'The Shakespeare of the Essay Form'

“ordinary sanity in extraordinary prose” 

The phrase is the American poet David Mason’s in his essay “The Freedom of Montaigne.” In characterizing the Frenchman and his essays, Mason describes an ideal seldom attained and occasionally scorned. Today, extreme, sweeping statements seem to get all the attention. You don’t attract readers by being, as Montaigne’s biographer Donald Frame puts it, “basically conservative, not radical, an accepter, not a reformer, seeking harmony, not conflict, within.” A New Immaturity has taken over. Intensity of expression is confused with human truth. We’re all back on the playground again, taunting and bullying our playmates, leaving little room for understanding and empathy.

 

Mason seems especially taken with the essay “Of Cruelty” (1578-80), in which Montaigne writes: “Among other vices, I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and by judgment, as the extreme of all vices. But this is to such a point of softness that I do not see a chicken’s neck wrung without distress, and I cannot bear to hear the scream of a hare in the teeth of my dogs, although the chase is a violent pleasure.”

 

Typically, Montaigne is honest, a perennial adult. Like some of us, he’s a softy, even with the wars of religion raging around his home in France. He acknowledges the thrill of the hunt while feeling pity for the game. His age, like ours, was barbarous – that’s merely human nature, which hasn’t changed. Only the scale of cruelty during the twentieth century and after would have surprised him, not its lingering impulse. For one example, he lived through the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and wrote about the public executions he witnessed.

 

Mason knows Shakespeare read Montaigne and found him useful, as we do. He describes Montaigne as “the Shakespeare of the essay form” – the highest critical praise possible. Both writers can never be exhausted. We read and reread them across a lifetime and they remain new and vital, as though we were reading them for the first time, even at an advanced age. Frame writes in his biography of Montaigne:

 

“I believe it is above all his sturdy, honest independence, his cheerful self-acceptance, that draws the crowd of readers to his book today. Our love of moral independence is ambivalent; our anxiety and sense of guilt make us often hanker rather for an ‘escape from freedom.’ And here we have a man, not the best that ever lived no doubt but assuredly far from the worst and better than most of us, who with scandalous serenity lays himself on the line and says in effect, quite simply, Here I am.”

 

[Mason’s essay is published in the Autumn 2017 issue of The Hudson Review and collected in Incarnation & Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us? (Paul Dry Books, 2023). The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957). Frame is the author of Montaigne: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).]