If all the good people were clever,
And all clever people were good,
The world would be wiser than ever
We thought that it possibly could,
But somehow 'tis seldom or never
The two hit it off as they should;
The good are so harsh to the clever,
The clever so rude to the good! (Wordsworth)It is common to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it. Profound ideas cannot, after all, be explained in the language of children. Yet the association between difficulty and profundity might less generously be described as a manifestation in the literary sphere of a perversity familiar from emotional life, where people who are mysterious and elusive can inspire a respect in modest minds that reliable and clear ones do not.
Montaigne had no qualms bluntly admitting his problem with mysterious books. "If I cannot have lengthy commerce with them", he wrote, "I only like pleasurable, easy ones which tickle my interest. I am not prepared to bash my brains for anything, not even forlearning's sake, however precious it may be. From books all I seek is to give myself pleasure by an honourable pastime ... If I come across difficult passages in my reading I never bite my nails over them: after making a charge or two I let them be ... If one book wearies me I take up another.
Which was nonsense, or rather playful posturing on the part of a man with a thousand volumes on his shelf and an encyclopedic knowledge of Greek and Latin philosophy. If Montaigne enjoyed presenting himself as a dim gentleman prone to somnolence (sleepy, dreary) during philosophical expositions, it was disingenuousness with a purpose. The repeated declarations of laziness and slowness were tactical ways to undermine a corrupt understanding of intelligence and good writing.
There are, so Montaigne implied, no legitimate reasons why books in the humanities should be difficult or boring; wisdom does not require a specialized vocabulary or syntax, nor does an audience benefit from being wearied. Carefully used, boredom can be a valuable indicator of the merit of books. Though it can never be a sufficient judge (and in its more degenerate forms, slips into wilful indifference and impatience), taking our levels of boredom into account can temper an otherwise excessive tolerance for balderdash. Those who do not listen to their boredom when reading, like those who pay no attention to pain, may be increasing their suffering unnecessarily. Whatever the dangers of being wrongly bored, there are as many pitfalls in never allowing ourselves to lose patience with our reading matter.
Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is going on. Montaigne encouraged us to blame the author. An incomprehensible prose-style is likely to have resulted more from laziness than cleverness; what reads easily is rarely so written. Or else such prose masks an absence of content; being incomprehensible offers unparalleled protection against having nothing to say:
Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal ihe vanity of their studies and which human stupidity is keen to accept in payment.
There is no reason for philosophers to use words that would sound out of place in a street or market:
Just as in dress it is the sign of a petty mind to seek to draw attention by some personal or unusual fashion, so too in speech; the search for new expressions and little-known words derives from an adolescent schoolmasterish ambition. If only I could limit myself to words used in Les Halls (traditional market) in Paris.
But writing with simplicity requires courage, for there is a danger that one will be overlooked, dismissed as simpleminded by those with a tenacious belief that impassable prose is a hallmark of intelligence. So strong is this bias, Montaigne wondered whether the majority of university scholars would have appreciated Socrates, a man they professed to revere above all others, if he had approached them in their own towns, devoid of the prestige of Plato's dialogues, in his dirty cloak, speaking in plain language:
"The portrait of the conversations of Socrates which his friends have bequeathed to us receives our approbation only because we are overawed by the general approval of them. It is not from our own knowledge; since they do not follow our practices: if something like them were to be produced nowadays there are few who would rate them highly. We can appreciate no graces which are not pointed, inflated and magnified by artifice. Such graces as flow on under the name ofnaivety and simplicity readily go unseen by so coarse an insight as ours . . . For us, is not naivety close kin to simplemindedness and a quality worthy of reproach? Socrates makes his soul move with the natural motion of the common people: thus speaks a peasant; thus speaks a woman . . . His inductions and comparisons are drawn from the most ordinary and best-known of men's activities; anyone can understand him. Under so common a form we today would never have discerned the nobility and splendour of his astonishing concepts; We who judge any which are not swollen up by erudition to be base and common-place and who are never aware of riches except when pompously paraded.
