The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men [Vol. 4]

MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC

As he tells in the Essays, Mr. Emerson made a friend of Montaigne in his youth,—felt that Montaigne, three centuries earlier, had, with wit and frank courage, written of things as he himself would have liked to, in boyish protest at timid observance and decorum. There was obvious contrast between their conditions. The French lord, baptized into the communion of the Church of Rome, bred to the usual military accomplishments, with something of a courtier's experience, and a student of law, heir of a castle and full feudal rights, and living in troublous times, stirred the imagination of a delicate and studious youth, growing up well-bred but poor in the very heart of Puritan simplicity and democracy in New England. Yet there were bonds stronger than their differences,—a greater Catholicism, a brave love of truth, and disgust at cant, and desire to make their protest freely; a human way

of looking at men and things and the teaching of each day, a love of wild nature and the independence and retirement of a country householder,—these, and their common love of Plato and of Plutarch. As to writing, Emerson's word in his journal about Montaigne was true of himself: "Montaigne or Socrates would quote Paul of Tarsus and Goody Two-shoes with equal willingness."

During the time of his Boston ministry, on Christmas day, 1831, he wrote to his Aunt Mary, who eagerly followed her nephews' reading and discussed it with them:—

"No effeminate parlor workman is he on an idea got at an evening lecture or a young men's debate, but roundly tells what he saw or what he thought of when he was riding on horseback or entertaining a troop at his château. A gross, semi-savage indecency debases his book, and ought doubtless to turn it out of doors, but the robustness of his sentiments, the generosity of his judgment, the downright truth without fear or favor, I do embrace with both arms. It is wild and savory as sweet-fern. Henry the Eighth loved to see a man; and it is exhilarating once in a while to come across a genuine Saxon stump, a wild, virtuous man, who knows books, but gives them their right place, lower than his reason. Books are apt to turn reason out of doors. You find men talking everywhere from their memories instead of from their understanding. If I stole this thought from Montaigne, as is very likely, I don't care. I should have said the same myself."

Later, in his journal, appreciating the brave, out-of-door, half-military aspect of the man, he notes, "We can't afford to take the horse out of Montaigne's Essays." Again, valuing Montaigne's solid basis, he writes: "Montaigne has the de quoi which the French cherubs had not when the courteous archbishop implored them to sit down." In the story the

kind prelate said, Asseyez vous, mes enfans, and the fluttering cherubs answered, Monseigneur, nous n'avons pas de quoi.

In his first summer in Concord after he made it his home, at the age of thirty-two, Mr. Emerson made this entry in his journal:—

8th AUGUST [1835].

Yesterday I delighted myself with Michel de Montaigne. With all my heart I embrace the grand old sloven. He pricks and stings the sense of virtue in me, the wild gentile stock, I mean, for he has no Grace. But his panegyric of Cato and of Socrates in his essay On Cruelty (vol. ii.) do wind up again for us the spent springs, and make virtue possible without the discipline of Christianity; or rather do shame her of her eye-service and put her upon her honor. I read the Essays in Defence of Seneca and Plutarch; On Books; On Drunkenness; and On Cruelty. And at some fortunate line, which I cannot now recall, the spirit of some Plutarch hero or sage touched mine with such thrill as the war-trump makes in Talbot's ear and blood.

Eight years later he writes:—

"I once took so much delight in Montaigne, that I thought I should not need any other book; then in Plotinus, in Synesius, in Goethe,—even in Bettini; but to-day I turn the pages of either of them languidly enough, whilst I still cherish their genius. … It is too strong for us, this onward trick of Nature. Pero si muove."

Two months after the above entry, Mr. Emerson said in a letter written to his young friend Henry Thoreau, then teaching in his brother William Emerson's family in Staten Island:—

"We have had the new Hazlitt's Montaigne which contained

the 'Journey to Italy,' new to me, and the narrative of the death of the renowned friend Étienne de la Boéce."

Page 149, note 1. This image of the two-facedness of things is used to a different purpose in Emerson's poem "The Chartist's Complaint," originally entitled "Janus." But in almost every essay, though sometimes in separate essays, his own habit is to contemplate one facet of a truth at a time, and then, often abruptly, go to another point of view.

Page 150, note 1. "Aristotle, founding on the qualities of matter, is the European skeptic, Plato the believer." (Journal, 1845.)

Page 150, note 2. Strangely in contrast with this attitude of the timid or intolerant man of the gown was Mr. Emerson's own interested, respectful, and often admiring attitude towards the man of deeds, whether laborer, mechanic, merchant, or statesman.

Page 151, note 1. This recalls the first lines of Michael Angelo's sonnet to Vittoria Colonna translated by Emerson:—

Never did sculptor's dream unfoldA form which marble doth not holdIn its white block; yet it therein shall findOnly the hand secure and boldWhich still obeys the mind.Poems, Translations.

