We, who are interested rather in literature than in the history of literature, and rather in the reaction produced upon ourselves by great original geniuses than in any judicial estimate of their actual achievements, can afford to regard with serene indifference the charges of arbitrariness and caprice brought against us by professional students.

Let these professional students prove to us that, in addition to their learning, they have receptive senses and quickly stimulated imagination, and we will accept them willingly as our guides.

We have already accepted Pater, Brandes, de Gourmont, critics who have the secret of combining immense erudition with creative intelligence, and it is under the power and the spell of these authoritative and indisputable names that we claim our right to the most personal and subjective enjoyment, precisely as the occasion and hour calls, of the greatest figures in art and letters.

Most of all we have a right to treat Montaigne as we please, even though that right includes the privilege of not reading every word of the famous Essays, and of only reverting ­in our light return to them ­to those aspects and qualities which strike an answering chord in ourselves.

This was, after all, what he ­the great humanist ­was always doing; he the unscrupulous, indiscriminate and casual reader; and if we treat him in the same spirit as that in which he treated the classical authors he loved most, we shall at least be acting under the cloak of his approval, however much we annoy the Calvins and Scaligers of our age.

The man must have been a colossal genius.  No human writer has done quite what he did, anticipating the methods and spiritual secrets of posterity, and creating for himself, with sublime indifference to contemporary usage and taste, the sort of intellectual atmosphere that suited him.

When one thinks how sensitive we all are to the intellectual environments in which we move ­how we submit for instance, at this very moment, without being able to help ourselves, to the ideas set in motion by Nietzsche, say, or Walt Whitman ­it seems impossible to overrate as a sheer triumph of personal force, the thing that Montaigne did in disentangling himself from the tendencies of his age, and creating almost “in vacuo,” with nothing to help him but his own temperament and the ancient classics, a new emotional attitude toward life, something that might without the least exaggeration be called “a new soul.”

The magnitude of his spiritual undertaking can best be estimated if we conceive ourselves freeing our minds, at this moment, from the influences of Nietzsche and Dostoievsky and Whitman and Pater and Wilde, and launching out into some completely original attitude toward existence, fortified it may be by the reading of Sophocles or of Lucretius, but with so original a mental vista that we leave every contemporary writer hopelessly behind.

Suppose we looked about us with a view to the undertaking of so huge an intellectual venture, where should we go to discover the original impetus, the first embryonic germ, of the new way?

In ourselves?  In our own temperament?  Ah! that is the crux of the whole matter.  It was in his temperament that he found the force and inexhaustible riches to carry the matter through ­but have we got such power at our disposal?  It is doubtful.  It is hard to even dream that we have.  And yet ­consider the simplicity of what he did!

He just took himself, Michael de Montaigne, as he was, in the plain unvarnished totality of his vigorous self-conscious temperament, and jotted down, more for his own amusement than for that of posterity, carelessly, frankly, nonchalantly, his tastes, his vices, his apathies, his antipathies, his prejudices and his pleasures.

In doing this ­though there is a certain self-revelation in Augustine’s confessions and a certain autobiographical frankness in the writings of many of the classical authors ­he did what had never been done by any one before his time, and what, not forgetting Rousseau and Heine and Casanova and Charles Lamb, has never been so well done since.  But whether, in these latter days, we can achieve this thing as Montaigne achieved it, the fact remains that this is what we are all at the present time trying hard to do.

The “new soul,” which he was permitted by the gods to evoke out of the very abyss, has become, in the passionate subjectivity of our age, the very life-blood of our intellect.  Not one among our most interesting artists and writers but does his utmost to reveal to the world every phase and aspect of his personal identity.  What was but a human necessity, rather concealed and discouraged than reveled in and exploited before Montaigne, has, after Montaigne, become the obsession and preoccupation of us all.  We have got the secret, the great idea, the “new soul.”  It only remains for us to incarnate it in beautiful and convincing form.

Ah! it is just there where we find the thing so hard.  It is easy to say ­“Find yourself, know yourself, express yourself!” It is extremely difficult to do any of these things.

No one who has not attempted to set down in words the palpable image and body of what he is, or of what he seems to himself, can possibly conceive the difficulty of the task.

