Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/800

Rh 770 MONTAIGNE the riches of their ancestors. The study of them influenced all the great prose writers of France, and they could not fail to be influ enced in the direction which it was most important that they should take by the racy phrase, the quaint and picturesque vocabulary, and the unconstrained constructions of Montaigne. It would be impossible, however, for the stoutest defender of the importance of form in literature to assign the chief part in Mon taigne s influence to style. It is the method or rather the manner of thinking of which that style is the garment which has in reality exercised influence on the world. Like all writers except Shake speare, Montaigne thoroughly and completely exhibits the intellec tual and moral complexion of his own time. When he reached man hood the French Renaissance (which was perhaps on the whole the most characteristic example of that phenomenon, the religious element being neither in excess as it was in England and Germany, nor in defect as it had been in Italy) was at high water, and the turn of the tide was beginning. Rabelais, who died when Montaigne was still in i;arly manhood, exhibits the earlier and rising spirit, though he needs to be completed on the poetical side. The Renaissance had, as all revolts against authority must have, a certain sceptical element, but it was not at first by any means eminently sceptical. Despite the half ironical, half warning termination of Pantagrucl, an immense confidence and delight, as of the invader of a promised land, fills the pages of Rabelais. He rejoices in his strength, in his knowledge, in his freedom, in the pleasures of the flesh and the spirit. With Montaigne begins the age of disenchantment. By the time at least when he began to meditate his essays in the retirement of his country house it was tolerably certain that no golden age was about to return. The Reformation had brought not peace but a sword, and the Calvinists were as intolerant as the Catholics. The revival of learning had, whatever its benefits, merely changed the outward guise of pedants instead of extirpating pedantry. The art of printing had multiplied rubbish as well as valuable matter. The discovery of America had brought ruin to the discovered, and disease and discord to the discoverers. The horrors of a disputed succession were already threatening France. These things were enough to make thoughtful men dubious about the blessings of progress and reform ; but the extreme dissoluteness which charac terised the private life of the time also brought about its natural result of satiety. Physical science had hardly yet emerged to occupy some active minds ; scholasticism was dead, while Bacon and Des cartes had not arisen ; nothing like a theory of politics had been evolved, though Bodin and a few others were feeling after one. As the earlier Renaissance had specially occupied itself with the prac tical business and pleasures of life, so the later Renaissance specially mused on the vanity of this business and these pleasures. The pre- disjwsing circumstances which affected Montaigne were thus likely to incline him to scepticism, to ethical musings on the vanity of life and the like. But to all this there had to be added the peculiarity of his own temperament. This was a decidedly complicated one, and neglect of it has led some readers to adopt a more positive idea of Montaigne s scepticism than is fully justified by all the facts. The municipality of Rome has put up a tablet on the house occupied by Montaigne during his visit there, which speaks of him as a &quot;founder of the new philosophy.&quot; In Italian mouths at the present day this is equivalent to an assertion that Montaigne was an enemy of Christianity. No assumption can be more gratuitous or less borne out by the text of his works and the reasonable inferences to be drawn from them. The attitude which he assumed was no doubt ephectic and critical chiefly. He decorated his study at Montaigne with inscriptions (still, by dint of accidental preservation and restoration not accidental, legible there), most of which are of the most pessimist and sceptical character. Eccle- siastes, Ecclesiasticus, Horace, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, the fragments of the Greek dramatists and philosophers, are ransacked for epigraphs indicating the vanity of human reason, human wishes, human belief, human thoughts and actions of every kind. In one curious essay (if indeed it is to be called an essay), the &quot; Apologie de Raymond Sebonde,&quot; he has apparently amused himself with gathering together, in the shape of quotations as well as of re flexions, all that can be said against certainty in aesthetics as well as in dogmatics. But the general tenor of the essays is in complete contrast with this sceptical attitude, at least in its more decided form, and it is worth notice that the motto &quot; Que scai-je ? &quot; does not apjxiar on the title page till after the writer s death. The general disposition, moreover, manifested in these famous writings is very far from being determinedly Pyrrhonist or despairingly misanthro pic. Montaigne is far too much occupied about all sorts of the minutest details of human life to make it for a moment admissible that he regarded