'That Spiritual Pepys'

In 1848, James Russll Lowell published the book-length poem A Fable for Critics. It’s the work of a cocky young man. Lowell was twenty-eight and he’s taking on some of the literary panjandrums of the age, many now long-forgotten. He is carving out his territory. Poe he famously describes as “three-fifths genius . . . and two-fifths sheer fudge.” The satire is mild, never savage (which is disappointing). Of Emerson, who remained his friend, he writes: 

“He seems, to my thinking (although I'm afraid

The comparison must, long ere this, have been made),

A Plotinus-Montaigne, where the Egyptian’s gold mist

And the Gascon’s shrewd wit cheek-by-jowl coexist;

All admire, and yet scarcely six converts he’s got

To I don’t (nor they either) exactly know what;

For though he builds glorious temples, ’tis odd

He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.”

 

Emerson was a supremely silly man. He had a minor gift for prose at the sentence level – he occasionally packs an essay into a sentence -- but nothing he wrote held together. In We Are Doomed (2009), John Derbyshire characterizes Emerson as “a key progenitor of modern smiley-face liberalism.” His understanding of human nature is dangerously, laughably naïve, the air-headed lunacy of a befuddled Unitarian. Without an understanding of evil, you understand little or nothing about our species. Emerson frequently cited Plotinus in his essays and poems and devoted an essay to “Montaigne; or, the Skeptic.”

 

 In “A Preliminary Note to the Second Edition” of A Fable for Critics, Lowell tells us he is turning away from his mediocre contemporaries and embracing his precursors:

 

“With Hakluyt or Purchas I wander away to the black northern seas or barbaric Cathay; get fou with O’Shanter, and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave; with Fletcher wax tender, o’er Chapman grow brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward again, down by mystical Browne’s Jacob’s-ladder-like brain, to that spiritual Pepys (Cotton’s version) Montaigne; find a new depth in Wordsworth, undreamed of before,—that marvel, a poet divine who can bore.”

 

Much to dismiss and embrace here. Montaigne is the only Frenchman on Lowell’s roll call. I’m not sure I can decrypt “a spiritual Pepys” but I like it. Perhaps he refers to the journal-like inclusiveness of the Essays, his attentiveness to the commonplace as well as the elevated. Montaigne easily ranks with George Herbert and Sir Thomas Browne in my pantheon. “Browne’s Jacob-ladder-like brain” is a beaut.

 

The essay “Of the Education of Children” is dedicated and addressed by Montaigne to Madame Diane de Foix, the Comtesse de Gurson, wife of Louis de Foix, Montaigne’s friend killed in the Battle of Montraveau in 1587. The countess is pregnant as Montaigne addresses her, and he blithely assumes she is carrying a son (“you are too noble-spirited to begin otherwise than with a male”). The confidence with which he lectures her on children and their education is breathtaking. Montaigne had married in 1565 and with Françoise de la Chassaigne he had a daughter. Four other children died in infancy. Here, in Donald Frame’s translation, is Montaigne:

 

“Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men. We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose. Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not ‘Athens,’ but ‘The world.’ He, whose imagination was fuller and more extensive, embraced the universe as his city, and distributed his knowledge, his company, and his affections to all mankind, unlike us who look only at what is underfoot.”

 

Throughout most of the essay, Montaigne’s advice is admirably broad-minded. He urges the countess to hire an accomplished tutor and expose the boy to the best of books and people. He particularly recommends Plutarch, Seneca and Tacitus, and says “the first taste I had for books” came with reading Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Montaigne writes of himself as a young man:

 

“Meanwhile, for all that, my mind was not lacking in strong stirrings of its own, and certain and open-minded judgments about the things it understood; and it digested them alone, without communication. And, among other things, I really do believe that it would have been wholly incapable of submitting to force and violence.”

 

Montaigne was born 1533 and died on this date, September 13, in 1592 at age fifty-nine.