When Experts Overstep Their Bounds — The Essays of Montaigne

On his travels Montaigne makes it a custom to learn from whoever sits with him, and to put each companion upon the subject they can actually speak of. He quotes the Italian proverb: let the sailor talk of winds, the cowherd of oxen, the soldier of wounds, the shepherd of flocks. Most people do the opposite. They would rather be prating of another man's province than their own, thinking it so much new reputation acquired. Archidamus jeers Pertander for quitting the glory of an excellent physician to gain the repute of a very bad poet. Caesar grows large on bridges and engines of war and stays succinct on his own valour and military conduct. His exploits already prove him a great captain; he still wants to be thought an excellent engineer to boot. The elder Dionysius, another great captain, takes great pains to win a name by poetry and is never cut out for a poet. A lawyer, shown a study furnished with books of his own faculty, ignores them and descants instead on a barricade on the winding stair, a thing soldiers pass every day without notice. By this course, Montaigne says, a man never arrives at perfection in anything.

When he reads histories he first asks what kind of man the author is. From a physician he will take wounds and the temperature of the air; from a soldier, the actions he was personally engaged in; from an ambassador, the manner of a negotiation. That is why he lingers on a passage in Monsieur de Langey. Charles V, speaking in the Consistory at Rome before the Bishop of Macon and Monsieur du Velly, mixes injurious expressions to the dishonour of France. He says that if his own captains were not men of another fidelity, he would go with a rope about his neck and sue the King for mercy. He also challenges the King to fight him in his shirt, with rapier and poignard, in a boat. The ambassadors send a despatch and conceal the greatest part, particularly those last two passages. Montaigne wonders that a servant should have power to hide what his master ought to hear. The liberty of selecting, disposing, judging, and concluding belongs to the man who gives the law, not to the man who only receives it. He would not be so served in his little concerns.

Yet he will not turn every act of judgment into a virtue. People slip the collar of command on any pretence, and no utility from the wit or valour of those they employ should be dearer to a superior than sincere obedience. P. Crassus, consul in Asia, orders a Greek engineer to fetch the greater of two masts at Athens for a battery. The engineer, trusting his own science, brings the lesser mast, which the rules of art say is more proper. Crassus hears the reasons with patience and has him well whipped, valuing discipline more than the work in hand. Ambassadors, though, are never held to so confined a line. They do not simply execute; they form and model their master's pleasure. Montaigne has known men of command checked for obeying the express words of the king's letters rather than the necessity of the affairs in hand. Men of understanding still condemn the Persian custom of giving lieutenants so little rein that every new difficulty must wait on further commands, a delay that has often prejudiced affairs across a vast dominion. And Crassus, writing to a man whose profession it was to know those things, and telling him the use of the mast, did he not seem to invite that better judgment?