep., 90.]
For my own part, I cannot without grief see so much as an innocent beast
pursued and killed that has no defence, and from which we have received
no offence at all; and that which frequently happens, that the stag we
hunt, finding himself weak and out of breath, and seeing no other remedy,
surrenders himself to us who pursue him, imploring mercy by his tears:
“Questuque cruentus,
Atque imploranti similis,”
[“Who, bleeding, by his tears seems to crave mercy.”
--AEnead, vii. 501.]
has ever been to me a very unpleasing sight; and I hardly ever take a
beast alive that I do not presently turn out again. Pythagoras bought
them of fishermen and fowlers to do the same:
“Primoque a caede ferarum,
Incaluisse puto maculatum sanguine ferrum.”
[“I think ‘twas slaughter of wild beasts that first stained the
steel of man with blood.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 106.]
Those natures that are sanguinary towards beasts discover a natural
proneness to cruelty. After they had accustomed themselves at Rome to
spectacles of the slaughter of animals, they proceeded to those of the
slaughter of men, of gladiators. Nature has herself, I fear, imprinted
in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity; nobody takes pleasure in seeing
beasts play with and caress one another, but every one is delighted with
seeing them dismember, and tear one another to pieces. And that I may
not be laughed at for the sympathy I have with them, theology itself
enjoins us some favour in their behalf; and considering that one and the
same master has lodged us together in this palace for his service, and
that they, as well as we, are of his family, it has reason to enjoin us
some affection and regard to them. Pythagoras borrowed the
metempsychosis from the Egyptians; but it has since been received by
several nations, and particularly by our Druids:
“Morte carent animae; semperque, priore relicts
Sede, novis domibus vivunt, habitantque receptae.”
[“Souls never die, but, having left their former seat, live
and are received into new homes.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 158.]
The religion of our ancient Gauls maintained that souls, being eternal,
never ceased to remove and shift their places from one body to another;
mixing moreover with this fancy some consideration of divine justice; for
according to the deportments of the soul, whilst it had been in
Alexander, they said that God assigned it another body to inhabit, more
or less painful, and proper for its condition:
“Muta ferarum
Cogit vincla pati; truculentos ingerit ursis,
Praedonesque lupis; fallaces vulpibus addit:
Atque ubi per varios annos, per mille figuras
Egit, Lethaeo purgatos flumine, tandem
Rursus ad humanae revocat primordia formae:”
[“He makes them wear the silent chains of brutes, the bloodthirsty
souls he encloses in bears, the thieves in wolves, the deceivers in
foxes; where, after successive years and a thousand forms, man had
spent his life, and after purgation in Lethe’s flood, at last he
restores them to the primordial human shapes.”
--Claudian, In Ruf., ii. 482.]
If it had been valiant, he lodged it in the body of a lion; if
voluptuous, in that of a hog; if timorous, in that of a hart or hare; if
malicious, in that of a fox, and so of the rest, till having purified it
by this chastisement, it again entered into the body of some other man:
“Ipse ego nam memini, Trojani, tempore belli
Panthoides Euphorbus eram.”
[“For I myself remember that, in the days of the Trojan war, I was
Euphorbus, son of Pantheus.”--Ovid, Met., xv. 160; and see Diogenes
Laertius, Life of Pythagoras.]
As to the relationship betwixt us and beasts, I do not much admit of it;
nor of that which several nations, and those among the most ancient and
most noble, have practised, who have not only received brutes into their
society and companionship, but have given them a rank infinitely above
themselves, esteeming them one while familiars and favourites of the
gods, and having them in more than human reverence and respect; others
acknowledged no other god or divinity than they:
“Bellux a barbaris propter beneficium consecratae.”
[“Beasts, out of opinion of some benefit received by them, were
consecrated by barbarians”--Cicero, De Natura Deor., i. 36.]
“Crocodilon adorat
Pars haec; illa pavet saturam serpentibus ibin:
Effigies sacri hic nitet aurea cercopitheci;
Hic piscem flumints, illic
Oppida tota canem venerantur.”
[“This place adores the crocodile; another dreads the ibis, feeder
on serpents; here shines the golden image of the sacred ape; here
men venerate the fish of the river; there whole towns worship a
dog.”--Juvenal, xv. 2.]
And the very interpretation that Plutarch, gives to this error, which is
very well conceived, is advantageous to them: for he says that it was not
the cat or the ox, for example, that the Egyptians adored: but that they,
in those beasts, adored some image of the divine faculties; in this,
patience and utility: in that, vivacity, or, as with our neighbours the
Burgundians and all the Germans, impatience to see themselves shut up; by
which they represented liberty, which they loved and adored above all
other godlike attributes, and so of the rest. But when, amongst the more
moderate opinions, I meet with arguments that endeavour to demonstrate
the near resemblance betwixt us and animals, how large a share they have
in our greatest privileges, and with how much probability they compare us
together, truly I abate a great deal of our presumption, and willingly
resign that imaginary sovereignty that is attributed to us over other
creatures.
But supposing all this were not true, there is nevertheless a certain
respect, a general duty of humanity, not only to beasts that have life
and sense, but even to trees, and plants. We owe justice to men, and
graciousness and benignity to other creatures that are capable of it;
there is a certain commerce and mutual obligation betwixt them and us.
Nor shall I be afraid to confess the tenderness of my nature so childish,
that I cannot well refuse to play with my dog, when he the most
unseasonably importunes me to do so. The Turks have alms and hospitals
for beasts. The Romans had public care to the nourishment of geese, by
whose vigilance their Capitol had been preserved. The Athenians made a
decree that the mules and moyls which had served at the building of the
temple called Hecatompedon should be free and suffered to pasture at
their own choice, without hindrance. The Agrigentines had a common use
solemnly to inter the beasts they had a kindness for, as horses of some
rare quality, dogs, and useful birds, and even those that had only been
kept to divert their children; and the magnificence that was ordinary
with them in all other things, also particularly appeared in the
sumptuosity and numbers of monuments erected to this end, and which
remained in their beauty several ages after. The Egyptians buried
wolves, bears, crocodiles, dogs, and cats in sacred places, embalmed
their bodies, and put on mourning at their death. Cimon gave an
honourable sepulture to the mares with which he had three times gained
the prize of the course at the Olympic Games. The ancient Xantippus
caused his dog to be interred on an eminence near the sea, which has ever
since retained the name, and Plutarch says, that he had a scruple about
selling for a small profit to the slaughterer an ox that had been long in
his service.
Chapter XII. Apology For Raimond Sebond.
Learning is, indeed, a very great and a very material accomplishment;
and those who despise it sufficiently discover their own want of
understanding; but learning yet I do not prize it at the excessive rate
that some others do, as Herillus, the philosopher, for one, who therein
places the sovereign good, and maintained “That it was only in her to
render us wise and contented,” which I do not believe; no more than I
do what others have said, that learning is the mother of all virtue, and
that all vice proceeds from ignorance, which, if it be true, required
a very long interpretation. My house has long-been open to men of
knowledge, and is very well known to them; for my father, who governed
it fifty years and upwards, inflamed with the new ardour with which
Francis the First embraced letters, and brought them into esteem, with
great diligence and expense hunted after the acquaintance of learned
men, receiving them into his house as persons sacred, and that had some
particular inspiration of divine wisdom; collecting their sayings and
sentences as so many oracles, and with so much the greater reverence
and religion as he was the less able to judge of them; for he had no
knowledge of letters any more than his predecessors. For my part I love
them well, but I do not adore them. Amongst others, Peter Bunel, a man
of great reputation for knowledge in his time, having, with some others
of his sort, staid some days at Montaigne in my father’s company,
he presented him at his departure with a book, entitled _Theologia
naturalis; sive Liber Creaturarum, magistri Raimondi de Sebonde._ And as
the Italian and Spanish tongues were familiar to my father, and as this
book was written in a sort of jargon of Spanish with Latin terminations,
he hoped that, with a little help, he might be able to understand it,
and therefore recommended it to him for a very useful book, and proper
tor the time wherein he gave it to him; which was when the novel
doctrines of Luther began to be in vogue, and in many places to stagger
our ancient belief: wherein he was very well advised, wisely, in his own
reason, foreseeing that the beginning of this distemper would easily
run into an execrable atheism, for the vulgar, not having the faculty of
judging of things, suffering themselves to be carried away by chance and
appearance, after having once been inspired with the boldness to
despise and control those opinions which they had before had in extreme
reverence, such as those wherein their salvation is concerned, and
that some of the articles of their religion are brought into doubt and
dispute, they afterwards throw all other parts of their belief into the
same uncertainty, they having with them no other authority or foundation
than the others they had already discomposed; and shake off all the
impressions they had received from the authority of the laws, or the
reverence of the ancient customs, as a tyrannical yoke:
Nam cupide eonculcatur nimis ante metutum;
“For with most eagerness they spurn the law,
By which they were before most kept in awe;”
resolving to admit nothing for the future to which they had not first
interposed their own decrees, and given their particular consent.
It happened that my father, a little before his death, having
accidentally found this book under a heap of other neglected papers,
commanded me to translate it for him into French. It is good too
translate such authors as this, where there is little but the matter
itself to express; but such wherein grace of language and elegance of
style are aimed at, are dangerous to attempt, especially when a man is
to turn them into a weaker idiom. It was a strange and a new undertaking
for me; but having by chance at that time nothing else to do, and not
being able to resist the command of the best father that ever was, I did
it as well as I could; and he was so well pleased with it as to order it
to be printed, which after his death was done.
I found the ideas of this author exceeding fine the contexture of his
work well followed, and his design full of piety; and because many
people take a delight to read it, and particularly the ladies, to whom
we owe the most service, I have often thought to assist them to clear
the book of two principal objections made to it. His design is bold and
daring, for he undertakes, by human and natural reasons, to establish
and make good, against the atheists, all the articles of the Christian
religion: wherein, to speak the truth, he is so firm and so successful
that I do not think it possible to do better upon that subject; nay, I
believe he has been equalled by none. This work seeming to me to be too
beautiful and too rich for an author whose name is so little known, and
of whom all that we know is that he was a Spaniard, practising physic at
Toulouse about two hundred years ago; I enquired of Adrian Turnebus, who
knew all things, what he thought of that book; who made answer, “That he
thought it was some abstract drawn from St. Thomas d’Aquin; for that, in
truth, his mind, so full of infinite erudition and admirable subtlety,
was alone capable of such thoughts.” Be this as it may, whoever was the
author and inventor (and ‘tis not reasonable, without greater certainty,
to deprive Sebond of that title), he was a man of great judgment and
most admirable parts.
The first thing they reprehend in his work is “That Christians are to
blame to repose their belief upon human reason, which is only conceived
by faith and the particular inspiration of divine grace.” In which
objection there appears to be something of zeal to piety, and therefore
we are to endeavour to satisfy those who put it forth with the greater
mildness and respect. This were a task more proper for a man well
read in divinity than for me, who know nothing of it; nevertheless, I
conceive that in a thing so divine, so high, and so far transcending
all human intelligence, as is that truth, with which it has pleased
the bounty of God to enlighten us, it is very necessary that he should
moreover lend us his assistance, as a very extraordinary favour and
privilege, to conceive and imprint it in our understanding. And I do
not believe that means purely human are in any sort capable of doing it:
for, if they were, so many rare and excellent souls, and so abundantly
furnished with natural force, in former ages, could not have failed,
by their reason, to arrive at this knowledge. ‘Tis faith alone that
livelily mind certainly comprehends the deep mysteries of our religion;
but, withal, I do not say that it is not a worthy and very laudable
attempt to accommodate those natural and human utensils with which God
has endowed us to the service of our faith: it is not to be doubted but
that it is the most noble use we can put them to; and that there is not
a design in a Christian man more noble than to make it the aim and end
of all his studies to extend and amplify the truth of his belief. We do
not satisfy ourselves with serving God with our souls and understandings
only, we moreover owe and render him a corporal reverence, and apply our
limbs and motions, and external things to do him honour; we must here
do the same, and accompany our faith with all the reason we have, but
always with this reservation, not to fancy that it is upon us that
it depends, nor that our arguments and endeavours can arrive at so
supernatural and divine a knowledge. If it enters not into us by an
extraordinary infusion; if it enters not only by reason, but, moreover,
by human ways, it is not in us in its true dignity and splendour: and
yet, I am afraid, we only have it by this way.
If we hold upon God by the mediation of a lively faith; if we hold upon
God by him, and not by us; if we had a divine basis and foundation,
human occasions would not have the power to shake us as they do; our
fortress would not surrender to so weak a battery; the love of novelty,
the constraint of princes, the success of one party, and the rash and
fortuitous change of our opinions, would not have the power to stagger
and alter our belief: we should not then leave it to the mercy of every
new argument, nor abandon it to all the rhetoric in the world; we should
withstand the fury of these waves with an immovable and unyielding
constancy:
As a great rock repels the rolling tides,
That foam and bark about her marble sides,
From its strong bulk
If we were but touched with this ray of divinity, it would appear
throughout; not only our words, but our works also, would carry
its brightness and lustre; whatever proceeded from us would be seen
illuminated with this noble light. We ought to be ashamed that, in all
the human sects, there never was any of the faction, that did not, in
some measure, conform his life and behaviour to it, whereas so divine
and heavenly an institution does only distinguish Christians by the
name! Will you see the proof of this? Compare our manners to those of a
Mahometan or Pagan, you will still find that we fall very
short; there, where, out of regard to the reputation and advantage of
our religion, we ought to shine in excellency at a vast distance beyond
all others: and that it should be said of us, “Are they so just, so
charitable, so good: Then they are Christians.” All other signs are
common to all religions; hope, trust, events, ceremonies, penance,
martyrs. The peculiar mark of our truth ought to be our virtue, as it
is also the most heavenly and difficult, and the most worthy product
of truth. For this our good St. Louis was in the right, who, when the
Tartar king, who was become Christian, designed to come to Lyons to kiss
the Pope’s feet, and there to be an eye-witness of the sanctity he hoped
to find in our manner, immediately diverted him from his purpose; for
fear lest our disorderly way of living should, on the contrary, put
him out of conceit with so holy a belief! And yet it happened quite
otherwise since to that other, who, going to Rome, to the same end, and
there seeing the dissoluteness of the prelates and people of that time,
settled himself so much the more firmly in our religion, considering
how great the force and divinity of it must necessarily be that could
maintain its dignity and splendour among so much corruption, and in so
vicious hands. If we had but one single grain of faith, we should remove
mountains from their places, saith the sacred Word; our actions, that
would then be directed and accompanied by the divinity, would not be
merely human, they would have in them something of miraculous, as well
as our belief: _Brevis est institutio vitæ honestæ beauæque, si
credos._ “Believe, and the way to happiness and virtue is a short one.”
Some impose upon the world that they believe that which they do not;
others, more in number, make themselves believe that they believe, not
being able to penetrate into what it is to believe. We think it strange
if, in the civil war which, at this time, disorders our state, we see
events float and vary aller a common and ordinary manner; which is
because we bring nothing to it but our own. Justice, which is in one
party, is only there for ornament and palliation; it, is, indeed,
pretended, but ‘tis not there received, settled and espoused: it is
there, as in the mouth of an advocate, not as in the heart and affection
of the party. God owes his extraordinary assistance to faith and
religion; not to our passions. Men there are the conductors, and therein
serve themselves with religion, whereas it ought to be quite contrary.
Observe, if it be not by our own hands that we guide and train it, and
draw it like wax into so many contrary figures, from a rule in itself so
direct and firm. When and where was this more manifest than in France in
our days? They who have taken it on the left hand, they who have taken
it on the right; they who call it black, they who call it white, alike
employ it to their violent and ambitious designs, conduct it with
a progress, so conform in riot and injustice that they render the
diversity they pretended in their opinions, in a thing whereon the
conduct and rule of our life depends, doubtful and hard to believe. Did
one ever see, come from the same school and discipline, manners more
united, and more the same? Do but observe with what horrid impudence
we toss divine arguments to and fro, and how irreligiously we have both
rejected and retaken them, accord--as fortune has shifted our places in
these intestine storms.
This so solemn proposition, “Whether it be lawful for a subject to rebel
and take up arms against his prince for the defence of his religion,” do
you remember in whose mouths, the last year, the affirmative of it
was the prop of one party, and the negative the pillar of another? And
hearken now from what quarter comes the voice and instruction of the
one and the other, and if arms make less noise and rattle for this cause
than for that. We condemn those to the fire who say that truth must be
made to bear the yoke of our necessity; and how much worse does France
than say it? Let us confess the truth; whoever should draw out from the
army, even that raised by the king, those who take up arms out of pure
zeal to religion, and also those who only do it to protect the laws of
their country, or for the service of their prince, could hardly, out
of both these put together, make one complete company of gens-d’armes.
Whence does this proceed, that there are so few to be found who have
maintained the same will and the same progress in our civil commotions,
and that we see them one while move but a foot-pace, and another run
full speed? and the same men one while damage our affairs by their
violent heat and fierceness, and another by their coldness, gentleness,
and slowness; but that they are pushed on by particular and casual
considerations, according to the variety wherein they move?
I evidently perceive that we do not willingly afford devotion any other
offices but those that least suit with our own passions.
There hostility so admirable as the Christian. Our zeal performs
wonders, when it seconds our inclinations to hatred, cruelty, ambition,
avarice, detraction, and rebellion: but when it moves, against the hair,
towards bounty, benignity, and temperance, unless, by miracle, some
rare and virtuous disposition prompts us to it, we stir neither hand nor
toot. Our religion is intended to extirpate vices, whereas it screens,
nourishes, and incites them. We must not mock God. If we believed in
him, I do not say by faith, but with a simple belief, that is to say
(and I speak it to our great shame) if we believed in him and recognised
him as we do any other history, or as we would do one of our companions,
we should love him above all other things for the infinite bounty and
beauty that shines in him;--at least, he would go equal in our affection
with riches, pleasure, glory, and our friends. The best of us is not so
much afraid to outrage him as he is afraid to injure his neighbour, his
kinsman, or his master. Is there any understanding so weak that, having
on one side the object of one of our vicious pleasures, and on the other
(in equal knowledge and persuasion) the state of an immortal glory,
would change the first for the other? and yet we often renounce this out
of mere contempt: for what lust tempts us to blaspheme, if not, perhaps,
the very desire to offend. The philosopher Antisthenes, as he was being
initiated in the mysteries of Orpheus, the priest telling him, “That
those who professed themselves of that religion were certain to receive
perfect and eternal felicity after death,”--“If thou believest that,”
answered he, “why dost thou not die thyself?” Diogenes, more rudely,
according to his manner, and more remote from our purpose, to the priest
that in like manner preached to him, “To become of his religion, that he
might obtain the happiness of the other world;--“What!” said he, “thou
wouldest have me to believe that Agesilaus and Epaminondas, who were so
great men, shall be miserable, and that thou, who art but a calf, and
canst do nothing to purpose, shalt be happy, because thou art a priest?”
Did we receive these great promises of eternal beatitude with the same
reverence and respect that we do a philosophical discourse, we should
not have death in so great horror:
Non jam se moriens dissolvi conqurreretur;
Sed magis ire foras, stemque relinquere ut angais,
Gauderet, prealonga senex aut cornua cervus.
“We should not on a death bed grieve to be
Dissolved, but rather launch out cheerfully
From our old hut, and with the snake, be glad
To cast off the corrupted slough we had;
Or with th’ old stag rejoice to be now clear
From the large horns, too ponderous grown to bear.”
“I desire to be dissolved,” we should say, “and to be with Jesus Christ”
The force of Plato’s arguments concerning the immortality of the soul
set some of his disciples to seek a premature grave, that they might the
sooner enjoy the things he had made them hope for.
All this is a most evident sign that we only receive our religion
after our own fashion, by our own hands, and no otherwise than as other
religions are received. Either we are happened in the country where it
is in practice, or we reverence the antiquity of it, or the authority
of the men who have maintained it, or fear the menaces it fulminates
against misbelievers, or are allured by its promises. These
considerations ought, ‘tis true, to be applied to our belief but as
subsidiaries only, for they are human obligations. Another religion,
other witnesses, the like promises and threats, might, by the same way,
imprint a quite contrary belief. We are Christians by the same title
that we are Perigordians or Germans. And what Plato says, “That there
are few men so obstinate in their atheism whom a pressing danger will
not reduce to an acknowledgment of the divine power,” does not concern
a true Christian: ‘tis for mortal and human religions to be received by
human recommendation. What kind of faith can that be that cowardice and
want of courage establish in us? A pleasant faith, that does not believe
what it believes but for want of courage to disbelieve it! Can a vicious
passion, such as inconstancy and astonishment, cause any regular product
in our souls? “They are confident in their judgment,” says he, “that
what is said of hell and future torments is all feigned: but an occasion
of making the expedient presenting itself, when old age or diseases
bring them to the brink of the grave, the terror of death, by the horror
of that future condition, inspires them with a new belief!” And by
reason that such impressions render them timorous, he forbids in his
_Laws_ all such threatening doctrines, and all persuasion that anything
of ill can befall a man from the gods, excepting for his great good when
they happen to him, and for a medicinal effect. They say of Bion that,
infected with the atheism of Theodoras, he had long had religious men in
great scorn and contempt, but that death surprising him, he gave
himself up to the most extreme superstition; as if the gods withdrew and
returned according to the necessities of Bion. Plato and these examples
would conclude that we are brought to a belief of God either by reason
or by force. Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous,
difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how
arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to
be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly
to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have,
nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience. Yet
will they not fail to lift up their hands towards heaven if you give
them a good thrust with a sword in the breast, and when fear or sickness
has abated and dulled the licentious fury of this giddy humour they will
easily re-unite, and very discreetly suffer themselves to be reconciled
to the public faith and examples. A doctrine seriously digested is one
thing, and those superficial impressions another; which springing from
the disorder of an unhinged understanding, float at random and great
uncertainty in the fancy. Miserable and senseless men, who strive to be
worse than they can!
The error of paganism and the ignorance of our sacred truth, let this
great soul of Plato, but great only in human greatness, fall also into
this other mistake, “That children and old men were most susceptible of
religion,” as if it sprung and derived its credit from our weakness.
The knot that ought to bind the judgment and the will, that ought to
restrain the soul and join it to our creator, should be a knot that
derives its foldings and strength not from our considerations, from our
reasons and passions, but from a divine and supernatural constraint,
having but one form, one face, and one lustre, which is the authority
of God and his divine grace. Now the heart and soul being governed and
commanded by faith, ‘tis but reason that they should muster all our
other faculties, according as they are able to perform to the service
and assistance of their design. Neither is it to be imagined that all
this machine has not some marks imprinted upon it by the hand of the
mighty architect, and that there is not in the things of this world
some image that in some measure resembles the workman who has built and
formed them. He has, in his stupendous works, left the character of his
divinity, and ‘tis our own weakness only that hinders us from discerning
it. ‘Tis what he himself is pleased to tell us, “That he manifests his
invisible operations to us by those that are visible.” Sebond applied
himself to this laudable and noble study, and demonstrates to us that
there is not any part or member of the world that disclaims or derogates
from its maker. It were to do wrong to the divine goodness, did not the
universe consent to our belief. The heavens, the earth, the elements,
our bodies and our souls,--all things concur to this; we have but to
find out the way to use them; they instruct us, if we are capable
of instruction. For this world is a sacred temple, into which man is
introduced, there to contemplate statues, not the works of a mortal
hand, but such as the divine purpose has made the objects of sense; the
sun, the stars, the water, and the earth, to represent those that are
intelligible to us. “The invisible tilings of God,” says St. Paul,
“appear by the creation of the world, his eternal wisdom and divinity
being considered by his works.”
And God himself envies not men the grace
Of seeing and admiring heaven’s face;
But, rolling it about, he still anew
Presents its varied splendour to our view,
And on oar minds himself inculcates, so
That we th’ Almighty mover well may know:
Instructing us by seeing him the cause
Of ill, to revcreoce and obey his laws.”
Now our prayers and human discourses are but as sterile and undigested
matter. The grace of God is the form; ‘tis that which gives fashion and
value to it. As the virtuous actions of Socrates and Cato remain vain
and fruitless, for not having had the love and obedience to the true
creator of all things, so is it with our imaginations and discourses;
they have a kind of body, but it is an inform mass, without fashion and
without light, if faith and grace be not added thereto. Faith coming to
tinct and illustrate Sehond’s arguments renders them firm and stolid;
and to that degree that they are capable of serving for directions, and
of being the first guides to an elementary Christian to put him into the
way of this knowledge. They in some measure form him to, and render him
capable of, the grace of God, by which means he afterwards completes and
perfects himself in the true belief. I know a man of authority, bred up
to letters, who has confessed to me to have been brought back from the
errors of unbelief by Sebond’s arguments. And should they be stripped of
this ornament, and of the assistance and approbation of the faith,
and be looked upon as mere fancies only, to contend with those who are
precipitated into the dreadful and horrible darkness of irréligion, they
will even there find them as solid and firm as any others of the same
quality that can be opposed against them; so that we shall be ready to
say to our opponents:
Si melius quid habes, arcesse; vel imperium fer:
“If you have arguments more fit.
Produce them, or to these submit.”
let them admit the force of our reasons, or let them show us others,
and upon some other subject, better woven and of finer thread. I am,
unawares, half engaged in the second objection, to which I proposed to
make answer in the behalf of Sebond. Some say that his arguments are
weak, and unable to make good what he intends, and undertake with great
ease to confute them. These are to be a little more roughly handled, for
they are more dangerous and malicious than the first Men willingly wrest
the sayings of others to favour their own prejudicate opinions. To an
atheist all writings tend to atheisïm: he corrupts the most innocent
matter with his own venom. These have their judgments so prepossessed
that they cannot relish Sebond’s reasons. As to the rest, they think we
give them very fair play in putting them into the liberty of combatting
our religion with weapons merely human, whom, in her majesty, full of
authority and command, they durst not attack. The means that I shall
use, and that I think most proper to subdue this frenzy, is to crush and
spurn under foot pride and human arrogance; to make them sensible of
the inanity, vanity, and vileness of man; to wrest the wretched arms
of their reason out of their hands; to make them bow down and bite the
ground under the authority and reverence of the Divine Majesty. ‘Tis to
that alone that knowledge and wisdom appertain; that alone that can make
a true estimate of itself, and from which we purloin whatever we value
ourselves upon: [--Greek--] “God permits not any being but himself to be
truly wise.” Let us subdue this presumption, the first foundation of the
tyranny of the evil spirit _Deus superbis re-sistit, humilibus autem
dal gratiam._ “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
“Understanding is in the gods,” says Plato, “and not at all, or very
little, in men.” Now it is in the mean time a great consolation to a
Christian man to see our frail and mortal parts so fitly suited to our
holy and divine faith that, when we employ them to the subjects of their
own mortal and frail nature they are not even there more unitedly or
more firmly adjusted. Let us see, then, if man has in his power other
more forcible and convincing reasons than those of Sebond; that is to
say, if it be in him to arrive at any certainty by argument and reason.
For St. Augustin, disputing against these people, has good cause to
reproach them with injustice, “In that they maintain the part of our
belief to be false that our reason cannot establish.” And to show that
a great many things may be, and have been, of which our nature could
not sound the reason and causes, he proposes to them certain known and
undoubted experiments, wherein men confess they see nothing; and this he
does, as all other things, with a curious and ingenious inquisition.
We must do more than this, and make them know that, to convince the
weakness of their reason, there is no necessity of culling out uncommon
examples: and that it is so defective and so blind that there is no
faculty clear enough for it; that to it the easy and the hard are all
one; that all subjects equally, and nature in general, disclaim its
authority and reject its mediation.
What does truth mean when she preaches to us to fly worldly philosophy,
when she so often inculcates to us, “That our wisdom is but folly in the
sight of God: that the vainest of all vanities is man: that the man who
presumes upon his wisdom does not yet know what wisdom is; and that man,
who is nothing, if he thinks himself to be anything, does seduce and
deceive himself.” These sentences of the Holy Spirit do so clearly and
vividly express that which I would maintain that I should need no other
proof against men who would with all humility and obedience submit to
his authority: but these will be whipped at their own expense, and will
not suffer a man to oppose their reason but by itself.
Let us then, for once, consider a man alone, without foreign assistance,
armed only with his own proper arms, and unfurnished of the divine grace
and wisdom, which is all his honour, strength, and the foundation of his
being. Let us see how he stands in this fine equipage. Let him make me
understand, by the force of his reason, upon what foundations he has
built those great advantages he thinks he has over other creatures. Who
has made him believe that this admirable motion of the celestial arch,
the eternal light of those luminaries that roll so high over his head,
the wondrous and fearful motions of that infinite ocean, should be
established and continue so many ages for his service and convenience?
Can any thing be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and
wretched creature, who is not so much as master of himself, but subject
to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of
the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less
to command the whole? And the privilege which he attributes to himself
of being the only creature in this vast fabric who has the understanding
to discover the beauty and the paris of it; the only one who can
return thanks to the architect, and keep account of the revenues and
disbursements of the world; who, I wonder, sealed him this patent? Let
us see his commission for this great employment Was it granted in favour
of the wise only? Few people will be concerned in it. Are fools and
wicked persons worthy so extraordinary a favour, and, being the worst
part of the world, to be preferred before the rest? Shall we believe
this man?--“For whose sake shall we, therefore, conclude that the world
was made? For theirs who have the use of reason: these are gods and men,
than whom certainly nothing can be better:” we can never sufficiently
decry the impudence of this conjunction. But, wretched creature,
what has he in himself worthy of such an advantage? Considering the
incorruptible existence of the celestial bodies; beauty; magnitude, and
continual revolution by so exact a rule;
Cum suspicimus mæni cælestia mundi
Templa super, stellisque micantibus arthera fiium,
El venit in mcntem lunæ solisque viarurn.
“When we the heavenly arch above behold.
And the vast sky adorned with stars of gold.
And mark the r’eglar course? that the sun
And moon in their alternate progress run.”
considering the dominion and influence those bodies have, not only over
our lives and fortunes;
Facta etenim et vitas hominum suspendit ab aatris;
“Men’s lives and actions on the stars depend.”
but even over our inclinations, our thoughts and wills, which they
govern, incite and agitate at the mercy of their influences, as our
reason teaches us;
“Contemplating the stars he finds that they
Rule by a secret and a silent sway;
And that the enamell’d spheres which roll above
Do ever by alternate causes move.
And, studying these, he can also foresee,
By certain signs, the turns of destiny;”
seeing that not only a man, not only kings, but that monarchies,
empires, and all this lower world follow the influence of the celestial
motions,
“How great a change a little motion brings!
So great this kingdom is that governs kings:”
if our virtue, our vices, our knowledge, and this very discourse we are
upon of the power of the stars, and the comparison we are making betwixt
them and us, proceed, as our reason supposes, from their favour;
“One mad in love may cross the raging main,
To level lofty Ilium with the plain;
Another’s fate inclines him more by far
To study laws and statutes for the bar.
Sons kill their father, fathers kill their sons,
And one arm’d brother ‘gainst another runs..
This war’s not their’s, but fate’s, that spurs them on
To shed the blood which, shed, they must bemoan;
And I ascribe it to the will of fate
That on this theme I now expatiate:”
if we derive this little portion of reason we have from the bounty of
heaven, how is it possible that reason should ever make us equal to it?
How subject its essence and condition to our knowledge? Whatever we see
in those bodies astonishes us: _Quæ molitio, qua ferramenta, qui vectes,
quæ machina, qui ministri tanti operis fuerunt?_ “What contrivance, what
tools, what materials, what engines, were employed about so stupendous
a work?” Why do we deprive them of soul, of life, and discourse? Have we
discovered in them any immoveable or insensible stupidity, we who
have no commerce with them but by obedience? Shall we say that we have
discovered in no other creature but man the use of a reasonable soul?
What! have we seen any thing like the sun? Does he cease to be, because
we have seen nothing like him? And do his motions cease, because there
are no other like them? If what we have not seen is not, our knowledge
is marvellously contracted: _Quæ sunt tantæ animi angustiæ!_ “How narrow
are our understandings!” Are they not dreams of human vanity, to make
the moon a celestial earth? there to fancy mountains and vales, as
Anaxagoras did? there to fix habitations and human abodes, and plant
colonies for our convenience, as Plato and Plutarch have done? And of
our earth to make a luminous and resplendent star? “Amongst the
other inconveniences of mortality this is one, that darkness of the
understanding which leads men astray, not so much from a necessity of
erring, but from a love of error. The corruptible body stupifies
the soul, and the earthly habitation dulls the faculties of the
imagination.”
Presumption is our natural and original disease. The most wretched and
frail of all creatures is man, and withal the proudest. He feels and
sees himself lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and
rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest
story of the house, the most remote from the heavenly arch, with animals
of the worst condition of the three; and yet in his imagination will be
placing himself above the circle of the moon, and bringing the heavens
under his feet. ‘Tis by the same vanity of imagination that he equals
himself to God, attributes to himself divine qualities, withdraws and
separates himself from the the crowd of other creatures, cuts out the
shares of the animals, his fellows and companions, and distributes to
them portions of faculties and force, as himself thinks fit How does
he know, by the strength of his understanding, the secret and internal
motions of animals?--from what comparison betwixt them and us does he
conclude the stupidity he attributes to them? When I play with my cat
who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? We
mutually divert one another with our play. If I have my hour to begin
or to refusç, she also has hers. Plato, in his picture of the golden age
under Saturn, reckons, among the chief advantages that a man then had,
his communication with beasts, of whom, inquiring and informing himself,
he knew the true qualities and differences of them all, by which he
acquired a very perfect intelligence and prudence, and led his life
more happily than we could do. Need we a better proof to condemn human
impudence in the concern of beasts? This great author was of opinion
that nature, for the most part in the corporal form she gave them, had
only regard to the use of prognostics that were derived thence in his
time. The defect that hinders communication betwixt them and us, why may
it not be in our part as well as theirs? ‘Tis yet to determine where the
fault lies that we understand not one another,--for we understand them
no more than they do us; and by the same reason they may think us to be
beasts as we think them. ‘Tis no great wonder if we understand not them,
when we do not understand a Basque or a Troglodyte. And yet some have
boasted that they understood them, as Apollonius Tyanaus, Melampus,
Tiresias, Thales, and others. And seeing, as cusmographers report, that
there are nations that have a dog for their king, they must of necessity
be able to interpret his voice and motions. We must observe the parity
betwixt us, have some tolerable apprehension of their meaning, and so
have beasts of ours,--much about the same. They caress us, threaten us,
and beg of us, and we do the same to them.
As to the rest, we manifestly discover that they have a full and
absolute communication amongst themselves, and that they perfectly
understand one another, not only those of the same, but of divers kinds:
“The tamer herds, and wilder sort of brutes.
Though we of higher race conclude them mutes.
Yet utter dissonant and various notes,
From gentler lungs or more distended throats,
As fear, or grief, or anger, do them move,
Or as they do approach the joys of love.”
In one kind of barking of a dog the horse knows there is anger, of
another sort of bark he is not afraid. Even in the very beasts that
have no voice at all, we easily conclude, from the society of offices
we observe amongst them, some other sort of communication: their very
motions discover it:
“As infants who, for want of words, devise
Expressive motions with their hands and eyes.”
And why not, as well as our dumb people, dispute, argue, and tell
stories by signs? Of whom I have seen some, by practice, so clever and
active that way that, in fact, they wanted nothing of the perfection
of making themselves understood. Lovers are angry, reconciled, intreat,
thank, appoint, and, in short, speak all things by their eyes:
“Even silence in a lover
Love and passion can discover.”
What with the hands? We require, promise, call, dismiss, threaten, pray,
supplicate, deny, refuse, interrogate, admire, number, confess, repent,
fear, express confusion, doubt, instruct, command, incite, encourage,
swear, testify, accuse, condemn, absolve, abuse, despise, defy, provoke,
flatter, applaud, bless, submit, mock, reconcile, recommend, exalt,
entertain, congratulate, complain, grieve, despair, wonder, exclaim, and
what not! And all this with a variety and multiplication, even emulating
speech. With the head we invite, remand, confess, deny, give the lie,
welcome, honour, reverence, disdain, demand, rejoice, lament, reject,
caress, rebuke, submit, huff, encourage, threaten, assure, and inquire.
What with the eyebrows?--what with the shoulders! There is not a motion
that does not speak, and in an intelligible language without discipline,
and a public language that every one understands: whence it should
follow, the variety and use distinguished from others considered, that
these should rather be judged the property of human nature. I omit
what necessity particularly does suddenly suggest to those who are in
need;--the alphabets upon the fingers, grammars in gesture, and the
sciences which are only by them exercised and expressed; and the nations
that Pliny reports have no other language. An ambassador of the city of
Abdera, after a long conference with Agis, King of Sparta, demanded of
him, “Well, sir, what answer must I return to my fellow-citizens?” “That
I have given thee leave,” said he, “to say what thou wouldest, and as
much as thou wouldest, without ever speaking a word.” is not this a
silent speaking, and very easy to be understood?
As to the rest, what is there in us that we do not see in the operations
of animals? Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better
distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that
of bees? Can we imagine that such, and so regular, a distribution of
employments can be carried on without reasoning and deliberation?
“Hence to the bee some sages have assign’d
Some portion of the god and heavenly wind.”
The swallows that we see at the return of the spring, searching all the
corners of our houses for the most commodious places wherein to build
their nest; do they seek without judgment, and amongst a thousand choose
out the most proper for their purpose, without discretion? And in that
elegant and admirable contexture of their buildings, can birds rather
make choice of a square figure than a round, of an obtuse than of a
right angle, without knowing their properties and effects? Do they bring
water, and then clay, without knowing that the hardness of the latter
grows softer by being wetted? Do they mat their palace with moss or down
without foreseeing that their tender young will lie more safe and easy?
Do they secure themselves from the wet and rainy winds, and place their
lodgings against the east, without knowing the different qualities of
the winds, and considering that one is more wholesome than another?
Why does the spider make her web tighter in one place, and slacker in
another; why now make one sort of knot, and then another, if she has not
deliberation, thought, and conclusion? We sufficiently discover in most
of their works how much animals excel us, and how unable our art is to
imitate them. We see, nevertheless, in our rougher performances, that we
employ all our faculties, and apply the utmost power of our souls; why
do we not conclude the same of them?
Why should we attribute to I know not what natural and servile
inclination the works that excel all we can do by nature and art?
wherein, without being aware, we give them a mighty advantage over us
in making nature, with maternal gentleness and love, accompany and learn
them, as it were, by the hand to all the actions and commodities of
their life, whilst she leaves us to chance and fortune, and to seek out
by art the things that are necessary to our conservation, at the same
time denying us the means of being able, by any instruction or effort of
understanding, to arrive at the natural sufficiency of beasts; so that
their brutish stupidity surpasses, in all conveniences, all that our
divine intelligence can do. Really, at this rate, we might with great
reason call her an unjust stepmother: but it is nothing so, our polity
is not so irregular and unformed.
Nature has universally cared for all her creatures, and there is not
one she has not amply furnished with all means necessary for the
conservation of its being. For the common complaints I hear men make (as
the license of their opinions one while lifts them up above the clouds,
and then again depresses them to the antipodes), that we are the only
animal abandoned naked upon the bare earth, tied and bound, not having
wherewithal to arm and clothe us but by the spoil of others; whereas
nature has covered all other creatures either with shells, husks,
bark, hair, wool, prickles, leather, down, feathers, scales, or silk,
according to the necessities of their being; has armed them with talons,
teeth, or horns, wherewith to assault and defend, and has herself taught
them that which is most proper for them, to swim, to run, to fly, and
sing, whereas man neither knows how to walk, speak, eat, or do any thing
but weep, without teaching;
“Like to the wretched mariner, when toss’d
By raging seas upon the desert coast,
The tender babe lies naked on the earth,
Of all supports of life stript by his birth;
When nature first presents him to the day,
Freed from the cell wherein before he lay,
He fills the ambient air with doleful cries.
Foretelling thus life’s future miseries;
But beasts, both wild and tame, greater and less,
Do of themselves in strength and bulk increase;
They need no rattle, nor the broken chat,
Ay which the nurse first teaches boys to prate
They look not out for different robes to wear,
According to the seasons of the year;
And need no arms nor walls their goods to save,
Since earth and liberal nature ever have,
And will, in all abundance, still produce
All things whereof they can have need or use:”
these complaints are false; there is in the polity of the world a
greater equality and more uniform relation. Our skins are as sufficient
to defend us from the injuries of the weather as theirs are; witness
several nations that yet know not the use of clothes. Our ancient Gauls
were but slenderly clad, any more than the Irish, our neighbours, though
in so cold a climate; but we may better judge of this by ourselves: for
all those parts that we are pleased to expose to the air are found very
able to endure it: the face, the feet, the hands, the arms, the head,
according to the various habit; if there be a tender part about us,
and that would seem to be in danger from cold, it should be the stomach
where the digestion is; and yet our forefathers were there always
open, and our ladies, as tender and delicate as they are, go sometimes
half-bare as low as the navel. Neither is the binding or swathing of
infants any more necessary; and the Lacedæmoman mothers brought theirs
in all liberty of motion of members, without any ligature at all. Our
crying is common with the greatest part of other animals, and there are
but few creatures that are not observed to groan, and bemoan themselves
a long time after they come into the world; forasmuch as it is a
behaviour suitable to the weakness wherein they find themselves. As
to the custom of eating, it is in us, as in them, natural, and without
instruction;
“For every one soon finds his natural force.
Which he, or better may employ, or worse.”
Who doubts but an infant, arrived to the strength of feeding himself,
may make shift to find something to eat And the earth produces and
offers him wherewithal to supply his necessity, without other culture
and artifice; and if not at all times, no more does she do it to beasts,
witness the provision we see ants and other creatures hoard up against
the dead seasons of the year. The late discovered nations, so abundantly
furnished with natural meat and drink, without care, or without cookery,
may give us to understand that bread is not our only food, and that,
without tillage, our mother nature has provided us sufficiently of all
we stand in need of: nay, it appears more fully and plentifully than she
does at present, now that we have added our own industry:
“The earth did first spontaneously afford
Choice fruits and wines to furnish out the board;
With herbs and flow’rs unsown in verdant fields.
But scarce by art so good a harvest yields;
Though men and oxen mutually have strove,
With all their utmost force the soil t’ improve,”
the debauchery and irregularity of our appetites outstrips all the
inventions we can contrive to satisfy it.
As to arms, we have more natural ones than than most other animals more
various motions of limbs, and naturally and without lesson extract more
service from them. Those that are trained to fight naked are seen
to throw themselves into the like hazards that we do. If some beasts
surpass us in this advantage, we surpass many others. And the industry
of fortifying the body, and covering it by acquired means, we have by
instinct and natural precept? That it is so, the elephant shows
who sharpen, and whets the teeth he makes use of in war (for he has
particular ones for that service, which he spares, and never employs
them at all to any other use); when bulls go to fight, they toss and
throw the dust about them; boars whet their tusks; and the ichneumon,
when he is about to engage with the crocodile, fortifies his body,
and covers and crusts it all over with close-wrought and well-tempered
slime, as with a cuirass. Why shall we not say that it is also natural
for us to arm ourselves with wood and iron?
As to speech, it is certain that if it be not natural it is not
necessary. Nevertheless I believe that a child which had been brought up
in an absolute solitude, remote from all society of men (which would
be an experiment very hard to make), would have some kind of speech to
express his meaning by. And ‘tis not to be supposed that nature should
have denied that to us which she has given to several other animals:
for what is this faculty we observe in them, of complaining, rejoicing,
calling to one another for succour, and inviting each other to love,
which they do with the voice, other than speech? And why should they
not speak to one another? They speak to us, and we to them. In how many
several sorts of ways do we speak to our dogs, and they answer us?
We converse with them in another sort of language, and use other
appellations, than we do with birds, hogs, oxen, horses, and alter the
idiom according to the kind.
“Thus from one swarm of ants some sally out.
To spy another’s stock or mark its rout.”
Lactantius seems to attribute to beasts not only speech, but laughter
also. And the difference of language which is seen amongst us, according
to the difference of countries, is also observed in animals of the
same kind. Aristotle, in proof of this, instances the Various calls of
partridges, according to the situation of places:
“And various birds do from their warbling throats
At various times, utter quite different notes,
And some their hoarse songs with the seasons change.”
But it is yet to be known what language this child would speak; and of
that what is said by guess has no great appearance. If a man will allege
to me, in opposition to this opinion, that those who are naturally deaf
speak not, I answer that this is not only because they could not receive
the instruction of speaking by ear, but rather because the sense of
hearing, of which they are deprived, relates to that of speaking, and
that these hold together by a natural and inseparable tie, in such
manner that what we speak we must first speak to ourselves within, and
make it sound in our own ears, before we can utter it to others.
All this I have said to prove the resemblance there is in human things,
and to bring us back and join us to the crowd. We are neither above nor
below the rest All that is under heaven, says the sage, runs one law and
one fortune:
“All things remain
Bound and entangled in one fatal chain.”
There is, indeed, some difference,--there are several orders and
degrees; but it is under the aspect of one and the same nature:
“All things by their own rites proceed, and draw
Towards their ends, by nature’s certain law.”
Man must be compelled and restrained within the bounds of this polity.
Miserable creature! he is not in a condition really to step over the
rail. He is fettered and circumscribed, he is subjected to the same
necessity that the other creatures of his rank and order are, and of
a very mean condition, without any prerogative of true and real
pre-eminence. That which he attributes to himself, by vain fancy and
opinion, has neither body nor taste. And if it be so, that he only, of
all the animals, has this liberty of imagination and irregularity of
thoughts, representing to him that which is, that which is not, and that
he would have, the false and the true, ‘tis an advantage dearly bought,
and of which he has very little reason to be proud; for thence springs
the principal and original fountain of all the evils that befal
him,--sin, sickness, irresolution, affliction, despair. I say, then,
to return to my subject, that there is no appearance to induce a man to
believe that beasts should, by a natural and forced inclination, do the
same things that we do by our choice and industry. We ought from like
effects to conclude like faculties, and from greater effects greater
faculties; and consequently confess that the same reasoning, and the
same ways by which we operate, are common with them, or that they have
others that are better. Why should we imagine this natural constraint in
them, who experience no such effect in ourselves? added that it is more
honourable to be guided and obliged to act regularly by a natural and
inevitable condition, and nearer allied to the divinity, than to act
regularly by a temerarious and fortuitous liberty, and more safe to
entrust the reins of our conduct in the hands of nature than our
own. The vanity of our presumption makes us prefer rather to owe our
sufficiency to our own exertions than to her bounty, and to enrich the
other animals with natural goods, and abjure them in their favour,
in order to honour and ennoble ourselves with goods acquired, very
foolishly in my opinion; for I should as much value parts and virtues
naturally and purely my own as those I had begged and obtained from
education. It is not in our power to obtain a nobler reputation than to
be favoured of God and nature.
For instance, take the fox, the people of Thrace make use of when they
wish to pass over the ice of some frozen river, and turn him out before
them to that purpose; when we see him lay his ear upon the bank of
the river, down to the ice, to listen if from a more remote or nearer
distance he can hear the noise of the waters’ current, and, according as
he finds by that the ice to be of a less or greater thickness, to retire
or advance,--have we not reason to believe thence that the same rational
thoughts passed through his head that we should have upon the like
occasions; and that it is a ratiocination and consequence, drawn from
natural sense, that that which makes a noise runs, that which runs
is not frozen, what is not frozen is liquid, and that which is liquid
yields to impression! For to attribute this to a mere quickness of the
sense of hearing, without reason and consequence, is a chimæra that
cannot enter into the imagination. We are to suppose the same of
the many sorts of subtleties and inventions with which beasts secure
themselves from, and frustrate, the enterprizes we plot against them.
And if we will make an advantage even of this, that it is in our power
to seize them, to employ them in our service, and to use them at our
pleasure, ‘tis still but the same advantage we have over one another. We
have our slaves upon these terms: the Climacidæ, were they not women
in Syria who, squat on all fours, served for a ladder or footstool, by
which the ladies mounted their coaches? And the greatest part of free
persons surrender, for very trivial conveniences, their life and being
into the power of another. The wives and concubines of the Thracians
contended who should be chosen to be slain upon their husband’s tomb.
Have tyrants ever failed of finding men enough vowed to their devotion?
some of them moreover adding this necessity, of accompanying them in
death as well as life? Whole armies have bound themselves after this
manner to their captains. The form of the oath in the rude school of
gladiators was in these words: “We swear to suffer ourselves to be
chained, burnt, wounded, and killed with the sword, and to endure all
that true gladiators suffer from their master, religiously engaging both
body and soul in his service.”
Uire meum, si vis, flamma caput, et pete ferro
Corpus, et iutorto verbere terga seca.
“Wound me with steel, or burn my head with fire.
Or scourge my shoulders with well-twisted wire.”
This was an obligation indeed, and yet there, in one year, ten thousand
entered into it, to their destruction. When the Scythians interred their
king they strangled upon his body the most beloved of his concubines,
his cup-bearer, the master of his horse, his chamberlain, the usher of
his chamber, and his cook. And upon the anniversary thereof they killed
fifty horses, mounted by fifty pages, that they had impaled all up the
spine of the back to the throat, and there left them fixed in triumph
about his tomb. The men that serve us do it cheaper, and for a less
careful and favourable usage than what we treat our hawks, horses and
dogs withal. To what solicitude do we not submit for the conveniences of
these? I do not think that servants of the most abject condition would
willingly do that for their masters that princes think it an honour to
do for their beasts. Diogenes seeing his relations solicitous to redeem,
him from servitude: “They are fools,” said he; “‘tis he that keeps and
nourishes me that in reality serves me.” And they who entertain beasts
ought rather to be said to serve them, than to be served by them. And
withal in this these have something more generous in that one lion
never submitted to another lion, nor one horse to another, for want of
courage. As we go to the chase of beasts, so do tigers and lions to
the chase of men, and do the same execution upon one another; dogs upon
hares, pikes upon tench, swallows upon grass-hoppers, and sparrow-hawks
upon blackbirds and larks:
“The stork with snakes and lizards from the wood
And pathless wilds supports her callow brood,
While Jove’s own eagle, bird of noble blood,
Scours the wide country for undaunted food;
Sweeps the swift hare or swifter fawn away,
And feeds her nestlings with the generous prey.”
We divide the quarry, as well as the pains and labour of the chase, with
our hawks and hounds. And about Amphipolis, in Thrace, the hawkers and
wild falcons equally divide the prey in the half. As also along the lake
Mæotis, if the fisherman does not honestly leave the wolves an equal
share of what he has caught, they presently go and tear his nets in
pieces. And as we have a way of sporting that is carried on more by
subtlety than force, as springing hares, and angling with line and hook,
there is also the like amongst other animals. Aristotle says that the
cuttle-fish casts a gut out of her throat as long as a line, which she
extends and draws back at pleasure; and as she perceives some little
fish approach her she lets it nibble upon the end of this gut, lying
herself concealed in the sand or mud, and by little and little draws it
in, till the little fish is so near her that at one spring she may catch
it.
As to strength, there is no creature in the world exposed to so many
injuries as man. We need not a whale, elephant, or a crocodile, nor any
such-like animals, of which one alone is sufficient to dispatch a great
number of men, to do our business; lice are sufficient to vacate Sylla’s
dictatorship; and the heart and life of a great and triumphant emperor
is the breakfast of a little contemptible worm!
Why should we say that it is only for man, or knowledge built up by
art and meditation, to distinguish the things useful for his being, and
proper for the cure of his diseases, and those which are not; to know
the virtues of rhubarb and polypody. When we see the goats of Candia,
when wounded with an arrow, among a million of plants choose out
dittany for their cure; and the tortoise, when she has eaten a viper,
immediately go out to look for origanum to purge her; the dragon to rub
and clear his eyes with fennel; the storks to give themselves clysters
of sea-water; the elephants to draw not only out of their own bodies,
and those of their companions, but out of the bodies of their masters
too (witness the elephant of King Porus whom Alexander defeated), the
darts and javelins thrown at them in battle, and that so dexterously
that we ourselves could not do it with so little pain to the
patient;--why do we not say here also that this is knowledge and reason?
For to allege, to their disparagement, that ‘tis by the sole instruction
and dictate of nature that they know all this, is not to take from them
the dignity of knowledge and reason, but with greater force to attribute
it to them than to us, for the honour of so infallible a mistress.
Chrysippus, though in other things as scornful a judge of the condition
of animals as any other philosopher whatever, considering the motions of
a dog, who coming to a place where three ways met, either to hunt after
his master he has lost, or in pursuit of some game that flies before
him, goes snuffing first in one of the ways, and then in another, and,
after having made himself sure of two, without finding the trace of
what he seeks, dashes into the third without examination, is forced to
confess that this reasoning is in the dog: “I have traced my master to
this place; he must of necessity be gone one of these three ways; he is
not gone this way nor that, he must then infallibly be gone this other;”
and that assuring himself by this conclusion, he makes no use of his
nose in the third way, nor ever lays it to the ground, but suffers
himself to be carried on there bv the force of reason. This sally,
purely logical, and this use of propositions divided and conjoined, and
the right enumeration of parts, is it not every whit as good that the
dog knows all this of himself as well as from Trapezuntius?
Animals are not incapable, however, of being instructed after our
method. We teach blackbirds, ravens, pies, and parrots, to speak: and
the facility wherewith we see they lend us their voices, and render both
them and their breath so supple and pliant, to be formed and confined
within a certain number of letters and syllables, does evince that they
have a reason within, which renders them so docile and willing to learn.
Everybody, I believe, is glutted with the several sorts of tricks that
tumblers teach their dogs; the dances, where they do not miss any one
cadence of the sound they hear; the several various motions and leaps
they make them perform by the command of a word. But I observe this
effect with the greatest admiration, which nevertheless is very common,
in the dogs that lead the blind, both in the country and in cities: I
have taken notice how they stop at certain doors, where they are wont
to receive alms; how they avoid the encounter of coaches and carts, even
there where they have sufficient room to pass; I have seen them, by the
trench of a town, forsake a plain and even path and take a worse, only
to keep their masters further from the ditch;--how could a man have
made this dog understand that it was his office to look to his master’s
safely only, and to despise his own conveniency to serve him? And how
had he the knowledge that a way was wide enough for him that was not so
for a blind man? Can all this be apprehended without ratiocination!
I must not omit what Plutarch says he saw of a dog at Rome with the
Emperor Vespasian, the father, at the theatre of Marcellus. This dog
served a player, that played a farce of several parts and personages,
and had therein his part. He had, amongst other things, to counterfeit
himself for some time dead, by reason of a certain drug he was supposed
to eat After he had swallowed a piece of bread, which passed for the
drug, he began after awhile to tremble and stagger, as if he was taken
giddy: at last, stretching himself out stiff, as if dead, he suffered
himself to be drawn and dragged from place to place, as it was his part
to do; and afterward, when he knew it to be time, he began first gently
to stir, as if awaking out of a profound sleep, and lifting up his head
looked about him after such a manner as astonished all the spectators.
The oxen that served in the royal gardens of Susa, to water them, and
turn certain great wheels to draw water for that purpose, to which
buckets were fastened (such as there are many in Languedoc), being
ordered every one to draw a hundred turns a day, they were so accustomed
to this number that it was impossible by any force to make them draw one
turn more; but, their task being performed, they would suddenly stop and
stand still. We are almost men before we can count a hundred, and have
lately discovered nations that have no knowledge of numbers at all.
There is more understanding required in the teaching of’ others than in
being taught. Now, setting aside what Democritus held and proved, “That
most of the arts we have were taught us by other animals,” as by the
spider to weave and sew; by the swallow to build; by the swan and
nightingale music; and by several animals to make medicines:--Aristotle
is of opinion “That the nightingales teach their young ones to sing, and
spend a great deal of time and care in it;” whence it happens that those
we bring up in cages, and which have not had the time to learn of their
parents, want much of the grace of their singing: we may judge by this
that they improve by discipline and study; and, even amongst the wild,
it is not all and every one alike--every one has learnt to do better
or worse, according to their capacity. And so jealous are they one of
another, whilst learning, that they contention with emulation, and by
so vigorous a contention that sometimes the vanquished fall dead upon the
place, the breath rather failing than the voice. The younger ruminate
pensively and begin to mutter some broken notes; the disciple listens
to the master’s lesson, and gives the best account he is able; they
are silent oy turns; one may hear faults corrected and observe some
reprehensions of the teacher. “Ï have formerly seen,” says Arrian, “an
elephant having a cymbal hung at each leg, and another fastened to his
trunk, at the sound of which all the others danced round about him,
rising and bending at certain cadences, as they were guided by
the instrument; and ‘twas delightful to hear this harmony.” In the
spectacles of Rome there were ordinarily seen elephants taught to move
and dance to the sound of the voice, dances wherein were several changes
and cadences very hard to learn. And some have been known so intent upon
their lesson as privately to practice it by themselves, that they might
not be chidden nor beaten by their masters.
But this other story of the pie, of which we have Plutarch himself for a
warrant, is very strange. She lived in a barber’s shop at Rome, and did
wonders in imitating with her voice whatever she heard. It happened one
day that certain trumpeters stood a good while sounding before the
shop. After that, and all the next day, the pie was pensive, dumb, and
melancholic; which every body wondered at, and thought the noise of the
trumpets had so stupified and astonished her that her voice was
gone with her hearing. But they found at last that it was a profound
meditation and a retiring into herself, her thoughts exercising and
preparing her voice to imitate the sound of those trumpets, so that the
first voice she uttered was perfectly to imitate their strains, stops,
and changes; having by this new lesson quitted and taken in disdain all
she had learned before.
I will not omit this other example of a dog, also, which the same
Plutarch (I am sadly confounding all order, but I do not propose
arrangement here any more than elsewhere throughout my book) which
Plutarch says he saw on board a ship. This dog being puzzled how to get
the oil that was in the bottom of a jar, which he could not reach with
his tongue by reason of the narrow mouth of the vessel, went and fetched
stones and let them fall into the jar till he made the oil rise so high
that he could reach it. What is this but an effect of a very subtle
capacity! ‘Tis said that the ravens of Barbary do the same, when the
water they would drink is too low. This action is somewhat akin to what
Juba, a king of their nation relates of the elephants: “That when, by
the craft of the hunter, one of them is trapped in certain deep pits
prepared for them, and covered over with brush to deceive them, all the
rest, in great diligence, bring a great many stones and logs of wood to
raise the bottom so that he may get out.” But this animal, in
several other effects, comes so near to human capacity that, should I
particularly relate all that experience hath delivered to us, I should
easily have what I usually maintain granted: namely, that there is more
difference betwixt such and such a man than betwixt such a beast and
such a man. The keeper of an elephant in a private house of Syria robbed
him every meal of the half of his allowance. One day his master would
himself feed him, and poured the full measure of barley he had ordered
for his allowance into his manger which the elephant, casting an angry
look at the keeper, with his trunk separated the one-half from the
other, and thrust it aside, by that declaring the wrong was done him.
And another, having a keeper that mixed stones with his corn to make
up the measure, came to the pot where he was boiling meat for his own
dinner, and filled it with ashes. These are particular effects: but that
which all the world has seen, and all the world knows, that in all the
armies of the Levant one of the greatest force consisted in elephants,
with whom they did, without comparison, much greater execution than we
now do with our artillery; which takes, pretty nearly, their place in
a day of battle (as may easily be supposed by such as are well read in
ancient history);
“The sires of these huge animals were wont
The Carthaginian Hannibal to mount;
Our leaders also did these beasts bestride,
And mounted thus Pyrrhus his foes defied;
Nay, more, upon their backs they used to bear
Castles with armed cohorts to the war.”
They must necessarily have very confidently relied upon the fidelity and
understanding of these beasts when they entrusted them with the vanguard
of a battle, where the least stop they should have made, by reason of
the bulk and heaviness of their bodies, and the least fright that should
have made them face about upon their own people, had been enough to
spoil all: and there are but few examples where it has happened that
they have fallen foul upon their own troops, whereas we ourselves break
into our own battalions and rout one another. They had the charge not of
one simple movement only, but of many several things to be performed in
the battle: as the Spaniards did to their dogs in their new conquest of
the Indies, to whom they gave pay and allowed them a share in the spoil;
and those animals showed as much dexterity and judgment in pursuing the
victory and stopping the pursuit; in charging and retiring, as occasion
required; and in distinguishing their friends from their enemies, as
they did ardour and fierceness.
We more admire and value things that are unusual and strange than those
of ordinary observation. I had not else so long insisted upon these
examples: for I believe whoever shall strictly observe what we
ordinarily see in those animals we have amongst us may there find as
wonderful effects as those we seek in remote countries and ages. ‘Tis
one and the same nature that rolls on her course, and whoever has
sufficiently considered the present state of things, might certainly
conclude as to both the future ana the past. I have formerly seen men,
brought hither by sea from very distant countries, whose language not
being understood by us, and moreover their mien, countenance, and habit,
being quite differing from ours; which of us did not repute them savages
and brutes! Who did not attribute it to stupidity and want of common
sense to see them mute, ignorant of the French tongue, ignorant of our
salutations and cringes, our port and behaviour, from which all human
nature must by all means take its pattern and example. All that seems
strange to us, and that we do not understand, we condemn. The same
thing happens also in the judgments we make of beasts. They have several
conditions like to ours; from those we may, by comparison, draw some
conjecture: but by those qualities that are particular to themselves,
what know we what to make of them! The horses, dogs, oxen, sheep, birds,
and most of the animals that live amongst us, know our voices, and
suffer themselves to be governed by them: so did Crassus’s lamprey, and
came when he called it; as also do the eels that are found in the Lake
Arethusa; and I have seen several ponds where the fishes come to eat at
a certain call of those who use to feed them.
“They every one have names, and one and all
Straightway appear at their own master’s call:”
We may judge of that. We may also say that the elephants have some
participation of religion forasmuch as after several washings and
purifications they are observed to lift up their trunk like arms,
and, fixing their eyes towards the rising of the sun, continue long in
meditation and contemplation, at certain hours of the days, of their
own motion; without instruction or precept But because we do not see any
such signs in other animals, we cannot for that conclude that they are
without religion, nor make any judgment of what is concealed from us. As
we discern something in this action which the philosopher Cleanthes
took notice of, because it something resembles our own. He saw, he says,
“Ants go from their ant-hill, carrying the dead body of an ant towards
another ant-hill, whence several other ants came out to meet them, as if
to speak with them; where, after having been a while together, the last
returned to consult, you may suppose, with their fellow-citizens, and so
made two or three journeys, by reason of the difficulty of capitulation.
In the conclusion, the last comers brought the first a worm out of their
burrow, as it were for the ransom of the defunct, which the first laid
upon their backs and carried home, leaving the dead body to the others.”
This was the interpretation that Cleanthes gave of this transaction,
giving us by that to understand that those creatures that have no voice
are not, nevertheless, without intercourse and mutual communication,
whereof ‘tis through our own defect that we do not participate; and for
that reason foolishly take upon us to pass our censure. But they yet
produce either effects far beyond our capacity, to which we are so far
from being able to arrive by imitation that we cannot so much as by
imitation conceive it. Many are of opinion that in the great and last
naval engagement that Antony lost to Augustus, his admiral galley was
stayed in the middle of her course by the little fish the Latins call
_remora_, by reason of the property she has of staying all sorts of
vessels to which she fastens herself. And the Emperor Caligula, sailing
with a great navy upon the coast of Romania, his galley only was
suddenly stayed by the same fish, which, he caused to be taken, fastened
as it was to the keel of his ship, very angry that such a little animal
could resist both the sea, the wind, and the force of all his oars, by
being only fastened by the beak to his galley (for it is a shell-fish);
and was moreover, not without great reason, astonished that, being
brought to him in the vessel, it had no longer the strength it had
without. A citizen of Cyzicus formerly acquired the reputation of a good
mathematician for having learnt the quality of the hedge-hog: he has his
burrow open in divers places, and to several winds, and, foreseeing the
wind that is to come, stops the hole on that side, which that citizen
observing, gave the city certain predictions of the wind which was
presently to blow. The caméléon takes her colour from the place upon
which she is laid; but the polypus gives himself what colour he pleases,
according to occasion, either to conceal himself from what he fears, or
from what he has a design to seize: in the caméléon ‘tis a passive, but
in the polypus ‘tis an active, change. We have some changes of
colour, as in fear, anger, shame, and other passions, that alter our
complexions; but it is by the effect of suffering, as with the caméléon.
It is in the power of the jaundice, indeed, to make us turn yellow,
but ‘tis not in the power of our own will. Now these effects that we
discover in other animals, much greater than ours, seem to imply some
more excellent faculty in them unknown to us; as ‘tis to be presumed
there are several other qualities and abilities of theirs, of which no
appearances have arrived at us.
Amongst all the predictions of elder times, the most ancient and the
most certain were those taken from the flight of birds; we have nothing
certain like it, nor any thing to be so much admired. That rule and
order of the moving of the wing, whence they derived the consequences of
future things, must of necessity be guided by some excellent means to
so noble an operation: for to attribute this great effect to any natural
disposition, without the intelligence, consent, and meditation of him by
whom it is produced, is an opinion evidently false. That it is so, the
cramp-fish has this quality, not only to benumb all the members that
touch her, but even through the nets transmit a heavy dulness into the
hands of those that move and handle them; nay, it is further said that
if one pour water upon her, he will feel this numbness mount up the
water to the hand, and stupefy the feeling through the water. This is a
miraculous force; but ‘tis not useless to the cramp-fish; she knows it,
and makes use on’t; for, to catch the prey she desires, she will bury
herself in the mud, that other fishes swimming over her, struck and
benumbed with this coldness of hers, may fall into her power. Cranes,
swallows, and other birds of passage, by shifting their abode according
to the seasons, sufficiently manifest the knowledge they have of their
divining faculty, and put it in use. Huntsmen assure us that to cull out
from amongst a great many puppies that which ought to be preserved as
the best, the best way is to refer the choice to the mother; as thus,
take them and carry them out of the kennel, and the first she brings
back will certainly be the best; or if you make a show as if you would
environ the kennel with fire, that one she first catches up to save. By
which it appears they have a sort of prognostic which we have not; or
that they have some virtue in judging of their whelps other and more
certain than we have.
The manner of coming into the world, of engendering, nourishing, acting,
moving, living and dying of beasts, is so near to ours that whatever we
retrench from their moving causes, and add to our own condition above
theirs, can by no means proceed from any meditation of our own reason.
For the regimen of our health, physicians propose to us the example of
the beasts’ manners and way of living; for this saying (out of Plutarch)
has in all times been in the mouth of these people: “Keep warm thy feet
and head, as to the rest, live like a beast.”
The chief of all natural actions is generation; we have a certain
disposition of members which is the most proper for us to that end;
nevertheless, we are ordered by Lucretius to conform to the gesture and
posture of the brutes as the most effectual:--
More ferarum,
Quadrupedumque magis ritu, plerumque putantur
Concipere uxores:
Quia sic loca sumere possunt,
Pectoribus positis, sublatis semina lumbis;
and the same authority condemns, as hurtful, those indiscreet and
impudent motions which the women have added of their own invention, to
whom it proposes the more temperate and modest pattern and practice of
the beasts of their own sex:--
Nam mulier prohibet se concipere atque répugnât,
Clunibus ipsa viri Venerem si læta retractet,
Atque exossato ciet omni pectore fluctua.
Ejicit enim sulci recta regione viaque
Vomerem, atque locis avertit seminis ictum.
If it be justice to render to every one their due, the beasts that
serve, love, and defend their benefactors, and that pursue and fall upon
strangers and those who offend them, do in this represent a certain air
of our justice; as also in observing a very equitable equality in the
distribution of what they have to their young. And as to friendship,
they have it without comparison more lively and constant than men have.
King Lysimachus’s dog, Hyrcanus, master being dead, lay on his bed,
obstinately refusing either to eat or drink; and, the day that his
body was burnt, he took a run and leaped into the fire, where he was
consumed, As also did the dog of one Pyrrhus, for he would not stir from
off his master’s bed from the time he died; and when they carried him
away let himself be carried with him, and at last leaped into the pile
where they burnt his master’s body. There are inclinations of affection
which sometimes spring in us, without the consultation of reason; and by
a fortuitous temerity, which others call sympathy; of which beasts
are as capable as we. We see horses take such an acquaintance with
one another that we have much ado to make them eat or travel, when
separated; we observe them to fancy a particular colour in those of
their own kind, and, where they meet it, run to it with great joy and
demonstrations of good will, and have a dislike and hatred for some
other colour. Animals have choice, as well as we, in their amours, and
cull out their mistresses; neither are they exempt from our jealousies
and implacable malice.
Desires are either natural and necessary, as to eat and drink; or
natural and not necessary, as the coupling with females; or neither
natural nor necessary; of which last sort are almost all the desires of
men; they are all superfluous and artificial. For ‘tis marvellous how
little will satisfy nature, how little she has left us to desire; our
ragouts and kickshaws are not of her ordering. The Stoics say that a man
may live on an olive a day. The delicacy of our wines is no part of her
instruction, nor the refinements we introduce into the indulgence of our
amorous appetites:--
Neque ilia
Magno prognatum deposcit consule cunnum.
“Nature, in her pursuit of love, disclaims
The pride of titles, and the pomp of names.”
These irregular desires, that the ignorance of good and a false opinion
have infused into us, are so many that they almost exclude all the
natural; just as if there were so great a number of strangers in the
city as to thrust out the natural inhabitants, or, usurping upon their
ancient rights and privileges, should extinguish their authority and
introduce new laws and customs of their own. Animals are much more
regular than we, and keep themselves with greater moderation within the
limits nature has prescribed; but yet not so exactly that they have not
sometimes an analogy with our debauches. And as there have been furious
desires that have impelled men to the love of beasts, so there have been
examples of beasts that have fallen in love with us, and been seized
with monstrous affection betwixt kinds; witness the elephant who was
rival to Aristophanes the grammarian in the love of a young herb-wench
in the city of Alexandria, who was nothing behind him in all the offices
of a very passionate suitor; for going through the market where they
sold fruit, he would take some in his trunk and carry them to her.
He would as much as possible keep her always in his sight, and would
sometimes put his trunk under her handkerchief into her bosom, to feel
her breasts. They tell also of a dragon in love with a girl, and of a
goose enamoured of a child; of a ram that was suitor to the minstrelless
Glaucia, in the town of Asopus; and we see not unfrequently baboons
furiously in love with women. We see also certain male animals that
are fond of the males of their own kind. Oppian and others give us some
examples of the reverence that beasts have to their kindred in their
copulations; but experience often shows us the contrary:--
Nec habetur turpe juvencæ
Ferre patrem tergo; fit equo sua filia conjux;
Quasque creavit, init pecudes caper; ipsaque cujus
Semine concepta est, ex illo concipit ales.
“The heifer thinks it not a shame to take
Her lusty sire upon her willing back:
The horse his daughter leaps, goats scruple not
T’ increase the herd by those they have begot;
And birds of all sorts do in common live,
And by the seed they have conceived conceive.”
And for subtle cunning, can there be a more pregnant example than in the
philosopher Thales’s mule? who, fording a river, laden with salt, and
by accident stumbling there, so that the sacks he carried were all wet,
perceiving that by the melting of the salt his burden was something
lighter, he never failed, so oft as he came to any river, to lie down
with his load; till his master, discovering the knavery, ordered that he
should be laden with wood? wherein, finding himself mistaken, he ceased
to practise that device. There are several that very vividly represent
the true image of our avarice; for we see them infinitely solicitus to
get all they can, and hide it with that exceeding great care, though
they never make any use of it at all. As to thrift, they surpass us not
only in the foresight and laying up, and saving for the time to come,
but they have, moreover, a great deal of the science necessary thereto.
The ants bring abroad into the sun their grain and seed to air, refresh
and dry them when they perceive them to mould and grow musty, lest they
should decay and rot. But the caution and prevention they use in gnawing
their grains of wheat surpass all imagination of human prudence; for by
reason that the wheat does not always continue sound and dry, but grows
soft, thaws and dissolves as if it were steeped in milk, whilst hasting
to germination; for fear lest it should shoot and lose the nature and
property of a magazine for their subsistence, they nibble off the end by
which it should shoot and sprout.
As to what concerns war, which is the greatest and most magnificent of
human actions, I would very fain know whether we would use it for an
argument of some prerogative or, on contrary, for a testimony of our
weakness and imperfection; as, in truth, the science of undoing and
killing one another, and of ruining and destroying our own kind, has
nothing in it so tempting as to make it be coveted by beasts who have it
not.
Quando leoni Fortior eripuit vitam leo? quo nemore unquam
Expiravit aper majoris dentibus apri?
“No lion drinks a weaker lion’s gore,
No boar expires beneath a stronger boar.”
Yet are they not universally exempt; witness the furious encounters of
bees, and the enterprises of the princes of the contrary armies:--
Sæpe duobus Regibus incessit magno discordia motu;
Continuoque animos vulgi et trepidantia bello
Gorda licet longé præsciscere.
“But if contending factions arm the hive,
When rival kings in doubtful battle strive,
Tumultuous crowds the dread event prepare,
And palpitating hearts that beat to war.”
I never read this divine description but that, methinks, I there see
human folly and vanity represented in their true and lively colours. For
these warlike movements, that so ravish us with their astounding noise
and horror, this rattle of guns, drums, and cries,
Fulgur ibi ad coelum se tollit, totaque circum
Ære renidescit tellus, subterque virûm vi
Excitur pedibus sonitus, clamoreque montes
Icti rejectant voces ad sidera mundi;
“When burnish’d arms to heaven dart their rays,
And many a steely beam i’ th’ sunlight plays,
When trampled is the earth by horse and man,
Until the very centre groans again,
And that the rocks, struck by the various cries,
Reverberate the sound unto the skies;”
in the dreadful embattling of so many thousands of armed men, and so
great fury, ardour, and courage, ‘tis pleasant to consider by what idle
occasions they are excited, and by how light ones appeased:--
Paridis propter narratur amorem
Greciæ Barbariæ diro collisa duello:
“Of wanton Paris the illicit love
Did Greece and Troy to ten years’ warfare move:”
all Asia was ruined and destroyed for the lust of Paris; the envy of
one single man, a despite, a pleasure, a domestic jealousy, causes that
ought not to set two oyster-wenches by the ears, is the mover of all
this mighty bustle. Shall we believe those very men who are themselves
the principal authors of these mischiefs? Let us then hear the greatest,
the most powerful, the most victorious emperor that ever was, turning
into a jest, very pleasantly and ingeniously, several battles fought
both by sea and land, the blood and lives of five hundred thousand men
that followed his fortune, and the strength and riches of two parts of
the world drained for the expense of his expeditions:--
Quod futuit Glaphyran Antonius, hanc mihi poenam
Fulvia constituit, se quoqne uti futuam.
Fulviam ego ut futuam! quid, si me Manius oret
Podicem, faciam? Non puto, si sapiam.
Aut futue, aut pugnemus, ait
Quid, si mihi vitii
Charior est ipsâ mentula? Signa canant.
Qui? moi, que je serve Fulvie!
Sufflt-il quelle en ait envie?
A ce compte, on verrait se retirer von moi
Mille épouses mal satisfaites.
Aime-moi, me dit elle, ou combattons. Mais quoi?
Elle est bien laide! Allons, sonnes trompettes.
‘Cause Anthony is fired with Glaphire’s charms
Fain would his Fulvia tempt me to her arms.
If Anthony be false, what then? must I
Be slave to Fulvia’s lustful tyranny?
Then would a thousand wanton, waspish wives,
(I use my Latin with the liberty of conscience you are pleased to allow
me.) Now this great body, with so many fronts, and so many motions,
which seems to threaten heaven and earth:--
Quam multi Lybico volvuntur marmore fluctus,
Sævus ubi Orion hibemis conditur undis,
Vel quam solo novo densæ torrentur Aristæ,
Aut Hermi campo, aut Lyciæ flaventibus arvis;
Scuta sonant, pulsuque pedum tremit excita tellus:
“Not thicker billows beat the Lybian main,
When pale Orion sits in wintry rain;
Nor thicker harvests on rich Hermus rise,
Or Lycian fields, when Phobus burns the skies,
Than stand these troops: their bucklers ring around;
Their trampling turns the turf and shakes the solid ground:”
this furious monster, with so many heads and arms, is yet man--feeble,
calamitous, and miserable man! ‘Tis but an ant-hill disturbed and
provoked:--
It nigrum campis agmen:
“The black troop marches to the field:”
a contrary blast, the croaking of a flight of ravens, the stumble of
a horse, the casual passage of an eagle, a dream, a voice, a sign, a
morning mist, are any one of them sufficient to beat down and overturn
him. Dart but a sunbeam in his face, he is melted and vanished. Blow
but a little dust in his eyes, as our poet says of the bees, and all our
ensigns and legions, with the great Pompey himself at the head of them,
are routed and crushed to pieces; for it was he, as I take it, that
Sertorious beat in Spain with those fine arms, which also served Eumenes
against Antigonus, and Surena against Crassus:--
“Swarm to my bed like bees into their hives.
Declare for love, or war, she said; and frown’d:
No love I’ll grant: to arms bid trumpets sound.”
Hi motus animorum, atque hoc certamina tanta,
Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescent.
“Yet at thy will these dreadful conflicts cease,
Throw but a little dust and all is peace.”
Let us but slip our flies after them, and they will have the force and
courage to defeat them. Of fresh memory, the Portuguese having besieged
the city of Tamly, in the territory of Xiatine, the inhabitants of the
place brought a great many hives, of which are great plenty in that
place, upon the wall; and with fire drove the bees so furiously upon the
enemy that they gave over the enterprise, not being able to stand their
attacks and endure their stings; and so the citizens, by this new sort
of relief, gained liberty and the victory with so wonderful a fortune,
that at the return of their defenders from the battle they found they
had not lost so much as one. The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast
in the same mould; the weight and importance of the actions of princes
considered, we persuade ourselves that they must be produced by some as
weighty and important causes; but we are deceived; for they are pushed
on, and pulled back in their motions, by the same springs that we are
in our little undertakings. The same reason that makes us wrangle with
a neighbour causes a war betwixt princes; the same reason that makes us
whip a lackey, falling into the hands of a king makes him ruin a whole
province. They are as lightly moved as we, but they are able to do more.
In a gnat and an elephant the passion is the same.
As to fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man.
Our histories have recorded the violent pursuits that dogs have made
after the murderers of their masters. King Pyrrhus observing a dog that
watched a dead man’s body, and understanding that he had for three
days together performed that office, commanded that the body should be
buried, and took the dog along with him. One day, as he was at a general
muster of his army, this dog, seeing his master’s murderers, with great
barking and extreme signs of anger flew upon them, and by this first
accusation awakened the revenge of this murder, which was soon after
perfected by form of justice. As much was done by the dog of the wise
Hesiod, who convicted the sons of Ganictor of Naupactus of the murder
committed on the person of his master. Another dog being to guard a
temple at Athens, having spied a sacrilegious thief carrying away
the finest jewels, fell to barking at him with all his force, but the
warders not awaking at the noise, he followed him, and day being broke,
kept off at a little distance, without losing sight of him; if he
offered him any thing to eat he would not take it, but would wag his
tail at all the passengers he met, and took whatever they gave him; and
if the thief laid down to sleep, he likewise stayed upon the same place.
The news of this dog being come to the warders of the temple they put
themselves upon the pursuit, inquiring of the colour of the dog, and
at last found him in the city of Cromyon, and the thief also, whom they
brought back to Athens, where he got his reward; and the judges, in
consideration of this good office, ordered a certain measure of corn
for the dog’s daily sustenance, at the public charge, and the priests to
take care of it. Plutarch delivers this story for a certain truth, and
that it happened in the age wherein he lived.
As to gratitude (for I think we need bring this word into a little
repute), this one example, which Apion reports himself to have been an
eye-witness of, shall suffice.
“One day,” says he, “at Rome, they entertained the people with the sight
of the fighting of several strange beasts, and principally of lions
of an unusual size; there was one amongst the rest who, by his furious
deportment, by the strength and largeness of his limbs, and by his loud
and dreadful roaring, attracted the eyes of all the spectators. Amongst
other slaves that were presented to the people in this combat of beasts
there was one Androdus, of Dacia, belonging to a Roman lord of consular
dignity. This lion having seen him at a distance first made a sudden
stop, as it were in a wondering posture, and then softly approached
nearer in a gentle and peaceable manner, as if it were to enter into
acquaintance with him. This being done, and being now assured of what he
sought for, he began to wag his tail, as dogs do when they flatter their
masters, and to kiss and lick the hands and thighs of the poor wretch,
who was beside himself, and almost dead with fear. Androdus being by
this kindness of the lion a little come to himself, and having taken so
much heart as to consider and know him, it was a singular pleasure to
see the joy and caresses that passed betwixt them. At which the people
breaking into loud acclamations of joy, the emperor caused the slave
to be called, to know from him the cause of so strange an event; who
thereupon told him a new and a very strange story: “My master,” said
he, “being pro-consul in Africa, I was constrained, by his severity and
cruel usage, being daily beaten, to steal from him and run away; and,
to hide myself secretly from a person of so great authority in the
province, I thought it my best way to fly to the solitudes, sands, and
uninhabitable parts of that country, resolving that in case the means of
supporting life should chance to fail me, to make some shift or other
to kill myself. The sun being excessively hot at noon, and the heat
intolerable, I lit upon a private and almost inaccessible cave, and went
into it Soon after there came in to me this lion, with one foot wounded
and bloody, complaining and groaning with the pain he endured. At his
coming I was exceeding afraid; but he having spied me hid in the comer
of his den, came gently to me, holding out and showing me his wounded
foot, as if he demanded my assistance in his distress. I then drew out
a great splinter he had got there, and, growing a little more familiar
with him, squeezing the wound thrust out the matter, dirt, and gravel
which was got into it, and wiped and cleansed it the best I could. He,
finding himself something better, and much eased of his pain, laid him
down to rest, and presently fell asleep with his foot in my hand. From
that time forward he and I lived together in this cave three whole years
upon one and the same diet; for of the beasts that he killed in hunting
he always brought me the best pieces, which I roasted in the sun for
want of fire, and so ate it. At last, growing weary of this wild
and brutish life, the lion being one day gone abroad to hunt for our
ordinary provision, I departed thence, and the third day after was taken
by the soldiers, who brought me from Africa to this city to my master,
who presently condemned me to die, and to be thus exposed to the wild
beasts. Now, by what I see, this lion was also taken soon after, who has
now sought to recompense me for the benefit and cure that he received
at my hands.” This is the story that Androdus told the emperor, which he
also conveyed from hand to hand to the people; wherefore, at the general
request, he was absolved from his sentence and set at liberty, and the
lion was, by order of the people, presented to him. “We afterwards saw,”
says Apion, “Androdus leading this lion, in nothing but a small leash,
from tavern to tavern at Rome, and receiving what money every body would
give him, the lion being so gentle as to suffer himself to be covered
with the flowers that the people threw upon him, every one that met him
saying, ‘There goes the lion that entertained the man; there goes the
man that cured the lion.’”
We often lament the loss of beasts we love, and so do they the loss of
us:--
Post, bellator equus, positis insignibus, Æthon
It lacrymans, guttisque humectât grandibus ora.
“To close the pomp, Æthon, the steed of state.
Is led, the fun’ral of his lord to wait.
Stripped of his trappings, with a sullen pace
He walks, and the big tears run rolling down his face.”
As some nations have their wives in common, and some others have every
one his own, is not the same seen among beasts, and marriages better
kept than ours? As to the society and confederation they make
amongst themselves, to league together and to give one another mutual
assistance, is it not known that oxen, hogs, and other animals, at the
cry of any of their kind that we offend, all the herd run to his aid
and embody for his defence? The fish Scarus, when he has swallowed the
angler’s hook, his fellows all crowd about him and gnaw the line in
pieces; and if, by chance, one be got into the bow net, the others
present him their tails on the outside, which he holding fast with his
teeth, they after that manner disengage and draw him out.
Mullets, when one of their companions is engaged, cross the line over
their back, and, with a fin they have there, indented like a saw, cut
and saw it asunder. As to the particular offices that we receive from
one another for the service of life, there are several like examples
amongst them. ‘Tis said that the whale never moves that she has not
always before her a little fish like the sea-gudgeon, for this reason
called the guide-fish, whom the whale follows, suffering himself to be
led and turned with as great facility as the rudder guides the ship; in
recompense of which service also, whereas all the other things, whether
beast or vessel, that enter into the dreadful gulf of this monster’s
mouth, are immediately lost and swallowed up, this little fish retires
into it in great security, and there sleeps, during which time the whale
never stirs; but so soon as ever it goes out he immediately follows
it; and if by accident he loses the sight of his little guide, he goes
wandering here and there, and strikes his sides against the rocks like a
ship that has lost her helm; which Plutarch affirms to have seen in
the island of Anticyra. There is a like society betwixt the little bird
called the wren and the crocodile. The wren serves for a sentinel over
this great animal; and if the ichneumon, his mortal enemy, approach
to fight him, this little bird, for fear lest he should surprise him
asleep, both with his voice and bill rouses him and gives him notice
of his danger. He feeds of this monster’s leavings, who receives him
familiarly into his mouth, suffering him to peck in his jaws and betwixt
his teeth, and thence to pick out the bits of flesh that remain; and
when he has a mind to shut his mouth, he first gives the bird warning to
go out by closing it by little and little, and without bruising or doing
it any harm at all. The shell-fish called the naker, lives in the same
intelligence with the shrimp, a little sort of animal of the lobster
kind, which serves him in the nature of a porter, sitting at the opening
of the shell, which the naker keeps always gaping and open till the
shrimp sees some little fish, proper for their prey, within the hollow
of the shell, where she enters too, and pinches the naker so to the
quick that she is forced to close her shell, where they two together
devour the prey they have trapped in their fort. In the manner of living
of the tunnies we observe a singular knowledge of the three parts of
mathematics. As to astrology, they teach it men, for they stay in the
place where they are surprised by the brumal solstice, and never
stir thence till the next equinox; for which reason Aristotle himself
attributes to them this science. As to geometry and arithmetic, they
always form their numbers in the figure of a cube, every way square, and
make up the body of a battalion, solid, close, and environed round
with six equal sides, and swim in this square order, as large behind
as before; so that whoever in seeing them can count one rank may
easily number the whole troop, by reason that the depth is equal to the
breadth, and the breadth to the length.
As to magnanimity, it will be hard to exhibit a better instance of it
than in the example of the great dog sent to Alexander the Great from
the Indies. They first brought him a stag to encounter, next a boar, and
after that a bear, all which he slighted, and disdained to stir from
his place; but when he saw a lion he then immediately roused himself,
evidently manifesting that he declared that alone worthy to enter the
lists with him. Touching repentance and the acknowledgment of faults,
‘tis reported of an elephant that, having in the impetuosity of his rage
killed his keeper, he fell into so extreme a sorrow that he would never
after eat, but starved himself to death. And as to clemency, ‘tis said
of a tiger, the most cruel of all beasts, that a kid having been put
in to him, he suffered a two days’ hunger rather than hurt it, and the
third broke the grate he was shut up in, to seek elsewhere for prey; so
unwilling he was to fall upon the kid, his familiar and his guest, And
as to the laws of familiarity and agreement, formed by conversation,
it ordinarily happens that we bring up cats, dogs, and hares, tame
together.
But that which seamen by experience know, and particularly in the
Sicilian Sea, of the quality of the halcyons, surpasses all human
thought of what kind of animal has nature even so much honoured the
birth? The poets indeed say that one only island, Delos, which was
before a floating island, was fixed for the service of Latona’s
lying-in; but God has ordered that the whole ocean should be stayed,
made stable and smooth, without waves, without winds or rain, whilst
the halcyon produces her young, which is just about the solstice, the
shortest day of the year; so that by her privilege we have seven days
and seven nights in the very heart of winter wherein we may sail without
danger. Their females never have to do with any other male but their
own, whom they serve and assist all their lives, without ever forsaking
him. If he becomes weak and broken with age, they take him upon their
shoulders and carry him from place to place, and serve him till death.
But the most inquisitive into the secrets of nature could never yet
arrive at the knowledge of the wonderful fabric wherewith the halcyon
builds her nest for her little ones, nor guess at the materials.
Plutarch, who has seen and handled many of them, thinks it is the bones
of some fish which she joins and binds together, interlacing them, some
lengthwise and others across, and adding ribs and hoops in such manner
that she forms at last a round vessel fit to launch; which being done,
and the building finished, she carries it to the beach, where the sea
beating gently against it shows where she is to mend what is not well
jointed and knit, and where better to fortify the seams that are leaky,
that open at the beating of the waves; and, on the contrary, what is
well built and has had the due finishing, the beating of the waves does
so close and bind together that it is not to be broken or cracked by
blows either of stone or iron without very much ado. And that which is
more to be admired is the proportion and figure of the cavity within,
which is composed and proportioned after such a manner as not to receive
or admit any other thing than the bird that built it; for to any thing
else it is so impenetrable, close, and shut, nothing can enter, not so
much as the water of the sea. This is a very dear description of this
building, and borrowed from a very good hand; and yet me-thinks it does
not give us sufficient light into the difficulty of this architecture.
Now from what vanity can it proceed to despise and look down upon,
and disdainfully to interpret, effects that we can neither imitate nor
comprehend?
To pursue a little further this equality and correspondence betwixt us
and beasts, the privilege our soul so much glorifies herself upon, of
things she conceives to her own law, of striping all things that come
to her of their mortal and corporeal qualities, of ordering and
placing things she conceives worthy her taking notice of, stripping and
divesting them of their corruptible qualities, and making them to
lay aside length, breadth, depth, weight, colour, smell, roughness,
smoothness, hardness, softness, and all sensible accidents, as mean
and superfluous vestments, to accommodate them to her own immortal and
spiritual condition; as Rome and Paris, for example, that I have in
my fancy, Paris that I imagine, I imagine and comprehend it without
greatness and without place, without stone, without plaster, and without
wood; this very same privilege, I say, seems evidently to be in beasts;
for a courser accustomed to trumpets, to musket-shots, and battles, whom
we see start and tremble in his sleep and stretched upon his litter,
as if he were in a fight; it is almost certain that he conceives in
his soul the beat of a drum without noise, and an army without arms and
without body:--
Quippe videbis equos fortes, cum membra jacebunt
In somnis, sudare tamen, spirareque sæpe,
Et quasi de palmâ summas contendere vires:
“You shall see maneg’d horses in their sleep
Sweat, snort, start, tremble, and a clutter keep,
As if with all their force they striving were
The victor’s palm proudly away to bear:”
the hare, that a greyhound imagines in his sleep, after which we see
him pant so whilst he sleeps, stretch out his tail, shake his legs, and
perfectly represents all the motions of a course, is a hare without fur
and without bones:--
Venantumque canes in molli sæpe quiete
Jactant crura tamen subito, vocesque repente
Mittunt, et crebras reducunt naribus auras,
Ut vestigia si teneant inventa ferarum:
Expergefætique sequuntur inania sæpe
Cervorum simulacra, fagæ quasi dedita cernant;
Donee discussis redeant erroribus ad se:
“And hounds stir often in their quiet rest,
Spending their mouths, as if upon a quest,
Snuff, and breathe quick and short, as if they went
In a full chase upon a burning scent:
Nay, being wak’d, imagin’d stags pursue,
As if they had them in their real view,
Till, having shook themselves more broad awake,
They do at last discover the mistake:”
the watch-dogs, that we often observe to snarl in their dreams, and
afterwards bark out, and start up as if they perceived some stranger
at hand; the stranger that their soul discerns is a man spiritual and
imperceptible, without dimension, without colour, and without being:--
Consueta domi catulorum blanda propago
Degere, sæpe levem ex oculis volucremque soporem
Discutere, et corpus de terra corripere instant,
Proinde quasi ignotas facies atque ora tuantur.
“The fawning whelps of household curs will rise,
And, shaking the soft slumber from their eyes,
Oft bark and stare at ev’ry one within,
As upon faces they had never seen.”
to the beauty of the body, before I proceed any further I should know
whether or no we are agreed about the description. ‘Tis likely we do
not well know what beauty is in nature and in general, since to our
own human beauty we give so many divers forms, of which, were there any
natural rule and prescription, we should know it in common, as the heat
of the fire. But we fancy the forms according to our own appetite and
liking:--
Turpis Romano Belgicus ore color:
“A German hue ill suits, a Roman face.”
The Indians paint it black and tawny, with great swelled lips, wide flat
noses and load the cartilage betwixt the nostrils with great rings of
gold, to make it hang down to the mouth; as also the under lip with
great hoops, enriched with precious stones, that weigh them down to fall
upon the chin, it being with them a singular grace to show their teeth,
even below the roots. In Peru the greatest ears are the most beautiful,
which they stretch out as far as they can by art. And a man now living
says that he has seen in an eastern nation this care of enlarging them
in so great repute, and the ear loaded with so ponderous jewels, that he
did with great ease put his arm, sleeve and all, through the hole of
an ear. There are elsewhere nations that take great care to black their
teeth, and hate to see them white, whilst others paint them red. The
women are reputed more beautiful, not only in Biscay, but elsewhere,
for having their heads shaved; and, which is more, in certain frozen
countries, as Pliny reports. The Mexicans esteem a low forehead a great
beauty, and though they shave all other parts, they nourish hair on
the forehead and increase it by art, and have great breasts in so great
reputation that they affect to give their children suck over their
shoulders. We should paint deformity so. The Italians fashion it gross
and massy; the Spaniards gaunt and slender; and amongst us one has
it white, another brown; one soft and delicate, another strong and
vigorous; one will have his mistress soft and gentle, others haughty and
majestic. Just as the preference in beauty that Plato attributes to the
spherical figure the Epicureans gave rather to the pyramidal or square,
and cannot swallow a god in the form of a bowl. But, be it how it will,
nature has no more privileged us in this from her common laws than in
the rest And if we will judge ourselves aright, we shall find that, if
there be some animals less favoured in this than we, there are others,
and in greater number, that are more; _a multis animalibus decore
vincimur_ “Many animals surpass us in beauty,” even among the
terrestrial, our compatriots; for as to those of sea, setting the figure
aside, which cannot fall into any manner of proportion, being so much
another thing in colour, clearness, smoothness, and arrangement, we
sufficiently give place to them; and no less, in all qualities, to the
aerial. And this prerogative that the poets make such a mighty matter
of, our erect stature, looking towards heaven our original,
Pronaque cum spectent animalia cætera terrain,
Os homini sublime dédit, columque tueri
Jussit, et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus,
“Whilst all the brutal creatures downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
He set man’s face aloft, that, with his eyes
Uplifted, he might view the starry skies,”
is truly poetical; for there are several little beasts who have their
sight absolutely turned towards heaven; and I find the gesture of camels
and ostriches much higher raised and more erect than ours. What animals
have not their faces above and not before, and do not look opposite,
as we do; and that do not in their natural posture discover as much of
heaven and earth as man? And what qualities of our bodily constitution,
in Plato and Cicero, may not indifferently serve a thousand sorts of
beasts? Those that most resemble us are the most despicable and deformed
of all the herd; for those, as to outward appearance and form of visage,
are baboons:--
Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis?
“How like to man, in visage and in shape,
Is, of all beasts the most uncouth, the ape?”
as to the internal and vital parts, the hog. In earnest, when I consider
man stark naked, even in that sex which seems to have greatest share of
beauty, his defects, natural subjection, and imperfections, I find that
we have more reason than any other animal, to cover ourselves; and are
to be excused from borrowing of those to whom nature has in this been
kinder than to us, to trick ourselves out with their beauties, and hide
ourselves under their spoils, their wool, feathers, hair, and silk. Let
us observe, as to the rest, that man is the sole animal whose nudities
offend his own companions, and the only one who in his natural actions
withdraws and hides himself from his own kind. And really ‘tis also
an effect worth consideration, that they who are masters in the trade
prescribe, as a remedy for amorous passions, the full and free view of
the body a man desires; for that to cool the ardour there needs no more
but freely and fully to see what he loves:--
Ille quod obscænas in aperto corpore partes
Viderat, in cursu qui fuit, hæsit amor.
“The love that’s tilting when those parts appear
Open to view, flags in the hot career,”
And, although this receipt may peradventure proceed from a nice and cold
humour, it is notwithstanding a very great sign of our deficiencies
that use and acquaintance should make us disgust one another. It is
not modesty, so much as cunning and prudence, that makes our ladies so
circumspect to refuse us admittance into their cabinets before they are
painted and tricked up for the public view:--
Nec Veneres nostras hoc fallit; quo magis ipsæ
Omnia summopere hos vitæ postscenia celant,
Quos retinere volunt, adstrictoque esse in amore:
“Of this our ladies are full well aware,
Which make them, with such privacy and care,
Behind the scene all those defects remove,
Likely to check the flame of those they love,”
whereas, in several animals there is nothing that we do not love, and
that does not please our senses; so that from their very excrements
we do not only extract wherewith to heighten our sauces, but also our
richest ornaments and perfumes. This discourse reflects upon none but
the ordinary sort of women, and is not so sacrilegious as to comprehend
those divine, supernatural, and extraordinary beauties, which we see
shine occasionally among us like stars under a corporeal and terrestrial
veil.
As to the rest, the very share that we allow to beasts of the bounty
of nature, by our own confession, is very much to their advantage. We
attribute to ourselves imaginary and fantastic good, future and absent
good, for which human capacity cannot of herself be responsible; or
good, that we falsely attribute to ourselves by the license of opinion,
as reason, knowledge, and honour, and leave to them for their dividend,
essential, durable, and palpable good, as peace, repose, security,
innocence, and health; health, I say, the fairest and richest present
that nature can make us. Insomuch that philosophy, even the Stoic, is so
bold as to say, “That Heraclitus and Pherecides, could they have trucked
their wisdom for health, and have delivered themselves, the one of his
dropsy, and the other of the lousy disease that tormented him, they had
done well.” By which they set a greater value upon wisdom, comparing and
putting it into the balance with health, than they do with this other
proposition, which is also theirs; they say that if Circe had presented
Ulysses with the two potions, the one to make a fool become a wise
man, and the other to make a wise man become a fool, that Ulysses ought
rather to have chosen the last, than consent to that by which Circe
changed his human figure into that of a beast; and say that wisdom
itself would have spoke to him after this manner: “Forsake me, let me
alone, rather than lodge me under the body and figure of an ass.” How!
the philosophers, then will abandon this great and divine wisdom for
this corporeal and terrestrial covering? It is then no more by reason,
by discourse, and by the soul, that we excel beasts; ‘tis by our beauty,
our fair complexion, and our fine symmetry of parts, for which we must
quit our intelligence, our prudence, and all the rest. Well, I accept
this open and free confession; certainly they knew that those parts,
upon which we so much value ourselves, are no other than vain fancy.
If beasts then had all the virtue, knowledge, wisdom, and stoical
perfection, they would still be beasts, and would not be comparable to
man, miserable, wicked, mad, man. For, in short, whatever is not as we
are is nothing worth; and God, to procure himself an esteem among us,
must put himself into that shape, as we shall show anon. By which it
appears that it is not upon any true ground of reason, but by a foolish
pride and vain opinion, that we prefer ourselves before other animals,
and separate ourselves from their society and condition.
But to return to what I was upon before; we have for our part
inconstancy, irresolution, incertitude, sorrow, superstition, solicitude
of things to come, even after we shall be no more, ambition, avarice,
jealousy, envy, irregular, frantic, and untamed appetites, war, lying,
disloyalty, detraction, and curiosity. Doubtless, we have strangely
overpaid this fine reason, upon which we so much glorify ourselves, and
this capacity of judging and knowing, if we have bought it at the price
of this infinite number of passions to which we are eternally subject.
Unless we shall also think fit, as even Socrates does, to add to the
counterpoise that notable prerogative above beasts, That whereas nature
has prescribed them certain seasons and limits for the delights of
Venus, she has given us the reins at all hours and all seasons.” _Ut
vinum ogrotis, quia prodest rarô, nocet sopissime, melius est non
adhibere omnino, quam, spe dubio salutis, in apertam per-niciem
incurrere; sic, haud scio an melius fuerit humano generi motum istum
celerem cogitationis, acumen, solertiam, quam rationem vocamus, quoniam
pestifera sint multis, ad-modum paucis saluiaria, non dari omnino,
quam tam muniice et tam large dari?_ As it falls out that wine often
hurting the sick, and very rarely doing them good, it is better not to
give them any at all than to run into an apparent danger out of hope of
an uncertain benefit, so I know not whether it had not been better for
mankind that this quick motion, this penetration, this subtlety that we
call reason, had not been given to man at all; considering how pestiferous
it is to many, and useful but to few, than to have been conferred in so
abundant manner, and with so liberal a hand.” Of what advantage can we
conceive the knowledge of so many things was to Yarro and Aristotle? Did
it exempt them from human inconveniences? Were they by it freed from
the accidents that lay heavy upon the shoulders of a porter? Did they
extract from their logic any consolation for the gout? Or, for knowing
how this humour is lodged in the joints, did they feel it the less?
Did they enter into composition with death by knowing that some nations
rejoice at his approach; or with cuckoldry, by knowing that in some
parts of the world wives are in common? On the contrary, having been
reputed the greatest men for knowledge, the one amongst the Romans
and the other amongst the Greeks, and in a time when learning did most
flourish, we have not heard, nevertheless, that they had any particular
excellence in their lives; nay, the Greek had enough to do to clear
himself from some notable blemishes in his. Have we observed that
pleasure and health have a better relish with him that understands
astrology and grammar than with others?
Illiterati num minus nervi rigent?
“Th’ illiterate ploughman is as fit
For Venus’ service as the wit:”
or shame and poverty less troublesome to the first than to the last?
Scilicet et morbis et debilitate carebis,
Et luctum et curam effugies, et tempora vitæ
Longa tibi post hæc fato meliore dabuntur.
“Disease thy couch shall flee,
And sorrow and care; yes, thou, be sure, wilt see
Long years of happiness, till now unknown.”
I have known in my time a hundred artisans, a hundred labourers, wiser
and more happy than the rectors of the university, and whom I had much
rather have resembled. Learning, methinks, has its place amongst the
necessary, things of life, as glory, nobility, dignity, or at the most,
as beauty, riches, and such other qualities, which indeed are useful
to it, but remotely, and more by opinion than by nature. We stand
very little more in need of offices, rules, and laws of living in our
society, than cranes and ants do in theirs; and yet we see that these
carry themselves very regularly without erudition. If man was wise, he
would take the true value of every thing according as it was useful
and proper to his life. Whoever will number us by our actions and
deportments will find many more excellent men amongst the ignorant than
among the learned; aye, in all sorts of virtue. Old Rome seems to me
to have been of much greater value, both for peace and war, than that
learned Rome that ruined itself. And, though all the rest should be
equal, yet integrity and innocency would remain to the ancients, for
they cohabit singularly well with simplicity. But I will leave this
discourse, that would lead me farther than I am willing to follow; and
shall only say this further, ‘tis only humility and submission that can
make a complete good man. We are not to leave the knowledge of his duty
to every man’s own judgment; we are to prescribe it to him, and not
suffer him to choose it at his own discretion; otherwise, according to
the imbecility, and infinite variety of our reasons and opinions, we
should at large forge ourselves duties that would, as Epicurus says,
enjoin us to eat one another.
The first law that ever God gave to man was a law of pure obedience; it
was a commandment naked and simple, wherein man had nothing to inquire
after, nor to dispute; forasmuch as to obey is the proper office of a
rational soul, acknowledging a heavenly superior and benefactor. From
obedience and submission spring all other virtues, as all sin does from
selfopinion. And, on the contrary, the first temptation that by the
devil was offered to human nature, its first poison insinuated itself
into us by the promise made us of knowledge and wisdom; _Eritis sicut
Dii, scientes bonum et malum._ “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and
evil.” And the sirens, in Homer, to allure Ulysses, and draw him within
the danger of their snares, offered to give him knowledge. The plague of
man is the opinion of wisdom; and for this reason it is that ignorance
is so recommended to us, by our religion, as proper to faith and
obedience; _Cavete ne quis vos decipiat per philosophiam et inanes
seductiones, secundum elementa mundi._ “Take heed, lest any man deceive
you by philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, and the
rudiments of the world.” There is in this a general consent amongst
all sorts of philosophers, that the sovereign good consists in the
tranquillity of the soul and body; but where shall we find it?
Ad summum, sapiens uno minor est Jove, dives,
Liber, honoratus, pulcher, rex deniqne regum;
Præcipue sanus, nisi cum pituita molesta est:
“In short, the wise is only less than Jove,
Rich, free, and handsome; nay, a king above
All earthly kings; with health supremely blest,
Excepting when a cold disturbs his rest!”
It seems, in truth, that nature, for the consolation of our miserable
and wretched state, has only given us presumption for our inheritance.
‘Tis as Epictetus says, that man has nothing properly his own, but the
use of his opinion; we have nothing but wind and smoke for our portion.
The gods have health in essence, says philosophy, and sickness in
intelligence. Man, on the contrary, possesses his goods by fancy, his
ills in essence. We have reason to magnify the power of our imagination;
for all our goods are only in dream. Hear this poor calamitous animal
huff! “There is nothing,” says Cicero, “so charming as the employment of
letters; of letters, I say, by means whereof the infinity of things, the
immense grandeur of nature, the heavens even in this world, the earth,
and the seas are discovered to us; ‘tis they that have taught us
religion, moderation, and the grandeur of courage, and that have rescued
our souls from darkness, to make her see all things, high, low, first,
last, and middling; ‘tis they that furnish us wherewith to live happily
and well, and conduct us to pass over our lives without displeasure, and
without offence.” Does not this man seem to speak of the condition of
the ever-living and almighty God? But as to effects, a thousand little
countrywomen have lived lives more equal, more sweet, and constant than
his.
Deus ille fuit, deus, inclyte Memmi,
Qui princeps vitæ rationem invenit earn, quæ
Nunc appellatur sapientia; quique per artem
Fluctibus è tantis vitam, tantisque tenebris,
In tam tranquilla et tam clara luce locavit:
“That god, great Memmus, was a god no doubt
Who, prince of life, first found that reason out
Now wisdom called; and by his art, who did
That life in tempests tost, and darkness hid,
Place in so great a calm, and clear a light:”
here are brave ranting words; but a very slight accident put this man’s
understanding in a worse condition than that of the meanest shepherd,
notwithstanding this instructing god, this divine wisdom. Of the same
stamp and impudence is the promise of Democritus’s book: “I am going to
speak of all things;” and that foolish title that Aristotle prefixes
to one of his, order only afforded him a few lucid intervals which
he employed in composing his book, and at last made him kill
himself,--Eusebius’s Chronicon.
Of the Mortal Gods; and the judgment of Chrysippus, that “Dion was as
virtuous as God;” and my Seneca himself says, that “God had given him
life; but that to live well was his own;” conformably to this other: _In
virtute vere gloriamur; quod non contingeret, si id donum à Deo, non à
nobis haberemus:_ “We truly glory in our virtue; which would not be,
if it was given us of God, and not by ourselves;” this is also Seneca’s
saying; “that the wise man hath fortitude equal with God, but that his
is in spite of human frailty, wherein therefore he more than equals
God.” There is nothing so ordinary as to meet with sallies of the like
temerity; there is none of us, who take so much offence to see himself
equalled with God, as he does to see himself undervalued by being ranked
with other creatures; so much more are we jealous of our own interest
than that of our Creator.
But we must trample under foot this foolish vanity, and briskly and
boldly shake the ridiculous foundation upon which these false opinions
are founded. So long as man shall believe he has any means and power of
himself, he will never acknowledge what he owes to his Maker; his eggs
shall always be chickens, as the saying is; we must therefore strip him
to his shirt. Let us see some notable examples of the effects of his
philosophy: Posidonius being tormented with a disease so painful as made
him writhe his arms and gnash his teeth, thought he sufficiently scorned
the dolour, by crying out against it: “Thou mayst do thy worst, I will
not confess that thou art an evil.” He was as sensible of the pain as
my footman, but he made a bravado of bridling his tongue, at least,
and restraining it within the laws of his sect: _Re succumbere non
oportebat, verbis gloriantem._ “It did not become him, that spoke so
big, to confess his frailty when he came to the test.” Arcesilas being
ill of the gout, and Car-neades, who had come to see him, going away
troubled at his condition, he called him back, and showing him his feet
and breast: “There is nothing comes thence hither,” said he. This has
something a better grace, for he feels himself in pain, and would be
disengaged from it; but his heart, notwithstanding, is not conquered nor
subdued by it. The other stands more obstinately to his point, but, I
fear, rather verbally than really. And Dionysius Heracleotes, afflicted
with a vehement smarting in his eyes, was reduced to quit these stoical
resolutions. But even though knowledge should, in effect, do as they
say, and could blunt the point, and dull the edge, of the misfortunes
that attend us, what does she, more than what ignorance does more purely
and evidently?--The philosopher Pyrrho, being at sea in very great
danger, by reason of a mighty storm, presented nothing to the imitation
of those who were with him, in that extremity, but a hog they had on
board, that was fearless and unconcerned at the tempest. Philosophy,
when she has said all she can, refers us at last to the example of a
gladiator, wrestler, or muleteer, in which sort of people we commonly
observe much less apprehension of death, sense of pain, and other
inconveniences, and more of endurance, than ever knowledge furnished
any one withal, that was not bom and bred to hardship. What is the cause
that we make incisions, and cut the tender limbs of an infant, and those
of a horse, more easily than our own--but ignorance only? How many has
mere force of imagination made sick? We often see men cause themselves
to be let blood, purged, and physicked, to be cured of diseases they
only feel in opinion.--When real infirmities fail us, knowledge lends us
her’s; that colour, that complexion, portend some catarrhous defluxion;
this hot season threatens us with a fever; this breach in the
life-line of your left hand gives you notice of some near and dangerous
indisposition; and at last she roundly attacks health itself; saying,
this sprightliness and vigour of youth cannot continue in this posture;
there must be blood taken, and the heat abated, lest it turn against
yourself. Compare the life of a man subjected to such imaginations,
to that of a labourer that suffers himself to be led by his natural
appetite, measuring things only by the present sense, without knowledge,
and without prognostic, that feels no pain or sickness, but when he is
really ill. Whereas the other has the stone in his soul, before he has
it in his bladder; as if it were not time enough to suffer the evil when
it shall come, he must anticipate it by fancy, and run to meet it.
What I say of physic may generally serve in example for all other
sciences. Thence is derived that ancient opinion of the philosophers
that placed the sovereign good in the discovery of the weakness of our
judgment My ignorance affords me as much occasion of hope as of fear;
and having no other rule for my health than that of the examples of
others, and of events I see elsewhere upon the like occasion, I find of
all sorts, and rely upon those which by comparison are most favourable
to me. I receive health with open arms, free, full, and entire, and
by so much the more whet my appetite to enjoy it, by how much it is
at present less ordinary and more rare; so far am I from troubling its
repose and sweetness with the bitterness of a new and constrained manner
of living. Beasts sufficiently show us how much the agitation of our
minds brings infirmities and diseases upon us. That which is told us of
those of Brazil, that they never die but of old age, is attributed to
the serenity and tranquillity of the air they live in; but I rather
attribute it to the serenity and tranquillity of their souls, free from
all passion, thought, or employment, extended or unpleasing, a people
that pass over their lives in a wonderful simplicity and ignorance,
without letters, without law, without king, or any manner of religion.
And whence comes that, which we find by experience, that the heaviest
and dullest men are most able; and the most to be desired in amorous
performances; and that the love of a muleteer often renders itself more
acceptable than that of a gentleman, if it be not that the agitation
of the soul in the latter disturbs his physical ability, dissolves and
tires it, as it also ordinarily troubles and tires itself. What puts the
soul beside itself, and more usually throws it into madness, but her own
promptness, vigour, and agility, and, finally, her own proper force? Of
what is the most subtle folly made, but of the most subtle wisdom? As
great friendships spring from great enmities, and vigorous health from
mortal diseases, so from the rare and vivid agitations of our souls
proceed the most wonderful and most distracted frenzies; ‘tis but half
a turn of the toe from the one to the other. In the actions of madmen we
see how infinitely madness resembles the most vigorous operations of
the soul. Who does not know how indiscernible the difference is betwixt
folly and the sprightly elevations of a free soul, and the effects of a
supreme and extraordinary virtue? Plato says that melancholy persons are
the most capable of discipline, and the most excellent; and accordingly
in none is there so great a propension to madness. Great wits are ruined
by their own proper force and pliability; into what a condition, through
his own agitation and promptness of fancy, is one of the most judicious,
ingenious, and nearest formed, of any other Italian poet, to the air of
the ancient and true poesy, lately fallen! Has he not vast obligation
to this vivacity that has destroyed him? to this light that has blinded
him? to this exact and subtle apprehension of reason that has put him
beside his own? to this curious and laborious search after sciences,
that has reduced him to imbecility? and to this rare aptitude to the
exercises of the soul, that has rendered him without exercise and
without soul? I was more angry, if possible, than compassionate, to see
him at Ferrara in so pitiful a condition surviving himself, forgetting
both himself and his works, which, without his knowledge, though before
his face, have been published unformed and incorrect.
Would you have a man healthy, would you have him regular, and in a
steady and secure posture? Muffle him up in the shades of stupidity and
sloth. We must be made beasts to be made wise, and hoodwinked before we
are fit to be led. And if one shall tell me that the advantage of having
a cold and dull sense of pain and other evils, brings this disadvantage
along with it, to render us consequently less sensible also in the
fruition of good and pleasure, this is true; but the misery of our
condition is such that we have not so much to enjoy as to avoid, and
that the extremest pleasure does not affect us to the degree that a
light grief does: _Segnius homines bona quam mala sentiunt._ We are not
so sensible of the most perfect health as we are of the least sickness.
Pungit
In cute vix sum ma violatum plagula corpus;
Quando valere nihil quemquam movet. Hoc juvat unum,
Quod me non torquet latus, aut pes;
Cætera quisquam Vix queat aut sanum sese, aut sentire valentem.
“The body with a little sting is griev’d,
When the most perfect health is not perceiv’d,
This only pleases me, that spleen nor gout
Neither offend my side nor wring my foot;
Excepting these, scarce any one can tell,
Or e’er observes, when he’s in health and well.”
Our well-being is nothing but the not being ill. Which is the reason why
that sect of philosophers, which sets the greatest value upon pleasure,
has yet fixed it chiefly in unconsciousness of pain. To be freed from
ill is the greatest good that man can hope for or desire; as Ennius
says,--
Nimium boni est, cui nihil est mali;
for that every tickling and sting which are in certain pleasures, and
that seem to raise us above simple health and passiveness, that active,
moving, and, I know not how, itching, and biting pleasure; even that
very pleasure itself aims at nothing but insensibility as its mark. The
appetite that carries us headlong to women’s embraces has no other end
but only to cure the torment of our ardent and furious desires, and only
requires to be glutted and laid at rest, and delivered from the fever.
And so of the rest. I say, then, that if simplicity conducts us to a
state free from evil, she leads us to a very happy one according to our
condition. And yet we are not to imagine it so stupid an insensibility
as to be totally without sense; for Crantor had very good reason to
controvert the insensibility of Epicurus, if founded so deep that the
very first attack and birth of evils were not to be perceived: “I do not
approve such an insensibility as is neither possible nor to be desired.
I am very well content not to be sick; but if I am, I would know that
I am so; and if a caustic be applied, or incisions made in any part, I
would feel them.” In truth, whoever would take away the knowledge and
sense of evil, would at the same time eradicate the sense of pleasure,
and finally annihilate man himself: _Istud nihil dolere, non sine magnâ
mercede contingit, immanitatis in animo, stuporis in corpore._ “An
insensibility that is not to be purchased but at the price of inhumanity
in the soul, and of stupidity of the body.” Evil appertains to man
of course. Neither is pain always to be avoided, nor pleasure always
pursued.
‘Tis a great advantage to the honour of ignorance that knowledge itself
throws us into its arms, when she finds herself puzzled to fortify
us against the weight of evil; she is constrained to come to this
composition, to give us the reins, and permit us to fly into the lap
of the other, and to shelter ourselves under her protection from the
strokes and injuries of fortune. For what else is her meaning when she
instructs us to divert our thoughts from the ills that press upon us,
and entertain them with the meditation of pleasures past and gone; to
comfort ourselves in present afflictions with the remembrance of fled
delights, and to call to our succour a vanished satisfaction, to oppose
it to the discomfort that lies heavy upon us? _Levationes ægritudinum
in avocatione a cogitandâ molestiâ, et revocation ad contemplandas
voluptates, ponit_; “He directs us to alleviate our grief and pains by
rejecting unpleasant thoughts, and recalling agreeable ideas;” if it be
not that where her power fails she would supply it with policy, and make
use of sleight of hand where force of limbs will not serve her turn? For
not only to a philosopher, but to any man in his right wits, when he has
upon him the thirst of a burning fever, what satisfaction can it be to
him to remember the pleasure he took in drinking Greek wine a month ago?
It would rather only make matters worse to him:--
Che ricordarsi il ben doppia la noia.
“The thinking of pleasure doubles trouble.”
Of the same stamp is this other counsel that philosophy gives, only to
remember the happiness that is past, and to forget the misadventures we
have undergone; as if we had the science of oblivion in our own power,
and counsel, wherein we are yet no more to seek.
Suavis laborum est præteritorum ræmoria.
“Sweet is the memory of by-gone pain.”
How does philosophy, that should arm me to contend with fortune, and
steel my courage to trample all human adversities under foot, arrive to
this degree of cowardice to make me hide my head at this rate, and save
myself by these pitiful and ridiculous shifts? For the memory represents
to us not what we choose, but what she pleases; nay, there is nothing
that so much imprints any thing in our memory as a desire to forget it.
And ‘tis a good way to retain and keep any thing safe in the soul to
solicit her to lose it. And this is false: _Est situm in nobis, ut
et adversa quasi perpetua oblivione obruamus, et secunda jucunde et
suaviter meminerimus;_ “it is in our power to bury, as it were, in a
perpetual oblivion, all adverse accidents, and to retain a pleasant and
delightful memory of our successes;” and this is true: _Memini etiam quo
nolo; oblivisci non possum quo volo._ “I do also remember what I would
not; but I cannot forget what I would.” And whose counsel is this? His,
_qui se unies sapiervtem profiteri sit ausus;_ “who alone durst profess
himself a wise man.”
Qui genus humanum ingenio superavit, et omnes
Præstinxit stellas, exortus uti æthereus Sol.
“Who from mankind the prize of knowledge won,
And put the stars out like the rising sun.”
To empty and disfurnish the memory, is not this the true way to
ignorance?
Iners malorum remedium ignorantia est.
“Ignorance is but a dull remedy for evils.”
We find several other like precepts, whereby we are permitted to borrow
frivolous appearances from the vulgar, where we find the strongest
reason will not answer the purpose, provided they administer
satisfaction and comfort Where they cannot cure the wound, they are
content to palliate and benumb it I believe they will not deny this,
that if they could add order and constancy in a state of life that could
maintain itself in ease and pleasure by some debility of judgment, they
would accept it:--
Potare, et spargere flores
Incipiam, patiarque vel inconsultus haberi.
“Give me to drink, and, crown’d with flowers, despise
The grave disgrace of being thought unwise.”
There would be a great many philosophers of Lycas’s mind this man, being
otherwise of very regular manners, living quietly and contentedly in his
family, and not failing in any office of his duty, either towards his
own or strangers, and very carefully preserving himself from hurtful
things, became, nevertheless, by some distemper in his brain, possessed
with a conceit that he was perpetually in the theatre, a spectator of
the finest sights and the best comedies in the world; and being cured by
the physicians of his frenzy, was hardly prevented from endeavouring by
suit to compel them to restore him again to his pleasing imagination:--
Pol I me occidistis, amici,
Non servastis, ait; cui sic extorta voluptas,
Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error;
“By heaven! you’ve killed me, friends, outright,
And not preserved me; since my dear delight
And pleasing error, by my better sense
Unhappily return’d, is banished hence;”
with a madness like that of Thrasylaus the son of Pythodorus, who made
himself believe that all the ships that weighed anchor from the port of
Piræus, and that came into the haven, only made their voyages for
his profit; congratulating them upon their successful navigation, and
receiving them with the greatest joy; and when his brother Crito caused
him to be restored to his better understanding, he infinitely regretted
that sort of condition wherein he had lived with so much delight and
free from all anxiety of mind. ‘Tis according to the old Greek verse,
that “there is a great deal of convenience in not being over-wise.”
And Ecclesiastes, “In much wisdom there is much sorrow;” and “Who gets
wisdom gets labour and trouble.”
Even that to which philosophy consents in general, that last remedy
which she applies to all sorts of necessities, to put an end to the life
we are not able to endure. _Placet?--Pare. Non placet?--Quâcumque vis,
exi. Pungit dolor?--Vel fodiat sane. Si nudus es, da jugulum; sin tectus
armis Vulcaniis, id est fortitudine, résisté;_ “Does it please?--Obey
it. Not please?--Go where thou wilt. Does grief prick thee,--nay, stab
thee?--If thou art naked, present thy throat; if covered with the arms
of Vulcan, that is, fortitude, resist it.” And this word, so used in
the Greek festivals, _aut bibat, aut abeat,_ “either drink or go,” which
sounds better upon the tongue of a Gascon, who naturally changes the h
into v, than on that of Cicero:--
Vivere si recte nescis, decede peritis.
Lusisti satis, edisti satis, atque bibisti;
Tempus abire tibi est, ne potum largius æquo
Rideat et pulset lasciva decentius ætas.
“If to live well and right thou dost not know,
Give way, and leave thy place to those that do.
Thou’st eaten, drunk, and play’d to thy content,
‘Tis time to make thy parting compliment,
Lest youth, more decent in their follies, scoff
The nauseous scene, and hiss thee reeling off;”
What is it other than a confession of his impotency, and a sending back
not only to ignorance, to be there in safety, but even to stupidity,
insensibility, and nonentity?
Democritum postquam matura vetustas
Admonuit memorem motus languescere mentis;
Sponte sua letho caput obvius obtulit ipse.
“Soon as, through age, Democritus did find
A manifest decadence in his mind,
He thought he now surviv’d to his own wrong,
And went to meet his death, that stay’d too long.”
‘Tis what Antisthenes said, “That a man should either make provision
of sense to understand, or of a halter to hang himself;” and what
Chrysippus alleged upon this saying of the poet Tyrtæus:--
“Or to arrive at virtue or at death;”
and Crates said, “That love would be cured by hunger, if not by time;
and whoever disliked these two remedies, by a rope.” That Sextius, of
whom both Seneca and Plutarch speak with so high an encomium, having
applied himself, all other things set aside, to the study of philosophy,
resolved to throw himself into the sea, seeing the progress of his
studies too tedious and slow. He ran to find death, since he could not
overtake knowledge. These are the words of the law upon the subject:
“If peradventure some great inconvenience happen, for which there is no
remedy, the haven is near, and a man may save himself by swimming out
of his body as out of a leaky skiff; for ‘tis the fear of dying, and not
the love of life, that ties the fool to his body.”
As life renders itself by simplicity more pleasant, so more innocent
and better, also it renders it as I was saying before: “The simple
and ignorant,” says St. Paul, “raise themselves up to heaven and take
possession of it; and we, with all our knowledge, plunge ourselves into
the infernal abyss.” I am neither swayed by Valentinian, a professed
enemy to all learning and letters, nor by Licinius, both Roman emperors,
who called them the poison and pest of all political government; nor by
Mahomet, who, as ‘tis said, interdicted all manner of learning to his
followers; but the example of the great Lycurgus, and his authority,
with the reverence of the divine Lacedemonian policy, so great, so
admirable, and so long flourishing in virtue and happiness, without any
institution or practice of letters, ought certainly to be of very great
weight. Such as return from the new world discovered by the Spaniards
in our fathers’ days, testify to us how much more honestly and regularly
those nations live, without magistrate and without law, than ours do,
where there are more officers and lawyers than there are of other sorts
of men and business:--
Di cittatorie piene, e di libelli,
D’esamine, e di carte di procure,
Hanno le mani e il seno, e gran fastelli
Di chioge, di consigli, et di letture:
Per cui le faculta de* poverelli
Non sono mai nelle città sicure;
Hanno dietro e dinanzi, e d’ambi i lati,
Notai, procuratori, ed avvocati.
“Their bags were full of writs, and of citations,
Of process, and of actions and arrests,
Of bills, of answers, and of replications,
In courts of delegates, and of requests,
To grieve the simple sort with great vexations;
They had resorting to them as their guests,
Attending on their circuit, and their journeys,
Scriv’ners, and clerks, and lawyers, and attorneys.”
It was what a Roman senator of the latter ages said, that their
predecessors’ breath stunk of garlic, but their stomachs were perfumed
with a good conscience; and that, on the contrary, those of his time
were all sweet odour without, but stunk within of all sorts of vices;
that is to say, as I interpret it, that they abounded with learning
and eloquence, but were very defective in moral honesty. Incivility,
ignorance, simplicity, roughness, are the natural companions of
innocence; curiosity, subtlety, knowledge, bring malice in their train;
humility, fear, obedience, and affability, which are the principal
things that support and maintain human society, require an empty and
docile soul, and little presuming upon itself.
Christians have a particular knowledge, how natural and original an evil
curiosity is in man; the thirst of knowledge, and the desire to
become more wise, was the first ruin of man, and the way by which he
precipitated himself into eternal damnation. Pride was his ruin and
corruption. ‘Tis pride that diverts him from the common path, and makes
him embrace novelties, and rather choose to be head of a troop, lost and
wandering in the path of error; to be a master and a teacher of lies,
than to be a disciple in the school of truth, suffering himself to be
led and guided by the hand of another, in the right and beaten
road. ‘Tis, peradventure, the meaning of this old Greek saying, that
superstition follows pride, and obeys it as if it were a father:
[--Greek--] Ah, presumption, how much dost thou hinder us?
After that Socrates was told that the god of wisdom had assigned to him
the title of sage, he was astonished at it, and, searching and examining
himself throughout, could find no foundation for this divine judgment.
He knew others as just, temperate, valiant, and learned, as himself; and
more eloquent, more handsome, and more profitable to their country than
he. At last he concluded that he was not distinguished from others, nor
wise, but only because he did not think himself so; and that his God
considered the opinion of knowledge and wisdom as a singular absurdity
in man; and that his best doctrine was the doctrine of ignorance, and
simplicity his best wisdom. The sacred word declares those miserable
among us who have an opinion of themselves: “Dust and ashes,” says it
to such, “what hast thou wherein to glorify thyself?” And, in another
place, “God has made man like unto a shadow,” of whom who can judge,
when by removing the light it shall be vanished! Man is a thing of
nothing.
Our force is so far from being able to comprehend the divine height,
that, of the works of our Creator, those best bear his mark, and are
with better title his, which we the least understand. To meet with an
incredible thing is an occasion to Christians to believe; and it is
so much the more according to reason, by how much it is against human
reason. If it were according to reason, it would be no more a miracle;
and if it were according to example, it would be no longer a singular
thing. _Melius scitur Deus nesdendo_: “God is better known by not
knowing him,” says St. Austin: and Tacitus, _Sanctius est ac reverentius
de actis Deorum credere, quam scire_; “it is more holy and reverent to
believe the works of God than to know them;” and Plato thinks there is
something of impiety in inquiring too curiously into God, the world,
and the first causes of things: _Atque illum quidem parentem hujus
universitaiis invenire, difficile; et, quum jam inveneris, indicare in
vulgtis, nefas_: “to find out the parent of the world is very difficult;
and when found out, to reveal him to the vulgar is sin,” says Cicero. We
talk indeed of power, truth, justice; which are words that signify some
great thing; but that thing we neither see nor conceive at all. We say
that God fears, that God is angry, that God loves,
Immortalia mortali sermone notantes:
“Giving to things immortal mortal names.”
These are all agitations and emotions that cannot be in God, according
to our form, nor can we imagine them, according to his. It only belongs
to God to know himself, and to interpret his own works; and he does it
in our language, going out of himself, to stoop to us who grovel upon
the earth. How can prudence, which is the choice between good and evil,
be properly attributed to him whom no evil can touch? How can reason
and intelligence, which we make use of, to arrive by obscure at apparent
things; seeing that nothing is obscure to him? How justice, which
distributes to every one what appertains to him, a thing begot by the
society and community of men, how is that in God? How temperance, which
is the moderation of corporal pleasures, that have no place in the
Divinity? Fortitude to support pain, labour, and dangers, as little
appertains to him as the rest; these three things have no access to
him. For which reason Aristotle holds him equally exempt from virtue
and vice: _Neque gratia, neque ira teneri potest; quod quo talia essent,
imbecilla essent omnia?_ “He can neither be affected with favour nor
indignation, because both these are the effects of frailty.”
The participation we have in the knowledge of truth, such as it is,
is not acquired by our own force: God has sufficiently given us to
understand that, by the witnesses he has chosen out of the common
people, simple and ignorant men, that he has been pleased to employ
to instruct us in his admirable secrets. Our faith is not of our
own acquiring; ‘tis purely the gift of another’s bounty: ‘tis not by
meditation, or by virtue of our own understanding, that we have
acquired our religion, but by foreign authority and command wherein the
imbecility of our own judgment does more assist us than any force of it;
and our blindness more than our clearness of sight: ‘tis more by__ the
mediation of our ignorance than of our knowledge that we know any thing
of the divine wisdom. ‘Tis no wonder if our natural and earthly parts
cannot conceive that supernatural and heavenly knowledge: let us bring
nothing of our own, but obedience and subjection; for, as it is written,
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the
understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe?
Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the
wisdom of this world? For after that, in the wisdom of God, the world
knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save
them that believe.”
Finally, should I examine whether it be in the power of man to find out
that which he seeks and if that quest, wherein he has busied himself so
many ages, has enriched him with any new force, or any solid truth; I
believe he will confess, if he speaks from his conscience, that all
he has got by so long inquiry is only to have learned to know his
own weakness. We have only by a long study confirmed and verified the
natural ignorance we were in before. The same has fallen out to men
truly wise, which befalls the ears of corn; they shoot and raise their
heads high and pert, whilst empty; but when full and swelled with grain
in maturity, begin to flag and droop. So men, having tried and sounded
all things, and having found in that mass of knowledge, and provision of
so many various things, nothing solid and firm, and nothing but
vanity, have quitted their presumption, and acknowledged their natural
condition. ‘Tis what Velleius reproaches Cotta withal and Cicero, “that
they had learned of Philo, that they had learned nothing.” Pherecydes,
one of the seven sages, writing to Thales upon his death-bed; “I have,”
said he, “given order to my people, after my interment, to carry my
writings to thee. If they please thee and the other sages, publish; if
not, suppress them. They contain no certainty with which I myself am
satisfied. Neither do I pretend to know the truth, or to attain to it.
I rather open than discover things.” The wisest man that ever was, being
asked what he knew, made answer, “He knew this, that he knew nothing.”
By which he verified what has been said, that the greatest part of what
we know is the least of what we do not; that is to say, that even
what we think we know is but a piece, and a very little one, of our
ignorance. We know things in dreams, says Plato, and are ignorant of
them in truth. _Ormes pene veteres nihil cognosci, nihil percipi,
nihil sciri posse dixerunt; angustos sensus, imbecilles animos, brevia
curricula vito._ “Almost all the ancients have declared that there is
nothing to be known, nothing to be perceived or understood; the senses
are too limited, men’s minds too weak, and the course of life too short.”
And of Cicero himself, who stood indebted to his learning for all he
was worth, Valerius says, “That he began to disrelish letters in his old
age; and when at his studies, it was with great independency upon any
one party; following what he thought probable, now in one sect, and
then in another, evermore wavering under the doubts of the academy.”
_Dicendum est, sed ita ut nihil affirment, quceram omnia, dubitans
plerumque, et mihi diffidens._ “Something I must say, but so as to
affirm nothing; I inquire into all things, but for the most part in
doubt and distrust of myself.”
I should have too fair a game should I consider man in his common way of
living and in gross; yet I might do it by his own rule, who judges truth
not by weight, but by the number of votes. Let us set the people aside,
Qui vigilans stertit,....
Mortua cui vita est prope jam vivo atque videnti;
“Half of his life by lazy sleep’s possess’d,
And when awake his soul but nods at best;”
who neither feel nor judge, and let most of their natural faculties lie
idle; I will take man in his highest ground. Let us consider him in
that little number of men, excellent and culled out from the rest, who,
having been endowed with a remarkable and particular natural force, have
moreover hardened and whetted it by care, study, and art, and raised
it to the highest pitch of wisdom to which it can possibly arrive. They
have adjusted their souls to all ways and all biases; have propped and
supported them with all foreign helps proper for them, and enriched and
adorned them with all they could borrow for their advantage, both within
and without the world; ‘tis in these is placed the utmost and most
supreme height to which human nature can attain. They have regulated
the world with policies and laws. They have instructed it with arts and
sciences, and by the example of their admirable manners. I shall make
account of none but such men as these, their testimony and experience.
Let us examine how far they have proceeded, and where they stopped. The
errors and defects that we shall find amongst these men the world may
boldly avow as their own.
Whoever goes in search of any thing must come to this, either to say
that he has found it, or that it is not to be found, or that he is yet
upon the search. All philosophy is divided into these three kinds; her
design is to seek out truth, knowledge, and certainty. The Peripatetics,
Epicureans, Stoics, and others, have thought they have found it. These
established the sciences we have, and have treated of them as of certain
knowledge. Clitomachus, Carneades, and the Academics, have despaired
in their search, and concluded that truth could not be conceived by our
understandings. The result of these is weakness and human ignorance.
This sect has had the most and the most noble followers. Pyrrho, and
other skeptics or epechists, whose dogmas are held by many of the
ancients to be taken from Homer, the seven sages, and from Archilochus
and Euripides, and to whose number these are added, Zeno, Democritus,
and Xenophanes, say that they are yet upon the inquiry after truth.
These conclude that the others, who think they have found it out, are
infinitely deceived; and that it is too daring a vanity in the second
sort to determine that human reason is not able to attain unto it;
for this establishing a standard of our power, to know and judge the
difficulty of things, is a great and extreme knowledge, of which they
doubt whether man is capable:--
Nil sciri quisquis putat, id quoque nescit,
An sciri possit; quam se nil scire fatetur.
“He that says nothing can be known, o’erthrows
His own opinion, for he nothing knows,
So knows not that.”
The ignorance that knows itself, judges and condemns itself, is not an
absolute ignorance; to be such, it must be ignorant of itself; so that
the profession of the Pyrrhonians is to waver, doubt, and inquire, not
to make themselves sure of, or responsible to themselves for any
thing. Of the three actions of the soul, imaginative, appetitive, and
consentive, they receive the two first; the last they kept ambiguous,
without inclination or approbation, either of one thing or another,
so light as it is. Zeno represented the motion of his imagination upon
these divisions of the faculties of the soul thus: “An open and expanded
hand signified appearance; a hand half shut, and the fingers a little
bending, consent; a clenched fist, comprehension; when with the left
he yet thrust the right fist closer, knowledge.” Now this situation of
their judgment upright and inflexible, receiving all objects without
application or consent, leads them to their ataraxy, which is a
peaceable condition of life, temperate, and exempt from the agitations
we receive by the impression of opinion and knowledge that we think we
have of things; whence spring fear, avarice, envy, immoderate desires,
ambition, pride, superstition, love of novelty, rebellion, disobedience,
obstinacy, and the greatest part of bodily ills; nay, and by that they
are exempt from the jealousy of their discipline; for they debate after
a very gentle manner; they fear no requital in their disputes; when they
affirm that heavy things descend they would be sorry to be believed,
and love tobe contradicted, to engender doubt and suspense of judgment,
which is their end. They only put forward their propositions to
contend with those they think we have in our belief. If you take their
arguments, they will as readily maintain the contrary; ‘tis all one to
them, they have no choice. If you maintain that snow is black, they will
argue on the contrary that it is white; if you say it is neither the
one nor the other, they will maintain that it is both. If you hold, of
certain judgment, that you know nothing, they will maintain that you do.
Yea, and if by an affirmative axiom you assure them that you doubt, they
will argue against you that you doubt not; or that you cannot judge and
determine that you doubt. And by this extremity of doubt, which jostles
itself, they separate and divide themselves from many opinions, even
of those they have several ways maintained, both concerning doubt and
ignorance. “Why shall not they be allowed to doubt,” say they, “as well
as the dogmatists, one of whom says green, another yellow? Can any thing
be proposed to us to grant, or deny, which it shall not be permitted to
consider as ambiguous?” And where others are carried away, either by
the custom of their country, or by the instruction of parents, or by
accident, as by a tempest, without judgment and without choice, nay,
and for the most part before the age of discretion, to such and such
an opinion, to the sect whether Stoic or Epicurean, with which they
are prepossessed, enslaved, and fast bound, as to a thing they cannot
forsake: _Ad quamcumque disciplinant, velut tempestate, delati, ad earn,
tanquam ad saxum, adhorescunt;_ “every one cleaves to the doctrine he
has happened upon, as to a rock against which he has been thrown by
tempest;” why shall not these likewise be permitted to maintain their
liberty, and consider things without obligation or slavery? _hoc
liberiores et solutiores, quod integra illis est judicandi potestas_:
“in this more unconstrained and free, because they have the greater
power of judging.” Is it not of some advantage to be disengaged from the
necessity that curbs others? Is it not better to remain in suspense than
to entangle one’s self in the innumerable errors that human fancy has
produced? Is it not much better to suspend one’s persuasion than to
intermeddle with these wrangling and seditious divisions: “What shall
I choose?” “What you please, provided you will choose.” A very foolish
answer; but such a one, nevertheless, as all dogmatism seems to point
at, and by which we are not permitted to be ignorant of what we are
ignorant of.
Take the most eminent side, that of the greatest reputation; it will
never be so sure that you shall not be forced to attack and contend with
a hundred and a hundred adversaries to defend it. Is it not better to
keep out of this hurly-burly? You are permitted to embrace Aristotle’s
opinions of the immortality of the soul with as much zeal as your honour
and life, and to give the lie to Plato thereupon, and shall they be
interdicted to doubt him? If it be lawful for Panætius to maintain
his opinion about augury, dreams, oracles, vaticinations, of which the
Stoics made no doubt at all; why may not a wise man dare to do the
same in all things that he dared to do in those he had learned of his
masters, established by the common consent of the school, whereof he
is a professor and a member? If it be a child that judges, he knows not
what it is; if a wise man, he is prepossessed. They have reserved for
themselves a marvellous advantage in battle, having eased themselves of
the care of defence. If you strike them, they care not, provided
they strike too, and they turn every thing to their own use. If they
overcome, your argument is lame; if you, theirs; if they fall short,
they verify ignorance; if you fall short, you do it; if they prove that
nothing is known, ‘tis well; if they cannot prove it, ‘tis also well:
_Ut quurn in eadem re paria contrariis in partibus momenta inveniuntur,
facilius ab utraque parte assertio sustineatur:_ “That when like
sentiments happen _pro_ and _con_ in the same thing, the assent may on
both sides be more easily suspended.” And they make account to find out,
with much greater facility, why a thing is false, than why ‘tis true;
that which is not, than that which is; and what they do not believe,
than what they do. Their way of speaking is: “I assert nothing; it is no
more so than so, or than neither one nor t’other; I understand it not.
Appearances are everywhere equal; the law of speaking, _pro_ or _con_,
is the same. Nothing seems true, that may not seem false.” Their
sacramental word is that is to say, “I hold, I stir not.” This is the
burden of their song, and others of like stuff. The effect of which is
a pure, entire, perfect, and absolute suspension of judgment. They make
use of their reason to inquire and debate, but not to fix and determine.
Whoever shall imagine a perpetual confession of ignorance, a judgment
without bias, propension, or inclination, upon any occasion whatever,
conceives a true idea of Pyrrhonism. I express this fancy as well as
I can, by reason that many find it hard to conceive, and the authors
themselves represent it a little variously and obscurely.
As to what concerns the actions of life, they are in this of the
common fashion. They yield and give up themselves to their natural
inclinations, to the power and impulse of passions, to the constitution
of laws and customs, and to the tradition of arts; _Non enim nos Deus
ista scire, sed tantummodo uti, voluit._ “For God would not have us
know, but only use those things.” They suffer their ordinary actions to
be guided by those things, without any dispute or judgment. For
which reason I cannot consent to what is said of Pyrrho, by those
who represent him heavy and immovable, leading a kind of savage and
unsociable life, standing the jostle of carts, going upon the edge of
precipices, and refusing to accommodate himself to the laws. This is to
enhance upon his discipline; he would never make himself a stock or
a stone, he would show himself a living man, discoursing, reasoning,
enjoying all reasonable conveniences and pleasures, employing and making
use of all his corporal and spiritual faculties in rule and reason.
The fantastic, imaginary, and false privileges that man had usurped
of lording it, ordaining, and establishing, he has utterly quitted and
renounced. Yet there is no sect but is constrained to permit her sage to
follow several things not comprehended, perceived, or consented to, if
he means to live. And if he goes to sea, he follows that design, not
knowing whether his voyage shall be successful or no; and only insists
upon the tightness of the vessel, the experience of the pilot, and the
convenience of the season, and such probable circumstances; after which
he is bound to go, and suffer himself to be governed by appearances,
provided there be no express and manifest contrariety in them. He has a
body, he has a soul; the senses push them, the mind spurs them on. And
although he does not find in himself this proper and singular sign of
judging, and that he perceives that he ought not to engage his
consent, considering that there may be some false, equal to these true
appearances, yet does he not, for all that, fail of carrying on the
offices of his life with great liberty and convenience. How many arts
are there that profess to consist more in conjecture than knowledge;
that decide not on true and false, and only follow that which seems so!
There are, say they, true and false, and we have in us wherewith to seek
it; but not to make it stay when we touch it. We are much more prudent,
in letting ourselves be regulated by the order of the world, without
inquiry. A soul clear from prejudice has a marvellous advance towards
tranquillity and repose. Men that judge and control their judges, do
never duly submit to them.
How much more docile and easy to be governed, both by the laws of
religion and civil polity, are simple and incurious minds, than those
over-vigilant wits, that will still be prating of divine and human
causes! There is nothing in human invention that carries so great a show
of likelihood and utility as this; this presents man, naked and empty,
confessing his natural weakness, fit to receive some foreign force from
above, unfurnished of human, and therefore more apt to receive into him
the divine knowledge, making nought of his own judgment, to give more
room to faith; neither disbelieving nor establishing any dogma against
common observances; humble, obedient, disciplinable, and studious; a
sworn enemy of heresy; and consequently freeing himself from vain and
irreligious opinions, introduced by false sects. ‘Tis a blank paper
prepared to receive such forms from the finger of God as he shall please
to write upon it. The more we resign and commit ourselves to God, and
the more we renounce ourselves, of the greater value we are. “Take in
good part,” says Ecclesiastes, “the things that present themselves to
thee, as they seem and taste from hand to mouth; the rest is out of thy
knowledge.” _Dominus novit cogitationes hominum, quoniam vanæ sunt_:
“The Lord knoweth the hearts of men, that they are but vanity.”
Thus we see that of the three general sects of philosophy, two make open
profession of doubt and ignorance; and in that of the Dogmatists, which
is the third, it is easy to discover that the greatest part of them only
assume this face of confidence and assurance that
they may produce the better effect; they have not so much thought
to establish any certainty for us, as to show us how far they have
proceeded in their search of truth: _Quam docti jingunt magis quam
nôrunt_: “Which the learned rather feign than know.” Timæus, being
to instruct Socrates in what he knew of the gods, the world, and men,
proposes to speak to him as a man to a man; and that it is sufficient,
if his reasons are probable as those of another; for that exact
reasons were neither in his nor any other mortal hand; which one of
his followers has thus imitated: _Ut potero, explicabo: nec tamen, ut
Pythius Apollo, certa ut sint et fixa quæ dixero; sed, ut homunculus,
probabilia conjecturâ sequens:_ “I will, as well as I am able, explain;
affirming, yet not as the Pythian oracle, that what I say is fixed and
certain, but like a mere man, that follows probabilities by conjecture.”
And this, upon the natural and common subject of the contempt of death;
he has elsewhere translated from the very words of Plato: _Si forte, de
Deorum naturâ ortuque mundi disserentes, minus id quod habemiis in animo
consequi-mur, haud erit mirum; oquum est enim meminisse, et me, qui
disseram, hominem esse, et vos, qui judicetis, ut, si probabilia
dicentur, nihil ultra requiratis?_ “If perchance, when we discourse
of the nature of God, and the world’s original, we cannot do it as we
desire, it will be no great wonder. For it is just you should remember
that both I who speak and you who are to judge, are men; so that if
probable things are delivered, you shall require and expect no more.”
Aristotle ordinarily heaps up a great number of other men’s opinions and
beliefs, to compare them with his own, and to let us see how much he has
gone beyond them, and how much nearer he approaches to the likelihood of
truth; for truth is not to be judged by the authority and testimony
of others; which made Epicurus religiously avoid quoting them in his
writings. This is the prince of all dogmatists, and yet we are told by
him that the more we know the more we have room for doubt. In earnest,
we sometimes see him shroud and muffle up himself in so thick and so
inextricable an obscurity that we know not what to make of his advice;
it is, in effect, a Pyrrhonism under a resolutive form. Hear Cicero’s
protestation, who expounds to us another’s fancy by his own: _Qui
requirunt quid de quâque re ipsi sentiamus, curiosius id faciunt quam
necesse est,... Hoc in philosophiâ ratio, contra omnia disserendi,
nuttamque rem aperte judicandi, profecta a Socrate, repetita
ab Arcesila, conjirmata a Gameade, usquê ad nostram viget
cetatem..........Hi sumus, qui omnibus veris falsa quodam adjuncta esse
dicamus, tanta similitudine, ut in iis nulla insit certe judicandi et
assentiendi nota._ “They who desire to know what we think of every
thing are therein more inquisitive than is necessary. This practice
in philosophy of disputing against every thing, and of absolutely
concluding nothing, begun by Socrates, repeated by Arcesilaus, and
confirmed by Cameades, has continued in use even to our own times. We
are they who declare that there is so great a mixture of things false
amongst all that are true, and they so resemble one another, that there
can be in them no certain mark to direct us either to judge or assent.”
Why hath not Aristotle only, but most of the philosophers, affected
difficulty, if not to set a greater value upon the vanity of the
subject, and amuse the curiosity of our minds by giving them this hollow
and fleshless bone to pick? Clitomachus affirmed “That he could never
discover by Carneades’s writings what opinion he was of.” This was it
that made Epicurus affect to be abstruse, and that procured Heraclitus
the epithet of [--Greek--] Difficulty is a coin the learned make use
of, like jugglers, to conceal the vanity of their art, and which human
sottishness easily takes for current pay.
Claras, ob obscuram linguam, magis inter manes...
Omnia enim stolidi magis admirantur amantque
Inversis quæ sub verbis latitantia cemunt.
“Bombast and riddle best do puppies please,
For fools admire and love such things as these;
And a dull quibble, wrapt in dubious phrase,
Up to the height doth their wise wonder raise.”
Cicero reprehends some of his friends for giving more of their time
to the study of astrology, logic, and geometry, than they were really
worth; saying that they were by these diverted from the duties of life,
and more profitable and proper studies. The Cyrenaick philosophers, in
like manner, despised physics and logic. Zeno, in the very beginning of
the books of the commonwealth, declared all the liberal arts of no use.
Chrysippus said “That what Plato and Aristotle had writ, concerning
logic, they had only done in sport, and by way of exercise;” and could
not believe that they spoke in earnest of so vain a thing. Plutarch
says the same of metaphysics. And Epicurus would have said as much
of rhetoric, grammar, poetry, mathematics, and, natural philosophy
excepted, of all the sciences; and Socrates of them all, excepting that
which treats of manners and of life. Whatever any one required to be
instructed in, by him, he would ever, in the first place, demand
an account of the conditions of his life present and past, which he
examined and judged, esteeming all other learning subsequent to that
and supernumerary: _Parum mihi placeant eæ littero quo ad virtutem
doctoribus nihil pro-fuerunt._ “That learning is in small repute with me
which nothing profited the teachers themselves to virtue.” Most of the
arts have been in like manner decried by the same knowledge; but they
did not consider that it was from the purpose to exercise their wits in
those very matters wherein there was no solid advantage.
As to the rest, some have looked upon Plato as a dogmatist, others as a
doubter, others in some things the one, and in other things the other.
Socrates, the conductor of his dialogues, is eternally upon questions
and stirring up disputes, never determining, never satisfying, and
professes to have no other science but that of opposing himself. Homer,
their author, has equally laid the foundations of all the sects of
philosophy, to show how indifferent it was which way we should choose.
‘Tis said that ten several sects sprung from Plato; yet, in my opinion,
never did any instruction halt and stumble, if his does not.
Socrates said that midwives, in taking upon them the trade of helping
others to bring forth, left the trade of bringing forth themselves; and
that by the title of a wise man or sage, which the gods had conferred
upon him, he was disabled, in his virile and mental love, of the faculty
of bringing forth, contenting himself to help and assist those that
could; to open their nature, anoint the passes, and facilitate their
birth; to judge of the infant, baptize, nourish, fortify, swath, and
circumcise it, exercising and employing his understanding in the perils
and fortunes of others.
It is so with the most part of this third sort of authors, as the
ancients have observed in the writings of Anaxagoras, Democritus,
Parmenides, Xenophanes, and others. They have a way of writing, doubtful
in substance and design, rather inquiring than teaching, though they mix
their style with some dogmatical periods. Is not the same thing seen in
Seneca and Plutarch? How many contradictions are there to be found if a
man pry narrowly into them! So many that the reconciling lawyers ought
first to reconcile them every one to themselves. Plato seems to have
affected this method of philosophizing in dialogues; to the end that he
might with greater decency, from several mouths, deliver the diversity
and variety of his own fancies. It is as well to treat variously of
things as to treat of them conformably, and better, that is to say, more
copiously and with greater profit. Let us take example from ourselves:
judgments are the utmost point of all dogmatical and determinative
speaking; and yet those _arrets_ that our parliaments give the people,
the most exemplary of them, and those most proper to nourish in them the
reverence due to that dignity, principally through the sufficiency of
the persons acting, derive their beauty not so much from the conclusion,
which with them is quotidian and common to every judge, as from the
dispute and heat of divers and contrary arguments that the matter of law
and equity will permit And the largest field for reprehension that
some philosophers have against others is drawn from the diversities and
contradictions wherein every one of them finds himself perplexed, either
on purpose to show the vacillation of the human mind concerning every
thing, or ignorantly compelled by the volubility and incomprehensibility
of all matter; which is the meaning of the maxim--“In a slippery and
sliding place let us suspend our belief;” for, as Euripides says,--
“God’s various works perplex the thoughts of men.”
Like that which Empedocles, as if transported with a divine fury, and
compelled by truth, often strewed here and there in his writings: “No,
no, we feel nothing, we see nothing; all things are concealed from
us; there is not one thing of which we can positively say what it is;”
according to the divine saying: _Cogitationes mortalium timidæ, et
incertæ adinventiones nostro et providentice._ “For the thoughts of
mortal men are doubtful; and our devices are but uncertain.” It is not
to be thought strange if men, despairing to overtake what they hunt
after, have not however lost the pleasure of the chase; study being
of itself so pleasant an employment; and so pleasant that amongst the
pleasures, the Stoics forbid that also which proceeds from the exercise
of the mind, will have it curbed, and find a kind of intemperance in too
much knowledge.
Democritus having eaten figs at his table that tasted of honey, fell
presently to considering with himself whence they should derive this
unusual sweetness; and to be satisfied in it, was about to rise from the
table to see the place whence the figs had been gathered; which his maid
observing, and having understood the cause, smilingly told him that “he
need not trouble himself about that, for she had put them into a vessel
in which there had been honey.” He was vexed at this discovery, and that
she had deprived him of the occasion of this inquiry, and robbed his
curiosity of matter to work upon: “Go thy way,” said he, “thou hast done
me an injury; but, for all that, I will seek out the cause as if it
were natural;” and would willingly have found out some true reason for a
false and imaginary effect. This story of a famous and great philosopher
very clearly represents to us that studious passion that puts us upon
the pursuit of things, of the acquisition of which we despair. Plutarch
gives a like example of some one who would not be satisfied in that
whereof he was in doubt, that he might not lose the pleasure of
inquiring into it; like the other who would not that his physician
should allay the thirst of his fever, that he might not lose the
pleasure of quenching it by drinking. _Satius est supervacua discere,
quam nihil._ “‘Tis better to learn more than necessary than nothing at
all.” As in all sorts of feeding, the pleasure of eating is very often
single and alone, and that what we take, which is acceptable to the
palate, is not always nourishing or wholesome; so that which our minds
extract from science does not cease to be pleasant, though there
be nothing in it either nutritive or healthful. Thus they say: “The
consideration of nature is a diet proper for our minds, it raises and
elevates us, makes us disdain low and terrestrial things, by comparing
them with those that are celestial and high. The mere inquisition into
great and occult things is very pleasant, even to those who acquire no
other benefit than the reverence and fear of judging it.” This is
what they profess. The vain image of this sickly curiosity is yet more
manifest in this other example which they so often urge. “Eudoxus wished
and begged of the gods that he might once see the sun near at hand, to
comprehend the form, greatness, and beauty of it; even though he should
thereby be immediately burned.” He would at the price of his life
purchase a knowledge, of which the use and possession should at the same
time be taken from him; and for this sudden and vanishing knowledge
lose all the other knowledge he had in present, or might afterwards have
acquired.
I cannot easily persuade myself that Epicurus, Plato, and Pytagoras,
have given us their atom, idea and numbers, for current pay. They were
too wise to establish their articles of faith upon things so disputable
and uncertain. But in that obscurity and ignorance in which the world
then was, every one of these great men endeavoured to present some kind
of image or reflection of light, and worked their brains for inventions
that might have a pleasant and subtle appearance; provided that, though
false, they might make good their ground against those that would oppose
them. _Unicuique ista pro ingenio finguntur, non ex scientiæ vi._ “These
things every one fancies according to his wit, and not by any power of
knowledge.”
One of the ancients, who was reproached, “That he professed philosophy,
of which he nevertheless in his own judgment made no great account,”
made answer, “That this was truly to philosophize.”
They wished to consider all, to balance every thing, and found that an
employment well suited to our natural curiosity. Some things they wrote
for the benefit of public society, as their religions; and for that
consideration it was but reasonable that they should not examine public
opinions to the quick, that they might not disturb the common obedience
to the laws and customs of their country.
Plato treats of this mystery with a raillery manifest enough; for where
he writes according to his own method he gives no certain rule. When he
plays the legislator he borrows a magisterial and positive style, and
boldly there foists in his most fantastic inventions, as fit to persuade
the vulgar, as impossible to be believed by himself; knowing very well
how fit we are to receive all sorts of impressions, especially the most
immoderate and preposterous; and yet, in his _Laws_, he takes singular
care that nothing be sung in public but poetry, of which the fiction and
fabulous relations tend to some advantageous end; it being so easy to
imprint all sorts of phantasms in human minds, that it were injustice
not to feed them rather with profitable untruths than with untruths that
are unprofitable and hurtful. He says very roundly, in his _Republic,_
“That it is often necessary, for the benefit of men, to deceive them.”
It is very easy to distinguish that some of the sects have more followed
truth, and the others utility, by which the last have gained their
reputation. ‘Tis the misery of our condition that often that which
presents itself to our imagination for the truest does not appear the
most useful to life. The boldest sects, as the Epicurean, Pyrrhonian,
and the new Academic, are yet constrained to submit to the civil law at
the end of the account.
There are other subjects that they have tumbled and tossed about, some
to the right and others to the left, every one endeavouring, right or
wrong, to give them some kind of colour; for, having found nothing so
abstruse that they would not venture to speak of, they are very
often forced to forge weak and ridiculous conjectures; not that they
themselves looked upon them as any foundation, or establishing any
certain truth, but merely for exercise. _Non tam id sensisse quod
dicerent, quam exercere ingénia materio difficultate videntur voluisse._
“They seem not so much themselves to have believed what they said, as to
have had a mind to exercise their wits in the difficulty of the
matter.” And if we did not take it thus, how should we palliate so
great inconstancy, variety, and vanity of opinions, as we see have been
produced by those excellent and admirable men? As, for example, what
can be more vain than to imagine, to guess at God, by our analogies and
conjectures? To direct and govern him and the world by our capacities
and our laws? And to serve ourselves, at the expense of the divinity,
with what small portion of capacity he has been pleased to impart to
our natural condition; and because we cannot extend our sight to his
glorious throne, to have brought him down to our corruption and our
miseries?
Of all human and ancient opinions concerning religion, that seems to
me the most likely and most excusable, that acknowledged God as an
incomprehensible power, the original and preserver of all things, all
goodness, all perfection, receiving and taking in good part the honour
and reverence that man paid him, under what method, name, or ceremonies
soever--
Jupiter omnipotens, rerum, regumque, deûmque,
Progenitor, genitrixque.
“Jove, the almighty, author of all things,
The father, mother, of both gods and kings.”
This zeal has universally been looked upon from heaven with a gracious
eye. All governments have reaped fruit from their devotion; impious
men and actions have everywhere had suitable events. Pagan histories
acknowledge dignity, order, justice, prodigies, and oracles, employed
for their profit and instruction in their fabulous religions; God,
through his mercy, vouchsafing, by these temporal benefits, to cherish
the tender principles of a kind of brutish knowledge that natural reason
gave them of him, through the deceiving images of their dreams. Not only
deceiving and false, but impious also and injurious, are those that man
has forged from his own invention: and of all the religions that St.
Paul found in repute at Athens, that which they had dedicated “to the
unknown God” seemed to him the most to be excused.
Pythagoras shadowed the truth a little more closely, judging that
the knowledge of this first cause and being of beings ought to be
indefinite, without limitation, without declaration; that it was nothing
else than the extreme effort of our imagination towards perfection,
every one amplifying the idea according to the talent of his capacity.
But if Numa attempted to conform the devotion of his people to this
project; to attach them to a religion purely mental, without any
prefixed object and material mixture, he undertook a thing of no use;
the human mind could never support itself floating in such an infinity
of inform thoughts; there is required some certain image to be presented
according to its own model. The divine majesty has thus, in some sort,
suffered himself to be circumscribed in corporal limits for our
advantage. His supernatural and celestial sacraments have signs of our
earthly condition; his adoration is by sensible offices and words; for
‘tis man that believes and prays. I shall omit the other arguments upon
this subject; but a man would have much ado to make me believe that the
sight of our crucifixes, that the picture of our Saviour’s passion, that
the ornaments and ceremonious motions of our churches, that the voices
accommodated to the devotion of our thoughts, and that emotion of the
senses, do not warm the souls of the people with a religious passion of
very advantageous effect.
Of those to whom they have given a body, as necessity required in that
universal blindness, I should, I fancy, most incline to those who adored
the sun:--
La Lumière commune,
L’oil du monde; et si Dieu au chef porte des yeux,
Les rayons du soleil sont ses yeulx radieux,
Qui donnent vie à touts, nous maintiennent et gardent,
Et les faictsdes humains en ce monde regardent:
Ce beau, ce grand soleil qui nous faict les saisons,
Selon qu’il entre ou sort de ses douze maisons;
Qui remplit l’univers de ses vertus cognues;
Qui d’un traict de ses yeulx nous dissipe les nues;
L’esprit, l’ame du monde, ardent et flamboyant,
En la course d’un jour tout le Ciel tournoyant;
Plein d’immense grandeur, rond, vagabond, et ferme;
Lequel tient dessoubs luy tout le monde pour terme:
En repos, sans repos; oysif, et sans séjour;
Fils aisné de nature, et le père du jour:
“The common light that equal shines on all,
Diffused around the whole terrestrial ball;
And, if the almighty Ruler of the skies
Has eyes, the sunbeams are his radiant eyes,
That life and safety give to young and old,
And all men’s actions upon earth behold.
This great, this beautiful, the glorious sun,
Who makes their course the varied seasons run;
That with his virtues fills the universe,
And with one glance can sullen clouds disperse;
Earth’s life and soul, that, flaming in his sphere,
Surrounds the heavens in one day’s career;
Immensely great, moving yet firm and round,
Who the whole world below has made his bound;
At rest, without rest, idle without stay,
Nature’s first son, and father of the day:”
forasmuch as, beside this grandeur and beauty of his, ‘tis the only
piece of this machine that we discover at the remotest distance from us;
and by that means so little known that they were pardonable for entering
into so great admiration and reverence of it.
Thales, who first inquired into this sort of matter, believed God to be
a Spirit that made all things of water; Anaximander, that the gods
were always dying and entering into life again; and that there were an
infinite number of worlds; Anaximines, that the air was God, that he
was procreate and immense, always moving. Anaxagoras the first, was of
opinion that the description and manner of all things were conducted by
the power and reason of an infinite spirit. Alcmæon gave divinity to
the sun, moon, and stars, and to the soul. Pythagoras made God a spirit,
spread over the nature of all things, whence our souls are extracted;
Parmenides, a circle surrounding the heaven, and supporting the world by
the ardour of light. Empedocles pronounced the four elements, of which
all things are composed, to be gods; Protagoras had nothing to say,
whether they were or were not, or what they were; Democritus was one
while of opinion that the images and their circuitions were gods;
another while, the nature that darts out those images; and then,
our science and intelligence. Plato divides his belief into several
opinions; he says, in his _Timæus_, that the Father of the World cannot
be named; in his Laws, that men are not to inquire into his being; and
elsewhere, in the very same books, he makes the world, the heavens, the
stars, the earth, and our souls, gods; admitting, moreover, those which
have been received by ancient institution in every republic.
Xenophon reports a like perplexity in Socrates’s doctrine; one while
that men are not to inquire into the form of God, and presently makes
him maintain that the sun is God, and the soul God; that there is but
one God, and then that there are many. Speusippus, the nephew of Plato,
makes God a certain power governing all things, and that he has a soul.
Aristotle one while says it is the spirit, and another the world; one
while he gives the world another master, and another while makes God the
heat of heaven. Zenocrates makes eight, five named amongst the planets;
the sixth composed of all the fixed stars, as of so many members; the
seventh and eighth, the sun and moon. Heraclides Ponticus does nothing
but float in his opinion, and finally deprives God of sense, and makes
him shift from one form to another, and at last says that it is heaven
and earth. Theophrastus wanders in the same irresolution amongst his
fancies, attributing the superintendency of the world one while to the
understanding, another while to heaven, and then to the stars. Strato
says that ‘tis nature, she having the power of generation, augmentation,
and diminution, without form and sentiment Zeno says ‘tis the law of
nature, commanding good and prohibiting evil; which law is an animal;
and takes away the accustomed gods, Jupiter, Juno, and Vesta. Diogenes
Apolloniates, that ‘tis air. Zenophanes makes God round, seeing and
hearing, not breathing, and having nothing in common with human nature.
Aristo thinks the form of God to be incomprehensible, deprives him
of sense, and knows not whether he be an animal or something else;
Cleanthes, one while supposes it to be reason, another while the world,
another the soul of nature, and then the supreme heat rolling about, and
environing all. Perseus, Zeno’s disciple, was of opinion that men have
given the title of gods to such as have been useful, and have added
any notable advantage to human life, and even to profitable things
themselves. Chrysippus made a confused heap of all the preceding
theories, and reckons, amongst a thousand forms of gods that he makes,
the men also that have been deified. Diagoras and Theodoras flatly
denied that there were any gods at all. Epicurus makes the gods shining,
transparent, and perflable, lodged as betwixt two forts, betwixt two
worlds, secure from blows, clothed in a human figure, and with such
members as we have; which members are to them of no use:--
Ego Deum genus esse semper duxi, et dicam colitum;
Sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus.
“I ever thought that gods above there were,
But do not think they care what men do here.”
Trust to your philosophy, my masters; and brag that you have found
the bean in the cake when you see what a rattle is here with so many
philosophical heads! The perplexity of so many worldly forms has gained
this over me, that manners and opinions contrary to mine do not so much
displease as instruct me; nor so much make me proud as they humble me,
in comparing them. And all other choice than what comes from the express
and immediate hand of God seems to me a choice of very little privilege.
The policies of the world are no less opposite upon this subject than
the schools, by which we may understand that fortune itself is not more
variable and inconstant, nor more blind and inconsiderate, than our
reason. The things that are most unknown are most proper to be deified;
wherefore to make gods of ourselves, as the ancients did, exceeds the
extremest weakness of understanding. I would much rather have gone along
with those who adored the serpent, the dog, or the ox; forasmuch as
their nature and being is less known to us, and that we have more room
to imagine what we please of those beasts, and to attribute to them
extraordinary faculties. But to have made gods of our own condition, of
whom we ought to know the imperfections; and to have attributed to
them desire, anger, revenge, marriages, generation, alliances, love,
jealousy, our members and bones, our fevers and pleasures, our death and
obsequies; this must needs have proceeded from a marvellous inebriety of
the human understanding;
Quæ procul usque adeo divino ab numine distant,
Inque Deûm numéro quæ sint indigna videri;
“From divine natures these so distant are,
They are unworthy of that character.”
_Formo, otates, vestitus, omatus noti sunt; genera, conjugia,
cognationes, omniaque traducta ad similitudinem imbellitar tis
humano: nam et perturbatis animis inducuntur; accipimus enim deorurn
cupiditates, cegritudines, iracundias_; “Their forms, ages, clothes,
and ornaments are known: their descents, marriages, and kindred, and all
adapted to the similitude of human weakness; for they are represented to
us with anxious minds, and we read of the lusts, sickness, and anger
of the gods;” as having attributed divinity not only to faith,
virtue, honour, concord, liberty, victory, and piety; but also to
voluptuousness, fraud, death, envy, old age, misery; to fear, fever, ill
fortune, and other injuries of our frail and transitory life:--
Quid juvat hoc, templis nostros inducere mores?
O curvæ in terris animæ et colestium inanes!
“O earth-born souls! by earth-born passions led,
To every spark of heav’nly influence dead!
Think ye that what man values will inspire
In minds celestial the same base desire?”
The Egyptians, with an impudent prudence, interdicted, upon pain of
hanging, that any one should say that their gods, Serapis and Isis, had
formerly been men; and yet no one was ignorant that they had been
such; and their effigies, represented with the finger upon the mouth,
signified, says Varro, that mysterious decree to their priests, to
conceal their mortal original, as it must by necessary consequence
cancel all the veneration paid to them. Seeing that man so much desired
to equal himself to God, he had done better, says Cicero, to have
attracted those divine conditions to himself, and drawn them down hither
below, than to send his corruption and misery up on high; but, to take
it right, he has several ways done both the one and the other, with like
vanity of opinion.
When philosophers search narrowly into the hierarchy of their gods, and
make a great bustle about distinguishing their alliances, offices, and
power, I cannot believe they speak as they think. When Plato describes
Pluto’s orchard to us, and the bodily conveniences or pains that attend
us after the ruin and annihilation of our bodies, and accommodates them
to the feeling we have in this life:--
Secreti celant calles, et myrtea circum
Sylva tegit; curæ non ipsâ in morte relinquunt;
“In secret vales and myrtle groves they lie,
Nor do cares leave them even when they die.”
when Mahomet promises his followers a Paradise hung with tapestry,
gilded and enamelled with gold and precious stones, furnished with
wenches of excelling beauty, rare wines, and delicate dishes; it
is easily discerned that these are deceivers that accommodate their
promises to our sensuality, to attract and allure us by hopes and
opinions suitable to our mortal appetites. And yet some amongst us
are fallen into the like error, promising to themselves after the
resurrection a terrestrial and temporal life, accompanied with all sorts
of worldly conveniences and pleasures. Can we believe that Plato, he
who had such heavenly conceptions, and was so well acquainted with the
Divinity as thence to derive the name of the Divine Plato, ever thought
that the poor creature, man, had any thing in him applicable to that
incomprehensible power? and that he believed that the weak holds we are
able to take were capable, or the force of our understanding sufficient,
to participate of beatitude or eternal pains? We should then tell him
from human reason: “If the pleasures thou dost promise us in the other
life are of the same kind that I have enjoyed here below, this has
nothing in common with infinity; though all my five natural senses
should be even loaded with pleasure, and my soul full of all the
contentment it could hope or desire, we know what all this amounts to,
all this would be nothing; if there be any thing of mine there, there is
nothing divine; if this be no more than what may belong to our present
condition, it cannot be of any value. All contentment of mortals is
mortal. Even the knowledge of our parents, children, and friends,
if that can affect and delight us in the other world, if that still
continues a satisfaction to us there, we still remain in earthly and
finite conveniences. We cannot as we ought conceive the greatness of
these high and divine promises, if we could in any sort conceive them;
to have a worthy imagination of them we must imagine them unimaginable,
inexplicable, and incomprehensible, and absolutely another thing than
those of our miserable experience.” “Eye hath not seen,” saith St. Paul,
“nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man, the things
that God hath prepared for them that love him.” And if, to render us
capable, our being were reformed and changed (as thou, Plato, sayest, by
thy purifications), it ought to be so extreme and total a change, that
by physical doctrine it be no more us;--
Hector erat tunc cum bello certabat; at ille
Tractus ab Æmonio non erat Hector eqao;
He Hector was whilst he could fight, but when
Dragg’d by Achilles’ steeds, no Hector then;
it must be something else that must receive these recompenses:--
Quod mutatur... dissolvitur; interit ergo;
Trajiciuntur enim partes, atque ordine migrant.
“Things changed dissolved are, and therefore die;
Their parts are mix’d, and from their order fly.”
For in Pythagoras’s metempsychosis, and the change of habitation that
he imagined in souls, can we believe that the lion, in whom the soul of
Cæsar is enclosed, does espouse Cæsar’s passions, or that the lion
is he? For if it was still Cæsar, they would be in the right who,
controverting this opinion with Plato, reproach him that the son
might be seen to ride his mother transformed into a mule, and the like
absurdities. And can we believe that in the mutations that are made of
the bodies of animals into others of the same kind, the new comers are
not other than their predecessors? From the ashes of a phoenix, a worm,
they say, is engendered, and from that another phoenix; who can
imagine that this second phoenix is no other than the first? We see our
silk-worms, as it were, die and wither; and from this withered body a
butterfly is produced; and from that another worm; how ridiculous would
it be to imagine that this was still the first! That which once has
ceased to be is no more:--
Nec, si materiam nostram collegerit ætas
Post obitum, rursumque redegerit, ut sita nunc est,
Atque iterum nobis fuerint data lumina vitæ,
Pertineat quidquam tamen ad nos id quoque factum,
Interrupta semel cum sit repetentia nostra.
“Neither tho’ time should gather and restore
Our matter to the form it was before,
And give again new light to see withal,
Would that new figure us concern at all;
Or we again ever the same be seen,
Our being having interrupted been.”
And, Plato, when thou sayest in another place that it shall be the
spiritual part of man that will be concerned in the fruition of the
recompense of another life, thou tellest us a thing wherein there is as
little appearance of truth:--
Scilicet, avolsis radicibus, ut nequit ullam
Dispicere ipsa oculus rem, seorsum corpore toto;
“No more than eyes once from their optics torn,
Can ever after any thing discern;”
for, by this account, it would no more be man, nor consequently us,
who would be concerned in this enjoyment; for we are composed of two
principal essential parts, the separation of which is the death and ruin
of our being:--
Inter enim jecta est vital pausa, vageque
Deerrarunt passim motus ab sensibus omnes;
“When once that pause of life is come between,
‘Tis just the same as we had never been;”
we cannot say that the man suffers when the worms feed upon his members,
and that the earth consumes them:--
Et nihil hoc ad nos, qui coltu conjugioque
Corporis atque animæ consistimus uniter apti.
“What’s that to us? for we are only we,
While soul and body in one frame agree.”
Moreover, upon what foundation of their justice can the gods take notice
of or reward man after his death and virtuous actions, since it was
themselves that put them in the way and mind to do them? And why should
they be offended at or punish him for wicked ones, since themselves have
created in him so frail a condition, and when, with one glance of their
will, they might prevent him from falling? Might not Epicurus, with
great colour of human reason, object this to Plato, did he not often
save himself with this sentence: “That it is impossible to establish any
thing certain of the immortal nature by the mortal?” She does nothing
but err throughout, but especially when she meddles with divine things.
Who does more evidently perceive this than we? For although we have
given her certain and infallible principles; and though we have
enlightened her steps with the sacred lamp of truth that it has pleased
God to communicate to us; we daily see, nevertheless, that if she swerve
never so little from the ordinary path; and that she stray from, or
wander out of the way set out and beaten by the church, how soon she
loses, confounds and fetters herself, tumbling and floating in this
vast, turbulent, and waving sea of human opinions, without restraint,
and without any determinate end; so soon as she loses that great and
common road, she enters into a labyrinth of a thousand several paths.
Man cannot be any thing but what he is, nor imagine beyond the reach of
his capacity. “Tis a greater presumption,” says Plutarch, “in them who
are but men to attempt to speak and discourse of the gods and demi-gods
than it is in a man utterly ignorant of music to give an opinion of
singing; or in a man who never saw a camp to dispute about arms and
martial affairs, presuming by some light conjecture to understand the
effects of an art he is totally a stranger to.” Antiquity, I believe,
thought to put a compliment upon, and to add something to, the divine
grandeur in assimilating it to man, investing it with his faculties,
and adorning it with his ugly humours and most shameful necessities;
offering it our aliments to eat, presenting it with our dances,
mummeries, and farces, to divert it; with our vestments to cover it,
and our houses to inhabit, coaxing it with the odour of incense and the
sounds of music, with festoons and nosegays; and to accommodate it to
our vicious passions, flattering its justice with inhuman vengeance, and
with the ruin and dissipation of things by it created and preserved as
Tiberius Sempronius, who burnt the rich spoils and arms he had gained
from the enemy in Sardinia for a sacrifice to Vulcan; and Paulus
Æmilius, those of Macedonia, to Mars and Minerva; and Alexander,
arriving at the Indian Ocean, threw several great vessels of gold into
the sea, in honour of Thetes; and moreover loading her altars with
a slaughter not of innocent beasts only, but of men also, as several
nations, and ours among the rest, were commonly used to do; and I
believe there is no nation under the sun that has not done the same:--
Sulmone creatos
Quatuor hîc juvenes, totidem quos educat Ufens,
Viventes rapit, inferias quos immolet umbris.
“Four sons of Sulmo, four whom Ufens bred,
He took in flight, and living victims led,
To please the ghost of Pallas, and expire
In sacrifice before his fun’ral pyre.”
The Getæ hold themselves to be immortal, and that their death is nothing
but a journey to their god Zamolxis. Every five years they dispatch some
one among them to him, to entreat of him such necessaries as they stand
in need of. This envoy is chosen by lot, and the form of dispatching
him, after he has been instructed by word of mouth what he is to
deliver, is that of the assistants, three hold up as many javelins, upon
which the rest throw his body with all their force. If he happen to
be wounded in a mortal part, and that he immediately dies, ‘tis held a
certain argument of divine favour; but if he escapes, he is looked upon
as a wicked and execrable wretch, and another is dismissed after the
same manner in his stead. Amestris, the mother of Xerxes, being grown
old, caused at once fourteen young men, of the best families of Persia,
to be buried alive, according to the religion of the country, to gratify
some infernal deity. And even to this day the idols of Themixtitan
are cemented with the blood of little children, and they delight in no
sacrifice but of these pure and infantine souls; a justice thirsty of
innocent blood:--
Tantum religio potuit suadere maloram.
“Such impious use was of religion made,
So many demon acts it could persuade.”
The Carthaginians immolated their own children to Saturn; and those who
had none of their own bought of others, the father and mother being in
the mean time obliged to assist at the ceremony with a gay and contented
countenance.
It was a strange fancy to think to gratify the divine bounty with our
afflictions; like the Lacedemonians, who regaled their Diana with the
tormenting of young boys, whom they caused to be whipped for her sake,
very often to death. It was a savage humour to imagine to gratify the
architect by the subversion of his building, and to think to take away
the punishment due to the guilty by punishing the innocent; and that
poor Iphigenia, at the port of Aulis, should by her death and immolation
acquit, towards God, the whole army of the Greeks from all the crimes
they had committed;
Et casta inceste, nubendi tempore in ipso,
Hostia concideret mactatu mosta parentis;
“That the chaste virgin in her nuptial band
Should die by an unnat’ral father’s hand;”
and that the two noble and generous souls of the two Decii, the father
and the son, to incline the favour of the gods to be propitious to the
affairs of Rome, should throw themselves headlong into the thickest of
the enemy: _Quo fuit tanta deorum iniquitas, ut placari populo Romano
non possent, nisi tales viri occidissent?_ “How great an injustice in
the gods was it that they could not be reconciled to the people of Rome
unless such men perished!” To which may be added, that it is not for the
criminal to cause himself to be scourged according to his own measure
nor at his own time, but that it purely belongs to the judge, who
considers nothing as chastisements but the penalty that he appoints, and
cannot call that punishment which proceeds from the consent of him that
suffers. The divine vengeance presupposes an absolute dissent in us,
both for its justice and for our own penalty. And therefore it was a
ridiculous humour of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, who, to interrupt the
continued course of his good fortune, and to balance it, went and threw
the dearest and most precious jewel he had into the sea, believing
that by this voluntary and antedated mishap he bribed and satisfied
the revolution and vicissitude of fortune; and she, to mock his folly,
ordered it so that the same jewel came again into his hands, found
in the belly of a fish. And then to what end were those tearings and
dismemberments of the Corybantes, the Menades, and, in our times, of the
Mahometans, who slash their faces, bosoms, and limbs, to gratify their
prophet; seeing that the offence lies in the will, not in the breast,
eyes, genitals, roundness of form, the shoulders, or the throat?
_Tantus est perturbâto mentis, et sedibus suis pilso, furor, ut sic dii
placentur, quemadmodum ne homines quidem soviunt._ “So great is the
fury and madness of troubled minds when once displaced from the seat of
reason, as if the gods should be appeased with what even men are not so
cruel as to approve.” The use of this natural contexture has not only
respect to us, but also to the service of God and other men; ‘tis as
unjust for us voluntarily to wound or hurt it as to kill ourselves upon
any pretence whatever; it seems to be great cowardice and treason to
exercise cruelty upon, and to destroy, the functions of the body that
are stupid and servile, to spare the soul the solicitude of governing
them according to reason: _Ubi iratos deos timent, qui sic propitios
habere merentur? In regiæ libidinis voluptatem castrati sunt quidam;
sed nemo sibi, ne vir esset, jubente domino, mantis intulit._ “Where are
they so afraid of the anger of the gods as to merit their favour at that
rate? Some, indeed, have been made eunuchs for the lust of princes: but
no man at his master’s command has put his own hand to unman himself.”
So did they fill their religion with several ill effects:--
Sæpius olim Religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta.
“In elder times Religion did commit most fearful crimes.”
Now nothing of ours can in any sort be compared or likened unto
the divine nature, which will not blemish and stain it with much
imperfection.