Page 152, note 1. Mr. Emerson, on his way to town meeting, saw his honest neighbor George Minot, a farmer and pot-hunter, at work, and asked him if he were not going to cast his vote for Freedom, in the sad days of the Fugitive Slave Law. "No," said Minot, "I ain't a-goin'. It's no use a-ballotin', for it won't stay so. What you do with a gun 'll stay."

Page 154, note 1. This was the remark of his next neighbor on the other side, a laborer.

Page 155, note 1. Here come in favorite images: that the planet is bearing its solidest materialists, helpless, whither they know not, at frightful speed through stellar space, drugged and cheated by the illusions of the senses which they cannot interpret, the Maia of the Oriental philosophers.

Page 155, note 2. These lines are borrowed from George Herbert's poem entitled "Affliction." When a youth he longed to leave Cambridge University, but his mother would not permit him to do so.

"Whereas my birth and spirit rather took The way that takes to town: Thou didst betray me to a lingering book, And wrapt me in a gown: I was entangled in a world of strife; Before I had the power to change my life."

Page 156, note 1. Here is a momentary indulgence at the expense of Mr. Emerson's long-sitting reformer visitors, from the journal of 1842, yet showing a magnanimity to the borers which he was fighting on his peach-trees in those days.

"The borer on our peach-trees bores that she may deposit an egg; but the borer into theories and institutions and books, bores that he may bore."

Page 157, note 1. Mr. Emerson recognized Nature's secret of Identity through all fugitive forms in the fable of the sea-god Proteus, who, when caught sleeping by a mortal, took shapes of beasts, of serpents, of fire, to disconcert his captor, yet, if held fast in spite of all, must answer his questions.

Page 158, note 1. It will be remembered that this book was written at the end of a decade which had witnessed an

extraordinary awakening in the minds and consciences of New England people and their neighbors. Mr. Emerson's papers on "The Times," "The Transcendentalist," "New England Reformers" in Nature, Addresses and Lectures, and his "Historical Notes of Life and Letters in New England" in Lectures and Biographical Sketches bear witness to the ferments that were at work on the questions of Emancipation, Temperance, Non-Resistance, Communities, Labor, as well as in Religion, Education, and Literature.

Page 162, note 1. The following passage is copied from some stray leaves of the lecture on Montaigne:—

"Talent without character is friskiness. The charm of Montaigne's egotism, and of his anecdotes, is, that there is a stout cavalier, a seigneur of France, at home in his château, responsible for all this chatting.

"Now suppose it should be shown and proved that the famous 'Essays' were a jeu d' esprit of Scaliger, or other scribacious person, written for the booksellers, and not resting on a real status picturesque in the eyes of all men. Would not the book instantly lose almost all its value?"

Page 163, note 1. The brilliant John Sterling, with whom Emerson formed a strong friendship through correspondence due at first to their common affection for Carlyle. They never met, for Sterling died in 1844. In his journal for 1843 Mr. Emerson records, almost in the same words as here, his pleasure, when a boy, in Cotton's Montaigne and his visit to Père Lachaise and of reading Sterling's "loving criticism on Montaigne in the Westminster Review," adding, "and soon after, Carlyle writes me word that this same lover of Montaigne is a lover of me. Now I have been introducing to his genius two of my friends, James and Tappan, who warm to

him as to a brother. So true is S. G. W.'s saying that all whom he knew met." Sterling's biography was written both by Archdeacon Hare, who edited his works, and by Carlyle. His Correspondence with Emerson was published in 1897.

Page 165, note 1. Mr. Emerson drew this contrast between Montaigne and Plutarch in his essay on the latter, printed in Lectures and Biographical Sketches:—

"Plutarch had a religion, which Montaigne wanted, and which defends him from wantonness; and, though Plutarch is as plain-spoken, his moral sentiment is always pure."

Page 166, note 1. Had Montaigne been a living, instead of a dead friend, Mr. Emerson's tolerance would have been sorely strained by this habit, and he would have wished to counsel him that "there is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers," as he tells at large as a final word of advice in the essay on "Behavior" in Conduct of Life.

Page 166, note 2. Miss Edgeworth's stories for children are so little read in this generation that it may be well to say that Old Poz was a character who bore this nickname because he was positive of his knowledge on all topics.

Page 168, note 1. In the journal for 1840 are the following sentences continuous with the foregoing passage:—

"I know nobody among my contemporaries except Carlyle who writes with any sinew and vivacity comparable to Plutarch and Montaigne. Yet always the profane swearing and bar-room wit has salt and fire in it. I cannot now read Webster's speeches. Fuller and Browne and Milton are quick, but the list is soon ended. Goethe seems to be well alive, no pedant: Luther too."

