Montaigne

I.

THERE have been greater men in literature than Montaigne, but none have been more successful. His reputation is immense ; he is in men’s mouths as often as Dante or Cervantes. We look at that intelligent, contemplative, unimpassioned face, with its tired eyes, and wonder that he should have achieved fame as immortal as that of the fierce Italian or the noble Spaniard. In the affairs of fame luck plays its part. Sometimes a man’s genius keeps step with his country and his time ; he gains power from sympathy, his muscles harden, his head clears, as he runs a winning race. Another man will fail in the enervating atmosphere of recognition and applause; he needs obstacles, the whip and spur of difficulty. Montaigne was born under a lucky star. Had fate shown him all the kingdoms of the world and all time, and given him the choice when and where to live, he could not have chosen better.

Montaigne’s genius is French in every fibre ; he embodies better than any one other man the French character. In this world nationality counts for much, both at home and abroad. Frenchmen enjoy their own ; they relish French nature, its niceties, its strong personality. Sluggish in turning to foreign things, they are not prone to acquire tastes, but whatever is native to them they cultivate, study, and appreciate with rare subtlety. They enjoy Montaigne as men enjoy a work of art, with the satisfaction of comprehension.

In truth, all men like a strong national flavor in a book. Montaigne typifies what France has been to the world : he exhibits the characteristic marks of French intelligence ; he represents the French mind. Of course such representation is false in many measures. A nation is too big to have her character completely shown forth by one man. Look at the cathedrals of the Ile-de-France; read the lives of Joan of Arc and St. Francis of Sales, of the Jesuits in Canada; remember Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, and that it was, as M. de Vogüé says, the mad caprice of France which raised Napoleon to his high estate ; and we realize how fanciful it is to make one man typify a nation. Nevertheless, it is common talk that France takes ideas and makes them clear ; that she unravels the tangled threads of thought, eliminating disorder ; that she is romantic ; that she is not religious; that she shrugs her shoulders at the vague passions of the soul; that she is immensely intelligent; that she is fond of pleasure ; and that her favorite diversion is to sit beside the great boulevard of human existence and make comments, fresh, frank, witty, wise.

In these respects Montaigne is typical. He does not create new ideas, he is no explorer; he takes the notions of other men, holds them up to the light, turns them round and about, gazing at them. He is intellectually honest ; he dislikes pretense. At bottom, too, he is romantic : witness his reverence for Socrates, his admiration of the Stoics, his desire for the citizenship of Rome. He has the French cast of mind that regards men, primarily, not as individuals, but rather as members of society. He has the sense of behavior. “ All strangeness and peculiarity in our manners and ways of life are to be avoided as enemies to society. . . . Knowledge of how to behave in company is a very useful knowledge. Like grace and beauty, it conciliates at the very beginning of acquaintance, and in consequence opens the door for us to learn by the example of others, and to set an example ourselves, if we have anything worth teaching.”

Montaigne is not religious, — certainly not after the fashion of a Bishop Brooks or a Father Hecker. He is a pagan rather than a Christian. He likes gayety, wit, agreeable society ; he is fond of conversation. He boards his subject like a sociable creature, he is a born talker, he talks away obscurity. He follows his subject as a young dog follows a carriage, bounding off the road a hundred times to investigate the neighborhood. His loose-limbed mind is easy, light, yet serious. He pares away the rind of things, smelling the fruit joyously, not as if employed in a business of funereal looks, but in something human and cheerful. He has good taste.

Montaigne had good luck not only in his country, but also in his generation. He lived at the time when the main current of Latin civilization was diverting from Italy to France. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Italy was the intellectual head of the Latin world, her thought and art were the moulding forces of modern civilization. When the seventeenth century opened, France had assumed the primacy. The great culmination of the Italian Renaissance came close to the time of Montaigne’s birth ; when he died, Italy was sinking into dependence in thought and servility in art, whereas France was emerging from her civil wars, under the rule of one of the greatest of Frenchmen, ready to become the dominant power, politically and intellectually, in Europe. Coming at this time, Montaigne was a pioneer. His was one of the formative minds which gave to French intelligence that temper which has enabled it to do so much for the world in the last three hundred years. He showed it a great model of dexterity, lightness, and ease.

Not only did Montaigne help fashion the French intelligence in that important period, but he did much to give that intelligence a tool by which it could put its capacities to use. It is from Montaigne that French prose gets a buoyant lightness. He has been called one of the great French poets. Had it not been for Montaigne and his contemporaries, the depressing influence of the seventeenth century would have hardened the language, taking out its grace, and making it a clever mechanical contrivance. His influence has been immense. It is said that an hundred years after his death his Essays were to be found on the bookshelves of every gentleman in Franee. French critics trace his influence on Pascal, La Bruyère, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Sainte-Beuve, and Renan. To-day, no one can read M. Anatole France or M. Jules Lemaître without saying to himself, “This is fruit from the same rich stock.”