How can that infinite beauty, power, and goodness, admit of any
correspondence or similitude to such abject things as we are, without
extreme wrong and manifest dishonour to his divine greatness? _Infirmum
dei fortius est hominibs; et stultum dei sapientius est hominibus._ “For
the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is
stronger than men.” Stilpo, the philosopher, being asked, “Whether
the gods were delighted with our adorations and sacrifices?”--“You are
indiscreet,” answered he; “let us withdraw apart, if you would talk of
such things.” Nevertheless, we prescribe him bounds, we keep his power
besieged by our reasons (I call our ravings and dreams reason, with the
dispensation of philosophy, which says, “That the wicked man, and even
the fool, go mad by reason, but a particular form of reason”), we
would subject him to the vain and feeble appearances of our
understandings,--him who has made both us and our knowledge. Because
that nothing is made of nothing, God therefore could not make the world
without matter. What! has God put into our hands the keys and most
secret springs of his power? Is he obliged not to exceed the limits of
our knowledge? Put the case, O man! that thou hast been able here to
mark some footsteps of his effects; dost thou therefore think that he
has employed all he can, and has crowded all his forms and ideas in this
work? Thou seest nothing but the order and revolution of this little
cave in which thou art lodged, if, indeed, thou dost see so much;
whereas his divinity has an infinite jurisdiction beyond. This part is
nothing in comparison of the whole:--
Omnia cum colo, terràque, manque,
Nil sunt ad summam summal totius omnem.
“The earth, the sea, and skies, from pole to pole,
Are small, nay, nothing to the mighty whole.”
‘Tis a municipal law that thou allegest, thou knowest not what is
universal Tie thyself to that to which thou art subject, but not him; he
is not of thy brotherhood, thy fellow-citizen, or companion. If he has
in some sort communicated himself unto thee, ‘tis not to debase himself
unto thy littleness, nor to make thee comptroller of his power; the
human body cannot fly to the clouds; rules are for thee. The sun runs
every day his ordinary course; the bounds of the sea and the earth
cannot be confounded; the water is unstable and without firmness; a
wall, unless it be broken, is impenetrable to a solid body; a man cannot
preserve his life in the flames; he cannot be both in heaven and upon
earth, and corporally in a thousand places at once. ‘Tis for thee that
he has made these rules; ‘tis thee that they concern; he has manifested
to Christians that he has enfranchised himself from them all when it
pleased him. And, in truth, why, almighty as he is, should he have
limited his power within any certain bounds? In favour of whom should he
have renounced his privilege? Thy reason has in no other thing more of
likelihood and foundation than in that wherein it persuades thee that
there is a plurality of worlds:--
Terramque et solem, lunam, mare, estera quo rant,
Non esse unica, sed numéro magis innumerali.
“That earth, sun, moon, sea, and the rest that are,
Not single, but innumerable were.”
The most eminent minds of elder times believed it; and some of this
age of ours, compelled by the appearances of human reason, do the same;
forasmuch as in this fabric that we behold there is nothing single and
one,
Cum in summà res nulla sit una,
Unica quo gignatur, et unica solaque crescat;
“Since nothing’s single in this mighty place,
That can alone beget, alone increase;”
and that all the kinds are multiplied in some number; by which it seems
not to be likely that God should have made this work only without a
companion; and that the matter of this form should have been totally
drained in this individual.
Quare etiam atque etiam tales fateare necesse est
Esse alios alibi congressus materiali;
Qualis hic est, avido complexu quem tenet æther.
“Wherefore ‘tis necessary to confess
That there must elsewhere be the like congress
Of the like matter, which the airy space
Holds fast within its infinite embrace.”
Especially if it be a living creature, which its motions render so
credible that Plato affirms it, and that many of our people do either
confirm, or dare not deny it; no more than that ancient opinion that
the heavens, the stars, and other members of the world, are creatures
composed of body and soul, mortal in respect of their composition,
but immortal by the determination of the Creator. Now if there be many
worlds, as Democritus, Epicurus, and almost all philosophy has believed,
what do we know that the principles and rules of this of ours in like
manner concern the rest? They may peradventure have another form and
another polity. Epicurus supposes them either like or unlike. We see
in this world an infinite difference and variety, only by distance of
places; neither com, wine, nor any of our animals are to be seen in that
new comer of the world discovered by our fathers; ‘tis all there another
thing; and in times past, do but consider in how many parts of the world
they had no knowledge either of Bacchus or Ceres. If Pliny and Herodotus
are to be believed, there are in certain places kinds of men very little
resembling us, mongrel and ambiguous forms, betwixt the human and brutal
natures; there are countries where men are bom without heads, having
their mouth and eyes in their breast; where they are all hermaphrodites;
where they go on all four; where they have but one eye in the forehead,
and a head more like a dog than like ours; where they are half fish the
lower part, and live in the water; where the women bear at five years
old, and live but eight; where the head and the skin of the forehead is
so hard that a sword will not touch it, but rebounds again; where men
have no beards; nations that know not the use of fire; others that eject
seed of a black colour. What shall we say of those that naturally change
themselves into wolves, colts, and then into men again? And if it be
true, as Plutarch says, that in some place of the Indies there are men
without mouths, who nourish themselves with the smell of certain odours,
how many of our descriptions are false? He is no longer risible, nor,
perhaps, capable of reason and society. The disposition and cause of our
internal composition would then for the most part be to no purpose, and
of no use.
Moreover, how many things are there in our own knowledge that oppose
those fine rules we have cut out for and prescribe to nature? And yet we
must undertake to circumscribe thereto God himself! How many things do
we call miraculous, and contrary to nature? This is done by every nation
and by every man, according to the proportion of his ignorance. How many
occult properties and quintessences do we daily discover? For, for us
to go “according to nature,” is no more but to go “according to our
understanding,” as far as that is able to follow, and as far as we
are able to see into it; all beyond that is, forsooth, monstrous and
irregular. Now, by this account, all things shall be monstrous to the
wisest and most understanding men; for human reason has persuaded them
that there was no manner of ground nor foundation, not so much as to be
assured that snow is white, and Anaxagoras affirmed it to be black; if
there be any thing, or if there be nothing; if there be knowledge
or ignorance, which Metrodorus of Chios denied that man was able to
determine; or whether we live, as Euripides doubts whether the life we
live is life, or whether that we call death be not life, [--Greek--]
and not without some appearance. For why do we derive the title of being
from this instant, which is but a flash in the infinite course of an
eternal night, and so short an interruption of our perpetual and natural
condition, death possessing all the before and after this moment, and
also a good part of the moment itself. Others swear there is no motion
at all, as followers of Melissus, and that nothing stirs. For if there
be but one, neither can that spherical motion be of any use to him,
nor motion from one place to another, as Plato proves: “That there is
neither generation nor corruption in nature.” Protagoras says that there
is nothing in nature but doubt; that a man may equally dispute of all
things; and even of this, whether a man can equally dispute of all
things; Nausiphanes, that of things which seem to be, nothing is
more than it is not; that there is nothing certain but uncertainty;
Parmenides, that of that which seems, there is no one thing in general;
that there is but one thing; Zeno, that one same is not, and that there
is nothing; if there were one thing, it would either be in another or in
itself; if it be in another, they are two; if it be in itself, they are
yet two; the comprehending, and the comprehended. According to these
doctrines the nature of things is no other than a shadow, either false
or vain.
This way of speaking in a Christian man has ever seemed to me very
indiscreet and irreverent. “God cannot die; God cannot contradict
himself; God cannot do this or that.” I do not like to have the divine
power so limited by the laws of men’s mouths; and the idea which
presents itself to us in those propositions ought to be more religiously
and reverently expressed.
Our speaking has its failings and defects, as well as all the rest. Most
of the occasions of disturbance in the world are grammatical ones; our
suits only spring from disputes as to the interpretation of laws; and
most wars proceed from the inability of ministers clearly to express the
conventions and treaties of amity of princes. How many quarrels, and
of how great importance, has the doubt of the meaning of this syllable,
_hoc_,* created in the world? Let us take the clearest conclusion that
logic itself
* Montaigne here refers to the controversies between
the Catholics and Protestants about transubstantiation.
presents us withal; if you say, “It is fine weather,” and that you
say true, it is then fine weather. Is not this a very certain form of
speaking? And yet it will deceive us; that it will do so, let us follow
the example: If you say, “I lie,” if you say true, you do lie. The art,
the reason, and force of the conclusion of this, are the same with the
other, and yet we are gravelled. The Pyrrhonian philosophers, I see,
cannot express their general conception in any kind of speaking; for
they would require a new language on purpose; ours is all formed of
affirmative propositions, which are totally antarctic to them; insomuch
that when they say “I doubt,” they are presently taken by the throat, to
make them confess that at least they know and are assured that they do
doubt. By which means they have been compelled to shelter themselves
under this medical comparison, without which their humour would be
inexplicable: when they pronounce, “I know not,” or, “I doubt,” they say
that this proposition carries off itself with the rest, no more nor less
than rhubarb, that drives out the ill humours, and carries itself
off with them. This fancy will be more certainly understood by
interrogation: “What do I know?” as I bear it with the emblem of a
balance.
See what use they make of this irreverent way of speaking; in the
present disputes about our religion, if you press its adversaries too
hard, they will roundly tell you, “that it is not in the power of God to
make it so, that his body should be in paradise and upon earth, and in
several places at once.” And see, too, what advantage the old scoffer
made of this. “At least,” says he, “it is no little consolation to man
to see that God cannot do all things; for he cannot kill himself, though
he would; which is the greatest privilege we have in our condition; he
cannot make mortal immortal, nor revive the dead; nor make it so, that
he who has lived has not; nor that he who has had honours has not had
them; having no other right to the past than that of oblivion.” And that
the comparison of man to God may yet be made out by jocose examples: “He
cannot order it so,” says he, “that twice ten shall not be twenty.”
This is what he says, and what a Christian ought to take heed shall not
escape his lips. Whereas, on the contrary, it seems as if men studied
this foolish daring of language, to reduce God to their own measure:--
Cras vel atrâ Nube polum, Pater, occupato,
Vel sole puro; non tamen irritum
Quodcumque retro est efficiet, neque
Diffinget infectumque reddet
Quod fugiens semel hora vexit.
“To-morrow, let it shine or rain,
Yet cannot this the past make vain:
Nor uncreate and render void
That which was yesterday enjoyed.”
When we say that the infinity of ages, as well past as to come, are but
one instant with God; that his goodness, wisdom, and power are the same
with his essence; our mouths speak it, but our understandings apprehend
it not; and yet, such is our vain opinion of ourselves, that we must
make the Divinity to pass through our sieve; and thence proceed all the
dreams and errors with which the world abounds, whilst we reduce and
weigh in our balance a thing so far above our poise. _Mirum quo procédat
improbitas cordis humani, parvulo aliquo intritata successu._ “‘Tis
wonderful to what the wickedness of man’s heart will proceed, if
elevated with the least success.” How magisterially and insolently does
Epicurus reprove the Stoics, for maintaining that the truly good and
happy being appertained only to God, and that the wise man had nothing
but a shadow and resemblance of it! How temerariously have they bound
God to destiny (a thing which, by my consent, none that bears the name
of a Christian shall ever do again)! and Thales, Plato, and Pythagoras
have enslaved him to necessity. This arrogance of attempting to discover
God with our eyes has been the cause that an eminent person among us has
attributed to the Divinity a corporal form; and is the reason of what
happens to us every day, of attributing to God important events, by a
particular assignment. Because they weigh with us, they conclude that
they also weigh with him, and that he has a more intent and vigilant
regard to them than to others of less moment to us or of ordinary
course: _Magna Dii curant, parva negligunt:_ “The gods are concerned at
great matters, but slight the small.” Listen to him; he will clear this
to you by his reason: _Nec in regnis quidem reges omnia minima curant:_
“Neither indeed do kings in their administration take notice of all the
least concerns.” As if to that King of kings it were more or less
to subvert a kingdom, or to move the leaf of a tree; or as if his
providence acted after another manner in inclining the event of a battle
than in the leap of a flea. The hand of his government is laid upon
every thing after the same manner, with the same power and order; our
interest does nothing towards it; our inclinations and measures sway
nothing with him. _Deus ita artifex magnus in magnis, ut minor non sit
in parvis:_ “God is so great an artificer in great things, that he is no
less in the least” Our arrogancy sets this blasphemous comparison
ever before us. Because our employments are a burden to us, Strato has
courteously been pleased to exempt the gods from all offices, as their
priests are; he makes nature produce and support all things; and
with her weights and motions make up the several parts of the world,
discharging human nature from the awe of divine judgments: _Quod beatum
æterumque sit, id nec habere negotii quicquam, nec exhibere alteri:_
“What is blessed and eternal has neither any business itself nor gives
any to another.” Nature will that in like things there should be a like
relation. The infinite number of mortals, therefore, concludes a
like number of immortals; the infinite things that kill and destroy
presupposes as many that preserve and profit. As the souls of the
gods, without tongue, eye, or ear, do every one of them feel amongst
themselves what the other feels, and judge our thoughts; so the souls of
men, when at liberty and loosed from the body, either by sleep or some
ecstacy, divine, foretell, and see things, which, whilst joined to the
body, they could not see. “Men,” says St. Paul, “professing themselves
to be wise, they become fools; and change the glory of the uncorruptible
God into an image made like corruptible man.” Do but take notice of the
juggling in the ancient deifications. After the great and stately pomp
of the funeral, so soon as the fire began to mount to the top of the
pyramid, and to catch hold of the couch where the body lay, they at the
same time turned out an eagle, which flying upward, signified that the
soul went into Paradise. We have a thousand medals, and particularly
of the worthy Faustina, where this eagle is represented carrying these
deified souls to heaven with their heels upwards. ‘Tis pity that we
should fool ourselves with our own fopperies and inventions,
Quod finxere, timent,
“They fear their own inventions,”
like children who are frighted with the same face of their playfellow,
that they themselves have smeared and smutted. _Quasi quicquam
infelicius sit homine, cui sua figmenta dominantur:_
“As if any thing could be more unhappy than man, who is insulted over by
his own imagination.” ‘Tis far from honouring him who made us, to honour
him that we have made. Augustus had more temples than Jupiter, served
with as much religion and belief of miracles. The Thracians, in return
of the benefits they had received from Agesilaus, came to bring him word
that they had canonized him: “Has your nation,” said he to them, “the
power to make gods of whom they please? Pray first deify some one
amongst yourselves, and when I shall see what advantage he has by it,
I will thank you for your offer.” Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot
make a worm, and yet he will be making gods by dozens. Hear Trismegistus
in praise of our sufficiency: “Of all the wonderful things, it surmounts
all wonder that man could find out the divine nature and make it.” And
take here the arguments of the school of philosophy itself:--
Nosse cui divos et coli munina soli,
Aut soli nescire, datum.
“To whom to know the deities of heaven,
Or know he knows them not, alone ‘tis given.”
“If there is a God, he is a living creature; if he be a living creature,
he has sense; and if he has sense, he is subject to corruption. If he
be without a body he is without a soul, and consequently without action;
and if he has a body, it is perishable.” Is not here a triumph? we
are incapable of having made the world; there must then be some more
excellent nature that has put a hand to the work. It were a foolish and
ridiculous arrogance to esteem ourselves the most perfect thing of the
universe. There must then be something that is better, and that must be
God. When you see a stately and stupendous edifice, though you do not
know who is the owner of it, you would yet conclude it was not built for
rats. And this divine structure, that we behold of the celestial
palace, have we not reason to believe that it is the residence of some
possessor, who is much greater than we? Is not the most supreme always
the most worthy? but we are in the lowest form. Nothing without a soul
and without reason can produce a living creature capable of reason. The
world produces us, the world then has soul and reason. Every part of us
is less than we. We are part of the world, the world therefore is endued
with wisdom and reason, and that more abundantly than we. ‘Tis a fine
thing to have a great government; the government of the world then
appertains to some happy nature. The stars do us no harm; they are then
full of goodness. We have need of nourishment; then so have the gods
also, and feed upon the vapours of the earth. Worldly goods are not
goods to God; therefore they are not goods to us; offending and being
offended are equally testimonies of imbecility; ‘tis therefore folly to
fear God. God is good by his nature; man by his industry, which is more.
The divine and human wisdom have no other distinction, but that the
first is eternal; but duration is no accession to wisdom, therefore we
are companions. We have life, reason, and liberty; we esteem goodness,
charity, and justice; these qualities are then in him. In conclusion,
building and destroying, the conditions of the Divinity, are forged by
man, according as they relate to himself. What a pattern, and what a
model! let us stretch, let us raise and swell human qualities as much as
we please; puff up thyself, poor man, yet more and more, and more:--
Non, si tu ruperis, inquit.
“Not if thou burst,” said he.
_Profecto non Deum, quern cogitare non possunt, sed semetip pro illo
cogitantes, non ilium, sed seipsos, non illi, sed sibi comparant?_
“Certainly they do not imagine God, whom they cannot imagine; but
they imagine themselves in his stead; they do not compare him, but
themselves, not to him, but to themselves.” In natural things the
effects do but half relate to their causes. What’s this to the purpose?
His condition is above the order of nature, too elevated, too remote,
and too mighty, to permit itself to be bound and fettered by our
conclusions. ‘Tis not through ourselves that we arrive at that place;
our ways lie too low. We are no nearer heaven on the top of Mount Cenis
than at the bottom of the sea; take the distance with your astrolabe.
They debase God even to the carnal knowledge of women, to so many times,
and so many generations. Paulina, the wife of Satuminus, a matron of
great reputation at Rome, thinking she lay with the god Serapis, found
herself in the arms of an amoroso of hers, through the panderism of the
priests of his temple. Varro, the most subtle and most learned of all
the Latin authors, in his book of theology, writes, that the sexton of
Hercules’s temple, throwing dice with one hand for himself, and with the
other for Hercules, played after that manner with him for a supper and
a wench; if he won, at the expense of the offerings; if he lost, at his
own. The sexton lost, and paid the supper and the wench. Her name was
Laurentina, who saw by night this god in her arms, who moreover told
her, that the first she met the next day, should give her a heavenly
reward; which proved to be Taruncius, a rich young man, who took her
home to his house, and in time left her his inheritrix. She, in her
turn, thinking to do a thing that would be pleasing to the god, left the
people of Rome heirs to her; and therefore had divine honours attributed
to her. As if it had not been sufficient that Plato was originally
descended from the gods by a double line, and that he had Neptune for
the common father of his race, it was certainly believed at Athens, that
Aristo, having a mind to enjoy the fair Perictione, could not, and
was warned by the god Apollo, in a dream, to leave her unpolluted and
untouched, till she should first be brought to bed. These were the
father and mother of Plato. How many ridiculous stories are there of
like cuckoldings, committed by the gods against poor mortal men! And how
many husbands injuriously scandaled in favour of the children! In the
Mahometan religion there are Merlins enough found by the belief of the
people; that is to say, children without fathers, spiritual, divinely
conceived in the wombs of virgins, and carry names that signify so much
in their language.
We are to observe that to every thing nothing is more dear and estimable
than its being (the lion, the eagle the dolphin, prize nothing above
their own kind); and that every thing assimilates the qualities of all
other things to its own proper qualities, which we may indeed extend
or contract, but that’s all; for beyond that relation and principle our
imagination cannot go, can guess at nothing else, nor possibly go out
thence, nor stretch beyond it; whence spring these ancient conclusions:
of all forms the most beautiful is that of man; therefore God must be
of that form. No one can be happy without virtue, nor virtue be without
reason, and reason cannot inhabit anywhere but in a human shape; God is
therefore clothed in a human figure. _Ita est informatum et anticipatum
mentibus nostris, ut homini, quum de Deo cogitet, forma occurrat
hu-mana._ “It is so imprinted in our minds, and the fancy is so
prepossessed with it, that when a man thinks of God, a human figure ever
presents itself to the imagination.” Therefore it was that Xenophanes
pleasantly said, “That if beasts frame any gods to themselves, as ‘tis
likely they do, they make them certainly such as themselves are, and
glorify themselves in it, as we do. For why may not a goose say thus;
“All the parts of the universe I have an interest in; the earth serves
me to walk upon; the sun to light me; the stars have their influence
upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters;
there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favourably as me;
I am the darling of nature! Is it not man that keeps, lodges, and serves
me? ‘Tis for me that he both sows and grinds; if he eats me he does the
same by his fellow-men, and so do I the worms that kill and devour him.”
As much might be said by a crane, and with greater confidence, upon the
account of the liberty of his flight, and the possession of that high
and beautiful region. _Tam blanda conciliatrix, et tam sui est lena ipsa
natura._ “So flattering and wheedling a bawd is nature to herself.”
Now by the same consequence, the destinies are then for us; for us the
world; it shines it thunders for us; creator and creatures, all are for
us; ‘tis the mark and point to which the universality of things aims.
Look into the records that philosophy has kept for two thousand years
and more, of the affairs of heaven; the gods all that while have
neither acted nor spoken but for man. She does not allow them any other
consultation or occupation. See them here against us in war:--
Domitosque Herculeâ manu
Telluris juvenes, unde periculum
Fulgens contre mu it domus
Saturai veteris.
“The brawny sons of earth, subdu’d by hand
Of Hercules on the Phlegræan strand,
Where the rude shock did such an uproar make,
As made old Saturn’s sparkling palace shake.”
And here you shall see them participate of our troubles, to make a
return for our having so often shared in theirs:--
Neptunus muros, magnoque emota tridenti
Fundamenta quatit, totamque à sedibus urbem
Emit: hie Juno Scæas sævissima portas Prima tenet.
“Amidst that smother Neptune holds his place,
Below the walls’ foundation drives his mace,
And heaves the city from its solid base.
See where in arms the cruel Juno stands,
Full in the Scæan gate.”
The Caunians, jealous of the authority of their own proper gods, armed
themselves on the days of their devotion, and through the whole of their
precincts ran cutting and slashing the air with their swords, by that
means to drive away and banish all foreign gods out of their territory.
Their powers are limited according that the plague, that the scurf, that
the phthisic; one cures one sort of itch, another another: _Adeo minimis
etiam rebus prava religio inserit Deos?_ “At such a rate does false
religion create gods for the most contemptible uses.” This one makes
grapes grow, that onions; this has the presidence over lechery, that
over merchandise; for every sort of artisan a god; this has his province
and reputation in the east; that his in the west:--
“Here lay her armour, here her chariot stood.”
O sancte Apollo, qui umbilicum certum terrarum obtines!
“O sacred Phoebus, who with glorious ray,
From the earth’s centre, dost thy light display.”
Pallada Cecropidæ, Minola Creta Dianam,
Vulcanum tellus Hypsipylea colit,
Junonem Sparte, Pelopeladesque Mycenæ;
Pinigerum Fauni Mænalis ora caput;
Mars Latio venerandus.
“Th’ Athenians Pallas, Cynthia Crete adore,
Vulcan is worshipped on the Lemnian shore.
Proud Juno’s altars are by Spartans fed,
Th’ Arcadians worship Faunus, and ‘tis said
To Mars, by Italy, is homage paid.”
to our necessity; this cures horses, that men,
Hic illius arma, Hic currus fuit.
This has only one town or family in his possession; that lives alone;
that in company, either voluntary or upon necessity:--
Junctaque sunt magno templa nepotis avo.
“And temples to the nephew joined are,
To those were reared to the great-grandfather.”
In here are some so wretched and mean (for the number amounts to six and
thirty thousand) that they must pack five or six together, to produce
one ear of corn, and thence take their several names; three to a
door--that of the plank, that of the hinge, and that of the threshold.
Four to a child--protectors of his swathing-clouts, his drink, meat, and
sucking. Some certain, some uncertain and doubtful, and some that are
not yet entered Paradise:--
Quos, quoniam coli nondum dignamur honore,
Quas dedimus certè terras habitare sinanras:
“Whom, since we yet not worthy think of heaven,
We suffer to possess the earth we’ve given.”
There are amongst them physicians, poets, and civilians. Some of a
mean betwixt the divine and human nature; mediators betwixt God and us,
adorned with a certain second and diminutive sort of adoration; infinite
in titles and offices; some good; others ill; some old and decrepit,
and some that are mortal. For Chrysippus was of opinion that in the last
conflagration of the world all the gods were to die but Jupiter. Man
makes a thousand pretty societies betwixt God and him; is he not his
countryman?
Jovis incunabula Creten.
“Crete, the cradle of Jupiter.”
And this is the excuse that, upon consideration of this subject,
Scævola, a high priest, and Varro, a great theologian in their times,
make us: “That it is necessary that the people should be ignorant of
many things that are true, and believe many things that are false.”
_Quum veritatem qua liberetur inquirat credatur ei expedire quod
fallitur._ “Seeing he inquires into the truth, by which he would be
made free, ‘tis fit he should be deceived.” Human eyes cannot perceive
things but by the forms they know; and we do not remember what a leap
miserable Phæton took for attempting to guide his father’s horses with
a mortal hand. The mind of man falls into as great a depth, and is after
the same manner bruised and shattered by his own rashness. If you ask of
philosophy of what matter the heavens and the sun are? what answer will
she return, if not that it is iron, or, with Anaxagoras, stone, or some
other matter that she makes use of? If a man inquire of Zeno what nature
is? “A fire,” says he, “an artisan, proper for generation, and regularly
proceeding.” Archimedes, master of that science which attributes to
itself the precedency before all others for truth and certainty;
“the sun,” says he, “is a god of red-hot iron.” Was not this a fine
imagination, extracted from the inevitable necessity of geometrical
demonstrations? Yet not so inevitable and useful but that Socrates
thought it was enough to know so much of geometry only as to measure the
land a man bought or sold; and that Polyænus, who had been a great
and famous doctor in it, despised it, as full of falsity and manifest
vanity, after he had once tasted the delicate fruits of the lozelly
gardens of Epicurus. Socrates in Xenophon, concerning this affair,
says of Anaxagoras, reputed by antiquity learned above all others in
celestial and divine matters, “That he had cracked his brain, as all
other men do who too immoderately search into knowledges which nothing
belong to them:” when he made the sun to be a burning stone, he did not
consider that a stone does not shine in the fire; and, which is worse,
that it will there consume; and in making the sun and fire one, that
fire does not turn the complexions black in shining upon them; that
we are able to look fixedly upon fire; and that fire kills herbs and
plants. ‘Tis Socrates’s opinion, and mine too, that the best judging
of heaven is not to judge of it at all. Plato having occasion, in his
_Timous_, to speak of the demons, “This undertaking,” says he, “exceeds
my ability.” We are therefore to believe those ancients who said they
were begotten by them; ‘tis against all reason to refuse a man’s faith
to the children of the gods, though what they say should not be proved
by any necessary or probable reasons; seeing they engage to speak of
domestic and familiar things.
Let us see if we have a little more light in the knowledge of human and
natural things. Is it not a ridiculous attempt for us to forge for those
to whom, by our own confession, our knowledge is not able to attain,
another body, and to lend a false form of our own invention; as is
manifest in this motion of the planets; to which, seeing our wits
cannot possibly arrive, nor conceive their natural conduct, we lend them
material, heavy, and substantial springs of our own by which to move:--
Temo aureus, aurea summæ
Curvatura rotæ, radiorum argenteus ordo.
“Gold was the axle, and the beam was gold;
The wheels with silver spokes on golden circles roll’d.”
You would say that we had had coachmakers, carpenters, and painters,
that went up on high to make engines of various motions, and to range
the wheelwork and interfacings of the heavenly bodies of differing
colours about the axis of necessity, according to Plato:--
Mundus domus est maxima rerum,
Quam quinque altitonæ fragmine zonæ
Cingunt, per quam limbus pictus bis sex signis
Stellimicantibus, altus in obliquo æthere, lunæ
Bigas acceptat.
“The world’s a mansion that doth all things hold,
Which thundering zones, in number five, enfold,
Through which a girdle, painted with twelve signs,
And that with sparkling constellations, shines,
In heaven’s arch marks the diurnal course
For the sun’s chariot and his fiery horse.”
These are all dreams and fanatic follies. Why will not nature please for
once to lay open her bosom to us, and plainly discover to us the means
and conduct of her movements, and prepare our eyes to see them? Good
God, what abuse, what mistakes should we discover in our poor science!
I am mistaken if that weak knowledge of ours holds any one thing as it
really is, and I shall depart hence more ignorant of all other things
than my own ignorance.
Have I not read in Plato this divine saying, that “nature is nothing
but enigmatic poesy!” As if a man might perhaps see a veiled and shady
picture, breaking out here and there with an infinite variety of false
lights to puzzle our conjectures: _Latent ista omnia crassis occullata
et circumfusa tenebris; ut nulla acies humani ingenii tanta sit, quæ
penetrare in coelum, terram intrare, possit._ “All those things lie
concealed and involved in so dark an obscurity that no point of human
wit can be so sharp as to pierce heaven or penetrate the earth.” And
certainly philosophy is no other than sophisticated poetry. Whence do
the ancient writers extract their authorities but from the poets? and
the first of them were poets themselves, and writ accordingly. Plato is
but a poet unripped. Timon calls him, insultingly, “a monstrous forger
of miracles.” All superhuman sciences make use of the poetic style. Just
as women make use of teeth of ivory where the natural are wanting, and
instead of their true complexion make one of some artificial matter; as
they stuff themselves out with cotton to appear plump, and in the sight
of every one do paint, patch, and trick up themselves with a false and
borrowed beauty; so does science (and even our law itself has, they say,
legitimate fictions, whereon it builds the truth of its justice);
she gives us in presupposition, and for current pay, things which she
herself informs us were invented; for these _epicycles, eccentrics, and
concentrics_, which astrology makes use of to carry on the motions of
the stars, she gives us for the best she could invent upon that subject;
as also, in all the rest, philosophy presents us not that which really
is, or what she really believes, but what she has contrived with the
greatest and most plausible likelihood of truth, and the quaintest
invention. Plato, upon the discourse of the state of human bodies and
those of beasts, says, “I should know that what I have said is truth,
had I the confirmation of an oracle; but this I will affirm, that what I
have said is the most likely to be true of any thing I could say.”
‘Tis not to heaven only that art sends her ropes, engines, and wheels;
let us consider a little what she says of us ourselves, and of our
contexture.
There is not more retrogradation, trepidation, accession, recession, and
astonishment, in the stars and celestial bodies, than they have found
out in this poor little human body. In earnest, they have good reason,
upon that very account, to call it the little world, so many tools and
parts have they employed to erect and build it. To assist the motions
they see in man, and the various functions that we find in ourselves, in
how many parts have they divided the soul, in how many places lodged it?
in how many orders have they divided, and to how many stories have they
raised this poor creature, man, besides those that are natural and to
be perceived? And how many offices and vocations have they assigned him?
They make it an imaginary public thing. ‘Tis a subject that they hold
and handle; and they have full power granted to them to rip, place,
displace, piece, and stuff it, every one according to his own fancy, and
yet they possess it not They cannot, not in reality only, but even in
dreams, so govern it that there will not be some cadence or sound that
will escape their architecture, as enormous as it is, and botched with
a thousand false and fantastic patches. And it is not reason to excuse
them; for though we are satisfied with painters when they paint heaven,
earth, seas, mountains, and remote islands, that they give us some
slight mark of them, and, as of things unknown, are content with a faint
and obscure description; yet when they come and draw us after life, or
any other creature which is known and familiar to us, we then require of
them a perfect and exact representation of lineaments and colours, and
despise them if they fail in it.
I am very well pleased with the Milesian girl, who observing the
philosopher Thales to be always contemplating the celestial arch, and
to have his eyes ever gazing upward, laid something in his way that he
might stumble over, to put him in mind that it would be time to take up
his thoughts about things that are in the clouds when he had provided
for those that were under his feet. Doubtless she advised him well,
rather to look to himself than to gaze at heaven; for, as Democritus
says, by the mouth of Cicero,--
Quod est ante pedes, nemo spectat: coeli scrutantur plagas.
“No man regards what is under his feet;
They are always prying towards heaven.”
But our condition will have it so, that the knowledge of what we have in
hand is as remote from us, and as much above the clouds, as that of the
stars. As Socrates says, in Plato, “That whoever meddles with philosophy
may be reproached as Thales was by the woman, that he sees nothing of
that which is before him. For every philosopher is ignorant of what his
neighbour does; aye, and of what he does himself, and is ignorant of
what they both are, whether beasts or men.”
Those people, who find Sebond’s arguments too weak, that are ignorant of
nothing, that govern the world, that know all,--
Quæ mare compescant causæ; quid temperet annum;
Stellæ sponte suâ, jussæve, vagentur et errent;
Quid premat obscurum lunæ, quid proférât orbem;
Quid velit et posait rerum concordia discors;
“What governs ocean’s tides,
And through the various year the seasons guides;
Whether the stars by their own proper force,
Or foreign power, pursue their wand’ring course;
Why shadows darken the pale queen of night;
Whence she renews her orb and spreads her light;--
What nature’s jarring sympathy can mean;”
have they not sometimes in their writings sounded the difficulties they
have met with of knowing their own being? We see very well that the
finger moves, that the foot moves, that some parts assume a voluntary
motion of themselves without our consent, and that others work by our
direction; that one sort of apprehension occasions blushing; another
paleness; such an imagination works upon the spleen only, another upon
the brain; one occasions laughter, another tears; another stupefies and
astonishes all our senses, and arrests the motion of all our members;
at one object the stomach will rise, at another a member that lies
something lower; but how a spiritual impression should make such a
breach into a massy and solid subject, and the nature of the connection
and contexture of these admirable springs and movements, never yet
man knew: _Omnia incerta ratione, et in naturæ majestate abdita._ “All
uncertain in reason, and concealed in the majesty of nature,” says
Pliny. And St Augustin, _Modus quo corporibus adhorent spiritus....
omnino minis est, nec comprehendi ab homine potest; et hoc ipse
homo est,_ “The manner whereby souls adhere to bodies is altogether
wonderful, and cannot be conceived by man, and yet this is man.” And
yet it is not so much as doubted; for the opinions of men are received
according to the ancient belief, by authority and upon trust, as if
it were religion and law. ‘Tis received as gibberish which is commonly
spoken; this truth, with all its clutter of arguments and proofs, is
admitted as a firm and solid body, that is no more to be shaken, no more
to be judged of; on the contrary, every one, according to the best of
his talent, corroborates and fortifies this received belief with the
utmost power of his reason, which is a supple utensil, pliable, and to
be accommodated to any figure; and thus the world comes to be filled
with lies and fopperies. The reason that men doubt of divers things is
that they never examine common impressions; they do not dig to the root,
where the faults and defects lie; they only debate upon the branches;
they do not examine whether such and such a thing be true, but if it
has been so and so understood; it is not inquired into whether Galen has
said any thing to purpose, but whether he has said so or so. In truth it
was very good reason that this curb to the liberty of our judgments and
that tyranny over our opinions, should be extended to the schools and
arts. The god of scholastic knowledge is Aristotle; ‘tis irreligion to
question any of his decrees, as it was those of Lucurgus at Sparta;
his doctrine is a magisterial law, which, peradventure, is as false as
another. I do not know why I should not as willingly embrace either the
ideas of Plato, or the atoms of Epicurus, or the plenum or vacuum of
Leucippus and Democritus, or the water of Thales, or the infinity
of nature of Anaximander, or the air of Diogenes, or the numbers and
symmetry of Pythagoras, or the infinity of Parmenides, or the One of
Musæus, or the water and fire of Apollodorus, or the similar parts of
Anaxagoras, or the discord and friendship of Empedocles, or the fire of
Heraclitus, or any other opinion of that infinite confusion of opinions
and determinations, which this fine human reason produces by its
certitude and clearsightedness in every thing it meddles withal, as I
should the opinion of Aristotle upon this subject of the principles
of natural things; which principles he builds of three pieces--matter,
form, and privation. And what can be more vain than to make inanity
itself the cause of the production of things? Privation is a negative;
of what humour could he then make the cause and original of things that
are? And yet that were not to be controverted but for the exercise of
logic; there is nothing disputed therein to bring it into doubt, but to
defend the author of the school from foreign objections; his authority
is the non-ultra, beyond which it is not permitted to inquire.
It is very easy, upon approved foundations, to build whatever we please;
for, according to the law and ordering of this beginning, the other
parts of the structure are easily carried on without any failure. By
this way we find our reason well-grounded, and discourse at a venture;
for our masters prepossess and gain beforehand as much room in our
belief as is necessary towards concluding afterwards what they
please, as geometricians do by their granted demands, the consent and
approbation we allow them giving them wherewith to draw us to the right
and left, and to whirl us about at their pleasure. Whatever springs from
these presuppositions is our master and our God; he will take the level
of his foundations so ample and so easy that by them he may mount us
up to the clouds, if he so please. In this practice and negotiation
of science we have taken the saying of Pythagoras, “That every expert
person ought to be believed in his own art” for current pay. The
logician refers the signification of words to the grammarians; the
rhetorician borrows the state of arguments from the logician; the poet
his measure from the musician: the geometrician his proportions from
the arithmetician, and the metaphysicians take physical conjectures for
their foundations; for every science has its principle presupposed, by
which human judgment is everywhere kept in check. If you come to rush
against the bar where the principal error lies, they have presently this
sentence in their mouths, “That there is no disputing with persons who
deny principles.” Now men can have no principles if not revealed to them
by the divinity; of all the rest the beginning, the middle, and the
end, is nothing but dream and vapour. To those that contend upon
presupposition we must, on the contrary, presuppose to them the same
axiom upon which the dispute is. For every human presupposition and
declaration has as much authority one as another, if reason do not make
the difference. Wherefore they are all to be put into the balance, and
first the generals and those that tyrannize over us. The persuasion of
certainty is a certain testimony of folly and extreme incertainty;
and there are not a more foolish sort of men, nor that are less
philosophers, than the Philodoxes of Plato; we must inquire whether fire
be hot? whether snow be white? if there be any such things as hard or
soft within our knowledge?
And as to those answers of which they make old stories, as he that
doubted if there was any such thing as heat, whom they bid throw himself
into the fire; and he that denied the coldness of ice, whom they bid
to put ice into his bosom;--they are pitiful things, unworthy of the
profession of philosophy. If they had let us alone in our natural
being, to receive the appearance of things without us, according as they
present themselves to us by our senses, and had permitted us to follow
our own natural appetites, governed by the condition of our birth, they
might then have reason to talk at that rate; but ‘tis from them we have
learned to make ourselves judges of the world; ‘tis from them that we
derive this fancy, “That human reason is controller-general of all that
is without and within the roof of heaven; that comprehends every thing,
that can do every thing; by the means of which every thing is known and
understood.” This answer would be good among the cannibals, who enjoy
the happiness of a long, quiet, and peaceable life, without Aristotle’s
precepts, and without the knowledge of the name of physics; this answer
would perhaps be of more value and greater force than all those they
borrow from their reason and invention; of this all animals, and all
where the power of the law of nature is yet pure and simple, would be
as capable as we, but as for them they have renounced it. They need not
tell us, “It is true, for you see and feel it to be so;” they must tell
me whether I really feel what I think I do; and if I do feel it, they
must then tell me why I feel it, and how, and what; let them tell me the
name, original, the parts and junctures of heat and cold, the qualities
of the agent and patient; or let them give up their profession, which is
not to admit or approve of any thing but by the way of reason; that is
their test in all sorts of essays; but, certainly, ‘tis a test full of
falsity, error, weakness, and defect.
Which way can we better prove it than by itself? If we are not to
believe her when speaking of herself, she can hardly be thought fit to
judge of foreign things; if she know any thing, it must at least be her
own being and abode; she is in the soul, and either a part or an effect
of it; for true and essential reason, from which we by a false colour
borrow the name, is lodged in the bosom of the Almighty; there is her
habitation and recess; ‘tis thence that she imparts her rays, when God
is pleased to impart any beam of it to mankind, as Balias issued from
her father’s head, to communicate herself to the world.
Now let us see what human reason tells us of herself and of the soul,
not of the soul in general, of which almost all philosophy makes the
celestial and first bodies participants; nor of that which Thales
attributed to things which themselves are reputed inanimate, lead
thereto by the consideration of the loadstone; but of that which
appertains to us, and that we ought the best to know:--
Ignoratur enim, quæ sit natura animai;
Nata sit; an, contra, nascentibus insinuetur;
Et simnl intereat nobiscum morte dirempta;
An tenebras Orci visat, vastasque lacunas,
An pecudes alias divinitns insinuet se.
“For none the nature of the soul doth know,
Whether that it be born with us, or no;
Or be infused into us at our birth,
And dies with us when we return to earth,
Or then descends to the black shades below,
Or into other animals does go.”
Crates and Dicæarchus were of opinion that there was no soul at all,
but that the body thus stirs by a natural motion; Plato, that it was a
substance moving of itself; Thales, a nature without repose; Aedepiades,
an exercising of the senses; Hesiod and Anaximander, a thing composed of
earth and water; Parmenides, of earth and fire; Empedocles, of blood:--
Sanguineam vomit ille animam;
“He vomits up his bloody soul.”
Posidonius, Cleanthes, and Galen, that it was heat or a hot complexion--
Igneus est ollis vigor, et colestis origo;
“Their vigour of fire and of heavenly race.”
Hippocrates, a spirit diffused all over the body; Varro, that it was an
air received at the mouth, heated in the lungs, moistened in the heart,
and diffused throughout the whole body; Zeno, the quintessence of the
four elements; Heraclides Ponticus, that it was the light; Zenocrates
and the Egyptians, a mobile number; the Chaldeans, a virtue without any
determinate form:--
Habitum quemdam vitalem corporis esse,
Harmoniam Græci quam dicunt.
“A certain vital habit in man’s frame,
Which harmony the Grecian sages name.”
Let us not forget Aristotle, who held the soul to be that which
naturally causes the body to move, which he calls entelechia, with
as cold an invention as any of the rest; for he neither speaks of the
essence, nor of the original, nor of the nature of the soul, but
only takes notice of the effect Lactantius, Seneca, and most of the
Dogmatists, have confessed that it was a thing they did not understand;
after all this enumeration of opinions, _Harum sententiarum quo vera
sit, Deus aliquis viderit:_ “Of these opinions which is the true, let
some god determine,” says Cicero. “I know by myself,” says St Bernard,
“how incomprehensible God is, seeing I cannot comprehend the parts of my
own being.”
Heraclitus, who was of opinion that every being was full of souls and
demons, did nevertheless maintain that no one could advance so far
towards the knowledge of the soul as ever to arrive at it; so profound
was the essence of it.
Neither is there less controversy and debate about seating of it.
Hippocrates and Hierophilus place it in the ventricle of the brain;
Democritus and Aristotle throughout the whole body;--
Ut bona sæpe valetudo cum dicitur esse
Corporis, et non est tamen hæc pars ulla ralentis;
“As when the body’s health they do it call,
When of a sound man, that’s no part at all.”
Epicurus in the stomach;
Hic exsultat enim pavor ac metus;
Hæc loca circum Lætitiæ mulcent.
“For this the seat of horror is and fear,
And joys in turn do likewise triumph here.”
The Stoics, about and within the heart; Erasistratus, adjoining the
membrane of the epicranium; Empedocles, in the blood; as also Moses,
which was the reason why he interdicted eating the blood of beasts,
because the soul is there seated; Galen thought that every part of the
body had its soul; Strato has placed it betwixt the eyebrows; _Quâ facie
quidem sit animus, aut ubi habitet, ne quorendum quidem est:_ “What
figure the soul is of, or what part it inhabits, is not to be inquired
into,” says Cicero. I very willingly deliver this author to you in his
own words; for should I alter eloquence itself? Besides, it were but a
poor prize to steal the matter of his inventions; they are neither
very frequent, nor of any great weight, and sufficiently known. But the
reason why Chrysippus argues it to be about the heart, as all the rest
of that sect do, is not to be omitted; “It is,” says he, “because when
we would affirm any things we lay our hand upon our breasts; and when
we would pronounce èyù, which signifies I, we let the lower jaw fall
towards the stomach.” This place ought not to be passed over without
a remark upon the vanity of so great a man; for besides that these
considerations are infinitely light in themselves, the last is only a
proof to the Greeks that they have their souls lodged in that part. No
human judgment is so sprightly and vigilant that it does not sometimes
sleep. Why do we fear to say? The Stoics, the fathers of human prudence,
think that the soul of a man, crushed under a ruin, long labours
and strives to get out, like a mouse caught in a trap, before it can
disengage itself from the burden. Some hold that the world was made to
give bodies, by way of punishment, to the spirits fallen, by their own
fault, from the purity wherein they had been created, the first creation
having been incorporeal; and that, according as they are more or less
depraved from their spirituality, so are they more or less jocundly or
dully incorporated; and that thence proceeds all the variety of so much
created matter. But the spirit that for his punishment was invested
with the body of the sun must certainly have a very rare and particular
measure of change.
The extremities of our perquisition do all fall into astonishment
and blindness; as Plutarch says of the testimony of histories, that,
according to charts and maps, the utmost bounds of known r countries are
taken up with marshes, impenetrable forests, deserts, and uninhabitable
places; this is the reason why the most gross and childish ravings were
most found in those authors who treat of the most elevated subjects, and
proceed the furthest in them, losing themselves in their own curiosity
and presumption. The beginning and end of knowledge are equally foolish;
observe to what a pitch Plato flies in his poetic clouds; do but take
notice there of the gibberish of the gods; but what did he dream of when
he defined a man to be “a two-legged animal without feathers: giving
those who had a mind to deride him a pleasant occasion; for, having
pulled a capon alive, they went about calling it the man of Plato.”
And what did the Epicureans think of, out of what simplicity did they
first imagine that their _atoms_ that they said were bodies having some
weight, and a natural motion downwards, had made the world; till
they were put in mind, by their adversaries, that, according to this
description, it was impossible they should unite and join to one
another, their fall being so direct and perpendicular, and making so
many parallel lines throughout? Wherefore there was a necessity that
they should since add a fortuitous and sideways motion, and that they
should moreover accoutre their atoms with hooked tails, by which they
might unite and cling to one another. And even then do not those that
attack them upon this second consideration put them hardly to it? “If
the atoms have by chance formed so many sorts of figures, why did it
never fall out that they made a house or a shoe? Why at the same rate
should we not believe that an infinite number of Greek letters,
strewed all over a certain place, might fall into the contexture of the
_Iliad?_”--“Whatever is capable of reason,” says Zeno, “is better than
that which is not capable; there is nothing better than the world;
the world is therefore capable of reason.” Cotta, by this way of
argumentation, makes the world a mathematician; ‘and tis also made a
musician and an organist by this other argumentation of Zeno: “The
whole is more than a part; we are capable of wisdom, and are part of the
world; therefore the world is wise.” There are infinite like examples,
not only of arguments that are false in themselves, but silly ones, that
do not hold in themselves, and that accuse their authors not so much
of ignorance as imprudence, in the reproaches the philosophers dash one
another in the teeth withal, upon their dissensions in their sects and
opinions.
Whoever should bundle up a lusty faggot of the fooleries of human wisdom
would produce wonders. I willingly muster up these few for a pattern,
by a certain meaning not less profitable to consider than the most sound
and moderate instructions. Let us judge by these what opinion we are to
have of man, of his sense and reason, when in these great persons that
have raised human knowledge so high, so many gross mistakes and manifest
errors are to be found.
For my part, I am apt to believe that they have treated of knowledge
casually, and like a toy, with both hands; and have contended about
reason as of a vain and frivolous instrument, setting on foot all sorts
of fancies and inventions, sometimes more sinewy, and sometimes weaker.
This same Plato, who defines man as if he were a cock, says elsewhere,
after Socrates, “That he does not, in truth, know what man is, and that
he is a member of the world the hardest to understand.” By this variety
and instability of opinions, they tacitly lead us, as it were by the
hand, to this resolution of their irresolution. They profess not always
to deliver their opinions barefaced and apparent to us; they have one
while disguised them in the fabulous shadows of poetry, and at another
in some other vizor; for our imperfection carries this also along with
it, that crude meat is not always proper for our stomachs; we must dry,
alter, and mix it; they do the same; they sometimes conceal their real
opinions and judgments, and falsify them to accommodate themselves to
the public use. They will not make an open profession of ignorance, and
of the imbecility of human reason, that they may not fright children;
but they sufficiently discover it to us under the appearance of a
troubled and inconstant science.
I advised a person in Italy, who had a great mind to speak Italian, that
provided he only had a desire to make himself understood, without being
ambitious in any other respect to excel, that he should only make use
of the first word that came to the tongue’s end, whether Latin, French,
Spanish, or Gascon, and that, by adding the Italian termination, he
could not fail of hitting upon some idiom of the country, either Tuscan,
Roman, Venetian, Piedmontese, or Neapolitan, and so fall in with some
one of those many forms. I say the same of Philosophy; she has so many
faces, so much variety, and has said so many things, that all our dreams
and ravings are there to be found. Human fancy can conceive nothing
good or bad that is not there: _Nihil tam absurde did potest, quod non
dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum._ “Nothing can be said so absurd, that
has not been said before by some of the philosophers.” And I am the more
willing to expose my whimsies to the public; forasmuch as, though they
are spun out of myself, and without any pattern, I know they will be
found related to some ancient humour, and some will not stick to say,
“See whence he took it!” My manners are natural, I have not called in
the assistance of any discipline to erect them; but, weak as they are,
when it came into my head to lay them open to the world’s view, and that
to expose them to the light in a little more decent garb I went to adorn
them with reasons and examples, it was a wonder to myself accidentally
to find them conformable to so many philosophical discourses and
examples. I never knew what regimen my life was of till it was near
worn out and spent; a new figure--an unpremeditated and accidental
philosopher.
But to return to the soul. Inasmuch as Plato has placed reason in the
brain, anger in the heart, and concupiscence in the liver; ‘tis likely
that it was rather an interpretation of the movements of
the soul, than that he intended a division and separation of it, as of
a body, into several members. And the most likely of their opinions
is that ‘tis always a soul, that by its faculty, reasons, remembers,
comprehends, judges, desires, and exercises all its other operations by
divers instruments of the body; as the pilot guides his ship according
to his experience, one while straining or slacking the cordage, one
while hoisting the mainyard, or removing the rudder, by one and the same
power carrying on several effects; and that it is lodged in the brain;
which appears in that the wounds and accidents that touch that part do
immediately offend the faculties of the soul; and ‘tis not incongruous
that it should thence diffuse itself through the other parts of the body
Medium non deserit unquam
Coeli Phoebus iter; radiis tamen omnia lustrât.
“Phoebus ne’er deviates from the zodiac’s way;
Yet all things doth illustrate with his ray.”
As the sun sheds from heaven its light and influence, and fills the
world with them:--
Cætera pars animas, per totum dissita corpus,
Paret, et ad numen mentis momenque movetur.
“The other part o’ th’ soul diffus’d all o’er
The body, does obey the reason’s lore.”
Some have said that there was a general soul, as it were a great body,
whence all the particular souls were extracted, and thither again
return, always restoring themselves to that universal matter:--
Deum namque ire per omnes
Terrasque, tractusque maris, columque profundum;
Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,
Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas:
Scilicet hue reddi deinde, ac resoluta referri
Omnia; nec morti esse locum:
“For God goes forth, and spreads throughout the whole
Heaven, earth, and sea, the universal soul;
Each at its birth, from him all beings share,
Both man and brute, the breath of vital air;
To him return, and, loos’d from earthly chain,
Fly whence they sprung, and rest in God again,
Spurn at the grave, and, fearless of decay,
Dwell in high heaven, and star th’ ethereal way.”
Others, that they only rejoined and reunited themselves to it; others,
that they were produced from the divine substance; others, by the angels
of fire and air; others, that they were from all antiquity; and some
that they were created at the very point of time the bodies wanted
them; others make them to descend from the orb of the moon, and return
thither; the generality of the ancients believed that they were begotten
from father to son, after a like manner, and produced with all other
natural things; taking their argument from the likeness of children to
their fathers;
Instillata patris virtus tibi;
Fortes creantur fortibus, et bonis;
“Thou hast thy father’s virtues with his blood:
For still the brave spring from the brave and good;”
and that we see descend from fathers to their children not only
bodily marks, but moreover a resemblance of humours, complexions, and
inclinations of the soul:--
Denique cur acris violentia triste leonum
Seminium sequitur? dolus vulpibus, et fuga, cervis
A patribus datur, et patrius pavor incitât artus?
Si non certa suo quia semine seminioque
Vis animi pariter crescit cum corpore toto.
“For why should rage from the fierce lion’s seed,
Or from the subtle fox’s craft, proceed;
Or why the tim’rous and flying hart
His fear and trembling to his race impart;
But that a certain force of mind does grow,
And still increases as the bodies do?”
That thereupon the divine justice is grounded, punishing in the children
the faults of their fathers; forasmuch as the contagion of paternal
vices is in some sort imprinted in the soul of children, and that the
ill government of their will extends to them; moreover, that if souls
had any other derivation than a natural consequence, and that they had
been some other thins out of the body, they would retain some memory
of their first being, the natural faculties that are proper to them of
discoursing, reasoning, and remembering, being considered:--
Si in corpus nascentibus insinuatur,
Cur super anteactam ætatem meminisse nequimus,
Nec vestigia gestarum rerum ulla tenemus?
“For at our birth if it infused be,
Why do we then retain no memory
Of our foregoing life, and why no more
Remember any thing we did before?”
for, to make the condition of our souls such as we would have it to be,
we must suppose them all-knowing, even in their natural simplicity and
purity; by these means they had been such, being free from the prison of
the body, as well before they entered into it, as we hope they shall be
after they are gone out of it; and from this knowledge it should follow
that they should remember, being got in the body, as Plato said, “That
what we learn is no other than a remembrance of what we knew before;” a
thing which every one by experience may maintain to be false. Forasmuch,
in the first place, as that we do not justly remember any thing but
what we have been taught, and that if the memory did purely perform its
office it would at least suggest to us something more than what we have
learned. Secondly, that which she knew being in her purity, was a
true knowledge, knowing things as they are by her divine intelligence;
whereas here we make her receive falsehood and vice when we instruct
her; wherein she cannot employ her reminiscence, that image and
conception having never been planted in her. To say that the corporal
prison does in such sort suffocate her natural faculties, that they
are there utterly extinct, is first contrary to this other belief of
acknowledging her power to be so great, and the operations of it that
men sensibly perceive in this life so admirable, as to have thereby
concluded that divinity and eternity past, and the immortality to
come:--
Nam si tantopere est anirai mutata potestas,
Omnia ut actarum exciderit retinentia rerum,
Non, ut opinor, ea ab letho jam longior errat.
“For if the mind be changed to that degree
As of past things to lose all memory,
So great a change as that, I must confess,
Appears to me than death but little less.”
Furthermore, ‘tis here with us, and not elsewhere, that the force
and effects of the soul ought to be considered; all the rest of her
perfections are vain and useless to her; ‘tis by her present condition
that all her immortality is to be rewarded and paid, and of the life of
man only that she is to render an account It had been injustice to have
stripped her of her means and powers; to have disarmed her in order, in
the time of her captivity and imprisonment in the flesh, of her weakness
and infirmity in the time wherein she was forced and compelled, to pass
an infinite and perpetual sentence and condemnation, and to insist upon
the consideration of so short a time, peradventure but an hour or two,
or at the most but a century, which has no more proportion with infinity
than an instant; in this momentary interval to ordain and definitively
to determine of her whole being; it were an unreasonable disproportion,
too, to assign an eternal recompense in consequence of so short a life.
Plato, to defend himself from this inconvenience, will have future
payments limited to the term of a hundred years, relatively to human
duration; and of us ourselves there are enough who have given them
temporal limits. By this they judged that the generation of the soul
followed the common condition of human things, as also her life,
according to the opinion of Epicurus and Democritus, which has been the
most received; in consequence of these fine appearances that they saw
it bom, and that, according as the body grew more capable, they saw it
increase in vigour as the other did; that its feebleness in infancy was
very manifest, and in time its better strength and maturity, and after
that its declension and old age, and at last its decrepitude:--
Gigni pariter cum corpore, et una
Crescere sentimus, pariterque senescere mentem.
“Souls with the bodies to be born we may
Discern, with them t’ increase, with them decay.”
They perceived it to be capable of divers passions, and agitated with
divers painful motions, whence it fell into lassitude and uneasiness;
capable of alteration and change, of cheerfulness, of stupidity and
languor, and subject to diseases and injuries, as the stomach or the
foot;
Mentem sanari, corpus ut ægrum,
Ceraimus, et flecti medicinâ posse videmus;
“Sick minds, as well as bodies, we do see
By Med’cine’s virtue oft restored to be;”
dazzled and intoxicated with the fumes of wine, jostled from her seat by
the vapours of a burning fever, laid asleep by the application of some
medicaments, and roused by others,--
Corpoream naturam animi esse necesse est,
Corporeis quoniam telis ictuque laborat;
“There must be of necessity, we find,
A nature that’s corporeal of the mind,
Because we evidently see it smarts
And wounded is with shafts the body darts;”
they saw it astonished and overthrown in all its faculties through the
mere bite of a mad dog, and in that condition to have no stability
of reason, no sufficiency, no virtue, no philosophical resolution, no
resistance that could exempt it from the subjection of such accidents;
the slaver of a contemptible cur shed upon the hand of Socrates, to
shake all his wisdom and all his great and regulated imaginations, and
so to annihilate them, ad that there remained no trace of his former
knowledge,--
Vis.... animal Conturbatur, et.... divisa seorsum
Disjectatur, eodem illo distracta veneno;
“The power of the soul’s disturbed; and when
That once is but sequestered from her, then
By the same poison ‘tis dispersed abroad;”
and this poison to find no more resistance in that great soul than in an
infant of four years old; a poison sufficient to make all philosophy, if
it were incarnate, become furious and mad; insomuch that Cato, who
ever disdained death and fortune, could not endure the sight of a
looking-glass, or of water, overwhelmed with horror and affright at
the thought of falling, by the contagion of a mad dog, into the disease
called by physicians hydrophobia:--
Vis morbi distracta per artus
Turbat agens animam, spumantes æquore salso
Ventorum ut validis fervescunt viribus undæ.
“Throughout the limbs diffused, the fierce disease
Disturbs the soul, as in the briny seas,
The foaming waves to swell and boil we see,
Stirred by the wind’s impetuosity.”
Now, as to this particular, philosophy has sufficiently armed man to
encounter all other accidents either with patience, or, if the search
of that costs too dear, by an infallible defeat, in totally depriving
himself of all sentiment; but these are expedients that are only of use
to a soul being itself, and in its full power, capable of reason and
deliberation; but not at all proper for this inconvenience, where, in
a philosopher, the soul becomes the soul of a madman, troubled,
overturned, and lost; which many occasions may produce, as a too
vehement agitation that any violent passion of the soul may beget in
itself; or a wound in a certain part of the person, or vapours from the
stomach, any of which may stupefy the understanding and turn the brain.
Morbis in corporis avius errat
Sæpe animus; dementit enim, deliraque fatur;
Interdumque gravi lethargo fertur in altum
Æternumque soporem, oculis mi tuque cadenti:
“For when the body’s sick, and ill at ease,
The mind doth often share in the disease;
Wonders, grows wild, and raves, and sometimes by
A heavy and a stupid lethargy,
Is overcome and cast into a deep,
A most profound and everlasting sleep.”
The philosophers, methinks, have not much touched this string, no more
than another of equal importance; they have this dilemma continually
in their mouths, to console our mortal condition: “The soul is either
mortal or immortal; if mortal, it will suffer no pain; if immortal, it
will change for the better.”--They never touch the other branch, “What
if she change for the worse?” and leave to the poets the menaces of
future torments. But thereby they make themselves a good game. These are
two omissions that I often meet with in their discourses. I return to
the first.
This soul loses the use of the sovereign stoical good, so constant and
so firm. Our fine human wisdom must here yield, and give up her arms. As
to the rest, they also considered, by the vanity of human reason, that
the mixture and association of two so contrary things as the mortal and
the immortal, was unimaginable:--
Quippe etenim mortale æterao jungere, et una
Consentire putare, et fungi mutua posse,
Desipere est. Quid enim diversius esse putandum est,
Aut magis inter se disjunctum discrepitansque,
Quam, mortale quod est, immortali atque perenni
Junctum, in concilio, sævas tolerare procellas?
“The mortal and th’ eternal, then, to blend,
And think they can pursue one common end,
Is madness: for what things more diff’rent are.
Distinct in nature, and disposed to jar?
How can it then be thought that these should bear,
When thus conjoined, of harms an equal share?”
Moreover, they perceived the soul tending towards death as well as the
body:--
Simul ovo fessa fatiscit:
“Fatigued together with the weight of years:”
which, according to Zeno, the image of sleep does sufficiently
demonstrate to us; for he looks upon it “as a fainting and fall of the
soul, as well as of the body:” _Contrahi animum et quasi labi putat
atque decidere:_ and, what they perceived in some, that the soul
maintained its force and vigour to the last gasp of life, they
attributed to the variety of diseases, as it is observable in men at the
last extremity, that some retain one sense, and some another; one
the hearing, and another the smell, without any manner of defect or
alteration; and that there is not so universal a deprivation that some
parts do not remain vigorous and entire:--
Non alio pacto, quam si, pes cum dolet ægri,
In nullo caput interea sit forte dolore.
“So, often of the gout a man complains,
Whose head is, at the same time, free from pains.”
The sight of our judgment is, to truth, the same that the owl’s eyes
are to the splendour of the sun, says Aristotle. By what can we better
convince him, than by so gross blindness in so apparent a light? For the
contrary opinion of the immortality of the soul, which, Cicero says,
was first introduced, according to the testimony of books at least, by
Pherecydes
Syrius, in the time of King Tullus (though some attribute it to Thales,
and others to others), ‘tis the part of human science that is treated of
with the greatest doubt and
reservation. The most positive dogmatists are fain, in this point
principally, to fly to the refuge of the Academy. No one doubts what
Aristotle has established upon this subject, no more than all the
ancients in general, who handle it with a wavering belief: _Rem
gratissimam promittentium magis quam probantium:_ “A thing more
acceptable in the promisors than the provers.” He conceals himself in
clouds of words of difficult, unintelligible sense, and has left to
those of his sect as great a dispute about his judgment as about the
matter itself.
Two things rendered this opinion plausible to them; one, that, without
the immortality of souls, there would be nothing whereon to ground the
vain hopes of glory, which is a consideration of wonderful
repute in the world; the other, that it is a very profitable impression,
as Plato says, that vices, when they escape the discovery and cognizance
of human justice, are still within the reach of the divine, which will
pursue them even after the death of the guilty. Man is excessively
solicitous to prolong his being, and has to the utmost of his power
provided for it; there are monuments for the conservation of the body,
and glory to preserve the name. He has employed all his wit and opinion
to the rebuilding of himself, impatient of his fortune, and to prop
himself by his inventions. The soul, by reason of its anxiety and
impotence, being unable to stand by itself, wanders up and down to seek
out consolations, hopes, and foundations, and alien circumstances, to
which she adheres and fixes; and how light or fantastic soever invention
delivers them to her, relies more willingly, and with greater assurance,
upon them than upon herself. But ‘tis wonderful to observe how the most
constant and obstinate maintainers of this just and clear persuasion
of the immortality of the soul fall short, and how weak their arguments
are, when they go about to prove it by human reason: _Somnia sunt non
docentis, sed optantis:_ “They are dreams, not of the teacher, but
wisher,” says one of the ancients. By which testimony man may know that
he owes the truth he himself finds out to fortune and accident; since
that even then, when it is fallen into his hand, he has not wherewith to
hold and maintain it, and that his reason has not force to make use of
it. All things produced by our own meditation and understanding, whether
true or false, are subject to incertitude and controversy. ‘Twas for
the chastisement of our pride, and for the instruction of our miserable
condition and incapacity, that God wrought the perplexity and confusion
of the tower of Babel. Whatever we undertake without his assistance,
whatever we see without the lamp of his grace, is but vanity and folly.
We corrupt the very essence of truth, which is uniform and constant,
by our weakness, when fortune puts it into our possession. What course
soever man takes of himself, God still permits it to come to the same
confusion, the image whereof he so lively represents to us in the just
chastisement wherewith he crushed Nimrod’s presumption, and frustrated
the vain attempt of his proud structure; _Perdam sapientiam sapientium,
et prudentiam prudentium reprobabo._ “I will destroy the wisdom of the
wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” The
diversity of idioms and tongues, with which he disturbed this work,
what are they other than this infinite and perpetual alteration and
discordance of opinions and reasons, which accompany and confound the
vain building of human wisdom, and to very good effect too; for what
would hold us, if we had but the least grain of knowledge? This saint
has very much obliged me: _Ipsa veritatis occultatio ant humili-tatis
exercitatio est, aut elationis attritio_ “The very concealment of the
truth is either an exercise of humility or a quelling of presumption.”
To what a pitch of presumption and insolence do we raise our blindness
and folly!
But to return to my subject. It was truly very good reason that we
should be beholden to God only, and to the favour of his grace, for the
truth of so noble a belief, since from his sole bounty we receive
the fruit of immortality, which consists in the enjoyment of eternal
beatitude. Let us ingenuously confess that God alone has dictated it
to us, and faith; for ‘tis no lesson of nature and our own reason.
And whoever will inquire into his own being and power, both within
and without, without this divine privilege; whoever shall consider
man impartially, and without flattery, will see in him no efficacy or
faculty that relishes of any thing but death and earth. The more we
give and confess to owe and render to God, we do it with the greater
Christianity. That which this Stoic philosopher says he holds from the
fortuitous consent of the popular voice; had it not been better that he
had held it from God? _Cum de animarum otemitate disserimus, non leve
momentum apud nos habet consensus hominum aut timentium inferos, aut
colentium. Utor hâc publicâ persuasione._ “When we discourse of the
immortality of souls, the consent of men that either fear or adore the
infernal powers, is of no small advantage. I make use of this public
persuasion.” Now the weakness of human arguments upon this subject
is particularly manifested by the fabulous circumstances they have
superadded as consequences of this opinion, to find out of what
condition this immortality of ours was. Let us omit the Stoics, (_usuram
nobis largiuntur tanquam cornicibus; diu mansuros aiunt animos; semper,
negant._ “They give us a long life, as also they do to crows; they say
our soul shall continue long, but that it shall continue always they
deny,”) who give to souls a life after this, but finite. The most
universal and received fancy, and that continues down to our times in
various places, is that of which they make Pythagoras the author; not
that he was the original inventor, but because it received a great deal
of weight and repute by the authority of his approbation: “That souls,
at their departure out of us, did nothing but shift from one body to
another, from a lion to a horse, from a horse to a king, continually
travelling at this rate from habitation to habitation;” and he himself
said that he remembered he had been Ætha-lides, since that Euphorbus,
afterwards Hermotimus, and, finally, from Pyrrhus was passed into
Pythagoras; having a memory of himself of two hundred and six years. And
some have added that these very souls sometimes mount up to heaven, and
come down again:--
O pater, aime aliquas ad colum hinc ire putandum est
Sublimes animas, iterumque ad tarda reverti
Corpora? Quæ lucis miseris tam dira cupido?
“O, father, is it then to be conceiv’d
That any of these spirits, so sublime,
Should hence to the celestial regions climb,
And thence return to earth to reassume
Their sluggish bodies rotting in a tomb?
For wretched life whence does such fondness come?”
Origen makes them eternally to go and come from a better to a worse
estate. The opinion that Varro mentions is that, after four hundred and
forty years’ revolution, they should be reunited to their first bodies;
Chrysippus held that this would happen after a certain space of time
unknown and unlimited. Plato, who professes to have embraced this belief
from Pindar and the ancient poets, that we are to undergo infinite
vicissitudes of mutation, for which the soul is prepared, having neither
punishment nor reward in the other world but what is temporal, as its
life here is but temporal, concludes that it has a singular knowledge of
the affairs of heaven, of hell, of the world, through all which it has
passed, repassed, and made stay in several voyages, are matters for her
memory. Observe her progress elsewhere: “The soul that has lived well
is reunited to the stars to which it is assigned; that which has lived
ill removes into a woman, and if it do not there reform, is again
removed into a beast of condition suitable to its vicious manners, and
shall see no end of its punishments till it be returned to its natural
constitution, and that it has, by the force of reason, purged itself
from those gross, stupid, and elementary qualities it was polluted
with.” But I will not omit the objection the Epicureans make against
this transmigration from one body to another; ‘tis a pleasant one; they
ask what expedient would be found out if the number of the dying should
chance to be greater than that of those who are coming into the world.
For the souls, turned out of their old habitation, would scuffle and
crowd which should first get possession of their new lodging; and they
further demand how they shall pass away their time, whilst waiting
till new quarters are made ready for them? Or, on the contrary, if more
animals should be born than die, the body, they say, would be but in an
ill condition whilst waiting for a soul to be infused into it; and it
would fall out that some bodies would die before they had been alive.
Denique comrabia ad Veneris, partusque ferarum
Esse animas præsto, deridiculum esse videtur;
Et spectare immortales mortalia membra
Innumero numéro, certareque præproperanter
Inter se, quæ prima potissimaqæ insinueter.
“Absurd to think that whilst wild beasts beget,
Or bear their young, a thousand souls do wait,
Expect the falling body, fight and strive
Which first shall enter in and make it live.”
Others have arrested the soul in the body of the deceased, with it to
animate serpents, worms, and other beasts, which are said to be bred
out of the corruption of our members, and even out of our ashes; others
divide them into two parts, the one mortal, the other immortal; others
make it corporeal, and nevertheless immortal. Some make it immortal,
without
sense or knowledge. There are others, even among ourselves, who have
believed that devils were made of the souls of the damned; as Plutarch
thinks that gods were made of those that were saved; for there are few
things which that author is so positive in as he is in this; maintaining
elsewhere a doubtful and ambiguous way of expression. “We are told,”
says he, “and steadfastly should believe, that the souls of virtuous
men, both according to nature and the divine justice, become saints, and
from saints demigods, and from demigods, after they are perfectly, as in
sacrifices of purgation, cleansed and purified, being delivered from all
passibility and all mortality, they become, not by any civil decree, but
in real truth, and according to all probability of reason, entire and
perfect gods, in receiving a most happy and glorious end.” But who
desires to see him--him, who is yet the most sober and moderate of the
whole gang of philosophers, lay about him with greater boldness, and
relate his miracles upon this subject, I refer him to his treatise _of
the Moon,_ and _of the Demon of Socrates_, where he may, as evidently
as in any other place whatever, satisfy himself that the mysteries of
philosophy have many strange things in common with those of poetry;
human understanding losing itself in attempting to sound and search all
things to the bottom; even as we, tired and worn out with a long course
of life, return to infancy and dotage. See here the fine and certain
instructions which we extract from human knowledge concerning the soul.
Neither is there less temerity in what they teach us touching our
corporal parts. Let us choose out one or two examples; for otherwise we
should lose ourselves in this vast and troubled ocean of medical errors.
Let us first know whether, at least, they agree about the matter whereof
men produce one another; for as to their first production it is
no wonder if, in a thing so high and so long since past, human
understanding finds itself puzzled and perplexed. Archelaus, the
physician, whose disciple and favourite Socrates was, according to
Aristoxenus, said that both men and beasts were made of a lacteous
slime, expressed by the heat of the earth; Pythagoras says that our
seed is the foam or cream of our better blood; Plato, that it is the
distillation of the marrow of the backbone; raising his argument from
this, that that part is first sensible of being weary of the work;
Alcmeon, that it is part of the substance of the brain, and that it
is so, says he, is proved by the weakness of the eyes in those who
are immoderate in that exercise; Democritus, that it is a substance
extracted from the whole mass of the body; Epicurus, an extract from
soul and body; Aristotle, an excrement drawn from the aliment of the
blood, the last which is diffused over our members; others, that it is
a blood concocted and digested by the heat of the genitals, which they
judge, by reason that in excessive endeavours a man voids pure blood;
wherein there seems to be more likelihood, could a man extract any
appearance from so infinite a confusion. Now, to bring this seed to do
its work, how many contrary opinions do they set on foot? Aristotle
and Democritus are of opinion that women have no sperm, and that ‘tis
nothing but a sweat that they distil in the heat of pleasure and
motion, and that contributes nothing at all to generation. Galen, on
the contrary, and his followers, believe that without the concurrence
of seeds there can be no generation. Here are the physicians, the
philosophers, the lawyers, and divines, by the ears with our wives about
the dispute, “For what term women carry their fruit?” and I, for my
part, by the example of myself, stick with those that maintain a woman
goes eleven months with child. The world is built upon this experience;
there is no so commonplace a woman that cannot give her judgment in all
these controversies; and yet we cannot agree.
Here is enough to verify that man is no better instructed in the
knowledge of himself, in his corporal than in his spiritual part We have
proposed himself to himself, and his reason to his reason, to see what
she could say. I think I have sufficiently demonstrated how little
she understands herself in herself; and who understands not himself in
himself, in what can he? _Quasi vero mensuram ullius rei possit agere,
qui sui nesciat._ “As if he could understand the measure of any other
thing, that knows not his own.” In earnest, Protagoras told us a pretty
flam in making man the measure of all things, that never knew so much as
his own; and if it be not he, his dignity will not permit that any
other creature should have this advantage; now he being so contrary
in himself, and one judgment so incessantly subverting another, this
favourable proposition was but a mockery, which induced us necessarily
to conclude the nullity of the compass and the compasser. When Thales
reputes the knowledge of man very difficult for man to comprehend, he
at the same time gives him to understand that all other knowledge is
impossible.
You,* for whom I have taken the pains, contrary to my custom, to write
so long a discourse, will not refuse to support your Sebond by the
ordinary forms of arguing, wherewith you are every day instructed, and
in this will exercise both your wit and learning; for this last fencing
trick is never to be made use of but as an extreme remedy; ‘tis a
desperate thrust, wherein you are to quit your own arms to make your
adversary abandon his; and a secret sleight, which must be very rarely,
and then very reservedly, put in practice. ‘Tis great temerity to lose
yourself that you may destroy another; you must not die to be revenged,
as Gobrias did; for, being closely grappled in combat with a lord of
Persia, Darius coming in sword in hand, and fearing to strike lest he
should kill Gobrias, he called out to him boldly to fall on,
* The author, as we have already mentioned, is addressing
Margaret de Valois.
though he should run them both through at once. I have known desperate
weapons, and conditions of single combat, and wherein he that offered
them put himself and his adversary upon terms of inevitable death to
them both, censured for unjust. The Portuguese, in the Indian Sea, took
certain Turks prisoners, who, impatient of their captivity, resolved,
and it succeeded, by striking the nails of the ship one against another,
and making a spark to fall into the barrels of powder that were set in
the place where they were guarded, to blow up and reduce themselves,
their masters, and the vessel to ashes. We here touch the out-plate
and utmost limits of sciences, wherein the extremity is vicious, as
in virtue. Keep yourselves in the common road; it is not good to be so
subtle and cunning. Remember the Tuscan proverb:--
Chi troppo s’assottiglia, si scavezza.
“Who makes himself too wise, becomes a fool.”
I advise you that, in all your opinions and discourses, as well as
in your manners and all other things, you keep yourself moderate and
temperate, and avoid novelty; I am an enemy to all extravagant ways.
You, who by the authority of your grandeur, and yet more by the
advantages which those qualities give you that are more your own, may
with the twinkle of an eye command whom you please, ought to have given
this charge to some one who made profession of letters, who might after
a better manner have proved and illustrated these things to you. But
here is as much as you will stand in need of.
Epicurus said of the laws, “That the worst were so necessary for us that
without them men would devour one another.” And Plato affirms, “That
without laws we should live like beasts.” Our wit is a wandering,
dangerous, and temerarious utensil; it is hard to couple any order or
measure to it; in those of our own time, who are endued with any rare
excellence above others, or any extraordinary vivacity of understanding,
we see them almost all lash out into licentiousness of opinions and
manners; and ‘tis almost a miracle to find one temperate and sociable.
‘Tis all the reason in the world to limit human wit within the strictest
limits imaginable; in study, as in all the rest, we ought to have
its steps and advances numbered and fixed, and that the limits of its
inquisition be bounded by art. It is curbed and fettered by religions,
laws, customs, sciences, precepts, mortal and immortal penalties. And
yet we see that it escapes from all these bonds by its volubility and
dissolution; *tis a vain body which has nothing to lay hold on or to
seize; a various and difform body, incapable of being either bound
or held. In earnest, there are few souls so regular, firm, and well
descended, as are to be trusted with their own conduct, and that can
with moderation, and without temerity, sail in the liberty of their own
judgments, beyond the common and received opinions; *tis more expedient
to put them under pupilage. Wit is a dangerous weapon, even to the
possessor, if he knows not how to use it discreetly; and there is not a
beast to whom a headboard is more justly to be given, to keep his looks
down and before his feet, and to hinder him from wandering here and
there out of the tracks which custom and the laws have laid before him.
And therefore it will be better for you to keep yourself in the beaten
path, let it be what it will, than to fly out at a venture with this
unbridled liberty. But if any of these new doctors will pretend to be
ingenious in your presence, at the expense both of your soul and his
own, to avoid this dangerous plague, which is every day laid in your
way to infect you, this preservative, in the extremest necessity,
will prevent the danger and hinder the contagion of this poison from
offending either you or your company.
The liberty, then, and frolic forwardness of these ancient wits produced
in philosophy and human sciences several sects of different opinions,
every one undertaking to judge and make choice of what he would stick
to and maintain. But now that men go all one way, _Qui certis quibusdam
destinatisque sententiis addicti et consecrati sunt, ut etiam, quæ non
probant, cogantur defendere,_ “Who are so tied and obliged to certain
opinions that they are bound to defend even those they do not approve,”
and that we receive the arts by civil authority and decree, so that the
schools have but one pattern, and a like circumscribed institution and
discipline, we no more take notice what the coin weighs, and is really
worth, but every one receives it according to the estimate that common
approbation and use puts upon it; the alloy is not questioned, but how
much it is current for. In like manner all things pass; we take
physic as we do geometry; and tricks of hocus-pocus, enchantments,
and love-spells, the correspondence of the souls of the dead,
prognostications, domifications, and even this ridiculous pursuit of the
philosophers’ stone, all things pass for current pay, without any manner
of scruple or contradiction. We need to know no more but that Mars’
house is in the middle of the triangle of the hand, that of Venus in
the thumb, and that of Mercury in the little finger; that when the
table-line cuts the tubercle of the forefinger ‘tis a sign of cruelty,
that when it falls short of the middle finger, and that the natural
median-line makes an angle with the vital in the same side, ‘tis a sign
of a miserable death; that if in a woman the natural line be open, and
does not close the angle with the vital, this denotes that she shall not
be very chaste. I leave you to judge whether a man qualified with such
knowledge may not pass with reputation and esteem in all companies.
Theophrastus said that human knowledge, guided by the senses, might
judge of the causes of things to a certain degree; but that being
arrived to first and extreme causes, it must stop short and retire, by
reason either of its own infirmity or the difficulty of things. ‘Tis a
moderate and gentle opinion, that our own understandings may conduct
us to the knowledge of some things, and that it has certain measures
of power, beyond which ‘tis temerity to employ it; this opinion is
plausible, and introduced by men of well composed minds, but ‘tis hard
to limit our wit, which is curious and greedy, and will no more stop
at a thousand than at fifty paces; having experimentally found that,
wherein one has failed, the other has hit, and that what was unknown to
one age, the age following has explained; and that arts and sciences are
not cast in a mould, but are formed and perfected by degrees, by often
handling and polishing, as bears leisurely lick their cubs into form;
what my force cannot discover, I do not yet desist to sound and to try;
and by handling and kneading this new matter over and over again, by
turning and heating it, I lay open to him that shall succeed me, a kind
of facility to enjoy it more at his ease, and make it more maniable and
supple for him,
Ut hymettia sole
Cera remollescit, tractataque poll ice multas
Vertitur in facies, ipsoque fit utilis usu;
“As wax doth softer in the sun become,
And, tempered ‘twixt the finger and the thumb,
Will varions forms, and several shapes admit,
Till for the present use ‘tis rendered fit;”
as much will the second do for the third; which is the cause that
the difficulty ought not to make me despair, and my own incapacity as
little; for ‘tis nothing but my own.
Man is as capable of all things as of some; and if he confesses, as
Theophrastus says, the ignorance of first causes, let him at once
surrender all the rest of his knowledge; if he is defective in
foundation, his reason is aground; disputation and inquiry have no other
aim nor stop but principles; if this aim do not stop his career, he
runs into an infinite irresolution. _Non potest aliud alio magis minusve
comprehendi, quoniam omnium rerum una est dejinitio comprehendendi:_
“One thing can no more or less be comprehended than another, because
the definition of comprehending all things is the same.” Now ‘tis very
likely that, if the soul knew any thing, it would in the first place
know itself; and if it knew any thing out of itself, it would be its own
body and case, before any thing else. If we see the gods of physic to
this very day debating about our anatomy,
Mulciber in Trojam, pro Trojâ stabat Apollo;
“Vulcan against, for Troy Apollo stood;”
when are we to expect that they will be agreed? We are nearer neighbours
to ourselves than whiteness to snow, or weight to stones. If man do not
know himself, how should he know his force and functions? It is not,
perhaps, that we have not some real knowledge in us; but ‘tis by chance;
forasmuch as errors are received into our soul by the same way, after
the same manner, and by the same conduct, it has not wherewithal to
distinguish them, nor wherewithal to choose the truth from falsehood.
The Academics admitted a certain partiality of judgment, and thought it
too crude to say that it was not more likely to say that snow was white
than black; and that we were no more assured of the motion of a stone,
thrown by the hand, than of that of the eighth sphere. And to avoid
this difficulty and strangeness, that can in truth hardly lodge in our
imagination, though they concluded that we were in no sort capable of
knowledge, and that truth is engulfed in so profound an abyss as is not
to be penetrated by human sight; yet they acknowledged some things to be
more likely than others, and received into their judgment this faculty,
that they had a power to incline to one appearance more than another,
they allowed him this propension, interdicting all resolution. The
Pyrrhonian opinion is more bold, and also somewhat more likely; for this
academic inclination, and this propension to one proposition rather than
another, what is it other than a recognition of some more apparent
truth in this than in that? If our understanding be capable of the form,
lineaments, port, and face of truth, it might as well see it entire as
by halves, springing and imperfect This appearance of likelihood,
which makes them rather take the left hand than the right, augments
it; multiply this ounce of verisimilitude that turns the scales to
a hundred, to a thousand, ounces; it will happen in the end that the
balance will itself end the controversy, and determine one choice, one
entire truth. But why do they suffer themselves to incline to and be
swayed by verisimilitude, if they know not the truth? How should they
know the similitude of that whereof they do not know the essence? Either
we can absolutely judge, or absolutely we cannot If our intellectual and
sensible faculties are without foot or foundation, if they only pull
and drive, ‘tis to no purpose that we suffer our judgments to be carried
away with any part of their operation, what appearance soever they
may seem to present us; and the surest and most happy seat of our
understanding would be that where it kept itself temperate, upright, and
inflexible, without tottering, or without agitation: _Inter visa, vera
aut falsa, ad animi assensum, nihil interest:_ “Amongst things that
seem, whether true or false, it signifies nothing to the assent of the
mind.” That things do not lodge in us in their form and essence, and
do not there make their entry by their own force and authority, we
sufficiently see; because, if it were so, we should receive them after
the same manner; wine would have the same relish with the sick as with
the healthful; he who has his finger chapt or benumbed would find the
same hardness in wood or iron that he handles that another does; foreign
subjects then surrender themselves to our mercy, and are seated in us as
we please. Now if on our part we received any thing without alteration,
if human grasp were capable and strong enough to seize on truth by our
own means, these means being common to all men, this truth would be
conveyed from hand to hand, from one to another; and at least there
would be some one thing to be found in the world, amongst so many as
there are, that would be believed by men with an universal consent;
but this, that there is no one proposition that is not debated and
controverted amongst us, or that may not be, makes it very manifest that
our natural judgment does not very clearly discern what it embraces; for
my judgment cannot make my companions approve of what it approves; which
is a sign that I seized it by some other means than by a natural power
that is in me and in all other men.
Let us lay aside this infinite confusion of opinions, which we see even
amongst the philosophers themselves, and this perpetual and universal
dispute about the knowledge of things; for this is truly presupposed,
that men, I mean the most knowing, the best bom, and of the best parts,
are not agreed about any one thing, not that heaven is over our heads;
for they that doubt of every thing, do also doubt of that; and they
who deny that we are able to comprehend any thing, say that we have not
comprehended that the heaven is over our heads, and these two opinions
are, without comparison, the stronger in number.
Besides this infinite diversity and division, through the trouble that
our judgment gives ourselves, and the incertainty that every one is
sensible of in himself, ‘tis easy to perceive that its seat is very
unstable and insecure. How variously do we judge of things?--How often
do we alter our opinions? What I hold and believe to-day I hold and
believe with my whole belief; all my instruments and engines seize and
take hold of this opinion, and become responsible to me for it, at least
as much as in them lies; I could not embrace nor conserve any truth
with greater confidence and assurance than I do this; I am wholly and
entirely possessed with it; but has it not befallen me, not only once,
but a hundred, a thousand times, every day, to have embraced some other
thing with all the same instruments, and in the same condition, which
I have since judged to be false? A man must at least become wise at his
own expense; if I have often found myself betrayed under this colour; if
my touch proves commonly false, and my balance unequal and unjust, what
assurance can I now have more than at other times? Is it not stupidity
and madness to suffer myself to be so often deceived by my guide?
Nevertheless, let fortune remove and shift us five hundred times from
place to place, let her do nothing but incessantly empty and fill into
our belief, as into a vessel, other and other opinions; yet still the
present and the last is the certain and infallible one; for this we must
abandon goods, honour, life, health, and all.
Posterior.... res ilia reperta
Perdit, et immutat sensus ad pristina qnæqne.
“The last things we find out are always best,
And make us to disrelish all the rest.”
Whatever is preached to us, and whatever we learn, we should still
remember that it is man that gives and man that receives; ‘tis a mortal
hand that presents it to us; ‘tis a mortal hand that accepts it The
things that come to us from heaven have the sole right and authority of
persuasion, the sole mark of truth; which also we do not see with our
own eyes, nor receive by our own means; that great and sacred image
could not abide in so wretched a habitation if God for this end did not
prepare it, if God did not by his particular and supernatural grace and
favour fortify and reform it. At least our frail and defective condition
ought to make us behave ourselves with more reservedness and moderation
in our innovations and changes; we ought to remember that, whatever we
receive into the understanding, we often receive things that are false,
and that it is by the same instruments that so often give themselves the
lie and are so often deceived.
Now it is no wonder they should so often contradict themselves, being
so easy to be turned and swayed by very light occurrences. It is certain
that our apprehensions, our judgment, and the faculties of the soul in
general, suffer according to the movements and alterations of the body,
which alterations are continual. Are not our minds more sprightly, ouï
memories more prompt and quick, and our thoughts more lively, in health
than in sickness? Do not joy and gayety make us receive subjects
that present themselves to our souls quite otherwise than care and
melancholy? Do you believe that Catullus’s verses, or those of Sappho,
please an old doting miser as they do a vigorous, amorous young man?
Cleomenes, the son of Anexandridas, being sick, his friends reproached
him that he had humours and whimsies that were new and unaccustomed;
“I believe it,” said he; “neither am I the same man now as when I am in
health; being now another person, my opinions and fancies are also other
than they were before.” In our courts of justice this word is much in
use, which is spoken of criminals when they find the judges in a good
humour, gentle, and mild, _Gaudeat de bonâ fortunâ _; “Let him rejoice
in his good fortune;” for it is most certain that men’s judgments are
sometimes more prone to condemnation, more sharp and severe, and at
others more facile, easy, and inclined to excuse; he that carries with
him from his house the pain of the gout, jealousy, or theft by his man,
having his whole soul possessed with anger, it is not to be doubted
but that his judgment will lean this way. That venerable senate of the
Areopagites used to hear and determine by night, for fear lest the sight
of the parties might corrupt their justice. The very air itself, and the
serenity of heaven, will cause some mutation in us, according to these
verses in Cicero:--
Tales sunt hominnm mentes, quali pater ipse
Jupiter auctiferâ lustravit lampade terras.
“Men’s minds are influenc’d by th’ external air,
Dark or serene, as days are foul or fair.”
‘Tis not only fevers, debauches, and great accidents, that overthrow our
judgments,--the least things in the world will do it; and we are not to
doubt, though we may not be sensible of it, that if a continued fever
can overwhelm the soul, a tertian will in some proportionate measure
alter it; if an apoplexy can stupefy and totally extinguish the sight of
our understanding, we are not to doubt but that a great cold will dazzle
it; and consequently there is hardly one single hour in a man’s whole
life wherein our judgment is in its due place and right condition, our
bodies being subject to so many continual mutations, and stuffed with so
many several sorts of springs, that I believe the physicians, that it is
hard but that there must be always some one or other out of order.
As to what remains, this malady does not very easily discover itself,
unless it be extreme and past remedy; forasmuch as reason goes always
lame, halting, and that too as well with falsehood as with truth; and
therefore ‘tis hard to discover her deviations and mistakes. I always
call that appearance of meditation which every one forges in himself
reason; this reason, of the condition of which there may be a hundred
contrary ones about one and the same subject, is an instrument of lead
and of wax, ductile, pliable, and accommodate to all sorts of biases,
and to all measures; so that nothing remains but the art and skill how
to turn and mould it. How uprightly soever a judge may mean, if he
does not look well to himself, which few care to do, his inclination to
friendship, to relationship, to beauty or revenge, and not only things
of that weight, but even the fortuitous instinct that makes us favour
one thing more than another, and that, without reason’s permission, puts
the choice upon us in two equal subjects, or some shadow of like
vanity, may insensibly insinuate into his judgment the recommendation or
disfavour of a cause, and make the balance dip.
I, that watch myself as narrowly as I can, and that have my eyes
continually bent upon myself, like one that has no great business to do
elsewhere,
Quis sub Arcto Rex gelidæ metuatur oræ,
Quid Tyridatem terreat, unice Securus,
“I care not whom the northern clime reveres,
Or what’s the king that Tyridates fears,”
dare hardly tell the vanity and weakness I find in myself My foot is so
unstable and unsteady, I find myself so apt to totter and reel, and my
sight so disordered, that, fasting, I am quite another man than when
full; if health and a fair day smile upon me, I am a very affable,
good-natured man; if a corn trouble my toe, I am sullen, out of humour,
and not to be seen. The same pace of a horse seems to me one while
hard, and another easy; and the same way one while shorter, and another
longer; and the same form one while more, another less agreeable: I am
one while for doing every thing, and another for doing nothing at all;
and what pleases me now would be a trouble to me at another time. I
have a thousand senseless and casual actions within myself; either I
am possessed by melancholy or swayed by choler; now by its own private
authority sadness predominates in me, and by and by, I am as merry as
a cricket. When I take a book in hand I have then discovered admirable
graces in such and such passages, and such as have struck my soul; let
me light upon them at another time, I may turn and toss, tumble
and rattle the leaves to no purpose; ‘tis then to me an inform and
undiscovered mass. Even in my own writings I do not always find the air
of my first fancy; I know not what I would have said, and am often put
to it to correct and pump for a new sense, because I have lost the first
that was better. I do nothing but go and come; my judgment does not
always advance--it floats and roams:--
Velut minuta magno
Deprensa navis in mari vesaniente vento.
“Like a small bark that’s tost upon the main.
When winds tempestuous heave the liquid plain.”
Very often, as I am apt to do, having for exercise taken to maintain an
opinion contrary to my own, my mind, bending and applying itself that
way, does so engage me that way that I no more discern the reason of my
former belief, and forsake it I am, as it were, misled by the side to
which I incline, be it what it will, and carried away by my own weight.
Every one almost would say the same of himself, if he considered himself
as I do. Preachers very well know that the emotions which steal upon
them in speaking animate them towards belief; and that in passion we
are more warm in the defence of our proposition, take ourselves a deeper
impression of it, and embrace it with greater vehemence and approbation
than we do in our colder and more temperate state. You only give your
counsel a simple brief of your cause; he returns you a dubious and
uncertain answer, by which you find him indifferent which side he takes.
Have you feed him well that he may relish it the better, does he begin
to be really concerned, and do you find him interested and zealous in
your quarrel? his reason and learning will by degrees grow hot in your
cause; behold an apparent and undoubted truth presents itself to his
understanding; he discovers a new light in your business, and does in
good earnest believe and persuade himself that it is so. Nay, I do not
know whether the ardour that springs from spite and obstinacy, against
the power and violence of the magistrate and danger, or the interest of
reputation, may not have made some men, even at the stake, maintain the
opinion for which, at liberty, and amongst friends, they would not have
burned a finger. The shocks and jostles that the soul receives from the
body’s passions can do much in it, but its own can do a great deal more;
to which it is so subjected that perhaps it may be made good that it has
no other pace and motion but from the breath of those winds, without the
agitation of which it would be becalmed and without action, like a
ship in the middle of the sea, to which the winds hare denied
their assistance. And whoever should maintain this, siding with the
Peripatetics, would do us no great wrong, seeing it is very well known
that the greatest and most noble actions of the soul proceed from, and
stand in need of, this impulse of the passions. Valour, they say,
cannot be perfect without the assistance of anger; _Semper Ajax fortis,
fortissimus tamen in furore;_ “Ajax was always brave, but most when in
a fury:” neither do we encounter the wicked and the enemy vigorously
enough if we be not angry; nay, the advocate, it is said, is to inspire
the judges with indignation, to obtain justice.
Irregular desires moved Themistocles, and Demosthenes, and have pushed
on the philosophers to watching, fasting, and pilgrimages; and lead us
to honour, learning, and health, which are all very useful ends. And
this meanness of soul, in suffering anxiety and trouble, serves to breed
remorse and repentance in the conscience, and to make us sensible of
the scourge of God, and politic correction for the chastisement of
our offences; compassion is a spur to clemency; and the prudence of
preserving and governing ourselves is roused by our fear; and how many
brave actions by ambition! how many by presumption! In short, there is
no brave and spiritual virtue without some irregular agitation. May not
this be one of the reasons that moved the Epicureans to discharge God
from all care and solicitude of our affairs; because even the effects of
his goodness could not be exercised in our behalf without disturbing its
repose, by the means of passions which are so many spurs and instruments
pricking on the soul to virtuous actions; or have they thought
otherwise, and taken them for tempests, that shamefully hurry the soul
from her tranquillity? _Ut maris tranquillitas intettigitur, nullâ, ne
minima quidem, aura fluctus commovente: Sic animi quietus et placatus
status cemitur, quum perturbatis nulla est, qua moveri queat.._ “As it
is understood to be a calm sea when there is not the least breath of air
stirring; so the state of the soul is discerned to be quiet and appeased
when there is no perturbation to move it.”
What varieties of sense and reason, what contrariety of imaginations
does the diversity of our passions inspire us with! What assurance then
can we take of a thing so mobile and unstable, subject by its condition
to the dominion of trouble, and never going other than a forced and
borrowed pace? If our judgment be in the power even of sickness and
perturbation; if it be from folly and rashness that it is to receive the
impression of things, what security can we expect from it?
Is it not a great boldness in philosophy to believe that men perform the
greatest actions, and nearest approaching the Divinity, when they
are furious, mad, and beside themselves? We better ourselves by the
privation of our reason, and drilling it. The two natural ways to
enter into the cabinet of the gods, and there to foresee the course of
destiny, are fury and sleep.
This is pleasant to consider; by the dislocation that passions cause
in our reason, we become virtuous; by its extirpation, occasioned by
madness or the image of death, we become diviners and prophets. I was
never so willing to believe philosophy in any thing as this. ‘Tis a pure
enthusiasm wherewith sacred truth has inspired the spirit of philosophy,
which makes it confess, contrary to its own proposition, that the most
calm, composed, and healthful estate ef the soul that philosophy can
seat it in is not its best condition; our waking is more a sleep than
sleep itself, our wisdom less wise than folly; our dreams are worth more
than our meditation; and the worst place we can take is in ourselves.
But does not philosophy think that we are wise enough to consider
that the voice that the spirit utters, when dismissed from man, so
clear-sighted, so great, and so perfect, and whilst it is in man so
terrestrial, ignorant, and dark, is a voice proceeding from the spirit
of dark, terrestrial, and ignorant man, and for this reason a voice not
to be trusted and believed?
I, being of a soft and heavy complexion, have no great experience of
these vehement agitations, the most of which surprise the soul on a
sudden, without giving it leisure to recollect itself. But the passion
that is said to be produced by idleness in the hearts of young men,
though it proceed leisurely, and with a measured progress, does
evidently manifest, to those who have tried to oppose its power, the
violence our judgment suffers in this alteration and conversion. I have
formerly attempted to withstand and repel it; for I am so far from being
one of those that invite vices, that I do not so much as follow them, if
they do not haul me along; I perceived it to spring, grow, and increase,
in spite of my resistance; and at last, living and seeing as I was,
wholly to seize and possess me. So that, as if rousing from drunkenness,
the images of things began to appear to me quite other than they used
to be; I evidently saw the advantages of the object I desired, grow,
and increase, and expand by the influence of my imagination, and the
difficulties of my attempt to grow more easy and smooth; and both my
reason and conscience to be laid aside; but this fire being evaporated
in an instant, as from a flash of lightning, I was aware that my soul
resumed another kind of sight, another state, and another judgment;
the difficulties of retreat appeared great and invincible, and the same
things had quite another taste and aspect than the heat of desire had
presented them to me; which of the two most truly? Pyrrho knows nothing
about it. We are never without sickness. Agues have their hot and cold
fits; from the effects of an ardent passion we fall again to shivering;
as much as I had advanced, so much I retired:--
Qualis ubi alterno procurrens gurgite pontus,
Nunc ruit ad terras, scopulosque superjacit undam
Spumeus, extremamque sinu perfundit arenam;
Nunc rapidus retro, atque æstu revoluta resorbens
Saxa, fugit, littusque vado labente relihquit.
“So swelling surges, with a thundering roar,
Driv’n on each others’ backs, insult the shore,
Bound o’er the rocks, encroach upon the land,
And far upon the beach heave up the sand;
Then backward rapidly they take their way,
Repulsed from upper ground, and seek the sea.”
Now, from the knowledge of this volubility of mine, I have accidentally
begot in myself a certain constancy of opinions, and have not much
altered those that were first and natural in me; for what appearance
soever there may be in novelty, I do not easily change, for fear of
losing by the bargain; and, as I am not capable of choosing, I take
other men’s choice, and keep myself in the station wherein God has
placed me; I could not otherwise keep myself from perpetual rolling.
Thus have I, by the grace of God, preserved myself entire, without
anxiety or trouble of conscience, in the ancient faith of our religion,
amidst so many sects and divisions as our age has produced. The writings
of the ancients, the best authors I mean, being full and solid, tempt
and carry me which way almost they will; he that I am reading seems
always to have the most force; and I find that every one in his turn is
in the right, though they contradict one another. The facility that good
wits have of rendering every thing likely they would recommend, and
that nothing is so strange to which they do not undertake to give colour
enough to deceive such simplicity as mine, this evidently shows the
weakness of their testimony. The heavens and the stars have been
three thousand years in motion; all the world were of that belief
till Cleanthes the Samian, or, according to Theophrastus, Nicetas of
Syracuse, took it into his head to maintain that it was the earth that
moved, turning about its axis by the oblique circle of the zodiac.
And Copernicus has in our times so grounded this doctrine that it very
regularly serves to all astrological consequences; what use can we
make of this, if not that we ought not much to care which is the true
opinion? And who knows but that a third, a thousand years hence, may
over throw the two former.
Sic volvenda ætas commutât tempora rerum:
Quod fuit in pretio, fit nullo denique honore;
Porro aliud succedit, et e contemptibus exit,
Inque dies magis appetitur, floretque repertum
Laudibus, et miro est mortales inter honore.
“Thus ev’ry thing is changed in course of time,
What now is valued passes soon its prime;
To which some other thing, despised before,
Succeeds, and grows in vogue still more and more;
And once received, too faint all praises seem,
So highly it is rais’d in men’s esteem.”
So that when any new doctrine presents itself to us, we have great
reason to mistrust, and to consider that, before that was set on foot,
the contrary had been generally received; and that, as that has been
overthrown by this, a third invention, in time to come, may start
up which may damn the second. Before the principles that Aristotle
introduced were in reputation, other principles contented human reason,
as these satisfy us now. What patent have these people, what particular
privilege, that the career of our invention must be stopped by them, and
that the possession of our whole future belief should belong to them?
They are no more exempt from being thrust out of doors than their
predecessors were. When any one presses me with a new argument, I ought
to believe that what I cannot answer another can; for to believe all
likelihoods that a man cannot confute is great simplicity; it would
by that means come to pass that all the vulgar (and we are all of the
vulgar) would have their belief as tumable as a weathercock; for their
souls, being so easy to be imposed upon, and without any resistance,
must of force incessantly receive other and other impressions, the last
still effacing all footsteps of that which went before. He that finds
himself weak ought to answer, according to practice, that he will speak
with his counsel, or refer himself to the wiser, from whom he received
his instruction. How long is it that physic has been practised in the
world? ‘Tis said that a new comer, called Paracelsus, changes and
overthrows the whole order of ancient rules, and maintains that, till
now, it has been of no other use but to kill men. I believe he will
easily make this good, but I do not think it were wisdom to venture my
life in making trial of his own experience. We are not to believe every
one, says the precept, because every one can say all things. A man of
this profession of novelties and physical reformations not long since
told me that all the ancients were notoriously mistaken in the nature
and motions of the winds, which he would evidently demonstrate to me if
I would give him the hearing. After I had with some patience heard his
arguments, which were all full of likelihood of truth: “What, then,”
said I, “did those that sailed according to Theophrastus make way
westward, when they had the prow towards the east? did they go sideward
or backward?” “That’s fortune,” answered he, “but so it is that they
were mistaken.” I replied that I had rather follow effects than reason.
Now these are things that often interfere with one another, and I have
been told that in geometry (which pretends to have gained the highest
point of certainty of all science) there are inevitable demonstrations
found which subvert the truth of all experience; as Jacques Pelletier
told me, at my own house, that he had found out two lines stretching
themselves one towards the other to meet, which nevertheless he
affirmed, though extended to infinity, could never arrive to touch one
another. And the Pyrrhonians make no other use of their arguments and
their reason than to ruin the appearance of experience; and ‘tis a
wonder how far the suppleness of our reason has followed them in this
design of controverting the evidence of effects; for they affirm that we
do not move, that we do not speak, and that there is neither weight nor
heat, with the same force of argument that we affirm the most likely
things. Ptolemy, who was a great man, had established the bounds of this
world of ours; all the ancient philosophers thought they had the measure
of it, excepting some remote isles that might escape their knowledge;
it had been Pyrrhonism, a thousand years ago, to doubt the science of
cosmography, and the opinions that every one had received from it; it
was heresy to admit the antipodes; and behold, in this age of ours,
there is an infinite extent of terra firma discovered, not an island or
single country, but a division of the world, nearly equal in greatness
to that we knew before. The geographers of our time stick not to assure
us that now all is found; all is seen:--
Nam quod adest prosto, placet, et pollere videtur;
“What’s present pleases, and appears the best;”
but it remains to be seen whether, as Ptolemy was therein formerly
deceived upon the foundation of his reason, it were not very foolish to
trust now in what these people say? And whether it is not more likely
that this great body, which we call the world, is not quite another
thing than what we imagine.
Plato says that it changes countenance in all respects; that the
heavens, the stars, and the sun, have all of them sometimes motions
retrograde to what we see, changing east into west The Egyptian priests
told Herodotus that from the time of their first king, which was eleven
thousand and odd years since (and they showed him the effigies of all
their kings in statues taken from the life), the sun had four times
altered his course; that the sea and the earth did alternately change
into one another; that the beginning of the world is undetermined;
Aristotle and Cicero both say the same; and some amongst us are of
opinion that it has been from all eternity, is mortal, and renewed again
by several vicissitudes; calling Solomon and Isaiah to witness; to evade
those oppositions, that God has once been a creator without a creature;
that he has had nothing to do, that he got rid of that idleness by
putting his hand to this work; and that consequently he is subject to
change. In the most famous of the Greek schools the world is taken for a
god, made by another god greater than he, and composed of a body, and a
soul fixed in his centre, and dilating himself by musical numbers to
his circumference; divine, infinitely happy, and infinitely great,
infinitely wise and eternal; in him are other gods, the sea, the earth,
the stars, who entertain one another with an harmonious and perpetual
agitation and divine dance, sometimes meeting, sometimes retiring from
one another; concealing and discovering themselves; changing their
order, one while before, and another behind. Heraclitus was positive
that the world was composed of fire; and, by the order of destiny,
was one day to be enflamed and consumed in fire, and then to be again
renewed. And Apuleius says of men: _Sigillatim mortales, cunctim
perpetui._ “That they are mortal in particular, and immortal in
general.” Alexander writ to his mother the narration of an Egyptian
priest, drawn from their monuments, testifying the antiquity of that
nation to be infinite, and comprising the birth and progress of other
countries. Cicero and Diodorus say that in their time the Chaldees kept
a register of four hundred thousand and odd years, Aristotle, Pliny,
and others, that Zoroaster flourished six thousand years before Plato’s
time. Plato says that they of the city of Sais have records in writing
of eight thousand years; and that the city of Athens was built a
thousand years before the said city of Sais; Epicurus, that at the same
time things are here in the posture we see, they are alike and in the
same manner in several other worlds; which he would have delivered with
greater assurance, had he seen the similitude and concordance of the new
discovered world of the West Indies with ours, present and past, in so
many strange examples.
In earnest, considering what is come to our knowledge from the course
of this terrestrial polity, I have often wondered to see in so vast a
distance of places and times such a concurrence of so great a number of
popular and wild opinions, and of savage manners and beliefs, which by
no means seem to proceed from our natural meditation. The human mind is
a great worker of miracles! But this relation has, moreover, I know
not what of extraordinary in it; ‘tis found to be in names, also, and a
thousand other things; for they found nations there (that, for aught we
know, never heard of us) where circumcision was in use; where there were
states and great civil governments maintained by women only, without
men; where our fasts and Lent were represented, to which was added
abstinence from women; where our crosses were several ways in repute;
here they were made use of to honour and adorn their sepultures, there
they were erected, and particularly that of St Andrew, to protect
themselves from nocturnal visions, and to lay upon the cradles of
infants against enchantments; elsewhere there was found one of wood,
of very great height, which was adored for the god of rain, and this
a great way in the interior; there was seen an express image of our
penance priests, the use of mitres, the celibacy of priests, the art
of divination by the entrails of sacrificed beasts, abstinence from all
sorts of flesh and fish in their diet, the manner of priests officiating
in a particular and not a vulgar language; and this fancy, that the
first god was driven away by a second, his younger brother; that they
were created with all sorts of necessaries and conveniences, which have
since been in a degree taken from them for their sins, their territory
changed, and their natural condition made worse; that they were of
old overwhelmed by the inundation of water from heaven; that but few
families escaped, who retired into caves on high mountains, the mouths
of which they stopped so that the waters could not get in, having shut
up, together with themselves, several sorts of animals; that when they
perceived the rain to cease they sent out dogs, which returning clean
and wet, they judged that the water was not much abated; afterwards
sending out others, and seeing them return dirty, they issued out to
repeople the world, which they found only full of serpents. In one place
we met with the belief of a day of judgment; insomuch that they were
marvellously displeased at the Spaniards for discomposing the bones of
the dead, in rifling the sepultures for riches, saying that those bones
so disordered could not easily rejoin; the traffic by exchange, and no
other way; fairs and markets for that end; dwarfs and deformed people
for the ornament of the tables of princes; the use of falconry,
according to the nature of their hawks; tyrannical subsidies; nicety in
gardens; dancing, tumbling tricks, music of instruments, coats of arms,
tennis-courts, dice and lotteries, wherein they are sometimes so eager
and hot as to stake themselves and their liberty; physic, no otherwise
than by charms; the way of writing in cypher; the belief of only one
first man, the father of all nations; the adoration of one God, who
formerly lived a man in perfect virginity, fasting, and penitence,
preaching the laws of nature, and the ceremonies of religion, and that
vanished from the world without a natural death; the theory of giants;
the custom of making themselves drunk with their beverages, and drinking
to the utmost; religious ornaments painted with bones and dead men’s
skulls; surplices, holy water sprinkled; wives and servants, who present
themselves with emulation, burnt and interred with the dead husband or
master; a law by which the eldest succeeds to all the estate, no
part being left for the younger but obedience; the custom that, upon
promotion to a certain office of great authority, the promoted is to
take upon him a new name, and to leave that which he had before; another
to strew lime upon the knee of the new-born child, with these words:
“From dust thou earnest, and to dust thou must return;” as also the art
of augury. The vain shadows of our religion, which are observable in
some of these examples, are testimonies of its dignity and divinity. It
is not only in some sort insinuated into all the infidel nations on this
side of the world, by a certain imitation, but in these barbarians
also, as by a common and supernatural inspiration; for we find there the
belief of purgatory, but of a new form; that which we give to the fire
they give to the cold, and imagine that souls are purged and punished by
the rigour of an excessive coldness. And this example puts me in mind
of another pleasant diversity; for as there were there some people who
delighted to unmuffle the ends of their instruments, and clipped off
the prepuce after the Mahometan and Jewish manner; there were others who
made so great conscience of laying it bare, that they carefully pursed
it up with little strings to keep that end from peeping into the air;
and of this other diversity, that whereas we, to honour kings and
festivals, put on the best clothes we have; in some regions, to express
their disparity and submission to their king, his subjects present
themselves before him in their vilest habits, and entering his palace,
throw some old tattered garment over their better apparel, to the end
that all the lustre and ornament may solely be in him. But to proceed:--
If nature enclose within the bounds of her ordinary progress the
beliefs, judgments, and opinions of men, as well as all other things;
if they have their revolution, their season, their birth and death, like
cabbage plants; if the heavens agitate and rule them at their pleasure,
what magisterial and permanent authority do we attribute to them? If
we experimentally see that the form of our beings depends upon the air,
upon the climate, and upon the soil, where we are bom, and not only the
colour, the stature, the complexion, and the countenances, but moreover
the very faculties of the soul itself: Et plaga codi non solum ad robor
corporum, sed etiam anirum facit: “The climate is of great efficacy,
not only to the strength of bodies, but to that of souls also,” says
Vegetius; and that the goddess who founded the city of Athens chose
to situate it in a temperature of air fit to make men prudent, as
the Egyptian priests told Solon: _Athenis tenue colum; ex quo etiam
acutiores putantur Attici; crassum Thebis; itaque pingues Thebani,
et valentes:_ “The air of Athens is subtle and thin; whence also the
Athenians are reputed to be more acute; and at Thebes more gross and
thick; wherefore the Thebans are looked upon as more heavy-witted and
more strong.” In such sort that, as fruits and animals grow different,
men are also more or less warlike, just, temperate, and docile; here
given to wine, elsewhere to theft or uncleanness; here inclined to
superstition, elsewhere to unbelief; in one place to liberty, in another
to servitude; capable of one science or of one art, dull or ingenious,
obedient or mutinous, good or bad, according as the place where they
are seated inclines them; and assume a new complexion, if removed, like
trees, which was the reason why Cyrus would not grant the Persians
leave to quit their rough and craggy country to remove to another
more pleasant and even, saying, that fertile and tender soils made
men effeminate and soft. If we see one while one art and one belief
flourish, and another while another, through some celestial influence;
such an age to produce such natures, and to incline mankind to such and
such a propension, the spirits of men one while gay and another gray,
like our fields, what becomes of all those fine prerogatives we so
soothe ourselves withal? Seeing that a wise man may be mistaken, and a
hundred men and a hundred nations, nay, that even human nature
itself, as we believe, is many ages wide in one thing or another, what
assurances have we that she should cease to be mistaken, or that in this
very age of ours she is not so?
Methinks that amongst other testimonies of our imbecility, this ought
not to be forgotten, that man cannot, by his own wish and desire, find
out what he wants; that not in fruition only, but in imagination and
wish, we cannot agree about what we would have to satisfy and content
us. Let us leave it to our own thought to cut out and make up at
pleasure; it cannot so much as covet what is proper for it, and satisfy
itself:--
Quid enim ratione timemus,
Aut cupimus? Quid tain dextro pede concipis, ut te
Conatus non poniteat, votique peracti?
“For what, with reason, do we speak or shun,
What plan, how happily soe’r begun,
That, when achieved, we do not wish undone?”
And therefore it was that Socrates only begged of the gods that they
would give him what they knew to be best for him; and the private
and public prayer of the Lacedemonians was simply for good and useful
things, referring the choice and election of them to the discretion of
the Supreme Power:--
Conjugium petimus, partumqué uxoris; at illis
Notum, qui pueri, qualisque futura sit uxor:
“We ask for Wives and children; they above
Know only, when we have them, what they’ll prove;”
and Christians pray to God, “Thy will be done,” that they may not fall
into the inconvenience the poet feigns of King Midas. He prayed to
the gods that all he touched might be turned into gold; his prayer was
heard; his wine was gold, his bread was gold, the feathers of his
bed, his shirt, his clothes, were all gold, so that he found himself
overwhelmed with the fruition of his desire, and endowed with an
intolerable benefit, and was fain to unpray his prayers.
Attonitus novitate mali, divesque, miserque,
Effugere optât opes, et, quæ modo voverat, odit.
“Astonished at the strangeness of the ill,
To be so rich, yet miserable still;
He wishes now he could his wealth evade,
And hates the thing for which before he prayed.”
To instance in myself: being young, I desired of fortune, above all
things, the order of St. Michael, which was then the utmost distinction
of honour amongst the French nobles, and very rare. She pleasantly
gratified my longing; instead of raising me, and lifting me up from my
own place to attain to it, she was much kinder to me; for she brought it
so low, and made it so cheap, that it stooped down to my shoulders, and
lower. Cleobis and Bito, Trophonius and Agamedes, having requested, the
first of their goddess, the last of their god, a recompense worthy of
their piety, had death for a reward; so differing from ours are heavenly
opinions concerning what is fit for us. God might grant us riches,
honours, life, and even health, to our own hurt; for every thing that
is pleasing to us is not always good for us. If he sends us death, or
an increase of sickness, instead of a cure, _Vvrga tua et baculus, tuus
ipsa me consolata sunt._ “Thy rod and thy staff have comforted me,” he
does it by the rule of his providence, which better and more certainly
discerns what is proper for us than we can do; and we ought to take it
in good part, as coming from a wise and most friendly hand
Si consilium vis:
Permittee ipsis expendere numinibus, quid
Conveniat nobis, rebusque sit utile nostris...
Carior est illis homo quam sibi;
“If thou’lt be rul’d, to th’ gods thy fortunes trust,
Their thoughts are wise, their dispensations just.
What best may profit or delight they know,
And real good, for fancied bliss, bestow;
With eyes of pity, they our frailties scan,
More dear to them, than to himself, is man;”
for to require of him honours and commands, is to require ‘that he may
throw you into a battle, set you upon a cast at dice, or something of
the like nature, whereof the issue is to you unknown, and the fruit
doubtful.
There is no dispute so sharp and violent amongst the philosophers,
as about the question of the sovereign good of man; whence, by the
calculation of Varro, rose two hundred and eighty-eight sects. _Qui
autem de summo bono dissentit, de totâ philosophies ratione disputât._
“For whoever enters into controversy concerning the supreme good,
disputes upon the whole matter of philosophy.”
Très mihi convivæ prope dissentire videntur,
Poscentes vario mul turn divers a palato;
Quid dem? Quid non dem? Renuis tu quod jubet alter;
Quod petis, id sane est invisum acidumque duobus;
“I have three guests invited to a feast,
And all appear to have a different taste;
What shall I give them? What shall I refuse?
What one dislikes the other two shall choose;
And e’en the very dish you like the best
Is acid or insipid to the rest:”
nature should say the same to their contests and debates. Some say that
our well-being lies in virtue, others in pleasure, others in submitting
to nature; one in knowledge, another in being exempt from pain, another
in not suffering ourselves to be carried away by appearances; and this
fancy seems to have some relation to that of the ancient Pythagoras,
Nil admirari, prope res est una, Numici,
Solaque, quæ possit facere et servare beatum:
“Not to admire’s the only art I know
Can make us happy, and can keep us so;”
which is the drift of the Pyrrhonian sect; Aristotle attributes the
admiring nothing to magnanimity; and Arcesilaus said, that constancy and
a right inflexible state of judgment were the true good, and consent
and application the sin and evil; and there, it is true, in being thus
positive, and establishing a certain axiom, he quitted Pyrrhonism; for
the’ Pyrrhonians, when they say that ataraxy, which is the immobility
of judgment, is the sovereign good, do not design to speak it
affirmatively; but that the same motion of soul which makes them avoid
precipices, and take shelter from the cold, presents them such a fancy,
and makes them refuse another.
How much do I wish that, whilst I live, either some other or Justus
Lipsius, the most learned man now living, of a most polite and judicious
understanding, truly resembling my Turnebus, had both the will and
health, and leisure sufficient, carefully and conscientiously to collect
into a register, according to their divisions and classes, as many as
are to be found, of the opinions of the ancient philosophers, about the
subject of our being and manners, their controversies, the succession
and reputation of sects; with the application of the lives of the
authors and their disciples to their own precepts, in memorable
accidents, and upon exemplary occasions. What a beautiful and useful
work that would be!
As to what remains, if it be from ourselves that we are to extract the
rules of our manners, upon what a confusion do we throw ourselves! For
that which our reason advises us to, as the most likely, is generally
for every one to obey the laws of his country, as was the advice of
Socrates, inspired, as he says, by a divine counsel; and by that,
what would it say, but that our duty has no other rule but what is
accidental? Truth ought to have a like and universal visage; if man
could know equity and justice that had a body and a true being, he would
not fetter it to the conditions of this country or that; it would not be
from the whimsies of the Persians or Indians that virtue would receive
its form. There is nothing more subject to perpetual agitation than
the laws; since I was born, I have known those of the English, our
neighbours, three or four times changed, not only in matters of civil
regimen, which is the only thing wherein constancy may be dispensed
with, but in the most important subject that can be, namely, religion,
at which I am the more troubled and ashamed, because it is a nation with
whom those of my province have formerly had so great familiarity and
acquaintance, that there yet remains in my house some footsteps of our
ancient kindred; and here with us at home, I have known a thing that
was capital to become lawful; and we that hold of others are likewise,
according to the chance of war, in a possibility of being one day found
guilty of high-treason, both divine and human, should the justice of
our arms fall into the power of injustice, and, after a few years’
possession, take a quite contrary being. How could that ancient god more
clearly accuse the ignorance of human knowledge concerning the divine
Being, and give men to understand that their religion was but a thing of
their own contrivance, useful as a bond to their society, than declaring
as he did to those who came to his tripod for instruction, that every
one’s true worship was that which he found in use in the place where he
chanced to be? O God, what infinite obligation have we to the bounty
of our sovereign Creator, for having disabused our belief from these
wandering and arbitrary devotions, and for having seated it upon the
eternal foundation of his holy word? But what then will philosophers say
to us in this necessity? “That we follow the laws of our country;” that
is to say, this floating sea of the opinions of a republic, or a prince,
that will paint out justice for me in as many colours, and form it
as many ways as there are changes of passions in themselves; I cannot
suffer my judgment to be so flexible. What kind of virtue is that which
I see one day in repute, and that to-morrow shall be in none, and which
the crossing of a river makes a crime? What sort of truth can that
be, which these mountains limit to us, and make a lie to all the world
beyond them?
But they are pleasant, when, to give some certainty to the laws, they
say, that there are some firm, perpetual, and immovable, which they call
natural, that are imprinted in human kind by the condition of their own
proper being; and of these some reckon three, some four, some more, some
less; a sign that it is a mark as doubtful as the rest Now they are so
unfortunate, (for what can I call it else but misfortune that, of so
infinite a number of laws, there should not be found one at least
that fortune and the temerity of chance has suffered to be universally
received by the consent of all nations?) they are, I say, so miserable,
that of these three or four select laws, there is not so much as one
that is not contradicted and disowned, not only by one nation, but by
many. Now, the only likely sign, by which they can argue or infer some
natural laws, is the universality of approbation; for we should, without
doubt, follow with a common consent that which nature had truly ordained
us; and not only every nation, but every private man, would resent the
force and violence that any one should do him who would tempt him to
any thing contrary to this law. But let them produce me one of this
condition. Proctagoras and Aristo gave no other essence to the justice
of laws than the authority and opinion of the legislator; and that,
these laid aside, the honest and the good lost their qualities, and
remained empty names of indifferent things; Thrasymachus, in Plato,
is of opinion that there is no other right but the convenience of the
superior. There is not any thing wherein the world is so various as in
laws and customs; such a thing is abominable here which is elsewhere in
esteem, as in Lacedemon dexterity in stealing; marriages between near
relations, are capitally interdicted amongst us; they are elsewhere in
honour:--
Gentes esse ferantur,
In quibus et nato genitrix, et nata parenti
Jungitur, et pietas geminato crescit amore;
“There are some nations in the world, ‘tis said,
Where fathers daughters, sons their mothers wed;
And their affections thereby higher rise,
More firm and constant by these double ties;”
the murder of infants, the murder of fathers, the community of wives,
traffic of robberies, license in all sorts of voluptuousness; in short,
there is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some
nation or other.
It is credible that there are natural laws for us, as we see them
in other creatures; but they are lost in us, this fine human reason
everywhere so insinuating itself to govern and command, as to shuffle
and confound the face of things, according to its own vanity and
inconstancy: _Nihil itaque amplius nostrum est; quod nostrum dico,
artis est:_ “Therefore nothing is any more truly ours; what we call ours
belongs to art.” Subjects have divers lustres and divers considerations,
and thence the diversity of opinions principally proceeds; one nation
considers a subject in one aspect, and stops there: another takes it in
a different point of view.
There is nothing of greater horror to be imagined than for a man to eat
his father; and yet the people, whose ancient custom it was so to do,
looked upon it as a testimony of piety and affection, seeking thereby to
give their progenitors the most worthy and honourable sepulture; storing
up in themselves, and as it were in their own marrow, the bodies
and relics of their fathers; and in some sort regenerating them by
transmutation into their living flesh, by means of nourishment and
digestion. It is easy to consider what a cruelty and abomination it
must have appeared to men possessed and imbued with this snperstition
to throw their fathers’ remains to the corruption of the earth, and the
nourishment of beasts and worms.
Lycurgus considered in theft the vivacity, diligence, boldness, and
dexterity of purloining any thing from our neighbours, and the benefit
that redounded to the public that every one should look more narrowly
to the conservation of what was his own; and believed that, from this
double institution of assaulting and defending, advantage was to be made
for military discipline (which was the principal science and virtue to
which he would inure that nation), of greater consideration than the
disorder and injustice of taking another man’s goods.
Dionysius, the tyrant, offered Plato a robe of the Persian fashion,
long, damasked, and perfumed; Plato refused it, saying, “That being
born a man, he would not willingly dress himself in women’s clothes;”
but Aristippus accepted it with this answer, “That no accoutrement could
corrupt a chaste courage.” His friends reproaching him with meanness of
spirit, for laying it no more to heart that Dionysius had spit in his
face, “Fishermen,” said he, “suffer themselves to be drenched with the
waves of the sea from head to foot to catch a gudgeon.” Diogenes was
washing cabbages, and seeing him pass by, “If thou couldst live on
cabbage,” said he, “thou wouldst not fawn upon a tyrant;” to whom
Aristippus replied, “And if thou knewest how to live amongst men, thou
wouldst not be washing cabbages.” Thus reason finds appearances for
divers effects; ‘tis a pot with two ears that a man may take by the
right or left:--
Bellum, o terra hospita, portas:
Bello armantur eqni; bellum hæc armenta minantur.
Sed tamen idem olim curru succedere sueti
Quadrupedes, et frena jugo concordia ferre;
Spes est pacis.
“War, war is threatened from this foreign ground
(My father cried), where warlike steeds are found.
Yet, since reclaimed, to chariots they submit,
And bend to stubborn yokes, and champ the bit,
Peace may succeed to war.”
Solon, being lectured by his friends not to shed powerless and
unprofitable tears for the death of his son, “It is for that reason that
I the more justly shed them,” said he, “because they are powerless
and unprofitable.” Socrates’s wife exasperated her grief by this
circumstance: “Oh, how unjustly do these wicked judges put him to
death!” “Why,” replied he, “hadst thou rather they should execute me
justly?” We have our ears bored; the Greeks looked upon that as a mark
of slavery. We retire in private to enjoy our wives; the Indians do it
in public. The Scythians immolated strangers in their temples; elsewhere
temples were a refuge:--
Inde furor vulgi, quod numina vicinorum
Odit quisque locus, cum solos credat habendos
Esse deos, quos ipse colit.
“Thus ‘tis the popular fury that creates
That all their neighbours’ gods each nation hates;
Each thinks its own the genuine; in a word,
The only deities to be adored.”
I have heard of a judge who, coming upon a sharp conflict betwixt
Bartolus and Aldus, and some point controverted with many contrarieties,
writ in the margin of his book, “a question for a friend;” that is to
say, that truth was there so controverted and disputed that in a like
cause he might favour which of the parties he thought fit ‘Twas only for
want of wit that he did not write “a question for a friend” throughout.
The advocates and judges of our times find bias enough in all causes
to accommodate them to what they themselves think fit. In so infinite
a science, depending upon the authority of so many opinions, and so
arbitrary a subject, it cannot be but that of necessity an extreme
confusion of judgments must arise; there is hardly any suit so clear
wherein opinions do not very much differ; what one court has determined
one way another determines quite contrary, and itself contrary to that
at another time. Of which we see very frequent examples, owing to that
practice admitted amongst us, and which is a marvellous blemish to the
ceremonious authority and lustre of our justice, of not abiding by one
sentence, but running from judge to judge, and court to court, to decide
one and the same cause.
As to the liberty of philosophical opinions concerning vice and virtue,
‘tis not necessary to be insisted upon; therein are found many opinions
that are better concealed than published to weak minds. Arcesilaus said,
“That in venery it was no matter where, or with whom, it was committed:”
_Et obsccenas voluptates, si natura requirit, non genere, aut loco, aut
ordine, sed forma, otate, jigurâ, metiendas Epicurus putat.... ne amores
quidem sanctos a sapiente alienos esse arbitrantur.... Queeramus, ad
quam usque otatem juvenes amandi sint._ “And obscene pleasures, if
nature requires them,” Epicurus thinks, “are not to be measured either
by race, kind, place, or rank, but by age, shape, and beauty.... Neither
are sacred loves thought to be foreign to wise men;... we are to
inquire till what age young men are to be loved.” These last two stoical
quotations, and the reproach that Dicæarchus threw into the teeth of
Plato himself, upon this account, show how much the soundest philosophy
indulges licenses and excesses very remote from common custom.
Laws derive their authority from possession and custom. ‘Tis dangerous
to trace them back to their beginning; they grow great, and ennoble
themselves, like our rivers, by running on; but follow them upward to
their source, ‘tis but a little spring, scarce discernable,
that swells thus, and thus fortifies itself by growing old. Do but
consult the ancient considerations that gave the first motion to this
famous torrent, so full of dignity, awe, and reverence, you will find
them so light and weak that it is no wonder if these people, who weigh
and reduce every thing to reason, and who admit nothing by authority, or
upon trust, have their judgments often very remote, and differing from
those of the public. It is no wonder if people, who take their pattern
from the first image of nature, should in most of their opinions swerve
from the common path; as, for example, few amongst them would have
approved of the strict conditions of our marriages, and most of them
have been for having wives in common, and without obligation; they would
refuse our ceremonies. Chrysippus said, “That a philosopher would make
a dozen somersaults, aye, and without his breeches, for a dozen of
olives.” That philosopher would hardly have advised Clisthenes to have
refused Hippoclides the fair Agarista his daughter, for having seen him
stand on his head upon a table. Metrocles somewhat indiscreetly broke
wind backwards while in disputation, in the presence of a great auditory
in his school, and kept himself hid in his own house for shame, till
Crates coming to visit him, and adding to his consolations and reasons
the example of his own liberty, by falling to try with him who should
sound most, cured him of that scruple, and withal drew him to his own
stoical sect, more free than that more reserved one of the Peripatetics,
of which he had been till then. That which we call decency, not to dare
to do that in public which is decent enough to do in private, the Stoics
call foppery; and to mince it, and to be so modest as to conceal and
disown what nature, custom, and our desires publish and proclaim of our
actions, they reputed a vice. The other thought it was to undervalue the
mysteries of Venus to draw them out of the private oratory, to expose
them to the view of the people; and that to bring them out from behind
the curtain was to debase them. Modesty is a thing of weight; secrecy,
reservation, and circumspection, are parts of esteem. Pleasure did
very ingeniously when, under the mask of virtue, she sued not to be
prostituted in the open streets, trodden under foot, and exposed to
the public view, wanting the dignity and convenience of her private
cabinets. Hence some say that to put down public stews is not only to
disperse fornication into all places, that was confined to one, but
moreover, by the difficulty, to incite wild and idle people to this
vice:--
Mochus es Aufidiæ, qui vir,
Scævine, fuisti:
Rivalis fuerat qui tuus, ille vir est.
Cur aliéna placet tibi, quæ tua non placet uxor?
Numquid securus non potes arrigere?
This experience diversifies itself in a thousand examples:--
Nullus in urbe fuit totâ, qui tangere vellet
Uxorem gratis, Cæciliane, tuam,
Dum licuit: sed nunc, positis custodibus, ingens
Turba fututorum est. Ingeniosus homo es.
A philosopher being taken in the very act, and asked what he was doing,
coldly replied, “I am planting man;” no more blushing to be so caught
than if they had found him planting garlic.
It is, I suppose, out of tenderness and respect to the natural modesty
of mankind that a great and religious author is of opinion that this act
is so necessarily obliged to privacy and shame that he cannot persuade
himself there could be any absolute performance in those impudent
embraces of the Cynics, but that they contented themselves to represent
lascivious gestures only, to maintain the impudence of their school’s
profession; and that, to eject what shame had withheld and restrained,
it was afterward necessary for them to withdraw into the shade. But he
had not thoroughly examined their debauches; for Diogenes, playing the
beast with himself in public, wished, in the presence of all that saw
him, that he could fill his belly by that exercise. To those who asked
him why he did not find out a more commodious place to eat in than
in the open street, he made answer, “Because I am hungry in the open
street.” The women philosophers who mixed with their sect, mixed also
with their persons, in all places, without reservation; and Hipparchia
was not received into Crates’s society, but upon condition that she
should, in all things, follow the practice and customs of his rule.
These philosophers set a great price upon virtue, and renounce all other
discipline but the moral; and yet, in all their actions, they attributed
the sovereign authority to the election of their sage, and above the
laws; and gave no other curb to voluptuousness but moderation only, and
the conservation of the liberty of others.
Heraclitus and Protagoras, forasmuch as wine seemed bitter to the sick,
and pleasant to the sound, the rudder crooked in the water, and straight
when out, and such like contrary appearances as are found in subjects,
argued thence that all subjects had, in themselves, the causes of these
appearances; and there was some bitterness in the wine which had some
sympathy with the sick man’s taste, and the rudder some bending quality
sympathizing with him that looks upon it in the water; and so of all
the rest; which is to say, that all is in all things, and, consequently,
nothing in any one; for, where all is, there is nothing.
This opinion put me in mind of the experience we have that there is
no sense or aspect of any thing, whether bitter or sweet, straight
or crooked, that the human mind does not find out in the writings it
undertakes to tumble over. Into the cleanest, purest, and most perfect
words that can possibly be, how many lies and falsities have we
suggested! What heresy has not there found ground and testimony
sufficient to make itself embraced and defended! ‘Tis for this that the
authors of such errors will never depart from proof of the testimony of
the interpretation of words. A person of dignity, who would approve to
me, by authority, the search of the philosopher’s stone, wherein he
was head over ears engaged, lately alleged to me at least five or six
passages of the Bible upon which, he said, he first founded his attempt,
for the discharge of his conscience (for he is a divine); and, in truth,
the idea was not only pleasant, but, moreover, very well accommodated to
the defence of this fine science.
By this way the reputation of divining fables is acquired. There is no
fortune-teller, if we have this authority, but, if a man will take the
pains to tumble and toss, and narrowly to peep into all the folds and
glosses of his words, he may make him, like the Sibyls, say what he
will. There are so many ways of interpretation that it will be hard but
that, either obliquely or in a direct line, an ingenious wit will
find out, in every subject, some air that will serve for his purpose;
therefore we find a cloudy and ambiguous style in so frequent and
ancient use. Let the author but make himself master of that, to busy
posterity about his predictions, which not only his own parts, but the
accidental favour of the matter itself, may do for him; and, as to
the rest, express himself, whether after a foolish or a subtle manner,
somewhat obscurely or contradictorily, ‘tis no matter;--a number of
wits, shaking and sifting him, will bring out a great many several
forms, either according to his meaning, or collateral, or contrary, to
it, which will all redound to his honour; he will see himself enriched
by the means of his disciples, like the regents of colleges by their
pupils yearly presents. This it is which has given reputation to many
things of no worth at all; that has brought several writings in vogue,
and given them the fame of containing all sorts of matter can be
desired; one and the same thing receiving a thousand and a thousand
images and various considerations; nay, as many as we please.
Is it possible that Homer could design to say all that we make him
say, and that he designed so many and so various figures, as that the
divines, law-givers, captains, philosophers, and all sorts of men
who treat of sciences, how variously and opposite soever, should
indifferently quote him, and support their arguments by his authority,
as the sovereign lord and master of all offices, works, and artisans,
and counsellor-general of all enterprises? Whoever has had occasion for
oracles and predictions has there found sufficient to serve his turn.
‘Tis a wonder how many and how admirable concurrences an intelligent
person, and a particular friend of mine, has there found out in favour
of our religion; and cannot easily be put out of the conceit that it was
Homer’s design; and yet he is as well acquainted with this author as
any man whatever of his time. And what he has found in favour of our
religion there, very many anciently have found in favour of theirs. Do
but observe how Plato is tumbled and tossed about; every one ennobling
his own opinions by applying him to himself, and making him take what
side they please. They draw him in, and engage him in all the new
opinions the world receives; and make him, according to the different
course of things, differ from himself; every one makes him disavow,
according to his own sense, the manners and customs lawful in his age,
because they are unlawful in ours; and all this with vivacity and power,
according to the force and sprightliness of the wit of the interpreter.
From the same foundation that Heraclitus and this sentence of his had,
“that all things had in them those forms that we discern,” Democritus
drew quite a contrary conclusion,--“that objects have in them nothing
that we discern in them;” and because honey is sweet to one and bitter
to another, he thence argued that it was neither sweet nor bitter. The
Pyrrhonians would say that they knew not whether it is sweet or bitter,
or whether the one or the other, or both; for these always gained
the highest point of dubitation. The Cyrenaics held that nothing was
perceptible from without, and that that only was perceptible that
inwardly touched us, as pain and pleasure; acknowledging neither sound
nor colour, but certain affections only that we receive from them; and
that man’s judgment had no other seat Protagoras believed that “what
seems true to every one, is true to every one.” The Epicureans lodged
all judgment in the senses, and in the knowledge of things, and in
pleasure. Plato would have the judgment of truth, and truth itself,
derived from opinions and the senses, to belong to the wit and
cogitation.
This discourse has put me upon the consideration of the senses, in which
lies the greatest foundation and Pro°f of our ignorance. Whatsoever is
known, is doubtless known by the faculty of the knower; for, seeing the
judgment proceeds from the operation of him that judges, ‘tis reason
that this operation be performed by his means and will, not by the
constraint of another; as it would happen if we knew things by the
power, and according to the law of their essence. Now all knowledge is
conveyed to us by the senses; they are our masters:--
Via qua munita fidei
Proxima fert humanum in pectus, templaque mentis;
“It is the surest path that faith can find
By which to enter human heart and mind.”
Science begins by them, and is resolved into them. After all, we should
know no more than a stone if we did not know there is sound, odour,
light, taste, measure, weight, softness, hardness, sharpness, colour,
smoothness, breadth, and depth; these are the platforms and principles
of the structure of all our knowledge; and, according to some, science
is nothing else but sense. He that could make me contradict the senses,
would have me by the throat; he could not make me go further back. The
senses are the beginning and the end of human knowledge:--
Invenies primis ab sensibns esse creatam
Notitiam veil; neque sensus posse refelli....
Quid majore fide porro, quam sensus, haberi Debet?
“Of truth, whate’er discoveries are made,
Are by the senses to us first conveyed;
Nor will one sense be baffled; for on what
Can we rely more safely than on that?”
Let us attribute to them the least we can, we must, however, of
necessity grant them this, that it is by their means and mediation that
all our instruction is directed. Cicero says, that Chrysippus having
attempted to extenuate the force and virtue of the senses, presented to
himself arguments and so vehement oppositions to the contrary that he
could not satisfy himself therein; whereupon Cameades, who maintained
the contrary side, boasted that he would make use of the very words and
arguments of Chrysippus to controvert and confute him, and therefore
thus cried out against him: “O miserable! thy force has destroyed thee.”
There can be nothing absurd to a greater degree than to maintain that
fire does not warm, that light does not shine, and that there is no
weight nor solidity in iron, which are things conveyed to us by the
senses; neither is there belief nor knowledge in man that can be
compared to that for certainty.
The first consideration I have upon the subject of the senses is that I
make a doubt whether or no man be furnished with all natural senses. I
see several animals who live an entire and perfect life, some without
sight, others without hearing; who knows whether to us also one, two,
three, or many other senses may not be wanting? For if any one be
wanting, our examination cannot discover the defect. ‘Tis the privilege
of the senses to be the utmost limit of our discovery; there is nothing
beyond them that can assist us in exploration, not so much as one sense
in the discovery of another:--
An poterunt oculos aures reprehendere? an aures
Tactus an hunc porro tactum sapor argnet oris?
An confutabunt nares, oculive revincent?
“Can ears the eyes, the touch the ears, correct?
Or is that touch by tasting to be check’d?
Or th’ other senses, shall the nose or eyes
Confute in their peculiar faculties?”
They all make the extremest limits of our ability:--
Seorsum cuique potestas Divisa est, sua vis cuique est,
“Each has its power distinctly and alone,
And every sense’s power is its own.”
It is impossible to make a man naturally blind conceive that he does not
see; impossible to make him desire sight, or to regret his defect; for
which reason we ought not to derive any assurance from the soul’s being
contented and satisfied with those we have; considering that it cannot
be sensible herein of its infirmity and imperfection, if there be any
such thing. It is impossible to say any thing to this blind man, either
by reasoning, argument, or similitude, that can possess his imagination
with any apprehension of light, colour, or sight; there’s nothing
remains behind that can push on the senses to evidence. Those that
are born blind, whom we hear wish they could see, it is not that they
understand what they desire; they have learned from us that they want
something; that there is something to be desired that we have, which
they can name indeed and speak of its effect and consequences; but yet
they know not what it is, nor apprehend it at all.
I have seen a gentleman of a good family who was born blind, or at least
blind from such an age that he knows not what sight is; who is so little
sensible of his defect that he makes use as we do of words proper for
seeing, and applies them after a manner wholly particular and his own.
They brought him a child to which he was god-father, which, having taken
into his arms, “Good God,” said he, “what a fine child! How beautiful
to look upon! what a pretty face it has!” He will say, like one of us,
“This room has a very fine prospect;--it is clear weather;--the sun
shines bright.” And moreover, being that hunting, tennis, and butts are
our exercises, and he has heard so, he has taken a liking to them, will
ride a-hunting, and believes he has as good share of the sport as we
have; and will express himself as angry or pleased as the best of us
all, and yet knows nothing of it but by the ear. One cries out to him,
“Here’s a hare!” when he is upon some even plain where he may safely
ride; and afterwards, when they tell him, “The hare is killed,” he will
be as overjoyed and proud of it as he hears others say they are. He will
take a tennis-ball in his left hand and strike it away with the racket;
he will shoot with a harquebuss at random, and is contented with what
his people tell him, that he is over, or wide.
Who knows whether all human kind commit not the like absurdity, for want
of some sense, and that through this default the greatest part of
the face of things is concealed from us? What do we know but that the
difficulties which we find in several works of nature proceed hence;
and that several effects of animals, which exceed our capacity, are not
produced by faculty of some sense that we are defective in? and whether
some of them have not by this means a life more full and entire than
ours? We seize an apple with all our senses; we there find redness,
smoothness, odour, and sweetness; but it may have other virtues besides
these, as to heat or binding, which no sense of ours can have any
reference unto. Is it not likely that there are sensitive faculties in
nature that are fit to judge of and to discern those which we call the
occult properties in several things, as for the loadstone to attract
iron; and that the want of such faculties is the cause that we
are ignorant of the true essence of such things? ‘Tis perhaps some
particular sense that gives cocks to understand what hour it is at
midnight, and when it grows to be towards day, and that makes them crow
accordingly; that teaches chickens, before they have any experience of
the matter, to fear a sparrow-hawk, and not a goose or a peacock, though
birds of a much larger size; that cautions them against the hostile
quality the cat has against them, and makes them not to fear a dog; to
arm themselves against the mewing, a kind of flattering voice, of the
one, and not against the barking, a shrill and threatening voice, of the
other; that teaches wasps, ants, and rats, to fall upon the best pear
and the best cheese before they have tasted them, and inspires the stag,
elephant, and serpent, with the knowledge of a certain herb proper for
their cure. There is no sense that has not a mighty dominion, and that
does not by its power introduce an infinite number of knowledges. If
we were defective in the intelligence of sounds, of harmony, and of the
voice, it would cause an unimaginable confusion in all the rest of our
science; for, besides what belongs to the proper effect of every sense,
how many arguments, consequences, and conclusions do we draw to other
things, by comparing one sense with another? Let an understanding man
imagine human nature originally produced without the sense of seeing,
and consider what ignorance and trouble such a defect would bring upon
him, what a darkness and blindness in the soul; he will then see by that
of how great importance to the knowledge of truth the privation of such
another sense, or of two or three, should we be so deprived, would be.
We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five
senses; but perhaps we should have the consent and contribution of eight
or ten to make a certain discovery of it in its essence.
The sects that controvert the knowledge of man do it principally by the
uncertainty and weakness of our senses; for since all knowledge is
by their means and mediation conveyed unto us, if they fail in their
report, if they corrupt or alter what they bring us from without, if the
light which by them creeps into the soul be obscured in the passage,
we have nothing else to hold by. From this extreme difficulty all these
fancies proceed: “That every subject has in itself all we there find.
That it has nothing in it of what we think we there find;” and that of
the Epicureans, “That the sun is no bigger than ‘tis judged by our sight
to be:--”
Quidquid id est, nihilo fertur majore figura,
Quam nostris oculis quam cemimus, esse videtur:
“But be it what it will in our esteems,
It is no bigger than to us it seems:”
that the appearances which represent a body great to him that is near,
and less to him that is more remote, are both true:--
Nee tamen hic oculos falli concedimus hilum....
Proinde animi vitium hoc oculis adfingere noli:
“Yet that the eye’s deluded we deny;
Charge not the mind’s faults, therefore, on the eye:”
“and, resolutely, that there is no deceit in the senses; that we are to
lie at their mercy, and seek elsewhere reasons to excuse the difference
and contradictions we there find, even to the inventing of lies and
other flams, if it come to that, rather than accuse the senses.”
Timagoras vowed that, by pressing or turning his eye, he could never
perceive the light of the candle to double, and that the seeming so
proceeded from the vice of opinion, and not from the instrument. The
most absurd of all absurdities, with the Epicureans, is to deny the
force and effect of the senses:--
Proinde, quod in quoquo est his visum tempore, verum est
Et, si non potuit ratio dissolvere causam,
Cur ea, quæ fuerint juxtim quadrata, procul sint
Visa rotunda; tamen præstat rationis egentem
Beddere mendose causas utriusque figuræ,
Quam manibus manifesta suis emittere quæquam,
Et violare fidem primam, et convellere tota
Fundamenta, quibus nixatur vita salusque:
Non modo enim ratio ruat omnis, vita quoque ipsa
Concidat extemplo, nisi credere sensibus ausis,
Procipitesque locos vitare, et cætera, quæ sint
In genere hoc fugienda.
“That what we see exists I will maintain,
And if our feeble reason can’t explain
Why things seem square when they are very near,
And at a greater distance round appear;
‘Tis better yet, for him that’s at a pause,
‘T’ assign to either figure a false cause,
Than shock his faith, and the foundations rend
On which our safety and our life depend:
For reason not alone, but life and all,
Together will with sudden ruin fall;
Unless we trust our senses, nor despise
To shun the various dangers that arise.”
This so desperate and unphilosophical advice expresses only this,--that
human knowledge cannot support itself but by reason unreasonable,
foolish, and mad; but that it is yet better that man, to set a greater
value upon himself, make use of any other remedy, how fantastic soever,
than to confess his necessary ignorance--a truth so disadvantageous to
him. He cannot avoid owning that the senses are the sovereign lords
of his knowledge; but they are uncertain, and falsifiable in all
circumstances; ‘tis there that he is to fight it out to the last; and
if his just forces fail him, as they do, to supply that defect with
obstinacy, temerity, and impudence. In case what the Epicureans say
be true, viz: “that we have no knowledge if the senses’ appearances
be false;” and if that also be true which the Stoics say, “that the
appearances of the senses are so false that they can furnish us with no
manner of knowledge,” we shall conclude, to the disadvantage of these
two great dogmatical sects, that there is no science at all.
As to the error and uncertainty of the operation of the senses, every
one may furnish himself with as many examples as he pleases; so ordinary
are the faults and tricks they put upon us. In the echo of a valley the
sound of a trumpet seems to meet us, which comes from a place behind:--
Exstantesque procul medio de gurgite montes,
Classibus inter qnos liber patet exitus, idem
Apparent, et longe divolsi licet, ingens
Insula conjunctis tamen ex his ana videtur...
Et fugere ad puppim colies campique videntur,
Qnos agimns proter navim, velisque volamus....
Ubi in medio nobis equus acer obhæsit
Flamine, equi corpus transversum ferre videtur
Vis, et in adversum flumen contrudere raptim.
“And rocks i’ th’ seas that proudly raise their head,
Though far disjoined, though royal navies spread,
Their sails between; yet if from distance shown,
They seem an island all combin’d in one.
Thus ships, though driven by a prosperous gale,
Seem fix’d to sailors; those seem under sail
That ride at anchor safe; and all admire,
As they row by, to see the rocks retire.
Thus, when in rapid streams my horse hath stood,
And I look’d downward on the rolling flood;
Though he stood still, I thought he did divide
The headlong streams, and strive against the tide,
And all things seem’d to move on every side.”
Take a musket-ball under the forefinger, the middle finger being lapped
over it, it feels so like two that a man will have much ado to persuade
himself there is but one; the end of the two fingers feeling each of
them one at the same time; for that the senses are very often masters of
our reason, and constrain it to receive impressions which it judges and
knows to be false, is frequently seen. I set aside the sense of feeling,
that has its functions nearer, more lively, and substantial, that so
often, by the effects of the pains it helps the body to, subverts and
overthrows all those fine Stoical resolutions, and compels him to cry
out of his belly, who has resolutely established this doctrine in his
soul--“That the colic, and all other pains and diseases, are indifferent
things, not having the power to abate any thing of the sovereign
felicity wherein the wise man is seated by his virtue.” There is no
heart so effeminate that the rattle and sound of our drums and trumpets
will not inflame with courage; nor so sullen that the harmony of our
music will not rouse and cheer; nor so stubborn a soul that will
not feel itself struck with some reverence in considering the gloomy
vastness of our churches, the variety of ornaments, and order of our
ceremonies; and in hearing the solemn music of our organs, and the grace
and devout harmony of our voices. Even those that come in with contempt
feel a certain shivering in their hearts, and something of dread that
makes them begin to doubt their opinions. For my part I do not think
myself strong enough to hear an ode of Horace or Catullus sung by a
beautiful young mouth without emotion; and Zeno had reason to say “that
the voice was the flower of beauty.” One would once make me believe that
a certain person, whom all we Frenchmen know, had imposed upon me in
repeating some verses that he had made; that they were not the same upon
paper that they were in the air; and that my eyes would make a contrary
judgment to my ears; so great a power has pronunciation to give fashion
and value to works that are left to the efficacy and modulation of the
voice. And therefore Philoxenus was not so much to blame, hearing
one giving an ill accent to some composition of his, in spurning and
breaking certain earthen vessels of his, saying, “I break what is thine,
because thou corruptest what is mine.” To what end did those men who
have, with a firm resolution, destroyed themselves, turn away their
faces that they might not see the blow that was by themselves appointed?
And that those who, for their health, desire and command incisions to
be made, and cauteries to be applied to them, cannot endure the sight of
the preparations, instruments, and operations of the surgeon, being that
the sight is not in any way to participate in the pain? Are not these
proper examples to verify the authority the senses have over the
imagination? ‘Tis to much purpose that we know these tresses were
borrowed from a page or a lackey; that this rouge came from Spain, and
this pearl-powder from the Ocean Sea. Our sight will, nevertheless,
compel us to confess their subject more agreeable and more lovely
against all reason; for in this there is nothing of its own:--
Auferinrar cultu; gemmis, auroque teguntur
Crimina; pars minima est ipsa puella sni.
Sæpe, ubi sit quod ames, inter tarn multa requiras:
Decipit hac oculos ægide dives Amor.
“By dress we’re won; gold, gems, and rich brocades
Make up the pageant that your heart invades;
In all that glittering figure which you see,
The far least part of her own self is she;
In vain for her you love amidst such cost
You search, the mistress in such dress is lost.”
What a strange power do the poets attribute to the senses, that make
Narcissus so desperately in love with his own shadow,
Cunctaque miratur, quibus est mirabilis ipse;
Se cupit imprudens, et, qui probat, ipse probatur;
Dumque petit, petitur; pariterque accendit, et ardet:
“Admireth all; for which to be admired;
And inconsiderately himself desir’d.
The praises which he gives his beauty claim’d,
Who seeks is sought, th’ inflamer is inflam’d:”
and Pygmalion’s judgment so troubled by the impression of the sight
of his ivory statue that he loves and adores it as if it were a living
woman!
Oscnla dat, reddique putat: sequi turque, tenetque,
Et credit tactis digitos insidere membris;
Et metuit, pressos veniat ne livor in artus.
“He kisses, and believes he’s kissed again;
Seizes, and ‘twixt his arms his love doth strain,
And thinks the polish’d ivory thus held
Doth to his fingers amorous pressure yield,
And has a timorous fear, lest black and blue
Should in the parts with ardour press’d ensue.”
Put a philosopher into a cage of small thin set bars of iron, hang him
on the top of the high tower of Notre Dame at Paris; he will see, by
manifest reason, that he cannot possibly fall, and yet he will find
(unless he has been used to the plumber’s trade) that he cannot help but
the sight of the excessive height will fright and astound him; for we
have enough to do to assure ourselves in the galleries of our steeples,
if they are made with open work, although they are of stone; and some
there are that cannot endure so much as to think of it. Let there be a
beam thrown over betwixt these two towers, of breadth sufficient to
walk upon, there is no philosophical wisdom so firm that can give us the
courage to walk over it as we should do upon the ground. I have often
tried this upon our mountains in these parts; and though I am one who am
not the most subject to be afraid, I was not able to endure to look into
that infinite depth without horror and trembling, though I stood above
my length from the edge of the precipice, and could not have fallen
unless I would. Where I also observed that, what height soever the
precipice was, provided there were some tree, or some jutting out of a
rock, a little to support and divide the sight, it a little eases our
fears, and gives greater assurance; as if they were things by which in
falling we might have some relief; but that direct precipices we are
not to look upon without being giddy; _Ut despici vine vertigine
timid ocvlorum animique non possit:_ “‘To that one cannot look without
dizziness;” which is a manifest imposture of the sight. And therefore
it was that that fine philosopher put out his own eyes, to free the soul
from being diverted by them, and that he might philosophize at greater
liberty; but, by the same rule, he should have dammed up his ears,
that Theophrastus says are the most dangerous instruments about us for
receiving violent impressions to alter and disturb us; and, finally,
should have deprived himself of all his other senses, that is to say, of
his life and being; for they have all the power to command our soul and
reason: _Fit etiam sope specie quâdam, sope vocum gravitate et cantibus,
ut pettantur animi vehementius; sope etiam cura et timoré,_ “For it
often falls out that the minds are more vehemently struck by some sight,
by the quality and sound of the voice, or by singing; and ofttimes also
by grief and fear.” Physicians hold that there are certain complexions
that are agitated by the same sounds and instruments even to fury. I
have seen some who could not hear a bone gnawed under the table without
impatience; and there is scarce any man who is not disturbed at the
sharp and shrill noise that the file makes in grating upon the iron;
as also to hear chewing near them, or to hear any one speak who has an
impediment in the throat or nose, will move some people even to anger
and hatred. Of what use was that piping prompter of Gracchus, who
softened, raised, and moved his master’s voice whilst he declaimed at
Rome, if the movements and quality of the sound had not the power to
move and alter the judgments of the auditory? In earnest, there is
wonderful reason to keep such a clutter about the firmness of this fine
piece, that suffers itself to be turned and twined by the motion and
accidents of so light a wind.
The same cheat that the senses put upon our understanding they have in
turn put upon them; the soul also some times has its revenge; they lie
and contend which should most deceive one another. What we see and hear
when we are transported with passion, we neither see nor hear as it
is:--
Et solem geminum, et duplices se ostendere Thebas.
“Thebes seems two cities, and the sun two suns.”
The object that we love appears to us more beautiful than it really is;
Multimodis igitur pravas turpesque videmus
Esse in deliciis, summoque in honore vigere;
“Hence ‘tis that ugly things in fancied dress
Seem gay, look fair to lovers’ eyes, and please;”
and that we hate more ugly; to a discontented and afflicted man the
light of the day seems dark and overcast. Our senses are not only
depraved, but very often stupefied by the passions of the soul; how many
things do we see that we do not take notice of, if the mind be occupied
with other thoughts?
In rebus quoque apertis noscere possis,
Si non advertas animum, proinde esse quasi omni
Tempore semotæ fuerint, longeque remotæ:
“Nay, even in plainest things, unless the mind
Take heed, unless she sets herself to find,
The thing no more is seen, no more belov’d,
Than if the most obscure and most remov’d:”
it would appear that the soul retires within, and amuses the powers of
the senses. And so both the inside and the outside of man is full of
infirmity and falsehood.
They who have compared our lives to a dream were, perhaps, more in the
right than they were aware of. When we dream, the soul lives, works, and
exercises all its faculties, neither more nor less than when awake;
but more largely and obscurely, yet not so much, neither, that the
difference should be as great as betwixt night and the meridian
brightness of the sun, but as betwixt night and shade; there she sleeps,
here she slumbers; but, whether more or less, ‘tis still dark, and
Cimmerian darkness. We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. I do not see so
clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear
enough and free from clouds; moreover, sleep, when it is profound,
sometimes rocks even dreams themselves asleep; but our waking is never
so sprightly that it rightly purges and dissipates those whimsies, which
are waking dreams, and worse than dreams. Our reason and soul receiving
those fancies and opinions that come in dreams, and authorizing the
actions of our dreams with the like approbation that they do those of
the day, wherefore do we not doubt whether our thought, our action, is
not another sort of dreaming, and our waking a certain kind of sleep?
If the senses be our first judges, it is not ours that we are alone to
consult; for, in this faculty, beasts have as great, or greater, than
we; it is certain that some of them have the sense of hearing more quick
than man; others that of seeing, others that of feeling, others that
of touch and taste. Democritus said, that the gods and brutes had the
sensitive faculties more perfect than man. But betwixt the effects of
their senses and ours the difference is extreme. Our spittle cleanses
and dries up our wounds; it kills the serpent:--
Tantaque in his rebas distantia differitasque est,
Ut quod aliis cibus est, aliis fuat acre venenum.
Sæpe etenim serpens, hominis contacta salivà,
Disperit, ac sese mandendo conficit ipsa:
“And in those things the difference is so great
That what’s one’s poison is another’s meat;
For serpents often have been seen, ‘tis said,
When touch’d with human spittle, to go mad,
And bite themselves to death:”
what quality shall we attribute to our spittle? as it affects ourselves,
or as it affects the serpent? By which of the two senses shall we prove
the true essence that we seek for?
Pliny says there are certain sea-hares in the Indies that are poison to
us, and we to them; insomuch that, with the least touch, we kill
them. Which shall be truly poison, the man or the fish? Which shall we
believe, the fish of the man, or the man of the fish? One quality of the
air infects a man, that does the ox no harm; some other infects the ox,
but hurts not the man. Which of the two shall, in truth and nature, be
the pestilent quality? To them who have the jaundice, all things seem
yellow and paler than to us:--
Lurida præterea fiunt, quæcunque tuentur Arquati.
“Besides, whatever jaundic’d eyes do view
Looks pale as well as those, and yellow too.”
They who are troubled with the disease that the physicians call
hyposphagma--which is a suffusion of blood under the skin--see all
things red and bloody. What do we know but that these humours, which
thus alter the operations of sight, predominate in beasts, and are usual
with them? for we see some whose eyes are yellow, like us who have the
jaundice; and others of a bloody colour; ‘tis likely that the colours
of objects seem other to them than to us. Which of the two shall make
a right judgment? for it is not said that the essence of things has a
relation to man only; hardness, whiteness, depth, and sharpness, have
reference to the service and knowledge of animals as well as to us, and
nature has equally designed them for their use. When we press down
the eye, the body that we look upon we perceive to be longer and more
extended;--many beasts have their eyes so pressed down; this length,
therefore, is perhaps the true form of that body, and not that which our
eyes give it in the usual state. If we close the lower part of the eye
things appear double to us:--
Bina lucemarum fiorentia lumina flammis...
Et duplices hominum faciès, et corpora bina.
“One lamp seems double, and the men appear
Each on two bodies double heads to bear.”
If our ears be hindered, or the passage stopped with any thing, we
receive the sound quite otherwise than we usually do; animals, likewise,
who have either the ears hairy, or but a very little hole instead of an
ear, do not, consequently, hear as we do, but receive another kind of
sound. We see at festivals and theatres that, opposing a painted glass
of a certain colour to the light of the flambeaux, all things in the
place appear to us green, yellow, or violet:--
Et vulgo faciunt id lutea russaque vela,
Et ferrugina, cum, magnis intenta theatris,
Per malos vulgata trabesque, trementia pendent;
Namque ibi consessum caveai subter, et omnem
Scenai speciem, patrum, matrumque, deorumque
Inficiunt, coguntque suo volitare colore:
“Thus when pale curtains, or the deeper red,
O’er all the spacious theatre are spread,
Which mighty masts and sturdy pillars bear,
And the loose curtains wanton in the air;
Whole streams of colours from the summit flow,
The rays divide them in their passage through,
And stain the scenes, and men, and gods below:”
‘tis likely that the eyes of animals, which we see to be of divers
colours, produce the appearance of bodies the same with their eyes.
We should, therefore, to make a right judgment of the oppositions of
the senses, be first agreed with beasts, and secondly amongst ourselves;
which we by no means are, but enter into dispute every time that one
hears, sees, or tastes something otherwise than another does, and
contests, as much as upon any other thing, about the diversity of the
images that the senses represent to us. A child, by the ordinary rule of
nature, hears, sees, and talks otherwise than a man of thirty years old;
and he than one of threescore. The senses are, in some, more obscure and
dusky, and more open and quick in others. We receive things variously,
according as we are, and according as they appear to us. Those rings
which are cut out in the form of feathers, which are called _endless
feathers_, no eye can discern their size, or can keep itself from the
deception that on one side they enlarge, and on the other contract, and
come So a point, even when the ring is being turned round the finger;
yet, when you feel them, they seem all of an equal size. Now, our
perception being so uncertain and so controverted, it is no more a
wonder if we are told that we may declare that snow appears white to us;
but that to affirm that it is in its own essence really so is more
than we are able to justify; and, this foundation being shaken, all
the knowledge in the world must of necessity fall to ruin. What! do
our senses themselves hinder one another? A picture seems raised and
embossed to the sight; in the handling it seems flat to the touch.
Shall we say that musk, which delights the smell, and is offensive to
the taste, is agreeable or no? There are herbs and unguents proper for
one part o£ the body, that are hurtful to another; honey is pleasant to
the taste, but offensive to the sight. They who, to assist their lust,
used in ancient times to make use of magnifying-glasses to represent the
members they were to employ bigger, by that ocular tumidity to please
themselves the more; to which of their senses did they give the
prize,--whether to the sight, that represented the members as large and
great as they would desire, or to the feeling, which represented them
little and contemptible? Are they our senses that supply the subject
with these different conditions, and have the subjects themselves,
nevertheless, but one? As we see in the bread we eat, it is nothing but
bread, but, by being eaten, it becomes bones, blood, flesh, hair; and
nails:--
Ut cibus in membra atque artus cum diditur omnes,
Disperit,, atque aliam naturam sufficit ex se;
“As meats, diffus’d through all the members, lose
Their former state, and different things compose;”
the humidity sucked up by the root of a tree becomes trunk, leaf, and
fruit; and the air, being but one, is modulated, in a trumpet, to a
thousand sorts of sounds; are they our senses, I would fain know, that,
in like manner, form these subjects into so many divers qualities, or
have they them really such in themselves? And upon this doubt what can
we determine of their true essence? Moreover, since the accidents of
disease, of raving, or sleep, make things appear otherwise to us than
they do to the healthful, the wise, and those that are awake, is it
not likely that our right posture of health and understanding, and our
natural humours, have, also, wherewith to give a being to things
that have a relation to their own condition, and accommodate them to
themselves, as well as when they are disordered;--that health is as
capable of giving them an aspect as sickness? Why has not the temperate
a certain form of objects relative to it, as well as the intemperate?
and why may it not as well stamp it with its own character as the other?
He whose mouth is out of taste, says the wine is flat; the healthful man
commends its flavour, and the thirsty its briskness. Now, our condition
always accommodating things to itself, and transforming them according
to its own posture, we cannot know what things truly are in themselves,
seeing that nothing comes to us but what is falsified and altered by the
senses. Where the compass, the square, and the rule, are crooked, all
propositions drawn thence, and all buildings erected by those guides,
must, of necessity, be also defective; the uncertainty of our senses
renders every thing uncertain that they produce:--
Denique ut in fabricâ, si prava est régula prima,
Normaque si fallax rectis regionibus exit,
Et libella aliquâ si ex parte claudicat hilum;
Omnia mendose fieri, atque obstipa necessum est,
Prava, cubantia, prona, supina, atque absona tecta;
Jam ruere ut quædam videantux’velle, ruantque
Prodita judiciis fallacibus omnia primis;
Sic igitur ratio tibi reram prava necesse est,
Falsaque sit, falsis quæcunque ab sensibus orta est.
“But lastly, as in building, if the line
Be not exact and straight, the rule decline,
Or level false, how vain is the design!
Uneven, an ill-shap’d and tottering wall
Must rise; this part must sink, that part must fall,
Because the rules were false that fashion’d all;
Thus reason’s rules are false if all commence
And rise from failing and from erring sense.”
As to what remains, who can be fit to judge of and to determine those
differences? As we say in controversies of religion that we must have
a judge neither inclining to the one side nor the other, free from all
choice and affection, which cannot be amongst Christians, just so it
falls out in this; for if he be old he cannot judge of the sense of
old age, being himself a party in the case; if young, there is the same
exception; if healthful, sick, asleep, or awake, he is still the
same incompetent judge. We must have some one exempt from all these
propositions, as of things indifferent to him; and by this rule we must
have a judge that never was.
To judge of the appearances that we receive of subjects, we ought t
have a deciding instrument; to verify this instrument we must have
demonstration; to verify this demonstration an instrument; and here
we are round again upon the wheel, and no further advanced. Seeing
the senses cannot determine our dispute, being full of uncertainty
themselves, it must then be reason that must do it; but no reason can be
erected upon any other foundation than that of another reason; and so we
run back to all infinity. Our fancy does not apply itself to things that
are strange, but is conceived by the mediation of the senses; and the
senses do not comprehend a foreign subject, but only their own passions;
by which means fancy and appearance are no part of the subject, but only
of the passion and sufferance of sense; which passion and subject are
different things; wherefore whoever judges by appearances judges by
another thing than the subject. And to say that the passions of
the senses convey to the soul the quality of foreign subjects by
resemblance, how can the soul and understanding be assured of this
resemblance, having of itself no commerce with foreign subjects? As they
who never knew Socrates cannot, when they see his picture, say it is
like him. Now, whoever would, notwithstanding, judge by appearances, if
it be by all, it is impossible, because they hinder one another by their
contrarieties and discrepancies, as we by experience see: shall some
select appearances govern the rest? you must verify this select by
another select, the second by a third, and thus there will never be
any end to it. Finally, there is no constant existence, neither of the
objects’ being nor our own; both we, and our judgments, and all mortal
things, are evermore incessantly running and rolling; and consequently
nothing certain can be established from the one to the other, both the
judging and the judged being in a continual motion and mutation.
We have no communication with being, by reason that all human nature is
always in the middle, betwixt being bom and dying, giving but an obscure
appearance and shadow, a weak and uncertain opinion of itself; and if,
perhaps, you fix your thought to apprehend your being, it would be but
like grasping water; for the more you clutch your hand to squeeze and
hold what is in its own nature flowing, so much more you lose of what
you would grasp and hold. So, seeing that all things are subject to
pass from one change to another, reason, that there looks for a real
substance, finds itself deceived, not being able to apprehend any thing
that is subsistent and permanent, because that every thing is either
entering into being, and is not yet arrived at it, or begins to die
before it is bom. Plato said, that bodies had never any existence, but
only birth; conceiving that Homer had made the Ocean and Thetis father
and mother of the gods, to show us that all things are in a perpetual
fluctuation, motion, and variation; the opinion of all the philosophers,
as he says, before his time, Parmenides only excepted, who would not
allow things to have motion, on the power whereof he sets a mighty
value. Pythagoras was of opinion that all matter was flowing and
unstable; the Stoics, that there is no time present, and that what we
call so is nothing but the juncture and meeting of the future and the
past; Heraclitus, that never any man entered twice into the same river;
Epichar-mus, that he who borrowed money but an hour ago does not owe
it now; and that he who was invited over-night to come the next day to
dinner comes nevertheless uninvited, considering that they are no more
the same men, but are become others; and that there could not a mortal
substance be found twice in the same condition; for, by the suddenness
and quickness of the change, it one while disperses, and another
reunites; it comes and goes after such a manner that what begins to be
born never arrives to the perfection of being, forasmuch as that birth
is never finished and never stays, as being at an end, but from the seed
is evermore changing and shifting one to another; as human seed is first
in the mother’s womb made a formless embryo, after delivered thence a
sucking infant, afterwards it becomes a boy, then a youth, then a man,
and at last a decrepit old man; so that age and subsequent generation is
always destroying and spoiling that which went before:--
Mutât enira mundi naturam totius ætas,
Ex alioque alius status excipere omnia debet;
Nec manet ulla sui similis res; omnia migrant,
Omnia commutât natura, et vertere cogit.
“For time the nature of the world translates,
And from preceding gives all things new states;
Nought like itself remains, but all do range,
And nature forces every thing to change.”
“And yet we foolishly fear one kind of death, whereas we have already
passed, and do daily pass, so many others; for not only, as Heraclitus
said, the death of fire is generation of air, and the death of air
generation of water; but, moreover, we may more manifestly discern it in
ourselves; manhood dies, and passes away when age comes on; and youth is
terminated in the flower of age of a full-grown man, infancy in youth,
and the first age dies in infancy; yesterday died in to-day, and to-day
will die in to-morrow; and there is nothing that remains in the same
state, or that is always the same thing. And that it is so let this be
the proof; if we are always one and the same, how comes it to pass that
we are now pleased with one thing, and by and by with another? How
comes it to pass that we love or hate contrary things, that we praise
or condemn them? How comes it to pass that we have different affections,
and no more retain the same sentiment in the same thought? For it is not
likely that without mutation we should assume other passions; and, that
which suffers mutation does not remain the same, and if it be not the
same it is not at all; but the same that the being is does, like it,
unknowingly change and alter; becoming evermore another from another
thing; and consequently the natural senses abuse and deceive themselves,
taking that which seems for that which is, for want of well knowing
what that which is, is. But what is it then that truly is? That which is
eternal; that is to say, that never had beginning, nor never shall have
ending, and to which time can bring no mutation. For time is a mobile
thine, and that appears as in a shadow, with a matter evermore flowing
and running, without ever remaining stable and permanent; and to which
belong those words, _before and after, has been, or shall be:_ which at
the first sight, evidently show that it is not a thing that is; for it
were a great folly, and a manifest falsity, to say that that is which is
not ÿet being, or that has already ceased to be. And as to these words,
_present, instant, and now_, by which it seems that we principally
support and found the intelligence of time, reason, discovering, does
presently destroy it; for it immediately divides and splits it into the
_future and past_, being of necessity to consider it divided in two. The
same happens to nature, that is measured, as to time that measures it;
for she has nothing more subsisting and permanent than the other, but
all things are either born, bearing, or dying. So that it were sinful to
say of God, who is he only who _is, that he was, or that he shall be _;
for those are terms of declension, transmutation, and vicissitude, of
what cannot continue or remain in being; wherefore we are to conclude
that God alone is, not according to any measure of time, but according
to an immutable and an immovable eternity, not measured by time, nor
subject to any declension; before whom nothing was, and after whom
nothing shall be, either more new or more recent, but a real being, that
with one sole now fills the for ever, and that there is nothing that
truly is but he alone; without our being able to say, _he has been, or
shall be_; without beginning, and without end.” To this so religious
conclusion of a pagan I shall only add this testimony of one of the same
condition, for the close of this long and tedious discourse, which would
furnish me with endless matter: “What a vile and abject thing,” says he,
“is man, if he do not raise himself above humanity!” ‘Tis a good word
and a profitable desire, but withal absurd; for to make the handle
bigger than the hand, the cubic longer than the arm, and to hope
to stride further than our legs can reach, is both impossible and
monstrous; or that man should rise above himself and humanity; for he
cannot see but with his eyes, nor seize but with his hold. He shall
be exalted, if God will lend him an extraordinary hand; he shall exalt
himself, by abandoning and renouncing his own proper means, and by
suffering himself to be raised and elevated by means purely celestial.
It belongs to our Christian faith, and not to the stoical virtue, to
pretend to that divine and miraculous metamorphosis.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A little cheese when a mind to make a feast
A word ill taken obliterates ten years’ merit
Cato said: So many servants, so many enemies
Cherish themselves most where they are most wrong
Condemn all violence in the education of a tender soul
Cruelty is the very extreme of all vices
Disguise, by their abridgments and at their own choice
Epicurus
Flatterer in your old age or in your sickness
He felt a pleasure and delight in so noble an action
He judged other men by himself
I cannot well refuse to play with my dog
I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them rather
I had rather be old a brief time, than be old before old age
I owe it rather to my fortune than my reason
Incline the history to their own fancy
It (my books) may know many things that are gone from me
Knowledge and truth may be in us without judgment
Learn the theory from those who best know the practice
Loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men
Motive to some vicious occasion or some prospect of profit
My books: from me hold that which I have not retained
My dog unseasonably importunes me to play
My innocence is a simple one; little vigour and no art.
Never observed any great stability in my soul to resist passions
Nothing tempts my tears but tears
Omit, as incredible, such things as they do not understand
On all occasions to contradict and oppose
Only desire to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent
Passion of dandling and caressing infants scarcely born
Perfection: but I will not buy it so dear as it costs
Plato will have nobody marry before thirty
Prudent and just man may be intemperate and inconsistent
Puerile simplicities of our children
Shelter my own weakness under these great reputations
Socrates kept a confounded scolding wife
The authors, with whom I converse
There is no recompense becomes virtue
To do well where there was danger was the proper office
To whom no one is ill who can be good?
Turks have alms and hospitals for beasts
Vices will cling together, if a man have not a care
Virtue is much strengthened by combats
Virtue refuses facility for a companion
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 11.
XIII. Of judging of the death of another.
XIV. That the mind hinders itself.
XV. That our desires are augmented by difficulty.
XVI. Of glory.
XVII. Of presumption.
CHAPTER XIII
OF JUDGING OF THE DEATH OF ANOTHER
When we judge of another’s assurance in death, which, without doubt, is
the most remarkable action of human life, we are to take heed of one
thing, which is that men very hardly believe themselves to have arrived
to that period. Few men come to die in the opinion that it is their
latest hour; and there is nothing wherein the flattery of hope more
deludes us; It never ceases to whisper in our ears, “Others have been
much sicker without dying; your condition is not so desperate as ‘tis
thought; and, at the worst, God has done other miracles.” Which happens
by reason that we set too much value upon ourselves; it seems as if the
universality of things were in some measure to suffer by our dissolution,
and that it commiserates our condition, forasmuch as our disturbed sight
represents things to itself erroneously, and that we are of opinion they
stand in as much need of us as we do of them, like people at sea, to whom
mountains, fields, cities, heaven and earth are tossed at the same rate
as they are:
“Provehimur portu, terraeque urbesque recedunt:”
[“We sail out of port, and cities and lands recede.”
--AEneid, iii. 72.]
Whoever saw old age that did not applaud the past and condemn the present
time, laying the fault of his misery and discontent upon the world and
the manners of men?
“Jamque caput quassans, grandis suspirat arator.
Et cum tempora temporibus praesentia confert
Praeteritis, laudat fortunas saepe parentis,
Et crepat antiquum genus ut pietate repletum.”
[“Now the old ploughman, shaking his head, sighs, and compares
present times with past, often praises his parents’ happiness, and
talks of the old race as full of piety.”--Lucretius, ii. 1165.]
We will make all things go along with us; whence it follows that we
consider our death as a very great thing, and that does not so easily
pass, nor without the solemn consultation of the stars:
“Tot circa unum caput tumultuantes dens,”
[“All the gods to agitation about one man.”
--Seneca, Suasor, i. 4.]
and so much the more think it as we more value ourselves. “What, shall
so much knowledge be lost, with so much damage to the world, without a
particular concern of the destinies? Does so rare and exemplary a soul
cost no more the killing than one that is common and of no use to the
public? This life, that protects so many others, upon which so many
other lives depend, that employs so vast a number of men in his service,
that fills so many places, shall it drop off like one that hangs but by
its own simple thread? None of us lays it enough to heart that he is
but one: thence proceeded those words of Caesar to his pilot, more tumid
than the sea that threatened him:
“Italiam si coelo auctore recusas,
Me pete: sola tibi causa est haec justa timoris,
Vectorem non nosce tuum; perrumpe procellas,
Tutela secure mea.”
[“If you decline to sail to Italy under the God’s protection, trust
to mine; the only just cause you have to fear is, that you do not
know your passenger; sail on, secure in my guardianship.”
--Lucan, V. 579.]
And these:
“Credit jam digna pericula Caesar
Fatis esse suis; tantusne evertere, dixit,
Me superis labor est, parva quern puppe sedentem,
Tam magno petiere mari;”
[“Caesar now deemed these dangers worthy of his destiny: ‘What!’
said he, ‘is it for the gods so great a task to overthrow me, that
they must be fain to assail me with great seas in a poor little
bark.’”--Lucan, v. 653.]
and that idle fancy of the public, that the sun bore on his face mourning
for his death a whole year:
“Ille etiam extincto miseratus Caesare Romam,
Cum caput obscura nitidum ferrugine texit:”
[“Caesar being dead, the sun in mourning clouds, pitying Rome,
clothed himself.”--Virgil, Georg., i. 466.]
and a thousand of the like, wherewith the world suffers itself to be so
easily imposed upon, believing that our interests affect the heavens, and
that their infinity is concerned at our ordinary actions:
“Non tanta caelo societas nobiscum est, ut nostro
fato mortalis sit ille quoque siderum fulgor.”
[“There is no such alliance betwixt us and heaven, that the
brightness of the stars should be made also mortal by our death.”
--Pliny, Nat. Hist., ii. 8.]
Now, to judge of constancy and resolution in a man who does not yet
believe himself to be certainly in danger, though he really is, is not
reason; and ‘tis not enough that he die in this posture, unless he
purposely put himself into it for this effect. It commonly falls out in
most men that they set a good face upon the matter and speak with great
indifference, to acquire reputation, which they hope afterwards, living,
to enjoy. Of all whom I have seen die, fortune has disposed their
countenances and no design of theirs; and even of those who in ancient
times have made away with themselves, there is much to be considered
whether it were a sudden or a lingering death. That cruel Roman Emperor
would say of his prisoners, that he would make them feel death, and if
any one killed himself in prison, “That fellow has made an escape from
me”; he would prolong death and make it felt by torments:
“Vidimus et toto quamvis in corpore caeso
Nil anima lethale datum, moremque nefandae,
Durum saevitix, pereuntis parcere morti.”
[“We have seen in tortured bodies, amongst the wounds, none that
have been mortal, inhuman mode of dire cruelty, that means to kill,
but will not let men die.”--Lucan, iv. i. 78.]
In plain truth, it is no such great matter for a man in health and in a
temperate state of mind to resolve to kill himself; it is very easy to
play the villain before one comes to the point, insomuch that
Heliogabalus, the most effeminate man in the world, amongst his lowest
sensualities, could forecast to make himself die delicately, when he
should be forced thereto; and that his death might not give the lie to
the rest of his life, had purposely built a sumptuous tower, the front
and base of which were covered with planks enriched with gold and
precious stones, thence to precipitate himself; and also caused cords
twisted with gold and crimson silk to be made, wherewith to strangle
himself; and a sword with the blade of gold to be hammered out to fall
upon; and kept poison in vessels of emerald and topaz wherewith to poison
himself according as he should like to choose one of these ways of dying:
“Impiger. . . ad letum et fortis virtute coacta.”
[“Resolute and brave in the face of death by a forced courage.
--“Lucan, iv. 798.]
Yet in respect of this person, the effeminacy of his preparations makes
it more likely that he would have thought better on’t, had he been put to
the test. But in those who with greater resolution have determined to
despatch themselves, we must examine whether it were with one blow which
took away the leisure of feeling the effect for it is to be questioned
whether, perceiving life, by little and little, to steal away the
sentiment of the body mixing itself with that of the soul, and the means
of repenting being offered, whether, I say, constancy and obstinacy in so
dangerous an intention would have been found.
In the civil wars of Caesar, Lucius Domitius, being taken in the Abruzzi,
and thereupon poisoning himself, afterwards repented. It has happened in
our time that a certain person, being resolved to die and not having gone
deep enough at the first thrust, the sensibility of the flesh opposing
his arm, gave himself two or three wounds more, but could never prevail
upon himself to thrust home. Whilst Plautius Silvanus was upon his
trial, Urgulania, his grandmother, sent him a poniard with which, not
being able to kill himself, he made his servants cut his veins. Albucilla
in Tiberius time having, to kill himself, struck with too much
tenderness, gave his adversaries opportunity to imprison and put him to
death their own way.’ And that great leader, Demosthenes, after his rout
in Sicily, did the same; and C. Fimbria, having struck himself too
weakly, entreated his servant to despatch him. On the contrary,
Ostorius, who could not make use of his own arm, disdained to employ that
of his servant to any other use but only to hold the poniard straight and
firm; and bringing his throat to it, thrust himself through. ‘Tis, in
truth, a morsel that is to be swallowed without chewing, unless a man be
thoroughly resolved; and yet Adrian the emperor made his physician mark
and encircle on his pap the mortal place wherein he was to stab to whom
he had given orders to kill him. For this reason it was that Caesar,
being asked what death he thought to be the most desired, made answer,
“The least premeditated and the shortest.”--[Tacitus, Annals, xvi. 15]--
If Caesar dared to say it, it is no cowardice in me to believe it.”
