The Essays of Montaigne, Volume 18

M >> Michel de Montaigne >> The Essays of Montaigne, Volume 18


["Wherever the season takes me,(where the tempest drives me)
there I am carried as a guest."--Horace, Ep., i. i, 15.]

I never saw any peasant among my neighbours cogitate with what
countenance and assurance he should pass over his last hour; nature
teaches him not to think of death till he is dying; and then he does it
with a better grace than Aristotle, upon whom death presses with a double
weight, both of itself and from so long a premeditation; and, therefore,
it was the opinion of Caesar, that the least premeditated death was the
easiest and the most happy:

"Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet, quam necesse est."

["He grieves more than is necessary, who grieves before it is
necessary."--Seneca, Ep., 98.]

The sharpness of this imagination springs from our curiosity: 'tis thus
we ever impede ourselves, desiring to anticipate and regulate natural
prescripts. It is only for the doctors to dine worse for it, when in the
best health, and to frown at the image of death; the common sort stand in
need of no remedy or consolation, but just in the shock, and when the
blow comes; and consider on't no more than just what they endure. Is it
not then, as we say, that the stolidity and want of apprehension in the
vulgar give them that patience m present evils, and that profound
carelessness of future sinister accidents? That their souls, in being
more gross and dull, are less penetrable and not so easily moved? If it
be so, let us henceforth, in God's name, teach nothing but ignorance;
'tis the utmost fruit the sciences promise us, to which this stolidity so
gently leads its disciples.

We have no want of good masters, interpreters of natural simplicity.
Socrates shall be one; for, as I remember, he speaks something to this
purpose to the judges who sat upon his life and death.

[That which follows is taken from the Apology of Socrates in Plato,
chap. 17, &c.]

"I am afraid, my masters, that if I entreat you not to put me to death, I
shall confirm the charge of my accusers, which is, that I pretend to be
wiser than others, as having some more secret knowledge of things that
are above and below us. I have neither frequented nor known death, nor
have ever seen any person that has tried its qualities, from whom to
inform myself. Such as fear it, presuppose they know it; as for my part,
I neither know what it is, nor what they do in the other world. Death
is, peradventure, an indifferent thing; peradventure, a thing to be
desired. 'Tis nevertheless to be believed, if it be a transmigration
from one place to another, that it is a bettering of one's condition to
go and live with so many great persons deceased, and to be exempt from
having any more to do with unjust and corrupt judges; if it be an
annihilation of our being, 'tis yet a bettering of one's condition to
enter into a long and peaceable night; we find nothing more sweet in life
than quiet repose and a profound sleep without dreams. The things that
I know to be evil, as to injure one's neighbour and to disobey one's
superior, whether it be God or man, I carefully avoid; such as I do not
know whether they be good or evil, I cannot fear them. If I am to die
and leave you alive, the gods alone only know whether it will go better
with you or with me. Wherefore, as to what concerns me, you may do as
you shall think fit. But according to my method of advising just and
profitable things, I say that you will do your consciences more right to
set me at liberty, unless you see further into my cause than I do; and,
judging according to my past actions, both public and private, according
to my intentions, and according to the profit that so many of our
citizens, both young and old, daily extract from my conversation, and the
fruit that you all reap from me, you cannot more duly acquit yourselves
towards my merit than in ordering that, my poverty considered, I should
be maintained at the Prytanaeum, at the public expense, a thing that I
have often known you, with less reason, grant to others. Do not impute
it to obstinacy or disdain that I do not, according to the custom,
supplicate and go about to move you to commiseration. I have both
friends and kindred, not being, as Homer says, begotten of wood or of
stone, no more than others, who might well present themselves before you
with tears and mourning, and I have three desolate children with whom to
move you to compassion; but I should do a shame to our city at the age I
am, and in the reputation of wisdom which is now charged against me, to
appear in such an abject form. What would men say of the other
Athenians? I have always admonished those who have frequented my
lectures, not to redeem their lives by an unbecoming action; and in the
wars of my country, at Amphipolis, Potidea, Delia, and other expeditions
where I have been, I have effectually manifested how far I was from
securing my safety by my shame. I should, moreover, compromise your
duty, and should invite you to unbecoming things; for 'tis not for my
prayers to persuade you, but for the pure and solid reasons of justice.
You have sworn to the gods to keep yourselves upright; and it would seem
as if I suspected you, or would recriminate upon you that I do not
believe that you are so; and I should testify against myself, not to
believe them as I ought, mistrusting their conduct, and not purely
committing my affair into their hands. I wholly rely upon them; and hold
myself assured they will do in this what shall be most fit both for you
and for me: good men, whether living or dead, have no reason to fear the
gods."

