Montanus

“ Montanus is beautiful, and women's eyes are snared in the excellence of objects, as desirous to feed their looks with a fair face, as the bee to suck on a sweet flower. Montanus is wealthy, and an ounce of give me persuades a woman more than a pound of hear me. Danaë was won with a golden shower, when she could not be gotten with all the entreaties of Jupiter: I tell you, sir, the string of a woman's heart reacheth to the pulse of her hand; and let a man rub that with gold, and 't is hard but she will prove his heart's gold. ”

“ This belief was especially pronounced among the Montanists, Montanus having proclaimed that the parousia would occur before his death, and even having gone so far as to attempt to collect all the faithful (Montanists) in one place in Phrygia, where they were to await that event and where the new Jerusalem was to be set up (see above, Bk. V. chap. 18, note 6) . ”

“ They were married women, who left their husbands to become disciples of Montanus, were given the rank of virgins in his church, and with him were the greatest prophets of the sect. They were regarded with the most profound reverence by all Montanists, who in many quarters were called after the name of the latter, Priscillianists. It was a characteristic of the Montanists that they insisted upon the religious equality of men and women; that they accorded just as high honor to the women as to the men, and listened to their prophecies with the same reverence. ”

“ Montanus professed to have received a message from the "Paraclete" to reform the growing worldliness and the lax ecclesiastical discipline of the Church. Montanists denounced the innovations introduced into the Church, and sought to return to the simpler and purer doctrines and organisation of the early Church. They preached a universal priesthood of all believers. In exalting virginity, widowhood, and martyrdom, in professing a contempt for the world with all its excesses, and in insisting upon an arbitrary holiness, Montanism was a force paving the way for ascetic Christianity. ”

“ Montanus was a crafty statesman and a practised diplomatist, whose society was sought for at the Court, whose opinions carried weight in the Senate; but the old voluptuary had long discovered that there was no safety under the Empire for those who took a leading part in the council, but that certain distinction awaited proficiency at the banquet—so he devoted his powerful intellect to the study of gastronomy and the fabrication of witty sayings ”

“ If indifferent things can contribute to the perfection of revelation, there may be endless revelations; and the last always more perfect, as having new indifferent things. It was not about things of a moral nature that there were divisions in the primitive times, and that Montanism spread itself over a great part of the Christian world; the followers of Montanus, as Eusebius writes, boasting that he was the Paraclet, and that Priscilla and Maximilla his companions were his prophetesses? ”

“ Footnotes ↑ Montanism must not be looked upon as a heresy in the ordinary sense of the term. The movement lay in the sphere of life and discipline rather than in that of theology. Its fundamental proposition was the continuance of divine revelation which was begun under the old Dispensation, was carried on in the time of Christ and his apostles, and reached its highest development under the dispensation of the Paraclete, which opened with the activity of Montanus. ”

“ The unique book which I packed was the sixth volume of Montaigne in the Temple Classics edition. We are all aware, from the writings of Mr. A.B. Walkley, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Mr. Hall Caine, and others, what a peerless companion is Montaigne; how in Montaigne there is a page to suit every mood; how the most diverse mentalities—the pious, the refined, the libertine, the philosophic, the egoistic, the altruistic, the merely silly—may find in him the food of sympathy. I knew I should be all right with Montaigne. ”

“ He was sound throughout; and if he lacked the genius and the philosophy of Montaigne, he was his equal in worldly knowledge and in tolerant good temper. He heard, enjoyed, and repeated all the gossip of foreign courts, all the "severe jests" which passed from lip to lip. He loved the beauty of Italy, the wit of France, the spirit of the Netherlands, and the valor of Spain. The first handsome woman that earth ever saw, he tells us, was made of Venice glass, as beautiful and as brittle as are her descendants to-day. ”

“ This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed by translating it into all tongues and printing seventy-five editions of it in Europe; and that, too, a circulation somewhat chosen, namely among courtiers, soldiers, princes, men of the world and men of wit and generosity.
Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, and given the right and permanent expression of the human mind, on the conduct of life?
We are natural believers. Truth, or the connection between cause and effect, alone interests us. We are persuaded that a thread runs through all things: all worlds are strung on it, as beads ”

“ What a pathetic tale it is, one of Montaigne’s many. What a homely tongue the great essayist has, and yet what a wise one—possessing, as he does, the art of telling us all the old tales of Greece and Rome clothed in summer verdure, so that the leaves of his discourse never grow stale or faded. He makes the ancient world live again, and gives men and women who lived and died hundreds of years before he was born new life and beauty. ”

“ 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. ”

“ With the last it is never Death or Travel alone: it is always Death one-fourth, and Montaigne three-fourths; or Travel one-fourth, and Montaigne three-fourths. He pours his thought into the water of gossip, and gives you to drink. He gilds his pill always, and he always gilds it with himself. The general characteristics of his Essays have been indicated, and it is worth while inquiring what they teach, what positive good they have done, and why for three centuries they have charmed, and still continue to charm. ”

“ So tranquil a spectator of so average a world, a too critical minimiser, it might seem, of all that pretends to be of importance, Montaigne was constantly, gratefully, announcing his contact, in life, in books, with undeniable power and greatness, with forces full of beauty in their vigour, like lightning, the sea, the torrents:—overpowering desire augmented, yet victorious, by its very difficulty; the bewildering constancy of martyrs; single-hearted virtue not to be resolved into anything less surprising than itself ”

