26

26. On educating children

[The previous chapter, ‘On schoolmasters’ learning’, was read in manuscript by visitors. Montaigne was encouraged to write at greater length on how to bring up boys. He had no son of his own but wrote partly for his friend and admirer Diane de Foix (who married in 1579 and was pregnant, hoping for a son and heir). Montaigne tells of his own upbringing by the best of fathers. Emphasizing the importance of things over words brings him to write of his own ‘brain-child’: the Essays, a matter of words. Thinking of his father’s gentle methods based on exciting a child’s love and enthusiasm for learning and good morals, he makes a diversion on kings and magistrates, who as ‘fathers of the people’, ought to use similar methods. The additions marked [C] show his new and growing respect for Plato (for whom books were indeed the preferred ‘children’ of superior minds). Montaigne launches a frontal attack (without naming him) on Hesiod, who made the path to virtue sweaty, painful and rough. For Montaigne, even children can find the paths to virtue lovely and delightful.]

For Madame Diane de Foix, Countess of Gurson

[A] I have never known a father fail to acknowledge his son as his own, no matter how [C] scurvy or crook-backed [A] he may be.1 It is not that he fails to see his infirmities (unless he is quite besotted by his affection): but the thing is his, for all that! The same applies to me: I can see – better than anyone else – that these writings of mine are no more than the ravings of a man who has never done more than taste the outer crust of knowledge – even that was during his childhood – and who has retained only an ill-formed generic notion of it: a little about everything and nothing about anything, in the French style. For, in brief, I do know that there is such a thing as medicine and jurisprudence; that there are four parts to mathematics: and I know more or less what they cover. [C] (Perhaps I do also know how the sciences in general claim to serve us in our lives.) [A] But what I have definitely not done is to delve deeply into them, biting my nails over the study of Aristotle,2 [C] that monarch of the doctrine of the Modernists,3 [A] or stubbornly persevering in any field4 of learning. [C] I could not sketch even the mere outlines of any art whatsoever; there is no boy even in the junior forms who cannot say be is more learned than I am: I could not even test him on his first lesson, at least not in detail. When forced to do so, I am constrained to extract (rather ineptly) something concerning universals, against which I test his inborn judgement – a subject as unknown to the boys as theirs is to me.5

I have fashioned no sustained intercourse with any solid book except Plutarch and Seneca; like the Danaïdes I am constantly dipping into them and then pouring out: I spill some of it on to this paper but next to nothing on to me.6

[A] My game-bag is made for history [C] rather, [A] or poetry, which I love, being particularly inclined towards it;7 for (as Cleanthes said) just as the voice of the trumpet rings out clearer and stronger for being forced through a narrow tube so too a saying leaps forth much more vigorously when compressed into the rhythms of poetry, striking me then with a livelier shock. As for my own natural faculties which are being assayed here, I can feel them bending beneath their burden. My concepts and judgement can only fumble their way forward, swaying, stumbling, tripping over; even when I have advanced as far as I can, I never feel satisfied, for I have a troubled cloudy vision of lands beyond, which I cannot make out. I undertake to write without preconceptions on any subject which comes to mind, employing nothing but my own natural resources: then if (as happens often) I chance to come across in excellent authors the very same topics I have undertaken to treat (as I have just done recently in Plutarch about the power of the imagination) I acknowledge myself to be so weak, so paltry, so lumbering and so dull compared with such men, that I feel scorn and pity for myself. I do congratulate myself, however, that my opinions frequently coincide with theirs [C] and on the fact that I do at least trail far behind them murmuring ‘Hear, hear’. [A] And again, I do know (what many do not) the vast difference there is between them and me. What I myself have thought up and produced is poor feeble stuff, but I let it go on, without plastering over the cracks or stitching up the rents which have been revealed by such comparisons.8 [C] You need a strong backbone if you undertake to march shoulder to shoulder with fellows like that.

[A] Those rash authors of our own century who scatter whole passages from ancient writers throughout their own worthless works, seeking to acquire credit [C] thereby,9 [A] achieve the reverse; between them and the Ancients there is an infinite difference of lustre, which gives such a pale sallow ugly face to their own contributions that they lose far more than they gain.

– [C] There were two opposing concepts. Chrysippus the philosopher intermingled not merely passages from other authors into his writings but entire books: in one he cited the whole of the Medea of Euripides! Apollodorus said that if you cut out his borrowings his paper would remain blank. Epicurus on the other hand left three hundred tomes behind him: not one quotation from anyone else was planted in any of them.10 –

[A] The other day I chanced upon such a borrowing. I had languished along behind some French words, words so bloodless, so fleshless and so empty of matter that indeed they were nothing but French and nothing but words. At the end of a long and boring road I came upon a paragraph which was high, rich, soaring to the clouds. If I had found a long gentle slope leading up to it, that would have been pardonable: what I came across was a cliff surging up so straight and so steep that I knew I was winging my way to another world after the first half-a-dozen words. That was how I realized what a slough I had been floundering through beforehand, so base and so deep that I did not have the heart to sink back into it.

If I [C] were to stuff one of my chapters with such rich spoils, that chapter [A] would reveal11 all too clearly the silliness of the others. [C] Reproaching other people for my own faults does not seem to me to be any more odd than reproaching myself for other people’s (as I often do). We must condemn faults anywhere and everywhere, allowing them no sanctuary whatsoever. Yet I myself know how valiantly I strive to measure up to my stolen wares and to match myself to them equal to equal, not without some rash hope of throwing dust in the eyes of critics who would pick them out (though more thanks to the skill with which I apply them than to my skill in discovering them or to any strengths of my own). Moreover I do not take on those old champions all at once, wrestling with them body to body: It is a matter of slight, repeated, tiny encounters. I do not cling on: I merely try them out, going less far than I intended when haggling with myself over them. If I should prove merely up to sparring with them it would be a worthy match, for I only take them on when they are toughest.

But what about the things I have caught others doing? They bedeck themselves in other men’s armour, with not even their fingertips showing. As it is easy for the learned to do on some commonplace subject, they carry through their projected work with bits of what was written in ancient times, patched together higgledy-piggledy. In the case of those who wish to hide their borrowings and pass them off as their own, their action is, first and foremost, unjust and mean: they have nothing worthwhile of their own to show off so they try to recommend themselves with someone else’s goods; secondly it is stupid to be satisfied with winning, by cheating, the ignorant approbation of the crowd while losing all credit among men of understanding: their praise alone has any weight, but they look down their noses at our borrowed plasterwork. For my part there is nothing that I would want to do less: I only quote others the better to quote myself.

None of this applies to centos published as such; I have seen some very ingenious ones in my time, including one under the name of Capilupi, not to mention those of the ancients. Their authors show their wits in both this and other ways, as did Justus Lipsius in his Politics, with its industriously interwoven erudition.12

[A] Be that as it may; I mean that whatever these futilities of mine may be, I have no intention of hiding them, any more than I would a bald and grizzled portrait of myself just because the artist had painted not a perfect face but my own. Anyway these are my humours, my opinions: I give them as things which I believe, not as things to be believed. My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow if I am initiated into some new business which changes me. I have not, nor do I desire, enough authority to be believed. I feel too badly taught to teach others.

Now in my home the other day somebody read the previous chapter and told me that I ought to spread myself a bit more on the subject of children’s education. If, My Lady, I did have some competence in this matter I could not put it to better use than to make a present of it to that little man who is giving signs that he is soon to make a gallant sortie out of you. (You are too great-souled to begin other than with a boy.) Having played so large a part in arranging your marriage I have a rightful concern for the greatness and prosperity of all that springs from it, quite apart from that long enjoyment you have had of my service to you, by which I am indeed bound to desire honour, wealth and success to anything that touches on you. But in truth I know nothing about education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.

