'He Is Some Twentie Sev’rall Men at Least'

Whitman “contained multitudes,” of course, while George Herbert says of a man: “He is some twentie sev’rall men at least / Each sev’rall houre.” What sounds self-dramatizing in the American simply acknowledges our inconstancy, our fickle nature, in Herbert’s poem “Giddinesse.” In his time, giddiness, the OED tells us, meant “thoughtless folly, flightiness; fickleness, instability.” One of the lessons of aging is coming to accept that our precious “self” is plural. We mutate across a lifetime, of course, but sometimes hourly. By nature we are fluid and often contradictory. Herbert sent me back to Montaigne who in his essay “Of the inconsistency of our action” writes:

“We are all patchwork and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”

 

Sounding very contemporary, Montaigne concludes: “[A] sound intellect will refuse to judge men simply by their outward actions; we must probe the inside and discover what springs set men in motion. But since this is an arduous and hazardous undertaking, I wish fewer people would meddle with it.”

 

Herbert, born sixty years after the French essayist, writes:

 

“Now he will fight it out, and to the warres;

                      Now eat his bread in peace,

And snudge in quiet: now he scorns increase;

                      Now all day spares.”

 

Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary defines snudge as “to lie idle, close, or snug.” Herbert adds: “O what a sight were Man, if his attires / Did alter with his minde . . .”

 

[I have used Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1958).]