Degrees of Like-Mindedness

Compared with the celebrated intellects discussed in the foregoing chapter, the legitimacy of Montaigne within the history of philosophy remains slightly precarious. But because both writers were suspicious of system and theory when set against the uneven experience of life, it is perhaps not surprising that neither Johnson nor Montaigne has done well from the divisions of an intellectual narrative taking the history of ideas, doctrines or theories as its organizational paradigm. Where Johnson has never been accepted as a philosopher proper, Montaigne’s broadly humanistic appeal has found an audience outside the stricter disciplinary limits of philosophy. Strangely perhaps, this common unfixability means they have never been easy writers to name in the same breath. Most might think of Johnson as the great rationalist and Montaigne as the preeminent skeptic, of Johnson as seeking firm principle at every turn, of Montaigne as exalting all that is wandering and noncommittal. The terms of closer comparison have therefore proved elusive. As Jack Lynch has noted:

Lynch is right to be surprised, since comparison provokes tantalizing parallels: the fact that both spoke Latin; that both wrote extensively of their travels; that both are wise on the nature of happiness; and that both enjoyed the company of a favorite cat. Both are also adept at seeing the world from opposite points of view and both offer types of Shakespearean context.Footnote ² Montaigne, however, offers an analogue for Johnsonian critical and philosophical thinking that exceeds the circumstantial. Montaigne may be a writer less obviously part of Johnson’s literary context than Dryden or Pope, but he illuminates Johnson’s thinking under the aspect of broadly European, broadly humanistic, traditions of thought. His highlighting points to the stature of Johnson’s critical achievement when set against more formal disciplines of intellectual history and defines Johnson’s place in what Isobel Grundy has called the “scale of greatness.”Footnote ³

There are intermediaries no doubt: Dryden wrote with appreciation of the “Wise Montaigne,”Footnote ⁴ and he alludes to the French essayist in his poetical translation of the latter part of the third book of Lucretius’s De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”), “Against the Fear of Death” (1685). In the Preface to his last work, Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), he defends his personal “rambling” in prefaces “learn’d from the Practice of honest Montaign.”Footnote ⁵ Dryden’s undogmatic ease in his English critical essays suggests a quality domesticated from Montaigne which produced the “gay and vigorous dissertation” Johnson could delight in (“Life of Dryden,” in Lives, vol. ii, p. 120). We have seen that Charles Cotton (he of the contributions to Isaac Walton’s The Compleat Angler) had published a new English “Augustan” translation of Montaigne in 1685 – the same year as the volume of Sylvae, or Poetical Miscellanies that contained Dryden’s translations of Lucretius.Footnote ⁶ In addition to Lucretius, both Dryden and Pope found inspiration in the same classical originals that stock the text of Montaigne – particularly Ovid, Virgil, Horace and Cicero. These and other Roman or Greek authors populate the Essays; they combine with Montaigne’s own thought, or stand in its place.

Confluences of nature and taste associate the two writers. It is true that Johnson embarked on the sorts of laborious literary endeavors – the Shakespeare edition, the Dictionary – the like of which, save editing Étienne de la Boétie and translating the five hundred pages of Raimond de Sebonde’s Theologia naturalis (“Natural Theology”), seem unimaginable as tasks congenial to Montaigne. Yet as readers both confess to being easily bored. “Tediousness is the most fatal of all faults,” wrote Johnson (“Life of Prior,” in Lives, vol. iii, p. 60), who once advised his friend Boswell that “A man ought to read just as inclination leads him” (Boswell, vol. i, p. 428); Montaigne is outspoken in his willingness to abandon a book at the point where it ceases to please. “I seek, in the reading of Books,” wrote Montaigne, “only to please myself, by an irreproachable Diversion”:

