The Press. — London, England, 1858-01-02 00:00:00

Xitcrature. Montaigne the Essayist. By Bayle St John. Two Vols. London : Chapman and Hall. MR. BATLE ST. JOHN has evidently taken on himself the mission of a special illustrator of French literature. The necessity for such a vocation may be doubted. French is a lan guage of almost universal acquisition, and we think that the classics of France fare worse on translation than the masterpieces of other countries. Mr. St. John would, we thiuk, appear to more advantage as an illustrator of German literature, if he devoted himself to its study. However, we must take him as he is. " Montaigne the Essayist " is not a good subject for a biography in two volumes. Incident was wanted in his life, and he had not the influence of a mar► of action It is seldom indeed that the biography of a mere author can he rendered popularly attractive, and the instance of Montaigne is no exception to the rule. We have the man and his mind painted in his " Essays." Hence there is a dryness and want of vivacity in this work which has a certain appearance of heaviness It reads like an article in a biographical die. tionary expanded into two volumes ; and we think that some of Mr. St. John's former works had more strength and brilliancy of style. Whether Montaigne himself is popularly relished in England seems to us more than doubtful. It is true that authors, scholars, and professed " great readers " like " down right Montaigne," but he is not the sort of writer that Englishmen generally admire. To open grave questions, and not to settle them decisively, is contrary to English taste. Loose and slippery views on deep problems in morals ought not to he encouraged; and Atter bury echoed the English feeling when he wrote to Pope,—" I hate to see a book gravely " written, and in all the forms of arguments " tion, which proves nothing, and which says " nothing, and endeavours only to put us in a " way of distrusting onr faculties, and doubting " whether the marks of truth and falsehood " can in any way be distinguished from each " other." If his merits are many, his faults are not a few. It is difficult to say, when he is in our hand, whether we aro reading himself or other writers, whose matter is so skilfully interwoven with his own. " I purposely con ceal," said he, "the authors from whom I borrow, to check the presumption of those who are apt to censure what they find in a " modern. lam content that they should " lash Seneca and Plutarch through my sides." His style is thus more composite than at first appears, and we admit that one of his charms is the variety of colour produced by his pecu liar mode of writing. He stands at the head of the sauntering school of essayists, and he has no prototype, nor any exact parallel, in the literature of any other country. We see in his writings much of the spirit of the times in which he lived,. and we catch the tone of a French gentleman while France had still a healthy provincial life, and before the State had erected a dominating bureaucracy at Paris. In the opening passage of this work there is both abruptness of tone and much exagge ration : No French writer has exerted so much influence on English literature—with the exception, perhaps, of Behehtts—us Montaigne. The Essays are known in sub stnnee far beydnd the oirele of readers who can decipher their idiomatic Freuel, studded with Gaston phrases, or relish the quaint old English translations by Florio and Cotton, however modernised. From Sliakspeate and Bacon, down to the humblest essayist earnest enough to make, mail -the theme of his speculations, we find names of communion with Montaigne. His acquaintance is immetimes acknowledged, oftener implied. Butler and rope quote, but Swift and Sterne show that they were fstuiyiar with him. There is something marvelionsly festinating in his society; whith explains this influence fir mare than any poverty of thought in our great writers. No man. Gen pass an hour with him without feeiing wiser and more inclined to be sententious. The range of his observations was so vast, that to borrow from the Essays seems equivalent to borrowing from the collective experi unce.tif hurnanity. Montaigne would have been the lust Men to tomplaio of snely ie4tizirait ; for if nil , his sue. esteem espeenelly. in nor Wand, 143til taken from la in, he took from all Me predeeessora. We are never sure, urinal we •pen the Sows awl gird dazzled by some sa)iog. that sparicki like, s diantoittl, 1 ;14 r ww Ithonla admiro .. THE PRE S S, JANUARY 2, 1858. Plutarch, Seneca, or Montaigne. To point out, therefore, that English writers are under obligation to this wonder ful speculator, is nut to diminish their value, but to show that it is a debt of gratitude in us to study his career. Mr. St. John overstates the amount of influence of Montaigne upon English literature. Swift was little moved by