37

37. On Cato the Younger

[Cato the Younger was a philosophical and moral hero for many Renaissance Christians despite his having preferred suicide to ignominy. (In Dante he is Beatrice’s guide to the Heavenly regions.) Montaigne protests against those who reduce the ‘forms’ (the souls) of great men to their own mean level: the condign reaction to greatness of soul is not a niggling desire to diminish but that kind of ecstasy produced by wonder and amazement – admiratio. Poetry, conceived much as Plato conceived it in his dialogue Io (a source of Ronsard’s theories too), is playing its rightful role when, by its beauty, it stuns the reader, performer or listener into just such a condign ecstasy of amazement. At least at this stage in the Essays, Montaigne sees the ascetic Christian Feuillants and Capuchins – heroes of Christian virtue – as remaining within the general form of Man.]

[A] I do not suffer from that common failing of judging another man1 [C] by me: I can easily believe that others have qualities quite distinct from my own. Just because I feel that I am pledged to my individual form, I do not bind all others to it as everyone else does: I can conceive and believe that there are thousands of different ways of living and, contrary to most men, I more readily acknowledge our differences than our similarities. I am as ready as you may wish to relieve another human being of my attributes and basic qualities and to contemplate him simply as he is, free from comparisons and sculpting him after his own model. I am not sexually continent, but that does not stop me from sincerely acknowledging the continence of the Feuillants and Capuchins nor from thinking well of their way of life: in thought, I can readily put myself in their place. Indeed I love and respect them all the more for being different from me.2 My one desire is that each of us should each be judged apart and that conclusions about me should not be drawn from routine exempla.

[A] My own weakness in no way affects the opinion which I should have of the strength and vigour of those who merit it. [C] ‘Sunt qui nihil laudent, nisi quod se imitari posse confidunt.’ [There are those who praise nothing except what they are sure they can match.]3 [A] I crawl in earthy slime but I do not fail to note, way up in the clouds, the matchless height of certain heroic souls. It means a great deal to me to have my judgement rightly controlled even if my actions cannot be so, and to maintain at least that master-part of me free from corruption.4 Even when my legs let me down it is something that my will is sound. At least in our latitudes, the century we live in is so leaden that [C] it lacks not only the practice of virtue but the very idea of it:5 [A] virtue seems to be no more than scholastic jargon:

[Al] virtutem verba putant, ut Lucum ligna:

[they think that virtue is but a word and that sacred groves are mere matchwood.]6

[C] ‘Quam vereri deberent, etiam si percipere non possent.’ [Even if they cannot understand it, they should revere it.]7 It is a gewgaw to hang up in a display-case, or to have dangling from your tongue just as an earring dangles from your ear.

[A] Virtuous actions are no longer there to be recognized: those which have the face of virtue do not have her essence, since we are led to do them from profit, reputation, fear, custom and other similar motives. Such justice, valour and graciousness as we practise then can be termed so in the view of others from the face they put on in public, but they are by no means virtuous to the doer: a different end was aimed at; [C] there was a different motivation. [A] Virtue acknowledges nothing which is not done by her and for her alone.

[C] When, following their custom, the victors in that great battle of Potidaea (which the Greeks under Pausanias won against Mardonius and the Persians)8 had to divide the glory of that exploit among themselves, they awarded pre-eminence in valour on the field to the Spartan people. Then, when those excellent judges of virtue, the Spartans, had to decide which of their men should individually hold the honour of having done best that day, they decided that Aristodemus had the most courageously exposed himself to risk: yet they never awarded him the prize because his valour had been spurred on by his wish to purge himself of the reproach he had incurred in the battle of Thermopylae and by a desire to die bravely to atone for his past disgrace.

