The Essays of Montaigne, progress report 1

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays (Penguin Classics 1991, translated by M. A. Screech) Book 1, from beginning to part way through Essay 26, ‘On educating children’
and also
Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete, translated by Charles Cotton 1877 (Project Gutenberg, 2004)
Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Penguin Classics 1959, selected and translated by J. M. Cohen)
Michel de Montaigne , What Do I Know? Essential Essays (Pushkin Press 2023, selected and translated by David Coward with an introduction by Yiyun Li)

I started my slow read of Montaigne’s essays at the beginning of March. It took me until the middle of the month to settle on a text.

I began with a library copy of the Penguin Classic edition translated by J. M. Cohen, which turns out to be a selection of about a third of the essays. I began filling in the gaps from Project Gutenberg’s ponderous 1877 translation by Charles Cotton. Then for a birthday present I was given What Do I Know, a much smaller selection in a much smoother translation with a welcoming introduction by novelist Yiyun Li. At last, I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before, I bought the Penguin Classic Complete Essays which features M. A. Screech’s 1991 translation. With occasional back and forth to compare translations, that’s the text I’m now reading, and page numbers refer to it unless I indicate otherwise.

With my slow-reads, I take it as a sign that I’ve chosen a true classic when I come across references in other reading. Montaigne cropped up at least twice this month.

On 8 March, the Guardian‘s agony aunt Eleanor Gordon-Smith ended a column with this:

Montaigne thought you only get one true friend in your lifetime. You’re allowed to decide a given person isn’t yours.

That may come from a web search for quotes on friendship rather than Eleanor’s immersion in Montaigne. In Hisham Matar’s My Friends (my blog post here), the Libyan writer Hosam knows Montaigne well enough to disagree with him:

‘Is there anything more depressing than a wall of books? But you, my dear, disagree. Like Montaigne, you believe that the very presence of books in your room cultivates you, that books are not only to be read but to be lived with.’

(Hisham Matar, My Friends, page 321)

I haven’t come across Montaigne’s belief about books yet, but one of his charms is that he doesn’t expect the reader to agree with him.

What can I report after a month of reading a little Montaigne each morning? Well, the thing that stands out most obviously, which is also for me the main obstacle to straightforward enjoyment, is his frequent reference to writers of antiquity – sometimes in direct quotations of the Greek or Latin (mercifully translated into English in all the versions I have), sometime in recounted anecdotes. I tend to get lost as these references accumulate, but on a good morning they add to the charm of the essays.

‘On educating children’, the essay I am currently reading, is the longest so far at 37 pages. In the previous essay, whose title M. A. Creech translates respectfully as ‘On Schoolmasters’ learning’, whereas others, Charles Cotton included, call it ‘Of Pedantry’, there’s a lovely moment when Montaigne, having castigated a certain kind of schoolmasterly person for quoting from the classics too much, beats the reader to the punch:

Such foolishness fits my own case marvellously well. Am I for the most part not doing the same when assembling my material? Off I go, rummaging about in books for sayings which please me – not so as to store them up (for I have no storehouses) but so as to carry them back to this book, where they are no more mine than they were in their original place.

(Page 154)

In ‘On educating children’, he characteristically takes his time getting to the subject in hand, and spends a couple of pages discussing the role of quotations, and defends himself against his own mocking self-accusation:

I  undertake to write without preconceptions on any subject which comes to mind, employing nothing but my own natural resources: then if (as happens often) I chance to come across in excellent authors the very same topics I have undertaken to treat … I acknowledge myself to be so weak, so paltry, so lumbering and so dull compared with such men, that I feel scorn and pity for myself. I do congratulate myself, however, that my opinions frequentlty coincide with theirs.

(Page 164)

Hmm, that ‘often’ is to be emphasised, but his point, even the false modesty, rings true.

I’m pretty much out of time for this post. I should mention pleasure: there’s a lot of that in these essays. I mean the pleasure of reading, but there’s also pleasure as subject matter, even one or two discreetly bawdy passages. Montaigne and I will probably be conversing in the morning for the rest of the year. I hope to bring you interesting tidbits every month