VOLUME4Series ContentsMONTAIGNE'S MESSAGE AND METHODSOURCES OF MONTAIGNE'S THOUGHTMONTAIGNE'S RHETORIC Composing Myself for OthersLANGUAGE AND MEANING Word Study in Montaigne's EssaisREADING MONTAIGNE

LANGUAGEAND MEANINGWord Study in Montaigne's EssaisEdited with introductions byDIKKA BERVENOakland UniversityGARLAND PUBLISHING, Inc.New York & London 1995MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCEI

t would seem impertinent to ask what Montaigne's last essay is about. Yet if the student were to ask such a question of his teacher I doubt whether an agreed or a reliable answer would be possible. We could tell him the date of the essay, more closely than of many others. We might add that he would find in it some interesting facts about Montaigne's way of life and some remarkable statements of his personal philosophy. But we should not thereby have answered the question as to what the essay is really about. Is it really about any single subject? Is it any more than a series of chatty irrelevancies, an old man's confession of things that have interested him ?Such apparently innocent questions as these confront us with some of the most difficult problems in the study of Montaigne. For the general reader these problems do not exist. He reads Montaigne as a pleasant rather than a serious author. Like Charles Lamb and Izaak Walton he reads 'the witty Frenchman' whose essays make an admirable bedside book. Yet Montaigne has always had more careful readers. For the Marquess of Halifax his essays were the most entertaining book in the world, partly because they were also original and profound. He wrote in a letter to Charles Cotton: of 'this great man, whom Nature hath made too big to confine himself to the Exactness of a Studied Stile. He let his mind have its full Flight, and sheweth by a generous kind of negligence that he did not write for praise but to give to the world a true picture of himself and of Mankind.'11 Complete Works of George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax, edited by Walter Raleigh, Oxford, 1912, p. 185.

MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCE 35Modern scholarship has confirmed this impression. Since the pioneer work of Pierre Villey, over forty years ago, the serious student has no longer been able to read Montaigne as a man of wit, who wanders from the point at will. Witty he certainly is, and entertaining no less, irrelevant also on occasion, but not so often as the cursory reader might think. As he once neatly put it: 'C'est 1'in-diligent lecteur qui perd son subject, non pas moy* (Jouaust, vi. 203). One cannot read him long before discovering, as Lord Halifax did, a mind in full flight, giving us a true picture of mankind, a mind also of essential relevance, despite the superficial air of eclectic chat. Even such an unwieldy essay as the Apologie de Raimond Sebond proves on careful examination to be a cogent indictment of the scholastic position, an essay in which every part is pertinent to its theme.lIt is the purpose of the present inquiry to ascertain whether the essay on Experience is equally cogent. Such is not the general view. Its purple passages are quoted and its autobiographical material exploited, but it has never, to my knowledge, been submitted to rigorous analysis.2 The most serious summary of its content has been twice given, at an interval of over twenty years, by M. Villey. In 1908, after admitting the 'capital importance' of the essay, he wrote:En substance il dit ceci: Nous ne pouvons pas nous baser sur la seule raison pour acqurir la connaissance ... il faut nous en1The recent work of continental scholars has enabled us to see this moreclearly, notably that of Prof. Hugo Friedrich, 'Montaigne Ober Glauben undWissen', Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 1932.x. 412-35. Cf. the larger treatment inFriedrich's general work, Montaigne, Berne, 1949.2In Friedrich's view, this would apply to most of Montaigne's later work:'Das Verlsslichste und ErschSpfendste, was die M-Forschung bietet, betrifft diebiographischen, textkritischen und quellengeschichtlichen Fragen. Sobald dieseUntersuchungen aber zu einer Auslegung der Essais Ubergehen, befriedigen sicnicht mehr', op. cit., p. 9.?

