Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne and Milton

DAVID L.

SEDLEY

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Ann Arbor

For my family: Mark, Jane, & Aaron Sedley

Copyright© by the University of Michigan 2005 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America @ Printed on acid�free paper

2008

2007

2006

2005

4

3

2

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. Portions of the introduction and chapter I are reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, The Modern Language Association of America. A CIP

catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging�in� Publication Data Sedley, David Louis, I968Sublimity and skepticism in Montaigne and Milton/ David L. Sedley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN�I3: 978�o�472�II528�o (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN�Io: o�472�I I528�6 (cloth: alk. paper) de, I533-I592-Criticism and interpretation. I674-Criticism and interpretation.

I. Montaigne, Michel 2. Milton, John, I6o8-

3· Sublime, The, in literature.

4· Skepticism in literature. I. Title. PQI643.S39 82I 1 .4-dc22

2005 20050I7929

Acknowledgments

THE FOLLOWING PAGES

were hard to write; they would have been a lot

harder without the help of the following people and institutions. The book began as a dissertation in comparative literature at Princeton University directed by Victoria Kahn and Fran<;ois Rigolot. I could not ask for a more fortunate combination of mentors. Vicky taught me how to make argu-­ ments, while Fran<;ois taught me where to put them. Their lessons, moral as well as intellectual, have permanent value to me. Other scholars whom I met at Princeton told or wrote me things that resonate here: Sandra Bermann, Robert Fagles, Alban Forcione, Lionel Gossman, Anthony Grafton, the late Thomas Greene, Ronald Levao, Alexander Nehamas, Volker Schroder, and Susan Wolfson. I am grateful for both their answers to my questions and questions about my answers. Many of my best memo-­ ries of graduate school involve friends: Michael Cole, Gretchen Dietrich, Naomi Kroll, Peg Laird, Melissa McCormick, Carol Szymanski, Brad Verter, and Madeleine Viljoen. These people made my life of the mind at Princeton livable. Howard Huang gets a sentence of his own for getting me to relax in New Jersey and New York. When I got to Haverford College I found tremendous support for myself and my work. Deborah Roberts chaired the committee that hired me and since then has been a source of intelligence, virtue, and inspira-­ tion. Israel Burshatin has counseled me wisely on more matters than I can remember; to me, he puts the "liberal" in this liberal arts college. William

VI

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Galperin's reckless enthusiasm buoyed this project and helped me navi-­ gate it into press. The provosts of the college, Elaine Hansen and David Dawson, provided the time and money necessary for the extension and revision of the manuscript. The library, under the direction of Robert Kieft, provided the right books at the right times. The professional and personal support of many other members of the Haverford community and of nearby institutions eased the challenge of pursuing research while learn-­ ing to teach: Koffi Anyinefa, Carol Bernstein, Lance Donaldson Evans, Ignacio Gallup--Diaz, Marcel Gutwirth, Laurie Hart, the late Brad High, Sean Keilen, Aryeh Kosman, Catherine Lafarge, Brigitte Mahuzier, Raji Mohan, Bethel Saler, Ullrich Schoenherr, Paul Smith, Gus Stadler, and Tina Zwarg. The final round of revisions to the manuscript, particularly chapter 3, happened under the influence of acute suggestions by Stephen Orgel, Eileen Reeves, and two anonymous readers for the University of Michigan Press. Throughout the review process at Michigan, I relied on the integrity and expertise of Chris Collins. Ullrich Langer and Larry Rhu deserve spe-­ cial mention for their perennial support of my work. As I write, official relations between France and the United States are rather cool. From my standpoint, however, they are as warm as could be. The French government awarded me a Chateaubriand fellowship, and the Ecole Normale Superieure has provided me with housing, food, and per-­ petual access to its libraries. Emmanuel Bury, Jean--Charles Darmon, and Gerard Ferreyrolles have welcomed me into their seminars and thus intro-­ duced me to the

fleur

of French scholarship. Most important, French

friends have given me a French life: Frank and Marie Accart, Quentin, Emma, and Lucien Bajac, Amelie Blanckaert, Jean De Guardia, Camille Esmein, Fran<;oise Mark, Lise Michel, Isabelle Olivero, Marie Parmentier, Allan Patofsky, Yehiel Rabinowitz, Jean--Luc Remaud, Gonzalo Sanchez, Michel Tissier, and Christine Van Geen. These people have done me such favors of language, cuisine, and culture that it is hard to imagine myself without them. I can only hope for the chance to return their generosity. Last and most, Lisa Jane Graham has improved this book through her uncanny knack for making my head spin while keeping it attached to my body. For that I cannot thank her enough.

Contents

Introduction

I

CHAPTER ONE

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne's Journal de voyage CHAPTER TWO

The Grandeur of Ruin in the Essais

43

CHAPTER THREE

Comus and the Invention of Milton's Grand Style CHAPTER FOUR

Paradise Lost and How (Not) to Be Sublime Conclusion Notes

155

Bibliography Index

134

201

185

108

82

18

Introduction

MUCH CONTEMPORARY DEBATE

about the sublime revolves around two

positions: the sublime provides either a way out of skepticism or a way into it. Some theorists interpret human appreciation of the transcendence of understanding implicit in sublimity as indicating something beyond mere cognition and thus as anchoring epistemology and ethics. Others find in the sublime not the removal but the institution of skepticism; they take the defeat of understanding by the sublime as a sign of human incapacity for knowledge or morality. For partisans on both sides of the debate, sub-­ limity serves as an aesthetic laboratory for deciding the human capacity to know what is and what ought to be. This controversy frequently appears as a rivalry between opposed ver-­ sions of the story of sublimity. Samuel Monk's seminal book, The Sublime: A

Study of Critical Theories in Eighteenth---Century England, which helped

spawn the twentieth--century industry of criticism about the sublime, pre-­ sents a teleological history of sublimity in eighteenth--century England.

1

Monk's history is teleological in that he portrays the Kantian sublime as the "unconscious goal toward which Edmund Burke and other Enlighten-­ ment theorists groped" (6). Monk ascribes the shift occasioned by Kant's account, whereby the experience of sublimity depends less on the object perceived than on the mind of the perceiver, to Kant's overall project of "rescuing thought from the slough of scepticism into which he saw that the empiricism of Hume was bound to lead" (4). Positioning Kant as the

2

SUBLIMITY AND SKEPTICISM IN MONTAIGNE AND MILTON

champion of eighteenth--century theory of the sublime, Monk's story ends with the triumph of sublimity over skepticism, the evolution from the con-­ tingent truths of empiricism to the absolute truths of transcendental phi-­ losophy. More recent treatments of the sublime, however, especially those by psychoanalytic, deconstructive, feminist, and postmodern critics, tend to identify the sublime as a further manifestation of skepticism.2 Such critics contend that any transcendence of impotence and indeterminacy the sub-­ lime may seem to offer results from trickery or bad faith. Rather than her-­ ald sublimity as the transcendence of skepticism, they regard it as only the disguised repetition of skepticism. In these accounts Kant loses the privileged status Monk accords to him. In "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant," Paul de Man charac-­ terizes the argument in Kant's Critique of Judgment concerning the sublime as a series of inconsistencies in which each attempt to resolve a problem instead produces another: "The exchange from part to whole generates wholes that turn out to be only parts" (95). De Man ruins Kantian sub-­ limity, rendering it one more case of skeptical fragmentation. According to de Man, the robustness of this incoherence, the failure of the sublime to secure an exit from skepticism through philosophical argument, indi-­ cates that Kant's analysis relies on rhetorical sleight of hand. De Man uses this assertion to make a favorite deconstructive point, that what seems to be philosophical argument "is in fact determined by linguistic structures that are not within the author's control" (Ios). For de Man, the sublime demonstrates that no argument can transcend its own indeterminate foundations.3 Jean--Fran<;ois Lyotard, in "The Sublime and the Avant--Garde," goes so far as to upend Monk's plot: instead of narrating a progression from Burke to Kant, Lyotard moves achronologically from Kant to Burke. Lyotard's story shares the teleological quality of Monk's, only it culminates not in skepticism extinguished but in skepticism expressed. According to Lyo-­ tard, the evolution of the sublime, from Peri hypsous (On the Sublime), the first--century treatise traditionally attributed to Longinus, to the twentieth-­ century avant--garde, involves a gradual dissociation from techne, the rules an artist uses in determining the formation of the aesthetic object. With these superficial aspects of the sublime discarded, only its essential func-­ tion remains, the attestation of indeterminacy: "With the advent of the aesthetics of the sublime, the stake of art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to be the witness to the fact that there is indeterminacy"

(IoI). The sublime of the avant--garde insists on a skeptical absence of

Introduction

3

determination, an absence remarked peripherally in Longinus and increas-­ ingly central in the progression from Boileau, whose influential translation and analysis of Peri hypsous first appeared in r674, to Kant and then to Burke, the forefather of the avant--garde. In Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Lyotard appears to supersede this demotion of Kant for insufficient skepticism by interpreting the Cri--­

tique of Judgment as a deeply skeptical document. Like a "meteor" ( 159), Kant's discussion of sublimity pulverizes the bridge between mind and nature he intended it to buttress: "The relation of thinking to the object breaks down. In sublime feeling, nature no longer 'speaks' to thought through the 'coded writing' of its forms" (52). Lyotard's skeptical reading of the Kantian sublime, like de Man's, complements a larger critical project. By arguing that sublimity spins beyond Kant's control, Lyotard undermines a stronghold of Enlightenment thought and its tendency to construct "grand narratives" as opposed to the "little narratives" necessitated by the postmodern condition:4 "The beautiful contributed to the Enlightenment, which was a departure from childhood, as Kant says. But the sublime is a sudden blazing, and without future. Thus it is that it acquired a future and addresses us still, we who hardly hope in the Kantian sense" (ss).s Opposition to the skeptical school of sublimity has arisen. Frances Fer-­ guson, sensing that preferring Burke to Kant determines the deconstruc-­ tive diagnosis of the sublime, argues that the deconstructionists have mis-­ understood Kant.6 She considers moot de Man's accusation that the Kantian sublime founders on inconsistencies, because inconsistency was precisely Kant's point. Kant sought not to use the sublime to solve the empiricist dilemma of mind and object but, rather, to use that dilemma, the inconsistency of objective qualities and subjective affects, as a way to recognize an a priori structure in ourselves. Christopher Norris, noting the importance of a critique of Kant for postmodern critics, charges Lyotard's treatment of Kant with disregarding Kant's intentions.? According to Nor-­ ris, Lyotard takes literally what Kant meant as metaphor, ignoring Kant's caveats that one must discuss indirectly ineffable matters such as sublim-­ ity. Furthermore, Kant's aesthetic argument is not the keystone that Lyotard takes it to be, so Lyotard's attacks, even if effective, would not imperil the rest of Kant's critical edifice. 8 While far from exhaustive, this survey of interpretations indicates that the sublime maintains a close but unstable cohabitation with skepticism.9 Although sublimity and skepticism occupy the same theoretical space, their coordinates within that space change constantly. Theorists consis-­ tently propose a relation between the two but cannot agree on how they

4

SUBLIMITY AND SKEPTICISM IN MONTAIGNE AND MILTON

relate. This disagreement results in an oscillation between two sets of pos-­ sibilities. Does sublimity resolve or perpetuate skepticism? Is the associa-­ tion between sublimity and skepticism antagonistic or symbiotic? This oscillation is not limited to theories of the sublime, nor to those of skepticism.

ro

One could argue, in fact, that it culminates a trend in twen-­

tieth--century theories of literature. Surveying chronologically the histori-­ cal criticism in the earlier years of the century, the New Criticism of the 1940s and 1950S, the deconstruction of the 1970s and 198os, and the New Historicism of more recent years, one observes an increasingly profound skepticism, first about the availability of meaning outside of the literary text, then about the availability of meaning within the text, and finally about any approach that is preponderantly either contextual or textual. This advancing skepticism accompanies a progression into sublimity: skepticism sustains an ever--widening vision of aesthetic objects and sub-­ jects and thus the mode of attention required to do them justice. The case of New Historicism clarifies how the interaction of skepticism and sublimity has swayed critical currents. New Historicism is a pertinent example here for several reasons. It has had a powerful impact on early modern studies. It remains among the most recently recognized critical approaches to literature. Most important, its chief practitioner distin-­ guishes it from previous approaches in terms of the relationship between sublimity and skepticism. Stephen Greenblatt takes the occasion of introducing a collection of his essays (Learning to Curse) to state new historical principles of reading. He describes his criticism as a "trajectory" that began with his early doubts about the persona and ideas of one of his teachers in graduate school, William K. Wimsatt: Wimsatt seemed to be eight feet tall and to be the possessor of a set of absolute convictions, but I was anything but certain. The best I could manage was a seminar paper that celebrated Sir Philip Sid-­ ney's narrative staging of his own confusions: "there is nothing so certain," Sidney wrote, "as our continual uncertainty." I briefly entertained a notion of going on to write a dissertation on uncer-­ tainty-to make a virtue of my own inner necessity-but the proj-­ ect seemed to me a capitulation, in thin disguise, to the hierophan-­ tic service to the mystery cult that I precisely wished to resist. For the radical uncertainty (what would now be called aporia) with which I was concerned was not, in the end, very different from the