More ­oh, so much more ­is needed than the mere saying, “I like honey and milk better than meat and wine” or “I like girls who are plump and fair better than those who are slim and dark.”  That is why so much of modern autobiographical and confessional writing is dull beyond words.  Even impertinence will not save our essays upon ourselves from being tedious ­nor will shamelessness in the flaunting of our vices.  Something else is required than a mere wish to strip ourselves bare; something else than a mere desire to call attention to ourselves.  And this “something else” is genius, and genius of a very rare and peculiar kind.  It is not enough to say, “I am this or that or the other.”  The writer who desires to give a convincing picture of what he is must diffuse the essence of his soul not merely into his statements about himself but into the style in which these statements are made.

Two men may start together to write confessions, and one of the two may dissect every nerve and fibre of his inmost soul, while the other may ramble carelessly on about the places he has seen, and the people he has met; yet in the ultimate result it may turn out that it is the latter rather than the former who has revealed his identity.

Human personalities ­the strange and subtle differences which separate us from one another ­refuse to give up the secrets of their quality save at the magical summons of what we call “style.”  Mr. Pepys was a quaint fellow and no Goethean egotist; but he managed to put a peculiar flavour of style ­with a rhythm and a colour all its own ­into his meticulous gossip.

Montaigne’s essays are not by any means of equal value.  The more intimately they deal with his own ways and habits, the more physiological they become in their shameless candour, the better do they please us.  They grow less interesting to my thinking where they debouch into quotations, some of them whole pages in length, from his favourite Roman writers.

He seems to have kept voluminous scrap-books of such quotations, and, like many less famous people, to have savoured a peculiar satisfaction from transcribing them.  One can imagine the deliberate and epicurean way he would go about this task, deriving from the mere bodily effort of “copying out” these long and carefully chosen excerpts, an almost sensual pleasure; the sort of pleasure which the self-imposed observance of some mechanical routine in a leisured person’s life is able to produce, not unaccompanied by agreeable sensations of physical well-being.

But what, after all, is this “new soul” which Montaigne succeeded in putting into our western civilisation at the very moment when Catholic and Protestant were so furiously striving for the mastery?  What is this new tone, this new temper, this new temperamental atmosphere which, in the intervals of his cautious public work and his lazy compiling of scrap-books from the classics, he managed to fling abroad upon the air?

It is a spiritual ingredient, composed, when one comes to analyse it, of two chemical elements; of what might be called aesthetic egoism and of what we know as philosophic scepticism.  Let us deal with the former of these two elements first.

Egoism, in the new psychological sense of the word, may be regarded as the deliberate attempt in an individual’s life to throw the chief interest and emphasis of his days upon the inward, personal, subjective impressions produced by the world, rather than upon outward action or social progress.  Egoism does not necessarily imply the invidious stigma of selfishness.  Goethe, the greatest of all egoists, was notoriously free from such a vice.  “Who,” cried Wieland, when they first met at Weimar, “who can resist the unselfishness of this man?”

Egoism does not necessarily imply “egotism,” though it must be confessed that in Montaigne’s case, though not in Goethe’s, there may have been a touch of that less generous attribute.

Egoism is an intellectual gesture, a spiritual attitude, a temperamental atmosphere.  It is a thing which implies a certain definite philosophical mood in regard to the riddle of existence; though, of course, between individual egoists there may be wide gulfs of personal divergence.

Between Montaigne and Goethe, for instance, there is an immense difference.  Goethe’s egoism was creative; Montaigne’s receptive.  Goethe’s was many-sided; driven forward by a tremendous demonic urge toward the satisfaction of a curiosity which was cosmic and universal.  Montaigne’s was in a certain sense narrow, limited, cautious, earth-bound.  It had nothing of the large poetic sweep, nothing of the vast mystical horizons and huge imaginative vistas of the great German.  But on the other hand, it was closer to the soil, homelier, more humorous, in a certain measure more natural, normal and human.

This “cult of egoism” is obviously not entirely modern.  Traces of it, aspects of it, fragments and morsels of it, have existed from all time.  It was the latent presence of this quality in his great Romans, much more than their mere “outward triumphs,” which led him to brood so incessantly upon their memories.

But Montaigne himself was the first of all writers to give palpable intellectual shape to this diffused spiritual temper.

In recent times, some of the most fascinating of our literary guides have been philosophical egotists.  Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Emerson, Pater, Stendhal, Maurice Barres (in his earlier work), de Gourmont, D’Annunzio, Oscar Wilde ­are all, in their widely different ways, masters of the same cult.

