Essays of Michel de Montaigne - 034

are public professors of divinity, to be very reserved in writing of
religion, would carry with it a very good colour of utility and justice
--and to me, amongst the rest peradventure, to hold my prating? I have
been told that even those who are not of our Church nevertheless amongst
themselves expressly forbid the name of God to be used in common
discourse, nor so much even by way of interjection, exclamation,
assertion of a truth, or comparison; and I think them in the right: upon
what occasion soever we call upon God to accompany and assist us, it
ought always to be done with the greatest reverence and devotion.
There is, as I remember, a passage in Xenophon where he tells us that we
ought so much the more seldom to call upon God, by how much it is hard to
compose our souls to such a degree of calmness, patience, and devotion as
it ought to be in at such a time; otherwise our prayers are not only vain
and fruitless, but vicious: “forgive us,” we say, “our trespasses, as we
forgive them that trespass against us”; what do we mean by this petition
but that we present to God a soul free from all rancour and revenge? And
yet we make nothing of invoking God’s assistance in our vices, and
inviting Him into our unjust designs:
“Quae, nisi seductis, nequeas committere divis”
[“Which you can only impart to the gods, when you have gained them
over.”--Persius, ii. 4.]
the covetous man prays for the conservation of his vain and superfluous
riches; the ambitious for victory and the good conduct of his fortune;
the thief calls Him to his assistance, to deliver him from the dangers
and difficulties that obstruct his wicked designs, or returns Him thanks
for the facility he has met with in cutting a man’s throat; at the door
of the house men are going to storm or break into by force of a petard,
they fall to prayers for success, their intentions and hopes of cruelty,
avarice, and lust.
“Hoc igitur, quo to Jovis aurem impellere tentas,
Dic agedum Staio: ‘proh Jupiter! O bone, clamet,
Jupiter!’ At sese non clamet Jupiter ipse.”
[“This therefore, with which you seek to draw the ear of Jupiter,
say to Staius. ‘O Jupiter! O good Jupiter!’ let him cry. Think
you Jupiter himself would not cry out upon it?”--Persius, ii. 21.]
Marguerite, Queen of Navarre,--[In the Heptameron.]--tells of a young
prince, who, though she does not name him, is easily enough by his great
qualities to be known, who going upon an amorous assignation to lie with
an advocate’s wife of Paris, his way thither being through a church, he
never passed that holy place going to or returning from his pious
exercise, but he always kneeled down to pray. Wherein he would employ
the divine favour, his soul being full of such virtuous meditations,
I leave others to judge, which, nevertheless, she instances for a
testimony of singular devotion. But this is not the only proof we have
that women are not very fit to treat of theological affairs.
A true prayer and religious reconciling of ourselves to Almighty God
cannot enter into an impure soul, subject at the very time to the
dominion of Satan. He who calls God to his assistance whilst in a course
of vice, does as if a cut-purse should call a magistrate to help him, or
like those who introduce the name of God to the attestation of a lie.
“Tacito mala vota susurro
Concipimus.”
[“We whisper our guilty prayers.”---Lucan, v. 104.]
There are few men who durst publish to the world the prayers they make to
Almighty God:
“Haud cuivis promptum est, murmurque, humilesque susurros
Tollere de templis, et aperto vivere voto”
[“‘Tis not convenient for every one to bring the prayers he mutters
out of the temple, and to give his wishes to the public ear.
--“Persius, ii. 6.]
and this is the reason why the Pythagoreans would have them always public
and heard by every one, to the end they might not prefer indecent or
unjust petitions as this man:
“Clare quum dixit, Apollo!
Labra movet, metuens audiri: Pulcra Laverna,
Da mihi fallere, da justum sanctumque videri;
Noctem peccatis, et fraudibus objice nubem.”
[“When he has clearly said Apollo! he moves his lips, fearful to be
heard; he murmurs: O fair Laverna, grant me the talent to deceive;
grant me to appear holy and just; shroud my sins with night, and
cast a cloud over my frauds.”--Horace, Ep., i. 16, 59.--(Laverna
was the goddess of thieves.)]
The gods severely punished the wicked prayers of OEdipus in granting
them: he had prayed that his children might amongst themselves determine
the succession to his throne by arms, and was so miserable as to see
himself taken at his word. We are not to pray that all things may go as
we would have them, but as most concurrent with prudence.