“ So, over the water, the imagination of Montaigne brooded in fascination upon savages, cannibals, society, and government.
But the mention of Montaigne suggests that though the influence of the sea and the voyages, of the lumber-room crammed with sea beasts and horns and ivory and old maps and nautical instruments, helped to inspire the greatest age of English poetry, its effects were by no means so beneficial upon English prose. Rhyme and metre helped the poets to keep the tumult of their perceptions in order. ”

“ In sooth we should have been in danger of pushing one another into the abyss, if they had not built between the river and the wayfarers a wall which was continued in places a German league at a stretch. The more lofty of the mountains which stood around us were wild rocks, some in solid masses, some scored and broken up by the passage of the torrents, and some of a kind of shale which let fall below innumerable fragments of astonishing size, wherefore it impressed us that it would be perilous to travel here during a tempest. ”

“ Montaigne the writer is serenely contemplating Montaigne the man. He is submitting him, his tastes, views, habits, and feelings, to a friendly inspection, recorded in the easy style of a man of the world, which charms the reader as he might be charmed by varied and fruity talk. It charms him all the more because the self depicted by Montaigne is always in many respects the self of the listener, who feels all through that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. ”

“ 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, in his “Essays,” is a pure and perfect egotist, naked and not ashamed. Egotism is Montaigne’s note, his differentia, in the world of literature. Other literary men have been egotists—since. But Montaigne may be called the first, and he is the greatest; by no means the most monstrous, but the greatest.
Montaigne was a Gascon, and Gasconisms adulterate the purity of his French. But his style—a little archaic now, and never finished to the nail—had virtues of its own which have exercised a wholesome influence on classic French prose. It is simple, direct, manly, genuine. ”

“ At times he seems to forget that he himself and Montaigne are after all not of the same flock, as his mind grazes in those pleasant places. Qu'il (man) se regarde comme égaré dans ce canton détourné de la nature, et de ce petit cachot où il se trouve logé, qu'il apprenne the earth, et soi-même à son juste prix. Il ffre, mais elle est ployable à tous sens; et ainsi il n'y en a point. Un même sens change selon les paroles qui l'expriment. He has touches even of what he calls the malignity, the malign irony of Montaigne. ”

“ As my life and opinions are likely to make some noise in the world, and, if I conjecture right, will take in all ranks, professions, and denominations of men whatever,—be no less read than the Pilgrim’s Progress itself—and in the end, prove the very thing which Montaigne dreaded his essays should turn out, that is, a book for a parlour-window;—I find it necessary to consult every one a little in his turn ”

“ Even the blind may read, and thus bring back to themselves the life of the past; but how the indolent mind is helped when spurred by the eye's impressions! The eye awakens ideas that might otherwise sleep on for ever, by looking at scenes filled with the living interest of a Montaigne or a Talbot.
I might have got to within four miles or thereabouts of the Castle of Montaigne, by using the railroad that runs up the valley of the Lower Dordogne, but I preferred to start on foot from Montpont. ”

“ And it was characteristic of Montaigne, a note of the real helpfulness there was in his thoughts, that he preferred to base virtue on low, safe, ground. "The lowest walk is the safest: 'tis the seat of constancy." ”

“ The Landes—that long, desolate tract on the western coast of France between the Gironde and the Adour, with its vast forests of melancholy pines, its lone moors and solitary deserts, its broad marshes, and its dunes of sand that creep relentlessly on as if they had life—appeal wonderfully to the imagination, that folle du logis, as Montaigne calls it, but which, in spite of him, we love to feed. ”

“ First, M. de Montaigne.—When Montaigne found himself feeling old and ill, in 1580, he made up his mind to try the baths of Germany and Italy. So he set out; and returned in 1581. And sometimes the baths did him good and sometimes they made no difference; but the journeying never failed to do what the baths were meant for. He always, he says, found forgetfulness of his age and infirmities in travelling. However restless at night, he was alert in the morning, if the morning meant starting for somewhere fresh. Compared with Montaigne at home, Montaigne abroad never got tired or fretful ”

“ That his mustache, if stroked with his perfumed glove, or handkerchief, will retain the odour a whole day, is related with as much gravity as the loss of a battle, or the march of a desolating plague. Montaigne, in his grave passages, reaches an eloquence intricate and highly wrought; but then his moods are Protean, and he is constantly alternating his stateliness with familiarity, anecdote, humour, coarseness. His Essays are like a mythological landscape—you hear the pipe of Pan in the distance, the naked goddess moves past, the satyr leers from the thicket. ”

“ Perhaps with more art, he might have had less of that happy audacity of the first leap which Montaigne valued so highly, but would he not have gained could he have spoken to us in a verse as sonorous as the Greek hexameter, nay, even as sweet in its cadences, as variously voluble by its slurs and elisions, and withal as sharply edged and clean cut as the Italian pentameter? It is at least a question open to debate. ”

“ Here we find the man giving his experience of a phase of life which, for good or evil, has become almost normal in these latter days. Most of us have crossed the Alps and descended upon Italy; and, changed as the conditions of travel are, it raises a sympathetic interest to read of the humours of the road in Montaigne’s time, and to compare his experience with our own. ”