Gide - Montaigne PDF
Gide - Montaigne PDF
Gide - Montaigne PDF
Andr Gide published four essays in The Yale Review. Montaigne was the last of them, and appeared in our issue for
March 1939. In the same issue were an essay by Deems Taylor
and a review of the Yale edition of Horace Walpoles letters
by Virginia Woolf. Gide had been a student of Montaigne
for decades. In 1926, Andr Malraux conceived of a Histoire
de la littrature for which various writers among them
Franois Mauriac and Jean Giraudoux would be commissioned to write dialogues with illustrious predecessors. Though
the book never appeared, Gides essay on Montaigne was published separately and remains an extraordinary meeting of
temperaments.
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perfected, and at his death, in 1592, he left yet another copy of his
work loaded with emendations and addenda which were incorporated in later editions. Meanwhile Montaigne travelled through
South Germany and Italy, in 1580 and 1581, and then lled the
important post of Mayor of Bordeaux; he gives his readers the
benet of the observations he gathered in foreign lands and of the
experiences of his public life at a period when the wars of religion
were profoundly troubling his country.
From this time onwards, leaving public aairs in order to occupy himself only with his own thoughts, he shut himself up in his
library and for the rest of his life never left the little chteau in
Prigord where he was born. Here he wrote the additional chapters that constitute the third book of the Essays; he revised the
old ones, corrected, improved, and expanded them. Occasionally,
he encumbered his rst text, too, with a load of quotations gathered in the course of his continual reading, for Montaigne was
persuaded that everything had already been thought and said,
and he was anxious to show that man is always and everywhere
one and the same. The abundance of these quotations, which
turn some of his chapters into a compact pudding of Greek and
Latin authors, might cast a doubt on Montaignes originality. It
must indeed have been exceptionally great to triumph over such a
jumble of antiquities.
This show of erudition was not peculiar to Montaigne, for his
was a time when mens heads had been turned by Greek and Latin
culture. Gibbon has very justly remarked that the study of the
classics, which dates from much further back than the beginning
of the Renaissance, retarded rather than hastened the intellectual
development of the peoples of the West. The reason for this is that
writers were then hunting for models rather than for inspiration
and stimulus. Learning, in the days of Boccaccio and Rabelais,
weighed heavily on mens minds and, far from helping to liberate,
stied them. The authority of the ancients, and of Aristotle in
particular, drove culture into a rut and during the sixteenth century the University of Paris turned out almost nothing but bookworms and pedants.
Montaigne did not go so far as to rebel against this bookish
culture, but he succeeded so well in assimilating and making it his
own that it was never a hindrance to his mind, and in this he
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diers from all other writers of his time. At most, he follows the
fashion by interlarding his works with quotations. But he asks,
What avails it us to have our bellies full of meat, if it be not
digested? If it be not transchanged in us? except it nourish, augment and strengthen us? And again, and more prettily, he compares himself to the bees who here and there suck this and cull
that ower, but afterward they produce the honey which is peculiarly their own; then is it no more thyme or marjoram.
The success of the Essays would be inexplicable but for the
authors extraordinary personality. What did he bring the world,
then, that was so new? Self-knowledge and all other knowledge
seemed to him uncertain; but the human being he discovers and
uncovers is so genuine, so true, that in him every reader of the
Essays recognizes himself.
In every historical period, an attempt is made to cover over
this real self with a conventional gure of humanity. Montaigne
pushes aside this mask in order to get at what is essential; if he
succeeds, it is thanks to assiduous eort and singular perspicacity;
it is by opposing convention, established beliefs, conformism, with
a spirit of criticism that is constantly on the alert, easy and at the
same time tense, playful, amused at everything, smiling, indulgent
yet uncompromising, for its object is to know and not to moralize.
Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers, says
Emerson, who places him in his constellation of six Representative Men with Plato, Swedenborg, Shakespeare, Goethe, and
Napoleon. In his study on Montaigne, or The Sceptic, he tells us
that the Essays is the only book which we certainly know to have
been in the poets library the poet here being Shakespeare.
Leigh Hunt, he adds, relates of Lord Byron, that Montaigne was
the only great writer of past times whom he read with avowed
satisfaction, and further on he says, Gibbon reckons, in these
bigoted times [the sixteenth century] but two men of liberality in
France: Henry IV and Montaigne.