Is not this an innocent child's pleading of an unimaginable loftiness,
true, frank, and just, unexampled?--and in what a necessity employed!
Truly, he had very good reason to prefer it before that which the great
orator Lysias had penned for him: admirably couched, indeed, in the
judiciary style, but unworthy of so noble a criminal. Had a suppliant
voice been heard out of the mouth of Socrates, that lofty virtue had
struck sail in the height of its glory; and ought his rich and powerful
nature to have committed her defence to art, and, in her highest proof,
have renounced truth and simplicity, the ornaments of his speaking, to
adorn and deck herself with the embellishments of figures and the
flourishes of a premeditated speech? He did very wisely, and like
himself, not to corrupt the tenor of an incorrupt life, and so sacred an
image of the human form, to spin out his decrepitude another year, and to
betray the immortal memory of that glorious end. He owed his life not to
himself, but to the example of the world; had it not been a public
damage, that he should have concluded it after a lazy and obscure manner?
Assuredly, that careless and indifferent consideration of his death
deserved that posterity should consider it so much the more, as indeed
they did; and there is nothing so just in justice than that which fortune
ordained for his recommendation; for the Athenians abominated all those
who had been causers of his death to such a degree, that they avoided
them as excommunicated persons, and looked upon everything as polluted
that had been touched by them; no one would wash with them in the public
baths, none would salute or own acquaintance with them: so that, at last,
unable longer to support this public hatred, they hanged themselves.

If any one shall think that, amongst so many other examples that I had to
choose out of in the sayings of Socrates for my present purpose, I have
made an ill choice of this, and shall judge this discourse of his
elevated above common conceptions, I must tell them that I have properly
selected it; for I am of another opinion, and hold it to be a discourse,
in rank and simplicity, much below and behind common conceptions. He
represents, in an inartificial boldness and infantine security, the pure
and first impression and ignorance of nature; for it is to be believed
that we have naturally a fear of pain, but not of death, by reason of
itself; 'tis a part of our being, and no less essential than living.

To what end should nature have begotten in us a hatred to it and a horror
of it, considering that it is of so great utility to her in maintaining
the succession and vicissitude of her works? and that in this universal
republic, it conduces more to birth and augmentation than to loss or
ruin?

"Sic rerum summa novatur."

"Mille animas una necata dedit."

"The failing of one life is the passage to a thousand other lives."

Nature has imprinted in beasts the care of themselves and of their
conservation; they proceed so far as hitting or hurting to be timorous of
being worse, of themselves, of our haltering and beating them, accidents
subject to their sense and experience; but that we should kill them, they
cannot fear, nor have they the faculty to imagine and conclude such a
thing as death; it is said, indeed, that we see them not only cheerfully
undergo it, horses for the most part neighing and swans singing when they
die, but, moreover, seek it at need, of which elephants have given many
examples.

Besides, the method of arguing, of which Socrates here makes use, is it
not equally admirable both in simplicity and vehemence? Truly it is much
more easy to speak like Aristotle and to live like Caesar than to speak
and live as Socrates did; there lies the extreme degree of perfection and
difficulty; art cannot reach it. Now, our faculties are not so trained
up; we do not try, we do not know them; we invest ourselves with those of
others, and let our own lie idle; as some one may say of me, that I have
here only made a nosegay of foreign flowers, having furnished nothing of
my own but the thread to tie them.

