Montaigne will not let the Stoics flatten vice into one size. Vices are alike as vices, he says, yet they are not all equal vices. The man who has gone a hundred paces past the ordinary bound is not in the same case as the man who has gone ten, and sacrilege is not the theft of a cabbage. Confounding the order and measure of sins is dangerous. Murderers, traitors, and tyrants get too much by it when they flatter their consciences because another man is idle or lascivious. Everyone overrates a companion's offence and extenuates his own. Among the rest, drunkenness seems to him a gross and brutish vice, totally corporeal and earthly. Other vices discompose the understanding. This one overthrows it. The worst state of man is that wherein he loses the knowledge and government of himself. Wine past measure vents inward secrets as ferment works the lees to the top of a vessel. Josephus worms an ambassador's secrets with liquor, yet Augustus still trusts Lucius Piso, and Tiberius trusts Cossus, though both have been carried drunk from the Senate. The design of killing Caesar is as safely told to Cimber, who drinks, as to Cassius, who drinks only water. The Germans, drunk as the devil, still know their post and keep their ranks. Attalus, meaning to affront Pausanias, makes him drink till he can be abandoned to the muleteers. Near Bordeaux a widow of chaste repute, finding herself with child, has it proclaimed that whoever did the deed and will confess may marry her. A labourer says he found her asleep by the chimney after too much of the bottle. They still live as man and wife.
Antiquity has not much decried the vice. Some Stoics advise a liberty to drink, even to drunkenness, to refresh the soul. Cato is reproached as a hard drinker. Cyrus claims he can drink more than Artaxerxes. Silvius of Paris would rouse the stomach once a month by this excess, and the Persians consult on important affairs after being warmed with wine. Montaigne's own taste and constitution are greater enemies to the vice than his discourse. He ranks it unmanly and stupid, yet less malicious than vices that jostle public society, and cheaper to the conscience. A great lord of his time drinks nearly five quarts at meals and still appears too wise and discreet. The after-breakfasts and collations of his father's house have grown rarer. It may be, he says, that they are more addicted to Venus than their fathers were. His father swore he was a virgin at his marriage in 1528, in his thirty-third year, on the way home from Italy, and left a journal of those wars in his own hand. Then Montaigne returns to the bottles. He cannot understand how a man extends the pleasure of drinking beyond thirst and forges an appetite against nature. Plato forbids children wine till eighteen and drunkenness till forty, then lets Dionysos restore gaiety and youth, provided a discreet chief keeps order. Stilpo, oppressed with age, hastens his end with pure wine. The same thing, not designed, despatches Arcesilaus.
The old question is whether the soul of a wise man can be overcome by the strength of wine. The most regular and most perfect soul in the world has but too much to do to keep itself upright. Not one of a thousand is right and settled so much as one minute in a whole life. Lucretius keeps a clatter with his philosophy, then goes mad with a love philtre. An apoplexy will stun Socrates as well as a porter. Some men forget their own names by disease. A slight wound turns judgment topsy-turvy. Wisdom does not force natural dispositions. A man must tremble upon the margin of a precipice like a child. It is sufficient to curb and moderate inclinations. Totally to suppress them is not in him to do. Even Plutarch, seeing Brutus and Torquatus kill their children, begins to doubt whether virtue could proceed so far.
The Stoic rhodomontades, Anaxarchus in the mortar telling them they pound only his sheath, the martyr in the flame inviting the tyrant to eat, the child in Josephus defying Antiochus, Epicurus calling for sharper pain: a man must confess some frenzy possesses those souls. Aristotle says no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. Plato says a sober-minded man knocks at the door of poesy in vain, and that we must be out of ourselves to prophesy. Wisdom, on this showing, is a regular government of the soul, carried on with measure, for which she is to herself responsible. Whether wine, or sickness, or a holy fury, can lift that government from its seat is still the open account.
