12
12. On physiognomy
[Renaissance books on physiognomy all gave pride of place to Zopyrus the Physiognomist, who judged by his art that Socrates was a bad man and a bom womanizer. (Socrates admitted this, adding that he had ‘reformed’ his soul.) Montaigne compares and contrasts himself to Socrates and shows how his own frank expression served him well. This chapter corrects much of what had been said in I, 20 (‘To philosophize is to learn how to die’) and takes even farther Montaigne’s respect for Nature and the wisdom of the beasts expounded in ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’. In this most personally anecdotal of chapters, Montaigne has discovered the moral greatness of simple folk faced with certain death. And he hints at his hopes that Henry of Navarre will bring peace to France.]
[B] Virtually all the opinions which we have are held on authority and trust. That is no bad thing: in so ailing a time as this we could do nothing worse than to make our own choices. That portrait of the conversations of Socrates which his friends have bequeathed to us receives our approbation only because we are overawed by the general approval of them. It is not from our own knowledge, since they do not follow our1 practices: if something like them were to be produced nowadays there are few who would rate them highly. We can appreciate no graces which are not pointed, inflated and magnified by artifice. Such graces as flow on under the name of naïvety and simplicity readily go unseen by so coarse an insight as ours: they have a delicate, secret beauty: to uncover their hidden light requires sight which is purged and pure. For us, is not naïvety close kin to simplemindedness and a quality worthy of reproach?2 Socrates makes his soul move with the natural motion of the common people: thus speaks a peasant; thus speaks a woman. [C] He has nothing on his lips but draymen, joiners, cobblers and masons. [B] His inductions and comparisons are drawn from the most ordinary and best-known of men’s activities; anyone can understand him. Under so common a form we today would never have discerned the nobility and splendour of his astonishing concepts; we [C] who judge any which are not swollen up by erudition to be base and commonplace and [B] who are never aware of riches except when pompously paraded. Our society has been prepared to appreciate nothing but ostentation: nowadays you can fill men up with nothing but wind and then bounce them about like balloons. But this man, Socrates, did not deal with vain notions: his aim was to provide us with matter and precepts which genuinely and intimately serve our lives:
servare modum, finemque tenere, Naturamque sequi.
[to keep the mean; to hold fast to the limit; and to follow nature.]3
He was ever one, ever the same: he raised himself up to the highest level of vigour not by sallies but by complexion. Or (to put it better) he raised nothing, but rather brought it down and back to its natural and original level, by which he moderated vigour, hardships and difficulties.
In the case of Cato we can clearly see that his manner is strained far above the normal: in the brave actions of his life and death we know that he is riding high as his tallest horses. Socrates however keeps his feet on the ground, dealing with the most useful subjects at a quiet and everyday pace, advancing at the rate of human life towards both death and the harshest ordeals that can ever occur. Fortunately it turned out that the man most worthy of being known and of being set before the world as an example was precisely the one we have the surest knowledge about.4 He was observed by the most observant men there ever have been: the testimonies that we have of him are astonishing by their fidelity and their skill. Happily for us he could so order the purest and most childlike thoughts that, without stretching them or perverting them, he could produce by them the most beautiful actions of our souls. He portrays the soul as neither high-soaring nor abundantly endowed: he portrays it simply as sane, though with a pure and lively sanity. From such commonplace natural principles, from such ordinary everyday ideas, without being carried away and without goading himself on, he formed beliefs, actions and morals which were not simply the best regulated but also the most sublime and most forceful that ever have been. [C] He it was who brought human wisdom back from the heavens where she was wasting her time and returned her to mankind, in whom lies her most proper and most demanding task as well as her most useful one.5 [B] See him pleading his case before his judges; see with what arguments he awakens his mind for the hazards of war; see what reasons strengthen his endurance when confronted by lies, tyranny and death, as well as by his wife’s pig-headedness. Nothing there is lifted from the arts or sciences: the simplest folk can recognize in him their own means and strengths. It is not possible to be less pretentious or more lowly. He did a great favour to human nature by showing how much she can do by herself. We are richer than we think, each one of us. Yet we are schooled for borrowing and begging! We are trained to make more use of other men’s goods than of our own.
In nothing does Man know how to halt at the point of his need; be it pleasure, wealth or power, he clasps at more than he can hold: his greed is not susceptible to moderation. It is the same, I find, with his curiosity for knowledge: he hacks out for himself much greater tasks than he needs or can achieve, [C] making the extent of knowledge and the usefulness of knowledge co-equal: ‘Ut omnium return, sic litterarum quoque intemperantia laboramus.’ [In learning as in everything else, we suffer from lack of temperance.]6 And Tacitus is right to praise the mother of Agricola for having restrained in her son too seething an appetite for knowledge:7 like the rest of men’s goods, knowledge is one which, if we look at it steadily, has much inherent vanity and natural feebleness. And it costs us dear. To acquire such pabulum is more hazardous than the acquiring of other food or drink;8 for in other cases whatever food we have bought we can carry home in containers – which gives us time to decide on its worth, and on how much of it we shall take and when. But from the outset all kinds of learning can be put into no container but our soul: as we buy them we ingest them, leaving the market-place either already contaminated or else improved. Some of them, instead of nourishing us, burden us and hamper us; others still, under pretence of curing us, poison us.
[B] I have taken pleasure in hearing of men somewhere or other who, from piety, make vows of ignorance similar to vows of chastity, poverty and penance. To take the edge off that cupidity which goads us towards the study of books, and to deprive our souls of that pleasurable self-satisfaction which thrills us with the opinion that we know something is farther to castrate our disordered desires. [C] And it is to fulfil the vow of poverty abundantly to be also poor in spirit.9
[B] We need but little doctrine to live at our ease. And Socrates teaches us that it lies within us, as well as how to find it there and how to make it help us.10 All that capacity of ours for exceeding what is [C] natural is more or less [B] vain and superfluous:11 it is much if it does not burden and bother us more than it serves us: [C] ‘Paucis opus est litteris ad mentem bonam.’ [To produce a good mind you need only a few books.] [B] They are the feverish excesses of our mind, a confused and disquieted tool.
Contemplate yourself. You will find within you Nature’s arguments concerning death – true arguments, most fit to serve you in your need: they it is which make a farm-labourer, as well as entire nations, die with as much constancy as a philosopher.12 [C] Would I have died any the less happily before reading the Tusculan Disputations? I judge that I would not. And now that I find that I must really face death, I realize that my tongue has been enriched by them but not at all my mind, which is as Nature forged it for me: its buckler in that combat is to approach it as do the common people. Books have been useful to me less for instruction than as training. What if [B] erudition, while making an assay at arming us with new defences against natural ills, should have imprinted on our thoughts the weight of those ills and their size rather than her subtle arguments for protecting us against them! [C] For subtle arguments they are, by which erudition most vainly alerts us. Just see how writers – even the most wise and succinct of them – strew additional trivial arguments round about one good one, arguments which, if you look at them closely, have no body in them. They are nothing but verbal contortions by which we are deceived. Yet, in so far as they may serve a purpose, I have no wish to pluck them any barer. Here and there within these covers there are enough arguments of that sort, either borrowed or imitated. Nevertheless we must be careful not to give the name of fortitude to what is but the conduct of a gentleman, nor call solid what is but clever, nor good what is but beautiful – ‘quae magis gustata quant potato delectant’ [things which are more pleasant to sip than to quaff].13 And, ‘ubi non ingenii sed animi negotium agitur’ [whenever we are concerned with the soul not the mind], not everything that we fancy feeds us.