A short death,” says Pliny, “is the sovereign good hap of human life.
“People do not much care to recognise it. No one can say that he is
resolute for death who fears to deal with it and cannot undergo it with
his eyes open: they whom we see in criminal punishments run to their
death and hasten and press their execution, do it not out of resolution,
but because they will not give them selves leisure to consider it; it
does not trouble them to be dead, but to die:
“Emodi nolo, sed me esse mortem nihil astigmia:”
[“I have no mind to die, but I have no objection to be dead.”
--Epicharmus, apud Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 8.]
‘tis a degree of constancy to which I have experimented, that I can
arrive, like those who plunge into dangers, as into the sea, with their
eyes shut.
There is nothing, in my opinion, more illustrious in the life of
Socrates, than that he had thirty whole days wherein to ruminate upon the
sentence of his death, to have digested it all that time with a most
assured hope, without care, and without alteration, and with a series of
words and actions rather careless and indifferent than any way stirred or
discomposed by the weight of such a thought.
That Pomponius Atticus, to whom Cicero writes so often, being sick,
caused Agrippa, his son-in-law, and two or three more of his friends, to
be called to him, and told them, that having found all means practised
upon him for his recovery to be in vain, and that all he did to prolong
his life also prolonged and augmented his pain, he was resolved to put an
end both to the one and the other, desiring them to approve of his
determination, or at least not to lose their labour in endeavouring to
dissuade him. Now, having chosen to destroy himself by abstinence, his
disease was thereby cured: the remedy that he had made use of to kill
himself restored him to health. His physicians and friends, rejoicing at
so happy an event, and coming to congratulate him, found themselves very
much deceived, it being impossible for them to make him alter his
purpose, he telling them, that as he must one day die, and was now so far
on his way, he would save himself the labour of beginning another time.
This man, having surveyed death at leisure, was not only not discouraged
at its approach, but eagerly sought it; for being content that he had
engaged in the combat, he made it a point of bravery to see the end; ‘tis
far beyond not fearing death to taste and relish it.
The story of the philosopher Cleanthes is very like this: he had his gums
swollen and rotten; his physicians advised him to great abstinence:
having fasted two days, he was so much better that they pronounced him
cured, and permitted him to return to his ordinary course of diet; he, on
the contrary, already tasting some sweetness in this faintness of his,
would not be persuaded to go back, but resolved to proceed, and to finish
what he had so far advanced.
Tullius Marcellinus, a young man of Rome, having a mind to anticipate the
hour of his destiny, to be rid of a disease that was more trouble to him
than he was willing to endure, though his physicians assured him of a
certain, though not sudden, cure, called a council of his friends to
deliberate about it; of whom some, says Seneca, gave him the counsel that
out of unmanliness they would have taken themselves; others, out of
flattery, such as they thought he would best like; but a Stoic said this
to him: “Do not concern thyself, Marcellinus, as if thou didst deliberate
of a thing of importance; ‘tis no great matter to live; thy servants and
beasts live; but it is a great thing to die handsomely, wisely, and
firmly. Do but think how long thou hast done the same things, eat,
drink, and sleep, drink, sleep, and eat: we incessantly wheel in the same
circle. Not only ill and insupportable accidents, but even the satiety
of living, inclines a man to desire to die.” Marcellinus did not stand
in need of a man to advise, but of a man to assist him; his servants were
afraid to meddle in the business, but this philosopher gave them to under
stand that domestics are suspected even when it is in doubt whether the
death of the master were voluntary or no; otherwise, that it would be of
as ill example to hinder him as to kill him, forasmuch as:
“Invitum qui servat, idem facit occidenti.”
[“He who makes a man live against his will, ‘tis as cruel
as to kill him.”--Horat., De Arte Poet., 467]
He then told Marcellinus that it would not be unbecoming, as what is left
on the tables when we have eaten is given to the attendants, so, life
being ended, to distribute something to those who have been our servants.
Now Marcellinus was of a free and liberal spirit; he, therefore, divided
a certain sum of money amongst his servants, and consoled them. As to
the rest, he had no need of steel nor of blood: he resolved to go out of
this life and not to run out of it; not to escape from death, but to
essay it. And to give himself leisure to deal with it, having forsaken
all manner of nourishment, the third day following, after having caused
himself to be sprinkled with warm water, he fainted by degrees, and not
without some kind of pleasure, as he himself declared.
In fact, such as have been acquainted with these faintings, proceeding
from weakness, say that they are therein sensible of no manner of pain,
but rather feel a kind of delight, as in the passage to sleep and best.
These are studied and digested deaths.
But to the end that Cato only may furnish out the whole example of
virtue, it seems as if his good with which the leisure to confront and
struggle with death, reinforcing his destiny had put his ill one into the
hand he gave himself the blow, seeing he had courage in the danger,
instead of letting it go less. And if I had had to represent him in his
supreme station, I should have done it in the posture of tearing out his
bloody bowels, rather than with his sword in his hand, as did the
statuaries of his time, for this second murder was much more furious than
the first.
CHAPTER XIV
THAT OUR MIND HINDERS ITSELF
‘Tis a pleasant imagination to fancy a mind exactly balanced betwixt two
equal desires: for, doubtless, it can never pitch upon either, forasmuch
as the choice and application would manifest an inequality of esteem;
and were we set betwixt the bottle and the ham, with an equal appetite to
drink and eat, there would doubtless be no remedy, but we must die of
thirst and hunger. To provide against this inconvenience, the Stoics,
when they are asked whence the election in the soul of two indifferent
things proceeds, and that makes us, out of a great number of crowns,
rather take one than another, they being all alike, and there being no
reason to incline us to such a preference, make answer, that this
movement of the soul is extraordinary and irregular, entering into us
by a foreign, accidental, and fortuitous impulse. It might rather,
methinks, he said, that nothing presents itself to us wherein there is
not some difference, how little soever; and that, either by the sight or
touch, there is always some choice that, though it be imperceptibly,
tempts and attracts us; so, whoever shall presuppose a packthread equally
strong throughout, it is utterly impossible it should break; for, where
will you have the breaking to begin? and that it should break altogether
is not in nature. Whoever, also, should hereunto join the geometrical
propositions that, by the certainty of their demonstrations, conclude the
contained to be greater than the containing, the centre to be as great as
its circumference, and that find out two lines incessantly approaching
each other, which yet can never meet, and the philosopher’s stone, and
the quadrature of the circle, where the reason and the effect are so
opposite, might, peradventure, find some argument to second this bold
saying of Pliny:
“Solum certum nihil esse certi,
et homine nihil miserius ant superbius.”
[“It is only certain that there is nothing certain, and that nothing
is more miserable or more proud than man.”--Nat. Hist., ii. 7.]
CHAPTER XV
THAT OUR DESIRES ARE AUGMENTED BY DIFFICULTY
There is no reason that has not its contrary, say the wisest of the
philosophers. I was just now ruminating on the excellent saying one of
the ancients alleges for the contempt of life: “No good can bring
pleasure, unless it be that for the loss of which we are beforehand
prepared.”
“In aequo est dolor amissae rei, et timor amittendae,”
[“The grief of losing a thing, and the fear of losing it,
are equal.”--Seneca, Ep., 98.]
meaning by this that the fruition of life cannot be truly pleasant to us
if we are in fear of losing it. It might, however, be said, on the
contrary, that we hug and embrace this good so much the more earnestly,
and with so much greater affection, by how much we see it the less
assured and fear to have it taken from us: for it is evident, as fire
burns with greater fury when cold comes to mix with it, that our will is
more obstinate by being opposed:
“Si nunquam Danaen habuisset ahenea turris,
Non esses, Danae, de Jove facta parens;”
[“If a brazen tower had not held Danae, you would not, Danae, have
been made a mother by Jove.”--Ovid, Amoy., ii. 19, 27.]
and that there is nothing naturally so contrary to our taste as satiety
which proceeds from facility; nor anything that so much whets it as
rarity and difficulty:
“Omnium rerum voluptas ipso, quo debet fugare, periculo crescit.”
[“The pleasure of all things increases by the same danger that
should deter it.”--Seneca, De Benef., vii. 9.]
“Galla, nega; satiatur amor, nisi gaudia torquent.”
[“Galla, refuse me; love is glutted with joys that are not attended
with trouble.”--Martial, iv. 37.]
To keep love in breath, Lycurgus made a decree that the married people of
Lacedaemon should never enjoy one another but by stealth; and that it
should be as great a shame to take them in bed together as committing
with others. The difficulty of assignations, the danger of surprise, the
shame of the morning,
“Et languor, et silentium,
Et latere petitus imo Spiritus:”
[“And languor, and silence, and sighs, coming from the innermost
heart.”--Hor., Epod., xi. 9.]
these are what give the piquancy to the sauce. How many very wantonly
pleasant sports spring from the most decent and modest language of the
works on love? Pleasure itself seeks to be heightened with pain; it is
much sweeter when it smarts and has the skin rippled. The courtesan
Flora said she never lay with Pompey but that she made him wear the
prints of her teeth.--[Plutarch, Life of Pompey, c. i.]
“Quod petiere, premunt arcte, faciuntque dolorem
Corporis, et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis . . .
Et stimuli subsunt, qui instigant laedere ad ipsum,
Quodcunque est, rabies unde illae germina surgunt.”
[“What they have sought they dress closely, and cause pain; on the
lips fix the teeth, and every kiss indents: urged by latent stimulus
the part to wound”--Lucretius, i. 4.]
And so it is in everything: difficulty gives all things their estimation;
the people of the march of Ancona more readily make their vows to St.
James, and those of Galicia to Our Lady of Loreto; they make wonderful
to-do at Liege about the baths of Lucca, and in Tuscany about those of
Aspa: there are few Romans seen in the fencing school of Rome, which is
full of French. That great Cato also, as much as us, nauseated his wife
whilst she was his, and longed for her when in the possession of another.
I was fain to turn out into the paddock an old horse, as he was not to be
governed when he smelt a mare: the facility presently sated him as
towards his own, but towards strange mares, and the first that passed by
the pale of his pasture, he would again fall to his importunate neighings
and his furious heats as before. Our appetite contemns and passes by
what it has in possession, to run after that it has not:
“Transvolat in medio posita, et fugientia captat.”
[“He slights her who is close at hand, and runs after her
who flees from him.”--Horace, Sat., i. 2, 108.]
To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to’t:
“Nisi to servare puellam
Incipis, incipiet desinere esse mea:”
[“Unless you begin to guard your mistress, she will soon begin
to be no longer mine.”--Ovid, Amoy., ii. 19, 47.]
to give it wholly up to us is to beget in us contempt. Want and
abundance fall into the same inconvenience:
“Tibi quod superest, mihi quod desit, dolet.”
[“Your superfluities trouble you, and what I want
troubles me.--“Terence, Phoym., i. 3, 9.]
Desire and fruition equally afflict us. The rigors of mistresses are
troublesome, but facility, to say truth, still more so; forasmuch as
discontent and anger spring from the esteem we have of the thing desired,
heat and actuate love, but satiety begets disgust; ‘tis a blunt, dull,
stupid, tired, and slothful passion:
“Si qua volet regnare diu, contemnat amantem.”
[“She who would long retain her power must use her lover ill.”
--Ovid, Amor., ii. 19, 33]
“Contemnite, amantes:
Sic hodie veniet, si qua negavit heri.”
[“Slight your mistress; she will to-day come who denied you
yesterday.--“Propertius, ii. 14, 19.]
Why did Poppea invent the use of a mask to hide the beauties of her face,
but to enhance it to her lovers? Why have they veiled, even below the
heels, those beauties that every one desires to show, and that every one
desires to see? Why do they cover with so many hindrances, one over
another, the parts where our desires and their own have their principal
seat? And to what serve those great bastion farthingales, with which our
ladies fortify their haunches, but to allure our appetite and to draw us
on by removing them farther from us?
“Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri.”
[“She flies to the osiers, and desires beforehand to be seen going.”
--Virgil, Eclog., iii. 65.]
“Interdum tunica duxit operta moram.”
[“The hidden robe has sometimes checked love.”
--Propertius, ii. 15, 6.]
To what use serves the artifice of this virgin modesty, this grave
coldness, this severe countenance, this professing to be ignorant of
things that they know better than we who instruct them in them, but to
increase in us the desire to overcome, control, and trample underfoot at
pleasure all this ceremony and all these obstacles? For there is not
only pleasure, but, moreover, glory, in conquering and debauching that
soft sweetness and that childish modesty, and to reduce a cold and
matronlike gravity to the mercy of our ardent desires: ‘tis a glory,
say they, to triumph over modesty, chastity, and temperance; and whoever
dissuades ladies from those qualities, betrays both them and himself.
We are to believe that their hearts tremble with affright, that the very
sound of our words offends the purity of their ears, that they hate us
for talking so, and only yield to our importunity by a compulsive force.
Beauty, all powerful as it is, has not wherewithal to make itself
relished without the mediation of these little arts. Look into Italy,
where there is the most and the finest beauty to be sold, how it is
necessitated to have recourse to extrinsic means and other artifices to
render itself charming, and yet, in truth, whatever it may do, being
venal and public, it remains feeble and languishing. Even so in virtue
itself, of two like effects, we notwithstanding look upon that as the
fairest and most worthy, wherein the most trouble and hazard are set
before us.
‘Tis an effect of the divine Providence to suffer the holy Church to be
afflicted, as we see it, with so many storms and troubles, by this
opposition to rouse pious souls, and to awaken them from that drowsy
lethargy wherein, by so long tranquillity, they had been immerged.
If we should lay the loss we have sustained in the number of those who
have gone astray, in the balance against the benefit we have had by being
again put in breath, and by having our zeal and strength revived by
reason of this opposition, I know not whether the utility would not
surmount the damage.
We have thought to tie the nuptial knot of our marriages more fast and
firm by having taken away all means of dissolving it, but the knot of the
will and affection is so much the more slackened and made loose, by how
much that of constraint is drawn closer; and, on the contrary, that which
kept the marriages at Rome so long in honour and inviolate, was the
liberty every one who so desired had to break them; they kept their wives
the better, because they might part with them, if they would; and, in the
full liberty of divorce, five hundred years and more passed away before
any one made use on’t.
“Quod licet, ingratum est; quod non licet, acrius urit.”
[“What you may, is displeasing; what is forbidden, whets the
appetite.--“Ovid, Amor., ii. 19.]
We might here introduce the opinion of an ancient upon this occasion,
“that executions rather whet than dull the edge of vices: that they do
not beget the care of doing well, that being the work of reason and
discipline, but only a care not to be taken in doing ill:”
“Latius excisae pestis contagia serpunt.”
[“The plague-sore being lanced, the infection spreads all the more.”
--Rutilius, Itinerar. 1, 397.]
I do not know that this is true; but I experimentally know, that never
civil government was by that means reformed; the order and regimen of
manners depend upon some other expedient.
The Greek histories make mention of the Argippians, neighbours to
Scythia, who live without either rod or stick for offence; where not only
no one attempts to attack them, but whoever can fly thither is safe, by
reason of their virtue and sanctity of life, and no one is so bold as to
lay hands upon them; and they have applications made to them to determine
the controversies that arise betwixt men of other countries. There is a
certain nation, where the enclosures of gardens and fields they would
preserve, are made only of a string of cotton; and, so fenced, is more
firm and secure than by our hedges and ditches.
“Furem signata sollicitant . . .
aperta effractarius praeterit.”
[“Things sealed, up invite a thief: the housebreaker
passes by open doors.”--Seneca, Epist., 68.]
Peradventure, the facility of entering my house, amongst other things,
has been a means to preserve it from the violence of our civil wars:
defence allures attempt, and defiance provokes an enemy. I enervated the
soldiers’ design by depriving the exploit of danger and all manner of
military glory, which is wont to serve them for pretence and excuse:
whatever is bravely, is ever honourably, done, at a time when justice is
dead. I render them the conquest of my house cowardly and base; it is
never shut to any one that knocks; my gate has no other guard than a
porter, and he of ancient custom and ceremony; who does not so much serve
to defend it as to offer it with more decorum and grace; I have no other
guard nor sentinel than the stars. A gentleman would play the fool to
make a show of defence, if he be not really in a condition to defend
himself. He who lies open on one side, is everywhere so; our ancestors
did not think of building frontier garrisons. The means of assaulting,
I mean without battery or army, and of surprising our houses, increases
every day more and more beyond the means to guard them; men’s wits are
generally bent that way; in invasion every one is concerned: none but the
rich in defence. Mine was strong for the time when it was built; I have
added nothing to it of that kind, and should fear that its strength might
turn against myself; to which we are to consider that a peaceable time
would require it should be dismantled. There is danger never to be able
to regain it, and it would be very hard to keep; for in intestine
dissensions, your man may be of the party you fear; and where religion is
the pretext, even a man’s nearest relations become unreliable, with some
colour of justice. The public exchequer will not maintain our domestic
garrisons; they would exhaust it: we ourselves have not the means to do
it without ruin, or, which is more inconvenient and injurious, without
ruining the people. The condition of my loss would be scarcely worse.
As to the rest, you there lose all; and even your friends will be more
ready to accuse your want of vigilance and your improvidence, and your
ignorance of and indifference to your own business, than to pity you.
That so many garrisoned houses have been undone whereas this of mine
remains, makes me apt to believe that they were only lost by being
guarded; this gives an enemy both an invitation and colour of reason; all
defence shows a face of war. Let who will come to me in God’s name; but
I shall not invite them; ‘tis the retirement I have chosen for my repose
from war. I endeavour to withdraw this corner from the public tempest,
as I also do another corner in my soul. Our war may put on what forms it
will, multiply and diversify itself into new parties; for my part, I stir
not. Amongst so many garrisoned houses, myself alone amongst those of my
rank, so far as I know, in France, have trusted purely to Heaven for the
protection of mine, and have never removed plate, deeds, or hangings.
I will neither fear nor save myself by halves. If a full acknowledgment
acquires the Divine favour, it will stay with me to the end: if not, I
have still continued long enough to render my continuance remarkable and
fit to be recorded. How? Why, there are thirty years that I have thus
lived.
CHAPTER XVI
OF GLORY
There is the name and the thing: the name is a voice which denotes and
signifies the thing; the name is no part of the thing, nor of the
substance; ‘tis a foreign piece joined to the thing, and outside it.
God, who is all fulness in Himself and the height of all perfection,
cannot augment or add anything to Himself within; but His name may be
augmented and increased by the blessing and praise we attribute to His
exterior works: which praise, seeing we cannot incorporate it in Him,
forasmuch as He can have no accession of good, we attribute to His name,
which is the part out of Him that is nearest to us. Thus is it that to
God alone glory and honour appertain; and there is nothing so remote from
reason as that we should go in quest of it for ourselves; for, being
indigent and necessitous within, our essence being imperfect, and having
continual need of amelioration, ‘tis to that we ought to employ all our
endeavour. We are all hollow and empty; ‘tis not with wind and voice
that we are to fill ourselves; we want a more solid substance to repair
us: a man starving with hunger would be very simple to seek rather to
provide himself with a gay garment than with a good meal: we are to look
after that whereof we have most need. As we have it in our ordinary
prayers:
“Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus.”
We are in want of beauty, health, wisdom, virtue, and such like essential
qualities: exterior ornaments should, be looked after when we have made
provision for necessary things. Divinity treats amply and more
pertinently of this subject, but I am not much versed in it.
Chrysippus and Diogenes were the earliest and firmest advocates of the
contempt of glory; and maintained that, amongst all pleasures, there was
none more dangerous nor more to be avoided than that which proceeds from
the approbation of others. And, in truth, experience makes us sensible of
many very hurtful treasons in it. There is nothing that so poisons
princes as flattery, nor anything whereby wicked men more easily obtain
credit and favour with them; nor panderism so apt and so usually made use
of to corrupt the chastity of women as to wheedle and entertain them with
their own praises. The first charm the Syrens made use of to allure
Ulysses is of this nature:
“Deca vers nous, deca, o tres-louable Ulysse,
Et le plus grand honneur don’t la Grece fleurisse.”
[“Come hither to us, O admirable Ulysses, come hither, thou greatest
ornament and pride of Greece.”--Homer, Odysseus, xii. 184.]
These philosophers said, that all the glory of the world was not worth an
understanding man’s holding out his finger to obtain it:
“Gloria quantalibet quid erit, si gloria tantum est?”
[“What is glory, be it as glorious as it may be, if it be no more
than glory?”--Juvenal, Sat., vii. 81.]
I say for it alone; for it often brings several commodities along with
it, for which it may justly be desired: it acquires us good-will, and
renders us less subject and exposed to insult and offence from others,
and the like. It was also one of the principal doctrines of Epicurus;
for this precept of his sect, Conceal thy life, that forbids men to
encumber themselves with public negotiations and offices, also
necessarily presupposes a contempt of glory, which is the world’s
approbation of those actions we produce in public.--[Plutarch, Whether
the saying, Conceal thy life, is well said.]--He that bids us conceal
ourselves, and to have no other concern but for ourselves, and who will
not have us known to others, would much less have us honoured and
glorified; and so advises Idomeneus not in any sort to regulate his
actions by the common reputation or opinion, except so as to avoid the
other accidental inconveniences that the contempt of men might bring upon
him.
These discourses are, in my opinion, very true and rational; but we are,
I know not how, double in ourselves, which is the cause that what we
believe we do not believe, and cannot disengage ourselves from what we
condemn. Let us see the last and dying words of Epicurus; they are
grand, and worthy of such a philosopher, and yet they carry some touches
of the recommendation of his name and of that humour he had decried by
his precepts. Here is a letter that he dictated a little before his last
gasp:
“EPICUYUS TO HEYMACHUS, health.
“Whilst I was passing over the happy and last day of my life, I
write this, but, at the same time, afflicted with such pain in my
bladder and bowels that nothing can be greater, but it was
recompensed with the pleasure the remembrance of my inventions and
doctrines brought to my soul. Now, as the affection thou hast ever
from thy infancy borne towards me and philosophy requires, take upon
thee the protection of Metrodorus’ children.”
This is the letter. And that which makes me interpret that the pleasure
he says he had in his soul concerning his inventions, has some reference
to the reputation he hoped for thence after his death, is the manner of
his will, in which he gives order that Amynomachus and Timocrates, his
heirs, should, every January, defray the expense of the celebration of
his birthday as Hermachus should appoint; and also the expense that
should be made the twentieth of every moon in entertaining the
philosophers, his friends, who should assemble in honour of the memory of
him and of Metrodorus.--[Cicero, De Finibus, ii. 30.]
Carneades was head of the contrary opinion, and maintained that glory was
to be desired for itself, even as we embrace our posthumous issue for
themselves, having no knowledge nor enjoyment of them. This opinion has
not failed to be the more universally followed, as those commonly are
that are most suitable to our inclinations. Aristotle gives it the first
place amongst external goods; and avoids, as too extreme vices, the
immoderate either seeking or evading it. I believe that, if we had the
books Cicero wrote upon this subject, we should there find pretty
stories; for he was so possessed with this passion, that, if he had
dared, I think he could willingly have fallen into the excess that others
did, that virtue itself was not to be coveted, but upon the account of
the honour that always attends it:
“Paulum sepultae distat inertiae
Celata virtus:”
[“Virtue concealed little differs from dead sloth.”
--Horace, Od., iv. 9, 29.]
which is an opinion so false, that I am vexed it could ever enter into
the understanding of a man that was honoured with the name of
philosopher.
If this were true, men need not be virtuous but in public; and we should
be no further concerned to keep the operations of the soul, which is the
true seat of virtue, regular and in order, than as they are to arrive at
the knowledge of others. Is there no more in it, then, but only slily
and with circumspection to do ill? “If thou knowest,” says Carneades,
“of a serpent lurking in a place where, without suspicion, a person is
going to sit down, by whose death thou expectest an advantage, thou dost
ill if thou dost not give him caution of his danger; and so much the more
because the action is to be known by none but thyself.” If we do not
take up of ourselves the rule of well-doing, if impunity pass with us for
justice, to how many sorts of wickedness shall we every day abandon
ourselves? I do not find what Sextus Peduceus did, in faithfully
restoring the treasure that C. Plotius had committed to his sole secrecy
and trust, a thing that I have often done myself, so commendable, as I
should think it an execrable baseness, had we done otherwise; and I think
it of good use in our days to recall the example of P. Sextilius Rufus,
whom Cicero accuses to have entered upon an inheritance contrary to his
conscience, not only not against law, but even by the determination of
the laws themselves; and M. Crassus and Hortensius, who, by reason of
their authority and power, having been called in by a stranger to share
in the succession of a forged will, that so he might secure his own part,
satisfied themselves with having no hand in the forgery, and refused not
to make their advantage and to come in for a share: secure enough, if
they could shroud themselves from accusations, witnesses, and the
cognisance of the laws:
“Meminerint Deum se habere testem, id est (ut ego arbitror)
mentem suam.”
[“Let them consider they have God to witness, that is (as I
interpret it), their own consciences.”--Cicero, De Offic., iii. 10.]
Virtue is a very vain and frivolous thing if it derive its recommendation
from glory; and ‘tis to no purpose that we endeavour to give it a station
by itself, and separate it from fortune; for what is more accidental than
reputation?
“Profecto fortuna in omni re dominatur: ea res cunctas ex
libidine magis, quhm ex vero, celebrat, obscuratque.”
[“Fortune rules in all things; it advances and depresses things
more out of its own will than of right and justice.”
--Sallust, Catilina, c. 8.]
So to order it that actions may be known and seen is purely the work of
fortune; ‘tis chance that helps us to glory, according to its own
temerity. I have often seen her go before merit, and often very much
outstrip it. He who first likened glory to a shadow did better than he
was aware of; they are both of them things pre-eminently vain glory also,
like a shadow, goes sometimes before the body, and sometimes in length
infinitely exceeds it. They who instruct gentlemen only to employ their
valour for the obtaining of honour:
“Quasi non sit honestum, quod nobilitatum non sit;”
[“As though it were not a virtue, unless celebrated”
--Cicero De Offic. iii. 10.]
what do they intend by that but to instruct them never to hazard
themselves if they are not seen, and to observe well if there be
witnesses present who may carry news of their valour, whereas a thousand
occasions of well-doing present themselves which cannot be taken notice
of? How many brave individual actions are buried in the crowd of a
battle? Whoever shall take upon him to watch another’s behaviour in such
a confusion is not very busy himself, and the testimony he shall give of
his companions’ deportment will be evidence against himself:
“Vera et sapiens animi magnitudo, honestum illud,
quod maxime naturam sequitur, in factis positum,
non in gloria, judicat.”
[“The true and wise magnanimity judges that the bravery which most
follows nature more consists in act than glory.”
--Cicero, De Offic. i. 19.]
All the glory that I pretend to derive from my life is that I have lived
it in quiet; in quiet, not according to Metrodorus, or Arcesilaus, or
Aristippus, but according to myself. For seeing philosophy has not been
able to find out any way to tranquillity that is good in common, let
every one seek it in particular.
To what do Caesar and Alexander owe the infinite grandeur of their renown
but to fortune? How many men has she extinguished in the beginning of
their progress, of whom we have no knowledge, who brought as much courage
to the work as they, if their adverse hap had not cut them off in the
first sally of their arms? Amongst so many and so great dangers I do not
remember I have anywhere read that Caesar was ever wounded; a thousand
have fallen in less dangers than the least of those he went through. An
infinite number of brave actions must be performed without witness and
lost, before one turns to account. A man is not always on the top of a
breach, or at the head of an army, in the sight of his general, as upon a
scaffold; a man is often surprised betwixt the hedge and the ditch; he
must run the hazard of his life against a henroost; he must dislodge four
rascally musketeers out of a barn; he must prick out single from his
party, and alone make some attempts, according as necessity will have it.
And whoever will observe will, I believe, find it experimentally true,
that occasions of the least lustre are ever the most dangerous; and that
in the wars of our own times there have more brave men been lost in
occasions of little moment, and in the dispute about some little paltry
fort, than in places of greatest importance, and where their valour might
have been more honourably employed.
Who thinks his death achieved to ill purpose if he do not fall on some
signal occasion, instead of illustrating his death, wilfully obscures his
life, suffering in the meantime many very just occasions of hazarding
himself to slip out of his hands; and every just one is illustrious
enough, every man’s conscience being a sufficient trumpet to him.
“Gloria nostra est testimonium conscientiae nostrae.”
[“For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience.”
--Corinthians, i. I.]
He who is only a good man that men may know it, and that he may be the
better esteemed when ‘tis known; who will not do well but upon condition
that his virtue may be known to men: is one from whom much service is not
to be expected:
“Credo ch ‘el reste di quel verno, cose
Facesse degne di tener ne conto;
Ma fur fin’ a quel tempo si nascose,
Che non a colpa mia s’ hor ‘non le conto
Perche Orlando a far l’opre virtuose
Piu ch’a narrar le poi sempre era pronto;
Ne mai fu alcun’ de’suoi fatti espresso,
Se non quando ebbe i testimonii appresso.”
[“The rest of the winter, I believe, was spent in actions worthy of
narration, but they were done so secretly that if I do not tell them
I am not to blame, for Orlando was more bent to do great acts than
to boast of them, so that no deeds of his were ever known but those
that had witnesses.”--Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, xi. 81.]
A man must go to the war upon the account of duty, and expect the
recompense that never fails brave and worthy actions, how private soever,
or even virtuous thoughts-the satisfaction that a well-disposed
conscience receives in itself in doing well. A man must be valiant for
himself, and upon account of the advantage it is to him to have his
courage seated in a firm and secure place against the assaults of
fortune:
“Virtus, repulsaa nescia sordidx
Intaminatis fulget honoribus
Nec sumit, aut ponit secures
Arbitrio popularis aura.”
[“Virtue, repudiating all base repulse, shines in taintless
honours, nor takes nor leaves dignity at the mere will of the
vulgar.”--Horace, Od., iii. 2, 17.]
It is not for outward show that the soul is to play its part, but for
ourselves within, where no eyes can pierce but our own; there she defends
us from the fear of death, of pain, of shame itself: there she arms us
against the loss of our children, friends, and fortunes: and when
opportunity presents itself, she leads us on to the hazards of war:
“Non emolumento aliquo, sed ipsius honestatis decore.”
[“Not for any profit, but for the honour of honesty itself.”
--Cicero, De Finib., i. 10.]
This profit is of much greater advantage, and more worthy to be coveted
and hoped for, than, honour and glory, which are no other than a
favourable judgment given of us.
A dozen men must be called out of a whole nation to judge about an acre
of land; and the judgment of our inclinations and actions, the most
difficult and most important matter that is, we refer to the voice and
determination of the rabble, the mother of ignorance, injustice, and
inconstancy. Is it reasonable that the life of a wise man should
depend upon the judgment of fools?
“An quidquam stultius, quam, quos singulos contemnas,
eos aliquid putare esse universes?”
[“Can anything be more foolish than to think that those you despise
singly, can be anything else in general.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 36.]
He that makes it his business to please them, will have enough to do and
never have done; ‘tis a mark that can never be aimed at or hit:
“Nil tam inaestimabile est, quam animi multitudinis.”
[“Nothing is to be so little understood as the minds of the
multitude.”--Livy, xxxi. 34.]
Demetrius pleasantly said of the voice of the people, that he made no
more account of that which came from above than of that which came from
below. He [Cicero] says more:
“Ego hoc judico, si quando turpe non sit, tamen non
esse non turpe, quum id a multitudine laudatur.”
[“I am of opinion, that though a thing be not foul in itself,
yet it cannot but become so when commended by the multitude.”
--Cicero, De Finib., ii. 15.]
No art, no activity of wit, could conduct our steps so as to follow so
wandering and so irregular a guide; in this windy confusion of the noise
of vulgar reports and opinions that drive us on, no way worth anything
can be chosen. Let us not propose to ourselves so floating and wavering
an end; let us follow constantly after reason; let the public approbation
follow us there, if it will; and as it wholly depends upon fortune, we
have no reason sooner to expect it by any other way than that. Even
though I would not follow the right way because it is right, I should,
however, follow it as having experimentally found that, at the end of
the reckoning, ‘tis commonly the most happy and of greatest utility.
“Dedit hoc providentia hominibus munus,
ut honesta magis juvarent.”
[“This gift Providence has given to men, that honest things should
be the most agreeable.”--Quintilian, Inst. Orat., i. 12.]
The mariner of old said thus to Neptune, in a great tempest: “O God, thou
wilt save me if thou wilt, and if thou choosest, thou wilt destroy me;
but, however, I will hold my rudder straight.”--[Seneca, Ep., 85.]--
I have seen in my time a thousand men supple, halfbred, ambiguous, whom
no one doubted to be more worldly-wise than I, lose themselves, where I
have saved myself:
“Risi successus posse carere dolos.”
[“I have laughed to see cunning fail of success.”
--Ovid, Heroid, i. 18.]
Paulus AEmilius, going on the glorious expedition of Macedonia, above all
things charged the people of Rome not to speak of his actions during his
absence. Oh, the license of judgments is a great disturbance to great
affairs! forasmuch as every one has not the firmness of Fabius against
common, adverse, and injurious tongues, who rather suffered his authority
to be dissected by the vain fancies of men, than to do less well in his
charge with a favourable reputation and the popular applause.
There is I know not what natural sweetness in hearing one’s self
commended; but we are a great deal too fond of it:
“Laudari metuam, neque enim mihi cornea fibra est
Sed recti finemque extremumque esse recuso
Euge tuum, et belle.”
[“I should fear to be praised, for my heart is not made of horn;
but I deny that ‘excellent--admirably done,’ are the terms and
final aim of virtue.”--Persius, i. 47.]
I care not so much what I am in the opinions of others, as what I am in
my own; I would be rich of myself, and not by borrowing. Strangers see
nothing but events and outward appearances; everybody can set a good face
on the matter, when they have trembling and terror within: they do not
see my heart, they see but my countenance. One is right in decrying the
hypocrisy that is in war; for what is more easy to an old soldier than to
shift in a time of danger, and to counterfeit the brave when he has no
more heart than a chicken? There are so many ways to avoid hazarding a
man’s own person, that we have deceived the world a thousand times before
we come to be engaged in a real danger: and even then, finding ourselves
in an inevitable necessity of doing something, we can make shift for that
time to conceal our apprehensions by setting a good face on the business,
though the heart beats within; and whoever had the use of the Platonic
ring, which renders those invisible that wear it, if turned inward
towards the palm of the hand, a great many would very often hide
themselves when they ought most to appear, and would repent being placed
in so honourable a post, where necessity must make them bold.
“Falsus honor juvat, et mendax infamia terret
Quem nisi mendosum et mendacem?”
[“False honour pleases, and calumny affrights, the guilty
and the sick.”--Horace, Ep., i. 16, 89.]
Thus we see how all the judgments that are founded upon external
appearances, are marvellously uncertain and doubtful; and that there is
no so certain testimony as every one is to himself. In these, how many
soldiers’ boys are companions of our glory? he who stands firm in an
open trench, what does he in that more than fifty poor pioneers who open
to him the way and cover it with their own bodies for fivepence a day
pay, do before him?
“Non quicquid turbida Roma
Elevet, accedas; examenque improbum in illa
Castiges trutina: nec to quaesiveris extra.”
[“Do not, if turbulent Rome disparage anything, accede; nor correct
a false balance by that scale; nor seek anything beyond thyself.”
--Persius, Sat., i. 5.]
The dispersing and scattering our names into many mouths, we call making
them more great; we will have them there well received, and that this
increase turn to their advantage, which is all that can be excusable in
this design. But the excess of this disease proceeds so far that many
covet to have a name, be it what it will. Trogus Pompeius says of
Herostratus, and Titus Livius of Manlius Capitolinus, that they were more
ambitious of a great reputation than of a good one. This is very common;
we are more solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak; and it
is enough for us that our names are often mentioned, be it after what
manner it will. It should seem that to be known, is in some sort to have
a man’s life and its duration in others’ keeping. I, for my part, hold
that I am not, but in myself; and of that other life of mine which lies
in the knowledge of my friends, to consider it naked and simply in
itself, I know very well that I am sensible of no fruit nor enjoyment
from it but by the vanity of a fantastic opinion; and when I shall be
dead, I shall be still and much less sensible of it; and shall, withal,
absolutely lose the use of those real advantages that sometimes
accidentally follow it.
I shall have no more handle whereby to take hold of reputation, neither
shall it have any whereby to take hold of or to cleave to me; for to
expect that my name should be advanced by it, in the first place, I have
no name that is enough my own; of two that I have, one is common to all
my race, and indeed to others also; there are two families at Paris and
Montpellier, whose surname is Montaigne, another in Brittany, and one in
Xaintonge, De La Montaigne. The transposition of one syllable only would
suffice so to ravel our affairs, that I shall share in their glory, and
they peradventure will partake of my discredit; and, moreover, my
ancestors have formerly been surnamed, Eyquem,--[Eyquem was the
patronymic.]--a name wherein a family well known in England is at this
day concerned. As to my other name, every one may take it that will, and
so, perhaps, I may honour a porter in my own stead. And besides, though
I had a particular distinction by myself, what can it distinguish, when I
am no more? Can it point out and favour inanity?
“Non levior cippus nunc imprimit ossa?
Laudat posteritas! Nunc non e manibus illis,
Nunc non a tumulo fortunataque favilla,
Nascentur violae?”
[“Does the tomb press with less weight upon my bones? Do comrades
praise? Not from my manes, not from the tomb, not from the ashes
will violets grow.”--Persius, Sat., i. 37.]
but of this I have spoken elsewhere. As to what remains, in a great
battle where ten thousand men are maimed or killed, there are not fifteen
who are taken notice of; it must be some very eminent greatness, or some
consequence of great importance that fortune has added to it, that
signalises a private action, not of a harquebuser only, but of a great
captain; for to kill a man, or two, or ten: to expose a man’s self
bravely to the utmost peril of death, is indeed something in every one of
us, because we there hazard all; but for the world’s concern, they are
things so ordinary, and so many of them are every day seen, and there
must of necessity be so many of the same kind to produce any notable
effect, that we cannot expect any particular renown from it:
“Casus multis hic cognitus, ac jam
Tritus, et a medio fortunae ductus acervo.”
[“The accident is known to many, and now trite; and drawn from the
midst of Fortune’s heap.”--Juvenal, Sat., xiii. 9.]
Of so many thousands of valiant men who have died within these fifteen
hundred years in France with their swords in their hands, not a hundred
have come to our knowledge. The memory, not of the commanders only, but
of battles and victories, is buried and gone; the fortunes of above half
of the world, for want of a record, stir not from their place, and vanish
without duration. If I had unknown events in my possession, I should
think with great ease to out-do those that are recorded, in all sorts of
examples. Is it not strange that even of the Greeks and Romans, with so
many writers and witnesses, and so many rare and noble exploits, so few
are arrived at our knowledge:
“Ad nos vix tenuis famx perlabitur aura.”
[“An obscure rumour scarce is hither come.”--AEneid, vii. 646.]
It will be much if, a hundred years hence, it be remembered in general
that in our times there were civil wars in France. The Lacedaemonians,
entering into battle, sacrificed to the Muses, to the end that their
actions might be well and worthily written, looking upon it as a divine
and no common favour, that brave acts should find witnesses that could
give them life and memory. Do we expect that at every musket-shot we
receive, and at every hazard we run, there must be a register ready to
record it? and, besides, a hundred registers may enrol them whose
commentaries will not last above three days, and will never come to the
sight of any one. We have not the thousandth part of ancient writings;
‘tis fortune that gives them a shorter or longer life, according to her
favour; and ‘tis permissible to doubt whether those we have be not the
worst, not having seen the rest. Men do not write histories of things of
so little moment: a man must have been general in the conquest of an
empire or a kingdom; he must have won two-and-fifty set battles, and
always the weaker in number, as Caesar did: ten thousand brave fellows
and many great captains lost their lives valiantly in his service, whose
names lasted no longer than their wives and children lived:
“Quos fama obscura recondit.”
[“Whom an obscure reputation conceals.”--AEneid, v. 302.]
Even those whom we see behave themselves well, three months or three
years after they have departed hence, are no more mentioned than if they
had never been. Whoever will justly consider, and with due proportion,
of what kind of men and of what sort of actions the glory sustains itself
in the records of history, will find that there are very few actions and
very few persons of our times who can there pretend any right. How many
worthy men have we known to survive their own reputation, who have seen
and suffered the honour and glory most justly acquired in their youth,
extinguished in their own presence? And for three years of this
fantastic and imaginary life we must go and throw away our true and
essential life, and engage ourselves in a perpetual death! The sages
propose to themselves a nobler and more just end in so important an
enterprise:
“Recte facti, fecisse merces est: officii fructus,
ipsum officium est.”
[“The reward of a thing well done is to have done it; the fruit
of a good service is the service itself.”--Seneca, Ep., 8.]
It were, peradventure, excusable in a painter or other artisan, or in a
rhetorician or a grammarian, to endeavour to raise himself a name by his
works; but the actions of virtue are too noble in themselves to seek any
other reward than from their own value, and especially to seek it in the
vanity of human judgments.
If this false opinion, nevertheless, be of such use to the public as to
keep men in their duty; if the people are thereby stirred up to virtue;
if princes are touched to see the world bless the memory of Trajan, and
abominate that of Nero; if it moves them to see the name of that great
beast, once so terrible and feared, so freely cursed and reviled by every
schoolboy, let it by all means increase, and be as much as possible
nursed up and cherished amongst us; and Plato, bending his whole
endeavour to make his citizens virtuous, also advises them not to despise
the good repute and esteem of the people; and says it falls out, by a
certain Divine inspiration, that even the wicked themselves oft-times, as
well by word as opinion, can rightly distinguish the virtuous from the
wicked. This person and his tutor are both marvellous and bold
artificers everywhere to add divine operations and revelations where
human force is wanting:
“Ut tragici poetae confugiunt ad deum,
cum explicare argumenti exitum non possunt:”
[“As tragic poets fly to some god when they cannot explain
the issue of their argument.”--Cicero, De Nat. Deor., i. 20.]
and peradventure, for this reason it was that Timon, railing at him,
called him the great forger of miracles. Seeing that men, by their
insufficiency, cannot pay themselves well enough with current money, let
the counterfeit be superadded. ‘Tis a way that has been practised by all
the legislators: and there is no government that has not some mixture
either of ceremonial vanity or of false opinion, that serves for a curb
to keep the people in their duty. ‘Tis for this that most of them have
their originals and beginnings fabulous, and enriched with supernatural
mysteries; ‘tis this that has given credit to bastard religions, and
caused them to be countenanced by men of understanding; and for this,
that Numa and Sertorius, to possess their men with a better opinion of
them, fed them with this foppery; one, that the nymph Egeria, the other
that his white hind, brought them all their counsels from the gods.
And the authority that Numa gave to his laws, under the title of the
patronage of this goddess, Zoroaster, legislator of the Bactrians and
Persians, gave to his under the name of the God Oromazis: Trismegistus,
legislator of the Egyptians, under that of Mercury; Xamolxis, legislator
of the Scythians, under that of Vesta; Charondas, legislator of the
Chalcidians, under that of Saturn; Minos, legislator of the Candiots,
under that of Jupiter; Lycurgus, legislator of the Lacedaemonians, under
that of Apollo; and Draco and Solon, legislators of the Athenians, under
that of Minerva. And every government has a god at the head of it;
the others falsely, that truly, which Moses set over the Jews at their
departure out of Egypt. The religion of the Bedouins, as the Sire de
Joinville reports, amongst other things, enjoined a belief that the soul
of him amongst them who died for his prince, went into another body more
happy, more beautiful, and more robust than the former; by which means
they much more willingly ventured their lives:
“In ferrum mens prona viris, animaeque capaces
Mortis, et ignavum est rediturae parcere vitae.”
[“Men’s minds are prone to the sword, and their souls able to bear
death; and it is base to spare a life that will be renewed.”
--Lucan, i. 461.]
This is a very comfortable belief, however erroneous. Every nation has
many such examples of its own; but this subject would require a treatise
by itself.
To add one word more to my former discourse, I would advise the ladies no
longer to call that honour which is but their duty:
“Ut enim consuetudo loquitur, id solum dicitur
honestum, quod est populari fama gloriosum;”
[“As custom puts it, that only is called honest which is
glorious by the public voice.”--Cicero, De Finibus, ii. 15.]
their duty is the mark, their honour but the outward rind. Neither would
I advise them to give this excuse for payment of their denial: for I
presuppose that their intentions, their desire, and will, which are
things wherein their honour is not at all concerned, forasmuch as nothing
thereof appears without, are much better regulated than the effects:
“Qux quia non liceat, non facit, illa facit:”
[“She who only refuses, because ‘tis forbidden, consents.”
--Ovid, Amor., ii. 4, 4.]
The offence, both towards God and in the conscience, would be as great to
desire as to do it; and, besides, they are actions so private and secret
of themselves, as would be easily enough kept from the knowledge of
others, wherein the honour consists, if they had not another respect to
their duty, and the affection they bear to chastity, for itself. Every
woman of honour will much rather choose to lose her honour than to hurt
her conscience.
CHAPTER XVII
OF PRESUMPTION
There is another sort of glory, which is the having too good an opinion
of our own worth. ‘Tis an inconsiderate affection with which we flatter
ourselves, and that represents us to ourselves other than we truly are:
like the passion of love, that lends beauties and graces to the object,
and makes those who are caught by it, with a depraved and corrupt
judgment, consider the thing which they love other and more perfect than
it is.
I would not, nevertheless, for fear of failing on this side, that a man
should not know himself aright, or think himself less than he is; the
judgment ought in all things to maintain its rights; ‘tis all the reason
in the world he should discern in himself, as well as in others, what
truth sets before him; if it be Caesar, let him boldly think himself the
greatest captain in the world. We are nothing but ceremony: ceremony
carries us away, and we leave the substance of things: we hold by the
branches, and quit the trunk and the body; we have taught the ladies to
blush when they hear that but named which they are not at all afraid to
do: we dare not call our members by their right names, yet are not afraid
to employ them in all sorts of debauchery: ceremony forbids us to express
by words things that are lawful and natural, and we obey it: reason
forbids us to do things unlawful and ill, and nobody obeys it. I find
myself here fettered by the laws of ceremony; for it neither permits a
man to speak well of himself, nor ill: we will leave her there for this
time.
They whom fortune (call it good or ill) has made to, pass their lives in
some eminent degree, may by their public actions manifest what they are;
but they whom she has only employed in the crowd, and of whom nobody will
say a word unless they speak themselves, are to be excused if they take
the boldness to speak of themselves to such as are interested to know
them; by the example of Lucilius:
“Ille velut fidis arcana sodalibus olim
Credebat libris, neque si male cesserat, usquam
Decurrens alio, neque si bene: quo fit, ut omnis,
Votiva pateat veluri descripta tabella
Vita senis;”
[“He formerly confided his secret thoughts to his books, as to tried
friends, and for good and evil, resorted not elsewhere: hence it
came to pass, that the old man’s life is there all seen as on a
votive tablet.”--Horace, Sat., ii. I, 30.]
he always committed to paper his actions and thoughts, and there
portrayed himself such as he found himself to be:
“Nec id Rutilio et Scauro citra fidem; aut obtrectationi fuit.”
[“Nor was this considered a breach of good faith or a disparagement
to Rutilius or Scaurus.”--Tacitus, Agricola, c. I.]
I remember, then, that from my infancy there was observed in me I know
not what kind of carriage and behaviour, that seemed to relish of pride
and arrogance. I will say this, by the way, that it is not unreasonable
to suppose that we have qualities and inclinations so much our own, and
so incorporate in us, that we have not the means to feel and recognise
them: and of such natural inclinations the body will retain a certain
bent, without our knowledge or consent. It was an affectation
conformable with his beauty that made Alexander carry his head on one
side, and caused Alcibiades to lisp; Julius Caesar scratched his head
with one finger, which is the fashion of a man full of troublesome
thoughts; and Cicero, as I remember, was wont to pucker up his nose, a
sign of a man given to scoffing; such motions as these may imperceptibly
happen in us. There are other artificial ones which I meddle not with,
as salutations and congees, by which men acquire, for the most part
unjustly, the reputation of being humble and courteous: one may be humble
out of pride. I am prodigal enough of my hat, especially in summer, and
never am so saluted but that I pay it again from persons of what quality
soever, unless they be in my own service. I should make it my request to
some princes whom I know, that they would be more sparing of that
ceremony, and bestow that courtesy where it is more due; for being so
indiscreetly and indifferently conferred on all, it is thrown away to no
purpose; if it be without respect of persons, it loses its effect.
Amongst irregular deportment, let us not forget that haughty one of the
Emperor Constantius, who always in public held his head upright and
stiff, without bending or turning on either side, not so much as to look
upon those who saluted him on one side, planting his body in a rigid
immovable posture, without suffering it to yield to the motion of his
coach, not daring so much as to spit, blow his nose, or wipe his face
before people. I know not whether the gestures that were observed in me
were of this first quality, and whether I had really any occult proneness
to this vice, as it might well be; and I cannot be responsible for the
motions of the body; but as to the motions of the soul, I must here
confess what I think of the matter.
This glory consists of two parts; the one in setting too great a value
upon ourselves, and the other in setting too little a value upon others.
As to the one, methinks these considerations ought, in the first place,
to be of some force: I feel myself importuned by an error of the soul
that displeases me, both as it is unjust, and still more as it is
troublesome; I attempt to correct it, but I cannot root it out; and this
is, that I lessen the just value of things that I possess, and overvalue
things, because they are foreign, absent, and none of mine; this humour
spreads very far. As the prerogative of the authority makes husbands
look upon their own wives with a vicious disdain, and many fathers their
children; so I, betwixt two equal merits, should always be swayed against
my own; not so much that the jealousy of my advancement and bettering
troubles my judgment, and hinders me from satisfying myself, as that of
itself possession begets a contempt of what it holds and rules. Foreign
governments, manners, and languages insinuate themselves into my esteem;
and I am sensible that Latin allures me by the favour of its dignity to
value it above its due, as it does with children, and the common sort of
people: the domestic government, house, horse, of my neighbour, though no
better than my own, I prize above my own, because they are not mine.
Besides that I am very ignorant in my own affairs, I am struck by the
assurance that every one has of himself: whereas there is scarcely
anything that I am sure I know, or that I dare be responsible to myself
that I can do: I have not my means of doing anything in condition and
ready, and am only instructed therein after the effect; as doubtful of my
own force as I am of another’s. Whence it comes to pass that if I happen
to do anything commendable, I attribute it more to my fortune than
industry, forasmuch as I design everything by chance and in fear. I have
this, also, in general, that of all the opinions antiquity has held of
men in gross, I most willingly embrace and adhere to those that most
contemn and undervalue us, and most push us to naught; methinks,
philosophy has never so fair a game to play as when it falls upon our
vanity and presumption; when it most lays open our irresolution,
weakness, and ignorance. I look upon the too good opinion that man has
of himself to be the nursing mother of all the most false opinions, both
public and private. Those people who ride astride upon the epicycle of
Mercury, who see so far into the heavens, are worse to me than a
tooth-drawer that comes to draw my teeth; for in my study, the subject of
which is man, finding so great a variety of judgments, so profound a
labyrinth of difficulties, one upon another, so great diversity and
uncertainty, even in the school of wisdom itself, you may judge, seeing
these people could not resolve upon the knowledge of themselves and their
own condition, which is continually before their eyes, and within them,
seeing they do not know how that moves which they themselves move, nor
how to give us a description of the springs they themselves govern and
make use of, how can I believe them about the ebbing and flowing of the
Nile? The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a
scourge, says the Holy Scripture.
But to return to what concerns myself; I think it would be very difficult
for any other man to have a meaner opinion of himself; nay, for any other
to have a meaner opinion of me than of myself: I look upon myself as one
of the common sort, saving in this, that I have no better an opinion of
myself; guilty of the meanest and most popular defects, but not disowning
or excusing them; and I do not value myself upon any other account than
because I know my own value. If there be any vanity in the case, ‘tis
superficially infused into me by the treachery of my complexion, and has
no body that my judgment can discern: I am sprinkled, but not dyed. For
in truth, as to the effects of the mind, there is no part of me, be it
what it will, with which I am satisfied; and the approbation of others
makes me not think the better of myself. My judgment is tender and nice,
especially in things that concern myself.
I ever repudiate myself, and feel myself float and waver by reason of my
weakness. I have nothing of my own that satisfies my judgment. My sight
is clear and regular enough, but, at working, it is apt to dazzle; as I
most manifestly find in poetry: I love it infinitely, and am able to give
a tolerable judgment of other men’s works; but, in good earnest, when I
apply myself to it, I play the child, and am not able to endure myself.
A man may play the fool in everything else, but not in poetry;
“Mediocribus esse poetis
Non dii, non homines, non concessere columnae.”
[“Neither men, nor gods, nor the pillars (on which the poets
offered their writings) permit mediocrity in poets.”
--Horace, De Arte Poet., 372.]
I would to God this sentence was written over the doors of all our
printers, to forbid the entrance of so many rhymesters!
“Verum
Nihil securius est malo poetae.”
[“The truth is, that nothing is more confident than a bad poet.”
--Martial, xii. 63, 13.]
Why have not we such people?--[As those about to be mentioned.]--
Dionysius the father valued himself upon nothing so much as his poetry;
at the Olympic games, with chariots surpassing all the others in
magnificence, he sent also poets and musicians to present his verses,
with tent and pavilions royally gilt and hung with tapestry. When his
verses came to be recited, the excellence of the delivery at first
attracted the attention of the people; but when they afterwards came to
poise the meanness of the composition, they first entered into disdain,
and continuing to nettle their judgments, presently proceeded to fury,
and ran to pull down and tear to pieces all his pavilions: and, that his
chariots neither performed anything to purpose in the race, and that the
ship which brought back his people failed of making Sicily, and was by
the tempest driven and wrecked upon the coast of Tarentum, they certainly
believed was through the anger of the gods, incensed, as they themselves
were, against the paltry Poem; and even the mariners who escaped from the
wreck seconded this opinion of the people: to which also the oracle that
foretold his death seemed to subscribe; which was, “that Dionysius should
be near his end, when he should have overcome those who were better than
himself,” which he interpreted of the Carthaginians, who surpassed him in
power; and having war with them, often declined the victory, not to incur
the sense of this prediction; but he understood it ill; for the god
indicated the time of the advantage, that by favour and injustice he
obtained at Athens over the tragic poets, better than himself, having
caused his own play called the Leneians to be acted in emulation;
presently after which victory he died, and partly of the excessive joy he
conceived at the success.
[Diodorus Siculus, xv. 7.--The play, however, was called the
“Ransom of Hector.” It was the games at which it was acted that
were called Leneian; they were one of the four Dionysiac festivals.]
What I find tolerable of mine, is not so really and in itself, but in
comparison of other worse things, that I see well enough received. I
envy the happiness of those who can please and hug themselves in what
they do; for ‘tis an easy thing to be so pleased, because a man extracts
that pleasure from himself, especially if he be constant in his
self-conceit. I know a poet, against whom the intelligent and the
ignorant, abroad and at home, both heaven and earth exclaim that he has
but very little notion of it; and yet, for all that, he has never a whit
the worse opinion of himself; but is always falling upon some new piece,
always contriving some new invention, and still persists in his opinion,
by so much the more obstinately, as it only concerns him to maintain it.
My works are so far from pleasing me, that as often as I review them,
they disgust me:
“Cum relego, scripsisse pudet; quia plurima cerno,
Me quoque, qui feci, judice, digna lini.”
[“When I reperuse, I blush at what I have written; I ever see one
passage after another that I, the author, being the judge, consider
should be erased.”--Ovid, De Ponto, i. 5, 15.]
I have always an idea in my soul, and a sort of disturbed image which
presents me as in a dream with a better form than that I have made use
of; but I cannot catch it nor fit it to my purpose; and even that idea is
but of the meaner sort. Hence I conclude that the productions of those
great and rich souls of former times are very much beyond the utmost
stretch of my imagination or my wish; their writings do not only satisfy
and fill me, but they astound me, and ravish me with admiration; I judge
of their beauty; I see it, if not to the utmost, yet so far at least as
‘tis possible for me to aspire. Whatever I undertake, I owe a sacrifice
to the Graces, as Plutarch says of some one, to conciliate their favour:
“Si quid enim placet,
Si quid dulce horninum sensibus influit,
Debentur lepidis omnia Gratiis.”
[“If anything please that I write, if it infuse delight into men’s
minds, all is due to the charming Graces.” The verses are probably
by some modern poet.]
They abandon me throughout; all I write is rude; polish and beauty are
wanting: I cannot set things off to any advantage; my handling adds
nothing to the matter; for which reason I must have it forcible, very
full, and that has lustre of its own. If I pitch upon subjects that are
popular and gay, ‘tis to follow my own inclination, who do not affect a
grave and ceremonious wisdom, as the world does; and to make myself more
sprightly, but not my style more wanton, which would rather have them
grave and severe; at least if I may call that a style which is an inform
and irregular way of speaking, a popular jargon, a proceeding without
definition, division, conclusion, perplexed like that Amafanius and
Rabirius.--[Cicero, Acad., i. 2.]--I can neither please nor delight,
nor even tickle my readers: the best story in the world is spoiled by my
handling, and becomes flat; I cannot speak but in rough earnest, and am
totally unprovided of that facility which I observe in many of my
acquaintance, of entertaining the first comers and keeping a whole
company in breath, or taking up the ear of a prince with all sorts of
discourse without wearying themselves: they never want matter by reason
of the faculty and grace they have in taking hold of the first thing that
starts up, and accommodating it to the humour and capacity of those with
whom they have to do. Princes do not much affect solid discourses, nor I
to tell stories. The first and easiest reasons, which are commonly the
best taken, I know not how to employ: I am an ill orator to the common
sort. I am apt of everything to say the extremest that I know. Cicero
is of opinion that in treatises of philosophy the exordium is the hardest
part; if this be true, I am wise in sticking to the conclusion. And yet
we are to know how to wind the string to all notes, and the sharpest is
that which is the most seldom touched. There is at least as much
perfection in elevating an empty as in supporting a weighty thing. A man
must sometimes superficially handle things, and sometimes push them home.
I know very well that most men keep themselves in this lower form from
not conceiving things otherwise than by this outward bark; but I likewise
know that the greatest masters, and Xenophon and Plato are often seen to
stoop to this low and popular manner of speaking and treating of things,
but supporting it with graces which never fail them.
Farther, my language has nothing in it that is facile and polished; ‘tis
rough, free, and irregular, and as such pleases, if not my judgment, at
all events my inclination, but I very well perceive that I sometimes give
myself too much rein, and that by endeavouring to avoid art and
affectation I fall into the other inconvenience:
“Brevis esse laboro,
Obscurus fio.”
[ Endeavouring to be brief, I become obscure.”
--Hor., Art. Poet., 25.]
Plato says, that the long or the short are not properties, that either
take away or give value to language. Should I attempt to follow the
other more moderate, united, and regular style, I should never attain to
it; and though the short round periods of Sallust best suit with my
humour, yet I find Caesar much grander and harder to imitate; and though
my inclination would rather prompt me to imitate Seneca’s way of writing,
yet I do nevertheless more esteem that of Plutarch. Both in doing and
speaking I simply follow my own natural way; whence, peradventure, it
falls out that I am better at speaking than writing. Motion and action
animate words, especially in those who lay about them briskly, as I do,
and grow hot. The comportment, the countenance; the voice, the robe, the
place, will set off some things that of themselves would appear no better
than prating. Messalla complains in Tacitus of the straitness of some
garments in his time, and of the fashion of the benches where the orators
were to declaim, that were a disadvantage to their eloquence.
My French tongue is corrupted, both in the pronunciation and otherwise,
by the barbarism of my country. I never saw a man who was a native of
any of the provinces on this side of the kingdom who had not a twang of
his place of birth, and that was not offensive to ears that were purely
French. And yet it is not that I am so perfect in my Perigordin: for I
can no more speak it than High Dutch, nor do I much care. ‘Tis a
language (as the rest about me on every side, of Poitou, Xaintonge,
Angoumousin, Limousin, Auvergne), a poor, drawling, scurvy language.
There is, indeed, above us towards the mountains a sort of Gascon spoken,
that I am mightily taken with: blunt, brief, significant, and in truth a
more manly and military language than any other I am acquainted with, as
sinewy, powerful, and pertinent as the French is graceful, neat, and
luxuriant.
As to the Latin, which was given me for my mother tongue, I have by
discontinuance lost the use of speaking it, and, indeed, of writing it
too, wherein I formerly had a particular reputation, by which you may see
how inconsiderable I am on that side.
Beauty is a thing of great recommendation in the correspondence amongst
men; ‘tis the first means of acquiring the favour and good liking of one
another, and no man is so barbarous and morose as not to perceive himself
in some sort struck with its attraction. The body has a great share in
our being, has an eminent place there, and therefore its structure and
composition are of very just consideration. They who go about to
disunite and separate our two principal parts from one another are to
blame; we must, on the contrary, reunite and rejoin them. We must
command the soul not to withdraw and entertain itself apart, not to
despise and abandon the body (neither can she do it but by some apish
counterfeit), but to unite herself close to it, to embrace, cherish,
assist, govern, and advise it, and to bring it back and set it into the
true way when it wanders; in sum, to espouse and be a husband to it, so
that their effects may not appear to be diverse and contrary, but uniform
and concurring. Christians have a particular instruction concerning this
connection, for they know that the Divine justice embraces this society
and juncture of body and soul, even to the making the body capable of
eternal rewards; and that God has an eye to the whole man’s ways, and
wills that he receive entire chastisement or reward according to his
demerits or merits. The sect of the Peripatetics, of all sects the most
sociable, attribute to wisdom this sole care equally to provide for the
good of these two associate parts: and the other sects, in not
sufficiently applying themselves to the consideration of this mixture,
show themselves to be divided, one for the body and the other for the
soul, with equal error, and to have lost sight of their subject, which is
Man, and their guide, which they generally confess to be Nature. The
first distinction that ever was amongst men, and the first consideration
that gave some pre-eminence over others, ‘tis likely was the advantage of
beauty:
“Agros divisere atque dedere
Pro facie cujusque, et viribus ingenioque;
Nam facies multum valuit, viresque vigebant.”
[“They distributed and conferred the lands to every man according
to his beauty and strength and understanding, for beauty was much
esteemed and strength was in favour.”--Lucretius, V. 1109.]
Now I am of something lower than the middle stature, a defect that not
only borders upon deformity, but carries withal a great deal of
inconvenience along with it, especially for those who are in office and
command; for the authority which a graceful presence and a majestic mien
beget is wanting. C. Marius did not willingly enlist any soldiers who
were not six feet high. The Courtier has, indeed, reason to desire a
moderate stature in the gentlemen he is setting forth, rather than any
other, and to reject all strangeness that should make him be pointed at.
But if I were to choose whether this medium must be rather below than
above the common standard, I would not have it so in a soldier. Little
men, says Aristotle, are pretty, but not handsome; and greatness of soul
is discovered in a great body, as beauty is in a conspicuous stature: the
Ethiopians and Indians, says he, in choosing their kings and magistrates,
had regard to the beauty and stature of their persons. They had reason;
for it creates respect in those who follow them, and is a terror to the
enemy, to see a leader of a brave and goodly stature march at the head of
a battalion:
“Ipse inter primos praestanti corpore Turnus
Vertitur arma, tenens, et toto vertice supra est.”
[“In the first rank marches Turnus, brandishing his weapon,
taller by a head than all the rest.”--Virgil, AEneid, vii. 783.]
Our holy and heavenly king, of whom every circumstance is most carefully
and with the greatest religion and reverence to be observed, has not
himself rejected bodily recommendation,
“Speciosus forma prae filiis hominum.”
[“He is fairer than the children of men.”--Psalm xiv. 3.]
And Plato, together with temperance and fortitude, requires beauty in the
conservators of his republic. It would vex you that a man should apply
himself to you amongst your servants to inquire where Monsieur is, and
that you should only have the remainder of the compliment of the hat that
is made to your barber or your secretary; as it happened to poor
Philopoemen, who arriving the first of all his company at an inn where he
was expected, the hostess, who knew him not, and saw him an unsightly
fellow, employed him to go help her maids a little to draw water, and
make a fire against Philopoemen’s coming; the gentlemen of his train
arriving presently after, and surprised to see him busy in this fine
employment, for he failed not to obey his landlady’s command, asked him
what he was doing there: “I am,” said he, “paying the penalty of my
ugliness.” The other beauties belong to women; the beauty of stature is
the only beauty of men. Where there is a contemptible stature, neither
the largeness and roundness of the forehead, nor the whiteness and
sweetness of the eyes, nor the moderate proportion of the nose, nor the
littleness of the ears and mouth, nor the evenness and whiteness of the
teeth, nor the thickness of a well-set brown beard, shining like the husk
of a chestnut, nor curled hair, nor the just proportion of the head, nor
a fresh complexion, nor a pleasing air of a face, nor a body without any
offensive scent, nor the just proportion of limbs, can make a handsome
man. I am, as to the rest, strong and well knit; my face is not puffed,
but full, and my complexion betwixt jovial and melancholic, moderately
sanguine and hot,
“Unde rigent setis mihi crura, et pectora villis;”
[“Whence ‘tis my legs and breast bristle with hair.”
--Martial, ii. 36, 5.]
my health vigorous and sprightly, even to a well advanced age, and rarely
troubled with sickness. Such I was, for I do not now make any account of
myself, now that I am engaged in the avenues of old age, being already
past forty:
“Minutatim vires et robur adultum
Frangit, et in partem pejorem liquitur aetas:”
[“Time by degrees breaks our strength and makes us grow feeble.
--“Lucretius, ii. 1131.]
what shall be from this time forward, will be but a half-being, and no
more me: I every day escape and steal away from myself:
“Singula de nobis anni praedantur euntes.”
[“Of the fleeting years each steals something from me.”
--Horace, Ep., ii. 2.]
Agility and address I never had, and yet am the son of a very active and
sprightly father, who continued to be so to an extreme old age. I have
scarce known any man of his condition, his equal in all bodily exercises,
as I have seldom met with any who have not excelled me, except in
running, at which I was pretty good. In music or singing, for which I
have a very unfit voice, or to play on any sort of instrument, they could
never teach me anything. In dancing, tennis, or wrestling, I could never
arrive to more than an ordinary pitch; in swimming, fencing, vaulting,
and leaping, to none at all. My hands are so clumsy that I cannot even
write so as to read it myself, so that I had rather do what I have
scribbled over again, than take upon me the trouble to make it out. I do
not read much better than I write, and feel that I weary my auditors
otherwise (I am) not a bad clerk. I cannot decently fold up a letter,
nor could ever make a pen, or carve at table worth a pin, nor saddle a
horse, nor carry a hawk and fly her, nor hunt the dogs, nor lure a hawk,
nor speak to a horse. In fine, my bodily qualities are very well suited
to those of my soul; there is nothing sprightly, only a full and firm
vigour: I am patient enough of labour and pains, but it is only when I go
voluntary to work, and only so long as my own desire prompts me to it:
“Molliter austerum studio fallente laborem.”
[“Study softly beguiling severe labour.”
--Horace, Sat., ii. 2, 12.]
otherwise, if I am not allured with some pleasure, or have other guide
than my own pure and free inclination, I am good for nothing: for I am of
a humour that, life and health excepted, there is nothing for which I
will bite my nails, and that I will purchase at the price of torment of
mind and constraint:
“Tanti mihi non sit opaci
Omnis arena Tagi, quodque in mare volvitur aurum.”
[“I would not buy rich Tagus sands so dear, nor all the gold that
lies in the sea.”--Juvenal, Sat., iii. 54.]
Extremely idle, extremely given up to my own inclination both by nature
and art, I would as willingly lend a man my blood as my pains. I have a
soul free and entirely its own, and accustomed to guide itself after its
own fashion; having hitherto never had either master or governor imposed
upon me: I have walked as far as I would, and at the pace that best
pleased myself; this is it that has rendered me unfit for the service of
others, and has made me of no use to any one but myself.
Nor was there any need of forcing my heavy and lazy disposition; for
being born to such a fortune as I had reason to be contented with (a
reason, nevertheless, that a thousand others of my acquaintance would
have rather made use of for a plank upon which to pass over in search of
higher fortune, to tumult and disquiet), and with as much intelligence as
I required, I sought for no more, and also got no more:
“Non agimur tumidis velis Aquilone secundo,
Non tamen adversis aetatem ducimus Austris
Viribus, ingenio, specie, virtute, loco, re,
Extremi primorum, extremis usque priores.”
[“The northern wind does not agitate our sails; nor Auster trouble
our course with storms. In strength, talent, figure, virtue,
honour, wealth, we are short of the foremost, but before the last.”
--Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 201.]
I had only need of what was sufficient to content me: which nevertheless
is a government of soul, to take it right, equally difficult in all sorts
of conditions, and that, of custom, we see more easily found in want than
in abundance: forasmuch, peradventure, as according to the course of our
other passions, the desire of riches is more sharpened by their use than
by the need of them: and the virtue of moderation more rare than that of
patience; and I never had anything to desire, but happily to enjoy the
estate that God by His bounty had put into my hands. I have never known
anything of trouble, and have had little to do in anything but the
management of my own affairs: or, if I have, it has been upon condition
to do it at my own leisure and after my own method; committed to my trust
by such as had a confidence in me, who did not importune me, and who knew
my humour; for good horsemen will make shift to get service out of a
rusty and broken-winded jade.
Even my infancy was trained up after a gentle and free manner, and exempt
from any rigorous subjection. All this has helped me to a complexion
delicate and incapable of solicitude, even to that degree that I love to
have my losses and the disorders wherein I am concerned, concealed from
me. In the account of my expenses, I put down what my negligence costs
me in feeding and maintaining it;
“Haec nempe supersunt,
Quae dominum fallunt, quae prosunt furibus.”
[“That overplus, which the owner knows not of,
but which benefits the thieves”--Horace, Ep., i. 645]
I love not to know what I have, that I may be less sensible of my loss;
I entreat those who serve me, where affection and integrity are absent,
to deceive me with something like a decent appearance. For want of
constancy enough to support the shock of adverse accidents to which we
are subject, and of patience seriously to apply myself to the management
of my affairs, I nourish as much as I can this in myself, wholly leaving
all to fortune “to take all things at the worst, and to resolve to bear
that worst with temper and patience”; that is the only thing I aim at,
and to which I apply my whole meditation. In a danger, I do not so much
consider how I shall escape it, as of how little importance it is,
whether I escape it or no: should I be left dead upon the place, what
matter? Not being able to govern events, I govern myself, and apply
myself to them, if they will not apply themselves to me. I have no great
art to evade, escape from or force fortune, and by prudence to guide and
incline things to my own bias. I have still less patience to undergo the
troublesome and painful care therein required; and the most uneasy
condition for me is to be suspended on urgent occasions, and to be
agitated betwixt hope and fear.
Deliberation, even in things of lightest moment, is very troublesome to
me; and I find my mind more put to it to undergo the various tumblings
and tossings of doubt and consultation, than to set up its rest and to
acquiesce in whatever shall happen after the die is thrown. Few passions
break my sleep, but of deliberations, the least will do it. As in roads,
I preferably avoid those that are sloping and slippery, and put myself
into the beaten track how dirty or deep soever, where I can fall no
lower, and there seek my safety: so I love misfortunes that are purely
so, that do not torment and tease me with the uncertainty of their
growing better; but that at the first push plunge me directly into the
worst that can be expected
“Dubia plus torquent mala.”
[“Doubtful ills plague us worst.”
--Seneca, Agamemnon, iii. 1, 29.]
In events I carry myself like a man; in conduct, like a child. The fear
of the fall more fevers me than the fall itself. The game is not worth
the candle. The covetous man fares worse with his passion than the poor,
and the jealous man than the cuckold; and a man ofttimes loses more by
defending his vineyard than if he gave it up. The lowest walk is the
safest; ‘tis the seat of constancy; you have there need of no one but
yourself; ‘tis there founded and wholly stands upon its own basis. Has
not this example of a gentleman very well known, some air of philosophy
in it? He married, being well advanced in years, having spent his youth
in good fellowship, a great talker and a great jeerer, calling to mind
how much the subject of cuckoldry had given him occasion to talk and
scoff at others. To prevent them from paying him in his own coin, he
married a wife from a place where any one finds what he wants for his
money: “Good morrow, strumpet”; “Good morrow, cuckold”; and there was not
anything wherewith he more commonly and openly entertained those who came
to see him than with this design of his, by which he stopped the private
chattering of mockers, and blunted all the point from this reproach.
As to ambition, which is neighbour, or rather daughter, to presumption,
fortune, to advance me, must have come and taken me by the hand; for to
trouble myself for an uncertain hope, and to have submitted myself to all
the difficulties that accompany those who endeavour to bring themselves
into credit in the beginning of their progress, I could never have done
it:
“Spem pretio non emo.”
[“I will not purchase hope with ready money,” (or),
“I do not purchase hope at a price.”
--Terence, Adelphi, ii. 3, 11.]
I apply myself to what I see and to what I have in my hand, and go not
very far from the shore,
“Alter remus aquas, alter tibi radat arenas:”
[“One oar plunging into the sea, the other raking the sands.”
--Propertius, iii. 3, 23.]
and besides, a man rarely arrives at these advancements but in first
hazarding what he has of his own; and I am of opinion that if a man have
sufficient to maintain him in the condition wherein he was born and
brought up, ‘tis a great folly to hazard that upon the uncertainty of
augmenting it. He to whom fortune has denied whereon to set his foot,
and to settle a quiet and composed way of living, is to be excused if he
venture what he has, because, happen what will, necessity puts him upon
shifting for himself:
“Capienda rebus in malis praeceps via est:”
[“A course is to be taken in bad cases.” (or),
“A desperate case must have a desperate course.”
---Seneca, Agamemnon, ii. 1, 47.]
and I rather excuse a younger brother for exposing what his friends have
left him to the courtesy of fortune, than him with whom the honour of his
family is entrusted, who cannot be necessitous but by his own fault.
I have found a much shorter and more easy way, by the advice of the good
friends I had in my younger days, to free myself from any such ambition,
and to sit still:
“Cui sit conditio dulcis sine pulvere palmae:”
[“What condition can compare with that where one has gained the
palm without the dust of the course.”--Horace, Ep., i. I, 51.]
judging rightly enough of my own strength, that it was not capable of any
great matters; and calling to mind the saying of the late Chancellor
Olivier, that the French were like monkeys that swarm up a tree from
branch to branch, and never stop till they come to the highest, and there
shew their breech.
“Turpe est, quod nequeas, capiti committere pondus,
Et pressum inflexo mox dare terga genu.”
[“It is a shame to load the head so that it cannot bear the
burthen, and the knees give way.”--Propertius, iii. 9, 5.]
I should find the best qualities I have useless in this age; the facility
of my manners would have been called weakness and negligence; my faith
and conscience, scrupulosity and superstition; my liberty and freedom
would have been reputed troublesome, inconsiderate, and rash. Ill luck
is good for something. It is good to be born in a very depraved age; for
so, in comparison of others, you shall be reputed virtuous good cheap; he
who in our days is but a parricide and a sacrilegious person is an honest
man and a man of honour:
“Nunc, si depositum non inficiatur amicus,
Si reddat veterem cum tota aerugine follem,
Prodigiosa fides, et Tuscis digna libellis,
Quaeque coronata lustrari debeat agna:”
[“Now, if a friend does not deny his trust, but restores the old
purse with all its rust; ‘tis a prodigious faith, worthy to be
enrolled in amongst the Tuscan annals, and a crowned lamb should be
sacrificed to such exemplary integrity.”--Juvenal, Sat., xiii. 611.]
and never was time or place wherein princes might propose to themselves
more assured or greater rewards for virtue and justice. The first who
shall make it his business to get himself into favour and esteem by those
ways, I am much deceived if he do not and by the best title outstrip his
competitors: force and violence can do something, but not always all.
We see merchants, country justices, and artisans go cheek by jowl with
the best gentry in valour and military knowledge: they perform honourable
actions, both in public engagements and private quarrels; they fight
duels, they defend towns in our present wars; a prince stifles his
special recommendation, renown, in this crowd; let him shine bright in
humanity, truth, loyalty, temperance, and especially injustice; marks
rare, unknown, and exiled; ‘tis by no other means but by the sole
goodwill of the people that he can do his business; and no other
qualities can attract their goodwill like those, as being of the greatest
utility to them:
“Nil est tam populare, quam bonitas.”
[“Nothing is so popular as an agreeable manner (goodness).”
--Cicero, Pro Ligar., c. 12.]
By this standard I had been great and rare, just as I find myself now
pigmy and vulgar by the standard of some past ages, wherein, if no other
better qualities concurred, it was ordinary and common to see a man
moderate in his revenges, gentle in resenting injuries, religious of his
word, neither double nor supple, nor accommodating his faith to the will
of others, or the turns of the times: I would rather see all affairs go
to wreck and ruin than falsify my faith to secure them. For as to this
new virtue of feigning and dissimulation, which is now in so great
credit, I mortally hate it; and of all vices find none that evidences so
much baseness and meanness of spirit. ‘Tis a cowardly and servile humour
to hide and disguise a man’s self under a visor, and not to dare to show
himself what he is; ‘tis by this our servants are trained up to
treachery; being brought up to speak what is not true, they make no
conscience of a lie. A generous heart ought not to belie its own
thoughts; it will make itself seen within; all there is good, or at least
human. Aristotle reputes it the office of magnanimity openly and
professedly to love and hate; to judge and speak with all freedom; and
not to value the approbation or dislike of others in comparison of truth.
Apollonius said it was for slaves to lie, and for freemen to speak truth:
‘tis the chief and fundamental part of virtue; we must love it for
itself. He who speaks truth because he is obliged so to do, and because
it serves him, and who is not afraid to lie when it signifies nothing to
anybody, is not sufficiently true. My soul naturally abominates lying,
and hates the very thought of it. I have an inward shame and a sharp
remorse, if sometimes a lie escapes me: as sometimes it does, being
surprised by occasions that allow me no premeditation. A man must not
always tell all, for that were folly: but what a man says should be what
he thinks, otherwise ‘tis knavery. I do not know what advantage men
pretend to by eternally counterfeiting and dissembling, if not never to
be believed when they speak the truth; it may once or twice pass with
men; but to profess the concealing their thought, and to brag, as some of
our princes have done, that they would burn their shirts if they knew
their true intentions, which was a saying of the ancient Metellius of
Macedon; and that they who know not how to dissemble know not how to
rule, is to give warning to all who have anything to do with them, that
all they say is nothing but lying and deceit:
“Quo quis versutior et callidior est, hoc invisior et
suspectior, detracto opinione probitatis:”
[“By how much any one is more subtle and cunning, by so much is he
hated and suspected, the opinion of his integrity being withdrawn.”
--Cicero, De Off., ii. 9.]
it were a great simplicity in any one to lay any stress either on the
countenance or word of a man who has put on a resolution to be always
another thing without than he is within, as Tiberius did; and I cannot
conceive what part such persons can have in conversation with men, seeing
they produce nothing that is received as true: whoever is disloyal to
truth is the same to falsehood also.
Those of our time who have considered in the establishment of the duty of
a prince the good of his affairs only, and have preferred that to the
care of his faith and conscience, might have something to say to a prince
whose affairs fortune had put into such a posture that he might for ever
establish them by only once breaking his word: but it will not go so;
they often buy in the same market; they make more than one peace and
enter into more than one treaty in their lives. Gain tempts to the first
breach of faith, and almost always presents itself, as in all other ill
acts, sacrileges, murders, rebellions, treasons, as being undertaken for
some kind of advantage; but this first gain has infinite mischievous
consequences, throwing this prince out of all correspondence and
negotiation, by this example of infidelity. Soliman, of the Ottoman
race, a race not very solicitous of keeping their words or compacts,
when, in my infancy, he made his army land at Otranto, being informed
that Mercurino de’ Gratinare and the inhabitants of Castro were detained
prisoners, after having surrendered the place, contrary to the articles
of their capitulation, sent orders to have them set at liberty, saying,
that having other great enterprises in hand in those parts, the
disloyalty, though it carried a show of present utility, would for the
future bring on him a disrepute and distrust of infinite prejudice.
Now, for my part, I had rather be troublesome and indiscreet than a
flatterer and a dissembler. I confess that there may be some mixture of
pride and obstinacy in keeping myself so upright and open as I do,
without any consideration of others; and methinks I am a little too free,
where I ought least to be so, and that I grow hot by the opposition of
respect; and it may be also, that I suffer myself to follow the
propension of my own nature for want of art; using the same liberty,
speech, and countenance towards great persons, that I bring with me from
my own house: I am sensible how much it declines towards incivility and
indiscretion but, besides that I am so bred, I have not a wit supple
enough to evade a sudden question, and to escape by some evasion, nor to
feign a truth, nor memory enough to retain it so feigned; nor, truly,
assurance enough to maintain it, and so play the brave out of weakness.
And therefore it is that I abandon myself to candour, always to speak as
I think, both by complexion and design, leaving the event to fortune.
Aristippus was wont to say, that the principal benefit he had extracted
from philosophy was that he spoke freely and openly to all.
Memory is a faculty of wonderful use, and without which the judgment can
very hardly perform its office: for my part I have none at all. What any
one will propound to me, he must do it piecemeal, for to answer a speech
consisting of several heads I am not able. I could not receive a
commission by word of mouth without a note-book. And when I have a
speech of consequence to make, if it be long, I am reduced to the
miserable necessity of getting by heart word for word, what I am to say;
I should otherwise have neither method nor assurance, being in fear that
my memory would play me a slippery trick. But this way is no less
difficult to me than the other; I must have three hours to learn three
verses. And besides, in a work of a man’s own, the liberty and authority
of altering the order, of changing a word, incessantly varying the
matter, makes it harder to stick in the memory of the author. The more
I mistrust it the worse it is; it serves me best by chance; I must
solicit it negligently; for if I press it, ‘tis confused, and after it
once begins to stagger, the more I sound it, the more it is perplexed;
it serves me at its own hour, not at mine.
And the same defect I find in my memory, I find also in several other
parts. I fly command, obligation, and constraint; that which I can
otherwise naturally and easily do, if I impose it upon myself by an
express and strict injunction, I cannot do it. Even the members of my
body, which have a more particular jurisdiction of their own, sometimes
refuse to obey me, if I enjoin them a necessary service at a certain
hour. This tyrannical and compulsive appointment baffles them; they
shrink up either through fear or spite, and fall into a trance. Being
once in a place where it is looked upon as barbarous discourtesy not to
pledge those who drink to you, though I had there all liberty allowed me,
I tried to play the good fellow, out of respect to the ladies who were
there, according to the custom of the country; but there was sport enough
for this pressure and preparation, to force myself contrary to my custom
and inclination, so stopped my throat that I could not swallow one drop,
and was deprived of drinking so much as with my meat; I found myself
gorged, and my, thirst quenched by the quantity of drink that my
imagination had swallowed. This effect is most manifest in such as have
the most vehement and powerful imagination: but it is natural,
notwithstanding, and there is no one who does not in some measure feel
it. They offered an excellent archer, condemned to die, to save his
life, if he would show some notable proof of his art, but he refused to
try, fearing lest the too great contention of his will should make him
shoot wide, and that instead of saving his life, he should also lose the
reputation he had got of being a good marksman. A man who thinks of
something else, will not fail to take over and over again the same number
and measure of steps, even to an inch, in the place where he walks; but
if he made it his business to measure and count them, he will find that
what he did by nature and accident, he cannot so exactly do by design.
My library, which is a fine one among those of the village type, is
situated in a corner of my house; if anything comes into my head that I
have a mind to search or to write, lest I should forget it in but going
across the court, I am fain to commit it to the memory of some other.
If I venture in speaking to digress never so little from my subject, I am
infallibly lost, which is the reason that I keep myself, in discourse,
strictly close. I am forced to call the men who serve me either by the
names of their offices or their country; for names are very hard for me
to remember. I can tell indeed that there are three syllables, that it
has a harsh sound, and that it begins or ends with such a letter; but
that’s all; and if I should live long, I do not doubt but I should forget
my own name, as some others have done. Messala Corvinus was two years
without any trace of memory, which is also said of Georgius Trapezuntius.
For my own interest, I often meditate what a kind of life theirs was, and
if, without this faculty, I should have enough left to support me with
any manner of ease; and prying narrowly into it, I fear that this
privation, if absolute, destroys all the other functions of the soul:
“Plenus rimarum sum, hac atque iliac perfluo.”
[“I’m full of chinks, and leak out every way.”
--Ter., Eunuchus, ii. 2, 23.]
It has befallen me more than once to forget the watchword I had three
hours before given or received, and to forget where I had hidden my
purse; whatever Cicero is pleased to say, I help myself to lose what I
have a particular care to lock safe up:
“Memoria certe non modo Philosophiam sed omnis
vitae usum, omnesque artes, una maxime continet.”
[“It is certain that memory contains not only philosophy,
but all the arts and all that appertain to the use of life.”
--Cicero, Acad., ii. 7.]
Memory is the receptacle and case of science: and therefore mine being so
treacherous, if I know little, I cannot much complain. I know, in
general, the names of the arts, and of what they treat, but nothing more.
I turn over books; I do not study them. What I retain I no longer
recognise as another’s; ‘tis only what my judgment has made its advantage
of, the discourses and imaginations in which it has been instructed: the
author, place, words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget; and
I am so excellent at forgetting, that I no less forget my own writings
and compositions than the rest. I am very often quoted to myself, and am
not aware of it. Whoever should inquire of me where I had the verses and
examples, that I have here huddled together, would puzzle me to tell him,
and yet I have not borrowed them but from famous and known authors, not
contenting myself that they were rich, if I, moreover, had them not from
rich and honourable hands, where there is a concurrence of authority with
reason. It is no great wonder if my book run the same fortune that other
books do, if my memory lose what I have written as well as what I have
read, and what I give, as well as what I receive.
Besides the defect of memory, I have others which very much contribute to
my ignorance; I have a slow and heavy wit, the least cloud stops its
progress, so that, for example, I never propose to it any never so easy a
riddle that it could find out; there is not the least idle subtlety that
will not gravel me; in games, where wit is required, as chess, draughts,
and the like, I understand no more than the common movements. I have a
slow and perplexed apprehension, but what it once apprehends, it
apprehends well, for the time it retains it. My sight is perfect,
entire, and discovers at a very great distance, but is soon weary and
heavy at work, which occasions that I cannot read long, but am forced to
have one to read to me. The younger Pliny can inform such as have not
experimented it themselves, how important an impediment this is to those
who devote themselves to this employment.
There is no so wretched and coarse a soul, wherein some particular
faculty is not seen to shine; no soul so buried in sloth and ignorance,
but it will sally at one end or another; and how it comes to pass that a
man blind and asleep to everything else, shall be found sprightly, clear,
and excellent in some one particular effect, we are to inquire of our
masters: but the beautiful souls are they that are universal, open, and
ready for all things; if not instructed, at least capable of being so;
which I say to accuse my own; for whether it be through infirmity or
negligence (and to neglect that which lies at our feet, which we have in
our hands, and what nearest concerns the use of life, is far from my
doctrine) there is not a soul in the world so awkward as mine, and so
ignorant of many common things, and such as a man cannot without shame
fail to know. I must give some examples.
I was born and bred up in the country, and amongst husbandmen; I have had
business and husbandry in my own hands ever since my predecessors, who
were lords of the estate I now enjoy, left me to succeed them; and yet I
can neither cast accounts, nor reckon my counters: most of our current
money I do not know, nor the difference betwixt one grain and another,
either growing or in the barn, if it be not too apparent, and scarcely
can distinguish between the cabbage and lettuce in my garden. I do not
so much as understand the names of the chief instruments of husbandry,
nor the most ordinary elements of agriculture, which the very children
know: much less the mechanic arts, traffic, merchandise, the variety and
nature of fruits, wines, and viands, nor how to make a hawk fly, nor to
physic a horse or a dog. And, since I must publish my whole shame, ‘tis
not above a month ago, that I was trapped in my ignorance of the use of
leaven to make bread, or to what end it was to keep wine in the vat.
They conjectured of old at Athens, an aptitude for the mathematics in
him they saw ingeniously bavin up a burthen of brushwood. In earnest,
they would draw a quite contrary conclusion from me, for give me the
whole provision and necessaries of a kitchen, I should starve. By these
features of my confession men may imagine others to my prejudice: but
whatever I deliver myself to be, provided it be such as I really am,
I have my end; neither will I make any excuse for committing to paper
such mean and frivolous things as these: the meanness of the subject
compells me to it. They may, if they please, accuse my project, but not
my progress: so it is, that without anybody’s needing to tell me, I
sufficiently see of how little weight and value all this is, and the
folly of my design: ‘tis enough that my judgment does not contradict
itself, of which these are the essays.
“Nasutus sis usque licet, sis denique nasus,
Quantum noluerit ferre rogatus Atlas;
Et possis ipsum to deridere Latinum,
Non potes in nugas dicere plura mess,
Ipse ego quam dixi: quid dentem dente juvabit
Rodere? carne opus est, si satur esse velis.
Ne perdas operam; qui se mirantur, in illos
Virus habe; nos haec novimus esse nihil.”
[“Let your nose be as keen as it will, be all nose, and even a nose
so great that Atlas will refuse to bear it: if asked, Could you even
excel Latinus in scoffing; against my trifles you could say no more
than I myself have said: then to what end contend tooth against
tooth? You must have flesh, if you want to be full; lose not your
labour then; cast your venom upon those that admire themselves; I
know already that these things are worthless.”--Mart., xiii. 2.]
I am not obliged not to utter absurdities, provided I am not deceived in
them and know them to be such: and to trip knowingly, is so ordinary with
me, that I seldom do it otherwise, and rarely trip by chance. ‘Tis no
great matter to add ridiculous actions to the temerity of my humour,
since I cannot ordinarily help supplying it with those that are vicious.
I was present one day at Barleduc, when King Francis II., for a memorial
of Rene, king of Sicily, was presented with a portrait he had drawn of
himself: why is it not in like manner lawful for every one to draw
himself with a pen, as he did with a crayon? I will not, therefore, omit
this blemish though very unfit to be published, which is irresolution; a
very great effect and very incommodious in the negotiations of the
affairs of the world; in doubtful enterprises, I know not which to
choose:
“Ne si, ne no, nel cor mi suona intero.”
[“My heart does not tell me either yes or no.”--Petrarch.]
I can maintain an opinion, but I cannot choose one. By reason that in
human things, to what sect soever we incline, many appearances present
themselves that confirm us in it; and the philosopher Chrysippus said,
that he would of Zeno and Cleanthes, his masters, learn their doctrines
only; for, as to proofs and reasons, he should find enough of his own.
Which way soever I turn, I still furnish myself with causes, and
likelihood enough to fix me there; which makes me detain doubt and the
liberty of choosing, till occasion presses; and then, to confess the
truth, I, for the most part, throw the feather into the wind, as the
saying is, and commit myself to the mercy of fortune; a very light
inclination and circumstance carries me along with it.
“Dum in dubio est animus, paulo momento huc atque
Illuc impellitur.”
[“While the mind is in doubt, in a short time it is impelled this
way and that.”--Terence, Andr., i. 6, 32.]
The uncertainty of my judgment is so equally balanced in most
occurrences, that I could willingly refer it to be decided by the chance
of a die: and I observe, with great consideration of our human infirmity,
the examples that the divine history itself has left us of this custom of
referring to fortune and chance the determination of election in doubtful
things:
“Sors cecidit super Matthiam.”
[“The lot fell upon Matthew.”--Acts i. 26.]
Human reason is a two-edged and dangerous sword: observe in the hands of
Socrates, her most intimate and familiar friend, how many several points
it has. I am thus good for nothing but to follow and suffer myself to be
easily carried away with the crowd; I have not confidence enough in my
own strength to take upon me to command and lead; I am very glad to find
the way beaten before me by others. If I must run the hazard of an
uncertain choice, I am rather willing to have it under such a one as is
more confident in his opinions than I am in mine, whose ground and
foundation I find to be very slippery and unsure.
Yet I do not easily change, by reason that I discern the same weakness in
contrary opinions:
“Ipsa consuetudo assentiendi periculosa
esse videtur, et lubrica;”
[“The very custom of assenting seems to be dangerous
and slippery.”--Cicero, Acad., ii. 21.]
especially in political affairs, there is a large field open for changes
and contestation:
“Justa pari premitur veluti cum pondere libra,
Prona, nec hac plus pane sedet, nec surgit ab illa.”
[“As a just balance, pressed with equal weight, neither dips
nor rises on either side.”--Tibullus, iv. 41.]
Machiavelli’s writings, for example, were solid enough for the subject,
yet were they easy enough to be controverted; and they who have done so,
have left as great a facility of controverting theirs; there was never
wanting in that kind of argument replies and replies upon replies, and as
infinite a contexture of debates as our wrangling lawyers have extended
in favour of long suits:
“Caedimur et totidem plagis consumimus hostem;”
[“We are slain, and with as many blows kill the enemy” (or),
“It is a fight wherein we exhaust each other by mutual wounds.”
--Horace, Epist., ii. 2, 97.]
the reasons have little other foundation than experience, and the variety
of human events presenting us with infinite examples of all sorts of
forms. An understanding person of our times says: That whoever would, in
contradiction to our almanacs, write cold where they say hot, and wet
where they say dry, and always put the contrary to what they foretell; if
he were to lay a wager, he would not care which side he took, excepting
where no uncertainty could fall out, as to promise excessive heats at
Christmas, or extremity of cold at Midsummer. I have the same opinion of
these political controversies; be on which side you will, you have as
fair a game to play as your adversary, provided you do not proceed so far
as to shock principles that are broad and manifest. And yet, in my
conceit, in public affairs, there is no government so ill, provided it be
ancient and has been constant, that is not better than change and
alteration.
Our manners are infinitely corrupt, and wonderfully incline to the worse;
of our laws and customs there are many that are barbarous and monstrous
nevertheless, by reason of the difficulty of reformation, and the danger
of stirring things, if I could put something under to stop the wheel, and
keep it where it is, I would do it with all my heart:
“Numquam adeo foedis, adeoque pudendis
Utimur exemplis, ut non pejora supersint.”
[“The examples we use are not so shameful and foul
but that worse remain behind.”--Juvenal, viii. 183.]
The worst thing I find in our state is instability, and that our laws,
no more than our clothes, cannot settle in any certain form. It is very
easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are
full of it: it is very easy to beget in a people a contempt of ancient
observances; never any man undertook it but he did it; but to establish a
better regimen in the stead of that which a man has overthrown, many who
have attempted it have foundered. I very little consult my prudence in
my conduct; I am willing to let it be guided by the public rule. Happy
the people who do what they are commanded, better than they who command,
without tormenting themselves as to the causes; who suffer themselves
gently to roll after the celestial revolution! Obedience is never pure
nor calm in him who reasons and disputes.
In fine, to return to myself: the only thing by which I something esteem
myself, is that wherein never any man thought himself to be defective; my
recommendation is vulgar, common, and popular; for who ever thought he
wanted sense? It would be a proposition that would imply a contradiction
in itself; ‘tis a disease that never is where it is discerned; ‘tis
tenacious and strong, but what the first ray of the patient’s sight
nevertheless pierces through and disperses, as the beams of the sun do
thick and obscure mists; to accuse one’s self would be to excuse in this
case, and to condemn, to absolve. There never was porter or the silliest
girl, that did not think they had sense enough to do their business.
We easily enough confess in others an advantage of courage, strength,
experience, activity, and beauty, but an advantage in judgment we yield
to none; and the reasons that proceed simply from the natural conclusions
of others, we think, if we had but turned our thoughts that way, we
should ourselves have found out as well as they. Knowledge, style, and
such parts as we see in others’ works, we are soon aware of, if they
excel our own: but for the simple products of the understanding, every
one thinks he could have found out the like in himself, and is hardly
sensible of the weight and difficulty, if not (and then with much ado) in
an extreme and incomparable distance. And whoever should be able clearly
to discern the height of another’s judgment, would be also able to raise
his own to the same pitch. So that it is a sort of exercise, from which
a man is to expect very little praise; a kind of composition of small
repute. And, besides, for whom do you write? The learned, to whom the
authority appertains of judging books, know no other value but that of
learning, and allow of no other proceeding of wit but that of erudition
and art: if you have mistaken one of the Scipios for another, what is all
the rest you have to say worth? Whoever is ignorant of Aristotle,
according to their rule, is in some sort ignorant of himself; vulgar
souls cannot discern the grace and force of a lofty and delicate style.
Now these two sorts of men take up the world. The third sort into whose
hands you fall, of souls that are regular and strong of themselves, is so
rare, that it justly has neither name nor place amongst us; and ‘tis so
much time lost to aspire unto it, or to endeavour to please it.
‘Tis commonly said that the justest portion Nature has given us of her
favours is that of sense; for there is no one who is not contented with
his share: is it not reason? whoever should see beyond that, would see
beyond his sight. I think my opinions are good and sound, but who does
not think the same of his own? One of the best proofs I have that mine
are so is the small esteem I have of myself; for had they not been very
well assured, they would easily have suffered themselves to have been
deceived by the peculiar affection I have to myself, as one that places
it almost wholly in myself, and do not let much run out. All that others
distribute amongst an infinite number of friends and acquaintance, to
their glory and grandeur, I dedicate to the repose of my own mind and to
myself; that which escapes thence is not properly by my direction:
“Mihi nempe valere et vivere doctus.”
[“To live and to do well for myself.”
--Lucretius, v. 959.]
Now I find my opinions very bold and constant in condemning my own
imperfection. And, to say the truth, ‘tis a subject upon which I
exercise my judgment as much as upon any other. The world looks always
opposite; I turn my sight inwards, and there fix and employ it. I have
no other business but myself, I am eternally meditating upon myself,
considering and tasting myself. Other men’s thoughts are ever wandering
abroad, if they will but see it; they are still going forward:
“Nemo in sese tentat descendere;”
[“No one thinks of descending into himself.”
--Persius, iv. 23.]
for my part, I circulate in myself. This capacity of trying the truth,
whatever it be, in myself, and this free humour of not over easily
subjecting my belief, I owe principally to myself; for the strongest and
most general imaginations I have are those that, as a man may say, were
born with me; they are natural and entirely my own. I produced them
crude and simple, with a strong and bold production, but a little
troubled and imperfect; I have since established and fortified them with
the authority of others and the sound examples of the ancients, whom I
have found of the same judgment: they have given me faster hold, and a
more manifest fruition and possession of that I had before embraced. The
reputation that every one pretends to of vivacity and promptness of wit,
I seek in regularity; the glory they pretend to from a striking and
signal action, or some particular excellence, I claim from order,
correspondence, and tranquillity of opinions and manners:
“Omnino si quidquam est decorum, nihil est profecto magis, quam
aequabilitas universae vitae, tum singularum actionum, quam
conservare non possis, si, aliorum naturam imitans, omittas tuam.”
[“If anything be entirely decorous, nothing certainly can be more so
than an equability alike in the whole life and in every particular
action; which thou canst not possibly observe if, imitating other
men’s natures, thou layest aside thy own.”--Cicero, De Of., i. 31.]
Here, then, you see to what degree I find myself guilty of this first
part, that I said was the vice of presumption. As to the second, which
consists in not having a sufficient esteem for others, I know not whether
or no I can so well excuse myself; but whatever comes on’t I am resolved
to speak the truth. And whether, peradventure, it be that the continual
frequentation I have had with the humours of the ancients, and the idea
of those great souls of past ages, put me out of taste both with others
and myself, or that, in truth, the age we live in produces but very
indifferent things, yet so it is that I see nothing worthy of any great
admiration. Neither, indeed, have I so great an intimacy with many men
as is requisite to make a right judgment of them; and those with whom my
condition makes me the most frequent, are, for the most part, men who
have little care of the culture of the soul, but that look upon honour as
the sum of all blessings, and valour as the height of all perfection.
What I see that is fine in others I very readily commend and esteem: nay,
I often say more in their commendation than I think they really deserve,
and give myself so far leave to lie, for I cannot invent a false subject:
my testimony is never wanting to my friends in what I conceive deserves
praise, and where a foot is due I am willing to give them a foot and a
half; but to attribute to them qualities that they have not, I cannot do
it, nor openly defend their imperfections. Nay, I frankly give my very
enemies their due testimony of honour; my affection alters, my judgment
does not, and I never confound my animosity with other circumstances that
are foreign to it; and I am so jealous of the liberty of my judgment that
I can very hardly part with it for any passion whatever. I do myself a
greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie. This
commendable and generous custom is observed of the Persian nation, that
they spoke of their mortal enemies and with whom they were at deadly war,
as honourably and justly as their virtues deserved.
I know men enough that have several fine parts; one wit, another courage,
another address, another conscience, another language: one science,
another, another; but a generally great man, and who has all these brave
parts together, or any one of them to such a degree of excellence that we
should admire him or compare him with those we honour of times past, my
fortune never brought me acquainted with; and the greatest I ever knew, I
mean for the natural parts of the soul, was Etienne De la Boetie; his was
a full soul indeed, and that had every way a beautiful aspect: a soul of
the old stamp, and that had produced great effects had his fortune been
so pleased, having added much to those great natural parts by learning
and study.
But how it comes to pass I know not, and yet it is certainly so, there is
as much vanity and weakness of judgment in those who profess the greatest
abilities, who take upon them learned callings and bookish employments as
in any other sort of men whatever; either because more is required and
expected from them, and that common defects are excusable in them, or
because the opinion they have of their own learning makes them more bold
to expose and lay themselves too open, by which they lose and betray
themselves. As an artificer more manifests his want of skill in a rich
matter he has in hand, if he disgrace the work by ill handling and
contrary to the rules required, than in a matter of less value; and men
are more displeased at a disproportion in a statue of gold than in one of
plaster; so do these when they advance things that in themselves and in
their place would be good; for they make use of them without discretion,
honouring their memories at the expense of their understandings, and
making themselves ridiculous by honouring Cicero, Galen, Ulpian, and St.
Jerome alike.
I willingly fall again into the discourse of the vanity of our education,
the end of which is not to render us good and wise, but learned, and she
has obtained it. She has not taught us to follow and embrace virtue and
prudence, but she has imprinted in us their derivation and etymology; we
know how to decline Virtue, if we know not how to love it; if we do not
know what prudence is really and in effect, and by experience, we have it
however by jargon and heart: we are not content to know the extraction,
kindred, and alliances of our neighbours; we desire, moreover, to have
them our friends and to establish a correspondence and intelligence with
them; but this education of ours has taught us definitions, divisions,
and partitions of virtue, as so many surnames and branches of a
genealogy, without any further care of establishing any familiarity or
intimacy betwixt her and us. It has culled out for our initiatory
instruction not such books as contain the soundest and truest opinions,
but those that speak the best Greek and Latin, and by their fine words
has instilled into our fancy the vainest humours of antiquity.
A good education alters the judgment and manners; as it happened to
Polemon, a lewd and debauched young Greek, who going by chance to hear
one of Xenocrates’ lectures, did not only observe the eloquence and
learning of the reader, and not only brought away, the knowledge of some
fine matter, but a more manifest and more solid profit, which was the
sudden change and reformation of his former life. Whoever found such an
effect of our discipline?
“Faciasne, quod olim
Mutatus Polemon? ponas insignia morbi
Fasciolas, cubital, focalia; potus ut ille
Dicitur ex collo furtim carpsisse coronas,
Postquam est impransi correptus voce magistri?”
[“Will you do what reformed Polemon did of old? will you lay aside
the joys of your disease, your garters, capuchin, muffler, as he in
his cups is said to have secretly torn off his garlands from his
neck when he heard what that temperate teacher said?”
--Horace, Sat., ii. 3, 253]
That seems to me to be the least contemptible condition of men, which by
its plainness and simplicity is seated in the lowest degree, and invites
us to a more regular course. I find the rude manners and language of
country people commonly better suited to the rule and prescription of
true philosophy, than those of our philosophers themselves:
“Plus sapit vulgus, quia tantum, quantum opus est, sapit.”
[“The vulgar are so much the wiser, because they only know what
is needful for them to know.”--Lactantms, Instit. Div., iii. 5.]
The most remarkable men, as I have judged by outward appearance (for to
judge of them according to my own method, I must penetrate a great deal
deeper), for soldiers and military conduct, were the Duc de Guise, who
died at Orleans, and the late Marshal Strozzi; and for men of great
ability and no common virtue, Olivier and De l’Hospital, Chancellors of
France. Poetry, too, in my opinion, has flourished in this age of ours;
we have abundance of very good artificers in the trade: D’Aurat, Beza,
Buchanan, L’Hospital, Montdore, Turnebus; as to the French poets, I
believe they raised their art to the highest pitch to which it can ever
arrive; and in those parts of it wherein Ronsard and Du Bellay excel, I
find them little inferior to the ancient perfection. Adrian Turnebus
knew more, and what he did know, better than any man of his time, or long
before him. The lives of the last Duke of Alva, and of our Constable de
Montmorency, were both of them great and noble, and that had many rare
resemblances of fortune; but the beauty and glory of the death of the
last, in the sight of Paris and of his king, in their service, against
his nearest relations, at the head of an army through his conduct
victorious, and by a sudden stroke, in so extreme old age, merits
methinks to be recorded amongst the most remarkable events of our times.
As also the constant goodness, sweetness of manners, and conscientious
facility of Monsieur de la Noue, in so great an injustice of armed
parties (the true school of treason, inhumanity, and robbery), wherein he
always kept up the reputation of a great and experienced captain.
I have taken a delight to publish in several places the hopes I have of
Marie de Gournay le Jars,
[She was adopted by him in 1588. See Leon Feugere’s Mademoiselle
de Gournay: ‘Etude sur sa Vie et ses Ouvrages’.]
my adopted daughter; and certainly beloved by me more than paternally,
and enveloped in my retirement and solitude as one of the best parts of
my own being: I have no longer regard to anything in this world but her.
And if a man may presage from her youth, her soul will one day be capable
of very great things; and amongst others, of the perfection of that
sacred friendship, to which we do not read that any of her sex could ever
yet arrive; the sincerity and solidity of her manners are already
sufficient for it, and her affection towards me more than superabundant,
and such, in short, as that there is nothing more to be wished, if not
that the apprehension she has of my end, being now five-and-fifty years
old, might not so much afflict her. The judgment she made of my first
Essays, being a woman, so young, and in this age, and alone in her own
country; and the famous vehemence wherewith she loved me, and desired my
acquaintance solely from the esteem she had thence of me, before she ever
saw my face, is an incident very worthy of consideration.
Other virtues have had little or no credit in this age; but valour is
become popular by our civil wars; and in this, we have souls brave even
to perfection, and in so great number that the choice is impossible to
make.
This is all of extraordinary and uncommon grandeur that has hitherto
arrived at my knowledge.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A generous heart ought not to belie its own thoughts
A man may play the fool in everything else, but not in poetry
Against my trifles you could say no more than I myself have said
Agitated betwixt hope and fear
All defence shows a face of war
Almanacs
An advantage in judgment we yield to none
Any old government better than change and alteration
Anything becomes foul when commended by the multitude
Appetite runs after that it has not
Armed parties (the true school of treason, inhumanity, robbery)
Authority to be dissected by the vain fancies of men
Authority which a graceful presence and a majestic mien beget
Be on which side you will, you have as fair a game to play
Beauty of stature is the only beauty of men
Believing Heaven concerned at our ordinary actions
Better at speaking than writing. Motion and action animate word
Caesar’s choice of death: “the shortest”
Ceremony forbids us to express by words things that are lawful
Content: more easily found in want than in abundance
Curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge
Defence allures attempt, and defiance provokes an enemy
Desire of riches is more sharpened by their use than by the need
Difficulty gives all things their estimation
Doubt whether those (old writings) we have be not the worst
Doubtful ills plague us worst
Endeavouring to be brief, I become obscure
Engaged in the avenues of old age, being already past forty
Every government has a god at the head of it
Executions rather whet than dull the edge of vices
Fear of the fall more fevers me than the fall itself
Folly to hazard that upon the uncertainty of augmenting it.
For who ever thought he wanted sense?
Fortune rules in all things
Gentleman would play the fool to make a show of defence
Happen to do anything commendable, I attribute it to fortune
Having too good an opinion of our own worth
He should discern in himself, as well as in others
He who is only a good man that men may know it
How many worthy men have we known to survive their reputation
Humble out of pride
I am very glad to find the way beaten before me by others
I find myself here fettered by the laws of ceremony
I have no mind to die, but I have no objection to be dead
I have not a wit supple enough to evade a sudden question
I have nothing of my own that satisfies my judgment
I would be rich of myself, and not by borrowing
Ill luck is good for something
Imitating other men’s natures, thou layest aside thy own
Immoderate either seeking or evading glory or reputation
Impunity pass with us for justice
It is not for outward show that the soul is to play its part
Knowledge of others, wherein the honour consists
Lessen the just value of things that I possess
License of judgments is a great disturbance to great affairs
Lose what I have a particular care to lock safe up
Loses more by defending his vineyard than if he gave it up.
More brave men been lost in occasions of little moment
More solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak
My affection alters, my judgment does not
No way found to tranquillity that is good in common
Not being able to govern events, I govern myself
Not conceiving things otherwise than by this outward bark
Not for any profit, but for the honour of honesty itself
Nothing is more confident than a bad poet
Nothing that so poisons as flattery
Obedience is never pure nor calm in him who reasons and disputes
Occasions of the least lustre are ever the most dangerous
Of the fleeting years each steals something from me
Office of magnanimity openly and professedly to love and hate
Old age: applaud the past and condemn the present
One may be humble out of pride
Our will is more obstinate by being opposed
Overvalue things, because they are foreign, absent
Philopoemen: paying the penalty of my ugliness.
Pleasing all: a mark that can never be aimed at or hit
Poets
Possession begets a contempt of what it holds and rules
Prolong his life also prolonged and augmented his pain
Regret so honourable a post, where necessity must make them bold
Sense: no one who is not contented with his share
Setting too great a value upon ourselves
Setting too little a value upon others
She who only refuses, because ‘tis forbidden, consents
Short of the foremost, but before the last
Souls that are regular and strong of themselves are rare
Suicide: a morsel that is to be swallowed without chewing
Take all things at the worst, and to resolve to bear that worst
The age we live in produces but very indifferent things
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it
The satiety of living, inclines a man to desire to die
There is no reason that has not its contrary
They do not see my heart, they see but my countenance
Those who can please and hug themselves in what they do
Tis far beyond not fearing death to taste and relish it
To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to’t
Voice and determination of the rabble, the mother of ignorance
Vulgar reports and opinions that drive us on
We believe we do not believe
We consider our death as a very great thing
We have not the thousandth part of ancient writings
We have taught the ladies to blush
We set too much value upon ourselves
Were more ambitious of a great reputation than of a good one
What a man says should be what he thinks
What he did by nature and accident, he cannot do by design
What is more accidental than reputation?
What, shall so much knowledge be lost
Wiser who only know what is needful for them to know
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 12.
XVIII. Of giving the lie.
XIX. Of liberty of conscience.
XX. That we taste nothing pure.
XXI. Against idleness.
XXII. Of Posting.
XXIII. Of ill means employed to a good end.
XXIV. Of the Roman grandeur.
XXV. Not to counterfeit being sick.
XXVI. Of thumbs.
XXVII. Cowardice the mother of cruelty.
XXVIII. All things have their season.
XXIX. Of virtue.
XXX. Of a monstrous child.
XXXI. Of anger.
CHAPTER XVIII
OF GIVING THE LIE
Well, but some one will say to me, this design of making a man’s self the
subject of his writing, were indeed excusable in rare and famous men, who
by their reputation had given others a curiosity to be fully informed of
them. It is most true, I confess and know very well, that a mechanic
will scarce lift his eyes from his work to look at an ordinary man,
whereas a man will forsake his business and his shop to stare at an
eminent person when he comes into a town. It misbecomes any other to
give his own character, but him who has qualities worthy of imitation,
and whose life and opinions may serve for example: Caesar and Xenophon
had a just and solid foundation whereon to found their narrations, the
greatness of their own performances; and were to be wished that we had
the journals of Alexander the Great, the commentaries that Augustus,
Cato, Sylla, Brutus, and others left of their actions; of such persons
men love and contemplate the very statues even in copper and marble.
This remonstrance is very true; but it very little concerns me:
“Non recito cuiquam, nisi amicis, idque coactus;
Non ubivis, coramve quibuslibet, in medio qui
Scripta foro recitant, sunt multi, quique lavantes.”
[“I repeat my poems only to my friends, and when bound to do so;
not before every one and everywhere; there are plenty of reciters
in the open market-place and at the baths.”--Horace, sat. i. 4, 73.]
I do not here form a statue to erect in the great square of a city, in a
church, or any public place:
“Non equidem hoc studeo, bullatis ut mihi nugis,
Pagina turgescat......
Secreti loquimur:”
[“I study not to make my pages swell with empty trifles;
you and I are talking in private.”--Persius, Sat., v. 19.]
‘tis for some corner of a library, or to entertain a neighbour,
a kinsman, a friend, who has a mind to renew his acquaintance and
familiarity with me in this image of myself. Others have been encouraged
to speak of themselves, because they found the subject worthy and rich;
I, on the contrary, am the bolder, by reason the subject is so poor and
sterile that I cannot be suspected of ostentation. I judge freely of the
actions of others; I give little of my own to judge of, because they are
nothing: I do not find so much good in myself, that I cannot tell it
without blushing.
What contentment would it not be to me to hear any one thus relate to me
the manners, faces, countenances, the ordinary words and fortunes of my
ancestors? how attentively should I listen to it! In earnest, it would
be evil nature to despise so much as the pictures of our friends and
predecessors, the fashion of their clothes and arms. I preserve their
writing, seal, and a particular sword they wore, and have not thrown the
long staves my father used to carry in his hand, out of my closet.
“Paterna vestis, et annulus, tanto charior est
posteris, quanto erga parentes major affectus.”
[“A father’s garment and ring is by so much dearer to his posterity,
as there is the greater affection towards parents.”
--St. Aug., De Civat. Dei, i. 13.]
If my posterity, nevertheless, shall be of another mind, I shall be
avenged on them; for they cannot care less for me than I shall then do
for them. All the traffic that I have in this with the public is, that I
borrow their utensils of writing, which are more easy and most at hand;
and in recompense shall, peradventure, keep a pound of butter in the
market from melting in the sun:--[Montaigne semi-seriously speculates on
the possibility of his MS. being used to wrap up butter.]
“Ne toga cordyllis, ne penula desit olivis;
Et laxas scombris saepe dabo tunicas;”
[“Let not wrappers be wanting to tunny-fish, nor olives;
and I shall supply loose coverings to mackerel.”
--Martial, xiii. I, I.]
And though nobody should read me, have I wasted time in entertaining
myself so many idle hours in so pleasing and useful thoughts? In
moulding this figure upon myself, I have been so often constrained to
temper and compose myself in a right posture, that the copy is truly
taken, and has in some sort formed itself; painting myself for others,
I represent myself in a better colouring than my own natural complexion.
I have no more made my book than my book has made me: ‘tis a book
consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my
life, and whose business is not designed for others, as that of all other
books is. In giving myself so continual and so exact an account of
myself, have I lost my time? For they who sometimes cursorily survey
themselves only, do not so strictly examine themselves, nor penetrate so
deep, as he who makes it his business, his study, and his employment, who
intends a lasting record, with all his fidelity, and with all his force:
The most delicious pleasures digested within, avoid leaving any trace of
themselves, and avoid the sight not only of the people, but of any other
person. How often has this work diverted me from troublesome thoughts?
and all that are frivolous should be reputed so. Nature has presented us
with a large faculty of entertaining ourselves alone; and often calls us
to it, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but chiefly
and mostly to ourselves. That I may habituate my fancy even to meditate
in some method and to some end, and to keep it from losing itself and
roving at random, ‘tis but to give to body and to record all the little
thoughts that present themselves to it. I give ear to my whimsies,
because I am to record them. It often falls out, that being displeased
at some action that civility and reason will not permit me openly to
reprove, I here disgorge myself, not without design of public
instruction: and also these poetical lashes,
“Zon zur l’oeil, ion sur le groin,
Zon zur le dos du Sagoin,”
[“A slap on his eye, a slap on his snout, a slap on Sagoin’s
back.”--Marot. Fripelippes, Valet de Marot a Sagoin.]
imprint themselves better upon paper than upon the flesh. What if I
listen to books a little more attentively than ordinary, since I watch if
I can purloin anything that may adorn or support my own? I have not at
all studied to make a book; but I have in some sort studied because I had
made it; if it be studying to scratch and pinch now one author, and then
another, either by the head or foot, not with any design to form opinions
from them, but to assist, second, and fortify those I already have
embraced. But whom shall we believe in the report he makes of himself in
so corrupt an age? considering there are so few, if, any at all, whom we
can believe when speaking of others, where there is less interest to lie.
The first thing done in the corruption of manners is banishing truth;
for, as Pindar says, to be true is the beginning of a great virtue, and
the first article that Plato requires in the governor of his Republic.
The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what every man
persuades another man to believe; as we generally give the name of money
not only to pieces of the dust alloy, but even to the false also, if they
will pass. Our nation has long been reproached with this vice; for
Salvianus of Marseilles, who lived in the time of the Emperor
Valentinian, says that lying and forswearing themselves is with the
French not a vice, but a way of speaking. He who would enhance this
testimony, might say that it is now a virtue in them; men form and
fashion themselves to it as to an exercise of honour; for dissimulation
is one of the most notable qualities of this age.
I have often considered whence this custom that we so religiously observe
should spring, of being more highly offended with the reproach of a vice
so familiar to us than with any other, and that it should be the highest
insult that can in words be done us to reproach us with a lie. Upon
examination, I find that it is natural most to defend the defects with
which we are most tainted. It seems as if by resenting and being moved
at the accusation, we in some sort acquit ourselves of the fault; though
we have it in effect, we condemn it in outward appearance. May it not
also be that this reproach seems to imply cowardice and feebleness of
heart? of which can there be a more manifest sign than to eat a man’s own
words--nay, to lie against a man’s own knowledge? Lying is a base vice;
a vice that one of the ancients portrays in the most odious colours when
he says, “that it is to manifest a contempt of God, and withal a fear of
men.” It is not possible more fully to represent the horror, baseness,
and irregularity of it; for what can a man imagine more hateful and
contemptible than to be a coward towards men, and valiant against his
Maker? Our intelligence being by no other way communicable to one
another but by a particular word, he who falsifies that betrays public
society. ‘Tis the only way by which we communicate our thoughts and
wills; ‘tis the interpreter of the soul, and if it deceive us, we no
longer know nor have further tie upon one another; if that deceive us, it
breaks all our correspondence, and dissolves all the ties of government.
Certain nations of the newly discovered Indies (I need not give them
names, seeing they are no more; for, by wonderful and unheardof example,
the desolation of that conquest has extended to the utter abolition of
names and the ancient knowledge of places) offered to their gods human
blood, but only such as was drawn from the tongue and ears, to expiate
for the sin of lying, as well heard as pronounced. That good fellow of
Greece--[Plutarch, Life of Lysander, c. 4.]--said that children are
amused with toys and men with words.
As to our diverse usages of giving the lie, and the laws of honour in
that case, and the alteration they have received, I defer saying what I
know of them to another time, and shall learn, if I can, in the
meanwhile, at what time the custom took beginning of so exactly weighing
and measuring words, and of making our honour interested in them; for it
is easy to judge that it was not anciently amongst the Romans and Greeks.
And it has often seemed to me strange to see them rail at and give one
another the lie without any quarrel. Their laws of duty steered some
other course than ours. Caesar is sometimes called thief, and sometimes
drunkard, to his teeth. We see the liberty of invective they practised
upon one another, I mean the greatest chiefs of war of both nations,
where words are only revenged with words, and do not proceed any farther.
CHAPTER XIX
OF LIBERTY OF CONSCIENCE
‘Tis usual to see good intentions, if carried on without moderation, push
men on to very vicious effects. In this dispute which has at this time
engaged France in a civil war, the better and the soundest cause no doubt
is that which maintains the ancient religion and government of the
kingdom. Nevertheless, amongst the good men of that party (for I do not
speak of those who only make a pretence of it, either to execute their
own particular revenges or to gratify their avarice, or to conciliate the
favour of princes, but of those who engage in the quarrel out of true
zeal to religion and a holy desire to maintain the peace and government
of their country), of these, I say, we see many whom passion transports
beyond the bounds of reason, and sometimes inspires with counsels that
are unjust and violent, and, moreover, rash.
It is certain that in those first times, when our religion began to gain
authority with the laws, zeal armed many against all sorts of pagan
books, by which the learned suffered an exceeding great loss, a disorder
that I conceive to have done more prejudice to letters than all the
flames of the barbarians. Of this Cornelius Tacitus is a very good
testimony; for though the Emperor Tacitus, his kinsman, had, by express
order, furnished all the libraries in the world with it, nevertheless one
entire copy could not escape the curious examination of those who desired
to abolish it for only five or six idle clauses that were contrary to our
belief.
They had also the trick easily to lend undue praises to all the emperors
who made for us, and universally to condemn all the actions of those who
were adversaries, as is evidently manifest in the Emperor Julian,
surnamed the Apostate,
[The character of the Emperor Julian was censured, when Montaigne
was at Rome in 1581, by the Master of the Sacred Palace, who,
however, as Montaigne tells us in his journal (ii. 35), referred it
to his conscience to alter what he should think in bad taste. This
Montaigne did not do, and this chapter supplied Voltaire with the
greater part of the praises he bestowed upon the Emperor.--Leclerc.]
who was, in truth, a very great and rare man, a man in whose soul
philosophy was imprinted in the best characters, by which he professed to
govern all his actions; and, in truth, there is no sort of virtue of
which he has not left behind him very notable examples: in chastity (of
which the whole of his life gave manifest proof) we read the same of him
that was said of Alexander and Scipio, that being in the flower of his
age, for he was slain by the Parthians at one-and-thirty, of a great many
very beautiful captives, he would not so much as look upon one. As to
his justice, he took himself the pains to hear the parties, and although
he would out of curiosity inquire what religion they were of,
nevertheless, the antipathy he had to ours never gave any counterpoise to
the balance. He made himself several good laws, and repealed a great
part of the subsidies and taxes levied by his predecessors.
We have two good historians who were eyewitnesses of his actions: one of
whom, Marcellinus, in several places of his history sharply reproves an
edict of his whereby he interdicted all Christian rhetoricians and
grammarians to keep school or to teach, and says he could wish that act
of his had been buried in silence: it is probable that had he done any
more severe thing against us, he, so affectionate as he was to our party,
would not have passed it over in silence. He was indeed sharp against
us, but yet no cruel enemy; for our own people tell this story of him,
that one day, walking about the city of Chalcedon, Maris, bishop of the
place; was so bold as to tell him that he was impious, and an enemy to
Christ, at which, they say, he was no further moved than to reply,
“Go, poor wretch, and lament the loss of thy eyes,” to which the bishop
replied again, “I thank Jesus Christ for taking away my sight, that I may
not see thy impudent visage,” affecting in that, they say, a
philosophical patience. But this action of his bears no comparison to
the cruelty that he is said to have exercised against us. “He was,” says
Eutropius, my other witness, “an enemy to Christianity, but without
putting his hand to blood.” And, to return to his justice, there is
nothing in that whereof he can be accused, the severity excepted he
practised in the beginning of his reign against those who had followed
the party of Constantius, his predecessor. As to his sobriety, he lived
always a soldier-like life; and observed a diet and routine, like one
that prepared and inured himself to the austerities of war. His
vigilance was such, that he divided the night into three or four parts,
of which the least was dedicated to sleep; the rest was spent either in
visiting the state of his army and guards in person, or in study; for
amongst other rare qualities, he was very excellent in all sorts of
learning. ‘Tis said of Alexander the Great, that being in bed, for fear
lest sleep should divert him from his thoughts and studies, he had always
a basin set by his bedside, and held one of his hands out with a ball of
copper in it, to the end, that, beginning to fall asleep, and his fingers
leaving their hold, the ball by falling into the basin, might awake him.
But the other had his soul so bent upon what he had a mind to do, and so
little disturbed with fumes by reason of his singular abstinence, that he
had no need of any such invention. As to his military experience, he was
excellent in all the qualities of a great captain, as it was likely he
should, being almost all his life in a continual exercise of war, and
most of that time with us in France, against the Germans and Franks: we
hardly read of any man who ever saw more dangers, or who made more
frequent proofs of his personal valour.
His death has something in it parallel with that of Epaminondas, for he
was wounded with an arrow, and tried to pull it out, and had done so, but
that, being edged, it cut and disabled his hand. He incessantly called
out that they should carry him again into the heat of the battle, to
encourage his soldiers, who very bravely disputed the fight without him,
till night parted the armies. He stood obliged to his philosophy for the
singular contempt he had for his life and all human things. He had a
firm belief of the immortality of souls.
In matter of religion he was wrong throughout, and was surnamed the
Apostate for having relinquished ours: nevertheless, the opinion seems to
me more probable, that he had never thoroughly embraced it, but had
dissembled out of obedience to the laws, till he came to the empire.
He was in his own so superstitious, that he was laughed at for it by
those of his own time, of the same opinion, who jeeringly said, that had
he got the victory over the Parthians, he had destroyed the breed of oxen
in the world to supply his sacrifices. He was, moreover, besotted with
the art of divination, and gave authority to all sorts of predictions.
He said, amongst other things at his death, that he was obliged to the
gods, and thanked them, in that they would not cut him off by surprise,
having long before advertised him of the place and hour of his death, nor
by a mean and unmanly death, more becoming lazy and delicate people; nor
by a death that was languishing, long, and painful; and that they had
thought him worthy to die after that noble manner, in the progress of his
victories, in the flower of his glory. He had a vision like that of
Marcus Brutus, that first threatened him in Gaul, and afterward appeared
to him in Persia just before his death. These words that some make him
say when he felt himself wounded: “Thou hast overcome, Nazarene”; or as
others, “Content thyself, Nazarene”; would hardly have been omitted, had
they been believed, by my witnesses, who, being present in the army, have
set down to the least motions and words of his end; no more than certain
other miracles that are reported about it.
And to return to my subject, he long nourished, says Marcellinus,
paganism in his heart; but all his army being Christians, he durst not
own it. But in the end, seeing himself strong enough to dare to discover
himself, he caused the temples of the gods to be thrown open, and did his
uttermost to set on foot and to encourage idolatry. Which the better to
effect, having at Constantinople found the people disunited, and also the
prelates of the church divided amongst themselves, having convened them
all before him, he earnestly admonished them to calm those civil
dissensions, and that every one might freely, and without fear, follow
his own religion. Which he the more sedulously solicited, in hope that
this licence would augment the schisms and factions of their division,
and hinder the people from reuniting, and consequently fortifying
themselves against him by their unanimous intelligence and concord;
having experienced by the cruelty of some Christians, that there is no
beast in the world so much to be feared by man as man; these are very
nearly his words.
Wherein this is very worthy of consideration, that the Emperor Julian
made use of the same receipt of liberty of conscience to inflame the
civil dissensions that our kings do to extinguish them. So that a man
may say on one side, that to give the people the reins to entertain every
man his own opinion, is to scatter and sow division, and, as it were, to
lend a hand to augment it, there being no legal impediment or restraint
to stop or hinder their career; but, on the other side, a man may also
say, that to give the people the reins to entertain every man his own
opinion, is to mollify and appease them by facility and toleration, and
to dull the point which is whetted and made sharper by singularity,
novelty, and difficulty: and I think it is better for the honour of the
devotion of our kings, that not having been able to do what they would,
they have made a show of being willing to do what they could.
CHAPTER XX
THAT WE TASTE NOTHING PURE
The feebleness of our condition is such that things cannot, in their
natural simplicity and purity, fall into our use; the elements that we
enjoy are changed, and so ‘tis with metals; and gold must be debased with
some other matter to fit it for our service. Neither has virtue, so
simple as that which Aristo, Pyrrho, and also the Stoics, made the end of
life; nor the Cyrenaic and Aristippic pleasure, been without mixture
useful to it. Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one
exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience:
“Medio de fonte leporum,
Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis fioribus angat.”
[“From the very fountain of our pleasure, something rises that is
bitter, which even in flowers destroys.”--Lucretius, iv. 1130.]
Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it;
would you not say that it is dying of pain? Nay, when we frame the image
of it in its full excellence, we stuff it with sickly and painful
epithets and qualities, languor, softness, feebleness, faintness,
‘morbidezza’: a great testimony of their consanguinity and
consubstantiality. The most profound joy has more of severity than
gaiety, in it. The highest and fullest contentment offers more of the
grave than of the merry:
“Ipsa felicitas, se nisi temperat, premit.”
[“Even felicity, unless it moderate itself, oppresses?”
--Seneca, Ep. 74.]
Pleasure chews and grinds us; according to the old Greek verse, which
says that the gods sell us all the goods they give us; that is to say,
that they give us nothing pure and perfect, and that we do not purchase
but at the price of some evil.
Labour and pleasure, very unlike in nature, associate, nevertheless,
by I know not what natural conjunction. Socrates says, that some god
tried to mix in one mass and to confound pain and pleasure, but not being
able to do it; he bethought him at least to couple them by the tail.
Metrodorus said, that in sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure. I
know not whether or no he intended anything else by that saying; but for
my part, I am of opinion that there is design, consent, and complacency
in giving a man’s self up to melancholy. I say, that besides ambition,
which may also have a stroke in the business, there is some shadow of
delight and delicacy which smiles upon and flatters us even in the very
lap of melancholy. Are there not some constitutions that feed upon it?
“Est quaedam flere voluptas;”
[“‘Tis a certain kind of pleasure to weep.”
--Ovid, Trist., iv. 3, 27.]
and one Attalus in Seneca says, that the memory of our lost friends is as
grateful to us, as bitterness in wine, when too old, is to the palate:
“Minister vetuli, puer, Falerni
Inger’ mi calices amariores”--
[“Boy, when you pour out old Falernian wine, the bitterest put
into my bowl.”--Catullus, xxvii. I.]
and as apples that have a sweet tartness.
Nature discovers this confusion to us; painters hold that the same
motions and grimaces of the face that serve for weeping; serve for
laughter too; and indeed, before the one or the other be finished, do but
observe the painter’s manner of handling, and you will be in doubt to
which of the two the design tends; and the extreme of laughter does at
last bring tears:
“Nullum sine auctoramento malum est.”
[“No evil is without its compensation.”--Seneca, Ep., 69.]
When I imagine man abounding with all the conveniences that are to be
desired (let us put the case that all his members were always seized with
a pleasure like that of generation, in its most excessive height) I feel
him melting under the weight of his delight, and see him utterly unable
to support so pure, so continual, and so universal a pleasure. Indeed,
he is running away whilst he is there, and naturally makes haste to
escape, as from a place where he cannot stand firm, and where he is
afraid of sinking.
When I religiously confess myself to myself, I find that the best virtue
I have has in it some tincture of vice; and I am afraid that Plato, in
his purest virtue (I, who am as sincere and loyal a lover of virtue of
that stamp as any other whatever), if he had listened and laid his ear
close to himself and he did so no doubt--would have heard some jarring
note of human mixture, but faint and only perceptible to himself. Man is
wholly and throughout but patch and motley. Even the laws of justice
themselves cannot subsist without mixture of injustice; insomuch that
Plato says, they undertake to cut off the hydra’s head, who pretend to
clear the law of all inconveniences:
“Omne magnum exemplum habet aliquid ex iniquo,
quod contra singulos utilitate publics rependitur,”
[“Every great example has in it some mixture of injustice, which
recompenses the wrong done to particular men by the public utility.”
--Annals, xiv. 44.]
says Tacitus.
It is likewise true, that for the use of life and the service of public
commerce, there may be some excesses in the purity and perspicacity of
our minds; that penetrating light has in it too much of subtlety and
curiosity: we must a little stupefy and blunt them to render them more
obedient to example and practice, and a little veil and obscure them, the
better to proportion them to this dark and earthly life. And therefore
common and less speculative souls are found to be more proper for and
more successful in the management of affairs, and the elevated and
exquisite opinions of philosophy unfit for business. This sharp vivacity
of soul, and the supple and restless volubility attending it, disturb our
negotiations. We are to manage human enterprises more superficially and
roughly, and leave a great part to fortune; it is not necessary to
examine affairs with so much subtlety and so deep: a man loses himself in
the consideration of many contrary lustres, and so many various forms:
“Volutantibus res inter se pugnantes, obtorpuerunt.... animi.”
[“Whilst they considered of things so indifferent in themselves,
they were astonished, and knew not what to do.”--Livy, xxxii. 20.]
‘Tis what the ancients say of Simonides, that by reason his imagination
suggested to him, upon the question King Hiero had put to him--[What God
was.--Cicero, De Nat. Deor., i. 22.]--(to answer which he had had many
days for thought), several sharp and subtle considerations, whilst he
doubted which was the most likely, he totally despaired of the truth.
He who dives into and in his inquisition comprehends all circumstances
and consequences, hinders his election: a little engine well handled is
sufficient for executions, whether of less or greater weight. The best
managers are those who can worst give account how they are so; while the
greatest talkers, for the most part, do nothing to purpose; I know one of
this sort of men, and a most excellent discourser upon all sorts of good
husbandry, who has miserably let a hundred thousand livres yearly revenue
slip through his hands; I know another who talks, who better advises than
any man of his counsel, and there is not in the world a fairer show of
soul and understanding than he has; nevertheless, when he comes to the
test, his servants find him quite another thing; not to make any mention
of his misfortunes.
CHAPTER XXI
AGAINST IDLENESS
The Emperor Vespasian, being sick of the disease whereof he died, did not
for all that neglect to inquire after the state of the empire, and even
in bed continually despatched very many affairs of great consequence; for
which, being reproved by his physician, as a thing prejudicial to his
health, “An emperor,” said he, “must die standing.” A fine saying, in my
opinion, and worthy a great prince. The Emperor Adrian since made use of
the same words, and kings should be often put in mind of them, to make
them know that the great office conferred upon them of the command of so
many men, is not an employment of ease; and that there is nothing can so
justly disgust a subject, and make him unwilling to expose himself to
labour and danger for the service of his prince, than to see him, in the
meantime, devoted to his ease and frivolous amusement, and to be
solicitous of his preservation who so much neglects that of his people.
Whoever will take upon him to maintain that ‘tis better for a prince to
carry on his wars by others, than in his own person, fortune will furnish
him with examples enough of those whose lieutenants have brought great
enterprises to a happy issue, and of those also whose presence has done
more hurt than good: but no virtuous and valiant prince can with patience
endure so dishonourable councils. Under colour of saving his head, like
the statue of a saint, for the happiness of his kingdom, they degrade him
from and declare him incapable of his office, which is military
throughout: I know one--[Probably Henry IV.]--who had much rather be
beaten, than to sleep whilst another fights for him; and who never
without jealousy heard of any brave thing done even by his own officers
in his absence. And Soliman I. said, with very good reason, in my
opinion, that victories obtained without the master were never complete.
Much more would he have said that that master ought to blush for shame,
to pretend to any share in the honour, having contributed nothing to the
work, but his voice and thought; nor even so much as these, considering
that in such work as that, the direction and command that deserve honour
are only such as are given upon the spot, and in the heat of the
business. No pilot performs his office by standing still. The princes
of the Ottoman family, the chiefest in the world in military fortune,
have warmly embraced this opinion, and Bajazet II., with his son, who
swerved from it, spending their time in science and other retired
employments, gave great blows to their empire; and Amurath III., now
reigning, following their example, begins to find the same. Was it not
Edward III., King of England, who said this of our Charles V.: “There
never was king who so seldom put on his armour, and yet never king who
gave me so much to do.” He had reason to think it strange, as an effect
of chance more than of reason. And let those seek out some other to join
with them than me, who will reckon the Kings of Castile and Portugal
amongst the warlike and magnanimous conquerors, because at the distance
of twelve hundred leagues from their lazy abode, by the conduct of their
captains, they made themselves masters of both Indies; of which it has to
be known if they would have had even the courage to go and in person
enjoy them.
The Emperor Julian said yet further, that a philosopher and a brave man
ought not so much as to breathe; that is to say, not to allow any more to
bodily necessities than what we cannot refuse; keeping the soul and body
still intent and busy about honourable, great, and virtuous things. He
was ashamed if any one in public saw him spit, or sweat (which is said by
some, also, of the Lacedaemonian young men, and which Xenophon says of
the Persian), forasmuch as he conceived that exercise, continual labour,
and sobriety, ought to have dried up all those superfluities. What
Seneca says will not be unfit for this place; which is, that the ancient
Romans kept their youth always standing, and taught them nothing that
they were to learn sitting.
‘Tis a generous desire to wish to die usefully and like a man, but the
effect lies not so much in our resolution as in our good fortune; a
thousand have proposed to themselves in battle, either to overcome or to
die, who have failed both in the one and the other, wounds and
imprisonment crossing their design and compelling them to live against
their will. There are diseases that overthrow even our desires, and our
knowledge. Fortune ought not to second the vanity of the Roman legions,
who bound themselves by oath, either to overcome or die:
“Victor, Marce Fabi, revertar ex acie: si fallo, Jovem patrem,
Gradivumque Martem aliosque iratos invoco deos.”
[“I will return, Marcus Fabius, a conqueror, from the fight:
and if I fail, I invoke Father Jove, Mars Gradivus, and the
other angry gods.”--Livy, ii. 45.]
The Portuguese say that in a certain place of their conquest of the
Indies, they met with soldiers who had condemned themselves, with
horrible execrations, to enter into no other composition but either to
cause themselves to be slain, or to remain victorious; and had their
heads and beards shaved in token of this vow. ‘Tis to much purpose for
us to hazard ourselves and to be obstinate: it seems as if blows avoided
those who present themselves too briskly to them, and do not willingly
fall upon those who too willingly seek them, and so defeat them of their
design. Such there have been, who, after having tried all ways, not
having been able with all their endeavour to obtain the favour of dying
by the hand of the enemy, have been constrained, to make good their
resolution of bringing home the honour of victory or of losing their
lives, to kill themselves even in the heat of battle. Of which there are
other examples, but this is one: Philistus, general of the naval army of
Dionysius the younger against the Syracusans, presented them battle which
was sharply disputed, their forces being equal: in this engagement, he
had the better at the first, through his own valour: but the Syracusans
drawing about his gally to environ him, after having done great things in
his own person to disengage himself and hoping for no relief, with his
own hand he took away the life he had so liberally, and in vain, exposed
to the enemy.
Mule Moloch, king of Fez, who lately won against Sebastian, king of
Portugal, the battle so famous for the death of three kings, and for the
transmission of that great kingdom to the crown of Castile, was extremely
sick when the Portuguese entered in an hostile manner into his dominions;
and from that day forward grew worse and worse, still drawing nearer to
and foreseeing his end; yet never did man better employ his own
sufficiency more vigorously and bravely than he did upon this occasion.
He found himself too weak to undergo the pomp and ceremony of entering.
into his camp, which after their manner is very magnificent, and
therefore resigned that honour to his brother; but this was all of the
office of a general that he resigned; all the rest of greatest utility
and necessity he most, exactly and gloriously performed in his own
person; his body lying upon a couch, but his judgment and courage upright
and firm to his last gasp, and in some sort beyond it. He might have
wasted his enemy, indiscreetly advanced into his dominions, without
striking a blow; and it was a very unhappy occurrence, that for want of a
little life or somebody to substitute in the conduct of this war and the
affairs of a troubled state, he was compelled to seek a doubtful and
bloody victory, having another by a better and surer way already in his
hands. Notwithstanding, he wonderfully managed the continuance of his
sickness in consuming the enemy, and in drawing them far from the
assistance of the navy and the ports they had on the coast of Africa,
even till the last day of his life, which he designedly reserved for this
great battle. He arranged his battalions in a circular form, environing
the Portuguese army on every side, which round circle coming to close in
and to draw up close together, not only hindered them in the conflict
(which was very sharp through the valour of the young invading king),
considering that they had every way to present a front, but prevented
their flight after the defeat, so that finding all passages possessed and
shut up by the enemy, they were constrained to close up together again:
“Coacerventurque non solum caede, sed etiam fuga,”
[“Piled up not only in slaughter but in flight.”]
and there they were slain in heaps upon one another, leaving to the
conqueror a very bloody and entire victory. Dying, he caused himself to
be carried and hurried from place to place where most need was, and
passing along the files, encouraged the captains and soldiers one after
another; but a corner of his main battalions being broken, he was not to
be held from mounting on horseback with his sword in his hand; he did his
utmost to break from those about him, and to rush into the thickest of
the battle, they all the while withholding him, some by the bridle, some
by his robe, and others by his stirrups. This last effort totally
overwhelmed the little life he had left; they again laid him upon his
bed; but coming to himself, and starting as it were out of his swoon, all
other faculties failing, to give his people notice that they were to
conceal his death the most necessary command he had then to give, that
his soldiers might not be discouraged (with the news) he expired with his
finger upon his mouth, the ordinary sign of keeping silence. Who ever
lived so long and so far into death? whoever died so erect, or more like
a man?
The most extreme degree of courageously treating death, and the most
natural, is to look upon it not only without astonishment but without
care, continuing the wonted course of life even into it, as Cato did,
who entertained himself in study, and went to sleep, having a violent and
bloody death in his heart, and the weapon in his hand with which he was
resolved to despatch himself.
CHAPTER XXII
OF POSTING
I have been none of the least able in this exercise, which is proper for
men of my pitch, well-knit and short; but I give it over; it shakes us
too much to continue it long. I was at this moment reading, that King
Cyrus, the better to have news brought him from all parts of the empire,
which was of a vast extent, caused it to be tried how far a horse could
go in a day without baiting, and at that distance appointed men, whose
business it was to have horses always in readiness, to mount those who
were despatched to him; and some say, that this swift way of posting is
equal to that of the flight of cranes.
Caesar says, that Lucius Vibullius Rufus, being in great haste to carry
intelligence to Pompey, rode night and day, still taking fresh horses for
the greater diligence and speed; and he himself, as Suetonius reports,
travelled a hundred miles a day in a hired coach; but he was a furious
courier, for where the rivers stopped his way he passed them by swimming,
without turning out of his way to look for either bridge or ford.
Tiberius Nero, going to see his brother Drusus, who was sick in Germany,
travelled two hundred miles in four-and-twenty hours, having three
coaches. In the war of the Romans against King Antiochus, T. Sempronius
Gracchus, says Livy:
“Per dispositos equos prope incredibili celeritate
ab Amphissa tertio die Pellam pervenit.”
[“By pre-arranged relays of horses, he, with an almost incredible
speed, rode in three days from Amphissa to Pella.”
--Livy, xxxvii. 7.]
And it appears that they were established posts, and not horses purposely
laid in upon this occasion.
Cecina’s invention to send back news to his family was much more quick,
for he took swallows along with him from home, and turned them out
towards their nests when he would send back any news; setting a mark of
some colour upon them to signify his meaning, according to what he and
his people had before agreed upon.
At the theatre at Rome masters of families carried pigeons in their
bosoms to which they tied letters when they had a mind to send any orders
to their people at home; and the pigeons were trained up to bring back an
answer. D. Brutus made use of the same device when besieged in Modena,
and others elsewhere have done the same.
In Peru they rode post upon men, who took them upon their shoulders in a
certain kind of litters made for that purpose, and ran with such agility
that, in their full speed, the first couriers transferred their load to
the second without making any stop.
I understand that the Wallachians, the grand Signior’s couriers, perform
wonderful journeys, by reason they have liberty to dismount the first
person they meet upon the road, giving him their own tired horses; and
that to preserve themselves from being weary, they gird themselves
straight about the middle with a broad girdle; but I could never find
any benefit from this.
CHAPTER XXIII
OF ILL MEANS EMPLOYED TO A GOOD END
There is wonderful relation and correspondence in this universal
government of the works of nature, which very well makes it appear that
it is neither accidental nor carried on by divers masters. The diseases
and conditions of our bodies are, in like manner, manifest in states and
governments; kingdoms and republics are founded, flourish, and decay with
age as we do. We are subject to a repletion of humours, useless and
dangerous: whether of those that are good (for even those the physicians
are afraid of; and seeing we have nothing in us that is stable, they say
that a too brisk and vigorous perfection of health must be abated by art,
lest our nature, unable to rest in any certain condition, and not having
whither to rise to mend itself, make too sudden and too disorderly a
retreat; and therefore prescribe wrestlers to purge and bleed, to qualify
that superabundant health), or else a repletion of evil humours, which is
the ordinary cause of sickness. States are very often sick of the like
repletion, and various sorts of purgations have commonly been applied.
Some times a great multitude of families are turned out to clear the
country, who seek out new abodes elsewhere and encroach upon others.
After this manner our ancient Franks came from the remotest part of
Germany to seize upon Gaul, and to drive thence the first inhabitants;
so was that infinite deluge of men made up who came into Italy under the
conduct of Brennus and others; so the Goths and Vandals, and also the
people who now possess Greece, left their native country to go settle
elsewhere, where they might have more room; and there are scarce two or
three little corners in the world that have not felt the effect of such
removals. The Romans by this means erected their colonies; for,
perceiving their city to grow immeasurably populous, they eased it of the
most unnecessary people, and sent them to inhabit and cultivate the lands
conquered by them; sometimes also they purposely maintained wars with
some of their enemies, not only to keep their own men in action, for fear
lest idleness, the mother of corruption, should bring upon them some
worse inconvenience:
“Et patimur longae pacis mala; saevior armis
Luxuria incumbit.”
[“And we suffer the ills of a long peace; luxury is more pernicious
than war.”--Juvenal, vi. 291.]
but also to serve for a blood-letting to their Republic, and a little to
evaporate the too vehement heat of their youth, to prune and clear the
branches from the stock too luxuriant in wood; and to this end it was
that they maintained so long a war with Carthage.
In the treaty of Bretigny, Edward III., king of England, would not, in
the general peace he then made with our king, comprehend the controversy
about the Duchy of Brittany, that he might have a place wherein to
discharge himself of his soldiers, and that the vast number of English he
had brought over to serve him in his expedition here might not return
back into England. And this also was one reason why our King Philip
consented to send his son John upon a foreign expedition, that he might
take along with him a great number of hot young men who were then in his
pay.
There--are many in our times who talk at this rate, wishing that
this hot emotion that is now amongst us might discharge itself in some
neighbouring war, for fear lest all the peccant humours that now reign in
this politic body of ours may diffuse themselves farther, keep the fever
still in the height, and at last cause our total ruin; and, in truth, a
foreign is much more supportable than a civil war, but I do not believe
that God will favour so unjust a design as to offend and quarrel with
others for our own advantage:
“Nil mihi tam valde placeat, Rhamnusia virgo,
Quod temere invitis suscipiatur heris.”
[“Rhamnusian virgin, let nothing ever so greatly please me which is
taken without justice from the unwilling owners”
--Catullus, lxviii. 77.]
And yet the weakness of our condition often pushes us upon the necessity
of making use of ill means to a good end. Lycurgus, the most perfect
legislator that ever was, virtuous and invented this very unjust practice
of making the helots, who were their slaves, drunk by force, to the end
that the Spartans, seeing them so lost and buried in wine, might abhor
the excess of this vice. And yet those were still more to blame who of
old gave leave that criminals, to what sort of death soever condemned,
should be cut up alive by the physicians, that they might make a true
discovery of our inward parts, and build their art upon greater
certainty; for, if we must run into excesses, it is more excusable to do
it for the health of the soul than that of the body; as the Romans
trained up the people to valour and the contempt of dangers and death by
those furious spectacles of gladiators and fencers, who, having to fight
it out to the last, cut, mangled, and killed one another in their
presence:
“Quid vesani aliud sibi vult ars impia ludi,
Quid mortes juvenum, quid sanguine pasta voluptas?”
[“What other end does the impious art of the gladiators propose to
itself, what the slaughter of young men, what pleasure fed with
blood.”--Prudentius, Contra Symmachum, ii. 643.]
and this custom continued till the Emperor Theodosius’ time:
“Arripe dilatam tua, dux, in tempora famam,
Quodque patris superest, successor laudis habeto
Nullus in urbe cadat, cujus sit poena voluptas....
Jam solis contenta feris, infamis arena
Nulla cruentatis homicidia ludat in armis.”
[“Prince, take the honours delayed for thy reign, and be successor
to thy fathers; henceforth let none at Rome be slain for sport. Let
beasts’ blood stain the infamous arena, and no more homicides be
there acted.”--Prudentius, Contra Symmachum, ii. 643.]
It was, in truth, a wonderful example, and of great advantage for the
training up the people, to see every day before their eyes a hundred; two
hundred, nay, a thousand couples of men armed against one another, cut
one another to pieces with so great a constancy of courage, that they
were never heard to utter so much as one syllable of weakness or
commiseration; never seen to turn their backs, nor so much as to make one
cowardly step to evade a blow, but rather exposed their necks to the
adversary’s sword and presented themselves to receive the stroke; and
many of them, when wounded to death, have sent to ask the spectators if
they were satisfied with their behaviour, before they lay down to die
upon the place. It was not enough for them to fight and to die bravely,
but cheerfully too; insomuch that they were hissed and cursed if they
made any hesitation about receiving their death. The very girls
themselves set them on:
“Consurgit ad ictus,
Et, quoties victor ferrum jugulo inserit, illa
Delicias ait esse suas, pectusque jacentis
Virgo modesta jubet converso pollice rumpi.”
[“The modest virgin is so delighted with the sport, that she
applauds the blow, and when the victor bathes his sword in his
fellow’s throat, she says it is her pleasure, and with turned thumb
orders him to rip up the bosom of the prostrate victim.”
--Prudentius, Contra Symmachum, ii. 617.]
The first Romans only condemned criminals to this example: but they
afterwards employed innocent slaves in the work, and even freemen too,
who sold themselves to this purpose, nay, moreover, senators and knights
of Rome, and also women:
“Nunc caput in mortem vendunt, et funus arena,
Atque hostem sibi quisque parat, cum bella quiescunt.”
[“They sell themselves to death and the circus, and, since the wars
are ceased, each for himself a foe prepares.”
--Manilius, Astron., iv. 225.]
“Hos inter fremitus novosque lusus....
Stat sexus rudis insciusque ferri,
Et pugnas capit improbus viriles;”
[“Amidst these tumults and new sports, the tender sex, unskilled in
arms, immodestly engaged in manly fights.”
--Statius, Sylv., i. 6, 51.]
which I should think strange and incredible, if we were not accustomed
every day to see in our own wars many thousands of men of other nations,
for money to stake their blood and their lives in quarrels wherein they
have no manner of concern.
CHAPTER XXIV
OF THE ROMAN GRANDEUR
I will only say a word or two of this infinite argument, to show the
simplicity of those who compare the pitiful greatness of these times with
that of Rome. In the seventh book of Cicero’s Familiar Epistles (and let
the grammarians put out that surname of familiar if they please, for in
truth it is not very suitable; and they who, instead of familiar, have
substituted “ad Familiares,” may gather something to justify them for so
doing out of what Suetonius says in the Life of Caesar, that there was a
volume of letters of his “ad Familiares “) there is one directed to
Caesar, then in Gaul, wherein Cicero repeats these words, which were in
the end of another letter that Caesar had written to him: “As to what
concerns Marcus Furius, whom you have recommended to me, I will make him
king of Gaul, and if you would have me advance any other friend of yours
send him to me.” It was no new thing for a simple citizen of Rome, as
Caesar then was, to dispose of kingdoms, for he took away that of King
Deiotarus from him to give it to a gentleman of the city of Pergamus,
called Mithridates; and they who wrote his Life record several cities
sold by him; and Suetonius says, that he had once from King Ptolemy three
millions and six hundred thousand crowns, which was very like selling him
his own kingdom:
“Tot Galatae, tot Pontus, tot Lydia, nummis.”
[“So much for Galatia, so much for Pontus,
so much for Lydia.”--Claudius in Eutrop., i. 203.]
Marcus Antonius said, that the greatness of the people of Rome was not
so much seen in what they took, as in what they gave; and, indeed, some
ages before Antonius, they had dethroned one amongst the rest with so
wonderful authority, that in all the Roman history I have not observed
anything that more denotes the height of their power. Antiochus
possessed all Egypt, and was, moreover, ready to conquer Cyprus and other
appendages of that empire: when being upon the progress of his victories,
C. Popilius came to him from the Senate, and at their first meeting
refused to take him by the hand, till he had first read his letters,
which after the king had read, and told him he would consider of them,
Popilius made a circle about him with his cane, saying:--“Return me an
answer, that I may carry it back to the Senate, before thou stirrest out
of this circle.” Antiochus, astonished at the roughness of so positive
a command, after a little pause, replied, “I will obey the Senate’s
command.” Then Popilius saluted him as friend of the Roman people.
To have renounced claim to so great a monarchy, and a course of such
successful fortune, from the effects of three lines in writing! Truly
he had reason, as he afterwards did, to send the Senate word by his
ambassadors, that he had received their order with the same respect as if
it had come from the immortal gods.
All the kingdoms that Augustus gained by the right of war, he either
restored to those who had lost them or presented them to strangers. And
Tacitus, in reference to this, speaking of Cogidunus, king of England,
gives us, by a marvellous touch, an instance of that infinite power: the
Romans, says he, were from all antiquity accustomed to leave the kings
they had subdued in possession of their kingdoms under their authority.
“Ut haberent instruments servitutis et reges.”
[“That they might have even kings to be their slaves.”
--Livy, xlv. 13.]
‘Tis probable that Solyman, whom we have seen make a gift of Hungary and
other principalities, had therein more respect to this consideration than
to that he was wont to allege, viz., that he was glutted and overcharged
with so many monarchies and so much dominion, as his own valour and that
of his ancestors had acquired.
CHAPTER XXV
NOT TO COUNTERFEIT BEING SICK
There is an epigram in Martial, and one of the very good ones--for he has
of all sorts--where he pleasantly tells the story of Caelius, who, to
avoid making his court to some great men of Rome, to wait their rising,
and to attend them abroad, pretended to have the gout; and the better to
colour this anointed his legs, and had them lapped up in a great many
swathings, and perfectly counterfeited both the gesture and countenance
of a gouty person; till in the end, Fortune did him the kindness to make
him one indeed:
“Quantum curs potest et ars doloris
Desiit fingere Caelius podagram.”
[“How great is the power of counterfeiting pain: Caelius has ceased
to feign the gout; he has got it.”--Martial, Ep., vii. 39, 8.]
I think I have read somewhere in Appian a story like this, of one who to
escape the proscriptions of the triumvirs of Rome, and the better to be
concealed from the discovery of those who pursued him, having hidden
himself in a disguise, would yet add this invention, to counterfeit
having but one eye; but when he came to have a little more liberty, and
went to take off the plaster he had a great while worn over his eye, he
found he had totally lost the sight of it indeed, and that it was
absolutely gone. ‘Tis possible that the action of sight was dulled from
having been so long without exercise, and that the optic power was wholly
retired into the other eye: for we evidently perceive that the eye we
keep shut sends some part of its virtue to its fellow, so that it will
swell and grow bigger; and so inaction, with the heat of ligatures and,
plasters, might very well have brought some gouty humour upon the
counterfeiter in Martial.
Reading in Froissart the vow of a troop of young English gentlemen, to
keep their left eyes bound up till they had arrived in France and
performed some notable exploit upon us, I have often been tickled with
this thought, that it might have befallen them as it did those others,
and they might have returned with but an eye a-piece to their mistresses,
for whose sakes they had made this ridiculous vow.
Mothers have reason to rebuke their children when they counterfeit having
but one eye, squinting, lameness, or any other personal defect; for,
besides that their bodies being then so tender, may be subject to take an
ill bent, fortune, I know not how, sometimes seems to delight in taking
us at our word; and I have heard several examples related of people who
have become really sick, by only feigning to be so. I have always used,
whether on horseback or on foot, to carry a stick in my hand, and even to
affect doing it with an elegant air; many have threatened that this fancy
would one day be turned into necessity: if so, I should be the first of
my family to have the gout.
But let us a little lengthen this chapter, and add another anecdote
concerning blindness. Pliny reports of one who, dreaming he was blind,
found himself so indeed in the morning without any preceding infirmity in
his eyes. The force of imagination might assist in this case, as I have
said elsewhere, and Pliny seems to be of the same opinion; but it is more
likely that the motions which the body felt within, of which physicians,
if they please, may find out the cause, taking away his sight, were the
occasion of his dream.
Let us add another story, not very improper for this subject, which
Seneca relates in one of his epistles: “You know,” says he, writing to
Lucilius, “that Harpaste, my wife’s fool, is thrown upon me as an
hereditary charge, for I have naturally an aversion to those monsters;
and if I have a mind to laugh at a fool, I need not seek him far; I can
laugh at myself. This fool has suddenly lost her sight: I tell you a
strange, but a very true thing she is not sensible that she is blind, but
eternally importunes her keeper to take her abroad, because she says the
house is dark. That what we laugh at in her, I pray you to believe,
happens to every one of us: no one knows himself to be avaricious or
grasping; and, again, the blind call for a guide, while we stray of our
own accord. I am not ambitious, we say; but a man cannot live otherwise
at Rome; I am not wasteful, but the city requires a great outlay; ‘tis
not my fault if I am choleric--if I have not yet established any certain
course of life: ‘tis the fault of youth. Let us not seek our disease out
of ourselves; ‘tis in us, and planted in our bowels; and the mere fact
that we do not perceive ourselves to be sick, renders us more hard to be
cured. If we do not betimes begin to see to ourselves, when shall we
have provided for so many wounds and evils wherewith we abound? And yet
we have a most sweet and charming medicine in philosophy; for of all the
rest we are sensible of no pleasure till after the cure: this pleases and
heals at once.” This is what Seneca says, that has carried me from my
subject, but there is advantage in the change.
CHAPTER XXVI
OF THUMBS
Tacitus reports, that amongst certain barbarian kings their manner was,
when they would make a firm obligation, to join their right hands close
to one another, and intertwist their thumbs; and when, by force of
straining the blood, it appeared in the ends, they lightly pricked them
with some sharp instrument, and mutually sucked them.
Physicians say that the thumbs are the master fingers of the hand, and
that their Latin etymology is derived from “pollere.” The Greeks called
them ‘Avtixeip’, as who should say, another hand. And it seems that the
Latins also sometimes take it in this sense for the whole hand:
“Sed nec vocibus excitata blandis,
Molli pollici nec rogata, surgit.”
[“Neither to be excited by soft words or by the thumb.”
--Mart., xii. 98, 8.]
It was at Rome a signification of favour to depress and turn in the
thumbs:
“Fautor utroque tuum laudabit pollice ludum:”
[“Thy patron will applaud thy sport with both thumbs”
--Horace.]
and of disfavour to elevate and thrust them outward:
“Converso pollice vulgi,
Quemlibet occidunt populariter.”
[“The populace, with inverted thumbs, kill all that
come before them.”--Juvenal, iii. 36]
The Romans exempted from war all such as were maimed in the thumbs, as
having no more sufficient strength to hold their weapons. Augustus
confiscated the estate of a Roman knight who had maliciously cut off the
thumbs of two young children he had, to excuse them from going into the
armies; and, before him, the Senate, in the time of the Italic war, had
condemned Caius Vatienus to perpetual imprisonment, and confiscated all
his goods, for having purposely cut off the thumb of his left hand, to
exempt himself from that expedition. Some one, I have forgotten who,
having won a naval battle, cut off the thumbs of all his vanquished
enemies, to render them incapable of fighting and of handling the oar.
The Athenians also caused the thumbs of the AEginatans to be cut off,
to deprive them of the superiority in the art of navigation.
In Lacedaemon, pedagogues chastised their scholars by biting their
thumbs.
CHAPTER XXVII
COWARDICE THE MOTHER OF CRUELTY
I have often heard it said that cowardice is the mother of cruelty; and I
have found by experience that malicious and inhuman animosity and
fierceness are usually accompanied with feminine weakness. I have seen
the most cruel people, and upon frivolous occasions, apt to cry.
Alexander, the tyrant of Pheres, durst not be a spectator of tragedies in
the theatre, for fear lest his citizens should see him weep at the
misfortunes of Hecuba and Andromache, who himself without pity caused so
many people every day to be murdered. Is it not meanness of spirit that
renders them so pliable to all extremities? Valour, whose effect is only
to be exercised against resistance--
“Nec nisi bellantis gaudet cervice juvenci”--
[“Nor delights in killing a bull unless he resists.”
--Claudius, Ep. ad Hadrianum, v. 39.]
stops when it sees the enemy at its mercy; but pusillanimity, to say that
it was also in the game, not having dared to meddle in the first act of
danger, takes as its part the second, of blood and massacre. The murders
in victories are commonly performed by the rascality and hangers-on of an
army, and that which causes so many unheard of cruelties in domestic wars
is, that this canaille makes war in imbruing itself up to the elbows in
blood, and ripping up a body that lies prostrate at its feet, having no
sense of any other valour:
“Et lupus, et turpes instant morientibus ursi,
Et quaecunque minor nobilitate fera est:”
[“Wolves and the filthy bears, and all the baser beasts,
fall upon the dying.”--Ovid, Trist., iii. 5, 35.]
like cowardly dogs, that in the house worry and tear the skins of wild
beasts, they durst not come near in the field. What is it in these times
of ours that makes our quarrels mortal; and that, whereas our fathers had
some degrees of revenge, we now begin with the last in ours, and at the
first meeting nothing is to be said but, kill? What is this but
cowardice?
Every one is sensible that there is more bravery and disdain in subduing
an enemy, than in cutting, his throat; and in making him yield, than in
putting him to the sword: besides that the appetite of revenge is better
satisfied and pleased because its only aim is to make itself felt: And
this is the reason why we do not fall upon a beast or a stone when they
hurt us, because they are not capable of being sensible of our revenge;
and to kill a man is to save him from the injury and offence we intend
him. And as Bias cried out to a wicked fellow, “I know that sooner or
later thou wilt have thy reward, but I am afraid I shall not see it”;
--[Plutarch, on the Delay in Divine Justice, c. 2.]--and pitied the
Orchomenians that the penitence of Lyciscus for the treason committed
against them, came at a season when there was no one remaining alive of
those who had been interested in the offence, and whom the pleasure of
this penitence should affect: so revenge is to be pitied, when the person
on whom it is executed is deprived of means of suffering under it: for as
the avenger will look on to enjoy the pleasure of his revenge, so the
person on whom he takes revenge should be a spectator too, to be
afflicted and to repent. “He will repent it,” we say, and because we
have given him a pistol-shot through the head, do we imagine he will
repent? On the contrary, if we but observe, we shall find, that he makes
mouths at us in falling, and is so far from penitency, that he does not
so much as repine at us; and we do him the kindest office of life, which
is to make him die insensibly, and soon: we are afterwards to hide
ourselves, and to shift and fly from the officers of justice, who pursue
us, whilst he is at rest. Killing is good to frustrate an offence to
come, not to revenge one that is already past; and more an act of fear
than of bravery; of precaution than of courage; of defence than of
enterprise. It is manifest that by it we lose both the true end of
revenge and the care of our reputation; we are afraid, if he lives he
will do us another injury as great as the first; ‘tis not out of
animosity to him, but care of thyself, that thou gettest rid of him.
In the kingdom of Narsingah this expedient would be useless to us, where
not only soldiers, but tradesmen also, end their differences by the
sword. The king never denies the field to any who wish to fight; and
when they are persons of quality; he looks on, rewarding the victor with
a chain of gold,--for which any one who pleases may fight with him again,
so that, by having come off from one combat, he has engaged himself in
many.
If we thought by virtue to be always masters of our enemies, and to
triumph over them at pleasure, we should be sorry they should escape from
us as they do, by dying: but we have a mind to conquer, more with safety
than honour, and, in our quarrel, more pursue the end than the glory.
Asnius Pollio, who, as being a worthy man, was the less to be excused,
committed a like, error, when, having written a libel against Plancus, he
forbore to publish it till he was dead; which is to bite one’s thumb at a
blind man, to rail at one who is deaf, to wound a man who has no feeling,
rather than to run the hazard of his resentment. And it was also said of
him that it was only for hobgoblins to wrestle with the dead.
He who stays to see the author die, whose writings he intends to
question, what does he say but that he is weak in his aggressiveness?
It was told to Aristotle that some one had spoken ill of him: “Let him
do more,” said he; “let him whip me too, provided I am not there.”
Our fathers contented themselves with revenging an insult with the lie,
the lie with a box of the ear, and so forward; they were valiant enough
not to fear their adversaries, living and provoked we tremble for fear so
soon as we see them on foot. And that this is so, does not our noble
practice of these days, equally to prosecute to death both him that has
offended us and him we have offended, make it out? ‘Tis also a kind
of cowardice that has introduced the custom of having seconds, thirds,
and fourths in our duels; they were formerly duels; they are now
skirmishes, rencontres, and battles. Solitude was, doubtless, terrible
to those who were the first inventors of this practice:
“Quum in se cuique minimum fiduciae esset,”
for naturally any company whatever is consolatory in danger. Third
persons were formerly called in to prevent disorder and foul play only,
and to be witness of the fortune of the combat; but now they have brought
it to this pass that the witnesses themselves engage; whoever is invited
cannot handsomely stand by as an idle spectator, for fear of being
suspected either of want of affection or of courage. Besides the
injustice and unworthiness of such an action, of engaging other strength
and valour in the protection of your honour than your own, I conceive it
a disadvantage to a brave man, and who wholly relies upon himself, to
shuffle his fortune with that of a second; every one runs hazard enough
himself without hazarding for another, and has enough to do to assure
himself in his own valour for the defence of his life, without intrusting
a thing so dear in a third man’s hand. For, if it be not expressly
agreed upon before to the contrary, ‘tis a combined party of all four,
and if your second be killed, you have two to deal withal, with good
reason; and to say that it is foul play, it is so indeed, as it is, well
armed, to attack a man who has but the hilt of a broken sword in his
hand, or, clear and untouched, a man who is desperately wounded: but if
these be advantages you have got by fighting, you may make use of them
without reproach. The disparity and inequality are only weighed and
considered from the condition of the combatants when they began; as to
the rest, you must take your chance: and though you had, alone, three
enemies upon you at once, your two companions being killed, you have no
more wrong done you, than I should do in a battle, by running a man
through whom I should see engaged with one of our own men, with the like
advantage. The nature of society will have it so that where there is
troop against troop, as where our Duke of Orleans challenged Henry, king
of England, a hundred against a hundred; three hundred against as many,
as the Argians against the Lacedaemonians; three to three, as the Horatii
against the Curiatii, the multitude on either side is considered but as
one single man: the hazard, wherever there is company, being confused and
mixed.
I have a domestic interest in this discourse; for my brother, the Sieur
de Mattecoulom, was at Rome asked by a gentleman with whom he had no
great acquaintance, and who was a defendant challenged by another, to be
his second; in this duel he found himself matched with a gentleman much
better known to him. (I would fain have an explanation of these rules of
honour, which so often shock and confound those of reason.) After having
despatched his man, seeing the two principals still on foot and sound, he
ran in to disengage his friend. What could he do less? should he have
stood still, and if chance would have ordered it so, have seen him he was
come thither to defend killed before his face? what he had hitherto done
helped not the business; the quarrel was yet undecided. The courtesy
that you can, and certainly ought to shew to your enemy, when you have
reduced him to an ill condition and have a great advantage over him, I do
not see how you can do it, where the interest of another is concerned,
where you are only called in as an assistant, and the quarrel is none of
yours: he could neither be just nor courteous, at the hazard of him he
was there to serve. And he was therefore enlarged from the prisons of
Italy at the speedy and solemn request of our king. Indiscreet nation!
we are not content to make our vices and follies known to the world by
report only, but we must go into foreign countries, there to show them
what fools we are. Put three Frenchmen into the deserts of Libya, they
will not live a month together without fighting; so that you would say
this peregrination were a thing purposely designed to give foreigners the
pleasure of our tragedies, and, for the most part, to such as rejoice and
laugh at our miseries. We go into Italy to learn to fence, and exercise
the art at the expense of our lives before we have learned it; and yet,
by the rule of discipline, we should put the theory before the practice.
We discover ourselves to be but learners:
“Primitae juvenum miserae, bellique futuri
Dura rudimenta.”
[“Wretched the elementary trials of youth, and hard the
rudiments of approaching war.”--Virgil, AEneid, xi. 156.]
I know that fencing is an art very useful to its end (in a duel betwixt
two princes, cousin-germans, in Spain, the elder, says Livy, by his skill
and dexterity in arms, easily overcoming the greater and more awkward
strength of the younger), and of which the knowledge, as I experimentally
know, has inspired some with courage above their natural measure; but
this is not properly valour, because it supports itself upon address, and
is founded upon something besides itself. The honour of combat consists
in the jealousy of courage, and not of skill; and therefore I have known
a friend of mine, famed as a great master in this exercise, in his
quarrels make choice of such arms as might deprive him of this advantage
and that wholly depended upon fortune and assurance, that they might not
attribute his victory rather to his skill in fencing than his valour.
When I was young, gentlemen avoided the reputation of good fencers as
injurious to them, and learned to fence with all imaginable privacy as a
trade of subtlety, derogating from true and natural valour:
“Non schivar non parar, non ritirarsi,
Voglion costor, ne qui destrezza ha parte;
Non danno i colpi or finti, or pieni, or scarsi!
Toglie l’ira a il furor l’uso de l’arte.
Odi le spade orribilmente utarsi
A mezzo il ferro; il pie d’orma non parte,
Sempre a il pie fermo, a la man sempre in moto;
Ne scende taglio in van, ne punta a voto.”
[“They neither shrank, nor vantage sought of ground,
They travers’d not, nor skipt from part to part,
Their blows were neither false, nor feigned found:
In fight, their rage would let them use no art.
Their swords together clash with dreadful sound,
Their feet stand fast, and neither stir nor start,
They move their hands, steadfast their feet remain.
Nor blow nor foin they strook, or thrust in vain.”
--Tasso, Gierus. Lib., c. 12, st. 55, Fairfax’s translation.]
Butts, tilting, and barriers, the feint of warlike fights, were the
exercises of our forefathers: this other exercise is so much the less
noble, as it only respects a private end; that teaches us to destroy one
another against law and justice, and that every way always produces very
ill effects. It is much more worthy and more becoming to exercise
ourselves in things that strengthen than that weaken our government and
that tend to the public safety and common glory. The consul, Publius
Rutilius, was the first who taught the soldiers to handle their arms
with skill, and joined art with valour, not for the rise of private
quarrel, but for war and the quarrels of the people of Rome; a popular
and civil defence. And besides the example of Caesar, who commanded his
men to shoot chiefly at the face of Pompey’s soldiers in the battle of
Pharsalia, a thousand other commanders have also bethought them to invent
new forms of weapons and new ways of striking and defending, according as
occasion should require.
But as Philopoemen condemned wrestling, wherein he excelled, because the
preparatives that were therein employed were differing from those that
appertain to military discipline, to which alone he conceived men of
honour ought wholly to apply themselves; so it seems to me that this
address to which we form our limbs, those writhings and motions young men
are taught in this new school, are not only of no use, but rather
contrary and hurtful to the practice of fight in battle; and also our
people commonly make use of particular weapons, and peculiarly designed
for duel; and I have seen, when it has been disapproved, that a gentleman
challenged to fight with rapier and poignard appeared in the array of a
man-at-arms, and that another should take his cloak instead of his
poignard. It is worthy of consideration that Laches in Plato, speaking
of learning to fence after our manner, says that he never knew any great
soldier come out of that school, especially the masters of it: and,
indeed, as to them, our experience tells as much. As to the rest, we may
at least conclude that they are qualities of no relation or
correspondence; and in the education of the children of his government,
Plato interdicts the art of boxing, introduced by Amycus and Epeius, and
that of wrestling, by Antaeus and Cercyo, because they have another end
than to render youth fit for the service of war and contribute nothing to
it. But I see that I have somewhat strayed from my theme.
The Emperor Mauricius, being advertised by dreams and several
prognostics, that one Phocas, an obscure soldier, should kill him,
questioned his son-in-law, Philip, who this Phocas was, and what were his
nature, qualities, and manners; and so soon as Philip, amongst other
things, had told him that he was cowardly and timorous, the emperor
immediately concluded then that he was a murderer and cruel. What is it
that makes tyrants so sanguinary? ‘Tis only the solicitude for their own
safety, and that their faint hearts can furnish them with no other means
of securing themselves than in exterminating those who may hurt them,
even so much as women, for fear of a scratch:
“Cuncta ferit, dum cuncta timer.”
[“He strikes at all who fears all.”
--Claudius, in Eutrop., i. 182.]
The first cruelties are exercised for themselves thence springs the fear
of a just revenge, which afterwards produces a series of new cruelties,
to obliterate one another. Philip, king of Macedon, who had so much to
do with the people of Rome, agitated with the horror of so many murders
committed by his order, and doubting of being able to keep himself secure
from so many families, at divers times mortally injured and offended by
him, resolved to seize all the children of those he had caused to be
slain, to despatch them daily one after another, and so to establish his
own repose.
Fine matter is never impertinent, however placed; and therefore I, who
more consider the weight and utility of what I deliver than its order and
connection, need not fear in this place to bring in an excellent story,
though it be a little by-the-by; for when they are rich in their own
native beauty, and are able to justify themselves, the least end of a
hair will serve to draw them into my discourse.
Amongst others condemned by Philip, had been one Herodicus, prince of
Thessaly; he had, moreover, after him caused his two sons-in-law to be
put to death, each leaving a son very young behind him. Theoxena and
Archo were their two widows. Theoxena, though highly courted to it,
could not be persuaded to marry again: Archo married Poris, the greatest
man among the AEnians, and by him had a great many children, whom she,
dying, left at a very tender age. Theoxena, moved with a maternal
charity towards her nephews, that she might have them under her own eyes
and in her own protection, married Poris: when presently comes a
proclamation of the king’s edict. This brave-spirited mother, suspecting
the cruelty of Philip, and afraid of the insolence of the soldiers
towards these charming and tender children was so bold as to declare hat
she would rather kill them with her own hands than deliver them. Poris,
startled at this protestation, promised her to steal them away, and to
transport them to Athens, and there commit them to the custody of some
faithful friends of his. They took, therefore, the opportunity of an
annual feast which was celebrated at AEnia in honour of AEneas, and
thither they went. Having appeared by day at the public ceremonies and
banquet, they stole the night following into a vessel laid ready for the
purpose, to escape away by sea. The wind proved contrary, and finding
themselves in the morning within sight of the land whence they had
launched overnight, and being pursued by the guards of the port, Poris
perceiving this, laboured all he could to make the mariners do their
utmost to escape from the pursuers. But Theoxena, frantic with affection
and revenge, in pursuance of her former resolution, prepared both weapons
and poison, and exposing them before them; “Go to, my children,” said
she, “death is now the only means of your defence and liberty, and shall
administer occasion to the gods to exercise their sacred justice: these
sharp swords, and these full cups, will open you the way into it;
courage, fear nothing! And thou, my son, who art the eldest, take this
steel into thy hand, that thou mayest the more bravely die.” The
children having on one side so powerful a counsellor, and the enemy at
their throats on the other, run all of them eagerly upon what was next to
hand; and, half dead, were thrown into the sea. Theoxena, proud of
having so gloriously provided for the safety of her children, clasping
her arms with great affection about her husband’s neck. “Let us, my
friend,” said she, “follow these boys, and enjoy the same sepulchre they
do”; and so, having embraced, they threw themselves headlong into the
sea; so that the ship was carried--back without the owners into the
harbour.
Tyrants, at once both to kill and to make their anger felt, have employed
their capacity to invent the most lingering deaths. They will have their
enemies despatched, but not so fast that they may not have leisure to
taste their vengeance. And therein they are mightily perplexed; for if
the torments they inflict are violent, they are short; if long, they are
not then so painful as they desire; and thus plague themselves in choice
of the greatest cruelty. Of this we have a thousand examples in
antiquity, and I know not whether we, unawares, do not retain some traces
of this barbarity.
All that exceeds a simple death appears to me absolute cruelty. Our
justice cannot expect that he, whom the fear of dying by being beheaded
or hanged will not restrain, should be any more awed by the imagination
of a languishing fire, pincers, or the wheel. And I know not, in the
meantime, whether we do not throw them into despair; for in what
condition can be the soul of a man, expecting four-and-twenty hours
together to be broken upon a wheel, or after the old way, nailed to a
cross? Josephus relates that in the time of the war the Romans made in
Judaea, happening to pass by where they had three days before crucified
certain Jews, he amongst them knew three of his own friends, and obtained
the favour of having them taken down, of whom two, he says, died; the
third lived a great while after.
Chalcondylas, a writer of good credit, in the records he has left behind
him of things that happened in his time, and near him, tells us, as of
the most excessive torment, of that the Emperor Mohammed very often
practised, of cutting off men in the middle by the diaphragm with one
blow of a scimitar, whence it followed that they died as it were two
deaths at once; and both the one part, says he, and the other, were seen
to stir and strive a great while after in very great torment. I do not
think there was any great suffering in this motion the torments that are
the most dreadful to look on are not always the greatest to endure; and I
find those that other historians relate to have been practised by him
upon the Epirot lords, are more horrid and cruel, where they were
condemned to be flayed alive piecemeal, after so malicious a manner that
they continued fifteen days in that misery.
And these other two: Croesus, having caused a gentleman, the favourite of
his brother Pantaleon, to be seized, carried him into a fuller’s shop,
where he caused him to be scratched and carded with the cards and combs
belonging to that trade, till he died. George Sechel, chief commander of
the peasants of Poland, who committed so many mischiefs under the title
of the Crusade, being defeated in battle and taken bu the Vayvode of
Transylvania, was three days bound naked upon the rack exposed to all
sorts of torments that any one could contrive against him: during which
time many other prisoners were kept fasting; in the end, he living and
looking on, they made his beloved brother Lucat, for whom alone he
entreated, taking on himself the blame of all their evil actions drink
his blood, and caused twenty of his most favoured captains to feed upon
him, tearing his flesh in pieces with their teeth, and swallowing the
morsels. The remainder of his body and his bowels, so soon as he was
dead, were boiled, and others of his followers compelled to eat them.
CHAPTER XXVIII
ALL THINGS HAVE THEIR SEASON
Such as compare Cato the Censor with the younger Cato, who killed
himself, compare two beautiful natures, much resembling one another.
The first acquired his reputation several ways, and excels in military
exploits and the utility of his public employments; but the virtue of the
younger, besides that it were blasphemy to compare any to it in vigour,
was much more pure and unblemished. For who could absolve that of the
Censor from envy and ambition, having dared to attack the honour of
Scipio, a man in goodness and all other excellent qualities infinitely
beyond him or any other of his time?