[C] It is just as in farming: the ploughing which precedes the planting is easy and sure; so is the planting itself: but as soon as what is planted springs to life, the raising of it is marked by a great variety of methods and by difficulty. So too with human beings; it is not much trouble to plant them, but as soon as they are born we take on in order to form them and bring them up a diversity of cares, full of bustle and worry. [A] When they are young they give such slight and obscure signs of their inclinations, while their promises are so false and unreliable, that it is hard to base any solid judgement upon them. [B] Look at Cimon, Themistocles and hundreds of others; think how unlike themselves they used to be! Bear-cubs and puppies manifest their natural inclinations but humans immediately acquire habits, laws and opinions; they easily change or adopt disguises.13

[A] Yet it is so hard to force a child’s natural bent. That explains why, having chosen the wrong route, we toil to no avail and often waste years training children for occupations in which they never achieve anything. All the same my opinion is that, faced by this difficulty, we should always guide them towards the best and most rewarding goals, and that we should attach little importance to those trivial prognostications and foretellings we base on their childish actions. [C] Even Plato seems to me to give too much weight to them in his Republic.

[A] Learning, My Lady, is a great ornament and a useful instrument of wondrous service, especially in those who are fortunate to live in so high an estate as yours. And in truth she does not find her true employment in hands base and vile. She is far more proud to deploy her resources for the conducting of a war, the, the commanding of a nation and the winning of the affection of a prince or of a foreign people than for drawing up dialectical arguments, pleading in a court of appeal or prescribing a mass of pills. And, therefore, My Lady, since I believe you will not overlook this aspect of the education of your children, you who have yourself tasted its sweetness and who belong to a family of authors – for we still possess the writings of those early de Foix, Counts from whom both the present Count, your husband, is descended and you yourself, while your uncle François, the Sieur de Candale, gives birth every day to new ones, which will spread an awareness of this family trait to many later centuries14 – I want to tell you of one thought of mine which runs contrary to normal practice. That is all I am able to contribute to your service in this matter.

The responsibilities of the tutor you give your son (and the results of the education he provides depend on your choice of him) comprise many other elements which I do not touch upon since I have nothing worthwhile to contribute; as for the one subject on which I do undertake to give him my advice, he will only accept what I say insofar as it seems convincing to him. The son of the house is seeking book-learning15 not to make money (for so abject an end is unworthy of the grace and favour of the Muses and anyway has other aims and depends on others) nor for external advantages, but rather for those which are truly his own, those which inwardly enrich and adorn him. Since I would prefer that he turned out to be an able man not an erudite one, I would wish you to be careful to select as guide for him a tutor with a well-formed rather than a well-filled brain. Let both be looked for, but place character and intelligence before knowledge; and let him carry out his responsibilities in a new way.

Teachers are for ever bawling into our ears as though pouring knowledge down through a funnel our task is merely to repeat what we have been told. I would want our tutor to put that right: as soon as the mind in his charge allows it, he should make it show its fettle by appreciating and selecting things – and by distinguishing between them; the tutor should sometimes prepare the way for the boy, sometimes let him do it all on his own. I do not want the tutor to be the only one to choose topics or to do all the talking: when the boy’s turn comes let the tutor listen to his pupil talking. [C] Socrates and then Archesilaus used to make their pupils speak first; they spoke afterwards. ‘Obest plerumque iis qui discere volunt authoritas eorum qui docent.’ [For those who want to learn, the obstacle can often be the authority of those who teach.]16

It is good to make him trot in front of his tutor in order to judge his paces and to judge how far down the tutor needs to go to adapt himself to his ability. If we get that proportion wrong we spoil everything; knowing how to find it and to remain well-balanced within it is one of the most arduous tasks there is. It is the action of a powerful elevated mind to know how to come down to the level of the child and to guide his footsteps. Personally I go uphill more firmly and surely than down.

Those who follow our French practice and undertake to act as schoolmaster for several minds diverse in kind and capacity, using the same teaching and the same degree of guidance for them all, not surprisingly can scarcely find in a whole tribe of children more than one or two who bear fruit from their education.

[A] Let the tutor not merely require a verbal account of what the boy has been taught but the meaning and the substance of it: let him judge how the child has profited from it not from the evidence of his memory but from that of his life. Let him take what the boy has just learned and make him show him dozens of different aspects of it and then apply it to just as many different subjects, in order to find out whether he has really grasped it and made it part of himself, [C] judging the boy’s progress by what Plato taught about education. [A] Spewing up food exactly as you have swallowed it is evidence of a failure to digest and assimilate it; the stomach has not done its job if, during concoction, it fails to change the substance and the form of what it is given.17

Our [B] souls are moved only at second-hand, being shackled and constrained to what is desired by someone else’s ideas; they are captives, enslaved to the authority of what they have been taught. We have been so subjected to leading-reins that we take no free steps on our own. Our drive to be free has been quenched. [C] ‘Nunquam tutelae suae fiunt.’ [They are never free from tutelage.]18 [B] In Pisa I met, in private, a decent man who is such an Aristotelian that the most basic of his doctrines is that the touchstone and the measuring-scale of all sound ideas and of each and every truth lie in their conformity with the teachings of Aristotle, outside of which all is inane and chimerical: Aristotle has seen everything, done everything. When that proposition was taken too widely and unfairly interpreted, for a long time he had a great deal of trouble from the Roman Inquisition.19

[A] Let the tutor pass everything through a filter and never lodge anything in the boy’s head simply by authority, at second-hand. Let the principles of Aristotle not be principles for him any more than those of the Stoics or Epicureans. Let this diversity of judgements be set before him; if he can, he will make a choice: if he cannot then he will remain in doubt. [C] Only fools have made up their minds and are certain:

[Al] Che non men che saper dubbiar m’aggrada. [For doubting pleases me as much as knowing.]20

For if it is by his own reasoning that he adopts the opinions of Xenophon and Plato, they are no longer theirs: they are his. [C] To follow another is to follow nothing: ‘Non sumus sub rege: sibi quisque se vindicet.’ [We are under no king: let each man act freely.]21 Let him at least know what he does know. [A] He should not be learning their precepts but drinking in their humours. If he wants to, let him not be afraid to forget where he got them from, but let him be sure that he knows how to appropriate them. Truth and reason are common to all: they no more belong to the man who first put them into words than to him who last did so. [C] It is no more secundum Platonem than secundum me: Plato and I see and understand it the same way. [A] Bees ransack flowers here and flowers there: but then they make their own honey, which is entirely theirs and no longer thyme or marjoram. Similarly the boy will transform his borrowings; he will confound their forms so that the end-product is entirely his: namely, his judgement, the forming of which is the only aim of his toil, his study and his education.

[C] Let him hide the help he received and put only his achievements on display. Pillagers and borrowers make a parade of what they have bought and built not of what they have filched from others! You never see the ‘presents’ given to a Parliamentary lawyer: what you see are the honours which he obtains for his children, and the families they marry into. Nobody puts his income on show, only his possessions. The profit we possess after study is to have become better and wiser.

[A] As Epicharmus said, that which sees and hears is our understanding; it is our understanding which benefits all, which arranges everything, which acts, which is Master and which reigns.22 We indeed make it into a slave and a coward by not leaving it free to do anything of itself. Which tutor ever asks his pupil what he thinks about [B] rhetoric or grammar or [A] this or that statement of Cicero? They build them into our memory, panelling and all, as though they were oracles, in which letters and syllables constitute the actual substance. [C] ‘Knowing’ something does not mean knowing it by heart; that simply means putting it in the larder of our memory. That which we rightly ‘know’ can be deployed without looking back at the model, without turning our eyes back towards the book. What a wretched ability it is which is purely and simply bookish! Book-learning should serve as an ornament not as a foundation – following the conclusion of Plato that true philosophy consists in resoluteness, faithfulness and purity, whereas the other sciences, which have other aims, are merely cosmetic.

[A] Take Palvel and Pompeo, those excellent dancing-masters when I was young: I would like to have seen them teaching us our steps just by watching them without budging from our seats, like those teachers who seek to give instruction to our understanding without making it dance – [C] or to have seen others teach us how to manage a horse, a pike or a lute, or to sing without practice, as these fellows do who want to teach us to judge well and to speak well but who never give us exercises in judging or speaking. [A] Yet for such an apprenticeship everything we see can serve as an excellent book: some cheating by a page, some stupidity on the part of a lackey, something said at table, all supply new material.