There are reasons besides these, which have given Montaigne his great position in the world’s literature. The first is his habit of mind. He is a considerer, an examiner, a skeptic. He prowls about the beliefs, the opinions and usages, of men, and, taking up a thought, lifts from it, one by one, as if he were peeling an artichoke, the envelopes of custom, of prejudices, of time, of place. He holds up the opinion of one school, praising and admiring it ; and then the contradictory opinion of another school, praising and admiring that. In his scales he balances notion against notion, man against man, usage against usage. It was his great usefulness that, in a time when important men put so much trust in matters of faith that they constructed theologies of adamant and burnt dissenters, he calmly announced the relativity of knowledge. He was no student mustily thinking in a dead language, but a gentleman in waiting to the king, knight of the Order of St. Michael, writing in fresh, poetic French, with all the captivation of charm, teaching the fundamental principles of doubt and uncertainty ; for if there be doubt there will be tolerance, if there be uncertainty there will be liberality. He laid the axe to the root of religious bigotry and civil intolerance. “ Things apart by themselves have, it may be, their weight, their dimensions, their condition ; but within us, the mind cuts and fashions them according to its own comprehension. . . . Health, conscience, authority, knowledge, riches, beauty, and their contraries, strip off their outward semblances at the threshold of the mind, and receive at its hands new garments, of such dyes as it please.”

The emphasis of self is at the base of modern life. The art of the Renaissance sprung from the passion for self-expression. The Reformation took self as the hammer which broke the yoke of the Roman Church. Self stood on its feet and faced God; what need of priests and intermediaries ? Montaigne is a great exponent of this spirit. A man of letters and a philosopher, he did not find in duty an explanation of life, but he realized the significance of this imperious self, this I, I, I, that proclaims itself to be at the bottom of everything. Step by step, as he goes from Plato to Cicero, from Cicero to Seneca, from Seneca to Plutarch, he discovers humanity taking individual form ; compressed into the likeness of a single man, it puts on familiar features, it speaks with a wellknown voice, and, at the same time, philosophy turns and shapes itself in the mould of a single human mind: that face, that voice, that mind, are his own. Start how he will, every road twists and winds back to himself. As if by compulsion, like a man under the spell of another’s will, he gradually renounces all other study. In self is to be found the philosophy of life. If we once firmly accept the notion that we know nothing but ourselves, then the universe outside becomes a shadowy collection of vapors, mysterious, hypothetical, and self hardens into the only reality. Here is a basis for a religion or a philosophy. So speculating, the philosopher opened the eyes of the artist. If self be the field of philosophy, it is the opportunity of the artist. Never had a man of letters sat to himself for his own portrait. Montaigne is the “ prince of egotists,” because he is a philosopher and a great artist. He is a skeptic, but he points a way to positive doctrine. He is a man of letters, but he teaches the primary rules of civil and religious liberty. He is a member of the Holy Church, Apostolic and Roman, but he lays the foundation of a philosophy open to Reformer and to infidel. Profoundly interested in the questions lying at the base of life, he is one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance.

II.

Montaigne was a Gascon, of a family of merchants. His great-grandfather, Ramon Eyquem, founded the family fortunes by trade, and bettered them by a prudent marriage. He became one of the richest merchants of Bordeaux, dealing in wine and salt fish, and bought the estate of Montaigne, a little seigniory near the river Dordogne, not very far from the city. His son, Grimon, also prospered, and in his turn left to his son, Pierre, Montaigne’s father, so good a property that Pierre was enabled to give up trade, and betake himself to arms. Pierre served for several years in Italy, under Francis I. On his return he married Antoinette de Louppes, or Lopes, a rich lady of Spanish descent, with some Jewish blood in her veins. He was an active, hard-working, conscientious, capable man, devoting himself to public affairs. He held one office after another in the city of Bordeaux, and finally was elected mayor. He took especial interest in education, improving the schools, and making changes for the better in the college. His interest amounted to a hobby, if we may judge from his method of educating his son. His years in Italy had opened his mind, and though no scholar himself, he was a great admirer of the new learning, and sought the company of scholars. Evidently, he was a man who liked to think, and was not afraid to put his ideas into practice. He enlarged the seigniory of Montaigne and rebuilt the château. His son says of him that he was the best father that ever was ; that he was ambitious to do everything that was honorable, and had a very high regard for his word.