Introduction

5

"mysterious and special" status of the concrete universal. Besides, I had another idea. ( I ) I I Greenblatt gives the impression that he abandoned his primitive skepti-­ cism for the kind of work that came to be known as New Historicism. In fact, skepticism never loses its fundamental place in Greenblatt's criticism but continues to shape it. I2 This skeptical form reveals itself at defining moments, when Greenblatt approaches the limit of his "trajec-­ tory" and the pressure to pinpoint the new historicist perspective mounts. Such moments challenge Greenblatt to take a stand without backsliding into the dogmatism embodied by Wimsatt. Greenblatt's efforts to remain true to his skepticism produce the promi-­ nent features of his method. The various expositions of New Historicism throughout Learning

to

Curse consist of a series of maneuvers to outflank

settled positions. One such maneuver is to define New Historicism indefinitely. "I am reluctant," says Greenblatt in the introduction, "to con-­ fer upon any of these rubrics the air of doctrine or to claim that each marks out a quite distinct and well--bounded territory" (3). In "Towards a Poetics of Culture," he distinguishes other schools of criticism from his own by the "openness" of its practitioners to controversy while refusing to "enrol themselves in one or the other of the dominant theoretical camps" (146-47). In "Resonance and Wonder," the final essay in the collection, Greenblatt once again expounds New Historicism, this time by offering three dictionary definitions of "historicism" and then claiming that New Historicism does not adhere to any but rather violates all of them (164-68). The famous use of anecdote is another strategy to avoid the "air of doc-­ trine." Whenever the introduction verges on a straightforward assertion, Greenblatt tells a story. At one point, he says explicitly that anecdotes provide an "insistence on contingency, the sense if not of a break then at least of a swerve in the ordinary and well--understood succession of events"

(s). Anecdotes infuse arguments with a salutary uncertainty, purging from them the causal explanations that infect sure opinions. Greenblatt reverts to a story whenever his ideology threatens to stagnate into a firm convic-­ tion. Indeed, as if this statement about the effect of anecdotes itself risked dogmatism, Greenblatt supplements it anecdotally by telling the story of his father's storytelling (6-9). I3 Most important to my argument here, Greenblatt's efforts to define his enterprise while honoring his skepticism result in the formation of an aes--

6

SUBLIMITY AND SKEPTICISM IN MONTAIGNE AND MILTON

thetic category. The "trajectory" described in the introduction to Learning to

Curse proceeds from the naked uncertainty of Greenblatt's doctoral days

to an aesthetics of uncertainty. New Historicism "describes less a set of beliefs than the trajectory I have begun to sketch, a trajectory that led from American literary formalism through the political and theoretical ferment of the

I 970s

to a fascination with what one of the best new his-­

toricist critics calls 'the historicity of texts and the textuality of history' "

(3). New Historicism tends toward a "fascination," toward an act of ener-­ gized attention to the porousness of the boundary that divides texts and history. Greenblatt characteristically adds to this description an anecdote that elaborates both the ambiguity that concerns New Historicism and a class of aesthetic experience to which such ambiguity belongs. He portrays the political ferment that enveloped the Berkeley campus in the late six-­ ties, a fertnent that interrupted the various distinctions conventional to the operation of a university. Having sketched the ferment, Greenblatt then classifies it as "sublime" (4). The elevated degree of attention implied by "fascination" and "sub-­ lime" develops throughout Learning

to

Curse. In the introduction, Green-­

blatt focuses increasingly on the aesthetic experience that literature involves, such as the sensation of delight. He traces the source of literary sensation to an indeterminate zone that is both textual and contextual and therefore identifiable as neither. Greenblatt names this hybrid response "wonder" ( I 3). Although in the introduction Greenblatt only mentions wonder, the final essay in the collection is devoted entirely to it. The tra-­ jectories of both the introduction and Learning

to

Curse as a whole lead to

wonder.14 The structure of wonder, as a category of attention, bears the impres-­ sion of Greenblatt's basic skepticism. In "Resonance and Wonder," Green-­ blatt introduces wonder as the new historicist alternative to the old his-­ toricist veneration of the past. Furthermore, unlike the formalist attention paid to texts by New Criticism, wonder leads to its own disintegration, as wonderful attention to a text transforms itself into attention to context, which Greenblatt calls "resonance." Resonance, in turn, reactivates won-­ der, so that the new historicist mode of attention oscillates between text and context. The critic achieves wonder, then, together with resonance, by skeptically refusing to adhere to either historicism or formalism in favor of balancing both. Greenblatt suspends his belief in other perspectives in order to arrive at his own. His New Historicism thus advocates an aesthetic category whose structure conforms to the skeptical procedure of discover-­ ing one's own view in the process of doubting those of others. rs

Introduction

7

Greenblatt fashions out of skepticism the form of attention employed by New Historicism. This wonder owes its porous structure to a deep uncertainty about what merits the critic's attention. Carefully reading Greenblatt's work, moreover, one senses that the converse is also true: not only does his skepticism inform his aesthetics, but his aesthetics demands his skepticism. Consider again how Greenblatt expresses his uncertainty about the New Criticism of Wimsatt: "His theory . . . seemed almost irre-­ sistibly true, but I wasn't sure that I wanted to enlist myself for life as a cel-­ ebrant of the mystery" (I). Greenblatt sounds dissatisfied with formalism as with a false form of worship; a few sentences later, he refers to his rejec-­ tion of Wimsatt's "mystery cult." Greenblatt's reservations about New Criticism do not take the form of simple doubt. After all, Wimsatt's theo-­ ries appear to Greenblatt "almost irresistibly true." Rather, he sees formal-­ ism as a "cult" of "hierophants" practicing an inadequate form of rever-­ ence. Greenblatt resists Wimsatt's theories not just because he doubts them, but because he believes in a better way than Wimsatt's of attending to the "mystery" of literature. This richer form of attention would do more than pin aesthetic experience down to the formal features of a text. 16 Wonder, derived from both text and context, testifies to a grandeur of aesthetic experience that Greenblatt will not shoehorn. Greenblatt is thus an aesthete, insofar as he exalts the aesthetic above any one, text-- or con-­ text--bound explanation favored by more restrictive or less sensitive critics. Greenblatt uses skepticism to create a realm where the origin of literary sensation may remain unlocated and thereby inviolate. Even the relation of this realm to historical context is indeterminate. Contrary to popular perception, Greenblatt does not advocate a return from text to context so much as he recommends an oscillation between text and context, because the grandeur of aesthetic experience overwhehns the boundaries between them and so belongs to both. Greenblatt's brand of New Historicism manifests, most clearly in its efforts to define itself, a double tendency toward skepticism and sublimity. He declares the uncertainty fundamental to his intellectual development and scrupulously avoids stating his critical precepts in absolute terms. He relies on a sense of wonder to liberate the aesthetic force of literature from any one fixed residence and thus to expand its territory ad infinitum. These concerns, moreover, symmetrically lend depth to each other: Greenblatt both develops losses of belief into an enriched aesthetics and cultivates in an enriched aesthetics losses of belief. The preceding discussion of New Historicism shows that the relation between sublimity and skepticism extends beyond the direct treatments of

8

SUBLIMITY AND SKEPTICISM IN MONTAIGNE AND MILTON

them. This book attempts to explain this relation. Local pressures-taste or distaste for critical movements such as New Criticism, deconstruction, or postmodernism, the culture of Yale in the sixties or Berkeley in the sev-­ enties, Anglo--American or Continental habits of doing philosophy, agree-­ ment with Kant or with Burke-certainly inform it. The following pages, however, explore the possibility that the insecure intimacy between skep-­ ticism and the sublime also registers the influence of relatively remote fac-­ tors. While the roots of the current discussion obviously descend to the Enlightenment arguments of Burke and Kant, they also reach a shift in intellectual and cultural history that occurred toward the end of the Renaissance, or in other words, toward the beginning of the modern period. The cohabitation of skepticism and the sublime observable in recent criticism derives not only from critics' ideas, inclinations, and expe-­ riences but also from the situation of sublimity and skepticism in a post-­ Renaissance, modern culture, where epistemological difficulty and aes-­ thetic force energize each other. I argue that two early modern phenomena, the rise of the sublime as an aesthetic category and the emergence of skepticism as a philosophical problem, are interrelated. This argument, developed through studies of Montaigne and Milton, takes on complementary forms. The first is that sublimity motivated skepticism: the sense that a force existed outside the aesthetic categories conventional in the Renaissance drove authors into a skeptical frame of mind. The second is that skepticism created sublimity: the skeptical mind--set offered alternative resources of aesthetic power and enabled authors to fashion a sublime style. These claims revise standard views of skepticism and the sublime, suggesting a mandate for an enriched aesthetics behind late--Renaissance loss of belief and exposing the Renais-­ sance impulse behind the modern career of sublimity. I pursue these concerns in chapters on Montaigne's Journal de voyage and Essais and on Milton's Comus and Paradise Lost. While these individ-­ ual episodes address Renaissance scholars, the narrative as a whole appeals to intellectual historians and critical theorists, who have been indepen-­ dently telling stories of skepticism and the sublime. Historians of ideas examine the impact of skepticism on early modern culture to see how its intellectual enterprises assume their modern forms. Meanwhile, successive schools of literary theory have appropriated the sublime in order to articu-­ late and justify their methodologies. By exposing the twin origins of skep-­ ticism and sublimity, I hope to contribute to ongoing discussion of the ori-­ gins of modernity and genealogies of modern habits of criticism. The contemporary prominence of sublimity is the inheritance of what

Introduction

9

I have just called "the rise of the sublime." To say that the sublime rose is not to say that sublimity at one point did not exist, but rather that during the seventeenth century sublimity moved from the periphery to the center of discussions of what constitutes the experience of art and why art mat-­ ters. Before its rise, sublimity was just one among a cluster of similar con-­ cepts, as a vein of interest in aesthetic extremes, especially admiratio (won-­ der), cut across several domains of Renaissance culture. 17 Over the last fifteen or so years, scholars have freshly defined the early modern period as an age of the marvelous, whose key activities revolved around the produc-­ tion of wonderful sensations. Wonder was perceived to confer value on the activities of physics, biology, anthropology, exploration, the collection of oddities, the study of monsters, the visual arts, and especially literature. In the Renaissance, it was given that an author (particularly of tragedy and epic) should relate an incident as marvelously as possible. rS But whereas during the Renaissance admiratio presided over literary creation and recep-­ tion, subsequently wonder ceded prestige to sublimity as the way that one was supposed to move and be moved. Explanations of this shift have traditionally revolved around the trans-­ mission of the Longinian treatise Peri hypsous (On the Sublime), which con-­ cerns a distinctively explosive and sensational notion of grandeur. The sublimity of Longinus involves less a well--defined species of expression than an ephemeral and elusive quality that inheres in and emanates from great writing regardless of its style. The treatise elaborates particularly the sensational aspects of grandeur, depicting it as a form or state of attention that great literature compels its audience to enter. Longinus emphasizes the aesthetic experience of sublimity to such an extent that it becomes an essential ingredient: while a variety of formal features may provoke the effect of sublimity (such as asyndeton, change of case, word order, and rhythm), the effect itself remains consistent. On the Sublime abounds with aesthetic responses, all of which share the characteristic of intensity, the result of a powerful impact. The very extremism that unites these sensa-­ tions into the category of sublimity resists categorization. The sublime transports readers out of themselves: r9 the state of attention created by sub-­ limity is not just grand in comparison to other states but superlatively so to the point where it does not really comprise a state at all. Sublimity is a state of ecstasy, a state that transcends statehood. Consider one of Longi-­ nus's comments on Homer: "He uses a cosmic interval to measure their [i.e., the divine horses' at Iliad 5· 770-72] stride. So supreme is the grandeur of this, one might well say that if the horses of heaven take two consecu-­ tive strides there will then be no place found for them in the world"

IO

SUBLIMITY AND SKEPTICISM IN MONTAIGNE AND MILTON

(9·5.187). What fascinates Longinus is not so much movement between places as tnovement out of place per se. He focuses on an aesthetic anti-­ category, a category that paradoxically contains a force that overwhelms all containment. The special contents of the Longinian text inspire Monk to begin with Boileau as its first major modern transmitter, and this chronology still serves most theoretical accounts of sublimity, whose references rarely go earlier than the eighteenth century.20 This timeline is out of date, how-­ ever, as literary historians have illuminated a pre--Boileauvian tradition that reaches into the Renaissance. Philological research has demonstrated that Longinus had a wider distribution and appreciation subsequent to and even before Francesco Robortello's editio princeps (1554) than previously realized. 21 The exposure of this earlier phase to modern sublimity rein-­ forces the notion of the Renaissance as an age of the marvelous where interest in aesthetic extremes flourished. Awareness of the availability of

On the Sublime long before its vogue also suggests, however, that interest in Longinus did not cause interest in sublimity so much as the other way around: it was the search for something more than admiration that led to the rediscovery of Longinus. A new question, then, arises: what would drive such a search? Freed from the strictly Longinian tradition and thus open to the concerns that promoted the popularity of On the Sublime as well as those that were gen-­ erated by it, historians of the pre-- Boileauvian sublime have proposed some answers: the desire to bolster a monarchy threatened by civil war or a papal authority threatened by theological schism, the loss of familiarity with conventional techniques of persuasion due to pedagogical negligence, or the perpetuation of the ancient trend toward a rhetoric that appeals to volition as well as cognition.22 The answer that I would like to propose is skepticism; in order to explain why, it is necessary to say something about the Renaissance in general. The wild complexity of Renaissance culture makes any general-­ ization about it at least somewhat mistaken. Nevertheless, a deep streak of concern with the revival of antiquity runs from Petrarch to Peiresc. This preoccupation was far from being a unique or exclusive feature; but it was perhaps the most consistent one, and it is the one most consistently rec-­ ognized by scholars.23 Through such strategies as philology, archaeology, and imitation, Renaissance artists and thinkers in various fields were inter-­ ested in trying to recollect pieces of ancient culture-texts and temples, ideas and styles of expression-that had been scattered or lost after the fall

