Montaigne in America

by THEODORE SPENCER

1

A committee room in an American university. Eight p.m. The University Committee on Humanism and Society is seated around a table. The committee consists of Dean A (Chairman) and Professors B, C, D, and E. There is an empty chair opposite Dean A.

DEAN A: Before we begin this evening’s business, gentlemen, I should like to explain to our new member, Professor E, our method of procedure, which is not, I believe, generally known to the faculty as a whole. Our purpose, however, you do know: it is to discuss the significance of the great thinkers of the past for contemporary American education in general and for the undergraduates of this university in particular. To help us accomplish our purpose the President has given us extraordinary powers. When any one of us is doubtful as to the value and wisdom of the ideas presented by a given author of the past, we are enabled, by a method which I will not waste your time in explaining, to summon before us the actual author whose work we are considering.

PROFESSOR E: The actual author! In person?

DEAN A: Yes; in person. It saves us a great deal of trouble. This evening we have planned to discuss the work of Montaigne. Most of us agree about Montaigne’s wisdom and common sense, but Professor C — who, as you know, is a member of both the Department of Sociology and the School of Education— feels very strongly that Montaigne’s work should be removed from our list of selected books. We have therefore decided to exercise the powers the President has given us, and in a moment I will invite Montaigne to join us. Unfortunately, however, the President’s powers are not unlimited, and our visitor will be allowed to stay only fifty minutes; I must therefore ask you to make your discussion as brief and as pertinent as possible. Are you ready, gentlemen? (They are all ready.) Good. Then I will put out the lights for the usual period.

He puts out the lights. The room is dark for fortyfive seconds. When the lights are turned on, Montaigne, aged fifty-eight, is seated in the empty chair.

DEAN A: Good evening, sir. I believe you have already been informed as to why we have asked you to join us?

MONTAIGNE: Yes, thank you, I have. I congratulate you on the excellence of your arrangements. What would you like to ask me?

DEAN A: Perhaps I had better begin at the beginning. I can put it very simply: we are looking for wisdom. We are, in this university, and I think it is true of our country as a whole, somewhat in the position of the man in the Gospel: we say, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” We are convinced that our way of life is basically sound, that democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, all the other freedoms that are necessary to the good life, must be maintained.

But at the same time we are frightened. We are afraid that those freedoms, if and when they are secured, won’t be rightly or justly used. We want a foundation on which to build them. We want to give the people in this country, and eventually all the people who live on this planet, a common basis of knowledge, a common sense of values, a common will for right action, so that they can live happily together, communicate generously with one another, act intelligently for the common interest, and be tolerant and productive. We feel that economic security, world organizations, mutual expressions of good will, though essential, are not enough.

We believe that we must rely, not only on the wisdom of our own generation, but on the wisdom of the past, without which our own wisdom may be thin and superficial. Our problem has recently been well stated by Mr. T. S. Eliot: “In our age, when men seem more than ever prone to confuse wisdom with knowledge, and knowledge with information, and try to solve problems of life in terms of engineering, there is coming into existence a new kind of provincialism which perhaps deserves a new name. It is a provincialism, not of space, but of time; one for which history is merely the chronicle of human devices which have served their turn and been scrapped, one for which the world is the property solely of the living, a property in which the dead hold no shares.”

That is the provincialism which we are anxious to overcome, and it is for this reason that we are considering with as much care as possible the writers of the past who, like yourself, have helped to form our view of what makes a wise human being. Naturally there has been some disagreement among us as to which writers and thinkers can be most useful to us, and when such disagreement has occurred, we have invited the writers concerned to appear before us and to expound their views.

PROFESSOR C: You have stated our problem, A, with your usual clarity, but I think it’s only fair to M. de Montaigne to say at once that, in my opinion, the reading of his essays can do much more harm than good to any youthful mind.

MONTAIGNE: I appreciate your frankness, Professor C, but you surprise me. I should have thought myself the most harmless person on earth.