336 MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCEremettre l'exprience . . . L'exprience de l'un peut n'tre pas inutile aux autres. Je vais par suite vous apporter mon exprience moi; chacun verra dans quelle mesure elle lui convient ... le chapitre n'est en effet qu'un rsum de l'exprience de Montaigne.1In 1931 in the course of a preface to the essay, M. Villey calls it 'un plaidoyer en faveur de l'exprience' which, despite irrelevancies, gives us 'son attitude dernire dans la recherche de la vrit', an attitude which is defined thus :Instruit de tous les piges qui menacent l'exercice de la raison, Montaigne cherche s'assurer un point d'appui solide dans le fait... le fait qui intresse le moraliste c'est le moi, seul connu directement par lui, et par le moyen duquel il prend connaissance de l'homme en gnral.2The professor's view has obviously changed through the years. What he once thought autobiography for the use of the public, as a means whereby any reader could compare his experience with that of the author, M. Villey came to qualify as a final attitude to the truth, as the process of finding refuge from the uncertainties of reason in . . . the facts. But the facts amount, it seems, to little more than the fact of the writer's personality. Can this be called an attitude to the truth in any valid sense ? Perhaps I have not understood the professor: I find his explanations more difficult than the essay they explain. The obscurity seems to be due to the fact that the word 'experience' is given no precise meaning. We cannot know whether an essay on Experience is a plea for the facts against reason until we know what is meant by the words we are using. When we speak, as M. Villey does, of'the fruit of experience' I think that we are meaning something different from what we mean by saying that we have experienced a shock. In the first case we are thinking of the amount that a man has learnt and seen in the process of living; in the second we1 P. Villey: Les sources et rvolution des Essais de Montaigne, Paris, 1908,ii. 322.2 Les Essais de Montaigne, Alcan, i93i> iii. 361.

* ' MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCE 37are thinking of a certain means of receiving an impression from any event. Applying this to our problem, does Montaigne's essay give us what we usually call the 'experience of a long life' or does it discuss actual, direct contact with life? The two senses lead to widely differing interpretations of the essay, yet both senses are established in modern usage. The Concise Oxford Dictionary, for example, in its two-line definition of the word has : 'actual observation of facts or events, knowledge resulting from this'. Which, if either, is Montaigne's subject? For the answer may well be: neither. Littr gives three meanings:acte d'prouver;connaissance des choses acquise par un long usage;tentative pour reconnatre comment une chose se passe.It may be that the sixteenth-century usage implied something else, but that we cannot tell without meticulous comparison of cases. We shall find that, as with present-day usage, the precise sense is not always discernible from any single example. When, for instance, Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes : 'L'exprience du monde en dgote', is he referring to the way we experience the world, or to accumulated dealings with the world ? We cannot say, any more than we can say what M. Villey was referring to in the phrase 'un plaidoyer en faveur de l'exprience'.The most natural source to which we go for help is in this case of no use to us. Though the word occurs in Huguet's Dictionnaire du 16e sicle the only sense given is preuve, which is supported by quotations from two minor writers. Something more to the point is found in Le Grand Dictionnaire de l'Acadmie Franaise which, though not contemporary, takes us to within a hundred years of Montaigne's last revision of the essay. As a starting-point to our inquiry it may be quoted in full :Experience. S.F. Espreuve qu'on fait de quelque chose, soit T4o MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCEimaginions Dieu en l'air, sans en avoir en nous le sentiment par experience.And again, with similar meaning:Ceste congnoissance consiste plus en vive experience qu'en vaine speculation . . . tellement Dieu se donne sentir tel par experience, qu'il se declaire par sa parole.1Even such occasional soundings into the mass of literature written and read in Montaigne's day suggest the complexity of the problem involved and give some point to the desire of a modern scholar that we need a history of the word :Nous parlions d'exprience. Comment n'avons-nous pas non plus d'histoire de ce mot? Experience, pour nous, une technique, surtout familire aux hommes de laboratoire. Une intervention longuement prmdite et calcule d'avance dans le domaine des faits bruts. Le rsultat d'un choix, et d'un choix opr pour permettre soit la vrification d'une hypothse dj formule, soit la formation d'une nouvelle hypothse. Pour eux? le fait d'prouver, le fait d'observer, le fait d'enregistrer, tel quel, un phnomne, un vnement qui se produit de lui-mme, en dehors de toute intervention, de toute volont particulire de le produire ou non.2Professor Febvre brings us back to the third sense of the word in Littr, that of 'experiment'. Even if it were impossible to decide which of the three meanings Montaigne and his contemporaries intend in any given case, we should at least be aware that they were all then possible. A careful scrutiny of the passages just quoted will, I think, suggest that the most general meaning of the word exprience in the French Renaissance was something felt or perceived in an immediate and lively way, with the force of personal acquaintance or participation. It is opposed to1 Institution de la Religion Chrestienne, d. Lefranc, Chtelain, Pannier, 1911, pp. iii, xxvii, xxxv, 13, 28, 29.* L. Febvre, Le Problme de l'Incroyance au 16e sicle, Paris, 1942, p. 477. I owe this reference, and that to Amyot, to my colleague Mr. R. A. Sayce.

MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCE 41what is apprehended by the mind, to such activities, that is, as 'speculation' and 'imagination', which beside its immediate apprehension appear airy and vain. Like Calvin it is for Montaigne a feeling: 'il se sent par exprience que tant d'interprtations dissipent la vrit'. (Jouaust, vii. 7. All succeeding references to the essay are to the paging in this volume.)Montaigne uses the word fifteen times in all, once in the title, and once in Latin. At the outset of the essay he opposes experience and reason. Would this be intelligible if he were thinking of experience as 'une connaissance des choses acquise par un long usage' ? Was he not rather contrasting the conclusions of argument and the impressions of sense ? Was he not striving to define that contact with events which is entirely different from anything we may know about those events? Let us not be less diligent in the interpretation than he was in the expression. Such sentences as these demand the closest scrutiny:La raison a tant de formes que nous ne savons laquelle nous prendre; l'exprience n'en a pas moins. La consequence que nous voulons tirer de la conference des evenemens est mal seure, d'autant qu'ils sont tousjours dissemblables. Il n'est aucune qualit si universelle en cette image des choses que la diversit et varit.1 (2)The point is clinched by an image so apt that one feels it may have inspired the argument or suggested its development, the case of the Greek at Delphi who could even distinguish one egg from another. The point seems to be that the mind, in classifying things, overlooks their essential feature, which is diversity.Rather than consider each occurrence of the word we1 For clarity's sake I append a modern translation:Reason has so many shapes that we know not which to lay hold of: experience has no fewer. The inference we try to draw from the likeness of events is uncertain, because they are always unlike. No quality is so universal, in the appearance of things, as diversity and variety.S42 MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCE

may pass at once to the passage where Montaigne is concerned to express what he is writing about, in which the title word occurs three times :En fin, toute cette fricasse que je barbouille ici n'est qu'un registre des essais de ma vie, qui est, pour l'interne sant exemplaire assez prendre l'instruction contre-poil. Mais quant la sant corporelle, personne ne peut fournir d'exprience plus utile que moy, qui la prsente pure, nullement corrompue et altre par art et par opination. L'exprience est proprement sur son fumier au sujet de la mdecine, o la raison lui quitte toute la place. Tibre disoit que quiconque avoit vescu vingt ans se debvoit respondre des choses qui luy estoyent nuisibles ou salutaires, et se savoir conduire sans mdecine. Elle faict profession d'avoir tousjours l'exprience pour touche de son operation. Ainsi Platon avoit raison de dire que pour estre vray mdecin, il serait ncessaire que celuy qui l'entre-prendroit eust pass par toutes les maladies qu'il veut guarir et par tous les accidens et circonstances dequoy il doit juger. C'est raison qu'ils prennent la verole s'ils la veulent savoir panser. Vrayment je m'en fierais celuy-la, car les autres nous guident comme celuy qui peint les mers, les escueils et les ports, estant assis sur sa table, et y faict promener le modle d'un navire en toute seuret: jettez le l'effect, il ne sait par o s'y prendre. Ils font telle description de nos maux que faict un trompette de ville qui crie un cheval ou un chien perdu: Tel poil, telle hauteur, telle oreille; mais presentez-le luy, il ne le cognoit pas pourtant. (26)

