Page:Essays, Vol 4 (Ives, 1925).pdf/15

Virgil’s lines, though so hidden away in the body of it, are in every sense the heart of this flux de caguet, flux impetueux par fois et nuisible (Montaigne's own words); or, if not nuisible, at least indelicate — lacking in the open reserve that wisely avoids speech concerning “the sacred secrets known to all.”

The emotion that led Montaigne to “free” speech here and elsewhere (an emotion, I think, entirely removed from personal coarseness of nature — almost indeed the result of the opposite) was the mistaken belief that, as he says in Latin, non pudet dicere, quod non pudet sentire. He did not recognise — and perhaps his constant contact with heathen conceptions of the relations of man and woman somewhat stood in the way of his recognising — that the greatest mystery of human nature, the blending of the spiritual and the physical in sexual intercourse, the workings of the angel and the animal, that this mystery of human nature is but the environment of the divine mystery of the creation of life. Montaigne's eyes were attracted by the splendid parti-coloured clouds of the environment; he seems never to have gazed long at the central sun, that “alma Venus” of which Lucretius so magnificently sang.

Montaigne’s constant contemplation of the coming of death seems never to have turned his thoughts, as it well might have done, to the preceding coming of life. He had no intimations of immortality from perceiving any trailing clouds of glory about himself; and it was simply man here — man neither before nor after his earthly birth and death — that interested him.

With all his conviction that we can know nothing with certainty, it was what we can (imperfectly) know that was his object of study. “Mysteries” were outside the scope of his consideration, and when his way was blocked by the great and awful mysteries that do exist, he simply took another path: Je gauchis tout doucement.

This renders his treatment, always, of the subject of these vers de Virgile trivial and uninteresting, exaggerated and paradoxical; but it is never gross, never repulsive, save in the licentiousness of his illustrations

1. ↑ Quoted by Montaigne with some changes. “Since thou then art sole mistress of the nature of things and without thee nothing rises up into the divine borders of light, nothing grows to be glad or lovely.”