It is a plea to take books seriously, even when their language is unintimidating and their ideas clear - and, by extension, to refrain from considering ourselves as fools if, because of a hole in our budget or our education, our cloaks are simple and our vocabulary no larger than that of a stallholder in Les Halles."
What clever people should know
"They should know the facts, and if they do not and if they have in addition been so foolish as to get these wrong in a book, they should expect no mercy from scholars, who will be justified in slap- ping them down, and pointing out, with supercilious civility, that a date is wrong or a word misquoted, a passage is out of context or an important source forgotten."
Yet in Montaigne's schema of intelligence, what matters in a book is usefulness and appropriareness to life; it is less valuable to convey with precision what Plato wrote or Epicurus meant than to judge whether what they have said is interesting and could in the early hours help us over anxiety or loneliness. The responsibility of authors in the humanities is not to quasi-scientific accuracy, but to happiness and health, Montaigne vented his irritation with those who refused the point:
"The scholars whose concern it is to pass judgement on books recognize no worth but that of learning and allow no intellectual activity other than that of scholarship and erudition. Mistake one Scipio for the other, and you have nothing left worth saying, have you? According to them, fail to know your Aristotle and you fail to know yourself".
The Essays were themselves marked by frequent misquotations, misattributions, illogical swerves of argument and a failure to define terms. The author wasn't bothered:
"I do my writing at Home, deep in the country, where nobody can help or correct me and where I normally never frequent nobody knows even the Latin of the Lord's prayer let alone proper French."
Naturally, there were errors in the book, "I am full of them", he boasted, but they weren't enough to doom the Essays, just as accuracy could not ensure their worth. It was a greater sin to write something which did not attempt to be wise than to confuse Scipio Aemilianus (c. 185-129 BC) with Scipio Africanus (236-183 BC).
Where clever people should get their ideas from
"From people even cleverer than they are. They should spend their time quoting and producing commentaries about great authorities who occupy the upper rungs of the tree of knowledge. They should write treatises on the moral thought of Plato or the ethics of Cicero."
Montaigne owed much to the idea. There were frequent passages of commentary in the Essays, and hundreds of quotations from authors who Montaigne felt had captured points more elegantly and more acutely than he was able to. He quoted Plato 128 times, Lucretius 149 and Seneca 130.
"It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them, our pencil lines and annotations in the margins of their books and our borrowings from them indicating where we find a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of which our own minds are made - a congruence all the more striking if the work was written in an age of togas and animal sacrifices. We make these words into our books as a homage for reminding us of who we are.
"But rather than illuminating our experiences and goading us on to our own discoveries, great books may come to cast a problematic shadow. They may lead us to dismiss aspects of our lives of which there is no printed testimony. Far from expanding our horizons, they may unjustly come to mark their limits." Montaigne knew one man who seemed to have bought his bibliophilia too dearly:
"Whenever I ask this aquaintance of mine to tell me what he knows about something, he wants to show me a book: he would not venture to tell me that he has scabs on his ass without studying his lexicon to find out the meanings of scab and ass".
Such reluctance to trust our own, extra-literary, experiences might not be grievous if books could be relied upon to express all our potentialities, if they knew all our scabs. But as Montaigne recognized, the great books are silent on too many themes, so that if we allow them to define the boundaries of our curiosity, they will hold back the development of our minds. A meeting in Italy crystallized the issue:
"In Pisa I met a decent man who is such an Aristotelian that the most basic of his doctrines is that the touchstone and the measuring-scale of all sound ideas and of each and every truth must lie in conformity with the teachings of Aristotle, outside of which all is inane and chimerical: Aristotle has seen everything, done everything".
He had, of course, done and seen a lot. Of all the thinkers of antiquity, Aristotle was perhaps the most comprehensive, his works ranging over the landscape of knowledge. On Generation and Corruption, On the Heavens, Meteorology, On the Soul, Parts of Animals, Movements of Animals, Sophistical Refutations, Nicomachean Ethics, Physics, politics...
