'Even Belles Lettres Legitimate As Prayer'

In the “Prologue” to his 1962 prose collection The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden borrows a conceit from Lewis Carroll and divides all writers – “except the supreme masters who transcend all systems of classification” – into Alices and Mabels. In Alice in Wonderland, the title character, pondering her identity, says “. . . I’m sure I can’t be Mabel for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little. Beside she’s she and I’m I.” The categorization recalls Sir Isaiah Berlin’s Foxes and Hedgehogs. Of course, all of humanity can also be divided into those who divide all of humanity into two categories and those who don’t. 

Leading the list of Auden’s Alices is Montaigne, followed by the names of eight other writers, including Andrew Marvell, Jane Austen and Paul Valéry. Like Alice, Montaigne knew “all sorts of things” – he is among the most learned of writers -- even while asking “Que sais-je?”: “What do I know?” Montaigne begins his longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (1576), with these words:

 

“In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. But yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, like Herillus the philosopher, who placed in it the sovereign good, and held that it was in its power to make us wise and content. That I do not believe, nor what others have said, that knowledge is the mother of all virtue, and that all vice is produced by ignorance. If that is true, it is subject to a long interpretation.”

 

Montaigne distills skepticism, which isn’t the same as nihilism or know-it-all-ism. It’s closer to the absence of naiveté, credulity and mental laziness, coupled with an open mind and curiosity. Montaigne was a benign skeptic and a Roman Catholic who lived through the French Wars of Religion. Auden wrote “Montaigne” in 1940, the year France fell to the Germans.

 

“Outside his library window he could see

A gentle landscape terrified of grammar,

Cities where lisping was compulsory,

And provinces where it was death to stammer.

 

“The hefty sprawled, too tired to care: it took

This donnish undersexed conservative

To start a revolution and to give

The Flesh its weapons to defeat the Book.

 

“When devils drive the reasonable wild,

They strip their adult century so bare,

Love must be re-grown from the sensual child,

 

‘To doubt becomes a way of definition,

Even belles lettres legitimate as prayer,

And laziness a movement of contrition.”

 

“Death to stammer” is no exaggeration. In the sixteenth century, speech defects were often equated with possession by the devil. The final stanza is a writer’s credo. Auden was born on this day in 1907. He shares a birthday with my youngest son, David, who turns twenty-two today.  

 

[The Montaigne passage is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]