[B] To see the exertions that Seneca imposed upon himself in order to steel himself against death, to see him sweat and grunt in order to stiffen and reassure himself during his long struggles on his pedestal, would have shaken his reputation for me if he had not sustained it with such valour as he was dying. His burning emotion, [C] so oft repeated, shows that he himself was ardent and impetuous. (We must convict him out of his own mouth: ‘Magnus animus remissius loquitur et securius’ [A great mind speaks with more calm and assurance]; ‘Non est alius ingenio, alius animo color.’ [There is not one colour for the wit another for the mind.]) And it also [B] shows that14 he was to some extent hard pressed by his adversary. The style of Plutarch, being more detached and relaxed, is for me more manly and persuasive: I would find it easier to believe that his soul’s emotions were more assured and steady. Seneca, more [C] lively [B], puts in the goad15 and wakes us up with a start; he stimulates, rather, our wit: Plutarch, more [C] settled, [B] constantly16 reassures and strengthens us; he stimulates, rather, our understanding. [C] Seneca enraptures our judgement: Plutarch wins it.
I have likewise seen even more hallowed writings which, in their portrayal of the conflict sustained against the prickings of the flesh, show them to be so sharp, so strong and invincible, that the likes of us, who are but the off-scourings of the commonality, are as struck with wonder by the strangeness and unknown power of the temptations as by the resistance put up to them.17
[B] Why do we go on stiffening our morale by such learned maxims?18
Let us look to the land and to the wretched people we can see scattered over it, bending low over their toil, ignorant of Aristotle, Cato, example and precept: from them Nature draws every day deeds of constancy and steadfastness which are purer and more unbending than those which we so carefully study in our schools. How many country-folk do I see ignoring poverty; how many yearning for death or meeting it without panic or distress? That man over there who is trenching my garden has, this morning, buried his father or his son. The very names by which they call our afflictions soften them and sweeten their bitter taste: for them consumption is ‘the cough’; dysentery, a ‘runny stomach’; pleurisy, ‘a chill’. And as they give them mild names they endure them better too. Ills have to be grievous indeed to interrupt their habitual toil. They take to their beds only to die: [C] ‘Simplex illa et aperta virtus in obscurant et solertam scientiam versa est.’ [Virtue, simple and open, has been converted into obscure and subtle erudition.]19
[B] I wrote this round about the time when the huge burdens of our civil disturbances were for several months pressing right down on me with all their weight. I had the enemy at my gates on one side and on the other side a worse enemy, marauders: [C] ‘non armis sed vitiis certatur’ [not with arms is the fight but with crimes].20 [B] I was being assayed by every kind of military outrage all at once.
Hostis adest dextra levaque a parte timendus, Vicinoque malo terret utrumque lotus.
[A redoubtable enemy I have to left and right: on either side immediate danger threatens.]
What a monstrosity this war is! Other wars are external: this one also gnaws at itself and destroys itself with its own poison. Its nature is so malign and so destructive that it destroys itself along with everything else, tearing itself limb from limb in its frenzy. As often as not we can see it falling apart, more by itself than from lack of any necessary commodity or by enemy action. All military lore flees it: it came to cure sedition, yet it is full of it; it seeks to punish disobedience, and is an example of it; it is used to defend our laws, but it takes part in a rebellion against its own. Where has it got us? Our medicines are infected:
Nostre mal s’empoisonne Du secours qu’on luy donne.
[Our illness draws Venom from the succour we bring it.]21
Exuperat magis aegrescitque medendo; [The illness grows greater and more sickly with the cure;]
Omnia fanda, nefanda, malo pemista furore, Justificam nobis mentem avertere Deorum.
[Now that right and wrong have been confounded by our wicked frenzy, it has brought the gods to turn away their righteous will from us.]
When such distempers attack a whole people, at first you can tell the sound from the sickly; but when they come to drag on as ours do, the whole body politic feels it from head to heel: no organ is free from corruption. For there is no air which is so greedily breathed as the air of licence, nor which spreads and permeates as far. Our armies are bound and held together now only by the cement of foreign mercenaries: you can no longer make up one reliable and disciplined body of soldiers. How ignominious! There is only as much discipline as our hired soldiers care to show us: every man Jack of us follows his own discretion not that of his commander, who has more trouble with his own troops than with the enemy. The General it is who must follow, woo and bow: he alone has to obey; all the rest are free and untrammelled.22
I take pleasure in seeing how much baseness and faint-heartedness there are in ambition, and how much abject servitude it requires to achieve its end. But what displeases me is daily to see decent characters who are capable of justice corrupted by their management and command of this disorder. Long sufferance begets habit: habit, acceptance and imitation. We have enough men with ill-endowed souls without spoiling the good and generous ones. If we go on this way there will scarcely be one man left to whom we could entrust the welfare of our State, should Fortune ever restore its health to us.
Hunc saltern everso Juvenem succurrere seclo Ne prohibite.
[At least do not prevent this Youth from bringing succour to this prostrate world.]23
[C] What has become of that old axiom that soldiers should go more in fear of their captain than of their enemy? And what of that wonderful example of an apple tree which happened to be enclosed within the limits of a Roman army-camp, yet, when the camp was struck next day, was still there, leaving its owner with his full complement of ripe and delicious apples?24 I wish that our young men, instead of the time they spend on less useful tours and less honourable apprenticeships, would devote half of it to watching the war at sea under some good Captain-Commander of Rhodes, and the other half to studying the discipline of the Turkish armies, for it has many superiorities and advantages over ours. One is, that whereas our soldiers become more disorderly during our campaigns, there they become more self-controlled and circumspect, since such offences and larcenies against the common people as are punishable by cudgelling in times of peace become capital in time of war. There is a pre-established tariff; for one egg taken without payment: fifty strokes of the cane; for anything else, no matter how trivial, which cannot be used as food: immediate impaling or beheading. It amazed me to read in the history of Selim, the cruellest conqueror there has ever been, that, when he had subdued Egypt, those wonderful gardens which surround the City of Damascus and abound in delicacies remained unsullied by the hands of his soldiers. Yet those gardens were all open and unfenced.