Montaigne, as Lynch points out, is often credited with inventing the literary form whereby Johnson made his mark as a moralist. “Montaigne and Bacon, in particular,” suggests the Introduction to the Yale edition of Johnson’s Rambler, “are the progenitors of the more straightforward moral essays” (Works iii, p. xxvii). “Perhaps responding to his reading of Francis Bacon for the Dictionary,” argues Robert D. Spector, “and surely reflecting his familiarity with … Montaigne … Johnson found the form attractive.”Footnote ⁸ Yet Montaigne’s essays do not have the discipline that Johnson – with the examples of Bacon, Cowley, Steele and Addison before him – was skillful in imposing on the organized “rambling” of his own productions. As Johnson appears to have noticed, the essays of his French predecessor are shaped by what Paul Korshin has called “colloquial tradition.”Footnote ⁹

The scholar of French literature Terence Cave has indicated in a recent study that the essai, for Montaigne, in fact corresponded closely with what we might call today a “sounding”;Footnote ¹⁰ and perhaps for this reason Johnson argues in Rambler 158 with the pragmatism of the periodical journalist against a lazy pseudo-spontaneity made popular by the prestige of Montaigne’s invented form. He describes how critics have deduced rules from lyric poetry “which they have set free from all the laws by which other compositions are confined, and allow to neglect the niceties of transition, to start into remote digressions, and to wander without restraint from one scene of imagery to another.” Without naming names, Johnson moves to the prose counterpart of the lyric and ambivalently praises “A writer of later times” who “by the vivacity of his essays reconciled mankind to the same licentiousness in short dissertations; and he therefore who wants skill to form a plan, or diligence to pursue it, needs only entitle his performance an essay, to acquire the right of heaping together the collections of half his life, without order, coherence, or propriety” (Works v, p. 77).

In his habit of gathering anecdotes relating to notable, strange and curious persons and events, Montaigne commonly expresses wide-eyed wonder, incredulity (and mock-credulity), and his capacity for actual astonishment (even at the workings of his own mind) recalls this combination. By contrast Johnson writes his earlier essays within a public discourse partly borrowed from the sermon. When, once again, Johnson refers to Montaigne in Rambler 13 concerning the confidences of friendship, it is to disagree with him. This is the text (“De l’amitié,” “Of Friendship”) that the Duchess of Marlborough had once used manipulatively to extract secrets from Queen Anne:

The “kindly” of “kindly shewn” has its irony here.

Johnson, Montaigne and Reason’s Instability

The two Yale volumes of Johnson on Shakespeare (Works vii and viii) register no allusions to Montaigne; none appear in the Yale text of Rasselas (Works xvi). Yet Montaigne’s array of topics remains tantalizingly prescient of Johnson: “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn How to Die,” “Of Experience,” “That the Mind Hinders Itself,” “Against Idleness,” “That Our Desires Are Augmented by Difficulty,” “The Inconstancy of Our Actions,” “Of the Uncertainty of Our Judgment,” and so forth. These are not insignificant signposts of Montaigne’s mind; but they equally characterize Johnson’s. And in neither author is theme entirely separate from form – from a way of thinking that brings comparison closer. That Florio’s 1603 Elizabethan Montaigne informed profound moments of Shakespeare’s plays has been widely entertained and equally firmly denied, and in one place only (“Of Cannibals”) is Montaigne uncontroversially a source.Footnote ¹¹ This is the speech in The Tempest by the old counsellor Gonzalo on life lived according to nature and is one of the passages that Johnson annotated without “censure or approbation” (Works vii, p. 105). Johnson reprints a note from Warburton’s edition of 1747 that reads: “All this Dialogue is a fine Satire in the Utopian Treatises of Government, and the impracticable inconsistent Schemes therein recommended.”Footnote ¹² The evidence of Shakespeare as English cousin to Montaigne is supported when Montaigne’s themes correspond with philosophical issues arising in a dramatic form in the plays. Thus William H. Hamlin has given the example of “conscience” – of compelling importance to Johnson’s own moral and personal life. “Like the essays of Montaigne,” writes Hamlin, “the plays of Shakespeare abound with explorations.” “One of the primary instances,” he claims with respect to Montaigne’s “Of Conscience,” “is that of Claudius in Hamlet.”Footnote ¹³ Stephen Greenblatt and Peter G. Platt in their selection from Florio’s translation point to the relation between the bastard Edmund in King Lear and Montaigne’s “Of the Affection of Fathers to their Children.”Footnote ¹⁴ But they also revive the suggestion that “To Study Philosophy Is to Learn How to Die” (Montaigne’s essay reasoning in the vein of Lucretius against the fear of death) influenced the Duke’s famous address to the condemned Claudio in Measure for Measure:

