10

10. On a ready or hesitant delivery

[Montaigne considers ‘readiness’ to speak in public, both in the sense of speaking easily and of being ready with a prepared text. These senses are contained in the Latin word promptus which lies behind his French term for ‘ready’ speech: prompt.]

[A] Onc ne furent à tous toutes grâces données. [It never was, that to every man was every gift vouchsafed.]1

We can see that in the case of the gift of speaking well: some have such a prompt facility and (as we say) such ease in ‘getting it out’, that they are always ready anywhere: others, more hesitant, never speak without thinking and working it all out beforehand. Just as the rule given to ladies is to take up sports and exercises which show off their charms, so too, if I had to give similar advice where these two qualities are concerned, it seems to me that nowadays, when eloquence is mainly professed by preachers and barristers, the hesitant man had better be a preacher and the other man a barrister. Since the duties of a preacher allow him as much time as he wishes to make things ready, he runs an uninterrupted race from point to point, whereas the exigencies of a barrister require him to enter the fray at a moment’s notice; the unforeseeable replies of the opposite party can throw him off his stride into a situation where a new decision has to be made in full course. Yet in that meeting between Pope Clement and King Francis at Marseilles the reverse applied:2 Monsieur Poyet, a man whose whole life had been nurtured at the Bar and who was highly regarded, had the duty of making the oration before the Pope; he had given it long thought and (so it was said) had brought it from Paris already prepared; but on the very day that it was to be delivered the Pope (fearing that something might be addressed to him which could give offence to the other princes’ ambassadors who were in attendance) conveyed to the King the topic which seemed most proper to that time and place – unfortunately a totally different one from what Monsieur Poyet had toiled over; his oration was now useless and he had to be quickly ready with another. But as he realized that he was incapable of doing that, My Lord the Cardinal Du Bellay had to take on the task.

[B] The role of a barrister is more demanding than that of a preacher, and yet in France at least we can find more tolerable barristers, in my opinion, than tolerable preachers.

[A] It seems that it is, rather, the property of Man’s wit to act readily and quickly, while the property of the judgement is to be slow and poised. But there is the same measure of oddness in the man who is struck dumb if he has no time to prepare his speech and the man who cannot take advantage and speak better when he does have time. They say that Severus Cassius spoke better when he had not thought about it beforehand: that he owed more to Fortune than to hard work: that it was good for him to be interrupted, his opponents being afraid of provoking him, lest anger made him redouble his eloquence.3

I know from experience the kind of character which gets nowhere unless it is allowed to run happy and free and which by nature is unable to keep up vehemently and laboriously practising anything beforehand. We say that some books ‘stink of lamp-oil’, on account of the harshness and roughness which are stamped on writings in which toil has played a major part.4

In addition, a soul worrying about doing well, straining and tensely drawn towards its purpose, is held at bay – like water which cannot find its way through the narrow neck of an open gutter because of the violent pressure of its overflowing abundance. Moreover the particular character which I am speaking of does not want to be driven and spurred on by strong passions such as Cassius’ anger (for such an activity would be too violent): it wants not to be shaken about but aroused; it wants to be warmed and awakened by events which are external, fortuitous and immediate. Leave it to act by itself and it will drag along and languish. Its life and its grace consist in activity.

[B] I cannot remain fixed within my disposition and endowments. Chance plays a greater part in all this than I do. The occasion, the company, the very act of using my voice, draw from my mind more than what I can find there when I exercise it and try it out all by myself. [A] And that is why the spoken word is worth more than the written – if a choice can be made between things of no value.5

[C] This, too, happens in my case: where I seek myself I cannot find myself: I discover myself more by accident than by inquiring into my judgement. Suppose something subtle springs up as I write – I mean, of course, something which would be blunt in others but is acute in me. (Enough of these courtesies! When we say such things we all mean them to be taken in proportion to our abilities.) Later, I miss the point so completely that I do not know what I meant to say (some outsider has often rediscovered the meaning before I do). If every time that happened I were to start scraping out words with my eraser I would efface the whole of my Essays. Yet, subsequently, chance may make what I wrote clearer than the noon-day sun: it will be my former hesitations which then astonish me.