Introduction

I I

of the Roman Empire. A certain optimism subsidized this economy of recovery, an optimism about the capacity of the early modern mind to per-­ ceive and reconstitute the grandeur of antiquity. The idea was that the Renaissance mind could, despite obstacles, apprehend and represent ancient civilization as a model for early modern thought, art, and con-­ duct.24 The Renaissance preeminence of such notions as admiratio reflected the investment of Renaissance culture per se in strategies of recu-­ peration. Admiratio and its relatives fed off and into the Renaissance econ-­ omy of recovery. They also, of course, structured its discourse of discovery in encounters with the New World. In various ways, wonder supported and depended on the potential of the mind to recover what is lost, to illu-­ minate what is obscure, to know what is ignored. Skepticism threatened this confidence and the projects it sustained. Skepticism involves doubt; a skeptic resides in a state of ignorance, too sensitive to the difficulties of knowing to claim knowledge about anything. As skepticism emerged in the late sixteenth century as a prevalent intel-­ lectual orientation (I will say more about the rise of skepticism presently), it interfered with the optimism about what the Renaissance mind could do in the way of knowing and reviving ancient culture. Skepticism thus inter-­ rupted the Renaissance economy of recovery, and in doing so, drained the notions sustained by that economy-such as wonder-of some of their power. In the meantime, however, sublimity rose, because the absence of knowledge both deprived wonder of its primary source of energy and sup-­ plied the source that fueled sublimity. Whereas the wonderful reaches the frontier of understanding, the sublime plunges the mind into confusion. Knowledge inspires wonder; sublimity thrives on ignorance, the only inspiration available in the modern age of skepticism.25 Using skepticism to understand the rise of sublimity thus helps to dif .. ferentiate it from its Renaissance rivals and to account for its subsequent success. This pairing illuminates skepticism as well. Ancient skepticism consisted of a series of philosophical schools concerned with the manufac-­ ture of eudaimonia, or well--being.26 Skeptics employed doubt as a means to

ataraxia, a tranquility undisturbed by the trauma of having to abandon beliefs in a world where beliefs are constantly overturned. The skeptic achieves this therapeutic end by suspending judgment so as to have no beliefs to abandon. This suspension, accomplished through a series of tropes or modes of argument, purges the mind of any dogmatic position that would otherwise incite commitment and ultimately, in the deceptive world of appearances, disquiet. The skeptic thus becomes an expert at rais--

12

SUBLIMITY AND SKEPTICISM IN MONTAIGNE AND MILTON

ing doubt, at calling attention to a distance between the mind and the objects of its cognition, at fragmenting one absolute truth of the matter into multiple and equally possible truths. 27 The rise of skepticism during the early modern period has received extensive treatment by scholars. During the medieval period, doubt as an intellectual attitude obviously persisted, but the schools of thought called "skeptical" in antiquity subsided. 28 Intellectual historians tend to describe the early modern rise of skepticism as an epistemological accident trig-­ gered by two events: the recovery of ancient texts by humanism and the theological controversy that arose as a result of the Reformation. 29 Renais-­ sance humanists recovered, diffused, and studied texts that contained the ideas and arguments of ancient skepticism: the Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius, Cicero's Academica, and especially the works of Sextus Empiricus, first published in

I 562

but previously circulated in manuscript.

Around the same time, the Reformation challenged the authority of the church to establish what counted as religious truth. By rejecting what the church used to determine truth (Roman tradition) in favor of another cri-­ terion (what one believed from reading the Bible), Luther created an intellectual environment open to the influence of skeptical ways of thought. In other words, skepticism became useful, and so was employed, in a context where the criterion of truth, the sign or mark one pointed to in order to distinguish true from false, was up for grabs. Having entered the theological realm, skepticism then seeped by osmosis through the texts supplied by Renaissance humanism into other domains where knowledge was sought. Eventually, the incremental absorption of skepticism by Mon-­ taigne and other thinkers precipitated a crisis of knowledge, the recogni-­ tion that the difficulty of knowing was a problem that had to be addressed for doing serious work in a number of fields-especially philosophy, where skepticism became the major preoccupation of Descartes and Hume. This account of the rise of skepticism was originally proposed by Richard Popkin in a book first published in I 960. Accepted as standard for decades, Popkin's thesis has only recently come under attack by a new generation of scholars.3° These scholars question the link drawn by Pop-­ kin between skepticism and fideism, suggest that sixteenth--century skepti-­ cism differs from the skepticism of later centuries, and maintain that dur-­ ing even a single period there is less skepticism than there are skepticisms.31 In an important respect, however, these criticisms follow Popkin rather than break with him. They follow insofar as they still work on the tradition of explicitly engaging problems of knowledge from Sextus to Hume that Popkin outlined. Lately, however, critics writing in French

Introduction

I

3

and using literary materials have revealed that the history of skepticism involves more than a series of explicit discussions.32 Terence Cave in par-­ ticular has demonstrated that during the early modern period epistemo-­ logical trouble often surfaced in mysterious ways. Uninvited, unannounced, and even unwelcome, doubts slipped into literature and disturbed its official procedures. Such stealthy intrusions suggest that more motivated the rise of skepticism than the philological seepage of ancient ideas into philosophical discussions.33 Making the connection between skepticism and sublimity specifies what some of this extra motivation was. The overwhelming impact of skepticism subsequent to its rise has inspired commentators to found on it a theory of modernity. According to this theory, modernity happens when skepticism becomes irresistible. Although many modes of doubt more or less recognized as "skeptical" existed throughout the Renaissance, toward its end skepticism acquired a contagious energy and a transformative impact. A number of notions and areas of thought were obliged to con-­ front skepticism and adjust to its influence. The result of these adjust-­ ments, as their historians have shown, was a series of characteristically modern structures. Popkin himself explains the modernization of philosophy as the after-­ math of Descartes's doomed effort to overcome doubts about the possibil-­ ity of knowledge. Despite his "heroic" effort, Descartes left skepticism "unsolved and insoluble at the base of all modern philosophy" (I 57). Pop-­ kin also traces the effect of doubt on scientific hopes of knowing the essen-­ tial natures of objects. In the face of the "full force of the sceptical attack," the science of essences pursued by Galileo gave way to the pursuit of hypotheses about the way the world appears (I I2). This new approach, formulated in France by Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi and adopted in England by the Royal Society, eventually defined the aspirations of Newtonian physics (I24).34 Whereas Galileo thought he could grasp the reality of what he observed, Newton forwent that ambition and tried instead to account for the apparent surfaces of his observations. The model of modernity erected by Popkin for philosophy and science has been extended to other fields. Richard Tuck, for example, studies the increasing importance of skepticism about moral principles to early mod-­ ern theories of government, which veered away from the idea of an inher-­ ently rational state and toward new conceptions of Realpolitik, raison d'etat, and social contract. Tuck's account culminates with Hobbes, whose

skepticism inspired him to abandon the search for the natural structure of government in favor of artificial standards of civility. Once the ideal way

14

SUBLIMITY AND SKEPTICISM IN MONTAIGNE AND MILTON

to organize society became unknown, a practical arrangement became necessary to avoid chaos.Hobbes, claims Tuck, "saw deeper into the issues of relativism than any philosopher of his time....For that reason he must remain the foundational philosopher of our political institutions." 5 3 In his study of the development of modern historiography, Zachary Schiffman argues that the sensitivity to differences between various cultures inspired by late--Renaissance skepticism provoked historians to focus "not on what endured through change but on what was new and unique" ( 76).36 This focus ultimately yielded Giambattista Vico's understanding of history as an evolutionary process, an understanding that Schiffman identifies as "the prototype of our own ...relativism" ( 136).37 The theory that underwrites these histories of intellectual enterprises follows an equation in which skepticism makes the difference that consti-­ tutes modernity. The old form of a discipline plus skepticism equals the new configuration.The absorption of doubt into the domains just surveyed converted each one to its modern format: analytic epistemology, empirical science, social contract theory, developmental historiography. The differences made by skepticism, however, stemmed from its repeti-­ tion. The irresistibility of doubt meant that detours around it had closed and that only thinking through doubt remained possible. As a conse-­ quence, once raised, uncertainty persisted as part of the solution to the very problems it had created. The classic example of this double role of skepticism is Descartes, who insisted on knowing the essential truth and yet took skepticism seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he used doubt to answer the very questions that doubt had raised.Descartes inspected what the doubter says (i.e., "I doubt") for criteria of truth (i.e., clarity and dis-­ tinctness), which he then used to identify all further truths that interested him.Descartes recycled the doubter's discourse as a picture of what know-­ ing looks like, which once in hand, functioned as an epistemological field guide. The critics of this procedure claimed the result to be not less but more skepticism, and indeed Descartes did not eradicate skepticism as much as he registered its preeminence in modern philosophy.38 In the following pages I will argue that the phenomenon exemplified by the case of Descartes-intellectual industries recycling skepticism and in the process assuming their modern structures-also occurred in the field of aesthetics.The result of the confrontation and absorption of skepticism on these grounds was the rise of the sublime.39 The story of the rise of sublim-­ ity as a function of skepticism will add evidence to the skeptical model of modernity. This story will also suggest why this paradigm is so powerful, and thus why modern skepticism has such power.Crediting doubt with its

Introduction

I

5

part in the construction of sublimity does more than further document the spread of epistemological trouble throughout early modern culture and thus once more confirm the equation that what's old plus skepticism equals what's modern. An account of the aesthetic use of ignorance tells a different story, a story that enriches one's notion of what skepticism is. Sublimity is not only the effect of skepticism but also its cause: exposing what doubt motivates also exposes the spur to suspend belief. By seeing that skepticism contributes power and style to literature, one sees that ignorance contains a potent form of expression. And when one sees that skepticism makes such a compelling contribution, one sees how forceful it must be for modern thought and art. Sublimity and skepticism belong together, therefore, because they are incomplete apart. Since they developed not just collaterally but con-­ jointly, each answers questions about the career of the other. Skepticism helps make sense of the rise of the sublime over wonder and its Renais-­ sance cognates. The sublime helps account for the irresistibility that char-­ acterizes the rise of skepticism. 4o While the first juxtaposition proposed by the title of this book may be anticipated, the second one, between Montaigne and Milton, is likely a surprise. The faithful, Protestant, and Republican poet would apparently have little to do with the skeptical, Catholic, and noble essayist. A com-­ monplace ofMilton criticism dictates that he cared far less for French than (say) Italian writing. My selection of authors, however, primarily respects the problem of skepticism and the sublime. Montaigne holds an important place in histories of skepticism as the first Renaissance thinker to absorb deeply the ideas of ancient doubters. Milton wrote the first postclassical poetry consistently considered to be sublime. The juxtaposition of these two authors thus coordinates the traditions that have canonized them and reveals how interrelated those traditions are. This perspective also compli-­ cates the canonical views ofMontaigne andMilton. Montaigne cultivated skepticism, I argue, in order to produce sublimity. Milton forged sublimity, I contend, through his encounter with skepticism. This study, furthermore, does not concern influence in the standard sense. Whether or not Milton read Montaigne is less important than the impact of skepticism on Milton. Such impact does not read as a series of explicit references to skeptical themes. I have already mentioned that early modern doubt flowed through unrecognized and unwarranted chan-­ nels. This characterization applies doubly to skepticism combined with sublimity, which resembles not so much a concept proposed to the mind as an explosion that blows it. Their relation thus generated disturbances that

16

SUBLIMITY AND SKEPTICISM IN MONTAIGNE AND MILTON

overrode the conventional circuits of influence and whose detection requires reading outside them. In this context, the absence of direct con-­ nections between Montaigne and Milton does not prevent but rather encourages their conjunction. The third reason for pairing Montaigne and Milton involves the mod-­ ern trajectory that I have treated earlier in this introduction as an impli-­ cation of my argument. While I take the term "early modern" seriously, I do not accept modernity as a teleological or punctual process. The selec-­ tion of heterogeneous authors and the various genres they practice-travel journal, essay, masque, epic-respects the notion that early modern cul-­ ture does not evolve into modernity at any one time or place, but rather over a range of coordinates that define, however indefinitely, a threshold. This study seeks to contribute to the enterprise of locating some points of this threshold.41 Finally, in case it is not already obvious, I would like to point out that this book is not a survey of the history of the relations between sublimity and skepticism. Rather, it is an essay in comparative literature that pro-­ poses a model of reading. I have chosen to concentrate on Montaigne and Milton because I am less interested in covering a range of material than in opening a range of problems embedded in that material. The spectrum of these problems-modernity, aesthetics, influence, New Historicism, and interdisciplinarity (in addition to the ones in my title )-is generated by a focus on a cluster of texts. I do not, moreover, mean to suggest that my close--ups are qualitatively superior to a bird's--eye view of the Renaissance favored by other studies.42 Both perspectives can enrich how we see early modernity, and those who study early modernity will want to see both. Chapter I studies the encounter between skepticism and archaeology triggered by Montaigne's visit to Rome in 158o-8I. In his Journal de voy-­

age, Montaigne views as reductive the Renaissance efforts to admire the ruins of the capital by reconstructing them. His meditation on the ruins uses this doubt to develop an alternative discourse of grandeur paradoxi-­ cally through fragmentation. Montaigne's skepticism thus depends on a dissatisfaction with the capacity of wonder to respect ancient eminence and results in the form of respect to be known as the sublime. Chapter

