The Complete Essays (46 page)

37. On Cato the Younger

[Cato the Younger was a philosophical and moral hero for many Renaissance Christians despite his having preferred suicide to ignominy. (In Dante he is Beatrice’s guide to the Heavenly regions.) Montaigne protests against those who reduce the ‘forms’ (the souls) of great men to their own mean level: the condign reaction to greatness of soul is not a niggling desire to diminish but that kind of ecstasy produced by wonder and amazement
– admiratio.
Poetry, conceived much as Plato conceived it in his dialogue
Io (
a source of Ronsard’s theories too), is playing its rightful role when, by its beauty, it stuns the reader, performer or listener into just such a condign ecstasy of amazement. At least at this stage in the
Essays,
Montaigne sees the ascetic Christian Feuillants and Capuchins – heroes of Christian virtue – as remaining within the general form of Man.]

[A] I do not suffer from that common failing of judging another man
¹
[C] by me: I can easily believe that others have qualities quite distinct from my own. Just because I feel that I am pledged to my individual form, I do not bind all others to it as everyone else does: I can conceive and believe that there are thousands of different ways of living and, contrary to most men, I more readily acknowledge our differences than our similarities. I am as ready as you may wish to relieve another human being of my attributes and basic qualities and to contemplate him simply as he is, free from comparisons and sculpting him after his own model. I am not sexually continent, but that does not stop me from sincerely acknowledging the continence of the Feuillants and Capuchins nor from thinking well of their way of life: in thought, I can readily put myself in their place. Indeed I love and respect them all the more for being different from me.
²
My one desire is that each of us should each be judged apart and that conclusions about me should not be drawn from routine
exempla
.

[A] My own weakness in no way affects the opinion which I should have of the strength and vigour of those who merit it. [C]
‘Sunt qui nihil laudent, nisi quod se imitari posse confidunt.’
[There are those who praise nothing except what they are sure they can match.]
³
[A] I crawl in earthy slime but I do not fail to note, way up in the clouds, the matchless height of certain heroic souls. It means a great deal to me to have my judgement rightly controlled even if my actions cannot be so, and to maintain at least that master-part of me free from corruption.
⁴
Even when my legs let me down it is something that my will is sound. At least in our latitudes, the century we live in is so leaden that [C] it lacks not only the practice of virtue but the very idea of it:
⁵
[A]
virtue
seems to be no more than scholastic jargon:

[Al]
virtutem verba putant, ut
Lucum ligna:

[they think that virtue is but a word and that sacred groves are mere matchwood.]
⁶

[C]
‘Quam vereri deberent, etiam si percipere non possent.’
[Even if they cannot understand it, they should revere it.]
⁷
It is a gewgaw to hang up in a display-case, or to have dangling from your tongue just as an earring dangles from your ear.

[A] Virtuous actions are no longer there to be recognized: those which have the face of virtue do not have her essence, since we are led to do them from profit, reputation, fear, custom and other similar motives. Such justice, valour and graciousness as we practise then can be termed so in the view of others from the face they put on in public, but they are by no means virtuous to the doer: a different end was aimed at; [C] there was a different motivation. [A] Virtue acknowledges nothing which is not done by her and for her alone.

[C] When, following their custom, the victors in that great battle of Potidaea (which the Greeks under Pausanias won against Mardonius and the Persians)
⁸
had to divide the glory of that exploit among themselves,
they awarded pre-eminence in valour on the field to the Spartan people. Then, when those excellent judges of virtue, the Spartans, had to decide which of their men should individually hold the honour of having done best that day, they decided that Aristodemus had the most courageously exposed himself to risk: yet they never awarded him the prize because his valour had been spurred on by his wish to purge himself of the reproach he had incurred in the battle of Thermopylae and by a desire to die bravely to atone for his past disgrace.

[A] Our judgements follow the depravity of our morals and remain sick. I note that the majority of ingenious men in my time are clever at besmirching the glory of the fair and great-souled actions of ancient times, foisting some base interpretation on them and devising frivolous causes and occasions for them. [B] What great subtlety! Why, show me the most excellent and purest deed there is and I can go and furnish fifty vicious but plausible motives for it! What a variety of concepts, God knows, can be foisted on to our inner wills if anyone wishes to work on them in detail! [C] Such men are clever in their denigration, yet not so much maliciously as heavily and clumsily. The same pains that they take to detract from those great reputations I would readily take to lend a shoulder to enhance them. Those rare persons who have been hand-picked by the wise to be exemplary to us all I will not hesitate, on my part, to load with honour, insofar as my material allows, by interpreting their characteristics favourably. But we must believe that, for all our striving, our thoughts fall well below what the great deserve. It is the duty of good men to depict virtue as beautiful as possible; and it would not be inappropriate if our emotions should make us ecstatic under the influence of souls so august. What these people do, on the contrary, [A] they do, as I have just said, either out of malice or from that defect which reduces what they believe to what they can grasp, or else (as I am inclined to think) because their perception is not strong and clear enough to comprehend the splendour of virtue in her native purity, since they have not trained it to do so. Plutarch states that some men in his time attributed the death of Cato the Younger to his fear of Caesar; this rightly incensed him – by which one can judge how more indignant he would have been at those who attributed it to ambition.
⁹
[C] Idiots! Cato would rather have done a fair and noble deed which brought him shame than to do it for glory. [A] That great
man was truly a model which Nature chose to show how far human virtue and fortitude can reach.

