Montaigne had an upbringing nothing like Johnson’s. He grew up on an estate near Bordeaux as the treasured member of a wealthy, established family whose money was ample but not ancient. He was raised gently and nurturingly according to a humanist plan devised by the man he thought the best of all fathers, including being awoken sweetly each morning by the sound of a musical instrument. The upbringing was designed to make him educated, well-rounded, and gentle. He went to a prestigious boarding school and then served as a town counselor and member of the local parlement.
Montaigne’s situation was comfortable, but his times were not. He was a public servant at a time of a series of religious civil wars, trying to play a mediating role in some of them. In his thirty-eighth year, he retired from public life. His goal was to return to his estate and lead a life of learned leisure. Johnson wrote in the teeming pub life of Grub Street; Montaigne wrote from the seclusion of his own tower library, in a large room decorated with Greek, Roman, and biblical maxims.
His initial goal was to study the ancients (Plutarch, Ovid, Tacitus) and learn from his church (at least in public, he was a Roman Catholic with orthodox views, although, with an earthy rather than an abstract slant of mind, he seemed to draw less wisdom from theology than from history). He thought he might write learned pieces on war and high policy.
But his mind did not allow that. Like Johnson, Montaigne had a midlife suspicion that he had been living wrongly in some fundamental way. Once he retired to a life of contemplation, he discovered that his own mind would not allow tranquillity. He found his mind was fragmented, liquid, and scattershot. He compared his thoughts to the shimmerings of light dancing on the ceiling when sunlight is reflected off a pool of water. His brain was constantly racing off in all directions. When he started to think about himself, all he found was some momentary perception, which was followed by some unrelated perception, which was then followed by another.
Montaigne fell into a depression, and in his suffering he became his own literary subject. “We are, I know not how, double within ourselves,” he wrote. The imagination runs away. “I cannot fix my subject. He is always restless, and reels with a natural intoxication…. I do not portray being. I portray passing…. I must suit my story to the hour, for soon I may change.”
Montaigne came to realize how hard it was to control one’s own mind, or even one’s body. He despaired over even his own penis, “which intrudes so tiresomely when we do not require it and fails us so annoyingly when we need it most.” But the penis is not alone in its rebellion. “I ask you to consider whether there is a single part of our bodies that does not often refuse to work at our will, and does not often operate in defiance of it.”
Writing, then, was an act of self-integration. Montaigne’s theory was that much of the fanaticism and violence he saw around him was caused by the panic and uncertainty people feel because they can’t grasp the elusiveness within themselves. The push for worldly splendor and eternal glory are futile efforts by people who are seeking external means to achieve internal tranquillity and friendship with themselves. As he put it, “Every man rushes elsewhere into the future, because no man has arrived at himself.” Montaigne would use his essays to arrive at himself. He would, through writing, create a viewpoint and a prose style that would impose order and equanimity on the fragmented self inside.
Both Johnson and Montaigne were seeking deep self-awareness, but they went about it by different methods. Johnson described other people and the outer world, hoping to define himself obliquely. Sometimes he would write a biography of someone else, but so many of his own traits peeped through that his portrait seems like an autobiography in disguise. Montaigne started from the other end. He described himself, and his responses to things, and through self-examination hoped to define the nature that all men and women share, observing, “Each man bears within himself the entire form of man’s estate.”
Johnson’s essays sound authoritative, but Montaigne’s are written in a style that is modest, provisional, and tentative. They were not organized formally. They do not follow a clear logical structure; they accrete. He would make a point, and if some related point came to him months later, he’d scrawl it in the margins for inclusion in the final edition. That haphazard method disguised the seriousness of his enterprise. He made it look easy, but he did not take his mission lightly. He understood how original his project was: completely honest self-revelation, and through that, a vision of the moral life. He understood he was trying to create a new method of character formation and implying a new type of hero, a hero of ruthlessly honest but sympathetic self-understanding. The manner was carefree, but the task was arduous: “We must really strain our soul to be aware of our own fallibility.” The idea was not simply to expand his knowledge of himself, or to play around in his own mind, or to expose himself for the sake of fame or attention or success. His goal was to confront himself in order to lead a coherent and disciplined life: “Greatness of the soul is not so much pressing upward and forward as knowing how to set oneself in order and circumscribe oneself.”
Montaigne sought to address his moral problems through self-knowledge and self-reform. He argued that this sort of self-confrontation imposes even harsher demands than those placed on an Alexander the Great or a Socrates. Those figures operate in public and are rewarded with glory and renown. The solitary seeker after honest self-knowledge works in private. Other people seek the approval of the crowd; Montaigne sought self-respect. “Every one can play his part in the farce, and act an honest role on the stage. But to be disciplined within, in one’s own breast, where all is permissible and all is concealed. That is the point.”
Montaigne cut short a successful career because he felt the struggle for internal depth and self-respect was more important. He did it by bravely facing the truth about himself. Even during the act of self-confrontation he created an attitude of equipoise that has charmed readers throughout the centuries since. He was willing to face unpleasant truths about himself without getting defensive or trying to rationalize them away. Most of the time his own deficiencies just made him smile.
He had, in the first place, a humble but secure view of himself. He admits that he is a small and uncharismatic man. If he rides around with his staff, people can’t tell who is master and who is servant. If he has a poor memory, he will tell you. If he is bad at chess and other games, he will tell you. If he has a small penis, he will tell you. If he is decaying with age, he will tell you.
Like most people, he observes, he’s a bit venaclass="underline" “Let anyone search his heart and we will find that our inward wishes are for the most part born and nourished at the expense of others.” He notes that most of the things we struggle for are ephemeral and fragile. A philosopher can cultivate the greatest mind in history, but one bite from a rabid dog could turn him into a raving idiot. Montaigne is the author of the take-you-down-a-peg saying that “on the loftiest throne in the world we are still only sitting on our own rump.” He argues that “if others examined themselves attentively, as I do, they would find themselves, as I do, full of inanity and nonsense. Get rid of it I cannot without getting rid of myself. We are all steeped in it, one as much as another; but those who are aware of it are a little better off—though I don’t know.” As Sarah Bakewell observes in her superb book on the man, How to Live, that final coda “though I don’t know” is pure Montaigne.
One day, one of his servants, who was riding behind him, took off at full gallop and crashed right into Montaigne and his horse. Montaigne was thrown ten paces behind his horse and lay unconscious, spread on the ground, as if dead. His terrified servants began carrying his lifeless form back to the castle. As they did, he began to come to. His servants later told him how he had behaved—gasping for air, scratching furiously at his chest, ripping at his clothes as if to free himself, apparently in agony. Inside, though, the mental scene was quite different. “I felt infinite sweetness and repose,” he recalled, and took pleasure in “growing languid and letting myself go.” He had the sensation of being gently carried aloft on a magic carpet.