Montaigne, and their tempers were extreinly unlike; and we do not know that any English author ever aimed at being an English Montaigne. Was it in Montaigne that Sterne found his pathos, or Pope his condensed energy of precise expres sion ? In the concluding note to the second volume is the following passage, which is cri-; tically just : But when we have read all that has been written about Montaigne—a small library in itself—we feel that, though we know multitudes of facts, the true character of the man, as we faintly conceited it when we first read the Essays, has been tampered with somewhat. The Montaigne of Pascal and Mtdebranch is an esprit fort of the seven teenth century ; the Montaigne of I3ayle is a gentlemanly sceptic ; the Montaigne of the Voltaireans is a scoffer ; the Montaigne of the Abbe Laborderie is a Capuchin Friar the Montaigne of Mr. Emerson is Mr. Emerson himself; the. Montaigne of Dr. Payee is the property of Dr. Payen; and the Montaigne of M. (Iran is a Prefet of the Gironde. Just so. Most of the illustrators have brought their own prejudices to the study of Mon taigne. Coleridge said " It is tee who are Ham " let," alluding to the facility which every one has of making a Hamlet for himself out of Shakespeare's words; and a similar remark might almost be made upon the ease with which opposite kinds of natures find sympathy with Montaigne. Mr. St. John succeeds best when he describes external reality which has come under his own observation. The pen that wrote the vivid "Purple Tints of Paris " can be seen in this account of the modern visitors to the Chateau de Montaigne : They are not led thither by that passionate fondness, that mysterious and almost sinful affection, which converts into valuably property every place where Rousseau suffered or was eloquent ; but by a calm sympathy, an honest admiration of worth, circumscribed in its manifestation by cheerful egotism, which is one of the characteristics that finds the sympathy of the steady readers for whom these pages are chiefly written. You will generally ob serve that the admirers of Montaigne have a great many books of their own, not modern cheap elitions, but solid calf-bound volumes, bought at second-hand much cheaper ; that they are, if not exactly eccentric people, people of marked features of character ; that they have often a good sober-looking volume in their pockets, and form, in fact, a coterie of observers and thinkers, who run toget:ier like quicksilver when they meet, and are rather formed to instruct youth and suggest wisdom to the idle or impetuous, than themselves to take any very active part in this world's affairs. A flavour of rural enjoyment adds to the aroma of Montaigne's con4osition, awl Mr. St. John well observes : The Essays bear many marks of having been written by a country gentleman. The murmur bout the farm yard sometimes resounds through Montaigne's sentences ; and breezes from orchard, and hill, and valley, fan our cheeks as we flutter his leaves. He is no minute de scriber: he does not paint the ronghnesses of tree bark or count the veins of a leaf; but the masses, around cast impressions into his mind which he reproduces. " When I dance, I dance," says he; explaining how each pursuit absorbed him in its turn. " When I slumber, I slumber; and when I stroll alone beneath the branches of a fair orchard, if T allow my thoughts to commune awhile with things remote and foreign, some other while I recall them to my stroll, to the orchard, to the sweetness of the soli tude, and to myself." This fair orchard belonged to him and still exists behind the chateau, gently spread on the eastern elope of the hill. All his illustrations of a similar kind seem gathered under the shadow of his castle, on the day he uses them. They are like fresh-picked flowers, which have not yet felt the warmth of the bosom on which they glow. lle finds them in every corner of the vnlley " We do not advance in this life, we are carried along, like trifles floating on a stream ; now lapsing gently, now hurrying rapidly, as the water is lively or slow." He is evidently down on the banks of the Didoire, which indeed, when I last ruffled its grassy banks, creating an image to flit by me through those solitudes—for our minds are the tombs from which ghosts conic out to haunt the world— was here whirling autumn leaves along in a narrow bed, there allowing them to rest in tiny reaches. But he goes further, and notices the progress which the Dordogne is making in eating sway its banks, so as to carry off many houses by the foundations. This, and the destruction of his brother's estate in Metloc by the sea, enabled him to understand the supposed disappearance of the Atlantis. Mr. St. John, in the following passal2e, attempts to define critically the aims of Mon taigne : If we escape from the influence of particular passages and circumstanoes, alleged as