A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH FAMILIAR ESSAY I. MONTAIGNE AND THE BEGINNINGS OF The Familiar Essay made its first appearance in England during one of the most crowded and prolific periods of her literary history- the last decade of the sixteenth century. As a distinct type of prose writing it was not native to England, although many of the literary practices out of which it developed were to be found there, as in most of the countries of Europe. The direct stimulus to its cultivation by English writers came from France. and tastes In the year 1570 a French gentleman, Michel de Montaigne, gave up his post as a lawyer in Bordeaux and retired to his country estates, for the purpose, as he himself expressed it, of Montaigne (1533-1592): "living in quiet and reading." In his education and his education tastes Montaigne was a typical cultured Frenchman of the Renaissance. At the instance of his father, an enthusiastic admirer of Italian humanism, he was taught Latin before he learned French, and at college he had among his tutors some of the most accomplished classical scholars of the time. His culture consequently took on a very pronounced Latin and Italian tinge; Greek writers he read with difficulty, and by preference in translations; and his interest in earlier and contemporary French literature was limited to a few authors and books, principally in the field of history. Above all, as he grew older he became absorbed in the moral problems which the revival of the literatures and philosophies of antiquity, together with the discovery of America, had brought to the fore all over Europe. It was doubtless to gain more time for reflection on these questions that at the age of thirty-seven he abandoned active life for a quiet existence in his library at Montaigne. He had not been there long before a natural desire to preserve his memories" and to "clarify his reflections" led him to write. ९९ Sources and character of his early essays ९९ The form which his first compositions took was in no sense original with him. By the middle of the sixteenth century there had come into existence, in nearly all the countries touched by the Renaissance, various types of works designed to make accessible the knowledge and ideas of antiquity. Some of these had themselves an antique origin. Thus, from the so-called Distichs of Cato, a work dating from the late Roman Empire, proceeded a long line of collections of "sentences," or moral maxims, of which Erasmus's Adagia (1500) was perhaps the most celebrated -books in which were brought together, sometimes under general heads such as ९९ education,” the brevity of life," "death," "youth and age," " riches," etc., wise sayings of ancient and often, too, of modern authors. Similarly, the influence of Plutarch (born cir. 46 A.D.) and of Valerius Maximus (first century A.D.) led to the compilation of numerous books of apothegms, or " sentences" put into the mouths of historical personages, and of "examples," or significant anecdotes culled from the writings of historians and moralists. Works of this kind enjoyed an extraordinary vogue during the Renaissance; they existed in nearly all the modern languages as well as in Latin, and some of them ran through literally hundreds of editions. Strictly speaking, however, they were not so much books as extremely arid compilations of raw material. To supplement them, and to present the wisdom of antiquity in a more readable form, certain humanists developed, chiefly from hints furnished by such ancient authors as Aulus Gellius (2d century A.D.) and Macrobius (5th century A.D.), a special type of writing, commonly called in France the leçon morale, in which "sentences," apothegms, and "examples" were fused together in short dissertations on ethical subjects. The writers who cultivated this genre, whether in Latin or in the various vernaculars, had for the most part a purely practical object to collect and make readily accessible the views and discoveries of the ancients on all questions relating to the conduct of life. They attached themselves by preference to subjects of a general and commonplace sort, such as strange customs and singular happenings, the grandeur and misery of man, the intelligence of animals, the moral virtues, the force of the imagination, death; and in treatment they seldom went beyond an impersonal, unoriginal grouping of maxims and "examples." When Montaigne began to write, probably in 1571, it was to the compilers of leçons that he looked for literary inspiration. It was, indeed, only natural that he should do so; for his own aims in writing were at first almost precisely the same as theirs. He had no ambition to write an original book; he wished only to bring together, with a minimum of effort, the interesting and helpful passages which he encountered in his reading. Accordingly, his first compositions belonged essentially in both manner and matter to the genre which these compilers had popularized. Some of them, as, for example, a little piece entitled "That the Hour of Parley is Dangerous," were merely brief collections of anecdotes and "sentences," unified by a common subject; others, such as "Of the Inequality Amongst Us" and "Of Sorrow,"1 had a somewhat more elaborate organization, but were constructed out of the same elements. The subjects, all of them questions of morals or practical affairs, had nearly all been treated. already by one or another of the numerous writers of leçons. In dealing with them afresh Montaigne displayed an impersonality of method quite as marked as that of any of his predecessors. Now and then he developed in his own way a maxim from an ancient writer, added a word of comment to one of his numerous moral stories, or contributed a sentence or two of transition; but beyond that his ambition did not go; there were no personal confidences, no revelations of his own experience and ideas. His creation of the per Such was the character of the writings with which Montaigne occupied himself during the year or two following his retirement. His subservience to the ideals and methods of the leçon was complete. About 1574, however, before he had published sonal essay anything, a change began in his conception and practice of composition which was to result, before 1580, in the creation of an entirely new literary form - the personal essay. Among the influences which contributed to this change one of the most potent certainly was that of his own temperament. Montaigne had brought into his retirement a strong native tendency to moral reflection and self-analysis-a tendency which his isolation from affairs, and especially a severe illness which he underwent about 1578, no doubt helped to intensify. But there were literary factors also at work. Shortly after 1 See pp. 2-5, below. 