smoke," had touched Montaigne's nature with refinements it might
otherwise have lacked. He would have wished "to speak concerning it,
to those who had experience" of what he said, could such have been
found. In despair of that, he loved to discourse of it to all
comers,--how it had come about, the circumstances of its sudden and
wonderful growth. Yet after all were he pressed to say why he had so
loved Etienne de la Boetie, he [100] could but answer, "Because it
was He! Because it was I!"

And the surprises there are in man, his complexity, his variancy,
were symptomatic of the changefulness, the confusion, the surprises,
of the earth under one's feet, of the whole material world. The
irregular, the unforeseen, the inconsecutive, miracle, accident, he
noted lovingly: it had a philosophic import. It was habit rather
than knowledge of them that took away the strangeness of the things
actually about one. How many unlikely matters there were, testified
by persons worthy of faith, "which, if we cannot persuade ourselves
to believe, we ought at least to leave in suspense.--Though all that
had arrived by report of past time should be true, it would be less
than nothing in comparison of what is unknown."

On all sides we are beset by the incalculable--walled up suddenly, as
if by malign trickery, in the open field, or pushed forward
senselessly, by the crowd around us, to good-fortune. In art, as in
poetry, there are the "transports" which lift the artist out of, as
they are not of, himself; for orators also, "those extraordinary
motions which sometimes carry them above their design." Himself, "in
the necessity and heat of combat," had sometimes made answers, that
went "through and through," beyond hope. The work, by its own force
and fortune, sometimes outstrips the workman. And then, in [101]