The out-looking activities and the out-looking social interests of Voltaire or Renan, or Anatole France, give to these great writers quite a different psychological tone.  The three I have just mentioned are all too inveterately spirits of mockery even to take seriously their own “sensations and ideas”; and however ironical and humorous an egoist may be with regard to other people’s impressions, with regard to his own he is grave, intent, preoccupied, almost solemn.

When one thinks of it, there is a curious solemnity of preoccupation with themselves and their own sensations about Wilde, Pater, Whitman, Stendhal, D’Annunzio and Barres.  And this “gravity of egoism” is precisely the thing which, for all his humorous humanity, distinguished the great Montaigne and which his early critics found so irritating.

“What do I care ­what does any one care,” grumbled the learned Scaliger, “whether he prefers white wine to red wine?”

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 saïs-je?” “What do I know?” writes itself nowadays across our whole sky.  This also ­“this film of white light,” as some one has called it, floating waveringly beneath each one of our most cherished convictions was, not unknown before his time.

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 Caesarean 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 great epochs, the great societies.

It is for this reason that France, among all modern nations, is the most sceptical.

Barbarian peoples are rarely endowed with this quality.  The crude animal energy, which makes them successful! in business, and even sometimes in war, is an energy which, for all its primitive force, is destructive of civilisation.  Civilisation, the rarest work of art of our race’s evolution, is essentially a thing created in restraint of such crude energies; as it is created in restraint of the still cruder energies of nature itself.

The Protestant Reformation springing out of the soul of the countries “beyond the Alps” is, of course, the supreme example of this uncivilised force.  One frequently encounters sceptical-minded Catholics, full of the very spirit of Montaigne ­who died in the Catholic faith ­but it is rare to meet a Protestant who is not, in a most barbarous sense, full of dogmatic and argumentative “truth.”

So uncivilised and unlovely is this controversial mood that free-thinkers are often tempted to be unfair to the Reformation.  This is a fault; for after all it is something, even for ingrained sceptics prepared to offer incense at any official altar, to be saved from the persecuting alliance of church and state.

It is not pleasant to meet argumentative revivalists, and the Puritan influence upon art and letters is no less than deadly; but it is better to be teased with impertinent questions about one’s soul than to be led away to the stake for its salvation.

The mention of the situation, in which in spite of Shakespeare and the rest poor modern sceptics still find themselves, is an indication of how hopelessly illusive all talk of “progress” is.  Between Calvin on the one hand and the Sorbonne on the other, Montaigne might well shuffle home from his municipal duties and read Horace in his tower.  And we, after three hundred odd years, have little better to do.

Heine, impish descendant of this great doubter, took refuge from human madness at the feet of Venus in the Louvre.  Machiavel ­for all his crafty wisdom ­was driven back to his books and his memories.  Goethe built up the “pyramid of his existence” among pictures and fossils and love affairs, leaving the making of history to others, and keeping “religious truth” at a convenient distance.

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 well-being, 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.

It must not, however, be for a moment supposed that the scepticism of Montaigne is identical with the so-called “pragmatism” of William James or with the “instinct theories” of Bergson.

Both of these modern attitudes make the assumption that a genuine advance in our knowledge of “truth” is really possible; though possible along quite different lines from the old absolute dogmatic metaphysical ones.  But the scepticism of Montaigne throws doubt upon every human attempt to get behind the shifting flowing stream of sense impressions.  The rough and ready clue which it offers to the confusions of life is not drawn from any individualistic “point d’appui” of pseudo-psychological personal vision, as are these modern clues to the mystery.  It is drawn from nothing more recondite than the customary traditions, usages, pieties and customs of the generations of humanity; habits of mind and moods of hope which have behind them, not so much the psychological insight of clever individuals ­the William Jameses and Bergsons of past ages ­as the primitive and permanent emotions of the masses of average men and women themselves, confronting the eternal silence.

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 rôle 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 the unsophisticated heart of man naturally and spontaneously turns.

They will be encouraged to go to the “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.

In the enjoyment of life spent thus fastidiously in the cultivation of our own sensations, and thus largely and generously in a broad sympathy with the emotions of the masses of men, there is room for many kinds of love.  But of all the love passions which destiny offers us, none lends itself better to the peculiar path we have chosen than the passion of friendship.  It is the love of an “alter ego,” a second self, a twin soul, which more than anything else is able to heighten and deepen our consciousness of life.