With this argument Johnson, who notoriously did fear to die, could have little sympathy. He wrote in his 1765 notes to the same play that: “Here Dr. Warburton might have found a sentiment worthy of his animadversion. I cannot without indignation find Shakespear saying, that death is only sleep, lengthening out his exhortation by a sentence which in the Friar is impious, in the reasoner is foolish, and in the poet trite and vulgar.”Footnote ¹⁵

Doubtless other particular parallels can be invoked. Johnson can be said to “argue” with Montaigne on various issues within the disciplines of moral thought and its persistent topics. But Johnson’s comparability with Montaigne is best observed at the level suggested by Matthew Arnold’s reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and by his reference to the unstable nature of experience that emerges from the Essays:

“Shakespeare’s plays,” Johnson writes, with Hamlet very much in mind, “are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies” (Works vii, p. 66), an explicit repudiation of John Heming and Henry Condell’s division of the dramatic oeuvre into “Tragedies,” “Comedies” and “Histories” in 1623. Johnson’s passage on Shakespeare’s “mingled” drama (Works vii, p. 66) offers likewise symmetries of loss and gain, but he refuses an account of Shakespeare’s formal success, and the energy of his passage suggests, as we have seen, that he would not want the plays, or indeed the world, to be different. Johnson replaces the criteria of literary categories with the sovereignty of diversified experience – “the whole system of life,” “the sum of life” and “the course of the world.” (Works vii, pp. 62, 63, 66). The praise of Hamlet is the praise of “variety” (Works viii, p. 1011).

This variety is the philosophical hallmark of Rasselas. Johnson had had the poet Imlac claim that “The causes of good and evil … are so various and uncertain, so often entangled with each other, so diversified by various relations, and so much subject to accidents which cannot be foreseen, that he who would fix his condition upon incontestable reasons of preference, must live and die inquiring and deliberating” (Works xvi, p. 67). Montaigne had explained in “Of Experience” how careful an observer of human nature he had come to be:

Montaigne connects these reflections with lines from Virgil’s second Georgic devoted to cultivating varieties of vine:

From this locus in Roman poetry, appealing no doubt to the specialist expertise of the proprietor of a vineyard, Montaigne looks forward to Dryden’s Lucretian or Epicurean vision. Montaigne expands a musical metaphor into a celebration of the good that comes from the inescapable mixture:

Such is the positive, consolatory, side of Johnson’s like-mindedness with Montaigne.

But there is a darker aspect. Perhaps again with the ambiguous atmosphere of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in view, Johnson shares with Montaigne a sense of the limits and deceptions of Reason, and a conception of the boundary beyond which stability of judgment cannot be sustained. Rasselas once more invites comparisons. “Disorders of intellect,” Johnson had Imlac claim (shortly after the travellers in Rasselas have encountered the delusions of an astronomer who believes he can control the weather), “happen much more often than superficial observers will easily believe. Perhaps, if we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state.” Imlac then reflects on the difference between normal psychological rivalries between Reason and Imagination, and madness proper:

– concluding with a move from “imagination” to “fancy” (of which one meaning given in the Dictionary is “Caprice; humour, whim”):

In suggesting the unattainability of the mind’s “right state,” Johnson writes in the vein of Montaigne’s “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde” where the effort to live according to nature is defeated by nature:

Such parallels may fall short of the standard required to reveal the unambiguous influence of Montaigne upon Johnson; they underpin, nevertheless, the suggestive comparability of the two writers. Montaigne expresses the precariousness of Reason’s “right state” on the foundation that there is “hardly one single Hour in a Man’s whole Life, wherein our Judgment is in its due Place and right Condition.” As Johnson was likewise to observe, the proximity of sense to insanity is unnerving, and the marks of madness, the tipping point of the astronomer’s malaise in Rasselas, regularly show up too late for therapy: The “Malady does not very easily discover itself,” wrote Montaigne, “unless it be extream and past Remedy.”Footnote ²¹

Intertraffic of the Mind

Johnson and Montaigne commonly address humanity’s same essential problems: the questions “how to live and how to die?” In the answers available from religion there is similarity and dissimilarity: “Like Montaigne,” writes Greg Clingham, “Johnson’s ethics is based on Christian worship and theology, though he distinguishes between absolute issues of religion and the relative matters of social and personal experience.”Footnote ²² Where the two writers combine is suggested by the account of Montaigne’s general influence in the English eighteenth century proposed by Fred Parker, who describes “the presence of the thinking self within the process of thinking.”Footnote ²³ It is in this embodied thought – a way of thinking and living while learning to die – that we see the “intertraffic” between Johnson and Montaigne on terms that inform both the Shakespearean criticism and Rasselas.Footnote ²⁴

“Que sçay-je?” (“What do I know?”) asks Montaigne, and exhibits the quizzical, unassuming humility in the face of the unknowable universe that goes with a reenergized determination to explore the world of mind as the mind presents itself to itself. Montaigne’s breezy diffidence contrasts with the anguished soliloquies addressed to self of Johnson’s Diaries, Prayers and Annals (Works i) and with the anxious self-inspection to be found at times in the Rambler (Works iii–v). Johnson may indeed make a clearer distinction than Montaigne between the special case of religious observance through worship and prayer and the poetical expression of personal experience (as in the “Life of Waller” [Lives, vol. ii, pp. 52–54]); but both writers incarnate the “certainty that is still struggling” – the questioning humanity that is the Wittgensteinian territory of modern philosophy.Footnote ²⁵ As many of his letters, prayers and diaries reveal, Johnson’s criteria of judgment may be of the heart while simultaneously founded on principles amenable to a rigorously intellectual defence, and in the private departments of life he evinces a sensibility he was often ready to ridicule in its public displays. But given the extent and the eloquence of their expression, such experience cannot be completely divorced from Johnson’s encounters with the dark interiors of human nature evoked by Shakespeare and others – by what Rapin had called the “abyss” of the heart.Footnote ²⁶

Johnson and Montaigne epitomize alternative ways of being human; and the contrast between them again makes clearer how his emotional life sustained Johnson’s criticism. We feel the pride he took in personal achievements, in the lonely labors of the heroic self who movingly describes bringing the Dictionary to a close (Works xviii, pp. 111–13). Such a personality seems discrepant with Montaigne’s tendency (as the “I” of the Essays) to defer, abnegate or shed the specific self of Michel de Montaigne and to adopt the aloof nonchalance of French aristocratic containment with its arrogance of humility and self-deferral. The proud professional author of the English eighteenth century might find reason to despise this – as Johnson disdained the “Epicurean deities” to which, in his “Life of Cowley,” he compared the Metaphysical poets “making remarks on the actions of men, and the vicissitudes of life, without interest [i.e. personal involvement, and], without emotion” (Lives, vol. i, p. 201).

Johnson’s homage to the writer’s public role stands symbolically against the rewards of a vineyard and a private library in the rural Dordogne. “Commit yourself again to the current of the world” is Imlac’s consolatory wisdom in Rasselas (Works xvi, p. 127). As his work as a diplomatic intermediary will testify, Montaigne’s own appetite for public life was never completely exhausted. But when Montaigne reflects on the miseries wrought by contending ideologies, and remembers the bigotry of France’s barbarous religious wars, his skeptical inclination is to stand aside. “Je m’abstien” (“I abstain”) is his motto.