PROFESSOR C: That’s just the trouble. You give the impression of urbanity, of ease, of harmlessness, and yet your attitude to life, and the influence it has exerted, have been — I don’t think I use too strong a word — mainly destructive.

MONTAIGNE: Destructive of what? Of vanity, pretension, lying, violence? If so, I plead guilty to the charge with pleasure.

PROFESSOR C: No, sir, that’s not what I mean. It goes much deeper than that. You are a skeptic —

MONTAIGNE: I have been called so by others; I never applied that word to myself. At one stage in my career, to be sure —

PROFESSOR C: YOU are a skeptic. Now there are certain periods in the history of civilization in which skepticism is important, even necessary; I will grant you that your own period was perhaps one of them. You preached the gospel of doubt to a conceited generation; you broke down human pretensions and attacked human pride. It was a worthy gesture —

MONTAIGNE: More than a gesture, my friend.

PROFESSOR C: And it was extremely effective. But what good can you do now? What help can you give to a generation that is already so skeptical as a result of its own experience that it doesn’t need your insidiously convincing arguments to be converted — a generation that suffers not from pride but from fear? We do not need to have our noses rubbed in the dirt, to be compared, unfavorably, with foxes, horses, and dogs; we find it only too easy to make those comparisons ourselves.

The youth of your generation was brought up to believe that man was the sole aim of creation, and that the laws he lived under were laws made by God for his peculiar benefit. That was, of course, a very arrogant view, and at the time you did right to attack it. When you said that only the individual was worth thinking about, and that no generalizations were true, you said something that needed saying — in the sixteenth century. But it does not need saying now; we are at the opposite end of the swing of the pendulum. And that’s why I say that you and your ideas should have no place in our education or our society.

MONTAIGNE: What you tell me is nothing new; my essays were put on the Index in 1676. But forgive my interruption; you have doubtless more to say, and I should like to hear your full indictment before I try to reply to it .

2

PROFESSOR C: You are quite right, sir, in assuming that I think there is more than your skepticism that can be considered irrelevant or even harmful to our present generation. In the first place, you were an aristocrat; you inherited plenty of money, and you married more. That gave you an opportunity to indulge your intellectual whims without considering whether or not other human beings were in a position to do the same thing. Even though you were, for four years, Mayor of Bordeaux, and at times throughout your life were involved in politics, nevertheless your own comfortable library was what mattered to you most, and you were protected from disturbance and responsibility whenever you wanted to escape them.

In that ivory tower of yours you wrote your essays, always focused more and more on your own ideas, your own personality, even on your fondness for melons. Your existence was entirely selfish, and its complacent egoism is not mitigated by the charm and humor with which you have described it. A young man or woman who should read your essays at the present day and be sufficiently impressed with them to take your self-indulgence as a model would be cut off from that fructifying intercourse with ordinary human beings without which active wisdom cannot exist.

Furthermore, your essays, particularly the later ones, not only encourage egoism: they discourage ambition. “Others,” you say, “study how to elevate their minds and raise them on stilts; I to humble mine and bring it low.” You do your best to debase human nature, you discount the possibilities of greatness in the average human being, you admire — or at least you say you do — the ignorance of the peasant more than the wisdom of the philosopher. The virtues you recommend — order, moderation, and constancy — are the tamest virtues that you can think of, and the best advice you can give a man is to tell him to relax. I do not believe in censorship, but I frankly confess I have a great deal of sympathy with the people who put your essays on the Index.

I certainly do not think that the slack egoism, the self-satisfied self-contemplation, the lazy and indulgent withdrawal from energy and action, which the essays so temptingly prescribe, should be set as an example before young people whose business is to reconstruct, rather than to undermine, a civilization.

MONTAIGNE: I gather, Professor C, that there are three main reasons for your disapproval of my essays: you dislike my skepticism, my rank in society, and my lack of ambition. The first of these I deny, the second I could not help, and the third I stoutly defend. Perhaps I can best explain myself if I indulge in a little autobiography. A number of recent scholars — including yourself, Professor B — who have flattered me by the devoted attention they have paid to my essays have divided my intellectual career into a period of Stoicism, a period of Skepticism, and a period of something like Epicureanism.