For this purpose mixing with people is wonderfully appropriate. So are visits to foreign lands: but not the way the French nobles do it (merely bringing back knowledge of how many yards long the Pantheon is, or of the rich embroidery on Signora Livia’s knickers); nor the way others do so (knowing how much longer and fatter Nero’s face is on some old ruin over there compared with his face on some comparable medallion) but mainly learning of the humours of those peoples and of their manners, and knocking off our corners by rubbing our brains against other people’s. I would like pupils to be taken abroad from their tenderest years, mainly (so as to kill two birds with one stone) to any neighbouring peoples whose languages, being least like our own, are ones which our tongue cannot get round unless you start bending it young. And, besides, it is a universally received opinion that it is not sensible to bring up a boy in the lap of his parents. Natural affection makes parents too soft, too indulgent – even the wisest of them. They are incapable of either punishing his faults or of bringing him up as roughly and as dangerously as he ought to be. They could not bear to see him riding back from his training all dirty and sweaty, [C] drinking this hot, drinking that cold, [A] nor to see him on a fractious horse, or up against a tough opponent foil in hand, nor with his first arquebus. But there is no other prescription: anyone who wants to be absolutely certain of making a real man of him must not spare his youth and must frequently flout the laws of medicine.

[B] vitamque sub dio et trepidis agat In rebus.

[Let him camp in the open, amidst war’s alarms.]23

[C] Nor is it enough to toughen up his soul: you must also toughen up his muscles.24 The Soul is too hard-pressed if she is not seconded. She has too much to do herself to think of taking on the duties of both. I know how my own soul groans in her fellowship with a body so soft and sensitive to pain and which relies too heavily on her; and I have noticed in my reading that in their writings my moral guides pass off as examples of greatness of soul or strength of mind things which really belong to a tough skin or to strong bones. I have known men, women and children who are so constituted that a good beating means less to them than a pinch does to me, and who stir neither tongue nor eyebrow under the blows. When athletes play the philosopher in endurance it is strength of muscle rather than strength of mind. Now learning to endure toil is learning to endure pain: ‘labor callum obducit dolori’ [toil puts callouses on our minds, against pain].25 Pain and discomfort in training are needed to break him in for the pain and discomfort of dislocated joints, of the stone and of cauterizings – and of dungeons and tortures as well for, seeing the times we live in, those two may concern the good man as much as the bad. We are experiencing that now: whoever bears arms against Law threatens the best of men with the cat-o’-nine-tails and the rope.

[A] And then the authority of the tutor, which must be sovereign for the boy, is hampered and interrupted by the presence of his parents. Add to which the respect paid to the boy by his household and his awareness of the resources and dignity of his family are not in my opinion trivial disadvantages at that particular age.

Yet in the school of conversation among men I have often noticed a perversion: instead of learning about others we labour only to teach them about ourselves and are more concerned to sell our own wares than to purchase new ones. In our commerce with others, silence and modesty are most useful qualities. Train the lad to be sparing and reticent about his accomplishments (when he eventually has any) and he will not take umbrage when unlikely tales and daft things are related in his presence – for it is unmannerly and impolite to criticize everything which is not to our liking. [C] Let him be satisfied with correcting himself without being seen to reproach others for doing things he would not do himself and without flouting public morality: ‘Licet sapere sine pompa, sine invidia.’ [One should be wise without ostentation or ill-will.]26 Let him shun any semblance of impolitely laying down the law, as well as that puerile ambition to wish to appear clever by being different or to earn a name for criticizing or flaunting novelties. It is only appropriate for great poets freely to break the rules of poetry: similarly it is intolerable for any but great and illustrious souls to give themselves unaccustomed prerogatives: – ‘Si quid Socrates et Aristippus contra morem et consuetudinem fecerint, idem sibi ne arbitretur licere: magnis enim illi et divinis bonis hanc licentiam assequebantur.’ [Although Socrates and Aristippus sometimes flouted normal rules and customs, one should not feel free to do the same: they obtained that privilege by qualities great and sublime.]27

[A] The boy will be taught not to get into a discussion or a quarrel except when he finds a sparring-partner worth wrestling with – and even then not to employ all the holds which might help him but merely those which help him most. Teach him a certain refinement in sorting out and selecting his arguments, with an affection for relevance and so for brevity.

Above all let him be taught to throw down his arms and surrender to truth as soon as he perceives it, whether that truth is born at his rival’s doing or within himself from some change in his ideas. He will never be up in a pulpit reading out some prescribed text: he only has to defend a case when when it has his approbation. He is not going to take up the kind of profession in which freedom to think again, or to admit mistakes, has been traded for ready cash. [C] ‘Neque, ut omnia que præscripta et imperata sint defendat, necessitate ulla cogitur.’ [He is under no obligation to support all precepts and assertions.]28

If the tutor’s complexion is like mine he will so form the will of the boy that he will become a loyal subject of his monarch as well as a devoted and brave one, but he will throw cold water on any desire to be attached to him except through public service. Apart from several other disadvantages which cripple our freedom, when a man’s judgement is pledged and purchased by private obligations, either it is partial and less free or else he cart be taxed with unwisdom and ingratitude. A courtier can have neither the right to speak nor the desire to think other than favourably of a Master who from among so many thousands of his subjects has chosen to favour him with his own hand and to elevate him. Not unreasonably such favour and preferment will corrupt his freedom and dazzle him. That is why what that lot have to say on the topic is habitually at variance with all others in the State and little to be trusted.

[A] As for our pupil’s talk, let his virtue and his sense of right and wrong shine through it [C] and have no guide but reason. [A] Make him understand that confessing an error which he discovers in his own argument even when he alone has noticed it is an act of justice and integrity, which are the main qualities he pursues; [C] stubbornness and rancour are vulgar qualities, visible in common souls whereas to think again, to change one’s mind and to give up a bad case in the heat of the argument are rare qualities showing strength and wisdom.

[A] When in society the boy will be told to keep his eyes open: I find that the front seats are normally taken as a right by the less able men and that great inherited wealth is hardly ever associated with ability; while at the top end of the table the talk was about the beauty of a tapestry or the bouquet of the malmsey, I have known many witty remarks at the other end pass unnoticed. He will sound out the capacity of each person: of a herdsman, a mason, a wayfarer: he must use what he can get, take what a man has to sell and see that nothing goes wasted: even other people’s stupidity and weakness serve to instruct him. By noting each man’s endowments and habits, there will be engendered in him a desire for the good ones and a contempt for the bad.

Put into his mind a decent, careful spirit of inquiry about everything: he will go and see anything nearby which is of singular quality: a building, a fountain, a man, the site of an old battle, a place which Caesar or Charlemagne passed through:

[C] Quœ tellus sit lenta gelu, quæ putris ab œstu, Ventus in Italiam quis bene vela ferat.

[what land is benumbed with the cold, which dusty with heat, which favourable winds blow sails towards Italian coasts.]29

[A] He will inquire into the habits, means and alliances of various monarchs, things most pleasant to study and most useful to know. In his commerce with men I mean him to include – and that principally – those who live only in the memory of books. By means of history he will frequent those great souls of former years. If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time: it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price – [C] the only study, Plato said, which the Spartans kept as their share.30 [A] Under this heading what profit will he not get out of reading the Lives of our favourite Plutarch! But let our tutor remember the object of his trust, which is less to stamp [C] the date of the fall of Carthage on the boy as the behaviour of Hannibal and Scipio; less to stamp [A] the name of the place where Marcellus died as how his death there showed him unworthy of his task. Let him not so much learn what happened as judge what happened. [C] That, if you ask me, is the subject to which our wits are applied in the most diverse of manners. I have read hundreds of things in Livy which another has not found there. Plutarch found in him hundreds of things which I did not see (and which perhaps the author never put there). For some Livy is purely a grammatical study; for others he is philosophy dissected, penetrating into the most abstruse parts of our nature. [A] There are in Plutarch developed treatises very worth knowing, for he is to my mind the master-craftsman at that job; but there are also hundreds of points which he simply touches on: he merely flicks his fingers towards the way we should go if we want to, or at times he contents himself with a quick shot at the liveliest part of the subject: those passages we must rip out and put out on display. [B] For example that one saying of his, ‘that the inhabitants of Asia were slaves of one tyrant because they were incapable of pronouncing one syllable: NO,’ may have furnished La Boëtie with the matter and moment of his book De la Servitude volontaire.31 [A] Seeing Plutarch select a minor action in the life of a man, or an apparently unimportant saying, is worth a treatise in itself. It is a pity that intelligent men are so fond of brevity: by it their reputation is certainly worth all the more, but we are worth all the less. Plutarch would rather we vaunted his judgement than his knowledge, and he would rather leave us craving for more than bloated. He realized that you could say too much even on a good subject, and that Alexandridas rightly criticized the orator whose address to the ephors was good but too long, saying, ‘Oh, Stranger, you say what you should, but not the way that you should!’32 [C] People whose bodies are too thin pad them out: those whose matter is too slender pad it out too, with words.

