New book on Montaigne, OW influence
OW
at an Answer
By Sarah Bakewell (Chatto & Windus, £16.99)
After inheriting his father’s estate in the interior of Aquitaine,
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) decided to quit public life as a
magistrate in the Bordeaux parlement and devote himself to leisurely
study. Instead of leading to the Horatian idyll of self-cultivation he
expected, the inactivity and desultory reading led to a nervous
breakdown. To steady himself, he began to write.
Since he was neither a military man nor a man of affairs, his only
subject matter was himself; so he resolved to try (essayer) to assay
himself, his nature, his opinions, his attitudes and reactions,
pretending nothing and confessing all. “I am myself the matter of my
book” he wrote; and he knew that he was engaged in producing something
wholly original by being so. The result is a classic that has been
admired, imitated and enjoyed ever since.
A reason for the enduring attraction of Montaigne’s Essays is that
they do what all classics do: they illuminate the universal in the
particular. In one way this should be a surprise, because Montaigne
was a highly individual man and, by his own account, a rather
unsuccessful one. He frankly confessed his inabilities and
shortcomings, his dislike of business, his yearning for solitude, his
regret at being forgetful and not very clever, his physical lacks (he
was short and had, he tells us, a small penis). Yet his frankness is
refreshing and full of human truth. He found a method of writing
suited to the character of his mind—an aleatory, divagatory,
exploratory method which meandered along with his thoughts, making his
essays unsystematic and random, full of unexpected, entertaining
detours.
Sarah Bakewell adopts Montaigne’s own method to give an account of him
and his views. Because Montaigne’s great question was Socrates’s
question—“how to live?”—she arranges her portrait of him around the
answers he offered. The outcome is an instructive journey around
Montaigne, exemplifying his charm and the universality of his appeal.
Bakewell rightly treats Montaigne as a contemporary for all times.
Scholars, by contrast, like to emphasise the respects in which he was
of his epoch, rooting him in the turbulent mixture of Renaissance and
Reformation that made it possible for him to write as a pagan in the
bitter midst of the 16th century’s wars of religion. His own family
was divided between the Protestant and Catholic causes, but, following
the example of the Belgian scholar Justus Lipsius, Montaigne retained
a scrupulously orthopractic public image as a Catholic, though every
indication in his writings tells us that he was a sceptic in religion
as in everything else, and had—as Pascal critically noted—a pagan
attitude to death as the end of one’s existence. But by allowing him
his universality, Bakewell explains how it is that he speaks with
equal clarity to his contemporaries at the end of the 16th century, to
Voltaire in the 18th, to William Hazlitt (who said of him that he was
“the first to have the courage to say as an author what he felt as a
man”) in the 19th, and to his readers today.
Familiarly, the key to Montaigne is his scepticism. It is the
scepticism of Pyrrho, as recorded by Sextus Empiricus, which teaches
that because the arguments for and against any proposition are equally
good or bad, one must suspend judgement (a state known as
acatalepsia). This open-minded, non-committal, often ambiguous stance
suited Montaigne. He accordingly chose as his motto Que sais-je?
Montaigne retired from public life in 1568, the year that he inherited
his estate. His nervous breakdown occurred around 1570. He wrote the
essays comprising book one in the first half of the 1570s, and the
essays of book two in the second half of that decade. They were
published in 1580, and became an immediate bestseller. Montaigne then
travelled for his health to the spas of Germany and Italy, keeping a
journal; and in the late 1580s wrote the essays comprising book three.
These are far longer than the book one essays, but suggest a return to
the Stoicism of book one—a revised, modified, sceptical Stoicism to be
sure, but a form of Stoicism nevertheless, filtered through an even
more intensely personal and self-deprecating self-examination. “Others
form Man,” he wrote, “I give an account of Man and sketch a picture of
a particular one of them who is very badly formed and who [if I could]
I would truly make very different from what he is.” The journey to
this mature reconciliation with himself came courtesy of his belief
that anything viewed from the long perspective of history, or from
vantage points quite different from one’s own habitual attitudes,
would put everything into perspective, making both enthusiasm and
anxiety impossible.
