Montaigne's Scepticism (by John Cowper Powys)

John Cowper Powys

Suspended Judgments: Essays on Books and Sensations

(1916)

MONTAIGNE

(...) The second element in the compound chemistry of the “modern temper” introduced into the world by Montaigne may be found in his famous scepticism. The formidable levity of that” notorious “que sais-je ?”, “What do I know ?”, writes itself nowadays across our whole sky. All the great sophists — Protagoras especially, with his “man the measure of all things”— were, in a sense, professional teachers of a refined scepticism. Plato himself, with his wavering and gracious hesitations, was more than touched by the same spirit.

Scepticism as a natural human philosophy — perhaps as the only natural human philosophy — underlies all the beautiful soft-coloured panorama of pagan poetry and pagan thought. It must have been the habitual temper of mind in any Periclean symposium or Cesarean salon. It is, pre-eminently and especially, the civilised attitude of mind; the attitude of mind most dominant and universal in the great races, the hon epochs, the great societies. It is for this reason that France, among all modern nations, is the most sceptical.

(...)

This scepticism of Montaigne is a much rarer quality among men of genius than the egoism

with which it is so closely associated. I am inclined to regard it as the sanest of all human

moods. What distinguishes it from other intellectual attitudes is the fact that it is shared by the very loftiest with the very simplest minds. It is the prevailing temper of shepherds and ploughmen, of carters and herdsmen, of all honest gatherers at rustic taverns who discuss the state of the crops, the prospects of the weather, the cattle market and the rise and fall of nations. It is the wisdom of the earth itself; shrewd, friendly, full of unaccountable instincts; obstinate and capricious, given up to irrational and inexplicable superstitions; sluggish, suspicious, cautious, hostile to theory, enamoured of inconsistencies, humorously critical of all ideals, realistic, empirical, wayward, ready to listen to any magical whisper, to any faint pipings of the flutes of Pan, but grumblingly reluctant to follow the voices of the prophets and the high doctrines of the leaders of men.

Its wisdom is the wisdom of lazy noons in spacious corn-fields; of dewy mornings in misty

lanes and moss-grown paths; of dreamy shadows in deep grass when the apple boughs hang heavily earthward, and long nights of autumn rain have left amber-coloured pools in the hollow places of the trees and in the mud trodden by the cattle.

Its sanity is the sanity of farm-yards and smoking dung-heaps and Priapian jests beneath

wintry hedges, and clear earth-sweet thoughtless laughter under large, liquid, mid-summer stars. The nonchalant “What do I know ?”—‘“What does any one know ?”—of this shrewd pagan spirit ‘has nothing in it of the ache of pessimistic disillusion. It has never had any illusions. It has taken things as they appear, and life as it appears, and it is so close to the kindly earth-mud beneath our feet that it is in no fear of any desperate fall.

What lends the sceptical wisdom of Montaigne such massive and enduring weight is the very fact of its being the natural pagan wisdom of generations of simple souls who live close to the earth. No wonder he was popular with the farmers and peasants of his countryside and with the thrifty burgesses of his town. He must have gathered much wisdom from his wayfaring among the fields, and many scandalous sidelights upon human nature as he loitered among the streets and wharfs of the city. It is indeed the old joyous, optimistic, pagan spirit, full of courage and gaiety; full too, it must be confessed, of a humorous terror now and then, and yet capable enough sometimes of looking very formidable antagonists squarely in the face and refusing to quit the quiet ways it has marked out and the shrewd middle path it has chosen!

Turning over the pages of Cotton’s translation — it is my fancy to prefer this one to the more famous Florio’s — there seems to me to arise from these rambling discourses, a singularly wholesome savour. I seem to see Montaigne’s massive and benignant countenance as he jogs home, wrapped against the wind in the cloak that was once his father’s, along the muddy autumn lanes, upon his strong but not over-impetuous nag. Surely I have seen that particular cast of features in the weather-beaten face of many a farm labourer, and listened too, from the same lips, to just as relishing a commentary upon the surprising ways of providence with mortal men. Full of a profound sense of a physical wellbeing, which the troublesome accidents of chance and time only served to intensify, Montaigne surveyed the grotesque panorama of human life with a massive and indelible satisfaction.