[B] But is there any affliction in a polity which it is worth tackling with so fatal a cure? According to Favonius, not even the usurping of a tyrannous hold upon the State.25 [C] Similarly Plato does not allow that violence be done against the peace of one’s country even to cure it, and will accept no correction which costs the blood and ruination of the citizens, laying down that it is a good thing man’s duty in such a case to leave things as they are, simply praying God to exceed the normal Order and to bring His hand to bear. He appears to have criticized his close friend Dion for having acted just a little out of line.26 I was a Platonist in that way before I ever knew there had been a Plato in this world. And although that great man must be simply excluded from our communion – he who by the purity of his conscience deserved so well of God’s favour as to penetrate through the widespread darkness of his time deeply into the light of Christianity – I do not think it well becomes us to let ourselves be taught by a pagan how impious it is to expect from God no succour whatsoever which is His alone, requiring no cooperation on our part.27
I often doubt whether, among all those who engage in such disorders, there has ever been found one man who was so feeble of understanding that he actually let himself be convinced that he was advancing towards reformation by way of the ultimate in deformation; that he was ensuring his salvation by means of the most explicit causes we know of most certain damnation;28 or that, by overthrowing the constitution, the authorities and the laws under the tutelage of which God has placed him, and by the dismembering of his motherland (tossing parts of her to be gnawed by her ancient foes, filling brotherly hearts with parricidal hatreds and summoning up devils and the Furies to help him) he can somehow bring succour to the most holy loveliness and justice of God’s word.29 [B] Ambition, greed, cruelty, revenge do not have enough natural violence of their own, so let us light the match and stir the fire under the glorious pretext of justice and devotion! No worse state of affairs can be imagined than one in which wickedness becomes lawful, donning, by leave of the magistrate, the mantle of authority. [C] ‘Nihil in speciem fallacius quam prava relligio, ubi deorum numen praetenditur sceleribus.’ [Nothing is more deceitful than a depraved piety by which the will of the gods serves as a pretext for crimes.]30 According to Plato, the ultimate species of injustice is when what is unjust is held to be just.
[B] The common people suffered then not merely present depravations –
undique totis Usque adeo turbatur agris,
[all fields devasted everywhere,]31
– but future ones as well: the living had to suffer; so too those who were yet unborn. They were robbed of everything, even of hope (and so, in consequence, was I): they ravished from them all the means they possessed, which for long years would have provided their livelihood:
Quœ nequeunt secum ferre aut abducere perdunt, Et cremat insontes turba scelesta casas.
[They smash whatever they cannot carry or cart away; the mob of ruffians burn down innocent cottages.]
Muris nulla fides, squallent populatibus agri. [There is no safety within city walls: outside, the fields are ravaged.]
Apart from that attack, I suffered others as well. I incurred the penalties which moderation entails during such disorders. I was trounced on every hand: I was Guelph to the Ghibelline, Ghibelline to the Guelph. (One of our poets says just that, but I do not remember where.) The fact that my home is where it is, coupled with my affability towards the men of my neighbourhood, made me appear one thing, my life and actions another.32 No formal indictments were made: folk had nothing to get their teeth into. I never break the laws: if a proper investigation had been made, any remaining doubt would have been owed to me. But there were unspoken suspicions [C] circulating underhand [B] for33 which there is never any lack of pretext in so confused a chaos, no more than there is any lack of envious minds or silly ones. [C] I usually have a way of aggravating any harmful inferences which Fortune strews against me by refusing to justify, defend or explain myself, reckoning that to plead for my good conscience is to compromise it:34 ‘Perspicuitas enim argumentatione elevatur.’
[Argument merely removes the perspicuity.]35 And so, as though each man can see into me as clearly as I can, instead of distancing myself from an accusation I advance towards it, improving upon it by an ironic and mocking admission of guilt – if, that is, I do not flatly keep silent about it, as being unworthy of a reply.
But those who take that for some excessive arrogance on my part wish me scarcely less harm than those who take it for the weakness of an indefensible case – especially those great lords for whom the ultimate crime is lack of submissiveness and who are insolent in face of any justice which knows what is what, and which fails to be humble, submissive and begging. I have often bumped up against that pillar. Be that as it may, over what befell me then [B] an ambitious man would have hanged himself; so would a covetous man. I am in no wise acquisitive –
Sit mihi quod nunc est, etiam minus, ut mihi vivant Quod superest œvi, si quid superesse volent dii.
[Let me keep what I have now – or less even – so that I may live the rest of my life for myself (if the gods grant me any more life to live).]36
– yet such losses as do befall me through another’s wrong-doing, be it larceny or violence, pain me just about as much as they do a man sick and tortured by covetousness. The affront is immeasurably more bitter than the loss.
Hundreds of different kinds of misfortune rushed upon me one after another: if they had come together I could have borne them more cheerfully. I had already thought about entrusting my impoverished and straitened old age to one of my loved ones, but after letting my eyes rove over all my affairs, I realized that I was reduced to my shirt. To plummet down from such a height you need to be caught by firmly loving arms, solid and favoured by fortune. Such arms are rare – if there be any at all. In the end I realized that the surest way was to entrust my needs and my person to myself and that, if I should chance to be coldly treated by Fortune’s favour, then I should commend myself even more strongly to my own, clinging to myself and becoming more intimately beholden to myself. [C] In all their concerns men dash to seek props from others so as to spare their own, which alone, for anyone who knows how to arm himself with them, are certain and strong. Each man rushes elsewhere and towards the future, since no man has reached his own self.
[B] I concluded that my afflictions were useful ones. Firstly, because bad pupils, when reason proves inadequate, have to be taught by a good hiding, [C] just as we straighten back wood, when it has become warped, by driving in wedges over a fire. [B] For such a long time now I have been lecturing myself about holding to myself and keeping apart from matters external, yet I still go on turning my gaze sideways: I am tempted by a nod, by a gracious word from some great man or by an encouraging face. (God knows there is a dearth of those nowadays, and how little they imply!) I can still hear without a frown the seductions of those who would try to put me up for auction, resisting them so feebly that it appears that I would really rather be convinced by them. A mind so unwilling to learn requires flogging: I am a cask which is splitting apart, leaking and failing in its duty: it needs knocking together and tightening up with good whacks from the mallet.
Secondly, because my misfortune served me as practice, preparing me for the worst (should I, who by the bounty of Fortune and the properties of my character hope to be among the last, happen to be among the first to be caught up in this tempest), teaching me in good time to limit my way of life, and to order it for a new estate. True freedom is to have power over oneself to do anything with oneself. [C] ‘Potentissimus est qui se habet in potestate.’ [Most powerful is he who has himself in his power.]37 [B] In ordinary tranquil times we prepare ourselves for moderate and common ills. But during the disorders in which we have lived these last thirty years, every man in France sees himself, both individually and collectively and hour by hour, on the point of having his entire fate reversed: all the more reason, then, to keep one’s mind supplied with stronger and more manly provender. Let us be grateful to our fate for having made us live in an age which is neither soft and idle nor lazy: nowadays a man who would never otherwise have become famous may do so because of his misfortunes.
[C] I rarely read in my history books about the disorders in other States without regretting that I could not have been there to study them more closely: so, too, my desire for knowledge leads me to find at least some satisfaction in being able to see with my own eyes this remarkable spectacle of the death of our institutions, the manner of it and its symptoms. Since I cannot retard it, I am happy to be destined to be present and to learn from it. After all, we make great efforts so that we can eagerly witness performances of fictional portrayings of the tragedies of human fortune; it is not that we lack sympathy for what we hear there but that we delight in awakening our grief by the exceptional nature of those pitiable events. Nothing thrills without hurting. Good historians avoid telling of calm events – still waters and dead seas – in order to sail again into wars and seditions, to which (as they know) we summon them.