But I am not up to treating so rich a subject here. I simply wish to make verses from five Latin poets rival each other in their praise of Cato, [C] both in the interest of Cato and secondarily in their own.

Now a well-educated boy ought to find the first two feeble compared to the third; the third, more young and vigorous but ruined by its own excessive power; he ought to reckon that there is room for two or three degrees of ingenuity before we reach the fourth, at which point he will clasp his hands in wonder. When he comes to the final one, which far outdistances the others, by a distance that he will swear no human wit can cover, he will be thunderstruck and moved to ecstasy.

Here is something of a marvel: we now have far more poets than judges and connoisseurs of poetry. It is far easier to write poetry than to appreciate it. At a rather low level you can judge it by the rules of art: but good, enrapturing, divine poetry is above reason and rules. Whoever can distinguish its beauties with a firm and settled gaze does not in fact see it all, no more than we can see the brilliance of a flash of lightning. It does not exercise our judgement, it ravishes it and enraptures it; the frenzy which sets its goads in him who knows how to discern it also strikes a third person who hears him relate and recite it, just as a magnet not only attracts a needle but also pours into it the faculty of attracting others. It can more easily be seen in the theatre that the sacred inspiration of the Muses, having first seized the poet with anger, grief or hatred and driven him outside himself whither they will, then affects the actor through the poet and then, in succession, the entire audience – needle hanging from needle, each attracting the next one in the chain.
¹⁰

From my earliest childhood poetry has had the power to transpierce and transport me. But this living feeling, which is innate to me, has been variously affected by the variety of poetic forms – it is not a matter of higher or lower (for each was the highest of its kind) but of a difference of lustre: first came a gay and genial flowing; then a keen and sublime subtlety; and finally a ripe and constant power. Examples will convey this better: Ovid, Lucan, Virgil.
¹¹

But here are our poets waiting to compete:

[A]
Sit Cato, dum vivit, sane vel Cæsare major
,

[Let Cato while he lives be greater even than Cæsar,]

says one of them.

Et invictum, devicta morte, Catonem
,

[Then undefeated, death-defeating Cato,]

says another.
¹²
And the next, telling of the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey:

Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni
.

[The cause of the victors pleased the gods: that of the vanquished, Cato.]
¹³

And the fourth, when praising Caesar:

Et cuncta terrarum subacta
        Praeter atrocem animum Catonis
.

[The whole world conquered, save for the unyielding soul of Cato.]
¹⁴

And then the master of the choir,
¹⁵
having listed and displayed the names of all the greatest of the Romans, ends in this wise:

his dantem jura Catonem
.

[and then – a law to them all – Cato.]

38. How we weep and laugh at the same thing

[An understanding of the complexity of conflicting emotions helps us to avoid trivial interpretations of great men and their grief.]

[A] When we read in our history books that Antigonus was severely displeased with his son for having brought him the head of his enemy King Pyrrhus who had just been killed fighting against him and that he burst into copious tears when he saw it;
¹
and that Duke René of Lorraine also lamented the death of Duke Charles of Burgundy whom he had just defeated, and wore mourning at his funeral; and that at the battle of Auroy which the Count de Montfort won against Charles de Blois, his rival for the Duchy of Brittany, the victor showed great grief when he happened upon his enemy’s corpse: we should not at once exclaim,

Et cosi aven che l’animo ciascuna
Sua passion sotto et contrario manto
Ricopre, con la vista hor’ chiara hor bruna
.

[Thus does the mind cloak every passion with its opposite, our faces showing now joy, now sadness.]
²

When they presented Caesar with the head of Pompey our histories say
³
that he turned his gaze away as from a spectacle both ugly and displeasing. There had been such a long understanding and fellowship between them in the management of affairs of State, they had shared the same fortunes and rendered each other so many mutual services as allies, that we should not believe that his behaviour was quite false and counterfeit – as this other poet thinks it was:

tutumque putavit
Jam bonus esse socer; lachrimas non sponte cadentes
Effudit, gemitusque expressit pectore læto
.