"But the very scale of Aristotle's achievement bequeathed a problematic legacy. There are authors too clever for their own good. Having said so much, they appear to have had the last word. Their genius inhibits the sense of irreverence vital to creative work in their successors. Aristotle may, paradoxically, prevent those who most respect him from behaving like him. He rose to greatness only by doubting much of the knowledge that had been built up before him, not by refusing to read Plato or Heraclitus, but by mounting a salient critique of some of their weaknesses based on an appreciation of their strength".
To act in a truly Aristotelian spirit, as Montaigne realized and the man from Pisa did not, may mean allowing for some intelligent departures from even the most accomplished authorities.
"Yet it is understandable to prefer to quote and write commentaries rather than speak and think for ourselves. A commentary on a book written by someone else, though technically laborious to produce, requiring hours of research and exegesis, is immune from the most cruel attacks that can befall original works."
Commentators may be criticized for failing to do justice to the ideas of great thinkers; they cannot be held responsible for the ideas themselves - which was a reason why Montaigne included so many quotations and passages of commentary in the Essays.
"I sometimes get others to say what I cannot put so well myself because of the weakness of my language, and sometimes because of the weakness of my intellect ... and sometimes ... to rein in the temerity of those hasty criticisms which leap to attack writings of every kind, especially recent writings by men still alive. I have to hide my weaknesses beneath those great reputations.
It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries. Statements which might be acceptable when they issue from the quills of ancient authors are likely to attract ridicule when expressed by contemporaries. Critics are not inclined to bow before the grander pronouncements of those with whom they attended university. It is not these individuals who will be allowed to speak as though they were ancient philosophers. 'No man has escaped paying the penalty for being born' wrote Seneca, 'but a man struck by a similar sentiment in later ages would not be advised to speak like this untill he manifested a particular appetite for humiliation'." Montaigne, who did not, took shelter, and at the end of the Essays, made a con- fession, touching for its vulnerability:
"If I had had confidence to do what I really wanted, I would have spoken utterly alone, come what may."
If he lacked confidence, it was because the closer one came to him in time and place, the less his thoughts were likely to be treated as though they might be as valid as those of Seneca and Plato;
"In my own climate of Gascony, they find it funny to see me in print. I am valued the more the farther from Home knowledge of me has spread".
In the behaviour of his family and staff, those who heard him snoring or changed the bedlinen, there was none of the reverence of his Parisian reception, let alone his posthumous one:
"A man may appear to the world as a marvel: yet his wife and his manservant see nothing remarkable about him. Few men have been wonders to their families".
We may take this in two ways: that no one is genuinely marvellous, but that only families and staff are close enough to discern the disappointing truth. Or that many people are interesting, but that if they are too close to us in age and place, we are likely not to take them too seriously, on account of a curious bias against what is at hand.
Montaigne was not pitying himself; rather, he was using the criticism of more ambitious contemporary works as a symptom of a deleterious impulse to think that the truth always has to lie far from us, in another climate, in an ancient library, in the books of people who lived long ago. It is a question of whether access to genuinely valuable things is limited to a handful of geniuses born between the construction of the Parthenon and the sack of Rome, or whether, as Montaigne daringly proposed, they may be open to you and me as well.
A highly peculiar source of wisdom was being pointed out, more peculiar still than Pyrrho's seafaring pig, a Tupi Indian or a Gascon ploughman: the reader. If we attend properly to our experiences and learn to consider ourselves plausible candidates for an intellectual life, it is, implied Montaigne, open to all of us to arrive at insights no less profound than those in the great ancient books.
The thought is not easy. We are educated to associate virtue with submission to textual authorities, rather than with an exploration of the volumes daily transcribed within ourselves by our perceptual mechanisms. Montaigne tried to return us to ourselves:
"We know how to say, 'This is what Cicero said; This is morality for Plato; These are the Ipsissima verba (Latin for "very words") of Aristotle. But what have we got to say? What judgements do we make? What are we doing? A parrot could talk as well as we do'".
