Montaigne writes to Diane de Foix, Countess of Gurson, the way a father still owns a son, however decrepit or deformed. He owns these idle reveries the same way. He has only nibbled the outward crust of sciences, kept a snatch of everything and nothing of the whole, and cannot draw the first lineaments or dead colour of any art. A boy of the lowest form may pretend to be wiser. He reads Plutarch and Seneca like the Danaides, eternally filling a vessel that runs out. When he meets the same heads in better writers he pities himself, then lets his own low inventions run on without plastering the defects. Chrysippus stuffed other men's work into his books, even the Medea of Euripides. Epicurus left three hundred volumes without one quotation. Diane is with child. Science, he tells her, is a great ornament in persons of her fortune, more prompt to assist in war, government, and the leagues of princes than in a mean condition. All he understands as to that particular is this: the greatest and most important difficulty of human science is the education of children. Planting is certain. After the plant lives, art and care begin. It is no hard matter to get children. After they are born, the trouble of training them starts. He will not trust light prognostics in tender years, though Plato's Republic gives them too much authority. For a boy meant to come out an accomplished cavalier rather than a mere scholar, friends must find a tutor with a well-made rather than a well-filled head, manners and judgment preferred to mere learning. Pedagogues thunder into the pupil's ears as if pouring into a funnel, and the boy's business is only to repeat. Montaigne would have the tutor correct that error at once: put capacity to the test, let the pupil taste and choose, sometimes open the way and sometimes leave him to open it. The tutor must hear the pupil speak in turn. Socrates and Arcesilaus made their scholars speak first. The authority of those who teach is often an impediment to those who desire to learn. At Pisa, Montaigne was taken to see a very honest Aristotelian whose usual thesis was that the touchstone of all truth was absolute conformity to Aristotle; the position, taken too broadly, kept the man long in danger of the Inquisition at Rome. If the boy embraces Xenophon and Plato by his own reason, the opinions become his own. Who follows another follows nothing, finds nothing, and is inquisitive after nothing. Truth and reason are common: they are no more his who spoke them first than his who speaks them after. Bees cull sweets from many blossoms and then make honey that is their own, no longer thyme and marjoram. To know by rote is no knowledge. It is only to retain what was entrusted to memory. Conversation and travel matter more than measuring Santa Rotonda or Signora Livia's petticoats. A boy should be sent abroad very young, first into neighbouring nations whose language differs most from his own, to report humours, manners, customs, and laws, and to sharpen his wits against other nations. The soul is oppressed if the members do not assist. Montaigne knows to his cost how a tender, indisposed body leans on the mind. Hardness of bone is not magnanimity. Arguing is not a trade where the liberty of recantation is sold for ready money.
The pupil must learn that to acknowledge the error he discovers in his own argument, though only found out by himself, is judgment and sincerity. Obstinacy appears most in mean souls. What profit shall he not reap, as to the business of men, by reading the Lives of Plutarch? The governor must not imprint the date Carthage fell so much as the manners of Hannibal and Scipio, nor where Marcellus died so much as why it was unworthy of his duty that he died there. Teach the boy to judge history, not reciting it. At the Olympic games some come for the prize, some to sell. Some, and those none of the worst, come only to look on, spectators of other men's lives, the better to regulate their own. To those examples belong the profitable discourses of philosophy. It is a thousand pities that philosophy should be looked upon as a vain and fantastic name, a thing of no use. Petty sophistries have prepossessed the avenues to it. People represent it to children with a frowning, grim, and formidable aspect. Who has disguised it with this false, pale, and ghostly countenance? There is nothing more airy, more gay, more frolic. She preaches feasting and jollity. A melancholic look shows that she does not inhabit there. Demetrius the grammarian, finding a knot of philosophers in the temple of Delphos, took their cheer for shallowness. Heracleon the Megarean replied that it is for those puzzled about the future tense, or the derivation of comparatives, to knit their brows. Philosophical discourses cheer those who entertain them. The soul that lodges philosophy ought to look like that. Montaigne would not imprison the pupil or make a pack-horse of him fourteen or fifteen hours a day. Carneades was so besotted with knowledge he would not comb his head or pare his nails. Running, wrestling, music, dancing, hunting, riding, and fencing are a good part of the study. It is not a soul, it is not a body that we are training up, but a man, and we ought not to divide him. Plato would have them draw together like two horses harnessed to a coach.