I doubt whether I can properly admit how little it has cost me in terms of my life’s repose and tranquillity to have passed more than a half of my days during the collapse of my country. Faced with misfortunes which do not concern me directly, I buy my resignation a little too cheaply; as for lamenting on my own behalf, I have regard not so much for what has been taken from me but for what still remains to me, both within and without. There is some consolation in dodging, one after another, the successive evils which have us in their sights, only to strike elsewhere around us. Moreover, where public misfortunes are concerned, the more my compassion is spread overall the weaker it becomes. To which add that it is certainly more or less true that ‘tantum ex publicis malis sentimus, quantum ad privatas res pertinet’ [from public ills we feel only as much as touches us directly],38 and that our original health was such as to diminish any sorrow we ought to have felt for its loss. It was indeed ‘health’, but only by comparison with the malady which followed it. We did not have far to fall; least tolerable of all, it seems to me, are honoured corruption and institutionalized brigandry: there is less wrong in stealing from us in a forest than in a place of safety. The ‘health’ of our State concerned a body entirely composed of organs each rivalling one another in corruption, and (for the most part) of aged sores, no longer being cured nor wanting to be cured.
[B] This shaking of the foundations stimulated me rather than flattened me, thanks to my sense of right and wrong which acted not merely peaceably but proudly, and I found nothing to reproach myself with. And since God never sends us pure evils any more than pure blessings, my own health held out better than usual throughout this period: and just as without health I can achieve nothing, with health there are few things which I cannot achieve. It provided me with the means of quickening my store of wisdom and of stretching forth my hand to parry blows which would readily have wounded more deeply. And in bearing my afflictions I found some means of withstanding Fortune and found that it would take some great shock to throw me from the saddle. (I do not say that to provoke her into making a more vigorous attack on me! I am her ‘most obedient servant’: my hands are raised in supplication: let her be satisfied, for God’s sake!)
Do I feel her assaults? Of course I do. As39 those who are overwhelmed and obsessed by grief yet allow some pleasure to fondle them from time to time and to release a smile, so too I have enough hold over myself to make my usual state a peaceful one, free from the burden of painful reflections; yet I can allow myself occasionally to be surprised by those biting and unpleasant thoughts which, while I am arming myself to drive them off or struggle against them, come along and batter me.
Following hard upon the others a worse calamity befell me: the plague, of unique virulence, raged both inside my home and around it; for, just as healthy bodies fall prey only to the most serious of illnesses, which alone can get a hold on them, similarly the air around my estates (which in human memory had never given a foothold to contagion, even when it came very close) once it was corrupted produced strange effects40 indeed:
Mista senum et juvenum densantur funera, nullum Sœva caput Proserpina fugit.
[Young and old come in crowds to be buried: cruel Proserpine spares no one’s head.]
I had to put up with a fine state of affairs: the very sight of my house was terrifying. Everything inside lay unprotected, left to anyone who wanted it. I, who am so hospitable myself, had to go in painful quest of a refuge for my family – a family of castaways, a source of fear to those who loved us and to itself, and of terror wherever it sought to settle, having to change quarters as soon as one of us got a slightly sore finger. All illnesses are then taken to be the plague: no time is allowed to probe them. And (best of all!) according to the rules of the Art, every time you are exposed to risk, you spend your quarantine in an ecstatic dread of that illness; your imagination meanwhile has its own way of agitating you, making your very health sweat with fever.
All of which would have touched me far less if I did not have to worry about others, spending six wretched months acting as guide for that caravan: for I myself bear within me my own prophylactics, namely determination and long-suffering. I am not much bothered by dread (which is particularly to be feared in this illness): and so, if I alone had sought to make an escape, it would have been a merrier and more distant one. It is not, I think, the worst of deaths: it is normally short, marked by numbness and lack of pain, comforted by being shared by many, without ritual and without a crowd of mourners.
As for those who dwelt around us, not one in a hundred escaped:
videos desertaque regna Pastorum, et longe saltus lateque vacantes.
[you may see the abandoned realms of the shepherds and, far and wide, the deserted pastures.]41
Down here my income is mainly from farm-labour; now, the land which once had a hundred men on it working for me has long lain fallow. At that time what exemplary resignation did we see among all those simple folk. In general each one gave up worrying about his life. The grapes, the principal produce of the region, remained hanging on the vines, since everybody without exception was ready, awaiting death that night or next morning with voices and faces so little terrified that it seemed they had all made a pact with that unavoidable evil, and that the sentence upon them was universal and inevitable. That sentence always is! Yet our resolution in death hangs on so little: its being delayed by a few hours, or the mere factor of our having companions, make us [C] conceive of death [B] differently.42 But just look at these folk: they are no longer amazed that, babes, children and old men, they are all to die the same month: they no longer weep for themselves. I saw some who were afraid that they would be left behind as in some ghastly wilderness; the only worry that I know they had concerned their burial: it disturbed them to see corpses scattered over the fields at the mercy of the beasts, which at once started to thrive there. [C] (How incompatible human notions are! The Neorites, a people subjugated by Alexander, abandon the bodies of their dead deep in their forests, there to be eaten – for them it is the only blessed form of sepulture.)43 [B] One man, in good health, was already digging his grave: others would lie down in theirs while there was still life in them. And one of my day-labourers pulled the earth over himself as he lay dying, using his hands and feet. Was he not donning his own shroud so as to lay himself more comfortably at rest – [C] a deed in some ways as sublime as that of those Roman soldiers who, after the Battle of Cannae, were discovered to have dug holes in the ground, thrust in their heads, drawn in the soil and suffocated themselves?44
[B] In short, an entire people, at a stroke and pragmatically, were brought to a state which yielded nothing in firmness of purpose to any studied philosophical steadfastness. Most of the teachings which schooling supplies us with to give us courage have more ostentation than fortitude, and are cultivated more for decoration than for profit. We have abandoned Nature and want to teach her own lessons to her who used to guide us so happily and surely. And yet such traces of her teachings and whatever little of her image remain by favour of ignorance stamped on the life of that crowd of uncultured country-folk, Erudition is compelled to go and beg from them, day in, day out, in order to supply patterns of constancy, simplicity and tranquillity for its own pupils. Fine it is to see the latter, full as they are of fair learning, having to imitate that untutored simplicity – imitating it moreover in the most basic acts of virtue; fine too that our wisdom must learn from the very beasts the lessons most useful for the greatest and most necessary aspects of our life: how we should live and die, manage our goods, love and educate our offspring and maintain justice. That is a singular witness that humanity is sick and that our reason (which we mould as we will, ever finding some novelty or some different approach) leaves behind in us no manifest trace of Nature. Men have done to Nature what makers of perfume have done to their essential oil: they have adulterated her with so many arguments and extraneous reasonings that she has become varied, different for each man,45 having lost her own unchanging universal visage and so making us seek her testimony from the beasts, which are not subject to bias, corruption or diversity of opinion. For while it is indeed true that even they do not always exactly follow the path of Nature, yet they stray so little from it that you can always see Nature’s rut. It is as with horses: when you lead them along they jump about, making little rebellions which extend no further than their leading-reins, meanwhile always following the steps of the man who is guiding them; and like the hawk which takes to flight, but always under the control of its string.