[A] Frequent commerce with the world can be an astonishing source of light for a man’s judgement. We are all cramped and confined inside ourselves: we can see no further than the end of our noses. When they asked Socrates where he came from he did not say ‘From Athens’, but ‘From the world’.33 He, whose thoughts were fuller and wider, embraced the universal world as his City, scattered his acquaintances, his fellowship and his affections throughout the whole human race, not as we do who only look at what lies right in front of us. When frost attacks the vines in my village my parish priest talks of God being angry against the human race: in his judgement the Cannibals are already dying of the croup! At the sight of our civil wars, who fails to exclaim that the world is turned upside down and that the Day of Judgement has got us by the throat, forgetting that many worse events have been known in the past and that, in thousands of parts of the world, they are still having a fine old time! [B] Personally I am surprised that our wars turn out to be so mild and gentle, given their unpunished licentiousness. [A] When the hail beats down on your head the entire hemisphere seems stormy and tempestuous. Like that peasant of Savoy who said that if only that silly King of France had known how to use his luck properly he could have become the Duke’s chief steward eventually! His mind could not conceive of any degree of grandeur above that of his Duke. [C] We are all caught in that same error without realizing it: a harmful error of great consequence. [A] Only a man who can picture in his mind the mighty idea of Mother Nature in her total majesty; who can read in her countenance a variety so general and so unchanging and then pick out therein not merely himself but an entire kingdom as a tiny, feint point: only he can reckon things at their real size. This great world of ours (which for some is only one species within a generic group) is the looking-glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves from the right slant. To sum up then, I want it to be the book which our pupil studies. Such a variety of humours, schools of thought, opinions, laws and customs teach us to judge sanely of our own and teach our judgement to acknowledge its shortcomings and natural weakness. And that is no light apprenticeship. So many revolutions, so many changes in the fortune of a state, teach us to realize that our own fortune is no great miracle. So many names, so many victories and conquests lying buried in oblivion, make it ridiculous to hope that we shall immortalize our names by rounding up ten armed brigands or by storming some hen-house or other known only by its capture. The proud arrogance of so many other nations’ pomp and the high-flown majesty of the grandeur of so many courts strengthen our gaze to look firmly and assuredly, without blinking, at the brilliance of our own. So many millions upon millions of men dead and buried before us encourage us not to be afraid of going to join such a goodly company in the world to come.

And so on.

[C] Our life, said Pythagoras,34 is like the vast throng assembled for the Olympic Games: some use their bodies there to win fame from the contests; others come to trade, to make a profit; still others – and they are by no means the worst – seek no other gain than to be spectators, seeing how everything is done and why; they watch how other men live so that they can judge and regulate their own lives. [A] All the most profitable treatises of philosophy (which ought to be the touchstone and measure of men’s actions) can be properly reduced to examples. Teach the boy this:

[B] quid fas optare, quid asper Utile nummus habet; patriæ charisque propinquis Quantum elargiri deceat: quem te Deus esse Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re; Quid sumus, aut quidnam victuri gignimur;

[what he may justly wish for; that money is hard to earn and should be used properly; the extent of our duty to our country and to our dear ones; what God orders you to be, and what place He has assigned to you in the scheme of things; what we are and what we shall win when we have overcome;]35

teach him [A] what knowing and not knowing means (which ought to be the aim of study); what valour is, and justice and temperance; what difference there is between ordinate and inordinate aspirations; slavery and due subordination; licence and liberty; what are the signs of true and solid happiness; how far we should fear death, pain and shame:

[B] Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem;

[How we can flee from hardships and how we can endure them;]36

[A] what principles govern our emotions and the physiology of so many and diverse stirrings within us. For it seems to me that the first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die… and to live. [C] Among the liberal arts, start with the art which produces liberal men. All of them are of some service in the regulation and practice of our lives, just as everything else is; but let us select the one which leads there directly and professes to do so.

If we knew how to restrict our life’s appurtenances to their right and natural limits, we would discover that the greater part of the arts and sciences as now practised are of no practical use to us, and that, even in those which are useful, there are useless wastes and chasms which we would do better to leave where they are; following what Socrates taught, we should set limits to our study of subjects which lack utility.

[A] sapere aude,Incipe: vivendi qui recte prorogat horam, Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum.

[Dare to be wise. Start now. To put off the moment when you will start to live justly is to act like the bumpkin who would cross but who waits for the stream to dry up; time flows and will flow for ever, as an ever-rolling stream.]37

There is great folly in teaching our children

[B] quid moveant Pisces, animosaque signa Leonis, Lotus et Hesperia quid Capricomus aqua,

[what influences stem from Pisces and the lively constellation of Leo or from Capricorn which plunges into the Hesperian Sea,]38

about the heavenly bodies [A] and the motions of the Eighth Sphere before they know about their own properties.

[What do the Pleiades or the Herdsman matter to me!]39

[C] Writing to Anaximenes, Pythagoras asked: ‘What mind am I supposed to bring to the secrets of the heavens, having death and slavery ever present before my eyes?’ (At that time the kings of Persia were preparing for war against his country.)40 We could all ask the same: ‘Assaulted as I am by ambition, covetousness, rashness and superstition, and having such enemies to life as that within me, should I start wondering about the motions of the Universe?’

[A] Only after showing the boy what will make him a wiser and a better man will you explain to him the elements of Logic, Physics, Geometry and Rhetoric. Since his judgement has already been formed he will soon get to the bottom of any science he chooses. His lessons will sometimes be discussion, sometimes reading from books; at times the tutor will provide him with extracts from authors suited to his purposes: at others the tutor will pick out the marrow and chew it over for him. If the tutor is not sufficiently familiar with those books to find the discourses in them which serve his purposes you could associate with him a scholar who could furnish him, as the need arises, with material for him to arrange and dispense to the growing boy.

Who can doubt that such lessons will be more natural and easy than those in Theodore Gaza,41 whose precepts are prickly and nasty, and whose words are hollow and fleshless, with nothing to get hold of or to quicken the mind. Here then is nourishment for the soul to bite on. The fruit is incomparably more plentiful and will ripen sooner.

Oddly, things have now reached such a state that even among men of intelligence philosophy means something fantastical and vain, without value or usefulness, [C] both in opinion and practice. [A] The cause lies in chop-logic which has captured all the approaches. It is a great mistake to portray Philosophy with a haughty, frowning, terrifying face, or as inaccessible to the young. Whoever clapped that wan and frightening mask on her face! There is nothing more lovely, more happy and gay – I almost said more amorously playful. What she preaches is all feast and fun. A sad and gloomy mien shows you have mistaken her address.

Some philosophers were sitting together in the temple at Delphi one day. ‘Either I am mistaken,’ said Demetrius the grammarian, ‘or your calm happy faces show that you are not having an important discussion.’ One of them, Herakleon of Megara, retorted: ‘Furrowed brows are for grammarians telling us whether ballō takes two ls in the future, researching into the derivation of the comparatives keiron and beltion and of the superlatives keiriston and beltiston: philosophical discussions habitually make men happy and joyful not frowning and sad.’42

[B] Deprendas animi tormenta latentis in œgro Corpore, deprendas et gaudia: sumit utrumque Inde habitum facies.

