ABUNDANCE OF LATER SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PROSE—A DISTINCTION—SULLY—BODIN—THE GREAT MEMOIR-WRITERS—CARLOIX—LA NOUE—D’AUBIGNÉ—MONLUC—BRANTÔME—THE ‘SATYRE MÉNIPÉE’—ITS ORIGIN—ITS AUTHORS—ITS FORM AND SPIRIT—MONTAIGNE—HIS ‘ESSAYS’—THE SCEPTICISM OF MONTAIGNE—HIS STYLE—CHARRON AND DU VAIR.

No race has ever allowed less of what it has done, suffered, or even only seen, to be lost than the French. It has ever been the ambition of the men of that people to leave some record of themselves. We have to thank what an ill-conditioned critic might call its vanity for a memoir-literature which would be inadequately praised if it were only called the first in the world. The world has not only no equal, but no second, to be used as a comparison. The France of the wars of Religion, agitated as it was, was exceptionally rich in these delightful books. For that we have good reason to be grateful, since this time, full as it was of colour, of ability, of passion, and of the most remote extremes in character, has left us the means of knowing it more fully than we can know our own generation. As it was also an age of great political and religious strife, treatises on politics and religion were naturally written, seeing that amid all the turmoil and fury men continued to write. There is more cause for surprise when we meet also with works of science, or on the arts—though the surprise is not perhaps fully justified, since even in the wildest times the great mass of men live their lives very much as in peace. When commotions have reached the point of causing universal disturbance, they soon end. Mankind would starve if they were not suspended.

Out of all the mass of writing produced in the second half of the sixteenth century in France (or by men who must be assigned to that period but who lived into the seventeenth), which is valuable for one reason or another, all is not literature. Only a part can be read from any other motive than interest in the matter. The historians Palma Cayet, Jean de Serres, and his brother Olivier de Serres, author of the ThÉÂtre d’Agriculture, for instance, will hardly be read for their style, or except by students. "Sully." As much must be said of the memoirs of Sully, which are called for short Les Œconomies Royales.[104] It is not because this book began to be published at the ChÂteau de Sully in 1638 that we must leave it aside, for in matter and spirit it belongs to the previous century. Nor is it because Les Œconomies Royales are wanting in interest. They are of great historical value, and the form is attractive from its mere oddity. Sully employed four secretaries to tell him his own life, so that they are found informing their master, “Monsieur your father had four sons, for whom he had no other ambition than to make them such gallant men that they might raise their house to its ancient splendour, from which the fall of the elder line to the distaff [i.e., to female heirs] three times, and the unthrifty courses of his ancestors, and especially of his father, had much diminished it in goods.” Or a little further on, “This [viz., to be a faithful and obedient servant] you also swore to him in such fair terms, with so much confidence, and in so agreeable a tone of voice, that he at once conceived great hopes of you.” Yet the oddity and the matter are the virtues of the Œconomies Royales. Something equivalent must needs be said of the memoirs of Castelnau, of Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes—written by his son Jean—of CondÉ, of FranÇois de Guise, and many others.[105]

Jean Bodin (1530-1596) is a great name in political science. His RÉpublique, first published in French in 1578 and then enlarged and translated into Latin by the author in 1586, must always remain of value, if for no other reason than because it shows how it was possible for men of the sixteenth century who were not merely servile courtiers, to believe in the “right divine” of kings and the excellence of despotism. Bodin’s influence, even among ourselves, was strong in the seventeenth century. Strafford was almost certainly thinking of him when he told the Council that the king was entitled, as representative of the State, to act legibus solutus; and his doctrine was taught in incomparable English by Hobbes. Yet Bodin will hardly be read for his French, and what we cannot read for the form cannot be called literature.

It shows, as fully as anything well could, the wealth of French prose that we can leave aside so many writers, even in what is not one of the great periods, and yet retain a considerable body of literature in the very fullest sense of the word. Montaigne, who is pre-eminent, stands by himself, alike in form and in matter, and so for other reasons does the Satyre MÉnippÉe. But among the memoir-writers who also were in some cases historians, there are five who would of themselves be enough to make the wealth of any other literature in this kind—Carloix, La Noue, D’AubignÉ, Monluc, and BrantÔme. They came indeed in a happy hour. The generation was full of strong and violent characters, and of sudden picturesque events to supply them with matter. The language had been developed and shaped by Rabelais, Calvin, and the translators with Amyot at their head, while it had not yet been pruned by the pedantry of the seventeenth century. It still kept its colour. In history the classics and the Italians had supplied models of more capability than the chronicles which Comines had followed. For the model of the memoir, a people who could look back to Joinville and Villehardouin had no need of foreign influence.