For Montaigne, the body is as important as the mind; he does
not separate the one from the other and is constantly careful never
to give us his thoughts in the abstract. It is particularly incumbent
on us, therefore, to see him before we listen to him. It is he himself
who furnishes us with all the elements of a full-length portrait.
Let us look at it.
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perfect representative of skepticism (that is to say, of antidogmatism, of the spirit of inquiry and investigation), may be compared,
it has been said, to those purgative medicines which the patient
ejects together with the stu of which they rid him. So that some
people have seen in his maxim Que sais-je? (What do I know?)
at once the highest mark of his wisdom and of his teaching. Not
that it satises me. It is not their skepticism that pleases me in the
Essays, nor is that the lesson I draw from them. A heedy reader
will nd in Montaigne more and better things than doubts and
questions.
To Pilates cruel question, which re-echoes down the ages, Montaigne seems to have adopted as his own, though in a quite human
and profane manner, and in a very dierent sense, Christs divine
answer: I am the truth. That is to say, he thinks he can know
nothing truly but himself. This is what makes him talk so much
about himself; for the knowledge of self seems to him indeed as
important as any other. The mask, he says, must as well be
taken from things as from men. He paints himself in order to
unmask himself. And as the mask belongs much more to the
country and the period than to the man himself, it is, above all, by
the mask that people dier, so that in the being that is really
unmasked, it is easy to recognize our own likeness.
He even comes to think that the portrait he paints of himself
may be more generally interesting in proportion as it is more
peculiar to himself; and it is by reason of this profound truth that
we do, in fact, take so great an interest in his portrait; for every
man beareth the whole stamp of human condition. And more
than this: Montaigne is convinced that, as Pindarus said, to be
sincerely true is the beginning of a great virtue. These admirable
words which Montaigne borrowed from Plutarch, who himself
took them from Pindar, I adopt as my own; I should like to inscribe
them in the forefront of the Essays, for there, above all, lies the
important lesson I draw from them.
And yet Montaigne does not seem to have himself at rst
grasped the boldness and reach of this resolve of his to admit only
the truth about himself and to paint himself as Nature made him.
This accounts for a certain early hesitation in his drawing, for his
attempt to nd shelter in the thick undergrowths of history, for
his piling up of quotations and examples authorizations, I was
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never of Christ. Not once does he refer to His words; one might
almost doubt whether he had ever read the Gospels or rather,
one cannot doubt that he never read them seriously. As for the
respect he shows Catholicism, there undoubtedly enters into it a
large amount of prudence. (We must remember that the great
massacre of Protestants throughout France on the eve of St. Bartholomews Day took place in 1572.) The example of Erasmus was
a warning to him, and it is easy to understand that he was far from
anxious to be obliged to write his Retractations. I know that, as a
matter of fact, Erasmus never wrote his, but he had to promise the
church that he would. And even a promise of this kind is a nuisance. Far better to be wily.
In the 1582 and 1595 editions of the Essays, a multitude of
conciliatory additions have been introduced into the chapter entitled Of Prayers and Orisons. During his travels in Italy in 1581,
Montaigne had presented his book to Pope Gregory the Thirteenth, who was the founder of the Gregorian calendar now in use.
The Pope complimented him but made a few reservations of
which Montaigne took account in the passages he afterwards introduced into the Essays. In these and in others as well, Montaigne
insists, to excess and with much repetition, on his perfect orthodoxy and submission to the church. The church, indeed, showed
herself at that time extremely accommodating; she had come to
terms with the cultural development of the Renaissance; Erasmus,
in spite of the accusation of atheism which caused his books to be
condemned in Paris, was put up as a candidate for the cardinalate;
the works of Machiavelli, notwithstanding their profoundly irreligious character, had been printed in Rome by virtue of a brief of
Clement the Seventh. This tolerance and relaxation on the part of
the church incited the great leaders of the Reformation to a corresponding increase of intransigence. Montaigne could come to an
understanding with Catholicism but not with Protestantism. He
accepted religion provided it was satised with a semblance. What
he wrote about princes applied in his mind to ecclesiastical authorities as well: All inclination and submission is due to them,
except the minds. My reason is not framed to bend or stoop; my
knees are.
In order still further to protect his book, he felt impelled to
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