2

explores the hypothesis that the fragmentary discourse of

grandeur deployed in the Journal also defines the Essais. Montaigne's mas-­ terpiece presents a series of ruined structures: essays, citations, ellipses. These textual ruins take shape in the epistemological vacuum created by skepticism and in accordance with its procedures of mental detachment. Skeptical undoings dismantle the conventional Renaissance claims to

Introduction

I7

grandeur (admiratio, furor, copia) only to discover in their ruins the articu-­ lation of the passions that animate the entire Essais project: Montaigne's reverence for antiquity and his love for his departed friend Etienne de la Boetie, bearer of the "ancient mark." Basic to the Essais, therefore, is a sublimity that both requires and inspires their skepticism. Chapter 3 shifts the focus to Milton and particularly to his formative encounter with the extreme aesthetics of the English masque. Rather than leading its heroine to the science of magnificence usual to the genre, the plot of Comus insists on the Lady's failure to recognize the objectivity of her perceptions. She finds in her confusion, however, an echoic pattern, which generates the song to Echo that allows her to get the attention of others and then pay attention herself. As a "Lady" himself, Milton repre-­ sents his own effort to find a way of writing that resonates with the skepti-­ cism troubling English culture in the early seventeenth century. Comus thus portrays Milton in the process of inventing through skepticism the sublime style for which he would eventually become famous. Chapter 4 traces the source of the reputation of Paradise Lost for sub-­ limity. While Milton's masque represents the discovery of his grand style, his epic offers lessons in elevation through the negative example of Satan. Satan's downward mobility is the consequence of his bad taste founded on his arrogant attitude toward knowledge. Andrew Marvell's introductory poem to the twelve--book edition ( 1674) suggests how early readers could access and assimilate the interplay of eminence and ignorance that Par--­

adise Lost promotes. Milton's epic, therefore, does not merely offer a pas-­ sive site for its readers to build their theories, but rather includes a blue-­ print for the skeptical construction of sublimity. The individual chapters not only support the overall argument, but also demonstrate the capacity of that argument to produce what I hope are convincing and helpful readings of great and difficult works. The conclu-­ sion, more speculative than the preceding chapters, considers how the pre-­ history of the sublime and its relation to skepticism may enrich studies of sublimity as an Enlightenment phenomenon. Burke not only uses Milton as evidence for his theories, but theorizes according to Miltonic principles. Kant's reading of sublimity exploits the value of fragmentation established by Montaigne and cultivated by Pascal. These connections suggest a fresh way to understand the collective indecision of the great theorists about whether epistemological difficulty energizes or enervates aesthetic force. They also bring us closer to the frame of mind that shaped the texts that still animate our contemporary debates.

CHAPTER ONE

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne's Journal de voyage

' MONTAIGNE s MEDITATION

on the ruins of Rome in the Journal de voy-­

age, his major written work after the Essais, serves as my initial example to elaborate the set of claims advanced in the introduction. I treat the Jour-­ nal first because it illustrates every aspect of my overall argument about sublimity and skepticism: their association; the role of Renaissance skepti-­ cism in forming and promoting sublime style and sensation at the expense of such notions as admiratio; the aesthetic mandate and nature of early modern doubt; and the involvement of skepticism and the sublime in the transition from Renaissance to modern culture. Montaigne's meditation illustrates these arguments so well because it epitomizes Montaigne's encounter with both Renaissance aesthetics and the Renaissance per se. By meditating on Rome, Montaigne confronts admiratio, the category of sensation traditionally used to articulate and contain responses to the city. By meditating on Rome's ruins, Montaigne performs an essential, recollective task of Renaissance thought. When Montaigne applies himself to admiratio and to Renaissance thought, he applies the pressure of his skepticism. The account ofMontaigne's medita-­ tion provided by the Journal thus records the impact that doubt had on the form of wonder and on the culture that established and sustained that form. In representing these incursions of doubt, the meditation reveals

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne's Journal de voyage

19

skepticism in the process of transforming wonder into sublimity and help-­ ing to turn the Renaissance toward modernity. Another reason to begin with the Journal de voyage involves the trajec-­ tory of what I say about Montaigne over this and the next chapter. The meditation on Rome, I will show, addresses the question of how to com-­ municate grandeur.Montaigne's answer is what he calls a "new and extra-­ ordinary testimony of grandeur,"1 by which he means the style that he employs to convey the impression that Rome makes on him.The concern and style of the meditation are also the concern and style of the Essais, the subject of chapter 2.My analysis of the Journal, therefore, prepares a model for understanding Montaigne's masterpiece. Skepticism contributed to the demise of the Renaissance and to the birth of post--Renaissance culture.One may understand this transition as a shift in the appreciation of ancient authors.Whereas early in the Renais-­ sance the classics tended to preside as authorities for knowing the early modern world and living the early modern life, later their epistemological and moral authority attenuated. The very notion of the Renaissance depends on an economy of recovery, an economy subsidized by the possi-­ bility that the Renaissance mind could, despite intellectual and physical obstacles, apprehend and represent ancient civilization as an exemplar applicable for early modernity.This economy, however, eventually inter-­ rupted itself: the effort to repair the fragmented grandeur of antiquity, an effort advocated especially by Renaissance humanists from Petrarch for-­ ward, assumed and emphasized the fragmentation of the grandeur that required repair in the first place.Recollection lives by fragmentation.

2

Several scholars have remarked that as the Renaissance proceeded into the sixteenth century, skepticism grew about the recollective efforts of humanism and therefore about the possibility of referring to ancient authors as models of knowledge and morality) In describing this shift, these scholars have often turned to Montaigne to determine where and how the intellectual enterprises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries exhausted themselves.For example, in an essay about Joachim Du Bellay's sonnet sequence Les antiquitez de Rome, Thomas Greene identifies Mon-­ taigne's meditation on the ruins of Rome in the Journal de voyage as the point where skepticism precluded the possibility of recollecting antiquity.4 Greene remarks in the Antiquitez an unresolved tension between archaeo-­ logical and architectural motifs that epitomizes the tension evident across Renaissance culture between the threat of fragmentation and the hope of recollection.Du Bellay's poetry produces "paradoxically a ...truly coher-­ ent, if deeply skeptical, commentary on the humanist adventure" (220).

20

SUBLIMITY AND SKEPTICISM IN MONTAIGNE AND MILTON

Skepticism denotes the threat that despite the recollective efforts of Renaissance humanism, the fragments of antiquity will remain incoher-­ ent. Du Bellay's doubtful humanism "both produced and endured its own skepticism" (228). In discussing Du Bellay, Greene describes Renaissance culture as char-­ acterized by a tension ceaselessly eased and redrawn, by a cycle of doubt and transcendence that underwent innumerable revolutions. The radical skepticism of Montaigne's meditation on Rome, however, slackened this tension and thus marked the end of the Renaissance: With [Montaigne's] refusal to conjecture [about Rome's topogra-­ phy] we come to a turning point. With the visible ruins meaningless and the substantial inheritance unreachable, incapable of disinter-­ ment, the humanist Renaissance on the Continent reached a con-­ clusion. (2 38) According to Greene, the Continental Renaissance lasted until a skepti-­ cism too deep for humanist repair tipped the balance exemplified by Du Bellay between doubt about and belief in the quintessentially humanist project of recollecting ancient ruins.s Historians of skepticism per se corroborate Greene's sense that Mon-­ taigne wielded a form of doubt incisive enough to dismantle the intellec-­ tual architecture of the Renaissance. Richard Popkin argues in his history of early modern skepticism that Montaigne's absorption of the modes of doubting in the works of Sextus Empiricus (first published in translation in 1562), combined with the uncertainty created by the Reformation chal-­ lenge of church criteria, produced the devastating skepticism of the "Apologie de Raimond Sebond [Apology for Raymond Sebond]": "By extending the implicit sceptical tendencies of the Reformation crisis, the humanistic crisis, and the scientific crisis, into a total crise pyrrhonienne, Montaigne's genial 'Apologie' became the coup de grace to an entire intel-­ lectual world" (s6).6 Since Montaigne left for Rome just after the publica-­ tion of the "Apologie" in the first edition of the Essais (158o), it makes sense that in the Journal, which describes his Roman visit, Montaigne would question the early tnodern mind's capacity to infer the originary grandeur of antiquity from Renaissance ruins. Skepticism as Montaigne practiced it renders all truth, let alone truth about the distant past, inac-­ cessible or at best duplicitous. As I show in this chapter, Montaigne's skep-­ tical refusal to conjecture about ancient Rome on the basis of its remains

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne's Journal de voyage

21

implies a distance between ancient presence and modern representation too great to be closed by conventional humanist methods. But skepticism had a productive side that is ignored by discussions of its preventive effects, and Montaigne's meditation on the ruins of Rome sig-­ nals not just a sterile renunciation but also a seminal moment in Western consciousness. While Montaigne's skepticism may invalidate Renaissance knowledge of antiquity and thus reduce the authority of antiquity as a col-­ lection of moral and epistemological exemplars, it also fashions for antiq-­ uity a new notion of aesthetic authority, an authority requiring a special category-the sublime-to accommodate it. This argument complements and expands some scholarly acknowledg-­ ment of sublimity as a notion available, primarily through Peri hypsous (first published in 1554), to a select group of rhetoricians and literary the-­ orists in the second half of the sixteenth century, some of whom Mon-­ taigne may have encountered during his sojourn in Rome.7 My approach differs, however, from the few direct treatments of the sublime in Mon-­ taigne, which focus mostly on verbal and thematic echoes of Peri hypsous in the Essais. 8 Such analysis amounts to guesswork, because Montaigne does not cite Longinus explicitly, nor does he employ a consistent, con-­ trolled vocabulary for the sublime. What appear to be paraphrases ofLong-­ inus, therefore, may actually stem from a variety of other cognate notions such as admiratio ("admiration" or "wonder") mentioned by several ancient, medieval, and Renaissance authors, or Ficinian furor poeticus ("poetic frenzy"). Montaignian sublimity, in my view, entails the skeptical recognition of the inadequacy of any one notion of eminence, Longinian or otherwise. My argument thus concerns less the influence of a particular model than the abandonment of all models. I study how the ruins of Rome appear under Montaigne's skeptical gaze and how that appearance invokes and is inspired by an aesthetic category beyond those native to Renais-­ sance humanism. The Journal de voyage records Montaigne's trip from his home near Bor-­ deaux in the southwest of France through what are now Switzerland, Ger-­ many, Austria, and Italy in I58o-81, just after the first edition of the Essais appeared. Rome was the point of the whole trip. Everything about Mon-­ taigne drew him there, especially his training as a Renaissance humanist, that is, as someone invested in the project of studying antiquity in order to transfer its grandeur to a new age.9 As a humanist, Montaigne would get to walk the ground walked by the Latin authors whose works he revered. But Montaigne was no ordinary Renaissance man. Montaigne respected

22

SUBLIMITY AND SKEPTICISM IN MONTAIGNE AND MILTON

antiquity with a special fervor that reflected the extreme education that he had received as a child. In "De !'institution des enfans [On the Education of Children]" (I .26), Montaigne describes this education: [A] Feu mon pere, ayant fait toutes les recherches qu'homme peut faire, parmy les gens s<;avans et d'entendement, d'une forme d'insti-­ tution exquise, fut advise de cet inconvenient qui estoit en usage; et luy disoit--on que cette longueur que nous mettions a apprendre les langues, [C] qui ne leur coustoient rien, [A] est la seule cause pourquoy nous ne pouvions arriver a la grandeur d'ame et de cog-­ noissance des anciens Grecs et Romains. J e ne croy pas que ce en soit la seule cause. Tant y a que l'expedient que mon pere y trouva, ce fut que, en nourrice et avant le premier desnouement de rna langue, il me donna en charge a un Alleman, qui depuis est mort fameux medecin en France, du tout ignorant de nostre langue, et tresbein verse en la Latine....Quant au reste de sa maison, c'estoit une reigle inviolable que ny luy mesme, ny rna mere, ny valet, ny chambriere, ne parloyent en rna compaignie qu'autant de mots de Latin que chacun avoit apris pour jargonner avec moy. C'est mer-­ veille du fruict que chacun y fit....Quant a moy, j'avois plus de six ans avant que j'entendisse non plus de Fran<;ois ou de Perigordin que d'Arabesque. (I 73)

[My late father, having made all the inquiries a man can make, among men of learning and understanding, about a superlative system of educa--­ tion, became aware of the drawbacks that were prevalent; and he was told that the long time we put into learning languages which cost the ancient Greeks and Romans nothing was the only reason we could not attain their grandeur in soul and in knowledge. I do not think that that is the only reason.At all events, the expedient my father hit upon was this, that while I was nursing and before the first loosening of my tongue, he put me in the care of a German, who has since died a famous doctor in France, wholly ignorant of our language and very well versed in Latin. ...As for the rest of my father's household, it was an inviolable rule that neither my father himself, nor my mother, nor any valet or housemaid, should speak anything in my presence but such Latin words as each had learned in order to jabber with me. It was wonderful how everyone profited from this....As for me, I was over six before I understood any more French (or Perigordian) than Arabic.] ( 128) 10

