Page:Essays, Vol 4 (Ives, 1925).pdf/17
BOOK III, CHAPTER V 5
Unus homo nobis cunctando restituit rem:
Non ponebat enim rumores ante salutem.
Ergo postque magisque viri nunc gloria claret.* Montaigne’s humorously familiar use of this quotation suggests that it was a phrase that had sunk into his mind from the force of its serious meaning. It may be remembered that he says in another place:
“My citations do not always serve simply as comment. I do not re- gard them solely in the light of the use that I make of them; they often have in them, beyond what I say, the seed of a richer and bolder mean- ing; and often indirectly a more subtle suggestion, both for me who do not wish to express myself more fully and for those readers who enter into my thought.”
One of the most animated expressions of Montaigne’s eager love of society — of companionship — occurs here: “If there be any one, any pleasant party, in country, in city, in France, or elsewhere, resident or travelling, to whom my temperament may be agreeable and whose tem- peraments may be agreeable to me, they have but to whistle and I will go to them and supply them with essays in flesh and bone.” With this Passage may be connected another in a later Essay, where, after repeat- ing what he says here, that if he came to the knowledge of any man of worth who liked his writings he would readily go to him even if he were far off, “for the delightfulness of an agreeable companion can not be too highly bought, to my thinking,” he adds that no long familiarity agg be necessary for friendship, since ce registre completely reveals What he says of the virtue of chastity concerning itself only with the will is a text which might be considered with advantage to-day. And the way in which in these pages, and the following ones on jealousy, he sets forth the conditions of social life may suggest the most serious con- siderations regarding the undesirableness of holding theories that are at variance with facts.
The eloquent page on /e dien dire, and the following ones, are a vigar- ous enlargement of the same thought in the Essay “ Of the Education of Children,”
The passage immediately following, on his conditions in writing and on what “I have said to myself,” can not be too carefully read and pon- dered as shewing not only his philosophy of his own authorship, but his singularly careful and discerning judgement of his own writings; and I think special stress should be laid on the “ You often trifle deceptively,” | all the more that it is a posthumous addition. It seems to me to indicate that he had perceived himself to be often misunderstood in this respect.
1 How preferable was the conduct of Quintus Maximus, of whom Ennius says: “One man, by temporising, set right our affairs; he indeed did not consider public sayings as much as the safety of the country, and therefore the glory of that man shines now and hereafter, and ever more brightly.”