Michel was born on the last day of February, 1533. He was the third of eleven children ; the two elder died in infancy. His education began at once. Still a baby, he was put in charge of some peasants who lived near the château, in order that his earliest notions should be of simple things. His godparents were country folk ; for Pierre Eyquem deemed it better that his son should early learn to make friends " with those who stretch their arms toward us rather than with those who turn their backs on us.” The second step in education was to direct Michel’s mind so that it should naturally take the heroic Roman mould. His father thought that this result would be more likely to follow if the baby spoke Latin. He was therefore put into the hands of a learned German, who spoke Latin very well, and could speak no French. There were also two other scholars in attendance on the little boy,—less learned, however, — who took turns with the German in accompanying him. They also spoke nothing but Latin in Michel’s presence. “ As for the rest of the household, it was an inviolable rule that neither my father nor mother, nor the man servant nor the maid servant, should speak when I was by, except some Latin words which they had learned on purpose to talk with me.” This rule was so well obeyed that not only his father and mother learned enough Latin to understand it and to speak it a little, but also the servants who waited on him. In fact, they all became so very Latin that even the people in the village called various implements and utensils by their Latin names. Montaigne was more than six years old before he heard any French spoken ; he spoke Latin as if it were his native tongue. At six Montaigne was sent to the College of Guyenne, in Bordeaux, where his Latin began to get bad, and served no better purpose than to make his studies so easy that he was quickly put into the higher classes. He stayed at college till he had completed the course in 1546, when he was thirteen years old. He says that he took no knowledge of any value away with him. This statement must be taken with a grain of salt, for he had been under the care of very famous scholars, and instead of wasting his time over poor books or in idleness he had read the best Latin authors. He did not even know the name of Amadis of Gaul, but fell upon Ovid, Virgil, Terence, and Plautus. After them he read the Italian comedies. This reading was done on the sly, the teachers winking at it. “ Had they not done so,” he says, “ I should have left college with a hatred for books, like almost all the young nobility.”

Whether or not, so bred, Montaigne became more like Scipio and Cato Major, his father’s interest in education no doubt stimulated his own. In all the shrewdness of the Essays there is no more definite and practical teaching than his advice on education, especially in his asseverations of its large purposes. “ There is nothing so noble,” he says, “ as to make a man what he should be; there is no learning comparable to the knowledge of how to live this life aright and according to the laws of nature.” Montaigne laid down, clearly and sharply, principles that sound commonplace to-day : that the object of education is to make, not a scholar, but a man ; that education shall concern itself with the understanding rather than with the memory ; that mind and body must be developed together. It would be easy to quote pages. “ To know by heart is not to know; it is only holding on to what has been put into the custody of the memory. . . . We receive as bailiffs the opinions and learning of others ; we must make them our own. . . . We learn to say Cicero says this, Plato thinks this, these are Aristotle’s words; but we, what do we say ? What do we do ? What is our opinion ?

. . . If the mind does not acquire a better temper, if the judgment does not become more sound, I had as lief the schoolboy should pass his time playing tennis : his body, at least, would be more supple. See him come back after years spent : there is nothing so unfit for use; all that you see more than he had before Is that his Latin and Greek leave him more silly and conceited than when he left home. He ought to have brought back a full mind: he brings it back blown out; instead of having it bigger, it is only puffed up. ... It is also an opinion accepted by everybody that a boy ought not to be brought up round his parents’ knees. Natural affection makes them too tender and too soft; they are not able to punish his faults, nor to see him nourished hardily, as he should be, and run risks. They won’t let him come back sweating and dusty from exercise, drink hot, drink cold, nor see him on a horse backwards, nor facing a rough fencer foil in hand, nor with his first gun. There ’s no help for it: if you wish to make a man, you must not spare him such matters of youth. You must often break the rules of medicine. It is not enough to make his soul firm ; his muscles must be firm, too. The soul is too hard pressed if she be not supported well, and has too much to do if she must furnish strength for both.”

Montaigne himself must have learned the value of exercise, for he became a great horseman, more at home on horseback than on foot. Till the time of ill health he seems to have had a vigorous body; he could sit in the saddle for eight or ten hours, and survived a very severe fall, though he “ vomited buckets of blood.”

Of Montaigne’s life after leaving the college we know little or nothing. He must have studied law, — perhaps at the University of Toulouse, perhaps in Bordeaux. But matters other than the classics or civil law, and more profitable to a great critic of life, must have been rumbling in his ears, making him begin to speculate on the opinions and customs of men, and their reasonableness. Already troubles prophetic of civil war were afoot.

III.

In 1554 the king established a Court of Aids at Péigueux. Pierre Eyquem was appointed one of the magistrates, but before he took his seat he was elected mayor of Bordeaux, and resigned his position as member of the court in favor of his son, who, under the system then prevalent, became magistrate in his stead. Montaigne was twenty-one years old. After a year or two the Court of Aids was annulled, and its magistrates were made members of the Parlement of Bordeaux. Here Montaigne met Etienne de La Boétie, who was also a member. The two men at once became most loving friends. La Boétie had a noble, passionate character. Montaigne says that he was cast in the heroic mould, an antique Roman, the greatest man of their time. After six years La Boétie died, in 1563. Seventeen years later, while traveling in Italy, Montaigne wrote to a friend, “ All of a sudden I fell to thinking about M. de La Boétie, and I stayed so long without shaking the fit off that it made me feel very sad.” This was the master affection of Montaigne’s life, and the noblest. It was a friendship “ so whole, so perfect, that there are none such to be read of, and among men today there is no trace to be seen. There is need of so happy a meeting to fashion it that fortune does well if it happens once in three hundred years.” They were wont to call each other “ brother.” “ In truth, the name of brother is beautiful and full of sweetness ; for this reason he and I gave it to the bond between us.”

