There is, Montaigne says, no more manifest vanity than to write of vanity so vainly. Divinity has already said all is vanity, and he has taken a road he can travel so long as ink and paper last. He cannot give account of his life by actions, because fortune placed them too low; he must do it by his fancies. A gentleman he once saw communicated life only by a row of basins of seven or eight days' standing. Montaigne offers, less nauseous, the excrements of an old mind, sometimes thick, sometimes thin, always indigested. Diomedes wrote six thousand books upon grammar; Coste says it was Didymus, and that the number is probably exaggerated, yet the sting remains: so many words for words only. They accused Galba of living idly; he answered that every one ought to give account of his actions, but not of his home. Montaigne says he was mistaken, for justice also takes cognisance of those who glean after the reaper. There should be a restraint of law against foolish scribblers as well as vagabonds. If there were, he and a hundred others would be banished. He does not speak in jest. Scribbling seems a symptom of a disordered age. When did they write so much as since their troubles? When did the Romans write so much as upon the point of ruin? The weaker sort contribute folly, vanity, and idleness; of these he is one. In a time when doing ill is common, to do but what signifies nothing is a kind of commendation. He came late to the government of a house, having already taken another bent. A stranger does not understand how much it costs to maintain the show of order in a family, or how a shoe that looks well made pinches only the foot that wears it. He is angry he has not finished the beginnings his father left, the more so because he is likely to be the last possessor of his race. Building, hunting, and gardens cannot much amuse him. He hates poverty equally with pain, yet could change this life for one humbler and less chargeable. When absent he would be less concerned for the ruin of a tower than, when present, for the fall of a tile. His mind is composed at distance and suffers like the meanest peasant at home. A bridle wrongly put on, or a strap flapping against his leg, will keep him out of humour a day. At home he is responsible for whatever goes amiss. Few masters of his medium condition can shift the greatest part of the burden. This takes much from his grace with visitors; he has detained some rather by hope of a good dinner than by his own behaviour. He loves order and cleanliness more than abundance.
The other cause that tempts him out is inaptitude for the present manners of the state. In his neighbourhood, by the long licence of civil wars, right and wrong have changed places, and men plough girt with arms. He sees manners in common use so ferocious, especially in inhumanity and treachery, that he has not the heart to think of them without horror. Necessity still knits men together, and that accidental connection afterwards forms itself into laws. Pacuvius shut the Capuan senators in the palace and offered the people their revenge, one by one, provided they named an honest man for each vacancy. They cried out against every old name, then found a hundred imperfections in every new one, and stole away preferring the oldest known evil to one untried. Montaigne will not yet say they are at their last gasp. Conservation of states surpasses understanding; a civil government, Plato says, often continues against unjust laws, tyranny, and the licence of the people. Pibrac and Foix, two Gascons of sincerity and wisdom, have been lost to the crown in times disproportioned to their manners. Nothing presses so hard upon a state as innovation. The same suspicion turns on the book. Of such dealers nothing should be bought till after they are dead. His book is always the same, saving supernumerary emblems added like ill-jointed marqueterie. Stories take place by opportuneness, not always by age. His understanding goes backward as well as forward, and they often correct themselves as foolishly as they correct others. He has grown older since the publications of 1580 and doubts he is an inch the wiser. I now, and I anon, are two several persons; whether better, he cannot determine. Age would be a fine thing if they only travelled toward improvement; it is a drunken, stumbling motion, like reeds the air waves at pleasure. Antiochus wrote for the Academy in youth and against it in age, and would still have been Antiochus. As matters stand, Montaigne lives above one half by the favour of neighbours who let him keep a private chapel when churches round about are interdicted, and his goods and life, as one who protects their wives and cattle. His house has shared the reputation of Lycurgus the Athenian, guardian of fellow-citizens' purses. He wants to live by right and authority, not by recompense or favour. He husbands friendship, hates being obliged, and will do a good turn only if it costs no great care. Hippias of Elis furnished himself with knowledge so that, at need, he might not depend upon another; Montaigne fortifies himself in courage and in fortune for the same reason, because even the self he possesses is in part defective and borrowed. He looks on a Polander as a Frenchman and refuses the Persian kings' Choaspes water, which dried up, so far as they were concerned, every other river. What Socrates did in treating banishment as worse than death, he shall never be so decrepid or so strictly habituated to his own country to share.