A boy who at the beat of drum leaves a noble expedition for a morris or the bears, who would rather return from tennis than dusty and victorious from a battle, has no other remedy. Bind him prentice in some good town to learn to make minced pies, though he were the son of a duke, according to Plato's precept that children are to be placed not by the father's wealth or condition, but by the faculties and capacity of their own souls. Since philosophy instructs us to live, and infancy has its lessons there as well as other ages, why is it not communicated to children betimes? We currently teach men to live when they have almost done living. A hundred students have got the pox before they have come to read Aristotle's lecture on temperance. The clay is moist and soft now. The nurse is more capable of those lessons than of learning to read or write. The strict government of most colleges has evermore displeased Montaigne. It is a real house of correction of imprisoned youth. They are made debauched by being punished before they are so. Come in when they are about their lesson and you hear the outcries of boys under execution, and pedagogues drunk with fury: a furious countenance and a rod in hand, a cursed way to tempt tender souls to love their book. All singularity in manners is inconsistent with civil society. Demophoon, steward to Alexander, sweated in the shade and shivered in the sun. The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine. Zeuxidamus, asked why the Lacedaemonians did not write their constitutions of chivalry, said they would inure the young men to action and not amuse them with words. Compare such a one, after fifteen or sixteen years of study, with a college Latinist who has thrown away so much time in nothing but learning to speak. The world is nothing but babble. Half an age is embezzled in words, clauses, and five-part discourses. Going one day to Orleans, Montaigne met two pedants travelling toward Bordeaux. A man may know nothing of ablative or grammar, no more than his lackey or a fishwife of the Petit Pont, and still give you a bellyful of talk, and trip as little as the best masters of art in France. Things themselves force the words to express them. Words should follow things, not replace them.
An easy and natural negligence does well in speech. Greek and Latin are great ornaments, but we buy them too dear. Montaigne's late father, after the most precise inquiry among men of learning, committed him in infancy, before he began to speak, to a German who later died a famous physician in France, totally ignorant of French and very fluent in Latin. The house was surrounded with that language. Some thought it troubles the brains of children to snatch them violently from sleep, so the father caused him to be wakened by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a musician for that purpose. He is not to be blamed if he did not reap fruits answerable to so exquisite a culture. Two things were the cause. First, a sterile and improper soil: though strong and healthful, the boy was so heavy, idle, and indisposed they could not rouse him from sloth, not even to get him out to play. He had a slow wit that would go no faster than it was led, a tardy understanding, a languishing invention, and an incredible defect of memory. Secondly, the good man, timorous of failing in a thing he had so wholly set his heart upon, suffered himself at last to be overruled by the common opinions, which always follow their leader as a flight of cranes, and complied with the method of the time. He sent the boy at six to the College of Guienne, then the best in France. It was a college still. The Latin immediately grew corrupt. At thirteen he had run through the whole course without any advantage he can honestly brag of. The first taste for books came from Ovid's Metamorphoses. An understanding tutor discreetly connived at that truancy, and the boy ran through Virgil, Terence, and Plautus, allured by the sweetness of the subject. Had the man taken him off, Montaigne believes he would have brought away nothing but a hatred of books, as almost all young gentlemen do. The stolen hours whetted the appetite. The fear was not that he should do ill, but that he should do nothing. Nobody prognosticated that he should be wicked, but only useless. They foresaw idleness, but no malice. Before he had well entered his twelfth year he played the chief parts in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, Guerente, and Muret at Guienne, and was looked upon as one of the best actors. Well-governed corporations assemble citizens for sports and spectacles as well as devotion. To return to his subject, there is nothing like alluring the appetite and affections. Otherwise you make nothing but so many asses laden with books. By dint of the lash you give them their pocketful of learning to keep. To do well you should not only lodge it with them, but make them espouse it. The letter is written. Diane's son is not yet born. The father had the method and still reaped a slow, idle soil. Whether that unborn boy will marry what he is given, or only carry it under the lash, is not decided.
