Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance

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Now; and not then! For if men are so diverse, not less disparate are
the many men who keep discordant company within each one of us,
"every man carrying in him the entire form of human condition."
"That we taste nothing pure:" the variancy of the individual in
regard to himself: the complexity of soul which there, too, makes
"all judgments in the gross" impossible or useless, certainly
inequitable, he delighted to note. Men's minds were like the
grotesques which some artists of that day loved to joint together, or
like one of his own [94] inconstant essays, never true for a page to
its proposed subject. "Nothing is so supple as our understanding: it
is double and diverse; and the matters are double and diverse, too."

Here, as it seemed to Gaston, was one for whom exceptions had taken
the place of law: the very genius of qualification followed him
through all his keen, constant, changeful consideration of men and
things. How many curious moral variations he had to show!--"vices
that are lawful": vices in us which "help to make up the seam in our
piecing, as poisons are useful for the conservation of health":
"actions good and excusable that are not lawful in themselves": "the
soul discharging her passions upon false objects where the true are
wanting": men doing more than they propose, or they hardly know what,
at immense hazard, or pushed to do well by vice itself, or working
for their enemies: "condemnations more criminal than the crimes they
condemn": the excuses that are self-accusations: instances, from his
own experience, of a hasty confidence in other men's virtue which
"God had favoured": and how, "even to the worst people, it is sweet,
their end once gained by a vicious act, to foist into it some show of
justice." In the presence of this indefatigable analyst of act and
motive all fixed outlines seemed to vanish away. The healthful
pleasure of motion, of thoughts in motion!--Yes! Gaston felt them,
the oldest of [95] them, moving, as he listened, under and away from
his feet, as if with the ground he stood on. And this was the vein
of thought which oftenest led the master back contemptuously to
emphasise the littleness of man.--"I think we can never be despised
according to our full desert."

By way of counterpoise, there were admirable surprises in man. That
cross-play of human tendencies determined from time to time in the
forces of unique and irresistible character, "moving all together,"
pushing the world around it to phenomenal good or evil. For such as
"make it their business to oversee human actions, it seems impossible
they should proceed from one and the same person." Consolidation of
qualities supposed, this did but make character, already the most
attractive, because the most dynamic, phenomenon of experience, more
interesting still. So tranquil a spectator of so average a world, a
too critical minimiser, it might seem, of all that pretends to be of
importance, Montaigne was constantly, gratefully, announcing his
contact, in life, in books, with undeniable power and greatness, with
forces full of beauty in their vigour, like lightning, the sea, the
torrents:--overpowering desire augmented, yet victorious, by its very
difficulty; the bewildering constancy of martyrs; single-hearted
virtue not to be resolved into anything less surprising than itself;
the devotion of that famed, so companionable, wife, dying cheerfully
[96] by her own act along with the sick husband "who could do no
better than kill himself"; the grief, the joy, of which men suddenly
die; the unconscious Stoicism of the poor; that stern self-control
with which Jacques Bonhomme goes as usual to his daily labour with a
heart tragic for the dead child at home; nay! even the boldness and
strength of "those citizens who sacrifice honour and conscience, as
others of old sacrificed their lives, for the good of their country."
So carefully equable, his mind nevertheless was stored with, and
delighted in, incidents, personalities, of barbarous strength--Esau,
in all his phases--the very rudest children or "our great and
powerful mother, nature." As Plato had said, "'twas to no purpose
for a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy," or, if truth
were spoken, of any other high matter of doing or making. That was
consistent with his sympathetic belief in the capability of mere
impetuous youth as such. Even those unexpected traits in ordinary
people which seem to hint at larger laws and deeper forces of
character, disconcerting any narrow judgment upon them, he welcomed
as akin to his own indolent, but suddenly kindling, nature:--the mere
self-will of men, the shrewd wisdom of an unlettered old woman, the
fount of goodness in a cold or malicious heart. "I hear every day
fools say things far from foolish." Those invincible prepossessions
of humanity, or of the [97] individual, which Bacon reckoned "idols
of the cave," are no offence to him; are direct informations, it may
be, beyond price, from a kindly spirit of truth in things.