That which they, report of him, amongst other things, that in his extreme
old age he put himself upon learning the Greek tongue with so greedy an
appetite, as if to quench a long thirst, does not seem to me to make much
for his honour; it being properly what we call falling into second
childhood. All things have their seasons, even good ones, and I may say
my Paternoster out of time; as they accused T. Quintus Flaminius, that
being general of an army, he was seen praying apart in the time of a
battle that he won.
“Imponit finem sapiens et rebus honestis.”
[“The wise man limits even honest things.”--Juvenal, vi. 444]
Eudemonidas, seeing Xenocrates when very old, still very intent upon his
school lectures: “When will this man be wise,” said he, “if he is yet
learning?” And Philopaemen, to those who extolled King Ptolemy for every
day inuring his person to the exercise of arms: “It is not,” said he,
“commendable in a king of his age to exercise himself in these things; he
ought now really to employ them.” The young are to make their
preparations, the old to enjoy them, say the sages: and the greatest vice
they observe in us is that our desires incessantly grow young again; we
are always re-beginning to live.
Our studies and desires should sometime be sensible of age; yet we have
one foot in the grave and still our appetites and pursuits spring every
day anew within us:
“Tu secanda marmora
Locas sub ipsum funus, et, sepulcri
Immemor, struis domos.”
[“You against the time of death have marble cut for use, and,
forgetful of the tomb, build houses.”--Horace, Od., ii. 18, 17.]
The longest of my designs is not of above a year’s extent; I think of
nothing now but ending; rid myself of all new hopes and enterprises; take
my last leave of every place I depart from, and every day dispossess
myself of what I have.
“Olim jam nec perit quicquam mihi, nec acquiritur....
plus superest viatici quam viae.”
[“Henceforward I will neither lose, nor expect to get: I have more
wherewith to defray my journey, than I have way to go.” (Or):
“Hitherto nothing of me has been lost or gained; more remains to pay
the way than there is way.”--Seneca, Ep., 77. (The sense seems to
be that so far he had met his expenses, but that for the future he
was likely to have more than he required.)]
“Vixi, et, quem dederat cursum fortuna, peregi.”
[“I have lived and finished the career Fortune placed before me.”
--AEneid, iv. 653.]
‘Tis indeed the only comfort I find in my old age, that it mortifies in
me several cares and desires wherewith my life has been disturbed; the
care how the world goes, the care of riches, of grandeur, of knowledge,
of health, of myself. There are men who are learning to speak at a time
when they should learn to be silent for ever. A man may always study,
but he must not always go to school what a contemptible thing is an old
Abecedarian!--[Seneca, Ep. 36]
“Diversos diversa juvant; non omnibus annis
Omnia conveniunt.”
[“Various things delight various men; all things are not
for all ages.”--Gall., Eleg., i. 104.]
If we must study, let us study what is suitable to our present condition,
that we may answer as he did, who being asked to what end he studied in
his decrepit age, “that I may go out better,” said he, “and at greater
ease.” Such a study was that of the younger Cato, feeling his end
approach, and which he met with in Plato’s Discourse of the Eternity of
the Soul: not, as we are to believe, that he was not long before
furnished with all sorts of provision for such a departure; for of
assurance, an established will and instruction, he had more than Plato
had in all his writings; his knowledge and courage were in this respect
above philosophy; he applied himself to this study, not for the service
of his death; but, as a man whose sleeps were never disturbed in the
importance of such a deliberation, he also, without choice or change,
continued his studies with the other accustomary actions of his life.
The night that he was denied the praetorship he spent in play; that
wherein he was to die he spent in reading. The loss either of life
or of office was all one to him.
CHAPTER XXIX
OF VIRTUE
I find by experience, that there is a good deal to be said betwixt the
flights and emotions of the soul or a resolute and constant habit; and
very well perceive that there is nothing we may not do, nay, even to the
surpassing the Divinity itself, says a certain person, forasmuch as it is
more to render a man’s self impassible by his own study and industry,
than to be so by his natural condition; and even to be able to conjoin to
man’s imbecility and frailty a God-like resolution and assurance; but it
is by fits and starts; and in the lives of those heroes of times past
there are sometimes miraculous impulses, and that seem infinitely to
exceed our natural force; but they are indeed only impulses: and ‘tis
hard to believe, that these so elevated qualities in a man can so
thoroughly tinct and imbue the soul that they should become ordinary,
and, as it were, natural in him. It accidentally happens even to us,
who are but abortive births of men, sometimes to launch our souls, when
roused by the discourses or examples of others, much beyond their
ordinary stretch; but ‘tis a kind of passion which pushes and agitates
them, and in some sort ravishes them from themselves: but, this
perturbation once overcome, we see that they insensibly flag and slacken
of themselves, if not to the lowest degree, at least so as to be no more
the same; insomuch as that upon every trivial occasion, the losing of a
bird, or the breaking, of a glass, we suffer ourselves to be moved little
less than one of the common people. I am of opinion, that order,
moderation, and constancy excepted, all things are to be done by a man
that is very imperfect and defective in general. Therefore it is, say
the Sages, that to make a right judgment of a man, you are chiefly to pry
into his common actions, and surprise him in his everyday habit.
Pyrrho, he who erected so pleasant a knowledge upon ignorance,
endeavoured, as all the rest who were really philosophers did, to make
his life correspond with his doctrine. And because he maintained the
imbecility of human judgment to be so extreme as to be incapable of any
choice or inclination, and would have it perpetually wavering and
suspended, considering and receiving all things as indifferent, ‘tis
said, that he always comforted himself after the same manner and
countenance: if he had begun a discourse, he would always end what he had
to say, though the person he was speaking to had gone away: if he walked,
he never stopped for any impediment that stood in his way, being
preserved from precipices, collision with carts, and other like
accidents, by the care of his friends: for, to fear or to avoid anything,
had been to shock his own propositions, which deprived the senses
themselves of all election and certainty. Sometimes he suffered incision
and cauteries with so great constancy as never to be seen so much as to
wince. ‘Tis something to bring the soul to these imaginations; ‘tis more
to join the effects, and yet not impossible; but to conjoin them with
such perseverance and constancy as to make them habitual, is certainly,
in attempts so remote from the common usage, almost incredible to be
done. Therefore it was, that being sometime taken in his house sharply
scolding with his sister, and being reproached that he therein
transgressed his own rules of indifference: “What!” said he, “must this
bit of a woman also serve for a testimony to my rules?” Another time,
being seen to defend himself against a dog: “It is,” said he, “very hard
totally to put off man; and we must endeavour and force ourselves to
resist and encounter things, first by effects, but at least by reason and
argument.”
About seven or eight years since, a husbandman yet living, but two
leagues from my house, having long been tormented with his wife’s
jealousy, coming one day home from his work, and she welcoming him with
her accustomed railing, entered into so great fury that with a sickle he
had yet in his hand, he totally cut off all those parts that she was
jealous of and threw them in her face. And, ‘tis said that a young
gentleman of our nation, brisk and amorous, having by his perseverance at
last mollified the heart of a fair mistress, enraged, that upon the point
of fruition he found himself unable to perform, and that,
“Nec viriliter
Iners senile penis extulit caput.”
[(The 19th or 20th century translators leave this phrase
untranslated and with no explanation. D.W.)
--Tibullus, Priap. Carm., 84.]
as soon as ever he came home he deprived himself of the rebellious
member, and sent it to his mistress, a cruel and bloody victim for the
expiation of his offence. If this had been done upon mature
consideration, and upon the account of religion, as the priests of Cybele
did, what should we say of so high an action?
A few days since, at Bergerac, five leagues from my house, up the river
Dordogne, a woman having overnight been beaten and abused by her husband,
a choleric ill-conditioned fellow, resolved to escape from his ill-usage
at the price of her life; and going so soon as she was up the next
morning to visit her neighbours, as she was wont to do, and having let
some words fall in recommendation of her affairs, she took a sister of
hers by the hand, and led her to the bridge; whither being come, and
having taken leave of her, in jest as it were, without any manner of
alteration in her countenance, she threw herself headlong from the top
into the river, and was there drowned. That which is the most remarkable
in this is, that this resolution was a whole night forming in her head.
It is quite another thing with the Indian women for it being the custom
there for the men to have many wives, and the best beloved of them to
kill herself at her husband’s decease, every one of them makes it the
business of her whole life to obtain this privilege and gain this
advantage over her companions; and the good offices they do their
husbands aim at no other recompense but to be preferred in accompanying
him in death:
“Ubi mortifero jacta est fax ultima lecto,
Uxorum fusis stat pia turba comis
Et certamen habent lethi, quae viva sequatur
Conjugium: pudor est non licuisse mori.
Ardent victrices, et flammae pectora praebent,
Imponuntque suis ora perusta viris.”
[“For when they threw the torch on the funeral bed, the pious wives
with hair dishevelled, stand around striving, which, living, shall
accompany her spouse; and are ashamed that they may not die; they
who are preferred expose their breasts to the flame, and they lay
their scorched lips on those of their husbands.”
--Propertius, iii. 13, 17.]
A certain author of our times reports that he has seen in those Oriental
nations this custom in practice, that not only the wives bury themselves
with their husbands, but even the slaves he has enjoyed also; which is
done after this manner: The husband being dead, the widow may if she will
(but few will) demand two or three months’ respite wherein to order her
affairs. The day being come, she mounts on horseback, dressed as fine as
at her wedding, and with a cheerful countenance says she is going to
sleep with her spouse, holding a looking-glass in her left hand and an
arrow in the other. Being thus conducted in pomp, accompanied with her
kindred and friends and a great concourse of people in great joy, she is
at last brought to the public place appointed for such spectacles: this
is a great space, in the midst of which is a pit full of wood, and
adjoining to it a mount raised four or five steps, upon which she is
brought and served with a magnificent repast; which being done, she falls
to dancing and singing, and gives order, when she thinks fit, to kindle
the fire. This being done, she descends, and taking the nearest of her
husband’s relations by the hand, they walk to the river close by, where
she strips herself stark naked, and having distributed her clothes and
jewels to her friends, plunges herself into the water, as if there to
cleanse herself from her sins; coming out thence, she wraps herself in a
yellow linen of five-and-twenty ells long, and again giving her hand to
this kinsman of her husband’s, they return back to the mount, where she
makes a speech to the people, and recommends her children to them, if she
have any. Betwixt the pit and the mount there is commonly a curtain
drawn to screen the burning furnace from their sight, which some of them,
to manifest the greater courage, forbid. Having ended what she has to
say, a woman presents her with a vessel of oil, wherewith to anoint her
head and her whole body, which when done with she throws into the fire,
and in an instant precipitates herself after. Immediately, the people
throw a good many billets and logs upon her that she may not be long in
dying, and convert all their joy into sorrow and mourning. If they are
persons of meaner condition, the body of the defunct is carried to the
place of sepulture, and there placed sitting, the widow kneeling before
him, embracing the dead body; and they continue in this posture whilst
the people build a wall about them, which so soon as it is raised to the
height of the woman’s shoulders, one of her relations comes behind her,
and taking hold of her head, twists her neck; so soon as she is dead, the
wall is presently raised up, and closed, and there they remain entombed.
There was, in this same country, something like this in their
gymnosophists; for not by constraint of others nor by the impetuosity of
a sudden humour, but by the express profession of their order, their
custom was, as soon as they arrived at a certain age, or that they saw
themselves threatened by any disease, to cause a funeral pile to be
erected for them, and on the top a stately bed, where, after having
joyfully feasted their friends and acquaintance, they laid them down with
so great resolution, that fire being applied to it, they were never seen
to stir either hand or foot; and after this manner, one of them, Calanus
by name; expired in the presence of the whole army of Alexander the
Great. And he was neither reputed holy nor happy amongst them who did
not thus destroy himself, dismissing his soul purged and purified by the
fire, after having consumed all that was earthly and mortal. This
constant premeditation of the whole life is that which makes the wonder.
Amongst our other controversies, that of ‘Fatum’ has also crept in; and
to tie things to come, and even our own wills, to a certain and
inevitable necessity, we are yet upon this argument of time past:
“Since God foresees that all things shall so fall out, as doubtless He
does, it must then necessarily follow, that they must so fall out”: to
which our masters reply: “that the seeing anything come to pass, as we
do, and as God Himself also does (for all things being present with him,
He rather sees, than foresees), is not to compel an event: that is, we
see because things do fall out, but things do not fall out because we
see: events cause knowledge, but knowledge does not cause events. That
which we see happen, does happen; but it might have happened otherwise:
and God, in the catalogue of the causes of events which He has in His
prescience, has also those which we call accidental and voluntary,
depending upon the liberty. He has given our free will, and knows that
we do amiss because we would do so.”
I have seen a great many commanders encourage their soldiers with this
fatal necessity; for if our time be limited to a certain hour, neither
the enemies’ shot nor our own boldness, nor our flight and cowardice,
can either shorten or prolong our lives. This is easily said, but see
who will be so easily persuaded; and if it be so that a strong and lively
faith draws along with it actions of the same kind, certainly this faith
we so much brag of, is very light in this age of ours, unless the
contempt it has of works makes it disdain their company. So it is, that
to this very purpose the Sire de Joinville, as credible a witness as any
other whatever, tells us of the Bedouins, a nation amongst the Saracens,
with whom the king St. Louis had to do in the Holy Land, that they, in
their religion, so firmly believed the number of every man’s days to be
from all eternity prefixed and set down by an inevitable decree, that
they went naked to the wars, excepting a Turkish sword, and their bodies
only covered with a white linen cloth: and for the greatest curse they
could invent when they were angry, this was always in their mouths:
“Accursed be thou, as he that arms himself for fear of death.” This is a
testimony of faith very much beyond ours. And of this sort is that also
that two friars of Florence gave in our fathers’ days. Being engaged in
some controversy of learning, they agreed to go both of them into the
fire in the sight of all the people, each for the verification of his
argument, and all things were already prepared, and the thing just upon
the point of execution, when it was interrupted by an unexpected
accident.--[7th April 1498. Savonarola issued the challenge. After many
delays from demands and counter-demands by each side as to the details of
the fire, both parties found that they had important business to transact
in another county--both just barely escaped assassination at the hands of
the disappointed spectators. D.W.]
A young Turkish lord, having performed a notable exploit in his own
person in the sight of both armies, that of Amurath and that of Huniades,
ready to join battle, being asked by Amurath, what in such tender and
inexperienced years (for it was his first sally into arms) had inspired
him with so brave a courage, replied, that his chief tutor for valour was
a hare. “For being,” said he, “one day a hunting, I found a hare
sitting, and though I had a brace of excellent greyhounds with me, yet
methought it would be best for sureness to make use of my bow; for she
sat very fair. I then fell to letting fly my arrows, and shot forty that
I had in my quiver, not only without hurting, but without starting her
from her form. At last I slipped my dogs after her, but to no more
purpose than I had shot: by which I understood that she had been secured
by her destiny; and, that neither darts nor swords can wound without the
permission of fate, which we can neither hasten nor defer.” This story
may serve, by the way, to let us see how flexible our reason is to all
sorts of images.
A person of great years, name, dignity, and learning boasted to me that
he had been induced to a certain very important change in his faith by a
strange and whimsical incitation, and one otherwise so inadequate, that I
thought it much stronger, taken the contrary way: he called it a miracle,
and so I look upon it, but in a different sense. The Turkish historians
say, that the persuasion those of their nation have imprinted in them of
the fatal and unalterable prescription of their days, manifestly conduces
to the giving them great assurance in dangers. And I know a great prince
who makes very fortunate use of it, whether it be that he really believes
it, or that he makes it his excuse for so wonderfully hazarding himself:
let us hope Fortune may not be too soon weary of her favour to him.
There has not happened in our memory a more admirable effect of
resolution than in those two who conspired the death of the Prince of
Orange.
[The first of these was Jehan de Jaureguy, who wounded the Prince
18th March 1582; the second, by whom the Prince was killed 10th July
1584., was Balthazar Gerard.]
‘Tis marvellous how the second who executed it, could ever be persuaded
into an attempt, wherein his companion, who had done his utmost, had had
so ill success; and after the same method, and with the same arms, to go
attack a lord, armed with so recent a late lesson of distrust, powerful
in followers and bodily strength, in his own hall, amidst his guards, and
in a city wholly at his devotion. Assuredly, he employed a very resolute
arm and a courage enflamed with furious passion. A poignard is surer for
striking home; but by reason that more motion and force of hand is
required than with a pistol, the blow is more subject to be put by or
hindered. That this man did not run to a certain death, I make no great
doubt; for the hopes any one could flatter him withal, could not find
place in any sober understanding, and the conduct of his exploit
sufficiently manifests that he had no want of that, no more than of
courage. The motives of so powerful a persuasion may be diverse, for our
fancy does what it will, both with itself and us. The execution that was
done near Orleans--[The murder of the Duke of Guise by Poltrot.]--was
nothing like this; there was in this more of chance than vigour; the
wound was not mortal, if fortune had not made it so, and to attempt to
shoot on horseback, and at a great distance, by one whose body was in
motion from the motion of his horse, was the attempt of a man who had
rather miss his blow than fail of saving himself. This was apparent from
what followed; for he was so astonished and stupefied with the thought of
so high an execution, that he totally lost his judgment both to find his
way to flight and to govern his tongue. What needed he to have done more
than to fly back to his friends across the river? ‘Tis what I have done
in less dangers, and that I think of very little hazard, how broad soever
the river may be, provided your horse have easy going in, and that you
see on the other side easy landing according to the stream. The other,
--[Balthazar Gerard.]--when they pronounced his dreadful sentence,
“I was prepared for this,” said he, “beforehand, and I will make you
wonder at my patience.”
The Assassins, a nation bordering upon Phoenicia,
[Or in Egypt, Syria, and Persia. Derivation of ‘assassin’ is from
Hassan-ben-Saba, one of their early leaders, and they had an
existence for some centuries. They are classed among the secret
societies of the Middle Ages. D.W.]
are reputed amongst the Mohammedans a people of very great devotion and
purity of manners. They hold that the nearest way to gain Paradise is to
kill some one of a contrary religion; which is the reason they have often
been seen, being but one or two, and without armour, to attempt against
powerful enemies, at the price of a certain death and without any
consideration of their own danger. So was our Raymond, Count of Tripoli,
assassinated (which word is derived from their name) in the heart of his
city,--[in 1151]--during our enterprises of the Holy War: and likewise
Conrad, Marquis of Monteferrat, the murderers at their execution bearing
themselves with great pride and glory that they had performed so brave an
exploit.
CHAPTER XXX.
OF A MONSTROUS CHILD
This story shall go by itself; for I will leave it to physicians to
discourse of. Two days ago I saw a child that two men and a nurse, who
said they were the father, the uncle, and the aunt of it, carried about
to get money by showing it, by reason it was so strange a creature. It
was, as to all the rest, of a common form, and could stand upon its feet;
could go and gabble much like other children of the same age; it had
never as yet taken any other nourishment but from the nurse’s breasts,
and what, in my presence, they tried to put into the mouth of it, it only
chewed a little and spat it out again without swallowing; the cry of it
seemed indeed a little odd and particular, and it was just fourteen
months old. Under the breast it was joined to another child, but without
a head, and which had the spine of the back without motion, the rest
entire; for though it had one arm shorter than the other, it had been
broken by accident at their birth; they were joined breast to breast, and
as if a lesser child sought to throw its arms about the neck of one
something bigger. The juncture and thickness of the place where they
were conjoined was not above four fingers, or thereabouts, so that if you
thrust up the imperfect child you might see the navel of the other below
it, and the joining was betwixt the paps and the navel. The navel of the
imperfect child could not be seen, but all the rest of the belly, so that
all that was not joined of the imperfect one, as arms, buttocks, thighs,
and legs, hung dangling upon the other, and might reach to the mid-leg.
The nurse, moreover, told us that it urined at both bodies, and that the
members of the other were nourished, sensible, and in the same plight
with that she gave suck to, excepting that they were shorter and less.
This double body and several limbs relating to one head might be
interpreted a favourable prognostic to the king,--[Henry III.]--of
maintaining these various parts of our state under the union of his laws;
but lest the event should prove otherwise, ‘tis better to let it alone,
for in things already past there needs no divination,
“Ut quum facts sunt, tum ad conjecturam
aliqui interpretatione revocentur;”
[“So as when they are come to pass, they may then by some
interpretation be recalled to conjecture”
--Cicero, De Divin., ii. 31.]
as ‘tis said of Epimenides, that he always prophesied backward.
I have just seen a herdsman in Medoc, of about thirty years of age, who
has no sign of any genital parts; he has three holes by which he
incessantly voids his water; he is bearded, has desire, and seeks contact
with women.
Those that we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity
of His work the infinite forms that He has comprehended therein; and it
is to be believed that this figure which astonishes us has relation to
some other figure of the same kind unknown to man. From His all wisdom
nothing but good, common; and regular proceeds; but we do not discern the
disposition and relation:
“Quod crebro videt, non miratur, etiamsi,
cur fiat, nescit. Quod ante non vidit, id,
si evenerit, ostentum esse censet.”
[“What he often sees he does not admire, though he be ignorant how
it comes to pass. When a thing happens he never saw before, he
thinks that it is a portent.”--Cicero, De Divin., ii. 22.]
Whatever falls out contrary to custom we say is contrary to nature, but
nothing, whatever it be, is contrary to her. Let, therefore, this
universal and natural reason expel the error and astonishment that
novelty brings along with it.
CHAPTER XXXI
OF ANGER
Plutarch is admirable throughout, but especially where he judges of human
actions. What fine things does he say in the comparison of Lycurgus and
Numa upon the subject of our great folly in abandoning children to the
care and government of their fathers? The most of our civil governments,
as Aristotle says, “leave, after the manner of the Cyclopes, to every one
the ordering of their wives and children, according to their own foolish
and indiscreet fancy; and the Lacedaemonian and Cretan are almost the
only governments that have committed the education of children to the
laws. Who does not see that in a state all depends upon their nurture
and bringing up? and yet they are left to the mercy of parents, let them
be as foolish and ill-conditioned as they may, without any manner of
discretion.”
Amongst other things, how often have I, as I have passed along our
streets, had a good mind to get up a farce, to revenge the poor boys whom
I have seen hided, knocked down, and miserably beaten by some father or
mother, when in their fury and mad with rage? You shall see them come
out with fire and fury sparkling in their eyes:
“Rabie jecur incendente, feruntur,
Praecipites; ut saxa jugis abrupta, quibus mons
Subtrahitur, clivoque latus pendente recedit,”
[“They are headlong borne with burning fury as great stones torn
from the mountains, by which the steep sides are left naked and
bare.”--Juvenal, Sat., vi. 647.]
(and according to Hippocrates, the most dangerous maladies are they that
disfigure the countenance), with a roaring and terrible voice, very often
against those that are but newly come from nurse, and there they are
lamed and spoiled with blows, whilst our justice takes no cognisance of
it, as if these maims and dislocations were not executed upon members of
our commonwealth:
“Gratum est, quod patria; civem populoque dedisti,
Si facis, ut patrix sit idoneus, utilis agris,
Utilis et bellorum et pacis rebus agendis.”
[“It is well when to thy country and the people thou hast given a
citizen, provided thou make fit for his country’s service; useful to
till the earth, useful in affairs of war and peace”
--Juvenal, Sat., xiv. 70.]
There is no passion that so much transports men from their right judgment
as anger. No one would demur upon punishing a judge with death who
should condemn a criminal on the account of his own choler; why, then,
should fathers and pedagogues be any more allowed to whip and chastise
children in their anger? ‘Tis then no longer correction, but revenge.
Chastisement is instead of physic to children; and would we endure a
physician who should be animated against and enraged at his patient?
We ourselves, to do well, should never lay a hand upon our servants
whilst our anger lasts. When the pulse beats, and we feel emotion in
ourselves, let us defer the business; things will indeed appear otherwise
to us when we are calm and cool. ‘Tis passion that then commands, ‘tis
passion that speaks, and not we. Faults seen through passion appear much
greater to us than they really are, as bodies do when seen through a
mist. He who is hungry uses meat; but he who will make use of
chastisement should have neither hunger nor thirst to it. And, moreover,
chastisements that are inflicted with weight and discretion are much
better received and with greater benefit by him who suffers; otherwise,
he will not think himself justly condemned by a man transported with
anger and fury, and will allege his master’s excessive passion, his
inflamed countenance, his unwonted oaths, his emotion and precipitous
rashness, for his own justification:
“Ora tument ira, nigrescunt sanguine venae,
Lumina Gorgoneo saevius igne micant.”
[“Their faces swell, their veins grow black with rage, and their
eyes sparkle with Gorgonian fire.”--Ovid, De Art. Amandi, iii. 503.]
Suetonius reports that Caius Rabirius having been condemned by Caesar,
the thing that most prevailed upon the people (to whom he had appealed)
to determine the cause in his favour, was the animosity and vehemence
that Caesar had manifested in that sentence.
Saying is a different thing from doing; we are to consider the sermon
apart and the preacher apart. These men lent themselves to a pretty
business who in our times have attempted to shake the truth of our Church
by the vices of her ministers; she extracts her testimony elsewhere; ‘tis
a foolish way of arguing and that would throw all things into confusion.
A man whose morals are good may have false opinions, and a wicked man may
preach truth, even though he believe it not himself. ‘Tis doubtless a
fine harmony when doing and saying go together; and I will not deny but
that saying, when the actions follow, is not of greater authority and
efficacy, as Eudamidas said, hearing a philosopher talk of military
affairs: “These things are finely said, but he who speaks them is not to
be believed for his ears have never been used to the sound of the
trumpet.” And Cleomenes, hearing an orator declaiming upon valour, burst
out into laughter, at which the other being angry; “I should,” said he to
him, “do the same if it were a swallow that spoke of this subject; but if
it were an eagle I should willingly hear him.” I perceive, methinks, in
the writings of the ancients, that he who speaks what he thinks, strikes
much more home than he who only feigns. Hear Cicero speak of the love of
liberty: hear Brutus speak of it, the mere written words of this man
sound as if he would purchase it at the price of his life. Let Cicero,
the father of eloquence, treat of the contempt of death; let Seneca do
the same: the first languishingly drawls it out so you perceive he would
make you resolve upon a thing on which he is not resolved himself; he
inspires you not with courage, for he himself has none; the other
animates and inflames you. I never read an author, even of those who
treat of virtue and of actions, that I do not curiously inquire what kind
of a man he was himself; for the Ephori at Sparta, seeing a dissolute
fellow propose a wholesome advice to the people, commanded him to hold
his peace, and entreated a virtuous man to attribute to himself the
invention, and to propose it. Plutarch’s writings, if well understood,
sufficiently bespeak their author, and so that I think I know him even
into his soul; and yet I could wish that we had some fuller account of
his life. And I am thus far wandered from my subject, upon the account
of the obligation I have to Aulus Gellius, for having left us in writing
this story of his manners, that brings me back to my subject of anger.
A slave of his, a vicious, ill-conditioned fellow, but who had the
precepts of philosophy often ringing in his ears, having for some offence
of his been stript by Plutarch’s command, whilst he was being whipped,
muttered at first, that it was without cause and that he had done nothing
to deserve it; but at last falling in good earnest to exclaim against and
rail at his master, he reproached him that he was no philosopher, as he
had boasted himself to be: that he had often heard him say it was
indecent to be angry, nay, had written a book to that purpose; and that
the causing him to be so cruelly beaten, in the height of his rage,
totally gave the lie to all his writings; to which Plutarch calmly and
coldly answered, “How, ruffian,” said he, “by what dost thou judge that
I am now angry? Does either my face, my colour, or my voice give any
manifestation of my being moved? I do not think my eyes look fierce,
that my countenance appears troubled, or that my voice is dreadful: am I
red, do I foam, does any word escape my lips I ought to repent? Do I
start? Do I tremble with fury? For those, I tell thee, are the true
signs of anger.” And so, turning to the fellow that was whipping him,
“Ply on thy work,” said he, “whilst this gentleman and I dispute.” This
is his story.
Archytas Tarentinus, returning from a war wherein he had been
captain-general, found all things in his house in very great disorder,
and his lands quite out of tillage, through the ill husbandry of his
receiver, and having caused him to be called to him; “Go,” said he, “if I
were not in anger I would soundly drub your sides.” Plato likewise,
being highly offended with one of his slaves, gave Speusippus order to
chastise him, excusing himself from doing it because he was in anger.
And Carillus, a Lacedaemonian, to a Helot, who carried himself insolently
towards him: “By the gods,” said he, “if I was not angry, I would
immediately cause thee to be put to death.”
‘Tis a passion that is pleased with and flatters itself. How often,
being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good
defence and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth
and innocence itself? In proof of which, I remember a marvellous example
of antiquity.
Piso, otherwise a man of very eminent virtue, being moved against a
soldier of his, for that returning alone from forage he could give him no
account where he had left a companion of his, took it for granted that he
had killed him, and presently condemned him to death. He was no sooner
mounted upon the gibbet, but, behold, his wandering companion arrives, at
which all the army were exceedingly glad, and after many embraces of the
two comrades, the hangman carried both the one and the other into Piso’s
presence, all those present believing it would be a great pleasure even
to himself; but it proved quite contrary; for through shame and spite,
his fury, which was not yet cool, redoubled; and by a subtlety which his
passion suddenly suggested to him, he made three criminals for having
found one innocent, and caused them all to be despatched: the first
soldier, because sentence had passed upon him; the second, who had lost
his way, because he was the cause of his companion’s death; and the
hangman, for not having obeyed the order which had been given him.
Such as have had to do with testy and obstinate women, may have
experimented into what a rage it puts them to oppose silence and coldness
to their fury, and that a man disdains to nourish their anger. The
orator Celius was wonderfully choleric by nature; and to one who supped
in his company, a man of a gentle and sweet conversation, and who, that
he might not move him, approved and consented to all he said; he,
impatient that his ill-humour should thus spend itself without aliment:
“For the love of the gods deny me something,” said he, “that we may be
two.” Women, in like manner, are only angry that others may be angry
again, in imitation of the laws of love. Phocion, to one who interrupted
his speaking by injurious and very opprobrious words, made no other
return than silence, and to give him full liberty and leisure to vent his
spleen; which he having accordingly done, and the storm blown over,
without any mention of this disturbance, he proceeded in his discourse
where he had left off before. No answer can nettle a man like such a
contempt.
Of the most choleric man in France (anger is always an imperfection, but
more excusable in, a soldier, for in that trade it cannot sometimes be
avoided) I often say, that he is the most patient man that I know, and
the most discreet in bridling his passions; which rise in him with so
great violence and fury,
“Magno veluti cum flamma sonore
Virgea suggeritur costis undantis ahem,
Exsultantque aatu latices, furit intus aquae vis.
Fumidus atque alte spumis exuberat amnis,
Nec jam se capit unda; volat vapor ater ad auras;”
[“When with loud crackling noise, a fire of sticks is applied to the
boiling caldron’s side, by the heat in frisky bells the liquor
dances; within the water rages, and high the smoky fluid in foam
overflows. Nor can the wave now contain itself; the black steam
flies all abroad.”--AEneid, vii. 462.]
that he must of necessity cruelly constrain himself to moderate it. And
for my part, I know no passion which I could with so much violence to
myself attempt to cover and conceal; I would not set wisdom at so high a
price; and do not so much consider what a man does, as how much it costs
him to do no worse.
Another boasted himself to me of the regularity and gentleness of his
manners, which are to truth very singular; to whom I replied, that it was
indeed something, especially m persons of so eminent a quality as
himself, upon whom every one had their eyes, to present himself always
well-tempered to the world; but that the principal thing was to make
provision for within and for himself; and that it was not in my opinion
very well to order his business outwardly well, and to grate himself
within, which I was afraid he did, in putting on and maintaining this
mask and external appearance.
A man incorporates anger by concealing it, as Diogenes told Demosthenes,
who, for fear of being seen in a tavern, withdrew himself the more
retiredly into it: “The more you retire backward, the farther you enter
in.” I would rather advise that a man should give his servant a box of
the ear a little unseasonably, than rack his fancy to present this grave
and composed countenance; and had rather discover my passions than brood
over them at my own expense; they grow less inventing and manifesting
themselves; and ‘tis much better their point should wound others without,
than be turned towards ourselves within:
“Omnia vitia in aperto leviora sunt: et tunc perniciosissima,
quum simulata sanitate subsident.”
[“All vices are less dangerous when open to be seen, and then most
pernicious when they lurk under a dissembled good nature.”
--Seneca, Ep. 56]
I admonish all those who have authority to be angry in my family, in the
first place to manage their anger and not to lavish it upon every
occasion, for that both lessens the value and hinders the effect: rash
and incessant scolding runs into custom, and renders itself despised; and
what you lay out upon a servant for a theft is not felt, because it is
the same he has seen you a hundred times employ against him for having
ill washed a glass, or set a stool out of place. Secondly, that they be
not angry to no purpose, but make sure that their reprehension reach him
with whom they are offended; for, ordinarily, they rail and bawl before
he comes into their presence, and continue scolding an age after he is
gone:
“Et secum petulans amentia certat:”
[“And petulant madness contends with itself.”
--Claudian in Eutrop., i. 237.]
they attack his shadow, and drive the storm in a place where no one is
either chastised or concerned, but in the clamour of their voice.
I likewise in quarrels condemn those who huff and vapour without an
enemy: those rhodomontades should be reserved to discharge upon the
offending party:
“Mugitus veluti cum prima in praelia taurus
Terrificos ciet, atque irasci in cornua tentat,
Arboris obnixus trunco, ventospue lacessit
Ictibus, et sparsa ad pugnum proludit arena.”
[“As when a bull to usher in the fight, makes dreadful bellowings,
and whets his horns against the trunk of a tree; with blows he beats
the air, and rehearses the fight by scattering the sand.”
--AEneid, xii. 103.]
When I am angry, my anger is very sharp but withal very short, and as
private as I can; I lose myself indeed in promptness and violence, but
not in trouble; so that I throw out all sorts of injurious words at
random, and without choice, and never consider pertinently to dart my
language where I think it will deepest wound, for I commonly make use of
no other weapon than my tongue.
My servants have a better bargain of me in great occasions than in
little; the little ones surprise me; and the misfortune is, that when you
are once upon the precipice, ‘tis no matter who gave you the push, you
always go to the bottom; the fall urges, moves, and makes haste of
itself. In great occasions this satisfies me, that they are so just
every one expects a reasonable indignation, and then I glorify myself in
deceiving their expectation; against these, I fortify and prepare myself;
they disturb my head, and threaten to transport me very far, should I
follow them. I can easily contain myself from entering into one of these
passions, and am strong enough, when I expect them, to repel their
violence, be the cause never so great; but if a passion once prepossess
and seize me, it carries me away, be the cause never so small. I bargain
thus with those who may contend with me when you see me moved first, let
me alone, right or wrong; I’ll do the same for you. The storm is only
begot by a concurrence of angers, which easily spring from one another,
and are not born together. Let every one have his own way, and we shall
be always at peace. A profitable advice, but hard to execute. Sometimes
also it falls out that I put on a seeming anger, for the better governing
of my house, without any real emotion. As age renders my humours more
sharp, I study to oppose them, and will, if I can, order it so, that for
the future I may be so much the less peevish and hard to please, as I
have more excuse and inclination to be so, although I have heretofore
been reckoned amongst those who have the greatest patience.
A word more to conclude this argument. Aristotle says, that anger
sometimes serves for arms to virtue and valour. That is probable;
nevertheless, they who contradict him pleasantly answer, that ‘tis a
weapon of novel use, for we move all other arms, this moves us; our hand
guides it not, ‘tis it that guides our hand; it holds us, we hold not it.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A man may always study, but he must not always go to school
Accursed be thou, as he that arms himself for fear of death
All things have their seasons, even good ones
All those who have authority to be angry in my family
“An emperor,” said he, “must die standing”
Ancient Romans kept their youth always standing at school
And we suffer the ills of a long peace
Be not angry to no purpose
Best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice
By resenting the lie we acquit ourselves of the fault
“By the gods,” said he, “if I was not angry, I would execute you”
Children are amused with toys and men with words
Consent, and complacency in giving a man’s self up to melancholy
Defend most the defects with which we are most tainted
Emperor Julian, surnamed the Apostate
Fortune sometimes seems to delight in taking us at our word
Greatest talkers, for the most part, do nothing to purpose
Have more wherewith to defray my journey, than I have way to go
Hearing a philosopher talk of military affairs
How much it costs him to do no worse
I need not seek a fool from afar; I can laugh at myself
Idleness, the mother of corruption
If a passion once prepossess and seize me, it carries me away
In sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure
Killing is good to frustrate an offence to come, not to revenge
Laws cannot subsist without mixture of injustice
Least end of a hair will serve to draw them into my discourse
Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; ‘tis in us
Look on death not only without astonishment but without care
Melancholy: Are there not some constitutions that feed upon it?
Most cruel people, and upon frivolous occasions, apt to cry.
No beast in the world so much to be feared by man as man
Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning
Our fancy does what it will, both with itself and us
Owe ourselves chiefly and mostly to ourselves
Petulant madness contends with itself
Rage it puts them to oppose silence and coldness to their fury
Rash and incessant scolding runs into custom
Revenge, which afterwards produces a series of new cruelties
See how flexible our reason is
Seeming anger, for the better governing of my house
Shake the truth of our Church by the vices of her ministers
Take my last leave of every place I depart from
The gods sell us all the goods they give us
The storm is only begot by a concurrence of angers
Though nobody should read me, have I wasted time
Tis said of Epimenides, that he always prophesied backward
Tis then no longer correction, but revenge
Upon the precipice, ‘tis no matter who gave you the push
“When will this man be wise,” said he, “if he is yet learning?”
When you see me moved first, let me alone, right or wrong
Young are to make their preparations, the old to enjoy them
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 13.
XXXII. Defence of Seneca and Plutarch.
XXXIII. The story of Spurina.
XXXIV. Means to carry on a war according to Julius Caesar.
XXXV. Of three good women.
XXXVI. Of the most excellent men.
XXXVII. Of the resemblance of children to their fathers.
CHAPTER XXXII
DEFENCE OF SENECA AND PLUTARCH
The familiarity I have with these two authors, and the assistance they
have lent to my age and to my book, wholly compiled of what I have
borrowed from them, oblige me to stand up for their honour.
As to Seneca, amongst a million of little pamphlets that those of the
so-called reformed religion disperse abroad for the defence of their cause
(and which sometimes proceed from so good a hand, that ‘tis pity his pen
is not employed in a better subject), I have formerly seen one, that to
make up the parallel he would fain find out betwixt the government of our
late poor King Charles IX. and that of Nero, compares the late Cardinal
of Lorraine with Seneca; their fortunes, in having both of them been the
prime ministers in the government of their princes, and in their manners,
conditions, and deportments to have been very near alike. Wherein, in my
opinion, he does the said cardinal a very great honour; for though I am
one of those who have a very high esteem for his wit, eloquence, and zeal
to religion and the service of his king, and his good fortune to have
lived in an age wherein it was so novel, so rare, and also so necessary
for the public good to have an ecclesiastical person of such high birth
and dignity, and so sufficient and capable of his place; yet, to confess
the truth, I do not think his capacity by many degrees near to the other,
nor his virtue either so clean, entire, or steady as that of Seneca.
Now the book whereof I speak, to bring about its design, gives a very
injurious description of Seneca, having borrowed its approaches from Dion
the historian, whose testimony I do not at all believe for besides that
he is inconsistent, that after having called Seneca one while very wise,
and again a mortal enemy to Nero’s vices, makes him elsewhere avaricious,
an usurer, ambitious, effeminate, voluptuous, and a false pretender to
philosophy, his virtue appears so vivid and vigorous in his writings, and
his vindication is so clear from any of these imputations, as of his
riches and extraordinarily expensive way of living, that I cannot believe
any testimony to the contrary. And besides, it is much more reasonable
to believe the Roman historians in such things than Greeks and
foreigners. Now Tacitus and the rest speak very honourably both of his
life and death; and represent him to us a very excellent and virtuous
person in all things; and I will allege no other reproach against Dion’s
report but this, which I cannot avoid, namely, that he has so weak a
judgment in the Roman affairs, that he dares to maintain Julius Caesar’s
cause against Pompey [And so does this editor. D.W.], and that of Antony
against Cicero.
Let us now come to Plutarch: Jean Bodin is a good author of our times,
and a writer of much greater judgment than the rout of scribblers of his
age, and who deserves to be read and considered. I find him, though, a
little bold in this passage of his Method of history, where he accuses
Plutarch not only of ignorance (wherein I would have let him alone: for
that is beyond my criticism), but that he “often writes things
incredible, and absolutely fabulous “: these are his own words. If he
had simply said, that he had delivered things otherwise than they really
are, it had been no great reproach; for what we have not seen, we are
forced to receive from other hands, and take upon trust, and I see that
he purposely sometimes variously relates the same story; as the judgment
of the three best captains that ever were, given by Hannibal; ‘tis one
way in the Life of Flammius, and another in that of Pyrrhus. But to
charge him with having taken incredible and impossible things for current
pay, is to accuse the most judicious author in the world of want of
judgment. And this is his example; “as,” says he, “when he relates that
a Lacedaemonian boy suffered his bowels to be torn out by a fox-cub he
had stolen, and kept it still concealed under his coat till he fell down
dead, rather than he would discover his theft.” I find, in the first
place, this example ill chosen, forasmuch as it is very hard to limit the
power of the faculties of--the soul, whereas we have better authority to
limit and know the force of the bodily limbs; and therefore, if I had
been he, I should rather have chosen an example of this second sort; and
there are some of these less credible: and amongst others, that which he
refates of Pyrrhus, that “all wounded as he was, he struck one of his
enemies, who was armed from head to foot, so great a blow with his sword,
that he clave him down from his crown to his seat, so that the body was
divided into two parts.” In this example I find no great miracle, nor do
I admit the excuse with which he defends Plutarch, in having added these
words, “as ‘tis said,” to suspend our belief; for unless it be in things
received by authority, and the reverence to antiquity or religion, he
would never have himself admitted, or enjoined us to believe things
incredible in themselves; and that these words, “as ‘tis said,” are not
put in this place to that effect, is easy to be seen, because he
elsewhere relates to us, upon this subject, of the patience of the
Lacedaemonian children, examples happening in his time, more unlikely to
prevail upon our faith; as what Cicero has also testified before him, as
having, as he says, been upon the spot: that even to their times there
were children found who, in the trial of patience they were put to before
the altar of Diana, suffered themselves to be there whipped till the
blood ran down all over their bodies, not only without crying out, but
without so much as a groan, and some till they there voluntarily lost
their lives: and that which Plutarch also, amongst a hundred other
witnesses, relates, that at a sacrifice, a burning coal having fallen
into the sleeve of a Lacedaemonian boy, as he was censing, he suffered
his whole arm to be burned, till the smell of the broiling flesh was
perceived by those present. There was nothing, according to their
custom, wherein their reputation was more concerned, nor for which they
were to undergo more blame and disgrace, than in being taken in theft.
I am so fully satisfied of the greatness of those people, that this story
does not only not appear to me, as to Bodin, incredible; but I do not
find it so much as rare and strange. The Spartan history is full of a
thousand more cruel and rare examples; and is; indeed, all miracle in
this respect.
Marcellinus, concerning theft, reports that in his time there was no sort
of torments which could compel the Egyptians, when taken in this act,
though a people very much addicted to it, so much as to tell their name.
A Spanish peasant, being put to the rack as to the accomplices of the
murder of the Praetor Lucius Piso, cried out in the height of the
torment, “that his friends should not leave him, but look on in all
assurance, and that no pain had the power to force from him one word of
confession,” which was all they could get the first day. The next day,
as they were leading him a second time to another trial, strongly
disengaging himself from the hands of his guards, he furiously ran his
head against a wall, and beat out his brains.
Epicharis, having tired and glutted the cruelty of Nero’s satellites, and
undergone their fire, their beating, their racks, a whole day together,
without one syllable of confession of her conspiracy; being the next day
brought again to the rack, with her limbs almost torn to pieces, conveyed
the lace of her robe with a running noose over one of the arms of her
chair, and suddenly slipping her head into it, with the weight of her own
body hanged herself. Having the courage to die in that manner, is it not
to be presumed that she purposely lent her life to the trial of her
fortitude the day before, to mock the tyrant, and encourage others to the
like attempt?
And whoever will inquire of our troopers the experiences they have had in
our civil wars, will find effects of patience and obstinate resolution in
this miserable age of ours, and amongst this rabble even more effeminate
than the Egyptians, worthy to be compared with those we have just related
of the Spartan virtue.
I know there have been simple peasants amongst us who have endured the
soles of their feet to be broiled upon a gridiron, their finger-ends to
be crushed with the cock of a pistol, and their bloody eyes squeezed out
of their heads by force of a cord twisted about their brows, before they
would so much as consent to a ransom. I have seen one left stark naked
for dead in a ditch, his neck black and swollen, with a halter yet about
it with which they had dragged him all night at a horse’s tail, his body
wounded in a hundred places, with stabs of daggers that had been given
him, not to kill him, but to put him to pain and to affright him, who had
endured all this, and even to being speechless and insensible, resolved,
as he himself told me, rather to die a thousand deaths (as indeed, as to
matter of suffering, he had borne one) before he would promise anything;
and yet he was one of the richest husbandmen of all the country. How
many have been seen patiently to suffer themselves to be burnt and
roasted for opinions taken upon trust from others, and by them not at all
understood? I have known a hundred and a hundred women (for Gascony has
a certain prerogative for obstinacy) whom you might sooner have made eat
fire than forsake an opinion they had conceived in anger. They are all
the more exasperated by blows and constraint. And he that made the story
of the woman who, in defiance of all correction, threats, and
bastinadoes, ceased not to call her husband lousy knave, and who being
plunged over head and ears in water, yet lifted her hands above her head
and made a sign of cracking lice, feigned a tale of which, in truth, we
every day see a manifest image in the obstinacy of women. And obstinacy
is the sister of constancy, at least in vigour and stability.
We are not to judge what is possible and what is not, according to what
is credible and incredible to our apprehension, as I have said elsewhere
and it is a great fault, and yet one that most men are guilty of, which,
nevertheless, I do not mention with any reflection upon Bodin, to make a
difficulty of believing that in another which they could not or would not
do themselves. Every one thinks that the sovereign stamp of human nature
is imprinted in him, and that from it all others must take their rule;
and that all proceedings which are not like his are feigned and false.
Is anything of another’s actions or faculties proposed to him? the first
thing he calls to the consultation of his judgment is his own example;
and as matters go with him, so they must of necessity do with all the
world besides dangerous and intolerable folly! For my part, I consider
some men as infinitely beyond me, especially amongst the ancients, and
yet, though I clearly discern my inability to come near them by a
thousand paces, I do not forbear to keep them in sight, and to judge of
what so elevates them, of which I perceive some seeds in myself, as I
also do of the extreme meanness of some other minds, which I neither am
astonished at nor yet misbelieve. I very well perceive the turns those
great souls take to raise themselves to such a pitch, and admire their
grandeur; and those flights that I think the bravest I could be glad to
imitate; where, though I want wing, yet my judgment readily goes along
with them. The other example he introduces of “things incredible and
wholly fabulous,” delivered by Plutarch, is, that “Agesilaus was fined by
the Ephori for having wholly engrossed the hearts and affections of his
citizens to himself alone.” And herein I do not see what sign of falsity
is to be found: clearly Plutarch speaks of things that must needs be
better known to him than to us; and it was no new thing in Greece to see
men punished and exiled for this very thing, for being too acceptable to
the people; witness the Ostracism and Petalism.--[Ostracism at Athens
was banishment for ten years; petalism at Syracuse was banishment for
five years.]
There is yet in this place another accusation laid against Plutarch which
I cannot well digest, where Bodin says that he has sincerely paralleled
Romans with Romans, and Greeks amongst themselves, but not Romans with
Greeks; witness, says he, Demosthenes and Cicero, Cato and Aristides,
Sylla and Lysander, Marcellus and Pelopidas, Pompey and Agesilaus,
holding that he has favoured the Greeks in giving them so unequal
companions. This is really to attack what in Plutarch is most excellent
and most to be commended; for in his parallels (which is the most
admirable part of all his works, and with which, in my opinion, he is
himself the most pleased) the fidelity and sincerity of his judgments
equal their depth and weight; he is a philosopher who teaches us virtue.
Let us see whether we cannot defend him from this reproach of falsity and
prevarication. All that I can imagine could give occasion to this
censure is the great and shining lustre of the Roman names which we have
in our minds; it does not seem likely to us that Demosthenes could rival
the glory of a consul, proconsul, and proctor of that great Republic; but
if a man consider the truth of the thing, and the men in themselves,
which is Plutarch’s chiefest aim, and will rather balance their manners,
their natures, and parts, than their fortunes, I think, contrary to
Bodin, that Cicero and the elder Cato come far short of the men with whom
they are compared. I should sooner, for his purpose, have chosen the
example of the younger Cato compared with Phocion, for in this couple
there would have been a more likely disparity, to the Roman’s advantage.
As to Marcellus, Sylla, and Pompey, I very well discern that their
exploits of war are greater and more full of pomp and glory than those of
the Greeks, whom Plutarch compares with them; but the bravest and most
virtuous actions any more in war than elsewhere, are not always the most
renowned. I often see the names of captains obscured by the splendour of
other names of less desert; witness Labienus, Ventidius, Telesinus, and
several others. And to take it by that, were I to complain on the behalf
of the Greeks, could I not say, that Camillus was much less comparable to
Themistocles, the Gracchi to Agis and Cleomenes, and Numa to Lycurgus?
But ‘tis folly to judge, at one view, of things that have so many
aspects. When Plutarch compares them, he does not, for all that, make
them equal; who could more learnedly and sincerely have marked their
distinctions? Does he parallel the victories, feats of arms, the force
of the armies conducted by Pompey, and his triumphs, with those of
Agesilaus? “I do not believe,” says he, “that Xenophon himself, if he
were now living, though he were allowed to write whatever pleased him to
the advantage of Agesilaus, would dare to bring them into comparison.”
Does he speak of paralleling Lysander to Sylla. “There is,” says he,
“no comparison, either in the number of victories or in the hazard of
battles, for Lysander only gained two naval battles.” This is not to
derogate from the Romans; for having only simply named them with the
Greeks, he can have done them no injury, what disparity soever there may
be betwixt them and Plutarch does not entirely oppose them to one
another; there is no preference in general; he only compares the pieces
and circumstances one after another, and gives of every one a particular
and separate judgment. Wherefore, if any one could convict him of
partiality, he ought to pick out some one of those particular judgments,
or say, in general, that he was mistaken in comparing such a Greek to
such a Roman, when there were others more fit and better resembling to
parallel him to.
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE STORY OF SPURINA
Philosophy thinks she has not ill employed her talent when she has given
the sovereignty of the soul and the authority of restraining our
appetites to reason. Amongst which, they who judge that there is none
more violent than those which spring from love, have this opinion also,
that they seize both body and soul, and possess the whole man, so that
even health itself depends upon them, and medicine is sometimes
constrained to pimp for them; but one might, on the contrary, also say,
that the mixture of the body brings an abatement and weakening; for such
desires are subject to satiety, and capable of material remedies.
Many, being determined to rid their soul from the continual alarms of
this appetite, have made use of incision and amputation of the rebelling
members; others have subdued their force and ardour by the frequent
application of cold things, as snow and vinegar. The sackcloths of our
ancestors were for this purpose, which is cloth woven of horse hair, of
which some of them made shirts, and others girdles, to torture and
correct their reins. A prince, not long ago, told me that in his youth
upon a solemn festival in the court of King Francis I., where everybody
was finely dressed, he would needs put on his father’s hair shirt, which
was still kept in the house; but how great soever his devotion was, he
had not patience to wear it till night, and was sick a long time after;
adding withal, that he did not think there could be any youthful heat so
fierce that the use of this recipe would not mortify, and yet perhaps he
never essayed the most violent; for experience shows us, that such
emotions are often seen under rude and slovenly clothes, and that a hair
shirt does not always render those chaste who wear it.
Xenocrates proceeded with greater rigour in this affair; for his
disciples, to make trial of his continency, having slipt Lais, that
beautiful and famous courtesan, into his bed, quite naked, excepting the
arms of her beauty and her wanton allurements, her philters, finding
that, in despite of his reason and philosophical rules, his unruly flesh
began to mutiny, he caused those members of his to be burned that he
found consenting to this rebellion. Whereas the passions which wholly
reside in the soul, as ambition, avarice, and the rest, find the reason
much more to do, because it cannot there be helped but by its own means;
neither are those appetites capable of satiety, but grow sharper and
increase by fruition.
The sole example of Julius Caesar may suffice to demonstrate to us the
disparity of these appetites; for never was man more addicted to amorous
delights than he: of which one testimony is the peculiar care he had of
his person, to such a degree, as to make use of the most lascivious means
to that end then in use, as to have all the hairs of his body twitched
off, and to wipe all over with perfumes with the extremest nicety.
And he was a beautiful person in himself, of a fair complexion, tall,
and sprightly, full faced, with quick hazel eyes, if we may believe
Suetonius; for the statues of him that we see at Rome do not in all
points answer this description. Besides his wives, whom he four times
changed, without reckoning the amours of his boyhood with Nicomedes, king
of Bithynia, he had the maidenhead of the renowned Cleopatra, queen of
Egypt; witness the little Caesario whom he had by her. He also made love
to. Eunoe, queen of Mauritania, and at Rome, to Posthumia, the wife of
Servius Sulpitius; to Lollia, the wife of Gabinius to Tertulla, the wife
of Crassus, and even to Mutia, wife to the great Pompey: which was the
reason, the Roman historians say, that she was repudiated by her husband,
which Plutarch confesses to be more than he knew; and the Curios, both
father and son, afterwards reproached Pompey, when he married Caesar’s
daughter, that he had made himself son-in-law to a man who had made him
cuckold, and one whom he himself was wont to call AEgisthus. Besides all
these, he entertained Servilia, Cato’s sister and mother to Marcus
Brutus, whence, every one believes, proceeded the great affection he had
to Brutus, by reason that he was born at a time when it was likely he
might be his son. So that I have reason, methinks, to take him for a man
extremely given to this debauch, and of very amorous constitution. But
the other passion of ambition, with which he was infinitely smitten,
arising in him to contend with the former, it was boon compelled to give
way.
And here calling to mind Mohammed, who won Constantinople, and finally
exterminated the Grecian name, I do not know where these two were so
evenly balanced; equally an indefatigable lecher and soldier: but where
they both meet in his life and jostle one another, the quarrelling
passion always gets the better of the amorous one, and this though it was
out of its natural season never regained an absolute sovereignty over the
other till he had arrived at an extreme old age and unable to undergo the
fatigues of war.
What is related for a contrary example of Ladislaus, king of Naples, is
very remarkable; that being a great captain, valiant and ambitious, he
proposed to himself for the principal end of his ambition, the execution
of his pleasure and the enjoyment of some rare and excellent beauty. His
death sealed up all the rest: for having by a close and tedious siege
reduced the city of Florence to so great distress that the inhabitants
were compelled to capitulate about surrender, he was content to let them
alone, provided they would deliver up to him a beautiful maid he had
heard of in their city; they were forced to yield to it, and by a private
injury to avert the public ruin. She was the daughter of a famous
physician of his time, who, finding himself involved in so foul a
necessity, resolved upon a high attempt. As every one was lending a hand
to trick up his daughter and to adorn her with ornaments and jewels to
render her more agreeable to this new lover, he also gave her a
handkerchief most richly wrought, and of an exquisite perfume, an
implement they never go without in those parts, which she was to make use
of at their first approaches. This handkerchief, poisoned with his
greatest art, coming to be rubbed between the chafed flesh and open
pores, both of the one and the other, so suddenly infused the poison,
that immediately converting their warm into a cold sweat they presently
died in one another’s arms.
But I return to Caesar. His pleasures never made him steal one minute of
an hour, nor go one step aside from occasions that might any way conduce
to his advancement. This passion was so sovereign in him over all the
rest, and with so absolute authority possessed his soul, that it guided
him at pleasure. In truth, this troubles me, when, as to everything
else, I consider the greatness of this man, and the wonderful parts
wherewith he was endued; learned to that degree in all sorts of knowledge
that there is hardly any one science of which he has not written; so
great an orator that many have preferred his eloquence to that of Cicero,
and he, I conceive, did not think himself inferior to him in that
particular, for his two anti-Catos were written to counterbalance the
elocution that Cicero had expended in his Cato. As to the rest, was ever
soul so vigilant, so active, and so patient of labour as his? and,
doubtless, it was embellished with many rare seeds of virtue, lively,
natural, and not put on; he was singularly sober; so far from being
delicate in his diet, that Oppius relates, how that having one day at
table set before him medicated instead of common oil in some sauce, he
ate heartily of it, that he might not put his entertainer out of
countenance. Another time he caused his baker to be whipped for serving
him with a finer than ordinary sort of bread. Cato himself was wont to
say of him, that he was the first sober man who ever made it his business
to ruin his country. And as to the same Cato’s calling, him one day
drunkard, it fell out thus being both of them in the Senate, at a time
when Catiline’s conspiracy was in question of which was Caesar was
suspected, one came and brought him a letter sealed up. Cato believing
that it was something the conspirators gave him notice of, required him
to deliver into his hand, which Caesar was constrained to do to avoid
further suspicion. It was by chance a love-letter that Servilia, Cato’s
sister, had written to him, which Cato having read, he threw it back to
him saying, “There, drunkard.” This, I say, was rather a word of disdain
and anger than an express reproach of this vice, as we often rate those
who anger us with the first injurious words that come into our mouths,
though nothing due to those we are offended at; to which may be added
that the vice with which Cato upbraided him is wonderfully near akin to
that wherein he had surprised Caesar; for Bacchus and Venus, according to
the proverb, very willingly agree; but to me Venus is much more sprightly
accompanied by sobriety. The examples of his sweetness and clemency to
those by whom he had been offended are infinite; I mean, besides those he
gave during the time of the civil wars, which, as plainly enough appears
by his writings, he practised to cajole his enemies, and to make them
less afraid of his future dominion and victory. But I must also say,
that if these examples are not sufficient proofs of his natural
sweetness, they, at least, manifest a marvellous confidence and grandeur
of courage in this person. He has often been known to dismiss whole
armies, after having overcome them, to his enemies, without ransom, or
deigning so much as to bind them by oath, if not to favour him, at least
no more to bear arms against him; he has three or four times taken some
of Pompey’s captains prisoners, and as often set them at liberty. Pompey
declared all those to be enemies who did not follow him to the war; he
proclaimed all those to be his friends who sat still and did not actually
take arms against him. To such captains of his as ran away from him to
go over to the other side, he sent, moreover, their arms, horses, and
equipage: the cities he had taken by force he left at full liberty to
follow which side they pleased, imposing no other garrison upon them but
the memory of his gentleness and clemency. He gave strict and express
charge, the day of his great battle of Pharsalia, that, without the
utmost necessity, no one should lay a hand upon the citizens of Rome.
These, in my opinion, were very hazardous proceedings, and ‘tis no wonder
if those in our civil war, who, like him, fight against the ancient
estate of their country, do not follow his example; they are
extraordinary means, and that only appertain to Caesar’s fortune, and to
his admirable foresight in the conduct of affairs. When I consider the
incomparable grandeur of his soul, I excuse victory that it could not
disengage itself from him, even in so unjust and so wicked a cause.
To return to his clemency: we have many striking examples in the time of
his government, when, all things being reduced to his power, he had no
more written against him which he had as sharply answered: yet he did not
soon after forbear to use his interest to make him consul. Caius Calvus,
who had composed several injurious epigrams against him, having employed
many of his friends to mediate a reconciliation with him, Caesar
voluntarily persuaded himself to write first to him. And our good
Catullus, who had so rudely ruffled him under the name of Mamurra, coming
to offer his excuses to him, he made the same day sit at his table.
Having intelligence of some who spoke ill of him, he did no more, but
only by a public oration declare that he had notice of it. He still less
feared his enemies than he hated them; some conspiracies and cabals that
were made against his life being discovered to him, he satisfied himself
in publishing by proclamation that they were known to him, without
further prosecuting the conspirators.
As to the respect he had for his friends: Caius Oppius, being with him
upon a journey, and finding himself ill, he left him the only lodging he
had for himself, and lay all night upon a hard ground in the open air.
As to what concerns his justice, he put a beloved servant of his to death
for lying with a noble Roman’s wife, though there was no complaint made.
Never had man more moderation in his victory, nor more resolution in his
adverse fortune.
But all these good inclinations were stifled and spoiled by his furious
ambition, by which he suffered himself to be so transported and misled
that one may easily maintain that this passion was the rudder of all his
actions; of a liberal man, it made him a public thief to supply this
bounty and profusion, and made him utter this vile and unjust saying,
“That if the most wicked and profligate persons in the world had been
faithful in serving him towards his advancement, he would cherish and
prefer them to the utmost of his power, as much as the best of men.”
It intoxicated him with so excessive a vanity, as to dare to boast in the
presence of his fellow-citizens, that he had made the great commonwealth
of Rome a name without form and without body; and to say that his answers
for the future should stand for laws; and also to receive the body of the
Senate coming to him, sitting; to suffer himself to be adored, and to
have divine honours paid to him in his own presence. To conclude, this
sole vice, in my opinion, spoiled in him the most rich and beautiful
nature that ever was, and has rendered his name abominable to all good
men, in that he would erect his glory upon the ruins of his country and
the subversion of the greatest and most flourishing republic the world
shall ever see.
There might, on the contrary, many examples be produced of great men whom
pleasures have made to neglect the conduct of their affairs, as Mark
Antony and others; but where love and ambition should be in equal
balance, and come to jostle with equal forces, I make no doubt but the
last would win the prize.
To return to my subject: ‘tis much to bridle our appetites by the
argument of reason, or, by violence, to contain our members within their
duty; but to lash ourselves for our neighbour’s interest, and not only to
divest ourselves of the charming passion that tickles us, of the pleasure
we feel in being agreeable to others, and courted and beloved of every
one, but also to conceive a hatred against the graces that produce that
effect, and to condemn our beauty because it inflames others; of this, I
confess, I have met with few examples. But this is one. Spurina, a
young man of Tuscany:
“Qualis gemma micat, fulvum quae dividit aurum,
Aut collo decus, aut cupiti: vel quale per artem
Inclusum buxo aut Oricia terebintho
Lucet ebur,”
[“As a gem shines enchased in yellow gold, or an ornament on the
neck or head, or as ivory has lustre, set by art in boxwood or
Orician ebony.”--AEneid, x. 134.]
being endowed with a singular beauty, and so excessive, that the chastest
eyes could not chastely behold its rays; not contenting himself with
leaving so much flame and fever as he everywhere kindled without relief,
entered into a furious spite against himself and those great endowments
nature had so liberally conferred upon him, as if a man were responsible
to himself for the faults of others, and purposely slashed and
disfigured, with many wounds and scars, the perfect symmetry and
proportion that nature had so curiously imprinted in his face. To give
my free opinion, I more admire than honour such actions: such excesses
are enemies to my rules. The design was conscientious and good, but
certainly a little defective in prudence. What if his deformity served
afterwards to make others guilty of the sin of hatred or contempt; or of
envy at the glory of so rare a recommendation; or of calumny,
interpreting this humour a mad ambition! Is there any form from which
vice cannot, if it will, extract occasion to exercise itself, one way or
another? It had been more just, and also more noble, to have made of
these gifts of God a subject of exemplary regularity and virtue.
They who retire themselves from the common offices, from that infinite
number of troublesome rules that fetter a man of exact honesty in civil
life, are in my opinion very discreet, what peculiar sharpness of
constraint soever they impose upon themselves in so doing. ‘Tis in some
sort a kind of dying to avoid the pain of living well. They may have
another reward; but the reward of difficulty I fancy they can never have;
nor, in uneasiness, that there can be anything more or better done than
the keeping oneself upright amid the waves of the world, truly and
exactly performing all parts of our duty. ‘Tis, peradventure, more easy
to keep clear of the sex than to maintain one’s self aright in all points
in the society of a wife; and a man may with less trouble adapt himself
to entire abstinence than to the due dispensation of abundance. Use,
carried on according to reason, has in it more of difficulty than
abstinence; moderation is a virtue that gives more work than suffering;
the well living of Scipio has a thousand fashions, that of Diogenes but
one; this as much excels the ordinary lives in innocence as the most
accomplished excel them in utility and force.
CHAPTER XXXIV
OBSERVATION ON THE MEANS TO CARRY ON A WAR ACCORDING TO JULIUS CAESAR
‘Tis related of many great leaders that they have had certain books in
particular esteem, as Alexander the Great, Homer; Scipio Africanus,
Xenophon; Marcus Brutus, Polybius; Charles V., Philip’de Comines; and
‘tis said that, in our times, Machiavelli is elsewhere still in repute;
but the late Marshal Strozzi, who had taken Caesar for his man, doubtless
made the best choice, seeing that it indeed ought to be the breviary of
every soldier, as being the true and sovereign pattern of the military
art. And, moreover, God knows with that grace and beauty he has
embellished that rich matter, with so pure, delicate, and perfect
expression, that, in my opinion, there are no writings in the world
comparable to his, as to that business.
I will set down some rare and particular passages of his wars that remain
in my memory.
His army, being in some consternation upon the rumour that was spread of
the great forces that king Juba was leading against him, instead of
abating the apprehension which his soldiers had conceived at the news and
of lessening to them the forces of the enemy, having called them all
together to encourage and reassure them, he took a quite contrary way to
what we are used to do, for he told them that they need no more trouble
themselves with inquiring after the enemy’s forces, for that he was
certainly informed thereof, and then told them of a number much
surpassing both the truth and the report that was current in his army;
following the advice of Cyrus in Xenophon, forasmuch as the deception is
not of so great importance to find an enemy weaker than we expected, than
to find him really very strong, after having been made to believe that he
was weak.
It was always his use to accustom his soldiers simply to obey, without
taking upon them to control, or so much as to speak of their captain’s
designs, which he never communicated to them but upon the point of
execution; and he took a delight, if they discovered anything of what he
intended, immediately to change his orders to deceive them; and to that
purpose, would often, when he had assigned his quarters in a place, pass
forward and lengthen his day’s march, especially if it was foul and rainy
weather.
The Swiss, in the beginning of his wars in Gaul, having sent to him to
demand a free passage over the Roman territories, though resolved to
hinder them by force, he nevertheless spoke kindly to the messengers, and
took some respite to return an answer, to make use of that time for the
calling his army together. These silly people did not know how good a
husband he was of his time: for he often repeats that it is the best part
of a captain to know how to make use of occasions, and his diligence in
his exploits is, in truth, unheard of and incredible.
If he was not very conscientious in taking advantage of an enemy under
colour of a treaty of agreement, he was as little so in this, that he
required no other virtue in a soldier but valour only, and seldom
punished any other faults but mutiny and disobedience. He would often
after his victories turn them loose to all sorts of licence, dispensing
them for some time from the rules of military discipline, saying withal
that he had soldiers so well trained up that, powdered and perfumed, they
would run furiously to the fight. In truth, he loved to have them richly
armed, and made them wear engraved, gilded, and damasked armour, to the
end that the care of saving it might engage them to a more obstinate
defence. Speaking to them, he called them by the name of
fellow-soldiers, which we yet use; which his successor, Augustus,
reformed, supposing he had only done it upon necessity, and to cajole
those who merely followed him as volunteers:
“Rheni mihi Caesar in undis
Dux erat; hic socius; facinus quos inquinat, aequat:”
[“In the waters of the Rhine Caesar was my general; here at Rome he
is my fellow. Crime levels those whom it polluted.”
--Lucan, v. 289.]
but that this carriage was too mean and low for the dignity of an emperor
and general of an army, and therefore brought up the custom of calling
them soldiers only.
With this courtesy Caesar mixed great severity to keep them in awe; the
ninth legion having mutinied near Placentia, he ignominiously cashiered
them, though Pompey was then yet on foot, and received them not again to
grace till after many supplications; he quieted them more by authority
and boldness than by gentle ways.
In that place where he speaks of his, passage over the Rhine to Germany,
he says that, thinking it unworthy of the honour of the Roman people to
waft over his army in vessels, he built a bridge that they might pass
over dry-foot. There it was that he built that wonderful bridge of which
he gives so particular a description; for he nowhere so willingly dwells
upon his actions as in representing to us the subtlety of his inventions
in such kind of handiwork.
I have also observed this, that he set a great value upon his
exhortations to the soldiers before the fight; for where he would show
that he was either surprised or reduced to a necessity of fighting, he
always brings in this, that he had not so much as leisure to harangue his
army. Before that great battle with those of Tournay, “Caesar,” says he,
“having given order for everything else, presently ran where fortune
carried him to encourage his people, and meeting with the tenth legion,
had no more time to say anything to them but this, that they should
remember their wonted valour; not to be astonished, but bravely sustain
the enemy’s encounter; and seeing the enemy had already approached within
a dart’s cast, he gave the signal for battle; and going suddenly thence
elsewhere, to encourage others, he found that they were already engaged.”
Here is what he tells us in that place. His tongue, indeed, did him
notable service upon several occasions, and his military eloquence was,
in his own time, so highly reputed, that many of his army wrote down his
harangues as he spoke them, by which means there were volumes of them
collected that existed a long time after him. He had so particular a
grace in speaking, that his intimates, and Augustus amongst others,
hearing those orations read, could distinguish even to the phrases and
words that were not his.
The first time that he went out of Rome with any public command, he
arrived in eight days at the river Rhone, having with him in his coach a
secretary or two before him who were continually writing, and him who
carried his sword behind him. And certainly, though a man did nothing
but go on, he could hardly attain that promptitude with which, having
been everywhere victorious in Gaul, he left it, and, following Pompey to
Brundusium, in eighteen days’ time he subdued all Italy; returned from
Brundusium to Rome; from Rome went into the very heart of Spain, where he
surmounted extreme difficulties in the war against Afranius and Petreius,
and in the long siege of Marseilles; thence he returned into Macedonia,
beat the Roman army at Pharsalia, passed thence in pursuit of Pompey into
Egypt, which he also subdued; from Egypt he went into Syria and the
territories of Pontus, where he fought Pharnaces; thence into Africa,
where he defeated Scipio and Juba; again returned through Italy, where he
defeated Pompey’s sons:
“Ocyor et coeli fiammis, et tigride foeta.”
[“Swifter than lightning, or the cub-bearing tigress.”
--Lucan, v. 405]
“Ac veluti montis saxum de, vertice praeceps
Cum ruit avulsum vento, seu turbidus imber
Proluit, aut annis solvit sublapsa vetustas,
Fertur in abruptum magno mons improbus actu,
Exultatque solo, silvas, armenta, virosque,
Involvens secum.”
[“And as a stone torn from the mountain’s top by the wind or rain
torrents, or loosened by age, falls massive with mighty force,
bounds here and there, in its course sweeps from the earth with it
woods, herds, and men.”--AEneid, xii. 684.]
Speaking of the siege of Avaricum, he says, that it, was his custom to be
night and day with the pioneers.--[Engineers. D.W.]--In all enterprises
of consequence he always reconnoitred in person, and never brought his
army into quarters till he had first viewed the place, and, if we may
believe Suetonius, when he resolved to pass over into England, he was the
first man that sounded the passage.
He was wont to say that he more valued a victory obtained by counsel than
by force, and in the war against Petreius and Afranius, fortune
presenting him with an occasion of manifest advantage, he declined it,
saying, that he hoped, with a little more time, but less hazard, to
overthrow his enemies. He there also played a notable part in commanding
his whole army to pass the river by swimming, without any manner of
necessity:
“Rapuitque ruens in praelia miles,
Quod fugiens timuisset, iter; mox uda receptis
Membra fovent armis, gelidosque a gurgite, cursu
Restituunt artus.”
[“The soldier rushing through a way to fight which he would have
been afraid to have taken in flight: then with their armour they
cover wet limbs, and by running restore warmth to their numbed
joints.”--Lucan, iv. 151.]
I find him a little more temperate and considerate in his enterprises
than Alexander, for this man seems to seek and run headlong upon dangers
like an impetuous torrent which attacks and rushes against everything it
meets, without choice or discretion;
“Sic tauriformis volvitur Aufidus;
Qui regna Dauni perfluit Appuli,
Dum saevit, horrendamque cultis
Diluviem meditatur agris;”
[“So the biforked Aufidus, which flows through the realm of the
Apulian Daunus, when raging, threatens a fearful deluge to the
tilled ground.”--Horat., Od., iv. 14, 25.]
and, indeed, he was a general in the flower and first heat of his youth,
whereas Caesar took up the trade at a ripe and well advanced age; to
which may be added that Alexander was of a more sanguine, hot, and
choleric constitution, which he also inflamed with wine, from which
Caesar was very abstinent.
But where necessary occasion required, never did any man venture his
person more than he: so much so, that for my part, methinks I read in
many of his exploits a determinate resolution to throw himself away to
avoid the shame of being overcome. In his great battle with those of
Tournay, he charged up to the head of the enemies without his shield,
just as he was seeing the van of his own army beginning to give ground’;
which also several other times befell him. Hearing that his people were
besieged, he passed through the enemy’s army in disguise to go and
encourage them with his presence. Having crossed over to Dyrrachium with
very slender forces, and seeing the remainder of his army which he had
left to Antony’s conduct slow in following him, he undertook alone to
repass the sea in a very great storms and privately stole away to fetch
the rest of his forces, the ports on the other side being seized by
Pompey, and the whole sea being in his possession. And as to what he
performed by force of hand, there are many exploits that in hazard exceed
all the rules of war; for with how small means did he undertake to subdue
the kingdom of Egypt, and afterwards to attack the forces of Scipio and
Juba, ten times greater than his own? These people had, I know not what,
more than human confidence in their fortune; and he was wont to say that
men must embark, and not deliberate, upon high enterprises. After the
battle of Pharsalia, when he had sent his army away before him into Asia,
and was passing in one single vessel the strait of the Hellespont, he met
Lucius Cassius at sea with ten tall men-of-war, when he had the courage
not only to stay his coming, but to sail up to him and summon him to
yield, which he did.
Having undertaken that furious siege of Alexia, where there were
fourscore thousand men in garrison, all Gaul being in arms to raise the
siege and having set an army on foot of a hundred and nine thousand
horse, and of two hundred and forty thousand foot, what a boldness and
vehement confidence was it in him that he would not give over his
attempt, but resolved upon two so great difficulties--which nevertheless
he overcame; and, after having won that great battle against those
without, soon reduced those within to his mercy. The same happened to
Lucullus at the siege of Tigranocerta against King Tigranes, but the
condition of the enemy was not the same, considering the effeminacy of
those with whom Lucullus had to deal. I will here set down two rare and
extraordinary events concerning this siege of Alexia; one, that the Gauls
having drawn their powers together to encounter Caesar, after they had
made a general muster of all their forces, resolved in their council of
war to dismiss a good part of this great multitude, that they might not
fall into confusion. This example of fearing to be too many is new; but,
to take it right, it stands to reason that the body of an army should be
of a moderate greatness, and regulated to certain bounds, both out of
respect to the difficulty of providing for them, and the difficulty of
governing and keeping them in order. At least it is very easy to make it
appear by example that armies monstrous in number have seldom done
anything to purpose. According to the saying of Cyrus in Xenophon,
“‘Tis not the number of men, but the number of good men, that gives the
advantage”: the remainder serving rather to trouble than assist. And
Bajazet principally grounded his resolution of giving Tamerlane battle,
contrary to the opinion of all his captains, upon this, that his enemies
numberless number of men gave him assured hopes of confusion.
Scanderbeg, a very good and expert judge in such matters, was wont to say
that ten or twelve thousand reliable fighting men were sufficient to a
good leader to secure his regulation in all sorts of military occasions.
The other thing I will here record, which seems to be contrary both to
the custom and rules of war, is, that Vercingetorix, who was made general
of all the parts of the revolted Gaul, should go shut up himself in
Alexia: for he who has the command of a whole country ought never to shut
himself up but in case of such last extremity that the only place he has
left is in concern, and that the only hope he has left is in the defence
of that city; otherwise he ought to keep himself always at liberty, that
he may have the means to provide, in general, for all parts of his
government.
To return to Caesar. He grew, in time, more slow and more considerate,
as his friend Oppius witnesses: conceiving that he ought not lightly to
hazard the glory of so many victories, which one blow of fortune might
deprive him of. ‘Tis what the Italians say, when they would reproach the
rashness and foolhardiness of young people, calling them Bisognosi
d’onore, “necessitous of honour,” and that being in so great a want and
dearth of reputation, they have reason to seek it at what price soever,
which they ought not to do who have acquired enough already. There may
reasonably be some moderation, some satiety, in this thirst and appetite
of glory, as well as in other things: and there are enough people who
practise it.
He was far remote from the religious scruples of the ancient Romans, who
would never prevail in their wars but by dint of pure and simple valour;
and yet he was more conscientious than we should be in these days, and
did not approve all sorts of means to obtain a victory. In the war
against Ariovistus, whilst he was parleying with him, there happened some
commotion between the horsemen, which was occasioned by the fault of
Ariovistus’ light horse, wherein, though Caesar saw he had a very great
advantage of the enemy, he would make no use on’t, lest he should have
been reproached with a treacherous proceeding.
He was always wont to wear rich garments, and of a shining colour in
battle, that he might be the more remarkable and better observed.
He always carried a stricter and tighter hand over his soldiers when near
an enemy. When the ancient Greeks would accuse any one of extreme
insufficiency, they would say, in common proverb, that he could neither
read nor swim; he was of the same opinion, that swimming was of great use
in war, and himself found it so; for when he had to use diligence, he
commonly swam over the rivers in his way; for he loved to march on foot,
as also did Alexander the Great. Being in Egypt forced, to save himself,
to go into a little boat, and so many people leaping in with him that it
was in danger of sinking, he chose rather to commit himself to the sea,
and swam to his fleet, which lay two hundred paces off, holding in his
left hand his tablets, and drawing his coatarmour in his teeth, that it
might not fall into the enemy’s hand, and at this time he was of a pretty
advanced age.
Never had any general so much credit with his soldiers: in the beginning
of the civil wars, his centurions offered him to find every one a
man-at-arms at his own charge, and the foot soldiers to serve him at
their own expense; those who were most at their ease, moreover,
undertaking to defray the more necessitous. The late Admiral Chastillon
[Gaspard de Coligny, assassinated in the St. Bartholomew
massacre, 24th August 1572.]
showed us the like example in our civil wars; for the French of his army
provided money out of their own purses to pay the foreigners that were
with him. There are but rarely found examples of so ardent and so ready
an affection amongst the soldiers of elder times, who kept themselves
strictly to their rules of war: passion has a more absolute command over
us than reason; and yet it happened in the war against Hannibal, that by
the example of the people of Rome in the city, the soldiers and captains
refused their pay in the army, and in Marcellus’ camp those were branded
with the name of Mercenaries who would receive any. Having got the worst
of it near Dyrrachium, his soldiers came and offered themselves to be
chastised and punished, so that there was more need to comfort than
reprove them. One single cohort of his withstood four of Pompey’s
legions above four hours together, till they were almost all killed with
arrows, so that there were a hundred and thirty thousand shafts found in
the trenches. A soldier called Scaeva, who commanded at one of the
avenues, invincibly maintained his ground, having lost an eye, with one
shoulder and one thigh shot through, and his shield hit in two hundred
and thirty places. It happened that many of his soldiers being taken
prisoners, rather chose to die than promise to join the contrary side.
Granius Petronius was taken by Scipio in Africa: Scipio having put the
rest to death, sent him word that he gave him his life, for he was a man
of quality and quaestor, to whom Petronius sent answer back, that
Caesar’s soldiers were wont to give others their life, and not to receive
it; and immediately with his own hand killed himself.
Of their fidelity there are infinite examples amongst them, that which
was done by those who were besieged in Salona, a city that stood for
Caesar against Pompey, is not, for the rarity of an accident that there
happened, to be forgotten. Marcus Octavius kept them close besieged;
they within being reduced to the extremest necessity of all things, so
that to supply the want of men, most of them being either slain or
wounded, they had manumitted all their slaves, and had been constrained
to cut off all the women’s hair to make ropes for their war engines,
besides a wonderful dearth of victuals, and yet continuing resolute never
to yield. After having drawn the siege to a great length, by which
Octavius was grown more negligent and less attentive to his enterprise,
they made choice of one day about noon, and having first placed the women
and children upon the walls to make a show, sallied upon the besiegers
with such fury, that having routed the first, second, and third body, and
afterwards the fourth, and the rest, and beaten them all out of their
trenches, they pursued them even to their ships, and Octavius himself was
fain to fly to Dyrrachium, where Pompey lay. I do not at present
remember that I have met with any other example where the besieged ever
gave the besieger a total defeat and won the field, nor that a sortie
ever achieved the result of a pure and entire victory.
CHAPTER XXXV
OF THREE GOOD WOMEN
They are not by the dozen, as every one knows, and especially in the
duties of marriage, for that is a bargain full of so many nice
circumstances that ‘tis hard a woman’s will should long endure such a
restraint; men, though their condition be something better under that
tie, have yet enough to do. The true touch and test of a happy marriage
have respect to the time of the companionship, if it has been constantly
gentle, loyal, and agreeable. In our age, women commonly reserve the
publication of their good offices, and their vehement affection towards
their husbands, until they have lost them, or at least, till then defer
the testimonies of their good will; a too slow testimony and
unseasonable. By it they rather manifest that they never loved them till
dead: their life is nothing but trouble; their death full of love and
courtesy. As fathers conceal their affection from their children, women,
likewise, conceal theirs from their husbands, to maintain a modest
respect. This mystery is not for my palate; ‘tis to much purpose that
they scratch themselves and tear their hair. I whisper in a
waiting-woman’s or secretary’s ear: “How were they, how did they live
together?” I always have that good saying m my head:
“Jactantius moerent, quae minus dolent.”
[“They make the most ado who are least concerned.” (Or:)
“They mourn the more ostentatiously, the less they grieve.”
--Tacitus, Annal., ii. 77, writing of Germanicus.]
Their whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead. We
should willingly give them leave to laugh after we are dead, provided
they will smile upon us whilst we are alive. Is it not enough to make a
man revive in pure spite, that she, who spat in my face whilst I was in
being, shall come to kiss my feet when I am no more? If there be any
honour in lamenting a husband, it only appertains to those who smiled
upon them whilst they had them; let those who wept during their lives
laugh at their deaths, as well outwardly as within. Therefore, never
regard those blubbered eyes and that pitiful voice; consider her
deportment, her complexion, the plumpness of her cheeks under all those
formal veils; ‘tis there she talks plain French. There are few who do
not mend upon’t, and health is a quality that cannot lie. That starched
and ceremonious countenance looks not so much back as forward, and is
rather intended to get a new husband than to lament the old. When I was
a boy, a very beautiful and virtuous lady, who is yet living, the widow
of a prince, wore somewhat more ornament in her dress than our laws of
widowhood allow, and being reproached with it, she made answer that it
was because she was resolved to have no more love affairs, and would
never marry again.
I have here, not at all dissenting from our customs, made choice of three
women, who have also expressed the utmost of their goodness and affection
about their husbands’ deaths; yet are they examples of another kind than
are now m use, and so austere that they will hardly be drawn into
imitation.
The younger Pliny’ had near a house of his in Italy a neighbour who was
exceedingly tormented with certain ulcers in his private parts. His wife
seeing him so long to languish, entreated that he would give her leave to
see and at leisure to consider of the condition of his disease, and that
she would freely tell him what she thought. This permission being
obtained, and she having curiously examined the business, found it
impossible he could ever be cured, and that all he had to hope for or
expect was a great while to linger out a painful and miserable life, and
therefore, as the most sure and sovereign remedy, resolutely advised him
to kill himself. But finding him a little tender and backward in so rude
an attempt: “Do not think, my friend,” said she, “that the torments I see
thee endure are not as sensible to me as to thyself, and that to deliver
myself from them, I will not myself make use of the same remedy I have
prescribed to thee. I will accompany thee in the cure as I have done in
the disease; fear nothing, but believe that we shall have pleasure in
this passage that is to free us from so many miseries, and we will go
happily together.” Which having said, and roused up her husband’s
courage, she resolved that they should throw themselves headlong into the
sea out of a window that overlooked it, and that she might maintain to
the last the loyal and vehement affection wherewith she had embraced him
during his life, she would also have him die in her arms; but lest they
should fail, and should quit their hold in the fall through fear, she
tied herself fast to him by the waist, and so gave up her own life to
procure her husband’s repose. This was a woman of mean condition; and,
amongst that class of people, ‘tis no very new thing to see some examples
of rare virtue:
“Extrema per illos
Justitia excedens terris vestigia fecit.”
[“Justice, when she left the earth, took her last
steps among them.”--Virgil, Georg., ii. 473.]
The other two were noble and rich, where examples of virtue are rarely
lodged.
Arria, the wife of Caecina Paetus, a consular person, was the mother of
another Arria, the wife of Thrasea Paetus, he whose virtue was so
renowned in the time of Nero, and by this son-in-law, the grandmother of
Fannia: for the resemblance of the names of these men and women, and
their fortunes, have led to several mistakes. This first Arria, her
husband Caecina Paetus, having been taken prisoner by some of the Emperor
Claudius’ people, after Scribonianus’ defeat, whose party he had embraced
in the war, begged of those who were to carry him prisoner to Rome, that
they would take her into their ship, where she would be of much less
charge and trouble to them than a great many persons they must otherwise
have to attend her husband, and that she alone would undertake to serve
him in his chamber, his kitchen, and all other offices. They refused,
whereupon she put herself into a fisher-boat she hired on the spot, and
in that manner followed him from Sclavonia. When she had come to Rome,
Junia, the widow of Scribonianus, having one day, from the resemblance of
their fortune, accosted her in the Emperor’s presence; she rudely
repulsed her with these words, “I,” said she, “speak to thee, or give ear
to any thing thou sayest! to thee in whose lap Scribonianus was slain,
and thou art yet alive!” These words, with several other signs, gave her
friends to understand that she would undoubtedly despatch herself,
impatient of supporting her husband’s misfortune. And Thrasea, her
son-in-law, beseeching her not to throw away herself, and saying to her,
“What! if I should run the same fortune that Caecina has done, would you
that your daughter, my wife, should do the same?”--“Would I?” replied
she, “yes, yes, I would: if she had lived as long, and in as good
understanding with thee as I have done, with my husband.” These answers
made them more careful of her, and to have a more watchful eye to her
proceedings. One day, having said to those who looked to her: “Tis to
much purpose that you take all this pains to prevent me; you may indeed
make me die an ill death, but to keep me from dying is not in your
power”; she in a sudden phrenzy started from a chair whereon she sat, and
with all her force dashed her head against the wall, by which blow being
laid flat in a swoon, and very much wounded, after they had again with
great ado brought her to herself: “I told you,” said she, “that if you
refused me some easy way of dying, I should find out another, how painful
soever.” The conclusion of so admirable a virtue was this: her husband
Paetus, not having resolution enough of his own to despatch himself, as
he was by the emperor’s cruelty enjoined, one day, amongst others, after
having first employed all the reasons and exhortations which she thought
most prevalent to persuade him to it, she snatched the poignard he wore
from his side, and holding it ready in her hand, for the conclusion of
her admonitions; “Do thus, Paetus,” said she, and in the same instant
giving herself a mortal stab in the breast, and then drawing it out of
the wound, presented it to him, ending her life with this noble,
generous, and immortal saying, “Paete, non dolet”--having time to
pronounce no more but those three never-to-be-forgotten words: “Paetus,
it is not painful.”
“Casta suo gladium cum traderet Arria Paeto,
Quern de visceribus traxerat ipsa suis
Si qua fides, vulnus quod feci non dolet, inquit,
Sed quod to facies, id mihi, Paete, dolet.”
[“When the chaste Arria gave to Poetus the reeking sword she had
drawn from her breast, ‘If you believe me,’ she said, ‘Paetus, the
wound I have made hurts not, but ‘tis that which thou wilt make that
hurts me.’”---Martial, i. 14.]
The action was much more noble in itself, and of a braver sense than the
poet expressed it: for she was so far from being deterred by the thought
of her husband’s wound and death and her own, that she had been their
promotress and adviser: but having performed this high and courageous
enterprise for her husband’s only convenience, she had even in the last
gasp of her life no other concern but for him, and of dispossessing him
of the fear of dying with her. Paetus presently struck himself to the
heart with the same weapon, ashamed, I suppose, to have stood in need of
so dear and precious an example.
Pompeia Paulina, a young and very noble Roman lady, had married Seneca in
his extreme old age. Nero, his fine pupil, sent his guards to him to
denounce the sentence of death, which was performed after this manner:
When the Roman emperors of those times had condemned any man of quality,
they sent to him by their officers to choose what death he would, and to
execute it within such or such a time, which was limited, according to
the degree of their indignation, to a shorter or a longer respite, that
they might therein have better leisure to dispose their affairs, and
sometimes depriving them of the means of doing it by the shortness of the
time; and if the condemned seemed unwilling to submit to the order, they
had people ready at hand to execute it either by cutting the veins of the
arms and legs, or by compelling them by force to swallow a draught of
poison. But persons of honour would not abide this necessity, but made
use of their own physicians and surgeons for this purpose. Seneca, with
a calm and steady countenance, heard their charge, and presently called
for paper to write his will, which being by the captain refused, he
turned himself towards his friends, saying to them, “Since I cannot leave
you any other acknowledgment of the obligation I have to you, I leave you
at least the best thing I have, namely, the image of my life and manners,
which I entreat you to keep in memory of me, that by so doing you may
acquire the glory of sincere and real friends.” And there withal, one
while appeasing the sorrow he saw in them with gentle words, and
presently raising his voice to reprove them: “What,” said he, “are become
of all our brave philosophical precepts? What are become of all the
provisions we have so many years laid up against the accidents of
fortune? Is Nero’s cruelty unknown to us? What could we expect from him
who had murdered his mother and his brother, but that he should put his
tutor to death who had brought him up?” After having spoken these words
in general, he turned himself towards his wife, and embracing her fast in
his arms, as, her heart and strength failing her, she was ready to sink
down with grief, he begged of her, for his sake, to bear this accident
with a little more patience, telling her, that now the hour was come
wherein he was to show, not by argument and discourse, but effect, the
fruit he had acquired by his studies, and that he really embraced his
death, not only without grief, but moreover with joy. “Wherefore, my
dearest,” said he, “do not dishonour it with thy tears, that it may not
seem as if thou lovest thyself more than my reputation. Moderate thy
grief, and comfort thyself in the knowledge thou hast had of me and my
actions, leading the remainder of thy life in the same virtuous manner
thou hast hitherto done.” To which Paulina, having a little recovered
her spirits, and warmed the magnanimity of her courage with a most
generous affection, replied,--“No, Seneca,” said she, “I am not a woman
to suffer you to go alone in such a necessity: I will not have you think
that the virtuous examples of your life have not taught me how to die;
and when can I ever better or more fittingly do it, or more to my own
desire, than with you? and therefore assure yourself I will go along with
you.” Then Seneca, taking this noble and generous resolution of his wife
m good part, and also willing to free himself from the fear of leaving
her exposed to the cruelty of his enemies after his death: “I have,
Paulina,” said he, “instructed thee in what would serve thee happily to
live; but thou more covetest, I see, the honour of dying: in truth,
I will not grudge it thee; the constancy and resolution in our common end
are the same, but the beauty and glory of thy part are much greater.”
Which being said, the surgeons, at the same time, opened the veins of
both their arms, but as those of Seneca were more shrunk up, as well with
age as abstinence, made his blood flow too slowly, he moreover commanded
them to open the veins of his thighs; and lest the torments he endured
might pierce his wife’s heart, and also to free himself from the
affliction of seeing her in so sad a condition, after having taken a very
affectionate leave of her, he entreated she would suffer them to carry
her into her chamber, which they accordingly did. But all these
incisions being not yet enough to make him die, he commanded Statius
Anneus, his physician, to give him a draught of poison, which had not
much better effect; for by reason of the weakness and coldness of his
limbs, it could not arrive at his heart. Wherefore they were forced to
superadd a very hot bath, and then, feeling his end approach, whilst he
had breath he continued excellent discourses upon the subject of his
present condition, which the secretaries wrote down so long as they could
hear his voice, and his last words were long after in high honour and
esteem amongst men, and it is a great loss to us that they have not come
down to our times. Then, feeling the last pangs of death, with the
bloody water of the bath he bathed his head, saying: “This water I
dedicate to Jupiter the deliverer.” Nero, being presently informed of
all this, fearing lest the death of Paulina, who was one of the best-born
ladies of Rome, and against whom he had no particular unkindness, should
turn to his reproach, sent orders in all haste to bind up her wounds,
which her attendants did without her knowledge, she being already half
dead, and without all manner of sense. Thus, though she lived contrary
to her own design, it was very honourably, and befitting her own virtue,
her pale complexion ever after manifesting how much life had run from her
veins.
These are my three very true stories, which I find as entertaining and as
tragic as any of those we make out of our own heads wherewith to amuse
the common people; and I wonder that they who are addicted to such
relations, do not rather cull out ten thousand very fine stories, which
are to be found in books, that would save them the trouble of invention,
and be more useful and diverting; and he who would make a whole and
connected body of them would need to add nothing of his own, but the
connection only, as it were the solder of another metal; and might by
this means embody a great many true events of all sorts, disposing and
diversifying them according as the beauty of the work should require,
after the same manner, almost, as Ovid has made up his Metamorphoses of
the infinite number of various fables.
In the last couple, this is, moreover, worthy of consideration, that
Paulina voluntarily offered to lose her life for the love of her husband,
and that her husband had formerly also forborne to die for the love of
her. We may think there is no just counterpoise in this exchange; but,
according to his stoical humour, I fancy he thought he had done as much
for her, in prolonging his life upon her account, as if he had died for
her. In one of his letters to Lucilius, after he has given him to
understand that, being seized with an ague in Rome, he presently took
coach to go to a house he had in the country, contrary to his wife’s
opinion, who would have him stay, and that he had told her that the ague
he was seized with was not a fever of the body but of the place, it
follows thus: “She let me go,” says he, “giving me a strict charge of my
health. Now I, who know that her life is involved in mine, begin to make
much of myself, that I may preserve her. And I lose the privilege my age
has given me, of being more constant and resolute in many things, when I
call to mind that in this old fellow there is a young girl who is
interested in his health. And since I cannot persuade her to love me
more courageously, she makes me more solicitously love myself: for we
must allow something to honest affections, and, sometimes, though
occasions importune us to the contrary, we must call back life, even
though it be with torment: we must hold the soul fast in our teeth, since
the rule of living, amongst good men, is not so long as they please, but
as long as they ought. He that loves not his wife nor his friend so well
as to prolong his life for them, but will obstinately die, is too
delicate and too effeminate: the soul must impose this upon itself, when
the utility of our friends so requires; we must sometimes lend ourselves
to our friends, and when we would die for ourselves must break that
resolution for them. ‘Tis a testimony of grandeur of courage to return
to life for the consideration of another, as many excellent persons have
done: and ‘tis a mark of singular good nature to preserve old age (of
which the greatest convenience is the indifference as to its duration,
and a more stout and disdainful use of life), when a man perceives that
this office is pleasing, agreeable, and useful to some person by whom he
is very much beloved. And a man reaps by it a very pleasing reward; for
what can be more delightful than to be so dear to his wife, as upon her
account he shall become dearer to himself? Thus has my Paulina loaded me
not only with her fears, but my own; it has not been sufficient to
consider how resolutely I could die, but I have also considered how
irresolutely she would bear my death. I am enforced to live, and
sometimes to live in magnanimity.” These are his own words, as excellent
as they everywhere are.
CHAPTER XXXVI
OF THE MOST EXCELLENT MEN
If I should be asked my choice among all the men who have come to my
knowledge, I should make answer, that methinks I find three more
excellent than all the rest.
One of them Homer: not that Aristotle and Varro, for example, were not,
peradventure, as learned as he; nor that possibly Virgil was not equal to
him in his own art, which I leave to be determined by such as know them
both. I who, for my part, understand but one of them, can only say this,
according to my poor talent, that I do not believe the Muses themselves
could ever go beyond the Roman:
“Tale facit carmen docta testudine, quale
Cynthius impositis temperat articulis:”
[“He plays on his learned lute a verse such as Cynthian Apollo
modulates with his imposed fingers.”--Propertius, ii. 34, 79.]
and yet in this judgment we are not to forget that it is chiefly from
Homer that Virgil derives his excellence, that he is guide and teacher;
and that one touch of the Iliad has supplied him with body and matter out
of which to compose his great and divine AEneid. I do not reckon upon
that, but mix several other circumstances that render to me this poet
admirable, even as it were above human condition. And, in truth, I often
wonder that he who has produced, and, by his authority, given reputation
in the world to so many deities, was not deified himself. Being blind
and poor, living before the sciences were reduced into rule and certain
observation, he was so well acquainted with them, that all those who have
since taken upon them to establish governments, to carry on wars, and to
write either of religion or philosophy, of what sect soever, or of the
arts, have made use of him as of a most perfect instructor in the
knowledge of all things, and of his books as of a treasury of all sorts
of learning:
“Qui, quid sit pulcrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non,
Planius ac melius Chrysippo et Crantore dicit:”
[“Who tells us what is good, what evil, what useful, what not, more
clearly and better than Chrysippus and Crantor?”
--Horace, Ep., i. 2, 3.]
and as this other says,
“A quo, ceu fonte perenni,
Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis”
[“From which, as from a perennial spring, the lips of the poets
are moistened by Pierian waters.”--Ovid, Amoy., iii. 9, 25.]
and the other,
“Adde Heliconiadum comites, quorum unus Homerus
Sceptra potitus;”
[“Add the companions of the Muses, whose sceptre Homer has solely
obtained.”--Lucretius, iii. 1050.]
and the other:
“Cujusque ex ore profusos
Omnis posteritas latices in carmina duxit,
Amnemque in tenues ausa est deducere rivos.
Unius foecunda bonis.”
[“From whose mouth all posterity has drawn out copious streams of
verse, and has made bold to turn the mighty river into its little
rivulets, fertile in the property of one man.”
--Manilius, Astyon., ii. 8.]
‘Tis contrary to the order of nature that he has made the most excellent
production that can possibly be; for the ordinary birth of things is
imperfect; they thrive and gather strength by growing, whereas he
rendered the infancy of poesy and several other sciences mature, perfect,
and accomplished at first. And for this reason he may be called the
first and the last of the poets, according to the fine testimony
antiquity has left us of him, “that as there was none before him whom he
could imitate, so there has been none since that could imitate him.”
His words, according to Aristotle, are the only words that have motion
and action, the only substantial words. Alexander the Great, having
found a rich cabinet amongst Darius’ spoils, gave order it should be
reserved for him to keep his Homer in, saying: that he was the best and
most faithful counsellor he had in his military affairs. For the same
reason it was that Cleomenes, the son of Anaxandridas, said that he was
the poet of the Lacedaemonians, for that he was an excellent master for
the discipline of war. This singular and particular commendation is also
left of him in the judgment of Plutarch, that he is the only author in
the world that never glutted nor disgusted his readers, presenting
himself always another thing, and always flourishing in some new grace.
That wanton Alcibiades, having asked one, who pretended to learning, for
a book of Homer, gave him a box of the ear because he had none, which he
thought as scandalous as we should if we found one of our priests without
a Breviary. Xenophanes complained one day to Hiero, the tyrant of
Syracuse, that he was so poor he had not wherewithal to maintain two
servants. “What!” replied he, “Homer, who was much poorer than thou
art, keeps above ten thousand, though he is dead.” What did Panaetius
leave unsaid when he called Plato the Homer of the philosophers? Besides
what glory can be compared to his? Nothing is so frequent in men’s
mouths as his name and works, nothing so known and received as Troy,
Helen, and the war about her, when perhaps there was never any such
thing. Our children are still called by names that he invented above
three thousand years ago; who does not know Hector and Achilles? Not
only some particular families, but most nations also seek their origin in
his inventions. Mohammed, the second of that name, emperor of the Turks,
writing to our Pope Pius II., “I am astonished,” says he, “that the
Italians should appear against me, considering that we have our common
descent from the Trojans, and that it concerns me as well as it does them
to revenge the blood of Hector upon the Greeks, whom they countenance
against me.” Is it not a noble farce wherein kings, republics, and
emperors have so many ages played their parts, and to which the vast
universe serves for a theatre? Seven Grecian cities contended for his
birth, so much honour even his obscurity helped him to!
“Smyrna, Rhodos, Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athenm.”
The other is Alexander the Great. For whoever will consider the age at
which he began his enterprises, the small means by which he effected so
glorious a design, the authority he obtained in such mere youth with the
greatest and most experienced captains of the world, by whom he was
followed, the extraordinary favour wherewith fortune embraced and
favoured so many hazardous, not to say rash, exploits,
“Impellens quicquid sibi summa petenti
Obstaret, gaudensque viam fecisse ruins;”
[“Bearing down all who sought to withstand him, and pleased
to force his way by ruin.”--Lucan, i. 149.]
that greatness, to have at the age of three-and-thirty years, passed
victorious through the whole habitable earth, and in half a life to have
attained to the utmost of what human nature can do; so that you cannot
imagine its just duration and the continuation of his increase in valour
and fortune, up to a due maturity of age, but that you must withal
imagine something more than man: to have made so many royal branches to
spring from his soldiers, leaving the world, at his death, divided
amongst four successors, simple captains of his army, whose posterity so
long continued and maintained that vast possession; so many excellent
virtues as he was master of, justice, temperance, liberality, truth in
his word, love towards his own people, and humanity towards those he
overcame; for his manners, in general, seem in truth incapable of any
manner of reproach, although some particular and extraordinary actions of
his may fall under censure. But it is impossible to carry on such great
things as he did within the strict rules of justice; such as he are to be
judged in gross by the main end of their actions. The ruin of Thebes and
Persepolis, the murder of Menander and of Ephistion’s physician, the
massacre of so many Persian prisoners at one time, of a troop of Indian
soldiers not without prejudice to his word, and of the Cossians, so much
as to the very children, are indeed sallies that are not well to be
excused. For, as to Clytus, the fault was more than redeemed; and that
very action, as much as any other whatever, manifests the goodness of his
nature, a nature most excellently formed to goodness; and it was
ingeniously said of him, that he had his virtues from Nature, his vices
from Fortune. As to his being a little given to bragging, a little too
impatient of hearing himself ill-spoken of, and as to those mangers,
arms, and bits he caused to be strewed in the Indies, all those little
vanities, methinks, may very well be allowed to his youth, and the
prodigious prosperity of his fortune. And who will consider withal his
so many military virtues, his diligence, foresight, patience, discipline,
subtlety, magnanimity, resolution, and good fortune, wherein (though we
had not had the authority of Hannibal to assure us) he was the first of
men, the admirable beauty and symmetry of his person, even to a miracle,
his majestic port and awful mien, in a face so young, ruddy, and radiant:
“Qualis, ubi Oceani perfusus Lucifer unda,
Quem Venus ante alios astrorum diligit ignes,
Extulit os sacrum coelo, tenebrasque resolvit;”
[“As when, bathed in the waves of Ocean, Lucifer, whom Venus loves
beyond the other stars, has displayed his sacred countenance to the
heaven, and disperses the darkness”--AEneid, iii. 589.]
the excellence of his knowledge and capacity; the duration and grandeur
of his glory, pure, clean, without spot or envy, and that long after his
death it was a religious belief that his very medals brought good fortune
to all who carried them about them; and that more kings and princes have
written his actions than other historians have written the actions of any
other king or prince whatever; and that to this very day the Mohammedans,
who despise all other histories, admit of and honour his alone, by a
special privilege: whoever, I say, will seriously consider these
particulars, will confess that, all these things put together, I had
reason to prefer him before Caesar himself, who alone could make me
doubtful in my choice: and it cannot be denied that there was more of his
own in his exploits, and more of fortune in those of Alexander. They
were in many things equal, and peradventure Caesar had some greater
qualities they were two fires, or two torrents, overrunning the world by
several ways;
“Ac velut immissi diversis partibus ignes
Arentem in silvam, et virgulta sonantia lauro
Aut ubi decursu rapido de montibus altis
Dant sonitum spumosi amnes, et in aequora currunt,
Quisque suum populatus iter:”
[“And as fires applied in several parts to a dry wood and crackling
shrubs of laurel, or as with impetuous fall from the steep
mountains, foaming torrents pour down to the ocean, each clearing a
destructive course.”--AEneid, xii. 521.]
but though Caesar’s ambition had been more moderate, it would still be so
unhappy, having the ruin of his country and universal mischief to the
world for its abominable object, that, all things raked together and put
into the balance, I must needs incline to Alexander’s side.
The third and in my opinion the most excellent, is Epaminondas. Of glory
he has not near so much as the other two (which, for that matter, is but
a part of the substance of the thing): of valour and resolution, not of
that sort which is pushed on by ambition, but of that which wisdom and
reason can plant in a regular soul, he had all that could be imagined.
Of this virtue of his, he has, in my idea, given as ample proof as
Alexander himself or Caesar: for although his warlike exploits were
neither so frequent nor so full, they were yet, if duly considered in all
their circumstances, as important, as bravely fought, and carried with
them as manifest testimony of valour and military conduct, as those of
any whatever. The Greeks have done him the honour, without
contradiction, to pronounce him the greatest man of their nation; and to
be the first of Greece, is easily to be the first of the world. As to
his knowledge, we have this ancient judgment of him, “That never any man
knew so much, and spake so little as he”;--[Plutarch, On the Demon of
Socrates, c. 23.]--for he was of the Pythagorean sect; but when he did
speak, never any man spake better; an excellent orator, and of powerful
persuasion. But as to his manners and conscience, he infinitely
surpassed all men who ever undertook the management of affairs; for in
this one thing, which ought chiefly to be considered, which alone truly
denotes us for what we are, and which alone I make counterbalance all the
rest put together, he comes not short of any philosopher whatever, not
even of Socrates himself. Innocence, in this man, is a quality peculiar,
sovereign, constant, uniform, incorruptible, compared with which, it
appears in Alexander subject to something else subaltern, uncertain,
variable, effeminate, and fortuitous.
Antiquity has judged that in thoroughly sifting all the other great
captains, there is found in every one some peculiar quality that
illustrates his name: in this man only there is a full and equal virtue
throughout, that leaves nothing to be wished for in him, whether in
private or public employment, whether in peace or war; whether to live
gloriously and grandly, and to die: I do not know any form or fortune of
man that I so much honour and love.
‘Tis true that I look upon his obstinate poverty, as it is set out by his
best friends, as a little too scrupulous and nice; and this is the only
feature, though high in itself and well worthy of admiration, that I find
so rugged as not to desire to imitate, to the degree it was in him.
Scipio AEmilianus alone, could one attribute to him as brave and
magnificent an end, and as profound and universal a knowledge, might be
put into the other scale of the balance. Oh, what an injury has time
done me to deprive me of the sight of two of the most noble lives which,
by the common consent of all the world, one of the greatest of the
Greeks, and the other of the Romans, were in all Plutarch. What a
matter! what a workman!
For a man that was no saint, but, as we say, a gentleman, of civilian and
ordinary manners, and of a moderate ambition, the richest life that I
know, and full of the richest and most to be desired parts, all things
considered, is, in my opinion, that of Alcibiades.
But as to what concerns Epaminondas, I will here, for the example of an
excessive goodness, add some of his opinions: he declared, that the
greatest satisfaction he ever had in his whole life, was the contentment
he gave his father and mother by his victory at Leuctra; wherein his
deference is great, preferring their pleasure before his own, so dust and
so full of so glorious an action. He did not think it lawful, even to
restore the liberty of his country, to kill a man without knowing a
cause: which made him so cold in the enterprise of his companion
Pelopidas for the relief of Thebes. He was also of opinion that men in
battle ought to avoid the encounter of a friend who was on the contrary
side, and to spare him. And his humanity, even towards his enemies
themselves, having rendered him suspected to the Boeotians, for that,
after he had miraculously forced the Lacedaemonians to open to him the
pass which they had undertaken to defend at the entrance into the Morea,
near Corinth, he contented himself with having charged through them,
without pursuing them to the utmost, he had his commission of general
taken from him, very honourably upon such an account, and for the shame
it was to them upon necessity afterwards to restore him to his command,
and so to manifest how much upon him depended their safety and honour;
victory like a shadow attending him wherever he went; and indeed the
prosperity of his country, as being from him derived, died with him.
CHAPTER XXXVII
OF THE RESEMBLANCE OF CHILDREN TO THEIR FATHERS
This faggoting up of so many divers pieces is so done that I never set
pen to paper but when I have too much idle time, and never anywhere but
at home; so that it is compiled after divers interruptions and intervals,
occasions keeping me sometimes many months elsewhere. As to the rest,
I never correct my first by any second conceptions; I, peradventure, may
alter a word or so, but ‘tis only to vary the phrase, and not to destroy
my former meaning. I have a mind to represent the progress of my
humours, and that every one may see each piece as it came from the forge.
I could wish I had begun sooner, and had taken more notice of the course
of my mutations. A servant of mine whom I employed to transcribe for me,
thought he had got a prize by stealing several pieces from me, wherewith
he was best pleased; but it is my comfort that he will be no greater a
gainer than I shall be a loser by the theft. I am grown older by seven
or eight years since I began; nor has it been without same new
acquisition: I have, in that time, by the liberality of years, been
acquainted with the stone: their commerce and long converse do not well
pass away without some such inconvenience. I could have been glad that
of other infirmities age has to present long-lived men withal, it had
chosen some one that would have been more welcome to me, for it could not
possibly have laid upon me a disease for which, even from my infancy, I
have had so great a horror; and it is, in truth, of all the accidents of
old age, that of which I have ever been most afraid. I have often
thought with myself that I went on too far, and that in so long a voyage
I should at last run myself into some disadvantage; I perceived, and have
often enough declared, that it was time to depart, and that life should
be cut off in the sound and living part, according to the surgeon’s rule
in amputations; and that nature made him pay very strict usury who did
not in due time pay the principal. And yet I was so far from being
ready, that in the eighteen months’ time or thereabout that I have been
in this uneasy condition, I have so inured myself to it as to be content
to live on in it; and have found wherein to comfort myself, and to hope:
so much are men enslaved to their miserable being, that there is no
condition so wretched they will not accept, provided they may live! Hear
Maecenas:
“Debilem facito manu,
Debilem pede, coxa,
Lubricos quate dentes;
Vita dum superest, bene est.”
[“Cripple my hand, foot, hip; shake out my loose teeth: while
there’s life, ‘tis well.”--Apud Seneca, Ep., 101.]
And Tamerlane, with a foolish humanity, palliated the fantastic cruelty
he exercised upon lepers, when he put all he could hear of to death, to
deliver them, as he pretended, from the painful life they lived. For
there was not one of them who would not rather have been thrice a leper
than be not. And Antisthenes the Stoic, being very sick, and crying out,
“Who will deliver me from these evils?” Diogenes, who had come to visit
him, “This,” said he, presenting him a knife, “soon enough, if thou
wilt.”--“I do not mean from my life,” he replied, “but from my
sufferings.” The sufferings that only attack the mind, I am not so
sensible of as most other men; and this partly out of judgment, for the
world looks upon several things as dreadful or to be avoided at the
expense of life, that are almost indifferent to me: partly, through a
dull and insensible complexion I have in accidents which do not
point-blank hit me; and that insensibility I look upon as one of the best
parts of my natural condition; but essential and corporeal pains I am
very sensible of. And yet, having long since foreseen them, though with
a sight weak and delicate and softened with the long and happy health and
quiet that God has been pleased to give me the greatest part of my time,
I had in my imagination fancied them so insupportable, that, in truth, I
was more afraid than I have since found I had cause: by which I am still
more fortified in this belief, that most of the faculties of the soul, as
we employ them, more trouble the repose of life than they are any way
useful to it.
I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the
most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases; I have already
had the trial of five or six very long and very painful fits; and yet I
either flatter myself, or there is even in this state what is very well
to be endured by a man who has his soul free from the fear of death, and
of the menaces, conclusions, and consequences which physic is ever
thundering in our ears; but the effect even of pain itself is not so
sharp and intolerable as to put a man of understanding into rage and
despair. I have at least this advantage by my stone, that what I could
not hitherto prevail upon myself to resolve upon, as to reconciling and
acquainting myself with death, it will perfect; for the more it presses
upon and importunes me, I shall be so much the less afraid to die. I had
already gone so far as only to love life for life’s sake, but my pain
will dissolve this intelligence; and God grant that in the end, should
the sharpness of it be once greater than I shall be able to bear, it does
not throw me into the other no less vicious extreme to desire and wish to
die!
“Summum nec metuas diem, nec optes:”
[“Neither to wish, nor fear to die.” (Or:)
“Thou shouldest neither fear nor desire the last day.”
--Martial, x. 7.]
they are two passions to be feared; but the one has its remedy much
nearer at hand than the other.
As to the rest, I have always found the precept that so rigorously
enjoins a resolute countenance and disdainful and indifferent comportment
in the toleration of infirmities to be ceremonial. Why should
philosophy, which only has respect to life and effects, trouble itself
about these external appearances? Let us leave that care to actors and
masters of rhetoric, who set so great a value upon our gestures. Let her
allow this vocal frailty to disease, if it be neither cordial nor
stomachic, and permit the ordinary ways of expressing grief by sighs,
sobs, palpitations, and turning pale, that nature has put out of our
power; provided the courage be undaunted, and the tones not expressive
of despair, let her be satisfied. What matter the wringing of our hands,
if we do not wring our thoughts? She forms us for ourselves, not for
others; to be, not to seem; let her be satisfied with governing our
understanding, which she has taken upon her the care of instructing;
that, in the fury of the colic, she maintain the soul in a condition to
know itself, and to follow its accustomed way, contending with, and
enduring, not meanly truckling under pain; moved and heated, not subdued
and conquered, in the contention; capable of discourse and other things,
to a certain degree. In such extreme accidents, ‘tis cruelty to require
so exact a composedness. ‘Tis no great matter that we make a wry face,
if the mind plays its part well: if the body find itself relieved by
complaining let it complain: if agitation ease it, let it tumble and toss
at pleasure; if it seem to find the disease evaporate (as some physicians
hold that it helps women in delivery) in making loud outcries, or if this
do but divert its torments, let it roar as it will. Let us not command
this voice to sally, but stop it not. Epicurus, not only forgives his
sage for crying out in torments, but advises him to it:
“Pugiles etiam, quum feriunt, in jactandis caestibus
ingemiscunt, quia profundenda voce omne corpus intenditur,
venitque plaga vehementior.”
[“Boxers also, when they strike, groan in the act, because with the
strength of voice the whole body is carried, and the blow comes with
the greater vehemence.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 23.]
We have enough to do to deal with the disease, without troubling
ourselves with these superfluous rules.
Which I say in excuse of those whom we ordinarily see impatient in the
assaults of this malady; for as to what concerns myself, I have passed it
over hitherto with a little better countenance, and contented myself with
groaning without roaring out; not, nevertheless, that I put any great
constraint upon myself to maintain this exterior decorum, for I make
little account of such an advantage: I allow herein as much as the pain
requires; but either my pains are not so excessive, or I have more than
ordinary patience. I complain, I confess, and am a little impatient in a
very sharp fit, but I do not arrive to such a degree of despair as he who
with:
“Ejulatu, questu, gemitu, fremitibus
Resonando, multum flebiles voces refert:”
[“Howling, roaring, groaning with a thousand noises, expressing his
torment in a dismal voice.” (Or:) “Wailing, complaining, groaning,
murmuring much avail lugubrious sounds.”--Verses of Attius, in his
Phaloctetes, quoted by Cicero, De Finib., ii. 29; Tusc. Quaes.,
ii. 14.]
I try myself in the depth of my suffering, and have always found that I
was in a capacity to speak, think, and give a rational answer as well as
at any other time, but not so firmly, being troubled and interrupted by
the pain. When I am looked upon by my visitors to be in the greatest
torment, and that they therefore forbear to trouble me, I often essay my
own strength, and myself set some discourse on foot, the most remote I
can contrive from my present condition. I can do anything upon a sudden
endeavour, but it must not continue long. Oh, what pity ‘tis I have not
the faculty of that dreamer in Cicero, who dreaming he was lying with a
wench, found he had discharged his stone in the sheets. My pains
strangely deaden my appetite that way. In the intervals from this
excessive torment, when my ureters only languish without any great dolor,
I presently feel myself in my wonted state, forasmuch as my soul takes no
other alarm but what is sensible and corporal, which I certainly owe to
the care I have had of preparing myself by meditation against such
accidents:
“Laborum,
Nulla mihi nova nunc facies inopinave surgit;
Omnia praecepi, atque animo mecum ante peregi.”
[“No new shape of suffering can arise new or unexpected; I have
anticipated all, and acted them over beforehand in my mind.”
--AEneid, vi. 103.]
I am, however, a little roughly handled for an apprentice, and with a
sudden and sharp alteration, being fallen in an instant from a very easy
and happy condition of life into the most uneasy and painful that can be
imagined. For besides that it is a disease very much to be feared in
itself, it begins with me after a more sharp and severe manner than it is
used to do with other men. My fits come so thick upon me that I am
scarcely ever at ease; yet I have hitherto kept my mind so upright that,
provided I can still continue it, I find myself in a much better
condition of life than a thousand others, who have no fewer nor other
disease but what they create to themselves for want of meditation.
There is a certain sort of crafty humility that springs from presumption,
as this, for example, that we confess our ignorance in many things, and
are so courteous as to acknowledge that there are in the works of nature
some qualities and conditions that are imperceptible to us, and of which
our understanding cannot discover the means and causes; by this so honest
and conscientious declaration we hope to obtain that people shall also
believe us as to those that we say we do understand. We need not trouble
ourselves to seek out foreign miracles and difficulties; methinks,
amongst the things that we ordinarily see, there are such
incomprehensible wonders as surpass all difficulties of miracles. What a
wonderful thing it is that the drop of seed from which we are produced
should carry in itself the impression not only of the bodily form, but
even of the thoughts and inclinations of our fathers! Where can that
drop of fluid matter contain that infinite number of forms? and how can
they carry on these resemblances with so precarious and irregular a
process that the son shall be like his great-grandfather, the nephew like
his uncle? In the family of Lepidus at Rome there were three, not
successively but by intervals, who were born with the same eye covered
with a cartilage. At Thebes there was a race that carried from their
mother’s womb the form of the head of a lance, and he who was not born so
was looked upon as illegitimate. And Aristotle says that in a certain
nation, where the women were in common, they assigned the children to
their fathers by their resemblance.
‘Tis to be believed that I derive this infirmity from my father, for he
died wonderfully tormented with a great stone in his bladder; he was
never sensible of his disease till the sixty-seventh year of his age; and
before that had never felt any menace or symptoms of it, either in his
reins, sides, or any other part, and had lived, till then, in a happy,
vigorous state of health, little subject to infirmities, and he continued
seven years after in this disease, dragging on a very painful end of
life. I was born about five-and-twenty years before his disease seized
him, and in the time of his most flourishing and healthful state of body,
his third child in order of birth: where could his propension to this
malady lie lurking all that while? And he being then so far from the
infirmity, how could that small part of his substance wherewith he made
me, carry away so great an impression for its share? and how so
concealed, that till five-and-forty years after, I did not begin to be
sensible of it? being the only one to this hour, amongst so many
brothers and sisters, and all by one mother, that was ever troubled with
it. He that can satisfy me in this point, I will believe him in as many
other miracles as he pleases; always provided that, as their manner is,
he do not give me a doctrine much more intricate and fantastic than the
thing itself for current pay.
Let the physicians a little excuse the liberty I take, for by this same
infusion and fatal insinuation it is that I have received a hatred and
contempt of their doctrine; the antipathy I have against their art is
hereditary. My father lived three-score and fourteen years, my
grandfather sixty-nine, my great-grandfather almost fourscore years,
without ever tasting any sort of physic; and, with them, whatever was not
ordinary diet, was instead of a drug. Physic is grounded upon experience
and examples: so is my opinion. And is not this an express and very
advantageous experience. I do not know that they can find me in all
their records three that were born, bred, and died under the same roof,
who have lived so long by their conduct. They must here of necessity
confess, that if reason be not, fortune at least is on my side, and with
physicians fortune goes a great deal further than reason. Let them not
take me now at a disadvantage; let them not threaten me in the subdued
condition wherein I now am; that were treachery. In truth, I have enough
the better of them by these domestic examples, that they should rest
satisfied. Human things are not usually so constant; it has been two
hundred years, save eighteen, that this trial has lasted, for the first
of them was born in the year 1402: ‘tis now, indeed, very good reason
that this experience should begin to fail us. Let them not, therefore,
reproach me with the infirmities under which I now suffer; is it not
enough that I for my part have lived seven-and-forty years in good
health? though it should be the end of my career; ‘tis of the longer
sort.
My ancestors had an aversion to physic by some occult and natural
instinct; for the very sight of drugs was loathsome to my father. The
Seigneur de Gaviac, my uncle by the father’s side, a churchman, and a
valetudinary from his birth, and yet who made that crazy life hold out to
sixty-seven years, being once fallen into a furious fever, it was ordered
by the physicians he should be plainly told that if he would not make use
of help (for so they call that which is very often an obstacle), he would
infallibly be a dead man. That good man, though terrified with this
dreadful sentence, yet replied, “I am then a dead man.” But God soon
after made the prognostic false. The last of the brothers--there were
four of them--and by many years the last, the Sieur de Bussaguet, was the
only one of the family who made use of medicine, by reason, I suppose, of
the concern he had with the other arts, for he was a councillor in the
court of Parliament, and it succeeded so ill with him, that being in
outward appearance of the strongest constitution, he yet died long before
any of the rest, save the Sieur de Saint Michel.
‘Tis possible I may have derived this natural antipathy to physic from
them; but had there been no other consideration in the case, I would have
endeavoured to have overcome it; for all these conditions that spring in
us without reason, are vicious; ‘tis a kind of disease that we should
wrestle with. It may be I had naturally this propension; but I have
supported and fortified it by arguments and reasons which have
established in me the opinion I am of. For I also hate the consideration
of refusing physic for the nauseous taste.
I should hardly be of that humour who hold health to be worth purchasing
by all the most painful cauteries and incisions that can be applied.
And, with Epicurus, I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided, if
greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted, that will
terminate in greater pleasures. Health is a precious thing, and the only
one, in truth, meriting that a man should lay out, not only his time,
sweat, labour, and goods, but also his life itself to obtain it;
forasmuch as, without it, life is wearisome and injurious to us:
pleasure, wisdom, learning, and virtue, without it, wither away and
vanish; and to the most laboured and solid discourses that philosophy
would imprint in us to the contrary, we need no more but oppose the image
of Plato being struck with an epilepsy or apoplexy; and, in this
presupposition, to defy him to call the rich faculties of his soul to his
assistance. All means that conduce to health can neither be too painful
nor too dear to me. But I have some other appearances that make me
strangely suspect all this merchandise. I do not deny but that there may
be some art in it, that there are not amongst so many works of Nature,
things proper for the conservation of health: that is most certain: I
very well know there are some simples that moisten, and others that dry;
I experimentally know that radishes are windy, and senna-leaves purging;
and several other such experiences I have, as that mutton nourishes me,
and wine warms me: and Solon said “that eating was physic against the
malady hunger.” I do not disapprove the use we make of things the earth
produces, nor doubt, in the least, of the power and fertility of Nature,
and of its application to our necessities: I very well see that pikes and
swallows live by her laws; but I mistrust the inventions of our mind, our
knowledge and art, to countenance which, we have abandoned Nature and her
rules, and wherein we keep no bounds nor moderation. As we call the
piling up of the first laws that fall into our hands justice, and their
practice and dispensation very often foolish and very unjust; and as
those who scoff at and accuse it, do not, nevertheless, blame that noble
virtue itself, but only condemn the abuse and profanation of that sacred
title; so in physic I very much honour that glorious name, its
propositions, its promises, so useful for the service of mankind; but the
ordinances it foists upon us, betwixt ourselves, I neither honour nor
esteem.
In the first place, experience makes me dread it; for amongst all my
acquaintance, I see no people so soon sick, and so long before they are
well, as those who take much physic; their very health is altered and
corrupted by their frequent prescriptions. Physicians are not content to
deal only with the sick, but they will moreover corrupt health itself,
for fear men should at any time escape their authority. Do they not,
from a continual and perfect health, draw the argument of some great
sickness to ensue? I have been sick often enough, and have always found
my sicknesses easy enough to be supported (though I have made trial of
almost all sorts), and as short as those of any other, without their
help, or without swallowing their ill-tasting doses. The health I have
is full and free, without other rule or discipline than my own custom and
pleasure. Every place serves me well enough to stay in, for I need no
other conveniences, when I am sick, than what I must have when I am well.
I never disturb myself that I have no physician, no apothecary, nor any
other assistance, which I see most other sick men more afflicted at than
they are with their disease. What! Do the doctors themselves show us
more felicity and duration in their own lives, that may manifest to us
some apparent effect of their skill?
There is not a nation in the world that has not been many ages without
physic; and these the first ages, that is to say, the best and most
happy; and the tenth part of the world knows nothing of it yet; many
nations are ignorant of it to this day, where men live more healthful and
longer than we do here, and even amongst us the common people live well
enough without it. The Romans were six hundred years before they
received it; and after having made trial of it, banished it from the city
at the instance of Cato the Censor, who made it appear how easy it was to
live without it, having himself lived fourscore and five years, and kept
his wife alive to an extreme old age, not without physic, but without a
physician: for everything that we find to be healthful to life may be
called physic. He kept his family in health, as Plutarch says if I
mistake not, with hare’s milk; as Pliny reports, that the Arcadians
cured all manner of diseases with that of a cow; and Herodotus says, the
Lybians generally enjoy rare health, by a custom they have, after their
children are arrived to four years of age, to burn and cauterise the
veins of their head and temples, by which means they cut off all
defluxions of rheum for their whole lives. And the country people of our
province make use of nothing, in all sorts of distempers, but the
strongest wine they can get, mixed with a great deal of saffron and
spice, and always with the same success.
And to say the truth, of all this diversity and confusion of
prescriptions, what other end and effect is there after all, but to purge
the belly? which a thousand ordinary simples will do as well; and I do
not know whether such evacuations be so much to our advantage as they
pretend, and whether nature does not require a residence of her
excrements to a certain proportion, as wine does of its lees to keep it
alive: you often see healthful men fall into vomitings and fluxes of the
belly by some extrinsic accident, and make a great evacuation of
excrements, without any preceding need, or any following benefit, but
rather with hurt to their constitution. ‘Tis from the great Plato, that
I lately learned, that of three sorts of motions which are natural to us,
purging is the worst, and that no man, unless he be a fool, ought to take
anything to that purpose but in the extremest necessity. Men disturb and
irritate the disease by contrary oppositions; it must be the way of
living that must gently dissolve, and bring it to its end. The violent
gripings and contest betwixt the drug and the disease are ever to our
loss, since the combat is fought within ourselves, and that the drug is
an assistant not to be trusted, being in its own nature an enemy to our
health, and by trouble having only access into our condition. Let it
alone a little; the general order of things that takes care of fleas and
moles, also takes care of men, if they will have the same patience that
fleas and moles have, to leave it to itself. ‘Tis to much purpose we cry
out “Bihore,”--[A term used by the Languedoc waggoners to hasten their
horses]--‘tis a way to make us hoarse, but not to hasten the matter.
‘Tis a proud and uncompassionate order: our fears, our despair displease
and stop it from, instead of inviting it to, our relief; it owes its
course to the disease, as well as to health; and will not suffer itself
to be corrupted in favour of the one to the prejudice of the other’s
right, for it would then fall into disorder. Let us, in God’s name,
follow it; it leads those that follow, and those who will not follow, it
drags along, both their fury and physic together. Order a purge for your
brain, it will there be much better employed than upon your stomach.
One asking a Lacedaemonian what had made him live so long, he made
answer, “the ignorance of physic”; and the Emperor Adrian continually
exclaimed as he was dying, that the crowd of physicians had killed him.
A bad wrestler turned physician: “Courage,” says Diogenes to him; “thou
hast done well, for now thou will throw those who have formerly thrown
thee.” But they have this advantage, according to Nicocles, that the sun
gives light to their success and the earth covers their failures. And,
besides, they have a very advantageous way of making use of all sorts of
events: for what fortune, nature, or any other cause (of which the number
is infinite), products of good and healthful in us, it is the privilege
of physic to attribute to itself; all the happy successes that happen to
the patient, must be thence derived; the accidents that have cured me,
and a thousand others, who do not employ physicians, physicians usurp to
themselves: and as to ill accidents, they either absolutely disown them,
in laying the fault upon the patient, by such frivolous reasons as they
are never at a loss for; as “he lay with his arms out of bed,” or “he was
disturbed with the rattling of a coach:”
“Rhedarum transitus arcto
Vicorum inflexu:”
[“The passage of the wheels in the narrow
turning of the street”--Juvenal, iii. 236.]
or “somebody had set open the casement,” or “he had lain upon his left
side,” or “he had some disagreeable fancies in his head”: in sum, a word,
a dream, or a look, seems to them excuse sufficient wherewith to palliate
their own errors: or, if they so please, they even make use of our
growing worse, and do their business in this way which can never fail
them: which is by buzzing us in the ear, when the disease is more
inflamed by their medicaments, that it had been much worse but for those
remedies; he, whom from an ordinary cold they have thrown into a double
tertian-ague, had but for them been in a continued fever. They do not
much care what mischief they do, since it turns to their own profit.
In earnest, they have reason to require a very favourable belief from
their patients; and, indeed, it ought to be a very easy one, to swallow
things so hard to be believed. Plato said very well, that physicians
were the only men who might lie at pleasure, since our health depends
upon the vanity and falsity of their promises.
AEsop, a most excellent author, and of whom few men discover all the
graces, pleasantly represents to us the tyrannical authority physicians
usurp over poor creatures, weakened and subdued by sickness and fear,
when he tells us, that a sick person, being asked by his physician what
operation he found of the potion he had given him: “I have sweated very
much,” says the sick man. “That’s good,” says the physician. Another
time, having asked how he felt himself after his physic: “I have been
very cold, and have had a great shivering upon me,” said he. “That is
good,” replied the physician. After the third potion, he asked him again
how he did: “Why, I find myself swollen and puffed up,” said he, “as if
I had a dropsy.”--“That is very well,” said the physician. One of his
servants coming presently after to inquire how he felt himself, “Truly,
friend,” said he, “with being too well I am about to die.”
There was a more just law in Egypt, by which the physician, for the three
first days, was to take charge of his patient at the patient’s own risk
and cost; but, those three days being past, it was to be at his own. For
what reason is it that their patron, AEsculapius, should be struck with
thunder for restoring Hippolitus from death to life:
“Nam Pater omnipotens, aliquem indignatus ab umbris
Mortalem infernis ad lumina surgere vitae,
Ipse repertorem medicinae talis, et artis
Fulmine Phoebigenam Stygias detrusit ad undas;”
[“Then the Almighty Father, offended that any mortal should rise to
the light of life from the infernal shades, struck the son of
Phoebus with his forked lightning to the Stygian lake.”
--AEneid, vii. 770.]
and his followers be pardoned, who send so many souls from life to death?
A physician, boasting to Nicocles that his art was of great authority:
“It is so, indeed,” said Nicocles, “that can with impunity kill so many
people.”
As to what remains, had I been of their counsel, I would have rendered my
discipline more sacred and mysterious; they begun well, but they have not
ended so. It was a good beginning to make gods and demons the authors of
their science, and to have used a peculiar way of speaking and writing,
notwithstanding that philosophy concludes it folly to persuade a man to
his own good by an unintelligible way: “Ut si quis medicus imperet, ut
sumat:”
“Terrigenam, herbigradam, domiportam, sanguine cassam.”
[“Describing it by the epithets of an animal trailing with its slime
over the herbage, without blood or bones, and carrying its house
upon its back, meaning simply a snail.”--Coste]
It was a good rule in their art, and that accompanies all other vain,
fantastic, and supernatural arts, that the patient’s belief should
prepossess them with good hope and assurance of their effects and
operation: a rule they hold to that degree, as to maintain that the most
inexpert and ignorant physician is more proper for a patient who has
confidence in him, than the most learned and experienced whom he is not
so acquainted with. Nay, even the very choice of most of their drugs is
in some sort mysterious and divine; the left foot of a tortoise, the
urine of a lizard, the dung of an elephant, the liver of a mole, blood
drawn from under the right wing of a white pigeon; and for us who have
the stone (so scornfully they use us in our miseries) the excrement of
rats beaten to powder, and such like trash and fooleries which rather
carry a face of magical enchantment than of any solid science. I omit
the odd number of their pills, the destination of certain days and feasts
of the year, the superstition of gathering their simples at certain
hours, and that so austere and very wise countenance and carriage which
Pliny himself so much derides. But they have, as I said, failed in that
they have not added to this fine beginning the making their meetings and
consultations more religious and secret, where no profane person should
have admission, no more than in the secret ceremonies of AEsculapius; for
by the reason of this it falls out that their irresolution, the weakness
of their arguments, divinations and foundations, the sharpness of their
disputes, full of hatred, jealousy, and self-consideration, coming to be
discovered by every one, a man must be marvellously blind not to see that
he runs a very great hazard in their hands. Who ever saw one physician
approve of another’s prescription, without taking something away, or
adding something to it? by which they sufficiently betray their tricks,
and make it manifest to us that they therein more consider their own
reputation, and consequently their profit, than their patient’s interest.
He was a much wiser man of their tribe, who of old gave it as a rule,
that only one physician should undertake a sick person; for if he do
nothing to purpose, one single man’s default can bring no great scandal
upon the art of medicine; and, on the contrary, the glory will be great
if he happen to have success; whereas, when there are many, they at every
turn bring a disrepute upon their calling, forasmuch as they oftener do
hurt than good. They ought to be satisfied with the perpetual
disagreement which is found in the opinions of the principal masters and
ancient authors of this science, which is only known to men well read,
without discovering to the vulgar the controversies and various judgments
which they still nourish and continue amongst themselves.
Will you have one example of the ancient controversy in physic?
Herophilus lodges the original cause of all diseases in the humours;
Erasistratus, in the blood of the arteries; Asclepiades, in the invisible
atoms of the pores; Alcmaeon, in the exuberance or defect of our bodily
strength; Diocles, in the inequality of the elements of which the body is
composed, and in the quality of the air we breathe; Strato, in the
abundance, crudity, and corruption of the nourishment we take; and
Hippocrates lodges it in the spirits. There is a certain friend of
theirs,--[Celsus, Preface to the First Book.]--whom they know better
than I, who declares upon this subject, “that the most important science
in practice amongst us, as that which is intrusted with our health and
conservation, is, by ill luck, the most uncertain, the most perplexed,
and agitated with the greatest mutations.” There is no great danger in
our mistaking the height of the sun, or the fraction of some astronomical
supputation; but here, where our whole being is concerned, ‘tis not
wisdom to abandon ourselves to the mercy of the agitation of so many
contrary winds.
Before the Peloponnesian war there was no great talk of this science.
Hippocrates brought it into repute; whatever he established, Chrysippus
overthrew; after that, Erasistratus, Aristotle’s grandson, overthrew what
Chrysippus had written; after these, the Empirics started up, who took a
quite contrary way to the ancients in the management of this art; when
the credit of these began a little to decay, Herophilus set another sort
of practice on foot, which Asclepiades in turn stood up against, and
overthrew; then, in their turn, the opinions first of Themiso, and then
of Musa, and after that those of Vectius Valens, a physician famous
through the intelligence he had with Messalina, came in vogue; the empire
of physic in Nero’s time was established in Thessalus, who abolished and
condemned all that had been held till his time; this man’s doctrine was
refuted by Crinas of Marseilles, who first brought all medicinal
operations under the Ephemerides and motions of the stars, and reduced
eating, sleeping, and drinking to hours that were most pleasing to
Mercury and the moon; his authority was soon after supplanted by
Charinus, a physician of the same city of Marseilles, a man who not only
controverted all the ancient methods of physic, but moreover the usage of
hot baths, that had been generally and for so many ages in common use; he
made men bathe in cold water, even in winter, and plunged his sick
patients in the natural waters of streams. No Roman till Pliny’s time
had ever vouchsafed to practise physic; that office was only performed
by Greeks and foreigners, as ‘tis now amongst us French, by those who
sputter Latin; for, as a very great physician says, we do not easily
accept the medicine we understand, no more than we do the drugs we
ourselves gather. If the nations whence we fetch our guaiacum,
sarsaparilla, and China wood, have physicians, how great a value must we
imagine, by the same recommendation of strangeness, rarity, and dear
purchase, do they set upon our cabbage and parsley? for who would dare
to contemn things so far fetched, and sought out at the hazard of so long
and dangerous a voyage?
Since these ancient mutations in physic, there have been infinite others
down to our own times, and, for the most part, mutations entire and
universal, as those, for example, produced by Paracelsus, Fioravanti, and
Argentier; for they, as I am told, not only alter one recipe, but the
whole contexture and rules of the body of physic, accusing all others of
ignorance and imposition who have practised before them. At this rate,
in what a condition the poor patient must be, I leave you to judge.
If we were even assured that, when they make a mistake, that mistake of
theirs would do us no harm, though it did us no good, it were a
reasonable bargain to venture the making ourselves better without any
danger of being made worse. AEsop tells a story, that one who had bought
a Morisco slave, believing that his black complexion had arrived by
accident and the ill usage of his former master, caused him to enter with
great care into a course of baths and potions: it happened that the Moor
was nothing amended in his tawny complexion, but he wholly lost his
former health. How often do we see physicians impute the death of their
patients to one another? I remember that some years ago there was an
epidemical disease, very dangerous and for the most part mortal, that
raged in the towns about us: the storm being over which had swept away an
infinite number of men, one of the most famous physicians of all the
country, presently after published a book upon that subject, wherein,
upon better thoughts, he confesses that the letting blood in that disease
was the principal cause of so many mishaps. Moreover, their authors hold
that there is no physic that has not something hurtful in it. And if
even those of the best operation in some measure offend us, what must
those do that are totally misapplied? For my own part, though there were
nothing else in the case, I am of opinion, that to those who loathe the
taste of physic, it must needs be a dangerous and prejudicial endeavour
to force it down at so incommodious a time, and with so much aversion,
and believe that it marvellously distempers a sick person at a time when
he has so much need of repose. And more over, if we but consider the
occasions upon which they usually ground the cause of our diseases, they
are so light and nice, that I thence conclude a very little error in the
dispensation of their drugs may do a great deal of mischief. Now, if the
mistake of a physician be so dangerous, we are in but a scurvy condition;
for it is almost impossible but he must often fall into those mistakes:
he had need of too many parts, considerations, and circumstances, rightly
to level his design: he must know the sick person’s complexion, his
temperament, his humours, inclinations, actions, nay, his very thoughts
and imaginations; he must be assured of the external circumstances, of
the nature of the place, the quality of the air and season, the situation
of the planets, and their influences: he must know in the disease, the
causes, prognostics, affections, and critical days; in the drugs, the
weight, the power of working, the country, figure, age, and dispensation,
and he must know how rightly to proportion and mix them together, to
beget a just and perfect symmetry; wherein if there be the least error,
if amongst so many springs there be but any one out of order, ‘tis enough
to destroy us. God knows with how great difficulty most of these things
are to be understood: for (for example) how shall the physician find out
the true sign of the disease, every disease being capable of an infinite
number of indications? How many doubts and controversies have they
amongst themselves upon the interpretation of urines? otherwise, whence
should the continual debates we see amongst them about the knowledge of
the disease proceed? how could we excuse the error they so oft fall into,
of taking fox for marten? In the diseases I have had, though there were
ever so little difficulty in the case, I never found three of one
opinion: which I instance, because I love to introduce examples wherein I
am myself concerned.
A gentleman at Paris was lately cut for the stone by order of the
physicians, in whose bladder, being accordingly so cut, there was found
no more stone than in the palm of his hand; and in the same place a
bishop, who was my particular friend, having been earnestly pressed by
the majority of the physicians whom he consulted, to suffer himself to be
cut, to which also, upon their word, I used my interest to persuade him,
when he was dead and opened, it appeared that he had no malady but in the
kidneys. They are least excusable for any error in this disease, by
reason that it is in some sort palpable; and ‘tis thence that I conclude
surgery to be much more certain, by reason that it sees and feels what it
does, and so goes less upon conjecture; whereas the physicians have no
‘speculum matricis’, by which to examine our brains, lungs, and liver.
Even the very promises of physic are incredible in themselves; for,
having to provide against divers and contrary accidents that often
afflict us at one and the same time, and that have almost a necessary
relation, as the heat of the liver and the coldness of the stomach, they
will needs persuade us, that of their ingredients one will heat the
stomach and the other will cool the liver: one has its commission to go
directly to the kidneys, nay, even to the bladder, without scattering its
operations by the way, and is to retain its power and virtue through all
those turns and meanders, even to the place to the service of which it is
designed, by its own occult property this will dry-the brain; that will
moisten the lungs. Of all this bundle of things having mixed up a
potion, is it not a kind of madness to imagine or to hope that these
differing virtues should separate themselves from one another in this
mixture and confusion, to perform so many various errands? I should very
much fear that they would either lose or change their tickets, and
disturb one another’s quarters. And who can imagine but that, in this
liquid confusion, these faculties must corrupt, confound, and spoil one
another? And is not the danger still more when the making up of this
medicine is entrusted to the skill and fidelity of still another, to
whose mercy we again abandon our lives?
As we have doublet and breeches-makers, distinct trades, to clothe us,
and are so much the better fitted, seeing that each of them meddles only
with his own business, and has less to trouble his head with than the
tailor who undertakes all; and as in matter of diet, great persons, for
their better convenience, and to the end they may be better served, have
cooks for the different offices, this for soups and potages, that for
roasting, instead of which if one cook should undertake the whole
service, he could not so well perform it; so also as to the cure of our
maladies. The Egyptians had reason to reject this general trade of
physician, and to divide the profession: to each disease, to each part of
the body, its particular workman; for that part was more properly and
with less confusion cared for, seeing the person looked to nothing else.
Ours are not aware that he who provides for all, provides for nothing;
and that the entire government of this microcosm is more than they are
able to undertake. Whilst they were afraid of stopping a dysentery, lest
they should put the patient into a fever, they killed me a friend,
--[Estienne de la Boetie.]--who was worth more than the whole of them.
They counterpoise their own divinations with the present evils; and
because they will not cure the brain to the prejudice of the stomach,
they injure both with their dissentient and tumultuary drugs.
As to the variety and weakness of the rationale of this art, they are
more manifest in it than in any other art; aperitive medicines are proper
for a man subject to the stone, by reason that opening and dilating the
passages they help forward the slimy matter whereof gravel and stone are
engendered, and convey that downward which begins to harden and gather in
the reins; aperitive things are dangerous for a man subject to the stone,
by reason that, opening and dilating the passages, they help forward the
matter proper to create the gravel toward the reins, which by their own
propension being apt to seize it, ‘tis not to be imagined but that a
great deal of what has been conveyed thither must remain behind;
moreover, if the medicine happen to meet with anything too large to be
carried through all the narrow passages it must pass to be expelled, that
obstruction, whatever it is, being stirred by these aperitive things and
thrown into those narrow passages, coming to stop them, will occasion a
certain and most painful death. They have the like uniformity in the
counsels they give us for the regimen of life: it is good to make water
often; for we experimentally see that, in letting it lie long in the
bladder, we give it time to settle the sediment, which will concrete into
a stone; it is good not to make water often, for the heavy excrements it
carries along with it will not be voided without violence, as we see by
experience that a torrent that runs with force washes the ground it rolls
over much cleaner than the course of a slow and tardy stream; so, it is
good to have often to do with women, for that opens the passages and
helps to evacuate gravel; it is also very ill to have often to do with
women, because it heats, tires, and weakens the reins. It is good to
bathe frequently in hot water, forasmuch as that relaxes and mollifies
the places where the gravel and stone lie; it is also ill by reason that
this application of external heat helps the reins to bake, harden, and
petrify the matter so disposed. For those who are taking baths it is
most healthful. To eat little at night, to the end that the waters they
are to drink the next morning may have a better operation upon an empty
stomach; on the other hand, it is better to eat little at dinner, that it
hinder not the operation of the waters, while it is not yet perfect, and
not to oppress the stomach so soon after the other labour, but leave the
office of digestion to the night, which will much better perform it than
the day, when the body and soul are in perpetual moving and action. Thus
do they juggle and trifle in all their discourses at our expense; and
they could not give me one proposition against which I should not know
how to raise a contrary of equal force. Let them, then, no longer
exclaim against those who in this trouble of sickness suffer themselves
to be gently guided by their own appetite and the advice of nature, and
commit themselves to the common fortune.
I have seen in my travels almost all the famous baths of Christendom, and
for some years past have begun to make use of them myself: for I look
upon bathing as generally wholesome, and believe that we suffer no little
inconveniences in our health by having left off the custom that was
generally observed, in former times, almost by all nations, and is yet in
many, of bathing every day; and I cannot imagine but that we are much the
worse by, having our limbs crusted and our pores stopped with dirt. And
as to the drinking of them, fortune has in the first place rendered them
not at all unacceptable to my taste; and secondly, they are natural and
simple, which at least carry no danger with them, though they may do us
no good, of which the infinite crowd of people of all sorts and
complexions who repair thither I take to be a sufficient warranty; and
although I have not there observed any extraordinary and miraculous
effects, but that on the contrary, having more narrowly than ordinary
inquired into it, I have found all the reports of such operations that
have been spread abroad in those places ill-grounded and false, and those
that believe them (as people are willing to be gulled in what they
desire) deceived in them, yet I have seldom known any who have been made
worse by those waters, and a man cannot honestly deny but that they beget
a better appetite, help digestion, and do in some sort revive us, if we
do not go too late and in too weak a condition, which I would dissuade
every one from doing. They have not the virtue to raise men from
desperate and inveterate diseases, but they may help some light
indisposition, or prevent some threatening alteration. He who does not
bring along with him so much cheerfulness as to enjoy the pleasure of the
company he will there meet, and of the walks and exercises to which the
amenity of those places invite us, will doubtless lose the best and
surest part of their effect. For this reason I have hitherto chosen to
go to those of the most pleasant situation, where there was the best
conveniency of lodging, provision, and company, as the baths of Bagneres
in France, those of Plombieres on the frontiers of Germany and Lorraine,
those of Baden in Switzerland, those of Lucca in Tuscany, and especially
those of Della Villa, which I have the most and at various seasons
frequented.
Every nation has particular opinions touching their use, and particular
rules and methods in using them; and all of them, according to what I
have seen, almost with like effect. Drinking them is not at all received
in Germany; the Germans bathe for all diseases, and will lie dabbling in
the water almost from sun to sun; in Italy, where they drink nine days,
they bathe at least thirty, and commonly drink the water mixed with some
other drugs to make it work the better. Here we are ordered to walk to
digest it; there we are kept in bed after taking it till it be wrought
off, our stomachs and feet having continually hot cloths applied to them
all the while; and as the Germans have a particular practice generally to
use cupping and scarification in the bath, so the Italians have their
‘doccie’, which are certain little streams of this hot water brought
through pipes, and with these bathe an hour in the morning, and as much
in the afternoon, for a month together, either the head, stomach, or any
other part where the evil lies. There are infinite other varieties of
customs in every country, or rather there is no manner of resemblance to
one another. By this you may see that this little part of physic to
which I have only submitted, though the least depending upon art of all
others, has yet a great share of the confusion and uncertainty everywhere
else manifest in the profession.
The poets put what they would say with greater emphasis and grace;
witness these two epigrams:
“Alcon hesterno signum Jovis attigit: ille,
Quamvis marmoreus, vim patitur medici.
Ecce hodie, jussus transferri ex aeede vetusta,
Effertur, quamvis sit Deus atque lapis.”
[“Alcon yesterday touched Jove’s statue; he, although marble,
suffers the force of the physician: to-day ordered to be transferred
from the old temple, where it stood, it is carried out, although it
be a god and a stone.”--Ausonius, Ep., 74.]
and the other:
“Lotus nobiscum est, hilaris coenavit; et idem
Inventus mane est mortuus Andragoras.
Tam subitae mortis causam, Faustine, requiris?
In somnis medicum viderat Hermocratem:”
[“Andragoras bathed with us, supped gaily, and in the morning the
same was found dead. Dost thou ask, Faustinus, the cause of this so
sudden death? In his dreams he had seen the physician Hermocrates.”
--Martial, vi. 53.]
upon which I will relate two stories.
The Baron de Caupene in Chalosse and I have betwixt us the advowson of a
benefice of great extent, at the foot of our mountains, called Lahontan.
It is with the inhabitants of this angle, as ‘tis said of those of the
Val d’Angrougne; they lived a peculiar sort of life, their fashions,
clothes, and manners distinct from other people; ruled and governed by
certain particular laws and usages, received from father to son, to which
they submitted, without other constraint than the reverence to custom.
This little state had continued from all antiquity in so happy a
condition, that no neighbouring judge was ever put to the trouble of
inquiring into their doings; no advocate was ever retained to give them
counsel, no stranger ever called in to compose their differences; nor was
ever any of them seen to go a-begging. They avoided all alliances and
traffic with the outer world, that they might not corrupt the purity of
their own government; till, as they say, one of them, in the memory of
man, having a mind spurred on with a noble ambition, took it into his
head, to bring his name into credit and reputation, to make one of his
sons something more than ordinary, and having put him to learn to write
in a neighbouring town, made him at last a brave village notary. This
fellow, having acquired such dignity, began to disdain their ancient
customs, and to buzz into the people’s ears the pomp of the other parts
of the nation; the first prank he played was to advise a friend of his,
whom somebody had offended by sawing off the horns of one of his goats,
to make his complaint to the royal judges thereabout, and so he went on
from one to another, till he had spoiled and confounded all. In the tail
of this corruption, they say, there happened another, and of worse
consequence, by means of a physician, who, falling in love with one of
their daughters, had a mind to marry her and to live amongst them. This
man first of all began to teach them the names of fevers, colds, and
imposthumes; the seat of the heart, liver, and intestines, a science till
then utterly unknown to them; and instead of garlic, with which they were
wont to cure all manner of diseases, how painful or extreme soever, he
taught them, though it were but for a cough or any little cold, to take
strange mixtures, and began to make a trade not only of their health, but
of their lives. They swear till then they never perceived the evening
air to be offensive to the head; that to drink when they were hot was
hurtful, and that the winds of autumn were more unwholesome than those of
spring; that, since this use of physic, they find themselves oppressed
with a legion of unaccustomed diseases, and that they perceive a general
decay in their ancient vigour, and their lives are cut shorter by the
half. This is the first of my stories.
The other is, that before I was afflicted with the stone, hearing that
the blood of a he-goat was with many in very great esteem, and looked
upon as a celestial manna rained down upon these latter ages for the good
and preservation of the lives of men, and having heard it spoken of by
men of understanding for an admirable drug, and of infallible operation;
I, who have ever thought myself subject to all the accidents that can
befall other men, had a mind, in my perfect health, to furnish myself
with this miracle, and therefore gave order to have a goat fed at home
according to the recipe: for he must be taken in the hottest month of all
summer, and must only have aperitive herbs given him to eat, and white
wine to drink. I came home by chance the very day he was to be killed;
and some one came and told me that the cook had found two or three great
balls in his paunch, that rattled against one another amongst what he had
eaten. I was curious to have all his entrails brought before me, where,
having caused the skin that enclosed them to be cut, there tumbled out
three great lumps, as light as sponges, so that they appeared to be
hollow, but as to the rest, hard and firm without, and spotted and mixed
all over with various dead colours; one was perfectly round, and of the
bigness of an ordinary ball; the other two something less, of an
imperfect roundness, as seeming not to be arrived at their, full growth.
I find, by inquiry of people accustomed to open these animals, that it is
a rare and unusual accident. ‘Tis likely these are stones of the same
nature with ours and if so, it must needs be a very vain hope in
those who have the stone, to extract their cure from the blood of a beast
that was himself about to die of the same disease. For to say that the
blood does not participate of this contagion, and does not thence alter
its wonted virtue, it is rather to be believed that nothing is engendered
in a body but by the conspiracy and communication of all the parts: the
whole mass works together, though one part contributes more to the work
than another, according to the diversity of operations; wherefore it is
very likely that there was some petrifying quality in all the parts of
this goat. It was not so much for fear of the future, and for myself,
that I was curious in this experiment, but because it falls out in mine,
as it does in many other families, that the women store up such little
trumperies for the service of the people, using the same recipe in fifty
several diseases, and such a recipe as they will not take themselves, and
yet triumph when they happen to be successful.
As to what remains, I honour physicians, not according to the precept
for their necessity (for to this passage may be opposed another of the
prophet reproving King Asa for having recourse to a physician), but for
themselves, having known many very good men of that profession, and most
worthy to be beloved. I do not attack them; ‘tis their art I inveigh
against, and do not much blame them for making their advantage of our
folly, for most men do the same. Many callings, both of greater and of
less dignity than theirs, have no other foundation or support than public
abuse. When I am sick I send for them if they be near, only to have
their company, and pay them as others do. I give them leave to command
me to keep myself warm, because I naturally love to do it, and to appoint
leeks or lettuce for my broth; to order me white wine or claret; and so
as to all other things, which are indifferent to my palate and custom.
I know very well that I do nothing for them in so doing, because
sharpness and strangeness are incidents of the very essence of physic.
Lycurgus ordered wine for the sick Spartans. Why? because they
abominated the drinking it when they were well; as a gentleman, a
neighbour of mine, takes it as an excellent medicine in his fever,
because naturally he mortally hates the taste of it. How many do we see
amongst them of my humour, who despise taking physic themselves, are men
of a liberal diet, and live a quite contrary sort of life to what they
prescribe others? What is this but flatly to abuse our simplicity? for
their own lives and health are no less dear to them than ours are to us,
and consequently they would accommodate their practice to their rules, if
they did not themselves know how false these are.
‘Tis the fear of death and of pain, impatience of disease, and a violent
and indiscreet desire of a present cure, that so blind us: ‘tis pure
cowardice that makes our belief so pliable and easy to be imposed upon:
and yet most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit; for
I hear them find fault and complain as well as we; but they resolve at
last, “What should I do then?” As if impatience were of itself a better
remedy than patience. Is there any one of those who have suffered
themselves to be persuaded into this miserable subjection, who does not
equally surrender himself to all sorts of impostures? who does not give
up himself to the mercy of whoever has the impudence to promise him a
cure? The Babylonians carried their sick into the public square; the
physician was the people: every one who passed by being in humanity and
civility obliged to inquire of their condition, gave some advice
according to his own experience. We do little better; there is not so
simple a woman, whose gossips and drenches we do not make use of: and
according to my humour, if I were to take physic, I would sooner choose
to take theirs than any other, because at least, if they do no good, they
will do no harm. What Homer and Plato said of the Egyptians, that they
were all physicians, may be said of all nations; there is not a man
amongst any of them who does not boast of some rare recipe, and who will
not venture it upon his neighbour, if he will let him. I was the other
day in a company where one, I know not who, of my fraternity brought us
intelligence of a new sort of pills made up of a hundred and odd
ingredients: it made us very merry, and was a singular consolation, for
what rock could withstand so great a battery? And yet I hear from those
who have made trial of it, that the least atom of gravel deigned not to
stir fort.
I cannot take my hand from the paper before I have added a word
concerning the assurance they give us of the certainty of their drugs,
from the experiments they have made.
The greatest part, I should say above two-thirds of the medicinal
virtues, consist in the quintessence or occult property of simples,
of which we can have no other instruction than use and custom; for
quintessence is no other than a quality of which we cannot by our reason
find out the cause. In such proofs, those they pretend to have acquired
by the inspiration of some daemon, I am content to receive (for I meddle
not with miracles); and also the proofs which are drawn from things that,
upon some other account, often fall into use amongst us; as if in the
wool, wherewith we are wont to clothe ourselves, there has accidentally
some occult desiccative property been found out of curing kibed heels, or
as if in the radish we eat for food there has been found out some
aperitive operation. Galen reports, that a man happened to be cured of a
leprosy by drinking wine out of a vessel into which a viper had crept by
chance. In this example we find the means and a very likely guide and
conduct to this experience, as we also do in those that physicians
pretend to have been directed to by the example of some beasts. But in
most of their other experiments wherein they affirm they have been
conducted by fortune, and to have had no other guide than chance, I find
the progress of this information incredible. Suppose man looking round
about him upon the infinite number of things, plants, animals, metals;
I do not know where he would begin his trial; and though his first fancy
should fix him upon an elk’s horn, wherein there must be a very pliant
and easy belief, he will yet find himself as perplexed in his second
operation. There are so many maladies and so many circumstances
presented to him, that before he can attain the certainty of the point to
which the perfection of his experience should arrive, human sense will be
at the end of its lesson: and before he can, amongst this infinity of
things, find out what this horn is; amongst so many diseases, what is
epilepsy; the many complexions in a melancholy person; the many seasons
in winter; the many nations in the French; the many ages in age; the many
celestial mutations in the conjunction of Venus and Saturn; the many
parts in man’s body, nay, in a finger; and being, in all this, directed
neither by argument, conjecture, example, nor divine inspirations, but
merely by the sole motion of fortune, it must be by a perfectly
artificial, regular and methodical fortune. And after the cure is
performed, how can he assure himself that it was not because the disease
had arrived at its period or an effect of chance? or the operation of
something else that he had eaten, drunk, or touched that day? or by
virtue of his grandmother’s prayers? And, moreover, had this experiment
been perfect, how many times was it repeated, and this long bead-roll of
haps, and concurrences strung anew by chance to conclude a certain rule?
And when the rule is concluded, by whom, I pray you? Of so many
millions, there are but three men who take upon them to record their
experiments: must fortune needs just hit one of these? What if another,
and a hundred others, have made contrary experiments? We might,
peradventure, have some light in this, were all the judgments and
arguments of men known to us; but that three witnesses, three doctors,
should lord it over all mankind, is against reason: it were necessary
that human nature should have deputed and chosen them out, and that they
were declared our comptrollers by express procuration:
“TO MADAME DE DURAS.
--[Marguerite de Grammont, widow of Jean de Durfort, Seigneur de
Duras, who was killed near Leghorn, leaving no posterity. Montaigne
seems to have been on terms of considerable intimacy with her, and
to have tendered her some very wholesome and frank advice in regard
to her relations with Henry IV.]--
“MADAME,--The last time you honoured me with a visit, you found me at work
upon this chapter, and as these trifles may one day fall into your hands,
I would also that they testify in how great honour the author will take
any favour you shall please to show them. You will there find the same
air and mien you have observed in his conversation; and though I could
have borrowed some better or more favourable garb than my own, I would
not have done it: for I require nothing more of these writings, but to
present me to your memory such as I naturally am. The same conditions
and faculties you have been pleased to frequent and receive with much
more honour and courtesy than they deserve, I would put together (but
without alteration or change) in one solid body, that may peradventure
continue some years, or some days, after I am gone; where you may find
them again when you shall please to refresh your memory, without putting
you to any greater trouble; neither are they worth it. I desire you
should continue the favour of your friendship to me, by the same
qualities by which it was acquired.
“I am not at all ambitious that any one should love and esteem me more
dead than living. The humour of Tiberius is ridiculous, but yet common,
who was more solicitous to extend his renown to posterity than to render
himself acceptable to men of his own time. If I were one of those to
whom the world could owe commendation, I would give out of it one-half to
have the other in hand; let their praises come quick and crowding about
me, more thick than long, more full than durable; and let them cease, in
God’s name, with my own knowledge of them, and when the sweet sound can
no longer pierce my ears. It were an idle humour to essay, now that I am
about to forsake the commerce of men, to offer myself to them by a new
recommendation. I make no account of the goods I could not employ in the
service of my life. Such as I am, I will be elsewhere than in paper: my
art and industry have been ever directed to render myself good for
something; my studies, to teach me to do, and not to write. I have made
it my whole business to frame my life: this has been my trade and my
work; I am less a writer of books than anything else. I have coveted
understanding for the service of my present and real conveniences, and
not to lay up a stock for my posterity. He who has anything of value in
him, let him make it appear in his conduct, in his ordinary discourses,
in his courtships, and his quarrels: in play, in bed, at table, in the
management of his affairs, in his economics. Those whom I see make good
books in ill breeches, should first have mended their breeches, if they
would have been ruled by me. Ask a Spartan whether he had rather be a
good orator or a good soldier: and if I was asked the same question, I
would rather choose to be a good cook, had I not one already to serve me.
My God! Madame, how should I hate such a recommendation of being a
clever fellow at writing, and an ass and an inanity in everything else!
Yet I had rather be a fool both here and there than to have made so ill a
choice wherein to employ my talent. And I am so far from expecting to
gain any new reputation by these follies, that I shall think I come off
pretty well if I lose nothing by them of that little I had before. For
besides that this dead and mute painting will take from my natural being,
it has no resemblance to my better condition, but is much lapsed from my
former vigour and cheerfulness, growing faded and withered: I am towards
the bottom of the barrel, which begins to taste of the lees.
“As to the rest, Madame, I should not have dared to make so bold with the
mysteries of physic, considering the esteem that you and so many others
have of it, had I not had encouragement from their own authors. I think
there are of these among the old Latin writers but two, Pliny and Celsus
if these ever fall into your hands, you will find that they speak much
more rudely of their art than I do; I but pinch it, they cut its throat.
Pliny, amongst other things, twits them with this, that when they are at
the end of their rope, they have a pretty device to save themselves, by
recommending their patients, whom they have teased and tormented with
their drugs and diets to no purpose, some to vows and miracles, others to
the hot baths. (Be not angry, Madame; he speaks not of those in our
parts, which are under the protection of your house, and all Gramontins.)
They have a third way of saving their own credit, of ridding their hands
of us and securing themselves from the reproaches we might cast in their
teeth of our little amendment, when they have had us so long in their
hands that they have not one more invention left wherewith to amuse us,
which is to send us to the better air of some other country. This,
Madame, is enough; I hope you will give me leave to return to my
discourse, from which I have so far digressed, the better to divert you.”
It was, I think, Pericles, who being asked how he did: “You may judge,”
says he, “by these,” showing some little scrolls of parchment he had tied
about his neck and arms. By which he would infer that he must needs be
very sick when he was reduced to a necessity of having recourse to such
idle and vain fopperies, and of suffering himself to be so equipped.
I dare not promise but that I may one day be so much a fool as to commit
my life and death to the mercy and government of physicians; I may fall
into such a frenzy; I dare not be responsible for my future constancy:
but then, if any one ask me how I do, I may also answer, as Pericles did,
“You may judge by this,” shewing my hand clutching six drachms of opium.
It will be a very evident sign of a violent sickness: my judgment will be
very much out of order; if once fear and impatience get such an advantage
over me, it may very well be concluded that there is a dreadful fever in
my mind.
I have taken the pains to plead this cause, which I understand
indifferently, a little to back and support the natural aversion to drugs
and the practice of physic I have derived from my ancestors, to the end
it may not be a mere stupid and inconsiderate aversion, but have a little
more form; and also, that they who shall see me so obstinate in my
resolution against all exhortations and menaces that shall be given me,
when my infirmity shall press hardest upon me, may not think ‘tis mere
obstinacy in me; or any one so ill-natured as to judge it to be any
motive of glory: for it would be a strange ambition to seek to gain
honour by an action my gardener or my groom can perform as well as I.
Certainly, I have not a heart so tumorous and windy, that I should
exchange so solid a pleasure as health for an airy and imaginary
pleasure: glory, even that of the Four Sons of Aymon, is too dear bought
by a man of my humour, if it cost him three swinging fits of the stone.
Give me health, in God’s name! Such as love physic, may also have good,
great, and convincing considerations; I do not hate opinions contrary to
my own: I am so, far from being angry to see a discrepancy betwixt mine
and other men’s judgments, and from rendering myself unfit for the
society of men, from being of another sense and party than mine, that on
the contrary (the most general way that nature has followed being
variety, and more in souls than bodies, forasmuch as they are of a more
supple substance, and more susceptible of forms) I find it much more rare
to see our humours and designs jump and agree. And there never were, in
the world, two opinions alike, no more than two hairs, or two grains:
their most universal quality is diversity.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
I am towards the bottom of the barrel
Accusing all others of ignorance and imposition
Affection towards their husbands, (not) until they have lost them
Anything of value in him, let him make it appear in his conduct
As if impatience were of itself a better remedy than patience
Assurance they give us of the certainty of their drugs
At least, if they do no good, they will do no harm
Attribute to itself; all the happy successes that happen
Best part of a captain to know how to make use of occasions
Burnt and roasted for opinions taken upon trust from others
Commit themselves to the common fortune
Crafty humility that springs from presumption
Did not approve all sorts of means to obtain a victory
Disease had arrived at its period or an effect of chance?
Dissentient and tumultuary drugs
Do not much blame them for making their advantage of our folly
Doctors: more felicity and duration in their own lives?
Doctrine much more intricate and fantastic than the thing itself
Drugs being in its own nature an enemy to our health
Even the very promises of physic are incredible in themselves
Fathers conceal their affection from their children
He who provides for all, provides for nothing
Health depends upon the vanity and falsity of their promises
Health is altered and corrupted by their frequent prescriptions
Health to be worth purchasing by all the most painful cauteries
Homer: The only words that have motion and action
I dare not promise but that I may one day be so much a fool
I see no people so soon sick as those who take physic
Indiscreet desire of a present cure, that so blind us
Intended to get a new husband than to lament the old
Let it alone a little
Life should be cut off in the sound and living part
Live a quite contrary sort of life to what they prescribe others
Live, not so long as they please, but as long as they ought
Llaying the fault upon the patient, by such frivolous reasons
Long a voyage I should at last run myself into some disadvantage
Making their advantage of our folly, for most men do the same
Man may with less trouble adapt himself to entire abstinence
Man runs a very great hazard in their hands (of physicians)
Mark of singular good nature to preserve old age
Men must embark, and not deliberate, upon high enterprises
Mercenaries who would receive any (pay)
Moderation is a virtue that gives more work than suffering
More valued a victory obtained by counsel than by force
Most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit
Never any man knew so much, and spake so little
No danger with them, though they may do us no good
No other foundation or support than public abuse
No physic that has not something hurtful in it
Noble and rich, where examples of virtue are rarely lodged
Obstinacy is the sister of constancy
Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better
Ordinances it (Medicine) foists upon us
Passion has a more absolute command over us than reason
Pay very strict usury who did not in due time pay the principal
People are willing to be gulled in what they desire
Physician’s “help”, which is very often an obstacle
Physicians are not content to deal only with the sick
Physicians fear men should at any time escape their authority
Physicians were the only men who might lie at pleasure
Physicians: earth covers their failures
Plato said of the Egyptians, that they were all physicians
Pure cowardice that makes our belief so pliable
Recommendation of strangeness, rarity, and dear purchase
Send us to the better air of some other country
Should first have mended their breeches
Smile upon us whilst we are alive
So austere and very wise countenance and carriage (of physicians)
So much are men enslaved to their miserable being
Solon said that eating was physic against the malady hunger
Strangely suspect all this merchandise: medical care
Studies, to teach me to do, and not to write
Such a recipe as they will not take themselves
That he could neither read nor swim
The Babylonians carried their sick into the public square
They (good women) are not by the dozen, as every one knows
They have not one more invention left wherewith to amuse us
They juggle and trifle in all their discourses at our expense
They never loved them till dead
Tis in some sort a kind of dying to avoid the pain of living wel
Tis not the number of men, but the number of good men
Tis there she talks plain French
To be, not to seem
To keep me from dying is not in your power
Two opinions alike, no more than two hairs
Tyrannical authority physicians usurp over poor creatures
Venture it upon his neighbour, if he will let him
Venture the making ourselves better without any danger
We confess our ignorance in many things
We do not easily accept the medicine we understand
What are become of all our brave philosophical precepts?
What we have not seen, we are forced to receive from other hands
Whatever was not ordinary diet, was instead of a drug
Whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead
Who does not boast of some rare recipe
Who ever saw one physician approve of another’s prescription
Willingly give them leave to laugh after we are dead
With being too well I am about to die
Wont to give others their life, and not to receive it
You may indeed make me die an ill death
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 14.
I. Of Profit and Honesty.
II. Of Repentance.
III. Of Three Commerces.
IV. Of Diversion.
ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE
BOOK THE THIRD
CHAPTER I
OF PROFIT AND HONESTY
No man is free from speaking foolish things; but the worst on’t is, when
a man labours to play the fool:
“Nae iste magno conatu magnas nugas dixerit.”
[“Truly he, with a great effort will shortly say a mighty trifle.”
---Terence, Heaut., act iii., s. 4.]
This does not concern me; mine slip from me with as little care as they
are of little value, and ‘tis the better for them. I would presently
part with them for what they are worth, and neither buy nor sell them,
but as they weigh. I speak on paper, as I do to the first person I meet;
and that this is true, observe what follows.
To whom ought not treachery to be hateful, when Tiberius refused it in a
thing of so great importance to him? He had word sent him from Germany
that if he thought fit, they would rid him of Arminius by poison: this
was the most potent enemy the Romans had, who had defeated them so
ignominiously under Varus, and who alone prevented their aggrandisement
in those parts.
He returned answer, “that the people of Rome were wont to revenge
themselves of their enemies by open ways, and with their swords in their
hands, and not clandestinely and by fraud”: wherein he quitted the
profitable for the honest. You will tell me that he was a braggadocio; I
believe so too: and ‘tis no great miracle in men of his profession. But
the acknowledgment of virtue is not less valid in the mouth of him who
hates it, forasmuch as truth forces it from him, and if he will not
inwardly receive it, he at least puts it on for a decoration.
Our outward and inward structure is full of imperfection; but there is
nothing useless in nature, not even inutility itself; nothing has
insinuated itself into this universe that has not therein some fit and
proper place. Our being is cemented with sickly qualities: ambition,
jealousy, envy, revenge, superstition, and despair have so natural a
possession in us, that its image is discerned in beasts; nay, and
cruelty, so unnatural a vice; for even in the midst of compassion we feel
within, I know not what tart-sweet titillation of ill-natured pleasure in
seeing others suffer; and the children feel it:
“Suave mari magno, turbantibus aequora ventis,
E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem:”
[“It is sweet, when the winds disturb the waters of the vast sea, to
witness from land the peril of other persons.”--Lucretius, ii. I.]
of the seeds of which qualities, whoever should divest man, would destroy
the fundamental conditions of human life. Likewise, in all governments
there are necessary offices, not only abject, but vicious also. Vices
there help to make up the seam in our piecing, as poisons are useful for
the conservation of health. If they become excusable because they are of
use to us, and that the common necessity covers their true qualities, we
are to resign this part to the strongest and boldest citizens, who
sacrifice their honour and conscience, as others of old sacrificed their
lives, for the good of their country: we, who are weaker, take upon us
parts both that are more easy and less hazardous. The public weal
requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre; let us leave this
commission to men who are more obedient and more supple.
In earnest, I have often been troubled to see judges, by fraud and false
hopes of favour or pardon, allure a criminal to confess his fact, and
therein to make use of cozenage and impudence. It would become justice,
and Plato himself, who countenances this manner of proceeding, to furnish
me with other means more suitable to my own liking: this is a malicious
kind of justice, and I look upon it as no less wounded by itself than by
others. I said not long since to some company in discourse, that I
should hardly be drawn to betray my prince for a particular man, who
should be much ashamed to betray any particular man for my prince; and I
do not only hate deceiving myself, but that any one should deceive
through me; I will neither afford matter nor occasion to any such thing.
In the little I have had to mediate betwixt our princes--[Between the
King of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV., and the Duc de Guise. See De
Thou, De Vita Sua, iii. 9.]--in the divisions and subdivisions by which
we are at this time torn to pieces, I have been very careful that they
should neither be deceived in me nor deceive others by me. People of
that kind of trading are very reserved, and pretend to be the most
moderate imaginable and nearest to the opinions of those with whom they
have to do; I expose myself in my stiff opinion, and after a method the
most my own; a tender negotiator, a novice, who had rather fail in the
affair than be wanting to myself. And yet it has been hitherto with so
good luck (for fortune has doubtless the best share in it), that few
things have passed from hand to hand with less suspicion or more favour
and privacy. I have a free and open way that easily insinuates itself
and obtains belief with those with whom I am to deal at the first
meeting. Sincerity and pure truth, in what age soever, pass for current;
and besides, the liberty and freedom of a man who treats without any
interest of his own is never hateful or suspected, and he may very well
make use of the answer of Hyperides to the Athenians, who complained of
his blunt way of speaking: “Messieurs, do not consider whether or no I am
free, but whether I am so without a bribe, or without any advantage to my
own affairs.” My liberty of speaking has also easily cleared me from all
suspicion of dissembling by its vehemency, leaving nothing unsaid, how
home and bitter soever (so that I could have said no worse behind their
backs), and in that it carried along with it a manifest show of
simplicity and indifference. I pretend to no other fruit by acting than
to act, and add to it no long arguments or propositions; every action
plays its own game, win if it can.
As to the rest, I am not swayed by any passion, either of love or hatred,
towards the great, nor has my will captivated either by particular injury
or obligation. I look upon our kings with an affection simply loyal and
respectful, neither prompted nor restrained by any private interest, and
I love myself for it. Nor does the general and just cause attract me
otherwise than with moderation, and without heat. I am not subject to
those penetrating and close compacts and engagements. Anger and hatred
are beyond the duty of justice; and are passions only useful to those who
do not keep themselves strictly to their duty by simple reason:
“Utatur motu animi, qui uti ratione non potest.”
[“He may employ his passion, who can make no use of his reason.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 25.]
All legitimate intentions are temperate and equable of themselves; if
otherwise, they degenerate into seditious and unlawful. This is it which
makes me walk everywhere with my head erect, my face and my heart open.
In truth, and I am not afraid to confess it, I should easily, in case of
need, hold up one candle to St. Michael and another to his dragon, like
the old woman; I will follow the right side even to the fire, but
exclusively, if I can. Let Montaigne be overwhelmed in the public ruin
if need be; but if there be no need, I should think myself obliged to
fortune to save me, and I will make use of all the length of line my duty
allows for his preservation. Was it not Atticus who, being of the just
but losing side, preserved himself by his moderation in that universal
shipwreck of the world, amongst so many mutations and diversities? For
private man, as he was, it is more easy; and in such kind of work, I
think a man may justly not be ambitious to offer and insinuate himself.
For a man, indeed, to be wavering and irresolute, to keep his affection
unmoved and without inclination in the troubles of his country and public
divisions, I neither think it handsome nor honest:
“Ea non media, sed nulla via est, velut eventum
exspectantium, quo fortunae consilia sua applicent.”
[“That is not a middle way, but no way, to await events, by which
they refer their resolutions to fortune.”--Livy, xxxii. 21.]
This may be allowed in our neighbours’ affairs; and thus Gelo, the tyrant
of Syracuse, suspended his inclination in the war betwixt the Greeks and
barbarians, keeping a resident ambassador with presents at Delphos, to
watch and see which way fortune would incline, and then take fit occasion
to fall in with the victors. It would be a kind of treason to proceed
after this manner in our own domestic affairs, wherein a man must of
necessity be of the one side or the other; though for a man who has no
office or express command to call him out, to sit still I hold it more
excusable (and yet I do not excuse myself upon these terms) than in
foreign expeditions, to which, however, according to our laws, no man is
pressed against his will. And yet even those who wholly engage
themselves in such a war may behave themselves with such temper and
moderation, that the storm may fly over their heads without doing them
any harm. Had we not reason to hope such an issue in the person of the
late Bishop of Orleans, the Sieur de Morvilliers?
[An able negotiator, who, though protected by the Guises, and
strongly supporting them, was yet very far from persecuting the
Reformists. He died 1577.]
And I know, amongst those who behave themselves most bravely in the
present war, some whose manners are so gentle, obliging, and just, that
they will certainly stand firm, whatever event Heaven is preparing for
us. I am of opinion that it properly belongs to kings only to quarrel
with kings; and I laugh at those spirits who, out of lightness of heart,
lend themselves to so disproportioned disputes; for a man has never the
more particular quarrel with a prince, by marching openly and boldly
against him for his own honour and according to his duty; if he does not
love such a person, he does better, he esteems him. And notably the
cause of the laws and of the ancient government of a kingdom, has this
always annexed to it, that even those who, for their own private
interest, invade them, excuse, if they do not honour, the defenders.
But we are not, as we nowadays do, to call peevishness and inward
discontent, that spring from private interest and passion, duty, nor a
treacherous and malicious conduct, courage; they call their proneness to
mischief and violence zeal; ‘tis not the cause, but their interest, that
inflames them; they kindle and begin a war, not because it is just, but
because it is war.
A man may very well behave himself commodiously and loyally too amongst
those of the adverse party; carry yourself, if not with the same equal
affection (for that is capable of different measure), at least with an
affection moderate, well tempered, and such as shall not so engage you to
one party, that it may demand all you are able to do for that side,
content yourself with a moderate proportion of their, favour and
goodwill; and to swim in troubled waters without fishing in them.
The other way, of offering a man’s self and the utmost service he is able
to do, both to one party and the other, has still less of prudence in it
than conscience. Does not he to whom you betray another, to whom you
were as welcome as to himself, know that you will at another time do as
much for him? He holds you for a villain; and in the meantime hears what
you will say, gathers intelligence from you, and works his own ends out
of your disloyalty; double-dealing men are useful for bringing in, but we
must have a care they carry out as little as is possible.
I say nothing to one party that I may not, upon occasion, say to the
other, with a little alteration of accent; and report nothing but things
either indifferent or known, or what is of common consequence. I cannot
permit myself, for any consideration, to tell them a lie. What is
intrusted to my secrecy, I religiously conceal; but I take as few trusts
of that nature upon me as I can. The secrets of princes are a
troublesome burthen to such as are not interested in them. I very
willingly bargain that they trust me with little, but confidently rely
upon what I tell them. I have ever known more than I desired. One open
way of speaking introduces another open way of speaking, and draws out
discoveries, like wine and love. Philippides, in my opinion, answered
King Lysimachus very discreetly, who, asking him what of his estate he
should bestow upon him? “What you will,” said he, “provided it be none
of your secrets.” I see every one is displeased if the bottom of the
affair be concealed from him wherein he is employed, or that there be any
reservation in the thing; for my part, I am content to know no more of
the business than what they would have me employ myself in, nor desire
that my knowledge should exceed or restrict what I have to say. If I
must serve for an instrument of deceit, let it be at least with a safe
conscience: I will not be reputed a servant either so affectionate or so
loyal as to be fit to betray any one: he who is unfaithful to himself, is
excusably so to his master. But they are princes who do not accept men
by halves, and despise limited and conditional services: I cannot help
it: I frankly tell them how far I can go; for a slave I should not be,
but to reason, and I can hardly submit even to that. And they also are
to blame to exact from a freeman the same subjection and obligation to
their service that they do from him they have made and bought, or whose
fortune particularly and expressly depends upon theirs. The laws have
delivered me from a great anxiety; they have chosen a side for me, and
given me a master; all other superiority and obligation ought to be
relative to that, and cut, off from all other. Yet this is not to say,
that if my affection should otherwise incline me, my hand should
presently obey it; the will and desire are a law to themselves; but
actions must receive commission from the public appointment.