We seem, in truth, to make use of our prayers as of a kind of jargon, and
as those do who employ holy words about sorceries and magical operations;
and as if we reckoned the benefit we are to reap from them as depending
upon the contexture, sound, and jingle of words, or upon the grave
composing of the countenance. For having the soul contaminated with
concupiscence, not touched with repentance, or comforted by any late
reconciliation with God, we go to present Him such words as the memory
suggests to the tongue, and hope from thence to obtain the remission of
our sins. There is nothing so easy, so sweet, and so favourable, as the
divine law: it calls and invites us to her, guilty and abominable as we
are; extends her arms and receives us into her bosom, foul and polluted
as we at present are, and are for the future to be. But then, in return,
we are to look upon her with a respectful eye; we are to receive this
pardon with all gratitude and submission, and for that instant at least,
wherein we address ourselves to her, to have the soul sensible of the
ills we have committed, and at enmity with those passions that seduced us
to offend her; neither the gods nor good men (says Plato) will accept the
present of a wicked man:
“Immunis aram si terigit manus,
Non sumptuosa blandior hostia
Mollivit aversos Penates
Farre pio et saliente mica.”
[“If a pure hand has touched the altar, the pious offering of a
small cake and a few grains of salt will appease the offended gods
more effectually than costly sacrifices.”
--Horace, Od., iii. 23, 17.]


CHAPTER LVII
OF AGE
I cannot allow of the way in which we settle for ourselves the duration
of our life. I see that the sages contract it very much in comparison of
the common opinion: “what,” said the younger Cato to those who would stay
his hand from killing himself, “am I now of an age to be reproached that
I go out of the world too soon?” And yet he was but eight-and-forty
years old. He thought that to be a mature and advanced age, considering
how few arrive unto it. And such as, soothing their thoughts with I know
not what course of nature, promise to themselves some years beyond it,
could they be privileged from the infinite number of accidents to which
we are by a natural subjection exposed, they might have some reason so to
do. What am idle conceit is it to expect to die of a decay of strength,
which is the effect of extremest age, and to propose to ourselves no
shorter lease of life than that, considering it is a kind of death of all
others the most rare and very seldom seen? We call that only a natural
death; as if it were contrary to nature to see a man break his neck with
a fall, be drowned in shipwreck, be snatched away with a pleurisy or the
plague, and as if our ordinary condition did not expose us to these
inconveniences. Let us no longer flatter ourselves with these fine
words; we ought rather, peradventure, to call that natural which is
general, common, and universal.
To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular, and,
therefore, so much less natural than the others; ‘tis the last and
extremest sort of dying: and the more remote, the less to be hoped for.
It is, indeed, the bourn beyond which we are not to pass, and which the
law of nature has set as a limit, not to be exceeded; but it is, withal,
a privilege she is rarely seen to give us to last till then. ‘Tis a
lease she only signs by particular favour, and it may be to one only in
the space of two or three ages, and then with a pass to boot, to carry
him through all the traverses and difficulties she has strewed in the way
of this long career. And therefore my opinion is, that when once forty
years we should consider it as an age to which very few arrive. For
seeing that men do not usually proceed so far, it is a sign that we are
pretty well advanced; and since we have exceeded the ordinary bounds,
which is the just measure of life, we ought not to expect to go much
further; having escaped so many precipices of death, whereinto we have
seen so many other men fall, we should acknowledge that so extraordinary
a fortune as that which has hitherto rescued us from those eminent
perils, and kept us alive beyond the ordinary term of living, is not like
to continue long.
‘Tis a fault in our very laws to maintain this error: these say that a
man is not capable of managing his own estate till he be five-and-twenty
years old, whereas he will have much ado to manage his life so long.
Augustus cut off five years from the ancient Roman standard, and declared
that thirty years old was sufficient for a judge. Servius Tullius
superseded the knights of above seven-and-forty years of age from the
fatigues of war; Augustus dismissed them at forty-five; though methinks
it seems a little unreasonable that men should be sent to the fireside
till five-and-fifty or sixty years of age. I should be of opinion that
our vocation and employment should be as far as possible extended for the
public good: I find the fault on the other side, that they do not employ
us early enough. This emperor was arbiter of the whole world at
nineteen, and yet would have a man to be thirty before he could be fit to
determine a dispute about a gutter.
For my part, I believe our souls are adult at twenty as much as they are
ever like to be, and as capable then as ever. A soul that has not by
that time given evident earnest of its force and virtue will never after
come to proof. The natural qualities and virtues produce what they have
of vigorous and fine, within that term or never,
“Si l’espine rion picque quand nai,
A pene que picque jamai,”
[“If the thorn does not prick at its birth,
‘twill hardly ever prick at all.”]
as they say in Dauphin.