For him there had been two grand surprises, two pre-eminent
manifestations of the power and charm of man, not to be explained
away,--one, within the compass of general and public observation: the
other, a matter of special intimacy to himself. There had been the
greatness of the old Greek and Roman life, so greatly recorded: there
had been the wisdom and kindness of Etienne de la Boetie, as made
known in all their fulness to him alone. That his ardent devotion to
the ancients had been rewarded with minute knowledge concerning them,
was the privilege of the age in which he was born, late in the
Revival of Letters. But the classical reading, which with others was
often but an affectation, seducing them from the highest to a lower
degree of reality, from men and women to their mere shadows in old
books, had been for him nothing less than personal contact. "The
qualities and fortunes" of the old Romans, especially, their
wonderful straight ways through the world, the straight passage of
their armies upon them, the splendour of their armour, of their
entire external presence and show, their "riches and embellishments,"
above all, "the suddenness of Augustus," in that grander age for
which decision was justifiable because really [98] possible, had ever
been "more in his head than the fortunes of his own country." If "we
have no hold even on things present but by imagination," as he loved
to observe,--then, how much more potent, steadier, larger, the
imaginative substance of the world of Alexander and Socrates, of
Virgil and Caesar, than that of an age, which seemed to him, living
in the midst of it, respectable mainly by its docility, by an
imitation of the ancients which after all left untouched the real
sources of their greatness. They had been indeed great, at the least
dramatically, redeemed in part by magnificent courage and tact, in
their very sins. "Our force is no more able to reach them in their
vicious than in their virtuous qualities; for both the one and the
other proceed from a vigour of soul which was without comparison
greater in them than in us."

And yet, thinking of his friendship with the "incomparable Etienne de
la Boetie, so perfect, inviolate and entire, that the like is hardly
to be found in story," he had to confess that the sources of
greatness must still be quick in the world. That had remained with
him as his one fixed standard of value in the estimate of men and
things. On this single point, antiquity itself had been surpassed;
the discourses it had left upon friendship seeming to him "poor and
flat in comparison of the sense he had of it." For once, his
sleepless habit of analysis had been checked by the inexplicable, the
absolute; [99] amid his jealously guarded indifference of soul he had
been summoned to yield, and had yielded, to the magnetic power of
another. "We were halves throughout, so that methinks by outliving
him I defraud him of his part. I was so grown to be always his
double in all things that methinks I am no more than half of myself.
There is no action or thought of mine wherein I do not miss him, as I
know that he would have missed me." Tender yet heroic, impulsive yet
so wise, he might have done what the survivor (so it seemed to
himself) was but vainly trying to do. It was worth his while to
become famous, if that hapless memory might but be embalmed in one's
fame. It had been better than love,--that friendship! to the
building of which so much "concurrence" had been requisite, that
"'twas much if fortune brought the like to pass once in three ages."
Actually, we may think, the "sweet society" of those four years, in
comparison with which the rest of his so pleasant life "was but
smoke," had touched Montaigne's nature with refinements it might
otherwise have lacked. He would have wished "to speak concerning it,
to those who had experience" of what he said, could such have been
found. In despair of that, he loved to discourse of it to all
comers,--how it had come about, the circumstances of its sudden and
wonderful growth. Yet after all were he pressed to say why he had so
loved Etienne de la Boetie, he [100] could but answer, "Because it
was He! Because it was I!"

And the surprises there are in man, his complexity, his variancy,
were symptomatic of the changefulness, the confusion, the surprises,
of the earth under one's feet, of the whole material world. The
irregular, the unforeseen, the inconsecutive, miracle, accident, he
noted lovingly: it had a philosophic import. It was habit rather
than knowledge of them that took away the strangeness of the things
actually about one. How many unlikely matters there were, testified
by persons worthy of faith, "which, if we cannot persuade ourselves
to believe, we ought at least to leave in suspense.--Though all that
had arrived by report of past time should be true, it would be less
than nothing in comparison of what is unknown."

On all sides we are beset by the incalculable--walled up suddenly, as
if by malign trickery, in the open field, or pushed forward
senselessly, by the crowd around us, to good-fortune. In art, as in
poetry, there are the "transports" which lift the artist out of, as
they are not of, himself; for orators also, "those extraordinary
motions which sometimes carry them above their design." Himself, "in
the necessity and heat of combat," had sometimes made answers, that
went "through and through," beyond hope. The work, by its own force
and fortune, sometimes outstrips the workman. And then, in [101]
defiance of the proprieties, whereas poets sometimes "flag, and
languish in a prosaic manner," prose will shine with the lustre,
vigour and boldness, with "the fury" of poetry.

