Mimesis (52 page)

No less a part of Montaigne’s method is the peculiar form of his Essays. They are neither an autobiography nor a diary. They are based on no artfully contrived plan and do not follow chronological order. They follow chance—
les fantasies de la musique sont conduictes par art, les miennes par sort
. Strictly speaking it is “things” after all which direct him—he moves among them, he lives in them; it is in things that he can always be found, for, with his very open eyes and his very impressionable mind, he stands in the midst of the world. But he does
not follow its course in time—nor a method whose aim is to attain knowledge of one specific thing or of a group of things. He follows his own inner rhythm, which, though constantly induced and maintained by things, is not bound to them, but freely skips from one to another. He prefers
une alleure poetique, à sauts et à gambades
(3, 9, p. 421). Villey has shown (
Les Sources
, etc., 2, p. 3ff.) that the form of the Essays stems from the collections of exempla, quotations, and aphorisms which were a very popular genre in late antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages and which in the sixteenth century helped to spread humanistic material. Montaigne had begun in this vein. Originally his book was a collection of the fruit of his reading, with running commentary. This pattern was soon broken; commentary predominated over text, subject matter or point of departure was not only things read but also things lived—now his own experiences, now what he heard from others or what took place around him. But the principle of clinging to concrete things, to what happens, he never gave up, any more than he did his freedom not to tie himself to a factfinding method or to the course of events in time. From things he takes the animation which saves him from abstract psychologizing and from empty probing within himself. But he guards himself against becoming subject to the law of any given thing, so that the rhythm of his own inner movement may not be muffled and finally lost. He praises this procedure very highly, especially in the ninth essay of book 3, from which we have quoted a few statements, and he cites Plato and other authors of antiquity as his models. His appeal to the authority of the many Platonic dialogues whose structure is apparently loose while their theme is not abstractly detached but embedded in the character and situation of the interlocutors, is doubtless not wholly unjustified; but it is beside the point. Montaigne is something new. The flavor of the personal, and indeed of a single individual, is present much more strikingly, and the manner of expression is much more spontaneous and closer to everyday spoken discourse, although no dialogue is involved. Then too, the description of the Socratic style in another passage in essay 12—we have referred to it in our chapter on Rabelais (p. 280)—exhibits a strongly Montaigne-colored Socrates. No philosopher of antiquity, not even Plato in his presentation of the discoursing Socrates, could write so directly out of the will of his own concrete existence, so juicily, so animally, and so spontaneously. And at bottom Montaigne knows this too. In a passage where he objects to his style being praised and asks the reader to concern himself only
with subject matter and meaning (1, 40, p. 483), he goes on to say:
Si suis je trompé, si gueres d’autres donnent plus à prendre en la matiere; et comment que ce soit, mal ou bien, si nul escrivain l’a semée ny gueres plus materielle, ny au moins plus drue en son papier
.

The second portion of the text quoted at the beginning of this chapter discusses the question whether his undertaking is justified and useful. This is the question to which Pascal, we know, gave so emphatic a negative answer (
le sot projet qu’il a de se peindre!
). Again both arrangement and expression are full of reservedly ironic modesty. It seems as though he himself had not quite the courage to answer the question with a clear affirmative, as though he were trying to excuse himself and plead extenuating circumstances. This impression is deceptive. He has already decided the question in his first sentence, long before he actually formulates it; and what later sounds almost like an apology (
au moins j’ay
…), unexpectedly turns into a self-affirmation so determined, so basic, and so conscious of its own idiosyncrasy that the impression of modesty and apologetic attitude vanishes completely. The order in which he presents his ideas is as follows:

1. I depict a lowly and unillustrious life; but that is of no consequence; even the lowliest life contains the whole of things human.

2. In contrast to others I depict no specialized body of knowledge, no special skill, which I have acquired; I present myself, Montaigne, in my entire person, and I am the first to do so.

3. If you reproach me with talking too much about myself, I reply by reproaching you with not even thinking about yourselves.

4. Only now does he formulate the question: Is it not presumptuous to wish to bring so limited an individual case to general and public knowledge? Is it reasonable that I should offer to a world which is only prepared to appreciate form and art, so undigested and simple a product of nature, and, to make matters worse, so insignificant a product of nature?