[C] ‘Exilia, tormenta, bella, morbos, naufragia meditate, ut nullo sis mala tiro.’ [Practise banishments, torments, wars, diseases and shipwrecks, so that you may not be a tyro in any misfortune.]46 – [B] What is the use of that curious desire to anticipate all the ills that can befall human nature and to prepare ourselves even against those which may perhaps never touch us? [C] ‘Parent passis tristiam facit, pati posse’ [The possibility of suffering makes one as sad as actual suffering]:47 we are hit not only by the bullet but by its bang and its wind! [B] Or why, like the most fevered minds (for fever it is) do we ask to be whipped right now, just because it may be that Fortune will, perhaps, make you suffer a whipping some day? [C] Or why do you not don your fur coat on Midsummer’s Day, because you will need it at Christmas!
[B] ‘Cast yourself into experiencing such ills as may befall you, [C] especially [B] the more extreme ones:48 test yourself against them,’ men say, ‘make absolutely certain.’
On the contrary; it would be more easy and more natural to free your very thoughts of such a burden. They will not come quick enough! Their true essence does not last long enough for us! And so, as though they did not weigh sufficiently upon our senses, our minds must go and extend them and prolong them, incorporating them within us beforehand. [C] ‘They will weigh on us enough once they are there,’ said one of the leaders, not of the tenderest school but the toughest. ‘Meanwhile decide in your own favour: believe what suits you best. What use is it to you to go welcoming and anticipating your ill fortune, losing the present because of fear of the future, and being miserable now because you must be so eventually?’49 Those are his very words.
[B] ‘Learning certainly does us a good service by instructing us very precisely about the dimensions of all evils’:
Curis acuens mortalia corda. [Sharpening with cares the minds of men.]50
What a pity if a little of their size should escape our sensations and our knowledge! It is certain that most preparations for death have caused more torment than undergoing it. [C] It was said in former times, most freely, by a most judicious author, ‘minus afficit sensus fatigatio quam cogitatio.’ [Our senses are less affected by hardships than by hard thinking.]51
The feeling that death is present is, of itself, sometimes enough to stir us to a quick resolve no longer to seek to avoid the inevitable. Several gladiators in former times were seen, after putting up a cowardly fight, to accept death most courageously, offering their throats to their opponents’ swords and welcoming them; but contemplating a future death requires a more leisurely steadfastness, one more difficult therefore to supply.52
[B] If you do not know how to die, never mind. Nature will tell you how to do it on the spot, plainly and adequately. She will do this job for you most punctiliously: do not worry about it:
Incertain frustra, mortales, funeris horam Quœrtis, et qua sit mors aditura via.
[In vain, O mortals, do you strive to know the uncertain hour of your death and by which road it will come.]53
Pœna minor certam subito perferre ruinant, Quod timeas gravius sustinuisse diu.
[It is less painful to have to undergo sudden and sure destruction than long to anticipate what you fear the most.]
We confuse life with worries about death, and death with worries about life. [C] One torments us: the other terrifies us. [B] We are not preparing ourselves to die: that is too momentary a matter. [C] A quarter of an hour of pain, without after-effects, without annoyance, has no need of precepts of its own. [B] To speak truly, we prepare ourselves against our preparations for death! Philosophy first commands us to have death ever before our eyes, to anticipate it and to consider it beforehand, and then she gives us rules and caveats in order to forestall our being hurt by our reflections and our foresight! Thus do doctors tip us into illnesses in order that they may have the means of employing their drugs and their Art.
[C] If we have not known how to live, it is not right to teach us how to die, making the form of the end incongruous with the whole. If we have known how to live steadfastly and calmly we shall know how to die the same way. They may bluster as much as they like, saying that ‘tota philosophorum vita commentatio mortis est’ [the entire life of philosophers is a preparation for death];54 but my opinion is that death is indeed the ending of life, but not therefore its End: it puts an end to it; it is its ultimate point; but it is not its objective. Life must be its own objective, its own purpose. Its right concern is to rule itself, govern itself, put up with itself. Numbered among its other duties included under the general and principal heading, How to live, there is the sub-section, How to die. If our fears did not lend it weight, dying would be one of our lighter duties.
[B] Judging from their usefulness and naïve truth, the teachings of Simplemindedness are not much inferior to those contrary ones which are lectured upon by Erudition. Men differ in tastes and fortitude: they must each be brought, by differing routes, to what is good for them, each according to his nature:
[C] Quo me cunque rapit tempestas, deferor hospes. [Wherever the storm may drive me, there I land and find a welcome.]55
[B] I have never known even one of my neighbouring peasants embark upon thoughts about what countenance and steadfastness he will show in his final hour. Nature teaches him never to reflect on death except when he lies a–dying. Then he does it with better grace than Aristotle, who is doubly oppressed by death: by death itself and by his long [C] anticipation. [B] That is why Caesar opined that the happiest and least burdensome of deaths was the one least [C] thought about.56 ‘Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet qu am necesse est.’ [He who suffers before he needs to, suffers more than he needs to.]
The painfulness of such thoughts is born of our excessive interest. We are always getting in our own way, wishing to forestall and overmaster Nature’s prescriptions. Only dons ought to die more badly when they are well, glowering at the thought of death. Common folk need no remedy nor consolation save when the blow falls; and then they reflect on it all the more justly since they are feeling it. [B] We assert (do we not) that what gives the common folk their power to endure [C] present ills, [B] as well as their profound indifference towards inauspicious future events, is their insensitivity and [C] lack of [B] understanding57 [C] and the fact that their souls, being crass and obtuse, are less open to penetration and disturbance. [B] If that is so, then for God’s sake let us adhere, from now on, to that School of animal stupidity! It leads its pupils to the ultimate profit promised by the sciences; and does it gently. We shall not lack good professors to interpret that natural simplicity. Socrates for one. For, as far as I can recall, he says more or less the following to the judges who were deliberating about his life:
Gentlemen: I am afraid that if I were to beseech you not to put me to death I should impale myself on the denunciation of my accusers: namely that I claim to know more than everyone else, because I have some more [C] secret [B] knowledge58 of things above us and of things below. I know that I have neither frequented death nor reconnoitred it; nor do I know anyone who, having assayed what it is like, can teach me about it. Those who fear death presuppose that they know it. As for me, I know neither what death is nor what the world to come is like. Death may be something indifferent or something desirable. [C] (We may believe, however, that it is a migration, a crossing from one place to another, and that there is some improvement in going to live among so many great men who have crossed that divide – and to be free from having to deal with wicked and corrupt judges! If death be a reduction of our being to nothingness, it is still an improvement to enter upon a long and peaceful night. We know of nothing in life sweeter than quiet rest and deep dreamless sleep.) [B] That which I know to be wicked, such as harming one’s neighbour and disobeying a superior, be it God or man, I scrupulously avoid. I cannot go in fear of things when I do not know whether they be good or evil.59
[C] If I go off to my death and leave you here alive, the gods alone know whether you or I will have the better of it. So, as far as it concerns me, you will please give such a sentence as suits yourselves. But following my way of giving just and useful counsel, I do say that, unless you can see more deeply into my case than I can, you would do better for your consciences’ sake to set me free; and also that, having made your judgement in keeping with my past deeds (both public and private), and also in keeping with my intentions and in keeping with the profit which so many of our citizens, both young and old, daily derive from my conversation and the advantages I bring to you, to all of you: you cannot properly release yourselves of your debt towards my merit except by issuing an order that I be maintained in the Prytaneum – at public expense, given my poverty – something which I have often seen you grant, with less reason, to others.
