20

20. We can savour nothing pure

[A chapter particularly interesting for the light it throws on melancholy. Some of Montaigne’s quotations derive directly from Justus Lipsius.]

[A] The feebleness of our condition means that we can make habitual use of nothing in its natural unsophisticated purity. The very elements which we enjoy are corrupt: so too are the metals – even gold must be alloyed with some other substance to make it serviceable to us. [C] Nor could the simple virtue which Ariston and Pyrrho, and the Stoics too, taught as the aim of our life serve that end without some admixture, any more than the hedonism of Aristippus and the Cyrenaics. [A] Of the pleasures and goods which we enjoy, not one is exempt from being compounded with some evil and injury.

[B] medio de fonte leporum Surgit amari aliquid, quod in ipsis floribus angat.

[from the very fount of our delights there surges something bitter which gives us distress even among the flowers.]1

The greatest of our pleasures has an air of groaning and lamentation. Could you not say that it was languishing from affliction? Indeed when we forge images of it at its highest reach we paint its face with sickly epithets and dolorous qualities: languor, faintness, weakness, debility, morbidezza,2 which greatly witnesses to their common blood and consubstantiality. [C] Deep joy has more gravity than gaiety; the highest and fullest happiness, more calm than playfulness. ‘Ipsa fælicitas, se nisi temperat, premit.’ [Even joy overwhelms us, unless it be tempered.]3 Ease crushes us. [A] That is what is meant by that line of ancient Greek poetry: ‘The gods sell us all the pleasures which they give us’; that is to say, none that they give us is pure and perfect: we can only buy them at the price of some suffering. [C] Pleasure and travail, so unlike in their natures, are yet fellows by some inexplicable natural relationship. Socrates said that some god or other made an assay at fusing pain and pleasure into one mass: when he could not achieve this he decided at least to couple them by their tails.4

[B] Metrodorus said that sadness was not unalloyed with a certain pleasure. I do not know whether he meant something else: personally I can readily think that there is an element of purpose, consent and complacency in feeding oneself on melancholy – I mean, quite apart from ambition, which can also be mixed up with it. There is some hint as of delicate sweetmeats which smiles at us and flatters us in the very bosom of melancholy. Are there not some complexions which make it their only food?

Est quædam flere voluptas. [There is a certain pleasure in our tears.]

[C] And Attalus says in Seneca that the memory of those loved ones we have lost tastes pleasant, like the bitterness of very old wine:

Minister vetuli, puer, falerni, Ingere mi calices amariores!

[Butler serving Falernian wine! Pour me out your bitterest cups!]

– like those apples which are both sharp and sweet.5

[B] Nature reveals this alloy to us; painters hold that the same wrinkling movements of our faces which serve to show weeping also show laughter. Indeed. Watch the picture in progress before either emotion has been finally delineated: you are in doubt towards which it is tending. And the extremes of laughter are mixed with tears.

[C] ‘Nullum sine auctoramento malum est.’ [There is no evil without its compensations.]6 When I picture a man besieged by all the enjoyments which he could desire – say that all his members were forever seized of a pleasure equal to that of sexual intercourse at its climax – I see him collapsing under the weight of his joy; and I can perceive him quite incapable of bearing pleasure so pure, so constant and so total: truly, once there, he runs away and naturally hastens to escape from it as from some narrow passage where he cannot find solid ground and fears to be engulfed.

[B] When I scrupulously make my confession to myself I find that the best of the goodness in me has some vicious stain. And I am afraid that Plato, even in his most flourishing virtue – (and I say this who am the most genuine and loyal admirer of it, as of all virtues of similar stamp) if he had put his ear close to it [C] (and he did put his ear close to it) [B] – he would have heard in it some sinister sound of a human alloy, even though it were a muffled sound which only he could detect. Man, totally and throughout, is but patches and many-coloured oddments.

[A] The very laws of justice cannot subsist without some admixture of injustice; and Plato says that those who claim to remove all the improprieties and inconsistencies from the laws are undertaking to cut off the Hydra’s head.7 Tacitus says: ‘Omne magnum exemplum habet aliquid ex iniquo, quod contra singulos utilitate publica rependitur.’ [Every case of exemplary punishment is unfair to individuals: that is counterbalanced by the public good.]

[B] It is likewise true that for the usages of the life and service of the common weal there can be an excess of purity and discernment in our wits; such penetrating clarity has too much subtleness and inquisitiveness. We must weigh down our wits and blunt their edge to render them more obedient to precedent and practice; we must coarsen them and darken them to give them the proportions of this earthy darksome life. That is why the more commonplace and less tense of wits are more appropriate to the conduct of affairs and more successful. The high inquisitive opinions of philosophy prove unsuited in practice. Such sharp vigour of soul and such supple restless whirring motions trouble our negotiations. We must manage the affairs of men more rough-and-readily, more superficially, leaving a good and better share to the rights of Fortune. There is no need to cast light so deeply and keenly on to our affairs. You lose yourself in them by contemplating so much varied brilliance and such diverse forms: [C] ‘Voluntantibus res inter se pugnantes obtorpuerant animi.’ [Minds wallowing in mutual contradictions are benumbed.]8

That is what the Ancients said of Simonides. When King Hiero posed him a question to answer which he had several days to meditate upon, his powers of thought presented him with so many keen and subtle considerations that, doubting which was the most likely, he totally despaired of the truth.9

[B] He who seeks out all the circumstances and grasps their consequences impedes his choice. A modest talent suffices and can equally well carry into execution matters of great and little weight. Note how those who best manage their estates are the least able to explain how they do so, while the most skilful talkers are as often as not useless at it. I know one man who is excellent at talking about all kinds of estate-management and at describing it but who has let a hundred thousand pounds of income slip through his fingers. I know another who speaks and deliberates better than any man in his council-chamber; never in the world was there a more beautiful display of intelligence and of competence: yet when it comes to practice his servants find he is quite other than that – I mean, even leaving aside bad luck.