[You can detect in a sickly body the hidden torments of the mind; you can detect her joys as well: the face reflects them both.]43

[A] The soul which houses philosophy must by her own sanity make for a sound body. Her tranquillity and ease must glow from her; she must fashion her outward bearing to her mould, arming it therefore with gracious pride, a spritely active demeanour and a happy welcoming face. [C] The most express sign of wisdom is unruffled joy: like all in the realms above the Moon, her state is ever serene. [A] Baroco and Baralipton have devotees reeking of filth and smoke.44 She does not. They know her merely by hearsay. Why, her task is to make the tempests of the soul serene and to teach hunger and fever how to laugh – not by imaginary epicycles but by reasons, [C] natural and palpable.45 Her aim is virtue, which is not (as they teach in schools) perched on the summit of a steep mountain, rough and inaccessible. Those who have drawn nigh her hold that on the contrary she dwells on a beautiful plateau, fertile and strewn with flowers; from there she clearly sees all things beneath her; but if you know the road you can happily make your way there by shaded grassy paths, flower-scented, smooth and gently rising, like tracks in the vaults of heaven.46

This highest virtue is fair, triumphant, loving, as delightful as she is courageous, a professed and implacable foe to bitterness, unhappiness, fear and constraint, having Nature for guide, Fortune and Pleasure for her companions: those who frequent her not have, after their own weakness, fashioned an absurd portrait of her, sad, shrill, sullen, threatening and glowering, perching her on a rocky peak, all on her own among the brambles – a spectre to terrify people.

This tutor of mine, who knows that his duty is to fill the will of his pupil with at least as much love as reverence for virtue, will know how to tell him that our poets are following commonplace humours: he will make him realize that the gods place sweat on the paths to the chambers of Venus rather than of Pallas.47 And when he comes to know his own mind and is faced with a choice between Bradamante to court and enjoy or Angelica48 – one with her natural beauty, active, noble, virile though not mannish, contrasting with the other’s beauty, soft, dainty, delicate and all artifice; the one disguised as a youth with a shining helmet on her head, the other robed as a maiden with pearls in her headdress: then his very passion will be deemed manly if he chooses flat contrary to that effeminate Phrygian shepherd.49 The tutor will then be teaching him a new lesson: what makes true virtue highly valued is the ease, usefulness and pleasure we find in being virtuous: so far from it being difficult, children can be virtuous as well as adults; the simple, as well as the clever. The means virtue uses is control not effort. Socrates, the foremost of her darlings, deliberately renounced effort so as to glide along with her easy natural progress. She is a Mother who nurtures human pleasures: by making them just she makes them sure and pure; by making them moderate they never pant for breath or lose their savour; by cutting away those which she denies us she sharpens our appreciation of those she leaves us – an abundance of all those which Nature wills for us; Mother-like, she provides them not until we are satiated but until we are satisfied (unless, that is, we claim that her rule is the enemy of pleasure because she ordains drinking without drunkenness, eating without indigestion, and sex without the pox). If Virtue should lack the ordinary share of good fortune, she evades or does without it, or else she forges a private happiness of her own, neither floating nor changeable. She knows how to be rich, powerful and learned and how to lie on a perfumed couch; she does love life; she does love beauty, renown and health. But her own peculiar office is to know how to enjoy those good things with proper moderation and how to lose them with constancy: an office much more noble than grievous; without it the whole course of our life becomes unnatural, troubled, deformed; then you can indeed tie it to those rocky paths, those brambles and those spectres.

Were our pupil’s disposition so bizarre that he would rather hear a tall story than the account of a great voyage or a wise discussion; that at the sound of the drum calling the youthful ardour of his comrades to arms he would turn aside for the drum of a troop of jugglers; that he would actually find it no more delightful and pleasant to return victorious covered with the dust of battle than after winning a prize for tennis or dancing: then I know no remedy except that his tutor should quickly strangle him when nobody is looking or apprentice him to make fairy-cakes in some goodly town – even if he were the heir of a Duke – following Plato’s precept that functions should be allocated not according to the endowments of men’s fathers but the endowments of their souls.50

[A] Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?

[B] Udum et molle lutum est; nunc nunc properandus et acri Fingendus sine fine rota.

[The clay is soft and malleable. Quick! hurry to fashion it on that potter’s wheel which is for ever spinning.]

[A] They teach us to live when our life is over. Dozens of students have caught the pox before they reach the lesson on temperance in their Aristotles. [C] Cicero said that even were he to live two men’s lives he would never find enough time to study the lyric poets.51 I find these chop-logic merchants even more gloomily useless. Our boy is too busy for that: to school-learning he owes but the first fifteen or sixteen years of his life: the rest is owed to action. Let us employ a time so short on things which it is necessary to know. [A] Get rid of those thorny problems of dialectics – they are trivial: our lives are never amended by them; take the simple arguments of philosophy: learn how to select the right ones and to apply them. They are easier to grasp than a tale in Boccaccio: a boy can do it as soon as he leaves his nanny; it is much easier than learning to read and write. Philosophy has arguments for Man at birth as well as in senility.

I share Plutarch’s conviction52 that Aristotle never spent much of the time of his great pupil Alexander on the art of syllogisms nor on the principles of geometry: he taught him, rather, sound precepts concerning valour, prowess, greatness of soul and temperance, as well as that self-assurance which fears nothing. With such an armoury he sent him still a child to conquer the empire of the world with merely thirty thousand foot-soldiers, four thousand horsemen and forty-two thousand crowns. As for the other arts and sciences, Plutarch says that he held them in esteem, praising their excellence and their nobility; but whatever pleasure he found in them he did not allow himself to be surprised by a desire to practise them himself.

[B] Petite hinc, juvenesque senesque,

Finem animo certum, miserisque viatica canis.

[Seek here, young men and old, a lasting purpose for your mind and a provision for white-haired wretchedness.]53

[C] That is what Epicurus says at the beginning of his letter to Meniceus: ‘Let the youngest not reject philosophy nor the oldest tire of it. Whoever does otherwise seems to be saying that the season for living happily has not yet come or is already past.’54

[A] Despite all this I do not want to imprison the boy.55 I do not want him to be left to the melancholy humour of a furious schoolmaster. I do not want to corrupt his mind as others do by making his work a torture, slaving away for fourteen or fifteen hours a day like a porter. [C] When you see him over-devoted to studying his books because of a solitary or melancholy complexion, it would not be good I find to encourage him in it: it unfits boys for mixing in polite society and distracts them from better things to do. And how many men have I known in my time made as stupid as beasts by an indiscreet hunger for knowledge! Carneades was turned so mad by it that he could not find time to tend to his hair or his nails.56

[A] Nor do I wish to have his noble manners ruined by the uncouthness or barbarity of others. In antiquity French wisdom was proverbially good at the outset, but lacking in staying power.57 And truly, still now, nothing is more gentlemanly than little French children; but they normally deceive the hopes placed in them, being in no ways outstanding once they are grown up. I have heard men of wisdom maintain that it is those colleges which parents send children to – and we have them in abundance – which make them so stupid.

For our boy any place and any time can be used to study: his room, a garden; his table, his bed; when alone or in company; morning and evening. His chief study will be philosophy, that Former of good judgement and character who is privileged to be concerned with everything.

It was an orator Isocrates who, being begged to talk about his art at a feast, replied (rightly we all think): ‘What I can do, this is no time for: what this is time for, I cannot do!’58 To present harangues and rhetorical debates to a company gathered for laughter and good cheer would be to mix together things too discordant.

You can say the same of all the other disciplines, but not of that part of Philosophy which treats of Man, his tasks and his duties: by the common consent of all the wise, she should not be barred from sports nor feastings seeing that commerce with her is sweet. And Plato having invited her to his Banquet, we can see how she entertained the guests in a relaxed manner appropriate to time and place even when treating one of her most sublime and most salutary themes:59

Æque pauperibus prodest, locupletibus æque; Et, neglecta, æque pueris senibüsque nocebit.

[She is equally helpful to the poor and the rich: neglect her, and she equally harms the young and the old.]60

In this way he will certainly lie fallow much less than do others. Now we can take three times as many steps strolling about a long-gallery and still feel less tired than on a walk to a definite goal: so too our lessons will slip by unnoticed if we apparently happen upon them, as, restricted to neither time or place, they intermingle with all our activities. The games and sports themselves will form a good part of his studies: racing, wrestling, [C] music-making, [A] dancing, hunting and the handling of arms and horses. I want his outward graces, his social ease [C] and his physical dexterity [A] to be moulded step by step with his soul. We are not bringing up a soul; we are not bringing up a body: we are bringing up a man. We must not split him into two. We must not bring up one without the other but, as Plato said, lead them abreast like a pair of horses harnessed together to the same shaft. [C] And does not Plato when you listen to him appear to devote more time and care to exercising the body, convinced that the mind may be exercised with the body but not vice versa?

