esplanades of Montaigne's palace are thoroughfares, men from every
European country rub clothes there, but somewhere in the building there
is a secret room in which the master sits, of which no one but himself
wears the key. We read in the Essays about his wife, his daughter, his
daughter's governess, of his cook, of his page, "who was never found
guilty of telling the truth," of his library, the Gascon harvest
outside his chateau, his habits of composition, his favourite
speculations; but somehow the man himself is constantly eluding us.
His daughter's governess, his page, the ripening Gascon fields, are
never introduced for their own sakes; they are employed to illustrate
and set off the subject on which he happens to be writing. A brawl in
his own kitchen he does not consider worthy of being specially set
down, but he has seen and heard everything: it comes in his way when
travelling in some remote region, and accordingly it finds a place. He
is the frankest, most outspoken of writers; and that very frankness.
and outspokenness puts the reader off his guard. If you wish to
preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness. The Essays are full of
this trick. The frankness is as well simulated as the grape-branches
of the Grecian artist which the birds flew towards and pecked. When
Montaigne retreats, he does so like a skilful general, leaving his
fires burning. In other ways, too, he is an adept in putting his
reader out. He discourses with the utmost gravity, but you suspect
mockery or banter in his tones. He is serious with the most trifling
subjects, and he trifles with the most serious. "He broods eternally
over his own thought," but who can tell what his thought may be for the
nonce? He is of all writers the most vagrant, surprising, and, to many
minds, illogical. His sequences are not the sequences of other men.
His writings are as full of transformations as a pantomime or a fairy
tale. His arid wastes lead up to glittering palaces, his
banqueting-halls end in a dog-hutch. He begins an essay about