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne's Journal de voyage

23

This pedagogical measure was extraordinary even at the height of the Latin vogue in France during the 1530S.11 (Montaigne was born in 1533.) Montaigne's introduction to Latin as an infant and among women pre-­ vents the division between the worlds of home and school.12 It is in the school where humanists supposed that a Latinate connection to ancient wisdom would strengthen a boy's courage. r3 Montaigne's contact with the means to antique "grandeur d'ame et de cognoissance" before the scholas-­ tic hardening of his passions helped make him particularly sensitive to such grandeur. By raising Montaigne to speak Latin as his mother tongue, Montaigne's father engineered his son to realize the dream of detecting and reviving ancient "grandeur." Its communication is exactly the subject of Montaigne's meditation, and no wonder, since he was destined to treat this subject by his special formation. Not surprisingly, then, after five months of travel Montaigne was excited to get to Rome: on the morning of their arrival, Montaigne awak-­ ens his entourage so that they may start three hours before dawn, "tant il avoit envy de voir le pave de Rome [so eager was he to see the pavement of Rome]" (90/71 ) . r4 And yet, despite his apparent readiness to throw himself at Rome's physical surfaces, Montaigne does not commit his med-­ itation to the Journal until almost two months after he gets there, during the last week of January 1581 (he had arrived at the end of November). In the meantime, Montaigne keeps busy: among other things, he complains about Roman hotels, passes a kidney stone, attends mass at Saint Peter's, has an audience with the pope and remarks the inelegance of his Italian, goes out to dinner, and sees a convicted thief hung, drawn, and quartered. Montaigne's hesitation to say something has to do with what others have already said. Understanding the import of Montaigne's meditation on the ruins of Rome requires reconstructing the horizon of expectation established for such meditations by humanist antiquarianism. By the time of Montaigne's visit, Rome had for well over two centuries embodied humanism's highest hopes and deepest doubts about the possibility of ren-­

ovatio Romae, the transfer of ancient culture to a new age. This project received its Renaissance impulse from Petrarch, who repeatedly and in various poetic and political contexts urged the return of modern Rome to its ancient grandeur. rs Petrarch's glorification of the ruins as reminders of former eminence inspired an industry of Roman antiquarianism. This industry developed increasingly precise methods of extrapolating from existing fragments a re--creation of the ancient city as a target for renovatio. Works such as Flavia Biondo's Roma instaurata (Rome Restored, composed

24

SUBLIMITY AND SKEPTICISM IN MONTAIGNE AND MILTON

1444-46), which undertook this archaeological reconstruction, presup-­ posed that careful study could close the distance between old and new Rome and thus enable the transfer of ancient virtue to the modern city. These works assumed that no matter how mutilated the ruin, one could refer to its original status and make available to the modern world the exemplar of antiquity and thus that the scientific recovery of the past grandeur of Rome might contribute to the city's rebirth. Though the sci-­ ence of Rome underwent many refinements, this presupposition remained largely intact into the sixteenth century. 16 Raphael Santi's letter of 1519 to Pope Leo X (possibly written in col-­ laboration with Baldassare Castiglione), reporting how Raphael executed the pope's commission to reconstruct ancient Rome pictorially, reflects the assumptions that underwrote the prevailing humanist science of Rome. Raphael asserts that despite centuries of ongoing ruin, through meticulous research he has "conseguito qualche notitia di quell'antiqua architectura [I have acquired at least some knowledge of the ancient archi-­ tecture]" (301/290). r7 Raphael proceeds to describe his methods in service of the pope's determination to preserve "vivo el paragone de li antichi [the example of the ancient world still alive]," so that the pope may "agguagliari et superarli [equal and surpass the men of ancient days]" (302/292). In describing the pope's charge Raphael reveals the kind of thinking that such a project required and inspired: Havendomi Vostra Santita comandato che 'io ponessi in disegno Roma anticha, quanta conoscier si puo, per quello, che oggidl si vede, con gli edificii che di se dimostrano tal reliquie, che per vero argumento si possono infallibilmente ridurre nel termine proprio come stavano, facendo quelli membri che sono in tutto ruinati, ne si veggono punto, corrispondenti a quelli che restano in piedi e che si veggono. (302)

[Your Holiness has commanded me to make a drawing of ancient Rome-as much as may be known from what can be seen today-with those buildings showing so much of what remains that, with careful study, you may know exactly what they were. Those that are completely ruined and no longer visible may be understood by the study of those that still stand and can be seen.] (292) The science of antiquity presumes to provide an understanding of how things in Rome once stood. rS

Sublimity and Skepticism in Montaigne's Journal de voyage

25

The antiquarian recollection of ancient Rome concretized and epito-­ mized the various recollective endeavors of the Renaissance. The success or failure of Roman antiquarianism signaled the success or failure of an entire culture. Because Montaigne's meditation addresses the foundations of a culture, it may record a tectonic shift in cultural history. The first and most memorable pronouncement of Montaigne's meditation therefore seems to authorize casting him as the disenchanter of the Renaissance: "[O]n ne voyoit rien de Rome que le ciel sous lequel elle avoit este assise et le plan de son giste [One saw nothing of Rome but the sky under which it had stood and the plan of its site]" ( Ioo/79). This statement is skeptical and counter--Renaissance: skeptical in that it implies an irreducible rift between the originary presence of Rome and the representation of Rome accessible through the senses, counter--Renaissance in that it consequently rejects the humanist revival of Rome that would require transmissions from the far side of that rift. "Rien de Rome," or merely its "ciel" or its "plan," erodes any basis for references from ruin to grandeur. Montaigne interrupts the economy of recovery on which Renaissance humanism, especially Renaissance humanist antiquarianism, and above all Renais-­ sance humanist Roman antiquarianism, depended. As I have proposed, Montaigne's "rien de Rome" does more than declare the death of the Renaissance by skepticism. The possibility that Montaigne preserves the grand dream of humanism (if not the methodol-­ ogy for realizing it) arises from a slightly wider cross section of the text, which, as usual in Montaigne, reveals very different attitudes and ideas. Immediately before Montaigne's meditation, the Journal describes Mon-­ taigne's avidly joining the humanist industry of Roman antiquarianism. Having first arrived in Rome on 30 November 158o, Montaigne has by late January of the following year dedicated himself to acquiring the "sci-­ ence" of the city:

Tous ces jours la, il ne s'amusa qu'a estudier Rome. Au commence-­ ment, il avoit prins un guide Fran<;ois; mais celuy la, par quelque humeur fantastique, s'estant rebute, il se piqua, par son propre estude, de venir a bout de cette science, aide de diverses cartes et livres qu'il se faisoit lire le soir, et le jour alloit sur les lieux mettre en pratique son apprentissage; si que, en peu de jours, il eust ayse-­ ment reguide son guide. (99-Ioo)

[All these days he spent his time only in studying Rome. At the beginning he had taken a French guide; but when this man quit because of some

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fancy or other, he made it a point of pride to learn all about Rome by his own study, aided by various maps and books that he had read to him in the evening; and in the daytime he would go on the spot to put his appren--­ ticeship into practice; so that in a few days he could easily have guided his guide.] ( 79) As an aid to study, Montaigne hires a French guide, presumably someone who not only knows more about Rome than Montaigne does but also will translate that knowledge into the language in which Montaigne can most easily grasp it. The act of engaging the guide expresses the characteristi-­ cally humanist faith that with the proper equipment, one can transfer the pattern of the past to the present. When the guide leaves, he takes his knowledge with him and thus removes the access to a French Renaissance science of Rome that Mon-­ taigne has sought from him. Montaigne's stubborn pursuit of such access despite the guide's departure indicates the strength of his commitment to rendering ancient Rome an object of humanist science. To this end, Mon-­ taigne almost certainly used Lucio Mauro's Antichita della Citta di Roma

(Roman Antiquities, 1558), a handy, compendious descendant of Biondo's Roma instaurata. An extant copy of this work bears Montaigne's signature on the title page. r9 Montaigne's determination, with the help of such works as Mauro's, "de venir a bout de cette science" embraces the project of renovatio Romae inherited from Petrarch. And apparently Montaigne succeeds: practicing by day the "apprentissage" absorbed by night, soon Montaigne could have "reguide son guide." In fewer than eighty words, this little drama of Montaigne's antiquar-­ ian activities stages the fundamental drama of Renaissance humanism. The presence, loss, and recovery of guidance to the ruins of Rome, the fad-­ ing in and out and in again of the signal from their archetypal configura-­ tion, realize the dream of transmitting over interference ancient grandeur to the postancient world. Expanding this inquiry to text adjacent to Montaigne's meditation shows that his doubtful departure from humanism abuts his credulous prac-­ tice of it. Having demonstrated this proximity, I return to the meditation to reveal a more intimate relation than one might suppose between skepticism and the impulse to reclaim grandeur that drives Renaissance culture: Il disoit "qu'on ne voyoit rien de Rome que le ciel sous lequel elle avoit este assise et le plan de son giste; que cette science qu'il en avoit estoit une science abstraite et contemplative, de laquelle il n'y

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avoit rien qui tombast sous les sens; que ceux qui disoient qu'on y voyoit au mains les ruines de Rome en disoient trop; car les ruines d'une si espouvantable machine rapporteroient plus d'honneur et de reverence a sa memoire; ce n'estoit rien que son sepulchre." ( Ioo )

[He said that one saw nothing of Rome but the sky under which it had stood and the plan of its site; that this knowledge that he had of it was an abstract and contemplative knowledge of which there was nothing percep--­ tible to the senses; that those who said that one at least saw the ruins of Rome said too much, for the ruins of so awesome a machine would bring more honor and reverence to its memory: this was nothing but its sepul--­ cher.] (79)

Montaigne's first two assertions, that one sees almost nothing of ancient Rome and that therefore knowledge of it lacks any sensuous content, retract the antiquarian behavior recorded in the preceding quotation. There Montaigne pursued "science" as a way to attain an "apprentissage" of Rome, to lay his mind on Rome directly. Here Montaigne says that such science is not apprehensive but "abstraite." It does not grasp Rome; it remains out of touch. The recuperative urge that drives Montaigne to obtain "science," how-­ ever, also animates his skepticism. Beyond his general worry about the abstractness of Roman science, Montaigne concerns himself particularly with the accuracy of the words used to designate Rome. Those who say ''ruines" say too much. The word ''ruines" is excessive, because it denotes more than what actually endures. This claim about the overstatement committed by ''ruines" receives interesting argumentative support. Instead of simply reverting to the opening charge ("qu'on ne voyoit rien de Rome") and thus again denying that anything of Rome could be an object of perception or knowledge, Montaigne asserts the exaggeration of ''ruines" on the basis of his speculation about the hypothetical effect actual ruins-were they to exist-would have on viewers. The words of those who say that they see ruins fall far from the mark, not only because of the distance of the ruins from human cognition or because of cognitive cal-­ lousness but also because the ruins of Rome, if present, would evoke more honor and reverence than Renaissance descriptions and tributes offer. As much as Montaigne criticizes the errors of antiquarian nomencla-­ ture, he criticizes the aesthetic responses others have offered to the mem-­ ory of Rome before his own meditation, responses unworthy of the frag-­ mented remains, let alone of the "espouvantable machine" that was

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ancient Rome. The phrase "espouvantable machine" represents the core of Montaigne's argument, a point not argued but assumed, the foundation for everything else that Montaigne says, including his skepticism. Mon-­ taigne's sense that early modern responses to Rome do not grant as much glory as they should to its ruins provokes him to declare the absence of those ruins. The assumption that any response to Rome must fit a certain aesthetic category-here, the "espouvantable"-makes Montaigne a skep-­ tic about Rome as an object of knowledge. This last point eludes the conventional wisdom about the history of skepticism. Here, awareness of the difficulty of knowing does not corre-­ spond to the digestion of ancient texts or to the intellectual fallout of the Reformation. Rather, Montaigne doubts the susceptibility of ancient Rome to knowledge because Rome's grandeur exceeds all Renaissance reports of it. In addition to inspiring skepticism, sublimity is inspired by it: Mon-­ taigne uses his doubts to fashion an aesthetic category for the grandeur that he feels. As the meditation continues, Montaigne waxes skeptical about admiratio, a flagship category of Renaissance aesthetics, and as a result an alternative category begins to emerge. Having questioned the accuracy of ''ruines," Montaigne substitutes his own, presumably more pre-­ cise term for the remnants of old Rome: "ce n'estoit rien que son sepul-­ chre." Then Montaigne draws a genealogy of this sepulchre, telling the story of the ruin of Rome and of the entombment of the city's ruins:

Le monde, ennemy de sa longue domination, avoit premierement brise et fracasse toutes les pieces de ce corps admirable; et, parce qu'encore tout mort, renverse et desfigure il luy faisoit horreur, il en avoit enseveli la ruine mesme. (I oo )

[The world, hostile to its long domination, had first broken and shattered all the parts of this wonderful body; and because, even though quite dead, overthrown, and disfigured, it still terrified the world, the world had buried its very ruin. 1 ( 7 9) The rest of the world, as Montaigne tells it, sought to undermine the dominion of Rome by shattering the parts of its marvelous body. But the strategy failed, because the body, though mutilated, still horrified its ene-­ mies. Therefore, as a backup measure, the enemies also buried the ruins, leaving only a sepulchre visible. Like the rejection of ''ruines," the substitution of "sepulchre" answers a