Page 172, note 1. In the journal he tells of "a walk to

the river with [a friend] and saw the moon interrogating, interrogating." The skeptic considered as a man in "the vestibule of the temple," suggests what has been said by Professor Weber of Strasburg on the doubts of Descartes as "a provisional skepticism, a means which he hastens to abandon as soon as he has discovered a certain primary truth." Dubito ut intelligam.

Page 174, note 1. The valued friend here alluded to, Mr. Charles K. Newcomb, was of a sensitive and beautiful character, a mystic, but with the Hamlet temperament to such an extent that he was paralyzed for all action by the tenderness of his conscience and the power with which all sides of a question presented themselves to him in turn. He was a member of the Brook Farm Community, a welcome but rare visitor at Mr. Emerson's house, and when he came he brought his writings, which interested his host greatly. I think they never came to publication, except a few papers in the Dial. His sense of duty sent him to the war for the Union in the ranks. He remained a bachelor all his life and in his last years lived much abroad.

Page 174, note 2. The last passage appears in the journal for 1845 thus:—

"Skepticism and gulfs of skepticism; strongest of all, that of the Saints. They come to the mount, and in the largest and most blissful communication to them, somewhat is left unsaid, which begets in them doubt and horrible doubt. So then, say they, before they have yet risen from their knees, Even this does not justify: we must still feel that this our homage and beatitude is partial and deformed. We must fly for relief and sanity to that other suspected and reviled part of nature, the kingdom of the understanding, the gymnastics of talent, the play of fancy."

Page 175, note 1. Here appears the cause which all his life he stood for,—The Church against the churches.

Page 177, note 1. Compare in the poem "Voluntaries"

Fate's grass grows rank in valley clods,And rankly on the castled steep.

Page 177, note 2. His method of dealing with these formidable doubts in the following pages is characteristic of the man; no attempt at dogmatically solving the question for all, but throwing of side-lights here and there, suggestive perhaps to other minds both of the magnitude of the problem, and how to approach it in their own way. Among many of his sayings on the subject of Indirection these may serve as specimens: "In good society—say among the angels in Heaven—is not everything spoken by indirection." "If we could speak the direct solving speech it would solve us too."

Page 180, note 1. Journal, 1845. "There are many skepticisms. The universe is like an infinite series of planes, each of which is a false bottom, and when we think our feet are planted now at last on the adamant, the slide is drawn out from under us.

"Value of the skeptic is the resistance to premature conclusions. If he prematurely conclude, his conclusion will be shattered, and he will become malignant. But he must limit himself with the anticipation of law in the mutations,—flowing law."

Page 182, note 1. This paragraph is exactly a case of Mr. Emerson's holding the mirror to his characters at just such an angle that you see something of his own face too, as Dr. Holmes said. His ecclesiastical sin had been, in Dr. Bartol's words, his excess of spirituality, and all sorts of well-meaning men were wishing him to spend himself on details and partial

reforms while he was trying to hear and transmit the universal laws. He has honestly endeavored in this essay to state the difficult problems fully and clearly, not "Sunday objections made up on purpose to be put down." But, after all, he belongs to the minds that are made "incapable of skepticism," "a man of thought who must feel the thought which is parent to the Universe."

Page 183, note 1. About the time when Mr. Emerson was parting from his church he was reading with great pleasure the life of George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, and making many extracts from it in his journal. The simple worship of the Quakers and their obedience to the moving Spirit always recommended them to him.

Page 183, note 2. In an early journal is this entry:—

"Fools and clowns and sots make the fringe of every one's tapestry of life and give a certain reality to the picture. What could we do in Concord without Bigelow's and Wesson's bar-rooms and their dependencies? What without such fixtures as Uncle Sol and old Moore, who sleeps in Dr. Hurd's barn, and the red Charity-house over the brook? Tragedy and Comedy go ever hand in hand."

And again in "The Poet":—

He, foolish child,A facile, reckless, wandering will,Eager for good, not hating ill,Thanked Nature for each stroke she dealt;On his tense chords all strokes were felt,The good, the bad with equal zeal,He asked, he only asked, to feel.Timid, self-pleasing, sensitive,With Gods, with fools, content to live.Poems, Appendix.

Page 184, note 1. This thought appears in his poem "The Day's Ration."

Page 186, note 1. In the "Woodnotes," II., the pine-tree sings—

Of tendency through endless ages.

Page 186, note 2. A line that he valued most of those of the poet Channing, his friend, from "A Poet's Hope."

There is a summary, not appearing in the essay in the journal of 1845, perhaps obscure in its ending, but interesting. The "cowage" of the first sentence was an herb which used to be prescribed for intestinal worms, and acted, not as a poison, but by piercing them with its sharp fibres.

"Montaigne good against bigots as cowage against worms, acts mechanically.

"But there is a higher Muse there, sitting where he durst not soar, a muse that follows the flowing power, a Dialectic that respects results: and it requires a muse, as Hafiz expresses himself only in musical phrases, the hyphens are small unities, not parts."