1572 he fell under the spell of the writings of Plutarch, then lately translated into French by Jacques Amyot. In these, particularly in the collection of short moral discourses known as Moralia, he found models of a very different sort from the dry and impersonal compilations he had imitated hitherto. Plutarch's chapters were, it is true, full of maxims and "examples"; but the maxims and "examples" did not form the substance of the composition they were wholly subordinate to the personal reflections of the author. The naturalness and freedom from pedantry of the old Greek moralist made a profound impression on Montaigne; he seems to have had the Moralia almost constantly before him during a period of several years, and their influence had much to do with the transformation of his own methods of composition. This transformation first appeared clearly in a number of pieces written between 1578 and 1580.2 Content no longer with a mere compilation of striking passages from his reading, Montaigne now aimed to give primarily his own reflections on moral and psychological subjects. The quotations and "examples," it is true, still abounded; but their function was changed; they were not, as before, the basis of the composition, but rather simply a means of illustrating the writer's thought. Moreover, to the "examples" drawn from books Montaigne began now to add anecdotes taken from his own memory and observation. Thus, in a chapter entitled "Of the Education of Children," after setting forth the general principles which should govern in the training of children, he proceeded to give a sketch, full of intimate details, of his own education. Again, in the chapter " Of Books" he discoursed not so much of books in general as of his own individual tastes and prejudices in literature. In short, the chapters written during this second period of Montaigne's career tended to become each a tissue of personal reflections, colored, to be sure, but no longer dominated, by their writer's reading. For the most part, too, they were considerably longer than those of the first period, and far less regular and orderly in composition. 2 Especially," Of the Education of Children," " Of the Affection of Fathers to their Children,” “Of Books,” “Of Cruelty,” “Of Presumption," and "Of the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers." With the exception of the first, all of these pieces are to be found in the second book of the Essais. The first book is almost entirely made up of impersonal essays of Montaigne's earliest period. First edition of Montaigne's Essais In 1580 Montaigne assembled the chapters he had written up to that time— ninety-four in all — and published them at Bordeaux in two books, entitling them modestly Essais. The name, a new one in European literature, itself gave warning that the collection was no mere book of conventional leçons, but, in however tentative a way, an original work. But Montaigne was not content with this indirect advertisement of his new-found purpose. Forgetful of nearly the whole of the first book, and thinking only of a few chapters in the second, he insisted, in his prefatory epistle to the reader, on the personal character of his undertaking. "It is," he wrote, "myself I portray." Between 1580 and 1588 Montaigne continued to busy himself with his book, and in the latter year, brought out a new edition, in Montaigne's which, along with revised versions of the essays written later essays before 1580, he included thirteen entirely new chapters.3 In these last pieces the traits which had been slowly coming to characterize his writing since about 1574 became still more marked. The individual essays were longer; the composition was if anything more rambling and discursive; and, though the quotations and the "examples" remained, the personal experiences and reflections of the writer formed even more notably the center of the work. Everywhere, no matter what the subject announced at the beginning of the chapter, Montaigne talked of himself of his memories of youth, of the curi ous and interesting things which had happened to him in manhood, of his habits of body and mind, of his whims and prejudices, of his ideas. Like the good moralist he was, he took on the whole more interest in what happened within him than in the external events of his life. "I can give no account of my life by my actions," he wrote in the essay "Of Vanity "; " fortune has placed them too low; I must do it by my fancies." But it was not his intention to write anything like a formal autobiography even of his inner life. He wished rather to find in his own experiences, commonplace as many of them were, light on the general moral problems which were always the primary subject of his reflections. "I propose," he said, speaking of his design 3 These formed a third book. Among them were the essays on which Montaigne's fame has perhaps most largely rested: "Of Repentance," " Upon Some Verses of Virgil," " Of Coaches,"" Of the Inconvenience of Greatness," "Of Vanity," " Of Experience." |