MONTAIGNE'S ESSAYS. THE SECOND BOOK. [CONTINUED.] CHAPTER XXXVII. OF THE RESEMBLANCE OF CHILDREN TO THEIR FATHERS. THIS fagoting up of so many divers pieces is done in this way: : I never set pen to paper but when too great idleness becomes troublesome, and never anywhere but at home; so that it is made up at several interruptions and intervals, occasions keeping me sometimes many months abroad.1 As to the rest I never correct my first by any second conceptions; perhaps I may alter a word or so; but 'tis only to vary the phrase, and not to omit my former meaning.2 I have a mind to represent the progress of my humour, that every one may see every piece as it came from the forge. I could wish I had begun sooner, that I might see more the course of my mutations. A servant of mine, that I employed to transcribe for me, thought he had got a prize by stealing several pieces from me, such as he took a fancy to; but it is my comfort that he will be no greater a gainer than I shall 1This chapter was written by Montaigne after his return from his journey through Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, on which he had been absent seventeen months. 2 Yet the edition of 1588 contains several passages which Montaigne afterwards greatly altered or entirely omitted, to the advantage, certainly, of his work." ease which he ways dreaded. be a loser by the theft. I am grown older by seven or eight Montaigne's pa- years since I began; which has not been withtience in the dis-out some new acquisition; I have in that time become acquainted with the stone, by the liberality of years, a long conversation with which hardly wears off without some such inconvenience. I could have been glad that of other presents age has to present long-lived men, withal it had chosen one that would have been more welcome to me, for it could not possibly have laid upon me a disease, for which, even from my infancy, I have had so great a horror; and it is in truth, of all the ills of old age, that of which I have ever been most afraid. I have often thought, with myself, that I went on too far, and that in so long a voyage I should at last run myself into some disadvantage; I perceived, and often declared, that it was time to knock off, and that death was to be cut out in the sound and living part, according to the surgeons' rule in amputations; and that nature made him pay very strict usury who did not in due time pay the principal. And yet I was so far from being ready that, in eighteen months' time, or thereabout, that I have been in this uneasy condition, I have so inured myself to it as to be content to live on in it; and have found wherein to comfort myself, and to hope; so much are men enslaved to their miserable being that there is no condition so wretched that they will not accept, provided they may live! Hear Mecenas : Debilem facito manu, Vita dum superest, bene est; 1 "Maim both my hands and feet, break legs and thighs, Let me but live, all's well enough, he cries." And Tamerlane, with a foolish humanity, palliated the fantastic cruelty he exercised upon lepers, when he put all he 1 Mæcenas, apud Seneca, Ep. 101. could hear of to death, to deliver them, as he pretended, from the painful life they lived; for there was not one of them who would not rather have undergone a triple leprosy than to be deprived of their being; and Antisthenes the Stoic1 being very sick, and crying out, "Who will deliver me from these evils?" Diogenes, who was come to visit him: “This," said he, presenting him a knife, " presently, if thou wilt.” "I do not mean from my life," he replied, "but from my disease." 2 The sufferings that only attack the mind I am not so sensible of as most other men; partly out of judgment, for the world looks upon several things as dreadful, or to be avoided at the expense of life, that are almost indifferent to me; partly through a stupid and insensible complexion I have, in evils which do not point-blank hit me; which insensibility I look upon as one of the best parts of my natural condition; but essential and corporeal pains, I am very sensible of. And yet having long since foreseen them, though with a sight weak and delicate, and softened with the long and happy health and quiet that God has been pleased to give me the greatest part of my time, I had in my imagination fancied them so insupportable that in truth I felt the fear of them more than I have since felt actual pain from them; by which I am still more fortified in this belief, that most of the faculties of the soul, as we employ them, more trouble the repose of life than they are any way useful to it. I am in conflict with the worst, the most sudden, the most painful, the most mortal, and the most irremediable of all diseases; I have already had the trial of five or The stone the six very long and very painful fits, and yet I most painful of all either flatter myself, or there is even in this estate what is very well to be endured by a man who has his soul free from the fear of death, and the menaces, conclu 1 Or rather the Cynic, of which sect he was the head, though in the main, there is no great difference betwixt the two sects as to their doctrine. diseases. 2 Diog. Laertius, in the life of Antisthenes, vi. 18. our ears. sions, and consequences, which physic is ever thundering in But the effect, even of pain itself, is not so sharp and intolerable as to put a man of understanding into impatience and despair. I have at least this advantage from my stone, that what I could not hitherto wholly prevail upon myself to resolve upon, as to reconciling and acquainting myself with death, it will perfect; for the more it presses upon and importunes me, I shall be so much the less afraid to die. I had already gone so far as only to love life for life's sake, but my pain will dissolve this intelligence; and God grant that in the end, should the sharpness of it be once greater than I shall be able to bear, it does not throw me into the other less vicious extreme, to desire and wish to die! Summum nec metuas diem, nec optes: 1 "Neither to wish nor fear to die; they are two passions to be feared, but the one has its remedy much nearer at hand than the other. in the agony of pain. As to the rest, I have always found the precept that so Complaint may exactly enjoins so firm a countenance, and so freely be indulged disdainful and indifferent a comportment in the toleration of infirmities, to be merely ceremonial. Why should philosophy, which only has respect to life and its effects, trouble itself about these external appearances? Let us leave that care to actors and masters of rhetoric, that set so great a value upon our gestures: let her, in God's name, allow this vocal frailty, if it be neither cordial nor stomachical, to the disease; and permit the ordinary ways of expressing grief by sighs, sobs, palpitations, and turning pale, that nature has put out of our power; provided the courage be undaunted, and the expressions not sounding of despair, let her be satisfied. What matter is it if we wring our hands, if we do not wring our thoughts? She forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem; let her be satisfied with governing our understandings, which 1 Mart. x. 47. |