His optimism, if you can call it by such a name, is not the optimism of theory; it is not the optimism of faith, far less is it that mystic and transcendental optimism which teases one, in these later days, with its swollen words and windy rhetoric. It is the optimism of simple, shrewd, sane common sense, the optimism of the poor, the optimism of sound nerves, the optimism of cab-men and bus drivers, of fishermen and gardeners, of “tinkers, tailors, soldiers, sailors, apothecaries and thieves.” What Montaigne really does is to bring into the courts of philosophy and to heighten with the classic style of one who was “brought up upon Latin,’ the sheer, natural, incorrigible love of life, of such persons, rich or poor, as have the earth in their blood and the shrewd wisdom of the earth and the geniality of the earth, and the mischievous wantonness of the earth, and the old, sly chuckling malice of the earth, in their blood and in their soul. He can record, and does often record, in those queer episodic dips into his scrap-book, the outrageous stories of a thousand freaks of nature. He loves these little impish tricks of the great careless gods. He loves the mad, wicked, astounding, abnormal things that are permitted to happen as the world moves round. He reads Tacitus and Plutarch very much as a Dorsetshire shepherd might read the Western Gazette, and makes, in the end, much of the same commentary.

In a certain sense Montaigne is the most human of all great geniuses. The whole turbulent stream of the motley spectacle passes through his consciousness and he can feel equal sympathy with the heroism of a Roman patriot and with the terrors of a persecuted philosopher. What pleases him best is to note the accidental little things —“life’s little ironies” — which so frequently intervene between ideal resolutions and their results in practise and fact. He chuckles over the unfortunate lapses in the careers of great men much as a mischievous gossip in a tavern might chuckle over similar lapses in the careers of local potentates.

Montaigne’s scepticism is the result of his looking at the world not through books or through the theories of books, but through his own eyes. He is sceptical because he sees that any one who wishes to live in harmony with the facts of life must be sceptical. Life is made up of such evasive entangled confused elements that any other attitude than this one is a noble madness if it is not knavish hypocrisy. The theories, convictions, moralities, opinions, of every child of Adam are subject to lamentable upheavals, as the incorrigible earth-gods, with their impish malice, seize them and play nine-pins with them. “All flows away and nothing remains,” says the ancient philosopher, and Montaigne shows clearly enough how vain it is to put our trust in any theory or system or principle or idea.

It is a mistake to regard his scepticism as merely negative. It is far more than that. Like all wise scepticism it is creative and constructive; not out of theories and phrases, nor out of principles and opinions, but out of events and persons and passions and instincts and chances and occasions. It is realistic — this Montaignesque method — realistic not materialistic. It takes each occasion as it occurs, each person as he presents himself, each passion, each instinct, each lust, each emotion, and out of these he creates a sort of piece-meal philosophy; modest enough and making no claim to finality, but serving us, at a pinch, as a sort of rough-and-ready clue through the confusions of life.

It will always appear presumptuous to the dogmatic type of mind, the mind made up of rationalistic and logical exigencies, to call scepticism like this by the name of “philosophy.” It will be still more obscure to such a mind how it is possible for a human being to live happily and joyfully in a complete absence of any synthetic system. And yet one feels certain enough that amid the jolts and jars and shocks of actual life even the most idealistic of philosophers leave their logic to shift for itself and just drift on as they may in the groove of traditional usages or the track of temperamental bias.

(...)

What the scepticism of Montaigne does is to clear out of the path all the individual claims to extraordinary insight of the philosophic great men of the world, by means of showing how, under the pressure of obstinate and malicious reality, such explanations of the universe break down and such great men collapse and become as blind, helpless, groping and uncertain as all the rest of us. Prophets and rationalists alike, logicians and soothsayers together, so collapse and fall away; while in their place the long slow patient wisdom of the centuries, the old shrewd superstitious wisdom of anonymous humanity rises up out of the pagan earth, and offers us our only solution.

Not that what we get in this humble way is really a solution at all. Rather is it a modest

working substitute for such solutions, a dim lamp flickering in a great darkness, a faint

shadow falling on a long uncertain road; a road of which we can see neither the beginning nor the end, and along which we have nothing better to guide us than such pathetic “omens of the way” as old wives’ tales repeat and old traditions hand down from mouth to mouth.