Do not take it as stubbornness or contempt if I do not follow precedent and become a suppliant moving you to pity.
Being no more than anyone else ‘engendered by sticks and stones’, as Homer puts it, I have friends and relations well able to appear before you in tears and grief; and I have three weeping children who can move you to pity. But I would bring shame on our city if, at my age, and having that reputation for wisdom (with which I am now charged) I were to sink to such cowardly behaviour. What would people say about the other Athenians! I have always counselled those who listened to me never to ransom their life by a dishonourable deed. And in my country’s wars, at Amphipolis, at Potidaea, at Delium, as well in others in which I played a part, I showed in practice how far I was from ensuring my safety by my shame.
Moreover I would be compromising your sense of duty and soliciting you to do something ugly: it is not for any supplications of mine to persuade you, but for pure and solid reasons of justice to do so. You have sworn to the gods to bear yourselves thus: it would seem that I were wishing to bring a counter-indictment, suspecting you of not believing that there are any gods! And I too would bear witness against myself, showing that I did not believe in them as I ought to, either, since I distrusted their governance and did not entrust my case entirely to their hands. I have complete trust in them, convinced as I am that they will act in this matter as will be best for me and for you.
Good men, whether living or dead, have nothing to fear from the gods.60
[B] As a plea is that not [C] crisp and sensible, yet naïve and lowly,61 [B] unimaginably sublime, [C] true, frank and incomparably right [B] – and made in such an hour of need! [C] It was reasonable indeed of Socrates to prefer it to the one which the great orator Lysias had written out for him, excellently couched in lawyers’ language but unworthy of so noble an accused.62 Should one ever hear a word of supplication from the lips of Socrates! Should such proud virtue strike sail precisely when it was being most vigorously displayed! Should his nature, noble and puissant, have entrusted his defence to art, and when it was being most highly assayed have renounced truth and simplicity, which were the ornaments of his speech, in order to bedizen itself with the cosmetic figures and fictions of a prepared address?
He acted most wisely and in keeping with himself by not corrupting the tenor of an incorruptible life, or so august a concept of the form of humankind, in order to prolong his old age by a year and so betray the immortal memory of that glorious end.
His duty in life was not to himself but to be an example to the world: would it not have been a public catastrophe if he had ended his life in some idle obscure manner?
[B] Indeed such a detached and quiet way of rating his death deserved that posterity should rate it more highly for him. And it did so. In the whole of justice nothing is more just than what Fortune ordained for its glory. The Athenians held those who were responsible for it in such loathing that they shunned them as persons accursed: anything which they touched was held to be polluted; no one would bathe in the public baths with them; no one greeted them; no one approached them; so that, finally, no longer able to bear such public opprobrium, they went and hanged themselves.63
If anyone reckons that I chose a bad example from among so many of Socrates’ speeches which could have served my purpose, and if he judges that Socrates’ reasoning here is far above the opinion of common men, well, I chose it on purpose. For I judge otherwise and maintain that his reasoning here holds a more modest rank than even common opinions and that its naïve simplicity is less elevated; [C] within an unspoiled boldness quite without artifice, and with a childlike assurance, [B] it exhibits Nature’s pure and primary [C] stamp and simplicity.64 [B] While it is credible that we should have a natural fear of pain, it is not credible that we should fear dying as such, which is a part of the essence of our being, no less than living is. For what purpose would Nature have engendered within us a loathing and horror of dying, seeing that dying rates as something extremely useful, in that it ensures succession and substitution within Nature’s works and also, within the [C] commonwealth [B] of this world,65 serves birth and increase more than loss and destruction.
Sic return summa novatur
[Thus is totality renewed]
[C] Mille animas una necata dedit.
[One death gives rise to a thousand lives.]
[B] The failing of one life is the gate to a thousand other lives.66 [C] Nature has stamped on the beasts a concern for themselves and their own conservation. They can get as far as being afraid of harm from knocking against things and so hurting themselves and of our tying them up and beating them – things which are within their sensations and experience. What they cannot fear is that we may kill them: they do not have the faculty of imagining death or thinking about it. In addition it is said that [B] one can see them not merely suffering death gladly (most horses whinny when dying, while swans [C] sing at [B] their deaths)67 but even seeking it when necessary, as is shown by several examples of elephants.68
Moreover is not the style of argument which Socrates uses here one which stuns us equally by its simplicity and its ecstatic force? In truth it is far easier to talk like Aristotle and to live like Caesar than both to talk like Socrates and live like Socrates. In him is lodged the highest degree of perfection and of difficulty. Art cannot reach it. Moreover our own faculties are not trained that way. We neither assay them nor understand them: we clothe ourselves in those of others and allow our own to lie unused – and some may say that about me, asserting that I have merely gathered here a big bunch of other men’s flowers, having furnished nothing of my own but the string to hold them together.
I have indeed made a concession to the taste of the public with these borrowed ornaments which accompany me. But I do not intend them to cover me up or to hide me: that is the very reverse of my design: I want to display nothing but my own – what is mine by nature. If I had had confidence to do what I really wanted, I would have spoken utterly alone, come what may. [C] Yet despite my projected design and my original concept (but following the whim of the age and the exhortation of others) I burden myself with more and more of them every day. That may not become me well: I think it does not, but never mind: it might be useful to somebody else.
[B] There are men who quote Plato and Homer without ever setting eyes on them. (I too have often taken my quotations not from the originals but from elsewhere.) Since in the place where I write I am surrounded by one thousand volumes, I could easily, if I wanted to, now borrow without trouble or scholarship, from a dozen of the kind of botchers whose pages I hardly ever turn, quite enough to [C] put an enamel gloss on [B] this treatise69 about physiognomy. To cram myself full of quotations all I would need would be the preliminary epistle of some German! And that is the way we go seeking tidbits of glory with which to diddle this foolish world!
[C] Those meat-pies stuffed with commonplaces by which so many eke out their studies on the cheap are useless except for commonplace topics; they can be used to show off, but not for right conduct – just such a laughable fruit of learning as served as knock-about amusement for Socrates against Euthydemus.70 I have known books made out of materials which have never been studied or understood, the author having entrusted the research for this and that needed to construct it to divers learned friends, being content for his part with having thought up the project and then having made an industrious compilation out of that bundle of unknown materials. At least the ink and paper are his. In all conscience that is not writing a book but purchasing one, borrowing one. It shows men – something of which they might have remained in doubt – that you are unable to write one. [B] A presiding judge boasted in my presence that he had amassed two hundred or so borrowed commonplaces and worked them into one of his presidential rescripts.71 [C] By declaring that fact to all and sundry he seemed to me to be nullifying the glory he was being given for it. [B] A petty and ridiculous vanity for my taste in such a subject and in such a person.72
[C] Among my many borrowings I take delight in being able to conceal the occasional one, masking it and distorting it to serve a new purpose. At the risk of letting people say that it is because I failed to understand any of the meanings in context, I give that one some peculiar slant with my own hand, so that they may all be less purely and simply someone else’s. [B] But those others put their larcenies on parade and into their accounts, thereby acquiring a better claim in law than I do! [C] Followers of Nature like me reckon that, in honour, invention takes incomparably higher precedence over quotation.