Although it has sometimes been impossible for me not to smile at the rigid earnestness with which they have tried to categorize me, there is, I suppose, a grain of truth in this description of my thinking. My earliest essays, especially before I revised t hem, contained a certain emphasis on Stoic discipline which I later grew to feel was out of character. And it is true that when, in 1576 (just a century before the precursors of Professor C decided that my essays were spiritually unhealthy), I took for my motto “Que sçay-je?” and read with considerable admiration the life of the skeptic Pyrrho and the exposition of the skeptical point of view by Sextus Empiricus, I was fresh from translating, at my father’s request , a singularly bloated and presumptuous work, the Natural Theology of Ramon Sabunde. It amused me to destroy the pretensions of Sabunde with the arguments of the skeptics.

It was, in fact, more than an amusement — much more; to destroy human vanity and arrogance by bringing man down to the level of animals and by showing that there was no agreement in the world about any kind of human knowledge was an essential act for me to perform if I was later to establish any true picture of the human situation in terms of the only evidence I could be sure of— namely, my own character. That picture has been called Epicurean; but I did not call it so when I was alive, nor would I call it so now. I was not, like the true Epicurean, an ascetic, and there was more energy in my belief than in that of Epicurus — more energy, certainly, than Professor C would attribute to it.

3

BUT perhaps my intellectual autobiography is not the thing that really concerns us this evening. Perhaps I should go back to Professor C’s emphasis on my rank in society, which seems to invalidate for him so much of what I had to say. I gather that Professor C believes that people like myself, with an inherited income and with a leisure they have not earned by their own efforts, are people who should not exist in your present society, and that in consequence what we have had to say in the past can have no meaning now. That seems to me, if I may say so, a very shallow point of view.

You, Professor C, are no doubt a believer in both progress and democracy. As you know, the concept of progress was to me meaningless, and democracy, in my century, was not an issue; if it had been, I should have pointed out that it has as many dangers as advantages. But let me put myself, for a moment, not in my own century but in yours, and let me try to defend myself as if I were not the Sieur de Montaigne but a member of your own society. Or let me be even more presumptuous; let me try to see what your century and mine have in common, apart from any material accidents or differences in social structure; let us try to discover whether my reflections about human nature are the result only of my particular privileged leisure, or whether they are the conclusions that any man might come to if my privileges were granted to everyone.

I cannot help thinking that every society needs a few people who will withdraw from the scramble and fuss of daily activity to reflect on what the fuss and scramble mean, and to consider as carefully as possible just what it is in the world and in himself that man has control of. I said just now that neither the concept of progress nor the ideal of democracy has ever meant very much to my thinking; it seemed very improbable to me that man could ever change himself by lifting himself by his own bootstraps, and if it had been suggested to me that this variable creature could, in the mass, ever be trusted to create his own government, I should have turned away with a smile. But if I should take the opposite view, if I should put myself in the position of defending progress and democracy, I think I could make a fairly strong case if I said that an attitude to human nature like mine was the attitude toward which progress should lead and which democracy should maintain.

I should say that the leisure which I — one out of a thousand — was able in my own time to enjoy should, according to the theory of progress, be enjoyed eventually by all men. I should say (and I hope you will not think me boastful; you must remember that I am not speaking at the moment for myself) that the kind of tolerance which my rank and my income enabled me to cultivate was an example of the kind of tolerance which in the future could be achieved by everyone; and I should say that if you believe in democracy my kind of tolerance must be the aim of all your education, if your democracy is to have any meaning.

PROFESSOR C: But your kind of tolerance is essentially passive; it’s static; it doesn’t lead anywhere. You accept things as they are, and if you see evil, injustice, or cruelty, all you do is to shrug your shoulders and say, “Things have always been like this; nothing we can do can ever make them better.” What sort of view is that to present to active young men and women?