[A] This education is to be conducted, moreover, with a severe gentleness, not as it usually is.61 Instead of children being invited to letters as guests, all they are shown in truth are cruelty and horror. Get rid of violence and force: as I see it, nothing so fundamentally stultifies and bastardizes a well-born nature.

If you want the boy to loathe disgrace and punishment do not harden him to them. Harden him to sweltering heat and to cold, to wind and sun and to such dangers as he must learn to treat with contempt. Rid him of all softness and delicacy about dress and about sleeping, eating and drinking. Get him used to anything. Do not turn him into a pretty boy or a ladies’ boy but into a boy who is fresh and vigorous. [C] Boy, man and now old man, I have always thought this. But I have always disliked, among other things, the way our colleges are governed. Their failure would have been less harmful, perhaps, if they had leant towards indulgence. They are a veritable gaol for captive youth. By punishing boys for depravity before they are depraved, you make them so.

Go there during lesson time: you will hear nothing but the screaming of tortured children and of masters drunk with rage. What a way to awaken a taste for learning in those tender timorous souls, driving them to it with terrifying scowls and fists armed with canes! An iniquitous and pernicious system. And besides (as Quintilian justly remarked)62 such imperious authority can lead to dreadful consequences – especially given our form of flogging.

How much more appropriate to strew their classrooms with leaf and flower than with blood-stained birch-rods. I would have portraits of Happiness there and Joy, with Flora and the Graces, as Speucippus the philosopher did in his school.63

When they have something to gain, make it enjoyable. Health-giving foods should be sweetened for a child: harmful ones made to taste nasty.

It is amazing how concerned Plato is in his Laws with the amusements and pastimes of the youths of his City and how he dwells on their races, sports, singing, capering and dancing, the control and patronage of which has been entrusted, he said, in antiquity to the gods, to Apollo, the Muses and Minerva. His care extends to over a hundred precepts for his gymnasia, yet he spends little time over book-learning; the only thing he seems specifically to recommend poetry for is the music.64

[A] In our manners and behaviour any strangeness and oddness are to be avoided as enemies of easy mixing in society – [C] and as monstrosities. Who would not have been deeply disturbed by Alexander’s steward Demophon whose complexion made him sweat in the shade and shiver in the sun? [A] I have known men who fly from the smell of apples rather than from gunfire; others who are terrified of a mouse, who vomit at the sight of cream or when a feather mattress is shaken up (like Germanicus who could not abide cocks or their crowing). Some occult property may be involved in this, but, if you ask me, if you set about it young enough you could stamp it out.

One victory my education has achieved over me (though not without some trouble, it is true) is that my appetite can be brought to accept without distinction any of the things people eat and drink except beer. While the body is still supple it should, for that very reason, be made pliant to all manners and customs. Provided that he can restrain his appetites and his will, you should not hesitate to make the young man suited to all peoples and companies, even, should the need arise, to immoderation and excess.

[C] His practice should conform to custom. [A] He should be able to do anything but want to do only what is good. (The very philosophers do not approve of Calesthenes for falling from grace with his master Alexander the Great, by declining to match drink for drink with him. He will laugh, fool about and be unruly with his Prince.) I would want him to outstrip his fellows in vigour and firmness even during the carousing and that he should refrain from wrongdoing not because he lacks strength or knowledge but because he does not want to do it. [C] ‘Multum interest utrum peccare aliquis nolit aut nesciat.’ [There is a great difference between not wanting to do evil and not knowing how to.]65

[A] My intention was to honour a nobleman who is as far removed from such excesses as any man in France when I asked him, in the presence of guests, how many times in his life he had had to get drunk while serving the King in Germany. He took it in the right spirit and said he had done it three times; and he told me about them. (I have known people who have run into real difficulties when frequenting that nation because they lacked this ability.)

I have often noted with great astonishment the extraordinary character of Alcibiades who, without impairing his health, could so readily adapt to diverse manners: at times he could outdo Persians in pomp and luxury; at others, Spartans in austerity and frugal living.66 He was a reformed man in Sparta, yet equally pleasure-seeking in Ionia:

Omnis Aristippum decuit color, et status, et res.

[On Aristippus any colour, rank or condition was becoming.]

Thus would I fashion my pupil:

quem duplici panno patientia velat Mirabor, vitæ via si conversa decebit, Personámque feret non inconcinnus utramqué.

[One who is patiently clad in rags yet could also adapt to the opposite extreme, playing both roles becomingly: him I will admire admire.]67

Such are my lessons.68 [C] For him who draws most profit from them, they are acts, not facts. To see his deeds is to hear his word: to hear his word is to see his deeds. ‘God forbid,’ says someone in Plato,69 ‘that philosophy should mean learning a lot of things and then talking about the arts: ‘Hanc amplissimam omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinam vita magis quam literis persequuti sunt’. [The fullest art of all – that of living good lives – they acquired more from life than from books.]70

Prince Leon of the Phliasians inquired of Heraclides of Pontus which art or science he professed. ‘I know none of them’, he replied; ‘I am a philosopher.’ Diogenes was reproached for being ignorant yet concerned with philosophy. ‘My concern is all the more appropriate,’ he replied. When Hegesias begged him to read a certain book he replied, ‘How amusing of you. You prefer real figs to painted ones, so why not true and natural deeds to written ones?’71

My pupil will not say his lesson: he will do it. He will rehearse his lessons in his actions. You will then see whether he is wise in what he takes on, good and just in what he does, gracious and sound in what he says, resilient in illnesses, modest in his sports, temperate in his pleasures, [A] indifferent to the taste of his food, be it fish or flesh, wine or water; [C] orderly in domestic matters: ‘Qui disciplinam suam, non ostentationem scientiæ, sed legem vitæ putet, quique obtemperet ipse sibi, et decretis pareat’ [as a man who knows how to make his education into a rule of life not a means of showing off; who can control himself and obey his own principles].72 The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives.

[A] To a man who asked him why the Spartans never drew up written rules of bravery and gave them to their children, Zeuxidamus replied that they wished to accustom them to deeds not [C] words. [A] After73 fifteen or sixteen years compare with that one of our college latinizers who has spent precisely as long simply learning to talk!

The world is nothing but chatter: I have never met a man who does not say more than he should rather than less. Yet half of our life is spent on that; they keep us four or five years learning the meanings of words and stringing them into sentences; four or five more in learning how to arrange them into a long composition, divided into four parts or five; then as many again in plaiting and weaving them into verbal subtleties.

Let us leave all that to those who make it their express profession.

When I was travelling to Orleans one day, on the plain this side of Cléry I met two college tutors who were coming from Bordeaux; there was about fifty yards between them; I could also make out some troops further away still, led by their officer (who was the Count de la Rochefoucault). One of my men asked the first of these tutors who was ‘that gentleman coming behind him’? The tutor had not noticed the party following behind them and thought they were talking about his companion: ‘He is not a gentleman,’ he amusingly replied, ‘but a grammarian. And I am a logician.’ Now we who, on the contrary, are trying to form a gentleman not a grammarian or a logician should let them waste their own time: we have business to do elsewhere. Provided that our student be well furnished with things, words will follow only too easily: if they do not come easily, then he can drag them out slowly.

I sometimes hear people who apologize for not being able to say what they mean, maintaining that their heads are so full of fine things that they cannot deliver them for want of eloquence. That is moonshine. Do you know what I think? It is a matter of shadowy notions coming to them from some unformed concepts which they are unable to untangle and to clarify in their minds: consequently they cannot deliver them externally. They themselves do not yet know what they mean. Just watch them giving a little stammer as they are about to deliver their brain-child: you can tell that they have labouring-pains not at childbirth [C] but during conception! [A] They are merely licking an imperfect lump into shape.74 For my part I maintain – [C] and Socrates is decisive – [A] that whoever has one clear living thought in his mind will deliver it even in Bergamask.75 Or if he is dumb he will do so by signs.

Verbaque prævisam rem non invita sequentur.