[And now he thought it was safe to play the good father-in-law; he poured out tears, but not spontaneous ones, and he forced out groans from his happy breast.]
⁴

For while it is true that most of our actions are but mask and cosmetic, and that it is sometimes true that

Hæredis fletus sub persona risus est;

[Behind the mask, the tears of an heir are laughter;]
⁵

nevertheless we ought to consider when judging such events how our souls are often shaken by conflicting emotions. Even as there is said to be a variety of humours assembled in our bodies, the dominant one being that which normally prevails according to our complexion, so too in our souls: although diverse emotions may shake them, there is one which must remain in possession of the field; nevertheless its victory is not so complete but that the weaker ones do not sometimes regain lost ground because of the pliancy and mutability of our soul and make a brief sally in their turn. That is why we can see that not only children, who artlessly follow Nature, often weep and laugh at the same thing, but that not one of us either can boast that, no matter how much he may want to set out on a journey, he still does not feel his heart a-tremble when he says goodbye to family and friends: even if he does not actually burst into tears at least he puts a foot over to stirrup with a sad and gloomy face. And however noble the passion which enflames the heart of a well-born bride, she still has to have her arms prised from her mother’s neck before being given to her husband, no matter what that merry fellow may say:

      Est ne novis nuptis odio venus, arme parentum
Frustrantur falsis gaudia lachrimulis,
Ubertim thalami quas intra limina fundunt?
Non, ita me divi, vera gemunt, juverint
.

[Is Venus really hated by our brides, or do they mock their parents’ joy with those false tears which they pour forth in abundance at their chamber-door? No. So help me, gods, their sobs are false ones.]
⁶

And so it is not odd to lament the death of a man whom we would by no means wish to be still alive.

When I rail at my manservant I do so sincerely with all my mind: my
curses are real not feigned. But once I cease to fume, if he needs help from me I am glad to help him: I turn over the page. [C] When I call him a dolt or a calf I have no intention of stitching such labels on to him for ever: nor do I believe I am contradicting myself when I later call him an honest fellow. No one characteristic clasps us purely and universally in its embrace. If only talking to oneself did not look mad, no day would go by without my being heard growling to myself, against myself, ‘You silly shit!’ Yet I do not intend that to be a definition of me.

[B] If anyone should think when he sees me sometimes look bleakly at my wife and sometimes lovingly that either emotion is put on, then he is daft. When Nero took leave of his mother whom he was sending to be drowned, he nevertheless felt some emotion at his mother’s departure and felt horror and pity.
⁷

[A] The sun, they say, does not shed its light in one continuous flow but ceaselessly darts fresh rays so thickly at us, one after another, that we cannot perceive any gap between them:

[B]
Largus enim liquidi fons luminis, ætherius sol
Inrigat assidue cælum candore recenti,
Suppeditatque novo confestim famine lumen
.

[That generous source of liquid light, the aethereal sun, assiduously floods the heavens with new rays and ceaselessly sheds light upon new light.]
⁸

So, too, our soul darts its arrows separately but imperceptibly.

[C] Artabanus happened to take his nephew Xerxes by surprise. He teased him about the sudden change which he saw come over his face. But Xerxes was in fact thinking about the huge size of his army as it was crossing the Hellespont for the expedition against Greece; he first felt a quiver of joy at seeing so many thousands of men devoted to his service and showed this by a happy and festive look on his face; then, all of a sudden his thoughts turned to all those lives which would wither in a hundred years at most: he knit his brow and was saddened to tears.
⁹

[A] We have pursued revenge for an injury with a resolute will; we have felt a singular joy at our victory… and we weep: yet it is not for
that that we weep. Nothing has changed; but our mind contemplates the matter in a different light and sees it from another aspect: for everything has many angles and many different sheens. Thoughts of kinship, old acquaintanceships and affections suddenly seize our minds and stir them each according to their worth: but the change is so sudden that it escapes us:

[B]
Nil adeo fieri celeri ratione videtur
Quam si mens fieri proponit et inchoat ipsa.
Ocius ergo animus quam res se perciet ulla,
Ante oculos quarum in promptu natura videtur
.

[Nothing can be seen to match the rapidity of the thoughts which the mind produces and initiates. The mind is swifter than anything which the nature of our eyes allows them to see.]
¹⁰

[A] That is why we deceive ourselves if we want to make this never-ending succession into one continuous whole. When Timoleon weeps for the murder which, with noble determination, he committed, he does not weep for the liberty he has restored to his country; he does not weep for the Tyrant: he weeps for his brother.
¹¹
He has done one part of his duty: let us allow him to do the other.