I’ve known Montaigne for 13 years, sat with him, heard him out on subjects I cared nothing about (those damn warhorses) and some areas of my expertise. Such as this topic.
I’ll get right to the point—Montaigne is wrong about public speaking. In fact, he’s wrong about passion in general. He’s opposed to it, scared of it, certain we should do everything possible to run away in fright from it.
You think that last line is an exaggeration? Read “On Restraining Your Will.” But actually, don’t, not yet. I have to a fight to pick with him now and I need your attention.
Montaigne had a problem with the fact that a gifted public speaker could sweep up people with emotions and make them fail at their reason. Quoting the great oratorical educator Quintilian, Montaigne notes that to be a highly effective speaker is to be an actor:
Quintilian says that he had known actors to be so involved in playing the part of a mourner that they were still shedding tears after they had returned home; and of himself he says that, having accepted to arouse grief in somebody else, he had so wedded himself to that emotion that he found himself surprised not only by tears but by pallor of face and by the stoop of a man truly weighed down by grief.
I hate to break this to Montaigne, but we are all actors. There is no authentic you waiting to be discovered and put on display at all times. We have different roles in our lives and we put on masks to play them. This modern obsession with authenticity makes people feel bad for doing the most natural thing: being the version of themselves most appropriate for the moment.
But even putting that aside, I don’t accept Montaigne’s interpretation … passion can be completely authentic. It can come from within, even if its use is to persuade your audience. Public speaking anxiety is one of the greatest sources of passion. It creates energy that can be put to good use. To be fearful of others’ reactions can make you fight for your right to be heard and to explain yourself, leading to a more energetic presentation. I think Montaigne would agree with this, but remember, he’s not a fan of oratory:
The orator (says Rhetoric) when acting out his case will be moved by the sound of his own voice and by his own feigned indignation; he will allow himself to be taken in by the emotion he is portraying. By acting out his part as in a play he will stamp on himself the essence of true grief and then transmit it to the judges (who are even less involved in the case than he is); it is like those mourners who are rented for funerals and who sell their tears and grief by weight and measure: for even though they only borrow their signs of grief, it is nevertheless certain that by habitually adopting the right countenance they often get carried away and find room inside themselves for real melancholy.
This is just excruciating to read. Sure, there are some very bad orators who manipulate audiences. I think they make themselves known and obvious. They do not destroy the art with their bad acting. On the contrary, it’s the passionless slide-clickers who have destroyed public speaking in our age, taking audiences on a boring ride through endless bullet points.
I’m trying to be fair to Montaigne. He is writing of an age of limited mass media. Public speaking was then the supreme form of mass communications, so one who believed in higher forms of discourse would mock it in his day.
Also, remember Montaigne is doing some of his own rationalizing — he admits that he’s not a terribly persuasive speaker:
I found out by experience that when it came to persuasion I was unsuccessful and heavy-handed: I either offer my arguments too pointedly and drily or else too brusquely, showing too little concern.
So Montaigne advises people—especially when trying to console the grieving—to deflect sad and hurt feelings as much as possible. And he suggests that this is what effective physicians do as well in fighting illness:
Doctors can rarely get the soul to mount a direct attack on her illness: they make her neither withstand the attack nor beat it off, parrying it rather and diverting it.
As he often does, Montaigne turns the discussion towards death and notes that the best way to avoid dwelling on it is to point towards a more hopeful future:
Our thoughts are always elsewhere. The hope of a better life arrests us and comforts us; or else it is the valor of our sons or the future glory of our family-name, or an escape from the evils of this life or from the vengeance menacing those who are causing our death.
Montaigne’s advice for those who have loved and lost is extremely blunt and actually rather obscene, even to modern eyes:
If when in love your passion is too powerful, dissipate it, they say. And they say truly: I have often usefully made the assay. Break it down into a variety of desires, one of which may rule as master if you like, but enfeeble it and delay it by subdividing it and diverting it, lest it dominate you and tyrannize over you: When the peevish vein gurgles in your vagrant groin, ejaculate the gathered fluid into any bodies whatever. And see to it quickly, lest you find yourself in trouble once it has seized hold of you, unless you befuddle those first wounds by new ones, effacing the first by roaming as a rover through vagrant Venus.
I’m really appalled by Montaigne’s advice here. If you are too much in love with a woman, find another to have sex with, the more random the better. It’s not enough that he has to insult the way I make a living, he’s making a frontal attack on my “take nothing casually” ethos as well.
It’s interesting that Montaigne moves from this question of sexual frustration quickly to his grief over the death of Étienne de La Boétie. Montaigne suggests he threw himself immediately into a romantic relationship to relieve himself of the sting of grief:
Once upon a time I was touched by a grief, powerful on account of my complexion and as justified as it was powerful. I might well have died from it if I had merely trusted to my own strength. I needed a mind-departing distraction to divert it; so by art and effort I made myself fall in love, helped in that by my youth. Love comforted me and took me away from the illness brought on by that loving-friendship. The same applies everywhere: some painful idea gets hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it.
That’s not exactly heartwarming either—an insincere romance to get over grieving. Montaigne’s diversions, in my opinion, are about fleeing from life, not living one in wisdom.
Montaigne considers imaginative joys to be nothing but escapism. Personally, I think those “castles in the air” he describes are what make life worth living::
When I throw myself into building castles in the air my imagination forges me pleasures and comforts which give real delight and joy to my soul. How often do we encumber our spirits with yellow bile or sadness by means of such shadows? And we put ourselves into fantastical rages, deleterious to our souls and bodies! What confused, ecstatic, madly laughing grimaces can be brought to our faces by such ravings! What jerkings of our limbs and trembling of our voices! That man over there is on his own, but does he not seem to be deceived by visions of a crowd of other men whom he has to deal with, or else to be persecuted by some devil within him?
Bringing the discussion back to public speaking and persuasion, Montaigne is making a case for genuine rationality—for winning people over with reason and sincerity, not passion and sophistry. But do these concepts really have to be in conflict? The speeches I write are always a blend of the head and heart.
Montaigne sees this embrace of reason as a way of putting your soul ahead of your body. I think this is a foolish hope, but I’ll let the man speak:
Abandoning your life for a dream is to value it for exactly what it is worth. Listen though to our soul triumphing over her wretched body and its frailty, as the butt of all indispositions and degradations. A fat lot of reason she has to talk! O wretched clay which Prometheus first moulded! How unwisely he wrought! By his art he arranged the body but saw not the mind. The right way would have been to start off with the soul.
I can accept that argument—I believe in being soulful. But to neglect the body as you do so is to pretend that the mind is some disconnected superior manager of it all. That nonsense gave us Descartes and centuries of misguided French thinking.
Let your emotions sing your reason, that’s my advice.
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