The five writers just named are not only excellent in themselves, but each of them is either in his own person the representative of a class, or makes us acquainted with one. Vincent Carloix wrote, not his own life, but that of his master, FranÇois de ScÉpeaux, Marshal de Vieilleville (1509-1571).[106] Carloix was the Marshal’s secretary for thirty-five years, and was fully trusted by him. It was by Vieilleville’s direction that the secretary undertook the memoirs, for which he was supplied with ample materials. He gives, as to the matter, the picture of a very important member of the party called “Les Politiques”—that is, those Frenchmen who, with no wish to separate from the Church of Rome, had yet no fanatical enmity to the Huguenots on religious grounds, but who were the enemies of the Dukes of Guise of the house of Lorraine. “Les Politiques” conquered in the end by alliance with Henry IV., and from them, years after the death of Vieilleville, came one of the most remarkable of political satires, the Satyre MÉnippÉe. The style of Carloix is one of singular life and colour, “although,” as the editor of the edition of 1757 says, “it is full of Gaulish, and antiquated, phrases and expressions.” It would now appear more proper to put “because.” Carloix has been said to have taken “Le Loyal Serviteur,” who wrote the life of Bayard, as his model. But if so, he followed him only in his plain narrative. Carloix has a wit and a share of the quality called by the French malice, wanting to Bayard’s simple-hearted squire. Under his air of candour he is a shrewd experienced man of the world.

FranÇois de la Noue, called Iron Arm, was born in Brittany of a well-connected family in 1531, and was killed at the siege of Lamballe in 1591. His character was drawn in the concise words of Henry IV.: “He was a thorough good soldier, and, still more, a thorough good man.” “C’Était un grand homme de guerre, encore plus un grand homme de bien.” What are called his memoirs form the twenty-sixth book of his Discours Politiques et Militaires, a great work of description, criticism, and reflection, rather than history, composed while he was a prisoner in the hands of the Spaniards in the Low Countries.[107] La Noue, who was converted to “the religion” by the chaplain of Coligny, was a type of all that was best among the Huguenots. He did not embrace the fanaticism together with the principles of his party. The memoirs, which are in fact an account of the wars of Religion, from the first “taking up of arms” in 1562 till 1570, are remarkably impartial. La Noue was one of the small body of men who can be perfectly loyal to their own party, and yet never falsify the story in its favour. He is just to the chiefs on the other side. Though a profoundly moral man, he was saved from priggery by a very real sense of humour. He could see the laughable side of things. His style wants the inimitable flash of Monluc, and it has not got the very peculiar flavour of the prose of D’AubignÉ, but it is nervous, clear, exact, and thoroughly excellent in its own way—the way of a wise temperate man, a quiet gentleman, and modest valiant soldier.

The title of memoir-writer must be understood in a very wide sense when it is applied to D’AubignÉ. Strictly speaking, the short Vie À ses Enfants is his memoir.[108] The Histoire Universelle, his main work in prose, is a great general history of contemporary events at home and abroad. But then it is also a history of events in which D’AubignÉ himself played an active part, and which he tells from an intensely personal point of view. It is to be noted that it ends with the wars of Religion, and the peace which was brought about by the abjuration of the king—that is to say, when D’AubignÉ himself ceased to take a prominent share in public affairs. To judge by his other prose work, which is considerable,[109] D’AubignÉ was by nature a vehement—or even virulent—pamphleteer. His Baron de Foeneste and his Confession de Sancy are fiercely satirical. They are also rather obscure, and not easily readable. It was on the suggestion of Henry IV. that he first began to think of writing the history of his time. He was to have worked in co-operation with the President Jeannin, an ex-Leaguer, and another thorough-going partisan. It is difficult to imagine what they could have produced between them. This fantastic scheme was dropped, and the Histoire Universelle was written after the king’s death. The style of D’AubignÉ shows the influence of his learned education, and of his practice in the poetic school of Ronsard. He sometimes uses purely pedantic words, as when he says that his father put him under the charge of a tutor, “Jean Costin, homme astorge et impiteux.” Astorge is a Greek word (?st?????), which would never have been used by Carloix, La Noue, or Monluc. Again, he deliberately followed classic models in the long speeches, frequently delivered by himself, which abound in his History, and are the most carefully written parts. When he tells Henry IV. in one of these addresses that it is useless for him to endeavour to make peace with the Court, because “you are guilty of your birth, and of the wrongs which have been done you,” the echo of Sallust and of Tacitus is distinctly audible; yet he can also be colloquial, and has no scruple in using idiomatic and proverbial phrases which a later generation would have rejected as unworthy of the “dignity of history.” Dignity is not wanting to D’AubignÉ, but it is given by the force of his thoughts and of his character, which is that of a man who might be a tyrannical friend and an exacting servant, but who was brave and high-minded.