I grant you that one of the goals of a progressive society is to give to everyone the kind of leisure that you, by an accident of birth, were able to enjoy, when so many of your contemporaries — peasants, workers, and soldiers— had no time for anything but sweating, eating, and sleeping. But if we followed your advice and sat back on our tails, to use your own expression, and contemplated our own personal idiosyncrasies, surely we should be a race of idle egoists, without ambition, without fructifying anger, without sympathy, generosity, or vitality. There would be no leadership, no daring, none of that brave originality which breaks the molds of convention and creates new life — in art, in science, and in statecraft. No, M. de Montaigne, nothing you have said so far has made me change my original opinion. What you had to say may have been very useful for your own generation; I do not see what use it can be to ours.

PROFESSOR B: And yet, C, M. de Montaigne lived in a time which was less different from our own than you seem to think. Civil war was tearing his country apart, and twice in our generation war has torn our world apart. In both his time and our own, passion has blinded reason, and the fear which is always propagated by violence has threatened to destroy self-respect and individual integrity. It would seem to me, if the essays of M. de Montaigne were studied in their historical context and in the light of our own situation as well, that they would give to our young men and women an example of those unifying conceptions which have been found effective by mankind and which we are seeking to define in our educational program.

MONTAIGNE: Thank you, Professor B, for your high opinion. I do not deserve, I fear, so eloquent a description of my usefulness. Yet, since you mention education, I cannot deny that when I wrote my essays I had some notion of “education” in the back of my mind; “the most difficult and important branch of human knowledge,” I once observed, “appears to be that which treats of the rearing and education of children,” and in what I had to say on the subject I had the rearing of adults in mind as well. As Professor B has said, mine was a violent age, and I did my best to prove, by example and precept, that the way of violence is not the way of wisdom.

But that my teaching, if teaching it can be called, had mere passivity for its aim, I refuse to admit. My aim was entirely different. When, after the death of Étienne de la Boëtie, I looked round at the society in which I lived, I saw no man in possession of himself. Many were violent partisans, accepting without thought the beliefs of their leaders; many were wildly ambitious, hoping to achieve by violent action a satisfaction that always eluded them. I saw little men puffed up by pride, and men with potentialities for greatness too ignorant of themselves to use those potentialities in wise action.

Men lived, as I saw it, outside of themselves; they were always struggling to be something they were not. It seemed to me necessary to bring people back to their senses, to show them their limits, to teach them to know themselves. A number of simple peasants, a few wise men of the past, had achieved that knowledge, but nearly all others seemed to be trying to escape from the men they were.

I thought that foolish; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transformed themselves into beasts; instead of raising, they degraded themselves. I observed that supercelestial ideas and subterrestrial conduct were singularly suited to each other. Greatness of soul, I concluded, consists, not so much in soaring high and pressing forward, as in knowing how to adapt and limit oneself. The most beautiful lives, in my opinion, were those which conformed to the model of common humanity, with order, but with nothing wonderful or extravagant.

The body and soul are parts of the same being, and one should not be exalted at the expense of the other. Nature has given us reason and desire, and has so ordered things that the actions she has laid upon us for our need give us pleasure. It is, I decided, our duty to compose our character, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquillity for our conduct of life.

4

PROFESSOR C: But this goal of yours, as I have tried to say before, is arrived at only through a skepticism which is entirely destructive. You remind me of E. M. Forster’s version of Landor: —

That’s why, at this stage of the world’s history, your essays can do only harm. Experience is itself already destructive enough. We need everything we can lay our hands on that will give us encouragement and hope, and I still insist that your essays do just the reverse: they make all action seem futile.

MONTAIGNE: I am sorry, Professor C, that the impression of futility which they give you is so ineradicable, for in spite of everything I said about the arrogance and ignorance of man, I never considered him futile. In fact, I was a sufficiently good Catholic to have thought such an opinion blasphemous.

I think of my skepticism, as I have already told you, as merely a stage in what Professor B and his fellow scholars would call my “development.” Skepticism helped me to find and know myself, and I am not the only man who has believed that selfknowledge is the beginning, and perhaps the end, of wisdom. My skepticism taught me to distrust generalities, to laugh —I hope without bitterness—at idealism untested by experience; it made me look inward to discover what sort of man I really was.