One of the best chapters in Bakewell’s book is the one she entitles
“Guard Your Humanity,” describing the horrors of the St Bartholomew’s
day massacre of 1572 and the violent sectarian hatreds that both
unleashed and followed them. Montaigne’s reaction to them was Stoic
detachment, an attitude that made some of his later readers temper
their admiration—especially the Romantics of the 19th century, who
found him too dispassionate for their commitment to enthusiasm. But
those who had learned enough from life to understand the saying “in
youth I loved Ovid, in age I love Horace” well understood his point.
Bakewell quotes the Austrian author Stefan Zweig as just such a
reader; before his suicide in 1942 Zweig listed the general
propositions that Montaigne, despite his sceptic acatalepsia, came to
assert as convictions, all on the theme of being free: free from
vanity, partisanship, ambition, the fear of death.
Although Montaigne assumed the role of detached spectator of the human
comedy, and advised having a private “room behind the shop” where one
could commune with oneself alone, he also advised conviviality and
friendship, and the lifelong love he felt for the friend he lost early
in life, Etienne de la Boétie, demonstrates that he understood this in
his blood. That is an attractive feature of the man. Even more so is
the ingenuousness, modesty and sanity of his account of himself, which
is practically a self-portrait of humanity. Bakewell obviously enjoyed
her time with Montaigne; she relishes his wry humour, his variety of
interests, his puncturing way with pretension, and above all his
humanity. Her enjoyment is sure to lead many readers to Montaigne’s
text, if they do not already know it. And those who do are certain to
appreciate Bakewell’s own empathy and eloquence.
OW
Since he was neither a military man nor a man of affairs, his only
subject matter was himself; so he resolved to try (essayer) to assay
himself, his nature, his opinions, his attitudes and reactions,
pretending nothing and confessing all.
A reason for the enduring attraction of Montaigne’s Essays is that
they do what all classics do: they illuminate the universal in the
particular. He found a method of writing suited to the character of
his mind—an aleatory, divagatory, exploratory method which meandered
along with his thoughts, making his essays unsystematic and random,
full of unexpected, entertaining detours.
Montaigne’s great question was Socrates’s question—“how to live.
Bakewell rightly treats Montaigne as a contemporary for all times.
Scholars, by contrast, like to emphasise the respects in which he was
of his epoch, rooting him in the turbulent mixture of Renaissance and
Reformation that made it possible for him to write as a pagan in the
bitter midst of the 16th century’s wars of religion. Montaigne
retained a scrupulously orthopractic public image as a Catholic,
though every indication in his writings tells us that he was a sceptic
in religion as in everything else, and had—as Pascal critically noted—
a pagan attitude to death as the end of one’s existence.
The key to Montaigne is his scepticism, which teaches that because the
arguments for and against any proposition are equally good or bad, one
must suspend judgement (a state known as acatalepsia). This open-
minded, non-committal, often ambiguous stance suited Montaigne. He
accordingly chose as his motto Que sais-je?
“Others form Man,” he wrote, “I give an account of Man and sketch a
picture of a particular one of them who is very badly formed and who
[if I could] I would truly make very different from what he is.” Of
the St Bartholomew’s day massacre of 1572 and the violent sectarian
hatreds that both unleashed and followed them, Montaigne’s reaction to
them was Stoic detachment, an attitude that made some of his later
readers temper their admiration—especially the Romantics of the 19th
century, who found him too dispassionate for their commitment to
enthusiasm. Montaigne, despite his sceptic acatalepsia, came to assert
as convictions, all on the theme of being free: free from vanity,
partisanship, ambition, the fear of death.
Although Montaigne assumed the role of detached spectator of the human
comedy, and advised having a private “room behind the shop” where one
could commune with oneself alone, he also advised conviviality and
friendship.
Montaigne was more than just a confessional writer–or a casuist. He
was the leading edge of the Enlightenment, who advised people to speak
for themselves, to believe in themselves, and to be independent.
Although a royalist and a faithful Catholic, he believe in the freedom
of the mind and truth telling. What do I know? was his watchword–and
Who am I? was his query. All this turned his readers into more
introspective and more challenging persons. That’s why Montaigne was
the first challenger of the Enlightenment.
a ’self-portrait of humanity’.
why not include Ou phrontìs Hippokleíde(i), which Montaigne had
painted around the inside lip of the dome in his study?