For a perfect picture of a partisan on the other side we have only to go to the Commentaries of one whom D’AubignÉ describes as “ce vieux renard de Monluc.” Yet Blaise de Lasseran-Massencome, Seigneur de Monluc, is perhaps hardly to be called a party man. Like the Lord Byron of our own civil war, he “was passionately the king’s.” He was born in or about 1503, near Condom, of an ancient and impoverished family of Gascony. Though the eldest son, he had even less than the traditional cadet’s portion. He could boast that, though a gentleman born, he had fought his way up from the lowest rank. After serving in the wars of Italy, he was named Governor of Guyenne by the king, and there distinguished himself by a ferocity exceptional even in those times. An arquebuse-wound in the face at the siege of Rabastens in 1570 disabled him for active service. His Commentaries were dictated in his last years, and he died in 1577.[110] It is one of the many sayings attributed to Henry IV. that the Commentaries of Monluc are “the Soldier’s Bible.” Whether the king said it or not, no truer description of this delightful book could be given. Monluc was a man of his time and his race. He “had the honour to be a Gascon” in every sense of the word, having all the valour, enterprise, craft, humour, and expansive vanity of the type. But he was also a perfect soldier, and profoundly convinced that his business was the greatest a man could follow. His Commentaries were avowedly written to show the “captains and lieutenants of France” what a soldier ought to be, by the example of Blaise de Monluc. The very thoroughness of his vanity gives the book a sincere tone. We feel that he was far too well pleased with himself to think it necessary to lie. That he saw things through the colouring medium of his self-sufficiency is possible—even certain—but at least he gives them as he saw them. Monluc was also a very able man, who was not wanting in appreciation of the humorous side of his own gasconnades, and therefore his vanity is never silly. The style is that of a book dictated by a man with a boundless faconde—that is to say, command of ready language; but it is too vivid and has too much substance ever to be garrulous. At times he can strike out images of great force.

Different though they were in life and character, there is a certain resemblance between Monluc and BrantÔme. Both have the same air of perfect satisfaction with themselves, and both pour out the fruits of their varied experience with the same appearance of colloquial confidence.[111] Pierre de Bourdeilles, called BrantÔme from the name of an abbey of which he was lay abbot—that is to say, of which he drew the abbot’s portion by favour of the king, without taking the vows—was a younger son of a distinguished family of Perigord. He was born about 1540, and died in 1614. During many years he travelled much, fought more or less, and lived at Court in the intervals of journeys or campaigns. Being disappointed of a place which the king had promised him, he was preparing to revenge himself by treason, when his horse fell with him, and crippled him for life. BrantÔme now betook himself to writing his reminiscences as a consolation. Though he professed a certain contempt for letters, he spent great pains on his work, and its bulk is considerable. In addition to some minor treatises—the so-called Discours des Duels, the Rodomontades Espaignolles, and a few others—he made two great collections, which he named Des Hommes and Des Femmes. These he rewrote and revised not a little. It was his wish that they should be published as he left them, but his heirs neglected his directions. His manuscripts were copied, handed about, and finally straggled into print by fragments, to which the booksellers gave fancy names, such as Les Grandes Dames, Les Dames Galantes, and so forth. The admiration which Monluc felt for his own business of soldiering, BrantÔme extended to every manifestation of energetic character by deed or word, moral or immoral, with a marked, but mainly artistic, preference for good sayings and immorality. He is not to be trusted in details, but he is in himself an invaluable witness to the time which produced him. Nowhere else can we see so fully the combination of the French love of showy action, and indifference to what we call morality, with the cruel wickedness of Italy, which distinguished the Court of the later Valois. He does not seem to have been in himself a bad man, and yet it does not appear that he saw any difference between right and wrong. Murders, and breaches of the seventh commandment, committed by ladies and gentlemen in a spirited way, have his admiration quite as easily as the most honourable actions. He tells all in the same brightly coloured, rapid, gossipping style, and stops to rejoice over every striking story which runs from his pen, whether it be a trait of magnanimity on the part of the Duke of Guise, or the brutal murder of three unarmed traders by one of his own friends, who was angry, and relieved his feelings by a butchery.