La Boétie died of the plague, or some disease like it. He told Montaigne that his illness was contagious, and besought him to stay with him no more than a few minutes at a time, but as often as he could. From that time Montaigne never left him. This act must be remembered, if we incline to blame Montaigne for shunning Bordeaux when the plague was upon it.

Two years afterwards Montaigne married Franyoise de la Chassaigne. It was a match made from considerations of suitability. The Eyquems were thrifty wooers. Montaigne had no romantic notions about love in marriage ; he did not seek a “ Cato’s daughter ” who should help him climb the heights of life. He says : “ The most useful and honorable knowledge and occupation for a mother of a family is the knowledge of housekeeping. That should be a woman’s predominant attribute ; that is what a man should look for when he goes a-courting. From what experience has taught me, I should require of a wife, above all other virtues, that of the housewife.” Nevertheless, they were very happily married. She was a woman of good sense and ability, and looked after the affairs of the seigniory with a much quicker eye than her husband. He dedicated to her a translation made by La Boétie from Plutarch. “Let us live,” he says, “you and me, after the old French fashion. ... I do not think I have a friend more intimate than you.” He had five children, all of whom died very young, except one daughter, who outlived him. For these children his feeling was placid.

Montaigne remained magistrate for fifteen years. He did not find the duties very much to his taste, but he must have acquitted himself well, because a year or two after his retirement the king decorated him with the Order of St. Michael. These years of his magistracy were calm enough for Montaigne, but they were not calm for France. In 1562 the civil wars broke out. There is something too fish - blooded about a man who sits in the “ back of his shop ” and attends to his judicial duties or writes essays, clammily watching events, while the country is on fire. But what has a skeptic to do with divine rights of kings or divine revelations ?

Little by little Montaigne was getting ready to forsake the magistracy for literature. He began by translating, at his father’s wish, the Theologia Naturalis of Raymond de Sebonde, — a treatise which undertook to establish the truth of the Christian religion by a process of reasoning. His father died before he finished it. It was published in 1569. The next year Montaigne resigned his seat in the Parlement of Bordeaux, and devoted himself to the publication of various manuscripts left by La Boétie. This done, the new Seigneur de Montaigne — he dropped the unaristocratic name of Eyquem — retired to his seigniory, “ with a resolution to avoid all manner of concern in affairs as much as possible, and to spend the small remainder of his life in privacy and peace.” There he lived for nine years, riding over his estates, planting, tending, — or more wisely suffering his wife to superintend, — receiving his friends, hospitable, enjoying opportunities to talk, or more happy still in his library. Here, in the second story of his tower, shut off from the buzz of household life, his friends, Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, Herodotus, Plato, with a thousand volumes more, on the shelves, the ceiling carved with aphorisms, Latin and Greek, he used to sit fulfilling his inscription : “ In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on his birthday, the day before the calends of March, Michel de Montaigne, having quitted some time ago the servitude of courts and public duties, has come, still in good health, to rest among the Muses. In peace and safety he will pass here what days remain for him to live, in the hope that the Fates will allow him to perfect this habitation, this sweet paternal asylum consecrated to independence, tranquillity, and leisure.”

IV.

It was quiet in the Château de Montaigne ; Plutarch and Cicero sat undisturbed, except for notes scribbled on their margins; but in Paris the Duke of Guise and the royal house were making St. Bartholomew a memorable day. Civil war again ravaged France, the League conspired with Spain, Henry of Navarre rallied the Huguenots, while the king, Henry III., dangled between them, making and breaking edicts. The Seigneur de Montaigne rode about his estates, or sat in his library, writing Concerning Idleness, Concerning Pedantry, Concerning Coaches, Concerning Solitude, Concerning Sumptuary Laws.

The most apathetic of us, knowing that Henry of Navarre and Henry of Guise are in the field, become so many Hotspurs at the thought of this liberalminded gentleman, the Order of St. Michael hanging round his neck, culling anecdotes out of Plutarch about Cyrus or Scipio. “ Zounds! how has he leisure to be sick in such a justling time ! ” We readers are a whimsical people; cushioned in armchairs, we catch on fire at the white plume of Navarre. What is the free play of thought to us ? Give us sword and pistol,— Ventre-Saint-Gris ! But the best fighting has not been done on battlefields, and Montaigne has helped the cause of justice and humanity better than twenty thousand armed men.