When Johnson is issuing his general caution against solitary retreat from the world in Adventurer 126 he exempts the “great names” and in so doing accommodates the rationale for Montaigne’s exit from his turbulent earlier career as Mayor of Bordeaux. Ordinary individuals are disappointed, writes Johnson, “from want of considering” “that those whom they aspire to imitate carried with them to their country seats minds full fraught with subjects of reflection, the consciousness of great merit, the memory of illustrious actions, the knowledge of important events, and the seeds of mighty designs to be ripened by future meditation” (Works ii, p. 473). Johnson never published an autobiography, and to Boswell’s regret he burned the pages of his diary. Montaigne, who enjoyed no Boswell equivalent, writes about, and out of, the self. That he might speak representatively for humanity, he makes himself the subject of the Essais. Johnson writes more consciously in a context of professional authorship, under the stimulus of other critics and rivals, and with the constraints of a reading public. He is less at ease with his person and situation than Montaigne. His susceptibility to guilt and anxiety, his propensity to remorse and his social appetite contrast with Montaigne’s self-forgiveness, self-acceptance and self-sufficiency. If there is in both writers an instinct to look inward to find what is out there, for Montaigne, the resultant writing seems performed with “scant … presumption of exposure to criticism” (to adapt a remark of Henry James on the first-person narrative). For Johnson, more painfully, the process approximates to what James calls “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation.”Footnote ²⁷

Hamlet’s evasion of finalist answers recalls the skepticism of Montaigne. On the inconstancy of the self, Montaigne foreshadows Hume, who writes that mankind is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which … are in a perpetual flux.”Footnote ²⁸ But Montaigne also anticipates Imlac’s attempt to console the broken-hearted travellers when he reminds them that “our minds, like our bodies are in continual flux” (Works xvi, p. 127). Johnson could observe his own “disturbances of the mind very near to madness” (Works i, p. 264); Montaigne figures the indecision of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and he resists the Last Word that Rasselas also withholds: the work ends with “A Conclusion in which Nothing is Concluded.” To a greater extent than Hume, Johnson and Montaigne could reach audiences beyond those of philosophy. In this, and with all their radical differences weighed in the balance, they unite moments in a history of mind suggestive of the historian David Cannadine’s appeal to “the undivided past.”Footnote ²⁹

Montaigne and the Lives

Howard Erskine-Hill has written of the Lives as containing “narratives of history,” surmising that “[their] great feature is the way [Johnson] sets forth the vulnerability of … people in the revolutions and storms of high politics.” “There was rarely safe or stable life during these violent changes,” he suggests, “and many people … put their hopes and lives in jeopardy.”Footnote ³⁰ Greg Clingham, meanwhile, focusing more on the literary and philosophical contexts, has noted how far the Lives is a comic enterprise, dramatizing and transforming a Christian theme “shared by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Montaigne’s essays, and Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly.”Footnote ³¹ Shakespearean playfulness has analogues in both Johnson and Montaigne, while both famously appreciate the ironies of a life wasted in the miseries of fearing to die. The poets in the Lives, major, middling or minor, Johnson sees in the company of others who are sometimes like them and sometimes not, sometimes living happily on the whole and sometimes miserably. They may be models of (not particularly attractive) self-control, like Addison; eccentric like Jonathan Swift, or reckless, destructive of others and self-destructive, like Richard Savage; sometimes hugely productive, like Dryden, or famous for their exquisite one-off achievements, like Pomfret; they may be private and retiring like Cowley or assiduous managers of their own celebrity like Pope. As Freya Johnston has shown, small things, down to the minute incidentals in the life of a minor poet, cohere with, and help constitute, Johnson’s “grandeur of generality” (“Life of Cowley,” in Lives, vol. i, p. 220).Footnote ³²

The deaths of the poets are part of their lives, regardless of how variously those lives are lived and however suddenly, slowly, predictably or unpredictably death sweeps them away. Montaigne’s “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn How to Die” (here quoted again from the 1711 fourth edition of Cotton’s 1685 translation) teaches a similar truth. Montaigne lists the miscellaneous causes by which individuals have encountered their ends:

– and so on, to almost comic effect.