The “love of women” has always about it something tragic and catastrophic.  It means the plunging of one’s hands into frozen snow or burning fire.  It means the crossing of perilous glades in tropic jungles.  It means the “sowing of the whirlwind” on the edge of the avalanche and the hunting of the mirage in the desert.  The ecstasy brought by it is too blinding to serve as an illumination for our days; and for all the tremulous sweetness of its approach it leaves behind it the poison of disillusion and the scars of rancour and remorse.

But the passion of friendship for one of one’s own sex burns with a calm clear flame.  A thousand little subtleties of observation, that would mean nothing were we alone, take to themselves a significant and symbolic value and lead us down pleasant and flower-strewn vistas of airy fancy.  In the absence of our friend the colour of his imagination falls like a magical light upon the saddest and dullest scenes; while with him at our side, all the little jerks and jars and jolts and ironical tricks of the hour and the occasion lose their brutish emphasis and sink into humorous perspective.  The sense of having some one for whom one’s weakest and least effective moments are of interest and for whom one’s weariness and unreason are only an additional bond, makes what were otherwise intolerable in our life easy and light to bear.

And what a delicious sense, in the midst of the open or hidden hostilities of our struggle against the world, to feel one has some one near at hand with whom, crouched in any “corner of the hubbub,” we may “make game of that” which makes as much of us!

Love, in the sexual sense, fails us in the bitterest crisis of our days because love, or the person loved, is the chief cause of the misery.  Scourged and lacerated by Aphrodite it is of little avail to flee to Eros.  But friendship ­of the noble, rare, absolute kind such as existed between Montaigne and his sweet Etienne ­is the only antidote, the only healing ointment, the only anodyne, which can make it possible for us to endure without complete disintegration “the pangs of despised love” and love’s bitter and withering reaction.

Love too ­in the ordinary sense ­implies jealousy, exclusiveness, insatiable exactions; whereas friendship, sure of its inviolable roots in spiritual equality, is ready to look generously and sympathetically upon every wandering obsession or passing madness in the friend of its choice.

With the exception of the love of a parent for a child this is the only human love which is outward-looking and centrifugal in its gaze; and even in the case of the love of a mother there is often something possessive and indrawing.

How beautifully, how finally, Montaigne, in his description of this high passion, sweeps aside at one stroke all that selfish emphasis upon “advantage” of which Bacon makes so much, and all that idealistic anxiety to retain one’s “separate identity” in which Emerson indulges!

“I love him because he is he and he loves me because I am I.”  This is worthy to be compared with the beautiful and terrible “I am Heathcliff” of the heroine in the Bronte novel.

Emerson speaks as though, having sounded the depths of one’s friend’s soul, one moved off, with a wave of the hand, upon one’s lonely quest, having none but God as one’s eternal companion.

This translunar preference for the “Over-soul” over every human feeling is not Montaigne’s notion of the passion of friendship.  He is more earth-bound in his proclivities.

“He is he and I am I,” and as long as we are what we are, in our flesh, in our blood, in our bones, nothing, while we live, can sever the bond between us.  And in death?  Ah! how much nearer to the pagan heart of this great mystery is the cry of the son of Jesse over the body of his beloved than all the Ciceronian rhetoric in the world ­and how much nearer to what that loss means!

Montaigne does not really, as Pater so charmingly hints, break the flexible consistency of his philosophic method when he loves his friends in this unbounded manner.  He is too great a sceptic to let his scepticism stand in the way of high adventures of this sort.

The essence of his unsystematic system is that one should give oneself freely up to what the gods throw in one’s way.  And if the gods ­in their inescapable predestination ­have made him “for me” and me “for him,” to cling fast with cold cautious hands to the anchor of moderation were to be false to the philosophy of the “Eternal Now.”

The whole of life is an enormous accident ­a dice-throw of eternity in the vapours of time and space.  Why not then, with him we love by our side, make richer and sweeter the nonchalant gaiety of our amusement, in the great mad purposeless preposterous show, by the “quips and cranks” of a companionable scepticism; canvassing all things in earth and heaven, reverencing God and Cæsar on this side of idolatry, relishing the foolish, fooling the wise, and letting the world drift on as it will?

“What do I know?” There may be more in life than the moralists guess, and more in death than the atheists imagine.