The attempt to enumerate all the writers who may be classed with one or another of the five just named could lead to nothing but a catalogue of mere names. Marguerite de Valois (1553-1615), the wife whom Henry IV. married at the “red wedding” of Saint Bartholomew, and afterwards repudiated, wrote memoirs under the direct inspiration of her friend and admirer BrantÔme. Pierre de l’Estoile (1545-1611)[112] wrote MÉmoires-Journaux—i.e., a diary of his time. The Correspondence of Catherine de Medici—recently edited by M. de FerriÈre—of Duplessis-Mornay (1549-1623), and of the Cardinal D’Ossat (1557-1604), which have long been known, the Negotiations of Pierre Jeannin (1546-1632), the great History of De Thou, written in Latin, are all of value, and are all well written. The list could easily be swollen, but it would be to little purpose where space does not allow of more than mention. From the literary point of view they are notable as showing that the autobiographical, anecdotic, historical, and, in short, average practical writing faculty of the French, which has given their literature its unrivalled continuity, was in full vigour during these generations, when, as one is tempted to think, men must have been far too intent on keeping themselves alive in the prevailing anarchy to have leisure for the use of the pen. Spain, in its happier days, produced something approaching the French historical and memoir work of the later sixteenth century. Elizabethan England, rich beyond comparison in poetic genius, has nothing like it to show. It could not be, of course; and yet we could have spared, not Marlowe, but perhaps Greene and Peele, and certainly Nash, Lodge (the lyrics apart), and Breton, to see the Armada, and the voyages to the Isles, through the eyes of an English Monluc, or the pacification of Ireland as told by a La Noue of our own, or such a picture of the Court of Elizabeth as could have been painted by the nearest conceivable English approach to BrantÔme.

There is, however, one piece of French prose of what may be called the practical order—written, that is to say, to secure a definite business end—which is far too good in itself, as well as too important in its consequences, to be passed with a mere mention. This is the famous, and in some ways still unrivalled, Satyre MÉnippÉe.[113] The book is a small collection of pamphlets, burlesques, and satiric verse. When due precaution is taken to avoid exaggeration and misunderstanding, it may be compared to our own Martin Mar-Prelate pamphlets. Both were the work of a body of men not individually of importance, who yet produced a great effect by combined action for a cause. Each is the beginning of journalism in its own country. They were nearly contemporary, but Martin Mar-Prelate came a little earlier. His dates are 1589-1592, and the Satyre MÉnippÉe belongs to 1593 and 1594. The comparison must not be pushed further, since the Satyre MÉnippÉe is markedly superior to Martin in artistic skill, and, it must be allowed, in dignity of purpose also, however kindly we may wish to think of the Puritan writers. Neither is there any reason to suppose that any connection existed between the two. If the writers of the Satyre MÉnippÉe had any inspiration other than their own desire to answer the virulent sermons and speeches of the League, they probably found it in Erasmus, and in the EpistolÆ Obscurorum Virorum of Ulrich von Hutten. The fact that the Satyre and Martin appeared almost side by side, only shows that the causes which were making for the establishment of journalism were working in France as well as in England. Use had already been made of the printing-press, the pulpit, and, in France at least, of the stage, for controversy. But much had been written in Latin, whether of the study or of the kennel. The anti-papal “sotties” of Gringore, played by the encouragement of Louis XII., the anti-Church farces of the Reformers, the sermons and the pamphlets of the League, were individual work, the still uncollected raw material of possible journalism. The next step was to organise collective action. It was done roughly, and unhappily for a party purpose, in England, but in France with skill, with much literary finish, and for a national cause.

