The Complete Essays (34 page)

[A] As for our pupil’s talk, let his virtue and his sense of right and wrong shine through it [C] and have no guide but reason. [A] Make him understand that confessing an error which he discovers in his own argument even when he alone has noticed it is an act of justice and integrity, which are the main qualities he pursues; [C] stubbornness and rancour are vulgar qualities, visible in common souls whereas to think again, to change one’s mind and to give up a bad case in the heat of the argument are rare qualities showing strength and wisdom.

[A] When in society the boy will be told to keep his eyes open: I find that the front seats are normally taken as a right by the less able men and that great inherited wealth is hardly ever associated with ability; while at the top end of the table the talk was about the beauty of a tapestry or the bouquet of the malmsey, I have known many witty remarks at the other end pass unnoticed. He will sound out the capacity of each person: of a herdsman, a mason, a wayfarer: he must use what he can get, take what a man has to sell and see that nothing goes wasted: even other people’s stupidity and weakness serve to instruct him. By noting each man’s endowments and habits, there will be engendered in him a desire for the good ones and a contempt for the bad.

Put into his mind a decent, careful spirit of inquiry about everything: he will go and see anything nearby which is of singular quality: a building, a fountain, a man, the site of an old battle, a place which Caesar or Charlemagne passed through:

[C]
Quœ tellus sit lenta gelu, quæ putris ab œstu,
Ventus in Italiam quis bene vela ferat
.

[what land is benumbed with the cold, which dusty with heat, which favourable winds blow sails towards Italian coasts.]
²⁹

[A] He will inquire into the habits, means and alliances of various monarchs, things most pleasant to study and most useful to know. In his commerce with men I mean him to include – and that principally – those who live only in the memory of books. By means of history he will frequent those great souls of former years. If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time: it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price – [C] the only study, Plato said, which the Spartans kept as their share.
³⁰
[A] Under this heading what profit will he not get out of reading the
Lives
of our favourite Plutarch! But let our tutor remember the object of his trust, which is less to stamp [C] the date of the fall of Carthage on the boy as the behaviour of Hannibal and Scipio; less to stamp [A] the name of the place where Marcellus died as how his death there showed him unworthy of his task. Let him not so much learn what happened as judge what happened. [C] That, if you ask me, is the subject to which our wits are applied in the most diverse of manners. I have read hundreds of things in Livy which another has not found there. Plutarch found in him hundreds of things which I did not see
(and which perhaps the author never put there). For some Livy is purely a grammatical study; for others he is philosophy dissected, penetrating into the most abstruse parts of our nature. [A] There are in Plutarch developed treatises very worth knowing, for he is to my mind the master-craftsman at that job; but there are also hundreds of points which he simply touches on: he merely flicks his fingers towards the way we should go if we want to, or at times he contents himself with a quick shot at the liveliest part of the subject: those passages we must rip out and put out on display. [B] For example that one saying of his, ‘that the inhabitants of Asia were slaves of one tyrant because they were incapable of pronouncing one syllable: NO,’ may have furnished La Boëtie with the matter and moment of his book
De la Servitude volontaire
.
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[A] Seeing Plutarch select a minor action in the life of a man, or an apparently unimportant saying, is worth a treatise in itself. It is a pity that intelligent men are so fond of brevity: by it their reputation is certainly worth all the more, but we are worth all the less. Plutarch would rather we vaunted his judgement than his knowledge, and he would rather leave us craving for more than bloated. He realized that you could say too much even on a good subject, and that Alexandridas rightly criticized the orator whose address to the ephors was good but too long, saying, ‘Oh, Stranger, you say what you should, but not the way that you should!’
³²
[C] People whose bodies are too thin pad them out: those whose matter is too slender pad it out too, with words.