[A] Our judgements follow the depravity of our morals and remain sick. I note that the majority of ingenious men in my time are clever at besmirching the glory of the fair and great-souled actions of ancient times, foisting some base interpretation on them and devising frivolous causes and occasions for them. [B] What great subtlety! Why, show me the most excellent and purest deed there is and I can go and furnish fifty vicious but plausible motives for it! What a variety of concepts, God knows, can be foisted on to our inner wills if anyone wishes to work on them in detail! [C] Such men are clever in their denigration, yet not so much maliciously as heavily and clumsily. The same pains that they take to detract from those great reputations I would readily take to lend a shoulder to enhance them. Those rare persons who have been hand-picked by the wise to be exemplary to us all I will not hesitate, on my part, to load with honour, insofar as my material allows, by interpreting their characteristics favourably. But we must believe that, for all our striving, our thoughts fall well below what the great deserve. It is the duty of good men to depict virtue as beautiful as possible; and it would not be inappropriate if our emotions should make us ecstatic under the influence of souls so august. What these people do, on the contrary, [A] they do, as I have just said, either out of malice or from that defect which reduces what they believe to what they can grasp, or else (as I am inclined to think) because their perception is not strong and clear enough to comprehend the splendour of virtue in her native purity, since they have not trained it to do so. Plutarch states that some men in his time attributed the death of Cato the Younger to his fear of Caesar; this rightly incensed him – by which one can judge how more indignant he would have been at those who attributed it to ambition.9 [C] Idiots! Cato would rather have done a fair and noble deed which brought him shame than to do it for glory. [A] That great man was truly a model which Nature chose to show how far human virtue and fortitude can reach.

But I am not up to treating so rich a subject here. I simply wish to make verses from five Latin poets rival each other in their praise of Cato, [C] both in the interest of Cato and secondarily in their own.

Now a well-educated boy ought to find the first two feeble compared to the third; the third, more young and vigorous but ruined by its own excessive power; he ought to reckon that there is room for two or three degrees of ingenuity before we reach the fourth, at which point he will clasp his hands in wonder. When he comes to the final one, which far outdistances the others, by a distance that he will swear no human wit can cover, he will be thunderstruck and moved to ecstasy.

Here is something of a marvel: we now have far more poets than judges and connoisseurs of poetry. It is far easier to write poetry than to appreciate it. At a rather low level you can judge it by the rules of art: but good, enrapturing, divine poetry is above reason and rules. Whoever can distinguish its beauties with a firm and settled gaze does not in fact see it all, no more than we can see the brilliance of a flash of lightning. It does not exercise our judgement, it ravishes it and enraptures it; the frenzy which sets its goads in him who knows how to discern it also strikes a third person who hears him relate and recite it, just as a magnet not only attracts a needle but also pours into it the faculty of attracting others. It can more easily be seen in the theatre that the sacred inspiration of the Muses, having first seized the poet with anger, grief or hatred and driven him outside himself whither they will, then affects the actor through the poet and then, in succession, the entire audience – needle hanging from needle, each attracting the next one in the chain.10

From my earliest childhood poetry has had the power to transpierce and transport me. But this living feeling, which is innate to me, has been variously affected by the variety of poetic forms – it is not a matter of higher or lower (for each was the highest of its kind) but of a difference of lustre: first came a gay and genial flowing; then a keen and sublime subtlety; and finally a ripe and constant power. Examples will convey this better: Ovid, Lucan, Virgil.11

But here are our poets waiting to compete:

[A] Sit Cato, dum vivit, sane vel Cæsare major,

[Let Cato while he lives be greater even than Cæsar,]

says one of them.

Et invictum, devicta morte, Catonem,

[Then undefeated, death-defeating Cato,]

says another.12 And the next, telling of the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey:

Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.

[The cause of the victors pleased the gods: that of the vanquished, Cato.]13

And the fourth, when praising Caesar:

Et cuncta terrarum subacta Praeter atrocem animum Catonis.

[The whole world conquered, save for the unyielding soul of Cato.]14

And then the master of the choir,15 having listed and displayed the names of all the greatest of the Romans, ends in this wise:

his dantem jura Catonem.

[and then – a law to them all – Cato.]