In Johnson’s world of the English poets, death may come progressively. So Swift, who in the Vanity of Human Wishes, anticipating Johnson’s passage in the Life, “expires a driv’ler and a show” (line 318; Works vi, p. 106). The end may arrive from the self-abuse of John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, “worn away by a long illness,” or by sudden accident, as Thomas Otway, who died (allegedly) by choking on the first mouthful of a bread roll eaten in haste. Rochester’s contemporary the Earl of Dorset was “tossed with the King in an open boat sixteen hours, in very rough and cold weather, on the coast of Holland,” after which “his health … declined; and on Jan. 19 1705–6, he died at Bath.” Milton died “by a quiet and silent expiration,” Addison after a “lingering decay,” and King, before his death, “grew weaker by degrees, and died on Christmas-day.” Richard Duke, on the other hand, “having returned from an entertainment,” was “found dead the next morning.” Hughes died on the very day his new tragedy was first performed. Parnell, having been appointed to an ecclesiastical post “worth four hundred pounds a year,” “enjoyed his preferment little more than a year.” Dryden, concluding the long life of a great poet, “died in Gerrard-street of a mortification in his leg.” Congreve died after his coach overturned on the way to Bath to seek treatment for the gout, and before he expired the accident caused him “a pain in his side.” Fenton, Johnson quotes Pope as saying, “died of indolence,” but he adds that “his immediate distemper was the gout.” Of Gay, Johnson relates, “a violent fit at last seized him, and hurried him to the grave … with more precipitance than he had ever known” (“Rochester,” in Lives, vol. ii, p. 12; “Otway,” in vol. ii, p. 26; “Dorset,” in vol. ii, p. 62; “King,” in vol. ii, p. 184; “Duke,” in vol. ii, p. 181; “Hughes,” in vol. iii, p. 41; “Parnell,” in vol. ii, p. 193; “Dryden,” in vol. ii, p. 108; “Congreve,” in vol. iii, p. 70; “Fenton,” in vol. iii, p. 91; “Gay,” in vol. iii, p. 100).

Both writers chart routes to a common fate.Footnote ³⁴ And as we shall see in the final chapter of this study, the characters of the Lives count likewise not as individuals only, but as a “species” (Preface to Shakespeare, Works vii, p. 62).Footnote ³⁵ As Macbeth contemplates the death of Lady Macbeth, so the poets, like ourselves, die in the midst of life, thinking on tomorrow, caught while designing to live. Johnson’s gloss on the speech, quoted in the previous chapter (Works vii, pp. 41–42), reinforces this moral of universal self-delusion that tomorrow must always come. Montaigne and Johnson correspondingly attacked the confident claims of any overarching theory – Montaigne in his critique of natural religion in his “Apology for Raymond de Sebonde” and Johnson in his withering treatment of Soame Jenyns. Johnson is skeptical of philosophical assurances in the portraits of Rasselas, and his criticism of the knowing philosophical complacency of Pope’s Essay on Man, the poem on which Jenyns had relied in part for his insights, is only a little less withering: “Surely,” Johnson complains after summarizing the versified arguments, “a man of no very comprehensive search may venture to say that he has heard all this before” (“Life of Pope,” in Lives, vol. iv, p. 77). The subjects that bond Johnson with Montaigne may be commonplaces of moral life that have been widely discussed; but Johnson did not, and could not, dismiss Montaigne in the same terms as those in which he spurned Pope’s Essay on Man. Significant among the shared philosophical issues that Johnson’s writings bring to the fore is the penetration of both life and criticism by the great theme of Time; it is the further unfolding of this theme, philosophically and historically, that constitutes the next stage of our enquiry.