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sensation of surpassing grandeur. Montaigne represents the entombment of the ruins, and consequently his early modern skepticism about them (since their entombment justifies his original, skeptical claim that one sees "rien de Rome"), as a consequence of the effort to shut down an effect that ancient Rome, and then its ruins, had on the rest of the world. The failure of this effort-even the ruins still horrified Rome's enemies, and even the tomb provides the occasion for Montaigne's stirring meditation-implies that Rome had more grandeur than the enemies thought. The enemies failed to flatten Roman eminence because they based their efforts on a flawed conception of how the city affected its spectators. Montaigne specifies this conception when he says that the opponents of Rome treated it as a "corps admirable" requiring dismemberment and burial. As a "corps admirable," ancient Rome made its enemies wonder. "Admirable" signals admiratio, the popular notion of aesthetic experience with classical and medieval roots that by Montaigne's time was particu-­ larly associated with the way Rome moved its visitors. Admiratio under-­ writes the great meditations on Rome that precede Montaigne's. By imply-­ ing through the portrayal of Rome's hapless enemies the underestimation perpetrated by admiratio, Montaigne offers a critique of the history of attempts to recognize the grandeur of the city. His meditation thus medi-­ tates on Roman meditations and on the senses of grandeur that have fos-­ tered them. Understanding admiratio and its implications illuminates how Montaigne's treatment of Rotne challenges previous treatments and calls for an expanded aesthetics of eminence.20

Admiratio is an aesthetic response that includes and then excludes skepticism. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle, the major authority on admiratio for the Renaissance, associates the concept with both the perplexity incited by obscure or enigmatic phenomena and the curiosity that demands their coherent explanation: It is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and the stars, and about the genesis of the universe. And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders); therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end. (982b12-22)21

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Admiration drives the admirer to ascertain the cause of and thus put an end to his wonder. For Aristotle and Aristotelian critics, therefore, the aesthetic experience of admiratio orients its subject from confusion to coherence, initiating a series of inferences that culminates in knowledge.22 The educational orientation of admiratio eventually made it a ready conductor of the hopes that impelled renovatio Romae. Admiratio supplied humanists with a response to ruins that did not leave them totally ruined. Renaissance antiquarianism exploited admiratio's contacts with both inco-­ herence and coherence as a way to correlate fragmentation with recollec-­ tion and thus to argue that ancient ruins can form the foundation of early modern comprehension. Admiratio facilitated the exchange between parts and whole on which the Renaissance economy of recovery depended. It became a favorite means of describing and justifying processes of recollect-­ ing for a new age the moral, architectural, and textual fragments of antiq-­ uity. Since Rome posed a crucial test case for such processes, it is not sur-­ prising to find that Renaissance encounters with Rome's ruins provoked expressions of admiration. One finds evidence of the Roman application of

admiratio in the twelfth--century guidebook Mirabilia urbis Romae (Marvels of Rome) as well as in famous visitors' evocations of Rome, such as Petrarch's in the fourteenth century and Du Bellay's in the sixteenth. During what has been called the Renaissance of the twelfth century, excitement about Rome's former grandeur and its possible revival inspired the Mirabilia. 23 It permitted the traveler and pilgrim not only to retrace the steps of early Christian figures but also (and more predominantly) to refer himself to the remains and sites of ancient, pagan Rome. The third part of the Mirabilia concludes with the closest thing in it to a method-­ ological statement: Haec et alia multa templa et palatia [exempla et consulum] impera-­ torum, consulum, senatorum, praefectorumque tempore paganorum in hac Romana urbe fuere, sicut in priscus annalibus legimus et oculis nostris vidimus et ab antiquis audivimus. Quantae etiam essent pulchritudinis auri et argenti, aeris et eboris pretiosorumque lapidutn, scriptis ad posterum memoriam, quanta melius potuimus, reducere curavimus. (3.65)

[These and more temples and palaces of emperors, consuls, senators, and prefects were inside this Roman city in the time of the heathen, as we have read in old chronicles, have seen with our own eyes, and have heard the

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ancient men tell of.In writing we have tried as well as we could to bring back to the human memory how great was their beauty in gold, silver, brass, ivory and precious stones.] (46)24 The "marvels" of the Mirabilia are the ruins of late medieval Rome; they become marvelous when their ancient grandeur is remembered through the references of the guidebook. Before the Renaissance proper, the

Mirabilia signaled the establishment of admiratio as the premier aesthetic category for articulating Roman grandeur. Two centuries after the Mirabilia, Petrarch adopted admiratio as both an expression of bewilderment verging on writer's block and a pretested strategy that enabled the recollection of ancient greatness.In book 2, let-­ ter 14 of the Rerum familiarium (Letters on Familiar Matters), he uses the concept to express his confoundment upon seeing the rubble of Rome for the first time: Ab urbe quid expectet, qui tam multa de montibus acceperit? Putabas me grande aliquid scripturum, cum Romam pervenissem. lngens michi forsan in posterum scribendi materia oblata est; in pre-­ sens nichil est quod inchoare ausim, miraculo rerum tantarum et stuporis mole obrutus .... Illa vero, mirum dictu, nichil imminuit, sed auxit omnia. Vere maior fuit Roma, maioresque sunt reliquie quam rebar. lam non orbem ab hac urbe domitum, sed tam sero domitum miror. (2.14.103)

[What news can one expect from the city of Rome when one has received so much news from the mountains? You thought that I would be writing something truly great once I had arrived in Rome.Perhaps what I shall be writing later will be great.For the present I know not where to start, over ... whelmed as I am by the wonder of so many things and by the greatness of my astonishment....In truth Rome was greater, and greater are its ruins than I imagined.I no longer wonder that the whole world was con--­ quered by this city but that I was conquered so late.] ( I 13)2s Petrarch describes his response to Rome's ruins in terms of admiratio. Although Petrarch's admiratio denotes confusion, one senses how wonder already leads him to begin to draw correspondences between the modern ruins he sees and the ancient grandeur the ruins represent.Petrarch is not spontaneously struck with wonder but strategically adopts admiratio as a contribution to renovatio Romae.

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One of the literary ways that Petrarch pursued renovatio was Africa, his poem about the Second Punic War, which represents the Roman republic in the epic form, itself one of ancient Rome's great institutions.26 Petrarch's opening lines describe this enterprise as the singing of wondrous th.tngs ("mtran . da") : Et michi conspicuum meritis belloqui tremendum, Musa, virum referes, Italis cui fracta sub armis Nobilis eternum prius attulit Africa nomen. Hunc precor exhausto liceat michi sugere fontem Ex Elicone sacrum, dulcis mea cura, Sorores, Si vobis miranda cano.

[Muse, you will tell me of the man renowned for his great deeds, redoubtable in war, on whom first noble Africa, subdued by Roman arms, bestowed a lasting name. Fair sisters, ye who are my dearest care, if I propose to sing of wondrous things may it be given me to quaff full deep of the sweet sacred spring of Helicon.] Accompanying both the initial experience of Rome's ruins and the occa-­ sion of its epic reconstruction, admiratio sets fragmentation and recollec-­ tion along a single continuum.28 While Petrarch confirmed admiratio as the conventional Renaissance response to Roman ruins, Du Bellay, chronologically and culturally much closer to Montaigne, questioned appeals to admiratio, as the recuperative appreciation of the ruins inherited from the Mirabilia began to break down. In the Deffence, et illustration de la langue franc;oyse, in the Latin elegy "Romae descriptio," and in the sonnets of the Antiquitez de Rome, Du Bel-­ lay admires the ruins but then interrogates his own admiration, asking how one can derive a sense of grandeur from dilapidation. In the Deffence ( I 549), written in Paris as a manifesto of what would become known as the Pleiade, the link between wonder and the repair of Roman grandeur tacitly loosens. Du Bellay receives wonder as the stock response to Latin literature. He describes, for example, how through imi-­ tation "les Romains on baty tous ces beaux Ecriz, que nous louons, et admirons si fort [the Romans built up that store of fine writings which we so praise and admire]" (91-92/51).29 Du Bellay's ambition for his vernacu--

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lar, however, requires that this admiration by Frenchmen be oriented toward themselves. He asks, "Pourquoy donques sommes nous si grands admirateurs d'autruy [Why then are we such great admirers of others]?" (I74l88).The expansion of wonder to France as well as Rome corresponds to the realization that the French empire of literature and politics to which he dedicates the Deffence cannot result from rebuilding what was once built and ruined in Rome.3° The famous conclusion of the Deffence urges not so much an archaeology as a pillaging of Rome: "Fran<;oys, marchez couraigeusement vers cete superbe Cite Romaine: et des serves Depouilles d'elles ...ornez voz Temples, et Autelz [Frenchmen, march bravely toward that proud city of Rome. From its indentured remains . . . decorate your temples and altars]" (I7919I). Instead of recommending a repair of the fragments of Roman grandeur, Du Bellay urges their further ravagement. The "Depouilles" are ruins torn from their original setting. Whether the

admiratio mentioned previously in the Deffence is now absent or only invis-­ ible, it clearly has not induced the desire for reconstruction that it did for Petrarch and other purveyors of renovatio Romae. The derailment of wonder from its reconstructive track preoccupies Du Bellay in his treatments of the ruins of Rome written during his time there from I553 to I557· "Romae descriptio," composed before the Antiquitez, begins by surveying the universally admired Roman marvels, which upon archaeological disinterment emerge from the earth revitalized: "Multaque praeterea veteris miracula Romae, I Undique defosso nunc rediviva solo [And many more marvels of ancient Rome, which now emerge revitalized from the trodden ground]" (37-38).31 As the poem continues, however, the wonder that inspires collective acknowledgment of Rome's great-­ ness-"Caesareos vultus quis non miretur et ora I Tam multis Romae con-­ spicienda locis [Who would not admire the countenances of the Caesars and so many remarkable heads throughout Rome]?" (9I-92)-produces less recollection and more fragmentation, as Rome's marvels overwhelm the poet's powers of description. The marvels transform, as Du Bellay doggedly persists in listing them, into ruins, mutilated signs of greatness lost forever: "Ardua Pyramidum dicam, truncosque Colossos, I Maestaque nunc vacuo muta theatra sinu [Shall I utter the height of the Pyramids, the colossal statues maimed, the theaters now mournful and silent, their hol-­ lows empty]?" (Io9-Io). From this unredeemable ruin, underscored by a retreat from the present to the past tense (Iosff.), Du Bellay draws the les-­ son of a chastened confidence in material things. The deterioration of Rome's physical aspect ultimately manifests the eternal life of Latin poetry, whose energy Du Bellay requests for a new, French context in a

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plea that forms the conclusion of the elegy. Rome's physical elevation brought low, Rome's poetry alone supplies eminence: "Sola virum virtus caeli super ardua tollit, I Virtutem caelo solaque Musa beat [Only the virtue of man uplifts him to the heights of the sky, and only the Muse blesses virtue with heaven]" (I4 7-48).Given the final silence about admi--­

ratio in "Romae descriptio," Du Bellay leaves another mixed tnessage con-­ cerning the fate of wonder: has it mutated or just disappeared? The Antiquitez reflect at length on wonder's fortune.In the second son-­ net, Du Bellay declares that while others may praise the seven wonders of the ancient world, he finds their effect concentrated in the seven hills of Rome: "[Q]uant a moy pour tous je veulx chanter I Les sept Costaux Romains, sept miracles du monde [But I will will sing above all monu-­ ments I Seven Roman Hills, the world's seven wonderments]" (2.I3-I4).2 3 Such a declaration leads one to expect the Antiquitez to celebrate a rebirth of the city's former greatness. The next sonnet, however, disappoints the expectation of grandeur associated with wonder: Nouveau venu qui cherches Rome en Rome, Et rien de Rome en Rome n'appen;ois, Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcz que tu vois, Et ces vieux murs, c'est ce que Rome on nomme.

[Thou stranger, which for Rome in Rome here seekest, And nought of Rome in Rome perceiv'st at all, These same old walls, old arches, which thou seest, Old Palaces, is that which Rome men call.] The repetition of the word "Rome" five times in these first four lines mul-­ tiplies its meaning."Rome" may signify ancient grandeur, modern ruin, or both.Such ambivalence disintegrates the very object that renovatio Romae seeks to reconstitute. Ruin has acquired a share of what "Rome" means. This entrenchment of fragmentation would complicate any effort to remove it.

Admiratio and grandeur nevertheless resurface together in sonnet I3. No amount of destruction done to Rome has humbled it so much that "la grandeur du rien ...I Ne face encor' esmerveiller le monde [But that this nothing ...I Makes the world wonder]" (I3.I3-I4).The "rien de Rome" of sonnet 3 that appeared to discount the wonder of sonnet 2 reconnects in sonnet I3 to a "grandeur" and the wonder that it still generates. The

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appearance of "esmerveiller" at the pointe of the poem registers the surprise of finding wonder still there.The endurance of wonder fascinates Du Bel-­ lay, as he focuses on the problem of how despite its reconstructive heritage wonder may express the unreconstructed grandeur of "rien." In a cluster of three sonnets toward the end of the Antiquitez, the ques-­ tioning of how wonder and ruin relate reaches a climax.Sonnets 27, 28, and 29 form a triptych bracketed by appearances of admiratio at the begin-­ ning of the first and at the end of the third.These appearances communi-­ cate a shift in what wonder is supposed to be about.Sonnet 27 addresses someone who admires the ruins of Rome: "Toy qui de Rome emerveille comtemples I L'antique orgueil [Thou that at Rome astonished dost behold I The antique pride]" (27.1 2).The admirer is then asked to modify his wonder in such a way as, Du Bellay predicts, to distract it from renovatio: Juge, en voyant ces ruines si amples, Ce qu'a ronge le temps injurieux, Puis qu'aux ouvriers les plus industrieux Ces vieux fragments encor servent d'exemples. Regarde apres, comme de jour en jour Rome fouillant son antique sejour, Se rebatist de tant d'ceuvres divines: Tu jugeras, que le demon Romain S'efforce encore d'une fatale main Ressusciter ces pouldreuses ruines. []udge by these ample ruins' view, the rest The which injurious time hath quite outworn, Since of all workmen held in reckoning best, Yet these old fragments are for patterns born: Then also mark, how Rome from day to day, Repairing her decayed fashion, Renews herself with buildings rich and gay; That one would judge, that the Roman Daemon Doth yet himself with fatal hand enforce, Again on foot to rear her powdered corse.]