that life as a whole but as smoke and vapour. Ho is much too curious of the varieties of belief, and too keenly interested in following them out, to leave himself in peril of the charge that all belief was to him a matter of indifference. The reason of the misapprehension of him which is current is due very mainly to the fact that lie was eminently a humorist in the midst of a people to whom, since his time, humour has been nearly un known. But there is more than this. The humorist as a recog nized genus almost always passes into the satirist. The temper which has been admirably defined as thinking in jest while feeling in earnest naturally throws itself into opposition, though it may not always take the irreconcilable form of the opposition of Swift. Perhaps the only actual parallel to Montaigne in literature is Lamb. There are differences between them, arising naturally enough from differences of temperament and experience ; but both agree in their attitude an attitude which is sceptical without being negative, and humorist without being satiric. There is hardly any writer in whom the human comedy appears treated with such completeness as it is in Montaigne. There is discernible in his essays no attempt to map out a complete plan, and then to fill up its outlines. But in the desultory and haphazard fashion which distinguishes him there are few parts of life on which he does not touch. The exceptions are chiefly to be found in the higher and more poetical strains of feeling to which the humorist temperament lends itself with reluctance and distrust, though it by no means excludes them. The French disposition, by a change which has never been sufficiently accounted for, and of which tin- most accurate examination of documents fails fully to detect tin? reason, had become, after being strongly idealist in the earlier Middle Ages, absolutely positive in the later, and from this positiveness it has never since quite freed itself. This positiveness is already notice able in Rabelais ; it becomes more noticeable still in Montaigne. 1 1 1; is always charming, but he is rarely inspiring, except in a very few passages where the sense of vanity and nothingness possesses him with unusual strength. As a general rule, an agreeable grotesque of the affairs of life (a grotesque which never loses hold of good taste sufficiently to be called burlesque) occupies him. There is a kind of anticipation of the scientific spirit in the careful zeal with which he picks up odd aspects of mankind, and comments upon them as he places them in his museum. Such a temperament is most pleasantly shown when it is least personal. The letter to the Bordeaux jurats does not, as has been said, show Montaigne in his best light, nor does another letter to his wife, in which he condoles with her on the death of one of their children in a strain which must have drawn from any woman of sensibility and spirit a torrent of indignant tears. But what is almost offensive in immediate and private relationships becomes not only toler able but delightful in the impersonal and irresponsible relationship of author to reader. A dozen generations of men have rejoiced in the gentle irony with which Montaigne handles the ludicrum hu- mani s&culi, in the quaint felicity of his selection of examples, and in the real though sometimes fantastic wisdom of his comment on his selections. Montaigne did not very long survive the completion of his book. His sojourn at Paris for the purpose of getting it printed was by no means uneventful, and on his way he stayed for some time at Blois, where he met De Thou. In Paris itself he had a more disagreeable experience, being for a short time committed to the Bastille by the Leaguers, as a kind of hostage, it is said, for a member of their party who had been arrested at Rouen by Henry of Navarre. But he was in no real danger. He was well known to and favoured by both Catherine de Medici and the Guises, and was very soon released. In Paris, too, at this time he made a whimsical but pleasant friendship. Marie le Jars, Demoiselle de Gournay, one of the most learned ladies of the 16th and 17th centuries, had conceived such a venera tion for the author of the Essays that, though a very young girl and connected with many noble families, she travelled to the capital on purpose to make his acquaint ance. He gave her the title of his &quot; fille d alliance &quot; (adopted daughter), which she bore proudly for the rest of her long life. She lived far into the 17th century, and became a character and something of a laughing-stock to the new generation ; but her services to Montaigne s literary memory were, as will be seen, great. Of his other friends in these last years of his life the most important were Etienne Pasquier and Pierre Charron. The latter, indeed, was more than a friend, he was a disciple ; and Montaigne, just as he had constituted Mademoiselle de Gournay his &quot; fille d alliance,&quot; bestowed on Charron the rather curious compliment of desiring that he should take the arms of the family of Montaigne. It has been thought from these two facts, and from an expression in one of the later essays, that the marriage of his daughter Leonore had not turned out to his satisfaction. But family affection, except towards his father, was by no means Montaigne s strongest point.