Womanhood and Montaigne

By Alfonso Reyes

He was one of the supreme stylists in Castilian language and the complete works of this great Mexican thinker is full of small gems with observations and meditations on other writers, philosophers and historical events. This is what he said about the great sceptic and creator of the literary essay -El Señor Montaña as Quevedo used to call him- and how the Frenchman’s thoughts on women could not have evolved because he knew of books and intellect but nothing whatsoever of sensuality

I

At thirty-eight, Montaigne, having withdrawn from public affairs, gives himself completely to the cultivation of his solitude, to leisure devoted to letters, to the search for the self. He begins —all beginnings are pedantic, academic— with a Stoicism whose rigidity is repugnant to his flexible and light nature. He then passes through an acute crisis of Pyrrhonism which some, without reason, regard as the culmination of his development. Finally, he arrives at something that personally has no name: a perfect effort of the intellect; a clear desire to master, accompanied by the delight of understanding, the incurable evil of existing, of feeling.

Fulfilling one of the types of the critical poet, he has discovered that his intelligence is, in itself, a superior form of joy. The wise man, Schopenhauer will say, does not know boredom. Alas! In the peaceful depths of that existence there lurks the possibility, the potential certainty, of a tragedy without catharsis. Montaigne locked the door to mystery. He fled from melancholy, denied it, always rejected it: he knew that a single drop of sorrow has an eternal taste.

Shut away in his library, he drowned it out with carpets and curtains: the Siren’s song could not reach him. Surely it was not music: music, according to Spinoza, is a pretext for melancholies, and, in any case, the sense of musicality is intoxicating and dissolving. It is perversely reduced to those rudimentary modulations with which Chiron taught the young Achilles to march. It is tempting: whoever has experienced it once surrenders to it without further resistance. Nietzsche, fleeing from Wagner, flees from sleep and sadness, from the spiritual fog; he leaves misty Atlantic Europe and seeks the sun of the Mediterranean.

Montaigne, for his part, daily clarifies within his soul that classical Bordelais joy which seems so much like the sun. The joy of good wine, of good books; the naturalist conception of man, without tortuous demands; a healthy inclination, easy discourse, and a memory full of surprises. “Thanks to this faculty of forgetting,” he has written, “the places and the books that I revisit always smile upon me with fresh novelty.”

Montaigne locked the door to mystery: through the cracks of the door, through the keyhole, the profound mystery of his being then flowed toward Montaigne, as the sea enters through the joints of a boat. He himself tells us that his peace and lucidity were constantly in danger, and that he managed to save himself only through a calculated and constant labour. It is as though he were saying that he lived in a voluntary deception, a fragile “crystallized bovarism”: a harsher collision with moral realities would perhaps have shattered him mercilessly. A little poverty, a little music —a violin hanging on a bare wall— might perhaps have brought him down. That is why the exuberant and sickly Rousseau called him “the false sincere man“.

Apollonian triumph, success of appearances, these lives fashioned like Parnassian sonnets, like Benvenuto’s candelabra, sometimes possess the tragic enchantment of flowers: their subtle balance of the ephemeral, and how they deceive us with the ostentatious apparatus of their solidity! How much they surpass, then, that weary existence in which all the moral tempests have painted their whip, and which is redeemed, for that very reason, by the vibration of its sorrows!

“Finally, [Montaigne] arrives at something that personally has no name: a perfect effort of the intellect; a clear desire to master, accompanied by the delight of understanding, the incurable evil of existing, of feeling.”

Saint Augustine said it in forceful words: impossible perfections do not seduce even the divinity itself; God wants us to be sinners and repentant, tested in the ethical warfare of the world. Goethe himself, in the ascending race of torches that was his life, how much of it did he perhaps accept, for his own defense, as an inflexible mask or an armor that does not bend to the command? Parallel to his existence, through that more or less external work with which he sought to quiet the echo of his youthful explosions, he allowed the unfinished work to resound, a commentary on his days and the true law of his spirit: the feverish and terrifying dreams of Faust, as sublime as Satan.

