This essay is valuable to the Montaigne corpus for three reasons. First, it is the only essay to open with a quote from Etienne de la Boetie. This makes it one of the most obvious pieces in Montaigne’s original mission to place la Boetie’s work center stage in his project.
But the essay is also interesting for two paragraphs Montaigne sneaks in toward the end. Here, Montaigne looks at temperaments and how they determine moods. He turns his attention first to a stoic outlook, one that tries to avoid all strong emotion:
There is another temperament where the soul asks not to be shaken and pricked by strong passions, like the anger of Cassius, for this emotion would be overwhelming. It wishes to be calmly roused, warmed up and awakened by strange, present and fortuitous stimuli. Without these stimulants, it drags and languishes. Agitation is its life and grace.
It sounds like Montaigne is describing his own state of mind here. But in something of a surprise, he immediately follows it up with an explanation that this does not apply to him at all, and in doing so, he describes a personal disposition that is far more akin to what we now call bipolar:
As for me, I have no great control over my disposition and moods. Chance owns my temperament more than I. The occasion, the company, even the inflection of my voice, draw more from my spirit in the moment than I discover when I probe it and employ it apart from myself. Thus, spoken words are better than writing, if I am allowed to choose between them.
This is curious for a number of reasons. First, because I had never considered personality to be a driver of public speaking style and it is not typical for those who teach oratory to do so. Montaigne is taking a strong stand that, at least for people like him, communications style is determined by personality factors.
He’s famous for his writing and notes many times in his essays that he’s not a great public speaker, so his conclusion that spoken words are better than written seems odd. But I think what Montaigne is really saying is that he speaks more eloquently off the cuff and in a debate than he does from a script prepared in advance.