[B] If I had wanted to speak from erudition I would have done so sooner: I would have written at a time closer to my studies when I had more memory and Nous. And if I had wanted to make a trade out of writing I would have had more confidence in myself at that age than I do now. [C] Moreover one particular favour which Fortune may have granted me by means of this book would then have occurred at a more propitious season. [B] Two of my acquaintances, men of great scholarship, have in my opinion lost half their value by declining to publish at forty and waiting until they were [C] sixty.73 [B] Like youth, maturity has its defects: worse ones. And old age is as unsuited to work of that nature as to any other. Whoever submits his senile mind to the presses is mad if he hopes to extract anything which does not stink of a man who is ugly, raving and half-asleep. Our mind as it ages becomes constipated and squat. I reveal my ignorance with copious pomp: I reveal my learning meagrely and pitifully – [C] the latter as an accessory, a by-product: the former, as explicit and primary. Strictly, I treat nothing except nothing, and I treat not science but nescience. [B] I have selected the time when my life (which I have to portray) is laid out before me: whatever remains over has more to do with dying. The only news which I would willingly still give to the public as I pack my bags would concern my dying, if I found it, as others do, to be loquacious.
It vexes me that Socrates, who was the perfect exemplar of all the great qualities, should have chanced to have so ugly a face and body (as they say he did), one so unbecoming to the beauty of his soul, [C] he who was so much in love, so madly in love, with beauty. Nature did him an injustice there. [B] There is nothing more probable than the conformity and correspondence of the body and the mind.74 [C] ‘Ipsi animi magni refert quali in corpore locati sint: multa enim e corpore existunt quœ acuant mentem, multa quœ obtundant.’ [It matters much to souls in what sort of body they are lodged; for many of the body’s qualities serve to sharpen the mind, and many others make it obtuse.]75 The author here is talking about unnatural ugliness and physical deformity. But we also use ugliness to mean an immediately recognizable uncomeliness, which is lodged primarily in the face and which we often find distasteful for quite trivial causes: for its colouring, a spot, a coarse expression or for some inexplicable reason even when the limbs are well-proportioned and whole. In that category was the ugliness which clothed the most beautiful soul of La Boëtie. Such surface ugliness, imperious though it may be, is less harmful in its effects on a man’s mind and is not, in people’s opinion, by any means a certain prognostic. The other kind, which is strictly speaking deformity, is more substantial and more inclined to turn its effects inwards. The shape of the foot is revealed not only by a shoe of fine polished leather but by any close-fitting one. [B] As Socrates said of his own ugliness: it would have revealed quite justly the ugliness of his soul, had he not corrected his soul by education.76 [C] But in saying it I hold that he was jesting as usual: never did so excellent a soul make itself.
[B] I cannot repeat often enough how highly I rate beauty, which is a powerful and most beneficial quality. (Socrates called it a ‘brief tyranny’ [C] and Plato ‘a privilege of Nature’.)77 [B] We have no other qualities which surpass it in repute. It holds the highest rank in human intercourse: it runs ahead of the others, carries off our judgement and biases it with its great authority and its wondrous impact. [C] Phryne would have lost her case even in the hands of an excellent advocate if she had not corrupted her judges by the brilliance of her beauty as she parted her garment.78 And I find that Cyrus, Alexander and Caesar, those three lords of the world, did not neglect it in order to execute their great endeavours. Nor did the elder Scipio. In Greek one and the same word embraces the beautiful and the good. And the Holy Ghost often calls things good when He means beautiful.79 I would readily defend the hierarchy of goods taken from an ancient poem and song which Plato says was popular: health, beauty, wealth.80.
Aristotle says that the right to command belongs to the beautiful and that, whenever there are persons whose beauty approaches that of the portraits of the gods, like veneration is due to them. When someone asked him why men haunt the company of the beautiful both longer and more often, he replied: ‘Only a blind man should ask that.’81 Most of the philosophers, and the greatest, paid for their tuition and acquired their wisdom by the favour and agency of their beauty.
[B] Not only in the men but in the animals serving me I consider beauty to be only two fingers away from goodness. Yet to me it seems that those facial traits and features and those distinctive characteristics from which inner complexions are inferred as well as our future destinies are things which cannot be lodged simply and directly under the headings of beauty or ugliness: no more than in times of plague pleasant smells and a clear atmosphere can promise salubrity nor all kinds of oppressiveness and stench threaten infection.
Those who accuse ladies of contradicting their beauty by their morals do not always strike home: a face may not be very well-shaped yet have an air of probity and dependability; just as, on the contrary, I have read behind a pair of beautiful eyes warnings of a malicious and dangerous character. Some physiognomies augur well: in the thick of victorious enemies you would immediately, from among men unknown, pick out one rather than another to surrender to and to entrust with your life: and you would not have been influenced strictly speaking by beauty. Looks are a weak guarantee, yet they have some influence.
If my task were to administer floggings, I would do so more severely to criminals who belie and betray the promises which Nature had planted on their features: I would inflict harsher punishment on malice in a man who looked debonair. It appears that some faces are blessed, others unblessed, and there is I think an art which can distinguish between the debonair face and the simple one, the severe and the harsh the sullen and the chagrined, the arrogant and the melancholic, and such other pairs of qualities.82 Some forms of beauty are not merely proud but haughty; others are gentle, and others still are lifeless. As for forecasting the future from them, such [C] matters [B] I leave undecided.83
As I have said already, as regards myself I have simply adopted raw that ancient precept which says that we cannot go wrong by following Nature, and that the sovereign precept is to conform to her.84 Unlike Socrates I have not corrected my natural complexions by the power of reason,85 and I have in no wise let my inclinations become confused by artifice. I let myself go as I came in: I combat nothing; my two principal parts live graciously together in peace and harmony. But, thank God, my nurse’s milk was moderately healthful and temperate.
[C] May I say en passant that I know There is a certain scholastic concept of morality – virtually the only one current – which is held in higher esteem among us than it is worth; it is a slave to precepts and bound by hopes and fears. I like the morality which laws and religions do not make up but make perfect and authoritative, one which knows that it has the means of sustaining itself without help, one which, rooted on its own stock, is born in us from the seed of that universal reason which is stamped upon every man who is not disnatured. That Reason which straightened out Socrates’ vicious kink made him obedient to the men and the gods who commanded in his city and courageous in death not because his soul was immortal but because he himself was mortal. Any instruction which convinces people that religious belief alone, without morality, suffices to satisfy God’s justice is destructive of all government and is far more harmful than it is ingenious and subtle. Men’s practices reveal an extraordinary distinction between devotion and the sense of right and wrong.
[B] I have a [C] bearing [B] which,86 both in beauty and as it is interpreted, is of good augury –
Quid dixi habere? Imo habui, Chreme! [What am I saying, have, Chremes? I mean I had!]
Heu tantum attriti corporis ossa vides! [Alas! You now see only the bones of this worn-down body!]87
– and has an appearance contrary to that of Socrates. It has often happened that people who have had no previous acquaintance with me, people going merely by my fine air and [C] presence, [B] have put88 great trust in me either for their own affairs or my own. And in foreign countries I have received singular and rare favour because of it. The following two experiences are perhaps both worth narrating in detail.