[Once you have mastered the things the words will come freely.]76

And as another said just as poetically though in prose: ‘Cum res animum occupavere, verba ambiunt.’ [When things have taken hold of the mind, the words come crowding forth.]77 [C] And another one: ‘Ipsae res verba rapiunt.’ [The things themselves ravish the words.]78

[A] ‘But he does not know what an ablative is, a conjunctive, a substantive: he knows no grammar!’ Neither does his footman or a Petit-Pont fishwife79 yet they will talk you to death if you let them and will probably no more stumble over the rules of their own dialect than the finest Master of Arts in France.

‘But he knows no rhetoric nor how to compose an opening captatio benevolentiae for his gentle reader!’80 He does not need to know that. All those fine ‘colours of rhetoric’ are in fact easily eclipsed by the light of pure and naïve truth. Those elegant techniques (as Afer shows in Tacitus) merely serve to entertain the masses who are unable to [C] take [A] heavier solid meat.81

Ambassadors from Samos came to King Cleomenes of Sparta with a long prepared speech to persuade him to go to war against Polycrates the Tyrant. He let them have their say and then replied: ‘As for your preamble and preface, I no longer remember it; nor of course your middle bit. As for your conclusion, I will do none of it.’82 An excellent answer, it seems to me, with a blow on the nose of those speechifiers.

[B] And what about this other case. The Athenians had to choose between two architects to take charge of a large building project. The first one was the more fly and presented himself with a fine prepared speech about the job to be done; he won the favour of the common people. The other architect merely spoke two or three words: ‘Gentlemen of Athens: what he said, I will do.’83

[A] At the height of his eloquence Cicero moved many into ecstasies of astonishment. But Cato merely laughed:‘Quite an amusing consul we have,’ he said.84

Now a useful saying or a pithy remark is always welcome wherever it is put. [C] If it is not good in the context of what comes before it or after it, it is good in itself. [A] I am not one of those who hold that good scansion makes a good poem: let the poet lengthen a short syllable if he wants to. That simply does not count. If the invention of his subject-matter is happy and if his wit and judgement have done their jobs, then I shall say: ‘Good poet: but bad versifier.’

Emunctæ naris, durus componere versus.

[He has the flair, though his verses are harsh.]

Take his work (says Horace) and pull its measured verse apart at the seams –

[B] Tempora certa modosque, et quod prius ordine verbum est, Posterius facias, præponens ultima primis, Invenias etiam disjecti membra poetæ

[Take away rhythm and measure; change the order of the words putting the first last and the last first: you will still find the poet in those scattered remains] –

[A] he will still not belie himself for all that: even bits of it will be beautiful.85

That is what Menander replied when the day came for his promised comedy and people chided him for not yet putting it in hand: ‘It is already composed,’ he said. ‘All I have to do is to put it into verse.’86 Having thought the things through and arranged them in his mind, he attached little importance to the remainder. Since Ronsard and Du Bellay have brought renown to our French poetry, every little apprentice I know is doing more or less as they do, using noble words and copying their cadences. [C] ‘Plus sonat quam valet.’ [‘More din than sense.’]87 [A] Ordinary people think there never have been so many poets. But easy as it has proved to copy their rhymes they all fall short when it comes to imitating the rich descriptions of the one and the delicate invention of the other.

‘Yes. But what will he do when they harass him with some sophistical syllogistic subtlety:

Bacon makes you drink; Drinking quenches your thirst: Therefore bacon quenches your thirst?

[C] Let him simply laugh at it: it is cleverer to laugh at it than to answer it. Or let him borrow Aristippus’s amusing rejoinder: ‘Why should I unravel that? It is bad enough all knotted up!’ Someone challenged Cleanthes with dialectical trickeries; Chrysippus said to him: ‘Go and play those conjuring tricks on children: do not interrupt the serious thoughts of a grown-up.’88 [A] If this verbal jugglery – [C] ‘contorta et aculeata sophismata’ [these contorted prickly sophisms]89 – [A] should persuade him to accept an untruth, that is dangerous: but if they do not result in action and simply move him to laughter, I really do not see why he should pay attention to them.

Some people are so daft that they will go a mile or so out of their way to hunt for a good word: [C] ‘aut qui non verba rebus aptant, sed res extrinsecus arcessunt, quibus verba conveniant!’ [they do not fit words to things but look for irrelevant things to fit to their words!] Or again: ‘Sunt qui alicujus verbi decore placentis vocentur ad id quod non proposuerant scribere.’ [There are authors who are led by the beauty of some attractive word to write what they never intended.]90 I myself am more ready to distort a fine saying in order to patch it on to me than to distort the thread of my argument to go in search of one.

[A] It is, on the contrary, for words to serve and to follow: if French cannot get there, let Gascon do so. I want things to dominate, so filling the thoughts of the hearer that he does not even remember the words. I like the kind of speech which is simple and natural, the same on paper as on the lip; speech which is rich in matter, sinewy, brief and short; [C] not so much titivated and refined as forceful and brusque –

Haec demum sapiet dictio, quae feriet

[The good style of speaking is the kind which strikes home]91 –

[A] gnomic rather than diffuse, far from affectation, uneven, disjointed and bold – let each bit form a unity – not schoolmasterly, not monkish, not legalistic, but soldierly, rather as Sallust described Julius Caesar’s [C] (though I do not quite see why he did so).92 [B] I like to imitate the unruly negligence shown by French youth in the way they are seen to wear their clothes,93 [C] with their mantles bundled round their neck, their capes tossed over one shoulder or [B] with a stocking pulled awry: it manifests a pride contemptuous of the mere externals of dress and indifferent to artifice. But I find it even better applied to speech. [C] All affectation is unbecoming in a courtier, especially given the hearty freedom of the French: and under a monarchy every gentleman is inevitably schooled in court manners. So we do well to lean towards the careless and natural. [A] I have no love for textures where the joins and seams all show (just as you ought not to be able to count the ribs or the veins in a beautiful body). [C] ‘Quae veritati operam dat oratio, incomposita sit et simplex.’ [Speech devoted to truth should be straightforward and plain.]94 ‘Quis accurate loquitur, nisi qui vult putide loqui?’ [Who can speak carefully unless he wants to sound affected?]95

When eloquence draws attention to itself it does wrong by the substance of things.

Just as in dress it is the sign of a petty mind to seek to draw attention by some personal or unusual fashion, so too in speech; the search for new expressions and little-known words derives from an adolescent schoolmasterish ambition. If only I could limit myself to words used in Les Halles in Paris! That grammarian Aristophanes did not know the first thing about it when he criticized Epicurus for his simple words and for having perspicuity of language as his sole rhetorical aim.96

To imitate speech is easy: an entire nation can do it: to imitate judgement and the research for your material takes rather more time! Most readers think similar styles, when they find them, clothe similar bodies. But you cannot borrow strength or sinews: you can borrow mantles and finery. Most of the people who haunt my company talk like these Essays:97 I cannot tell whether they think like them…

[A] Athenians (says Plato) take copious and elegant speech as their share; Spartans, brevity; Cretans, fecundity of thought not speech – and they are the best.98 Zeno said that he had two sorts of followers: those he termed philologous, who cared for real learning (they were his favourites) and those he termed logophilous, whose concern was with words.99

That does not mean that speaking well is not a fine thing or a good thing, but that it is not as good as we make it out to be. It irritates me that our life is taken up by it. I would prefer first to know my own language well and then that of the neighbours with whom I have regular dealings.