That fancy was singular in a man who thought the world his city yet hardly left Attica. Travel, for Montaigne, is a better school: the soul keeps meeting other lives, fancies, and usances. He can keep eight or ten hours on horseback, tormented with the stone, without alighting. Absences, he says, warm conjugal friendship rather than impair it; to part and meet again fills him with fresh affection for the house. The Stoics say he who dines in France nourishes his companion in Egypt. La Boétie lived, enjoyed, and saw for him, and he for La Boétie; they were too much blended when together, and distance made the conjunction of their wills richer. Bion, when Antigonus was about to reproach him with a mean birth, cut him short with a free confession of the slave, the butcher, and the strumpet, and said a generous confession disarms slander. Montaigne does not intend, in dying, to make a show of constancy. For whom should he do it? Reputation will then cease. Let us live merry among friends and go die among strangers, who will, for money, shift a pillow and rub the feet. We may lean, but not lay our whole weight on others so as to prop ourselves by their ruin, like the man who cut children's throats for their blood, or the old man warmed at night by young girls. He would advise Venice as a retreat. Decrepitude is a solitary quality. Sociable even to excess, he would now withdraw his troubles from sight, shrink into his shell like a tortoise, and learn to see men without hanging upon them. The objector says he will fall ill in a wretched place. He carries necessities, will not be beholden to a bolus for what nature cannot do, and, at the beginning of a fever, takes the last Christian offices so that what he will do for death is always done. What he has not settled in health, let no one expect of him when sick. He travels for pleasure: if the way is foul on the right, he turns left; if unfit to ride, he stays. He always finds superfluity superfluous. He seeks Greeks and Persians more than home customs, yet has scarce gone out of the sight of his own vanes. Be content with what you have is easy to say and no more in the power of the wise than of him. Taken by the letter, the pleasure of travelling testifies uneasiness and irresolution, their governing qualities. So great an enemy to consistency is the human condition. The laws which condemn us not to be able also condemn us for not being able.
Those who only speak of things may present actions one way and reasoning another. Those who speak of themselves, as he does, must march the pen as they march the feet. Common life ought to have relation to other lives. Cato's virtue was vigorous beyond the age, and for a public man it might be called, if not unjust, at least vain and out of season. Montaigne's own manners, not an inch from those current around him, still make him a little rough and unsociable. They wish for other magistrates, yet must obey those they have; it may be more laudable to obey the bad than the good. So long as the image of the received laws shines in any corner of the kingdom, there will he be. If two parts of doubtful choice appear, he will withdraw and escape the tempest. Betwixt Caesar and Pompey he would have declared; among the three robbers who came after, a man may hide or go with the current when reason no longer guides. He rambles; style and wit wander at the same rate. He wants the matter to show where it changes without connecting words for weak ears, and he has made the chapters longer because frequent breaks dissolved attention before it was raised. He is angry at this trouble-feast reason and makes it his business to bring vanity itself in repute, and folly too, if it produce him any pleasure. He cannot so often revisit the tomb of Rome that he does not admire it. He knew the Capitol before the Louvre, the Tiber before the Seine, and Lucullus, Metellus, and Scipio before the fortunes of his own country. They are all dead; so is his father, as absolutely dead in eighteen years as they are in sixteen hundred. He pays more service to the dead because they can no longer help themselves. This Rome they now see still deserves to be beloved: the only common city, her ruins grand and glorious. Fortune has offered him no outrage beyond what he could bear, yet a thousand perish in the port. A sterile vocation has its conveniences; he has never thought the want of children a defect that ought to render life less complete. He who left him the house foretold he would ruin it, considering a humour so little inclined to household affairs; the man was mistaken. He is in the same condition as when he entered, or somewhat better, and still without office. Then the god of Delphos commands: Look into yourself; discover yourself; keep close to yourself; call back the mind and will that elsewhere consume themselves. Men spill you and steal you from yourself. It is always vanity, within and without, but it is less vanity when less extended. Excepting thee, O man, said that god, everything studies itself first and keeps bounds according to its need. There is nothing so empty as thou, who embracest the universe: the investigator without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction, and, after all, the fool of the farce.