Parroting wouldn't be the scholars way of describing what it takes to write a commentary. A range of arguments could show the value outproducing an exegesis on the moral thought of Plato or the ethics of Cicero. Montaigne emphasized the cowardice and tedium in the activity instead. There is little skill in secondary works. Invention takes incomparably higher precedence over quotation.
The difficulty is technical. A matter of patience and a quiet library. Furthermore, many of the books which academic tradition encourages us to parrot are not fascinating in themselves. They are accorded a central place in the syllabus because they are the work of prestigious authors, while many equally or far more valid themes languish because no grand intellectual authority ever elucidated them.
The relation of art to reality has long been considered a serious philosophical topic, in part because Plato first raised it; the relation of shyness to personal appearance has not, in part because it did not attract the attention of any ancient philosopher.
In light of this unnatural respect for tradition, Montaigne thought it worth while to admit to his readers that, in truth, he thought Plato could be limited and dull:
"Will the licence of our age excuse my audacious sacrilege in thinking that his Dialogues drag slowly along stifling the matter. And in lamenting the time spent on those long useless preparatory discussions by a man who had so many better things to say?"
A relief to come upon this thought in Montaigne, one prestigious writer lending credence to timid, silent suspicions of another. As for Cicero, there was no need even to apologize before attacking:
"His introductory passages, his definitions, his sub-divisions and his etymologies eat up most of his work. If I spend an hour reading him, which is a lot for me, and then recall what pith and substance I have got out of him, most of the time I find nothing but wind".
If scholars paid such attention to the classics, it was, suggested Montaigne, from a vainglorious wish to be thought intelligent through association with prestigious names. The result for the reading public was a mountain of very learned, very unwise books:
"There are more books on books than on any other subject: all we do is gloss each other. All is aswarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth".
But interesting ideas are, Montaigne insisted, to be found in every life. However modest our stories, we can derive greater insights from ourselves than from all the books of old;
"Were I a good scholar, I would find enough in my own experience to make me wise. Whoever recalls to mind his last bout of anger, sees the ugliness of this passion better than in Aristotle. Anyone who recalls the ills he has undergone, those which have threatened him and the trivial incidents which have moved him from one condition to another, makes himself thereby ready for future mutations and the exploring of his condition. Even the life of Caesar is less exemplary for us than our own; a life whether imperial or plebeian is always a life affected by everything that can happen to a man".
Only an intimidating scholarly culture makes us think otherwise:
"We are richer than we think, each one of us. We may all arrive at wise ideas if we cease to think of ourselves as so unsuited to the task because we aren't 2,000 years old, aren't interested in Plato's dialogues and live quietly in the country. You can attach the whole of moral philosophy to a commonplace private life just as well as to one of richer stuff".
It was perhaps to bring the point home that Montaigne offered so much information on exactly how commonplace and private his own life had been. Why he wanted to tell us that he didn't like apples: "I am not overfond of any fruit except melons".
That he had a complex relationship with radishes: "I first of all found that radishes agreed with me, then they did not, now they do again".
That he practised the most advanced dental hygiene: "My teeth have always been exceedingly good. Since boyhood I learned to rub them on my napkin, both on waking up and before and after meals".
That he ate too fast: "In my haste I often bite my tongue and occasionally my fingers".
And liked wiping his mouth: "I could dine easily enough without a tablecloth, but I feel very uncomfortable dining without a clean napkin. I regret that we have not continued along the lines of the fashion started by our kings, changing napkins likes plates with each course".
Trivia, perhaps, but symbolic reminders that there was a thinking "I" behind his book, that a moral philosophy had issued, and so could issue again, from an ordinary, fruit-resistant soul: "There is no need to be discouraged if, from the outside, we look nothing like those who have ruminated in the past".
In Montaigne's redrawn portrait of the adequate, semi-rational human being, it is possible to speak no Greek, fart, change one's mind after a meal, get bored with books, know none of the ancient philosophers and mistake Scipios. A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.
Of the six men pictured above, three think like Montaigne and the rest think like these butchers.
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