Of all the great human actions I ever heard or read of, of what sort
soever, I have observed, both in former ages and our own, more were
performed before the age of thirty than after; and this ofttimes in the
very lives of the same men. May I not confidently instance in those of
Hannibal and his great rival Scipio? The better half of their lives they
lived upon the glory they had acquired in their youth; great men after,
‘tis true, in comparison of others; but by no means in comparison of
themselves. As to my own particular, I do certainly believe that since
that age, both my understanding and my constitution have rather decayed
than improved, and retired rather than advanced. ‘Tis possible, that
with those who make the best use of their time, knowledge and experience
may increase with their years; but vivacity, promptitude, steadiness, and
other pieces of us, of much greater importance, and much more essentially
our own, languish and decay:
“Ubi jam validis quassatum est viribus aevi
Corpus, et obtusis ceciderunt viribus artus,
Claudicat ingenium, delirat linguaque, mensque.”
[“When once the body is shaken by the violence of time,
blood and vigour ebbing away, the judgment halts,
the tongue and the mind dote.”--Lucretius, iii. 452.]
Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind; and I have
seen enough who have got a weakness in their brains before either in
their legs or stomach; and by how much the more it is a disease of no
great pain to the sufferer, and of obscure symptoms, so much greater is
the danger. For this reason it is that I complain of our laws, not that
they keep us too long to our work, but that they set us to work too late.
For the frailty of life considered, and to how many ordinary and natural
rocks it is exposed, one ought not to give up so large a portion of it to
childhood, idleness, and apprenticeship.
[Which Cotton thus renders: “Birth though noble, ought not to share
so large a vacancy, and so tedious a course of education.” Florio
(1613) makes the passage read as-follows: “Methinks that,
considering the weakness of our life, and seeing the infinite number
of ordinary rocks and natural dangers it is subject unto, we should
not, so soon as we come into the world, allot so large a share
thereof unto unprofitable wantonness in youth, ill-breeding
idleness, and slow-learning prentisage.”]


ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
Advise to choose weapons of the shortest sort
An ignorance that knowledge creates and begets
Ashamed to lay out as much thought and study upon it
Can neither keep nor enjoy anything with a good grace
Change of fashions
Chess: this idle and childish game
Death is terrible to Cicero, coveted by Cato
Death of old age the most rare and very seldom seen
Diogenes, esteeming us no better than flies or bladders
Do not to pray that all things may go as we would have them
Excel above the common rate in frivolous things
Expresses more contempt and condemnation than the other
Fancy that others cannot believe otherwise than as he does
Gradations above and below pleasure
Greatest apprehensions, from things unseen, concealed
He did not think mankind worthy of a wise man’s concern
Home anxieties and a mind enslaved by wearing complaints
How infirm and decaying material this fabric of ours is
I do not willingly alight when I am once on horseback
Led by the ears by this charming harmony of words
Little knacks and frivolous subtleties
Men approve of things for their being rare and new
Must of necessity walk in the steps of another
Natural death the most rare and very seldom seen
Not to instruct but to be instructed.
Present Him such words as the memory suggests to the tongue
Psalms of King David: promiscuous, indiscreet
Rhetoric: an art to flatter and deceive
Rhetoric: to govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble
Sitting betwixt two stools
Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind
Stupidity and facility natural to the common people
The Bible: the wicked and ignorant grow worse by it.
The faintness that surprises in the exercises of Venus
Thucydides: which was the better wrestler
To die of old age is a death rare, extraordinary, and singular
To make little things appear great was his profession
To smell, though well, is to stink
Valour will cause a trembling in the limbs as well as fear
Viscid melting kisses of youthful ardour in my wanton age
We can never be despised according to our full desert
When we have got it, we want something else
Women who paint, pounce, and plaster up their ruins



ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
Translated by Charles Cotton
Edited by William Carew Hazlitt
1877

CONTENTS OF VOLUME 9.
I. Of the inconstancy of our actions.
II. Of drunkenness.
III. A custom of the Isle of Cea.
IV. To-morrow’s a new day.
V. Of conscience.
VI. Use makes perfect.

ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE
BOOK THE SECOND
CHAPTER I
OF THE INCONSTANCY OF OUR ACTIONS
Such as make it their business to oversee human actions, do not find
themselves in anything so much perplexed as to reconcile them and bring
them into the world’s eye with the same lustre and reputation; for they
commonly so strangely contradict one another that it seems impossible
they should proceed from one and the same person. We find the younger
Marius one while a son of Mars and another a son of Venus. Pope Boniface
VIII. entered, it is said, into his Papacy like a fox, behaved himself in
it like a lion, and died like a dog; and who could believe it to be the
same Nero, the perfect image of all cruelty, who, having the sentence of
a condemned man brought to him to sign, as was the custom, cried out,
“O that I had never been taught to write!” so much it went to his heart
to condemn a man to death. All story is full of such examples, and every
man is able to produce so many to himself, or out of his own practice or
observation, that I sometimes wonder to see men of understanding give
themselves the trouble of sorting these pieces, considering that
irresolution appears to me to be the most common and manifest vice of our
nature witness the famous verse of the player Publius:
“Malum consilium est, quod mutari non potest.”