In order to appreciate the full merit of the Satyre MÉnippÉe, the reader must call to mind that after the murder of Henry III. his cousin of Navarre became King of France by inheritance. Henry IV. had the support not only of his own subjects and the Huguenots, but of the “Politiques,”—the moderate men, as we might say, among the Roman Catholics. The ardent partisans of the Church turned against him, and banded themselves with the princes of the house of Guise. The Catholic League, which had been first founded by Gaspard de Saulx-Tavannes nearly thirty years before, after the conspiracy of Amboise, was extended, and became a great organisation for the purpose of setting aside the heretic King of Navarre, and putting some assured Romanist on the throne. In reality it was little more than a cloak for the ambition of the Guises, and the partisans who saw a chance of profiting by anarchy. It had the support of the King of Spain. Paris was held, partly by the help of the more fanatical Roman Catholic clergy and the mob, partly by a so-called Spanish garrison—Moors, Neapolitans, and what not—made up out of the sweepings of Philip II.’s army. Even the conversion of Henry did not disarm the League. It called a sham meeting of the Estates of the realm to debate the question of setting him aside. At this moment a body of men in Paris combined to assail these so-called États with ridicule; and when we remember how brutally the “Guisards” had disposed of opponents and critics, it is hard to exaggerate the courage they showed.

The leader of the band was Pierre Leroy, canon of the Sainte Chapelle. It was to him that the idea first suggested itself, and he drew about him his friends Gillot, Passerat, Rapin, Chrestien, Pithou, and Durant. As may well be supposed, the early history of an anonymous work is somewhat obscure. It was at first a small manuscript pamphlet, handed about quietly. Additions were made. The verse seems to have been introduced at the later stages. Whether it was actually printed in 1593 appears very doubtful. The first known example is of 1594, and, as was natural enough, the Satyre was subject to a good deal of modification. The names of men who had been attacked, and who passed over later to Henry IV., were dropped out. Even the title was altered. The first chosen was “AbbrÉgÉ et l’Ame des Estatz convoquez À Paris en l’an 1593 le 10 Febvrier. Jouxte la relation de Mademoiselle de la Lande, Messieurs Domay et Victon Penitens blancqs.” An alternative title was “Le Catholicum de la Ligue, 1593.” The name of Satyre MÉnippÉe (taken from Lucian) seems to have been given by common consent rather than by the authors, and the first undoubted edition is called “La Vertu du Catholicon d’Espagne, avec un AbrÉgÉ de la tenue des Estats de Paris convoquez aux de Febvrier 1593 par les chefs de la Ligue. TirÉ des mÉmoires de Mademoiselle de la Lande, alias la Bayonnoise, et des secrettes confabulations d’elle et du PÈre Commelaid.”

In its final form the Satyre MÉnippÉe has some resemblance in form, and a marked likeness in spirit, to our own Anti-Jacobin as it was in the first and most militant stage. The authors of both were fighting with a combination of ridicule and argument against anarchy, and in the name of common-sense and patriotism. There is the same resistance to the foreigner in both. The Gallican clergy of the stamp of Leroy were no friends to the interference of the Pope in French affairs. That Philip II. was a foreigner could be disputed by nobody; and though the Lorraine princes had played a great part in France, and were connected with the Valois by marriage, they were still considered strangers. The Satyre MÉnippÉe opens by a burlesque speech delivered by a quack in praise of the Catholicon or universal cure of Spain—of the bribes which Philip II. was lavishing in order to promote the misfortunes of his neighbours. Then comes a description of the procession at the opening of the Estates, and of the tapestry on the walls, in which the different chiefs of the League are ridiculed, and the misfortunes they were bringing on the country shown. Then Mayenne makes a speech as Lieutenant-General of the kingdom—the sort of speech he would have made if he had told the truth. Various churchmen then speak—Italian or Italianate priests who were prepared to sacrifice France to the Pope, or mere beaters of the drum ecclesiastic. Then comes what is perhaps the best single thing in the Satyre, the speech of M. des Rieux, who speaks for the noblesse. The choice of this man—an historical character who was finally hanged as a brigand—to speak for the nobles is in itself a most ingenious stroke. He was a thorough military ruffian of the worst stamp, low-born and ignorant, who had obtained command of a castle, and who lived by plundering his neighbours. Des Rieux begins by giving it as his opinion that nothing could prove the excellence of the League more fully than just this, that the like of him could come to speak for the nobles. He goes on in the same tone, which is the swagger of a vulgar adventurer who feels himself safe. No more artful way of showing to what the League was reducing France could have been chosen. The speech of Des Rieux is attributed to Jacques Gillot, clerk to the Parliament of Paris. Then the tone of burlesque is dropped, and a vigorous denunciation of the League is delivered by M. d’Aubray as the spokesman of the Third Estate, the Burgesses. This, the longest of all, is said to be the work of Pierre Pithou. The verse, partly scattered through the book and partly collected at the end, belongs to Jean Passerat, the successor of Ramus at the CollÉge Royal, and to Gilles Durant, a lawyer and country gentleman. Both Passerat and Durant wrote other verse of excellence.