And as to "affairs,"--how spasmodic the mixture, collision or
coincidence, of the mechanic succession of things with men's
volition! Mere rumour, so large a factor in events,--who could trace
out its ways? Various events (he was never tired of illustrating the
fact) "followed from the same counsel." Fortune, chance, that is to
say, the incalculable contribution of mere matter to man, "would
still be mistress of events"; and one might think it no un-wisdom to
commit everything to fortuity. But no! "fortune too is oft-times
observed to act by the rule of reason: chance itself comes round to
hold of justice;" war, above all, being a matter in which fortune was
inexplicable, though men might seem to have made it the main business
of their lives. If "the force of all counsel lies in the occasion,"
that is because things perpetually shift. If man--his taste, his
very conscience--change with the habit of time and place, that is
because habit is the emphatic determination, the tyranny, of changing
external and material circumstance. So it comes about that every one
gives the name of barbarism to what is not in use round about him,
excepting perhaps the Greeks and Romans, somewhat conventionally; and
Montaigne was fond of assuring people, [102] suddenly, that could we
have those privileged Greeks and Romans actually to sit beside us for
a while, they would be found to offend our niceties at a hundred
points. We have great power of taking ourselves in, and "pay
ourselves with words." Words too, language itself, and therewith the
more intimate physiognomy of thought, "slip every day through our
fingers." With his eye on his own labour, wistfully, he thought on
the instability of the French language in particular--a matter, after
all, so much less "perennial than brass." In no respect was nature
more stable, more consecutive, than man.

In nature, indeed, as in one's self, there might be no ultimate
inconsequence: only, "the soul looks upon things with another eye,
and represents them to itself with another kind of face: for
everything has many faces and several aspects. There is nothing
single and rare in respect of itself, but only in respect of our
knowledge, which is a wretched foundation whereon to ground our
rules, and one that represents to us a very false image of things."
Ah! even in so "dear" a matter as bodily health, immunity from
physical pain, what doubts! what variations of experience, of learned
opinion! Already, in six years of married life, of four children
treated so carefully, never, for instance, roughly awaked from sleep,
"wherein," he would observe, "children are much more profoundly
involved than we,"--of four children, [103] two were dead, and one
even now miserably sick. Seeing the doctor depart one morning a
little hastily, on the payment of his fee, he was tempted to some
nice questions as to the money's worth. "There are so many maladies,
and so many circumstances, presented to the physician, that human
sense must soon be at the end of its lesson:--the many complexions in
a melancholy person; the many seasons in winter; the many nations in
the French; the many ages in age; the many celestial mutations in the
conjunction of Venus and Saturn; the many parts in man's body, nay,
in a finger. And suppose the cure effected, how can we assure
ourselves that it was not because the disease was arrived at its
period, or an effect of chance, or the operation of something else
that the child had eaten, drunk, or touched that day, or by virtue of
his mother's prayers? We suppose we see one side of a thing when we
are really looking at another. As for me, I never see all of
anything; neither do they who so largely promise to show it to
others. Of the hundred faces that everything has I take one, and am
for the most part attracted by some new light I find in it."

And that new light was sure to lead him back very soon to his
"governing method, ignorance"--an ignorance "strong and generous, and
that yields nothing in honour and courage to knowledge; an ignorance,
which to conceive requires no less knowledge than to conceive [104]
knowledge itself"--a sapient, instructed, shrewdly ascertained
ignorance, suspended judgment, doubt everywhere.--Balances, very
delicate balances; he was partial to that image of equilibrium, or
preponderance, in things. But was there, after all, so much as
preponderance anywhere? To Gaston there was a kind of fascination,
an actually aesthetic beauty, in the spectacle of that keen-edged
intelligence, dividing evidence so finely, like some exquisite steel
instrument with impeccable sufficiency, always leaving the last word
loyally to the central intellectual faculty, in an entire
disinterestedness. If on the one hand he was always distrustful of
things that he wished, on the other he had many opinions he would
endeavour to make his son dislike, if he had one. What if the truest
opinions were not always the most commodious to man, "being of so
wild a composition"? He would say nothing to one party that he might
not on occasion say to the other, "with a little alteration of
accent." Yes! Doubt, everywhere! doubt in the far background, as
the proper intellectual equivalent to the infinite possibilities of
things: doubt, shrewdly economising the opportunities of the present
hour, in the very spirit of the traveller who walks only for the
walk's sake,--"every day concludes my expectation, and the journey of
my life is carried on after the same fashion": doubt, finally, as
"the best of pillows to sleep on." And in fact Gaston did sleep well
after [105] those long days of physical and intellectual movement, in
that quiet world, till the spring came round again.