PROFESSOR C: But we don’t need your questioning and the insecurity that goes with it; we need people who take a position, people with a positive sense of values, not people like yourself, who look around at a world they cannot understand and dismiss it, saying, “What can I know? ”

PROFESSOR B: It seems to me, C, that you are somewhat perverse in your interpretation of M. de Montaigne. His famous question, “Que sçay-je?” implies something more than a shrug of the shoulders, and “Nothing” is not the only answer to it. It is a question that implies a serious search for knowledge.

I have always imagined that when M. de Montaigne adopted “Que sçay-je?” for his motto, he was asking himself just how much knowledge is possible — what are the content and the value of human knowledge? I say this is what I have always thought; if I am wrong, M. de Montaigne can correct me himself.

Montaigne; I should hardly venture, Professor B, to correct anyone who has devoted so many years to the study of my work as you have, and I will let your answer to Professor C stand as if it were my own. But there is one further observation which I should like to make, and I make it, I must confess, not without anxiety. When I hear Professor C asking me to take a “position,” I hear not only his own charming Texas accent, but the accent of many people in my own time who said the same thing. They were the dogmatists, the Aristotelians, the reactionaries; they were the people whose violent opinions fostered the civil war which lore my generation in two. It was against such people that I preached — though “preach” is not a word I like to use — the twin objectives of self-knowledge and tolerance. These objectives do not easily go out of date, Professor C, whereas, if I may say so, “positions” and dogmas do.

And in this respect, to digress a little, it seems to me that my point of view, or what there is in it which can be called skepticism, is more in harmony with the best thinking of your time than any dogmatic conviction. Your scientists, with their laws of relativity and indetermination, look at the world, if I read them correctly, through spectacles similar to my own; and wore the implications of their views applied to men’s daily lives, the resulting philosophy would be very similar to that which I tried to express in my essays. In this respect it is Professor C who is out of date, not I.

But my skepticism was only a prelude, a housecleaning preparatory to the installation of my tenant: Myself. It increased my tolerance, it satisfied my humor, but it was a means, not an end. My end was quite different. What, I asked myself, was the maitresse forme which governed my thoughts and my actions? How could I best keep it clean of irrelevant opinions that stained it, and of unnatural ideals which blurred its outline?

I realized that I should twist my being out of shape if I tried to be too rigid with myself; and since the customs of my time and country had helped to make me what I was, I realized that it would be foolish not to accept those customs as rules for the conduct of my outer life. For to the man who would really know himself, custom is nothing more than a suit of clothes, and such a man does not need to waste his energy in presumptuous rebellion against something that, after all, can do him little harm.

PROFESSOR C: Excuse me a moment. Did I understand you to say that custom is something that can do a man “little harm”? I should have thought it could do as much harm as anything in existence. Custom can make a man kill, cheat, lie, rob, and torture. How can you say it does “little harm”?

MONTAIGNE: It depends on how you define the word. Custom is law in embryo; law is matured and organized custom. To live in society we must have law, and we must obey that law if we are to be happy with other people. The wisest man who ever lived — Socrates — knew that, and he recognized that he must obey both religious custom and social law if he was to follow the wisdom which he was always seeking. Consequently he sacrificed a cock to Aesculapius and accepted the death to which the state condemned him. But he himself was not touched; they could not touch his soul. You look at life rather superficially, Professor C; to you it would seem that the inner man does not exist.

5

PROFESSOR C: Socrates, M. de Montaigne, lost his life for his beliefs; you, I notice, were very careful not to lose your life for yours.

MONTAIGNE: I was never afraid of doing so. But I confess I was no Socrates; in fact there was something in Socrates — I refer to his daemon — which, in spite of all my admiration for him, I found it difficult to swallow. No; my methods were different from his, though I hope our goals were not so very far apart. He labored to change men’s views of themselves, and so did I, and we both realized that it is the inner man who must be sought for, awakened, educated, and brought to maturity.