All this proceeding of mine is a little dissonant from the ordinary
forms; it would produce no great effects, nor be of any long duration;
innocence itself could not, in this age of ours, either negotiate without
dissimulation, or traffic without lying; and, indeed, public employments
are by no means for my palate: what my profession requires, I perform
after the most private manner that I can. Being young, I was engaged up
to the ears in business, and it succeeded well; but I disengaged myself
in good time. I have often since avoided meddling in it, rarely
accepted, and never asked it; keeping my back still turned to ambition;
but if not like rowers who so advance backward, yet so, at the same time,
that I am less obliged to my resolution than to my good fortune, that I
was not wholly embarked in it. For there are ways less displeasing to my
taste, and more suitable to my ability, by which, if she had formerly
called me to the public service, and my own advancement towards the
world’s opinion, I know I should, in spite of all my own arguments to the
contrary, have pursued them. Such as commonly say, in opposition to what
I profess, that what I call freedom, simplicity, and plainness in my
manners, is art and subtlety, and rather prudence than goodness, industry
than nature, good sense than good luck, do me more honour than disgrace:
but, certainly, they make my subtlety too subtle; and whoever has
followed me close, and pryed narrowly into me, I will give him the
victory, if he does not confess that there is no rule in their school
that could match this natural motion, and maintain an appearance of
liberty and licence, so equal and inflexible, through so many various and
crooked paths, and that all their wit and endeavour could never have led
them through. The way of truth is one and simple; that of particular
profit, and the commodity of affairs a man is entrusted with, is double,
unequal, and casual. I have often seen these counterfeit and artificial
liberties practised, but, for the most part, without success; they relish
of AEsop’s ass who, in emulation of the dog, obligingly clapped his two
fore-feet upon his master’s shoulders; but as many caresses as the dog
had for such an expression of kindness, twice so many blows with a cudgel
had the poor ass for his compliment:
“Id maxime quemque decet, quod est cujusque suum maxime.”
[“That best becomes every man which belongs most to him;”
--Cicero, De Offic., i. 31.]
I will not deprive deceit of its due; that were but ill to understand the
world: I know it has often been of great use, and that it maintains and
supplies most men’s employment. There are vices that are lawful, as
there are many actions, either good or excusable, that are not lawful in
themselves.
The justice which in itself is natural and universal is otherwise and
more nobly ordered than that other justice which is special, national,
and constrained to the ends of government,
“Veri juris germanaeque justitiae solidam et expressam
effigiem nullam tenemus; umbra et imaginibus utimur;”
[“We retain no solid and express portraiture of true right and
germane justice; we have only the shadow and image of it.”
--Cicero, De Offic., iii. 17.]
insomuch that the sage Dandamis, hearing the lives of Socrates,
Pythagoras, and Diogenes read, judged them to be great men every way,
excepting that they were too much subjected to the reverence of the laws,
which, to second and authorise, true virtue must abate very much of its
original vigour; many vicious actions are introduced, not only by their
permission, but by their advice:
“Ex senatus consultis plebisquescitis scelera exercentur.”
[“Crimes are committed by the decrees of the Senate and the
popular assembly.”--Seneca, Ep., 95.]
I follow the common phrase that distinguishes betwixt profitable and
honest things, so as to call some natural actions, that are not only
profitable but necessary, dishonest and foul.
But let us proceed in our examples of treachery two pretenders to the
kingdom of Thrace--[Rhescuporis and Cotys. Tacitus, Annal., ii. 65]--
were fallen into dispute about their title; the emperor hindered them
from proceeding to blows: but one of them, under colour of bringing
things to a friendly issue by an interview, having invited his competitor
to an entertainment in his own house, imprisoned and killed him. Justice
required that the Romans should have satisfaction for this offence; but
there was a difficulty in obtaining it by ordinary ways; what, therefore,
they could not do legitimately, without war and without danger, they
resolved to do by treachery; and what they could not honestly do, they
did profitably. For which end, one Pomponius Flaccus was found to be a
fit instrument. This man, by dissembled words and assurances, having
drawn the other into his toils, instead of the honour and favour he had
promised him, sent him bound hand and foot to Rome. Here one traitor
betrayed another, contrary to common custom: for they are full of
mistrust, and ‘tis hard to overreach them in their own art: witness the
sad experience we have lately had.--[Montaigne here probably refers to
the feigned reconciliation between Catherine de Medici and Henri, Duc de
Guise, in 1588.]
Let who will be Pomponius Flaccus, and there are enough who would: for my
part, both my word and my faith are, like all the rest, parts of this
common body: their best effect is the public service; this I take for
presupposed. But should one command me to take charge of the courts of
law and lawsuits, I should make answer, that I understood it not; or the
place of a leader of pioneers, I would say, that I was called to a more
honourable employment; so likewise, he that would employ me to lie,
betray, and forswear myself, though not to assassinate or to poison, for
some notable service, I should say, “If I have robbed or stolen anything
from any man, send me rather to the galleys.” For it is permissible in a
man of honour to say, as the Lacedaemonians did,--[Plutarch, Difference
between a Flatterer and a Friend, c. 21.]--having been defeated by
Antipater, when just upon concluding an agreement: “You may impose as
heavy and ruinous taxes upon us as you please, but to command us to do
shameful and dishonest things, you will lose your time, for it is to no
purpose.” Every one ought to make the same vow to himself that the kings
of Egypt made their judges solemnly swear, that they would not do
anything contrary to their consciences, though never so much commanded to
it by themselves. In such commissions there is evident mark of ignominy
and condemnation; and he who gives it at the same time accuses you, and
gives it, if you understand it right, for a burden and a punishment.
As much as the public affairs are bettered by your exploit, so much are
your own the worse, and the better you behave yourself in it, ‘tis so
much the worse for yourself; and it will be no new thing, nor,
peradventure, without some colour of justice, if the same person ruin
you who set you on work.
If treachery can be in any case excusable, it must be only so when it is
practised to chastise and betray treachery. There are examples enough of
treacheries, not only rejected, but chastised and punished by those in
favour of whom they were undertaken. Who is ignorant of Fabricius
sentence against the physician of Pyrrhus?
But this we also find recorded, that some persons have commanded a thing,
who afterward have severely avenged the execution of it upon him they had
employed, rejecting the reputation of so unbridled an authority, and
disowning so abandoned and base a servitude and obedience. Jaropelk,
Duke of Russia, tampered with a gentleman of Hungary to betray Boleslaus,
king of Poland, either by killing him, or by giving the Russians
opportunity to do him some notable mischief. This worthy went ably to
work: he was more assiduous than before in the service of that king, so
that he obtained the honour to be of his council, and one of the chiefest
in his trust. With these advantages, and taking an opportune occasion of
his master’s absence, he betrayed Vislicza, a great and rich city, to the
Russians, which was entirely sacked and burned, and not only all the
inhabitants of both sexes, young and old, put to the sword, but moreover
a great number of neighbouring gentry, whom he had drawn thither to that
end. Jaropelk, his revenge being thus satisfied and his anger appeased,
which was not, indeed, without pretence (for Boleslaus had highly
offended him, and after the same manner), and sated with the fruit of
this treachery, coming to consider the fulness of it, with a sound
judgment and clear from passion, looked upon what had been done with so
much horror and remorse that he caused the eyes to be bored out and the
tongue and shameful parts to be cut off of him who had performed it.
Antigonus persuaded the Argyraspides to betray Eumenes, their general,
his adversary, into his hands; but after he had caused him, so delivered,
to be slain, he would himself be the commissioner of the divine justice
for the punishment of so detestable a crime, and committed them into the
hands of the governor of the province, with express command, by whatever
means, to destroy and bring them all to an evil end, so that of that
great number of men, not so much as one ever returned again into
Macedonia: the better he had been served, the more wickedly he judged it
to be, and meriting greater punishment.
The slave who betrayed the place where his master, P. Sulpicius, lay
concealed, was, according to the promise of Sylla’s proscription,
manumitted for his pains; but according to the promise of the public
justice, which was free from any such engagement, he was thrown headlong
from the Tarpeian rock.
Our King Clovis, instead of the arms of gold he had promised them, caused
three of Cararie’s servants to be hanged after they had betrayed their
master to him, though he had debauched them to it: he hanged them with
the purse of their reward about their necks; after having satisfied his
second and special faith, he satisfied the general and first.
Mohammed II. having resolved to rid himself of his brother, out of
jealousy of state, according to the practice of the Ottoman family, he
employed one of his officers in the execution, who, pouring a quantity of
water too fast into him, choked him. This being done, to expiate the
murder, he delivered the murderer into the hands of the mother of him he
had so caused to be put to death, for they were only brothers by the
father’s side; she, in his presence, ripped up the murderer’s bosom, and
with her own hands rifled his breast for his heart, tore it out, and
threw it to the dogs. And even to the worst people it is the sweetest
thing imaginable, having once gained their end by a vicious action, to
foist, in all security, into it some show of virtue and justice, as by
way of compensation and conscientious correction; to which may be added,
that they look upon the ministers of such horrid crimes as upon men who
reproach them with them, and think by their deaths to erase the memory
and testimony of such proceedings.
Or if, perhaps, you are rewarded, not to frustrate the public necessity
for that extreme and desperate remedy, he who does it cannot for all
that, if he be not such himself, but look upon you as an accursed and
execrable fellow, and conclude you a greater traitor than he does,
against whom you are so: for he tries the malignity of your disposition
by your own hands, where he cannot possibly be deceived, you having no
object of preceding hatred to move you to such an act; but he employs you
as they do condemned malefactors in executions of justice, an office as
necessary as dishonourable. Besides the baseness of such commissions,
there is, moreover, a prostitution of conscience. Seeing that the
daughter of Sejanus could not be put to death by the law of Rome, because
she was a virgin, she was, to make it lawful, first ravished by the
hangman and then strangled: not only his hand but his soul is slave to
the public convenience.
When Amurath I., more grievously to punish his subjects who had taken
part in the parricide rebellion of his son, ordained that their nearest
kindred should assist in the execution, I find it very handsome in some
of them to have rather chosen to be unjustly thought guilty of the
parricide of another than to serve justice by a parricide of their own.
And where I have seen, at the taking of some little fort by assault in my
time, some rascals who, to save their own lives, would consent to hang
their friends and companions, I have looked upon them to be of worse
condition than those who were hanged. ‘Tis said, that Witold, Prince of
Lithuania, introduced into the nation the practice that the criminal
condemned to death should with his own hand execute the sentence,
thinking it strange that a third person, innocent of the fault, should be
made guilty of homicide.
A prince, when by some urgent circumstance or some impetuous and
unforeseen accident that very much concerns his state, compelled to
forfeit his word and break his faith, or otherwise forced from his
ordinary duty, ought to attribute this necessity to a lash of the divine
rod: vice it is not, for he has given up his own reason to a more
universal and more powerful reason; but certainly ‘tis a misfortune: so
that if any one should ask me what remedy? “None,” say I, “if he were
really racked between these two extremes: ‘sed videat, ne quoeratur
latebya perjurio’, he must do it: but if he did it without regret, if it
did not weigh on him to do it, ‘tis a sign his conscience is in a sorry
condition.” If there be a person to be found of so tender a conscience
as to think no cure whatever worth so important a remedy, I shall like
him never the worse; he could not more excusably or more decently perish.
We cannot do all we would, so that we must often, as the last anchorage,
commit the protection of our vessels to the simple conduct of heaven.
To what more just necessity does he reserve himself? What is less
possible for him to do than what he cannot do but at the expense of his
faith and honour, things that, perhaps, ought to be dearer to him than
his own safety, or even the safety of his people. Though he should, with
folded arms, only call God to his assistance, has he not reason to hope
that the divine goodness will not refuse the favour of an extraordinary
arm to just and pure hands? These are dangerous examples, rare and
sickly exceptions to our natural rules: we must yield to them, but with
great moderation and circumspection: no private utility is of such
importance that we should upon that account strain our consciences to
such a degree: the public may be, when very manifest and of very great
concern.
Timoleon made a timely expiation for his strange exploit by the tears he
shed, calling to mind that it was with a fraternal hand that he had slain
the tyrant; and it justly pricked his conscience that he had been
necessitated to purchase the public utility at so great a price as the
violation of his private morality. Even the Senate itself, by his means
delivered from slavery, durst not positively determine of so high a fact,
and divided into two so important and contrary aspects; but the
Syracusans, sending at the same time to the Corinthians to solicit their
protection, and to require of them a captain fit to re-establish their
city in its former dignity and to clear Sicily of several little tyrants
by whom it was oppressed, they deputed Timoleon for that service, with
this cunning declaration; “that according as he should behave himself
well or ill in his employment, their sentence should incline either to
favour the deliverer of his country, or to disfavour the murderer of his
brother.” This fantastic conclusion carries along with it some excuse,
by reason of the danger of the example, and the importance of so strange
an action: and they did well to discharge their own judgment of it, and
to refer it to others who were not so much concerned. But Timoleon’s
comportment in this expedition soon made his cause more clear, so
worthily and virtuously he demeaned himself upon all occasions; and the
good fortune that accompanied him in the difficulties he had to overcome
in this noble employment, seemed to be strewed in his way by the gods,
favourably conspiring for his justification.
The end of this matter is excusable, if any can be so; but the profit of
the augmentation of the public revenue, that served the Roman Senate for
a pretence to the foul conclusion I am going to relate, is not sufficient
to warrant any such injustice.
Certain cities had redeemed themselves and their liberty by money, by the
order and consent of the Senate, out of the hands of L. Sylla: the
business coming again in question, the Senate condemned them to be
taxable as they were before, and that the money they had disbursed for
their redemption should be lost to them. Civil war often produces such
villainous examples; that we punish private men for confiding in us when
we were public ministers: and the self-same magistrate makes another man
pay the penalty of his change that has nothing to do with it; the
pedagogue whips his scholar for his docility; and the guide beats the
blind man whom he leads by the hand; a horrid image of justice.
There are rules in philosophy that are both false and weak. The example
that is proposed to us for preferring private utility before faith given,
has not weight enough by the circumstances they put to it; robbers have
seized you, and after having made you swear to pay them a certain sum of
money, dismiss you. ‘Tis not well done to say, that an honest man can be
quit of his oath without payment, being out of their hands. ‘Tis no such
thing: what fear has once made me willing to do, I am obliged to do it
when I am no longer in fear; and though that fear only prevailed with my
tongue without forcing my will, yet am I bound to keep my word. For my
part, when my tongue has sometimes inconsiderately said something that I
did not think, I have made a conscience of disowning it: otherwise, by
degrees, we shall abolish all the right another derives from our promises
and oaths:
“Quasi vero forti viro vis possit adhiberi.”
[“As though a man of true courage could be compelled.”
--Cicero, De Offic., iii. 30.]
And ‘tis only lawful, upon the account of private interest, to excuse
breach of promise, when we have promised something that is unlawful and
wicked in itself; for the right of virtue ought to take place of the
right of any obligation of ours.
I have formerly placed Epaminondas in the first rank of excellent men,
and do not repent it. How high did he stretch the consideration of his
own particular duty? he who never killed a man whom he had overcome; who,
for the inestimable benefit of restoring the liberty of his country, made
conscience of killing a tyrant or his accomplices without due form of
justice: and who concluded him to be a wicked man, how good a citizen
soever otherwise, who amongst his enemies in battle spared not his friend
and his guest. This was a soul of a rich composition: he married
goodness and humanity, nay, even the tenderest and most delicate in the
whole school of philosophy, to the roughest and most violent human
actions. Was it nature or art that had intenerated that great courage of
his, so full, so obstinate against pain and death and poverty, to such an
extreme degree of sweetness and compassion? Dreadful in arms and blood,
he overran and subdued a nation invincible by all others but by him
alone; and yet in the heat of an encounter, could turn aside from his
friend and guest. Certainly he was fit to command in war who could so
rein himself with the curb of good nature, in the height and heat of his
fury, a fury inflamed and foaming with blood and slaughter. ‘Tis a
miracle to be able to mix any image of justice with such violent actions:
and it was only possible for such a steadfastness of mind as that of
Epaminondas therein to mix sweetness and the facility of the gentlest
manners and purest innocence. And whereas one told the Mamertini that
statutes were of no efficacy against armed men; and another told the
tribune of the people that the time of justice and of war were distinct
things; and a third said that the noise of arms deafened the voice of
laws, this man was not precluded from listening to the laws of civility
and pure courtesy. Had he not borrowed from his enemies the custom of
sacrificing to the Muses when he went to war, that they might by their
sweetness and gaiety soften his martial and rigorous fury? Let us not
fear, by the example of so great a master, to believe that there is
something unlawful, even against an enemy, and that the common concern
ought not to require all things of all men, against private interest:
“Manente memoria, etiam in dissidio publicorum
foederum, privati juris:”
[“The memory of private right remaining even amid
public dissensions.”--Livy, xxv. 18.]
“Et nulla potentia vires
Praestandi, ne quid peccet amicus, habet;”
[“No power on earth can sanction treachery against a friend.”
--Ovid, De Ponto, i. 7, 37.]
and that all things are not lawful to an honest man for the service of
his prince, the laws, or the general quarrel:
“Non enim patria praestat omnibus officiis....
et ipsi conducit pios habere cives in parentes.”
[“The duty to one’s country does not supersede all other duties.
The country itself requires that its citizens should act piously
toward their parents.”--Cicero, De Offic., iii. 23.]
Tis an instruction proper for the time wherein we live: we need not
harden our courage with these arms of steel; ‘tis enough that our
shoulders are inured to them: ‘tis enough to dip our pens in ink without
dipping them in blood. If it be grandeur of courage, and the effect of a
rare and singular virtue, to contemn friendship, private obligations, a
man’s word and relationship, for the common good and obedience to the
magistrate, ‘tis certainly sufficient to excuse us, that ‘tis a grandeur
that can have no place in the grandeur of Epaminondas’ courage.
I abominate those mad exhortations of this other discomposed soul,
“Dum tela micant, non vos pietatis imago
Ulla, nec adversa conspecti fronte parentes
Commoveant; vultus gladio turbate verendos.”
[“While swords glitter, let no idea of piety, nor the face even of a
father presented to you, move you: mutilate with your sword those
venerable features “--Lucan, vii. 320.]
Let us deprive wicked, bloody, and treacherous natures of such a pretence
of reason: let us set aside this guilty and extravagant justice, and
stick to more human imitations. How great things can time and example
do! In an encounter of the civil war against Cinna, one of Pompey’s
soldiers having unawares killed his brother, who was of the contrary
party, he immediately for shame and sorrow killed himself: and some years
after, in another civil war of the same people, a soldier demanded a
reward of his officer for having killed his brother.
A man but ill proves the honour and beauty of an action by its utility:
and very erroneously concludes that every one is obliged to it, and that
it becomes every one to do it, if it be of utility:
“Omnia non pariter rerum sunt omnibus apta.”
[“All things are not equally fit for all men.”
--Propertius, iii. 9, 7.]
Let us take that which is most necessary and profitable for human
society; it will be marriage; and yet the council of the saints find the
contrary much better, excluding from it the most venerable vocation of
man: as we design those horses for stallions of which we have the least
esteem.
CHAPTER II
OF REPENTANCE
Others form man; I only report him: and represent a particular one, ill
fashioned enough, and whom, if I had to model him anew, I should
certainly make something else than what he is but that’s past recalling.
Now, though the features of my picture alter and change, ‘tis not,
however, unlike: the world eternally turns round; all things therein are
incessantly moving, the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, and the pyramids of
Egypt, both by the public motion and their own. Even constancy itself is
no other but a slower and more languishing motion. I cannot fix my
object; ‘tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness; I take
it as it is at the instant I consider it; I do not paint its being, I
paint its passage; not a passing from one age to another, or, as the
people say, from seven to seven years, but from day to day, from minute
to minute, I must accommodate my history to the hour: I may presently
change, not only by fortune, but also by intention. ‘Tis a counterpart
of various and changeable accidents, and of irresolute imaginations, and,
as it falls out, sometimes contrary: whether it be that I am then another
self, or that I take subjects by other circumstances and considerations:
so it is that I may peradventure contradict myself, but, as Demades said,
I never contradict the truth. Could my soul once take footing, I would
not essay but resolve: but it is always learning and making trial.
I propose a life ordinary and without lustre: ‘tis all one; all moral
philosophy may as well be applied to a common and private life, as to one
of richer composition: every man carries the entire form of human
condition. Authors communicate themselves to the people by some especial
and extrinsic mark; I, the first of any, by my universal being; as Michel
de Montaigne, not as a grammarian, a poet, or a lawyer. If the world
find fault that I speak too much of myself, I find fault that they do not
so much as think of themselves. But is it reason that, being so
particular in my way of living, I should pretend to recommend myself to
the public knowledge? And is it also reason that I should produce to the
world, where art and handling have so much credit and authority, crude
and simple effects of nature, and of a weak nature to boot? Is it not to
build a wall without stone or brick, or some such thing, to write books
without learning and without art? The fancies of music are carried on by
art; mine by chance. I have this, at least, according to discipline,
that never any man treated of a subject he better understood and knew
than I what I have undertaken, and that in this I am the most
understanding man alive: secondly, that never any man penetrated farther
into his matter, nor better and more distinctly sifted the parts and
sequences of it, nor ever more exactly and fully arrived at the end he
proposed to himself. To perfect it, I need bring nothing but fidelity to
the work; and that is there, and the most pure and sincere that is
anywhere to be found. I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much
as I dare; and I dare a little the more, as I grow older; for, methinks,
custom allows to age more liberty of prating, and more indiscretion of
talking of a man’s self. That cannot fall out here, which I often see
elsewhere, that the work and the artificer contradict one another:
“Can a man of such sober conversation have written so foolish a book?”
Or “Do so learned writings proceed from a man of so weak conversation?”
He who talks at a very ordinary rate, and writes rare matter, ‘tis to say
that his capacity is borrowed and not his own. A learned man is not
learned in all things: but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout,
even to ignorance itself; here my book and I go hand in hand together.
Elsewhere men may commend or censure the work, without reference to the
workman; here they cannot: who touches the one, touches the other. He
who shall judge of it without knowing him, will more wrong himself than
me; he who does know him, gives me all the satisfaction I desire. I
shall be happy beyond my desert, if I can obtain only thus much from the
public approbation, as to make men of understanding perceive that I was
capable of profiting by knowledge, had I had it; and that I deserved to
have been assisted by a better memory.
Be pleased here to excuse what I often repeat, that I very rarely repent,
and that my conscience is satisfied with itself, not as the conscience of
an angel, or that of a horse, but as the conscience of a man; always
adding this clause, not one of ceremony, but a true and real submission,
that I speak inquiring and doubting, purely and simply referring myself
to the common and accepted beliefs for the resolution. I do not teach; I
only relate.
There is no vice that is absolutely a vice which does not offend, and
that a sound judgment does not accuse; for there is in it so manifest a
deformity and inconvenience, that peradventure they are in the right who
say that it is chiefly begotten by stupidity and ignorance: so hard is it
to imagine that a man can know without abhorring it. Malice sucks up the
greatest part of its own venom, and poisons itself. Vice leaves
repentance in the soul, like an ulcer in the flesh, which is always
scratching and lacerating itself: for reason effaces all other grief and
sorrows, but it begets that of repentance, which is so much the more
grievous, by reason it springs within, as the cold and heat of fevers are
more sharp than those that only strike upon the outward skin. I hold for
vices (but every one according to its proportion), not only those which
reason and nature condemn, but those also which the opinion of men,
though false and erroneous, have made such, if authorised by law and
custom.
There is likewise no virtue which does not rejoice a well-descended
nature: there is a kind of, I know not what, congratulation in well-doing
that gives us an inward satisfaction, and a generous boldness that
accompanies a good conscience: a soul daringly vicious may, peradventure,
arm itself with security, but it cannot supply itself with this
complacency and satisfaction. ‘Tis no little satisfaction to feel a
man’s self preserved from the contagion of so depraved an age, and to say
to himself: “Whoever could penetrate into my soul would not there find me
guilty either of the affliction or ruin of any one, or of revenge or
envy, or any offence against the public laws, or of innovation or
disturbance, or failure of my word; and though the licence of the time
permits and teaches every one so to do, yet have I not plundered any
Frenchman’s goods, or taken his money, and have lived upon what is my
own, in war as well as in peace; neither have I set any man to work
without paying him his hire.” These testimonies of a good conscience
please, and this natural rejoicing is very beneficial to us, and the only
reward that we can never fail of.
To ground the recompense of virtuous actions upon the approbation of
others is too uncertain and unsafe a foundation, especially in so corrupt
and ignorant an age as this, wherein the good opinion of the vulgar is
injurious: upon whom do you rely to show you what is recommendable? God
defend me from being an honest man, according to the descriptions of
honour I daily see every one make of himself:
“Quae fuerant vitia, mores sunt.”
[“What before had been vices are now manners.”--Seneca, Ep., 39.]
Some of my friends have at times schooled and scolded me with great
sincerity and plainness, either of their own voluntary motion, or by me
entreated to it as to an office, which to a well-composed soul surpasses
not only in utility, but in kindness, all other offices of friendship: I
have always received them with the most open arms, both of courtesy and
acknowledgment; but to say the truth, I have often found so much false
measure, both in their reproaches and praises, that I had not done much
amiss, rather to have done ill, than to have done well according to their
notions. We, who live private lives, not exposed to any other view than
our own, ought chiefly to have settled a pattern within ourselves by
which to try our actions: and according to that, sometimes to encourage
and sometimes to correct ourselves. I have my laws and my judicature to
judge of myself, and apply myself more to these than to any other rules:
I do, indeed, restrain my actions according to others; but extend them
not by any other rule than my own. You yourself only know if you are
cowardly and cruel, loyal and devout: others see you not, and only guess
at you by uncertain conjectures, and do not so much see your nature as
your art; rely not therefore upon their opinions, but stick to your own:
“Tuo tibi judicio est utendum.... Virtutis et vitiorum grave ipsius
conscientiae pondus est: qua sublata, jacent omnia.”
[“Thou must employ thy own judgment upon thyself; great is the
weight of thy own conscience in the discovery of virtues and vices:
which taken away, all things are lost.”
--Cicero, De Nat. Dei, iii. 35; Tusc. Quaes., i. 25.]
But the saying that repentance immediately follows the sin seems not to
have respect to sin in its high estate, which is lodged in us as in its
own proper habitation. One may disown and retract the vices that
surprise us, and to which we are hurried by passions; but those which by
a long habit are rooted in a strong and vigorous will are not subject to
contradiction. Repentance is no other but a recanting of the will and an
opposition to our fancies, which lead us which way they please. It makes
this person disown his former virtue and continency:
“Quae mens est hodie, cur eadem non puero fait?
Vel cur his animis incolumes non redeunt genae?”
[“What my mind is, why was it not the same, when I was a boy? or
why do not the cheeks return to these feelings?”
--Horace, Od., v. 10, 7.]
‘Tis an exact life that maintains itself in due order in private. Every
one may juggle his part, and represent an honest man upon the stage: but
within, and in his own bosom, where all may do as they list, where all is
concealed, to be regular, there’s the point. The next degree is to be so
in his house, and in his ordinary actions, for which we are accountable
to none, and where there is no study nor artifice. And therefore Bias,
setting forth the excellent state of a private family, says: “of which a
the master is the same within, by his own virtue and temper, that he is
abroad, for fear of the laws and report of men.” And it was a worthy
saying of Julius Drusus, to the masons who offered him, for three
thousand crowns, to put his house in such a posture that his neighbours
should no longer have the same inspection into it as before; “I will give
you,” said he, “six thousand to make it so that everybody may see into
every room.” ‘Tis honourably recorded of Agesilaus, that he used in his
journeys always to take up his lodgings in temples, to the end that the
people and the gods themselves might pry into his most private actions.
Such a one has been a miracle to the world, in whom neither his wife nor
servant has ever seen anything so much as remarkable; few men have been
admired by their own domestics; no one was ever a prophet, not merely in
his own house, but in his own country, says the experience of histories:
--[No man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre, said Marshal Catinat]--‘tis
the same in things of nought, and in this low example the image of a
greater is to be seen. In my country of Gascony, they look upon it as a
drollery to see me in print; the further off I am read from my own home,
the better I am esteemed. I purchase printers in Guienne; elsewhere they
purchase me. Upon this it is that they lay their foundation who conceal
themselves present and living, to obtain a name when they are dead and
absent. I had rather have a great deal less in hand, and do not expose
myself to the world upon any other account than my present share; when I
leave it I quit the rest. See this functionary whom the people escort in
state, with wonder and applause, to his very door; he puts off the
pageant with his robe, and falls so much the lower by how much he was
higher exalted: in himself within, all is tumult and degraded. And
though all should be regular there, it will require a vivid and
well-chosen judgment to perceive it in these low and private actions; to
which may be added, that order is a dull, sombre virtue. To enter a
breach, conduct an embassy, govern a people, are actions of renown; to
reprehend, laugh, sell, pay, love, hate, and gently and justly converse
with a man’s own family and with himself; not to relax, not to give a
man’s self the lie, is more rare and hard, and less remarkable. By which
means, retired lives, whatever is said to the contrary, undergo duties of
as great or greater difficulty than the others do; and private men, says
Aristotle,’ serve virtue more painfully and highly than those in
authority do: we prepare ourselves for eminent occasions, more out of
glory than conscience. The shortest way to arrive at glory, would be to
do that for conscience which we do for glory: and the virtue of Alexander
appears to me of much less vigour in his great theatre, than that of
Socrates in his mean and obscure employment. I can easily conceive
Socrates in the place of Alexander, but Alexander in that of Socrates, I
cannot. Who shall ask the one what he can do, he will answer, “Subdue
the world”: and who shall put the same question to the other, he will
say, “Carry on human life conformably with its natural condition”; a much
more general, weighty, and legitimate science than the other.--[Montaigne
added here, “To do for the world that for which he came into the world,”
but he afterwards erased these words from the manuscript.--Naigeon.]
The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking
orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in
mediocrity. As they who judge and try us within, make no great account
of the lustre of our public actions, and see they are only streaks and
rays of clear water springing from a slimy and muddy bottom so, likewise,
they who judge of us by this gallant outward appearance, in like manner
conclude of our internal constitution; and cannot couple common
faculties, and like their own, with the other faculties that astonish
them, and are so far out of their sight. Therefore it is that we give
such savage forms to demons: and who does not give Tamerlane great
eyebrows, wide nostrils, a dreadful visage, and a prodigious stature,
according to the imagination he has conceived by the report of his name?
Had any one formerly brought me to Erasmus, I should hardly have believed
but that all was adage and apothegm he spoke to his man or his hostess.
We much more aptly imagine an artisan upon his close-stool, or upon his
wife, than a great president venerable by his port and sufficiency: we
fancy that they, from their high tribunals, will not abase themselves so
much as to live. As vicious souls are often incited by some foreign
impulse to do well, so are virtuous souls to do ill; they are therefore
to be judged by their settled state, when they are at home, whenever that
may be; and, at all events, when they are nearer repose, and in their
native station.
Natural inclinations are much assisted and fortified by education; but
they seldom alter and overcome their institution: a thousand natures of
my time have escaped towards virtue or vice, through a quite contrary
discipline:
“Sic ubi, desuetae silvis, in carcere clausae
Mansuevere ferx, et vultus posuere minaces,
Atque hominem didicere pati, si torrida parvus
Venit in ora cruor, redeunt rabiesque fororque,
Admonitaeque tument gustato sanguine fauces
Fervet, et a trepido vix abstinet ira magistro;”
[“So savage beasts, when shut up in cages and grown unaccustomed to
the woods, have become tame, and have laid aside their fierce looks,
and submit to the rule of man; if again a slight taste of blood
comes into their mouths, their rage and fury return, their jaws are
erected by thirst of blood, and their anger scarcely abstains from
their trembling masters.”--Lucan, iv. 237.]
these original qualities are not to be rooted out; they may be covered
and concealed. The Latin tongue is as it were natural to me; I
understand it better than French; but I have not been used to speak it,
nor hardly to write it, these forty years. Unless upon extreme and
sudden emotions which I have fallen into twice or thrice in my life, and
once seeing my father in perfect health fall upon me in a swoon, I have
always uttered from the bottom of my heart my first words in Latin;
nature deafened, and forcibly expressing itself, in spite of so long a
discontinuation; and this example is said of many others.
They who in my time have attempted to correct the manners of the world by
new opinions, reform seeming vices; but the essential vices they leave as
they were, if indeed they do not augment them, and augmentation is
therein to be feared; we defer all other well doing upon the account of
these external reformations, of less cost and greater show, and thereby
expiate good cheap, for the other natural, consubstantial, and intestine
vices. Look a little into our experience: there is no man, if he listen
to himself, who does not in himself discover a particular and governing
form of his own, that jostles his education, and wrestles with the
tempest of passions that are contrary to it. For my part, I seldom find
myself agitated with surprises; I always find myself in my place, as
heavy and unwieldy bodies do; if I am not at home, I am always near at
hand; my dissipations do not transport me very far; there is nothing
strange or extreme in the case; and yet I have sound and vigorous turns.
The true condemnation, and which touches the common practice of men, is
that their very retirement itself is full of filth and corruption; the
idea of their reformation composed, their repentance sick and faulty,
very nearly as much as their sin. Some, either from having been linked
to vice by a natural propension or long practice, cannot see its
deformity. Others (of which constitution I am) do indeed feel the weight
of vice, but they counterbalance it with pleasure, or some other
occasion; and suffer and lend themselves to it for a certain price, but
viciously and basely. Yet there might, haply, be imagined so vast a
disproportion of measure, where with justice the pleasure might excuse
the sin, as we say of utility; not only if accidental and out of sin, as
in thefts, but in the very exercise of sin, or in the enjoyment of women,
where the temptation is violent, and, ‘tis said, sometimes not to be
overcome.
Being the other day at Armaignac, on the estate of a kinsman of mine, I
there saw a peasant who was by every one nicknamed the thief. He thus
related the story of his life: that, being born a beggar, and finding
that he should not be able, so as to be clear of indigence, to get his
living by the sweat of his brow, he resolved to turn thief, and by means
of his strength of body had exercised this trade all the time of his
youth in great security; for he ever made his harvest and vintage in
other men’s grounds, but a great way off, and in so great quantities,
that it was not to be imagined one man could have carried away so much in
one night upon his shoulders; and, moreover, he was careful equally to
divide and distribute the mischief he did, that the loss was of less
importance to every particular man. He is now grown old, and rich for a
man of his condition, thanks to his trade, which he openly confesses to
every one. And to make his peace with God, he says, that he is daily
ready by good offices to make satisfaction to the successors of those he
has robbed, and if he do not finish (for to do it all at once he is not
able), he will then leave it in charge to his heirs to perform the rest,
proportionably to the wrong he himself only knows he has done to each.
By this description, true or false, this man looks upon theft as a
dishonest action, and hates it, but less than poverty, and simply
repents; but to the extent he has thus recompensed he repents not. This
is not that habit which incorporates us into vice, and conforms even our
understanding itself to it; nor is it that impetuous whirlwind that by
gusts troubles and blinds our souls, and for the time precipitates us,
judgment and all, into the power of vice.
I customarily do what I do thoroughly and make but one step on’t; I have
rarely any movement that hides itself and steals away from my reason, and
that does not proceed in the matter by the consent of all my faculties,
without division or intestine sedition; my judgment is to have all the
blame or all the praise; and the blame it once has, it has always; for
almost from my infancy it has ever been one: the same inclination, the
same turn, the same force; and as to universal opinions, I fixed myself
from my childhood in the place where I resolved to stick. There are some
sins that are impetuous, prompt, and sudden; let us set them aside: but
in these other sins so often repeated, deliberated, and contrived,
whether sins of complexion or sins of profession and vocation, I cannot
conceive that they should have so long been settled in the same
resolution, unless the reason and conscience of him who has them, be
constant to have them; and the repentance he boasts to be inspired with
on a sudden, is very hard for me to imagine or form. I follow not the
opinion of the Pythagorean sect, “that men take up a new soul when they
repair to the images of the gods to receive their oracles,” unless he
mean that it must needs be extrinsic, new, and lent for the time; our own
showing so little sign of purification and cleanness, fit for such an
office.
They act quite contrary to the stoical precepts, who do indeed command us
to correct the imperfections and vices we know ourselves guilty of, but
forbid us therefore to disturb the repose of our souls: these make us
believe that they have great grief and remorse within: but of amendment,
correction, or interruption, they make nothing appear. It cannot be a
cure if the malady be not wholly discharged; if repentance were laid upon
the scale of the balance, it would weigh down sin. I find no quality so
easy to counterfeit as devotion, if men do not conform their manners and
life to the profession; its essence is abstruse and occult; the
appearance easy and ostentatious.
For my own part, I may desire in general to be other than I am; I may
condemn and dislike my whole form, and beg of Almighty God for an entire
reformation, and that He will please to pardon my natural infirmity: but
I ought not to call this repentance, methinks, no more than the being
dissatisfied that I am not an angel or Cato. My actions are regular,
and conformable to what I am and to my condition; I can do no better;
and repentance does not properly touch things that are not in our power;
sorrow does.. I imagine an infinite number of natures more elevated and
regular than mine; and yet I do not for all that improve my faculties, no
more than my arm or will grow more strong and vigorous for conceiving
those of another to be so. If to conceive and wish a nobler way of
acting than that we have should produce a repentance of our own, we must
then repent us of our most innocent actions, forasmuch as we may well
suppose that in a more excellent nature they would have been carried on
with greater dignity and perfection; and we would that ours were so.
When I reflect upon the deportment of my youth, with that of my old age,
I find that I have commonly behaved myself with equal order in both
according to what I understand: this is all that my resistance can do.
I do not flatter myself; in the same circumstances I should do the same
things. It is not a patch, but rather an universal tincture, with which
I am stained. I know no repentance, superficial, half-way, and
ceremonious; it must sting me all over before I can call it so, and must
prick my bowels as deeply and universally as God sees into me.
As to business, many excellent opportunities have escaped me for want of
good management; and yet my deliberations were sound enough, according to
the occurrences presented to me: ‘tis their way to choose always the
easiest and safest course. I find that, in my former resolves, I have
proceeded with discretion, according to my own rule, and according to the
state of the subject proposed, and should do the same a thousand years
hence in like occasions; I do not consider what it is now, but what it
was then, when I deliberated on it: the force of all counsel consists in
the time; occasions and things eternally shift and change. I have in my
life committed some important errors, not for want of good understanding,
but for want of good luck. There are secret, and not to be foreseen,
parts in matters we have in hand, especially in the nature of men; mute
conditions, that make no show, unknown sometimes even to the possessors
themselves, that spring and start up by incidental occasions; if my
prudence could not penetrate into nor foresee them, I blame it not: ‘tis
commissioned no further than its own limits; if the event be too hard for
me, and take the side I have refused, there is no remedy; I do not blame
myself, I accuse my fortune, and not my work; this cannot be called
repentance.
Phocion, having given the Athenians an advice that was not followed, and
the affair nevertheless succeeding contrary to his opinion, some one said
to him, “Well, Phocion, art thou content that matters go so well?”--“I am
very well content,” replied he, “that this has happened so well, but I do
not repent that I counselled the other.” When any of my friends address
themselves to me for advice, I give it candidly and clearly, without
sticking, as almost all other men do, at the hazard of the thing’s
falling out contrary to my opinion, and that I may be reproached for my
counsel; I am very indifferent as to that, for the fault will be theirs
for having consulted me, and I could not refuse them that office.
--[We may give advice to others, says Rochefoucauld, but we cannot
supply them with the wit to profit by it.]
I, for my own part, can rarely blame any one but myself for my oversights
and misfortunes, for indeed I seldom solicit the advice of another,
if not by honour of ceremony, or excepting where I stand in need of
information, special science, or as to matter of fact. But in things
wherein I stand in need of nothing but judgment, other men’s reasons may
serve to fortify my own, but have little power to dissuade me; I hear
them all with civility and patience; but, to my recollection, I never
made use of any but my own. With me, they are but flies and atoms, that
confound and distract my will; I lay no great stress upon my opinions;
but I lay as little upon those of others, and fortune rewards me
accordingly: if I receive but little advice, I also give but little. I
am seldom consulted, and still more seldom believed, and know no concern,
either public or private, that has been mended or bettered by my advice.
Even they whom fortune had in some sort tied to my direction, have more
willingly suffered themselves to be governed by any other counsels than
mine. And as a man who am as jealous of my repose as of my authority,
I am better pleased that it should be so; in leaving me there, they
humour what I profess, which is to settle and wholly contain myself
within myself. I take a pleasure in being uninterested in other men’s
affairs, and disengaged from being their warranty, and responsible for
what they do.
In all affairs that are past, be it how it will, I have very little
regret; for this imagination puts me out of my pain, that they were so to
fall out they are in the great revolution of the world, and in the chain
of stoical ‘causes: your fancy cannot, by wish and imagination, move one
tittle, but that the great current of things will not reverse both the
past and the future.
As to the rest, I abominate that incidental repentance which old age
brings along with it. He, who said of old, that he was obliged to his
age for having weaned him from pleasure, was of another opinion than I
am; I can never think myself beholden to impotency for any good it can do
to me:
“Nec tam aversa unquam videbitur ab opere suo providentia,
ut debilitas inter optima inventa sit.”
[“Nor can Providence ever seem so averse to her own work, that
debility should be found to be amongst the best things.”
--Quintilian, Instit. Orat., v. 12.]
Our appetites are rare in old age; a profound satiety seizes us after the
act; in this I see nothing of conscience; chagrin and weakness imprint in
us a drowsy and rheumatic virtue. We must not suffer ourselves to be so
wholly carried away by natural alterations as to suffer our judgments to
be imposed upon by them. Youth and pleasure have not formerly so far
prevailed with me, that I did not well enough discern the face of vice in
pleasure; neither does the distaste that years have brought me, so far
prevail with me now, that I cannot discern pleasure in vice. Now that I
am no more in my flourishing age, I judge as well of these things as if I
were.
[“Old though I am, for ladies’ love unfit,
The power of beauty I remember yet.”--Chaucer.]
I, who narrowly and strictly examine it, find my reason the very same it
was in my most licentious age, except, perhaps, that ‘tis weaker and more
decayed by being grown older; and I find that the pleasure it refuses me
upon the account of my bodily health, it would no more refuse now, in
consideration of the health of my soul, than at any time heretofore.
I do not repute it the more valiant for not being able to combat; my
temptations are so broken and mortified, that they are not worth its
opposition; holding but out my hands, I repel them. Should one present
the old concupiscence before it, I fear it would have less power to
resist it than heretofore; I do not discern that in itself it judges
anything otherwise now than it formerly did, nor that it has acquired any
new light: wherefore, if there be convalescence, ‘tis an enchanted one.
Miserable kind of remedy, to owe one’s health to one’s disease! Tis not
that our misfortune should perform this office, but the good fortune of
our judgment. I am not to be made to do anything by persecutions and
afflictions, but to curse them: that is, for people who cannot be roused
but by a whip. My reason is much more free in prosperity, and much more
distracted, and put to’t to digest pains than pleasures: I see best in a
clear sky; health admonishes me more cheerfully, and to better purpose,
than sickness. I did all that in me lay to reform and regulate myself
from pleasures, at a time when I had health and vigour to enjoy them;
I should be ashamed and envious that the misery and misfortune of my old
age should have credit over my good healthful, sprightly, and vigorous
years, and that men should estimate me, not by what I have been, but by
what I have ceased to be.
In my opinion, ‘tis the happy living, and not (as Antisthenes’ said) the
happy dying, in which human felicity consists. I have not made it my
business to make a monstrous addition of a philosopher’s tail to the head
and body of a libertine; nor would I have this wretched remainder give
the lie to the pleasant, sound, and long part of my life: I would present
myself uniformly throughout. Were I to live my life over again, I should
live it just as I have lived it; I neither complain of the past, nor do I
fear the future; and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that
I am without. ‘Tis one main obligation I have to my fortune, that the
succession of my bodily estate has been carried on according to the
natural seasons; I have seen the grass, the blossom, and the fruit, and
now see the withering; happily, however, because naturally. I bear the
infirmities I have the better, because they came not till I had reason to
expect them, and because also they make me with greater pleasure remember
that long felicity of my past life. My wisdom may have been just the
same in both ages, but it was more active, and of better grace whilst
young and sprightly, than now it is when broken, peevish, and uneasy.
I repudiate, then, these casual and painful reformations. God must touch
our hearts; our consciences must amend of themselves, by the aid of our
reason, and not by the decay of our appetites; pleasure is, in itself,
neither pale nor discoloured, to be discerned by dim and decayed eyes.
We ought to love temperance for itself, and because God has commanded
that and chastity; but that which we are reduced to by catarrhs, and for
which I am indebted to the stone, is neither chastity nor temperance; a
man cannot boast that he despises and resists pleasure if he cannot see
it, if he knows not what it is, and cannot discern its graces, its force,
and most alluring beauties; I know both the one and the other, and may
therefore the better say it. But; methinks, our souls in old age are
subject to more troublesome maladies and imperfections than in youth;
I said the same when young and when I was reproached with the want of a
beard; and I say so now that my grey hairs give me some authority. We
call the difficulty of our humours and the disrelish of present things
wisdom; but, in truth, we do not so much forsake vices as we change them,
and in my opinion, for worse. Besides a foolish and feeble pride, an
impertinent prating, froward and insociable humours, superstition, and a
ridiculous desire of riches when we have lost the use of them, I find
there more envy, injustice, and malice. Age imprints more wrinkles in
the mind than it does on the face; and souls are never, or very rarely
seen, that, in growing old, do not smell sour and musty. Man moves all
together, both towards his perfection and decay. In observing the wisdom
of Socrates, and many circumstances of his condemnation, I should dare to
believe that he in some sort himself purposely, by collusion, contributed
to it, seeing that, at the age of seventy years, he might fear to suffer
the lofty motions of his mind to be cramped and his wonted lustre
obscured. What strange metamorphoses do I see age every day make in many
of my acquaintance! ‘Tis a potent malady, and that naturally and
imperceptibly steals into us; a vast provision of study and great
precaution are required to evade the imperfections it loads us with, or
at least to weaken their progress. I find that, notwithstanding all my
entrenchments, it gets foot by foot upon me: I make the best resistance I
can, but I do not know to what at last it will reduce me. But fall out
what will, I am content the world may know, when I am fallen, from what I
fell.
CHAPTER III
OF THREE COMMERCES
We must not rivet ourselves so fast to our humours and complexions: our
chiefest sufficiency is to know how to apply ourselves to divers
employments. ‘Tis to be, but not to live, to keep a man’s self tied and
bound by necessity to one only course; those are the bravest souls that
have in them the most variety and pliancy. Of this here is an honourable
testimony of the elder Cato:
“Huic versatile ingenium sic pariter ad omnia fuit,
ut natum ad id unum diceres, quodcumque ageret.”
[“His parts were so pliable to all uses, that one would say he had
been born only to that which he was doing.”--Livy, xxxix. 49.]
Had I liberty to set myself forth after my own mode, there is no so
graceful fashion to which I would be so fixed as not to be able to
disengage myself from it; life is an unequal, irregular and multiform
motion. ‘Tis not to be a friend to one’s self, much less a master ‘tis
to be a slave, incessantly to be led by the nose by one’s self, and to be
so fixed in one’s previous inclinations, that one cannot turn aside nor
writhe one’s neck out of the collar. I say this now in this part of my
life, wherein I find I cannot easily disengage myself from the
importunity of my soul, which cannot ordinarily amuse itself but in
things of limited range, nor employ itself otherwise than entirely and
with all its force; upon the lightest subject offered it expands and
stretches it to that degree as therein to employ its utmost power;
wherefore it is that idleness is to me a very painful labour, and very
prejudicial to my health. Most men’s minds require foreign matter to
exercise and enliven them; mine has rather need of it to sit still and
repose itself,
“Vitia otii negotio discutienda sunt,”
[“The vices of sloth are to be shaken off by business.”
--Seneca, Ep. 56.]
for its chiefest and hardest study is to study itself. Books are to it
a sort of employment that debauch it from its study. Upon the first
thoughts that possess it, it begins to bustle and make trial of its
vigour in all directions, exercises its power of handling, now making
trial of force, now fortifying, moderating, and ranging itself by the way
of grace and order. It has of its own wherewith to rouse its faculties:
nature has given to it, as to all others, matter enough of its own to
make advantage of, and subjects proper enough where it may either invent
or judge.
Meditation is a powerful and full study to such as can effectually taste
and employ themselves; I had rather fashion my soul than furnish it.
There is no employment, either more weak or more strong, than that of
entertaining a man’s own thoughts, according as the soul is; the greatest
men make it their whole business,
“Quibus vivere est cogitare;”
[“To whom to live is to think.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 28.]
nature has therefore favoured it with this privilege, that there is
nothing we can do so long, nor any action to which we more frequently and
with greater facility addict ourselves. ‘Tis the business of the gods,
says Aristotle,’ and from which both their beatitude and ours proceed.
The principal use of reading to me is, that by various objects it rouses
my reason, and employs my judgment, not my memory. Few conversations
detain me without force and effort; it is true that beauty and elegance
of speech take as much or more with me than the weight and depth of the
subject; and forasmuch as I am apt to be sleepy in all other
communication, and give but the rind of my attention, it often falls out
that in such poor and pitiful discourses, mere chatter, I either make
drowsy, unmeaning answers, unbecoming a child, and ridiculous, or more
foolishly and rudely still, maintain an obstinate silence. I have a
pensive way that withdraws me into myself, and, with that, a heavy and
childish ignorance of many very ordinary things, by which two qualities I
have earned this, that men may truly relate five or six as ridiculous
tales of me as of any other man whatever.
But, to proceed in my subject, this difficult complexion of mine renders
me very nice in my conversation with men, whom I must cull and pick out
for my purpose; and unfits me for common society. We live and negotiate
with the people; if their conversation be troublesome to us, if we
disdain to apply ourselves to mean and vulgar souls (and the mean and
vulgar are often as regular as those of the finest thread, and all wisdom
is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common ignorance),
we must no more intermeddle either with other men’s affairs or our own;
for business, both public and private, has to do with these people. The
least forced and most natural motions of the soul are the most beautiful;
the best employments, those that are least strained. My God! how good
an office does wisdom to those whose desires it limits to their power!
that is the most useful knowledge: “according to what a man can,” was the
favourite sentence and motto of Socrates. A motto of great solidity.
We must moderate and adapt our desires to the nearest and easiest to be
acquired things. Is it not a foolish humour of mine to separate myself
from a thousand to whom my fortune has conjoined me, and without whom I
cannot live, and cleave to one or two who are out of my intercourse; or
rather a fantastic desire of a thing I cannot obtain? My gentle and easy
manners, enemies of all sourness and harshness, may easily enough have
secured me from envy and animosities; to be beloved, I do not say, but
never any man gave less occasion of being hated; but the coldness of my
conversation has, reasonably enough, deprived me of the goodwill of many,
who are to be excused if they interpret it in another and worse sense.
I am very capable of contracting and maintaining rare and exquisite
friendships; for by reason that I so greedily seize upon such
acquaintance as fit my liking, I throw myself with such violence upon
them that I hardly fail to stick, and to make an impression where I hit;
as I have often made happy proof. In ordinary friendships I am somewhat
cold and shy, for my motion is not natural, if not with full sail:
besides which, my fortune having in my youth given me a relish for one
sole and perfect friendship, has, in truth, created in me a kind of
distaste to others, and too much imprinted in my fancy that it is a beast
of company, as the ancient said, but not of the herd.--[Plutarch, On the
Plurality of Friends, c. 2.]--And also I have a natural difficulty of
communicating myself by halves, with the modifications and the servile
and jealous prudence required in the conversation of numerous and
imperfect friendships: and we are principally enjoined to these in this
age of ours, when we cannot talk of the world but either with danger or
falsehood.
Yet do I very well discern that he who has the conveniences (I mean the
essential conveniences) of life for his end, as I have, ought to fly
these difficulties and delicacy of humour, as much as the plague. I
should commend a soul of several stages, that knows both how to stretch
and to slacken itself; that finds itself at ease in all conditions
whither fortune leads it; that can discourse with a neighbour, of his
building, his hunting, his quarrels; that can chat with a carpenter or a
gardener with pleasure. I envy those who can render themselves familiar
with the meanest of their followers, and talk with them in their own way;
and dislike the advice of Plato, that men should always speak in a
magisterial tone to their servants, whether men or women, without being
sometimes facetious and familiar; for besides the reasons I have given,
‘tis inhuman and unjust to set so great a value upon this pitiful
prerogative of fortune, and the polities wherein less disparity is
permitted betwixt masters and servants seem to me the most equitable.
Others study how to raise and elevate their minds; I, how to humble mine
and to bring it low; ‘tis only vicious in extension:
“Narras et genus AEaci,
Et pugnata sacro bella sub Ilio
Quo Chium pretio cadum
Mercemur, quis aquam temperet ignibus,
Quo praebente domum, et quota,
Pelignis caream frigoribus, taces.”
[“You tell us long stories about the race of AEacus, and the battles
fought under sacred Ilium; but what to give for a cask of Chian
wine, who shall prepare the warm bath, and in whose house, and when
I may escape from the Pelignian cold, you do not tell us.”
--Horace, Od., iii. 19, 3.]
Thus, as the Lacedaemonian valour stood in need of moderation, and of the
sweet and harmonious sound of flutes to soften it in battle, lest they
should precipitate themselves into temerity and fury, whereas all other
nations commonly make use of harsh and shrill sounds, and of loud and
imperious cries, to incite and heat the soldier’s courage to the last
degree; so, methinks, contrary to the usual method, in the practice of
our minds, we have for the most part more need of lead than of wings; of
temperance and composedness than of ardour and agitation. But, above all
things, ‘tis in my opinion egregiously to play the fool, to put on the
grave airs of a man of lofty mind amongst those who are nothing of the
sort: ever to speak in print (by the book),
“Favellare in puma di forchetta.”
[“To talk with the point of a fork,” (affectedly)]
You must let yourself down to those with whom you converse; and sometimes
affect ignorance: lay aside power and subtilty in common conversation; to
preserve decorum and order ‘tis enough-nay, crawl on the earth, if they
so desire it.
The learned often stumble at this stone; they will always be parading
their pedantic science, and strew their books everywhere; they have, in
these days, so filled the cabinets and ears of the ladies with them, that
if they have lost the substance, they at least retain the words; so as in
all discourse upon all sorts of subjects, how mean and common soever,
they speak and write after a new and learned way,
“Hoc sermone pavent, hoc iram, gaudia, curas,
Hoc cuncta effundunt animi secreta; quid ultra?
Concumbunt docte;”
[“In this language do they express their fears, their anger, their
joys, their cares; in this pour out all their secrets; what more?
they lie with their lovers learnedly.”--Juvenal, vi. 189.]
and quote Plato and Aquinas in things the first man they meet could
determine as well; the learning that cannot penetrate their souls hangs
still upon the tongue. If people of quality will be persuaded by me, they
shall content themselves with setting out their proper and natural
treasures; they conceal and cover their beauties under others that are
none of theirs: ‘tis a great folly to put out their own light and shine
by a borrowed lustre: they are interred and buried under ‘de capsula
totae”--[Painted and perfumed from head to foot.” (Or:) “as if they were
things carefully deposited in a band-box.”--Seneca, Ep. 115]--It is
because they do not sufficiently know themselves or do themselves
justice: the world has nothing fairer than they; ‘tis for them to honour
the arts, and to paint painting. What need have they of anything but to
live beloved and honoured? They have and know but too much for this:
they need do no more but rouse and heat a little the faculties they have
of their own. When I see them tampering with rhetoric, law, logic, and
other drugs, so improper and unnecessary for their business, I begin to
suspect that the men who inspire them with such fancies, do it that they
may govern them upon that account; for what other excuse can I contrive?
It is enough that they can, without our instruction, compose the graces
of their eyes to gaiety, severity, sweetness, and season a denial with
asperity, suspense, or favour: they need not another to interpret what
we speak for their service; with this knowledge, they command with a
switch, and rule both the tutors and the schools. But if, nevertheless,
it angers them to give place to us in anything whatever, and will, out of
curiosity, have their share in books, poetry is a diversion proper for
them; ‘tis a wanton, subtle, dissembling, and prating art, all pleasure
and all show, like themselves. They may also abstract several
commodities from history. In philosophy, out of the moral part of it,
they may select such instructions as will teach them to judge of our
humours and conditions, to defend themselves from our treacheries, to
regulate the ardour of their own desires, to manage their liberty, to
lengthen the pleasures of life, and gently to bear the inconstancy of a
lover, the rudeness of a husband; and the importunity of years, wrinkles,
and the like. This is the utmost of what I would allow them in the
sciences.
There are some particular natures that are private and retired: my
natural way is proper for communication, and apt to lay me open; I am all
without and in sight, born for society and friendship. The solitude that
I love myself and recommend to others, is chiefly no other than to
withdraw my thoughts and affections into myself; to restrain and check,
not my steps, but my own cares and desires, resigning all foreign
solicitude, and mortally avoiding servitude and obligation, and not so
much the crowd of men as the crowd of business. Local solitude, to say
the truth, rather gives me more room and sets me more at large; I more
readily throw myself upon affairs of state and the world when I am alone.
At the Louvre and in the bustle of the court, I fold myself within my own
skin; the crowd thrusts me upon myself; and I never entertain myself so
wantonly, with so much licence, or so especially, as in places of respect
and ceremonious prudence: our follies do not make me laugh, it is our
wisdom which does. I am naturally no enemy to a court, life; I have
therein passed a part of my own, and am of a humour cheerfully to
frequent great company, provided it be by intervals and at my own time:
but this softness of judgment whereof I speak ties me perforce to
solitude. Even at home, amidst a numerous family, and in a house
sufficiently frequented, I see people enough, but rarely such with whom I
delight to converse; and I there reserve both for myself and others an
unusual liberty: there is in my house no such thing as ceremony,
ushering, or waiting upon people down to the coach, and such other
troublesome ceremonies as our courtesy enjoins (O the servile and
importunate custom!). Every one there governs himself according to his
own method; let who will speak his thoughts, I sit mute, meditating and
shut up in my closet, without any offence to my guests.
The men whose society and familiarity I covet are those they call sincere
and able men; and the image of these makes me disrelish the rest. It is,
if rightly taken, the rarest of our forms, and a form that we chiefly owe
to nature. The end of this commerce is simply privacy, frequentation and
conference, the exercise of souls, without other fruit. In our
discourse, all subjects are alike to me; let there be neither weight, nor
depth, ‘tis all one: there is yet grace and pertinency; all there is
tinted with a mature and constant judgment, and mixed with goodness,
freedom, gaiety, and friendship. ‘Tis not only in talking of the affairs
of kings and state that our wits discover their force and beauty, but
every whit as much in private conferences. I understand my men even by
their silence and smiles; and better discover them, perhaps, at table
than in the council. Hippomachus said, very well, “that he could know
the good wrestlers by only seeing them walk in the street.” If learning
please to step into our talk, it shall not be rejected, not magisterial,
imperious, and importunate, as-it commonly is, but suffragan and docile
itself; we there only seek to pass away our time; when we have a mind to
be instructed and preached to, we will go seek this in its throne; please
let it humble itself to us for the nonce; for, useful and profitable as
it is, I imagine that, at need, we may manage well enough without it, and
do our business without its assistance. A well-descended soul, and
practised in the conversation of men, will of herself render herself
sufficiently agreeable; art is nothing but the counterpart and register
of what such souls produce.
The conversation also of beautiful and honourable women is for me a sweet
commerce:
“Nam nos quoque oculos eruditos habemus.”
[“For we also have eyes that are versed in the matter.”
--Cicero, Paradox, v. 2.]
If the soul has not therein so much to enjoy, as in the first the bodily
senses, which participate more of this, bring it to a proportion next to,
though, in my opinion, not equal to the other. But ‘tis a commerce
wherein a man must stand a little upon his guard, especially those, where
the body can do much, as in me. I there scalded myself in my youth, and
suffered all the torments that poets say befall those who precipitate
themselves into love without order and judgment. It is true that that
whipping has made me wiser since:
“Quicumque Argolica de classe Capharea fugit,
Semper ab Euboicis vela retorquet aquis.”
[“Whoever of the Grecian fleet has escaped the Capharean rocks, ever
takes care to steer from the Euboean sea.”--Ovid, Trist., i. i, 83.]
‘Tis folly to fix all a man’s thoughts upon it, and to engage in it with
a furious and indiscreet affection; but, on the other hand, to engage
there without love and without inclination, like comedians, to play a
common part, without putting anything to it of his own but words, is
indeed to provide for his safety, but, withal, after as cowardly a manner
as he who should abandon his honour, profit, or pleasure for fear of
danger. For it is certain that from such a practice, they who set it on
foot can expect no fruit that can please or satisfy a noble soul. A man
must have, in good earnest, desired that which he, in good earnest,
expects to have a pleasure in enjoying; I say, though fortune should
unjustly favour their dissimulation; which often falls out, because there
is none of the sex, let her be as ugly as the devil, who does not think
herself well worthy to be beloved, and who does not prefer herself before
other women, either for her youth, the colour of her hair, or her
graceful motion (for there are no more women universally ugly, than there
are women universally beautiful, and such of the Brahmin virgins as have
nothing else to recommend them, the people being assembled by the common
crier to that effect, come out into the market-place to expose their
matrimonial parts to public view, to try if these at least are not of
temptation sufficient to get them a husband). Consequently, there is not
one who does not easily suffer herself to be overcome by the first vow
that they make to serve her. Now from this common and ordinary treachery
of the men of the present day, that must fall out which we already
experimentally see, either that they rally together, and separate
themselves by themselves to evade us, or else form their discipline by
the example we give them, play their parts of the farce as we do ours,
and give themselves up to the sport, without passion, care, or love;
“Neque afl’ectui suo, aut alieno, obnoxiae;”
[“Neither amenable to their own affections, nor those of others.”
--Tacitus, Annal., xiii. 45.]
believing, according to the persuasion of Lysias in Plato, that they may
with more utility and convenience surrender themselves up to us the less
we love them; where it will fall out, as in comedies, that the people
will have as much pleasure or more than the comedians. For my part,
I no more acknowledge a Venus without a Cupid than, a mother without
issue: they are things that mutully lend and owe their essence to one
another. Thus this cheat recoils upon him who is guilty of it; it does
not cost him much, indeed, but he also gets little or nothing by it.
They who have made Venus a goddess have taken notice that her principal
beauty was incorporeal and spiritual; but the Venus whom these people
hunt after is not so much as human, nor indeed brutal; the very beasts
will not accept it so gross and so earthly; we see that imagination and
desire often heat and incite them before the body does; we see in both
the one sex and the other, they have in the herd choice and particular
election in their affections, and that they have amongst themselves a
long commerce of good will. Even those to whom old age denies the
practice of their desire, still tremble, neigh, and twitter for love; we
see them, before the act, full of hope and ardour, and when the body has
played its game, yet please themselves with the sweet remembrance of the
past delight; some that swell with pride after they have performed, and
others who, tired and sated, still by vociferation express a triumphing
joy. He who has nothing to do but only to discharge his body of a
natural necessity, need not trouble others with so curious preparations:
it is not meat for a gross, coarse appetite.
As one who does not desire that men should think me better than I am,
I will here say this as to the errors of my youth. Not only from the
danger of impairing my health (and yet I could not be so careful but that
I had two light mischances), but moreover upon the account of contempt,
I have seldom given myself up to common and mercenary embraces: I would
heighten the pleasure by the difficulty, by desire, and a certain kind of
glory, and was of Tiberius’s mind, who in his amours was as much taken
with modesty and birth as any other quality, and of the courtesan Flora’s
humour, who never lent herself to less than a dictator, a consul, or a
censor, and took pleasure in the dignity of her lovers. Doubtless pearls
and gold tissue, titles and train, add something to it.
As to the rest, I had a great esteem for wit, provided the person was not
exceptionable; for, to confess the truth, if the one or the other of
these two attractions must of necessity be wanting, I should rather have
quitted that of the understanding, that has its use in better things;
but in the subject of love, a subject principally relating to the senses
of seeing and touching, something may be done without the graces of the
mind: without the graces of the body, nothing. Beauty is the true
prerogative of women, and so peculiarly their own, that ours, though
naturally requiring another sort of feature, is never in its lustre but
when youthful and beardless, a sort of confused image of theirs. ‘Tis
said that such as serve the Grand Signior upon the account of beauty, who
are an infinite number, are, at the latest, dismissed at two-and-twenty
years of age. Reason, prudence, and the offices of friendship are better
found amongst men, and therefore it is that they govern the affairs of
the world.
These two engagements are fortuitous, and depending upon others; the one
is troublesome by its rarity, the other withers with age, so that they
could never have been sufficient for the business of my life. That of
books, which is the third, is much more certain, and much more our own.
It yields all other advantages to the two first, but has the constancy
and facility of its service for its own share. It goes side by side with
me in my whole course, and everywhere is assisting me: it comforts me in
old age and solitude; it eases me of a troublesome weight of idleness,
and delivers me at all hours from company that I dislike: it blunts the
point of griefs, if they are not extreme, and have not got an entire
possession of my soul. To divert myself from a troublesome fancy, ‘tis
but to run to my books; they presently fix me to them and drive the other
out of my thoughts, and do not mutiny at seeing that I have only recourse
to them for want of other more real, natural, and lively commodities;
they always receive me with the same kindness. He may well go a foot,
they say, who leads his horse in his hand; and our James, King of Naples
and Sicily, who, handsome, young and healthful, caused himself to be
carried about on a barrow, extended upon a pitiful mattress in a poor
robe of grey cloth, and a cap of the same, yet attended withal by a royal
train, litters, led horses of all sorts, gentlemen and officers, did yet
herein represent a tender and unsteady authority: “The sick man has not
to complain who has his cure in his sleeve.” In the experience and
practice of this maxim, which is a very true one, consists all the
benefit I reap from books. As a matter of fact, I make no more use of
them, as it were, than those who know them not. I enjoy them as misers
do their money, in knowing that I may enjoy them when I please: my mind
is satisfied with this right of possession. I never travel without
books, either in peace or war; and yet sometimes I pass over several
days, and sometimes months, without looking on them. I will read
by-and-by, say I to myself, or to-morrow, or when I please; and in the
interim, time steals away without any inconvenience. For it is not to be
imagined to what degree I please myself and rest content in this
consideration, that I have them by me to divert myself with them when I
am so disposed, and to call to mind what a refreshment they are to my
life. ‘Tis the best viaticum I have yet found out for this human
journey, and I very much pity those men of understanding who are
unprovided of it. I the rather accept of any other sort of diversion,
how light soever, because this can never fail me.
When at home, I a little more frequent my library, whence I overlook at
once all the concerns of my family. ‘Tis situated at the entrance into
my house, and I thence see under me my garden, court, and base-court, and
almost all parts of the building. There I turn over now one book, and
then another, on various subjects, without method or design. One while
I meditate, another I record and dictate, as I walk to and fro, such
whimsies as these I present to you here. ‘Tis in the third storey of a
tower, of which the ground-room is my chapel, the second storey a chamber
with a withdrawing-room and closet, where I often lie, to be more
retired; and above is a great wardrobe. This formerly was the most
useless part of the house. I there pass away both most of the days of my
life and most of the hours of those days. In the night I am never there.
There is by the side of it a cabinet handsome enough, with a fireplace
very commodiously contrived, and plenty of light; and were I not more
afraid of the trouble than the expense--the trouble that frights me from
all business--I could very easily adjoin on either side, and on the same
floor, a gallery of an hundred paces long and twelve broad, having found
walls already raised for some other design to the requisite height.
Every place of retirement requires a walk: my thoughts sleep if I sit
still: my fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it: and all
those who study without a book are in the same condition. The figure of
my study is round, and there is no more open wall than what is taken up
by my table and my chair, so that the remaining parts of the circle
present me a view of all my books at once, ranged upon five rows of
shelves round about me. It has three noble and free prospects, and is
sixteen paces in diameter. I am not so continually there in winter; for
my house is built upon an eminence, as its name imports, and no part of
it is so much exposed to the wind and weather as this, which pleases me
the better, as being of more difficult access and a little remote, as
well upon the account of exercise, as also being there more retired from
the crowd. ‘Tis there that I am in my kingdom, and there I endeavour to
make myself an absolute monarch, and to sequester this one corner from
all society, conjugal, filial, and civil; elsewhere I have but verbal
authority only, and of a confused essence. That man, in my opinion, is
very miserable, who has not at home where to be by himself, where to
entertain himself alone, or to conceal himself from others. Ambition
sufficiently plagues her proselytes, by keeping them always in show, like
the statue of a public, square:
“Magna servitus est magna fortuna.”
[“A great fortune is a great slavery.”
--Seneca, De Consol. ad. Polyb., c. 26.]
They cannot so much as be private in the watercloset. I have thought
nothing so severe in the austerity of life that our monks affect, as what
I have observed in some of their communities; namely, by rule, to have a
perpetual society of place, and numerous persons present in every action
whatever; and think it much more supportable to be always alone than
never to be so.
If any one shall tell me that it is to undervalue the Muses to make use
of them only for sport and to pass away the time, I shall tell him, that
he does not know so well as I the value of the sport, the pleasure, and
the pastime; I can hardly forbear to add that all other end is
ridiculous. I live from day to day, and, with reverence be it spoken, I
only live for myself; there all my designs terminate. I studied, when
young, for ostentation; since, to make myself a little wiser; and now for
my diversion, but never for any profit. A vain and prodigal humour I had
after this sort of furniture, not only for the supplying my own need,
but, moreover, for ornament and outward show, I have since quite cured
myself of.
Books have many charming qualities to such as know how to choose them;
but every good has its ill; ‘tis a pleasure that is not pure and clean,
no more than others: it has its inconveniences, and great ones too. The
soul indeed is exercised therein; but the body, the care of which I must
withal never neglect, remains in the meantime without action, and grows
heavy and sombre. I know no excess more prejudicial to me, nor more to
be avoided in this my declining age.
These have been my three favourite and particular occupations; I speak
not of those I owe to the world by civil obligation.
CHAPTER IV.
OF DIVERSION
I was once employed in consoling a lady truly afflicted. Most of their
mournings are artificial and ceremonious:
“Uberibus semper lacrymis, semperque paratis,
In statione subatque expectantibus illam,
Quo jubeat manare modo.”
[“A woman has ever a fountain of tears ready to gush up whenever
she requires to make use of them.”--Juvenal, vi. 272.]
A man goes the wrong way to work when he opposes this passion; for
opposition does but irritate and make them more obstinate in sorrow; the
evil is exasperated by discussion. We see, in common discourse, that
what I have indifferently let fall from me, if any one takes it up to
controvert it, I justify it with the best arguments I have; and much more
a thing wherein I had a real interest. And besides, in so doing you
enter roughly upon your operation; whereas the first addresses of a
physician to his patient should be gracious, gay, and pleasing; never did
any ill-looking, morose physician do anything to purpose. On the
contrary, then, a man should, at the first approaches, favour their grief
and express some approbation of their sorrow. By this intelligence you
obtain credit to proceed further, and by a facile and insensible
gradation fall into discourses more solid and proper for their cure.
I, whose aim it was principally to gull the company who had their eyes
fixed upon me, took it into my head only to palliate the disease. And
indeed I have found by experience that I have an unlucky hand in
persuading. My arguments are either too sharp and dry, or pressed too
roughly, or not home enough. After I had some time applied myself to her
grief, I did not attempt to cure her by strong and lively reasons, either
because I had them not at hand, or because I thought to do my business
better another way; neither did I make choice of any of those methods of
consolation which philosophy prescribes: that what we complain of is no
evil, according to Cleanthes; that it is a light evil, according to the
Peripatetics; that to bemoan one’s self is an action neither commendable
nor just, according to Chrysippus; nor this of Epicurus, more suitable to
my way, of shifting the thoughts from afflicting things to those that are
pleasing; nor making a bundle of all these together, to make use of upon
occasion, according to Cicero; but, gently bending my discourse, and by
little and little digressing, sometimes to subjects nearer, and sometimes
more remote from the purpose, according as she was more intent on what I
said, I imperceptibly led her from that sorrowful thought, and kept her
calm and in good-humour whilst I continued there. I herein made use of
diversion. They who succeeded me in the same service did not, for all
that, find any amendment in her, for I had not gone to the root.
I, peradventure, may elsewhere have glanced upon some sort of public
diversions; and the practice of military ones, which Pericles made use of
in the Peloponnesian war, and a thousand others in other places, to
withdraw the adverse forces from their own countries, is too frequent in
history. It was an ingenious evasion whereby Monseigneur d’Hempricourt
saved both himself and others in the city of Liege, into which the Duke
of Burgundy, who kept it besieged, had made him enter to execute the
articles of their promised surrender; the people, being assembled by
night to consider of it, began to mutiny against the agreement, and
several of them resolved to fall upon the commissioners, whom they had in
their power; he, feeling the gusts of this first popular storm, who were
coming to rush into his lodgings, suddenly sent out to them two of the
inhabitants of the city (of whom he had some with him) with new and
milder terms to be proposed in their council, which he had then and there
contrived for his need: These two diverted the first tempest, carrying
back the enraged rabble to the town-hall to hear and consider of what
they had to say. The deliberation was short; a second storm arose as
violent as the other, whereupon he despatched four new mediators of the
same quality to meet them, protesting that he had now better conditions
to present them with, and such as would give them absolute satisfaction,
by which means the tumult was once more appeased, and the people again
turned back to the conclave. In fine, by this dispensation of
amusements, one after another, diverting their fury and dissipating it in
frivolous consultations, he laid it at last asleep till the day appeared,
which was his principal end.
This other story that follows is also of the same category. Atalanta, a
virgin of excelling beauty and of wonderful disposition of body, to
disengage herself from the crowd of a thousand suitors who sought her in
marriage, made this proposition, that she would accept of him for her
husband who should equal her in running, upon condition that they who
failed should lose their lives. There were enough who thought the prize
very well worth the hazard, and who suffered the cruel penalty of the
contract. Hippomenes, about to make trial after the rest, made his
address to the goddess of love, imploring her assistance; and she,
granting his request, gave him three golden apples, and instructed him
how to use them. The race beginning, as Hippomenes perceived his
mistress to press hard up to him; he, as it were by chance, let fall one
of these apples; the maid, taken with the beauty of it, failed not to
step out of her way to pick it up:
“Obstupuit Virgo, nitidique cupidine pomi
Declinat cursus, aurumque volubile tollit.”
[“The virgin, astonished and attracted by the glittering apple,
stops her career, and seizes the rolling gold.”
--Ovid, Metam., x. 666.]
He did the same, when he saw his time, by the second and the third, till
by so diverting her, and making her lose so much ground, he won the race.
When physicians cannot stop a catarrh, they divert and turn it into some
other less dangerous part. And I find also that this is the most
ordinary practice for the diseases of the mind:
“Abducendus etiam nonnunquam animus est ad alia studia,
sollicitudines, curas, negotia: loci denique mutatione,
tanquam aegroti non convalescentes, saepe curandus est.”
[“The mind is sometimes to be diverted to other studies, thoughts,
cares, business: in fine, by change of place, as where sick persons
do not become convalescent.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 35.]
‘Tis to little effect directly to jostle a man’s infirmities; we neither
make him sustain nor repel the attack; we only make him decline and evade
it.
This other lesson is too high and too difficult: ‘tis for men of the
first form of knowledge purely to insist upon the thing, to consider and
judge it; it appertains to one sole Socrates to meet death with an
ordinary countenance, to grow acquainted with it, and to sport with it;
he seeks no consolation out of the thing itself; dying appears to him a
natural and indifferent accident; ‘tis there that he fixes his sight and
resolution, without looking elsewhere. The disciples of Hegesias, who
starved themselves to death, animated thereunto by his fine lectures, and
in such numbers that King Ptolemy ordered he should be forbidden to
entertain his followers with such homicidal doctrines, did not consider
death in itself, neither did they judge of it; it was not there they
fixed their thoughts; they ran towards and aimed at a new being.
The poor wretches whom we see brought upon the scaffold, full of ardent
devotion, and therein, as much as in them lies, employing all their
senses, their ears in hearing the instructions given them, their eyes and
hands lifted up towards heaven, their voices in loud prayers, with a
vehement and continual emotion, do doubtless things very commendable and
proper for such a necessity: we ought to commend them for their devotion,
but not properly for their constancy; they shun the encounter, they
divert their thoughts from the consideration of death, as children are
amused with some toy or other when the surgeon is going to give them a
prick with his lancet. I have seen some, who, casting their eyes upon
the dreadful instruments of death round about, have fainted, and
furiously turned their thoughts another way; such as are to pass a
formidable precipice are advised either to shut their eyes or to look
another way.
Subrius Flavius, being by Nero’s command to be put to death, and by the
hand of Niger, both of them great captains, when they lead him to the
place appointed for his execution, seeing the grave that Niger had caused
to be hollowed to put him into ill-made: “Neither is this,” said he,
turning to the soldiers who guarded him, “according to military
discipline.” And to Niger, who exhorted him to keep his head firm: “Do
but thou strike as firmly,” said he. And he very well foresaw what would
follow when he said so; for Niger’s arm so trembled that he had several
blows at his head before he could cut it off. This man seems to have had
his thoughts rightly fixed upon the subject.
He who dies in a battle, with his sword in his hand, does not then think
of death; he feels or considers it not; the ardour of the fight diverts
his thought another way. A worthy man of my acquaintance, falling as he
was fighting a duel, and feeling himself nailed to the earth by nine or
ten thrusts of his enemy, every one present called to him to think of his
conscience; but he has since told me, that though he very well heard what
they said, it nothing moved him, and that he never thought of anything
but how to disengage and revenge himself. He afterwards killed his man
in that very duel. He who brought to L. Silanus the sentence of death,
did him a very great kindness, in that, having received his answer, that
he was well prepared to die, but not by base hands, he ran upon him with
his soldiers to force him, and as he, unarmed as he was, obstinately
defended himself with his fists and feet, he made him lose his life in
the contest, by that means dissipating and diverting in a sudden and
furious rage the painful apprehension of the lingering death to which he
was designed.
We always think of something else; either the hope of a better life
comforts and supports us, or the hope of our children’s worth, or the
future glory of our name, or the leaving behind the evils of this life,
or the vengeance that threatens those who are the causes of our death,
administers consolation to us:
“Spero equidem mediis, si quid pia numina possunt,
Supplicia hausurum scopulis, et nomine Dido
Saepe vocaturum . . . .
Audiam; et haec Manes veniet mihi fama sub imos.”
[“I hope, however, if the pious gods have any power, thou wilt feel
thy punishment amid the rocks, and will call on the name of Dido;
I shall hear, and this report will come to me below.”--AEneid, iv.
382, 387.]
Xenophon was sacrificing with a crown upon his head when one came to
bring him news of the death of his son Gryllus, slain in the battle of
Mantinea: at the first surprise of the news, he threw his crown to the
ground; but understanding by the sequel of the narrative the manner of a
most brave and valiant death, he took it up and replaced it upon his
head. Epicurus himself, at his death, consoles himself upon the utility
and eternity of his writings:
“Omnes clari et nobilitati labores fiunt tolerabiles;”
[“All labours that are illustrious and famous become supportable.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 26.]
and the same wound, the same fatigue, is not, says Xenophon, so
intolerable to a general of an army as to a common soldier. Epaminondas
took his death much more cheerfully, having been informed that the
victory remained to him:
“Haec sunt solatia, haec fomenta summorum dolorum;”
[“These are sedatives and alleviations to the greatest pains.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 23.]
and such like circumstances amuse, divert, and turn our thoughts from the
consideration of the thing in itself. Even the arguments of philosophy
are always edging and glancing on the matter, so as scarce to rub its
crust; the greatest man of the first philosophical school, and
superintendent over all the rest, the great Zeno, forms this syllogism
against death: “No evil is honourable; but death is honourable; therefore
death is no evil”; against drunkenness this: “No one commits his secrets
to a drunkard; but every one commits his secrets to a wise man: therefore
a wise man is no drunkard.” Is this to hit the white? I love to see
that these great and leading souls cannot rid themselves of our company:
perfect men as they are, they are yet simply men.
Revenge is a sweet passion, of great and natural impression; I discern it
well enough, though I have no manner of experience of it. From this not
long ago to divert a young prince, I did not tell him that he must, to
him that had struck him upon the one cheek, turn the other, upon account
of charity; nor go about to represent to him the tragical events that
poetry attributes to this passion. I left that behind; and I busied
myself to make him relish the beauty of a contrary image: and, by
representing to him what honour, esteem, and goodwill he would acquire by
clemency and good nature, diverted him to ambition. Thus a man is to
deal in such cases.
If your passion of love be too violent, disperse it, say they, and they
say true; for I have often tried it with advantage: break it into several
desires, of which let one be regent, if you will, over the rest; but,
lest it should tyrannise and domineer over you, weaken and protract, by
dividing and diverting it:
“Cum morosa vago singultiet inguine vena,”
[“When you are tormented with fierce desire, satisfy it with the
first person that presents herself.”--Persius, Sat., vi. 73.]
“Conjicito humorem collectum in corpora quaeque,”
[Lucretius, vi. 1062, to the like effect.]
and provide for it in time, lest it prove troublesome to deal with, when
it has once seized you:
“Si non prima novis conturbes vulnera plagis,
Volgivagaque vagus venere ante recentia cures.”
[“Unless you cure old wounds by new.”-Lucretius, iv. 1064.]
I was once wounded with a vehement displeasure, and withal, more just
than vehement; I might peradventure have lost myself in it, if I had
merely trusted to my own strength. Having need of a powerful diversion
to disengage me, by art and study I became amorous, wherein I was
assisted by my youth: love relieved and rescued me from the evil wherein
friendship had engaged me. ‘Tis in everything else the same; a violent
imagination hath seized me: I find it a nearer way to change than to
subdue it: I depute, if not one contrary, yet another at least, in its
place. Variation ever relieves, dissolves, and dissipates.
If I am not able to contend with it, I escape from it; and in avoiding
it, slip out of the way, and make, my doubles; shifting place, business,
and company, I secure myself in the crowd of other thoughts and fancies,
where it loses my trace, and I escape.
After the same manner does nature proceed, by the benefit of inconstancy;
for time, which she has given us for the sovereign physician of our
passions, chiefly works by this, that supplying our imaginations with
other and new affairs, it loosens and dissolves the first apprehension,
how strong soever. A wise man little less sees his friend dying at the
end of five-and-twenty years than on the first year; and according to
Epicurus, no less at all; for he did not attribute any alleviation of
afflictions, either to their foresight or their antiquity; but so many
other thoughts traverse this, that it languishes and tires at last.
Alcibiades, to divert the inclination of common rumours, cut off the ears
and tail of his beautiful dog, and turned him out into the public place,
to the end that, giving the people this occasion to prate, they might let
his other actions alone. I have also seen, for this same end of
diverting the opinions and conjectures of the people and to stop their
mouths, some women conceal their real affections by those that were only
counterfeit; but I have also seen some of them, who in counterfeiting
have suffered themselves to be caught indeed, and who have quitted the
true and original affection for the feigned: and so have learned that
they who find their affections well placed are fools to consent to this
disguise: the public and favourable reception being only reserved for
this pretended lover, one may conclude him a fellow of very little
address and less wit, if he does not in the end put himself into your
place, and you into his; this is precisely to cut out and make up a shoe
for another to draw on.
A little thing will turn and divert us, because a little thing holds us.
We do not much consider subjects in gross and singly; they are little and
superficial circumstances, or images that touch us, and the outward
useless rinds that peel off from the subjects themselves:
“Folliculos ut nunc teretes aestate cicadae
Linquunt.”
[“As husks we find grasshoppers leave behind them in summer.”
--Lucretius, v. 801.]
Even Plutarch himself laments his daughter for the little apish tricks of
her infancy.--[Consolation to his Wife on the Death of their Daughter,
c. I.]--The remembrance of a farewell, of the particular grace of an
action, of a last recommendation, afflict us. The sight of Caesar’s robe
troubled all Rome, which was more than his death had done. Even the
sound of names ringing in our ears, as “my poor master,”--“my faithful
friend,”--“alas, my dear father,” or, “my sweet daughter,” afflict us.
When these repetitions annoy me, and that I examine it a little nearer,
I find ‘tis no other but a grammatical and word complaint; I am only
wounded with the word and tone, as the exclamations of preachers very
often work more upon their auditory than their reasons, and as the
pitiful eyes of a beast killed for our service; without my weighing or
penetrating meanwhile into the true and solid essence of my subject:
“His se stimulis dolor ipse lacessit.”
[“With these incitements grief provokes itself.”
--Lucretius, ii. 42.]
These are the foundations of our mourning.
The obstinacy of my stone to all remedies especially those in my bladder,
has sometimes thrown me into so long suppressions of urine for three or
four days together, and so near death, that it had been folly to have
hoped to evade it, and it was much rather to have been desired,
considering the miseries I endure in those cruel fits. Oh, that good
emperor, who caused criminals to be tied that they might die for want of
urination, was a great master in the hangman’s’ science! Finding myself
in this condition, I considered by how many light causes and objects
imagination nourished in me the regret of life; of what atoms the weight
and difficulty of this dislodging was composed in my soul; to how many
idle and frivolous thoughts we give way in so great an affair; a dog, a
horse, a book, a glass, and what not, were considered in my loss; to
others their ambitious hopes, their money, their knowledge, not less
foolish considerations in my opinion than mine. I look upon death
carelessly when I look upon it universally as the end of life. I insult
over it in gross, but in detail it domineers over me: the tears of a
footman, the disposing of my clothes, the touch of a friendly hand, a
common consolation, discourages and softens me. So do the complaints in
tragedies agitate our souls with grief; and the regrets of Dido and
Ariadne, impassionate even those who believe them not in Virgil and
Catullus. ‘Tis a symptom of an obstinate and obdurate nature to be
sensible of no emotion, as ‘tis reported for a miracle of Polemon; but
then he did not so much as alter his countenance at the biting of a mad
dog that tore away the calf of his leg; and no wisdom proceeds so far as
to conceive so vivid and entire a cause of sorrow, by judgment that it
does not suffer increase by its presence, when the eyes and ears have
their share; parts that are not to be moved but by vain accidents.
Is it reason that even the arts themselves should make an advantage of
our natural stupidity and weakness? An orator, says rhetoric in the
farce of his pleading, shall be moved with the sound of his own voice and
feigned emotions, and suffer himself to be imposed upon by the passion he
represents; he will imprint in himself a true and real grief, by means of
the part he plays, to transmit it to the judges, who are yet less
concerned than he: as they do who are hired at funerals to assist in the
ceremony of sorrow, who sell their tears and mourning by weight and
measure; for although they act in a borrowed form, nevertheless, by
habituating and settling their countenances to the occasion, ‘tis most
certain they often are really affected with an actual sorrow. I was one,
amongst several others of his friends, who conveyed the body of Monsieur
de Grammont to Spissons from the siege of La Fere, where he was slain;
I observed that in all places we passed through we filled the people we
met with lamentations and tears by the mere solemn pomp of our convoy,
for the name of the defunct was not there so much as known. Quintilian
reports as to have seen comedians so deeply engaged in a mourning part,
that they still wept in the retiring room, and who, having taken upon
them to stir up passion in another, have themselves espoused it to that
degree as to find themselves infected with it, not only to tears, but,
moreover, with pallor and the comportment of men really overwhelmed with
grief.
In a country near our mountains the women play Priest Martin, for as they
augment the regret of the deceased husband by the remembrance of the good
and agreeable qualities he possessed, they also at the same time make a
register of and publish his imperfections; as if of themselves to enter
into some composition, and divert themselves from compassion to disdain.
Yet with much better grace than we, who, when we lose an acquaintance,
strive to give him new and false praises, and to make him quite another
thing when we have lost sight of him than he appeared to us when we did
see him; as if regret were an instructive thing, or as if tears, by
washing our understandings, cleared them. For my part, I henceforth
renounce all favourable testimonies men would give of me, not because I
shall be worthy of them, but because I shall be dead.
Whoever shall ask a man, “What interest have you in this siege?”
--“The interest of example,” he will say, “and of the common obedience to
my prince: I pretend to no profit by it; and for glory, I know how small
a part can affect a private man such as I: I have here neither passion
nor quarrel.” And yet you shall see him the next day quite another man,
chafing and red with fury, ranged in battle for the assault; ‘tis the
glittering of so much steel, the fire and noise of our cannon and drums,
that have infused this new rigidity and fury into his veins. A frivolous
cause, you will say. How a cause? There needs none to agitate the mind;
a mere whimsy without body and without subject will rule and agitate it.
Let me thing of building castles in Spain, my imagination suggests to me
conveniences and pleasures with which my soul is really tickled and
pleased. How often do we torment our mind with anger or sorrow by such
shadows, and engage ourselves in fantastic passions that impair both soul
and body? What astonished, fleeting, confused grimaces does this raving
put our faces into! what sallies and agitations both of members and
voices does it inspire us with! Does it not seem that this individual
man has false visions amid the crowd of others with whom he has to do,
or that he is possessed with some internal demon that persecutes him?
Inquire of yourself where is the object of this mutation? is there
anything but us in nature which inanity sustains, over which it has
power? Cambyses, from having dreamt that his brother should be one day
king of Persia, put him to death: a beloved brother, and one in whom he
had always confided. Aristodemus, king of the Messenians, killed himself
out of a fancy of ill omen, from I know not what howling of his dogs;
and King Midas did as much upon the account of some foolish dream he had
dreamed. ‘Tis to prize life at its just value, to abandon it for a
dream. And yet hear the soul triumph over the miseries and weakness of
the body, and that it is exposed to all attacks and alterations; truly,
it has reason so to speak!
“O prima infelix finger ti terra Prometheo!
Ille parum cauti pectoris egit opus
Corpora disponens, mentem non vidit in arte;
Recta animi primum debuit esse via.”
[“O wretched clay, first formed by Prometheus. In his attempt,
what little wisdom did he shew! In framing bodies, he did not
apply his art to form the mind, which should have been his first
care.”--Propertius, iii. 5, 7.]
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A little thing will turn and divert us
Abominate that incidental repentance which old age brings
Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face
Always be parading their pedantic science
Am as jealous of my repose as of my authority
Anger and hatred are beyond the duty of justice
Beast of company, as the ancient said, but not of the herd
Books go side by side with me in my whole course
Books have many charming qualities to such as know how to choose
But ill proves the honour and beauty of an action by its utility
Childish ignorance of many very ordinary things
Common consolation, discourages and softens me
Consoles himself upon the utility and eternity of his writings
Deceit maintains and supplies most men’s employment
Diverting the opinions and conjectures of the people
Dying appears to him a natural and indifferent accident
Every place of retirement requires a walk
Fault will be theirs for having consulted me
Few men have been admired by their own domestics
Follies do not make me laugh, it is our wisdom which does
Folly to put out their own light and shine by a borrowed lustre
For fear of the laws and report of men
Gently to bear the inconstancy of a lover
Give but the rind of my attention
Grief provokes itself
He may employ his passion, who can make no use of his reason
He may well go a foot, they say, who leads his horse in his hand
I do not consider what it is now, but what it was then
I find no quality so easy to counterfeit as devotion
I lay no great stress upon my opinions; or of others
I look upon death carelessly when I look upon it universally
I receive but little advice, I also give but little
I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare
I understand my men even by their silence and smiles
Idleness is to me a very painful labour
Imagne the mighty will not abase themselves so much as to live
In ordinary friendships I am somewhat cold and shy
Leaving nothing unsaid, how home and bitter soever
Library: Tis there that I am in my kingdom
Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom
Malicious kind of justice
Miserable kind of remedy, to owe one’s health to one’s disease!
Miserable, who has not at home where to be by himself
More supportable to be always alone than never to be so.
My fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it
My thoughts sleep if I sit still
Nearest to the opinions of those with whom they have to do
No evil is honourable; but death is honourable
No man is free from speaking foolish things
Noise of arms deafened the voice of laws
None of the sex, let her be as ugly as the devil thinks lovable
Obliged to his age for having weaned him from pleasure
Open speaking draws out discoveries, like wine and love
Perfect men as they are, they are yet simply men.
Preachers very often work more upon their auditory than reasons
Public weal requires that men should betray, and lie
Ridiculous desire of riches when we have lost the use of them
Rowers who so advance backward
Season a denial with asperity, suspense, or favour
So that I could have said no worse behind their backs
Socrates: According to what a man can
Studied, when young, for ostentation, now for diversion
Swim in troubled waters without fishing in them
Take a pleasure in being uninterested in other men’s affairs
The good opinion of the vulgar is injurious
The sick man has not to complain who has his cure in his sleeve
The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high
Tis an exact life that maintains itself in due order in private
Tis not the cause, but their interest, that inflames them
Titillation of ill-natured pleasure in seeing others suffer
To be a slave, incessantly to be led by the nose by one’s self
Truly he, with a great effort will shortly say a mighty trifle
We do not so much forsake vices as we change them
We much more aptly imagine an artisan upon his close-stool
What more? they lie with their lovers learnedly
What need have they of anything but to live beloved and honoured
Wisdom is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common
You must let yourself down to those with whom you converse
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 15.
V. Upon Some verses of Virgil.
CHAPTER V
UPON SOME VERSES OF VIRGIL
CHAPTER V.
By how much profitable thoughts are more full and solid, by so much are
they also more cumbersome and heavy: vice, death, poverty, diseases, are
grave and grievous subjects. A man should have his soul instructed in
the means to sustain and to contend with evils, and in the rules of
living and believing well: and often rouse it up, and exercise it in this
noble study; but in an ordinary soul it must be by intervals and with
moderation; it will otherwise grow besotted if continually intent upon
it. I found it necessary, when I was young, to put myself in mind and
solicit myself to keep me to my duty; gaiety and health do not, they say,
so well agree with those grave and serious meditations: I am at present
in another state: the conditions of age but too much put me in mind, urge
me to wisdom, and preach to me. From the excess of sprightliness I am
fallen into that of severity, which is much more troublesome; and for
that reason I now and then suffer myself purposely a little to run into
disorder, and occupy my mind in wanton and youthful thoughts, wherewith
it diverts itself. I am of late but too reserved, too heavy, and too
ripe; years every day read to me lectures of coldness and temperance.
This body of mine avoids disorder and dreads it; ‘tis now my body’s turn
to guide my mind towards reformation; it governs, in turn, and more
rudely and imperiously than the other; it lets me not an hour alone,
sleeping or waking, but is always preaching to me death, patience, and
repentance. I now defend myself from temperance, as I have formerly done
from pleasure; it draws me too much back, and even to stupidity. Now I
will be master of myself, to all intents and purposes; wisdom has its
excesses, and has no less need of moderation than folly. Therefore, lest
I should wither, dry up, and overcharge myself with prudence, in the
intervals and truces my infirmities allow me:
“Mens intenta suis ne seit usque malis.”
[“That my mind may not eternally be intent upon my ills.”
--Ovid., Trist., iv. i, 4.]
I gently turn aside, and avert my eyes from the stormy and cloudy sky I
have before me, which, thanks be to God, I regard without fear, but not
without meditation and study, and amuse myself in the remembrance of my
better years:
“Animus quo perdidit, optat,
Atque in praeterita se totus imagine versat.”
[“The mind wishes to have what it has lost, and throws itself
wholly into memories of the past.”--Petronius, c. 128.]
Let childhood look forward and age backward; was not this the
signification of Janus’ double face? Let years draw me along if they
will, but it shall be backward; as long as my eyes can discern the
pleasant season expired, I shall now and then turn them that way; though
it escape from my blood and veins, I shall not, however, root the image
of it out of my memory:
“Hoc est
Vivere bis, vita posse priore frui.”
[“‘Tis to live twice to be able to enjoy one’s former life again.”
--Martial, x. 23, 7.]
Plato ordains that old men should be present at the exercises, dances,
and sports of young people, that they may rejoice in others for the
activity and beauty of body which is no more in themselves, and call to
mind the grace and comeliness of that flourishing age; and wills that in
these recreations the honour of the prize should be given to that young
man who has most diverted the company. I was formerly wont to mark
cloudy and gloomy days as extraordinary; these are now my ordinary days;
the extraordinary are the clear and bright; I am ready to leap for joy,
as for an unwonted favour, when nothing happens me. Let me tickle
myself, I cannot force a poor smile from this wretched body of mine;
I am only merry in conceit and in dreaming, by artifice to divert the
melancholy of age; but, in faith, it requires another remedy than a
dream. A weak contest of art against nature. ‘Tis great folly to
lengthen and anticipate human incommodities, as every one does; I had
rather be a less while old than be old before I am really so.’ I seize on
even the least occasions of pleasure I can meet. I know very well, by
hearsay, several sorts of prudent pleasures, effectually so, and glorious
to boot; but opinion has not power enough over me to give me an appetite
to them. I covet not so much to have them magnanimous, magnificent, and
pompous, as I do to have them sweet, facile, and ready:
“A natura discedimus; populo nos damus,
nullius rei bono auctori.”
[“We depart from nature and give ourselves to the people, who
understand nothing.”--Seneca, Ep., 99.]
My philosophy is in action, in natural and present practice, very little
in fancy: what if I should take pleasure in playing at cob-nut or to whip
a top!
“Non ponebat enim rumores ante salutem.”
[“He did not sacrifice his health even to rumours.” Ennius, apud
Cicero, De Offic., i. 24]
Pleasure is a quality of very little ambition; it thinks itself rich
enough of itself without any addition of repute; and is best pleased
where most retired. A young man should be whipped who pretends to a
taste in wine and sauces; there was nothing which, at that age, I less
valued or knew: now I begin to learn; I am very much ashamed on’t; but
what should I do? I am more ashamed and vexed at the occasions that put
me upon’t. ‘Tis for us to dote and trifle away the time, and for young
men to stand upon their reputation and nice punctilios; they are going
towards the world and the world’s opinion; we are retiring from it:
“Sibi arma, sibi equos, sibi hastas, sibi clavam, sibi pilam,
sibi natationes, et cursus habeant: nobis senibus, ex lusionibus
multis, talos relinquant et tesseras;”
[“Let them reserve to themselves arms, horses, spears, clubs,
tennis, swimming, and races; and of all the sports leave to us old
men cards and dice.”--Cicero, De Senec., c. 16.]
the laws themselves send us home. I can do no less in favour of this
wretched condition into which my age has thrown me than furnish it with
toys to play withal, as they do children; and, in truth, we become such.
Both wisdom and folly will have enough to do to support and relieve me by
alternate services in this calamity of age:
“Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem.”
[“Mingle with counsels a brief interval of folly.”
--Horace, Od., iv. 12, 27.]
I accordingly avoid the lightest punctures; and those that formerly would
not have rippled the skin, now pierce me through and through: my habit of
body is now so naturally declining to ill:
“In fragili corpore odiosa omnis offensio est;”
[“In a fragile body every shock is obnoxious.”
--Cicero, De Senec., c. 18.]
“Mensque pati durum sustinet aegra nihil.”
[“And the infirm mind can bear no difficult exertion.”
--Ovid, De Ponto., i. 5, 18.]
I have ever been very susceptibly tender as to offences: I am much more
tender now, and open throughout.
“Et minimae vires frangere quassa valent.”
[“And little force suffices to break what was cracked before.”
--Ovid, De Tris., iii. 11, 22.]
My judgment restrains me from kicking against and murmuring at the
inconveniences that nature orders me to endure, but it does not take away
my feeling them: I, who have no other thing in my aim but to live and be
merry, would run from one end of the world to the other to seek out one
good year of pleasant and jocund tranquillity. A melancholic and dull
tranquillity may be enough for me, but it benumbs and stupefies me; I am
not contented with it. If there be any person, any knot of good company
in country or city, in France or elsewhere, resident or in motion, who
can like my humour, and whose humours I can like, let them but whistle
and I will run and furnish them with essays in flesh and bone:
Seeing it is the privilege of the mind to rescue itself from old age, I
advise mine to it with all the power I have; let it meanwhile continue
green, and flourish if it can, like mistletoe upon a dead tree. But I
fear ‘tis a traitor; it has contracted so strict a fraternity with the
body that it leaves me at every turn, to follow that in its need. I
wheedle and deal with it apart in vain; I try in vain to wean it from
this correspondence, to no effect; quote to it Seneca and Catullus, and
ladies and royal masques; if its companion have the stone, it seems to
have it too; even the faculties that are most peculiarly and properly its
own cannot then perform their functions, but manifestly appear stupefied
and asleep; there is no sprightliness in its productions, if there be not
at the same time an equal proportion in the body too.
Our masters are to blame, that in searching out the causes of the
extraordinary emotions of the soul, besides attributing it to a divine
ecstasy, love, martial fierceness, poesy, wine, they have not also
attributed a part to health: a boiling, vigorous, full, and lazy health,
such as formerly the verdure of youth and security, by fits, supplied me
withal; that fire of sprightliness and gaiety darts into the mind flashes
that are lively and bright beyond our natural light, and of all
enthusiasms the most jovial, if not the most extravagant.
It is, then, no wonder if a contrary state stupefy and clog my spirit,
and produce a contrary effect:
“Ad nullum consurgit opus, cum corpore languet;”
[“When the mind is languishing, the body is good for nothing.”
(Or:) “It rises to no effort; it languishes with the body.”
--Pseudo Gallus, i. 125.]
and yet would have me obliged to it for giving, as it wants to make out,
much less consent to this stupidity than is the ordinary case with men of
my age. Let us, at least, whilst we have truce, drive away incommodities
and difficulties from our commerce:
“Dum licet, obducta solvatur fronte senectus:”
[“Whilst we can, let us banish old age from the brow.”
--Herod., Ep., xiii. 7.]
“Tetrica sunt amcenanda jocularibus.”
[“Sour things are to be sweetened with those that are pleasant.”
--Sidonius Apollin., Ep., i. 9.]
I love a gay and civil wisdom, and fly from all sourness and austerity of
manners, all repellent, mien being suspected by me:
“Tristemque vultus tetrici arrogantiam:”
[“The arrogant sadness of a crabbed face.”--Auctor Incert.]
“Et habet tristis quoque turba cinaedos.”
[“And the dull crowd also has its voluptuaries.” (Or:)
“An austere countenance sometimes covers a debauched mind.”
--Idem.]
I am very much of Plato’s opinion, who says that facile or harsh humours
are great indications of the good or ill disposition of the mind.
Socrates had a constant countenance, but serene and smiling, not sourly
austere, like the elder Crassus, whom no one ever saw laugh. Virtue is a
pleasant and gay quality.
I know very well that few will quarrel with the licence of my writings,
who have not more to quarrel with in the licence of their own thoughts:
I conform myself well enough to their inclinations, but I offend their
eyes. ‘Tis a fine humour to strain the writings of Plato, to wrest his
pretended intercourses with Phaedo, Dion, Stella, and Archeanassa:
“Non pudeat dicere, quod non pudet sentire.”
[“Let us not be ashamed to speak what we are not ashamed to think.”]
I hate a froward and dismal spirit, that slips over all the pleasures of
life and seizes and feeds upon misfortunes; like flies, that cannot stick
to a smooth and polished body, but fix and repose themselves upon craggy
and rough places, and like cupping-glasses, that only suck and attract
bad blood.
As to the rest, I have enjoined myself to dare to say all that I dare to
do; even thoughts that are not to be published, displease me; the worst
of my actions and qualities do not appear to me so evil as I find it evil
and base not to dare to own them. Every one is wary and discreet in
confession, but men ought to be so in action; the boldness of doing ill
is in some sort compensated and restrained by the boldness of confessing
it. Whoever will oblige himself to tell all, should oblige himself to do
nothing that he must be forced to conceal. I wish that this excessive
licence of mine may draw men to freedom, above these timorous and mincing
virtues sprung from our imperfections, and that at the expense of my
immoderation I may reduce them to reason. A man must see and study his
vice to correct it; they who conceal it from others, commonly conceal it
from themselves; and do not think it close enough, if they themselves see
it: they withdraw and disguise it from their own consciences:
“Quare vitia sua nemo confitetur? Quia etiam nunc in
illia est; somnium narrare vigilantis est.”
[“Why does no man confess his vices? because he is yet in them;
‘tis for a waking man to tell his dream.”--Seneca, Ep., 53.]
The diseases of the body explain themselves by their increase; we find
that to be the gout which we called a rheum or a strain; the diseases of
the soul, the greater they are, keep, themselves the most obscure;
the most sick are the least sensible; therefore it is that with an
unrelenting hand they most often, in full day, be taken to task, opened,
and torn from the hollow of the heart. As in doing well, so in doing
ill, the mere confession is sometimes satisfaction. Is there any
deformity in doing amiss, that can excuse us from confessing ourselves?
It is so great a pain to me to dissemble, that I evade the trust of
another’s secrets, wanting the courage to disavow my knowledge. I can
keep silent, but deny I cannot without the greatest trouble and violence
to myself imaginable to be very secret, a man must be so by nature, not
by obligation. ‘Tis little worth, in the service of a prince, to be
secret, if a man be not a liar to boot. If he who asked Thales the
Milesian whether he ought solemnly to deny that he had committed
adultery, had applied himself to me, I should have told him that he ought
not to do it; for I look upon lying as a worse fault than the other.
Thales advised him quite contrary, bidding him swear to shield the
greater fault by the less;
[Montaigne’s memory here serves him ill, for the question being put
to Thales, his answer was: “But is not perjury worse than
adultery?”--Diogenes Laertius, in vita, i. 36.]
nevertheless, this counsel was not so much an election as a
multiplication of vice. Upon which let us say this in passing, that we
deal liberally with a man of conscience when we propose to him some
difficulty in counterpoise of vice; but when we shut him up betwixt two
vices, he is put to a hard choice as Origen was either to idolatrise or
to suffer himself to be carnally abused by a great Ethiopian slave they
brought to him. He submitted to the first condition, and wrongly, people
say. Yet those women of our times are not much out, according to their
error, who protest they had rather burden their consciences with ten men
than one mass.
If it be indiscretion so to publish one’s errors, yet there is no great
danger that it pass into example and custom; for Ariston said, that the
winds men most fear are those that lay them open. We must tuck up this
ridiculous rag that hides our manners: they send their consciences to the
stews, and keep a starched countenance: even traitors and assassins
espouse the laws of ceremony, and there fix their duty. So that neither
can injustice complain of incivility, nor malice of indiscretion. ‘Tis
pity but a bad man should be a fool to boot, and that outward decency
should palliate his vice: this rough-cast only appertains to a good and
sound wall, that deserves to be preserved and whited.
In favour of the Huguenots, who condemn our auricular and private
confession, I confess myself in public, religiously and purely: St.
Augustin, Origeti, and Hippocrates have published the errors of their
opinions; I, moreover, of my manners. I am greedy of making myself
known, and I care not to how many, provided it be truly; or to say
better, I hunger for nothing; but I mortally hate to be mistaken by those
who happen to learn my name. He who does all things for honour and
glory, what can he think to gain by shewing himself to the world in a
vizor, and by concealing his true being from the people? Praise a
humpback for his stature, he has reason to take it for an affront:
if you are a coward, and men commend you for your valour, is it of you
they speak? They take you for another. I should like him as well who
glorifies himself in the compliments and congees that are made him as if
he were master of the company, when he is one of the least of the train.
Archelaus, king of Macedon, walking along the street, somebody threw
water on his head, which they who were with him said he ought to punish:
“Aye, but,” said he, “whoever it was, he did not throw the water upon me,
but upon him whom he took me to be.” Socrates being told that people
spoke ill of him, “Not at all,” said he, “there is nothing, in me of what
they say.”
For my part, if any one should recommend me as a good pilot, as being
very modest or very chaste, I should owe him no thanks; and so, whoever
should call me traitor, robber, or drunkard, I should be as little
concerned. They who do not rightly know themselves, may feed themselves
with false approbations; not I, who see myself, and who examine myself
even to my very bowels, and who very well know what is my due. I am
content to be less commended, provided I am better known. I may be
reputed a wise man in such a sort of wisdom as I take to be folly.
I am vexed that my Essays only serve the ladies for a common piece of
furniture, and a piece for the hall; this chapter will make me part of
the water-closet. I love to traffic with them a little in private;
public conversation is without favour and without savour. In farewells,
we oftener than not heat our affections towards the things we take leave
of; I take my last leave of the pleasures of this world: these are our
last embraces.
But let us come to my subject: what has the act of generation, so
natural, so necessary, and so just, done to men, to be a thing not to
be spoken of without blushing, and to be excluded from all serious and
moderate discourse? We boldly pronounce kill, rob, betray, and that we
dare only to do betwixt the teeth. Is it to say, the less we expend in
words, we may pay so much the more in thinking? For it is certain that
the words least in use, most seldom written, and best kept in, are the
best and most generally known: no age, no manners, are ignorant of them,
no more than the word bread they imprint themselves in every one without
being, expressed, without voice, and without figure; and the sex that
most practises it is bound to say least of it. ‘Tis an act that we have
placed in the franchise of silence, from which to take it is a crime even
to accuse and judge it; neither dare we reprehend it but by periphrasis
and picture. A great favour to a criminal to be so execrable that
justice thinks it unjust to touch and see him; free, and safe by the
benefit of the severity of his condemnation. Is it not here as in matter
of books, that sell better and become more public for being suppressed?
For my part, I will take Aristotle at his word, who says, that
“bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.” These
verses are preached in the ancient school, a school that I much more
adhere to than the modern: its virtues appear to me to be greater, and
the vices less:
“Ceux qui par trop fuyant Venus estrivent,
Faillent autant que ceulx qui trop la suyvent.”
[“They err as much who too much forbear Venus, as they who are too
frequent in her rites.”--A translation by Amyot from Plutarch, A
philosopher should converse with princes.]
“Tu, dea, rerum naturam sola gubernas,
Nec sine to quicquam dias in luminis oras
Exoritur, neque fit laetum, nec amabile quidquam.”
[“Goddess, still thou alone governest nature, nor without thee
anything comes into light; nothing is pleasant, nothing joyful.”
--Lucretius, i. 22.]
I know not who could set Pallas and the Muses at variance with Venus, and
make them cold towards Love; but I see no deities so well met, or that
are more indebted to one another. Who will deprive the Muses of amorous
imaginations, will rob them of the best entertainment they have, and of
the noblest matter of their work: and who will make Love lose the
communication and service of poesy, will disarm him of his best weapons:
by this means they charge the god of familiarity and good will, and the
protecting goddesses of humanity and justice, with the vice of
ingratitude and unthankfulness. I have not been so long cashiered from
the state and service of this god, that my memory is not still perfect in
his force and value:
“Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae;”
[“I recognise vestiges of my old flame.”--AEneid., iv. 23.]
There are yet some remains of heat and emotion after the fever:
“Nec mihi deficiat calor hic, hiemantibus annis!”
[“Nor let this heat of youth fail me in my winter years.”]
Withered and drooping as I am, I feel yet some remains of the past
ardour:
“Qual l’alto Egeo, per the Aquilone o Noto
Cessi, the tutto prima il volse et scosse,
Non ‘s accheta ei pero; ma’l suono e’l moto
Ritien del l’onde anco agitate e grosse:”
[“As Aegean seas, when storms be calmed again,
That rolled their tumbling waves with troublous blasts,
Do yet of tempests passed some show retain,
And here and there their swelling billows cast.”--Fairfax.]
but from what I understand of it, the force and power of this god are
more lively and animated in the picture of poesy than in their own
essence:
“Et versus digitos habet:”
[“Verse has fingers.”--Altered from Juvenal, iv. 196.]
it has I know not what kind of air, more amorous than love itself. Venus
is not so beautiful, naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil:
“Dixerat; et niveis hinc atque hinc Diva lacertis
Cunctantem amplexu molli fovet. Ille repente
Accepit solitam flammam; notusque medullas
Intravit calor, et labefacta per ossa cucurrit
Non secus atque olim tonitru, cum rupta corusco
Ignea rima micans percurrit lumine nimbos.
. . . . . . Ea verba loquutus,
Optatos dedit amplexus; placidumque petivit
Conjugis infusus gremio per membra soporem.”
[“The goddess spoke, and throwing round him her snowy arms in soft
embraces, caresses him hesitating. Suddenly he caught the wonted
flame, and the well-known warmth pierced his marrow, and ran
thrilling through his shaken bones: just as when at times, with
thunder, a stream of fire in lightning flashes shoots across the
skies. Having spoken these words, he gave her the wished embrace,
and in the bosom of his spouse sought placid sleep.”
--AEneid, viii. 387 and 392.]
All that I find fault with in considering it is, that he has represented
her a little too passionate for a married Venus; in this discreet kind of
coupling, the appetite is not usually so wanton, but more grave and dull.
Love hates that people should hold of any but itself, and goes but
faintly to work in familiarities derived from any other title, as
marriage is: alliance, dowry, therein sway by reason, as much or more
than grace and beauty. Men do not marry for themselves, let them say
what they will; they marry as much or more for their posterity and
family; the custom and interest of marriage concern our race much more
than us; and therefore it is, that I like to have a match carried on by a
third hand rather than a man’s own, and by another man’s liking than that
of the party himself; and how much is all this opposite to the
conventions of love? And also it is a kind of incest to employ in this
venerable and sacred alliance the heat and extravagance of amorous
licence, as I think I have said elsewhere. A man, says Aristotle, must
approach his wife with prudence and temperance, lest in dealing too
lasciviously with her, the extreme pleasure make her exceed the bounds of
reason. What he says upon the account of conscience, the physicians say
upon the account of health: “that a pleasure excessively lascivious,
voluptuous, and frequent, makes the seed too hot, and hinders
conception”: ‘tis said, elsewhere, that to a languishing intercourse, as
this naturally is, to supply it with a due and fruitful heat, a man must
do it but seldom and at appreciable intervals:
“Quo rapiat sitiens Venerem, interiusque recondat.”
[“But let him thirstily snatch the joys of love and enclose them in
his bosom.”--Virg., Georg., iii. 137.]
I see no marriages where the conjugal compatibility sooner fails than
those that we contract upon the account of beauty and amorous desires;
there should be more solid and constant foundation, and they should
proceed with greater circumspection; this furious ardour is worth
nothing.
They who think they honour marriage by joining love to it, do, methinks,
like those who, to favour virtue, hold that nobility is nothing else but
virtue. They are indeed things that have some relation to one another,
but there is a great deal of difference; we should not so mix their names
and titles; ‘tis a wrong to them both so to confound them. Nobility is a
brave quality, and with good reason introduced; but forasmuch as ‘tis a
quality depending upon others, and may happen in a vicious person, in
himself nothing, ‘tis in estimate infinitely below virtue’;
[“If nobility be virtue, it loses its quality in all things wherein
not virtuous: and if it be not virtue, ‘tis a small matter.”
--La Byuyere.]
‘tis a virtue, if it be one, that is artificial and apparent, depending
upon time and fortune: various in form, according to the country; living
and mortal; without birth, as the river Nile; genealogical and common;
of succession and similitude; drawn by consequence, and a very weak one.
Knowledge, strength, goodness, beauty, riches, and all other qualities,
fall into communication and commerce, but this is consummated in itself,
and of no use to the service of others. There was proposed to one of our
kings the choice of two candidates for the same command, of whom one was
a gentleman, the other not; he ordered that, without respect to quality,
they should choose him who had the most merit; but where the worth of the
competitors should appear to be entirely equal, they should have respect
to birth: this was justly to give it its rank. A young man unknown,
coming to Antigonus to make suit for his father’s command, a valiant man
lately dead: “Friend,” said he, “in such preferments as these, I have not
so much regard to the nobility of my soldiers as to their prowess.”
And, indeed, it ought not to go as it did with the officers of the kings
of Sparta, trumpeters, fiddlers, cooks, the children of whom always
succeeded to their places, how ignorant soever, and were preferred before
the most experienced in the trade. They of Calicut make of nobles a sort
of superhuman persons: they are interdicted marriage and all but warlike
employments: they may have of concubines their fill, and the women as
many lovers, without being jealous of one another; but ‘tis a capital and
irremissible crime to couple with a person of meaner conditions than
themselves; and they think themselves polluted, if they have but touched
one in walking along; and supposing their nobility to be marvellously
interested and injured in it, kill such as only approach a little too
near them: insomuch that the ignoble are obliged to cry out as they walk,
like the gondoliers of Venice, at the turnings of streets for fear of
jostling; and the nobles command them to step aside to what part they
please: by that means these avoid what they repute a perpetual ignominy,
those certain death. No time, no favour of the prince, no office, or
virtue, or riches, can ever prevail to make a plebeian become noble: to
which this custom contributes, that marriages are interdicted betwixt
different trades; the daughter of one of the cordwainers’ gild is not
permitted to marry a carpenter; and parents are obliged to train up their
children precisely in their own callings, and not put them to any other
trade; by which means the distinction and continuance of their fortunes
are maintained.
A good marriage, if there be any such, rejects the company and conditions
of love, and tries to represent those of friendship. ‘Tis a sweet
society of life, full of constancy, trust, and an infinite number of
useful and solid services and mutual obligations; which any woman who has
a right taste:
“Optato quam junxit lumine taeda”--
[“Whom the marriage torch has joined with the desired light.”
--Catullus, lxiv. 79.]
would be loth to serve her husband in quality of a mistress. If she be
lodged in his affection as a wife, she is more honourably and securely
placed. When he purports to be in love with another, and works all he
can to obtain his desire, let any one but ask him, on which he had rather
a disgrace should fall, his wife or his mistress, which of their
misfortunes would most afflict him, and to which of them he wishes the
most grandeur, the answer to these questions is out of dispute in a sound
marriage.
And that so few are observed to be happy, is a token of its price and
value. If well formed and rightly taken, ‘tis the best of all human
societies; we cannot live without it, and yet we do nothing but decry it.
It happens, as with cages, the birds without despair to get in, and those
within despair of getting out. Socrates being asked, whether it was more
commodious to take a wife or not, “Let a man take which course he will,”
said he; “he will repent.” ‘Tis a contract to which the common
saying:
“Homo homini aut deus aut lupus,”
[“Man to man is either a god or a wolf.”--Erasmus, Adag.]
may very fitly be applied; there must be a concurrence of many qualities
in the construction. It is found nowadays more convenient for simple and
plebeian souls, where delights, curiosity, and idleness do not so much
disturb it; but extravagant humours, such as mine, that hate all sorts of
obligation and restraint, are not so proper for it:
“Et mihi dulce magis resoluto vivere collo.”
[“And it is sweet to me to live with a loosened neck.”
--Pseudo Gallus, i. 61.]
Might I have had my own will, I would not have married Wisdom herself, if
she would have had me. But ‘tis to much purpose to evade it; the common
custom and usance of life will have it so. The most of my actions are
guided by example, not by choice, and yet I did not go to it of my own
voluntary motion; I was led and drawn to it by extrinsic occasions; for
not only things that are incommodious in themselves, but also things
however ugly, vicious, and to be avoided, may be rendered acceptable by
some condition or accident; so unsteady and vain is all human resolution!
and I was persuaded to it, when worse prepared and less tractable than I
am at present, that I have tried what it is: and as great a libertine as
I am taken to be, I have in truth more strictly observed the laws of
marriage, than I either promised or expected. ‘Tis in vain to kick, when
a man has once put on his fetters: a man must prudently manage his
liberty; but having once submitted to obligation, he must confine himself
within the laws of common duty, at least, do what he can towards it.
They who engage in this contract, with a design to carry themselves in it
with hatred and contempt, do an unjust and inconvenient thing; and the
fine rule that I hear pass from hand to hand amongst the women, as a
sacred oracle:
[“Serve thy husband as thy master, but guard thyself against him as
from a traitor.”]
which is to say, comport thyself towards him with a dissembled, inimical,
and distrustful reverence (a cry of war and defiance), is equally
injurious and hard. I am too mild for such rugged designs: to say the
truth, I am not arrived to that perfection of ability and refinement of
wit, to confound reason with injustice, and to laugh at all rule and
order that does not please my palate; because I hate superstition, I do
not presently run into the contrary extreme of irreligion.
(If a man hate superstition he cannot love religion. D.W.)
If a man does not always perform his duty, he ought at least to love and
acknowledge it; ‘tis treachery to marry without espousing.
Let us proceed.
Our poet represents a marriage happy in a good accord wherein
nevertheless there is not much loyalty. Does he mean, that it is not
impossible but a woman may give the reins to her own passion, and yield
to the importunities of love, and yet reserve some duty toward marriage,
and that it may be hurt, without being totally broken? A serving man may
cheat his master, whom nevertheless he does not hate. Beauty,
opportunity, and destiny (for destiny has also a hand in’t),
“Fatum est in partibus illis
Quas sinus abscondit; nam, si tibi sidera cessent,
Nil faciet longi mensura incognita nervi;”
[“There is a fatality about the hidden parts: let nature have
endowed you however liberally, ‘tis of no use, if your good star
fails you in the nick of time.”--Juvenal, ix. 32.]
have attached her to a stranger; though not so wholly, peradventure, but
that she may have some remains of kindness for her husband. They are two
designs, that have several paths leading to them, without being
confounded with one another; a woman may yield to a man she would by no
means have married, not only for the condition of his fortune, but for
those also of his person. Few men have made a wife of a mistress, who
have not repented it. And even in the other world, what an unhappy life
does Jupiter lead with his, whom he had first enjoyed as a mistress!
‘Tis, as the proverb runs, to befoul a basket and then put it upon one’s
head. I have in my time, in a good family, seen love shamefully and
dishonestly cured by marriage: the considerations are widely different.
We love at once, without any tie, two things contrary in themselves.
Socrates was wont to say, that the city of Athens pleased, as ladies do
whom men court for love; every one loved to come thither to take a turn,
and pass away his time; but no one liked it so well as to espouse it,
that is, to inhabit there, and to make it his constant residence. I have
been vexed to see husbands hate their wives only because they themselves
do them wrong; we should not, at all events, methinks, love them the less
for our own faults; they should at least, upon the account of repentance
and compassion, be dearer to us.
They are different ends, he says, and yet in some sort compatible;
marriage has utility, justice, honour, and constancy for its share;
a flat, but more universal pleasure: love founds itself wholly upon
pleasure, and, indeed, has it more full, lively, and sharp; a pleasure
inflamed by difficulty; there must be in it sting and smart: ‘tis no
longer love, if without darts and fire. The bounty of ladies is too
profuse in marriage, and dulls the point of affection and desire: to
evade which inconvenience, do but observe what pains Lycurgus and Plato
take in their laws.
Women are not to blame at all, when they refuse the rules of life that
are introduced into the world, forasmuch as the men make them without
their help. There is naturally contention and brawling betwixt them and
us; and the strictest friendship we have with them is yet mixed with
tumult and tempest. In the opinion of our author, we deal
inconsiderately with them in this: after we have discovered that they
are, without comparison, more able and ardent in the practice of love
than we, and that the old priest testified as much, who had been one
while a man, and then a woman:
“Venus huic erat utraque nota:”
[“Both aspects of love were known to him,”
--Tiresias. Ovid. Metam., iii. 323.]
and moreover, that we have learned from their own mouths the proof that,
in several ages, was made by an Emperor and Empress of Rome,--[Proclus.]
--both famous for ability in that affair! for he in one night deflowered
ten Sarmatian virgins who were his captives: but she had five-and-twenty
bouts in one night, changing her man according to her need and liking;
“Adhuc ardens rigidae tentigine vulvae
Et lassata viris, nondum satiata, recessit:”
[“Ardent still, she retired, fatigued, but not satisfied.”
--Juvenal, vi. 128.]
and that upon the dispute which happened in Cataluna, wherein a wife
complaining of her husband’s too frequent addresses to her, not so much,
as I conceive, that she was incommodated by it (for I believe no miracles
out of religion) as under this pretence, to curtail and curb in this,
which is the fundamental act of marriage, the authority of husbands over
their wives, and to shew that their frowardness and malignity go beyond
the nuptial bed, and spurn under foot even the graces and sweets of
Venus; the husband, a man truly brutish and unnatural, replied, that even
on fasting days he could not subsist with less than ten courses:
whereupon came out that notable sentence of the Queen of Arragon, by
which, after mature deliberation of her council, this good queen, to give
a rule and example to all succeeding ages of the moderation required in
a just marriage, set down six times a day as a legitimate and necessary
stint; surrendering and quitting a great deal of the needs and desires of
her sex, that she might, she said, establish an easy, and consequently, a
permanent and immutable rule. Hereupon the doctors cry out: what must
the female appetite and concupiscence be, when their reason, their
reformation and virtue, are taxed at such a rate, considering the divers
judgments of our appetites? for Solon, master of the law school, taxes
us but at three a month,--that men may not fail in point of conjugal
frequentation: after having, I say, believed and preached all this, we go
and enjoin them continency for their particular share, and upon the last
and extreme penalties.
There is no passion so hard to contend with as this, which we would have
them only resist, not simply as an ordinary vice, but as an execrable
abomination, worse than irreligion and parricide; whilst we, at the same
time, go to’t without offence or reproach. Even those amongst us who
have tried the experiment have sufficiently confessed what difficulty, or
rather impossibility, they have found by material remedies to subdue,
weaken, and cool the body. We, on the contrary, would have them at once
sound, vigorous plump, high-fed, and chaste; that is to say, both hot and
cold; for the marriage, which we tell them is to keep them from burning,
is but small refreshment to them, as we order the matter. If they take
one whose vigorous age is yet boiling, he will be proud to make it known
elsewhere;
“Sit tandem pudor; aut eamus in jus;
Multis mentula millibus redempta,
Non est haec tua, Basse; vendidisti;”
[“Let there be some shame, or we shall go to law: your vigour,
bought by your wife with many thousands, is no longer yours: thou
hast sold it.--“Martial, xii. 90.]
Polemon the philosopher was justly by his wife brought before the judge
for sowing in a barren field the seed that was due to one that was
fruitful: if, on the other hand, they take a decayed fellow, they are in
a worse condition in marriage than either maids or widows. We think them
well provided for, because they have a man to lie with, as the Romans
concluded Clodia Laeta, a vestal nun, violated, because Caligula had
approached her, though it was declared he did no more but approach her:
but, on the contrary, we by that increase their necessity, forasmuch as
the touch and company of any man whatever rouses their desires, that in
solitude would be more quiet. And to the end, ‘tis likely, that they
might render their chastity more meritorious by this circumstance and
consideration, Boleslas and Kinge his wife, kings of Poland, vowed it by
mutual consent, being in bed together, on their very wedding day, and
kept their vow in spite of all matrimonial conveniences.
We train them up from their infancy to the traffic of love; their grace,
dressing, knowledge, language, and whole instruction tend that way: their
governesses imprint nothing in them but the idea of love, if for nothing
else but by continually representing it to them, to give them a distaste
for it. My daughter, the only child I have, is now of an age that
forward young women are allowed to be married at; she is of a slow, thin,
and tender complexion, and has accordingly been brought up by her mother
after a retired and particular manner, so that she but now begins to be
weaned from her childish simplicity. She was reading before me in a
French book where the word ‘fouteau’, the name of a tree very well known,
occurred;--[The beech-tree; the name resembles in sound an obscene
French word.]--the woman, to whose conduct she is committed, stopped her
short a little roughly, and made her skip over that dangerous step. I
let her alone, not to trouble their rules, for I never concern myself in
that sort of government; feminine polity has a mysterious procedure; we
must leave it to them; but if I am not mistaken the commerce of twenty
lacquies could not, in six months’ time, have so imprinted in her memory
the meaning, usage, and all the consequence of the sound of these wicked
syllables, as this good old woman did by reprimand and interdiction.
“Motus doceri gaudet Ionicos
Matura virgo, et frangitur artibus;
Jam nunc et incestos amores
De tenero, meditatur ungui.”
[“The maid ripe for marriage delights to learn Ionic dances, and to
imitate those lascivious movements. Nay, already from her infancy
she meditates criminal amours.”--Horace, Od., iii. 6, 21., the text
has ‘fingitur’.]
Let them but give themselves the rein a little, let them but enter into
liberty of discourse, we are but children to them in this science. Hear
them but describe our pursuits and conversation, they will very well make
you understand that we bring them nothing they have not known before, and
digested without our help.
[This sentence refers to a conversation between some young women in
his immediate neighbourhood, which the Essayist just below informs
us that he overheard, and which was too shocking for him to repeat.
It must have been tolerably bad.--Remark by the editor of a later
edition.]
Is it, perhaps, as Plato says, that they have formerly been debauched
young fellows? I happened one day to be in a place where I could hear
some of their talk without suspicion; I am sorry I cannot repeat it.
By’rlady, said I, we had need go study the phrases of Amadis, and the
tales of Boccaccio and Aretin, to be able to discourse with them: we
employ our time to much purpose indeed. There is neither word, example,
nor step they are not more perfect in than our books; ‘tis a discipline
that springs with their blood,
“Et mentem ipsa Venus dedit,”
[“Venus herself made them what they are,”
--Virg., Georg., iii. 267.]
which these good instructors, nature, youth, and health, are continually
inspiring them with; they need not learn, they breed it:
“Nec tantum niveo gavisa est ulla columbo,
Compar, vel si quid dicitur improbius,
Oscula mordenti semper decerpere rostro,
Quantum praecipue multivola est mulier.”
[“No milk-white dove, or if there be a thing more lascivious,
takes so much delight in kissing as woman, wishful for every man
she sees.”--Catullus, lxvi. 125.]
So that if the natural violence of their desire were not a little
restrained by fear and honour, which were wisely contrived for them, we
should be all shamed. All the motions in the world resolve into and tend
to this conjunction; ‘tis a matter infused throughout: ‘tis a centre to
which all things are directed. We yet see the edicts of the old and wise
Rome made for the service of love, and the precepts of Socrates for the
instruction of courtezans:
“Noncon libelli Stoici inter sericos
Jacere pulvillos amant:”
[“There are writings of the Stoics which we find lying upon
silken cushions.”--Horace, Epod., viii. 15.]
Zeno, amongst his laws, also regulated the motions to be observed in
getting a maidenhead. What was the philosopher Strato’s book Of Carnal
Conjunction?--[ Diogenes Laertius, v. 59.]--And what did Theophrastus
treat of in those he intituled, the one ‘The Lover’, and the other ‘Of
Love?’ Of what Aristippus in his ‘Of Former Delights’? What do the so
long and lively descriptions in Plato of the loves of his time pretend
to? and the book called ‘The Lover’, of Demetrius Phalereus? and
‘Clinias’, or the ‘Ravished Lover’, of Heraclides; and that of
Antisthenes, ‘Of Getting Children’, or, ‘Of Weddings’, and the other,
‘Of the Master or the Lover’? And that of Aristo: ‘Of Amorous Exercises’
What those of Cleanthes: one, ‘Of Love’, the other, ‘Of the Art of
Loving’? The amorous dialogues of Sphaereus? and the fable of Jupiter
and Juno, of Chrysippus, impudent beyond all toleration? And his fifty
so lascivious epistles? I will let alone the writings of the
philosophers of the Epicurean sect, protectress of voluptuousness. Fifty
deities were, in time past, assigned to this office; and there have been
nations where, to assuage the lust of those who came to their devotion,
they kept men and women in their temples for the worshippers to lie with;
and it was an act of ceremony to do this before they went to prayers:
“Nimirum propter continentiam incontinentia necessaria est;
incendium ignibus extinguitur.”
[“Forsooth incontinency is necessary for continency’s sake; a
conflagration is extinguished by fire.”]
In the greatest part of the world, that member of our body was deified;
in the same province, some flayed off the skin to offer and consecrate a
piece; others offered and consecrated their seed. In another, the young
men publicly cut through betwixt the skin and the flesh of that part in
several places, and thrust pieces of wood into the openings as long and
thick as they would receive, and of these pieces of wood afterwards made
a fire as an offering to their gods; and were reputed neither vigorous
nor chaste, if by the force of that cruel pain they seemed to be at all
dismayed. Elsewhere the most sacred magistrate was reverenced and
acknowledged by that member and in several ceremonies the effigy of it
was carried in pomp to the honour of various divinities. The Egyptian
ladies, in their Bacchanalia, each carried one finely-carved of wood
about their necks, as large and heavy as she could so carry it; besides
which, the statue of their god presented one, which in greatness
surpassed all the rest of his body.--[Herodotus, ii. 48, says “nearly
as large as the body itself.”]--The married women, near the place where
I live, make of their kerchiefs the figure of one upon their foreheads,
to glorify themselves in the enjoyment they have of it; and coming to be
widows, they throw it behind, and cover it with their headcloths. The
most modest matrons of Rome thought it an honour to offer flowers and
garlands to the god Priapus; and they made the virgins, at the time of
their espousals, sit upon his shameful parts. And I know not whether I
have not in my time seen some air of like devotion. What was the meaning
of that ridiculous piece of the chaussuye of our forefathers, and that is
still worn by our Swiss? [“Cod-pieces worn”--Cotton]--To what end do we
make a show of our implements in figure under our breeches, and often,
which is worse, above their natural size, by falsehood and imposture?
I have half a mind to believe that this sort of vestment was invented in
the better and more conscientious ages, that the world might not be
deceived, and that every one should give a public account of his
proportions: the simple nations wear them yet, and near about the real
size. In those days, the tailor took measure of it, as the shoemaker
does now of a man’s foot. That good man, who, when I was young, gelded
so many noble and ancient statues in his great city, that they might not
corrupt the sight of the ladies, according to the advice of this other
ancient worthy:
“Flagitii principium est, nudare inter gives corpora,”
[“‘Tis the beginning of wickedness to expose their persons among the
citizens”--Ennius, ap. Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 33.]
should have called to mind, that, as in the mysteries of the Bona Dea,
all masculine appearance was excluded, he did nothing, if he did not geld
horses and asses, in short, all nature:
“Omne adeo genus in terris, hominumque, ferarumque,
Et genus aequoreum, pecudes, pictaeque volucres,
In furias ignemque ruunt.”
[“So that all living things, men and animals, wild or tame,
and fish and gaudy fowl, rush to this flame of love.”
--Virgil, Georg., iii. 244.]
The gods, says Plato, have given us one disobedient and unruly member
that, like a furious animal, attempts, by the violence of its appetite,
to subject all things to it; and so they have given to women one like a
greedy and ravenous animal, which, if it be refused food in season, grows
wild, impatient of delay, and infusing its rage into their bodies, stops
the passages, and hinders respiration, causing a thousand ills, till,
having imbibed the fruit of the common thirst, it has plentifully bedewed
the bottom of their matrix. Now my legislator--[The Pope who, as
Montaigne has told us, took it into his head to geld the statues.]--
should also have considered that, peradventure, it were a chaster and
more fruitful usage to let them know the fact as it is betimes, than
permit them to guess according to the liberty and heat of their own
fancy; instead of the real parts they substitute, through hope and
desire, others that are three times more extravagant; and a certain
friend of mine lost himself by producing his in place and time when the
opportunity was not present to put them to their more serious use. What
mischief do not those pictures of prodigious dimension do that the boys
make upon the staircases and galleries of the royal houses? they give the
ladies a cruel contempt of our natural furniture. And what do we know
but that Plato, after other well-instituted republics, ordered that the
men and women, old and young, should expose themselves naked to the view
of one another, in his gymnastic exercises, upon that very account? The
Indian women who see the men in their natural state, have at least cooled
the sense of seeing. And let the women of the kingdom of Pegu say what
they will, who below the waist have nothing to cover them but a cloth
slit before, and so strait, that what decency and modesty soever they
pretend by it, at every step all is to be seen, that it is an invention
to allure the men to them, and to divert them from boys, to whom that
nation is generally inclined; yet, peradventure they lose more by it than
they get, and one may venture to say, that an entire appetite is more
sharp than one already half-glutted by the eyes. Livia was wont to say,
that to a virtuous woman a naked man was but a statue. The Lacedaemonian
women, more virgins when wives than our daughters are, saw every day the
young men of their city stripped naked in their exercises, themselves
little heeding to cover their thighs in walking, believing themselves,
says Plato, sufficiently covered by their virtue without any other robe.
But those, of whom St. Augustin speaks, have given nudity a wonderful
power of temptation, who have made it a doubt, whether women at the day
of judgment shall rise again in their own sex, and not rather in ours,
for fear of tempting us again in that holy state. In brief, we allure
and flesh them by all sorts of ways: we incessantly heat and stir up
their imagination, and then we find fault. Let us confess the truth;
there is scarce one of us who does not more apprehend the shame that
accrues to him by the vices of his wife than by his own, and that is not
more solicitous (a wonderful charity) of the conscience of his virtuous
wife than of his own; who had not rather commit theft and sacrilege, and
that his wife was a murderess and a heretic, than that she should not be
more chaste than her husband: an unjust estimate of vices. Both we and
they are capable of a thousand corruptions more prejudicial and unnatural
than lust: but we weigh vices, not according to nature, but according to
our interest; by which means they take so many unequal forms.
The austerity of our decrees renders the application of women to this
vice more violent and vicious than its own condition needs, and engages
it in consequences worse than their cause: they will readily offer to go
to the law courts to seek for gain, and to the wars to get reputation,
rather than in the midst of ease and delights, to have to keep so
difficult a guard. Do not they very well see that there is neither
merchant nor soldier who will not leave his business to run after this
sport, or the porter or cobbler, toiled and tired out as they are with
labour and hunger?
“Num tu, qux tenuit dives Achaemenes,
Aut pinguis Phrygiae Mygdonias opes,
Permutare velis crine Licymnim?
Plenas aut Arabum domos,
Dum fragrantia detorquet ad oscula
Cervicem, aut facili sxvitia negat,
Quae poscente magis gaudeat eripi,
Interdum rapere occupet?”
[“Wouldst thou not exchange all that the wealthy Arhaemenes had,
or the Mygdonian riches of fertile Phrygia, for one ringlet of
Licymnia’s hair? or the treasures of the Arabians, when she turns
her head to you for fragrant kisses, or with easily assuaged anger
denies them, which she would rather by far you took by force, and
sometimes herself snatches one!”--Horace, Od., ii. 12, 21.]
I do not know whether the exploits of Alexander and Caesar really surpass
the resolution of a beautiful young woman, bred up after our fashion, in
the light and commerce of the world, assailed by so many contrary
examples, and yet keeping herself entire in the midst of a thousand
continual and powerful solicitations. There is no doing more difficult
than that not doing, nor more active:
I hold it more easy to carry a suit of armour all the days of one’s life
than a maidenhead; and the vow of virginity of all others is the most
noble, as being the hardest to keep:
“Diaboli virtus in lumbis est,”
says St. Jerome. We have, doubtless, resigned to the ladies the most
difficult and most vigorous of all human endeavours, and let us resign to
them the glory too. This ought to encourage them to be obstinate in it;
‘tis a brave thing for them to defy us, and to spurn under foot that vain
pre-eminence of valour and virtue that we pretend to have over them; they
will find if they do but observe it, that they will not only be much more
esteemed for it, but also much more beloved. A gallant man does not give
over his pursuit for being refused, provided it be a refusal of chastity,
and not of choice; we may swear, threaten, and complain to much purpose;
we therein do but lie, for we love them all the better: there is no
allurement like modesty, if it be not rude and crabbed. ‘Tis stupidity
and meanness to be obstinate against hatred and disdain; but against a
virtuous and constant resolution, mixed with goodwill, ‘tis the exercise
of a noble and generous soul. They may acknowledge our service to a
certain degree, and give us civilly to understand that they disdain us
not; for the law that enjoins them to abominate us because we adore them,
and to hate us because we love them, is certainly very cruel, if but for
the difficulty of it. Why should they not give ear to our offers and
requests, so long as they are kept within the bounds of modesty?
wherefore should we fancy them to have other thoughts within, and to be
worse than they seem? A queen of our time said with spirit, “that to
refuse these courtesies is a testimony of weakness in women and a
self-accusation of facility, and that a lady could not boast of her
chastity who was never tempted.”
The limits of honour are not cut so short; they may give themselves a
little rein, and relax a little without being faulty: there lies on the
frontier some space free, indifferent, and neuter. He that has beaten
and pursued her into her fort is a strange fellow if he be not satisfied
with his fortune: the price of the conquest is considered by the
difficulty. Would you know what impression your service and merit have
made in her heart? Judge of it by her behaviour. Such an one may grant
more, who does not grant so much. The obligation of a benefit wholly
relates to the good will of those who confer it: the other coincident
circumstances are dumb, dead, and casual; it costs her dearer to grant
you that little, than it would do her companion to grant all. If in
anything rarity give estimation, it ought especially in this: do not
consider how little it is that is given, but how few have it to give;
the value of money alters according to the coinage and stamp of the
place. Whatever the spite and indiscretion of some may make them say in
the excess of their discontent, virtue and truth will in time recover all
the advantage. I have known some whose reputation has for a great while
suffered under slander, who have afterwards been restored to the world’s
universal approbation by their mere constancy without care or artifice;
every one repents, and gives himself the lie for what he has believed and
said; and from girls a little suspected they have been afterward advanced
to the first rank amongst the ladies of honour. Somebody told Plato that
all the world spoke ill of him. “Let them talk,” said he; “I will live
so as to make them change their note.” Besides the fear of God, and the
value of so rare a glory, which ought to make them look to themselves,
the corruption of the age we live in compels them to it; and if I were
they, there is nothing I would not rather do than intrust my reputation
in so dangerous hands. In my time the pleasure of telling (a pleasure
little inferior to that of doing) was not permitted but to those who had
some faithful and only friend; but now the ordinary discourse and common
table-talk is nothing but boasts of favours received and the secret
liberality of ladies. In earnest, ‘tis too abject, too much meanness of
spirit, in men to suffer such ungrateful, indiscreet, and giddy-headed
people so to persecute, forage, and rifle those tender and charming
favours.
This our immoderate and illegitimate exasperation against this vice
springs from the most vain and turbulent disease that afflicts human
minds, which is jealousy:
“Quis vetat apposito lumen de lumine sumi?
Dent licet assidue, nil tamen inde perit;”
[“Who says that one light should not be lighted from another light?
Let them give ever so much, as much ever remains to lose.”--Ovid, De
Arte Amandi, iii. 93. The measure of the last line is not good;
but the words are taken from the epigram in the Catalecta entitled
Priapus.]
she, and envy, her sister, seem to me to be the most foolish of the whole
troop. As to the last, I can say little about it; ‘tis a passion that,
though said to be so mighty and powerful, had never to do with me. As to
the other, I know it by sight, and that’s all. Beasts feel it; the
shepherd Cratis, having fallen in love with a she-goat, the he-goat, out
of jealousy, came, as he lay asleep, to butt the head of the female, and
crushed it. We have raised this fever to a greater excess by the
examples of some barbarous nations; the best disciplined have been
touched with it, and ‘tis reason, but not transported:
“Ense maritali nemo confossus adulter
Purpureo Stygias sanguine tinxit aquas.”
[“Never did adulterer slain by a husband
stain with purple blood the Stygian waters.”]
Lucullus, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Cato, and other brave men were
cuckolds, and knew it, without making any bustle about it; there was in
those days but one coxcomb, Lepidus, that died for grief that his wife
had used him so.
“Ah! tum te miserum malique fati,
Quem attractis pedibus, patente porta,
Percurrent raphanique mugilesque:”
[“Wretched man! when, taken in the fact, thou wilt be
dragged out of doors by the heels, and suffer the punishment
of thy adultery.”--Catullus, xv. 17.]
and the god of our poet, when he surprised one of his companions with his
wife, satisfied himself by putting them to shame only,
“Atque aliquis de dis non tristibus optat
Sic fieri turpis:”
[“And one of the merry gods wishes that he should himself
like to be so disgraced.”--Ovid, Metam., iv. 187.]
and nevertheless took anger at the lukewarm embraces she gave him;
complaining that upon that account she was grown jealous of his
affection:
“Quid causas petis ex alto? fiducia cessit
Quo tibi, diva, mei?”
[“Dost thou seek causes from above? Why, goddess, has your
confidence in me ceased?”--Virgil, AEneid, viii. 395.]
nay, she entreats arms for a bastard of hers,
“Arena rogo genitrix nato.”
[“I, a mother, ask armour for a son.”--Idem, ibid., 383.]
which are freely granted; and Vulcan speaks honourably of AEneas,
“Arma acri facienda viro,”
[“Arms are to be made for a valiant hero.”--AEneid, viii. 441.]
with, in truth, a more than human humanity. And I am willing to leave
this excess of kindness to the gods:
“Nec divis homines componier aequum est.”
[“Nor is it fit to compare men with gods.”
--Catullus, lxviii. 141.]
As to the confusion of children, besides that the gravest legislators
ordain and affect it in their republics, it touches not the women, where
this passion is, I know not how, much better seated:
“Saepe etiam Juno, maxima coelicolam,
Conjugis in culpa flagravit quotidiana.”
[“Often was Juno, greatest of the heaven-dwellers, enraged by her
husband’s daily infidelities.”--Idem, ibid.]
When jealousy seizes these poor souls, weak and incapable of resistance,
‘tis pity to see how miserably it torments and tyrannises over them; it
insinuates itself into them under the title of friendship, but after it
has once possessed them, the same causes that served for a foundation of
good-will serve them for a foundation of mortal hatred. ‘Tis, of all the
diseases of the mind, that which the most things serve for aliment and
the fewest for remedy: the virtue, health, merit, reputation of the
husband are incendiaries of their fury and ill-will:
“Nullae sunt inimicitiae, nisi amoris, acerbae.”
[“No enmities are bitter, save that of love.”
(Or:) “No hate is implacable except the hatred of love”
--Propertius, ii. 8, 3.]
This fever defaces and corrupts all they have of beautiful and good
besides; and there is no action of a jealous woman, let her be how chaste
and how good a housewife soever, that does not relish of anger and
wrangling; ‘tis a furious agitation, that rebounds them to an extremity
quite contrary to its cause. This held good with one Octavius at Rome.
Having lain with Pontia Posthumia, he augmented love with fruition, and
solicited with all importunity to marry her: unable to persuade her, this
excessive affection precipitated him to the effects of the most cruel and
mortal hatred: he killed her. In like manner, the ordinary symptoms of
this other amorous disease are intestine hatreds, private conspiracies,
and cabals:
“Notumque furens quid faemina possit,”
[“And it is known what an angry woman is capable of doing.”
--AEneid, V. 21.]
and a rage which so much the more frets itself, as it is compelled to
excuse itself by a pretence of good-will.
Now, the duty of chastity is of a vast extent; is it the will that we
would have them restrain? This is a very supple and active thing; a
thing very nimble, to be stayed. How? if dreams sometimes engage them so
far that they cannot deny them: it is not in them, nor, peradventure, in
chastity itself, seeing that is a female, to defend itself from lust and
desire. If we are only to trust to their will, what a case are we in,
then? Do but imagine what crowding there would be amongst men in
pursuance of the privilege to run full speed, without tongue or eyes,
into every woman’s arms who would accept them. The Scythian women put
out the eyes of all their slaves and prisoners of war, that they might
have their pleasure of them, and they never the wiser. O, the furious
advantage of opportunity! Should any one ask me, what was the first
thing to be considered in love matters, I should answer that it was how
to take a fitting time; and so the second; and so the third--‘tis a point
that can do everything. I have sometimes wanted fortune, but I have also
sometimes been wanting to myself in matters of attempt. God help him,
who yet makes light of this! There is greater temerity required in this
age of ours, which our young men excuse under the name of heat; but
should women examine it more strictly, they would find that it rather
proceeds from contempt. I was always superstitiously afraid of giving
offence, and have ever had a great respect for her I loved: besides, he
who in this traffic takes away the reverence, defaces at the same time
the lustre. I would in this affair have a man a little play the child,
the timorous, and the servant. If not this, I have in other bashfulness
whereof altogether in things some air of the foolish Plutarch makes
mention; and the course of my life has been divers ways hurt and
blemished with it; a quality very ill suiting my universal form: and,
indeed, what are we but sedition and discrepancy? I am as much out of
countenance to be denied as I am to deny; and it so much troubles me to
be troublesome to others that on occasion when duty compels me to try the
good-will of any one in a thing that is doubtful and that will be
chargeable to him, I do it very faintly, and very much against my will:
but if it be for my own particular (whatever Homer truly says, that
modesty is a foolish virtue in an indigent person), I commonly commit it
to a third person to blush for me, and deny those who employ me with the
same difficulty: so that it has sometimes befallen me to have had a mind
to deny, when I had not the power to do it.
‘Tis folly, then, to attempt to bridle in women a desire that is so
powerful in them, and so natural to them. And when I hear them brag of
having so maidenly and so temperate a will, I laugh at them: they retire
too far back. If it be an old toothless trot, or a young dry consumptive
thing, though it be not altogether to be believed, at least they say it
with more similitude of truth. But they who still move and breathe, talk
at that ridiculous rate to their own prejudice, by reason that
inconsiderate excuses are a kind of self-accusation; like a gentleman, a
neighbour of mine, suspected to be insufficient:
“Languidior tenera cui pendens sicula beta,
Numquam se mediam sustulit ad tunicam,”
[Catullus, lxvii. 2, i.--The sense is in the context.]
who three or four days after he was married, to justify himself, went
about boldly swearing that he had ridden twenty stages the night before:
an oath that was afterwards made use of to convict him of his ignorance
in that affair, and to divorce him from his wife. Besides, it signifies
nothing, for there is neither continency nor virtue where there are no
opposing desires. It is true, they may say, but we will not yield;
saints themselves speak after that manner. I mean those who boast in
good gravity of their coldness and insensibility, and who expect to be
believed with a serious countenance; for when ‘tis spoken with an
affected look, when their eyes give the lie to their tongue, and when
they talk in the cant of their profession, which always goes against the
hair, ‘tis good sport. I am a great servant of liberty and plainness;
but there is no remedy; if it be not wholly simple or childish, ‘tis
silly, and unbecoming ladies in this commerce, and presently runs into
impudence. Their disguises and figures only serve to cosen fools; lying
is there in its seat of honour; ‘tis a by-way, that by a back-door leads
us to truth. If we cannot curb their imagination, what would we have
from them. Effects? There are enough of them that evade all foreign
communication, by which chastity may be corrupted:
“Illud saepe facit, quod sine teste facit;”
[“He often does that which he does without a witness.”
--Martial, vii. 62, 6.]
and those which we fear the least are, peradventure, most to be feared;
their sins that make the least noise are the worst:
“Offendor maecha simpliciore minus.”
[“I am less offended with a more professed strumpet.”
--Idem, vi. 7,6.]
There are ways by which they may lose their virginity without
prostitution, and, which is more, without their knowledge:
“Obsterix, virginis cujusdam integritatem manu velut explorans, sive
malevolentia, sive inscitia, sive casu, dum inspicit, perdidit.”
[“By malevolence, or unskilfulness, or accident, the midwife,
seeking with the hand to test some maiden’s virginity, has sometimes
destroyed it.”--St. Augustine, De Civit. Dei, i. 18.]
Such a one, by seeking her maidenhead, has lost it; another by playing
with it has destroyed it. We cannot precisely circumscribe the actions,
we interdict them; they must guess at our meaning under general and
doubtful terms; the very idea we invent for their chastity is ridiculous:
for, amongst the greatest patterns that I have is Fatua, the wife of
Faunus: who never, after her marriage, suffered herself to be seen by any
man whatever; and the wife of Hiero, who never perceived her husband’s
stinking breath, imagining that it was common to all men. They must
become insensible and invisible to satisfy us.
Now let us confess that the knot of this judgment of duty principally
lies in the will; there have been husbands who have suffered cuckoldom,
not only without reproach or taking offence at their wives, but with
singular obligation to them and great commendation of their virtue.
Such a woman has been, who prized her honour above her life, and yet has
prostituted it to the furious lust of a mortal enemy, to save her
husband’s life, and who, in so doing, did that for him she would not have
done for herself! This is not the place wherein we are to multiply these
examples; they are too high and rich to be set off with so poor a foil as
I can give them here; let us reserve them for a nobler place; but for
examples of ordinary lustre, do we not every day see women amongst us who
surrender themselves for their husbands sole benefit, and by their
express order and mediation? and, of old, Phaulius the Argian, who
offered his to King Philip out of ambition; as Galba did it out of
civility, who, having entertained Maecenas at supper, and observing that
his wife and he began to cast glances at one another and to make eyes and
signs, let himself sink down upon his cushion, like one in a profound
sleep, to give opportunity to their desires: which he handsomely
confessed, for thereupon a servant having made bold to lay hands on the
plate upon the table, he frankly cried, “What, you rogue? do you not see
that I only sleep for Maecenas?” Such there may be, whose manners may be
lewd enough, whose will may be more reformed than another, who outwardly
carries herself after a more regular manner. As we see some who complain
of having vowed chastity before they knew what they did; and I have also
known others really, complain of having been given up to debauchery
before they were of the years of discretion. The vice of the parents or
the impulse of nature, which is a rough counsellor, may be the cause.
In the East Indies, though chastity is of singular reputation, yet custom
permitted a married woman to prostitute herself to any one who presented
her with an elephant, and that with glory, to have been valued at so high
a rate. Phaedo the philosopher, a man of birth, after the taking of his
country Elis, made it his trade to prostitute the beauty of his youth, so
long as it lasted, to any one that would, for money thereby to gain his
living: and Solon was the first in Greece, ‘tis said, who by his laws
gave liberty to women, at the expense of their chastity, to provide for
the necessities of life; a custom that Herodotus says had been received
in many governments before his time. And besides, what fruit is there of
this painful solicitude? For what justice soever there is in this
passion, we are yet to consider whether it turns to account or no: does
any one think to curb them, with all his industry?
“Pone seram; cohibe: sed quis custodiet ipsos
Custodes? cauta est, et ab illis incipit uxor.”
[“Put on a lock; shut them up under a guard; but who shall guard
the guard? she knows what she is about, and begins with them.”
--Juvenal, vi. 346.]
What commodity will not serve their turn, in so knowing an age?
Curiosity is vicious throughout; but ‘tis pernicious here. ‘Tis folly to
examine into a disease for which there is no physic that does not inflame
and make it worse; of which the shame grows still greater and more public
by jealousy, and of which the revenge more wounds our children than it
heals us. You wither and die in the search of so obscure a proof. How
miserably have they of my time arrived at that knowledge who have been so
unhappy as to have found it out? If the informer does not at the same
time apply a remedy and bring relief, ‘tis an injurious information, and
that better deserves a stab than the lie. We no less laugh at him who
takes pains to prevent it, than at him who is a cuckold and knows it not.
The character of cuckold is indelible: who once has it carries it to his
grave; the punishment proclaims it more than the fault. It is to much
purpose to drag out of obscurity and doubt our private misfortunes,
thence to expose them on tragic scaffolds; and misfortunes that only hurt
us by being known; for we say a good wife or a happy marriage, not that
they are really so, but because no one says to the contrary. Men should
be so discreet as to evade this tormenting and unprofitable knowledge:
and the Romans had a custom, when returning from any expedition, to send
home before to acquaint their wives with their coming, that they might
not surprise them; and to this purpose it is that a certain nation has
introduced a custom, that the priest shall on the wedding-day open the
way to the bride, to free the husband from the doubt and curiosity of
examining in the first assault, whether she comes a virgin to his bed, or
has been at the trade before.
But the world will be talking. I know, a hundred honest men cuckolds,
honestly and not unbeseemingly; a worthy man is pitied, not disesteemed
for it. Order it so that your virtue may conquer your misfortune; that
good men may curse the occasion, and that he who wrongs you may tremble
but to think on’t. And, moreover, who escapes being talked of at the
same rate, from the least even to the greatest?
“Tot qui legionibus imperitivit
Et melior quam to multis fuit, improbe, rebus.”
[“Many who have commanded legions, many a man much better far than
you, you rascal.”--Lucretius, iii. 1039, 1041.]
Seest thou how many honest men are reproached with this in thy presence;
believe that thou art no more spared elsewhere. But, the very ladies
will be laughing too; and what are they so apt to laugh at in this
virtuous age of ours as at a peaceable and well-composed marriage? Each
amongst you has made somebody cuckold; and nature runs much in parallel,
in compensation, and turn for turn. The frequency of this accident ought
long since to have made it more easy; ‘tis now passed into custom.
Miserable passion! which has this also, that it is incommunicable,
“Fors etiam nostris invidit questibus aures;”
[“Fortune also refuses ear to our complaints.”
--Catullus, lxvii.]
for to what friend dare you intrust your griefs, who, if he does not
laugh at them, will not make use of the occasion to get a share of the
quarry? The sharps, as well as the sweets of marriage, are kept secret
by the wise; and amongst its other troublesome conditions this to a
prating fellow, as I am, is one of the chief, that custom has rendered it
indecent and prejudicial to communicate to any one all that a man knows
and all that a man feels. To give women the same counsel against
jealousy would be so much time lost; their very being is so made up of
suspicion, vanity, and curiosity, that to cure them by any legitimate way
is not to be hoped. They often recover of this infirmity by a form of
health much more to be feared than the disease itself; for as there are
enchantments that cannot take away the evil but by throwing it upon
another, they also willingly transfer this ever to their husbands, when
they shake it off themselves. And yet I know not, to speak truth,
whether a man can suffer worse from them than their jealousy; ‘tis the
most dangerous of all their conditions, as the head is of all their
members. Pittacus used to say,--[Plutarch, On Contentment, c. II.]--
that every one had his trouble, and that his was the jealous head of his
wife; but for which he should think himself perfectly happy. A mighty
inconvenience, sure, which could poison the whole life of so just, so
wise, and so valiant a man; what must we other little fellows do? The
senate of Marseilles had reason to grant him his request who begged leave
to kill himself that he might be delivered from the clamour of his wife;
for ‘tis a mischief that is never removed but by removing the whole
piece; and that has no remedy but flight or patience, though both of them
very hard. He was, methinks, an understanding fellow who said, ‘twas a
happy marriage betwixt a blind wife and a deaf husband.
Let us also consider whether the great and violent severity of obligation
we enjoin them does not produce two effects contrary to our design
namely, whether it does not render the pursuants more eager to attack,
and the women more easy to yield. For as to the first, by raising the
value of the place, we raise the value and the desire of the conquest.
Might it not be Venus herself, who so cunningly enhanced the price of her
merchandise, by making the laws her bawds; knowing how insipid a delight
it would be that was not heightened by fancy and hardness to achieve?
In short, ‘tis all swine’s flesh, varied by sauces, as Flaminius’ host
said. Cupid is a roguish god, who makes it his sport to contend with
devotion and justice: ‘tis his glory that his power mates all powers, and
that all other rules give place to his:
“Materiam culpae prosequiturque suae.”
[“And seeks out a matter (motive) for his crimes.”
--Ovid, Trist., iv. I. 34.]
As to the second point; should we not be less cuckolds, if we less feared
to be so? according to the humour of women whom interdiction incites, and
who are more eager, being forbidden:
“Ubi velis, nolunt; ubi nolis, volunt ultro;
Concessa pudet ire via.”
[“Where thou wilt, they won’t; where thou wilt not, they
spontaneously agree; they are ashamed to go in the permitted path.”
--Terence, Eunuchus, act iv., sc. 8, v 43]
What better interpretation can we make of Messalina’s behaviour? She,
at first, made her husband a cuckold in private, as is the common use;
but, bringing her business about with too much ease, by reason of her
husband’s stupidity, she soon scorned that way, and presently fell to
making open love, to own her lovers, and to favour and entertain them in
the sight of all: she would make him know and see how she used him. This
animal, not to be roused with all this, and rendering her pleasures dull
and flat by his too stupid facility, by which he seemed to authorise and
make them lawful; what does she? Being the wife of a living and
healthful emperor, and at Rome, the theatre of the world, in the face of
the sun, and with solemn ceremony, and to Silius, who had long before
enjoyed her, she publicly marries herself one day that her husband was
gone out of the city. Does it not seem as if she was going to become
chaste by her husband’s negligence? or that she sought another husband
who might sharpen her appetite by his jealousy, and who by watching
should incite her? But the first difficulty she met with was also the
last: this beast suddenly roused these sleepy, sluggish sort of men are
often the most dangerous: I have found by experience that this extreme
toleration, when it comes to dissolve, produces the most severe revenge;
for taking fire on a sudden, anger and fury being combined in one,
discharge their utmost force at the first onset,
“Irarumque omnes effundit habenas:”
[“He let loose his whole fury.”--AEneid, xii. 499.]
he put her to death, and with her a great number of those with whom she
had intelligence, and even one of them who could not help it, and whom
she had caused to be forced to her bed with scourges.
What Virgil says of Venus and Vulcan, Lucretius had better expressed of a
stolen enjoyment betwixt her and Mars:
“Belli fera moenera Mavors
Armipotens regit, ingremium qui saepe tuum se
Rejictt, aeterno devinctus vulnere amoris
............................
Pascit amore avidos inhians in te, Dea, visus,
Eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore
Hunc tu, Diva, tuo recubantem corpore sancto
Circumfusa super, suaveis ex ore loquelas
Funde.”
[“Mars, the god of wars, who controls the cruel tasks of war, often
reclines on thy bosom, and greedily drinks love at both his eyes,
vanquished by the eternal wound of love: and his breath, as he
reclines, hangs on thy lips; bending thy head over him as he lies
upon thy sacred person, pour forth sweet and persuasive words.”
--Lucretius, i. 23.]
When I consider this rejicit, fiascit, inhians, ynolli, fovet, medullas,
labefacta, pendet, percurrit, and that noble circumfusa, mother of the
pretty infuses; I disdain those little quibbles and verbal allusions that
have since sprung up. Those worthy people stood in need of no subtlety
to disguise their meaning; their language is downright, and full of
natural and continued vigour; they are all epigram; not only the tail,
but the head, body, and feet. There is nothing forced, nothing
languishing, but everything keeps the same pace:
“Contextus totes virilis est; non sunt circa flosculos occupati.”
[“The whole contexture is manly; they don’t occupy themselves with
little flowers of rhetoric.”--Seneca, Ep., 33.]
‘Tis not a soft eloquence, and without offence only; ‘tis nervous and
solid, that does not so much please, as it fills and ravishes the
greatest minds. When I see these brave forms of expression, so lively,
so profound, I do not say that ‘tis well said, but well thought. ‘Tis
the sprightliness of the imagination that swells and elevates the words:
“Pectus est quod disertum Tacit.”
[“The heart makes the man eloquent.”--Quintilian, x. 7.]
Our people call language, judgment, and fine words, full conceptions.
This painting is not so much carried on by dexterity of hand as by having
the object more vividly imprinted in the soul. Gallus speaks simply
because he conceives simply: Horace does not content himself with a
superficial expression; that would betray him; he sees farther and more
clearly into things; his mind breaks into and rummages all the magazine
of words and figures wherewith to express himself, and he must have them
more than ordinary, because his conception is so. Plutarch says’ that he
sees the Latin tongue by the things: ‘tis here the same: the sense
illuminates and produces the words, no more words of air, but of flesh
and bone; they signify more than they say. Moreover, those who are not
well skilled in a language present some image of this; for in Italy I
said whatever I had a mind to in common discourse, but in more serious
talk, I durst not have trusted myself with an idiom that I could not wind
and turn out of its ordinary pace; I would have a power of introducing
something of my own.
The handling and utterance of fine wits is that which sets off language;
not so much by innovating it, as by putting it to more vigorous and
various services, and by straining, bending, and adapting it to them.
They do not create words, but they enrich their own, and give them weight
and signification by the uses they put them to, and teach them unwonted
motions, but withal ingeniously and discreetly. And how little this
talent is given to all is manifest by the many French scribblers of this
age: they are bold and proud enough not to follow the common road, but
want of invention and discretion ruins them; there is nothing seen in
their writings but a wretched affectation of a strange new style, with
cold and absurd disguises, which, instead of elevating, depress the
matter: provided they can but trick themselves out with new words, they
care not what they signify; and to bring in a new word by the head and
shoulders, they leave the old one, very often more sinewy and significant
than the other.
There is stuff enough in our language, but there is a defect in cutting
out: for there is nothing that might not be made out of our terms of
hunting and war, which is a fruitful soil to borrow from; and forms of
speaking, like herbs, improve and grow stronger by being transplanted.
I find it sufficiently abundant, but not sufficiently pliable and
vigorous; it commonly quails under a powerful conception; if you would
maintain the dignity of your style, you will often perceive it to flag
and languish under you, and there Latin steps in to its relief, as Greek
does to others. Of some of these words I have just picked out we do not
so easily discern the energy, by reason that the frequent use of them has
in some sort abased their beauty, and rendered it common; as in our
ordinary language there are many excellent phrases and metaphors to be
met with, of which the beauty is withered by age, and the colour is
sullied by too common handling; but that nothing lessens the relish to an
understanding man, nor does it derogate from the glory of those ancient
authors who, ‘tis likely, first brought those words into that lustre.
The sciences treat of things too refinedly, after an artificial, very
different from the common and natural, way. My page makes love, and
understands it; but read to him Leo Hebraeus--[Leo the Jew, Ficinus,
Cardinal Bembo, and Mario Equicola all wrote Treatises on Love.]--
and Ficinus, where they speak of love, its thoughts and actions, he
understands it not. I do not find in Aristotle most of my ordinary
motions; they are there covered and disguised in another robe for the use
of the schools. Good speed them! were I of the trade, I would as much
naturalise art as they artificialise nature. Let us let Bembo and
Equicola alone.
When I write, I can very well spare both the company and the remembrance
of books, lest they should interrupt my progress; and also, in truth, the
best authors too much humble and discourage me: I am very much of the
painter’s mind, who, having represented cocks most wretchedly ill,
charged all his boys not to suffer any natural cock to come into his
shop; and had rather need to give myself a little lustre, of the
invention of Antigenides the musician, who, when he was asked to sing or
play, took care beforehand that the auditory should, either before or
after, be satiated with some other ill musicians. But I can hardly be
without Plutarch; he is so universal and so full, that upon all
occasions, and what extravagant subject soever you take in hand, he will
still be at your elbow, and hold out to you a liberal and not to be
exhausted hand of riches and embellishments. It vexes me that he is so
exposed to be the spoil of those who are conversant with him: I can
scarce cast an eye upon him but I purloin either a leg or a wing.
And also for this design of mine ‘tis convenient for me for me to write
at home, in a wild country, where I have nobody to assist or relieve me;
where I hardly see a man who understands the Latin of his Paternoster,
and of French a little less. I might have made it better elsewhere, but
then the work would have been less my own; and its principal end and
perfection is to be exactly mine. I readily correct an accidental error,
of which I am full, as I run carelessly on; but for my ordinary and
constant imperfections, it were a kind of treason to put them out. When
another tells me, or that I say to myself, “Thou art too thick of
figures: this is a word of rough Gascon: that is a dangerous phrase (I do
not reject any of those that are used in the common streets of France;
they who would fight custom with grammar are triflers): this is an
ignorant discourse: this is a paradoxical discourse: that is going too
far: thou makest thyself too merry at times: men will think thou sayest a
thing in good earnest which thou only speakest in jest.”--“Yes, I know,
but I correct the faults of inadvertence, not those of custom. Do I not
talk at the same rate throughout? Do I not represent myself to the life?
‘Tis enough that I have done what I designed; all the world knows me in
my book, and my book in me.”
Now I have an apish, imitative quality: when I used to write verses (and
I never made any but Latin), they evidently discovered the poet I had
last read, and some of my first essays have a little exotic taste: I
speak something another kind of language at Paris than I do at Montaigne.
Whoever I steadfastly look upon easily leaves some impression of his upon
me; whatever I consider I usurp, whether a foolish countenance, a
disagreeable look, or a ridiculous way of speaking; and vices most of
all, because they seize and stick to me, and will not leave hold without
shaking. I swear more by imitation than by complexion: a murderous
imitation, like that of the apes so terrible both in stature and
strength, that Alexander met with in a certain country of the Indies, and
which he would have had much ado any other way to have subdued; but they
afforded him the means by that inclination of theirs to imitate whatever
they saw done; for by that the hunters were taught to put on shoes in
their sight, and to tie them fast with many knots, and to muffle up their
heads in caps all composed of running nooses, and to seem to anoint their
eyes with glue; so did those poor beasts employ their imitation to their
own ruin they glued up their own eyes, haltered and bound themselves.
The other faculty of playing the mimic, and ingeniously acting the words
and gestures of another, purposely to make people merry and to raise
their admiration, is no more in me than in a stock. When I swear my own
oath, ‘tis only, by God! of all oaths the most direct. They say that
Socrates swore by the dog; Zeno had for his oath the same interjection at
this time in use amongst the Italians, Cappari! Pythagoras swore By
water and air. I am so apt, without thinking of it, to receive these
superficial impressions, that if I have Majesty or Highness in my mouth
three days together, they come out instead of Excellency and Lordship
eight days after; and what I say to-day in sport and fooling I shall say
the same to-morrow seriously. Wherefore, in writing, I more unwillingly
undertake beaten arguments, lest I should handle them at another’s
expense. Every subject is equally fertile to me: a fly will serve the
purpose, and ‘tis well if this I have in hand has not been undertaken at
the recommendation of as flighty a will. I may begin, with that which
pleases me best, for the subjects are all linked to one another.
But my soul displeases me, in that it ordinarily produces its deepest and
most airy conceits and which please me best, when I least expect or study
for them, and which suddenly vanish, having at the instant, nothing to
apply them to; on horseback, at table, and in bed: but most on horseback,
where I am most given to think. My speaking is a little nicely jealous
of silence and attention: if I am talking my best, whoever interrupts me,
stops me. In travelling, the necessity of the way will often put a stop
to discourse; besides which I, for the most part, travel without company
fit for regular discourses, by which means I have all the leisure I would
to entertain myself. It falls out as it does in my dreams; whilst
dreaming I recommend them to my memory (for I am apt to dream that I
dream), but, the next morning, I may represent to myself of what
complexion they were, whether gay, or sad, or strange, but what they
were, as to the rest, the more I endeavour to retrieve them, the deeper I
plunge them in oblivion. So of thoughts that come accidentally into my
head, I have no more but a vain image remaining in my memory; only enough
to make me torment myself in their quest to no purpose.
Well, then, laying books aside, and more simply and materially speaking,
I find, after all, that Love is nothing else but the thirst of enjoying
the object desired, or Venus any other thing than the pleasure of
discharging one’s vessels, just as the pleasure nature gives in
discharging other parts, that either by immoderation or indiscretion
become vicious. According to Socrates, love is the appetite of
generation by the mediation of beauty. And when I consider the
ridiculous titillation of this pleasure, the absurd, crack-brained, wild
motions with which it inspires Zeno and Cratippus, the indiscreet rage,
the countenance inflamed with fury and cruelty in the sweetest effects of
love, and then that austere air, so grave, severe, ecstatic, in so wanton
an action; that our delights and our excrements are promiscuously
shuffled together; and that the supreme pleasure brings along with it, as
in pain, fainting and complaining; I believe it to be true, as Plato
says, that the gods made man for their sport:
“Quaenam ista jocandi
Saevitia!”
[“With a sportive cruelty” (Or:) “What an unkindness there is in
jesting!”--Claudian in Eutrop. i. 24.]
and that it was in mockery that nature has ordered the most agitative of
actions and the most common, to make us equal, and to put fools and wise
men, beasts and us, on a level. Even the most contemplative and prudent
man, when I imagine him in this posture, I hold him an impudent fellow to
pretend to be prudent and contemplative; they are the peacocks’ feet that
abate his pride:
“Ridentem dicere verum
Quid vetat?”
[“What prevents us from speaking truth with a smile?”
--Horace, Sat., i. I, 24.]
They who banish serious imaginations from their sports, do, says one,
like him who dares not adore the statue of a saint, if not covered with a
veil. We eat and drink, indeed, as beasts do; but these are not actions
that obstruct the functions of the soul, in these we maintain our
advantage over them; this other action subjects all other thought,
and by its imperious authority makes an ass of all Plato’s divinity and
philosophy; and yet there is no complaint of it. In everything else a
man may keep some decorum, all other operations submit to the rules of
decency; this cannot so much as in imagination appear other than vicious
or ridiculous: find out, if you can, therein any serious and discreet
procedure. Alexander said, that he chiefly knew himself to be mortal by
this act and sleeping; sleep suffocates and suppresses the faculties of
the soul; the familiarity with women likewise dissipates and exhausts
them: doubtless ‘tis a mark, not only of our original corruption, but
also of our vanity and deformity.
On the one side, nature pushes us on to it, having fixed the most noble,
useful, and pleasant of all her functions to this desire: and, on the
other side, leaves us to accuse and avoid it, as insolent and indecent,
to blush at it, and to recommend abstinence. Are we not brutes to call
that work brutish which begets us? People of so many differing religions
have concurred in several proprieties, as sacrifices, lamps, burning
incense, fasts, and offerings; and amongst others, in the condemning this
act: all opinions tend that way, besides the widespread custom of
circumcision, which may be regarded as a punishment. We have,
peradventure, reason to blame ourselves for being guilty of so foolish
a production as man, and to call the act, and the parts that are employed
in the act, shameful (mine, truly, are now shameful and pitiful). The
Essenians, of whom Pliny speaks, kept up their country for several ages
without either nurse or baby-clouts, by the arrival of strangers who,
following this pretty humour, came continually to them: a whole nation
being resolute, rather to hazard a total extermination, than to engage
themselves in female embraces, and rather to lose the succession of men,
than to beget one. ‘Tis said, that Zeno never had to do with a woman but
once in his life, and then out of civility, that he might not seem too
obstinately to disdain the sex.
[Diogenes Laertius, vii. 13.--What is there said, however, is that
Zeno seldom had commerce with boys, lest he should be deemed a very
misogynist.]
Every one avoids seeing a man born, every one runs to see him die; to
destroy him a spacious field is sought out in the face of the sun, but,
to make him, we creep into as dark and private a corner as we can: ‘tis a
man’s duty to withdraw himself bashfully from the light to create; but
‘tis glory and the fountain of many virtues to know how to destroy what
we have made: the one is injury, the other favour: for Aristotle says
that to do any one a kindness, in a certain phrase of his country, is to
kill him. The Athenians, to couple the disgrace of these two actions,
having to purge the Isle of Delos, and to justify themselves to Apollo,
interdicted at once all births and burials in the precincts thereof:
“Nostri nosmet paenitet.”
[“We are ashamed of ourselves.”--Terence, Phoymio, i. 3, 20.]
There are some nations that will not be seen to eat. I know a lady, and
of the best quality, who has the same opinion, that chewing disfigures
the face, and takes away much from the ladies’ grace and beauty; and
therefore unwillingly appears at a public table with an appetite; and I
know a man also, who cannot endure to see another eat, nor himself to be
seen eating, and who is more shy of company when putting in than when
putting out. In the Turkish empire, there are a great number of men who,
to excel others, never suffer themselves to be seen when they make their
repast: who never have any more than one a week; who cut and mangle their
faces and limbs; who never speak to any one: fanatic people who think to
honour their nature by disnaturing themselves; who value themselves upon
their contempt of themselves, and purport to grow better by being worse.
What monstrous animal is this, that is a horror to himself, to whom his
delights are grievous, and who weds himself to misfortune? There are
people who conceal their life:
“Exilioque domos et dulcia limina mutant,”
[“And change for exile their homes and pleasant abodes.”
--Virgil, Georg., ii. 511.]
and withdraw them from the sight of other men; who avoid health and
cheerfulness, as dangerous and prejudicial qualities. Not only many
sects, but many peoples, curse their birth, and bless their death; and
there is a place where the sun is abominated and darkness adored. We are
only ingenious in using ourselves ill: ‘tis the real quarry our
intellects fly at; and intellect, when misapplied, is a dangerous tool!
“O miseri! quorum gaudia crimen habent!”
[“O wretched men, whose pleasures are a crime!”
--Pseudo Gallus, i. 180.]
Alas, poor man! thou hast enough inconveniences that are inevitable,
without increasing them by throe own invention; and art miserable enough
by nature, without being so by art; thou hast real and essential
deformities enough, without forging those that are imaginary. Dost thou
think thou art too much at ease unless half thy ease is uneasy? dost
thou find that thou hast not performed all the necessary offices that
nature has enjoined thee, and that she is idle in thee, if thou dost not
oblige thyself to other and new offices? Thou dost not stick to infringe
her universal and undoubted laws; but stickest to thy own special and
fantastic rules, and by how much more particular, uncertain, and
contradictory they are, by so much thou employest thy whole endeavour in
them: the laws of thy parish occupy and bind thee: those of God and the
world concern thee not. Run but a little over the examples of this kind;
thy life is full of them.
Whilst the verses of these two poets, treat so reservedly and discreetly
of wantonness as they do, methinks they discover it much more openly.
Ladies cover their necks with network, priests cover several sacred
things, and painters shadow their pictures to give them greater lustre:
and ‘tis said that the sun and wind strike more violently by reflection
than in a direct line. The Egyptian wisely answered him who asked him
what he had under his cloak, “It is hid under my cloak,” said he, “that
thou mayest not know what it is:” but there are certain other things that
people hide only to show them. Hear that one, who speaks plainer,
“Et nudum pressi corpus ad usque meum:”
[“And pressed her naked body to mine” (Or:) “My body
I applied even to her naked side”--Ovid, Amor., i. 5, 24.]
methinks that he emasculates me. Let Martial turn up Venus as high as he
may, he cannot shew her so naked: he who says all that is to be said
gluts and disgusts us. He who is afraid to express himself, draws us on
to guess at more than is meant; there is treachery in this sort of
modesty, and specially when they half open, as these do, so fair a path
to imagination. Both the action and description should relish of theft.
The more respectful, more timorous, more coy, and secret love of the
Spaniards and Italians pleases me. I know not who of old wished his
throat as long as that of a crane, that he might the longer taste what he
swallowed; it had been better wished as to this quick and precipitous
pleasure, especially in such natures as mine that have the fault of being
too prompt. To stay its flight and delay it with preambles: all things
--a glance, a bow, a word, a sign, stand for favour and recompense betwixt
them. Were it not an excellent piece of thrift in him who could dine on
the steam of the roast? ‘Tis a passion that mixes with very little solid
essence, far more vanity and feverish raving; and we should serve and pay
it accordingly. Let us teach the ladies to set a better value and esteem
upon themselves, to amuse and fool us: we give the last charge at the
first onset; the French impetuosity will still show itself; by spinning
out their favours, and exposing them in small parcels, even miserable old
age itself will find some little share of reward, according to its worth
and merit. He who has no fruition but in fruition, who wins nothing
unless he sweeps the stakes, who takes no pleasure in the chase but in
the quarry, ought not to introduce himself in our school: the more steps
and degrees there are, so much higher and more honourable is the
uppermost seat: we should take a pleasure in being conducted to it, as in
magnificent palaces, by various porticoes and passages, long and pleasant
galleries, and many windings. This disposition of things would turn to
our advantage; we should there longer stay and longer love; without hope
and without desire we proceed not worth a pin. Our conquest and entire
possession is what they ought infinitely to dread: when they wholly
surrender themselves up to the mercy of our fidelity and constancy they
run a mighty hazard; they are virtues very rare and hard to be found; the
ladies are no sooner ours, than we are no more theirs:
“Postquam cupidae mentis satiata libido est,
Verba nihil metuere, nihil perjuria curant;”
[“When our desires are once satisfied, we care little
for oaths and promises.”--Catullus, lxiv. 147.]
