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;
the devotion of that famed, so companionable, wife, dying cheerfully
[96] by her own act along with the sick husband "who could do no
better than kill himself"; the grief, the joy, of which men suddenly
die; the unconscious Stoicism of the poor; that stern self-control
with which Jacques Bonhomme goes as usual to his daily labour with a
heart tragic for the dead child at home; nay! even the boldness and
strength of "those citizens who sacrifice honour and conscience, as
others of old sacrificed their lives, for the good of their country."
So carefully equable, his mind nevertheless was stored with, and
delighted in, incidents, personalities, of barbarous strength--Esau,
in all his phases--the very rudest children or "our great and
powerful mother, nature." As Plato had said, "'twas to no purpose
for a sober-minded man to knock at the door of poesy," or, if truth
were spoken, of any other high matter of doing or making. That was
consistent with his sympathetic belief in the capability of mere
impetuous youth as such. Even those unexpected traits in ordinary
people which seem to hint at larger laws and deeper forces of
character, disconcerting any narrow judgment upon them, he welcomed
as akin to his own indolent, but suddenly kindling, nature:--the mere
self-will of men, the shrewd wisdom of an unlettered old woman, the
fount of goodness in a cold or malicious heart. "I hear every day
fools say things far from foolish." Those invincible prepossessions
of humanity, or of the [97] individual, which Bacon reckoned "idols