Word Master

I’m in the process of reading The Complete Essays of Michel Montaigne, a labour worthy of Hercules. Please don’t misunderstand me; if it’s a labour it’s a hugely entertaining one. I’ve read some of his essays before though in a highly abridged edition. The full collection weighs in at thirteen hundred pages, full of all sorts of surprises and delights.

Montaigne is the father of the essay as a literary form. In so many ways his own personal technique, his assaying has never been bettered in style, range or content. I’ve not long finished On Democritus and Heraclitus, where he says of himself:

I take the first subject that Fortune offers: all are equally good for me. I never plan to expand them in full for I do not see the whole of anything: neither do those who promise to help us to do so! Everything has a hundred parts and a hundred faces: I take one of them and sometimes just touch it with the tip of my tongue or my fingertips, and sometimes I pinch it to the bone. I jab into it, not as wide but as deep as I can; and I often prefer to catch it from some unusual angle. I might even have ventured to make a fundamental study if I did not know myself better. Scattering broadcast a word here, a word there, examples ripped from their contexts, unusual ones, with no plan and no promises, I am under no obligation to make a good job of it nor even stick to the subject myself without varying it should it so please me; I can surrender to doubt and uncertainty and to my master-form, which is ignorance.

It’s just so brilliantly put, this technique of playful serendipity, the one I try myself with a fraction of the skill or the insight. There is not the least artifice in the way that Montaigne looks at things, though there is a slight tendency to self-deprecating understatement. He is the subject of his book, and spending a little leisure in pursuit of the subject is neither frivolous nor vain, as he himself suggests!

Montaigne also has a quality I admire most in a writer: a simple love of words. In introducing On the Vanity of Words, the essay that follows on from the above, the editor says that, despite the author’s mastery of language, he despised words and admired deeds. But that seems to me not to be a wholly accurate reading; for, drawing on classical examples, what he really despises is rhetoric, and rhetoric here is the worst kind of artifice; an abuse of words, an abuse of meaning and an abuse of language. Montaigne does give examples of bad usage, particularly in overblown technical terms, but he does so in words that are anything but vain. In other words, he disproves his own argument, or he proves the subtle irony of his intellect.

On Democritus and Heraclitus has another passage that I particularly like:

I do not think that there is so much wretchedness in us as vanity; we are not so much wicked as daft; we are not so much full of evil as inanity; we are not so much pitiful as despicable.

Vain, daft, inane and despicable, watching the news night after night, discovering the latest antics of some politician or celebrity, it’s a conclusion that is almost impossible to escape.

Night monsters

I’ve mentioned previously that the essay stands high among my favourite literary genres. Last year I worked my way through George Orwell’s exploration of subjects as varied as Charles Dickens and naughty seaside postcards, an absolute delight in every sense: in subject, in analysis and in the use of the most limpid forms of prose. This is where Orwell’s true genius lay, rather than in the novel; his efforts here are largely second rate. I also discovered the work of Clive James, an Australian author and broadcaster, who writes brilliantly on a range of literary and political figures; cultural and historical icons of one kind or another.

There are lots of other essayists I’ve dipped into, for the sheer pleasure of reading and for tuition on points of style. My collection includes the work of Francis Bacon, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, Michael de Montaigne and Charles Lamb.

It’s Lamb’s Essays of Elia that I’m reading at the moment, a wonderfully whimsical series of dissertations. There is one in particular that induced my own mood of whimsy and introspection - that entitled Witches and other Night Fears. It induced, if you like, a Proustian mood, a remembrance of things past, and that’s without the Madeleine!

In essence it concerns the nature of fear, on the images and ideas that induce fear in childhood. Here is how he describes his own fearful encounter;

From my childhood I was extremely inquisitive about witches and witch-stories. My maid, and more legendary aunt, supplied me with, good store. But I shall mention the accident which directed my curiosity originally into this channel. In my father's book-closet, the History of the Bible, by Stackhouse, occupied a distinguished station. The pictures with which it abounds -- one of the ark, in particular, and another of Solomon's temple, delineated with all the fidelity of ocular admeasurement, as if the artist had been upon the spot -- attracted my childish attention. There was a picture, too, of the Witch raising up Samuel, which I wish that I had never seen…

I was dreadfully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life -- so far as memory serves in things so long ago -- without an assurance, which realized its own prophecy, of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse then acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the Witch raising up Samuel --(O that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe--not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy -- but the shape and manner of their visitation. It was he who dressed up for me a hag that nightly sate upon my pillow -- a sure bed-fellow, when my aunt or my maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed waking over his delineation, and at night (if I may use so bold an expression) awoke into sleep, and found the vision true.


But then he grew and attained the age of reason, beyond the power of imagined things. I, too, am beyond their power, beyond the power of the monster under my bed, ready to reach out and pull me to some nether world if I did not get under the duvet quickly enough! Still I have lost something else in losing irrational fears: I have lost a peculiar kind of pleasure.

Pleasure? Yes, pleasure, the pleasure in reading ghost stories in fascination and fear; the tingly pleasure of the senses being alert to every creak and groan made by our old country house; the pleasures brought by the spur of my imagination – put that down, lift it up; I need to know what’s going to happen. I carried this with me even so far as school, reading ghost and horror stories by torch after lights out, stories I then related to the other girls, inducing and sharing in a collective terror. Terror, in this instance, was power!

No longer; it’s all gone, no matter how vivid the story. I think in childhood that each of us relives the passage of civilization, from the night fears of our distant ancestors to a growing belief in the light of reason, a far greater delusion. Perverse or not, I remember with some affection the comfort of irrationality…and the monster under my bed!

Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turn’d round, walks on.
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.