Montaigne fancies virtue to be something more noble than good nature and the mere propension to goodness we are born with. Well-disposed souls may wear the same face as virtue, yet the word imports something more active than being gently drawn to reason by a happy disposition. The man who, by natural sweetness, despises injuries received does a fine thing. The man who is nettled to the quick, then fortifies himself with reason against revenge and, after a great conflict, masters his own passion, does a great deal more. One action might be called goodness, the other virtue: the very name of virtue presupposes difficulty and an opponent. That is why we call God good, mighty, liberal and just, but not virtuous, since all His operations are natural and without endeavour. Metellus, alone of the Roman senators, withstands Saturninus's unjust law, incurs the capital penalty, and tells those who lead him to execution that to do well where there is no danger is a common thing, but to do well where there is danger is the proper office of a man of virtue. Virtue, Montaigne says, refuses facility for a companion.
Then the rule threatens to break. By this test the soul of Socrates would have little recommendation, for Montaigne cannot conceive in that person the least motion of a vicious inclination. If virtue cannot shine without contrary appetites, must she borrow her honour from vice? Cato tearing out his own bowels does not look like a man merely keeping the Stoic rules: there was a pleasure in so noble an action, and perhaps even an obligation to fortune for putting him on so brave a trial. Socrates in prison shows not only firmness but a frolic cheerfulness: when the irons come off he scratches his leg with pleasure. In both men virtue has turned to a complexion. Montaigne then ranks three sorts: to hinder the birth of temptations; to be surprised by passion and still stand firm; and to be simply endowed with a facile nature disaffected to vice. The third renders a man innocent but not virtuous, so near to cowardice that goodness and innocence have in some sort grown into contempt. An Italian lord in his presence ranked nations by how soon they smelled danger: Italians provide for safety before they have discovered the peril; French and Spaniards must see and feel it; Germans and Swiss do not look about them even when blows fall about their ears. When we judge a particular action, we are to consider the circumstances and the whole man.
To instance in himself, friends have called prudence in him what was merely fortune. He has not arrived at the first degree, where virtue is habit, and of the second he has made no great proofs. His virtue is a virtue, or rather an innocence, casual and accidental, owed to fortune, a good father, and an instinct he brought from his nurse. Aristippus, offered three beautiful women by Dionysius, said he would choose them all, then sent them home untouched. Epicurus lived on biscuit and water and asked only a little cheese against a feast. Amongst other vices Montaigne mortally hates cruelty, as the extreme of all vices. He cannot see a chicken's neck pulled off without trouble, nor endure the cry of a hare in his dog's teeth, though the chase is a violent pleasure. Someone praising Julius Caesar's clemency notes that he had pirates strangled before they were crucified, and punished a poisoning secretary with mere death. Even in justice, all that exceeds a simple death appears to Montaigne pure cruelty. A soldier, shut in a tower, sees carpenters raise a scaffold, stabs himself thrice with a rusty cart-nail, then hears he was only condemned to be beheaded, takes the wine he had refused, and thanks his judges for an unhoped-for mildness.
At Rome he happens on the execution of Catena, a notorious robber: the crowd watches the strangling without emotion, then lends every blow of the quartering a doleful cry. He lives in civil wars that furnish souls who, without hatred and without profit, hack limbs only to enjoy the spectacle of a man dying in anguish. He cannot without grief see an innocent beast pursued. The stag that surrenders in tears is an unpleasing sight, and he hardly ever takes a beast alive that he does not turn out again. Those natures sanguinary towards beasts discover a proneness to cruelty; Rome went from the slaughter of animals to the slaughter of men. Nature herself may have imprinted in man an instinct to inhumanity, yet there is a general duty of humanity not only to beasts but even to trees and plants. He cannot refuse to play with his dog when the dog most unseasonably importunes him. Xantippus inters his dog on a sea eminence that still bears the name, and Plutarch had a scruple about selling, for a small profit, an ox long in his service. The easy descending way is still open. What looks like goodness may be only a mild complexion. What looks like hardness may be only habit.