But beyond and above all the various interests upon which the
philosopher's mind was for ever afloat, there was one subject always
in prominence--himself. His minute peculiarities, mental and
physical, what was constitutional with him as well as his transient
humours, how things affected him, what they really were to him,
Michael, much more than man, all this Gaston came to know, as the
world knew it afterwards in the Essays, often amused, sometimes
irritated, but never suspicious of postures, or insincerity.
Montaigne himself admitted his egotism with frank humour:--"in favour
of the Huguenots, who condemn our private confession, I confess
myself in public." And this outward egotism of manner was but the
symptom of a certain deeper doctrinal egotism:--"I have no other end
in writing but to discover myself." And what was the purport, what
the justification, of this undissembled egotism? It was the
recognition, over against, or in continuation of, that world of
floating doubt, of the individual mind, as for each one severally, at
once the unique organ, and the only matter, of knowledge,--the
wonderful energy, the reality and authority of that, in its absolute
loneliness, conforming all things to its law, without witnesses as
without judge, without appeal, save to itself. [106] Whatever truth
there might be, must come for each one from within, not from without.
To that wonderful microcosm of the individual soul, of which, for
each one, all other worlds are but elements,--to himself,--to what
was apparent immediately to him, what was "properly of his own having
and substance": he confidently dismissed the inquirer. His own
egotism was but the pattern of the true intellectual life of every
one. "The greatest thing in the world is for a man to know that he
is his own. If the world find fault that I speak too much of myself,
I find fault that they do not so much as think of themselves." How
it had been "lodged in its author":--that, surely, was the essential
question, concerning every opinion that comes to one man from
another.

Yet, again, even on this ultimate ground of judgment, what undulancy,
complexity, surprises!--"I have no other end in writing but to
discover myself, who also shall peradventure be another thing to-
morrow." The great work of his life, the Essays, he placed "now
high, now low, with great doubt and inconstancy." "What are we but
sedition? like this poor France, faction against faction, within
ourselves, every piece playing every moment its own game, with as
much difference between us and ourselves as between ourselves and
others. Whoever will look narrowly into his own bosom will hardly
find himself twice in the same condition. [107] I give to myself
sometimes one face and sometimes another, according to the side I
turn to. I have nothing to say of myself, entirely and without
qualification. One grows familiar with all strange things by time.
But the more I frequent myself and the better I know myself, the less
do I understand myself. If others would consider themselves as I do,
they would find themselves full of caprice. Rid myself of it I
cannot without making myself away. They who are not aware of it have
the better bargain. And yet I know not whether they have or no!"

One's own experience!--that, at least, was one's own: low and earthy,
it might be; still, the earth was, emphatically, good, good-natured;
and he loved, emphatically, to recommend the wisdom, amid all doubts,
of keeping close to it. Gaston soon knew well a certain threadbare
garment worn by Montaigne in all their rides together, sitting
quaintly on his otherwise gallant appointments,--an old mantle that
had belonged to his father. Retained, as he tells us, in spite of
its inconvenience, "because it seemed to envelope me in him," it was
the symbol of a hundred natural, perhaps somewhat material, pieties.
Parentage, kinship, relationship through earth,--the touch of that
was everywhere like a caress to him. His fine taste notwithstanding,
he loved, in those long rambles, to partake of homely fare, paying
largely for it. Everywhere it was as if the earth in him turned
kindly to [108] earth. "Under the sun," the sturdy purple thistles,
the blossoming burrs also, were worth knowing. Let us grow together
with you! they seem to say. Himself was one of those whom he thought
"Heaven favoured" in making them die, so naturally, by degrees. "I
shall be blind before I am sensible of the decay of my sight, with
such kindly artifice do the Fatal Sisters entwist our lives. I melt,
and steal away from myself. How variously is it no longer I!" It
was not he who would carry a furry robe at midsummer, because he
might need it in the winter.--"In fine, we must live among the
living, and let the river flow under the bridge without our care,
above all things avoiding fear, that great disturber of reason. The
thing in the world I am most afraid of is fear."