What, then, was lacking in Montaigne? When he abandoned the ambitions of the world, life was reduced for him to the space of his library. He needed no greater spectacle than that of his soul and of his books. One friend or another with whom he could chat had only that transitory value of the conversations of comments pencilled in the margins of pages. Let us make an exception, however, for Étienne de La Boétie, whose death one annot stopped mourning, and for whom many of his infidelities may be forgiven, if only because he preserved, in that atmosphere of complacency, a painful memory for his friend.

Montaigne settles into life as a librarian in the cabinet of the Muses. At times, one seems to hear him exclaim, in Gracián’s words: “What a garden of April, what an Aranjuez of May, like a select library!” To believe him, in that house heroism has no greater value than that of mere historical reminiscence. The well-informed gentleman believes that dying for an idea is to give excessive logical value to conjectures. “Good heavens!” This was said in the century that Monsieur Danou (a witness to the Terror, whom Sainte-Beuve cites) called “the most tragic of all history.”

And yet, let us agree with Sainte-Beuve that there are moments when every citizen of a country ought to read a page of Montaigne, night after night. In Montaigne’s attitude toward his age we shall discover no weakness, nor is there any justification for calling it that: to remain serene in the face of popular madness is the greatest heroism. The leaders of politics are generally foolish men and failed men of letters. Noble dignity consists in not giving oneself over to them, even when the Ghibellines call us Guelphs and the Guelphs call us Ghibellines. On this point we may quote the excellent Vigny: “One should feel neither love nor hatred toward the men who govern. One owes them no more sentiments than one has for one’s coachman: if he drives well or drives badly, that is all.”

” The well-informed gentleman believes that dying for an idea is to give excessive logical value to conjectures.”

No: if anything was lacking in Montaigne it was a quality, or perhaps an experience, truly intimate: a divine blow of unconsciousness, an opportune revelation of mystery and pain. Let us say it plainly: Montaigne lacked a woman in his youth. It was not without reason that his contemporary Diego de San Pedro placed, in Cárcel de amor, as the first argument in defense of women, that they “not only make fools discreet, but make even the discreet themselves more subtle.”

II

Far from the amorous novel that was so popular in his day, Montaigne describes a solitary orbit. He was averse to the woman, a figure typical of the fashionable heroes of love, who invariably undertook it before killing themselves on the last page of the books. They interwove the stories with Platonic ideas, which required a Diotima to inspire them: a woman who served as a starting point for the highest adorations —as in Castiglione— the conception of beauty. At other times, the woman is an enchanting evil sorceress. In one case or another, she was the dominant character in the tale; and the lover, merely the plastic substance that melted in the heat of the beloved.

The remaining figures (almost shadows at times) consisted of a traitor —a corrosive element indispensable for the conflict to arise—, the venerable face of a father, preferably a king, always more or less misguided —an element of force that for an instant yields to evil, causing the imbalance from which the novel must spring—, and finally the chorus of mourners, the retinue of ladies and gentlemen whose task is to exclaim.

According to that conception, at once theological and sentimental, woman is the dispenser of vices and virtues, the embodiment of good and evil. The ultimate fruit of that medieval invention which began with the flashes of epic poetry, and then became enriched with fable, degenerating, as it became “dialectical,” in the books of chivalry, the heroine of the amorous novel —that bitter bee— has no place in the pages of the humanist.

Montaigne will seek in books the heroic woman and something rhetorical from the ancient orators, who left golden words upon the warrior’s tomb, or who portrayed the graceful and fierce little animal, contradictory and beautiful, subject to the slavery of the flesh and the animality of the blood, worshipful in the brothel and irritable in the home, which he believed he had encountered in these decamérons of life.

“Let us say it plainly: Montaigne lacked a woman in his youth.”