5. Instead of an answer he now gives these “extenuating circumstances”: a) no one has ever been so fully versed in his subject as I am in mine; b) no one has ever gone so deeply into his subject, so far into all its parts and ramifications; no one has ever carried out his purpose so exactly and so completely.

6. To achieve this I need nothing but unreserved sincerity and of that I have no lack. I am a little hampered by conventions; at times I should like to go somewhat further; but as I grow older I permit myself certain liberties which people are inclined to excuse in an old man.

7. In my case one thing at least cannot happen, as it does in the case of many a specialist: that man and work are not in accord; that one admires the work but finds the author a mediocrity in daily life—or vice versa. A man of learning is not learned in all fields; but a whole person is whole everywhere, including where he is ignorant. My book and I are one thing; he who speaks of the one speaks equally of the other.

This condensation shows the duplicity of his modesty; it shows it almost more clearly than the original text, because, being disconnected and dry, it lacks Montaigne’s amiable flow of expression. But the original is definite enough. The contrast “I—the others,” the malice toward specialists, and particularly the motifs “I am the first” and “no one has ever” cannot be missed and stand out more sharply at each rereading of the passage. We will now discuss these seven points individually. This to be sure is a somewhat meager expedient, if only for the reason that the points intermingle and are hard to keep apart. But it is necessary if one desires to get out of the text everything that is in it.

The statement that he depicts a lowly and unillustrious life is grossly exaggerated. Montaigne was a great gentleman, respected and influential, and it was his own choice that he made only so moderate and reluctant a use of his political possibilities. But the device of exaggerated modesty, which he frequently employs, serves him to set the main idea in stronger relief: any random human destiny,
une vie populaire et privée
, is all he needs for his purpose.
La vie de Cesar
, he says elsewhere (3, 13, p. 580),
n’a point plus d’exemple que la nostre pour nous: et emperiere et populaire, c’est tousjours une vie que tous accidens humains regardent. Escoutons y seulement. …
And then follows the famous sentence upon the
humaine condition
which is realized in any and every human being. With this sentence he has evidently answered the question of the significance and use of his undertaking. If every man affords material and occasion enough for the development of the complete moral philosophy, then a precise and sincere self-analysis of any random individual is directly justified. Indeed, one may go a step further: it is necessary, because it is the only way—according to Montaigne—which the science of man as a moral being can take. The method of listening (
escoutons y
) can be applied with any degree of accuracy only to the experimenter’s own person; it is in the last analysis a method of self-auscultation, of the observation of one’s own inner movements. One cannot observe others with the same exactness:
II n’y a que vous qui sçache si vous estes lasche et cruel ou loyal et devotieux; les autres ne vous voyent point, ils vous devinent par conjectures incertaines
… (3, 2, pp. 45-46). And one’s own life, the life to whose movements one must listen, is always a random life, for it is simply one of the millions of variants of the possibilities of human existence in general. The obligatory basis of Montaigne’s method is the random life one happens to have.