The inner man is what matters, and we human beings are not strong enough, or only very rarely so, to change ourselves and the world of custom at the same time. I concentrated on myself, on finding in myself what was essential, and by following the external customs of my time I had fewer distractions to worry about and more leisure to be clear.

It has been said of me that once a man has read my essays he can never be quite the same man he was before; and if that means what I should like it to, it means that my revelation of myself has given my reader greater self-knowledge than he had before he met me. I tried to conceal nothing, and if in the mind of anyone else I have helped a little to draw the curtain of self-concealment, I consider that I have clone him greater service than if I flashed before his eyes the banner of some ideal he might find it impossible to realize.

It was not my purpose to urge everyone to be like myself; though I had been very fortunate in my parentage, my inheritance, and my disposition, I found little in my nature which struck me as appropriate for a model of virtue; though I admired Socrates above all other men, and tried as well as I could to be like him, I had no intention that anyone should look upon me as I looked upon Socrates. I described myself as an example only in the sense of a specimen — the only specimen I could really know.

I do not want to force myself or my essays (the two are of course the same) on the young men and women of your generation; I do not believe in forcing anything, and perhaps your young men and women, if they read me, will find me old-fashioned and out of date. Your psychologists explain human nature in ways very different from mine, and the sense of progress, which, as Professor C has shown, seems still to be so strong in your culture, may have made you feel so removed or so advanced from my opinions that anything I said will seem meaningless.

Yet I cannot help thinking that if this happens, you will lose something important. It is one of the paradoxes of your highly developed sense of history that the past seems much less relevant to you than it did to me; the paradox is confirmed by the sentence which Dean A quoted from Mr. Eliot half an hour .ago. Your historians have taught you that to understand the past you must emphasize its differences from the present — something which I never thought of doing myself. To me, the men of Greece and Rome whom I read about in Plutarch were my contemporaries because they were my fellow men, and though I never went so far as Petrarch did when he actually wrote letters to Cicero as if he were a personal friend, I might easily have done so if it had occurred to me.

But such an act would be impossible for you; the historians have raised too many barriers between the past and yourselves, and the more you learn*about the past, the more you tend to disregard it. When you study the past, you exclaim, “How different, how queer! This can have nothing to do with me!” And so you think only of your own problems and your own times; you are, if I may say so, unhealthily contemporaneous.

This seems to me a great pity. I should like to have you feel about me as I felt about the ancients; I should like to have you know me as I felt I knew them. As I have already said, it took me a long time to discover myself, to “isolate,” as you would say, the maîtresse forme which was my essential self. It takes anyone — perhaps even a Socrates — a long time.

But, with all deference to Professor C, I doubt if anyone can properly call himself a human being unless he goes through some such process of self-knowledge as I did. Not that I expect, for a moment, that all human beings will reach the same conclusions about life and the best way to live it as mine. The maitresse forme of an Alexander, of a Saint Francis of Assisi, of a young man or woman in your university, will not be that of Michel de Montaigne. But it will be there just the same, and unless there is self-analysis, self-observation, a contemplation in tranquillity of the inner movements of the soul, it will not be found; and until it is found there will be distraction, perturbation, and anxiety — not content.

You will say, Professor C, that I am both selfish and impractical, and you will point out — in fact you have already done so — that it is idle to talk of inner content without first establishing economic security. Of course you are right; but in my opinion economic security, if you are to have a good life, is meaningless unless you demand inner content as its goal and its flower. A few people who really know themselves are the leaven of society; and if the reading of my essays can help to produce more such people than would exist otherwise — as, with all modesty, I hope they can — then I trust, gentlemen, you will not follow the advice of Professor C and exclude my work, and myself, from your curriculum.