All this memoir, history, and satire is interesting, but no part of it belongs to the literature which every thinking man in every country has read, or knows that it would be good to read. They may be all left aside, not without loss indeed, yet without irreparable loss. But whoever has not read the Essays of Montaigne has missed something necessary for the “criticism of life”—the exposition of a habit of thought, a way of looking at things, of discussing and deciding questions of conduct and principle, which are not only French and peculiar to one time, but human and universal.

Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne, was born at the ChÂteau de Montaigne in Perigord, near Bordeaux, in 1533. A legend, which appears to have no foundation, asserts that the family was of English origin. It had risen by the salt-fish trade, and its nobility was of recent origin, facts which Montaigne did not recognise so calmly as a philosopher should. His father served under Francis I. in the wars of Italy, and increased the considerable fortune he had inherited, by a rich marriage with Antoinette de Louppes, or Lopes, a Spanish Jewess by descent. Michel was educated at the College of Bordeaux by Buchanan, Muretus, and other famous scholars. By a fad of his father’s, he was surrounded from the beginning by people who only spoke Latin, and so learned the language naturally. His schooling came to an end when he was thirteen. Although he inherited a strong frame from his father, and did possibly serve one or two campaigns, he applied himself to the law, and not to arms, as a profession. He held a judicial post, first at PÉrigueux, then at Bordeaux, but resigned it early, and retired to his own house. Montaigne was known at Court, which he visited several times, even before he published the first two books of his Essays in 1580. During one visit to Paris in 1588 to superintend the publication of the third book, he was an eye-witness of the “day of the barricades,” and was imprisoned in the Bastille by Leaguers. He travelled abroad, and returned to hold municipal office at Bordeaux, where he showed more caution than courage during a visitation of the plague. He died at his own house of Montaigne in 1592, just as the long anarchy of the wars of Religion, which he had never allowed to ruffle the calm of his life, was coming to an end.[114]

The fame of Montaigne was great in his own time, and has never suffered eclipse. Nor is it possible that it ever should, since, in addition to personal qualities of an amusing and attractive kind, he was the thorough type of a certain stamp of intellect. He was as complete a Gascon as his countryman Monluc, and may even be said to have carried the peculiar quality of his race to a yet higher pitch. Monluc was resolved that all the world should know him for the astute and intrepid soldier he was. Montaigne did not condescend to justify himself by his deeds. He asked the world to be interested in him, not as a soldier, nor indeed as anything, except just a thinking man. And the world has never denied that the man and his thoughts were worth knowing. "His Essays." The subject of his Essays is always substantially Michel of Montaigne, his health, his reading, his views of men, things, and opinions, his habits of mind and body. In matter, in form, and in intellectual scope he is all the world apart from BrantÔme, and yet he is not wholly unlike the old disappointed courtier of the Valois, discoursing Des Hommes and Des Femmes. Both talk out all that was in them, with a certain affectation of carelessness, but in reality with thought, and no small toil over the manner of saying. During his later years Montaigne employed himself much in covering the margins of a copy of the so-called fifth edition of his Essays with corrections and additions. The book still exists in the library at Bordeaux. After his death his widow intrusted his friend, Pierre de Brach, with the task of editing a revised edition. Brach, who had the help of Montaigne’s adopted daughter, Mdlle. de Gournay, produced what was for long the accepted text in the edition of 1595. But though Pierre de Brach and Mdlle. de Gournay worked with care, they omitted a good deal, and misunderstood something. Successive editors in this century have laboured to correct their errors of omission and commission, but the text of Montaigne has never yet been fixed to the satisfaction of exacting critics.

