Dealing with great writers

We consider how to treat the first essayist.

There are, we find, a few authors that even someone of literary tastes and background is much more likely to know of than to have read.  They are familiar from references in other works, sometimes from an easily quotable line, but actual reading of their own works is remarkably limited.  We would put Erasmus and Sir Thomas Browne in this category, as well as Michel de Montaigne.  We’re not sure why their actual readership is so limited; their works are not as long and/or difficult as, say, the Divine Comedy or the Aeneid.  They just haven’t been included in the basic canon.  But they are familiar names, so that we need only use the one word “Montaigne” and there is no ambiguity.

A few years ago our tutor found a translation of Montaigne’s Essays in a used-book shop, and picked it up.  He passed it around among us as soon as he was finished.  We found it a remarkably interesting and candid book, full of insights and departures from common ideas and dogma, as well as time-tested wisdom.  We agreed with our tutor that it would be extremely interesting if the laws of time and space were suspended so we could actually meet the man; “So that,” he said, “I could argue with him.”

Of course it seems at least impolite to call up a figure from the past just to disagree with him.  Indeed, one could call it presumptuous; Montaigne is acknowledged to have been a Great Thinker, the inventor of the modern essay, while none of us have any pretension along those lines.  And of course there is material in the Essays that has not stood the test of time.  They were written in the sixteenth century, while France was undergoing her Wars of Religion, and much has changed since then; there have been discoveries and disappointments in plenty.  Advice on how to run the household of a minor noble, and how to educate the heir, may not have much application now.  But those parts are not what our tutor means.

There are passages in which he disagrees with Montaigne’s approach and reasoning, and he thinks a discussion with the author would be fruitful.  Not simply to change the mind of the man; that would particularly pointless at this date, in any case.  But he thinks that Montaigne was so honest and interested in the truth, as well as educated and able in many fields, that between them they could reach conclusions.  Good conclusions, firmly grounded, and of great value.  (Contrast this with our picture of Samuel Johnson, to whom any argument could have only a winner and a loser.  This may be unfair to him, but it’s certainly applicable to a large class of people.)

So we ask this question: if you could call up someone out of the past, not to absorb their wisdom nor to impart your own, but to find a truth; who would it be?