To certain minds the condition of the human race under the burden of such a twilight may well seem intolerable. To Montaigne it was not intolerable. It was his element, his pleasant Arcadia, his natural home. He loved the incongruities and inconsistencies of such a world; its

outrageous Rabelaisian jests, its monstrous changes and chances, its huge irrelevancy. He

loved its roguish and goblinish refusal to give up its secret to grave and solemn intellects, taking upon themselves the rdle of prophets. He loved a world that hides its treasures from the “wise and prudent” and reveals them — or at any rate all that will ever be revealed of them — to “babes and sucklings.”

Those who read Montaigne with a natural affinity for his peculiar turn of mind, will find themselves in a position to regard very humorously and lightly the portentous claims of modern philosophers whether they be rationalists or intuitivists. “There are more things in Heaven and earth,” they will retort to these scholarly Horatios in the very vein of that Prince of Denmark who — according to reliable critical opinion — was actually modelled on Montaigne himself. They will be encouraged to go on, as before, making the best of what the traditional wisdom of the centuries brings them, but not taking even this with more seriousness than its pathetic weight of human experience demands, and not dreaming that, with even this to help them, they are very closely initiated into the ultimate mystery.

They will be encouraged to go on as before, enjoying the books of the writers with a pinch of pleasant salt, but enjoying them with infinite zest and profit, and, at least, with full aesthetic appreciation. They will be encouraged to fall back upon the kindly possibilities and broad hopeful vistas to which thé unsophisticated heart of man naturally and spontaneously turns. They will be encouraged to go to he “highways and hedges” for their omens, to the felicitous encounters of the common road for their auguries and inspirations. They will listen reverently to the chatter of very simple people, and catch the shadow of the wings of fate falling upon very homely heads. The rough earth-wisdom of ploughed fields, heavy with brown sun-lit mud, will be redolent for them with whispers and hints and intimations of things that no philosophy can include and no psychology explain.

Out of the coarse rankness of rude primitive natures strange sweet mysteries will come to light, and upon the sensual lusts of satyrs, gambolling grossly in rain-soaked leafy midnights, the moon of tender purity will shed down her virginal benediction. For them the grotesque roots of trees will leer magically from the wayside to meet the uncouth gestures of the labourer and his trull; while in the smoke-thick air of mellow tavern-corners the

shameless mirth of honest revellers philosophising upon the world will have a smack of true

divinity.

They will be encouraged — the people who read Montaigne — to sink once more into their own souls and enjoy the rare sensations permitted to their own physical and psychological susceptibility, as the great world sweeps by them. I sometimes think that the wisdom of Montaigne, with its essential roots in physiological well-being, is best realised and understood when on some misty autumn morning, full of the smell of leaves, one lies, just newly awakened out of pleasant dreams, and watches the sunshine on wall and window and floor, and listens to the traffic of the town or the noises of the village. It is then, with the sweet languor of awakening, that one seems conscious of some ineffable spiritual secret to be drawn from the material sensations of the nerves of one’s body.

Montaigne, with all his gravity, is quite shameless in the assumption that the details of his bodily habits form an important part, not by any means to be neglected, of the picture he sets out to give of himself. And those who read Montaigne with sympathetic affinity will find themselves growing into the habit of making much of the sensations of their bodies. They will not rush foolishly and stupidly, like dull economic machines, from bedroom to “lunch counter” and from “lunch counter’ to office. They will savour every moment which can be called their own and they will endeavour to enlarge such moments by any sort

of economic or domestic change.

They will make much of the sensations of waking and bathing and eating and drinking

and going to sleep; just as they make much of the sensations of reading admirable books.

They will cross the road to the sunny side of the street; they will pause by the toy-shops and the flower-shops. They will go out into the fields, before breakfast, to look for mushrooms.

They will miss nothing of the caprices and humours and comedies of every day of human life;

for they will know that in the final issue none of us are wiser than the day and what the day

brings; none of us wiser than the wisdom of street and field and market-place; the wisdom of

the common people, the wisdom of our mother, the earth.

(...)

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