Once, when there does not seem to have been an immediate prospect of a fight, Montaigne offered his services to one of the king’s generals. Instead of being ordered to the field, he was sent back to Bordeaux to harangue the Parlement on the need of new fortifications. He was a loyal servant of the king, and deemed the Huguenots a rebellious faction, fighting against lawful authority; but his heart could not take sides ; he was disgusted with the hypocrisy of both parties, and the mask of religion. " I see it is evident that we render only those offices to piety which tickle our passions. There is no enmity so excellent as the Christian. Our zeal does wonders, when it goes following our inclination toward hate, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion. But the converse, — toward goodness, kindness, temperance, — if, as by miracle, some rare conjunction takes it that way, it goes neither afoot nor with wings. Our religion was made to pluck out vices ; it uncovers them, nurses them, encourages them. . . . Let us confess the truth: he that should pick out from the army, even the loyal army, those who march there only for zeal of religious feeling, and also those who singly consider the maintenance of their country’s laws or the service of their sovereign, he could not make a corporal’s guard of them.”

Montaigne was a Catholic. He did not share that passionate care of conduct which animated the Reformers. He did not see that the truth of a religion was affected by the misbehavior of its priests. When he heard, in Rome, that “ the general of the Cordeliers had been deprived of his place, and locked up, because in a sermon, in presence of the Pope and the cardinals, he had accused the prelates of the Church of laziness and ostentation, without particularity, only, speaking in commonplaces, on this subject,” Montaigne merely felt that civil liberty had been abused. He was not troubled to find the ceremonies in St. Peter’s " more magnificent than devotional,” nor to learn that the Pope, Gregory XIII., had a son. He was amused at the luxurious ways of the cardinals. He made the acquaintance of the maître d’hotel of Cardinal Caraffa. “ I made him tell me of his employment. He discoursed on the science of the gullet with the gravity and countenance of a judge, as if he had been talking of some grave point of theology ; he deciphered a difference of appetites, — that which one has when hungry, that which one has after the second and after the third course ; the means first merely to please it, then to wake it and prick it; the policy of sauces,” etc. He heard on the portico of St. Peter’s a canon of the Church “ read aloud a Latin bull, by which an immense number of people were excommunicated, among others the Huguenots, by that very name, and all princes who withheld any of the lands of the Church. At this article the cardinals, Medici and Caraffa, who were next to the Pope, laughed very hard.” The Master of the Sacred Palace had subjected the Essays to examination, and found fault with Montaigne’s notion that torture in addition to death was cruelty. Montaigne replied that he did not know that the opinion was heretical. To his mind, such matters had nothing to do with truth or religion. He accepted the Apostolic Roman Catholic faith. He was not disposed to take a single step out of the fold. If one, why not two ? And if reason once mutinied and took control, where would it stop ? He denied the competence of human reason to investigate things divine. “ Man can only be what he is ; he can only imagine according to his measure.”

To a man who took pleasure in turning such matters in his mind, to a man of the Renaissance full of eagerness to study the ancients and to enjoy them, to a man by no means attracted by the austerities of the Calvinists, a war for the sake of supplanting the old religion of France was greatly distasteful. He could not but admit that the Huguenots were right so far as they only wished liberty of worship, nor fail to respect their obedience to conscience. But his heart had not the heroic temper; he wanted peace, comfort, scholarship, elegance. It is one thing to sit in a library and admire heroic men in the pages of Plutarch, and another to enjoy living in the midst of them.

Montaigne spent these years in pleasant peacefulness, dawdling over his library, and putting his Essays together scrap by scrap. In 1580, at the age of forty-seven, he published the first two books of his Essays, which had an immediate and great success. After this he was obliged to forego literature for a time, because he was not well. He had little confidence in doctors, but hoped that he could get benefit by drinking natural waters. Therefore he went traveling. He also wanted to see the world : Rome, with which he had been familiar from boyhood, and Italy, of which he had heard so much from his father, and all strange lands. Perhaps, too, he was not unmindful that he was now not only the Seigneur de Montaigne, but the first man of letters in France, not even excepting Ronsard. He set forth in the summer of 1580, with his brother, the Seigneur de Mathecoulon, and several friends, journeying on horseback to Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. He kept a journal, which contains notes of travel, and also a full account of the effects of medicinal waters on his health. The interest of the journal consists chiefly in the pictures of those countries at that time, sketched by an intelligent traveler; but now and again there is a more personal interest, when Montaigne sees something that excites his curiosity. There is a likeness in his curiosity for foreign lands and his curiosity for ideas. He travels into Germany as if it were a new volume of Plutarch. He is agog for novelty, and new ways of life, new points of view. His secretary says : “I never saw him less tired nor less complaining of ill health ; he was in high spirits both traveling and stopping, so absorbed in what he met, and always looking for opportunities to talk to strangers. . . . I think if he had been alone with his servants he would have gone to Cracow or to Greece overland, rather than directly into Italy.”

In this journal, written first at his direction, perhaps at his dictation, by a secretary, and then, with some inconvenience, as he says, by himself, we find his interests and affections in the light and shadow of the first impression. In the Essays every paragraph is the cud of long rumination. Of Rome the journal says : “ We see nothing of Rome but the sky under which she lies and the place of her abode ; knowledge of her is an abstraction, framed by thought, with which the senses have no concern. Those who say that the ruins of Rome at least are to be seen say too much, for the ruins of so tremendous a fabric would bring more honor and reverence to her memory ; here is nothing but her place of burial. The world, hostile to her long dominion, has first broken and dashed to pieces all the parts of that admirable body ; and because, even when dead, overthrown and mutilated, she still made the world afraid, it has buried even the ruins. The little show of them that appears above the sepulchre has been preserved by fortune, to bear witness to that matchless grandeur which centuries, conflagrations, conspiracies of a world again and again plotting its ruin, have failed to destroy utterly.”

