Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/799

Rh MONTAIGNE 769 edition hitherto, make it rather difficult to use it as a document. The freak of writing part of it in a strange dog-Italian is not uncharacteristic of Montaigne, but the words of his last and best editors, MM. Courbet and Royer, who speak of the letters as &quot; 1 unique complement des essais,&quot; seem to indicate that they are not of those who accept the published Voyaye as authentic. Of the fact of the journey there is no doubt whatever. Montaigne (as was not unnatural in a man of his tempera ment, who had for some years, if not for the greater part of his life, lived solely to please himself) was not altogether delighted at his election to the mayoralty, which promised him two years of responsible if not very hard work. The memory of his father, however, and the commands of the king, which seem to have been expressed in a manner rather stronger than a mere formal confirmation, induced him to accept it ; and he seems to have discharged it neither better nor worse than an average magistrate. Indeed, he gave sufficient satisfaction to the citizens to be re-elected at the close of his term, and it may be suspected that the honour of the position, which was really one of considerable dignity and importance, was not altogether indifferent to him. Unfortunately, it cannot be said that nothing in his office became him like the leaving of it, for it was at the close of his second tenure that he gave the only sign of the demoralizing effect which is sometimes alleged by severe moralists to come of the half epicurean, half sceptical philo sophy which he undoubtedly professed. It was his business, if not exactly his duty, to preside at the formal election of his successor, the marechal de Matignon ; but there was a severe pestilence in Bordeaux, and Montaigne writes to the jurats of that town, in one of the few undoubtedly authentic letters which we possess, to the effect that he will leave them to judge whether his presence at the election is so necessary as to make it worth his while to expose himself to the danger of going into the town in its then condition, &quot; which is specially dangerous for men coming from a good air as he does.&quot; That is to say, the chief magistrate of one of the greatest towns in France not only declined to visit it because of sickness prevailing there, but had left it to itself at a time when nearly half the population perished, and when, according to the manners of the age, civil dis turbance was almost sure to follow accordingly. Attempts have been made to justify Montaigne, and it may be at least said that he at no time pretended to unselfish heroism ; but it is to be feared that the facts and the inference drawn from them admit of no dispute. At the least, Montaigne s conduct must be allowed to contrast very little to his advantage with that of Rotrou in the next century under somewhat similar circumstances though in a position of much less responsibility. It may, however, be urged in Montaigne s favour that the general circumstances of the time, where they did not produce reckless and foolhardy daring, almost necessarily produced a somewhat excessive caution. The League was on the point of attaining its greatest power ; the extreme Calvinist and Navarrese party, on the other side, was (as may be seen in Agrippa d Aubigne) no less fanatical than the League itself, and the salvation of France seemed to lie in the third party of politiques, or trimmers, to which Montaigne belonged. The capital motto of this party was that of the Scotch saying, &quot; Jouk and let the jaw gang by,&quot; and the continual habit of parry ing and avoiding political dangers might be apt to extend itself to dangers other than political. However this may be, Montaigne had difficulty enough during this turbulent period, all the more so from his neighbourhood to the chief haunts and possessions of Henry of Navarre. He was able, however, despite the occupations of his journey, his mayoralty, and the pressure of civil war and pestilence, which was not confined to the town, to continue his essay writing, and in 1588, after a visit of some length to Paris, the third book of the Essays was published, together with the former ones considerably revised. The new essays, as has been remarked, differ strikingly from the older ones in respect of length ; there being only one which confines itself to the average of those in the first two books. The whimsical unexpectedness of the titles, moreover, reappears in but two of them: &quot;Des coches&quot; and &quot;Des boiteux.&quot; They are, however, identical with the earlier ones in spirit, and make with them a harmonious whole a book which has hardly been second in influence to any of the modern world. This influence is almost equally remarkable in point of matter and in point of form, as regards the subsequent history of thought and as regards the subsequent history of literature. The latter aspect may be taken first. Montaigne is one of the few great writers who have not only perfected but have also invented a literary form. The essay as he gave it had no forerunner in modern literature, and no direct ancestor in the literature of classical times. It is indeed not improbable that it owes something to the body of tractates by different authors and of different dates, which goes under the name of Plutarch s Morals, and it also bears some resemblance to the miscellaneous work of Lucian. But the resemblance is in both cases at most that of suggestion. The peculiar desultoriness and tenta tive character of the essay proper were alien to the orderly character of the Greek mind, as were also its garrulity and the tendency which it has rather to reveal the idiosyncrasy of the writer than to deal in a systematic manner with the peculiarities of the subject. It has been suggested that tlie form which the essays assumed was in a way accidental, and this of itself precludes the idea of a definite model even if such a model could be found. Beginning with the throwing together of a few stray thoughts and quotations linked by a community of subject, the author by degrees acquires more and more certainty of hand, until he produces such masterpieces of apparent desultoriness and real unity as the essay &quot; Sur des vers de Virgile. &quot; In matter of style and language Montaigne s position is equally important, but the ways which led him to it are more clearly traceable. His favourite author was beyond all doubt Plu tarch, and his own explicit confession makes it undeniable that Plutarch s translator Amyot was his master in point of vocabulary, and (so far as he took any lessons in it) of style. Amyot was unquestionably one of the most remarkable writers of French in the 16th century, and to him more than to any one else is due the beauty of the prose style which marked the second half of that century, a style which, though unequal and requiring to bo modified for general use, is at its best the very flower, of the lan guage. Montaigne, however, followed with the perfect independence that characterized him. He was a contemporary of Ronsard, and his first essays were published when the innovations of the Pleiade had fully established themselves. He adopted them to a great extent, but with much discrimination, and he used his own judg ment in Latinizing when he pleased. In the same way he retained archaic and provincial words with a good deal of freedom, but by no means to excess. In the arrangement as in the selection of his language he is equally original. There is little or no trace in him of the interminable sentence which is the drawback of early prose in all languages when it has to deal with anything more difficult to manage than mere narrative. He has not the excessive classicism of style which mars even the fine prose of Calvin, and which makes that of some of Calvin s followers intolerably stiff. As a rule he is careless of definitely rhythmical cadence, though his sentences are always pleasant to the ear. But the principal characteristic of Montaigne s prose style is its remarkable ease and flexibility. These peculiarities, calculated in themselves to exercise a salutary influ ence on a language as yet somewhat undisciplined, acquired by accident an importance of an extraordinary kind. A few years after Montaigne s death a great revolution, as is generally known, passed over French. The criticism of Malherbe, followed by the establishment of the Academy, the minute grammatical censures of Vaugelas, and the severe literary censorship of Boileau turned French in less than three-quarters of a century from one of the freest languages in Europe to one of the most restricted. The Latinisms and Gnecisms of the Pleiade were tabooed at the same time with the most picturesque expressions of the older tongue. The efforts of the reformers were directed above all things to weed and to refine, to impose additional difficulties in the way of writing exquisitely, at the same time that, by holding out a strictly-defined model, they assisted persons of little genius and imagination to write tolerably. During this revolution only two writers of older date held their ground, and those two were Rabelais and Montaigne, Montaigne being of his nature more generally readable than Rabe lais. The Essays, the popularity of which no academic censorship could touch, thus kept before the eyes of the 17th and 18th cen turies a treasury of French in which every generation could behold