[“‘Tis evil counsel that will admit no change.”
--Pub. Mim., ex Aul. Gell., xvii. 14.]
There seems some reason in forming a judgment of a man from the most
usual methods of his life; but, considering the natural instability of
our manners and opinions, I have often thought even the best authors a
little out in so obstinately endeavouring to make of us any constant and
solid contexture; they choose a general air of a man, and according to
that interpret all his actions, of which, if they cannot bend some to a
uniformity with the rest, they are presently imputed to dissimulation.
Augustus has escaped them, for there was in him so apparent, sudden, and
continual variety of actions all the whole course of his life, that he
has slipped away clear and undecided from the most daring critics. I can
more hardly believe a man’s constancy than any other virtue, and believe
nothing sooner than the contrary. He that would judge of a man in detail
and distinctly, bit by bit, would oftener be able to speak the truth. It
is a hard matter, from all antiquity, to pick out a dozen men who have
formed their lives to one certain and constant course, which is the
principal design of wisdom; for to comprise it all in one word, says one
of the ancients, and to contract all the rules of human life into one,
“it is to will, and not to will, always one and the same thing: I will
not vouchsafe,” says he, “to add, provided the will be just, for if it be
not just, it is impossible it should be always one.” I have indeed
formerly learned that vice is nothing but irregularity, and want of
measure, and therefore ‘tis impossible to fix constancy to it. ‘Tis a
saying of. Demosthenes, “that the beginning oh all virtue is
consultation and deliberation; the end and perfection, constancy.” If we
would resolve on any certain course by reason, we should pitch upon the
best, but nobody has thought on’t:
“Quod petit, spernit; repetit, quod nuper omisit;
AEstuat, et vitae disconvenit ordine toto.”
[“That which he sought he despises; what he lately lost, he seeks
again. He fluctuates, and is inconsistent in the whole order of
life.”--Horace, Ep., i. I, 98.]
Our ordinary practice is to follow the inclinations of our appetite, be
it to the left or right, upwards or downwards, according as we are wafted
by the breath of occasion. We never meditate what we would have till the
instant we have a mind to have it; and change like that little creature
which receives its colour from what it is laid upon. What we but just
now proposed to ourselves we immediately alter, and presently return
again to it; ‘tis nothing but shifting and inconsistency:
“Ducimur, ut nervis alienis mobile lignum.”
[“We are turned about like the top with the thong of others.”
--Idem, Sat., ii. 7, 82.]
We do not go, we are driven; like things that float, now leisurely, then
with violence, according to the gentleness or rapidity of the current:
“Nonne videmus,
Quid sibi quisque velit, nescire, et quaerere semper
Commutare locum, quasi onus deponere possit?”
[“Do we not see them, uncertain what they want, and always asking
for something new, as if they could get rid of the burthen.”
--Lucretius, iii. 1070.]
Every day a new whimsy, and our humours keep motion with the time.
“Tales sunt hominum mentes, quali pater ipse
Juppiter auctificas lustravit lumine terras.”
[“Such are the minds of men, that they change as the light with
which father Jupiter himself has illumined the increasing earth.”
--Cicero, Frag. Poet, lib. x.]