And Thrasonides, a young man of Greece, was so in love with his passion
that, having, gained a mistress’s consent, he refused to enjoy her, that
he might not by fruition quench and stupefy the unquiet ardour of which
he was so proud, and with which he so fed himself. Dearness is a good
sauce to meat: do but observe how much the manner of salutation,
particular to our nation, has, by its facilities, made kisses, which
Socrates says are so powerful and dangerous for the stealing of hearts,
of no esteem. It is a displeasing custom and injurious for the ladies,
that they must be obliged to lend their lips to every fellow who has
three footmen at his heels, however ill-favoured he may be in himself:
“Cujus livida naribus caninis
Dependet glacies, rigetque barba . . .
Centum occurrere malo culilingis:”
Martial, vii. 94.
and we ourselves barely gain by it; for as the world is divided, for
three beautiful women we must kiss fifty ugly ones; and to a tender
stomach, like those of my age, an ill kiss overpays a good one.
In Italy they passionately court even their common women who sell
themselves for money, and justify the doing so by saying, “that there are
degrees of fruition, and that by such service they would procure for
themselves that which is most entire; the women sell nothing but their
bodies; the will is too free and too much of its own to be exposed to
sale.” So that these say, ‘tis the will they undertake and they have
reason. ‘Tis indeed the will that we are to serve and gain by wooing.
I abhor to imagine mine, a body without affection: and this madness is,
methinks, cousin-german to that of the boy who would needs pollute the
beautiful statue of Venus made by Praxiteles; or that of the furious
Egyptian, who violated the dead carcase of a woman he was embalming:
which was the occasion of the law then made in Egypt, that the corpses of
beautiful young women, of those of good quality, should be kept three
days before they should be delivered to those whose office it was to take
care for the interment. Periander did more wonderfully, who extended his
conjugal affection (more regular and legitimate) to the enjoyment of his
wife Melissa after she was dead. Does it not seem a lunatic humour in
the Moon, seeing she could no otherwise enjoy her darling Endymion, to
lay-him for several months asleep, and to please herself with the
fruition of a boy who stirred not but in his sleep? I likewise say that
we love a body without a soul or sentiment when we love a body without
its consent and desire. All enjoyments are not alike: there are some
that are hectic and languishing: a thousand other causes besides
good-will may procure us this favour from the ladies; this is not a
sufficient testimony of affection: treachery may lurk there, as well as
elsewhere: they sometimes go to’t by halves:
“Tanquam thura merumque parent
Absentem marmoreamve putes:”
[“As if they are preparing frankincense and wine . . . you might
think her absent or marble.”--Martial, xi. 103, 12, and 59, 8.]
I know some who had rather lend that than their coach, and who only
impart themselves that way. You are to examine whether your company
pleases them upon any other account, or, as some strong-chined groom,
for that only; in what degree of favour and esteem you are with them:
“Tibi si datur uni,
Quem lapide illa diem candidiore notat.”
[“Wherefore that is enough, if that day alone is given us which she
marks with a whiter stone.”--Catullus, lxviii. 147.]
What if they eat your bread with the sauce of a more pleasing
imagination.
“Te tenet, absentes alios suspirat amores.”
[“She has you in her arms; her thoughts are with
other absent lovers.”--Tibullus, i. 6, 35.]
What? have we not seen one in these days of ours who made use of this act
for the purpose of a most horrid revenge, by that means to kill and
poison, as he did, a worthy lady?
Such as know Italy will not think it strange if, for this subject, I seek
not elsewhere for examples; for that nation may be called the regent of
the world in this. They have more generally handsome and fewer ugly
women than we; but for rare and excellent beauties we have as many as
they. I think the same of their intellects: of those of the common sort,
they have evidently far more brutishness is immeasurably rarer there;
but in individual characters of the highest form, we are nothing indebted
to them. If I should carry on the comparison, I might say, as touching
valour, that, on the contrary, it is, to what it is with them, common and
natural with us; but sometimes we see them possessed of it to such a
degree as surpasses the greatest examples we can produce: The marriages
of that country are defective in this; their custom commonly imposes so
rude and so slavish a law upon the women, that the most distant
acquaintance with a stranger is as capital an offence as the most
intimate; so that all approaches being rendered necessarily substantial,
and seeing that all comes to one account, they have no hard choice to
make; and when they have broken down the fence, we may safely presume
they get on fire:
“Luxuria ipsis vinculis, sicut fera bestia,
irritata, deinde emissa.”
[“Lust, like a wild beast, being more excited by being bound,
breaks from his chains with greater wildness.”--Livy, xxxiv. 4.]
They must give them a little more rein:
“Vidi ego nuper equum, contra sua frena tenacem,
Ore reluctanti fulminis ire modo”:
[“I saw, the other day, a horse struggling against his bit,
rush like a thunderbolt.”--Ovid, Amor., iii. 4, 13.]
the desire of company is allayed by giving it a little liberty. We are
pretty much in the same case they are extreme in constraint, we in
licence. ‘Tis a good custom we have in France that our sons are received
into the best families, there to be entertained and bred up pages, as in
a school of nobility; and ‘tis looked upon as a discourtesy and an
affront to refuse this to a gentleman. I have taken notice (for, so many
families, so many differing forms) that the ladies who have been
strictest with their maids have had no better luck than those who allowed
them a greater liberty. There should be moderation in these things; one
must leave a great deal of their conduct to their own discretion; for,
when all comes to all, no discipline can curb them throughout. But it is
true withal that she who comes off with flying colours from a school of
liberty, brings with her whereon to repose more confidence than she who
comes away sound from a severe and strict school.
Our fathers dressed up their daughters’ looks in bashfulness and fear
(their courage and desires being the same); we ours in confidence and
assurance; we understand nothing of the matter; we must leave it to the
Sarmatian women, who may not lie with a man till with their own hands
they have first killed another in battle. For me, who have no other
title left me to these things but by the ears, ‘tis sufficient if,
according to the privilege of my age, they retain me for one of their
counsel. I advise them then, and us men too, to abstinence; but if the
age we live in will not endure it, at least modesty and discretion. For,
as in the story of Aristippus, who, speaking to some young men who
blushed to see him go into a scandalous house, said “the vice is in not
coming out, not in going in,” let her who has no care of her conscience
have yet some regard to her reputation; and though she be rotten within,
let her carry a fair outside at least.
I commend a gradation and delay in bestowing their favours: Plato
‘declares that, in all sorts of love, facility and promptness are
forbidden to the defendant. ‘Tis a sign of eagerness which they
ought to disguise with all the art they have, so rashly, wholly, and
hand-over-hand to surrender themselves. In carrying themselves orderly
and measuredly in the granting their last favours, they much more allure
our desires and hide their own. Let them still fly before us, even those
who have most mind to be overtaken: they better conquer us by flying, as
the Scythians did. To say the truth, according to the law that nature
has imposed upon them, it is not properly for them either to will or
desire; their part is to suffer, obey, and consent and for this it is
that nature has given them a perpetual capacity, which in us is but at
times and uncertain; they are always fit for the encounter, that they may
be always ready when we are so “Pati natee.”-[“Born to suffer.”-Seneca,
Ep., 95.]--And whereas she has ordered that our appetites shall be
manifest by a prominent demonstration, she would have theirs to be hidden
and concealed within, and has furnished them with parts improper for
ostentation, and simply defensive. Such proceedings as this that follows
must be left to the Amazonian licence: Alexander marching his army
through Hyrcania, Thalestris, Queen of the Amazons, came with three
hundred light horse of her own-sex, well mounted, and armed, having left
the remainder of a very great, army that followed her behind the
neighbouring mountains to give him a visit; where she publicly and in
plain terms told him that the fame of his valour and victories had
brought her thither to see him, and to make him an offer of her forces to
assist him in the pursuit of his enterprises; and that, finding him so
handsome, young, and vigorous, she, who was also perfect in all those
qualities, advised that they might lie together, to the end that from the
most valiant woman of the world and the bravest man then living, there
might spring some great and wonderful issue for the time to come.
Alexander returned her thanks for all the rest; but, to give leisure for
the accomplishment of her last demand, he detained her thirteen days in
that place, which were spent in royal feasting and jollity, for the
welcome of so courageous a princess.
We are, almost throughout, unjust judges of their actions, as they are of
ours. I confess the truth when it makes against me, as well as when ‘tis
on my side. ‘Tis an abominable intemperance that pushes them on so often
to change, and that will not let them limit their affection to any one
person whatever; as is evident in that goddess to whom are attributed so
many changes and so many lovers. But ‘tis true withal that ‘tis contrary
to the nature of love if it be, not violent; and contrary to the nature
of violence if it be constant. And they who wonder, exclaim, and keep
such a clutter to find out the causes of this frailty of theirs, as
unnatural and not to be believed, how comes it to pass they do not
discern how often they are themselves guilty of the same, without any
astonishment or miracle at all? It would, peradventure, be more strange
to see the passion fixed; ‘tis not a simply corporeal passion. If there
be no end to avarice and ambition, there is doubtless no more in desire;
it still lives after satiety; and ‘tis impossible to prescribe either
constant satisfaction or end; it ever goes beyond its possession. And by
that means inconstancy, peradventure, is in some sort more pardonable in
them than in us: they may plead, as well as we, the inclination to
variety and novelty common to us both; and secondly, without us, that
they buy a cat in a sack: Joanna, queen of Naples, caused her first
husband, Andrews, to be hanged at the bars of her window in a halter of
gold and silk woven with her own hand, because in matrimonial
performances she neither found his parts nor abilities answer the
expectation she had conceived from his stature, beauty, youth, and
activity, by which she had been caught and deceived. They may say there
is more pains required in doing than in suffering; and so they are on
their part always at least provided for necessity, whereas on our part it
may fall out otherwise. For this reason it was, that Plato wisely made a
law that before marriage, to determine of the fitness of persons, the
judges should see the young men who pretended to it stripped stark naked,
and the women but to the girdle only. When they come to try us they do
not, perhaps, find us worthy of their choice:
“Experta latus, madidoque simillima loro
Inguina, nec lassa stare coacta manu,
Deserit imbelles thalamos.”
[“After using every endeavour to arouse him to action,
she quits the barren couch.”--Martial, vii. 58.]
‘Tis not enough that a man’s will be good; weakness and insufficiency
lawfully break a marriage,
“Et quaerendum aliunde foret nervosius illud,
Quod posset zonam solvere virgineam:”
[“And seeks a more vigorous lover to undo her virgin zone.”
--Catullus, lxvii. 27.]
why not? and according to her own standard, an amorous intelligence,
more licentious and active,
“Si blando nequeat superesse labori.”
[“If his strength be unequal to the pleasant task.”
--Virgil, Georg., iii. 127.]
But is it not great impudence to offer our imperfections and
imbecilities, where we desire to please and leave a good opinion and
esteem of ourselves? For the little that I am able to do now:
“Ad unum
Mollis opus.”
[“Fit but for once.”--Horace, Epod., xii. 15.]
I would not trouble a woman, that I am to reverence and fear:
“Fuge suspicari,
Cujus undenum trepidavit aetas
Claudere lustrum.”
[“Fear not him whose eleventh lustrum is closed.”
--Horace, Od., ii. 4, 12, limits it to the eighth.]
Nature should satisfy herself in having rendered this age miserable,
without rendering it ridiculous too. I hate to see it, for one poor inch
of pitiful vigour which comes upon it but thrice a week, to strut and set
itself out with as much eagerness as if it could do mighty feats; a true
flame of flax; and laugh to see it so boil and bubble and then in a
moment so congealed and extinguished. This appetite ought to appertain
only to the flower of beautiful youth: trust not to its seconding that
indefatigable, full, constant, magnanimous ardour you think in you, for
it will certainly leave you in a pretty corner; but rather transfer it to
some tender, bashful, and ignorant boy, who yet trembles at the rod, and
blushes:
“Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro
Si quis ebur, vel mista rubent ubi lilia multa
Alba rosa.”
[“As Indian ivory streaked with crimson, or white lilies mixed
with the damask rose.”--AEneid, xii. 67.]
Who can stay till the morning without dying for shame to behold the
disdain of the fair eyes of her who knows so well his fumbling
impertinence,
“Et taciti fecere tamen convicia vultus,”
[“Though she nothing say, her looks betray her anger.”
--Ovid, Amor., i. 7, 21.]
has never had the satisfaction and the glory of having cudgelled them
till they were weary, with the vigorous performance of one heroic night.
When I have observed any one to be vexed with me, I have not presently
accused her levity, but have been in doubt, if I had not reason rather to
complain of nature; she has doubtless used me very uncivilly and
unkindly:
“Si non longa satis, si non bene mentula crassa
Nimirum sapiunt, videntque parvam
Matronae quoque mentulam illibenter:”
[The first of these verses is the commencement of an epigram of the
Veterum Poetayurra Catalecta, and the two others are from an epigram
in the same collection (Ad Matrones). They describe untranslatably
Montaigne’s charge against nature, indicated in the previous
passage.]
and done me a most enormous injury. Every member I have, as much one as
another, is equally my own, and no other more properly makes me a man
than this.
I universally owe my entire picture to the public. The wisdom of my
instruction consists in liberty, in truth, in essence: disdaining to
introduce those little, feigned, common, and provincial rules into the
catalogue of its real duties; all natural, general, and constant,
of which civility and ceremony are daughters indeed, but illegitimate.
We are sure to have the vices of appearance, when we shall have had those
of essence: when we have done with these, we run full drive upon the
others, if we find it must be so; for there is danger that we shall fancy
new offices, to excuse our negligence towards the natural ones, and to
confound them: and to manifest this, is it not seen that in places where
faults are crimes, crimes are but faults; that in nations where the laws
of decency are most rare and most remiss, the primitive laws of common
reason are better observed: the innumerable multitude of so many duties
stifling and dissipating our care. The application of ourselves to light
and trivial things diverts us from those that are necessary and just.
Oh, how these superficial men take an easy and plausible way in
comparison of ours! These are shadows wherewith we palliate and pay one
another; but we do not pay, but inflame the reckoning towards that great
judge, who tucks up our rags and tatters above our shameful parts, and
suckles not to view us all over, even to our inmost and most secret
ordures: it were a useful decency of our maidenly modesty, could it keep
him from this discovery. In fine, whoever could reclaim man from so
scrupulous a verbal superstition, would do the world no great disservice.
Our life is divided betwixt folly and prudence: whoever will write of it
but what is reverend and canonical, will leave above the one-half behind.
I do not excuse myself to myself; and if I did, it should rather be for
my excuses that I would excuse myself than for any other fault; I excuse
myself of certain humours, which I think more strong in number than those
that are on my side. In consideration of which, I will further say this
(for I desire to please every one, though it will be hard to do):
“Esse unum hominem accommodatum ad tantam morum
ac sermonum et voluntatum varietatem,”
[“For a man to conform to such a variety of manners,
discourses, and will.”--Q. Cicero, De Pet. Consul, c. 14.]
that they ought not to condemn me for what I make authorities, received
and approved by so many ages, to utter: and that there is no reason that
for want of rhyme they should refuse me the liberty they allow even to
churchmen of our nation and time, and these amongst the most notable, of
which here are two of their brisk verses:
“Rimula, dispeream, ni monogramma tua est.”
“Un vit d’amy la contente et bien traicte:”
[St. Gelais, (Euvres Poetiques), p. 99, ed. of Lyons, 1574.]
besides how many others. I love modesty; and ‘tis not out of judgment
that I have chosen this scandalous way of speaking; ‘tis nature that has
chosen it for me. I commend it not, no more than other forms that are
contrary to common use: but I excuse it, and by circumstances both
general and particular, alleviate its accusation.
But to proceed. Whence, too, can proceed that usurpation of sovereign
authority you take upon you over the women, who favour you at their own
expense,
“Si furtiva dedit mira munuscula nocte,”
[“If, in the stealthy night, she has made strange gifts.”
--Catullus, lxviii. 145.]
so that you presently assume the interest, coldness, and authority of a
husband? ‘Tis a free contract why do you not then keep to it, as you
would have them do? there is no prescription upon voluntary things.
‘Tis against the form, but it is true withal, that I in my time have
conducted this bargain as much as the nature of it would permit, as
conscientiously and with as much colour of justice, as any other
contract; and that I never pretended other affection than what I really
had, and have truly acquainted them with its birth, vigour, and
declination, its fits and intermissions: a man does not always hold on
at the same rate. I have been so sparing of my promises, that I think
I have been better than my word. They have found me faithful even to
service of their inconstancy, a confessed and sometimes multiplied
inconstancy. I never broke with them, whilst I had any hold at all, and
what occasion soever they have given me, never broke with them to hatred
or contempt; for such privacies, though obtained upon never so scandalous
terms, do yet oblige to some good will: I have sometimes, upon their
tricks and evasions, discovered a little indiscreet anger and impatience;
for I am naturally subject to rash emotions, which, though light and
short, often spoil my market. At any time they have consulted my
judgment, I never stuck to give them sharp and paternal counsels, and to
pinch them to the quick. If I have left them any cause to complain of
me, ‘tis rather to have found in me, in comparison of the modern use, a
love foolishly conscientious than anything else. I have kept my, word in
things wherein I might easily have been dispensed; they sometimes
surrendered themselves with reputation, and upon articles that they were
willing enough should be broken by the conqueror: I have, more than once,
made pleasure in its greatest effort strike to the interest of their
honour; and where reason importuned me, have armed them against myself;
so that they ordered themselves more decorously and securely by my rules,
when they frankly referred themselves to them, than they would have done
by their own. I have ever, as much as I could, wholly taken upon myself
alone the hazard of our assignations, to acquit them; and have always
contrived our meetings after the hardest and most unusual manner, as less
suspected, and, moreover, in my opinion, more accessible. They are
chiefly more open, where they think they are most securely shut; things
least feared are least interdicted and observed; one may more boldly dare
what nobody thinks you dare, which by its difficulty becomes easy. Never
had any man his approaches more impertinently generative; this way of
loving is more according to discipline but how ridiculous it is to our
people, and how ineffectual, who better knows than I? yet I shall not
repent me of it; I have nothing there more to lose:
“Me tabula sacer
Votiva paries, indicat uvida
Suspendisse potenti
Vestimenta maris deo:”
[“The holy wall, by my votive table, shows that I have hanged up my
wet clothes in honour of the powerful god of the sea.”
--Horace, Od., i. 5, 13.]
‘tis now time to speak out. But as I might, per adventure, say to
another, “Thou talkest idly, my friend; the love of thy time has little
commerce with faith and integrity;”
“Haec si tu postules
Ratione certa facere, nihilo plus agas,
Quam si des operam, ut cum ratione insanias:”
[“If you seek to make these things certain by reason, you will do no
more than if you should seek to be mad in your senses.”
--Terence, Eun., act i., sc. i, v. 16.]
on the contrary, also, if it were for me to begin again, certainly it
should be by the same method and the same progress, how fruitless soever
it might be to me; folly and insufficiency are commendable in an
incommendable action: the farther I go from their humour in this, I
approach so much nearer to my own. As to the rest, in this traffic, I
did not suffer myself to be totally carried away; I pleased myself in it,
but did not forget myself. I retained the little sense and discretion
that nature has given me, entire for their service and my own: a little
emotion, but no dotage. My conscience, also, was engaged in it, even to
debauch and licentiousness; but, as to ingratitude, treachery, malice,
and cruelty, never. I would not purchase the pleasure of this vice at
any price, but content myself with its proper and simple cost:
“Nullum intra se vitium est.”
[“Nothing is a vice in itself.”--Seneca, Ep., 95.]
I almost equally hate a stupid and slothful laziness, as I do a toilsome
and painful employment; this pinches, the other lays me asleep. I like
wounds as well as bruises, and cuts as well as dry blows. I found in
this commerce, when I was the most able for it, a just moderation betwixt
these extremes. Love is a sprightly, lively, and gay agitation; I was
neither troubled nor afflicted with it, but heated, and moreover,
disordered; a man must stop there; it hurts nobody but fools. A young
man asked the philosopher Panetius if it were becoming a wise man to be
in love? “Let the wise man look to that,” answered he, “but let not thou
and I, who are not so, engage ourselves in so stirring and violent an
affair, that enslaves us to others, and renders us contemptible to
ourselves.” He said true that we are not to intrust a thing so
precipitous in itself to a soul that has not wherewithal to withstand its
assaults and disprove practically the saying of Agesilaus, that prudence
and love cannot live together. ‘Tis a vain employment, ‘tis true,
unbecoming, shameful, and illegitimate; but carried on after this manner,
I look upon it as wholesome, and proper to enliven a drowsy soul and to
rouse up a heavy body; and, as an experienced physician, I would
prescribe it to a man of my form and condition, as soon as any other
recipe whatever, to rouse and keep him in vigour till well advanced in
years, and to defer the approaches of age. Whilst we are but in the
suburbs, and that the pulse yet beats:
“Dum nova canities, dum prima et recta senectus,
Dum superest lachesi quod torqueat, et pedibus me
Porto meis, nullo dextram subeunte bacillo,”
[“Whilst the white hair is new, whilst old age is still straight
shouldered, whilst there still remains something for Lachesis to
spin, whilst I walk on my own legs, and need no staff to lean upon.”
--Juvenal, iii. 26.]
we have need to be solicited and tickled by some such nipping incitation
as this. Do but observe what youth, vigour, and gaiety it inspired the
good Anacreon withal: and Socrates, who was then older than I, speaking
of an amorous object:
“Leaning,” said he, “my shoulder to her shoulder, and my head to hers, as
we were reading together in a book, I felt, without dissembling, a sudden
sting in my shoulder like the biting of an insect, which I still felt
above five days after, and a continual itching crept into my heart.” So
that merely the accidental touch, and of a shoulder, heated and altered a
soul cooled and enerved by age, and the strictest liver of all mankind.
And, pray, why not? Socrates was a man, and would neither be, nor seem,
any other thing. Philosophy does not contend against natural pleasures,
provided they be moderate, and only preaches moderation, not a total
abstinence; the power of its resistance is employed against those that
are adulterate and strange. Philosophy says that the appetites of the
body ought not to be augmented by the mind, and ingeniously warns us not
to stir up hunger by saturity; not to stuff, instead of merely filling,
the belly; to avoid all enjoyments that may bring us to want; and all
meats and drinks that bring thirst and hunger: as, in the service of
love, she prescribes us to take such an object as may simply satisfy the
body’s need, and does not stir the soul, which ought only barely to
follow and assist the body, without mixing in the affair. But have I not
reason to hold that these precepts, which, indeed, in my opinion, are
somewhat over strict, only concern a body in its best plight; and that in
a body broken with age, as in a weak stomach, ‘tis excusable to warm and
support it by art, and by the mediation of the fancy to restore the
appetite and cheerfulness it has lost of itself.
May we not say that there is nothing in us, during this earthly prison,
that is purely either corporeal or spiritual; and that we injuriously
break up a man alive; and that it seems but reasonable that we should
carry ourselves as favourably, at least, towards the use of pleasure as
we do towards that of pain! Pain was (for example) vehement even to
perfection in the souls of the saints by penitence: the body had there
naturally a sham by the right of union, and yet might have but little
part in the cause; and yet are they not contented that it should barely
follow and assist the afflicted soul: they have afflicted itself with
grievous and special torments, to the end that by emulation of one
another the soul and body might plunge man into misery by so much more
salutiferous as it is more severe. In like manner, is it not injustice,
in bodily pleasures, to subdue and keep under the soul, and say that it
must therein be dragged along as to some enforced and servile obligation
and necessity? ‘Tis rather her part to hatch and cherish them, there to
present herself, and to invite them, the authority of ruling belonging to
her; as it is also her part, in my opinion, in pleasures that are proper
to her, to inspire and infuse into the body all the sentiment it is
capable of, and to study how to make them sweet and useful to it. For it
is good reason, as they say, that the body should not pursue its
appetites to the prejudice of the mind; but why is it not also the reason
that the mind should not pursue hers to the prejudice of the body?
I have no other passion to keep me in breath. What avarice, ambition,
quarrels, lawsuits do for others who, like me, have no particular
vocation, love would much more commodiously do; it would restore to me
vigilance, sobriety, grace, and the care of my person; it would reassure
my countenance, so that the grimaces of old age, those deformed and
dismal looks, might not come to disgrace it; would again put me upon
sound and wise studies, by which I might render myself more loved and
esteemed, clearing my mind of the despair of itself and of its use, and
redintegrating it to itself; would divert me from a thousand troublesome
thoughts, a thousand melancholic humours that idleness and the ill
posture of our health loads us withal at such an age; would warm again,
in dreams at least, the blood that nature is abandoning; would hold up
the chin, and a little stretch out the nerves, the vigour and gaiety of
life of that poor man who is going full drive towards his ruin. But I
very well understand that it is a commodity hard to recover: by weakness
and long experience our taste is become more delicate and nice; we ask
most when we bring least, and are harder to choose when we least deserve
to be accepted: and knowing ourselves for what we are, we are less
confident and more distrustful; nothing can assure us of being beloved,
considering our condition and theirs. I am out of countenance to see
myself in company with those young wanton creatures:
“Cujus in indomito constantior inguine nervus,
Quam nova collibus arbor inhaeret.”
[“In whose unbridled reins the vigour is more inherent than in the
young tree on the hills.”--Horace, Epod., xii. 19.]
To what end should we go insinuate our misery amid their gay and
sprightly humour?
“Possint ut juvenes visere fervidi.
Multo non sine risu,
Dilapsam in cineres facem.”
[“As the fervid youths may behold, not without laughter, a burning
torch worn to ashes.”--Horace, Od., iv. 13, 21.]
They have strength and reason on their side; let us give way; we have
nothing to do there: and these blossoms of springing beauty suffer not
themselves to be handled by such benumbed hands nor dealt with by mere
material means, for, as the old philosopher answered one who jeered him
because he could not gain the favour of a young girl he made love to:
“Friend, the hook will not stick in such soft cheese.” It is a commerce
that requires relation and correspondence: the other pleasures we receive
may be acknowledged by recompenses of another nature, but this is not to
be paid but with the same kind of coin. In earnest, in this sport, the
pleasure I give more tickles my imagination than that they give me; now,
he has nothing of generosity in him who can receive pleasure where he
confers none--it must needs be a mean soul that will owe all, and can be
content to maintain relations with persons to whom he is a continual
charge; there is no beauty, grace, nor privacy so exquisite that a
gentleman ought to desire at this rate. If they can only be kind to us
out of pity, I had much rather die than live upon charity. I would have
right to ask, in the style wherein I heard them beg in Italy: “Fate ben
per voi,”--[“Do good for yourself.”]--or after the manner that Cyrus
exhorted his soldiers, “Who loves himself let him follow me.”--“Consort
yourself,” some one will say to me, “with women of your own condition,
whom like fortune will render more easy to your desire.” O ridiculous
and insipid composition!
“Nolo
Barbam vellere mortuo leoni.”
[“I would not pluck the beard from a dead lion.”--Martial]
Xenophon lays it for an objection and an accusation against Menon, that
he never made love to any but old women. For my part, I take more
pleasure in but seeing the just and sweet mixture of two young beauties,
or only in meditating on it in my fancy, than myself in acting second in
a pitiful and imperfect conjunction;
[Which Cotton renders, “Than to be myself an actor in the second
with a deformed creature.”]
I leave that fantastic appetite to the Emperor Galba, who was only for
old curried flesh: and to this poor wretch:
“O ego Di faciant talem to cernere possim,
Caraque mutatis oscula ferre comis,
Amplectique meis corpus non pingue lacertis!”
[Ovid, who (Ex. Ponto, i. 4, 49) writes to his wife, “O would the
gods arrange that such I might see thee, and bring dear kisses to
thy changed locks, and embrace thy withered body with my arms”]
Amongst chief deformities I reckon forced and artificial beauties: Hemon,
a young boy of Chios, thinking by fine dressing to acquire the beauty
that nature had denied him, came to the philosopher Arcesilaus and asked
him if it was possible for a wise man to be in love--“Yes,” replied he,
“provided it be not with a farded and adulterated beauty like thine.”
[Diogenes Laertius, iv. 36. The question was whether a wise man
could love him. Cotton has “Emonez, a young courtezan of Chios.”]
Ugliness of a confessed antiquity is to me less old and less ugly than
another that is polished and plastered up. Shall I speak it, without the
danger of having my throat cut? love, in my opinion, is not properly and
naturally in its season, but in the age next to childhood,
“Quem si puellarum insereres choro,
Mille sagaces falleret hospites,
Discrimen obscurum, solutis
Crinibus ambiguoque vultu:”
[“Whom if thou shouldst place in a company of girls, it would
require a thousand experts to distinguish him, with his loose locks
and ambiguous countenance.”--Horace, Od., ii. 5, 21.]
nor beauty neither; for whereas Homer extends it so far as to the budding
of the beard, Plato himself has remarked this as rare: and the reason why
the sophist Bion so pleasantly called the first appearing hairs of
adolescence ‘Aristogitons’ and ‘Harmodiuses’--[Plutarch, On Love, c.34.]--
is sufficiently known. I find it in virility already in some sort a
little out of date, though not so much as in old age;
“Importunus enim transvolat aridas
Quercus.”
[“For it uncivilly passes over withered oaks.”
--Horace, Od., iv. 13, 9.]
and Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, like a woman, very far extends the
advantage of women, ordaining that it is time, at thirty years old, to
convert the title of fair into that of good. The shorter authority we
give to love over our lives, ‘tis so much the better for us. Do but
observe his port; ‘tis a beardless boy. Who knows not how, in his school
they proceed contrary to all order; study, exercise, and usage are their
ways for insufficiency there novices rule:
“Amor ordinem nescit.”
[“Love ignores rules.” (Or:) “Love knows no rule.”
--St. Jerome, Letter to Chyomatius.]
Doubtless his conduct is much more graceful when mixed with inadvertency
and trouble; miscarriages and ill successes give him point and grace;
provided it be sharp and eager, ‘tis no great matter whether it be
prudent or no: do but observe how he goes reeling, tripping, and playing:
you put him in the stocks when you guide him by art and wisdom; and he is
restrained of his divine liberty when put into those hairy and callous
clutches.
As to the rest, I often hear the women set out this intelligence as
entirely spiritual, and disdain to put the interest the senses there have
into consideration; everything there serves; but I can say that I have
often seen that we have excused the weakness of their understandings in
favour of their outward beauty, but have never yet seen that in favour of
mind, how mature and full soever, any of them would hold out a hand to a
body that was never so little in decadence. Why does not some one of
them take it into her head to make that noble Socratical bargain between
body and soul, purchasing a philosophical and spiritual intelligence and
generation at the price of her thighs, which is the highest price she can
get for them? Plato ordains in his Laws that he who has performed any
signal and advantageous exploit in war may not be refused during the
whole expedition, his age or ugliness notwithstanding, a kiss or any
other amorous favour from any woman whatever. What he thinks to be so
just in recommendation of military valour, why may it not be the same in
recommendation of any other good quality? and why does not some woman
take a fancy to possess over her companions the glory of this chaste
love? I may well say chaste;
“Nam si quando ad praelia ventum est,
Ut quondam in stipulis magnus sine viribus ignis,
Incassum furit:”
[“For when they sometimes engage in love’s battle,
his sterile ardour lights up but as the flame of a straw.”
--Virgil, Georg., iii. 98.]
the vices that are stifled in the thought are not the worst.
To conclude this notable commentary, which has escaped from me in a
torrent of babble, a torrent sometimes impetuous and hurtful,
“Ut missum sponsi furtivo munere malum
Procurrit casto virginis a gremio,
Quod miserae oblitae molli sub veste locatuat,
Dum adventu matris prosilit, excutitur,
Atque illud prono praeceps agitur decursu
Huic manat tristi conscius ore rubor.”
[“As when an apple, sent by a lover secretly to his mistress, falls
from the chaste virgin’s bosom, where she had quite forgotten it;
when, starting at her mother’s coming in, it is shaken out and rolls
over the floor before her eyes, a conscious blush covers her face.”
--Catullus, lxv. 19.]
I say that males and females are cast in the same mould, and that,
education and usage excepted, the difference is not great. Plato
indifferently invites both the one and the other to the society of all
studies, exercises, and vocations, both military and civil, in his
Commonwealth; and the philosopher Antisthenes rejected all distinction
betwixt their virtue and ours. It is much more easy to accuse one sex
than to excuse the other; ‘tis according to the saying,
“Le fourgon se moque de la paele.”
[“The Pot and the Kettle.”]
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A gallant man does not give over his pursuit for being refused
A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted
Appetite is more sharp than one already half-glutted by the eyes
Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age
Certain other things that people hide only to show them
Chiefly knew himself to be mortal by this act
Dearness is a good sauce to meat
Each amongst you has made somebody cuckold
Eat your bread with the sauce of a more pleasing imagination
Evade this tormenting and unprofitable knowledge
Feminine polity has a mysterious procedure
Few men have made a wife of a mistress, who have not repented it
First thing to be considered in love matters: a fitting time
Friend, the hook will not stick in such soft cheese.
Give the ladies a cruel contempt of our natural furniture
Guess at our meaning under general and doubtful terms
Hate all sorts of obligation and restraint
Have ever had a great respect for her I loved
Have no other title left me to these things but by the ears
Heat and stir up their imagination, and then we find fault
Husbands hate their wives only because they themselves do wrong
I am apt to dream that I dream
I do not say that ‘tis well said, but well thought
I had much rather die than live upon charity.
I was always superstitiously afraid of giving offence
If I am talking my best, whoever interrupts me, stops me
If they can only be kind to us out of pity
In everything else a man may keep some decorum
In those days, the tailor took measure of it
Inclination to variety and novelty common to us both
Inconsiderate excuses are a kind of self-accusation
Interdiction incites, and who are more eager, being forbidden
It happens, as with cages, the birds without despair to get in
Jealousy: no remedy but flight or patience
Judgment of duty principally lies in the will
Ladies are no sooner ours, than we are no more theirs
“Let a man take which course he will,” said he; “he will repent.”
Let us not be ashamed to speak what we are not ashamed to think
Love is the appetite of generation by the mediation of beauty
Love shamefully and dishonestly cured by marriage
Love them the less for our own faults
Love, full, lively, and sharp; a pleasure inflamed by difficulty
Man must approach his wife with prudence and temperance
Marriage rejects the company and conditions of love
Men make them (the rules) without their (women’s) help
Misfortunes that only hurt us by being known
Modesty is a foolish virtue in an indigent person (Homer)
Most of my actions are guided by example, not by choice
Neither continency nor virtue where there are no opposing desire
No doing more difficult than that not doing, nor more active
O wretched men, whose pleasures are a crime
O, the furious advantage of opportunity!
Observed the laws of marriage, than I either promised or expect
One may more boldly dare what nobody thinks you dare
Order it so that your virtue may conquer your misfortune
Plato says, that the gods made man for their sport
Pleasure of telling (a pleasure little inferior to that of doing)
Priest shall on the wedding-day open the way to the bride
Prudent man, when I imagine him in this posture
Rage compelled to excuse itself by a pretence of good-will
Rather be a less while old than be old before I am really so
Represented her a little too passionate for a married Venus
Revenge more wounds our children than it heals us
Sex: To put fools and wise men, beasts and us, on a level
Sharps and sweets of marriage, are kept secret by the wise
Sins that make the least noise are the worst
Sleep suffocates and suppresses the faculties of the soul
Sufficiently covered by their virtue without any other robe
The best authors too much humble and discourage me
The impulse of nature, which is a rough counsellor
The privilege of the mind to rescue itself from old age
Their disguises and figures only serve to cosen fools
There is no allurement like modesty, if it be not rude
These sleepy, sluggish sort of men are often the most dangerous
They better conquer us by flying
They buy a cat in a sack
They err as much who too much forbear Venus
They must become insensible and invisible to satisfy us
They who would fight custom with grammar are triflers
Those which we fear the least are, peradventure, most to be fear
Those within (marriage) despair of getting out
Tis all swine’s flesh, varied by sauces
To what friend dare you intrust your griefs
Twas a happy marriage betwixt a blind wife and a deaf husband
Unjust judges of their actions, as they are of ours
Very idea we invent for their chastity is ridiculous
Virtue is a pleasant and gay quality
We ask most when we bring least
We say a good marriage because no one says to the contrary.
When jealousy seizes these poor souls
When their eyes give the lie to their tongue
Who escapes being talked of at the same rate
Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation
Would in this affair have a man a little play the servant
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 16.
VI. Of Coaches.
VII. Of the Inconvenience of Greatness.
VIII. Of the Art of Conference.
CHAPTER VI
OF COACHES
It is very easy to verify, that great authors, when they write of causes,
not only make use of those they think to be the true causes, but also of
those they believe not to be so, provided they have in them some beauty
and invention: they speak true and usefully enough, if it be ingeniously.
We cannot make ourselves sure of the supreme cause, and therefore crowd a
great many together, to see if it may not accidentally be amongst them:
“Namque unam dicere causam
Non satis est, verum plures, unde una tamen sit.”
[Lucretius, vi. 704.--The sense is in the preceding passage.]
Do you ask me, whence comes the custom of blessing those who sneeze?
We break wind three several ways; that which sallies from below is too
filthy; that which breaks out from the mouth carries with it some
reproach of gluttony; the third is sneezing, which, because it proceeds
from the head and is without offence, we give it this civil reception: do
not laugh at this distinction; they say ‘tis Aristotle’s.
I think I have seen in Plutarch’ (who of all the authors I know, is he
who has best mixed art with nature, and judgment with knowledge), his
giving as a reason for the, rising of the stomach in those who are at
sea, that it is occasioned by fear; having first found out some reason by
which he proves that fear may produce such an effect. I, who am very
subject to it, know well that this cause concerns not me; and I know it,
not by argument, but by necessary experience. Without instancing what
has been told me, that the same thing often happens in beasts, especially
hogs, who are out of all apprehension of danger; and what an acquaintance
of mine told me of himself, that though very subject to it, the
disposition to vomit has three or four times gone off him, being very
afraid in a violent storm, as it happened to that ancient:
“Pejus vexabar, quam ut periculum mihi succurreret;”
[“I was too ill to think of danger.” (Or the reverse:)
“I was too frightened to be ill.”--Seneca, Ep., 53. 2]
I was never afraid upon the water, nor indeed in any other peril (and I
have had enough before my eyes that would have sufficed, if death be
one), so as to be astounded to lose my judgment. Fear springs sometimes
as much from want of judgment as from want of courage. All the dangers I
have been in I have looked upon without winking, with an open, sound, and
entire sight; and, indeed, a man must have courage to fear. It formerly
served me better than other help, so to order and regulate my retreat,
that it was, if not without fear, nevertheless without affright and
astonishment; it was agitated, indeed, but not amazed or stupefied.
Great souls go yet much farther, and present to us flights, not only
steady and temperate, but moreover lofty. Let us make a relation of that
which Alcibiades reports of Socrates, his fellow in arms: “I found him,”
says he, “after the rout of our army, him and Lachez, last among those
who fled, and considered him at my leisure and in security, for I was
mounted on a good horse, and he on foot, as he had fought. I took
notice, in the first place, how much judgment and resolution he showed,
in comparison of Lachez, and then the bravery of his march, nothing
different from his ordinary gait; his sight firm and regular, considering
and judging what passed about him, looking one while upon those, and then
upon others, friends and enemies, after such a manner as encouraged
those, and signified to the others that he would sell his life dear to
any one who should attempt to take it from him, and so they came off; for
people are not willing to attack such kind of men, but pursue those they
see are in a fright.” That is the testimony of this great captain, which
teaches us, what we every day experience, that nothing so much throws us
into dangers as an inconsiderate eagerness of getting ourselves clear of
them:
“Quo timoris minus est, eo minus ferme periculi est.”
[“When there is least fear, there is for the most part least
danger.”--Livy, xxii. 5.]
Our people are to blame who say that such an one is afraid of death, when
they would express that he thinks of it and foresees it: foresight is
equally convenient in what concerns us, whether good or ill. To consider
and judge of danger is, in some sort, the reverse to being astounded.
I do not find myself strong enough to sustain the force and impetuosity
of this passion of fear, nor of any other vehement passion whatever: if I
was once conquered and beaten down by it, I should never rise again very
sound. Whoever should once make my soul lose her footing, would never
set her upright again: she retastes and researches herself too
profoundly, and too much to the quick, and therefore would never let the
wound she had received heal and cicatrise. It has been well for me that
no sickness has yet discomposed her: at every charge made upon me, I
preserve my utmost opposition and defence; by which means the first that
should rout me would keep me from ever rallying again. I have no
after-game to play: on which side soever the inundation breaks my banks,
I lie open, and am drowned without remedy. Epicurus says, that a wise
man can never become a fool; I have an opinion reverse to this sentence,
which is, that he who has once been a very fool, will never after be very
wise. God grants me cold according to my cloth, and passions
proportionable to the means I have to withstand them: nature having laid
me open on the one side, has covered me on the other; having disarmed me
of strength, she has armed me with insensibility and an apprehension that
is regular, or, if you will, dull.
I cannot now long endure (and when I was young could much less) either
coach, litter, or boat, and hate all other riding but on horseback, both
in town and country. But I can bear a litter worse than a coach; and, by
the same reason, a rough agitation upon the water, whence fear is
produced, better than the motions of a calm. At the little jerks of
oars, stealing the vessel from under us, I find, I know not how, both my
head and my stomach disordered; neither-can I endure to sit upon a
tottering chair. When the sail or the current carries us equally, or
that we are towed, the equal agitation does not disturb me at all; ‘tis
an interrupted motion that offends me, and most of all when most slow: I
cannot otherwise express it. The physicians have ordered me to squeeze
and gird myself about the bottom of the belly with a napkin to remedy
this evil; which however I have not tried, being accustomed to wrestle
with my own defects, and overcome them myself.
Would my memory serve me, I should not think my time ill spent in setting
down here the infinite variety that history presents us of the use of
chariots in the service of war: various, according to the nations and
according to the age; in my opinion, of great necessity and effect; so
that it is a wonder that we have lost all knowledge of them. I will only
say this, that very lately, in our fathers’ time, the Hungarians made
very advantageous use of them against the Turks; having in every one of
them a targetter and a musketeer, and a number of harquebuses piled ready
and loaded, and all covered with a pavesade like a galliot--[Canvas
spread along the side of a ship of war, in action to screen the movements
of those on board.]--They formed the front of their battle with three
thousand such coaches, and after the cannon had played, made them all
pour in their shot upon the enemy, who had to swallow that volley before
they tasted of the rest, which was no little advance; and that done,
these chariots charged into their squadrons to break them and open a way
for the rest; besides the use they might make of them to flank the
soldiers in a place of danger when marching to the field, or to cover a
post, and fortify it in haste. In my time, a gentleman on one of our
frontiers, unwieldy of body, and finding no horse able to carry his
weight, having a quarrel, rode through the country in a chariot of this
fashion, and found great convenience in it. But let us leave these
chariots of war.
As if their effeminacy--[Which Cotton translates: “as if the
insignificancy of coaches.” ]--had not been sufficiently known by better
proofs, the last kings of our first race travelled in a chariot drawn by
four oxen. Marc Antony was the first at Rome who caused himself to be
drawn in a coach by lions, and a singing wench with him.
[Cytheris, the Roman courtezan.--Plutarch’s Life of Antony, c. 3.
This, was the same person who is introduced by Gallus under the name
of Lycoris. Gallus doubtless knew her personally.]
Heliogabalus did since as much, calling himself Cybele, the mother of the
gods; and also drawn by tigers, taking upon him the person of the god
Bacchus; he also sometimes harnessed two stags to his coach, another time
four dogs, and another four naked wenches, causing himself to be drawn by
them in pomp, stark naked too. The Emperor Firmus caused his chariot to
be drawn by ostriches of a prodigious size, so that it seemed rather to
fly than roll.
The strangeness of these inventions puts this other fancy in my head:
that it is a kind of pusillanimity in monarchs, and a testimony that they
do not sufficiently understand themselves what they are, when they study
to make themselves honoured and to appear great by excessive expense: it
were indeed excusable in a foreign country, but amongst their own
subjects, where they are in sovereign command, and may do what they
please, it derogates from their dignity the most supreme degree of honour
to which they can arrive: just as, methinks, it is superfluous in a
private gentleman to go finely dressed at home; his house, his
attendants, and his kitchen sufficiently answer for him. The advice that
Isocrates gives his king seems to be grounded upon reason: that he should
be splendid in plate and furniture; forasmuch as it is an expense of
duration that devolves on his successors; and that he should avoid all
magnificences that will in a short time be forgotten. I loved to go fine
when I was a younger brother, for want of other ornament; and it became
me well: there are some upon whom their rich clothes weep: We have
strange stories of the frugality of our kings about their own persons and
in their gifts: kings who were great in reputation, valour, and fortune.
Demosthenes vehemently opposes the law of his city that assigned the
public money for the pomp of their public plays and festivals: he would
that their greatness should be seen in numbers of ships well equipped,
and good armies well provided for; and there is good reason to condemn
Theophrastus, who, in his Book on Riches, establishes a contrary opinion,
and maintains that sort of expense to be the true fruit of abundance.
They are delights, says Aristotle, that a only please the baser sort of
the people, and that vanish from the memory as soon as the people are
sated with them, and for which no serious and judicious man can have any
esteem. This money would, in my opinion, be much more royally, as more
profitably, justly, and durably, laid out in ports, havens, walls, and
fortifications; in sumptuous buildings, churches, hospitals, colleges,
the reforming of streets and highways: wherein Pope Gregory XIII. will
leave a laudable memory to future times: and wherein our Queen Catherine
would to long posterity manifest her natural liberality and munificence,
did her means supply her affection. Fortune has done me a great despite
in interrupting the noble structure of the Pont-Neuf of our great city,
and depriving me of the hope of seeing it finished before I die.
Moreover, it seems to subjects, who are spectators of these triumphs,
that their own riches are exposed before them, and that they are
entertained at their own expense: for the people are apt to presume of
kings, as we do of our servants, that they are to take care to provide us
all things necessary in abundance, but not touch it themselves; and
therefore the Emperor Galba, being pleased with a musician who played to
him at supper, called for his money-box, and gave him a handful of crowns
that he took out of it, with these words: “This is not the public money,
but my own.” Yet it so falls out that the people, for the most part,
have reason on their side, and that the princes feed their eyes with what
they have need of to fill their bellies.
Liberality itself is not in its true lustre in a sovereign hand: private
men have therein the most right; for, to take it exactly, a king has
nothing properly his own; he owes himself to others: authority is not
given in favour of the magistrate, but of the people; a superior is never
made so for his own profit, but for the profit of the inferior, and a
physician for the sick person, and not for himself: all magistracy, as
well as all art, has its end out of itself wherefore the tutors of young
princes, who make it their business to imprint in them this virtue of
liberality, and preach to them to deny nothing and to think nothing so
well spent as what they give (a doctrine that I have known in great
credit in my time), either have more particular regard to their own
profit than to that of their master, or ill understand to whom they
speak. It is too easy a thing to inculcate liberality on him who has as
much as he will to practise it with at the expense of others; and, the
estimate not being proportioned to the measure of the gift but to the
measure of the means of him who gives it, it comes to nothing in so
mighty hands; they find themselves prodigal before they can be reputed
liberal. And it is but a little recommendation, in comparison with other
royal virtues: and the only one, as the tyrant Dionysius said, that suits
well with tyranny itself. I should rather teach him this verse of the
ancient labourer:
[“That whoever will have a good crop must sow with his hand, and not
pour out of the sack.”--Plutarch, Apothegms, Whether the Ancients
were more excellent in Arms than in Learning.]
he must scatter it abroad, and not lay it on a heap in one place: and
that, seeing he is to give, or, to say better, to pay and restore to so
many people according as they have deserved, he ought to be a loyal and
discreet disposer. If the liberality of a prince be without measure or
discretion, I had rather he were covetous.
Royal virtue seems most to consist in justice; and of all the parts of
justice that best denotes a king which accompanies liberality, for this
they have particularly reserved to be performed by themselves, whereas
all other sorts of justice they remit to the administration of others.
An immoderate bounty is a very weak means to acquire for them good will;
it checks more people than it allures:
“Quo in plures usus sis, minus in multos uti possis....
Quid autem est stultius, quam, quod libenter facias,
curare ut id diutius facere non possis;”
[“By how much more you use it to many, by so much less will you be
in a capacity to use it to many more. And what greater folly can
there be than to order it so that what you would willingly do, you
cannot do longer.”--Cicero, De Offic., ii. 15.]
and if it be conferred without due respect of merit, it puts him out of
countenance who receives it, and is received ungraciously. Tyrants have
been sacrificed to the hatred of the people by the hands of those very
men they have unjustly advanced; such kind of men as buffoons, panders,
fiddlers, and such ragamuffins, thinking to assure to themselves the
possession of benefits unduly received, if they manifest to have him in
hatred and disdain of whom they hold them, and in this associate
themselves to the common judgment and opinion.
The subjects of a prince excessive in gifts grow excessive in asking,
and regulate their demands, not by reason, but by example. We have,
seriously, very often reason to blush at our own impudence: we are
over-paid, according to justice, when the recompense equals our service;
for do we owe nothing of natural obligation to our princes? If he bear
our charges, he does too much; ‘tis enough that he contribute to them:
the overplus is called benefit, which cannot be exacted: for the very
name Liberality sounds of Liberty.
In our fashion it is never done; we never reckon what we have received;
we are only for the future liberality; wherefore, the more a prince
exhausts himself in giving, the poorer he grows in friends. How should
he satisfy immoderate desires, that still increase as they are fulfilled?
He who has his thoughts upon taking, never thinks of what he has taken;
covetousness has nothing so properly and so much its own as ingratitude.
The example of Cyrus will not do amiss in this place, to serve the kings
of these times for a touchstone to know whether their gifts are well or
ill bestowed, and to see how much better that emperor conferred them than
they do, by which means they are reduced to borrow of unknown subjects,
and rather of them whom they have wronged than of them on whom they have
conferred their benefits, and so receive aids wherein there is nothing of
gratuitous but the name. Croesus reproached him with his bounty, and
cast up to how much his treasure would amount if he had been a little
closer-handed. He had a mind to justify his liberality, and therefore
sent despatches into all parts to the grandees of his dominions whom he
had particularly advanced, entreating every one of them to supply him
with as much money as they could, for a pressing occasion, and to send
him particulars of what each could advance. When all these answers were
brought to him, every one of his friends, not thinking it enough barely
to offer him so much as he had received from his bounty, and adding to it
a great deal of his own, it appeared that the sum amounted to a great
deal more than Croesus’ reckoning. Whereupon Cyrus: “I am not,” said he,
“less in love with riches than other princes, but rather a better
husband; you see with how small a venture I have acquired the inestimable
treasure of so many friends, and how much more faithful treasurers they
are to me than mercenary men without obligation, without affection; and
my money better laid up than in chests, bringing upon me the hatred,
envy, and contempt of other princes.”
The emperors excused the superfluity of their plays and public spectacles
by reason that their authority in some sort (at least in outward
appearance) depended upon the will of the people of Rome, who, time out
of mind, had been accustomed to be entertained and caressed with such
shows and excesses. But they were private citizens, who had nourished
this custom to gratify their fellow-citizens and companions (and chiefly
out of their own purses) by such profusion and magnificence it had quite
another taste when the masters came to imitate it:
“Pecuniarum translatio a justis dominis ad alienos
non debet liberalis videri.”
[“The transferring of money from the right owners to strangers
ought not to have the title of liberality.”
--Cicero, De Offic., i. 14.]
Philip, seeing that his son went about by presents to gain the affection
of the Macedonians, reprimanded him in a letter after this manner: “What!
hast thou a mind that thy subjects shall look upon thee as their
cash-keeper and not as their king? Wilt thou tamper with them to win
their affections? Do it, then, by the benefits of thy virtue, and not by
those of thy chest.” And yet it was, doubtless, a fine thing to bring
and plant within the amphitheatre a great number of vast trees, with all
their branches in their full verdure, representing a great shady forest,
disposed in excellent order; and, the first day, to throw into it a
thousand ostriches and a thousand stags, a thousand boars, and a thousand
fallow-deer, to be killed and disposed of by the people: the next day, to
cause a hundred great lions, a hundred leopards, and three hundred bears
to be killed in his presence; and for the third day, to make three
hundred pair of gladiators fight it out to the last, as the Emperor
Probus did. It was also very fine to see those vast amphitheatres, all
faced with marble without, curiously wrought with figures and statues,
and within glittering with rare enrichments:
“Baltheus en! gemmis, en illita porticus auro:”
[“A belt glittering with jewels, and a portico overlaid with gold.”
--Calpurnius, Eclog., vii. 47. A baltheus was a shoulder-belt or
baldric.]
all the sides of this vast space filled and environed, from the bottom to
the top, with three or four score rows of seats, all of marble also, and
covered with cushions:
“Exeat, inquit,
Si pudor est, et de pulvino surgat equestri,
Cujus res legi non sufficit;”
[“Let him go out, he said, if he has any sense of shame, and rise
from the equestrian cushion, whose estate does not satisfy the law.”
--Juvenal, iii. 153. The Equites were required to possess a fortune
of 400 sestertia, and they sat on the first fourteen rows behind the
orchestra.]
where a hundred thousand men might sit at their ease: and, the place
below, where the games were played, to make it, by art, first open and
cleave in chasms, representing caves that vomited out the beasts designed
for the spectacle; and then, secondly, to be overflowed by a deep sea,
full of sea monsters, and laden with ships of war, to represent a naval
battle; and, thirdly, to make it dry and even again for the combat of the
gladiators; and, for the fourth scene, to have it strown with vermilion
grain and storax,--[A resinous gum.]--instead of sand, there to make a
solemn feast for all that infinite number of people: the last act of one
only day:
“Quoties nos descendentis arenae
Vidimus in partes, ruptaque voragine terrae
Emersisse feras, et eisdem saepe latebris
Aurea cum croceo creverunt arbuta libro!....
Nec solum nobis silvestria cernere monstra
Contigit; aequoreos ego cum certantibus ursis
Spectavi vitulos, et equorum nomine dignum,
Sen deforme pecus, quod in illo nascitur amni....”
[“How often have we seen the stage of the theatre descend and part
asunder, and from a chasm in the earth wild beasts emerge, and then
presently give birth to a grove of gilded trees, that put forth
blossoms of enamelled flowers. Nor yet of sylvan marvels alone had
we sight: I saw sea-calves fight with bears, and a deformed sort of
cattle, we might call sea-horses.”--Calpurnius, Eclog., vii. 64.]
Sometimes they made a high mountain advance itself, covered with
fruit-trees and other leafy trees, sending down rivulets of water from
the top, as from the mouth of a fountain: otherwhiles, a great ship was
seen to come rolling in, which opened and divided of itself, and after
having disgorged from the hold four or five hundred beasts for fight,
closed again, and vanished without help. At other times, from the floor
of this place, they made spouts of perfumed water dart their streams
upward, and so high as to sprinkle all that infinite multitude. To
defend themselves from the injuries of the weather, they had that vast
place one while covered over with purple curtains of needlework, and
by-and-by with silk of one or another colour, which they drew off or
on in a moment, as they had a mind:
“Quamvis non modico caleant spectacula sole,
Vela reducuntur, cum venit Hermogenes.”
[“The curtains, though the sun should scorch the spectators, are
drawn in, when Hermogenes appears.”-Martial, xii. 29, 15. M.
Tigellius Hermogenes, whom Horace and others have satirised. One
editor calls him “a noted thief,” another: “He was a literary
amateur of no ability, who expressed his critical opinions with too
great a freedom to please the poets of his day.” D.W.]
The network also that was set before the people to defend them from the
violence of these turned-out beasts was woven of gold:
“Auro quoque torts refulgent
Retia.”
[“The woven nets are refulgent with gold.”
--Calpurnius, ubi supra.]
If there be anything excusable in such excesses as these, it is where the
novelty and invention create more wonder than the expense; even in these
vanities we discover how fertile those ages were in other kind of wits
than these of ours. It is with this sort of fertility, as with all other
products of nature: not that she there and then employed her utmost
force: we do not go; we rather run up and down, and whirl this way and
that; we turn back the way we came. I am afraid our knowledge is weak in
all senses; we neither see far forward nor far backward; our
understanding comprehends little, and lives but a little while; ‘tis
short both in extent of time and extent of matter:
“Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
Mufti, sed omnes illacrymabiles
Urgentur, ignotique longs
Nocte.”
[ Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, but all are pressed by the
long night unmourned and unknown.”--Horace, Od., iv. 9, 25.]
“Et supra bellum Thebanum et funera Trojae
Non alias alii quoque res cecinere poetae?”
[“Why before the Theban war and the destruction of Troy, have not
other poets sung other events?”--Lucretius, v. 327. Montaigne here
diverts himself m giving Lucretius’ words a construction directly
contrary to what they bear in the poem. Lucretius puts the
question, Why if the earth had existed from all eternity, there had
not been poets, before the Theban war, to sing men’s exploits.
--Coste.]
And the narrative of Solon, of what he had learned from the Egyptian
priests, touching the long life of their state, and their manner of
learning and preserving foreign histories, is not, methinks, a testimony
to be refused in this consideration:
“Si interminatam in omnes partes magnitudinem regionum videremus et
temporum, in quam se injiciens animus et intendens, ita late
longeque peregrinatur, ut nullam oram ultimi videat, in qua possit
insistere: in haec immensitate . . . infinita vis innumerabilium
appareret fomorum.”
[“Could we see on all parts the unlimited magnitude of regions and
of times, upon which the mind being intent, could wander so far and
wide, that no limit is to be seen, in which it can bound its eye, we
should, in that infinite immensity, discover an infinite force of
innumerable atoms.” Here also Montaigne puts a sense quite
different from what the words bear in the original; but the
application he makes of them is so happy that one would declare they
were actually put together only to express his own sentiments. “Et
temporum” is an addition by Montaigne.--Coste.]
Though all that has arrived, by report, of our knowledge of times past
should be true, and known by some one person, it would be less than
nothing in comparison of what is unknown. And of this same image of the
world, which glides away whilst we live upon it, how wretched and limited
is the knowledge of the most curious; not only of particular events,
which fortune often renders exemplary and of great concern, but of the
state of great governments and nations, a hundred more escape us than
ever come to our knowledge. We make a mighty business of the invention
of artillery and printing, which other men at the other end of the world,
in China, had a thousand years ago. Did we but see as much of the world
as we do not see, we should perceive, we may well believe, a perpetual
multiplication and vicissitude of forms. There is nothing single and
rare in respect of nature, but in respect of our knowledge, which is a
wretched foundation whereon to ground our rules, and that represents to
us a very false image of things. As we nowadays vainly conclude the
declension and decrepitude of the world, by the arguments we extract from
our own weakness and decay:
“Jamque adeo est affecta aetas effoet aque tellus;”
[“Our age is feeble, and the earth less fertile.”
--Lucretius, ii. 1151.]
so did he vainly conclude as to its birth and youth, by the vigour he
observed in the wits of his time, abounding in novelties and the
invention of divers arts:
“Verum, ut opinor, habet novitatem summa, recensque
Natura est mundi, neque pridem exordia coepit
Quare etiam quaedam nunc artes expoliuntur,
Nunc etiam augescunt; nunc addita navigiis sunt
Multa.”
[“But, as I am of opinion, the whole of the world is of recent
origin, nor had its commencement in remote times; wherefore it is
that some arts are still being refined, and some just on the
increase; at present many additions are being made to shipping.”
--Lucretius, v. 331.]
Our world has lately discovered another (and who will assure us that it
is the last of its brothers, since the Daemons, the Sybils, and we
ourselves have been ignorant of this till now?), as large, well-peopled,
and fruitful as this whereon we live and yet so raw and childish, that we
are still teaching it it’s a B C: ‘tis not above fifty years since it
knew neither letters, weights, measures, vestments, corn, nor vines: it
was then quite naked in the mother’s lap, and only lived upon what she
gave it. If we rightly conclude of our end, and this poet of the
youthfulness of that age of his, that other world will only enter into
the light when this of ours shall make its exit; the universe will fall
into paralysis; one member will be useless, the other in vigour. I am
very much afraid that we have greatly precipitated its declension and
ruin by our contagion; and that we have sold it opinions and our arts at
a very dear rate. It was an infant world, and yet we have not whipped
and subjected it to our discipline by the advantage of our natural worth
and force, neither have we won it by our justice and goodness, nor
subdued it by our magnanimity. Most of their answers, and the
negotiations we have had with them, witness that they were nothing behind
us in pertinency and clearness of natural understanding. The astonishing
magnificence of the cities of Cusco and Mexico, and, amongst many other
things, the garden of the king, where all the trees, fruits, and plants,
according to the order and stature they have in a garden, were
excellently formed in gold; as, in his cabinet, were all the animals bred
upon his territory and in its seas; and the beauty of their manufactures,
in jewels, feathers, cotton, and painting, gave ample proof that they
were as little inferior to us in industry. But as to what concerns
devotion, observance of the laws, goodness, liberality, loyalty, and
plain dealing, it was of use to us that we had not so much as they; for
they have lost, sold, and betrayed themselves by this advantage over us.
As to boldness and courage, stability, constancy against pain, hunger,
and death, I should not fear to oppose the examples I find amongst them
to the most famous examples of elder times that we find in our records on
this side of the world. Far as to those who subdued them, take but away
the tricks and artifices they practised to gull them, and the just
astonishment it was to those nations to see so sudden and unexpected an
arrival of men with beards, differing in language, religion, shape, and
countenance, from so remote a part of the world, and where they had never
heard there was any habitation, mounted upon great unknown monsters,
against those who had not only never seen a horse, but had never seen any
other beast trained up to carry a man or any other loading; shelled in a
hard and shining skin, with a cutting and glittering weapon in his hand,
against them, who, out of wonder at the brightness of a looking glass or
a knife, would exchange great treasures of gold and pearl; and who had
neither knowledge, nor matter with which, at leisure, they could
penetrate our steel: to which may be added the lightning and thunder of
our cannon and harquebuses, enough to frighten Caesar himself, if
surprised, with so little experience, against people naked, except where
the invention of a little quilted cotton was in use, without other arms,
at the most, than bows, stones, staves, and bucklers of wood; people
surprised under colour of friendship and good faith, by the curiosity of
seeing strange and unknown things; take but away, I say, this disparity
from the conquerors, and you take away all the occasion of so many
victories. When I look upon that in vincible ardour wherewith so many
thousands of men, women, and children so often presented and threw
themselves into inevitable dangers for the defence of their gods and
liberties; that generous obstinacy to suffer all extremities and
difficulties, and death itself, rather than submit to the dominion of
those by whom they had been so shamefully abused; and some of them
choosing to die of hunger and fasting, being prisoners, rather than to
accept of nourishment from the hands of their so basely victorious
enemies: I see, that whoever would have attacked them upon equal terms of
arms, experience, and number, would have had a hard, and, peradventure,
a harder game to play than in any other war we have seen.
Why did not so noble a conquest fall under Alexander, or the ancient
Greeks and Romans; and so great a revolution and mutation of so many
empires and nations, fall into hands that would have gently levelled,
rooted up, and made plain and smooth whatever was rough and savage
amongst them, and that would have cherished and propagated the good seeds
that nature had there produced; mixing not only with the culture of land
and the ornament of cities, the arts of this part of the world, in what
was necessary, but also the Greek and Roman virtues, with those that were
original of the country? What a reparation had it been to them, and what
a general good to the whole world, had our first examples and deportments
in those parts allured those people to the admiration and imitation of
virtue, and had begotten betwixt them and us a fraternal society and
intelligence? How easy had it been to have made advantage of souls so
innocent, and so eager to learn, leaving, for the most part, naturally so
good inclinations before? Whereas, on the contrary, we have taken
advantage of their ignorance and inexperience, with greater ease to
incline them to treachery, luxury, avarice, and towards all sorts of
inhumanity and cruelty, by the pattern and example of our manners. Who
ever enhanced the price of merchandise at such a rate? So many cities
levelled with the ground, so many nations exterminated, so many millions
of people fallen by the edge of the sword, and the richest and most
beautiful part of the world turned upside down, for the traffic of pearl
and pepper? Mechanic victories! Never did ambition, never did public
animosities, engage men against one another in such miserable
hostilities, in such miserable calamities.
Certain Spaniards, coasting the sea in quest of their mines, landed in a
fruitful and pleasant and very well peopled country, and there made to
the inhabitants their accustomed professions: “that they were peaceable
men, who were come from a very remote country, and sent on the behalf of
the King of Castile, the greatest prince of the habitable world, to whom
the Pope, God’s vicegerent upon earth, had given the principality of all
the Indies; that if they would become tributaries to him, they should be
very gently and courteously used”; at the same time requiring of them
victuals for their nourishment, and gold whereof to make some pretended
medicine; setting forth, moreover, the belief in one only God, and the
truth of our religion, which they advised them to embrace, whereunto they
also added some threats. To which they received this answer: “That as to
their being peaceable, they did not seem to be such, if they were so.
As to their king, since he was fain to beg, he must be necessitous and
poor; and he who had made him this gift, must be a man who loved
dissension, to give that to another which was none of his own, to bring
it into dispute against the ancient possessors. As to victuals, they
would supply them; that of gold they had little; it being a thing they
had in very small esteem, as of no use to the service of life, whereas
their only care was to pass it over happily and pleasantly: but that what
they could find excepting what was employed in the service of their gods,
they might freely take. As to one only God, the proposition had pleased
them well; but that they would not change their religion, both because
they had so long and happily lived in it, and that they were not wont to
take advice of any but their friends, and those they knew: as to their
menaces, it was a sign of want of judgment to threaten those whose nature
and power were to them unknown; that, therefore, they were to make haste
to quit their coast, for they were not used to take the civilities and
professions of armed men and strangers in good part; otherwise they
should do by them as they had done by those others,” showing them the
heads of several executed men round the walls of their city. A fair
example of the babble of these children. But so it is, that the
Spaniards did not, either in this or in several other places, where they
did not find the merchandise they sought, make any stay or attempt,
whatever other conveniences were there to be had; witness my CANNIBALS.
--[Chapter XXX. of Book I.]
Of the two most puissant monarchs of that world, and, peradventure, of
this, kings of so many kings, and the last they turned out, he of Peru,
having been taken in a battle, and put to so excessive a ransom as
exceeds all belief, and it being faithfully paid, and he having, by his
conversation, given manifest signs of a frank, liberal, and constant
spirit, and of a clear and settled understanding, the conquerors had a
mind, after having exacted one million three hundred and twenty-five
thousand and five hundred weight of gold, besides silver, and other
things which amounted to no less (so that their horses were shod with
massy gold), still to see, at the price of what disloyalty and injustice
whatever, what the remainder of the treasures of this king might be, and
to possess themselves of that also. To this end a false accusation was
preferred against him, and false witnesses brought to prove that he went
about to raise an insurrection in his provinces, to procure his own
liberty; whereupon, by the virtuous sentence of those very men who had by
this treachery conspired his ruin, he was condemned to be publicly hanged
and strangled, after having made him buy off the torment of being burnt
alive, by the baptism they gave him immediately before execution; a
horrid and unheard of barbarity, which, nevertheless, he underwent
without giving way either in word or look, with a truly grave and royal
behaviour. After which, to calm and appease the people, aroused and
astounded at so strange a thing, they counterfeited great sorrow for his
death, and appointed most sumptuous funerals.
The other king of Mexico,--[Guatimosin]--having for a long time defended
his beleaguered city, and having in this siege manifested the utmost of
what suffering and perseverance can do, if ever prince and people did,
and his misfortune having delivered him alive into his enemies’ hands,
upon articles of being treated like a king, neither did he in his
captivity discover anything unworthy of that title. His enemies, after
their victory, not finding so much gold as they expected, when they had
searched and rifled with their utmost diligence, they went about to
procure discoveries by the most cruel torments they could invent upon the
prisoners they had taken: but having profited nothing by these, their
courage being greater than their torments, they arrived at last to such a
degree of fury, as, contrary to their faith and the law of nations, to
condemn the king himself, and one of the principal noblemen of his court,
to the rack, in the presence of one another. This lord, finding himself
overcome with pain, being environed with burning coals, pitifully turned
his dying eyes towards his master, as it were to ask him pardon that he
was able to endure no more; whereupon the king, darting at him a fierce
and severe look, as reproaching his cowardice and pusillanimity, with a
harsh and constant voice said to him thus only: “And what dost thou think
I suffer? am I in a bath? am I more at ease than thou?” Whereupon the
other immediately quailed under the torment and died upon the spot. The
king, half roasted, was carried thence; not so much out of pity (for what
compassion ever touched so barbarous souls, who, upon the doubtful
information of some vessel of gold to be made a prey of, caused not only
a man, but a king, so great in fortune and desert, to be broiled before
their eyes), but because his constancy rendered their cruelty still more
shameful. They afterwards hanged him for having nobly attempted to
deliver himself by arms from so long a captivity and subjection, and he
died with a courage becoming so magnanimous a prince.
Another time, they burnt in the same fire four hundred and sixty men
alive at once, the four hundred of the common people, the sixty the
principal lords of a province, simply prisoners of war. We have these
narratives from themselves for they not only own it, but boast of it and
publish it. Could it be for a testimony of their justice or their zeal
to religion? Doubtless these are ways too differing and contrary to so
holy an end. Had they proposed to themselves to extend our faith, they
would have considered that it does not amplify in the possession of
territories, but in the gaining of men; and would have more than
satisfied themselves with the slaughters occasioned by the necessity of
war, without indifferently mixing a massacre, as upon wild beasts, as
universal as fire and sword could make it; having only, by intention,
saved so many as they meant to make miserable slaves of, for the work and
service of their mines; so that many of the captains were put to death
upon the place of conquest, by order of the kings of Castile, justly
offended with the horror of their deportment, and almost all of them
hated and disesteemed. God meritoriously permitted that all this great
plunder should be swallowed up by the sea in transportation, or in the
civil wars wherewith they devoured one another; and most of the men
themselves were buried in a foreign land without any fruit of their
victory.
That the revenue from these countries, though in the hands of so
parsimonious and so prudent a prince,--[Phillip II.]--so little answers
the expectation given of it to his predecessors, and to that original
abundance of riches which was found at the first landing in those new
discovered countries (for though a great deal be fetched thence, yet we
see ‘tis nothing in comparison of that which might be expected), is that
the use of coin was there utterly unknown, and that consequently their
gold was found all hoarded together, being of no other use but for
ornament and show, as a furniture reserved from father to son by many
puissant kings, who were ever draining their mines to make this vast heap
of vessels and statues for the decoration of their palaces and temples;
whereas our gold is always in motion and traffic; we cut it into a
thousand small pieces, and cast it into a thousand forms, and scatter and
disperse it in a thousand ways. But suppose our kings should thus hoard
up all the gold they could get in several ages and let it lie idle by
them.
Those of the kingdom of Mexico were in some sort more civilised and more
advanced in arts than the other nations about them. Therefore did they
judge, as we do, that the world was near its period, and looked upon the
desolation we brought amongst them as a certain sign of it. They
believed that the existence of the world was divided into five ages, and
in the life of five successive suns, of which four had already ended
their time, and that this which gave them light was the fifth. The first
perished, with all other creatures, by an universal inundation of water;
the second by the heavens falling upon us and suffocating every living
thing to which age they assigned the giants, and showed bones to the
Spaniards, according to the proportion of which the stature of men
amounted to twenty feet; the third by fire, which burned and consumed
all; the fourth by an emotion of the air and wind, which came with such
violence as to beat down even many mountains, wherein the men died not,
but were turned into baboons. What impressions will not the weakness of
human belief admit? After the death of this fourth sun, the world was
twenty-five years in perpetual darkness: in the fifteenth of which a man
and a woman were created, who restored the human race: ten years after,
upon a certain day, the sun appeared newly created, and since the account
of their year takes beginning from that day: the third day after its
creation the ancient gods died, and the new ones were since born daily.
After what manner they think this last sun shall perish, my author knows
not; but their number of this fourth change agrees with the great
conjunction of stars which eight hundred and odd years ago, as
astrologers suppose, produced great alterations and novelties in the
world.
As to pomp and magnificence, upon the account of which I engaged in this
discourse, neither Greece, Rome, nor Egypt, whether for utility,
difficulty, or state, can compare any of their works with the highway to
be seen in Peru, made by the kings of the country, from the city of Quito
to that of Cusco (three hundred leagues), straight, even, five-and-twenty
paces wide, paved, and provided on both sides with high and beautiful
walls; and close by them, and all along on the inside, two perennial
streams, bordered with beautiful plants, which they call moly. In this
work, where they met with rocks and mountains, they cut them through, and
made them even, and filled up pits and valleys with lime and stone to
make them level. At the end of every day’s journey are beautiful
palaces, furnished with provisions, vestments, and arms, as well for
travellers as for the armies that are to pass that way. In the estimate
of this work I have reckoned the difficulty which is especially
considerable in that place; they did not build with any stones less than
ten feet square, and had no other conveniency of carriage but by drawing
their load themselves by force of arm, and knew not so much as the art of
scaffolding, nor any other way of standing to their work, but by throwing
up earth against the building as it rose higher, taking it away again
when they had done.
Let us here return to our coaches. Instead of these, and of all other
sorts of carriages, they caused themselves to be carried upon men’s
shoulders. This last king of Peru, the day that he was taken, was thus
carried betwixt two upon staves of gold, and set in a chair of gold in
the middle of his army. As many of these sedan-men as were killed to
make him fall (for they would take him alive), so many others (and they
contended for it) took the place of those who were slain, so that they
could never beat him down, what slaughter soever they made of these
people, till a horseman, seizing upon him, brought him to the ground.
CHAPTER VII
OF THE INCONVENIENCE OF GREATNESS
Since we cannot attain unto it, let us revenge our selves by railing at
it; and yet it is not absolutely railing against anything to proclaim its
defects, because they are in all things to be found, how beautiful or how
much to be coveted soever. Greatness has, in general, this manifest
advantage, that it can lower itself when it pleases, and has, very near,
the choice of both the one and the other condition; for a man does not
fall from all heights; there are several from which one may descend
without falling down. It does, indeed, appear to me that we value it at
too high a rate, and also overvalue the resolution of those whom we have
either seen or heard have contemned it, or displaced themselves of their
own accord: its essence is not so evidently commodious that a man may
not, with out a miracle, refuse it. I find it a very hard thing to
undergo misfortunes, but to be content with a moderate measure of
fortune, and to avoid greatness, I think a very easy matter. ‘Tis,
methinks, a virtue to which I, who am no conjuror, could without any
great endeavour arrive. What, then, is to be expected from them that
would yet put into consideration the glory attending this refusal,
wherein there may lurk worse ambition than even in the desire itself,
and fruition of greatness? Forasmuch as ambition never comports itself
better, according to itself, than when it proceeds by obscure and
unfrequented ways.
I incite my courage to patience, but I rein it as much as I can towards
desire. I have as much to wish for as another, and allow my wishes as
much liberty and indiscretion; but yet it never befell me to wish for
either empire or royalty, or the eminency of those high and commanding
fortunes: I do not aim that way; I love myself too well. When I think to
grow greater, ‘tis but very moderately, and by a compelled and timorous
advancement, such as is proper for me in resolution, in prudence, in
health, in beauty, and even in riches too; but this supreme reputation,
this mighty authority, oppress my imagination; and, quite contrary to
that other,--[Julius Caesar.]--I should, peradventure, rather choose to
be the second or third in Perigord than the first at Paris at least,
without lying, rather the third at Paris than the first. I would neither
dispute with a porter, a miserable unknown, nor make crowds open in
adoration as I pass. I am trained up to a moderate condition, as well by
my choice as fortune; and have made it appear, in the whole conduct of my
life and enterprises, that I have rather avoided than otherwise the
climbing above the degree of fortune wherein God has placed me by my
birth; all natural constitution is equally just and easy. My soul is
such a poltroon, that I measure not good fortune by the height, but by
the facility.
But if my heart be not great enough, ‘tis open enough to make amends, at
any one’s request, freely to lay open its weakness. Should any one put
me upon comparing the life of L. Thorius Balbus, a brave man, handsome,
learned, healthful, understanding, and abounding in all sorts of
conveniences and pleasures, leading a quiet life, and all his own, his
mind well prepared against death, superstition, pain, and other
incumbrances of human necessity, dying, at last, in battle, with his
sword in his hand, for the defence of his country, on the one part; and
on the other part, the life of M. Regulus, so great and high as is known
to every one, and his end admirable; the one without name and without
dignity, the other exemplary and glorious to a wonder. I should
doubtless say, as Cicero did, could I speak as well as he.
[Cicero, De Finibus, ii. 20, gives the preference to Regulus, and
proclaims him the happier man.]
But if I was to compare them with my own, I should then also say that the
first is as much according to my capacity, and from desire, which I
conform to my capacity, as the second is far beyond it; that I could not
approach the last but with veneration, the other I could readily attain
by use.
Let us return to our temporal greatness, from which we are digressed. I
disrelish all dominion, whether active or passive. Otanes, one of the
seven who had right to pretend to the kingdom of Persia, did as I should
willingly have done, which was, that he gave up to his competitors his
right of being promoted to it, either by election or by lot, provided
that he and his might live in the empire out of all authority and
subjection, those of the ancient laws excepted, and might enjoy all
liberty that was not prejudicial to these, being as impatient of
commanding as of being commanded.
The most painful and difficult employment in the world, in my opinion, is
worthily to discharge the office of a king. I excuse more of their
mistakes than men commonly do, in consideration of the intolerable weight
of their function, which astounds me. ‘Tis hard to keep measure in so
immeasurable a power; yet so it is that it is, even to those who are not
of the best nature, a singular incitement to virtue to be seated in a
place where you cannot do the least good that shall not be put upon
record, and where the least benefit redounds to so many men, and where
your talent of administration, like that of preachers, principally
addresses itself to the people, no very exact judge, easy to deceive, and
easily content. There are few things wherein we can give a sincere
judgment, by reason that there are few wherein we have not, in some sort,
a private interest. Superiority and inferiority, dominion and subjection
are bound to a natural envy and contest, and must of necessity
perpetually intrench upon one another. I believe neither the one nor the
other touching the rights of the other party; let reason therefore, which
is inflexible and without passion, determine when we can avail ourselves
of it. ‘Tis not above a month ago that I read over, two Scottish authors
contending upon this subject, of whom he who stands for the people makes
the king to be in a worse condition than a carter; he who writes for
monarchy places him some degrees above God in power and sovereignty.
Now, the incommodity of greatness that I have taken to remark in this
place, upon some occasion that has lately put it into my head, is this:
there is not, peradventure, anything more pleasant in the commerce of
many than the trials that we make against one another, out of emulation
of honour and worth, whether in the exercises of the body or in those of
the mind, wherein sovereign greatness can have no true part. And, in
earnest, I have often thought that by force of respect itself men use
princes disdainfully and injuriously in that particular; for the thing I
was infinitely offended at in my childhood, that they who exercised with
me forbore to do their best because they found me unworthy of their
utmost endeavour, is what we see happen to them daily, every one finding
himself unworthy to contend with them. If we discover that they have the
least desire to get the better of us, there is no one who will not make
it his business to give it them, and who will not rather betray his own
glory than offend theirs; and will therein employ so much force only as
is necessary to save their honour. What share have they, then, in the
engagement, where every one is on their side? Methinks I see those
paladins of ancient times presenting themselves to jousts and battle with
enchanted arms and bodies. Brisson,
[Plutarch, On Satisfaction or Tranquillity of the Mind. But in his
essay, How a Man may Distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend, he calls
him Chriso.]
running against Alexander, purposely missed his blow, and made a fault in
his career; Alexander chid him for it, but he ought to have had him
whipped. Upon this consideration Carneades said, that “the sons of
princes learned nothing right but to manage horses; by reason that, in
all their other exercises, every one bends and yields to them; but a
horse, that is neither a flatterer nor a courtier, throws the son of a
king with no more ceremony than he would throw that of a porter.”
Homer was fain to consent that Venus, so sweet and delicate a goddess as
she was, should be wounded at the battle of Troy, thereby to ascribe
courage and boldness to her qualities that cannot possibly be in those
who are exempt from danger. The gods are made to be angry, to fear, to
run away, to be jealous, to grieve, to be transported with passions, to
honour them with the virtues that, amongst us, are built upon these
imperfections. Who does not participate in the hazard and difficulty, can
claim no interest in the honour and pleasure that are the consequents of
hazardous actions. ‘Tis pity a man should be so potent that all things
must give way to him; fortune therein sets you too remote from society,
and places you in too great a solitude. This easiness and mean facility
of making all things bow under you, is an enemy to all sorts of pleasure:
‘tis to slide, not to go; ‘tis to sleep, and not to live. Conceive man
accompanied with omnipotence: you overwhelm him; he must beg disturbance
and opposition as an alms: his being and his good are in indigence. Evil
to man is in its turn good, and good evil. Neither is pain always to be
shunned, nor pleasure always to be pursued.
Their good qualities are dead and lost; for they can only be perceived by
comparison, and we put them out of this: they have little knowledge of
true praise, having their ears deafened with so continual and uniform an
approbation. Have they to do with the stupidest of all their subjects?
they have no means to take any advantage of him; if he but say: “‘Tis
because he is my king,” he thinks he has said enough to express that he
therefore suffered himself to be overcome. This quality stifles and
consumes the other true and essential qualities: they are sunk in the
royalty, and leave them nothing to recommend themselves with but actions
that directly concern and serve the function of their place; ‘tis so much
to be a king, that this alone remains to them. The outer glare that
environs him conceals and shrouds him from us; our sight is there
repelled and dissipated, being filled and stopped by this prevailing
light. The senate awarded the prize of eloquence to Tiberius; he refused
it, esteeming that though it had been just, he could derive no advantage
from a judgment so partial, and that was so little free to judge.
As we give them all advantages of honour, so do we soothe and authorise
all their vices and defects, not only by approbation, but by imitation
also. Every one of Alexander’s followers carried his head on one side,
as he did; and the flatterers of Dionysius ran against one another in his
presence, and stumbled at and overturned whatever was under foot, to shew
they were as purblind as he. Hernia itself has also served to recommend
a man to favour; I have seen deafness affected; and because the master
hated his wife, Plutarch--[who, however, only gives one instance; and in
this he tells us that the man visited his wife privately.]--has seen his
courtiers repudiate theirs, whom they loved; and, which is yet more,
uncleanliness and all manner of dissoluteness have so been in fashion; as
also disloyalty, blasphemy, cruelty, heresy, superstition, irreligion,
effeminacy, and worse, if worse there be; and by an example yet more
dangerous than that of Mithridates’ flatterers, who, as their master
pretended to the honour of a good physician, came to him to have
incisions and cauteries made in their limbs; for these others suffered
the soul, a more delicate and noble part, to be cauterised.
But to end where I began: the Emperor Adrian, disputing with the
philosopher Favorinus about the interpretation of some word, Favorinus
soon yielded him the victory; for which his friends rebuking him, “You
talk simply,” said he; “would you not have him wiser than I, who commands
thirty legions?” Augustus wrote verses against Asinius Pollio, and “I,”
said Pollio, “say nothing, for it is not prudence to write in contest
with him who has power to proscribe.” And they were right. For
Dionysius, because he could not equal Philoxenus in poesy and Plato in
discourse, condemned the one to the quarries, and sent the other to be
sold for a slave into the island of AEgina.
CHAPTER VIII
OF THE ART OF CONFERENCE
‘Tis a custom of our justice to condemn some for a warning to others. To
condemn them for having done amiss, were folly, as Plato says,
[Diogenes Laertius, however, in his Life of Plato, iii. 181, says
that Plato’s offence was the speaking too freely to the tyrant.]
for what is done can never be undone; but ‘tis to the end they may offend
no more, and that others may avoid the example of their offence: we do
not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him. I do the same; my
errors are sometimes natural, incorrigible, and irremediable: but the
good which virtuous men do to the public, in making themselves imitated,
I, peradventure, may do in making my manners avoided:
“Nonne vides, Albi ut male vivat filius? utque
Barrus inops? magnum documentum, ne patriam rein
Perdere guis velit;”
[“Dost thou not see how ill the son of Albus lives? and how the
indigent Barrus? a great warning lest any one should incline to
dissipate his patrimony.”--Horace, Sat., i. 4, 109.]
publishing and accusing my own imperfections, some one will learn to be
afraid of them. The parts that I most esteem in myself, derive more
honour from decrying, than for commending myself which is the reason why
I so often fall into, and so much insist upon that strain. But, when all
is summed up, a man never speaks of himself without loss; a man’s
accusations of himself are always believed; his praises never: There may,
peradventure, be some of my own complexion who better instruct myself by
contrariety than by similitude, and by avoiding than by imitation. The
elder Cato was regarding this sort of discipline, when he said, “that the
wise may learn more of fools, than fools can of the wise”; and Pausanias
tells us of an ancient player upon the harp, who was wont to make his
scholars go to hear one who played very ill, who lived over against him,
that they might learn to hate his discords and false measures. The
horror of cruelty more inclines me to clemency, than any example of
clemency could possibly do. A good rider does not so much mend my seat,
as an awkward attorney or a Venetian, on horseback; and a clownish way of
speaking more reforms mine than the most correct. The ridiculous and
simple look of another always warns and advises me; that which pricks,
rouses and incites much better than that which tickles. The time is now
proper for us to reform backward; more by dissenting than by agreeing; by
differing more than by consent. Profiting little by good examples, I
make use of those that are ill, which are everywhere to be found: I
endeavour to render myself as agreeable as I see others offensive; as
constant as I see others fickle; as affable as I see others rough; as
good as I see others evil: but I propose to myself impracticable
measures.
The most fruitful and natural exercise of the mind, in my opinion, is
conversation; I find the use of it more sweet than of any other action of
life; and for that reason it is that, if I were now compelled to choose,
I should sooner, I think, consent to lose my sight, than my hearing and
speech. The Athenians, and also the Romans, kept this exercise in great
honour in their academies; the Italians retain some traces of it to this
day, to their great advantage, as is manifest by the comparison of our
understandings with theirs. The study of books is a languishing and
feeble motion that heats not, whereas conversation teaches and exercises
at once. If I converse with a strong mind and a rough disputant, he
presses upon my flanks, and pricks me right and left; his imaginations
stir up mine; jealousy, glory, and contention, stimulate and raise me up
to something above myself; and acquiescence is a quality altogether
tedious in discourse. But, as our mind fortifies itself by the
communication of vigorous and regular understandings, ‘tis not to be
expressed how much it loses and degenerates by the continual commerce and
familiarity we have with mean and weak spirits; there is no contagion
that spreads like that; I know sufficiently by experience what ‘tis worth
a yard. I love to discourse and dispute, but it is with but few men, and
for myself; for to do it as a spectacle and entertainment to great
persons, and to make of a man’s wit and words competitive parade is, in
my opinion, very unbecoming a man of honour.
Folly is a bad quality; but not to be able to endure it, to fret and vex
at it, as I do, is another sort of disease little less troublesome than
folly itself; and is the thing that I will now accuse in myself. I enter
into conference, and dispute with great liberty and facility, forasmuch
as opinion meets in me with a soil very unfit for penetration, and
wherein to take any deep root; no propositions astonish me, no belief
offends me, though never so contrary to my own; there is no so frivolous
and extravagant fancy that does not seem to me suitable to the production
of human wit. We, who deprive our judgment of the right of determining,
look indifferently upon the diverse opinions, and if we incline not our
judgment to them, yet we easily give them the hearing: Where one scale is
totally empty, I let the other waver under an old wife’s dreams; and I
think myself excusable, if I prefer the odd number; Thursday rather than
Friday; if I had rather be the twelfth or fourteenth than the thirteenth
at table; if I had rather, on a journey, see a hare run by me than cross
my way, and rather give my man my left foot than my right, when he comes
to put on my stockings. All such reveries as are in credit around us,
deserve at least a hearing: for my part, they only with me import
inanity, but they import that. Moreover, vulgar and casual opinions are
something more than nothing in nature; and he who will not suffer himself
to proceed so far, falls, peradventure, into the vice of obstinacy, to
avoid that of superstition.
The contradictions of judgments, then, neither offend nor alter, they
only rouse and exercise, me. We evade correction, whereas we ought to
offer and present ourselves to it, especially when it appears in the form
of conference, and not of authority. At every opposition, we do not
consider whether or no it be dust, but, right or wrong, how to disengage
ourselves: instead of extending the arms, we thrust out our claws. I
could suffer myself to be rudely handled by my friend, so much as to tell
me that I am a fool, and talk I know not of what. I love stout
expressions amongst gentle men, and to have them speak as they think; we
must fortify and harden our hearing against this tenderness of the
ceremonious sound of words. I love a strong and manly familiarity and
conversation: a friendship that pleases itself in the sharpness and
vigour of its communication, like love in biting and scratching: it is
not vigorous and generous enough, if it be not quarrelsome, if it be
civilised and artificial, if it treads nicely and fears the shock:
“Neque enim disputari sine reprehensione potest.”
[“Neither can a man dispute, but he must contradict.”
(Or:) “Nor can people dispute without reprehension.”
--Cicero, De Finib., i. 8.]
When any one contradicts me, he raises my attention, not my anger: I
advance towards him who controverts, who instructs me; the cause of truth
ought to be the common cause both of the one and the other. What will
the angry man answer? Passion has already confounded his judgment;
agitation has usurped the place of reason. It were not amiss that the
decision of our disputes should pass by wager: that there might be a
material mark of our losses, to the end we might the better remember
them; and that my man might tell me: “Your ignorance and obstinacy cost
you last year, at several times, a hundred crowns.” I hail and caress
truth in what quarter soever I find it, and cheerfully surrender myself,
and open my conquered arms as far off as I can discover it; and, provided
it be not too imperiously, take a pleasure in being reproved, and
accommodate myself to my accusers, very often more by reason of civility
than amendment, loving to gratify and nourish the liberty of admonition
by my facility of submitting to it, and this even at my own expense.
Nevertheless, it is hard to bring the men of my time to it: they have not
the courage to correct, because they have not the courage to suffer
themselves to be corrected; and speak always with dissimulation in the
presence of one another: I take so great a pleasure in being judged and
known, that it is almost indifferent to me in which of the two forms I am
so: my imagination so often contradicts and condemns itself, that ‘tis
all one to me if another do it, especially considering that I give his
reprehension no greater authority than I choose; but I break with him,
who carries himself so high, as I know of one who repents his advice,
if not believed, and takes it for an affront if it be not immediately
followed. That Socrates always received smilingly the contradictions
offered to his arguments, a man may say arose from his strength of
reason; and that, the advantage being certain to fall on his side, he
accepted them as a matter of new victory. But we see, on the contrary,
that nothing in argument renders our sentiment so delicate, as the
opinion of pre-eminence, and disdain of the adversary; and that, in
reason, ‘tis rather for the weaker to take in good part the oppositions
that correct him and set him right. In earnest, I rather choose the
company of those who ruffle me than of those who fear me; ‘tis a dull and
hurtful pleasure to have to do with people who admire us and approve of
all we say. Antisthenes commanded his children never to take it kindly
or for a favour, when any man commended them. I find I am much prouder
of the victory I obtain over myself, when, in the very ardour of dispute,
I make myself submit to my adversary’s force of reason, than I am pleased
with the victory I obtain over him through his weakness. In fine, I
receive and admit of all manner of attacks that are direct, how weak
soever; but I am too impatient of those that are made out of form. I
care not what the subject is, the opinions are to me all one, and I am
almost indifferent whether I get the better or the worse. I can
peaceably argue a whole day together, if the argument be carried on with
method; I do not so much require force and subtlety as order; I mean the
order which we every day observe in the wranglings of shepherds and
shop-boys, but never amongst us: if they start from their subject, ‘tis
out of incivility, and so ‘tis with us; but their tumult and impatience
never put them out of their theme; their argument still continues its
course; if they interrupt, and do not stay for one another, they at least
understand one another. Any one answers too well for me, if he answers
what I say: when the dispute is irregular and disordered, I leave the
thing itself, and insist upon the form with anger and indiscretion;
falling into wilful, malicious, and imperious way of disputation, of
which I am afterwards ashamed. ‘Tis impossible to deal fairly with a
fool: my judgment is not only corrupted under the hand of so impetuous a
master, but my conscience also.
Our disputes ought to be interdicted and punished as well as other verbal
crimes: what vice do they not raise and heap up, being always governed
and commanded by passion? We first quarrel with their reasons, and then
with the men. We only learn to dispute that we may contradict; and so,
every one contradicting and being contradicted, it falls out that the
fruit of disputation is to lose and annihilate truth. Therefore it is
that Plato in his Republic prohibits this exercise to fools and ill-bred
people. To what end do you go about to inquire of him, who knows nothing
to the purpose? A man does no injury to the subject, when he leaves it
to seek how he may treat it; I do not mean by an artificial and
scholastic way, but by a natural one, with a sound understanding. What
will it be in the end? One flies to the east, the other to the west;
they lose the principal, dispersing it in the crowd of incidents after an
hour of tempest, they know not what they seek: one is low, the other
high, and a third wide. One catches at a word and a simile; another is
no longer sensible of what is said in opposition to him, and thinks only
of going on at his own rate, not of answering you: another, finding
himself too weak to make good his rest, fears all, refuses all, at the
very beginning, confounds the subject; or, in the very height of the
dispute, stops short and is silent, by a peevish ignorance affecting a
proud contempt or a foolishly modest avoidance of further debate:
provided this man strikes, he cares not how much he lays himself open;
the other counts his words, and weighs them for reasons; another only
brawls, and uses the advantage of his lungs. Here’s one who learnedly
concludes against himself, and another who deafens you with prefaces and
senseless digressions: an other falls into downright railing, and seeks a
quarrel after the German fashion, to disengage himself from a wit that
presses too hard upon him: and a last man sees nothing into the reason of
the thing, but draws a line of circumvallation about you of dialectic
clauses, and the formulas of his art.
Now, who would not enter into distrust of sciences, and doubt whether he
can reap from them any solid fruit for the service of life, considering
the use we put them to?
“Nihil sanantibus litteris.”
[“Letters which cure nothing.”--Seneca, Ep., 59.]
Who has got understanding by his logic? Where are all her fair promises?
“Nec ad melius vivendum, nec ad commodius disserendum.”
[“It neither makes a man live better nor talk better.”
--Cicero, De Fin., i. 19.]
Is there more noise or confusion in the scolding of herring-wives than in
the public disputes of men of this profession? I had rather my son
should learn in a tap-house to speak, than in the schools to prate. Take
a master of arts, and confer with him: why does he not make us sensible
of this artificial excellence? and why does he not captivate women and
ignoramuses, as we are, with admiration at the steadiness of his reasons
and the beauty of his order? why does he not sway and persuade us to what
he will? why does a man, who has so much advantage in matter and
treatment, mix railing, indiscretion, and fury in his disputations?
Strip him of his gown, his hood, and his Latin, let him not batter our
ears with Aristotle, pure and simple, you will take him for one of us,
or worse. Whilst they torment us with this complication and confusion of
words, it fares with them, methinks, as with jugglers; their dexterity
imposes upon our senses, but does not at all work upon our belief this
legerdemain excepted, they perform nothing that is not very ordinary and
mean: for being the more learned, they are none the less fools.
[So Hobbes said that if he had read as much as the academical
pedants he should have known as little.]
I love and honour knowledge as much as they that have it, and in its true
use ‘tis the most noble and the greatest acquisition of men; but in such
as I speak of (and the number of them is infinite), who build their
fundamental sufficiency and value upon it, who appeal from their
understanding to their memory:
“Sub aliena umbra latentes,”
[“Sheltering under the shadow of others.”--Seneca, Ep., 33.]
and who can do nothing but by book, I hate it, if I dare to say so, worse
than stupidity. In my country, and in my time, learning improves
fortunes enough, but not minds; if it meet with those that are dull and
heavy, it overcharges and suffocates them, leaving them a crude and
undigested mass; if airy and fine, it purifies, clarifies, and subtilises
them, even to exinanition. ‘Tis a thing of almost indifferent quality;
a very useful accession to a well-born soul, but hurtful and pernicious
to others; or rather a thing of very precious use, that will not suffer
itself to be purchased at an under rate; in the hand of some ‘tis a
sceptre, in that of others a fool’s bauble.
But let us proceed. What greater victory do you expect than to make your
enemy see and know that he is not able to encounter you? When you get
the better of your argument; ‘tis truth that wins; when you get the
advantage of form and method, ‘tis then you who win. I am of opinion that
in, Plato and Xenophon Socrates disputes more in favour of the disputants
than in favour of the dispute, and more to instruct Euthydemus and
Protagoras in the, knowledge of their impertinence, than in the
impertinence of their art. He takes hold of the first subject like one
who has a more profitable end than to explain it--namely, to clear the
understandings that he takes upon him to instruct and exercise. To hunt
after truth is properly our business, and we are inexcusable if we carry
on the chase impertinently and ill; to fail of seizing it is another
thing, for we are born to inquire after truth: it belongs to a greater
power to possess it. It is not, as Democritus said, hid in the bottom of
the deeps, but rather elevated to an infinite height in the divine
knowledge. The world is but a school of inquisition: it is not who shall
enter the ring, but who shall run the best courses. He may as well play
the fool who speaks true, as he who speaks false, for we are upon the
manner, not the matter, of speaking. ‘Tis my humour as much to regard
the form as the substance, and the advocate as much as the cause, as
Alcibiades ordered we should: and every day pass away my time in reading
authors without any consideration of their learning; their manner is what
I look after, not their subject: And just so do I hunt after the
conversation of any eminent wit, not that he may teach me, but that I may
know him, and that knowing him, if I think him worthy of imitation, I may
imitate him. Every man may speak truly, but to speak methodically,
prudently, and fully, is a talent that few men have. The falsity that
proceeds from ignorance does not offend me, but the foppery of it. I
have broken off several treaties that would have been of advantage to
me, by reason of the impertinent contestations of those with whom I
treated. I am not moved once in a year at the faults of those over whom
I have authority, but upon the account of the ridiculous obstinacy of
their allegations, denials, excuses, we are every day going together by
the ears; they neither understand what is said, nor why, and answer
accordingly; ‘tis enough to drive a man mad. I never feel any hurt upon
my head but when ‘tis knocked against another, and more easily forgive
the vices of my servants than their boldness, importunity, and folly; let
them do less, provided they understand what they do: you live in hope to
warm their affection to your service, but there is nothing to be had or
to be expected from a stock.
But what, if I take things otherwise than they are? Perhaps I do; and
therefore it is that I accuse my own impatience, and hold, in the first
place, that it is equally vicious both in him that is in the right, and
in him that is in the wrong; for ‘tis always a tyrannic sourness not to
endure a form contrary to one’s own: and, besides, there cannot, in
truth, be a greater, more constant, nor more irregular folly than to be
moved and angry at the follies of the world, for it principally makes us
quarrel with ourselves; and the old philosopher never wanted an occasion
for his tears whilst he considered himself. Miso, one of the seven
sages, of a Timonian and Democritic humour, being asked, “what he
laughed at, being alone?”--“That I do laugh alone,” answered he. How
many ridiculous things, in my own opinion, do I say and answer every day
that comes over my head? and then how many more, according to the
opinion of others? If I bite my own lips, what ought others to do? In
fine, we must live amongst the living, and let the river run under the
bridge without our care, or, at least, without our interference. In
truth, why do we meet a man with a hunch-back, or any other deformity,
without being moved, and cannot endure the encounter of a deformed mind
without being angry? this vicious sourness sticks more to the judge than
to the crime. Let us always have this saying of Plato in our mouths: “Do
not I think things unsound, because I am not sound in myself? Am I not
myself in fault? may not my observations reflect upon myself?”--a wise
and divine saying, that lashes the most universal and common error of
mankind. Not only the reproaches that we throw in the face of one
another, but our reasons also, our arguments and controversies, are
reboundable upon us, and we wound ourselves with our own weapons: of
which antiquity has left me enough grave examples. It was ingeniously
and home-said by him, who was the inventor of this sentence:
“Stercus cuique suum bene olet.”
[“To every man his own excrements smell well.”--Erasmus]
We see nothing behind us; we mock ourselves an hundred times a day; when
we deride our neighbours; and we detest in others the defects which are
more manifest in us, and which we admire with marvellous inadvertency and
impudence. It was but yesterday that I heard a man of understanding and
of good rank, as pleasantly as justly scoffing at the folly of another,
who did nothing but torment everybody with the catalogue of his genealogy
and alliances, above half of them false (for they are most apt to fall
into such ridiculous discourses, whose qualities are most dubious and
least sure), and yet, would he have looked into himself, he would have
discerned himself to be no less intemperate and wearisome in extolling
his wife’s pedigree. O importunate presumption, with which the wife sees
herself armed by the hands of her own husband. Did he understand Latin,
we should say to him:
“Age, si hic non insanit satis sua sponte, instiga.”
[“Come! if of himself he is not mad enough, urge him on.”
--Terence, And., iv. 2, 9.]
I do not say that no man should accuse another, who is not clean
himself,--for then no one would ever accuse,--clean from the same sort of
spot; but I mean that our judgment, falling upon another who is then in
question, should not, at the same time, spare ourselves, but sentence us
with an inward and severe authority. ‘Tis an office of charity, that he
who cannot reclaim himself from a vice, should, nevertheless, endeavour
to remove it from another, in whom, peradventure, it may not have so deep
and so malignant a root; neither do him who reproves me for my fault that
he himself is guilty of the same. What of that? The reproof is,
notwithstanding, true and of very good use. Had we a good nose, our own
ordure would stink worse to us, forasmuch as it is our own: and Socrates
is of opinion that whoever should find himself, his son, and a stranger
guilty of any violence and wrong, ought to begin with himself, present
himself first to the sentence of justice, and implore, to purge himself,
the assistance of the hand of the executioner; in the next place, he
should proceed to his son, and lastly, to the stranger. If this precept
seem too severe, he ought at least to present himself the first, to the
punishment of his own conscience.
The senses are our first and proper judges, which perceive not things but
by external accidents; and ‘tis no wonder, if in all the parts of the
service of our society, there is so perpetual and universal a mixture of
ceremonies and superficial appearances; insomuch that the best and most
effectual part of our polities therein consist. ‘Tis still man with whom
we have to do, of whom the condition is wonderfully corporal. Let those
who, of these late years, would erect for us such a contemplative and
immaterial an exercise of religion, not wonder if there be some who think
it had vanished and melted through their fingers had it not more upheld
itself among us as a mark, title, and instrument of division and faction,
than by itself. As in conference, the gravity, robe, and fortune of him
who speaks, ofttimes gives reputation to vain arguments and idle words,
it is not to be presumed but that a man, so attended and feared, has not
in him more than ordinary sufficiency; and that he to whom the king has
given so many offices and commissions and charges, he so supercilious and
proud, has not a great deal more in him, than another who salutes him at
so great a distance, and who has no employment at all. Not only the
words, but the grimaces also of these people, are considered and put into
the account; every one making it his business to give them some fine and
solid interpretation. If they stoop to the common conference, and that
you offer anything but approbation and reverence, they then knock you
down with the authority of their experience: they have heard, they have
seen, they have done so and so: you are crushed with examples. I should
willingly tell them, that the fruit of a surgeon’s experience, is not the
history of his practice and his remembering that he has cured four people
of the plague and three of the gout, unless he knows how thence to
extract something whereon to form his judgment, and to make us sensible
that he has thence become more skillful in his art. As in a concert of
instruments, we do not hear a lute, a harpsichord, or a flute alone, but
one entire harmony, the result of all together. If travel and offices
have improved them, ‘tis a product of their understanding to make it
appear. ‘Tis not enough to reckon experiences, they must weigh, sort and
distil them, to extract the reasons and conclusions they carry along with
them. There were never so many historians: it is, indeed, good and of
use to read them, for they furnish us everywhere with excellent and
laudable instructions from the magazine of their memory, which,
doubtless, is of great concern to the help of life; but ‘tis not that we
seek for now: we examine whether these relaters and collectors of things
are commendable themselves.
I hate all sorts of tyranny, both in word and deed. I am very ready to
oppose myself against those vain circumstances that delude our judgments
by the senses; and keeping my eye close upon those extraordinary
greatnesses, I find that at best they are men, as others are:
“Rarus enim ferme sensus communis in illa
Fortuna.”
[“For in those high fortunes, common sense is generally rare.”
--Juvenal, viii. 73.]
Peradventure, we esteem and look upon them for less than they are, by
reason they undertake more, and more expose themselves; they do not
answer to the charge they have undertaken. There must be more vigour and
strength in the bearer than in the burden; he who has not lifted as much
as he can, leaves you to guess that he has still a strength beyond that,
and that he has not been tried to the utmost of what he is able to do; he
who sinks under his load, makes a discovery of his best, and the weakness
of his shoulders. This is the reason that we see so many silly souls
amongst the learned, and more than those of the better sort: they would
have made good husbandmen, good merchants, and good artisans: their
natural vigour was cut out to that proportion. Knowledge is a thing of
great weight, they faint under it: their understanding has neither vigour
nor dexterity enough to set forth and distribute, to employ or make use
of this rich and powerful matter; it has no prevailing virtue but in a
strong nature; and such natures are very rare--and the weak ones, says
Socrates, corrupt the dignity of philosophy in the handling, it appears
useless and vicious, when lodged in an ill-contrived mind. They spoil
and make fools of themselves:
“Humani qualis simulator simius oris,
Quern puer arridens pretioso stamine serum
Velavit, nudasque nates ac terga reliquit,
Ludibrium mensis.”
[“Just like an ape, simulator of the human face, whom a wanton boy
has dizened up in rich silks above, but left the lower parts bare,
for a laughing-stock for the tables.”
--Claudian, in Eutrop., i 303.]
Neither is it enough for those who govern and command us, and have all
the world in their hands, to have a common understanding, and to be able
to do the same that we can; they are very much below us, if they be not
infinitely above us: as they promise more, so they are to perform more.
And yet silence is to them, not only a countenance of respect and
gravity, but very often of good advantage too: for Megabyzus, going ‘to
see Apelles in his painting-room, stood a great while without speaking a
word, and at last began to talk of his paintings, for which he received
this rude reproof: “Whilst thou wast silent, thou seemedst to be some
great thing, by reason of thy chains and rich habit; but now that we have
heard thee speak, there is not the meanest boy in my workshop that does
not despise thee.” Those princely ornaments, that mighty state, did not
permit him to be ignorant with a common ignorance, and to speak
impertinently of painting; he ought to have kept this external and
presumptive knowledge by silence. To how many foolish fellows of my time
has a sullen and silent mien procured the credit of prudence and
capacity!
Dignities and offices are of necessity conferred more by fortune than
upon the account of merit; and we are often to blame, to condemn kings
when these are misplaced: on the contrary, ‘tis a wonder they should have
so good luck, where there is so little skill:
“Principis est virtus maxima nosse suos;”
[“‘Tis the chief virtue of a prince to know his people.”
--Martial, viii. 15.]
for nature has not given them a sight that can extend to so many people,
to discern which excels the rest, nor to penetrate into our bosoms, where
the knowledge of our wills and best value lies they must choose us by
conjecture and by groping; by the family, wealth, learning, and the voice
of the people, which are all very feeble arguments. Whoever could find
out a way by which they might judge by justice, and choose men by reason,
would, in this one thing, establish a perfect form of government.
“Ay, but he brought that great affair to a very good pass.” This is,
indeed, to say something, but not to say enough: for this sentence is
justly received, “That we are not to judge of counsels by events.”
The Carthaginians punished the ill counsels of their captains, though
they were rectified by a successful issue; and the Roman people often
denied a triumph for great and very advantageous victories because the
conduct of their general was not answerable to his good fortune.
We ordinarily see, in the actions of the world, that Fortune, to shew
us her power in all things, and who takes a pride in abating our
presumption, seeing she could not make fools wise, has made them
fortunate in emulation of virtue; and most favours those operations the
web of which is most purely her own; whence it is that the simplest
amongst us bring to pass great business, both public and private; and,
as Seiramnes, the Persian, answered those who wondered that his affairs
succeeded so ill, considering that his deliberations were so wise, “that
he was sole master of his designs, but that success was wholly in the
power of fortune”; these may answer the same, but with a contrary turn.
Most worldly affairs are performed by themselves
“Fata viam inveniunt;”
[“The destinies find the way.”--AEneid, iii. 395]
the event often justifies a very foolish conduct; our interposition is
little more than as it were a running on by rote, and more commonly a
consideration of custom and example, than of reason. Being formerly
astonished at the greatness of some affair, I have been made acquainted
with their motives and address by those who had performed it, and have
found nothing in it but very ordinary counsels; and the most common and
usual are indeed, perhaps, the most sure and convenient for practice, if
not for show. What if the plainest reasons are the best seated? the
meanest, lowest, and most beaten more adapted to affairs? To maintain
the authority of the counsels of kings, it needs not that profane persons
should participate of them, or see further into them than the outmost
barrier; he who will husband its reputation must be reverenced upon
credit and taken altogether. My consultation somewhat rough-hews the
matter, and considers it lightly by the first face it presents: the
stress and main of the business I have been wont to refer to heaven;
“Permitte divis caetera.”
[“Leave the rest to the gods.”--Horace, Od., i. 9, 9.]
Good and ill fortune are, in my opinion, two sovereign powers; ‘tis folly
to think that human prudence can play the part of Fortune; and vain is
his attempt who presumes to comprehend both causes and consequences, and
by the hand to conduct the progress of his design; and most especially
vain in the deliberations of war. There was never greater circumspection
and military prudence than sometimes is seen amongst us: can it be that
men are afraid to lose themselves by the way, that they reserve
themselves to the end of the game? I moreover affirm that our wisdom
itself and consultation, for the most part commit themselves to the
conduct of chance; my will and my reason are sometimes moved by one
breath, and sometimes by another; and many of these movements there are
that govern themselves without me: my reason has uncertain and casual
agitations and impulsions:
“Vertuntur species animorum, et pectora motus
Nunc alios, alios, dum nubila ventus agebat,
Concipiunt.”
[“The aspects of their minds change; and they conceive now such
ideas, now such, just so long as the wind agitated the clouds.”
--Virgil, Georg., i. 42.]
Let a man but observe who are of greatest authority in cities, and who
best do their own business; we shall find that they are commonly men of
the least parts: women, children, and madmen have had the fortune to
govern great kingdoms equally well with the wisest princes, and
Thucydides says, that the stupid more ordinarily do it than those of
better understandings; we attribute the effects of their good fortune to
their prudence:
“Ut quisque Fortuna utitur,
Ita praecellet; atque exinde sapere illum omnes dicimus;”
[“He makes his way who knows how to use Fortune, and thereupon we
all call him wise.”--Plautus, Pseudol., ii. 3, 13.]
wherefore I say unreservedly, events are a very poor testimony of our
worth and parts.
Now, I was upon this point, that there needs no more but to see a man
promoted to dignity; though we knew him but three days before a man of
little regard, yet an image of grandeur of sufficiency insensibly steals
into our opinion, and we persuade ourselves that, being augmented in
reputation and train, he is also increased in merit; we judge of him, not
according to his worth, but as we do by counters, according to the
prerogative of his place. If it happen so that he fall again, and be
mixed with the common crowd, every one inquires with amazement into the
cause of his having been raised so high. “Is this he,” say they, “was he
no wiser when he was there? Do princes satisfy themselves with so
little? Truly, we were in good hands.” This is a thing that I have
often seen in my time. Nay, even the very disguise of grandeur
represented in our comedies in some sort moves and gulls us. That which
I myself adore in kings is the crowd of their adorers; all reverence and
submission are due to them, except that of the understanding: my reason
is not obliged to bow and bend; my knees are. Melanthius being asked
what he thought of the tragedy of Dionysius, “I could not see it,” said
he, “it was so clouded with language”; so most of those who judge of the
discourses of great men ought to say, “I did not understand his words,
they were so clouded with gravity, grandeur, and majesty.” Antisthenes
one day tried to persuade the Athenians to give order that their asses
might be employed in tilling the ground as well as the horses were; to
which it was answered that that animal was not destined for such a
service: “That’s all one,” replied he, “you have only to order it: for
the most ignorant and incapable men you employ in the commands of your
wars incontinently become worthy enough, because you employ them”; to
which the custom of so many people, who canonise the king they have
chosen out of their own body, and are not content only to honour, but
must adore them, comes very near. Those of Mexico, after the ceremonies
of their king’s coronation are over, dare no more look him in the face;
but, as if they had deified him by his royalty. Amongst the oaths they
make him take to maintain their religion, their laws, and liberties, to
be valiant, just, and mild, he moreover swears to make the sun run his
course in his wonted light, to drain the clouds at fit seasons, to make
rivers run their course, and to cause the earth to bear all things
necessary for his people.
I differ from this common fashion, and am more apt to suspect the
capacity when I see it accompanied with that grandeur of fortune and
public applause; we are to consider of what advantage it is to speak when
a man pleases, to choose his subject, to interrupt or change it, with a
magisterial authority; to protect himself from the oppositions of others
by a nod, a smile, or silence, in the presence of an assembly that
trembles with reverence and respect. A man of a prodigious fortune
coming to give his judgment upon some slight dispute that was foolishly
set on foot at his table, began in these words: “It can be no other but
a liar or a fool that will say otherwise than so and so.” Pursue this
philosophical point with a dagger in your hand.
There is another observation I have made, from which I draw great
advantage; which is, that in conferences and disputes, every word that
seems to be good, is not immediately to be accepted. Most men are rich
in borrowed sufficiency: a man may say a good thing, give a good answer,
cite a good sentence, without at all seeing the force of either the one
or the other. That a man may not understand all he borrows, may perhaps
be verified in myself. A man must not always presently yield, what truth
or beauty soever may seem to be in the opposite argument; either he must
stoutly meet it, or retire, under colour of not understanding it, to try,
on all parts, how it is lodged in the author. It may happen that we
entangle ourselves, and help to strengthen the point itself. I have
sometimes, in the necessity and heat of the combat, made answers that
have gone through and through, beyond my expectation or hope; I only gave
them in number, they were received in weight. As, when I contend with a
vigorous man, I please myself with anticipating his conclusions, I ease
him of the trouble of explaining himself, I strive to forestall his
imagination whilst it is yet springing and imperfect; the order and
pertinency of his understanding warn and threaten me afar off: I deal
quite contrary with the others; I must understand, and presuppose nothing
but by them. If they determine in general words, “this is good, that is
naught,” and that they happen to be in the right, see if it be not
fortune that hits it off for them: let them a little circumscribe and
limit their judgment; why, or how, it is so. These universal judgments
that I see so common, signify nothing; these are men who salute a whole
people in a crowd together; they, who have a real acquaintance, take
notice of and salute them individually and by name. But ‘tis a hazardous
attempt; and from which I have, more than every day, seen it fall out,
that weak understandings, having a mind to appear ingenious, in taking
notice, as they read a book, of what is best and most to be admired, fix
their admiration upon some thing so very ill chosen, that instead of
making us discern the excellence of the author; they make us very well
see their own ignorance. This exclamation is safe, “That is fine,” after
having heard a whole page of Virgil; by that the cunning sort save
themselves; but to undertake to follow him line by line, and, with an
expert and tried judgment, to observe where a good author excels himself,
weighing the words, phrases, inventions, and his various excellences, one
after another; keep aloof from that:
“Videndum est, non modo quid quisque loquatur, sed etiam quid
quisque sentiat, atque etiam qua de causa quisque sentiat.”
[“A man is not only to examine what every one says, but also what
every one thinks, and from what reason every one thinks.”
--Cicero, De Offic:, i. 41.]
I every day hear fools say things that are not foolish: they say a good
thing; let us examine how far they understand it, whence they have it,
and what they mean by it. We help them to make use of this fine
expression, of this fine sentence, which is none of theirs; they only
have it in keeping; they have bolted it out at a venture; we place it for
them in credit and esteem. You lend them your hand. To what purpose?
they do not think themselves obliged to you for it, and become more inept
still. Don’t help them; let them alone; they will handle the matter like
people who are afraid of burning their fingers; they dare change neither
its seat nor light, nor break into it; shake it never so little, it slips
through their fingers; they give it up, be it never so strong or fair
they are fine weapons, but ill hafted: How many times have I seen the
experience of this? Now, if you come to explain anything to them, and to
confirm them, they catch at it, and presently rob you of the advantage of
your interpretation; “It was what I was about to say; it was just my
idea; if I did not express it so, it was for want of language.” Mere
wind! Malice itself must be employed to correct this arrogant ignorance.
The dogma of Hegesias, “that we are neither to hate nor accuse, but
instruct,” is correct elsewhere; but here ‘tis injustice and inhumanity
to relieve and set him right who stands in no need on’t, and is the worse
for’t. I love to let them step deeper into the mire; and so deep, that,
if it be possible, they may at last discern their error.
Folly and absurdity are not to be cured by bare admonition; and what
Cyrus answered to him, who importuned him to harangue his army, upon the
point of battle, “that men do not become valiant and warlike upon a
sudden, by a fine oration, no more than a man becomes a good musician by
hearing a fine song,” may properly be said of such an admonition as this.
These are apprenticeships that are to be served beforehand, by a long and
continued education. We owe this care and this assiduity of correction
and instruction to our own people; but to go preach to the first
passer-by, and to become tutor to the ignorance and folly of the first we
meet, is a thing that I abhor. I rarely do it, even in private
conversation, and rather give up the whole thing than proceed to these
initiatory and school instructions; my humour is unfit either to speak or
write for beginners; but for things that are said in common discourse, or
amongst other things, I never oppose them either by word or sign, how
false or absurd soever.
As to the rest, nothing vexes me so much in folly as that it is more
satisfied with itself than any reason can reasonably be. ‘Tis
unfortunate that prudence forbids us to satisfy and trust ourselves,
and always dismisses us timorous and discontented; whereas obstinacy and
temerity fill those who are possessed with them with joy and assurance.
‘Tis for the most ignorant to look at other men over the shoulder, always
returning from the combat full of joy and triumph. And moreover, for the
most part, this arrogance of speech and gaiety of countenance gives them
the better of it in the opinion of the audience, which is commonly weak
and incapable of well judging and discerning the real advantage.
Obstinacy of opinion and heat in argument are the surest proofs of folly;
is there anything so assured, resolute, disdainful, contemplative,
serious and grave as the ass?
May we not include under the title of conference and communication the
quick and sharp repartees which mirth and familiarity introduce amongst
friends, pleasantly and wittily jesting and rallying with one another?
‘Tis an exercise for which my natural gaiety renders me fit enough, and
which, if it be not so tense and serious as the other I spoke of but now,
is, as Lycurgus thought, no less smart and ingenious, nor of less
utility. For my part, I contribute to it more liberty than wit, and have
therein more of luck than invention; but I am perfect in suffering, for I
endure a retaliation that is not only tart, but indiscreet to boot,
without being moved at all; and whoever attacks me, if I have not a brisk
answer immediately ready, I do not study to pursue the point with a
tedious and impertinent contest, bordering upon obstinacy, but let it
pass, and hanging down cheerfully my ears, defer my revenge to another
and better time: there is no merchant that always gains: Most men change
their countenance and their voice where their wits fail, and by an
unseasonable anger, instead of revenging themselves, accuse at once their
own folly and impatience. In this jollity, we sometimes pinch the secret
strings of our imperfections which, at another and graver time, we cannot
touch without offence, and so profitably give one another a hint of our
defects. There are other jeux de main,--[practical jokes]--rude and
indiscreet, after the French manner, that I mortally hate; my skin is
very tender and sensible: I have in my time seen two princes of the blood
buried upon that very account. ‘Tis unhandsome to fight in play. As to
the rest, when I have a mind to judge of any one, I ask him how far he is
contented with himself; to what degree his speaking or his work pleases
him. I will none of these fine excuses, “I did it only in sport,
‘Ablatum mediis opus est incudibus istud.’
[“That work was taken from the anvil half finished.”
--Ovid, Trist., i. 6, 29.]
I was not an hour about it: I have never looked at it since.” Well,
then, say I, lay these aside, and give me a perfect one, such as you
would be measured by. And then, what do you think is the best thing in
your work? is it this part or that? is it grace or the matter, the
invention, the judgment, or the learning? For I find that men are,
commonly, as wide of the mark in judging of their own works, as of those
of others; not only by reason of the kindness they have for them, but for
want of capacity to know and distinguish them: the work, by its own force
and fortune, may second the workman, and sometimes outstrip him, beyond
his invention and knowledge. For my part, I judge of the value of other
men’s works more obscurely than of my own; and place the Essays, now
high, or low, with great doubt and inconstancy. There are several books
that are useful upon the account of their subjects, from which the author
derives no praise; and good books, as well as good works, that shame the
workman. I may write the manner of our feasts, and the fashion of our
clothes, and may write them ill; I may publish the edicts of my time, and
the letters of princes that pass from hand to hand; I may make an
abridgment of a good book (and every abridgment of a good book is a
foolish abridgment), which book shall come to be lost; and so on:
posterity will derive a singular utility from such compositions: but what
honour shall I have unless by great good fortune? Most part of the
famous books are of this condition.
When I read Philip de Commines, doubtless a very good author, several
years ago, I there took notice of this for no vulgar saying, “That a man
must have a care not to do his master so great service, that at last he
will not know how to give him his just reward”; but I ought to commend
the invention, not him, because I met with it in Tacitus, not long since:
“Beneficia ea usque lxta sunt, dum videntur exsolvi posse;
ubi multum antevenere, pro gratis odium redditur;”
[“Benefits are so far acceptable as they appear to be capable of
recompense; where they much exceed that point, hatred is returned
instead of thanks.”--Tacitus, Annal., iv. 18.]
and Seneca vigorously says:
“Nam qui putat esse turpe non reddere,
non vult esse cui reddat:”
[“For he who thinks it a shame not to requite, does not wish to
have the man live to whom he owes return.”--Seneca, Ep., 81.]
Q. Cicero says with less directness.:
“Qui se non putat satisfacere,
amicus esse nullo modo potest.”
[“Who thinks himself behind in obligation, can by no
means be a friend.”--Q. Cicero, De Petitione Consul, c. 9.]
The subject, according to what it is, may make a man looked upon as
learned and of good memory; but to judge in him the parts that are most
his own and the most worthy, the vigour and beauty of his soul, one must
first know what is his own and what is not; and in that which is not his
own, how much we are obliged to him for the choice, disposition,
ornament, and language he has there presented us with. What if he has
borrowed the matter and spoiled the form, as it often falls out? We, who
are little read in books, are in this strait, that when we meet with a
high fancy in some new poet, or some strong argument in a preacher, we
dare not, nevertheless, commend it till we have first informed ourselves,
through some learned man, if it be the writer’s wit or borrowed from some
other; until that I always stand upon my guard.
I have lately been reading the history of Tacitus quite through, without
interrupting it with anything else (which but seldom happens with me, it
being twenty years since I have kept to any one book an hour together),
and I did it at the instance of a gentleman for whom France has a great
esteem, as well for his own particular worth, as upon the account of a
constant form of capacity and virtue which runs through a great many
brothers of them. I do not know any author in a public narrative who
mixes so much consideration of manners and particular inclinations: and I
am of a quite contrary opinion to him, holding that, having especially to
follow the lives of the emperors of his time, so various and extreme in
all sorts of forms, so many notable actions as their cruelty especially
produced in their subjects, he had a stronger and more attractive matter
to treat of than if he had had to describe battles and universal
commotions; so that I often find him sterile, running over those brave
deaths as if he feared to trouble us with their multitude and length.
This form of history is by much the most useful; public movements depend
most upon the conduct of fortune, private ones upon our own. ‘Tis rather
a judgment than a narration of history; there are in it more precepts
than stories: it is not a book to read, ‘tis a book to study and learn;
‘tis full of sententious opinions, right or wrong; ‘tis a nursery of
ethic and politic discourses, for the use and ornament of those who have
any place in the government of the world. He always argues by strong and
solid reasons, after a pointed and subtle manner, according to the
affected style of that age, which was so in love with an inflated manner,
that where point and subtlety were wanting in things it supplied these
with lofty and swelling words. ‘Tis not much unlike the style of Seneca:
I look upon Tacitus as more sinewy, and Seneca as more sharp. His pen
seems most proper for a troubled and sick state, as ours at present is;
you would often say that he paints and pinches us.
They who doubt his good faith sufficiently accuse themselves of being his
enemy upon some other account. His opinions are sound, and lean to the
right side in the Roman affairs. And yet I am angry at him for judging
more severely of Pompey than consists with the opinion of those worthy
men who lived in the same time, and had dealings with him; and to have
reputed him on a par with Marius and Sylla, excepting that he was more
close. Other writers have not acquitted his intention in the government
of affairs from ambition and revenge; and even his friends were afraid
that victory would have transported him beyond the bounds of reason, but
not to so immeasurable a degree as theirs; nothing in his life threatened
such express cruelty and tyranny. Neither ought we to set suspicion
against evidence; and therefore I do not believe Plutarch in this matter.
That his narrations were genuine and straightforward may, perhaps, be
argued from this very thing, that they do not always apply to the
conclusions of his judgments, which he follows according to the bias he
has taken, very often beyond the matter he presents us withal, which he
has not deigned to alter in the least degree. He needs no excuse for
having approved the religion of his time, according as the laws enjoined,
and to have been ignorant of the true; this was his misfortune, not his
fault.
I have principally considered his judgment, and am not very well
satisfied therewith throughout; as these words in the letter that
Tiberius, old and sick, sent to the senate. “What shall I write to you,
sirs, or how should I write to you, or what should I not write to you at
this time? May the gods and goddesses lay a worse punishment upon me
than I am every day tormented with, if I know!” I do not see why he
should so positively apply them to a sharp remorse that tormented the
conscience of Tiberius; at least, when I was in the same condition, I
perceived no such thing.
And this also seemed to me a little mean in him that, having to say that
he had borne an honourable office in Rome, he excuses himself that he
does not say it out of ostentation; this seems, I say, mean for such a
soul as his; for not to speak roundly of a man’s self implies some want
of courage; a man of solid and lofty judgment, who judges soundly and
surely, makes use of his own example upon all occasions, as well as those
of others; and gives evidence as freely of himself as of a third person.
We are to pass by these common rules of civility, in favour of truth and
liberty. I dare not only speak of myself, but to speak only of myself:
when I write of anything else, I miss my way and wander from my subject.
I am not so indiscreetly enamoured of myself, so wholly mixed up with,
and bound to myself, that I cannot distinguish and consider myself apart,
as I do a neighbour or a tree: ‘tis equally a fault not to discern how
far a man’s worth extends, and to say more than a man discovers in
himself. We owe more love to God than to ourselves, and know Him less;
and yet speak of Him as much as we will.
If the writings of Tacitus indicate anything true of his qualities, he
was a great personage, upright and bold, not of a superstitious but of a
philosophical and generous virtue. One may think him bold in his
relations; as where he tells us, that a soldier carrying a burden of
wood, his hands were so frozen and so stuck to the load that they there
remained closed and dead, being severed from his arms. I always in such
things bow to the authority of so great witnesses.
What also he says, that Vespasian, “by the favour of the god Serapis,
cured a blind woman at Alexandria by anointing her eyes with his spittle,
and I know not what other miracle,” he says by the example and duty of
all his good historians. They record all events of importance; and
amongst public incidents are the popular rumours and opinions. ‘Tis
their part to relate common beliefs, not to regulate them: that part
concerns divines and philosophers, directors of consciences; and
therefore it was that this companion of his, and a great man like
himself, very wisely said:
“Equidem plura transcribo, quam credo: nam nec affirmare
sustineo, de quibus dubito, nec subducere quae accepi;”
[“Truly, I set down more things than I believe, for I can neither
affirm things whereof I doubt, nor suppress what I have heard.”
--Quintus Curtius, ix.]
and this other:
“Haec neque affirmare neque refellere operae
pretium est; famae rerum standum est.”
[“‘Tis neither worth the while to affirm or to refute these things;
we must stand to report”--Livy, i., Praef., and viii. 6.]
And writing in an age wherein the belief of prodigies began to decline,
he says he would not, nevertheless, forbear to insert in his Annals, and
to give a relation of things received by so many worthy men, and with so
great reverence of antiquity; ‘tis very well said. Let them deliver to
us history, more as they receive it than as they believe it. I, who am
monarch of the matter whereof I treat, and who am accountable to none, do
not, nevertheless, always believe myself; I often hazard sallies of my
own wit, wherein I very much suspect myself, and certain verbal quibbles,
at which I shake my ears; but I let them go at a venture. I see that
others get reputation by such things: ‘tis not for me alone to judge. I
present myself standing and lying, before and behind, my right side and
my left, and, in all my natural postures. Wits, though equal in force,
are not always equal in taste and application.
This is what my memory presents to me in gross, and with uncertainty
enough; all judgments in gross are weak and imperfect.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A hundred more escape us than ever come to our knowledge
A man must have courage to fear
A man never speaks of himself without loss
A man’s accusations of himself are always believed
Agitation has usurped the place of reason
All judgments in gross are weak and imperfect
Any argument if it be carried on with method
Apprenticeships that are to be served beforehand
Arrogant ignorance
Avoid all magnificences that will in a short time be forgotten
Being as impatient of commanding as of being commanded
Defer my revenge to another and better time
Desires, that still increase as they are fulfilled
Detest in others the defects which are more manifest in us
Disdainful, contemplative, serious and grave as the ass
Do not, nevertheless, always believe myself
Events are a very poor testimony of our worth and parts.
Every abridgment of a good book is a foolish abridgment
Fault not to discern how far a man’s worth extends
Folly and absurdity are not to be cured by bare admonition
Folly satisfied with itself than any reason can reasonably be
Folly than to be moved and angry at the follies of the world
Give us history, more as they receive it than as they believe it
I every day hear fools say things that are not foolish
I hail and caress truth in what quarter soever I find it
I hate all sorts of tyranny, both in word and deed
I love stout expressions amongst gentle men
I was too frightened to be ill
If it be the writer’s wit or borrowed from some other
Ignorance does not offend me, but the foppery of it.
It is not a book to read, ‘tis a book to study and learn
“It was what I was about to say; it was just my idea,”
Judge by justice, and choose men by reason
Knock you down with the authority of their experience
Learning improves fortunes enough, but not minds
Liberality at the expense of others
Malice must be employed to correct this arrogant ignorance
Man must have a care not to do his master so great service
Mix railing, indiscretion, and fury in his disputations
Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency
My humour is unfit either to speak or write for beginners
My reason is not obliged to bow and bend; my knees are
Never oppose them either by word or sign, how false or absurd
New World: sold it opinions and our arts at a very dear rate
Obstinancy and heat in argument are the surest proofs of folly
One must first know what is his own and what is not
Our knowledge, which is a wretched foundation
Passion has already confounded his judgment
Pinch the secret strings of our imperfections
Practical Jokes: Tis unhandsome to fight in play
Presumptive knowledge by silence
Silent mien procured the credit of prudence and capacity
Spectators can claim no interest in the honour and pleasure
Study of books is a languishing and feeble motion
The cause of truth ought to be the common cause
The event often justifies a very foolish conduct
The ignorant return from the combat full of joy and triumph
The very name Liberality sounds of Liberty.
There are some upon whom their rich clothes weep
There is no merchant that always gains
There is nothing single and rare in respect of nature
They have heard, they have seen, they have done so and so
They have not the courage to suffer themselves to be corrected
Tis impossible to deal fairly with a fool
To fret and vex at folly, as I do, is folly itself
Transferring of money from the right owners to strangers
Tutor to the ignorance and folly of the first we meet
Tyrannic sourness not to endure a form contrary to one’s own
Universal judgments that I see so common, signify nothing
“What he laughed at, being alone?”--“That I do laugh alone,”
We are not to judge of counsels by events
We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him
We neither see far forward nor far backward
Whilst thou wast silent, thou seemedst to be some great thing
Who has once been a very fool, will never after be very wise
Wide of the mark in judging of their own works
Wise may learn more of fools, than fools can of the wise
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 17.
IX. Of Vanity
CHAPTER IX
OF VANITY
There is, peradventure, no more manifest vanity than to write of it so
vainly. That which divinity has so divinely expressed to us--[“Vanity
of vanities: all is vanity.”--Eccles., i. 2.]--ought to be carefully and
continually meditated by men of understanding. Who does not see that I
have taken a road, in which, incessantly and without labour, I shall
proceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in the world? I can give
no account of my life by my actions; fortune has placed them too low: I
must do it by my fancies. And yet I have seen a gentleman who only
communicated his life by the workings of his belly: you might see on his
premises a show of a row of basins of seven or eight days’ standing; it
was his study, his discourse; all other talk stank in his nostrils.
Here, but not so nauseous, are the excrements of an old mind, sometimes
thick, sometimes thin, and always indigested. And when shall I have done
representing the continual agitation and mutation of my thoughts, as they
come into my head, seeing that Diomedes wrote six thousand books upon the
sole subject of grammar?
[It was not Diomedes, but Didymus the grammarian, who, as Seneca
(Ep., 88) tells us, wrote four not six thousand books on questions
of vain literature, which was the principal study of the ancient
grammarian.--Coste. But the number is probably exaggerated, and for
books we should doubtless read pamphlets or essays.]
What, then, ought prating to produce, since prattling and the first
beginning to speak, stuffed the world with such a horrible load of
volumes? So many words for words only. O Pythagoras, why didst not thou
allay this tempest? They accused one Galba of old for living idly; he
made answer, “That every one ought to give account of his actions, but
not of his home.” He was mistaken, for justice also takes cognisance of
those who glean after the reaper.
But there should be some restraint of law against foolish and impertinent
scribblers, as well as against vagabonds and idle persons; which if there
were, both I and a hundred others would be banished from the reach of our
people. I do not speak this in jest: scribbling seems to be a symptom of
a disordered and licentious age. When did we write so much as since our
troubles? when the Romans so much, as upon the point of ruin? Besides
that, the refining of wits does not make people wiser in a government:
this idle employment springs from this, that every one applies himself
negligently to the duty of his vocation, and is easily debauched from it.
The corruption of the age is made up by the particular contribution of
every individual man; some contribute treachery, others injustice,
irreligion, tyranny, avarice, cruelty, according to their power; the
weaker sort contribute folly, vanity, and idleness; of these I am one.
It seems as if it were the season for vain things, when the hurtful
oppress us; in a time when doing ill is common, to do but what signifies
nothing is a kind of commendation. ‘Tis my comfort, that I shall be one
of the last who shall be called in question; and whilst the greater
offenders are being brought to account, I shall have leisure to amend:
for it would, methinks, be against reason to punish little
inconveniences, whilst we are infested with the greater. As the
physician Philotimus said to one who presented him his finger to dress,
and who he perceived, both by his complexion and his breath, had an ulcer
in his lungs: “Friend, it is not now time to play with your nails.”
--[Plutarch, How we may distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend.]
And yet I saw, some years ago, a person, whose name and memory I have in
very great esteem, in the very height of our great disorders, when there
was neither law nor justice, nor magistrate who performed his office, no
more than there is now, publish I know not what pitiful reformations
about cloths, cookery, and law chicanery. Those are amusements wherewith
to feed a people that are ill-used, to show that they are not totally
forgotten. Those others do the same, who insist upon prohibiting
particular ways of speaking, dances, and games, to a people totally
abandoned to all sorts of execrable vices. ‘Tis no time to bathe and
cleanse one’s self, when one is seized by a violent fever; it was for the
Spartans alone to fall to combing and curling themselves, when they were
just upon the point of running headlong into some extreme danger of their
life.
For my part, I have that worse custom, that if my slipper go awry, I let
my shirt and my cloak do so too; I scorn to mend myself by halves.
When I am in a bad plight, I fasten upon the mischief; I abandon myself
through despair; I let myself go towards the precipice, and, as they say,
“throw the helve after the hatchet”; I am obstinate in growing worse, and
think myself no longer worth my own care; I am either well or ill
throughout. ‘T is a favour to me, that the desolation of this kingdom
falls out in the desolation of my age: I better suffer that my ill be
multiplied, than if my well had been disturbed.--[That, being ill, I
should grow worse, than that, being well, I should grow ill.]--The words
I utter in mishap are words of anger: my courage sets up its bristles,
instead of letting them down; and, contrary to others, I am more devout
in good than in evil fortune, according to the precept of Xenophon, if
not according to his reason; and am more ready to turn up my eyes to
heaven to return thanks, than to crave. I am more solicitous to improve
my health, when I am well, than to restore it when I am sick;
prosperities are the same discipline and instruction to me that
adversities and rods are to others. As if good fortune were a thing
inconsistent with good conscience, men never grow good but in evil
fortune. Good fortune is to me a singular spur to modesty and
moderation: an entreaty wins, a threat checks me; favour makes me bend,
fear stiffens me.
Amongst human conditions this is common enough: to be better pleased with
foreign things than with our own, and to love innovation and change:
“Ipsa dies ideo nos grato perluit haustu,
Quod permutatis hora recurrit equis:”
[“The light of day itself shines more pleasantly upon us because it
changes its horses every hour.” Spoke of a water hour-glass,
adds Cotton.]
I have my share. Those who follow the other extreme, of being quite
satisfied and pleased with and in themselves, of valuing what they have
above all the rest, and of concluding no beauty can be greater than what
they see, if they are not wiser than we, are really more happy; I do not
envy their wisdom, but their good fortune.
This greedy humour of new and unknown things helps to nourish in me the
desire of travel; but a great many more circumstances contribute to it;
I am very willing to quit the government of my house. There is, I
confess, a kind of convenience in commanding, though it were but in a
barn, and in being obeyed by one’s people; but ‘tis too uniform and
languid a pleasure, and is, moreover, of necessity mixed with a thousand
vexatious thoughts: one while the poverty and the oppression of your
tenants: another, quarrels amongst neighbours: another, the trespasses
they make upon you afflict you;
“Aut verberatae grandine vineae,
Fundusque mendax, arbore nunc aquas
Culpante, nunc torrentia agros
Sidera, nunc hyemes iniquas.”
[“Or hail-smitten vines and the deceptive farm; now trees damaged
by the rains, or years of dearth, now summer’s heat burning up the
petals, now destructive winters.”--Horatius, Od., iii. I, 29.]
and that God scarce in six months sends a season wherein your bailiff can
do his business as he should; but that if it serves the vines, it spoils
the meadows:
“Aut nimiis torret fervoribus aetherius sol,
Aut subiti perimunt imbres, gelidoeque pruinae,
Flabraque ventorum violento turbine vexant;”
[“Either the scorching sun burns up your fields, or sudden rains or
frosts destroy your harvests, or a violent wind carries away all
before it.”--Lucretius, V. 216.]
to which may be added the new and neat-made shoe of the man of old, that
hurts your foot,
[Leclerc maliciously suggests that this is a sly hit at Montaigne’s
wife, the man of old being the person mentioned in Plutarch’s Life
of Paulus Emilius, c. 3, who, when his friends reproached him for
repudiating his wife, whose various merits they extolled, pointed to
his shoe, and said, “That looks a nice well-made shoe to you; but I
alone know where it pinches.”]
and that a stranger does not understand how much it costs you, and what
you contribute to maintain that show of order that is seen in your
family, and that peradventure you buy too dear.
I came late to the government of a house: they whom nature sent into the
world before me long eased me of that trouble; so that I had already
taken another bent more suitable to my humour. Yet, for so much as I
have seen, ‘tis an employment more troublesome than hard; whoever is
capable of anything else, will easily do this. Had I a mind to be rich,
that way would seem too long; I had served my kings, a more profitable
traffic than any other. Since I pretend to nothing but the reputation of
having got nothing or dissipated nothing, conformably to the rest of my
life, improper either to do good or ill of any moment, and that I only
desire to pass on, I can do it, thanks be to God, without any great
endeavour. At the worst, evermore prevent poverty by lessening your
expense; ‘tis that which I make my great concern, and doubt not but to do
it before I shall be compelled. As to the rest, I have sufficiently
settled my thoughts to live upon less than I have, and live contentedly:
“Non aestimatione census, verum victu atque cultu,
terminantur pecunix modus.”
[“‘Tis not by the value of possessions, but by our daily subsistence
and tillage, that our riches are truly estimated.”
--Cicero, Paradox, vi. 3.]
My real need does not so wholly take up all I have, that Fortune has not
whereon to fasten her teeth without biting to the quick. My presence,
heedless and ignorant as it is, does me great service in my domestic
affairs; I employ myself in them, but it goes against the hair, finding
that I have this in my house, that though I burn my candle at one end by
myself, the other is not spared.
Journeys do me no harm but only by their expense, which is great, and
more than I am well able to bear, being always wont to travel with not
only a necessary, but a handsome equipage; I must make them so much
shorter and fewer; I spend therein but the froth, and what I have
reserved for such uses, delaying and deferring my motion till that be
ready. I will not that the pleasure of going abroad spoil the pleasure
of being retired at home; on the contrary, I intend they shall nourish
and favour one another. Fortune has assisted me in this, that since my
principal profession in this life was to live at ease, and rather idly
than busily, she has deprived me of the necessity of growing rich to
provide for the multitude of my heirs. If there be not enough for one,
of that whereof I had so plentifully enough, at his peril be it: his
imprudence will not deserve that I should wish him any more. And every
one, according to the example of Phocion, provides sufficiently for his
children who so provides for them as to leave them as much as was left
him. I should by no means like Crates’ way. He left his money in the
hands of a banker with this condition--that if his children were fools,
he should then give it to them; if wise, he should then distribute it to
the most foolish of the people; as if fools, for being less capable of
living without riches, were more capable of using them.
At all events, the damage occasioned by my absence seems not to deserve,
so long as I am able to support it, that I should waive the occasions of
diverting myself by that troublesome assistance.
There is always something that goes amiss. The affairs, one while of one
house, and then of another, tear you to pieces; you pry into everything
too near; your perspicacity hurts you here, as well as in other things.
I steal away from occasions of vexing myself, and turn from the knowledge
of things that go amiss; and yet I cannot so order it, but that every
hour I jostle against something or other that displeases me; and the
tricks that they most conceal from me, are those that I the soonest come
to know; some there are that, not to make matters worse, a man must
himself help to conceal. Vain vexations; vain sometimes, but always
vexations. The smallest and slightest impediments are the most piercing:
and as little letters most tire the eyes, so do little affairs most
disturb us. The rout of little ills more offend than one, how great
soever. By how much domestic thorns are numerous and slight, by so much
they prick deeper and without warning, easily surprising us when least we
suspect them.
[Now Homer shews us clearly enough how surprise gives the advantage;
who represents Ulysses weeping at the death of his dog; and not
weeping at the tears of his mother; the first accident, trivial as
it was, got the better of him, coming upon him quite unexpectedly;
he sustained the second, though more potent, because he was prepared
for it. ‘Tis light occasions that humble our lives. ]
I am no philosopher; evils oppress me according to their weight, and they
weigh as much according to the form as the matter, and very often more.
If I have therein more perspicacity than the vulgar, I have also more
patience; in short, they weigh with me, if they do not hurt me. Life is
a tender thing, and easily molested. Since my age has made me grow more
pensive and morose,
“Nemo enim resistit sibi, cum caeperit impelli,”
[“For no man resists himself when he has begun to be driven
forward.”--Seneca, Ep., 13.]
for the most trivial cause imaginable, I irritate that humour, which
afterwards nourishes and exasperates itself of its own motion; attracting
and heaping up matter upon matter whereon to feed:
“Stillicidi casus lapidem cavat:”
[“The ever falling drop hollows out a stone.”--Lucretius, i. 314.]
these continual tricklings consume and ulcerate me. Ordinary
inconveniences are never light; they are continual and inseparable,
especially when they spring from the members of a family, continual and
inseparable. When I consider my affairs at distance and in gross, I
find, because perhaps my memory is none of the best, that they have gone
on hitherto improving beyond my reason or expectation; my revenue seems
greater than it is; its prosperity betrays me: but when I pry more
narrowly into the business, and see how all things go:
“Tum vero in curas animum diducimus omnes;”
[“Indeed we lead the mind into all sorts of cares.”
--AEneid, v. 720.]
I have a thousand things to desire and to fear. To give them quite over,
is very easy for me to do: but to look after them without trouble, is
very hard. ‘Tis a miserable thing to be in a place where everything you
see employs and concerns you; and I fancy that I more cheerfully enjoy
the pleasures of another man’s house, and with greater and a purer
relish, than those of my own. Diogenes answered according to my humour
him who asked him what sort of wine he liked the best: “That of another,”
said he.--[Diogenes Laertius, vi. 54.]
My father took a delight in building at Montaigne, where he was born; and
in all the government of domestic affairs I love to follow his example
and rules, and I shall engage those who are to succeed me, as much as in
me lies, to do the same. Could I do better for him, I would; and am
proud that his will is still performing and acting by me. God forbid
that in my hands I should ever suffer any image of life, that I am able
to render to so good a father, to fail. And wherever I have taken in
hand to strengthen some old foundations of walls, and to repair some
ruinous buildings, in earnest I have done it more out of respect to his
design, than my own satisfaction; and am angry at myself that I have not
proceeded further to finish the beginnings he left in his house, and so
much the more because I am very likely to be the last possessor of my
race, and to give the last hand to it. For, as to my own particular
application, neither the pleasure of building, which they say is so
bewitching, nor hunting, nor gardens, nor the other pleasures of a
retired life, can much amuse me. And ‘tis what I am angry at myself for,
as I am for all other opinions that are incommodious to me; which I would
not so much care to have vigorous and learned, as I would have them easy
and convenient for life, they are true and sound enough, if they are
useful and pleasing. Such as hear me declare my ignorance in husbandry,
whisper in my ear that it is disdain, and that I neglect to know its
instruments, its seasons, its order, how they dress my vines, how they
graft, and to know the names and forms of herbs and fruits, and the
preparing the meat on which I live, the names and prices of the stuffs I
wear, because, say they; I have set my heart upon some higher knowledge;
they kill me in saying so. It is not disdain; it is folly, and rather
stupidity than glory; I had rather be a good horseman than a good
logician:
“Quin to aliquid saltem potius, quorum indiget usus,
Viminibus mollique paras detexere junco.”
[“‘Dost thou not rather do something which is required, and make
osier and reed basket.”--Virgil, Eclog., ii. 71.]
We occupy our thoughts about the general, and about universal causes and
conducts, which will very well carry on themselves without our care; and
leave our own business at random, and Michael much more our concern than
man. Now I am, indeed, for the most part at home; but I would be there
better pleased than anywhere else:
“Sit meae sedes utinam senectae,
Sit modus lasso maris, et viarum,
Militiaeque.”
[“Let my old age have a fixed seat; let there be a limit to fatigues
from the sea, journeys, warfare.”--Horace, Od., ii. 6, 6.]
I know not whether or no I shall bring it about. I could wish that,
instead of some other member of his succession, my father had resigned to
me the passionate affection he had in his old age to his household
affairs; he was happy in that he could accommodate his desires to his
fortune, and satisfy himself with what he had; political philosophy may
to much purpose condemn the meanness and sterility of my employment, if I
can once come to relish it, as he did. I am of opinion that the most
honourable calling is to serve the public, and to be useful to many,
“Fructus enim ingenii et virtutis, omnisque praestantiae,
tum maximus capitur, quum in proximum quemque confertur:”
[“For the greatest enjoyment of evil and virtue, and of all
excellence, is experienced when they are conferred on some one
nearest.”--Cicero, De Amicil., c.]
for myself, I disclaim it; partly out of conscience (for where I see the
weight that lies upon such employments, I perceive also the little means
I have to supply it; and Plato, a master in all political government
himself, nevertheless took care to abstain from it), and partly out of
cowardice. I content myself with enjoying the world without bustle;
only-to live an excusable life, and such as may neither be a burden to
myself nor to any other.
Never did any man more fully and feebly suffer himself to be governed by
a third person than I should do, had I any one to whom to entrust myself.
One of my wishes at this time should be, to have a son-in-law that knew
handsomely how to cherish my old age, and to rock it asleep; into whose
hands I might deposit, in full sovereignty, the management and use of all
my goods, that he might dispose of them as I do, and get by them what I
get, provided that he on his part were truly acknowledging, and a friend.
But we live in a world where loyalty of one’s own children is unknown.
He who has the charge of my purse in his travels, has it purely and
without control; he could cheat me thoroughly, if he came to reckoning;
and, if he is not a devil, I oblige him to deal faithfully with me by so
entire a trust:
“Multi fallere do cuerunt, dum timent falli;
et aliis jus peccandi suspicando fecerunt.”
[“Many have taught others to deceive, while they fear to be
deceived, and, by suspecting them, have given them a title to do
ill.”--Seneca, Epist., 3.]
The most common security I take of my people is ignorance; I never
presume any to be vicious till I have first found them so; and repose the
most confidence in the younger sort, that I think are least spoiled by
ill example. I had rather be told at two months’ end that I have spent
four hundred crowns, than to have my ears battered every night with
three, five, seven: and I have been, in this way, as little robbed as
another. It is true, I am willing enough not to see it; I, in some sort,
purposely, harbour a kind of perplexed, uncertain knowledge of my money:
up to a certain point, I am content to doubt. One must leave a little
room for the infidelity or indiscretion of a servant; if you have left
enough, in gross, to do your business, let the overplus of Fortune’s
liberality run a little more freely at her mercy; ‘tis the gleaner’s
portion. After all, I do not so much value the fidelity of my people as
I contemn their injury. What a mean and ridiculous thing it is for a man
to study his money, to delight in handling and telling it over and over
again! ‘Tis by this avarice makes its approaches.
In eighteen years that I have had my estate in my, own hands, I could
never prevail with myself either to read over my deeds or examine my
principal affairs, which ought, of necessity, to pass under my knowledge
and inspection. ‘Tis not a philosophical disdain of worldly and
transitory things; my taste is not purified to that degree, and I value
them at as great a rate, at least, as they are worth; but ‘tis, in truth,
an inexcusable and childish laziness and negligence. What would I not
rather do than read a contract? or than, as a slave to my own business,
tumble over those dusty writings? or, which is worse, those of another
man, as so many do nowadays, to get money? I grudge nothing but care and
trouble, and endeavour nothing so much, as to be careless and at ease.
I had been much fitter, I believe, could it have been without obligation
and servitude, to have lived upon another man’s fortune than my own: and,
indeed, I do not know, when I examine it nearer, whether, according to my
humour, what I have to suffer from my affairs and servants, has not in it
something more abject, troublesome, and tormenting than there would be in
serving a man better born than myself, who would govern me with a gentle
rein, and a little at my own case:
“Servitus obedientia est fracti animi et abjecti,
arbitrio carentis suo.”
[“Servitude is the obedience of a subdued and abject mind, wanting
its own free will.”--Cicero, Paradox, V. I.]
Crates did worse, who threw himself into the liberty of poverty, only to
rid himself of the inconveniences and cares of his house. This is what I
would not do; I hate poverty equally with pain; but I could be content to
change the kind of life I live for another that was humbler and less
chargeable.
When absent from home, I divest myself of all these thoughts, and should
be less concerned for the ruin of a tower, than I am, when present, at
the fall of a tile. My mind is easily composed at distance, but suffers
as much as that of the meanest peasant when I am at home; the reins of my
bridle being wrongly put on, or a strap flapping against my leg, will
keep me out of humour a day together. I raise my courage, well enough
against inconveniences: lift up my eyes I cannot:
“Sensus, o superi, sensus.”
[“The senses, O ye gods, the senses.”]
I am at home responsible for whatever goes amiss. Few masters (I speak
of those of medium condition such as mine), and if there be any such,
they are more happy, can rely so much upon another, but that the greatest
part of the burden will lie upon their own shoulders. This takes much
from my grace in entertaining visitors, so that I have, peradventure,
detained some rather out of expectation of a good dinner, than by my own
behaviour; and lose much of the pleasure I ought to reap at my own house
from the visitation and assembling of my friends. The most ridiculous
carriage of a gentleman in his own house, is to see him bustling about
the business of the place, whispering one servant, and looking an angry
look at another: it ought insensibly to slide along, and to represent an
ordinary current; and I think it unhandsome to talk much to our guests of
their entertainment, whether by way of bragging or excuse. I love order
and cleanliness--
“Et cantharus et lanx
Ostendunt mihi me”--
[“The dishes and the glasses shew me my own reflection.”
--Horace, Ep., i. 5, 23]
more than abundance; and at home have an exact regard to necessity,
little to outward show. If a footman falls to cuffs at another man’s
house, or stumble and throw a dish before him as he is carrying it up,
you only laugh and make a jest on’t; you sleep whilst the master of the
house is arranging a bill of fare with his steward for your morrow’s
entertainment. I speak according as I do myself; quite appreciating,
nevertheless, good husbandry in general, and how pleasant quiet and
prosperous household management, carried regularly on, is to some
natures; and not wishing to fasten my own errors and inconveniences to
the thing; nor to give Plato the lie, who looks upon it as the most
pleasant employment to every one to do his particular affairs without
wrong to another.
When I travel I have nothing to care for but myself, and the laying out
my money; which is disposed of by one single precept; too many things are
required to the raking it together; in that I understand nothing; in
spending, I understand a little, and how to give some show to my expense,
which is indeed its principal use; but I rely too ambitiously upon it,
which renders it unequal and difform, and, moreover, immoderate in both
the one and the other aspect; if it makes a show, if it serve the turn,
I indiscreetly let it run; and as indiscreetly tie up my purse-strings,
if it does not shine, and does not please me. Whatever it be, whether
art or nature, that imprints in us the condition of living by reference
to others, it does us much more harm than good; we deprive ourselves of
our own utilities, to accommodate appearances to the common opinion:
we care not so much what our being is, as to us and in reality, as what
it is to the public observation. Even the properties of the mind, and
wisdom itself, seem fruitless to us, if only enjoyed by ourselves, and if
it produce not itself to the view and approbation of others. There is a
sort of men whose gold runs in streams underground imperceptibly; others
expose it all in plates and branches; so that to the one a liard is worth
a crown, and to the others the inverse: the world esteeming its use and
value, according to the show. All over-nice solicitude about riches
smells of avarice: even the very disposing of it, with a too systematic
and artificial liberality, is not worth a painful superintendence and
solicitude: he, that will order his expense to just so much, makes it too
pinched and narrow. The keeping or spending are, of themselves,
indifferent things, and receive no colour of good or ill, but according
to the application of the will.
The other cause that tempts me out to these journeys is, inaptitude for
the present manners in our state. I could easily console myself for this
corruption in regard to the public interest:
“Pejoraque saecula ferri
Temporibus, quorum sceleri non invenit ipsa
Nomen, et a nullo posuit natura metallo;”
[“And, worse than the iron ages, for whose crimes there is no
similitude in any of Nature’s metals.”--Juvenal, xiii. 28.]
but not to my own. I am, in particular, too much oppressed by them: for,
in my neighbourhood, we are, of late, by the long licence of our civil
wars, grown old in so riotous a form of state,
“Quippe ubi fas versum atque nefas,”
[“Where wrong and right have changed places.”
--Virgil, Georg., i. 504.]
that in earnest, ‘tis a wonder how it can subsist:
“Armati terram exercent, semperque recentes
Convectare juvat praedas; et vivere rapto.”
[“Men plough, girt with arms; ever delighting in fresh robberies,
and living by rapine.”--AEneid, vii. 748.]
In fine, I see by our example, that the society of men is maintained and
held together, at what price soever; in what condition soever they are
placed, they still close and stick together, both moving and in heaps; as
ill united bodies, that, shuffled together without order, find of
themselves a means to unite and settle, often better than they could have
been disposed by art. King Philip mustered up a rabble of the most
wicked and incorrigible rascals he could pick out, and put them all
together into a city he had caused to be built for that purpose, which
bore their name: I believe that they, even from vices themselves, erected
a government amongst them, and a commodious and just society. I see, not
one action, or three, or a hundred, but manners, in common and received
use, so ferocious, especially in inhumanity and treachery, which are to
me the worst of all vices, that I have not the heart to think of them
without horror; and almost as much admire as I detest them: the exercise
of these signal villainies carries with it as great signs of vigour and
force of soul, as of error and disorder. Necessity reconciles and brings
men together; and this accidental connection afterwards forms itself into
laws: for there have been such, as savage as any human opinion could
conceive, who, nevertheless, have maintained their body with as much
health and length of life as any Plato or Aristotle could invent. And
certainly, all these descriptions of polities, feigned by art, are found
to be ridiculous and unfit to be put in practice.
These great and tedious debates about the best form of society, and the
most commodious rules to bind us, are debates only proper for the
exercise of our wits; as in the arts there are several subjects which
have their being in agitation and controversy, and have no life but
there. Such an idea of government might be of some value in a new world;
but we take a world already made, and formed to certain customs; we do
not beget it, as Pyrrha or Cadmus did. By what means soever we may have
the privilege to redress and reform it anew, we can hardly writhe it from
its wonted bent, but we shall break all. Solon being asked whether he
had established the best laws he could for the Athenians; “Yes,” said he,
“of those they would have received.” Varro excuses himself after the
same manner: “that if he were to begin to write of religion, he would say
what he believed; but seeing it was already received, he would write
rather according to use than nature.”
Not according to opinion, but in truth and reality, the best and most
excellent government for every nation is that under which it is
maintained: its form and essential convenience depend upon custom.
We are apt to be displeased at the present condition; but I,
nevertheless, maintain that to desire command in a few--[an oligarchy.]--
in a republic, or another sort of government in monarchy than that
already established, is both vice and folly:
“Ayme l’estat, tel que to le veois estre
S’il est royal ayme la royaute;
S’il est de peu, ou biers communaute,
Ayme l’aussi; car Dieu t’y a faict naistre.”
[“Love the government, such as you see it to be. If it be royal,
love royalty; if it is a republic of any sort, still love it; for
God himself created thee therein.”]
So wrote the good Monsieur de Pibrac, whom we have lately lost, a man of
so excellent a wit, such sound opinions, and such gentle manners. This
loss, and that at the same time we have had of Monsieur de Foix, are of
so great importance to the crown, that I do not know whether there is
another couple in France worthy to supply the places of these two Gascons
in sincerity and wisdom in the council of our kings. They were both
variously great men, and certainly, according to the age, rare and great,
each of them in his kind: but what destiny was it that placed them in
these times, men so remote from and so disproportioned to our corruption
and intestine tumults?
Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation: change only gives
form to injustice and tyranny. When any piece is loosened, it may be
proper to stay it; one may take care that the alteration and corruption
natural to all things do not carry us too far from our beginnings and
principles: but to undertake to found so great a mass anew, and to change
the foundations of so vast a building, is for them to do, who to make
clean, efface; who reform particular defects by an universal confusion,
and cure diseases by death:
“Non tam commutandarum quam evertendarum rerum cupidi.”
[“Not so desirous of changing as of overthrowing things.”
--Cicero, De Offic., ii. i.]
The world is unapt to be cured; and so impatient of anything that presses
it, that it thinks of nothing but disengaging itself at what price
soever. We see by a thousand examples, that it ordinarily cures itself
to its cost. The discharge of a present evil is no cure, if there be not
a general amendment of condition. The surgeon’s end is not only to cut
away the dead flesh; that is but the progress of his cure; he has a care,
over and above, to fill up the wound with better and more natural flesh,
and to restore the member to its due state. Whoever only proposes to
himself to remove that which offends him, falls short: for good does not
necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed, and a worse, as it
happened to Caesar’s murderers, who brought the republic to such a pass,
that they had reason to repent the meddling with the matter. The same
has since happened to several others, even down to our own times: the
French, my contemporaries, know it well enough. All great mutations
shake and disorder a state.
Whoever would look direct at a cure, and well consider of it before he
began, would be very willing to withdraw his hands from meddling in it.
Pacuvius Calavius corrected the vice of this proceeding by a notable
example. His fellow-citizens were in mutiny against their magistrates;
he being a man of great authority in the city of Capua, found means one
day to shut up the Senators in the palace; and calling the people
together in the market-place, there told them that the day was now come
wherein at full liberty they might revenge themselves on the tyrants by
whom they had been so long oppressed, and whom he had now, all alone and
unarmed, at his mercy. He then advised that they should call these out,
one by one, by lot, and should individually determine as to each, causing
whatever should be decreed to be immediately executed; with this proviso,
that they should, at the same time, depute some honest man in the place
of him who was condemned, to the end there might be no vacancy in the
Senate. They had no sooner heard the name of one senator but a great cry
of universal dislike was raised up against him. “I see,” says Pacuvius,
“that we must put him out; he is a wicked fellow; let us look out a good
one in his room.” Immediately there was a profound silence, every one
being at a stand whom to choose. But one, more impudent than the rest,
having named his man, there arose yet a greater consent of voices against
him, an hundred imperfections being laid to his charge, and as many just
reasons why he should not stand. These contradictory humours growing
hot, it fared worse with the second senator and the third, there being as
much disagreement in the election of the new, as consent in the putting
out of the old. In the end, growing weary of this bustle to no purpose,
they began, some one way and some another, to steal out of the assembly:
every one carrying back this resolution in his mind, that the oldest and
best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was, new and
untried.
Seeing how miserably we are agitated (for what have we not done!)
“Eheu! cicatricum, et sceleris pudet,
Fratrumque: quid nos dura refugimus
AEtas? quid intactum nefasti
Liquimus? Unde manus inventus
Metu Deorum continuit? quibus
Pepercit aris.”
[“Alas! our crimes and our fratricides are a shame to us! What
crime does this bad age shrink from? What wickedness have we left
undone? What youth is restrained from evil by the fear of the gods?
What altar is spared?”--Horace, Od., i. 33, 35]
I do not presently conclude,
“Ipsa si velit Salus,
Servare prorsus non potest hanc familiam;”
[“If the goddess Salus herself wish to save this family, she
absolutely cannot”--Terence, Adelph., iv. 7, 43.]
we are not, peradventure, at our last gasp. The conservation of states
is a thing that, in all likelihood, surpasses our understanding;--a civil
government is, as Plato says, a mighty and puissant thing, and hard to be
dissolved; it often continues against mortal and intestine diseases,
against the injury of unjust laws, against tyranny, the corruption and
ignorance of magistrates, the licence and sedition of the people. In all
our fortunes, we compare ourselves to what is above us, and still look
towards those who are better: but let us measure ourselves with what is
below us: there is no condition so miserable wherein a man may not find a
thousand examples that will administer consolation. ‘Tis our vice that
we more unwillingly look upon what is above, than willingly upon what is
below; and Solon was used to say, that “whoever would make a heap of all
the ills together, there is no one who would not rather choose to bear
away the ills he has than to come to an equal division with all other men
from that heap, and take his share.” Our government is, indeed, very
sick, but there have been others more sick without dying. The gods play
at ball with us and bandy us every way:
“Enimvero Dii nos homines quasi pilas habent.”
The stars fatally destined the state of Rome for an example of what they
could do in this kind: in it are comprised all the forms and adventures
that concern a state: all that order or disorder, good or evil fortune,
can do. Who, then, can despair of his condition, seeing the shocks and
commotions wherewith Rome was tumbled and tossed, and yet withstood them
all? If the extent of dominion be the health of a state (which I by no
means think it is, and Isocrates pleases me when he instructs Nicocles
not to envy princes who have large dominions, but those who know how to
preserve those which have fallen into their hands), that of Rome was
never so sound, as when it was most sick. The worst of her forms was the
most fortunate; one can hardly discern any image of government under the
first emperors; it is the most horrible and tumultuous confusion that can
be imagined; it endured it, notwithstanding, and therein continued,
preserving not a monarchy limited within its own bounds, but so many
nations so differing, so remote, so disaffected, so confusedly commanded,
and so unjustly conquered:
“Nec gentibus ullis
Commodat in populum, terra pelagique potentem,
Invidiam fortuna suam.”
[“Fortune never gave it to any nation to satisfy its hatred against
the people, masters of the seas and of the earth.”--Lucan, i. 32.]
Everything that totters does not fall. The contexture of so great a body
holds by more nails than one; it holds even by its antiquity, like old
buildings, from which the foundations are worn away by time, without
rough-cast or mortar, which yet live and support themselves by their own
weight:
“Nec jam validis radicibus haerens,
Pondere tuta suo est.”
Moreover, it is not rightly to go to work, to examine only the flank and
the foss, to judge of the security of a place; we must observe which way
approaches can be made to it, and in what condition the assailant is: few
vessels sink with their own weight, and without some exterior violence.
Now, let us everyway cast our eyes; everything about us totters; in all
the great states, both of Christendom and elsewhere, that are known to
us, if you will but look, you will there see evident menace of alteration
and ruin:
“Et sua sunt illis incommoda; parque per omnes
Tempestas.”
[“They all share in the mischief; the tempest rages
everywhere.”--AEneid, ii.]
Astrologers may very well, as they do, warn us of great revolutions and
imminent mutations: their prophecies are present and palpable, they need
not go to heaven to foretell this. There is not only consolation to be
extracted from this universal combination of ills and menaces, but,
moreover, some hopes of the continuation of our state, forasmuch as,
naturally, nothing falls where all falls: universal sickness is
particular health: conformity is antagonistic to dissolution. For my
part, I despair not, and fancy that I discover ways to save us:
“Deus haec fortasse benigna
Reducet in sedem vice.”
[“The deity will perchance by a favourable turn restore us to our
former position.”--Horace, Epod., xiii. 7.]
Who knows but that God will have it happen, as in human bodies that purge
and restore themselves to a better state by long and grievous maladies,
which render them more entire and perfect health than that they took from
them? That which weighs the most with me is, that in reckoning the
symptoms of our ill, I see as many natural ones, and that Heaven sends
us, and properly its own, as of those that our disorder and human
imprudence contribute to it. The very stars seem to declare that we have
already continued long enough, and beyond the ordinary term. This also
afflicts me, that the mischief which nearest threatens us, is not an
alteration in the entire and solid mass, but its dissipation and
divulsion, which is the most extreme of our fears.
I, moreover, fear, in these fantasies of mine, the treachery of my
memory, lest, by inadvertence, it should make me write the same thing
twice. I hate to examine myself, and never review, but very unwillingly,
what has once escaped my pen. I here set down nothing new. These are
common thoughts, and having, peradventure, conceived them an hundred
times, I am afraid I have set them down somewhere else already.
Repetition is everywhere troublesome, though it were in Homer; but ‘tis
ruinous in things that have only a superficial and transitory show. I do
not love over-insisting, even in the most profitable things, as in
Seneca; and the usage of his stoical school displeases me, to repeat,
upon every subject, at full length and width the principles and
presuppositions that serve in general, and always to realledge anew
common and universal reasons.
My memory grows cruelly worse every day:
“Pocula Lethaeos ut si ducentia somnos,
Arente fauce traxerim;”
[“As if my dry throat had drunk seducing cups of Lethaean
oblivion.”--Horace, Epod., xiv. 3.]
I must be fain for the time to come (for hitherto, thanks be to God,
nothing has happened much amiss), whereas others seek time and
opportunity to think of what they have to say, to avoid all preparation,
for fear of tying myself to some obligation upon which I must insist. To
be tied and bound to a thing puts me quite out, and to depend upon so
weak an instrument as my memory. I never read this following story that
I am not offended at it with a personal and natural resentment:
Lyncestes, accused of conspiracy against Alexander, the day that he was
brought out before the army, according to the custom, to be heard as to
what he could say for himself, had learned a studied speech, of which,
hesitating and stammering, he pronounced some words. Whilst growing more
and more perplexed, whilst struggling with his memory, and trying to
recollect what he had to say, the soldiers nearest to him charged their
pikes against him and killed him, looking upon him as convict; his
confusion and silence served them for a confession; for having had so
much leisure to prepare himself in prison, they concluded that it was not
his memory that failed him, but that his conscience tied up his tongue
and stopped his mouth. And, truly, well said; the place, the assembly,
the expectation, astound a man, even when he has but the ambition to
speak well; what can a man do when ‘tis an harangue upon which his life
depends?
For my part, the very being tied to what I am to say is enough to loose
me from it. When I wholly commit and refer myself to my memory, I lay so
much stress upon it that it sinks under me: it grows dismayed with the
burden. So much as I trust to it, so much do I put myself out of my own
power, even to the finding it difficult to keep my own countenance; and
have been sometimes very much put to it to conceal the slavery wherein I
was engaged; whereas my design is to manifest, in speaking, a perfect
calmness both of face and accent, and casual and unpremeditated motions,
as rising from present occasions, choosing rather to say nothing to
purpose than to show that I came prepared to speak well, a thing
especially unbecoming a man of my profession, and of too great obligation
on him who cannot retain much. The preparation begets a great deal more
expectation than it will satisfy. A man often strips himself to his
doublet to leap no farther than he would have done in his gown:
“Nihil est his, qui placere volunt, turn adversarium,
quam expectatio.”
[“Nothing is so adverse to those who make it their business to
please as expectation”--Cicero, Acad., ii. 4]
It is recorded of the orator Curio, that when he proposed the division of
his oration into three or four parts, or three or four arguments or
reasons, it often happened either that he forgot some one, or added one
or two more. I have always avoided falling into this inconvenience,
having ever hated these promises and prescriptions, not only out of
distrust of my memory, but also because this method relishes too much of
the artist:
“Simpliciora militares decent.”
[“Simplicity becomes warriors.”--Quintilian, Instit. Orat., xi. I.]
‘Tis enough that I have promised to myself never again to take upon me
to speak in a place of respect, for as to speaking, when a man reads his
speech, besides that it is very absurd, it is a mighty disadvantage to
those who naturally could give it a grace by action; and to rely upon the
mercy of my present invention, I would much less do it; ‘tis heavy and
perplexed, and such as would never furnish me in sudden and important
necessities.
Permit, reader, this essay its course also, and this third sitting to
finish the rest of my picture: I add, but I correct not. First, because
I conceive that a man having once parted with his labours to the world,
he has no further right to them; let him do better if he can, in some new
undertaking, but not adulterate what he has already sold. Of such
dealers nothing should be bought till after they are dead. Let them well
consider what they do before they, produce it to the light who hastens
them? My book is always the same, saving that upon every new edition
(that the buyer may not go away quite empty) I take the liberty to add
(as ‘tis but an ill jointed marqueterie) some supernumerary emblem; it is
but overweight, that does not disfigure the primitive form of the essays,
but, by a little artful subtlety, gives a kind of particular value to
every one of those that follow. Thence, however, will easily happen some
transposition of chronology, my stories taking place according to their
opportuneness, not always according to their age.
Secondly, because as to what concerns myself, I fear to lose by change:
my understanding does not always go forward, it goes backward too. I do
not much less suspect my fancies for being the second or the third, than
for being the first, or present, or past; we often correct ourselves as
foolishly as we do others. I am grown older by a great many years since
my first publications, which were in the year 1580; but I very much doubt
whether I am grown an inch the wiser. I now, and I anon, are two several
persons; but whether better, I cannot determine. It were a fine thing to
be old, if we only travelled towards improvement; but ‘tis a drunken,
stumbling, reeling, infirm motion: like that of reeds, which the air
casually waves to and fro at pleasure. Antiochus had in his youth
strongly written in favour of the Academy; in his old age he wrote as
much against it; would not, which of these two soever I should follow, be
still Antiochus? After having established the uncertainty, to go about
to establish the certainty of human opinions, was it not to establish
doubt, and not certainty, and to promise, that had he had yet another age
to live, he would be always upon terms of altering his judgment, not so
much for the better, as for something else?
The public favour has given me a little more confidence than I expected;
but what I ‘most fear is, lest I should glut the world with my writings;
I had rather, of the two, pique my reader than tire him, as a learned man
of my time has done. Praise is always pleasing, let it come from whom,
or upon what account it will; yet ought a man to understand why he is
commended, that he may know how to keep up the same reputation still:
imperfections themselves may get commendation. The vulgar and common
estimation is seldom happy in hitting; and I am much mistaken if, amongst
the writings of my time, the worst are not those which have most gained
the popular applause. For my part, I return my thanks to those
good-natured men who are pleased to take my weak endeavours in good part;
the faults of the workmanship are nowhere so apparent as in a matter
which of itself has no recommendation. Blame not me, reader, for those
that slip in here by the fancy or inadvertency of others; every hand,
every artisan, contribute their own materials; I neither concern myself
with orthography (and only care to have it after the old way) nor
pointing, being very inexpert both in the one and the other. Where they
wholly break the sense, I am very little concerned, for they at least
discharge me; but where they substitute a false one, as they so often do,
and wrest me to their conception, they ruin me. When the sentence,
nevertheless, is not strong enough for my proportion, a civil person
ought to reject it as spurious, and none of mine. Whoever shall know how
lazy I am, and how indulgent to my own humour, will easily believe that I
had rather write as many more essays, than be tied to revise these over
again for so childish a correction.
I said elsewhere, that being planted in the very centre of this new
religion, I am not only deprived of any great familiarity with men of
other kind of manners than my own, and of other opinions, by which they
hold together, as by a tie that supersedes all other obligations; but
moreover I do not live without danger, amongst men to whom all things are
equally lawful, and of whom the most part cannot offend the laws more
than they have already done; from which the extremist degree of licence
proceeds. All the particular being summed up together, I do not find one
man of my country, who pays so dear for the defence of our laws both in
loss and damages (as the lawyers say) as myself; and some there are who
vapour and brag of their zeal and constancy, that if things were justly
weighed, do much less than I. My house, as one that has ever been open
and free to all comers, and civil to all (for I could never persuade
myself to make it a garrison of war, war being a thing that I prefer to
see as remote as may be), has sufficiently merited popular kindness, and
so that it would be a hard matter justly to insult over me upon my own
dunghill; and I look upon it as a wonderful and exemplary thing that it
yet continues a virgin from blood and plunder during so long a storm, and
so many neighbouring revolutions and tumults. For to confess the truth,
it had been possible enough for a man of my complexion to have shaken
hands with any one constant and continued form whatever; but the contrary
invasions and incursions, alternations and vicissitudes of fortune round
about me, have hitherto more exasperated than calmed and mollified the
temper of the country, and involved me, over and over again, with
invincible difficulties and dangers.
I escape, ‘tis true, but am troubled that it is more by chance, and
something of my own prudence, than by justice; and am not satisfied to be
out of the protection of the laws, and under any other safeguard than
theirs. As matters stand, I live, above one half, by the favour of
others, which is an untoward obligation. I do not like to owe my safety
either to the generosity or affection of great persons, who allow me my
legality and my liberty, or to the obliging manners of my predecessors,
or my own: for what if I were another kind of man? If my deportment, and
the frankness of my conversation or relationship, oblige my neighbours,
‘tis that that they should acquit themselves of obligation in only
permitting me to live, and they may say, “We allow him the free liberty
of having divine service read in his own private chapel, when it is
interdicted in all churches round about, and allow him the use of his
goods and his life, as one who protects our wives and cattle in time of
need.” For my house has for many descents shared in the reputation of
Lycurgus the Athenian, who was the general depository and guardian of the
purses of his fellow-citizens. Now I am clearly of opinion that a man
should live by right and by authority, and not either by recompense or
favour. How many gallant men have rather chosen to lose their lives than
to be debtors for them? I hate to subject myself to any sort of
obligation, but above all, to that which binds me by the duty of honour.
I think nothing so dear as what has been given me, and this because my
will lies at pawn under the title of gratitude, and more willingly accept
of services that are to be sold; I feel that for the last I give nothing
but money, but for the other I give myself.
The knot that binds me by the laws of courtesy binds me more than that of
civil constraint; I am much more at ease when bound by a scrivener, than
by myself. Is it not reason that my conscience should be much more
engaged when men simply rely upon it? In a bond, my faith owes nothing,
because it has nothing lent it; let them trust to the security they have
taken without me. I had much rather break the wall of a prison and the
laws themselves than my own word. I am nice, even to superstition, in
keeping my promises, and, therefore, upon all occasions have a care to
make them uncertain and conditional. To those of no great moment, I add
the jealousy of my own rule, to make them weight; it wracks and oppresses
me with its own interest. Even in actions wholly my own and free, if I
once say a thing, I conceive that I have bound myself, and that
delivering it to the knowledge of another, I have positively enjoined it
my own performance. Methinks I promise it, if I but say it: and
therefore am not apt to say much of that kind. The sentence that I pass
upon myself is more severe than that of a judge, who only considers the
common obligation; but my conscience looks upon it with a more severe and
penetrating eye. I lag in those duties to which I should be compelled if
I did not go:
“Hoc ipsum ita justum est, quod recte fit, si est voluntarium.”
[“This itself is so far just, that it is rightly done, if it is
voluntary.”--Cicero, De Offic., i. 9.]
If the action has not some splendour of liberty, it has neither grace nor
honour:
“Quod vos jus cogit, vix voluntate impetrent:”
[“That which the laws compel us to do, we scarcely do with a will.”
--Terence, Adelph., iii. 3, 44.]
where necessity draws me, I love to let my will take its own course:
“Quia quicquid imperio cogitur, exigenti magis,
quam praestanti, acceptum refertur.”
[“For whatever is compelled by power, is more imputed to him that
exacts than to him that performs.”--Valerius Maximus, ii. 2, 6.]
I know some who follow this rule, even to injustice; who will sooner give
than restore, sooner lend than pay, and will do them the least good to
whom they are most obliged. I don’t go so far as that, but I’m not far
off.
I so much love to disengage and disobligate myself, that I have sometimes
looked upon ingratitudes, affronts, and indignities which I have received
from those to whom either by nature or accident I was bound in some way
of friendship, as an advantage to me; taking this occasion of their
ill-usage, for an acquaintance and discharge of so much of my debt. And
though I still continue to pay them all the external offices of public
reason, I, notwithstanding, find a great saving in doing that upon the
account of justice which I did upon the score of affection, and am a
little eased of the attention and solicitude of my inward will:
“Est prudentis sustinere, ut currum, sic impetum benevolentia;”
[“‘Tis the part of a wise man to keep a curbing hand upon the
impetus of friendship, as upon that of his horse.”
--Cicero, De Amicit., c. 17.]
‘tis in me, too urging and pressing where I take; at least, for a man who
loves not to be strained at all. And this husbanding my friendship
serves me for a sort of consolation in the imperfections of those in whom
I am concerned. I am very sorry they are not such as I could wish they
were, but then I also am spared somewhat of my application and engagement
towards them. I approve of a man who is the less fond of his child for
having a scald head, or for being crooked; and not only when he is
ill-conditioned, but also when he is of unhappy disposition, and imperfect
in his limbs (God himself has abated so much from his value and natural
estimation), provided he carry himself in this coldness of affection with
moderation and exact justice: proximity, with me, lessens not defects,
but rather aggravates them.
After all, according to what I understand in the science of benefit and
acknowledgment, which is a subtle science, and of great use, I know no
person whatever more free and less indebted than I am at this hour. What
I do owe is simply to foreign obligations and benefits; as to anything
else, no man is more absolutely clear:
“Nec sunt mihi nota potentum
Munera.”
[“The gifts of great men are unknown to me.”--AEneid, xii. 529.]