There are many points of interest in this passage. To begin with, M. Villey thought that the word essais needed elucidation and defined it as expriences. Then again, if I understand him aright, Montaigne refers to the experience of health in his case as 'unadulterated, quite uncorrupted by art and theory'. (Incidentally, 'art' is another Renaissance word of which we stand in real need of an accurate history.) The application of 'experience' to the medical profession can surely not mean length of service or knowledge. It must mean, if the contrast with reason is to be adhered to, personal as distinct from professional or bookish

MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCE* 43

knowledge.1 Once we grasp that Montaigne means this we shall see why health and disease play a central part in the argument, for it is precisely in that kind of sphere that actual experiencing of symptoms counts for more than all second-hand knowledge. The two delightful pictures which end the paragraph make this very plain. To talk about disease may be as far from real knowledge of what one is talking about as the painter of seascapes may be from being able really to handle the boat he so easily inserts, in a figure, on his canvas. Professional diagnosis may be, in the strict sense, as impertinent as the town crier's description of the lost dog: he is correct in each detail but cannot recognize the dog, for he has never seen it.If this point be granted, the relation of the parts of the essay to its subject becomes clear. It is not loquacity that makes Montaigne treat of personal matters of habit and physical existence which are not usually given serious discussion. It is because the most immediate, and least intellectual, apprehension of life is via the body. Thus the recurring themes of this essay seem to be health, eating, drinking, sleeping:Le dormir a occup une grande partie de ma vie ... la nourriture est une action principale de la vie... voil une dent qui me vient de choir sans douleur, sans effort, c'estoit le terme naturel de sa dure; et cette partie de mon estre et plusieurs autres sont desj mortes, autres demy mortes, des plus actives et qui tenoient le premier rang pendant la vigueur de mon aage. C'est ainsi que je fons et eschape moy- (57,65,67)Such things as these give an immediate apprehension of life, things that we do naturally or by custom, without1 As Prof. Mansell Jones puts it: 'Experience, which is true living, is not quantitative.' French Introspectives from Montaigne to Andr Gide, Cambridge, 1937, P- 20.10

1144 MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCE thinking. The coupling of health with custom is a sign of the way Montaigne's mind approaches its subject.Ma sant c'est maintenir sans destourbier mon estt accoustum. Je voy que la maladie m'en desloge d'un costj si je crois les mdecins ils m'en destourneront de l'autre; et par fortune et par art me voyl hors de ma route. Je ne croy rien plus certainement que cecy: que je ne sauroy estre offence par des choses que j'ay si longtemps accoustumes. C'est la coustume de donner forme nostre vie, telle qu'il Iuy plaist; elle peut tout en cela; c'est le breuvage de Circe, qui diversifie nostre nature comme bon luy semble. (28)The mental activity devoted to the consideration of things not subject primarily to the mind is most evident in the original development of this very point of custom. It is custom that can free us from bondage to routine,. . . elle peut nous duire non seulement telle forme qu'il luy plaist mais au changement et la variation, qui est le plus noble et le plus utile de ses apprentissages. La meilleure de mes complexions corporelles, c'est d'estre flexible et peu opiniastre; j'ay des inclinations plus propres et ordinaires et plus agrables que d'autres; mais avec bien peu d'effort je m'en destourne et me couple aisement la faon contraire. Un jeune homme doit troubler se9 rgles pour esveiiler sa vigueur, la garder de moisir et s'apoltronir; et n'est train de vie si sot et si dbile que celuy qui se conduit par ordonnance et discipline. (33)It is perhaps useful to note that this important development is introduced by a case of homely observation, expressed in unintellectual terms: 'Regardez la difference du vivre de mes valets bras la mienne . . .'If we look at the ways of living which :re adversely criticized in the essay they are almost all ways whereinthe mind has disregarded or misinterpreted primary data.Doctors, for instance, speak without the book because theyprescribe for they know not what; they even have thearrogance to prophesy what will happen :12... la dubitation et ignorance de ceux qui se meslent d'expliquer

MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCE 45les ressorts de nature et ses internes progrez et tant de faux progno-stiques de leur art nous doit faire cognoistre qu'elle a ses moyens infiniment incognuz; il y a grande incertitude, varit et obscurit de ce qu'elle nous promet ou menace. (55)Doctors are only a particular example of the harm of mind and intellect uncontrolled by actual experience. Language, codification, formulation, are all condemned as being second-hand, and thus divorced from living contact. Life is not a thing that can be eternally classified and ranged in compartments; it is like quicksilver, which the more boys strive to make it go one way escapes and goes its own way. The mind, working without control, obscures more than it clarifies. Books are written about things, then books about books, commentaries on commentaries: 'nous ne faisons que nous entregloser'. This negative part of the essay is the most living critique of human institutions which the Renaissance inspired ; for a parallel one must go to Hamlet's monologues. The biting picture of justice as a human system which fails to be just in effect is an example of social institution divorced from experience :Considrez la forme de cette justice qui nous regit, c'est un vray tesmoignage de l'humaine imbcillit, tant il y a de contradiction et d'erreur. Ce que nous trouvons faveur et rigueur en la justice, et y en trouvons tant que je ne say si l'entre-deux s'y trouve si souvent, ce sont parties maladives et membres injustes du corps mesmes et essence de la j ustice. (11)This reflection is suggested by an actual case of peasants who have found a man assaulted in a wood but who dare not answer his appeals for help, in case the law should apprehend them as murderers. Montaigne gives other cases, no doubt from his own experience, which have resulted in the sacrifice of innocent men to the forms of justice. This leads him to profound reflections on the authority of law,1346 MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCE

which is not an authority of reason or of right but of social power, a brilliant passage which has been read with profit by Pascal.There are then two sets of activity contrasted in the essay, the intellectual and the non-intellectual. By working out such a contrast Montaigne attacks one of the hardest problems of morals, the subject of Nature. In none of his essays is this so firmly grasped. The test of living is not conformity with any model of conduct thought out by men, it is conformity with the laws and constitutions of the creature we call man. This conformity we can each of us find within ourselves, and more surely than by listening to any outside authority. This is no new note in Montaigne's writing. It finds eloquent expression in the essay on Repentance, but we should be at a loss to account for the frequency of this appeal to nature throughout the essay on Experience were it not plain that for Montaigne Nature and Experience are, as it were, obverse and reverse of the same medal. In other words, he writes about experience because he is aiming at a more direct contact with nature than books or systems or the opinions of others can give him.Quel que soit donc le fruict que nous pouvons avoir de l'exprience, peine servira beaucoup nostre institution celle que nous tirons de9 exemples estrangers, si nous faisons si mal nostre proffict de celle que nous avons de nous-mesme, qui nou9 est plus familire et certes suffisante nous instruire de ce qu'il nous faut. (15)

Hence the constant stress on, and practice of, self-knowledge. Montaigne finds that scrutiny of himself replaces both metaphysics and physics and is more profitable than scrutiny of man in Plato. Philosophers indeed are un-\ certain guides :Les inquisitions et contemplations philosophiques ne servent que d'aliment nostre curiosit. Les Philosophes avec grand raison nous

MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCE 47

renvoyent aux rgles de Nature; mais elles n'ont que faire de si sublime cognoissance,1 ils les falsifient et nous prsentent son visage peint, trop haut en couleur et trop sophistiqu, d'o naissent tant de divers pourtraits d'un subject si uniforme. Comme elle nous a fourny de pieds marcher, aussi a elle de prudence nous guider dans la vie, prudence non tant ingnieuse, robuste et pompeuse, comme celle de leur invention, mais l'advenant, facile, quite et salutaire, et qui faict trs bien ce que l'autre diet, en celuy qui a l'heur de savoir l'employer navement et ordonnment, c'est dire naturellement. Le plus simplement se commettre nature, c'est s'y commettre le plus sagement. O que c'est un doux et mol chevet, et sain, que l'ignorance et l'incuriosit, reposer une teste bien faicte. ( 16)