Certainly I have so far yielded to public opinion, that those borrowed
ornaments accompany me; but I do not mean that they shall cover me and
hide me; that is quite contrary to my design, who desire to make a show
of nothing but what is my own, and what is my own by nature; and had I
taken my own advice, I had at all hazards spoken purely alone, I more and
more load myself every day,

[In fact, the first edition of the Essays (Bordeaux, 1580) has very
few quotations. These became more numerous in the edition of 1588;
but the multitude of classical texts which at times encumber
Montaigne's text, only dates from the posthumous edition of 1595, he
had made these collections in the four last years of his life, as an
amusement of his "idleness."--Le Clerc. They grow, however, more
sparing in the Third Book.]

beyond my purpose and first method, upon the account of idleness and the
humour of the age. If it misbecome me, as I believe it does, 'tis no
matter; it may be of use to some others. Such there are who quote Plato
and Homer, who never saw either of them; and I also have taken things out
of places far enough distant from their source. Without pains and
without learning, having a thousand volumes about me in the place where I
write, I can presently borrow, if I please, from a dozen such
scrap-gatherers, people about whom I do not much trouble myself, wherewith
to trick up this treatise of Physiognomy; there needs no more but a
preliminary epistle of a German to stuff me with quotations. And so it
is we go in quest of a tickling story to cheat the foolish world. These
lumber pies of commonplaces, wherewith so many furnish their studies, are
of little use but to common subjects, and serve but to show us, and not
to direct us: a ridiculous fruit of learning, that Socrates so pleasantly
discusses against Euthydemus. I have seen books made of things that were
never either studied or understood; the author committing to several of
his learned friends the examination of this and t'other matter to compile
it, contenting himself, for his share, with having projected the design,
and by his industry to have tied together this faggot of unknown
provisions; the ink and paper, at least, are his. This is to buy or
borrow a book, and not to make one; 'tis to show men not that he can make
a book, but that, whereof they may be in doubt, he cannot make one.
A president, where I was, boasted that he had amassed together two
hundred and odd commonplaces in one of his judgments; in telling which,
he deprived himself of the glory he had got by it: in my opinion, a
pusillanimous and absurd vanity for such a subject and such a person.
I do the contrary; and amongst so many borrowed things, am glad if I can
steal one, disguising and altering it for some new service; at the hazard
of having it said that 'tis for want of understanding its natural use;
I give it some particular touch of my own hand, to the end it may not be
so absolutely foreign. These set their thefts in show and value
themselves upon them, and so have more credit with the laws than I have:
we naturalists I think that there is a great and incomparable preference
in the honour of invention over that of allegation.

If I would have spoken by learning, I had spoken sooner; I had written of
the time nearer to my studies, when I had more wit and better memory, and
should sooner have trusted to the vigour of that age than of this, would
I have made a business of writing. And what if this gracious favour
--[His acquaintance with Mademoiselle de Gournay.]--which Fortune has
lately offered me upon the account of this work, had befallen me in that
time of my life, instead of this, wherein 'tis equally desirable to
possess, soon to be lost! Two of my acquaintance, great men in this
faculty, have, in my opinion, lost half, in refusing to publish at forty
years old, that they might stay till threescore. Maturity has its
defects as well as green years, and worse; and old age is as unfit for
this kind of business as any other. He who commits his decrepitude to
the press plays the fool if he think to squeeze anything out thence that
does not relish of dreaming, dotage, and drivelling; the mind grows
costive and thick in growing old. I deliver my ignorance in pomp and
state, and my learning meagrely and poorly; this accidentally and
accessorily, that principally and expressly; and write specifically of
nothing but nothing, nor of any science but of that inscience. I have
chosen a time when my life, which I am to give an account of, lies wholly
before me; what remains has more to do with death; and of my death
itself, should I find it a prating death, as others do, I would willingly
give an account at my departure.