Princes give me a great deal if they take nothing from me; and do me good
enough if they do me no harm; that’s all I ask from them. O how am I
obliged to God, that he has been pleased I should immediately receive
from his bounty all I have, and specially reserved all my obligation to
himself. How earnestly do I beg of his holy compassion that I may never
owe essential thanks to any one. O happy liberty wherein I have thus far
lived. May it continue with me to the last. I endeavour to have no
express need of any one:
“In me omnis spec est mihi.”
[“All my hope is in myself.”--Terence, Adelph., iii. 5, 9.]
‘Tis what every one may do in himself, but more easily they whom God has
placed in a condition exempt from natural and urgent necessities. It is
a wretched and dangerous thing to depend upon others; we ourselves, in
whom is ever the most just and safest dependence, are not sufficiently
sure.
I have nothing mine but myself, and yet the possession is, in part,
defective and borrowed. I fortify myself both in courage, which is the
strongest assistant, and also in fortune, therein wherewith to satisfy
myself, though everything else should forsake me. Hippias of Elis not
only furnished himself with knowledge, that he might, at need, cheerfully
retire from all other company to enjoy the Muses: nor only with the
knowledge of philosophy, to teach his soul to be contented with itself,
and bravely to subsist without outward conveniences, when fate would have
it so; he was, moreover, so careful as to learn to cook, to shave
himself, to make his own clothes, his own shoes and drawers, to provide
for all his necessities in himself, and to wean himself from the
assistance of others. A man more freely and cheerfully enjoys borrowed
conveniences, when it is not an enjoyment forced and constrained by need;
and when he has, in his own will and fortune, the means to live without
them. I know myself very well; but ‘tis hard for me to imagine any so
pure liberality of any one towards me, any so frank and free hospitality,
that would not appear to me discreditable, tyrannical, and tainted with
reproach, if necessity had reduced me to it. As giving is an ambitious
and authoritative quality, so is accepting a quality of submission;
witness the insulting and quarrelsome refusal that Bajazet made of the
presents that Tamerlane sent him; and those that were offered on the part
of the Emperor Solyman to the Emperor of Calicut, so angered him, that he
not only rudely rejected them, saying that neither he nor any of his
predecessors had ever been wont to take, and that it was their office to
give; but, moreover, caused the ambassadors sent with the gifts to be put
into a dungeon. When Thetis, says Aristotle, flatters Jupiter, when the
Lacedaemonians flatter the Athenians, they do not put them in mind of the
good they have done them, which is always odious, but of the benefits
they have received from them. Such as I see so frequently employ every
one in their affairs, and thrust themselves into so much obligation,
would never do it, did they but relish as I do the sweetness of a pure
liberty, and did they but weigh, as wise: men should, the burden of
obligation: ‘tis sometimes, peradventure, fully paid, but ‘tis never
dissolved. ‘Tis a miserable slavery to a man who loves to be at full
liberty in all reapects. Such as know me, both above and below me in
station, are able to say whether they have ever known a man less
importuning, soliciting, entreating, and pressing upon others than I.
If I am so, and a degree beyond all modern example, ‘tis no great wonder,
so many parts of my manners contributing to it: a little natural pride,
an impatience at being refused, the moderation of my desires and designs,
my incapacity for business, and my most beloved qualities, idleness and
freedom; by all these together I have conceived a mortal hatred to being
obliged to any other, or by any other than myself. I leave no stone
unturned, to do without it, rather than employ the bounty of another in
any light or important occasion or necessity whatever. My friends
strangely trouble me when they ask me to ask a third person; and I think
it costs me little less to disengage him who is indebted to me, by making
use of him, than to engage myself to him who owes me nothing. These
conditions being removed, and provided they require of me nothing if any
great trouble or care (for I have declared mortal war against all care),
I am very ready to do every one the best service I can. I have been very
willing to seek occasion to do people a good turn, and to attach them to
me; and methinks there is no more agreeable employment for our means.
But I have yet more avoided receiving than sought occasions of giving,
and moreover, according to Aristotle, it is more easy., My fortune has
allowed me but little to do others good withal, and the little it can
afford, is put into a pretty close hand. Had I been born a great person,
I should have been ambitious to have made myself beloved, not to make
myself feared or admired: shall I more plainly express it? I should more
have endeavoured to please than to profit others. Cyrus very wisely, and
by the mouth of a great captain, and still greater philosopher, prefers
his bounty and benefits much before his valour and warlike conquests;
and the elder Scipio, wherever he would raise himself in esteem, sets a
higher value upon his affability and humanity, than on his prowess and
victories, and has always this glorious saying in his mouth: “That he has
given his enemies as much occasion to love him as his friends.” I will
then say, that if a man must, of necessity, owe something, it ought to be
by a more legitimate title than that whereof I am speaking, to which the
necessity of this miserable war compels me; and not in so great a debt as
that of my total preservation both of life and fortune: it overwhelms me.
I have a thousand times gone to bed in my own house with an apprehension
that I should be betrayed and murdered that very night; compounding with
fortune, that it might be without terror and with quick despatch; and,
after my Paternoster, I have cried out,
“Impius haec tam culta novalia miles habebit!”
[“Shall impious soldiers have these new-ploughed grounds?”
--Virgil, Ecl., i. 71.]
What remedy? ‘tis the place of my birth, and that of most of my
ancestors; they have here fixed their affection and name. We inure
ourselves to whatever we are accustomed to; and in so miserable a
condition as ours is, custom is a great bounty of nature, which benumbs
out senses to the sufferance of many evils. A civil war has this with it
worse than other wars have, to make us stand sentinels in our own houses.
“Quam miserum, porta vitam muroque tueri,
Vixque suae tutum viribus esse domus!”
[“‘Tis miserable to protect one’s life by doors and walls, and to be
scarcely safe in one’s own house.”--Ovid, Trist., iv. I, 69.]
‘Tis a grievous extremity for a man to be jostled even in his own house
and domestic repose. The country where I live is always the first in
arms and the last that lays them down, and where there is never an
absolute peace:
“Tunc quoque, cum pax est, trepidant formidine belli....
Quoties Romam fortuna lacessit;
Hac iter est bellis.... Melius, Fortuna, dedisses
Orbe sub Eco sedem, gelidaque sub Arcto,
Errantesque domos.”
[“Even when there’s peace, there is here still the dear of war when
Fortune troubles peace, this is ever the way by which war passes.”
--Ovid, Trist., iii. 10, 67.]
[“We might have lived happier in the remote East or in the icy
North, or among the wandering tribes.”--Lucan, i. 255.]
I sometimes extract the means to fortify myself against these
considerations from indifference and indolence, which, in some sort,
bring us on to resolution. It often befalls me to imagine and expect
mortal dangers with a kind of delight: I stupidly plunge myself headlong
into death, without considering or taking a view of it, as into a deep
and obscure abyss which swallows me up at one leap, and involves me in an
instant in a profound sleep, without any sense of pain. And in these
short and violent deaths, the consequence that I foresee administers more
consolation to me than the effect does fear. They say, that as life is
not better for being long, so death is better for being not long. I do
not so much evade being dead, as I enter into confidence with dying. I
wrap and shroud myself into the storm that is to blind and carry me away
with the fury of a sudden and insensible attack. Moreover, if it should
fall out that, as some gardeners say, roses and violets spring more
odoriferous near garlic and onions, by reason that the last suck and
imbibe all the ill odour of the earth; so, if these depraved natures
should also attract all the malignity of my air and climate, and render
it so much better and purer by their vicinity, I should not lose all.
That cannot be: but there may be something in this, that goodness is more
beautiful and attractive when it is rare; and that contrariety and
diversity fortify and consolidate well-doing within itself, and inflame
it by the jealousy of opposition and by glory. Thieves and robbers, of
their special favour, have no particular spite at me; no more have I to
them: I should have my hands too full. Like consciences are lodged under
several sorts of robes; like cruelty, disloyalty, rapine; and so much the
worse, and more falsely, when the more secure and concealed under colour
of the laws. I less hate an open professed injury than one that is
treacherous; an enemy in arms, than an enemy in a gown. Our fever has
seized upon a body that is not much the worse for it; there was fire
before, and now ‘tis broken out into a flame; the noise is greater, not
the evil. I ordinarily answer such as ask me the reason of my travels,
“That I know very well what I fly from, but not what I seek.” If they
tell me that there may be as little soundness amongst foreigners, and
that their manners are no better than ours: I first reply, that it is
hard to be believed;
“Tam multa: scelerum facies!”
[“There are so many forms of crime.”--Virgil, Georg., i. 506.]
secondly, that it is always gain to change an ill condition for one that
is uncertain; and that the ills of others ought not to afflict us so much
as our own.
I will not here omit, that I never mutiny so much against France, that I
am not perfectly friends with Paris; that city has ever had my heart from
my infancy, and it has fallen out, as of excellent things, that the more
beautiful cities I have seen since, the more the beauty of this still
wins upon my affection. I love her for herself, and more in her own
native being, than in all the pomp of foreign and acquired
embellishments. I love her tenderly, even to her warts and blemishes.
I am a Frenchman only through this great city, great in people, great in
the felicity of her situation; but, above all, great and incomparable in
variety and diversity of commodities: the glory of France, and one of the
most noble ornaments of the world. May God drive our divisions far from
her. Entire and united, I think her sufficiently defended from all other
violences. I give her caution that, of all sorts of people, those will
be the worst that shall set her in discord; I have no fear for her, but
of herself, and, certainly, I have as much fear for her as for any other
part of the kingdom. Whilst she shall continue, I shall never want a
retreat, where I may stand at bay, sufficient to make me amends for
parting with any other retreat.
Not because Socrates has said so, but because it is in truth my own
humour, and peradventure not without some excess, I look upon all men as
my compatriots, and embrace a Polander as a Frenchman, preferring the
universal and common tie to all national ties whatever. I am not much
taken with the sweetness of a native air: acquaintance wholly new and
wholly my own appear to me full as good as the other common and
fortuitous ones with Four neighbours: friendships that are purely of our
own acquiring ordinarily carry it above those to which the communication
of climate or of blood oblige us. Nature has placed us in the world free
and unbound; we imprison ourselves in certain straits, like the kings of
Persia, who obliged themselves to drink no other water but that of the
river Choaspes, foolishly quitted claim to their right in all other
streams, and, so far as concerned themselves, dried up all the other
rivers of the world. What Socrates did towards his end, to look upon a
sentence of banishment as worse than a sentence of death against him, I
shall, I think, never be either so decrepid or so strictly habituated to
my own country to be of that opinion. These celestial lives have images
enough that I embrace more by esteem than affection; and they have some
also so elevated and extraordinary that I cannot embrace them so much as
by esteem, forasmuch as I cannot conceive them. That fancy was singular
in a man who thought the whole world his city; it is true that he
disdained travel, and had hardly ever set his foot out of the Attic
territories. What say you to his complaint of the money his friends
offered to save his life, and that he refused to come out of prison by
the mediation of others, in order not to disobey the laws in a time when
they were otherwise so corrupt? These examples are of the first kind for
me; of the second, there are others that I could find out in the same
person: many of these rare examples surpass the force of my action, but
some of them, moreover, surpass the force of my judgment.
Besides these reasons, travel is in my opinion a very profitable
exercise; the soul is there continually employed in observing new and
unknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said a better school
wherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversity
of so many other lives, fancies, and usances, and by making it relish a
perpetual variety of forms of human nature. The body is, therein,
neither idle nor overwrought; and that moderate agitation puts it in
breath. I can keep on horseback, tormented with the stone as I am,
without alighting or being weary, eight or ten hours together:
“Vires ultra sorternque senectae.”
[“Beyond the strength and lot of age.”--AEneid, vi. 114.]
No season is enemy to me but the parching heat of a scorching sun; for
the umbrellas made use of in Italy, ever since the time of the ancient
Romans, more burden a man’s arm than they relieve his head. I would fain
know how it was that the Persians, so long ago and in the infancy of
luxury, made ventilators where they wanted them, and planted shades, as
Xenophon reports they did. I love rain, and to dabble in the dirt, as
well as ducks do. The change of air and climate never touches me; every
sky is alike; I am only troubled with inward alterations which I breed
within myself, and those are not so frequent in travel. I am hard to be
got out, but being once upon the road, I hold out as well as the best.
I take as much pains in little as in great attempts, and am as solicitous
to equip myself for a short journey, if but to visit a neighbour, as for
the longest voyage. I have learned to travel after the Spanish fashion,
and to make but one stage of a great many miles; and in excessive heats
I always travel by night, from sun set to sunrise. The other method of
baiting by the way, in haste and hurry to gobble up a dinner, is,
especially in short days, very inconvenient. My horses perform the
better; never any horse tired under me that was able to hold out the
first day’s journey. I water them at every brook I meet, and have only a
care they have so much way to go before I come to my inn, as will digest
the water in their bellies. My unwillingness to rise in a morning gives
my servants leisure to dine at their ease before they set out; for my own
part, I never eat too late; my appetite comes to me in eating, and not
else; I am never hungry but at table.
Some of my friends blame me for continuing this travelling humour, being
married and old. But they are out in’t; ‘tis the best time to leave a
man’s house, when he has put it into a way of continuing without him, and
settled such order as corresponds with its former government. ‘Tis much
greater imprudence to abandon it to a less faithful housekeeper, and who
will be less solicitous to look after your affairs.
The most useful and honourable knowledge and employment for the mother of
a family is the science of good housewifery. I see some that are
covetous indeed, but very few that are good managers. ‘Tis the supreme
quality of a woman, which a man ought to seek before any other, as the
only dowry that must ruin or preserve our houses. Let men say what they
will, according to the experience I have learned, I require in married
women the economical virtue above all other virtues; I put my wife to’t,
as a concern of her own, leaving her, by my absence, the whole government
of my affairs. I see, and am vexed to see, in several families I know,
Monsieur about noon come home all jaded and ruffled about his affairs,
when Madame is still dressing her hair and tricking up herself, forsooth,
in her closet: this is for queens to do, and that’s a question, too: ‘tis
ridiculous and unjust that the laziness of our wives should be maintained
with our sweat and labour. No man, so far as in me lie, shall have a
clearer, a more quiet and free fruition of his estate than I. If the
husband bring matter, nature herself will that the wife find the form.
As to the duties of conjugal friendship, that some think to be impaired
by these absences, I am quite of another opinion. It is, on the
contrary, an intelligence that easily cools by a too frequent and
assiduous companionship. Every strange woman appears charming, and we
all find by experience that being continually together is not so pleasing
as to part for a time and meet again. These interruptions fill me with
fresh affection towards my family, and render my house more pleasant to
me. Change warms my appetite to the one and then to the other. I know
that the arms of friendship are long enough to reach from the one end of
the world to the other, and especially this, where there is a continual
communication of offices that rouse the obligation and remembrance. The
Stoics say that there is so great connection and relation amongst the
sages, that he who dines in France nourishes his companion in Egypt; and
that whoever does but hold out his finger, in what part of the world
soever, all the sages upon the habitable earth feel themselves assisted
by it. Fruition and possession principally appertain to the imagination;
it more fervently and constantly embraces what it is in quest of, than
what we hold in our arms. Cast up your daily amusements; you will find
that you are most absent from your friend when he is present with you;
his presence relaxes your attention, and gives you liberty to absent
yourself at every turn and upon every occasion. When I am away at Rome,
I keep and govern my house, and the conveniences I there left; see my
walls rise, my trees shoot, and my revenue increase or decrease, very
near as well as when I am there:
“Ante oculos errat domus, errat forma locorum.”
[“My house and the forms of places float before my eyes”
--Ovid, Trist, iii. 4, 57.]
If we enjoy nothing but what we touch, we may say farewell to the money
in our chests, and to our sons when they are gone a hunting. We will
have them nearer to us: is the garden, or half a day’s journey from home,
far? What is ten leagues: far or near? If near, what is eleven, twelve,
or thirteen, and so by degrees. In earnest, if there be a woman who can
tell her husband what step ends the near and what step begins the remote,
I would advise her to stop between;
“Excludat jurgia finis . . . .
Utor permisso; caudaeque pilos ut equinae
Paulatim vello, et demo unum, demo etiam unum
Dum cadat elusus ratione ruentis acervi:”
[“Let the end shut out all disputes . . . . I use what is
permitted; I pluck out the hairs of the horse’s tail one by one;
while I thus outwit my opponent.”--Horace, Ep., ii, I, 38, 45]
and let them boldly call philosophy to their assistance; in whose teeth
it may be cast that, seeing it neither discerns the one nor the other end
of the joint, betwixt the too much and the little, the long and the
short, the light and the heavy, the near and the remote; that seeing it
discovers neither the beginning nor the end, it must needs judge very
uncertainly of the middle:
“Rerum natura nullam nobis dedit cognitionem finium.”
[“Nature has green to us no knowledge of the end of things.”
--Cicero, Acad., ii. 29.]
Are they not still wives and friends to the dead who are not at the end
of this but in the other world? We embrace not only the absent, but
those who have been, and those who are not yet. We do not promise in
marriage to be continually twisted and linked together, like some little
animals that we see, or, like the bewitched folks of Karenty,--[Karantia,
a town in the isle of Rugen. See Saxo-Grammaticus, Hist. of Denmark,
book xiv.]--tied together like dogs; and a wife ought not to be so
greedily enamoured of her husband’s foreparts, that she cannot endure to
see him turn his back, if occasion be. But may not this saying of that
excellent painter of woman’s humours be here introduced, to show the
reason of their complaints?
“Uxor, si cesses, aut to amare cogitat,
Aut tete amari, aut potare, aut animo obsequi;
Et tibi bene esse soli, cum sibi sit male;”
[“Your wife, if you loiter, thinks that you love or are beloved; or
that you are drinking or following your inclination; and that it is
well for you when it is ill for her (all the pleasure is yours and
hers all the care).”
--Terence, Adelph., act i., sc. I, v. 7.]
or may it not be, that of itself opposition and contradiction entertain
and nourish them, and that they sufficiently accommodate themselves,
provided they incommodate you?
In true friendship, wherein I am perfect, I more give myself to my
friend, than I endeavour to attract him to me. I am not only better
pleased in doing him service than if he conferred a benefit upon me,
but, moreover, had rather he should do himself good than me, and he most
obliges me when he does so; and if absence be either more pleasant or
convenient for him, ‘tis also more acceptable to me than his presence;
neither is it properly absence, when we can write to one another: I have
sometimes made good use of our separation from one another: we better
filled and further extended the possession of life in being parted.
He--[La Boetie.]--lived, enjoyed, and saw for me, and I for him, as
fully as if he had himself been there; one part of us remained idle, and
we were too much blended in one another when we were together; the
distance of place rendered the conjunction of our wills more rich. This
insatiable desire of personal presence a little implies weakness in the
fruition of souls.
As to what concerns age, which is alleged against me, ‘tis quite
contrary; ‘tis for youth to subject itself to common opinions, and to
curb itself to please others; it has wherewithal to please both the
people and itself; we have but too much ado to please ourselves alone.
As natural conveniences fail, let us supply them with those that are
artificial. ‘Tis injustice to excuse youth for pursuing its pleasures,
and to forbid old men to seek them. When young, I concealed my wanton
passions with prudence; now I am old, I chase away melancholy by debauch.
And thus do the platonic laws forbid men to travel till forty or fifty
years old, so that travel might be more useful and instructive in so
mature an age. I should sooner subscribe to the second article of the
same Laws, which forbids it after threescore.
“But, at such an age, you will never return from so long a journey.”
What care I for that? I neither undertake it to return, nor to finish it
my business is only to keep myself in motion, whilst motion pleases me;
I only walk for the walk’s sake. They who run after a benefit or a hare,
run not; they only run who run at base, and to exercise their running.
My design is divisible throughout: it is not grounded upon any great
hopes: every day concludes my expectation: and the journey of my life is
carried on after the same manner. And yet I have seen places enough a
great way off, where I could have wished to have stayed. And why not,
if Chrysippus, Cleanthes, Diogenes, Zeno, Antipater, so many sages of the
sourest sect, readily abandoned their country, without occasion of
complaint, and only for the enjoyment of another air. In earnest, that
which most displeases me in all my travels is, that I cannot resolve to
settle my abode where I should best like, but that I must always propose
to myself to return, to accommodate myself to the common humour.
If I feared to die in any other place than that of my birth; if I thought
I should die more uneasily remote from my own family, I should hardly go
out of France; I should not, without fear, step out of my parish; I feel
death always pinching me by the throat or by the back. But I am
otherwise constituted; ‘tis in all places alike to me. Yet, might I have
my choice, I think I should rather choose to die on horseback than in
bed; out of my own house, and far from my own people. There is more
heartbreaking than consolation in taking leave of one’s friends; I am
willing to omit that civility, for that, of all the offices of
friendship, is the only one that is unpleasant; and I could, with all my
heart, dispense with that great and eternal farewell. If there be any
convenience in so many standers-by, it brings an hundred inconveniences
along with it. I have seen many dying miserably surrounded with all this
train: ‘tis a crowd that chokes them. ‘Tis against duty, and is a
testimony of little kindness and little care, to permit you to die in
repose; one torments your eyes, another your ears, another your tongue;
you have neither sense nor member that is not worried by them. Your
heart is wounded with compassion to hear the mourning of friends, and,
perhaps with anger, to hear the counterfeit condolings of pretenders.
Who ever has been delicate and sensitive, when well, is much more so when
ill. In such a necessity, a gentle hand is required, accommodated to his
sentiment, to scratch him just in the place where he itches, otherwise
scratch him not at all. If we stand in need of a wise woman--[midwife,
Fr. ‘sage femme’.]--to bring us into the world, we have much more need
of a still wiser man to help us out of it. Such a one, and a friend to
boot, a man ought to purchase at any cost for such an occasion. I am not
yet arrived to that pitch of disdainful vigour that is fortified in
itself, that nothing can assist or disturb; I am of a lower form; I
endeavour to hide myself, and to escape from this passage, not by fear,
but by art. I do not intend in this act of dying to make proof and show
of my constancy. For whom should I do it? all the right and interest I
have in reputation will then cease. I content myself with a death
involved within itself, quiet, solitary, and all my own, suitable to my
retired and private life; quite contrary to the Roman superstition, where
a man was looked upon as unhappy who died without speaking, and who had
not his nearest relations to close his eyes. I have enough to do to
comfort myself, without having to console others; thoughts enough in my
head, not to need that circumstances should possess me with new; and
matter enough to occupy me without borrowing. This affair is out of the
part of society; ‘tis the act of one single person. Let us live and be
merry amongst our friends; let us go repine and die amongst strangers; a
man may find those, for his money, who will shift his pillow and rub his
feet, and will trouble him no more than he would have them; who will
present to him an indifferent countenance, and suffer him to govern
himself, and to complain according to his own method.
I wean myself daily by my reason from this childish and inhuman humour,
of desiring by our sufferings to move the compassion and mourning of our
friends: we stretch our own incommodities beyond their just extent when
we extract tears from others; and the constancy which we commend in every
one in supporting his adverse fortune, we accuse and reproach in our
friends when the evil is our own; we are not satisfied that they should
be sensible of our condition only, unless they be, moreover, afflicted.
A man should diffuse joy, but, as much as he can, smother grief. He who
makes himself lamented without reason is a man not to be lamented when
there shall be real cause: to be always complaining is the way never to
be lamented; by making himself always in so pitiful a taking, he is never
commiserated by any. He who makes himself out dead when he is alive, is
subject to be thought living when he is dying. I have seen some who have
taken it ill when they have been told that they looked well, and that
their pulse was good; restrain their smiles, because they betrayed a
recovery, and be angry, at their health because it was not to be
lamented: and, which is a great deal more, these were not women.
I describe my infirmities, such as they really are, at most, and avoid
all expressions of evil prognostic and composed exclamations. If not
mirth, at least a temperate countenance in the standers-by, is proper in
the presence of a wise sick man: he does not quarrel with health, for,
seeing himself in a contrary condition, he is pleased to contemplate it
sound and entire in others, and at least to enjoy it for company: he does
not, for feeling himself melt away, abandon all living thoughts, nor
avoid ordinary discourse. I would study sickness whilst I am well; when
it has seized me, it will make its impression real enough, without the
help of my imagination. We prepare ourselves beforehand for the journeys
we undertake, and resolve upon them; we leave the appointment of the hour
when to take horse to the company, and in their favour defer it.
I find this unexpected advantage in the publication of my manners, that
it in some sort serves me for a rule. I have, at times, some
consideration of not betraying the history of my life: this public
declaration obliges me to keep my way, and not to give the lie to the
image I have drawn of my qualities, commonly less deformed and
contradictory than consists with the malignity and infirmity of the
judgments of this age. The uniformity and simplicity of my manners
produce a face of easy interpretation; but because the fashion is a
little new and not in use, it gives too great opportunity to slander.
Yet so it is, that whoever would fairly assail me, I think I so
sufficiently assist his purpose in my known and avowed imperfections,
that he may that way satisfy his ill-nature without fighting with the
wind. If I myself, to anticipate accusation and discovery, confess
enough to frustrate his malice, as he conceives, ‘tis but reason that he
make use of his right of amplification, and to wire-draw my vices as far
as he can; attack has its rights beyond justice; and let him make the
roots of those errors I have laid open to him shoot up into trees: let
him make his use, not only of those I am really affected with, but also
of those that only threaten me; injurious vices, both in quality and
number; let him cudgel me that way. I should willingly follow the
example of the philosopher Bion: Antigonus being about to reproach him
with the meanness of his birth, he presently cut him short with this
declaration: “I am,” said he, “the son of a slave, a butcher, and
branded, and of a strumpet my father married in the lowest of his
fortune; both of them were whipped for offences they had committed. An
orator bought me, when a child, and finding me a pretty and hopeful boy,
bred me up, and when he died left me all his estate, which I have
transported into this city of Athens, and here settled myself to the
study of philosophy. Let the historians never trouble themselves with
inquiring about me: I will tell them about it.” A free and generous
confession enervates reproach and disarms slander. So it is that, one
thing with another, I fancy men as often commend as undervalue me beyond
reason; as, methinks also, from my childhood, in rank and degree of
honour, they have given me a place rather above than below my right.
I should find myself more at ease in a country where these degrees were
either regulated or not regarded. Amongst men, when an altercation about
the precedence either of walking or sitting exceeds three replies, ‘tis
reputed uncivil. I never stick at giving or taking place out of rule, to
avoid the trouble of such ceremony; and never any man had a mind to go
before me, but I permitted him to do it.
Besides this profit I make of writing of myself, I have also hoped for
this other advantage, that if it should fall out that my humour should
please or jump with those of some honest man before I die, he would then
desire and seek to be acquainted with me. I have given him a great deal
of made-way; for all that he could have, in many years, acquired by close
familiarity, he has seen in three days in this memorial, and more surely
and exactly. A pleasant fancy: many things that I would not confess to
any one in particular, I deliver to the public, and send my best friends
to a bookseller’s shop, there to inform themselves concerning my most
secret thoughts;
“Excutienda damus praecordia.”
[“We give our hearts to be examined.”--Persius, V. 22.]
Did I, by good direction, know where to seek any one proper for my
conversation, I should certainly go a great way to find him out: for the
sweetness of suitable and agreeable company cannot; in my opinion, be
bought too dear. O what a thing is a true friend! how true is that old
saying, that the use of a friend is more pleasing and necessary than the
elements of water and fire!
To return to my subject: there is, then, no great harm in dying privately
and far from home; we conceive ourselves obliged to retire for natural
actions less unseemly and less terrible than this. But, moreover, such
as are reduced to spin out a long languishing life, ought not, perhaps,
to wish to trouble a great family with their continual miseries;
therefore the Indians, in a certain province, thought it just to knock a
man on the head when reduced to such a necessity; and in another of their
provinces, they all forsook him to shift for himself as well as he could.
To whom do they not, at last, become tedious and insupportable? the
ordinary offices of fife do not go that length. You teach your best
friends to be cruel perforce; hardening wife and children by long use
neither to regard nor to lament your sufferings. The groans of the stone
are grown so familiar to my people, that nobody takes any notice of them.
And though we should extract some pleasure from their conversation (which
does not always happen, by reason of the disparity of conditions, which
easily begets contempt or envy toward any one whatever), is it not too
much to make abuse of this half a lifetime? The more I should see them
constrain themselves out of affection to be serviceable to me, the more I
should be sorry for their pains. We have liberty to lean, but not to lay
our whole weight upon others, so as to prop ourselves by their ruin; like
him who caused little children’s throats to be cut to make use of their
blood for the cure of a disease he had, or that other, who was
continually supplied with tender young girls to keep his old limbs warm
in the night, and to mix the sweetness of their breath with his, sour and
stinking. I should readily advise Venice as a retreat in this decline of
life. Decrepitude is a solitary quality. I am sociable even to excess,
yet I think it reasonable that I should now withdraw my troubles from the
sight of the world and keep them to myself. Let me shrink and draw up
myself in my own shell, like a tortoise, and learn to see men without
hanging upon them. I should endanger them in so slippery a passage: ‘tis
time to turn my back to company.
“But, in these travels, you will be taken ill in some wretched place,
where nothing can be had to relieve you.” I always carry most things
necessary about me; and besides, we cannot evade Fortune if she once
resolves to attack us. I need nothing extraordinary when I am sick.
I will not be beholden to my bolus to do that for me which nature cannot.
At the very beginning of my fevers and sicknesses that cast me down,
whilst still entire, and but little, disordered in health, I reconcile
myself to Almighty God by the last Christian, offices, and find myself by
so doing less oppressed and more easy, and have got, methinks, so much
the better of my disease. And I have yet less need of a notary or
counsellor than of a physician. What I have not settled of my affairs
when I was in health, let no one expect I should do it when I am sick.
What I will do for the service of death is always done; I durst not so
much as one day defer it; and if nothing be done, ‘tis as much as to say
either that doubt hindered my choice (and sometimes ‘tis well chosen not
to choose), or that I was positively resolved not to do anything at all.
I write my book for few men and for few years. Had it been matter of
duration, I should have put it into firmer language. According to the
continual variation that ours has been subject to, up to this day, who
can expect that its present form should be in use fifty years hence?
It slips every day through our fingers, and since I was born, it is
altered above one-half. We say that it is now perfect; and every age
says the same of its own. I shall hardly trust to that, so long as it
varies and changes as it does. ‘Tis for good and useful writings to
rivet it to them, and its reputation will go according to the fortune of
our state. For which reason I am not afraid to insert in it several
private articles, which will spend their use amongst the men that are now
living, and that concern the particular knowledge of some who will see
further into them than every common reader. I will not, after all, as I
often hear dead men spoken of, that men should say of me: “He judged, he
lived so and so; he would have done this or that; could he have spoken
when he was dying, he would have said so or so, and have given this thing
or t’other; I knew him better than any.” Now, as much as decency
permits, I here discover my inclinations and affections; but I do more
willingly and freely by word of mouth to any one who desires to be
informed. So it is that in these memoirs, if any one observe, he will
find that I have either told or designed to tell all; what I cannot
express, I point out with my finger:
“Verum animo satis haec vestigia parva sagaci
Sunt, per quae possis cognoscere caetera tute”
[“By these footsteps a sagacious mind many easily find all other
matters (are sufficient to enable one to learn the rest well.)”
--Lucretius, i. 403.]
I leave nothing to be desired or to be guessed at concerning me. If
people must be talking of me, I would have it to be justly and truly; I
would come again, with all my heart, from the other world to give any one
the lie who should report me other than I was, though he did it to honour
me. I perceive that people represent, even living men, quite another
thing than what they really are; and had I not stoutly defended a friend
whom I have lost,--[De la Boetie.]--they would have torn him into a
thousand contrary pieces.
To conclude the account of my poor humours, I confess that in my travels
I seldom reach my inn but that it comes into my mind to consider whether
I could there be sick and dying at my ease. I desire to be lodged in
some private part of the house, remote from all noise, ill scents, and
smoke. I endeavour to flatter death by these frivolous circumstances;
or, to say better, to discharge myself from all other incumbrances, that
I may have nothing to do, nor be troubled with anything but that which
will lie heavy enough upon me without any other load. I would have my
death share in the ease and conveniences of my life; ‘tis a great part of
it, and of great importance, and I hope it will not in the future
contradict the past. Death has some forms that are more easy than
others, and receives divers qualities, according to every one’s fancy.
Amongst the natural deaths, that which proceeds from weakness and stupor
I think the most favourable; amongst those that are violent, I can worse
endure to think of a precipice than of the fall of a house that will
crush me in a moment, and of a wound with a sword than of a harquebus
shot; I should rather have chosen to poison myself with Socrates, than
stab myself with Cato. And, though it, be all one, yet my imagination
makes as great a difference as betwixt death and life, betwixt throwing
myself into a burning furnace and plunging into the channel of a river:
so idly does our fear more concern itself in the means than the effect.
It is but an instant, ‘tis true, but withal an instant of such weight,
that I would willingly give a great many days of my life to pass it over
after my own fashion. Since every one’s imagination renders it more or
less terrible, and since every one has some choice amongst the several
forms of dying, let us try a little further to find some one that is
wholly clear from all offence. Might not one render it even voluptuous,
like the Commoyientes of Antony and Cleopatra? I set aside the brave and
exemplary efforts produced by philosophy and religion; but, amongst men
of little mark there have been found some, such as Petronius and
Tigellinus at Rome, condemned to despatch themselves, who have, as it
were, rocked death asleep with the delicacy of their preparations; they
have made it slip and steal away in the height of their accustomed
diversions amongst girls and good fellows; not a word of consolation, no
mention of making a will, no ambitious affectation of constancy, no talk
of their future condition; amongst sports, feastings, wit, and mirth,
common and indifferent discourses, music, and amorous verses. Were it
not possible for us to imitate this resolution after a more decent
manner? Since there are deaths that are good for fools, deaths good for
the wise, let us find out such as are fit for those who are betwixt both.
My imagination suggests to me one that is easy, and, since we must die,
to be desired. The Roman tyrants thought they did, in a manner, give a
criminal life when they gave him the choice of his death. But was not
Theophrastus, that so delicate, so modest, and so wise a philosopher,
compelled by reason, when he durst say this verse, translated by Cicero:
“Vitam regit fortuna, non sapientia?”
[“Fortune, not wisdom, sways human life.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., V. 31.]
Fortune assists the facility of the bargain of my life, having placed it
in such a condition that for the future it can be neither advantage nor
hindrance to those who are concerned in me; ‘tis a condition that I would
have accepted at any time of my life; but in this occasion of trussing up
my baggage, I am particularly pleased that in dying I shall neither do
them good nor harm. She has so ordered it, by a cunning compensation,
that they who may pretend to any considerable advantage by my death will,
at the same time, sustain a material inconvenience. Death sometimes is
more grievous to us, in that it is grievous to others, and interests us
in their interest as much as in our own, and sometimes more.
In this conveniency of lodging that I desire, I mix nothing of pomp and
amplitude--I hate it rather; but a certain plain neatness, which is
oftenest found in places where there is less of art, and that Nature has
adorned with some grace that is all her own:
“Non ampliter, sea munditer convivium.”
[“To eat not largely, but cleanly.”--Nepos, Life of Atticus, c. 13]
“Plus salis quam sumptus.”
[“Rather enough than costly (More wit than cost)”--Nonius, xi. 19.]
And besides, ‘tis for those whose affairs compel them to travel in the
depth of winter through the Grisons country to be surprised upon the way
with great inconveniences. I, who, for the most part, travel for my
pleasure, do not order my affairs so ill. If the way be foul on my right
hand, I turn on my left; if I find myself unfit to ride, I stay where I
am; and, so doing, in earnest I see nothing that is not as pleasant and
commodious as my own house. ‘Tis true that I always find superfluity
superfluous, and observe a kind of trouble even in abundance itself.
Have I left anything behind me unseen, I go back to see it; ‘tis still on
my way; I trace no certain line, either straight or crooked.--[Rousseau
has translated this passage in his Emile, book v.]--Do I not find in the
place to which I go what was reported to me--as it often falls out that
the judgments of others do not jump with mine, and that I have found
their reports for the most part false--I never complain of losing my
labour: I have, at least, informed myself that what was told me was not
true.
I have a constitution of body as free, and a palate as indifferent, as
any man living: the diversity of manners of several nations only affects
me in the pleasure of variety: every usage has its reason. Let the plate
and dishes be pewter, wood, or earth; my meat be boiled or roasted; let
them give me butter or oil, of nuts or olives, hot or cold, ‘tis all one
to me; and so indifferent, that growing old, I accuse this generous
faculty, and would wish that delicacy and choice should correct the
indiscretion of my appetite, and sometimes soothe my stomach. When I
have been abroad out of France and that people, out of courtesy, have
asked me if I would be served after the French manner, I laughed at the
question, and always frequented tables the most filled with foreigners.
I am ashamed to see our countrymen besotted with this foolish humour of
quarrelling with forms contrary to their own; they seem to be out of
their element when out of their own village: wherever they go, they keep
to their own fashions and abominate those of strangers. Do they meet
with a compatriot in Hungary? O the happy chance! They are henceforward
inseparable; they cling together, and their whole discourse is to condemn
the barbarous manners they see about them. Why barbarous, because they
are not French? And those have made the best use of their travels who
have observed most to speak against. Most of them go for no other end
but to come back again; they proceed in their travel with vast gravity
and circumspection, with a silent and incommunicable prudence, preserving
themselves from the contagion of an unknown air. What I am saying of
them puts me in mind of something like it I have at times observed in
some of our young courtiers; they will not mix with any but men of their
own sort, and look upon us as men of another world, with disdain or pity.
Put them upon any discourse but the intrigues of the court, and they are
utterly at a loss; as very owls and novices to us as we are to them.
‘Tis truly said that a well-bred man is a compound man. I, on the
contrary, travel very much sated with our own fashions; I do not look for
Gascons in Sicily; I have left enough of them at home; I rather seek for
Greeks and Persians; they are the men I endeavour to be acquainted with
and the men I study; ‘tis there that I bestow and employ myself. And
which is more, I fancy that I have met but with few customs that are not
as good as our own; I have not, I confess, travelled very far; scarce out
of the sight of the vanes of my own house.
As to the rest, most of the accidental company a man falls into upon the
road beget him more trouble than pleasure; I waive them as much as I
civilly can, especially now that age seems in some sort to privilege and
sequester me from the common forms. You suffer for others or others
suffer for you; both of them inconveniences of importance enough, but the
latter appears to me the greater. ‘Tis a rare fortune, but of
inestimable solace; to have a worthy man, one of a sound judgment and of
manners conformable to your own, who takes a delight to bear you company.
I have been at an infinite loss for such upon my travels. But such a
companion should be chosen and acquired from your first setting out.
There can be no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so
much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind, that it does not grieve
me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to communicate it to:
“Si cum hac exceptione detur sapientia,
ut illam inclusam teneam, nec enuntiem, rejiciam.”
[“If wisdom be conferred with this reservation, that I must keep it
to myself, and not communicate it to others, I would none of it.”
--Seneca, Ep., 6.]
This other has strained it one note higher:
“Si contigerit ea vita sapienti, ut ommum rerum afliuentibus copiis,
quamvis omnia, quae cognitione digna sunt, summo otio secum ipse
consideret et contempletur, tamen, si solitudo tanta sit, ut hominem
videre non possit, excedat a vita.”
[“If such a condition of life should happen to a wise man, that in
the greatest plenty of all conveniences he might, at the most
undisturbed leisure, consider and contemplate all things worth the
knowing, yet if his solitude be such that he must not see a man, let
him depart from life.”--Cicero, De Offic., i. 43.]
Architas pleases me when he says, “that it would be unpleasant, even in
heaven itself, to wander in those great and divine celestial bodies
without a companion. But yet ‘tis much better to be alone than in
foolish and troublesome company. Aristippus loved to live as a stranger
in all places:
“Me si fata meis paterentur ducere vitam
Auspiciis,”
[“If the fates would let me live in my own way.”--AEneid, iv. 340.]
I should choose to pass away the greatest part of my life on horseback:
“Visere gestiens,
Qua pane debacchentur ignes,
Qua nebula, pluviique rores.”
[“Visit the regions where the sun burns, where are the thick
rain-clouds and the frosts.”--Horace, Od., iii. 3, 54.]
“Have you not more easy diversions at home? What do you there want? Is
not your house situated in a sweet and healthful air, sufficiently
furnished, and more than sufficiently large? Has not the royal majesty
been more than once there entertained with all its train? Are there not
more below your family in good ease than there are above it in eminence?
Is there any local, extraordinary, indigestible thought that afflicts
you?”
“Qua to nunc coquat, et vexet sub pectore fixa.”
[“That may now worry you, and vex, fixed in your breast.”
--Cicero, De Senect, c. 1, Ex Ennio.]
“Where do you think to live without disturbance?”
“Nunquam simpliciter Fortuna indulget.”
[“Fortune is never simply complaisant (unmixed).”
--Quintus Curtius, iv. 14]
You see, then, it is only you that trouble yourself; you will everywhere
follow yourself, and everywhere complain; for there is no satisfaction
here below, but either for brutish or for divine souls. He who, on so
just an occasion, has no contentment, where will he think to find it?
How many thousands of men terminate their wishes in such a condition as
yours? Do but reform yourself; for that is wholly in your own power!
whereas you have no other right but patience towards fortune:
“Nulla placida quies est, nisi quam ratio composuit.”
[“There is no tranquillity but that which reason has conferred.”
--Seneca, Ep., 56.]
I see the reason of this advice, and see it perfectly well; but he might
sooner have done, and more pertinently, in bidding me in one word be
wise; that resolution is beyond wisdom; ‘tis her precise work and
product. Thus the physician keeps preaching to a poor languishing
patient to “be cheerful”; but he would advise him a little more
discreetly in bidding him “be well.” For my part, I am but a man of the
common sort. ‘Tis a wholesome precept, certain and easy to be
understood, “Be content with what you have,” that is to say, with reason:
and yet to follow this advice is no more in the power of the wise men of
the world than in me. ‘Tis a common saying, but of a terrible extent:
what does it not comprehend? All things fall under discretion and
qualification. I know very well that, to take it by the letter, this
pleasure of travelling is a testimony of uneasiness and irresolution,
and, in sooth, these two are our governing and predominating qualities.
Yes, I confess, I see nothing, not so much as in a dream, in a wish,
whereon I could set up my rest: variety only, and the possession of
diversity, can satisfy me; that is, if anything can. In travelling, it
pleases me that I may stay where I like, without inconvenience, and that
I have a place wherein commodiously to divert myself. I love a private
life, because ‘tis my own choice that I love it, not by any dissenting
from or dislike of public life, which, peradventure, is as much according
to my complexion. I serve my prince more cheerfully because it is by the
free election of my own judgment and reason, without any particular
obligation; and that I am not reduced and constrained so to do for being
rejected or disliked by the other party; and so of all the rest. I hate
the morsels that necessity carves me; any commodity upon which I had only
to depend would have me by the throat;
“Alter remus aquas, alter mihi radat arenas;”
[“Let me have one oar in the water, and with the other rake the
shore.”--Propertius, iii. 3, 23.]
one cord will never hold me fast enough. You will say, there is vanity
in this way of living. But where is there not? All these fine precepts
are vanity, and all wisdom is vanity:
“Dominus novit cogitationes sapientum, quoniam vanae sunt.”
[“The Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.”
--Ps. xciii. II; or I Cor. iii. 20.]
These exquisite subtleties are only fit for sermons; they are discourses
that will send us all saddled into the other world. Life is a material
and corporal motion, an action imperfect and irregular of its own proper
essence; I make it my business to serve it according to itself:
“Quisque suos patimur manes.”
[“We each of us suffer our own particular demon.”--AEneid, vi. 743.]
“Sic est faciendum, ut contra naturam universam nihil contendamus;
ea tamen conservata propriam sequamur.”
[“We must so order it as by no means to contend against universal
nature; but yet, that rule being observed, to follow our own.”
--Cicero, De Offcc., i. 31.]
To what end are these elevated points of philosophy, upon which no human
being can rely? and those rules that exceed both our use and force?
I see often that we have theories of life set before us which neither the
proposer nor those who hear him have any hope, nor, which is more, any
inclination to follow. Of the same sheet of paper whereon the judge has
but just written a sentence against an adulterer, he steals a piece
whereon to write a love-letter to his companion’s wife. She whom you
have but just now illicitly embraced will presently, even in your
hearing, more loudly inveigh against the same fault in her companion than
a Portia would do;--[The chaste daughter of Cato of Utica.]--and men
there are who will condemn others to death for crimes that they
themselves do not repute so much as faults. I have, in my youth, seen a
man of good rank with one hand present to the people verses that excelled
both in wit and debauchery, and with the other, at the same time, the
most ripe and pugnacious theological reformation that the world has been
treated withal these many years. And so men proceed; we let the laws and
precepts follow their way; ourselves keep another course, not only from
debauchery of manners, but ofttimes by judgment and contrary opinion. Do
but hear a philosophical lecture; the invention, eloquence, pertinency
immediately strike upon your mind and move you; there is nothing that
touches or stings your conscience; ‘tis not to this they address
themselves. Is not this true? It made Aristo say, that neither a bath
nor a lecture did aught unless it scoured and made men clean. One may
stop at the skin; but it is after the marrow is picked out as, after we
have swallowed good wine out of a fine cup, we examine the designs and
workmanship. In all the courts of ancient philosophy, this is to be
found, that the same teacher publishes rules of temperance and at the
same time lessons in love and wantonness; Xenophon, in the very bosom of
Clinias, wrote against the Aristippic virtue. ‘Tis not that there is any
miraculous conversion in it that makes them thus wavering; ‘tis that
Solon represents himself, sometimes in his own person, and sometimes in
that of a legislator; one while he speaks for the crowd, and another for
himself; taking the free and natural rules for his own share, feeling
assured of a firm and entire health:
“Curentur dubii medicis majoribus aegri.”
[“Desperate maladies require the best doctors.”
--Juvenal, xiii. 124.]
Antisthenes allows a sage to love, and to do whatever he thinks
convenient, without regard to the laws, forasmuch as he is better advised
than they, and has a greater knowledge of virtue. His disciple Diogenes
said, that “men to perturbations were to oppose reason: to fortune,
courage: to the laws, nature.” For tender stomachs, constrained and
artificial recipes must be prescribed: good and strong stomachs serve
themselves simply with the prescriptions of their own natural appetite;
after this manner do our physicians proceed, who eat melons and drink
iced wines, whilst they confine their patients to syrups and sops.
“I know not,” said the courtezan Lais, “what they may talk of books,
wisdom, and philosophy; but these men knock as often at my door as any
others.” At the same rate that our licence carries us beyond what is
lawful and allowed, men have, often beyond universal reason, stretched
the precepts and rules of our life:
“Nemo satis credit tantum delinquere, quantum
Permittas.”
[“No one thinks he has done ill to the full extent of what he may.”
--Juvenal, xiv. 233.]
It were to be wished that there was more proportion betwixt the command
and the obedience; and the mark seems to be unjust to which one cannot
attain. There is no so good man, who so squares all his thoughts and
actions to the laws, that he is not faulty enough to deserve hanging ten
times in his life; and he may well be such a one, as it were great
injustice and great harm to punish and ruin:
“Ole, quid ad te
De cute quid faciat ille vel ille sua?”
[“Olus, what is it to thee what he or she does with their skin?”
--Martial, vii. 9, I.]
and such an one there may be, who has no way offended the laws, who,
nevertheless, would not deserve the character of a virtuous man, and whom
philosophy would justly condemn to be whipped; so unequal and perplexed
is this relation. We are so far from being good men, according to the
laws of God, that we cannot be so according to our own human wisdom never
yet arrived at the duties it had itself prescribed; and could it arrive
there, it would still prescribe to itself others beyond, to which it
would ever aspire and pretend; so great an enemy to consistency is our
human condition. Man enjoins himself to be necessarily in fault: he is
not very discreet to cut out his own duty by the measure of another being
than his own. To whom does he prescribe that which he does not expect
any one should perform? is he unjust in not doing what it is impossible
for him to do? The laws which condemn us not to be able, condemn us for
not being able.
At the worst, this difform liberty of presenting ourselves two several
ways, the actions after one manner and the reasoning after another, may
be allowed to those who only speak of things; but it cannot be allowed to
those who speak of themselves, as I do: I must march my pen as I do my
feet. Common life ought to have relation to the other lives: the virtue
of Cato was vigorous beyond the reason of the age he lived in; and for a
man who made it his business to govern others, a man dedicated to the
public service, it might be called a justice, if not unjust, at least
vain and out of season. Even my own manners, which differ not above an
inch from those current amongst us, render me, nevertheless, a little
rough and unsociable at my age. I know not whether it be without reason
that I am disgusted with the world I frequent; but I know very well that
it would be without reason, should I complain of its being disgusted with
me, seeing I am so with it. The virtue that is assigned to the affairs
of the world is a virtue of many wavings, corners, and elbows, to join
and adapt itself to human frailty, mixed and artificial, not straight,
clear, constant, nor purely innocent. Our annals to this very day
reproach one of our kings for suffering himself too simply to be carried
away by the conscientious persuasions of his confessor: affairs of state
have bolder precepts;
“Exeat aula,
Qui vult esse pius.”
[“Let him who will be pious retire from the court.”
--Lucan, viii. 493]
I formerly tried to employ in the service of public affairs opinions and
rules of living, as rough, new, unpolished or unpolluted, as they were
either born with me, or brought away from my education, and wherewith I
serve my own turn, if not so commodiously, at least securely, in my own
particular concerns: a scholastic and novice virtue; but I have found
them unapt and dangerous. He who goes into a crowd must now go one way
and then another, keep his elbows close, retire or advance, and quit the
straight way, according to what he encounters; and must live not so much
according to his own method as to that of others; not according to what
he proposes to himself, but according to what is proposed to him,
according to the time, according to the men, according to the occasions.
Plato says, that whoever escapes from the world’s handling with clean
breeches, escapes by miracle: and says withal, that when he appoints his
philosopher the head of a government, he does not mean a corrupt one like
that of Athens, and much less such a one as this of ours, wherein wisdom
itself would be to seek. A good herb, transplanted into a soil contrary
to its own nature, much sooner conforms itself to the soil than it
reforms the soil to it. I found that if I had wholly to apply myself to
such employments, it would require a great deal of change and new
modelling in me before I could be any way fit for it: And though I could
so far prevail upon myself (and why might I not with time and diligence
work such a feat), I would not do it. The little trial I have had of
public employment has been so much disgust to me; I feel at times
temptations toward ambition rising in my soul, but I obstinately oppose
them:
“At tu, Catulle, obstinatus obdura.”
[“But thou, Catullus, be obstinately firm.”--Catullus, viii. 19.]
I am seldom called to it, and as seldom offer myself uncalled; liberty
and laziness, the qualities most predominant in me, are qualities
diametrically contrary to that trade. We cannot well distinguish the
faculties of men; they have divisions and limits hard and delicate to
choose; to conclude from the discreet conduct of a private life a
capacity for the management of public affairs is to conclude ill; a man
may govern himself well who cannot govern others so, and compose Essays
who could not work effects: men there may be who can order a siege well,
who would ill marshal a battle; who can speak well in private, who would
ill harangue a people or a prince; nay, ‘tis peradventure rather a
testimony in him who can do the one that he cannot do the other, than
otherwise. I find that elevated souls are not much more proper for mean
things than mean souls are for high ones. Could it be imagined that
Socrates should have administered occasion of laughter, at the expense of
his own reputation, to the Athenians for: having never been able to sum
up the votes of his tribe, to deliver it to the council? Truly, the
veneration I have for the perfections of this great man deserves that his
fortune should furnish, for the excuse of my principal imperfections, so
magnificent an example. Our sufficiency is cut out into small parcels;
mine has no latitude, and is also very contemptible in number.
Saturninus, to those who had conferred upon him the command in chief:
“Companions,” said he, “you have lost a good captain, to make of him a
bad general.”
Whoever boasts, in so sick a time as this, to employ a true and sincere
virtue in the world’s service, either knows not what it is, opinions
growing corrupt with manners (and, in truth, to hear them describe it, to
hear the most of them glorify themselves in their deportments, and lay
down their rules; instead of painting virtue, they paint pure vice and
injustice, and so represent it false in the education of princes); or if
he does know it, boasts unjustly and let him say what he will, does a
thousand things of which his own conscience must necessarily accuse him.
I should willingly take Seneca’s word on the experience he made upon the
like occasion, provided he would deal sincerely with me. The most
honourable mark of goodness in such a necessity is freely to confess both
one’s own faults and those of others; with the power of its virtue to
stay one’s inclination towards evil; unwillingly to follow this
propension; to hope better, to desire better. I perceive that in these
divisions wherein we are involved in France, every one labours to defend
his cause; but even the very best of them with dissimulation and
disguise: he who would write roundly of the true state of the quarrel,
would write rashly and wrongly. The most just party is at best but a
member of a decayed and worm-eaten body; but of such a body, the member
that is least affected calls itself sound, and with good reason,
forasmuch as our qualities have no title but in comparison; civil
innocence is measured according to times and places. Imagine this in
Xenophon, related as a fine commendation of Agesilaus: that, being
entreated by a neighbouring prince with whom he had formerly had war, to
permit him to pass through his country, he granted his request, giving
him free passage through Peloponnesus; and not only did not imprison or
poison him, being at his mercy, but courteously received him according to
the obligation of his promise, without doing him the least injury or
offence. To such ideas as theirs this were an act of no especial note;
elsewhere and in another age, the frankness and unanimity of such an
action would be thought wonderful; our monkeyish capets
[Capets, so called from their short capes, were the students of
Montaigne College at Paris, and were held in great contempt.]
would have laughed at it, so little does the Spartan innocence resemble
that of France. We are not without virtuous men, but ‘tis according to
our notions of virtue. Whoever has his manners established in regularity
above the standard of the age he lives in, let him either wrest or blunt
his rules, or, which I would rather advise him to, let him retire, and
not meddle with us at all. What will he get by it?
“Egregium sanctumque virum si cerno, bimembri
Hoc monstrum puero, et miranti jam sub aratro
Piscibus inventis, et foetae comparo mulae.”
[“If I see an exemplary and good man, I liken it to a two-headed
boy, or a fish turned up by the plough, or a teeming mule.”
--Juvenal, xiii. 64.]
One may regret better times, but cannot fly from the present; we may wish
for other magistrates, but we must, notwithstanding, obey those we have;
and, peradventure, ‘tis more laudable to obey the bad than the good. So
long as the image of the ancient and received laws of this monarchy shall
shine in any corner of the kingdom, there will I be. If they
unfortunately happen to thwart and contradict one another, so as to
produce two parts, of doubtful and difficult choice, I will willingly
choose to withdraw and escape the tempest; in the meantime nature or the
hazards of war may lend me a helping hand. Betwixt Caesar and Pompey,
I should frankly have declared myself; but, as amongst the three robbers
who came after,--[Octavius, Mark Antony, and Lepidus.]--a man must have
been necessitated either to hide himself, or have gone along with the
current of the time, which I think one may fairly do when reason no
longer guides:
“Quo diversus abis?”
[“Whither dost thou run wandering?”--AEneid, v. 166.]
This medley is a little from my theme; I go out of my way; but ‘tis
rather by licence than oversight; my fancies follow one another, but
sometimes at a great distance, and look towards one another, but ‘tis
with an oblique glance. I have read a dialogue of Plato,--[The
Phaedrus.]--of the like motley and fantastic composition, the beginning
about love, and all the rest to the end about rhetoric; they fear not
these variations, and have a marvellous grace in letting themselves be
carried away at the pleasure of the wind, or at least to seem as if they
were. The titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the whole
matter; they often denote it by some mark only, as these others, Andria,
Eunuchus; or these, Sylla, Cicero, Toyquatus. I love a poetic progress,
by leaps and skips; ‘tis an art, as Plato says, light, nimble, demoniac.
There are pieces in Plutarch where he forgets his theme; where the
proposition of his argument is only found by incidence, stuffed and half
stifled in foreign matter. Observe his footsteps in the Daemon of
Socrates. O God! how beautiful are these frolicsome sallies, those
variations and digressions, and all the more when they seem most
fortuitous and careless. ‘Tis the indiligent reader who loses my
subject, and not I; there will always be found some word or other in a
corner that is to the purpose, though it lie very close. I ramble
indiscreetly and tumultuously; my style and my wit wander at the same
rate. He must fool it a little who would not be deemed wholly a fool,
say both the precepts, and, still more, the examples of our masters. A
thousand poets flag and languish after a prosaic manner; but the best old
prose (and I strew it here up and down indifferently for verse) shines
throughout with the lustre, vigour, and boldness of poetry, and not
without some air of its fury. And certainly prose ought to have the
pre-eminence in speaking. The poet, says Plato, seated upon the muses
tripod, pours out with fury whatever comes into his mouth, like the pipe
of a fountain, without considering and weighing it; and things escape him
of various colours, of contrary substance, and with an irregular torrent.
Plato himself is throughout poetical; and the old theology, as the
learned tell us, is all poetry; and the first philosophy is the original
language of the gods. I would have my matter distinguish itself; it
sufficiently shows where it changes, where it concludes, where it begins,
and where it rejoins, without interlacing it with words of connection
introduced for the relief of weak or negligent ears, and without
explaining myself. Who is he that had not rather not be read at all than
after a drowsy or cursory manner?
“Nihil est tam utile, quod intransitu prosit.”
[“Nothing is so useful as that which is cursorily so.”
--Seneca, Ep., 2.]
If to take books in hand were to learn them: to look upon them were to
consider them: and to run these slightly over were to grasp them, I were
then to blame to make myself out so ignorant as I say I am. Seeing I
cannot fix the attention of my reader by the weight of what I write,
‘manco male’, if I should chance to do it by my intricacies. “Nay, but
he will afterwards repent that he ever perplexed himself about it.”
‘Tis very true, but he will yet be there perplexed. And, besides, there
are some humours in which comprehension produces disdain; who will think
better of me for not understanding what I say, and will conclude the
depth of my sense by its obscurity; which, to speak in good sooth, I
mortally hate, and would avoid it if I could. Aristotle boasts somewhere
in his writings that he affected it: a vicious affectation. The frequent
breaks into chapters that I made my method in the beginning of my book,
having since seemed to me to dissolve the attention before it was raised,
as making it disdain to settle itself to so little, I, upon that account,
have made them longer, such as require proposition and assigned leisure.
In such an employment, to whom you will not give an hour you give
nothing; and you do nothing for him for whom you only do it whilst you
are doing something else. To which may be added that I have,
peradventure, some particular obligation to speak only by halves, to
speak confusedly and discordantly. I am therefore angry at this
trouble-feast reason, and its extravagant projects that worry one’s life,
and its opinions, so fine and subtle, though they be all true, I think
too dear bought and too inconvenient. On the contrary, I make it my
business to bring vanity itself in repute, and folly too, if it produce
me any pleasure; and let myself follow my own natural inclinations,
without carrying too strict a hand upon them.
I have seen elsewhere houses in ruins, and statues both of gods and men:
these are men still. ‘Tis all true; and yet, for all that, I cannot so
often revisit the tomb of that so great and so puissant city,--[Rome]--
that I do not admire and reverence it. The care of the dead is
recommended to us; now, I have been bred up from my infancy with these
dead; I had knowledge of the affairs of Rome long before I had any of
those of my own house; I knew the Capitol and its plan before I knew the
Louvre, and the Tiber before I knew the Seine. The qualities and
fortunes of Lucullus, Metellus, and Scipio have ever run more in my head
than those of any of my own country; they are all dead; so is my father
as absolutely dead as they, and is removed as far from me and life in
eighteen years as they are in sixteen hundred: whose memory,
nevertheless, friendship and society, I do not cease to embrace and
utilise with a perfect and lively union. Nay, of my own inclination, I
pay more service to the dead; they can no longer help themselves, and
therefore, methinks, the more require my assistance: ‘tis there that
gratitude appears in its full lustre. The benefit is not so generously
bestowed, where there is retrogradation and reflection. Arcesilaus,
going to visit Ctesibius, who was sick, and finding him in a very poor
condition, very finely conveyed some money under his pillow, and, by
concealing it from him, acquitted him, moreover, from the acknowledgment
due to such a benefit. Such as have merited from me friendship and
gratitude have never lost these by being no more; I have better and more
carefully paid them when gone and ignorant of what I did; I speak most
affectionately of my friends when they can no longer know it. I have had
a hundred quarrels in defending Pompey and for the cause of Brutus; this
acquaintance yet continues betwixt us; we have no other hold even on
present things but by fancy. Finding myself of no use to this age, I
throw myself back upon that other, and am so enamoured of it, that the
free, just, and flourishing state of that ancient Rome (for I neither
love it in its birth nor its old age) interests and impassionates me;
and therefore I cannot so often revisit the sites of their streets and
houses, and those ruins profound even to the Antipodes, that I am not
interested in them. Is it by nature, or through error of fancy, that the
sight of places which we know to have been frequented and inhabited by
persons whose memories are recommended in story, moves us in some sort
more than to hear a recital of their--acts or to read their writings?
“Tanta vis admonitionis inest in locis....Et id quidem in hac urbe
infinitum; quacumque enim ingredimur, in aliquam historiam vestigium
ponimus.”
[“So great a power of reminiscence resides in places; and that truly
in this city infinite, for which way soever we go, we find the
traces of some story.”--Cicero, De Fin., v. I, 2.]
It pleases me to consider their face, bearing, and vestments: I pronounce
those great names betwixt my teeth, and make them ring in my ears:
“Ego illos veneror, et tantis nominibus semper assurgo.”
[“I reverence them, and always rise to so great names.”
--Seneca, Ep., 64.]
Of things that are in some part great and admirable, I admire even the
common parts: I could wish to see them in familiar relations, walk, and
sup. It were ingratitude to contemn the relics and images of so many
worthy and valiant men as I have seen live and die, and who, by their
example, give us so many good instructions, knew we how to follow them.
And, moreover, this very Rome that we now see, deserves to be beloved, so
long and by so many titles allied to our crown; the only common and
universal city; the sovereign magistrate that commands there is equally
acknowledged elsewhere ‘tis the metropolitan city of all the Christian
nations the Spaniard and Frenchman is there at home: to be a prince of
that state, there needs no more but to be of Christendom wheresoever.
There is no place upon earth that heaven has embraced with such an
influence and constancy of favour; her very ruins are grand and glorious,
“Laudandis pretiosior ruinis.”
[“More precious from her glorious ruins.”
--Sidonius Apollinaris, Carm., xxiii.; Narba, v. 62.]
she yet in her very tomb retains the marks and images of empire:
“Ut palam sit, uno in loco gaudentis opus esse naturx.”
[“That it may be manifest that there is in one place the work of
rejoicing nature.”--Pliny, Nat. Hist., iii. 5.]
Some would blame and be angry at themselves to perceive themselves
tickled with so vain a pleasure our humours are never too vain that are
pleasant let them be what they may, if they constantly content a man of
common understanding, I could not have the heart to blame him.
I am very much obliged to Fortune, in that, to this very hour, she has
offered me no outrage beyond what I was well able to bear. Is it not her
custom to let those live in quiet by whom she is not importuned?
“Quanto quisque sibi plum negaverit,
A diis plum feret: nil cupientium
Nudus castra peto . . . .
Multa petentibus
Desunt multa.”
[“The more each man denies himself, the more the gods give him.
Poor as I am, I seek the company of those who ask nothing; they who
desire much will be deficient in much.”
--Horace, Od., iii. 16,21,42.]
If she continue her favour, she will dismiss me very well satisfied:
“Nihil supra
Deos lacesso.”
[“I trouble the gods no farther.”--Horace, Od., ii. 18, 11.]
But beware a shock: there are a thousand who perish in the port.
I easily comfort myself for what shall here happen when I shall be gone,
present things trouble me enough:
“Fortunae caetera mando.”
[“I leave the rest to fortune.”--Ovid, Metam., ii. 140.]
Besides, I have not that strong obligation that they say ties men to the
future, by the issue that succeeds to their name and honour; and
peradventure, ought less to covet them, if they are to be so much
desired. I am but too much tied to the world, and to this life, of
myself: I am content to be in Fortune’s power by circumstances properly
necessary to my being, without otherwise enlarging her jurisdiction over
me; and have never thought that to be without children was a defect that
ought to render life less complete or less contented: a sterile vocation
has its conveniences too. Children are of the number of things that are
not so much to be desired, especially now that it would be so hard to
make them good:
“Bona jam nec nasci licet, ita corrupta Bunt semina;”
[“Nothing good can be born now, the seed is so corrupt.”
--Tertullian, De Pudicita.]
and yet they are justly to be lamented by such as lose them when they
have them.
He who left me my house in charge, foretold that I was like to ruin it,
considering my humour so little inclined to look after household affairs.
But he was mistaken; for I am in the same condition now as when I first
entered into it, or rather somewhat better; and yet without office or any
place of profit.
As to the rest, if Fortune has never done me any violent or extraordinary
injury, neither has she done me any particular favour; whatever we derive
from her bounty, was there above a hundred years before my time: I have,
as to my own particular, no essential and solid good, that I stand
indebted for to her liberality. She has, indeed, done me some airy
favours, honorary and titular favours, without substance, and those in
truth she has not granted, but offered me, who, God knows, am all
material, and who take nothing but what is real, and indeed massive too,
for current pay: and who, if I durst confess so much, should not think
avarice much less excusable than ambition: nor pain less to be avoided
than shame; nor health less to be coveted than learning, or riches than
nobility.
Amongst those empty favours of hers, there is none that so much pleases
vain humour natural to my country, as an authentic bull of a Roman
burgess-ship, that was granted me when I was last there, glorious in
seals and gilded letters, and granted with all gracious liberality. And
because ‘tis couched in a mixt style, more or less favourable, and that I
could have been glad to have seen a copy of it before it had passed the
seal.
Being before burgess of no city at all, I am glad to be created one of
the most noble that ever was or ever shall be. If other men would
consider themselves at the rate I do, they would, as I do, discover
themselves to be full of inanity and foppery; to rid myself of it, I
cannot, without making myself away. We are all steeped in it, as well
one as another; but they who are not aware on’t, have somewhat the better
bargain; and yet I know not whether they have or no.
This opinion and common usage to observe others more than ourselves has
very much relieved us that way: ‘tis a very displeasing object: we can
there see nothing but misery and vanity: nature, that we may not be
dejected with the sight of our own deformities, has wisely thrust the
action of seeing outward. We go forward with the current, but to turn
back towards ourselves is a painful motion; so is the sea moved and
troubled when the waves rush against one another. Observe, says every
one, the motions of the heavens, of public affairs; observe the quarrel
of such a person, take notice of such a one’s pulse, of such another’s
last will and testament; in sum, be always looking high or low, on one
side, before or behind you. It was a paradoxical command anciently given
us by that god of Delphos: “Look into yourself; discover yourself; keep
close to yourself; call back your mind and will, that elsewhere consume
themselves into yourself; you run out, you spill yourself; carry a more
steady hand: men betray you, men spill you, men steal you from yourself.
Dost thou not see that this world we live in keeps all its sight confined
within, and its eyes open to contemplate itself? ‘Tis always vanity for
thee, both within and without; but ‘tis less vanity when less extended.
Excepting thee, O man, said that god, everything studies itself first,
and has bounds to its labours and desires, according to its need. There
is nothing so empty and necessitous as thou, who embracest the universe;
thou art the investigator without knowledge, the magistrate without
jurisdiction, and, after all, the fool of the farce.”
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A man may govern himself well who cannot govern others so
A man should diffuse joy, but, as much as he can, smother grief
A well-bred man is a compound man
All over-nice solicitude about riches smells of avarice
Always complaining is the way never to be lamented
Appetite comes to me in eating
Better to be alone than in foolish and troublesome company
By suspecting them, have given them a title to do ill
Change only gives form to injustice and tyranny
Civil innocence is measured according to times and places
Conclude the depth of my sense by its obscurity
Concluding no beauty can be greater than what they see
Confession enervates reproach and disarms slander
Counterfeit condolings of pretenders
Crates did worse, who threw himself into the liberty of poverty
Desire of travel
Enough to do to comfort myself, without having to console others
Friend, it is not now time to play with your nails
Gain to change an ill condition for one that is uncertain
Giving is an ambitious and authoritative quality
Good does not necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed
Greedy humour of new and unknown things
He must fool it a little who would not be deemed wholly a fool
I always find superfluity superfluous
I am disgusted with the world I frequent
I am hard to be got out, but being once upon the road
I am very willing to quit the government of my house
I content myself with enjoying the world without bustle
I enter into confidence with dying
I grudge nothing but care and trouble
I hate poverty equally with pain
I scorn to mend myself by halves
I write my book for few men and for few years
Justice als takes cognisance of those who glean after the reaper
Known evil was ever more supportable than one that was, new
Laws (of Plato on travel), which forbids it after threescore.
Liberty and laziness, the qualities most predominant in me
Liberty of poverty
Liberty to lean, but not to lay our whole weight upon others
Little affairs most disturb us
Men as often commend as undervalue me beyond reason
Methinks I promise it, if I but say it
My mind is easily composed at distance
Neither be a burden to myself nor to any other
No use to this age, I throw myself back upon that other
Nothing falls where all falls
Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation
Obstinate in growing worse
Occupy our thoughts about the general, and about universal cause
One may regret better times, but cannot fly from the present
Opposition and contradiction entertain and nourish them
Our qualities have no title but in comparison
Preferring the universal and common tie to all national ties
Proceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in the world
Satisfied and pleased with and in themselves
Settled my thoughts to live upon less than I have
Some wives covetous indeed, but very few that are good managers
That looks a nice well-made shoe to you
There can be no pleasure to me without communication
Think myself no longer worth my own care
Tis for youth to subject itself to common opinions
Tis more laudable to obey the bad than the good
Titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the whole matter
Travel with not only a necessary, but a handsome equipage
Turn up my eyes to heaven to return thanks, than to crave
Weigh, as wise: men should, the burden of obligation
What sort of wine he liked the best: “That of another,”
What step ends the near and what step begins the remote
When I travel I have nothing to care for but myself
Wise man to keep a curbing hand upon the impetus of friendship
World where loyalty of one’s own children is unknown
Wretched and dangerous thing to depend upon others
You have lost a good captain, to make of him a bad general
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 18.
X. Of Managing the Will.
XI. Of Cripples.
XII. Of Physiognomy.
CHAPTER X
OF MANAGING THE WILL
Few things, in comparison of what commonly affect other men, move, or, to
say better, possess me: for ‘tis but reason they should concern a man,
provided they do not possess him. I am very solicitous, both by study
and argument, to enlarge this privilege of insensibility, which is in me
naturally raised to a pretty degree, so that consequently I espouse and
am very much moved with very few things. I have a clear sight enough,
but I fix it upon very few objects; I have a sense delicate and tender
enough; but an apprehension and application hard and negligent. I am
very unwilling to engage myself; as much as in me lies, I employ myself
wholly on myself, and even in that subject should rather choose to curb
and restrain my affection from plunging itself over head and ears into
it, it being a subject that I possess at the mercy of others, and over
which fortune has more right than I; so that even as to health, which I
so much value, ‘tis all the more necessary for me not so passionately to
covet and heed it, than to find diseases so insupportable. A man ought
to moderate himself betwixt the hatred of pain and the love of pleasure:
and Plato sets down a middle path of life betwixt the two. But against
such affections as wholly carry me away from myself and fix me elsewhere,
against those, I say, I oppose myself with my utmost power. ‘Tis my
opinion that a man should lend himself to others, and only give himself
to himself. Were my will easy to lend itself out and to be swayed, I
should not stick there; I am too tender both by nature and use:
“Fugax rerum, securaque in otia natus.”
[“Avoiding affairs and born to secure ease.”
--Ovid, De Trist., iii. 2, 9.]
Hot and obstinate disputes, wherein my adversary would at last have the
better, the issue that would render my heat and obstinacy disgraceful
would peradventure vex me to the last degree. Should I set myself to it
at the rate that others do, my soul would never have the force to bear
the emotion and alarms of those who grasp at so much; it would
immediately be disordered by this inward agitation. If, sometimes, I
have been put upon the management of other men’s affairs, I have promised
to take them in hand, but not into my lungs and liver; to take them upon
me, not to incorporate them; to take pains, yes: to be impassioned about
it, by no means; I have a care of them, but I will not sit upon them.
I have enough to do to order and govern the domestic throng of those that
I have in my own veins and bowels, without introducing a crowd of other
men’s affairs; and am sufficiently concerned about my own proper and
natural business, without meddling with the concerns of others. Such as
know how much they owe to themselves, and how many offices they are bound
to of their own, find that nature has cut them out work enough of their
own to keep them from being idle. “Thou hast business enough at home:
look to that.”
Men let themselves out to hire; their faculties are not for themselves,
but for those to whom they have enslaved themselves; ‘tis their tenants
occupy them, not themselves. This common humour pleases not me. We must
be thrifty of the liberty of our souls, and never let it out but upon
just occasions, which are very few, if we judge aright. Do but observe
such as have accustomed themselves to be at every one’s call: they do it
indifferently upon all, as well little as great, occasions; in that which
nothing concerns them; as much as in what imports them most. They thrust
themselves in indifferently wherever there is work to do and obligation,
and are without life when not in tumultuous bustle:
“In negotiis sunt, negotii cause,”
[“They are in business for business’ sake.”--Seneca, Ep., 22.]
It is not so much that they will go, as it is that they cannot stand
still: like a rolling stone that cannot stop till it can go no further.
Occupation, with a certain sort of men, is a mark of understanding and
dignity: their souls seek repose in agitation, as children do by being
rocked in a cradle; they may pronounce themselves as serviceable to their
friends, as they are troublesome to themselves. No one distributes his
money to others, but every one distributes his time and his life: there
is nothing of which we are so prodigal as of these two things, of which
to be thrifty would be both commendable and useful. I am of a quite
contrary humour; I look to myself, and commonly covet with no great
ardour what I do desire, and desire little; and I employ and busy myself
at the same rate, rarely and temperately. Whatever they take in hand,
they do it with their utmost will and vehemence. There are so many
dangerous steps, that, for the more safety, we must a little lightly and
superficially glide over the world, and not rush through it. Pleasure
itself is painful in profundity:
“Incedis per ignes,
Suppositos cineri doloso.”
[“You tread on fire, hidden under deceitful ashes.”
--Horace, Od., ii. i, 7.]
The Parliament of Bordeaux chose me mayor of their city at a time when I
was at a distance from France,--[At Bagno Della Villa, near Lucca,
September 1581]--and still more remote from any such thought.
I entreated to be excused, but I was told by my friends that I had
committed an error in so doing, and the greater because the king had,
moreover, interposed his command in that affair. ‘Tis an office that
ought to be looked upon so much more honourable, as it has no other
salary nor advantage than the bare honour of its execution. It continues
two years, but may be extended by a second election, which very rarely
happens; it was to me, and had never been so but twice before: some years
ago to Monsieur de Lansac, and lately to Monsieur de Biron, Marshal of
France, in whose place I succeeded; and, I left mine to Monsieur de
Matignon, Marshal of France also: proud of so noble a fraternity--
“Uterque bonus pacis bellique minister.”
[“Either one a good minister in peace and war.”
--AEneid, xi. 658.]
Fortune would have a hand in my promotion, by this particular
circumstance which she put in of her own, not altogether vain; for
Alexander disdained the ambassadors of Corinth, who came to offer him a
burgess-ship of their city; but when they proceeded to lay before him
that Bacchus and Hercules were also in the register, he graciously
thanked them.
At my arrival, I faithfully and conscientiously represented myself to
them for such as I find myself to be--a man without memory, without
vigilance, without experience, and without vigour; but withal, without
hatred, without ambition, without avarice, and without violence; that
they might be informed of my qualities, and know what they were to expect
from my service. And whereas the knowledge they had had of my late
father, and the honour they had for his memory, had alone incited them to
confer this favour upon me, I plainly told them that I should be very
sorry anything should make so great an impression upon me as their
affairs and the concerns of their city had made upon him, whilst he held
the government to which they had preferred me. I remembered, when a boy,
to have seen him in his old age cruelly tormented with these public
affairs, neglecting the soft repose of his own house, to which the
declension of his age had reduced him for several years before, the
management of his own affairs, and his health; and certainly despising
his own life, which was in great danger of being lost, by being engaged
in long and painful journeys on their behalf. Such was he; and this
humour of his proceeded from a marvellous good nature; never was there a
more charitable and popular soul. Yet this proceeding which I commend in
others, I do not love to follow myself, and am not without excuse.
He had learned that a man must forget himself for his neighbour, and that
the particular was of no manner of consideration in comparison with the
general. Most of the rules and precepts of the world run this way; to
drive us out of ourselves into the street for the benefit of public
society; they thought to do a great feat to divert and remove us from
ourselves, assuming we were but too much fixed there, and by a too
natural inclination; and have said all they could to that purpose: for
‘tis no new thing for the sages to preach things as they serve, not as
they are. Truth has its obstructions, inconveniences, and
incompatibilities with us; we must often deceive that we may not deceive
ourselves; and shut our eyes and our understandings to redress and amend
them:
“Imperiti enim judicant, et qui frequenter
in hoc ipsum fallendi sunt, ne errent.”
[“For the ignorant judge, and therefore are oft to be deceived,
less they should err.”--Quintil., Inst. Orat., xi. 17.]
When they order us to love three, four, or fifty degrees of things above
ourselves, they do like archers, who, to hit the white, take their aim a
great deal higher than the butt; to make a crooked stick straight, we
bend it the contrary way.
I believe that in the Temple of Pallas, as we see in all other religions,
there were apparent mysteries to be exposed to the people; and others,
more secret and high, that were only to be shown to such as were
professed; ‘tis likely that in these the true point of friendship that
every one owes to himself is to be found; not a false friendship, that
makes us embrace glory, knowledge, riches, and the like, with a principal
and immoderate affection, as members of our being; nor an indiscreet and
effeminate friendship, wherein it happens, as with ivy, that it decays
and ruins the walls it embraces; but a sound and regular friendship,
equally useful and pleasant. He who knows the duties of this friendship
and practises them is truly of the cabinet of the Muses, and has attained
to the height of human wisdom and of our happiness, such an one, exactly
knowing what he owes to himself, will on his part find that he ought to
apply to himself the use of the world and of other men; and to do this,
to contribute to public society the duties and offices appertaining to
him. He who does not in some sort live for others, does not live much
for himself:
“Qui sibi amicus est, scito hunc amicum omnibus esse.”
[“He who is his own friend, is a friend to everybody else.”
--Seneca, Ep., 6.]
The principal charge we have is, to every one his own conduct; and ‘tis
for this only that we here are. As he who should forget to live a
virtuous and holy life, and should think he acquitted himself of his duty
in instructing and training others up to it, would be a fool; even so he
who abandons his own particular healthful and pleasant living to serve
others therewith, takes, in my opinion, a wrong and unnatural course.
I would not that men should refuse, in the employments they take upon
them, their attention, pains, eloquence, sweat, and blood if need be:
“Non ipse pro caris amicis
Aut patria, timidus perire:”
[“Himself not afraid to die for beloved friends, or for his
country.”--Horace, Od., iv. 9, 51.]
but ‘tis only borrowed, and accidentally; his mind being always in repose
and in health; not without action, but without vexation, without passion.
To be simply acting costs him so little, that he acts even sleeping;
but it must be set on going with discretion; for the body receives the
offices imposed upon it just according to what they are; the mind often
extends and makes them heavier at its own expense, giving them what
measure it pleases. Men perform like things with several sorts of
endeavour, and different contention of will; the one does well enough
without the other; for how many people hazard themselves every day in war
without any concern which way it goes; and thrust themselves into the
dangers of battles, the loss of which will not break their next night’s
sleep? and such a man may be at home, out of the danger which he durst
not have looked upon, who is more passionately concerned for the issue of
this war, and whose soul is more anxious about events than the soldier
who therein stakes his blood and his life. I could have engaged myself
in public employments without quitting my own matters a nail’s breadth,
and have given myself to others without abandoning myself. This
sharpness and violence of desires more hinder than they advance the
execution of what we undertake; fill us with impatience against slow or
contrary events, and with heat and suspicion against those with whom we
have to do. We never carry on that thing well by which we are
prepossessed and led:
“Male cuncta ministrat
Impetus.”
[“Impulse manages all things ill.”--Statius, Thebaid, x. 704.]
He who therein employs only his judgment and address proceeds more
cheerfully: he counterfeits, he gives way, he defers quite at his ease,
according to the necessities of occasions; he fails in his attempt
without trouble and affliction, ready and entire for a new enterprise;
he always marches with the bridle in his hand. In him who is intoxicated
with this violent and tyrannical intention, we discover, of necessity,
much imprudence and injustice; the impetuosity of his desire carries him
away; these are rash motions, and, if fortune do not very much assist,
of very little fruit. Philosophy directs that, in the revenge of
injuries received, we should strip ourselves of choler; not that the
chastisement should be less, but, on the contrary, that the revenge may
be the better and more heavily laid on, which, it conceives, will be by
this impetuosity hindered. For anger not only disturbs, but, of itself,
also wearies the arms of those who chastise; this fire benumbs and wastes
their force; as in precipitation, “festinatio tarda est,”--haste trips
up its own heels, fetters, and stops itself:
“Ipsa se velocitas implicat.”--Seneca, Ep. 44
For example, according to what I commonly see, avarice has no greater
impediment than itself; the more bent and vigorous it is, the less it
rakes together, and commonly sooner grows rich when disguised in a visor
of liberality.
A very excellent gentleman, and a friend of mine, ran a risk of impairing
his faculties by a too passionate attention and affection to the affairs
of a certain prince his master;--[Probably the King of Navarre, afterward
Henry IV.]--which master has thus portrayed himself to me; “that he
foresees the weight of accidents as well as another, but that in those
for which there is no remedy, he presently resolves upon suffering; in
others, having taken all the necessary precautions which by the vivacity
of his understanding he can presently do, he quietly awaits what may
follow.” And, in truth, I have accordingly seen him maintain a great
indifferency and liberty of actions and serenity of countenance in very
great and difficult affairs: I find him much greater, and of greater
capacity in adverse than in prosperous fortune; his defeats are to him
more glorious than his victories, and his mourning than his triumph.
Consider, that even in vain and frivolous actions, as at chess, tennis,
and the like, this eager and ardent engaging with an impetuous desire,
immediately throws the mind and members into indiscretion and disorder: a
man astounds and hinders himself; he who carries himself more moderately,
both towards gain and loss, has always his wits about him; the less
peevish and passionate he is at play, he plays much more advantageously
and surely.
As to the rest, we hinder the mind’s grasp and hold, in giving it so many
things to seize upon; some things we should only offer to it; tie it to
others, and with others incorporate it. It can feel and discern all
things, but ought to feed upon nothing but itself; and should be
instructed in what properly concerns itself, and that is properly of its
own having and substance. The laws of nature teach us what justly we
need. After the sages have told us that no one is indigent according to
nature, and that every one is so according to opinion, they very subtly
distinguish betwixt the desires that proceed from her, and those that
proceed from the disorder of our own fancy: those of which we can see the
end are hers; those that fly before us, and of which we can see no end,
are our own: the poverty of goods is easily cured; the poverty of the
soul is irreparable:
“Nam si, quod satis est homini, id satis esse potesset
Hoc sat erat: nunc, quum hoc non est, qui credimus porro
Divitias ullas animum mi explere potesse?”
[“For if what is for man enough, could be enough, it were enough;
but since it is not so, how can I believe that any wealth can give
my mind content.”--Lucilius aped Nonium Marcellinum, V. sec. 98.]
Socrates, seeing a great quantity of riches, jewels, and furniture
carried in pomp through his city: “How many things,” said he, “I do not
desire!”--[Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., V. 32.]--Metrodorus lived on twelve
ounces a day, Epicurus upon less; Metrocles slept in winter abroad
amongst sheep, in summer in the cloisters of churches:
“Sufficit ad id natura, quod poscit.”
[“Nature suffices for what he requires.”--Seneca, Ep., 90.]
Cleanthes lived by the labour of his own hands, and boasted that
Cleanthes, if he would, could yet maintain another Cleanthes.
If that which nature exactly and originally requires of us for the
conservation of our being be too little (as in truth what it is, and how
good cheap life may be maintained, cannot be better expressed than by
this consideration, that it is so little that by its littleness it
escapes the gripe and shock of fortune), let us allow ourselves a little
more; let us call every one of our habits and conditions nature; let us
rate and treat ourselves by this measure; let us stretch our
appurtenances and accounts so far; for so far, I fancy, we have some
excuse. Custom is a second nature, and no less powerful. What is
wanting to my custom, I reckon is wanting to me; and I should be almost
as well content that they took away my life as cut me short in the way
wherein I have so long lived. I am no longer in condition for any great
change, nor to put myself into a new and unwonted course, not even to
augmentation. ‘Tis past the time for me to become other than what I am;
and as I should complain of any great good hap that should now befall me,
that it came not in time to be enjoyed:
“Quo mihi fortunas, si non conceditur uti?”
[“What is the good fortune to me, if it is not granted to me
to use it.”--Horace, Ep., i. 5, 12.]
so should I complain of any inward acquisition. It were almost better
never, than so late, to become an honest man, and well fit to live, when
one has no longer to live. I, who am about to make my exit out of the
world, would easily resign to any newcomer, who should desire it, all the
prudence I am now acquiring in the world’s commerce; after meat, mustard.
I have no need of goods of which I can make no use; of what use is
knowledge to him who has lost his head? ‘Tis an injury and unkindness in
fortune to tender us presents that will only inspire us with a just
despite that we had them not in their due season. Guide me no more; I
can no longer go. Of so many parts as make up a sufficiency, patience is
the most sufficient. Give the capacity of an excellent treble to the
chorister who has rotten lungs, and eloquence to a hermit exiled into the
deserts of Arabia. There needs no art to help a fall; the end finds
itself of itself at the conclusion of every affair. My world is at an
end, my form expired; I am totally of the past, and am bound to authorise
it, and to conform my outgoing to it. I will here declare, by way of
example, that the Pope’s late ten days’ diminution
[Gregory XIII., in 1582, reformed the Calendar, and, in consequence,
in France they all at once passed from the 9th to the 20th
December.]
has taken me so aback that I cannot well reconcile myself to it; I belong
to the years wherein we kept another kind of account. So ancient and so
long a custom challenges my adherence to it, so that I am constrained to
be somewhat heretical on that point incapable of any, though corrective,
innovation. My imagination, in spite of my teeth, always pushes me ten
days forward or backward, and is ever murmuring in my ears: “This rule
concerns those who are to begin to be.” If health itself, sweet as it
is, returns to me by fits, ‘tis rather to give me cause of regret than
possession of it; I have no place left to keep it in. Time leaves me;
without which nothing can be possessed. Oh, what little account should I
make of those great elective dignities that I see in such esteem in the
world, that are never conferred but upon men who are taking leave of it;
wherein they do not so much regard how well the man will discharge his
trust, as how short his administration will be: from the very entry they
look at the exit. In short, I am about finishing this man, and not
rebuilding another. By long use, this form is in me turned into
substance, and fortune into nature.
I say, therefore, that every one of us feeble creatures is excusable in
thinking that to be his own which is comprised under this measure; but
withal, beyond these limits, ‘tis nothing but confusion; ‘tis the largest
extent we can grant to our own claims. The more we amplify our need and
our possession, so much the more do we expose ourselves to the blows of
Fortune and adversities. The career of our desires ought to be
circumscribed and restrained to a short limit of the nearest and most
contiguous commodities; and their course ought, moreover, to be performed
not in a right line, that ends elsewhere, but in a circle, of which the
two points, by a short wheel, meet and terminate in ourselves. Actions
that are carried on without this reflection--a near and essential
reflection, I mean--such as those of ambitious and avaricious men, and so
many more as run point-blank, and to whose career always carries them
before themselves, such actions, I say; are erroneous and sickly.
Most of our business is farce:
“Mundus universus exercet histrioniam.”
--[Petronius Arbiter, iii. 8.]
We must play our part properly, but withal as a part of a borrowed
personage; we must not make real essence of a mask and outward
appearance; nor of a strange person, our own; we cannot distinguish the
skin from the shirt: ‘tis enough to meal the face, without mealing the
breast. I see some who transform and transubstantiate themselves into as
many new shapes and new beings as they undertake new employments; and who
strut and fume even to the heart and liver, and carry their state along
with them even to the close-stool: I cannot make them distinguish the
salutations made to themselves from those made to their commission, their
train, or their mule:
“Tantum se fortunx permittunt, etiam ut naturam dediscant.”
[“They so much give themselves up to fortune, as even to unlearn
nature.”--Quintus Curtius, iii. 2.]
They swell and puff up their souls, and their natural way of speaking,
according to the height of their magisterial place. The Mayor of
Bordeaux and Montaigne have ever been two by very manifest separation.
Because one is an advocate or a financier, he must not ignore the knavery
there is in such callings; an honest man is not accountable for the vice
or absurdity of his employment, and ought not on that account refuse to
take the calling upon him: ‘tis the usage of his country, and there is
money to be got by it; a man must live by the world; and make his best of
it, such as it is. But the judgment of an emperor ought to be above his
empire, and see and consider it as a foreign accident; and he ought to
know how to enjoy himself apart from it, and to communicate himself as
James and Peter, to himself, at all events.
I cannot engage myself so deep and so entire; when my will gives me to
anything, ‘tis not with so violent an obligation that my judgment is
infected with it. In the present broils of this kingdom, my own interest
has not made me blind to the laudable qualities of our adversaries, nor
to those that are reproachable in those men of our party. Others adore
all of their own side; for my part, I do not so much as excuse most
things in those of mine: a good work has never the worst grace with me
for being made against me. The knot of the controversy excepted, I have
always kept myself in equanimity and pure indifference:
“Neque extra necessitates belli praecipuum odium gero;”
[“Nor bear particular hatred beyond the necessities of war.”]
for which I am pleased with myself; and the more because I see others
commonly fail in the contrary direction. Such as extend their anger and
hatred beyond the dispute in question, as most men do, show that they
spring from some other occasion and private cause; like one who, being
cured of an ulcer, has yet a fever remaining, by which it appears that
the ulcer had another more concealed beginning. The reason is that they
are not concerned in the common cause, because it is wounding to the
state and general interest; but are only nettled by reason of their
particular concern. This is why they are so especially animated, and to
a degree so far beyond justice and public reason:
“Non tam omnia universi, quam ea, quae ad quemque pertinent,
singuli carpebant.”
[“Every one was not so much angry against things in general, as
against those that particularly concern himself.”
--Livy, xxxiv. 36.]
I would have the advantage on our side; but if it be not, I shall not run
mad. I am heartily for the right party; but I do not want to be taken
notice of as an especial enemy to others, and beyond the general quarrel.
I marvellously challenge this vicious form of opinion: “He is of the
League because he admires the graciousness of Monsieur de Guise; he is
astonished at the King of Navarre’s energy, therefore he is a Huguenot;
he finds this to say of the manners of the king, he is therefore
seditious in his heart.” And I did not grant to the magistrate himself
that he did well in condemning a book because it had placed a heretic
--[Theodore de Beza.]--amongst the best poets of the time. Shall we not
dare to say of a thief that he has a handsome leg? If a woman be a
strumpet, must it needs follow that she has a foul smell? Did they in
the wisest ages revoke the proud title of Capitolinus they had before
conferred on Marcus Manlius as conservator of religion and the public
liberty, and stifle the memory of his liberality, his feats of arms, and
military recompenses granted to his valour, because he, afterwards
aspired to the sovereignty, to the prejudice of the laws of his country?
If we take a hatred against an advocate, he will not be allowed the next
day to be eloquent. I have elsewhere spoken of the zeal that pushed on
worthy men to the like faults. For my part, I can say, “Such an one does
this thing ill, and another thing virtuously and well.” So in the
prognostication or sinister events of affairs they would have every one
in his party blind or a blockhead, and that our persuasion and judgment
should subserve not truth, but to the project of our desires. I should
rather incline towards the other extreme; so much I fear being suborned
by my desire; to which may be added that I am a little tenderly
distrustful of things that I wish.
I have in my time seen wonders in the indiscreet and prodigious facility
of people in suffering their hopes and belief to be led and governed,
which way best pleased and served their leaders, despite a hundred
mistakes one upon another, despite mere dreams and phantasms. I no more
wonder at those who have been blinded and seduced by the fooleries of
Apollonius and Mahomet. Their sense and understanding are absolutely
taken away by their passion; their discretion has no more any other
choice than that which smiles upon them and encourages their cause.
I had principally observed this in the beginning of our intestine
distempers; that other, which has sprung up since, in imitating, has
surpassed it; by which I am satisfied that it is a quality inseparable
from popular errors; after the first, that rolls, opinions drive on one
another like waves with the wind: a man is not a member of the body, if
it be in his power to forsake it, and if he do not roll the common way.
But, doubtless, they wrong the just side when they go about to assist it
with fraud; I have ever been against that practice: ‘tis only fit to work
upon weak heads; for the sound, there are surer and more honest ways to
keep up their courage and to excuse adverse accidents.
Heaven never saw a greater animosity than that betwixt Caesar and Pompey,
nor ever shall; and yet I observe, methinks, in those brave souls,
a great moderation towards one another: it was a jealousy of honour and
command, which did not transport them to a furious and indiscreet hatred,
and was without malignity and detraction: in their hottest exploits upon
one another, I discover some remains of respect and good-will: and am
therefore of opinion that, had, it been possible, each of them would
rather have done his business without the ruin of the other than with it.
Take notice how much otherwise matters went with Marius and Sylla.
We must not precipitate ourselves so headlong after our affections and
interests. As, when I was young, I opposed myself to the progress of
love which I perceived to advance too fast upon me, and had a care lest
it should at last become so pleasing as to force, captivate, and wholly
reduce me to its mercy: so I do the same upon all other occasions where
my will is running on with too warm an appetite. I lean opposite to the
side it inclines to; as I find it going to plunge and make itself drunk
with its own wine; I evade nourishing its pleasure so far, that I cannot
recover it without infinite loss. Souls that, through their own
stupidity, only discern things by halves, have this happiness, that they
smart less with hurtful things: ‘tis a spiritual leprosy that has some
show of health, and such a health as philosophy does not altogether
contemn; but yet we have no reason to call it wisdom, as we often do.
And after this manner some one anciently mocked Diogeries, who, in the
depth of winter and quite naked, went embracing an image of snow for a
trial of his endurance: the other seeing him in this position, “Art thou
now very cold?” said he. “Not at all,” replied Diogenes. “Why, then,”
pursued the other, “what difficult and exemplary thing dost thou think
thou doest in embracing that snow?” To take a true measure of constancy,
one must necessarily know what the suffering is.
But souls that are to meet with adverse events and the injuries of
fortune, in their depth and sharpness, that are to weigh and taste them
according to their natural weight and bitterness, let such show their
skill in avoiding the causes and diverting the blow. What did King Cotys
do? He paid liberally for the rich and beautiful vessel that had been
presented to him, but, seeing it was exceedingly brittle, he immediately
broke it betimes, to prevent so easy a matter of displeasure against his
servants. In like manner, I have willingly avoided all confusion in my
affairs, and never coveted to have my estate contiguous to those of my
relations, and such with whom I coveted a strict friendship; for thence
matter of unkindness and falling out often proceeds. I formerly loved
hazardous games of cards and dice; but have long since left them off,
only for this reason that, with whatever good air I carried my losses,
I could not help feeling vexed within. A man of honour, who ought to be
touchily sensible of the lie or of an insult, and who is not to take a
scurvy excuse for satisfaction, should avoid occasions of dispute.
I shun melancholy, crabbed men, as I would the plague; and in matters I
cannot talk of without emotion and concern I never meddle, if not
compelled by my duty:
“Melius non incipient, quam desinent.”
[“They had better never to begin than to have to desist.”
--Seneca, Ep., 72.]
The surest way, therefore, is to prepare one’s self beforehand for
occasions.
I know very well that some wise men have taken another way, and have not
feared to grapple and engage to the utmost upon several subjects these
are confident of their own strength, under which they protect themselves
in all ill successes, making their patience wrestle and contend with
disaster:
“Velut rupes, vastum quae prodit in aequor,
Obvia ventorum furiis, expostaque ponto,
Vim cunctam atque minas perfert coelique marisque;
Ipsa immota manens.”
[“As a rock, which projects into the vast ocean, exposed to the
furious winds and the raging sea, defies the force and menaces of
sky and sea, itself unshaken.”--Virgil, AEneid, x. 693.]
Let us not attempt these examples; we shall never come up to them. They
set themselves resolutely, and without agitation, to behold the ruin of
their country, which possessed and commanded all their will: this is too
much, and too hard a task for our commoner souls. Cato gave up the
noblest life that ever was upon this account; we meaner spirits must fly
from the storm as far as we can; we must provide for sentiment, and not
for patience, and evade the blows we cannot meet. Zeno, seeing
Chremonides, a young man whom he loved, draw near to sit down by him,
suddenly started up; and Cleanthes demanding of him the reason why he did
so, “I hear,” said he, “that physicians especially order repose, and
forbid emotion in all tumours.” Socrates does not say: “Do not surrender
to the charms of beauty; stand your ground, and do your utmost to oppose
it.” “Fly it,” says he; “shun the fight and encounter of it, as of a
powerful poison that darts and wounds at a distance.” And his good
disciple, feigning or reciting, but, in my opinion, rather reciting than
feigning, the rare perfections of the great Cyrus, makes him distrustful
of his own strength to resist the charms of the divine beauty of that
illustrous Panthea, his captive, and committing the visiting and keeping
her to another, who could not have so much liberty as himself. And the
Holy Ghost in like manner:
“Ne nos inducas in tentationem.”
[“Lead us not into temptation.”--St. Matthew, vi. 13.]
We do not pray that our reason may not be combated and overcome by
concupiscence, but that it should not be so much as tried by it; that we
should not be brought into a state wherein we are so much as to suffer
the approaches, solicitations, and temptations of sin: and we beg of
Almighty God to keep our consciences quiet, fully and perfectly delivered
from all commerce of evil.
Such as say that they have reason for their revenging passion, or any
other sort of troublesome agitation of mind, often say true, as things
now are, but not as they were: they speak to us when the causes of their
error are by themselves nourished and advanced; but look backward--recall
these causes to their beginning--and there you will put them to a
nonplus. Will they have their faults less, for being of longer
continuance; and that of an unjust beginning, the sequel can be just?
Whoever shall desire the good of his country, as I do, without fretting
or pining himself, will be troubled, but will not swoon to see it
threatening either its own ruin, or a no less ruinous continuance; poor
vessel, that the waves, the winds, and the pilot toss and steer to so
contrary designs!
“In tam diversa magister
Ventus et unda trahunt.”
He who does not gape after the favour of princes, as after a thing he
cannot live without, does not much concern himself at the coldness of
their reception and countenance, nor at the inconstancy of their wills.
He who does not brood over his children or his honours with a slavish
propension, ceases not to live commodiously enough after their loss. He
who does good principally for his own satisfaction will not be much
troubled to see men judge of his actions contrary to his merit. A
quarter of an ounce of patience will provide sufficiently against such
inconveniences. I find ease in this receipt, redeeming myself in the
beginning as good cheap as I can; and find that by this means I have
escaped much trouble and many difficulties. With very little ado I stop
the first sally of my emotions, and leave the subject that begins to be
troublesome before it transports me. He who stops not the start will
never be able to stop the course; he who cannot keep them out will never,
get them out when they are once got in; and he who cannot arrive at the
beginning will never arrive at the end of all. Nor will he bear the fall
who cannot sustain the shock:
“Etenim ipsae se impellunt, ubi semel a ratione discessum est;
ipsaque sibi imbecillitas indulget, in altumque provehitur
imprudens, nec reperit locum consistendi.”
[“For they throw themselves headlong when once they lose their
reason; and infirmity so far indulges itself, and from want of
prudence is carried out into deep water, nor finds a place to
shelter it.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 18.]
I am betimes sensible of the little breezes that begin to sing and
whistle within, forerunners of the storm:
“Ceu flamina prima
Cum deprensa fremunt sylvis et caeca volutant
Murmura, venturos nautis prodentia ventos.”
[“As the breezes, pent in the woods, first send out dull murmurs,
announcing the approach of winds to mariners.”--AEneid, x. 97.]
How often have I done myself a manifest injustice to avoid the hazard of
having yet a worse done me by the judges, after an age of vexations,
dirty and vile practices, more enemies to my nature than fire or the
rack?
“Convenit a litibus, quantum licet, et nescio an paulo plus etiam
quam licet, abhorrentem esse: est enim non modo liberale, paululum
nonnunquam de suo jure decedere, sed interdum etiam fructuosum.”
[“A man should abhor lawsuits as much as he may, and I know not
whether not something more; for ‘tis not only liberal, but sometimes
also advantageous, too, a little to recede from one’s right.
--“Cicero, De Offic., ii. 18.]
Were we wise, we ought to rejoice and boast, as I one day heard a young
gentleman of a good family very innocently do, that his mother had lost
her cause, as if it had been a cough, a fever, or something very
troublesome to keep. Even the favours that fortune might have given me
through relationship or acquaintance with those who have sovereign
authority in those affairs, I have very conscientiously and very
carefully avoided employing them to the prejudice of others, and of
advancing my pretensions above their true right. In fine, I have so much
prevailed by my endeavours (and happily I may say it) that I am to this
day a virgin from all suits in law; though I have had very fair offers
made me, and with very just title, would I have hearkened to them, and a
virgin from quarrels too. I have almost passed over a long life without
any offence of moment, either active or passive, or without ever hearing
a worse word than my own name: a rare favour of Heaven.
Our greatest agitations have ridiculous springs and causes: what ruin did
our last Duke of Burgundy run into about a cartload of sheepskins!
And was not the graving of a seal the first and principal cause of the
greatest commotion that this machine of the world ever underwent?
--[The civil war between Marius and Sylla; see Plutarch’s Life of Marius,
c. 3.]--for Pompey and Caesar were but the offsets and continuation of
the two others: and I have in my time seen the wisest heads in this
kingdom assembled with great ceremony, and at the public expense, about
treaties and agreements, of which the true decision, in the meantime,
absolutely depended upon the ladies’ cabinet council, and the inclination
of some bit of a woman.
The poets very well understood this when they put all Greece and Asia to
fire and sword about an apple. Look why that man hazards his life and
honour upon the fortune of his rapier and dagger; let him acquaint you
with the occasion of the quarrel; he cannot do it without blushing: the
occasion is so idle and frivolous.
A little thing will engage you in it; but being once embarked, all the
cords draw; great provisions are then required, more hard and more
important. How much easier is it not to enter in than it is to get out?
Now we should proceed contrary to the reed, which, at its first
springing, produces a long and straight shoot, but afterwards, as if
tired and out of breath, it runs into thick and frequent joints and
knots, as so many pauses which demonstrate that it has no more its first
vigour and firmness; ‘twere better to begin gently and coldly, and to
keep one’s breath and vigorous efforts for the height and stress of the
business. We guide affairs in their beginnings, and have them in our own
power; but afterwards, when they are once at work, ‘tis they that guide
and govern us, and we are to follow them.
Yet do I not mean to say that this counsel has discharged me of all
difficulty, and that I have not often had enough to do to curb and
restrain my passions; they are not always to be governed according to the
measure of occasions, and often have their entries very sharp and
violent. But still good fruit and profit may thence be reaped; except
for those who in well-doing are not satisfied with any benefit, if
reputation be wanting; for, in truth, such an effect is not valued but by
every one to himself; you are better contented, but not more esteemed,
seeing you reformed yourself before you got into the whirl of the dance,
or that the provocative matter was in sight. Yet not in this only, but
in all other duties of life also, the way of those who aim at honour is
very different from that they proceed by, who propose to themselves order
and reason. I find some who rashly and furiously rush into the lists and
cool in the course. As Plutarch says, that those who, through false
shame, are soft and facile to grant whatever is desired of them, are
afterwards as facile to break their word and to recant; so he who enters
lightly into a quarrel is apt to go as lightly out of it. The same
difficulty that keeps me from entering into it, would, when once hot and
engaged in quarrel, incite me to maintain it with great obstinacy and
resolution. ‘Tis the tyranny of custom; when a man is once engaged; he
must go through with it, or die. “Undertake coolly,” said Bias,
“but pursue with ardour.” For want of prudence, men fall into want of
courage, which is still more intolerable.
Most accommodations of the quarrels of these days of ours are shameful
and false; we only seek to save appearances, and in the meantime betray
and disavow our true intentions; we salve over the fact. We know very
well how we said the thing, and in what sense we spoke it, and the
company know it, and our friends whom we have wished to make sensible of
our advantage, understand it well enough too: ‘tis at the expense of our
frankness and of the honour of our courage, that we disown our thoughts,
and seek refuge in falsities, to make matters up. We give ourselves the
lie, to excuse the lie we have given to another. You are not to consider
if your word or action may admit of another interpretation; ‘tis your own
true and sincere interpretation, your real meaning in what you said or
did, that you are thenceforward to maintain, whatever it cost you. Men
speak to your virtue and conscience, which are not things to be put under
a mask; let us leave these pitiful ways and expedients to the jugglers of
the law. The excuses and reparations that I see every day made and given
to repair indiscretion, seem to me more scandalous than the indiscretion
itself. It were better to affront your adversary a second time than to
offend yourself by giving him so unmanly a satisfaction. You have braved
him in your heat and anger, and you would flatter and appease him in your
cooler and better sense; and by that means lay yourself lower and at his
feet, whom before you pretended to overtop. I do not find anything a
gentleman can say so vicious in him as unsaying what he has said is
infamous, when to unsay it is authoritatively extracted from him;
forasmuch as obstinacy is more excusable in a man of honour than
pusillanimity. Passions are as easy for me to evade, as they are hard
for me to moderate:
“Exscinduntur facilius ammo, quam temperantur.”
[“They are more easily to be eradicated than governed.”]
He who cannot attain the noble Stoical impassibility, let him secure
himself in the bosom of this popular stolidity of mine; what they
performed by virtue, I inure myself to do by temperament. The middle
region harbours storms and tempests; the two extremes, of philosophers
and peasants, concur in tranquillity and happiness:
“Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas,
Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum
Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari!
Fortunatus et ille, Deos qui novit agrestes,
Panaque, Sylvanumque senem, Nymphasque sorores!”
[“Happy is he who could discover the causes of things, and place
under his feet all fears and inexorable fate, and the sound of
rapacious Acheron: he is blest who knows the country gods, and Pan,
and old Sylvanus, and the sister nymphs.”--Virgil, Georg., ii. 490.]
The births of all things are weak and tender; and therefore we should
have our eyes intent on beginnings; for as when, in its infancy, the
danger is not perceived, so when it is grown up, the remedy is as little
to be found. I had every day encountered a million of crosses, harder to
digest in the progress of ambition, than it has been hard for me to curb
the natural propension that inclined me to it:
“Jure perhorrui
Lath conspicuum tollere verticem.”
[“I ever justly feared to raise my head too high.”
--Horace, Od.,iii. 16, 18.]
All public actions are subject to uncertain and various interpretations;
for too many heads judge of them. Some say of this civic employment of
mine (and I am willing to say a word or two about it, not that it is
worth so much, but to give an account of my manners in such things), that
I have behaved myself in it as a man who is too supine and of a languid
temperament; and they have some colour for what they say. I endeavoured
to keep my mind and my thoughts in repose;
“Cum semper natura, tum etiam aetate jam quietus;”
[“As being always quiet by nature, so also now by age.”
--Cicero, De Petit. Consul., c. 2.]
and if they sometimes lash out upon some rude and sensible impression,
‘tis in truth without my advice. Yet from this natural heaviness of
mine, men ought not to conclude a total inability in me (for want of care
and want of sense are two very different things), and much less any
unkindness or ingratitude towards that corporation who employed the
utmost means they had in their power to oblige me, both before they knew
me and after; and they did much more for me in choosing me anew than in
conferring that honour upon me at first. I wish them all imaginable
good; and assuredly had occasion been, there is nothing I would have
spared for their service; I did for them as I would have done for myself.
‘Tis a good, warlike, and generous people, but capable of obedience and
discipline, and of whom the best use may be made, if well guided. They
say also that my administration passed over without leaving any mark or
trace. Good! They moreover accuse my cessation in a time when everybody
almost was convicted of doing too much. I am impatient to be doing where
my will spurs me on; but this itself is an enemy to perseverance. Let
him who will make use of me according to my own way, employ me in affairs
where vigour and liberty are required, where a direct, short, and,
moreover, a hazardous conduct are necessary; I may do something; but if
it must be long, subtle, laborious, artificial and intricate, he had
better call in somebody else. All important offices are not necessarily
difficult: I came prepared to do somewhat rougher work, had there been
great occasion; for it is in my power to do something more than I do, or
than I love to do. I did not, to my knowledge, omit anything that my
duty really required. I easily forgot those offices that ambition mixes
with duty and palliates with its title; these are they that, for the most
part, fill the eyes and ears, and give men the most satisfaction; not the
thing but the appearance contents them; if they hear no noise, they think
men sleep. My humour is no friend to tumult; I could appease a commotion
without commotion, and chastise a disorder without being myself
disorderly; if I stand in need of anger and inflammation, I borrow it,
and put it on. My manners are languid, rather faint than sharp. I do
not condemn a magistrate who sleeps, provided the people under his charge
sleep as well as he: the laws in that case sleep too. For my part, I
commend a gliding, staid, and silent life:
“Neque submissam et abjectam, neque se efferentem;”
[“Neither subject and abject, nor obtrusive.”
--Cicero, De Offic., i. 34]
my fortune will have it so. I am descended from a family that has lived
without lustre or tumult, and, time out of mind, particularly ambitious
of a character for probity.
Our people nowadays are so bred up to bustle and ostentation, that good
nature, moderation, equability, constancy, and such like quiet and
obscure qualities, are no more thought on or regarded. Rough bodies make
themselves felt; the smooth are imperceptibly handled: sickness is felt,
health little or not at all; no more than the oils that foment us, in
comparison of the pains for which we are fomented. ‘Tis acting for one’s
particular reputation and profit, not for the public good, to refer that
to be done in the public squares which one may do in the council chamber;
and to noon day what might have been done the night before; and to be
jealous to do that himself which his colleague can do as well as he; so
were some surgeons of Greece wont to perform their operations upon
scaffolds in the sight of the people, to draw more practice and profit.
They think that good rules cannot be understood but by the sound of
trumpet. Ambition is not a vice of little people, nor of such modest
means as ours. One said to Alexander: “Your father will leave you a
great dominion, easy and pacific”; this youth was emulous of his father’s
victories and of the justice of his government; he would not have enjoyed
the empire of the world in ease and peace. Alcibiades, in Plato, had
rather die young, beautiful, rich, noble, and learned, and all this in
full excellence, than to stop short of such condition; this disease is,
peradventure, excusable in so strong and so full a soul. When wretched
and dwarfish little souls cajole and deceive themselves, and think to
spread their fame for having given right judgment in an affair, or
maintained the discipline of the guard of a gate of their city, the more
they think to exalt their heads the more they show their tails. This
little well-doing has neither body nor life; it vanishes in the first
mouth, and goes no further than from one street to another. Talk of it
by all means to your son or your servant, like that old fellow who,
having no other auditor of his praises nor approver of his valour,
boasted to his chambermaid, crying, “O Perrete, what a brave, clever man
hast thou for thy master!” At the worst, talk of it to yourself, like a
councillor of my acquaintance, who, having disgorged a whole cartful of
law jargon with great heat and as great folly, coming out of the council
chamber to make water, was heard very complacently to mutter betwixt his
teeth:
“Non nobis, domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.”
[“Not unto us, O Lord, not to us: but unto Thy name be the glory.”
--Psalm cxiii. I.]
He who gets it of nobody else, let him pay himself out of his own purse.
Fame is not prostituted at so cheap a rate: rare and exemplary actions,
to which it is due, would not endure the company of this prodigious crowd
of petty daily performances. Marble may exalt your titles, as much as
you please, for having repaired a rod of wall or cleansed a public sewer;
but not men of sense. Renown does not follow all good deeds, if novelty
and difficulty be not conjoined; nay, so much as mere esteem, according
to the Stoics, is not due to every action that proceeds from virtue; nor
will they allow him bare thanks who, out of temperance, abstains from an
old blear-eyed crone. Those who have known the admirable qualities of
Scipio Africanus, deny him the glory that Panaetius attributes to him, of
being abstinent from gifts, as a glory not so much his as that of his
age. We have pleasures suitable to our lot; let us not usurp those of
grandeur: our own are more natural, and by so much more solid and sure,
as they are lower. If not for that of conscience, yet at least for
ambition’s sake, let us reject ambition; let us disdain that thirst of
honour and renown, so low and mendicant, that it makes us beg it of all
sorts of people:
“Quae est ista laus quae: possit e macello peti?”
[“What praise is that which is to be got in the market-place (meat
market)?” Cicero, De Fin., ii. 15.]
by abject means, and at what cheap rate soever: ‘tis dishonour to be so
honoured. Let us learn to be no more greedy, than we are capable, of
glory. To be puffed up with every action that is innocent or of use, is
only for those with whom such things are extraordinary and rare: they
will value it as it costs them. The more a good effect makes a noise,
the more do I abate of its goodness as I suspect that it was more
performed for the noise, than upon account of the goodness: exposed upon
the stall, ‘tis half sold. Those actions have much more grace and
lustre, that slip from the hand of him that does them, negligently and
without noise, and that some honest man thereafter finds out and raises
from the shade, to produce it to the light upon its own account,
“Mihi quidem laudabiliora videntur omnia, quae sine
venditatione, et sine populo teste fiunt,”
[“All things truly seem more laudable to me that are performed
without ostentation, and without the testimony of the people.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 26.]
says the most ostentatious man that ever lived.
I had but to conserve and to continue, which are silent and insensible
effects: innovation is of great lustre; but ‘tis interdicted in this age,
when we are pressed upon and have nothing to defend ourselves from but
novelties. To forbear doing is often as generous as to do; but ‘tis less
in the light, and the little good I have in me is of this kind. In fine,
occasions in this employment of mine have been confederate with my
humour, and I heartily thank them for it. Is there any who desires to be
sick, that he may see his physician at work? and would not the physician
deserve to be whipped who should wish the plague amongst us, that he
might put his art in practice? I have never been of that wicked humour,
and common enough, to desire that troubles and disorders in this city
should elevate and honour my government; I have ever heartily contributed
all I could to their tranquillity and ease.
He who will not thank me for the order, the sweet and silent calm that
has accompanied my administration, cannot, however, deprive me of the
share that belongs to me by title of my good fortune. And I am of such a
composition, that I would as willingly be lucky as wise, and had rather
owe my successes purely to the favour of Almighty God, than to any
operation of my own. I had sufficiently published to the world my
unfitness for such public offices; but I have something in me yet worse
than incapacity itself; which is, that I am not much displeased at it,
and that I do not much go about to cure it, considering the course of
life that I have proposed to myself.
Neither have I satisfied myself in this employment; but I have very near
arrived at what I expected from my own performance, and have much
surpassed what I promised them with whom I had to do: for I am apt to
promise something less than what I am able to do, and than what I hope to
make good. I assure myself that I have left no offence or hatred behind
me; to leave regret or desire for me amongst them, I at least know very
well that I never much aimed at it:
“Mene huic confidere monstro!
Mene salis placidi vultum, fluctusque quietos
Ignorare?”
[“Should I place confidence in this monster? Should I be ignorant
of the dangers of that seeming placid sea, those now quiet waves?”
--Virgil, Aeneid, V. 849.]
CHAPTER XI
OF CRIPPLES
‘Tis now two or three years ago that they made the year ten days shorter
in France.--[By the adoption of the Gregorian calendar.]--How many
changes may we expect should follow this reformation! it was really
moving heaven and earth at once. Yet nothing for all that stirs from its
place my neighbours still find their seasons of sowing and reaping, the
opportunities of doing their business, the hurtful and propitious days,
dust at the same time where they had, time out of mind, assigned them;
there was no more error perceived in our old use, than there is amendment
found in the alteration; so great an uncertainty there is throughout; so
gross, obscure, and obtuse is our perception. ‘Tis said that this
regulation might have been carried on with less inconvenience, by
subtracting for some years, according to the example of Augustus, the
Bissextile, which is in some sort a day of impediment and trouble, till
we had exactly satisfied this debt, the which itself is not done by this
correction, and we yet remain some days in arrear: and yet, by this
means, such order might be taken for the future, arranging that after the
revolution of such or such a number of years, the supernumerary day might
be always thrown out, so that we could not, henceforward, err above
four-and-twenty hours in our computation. We have no other account of
time but years; the world has for many ages made use of that only; and
yet it is a measure that to this day we are not agreed upon, and one that
we still doubt what form other nations have variously given to it, and
what was the true use of it. What does this saying of some mean, that
the heavens in growing old bow themselves down nearer towards us, and put
us into an uncertainty even of hours and days? and that which Plutarch
says of the months, that astrology had not in his time determined as to
the motion of the moon; what a fine condition are we in to keep records
of things past.
I was just now ruminating, as I often do, what a free and roving thing
human reason is. I ordinarily see that men, in things propounded to
them, more willingly study to find out reasons than to ascertain truth:
they slip over presuppositions, but are curious in examination of
consequences; they leave the things, and fly to the causes. Pleasant
talkers! The knowledge of causes only concerns him who has the conduct
of things; not us, who are merely to undergo them, and who have perfectly
full and accomplished use of them, according to our need, without
penetrating into the original and essence; wine is none the more pleasant
to him who knows its first faculties. On the contrary, both the body and
the soul interrupt and weaken the right they have of the use of the world
and of themselves, by mixing with it the opinion of learning; effects
concern us, but the means not at all. To determine and to distribute
appertain to superiority and command; as it does to subjection to accept.
Let me reprehend our custom. They commonly begin thus: “How is such a
thing done?” Whereas they should say, “Is such a thing done?” Our
reason is able to create a hundred other worlds, and to find out the
beginnings and contexture; it needs neither matter nor foundation: let it
but run on, it builds as well in the air as on the earth, and with
inanity as well as with matter:
“Dare pondus idonea fumo.”
[“Able to give weight to smoke.”--Persius, v. 20.]
I find that almost throughout we should say, “there is no such thing,”
and should myself often make use of this answer, but I dare not: for they
cry that it is an evasion produced from ignorance and weakness of
understanding; and I am fain, for the most part, to juggle for company,
and prate of frivolous subjects and tales that I believe not a word of;
besides that, in truth, ‘tis a little rude and quarrelsome flatly to deny
a stated fact; and few people but will affirm, especially in things hard
to be believed, that they have seen them, or at least will name witnesses
whose authority will stop our mouths from contradiction. In this way, we
know the foundations and means of things that never were; and the world
scuffles about a thousand questions, of which both the Pro and the Con
are false.
“Ita finitima sunt falsa veris, ut in praecipitem
locum non debeat se sapiens committere.”
[“False things are so near the true, that a wise man should not
trust himself in a precipitous place”--Cicero, Acad., ii. 21.]
Truth and lies are faced alike; their port, taste, and proceedings are
the same, and we look upon them with the same eye. I find that we are
not only remiss in defending ourselves from deceit, but that we seek and
offer ourselves to be gulled; we love to entangle ourselves in vanity, as
a thing conformable to our being.
I have seen the birth of many miracles in my time; which, although they
were abortive, yet have we not failed to foresee what they would have
come to, had they lived their full age. ‘Tis but finding the end of the
clew, and a man may wind off as much as he will; and there is a greater
distance betwixt nothing and the least thing in the world than there is
betwixt this and the greatest. Now the first that are imbued with this
beginning of novelty, when they set out with their tale, find, by the
oppositions they meet with, where the difficulty of persuasion lies, and
so caulk up that place with some false piece;
[Voltaire says of this passage, “He who would learn to doubt should
read this whole chapter of Montaigne, the least methodical of all
philosophers, but the wisest and most amiable.”
--Melanges Historiques, xvii. 694, ed. of Lefevre.]
besides that:
“Insita hominibus libido alendi de industria rumores,”
[“Men having a natural desire to nourish reports.”
--Livy, xxviii. 24.]
we naturally make a conscience of restoring what has been lent us,
without some usury and accession of our own. The particular error first
makes the public error, and afterwards, in turn, the public error makes
the particular one; and thus all this vast fabric goes forming and piling
itself up from hand to hand, so that the remotest witness knows more
about it than those who were nearest, and the last informed is better
persuaded than the first.
‘Tis a natural progress; for whoever believes anything, thinks it a work
of charity to persuade another into the same opinion; which the better to
do, he will make no difficulty of adding as much of his own invention as
he conceives necessary to his tale to encounter the resistance or want of
conception he meets with in others. I myself, who make a great
conscience of lying, and am not very solicitous of giving credit and
authority to what I say, yet find that in the arguments I have in hand,
being heated with the opposition of another, or by the proper warmth of
my own narration, I swell and puff up my subject by voice, motion,
vigour, and force of words, and moreover, by extension and amplification,
not without some prejudice to the naked truth; but I do it conditionally
withal, that to the first who brings me to myself, and who asks me the
plain and bare truth, I presently surrender my passion, and deliver the
matter to him without exaggeration, without emphasis, or any painting of
my own. A quick and earnest way of speaking, as mine is, is apt to run
into hyperbole. There is nothing to which men commonly are more inclined
than to make way for their own opinions; where the ordinary means fail
us, we add command, force, fire, and sword. ‘Tis a misfortune to be at
such a pass, that the best test of truth is the multitude of believers in
a crowd, where the number of fools so much exceeds the wise:
“Quasi vero quidquam sit tam valde, quam nil sapere, vulgare.”
[“As if anything were so common as ignorance.”
--Cicero, De Divin., ii.]
“Sanitatis patrocinium est, insanientium turba.”
[“The multitude of fools is a protection to the wise.”
--St. Augustine, De Civit. Dei, vi. 10.]
‘Tis hard to resolve a man’s judgment against the common opinions: the
first persuasion, taken from the very subject itself, possesses the
simple, and from them diffuses itself to the wise, under the authority of
the number and antiquity of the witnesses. For my part, what I should
not believe from one, I should not believe from a hundred and one: and I
do not judge opinions by years.
‘Tis not long since one of our princes, in whom the gout had spoiled an
excellent nature and sprightly disposition, suffered himself to be so far
persuaded with the report made to him of the marvellous operations of a
certain priest who by words and gestures cured all sorts of diseases,
as to go a long journey to seek him out, and by the force of his mere
imagination, for some hours so persuaded and laid his legs asleep, as to
obtain that service from them they had long time forgotten. Had fortune
heaped up five or six such-like incidents, it had been enough to have
brought this miracle into nature. There was afterwards discovered so
much simplicity and so little art in the author of these performances,
that he was thought too contemptible to be punished, as would be thought
of most such things, were they well examined:
“Miramur ex intervallo fallentia.”
[“We admire after an interval (or at a distance) things that
deceive.”--Seneca, Ep., 118, 2.]
So does our sight often represent to us strange images at a distance that
vanish on approaching near:
“Nunquam ad liquidum fama perducitur.”
[“Report is never fully substantiated.”
--Quintus Curtius, ix. 2.]
‘Tis wonderful from how many idle beginnings and frivolous causes such
famous impressions commonly, proceed. This it is that obstructs
information; for whilst we seek out causes and solid and weighty ends,
worthy of so great a name, we lose the true ones; they escape our sight
by their littleness. And, in truth, a very prudent, diligent, and subtle
inquisition is required in such searches, indifferent, and not
prepossessed. To this very hour, all these miracles and strange events
have concealed themselves from me: I have never seen greater monster or
miracle in the world than myself: one grows familiar with all strange
things by time and custom, but the more I frequent and the better I know
myself, the more does my own deformity astonish me, the less I understand
myself.
The principal right of advancing and producing such accidents is reserved
to fortune. Passing the day before yesterday through a village two
leagues from my house, I found the place yet warm with a miracle that had
lately failed of success there, where with first the neighbourhood had
been several months amused; then the neighbouring provinces began to take
it up, and to run thither in great companies of all sorts of people.
A young fellow of the place had one night in sport counterfeited the
voice of a spirit in his own house, without any other design at present,
but only for sport; but this having succeeded with him better than he
expected, to extend his farce with more actors he associated with him a
stupid silly country girl, and at last there were three of them of the
same age and understanding, who from domestic, proceeded to public,
preachings, hiding themselves under the altar of the church, never
speaking but by night, and forbidding any light to be brought. From
words which tended to the conversion of the world, and threats of the day
of judgment (for these are subjects under the authority and reverence of
which imposture most securely lurks), they proceeded to visions and
gesticulations so simple and ridiculous that--nothing could hardly be so
gross in the sports of little children. Yet had fortune never so little
favoured the design, who knows to what height this juggling might have at
last arrived? These poor devils are at present in prison, and are like
shortly to pay for the common folly; and I know not whether some judge
will not also make them smart for his. We see clearly into this, which
is discovered; but in many things of the like nature that exceed our
knowledge, I am of opinion that we ought to suspend our judgment, whether
as to rejection or as to reception.
Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the
abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of
professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we
are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions.
The style at Rome was that even that which a witness deposed to having
seen with his own eyes, and what a judge determined with his most certain
knowledge, was couched in this form of speaking: “it seems to me.” They
make me hate things that are likely, when they would impose them upon me
as infallible. I love these words which mollify and moderate the
temerity of our propositions: “peradventure; in some sort; some; ‘tis
said, I think,” and the like: and had I been set to train up children I
had put this way of answering into their mouths, inquiring and not
resolving: “What does this mean? I understand it not; it may be: is it
true?” so that they should rather have retained the form of pupils at
threescore years old than to go out doctors, as they do, at ten. Whoever
will be cured of ignorance must confess it.
Iris is the daughter of Thaumas;
[“That is, of Admiration. She (Iris, the rainbow) is beautiful, and
for that reason, because she has a face to be admired, she is said
to have been the daughter of Thamus.”
--Cicero, De Nat. Deor., iii. 20.]
admiration is the foundation of all philosophy, inquisition the progress,
ignorance the end. But there is a sort of ignorance, strong and
generous, that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge; an
ignorance which to conceive requires no less knowledge than to conceive
knowledge itself. I read in my younger years a trial that Corras,
[A celebrated Calvinist lawyer, born at Toulouse; 1513, and
assassinated there, 4th October 1572.]
a councillor of Toulouse, printed, of a strange incident, of two men who
presented themselves the one for the other. I remember (and I hardly
remember anything else) that he seemed to have rendered the imposture of
him whom he judged to be guilty, so wonderful and so far exceeding both
our knowledge and his own, who was the judge, that I thought it a very
bold sentence that condemned him to be hanged. Let us have some form of
decree that says, “The court understands nothing of the matter” more
freely and ingenuously than the Areopagites did, who, finding themselves
perplexed with a cause they could not unravel, ordered the parties to
appear again after a hundred years.
The witches of my neighbourhood run the hazard of their lives upon the
report of every new author who seeks to give body to their dreams. To
accommodate the examples that Holy Writ gives us of such things, most
certain and irrefragable examples, and to tie them to our modern events,
seeing that we neither see the causes nor the means, will require another
sort-of wit than ours. It, peradventure, only appertains to that sole
all-potent testimony to tell us. “This is, and that is, and not that
other.” God ought to be believed; and certainly with very good reason;
but not one amongst us for all that who is astonished at his own
narration (and he must of necessity be astonished if he be not out of his
wits), whether he employ it about other men’s affairs or against himself.
I am plain and heavy, and stick to the solid and the probable, avoiding
those ancient reproaches:
“Majorem fidem homines adhibent iis, quae non intelligunt;
--Cupidine humani ingenii libentius obscura creduntur.”
[“Men are most apt to believe what they least understand: and from
the acquisitiveness of the human intellect, obscure things are more
easily credited.” The second sentence is from Tacitus, Hist. 1. 22.]
I see very well that men get angry, and that I am forbidden to doubt upon
pain of execrable injuries; a new way of persuading! Thank God, I am not
to be cuffed into belief. Let them be angry with those who accuse their
opinion of falsity; I only accuse it of difficulty and boldness, and
condemn the opposite affirmation equally, if not so imperiously, with
them. He who will establish this proposition by authority and huffing
discovers his reason to be very weak. For a verbal and scholastic
altercation let them have as much appearance as their contradictors;
“Videantur sane, non affirmentur modo;”
[“They may indeed appear to be; let them not be affirmed (Let them
state the probabilities, but not affirm.)”
--Cicero, Acad., n. 27.]
but in the real consequence they draw from it these have much the
advantage. To kill men, a clear and strong light is required, and our
life is too real and essential to warrant these supernatural and
fantastic accidents.
As to drugs and poisons, I throw them out of my count, as being the worst
sort of homicides: yet even in this, ‘tis said, that men are not always
to rely upon the personal confessions of these people; for they have
sometimes been known to accuse themselves of the murder of persons who
have afterwards been found living and well. In these other extravagant
accusations, I should be apt to say, that it is sufficient a man, what
recommendation soever he may have, be believed as to human things; but of
what is beyond his conception, and of supernatural effect, he ought then
only to be believed when authorised by a supernatural approbation. The
privilege it has pleased Almighty God to give to some of our witnesses,
ought not to be lightly communicated and made cheap. I have my ears
battered with a thousand such tales as these: “Three persons saw him such
a day in the east three, the next day in the west: at such an hour, in
such a place, and in such habit”; assuredly I should not believe it
myself. How much more natural and likely do I find it that two men
should lie than that one man in twelve hours’ time should fly with the
wind from east to west? How much more natural that our understanding
should be carried from its place by the volubility of our disordered
minds, than that one of us should be carried by a strange spirit upon a
broomstaff, flesh and bones as we are, up the shaft of a chimney? Let
not us seek illusions from without and unknown, we who are perpetually
agitated with illusions domestic and our own. Methinks one is pardonable
in disbelieving a miracle, at least, at all events where one can elude
its verification as such, by means not miraculous; and I am of St.
Augustine’s opinion, that, “‘tis better to lean towards doubt than
assurance, in things hard to prove and dangerous to believe.”
‘Tis now some years ago that I travelled through the territories of a
sovereign prince, who, in my favour, and to abate my incredulity, did me
the honour to let me see, in his own presence, and in a private place,
ten or twelve prisoners of this kind, and amongst others, an old woman,
a real witch in foulness and deformity, who long had been famous in that
profession. I saw both proofs and free confessions, and I know not what
insensible mark upon the miserable creature: I examined and talked with
her and the rest as much and as long as I would, and gave the best and
soundest attention I could, and I am not a man to suffer my judgment to
be made captive by prepossession. In the end, and in all conscience, I
should rather have prescribed them hellebore than hemlock;
“Captisque res magis mentibus, quam consceleratis similis visa;”
[“The thing was rather to be attributed to madness, than malice.”
(“The thing seemed to resemble minds possessed rather than guilty.”)
--Livy, viii, 18.]
justice has its corrections proper for such maladies. As to the
oppositions and arguments that worthy men have made to me, both there,
and often in other places, I have met with none that have convinced me,
and that have not admitted a more likely solution than their conclusions.
It is true, indeed, that the proofs and reasons that are founded upon
experience and fact, I do not go about to untie, neither have they any
end; I often cut them, as Alexander did the Gordian knot. After all,
‘tis setting a man’s conjectures at a very high price upon them to cause
a man to be roasted alive.
We are told by several examples, as Praestantius of his father, that
being more profoundly, asleep than men usually are, he fancied himself
to be a mare, and that he served the soldiers for a sumpter; and what
he fancied himself to be, he really proved. If sorcerers dream so
materially; if dreams can sometimes so incorporate themselves with
effects, still I cannot believe that therefore our will should be
accountable to justice; which I say as one who am neither judge nor privy
councillor, and who think myself by many degrees unworthy so to be, but a
man of the common sort, born and avowed to the obedience of the public
reason, both in its words and acts. He who should record my idle talk as
being to the prejudice of the pettiest law, opinion, or custom of his
parish, would do himself a great deal of wrong, and me much more; for, in
what I say, I warrant no other certainty, but that ‘tis what I had then
in my thought, a tumultuous and wavering thought. All I say is by way of
discourse, and nothing by way of advice:
“Nec me pudet, ut istos fateri nescire, quod nesciam;”
[“Neither am I ashamed, as they are, to confess my ignorance of what
I do not know.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 25.]
I should not speak so boldly, if it were my due to be believed; and so I
told a great man, who complained of the tartness and contentiousness of
my exhortations. Perceiving you to be ready and prepared on one part, I
propose to you the other, with all the diligence and care I can, to clear
your judgment, not to compel it. God has your hearts in His hands, and
will furnish you with the means of choice. I am not so presumptuous even
as to desire that my opinions should bias you--in a thing of so great
importance: my fortune has not trained them up to so potent and elevated
conclusions. Truly, I have not only a great many humours, but also a
great many opinions, that I would endeavour to make my son dislike, if I
had one. What, if the truest are not always the most commodious to man,
being of so wild a composition?
Whether it be to the purpose or not, tis no great matter: ‘tis a common
proverb in Italy, that he knows not Venus in her perfect sweetness who
has never lain with a lame mistress. Fortune, or some particular
incident, long ago put this saying into the mouths of the people; and the
same is said of men as well as of women; for the queen of the Amazons
answered the Scythian who courted her to love, “Lame men perform best.”
In this feminine republic, to evade the dominion of the males, they
lamed them in their infancy--arms, legs, and other members that gave them
advantage over them, and only made use of them in that wherein we, in
these parts of the world, make use of them. I should have been apt to
think; that the shuffling pace of the lame mistress added some new
pleasure to the work, and some extraordinary titillation to those who
were at the sport; but I have lately learnt that ancient philosophy has
itself determined it, which says that the legs and thighs of lame women,
not receiving, by reason of their imperfection, their due aliment, it
falls out that the genital parts above are fuller and better supplied and
much more vigorous; or else that this defect, hindering exercise, they
who are troubled with it less dissipate their strength, and come more
entire to the sports of Venus; which also is the reason why the Greeks
decried the women-weavers as being more hot than other women by reason of
their sedentary trade, which they carry on without any great exercise of
the body. What is it we may not reason of at this rate? I might also
say of these, that the jaggling about whilst so sitting at work, rouses
and provokes their desire, as the swinging and jolting of coaches does
that of our ladies.
Do not these examples serve to make good what I said at first: that our
reasons often anticipate the effect, and have so infinite an extent of
jurisdiction that they judge and exercise themselves even on inanity
itself and non-existency? Besides the flexibility of our invention to
forge reasons of all sorts of dreams, our imagination is equally facile
to receive impressions of falsity by very frivolous appearances; for, by
the sole authority of the ancient and common use of this proverb, I have
formerly made myself believe that I have had more pleasure in a woman by
reason she was not straight, and accordingly reckoned that deformity
amongst her graces.
Torquato Tasso, in the comparison he makes betwixt France and Italy,
says that he has observed that our legs are generally smaller than those
of the Italian gentlemen, and attributes the cause of it to our being
continually on horseback; which is the very same cause from which
Suetonius draws a quite opposite conclusion; for he says, on the
contrary, that Germanicus had made his legs bigger by the continuation of
the same exercise.
Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding; it is the shoe of
Theramenes, fit for all feet. It is double and diverse, and the matters
are double and diverse too. “Give me a drachm of silver,” said a Cynic
philosopher to Antigonus. “That is not a present befitting a king,”
replied he. “Give me then a talent,” said the other. “That is not a
present befitting a Cynic.”
“Seu plures calor ille vias et caeca relaxat
Spiramenta, novas veniat qua succus in herbas
Seu durat magis, et venas astringit hiantes;
Ne tenues pluviae, rapidive potentia colic
Acrior, aut Boreae penetrabile frigus adurat.”
[“Whether the heat opens more passages and secret pores through
which the sap may be derived into the new-born herbs; or whether it
rather hardens and binds the gaping veins that the small showers and
keen influence of the violent sun or penetrating cold of Boreas may
not hurt them.”--Virg., Georg., i. 89.]
“Ogni medaglia ha il suo rovescio.”
[“Every medal has its reverse.”--Italian Proverb.]
This is the reason why Clitomachus said of old that Carneades had outdone
the labours of Hercules, in having eradicated consent from men, that is
to say, opinion and the courage of judging. This so vigorous fancy of
Carneades sprang, in my opinion, anciently from the impudence of those
who made profession of knowledge and their immeasurable self-conceit.
AEsop was set to sale with two other slaves; the buyer asked the first of
these what he could do; he, to enhance his own value, promised mountains
and marvels, saying he could do this and that, and I know not what; the
second said as much of himself or more: when it came to AEsop’s turn, and
that he was also asked what he could do; “Nothing,” said he, “for these
two have taken up all before me; they know everything.” So has it
happened in the school of philosophy: the pride of those who attributed
the capacity of all things to the human mind created in others, out of
despite and emulation, this opinion, that it is capable of nothing: the
one maintain the same extreme in ignorance that the others do in
knowledge; to make it undeniably manifest that man is immoderate
throughout, and can never stop but of necessity and the want of ability
to proceed further.
CHAPTER XII
OF PHYSIOGNOMY
Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and trust; and
‘tis not amiss; we could not choose worse than by ourselves in so weak an
age. That image of Socrates’ discourses, which his friends have
transmitted to us, we approve upon no other account than a reverence to
public sanction: ‘tis not according to our own knowledge; they are not
after our way; if anything of the kind should spring up now, few men
would value them. We discern no graces that are not pointed and puffed
out and inflated by art; such as glide on in their own purity and
simplicity easily escape so gross a sight as ours; they have a delicate
and concealed beauty, such as requires a clear and purified sight to
discover its secret light. Is not simplicity, as we take it,
cousin-german to folly and a quality of reproach? Socrates makes his
soul move a natural and common motion: a peasant said this; a woman said
that; he has never anybody in his mouth but carters, joiners, cobblers,
and masons; his are inductions and similitudes drawn from the most common
and known actions of men; every one understands him. We should never
have recognised the nobility and splendour of his admirable conceptions
under so mean a form; we, who think all things low and flat that are not
elevated, by learned doctrine, and who discern no riches but in pomp and
show. This world of ours is only formed for ostentation: men are only
puffed up with wind, and are bandied to and fro like tennis-balls. He
proposed to himself no vain and idle fancies; his design was to furnish
us with precepts and things that more really and fitly serve to the use
of life;
“Servare modum, finemque tenere,
Naturamque sequi.”
[“To keep a just mean, to observe a just limit,
and to follow Nature.”--Lucan, ii. 381.]
He was also always one and the same, and raised himself, not by starts
but by complexion, to the highest pitch of vigour; or, to say better,
mounted not at all, but rather brought down, reduced, and subjected all
asperities and difficulties to his original and natural condition; for in
Cato ‘tis most manifest that ‘tis a procedure extended far beyond the
common ways of men: in the brave exploits of his life, and in his death,
we find him always mounted upon the great horse; whereas the other ever
creeps upon the ground, and with a gentle and ordinary pace, treats of
the most useful matters, and bears himself, both at his death and in the
rudest difficulties that could present themselves, in the ordinary way of
human life.
It has fallen out well that the man most worthy to be known and to be
presented to the world for example should be he of whom we have the most
certain knowledge; he has been pried into by the most clear-sighted men
that ever were; the testimonies we have of him are admirable both in
fidelity and fulness. ‘Tis a great thing that he was able so to order
the pure imaginations of a child, that, without altering or wresting
them, he thereby produced the most beautiful effects of our soul: he
presents it neither elevated nor rich; he only represents it sound, but
assuredly with a brisk and full health. By these common and natural
springs, by these ordinary and popular fancies, without being moved or
put out, he set up not only the most regular, but the most high and
vigorous beliefs, actions, and manners that ever were. ‘Tis he who
brought again from heaven, where she lost her time, human wisdom, to
restore her to man with whom her most just and greatest business lies.
See him plead before his judges; observe by what reasons he rouses his
courage to the hazards of war; with what arguments he fortifies his
patience against calumny, tyranny, death, and the perverseness of his
wife: you will find nothing in all this borrowed from arts and sciences:
the simplest may there discover their own means and strength; ‘tis not
possible more to retire or to creep more low. He has done human nature a
great kindness in showing it how much it can do of itself.
We are all of us richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow
and to beg, and brought up more to make use of what is another’s than of
our own. Man can in nothing fix himself to his actual necessity: of
pleasure, wealth, and power, he grasps at more than he can hold; his
greediness is incapable of moderation. And I find that in curiosity of
knowing he is the same; he cuts himself out more work than he can do, and
more than he needs to do: extending the utility of knowledge to the full
of its matter:
“Ut omnium rerum, sic litterarum quoque, intemperantia laboramus.”
[“We carry intemperance into the study of literature, as well as
into everything else.”--Seneca, Ep., 106.]
And Tacitus had reason to commend the mother of Agricola for having
restrained her son in his too violent appetite for learning.
Tis a good, if duly considered, which has in it, as the other goods of
men have, a great deal of vanity and weakness, proper and natural to
itself, and that costs very dear. Its acquisition is far more hazardous
than that of all other meat or drink; for, as to other things, what we
have bought we carry home in some vessel, and there have full leisure to
examine our purchase, how much we shall eat or drink of it, and when: but
sciences we can, at the very first, stow into no other vessel than the
soul; we swallow them in buying, and return from the market, either
already infected or amended: there are some that only burden and
overcharge the stomach, instead of nourishing; and, moreover, some that,
under colour of curing, poison us. I have been pleased, in places where
I have been, to see men in devotion vow ignorance as well as chastity,
poverty, and penitence: ‘tis also a gelding of our unruly appetites, to
blunt this cupidity that spurs us on to the study of books, and to
deprive the soul of this voluptuous complacency that tickles us with the
opinion of knowledge: and ‘tis plenarily to accomplish the vow of
poverty, to add unto it that of the mind. We need little doctrine to
live at our ease; and Socrates teaches us that this is in us, and the way
how to find it, and the manner how to use it: All our sufficiency which
exceeds the natural is well-nigh superfluous and vain: ‘tis much if it
does not rather burden and cumber us than do us good:
“Paucis opus est literis ad mentem bonam:”
[“Little learning is needed to form a sound mind.”
--Seneca, Ep., 106.]
‘tis a feverish excess of the mind; a tempestuous and unquiet instrument.
Do but recollect yourself, and you will find in yourself natural
arguments against death, true, and the fittest to serve you in time of
necessity: ‘tis they that make a peasant, and whole nations, die with as
much firmness as a philosopher. Should I have died less cheerfully
before I had read Cicero’s Tusculan Quastiones? I believe not; and when
I find myself at the best, I perceive that my tongue is enriched indeed,
but my courage little or nothing elevated by them; that is just as nature
framed it at first, and defends itself against the conflict only after a
natural and ordinary way. Books have not so much served me for
instruction as exercise. What if knowledge, trying to arm us with new
defences against natural inconveniences, has more imprinted in our
fancies their weight and greatness, than her reasons and subtleties to
secure us from them? They are subtleties, indeed, with which she often
alarms us to little purpose. Do but observe how many slight and
frivolous, and, if nearly examined, incorporeal arguments, the closest
and wisest authors scatter about one good one: they are but verbal quirks
and fallacies to amuse and gull us: but forasmuch as it may be with some
profit, I will sift them no further; many of that sort are here and there
dispersed up and down this book, either borrowed or by imitation.
Therefore one ought to take a little heed not to call that force which is
only a pretty knack of writing, and that solid which is only sharp, or
that good which is only fine:
“Quae magis gustata quam potata, delectant,”
[“Which more delight in the tasting than in being drunk.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., v. 5.]
everything that pleases does not nourish:
“Ubi non ingenii, sed animi negotium agitur.”
[“Where the question is not about the wit, but about the soul.”
--Seneca, Ep., 75.]
To see the trouble that Seneca gives himself to fortify himself against
death; to see him so sweat and pant to harden and encourage himself, and
bustle so long upon this perch, would have lessened his reputation with
me, had he not very bravely held himself at the last. His so ardent and
frequent agitations discover that he was in himself impetuous and
passionate,
“Magnus animus remissius loquitur, et securius . . .
non est alius ingenio, alius ammo color;”
[“A great courage speaks more calmly and more securely. There is
not one complexion for the wit and another for the mind.”
--Seneca, Ep. 114, 115]
he must be convinced at his own expense; and he in some sort discovers
that he was hard pressed by his enemy. Plutarch’s way, by how much it is
more disdainful and farther stretched, is, in my opinion, so much more
manly and persuasive: and I am apt to believe that his soul had more
assured and more regular motions. The one more sharp, pricks and makes
us start, and more touches the soul; the other more constantly solid,
forms, establishes, and supports us, and more touches the understanding.
That ravishes the judgment, this wins it. I have likewise seen other
writings, yet more reverenced than these, that in the representation of
the conflict they maintain against the temptations of the flesh, paint
them, so sharp, so powerful and invincible, that we ourselves, who are of
the common herd, are as much to wonder at the strangeness and unknown
force of their temptation, as at the resisting it.
To what end do we so arm ourselves with this harness of science? Let us
look down upon the poor people that we see scattered upon the face of the
earth, prone and intent upon their business, that neither know Aristotle
nor Cato, example nor precept; from these nature every day extracts
effects of constancy and patience, more pure and manly than those we so
inquisitively study in the schools: how many do I ordinarily see who
slight poverty? how many who desire to die, or who die without alarm or
regret? He who is now digging in my garden, has this morning buried his
father or his son. The very names by which they call diseases sweeten
and mollify the sharpness of them: the phthisic is with them no more than
a cough, dysentery but a looseness, the pleurisy but a stitch; and, as
they gently name them, so they patiently endure them; they are very great
and grievous indeed when they hinder their ordinary labour; they never
keep their beds but to die:
“Simplex illa et aperta virtus in obscuram et solertem
scientiam versa est.”
[“That overt and simple virtue is converted into an obscure and
subtle science.”--Seneca, Ep., 95.]
I was writing this about the time when a great load of our intestine
troubles for several months lay with all its weight upon me; I had the
enemy at my door on one side, and the freebooters, worse enemies, on the
other,
“Non armis, sed vitiis, certatur;”
[“The fight is not with arms, but with vices.”--Seneca, Ep. 95.]
and underwent all sorts of military injuries at once:
“Hostis adest dextra laevaque a parte timendus.
Vicinoque malo terret utrumque latus.”
[“Right and left a formidable enemy is to be feared, and threatens
me on both sides with impending danger.”--Ovid, De Ponto, i. 3, 57.]
A monstrous war! Other wars are bent against strangers, this against
itself, destroying itself with its own poison. It is of so malignant and
ruinous a nature, that it ruins itself with the rest; and with its own
rage mangles and tears itself to pieces. We more often see it dissolve
of itself than through scarcity of any necessary thing or by force of the
enemy. All discipline evades it; it comes to compose sedition, and is
itself full of it; would chastise disobedience, and itself is the
example; and, employed for the defence of the laws, rebels against its
own. What a condition are we in! Our physic makes us sick!
“Nostre mal s’empoisonne
Du secours qu’on luy donne.”
“Exuperat magis, aegrescitque medendo.”
[“Our disease is poisoned with its very remedies”--AEnead, xii. 46.]
“Omnia fanda, nefanda, malo permista furore,
Justificam nobis mentem avertere deorum.”
[“Right and wrong, all shuffled together in this wicked fury, have
deprived us of the gods’ protection.”
--Catullus, De Nuptiis Pelei et Thetidos, V. 405.]
In the beginning of these popular maladies, one may distinguish the sound
from the sick; but when they come to continue, as ours have done, the
whole body is then infected from head to foot; no part is free from
corruption, for there is no air that men so greedily draw in that
diffuses itself so soon and that penetrates so deep as that of licence.
Our armies only subsist and are kept together by the cement of
foreigners; for of Frenchmen there is now no constant and regular army to
be made. What a shame it is! there is no longer any discipline but what
we see in the mercenary soldiers. As to ourselves, our conduct is at
discretion, and that not of the chief, but every one at his own. The
general has a harder game to play within than he has without; he it is
who has to follow, to court the soldiers, to give way to them; he alone
has to obey: all the rest if disolution and free licence. It pleases me
to observe how much pusillanimity and cowardice there is in ambition; by
how abject and servile ways it must arrive at its end; but it displeases
me to see good and generous natures, and that are capable of justice,
every day corrupted in the management and command of this confusion.
Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation. We had
ill-formed souls enough, without spoiling those that were generous and
good; so that, if we hold on, there will scarcely remain any with whom to
intrust the health of this State of ours, in case fortune chance to
restore it:
“Hunc saltem everso juvenem succurrere seclo,
Ne prohibete.”
[“Forbid not, at least, that this young man repair this ruined age.”
--Virgil, Georg., i. 500. Montaigne probably refers to Henry, king
of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV.]
What has become of the old precept, “That soldiers ought more to fear
their chief than the enemy”?--[Valerius Maximus, Ext. 2.]--and of that
wonderful example, that an orchard being enclosed within the precincts of
a camp of the Roman army, was seen at their dislodgment the next day in
the same condition, not an apple, though ripe and delicious, being pulled
off, but all left to the possessor? I could wish that our youth, instead
of the time they spend in less fruitful travels and less honourable
employments, would bestow one half of that time in being an eye-witness
of naval exploits, under some good captain of Rhodes, and the other half
in observing the discipline of the Turkish armies; for they have many
differences and advantages over ours; one of these is, that our soldiers
become more licentious in expeditions, theirs more temperate and
circumspect; for the thefts and insolencies committed upon the common
people, which are only punished with a cudgel in peace, are capital in
war; for an egg taken by a Turkish soldier without paying for it, fifty
blows with a stick is the fixed rate; for anything else, of what sort or
how trivial soever, not necessary to nourishment, they are presently
impaled or beheaded without mercy. I am astonished, in the history of
Selim, the most cruel conqueror that ever was, to see that when he
subdued Egypt, the beautiful gardens about Damascus being all open, and
in a conquered land, and his army encamped upon the very place, should be
left untouched by the hands of the soldiers, by reason they had not
received the signal of pillage.
But is there any disease in a government that it is worth while to physic
with such a mortal drug?--[i.e. as civil war.]--No, said Favonius, not
even the tyrannical usurpation of a Commonwealth. Plato, likewise, will
not consent that a man should violate the peace of his country in order
to cure it, and by no means approves of a reformation that disturbs and
hazards all, and that is to be purchased at the price of the citizens’
blood and ruin; determining it to be the duty of a good patriot in such a
case to let it alone, and only to pray to God for his extraordinary
assistance: and he seems to be angry with his great friend Dion, for
having proceeded somewhat after another manner. I was a Platonist in
this point before I knew there had ever been such a man as Plato in the
world. And if this person ought absolutely to be rejected from our
society (he who by the sincerity of his conscience merited from the
divine favour to penetrate so far into the Christian light, through the
universal darkness wherein the world was involved in his time), I do not
think it becomes us to suffer ourselves to be instructed by a heathen,
how great an impiety it is not to expect from God any relief simply his
own and without our co-operation. I often doubt, whether amongst so many
men as meddle in such affairs, there is not to be found some one of so
weak understanding as to have been really persuaded that he went towards
reformation by the worst of deformations; and advanced towards salvation
by the most express causes that we have of most assured damnation; that
by overthrowing government, the magistracy, and the laws, in whose
protection God has placed him, by dismembering his good mother, and
giving her limbs to be mangled by her old enemies, filling fraternal
hearts with parricidal hatreds, calling devils and furies to his aid, he
can assist the most holy sweetness and justice of the divine law.
Ambition, avarice, cruelty, and revenge have not sufficient natural
impetuosity of their own; let us bait them with the glorious titles of
justice and devotion. There cannot a worse state of things be imagined
than where wickedness comes to be legitimate, and assumes, with the
magistrates’ permission, the cloak of virtue:
“Nihil in speciem fallacius, quam prava religio,
ubi deorum numen prxtenditur sceleribus.”
[“Nothing has a more deceiving face than false religion, where the
divinity of the gods is obscured by crimes.”--Livy, xxxix. 16.]
The extremest sort of injustice, according to Plato, is where that which
is unjust should be reputed for just.
The common people then suffered very much, and not present damage only:
“Undique totis
Usque adeo turbatur agris,”
[“Such great disorders overtake our fields on every side.”
--Virgil, Eclog., i. II.]
but future too; the living were to suffer, and so were they who were yet
unborn; they stript them, and consequently myself, even of hope, taking
from them all they had laid up in store to live on for many years:
“Quae nequeunt secum ferre aut abducere, perdunt;
Et cremat insontes turba scelesta casas . . .
Muris nulla fides, squalent populatibus agri.”
[“What they cannot bear away, they spoil; and the wicked mob burn
harmless houses; walls cannot secure their masters, and the fields
are squalid with devastation.”
--Ovid, Trist., iii. 10, 35; Claudianus, In Eutyop., i. 244.]
Besides this shock, I suffered others: I underwent the inconveniences
that moderation brings along with it in such a disease: I was robbed on
all hands; to the Ghibelline I was a Guelph, and to the Guelph a
Ghibelline; one of my poets expresses this very well, but I know not
where it is.
[“So Tories called me Whig, and Whigs a Tory.”--Pope, after Horace.]
The situation of my house, and my friendliness with my neighbours,
presented me with one face; my life and my actions with another. They
did not lay formal accusations to my charge, for they had no foundation
for so doing; I never hide my head from the laws, and whoever would have
questioned me, would have done himself a greater prejudice than me; they
were only mute suspicions that were whispered about, which never want
appearance in so confused a mixture, no more than envious or idle heads.
I commonly myself lend a hand to injurious presumptions that fortune
scatters abroad against me, by a way I have ever had of evading to
justify, excuse, or explain myself; conceiving that it were to compromise
my conscience to plead in its behalf:
“Perspicuitas enim argumentatione elevatur;”
[“For perspicuity is lessened by argument.”
(“The clearness of a cause is clouded by argumentation.”)
--Cicero, De Nat. Deor., iii. 4.]
and, as if every one saw as clearly into me as I do myself, instead of
retiring from an accusation, I step up to meet it, and rather give it
some kind of colour by an ironical and scoffing confession, if I do not
sit totally mute, as of a thing not worth my answer. But such as look
upon this kind of behaviour of mine as too haughty a confidence, have as
little kindness for me as they who interpret the weakness of an
indefensible cause; namely, the great folks, towards whom want of
submission is the great fault, harsh towards all justice that knows and
feels itself, and is not submissive humble, and suppliant; I have often
knocked my head against this pillar. So it is that at what then befell
me, an ambitious man would have hanged himself, and a covetous man would
have done the same. I have no manner of care of getting;
“Si mihi, quod nunc est, etiam minus; et mihi vivam
Quod superest aevi, si quid superesse volent dii:”
[“If I may have what I now own, or even less, and may live for
myself what of life remains, if the gods grant me remaining years.”
--Horace, Ep., i. 18, 107.]
but the losses that befall me by the injury of others, whether by theft
or violence, go almost as near my heart as they would to that of the most
avaricious man. The offence troubles me, without comparison, more than
the loss. A thousand several sorts of mischiefs fell upon me in the neck
of one another; I could more cheerfully have borne them all at once.
I was already considering to whom, amongst my friends, I might commit a
necessitous and discredited old age; and having turned my eyes quite
round, I found myself bare. To let one’s self fall plump down, and from
so great a height, it ought to be in the arms of a solid, vigorous, and
fortunate friendship: these are very rare, if there be any. At last, I
saw that it was safest for me to trust to myself in my necessity; and if
it should so fall out, that I should be but upon cold terms in Fortune’s
favour, I should so much the more pressingly recommend me to my own, and
attach myself and look to myself all the more closely. Men on all
occasions throw themselves upon foreign assistance to spare their own,
which is alone certain and sufficient to him who knows how therewith to
arm himself. Every one runs elsewhere, and to the future, forasmuch as
no one is arrived at himself. And I was satisfied that they were
profitable inconveniences; forasmuch as, first, ill scholars are to be
admonished with the rod, when reason will not do, as a crooked piece of
wood is by fire and straining reduced to straightness. I have a great
while preached to myself to stick close to my own concerns, and separate
myself from the affairs of others; yet I am still turning my eyes aside.
A bow, a favourable word, a kind look from a great person tempts me; of
which God knows if there is scarcity in these days, and what they
signify. I, moreover, without wrinkling my forehead, hearken to the
persuasions offered me, to draw me into the marketplace, and so gently
refuse, as if I were half willing to be overcome. Now for so indocile a
spirit blows are required; this vessel which thus chops and cleaves, and
is ready to fall one piece from another, must have the hoops forced down
with good sound strokes of a mallet. Secondly, that this accident served
me for exercise to prepare me for worse, if I, who both by the benefit of
fortune, and by the condition of my manners, hoped to be among the last,
should happen to be one of the first assailed by this storm; instructing
myself betimes to constrain my life, and fit it for a new state. The
true liberty is to be able to do what a man will with himself:
“Potentissimus est, qui se habet in potestate.”
[“He is most potent who is master of himself.”--Seneca, Ep., 94.]
In an ordinary and quiet time, a man prepares himself for moderate and
common accidents; but in the confusion wherein we have been for these
thirty years, every Frenchman, whether personal or in general, sees
himself every hour upon the point of the total ruin and overthrow of his
fortune: by so much the more ought he to have his courage supplied with
the strongest and most vigorous provisions. Let us thank fortune, that
has not made us live in an effeminate, idle, and languishing age; some
who could never have been so by other means will be made famous by their
misfortunes. As I seldom read in histories the confusions of other
states without regret that I was not present, the better to consider
them, so does my curiosity make me in some sort please myself in seeing
with my own eyes this notable spectacle of our public death, its form and
symptoms; and since I cannot hinder it, I am content to have been
destined to be present therein, and thereby to instruct myself. So do
we eagerly covet to see, though but in shadow and the fables of theatres,
the pomp of tragic representations of human fortune; ‘tis not without
compassion at what we hear, but we please ourselves in rousing our
displeasure, by the rarity of these pitiable events. Nothing tickles
that does not pinch. And good historians skip over, as stagnant water
and dead sea, calm narrations, to return to seditions, to wars, to which
they know that we invite them.
I question whether I can decently confess with how small a sacrifice of
its repose and tranquillity I have passed over above the one half of my
life amid the ruin of my country. I lend myself my patience somewhat too
cheap, in accidents that do not privately assail me; and do not so much
regard what they take from me, as what remains safe, both within and
without. There is comfort in evading, one while this, another while
that, of the evils that are levelled at ourselves too, at last, but at
present hurt others only about us; as also, that in matters of public
interest, the more universally my affection is dispersed, the weaker it
is: to which may be added, that it is half true:
“Tantum ex publicis malis sentimus,
quantum ad privatas res pertinet;”
[“We are only so far sensible of public evils as they respect our
private affairs.”--Livy, xxx. 44.]
and that the health from which we fell was so ill, that itself relieves
the regret we should have for it. It was health, but only in comparison
with the sickness that has succeeded it: we are not fallen from any great
height; the corruption and brigandage which are in dignity and office
seem to me the least supportable: we are less injuriously rifled in a
wood than in a place of security. It was an universal juncture of
particular members, each corrupted by emulation of the others, and most
of them with old ulcers, that neither received nor required any cure.
This convulsion, therefore, really more animated than pressed me, by the
assistance of my conscience, which was not only at peace within itself,
but elevated, and I did not find any reason to complain of myself. Also,
as God never sends evils, any more than goods, absolutely pure to men,
my health continued at that time more than usually good; and, as I can
do nothing without it, there are few things that I cannot do with it.
It afforded me means to rouse up all my faculties, and to lay my hand
before the wound that would else, peradventure, have gone farther; and I
experienced, in my patience, that I had some stand against fortune, and
that it must be a great shock could throw me out of the saddle. I do not
say this to provoke her to give me a more vigorous charge: I am her
humble servant, and submit to her pleasure: let her be content, in God’s
name. Am I sensible of her assaults? Yes, I am. But, as those who are
possessed and oppressed with sorrow sometimes suffer themselves,
nevertheless, by intervals to taste a little pleasure, and are sometimes
surprised with a smile, so have I so much power over myself, as to make
my ordinary condition quiet and free from disturbing thoughts; yet I
suffer myself, withal, by fits to be surprised with the stings of those
unpleasing imaginations that assault me, whilst I am arming myself to
drive them away, or at least to wrestle with them.
But behold another aggravation of the evil which befell me in the tail of
the rest: both without doors and within I was assailed with a most
violent plague, violent in comparison of all others; for as sound bodies
are subject to more grievous maladies, forasmuch as they, are not to be
forced but by such, so my very healthful air, where no contagion, however
near, in the memory of man, ever took footing, coming to be corrupted,
produced strange effects:
“Mista senum et juvenum densentur funera; nullum
Saeva caput Proserpina fugit;”
[“Old and young die in mixed heaps. Cruel Proserpine forbears
none.”--Horace, Od., i. 28, 19.]
I had to suffer this pleasant condition, that the sight of my house, was
frightful to me; whatever I had there was without guard, and left to the
mercy of any one who wished to take it. I myself, who am so hospitable,
was in very great distress for a retreat for my family; a distracted
family, frightful both to its friends and itself, and filling every place
with horror where it attempted to settle, having to shift its abode so
soon as any one’s finger began but to ache; all diseases are then
concluded to be the plague, and people do not stay to examine whether
they are so or no. And the mischief on’t is that, according to the rules
of art, in every danger that a man comes near, he must undergo a
quarantine in fear of the evil, your imagination all the while tormenting
you at pleasure, and turning even your health itself into a fever. Yet
all this would have much less affected me had I not withal been compelled
to be sensible of the sufferings of others, and miserably to serve six
months together for a guide to this caravan; for I carry my own antidotes
within myself, which are resolution and patience. Apprehension, which is
particularly feared in this disease, does not much trouble me; and, if
being alone, I should have been taken, it had been a less cheerless and
more remote departure; ‘tis a kind of death that I do not think of the
worst sort; ‘tis commonly short, stupid, without pain, and consoled by
the public condition; without ceremony, without mourning, without a
crowd. But as to the people about us, the hundredth part of them could
not be saved:
“Videas desertaque regna
Pastorum, et longe saltus lateque vacantes.”
[“You would see shepherds’ haunts deserted, and far and wide empty
pastures.”--Virgil, Georg., iii. 476.]
In this place my largest revenue is manual: what an hundred men ploughed
for me, lay a long time fallow.
But then, what example of resolution did we not see in the simplicity of
all this people? Generally, every one renounced all care of life; the
grapes, the principal wealth of the country, remained untouched upon the
vines; every man indifferently prepared for and expected death, either
to-night or to-morrow, with a countenance and voice so far from fear,
as if they had come to terms with this necessity, and that it was an
universal and inevitable sentence. ‘Tis always such; but how slender
hold has the resolution of dying? The distance and difference of a few
hours, the sole consideration of company, renders its apprehension
various to us. Observe these people; by reason that they die in the same
month, children, young people, and old, they are no longer astonished at
it; they no longer lament. I saw some who were afraid of staying behind,
as in a dreadful solitude; and I did not commonly observe any other
solicitude amongst them than that of sepulture; they were troubled to see
the dead bodies scattered about the fields, at the mercy of the wild
beasts that presently flocked thither. How differing are the fancies of
men; the Neorites, a nation subjected by Alexander, threw the bodies of
their dead into the deepest and less frequented part of their woods, on
purpose to have them there eaten; the only sepulture reputed happy
amongst them. Some, who were yet in health, dug their own graves; others
laid themselves down in them whilst alive; and a labourer of mine, in
dying, with his hands and feet pulled the earth upon him. Was not this
to nestle and settle himself to sleep at greater ease? A bravery in some
sort like that of the Roman soldiers who, after the battle of Cannae,
were found with their heads thrust into holes in the earth, which they
had made, and in suffocating themselves, with their own hands pulled the
earth about their ears. In short, a whole province was, by the common
usage, at once brought to a course nothing inferior in undauntedness to
the most studied and premeditated resolution.
Most of the instructions of science to encourage us herein have in them
more of show than of force, and more of ornament than of effect. We have
abandoned Nature, and will teach her what to do; teach her who so happily
and so securely conducted us; and in the meantime, from the footsteps of
her instruction, and that little which, by the benefit of ignorance,
remains of her image imprinted in the life of this rustic rout of
unpolished men, science is constrained every day to borrow patterns for
her disciples of constancy, tranquillity, and innocence. It is pretty to
see that these persons, full of so much fine knowledge, have to imitate
this foolish simplicity, and this in the primary actions of virtue; and
that our wisdom must learn even from beasts the most profitable
instructions in the greatest and most necessary concerns of our life;
as, how we are to live and die, manage our property, love and bring up
our children, maintain justice: a singular testimony of human infirmity;
and that this reason we so handle at our pleasure, finding evermore some
diversity and novelty, leaves in us no apparent trace of nature. Men
have done with nature as perfumers with oils; they have sophisticated her
with so many argumentations and far-fetched discourses, that she is
become variable and particular to each, and has lost her proper,
constant, and universal face; so that we must seek testimony from beasts,
not subject to favour, corruption, or diversity of opinions. It is,
indeed, true that even these themselves do not always go exactly in the
path of nature, but wherein they swerve, it is so little that you may
always see the track; as horses that are led make many bounds and
curvets, but ‘tis always at the length of the halter, and still follow
him that leads them; and as a young hawk takes its flight, but still
under the restraint of its tether:
“Exsilia, torments, bells, morbos, naufragia meditare . . .
ut nullo sis malo tiro.”
[“To meditate upon banishments, tortures, wars, diseases, and
shipwrecks, that thou mayest not be a novice in any disaster.”
--Seneca, Ep., 91, 107.]
What good will this curiosity do us, to anticipate all the inconveniences
of human nature, and to prepare ourselves with so much trouble against
things which, peradventure, will never befall us?
“Parem passis tristitiam facit, pati posse;”
[“It troubles men as much that they may possibly suffer,
as if they really did suffer.”--Idem, ibid., 74.]
not only the blow, but the wind of the blow strikes us: or, like
phrenetic people--for certainly it is a phrensy--to go immediately and
whip yourself, because it may so fall out that Fortune may one day make
you undergo it; and to put on your furred gown at Midsummer, because you
will stand in need of it at Christmas! Throw yourselves, say they, into
the experience of all the evils, the most extreme evils that can possibly
befall you, and so be assured of them. On the contrary, the most easy
and most natural way would be to banish even the thoughts of them; they
will not come soon enough; their true being will not continue with us
long enough; our mind must lengthen and extend them; we must incorporate
them in us beforehand, and there entertain them, as if they would not
otherwise sufficiently press upon our senses. “We shall find them heavy
enough when they come,” says one of our masters, of none of the tender
sects, but of the most severe; “in the meantime, favour thyself; believe
what pleases thee best; what good will it do thee to anticipate thy ill
fortune, to lose the present for fear of the future: and to make thyself
miserable now, because thou art to be so in time?” These are his words.
Science, indeed, does us one good office in instructing us exactly as to
the dimensions of evils,
“Curis acuens mortalia corda!”
[“Probing mortal hearts with cares.”--Virgil, Georg., i. 23.]
‘Twere pity that any part of their greatness should escape our sense and
knowledge.
‘Tis certain that for the most part the preparation for death has
administered more torment than the thing itself. It was of old truly
said, and by a very judicious author:
“Minus afficit sensus fatigatio, quam cogitatio.”
[“Suffering itself less afflicts the senses than the apprehension
of suffering.”--Quintilian, Inst. Orat., i. 12.]
The sentiment of present death sometimes, of itself, animates us with a
prompt resolution not to avoid a thing that is utterly inevitable: many
gladiators have been seen in the olden time, who, after having fought
timorously and ill, have courageously entertained death, offering their
throats to the enemies’ sword and bidding them despatch. The sight of
future death requires a courage that is slow, and consequently hard to be
got. If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will, at
the time, fully and sufficiently instruct you: she will exactly do that
business for you; take you no care--
“Incertam frustra, mortales, funeris horam,
Quaeritis et qua sit mors aditura via....
Poena minor certam subito perferre ruinam;
Quod timeas, gravius sustinuisse diu.”
[“Mortals, in vain you seek to know the uncertain hour of death,
and by what channel it will come upon you.”--Propertius, ii. 27, 1.
“‘Tis less painful to undergo sudden destruction; ‘tis hard to bear
that which you long fear.”--Incert. Auct.]
We trouble life by the care of death, and death by the care of life: the
one torments, the other frights us. It is not against death that we
prepare, that is too momentary a thing; a quarter of an hour’s suffering,
without consequence and without damage, does not deserve especial
precepts: to say the truth, we prepare ourselves against the preparations
of death. Philosophy ordains that we should always have death before our
eyes, to see and consider it before the time, and then gives us rules and
precautions to provide that this foresight and thought do us no harm;
just so do physicians, who throw us into diseases, to the end they may
have whereon to employ their drugs and their art. If we have not known
how to live, ‘tis injustice to teach us how to die, and make the end
difform from all the rest; if we have known how to live firmly and
quietly, we shall know how to die so too. They may boast as much as they
please:
“Tota philosophorum vita commentatio mortis est;”
[“The whole life of philosophers is the meditation of death.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., ii. 30.]
but I fancy that, though it be the end, it is not the aim of life; ‘tis
its end, its extremity, but not, nevertheless, its object; it ought
itself to be its own aim and design; its true study is to order, govern,
and suffer itself. In the number of several other offices, that the
general and principal chapter of Knowing how to live comprehends, is this
article of Knowing how to die; and, did not our fears give it weight,
one of the lightest too.
To judge of them by utility and by the naked truth, the lessons of
simplicity are not much inferior to those which learning teaches us: nay,
quite the contrary. Men differ in sentiment and force; we must lead them
to their own good according to their capacities and by various ways:
“Quo me comque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes.”
[“Wherever the season takes me,(where the tempest drives me)
there I am carried as a guest.”--Horace, Ep., i. i, 15.]
I never saw any peasant among my neighbours cogitate with what
countenance and assurance he should pass over his last hour; nature
teaches him not to think of death till he is dying; and then he does it
with a better grace than Aristotle, upon whom death presses with a double
weight, both of itself and from so long a premeditation; and, therefore,
it was the opinion of Caesar, that the least premeditated death was the
easiest and the most happy:
“Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet, quam necesse est.”
[“He grieves more than is necessary, who grieves before it is
necessary.”--Seneca, Ep., 98.]
The sharpness of this imagination springs from our curiosity: ‘tis thus
we ever impede ourselves, desiring to anticipate and regulate natural
prescripts. It is only for the doctors to dine worse for it, when in the
best health, and to frown at the image of death; the common sort stand in
need of no remedy or consolation, but just in the shock, and when the
blow comes; and consider on’t no more than just what they endure. Is it
not then, as we say, that the stolidity and want of apprehension in the
vulgar give them that patience m present evils, and that profound
carelessness of future sinister accidents? That their souls, in being
more gross and dull, are less penetrable and not so easily moved? If it
be so, let us henceforth, in God’s name, teach nothing but ignorance;
‘tis the utmost fruit the sciences promise us, to which this stolidity so
gently leads its disciples.
We have no want of good masters, interpreters of natural simplicity.
Socrates shall be one; for, as I remember, he speaks something to this
purpose to the judges who sat upon his life and death.
[That which follows is taken from the Apology of Socrates in Plato,
chap. 17, &c.]
“I am afraid, my masters, that if I entreat you not to put me to death, I
shall confirm the charge of my accusers, which is, that I pretend to be
wiser than others, as having some more secret knowledge of things that
are above and below us. I have neither frequented nor known death, nor
have ever seen any person that has tried its qualities, from whom to
inform myself. Such as fear it, presuppose they know it; as for my part,
I neither know what it is, nor what they do in the other world. Death
is, peradventure, an indifferent thing; peradventure, a thing to be
desired. ‘Tis nevertheless to be believed, if it be a transmigration
from one place to another, that it is a bettering of one’s condition to
go and live with so many great persons deceased, and to be exempt from
having any more to do with unjust and corrupt judges; if it be an
annihilation of our being, ‘tis yet a bettering of one’s condition to
enter into a long and peaceable night; we find nothing more sweet in life
than quiet repose and a profound sleep without dreams. The things that
I know to be evil, as to injure one’s neighbour and to disobey one’s
superior, whether it be God or man, I carefully avoid; such as I do not
know whether they be good or evil, I cannot fear them. If I am to die
and leave you alive, the gods alone only know whether it will go better
with you or with me. Wherefore, as to what concerns me, you may do as
you shall think fit. But according to my method of advising just and
profitable things, I say that you will do your consciences more right to
set me at liberty, unless you see further into my cause than I do; and,
judging according to my past actions, both public and private, according
to my intentions, and according to the profit that so many of our
citizens, both young and old, daily extract from my conversation, and the
fruit that you all reap from me, you cannot more duly acquit yourselves
towards my merit than in ordering that, my poverty considered, I should
be maintained at the Prytanaeum, at the public expense, a thing that I
have often known you, with less reason, grant to others. Do not impute
it to obstinacy or disdain that I do not, according to the custom,
supplicate and go about to move you to commiseration. I have both
friends and kindred, not being, as Homer says, begotten of wood or of
stone, no more than others, who might well present themselves before you
with tears and mourning, and I have three desolate children with whom to
move you to compassion; but I should do a shame to our city at the age I
am, and in the reputation of wisdom which is now charged against me, to
appear in such an abject form. What would men say of the other
Athenians? I have always admonished those who have frequented my
lectures, not to redeem their lives by an unbecoming action; and in the
wars of my country, at Amphipolis, Potidea, Delia, and other expeditions
where I have been, I have effectually manifested how far I was from
securing my safety by my shame. I should, moreover, compromise your
duty, and should invite you to unbecoming things; for ‘tis not for my
prayers to persuade you, but for the pure and solid reasons of justice.
You have sworn to the gods to keep yourselves upright; and it would seem
as if I suspected you, or would recriminate upon you that I do not
believe that you are so; and I should testify against myself, not to
believe them as I ought, mistrusting their conduct, and not purely
committing my affair into their hands. I wholly rely upon them; and hold
myself assured they will do in this what shall be most fit both for you
and for me: good men, whether living or dead, have no reason to fear the
gods.”
Is not this an innocent child’s pleading of an unimaginable loftiness,
true, frank, and just, unexampled?--and in what a necessity employed!
Truly, he had very good reason to prefer it before that which the great
orator Lysias had penned for him: admirably couched, indeed, in the
judiciary style, but unworthy of so noble a criminal. Had a suppliant
voice been heard out of the mouth of Socrates, that lofty virtue had
struck sail in the height of its glory; and ought his rich and powerful
nature to have committed her defence to art, and, in her highest proof,
have renounced truth and simplicity, the ornaments of his speaking, to
adorn and deck herself with the embellishments of figures and the
flourishes of a premeditated speech? He did very wisely, and like
himself, not to corrupt the tenor of an incorrupt life, and so sacred an
image of the human form, to spin out his decrepitude another year, and to
betray the immortal memory of that glorious end. He owed his life not to
himself, but to the example of the world; had it not been a public
damage, that he should have concluded it after a lazy and obscure manner?
Assuredly, that careless and indifferent consideration of his death
deserved that posterity should consider it so much the more, as indeed
they did; and there is nothing so just in justice than that which fortune
ordained for his recommendation; for the Athenians abominated all those
who had been causers of his death to such a degree, that they avoided
them as excommunicated persons, and looked upon everything as polluted
that had been touched by them; no one would wash with them in the public
baths, none would salute or own acquaintance with them: so that, at last,
unable longer to support this public hatred, they hanged themselves.
If any one shall think that, amongst so many other examples that I had to
choose out of in the sayings of Socrates for my present purpose, I have
made an ill choice of this, and shall judge this discourse of his
elevated above common conceptions, I must tell them that I have properly
selected it; for I am of another opinion, and hold it to be a discourse,
in rank and simplicity, much below and behind common conceptions. He
represents, in an inartificial boldness and infantine security, the pure
and first impression and ignorance of nature; for it is to be believed
that we have naturally a fear of pain, but not of death, by reason of
itself; ‘tis a part of our being, and no less essential than living.
To what end should nature have begotten in us a hatred to it and a horror
of it, considering that it is of so great utility to her in maintaining
the succession and vicissitude of her works? and that in this universal
republic, it conduces more to birth and augmentation than to loss or
ruin?
“Sic rerum summa novatur.”
“Mille animas una necata dedit.”
“The failing of one life is the passage to a thousand other lives.”
Nature has imprinted in beasts the care of themselves and of their
conservation; they proceed so far as hitting or hurting to be timorous of
being worse, of themselves, of our haltering and beating them, accidents
subject to their sense and experience; but that we should kill them, they
cannot fear, nor have they the faculty to imagine and conclude such a
thing as death; it is said, indeed, that we see them not only cheerfully
undergo it, horses for the most part neighing and swans singing when they
die, but, moreover, seek it at need, of which elephants have given many
examples.
Besides, the method of arguing, of which Socrates here makes use, is it
not equally admirable both in simplicity and vehemence? Truly it is much
more easy to speak like Aristotle and to live like Caesar than to speak
and live as Socrates did; there lies the extreme degree of perfection and
difficulty; art cannot reach it. Now, our faculties are not so trained
up; we do not try, we do not know them; we invest ourselves with those of
others, and let our own lie idle; as some one may say of me, that I have
here only made a nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of
my own but the thread to tie them.
Certainly I have so far yielded to public opinion, that those borrowed
ornaments accompany me; but I do not mean that they shall cover me and
hide me; that is quite contrary to my design, who desire to make a show
of nothing but what is my own, and what is my own by nature; and had I
taken my own advice, I had at all hazards spoken purely alone, I more and
more load myself every day,
[In fact, the first edition of the Essays (Bordeaux, 1580) has very
few quotations. These became more numerous in the edition of 1588;
but the multitude of classical texts which at times encumber
Montaigne’s text, only dates from the posthumous edition of 1595, he
had made these collections in the four last years of his life, as an
amusement of his “idleness.”--Le Clerc. They grow, however, more
sparing in the Third Book.]
beyond my purpose and first method, upon the account of idleness and the
humour of the age. If it misbecome me, as I believe it does, ‘tis no
matter; it may be of use to some others. Such there are who quote Plato
and Homer, who never saw either of them; and I also have taken things out
of places far enough distant from their source. Without pains and
without learning, having a thousand volumes about me in the place where I
write, I can presently borrow, if I please, from a dozen such
scrap-gatherers, people about whom I do not much trouble myself, wherewith
to trick up this treatise of Physiognomy; there needs no more but a
preliminary epistle of a German to stuff me with quotations. And so it
is we go in quest of a tickling story to cheat the foolish world. These
lumber pies of commonplaces, wherewith so many furnish their studies, are
of little use but to common subjects, and serve but to show us, and not
to direct us: a ridiculous fruit of learning, that Socrates so pleasantly
discusses against Euthydemus. I have seen books made of things that were
never either studied or understood; the author committing to several of
his learned friends the examination of this and t’other matter to compile
it, contenting himself, for his share, with having projected the design,
and by his industry to have tied together this faggot of unknown
provisions; the ink and paper, at least, are his. This is to buy or
borrow a book, and not to make one; ‘tis to show men not that he can make
a book, but that, whereof they may be in doubt, he cannot make one.
A president, where I was, boasted that he had amassed together two
hundred and odd commonplaces in one of his judgments; in telling which,
he deprived himself of the glory he had got by it: in my opinion, a
pusillanimous and absurd vanity for such a subject and such a person.