Rome, “ the noblest city that ever was or ever will be,” had laid hold of his imagination. He says, “ I used all the five senses that nature gave me to obtain the title of Roman Citizen, if it were only for the ancient honor and religious memory of its authority.” By the help of a friend, the Pope’s influence procured him this dignity. The decree, bearing the S. P. Q. R., “pompous with seals and gilt letters,” gave him great pleasure.

He showed special interest in strange customs, as in the rite of circumcision, and in a ceremony of exorcising an evil spirit. This examination of other ways of living, other habits of thought, is the lever by which he lifts himself out of prejudices, out of the circle of authority, into his free and open-minded state. He always wished to see men who looked at life from other points of view. In Rome, as his secretary writes, “ M. de Montaigne was vexed to find so many Frenchmen there ; he hardly met anybody in the street who did not greet him in his own tongue.” In the Essays Montaigne says that, for education, acquaintance with men is wonderfully good, and also to travel in foreign lands ; not to bring back (after the fashion of the French nobility) nothing but the measures of the Pantheon, but to take home a knowledge of foreign ways of thought and of behavior, and to rub and polish our minds against those of others.

V.

While abroad, Montaigne received word, in September, 1581, that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux, to succeed the Maréchal de Biron. He hesitated ; he had no mind to give up his freedom. But the king sent an order, flattering and peremptory, that he should betake himself to his office “ without delay or excuse.” Accordingly he went.

It seems likely that there was some hand behind the scenes which pointed out to the councilors a man who would be acceptable to persons in high place. The Maréchal de Biron wished to be reëlected, but both the king and Henry of Navarre, the nominal governor of Guyenne, were opposed to him. History does not tell what happened, but the mayoralty was given to this distinguished, quiet gentleman, who had kept carefully aloof from partisanship. The office of mayor was not very burdensome ; the ordinary duties of administration fell upon others. Montaigne’s first term of two years passed uneventfully. De Thou, the historian, who knew him at this time, says that he learned much from Montaigne, a man “ very well versed in public affairs, especially in those concerning Guyenne, which he knows thoroughly.” In 1583 he was reëlected. Times grew more troubled. On the death of the king’s brother, Navarre became heir to the throne. The League, alarmed, made new efforts. Guise made a secret treaty with Spain that Navarre should not be recognized as king. Coming storms began to blow up about Bordeaux. The League plotted to seize the city. Poor Montaigne found himself in the midst of excursions and alarms. He was glad to lay down his charge when his term ended, on July 31,1585. In June a horrible plague broke out, and people in Bordeaux died by hundreds. Montaigne was away from the city. The council asked him to come to town to preside over the election of his successor. He answered, “ I will not spare my life or anything in your service, and I leave you to judge whether what I can do for you by my presence at the next election makes it worth while for me to run the risk of going to town.” The council did not insist, and Montaigne did not go. This is the act of his life which has called forth blame, not from his contemporaries, but from stout-hearted critics and heroic reviewers. To set an example of indifference to death is outside the ordinary path of duty. We like to hear tell of splendid recklessness of life, of fools who go to death out of a mad desire to stamp the fear of it under their feet ; and when disappointed of so fine a show, we become petulant, we betray that we are overfond of excitement. It was not the mayor’s duty to look after the public health ; that lay upon the council.

His office ended, Montaigne went back to his library, to revise and correct the first two books of his Essays, to stuff them with new paragraphs and quotations, and to write a third. But he could not retire far enough to get away from the sounds of civil war. Coutras was but a little too far for him to hear Navarre harangue his troops to victory, and the voices of the soldiers singing the psalm : —

A few days afterwards Henry of Navarre stopped at the château and dined with Montaigne. He had once before been there, making a visit of two days, when Montaigne was still mayor. The relations of these two men are very interesting, but somewhat difficult to decipher. De Thou says that Montaigne talked to him about Henry of Navarre and the Duke of Guise, and their hatred one of the other. “ As for religion,” added Montaigne, “ both make parade of it; it is a fine pretext to make those of their party follow them. But the interest of religion doesn’t touch either of them ; only the fear of being abandoned by the Protestants prevents the king of Navarre from returning to the religion of his ancestors, and the duke would betake himself to the Augsburg Confession, for which his uncle, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, had given him a taste, if he could follow it without prejudice to his interests.” But Navarre, though he was open-minded on the subject of creeds, and a most dexterous politician, was a noble and loyal gentleman, as Montaigne, with his keen, unprejudiced eyes, could well see. Navarre had been bred a Protestant, his friends were Protestants, and he would not forswear his religion so long as abjuration might work harm to them. When his conversion became of great moment to France, and promised to confer the blessings of peace on the country without hurt to the Protestants, he turned Catholic. This was conduct such as Montaigne would most heartily approve. Henry IV. acted as if he had been nursed on the Essays. And there is much to show that De Thou’s conversation is a very incorrect account of Montaigne’s opinion of Henry.