I Jiave continued the quotation to the end of the paragraph, as it would otherwise seem to have omitted one of the characteristic and oft-quoted expressions of Montaigne's hedonism. As usually understood the phrase about 'the soft pillow' is not at all characteristic of its author, whose restless mind is one of the keenest in literature. But no writer has been more pungent against the fussiness and the worry that often accompany intellectual activity. So understood, the phrase is germane to the thought of its whole paragraph and that in turn is closely relevant to the subject.of the essay. This aspect returns in even more vigorous expression in the course of the central section on the gall-stone. This detailed analysis of the effects of his own disease leads Montaigne to distinguish between its natural effect and the imaginative repercussion on the mind of the sufferer:Je seray assez temps sentir le mal sans l'allonger par le mal de la peur. Qui craint de souffrir, il souffre desj ce qu'il craint. Je ne me juge que par vray sentiment, non par discours. (55)

Would it be going too far to define Montaigne's subject by this last sentence, as an elaboration of that judgement which results from feeling rather than from abstract1 This seems difficult to translate, unless we substitute ils for elles.14

1548 MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCEthinking ? Discours is certainly for him, now as in the past, the enemy to be watched and avoided. It is not altogether easy to see why. Montaigne seems to deplore (what many have deplored as one of the faults incidental to the Cartesian philosophy) the separation of body and mind, the scorn of body and exaltation of mind which seem to be natural to the intellect when working without control. He therefore takes every occasion to re-establish the harmony of body and mind which unbridled intellect is apt to destroy: this seems to me to be the sense we should give to his adverb loyallement. His scepticism about intellectual conclusions, and more particularly about our blind faith in their accuracy, is a recurring theme: he glories in being ordinary, earthy, unintellectual, for that is natural to man; it is the fruit of actual experience of life in and on oneself, rather than through books or appropriated ways of thought.Moy, qui ne manie que terre terre, hay cette inhumaine sapience qui nous veut rendre ennemis de la culture et plaisir du corps. Je trouve pareille injustice de prendre contre cur les voluptez naturelles que de les prendre trop cur... il ne les faut ny suyvre ny fuir, mais il les faut recevoir; je les recois un peu plus grassement et gratieusement, et me laisse plus volontiers aller vers la pante naturelle. Nous n'avons que faire d'exaggerer leur inanit; elle se faict assez sentir et se produit assez. Mercy nostre esprit maladif, rabat-joye, qui nous desgoute d'elles comme de soy-mesme. Il traitte de soy et tout ce qu'il reoit, tantost avant, tantost arrire selon son estre insatiable, vagabond et versatile.Sincerum est nisi vas, quodcunque infundis acescit Moy, qui me vante d'embrasser si curieusement les commoditez de la vie et si particulirement, n'y trouve, quand j'y regarde ainsi finement, peu prs que du vent. Mais quoy ? nous sommes par tout vent; et le vent encore, plus sagement que nous, s'ayme bruyre, s'agiter, et se contente en ses propres offices, sans dsirer la stabilit, la solidit, qualitez non siennes. (75)These sentences confront us with the real paradox of the

MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCE 49famous essay we are considering. The intellect is never absent from this inquisition upon its activity. On the contrary, it is brilliantly applied to matters usually thought of as outside its purview. The essay is an intellectual statement of the non-intellectual nature of living. It is an inquiry into the extent to which direct contact with phenomena (with what M. Villey perhaps rashly called the facts) may correct and supplement the conclusions of the mind.1 Perhaps such an inquiry was only possible to a man who was both thinker and artist, at any rate to one who was not a systematic thinker in the sense known to philosophy. This may explain why Montaigne has for so long been disregarded as a thinker and considered as a 'writer', whatever that may mean. It goes some way, I think, to explain the structure of this final essay. It is clearly not constructed on a principle of rational and logical progression, in a straight line, so to speak. This has been hastily assumed to be due to Montaigne's habit of chatter about whatever might come into his head. Yet the essay has a plan, as is borne out by the fact that no extensive part of it can be said to be irrelevant to its subject. But the plan is that of an artist rather than of a logician. Subjects recur, almost rhythmically; they are not completely dealt with in any single section of the argument. One may watch this by the references to sleep, eating, health, doctors, and such topics. Pascal once described the difference between the order of charity and the order of intellect by saying that the former 'consiste principalement la digression sur chaque point qu'on rapporte la fin, pour la montrer toujours'. (Pense 2.83.)The finer essays of Montaigne are constructed, I sug-1 This was the view of Groethuysen: 'In diesem selbstndigen Erlebr des Lebens liegt das Machtvolle des Denkens Montaignes.' Festschrift Wechssler, 1929, P- 223.16