[A] Frequent commerce with the world can be an astonishing source of light for a man’s judgement. We are all cramped and confined inside ourselves: we can see no further than the end of our noses. When they asked Socrates where he came from he did not say ‘From Athens’, but ‘From the world’.
³³
He, whose thoughts were fuller and wider, embraced the universal world as his City, scattered his acquaintances, his fellowship and his affections throughout the whole human race, not as we do who only look at what lies right in front of us. When frost attacks the vines in my village my parish priest talks of God being angry against the human race: in his judgement the Cannibals are already dying of the croup! At the sight of our civil wars, who fails to exclaim that the world is turned upside
down and that the Day of Judgement has got us by the throat, forgetting that many worse events have been known in the past and that, in thousands of parts of the world, they are still having a fine old time! [B] Personally I am surprised that our wars turn out to be so mild and gentle, given their unpunished licentiousness. [A] When the hail beats down on your head the entire hemisphere seems stormy and tempestuous. Like that peasant of Savoy who said that if only that silly King of France had known how to use his luck properly he could have become the Duke’s chief steward eventually! His mind could not conceive of any degree of grandeur above that of his Duke. [C] We are all caught in that same error without realizing it: a harmful error of great consequence. [A] Only a man who can picture in his mind the mighty idea of Mother Nature in her total majesty; who can read in her countenance a variety so general and so unchanging and then pick out therein not merely himself but an entire kingdom as a tiny, feint point: only he can reckon things at their real size. This great world of ours (which for some is only one species within a generic group) is the looking-glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves from the right slant. To sum up then, I want it to be the book which our pupil studies. Such a variety of humours, schools of thought, opinions, laws and customs teach us to judge sanely of our own and teach our judgement to acknowledge its shortcomings and natural weakness. And that is no light apprenticeship. So many revolutions, so many changes in the fortune of a state, teach us to realize that our own fortune is no great miracle. So many names, so many victories and conquests lying buried in oblivion, make it ridiculous to hope that we shall immortalize our names by rounding up ten armed brigands or by storming some hen-house or other known only by its capture. The proud arrogance of so many other nations’ pomp and the high-flown majesty of the grandeur of so many courts strengthen our gaze to look firmly and assuredly, without blinking, at the brilliance of our own. So many millions upon millions of men dead and buried before us encourage us not to be afraid of going to join such a goodly company in the world to come.

And so on.

[C] Our life, said Pythagoras,
³⁴
is like the vast throng assembled for the Olympic Games: some use their bodies there to win fame from the contests; others come to trade, to make a profit; still others – and they are by no means the worst – seek no other gain than to be spectators, seeing
how everything is done and why; they watch how other men live so that they can judge and regulate their own lives. [A] All the most profitable treatises of philosophy (which ought to be the touchstone and measure of men’s actions) can be properly reduced to examples. Teach the boy this:

[B]            
quid fas optare, quid asper
Utile nummus habet; patriæ charisque propinquis
Quantum elargiri deceat: quem te Deus esse
Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re;
Quid sumus, aut quidnam victuri gignimur;

[what he may justly wish for; that money is hard to earn and should be used properly; the extent of our duty to our country and to our dear ones; what God orders you to be, and what place He has assigned to you in the scheme of things; what we are and what we shall win when we have overcome;]
³⁵

teach him [A] what knowing and not knowing means (which ought to be the aim of study); what valour is, and justice and temperance; what difference there is between ordinate and inordinate aspirations; slavery and due subordination; licence and liberty; what are the signs of true and solid happiness; how far we should fear death, pain and shame:

[B]
Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem;

[How we can flee from hardships and how we can endure them;]
³⁶

[A] what principles govern our emotions and the physiology of so many and diverse stirrings within us. For it seems to me that the first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die… and to live. [C] Among the liberal arts, start with the art which produces liberal men. All of them are of some service in the regulation and practice of our lives, just as everything else is; but let us select the one which leads there directly and professes to do so.

If we knew how to restrict our life’s appurtenances to their right and natural limits, we would discover that the greater part of the arts and sciences as now practised are of no practical use to us, and that, even in those which are useful, there are useless wastes and chasms which we would do better to leave where they are; following what Socrates taught, we should set limits to our study of subjects which lack utility.

[A]
sapere aude
,
Incipe: vivendi qui recte prorogat horam,
Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille
Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum
.

[Dare to be wise. Start now. To put off the moment when you will start to live justly is to act like the bumpkin who would cross but who waits for the stream to dry up; time flows and will flow for ever, as an ever-rolling stream.]
³⁷

There is great folly in teaching our children

[B]
quid moveant Pisces, animosaque signa Leonis,
Lotus et Hesperia quid Capricomus aqua
,

[what influences stem from Pisces and the lively constellation of Leo or from Capricorn which plunges into the Hesperian Sea,]
³⁸

about the heavenly bodies [A] and the motions of the Eighth Sphere before they know about their own properties.

[What do the Pleiades or the Herdsman matter to me!]
³⁹

[C] Writing to Anaximenes, Pythagoras asked: ‘What mind am I supposed to bring to the secrets of the heavens, having death and slavery ever present before my eyes?’ (At that time the kings of Persia were preparing for war against his country.)
⁴⁰
We could all ask the same: ‘Assaulted as I am by ambition, covetousness, rashness and superstition, and having such enemies to life as that within me, should I start wondering about the motions of the Universe?’

[A] Only after showing the boy what will make him a wiser and a better man will you explain to him the elements of Logic, Physics, Geometry and Rhetoric. Since his judgement has already been formed he will soon get to the bottom of any science he chooses. His lessons will sometimes be discussion, sometimes reading from books; at times the tutor will provide him with extracts from authors suited to his purposes: at others the tutor will pick out the marrow and chew it over for him. If the
tutor is not sufficiently familiar with those books to find the discourses in them which serve his purposes you could associate with him a scholar who could furnish him, as the need arises, with material for him to arrange and dispense to the growing boy.