Montaigne will pardon people for taking their own manners as the only rule of perfection. Almost all men, not only the vulgar, walk the beaten road their ancestors trod. He is content if they look on Fabricius or Laelius as barbarous because those Romans are neither clothed nor fashioned according to our mode. What he finds fault with is the next step: they let present usage blind them so far that every month they alter their opinion if custom requires it, and they vary their judgment even in their own particular concern.
When they wore the busk of their doublets up as high as their breasts, they stiffly maintained it was in its proper place. Some years after, it slipped down betwixt their thighs, and they laughed at the former fashion as uneasy and intolerable. The fashion now in use condemns both with so much resolution that a man would think a certain madness had crept in and infatuated their understandings. Change is so prompt that the despised forms must come back into vogue, and the same judgment, in fifteen or twenty years, takes up half a dozen contrary opinions. There is not any of us so discreet who is not gulled by this contradiction and blinded in both external and internal sight.
He musters old customs so the continual variation of human things may settle judgment more firmly. Romans fought with rapier and cloak, as we do, and stopped passengers on the road for an account of who they were. They bathed stark naked in mixed and perfumed water, ate lying upon beds, kissed in salutation as the Venetians do, and kept snow in summer to cool their wine. Cato, after Pharsalia, sat to his meals as a mark of austere grief. Pasicles, greeting a great man, laid his hand on the private parts instead of the knee and asked if that part was not the man's own as well. We match them in will for magnificence and vice, Montaigne says, but we lack their vigour of soul for either great good or great ill. Argian and Roman ladies mourned in white, as ours did formerly, and as they should do still if he governed the point. There are whole books on the subject. The next fashion is already waiting to call this one madness.
Coming Up in Chapter 50
The judgment, Montaigne says, is an utensil proper for all subjects and will have an oar in everything. He sounds a topic at a distance, and if it is too deep for his stature he keeps to the shore. Fortune chooses the argument; he never designs to go through any of them.