And still, health, the invincible survival of youth, "admonished him
to a better wisdom than years and sickness." Was there anything
better, fairer, than the beautiful light of health? To be in health
was itself the sign, perhaps the essence, of wisdom--a wisdom, rich
in counsels regarding all one's contacts with the earthy side of
existence. And how he could laugh!--at that King of Thrace, for
instance, who had a religion and a god all to himself, which his
subjects might not presume to worship; at that King of Mexico, who
swore at his coronation not only to keep the laws, but also to make
the sun run his annual course; at those followers [109] of Alexander,
who all carried their heads on one side as Alexander did. The
natural second-best, the intermediate and unheroic virtue (even the
Church, as we know, by no means requiring "heroic" virtue), was
perhaps actually the best, better than any kind of heroism, in an age
whose very virtues were apt to become insane; an age "guilty and
extravagant" in its very justice; for which, as regards all that
belongs to the spirit, the one thing needful was moderation. And it
was characteristic of Montaigne, a note of the real helpfulness there
was in his thoughts, that he preferred to base virtue on low, safe,
ground. "The lowest walk is the safest: 'tis the seat of constancy."
The wind about the tower, coming who knows whence and whither?--could
one enjoy its music, unless one knew the foundations safe, twenty
feet below-ground? Always he loved to hear such words as "soften and
modify the temerity of our propositions." To say less than the truth
about it, to dissemble the absoluteness of its claim, was agreeable
to his confidence in the natural charm, the gaiety, of goodness,
"that fair and beaten path nature has traced for us," over against
any difficult, militant, or chimerical virtue.--"Never had any morose
and ill-looking physician done anything to purpose." In that age, it
was a great thing to be just blameless. Virtue had its bounds,
"which once transgressed, the next step was into the territories
[110] of vice." "All decent and honest means of securing ourselves
from harm, were not only permitted but commendable." Any man who
despises his own life, might "always be master of that of another."
He would not condemn "a magistrate who sleeps; provided the people
under his charge sleep as well as he." Though a blundering world,
in collusion with a prejudiced philosophy, has "a great suspicion of
facility," there was a certain easy taking of things which made life
the richer for others as well as for one's self, and was at least an
excellent makeshift for disinterested service to them. With all his
admiration for the antique greatness of character, he would never
commend "so savage a virtue, and one that costs so dear," as that,
for instance, of the Greek mother, the Roman father, who assisted to
put their own erring sons to death. More truly commendable was the
custom of the Lacedaemonians, who when they went to battle sacrificed
always to the Muses, that "these might, by their sweetness and
gaiety, soften martial fury." How had divine philosophy herself been
discredited by the sour mask, the sordid patches, with which, her
enemies surely! had sent her abroad into the world. "I love a gay
and civil philosophy. There is nothing more cheerful than wisdom: I
had like to have said more wanton."

Was that why his conversation was sometimes coarse? "All the
contraries are to be found in [111] me, in one corner or another"; if
delicacy, so also coarseness. Delicacy there was, certainly,--a
wonderful fineness of sensation. "To the end," he tells us, "that
sleep should not so stupidly escape from me, I have caused myself to
be disturbed in my sleep, so that I might the better and more
sensibly taste and relish it.--Of scents, the simple and natural seem
to me the most pleasing, and I have often observed that they cause an
alteration in me, and work upon my spirits according to their several
virtues. In excessive heats I always travel by night, from sunset to
sunrise. I am betimes sensible of the little breezes that begin to
sing and whistle in the shrouds, the forerunners of the storm.--When
I walk alone in a beautiful orchard, if my thoughts are for a while
taken up with foreign occurrences, I some part of the time call them
back again to my walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of the
solitude, and to myself.--There is nothing in us either purely
corporeal, or purely spiritual. 'Tis an inhuman wisdom that would
have us despise and hate the culture of the body. 'Tis not a soul,
'tis not a body, we are training up, but a man; and we ought not to
divide him. Of all the infirmities we have, the most savage is to
despise our being."

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