This isn’t a terribly memorable essay, most of all its a defense of using exempla to display human virtue, but it does have this wonderful explanation of Montaigne’s point of view about people and life:
Just because I feel that I am pledged to my individual form, I do not bind all others to it as everyone else does: I can conceive and believe that there are thousands of different ways of living and, contrary to most men, I more readily acknowledge our differences than our similarities. I am as ready as you may wish to relieve another human being of my attributes and basic qualities and to contemplate him simply as he is, free from comparisons and sculpting him after his own model.
But while Montaigne loves and celebrates all the different forms of humanity, he also believes in virtue. He celebrates the noble, not the ignoble, and this is why he likes to use exempla, to show off virtuous behavior that they can learn from.
I crawl in earthy slime but I cannot note, way up in the clouds, the matchless height of certain heroic souls. It means a great deal to me to have my judgement rightly controlled even if my actions cannot be so, and to maintain at least that master-part of me free from corruption. Even when my legs let me down, it is something that my will is sound. At least in our latitudes, the century we live in is so leaden that it lacks not only the practice of virtue but the very idea of it: virtue seems to be no more than scholastic jargon: they think that virtue is but a word and that sacred groves are mere matchwood.
People make mistakes and always will. We should all have humility and accept that we often make the same errors that we call out in others. But Montaigne is arguing that we shouldn’t make the baseline of our behavior that which makes us similar, we should aspire to actions that would make us stand out and be worthy of honor. And he’s willing to go to great lengths to support these examples:
Our judgements follow the depravity of our morals and remain sick. I note that the majority of ingenious men in my time are clever at besmirching the glory of the fair and great-souled actions of ancient times, foisting some base interpretation on them and devising frivolous causes and occasions for them. What great subtlety! Why, show me the most excellent and purest deed there is and I can go and furnish fifty vicious but plausible motives for it! What a variety of concepts, God knows, can be foisted on to our inner wills if anyone wishes to work on them in detail! Such men are clever in their denigration, yet not so much maliciously as heavily and clumsily. The same pains that they take to detract from those great reputations I would readily take to lend a shoulder to enhance them. Those rare persons who have been hand-picked by the wise to be exemplary to us all I will not hesitate, on my part, to load with honour, insofar as my material allows, by interpreting their characteristics favourably.
From here, the essay takes a very odd turn, and I wonder if the conclusion is actually his sole purpose in writing the piece. Montaigne begins an examination of poetry and writes about how few people alive at his time had a great appreciation for poetry or knew how to evaluate it.
So he pulled together five different lines of poetry from well known Roman poets, all of the verse about Cato. And in the process, he ranked them, just to demonstrate that he was one of the people capable of telling the decent poem from the great. And it makes me wonder, did he bring Cato into the discussion just because it was a common denominator for the poets, the best way to compare in his personal poetry contest? Or also, perhaps, to remind everyone that Latin was literally his first language (his father, bizarrely, forced everyone to speak to Michel only in Latin. They would have to learn phrases at a time to converse with the small boy.) And he probably had a deeper appreciation for the language than any person of his time?
It’s possible this essay was just a long way of Montaigne telling us that Virgil was the greatest Roman poet.
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