Socrates was a perfect exemplar in all great qualities, and I am vexed
that he had so deformed a face and body as is said, and so unsuitable to
the beauty of his soul, himself being so amorous and such an admirer of
beauty: Nature did him wrong. There is nothing more probable than the
conformity and relation of the body to the soul:

"Ipsi animi magni refert, quali in corpore locati sint: multo enim a
corpore existunt, qux acuant mentem: multa qua obtundant;"

["It is of great consequence in what bodies minds are placed, for
many things spring from the body that may sharpen the mind, and many
that may blunt it."--Cicero, Tusc. Quaes., i. 33.]

this refers to an unnatural ugliness and deformity of limbs; but we call
ugliness also an unseemliness at first sight, which is principally lodged
in the face, and disgusts us on very slight grounds: by the complexion, a
spot, a rugged countenance, for some reasons often wholly inexplicable,
in members nevertheless of good symmetry and perfect. The deformity,
that clothed a very beautiful soul in La Boetie, was of this predicament:
that superficial ugliness, which nevertheless is always the most
imperious, is of least prejudice to the state of the mind, and of little
certainty in the opinion of men. The other, which is never properly
called deformity, being more substantial, strikes deeper in. Not every
shoe of smooth shining leather, but every shoe well-made, shews the shape
of the foot within. As Socrates said of his, it betrayed equal ugliness
in his soul, had he not corrected it by education; but in saying so, I
hold he was in jest, as his custom was; never so excellent a soul formed
itself.

I cannot often enough repeat how great an esteem I have for beauty, that
potent and advantageous quality; he (La Boetie) called it "a short
tyranny," and Plato, "the privilege of nature." We have nothing that
excels it in reputation; it has the first place in the commerce of men;
it presents itself in the front; seduces and prepossesses our judgments
with great authority and wonderful impression. Phryne had lost her cause
in the hands of an excellent advocate, if, opening her robe, she had not
corrupted her judges by the lustre of her beauty. And I find that Cyrus,
Alexander, and Caesar, the three masters of the world, never neglected
beauty in their greatest affairs; no more did the first Scipio. The same
word in Greek signifies both fair and good; and the Holy Word often says
good when it means fair: I should willingly maintain the priority in good
things, according to the song that Plato calls an idle thing, taken out
of some ancient poet: "health, beauty, riches." Aristotle says that the
right of command appertains to the beautiful; and that, when there is a
person whose beauty comes near the images of the gods, veneration is
equally due to him. To him who asked why people oftener and longer
frequent the company of handsome persons: "That question," said he, "is
only to be asked by the blind." Most of the philosophers, and the
greatest, paid for their schooling, and acquired wisdom by the favour and
mediation of their beauty. Not only in the men that serve me, but also
in the beasts, I consider it within two fingers' breadth of goodness.

And yet I fancy that those features and moulds of face, and those
lineaments, by which men guess at our internal complexions and our
fortunes to come, is a thing that does not very directly and simply lie
under the chapter of beauty and deformity, no more than every good odour
and serenity of air promises health, nor all fog and stink infection in a
time of pestilence. Such as accuse ladies of contradicting their beauty
by their manners, do not always hit right; for, in a face which is none
of the best, there may dwell some air of probity and trust; as, on the
contrary, I have read, betwixt two beautiful eyes, menaces of a dangerous
and malignant nature. There are favourable physiognomies, so that in a
crowd of victorious enemies, you shall presently choose, amongst men you
never saw before, one rather than another to whom to surrender, and with
whom to intrust your life; and yet not properly upon the consideration of
beauty.

A person's look is but a feeble warranty; and yet it is something
considerable too; and if I had to lash them, I would most severely
scourge the wicked ones who belie and betray the promises that nature has
planted in their foreheads; I should with greater severity punish malice
under a mild and gentle aspect. It seems as if there were some lucky and
some unlucky faces; and I believe there is some art in distinguishing
affable from merely simple faces, severe from rugged, malicious from
pensive, scornful from melancholic, and such other bordering qualities.
There are beauties which are not only haughty, but sour, and others that
are not only gentle, but more than that, insipid; to prognosticate from
them future events is a matter that I shall leave undecided.