At first the ruins look "amples," forming a sufficient basis for the ongoing reconstruction ("Rome ... Se rebastist") that the admirer observes.At

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last, however, the ruins appear "pouldreuses," a bad omen for those trying to renovate Rome. In the Deffence, ruins that are powdery are impossible to recollect:

Et si vous esperez (comme fist Esculape des Membres d'Hippolyte) que par ces fragments recuilliz, elles puyssent estre resuscitees, vous vous abusez: ne pensant point qu'ala cheute de si superbes Edifices conjointe ala ruyne fatale de ces deux puissantes Monarchies, une partie devint poudre, et l'autre doit estre en beaucoup de pieces, les queles vouloir reduire en un, seroit chose impossible. ( I I 2- I 3)

[If you hope that they can be resuscitated with these gathered fragments, as Aesculapius did with Hippolytus' members, you are fooling your--­ selves. You neglect the fact that when these great structures fell, linked as they were to the fatal collapse of two great world powers, one part was pulverized and the other was reduced to small pieces. To try to fuse them together again would be impossible.] ( 6o-6 1) The last line of sonnet 27 echoes the words of this passage ("resusciter," "poudreux") and its claim that powder manifests more fragmentation than any renovatio can fix. Sonnet 29 presents the same verdict regarding renovatio. Whereas Petrarch promoted Rome's present and future as well as past grandeur, Du Bellay puts it entirely in the past:34 Tout ce qu'Egypte en poincte fa<;onna, Tout ce que Grece ala Corinthienne, A l'Ionique, Attique, ou Dorienne Pour l'ornement des temples ma<;onna: Tout ce que l'art de Lysippe donna, La main d'Apelle, ou la main Phidienne, Souloit orner ceste Ville ancienne, Dont la grandeur le ciel mesme estonna. Tout ce qu'Athene' eut onques de sagesse, Tout ce qu'Asie eut onques de richesse, Tout ce qu'Afrique eut onques de nouveau, S'est vue icy.

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[All that which Egypt whilome did devise, All that which Greece their temples to embrave, After th' Ionic, Attic, Doric guise, Or Corinth skill' d in curious works to grave; All that Lysippus practike art could form, Apelles wit, or Phidias his skill, Was wont this ancient City to adorn, And the heaven itself with her wide wonders fill; All that which Athens ever brought forth wise, All that which Afrike ever brought forth strange, All that which Asie ever had of prize, Was here to see.]

Here the prospect of Roman grandeur arises repeatedly, as six of the first eleven lines mention "everything" that went into it. For every "tout," however, awaits a verb in the past tense. These verbs-"fa<_;onna," "ma<_;onna," "estonna," and "s'est vue"-hammer the grandeur under-­ ground where it now lies. And yet it is precisely this entombment that pro-­ duces wonder in the last three lines: "0 merveille profondel I Rome vivant fut l'ornement du monde, I Et morte elle est du monde le tumbeau [0 mar-­ velous great change: I Rome living, was the world's sole ornament, I And dead, is now the world's sole monument]" (29.12-14). Whereas in sonnet 27, the fall of Rome terminated wonder, in sonnet 29 wonder figures in the aftermath of Rome's demise. This resistant strain of wonder is "profonde" (as Du Bellay says) in more ways than one. In a literal sense wonder descends to a much lower level of the poem (line r2) than it did in sonnet 27 (line r). In going deeper on the page-sonnets 27 and 29 are printed on the upper halves of facing leaves in the first edition of the Antiquitez (rss8)-this wonder also expresses a more profound appreciation of ruin than conventional admiratio. The approfondissement of wonder occurs in sonnet 28, the pivotal poem in the sequence that I am discussing. This sonnet does not refer explicitly to wonder, but it helps make the transition from sonnet 27 to sonnet 29 in that it articulates forcefully how ruin amounts to grandeur. It compares Rome to an old and decaying oak tree: Qui a veu quelquefois un grand chesne asseiche, Qui pour son ornement quelque trophee porte,

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Lever encor' au ciel sa vieille teste morte, Dont le pied fermement n'est en terre fiche, Mais qui dessus le champ plus qu'a demy panche Monstre ses bras tous nuds, et sa racine torte, Et sans fueille umbrageux, de son poix se supporte Sur son tronc nouailleux en cent lieux esbranche: Eh bien qu'au premier vent il doive sa ruine, Et maint jeune a l'entour ait ferme la racine, Du devot populaire estre seul revere. Qui tel chesne a peu voir, qu'il imagine encores Comme entre les citez, qui plus florissent ores, Ce vieil honneur pouldreux est le plus honnore.

[He that hath seen a great oak dry and dead, Yet clad with reliques of some trophies old, Lifting to heaven her aged hoary head, Whose foot in ground hath left but feeble hold; But half disbowel'd lies above the ground, Showing her wreathed roots, and naked arms, And on her trunk all rotten and unsound Only supports herself for meat of worms; And though she owe her fall to the first wind, Yet of the devout people is adored, And many young plants spring out of her rind; Who such an oak hath seen, let him record That such this city's honor was of yore, And 'mongst all cities flourished much more.] The classical basis of this text is Lucan's description of Pompey, the Roman general and statesman, at the beginning of De bello civili (The Civil

War): Qualis frugifero quercus sublimis in agro Exuvias veteres populi sacrataque gestans Dona ducum nee iam validis radicibus haerens Pondere fixa suo est, nudosque per aera ramos Effundens trunco, non frondibus, efficit umbram; Et quamvis primo nutet casura sub Euro,

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Tot circum silvae firma se robore tollant, Sola tamen colitur.

[Thus an oak---tree, laden with the ancient trophies of a nation and the consecrated gifts of conquerors, towers in a fruitful field; but the roots it clings by have lost their toughness, and it stands by its weight alone, throwing out bare boughs into the sky and making a shade not with leaves but with its trunk; yet it alone is worshipped.)35 This simile, combined with the subsequent comparison of Julius Caesar to a bolt of lightning (I .I5 I-57), foreshadows Pompey's defeat by Caesar at Pharsalus. (Pharsalia is the alternative title of Lucan's epic.) Like Lucan, Du Bellay organizes his description around a paradox that challenges the opposition between grandeur and ruin. Indeed, his sonnet actually impresses in the very process of dissolving.Like the oak it describes, son-­ net 28 coheres by virtue of its decrepitude. The words that indicate the tree's autodismemberment also anchor the rhyme scheme that holds the 1.tnes of the poem together: "paneh" e ...esbranch"e, " "torte ...supporte."

Unlike Lucan, however, Du Bellay maps his challenge to the distinction between ruin and grandeur onto the Renaissance issue of wonder.By plac-­ ing sonnet 28 between two sonnets that register a deepening of admiratio, Du Bellay harnesses that challenge to this extension of the aesthetic cate-­ gory.The Antiquitez ask wonder to accommodate "la grandeur du rien." Montaigne's awareness of Du Bellay's oeuvre and the tradition of Roman meditations behind it comes across in Montaigne's opening remark-"On ne voyoit rien de Rome "-which echoes sonnet 3 of the

Antiquitez. But whereas Du Bellay seems to want to reform admiratio, Mon-­ taigne rejects it in favor of sublimity. Part of this process involves the cri-­ tique of admiratio implied by Montaigne's portrayal of the enemies of Rome as bad aestheticians. The enemies dismember Rome because they expect it to obey the logic of admiratio, which equates grandeur and coher-­ ence. Their failure means that they have miscalculated and that there exists a grandeur beyond admiration.After an intervening sentence, admi--­

ratio reappears, and Montaigne's critique of it proceeds: Que ces petites montres de sa ruine qui paroissent encore au dessus de la biere, c'estoit la fortune qui les avoit conservees pour le tes-­ moingnage de cette grandeur infinie que tant de siecles, tant de feux, la conjuration du monde reiteree a tant de fois a sa ruine, n'avoient peu universellement esteindre. Mais qu'il estoit vraisem--

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blable que ces membres desvisages qui en restoient, c'estoient les mains dignes, et que la furie des ennemys de cette gloire immortelle les avoit portes premierement a ruiner ce qu'il y avoit de plus beau et de plus digne; que les bastimens de cette Rome bastarde qu'on alloit asteure attachant a ces masures antiques, quoy qu'ils eussent de quoy ravir en admiration nos siecles presens, luy faisoient resou-­ venir proprement des nids que les moineaux et les corneilles vont suspendant en France aus voustes et parois des eglises que les Huguenots viennent d'y demolir. (I oo )

[These little signs of its ruin that still appear above the bier had been pre--­ served by fortune as testimony to that infinite greatness which so many centuries, so many conflagrations, and all the many conspiracies of the world to ruin it had not been able to extinguish completely. But it was likely that these disfigured limbs which remained were the least worthy, and that the fury of the enemies of that immortal glory had impelled them to destroy first of all what was most beautiful and most worthy; and the buildings of this bastard Rome which they were now attaching to these ancient ruins, although fully adequate to carry away the present age with admiration, reminded him precisely of the nests which sparrows and crows in France suspend from the arches and walls of the churches that the Huguenots have recently demolished.] ( 79) Buried in a dependent clause, admiratio responds no longer to the ancient grandeur of Rome but, rather, to its modern, bastardized version, which, however admired by Montaigne's contemporaries, elevates Montaigne only to the level of birds' nests in churches brought low by the iconoclasm of Huguenots.36 Montaigne uses the same doubt with which he disparages admiratio to create an alternative discourse of grandeur. He incorporates skepticism into the style of his meditation, a grand style whose grandeur depends not on a scientific but on a skeptical aesthetics. In the meditation eminence stems not from coherence but from fragmentation, not from apprehension but from abstraction, not from the success of cognition but from cogni-­ tion's collapse. Skepticism, therefore, is not a casualty of Montaigne's mis-­ sion of calling attention to Roman greatness. Rather, the achievement of his mission requires the growth of skepticism beyond the ruinous role assigned to it by admiratio and into an index of grandeur. The failure of Rome's enemies to attenuate its aesthetic force by dis-­ membering and crushing its "corps admirable" establishes a pattern iter--

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ated throughout the meditation. To a great extent, the meditation consti-­ tutes a potpourri of references, descriptions, and comparisons pertaining to Rome that are almost studied in their inconsistency. Montaigne repeat-­ edly refers to the object of his meditation as sotne kind of tomb, but never the same way twice: it is variously described as "sepulchre," "biere," "tombeau," "sepulture." Rome is represented in turn by its sky and plan, by the science of it, by its ruins, by the honor and reverence due and brought to it, by the memory of it, by its domination, by its body, by the broken pieces of its body, by the "montres" of its ruin, by its infinite grandeur, by testimony of its infinite grandeur, by its modern buildings, by its ancient walls, and by its glory and preeminence. The frenzied multiplication of efforts to refer to Rome belies the success of any one of them. The very abundance of errant references, however, points to the true dimensions of ancient grandeur insofar as they indicate the magnitude of the exertion involved in trying to wrap the meditative mind around Rome. Admiration that pretends to succeed in this effort manages only to reduce Rome to the dimensions of the human mind. Montaigne's praise orients itself not away from but toward skepticism, which in turn elevates the object of praise, since the confusion that results from trying to comprehend Rome lifts Rome above the ceiling of comprehension. The meditation's final sentence, its longest and most complex, both formally and thematically argues a new grandeur for ancient Rome: Encore craignoit il, a voir l'espace qu'occupe ce tombeau, qu'on ne le recognust pas tout, et que la sepulture ne fust elle mesme pour la pluspart ensevelie; que cela, de voir une si chetifve descharge, comme de morceaux de tuiles et pots casses, estre anciennement arrivee a un monceau de grandeur si excessive qu'il egale en hauteur et largeur plusieurs naturelles montaignes [car il le comparoit en hau-­ teur a la motte de Gurson et l'estimoit double en largeur], c'estoit une expresse ordonnance des destinees, pour faire sentir au monde leur conspiration a la gloire et preeminence de cette ville, par un si nouveau et extraordinaire tesmoingnage de sa grandeur. (Ioo-Ioi)

[He feared further, seeing the space that this tomb occupies, that we were not aware of all of it, and that the sepulcher itself was for the most part buried; and that judging from the fact that such paltry rubble as pieces of tile and broken pots had built up in ancient times to a pile of such excessive size that it equals in height and breadth several natural mountains (for he compared it in height to the hill of Gurson and estimated it to be twice as

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broad) , this must have been an express ordinance of the Fates, to make the world feel that they had conspired for the glory and preeminence of this city by so novel and extraordinary a testimonial of its greatness.] ( 79-80) This sentence forces the reading mind to gather momentum, weighing the mind with more and more things to ponder, as the sentence's units, syn-­ tactical and connotative, become increasingly long and interdependent and as the imaginative swings (from "descharge" to "montaignes," from Rome to the chateau of his neighbors Louis and Diane de Foix ["la motte de Gurson"]) cover greater distances more quickly. Finally, the reader hur-­ tles at top speed into the concluding argument of the meditation: that the accumulation of ancient Roman rubble into mountains manifests the Fates' deliberate ("expresse") authorization of a "nouveau et extraordinaire tesmoingnage de sa grandeur." Thematically, the sentence reflects its own fragmented structure in that it concerns how eminence ("un monceau de grandeur si excessive") rests on mere fragments ("chetifve descharge"). Montaigne's ultimate interest is not so much Roman grandeur as a testimony of grandeur, a ruined style capable of intimating ancient grandeur to a new age. An argu-­ ment for such a style of scattershot references is an argument for the style of the Essais, Montaigne's own "nouveau et extraordinaire tesmoingnage." The foregoing analysis of Montaigne's Journal de voyage depicts an interactive relation between the retreat of epistemological and moral authority and the advancement of a certain notion of aesthetic experi-­ ence. Montaigne's skepticism stems not merely from cognitive difficulty, which he was simply more sensitive to or better equipped to express than were his precursors, but also from his sense of a degree of aesthetic force to which Rome must correspond. In turn, Montaigne's skepticism, reflected in his dissatisfaction with any single definition of Rome in his meditation, furnishes a high style for communicating grandeur. Sublimity for Mon-­ taigne is a function not of particular references to Rome, the kind enabled by admiratio, but rather of the shortcomings of all references to the grandeur that paradoxically constitutes the subject of a discourse unable to refer to it. The sublime emerges through a series of impasses to grandeur erected by skepticism-a skepticism, however, that is itself invoked by a relentlessly demanding notion of aesthetic eminence. Montaigne does not only derive the aesthetic from his skepticism; for him, skepticism also becomes a strategy for creating the aesthetic, for fragmenting antiquity and thereby appropriating its power. Skepticism both answers a demand for and gives shape to sublimity.

