'Among the Essential Text-Books of Our Schools'

A reader in North Dakota tells me he has acquired Donald Frame’s translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford University Press, 1957) and asks for recommendations among them. Really, he can’t go wrong starting anywhere, and he already has his eyes on “Of Sleep,” “Of Books” and Montaigne’s longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Almost randomly I would suggest “Of Idleness” (his shortest essay: one page) and “Of Cruelty.” A sample from “Idleness”: 

“Just as we see that fallow land, if rich and fertile, teems with a hundred thousand kinds of wild and useless weeds, and that to set it to work we must subject it and sow it with certain seeds for our service; and as we see that women, all alone, produce mere shapeless masses and lumps of flesh, but that to create a good and natural offspring they must be made fertile with a different kind of seed; so it is with minds.”

 

Typical Montaigne: homely, readily understood metaphors and a sort of punchline bringing it all together. Here’s the next sentence, which amounts to common sense on minds: “Unless you keep them busy with some definite subject that will bridle and control them, they throw themselves in disorder hither and yon in the vague field of imagination.”

 

In 1934, the English literary critic F.L. Lucas (1894-1967) published in the journal Studies French and English an essay, “The Master-Essayist.” Lucas gives us a charming profile of the Frenchman:

 

“That a gaily self-indulgent old gentleman in Perigord once loved scratching his ears is and will be remembered where lives, by the thousand, of desperate industry and devoted idealism leave not a ripple on the inky waters of oblivion. Such is justice.”

 

Montaigne was the first to make the first-person singular a worthy subject, and he is seldom tedious, unlike Rousseau and a thousand imitators. Here is Lucas’ conclusion:

 

“Today Montaigne would rather have lived in a garret, alone with his own thoughts, than have earned his living in many of our occupations, or joined many of the movements of the modern world. After all, would he be wrong? If only we were wise, I believe that among the essential text-books of our schools, and of our schoolmasters, would be the Lives of Plutarch and the Essais of Montaigne.

 

[Find Lucas’ essay and many others in the “Articles” section of Isaac Waisberg’s essential IWP Books.)