Those who make it their business to oversee human actions find nothing so perplexing as reconciling them, for they commonly contradict one another so strangely that it seems impossible they should proceed from one and the same person. The younger Marius is one while a son of Mars and another a son of Venus. Pope Boniface VIII entered his Papacy like a fox, behaved himself in it like a lion, and died like a dog. Who could believe it the same Nero, the perfect image of all cruelty, who, having a condemned man's sentence brought to him to sign, cried out that he had never been taught to write, so much it went to his heart to condemn a man to death. Irresolution appears to Montaigne the most common and manifest vice of our nature. The player Publius said it is evil counsel that will admit no change. Authors still try to make of us any constant and solid contexture. They choose a general air of a man and impute whatever will not bend to dissimulation. Augustus has escaped them: his variety was so continual that he slipped away undecided from the most daring critics. Montaigne can more hardly believe a man's constancy than any other virtue. From all antiquity it is hard to pick out a dozen men who have formed their lives to one certain course. We never meditate what we would have till the instant we have a mind to have it. We change like that little creature which receives its colour from what it is laid upon. We do not go, we are driven. Empedocles observed the Agrigentines giving themselves up to delights as if every day were their last, and building as if they were to live for ever. In the younger Cato the judgment would not be hard: one step leads to all the rest. With us every particular action requires a particular judgment.
During the civil disorders of the kingdom, Montaigne was told of a maid, hard by where he then was, who threw herself from a window to avoid being forced by a common soldier quartered in the house. She was not killed, tried to cut her own throat, wounded herself, and, embrued in her own blood, appeared another Lucretia. He has since been very well assured that both before and after she was not so difficult a piece. Antigonus took a soldier into favour for his valour, had him cured of a long inward disease, then found him much more coldly at work. Yourself, sir, the man said, by having eased me of the pains that made me weary of my life. Lucullus's soldier, having been rifled by the enemy, performed a brave exploit in revenge, then flatly refused the next dangerous enterprise: employ some miserable plundered soldier. Chasan, rated by Mahomet for behaving ill against the Hungarians, rushed alone with a scimitar into the first body of the enemy and was cut to pieces. Montaigne will not call that established valour so much as a sudden despite. The man you saw yesterday so adventurous and brave may be as great a poltroon the next: anger, necessity, company, wine, or the sound of the trumpet had roused his spirits. Some have believed man has two souls. For his own part, the puff of every accident carries Montaigne along. He gives his soul sometimes one face and sometimes another: bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; lying, true. Distinguo is the most universal member of his logic. He has nothing to say of himself entirely, simply, and solidly, without mixture and confusion.
One gallant action, therefore, ought not to conclude a man valiant. If it were a habit of valour and not a sally, he would be equally resolute alone as in company, in a sickness in his bed as in a wound in the field. We should not then see the same man charge into a breach with brave assurance and afterwards torment himself like a woman for the loss of a trial at law or the death of a child. The action is commendable, not the man. No valour is more extreme in its kind than Alexander's, yet it is of but one kind: his fear of conspiracy, his superstition, and the excess of his penitence for the murder of Clytus all mark the unevenness. All we perform is a cento of several pieces. Virtue cannot be followed but for herself. To make a right judgment of a man, we are long and very observantly to follow his trace. No one lays down a certain design for his life. We deliberate only by pieces. The archer ought first to know at what he is to aim. No wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port. Montaigne will not acquiesce in the judgment that Sophocles was fit to manage domestic affairs because someone had read one of his tragedies, nor in the Parians who appointed the best farmers as new magistrates of Miletus, concluding that private husbandry proved public care. We are all lumps, and there is as much difference betwixt us and ourselves as betwixt us and others. Since ambition can teach valour, and even Venus can inflate boys and virgins with boldness, the understanding must penetrate the soul and discover by what springs the motion is guided. That being a high and hazardous undertaking, Montaigne could wish that fewer would attempt it.