There is no doubt that Greek and Latin are fine and great accomplishments; but they are bought too dear. I will tell you a cheaper way of buying them: it was assayed on me. Anyone is welcome to use it. My late father, after having made all possible inquiries among the learned and the wise about the choicest form of education, was warned about the disadvantages of the current system: they told him that the length of time we spend learning languages, [C] which cost the Ancients nothing, [A] is the sole reason why we cannot attain to the greatness of mind and knowledge of those old Greeks and Romans. I do not believe that to be the sole reason. Nevertheless the expedient found by my father was to place me, while still at the breast and before my tongue was untied, in the care of a German (who subsequently died in France as a famous doctor); he was totally ignorant of our language but very well versed in Latin. He had been brought over expressly and engaged at a very high fee: he had me continuously on his hands. There were two others with him, less learned: their task was to follow me about and provide him with some relief. They never addressed me in any other language but Latin. As for the rest of the household, it was an inviolable rule that neither he nor my mother nor a manservant nor a housemaid ever spoke in my presence anything except such words of Latin as they had learned in order to chatter a bit with me. It is wonderful how much they all got from it. My father and my mother learned in this way sufficient Latin to understand it and acquired enough to be able to talk it when they had to, as did those other members of the household who were most closely devoted to my service. In short we became so latinized that it spilled over into the neighbouring villages, where, resulting from this usage, you can still find several Latin names for tools and for artisans. As for me, I was six years old before I knew French any more than I know the patois of Périgord or Arabic. And so, without art, without books, without grammar, without rules, without whips and without [C] tears,100 [A] I had learned Latin as pure as that which my schoolteacher knew – for I had no means of corrupting it or contaminating it. So if they wanted me to assay writing a prose (as other boys do in the colleges by translating from French) they had to give me some bad Latin to turn into good. And Nicholas Grouchy (who wrote De comitiis Romanorum), Guillaume Guerente (who wrote a commentary on Aristotle), George Buchanan, that great Scottish poet, [A1] Marc-Antoine Muret [C] whom France and Italy acknowledge to be the best prose-writer in his day, [A] who were my private tutors, have often told me that as in my infancy I had that language so fluent and so ready that they were afraid to approach me.101

Buchanan, whom I subsequently met in the retinue of the late Lord Marshal de Brissac, told me that he was writing a book on educating children and was taking my education as his model, for he was then the tutor of Count de Brissac whom we have since seen so valiant and brave.

As for Greek (which I scarcely understand at all) my father planned to have it taught to me as methodically, but in a new way, as a sort of game or sport. We would bounce declensions about, rather like those who use certain board-games as a means of learning arithmetic and geometry. For among other things he had been counselled to bring me to love knowledge and duty by my own choice, without forcing my will, and to educate my soul entirely through gentleness and freedom. He was so meticulous about this that since some maintain that it disturbs the tender brains of children to wake them up with a start and to snatch them suddenly and violently out of their sleep (in which they are far more deeply plunged than we are) he would have me woken up by the sound of a musical instrument; [A1] and I was never without someone to do this for me.102

This example will suffice to judge all the rest by, and also to emphasize the wisdom and love of so good a father who is by no means to be criticized because he harvested no fruits worthy of so choice a husbandry. There were two causes for that: first, my soil was ill-suited and barren, for, though I enjoyed solid good health together with a quiet and amenable nature, I was, despite that, so heavy, passive and dreamy that nobody could drag me out of my idleness, not even to make me play. Whatever I could perceive I saw well and, beneath my heavy complexion, I nursed bold ideas as well as opinions old for my age. My mind was lazy and would only budge so long as it was led; I was slow to understand and my inventiveness was [C] slack.103 [A] To top it all, my memory was incredibly unreliable.

Considering all that it is no wonder that my father could make nothing of me.

The second reason was as follows: just as people who are frantic about finding a cure go and consult anybody, that good man was extremely frightened of failure in a matter which meant so much to him: he finally let himself be carried away by the common opinion (which always merely follows the leader as cranes do); he fell in with standard practice (no longer having about him the men who had given him his original educational ideas, which he had brought back from Italy) and sent me, at the age of six, to the Collège de Guyenne, then in full flourish as the best school in France. There too it is impossible to exaggerate the trouble he took over choosing good personal tutors for me and over all the other details of my education, preserving several idiosyncrasies opposed to the usual practices of the College. But for all that, it was still school. My Latin was at once corrupted and, since then, I have lost all use of it from lack of practice. And all my novel education merely served to enable me to stride right into the upper forms: I left College at thirteen, having ‘completed the course’ (as they put it); and in truth I now have nothing to show for it.

My first taste for books arose from enjoying Ovid’s Metamorphoses; when I was about seven or eight I used to sneak away from all other joys to read it, especially since Latin was my mother-tongue and the Metamorphoses was the easiest book I knew and the one most suitable by its subject to my tender age. (As for Lancelot du lac, [B] Amadis, [A] Huon de Bordeaux and so on, trashy books which children spend time on, I did not even know their titles – and still do not know their insides – so exact was the way I was taught.)

This rendered me a bit slacker about studying my set-books. I was particularly lucky at this stage to have to deal with an understanding tutor who adroitly connived at this and other similar passions: for I read in succession Virgil (the Aeneid), Terence, Plautus and the Italian comedies, ever seduced by the attractiveness of their subjects. Had he been mad enough to break this succession I reckon that I would have left school hating books, as most French aristocrats do. He acted most ingeniously. Pretending not to notice anything, he sharpened my appetite by making me devour such books in secret, while gently requiring me to do my duty by the other, prescribed, books. For the chief qualities which my father looked for in those who had charge of me were affability and an easy-going complexion: and my own complexion had no vices other than sluggishness and laziness. The risk was not that I should do wrong but do nothing. Nobody forecast that I would turn out bad, only useless. What they foretold was idleness not wickedness.

[C] I am aware that that is the way things have turned out. The complaints which ring in my ears confirm it: ‘Lazy! No warmth in his duties as friend, relation or public official! Too much on his own!’ Even the most insulting accusers never say, ‘Why did he go and take that?’ or ‘Why has he never paid up?’ What they say is, ‘Why will he not write it off?’ or ‘Why will he not give it away?’

I would consider it flattering if people found me wanting only in such works of supererogation. Where they are unjust is in requiring that I exceed my obligations – more rigorously, indeed, than they require of themselves their mere fulfilment. By so requiring they destroy the gratuitous nature of the deed and therefore the gratitude which would be my due; whereas any active generosity on my part should be more highly appreciated, seeing that I have never been the recipient of any. I am all the more free to dispose of my fortune in that it is thoroughly mine. Yet if I were a great burnisher-up of my actions I might well beat off such reproaches. I would teach some of these people that they are not annoyed because I do not do a lot for them but because I could do a lot more.

[A] For all that, my soul was not wanting in powerful emotions of her own, [C] nor in sure and open judgements about subjects which she knew, [A] digesting them alone, without telling anyone else. Among other things, I truly believe that she was incapable of surrendering to force and violence.

[B] Should I include another of my characteristics as a child? I had an assured countenance and a suppleness of voice and gesture when I undertook to act in plays; for, in advance of my age,

Alter ab undecimo tum me vix ceperat annus,

[The following year had scarcely plucked me from my eleventh,]104

I played the chief characters in the Latin tragedies of Buchanan, Guerente and Muret, which were put on in our Collège de Guyenne with dignity.105 In such matters Andreas Gouveanus, our principal, was incomparably the best principal in France, as he was in all other aspects of his duties; and I was held to be a past master. Acting is an activity which is not unpraiseworthy in the children of good families; I have subsequently seen our Princes actively involved in it (following the example of the ancients) and winning honour and praise. [C] In Greece it was open even to gentlemen to make acting their profession: ‘Aristoni tragico actori rem aperit: huic et genus et fortuna honesta erant; nec ars, quia nihil tale apud Græcos pudori est, ea deformabat.’ [He disclosed his project to Ariston, the tragic actor, a gentleman respected for his birth and his fortune; his profession in no ways impaired this respect, since nothing like that is a source of shame among the Greeks.]106

[B] Those who condemn such entertainments I have even accused of lack of perspicacity; and of injustice, those who deny entry into our goodly towns to worthwhile troops of actors, begrudging the people such public festivities. Good governments take the trouble to bring their citizens together and to assemble them for sports and games just as they do for serious acts of worship: a sense of community and good-will is increased by this. And you could not allow citizens any amusements better regulated than those which take place in the presence of all and in full view of the magistrate. I would find it reasonable that the magistrate or the monarch should occasionally offer such amusements to the people for nothing, with a kind of fatherly goodness and affection, [C] and that in the bigger towns there should be places set aside and duly appointed for such spectacles, which would be a diversion from worse and secret goings-on.

[A] Now, to get back to my subject, there is nothing like tempting the boy to want to study and to love it: otherwise you simply produce donkeys laden with books. They are flogged into retaining a pannierful of learning; but if it is to do any good, Learning must not only lodge with us: we must marry her.