After Henry had succeeded to the throne, and was still struggling with the League, Montaigne wrote to him: “ I have always thought of you as enjoying the good fortune to which you have come, and you may remember that, even when I was obliged to confess it to the curé, I always hoped for your success. Now, with more cause and more freedom, I salute it with full affection. Your success serves you where you are, but it serves you no less here by reputation. The noise does as much as the shot. We could not draw from the justice of your cause arguments to establish or win your subjects so strong as we do from the news of the prosperity of your enterprises. . . . The inclinations of people flow in a tide. If the incline is once in your favor, it will sweep on of its own weight, to the very end. I should have liked very much that the private gain of your soldiers and the need of making them content had not deprived you, especially in this great city, of the noble commendation of having treated your rebellious subjects, in the hour of victory, with more consideration than their own protectors do ; and that, differently from a transitory and usurped claim, you had shown that they were yours by a fatherly and truly royal protection.” The letter shows admiration and comprehension of the king, and an intimacy honorable to both. There was some invitation for Montaigne to come to court, and an offer of money, but he answered : “ Sire, your Majesty will do me, if you please, the favor to believe that I will never stint my purse on an occasion for which I would not spare my life. I have never received any money from the liberality of kings, — I have neither asked nor deserved it; I have never received payment for the steps I have taken in their service, of which your Majesty in part has knowledge. What I have done for your predecessors I will do very much more willingly for you. I am, Sire, as rich as I desire.” But ill health would not permit him to go, even if he had wished.

In the meantime Montaigne had been in Paris (in 1588) to publish a new edition of the Essays. There he formed the acquaintance of Mademoiselle de Gournay, a young lady of twenty, who had conceived a great enthusiasm for the Essays. Montaigne called her his adopted daughter. After his death, helped by Madame de Montaigne, she devoted herself to the preparation of a new edition of the Essays, with all the last changes and additions that the author had made. This edition was marked by great care and skill.

Montaigne spent the last few years of his life on his seigniory. He lived quietly, his health growing worse, till he died, on September 13, 1592, at the age of fifty-nine. It is said that when he felt his death near, no longer able, to speak, he wrote a little note asking his wife to summon several gentlemen of the neighborhood, that he might take leave of them. When they had come, he had mass said in his room ; and when the priest came to the elevation of the host, he threw himself forward as best he could, his hands clasped, and so died.

VI.

We are wont to call a man of letters great when many generations of men can go to his book, read what he says on the subject that concerns them, — conduct, religion, love, the significance of life, — and find that he has east some light, or at least has shifted the problem. Such is Montaigne. There were greater men living in his time, Shakespeare, Cervantes ; but life plies many questions to which poetry and idealism give no direct answer. If a man would look serenely upon the world, and learn the lesson that “ ripeness is all,” he must go to the poet and to the idealist, but he must go to the skeptic, too. Uncertainty is one of our lessons, and what man has talked so wisely and so persuasively as Montaigne concerning matters that lie at the threshold of the great questions of religion and philosophy, which must underlie all reasonable life ? Hear him, for instance, after finding fault with an excessive credulity, blaming its opposite : “ But also, on the other part, it is presumptuous and foolish to go about disdaining and condemning as false that which does not seem probable to us. This is a vice common to those who think they have an intelligence out of the ordinary.

I had that habit once, and if I heard of ghosts or prophecies of future events, or of magic, of witchcraft, or some wonderful story which I could not endure, I felt compassion for the poor people abused by this nonsense. Now I find that I myself was at least as much to be pitied. Not that I have ever had any experience beyond my first beliefs, and nothing has ever appealed to my curiosity ; but reason has taught me that to condemn finally a thing as false and impossible is to claim to comprehend the boundaries and limits of the will of God and of the power of our mother Nature, and that there is no more remarkable folly in the world than to bring them down to the measurements of our capacity and intelligence. If we give the names, — monsters or miracles, — there where our reason cannot go, how many continually come before our eyes ? Consider in what a mist, and how gropingly, we come to a knowledge of most things that are under our hands ; we shall find that it is familiarity, not knowledge, which has taken the strangeness away, and that, if those things were presented to us afresh, we should find them as much or more unbelievable than any others.”

