What a difference, Montaigne later reflected, between the outward appearance and the inner experience. How astonishing. One sanguine lesson he drew is that nobody has to bother learning how to die: “If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry; Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do the job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.”19
It’s almost as if Montaigne’s temperament could be reduced to an equation: a low but accurate view of one’s own nature plus a capacity for wonder and astonishment at the bizarreness of creation equals a calming spirit of equipoise. He was, as Bakewell puts it, “liberated to lightheartedness.”20 He seemed to maintain an even keel, neither surrendering to exuberance when things were going well nor falling into despair when they weren’t. He created a prose style that embodied graceful nonchalance and then tried to become as cool as his writing. “I seek only to grow indifferent and relaxed,” he writes at one point, not entirely convincingly. “I avoid subjecting myself to obligation, he observes (or advises). In essay after essay you can practically see him trying to will himself into easy self-acceptance: “I may wish on the whole, to be otherwise; I may condemn my general character, and implore God to reform me throughout, and to excuse my natural weakness. But I should not, I think, give the name of repentance to this, any more than I should to my dissatisfaction at not being an angel or Cato. My actions are controlled and shaped to what I am and to my condition of life. I can do no better.” He gave himself a moderating slogan: “I hold back.”
He’s a slow reader, so he focuses on just a few books. He’s a little lazy, so he learns to relax. (Johnson gave himself fervent self-improvement sermons, but Montaigne would not. Johnson was filled with moral sternness; Montaigne was not.) Montaigne’s mind naturally wanders, so he takes advantage and learns to see things from multiple perspectives. Every flaw comes with its own compensation.
The ardent and the self-demanding have never admired Montaigne. They find his emotional register too narrow, his aspirations too modest, his settledness too bland. They have trouble refuting him (he doesn’t write in traditional logical structures, so it’s hard to find the there there to refute), but they conclude that his pervasive skepticism and self-acceptance just lead to self-satisfaction, even a tinge of nihilism. They dismiss him as the master of emotional distance and conflict avoidance.
There’s some truth to that view, as Montaigne, of course, would have been the first to admit: “A painful notion takes hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than subdue it. I substitute a contrary one for it, or, if I cannot, at all events a different one. Variation always solaces, dissolves and dissipates. If I cannot combat it, I escape it; and in fleeing I dodge. I am tricky.”
Montaigne’s example teaches that if you have realistically low expectations, you’ll end up pleased in most circumstances. But he is not merely a mellow fellow, a sixteenth-century beach bum with an estate. He sometimes pretends to nonchalance, and he often hides his earnest intent, but he does have a higher vision of the good life and the good society. It is not based on ultimate salvation or ultimate justice, as more ambitious souls would prefer, but on friendship.
His essay on friendship is one of the most moving pieces he produced. It was written to celebrate the bond he shared with his dear friend Étienne de la Boetie, who died about five years into their relationship. They were both writers and thinkers. As we would say nowadays, they were genuine soul mates.
Everything in such a friendship is held in common—will, thoughts, opinions, property, families, children, honor, life. “Our souls travelled so unitedly together, they felt so strong an affection for one another and with this same affection saw in the very depths of each other’s hearts, that not only did I know his as well as my own, but I should certainly have trusted myself more freely to him than to myself.” If you were to construct a perfect society, he concludes, this sort of friendship would be at its peak.
Two Styles of Goodness
Both Montaigne and Johnson were brilliant essayists, masters of shifting perspective. Both were humanists in their way, heroically trying to use literature to find the great truths they believed the human mind is capable of comprehending but also doing so with a sense of humility, compassion, and charity. Both tried to pin down the chaos of existence in prose and create a sense of internal order and discipline. But Johnson is all emotional extremes; Montaigne is emotionally moderate. Johnson issues stern self-demands; Montaigne aims at nonchalance and ironic self-acceptance. Johnson is about struggle and suffering, Montaigne is a more genial character, wryly amused by the foibles of the world. Johnson investigated the world to become his desired self; Montaigne investigated himself to see the world. Johnson is a demanding moralist in a sensual, competitive city. He’s trying to fire moral ardor and get ambitious bourgeois people to focus on ultimate truths. Montaigne is a calming presence in a country filled with civil war and religious zealotry. Johnson tried to lift people up to emulate heroes. Montaigne feared that those who try to rise above what is realistically human end up sinking into the subhuman. In search of purity they end up burning people at the stake.
We can each of us decide if we are a little more like Montaigne or a little more like Johnson, or which master we can learn from on which occasion. For my part I’d say that Johnson, through arduous effort, built a superior greatness. He was more a creature of the active world. Montaigne’s equipoise grew in part from the fact that he grew up rich, with a secure title, and could retire from the messiness of history to the comfort of his estate. Most important, Johnson understood that it takes some hard pressure to sculpt a character. The material is resistant. There has to be some pushing, some sharp cutting, and hacking. It has to be done in confrontation with the intense events of the real world, not in retreat from them. Montaigne had such a genial nature, maybe he could be shaped through gentle observation. Most of us will end up mediocre and self-forgiving if we try to do that.
Industry
In 1746, Johnson signed a contract to create an English dictionary. Just as he was slowly bringing order to his own internal life, he would also bring order to his language. The French Academy had embarked on a similar project in the previous century. It had taken forty scholars fifty-five years to complete the task. Johnson and six clerks completed their task in eight. He defined 42,000 words and included roughly 116,000 illustrative quotations to show how the words were used. He culled an additional hundred thousand quotations that he ended up not using.
Johnson would pore over all the English literature he could get his hands on, marking the word usage and the usable quotations. He would have these copied onto slips of paper and then collate them in a vast organizational structure. The work was tedious, but Johnson saw a virtue in the tedium. He thought the dictionary would be good for the country and calming to himself. He entered the work, he wrote, “with the pleasing hope that, if it was low, it likewise would be safe. I was drawn forward with the prospect of employment, which, though not splendid, would be useful, and which, though it could not make my life envied, would keep it innocent; which would awaken no passion, engage me in no contention, nor throw in my way any temptation to disturb the quiet of others by censure, or my own by flattery.”21