On Friendship by Michel De Montaigne

Author:Michel De Montaigne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141964874
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2010-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

– ‘I only spent an hour on it’; ‘I have not seen it since’. – ‘All right,’ I say: ‘let us leave those examples. Show me something which does represent you entirely, something by which you are happy to be measured.’ And then I say, ‘What do you consider the most beautiful aspect of your work? Is it this quality or that quality? Is it its gracious style, its subject-matter, your discovery of the material, your judgement, your erudition?’

For I normally find that men are as wrong in judging their own work as other people’s, not simply because their emotions are involved but because they lack the ability to understand it and to analyse it. The work itself, by its own momentum and fortune, can favour the author beyond his own understanding and research; it can run ahead of him. There is no work that I can judge with less certainty than my own: the Essays I place – very hesitantly and with little assurance – sometimes low, sometimes high.

Many books are useful for their subject-matter: their authors derive little glory from them. And there are good books which as far as good workmanship is concerned are a disgrace to their authors. I could write about our style of feasting, about our clothing – and I could write it gracelessly; I could publish contemporary edicts and the letters of princes which come into the public domain; I could make an abridgement of a good book (and every abridgement of a good book is a daft one) and then the book itself could chance to get lost. Things like that. From such compilations posterity would derive unique assistance: but what honour would I derive from them except for being lucky? A good proportion of famous books fall in that category.

When I was reading a few years ago Philippe de Commines – a very good author, certainly – I noted the following saying as being above average: ‘We should be wary of doing such great services to our master that we render him unable to reward them justly.’ I should have praised not him but his discovery of a topic. Not long ago I came upon this sentence in Tacitus: ‘Beneficia eo usque laeta sunt dum videntur exolvi posse; ubi multum antevenere, pro gratia odium redditur.’ [Good turns are pleasing only in so far as they seem repayable. Much beyond that we repay with hatred not gratitude.] Seneca puts it forcefully: ‘Nam qui putat esse turpe non reddere, non vult esse cui reddat.’ [He for whom not to repay is a disgrace wants his benefactor dead.] Quintus Cicero, with a laxer turn of phrase, writes: ‘Qui se non putat satisfacere, amicus esse nullo modo potest.’ [He who cannot repay his debt to you can in no wise love you.]*

An author’s subject can, when appropriate, show him to be erudite or retentive, but if you are to judge what qualities in him most truly belong to him and are the most honourable (I

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