pro on one side or the other, and take into consideration the general verdict of blttrspe, which has never troubled itself about this contro versy !Jetts-Loa the Cmireliattel re.ts-t 11.11v,;111. in Fnittee, we Anti cothe to the ohnolaslett that gout Lague was a sceptic a. l q r in the true modern sense. He had not, like Voltaire anti his accomplice , , a secret, unacknowledged end in view. To have engaged in a conspiracy against Christianity, and committed all the unscrupulous acts which a conspiracy implies, would have seemed shocking to this honest Gaston gentleman—let us venture to say " honest," despite a certain tendency to casuistry, a certain proneness to com promise and concession : a man may be honest in this in complete world, and not rigid. But Montaigne was no Believer, in the proper sense of the word, nor inclined to call for help to his unbelief. In his time, religion had naurpe I too great a control over humanity—extended its authority too tar, and in the wrong direction. He felt inclined to shake it off, in order to be more tree in his ants and thoughts. His objection was not so much to Catholicism, with its mysteries and con. tempt of the human understanding, as to spiritualism in general, with its enthusiasm and contempt of human flesh. Protestantism to him was no promise ; it was an ad litional element of disorder and discomfort. The nisrt3rs who would rather be burned than recant, who set their sonls, the existence of which might be made doubtful by a syllogism, above their bodies (unmistakeable tenements of pain and pleasure )—these men, who went singing to the stake, and fixed sorrowful but forgiving eyes on their perse cutors, were almost more detestable to Montaigne than the persecutors themselves. He pitied their sufferings, but was angry with the unreasonable strength of their con- victions. What the author means by " a Sceptic in the " true modern sense" is not ve►y clear, and we cannot accept his peremptory decisions on the aims of Montaigne. There has always been a class of esoterical Romanists who like to play with philosophy. They reason them selves, in a fashion of their own, into discard ing the use of reason in religion : they deny that any standard of objective truth can be discovered, and they tolerate on the one side the assumed infallibility of their Church, and on the other hand they have a sympathy with the superstitions of the vulgar. They are a very dangerous class of minds, and servo no useful ends. They are no checks on the bigotry of the priest, although they may sap the convictions of the earnest in religious worship. They sneer at Protestantism as " fanaticism," and have no strong belief in philosophy. Montaigne had something in common with that class of minds, and we can not think that he proposed to himself any dis tinct moral purpose. Space, however, would be wanted for an ade quate characterisation of Montaigne. What ever we may think of his philosophy, his lite rary merits are indubitable. He was, and will continue to be, a charming writer; his temper was genial, his tone familiar, and his eloquence natural. He has a niche to him self in the Temple of Fame, and there are many for whom this biography of him will have much interest. But to enjoy it thoroughly we must first be familiar• with the writings of Mon taigne. Cambridge Essays. 1857. Contributed by Members of the University. London : J. W. Parker and Son. ONE of the chief objects, if we remember right, which the projectors of this series of essays set before themselves was the libera tion of the " Essay " proper from the inappro priate and injurious trammels with which the custom of periodical literature had encircled it. The papers in the leading quarterlies were still in strictness supposed to be reviews of books ; and the mischief resulting from this literary fiction was twofold. In the first place, able men, who might happen to possess uncommon knowledge, and to have arrived at novel con clusions upon various important subjects, were precluded from giving their reflections to the world till other people should have written books upon them first. Hence, se condly, it arose that literary men or politicians, growing impatient of protracted silence, would seek to publish their notions upon the slen derest possible pretence, and would rake up works written several years previously, and not always of any importance then, to place at the head of their article. Still, however, the old tradition haunted them: they must by some means or another bring their observa tioes within the scope of the work given forth as their text-book. The inevitable effect of this was to hamper them at every turn, and to impart a conventional and hackneyed air to their contributions which was not their own fault. A third and perhaps still more mis ohievous result of the system was this,—that pure criticism was thereby brought into cell- 16