Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/741

 the moral elevation of his work which would make the Church stare and the conventicle groan, and yet would be the truth, and nothing but the truth." These may seem hard sayings, utterly incredible if portions of his work are alone regarded, but accurate enough if the purpose and drift of his teaching as a whole be considered. It has been well said that the confession of faith of the curé of Meudon has far more moral reality than that which Rousseau puts into the mouth of his Savoyard vicar. He believes that the universe needs no other governor than its Creator, whose word guides the whole and determines the nature, properties, and condition of each several thing. Pascal's famous definition of Deity, "a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere," is but an echo from Babelais. And he can, with the wisest of the ancients and the best of the moderns, speak of the "great Soul of the universe which quickens all things." La Bruyère described his work as "a chimera; it has the face of a beautiful woman, but the tail of a serpent." Yet surely the man who had to wear the mask of a buffoon that he might preach the wisdom of truth and love to his age, well deserves the epigram which Beza wrote in his honour:

Montaigne is of all Frenchmen most thoroughly a son of the Renaissance. He loves books, especially the solid and sensible and well-flavoured books written in the ancient classic tongues, the men who made and those who read them, and he loved to study man. He says: "Je suis moy mesme la matière de mon livre." And he does not understand himself in any little or narrow sense, but rather as the epitome and mirror of mankind. The world in which he lived was not friendly to the freedom of thought which was expressed in affirmative speech or creative conduct, and so he learned to be silent-or sceptical. He had seen men hate each other, willingly burn or be burned, out of love to God; and he was moved by pity to moralise on the behaviour of those who were so positive where they could not know, and so little understood the God in whom they professed to believe that they never saw what the love of Him bound them to be and to do. The man that he studied and described was not abstract but concrete man, with all his foibles and failings, limited in his nature but infinite in his views, differing without ceasing from his fellows, and not always able to agree with himself. And man, so conceived, dwells amid mystery, has it within him, and confronts it without. Custom may guide him but not reason; for reason builds on arguments, whose every position depends on another, in a series infinitely regressive. "Les hommes sont tourmentés par les opinions qu'ils ont des choses, non par les choses mesmes." Where man is so ignorant he ought not to be dogmatic; where truth is what all seek and no one can be sure that he finds,