The Art of Honest Self-Knowledge — The Essays of Montaigne

Others form man; Montaigne only reports him, an ill-fashioned particular he would make otherwise if he could, and cannot. He does not paint being; he paints passage from minute to minute, and may contradict himself, but, as Demades said, never the truth. Could his soul once take footing, he would not essay but resolve. He proposes an ordinary life: every man carries the entire form of human condition, and he speaks as Michel de Montaigne, not as grammarian, poet, or lawyer. His book and he go hand in hand. He very rarely repents; his conscience is that of a man, not an angel or a horse. He does not teach; he only relates. Friends who scold him often use false measure. Private lives must settle a pattern within; others see art, not nature.

One may disown a vice that surprises; a vice rooted in a strong will is not subject to contradiction. Every one may play the honest man on stage; within the bosom, to be regular, there's the point. Bias wanted the master the same within as without. Julius Drusus would pay six thousand to make every room visible. Agesilaus lodged in temples so gods and people might pry. Gascony treats Montaigne in print as a drollery; the further off he is read, the better he is esteemed. The functionary puts off the pageant with his robe and falls. Socrates in obscure employment outranks Alexander on the great theatre; Montaigne can conceive Socrates as Alexander, not Alexander as Socrates. The soul's virtue is walking orderly, not flying high. Latin, unused forty years, still bursts from him when his father falls in a swoon: original qualities are covered, not rooted out. Reformers of his time correct seeming vices and leave the essential ones, expiating cheaply.

He is always near at home. Common repentance is as sick as the sin. At Armagnac a peasant nicknamed the thief stole to escape poverty, now rich, will have his heirs repay; he hates theft less than poverty, and repents only as far as he has recompensed. That is not the habit that incorporates us into vice. Montaigne moves in one step with all his faculties; his judgment has been one from infancy. Repeated, deliberated sins mean conscience is constant to have them. Devotion is easy to counterfeit. Wishing to be an angel or Cato is not repentance. His actions are regular to what he is, an universal tincture, not a patch; repentance must sting all over. Missed opportunities he blames on fortune, not work. Phocion, whose advice the Athenians did not follow, was content the affair succeeded, and did not repent the counsel.

He seldom solicits advice; other men's reasons fortify but rarely dissuade, and he is pleased to be so little believed. He has little regret for the past: things fall in the chain of stoical causes. He abominates the incidental repentance old age brings. Impotency is not virtue; a drowsy rheumatic virtue is not conscience. His reason is the same as in his licentious age, only weaker; he will not owe health to disease. Felicity is happy living, not happy dying; he would live the same life over. He has seen grass, blossom, fruit, and now the withering, happily, because naturally. The stone and catarrhs are not chastity. Age imprints more wrinkles in the mind than on the face, and we change vices for worse ones. Socrates at seventy may have colluded in his condemnation rather than let a cramped mind obscure his lustre. Age gets foot by foot upon him. He resists, and does not know to what it will reduce him. Fall out what will, he is content the world may know, when he is fallen, from what he fell.