Essays

Overview

The Essays is not a book with an argument. It is a collection of one hundred and seven pieces, ranging from a page to several hundred, grouped in three books and written over twenty years. Montaigne retired from public life at thirty-eight to a tower on his family estate near Bordeaux, had sentences from his favourite authors painted on the beams, and began writing what he called essais, meaning attempts or trials. The English word essay comes from this book.

The three books differ. Book I is the most conventional, short chapters on topics a well-read gentleman might address, with heavy quotation from Plutarch, Seneca and Cicero. Book II is longer and stranger, and contains the enormous Apology for Raymond Sebond, which starts as a defence of a theologian and becomes an assault on the reliability of human reason and the senses. Book III, written last, is Montaigne at full stretch: thirteen long essays in which the ostensible subject is a pretext and the real subject is how his own mind works.

He never revised by deletion. Later editions grew by insertion, so a sentence written at forty-five sits beside a qualification added at fifty-eight. Screech’s edition marks the layers, and reading them is like watching someone argue with himself across a decade.

The argument

If there is a through-line, it is this: we know much less than we pretend, and the honest response is to observe closely and hold conclusions loosely.

Montaigne gets there by accumulation. He collects customs from travellers’ reports, opinions from philosophers, and anecdotes from ancient history, and sets them against each other until it becomes clear that nearly everything we treat as natural is local. Burial practice, marriage, modesty, diet, courage in battle, all vary so widely that the appeal to nature collapses into an appeal to habit. In the Apology he pushes further: our senses may deceive us, animals may reason better than we allow, our best philosophers contradict each other, and we cannot get outside our own faculties to check them. The upshot is suspension of judgement, on the model of the ancient sceptics.

But he does not stop at doubt, and this is what makes him more than a debunker. Having ruled out certainty, he asks what a life looks like when conducted without it. His answers are practical and consistent. Follow the laws and customs of your own country, not because they are true but because obedience is cheaper than upheaval. Trust moderate, habitual kindness over heroic resolutions. Do not torture people, whatever the cause. Stay close to the body, which knows things the mind forgets. Educate children to judge rather than to recite.

The later essays turn the method on himself. He reports his kidney stones, his memory, his reading habits, his sexual appetite, his fear of doctors, his changes of mind, and he treats these details as evidence rather than as gossip. The claim underneath is that a man who describes one human being accurately has described the human condition, because each of us carries the whole of it.

How to read it

Do not start at page one and march. Programs almost never assign the whole book, and the usual selection is: To the Reader; Of the Education of Children (I.26); Of Friendship (I.28); Of Cannibals (I.31); That to Philosophise Is to Learn to Die (I.20); Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions (II.1); the Apology for Raymond Sebond (II.12), usually in extract; Of Cruelty (II.11); Of Repentance (III.2); On Some Verses of Virgil (III.5); Of Experience (III.13).

Read Of Cannibals and Of Experience even if nothing else. The first shows his method applied outward, the second applied inward.

Expect the digressions. An essay titled Of Coaches will discuss the conquest of the Americas; one titled Of Vanity will not get to vanity for twenty pages. This is not disorganisation, it is the form. Follow the sentence you are in rather than looking for the thesis.

Skip the quotations on a first read if they slow you, then go back. Montaigne quotes constantly, usually in Latin, and in the early essays the quotation sometimes carries the point. Later he uses the ancients as sparring partners and contradicts them freely.

On translation: Screech is accurate, footnotes the sources, and shows the layers of revision, which makes him the best for study. Frame reads more gracefully and is the version most often quoted in English. Cotton’s seventeenth-century text is free and has its own charm, but his Montaigne sounds like a contemporary of Dryden.

Questions it raises

• If custom explains most of what we call natural, on what basis does Montaigne condemn cruelty?
• He advises conformity to local law and religion while doubting that either is true. Is that wisdom or evasion?
• Can a man describe himself accurately, given his own account of how unstable the self is?
• The Apology attacks reason using reason. Does the argument undermine itself?
• Of Friendship claims that his friendship with La Boétie was unrepeatable. Does that make it a model for anything?
• Montaigne wrote in the middle of a religious civil war and rarely mentions it directly. Is the detachment a failure of nerve or the point?