On the one hand, the women of Weinsberg who, at the siege of the city by Conrad III, having obtained permission to leave on foot with whatever they could carry with them, hastened to carry their children and their husbands on their shoulders; or the Indian women who compete for their lord’s favor in order to deserve the honor of being buried alive in his tomb; the canonesses Pelagia and Sophronia, defending their honor through death; Sextilia and Paxea, committing suicide in order to encourage their husbands.

On the other hand, what Montaigne thinks about woman, leaving the fable aside. He declares them, once again, frivolous; he denies them the consistency required for friendship. Love, friendship: here we have an unresolved disjunction: if one is the decadence of the other, then the other is its equilibrium. Montaigne, in any case, belongs to that category of Shakespeare’s characters who, according to a theater critic of The Times, converse and behave more freely when their wives have gone away.

But, at least in love, does Montaigne acknowledge women’s superiority? In love, he says, the first stage is taking advantage of the moment, the second does the same, and so does the third; sometimes, with good fortune, but almost always, the spirit of enterprise. And he himself seems to think that pride is usually a matter of price, which he illustrates with the example of those Orientals who make people wonder why, having been given an elephant as a gift, they seem to understand that they know how to appreciate the value of the beautiful beast.

At times they seem to him to be monstrous animals: the Scythian women, he says, tear out the eyes of their prisoners and slaves so as to use them more freely. But he concedes, on the other hand, that they have some reason to protest against laws that concern them and that are enacted without their consent, such as those that oblige them to abstinence; for their chastity is merely a weapon of love.

If the rigor in the lover were to contradict us, the ease would do so much more: that is why they all veil themselves down to the talons of what they wish to display and have everyone see —Montaigne continues. For the rest, he accuses them of being inclined to contradict their husbands. And on this point he brings up some delightful anecdotes of the kind that popular tradition passes down. (The accusation is unfair: in the contradictions between her and him, the guilty party has always been he.)

He also says that they torment us with their jealousy, that they ruin our homes, and that one should not leave the fate of children in their hands, because they would resolve it in an unjust and fanciful manner. That disordered appetite and unhealthy taste —he explains— which they display during pregnancy, they always have in the soul. He detests, like Juvenal, the pedantic woman, and in general considers woman unfit for science. With Plato and Saint Thomas, he argues that wisdom remains in the tongue. He believes that, in order to be discreet, women have enough with their natural graces; but if they devote themselves to study, the better they are at it, the less they will please us.

On the other hand, citing Margarita of Navarre —with whom he would have become acquainted from the very first interview— he maintains that at thirty-two a woman changes from being beautiful to being good. Let us grant him, finally, a chivalrous trait; if it is true, he converses in some of his essays about the pleasures of courtship, which, in my time, at least, only allowed this outlet to the man who had a faithful and unique friend, while today the conversations of ladies reveal the secret adventures and favours. Those who reveal such things, he exclaims, do not deserve the sweetnesses they enjoyed.

Yet the wisest woman, our incomparable Celestina, would have absolved the indiscreet; for, as Pármeno said: “…nothing is happier than possessing without company. Do not withdraw or become bitter, for nature flees from what is sad and desires what is delightful. Delight is with friends in sensual matters, and especially in recounting the things of love and communicating them.”

Montaigne knew that something of his own which he wished to tell, at least on the paper on which he wrote: —It is also sweet to me —he asserts— the commerce of beautiful and honest women: nam nos quoque oculos eruditos habemus. —And later on, something I would like to know more about: —I suffered in my childhood all the furies which, according to the poets, take possession of lovers…

But we are soon disillusioned regarding the extent to which his experience of woman went, when, returning to the page, he does not throw in our face the fact that, in matters of love, between sacrificing the spirit or the body, he preferred to renounce the spiritual, which in the end and ultimately is called better use: because, he adds with unjust evidence, something is done without the graces of the spirit: nothing without the corporeal.

The “widow” of El Quijote explained in her own way that she loved her fellow, although foolish and coarse, “he knew” as much as or more than Aristotle.

Translated by Isabel Bussy

This text appears in Obras Completas de Alfonso Reyes, Mexico 1955, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Volumen III, pages 172-177