How to Read and Learn from Books — The Essays of Montaigne

Montaigne opens that he often speaks of things better handled by masters of the trade. What the reader has here is purely an essay of his natural parts, not those acquired. Whoever catches him tripping in ignorance will not get the better of him, for he will not become responsible to another for writings he is not satisfied with himself. If he is a man of some reading, he is a man of no retention. He weighs borrowings rather than numbering them, and when he transplants reasons into his own soil he conceals the author, so precipitate censors will give Plutarch a fillip on his nose and rail against Seneca when they think they rail at him. He must shelter his own weakness under those great reputations. He could wish a more perfect knowledge of things, but he will not buy it so dear as it costs. In books he seeks only honest diversion, or the science that treats of the knowledge of himself and instructs him how to die and how to live well. After a charge or two he gives a hard page over. If one book does not please him, he takes another.

Among books simply pleasant he still allows Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Johannes Secundus; Amadis never arrested even his childhood, and Ariosto and Ovid no longer tickle this old heavy soul. When he is disgusted with Plato's Axiochus, his judgment would rather err with the tutors of antiquity than oppose them. He sets Virgil's Georgics first among poems. Modern comic writers load three or four plots because they distrust their own strength. The Aeneid flies and keeps its point; Orlando Furioso hops from tale to tale. For profit mixed with pleasure he names Plutarch, now in French, and Seneca: loose pieces he can put down at will. Cicero's moral works smother the marrow in prefaces. After an hour Montaigne tries to recollect juice and finds wind. Wanting to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent, he asks a writer to begin with the main proposition and charge the redoubt. He comes already prepared from his chamber. He needs no Oyez, no sauce; he eats the meat raw.

He will even censure Plato's long interlocutions as dull, too much stifling the matter. He chooses books that use sciences, not such as only lead to them, and reads the Epistles to Atticus for private humours, because public writings show parts, not manners. He would rather know the conference in Brutus's tent the night before a battle than the next day's harangue. Of Cicero, learning excepted, he finds no great natural excellence, and the younger Cicero has Cestius whipped at table for slighting the father's eloquence. Historians are then his right ball. Those who write lives, insisting more upon counsels than events, are the most proper, and Plutarch is the man for him. Caesar deserves study for himself and for his language, except that he palliates a pestilent ambition and speaks too sparingly of his own share. Honest Froissart collects without discrimination, confesses an error where the finger is laid, and leaves the judgment of truth to the reader.

The more excellent historians may regulate belief, but that privilege belongs to very few. The middle sort spoil all: they chew the meat, wrest the narrative to their bias, and hide a private action that would instruct. Latter-age writers are culled for well-speaking and stitch street reports. The only good histories are those written by men who held command. Asinius Pollio found even Caesar misreporting a battle from lieutenants. Montaigne's memory is so extreme that he has taken scribbled books again as new, so he notes at the end of every book he will not reread the time he made an end, and the judgment he had made of it. In Guicciardini he finds a diligent actor who never attributes any motive to virtue, and therefore suspects the historian's own taste was vicious. The Memoirs of Monsieur du Bellay are rather an apology for King Francis against Charles V than history: Montmorency and Biron are omitted, and the very name of Madame d'Estampes is not to be found. Secret actions an historian may conceal, but to pass over in silence what all the world knows is an inexcusable defect. Whoever wants a perfect knowledge of that reign must still seek it elsewhere.