As a boy, Montaigne is jealous for the magister, because Italian farces always bring in the pedant as the fool of the play, and the finest gentlemen most despise the title. Du Bellay hates pedantic learning; Plutarch says Greek and Scholar were Roman insults. Age later tells Montaigne they had great reason. He still cannot see why a mind stuffed with other people's discourses should stay gross. A princess tells him a man's own brain must be squeezed to make room, and he tries the image of plants drowned with too much nourishment. Then he reverses it. The soul dilates as it fills, and the old captains were learned withal. Plato's philosophers look ridiculous in a lawsuit, yet Archimedes, disturbed from contemplation, raises engines that save Syracuse, and Thales, mocked for slighting riches, turns his wits to traffic and rakes in a year's fortune. That height is not the pedants' case. They live below ordinary form, and Aristotle's distinction of wise but not prudent will not excuse them. They are neither.
The evil, he decides, is the way they apply themselves to study. Parents spend to furnish heads with knowledge and never a word of judgment or virtue. The street honours the learned man and ignores the good one. We should ask who is better learned, not who is more learned. Pedants stuff the memory and leave conscience void, like birds that forage grain for their young and never taste it, holding knowledge at the tongue's end to spit abroad. Montaigne smiles at his own foppery: his essays cull sentences he cannot retain, and transplant them here, where they are no more his than in their first places. A rich gentleman of Rome spends a fortune on men who prompt Seneca or Homer, and fancies the knowledge his because it lives on his bounty. A man who needs fire sits at a neighbour's blaze and forgets to carry any home. A man can never be wise but by his own wisdom. After fifteen or sixteen years the scholar comes back a greater coxcomb than when he left home. Plato's Sophists make the pupil worse and take pay for the harm. If Protagoras's rule held, and pupils paid only what they swore the teaching was worth, these pedagogues would be sorely gravelled.
His Perigordin patois calls them lettre-ferits, letter-marked as if by a mallet. In Montaigne's house a friend patches a jargon of galimatias and holds a man of the long robe all afternoon, the coxcomb believing he has answered pertinently. Turnebus is the exception. He has made no profession but mere learning, and in that Montaigne thinks him the greatest man these thousand years, yet he has nothing of the pedant but the gown. Set on arguments wide of his art, he shows a judgment fit for arms and affairs of State. It is not enough that schooling does not spoil us; it must alter us for the better. Some Parliaments examine only learning; others add a case in law, and those proceed with the better method, because knowledge never makes shift without judgment. We study not for life but for the school. Learning must dye the soul, not tincture it; if the cloth will not take colour, it were better not to have learned. All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of goodness.
Xenophon's Persians taught children virtue as other nations teach letters, and Lycurgus barely mentions learning, as if generous boys needed tutors in valour, prudence, and justice instead of arts. Cyrus, made judge of a stolen coat, awards it by fit and is whipped for ignoring right. Agesilaus, asked what boys should learn, answers what they ought to do when they come to be men. At Athens they learned to speak well, at Sparta to do well. Socrates rallies Hippias, rich from teaching in Sicily and penniless at Sparta, until Hippias has to grant the excellence of that public life. Sciences, Montaigne says, more often soften courage than fortify it. When the Goths overran Greece, someone saved the libraries by arguing they would fix the enemy to a lazy life. Charles VIII takes Naples almost without a blow, and the nobles about him blame Italian princes who studied to render themselves ingenious and learned rather than vigorous and warlike. The Goths were told to leave the libraries standing, as furniture that would keep an enemy from arms. Italy, this time, has already done the leaving.