Professor C has called me an egoist. To that charge I do not willingly submit. Self-knowledge is not the same thing as selfishness; in fact the best way not to be selfish is to know oneself as well as possible. If you will turn to my essays, you will find that I have said that our free will exercises herself best in affection and friendship. To me that is not a very egoistic sentiment, nor would I call it egoistic to say, as I said, that I consider all men my compatriots, and that I embrace a Pole as I do a Frenchman, seeking in each only our common humanity.

I do not call it egoism to “hate that overbearing and quarrelsome arrogance that causes a man to believe and trust entirely to himself.” People who trust entirely to themselves, I said, are deadly enemies of learning and truth. And when I studied myself more than any other subject, I did so with humility, aware of the fact that every man who is so cocksure and self-satisfied as to think he knows enough about himself shows that he does not know himself in the least, as Socrates, in Xenophon, impresses upon Euthydemus. No, gentlemen, I am not a mere egoist, and those people who have dismissed me as one have not, I suspect, been much blessed with humor.

6

I WOULD say to men and women this: “Have you been able to meditate and manage your own lives? Then you have performed the greatest work of all.” My age was a more leisurely one than yours, but even then there was little meditation and little good management; your age moves very quickly, and I should be surprised if meditation and good management had increased with your increased ability to move your bodies from one place to another.

My essays offer you and your young men and women one example — I think a moderate and rational example —of a man who tried to live a wise life through self-knowledge, and to reveal his selfknowledge (painfully little of it, I am afraid) to other men. The essays were my offering to my own generation, but I flatter myself that I am no more a provincial in time than I was in space, and the affection with which I once would have embraced a Pole as well as a Frenchman I now extend to you over the gap of three hundred and sixty years.

But what I offer you, and your generation of young men and women, is not something merely passive — make no mistake about that. The men of the past who have read me, in France, in England, in America, and elsewhere, were not made passive by what: they learned of me, nor by what they learned, through me, of themselves. I did not make passive my great countryman, Pascal, nor did I make passive your great countryman, Emerson. Neither of them was a reproduction of myself — if he had been I should despise him.

In fact Pascal turned definitely against me, and the fish that Emerson had to fry were more transcendental than any that swam in the pond of my particular temperament. But Emerson would not have been what he was if I had not been what I was. Nor would Pascal. Nor many other men with less verbally articulate lives than theirs.

Do not misunderstand me, gentlemen; I am not a destroyer but a maker — a maker and a preserver. And of what? Of yourselves, the selves which your world, like all worlds of violence, would have you disastrously forget. I release you from bondage to empty slogans and party catchwords; I give you what you most highly prize, independence. What you do with that independence when you have got it is your own affair, but you cannot use it until you find it. And that you can find it through me, I modestly, but most firmly, believe.

DEAN A (looking at his watch): Our time, gentlemen, is almost up, and in one minute more M. de Montaigne’s chair will be empty. Is there any further question you would like to ask him before he leaves us?

PROFESSOR E: M. de Montaigne has spoken wisely, and with more passion than I had expected of him, but he has left out something very important: he has left out Christianity. What he says will do well enough for a pagan, but the morality of Jesus and the doctrine of redemption brought something new into the world, and once it was given to man, he can no more neglect it than he can neglect the weather. In this sense our guest is a moral and spiritual reactionary. Would you not say, Monsieur, that man needs something more than merely your kind of wisdom if he is really to achieve full being?

MONTAIGNE: That is a matter which I — (He disappears.)

DEAN A: I am sorry, E, you asked that question so late; as you see, our guest is gone and we cannot call him back. Perhaps B would like to answer in his place.

PROFESSOR B: If M. de Montaigne cannot answer that question himself, I am not presumptuous enough to answer it for him.

PROFESSOR C: It’s an irrelevant question anyway.

DEAN A: Well, gentlemen, you have heard what our guest has had to say for himself. Is there any further discussion, or shall we vote at once as to whether or not the essays of Montaigne shall be read in our compulsory course in the humanities?

PROFESSOR C: Question!

DEAN A: Very well, then. All those in favor please raise their right hands. Thank you. Those opposed? Thank you. The result is just as I expected. Good night, gentlemen. We will meet again next week.