Montaigne will not allow the way people settle how long a life should last. The sages contract that lease far below common opinion. The younger Cato, only eight-and-forty, asked those who would stay his hand from killing himself whether he was of an age to be reproached for leaving the world too soon. He thought forty-eight already mature, because so few ever arrive there. Those who soothe themselves with some course of nature and promise themselves years beyond would have a case only if they could be privileged from the accidents to which everyone is subject. It is an idle conceit, Montaigne says, to expect to die of a decay of strength, the effect of extremest age, and to propose no shorter lease than that. People call that the only natural death, as if breaking a neck in a fall, drowning in a shipwreck, or being snatched by a pleurisy or the plague were contrary to nature. What is general, common, and universal better deserves the name.
To die of old age is rare, extraordinary, and singular, and therefore less natural than the deaths people treat as accidents. It is the last and extremest sort of dying, a privilege nature is rarely seen to give, perhaps to one person in two or three ages, and then only with a pass through every traverse she has strewed in the way. Once a man has reached forty, Montaigne thinks he should count it an age few reach. Having exceeded the ordinary bounds, which is the just measure of life, he ought not to expect to go much further. The extraordinary fortune that has already rescued him from so many precipices is not likely to continue long. The laws keep the same error. They say a man cannot manage his own estate till five-and-twenty, though he will have much ado to manage his life that long. Augustus cut five years from the ancient Roman standard and declared thirty enough for a judge. Servius Tullius took knights above seven-and-forty off the fatigues of war. Augustus dismissed them at forty-five. Montaigne finds it a little unreasonable that men should be sent to the fireside till five-and-fifty or sixty. The fault sits on the other side: they do not employ people early enough. That same emperor was arbiter of the whole world at nineteen, and yet would have a man thirty before he could decide a dispute about a gutter.
Montaigne believes our souls are adult at twenty as much as they will ever be. A soul that has not by then given evident earnest of its force and virtue will never after come to proof. Of all the great human actions he has heard or read, more were performed before thirty than after, and often in the very lives of the same men. Hannibal and his great rival Scipio lived the better half of their lives on the glory they had acquired in youth: great men later beside others, but not beside themselves. As for his own particular, Montaigne believes that since that age both his understanding and his constitution have decayed rather than improved, and retired rather than advanced. Knowledge and experience may increase in those who make the best use of their time, but vivacity, promptitude, and steadiness languish. Sometimes the body first submits to age, sometimes the mind, and he has seen enough people take a weakness in the brain before the legs or the stomach. For this reason he complains of the laws, not that they keep us too long at work, but that they set us to work too late. Life is exposed to so many ordinary rocks that one ought not to give so large a portion of it to childhood, idleness, and apprenticeship. The laws still wait for a later birthday. The lease they are waiting on has not been signed.
Coming Up in Chapter 58
Those who oversee human actions cannot reconcile them into one reputation. The younger Marius is a son of Mars one hour and of Venus the next. Pope Boniface VIII enters like a fox, reigns like a lion, and dies like a dog. Nero weeps that he ever learned to write.
