From “The French Humorists.”

MONTAIGNE took the man of whom he knew most, himself, the creature which was to him the most interesting object in the world; and then began to group around this central figure all thoughts, influences, events, accidents, and habits which had accumulated during his lifetime. The man stands before us forever contemplating an immense pile of these things, his own. Suppose you had spread out before you all the things you had bought, possessed, or imagined, in the course of your life; suppose there were the toys and games of childhood, the follies of youth, the disappointments, the projects, the successes of a long career, would not the mere description of these things make an interesting volume? But Montaigne does more. He gives us not only these things, but the things he has learned from them. Montaigne’s “Essays” owe their greatest charm to the fact that they reveal not only the secrets of a soul, but of a soul not much raised above the commonplace, and like our own. Such influences as acted upon his spirit act upon ours. He goes about the world among his fellows, plays the fool among the boys, and is sober when he grows older; has posts of honor and dignity; associates sometimes with great people; is himself a gentleman of some learning; is a married man, and a père de famille. There is nothing which is not entirely commonplace, ordinary, and of mere routine in his life; everything which should make him entirely fitted for the task he undertook. The Pleiad poets, for instance, with their scholarship, seclusion, and pedantry—if these should attempt to do what Montaigne succeeded in doing, what sort of man would they produce? Consider what ordinary people talk about; listen to them at their tables, in the streets, in railway carriages; as they talk, Montaigne’s people talked. It is not of politics, nor is it of literature, nor is it of art. They talk of their own habits first, their little dodges to keep off sickness and defer death; then, their likings and dislikings; then, any amusements that are going on; then, money-making; then, the topic of the day, on which they have a decided opinion. That is how Montaigne talked, that is how he wrote. Nothing clearer than the portraits of himself, got from his “Essays”; nothing less likely to excite enthusiasm.

  He used to write in a large circular room, with an adjoining square cabinet. The rafters are bare, and covered with inscriptions, cut by the direction of Montaigne, such as the following:—

  The sides of the square cabinet were covered with fresco paintings, “Mars and Venus Surprised by Vulcan,” and such refreshing subjects, to which the philosopher might turn when wearied by working at his “certain verses of Virgil.” The circular room, in which was his library of a thousand volumes, no contemptible collection for the time, is sixteen paces in diameter. Here for twenty years, save when he is running up to Paris “on business,” sits a little squat-figured, undignified man; he is past forty now, and no longer fond of violent exercises; he dresses in plain white or black; he is quick and hasty-tempered, in so much that his servants get out of his sight when he begins to call them “calves”; he is easily irritated by little things, such as the fall of a tile, or the breaking of a thing; he sits down to dinner late, because he does not like to see a crowd of dishes on the table; he is fond of wine, but is not intemperate; he is awkward, and unable to do things which other men do; cannot dance or sing; cannot mend a pen, saddle a horse, or carve meat, and his awkwardness makes him uncomfortable. He has all the virtues, he says, except two or three; never makes enemies, never does any man injury; makes it his rule to keep things comfortable about him; is extremely kind-hearted, and eminently selfish. He is lacking in the domestic faculty; cares little about his wife, and does not pretend to care at all for babies; and he is always interfering with servants, so that they hate him. As regards his reading, it is without method, desultory; he takes up his books one after the other, and browses among them, reading Latin histories for chief pleasure. He evidently has no real love for poetry or power of criticism, because we find him turning from Ovid and Virgil and admiring the miserable centos in vogue at the time.

  Do you want to know more about him? Read the “Essays.” There you will find every page with some allusion to himself. You will be pleased to learn that he prefers white wine to red; that he loves to rest with his legs raised; that he likes scratching his ear, with other interesting details.

  It is all, in fact, as I said before, about himself. There is the man, with his appearance, his manners, his habits, and his baggage of thoughts. And because it is a real man, ten times as real as Rousseau’s pretended self, therefore it is an immortal book. The main interests of life lie in the commonplace; the great thoughts of a genius are too much for most of us; we like the easy wanderings of a mind of our own level; we follow the speculations of one who is not far removed from ourselves with pleasure, if not with profit. Like him, we doubt; like him, we know nothing; like him, we have no disposition to be martyrs; like him, we long after something that we have not got, something that we cannot understand; like him, we feel that it is an extremely disagreeable necessity, this of death.

  Like ourselves, but yet superior. His mind differing in degree from ours, not in kind; larger, broader, keener. It is impossible that truth should be better studied in a successive series of observations, although he is never able to show the relations of one to another. They have, indeed, no natural relations to him. He feels himself in a labyrinth full of uncertainty, doubt, and perplexity, wanders aimlessly along, turning from path to path, plucking flowers as he goes, and careless about finding any clew. His mottoes, cut upon the rafters of his library, show his mind, in which uncertainty is the leading characteristic. An uncertainty which chimed in with the miserable condition of affairs in the world; when burnings, tortures, civil wars, horrid plagues, were the commonest accidents of life, and man’s intellect, man’s reason, man’s kindly nature, seemed powerless to arrest the dreadful miseries wrought by king and priest. Religion? It is a need. Truth? Who knows what it is? Government? It means protection. Life? It means disappointment, disease, fear of death. Science? A bundle of contradictions. Love? It means falsehood and infidelity. And then men quarrel as to whether Montaigne was a Christian. It is exasperating to find the question so much as raised. What were these two banners under which men were ranged, of Huguenot and Catholic? Some poor artisans, like Bishop Briconnet’s weavers of Meaux, might greatly dare for liberty’s sake; to the men of culture the rival parties were but two political sides. Montaigne belonged to that side which represented, in his eyes, order and law; he was, therefore, a Catholic. Like all the men of his own time, he had a creed, a kind of pill, to be taken when it might be wanted. The time had gone by when such men as Rabelais and Dolet hoped to bring the world to Deism; the scholars had accepted the inevitable position of orthodoxy, and, while giving all their activity and interest to heathenism, were zealous supporters of the lifeless creed. Montaigne a Christian? Compare his morality with that of the Gospels; read how the dread of death is breathed in every page of his book; remember how he says that to pretend to know, to understand aught beyond the phenomenal, is to make the handful greater than the hand can hold; the armful larger than the arms can embrace; the stride wider than the legs can stretch—“a man can but see with his eyes and hold with his grasp.” Try then to remember that we are not in the nineteenth century, but in the sixteenth; that Montaigne died in the act of adoration, and cease to ask whether the man was a Christian. Christian? There was no better Christian than Montaigne in all his century.