I have, as I have said elsewhere as to my own concern, simply and
implicitly embraced this ancient rule, "That we cannot fail in following
Nature," and that the sovereign precept is to conform ourselves to her.
I have not, as Socrates did, corrected my natural composition by the
force of reason, and have not in the least disturbed my inclination by
art; I have let myself go as I came: I contend not; my two principal
parts live, of their own accord, in peace and good intelligence, but my
nurse's milk, thank God, was tolerably wholesome and good. Shall I say
this by the way, that I see in greater esteem than 'tis worth, and in use
solely among ourselves, a certain image of scholastic probity, a slave to
precepts, and fettered with hope and fear? I would have it such as that
laws and religions should not make, but perfect and authorise it; that
finds it has wherewithal to support itself without help, born and rooted
in us from the seed of universal reason, imprinted in every man by
nature. That reason which strengthens Socrates from his vicious bend
renders him obedient to the gods and men of authority in his city:
courageous in death, not because his soul is immortal, but because he is
mortal. 'Tis a doctrine ruinous to all government, and much more hurtful
than ingenious and subtle, which persuades the people that a religious
belief is alone sufficient, and without conduct, to satisfy the divine
justice. Use demonstrates to us a vast distinction betwixt devotion and
conscience.

I have a favourable aspect, both in form and in interpretation:

"Quid dixi, habere me? imo habui, Chreme."

["What did I say? that I have? no, Chremes, I had."
--Terence, Heaut., act i., sec. 2, v. 42.]

"Heu! tantum attriti corporis ossa vides;"

["Alas! of a worn body thou seest only the bones"]

and that makes a quite contrary show to that of Socrates. It has often
befallen me, that upon the mere credit of my presence and air, persons
who had no manner of knowledge of me have put a very great confidence in
me, whether in their own affairs or mine; and I have in foreign parts
thence obtained singular and rare favours. But the two following
examples are, peradventure, worth particular relation. A certain person
planned to surprise my house and me in it; his scheme was to come to my
gates alone, and to be importunate to be let in. I knew him by name,
and had fair reason to repose confidence in him, as being my neighbour
and something related to me. I caused the gates to be opened to him,
as I do to every one. There I found him, with every appearance of alarm,
his horse panting and very tired. He entertained me with this story:
"That, about half a league off, he had met with a certain enemy of his,
whom I also knew, and had heard of their quarrel; that his enemy had
given him a very brisk chase, and that having been surprised in disorder,
and his party being too weak, he had fled to my gates for refuge;
and that he was in great trouble for his followers, whom (he said) he
concluded to be all either dead or taken." I innocently did my best to
comfort, assure, and refresh him. Shortly after came four or five of his
soldiers, who presented themselves in the same countenance and affright,
to get in too; and after them more, and still more, very well mounted and
armed, to the number of five-and-twenty or thirty, pretending that they
had the enemy at their heels. This mystery began a little to awaken my
suspicion; I was not ignorant what an age I lived in, how much my house
might be envied, and I had several examples of others of my acquaintance
to whom a mishap of this sort had happened. But thinking there was
nothing to be got by having begun to do a courtesy, unless I went through
with it, and that I could not disengage myself from them without spoiling
all, I let myself go the most natural and simple way, as I always do, and
invited them all to come in. And in truth I am naturally very little
inclined to suspicion and distrust; I willingly incline towards excuse
and the gentlest interpretation; I take men according to the common
order, and do not more believe in those perverse and unnatural
inclinations, unless convinced by manifest evidence, than I do in
monsters and miracles; and I am, moreover, a man who willingly commit
myself to Fortune, and throw myself headlong into her arms; and I have
hitherto found more reason to applaud than to blame myself for so doing,
having ever found her more discreet about, and a greater friend to, my
affairs than I am myself. There are some actions in my life whereof the
conduct may justly be called difficult, or, if you please, prudent; of
these, supposing the third part to have been my own, doubtless the other
two-thirds were absolutely hers. We make, methinks, a mistake in that we
do not enough trust Heaven with our affairs, and pretend to more from our
own conduct than appertains to us; and therefore it is that our designs
so often miscarry. Heaven is jealous of the extent that we attribute to
the right of human prudence above its own, and cuts it all the shorter by
how much the more we amplify it. The last comers remained on horseback
in my courtyard, whilst their leader, who was with me in the parlour,
would not have his horse put up in the stable, saying he should
immediately retire, so soon as he had news of his men. He saw himself
master of his enterprise, and nothing now remained but its execution.
He has since several times said (for he was not ashamed to tell the story
himself) that my countenance and frankness had snatched the treachery out
of his hands. He again mounted his horse; his followers, who had their
eyes intent upon him, to see when he would give the signal, being very
much astonished to find him come away and leave his prey behind him.