But then this random life of one’s own must be taken as a whole. That is the portion of his declaration which we have listed above as point 2. It is a requirement one can easily understand. Every kind of specialization falsifies the moral picture; it presents us in but one of our roles; it consciously leaves in darkness broad reaches of our lives and destinies. From a book on Greek grammar or international law the author’s personal existence cannot be known, or at best only in those rare cases where his temperament is so strong and idiosyncratic that it breaks through in any manifestation of his life. Montaigne’s social and economic circumstances made it easy for him to develop and preserve his whole self. His needs were met halfway by his period, which had not yet fully developed for the upper classes of society the duty, the technique, and the ethos of specialized work, but on the contrary, under the influence of the oligarchic civilization of antiquity, strove for the most general and most human culture of the individual. Not one of his known contemporaries advanced in this direction so far as he did. Compared with him they are all specialists: theologians, philologists, philosophers, statesmen, physicians, poets, artists; they all present themselves to the world
par quelque marque particuliere et estrangiere
. Montaigne too, under the pressure of circumstances, was at times lawyer, soldier, politician; he was the mayor of Bordeaux for several years. But he did not give himself over to such activities; he merely lent himself for a time and subject to recall, and he promised those who laid tasks upon him
de les prendre en main, non pas au poulmon et au foye
(3, 10, p. 438). The method of using one’s own random life in its totality as a point of departure for moral philosophy, for the examination of the
humaine condition
, is in pronounced contrast to all the methods which investigate a large number of individuals in accordance with some definite plan—with respect to their possessing or lacking certain traits, let us say, or to their behavior in certain situations. All such methods seem to Montaigne pedantic and empty abstractions. In them he cannot recognize man, that is, himself; they disguise and simplify and systematize so that the reality is lost. Montaigne
limits himself to the detailed investigation and description of one single specimen, himself, and even in this investigation nothing is further from his method than isolating his subject in any manner, than detaching it from the accidental conditions and circumstances in which it is found at a particular moment, in order to arrive at its real, permanent, and absolute essence. Any such attempt to attain to the essence by isolating it from the momentary accidental contingencies would strike him as absurd because, to his mind, the essence is lost as soon as one detaches it from its momentary accidents. For this very reason he must renounce an ultimate definition of himself or of man, for such a definition would of necessity have to be abstract. He must limit himself to probing and reprobing himself, and renounce any
se résoudre
. But he is the kind of man for whom such a renunciation is not difficult, for he is convinced that the total object of cognition cannot be expressed. Furthermore his method, despite its seeming vagaries, is very strict in that it confines itself to pure observation. It undertakes no search into general causes. When Montaigne cites causes, they are of an immediate kind and themselves susceptible to observation. On this point there is a polemic passage which is timely even today:
Ils laissent là les choses et s’amusent à traicter les causes: plaisans causeurs! La cognoissance des causes appartient seulement à celuy qui a la conduite des choses, non à nous qui n’en avons que la souffrance, et qui en avons l’usage parfaictement plein selon notre nature, sans en penetrer l’origine et l’essence. … Ils commencent ordinairement ainsi: Comment est ce que cela se faict? Mais se faict il? faudroit il dire
… (3, 11, p. 485). We have intentionally refrained in all these remarks on Montaigne’s method from bringing up the almost inescapably associated technical terms of those modern philosophical methods which are related to his by affinity or contrast. The informed reader will supply these technical terms. We avoid them because there is nowhere a complete congruence, and precise qualifications would take us too far afield.

We have as yet said nothing concerning a few words which Montaigne, in describing his method of depicting his own random life in its totality for the purpose of investigating the
humaine condition
, puts in a syntactically prominent position. They are the words
moy le premier
and they confront us with the questions: Does he mean this seriously, and is he right? The first question can be answered summarily. He does mean to be taken seriously, for he repeats the assertion in various places. The theme “no one has ever,” which follows a
little further on in our text, is only a variant of it, and another passage—part of which we have quoted above on page 292f.—the passage on the
amusement nouveau et extraordinaire … de penetrer dans les profondeurs de ses replis internes
is introduced in the following manner:
Nous n’avons nouvelles que de deux ou trois anciens qui ayent battu ce chemin; et si ne pouvons dire si c’est du tout en pareille maniere à cette-ci, n’en connoissant que leurs noms. Nul depuis ne s’est jeté sur leur trace
… (2, 6, p. 93). There is, then, no doubt that Montaigne, despite all his modesty and his ironical attitude toward himself, was serious in making this assertion. But is he right in it? Do we really have no comparable work from earlier times? I cannot help thinking of Augustine. Montaigne never mentions the
Confessions
, and Villey (
Les Sources
, 1, 75) assumes that he did not know them well. But it is not possible that he should not have been aware at least of the existence and the character of this famous book. Perhaps he rather shrank from the comparison; perhaps it is a perfectly genuine and unironical modesty that prevents him from establishing a relationship between himself and his method and the most important of the Fathers. And he is right when he says that it was not at all
en pareille maniere
. Both purpose and approach are very different. And yet there is no other earlier author from whom anything so basically important is preserved in Montaigne’s method as the consistent and unreserved self-investigation of Augustine.