There was a man who had determined to take me and my house by surprise. His trick was to come alone to my gate and to press to be admitted fairly urgently. I knew him by name and had occasion to put my trust in him as a neighbour who was to some degree related to me by marriage. I opened the gate for him [C] as I do for everyone. [B] There he was, looking quite terrified, with his horse winded and quite exhausted. He told me the following story: one of his enemies had just come across him some half a league away. (I knew that man too and had heard of their quarrel.) He said that this enemy had followed remarkably close on his heels. He, having been taken by surprise [C] in disarray [B] and being weaker [C] in numbers, [B] had rushed to my gate for safety; he was very worried about his men whom he said he supposed were dead [C] or taken.89
[B] Very naively I assayed to strengthen, reassure and reinvigorate him. Soon after, lo and behold! four or five of his soldiers appeared, looking equally frightened and wanting to be let in. More came; then still more, until there was some twenty-five or thirty of them, all armed and well-equipped and claiming to have their enemy at their heels.
[C] This mystery-play began to awaken my suspicions: [B] I had not forgotten what a time we were living in, nor how much my house90 might be coveted; and I knew of several cases of acquaintances of mine who had had similar bad experiences. Nevertheless, I considered that there was nothing to be gained by having started out to be welcoming if I did not go through with it; so, not being able to defeat them without smashing up everything, I allowed myself to take the simplest and most natural course (as I always do) and ordered them to come in.
Besides, by my nature I am neither very suspicious nor distrustful; and that is the truth. I have a strong tendency to find justifications and the kindest interpretation. I judge men according to the common order of Nature; I do not believe in perverted and disnatured tendencies, any more than in portents and miracles, unless I am forced to do so by some major piece of evidence. I am moreover a man inclined to trust myself to Fortune and to allow myself to dash into her arms. Up to the present I have had more reason to congratulate myself on that than to pity myself, and I have found Fortune [C] both better informed and better disposed towards my affairs than I am. [B] There91 have been a few deeds in my life the handling of which could rightly be called difficult or, if you wish, wise. Allow even a third of those to be due to me: but two-thirds, certainly, were abundantly due to her.
– [C] Where we go wrong, if you ask me, is in not entrusting ourselves enough to Heaven and in expecting more from our own conduct of affairs than rightly belongs to us. That explains why our schemes so often go awry. Heaven is jealous of the scope which we allow to the rights of human wisdom to the prejudice of its own: the more we extend them the more Heaven cuts them back. –
[B] Those armed men remained mounted in my courtyard, while their leader was with me in my hall; he had not wished his horse to be stabled, saying that he would withdraw as soon as he had news of his men. He saw he was master of the situation and that the moment had come to execute his plan. Subsequently he often told me – for he was not afraid to tell his tale – that what wrenched his treachery from his grasp were my countenance and my frank behaviour. He got back into the saddle; his men, keeping their eyes constantly fixed on him to catch what signal he would give them, were amazed to see him ride out, surrendering his advantage.
On another occasion, trusting to some truce or other which had just been proclaimed between our forces, I was on the road travelling through some particularly ticklish terrain. As soon as wind of me got about, three or four groups of horsemen set out from different places to trap me. After three days one of them made contact with me and I was charged by fifteen or twenty masked gentlemen92 followed by a wave of mounted bowmen. There I was, captured; having surrendered I was dragged off into the thick of some neighbouring forest, deprived of my horse and luggage, my coffers ransacked, my strong-box seized. Horses and equipment were divided between their new owners. We haggled for some time in that thicket over my ransom, which they had pitched so high that it was obvious that they knew little about me. A great quarrel started between them over whether they would let me live. There were indeed several threatening circumstances which showed what a dangerous situation I was in:
[C] Tunc animis opus, Aenea, tunc pectore firmo. [Now, Aeneas, you need all your courage and a firm mind.]93
[B] I continued to hold out for the terms of my surrender: that I should give up to them only what they had won by despoiling me (which was not to be despised), with no promise of further ransom. We were there for two or three hours when they set me on a nag unlikely to want to bolt away and committed me, individually, to be brought along under the guard of some fifteen or twenty men armed with harquebuses, while my men were dispersed among other such soldiers, each with orders to escort us as prisoners along different routes. I had already covered the distance of some two or three harquebus shots,
Jam prece Pollucis, jam Castoris implorata, [Having by then prayed to Pollux and implored Castor,]94
when, all of a sudden, a most unexpected change came upon them. I saw their leader ride over to me, [C] using most gentle words and [B] putting95 himself to the trouble of searching among his troops for my scattered belongings, which, insofar as he could find them, he returned to me, not excluding my strong-box.96 In the end they gave me my best present, my freedom: the rest hardly affected me [C] at the time.
[B] The true cause of so novel ‘a volte-face, of such second thoughts which derived from no apparent impulsion, of so miraculous a reversal of intent, at such a time and in the course of such an operation which was fully thought through and deliberated upon and which custom had made lawful (for from the outset I openly admitted which side I was on and the road I was taking), I certainly do not really know even now. The most prominent man among them took off his mask and informed me of his name;97 he then told me several times that I owed my liberation to my countenance as well as to my freedom and firmness of speech which made me unworthy of such a misfortune; and he asked me to promise if necessary to return him the compliment.
It is possible that God in his goodness wished to make use of such trivial means to preserve me. (He protected me again the following day from other and worse [C] ambushes98 [B] which these very men had warned me about.)
The man in the second of these incidents is still alive to tell the tale: the man in the first was killed a little while ago.
If my countenance did not vouch for me, if people did not read in my eyes the innocence of my intentions, I would never have endured so long without feud or offence, given my indiscriminate frankness in saying, rightly or wrongly, whatever comes into my mind and in making casual judgements. Such a style may rightly appear discourteous and ill-suited to our manners, but I have never found anyone who considered it abusive or malevolent or who, provided he had it from my own mouth, was stung by my frankness. (Reported words have both a different resonance and a different sense.) Besides I do not hate anybody; and I am such a coward about hurting people that I cannot do it even to serve a rational end: when circumstances have required me to pass sentences on criminals I have preferred not to enforce justice; [C] ‘Ut magis peccari nolim quam satis animi ad vindicanda peccata habeam.’ [I wish the only crimes committed were those which I really had the heart to punish.]99 Aristotle was reproached with being too merciful to a wicked man. ‘True,’ he said. ‘But I was merciful to the man not to the wickedness.’100
Judgements normally inflame themselves towards revenge out of horror for the crime. That is precisely what tempers mine: my horror for the first murder makes me frightened of committing a second, and my loathing for the original act of cruelty makes me loathe to imitate it. [B] I am only a [C] Jack [B] of Clubs,101 but you can apply to me what was said of Charillus King of Sparta: ‘He cannot be good: he is not bad to the wicked.’ Or (since Plutarch presents it, as he does hundreds of other things, in two opposite and contrasting manners) you can put it thus: ‘He must be good: he is good even to the wicked.’102
When the deeds are not illegal, and those who do them dislike them, I am loath to act against them: so too if the deeds are illegal, and those who do them delight in them, then (to tell the truth) I am not over-scrupulous when acting against them.