Montaigne commends us to a prudent but brave open-mindedness. lie warns us against the dogmas of affirmation and the dogmas of denial. He bids us pause and consider. Nothing could be more wrong than the vulgar notion that Montaigne has something in common with Mephistopheles, the spirit that denies. He was a skeptic ; but a single epithet is always incorrect. He was a believer, too. He believed in education, in humanity, in tolerance, in the many-sidedness of life, in the infinite power of God, in the nobleness of humanity. Nothing excites his indignation so violently as the “great subtlety” of those men who sneer at heroic deeds, and attribute noble performance to mean motives. He makes no pretense of special interest in conduct; but conduct is not his business, — he is concerned with the philosophy which underlies conduct. Some men are impatient for action ; they will believe this, that, anything, for an excuse to be up and doing. Montaigne is not a man of action ; he feels uncomfortable when within hearing of the whir and rush of life ; he retires into the “ back of his shop ” to get away from the noisy, roistering band that tramps tumultuous down the great avenue of life. He was for contemplation and meditation. It was this shrinking from action that made him a skeptic. Action is the affirmation of belief, but also its begetter. I believe because I act. The heart beats, the blood circulates, the breath comes and goes, the impatient muscles do not wait for the tardy reason to don hat and overcoat, arms twitch, legs start, and the man is plunged into the hurly-burly of life. There he goes, in the midst of a crowd of human beings, hurrying, struggling, squirming, all filled to surfeit with most monstrous beliefs. Montaigne’s heart beats more slowly ; he is in no hurry to act; the meaning of life will not yield to mere importunity ; let us keep cool. “ If any difficulties occur in reading, I do not bite my nails about them, but, after an attempt or two to explain them, I give them over. Should I insist upon them, I should lose both myself and my time; for I have a genius that is extremely volatile, and what I do not discern at the first attempt becomes the more obscure to me the longer I pore over it. . . . Continuation and a too obstinate contention stupefy and tire my judgment. I must withdraw it, and leave it, to make new discoveries, just as, in order to judge rightly of the lustre of scarlet, we are ordered to pass it lightly with the eye, and to run it over at several sudden repeated views.”

Montaigne is of the Latin people, men of the south, children of the market place and the piazza. He sits in peacefulness, watching the comedy aud tragedy of the world. He lives apart; for him, life is a show, a school for philosophy, a subject for essays. If you have been bred in the Adirondacks or on the slope of Monadnock, up betimes, to tire your legs all the long day, and at evening to watch the setting sun and listen for the first call of the owl, you will not like Montaigne. There, in the morning of life, the blue sky overhead, the realities of life looking so strong and so noble, the speculations of a skeptic come like a cloud of dust. Montaigne is not for the young man. Youth has convictions ; its feelings purport absolute verity ; it possesses reality : why go a-fishing for dreams ? But when the blood runs cooler, when we are glad to be safe on earth, when of a winter’s evening we listen to the pleasant shoot of the bolt that shall keep us to ourselves, and draw up to the fire, then Montaigne is supreme. He is so agreeable, so charming, so skillful in taking up one subject, then another, so well practiced in conversation, so perfect a host. We are translated into his library. He wanders about the room, taking from his shelves one book after another, opening them at random, reading a scrap, and then talking about it. On he goes, talking wisely, wittily, kindly, while the flickering firelight plays over his sensitive, intelligent face, and the Gascon moon shines in patches on the floor, till the world we are used to dissolves under his talk, and its constituent parts waver and flicker with the firelight. Everything aërifies into dreammade stuff, out of which our fancy builds a new world, only to see it again dissolve and fade under his bewitching talk.

Montaigne talks of himself. But his self is not the vulgar self of the gossip ; it is the type and model of humanity. Like a great artist, he makes himself both individual and type. He is the psychologist studying man. He is his own laboratory, his own object of examination. When we try to discover the movements of the mind, have we any choice ? Must we not examine ourselves ? He does not bring us to himself for the mere exhilaration of talking about himself. His subject is man ; through the windows of man’s mind he makes us gaze at the universe, forever reiterating in our ears that man is a prisoner in the four walls of his mind, chafe how he will. If this be egotism, it is egotism with all its teeth drawn.

Skeptic, philosopher, abstracted from the world, Montaigne nevertheless does not shirk when the choice comes between speaking out and keeping silent. We cannot repeat too often his “ We must rend the mask from things as well as from men.” This is no easy task. Even the strength of the young mountaineer may not suffice. Masks familiar to us all our lives become very dear ; let us leave them,— there are other things to do. Is there not something ignoble in this use of our courage, to maltreat an old, venerable appearance ? Give us some work of poetry and romance ; bid us scale heaven. And so the masks of things remain unremoved. Old Montaigne had something sturdy in him at bottom. There is the admiration of the heroic in him always. " All other knowledge is useless to him who does not know how to be good. . . . The measure and the worth of a man consist in his heart and will ; in them is the home of his honor. . . . True victory lieth in the fight, not in coming off safely ; and the honor of courage is in combat, not in success.” Of the three philosophies that he studied, the Epicurean, the Pyrrhonian, the Stoic, his heart was inclined to the last, and I think he would rather have had a nod of approval from Cato the younger than have heard Sainte-Beuve salute him as the wisest of Frenchmen.

H. D. Sedgwick, Jr.