175o MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCEgest, on such a plan. Like the greater comedies of Molire, they bring to bear on a given theme a series of parallel considerations, so that the theme is never exhaustively treated but is illumined from several angles. We should therefore beware of the apparent digressions of Montaigne and the more so as we see them rapportes la fin. The reader stands to lose as well as to gain by such a method. In the hands of a second-rate author it would allow too much room for the trivial and the incidental; indeed Montaigne is accused of these faults. But on the credit side is a fresh and unacademic interest which leaves the subject more attractive at the end than at the beginningthe contrary in fact of much educational method. Montaigne, as he himself once wrote, is content to open up subjects. His essay is not a disquisition, it is a subtle mixture of argument, intuition, and example. In this case, his thoughts about experience and his own experience are inseparable: the incident is one with the argument. Autobiography and speculation shade into one another, nowhere perhaps more than in the passages where experience of his disease suggests reflections on the natural preparation of the body for its own decline:Tu ne meurs pas de ce que tu es malade, tu meurs de ce que tu es vivant; la mort te tue bien sans le secours de la maladie, et d'aucuns les maladies ont esloign la mort, qui ont plus vescu de ce qu'il leur sembloit s'en aller mourants.... La mort se mesle et confound par tout nostre vielle dclin praeoccupe son heur et s'ingre au cours de nostre avancement mesme. J'ay des portraits de ma forme de vingt et cinq et de trente cinq ans; je les compare avec celuy d'asteure; combien de fois ce n'est plus moy, combien est mon image prsente plus esloingne de celles l que de celle de mon trespas. (49, 67)Death inaugurated in life, a natural part of the life process, are these thoughts not relevant to a profound consideration of human experience ? I think they are, but it is

MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCE 51important at the same time to state that they are a product of the artistic view of life. We owe the dimensions of this essay to Montaigne the artist no less than to Montaigne the thinker. As Ruel wrote many years ago : 'Tous les procds de l'observation artistique peuvent se ramener ce principe: la vie seule peut connatre la vie.'1Perhaps a main cause of Montaigne's immense fascination for succeeding generations was this aesthetic achievement in the field of intellectual inquiry. The age in which he wrote was bookish and pedantic. It seemed to be fast losing that taste for the particular and the individual which we associate with the Renaissance.The decline in the reputation of Ronsard, the strictures of Malherbe upon Desportes, are signs of a preference for lucidity over poetry, for the concise and the general over the concrete and the fragmentary, perhaps for 'art' in the narrow sense over life. Such an essay as this on Experience seems to perform the miracle of focusing the intelligence on this neglected domain of the particular and the temporal.The masters of the classical age in France seem to have felt this. Pascal goes to this essay for his notion of law and of custom, of the automatic elements in behaviour (la machine). The astonishing awareness of La Rochefoucauld to the differences between thought and conduct probably owes something to the same source. Molire and Montaigne seem to have chosen precisely the same subject of medical professionalism of which to make sport, and incidentally to declare their own views on Nature.Is it fanciful to trace the influence of the same essay upon later developments in modern thought ? The empiricism of Diderot, Voltaire's aversion to metaphysics, Rousseau's nostalgic search for nature, were probably all nourished on 'experience'. Much of the thought of nineteenth-1 E. Ruel, Du sentiment artistique dans la morale de Montaigne, Paris, 1902, p. 8 9.1852 MONTAIGNE'S NOTION OF EXPERIENCEcentury artists and scholars was inspired by Maine de Biran, who thought of Montaigne as among 'les gens vraiment redoutables'. These and many other figures have been nourished by the protest against an intellectualism divorced from life, a protest of which Montaigne provided so brilliant an example. If one seeks a contemporary epithet for such thinking one might call it existential.w. g. moore

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