It is but natural that a writer who deals with permanently interesting questions of principle and conduct, and who has always been read, should have been diversely judged during the very different centuries which have passed since his death. The judgments of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries on the scepticism of Montaigne are in fact examples of a truth which he has himself most excellently stated—namely, that we read much of ourselves into our authors. During the strong Roman Catholic reaction of the seventeenth century his amused interest in both sides of all questions, and his favourite thesis that no doctrine is so sure that we are justified in killing men for it, were found exasperating by those who were terribly in earnest. In the eighteenth century he was praised, and accepted as a forerunner of Voltaire, on these very grounds. What one body of critics called poorness of spirit and coldness of heart, another called wisdom. For that he would himself have been prepared. In the first of his Essays, “By divers meanes men come unto a like end,” he states what was perhaps the firmest of his convictions—to wit, that “surely man is a wonderfull, vaine, divers, and wavering subject; it is very hard to ground any directly-constant and uniforme judgement upon him.” We shall perhaps not go far wrong if we describe the scepticism of Montaigne as a constant recollection that whatever men have said, thought, or done, has been necessarily the work of this “vaine, divers, and wavering subject,” and is not to be taken too seriously. A wise man will accept the social and religious order of his country, even with its vices, since we have so little wisdom that our efforts at amendment will probably produce more mischief than they will correct. In any case, what has existed and stood the test of experience has more claim on our loyalty than the mere guesses of the reformer. Yet, while accepting existing order, he need not believe in it too much, and he certainly need not deny himself the pleasure of noting the innumerable absurdities of even the most respectable parts of man’s handiwork. Science is vain, since it is but speculation on subjects we shall never really understand. Conduct is the important thing. Do not lie, do not be cruel, do not be a pedant (on these points indeed there was no scepticism in Montaigne); do not strive after unattainable ideals of truth (for what is truth except what we think about the causes and nature of things, and what are we but “vaine, diverse, and wavering subjects”?), or of virtue, or of chastity. Let us live our lives, exercising all our faculties of body and mind—in prudent moderation, and with due regard to our time of life. It is not the greatest advice which can be given to man. If the human race had acted up to Montaigne’s standard of wisdom, there would have been no prophets, no saints, no martyrs, hardly any great thinkers, or great explorers. It would be possible to follow Montaigne and be a haberdasher of small-wares. One could not follow him and be a bigot, “une bonne ligne droite de ferocitÉ sotte,” in any cause, or disgrace knowledge by pedantry, or conquest and discovery by cruelty and avarice. But it is an idle question whether he was better or worse than Luther or Saint Francis de Sales. He was different, and he is a perfect example of a stamp of man who will never fail while the human race lasts and thinks—the sagacious man who is naturally kind and honest, but is not virtuous in any lofty sense, or capable of strong conviction. Amid the clash of dogmatists, all fanatically sure they were right, and all cruel, which filled the sixteenth century with tumult, the voice of Montaigne supplied something which was sorely needed.

As a writer the importance of Montaigne can hardly be exaggerated. To him modern literature owes the essay, which of itself would be a claim to immortality. He first set the example of discussing great questions in the tone of the man of the world speaking to men of the world. His style, which can be eloquent to the highest degree, is more commonly easy and “savoury”—full, that is to say, of colour and character. His amplifications, and his constant use of quotations, his lawless wanderings away from his subject, and then through many turnings back to it—when he has a subject at all—his amazing indiscretions concerning his health, his morals, and his family history, his frequent sudden appeals to the reader, as of one speaking in confidence and on the spur of the moment, make up a combination which cannot be defined in its inexhaustible variety. It is not the least charm of the Essays that they invite desultory reading. If advice in this matter were ever of much value, we might recommend the reader who has Montaigne to begin, to start with the “Apologie for Raymond of Sebonde,” which will give him the whole spirit and way of thinking, and then to read as accident dictates. Orderly study is quite unnecessary with an author who starts from no premiss to arrive at no conclusion, whose unity is due not to doctrine but to character, and who “rays out curious observations on life” all illuminated by a vast learning and by humour.

The teaching of Montaigne was expounded by Pierre Charron (1541-1603), a lawyer, who took orders, and had written against the League and the Protestants, before he fell under the influence of the author of the Essays. His most famous—or rather, his one surviving—work, the TraitÉ de la Sagesse (1601),[115] is a restatement in more scholastic form of the ideas of Montaigne. Charron also drew largely, for he was not by any means an original writer, on Guillaume du Vair (1556-1621). Du Vair, who is considered one of the best prose-writers of his time, was the author of many treatises on philosophical subjects;[116] but he is remembered mainly for his famous Suasion, or plea for the Salic Law, delivered before the Estates summoned by the League in 1593. He represented the magistracy, and it is said that his argument persuaded the Estates to reject the candidature of the Infanta of Spain, who had been brought forward by the extreme Catholic party as rival to Henry IV.