We fluctuate betwixt various inclinations; we will nothing freely,
nothing absolutely, nothing constantly. In any one who had prescribed
and established determinate laws and rules in his head for his own
conduct, we should perceive an equality of manners, an order and an
infallible relation of one thing or action to another, shine through his
whole life; Empedocles observed this discrepancy in the Agrigentines,
that they gave themselves up to delights, as if every day was their last,
and built as if they had been to live for ever. The judgment would not
be hard to make, as is very evident in the younger Cato; he who therein
has found one step, it will lead him to all the rest; ‘tis a harmony of
very according sounds, that cannot jar. But with us ‘t is quite
contrary; every particular action requires a particular judgment. The
surest way to steer, in my opinion, would be to take our measures from
the nearest allied circumstances, without engaging in a longer
inquisition, or without concluding any other consequence. I was told,
during the civil disorders of our poor kingdom, that a maid, hard by the
place where I then was, had thrown herself out of a window to avoid being
forced by a common soldier who was quartered in the house; she was not
killed by the fall, and therefore, repeating her attempt would have cut
her own throat, had she not been prevented; but having, nevertheless,
wounded herself to some show of danger, she voluntarily confessed that
the soldier had not as yet importuned her otherwise; than by courtship,
earnest solicitation, and presents; but that she was afraid that in the
end he would have proceeded to violence, all which she delivered with
such a countenance and accent, and withal embrued in her own blood, the
highest testimony of her virtue, that she appeared another Lucretia; and
yet I have since been very well assured that both before and after she
was not so difficult a piece. And, according to my host’s tale in
Ariosto, be as handsome a man and as worthy a gentleman as you will, do
not conclude too much upon your mistress’s inviolable chastity for having
been repulsed; you do not know but she may have a better stomach to your
muleteer.
Antigonus, having taken one of his soldiers into a great degree of favour
and esteem for his valour, gave his physicians strict charge to cure him
of a long and inward disease under which he had a great while languished,
and observing that, after his cure, he went much more coldly to work than
before, he asked him what had so altered and cowed him: “Yourself, sir,”
replied the other, “by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of
my life.” Lucullus’s soldier having been rifled by the enemy, performed
upon them in revenge a brave exploit, by which having made himself a
gainer, Lucullus, who had conceived a good opinion of him from that
action, went about to engage him in some enterprise of very great danger,
with all the plausible persuasions and promises he could think of;
“Verbis, quae timido quoque possent addere mentem”
[“Words which might add courage to any timid man.”
--Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 1, 2.]
“Pray employ,” answered he, “some miserable plundered soldier in that
affair”:
“Quantumvis rusticus, ibit,
Ibit eo, quo vis, qui zonam perdidit, inquit;”
[“Some poor fellow, who has lost his purse, will go whither you
wish, said he.”--Horace, Ep., ii. 2, 39.]
and flatly refused to go. When we read that Mahomet having furiously
rated Chasan, Bassa of the Janissaries, because he had seen the
Hungarians break into his squadrons, and himself behave very ill in the
business, and that Chasan, instead of any other answer, rushed furiously
alone, scimitar in hand, into the first body of the enemy, where he was
presently cut to pieces, we are not to look upon that action,
peradventure, so much as vindication as a turn of mind, not so much
natural valour as a sudden despite. The man you saw yesterday so
adventurous and brave, you must not think it strange to see him as great
a poltroon the next: anger, necessity, company, wine, or the sound of the
trumpet had roused his spirits; this is no valour formed and established
by reason, but accidentally created by such circumstances, and therefore
it is no wonder if by contrary circumstances it appear quite another
thing.
These supple variations and contradictions so manifest in us, have given
occasion to some to believe that man has two souls; other two distinct
powers that always accompany and incline us, the one towards good and the
other towards ill, according to their own nature and propension; so
abrupt a variety not being imaginable to flow from one and the same
source.
For my part, the puff of every accident not only carries me along with it
according to its own proclivity, but moreover I discompose and trouble
myself by the instability of my own posture; and whoever will look
narrowly into his own bosom, will hardly find himself twice in the same
condition. I give to my soul sometimes one face and sometimes another,
according to the side I turn her to. If I speak variously of myself, it
is because I consider myself variously; all the contrarieties are there
to be found in one corner or another; after one fashion or another:
bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate;
ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant;
liberal, covetous, and prodigal: I find all this in myself, more or less,
according as I turn myself about; and whoever will sift himself to the
bottom, will find in himself, and even in his own judgment, this
volubility and discordance. I have nothing to say of myself entirely,
simply, and solidly without mixture and confusion. ‘Distinguo’ is the
most universal member of my logic. Though I always intend to speak well
of good things, and rather to interpret such things as fall out in the
best sense than otherwise, yet such is the strangeness of our condition,
that we are often pushed on to do well even by vice itself, if well-doing
were not judged by the intention only. One gallant action, therefore,
ought not to conclude a man valiant; if a man were brave indeed, he would
be always so, and upon all occasions. If it were a habit of valour and
not a sally, it would render a man equally resolute in all accidents; the
same alone as in company; the same in lists as in a battle: for, let them
say what they will, there is not one valour for the pavement and another
for the field; he would bear a sickness in his bed as bravely as a wound
in the field, and no more fear death in his own house than at an assault.
We should not then see the same man charge into a breach with a brave