Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

The parallels cannot be taken too far. For one thing, Shakespeare was a dramatist rather than an essayist. He can divide his contradictions between characters and put them into conflict on stage; Montaigne must contain all contradictions within himself. Another difference is that Montaigne does not sit all alone on top of the canon in his native land as Shakespeare does in England. He has therefore attracted less jealousy, and no iconoclasts have come to push him off his pedestal by claiming that he did not write his own Essays , as has so often happened with Shakespeare.

Or almost no one. Among the few exceptions is one of the major nineteenth-century “anti-Stratfordians,” or Shakespeare-doubters: Ignatius Donnelly. At the end of a large opus arguing that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, Donnelly adds extra chapters proving that Bacon also wrote Montaigne’s Essays , as well as Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and all of Christopher Marlowe’s work. He finds clues planted throughout the Essays , such as a passage in which Montaigne writes, “Whoever shall cure a child of an obstinate aversion to bread, bacon , or garlic, will cure him of all kind of delicacy.” The name Francis occurs several times in the text, admittedly always in the French form François and generally denoting the French king François I. No matter; this too is a clue. To clinch matters, Donnelly cites a discovery made by a Mrs. Pott, who alerted him to the frequent mention, in Shakespeare’s plays, of mountains, or Mountaines . Since Bacon wrote Shakespeare, any reference to Montaigne in the plays must suggest that he wrote the Essays too. “Can anyone believe that all this is the result of accident?” asks Donnelly.

He confesses himself baffled by some sections of the Essays that seem pregnant with clues, but which are harder to interpret, notably the story of a young woman who beat her white breasts after her brother was slain. Donnelly gives up:

Who is the young lady? There is nothing more about her in the text. And is it the white breasts that have slain her brother? … And where did the bullet come from? Was it from the white breasts? It is all nonsense … And there are hundreds of such passages.

The Essays’ being in French might seem to pose a problem — but not for Donnelly. His explanation is that Bacon wanted to publish a book of skeptical, religiously unorthodox opinions, yet dared not do so in England, so he arranged for it to appear in the guise of a translation. As luck would have it, Francis Bacon’s brother Anthony was in France at the time and knew Montaigne. He persuaded Montaigne to lend his name to the ruse, while someone else persuaded Florio to play the part of translator. Thus, Bacon wrote it; Montaigne signed it; Florio, presumably, actually translated it — but from English to French. “Montaigne” was indeed an Englishman, in a more literal way than Lord Halifax or William Hazlitt ever dreamed of.

One aspect of the story has some basis in fact: Anthony Bacon did know Montaigne, and visited him twice, once in the early 1580s and again in 1590. He could easily have brought a copy of the Essays back for his brother, which means that Francis could have read it (in French) before publishing his own collection of Essays in 1597. That would explain something that has often puzzled people: how did Bacon and Montaigne come up with the same book title within a few years of each other?

It must be said, however, that the title is almost the only point of similarity. All the qualities that suggest “Englishness” in Montaigne are resoundingly absent from his English counterpart. Bacon wrote with more intellectual rigor than Montaigne. He was more incisive, more philosophical, and a lot more boring. When he tackled subjects like reading or traveling, he issued orders. This is what you should read, and that is what you must visit on a journey. If ever a subject allowed of division into subtopics, he would so divide it, and he would announce each subdivision in advance before marching through them till he got to the end. One thing you can be sure of with Montaigne is that he will never do this to you.

Once the ice had been broken by Florio and Bacon, innumerable English books appeared with the word Essays in their title. Some were overtly inspired by Florio’s Montaigne, others by Bacon, but in almost every case it was from Montaigne that they took their style of writing and thinking. Very few English essays after the early seventeenth century were philosophically rigorous stabs of thought on important topics; almost all were delightful rambles about nothing in particular. Typical were the works of William Cornwallis, who read Florio in an early manuscript draft and published sequences of Essayes in 1600, 1601, 1616 and 1617, exploring such topics as “Of Sleepe,” “Of Discontentments,” “Of Fantasticknesse,” “Of Alehouses,” and “Of the Observation, and Use of Things.”

Even those who did not use the title often wrote in a recognizably digressive, personal way. While French literature became ever more poised and formal, England produced a series of oddballs such as Robert Burton, who described his way of writing, in his vast treatise The Anatomy of Melancholy , as coursing “like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees.” Even stranger was Sir Thomas Browne, who produced essayistic investigations into medicine, gardens, burial methods, imaginary libraries, and much more in a convoluted baroque style so unlike anyone else’s (even Florio’s) that any Browne sentence is instantly recognizable as his.

At the height of this high-quirkiness phase of Montaigne’s English reception, a new translator came along to straighten things out a little: Charles Cotton, whose new version appeared in 1685 and 1686, not long after the Essays went on the Index in France. Cotton was more accurate than Florio, and he brought a new generation of English readers to the Essays . Surprisingly, the author of this more restrained translation was personally a more wayward and dilettantish character than Florio. Cotton’s main claim to fame in his own day was his scatological burlesque poems. He once described himself as a “Northern clod” whose favorite occupation was drinking ale in the pub all evening before retiring to his library to

After his death, Charles Cotton’s posthumous reputation went through transformations as strange as those of Montaigne or Shakespeare, though on a smaller scale. The nineteenth century considered his comic verse obnoxious, and admired him instead for lyrical nature poetry which his own contemporaries had ignored. Later, this too slipped into obscurity. People celebrated him rather for a chapter on trout-tickling which he had contributed to Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler —a highly Montaignean work in itself. Today this relic of Cotton is forgotten in most quarters — though not among trout-ticklers — and he is remembered as much for his Montaigne work as anything.

Cotton’s remained the standard translation of the Essays for over two centuries, and it brought Montaigne to a new breed of less baroque writers, more interested in capturing the psychological realities of everyday life than spinning webs of fantasy. The poet Alexander Pope noted in his copy of Cotton, “This is (in my Opinion) the very best Book for Information of Manners, that has been writ; This Author says nothing but what every one feels att the Heart.” A piece in the literary magazine the Spectator praised Montaigne’s habit of weaving personal experiences and qualities into his book, a practice that might be self-indulgent but was entertaining. As the French critic Charles Dédéyan remarked, the English were happy to let a writer go on about himself, so long as he did it agreeably.