I do the contrary; and amongst so many borrowed things, am glad if I can
steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service; at the hazard
of having it said that ‘tis for want of understanding its natural use;
I give it some particular touch of my own hand, to the end it may not be
so absolutely foreign. These set their thefts in show and value
themselves upon them, and so have more credit with the laws than I have:
we naturalists I think that there is a great and incomparable preference
in the honour of invention over that of allegation.
If I would have spoken by learning, I had spoken sooner; I had written of
the time nearer to my studies, when I had more wit and better memory, and
should sooner have trusted to the vigour of that age than of this, would
I have made a business of writing. And what if this gracious favour
--[His acquaintance with Mademoiselle de Gournay.]--which Fortune has
lately offered me upon the account of this work, had befallen me in that
time of my life, instead of this, wherein ‘tis equally desirable to
possess, soon to be lost! Two of my acquaintance, great men in this
faculty, have, in my opinion, lost half, in refusing to publish at forty
years old, that they might stay till threescore. Maturity has its
defects as well as green years, and worse; and old age is as unfit for
this kind of business as any other. He who commits his decrepitude to
the press plays the fool if he think to squeeze anything out thence that
does not relish of dreaming, dotage, and drivelling; the mind grows
costive and thick in growing old. I deliver my ignorance in pomp and
state, and my learning meagrely and poorly; this accidentally and
accessorily, that principally and expressly; and write specifically of
nothing but nothing, nor of any science but of that inscience. I have
chosen a time when my life, which I am to give an account of, lies wholly
before me; what remains has more to do with death; and of my death
itself, should I find it a prating death, as others do, I would willingly
give an account at my departure.
Socrates was a perfect exemplar in all great qualities, and I am vexed
that he had so deformed a face and body as is said, and so unsuitable to
the beauty of his soul, himself being so amorous and such an admirer of
beauty: Nature did him wrong. There is nothing more probable than the
conformity and relation of the body to the soul:
“Ipsi animi magni refert, quali in corpore locati sint: multo enim a
corpore existunt, qux acuant mentem: multa qua obtundant;”
[“It is of great consequence in what bodies minds are placed, for
many things spring from the body that may sharpen the mind, and many
that may blunt it.”--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 33.]
this refers to an unnatural ugliness and deformity of limbs; but we call
ugliness also an unseemliness at first sight, which is principally lodged
in the face, and disgusts us on very slight grounds: by the complexion, a
spot, a rugged countenance, for some reasons often wholly inexplicable,
in members nevertheless of good symmetry and perfect. The deformity,
that clothed a very beautiful soul in La Boetie, was of this predicament:
that superficial ugliness, which nevertheless is always the most
imperious, is of least prejudice to the state of the mind, and of little
certainty in the opinion of men. The other, which is never properly
called deformity, being more substantial, strikes deeper in. Not every
shoe of smooth shining leather, but every shoe well-made, shews the shape
of the foot within. As Socrates said of his, it betrayed equal ugliness
in his soul, had he not corrected it by education; but in saying so, I
hold he was in jest, as his custom was; never so excellent a soul formed
itself.
I cannot often enough repeat how great an esteem I have for beauty, that
potent and advantageous quality; he (La Boetie) called it “a short
tyranny,” and Plato, “the privilege of nature.” We have nothing that
excels it in reputation; it has the first place in the commerce of men;
it presents itself in the front; seduces and prepossesses our judgments
with great authority and wonderful impression. Phryne had lost her cause
in the hands of an excellent advocate, if, opening her robe, she had not
corrupted her judges by the lustre of her beauty. And I find that Cyrus,
Alexander, and Caesar, the three masters of the world, never neglected
beauty in their greatest affairs; no more did the first Scipio. The same
word in Greek signifies both fair and good; and the Holy Word often says
good when it means fair: I should willingly maintain the priority in good
things, according to the song that Plato calls an idle thing, taken out
of some ancient poet: “health, beauty, riches.” Aristotle says that the
right of command appertains to the beautiful; and that, when there is a
person whose beauty comes near the images of the gods, veneration is
equally due to him. To him who asked why people oftener and longer
frequent the company of handsome persons: “That question,” said he, “is
only to be asked by the blind.” Most of the philosophers, and the
greatest, paid for their schooling, and acquired wisdom by the favour and
mediation of their beauty. Not only in the men that serve me, but also
in the beasts, I consider it within two fingers’ breadth of goodness.
And yet I fancy that those features and moulds of face, and those
lineaments, by which men guess at our internal complexions and our
fortunes to come, is a thing that does not very directly and simply lie
under the chapter of beauty and deformity, no more than every good odour
and serenity of air promises health, nor all fog and stink infection in a
time of pestilence. Such as accuse ladies of contradicting their beauty
by their manners, do not always hit right; for, in a face which is none
of the best, there may dwell some air of probity and trust; as, on the
contrary, I have read, betwixt two beautiful eyes, menaces of a dangerous
and malignant nature. There are favourable physiognomies, so that in a
crowd of victorious enemies, you shall presently choose, amongst men you
never saw before, one rather than another to whom to surrender, and with
whom to intrust your life; and yet not properly upon the consideration of
beauty.
A person’s look is but a feeble warranty; and yet it is something
considerable too; and if I had to lash them, I would most severely
scourge the wicked ones who belie and betray the promises that nature has
planted in their foreheads; I should with greater severity punish malice
under a mild and gentle aspect. It seems as if there were some lucky and
some unlucky faces; and I believe there is some art in distinguishing
affable from merely simple faces, severe from rugged, malicious from
pensive, scornful from melancholic, and such other bordering qualities.
There are beauties which are not only haughty, but sour, and others that
are not only gentle, but more than that, insipid; to prognosticate from
them future events is a matter that I shall leave undecided.
I have, as I have said elsewhere as to my own concern, simply and
implicitly embraced this ancient rule, “That we cannot fail in following
Nature,” and that the sovereign precept is to conform ourselves to her.
I have not, as Socrates did, corrected my natural composition by the
force of reason, and have not in the least disturbed my inclination by
art; I have let myself go as I came: I contend not; my two principal
parts live, of their own accord, in peace and good intelligence, but my
nurse’s milk, thank God, was tolerably wholesome and good. Shall I say
this by the way, that I see in greater esteem than ‘tis worth, and in use
solely among ourselves, a certain image of scholastic probity, a slave to
precepts, and fettered with hope and fear? I would have it such as that
laws and religions should not make, but perfect and authorise it; that
finds it has wherewithal to support itself without help, born and rooted
in us from the seed of universal reason, imprinted in every man by
nature. That reason which strengthens Socrates from his vicious bend
renders him obedient to the gods and men of authority in his city:
courageous in death, not because his soul is immortal, but because he is
mortal. ‘Tis a doctrine ruinous to all government, and much more hurtful
than ingenious and subtle, which persuades the people that a religious
belief is alone sufficient, and without conduct, to satisfy the divine
justice. Use demonstrates to us a vast distinction betwixt devotion and
conscience.
I have a favourable aspect, both in form and in interpretation:
“Quid dixi, habere me? imo habui, Chreme.”
[“What did I say? that I have? no, Chremes, I had.”
--Terence, Heaut., act i., sec. 2, v. 42.]
“Heu! tantum attriti corporis ossa vides;”
[“Alas! of a worn body thou seest only the bones”]
and that makes a quite contrary show to that of Socrates. It has often
befallen me, that upon the mere credit of my presence and air, persons
who had no manner of knowledge of me have put a very great confidence in
me, whether in their own affairs or mine; and I have in foreign parts
thence obtained singular and rare favours. But the two following
examples are, peradventure, worth particular relation. A certain person
planned to surprise my house and me in it; his scheme was to come to my
gates alone, and to be importunate to be let in. I knew him by name,
and had fair reason to repose confidence in him, as being my neighbour
and something related to me. I caused the gates to be opened to him,
as I do to every one. There I found him, with every appearance of alarm,
his horse panting and very tired. He entertained me with this story:
“That, about half a league off, he had met with a certain enemy of his,
whom I also knew, and had heard of their quarrel; that his enemy had
given him a very brisk chase, and that having been surprised in disorder,
and his party being too weak, he had fled to my gates for refuge;
and that he was in great trouble for his followers, whom (he said) he
concluded to be all either dead or taken.” I innocently did my best to
comfort, assure, and refresh him. Shortly after came four or five of his
soldiers, who presented themselves in the same countenance and affright,
to get in too; and after them more, and still more, very well mounted and
armed, to the number of five-and-twenty or thirty, pretending that they
had the enemy at their heels. This mystery began a little to awaken my
suspicion; I was not ignorant what an age I lived in, how much my house
might be envied, and I had several examples of others of my acquaintance
to whom a mishap of this sort had happened. But thinking there was
nothing to be got by having begun to do a courtesy, unless I went through
with it, and that I could not disengage myself from them without spoiling
all, I let myself go the most natural and simple way, as I always do, and
invited them all to come in. And in truth I am naturally very little
inclined to suspicion and distrust; I willingly incline towards excuse
and the gentlest interpretation; I take men according to the common
order, and do not more believe in those perverse and unnatural
inclinations, unless convinced by manifest evidence, than I do in
monsters and miracles; and I am, moreover, a man who willingly commit
myself to Fortune, and throw myself headlong into her arms; and I have
hitherto found more reason to applaud than to blame myself for so doing,
having ever found her more discreet about, and a greater friend to, my
affairs than I am myself. There are some actions in my life whereof the
conduct may justly be called difficult, or, if you please, prudent; of
these, supposing the third part to have been my own, doubtless the other
two-thirds were absolutely hers. We make, methinks, a mistake in that we
do not enough trust Heaven with our affairs, and pretend to more from our
own conduct than appertains to us; and therefore it is that our designs
so often miscarry. Heaven is jealous of the extent that we attribute to
the right of human prudence above its own, and cuts it all the shorter by
how much the more we amplify it. The last comers remained on horseback
in my courtyard, whilst their leader, who was with me in the parlour,
would not have his horse put up in the stable, saying he should
immediately retire, so soon as he had news of his men. He saw himself
master of his enterprise, and nothing now remained but its execution.
He has since several times said (for he was not ashamed to tell the story
himself) that my countenance and frankness had snatched the treachery out
of his hands. He again mounted his horse; his followers, who had their
eyes intent upon him, to see when he would give the signal, being very
much astonished to find him come away and leave his prey behind him.
Another time, relying upon some truce just published in the army, I took
a journey through a very ticklish country. I had not ridden far, but I
was discovered, and two or three parties of horse, from various places,
were sent out to seize me; one of them overtook me on the third day, and
I was attacked by fifteen or twenty gentlemen in vizors, followed at a
distance by a band of foot-soldiers. I was taken, withdrawn into the
thick of a neighbouring forest, dismounted, robbed, my trunks rifled, my
money-box taken, and my horses and equipage divided amongst new masters.
We had, in this copse, a very long contest about my ransom, which they
set so high, that it was manifest that I was not known to them. They
were, moreover, in a very great debate about my life; and, in truth,
there were various circumstances that clearly showed the danger I was in:
“Tunc animis opus, AEnea, tunc pectore firmo.”
[“Then, AEneas, there is need of courage, of a firm heart.”
--AEneid, vi. 261.]
I still insisted upon the truce, too willing they should have the gain of
what they had already taken from me, which was not to be despised,
without promise of any other ransom. After two or three hours that we
had been in this place, and that they had mounted me upon a horse that
was not likely to run from them, and committed me to the guard of fifteen
or twenty harquebusiers, and dispersed my servants to others, having
given order that they should carry us away prisoners several ways, and I
being already got some two or three musket-shots from the place,
“Jam prece Pollucis, jam Castoris, implorata,”
[“By a prayer addressed now to Pollux, now to Castor.”
--Catullus, lxvi. 65.]
behold a sudden and unexpected alteration; I saw the chief return to me
with gentler language, making search amongst the troopers for my
scattered property, and causing as much as could be recovered to be
restored to me, even to my money-box; but the best present they made was
my liberty, for the rest did not much concern me at that time. The true
cause of so sudden a change, and of this reconsideration, without any
apparent impulse, and of so miraculous a repentance, in such a time, in a
planned and deliberate enterprise, and become just by usage (for, at the
first dash, I plainly confessed to them of what party I was, and whither
I was going), truly, I do not yet rightly understand. The most prominent
amongst them, who pulled off his vizor and told me his name, repeatedly
told me at the time, over and over again, that I owed my deliverance to
my countenance, and the liberty and boldness of my speech, that rendered
me unworthy of such a misadventure, and should secure me from its
repetition. ‘Tis possible that the Divine goodness willed to make use of
this vain instrument for my preservation; and it, moreover, defended me
the next day from other and worse ambushes, of which these my assailants
had given me warning. The last of these two gentlemen is yet living
himself to tell the story; the first was killed not long ago.
If my face did not answer for me, if men did not read in my eyes and in
my voice the innocence of intention, I had not lived so long without
quarrels and without giving offence, seeing the indiscreet whatever comes
into my head, and to judge so rashly of things. This way may, with
reason, appear uncivil, and ill adapted to our way of conversation; but
I have never met with any who judged it outrageous or malicious, or that
took offence at my liberty, if he had it from my own mouth; words
repeated have another kind of sound and sense. Nor do I hate any person;
and I am so slow to offend, that I cannot do it, even upon the account of
reason itself; and when occasion has required me to sentence criminals,
I have rather chosen to fail in point of justice than to do it:
“Ut magis peccari nolim, quam satis animi
ad vindicanda peccata habeam.”
[“So that I had rather men should not commit faults than that I
should have sufficient courage to condemn them.”---Livy, xxxix. 21.]
Aristotle, ‘tis said, was reproached for having been too merciful to a
wicked man: “I was indeed,” said he, “merciful to the man, but not to his
wickedness.” Ordinary judgments exasperate themselves to punishment by
the horror of the fact: but it cools mine; the horror of the first murder
makes me fear a second; and the deformity of the first cruelty makes me
abhor all imitation of it.’ That may be applied to me, who am but a
Squire of Clubs, which was said of Charillus, king of Sparta: “He cannot
be good, seeing he is not evil even to the wicked.” Or thus--for
Plutarch delivers it both these ways, as he does a thousand other things,
variously and contradictorily--“He must needs be good, because he is so
even to the wicked.” Even as in lawful actions I dislike to employ
myself when for such as are displeased at it; so, to say the truth, in
unlawful things I do not make conscience enough of employing myself when
it is for such as are willing.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A man should abhor lawsuits as much as he may
A person’s look is but a feeble warranty
Accept all things we are not able to refute
Admiration is the foundation of all philosophy
Advantageous, too, a little to recede from one’s right
All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice
Apt to promise something less than what I am able to do
As if anything were so common as ignorance
Authority of the number and antiquity of the witnesses
Best test of truth is the multitude of believers in a crowd
Books have not so much served me for instruction as exercise
Books of things that were never either studied or understood
Condemn the opposite affirmation equally
Courageous in death, not because his soul is immortal--Socrates
Death conduces more to birth and augmentation than to loss
Decree that says, “The court understands nothing of the matter”
Deformity of the first cruelty makes me abhor all imitation
Enters lightly into a quarrel is apt to go as lightly out of it
Establish this proposition by authority and huffing
Extend their anger and hatred beyond the dispute in question
Fabric goes forming and piling itself up from hand to hand
Fortune heaped up five or six such-like incidents
Hard to resolve a man’s judgment against the common opinions
Haste trips up its own heels, fetters, and stops itself
He cannot be good, seeing he is not evil even to the wicked
He who stops not the start will never be able to stop the course
“How many things,” said he, “I do not desire!”
How much easier is it not to enter in than it is to get out
I am a little tenderly distrustful of things that I wish
I am no longer in condition for any great change
I am not to be cuffed into belief
I am plain and heavy, and stick to the solid and the probable
I do not judge opinions by years
I ever justly feared to raise my head too high
I would as willingly be lucky as wise
If I stand in need of anger and inflammation, I borrow it
If they hear no noise, they think men sleep
Impose them upon me as infallible
Inconveniences that moderation brings (in civil war)
Lend himself to others, and only give himself to himself
Let not us seek illusions from without and unknown
“Little learning is needed to form a sound mind.”--Seneca
Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation
Men are not always to rely upon the personal confessions
Merciful to the man, but not to his wickedness--Aristotle
Miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me
My humour is no friend to tumult
Nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of my own
Not believe from one, I should not believe from a hundred
Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding
Number of fools so much exceeds the wise
Opinions we have are taken on authority and trust
Others adore all of their own side
Pitiful ways and expedients to the jugglers of the law
Prepare ourselves against the preparations of death
Profession of knowledge and their immeasurable self-conceit
Quiet repose and a profound sleep without dreams
Reasons often anticipate the effect
Refusin to justify, excuse, or explain myself
Remotest witness knows more about it than those who were nearest
Restoring what has been lent us, wit usury and accession
Richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow
Right of command appertains to the beautiful-Aristotle
Rude and quarrelsome flatly to deny a stated fact
Suffer my judgment to be made captive by prepossession
Swell and puff up their souls, and their natural way of speaking
Taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance
The last informed is better persuaded than the first
The mind grows costive and thick in growing old
The particular error first makes the public error
Their souls seek repose in agitation
They gently name them, so they patiently endure them (diseases)
Those oppressed with sorrow sometimes surprised by a smile
Threats of the day of judgment
Tis better to lean towards doubt than assurance--Augustine
Tis no matter; it may be of use to some others
To forbear doing is often as generous as to do
To kill men, a clear and strong light is required
Too contemptible to be punished
True liberty is to be able to do what a man will with himself
Vast distinction betwixt devotion and conscience
We have naturally a fear of pain, but not of death
What did I say? that I have? no, Chremes, I had
Who discern no riches but in pomp and show
Whoever will be cured of ignorance must confess it
Would have every one in his party blind or a blockhead
Wrong the just side when they go about to assist it with fraud
Yet at least for ambition’s sake, let us reject ambition
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877
CONTENTS OF VOLUME 19.
XIII. Of Experience.
CHAPTER XIII
OF EXPERIENCE
There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge. We try all ways
that can lead us to it; where reason is wanting, we therein employ
experience,
“Per varios usus artem experientia fecit,
Exemplo monstrante viam,”
[“By various trials experience created art, example shewing the
way.”--Manilius, i. 59.]
which is a means much more weak and cheap; but truth is so great a thing
that we ought not to disdain any mediation that will guide us to it.
Reason has so many forms that we know not to which to take; experience
has no fewer; the consequence we would draw from the comparison of events
is unsure, by reason they are always unlike. There is no quality so
universal in this image of things as diversity and variety. Both the
Greeks and the Latins and we, for the most express example of similitude,
employ that of eggs; and yet there have been men, particularly one at
Delphos, who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so well
that he never mistook one for another, and having many hens, could tell
which had laid it.
Dissimilitude intrudes itself of itself in our works; no art can arrive
at perfect similitude: neither Perrozet nor any other can so carefully
polish and blanch the backs of his cards that some gamesters will not
distinguish them by seeing them only shuffled by another. Resemblance
does not so much make one as difference makes another. Nature has
obliged herself to make nothing other that was not unlike.
And yet I am not much pleased with his opinion, who thought by the
multitude of laws to curb the authority of judges in cutting out for them
their several parcels; he was not aware that there is as much liberty and
latitude in the interpretation of laws as in their form; and they but
fool themselves, who think to lessen and stop our disputes by recalling
us to the express words of the Bible: forasmuch as our mind does not find
the field less spacious wherein to controvert the sense of another than
to deliver his own; and as if there were less animosity and tartness in
commentary than in invention. We see how much he was mistaken, for we
have more laws in France than all the rest of the world put together, and
more than would be necessary for the government of all the worlds of
Epicurus:
“Ut olim flagitiis, sic nunc legibus, laboramus.”
[“As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by
laws.”--Tacitus, Annal., iii. 25.]
and yet we have left so much to the opinions and decisions of our judges
that there never was so full a liberty or so full a license. What have
our legislators gained by culling out a hundred thousand particular
cases, and by applying to these a hundred thousand laws? This number
holds no manner of proportion with the infinite diversity of human
actions; the multiplication of our inventions will never arrive at the
variety of examples; add to these a hundred times as many more, it will
still not happen that, of events to come, there shall one be found that,
in this vast number of millions of events so chosen and recorded, shall
so tally with any other one, and be so exactly coupled and matched with
it that there will not remain some circumstance and diversity which will
require a diverse judgment. There is little relation betwixt our
actions, which are in perpetual mutation, and fixed and immutable laws;
the most to be desired are those that are the most rare, the most simple
and general; and I am even of opinion that we had better have none at all
than to have them in so prodigious a number as we have.
Nature always gives them better and happier than those we make ourselves;
witness the picture of the Golden Age of the Poets and the state wherein
we see nations live who have no other. Some there are, who for their
only judge take the first passer-by that travels along their mountains,
to determine their cause; and others who, on their market day, choose out
some one amongst them upon the spot to decide their controversies. What
danger would there be that the wisest amongst us should so determine
ours, according to occurrences and at sight, without obligation of
example and consequence? For every foot its own shoe. King Ferdinand,
sending colonies to the Indies, wisely provided that they should not
carry along with them any students of jurisprudence, for fear lest suits
should get footing in that new world, as being a science in its own
nature, breeder of altercation and division; judging with Plato, “that
lawyers and physicians are bad institutions of a country.”
Whence does it come to pass that our common language, so easy for all
other uses, becomes obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts?
and that he who so clearly expresses himself in whatever else he speaks
or writes, cannot find in these any way of declaring himself that does
not fall into doubt and contradiction? if it be not that the princes of
that art, applying themselves with a peculiar attention to cull out
portentous words and to contrive artificial sentences, have so weighed
every syllable, and so thoroughly sifted every sort of quirking
connection that they are now confounded and entangled in the infinity of
figures and minute divisions, and can no more fall within any rule or
prescription, nor any certain intelligence:
“Confusum est, quidquid usque in pulverem sectum est.”
[“Whatever is beaten into powder is undistinguishable (confused).”
--Seneca, Ep., 89.]
As you see children trying to bring a mass of quicksilver to a certain
number of parts, the more they press and work it and endeavour to reduce
it to their own will, the more they irritate the liberty of this generous
metal; it evades their endeavour and sprinkles itself into so many
separate bodies as frustrate all reckoning; so is it here, for in
subdividing these subtilties we teach men to increase their doubts; they
put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties, and
lengthen and disperse them. In sowing and retailing questions they make
the world fructify and increase in uncertainties and disputes, as the
earth is made fertile by being crumbled and dug deep.
“Difficultatem facit doctrina.”
[“Learning (Doctrine) begets difficulty.”
--Quintilian, Insat. Orat., x. 3.]
We doubted of Ulpian, and are still now more perplexed with Bartolus and
Baldus. We should efface the trace of this innumerable diversity of
opinions; not adorn ourselves with it, and fill posterity with crotchets.
I know not what to say to it; but experience makes it manifest, that so
many interpretations dissipate truth and break it. Aristotle wrote to be
understood; if he could not do this, much less will another that is not
so good at it; and a third than he, who expressed his own thoughts. We
open the matter, and spill it in pouring out: of one subject we make a
thousand, and in multiplying and subdividing them, fall again into the
infinity of atoms of Epicurus. Never did two men make the same judgment
of the same thing; and ‘tis impossible to find two opinions exactly
alike, not only in several men, but in the same man, at diverse hours.
I often find matter of doubt in things of which the commentary has
disdained to take notice; I am most apt to stumble in an even country,
like some horses that I have known, that make most trips in the smoothest
way.
Who will not say that glosses augment doubts and ignorance, since there’s
no book to be found, either human or divine, which the world busies
itself about, whereof the difficulties are cleared by interpretation.
The hundredth commentator passes it on to the next, still more knotty and
perplexed than he found it. When were we ever agreed amongst ourselves:
“This book has enough; there is now no more to be said about it”? This
is most apparent in the law; we give the authority of law to infinite
doctors, infinite decrees, and as many interpretations; yet do we find
any end of the need of interpretating? is there, for all that, any
progress or advancement towards peace, or do we stand in need of any
fewer advocates and judges than when this great mass of law was yet in
its first infancy? On the contrary, we darken and bury intelligence; we
can no longer discover it, but at the mercy of so many fences and
barriers. Men do not know the natural disease of the mind; it does
nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and
perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work;
“Mus in pice.”--[“A mouse in a pitch barrel.”]--It thinks it discovers
at a great distance, I know not what glimpses of light and imaginary
truth: but whilst running to it, so many difficulties, hindrances, and
new inquisitions cross it, that it loses its way, and is made drunk with
the motion: not much unlike AEsop’s dogs, that seeing something like a
dead body floating in the sea, and not being able to approach it, set to
work to drink the water and lay the passage dry, and so choked
themselves. To which what one Crates’ said of the writings of Heraclitus
falls pat enough, “that they required a reader who could swim well,” so
that the depth and weight of his learning might not overwhelm and stifle
him. ‘Tis nothing but particular weakness that makes us content with
what others or ourselves have found out in this chase after knowledge:
one of better understanding will not rest so content; there is always
room for one to follow, nay, even for ourselves; and another road; there
is no end of our inquisitions; our end is in the other world. ‘Tis a
sign either that the mind has grown shortsighted when it is satisfied, or
that it has got weary. No generous mind can stop in itself; it will
still tend further and beyond its power; it has sallies beyond its
effects; if it do not advance and press forward, and retire, and rush and
wheel about, ‘tis but half alive; its pursuits are without bound or
method; its aliment is admiration, the chase, ambiguity, which Apollo
sufficiently declared in always speaking to us in a double, obscure, and
oblique sense: not feeding, but amusing and puzzling us. ‘Tis an
irregular and perpetual motion, without model and without aim; its
inventions heat, pursue, and interproduce one another:
Estienne de la Boetie; thus translated by Cotton:
“So in a running stream one wave we see
After another roll incessantly,
And as they glide, each does successively
Pursue the other, each the other fly
By this that’s evermore pushed on, and this
By that continually preceded is:
The water still does into water swill,
Still the same brook, but different water still.”
There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things,
and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but
comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of
authors there is great scarcity. Is it not the principal and most
reputed knowledge of our later ages to understand the learned? Is it not
the common and final end of all studies? Our opinions are grafted upon
one another; the first serves as a stock to the second, the second to the
third, and so forth; thus step by step we climb the ladder; whence it
comes to pass that he who is mounted highest has often more honour than
merit, for he is got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but
one.
How often, and, peradventure, how foolishly, have I extended my book to
make it speak of itself; foolishly, if for no other reason but this, that
it should remind me of what I say of others who do the same: that the
frequent amorous glances they cast upon their work witness that their
hearts pant with self-love, and that even the disdainful severity
wherewith they scourge them are but the dandlings and caressings of
maternal love; as Aristotle, whose valuing and undervaluing himself often
spring from the same air of arrogance. My own excuse is, that I ought in
this to have more liberty than others, forasmuch as I write specifically
of myself and of my writings, as I do of my other actions; that my theme
turns upon itself; but I know not whether others will accept this excuse.
I observed in Germany that Luther has left as many divisions and disputes
about the doubt of his opinions, and more, than he himself raised upon
the Holy Scriptures. Our contest is verbal: I ask what nature is, what
pleasure, circle, and substitution are? the question is about words, and
is answered accordingly. A stone is a body; but if a man should further
urge: “And what is a body?”--“Substance”; “And what is substance?” and
so on, he would drive the respondent to the end of his Calepin.
[Calepin (Ambrogio da Calepio), a famous lexicographer of the
fifteenth century. His Polyglot Dictionary became so famous, that
Calepin became a common appellation for a lexicon]
We exchange one word for another, and often for one less understood.
I better know what man is than I know what Animal is, or Mortal, or
Rational. To satisfy one doubt, they give me three; ‘tis the Hydra’s
head. Socrates asked Menon, “What virtue was.” “There is,” says Menon,
“the virtue of a man and of a woman, of a magistrate and of a private
person, of an old man and of a child.” “Very fine,” cried Socrates,
“we were in quest of one virtue, and thou hast brought us a whole
swarm.” We put one question, and they return us a whole hive. As no
event, no face, entirely resembles another, so do they not entirely
differ: an ingenious mixture of nature. If our faces were not alike, we
could not distinguish man from beast; if they were not unlike, we could
not distinguish one man from another; all things hold by some similitude;
every example halts, and the relation which is drawn from experience is
always faulty and imperfect. Comparisons are ever-coupled at one end or
other: so do the laws serve, and are fitted to every one of our affairs,
by some wrested, biassed, and forced interpretation.
Since the ethic laws, that concern the particular duty of every one in
himself, are so hard to be framed, as we see they are, ‘tis no wonder if
those which govern so many particulars are much more so. Do but consider
the form of this justice that governs us; ‘tis a true testimony of human
weakness, so full is it of error and contradiction. What we find to be
favour and severity in justice--and we find so much of them both, that I
know not whether the medium is as often met with are sickly and unjust
members of the very body and essence of justice. Some country people
have just brought me news in great haste, that they presently left in a
forest of mine a man with a hundred wounds upon him, who was yet
breathing, and begged of them water for pity’s sake, and help to carry
him to some place of relief; they tell me they durst not go near him, but
have run away, lest the officers of justice should catch them there; and
as happens to those who are found near a murdered person, they should be
called in question about this accident, to their utter ruin, having
neither money nor friends to defend their innocence. What could I have
said to these people? ‘Tis certain that this office of humanity would
have brought them into trouble.
How many innocent people have we known that have been punished, and this
without the judge’s fault; and how many that have not arrived at our
knowledge? This happened in my time: certain men were condemned to die
for a murder committed; their sentence, if not pronounced, at least
determined and concluded on. The judges, just in the nick, are informed
by the officers of an inferior court hard by, that they have some men in
custody, who have directly confessed the murder, and made an indubitable
discovery of all the particulars of the fact. Yet it was gravely
deliberated whether or not they ought to suspend the execution of the
sentence already passed upon the first accused: they considered the
novelty of the example judicially, and the consequence of reversing
judgments; that the sentence was passed, and the judges deprived of
repentance; and in the result, these poor devils were sacrificed by the
forms of justice. Philip, or some other, provided against a like
inconvenience after this manner. He had condemned a man in a great fine
towards another by an absolute judgment. The truth some time after being
discovered, he found that he had passed an unjust sentence. On one side
was the reason of the cause; on the other side, the reason of the
judicial forms: he in some sort satisfied both, leaving the sentence in
the state it was, and out of his own purse recompensing the condemned
party. But he had to do with a reparable affair; my men were irreparably
hanged. How many condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes
themselves?
All which makes me remember the ancient opinions, “That ‘tis of necessity
a man must do wrong by retail who will do right in gross; and injustice
in little things, who would come to do justice in great: that human
justice is formed after the model of physic, according to which, all that
is useful is also just and honest: and of what is held by the Stoics,
that Nature herself proceeds contrary to justice in most of her works:
and of what is received by the Cyrenaics, that there is nothing just of
itself, but that customs and laws make justice: and what the Theodorians
held that theft, sacrilege, and all sorts of uncleanness, are just in a
sage, if he knows them to be profitable to him.” There is no remedy: I
am in the same case that Alcibiades was, that I will never, if I can help
it, put myself into the hands of a man who may determine as to my head,
where my life and honour shall more depend upon the skill and diligence
of my attorney than on my own innocence. I would venture myself with
such justice as would take notice of my good deeds, as well as my ill;
where I had as much to hope as to fear: indemnity is not sufficient pay
to a man who does better than not to do amiss. Our justice presents to
us but one hand, and that the left hand, too; let him be who he may, he
shall be sure to come off with loss.
In China, of which kingdom the government and arts, without commerce with
or knowledge of ours, surpass our examples in several excellent features,
and of which the history teaches me how much greater and more various the
world is than either the ancients or we have been able to penetrate, the
officers deputed by the prince to visit the state of his provinces, as
they punish those who behave themselves ill in their charge, so do they
liberally reward those who have conducted themselves better than the
common sort, and beyond the necessity of their duty; these there present
themselves, not only to be approved but to get; not simply to be paid,
but to have a present made to them.
No judge, thank God, has ever yet spoken to me in the quality of a judge,
upon any account whatever, whether my own or that of a third party,
whether criminal or civil; nor no prison has ever received me, not even
to walk there. Imagination renders the very outside of a jail
displeasing to me; I am so enamoured of liberty, that should I be
interdicted the access to some corner of the Indies, I should live a
little less at my ease; and whilst I can find earth or air open
elsewhere, I shall never lurk in any place where I must hide myself.
My God! how ill should I endure the condition wherein I see so many
people, nailed to a corner of the kingdom, deprived of the right to enter
the principal cities and courts, and the liberty of the public roads,
for having quarrelled with our laws. If those under which I live should
shake a finger at me by way of menace, I would immediately go seek out
others, let them be where they would. All my little prudence in the
civil wars wherein we are now engaged is employed that they may not
hinder my liberty of going and coming.
Now, the laws keep up their credit, not for being just, but because they
are laws; ‘tis the mystic foundation of their authority; they have no
other, and it well answers their purpose. They are often made by fools,
still oftener by men who, out of hatred to equality, fail in equity, but
always by men, vain and irresolute authors. There is nothing so much,
nor so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws. Whoever obeys
them because they are just, does not justly obey them as he ought. Our
French laws, by their irregularity and deformity, lend, in some sort, a
helping hand to the disorder and corruption that all manifest in their
dispensation and execution: the command is so perplexed and inconstant,
that it in some sort excuses alike disobedience and defect in the
interpretation, the administration and the observation of it. What fruit
then soever we may extract from experience, that will little advantage
our institution, which we draw from foreign examples, if we make so
little profit of that we have of our own, which is more familiar to us,
and, doubtless, sufficient to instruct us in that whereof we have need.
I study myself more than any other subject; ‘tis my metaphysic, my
physic:
“Quis deus hanc mundi temperet arte domum:
Qua venit exoriens, qua deficit: unde coactis
Cornibus in plenum menstrua luna redit
Unde salo superant venti, quid flamine captet
Eurus, et in nubes unde perennis aqua;
Sit ventura dies mundi quae subruat arces....”
[“What god may govern with skill this dwelling of the world? whence
rises the monthly moon, whither wanes she? how is it that her horns
are contracted and reopen? whence do winds prevail on the main?
what does the east wind court with its blasts? and whence are the
clouds perpetually supplied with water? is a day to come which may
undermine the world?”--Propertius, iii. 5, 26.]
“Quaerite, quos agitat mundi labor.”
[“Ask whom the cares of the world trouble”--Lucan, i. 417.]
In this universality, I suffer myself to be ignorantly and negligently
led by the general law of the world: I shall know it well enough when I
feel it; my learning cannot make it alter its course; it will not change
itself for me; ‘tis folly to hope it, and a greater folly to concern
one’s self about it, seeing it is necessarily alike public and common.
The goodness and capacity of the governor ought absolutely to discharge
us of all care of the government: philosophical inquisitions and
contemplations serve for no other use but to increase our curiosity.
The philosophers; with great reason, send us back to the rules of nature;
but they have nothing to do with so sublime a knowledge; they falsify
them, and present us her face painted with too high and too adulterate a
complexion, whence spring so many different pictures of so uniform a
subject. As she has given us feet to walk with, so has she given us
prudence to guide us in life: not so ingenious, robust, and pompous a
prudence as that of their invention; but yet one that is easy, quiet, and
salutary, and that very well performs what the other promises, in him who
has the good luck to know how to employ it sincerely and regularly, that
is to say, according to nature. The most simply to commit one’s self to
nature is to do it most wisely. Oh, what a soft, easy, and wholesome
pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, whereon to repose a well-ordered
head!
I had rather understand myself well in myself, than in Cicero. Of the
experience I have of myself, I find enough to make me wise, if I were but
a good scholar: whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger,
and to what a degree that fever transported him, will see the deformity
of this passion better than in Aristotle, and conceive a more just hatred
against it; whoever will remember the ills he has undergone, those that
have threatened him, and the light occasions that have removed him from
one state to another, will by that prepare himself for future changes,
and the knowledge of his condition. The life of Caesar has no greater
example for us than our own: though popular and of command, ‘tis still a
life subject to all human accidents. Let us but listen to it; we apply
to ourselves all whereof we have principal need; whoever shall call to
memory how many and many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment,
is he not a great fool if he does not ever after suspect it? When I find
myself convinced, by the reason of another, of a false opinion, I do not
so much learn what he has said to me that is new and the particular
ignorance--that would be no great acquisition--as, in general, I learn my
own debility and the treachery of my understanding, whence I extract the
reformation of the whole mass. In all my other errors I do the same, and
find from this rule great utility to life; I regard not the species and
individual as a stone that I have stumbled at; I learn to suspect my
steps throughout, and am careful to place them right. To learn that a
man has said or done a foolish thing is nothing: a man must learn that he
is nothing but a fool, a much more ample, and important instruction. The
false steps that my memory has so often made, even then when it was most
secure and confident of itself, are not idly thrown away; it vainly
swears and assures me I shake my ears; the first opposition that is made
to its testimony puts me into suspense, and I durst not rely upon it in
anything of moment, nor warrant it in another person’s concerns: and were
it not that what I do for want of memory, others do more often for want
of good faith, I should always, in matter of fact, rather choose to take
the truth from another’s mouth than from my own. If every one would pry
into the effects and circumstances of the passions that sway him, as I
have done into those which I am most subject to, he would see them
coming, and would a little break their impetuosity and career; they do
not always seize us on a sudden; there is threatening and degrees
“Fluctus uti primo coepit cum albescere vento,
Paulatim sese tollit mare, et altius undas
Erigit, inde imo consurgit ad aethera fundo.”
[“As with the first wind the sea begins to foam, and swells, thence
higher swells, and higher raises the waves, till the ocean rises
from its depths to the sky.”--AEneid, vii. 528.]
Judgment holds in me a magisterial seat; at least it carefully endeavours
to make it so: it leaves my appetites to take their own course, hatred
and friendship, nay, even that I bear to myself, without change or
corruption; if it cannot reform the other parts according to its own
model, at least it suffers not itself to be corrupted by them, but plays
its game apart.
The advice to every one, “to know themselves,” should be of important
effect, since that god of wisdom and light’ caused it to be written on
the front of his temple,--[At Delphi]--as comprehending all he had to
advise us. Plato says also, that prudence is no other thing than the
execution of this ordinance; and Socrates minutely verifies it in
Xenophon. The difficulties and obscurity are not discerned in any
science but by those who are got into it; for a certain degree of
intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not, and we
must push against a door to know whether it be bolted against us or no:
whence this Platonic subtlety springs, that “neither they who know are to
enquire, forasmuch as they know; nor they who do not know, forasmuch as
to inquire they must know what they inquire of.” So in this, “of knowing
a man’s self,” that every man is seen so resolved and satisfied with
himself, that every man thinks himself sufficiently intelligent,
signifies that every one knows nothing about the matter; as Socrates
gives Euthydemus to understand. I, who profess nothing else, therein
find so infinite a depth and variety, that all the fruit I have reaped
from my learning serves only to make me sensible how much I have to
learn. To my weakness, so often confessed, I owe the propension I have
to modesty, to the obedience of belief prescribed me, to a constant
coldness and moderation of opinions, and a hatred of that troublesome and
wrangling arrogance, wholly believing and trusting in itself, the capital
enemy of discipline and truth. Do but hear them domineer; the first
fopperies they utter, ‘tis in the style wherewith men establish religions
and laws:
“Nihil est turpius, quam cognitioni et perceptions
assertionem approbationemque praecurrere.”
[“Nothing is worse than that assertion and decision should precede
knowledge and perception.”--Cicero, Acad., i. 13.]
Aristarchus said that anciently there were scarce seven sages to be found
in the world, and in his time scarce so many fools: have not we more
reason than he to say so in this age of ours? Affirmation and obstinacy
are express signs of want of wit. This fellow may have knocked his nose
against the ground a hundred times in a day, yet he will be at his Ergo’s
as resolute and sturdy as before. You would say he had had some new soul
and vigour of understanding infused into him since, and that it happened
to him, as to that ancient son of the earth, who took fresh courage and
vigour by his fall;
“Cui cum tetigere parentem,
jam defecta vigent renovata robore membra:”
[“Whose broken limbs, when they touched his mother earth,
immediately new force acquired.”--Lucan, iv. 599.]
does not this incorrigible coxcomb think that he assumes a new
understanding by undertaking a new dispute? ‘Tis by my own experience
that I accuse human ignorance, which is, in my opinion, the surest part
of the world’s school. Such as will not conclude it in themselves, by so
vain an example as mine, or their own, let them believe it from Socrates,
the master of masters; for the philosopher Antisthenes said to his
disciples, “Let us go and hear Socrates; there I will be a pupil with you”;
and, maintaining this doctrine of the Stoic sect, “that virtue was
sufficient to make a life completely happy, having no need of any other
thing whatever”; except of the force of Socrates, added he.
That long attention that I employ in considering myself, also fits rile
to judge tolerably enough of others; and there are few things whereof I
speak better and with better excuse. I happen very often more exactly to
see and distinguish the qualities of my friends than they do themselves:
I have astonished some with the pertinence of my description, and have
given them warning of themselves. By having from my infancy been
accustomed to contemplate my own life in those of others, I have acquired
a complexion studious in that particular; and when I am once interit upon
it, I let few things about me, whether countenances, humours,
or discourses, that serve to that purpose, escape me. I study all,
both what I am to avoid and what I am to follow. Also in my friends,
I discover by their productions their inward inclinations; not by
arranging this infinite variety of so diverse and unconnected actions
into certain species and chapters, and distinctly distributing my parcels
and divisions under known heads and classes;
“Sed neque quam multae species, nec nomina quae sint,
Est numerus.”
[“But neither can we enumerate how many kinds there what are their
names.”--Virgil, Georg., ii. 103.]
The wise speak and deliver their fancies more specifically, and piece by
piece; I, who see no further into things than as use informs me, present
mine generally without rule and experimentally: I pronounce my opinion by
disjointed articles, as a thing that cannot be spoken at once and in
gross; relation and conformity are not to be found in such low and common
souls as ours. Wisdom is a solid and entire building, of which every
piece keeps its place and bears its mark:
“Sola sapientia in se tota conversa est.”
[“Wisdom only is wholly within itself”--Cicero, De Fin., iii. 7.]
I leave it to artists, and I know not whether or no they will be able to
bring it about, in so perplexed, minute, and fortuitous a thing, to
marshal into distinct bodies this infinite diversity of faces, to settle
our inconstancy, and set it in order. I do not only find it hard to
piece our actions to one another, but I moreover find it hard properly to
design each by itself by any principal quality, so ambiguous and variform
they are with diverse lights. That which is remarked for rare in
Perseus, king of Macedon, “that his mind, fixing itself to no one
condition, wandered in all sorts of living, and represented manners so
wild and erratic that it was neither known to himself or any other what
kind of man he was,” seems almost to fit all the world; and, especially,
I have seen another of his make, to whom I think this conclusion might
more properly be applied; no moderate settledness, still running headlong
from one extreme to another, upon occasions not to be guessed at; no line
of path without traverse and wonderful contrariety: no one quality simple
and unmixed; so that the best guess men can one day make will be, that he
affected and studied to make himself known by being not to be known. A
man had need have sound ears to hear himself frankly criticised; and as
there are few who can endure to hear it without being nettled, those who
hazard the undertaking it to us manifest a singular effect of friendship;
for ‘tis to love sincerely indeed, to venture to wound and offend us, for
our own good. I think it harsh to judge a man whose ill qualities are
more than his good ones: Plato requires three things in him who will
examine the soul of another: knowledge, benevolence, boldness.
I was sometimes asked, what I should have thought myself fit for, had any
one designed to make use of me, while I was of suitable years:
“Dum melior vires sanguis dabat, aemula necdum
Temporibus geminis canebat sparsa senectus:”
[“Whilst better blood gave me vigour, and before envious old age
whitened and thinned my temples.”--AEneid, V. 415.]
“for nothing,” said I; and I willingly excuse myself from knowing
anything which enslaves me to others. But I had told the truth to my
master,--[Was this Henri VI.? D.W.]--and had regulated his manners, if
he had so pleased, not in gross, by scholastic lessons, which I
understand not, and from which I see no true reformation spring in those
that do; but by observing them by leisure, at all opportunities, and
simply and naturally judging them as an eye-witness, distinctly one by
one; giving him to understand upon what terms he was in the common
opinion, in opposition to his flatterers. There is none of us who would
not be worse than kings, if so continually corrupted as they are with
that sort of canaille. How, if Alexander, that great king and
philosopher, cannot defend himself from them!
I should have had fidelity, judgment, and freedom enough for that
purpose. It would be a nameless office, otherwise it would lose its
grace and its effect; and ‘tis a part that is not indifferently fit for
all men; for truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times
and indiscriminately; its use, noble as it is, has its circumspections
and limits. It often falls out, as the world goes, that a man lets it
slip into the ear of a prince, not only to no purpose, but moreover
injuriously and unjustly; and no man shall make me believe that a
virtuous remonstrance may not be viciously applied, and that the interest
of the substance is not often to give way to that of the form.
For such a purpose, I would have a man who is content with his own
fortune:
“Quod sit, esse velit, nihilque malit,”
[“Who is pleased with what he is and desires nothing further.”
--Martial, x. ii, 18.]
and of moderate station; forasmuch as, on the one hand, he would not be
afraid to touch his master’s heart to the quick, for fear by that means
of losing his preferment: and, on the other hand, being of no high
quality, he would have more easy communication with all sorts of people.
I would have this office limited to only one person; for to allow the
privilege of his liberty and privacy to many, would beget an inconvenient
irreverence; and of that one, I would above all things require the
fidelity of silence.
A king is not to be believed when he brags of his constancy in standing
the shock of the enemy for his glory, if for his profit and amendment he
cannot stand the liberty of a friend’s advice, which has no other power
but to pinch his ear, the remainder of its effect being still in his own
hands. Now, there is no condition of men whatever who stand in so great
need of true and free advice and warning, as they do: they sustain a
public life, and have to satisfy the opinion of so many spectators, that,
as those about them conceal from them whatever should divert them from
their own way, they insensibly find themselves involved in the hatred and
detestation of their people, often upon occasions which they might have
avoided without any prejudice even of their pleasures themselves, had
they been advised and set right in time. Their favourites commonly have
more regard to themselves than to their master; and indeed it answers
with them, forasmuch as, in truth, most offices of real friendship, when
applied to the sovereign, are under a rude and dangerous hazard, so that
therein there is great need, not only of very great affection and
freedom, but of courage too.
In fine, all this hodge-podge which I scribble here, is nothing but a
register of the essays of my own life, which, for the internal soundness,
is exemplary enough to take instruction against the grain; but as to
bodily health, no man can furnish out more profitable experience than I,
who present it pure, and no way corrupted and changed by art or opinion.
Experience is properly upon its own dunghill in the subject of physic,
where reason wholly gives it place: Tiberius said that whoever had lived
twenty years ought to be responsible to himself for all things that were
hurtful or wholesome to him, and know how to order himself without
physic;
[All that Suetonius says in his Life of Tiberius is that this
emperor, after he was thirty years old, governed his health without
the aid of physicians; and what Plutarch tells us, in his essay on
the Rules and Precepts of Health, is that Tiberius said that the man
who, having attained sixty years, held out his pulse to a physician
was a fool.]
and he might have learned it of Socrates, who, advising his disciples to
be solicitous of their health as a chief study, added that it was hard if
a man of sense, having a care to his exercise and diet, did not better
know than any physician what was good or ill for him. And physic itself
professes always to have experience for the test of its operations: so
Plato had reason to say that, to be a right physician, it would be
necessary that he who would become such, should first himself have passed
through all the diseases he pretends to cure, and through all the
accidents and circumstances whereof he is to judge. ‘Tis but reason they
should get the pox, if they will know how to cure it; for my part,
I should put myself into such hands; the others but guide us, like him
who paints seas and rocks and ports sitting at table, and there makes the
model of a ship sailing in all security; but put him to the work itself,
he knows not at which end to begin. They make such a description of our
maladies as a town crier does of a lost horse or dog--such a color, such
a height, such an ear--but bring it to him and he knows it not, for all
that. If physic should one day give me some good and visible relief,
then truly I will cry out in good earnest:
“Tandem effcaci do manus scientiae.”
[“Show me and efficacious science, and I will take it by the hand.”
--Horace, xvii. I.]
The arts that promise to keep our bodies and souls in health promise a
great deal; but, withal, there are none that less keep their promise.
And, in our time, those who make profession of these arts amongst us,
less manifest the effects than any other sort of men; one may say of
them, at the most, that they sell medicinal drugs; but that they are
physicians, a man cannot say.
[The edition of 1588 adds: “Judging by themselves, and those
who are ruled by them.”]
I have lived long enough to be able to give an account of the custom that
has carried me so far; for him who has a mind to try it, as his taster,
I have made the experiment. Here are some of the articles, as my memory
shall supply me with them; I have no custom that has not varied according
to circumstances; but I only record those that I have been best
acquainted with, and that hitherto have had the greatest possession of
me.
My form of life is the same in sickness as in health; the same bed, the
same hours, the same meat, and even the same drink, serve me in both
conditions alike; I add nothing to them but the moderation of more or
less, according to my strength and appetite. My health is to maintain my
wonted state without disturbance. I see that sickness puts me off it on
one side, and if I will be ruled by the physicians, they will put me off
on the other; so that by fortune and by art I am out of my way.
I believe nothing more certainly than this, that I cannot be hurt by the
use of things to which I have been so long accustomed. ‘Tis for custom
to give a form to a man’s life, such as it pleases him; she is all in all
in that: ‘tis the potion of Circe, that varies our nature as she best
pleases. How many nations, and but three steps from us, think the fear
of the night-dew, that so manifestly is hurtful to us, a ridiculous
fancy; and our own watermen and peasants laugh at it. You make a German
sick if you lay him upon a mattress, as you do an Italian if you lay him
on a feather-bed, and a Frenchman, if without curtains or fire. A Spanish
stomach cannot hold out to eat as we can, nor ours to drink like the
Swiss. A German made me very merry at Augsburg, by finding fault with
our hearths, by the same arguments which we commonly make use of in
decrying their stoves: for, to say the truth, the smothered heat, and
then the smell of that heated matter of which the fire is composed, very
much offend such as are not used to them; not me; and, indeed, the heat
being always equal, constant, and universal, without flame, without
smoke, and without the wind that comes down our chimneys, they may many
ways sustain comparison with ours. Why do we not imitate the Roman
architecture? for they say that anciently fires were not made in the
houses, but on the outside, and at the foot of them, whence the heat was
conveyed to the whole fabric by pipes contrived in the wall, which were
drawn twining about the rooms that were to be warmed: which I have seen
plainly described somewhere in Seneca. This German hearing me commend
the conveniences and beauties of his city, which truly deserves it, began
to compassionate me that I had to leave it; and the first inconvenience
he alleged to me was, the heaviness of head that the chimneys elsewhere
would bring upon me. He had heard some one make this complaint, and
fixed it upon us, being by custom deprived of the means of perceiving it
at home. All heat that comes from the fire weakens and dulls me. Evenus
said that fire was the best condiment of life: I rather choose any other
way of making myself warm.
We are afraid to drink our wines, when toward the bottom of the cask; in
Portugal those fumes are reputed delicious, and it is the beverage of
princes. In short, every nation has many customs and usages that are not
only unknown to other nations, but savage and miraculous in their sight.
What should we do with those people who admit of no evidence that is not
in print, who believe not men if they are not in a book, nor truth if it
be not of competent age? we dignify our fopperies when we commit them to
the press: ‘tis of a great deal more weight to say, “I have read such a
thing,” than if you only say, “I have heard such a thing.” But I, who no
more disbelieve a man’s mouth than his pen, and who know that men write
as indiscreetly as they speak, and who look upon this age as one that is
past, as soon quote a friend as Aulus Gelliusor Macrobius; and what I
have seen, as what they have written. And, as ‘tis held of virtue, that
it is not greater for having continued longer, so do I hold of truth,
that for being older it is none the wiser. I often say, that it is mere
folly that makes us run after foreign and scholastic examples; their
fertility is the same now that it was in the time of Homer and Plato.
But is it not that we seek more honour from the quotation, than from the
truth of the matter in hand? As if it were more to the purpose to borrow
our proofs from the shops of Vascosan or Plantin, than from what is to be
seen in our own village; or else, indeed, that we have not the wit to
cull out and make useful what we see before us, and to judge of it
clearly enough to draw it into example: for if we say that we want
authority to give faith to our testimony, we speak from the purpose;
forasmuch as, in my opinion, of the most ordinary, common, and known
things, could we but find out their light, the greatest miracles of
nature might be formed, and the most wonderful examples, especially upon
the subject of human actions.
Now, upon this subject, setting aside the examples I have gathered from
books, and what Aristotle says of Andron the Argian, that he travelled
over the arid sands of Lybia without drinking: a gentleman, who has very
well behaved himself in several employments, said, in a place where I
was, that he had ridden from Madrid to Lisbon, in the heat of summer,
without any drink at all. He is very healthful and vigorous for his age,
and has nothing extraordinary in the use of his life, but this, to live
sometimes two or three months, nay, a whole year, as he has told me,
without drinking. He is sometimes thirsty, but he lets it pass over,
and he holds that it is an appetite which easily goes off of itself;
and he drinks more out of caprice than either for need or pleasure.
Here is another example: ‘tis not long ago that I found one of the
learnedest men in France, among those of not inconsiderable fortune,
studying in a corner of a hall that they had separated for him with
tapestry, and about him a rabble of his servants full of licence. He
told me, and Seneca almost says the same of himself, he made an
advantage of this hubbub; that, beaten with this noise, he so much
the more collected and retired himself into himself for contemplation,
and that this tempest of voices drove back his thoughts within himself.
Being a student at Padua, he had his study so long situated amid the
rattle of coaches and the tumult of the square, that he not only formed
himself to the contempt, but even to the use of noise, for the service of
his studies. Socrates answered Alcibiades, who was astonished how he
could endure the perpetual scolding of his wife, “Why,” said he, “as
those do who are accustomed to the ordinary noise of wheels drawing
water.” I am quite otherwise; I have a tender head and easily
discomposed; when ‘tis bent upon anything, the least buzzing of a fly
murders it.
Seneca in his youth having warmly espoused the example of Sextius, of
eating nothing that had died, for a whole year dispensed with such food,
and, as he said, with pleasure, and discontinued it that he might not be
suspected of taking up this rule from some new religion by which it was
prescribed: he adopted, in like manner, from the precepts of Attalus a
custom not to lie upon any sort of bedding that gave way under his
weight, and, even to his old age, made use of such as would not yield to
any pressure. What the usage of his time made him account roughness,
that of ours makes us look upon as effeminacy.
Do but observe the difference betwixt the way of living of my labourers
and my own; the Scythians and Indians have nothing more remote both from
my capacity and my form. I have picked up charity boys to serve me: who
soon after have quitted both my kitchen and livery, only that they might
return to their former course of life; and I found one afterwards,
picking mussels out of the sewer for his dinner, whom I could neither by
entreaties nor threats reclaim from the sweetness he found in indigence.
Beggars have their magnificences and delights, as well as the rich, and,
‘tis said, their dignities and polities. These are the effects of
custom; she can mould us, not only into what form she pleases (the sages
say we ought to apply ourselves to the best, which she will soon make
easy to us), but also to change and variation, which is the most noble
and most useful instruction of all she teaches us. The best of my bodily
conditions is that I am flexible and not very obstinate: I have
inclinations more my own and ordinary, and more agreeable than others;
but I am diverted from them with very little ado, and easily slip into a
contrary course. A young man ought to cross his own rules, to awaken his
vigour and to keep it from growing faint and rusty; and there is no
course of life so weak and sottish as that which is carried on by rule
and discipline;
“Ad primum lapidem vectari quum placet, hora
Sumitur ex libro; si prurit frictus ocelli
Angulus, inspecta genesi, collyria quaerit;”
[“When he is pleased to have himself carried to the first milestone,
the hour is chosen from the almanac; if he but rub the corner of his
eye, his horoscope having been examined, he seeks the aid of
salves.”---Juvenal, vi. 576.]
he shall often throw himself even into excesses, if he will take my
advice; otherwise the least debauch will destroy him, and render him
troublesome and disagreeable in company. The worst quality in a
well-bred man is over-fastidiousness, and an obligation to a certain
particular way; and it is particular, if not pliable and supple. It is a
kind of reproach, not to be able, or not to dare, to do what we see those
about us do; let such as these stop at home. It is in every man
unbecoming, but in a soldier vicious and intolerable: who, as Philopcemen
said, ought to accustom himself to every variety and inequality of life.
Though I have been brought up, as much as was possible, to liberty and
independence, yet so it is that, growing old, and having by indifference
more settled upon certain forms (my age is now past instruction, and has
henceforward nothing to do but to keep itself up as well as it can),
custom has already, ere I was aware, so imprinted its character in me in
certain things, that I look upon it as a kind of excess to leave them
off; and, without a force upon myself, cannot sleep in the daytime, nor
eat between meals, nor breakfast, nor go to bed, without a great interval
betwixt eating and sleeping,--[Gastroesophogeal Reflux. D.W.]--as of
three hours after supper; nor get children but before I sleep, nor get
them standing; nor endure my own sweat; nor quench my thirst either with
pure water or pure wine; nor keep my head long bare, nor cut my hair
after dinner; and I should be as uneasy without my gloves as without my
shirt, or without washing when I rise from table or out of my bed; and I
could not lie without a canopy and curtains, as if they were essential
things. I could dine without a tablecloth, but without a clean napkin,
after the German fashion, very incommodiously; I foul them more than the
Germans or Italians do, and make but little use either of spoon or fork.
I complain that they did not keep up the fashion, begun after the example
of kings, to change our napkin at every service, as they do our plate.
We are told of that laborious soldier Marius that, growing old, he became
nice in his drink, and never drank but out of a particular cup of his own
I, in like manner, have suffered myself to fancy a certain form of
glasses, and not willingly to drink in common glasses, no more than from
a strange common hand: all metal offends me in comparison of a clear and
transparent matter: let my eyes taste, too, according to their capacity.
I owe several other such niceties to custom. Nature has also, on the
other side, helped me to some of hers: as not to be able to endure more
than two full meals in one day, without overcharging my stomach, nor a
total abstinence from one of those meals without filling myself with
wind, drying up my mouth, and dulling my appetite; the finding great
inconvenience from overmuch evening air; for of late years, in night
marches, which often happen to be all night long, after five or six hours
my stomach begins to be queasy, with a violent pain in my head, so that I
always vomit before the day can break. When the others go to breakfast,
I go to sleep; and when I rise, I am as brisk and gay as before. I had
always been told that the night dew never rises but in the beginning of
the night; but for some years past, long and familiar intercourse with
a lord, possessed with the opinion that the night dew is more sharp and
dangerous about the declining of the sun, an hour or two before it sets,
which he carefully avoids, and despises that of the night, he almost
impressed upon me, not so much his reasoning as his experiences. What,
shall mere doubt and inquiry strike our imagination, so as to change us?
Such as absolutely and on a sudden give way to these propensions, draw
total destruction upon themselves. I am sorry for several gentlemen who,
through the folly of their physicians, have in their youth and health
wholly shut themselves up: it were better to endure a cough, than, by
disuse, for ever to lose the commerce of common life in things of so
great utility. Malignant science, to interdict us the most pleasant
hours of the day! Let us keep our possession to the last; for the most
part, a man hardens himself by being obstinate, and corrects his
constitution, as Caesar did the falling sickness, by dint of contempt.
A man should addict himself to the best rules, but not enslave himself to
them, except to such, if there be any such, where obligation and
servitude are of profit.
Both kings and philosophers go to stool, and ladies too; public lives are
bound to ceremony; mine, that is obscure and private, enjoys all natural
dispensation; soldier and Gascon are also qualities a little subject to
indiscretion; wherefore I shall say of this act of relieving nature, that
it is desirable to refer it to certain prescribed and nocturnal hours,
and compel one’s self to this by custom, as I have done; but not to
subject one’s self, as I have done in my declining years, to a particular
convenience of place and seat for that purpose, and make it troublesome
by long sitting; and yet, in the fouler offices, is it not in some
measure excusable to require more care and cleanliness?
“Naturt homo mundum et elegans animal est.”
[“Man is by nature a clean and delicate creature.”--Seneca, Ep., 92.]
Of all the actions of nature, I am the most impatient of being
interrupted in that. I have seen many soldiers troubled with the
unruliness of their bellies; whereas mine and I never fail of our
punctual assignation, which is at leaping out of bed, if some
indispensable business or sickness does not molest us.
I think then, as I said before, that sick men cannot better place
themselves anywhere in more safety, than in sitting still in that course
of life wherein they have been bred and trained up; change, be it what it
will, distempers and puts one out. Do you believe that chestnuts can
hurt a Perigordin or a Lucchese, or milk and cheese the mountain people?
We enjoin them not only a new, but a contrary, method of life; a change
that the healthful cannot endure. Prescribe water to a Breton of
threescore and ten; shut a seaman up in a stove; forbid a Basque footman
to walk: you will deprive them of motion, and in the end of air and
light:
“An vivere tanti est?
Cogimur a suetis animum suspendere rebus,
Atque, ut vivamus, vivere desinimus. .
Hos superesse reor, quibus et spirabilis aer
Et lux, qua regimur, redditur ipsa gravis.”
[“Is life worth so much? We are compelled to withhold the mind
from things to which we are accustomed; and, that we may live, we
cease to live . . . . Do I conceive that they still live, to
whom the respirable air, and the light itself, by which we are
governed, is rendered oppressive?”
--Pseudo-Gallus, Eclog., i. 155, 247.]
If they do no other good, they do this at least, that they prepare
patients betimes for death, by little and little undermining and cutting
off the use of life.
Both well and sick, I have ever willingly suffered myself to obey the
appetites that pressed upon me. I give great rein to my desires and
propensities; I do not love to cure one disease by another; I hate
remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself. To be
subject to the colic and subject to abstain from eating oysters are two
evils instead of one; the disease torments us on the one side, and the
remedy on the other. Since we are ever in danger of mistaking, let us
rather run the hazard of a mistake, after we have had the pleasure. The
world proceeds quite the other way, and thinks nothing profitable that is
not painful; it has great suspicion of facility. My appetite, in various
things, has of its own accord happily enough accommodated itself to the
health of my stomach. Relish and pungency in sauces were pleasant to me
when young; my stomach disliking them since, my taste incontinently
followed. Wine is hurtful to sick people, and ‘tis the first thing that
my mouth then finds distasteful, and with an invincible dislike.
Whatever I take against my liking does me harm; and nothing hurts me that
I eat with appetite and delight. I never received harm by any action
that was very pleasant to me; and accordingly have made all medicinal
conclusions largely give way to my pleasure; and I have, when I was
young,
“Quem circumcursans huc atque huc saepe Cupido
Fulgebat crocink splendidus in tunic.”
[“When Cupid, fluttering round me here and there, shone in his rich
purple mantle.”--Catullus, lxvi. 133.]
given myself the rein as licentiously and inconsiderately to the desire
that was predominant in me, as any other whomsoever:
“Et militavi non sine gloria;”
[“And I have played the soldier not ingloriously.”
--Horace, Od., iii. 26, 2.]
yet more in continuation and holding out, than in sally:
“Sex me vix memini sustinuisse vices.”
[“I can scarcely remember six bouts in one night”
--Ovid, Amor., iii. 7, 26.]
‘Tis certainly a misfortune and a miracle at once to confess at what a
tender age I first came under the subjection of love: it was, indeed, by
chance; for it was long before the years of choice or knowledge; I do not
remember myself so far back; and my fortune may well be coupled with that
of Quartilla, who could not remember when she was a maid:
“Inde tragus, celeresque pili, mirandaque matri
Barba meae.”
[“Thence the odour of the arm-pits, the precocious hair, and the
beard which astonished my mother.”--Martial, xi. 22, 7.]
Physicians modify their rules according to the violent longings that
happen to sick persons, ordinarily with good success; this great desire
cannot be imagined so strange and vicious, but that nature must have a
hand in it. And then how easy a thing is it to satisfy the fancy? In my
opinion; this part wholly carries it, at least, above all the rest. The
most grievous and ordinary evils are those that fancy loads us with; this
Spanish saying pleases me in several aspects:
“Defenda me Dios de me.”
[“God defend me from myself.”]
I am sorry when I am sick, that I have not some longing that might give
me the pleasure of satisfying it; all the rules of physic would hardly be
able to divert me from it. I do the same when I am well; I can see very
little more to be hoped or wished for. ‘Twere pity a man should be so
weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him.
The art of physic is not so fixed, that we need be without authority for
whatever we do; it changes according to climates and moons, according to
Fernel and to Scaliger.--[Physicians to Henry II.]--If your physician
does not think it good for you to sleep, to drink wine, or to eat such
and such meats, never trouble yourself; I will find you another that
shall not be of his opinion; the diversity of medical arguments and
opinions embraces all sorts and forms. I saw a miserable sick person
panting and burning for thirst, that he might be cured, who was
afterwards laughed at for his pains by another physician, who condemned
that advice as prejudicial to him: had he not tormented himself to good
purpose? There lately died of the stone a man of that profession, who
had made use of extreme abstinence to contend with his disease: his
fellow-physicians say that, on the contrary, this abstinence had dried
him up and baked the gravel in his kidneys.
I have observed, that both in wounds and sicknesses, speaking discomposes
and hurts me, as much as any irregularity I can commit. My voice pains
and tires me, for ‘tis loud and forced; so that when I have gone to a
whisper some great persons about affairs of consequence, they have often
desired me to moderate my voice.
This story is worth a diversion. Some one in a certain Greek school
speaking loud as I do, the master of the ceremonies sent to him to speak
softly: “Tell him, then, he must send me,” replied the other, “the tone
he would have me speak in.” To which the other replied, “That he should
take the tone from the ears of him to whom he spake.” It was well said,
if it is to be understood: “Speak according to the affair you are
speaking about to your auditor,” for if it mean, “‘tis sufficient that he
hear you, or govern yourself by him,” I do not find it to be reason. The
tone and motion of my voice carries with it a great deal of the
expression and signification of my meaning, and ‘tis I who am to govern
it, to make myself understood: there is a voice to instruct, a voice to
flatter, and a voice to reprehend. I will not only that my voice reach
him, but, peradventure, that it strike and pierce him. When I rate my
valet with sharp and bitter language, it would be very pretty for him to
say; “Pray, master, speak lower; I hear you very well”:
“Est quaedam vox ad auditum accommodata,
non magnitudine, sed proprietate.”
[“There is a certain voice accommodated to the hearing, not by its
loudness, but by its propriety.”--Quintilian, xi. 3.]
Speaking is half his who speaks, and half his who hears; the latter
ought to prepare himself to receive it, according to its bias; as with
tennis-players, he who receives the ball, shifts and prepares, according
as he sees him move who strikes the stroke, and according to the stroke
itself.
Experience has, moreover, taught me this, that we ruin ourselves by
impatience. Evils have their life and limits, their diseases and their
recovery.
The constitution of maladies is formed by the pattern of the constitution
of animals; they have their fortune and their days limited from their
birth; he who attempts imperiously to cut them short by force in the
middle of their course, lengthens and multiplies them, and incenses
instead of appeasing them. I am of Crantor’s opinion, that we are
neither obstinately and deafly to oppose evils, nor succumb to them from
want of courage; but that we are naturally to give way to them, according
to their condition and our own. We ought to grant free passage to
diseases; I find they stay less with me, who let them alone; and I have
lost some, reputed the most tenacious and obstinate, by their own decay,
without help and without art, and contrary to its rules. Let us a little
permit Nature to take her own way; she better understands her own affairs
than we. But such an one died of it; and so shall you: if not of that
disease, of another. And how many have not escaped dying, who have had
three physicians at their tails? Example is a vague and universal
mirror, and of various reflections. If it be a delicious medicine, take
it: ‘tis always so much present good. I will never stick at the name nor
the colour, if it be pleasant and grateful to the palate: pleasure is one
of the chiefest kinds of profit. I have suffered colds, gouty
defluxions, relaxations, palpitations of the heart, megrims, and other
accidents, to grow old and die in time a natural death. I have so lost
them when I was half fit to keep them: they are sooner prevailed upon by
courtesy than huffing. We must patiently suffer the laws of our
condition; we are born to grow old, to grow weak, and to be sick, in
despite of all medicine. ‘Tis the first lesson the Mexicans teach their
children; so soon as ever they are born they thus salute them: “Thou art
come into the world, child, to endure: endure, suffer, and say nothing.”
‘Tis injustice to lament that which has befallen any one which may befall
every one:
“Indignare, si quid in to inique proprio constitutum est.”
[“Then be angry, when there is anything unjustly decreed against
thee alone.”--Seneca, Ep., 91.]
See an old man who begs of God that he will maintain his health vigorous
and entire; that is to say, that he restore him to youth:
“Stulte, quid haec frustra votis puerilibus optas?”
[“Fool! why do you vainly form these puerile wishes?”
--Ovid., Trist., 111. 8, II.]
is it not folly? his condition is not capable of it. The gout, the
stone, and indigestion are symptoms of long years; as heat, rains, and
winds are of long journeys. Plato does not believe that AEsculapius
troubled himself to provide by regimen to prolong life in a weak and
wasted body, useless to his country and to his profession, or to beget
healthful and robust children; and does not think this care suitable to
the Divine justice and prudence, which is to direct all things to
utility. My good friend, your business is done; nobody can restore you;
they can, at the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little, and by
that means prolong your misery an hour or two:
“Non secus instantem cupiens fulcire ruinam,
Diversis contra nititur obiicibus;
Donec certa dies, omni compage soluta,
Ipsum cum rebus subruat auxilium.”
[“Like one who, desiring to stay an impending ruin, places various
props against it, till, in a short time, the house, the props, and
all, giving way, fall together.”--Pseudo-Gallus, i. 171.]
We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade; our life, like the harmony
of the world, is composed of contrary things--of diverse tones, sweet and
harsh, sharp and flat, sprightly and solemn: the musician who should only
affect some of these, what would he be able to do? he must know how to
make use of them all, and to mix them; and so we should mingle the goods
and evils which are consubstantial with our life; our being cannot
subsist without this mixture, and the one part is no less necessary to it
than the other. To attempt to combat natural necessity, is to represent
the folly of Ctesiphon, who undertook to kick with his mule.--[Plutarch,
How to restrain Anger, c. 8.]
I consult little about the alterations I feel: for these doctors take
advantage; when they have you at their mercy, they surfeit your ears with
their prognostics; and formerly surprising me, weakened with sickness,
injuriously handled me with their dogmas and magisterial fopperies--one
while menacing me with great pains, and another with approaching death.
Hereby I was indeed moved and shaken, but not subdued nor jostled from my
place; and though my judgment was neither altered nor distracted, yet it
was at least disturbed: ‘tis always agitation and combat.
Now, I use my imagination as gently as I can, and would discharge it, if
I could, of all trouble and contest; a man must assist, flatter, and
deceive it, if he can; my mind is fit for that office; it needs no
appearances throughout: could it persuade as it preaches, it would
successfully relieve me. Will you have an example? It tells me: “that
‘tis for my good to have the stone: that the structure of my age must
naturally suffer some decay, and it is now time it should begin to
disjoin and to confess a breach; ‘tis a common necessity, and there is
nothing in it either miraculous or new; I therein pay what is due to old
age, and I cannot expect a better bargain; that society ought to comfort
me, being fallen into the most common infirmity of my age; I see
everywhere men tormented with the same disease, and am honoured by the
fellowship, forasmuch as men of the best quality are most frequently
afflicted with it: ‘tis a noble and dignified disease: that of such as
are struck with it, few have it to a less degree of pain; that these are
put to the trouble of a strict diet and the daily taking of nauseous
potions, whereas I owe my better state purely to my good fortune; for
some ordinary broths of eringo or burst-wort that I have twice or thrice
taken to oblige the ladies, who, with greater kindness than my pain was
sharp, would needs present me half of theirs, seemed to me equally easy
to take and fruitless in operation, the others have to pay a thousand
vows to AEsculapius, and as many crowns to their physicians, for the
voiding a little gravel, which I often do by the aid of nature: even the
decorum of my countenance is not disturbed in company; and I can hold my
water ten hours, and as long as any man in health. The fear of this
disease,” says my mind, “formerly affrighted thee, when it was unknown to
thee; the cries and despairing groans of those who make it worse by their
impatience, begot a horror in thee. ‘Tis an infirmity that punishes the
members by which thou hast most offended. Thou art a conscientious
fellow;”
“Quae venit indigne poena, dolenda venit:”
[“We are entitled to complain of a punishment that we have not
deserved.”--Ovid, Heroid., v. 8.]
“consider this chastisement: ‘tis very easy in comparison of others, and
inflicted with a paternal tenderness: do but observe how late it comes;
it only seizes on and incommodes that part of thy life which is, one way
and another, sterile and lost; having, as it were by composition, given
time for the licence and pleasures of thy youth. The fear and the
compassion that the people have of this disease serve thee for matter of
glory; a quality whereof if thou bast thy judgment purified, and that thy
reason has somewhat cured it, thy friends notwithstanding, discern some
tincture in thy complexion. ‘Tis a pleasure to hear it said of oneself
what strength of mind, what patience! Thou art seen to sweat with pain,
to turn pale and red, to tremble, to vomit blood, to suffer strange
contractions and convulsions, at times to let great tears drop from thine
eyes, to urine thick, black, and dreadful water, or to have it suppressed
by some sharp and craggy stone, that cruelly pricks and tears the neck of
the bladder, whilst all the while thou entertainest the company with an
ordinary countenance; droning by fits with thy people; making one in a
continuous discourse, now and then making excuse for thy pain, and
representing thy suffering less than it is. Dost thou call to mind the
men of past times, who so greedily sought diseases to keep their virtue
in breath and exercise? Put the case that nature sets thee on and impels
thee to this glorious school, into which thou wouldst never have entered
of thy own free will. If thou tellest me that it is a dangerous and
mortal disease, what others are not so? for ‘tis a physical cheat to
expect any that they say do not go direct to death: what matters if they
go thither by accident, or if they easily slide and slip into the path
that leads us to it? But thou dost not die because thou art sick; thou
diest because thou art living: death kills thee without the help of
sickness: and sickness has deferred death in some, who have lived longer
by reason that they thought themselves always dying; to which may be
added, that as in wounds, so in diseases, some are medicinal and
wholesome. The stone is often no less long-lived than you; we see men
with whom it has continued from their infancy even to their extreme old
age; and if they had not broken company, it would have been with them
longer still; you more often kill it than it kills you. And though it
should present to you the image of approaching death, were it not a good
office to a man of such an age, to put him in mind of his end? And,
which is worse, thou hast no longer anything that should make thee desire
to be cured. Whether or no, common necessity will soon call thee away.
Do but consider how skilfully and gently she puts thee out of concern
with life, and weans thee from the world; not forcing thee with a
tyrannical subjection, like so many other infirmities which thou seest
old men afflicted withal, that hold them in continual torment, and keep
them in perpetual and unintermitted weakness and pains, but by warnings
and instructions at intervals, intermixing long pauses of repose, as it
were to give thee opportunity to meditate and ruminate upon thy lesson,
at thy own ease and leisure. To give thee means to judge aright, and to
assume the resolution of a man of courage, it presents to thee the state
of thy entire condition, both in good and evil; and one while a very
cheerful and another an insupportable life, in one and the same day. If
thou embracest not death, at least thou shakest hands with it once a
month; whence thou hast more cause to hope that it will one day surprise
thee without menace; and that being so often conducted to the water-side,
but still thinking thyself to be upon the accustomed terms, thou and thy
confidence will at one time or another be unexpectedly wafted over. A
man cannot reasonably complain of diseases that fairly divide the time
with health.”
I am obliged to Fortune for having so often assaulted me with the same
sort of weapons: she forms and fashions me by use, hardens and habituates
me, so that I can know within a little for how much I shall be quit. For
want of natural memory, I make one of paper; and as any new symptom
happens in my disease, I set it down, whence it falls out that, having
now almost passed through all sorts of examples, if anything striking
threatens me, turning over these little loose notes, as the Sybilline
leaves, I never fail of finding matter of consolation from some
favourable prognostic in my past experience. Custom also makes me hope
better for the time to come; for, the conduct of this clearing out having
so long continued, ‘tis to be believed that nature will not alter her
course, and that no other worse accident will happen than what I already
feel. And besides, the condition of this disease is not unsuitable to my
prompt and sudden complexion: when it assaults me gently, I am afraid,
for ‘tis then for a great while; but it has, naturally, brisk and
vigorous excesses; it claws me to purpose for a day or two. My kidneys
held out an age without alteration; and I have almost now lived another,
since they changed their state; evils have their periods, as well as
benefits: peradventure, the infirmity draws towards an end. Age weakens
the heat of my stomach, and, its digestion being less perfect, sends this
crude matter to my kidneys; why, at a certain revolution, may not the
heat of my kidneys be also abated, so that they can no more petrify my
phlegm, and nature find out some other way of purgation. Years have
evidently helped me to drain certain rheums; and why not these excrements
which furnish matter for gravel? But is there anything delightful in
comparison of this sudden change, when from an excessive pain, I come, by
the voiding of a stone, to recover, as by a flash of lightning, the
beautiful light of health, so free and full, as it happens in our sudden
and sharpest colics? Is there anything in the pain suffered, that one
can counterpoise to the pleasure of so sudden an amendment? Oh, how much
does health seem the more pleasant to me, after a sickness so near and so
contiguous, that I can distinguish them in the presence of one another,
in their greatest show; when they appear in emulation, as if to make head
against and dispute it with one another! As the Stoics say that vices
are profitably introduced to give value to and to set off virtue, we can,
with better reason and less temerity of conjecture, say that nature has
given us pain for the honour and service of pleasure and indolence. When
Socrates, after his fetters were knocked off, felt the pleasure of that
itching which the weight of them had caused in his legs, he rejoiced to
consider the strict alliance betwixt pain and pleasure; how they are
linked together by a necessary connection, so that by turns they follow
and mutually beget one another; and cried out to good AEsop, that he
ought out of this consideration to have taken matter for a fine fable.
The worst that I see in other diseases is, that they are not so grievous
in their effect as they are in their issue: a man is a whole year in
recovering, and all the while full of weakness and fear. There is so
much hazard, and so many steps to arrive at safety, that there is no end
on’t before they have unmuffled you of a kerchief, and then of a cap,
before they allow you to walk abroad and take the air, to drink wine, to
lie with your wife, to eat melons, ‘tis odds you relapse into some new
distemper. The stone has this privilege, that it carries itself clean
off: whereas the other maladies always leave behind them some impression
and alteration that render the body subject to a new disease, and lend a
hand to one another. Those are excusable that content themselves with
possessing us, without extending farther and introducing their followers;
but courteous and kind are those whose passage brings us any profitable
issue. Since I have been troubled with the stone, I find myself freed
from all other accidents, much more, methinks, than I was before, and
have never had any fever since; I argue that the extreme and frequent
vomitings that I am subject to purge me: and, on the other hand, my
distastes for this and that, and the strange fasts I am forced to keep,
digest my peccant humours, and nature, with those stones, voids whatever
there is in me superfluous and hurtful. Let them never tell me that it
is a medicine too dear bought: for what avail so many stinking draughts,
so many caustics, incisions, sweats, setons, diets, and so many other
methods of cure, which often, by reason we are not able to undergo their
violence and importunity, bring us to our graves? So that when I have
the stone, I look upon it as physic; when free from it, as an absolute
deliverance.
And here is another particular benefit of my disease; which is, that it
almost plays its game by itself, and lets ‘me play mine, if I have only
courage to do it; for, in its greatest fury, I have endured it ten hours
together on horseback. Do but endure only; you need no other regimen
play, run, dine, do this and t’other, if you can; your debauch will do
you more good than harm; say as much to one that has the pox, the gout,
or hernia! The other diseases have more universal obligations; rack our
actions after another kind of manner, disturb our whole order, and to
their consideration engage the whole state of life: this only pinches the
skin; it leaves the understanding and the will wholly at our own
disposal, and the tongue, the hands, and the feet; it rather awakens than
stupefies you. The soul is struck with the ardour of a fever,
overwhelmed with an epilepsy, and displaced by a sharp megrim, and, in
short, astounded by all the diseases that hurt the whole mass and the
most noble parts; this never meddles with the soul; if anything goes
amiss with her, ‘tis her own fault; she betrays, dismounts, and abandons
herself. There are none but fools who suffer themselves to be persuaded
that this hard and massive body which is baked in our kidneys is to be
dissolved by drinks; wherefore, when it is once stirred, there is nothing
to be done but to give it passage; and, for that matter, it will itself
make one.
I moreover observe this particular convenience in it, that it is a
disease wherein we have little to guess at: we are dispensed from the
trouble into which other diseases throw us by the uncertainty of their
causes, conditions, and progress; a trouble that is infinitely painful:
we have no need of consultations and doctoral interpretations; the senses
well enough inform us both what it is and where it is.
By suchlike arguments, weak and strong, as Cicero with the disease of his
old age, I try to rock asleep and amuse my imagination, and to dress its
wounds. If I find them worse tomorrow, I will provide new stratagems.
That this is true: I am come to that pass of late, that the least motion
forces pure blood out of my kidneys: what of that? I move about,
nevertheless, as before, and ride after my hounds with a juvenile and
insolent ardour; and hold that I have very good satisfaction for an
accident of that importance, when it costs me no more but a dull
heaviness and uneasiness in that part; ‘tis some great stone that wastes
and consumes the substance of my kidneys and my life, which I by little
and little evacuate, not without some natural pleasure, as an excrement
henceforward superfluous and troublesome. Now if I feel anything
stirring, do not fancy that I trouble myself to consult my pulse or my
urine, thereby to put myself upon some annoying prevention; I shall soon
enough feel the pain, without making it more and longer by the disease of
fear. He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears. To
which may be added that the doubts and ignorance of those who take upon
them to expound the designs of nature and her internal progressions, and
the many false prognostics of their art, ought to give us to understand
that her ways are inscrutable and utterly unknown; there is great
uncertainty, variety, and obscurity in what she either promises or
threatens. Old age excepted, which is an indubitable sign of the
approach of death, in all other accidents I see few signs of the future,
whereon we may ground our divination. I only judge of myself by actual
sensation, not by reasoning: to what end, since I am resolved to bring
nothing to it but expectation and patience? Will you know how much I get
by this? observe those who do otherwise, and who rely upon so many
diverse persuasions and counsels; how often the imagination presses upon
them without any bodily pain. I have many times amused myself, being
well and in safety, and quite free from these dangerous attacks in
communicating them to the physicians as then beginning to discover
themselves in me; I underwent the decree of their dreadful conclusions,
being all the while quite at my ease, and so much the more obliged to the
favour of God and better satisfied of the vanity of this art.
There is nothing that ought so much to be recommended to youth as
activity and vigilance our life is nothing but movement. I bestir myself
with great difficulty, and am slow in everything, whether in rising,
going to bed, or eating: seven of the clock in the morning is early for
me, and where I rule, I never dine before eleven, nor sup till after six.
I formerly attributed the cause of the fevers and other diseases I fell
into to the heaviness that long sleeping had brought upon me, and have
ever repented going to sleep again in the morning. Plato is more angry
at excess of sleeping than at excess of drinking. I love to lie hard and
alone, even without my wife, as kings do; pretty well covered with
clothes. They never warm my bed, but since I have grown old they give me
at need cloths to lay to my feet and stomach. They found fault with the
great Scipio that he was a great sleeper; not, in my opinion, for any
other reason than that men were displeased that he alone should have
nothing in him to be found fault with. If I am anything fastidious in my
way of living ‘tis rather in my lying than anything else; but generally
I give way and accommodate myself as well as any one to necessity.
Sleeping has taken up a great part of my life, and I yet continue, at the
age I now am, to sleep eight or nine hours at one breath. I wean myself
with utility from this proneness to sloth, and am evidently the better
for so doing. I find the change a little hard indeed, but in three days
‘tis over; and I see but few who live with less sleep, when need
requires, and who more constantly exercise themselves, or to whom long
journeys are less troublesome. My body is capable of a firm, but not of
a violent or sudden agitation. I escape of late from violent exercises,
and such as make me sweat: my limbs grow weary before they are warm.
I can stand a whole day together, and am never weary of walking; but from
my youth I have ever preferred to ride upon paved roads; on foot, I get
up to the haunches in dirt, and little fellows as I am are subject in the
streets to be elbowed and jostled for want of presence; I have ever loved
to repose myself, whether sitting or lying, with my heels as high or
higher than my seat.
There is no profession as pleasant as the military, a profession both
noble in its execution (for valour is the stoutest, proudest, and most
generous of all virtues), and noble in its cause: there is no utility
either more universal or more just than the protection of the peace and
greatness of one’s country. The company of so many noble, young, and
active men delights you; the ordinary sight of so many tragic spectacles;
the freedom of the conversation, without art; a masculine and
unceremonious way of living, please you; the variety of a thousand
several actions; the encouraging harmony of martial music that ravishes
and inflames both your ears and souls; the honour of this occupation,
nay, even its hardships and difficulties, which Plato holds so light that
in his Republic he makes women and children share in them, are delightful
to you. You put yourself voluntarily upon particular exploits and
hazards, according as you judge of their lustre and importance; and, a
volunteer, find even life itself excusably employed:
“Pulchrumque mori succurrit in armis.”
[“‘Tis fine to die sword in hand.” (“And he remembers that it
is honourable to die in arms.”)--AEneid, ii. 317.]
To fear common dangers that concern so great a multitude of men; not to
dare to do what so many sorts of souls, what a whole people dare, is for
a heart that is poor and mean beyond all measure: company encourages even
children. If others excel you in knowledge, in gracefulness, in
strength, or fortune, you have alternative resources at your disposal;
but to give place to them in stability of mind, you can blame no one for
that but yourself. Death is more abject, more languishing and
troublesome, in bed than in a fight: fevers and catarrhs as painful and
mortal as a musket-shot. Whoever has fortified himself valiantly to bear
the accidents of common life need not raise his courage to be a soldier:
“Vivere, mi Lucili, militare est.”
[“To live, my Lucilius, is (to make war) to be a soldier.”
--Seneca, Ep., 96.]
I do not remember that I ever had the itch, and yet scratching is one of
nature’s sweetest gratifications, and so much at hand; but repentance
follows too near. I use it most in my ears, which are at intervals apt
to itch.
I came into the world with all my senses entire, even to perfection. My
stomach is commodiously good, as also is my head and my breath; and, for
the most part, uphold themselves so in the height of fevers. I have
passed the age to which some nations, not without reason, have prescribed
so just a term of life that they would not suffer men to exceed it; and
yet I have some intermissions, though short and inconstant, so clean and
sound as to be little inferior to the health and pleasantness of my
youth. I do not speak of vigour and sprightliness; ‘tis not reason they
should follow me beyond their limits:
“Non hoc amplius est liminis, aut aquae
Coelestis, patiens latus.”
[“I am no longer able to stand waiting at a door in the rain.”
--Horace, Od., iii. 10, 9.]
My face and eyes presently discover my condition; all my alterations
begin there, and appear somewhat worse than they really are; my friends
often pity me before I feel the cause in myself. My looking-glass does
not frighten me; for even in my youth it has befallen me more than once
to have a scurvy complexion and of ill augury, without any great
consequence, so that the physicians, not finding any cause within
answerable to that outward alteration, attributed it to the mind and to
some secret passion that tormented me within; but they were deceived.
If my body would govern itself as well, according to my rule, as my mind
does, we should move a little more at our ease. My mind was then not
only free from trouble, but, moreover, full of joy and satisfaction,
as it commonly is, half by its complexion, half by its design:
“Nec vitiant artus aegrae contagia mentis.”
[“Nor do the troubles of the body ever affect my mind.”
--Ovid, Trist., iii. 8, 25.]
I am of the opinion that this temperature of my soul has often raised my
body from its lapses; this is often depressed; if the other be not brisk
and gay, ‘tis at least tranquil and at rest. I had a quartan ague four
or five months, that made me look miserably ill; my mind was always, if
not calm, yet pleasant. If the pain be without me, the weakness and
languor do not much afflict me; I see various corporal faintings, that
beget a horror in me but to name, which yet I should less fear than a
thousand passions and agitations of the mind that I see about me. I make
up my mind no more to run; ‘tis enough that I can crawl along; nor do I
more complain of the natural decadence that I feel in myself:
“Quis tumidum guttur miratur in Alpibus?”
[“Who is surprised to see a swollen goitre in the Alps?”
--Juvenal, xiii. 162.]
than I regret that my duration shall not be as long and entire as that of
an oak.
I have no reason to complain of my imagination; I have had few thoughts
in my life that have so much as broken my sleep, except those of desire,
which have awakened without afflicting me. I dream but seldom, and then
of chimaeras and fantastic things, commonly produced from pleasant
thoughts, and rather ridiculous than sad; and I believe it to be true
that dreams are faithful interpreters of our inclinations; but there is
art required to sort and understand them
“Res, quae in vita usurpant homines, cogitant, curant, vident,
Quaeque agunt vigilantes, agitantque, ea si cui in somno accidunt,
Minus mirandum est.”
[“‘Tis less wonder, what men practise, think, care for, see, and do
when waking, (should also run in their heads and disturb them when
they are asleep) and which affect their feelings, if they happen to
any in sleep.”--Attius, cited in Cicero, De Divin., i. 22.]
Plato, moreover, says, that ‘tis the office of prudence to draw
instructions of divination of future things from dreams: I don’t know
about this, but there are wonderful instances of it that Socrates,
Xenophon, and Aristotle, men of irreproachable authority, relate.
Historians say that the Atlantes never dream; who also never eat any
animal food, which I add, forasmuch as it is, peradventure, the reason
why they never dream, for Pythagoras ordered a certain preparation of
diet to beget appropriate dreams. Mine are very gentle, without any
agitation of body or expression of voice. I have seen several of my time
wonderfully disturbed by them. Theon the philosopher walked in his
sleep, and so did Pericles servant, and that upon the tiles and top of
the house.
I hardly ever choose my dish at table, but take the next at hand, and
unwillingly change it for another. A confusion of meats and a clatter of
dishes displease me as much as any other confusion: I am easily satisfied
with few dishes: and am an enemy to the opinion of Favorinus, that in a
feast they should snatch from you the meat you like, and set a plate of
another sort before you; and that ‘tis a pitiful supper, if you do not
sate your guests with the rumps of various fowls, the beccafico only
deserving to be all eaten. I usually eat salt meats, yet I prefer bread
that has no salt in it; and my baker never sends up other to my table,
contrary to the custom of the country. In my infancy, what they had most
to correct in me was the refusal of things that children commonly best
love, as sugar, sweetmeats, and march-panes. My tutor contended with
this aversion to delicate things, as a kind of over-nicety; and indeed
‘tis nothing else but a difficulty of taste, in anything it applies
itself to. Whoever cures a child of an obstinate liking for brown bread,
bacon, or garlic, cures him also of pampering his palate. There are some
who affect temperance and plainness by wishing for beef and ham amongst
the partridges; ‘tis all very fine; this is the delicacy of the delicate;
‘tis the taste of an effeminate fortune that disrelishes ordinary and
accustomed things.
“Per qux luxuria divitiarum taedio ludit.”
[“By which the luxury of wealth causes tedium.”--Seneca, Ep., 18.]
Not to make good cheer with what another is enjoying, and to be curious
in what a man eats, is the essence of this vice:
“Si modica coenare times olus omne patella.”
[“If you can’t be content with herbs in a small dish for supper.”
--Horace, Ep., i. 5, 2.]
There is indeed this difference, that ‘tis better to oblige one’s
appetite to things that are most easy to be had; but ‘tis always vice to
oblige one’s self. I formerly said a kinsman of mine was overnice, who,
by being in our galleys, had unlearned the use of beds and to undress
when he went to sleep.
If I had any sons, I should willingly wish them my fortune. The good
father that God gave me (who has nothing of me but the acknowledgment of
his goodness, but truly ‘tis a very hearty one) sent me from my cradle to
be brought up in a poor village of his, and there continued me all the
while I was at nurse, and still longer, bringing me up to the meanest and
most common way of living:
“Magna pars libertatis est bene moratus venter.”
[“A well-governed stomach is a great part of liberty.”
--Seneca,Ep., 123.]
Never take upon yourselves, and much less give up to your wives, the care
of their nurture; leave the formation to fortune, under popular and
natural laws; leave it to custom to train them up to frugality and
hardship, that they may rather descend from rigour than mount up to it.
This humour of his yet aimed at another end, to make me familiar with the
people and the condition of men who most need our assistance; considering
that I should rather regard them who extend their arms to me, than those
who turn their backs upon me; and for this reason it was that he provided
to hold me at the font persons of the meanest fortune, to oblige and
attach me to them.
Nor has his design succeeded altogether ill; for, whether upon the
account of the more honour in such a condescension, or out of a natural
compassion that has a very great power over me, I have an inclination
towards the meaner sort of people. The faction which I should condemn in
our wars, I should more sharply condemn, flourishing and successful; it
will somewhat reconcile me to it, when I shall see it miserable and
overwhelmed. How willingly do I admire the fine humour of Cheilonis,
daughter and wife to kings of Sparta. Whilst her husband Cleombrotus, in
the commotion of her city, had the advantage over Leonidas her father,
she, like a good daughter, stuck close to her father in all his misery
and exile, in opposition to the conqueror. But so soon as the chance of
war turned, she changed her will with the change of fortune, and bravely
turned to her husband’s side, whom she accompanied throughout, where his
ruin carried him: admitting, as it appears to me, no other choice than to
cleave to the side that stood most in need of her, and where she could
best manifest her compassion. I am naturally more apt to follow the
example of Flaminius, who rather gave his assistance to those who had
most need of him than to those who had power to do him good, than I do to
that of Pyrrhus, who was of an humour to truckle under the great and to
domineer over the poor.
Long sittings at table both trouble me and do me harm; for, be it that I
was so accustomed when a child, I eat all the while I sit. Therefore it
is that at my own house, though the meals there are of the shortest, I
usually sit down a little while after the rest, after the manner of
Augustus, but I do not imitate him in rising also before the rest; on the
contrary, I love to sit still a long time after, and to hear them talk,
provided I am none of the talkers: for I tire and hurt myself with
speaking upon a full stomach, as much as I find it very wholesome and
pleasant to argue and to strain my voice before dinner.
The ancient Greeks and Romans had more reason than we in setting apart
for eating, which is a principal action of life, if they were not
prevented by other extraordinary business, many hours and the greatest
part of the night; eating and drinking more deliberately than we do, who
perform all our actions post-haste; and in extending this natural
pleasure to more leisure and better use, intermixing with profitable
conversation.
They whose concern it is to have a care of me, may very easily hinder me
from eating anything they think will do me harm; for in such matters I
never covet nor miss anything I do not see; but withal, if it once comes
in my sight, ‘tis in vain to persuade me to forbear; so that when I
design to fast I must be kept apart from the suppers, and must have only
so much given me as is required for a prescribed collation; for if to
table, I forget my resolution. When I order my cook to alter the manner
of dressing any dish, all my family know what it means, that my stomach
is out of order, and that I shall not touch it.
I love to have all meats, that will endure it, very little boiled or
roasted, and prefer them very high, and even, as to several, quite gone.
Nothing but hardness generally offends me (of any other quality I am as
patient and indifferent as any man I have known); so that, contrary to
the common humour, even in fish it often happens that I find them both
too fresh and too firm; not for want of teeth, which I ever had good,
even to excellence, and which age does not now begin to threaten; I have
always been used every morning to rub them with a napkin, and before and
after dinner. God is favourable to those whom He makes to die by
degrees; ‘tis the only benefit of old age; the last death will be so much
the less painful; it will kill but a half or a quarter of a man. There
is one tooth lately fallen out without drawing and without pain; it was
the natural term of its duration; in that part of my being and several
others, are already dead, others half dead, of those that were most
active and in the first rank during my vigorous years; ‘tis so I melt and
steal away from myself. What a folly it would be in my understanding to
apprehend the height of this fall, already so much advanced, as if it
were from the very top! I hope I shall not. I, in truth, receive a
principal consolation in meditating my death, that it will be just and
natural, and that henceforward I cannot herein either require or hope
from Destiny any other but unlawful favour. Men make themselves believe
that we formerly had longer lives as well as greater stature. But they
deceive themselves; and Solon, who was of those elder times, limits the
duration of life to threescore and ten years. I, who have so much and so
universally adored that “The mean is best,” of the passed time, and who
have concluded the most moderate measures to be the most perfect, shall
I pretend to an immeasurable and prodigious old age? Whatever happens
contrary to the course of nature may be troublesome; but what comes
according to her should always be pleasant:
“Omnia, quae secundum naturam fiunt, sunt habenda in bonis.”
[“All things that are done according to nature
are to be accounted good.”--Cicero, De Senect., c. 19.]
And so, says Plato, the death which is occasioned by wounds and diseases
is violent; but that which comes upon us, old age conducting us to it, is
of all others the most easy, and in some sort delicious:
“Vitam adolescentibus vis aufert, senibus maturitas.”
[“Young men are taken away by violence, old men by maturity.”
--Cicero, ubi sup.]
Death mixes and confounds itself throughout with life; decay anticipates
its hour, and shoulders itself even into the course of our advance.
I have portraits of myself taken at five-and-twenty and five-and-thirty
years of age. I compare them with that lately drawn: how many times is
it no longer me; how much more is my present image unlike the former,
than unlike my dying one? It is too much to abuse nature, to make her
trot so far that she must be forced to leave us, and abandon our conduct,
our eyes, teeth, legs, and all the rest to the mercy of a foreign and
haggard countenance, and to resign us into the hands of art, being weary
of following us herself.
I am not excessively fond either of salads or fruits, except melons. My
father hated all sorts of sauces; I love them all. Eating too much hurts
me; but, as to the quality of what I eat, I do not yet certainly know
that any sort of meat disagrees with me; neither have I observed that
either full moon or decrease, autumn or spring, have any influence upon
me. We have in us motions that are inconstant and unknown; for example,
I found radishes first grateful to my stomach, since that nauseous, and
now again grateful. In several other things, I find my stomach and
appetite vary after the same manner; I have changed again and again from
white wine to claret, from claret to white wine.
I am a great lover of fish, and consequently make my fasts feasts and
feasts fasts; and I believe what some people say, that it is more easy of
digestion than flesh. As I make a conscience of eating flesh upon
fish-days, so does my taste make a conscience of mixing fish and flesh;
the difference betwixt them seems to me too remote.
From my youth, I have sometimes kept out of the way at meals; either to
sharpen my appetite against the next morning (for, as Epicurus fasted and
made lean meals to accustom his pleasure to make shift without abundance,
I, on the contrary, do it to prepare my pleasure to make better and more
cheerful use of abundance); or else I fasted to preserve my vigour for
the service of some action of body or mind: for both the one and the
other of these is cruelly dulled in me by repletion; and, above all
things, I hate that foolish coupling of so healthful and sprightly a
goddess with that little belching god, bloated with the fumes of his
liquor--[ Montaigne did not approve of coupling Bacchus with Venus.]--
or to cure my sick stomach, or for want of fit company; for I say, as the
same Epicurus did, that one is not so much to regard what he eats, as
with whom; and I commend Chilo, that he would not engage himself to be at
Periander’s feast till he was first informed who were to be the other
guests; no dish is so acceptable to me, nor no sauce so appetising, as
that which is extracted from society. I think it more wholesome to eat
more leisurely and less, and to eat oftener; but I would have appetite
and hunger attended to; I should take no pleasure to be fed with three or
four pitiful and stinted repasts a day, after a medicinal manner: who
will assure me that, if I have a good appetite in the morning, I shall
have the same at supper? But we old fellows especially, let us take the
first opportune time of eating, and leave to almanac-makers hopes and
prognostics. The utmost fruit of my health is pleasure; let us take hold
of the present and known. I avoid the invariable in these laws of
fasting; he who would have one form serve him, let him avoid the
continuing it; we harden ourselves in it; our strength is there stupefied
and laid asleep; six months after, you shall find your stomach so inured
to it, that all you have got is the loss of your liberty of doing
otherwise but to your prejudice.
I never keep my legs and thighs warmer in winter than in summer; one
simple pair of silk stockings is all. I have suffered myself, for the
relief of my colds, to keep my head warmer, and my belly upon the account
of my colic: my diseases in a few days habituate themselves thereto, and
disdained my ordinary provisions: we soon get from a coif to a kerchief
over it, from a simple cap to a quilted hat; the trimmings of the doublet
must not merely serve for ornament: there must be added a hare’s skin or
a vulture’s skin, and a cap under the hat: follow this gradation, and you
will go a very fine way to work. I will do nothing of the sort, and
would willingly leave off what I have begun. If you fall into any new
inconvenience, all this is labour lost; you are accustomed to it; seek
out some other. Thus do they destroy themselves who submit to be
pestered with these enforced and superstitious rules; they must add
something more, and something more after that; there is no end on’t.
For what concerns our affairs and pleasures, it is much more commodious,
as the ancients did, to lose one’s dinner, and defer making good cheer
till the hour of retirement and repose, without breaking up a day; and so
was I formerly used to do. As to health, I since by experience find, on
the contrary, that it is better to dine, and that the digestion is better
while awake. I am not very used to be thirsty, either well or sick; my
mouth is, indeed, apt to be dry, but without thirst; and commonly I never
drink but with thirst that is created by eating, and far on in the meal;
I drink pretty well for a man of my pitch: in summer, and at a relishing
meal, I do not only exceed the limits of Augustus, who drank but thrice
precisely; but not to offend Democritus rule, who forbade that men should
stop at four times as an unlucky number, I proceed at need to the fifth
glass, about three half-pints; for the little glasses are my favourites,
and I like to drink them off, which other people avoid as an unbecoming
thing. I mix my wine sometimes with half, sometimes with the third part
water; and when I am at home, by an ancient custom that my father’s
physician prescribed both to him and himself, they mix that which is
designed for me in the buttery, two or three hours before ‘tis brought
in. ‘Tis said that Cranabs, king of Attica, was the inventor of this
custom of diluting wine; whether useful or no, I have heard disputed.
I think it more decent and wholesome for children to drink no wine till
after sixteen or eighteen years of age. The most usual and common method
of living is the most becoming; all particularity, in my opinion, is to
be avoided; and I should as much hate a German who mixed water with his
wine, as I should a Frenchman who drank it pure. Public usage gives the
law in these things.
I fear a mist, and fly from smoke as from the plague: the first repairs I
fell upon in my own house were the chimneys and houses of office, the
common and insupportable defects of all old buildings; and amongst the
difficulties of war I reckon the choking dust they made us ride in a
whole day together. I have a free and easy respiration, and my colds for
the most part go off without offence to the lungs and without a cough.
The heat of summer is more an enemy to me than the cold of winter; for,
besides the incommodity of heat, less remediable than cold, and besides
the force of the sunbeams that strike upon the head, all glittering light
offends my eyes, so that I could not now sit at dinner over against a
flaming fire.
To dull the whiteness of paper, in those times when I was more wont to
read, I laid a piece of glass upon my book, and found my eyes much
relieved by it. I am to this hour--to the age of fifty-four--Ignorant of
the use of spectacles; and I can see as far as ever I did, or any other.
‘Tis true that in the evening I begin to find a little disturbance and
weakness in my sight if I read, an exercise I have always found
troublesome, especially by night. Here is one step back, and a very
manifest one; I shall retire another: from the second to the third, and
so to the fourth, so gently, that I shall be stark blind before I shall
be sensible of the age and decay of my sight: so artificially do the
Fatal Sisters untwist our lives. And so I doubt whether my hearing
begins to grow thick; and you will see I shall have half lost it, when I
shall still lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me. A man
must screw up his soul to a high pitch to make it sensible how it ebbs
away.
My walking is quick and firm; and I know not which of the two, my mind or
my body, I have most to do to keep in the same state. That preacher is
very much my friend who can fix my attention a whole sermon through: in
places of ceremony, where every one’s countenance is so starched, where I
have seen the ladies keep even their eyes so fixed, I could never order
it so, that some part or other of me did not lash out; so that though I
was seated, I was never settled; and as to gesticulation, I am never
without a switch in my hand, walking or riding. As the philosopher
Chrysippus’ maid said of her master, that he was only drunk in his legs,
for it was his custom to be always kicking them about in what place
soever he sat; and she said it when, the wine having made all his
companions drunk, he found no alteration in himself at all; it may have
been said of me from my infancy, that I had either folly or quicksilver
in my feet, so much stirring and unsettledness there is in them, wherever
they are placed.
‘Tis indecent, besides the hurt it does to one’s health, and even to the
pleasure of eating, to eat greedily as I do; I often bite my tongue, and
sometimes my fingers, in my haste. Diogenes, meeting a boy eating after
that manner, gave his tutor a box on the ear! There were men at Rome
that taught people to chew, as well as to walk, with a good grace. I
lose thereby the leisure of speaking, which gives great relish to the
table, provided the discourse be suitable, that is, pleasant and short.
There is jealousy and envy amongst our pleasures; they cross and hinder
one another. Alcibiades, a man who well understood how to make good
cheer, banished even music from the table, that it might not disturb the
entertainment of discourse, for the reason, as Plato tells us, “that it
is the custom of ordinary people to call fiddlers and singing men to
feasts, for want of good discourse and pleasant talk, with which men of
understanding know how to entertain one another.” Varro requires all
this in entertainments: “Persons of graceful presence and agreeable
conversation, who are neither silent nor garrulous; neatness and
delicacy, both of meat and place; and fair weather.” The art of dining
well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure; neither the
greatest captains nor the greatest philosophers have disdained the use or
science of eating well. My imagination has delivered three repasts to
the custody of my memory, which fortune rendered sovereignly sweet to me,
upon several occasions in my more flourishing age; my present state
excludes me; for every one, according to the good temper of body and mind
wherein he then finds himself, furnishes for his own share a particular
grace and savour. I, who but crawl upon the earth, hate this inhuman
wisdom, that will have us despise and hate all culture of the body; I
look upon it as an equal injustice to loath natural pleasures as to be
too much in love with them. Xerxes was a blockhead, who, environed with
all human delights, proposed a reward to him who could find out others;
but he is not much less so who cuts off any of those pleasures that
nature has provided for him. A man should neither pursue nor avoid them,
but receive them. I receive them, I confess, a little too warmly and
kindly, and easily suffer myself to follow my natural propensions. We
have no need to exaggerate their inanity; they themselves will make us
sufficiently sensible of it, thanks to our sick wet-blanket mind, that
puts us out of taste with them as with itself; it treats both itself and
all it receives, one while better, and another worse, according to its
insatiable, vagabond, and versatile essence:
“Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcunque infundis, acescit.”
[“Unless the vessel be clean, it will sour whatever
you put into it.”--Horace, Ep., i. 2, 54.]
I, who boast that I so curiously and particularly embrace the
conveniences of life, find them, when I most nearly consider them, very
little more than wind. But what? We are all wind throughout; and,
moreover, the wind itself, more discreet than we, loves to bluster and
shift from corner to corner, and contents itself with its proper offices
without desiring stability and solidity-qualities not its own.
The pure pleasures, as well as the pure displeasures, of the imagination,
say some, are the greatest, as was expressed by the balance of
Critolaiis. ‘Tis no wonder; it makes them to its own liking, and cuts
them out of the whole cloth; of this I every day see notable examples,
and, peradventure, to be desired. But I, who am of a mixed and heavy
condition, cannot snap so soon at this one simple object, but that I
negligently suffer myself to be carried away with the present pleasures
of the, general human law, intellectually sensible, and sensibly
intellectual. The Cyrenaic philosophers will have it that as corporal
pains, so corporal pleasures are more powerful, both as double and as
more just. There are some, as Aristotle says, who out of a savage kind
of stupidity dislike them; and I know others who out of ambition do the
same. Why do they not, moreover, forswear breathing? why do they not
live of their own? why not refuse light, because it is gratuitous, and
costs them neither invention nor exertion? Let Mars, Pallas, or Mercury
afford them their light by which to see, instead of Venus, Ceres, and
Bacchus. These boastful humours may counterfeit some content, for what
will not fancy do? But as to wisdom, there is no touch of it. Will they
not seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives? I hate
that we should be enjoined to have our minds in the clouds, when our
bodies are at table; I would not have the mind nailed there, nor wallow
there; I would have it take place there and sit, but not lie down.
Aristippus maintained nothing but the body, as if we had no soul; Zeno
comprehended only the soul, as if we had no body: both of them faultily.
Pythagoras, they say, followed a philosophy that was all contemplation,
Socrates one that was all conduct and action; Plato found a mean betwixt
the two; but they only say this for the sake of talking. The true
temperament is found in Socrates; and, Plato is much more Socratic than
Pythagoric, and it becomes him better. When I dance, I dance; when I
sleep, I sleep. Nay, when I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my
thoughts are some part of the time taken up with external occurrences,
I some part of the time call them back again to my walk, to the orchard,
to the sweetness of that solitude, and to myself.
Nature has mother-like observed this, that the actions she has enjoined
us for our necessity should be also pleasurable to us; and she invites us
to them, not only by reason, but also by appetite, and ‘tis injustice to
infringe her laws. When I see alike Caesar and Alexander, in the midst
of his greatest business, so fully enjoy human and corporal pleasures, I
do not say that he relaxed his mind: I say that he strengthened it, by
vigour of courage subjecting those violent employments and laborious
thoughts to the ordinary usage of life: wise, had he believed the last
was his ordinary, the first his extraordinary, vocation. We are great
fools. “He has passed his life in idleness,” say we: “I have done
nothing to-day.” What? have you not lived? that is not only the
fundamental, but the most illustrious, of your occupations. “Had I been
put to the management of great affairs, I should have made it seen what I
could do.” “Have you known how to meditate and manage your life? you
have performed the greatest work of all.” In order to shew and develop
herself, nature needs only fortune; she equally manifests herself in all
stages, and behind a curtain as well as without one. Have you known how
to regulate your conduct, you have done a great deal more than he who has
composed books. Have you known how to take repose, you have done more
than he who has taken empires and cities.
The glorious masterpiece of man is to live to purpose; all other things:
to reign, to lay up treasure, to build, are but little appendices and
props. I take pleasure in seeing a general of an army, at the foot of a
breach he is presently to assault, give himself up entire and free at
dinner, to talk and be merry with his friends. And Brutus, when heaven
and earth were conspired against him and the Roman liberty, stealing some
hour of the night from his rounds to read and scan Polybius in all
security. ‘Tis for little souls, buried under the weight of affairs, not
from them to know how clearly to disengage themselves, not to know how to
lay them aside and take them up again:
“O fortes, pejoraque passi
Mecum saepe viri! nunc vino pellite curas
Cras ingens iterabimus aequor.”
[“O brave spirits, who have often suffered sorrow with me, drink
cares away; tomorrow we will embark once more on the vast sea.”
--Horace, Od., i. 7, 30.]
Whether it be in jest or earnest, that the theological and Sorbonnical
wine, and their feasts, are turned into a proverb, I find it reasonable
they should dine so much more commodiously and pleasantly, as they have
profitably and seriously employed the morning in the exercise of their
schools. The conscience of having well spent the other hours, is the
just and savoury sauce of the dinner-table. The sages lived after that
manner; and that inimitable emulation to virtue, which astonishes us both
in the one and the other Cato, that humour of theirs, so severe as even
to be importunate, gently submits itself and yields to the laws of the
human condition, of Venus and Bacchus; according to the precepts of their
sect, that require the perfect sage to be as expert and intelligent in
the use of natural pleasures as in all other duties of life:
“Cui cor sapiat, ei et sapiat palatus.”
Relaxation and facility, methinks, wonderfully honour and best become a
strong and generous soul. Epaminondas did not think that to take part,
and that heartily, in songs and sports and dances with the young men of
his city, were things that in any way derogated from the honour of his
glorious victories and the perfect purity of manners that was in him.
And amongst so many admirable actions of Scipio the grandfather, a person
worthy to be reputed of a heavenly extraction, there is nothing that
gives him a greater grace than to see him carelessly and childishly
trifling at gathering and selecting cockle shells, and playing at quoits,
[This game, as the “Dictionnaire de Trevoux” describes it, is one
wherein two persons contend which of them shall soonest pick up some
object.]
amusing and tickling himself in representing by writing in comedies the
meanest and most popular actions of men. And his head full of that
wonderful enterprise of Hannibal and Africa, visiting the schools in
Sicily, and attending philosophical lectures, to the extent of arming the
blind envy of his enemies at Rome. Nor is there anything more remarkable
in Socrates than that, old as he was, he found time to make himself
taught dancing and playing upon instruments, and thought it time well
spent. This same man was seen in an ecstasy, standing upon his feet a
whole day and a night together, in the presence of all the Grecian army,
surprised and absorbed by some profound thought. He was the first,
amongst so many valiant men of the army, to run to the relief of
Alcibiades, oppressed with the enemy, to shield him with his own body,
and disengage him from the crowd by absolute force of arms. It was he
who, in the Delian battle, raised and saved Xenophon when fallen from his
horse; and who, amongst all the people of Athens, enraged as he was at so
unworthy a spectacle, first presented himself to rescue Theramenes, whom
the thirty tyrants were leading to execution by their satellites, and
desisted not from his bold enterprise but at the remonstrance of
Theramenes himself, though he was only followed by two more in all. He
was seen, when courted by a beauty with whom he was in love, to maintain
at need a severe abstinence. He was seen ever to go to the wars, and
walk upon ice, with bare feet; to wear the same robe, winter and summer;
to surpass all his companions in patience of bearing hardships, and to
eat no more at a feast than at his own private dinner. He was seen, for
seven-and-twenty years together, to endure hunger, poverty, the
indocility of his children, and the nails of his wife, with the same
countenance. And, in the end, calumny, tyranny, imprisonment, fetters,
and poison. But was this man obliged to drink full bumpers by any rule
of civility? he was also the man of the whole army with whom the
advantage in drinking, remained. And he never refused to play at
noisettes, nor to ride the hobby-horse with children, and it became him
well; for all actions, says philosophy, equally become and equally honour
a wise man. We have enough wherewithal to do it, and we ought never to
be weary of presenting the image of this great man in all the patterns
and forms of perfection. There are very few examples of life, full and
pure; and we wrong our teaching every day, to propose to ourselves those
that are weak and imperfect, scarce good for any one service, and rather
pull us back; corrupters rather than correctors of manners. The people
deceive themselves; a man goes much more easily indeed by the ends, where
the extremity serves for a bound, a stop, and guide, than by the middle
way, large and open; and according to art, more than according to nature:
but withal much less nobly and commendably.
Greatness of soul consists not so much in mounting and in pressing
forward, as in knowing how to govern and circumscribe itself; it takes
everything for great, that is enough, and demonstrates itself in
preferring moderate to eminent things. There is nothing so fine and
legitimate as well and duly to play the man; nor science so arduous as
well and naturally to know how to live this life; and of all the
infirmities we have, ‘tis the most barbarous to despise our being.
Whoever has a mind to isolate his spirit, when the body is ill at ease,
to preserve it from the contagion, let him by all means do it if he can:
but otherwise let him on the contrary favour and assist it, and not
refuse to participate of its natural pleasures with a conjugal
complacency, bringing to it, if it be the wiser, moderation, lest by
indiscretion they should get confounded with displeasure. Intemperance
is the pest of pleasure; and temperance is not its scourge, but rather
its seasoning. Euxodus, who therein established the sovereign good, and
his companions, who set so high a value upon it, tasted it in its most
charming sweetness, by the means of temperance, which in them was
singular and exemplary.
I enjoin my soul to look upon pain and pleasure with an eye equally
regulated:
“Eodem enim vitio est effusio animi in laetitia
quo in dolore contractio,”
[“For from the same imperfection arises the expansion of the
mind in pleasure and its contraction in sorrow.”
--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., iv. 31.]
and equally firm; but the one gaily and the other severely, and so far as
it is able, to be careful to extinguish the one as to extend the other.
The judging rightly of good brings along with it the judging soundly of
evil: pain has something of the inevitable in its tender beginnings, and
pleasure something of the evitable in its excessive end. Plato couples
them together, and wills that it should be equally the office of
fortitude to fight against pain, and against the immoderate and charming
blandishments of pleasure: they are two fountains, from which whoever
draws, when and as much as he needs, whether city, man, or beast, is very
fortunate. The first is to be taken medicinally and upon necessity, and
more scantily; the other for thirst, but not to, drunkenness. Pain,
pleasure, love and hatred are the first things that a child is sensible
of: if, when reason comes, they apply it to themselves, that is virtue.
I have a special vocabulary of my own; I “pass away time,” when it is ill
and uneasy, but when ‘tis good I do not pass it away: “I taste it over
again and adhere to it”; one must run over the ill and settle upon the
good. This ordinary phrase of pastime, and passing away the time,
represents the usage of those wise sort of people who think they cannot
do better with their lives than to let them run out and slide away, pass
them over, and baulk them, and, as much as they can, ignore them and shun
them as a thing of troublesome and contemptible quality: but I know it to
be another kind of thing, and find it both valuable and commodious, even
in its latest decay, wherein I now enjoy it; and nature has delivered it
into our hands in such and so favourable circumstances that we have only
ourselves to blame if it be troublesome to us, or escapes us
unprofitably:
“Stulti vita ingrata est, trepida est, tota in futurum fertur.”
[“The life of a fool is thankless, timorous, and wholly bent upon
the future.”--Seneca, Ep:, 15.]
Nevertheless I compose myself to lose mine without regret; but withal as
a thing that is perishable by its condition, not that it molests or
annoys me. Nor does it properly well become any not to be displeased
when they die, excepting such as are pleased to live. There is good
husbandry in enjoying it: I enjoy it double to what others do; for the
measure of its fruition depends upon our more or less application to it.
Chiefly that I perceive mine to be so short in time, I desire to extend
it in weight; I will stop the promptitude of its flight by the
promptitude of my grasp; and by the vigour of using it compensate the
speed of its running away. In proportion as the possession of life is
more short, I must make it so much deeper and fuller.
Others feel the pleasure of content and prosperity; I feel it too, as
well as they, but not as it passes and slips by; one should study, taste,
and ruminate upon it to render condign thanks to Him who grants it to us.
They enjoy the other pleasures as they do that of sleep, without knowing
it. To the end that even sleep itself should not so stupidly escape from
me, I have formerly caused myself to be disturbed in my sleep, so that I
might the better and more sensibly relish and taste it. I ponder with
myself of content; I do not skim over, but sound it; and I bend my
reason, now grown perverse and peevish, to entertain it. Do I find
myself in any calm composedness? is there any pleasure that tickles me?
I do not suffer it to dally with my senses only; I associate my soul to
it too: not there to engage itself, but therein to take delight; not
there to lose itself, but to be present there; and I employ it, on its
part, to view itself in this prosperous state, to weigh and appreciate
its happiness and to amplify it. It reckons how much it stands indebted
to God that its conscience and the intestine passions are in repose; that
it has the body in its natural disposition, orderly and competently
enjoying the soft and soothing functions by which He, of His grace is
pleased to compensate the sufferings wherewith His justice at His good
pleasure chastises us. It reflects how great a benefit it is to be so
protected, that which way soever it turns its eye the heavens are calm
around it. No desire, no fear, no doubt, troubles the air; no
difficulty, past, present, or to, come, that its imagination may not pass
over without offence. This consideration takes great lustre from the
comparison of different conditions. So it is that I present to my
thought, in a thousand aspects, those whom fortune or their own error
carries away and torments. And, again, those who, more like to me, so
negligently and incuriously receive their good fortune. Those are folks
who spend their time indeed; they pass over the present and that which
they possess, to wait on hope, and for shadows and vain images which
fancy puts before them:
“Morte obita quales fama est volitare figuras,
Aut quae sopitos deludunt somnia sensus:”
[“Such forms as those which after death are reputed to hover about,
or dreams which delude the senses in sleep.”--AEneid, x. 641.]
which hasten and prolong their flight, according as they are pursued.
The fruit and end of their pursuit is to pursue; as Alexander said, that
the end of his labour was to labour:
“Nil actum credens, cum quid superesset agendum.”
[“Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done.
--“Lucan, ii. 657.]
For my part then, I love life and cultivate it, such as it has pleased
God to bestow it upon us. I do not desire it should be without the
necessity of eating and drinking; and I should think it a not less
excusable failing to wish it had been twice as long;
“Sapiens divitiarum naturalium quaesitor acerrimus:”
[“A wise man is the keenest seeker for natural riches.”
--Seneca, Ep., 119.]
nor that we should support ourselves by putting only a little of that
drug into our mouths, by which Epimenides took away his appetite and kept
himself alive; nor that we should stupidly beget children with our
fingers or heels, but rather; with reverence be it spoken, that we might
voluptuously beget them with our fingers and heels; nor that the body
should be without desire and without titillation. These are ungrateful
and wicked complaints. I accept kindly, and with gratitude, what nature
has done for me; am well pleased with it, and proud of it. A man does
wrong to that great and omnipotent giver to refuse, annul, or disfigure
his gift: all goodness himself, he has made everything good:
“Omnia quae secundum naturam sunt, aestimatione digna sunt.”
[“All things that are according to nature are worthy of esteem.”
--Cicero, De Fin., iii. 6.]
Of philosophical opinions, I preferably embrace those that are most
solid, that is to say, the most human and most our own: my discourse is,
suitable to my manners, low and humble: philosophy plays the child, to my
thinking, when it puts itself upon its Ergos to preach to us that ‘tis a
barbarous alliance to marry the divine with the earthly, the reasonable
with the unreasonable, the severe with the indulgent, the honest with the
dishonest. That pleasure is a brutish quality, unworthy to be tasted by
a wise man; that the sole pleasure he extracts from the enjoyment of a
fair young wife is a pleasure of his conscience to perform an action
according to order, as to put on his boots for a profitable journey.
Oh, that its followers had no more right, nor nerves, nor vigour in
getting their wives’ maidenheads than in its lesson.
This is not what Socrates says, who is its master and ours: he values, as
he ought, bodily pleasure; but he prefers that of the mind as having more
force, constancy, facility, variety, and dignity. This, according to
him, goes by no means alone--he is not so fantastic--but only it goes
first; temperance with him is the moderatrix, not the adversary of
pleasure. Nature is a gentle guide, but not more sweet and gentle than
prudent and just.
“Intrandum est in rerum naturam, et penitus,
quid ea postulet, pervidendum.”
[“A man must search into the nature of things, and fully examine
what she requires.”--Cicero, De Fin., V. 16.]
I hunt after her foot throughout: we have confounded it with artificial
traces; and that academic and peripatetic good, which is “to live
according to it,” becomes on this account hard to limit and explain; and
that of the Stoics, neighbour to it, which is “to consent to nature.”
Is it not an error to esteem any actions less worthy, because they are
necessary? And yet they will not take it out of my head, that it is not
a very convenient marriage of pleasure with necessity, with which, says
an ancient, the gods always conspire. To what end do we dismember by
divorce a building united by so close and brotherly a correspondence?
Let us, on the contrary, confirm it by mutual offices; let the mind rouse
and quicken the heaviness of the body, and the body stay and fix the
levity of the soul:
“Qui, velut summum bonum, laudat animac naturam, et, tanquam malum,
naturam carnis accusat, profectd et animam carnatiter appetit, et
carnem carnaliter fugit; quoniam id vanitate sentit humans, non
veritate divina.”
[“He who commends the nature of the soul as the supreme good, and
condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, at once both carnally
desires the soul, and carnally flies the flesh, because he feels
thus from human vanity, not from divine truth.”
--St. Augustin, De Civit. Dei, xiv. 5.]
In this present that God has made us, there is nothing unworthy our care;
we stand accountable for it even to a hair; and is it not a commission to
man, to conduct man according to his condition; ‘tis express, plain, and
the very principal one, and the Creator has seriously and strictly
prescribed it to us. Authority has power only to work in regard to
matters of common judgment, and is of more weight in a foreign language;
therefore let us again charge at it in this place:
“Stultitiae proprium quis non dixerit, ignave et contumaciter
facere, quae facienda sunt; et alio corpus impellere, alio animum;
distrahique inter diversissimos motus?”
[“Who will not say, that it is the property of folly, slothfully and
contumaciously to perform what is to be done, and to bend the body
one way and the mind another, and to be distracted betwixt wholly
different motions?”--Seneca, Ep., 74.]
To make this apparent, ask any one, some day, to tell you what whimsies
and imaginations he put into his pate, upon the account of which he
diverted his thoughts from a good meal, and regrets the time he spends in
eating; you will find there is nothing so insipid in all the dishes at
your table as this wise meditation of his (for the most part we had
better sleep than wake to the purpose we wake); and that his discourses
and notions are not worth the worst mess there. Though they were the
ecstasies of Archimedes himself, what then? I do not here speak of, nor
mix with the rabble of us ordinary men, and the vanity of the thoughts
and desires that divert us, those venerable souls, elevated by the ardour
of devotion and religion, to a constant and conscientious meditation of
divine things, who, by the energy of vivid and vehement hope,
prepossessing the use of the eternal nourishment, the final aim and last
step of Christian desires, the sole constant, and incorruptible pleasure,
disdain to apply themselves to our necessitous, fluid, and ambiguous
conveniences, and easily resign to the body the care and use of sensual
and temporal pasture; ‘tis a privileged study. Between ourselves, I have
ever observed supercelestial opinions and subterranean manners to be of
singular accord.
AEsop, that great man, saw his master piss as he walked: “What then,”
said he, “must we drop as we run?” Let us manage our time; there yet
remains a great deal idle and ill employed. The mind has not willingly
other hours enough wherein to do its business, without disassociating
itself from the body, in that little space it must have for its
necessity. They would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from
being men. It is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels,
they transform themselves into beasts; instead of elevating, they lay
themselves lower. These transcendental humours affright me, like high
and inaccessible places; and nothing is hard for me to digest in the life
of Socrates but his ecstasies and communication with demons; nothing so
human in Plato as that for which they say he was called divine; and of
our sciences, those seem to be the most terrestrial and low that are
highest mounted; and I find nothing so humble and mortal in the life of
Alexander as his fancies about his immortalisation. Philotas pleasantly
quipped him in his answer; he congratulated him by letter concerning the
oracle of Jupiter Ammon, which had placed him amongst the gods: “Upon thy
account I am glad of it, but the men are to be pitied who are to live
with a man, and to obey him, who exceeds and is not contented with the
measure of a man:”
“Diis to minorem quod geris, imperas.”
[“Because thou carriest thyself lower than the gods, thou rulest.”
--Horace, Od., iii. 6, 5.]
The pretty inscription wherewith the Athenians honoured the entry of
Pompey into their city is conformable to my sense: “By so much thou art
a god, as thou confessest thee a man.” ‘Tis an absolute and, as it were,
a divine perfection, for a man to know how loyally to enjoy his being.
We seek other conditions, by reason we do not understand the use of our
own; and go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside.
‘Tis to much purpose to go upon stilts, for, when upon stilts, we must
yet walk with our legs; and when seated upon the most elevated throne in
the world, we are but seated upon our breech. The fairest lives, in my
opinion, are those which regularly accommodate themselves to the common
and human model without miracle, without extravagance. Old age stands a
little in need of a more gentle treatment. Let us recommend that to God,
the protector of health and wisdom, but let it be gay and sociable:
“Frui paratis et valido mihi
Latoe, dones, et precor, integra
Cum mente; nec turpem senectam
Degere, nec Cithara carentem.”
[“Grant it to me, Apollo, that I may enjoy my possessions in good
health; let me be sound in mind; let me not lead a dishonourable
old age, nor want the cittern.”--Horace, Od., i. 31, 17.]
Or:
[“Grant it to me, Apollo, that I may enjoy what I have in good
health; let me be sound in body and mind; let me live in honour when
old, nor let music be wanting.”]
APOLOGY:
[In fact, the first edition of the Essays (Bordeaux, 1580) has very few
quotations. These became more numerous in the edition of 1588; but the
multitude of classical texts which at times encumber Montaigne’s text,
only dates from the posthumous edition of 1595] he had made these
collections in the four last years of his life, as an amusement of his
“idleness.”--Le Clerc. They grow, however, more sparing in the Third
Book.
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
A well-governed stomach is a great part of liberty
Affirmation and obstinacy are express signs of want of wit
Alexander said, that the end of his labour was to labour
All actions equally become and equally honour a wise man
As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by law
At the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little
better have none at all than to have them in so prodigious a num
Both kings and philosophers go to stool
Cannot stand the liberty of a friend’s advice
Cleave to the side that stood most in need of her
Condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes
Customs and laws make justice
Dignify our fopperies when we commit them to the press
Diversity of medical arguments and opinions embraces all
Every man thinks himself sufficiently intelligent
Excuse myself from knowing anything which enslaves me to others
First informed who were to be the other guests
Go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside
Got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one
Hate remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears
How many and many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment
“I have done nothing to-day.”--“What? have you not lived?”
If it be a delicious medicine, take it
Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not
Intemperance is the pest of pleasure
Language: obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts
Last death will kill but a half or a quarter of a man
Law: breeder of altercation and division
Laws keep up their credit, not for being just--but as laws
Lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me.
Learn my own debility and the treachery of my understanding
Life of Caesar has no greater example for us than our own
Long sittings at table both trouble me and do me harm
Made all medicinal conclusions largely give way to my pleasure
Man after who held out his pulse to a physician was a fool
Man must learn that he is nothing but a fool
More ado to interpret interpretations
More books upon books than upon any other subject
Never did two men make the same judgment of the same thing
None that less keep their promise (than physicians)
Nor get children but before I sleep, nor get them standing
Nothing so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws
Our justice presents to us but one hand
Perpetual scolding of his wife (of Socrates)
Physician: pass through all the diseases he pretends to cure
Plato angry at excess of sleeping than at excess of drinking
Plato: lawyers and physicians are bad institutions of a country
Prolong your misery an hour or two
Put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties
Resolved to bring nothing to it but expectation and patience
Scratching is one of nature’s sweetest gratifications
Seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives
So weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him
Soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity
Study makes me sensible how much I have to learn
Style wherewith men establish religions and laws
Subdividing these subtilties we teach men to increase their doub
That we may live, we cease to live
The mean is best
There is none of us who would not be worse than kings
Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done
Thinks nothing profitable that is not painful
Thou diest because thou art living
Tis so I melt and steal away from myself
Truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times
Truth, that for being older it is none the wiser
We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade
We ought to grant free passage to diseases
Whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger
Why do we not imitate the Roman architecture?
Wrangling arrogance, wholly believing and trusting in itself
Yet do we find any end of the need of interpretating?
ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS FOR THE COMPLETE EDITION:
A child should not be brought up in his mother’s lap
A gallant man does not give over his pursuit for being refused
A generous heart ought not to belie its own thoughts
A hundred more escape us than ever come to our knowledge
A lady could not boast of her chastity who was never tempted
A little cheese when a mind to make a feast
A little thing will turn and divert us
A man may always study, but he must not always go to school
A man may govern himself well who cannot govern others so
A man may play the fool in everything else, but not in poetry
A man must either imitate the vicious or hate them
A man must have courage to fear
A man never speaks of himself without loss
A man should abhor lawsuits as much as he may
A man should diffuse joy, but, as much as he can, smother grief
A man’s accusations of himself are always believed
A parrot would say as much as that
A person’s look is but a feeble warranty
A well-bred man is a compound man
A well-governed stomach is a great part of liberty
A word ill taken obliterates ten years’ merit
Abhorrence of the patient are necessary circumstances
Abominate that incidental repentance which old age brings
Accept all things we are not able to refute
Accommodated my subject to my strength
Accursed be thou, as he that arms himself for fear of death
Accusing all others of ignorance and imposition
Acquiesce and submit to truth
Acquire by his writings an immortal life
Addict thyself to the study of letters
Addresses his voyage to no certain, port
Admiration is the foundation of all philosophy
Advantageous, too, a little to recede from one’s right
Advise to choose weapons of the shortest sort
Affect words that are not of current use
Affection towards their husbands, (not) until they have lost them
Affirmation and obstinacy are express signs of want of wit
Affright people with the very mention of death
Against my trifles you could say no more than I myself have said
Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than it does on the face
Agesilaus, what he thought most proper for boys to learn?
Agitated betwixt hope and fear
Agitation has usurped the place of reason
Alexander said, that the end of his labour was to labour
All actions equally become and equally honour a wise man
All apprentices when we come to it (death)
All defence shows a face of war
All I aim at is, to pass my time at my ease
All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice
All judgments in gross are weak and imperfect
All over-nice solicitude about riches smells of avarice
All things have their seasons, even good ones
All think he has yet twenty good years to come
All those who have authority to be angry in my family
Almanacs
Always be parading their pedantic science
Always complaining is the way never to be lamented
Always the perfect religion
Am as jealous of my repose as of my authority
An advantage in judgment we yield to none
“An emperor,” said he, “must die standing”
An ignorance that knowledge creates and begets
Ancient Romans kept their youth always standing at school
And hate him so as you were one day to love him
And we suffer the ills of a long peace
Anger and hatred are beyond the duty of justice
Any argument if it be carried on with method
Any old government better than change and alteration
Any one may deprive us of life; no one can deprive us of death
Anything appears greatest to him that never knew a greater
Anything becomes foul when commended by the multitude
Anything of value in him, let him make it appear in his conduct
Appetite comes to me in eating
Appetite is more sharp than one already half-glutted by the eyes
Appetite runs after that it has not
Appetite to read more, than glutted with that we have
Applaud his judgment than commend his knowledge
Apprenticeship and a resemblance of death
Apprenticeships that are to be served beforehand
Apt to promise something less than what I am able to do
Archer that shoots over, misses as much as he that falls short
Armed parties (the true school of treason, inhumanity, robbery)
Arrogant ignorance
Art that could come to the knowledge of but few persons
“Art thou not ashamed,” said he to him, “to sing so well?”
Arts of persuasion, to insinuate it into our minds
As great a benefit to be without (children)
As if anything were so common as ignorance
As if impatience were of itself a better remedy than patience
As we were formerly by crimes, so we are now overburdened by law
Ashamed to lay out as much thought and study upon it
Assurance they give us of the certainty of their drugs
At least, if they do no good, they will do no harm
At the most, but patch you up, and prop you a little
Attribute facility of belief to simplicity and ignorance
Attribute to itself; all the happy successes that happen
Authority of the number and antiquity of the witnesses
Authority to be dissected by the vain fancies of men
Authority which a graceful presence and a majestic mien beget
Avoid all magnificences that will in a short time be forgotten
Away with that eloquence that enchants us with itself
Away with this violence! away with this compulsion!
Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age
Be not angry to no purpose
Be on which side you will, you have as fair a game to play
Bears well a changed fortune, acting both parts equally well
Beast of company, as the ancient said, but not of the herd
Beauty of stature is the only beauty of men
Because the people know so well how to obey
Become a fool by too much wisdom
Being as impatient of commanding as of being commanded
Being dead they were then by one day happier than he
Being over-studious, we impair our health and spoil our humour
Belief compared to the impression of a seal upon the soul
Believing Heaven concerned at our ordinary actions
Best part of a captain to know how to make use of occasions
Best test of truth is the multitude of believers in a crowd
Best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice
Better at speaking than writing--Motion and action animate word
better have none at all than to have them in so prodigious a num
Better to be alone than in foolish and troublesome company
Blemishes of the great naturally appear greater
Books go side by side with me in my whole course
Books have many charming qualities to such as know how to choose
Books have not so much served me for instruction as exercise
Books I read over again, still smile upon me with fresh novelty
Books of things that were never either studied or understood
Both himself and his posterity declared ignoble, taxable
Both kings and philosophers go to stool
Burnt and roasted for opinions taken upon trust from others
Business to-morrow
But ill proves the honour and beauty of an action by its utility
But it is not enough that our education does not spoil us
By resenting the lie we acquit ourselves of the fault
By suspecting them, have given them a title to do ill
“By the gods,” said he, “if I was not angry, I would execute you”
By the misery of this life, aiming at bliss in another
Caesar: he would be thought an excellent engineer to boot
Caesar’s choice of death: “the shortest”
Can neither keep nor enjoy anything with a good grace
Cannot stand the liberty of a friend’s advice
Carnal appetites only supported by use and exercise
Cato said: So many servants, so many enemies
Ceremony forbids us to express by words things that are lawful
Certain other things that people hide only to show them
Change is to be feared
Change of fashions
Change only gives form to injustice and tyranny
Cherish themselves most where they are most wrong
Chess: this idle and childish game
Chiefly knew himself to be mortal by this act
Childish ignorance of many very ordinary things
Children are amused with toys and men with words
Cicero: on fame
Civil innocence is measured according to times and places
Cleave to the side that stood most in need of her
cloak on one shoulder, my cap on one side, a stocking disordered
College: a real house of correction of imprisoned youth
Coming out of the same hole
Commit themselves to the common fortune
Common consolation, discourages and softens me
Common friendships will admit of division
Conclude the depth of my sense by its obscurity
Concluding no beauty can be greater than what they see
Condemn all violence in the education of a tender soul
Condemn the opposite affirmation equally
Condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes
Condemning wine, because some people will be drunk
Confession enervates reproach and disarms slander
Confidence in another man’s virtue
Conscience makes us betray, accuse, and fight against ourselves
Conscience, which we pretend to be derived from nature
Consent, and complacency in giving a man’s self up to melancholy
Consoles himself upon the utility and eternity of his writings
Content: more easily found in want than in abundance
Counterfeit condolings of pretenders
Courageous in death, not because his soul is immortal--Socrates
Courtesy and good manners is a very necessary study
Crafty humility that springs from presumption
Crates did worse, who threw himself into the liberty of poverty
Cruelty is the very extreme of all vices
Culling out of several books the sentences that best please me
Curiosity and of that eager passion for news
Curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge
“Custom,” replied Plato, “is no little thing”
Customs and laws make justice
Dangerous man you have deprived of all means to escape
Dangers do, in truth, little or nothing hasten our end
Dearness is a good sauce to meat
Death can, whenever we please, cut short inconveniences
Death conduces more to birth and augmentation than to loss
Death discharges us of all our obligations
Death has us every moment by the throat
Death is a part of you
Death is terrible to Cicero, coveted by Cato
Death of old age the most rare and very seldom seen
Deceit maintains and supplies most men’s employment
Decree that says, “The court understands nothing of the matter”
Defence allures attempt, and defiance provokes an enemy
Defend most the defects with which we are most tainted
Defer my revenge to another and better time
Deformity of the first cruelty makes me abhor all imitation
Delivered into our own custody the keys of life
Denying all solicitation, both of hand and mind
Depend as much upon fortune as anything else we do
Desire of riches is more sharpened by their use than by the need
Desire of travel
Desires, that still increase as they are fulfilled
Detest in others the defects which are more manifest in us
Did my discourses came only from my mouth or from my heart
Did not approve all sorts of means to obtain a victory
Die well--that is, patiently and tranquilly
Difference betwixt memory and understanding
Difficulty gives all things their estimation
Dignify our fopperies when we commit them to the press
Diogenes, esteeming us no better than flies or bladders
Discover what there is of good and clean in the bottom of the po
Disdainful, contemplative, serious and grave as the ass
Disease had arrived at its period or an effect of chance?
Disgorge what we eat in the same condition it was swallowed
Disguise, by their abridgments and at their own choice
Dissentient and tumultuary drugs
Diversity of medical arguments and opinions embraces all
Diverting the opinions and conjectures of the people
Do not much blame them for making their advantage of our folly
Do not to pray that all things may go as we would have them
Do not, nevertheless, always believe myself
Do thine own work, and know thyself
Doctors: more felicity and duration in their own lives?
Doctrine much more intricate and fantastic than the thing itself
Dost thou, then, old man, collect food for others’ ears?
Doubt whether those (old writings) we have be not the worst
Doubtful ills plague us worst
Downright and sincere obedience
Drugs being in its own nature an enemy to our health
Drunkeness a true and certain trial of every one’s nature
Dying appears to him a natural and indifferent accident
Each amongst you has made somebody cuckold
Eat your bread with the sauce of a more pleasing imagination
Education
Education ought to be carried on with a severe sweetness
Effect and performance are not at all in our power
Either tranquil life, or happy death
Eloquence prejudices the subject it would advance
Emperor Julian, surnamed the Apostate
Endeavouring to be brief, I become obscure
Engaged in the avenues of old age, being already past forty
Enough to do to comfort myself, without having to console others
Enslave our own contentment to the power of another?
Enters lightly into a quarrel is apt to go as lightly out of it
Entertain us with fables: astrologers and physicians
Epicurus
Establish this proposition by authority and huffing
Evade this tormenting and unprofitable knowledge
Even the very promises of physic are incredible in themselves
Events are a very poor testimony of our worth and parts
Every abridgment of a good book is a foolish abridgment
Every day travels towards death; the last only arrives at it
Every government has a god at the head of it
Every man thinks himself sufficiently intelligent
Every place of retirement requires a walk
Everything has many faces and several aspects
Examine, who is better learned, than who is more learned
Excel above the common rate in frivolous things
Excuse myself from knowing anything which enslaves me to others
Executions rather whet than dull the edge of vices
Expresses more contempt and condemnation than the other
Extend their anger and hatred beyond the dispute in question
Extremity of philosophy is hurtful
Fabric goes forming and piling itself up from hand to hand
Fame: an echo, a dream, nay, the shadow of a dream
Fancy that others cannot believe otherwise than as he does
Fantastic gibberish of the prophetic canting
Far more easy and pleasant to follow than to lead
Fathers conceal their affection from their children
Fault not to discern how far a man’s worth extends
Fault will be theirs for having consulted me
Fear and distrust invite and draw on offence
Fear is more importunate and insupportable than death itself
Fear of the fall more fevers me than the fall itself
Fear to lose a thing, which being lost, cannot be lamented?
Fear was not that I should do ill, but that I should do nothing
Fear: begets a terrible astonishment and confusion
Feared, lest disgrace should make such delinquents desperate
Feminine polity has a mysterious procedure
Few men have been admired by their own domestics
Few men have made a wife of a mistress, who have not repented it
First informed who were to be the other guests
First thing to be considered in love matters: a fitting time
Flatterer in your old age or in your sickness
Follies do not make me laugh, it is our wisdom which does
Folly and absurdity are not to be cured by bare admonition
Folly of gaping after future things
Folly satisfied with itself than any reason can reasonably be
Folly than to be moved and angry at the follies of the world
Folly to hazard that upon the uncertainty of augmenting it
Folly to put out their own light and shine by a borrowed lustre
For fear of the laws and report of men
For who ever thought he wanted sense?
Fortune heaped up five or six such-like incidents
Fortune rules in all things
Fortune sometimes seems to delight in taking us at our word
Fortune will still be mistress of events
Fox, who found fault with what he could not obtain
Friend, it is not now time to play with your nails
Friend, the hook will not stick in such soft cheese
Friendships that the law and natural obligation impose upon us
Fruits of public commotion are seldom enjoyed
Gain to change an ill condition for one that is uncertain
Gave them new and more plausible names for their excuse
Gentleman would play the fool to make a show of defence
Gently to bear the inconstancy of a lover
Gewgaw to hang in a cabinet or at the end of the tongue
Give but the rind of my attention
Give me time to recover my strength and health
Give the ladies a cruel contempt of our natural furniture
Give these young wenches the things they long for
Give us history, more as they receive it than as they believe it
Giving is an ambitious and authoritative quality
Glory and curiosity are the scourges of the soul
Go out of ourselves, because we know not how there to reside
Good does not necessarily succeed evil; another evil may succeed
Good to be certain and finite, and evil, infinite and uncertain
Got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one
Gradations above and below pleasure
Gratify the gods and nature by massacre and murder
Great presumption to be so fond of one’s own opinions
Greatest apprehensions, from things unseen, concealed
Greatest talkers, for the most part, do nothing to purpose
Greedy humour of new and unknown things
Grief provokes itself
Gross impostures of religions
Guess at our meaning under general and doubtful terms
Happen to do anything commendable, I attribute it to fortune
Hard to resolve a man’s judgment against the common opinions
Haste trips up its own heels, fetters, and stops itself
Hate all sorts of obligation and restraint
Hate remedies that are more troublesome than the disease itself
Have ever had a great respect for her I loved
Have more wherewith to defray my journey, than I have way to go
Have no other title left me to these things but by the ears
Have you ever found any who have been dissatisfied with dying?
Having too good an opinion of our own worth
He cannot be good, seeing he is not evil even to the wicked
He did not think mankind worthy of a wise man’s concern
He felt a pleasure and delight in so noble an action
He judged other men by himself
He may employ his passion, who can make no use of his reason
He may well go a foot, they say, who leads his horse in his hand
He must fool it a little who would not be deemed wholly a fool
He should discern in himself, as well as in others
He took himself along with him
He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears
He who is only a good man that men may know it
He who lays the cloth is ever at the charge of the feast
He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere
He who provides for all, provides for nothing
He who stops not the start will never be able to stop the course
He will choose to be alone
Headache should come before drunkenness
Health depends upon the vanity and falsity of their promises
Health is altered and corrupted by their frequent prescriptions
Health to be worth purchasing by all the most painful cauteries
Hearing a philosopher talk of military affairs
Heat and stir up their imagination, and then we find fault
Help: no other effect than that of lengthening my suffering
High time to die when there is more ill than good in living
Hoary head and rivelled face of ancient usage
Hobbes said that if he Had been at college as long as others--
Hold a stiff rein upon suspicion
Home anxieties and a mind enslaved by wearing complaints
Homer: The only words that have motion and action
Honour of valour consists in fighting, not in subduing
How infirm and decaying material this fabric of ours is
How many and many times he has been mistaken in his own judgment
How many more have died before they arrived at thy age
How many several ways has death to surprise us?
“How many things,” said he, “I do not desire!”
How many worthy men have we known to survive their reputation
How much easier is it not to enter in than it is to get out
How much it costs him to do no worse
How much more insupportable and painful an immortal life
How uncertain duration these accidental conveniences are
Humble out of pride
Husbands hate their wives only because they themselves do wrong
I always find superfluity superfluous
I am a little tenderly distrustful of things that I wish
I am apt to dream that I dream
I am disgusted with the world I frequent
I am hard to be got out, but being once upon the road
I am no longer in condition for any great change
I am not to be cuffed into belief
I am plain and heavy, and stick to the solid and the probable
I am very glad to find the way beaten before me by others
I am very willing to quit the government of my house
I bequeath to Areteus the maintenance of my mother
I can more hardly believe a man’s constancy than any virtue
I cannot well refuse to play with my dog
I content myself with enjoying the world without bustle
I dare not promise but that I may one day be so much a fool
I do not consider what it is now, but what it was then
I do not judge opinions by years
I do not much lament the dead, and should envy them rather
I do not say that ‘tis well said, but well thought
I do not willingly alight when I am once on horseback
I enter into confidence with dying
I ever justly feared to raise my head too high
I every day hear fools say things that are not foolish
I find myself here fettered by the laws of ceremony
I find no quality so easy to counterfeit as devotion
I for my part always went the plain way to work
I grudge nothing but care and trouble
I had much rather die than live upon charity
I had rather be old a brief time, than be old before old age
I hail and caress truth in what quarter soever I find it
I hate all sorts of tyranny, both in word and deed
I hate poverty equally with pain
I have a great aversion from a novelty
“I have done nothing to-day”--“What? have you not lived?”
I have lived longer by this one day than I should have done
I have no mind to die, but I have no objection to be dead
I have not a wit supple enough to evade a sudden question
I have nothing of my own that satisfies my judgment
I honour those most to whom I show the least honour
I lay no great stress upon my opinions; or of others
I look upon death carelessly when I look upon it universally
I love stout expressions amongst gentle men
I love temperate and moderate natures
I need not seek a fool from afar; I can laugh at myself
I owe it rather to my fortune than my reason
I receive but little advice, I also give but little
I scorn to mend myself by halves
I see no people so soon sick as those who take physic
I speak truth, not so much as I would, but as much as I dare
I take hold of, as little glorious and exemplary as you will
I understand my men even by their silence and smiles
I was always superstitiously afraid of giving offence
I was too frightened to be ill
“I wish you good health”--“No health to thee” replied the other
I would as willingly be lucky as wise
I would be rich of myself, and not by borrowing
I write my book for few men and for few years
Idleness is to me a very painful labour
Idleness, the mother of corruption
If a passion once prepossess and seize me, it carries me away
If I am talking my best, whoever interrupts me, stops me
If I stand in need of anger and inflammation, I borrow it
If it be a delicious medicine, take it
If it be the writer’s wit or borrowed from some other
If nature do not help a little, it is very hard
If they can only be kind to us out of pity
If they chop upon one truth, that carries a mighty report
If they hear no noise, they think men sleep
If to philosophise be, as ‘tis defined, to doubt
Ignorance does not offend me, but the foppery of it
Impotencies that so unseasonably surprise the lover
Ill luck is good for something
Imagne the mighty will not abase themselves so much as to live
Imitating other men’s natures, thou layest aside thy own
Immoderate either seeking or evading glory or reputation
Impose them upon me as infallible
Impostures: very strangeness lends them credit
Improperly we call this voluntary dissolution, despair
Impunity pass with us for justice
In everything else a man may keep some decorum
In ordinary friendships I am somewhat cold and shy
In solitude, be company for thyself--Tibullus
In sorrow there is some mixture of pleasure
In the meantime, their halves were begging at their doors
In this last scene of death, there is no more counterfeiting
In those days, the tailor took measure of it
In war not to drive an enemy to despair
Inclination to love one another at the first sight
Inclination to variety and novelty common to us both
Incline the history to their own fancy
Inconsiderate excuses are a kind of self-accusation
Inconveniences that moderation brings (in civil war)
Indiscreet desire of a present cure, that so blind us
Indocile liberty of this member
Inquisitive after everything
Insensible of the stroke when our youth dies in us
Insert whole sections and pages out of ancient authors
Intelligence is required to be able to know that a man knows not
Intemperance is the pest of pleasure
Intended to get a new husband than to lament the old
Interdict all gifts betwixt man and wife
Interdiction incites, and who are more eager, being forbidden
It (my books) may know many things that are gone from me
It happens, as with cages, the birds without despair to get in
It is better to die than to live miserable
It is no hard matter to get children
It is not a book to read, ‘tis a book to study and learn
It is not for outward show that the soul is to play its part
It’s madness to nourish infirmity
Jealousy: no remedy but flight or patience
Judge by justice, and choose men by reason
Judge by the eye of reason, and not from common report
Judgment of duty principally lies in the will
Judgment of great things is many times formed from lesser thing
Justice als takes cognisance of those who glean after the reaper
Killing is good to frustrate an offence to come, not to revenge
Knock you down with the authority of their experience
Knot is not so sure that a man may not half suspect it will slip
Knowledge and truth may be in us without judgment
Knowledge is not so absolutely necessary as judgment
Knowledge of others, wherein the honour consists
Known evil was ever more supportable than one that was, new
Ladies are no sooner ours, than we are no more theirs
Language: obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts
Lascivious poet: Homer
Last death will kill but a half or a quarter of a man
Law: breeder of altercation and division
Laws (of Plato on travel), which forbids it after threescore
Laws cannot subsist without mixture of injustice
Laws do what they can, when they cannot do what they would
Laws keep up their credit, not for being just--but as laws
Lay the fault on the voices of those who speak to me
Laying themselves low to avoid the danger of falling
Learn my own debility and the treachery of my understanding
Learn the theory from those who best know the practice
Learn what it is right to wish
Learning improves fortunes enough, but not minds
Least end of a hair will serve to draw them into my discourse
Least touch or prick of a pencil in comparison of the whole
Leave society when we can no longer add anything to it
Leaving nothing unsaid, how home and bitter soever
Led by the ears by this charming harmony of words
Lend himself to others, and only give himself to himself
Lessen the just value of things that I possess
“Let a man take which course he will,” said he; “he will repent”
Let him be as wise as he will, after all he is but a man
Let him be satisfied with correcting himself
Let him examine every man’s talent
Let it alone a little
Let it be permitted to the timid to hope
Let not us seek illusions from without and unknown
Let us not be ashamed to speak what we are not ashamed to think
Let us not seek our disease out of ourselves; ‘tis in us
Liberality at the expense of others
Liberty and laziness, the qualities most predominant in me
Liberty of poverty
Liberty to lean, but not to lay our whole weight upon others
Library: Tis there that I am in my kingdom
License of judgments is a great disturbance to great affairs
Life of Caesar has no greater example for us than our own
Life should be cut off in the sound and living part
Light griefs can speak: deep sorrows are dumb
Light prognostics they give of themselves in their tender years
Little affairs most disturb us
Little knacks and frivolous subtleties
Little learning is needed to form a sound mind--Seneca
Little less trouble in governing a private family than a kingdom
Live a quite contrary sort of life to what they prescribe others
Live at the expense of life itself
Live, not so long as they please, but as long as they ought
Living is slavery if the liberty of dying be wanting
Living well, which of all arts is the greatest
Llaying the fault upon the patient, by such frivolous reasons
Lodge nothing in his fancy upon simple authority and upon trust
Long a voyage I should at last run myself into some disadvantage
Long sittings at table both trouble me and do me harm
Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation
Look on death not only without astonishment but without care
Look upon themselves as a third person only, a stranger
Look, you who think the gods have no care of human things
Lose what I have a particular care to lock safe up
Loses more by defending his vineyard than if he gave it up
Love is the appetite of generation by the mediation of beauty
Love shamefully and dishonestly cured by marriage
Love them the less for our own faults
Love we bear to our wives is very lawful
Love, full, lively, and sharp; a pleasure inflamed by difficulty
Loved them for our sport, like monkeys, and not as men
Lower himself to the meanness of defending his innocence
Made all medicinal conclusions largely give way to my pleasure
Making their advantage of our folly, for most men do the same
Malice must be employed to correct this arrogant ignorance
Malice sucks up the greatest part of its own venom
Malicious kind of justice
Man (must) know that he is his own
Man after who held out his pulse to a physician was a fool
Man can never be wise but by his own wisdom
Man may say too much even upon the best subjects
Man may with less trouble adapt himself to entire abstinence
Man must approach his wife with prudence and temperance
Man must have a care not to do his master so great service
Man must learn that he is nothing but a fool
Man runs a very great hazard in their hands (of physicians)
Mark of singular good nature to preserve old age
Marriage
Marriage rejects the company and conditions of love
Melancholy: Are there not some constitutions that feed upon it?
Memories are full enough, but the judgment totally void
Men approve of things for their being rare and new
Men are not always to rely upon the personal confessions
Men as often commend as undervalue me beyond reason
Men make them (the rules) without their (women’s) help
Men must embark, and not deliberate, upon high enterprises
Men should furnish themselves with such things as would float
Mercenaries who would receive any (pay)
Merciful to the man, but not to his wickedness--Aristotle
Methinks I am no more than half of myself
Methinks I promise it, if I but say it
Miracle: everything our reason cannot comprehend
Miracles and strange events have concealed themselves from me
Miracles appear to be so, according to our ignorance of nature
Miserable kind of remedy, to owe one’s health to one’s disease!
Miserable, who has not at home where to be by himself
Misfortunes that only hurt us by being known
Mix railing, indiscretion, and fury in his disputations
Moderation is a virtue that gives more work than suffering
Modesty is a foolish virtue in an indigent person (Homer)
More ado to interpret interpretations
More books upon books than upon any other subject
More brave men been lost in occasions of little moment
More solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak
More supportable to be always alone than never to be so
More valued a victory obtained by counsel than by force
Morosity and melancholic humour of a sour ill-natured pedant
Most cruel people, and upon frivolous occasions, apt to cry
Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency
Most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit
Most of my actions are guided by example, not by choice
Mothers are too tender
Motive to some vicious occasion or some prospect of profit
Much better to offend him once than myself every day
Much difference betwixt us and ourselves
Must for the most part entertain ourselves with ourselves
Must of necessity walk in the steps of another
My affection alters, my judgment does not
My books: from me hold that which I have not retained
My dog unseasonably importunes me to play
My fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it
My humour is no friend to tumult
My humour is unfit either to speak or write for beginners
My innocence is a simple one; little vigour and no art
My mind is easily composed at distance
My reason is not obliged to bow and bend; my knees are
My thoughts sleep if I sit still
My words does but injure the love I have conceived within
Natural death the most rare and very seldom seen
Nature of judgment to have it more deliberate and more slow
Nature of wit is to have its operation prompt and sudden
Nature, who left us in such a state of imperfection
Nearest to the opinions of those with whom they have to do
Negligent garb, which is yet observable amongst the young men
Neither be a burden to myself nor to any other
Neither continency nor virtue where there are no opposing desire
Neither men nor their lives are measured by the ell
Neither the courage to die nor the heart to live
Never any man knew so much, and spake so little
Never did two men make the same judgment of the same thing
Never observed any great stability in my soul to resist passions
Never oppose them either by word or sign, how false or absurd
Never represent things to you simply as they are
Never spoke of my money, but falsely, as others do
New World: sold it opinions and our arts at a very dear rate
Nnone that less keep their promise(than physicians)
No alcohol the night on which a man intends to get children
No beast in the world so much to be feared by man as man
No danger with them, though they may do us no good
No doing more difficult than that not doing, nor more active
No effect of virtue, to have stronger arms and legs
No evil is honourable; but death is honourable
No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness
No great choice betwixt not knowing to speak anything but ill--
No man continues ill long but by his own fault
No man is free from speaking foolish things
No man more certain than another of to-morrow--Seneca
No necessity upon a man to live in necessity
No one can be called happy till he is dead and buried
No other foundation or support than public abuse
No passion so contagious as that of fear
No physic that has not something hurtful in it
No use to this age, I throw myself back upon that other
No way found to tranquillity that is good in common
Noble and rich, where examples of virtue are rarely lodged
Nobody prognosticated that I should be wicked, but only useless
Noise of arms deafened the voice of laws
None of the sex, let her be as ugly as the devil thinks lovable
Nor get children but before I sleep, nor get them standing
Nor have other tie upon one another, but by our word
Nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of my own
Not a victory that puts not an end to the war
Not being able to govern events, I govern myself
Not believe from one, I should not believe from a hundred
Not certain to live till I came home
Not conceiving things otherwise than by this outward bark
Not conclude too much upon your mistress’s inviolable chastity
Not for any profit, but for the honour of honesty itself
Not having been able to pronounce one syllable, which is No!
Not in a condition to lend must forbid himself to borrow
Not melancholic, but meditative
Not to instruct but to be instructed
Not want, but rather abundance, that creates avarice
Nothing can be a grievance that is but once
Nothing falls where all falls
Nothing is more confident than a bad poet
Nothing is so firmly believed, as what we least know
Nothing is so supple and erratic as our understanding
Nothing noble can be performed without danger
Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation
Nothing so grossly, nor so ordinarily faulty, as the laws
Nothing tempts my tears but tears
Nothing that so poisons as flattery
Number of fools so much exceeds the wise
O Athenians, what this man says, I will do
O my friends, there is no friend: Aristotle
O wretched men, whose pleasures are a crime
O, the furious advantage of opportunity!
Obedience is never pure nor calm in him who reasons and disputes
Obliged to his age for having weaned him from pleasure
Observed the laws of marriage, than I either promised or expect
Obstinacy and contention are common qualities
Obstinacy is the sister of constancy
Obstinancy and heat in argument are the surest proofs of folly
Obstinate in growing worse
Occasion to La Boetie to write his “Voluntary Servitude”
Occasions of the least lustre are ever the most dangerous
Occupy our thoughts about the general, and about universal cause
Of the fleeting years each steals something from me
Office of magnanimity openly and professedly to love and hate
Oftentimes agitated with divers passions
Old age: applaud the past and condemn the present
Old men who retain the memory of things past
Omit, as incredible, such things as they do not understand
On all occasions to contradict and oppose
One door into life, but a hundred thousand ways out
One may be humble out of pride
One may more boldly dare what nobody thinks you dare
One may regret better times, but cannot fly from the present
One must first know what is his own and what is not
Only desire to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent
Only secure harbour from the storms and tempests of life
Only set the humours they would purge more violently in work
Open speaking draws out discoveries, like wine and love
Opinions they have of things and not by the things themselves
Opinions we have are taken on authority and trust
Opposition and contradiction entertain and nourish them
Option now of continuing in life or of completing the voyage
Order a purge for your brain, it will there be much better
Order it so that your virtue may conquer your misfortune
Ordinances it (Medicine) foists upon us
Ordinary friendships, you are to walk with bridle in your hand
Ordinary method of cure is carried on at the expense of life
Others adore all of their own side
Ought not only to have his hands, but his eyes, too, chaste
Ought not to expect much either from his vigilance or power
Ought to withdraw and retire his soul from the crowd
Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning
Our fancy does what it will, both with itself and us
Our judgments are yet sick
Our justice presents to us but one hand
Our knowledge, which is a wretched foundation
Our qualities have no title but in comparison
Our will is more obstinate by being opposed
Over-circumspect and wary prudence is a mortal enemy
Overvalue things, because they are foreign, absent
Owe ourselves chiefly and mostly to ourselves
Passion has a more absolute command over us than reason
Passion has already confounded his judgment
Passion of dandling and caressing infants scarcely born
Pay very strict usury who did not in due time pay the principal
People are willing to be gulled in what they desire
People conceiving they have right and title to be judges
Perfect friendship I speak of is indivisible
Perfect men as they are, they are yet simply men
Perfection: but I will not buy it so dear as it costs
Perpetual scolding of his wife (of Socrates)
Petulant madness contends with itself
Philopoemen: paying the penalty of my ugliness
Philosophy
Philosophy has discourses proper for childhood
Philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die
Philosophy is that which instructs us to live
Philosophy looked upon as a vain and fantastic name
Phusicians cure by by misery and pain
Physic
Physician worse physicked
Physician: pass through all the diseases he pretends to cure
Physician’s “help”, which is very often an obstacle
Physicians are not content to deal only with the sick
Physicians fear men should at any time escape their authority
Physicians were the only men who might lie at pleasure
Physicians: earth covers their failures
Pinch the secret strings of our imperfections
Pitiful ways and expedients to the jugglers of the law
Pity is reputed a vice amongst the Stoics
Plato angry at excess of sleeping than at excess of drinking
Plato forbids children wine till eighteen years of age
Plato said of the Egyptians, that they were all physicians
Plato says, that the gods made man for their sport
Plato will have nobody marry before thirty
Plato: lawyers and physicians are bad institutions of a country
Plays of children are not performed in play
Pleasing all: a mark that can never be aimed at or hit
Pleasure of telling (a pleasure little inferior to that of doing
Possession begets a contempt of what it holds and rules
Practical Jokes: Tis unhandsome to fight in play
Preachers very often work more upon their auditory than reasons
Preface to bribe the benevolence of the courteous reader
Prefer in bed, beauty before goodness
Preferring the universal and common tie to all national ties
Premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty
Prepare ourselves against the preparations of death
Present Him such words as the memory suggests to the tongue
Present himself with a halter about his neck to the people
Presumptive knowledge by silence
Pretending to find out the cause of every accident
Priest shall on the wedding-day open the way to the bride
Proceed so long as there shall be ink and paper in the world
Profession of knowledge and their immeasurable self-conceit
Profit made only at the expense of another
Prolong his life also prolonged and augmented his pain
Prolong your misery an hour or two
Prudent and just man may be intemperate and inconsistent
Prudent man, when I imagine him in this posture
Psalms of King David: promiscuous, indiscreet
Public weal requires that men should betray, and lie
Puerile simplicities of our children
Pure cowardice that makes our belief so pliable
Put us into a way of extending and diversifying difficulties
Pyrrho’s hog
Quiet repose and a profound sleep without dreams
Rage compelled to excuse itself by a pretence of good-will
Rage it puts them to oppose silence and coldness to their fury
Rash and incessant scolding runs into custom
Rather be a less while old than be old before I am really so
Rather complain of ill-fortune than be ashamed of victory
Rather prating of another man’s province than his own
Reading those books, converse with the great and heroic souls
Reasons often anticipate the effect
Recommendation of strangeness, rarity, and dear purchase
Refusin to justify, excuse, or explain myself
Regret so honourable a post, where necessity must make them bold
Remotest witness knows more about it than those who were nearest
Represented her a little too passionate for a married Venus
Reputation: most useless, frivolous, and false coin that passes
Repute for value in them, not what they bring to us
Reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free
Resolved to bring nothing to it but expectation and patience
Rest satisfied, without desire of prolongation of life or name
Restoring what has been lent us, wit usury and accession
Revenge more wounds our children than it heals us
Revenge, which afterwards produces a series of new cruelties
Reverse of truth has a hundred thousand forms
Rhetoric: an art to flatter and deceive
Rhetoric: to govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble
Richer than we think we are; but we are taught to borrow
Ridiculous desire of riches when we have lost the use of them
Right of command appertains to the beautiful-Aristotle
Rome was more valiant before she grew so learned
Rowers who so advance backward
Rude and quarrelsome flatly to deny a stated fact
Same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago
Satisfaction of mind to have only one path to walk in
Satisfied and pleased with and in themselves
Say of some compositions that they stink of oil and of the lamp
Scratching is one of nature’s sweetest gratifications
Season a denial with asperity, suspense, or favour
See how flexible our reason is
Seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives
Seeming anger, for the better governing of my house
Send us to the better air of some other country
Sense: no one who is not contented with his share
Setting too great a value upon ourselves
Setting too little a value upon others
Settled my thoughts to live upon less than I have
Sex: To put fools and wise men, beasts and us, on a level
Shake the truth of our Church by the vices of her ministers
Shame for me to serve, being so near the reach of liberty
Sharps and sweets of marriage, are kept secret by the wise
She who only refuses, because ‘tis forbidden, consents
Shelter my own weakness under these great reputations
Short of the foremost, but before the last
Should first have mended their breeches
Silence, therefore, and modesty are very advantageous qualities
Silent mien procured the credit of prudence and capacity
Sins that make the least noise are the worst
Sitting betwixt two stools
Slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk
Sleep suffocates and suppresses the faculties of the soul
Smile upon us whilst we are alive
So austere and very wise countenance and carriage--of physicians
So many trillions of men, buried before us
So much are men enslaved to their miserable being
So that I could have said no worse behind their backs
So weak and languishing, as not to have even wishing left to him
Socrates kept a confounded scolding wife
Socrates: According to what a man can
Soft, easy, and wholesome pillow is ignorance and incuriosity
Solon said that eating was physic against the malady hunger
Solon, that none can be said to be happy until he is dead
some people rude, by being overcivil in their courtesy
Some wives covetous indeed, but very few that are good managers
Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind
Souls that are regular and strong of themselves are rare
Sparing and an husband of his knowledge
Speak less of one’s self than what one really is is folly
Spectators can claim no interest in the honour and pleasure
Stilpo lost wife, children, and goods
Stilpo: thank God, nothing was lost of his
Strangely suspect all this merchandise: medical care
Strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment
Studied, when young, for ostentation, now for diversion
Studies, to teach me to do, and not to write
Study makes me sensible how much I have to learn
Study of books is a languishing and feeble motion
Study to declare what is justice, but never took care to do it
Stumble upon a truth amongst an infinite number of lies
Stupidity and facility natural to the common people
Style wherewith men establish religions and laws
Subdividing these subtilties we teach men to increase their doub
Such a recipe as they will not take themselves
Suffer my judgment to be made captive by prepossession
Suffer those inconveniences which are not possibly to be avoided
Sufficiently covered by their virtue without any other robe
Suicide: a morsel that is to be swallowed without chewing
Superstitiously to seek out in the stars the ancient causes
Swell and puff up their souls, and their natural way of speaking
Swim in troubled waters without fishing in them
Take a pleasure in being uninterested in other men’s affairs
Take all things at the worst, and to resolve to bear that worst
Take my last leave of every place I depart from
Take two sorts of grist out of the same sack
Taking things upon trust from vulgar opinion
Taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance
Taught to consider sleep as a resemblance of death
Tearing a body limb from limb by racks and torments
Testimony of the truth from minds prepossessed by custom?
That he could neither read nor swim
That looks a nice well-made shoe to you
That we may live, we cease to live
That which cowardice itself has chosen for its refuge
The action is commendable, not the man
The age we live in produces but very indifferent things
The authors, with whom I converse
The Babylonians carried their sick into the public square
The best authors too much humble and discourage me
The Bible: the wicked and ignorant grow worse by it
The cause of truth ought to be the common cause
The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine
The consequence of common examples
The day of your birth is one day’s advance towards the grave
The deadest deaths are the best
The event often justifies a very foolish conduct
The faintness that surprises in the exercises of Venus
The gods sell us all the goods they give us
The good opinion of the vulgar is injurious
The honour we receive from those that fear us is not honour
The ignorant return from the combat full of joy and triumph
The impulse of nature, which is a rough counsellor
The last informed is better persuaded than the first
The mean is best
The mind grows costive and thick in growing old
The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness
The most voluntary death is the finest
The particular error first makes the public error
The pedestal is no part of the statue
The privilege of the mind to rescue itself from old age
The reward of a thing well done is to have done it
The satiety of living, inclines a man to desire to die
The sick man has not to complain who has his cure in his sleeve
The storm is only begot by a concurrence of angers
The thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear
The very name Liberality sounds of Liberty
The vice opposite to curiosity is negligence
The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high
Their disguises and figures only serve to cosen fools
Their labour is not to delivery, but about conception
Their pictures are not here who were cast away
Their souls seek repose in agitation
There are defeats more triumphant than victories
There are some upon whom their rich clothes weep
There can be no pleasure to me without communication
There is more trouble in keeping money than in getting it
There is no allurement like modesty, if it be not rude
There is no long, nor short, to things that are no more
There is no merchant that always gains
There is no reason that has not its contrary
There is no recompense becomes virtue
There is none of us who would not be worse than kings
There is nothing I hate so much as driving a bargain
There is nothing like alluring the appetite and affections
There is nothing single and rare in respect of nature
These sleepy, sluggish sort of men are often the most dangerous
They (good women) are not by the dozen, as every one knows
They begin to teach us to live when we have almost done living
They better conquer us by flying
They buy a cat in a sack
They can neither lend nor give anything to one another
They do not see my heart, they see but my countenance
They err as much who too much forbear Venus
They gently name them, so they patiently endure them (diseases)
They have heard, they have seen, they have done so and so
They have not one more invention left wherewith to amuse us
They have not the courage to suffer themselves to be corrected
They have yet touched nothing of that which is mine
They juggle and trifle in all their discourses at our expense
They must be very hard to please, if they are not contented
They must become insensible and invisible to satisfy us
They neither instruct us to think well nor to do well
They never loved them till dead
They who would fight custom with grammar are triflers
Thing at which we all aim, even in virtue is pleasure
Things grow familiar to men’s minds by being often seen
Things I say are better than those I write
Things often appear greater to us at distance than near at hand
Things seem greater by imagination than they are in effect
Things that engage us elsewhere and separate us from ourselves
Think myself no longer worth my own care
Think of physic as much good or ill as any one would have me
Thinking nothing done, if anything remained to be done
Thinks nothing profitable that is not painful
This decay of nature which renders him useless, burdensome
This plodding occupation of bookes is as painfull as any other
Those immodest and debauched tricks and postures
Those oppressed with sorrow sometimes surprised by a smile
Those which we fear the least are, peradventure, most to be fear
Those who can please and hug themselves in what they do
Those within (marriage) despair of getting out
Thou diest because thou art living
Thou wilt not feel it long if thou feelest it too much
Though I be engaged to one forme, I do not tie the world unto it
Though nobody should read me, have I wasted time
Threats of the day of judgment
Thucydides: which was the better wrestler
Thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain
Tis all swine’s flesh, varied by sauces
Tis an exact life that maintains itself in due order in private
Tis better to lean towards doubt than assurance--Augustine
Tis evil counsel that will admit no change
Tis far beyond not fearing death to taste and relish it
Tis for youth to subject itself to common opinions
Tis impossible to deal fairly with a fool
Tis in some sort a kind of dying to avoid the pain of living well
Tis more laudable to obey the bad than the good
Tis no matter; it may be of use to some others
Tis not the cause, but their interest, that inflames them
Tis not the number of men, but the number of good men
Tis said of Epimenides, that he always prophesied backward
Tis so I melt and steal away from myself
Tis the sharpnss of our mind that gives the edge to our pains
Tis then no longer correction, but revenge
Tis there she talks plain French
Titillation of ill-natured pleasure in seeing others suffer
Title of barbarism to everything that is not familiar
Titles being so dearly bought
Titles of my chapters do not always comprehend the whole matter
To be a slave, incessantly to be led by the nose by one’s self
To be, not to seem
To condemn them as impossible, is by a temerarious presumption
To contemn what we do not comprehend
To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular
To do well where there was danger was the proper office
To forbear doing is often as generous as to do
To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to’t
To fret and vex at folly, as I do, is folly itself
To give a currency to his little pittance of learning
To go a mile out of their way to hook in a fine word
To keep me from dying is not in your power
To kill men, a clear and strong light is required
To know by rote, is no knowledge
To make little things appear great was his profession
To make their private advantage at the public expense
To smell, though well, is to stink
To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one’s self to die
To what friend dare you intrust your griefs
To whom no one is ill who can be good?
Tongue will grow too stiff to bend
Too contemptible to be punished
Torture: rather a trial of patience than of truth
Totally brutified by an immoderate thirst after knowledge
Transferring of money from the right owners to strangers
Travel with not only a necessary, but a handsome equipage
True liberty is to be able to do what a man will with himself
Truly he, with a great effort will shortly say a mighty trifle
Truth itself has not the privilege to be spoken at all times
Truth, that for being older it is none the wiser
Turks have alms and hospitals for beasts
Turn up my eyes to heaven to return thanks, than to crave
Tutor to the ignorance and folly of the first we meet
Twas a happy marriage betwixt a blind wife and a deaf husband
Twenty people prating about him when he is at stool
Two opinions alike, no more than two hairs
Two principal guiding reins are reward and punishment
Tyrannic sourness not to endure a form contrary to one’s own
Tyrannical authority physicians usurp over poor creatures
Unbecoming rudeness to carp at everything
Under fortune’s favour, to prepare myself for her disgrace
Universal judgments that I see so common, signify nothing
Unjust judges of their actions, as they are of ours
Unjust to exact from me what I do not owe
Upon the precipice, ‘tis no matter who gave you the push
Use veils from us the true aspect of things
Utility of living consists not in the length of days
Valour has its bounds as well as other virtues
Valour whetted and enraged by mischance
Valour will cause a trembling in the limbs as well as fear
Valuing the interest of discipline
Vast distinction betwixt devotion and conscience
Venture it upon his neighbour, if he will let him
venture the making ourselves better without any danger
Very idea we invent for their chastity is ridiculous
Vice of confining their belief to their own capacity
Vices will cling together, if a man have not a care
Victorious envied the conquered
Virtue and ambition, unfortunately, seldom lodge together
Virtue is a pleasant and gay quality
Virtue is much strengthened by combats
Virtue refuses facility for a companion
Viscid melting kisses of youthful ardour in my wanton age
Voice and determination of the rabble, the mother of ignorance
Vulgar reports and opinions that drive us on
We are masters of nothing but the will
We are not to judge of counsels by events
We ask most when we bring least
We believe we do not believe
We can never be despised according to our full desert
We cannot be bound beyond what we are able to perform
We confess our ignorance in many things
We consider our death as a very great thing
We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him
We do not easily accept the medicine we understand
We do not go, we are driven
We do not so much forsake vices as we change them
We have lived enough for others
We have more curiosity than capacity
We have naturally a fear of pain, but not of death
We have not the thousandth part of ancient writings
We have taught the ladies to blush
We much more aptly imagine an artisan upon his close-stool
We must learn to suffer what we cannot evade
We neither see far forward nor far backward
We only labour to stuff the memory
We ought to grant free passage to diseases
We say a good marriage because no one says to the contrary
We set too much value upon ourselves
We still carry our fetters along with us
We take other men’s knowledge and opinions upon trust
Weakness and instability of a private and particular fancy
Weigh, as wise: men should, the burden of obligation
Well, and what if it had been death itself?
Were more ambitious of a great reputation than of a good one
What a man says should be what he thinks
What are become of all our brave philosophical precepts?
What can they not do, what do they fear to do (for beauty)
What can they suffer who do not fear to die?
What did I say? that I have? no, Chremes, I had
What he did by nature and accident, he cannot do by design
What is more accidental than reputation?
What may be done to-morrow, may be done to-day
What more? they lie with their lovers learnedly
What need have they of anything but to live beloved and honoured
What sort of wine he liked the best: “That of another”
What step ends the near and what step begins the remote
What they ought to do when they come to be men
What we have not seen, we are forced to receive from other hands
What, shall so much knowledge be lost
Whatever was not ordinary diet, was instead of a drug
When I travel I have nothing to care for but myself
When jealousy seizes these poor souls
When their eyes give the lie to their tongue
When time begins to wear things out of memory
When we have got it, we want something else
“When will this man be wise,” said he, “if he is yet learning?”
When you see me moved first, let me alone, right or wrong
Where the lion’s skin is too short
Where their profit is, let them there have their pleasure too
Wherever the mind is perplexed, it is in an entire disorder
Whilst thou wast silent, thou seemedst to be some great thing
Whimpering is offensive to the living and vain to the dead
Who by their fondness of some fine sounding word
Who can flee from himself
Who discern no riches but in pomp and show
Who does not boast of some rare recipe
Who escapes being talked of at the same rate
Who ever saw one physician approve of another’s prescription
Who has once been a very fool, will never after be very wise
Who would weigh him without the honour and grandeur of his end
Whoever expects punishment already suffers it
Whoever will be cured of ignorance must confess it
Whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger
Whosoever despises his own life, is always master
Why do we not imitate the Roman architecture?
Wide of the mark in judging of their own works
Willingly give them leave to laugh after we are dead
Willingly slip the collar of command upon any pretence whatever
Wisdom has its excesses, and has no less need of moderation
Wisdom is folly that does not accommodate itself to the common
Wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can
Wise man never loses anything if he have himself
Wise man to keep a curbing hand upon the impetus of friendship
Wise may learn more of fools, than fools can of the wise
Wise whose invested money is visible in beautiful villas
Wiser who only know what is needful for them to know
With being too well I am about to die
Woman who goes to bed to a man, must put off her modesty
Women who paint, pounce, and plaster up their ruins
Wont to give others their life, and not to receive it
World where loyalty of one’s own children is unknown
Worse endure an ill-contrived robe than an ill-contrived mind
Would have every one in his party blind or a blockhead
Would in this affair have a man a little play the servant
Wrangling arrogance, wholly believing and trusting in itself
Wretched and dangerous thing to depend upon others
Write what he knows, and as much as he knows, but no more
Wrong the just side when they go about to assist it with fraud
Yet at least for ambition’s sake, let us reject ambition
Yet do we find any end of the need of interpretating?
You and companion are theatre enough to one another
You have lost a good captain, to make of him a bad general
You may indeed make me die an ill death
You must first see us die
You must let yourself down to those with whom you converse
Young and old die upon the same terms
Young are to make their preparations, the old to enjoy them