CHAPTER TWO

The Grandeur of Ruin in the Essais

IN THE PREVIous CHAPTER,

I concluded that Montaigne's meditation on

the ruins of Rome in the Journal de voyage reflects the style and substance of the Essais. By this I did not mean to suggest that Montaigne discovered how to write essays at Rome. In any event, most of them predate Mon-­ taigne's trip. The meditation does, however, illuminate some of the prin-­ ciples that govern the major work. The things that are true of the medita-­ tion are the rules of the Essais: Montaigne's sensitivity to ancient grandeur leads him to doubt; Montaigne communicates with antiquity through ignorance; Montaigne's skepticism generates the ruined pattern of his sub-­ lime style; Montaigne degrades wonder as he elevates sublimity. The med-­ itation turns out as it does because its author is the mind of the Essais. After all, long before Montaigne went to Rome he knew ruins as the body of ancient literature that Renaissance scholars had incompletely reassembled and partially understood. Hundreds of parts of that body­ books-lined the shelves of the study where Montaigne did his writing.

1

Montaigne also had dozens of scraps of Greek and Latin inscribed on the beams of the study's ceiling, where they remain to this day. Surrounded by 2

such fragments of antiquity, Montaigne incorporated them into his work. Almost every essay includes ancient material cut and pasted into the 43

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French text. 3 In this sense, each essay presents a ruin and the Essais as a whole represent the ruins of antiquity. Over the course of the last century, the problem of fragmentation has increasingly occupied efforts to make sense of Montaigne. Pierre Villey inaugurated modern Montaigne studies by organizing the divergent ten-­ dencies of the Essais into an evolution.4 According to Villey, the contra-­ dictions within the Essais indicate not their discontinuity but the fact that they progress through stages of development: first Stoicism, then skepti-­ cism, and finally Epicureanism and the discovery of a "deep self." This the-­ ory, rooted in the progressionist philosophy of Ernest Renan and based on massive erudition, transformed the Essais into a coherent object of analy-­ sis by reducing their skepticism to a passing phase.S Although Villey played down the inconsistencies ofMontaigne's work, he could not help but notice them. The late Montaigne, remarked Villey, tends even more than the earlier one to digress, stop short, create disorder, and generally interrupt "le fil du discours [the line of argument]" ( 155).6 Villey wondered how these breakdowns in composition could occur after Montaigne had supposedly gotten over his skepticism: "Ce desordre--la, qui n'est plus calcule, mais qui est consenti par negligence, ne sert plus du tout a la peinture du Moi [Such disorder, which is not calculated but allowed only by negligence, contributes nothing whatsoever to self--portraiture]"

( 156). The disorders of the Essais made sense to Villey only as accidents. Hugo Friedrich's book on Montaigne still stands as the major alterna-­ tive to Villey's approach.? From Friedrich's perspective, the fragmentation that his predecessor had marginalized appeared central. Rather than arrange the Essais into discrete periods, Friedrich traced a set of overlap-­ ping themes that persist from the beginning to the end of the work. Friedrich focused not so much on howMontaigne adheres to the style and views of his precursors (as Villey had done), but rather on how the Essais shift on, depart from, and mutilate their foundations. Friedrich senses at the heart of Montaigne's work an aversion to "composition, that is, as it was called in classical rhetoric, the dispositio (taxis, oikonomia), or as the moderns called it, the ordo tractandi" (336). According to Friedrich, Mon-­ taigne achieves the essay form by breaking open the closed order of classi-­ cal composition. Subsequent to Friedrich's midcentury work, concern with the ways in which the Essais pull themselves apart intensified. Jean Starobinski, for example, discarded both the chronological phases of Villey and the achronological themes of Friedrich.8 As a result, the tensions that had been marginal to Villey and central to Friedrich came to be regarded as

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essential. Starobinski concentrated exclusively on the instability of Mon-­ taigne's approach to the issue of identity. According to Starobinski, the

Essais document the "motion" of Montaigne relative to the question of what constitutes selfhood. While at first Montaigne evades the forces that threaten to tear the self apart, he then paradoxically bases his identity on its dismemberment. Starobinski thus sees fragmentation as necessary to Montaigne's establishment of who he is. Through the pivotal studies of Villey, Friedrich, and Starobinski, the problem of fragmentation went from the periphery to the hub of critical conceptions of the Essais. Once in focus, the breaks in continuity demanded explanation. Edwin Duval, in an important article, asked why the Essais had the "open form" illuminated by Friedrich and suggested that it was not accidental but deliberate.9 Subsequent critics have begun to understand this form as strategic by referring it to skepticism. In light of the fact that Villey sought to prevent the Essais from dissolving by con-­ taining their skepticism, it makes sense that brokenness and skepticism would resurface together. Jean--Yves Pouilloux, for example, has referred Montaigne's resolution to "[C]ne dire qu'a demy [speak only by halves]" (996/762) to his determination never to stop thinking-in other words, always to think skeptically. Io Andre Tournon has held that Montaigne's habit of censuring himself by cutting his statements short stems from the special kind of collective verification that skeptical inquiry demands. I I Tournon has also related Montaigne's request that his editor chop up the prose of the Essais by adding capitals and punctuation to the "pyrrhonian" nature of Montaigne's language. I2 Ann Hartle connects what she calls the "skeptical moment" in Montaigne's thought to the apparent lack of tran-­ sitions between and within individual essais. I3 Montaigne criticism has gradually associated the tendencies of the Essais to disintegrate and to doubt. In the following pages, I read the Essais as ruins fashioned by skepticism. This reading confers a logic to the associ-­ ation whose development I have just traced. This logic, in turn, supports the larger claims of my project: the skepticism that ruins the Essais also forges their sublimity. I4 My reading of the Essais has three parts. I begin by considering a clus-­ ter of essays anchored by "C'est folie de rapporter le vray et le faux a nos-­ tre suffisance [It Is Folly to Measure the True and False by Our Own Capacity]" ( r.27), where Montaigne forms doubts as he formulates the ini-­ tial structure of the Essais project. The second part concerns a sequence of essays that runs through "Du jeune Caton [Of Younger Cato]" (1.37), where Montaigne generates sublimity as he defines how he writes. I turn

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finally to "De la vanite [Of Vanity]" (3.9), in which Montaigne revisits his voyage to Rome and realizes what he implied in the Journal about the

Essais and the ruins of Roman grandeur. Histories of modern skepticism have measured the gradual seepage into the Renaissance of doubts contained in ancient texts. The most important of these texts was the Hypotyposes (Outlines of Pyrrhonism) by Sextus Empiricus. From a philological perspective, therefore, Montaigne's "Apol-­ ogie de Raimond Sebond" (2.I2), whose torrent of skepticism stems in large part from the influence of Sextus, assumes preeminence. Even stud-­ ies of Montaigne's skepticism mildly interested in questions of influence concern themselves almost exclusively with the giant "Apologie."rs By choosing to focus on "C'est folie" instead of the "Apologie," I hope to recover fundamental senses of Montaignian doubt ignored by influential studies. Among the essays that Montaigne first composed (around I572), "C'est folie" predates Montaigne's initial exposure to Sextus (around

I576). Yet, the doubts stirred by this brief essay are powerful enough even-­ tually to trigger the shocks of the "Apologie."16 Apart from chronological considerations, the best reason to look in "C'est folie" for the roots of Montaigne's skepticism is that he begins the essay by telling the story of how he became skeptical: [A] Ce n'est pas a l'adventure sans raison que nous attribuons a sim-­ plesse et ignorance la facilite de croire et de laisser persuader: car il me semble avoir apris autrefois que la creance, c'estoit comme un' impression que se faisoit en nostre arne; et, a mesure qu'elle se trou-­ voit plus molle et de moindre resistance, il estoit plus ayse a y empreindre quelque chose.... Voyla pourquoy les enfans, le vul-­ gaire, les femmes et les malades sont plus subjects a estre menez par les oreilles. Mais aussi, de l'autre part, c'est une sotte presumption d'aller desdaignant et condamnant pour faux ce qui ne nous semble pas vraysemblable: qui est un vice ordinaire de ceux qui pensent avoir quelque suffisance outre la commune. ]'en faisoy ainsin autre-­ fois, et si j'oyois parler ou des esprits qui reviennent, ou du prognos-­ tique des choses futures, des enchantemens, des sorceleries, ou faire quelque autre compte ou je peusse pas mordre, Somnia, terrores magi--­

cos, miracula, sagas, I Nocturnos lemures portentdque Thessala, il me venoit compassion du pauvre peuple abuse de ces folies. Et a present, je treuve que j'estoy pour le moins autant a plaindre moy mesme. (I 78-79)

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[Perhaps it is not without reason that we attribute facility in belief and conviction to simplicity and ignorance; for it seems to me I once learned that belief was a sort of impression made on our mind, and that the softer and less resistant the mind, the easier it was to imprint something on it. . . . That is why children, common people, women, and sick people are most subject to being led by the ears. But then, on the other hand, it is foolish presumption to go around disdaining and condemning as false what ever does not seem likely to us; which is an ordinary vice in those who think they have more than common ability. I used to do so once; and if I heard of returning spirits, prognostications of future events, enchant--­ ments, sorcery, or some other story that I could not swallow, Dreams, witches, marvels, magic alarms, / Nocturnal specters, and Thes-­ salian charms, I felt compassion for the poor people who were taken in

by these follies. And now I think that I was at least as much to be pitied myself.] ( r 32) Montaigne starts by describing his preskeptical mind--set, what he used to think before he adopted the dubious attitude that he now possesses. This dogmatic posture featured a theory of knowledge. According to this the-­ ory, knowledge happens when solid contact occurs between mind and object: the object makes a good "impression" on the mind and the mind obtains a good feel for the object. Without such a close and firm rapport, no knowing transpires. During the time Montaigne adhered to this episte-­ mological notion, therefore, he would not assent to anything that he could not sink his mental teeth into ("mordre"), such as the insubstantial tales that enthrall "les enfans, le vulgaire, les femmes et les malades." The conversion from dogmatism to skepticism that Montaigne under-­ goes turns on wonder. In order to describe the sort of thing he refused to believe in his dogmatic days, Montaigne adduces two lines from the Epis--­

tles of Horace, which list "marvels" (miracula) among other objects of dis-­ belief. (Horace's miracula should be understood as "marvels" or "objects of wonder" rather than "miracles," since it stems from the same root as admi--­ ratio-miror-and since it is not ecclesiastical Latin.) There was no place for admiration in the rigid thinking now challenged by "C'est folie." The presence of miracula here means that when Montaigne says how he came to be a skeptic, he identifies a sense of wonder as the turning point, as the difference between his sure and shaky perspectives. But not just any wonder. In their original context, Horace's lines form part of a list of inter-­ ests (such as poetry) that a mature retiree should abandon in favor of the

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pursuit of philosophical knowledge. (Having just retired himself to write the Essais, Montaigne would have seriously considered Horace's advice.) Indeed, the next line in the text of the Epistles after "Thessala" is "rides [you laugh]," as Horace asks his addressee (Florus) if he does not laugh (as he should) at such ridiculous matters. r7 So the entire two lines translate, "Dreams, witches, marvels, magic alarms, nocturnal specters, and Thes-­ salian charms-do you laugh at these?" "Rides" both completes Horace's verse (as the last word of the poetic line) and ends wonder (in knowing laughter). But Montaigne omits "rides," and by breaking off the end from this piece of Latin, Montaigne puts off the end of wonder that Horace advises. In my first chapter I noted that the garden varieties of classical and Renaissance admiratio lead to the act of knowing. By pruning-or rather, ruining-wonder, Montaigne creates a hybrid that grows into the act of not knowing, the mature skepticism that his essay espouses. Other critics have noticed something unorthodox about the way Mon-­ taigne handles wonder. In her recent book on Montaigne Ann Hartle makes a comment about the role of wonder in his "accidental" philosophy that helps bring into focus my argument here: The radical contingency of being is the condition for the telos of accidental philosophy. The telos of deliberate philosophy is the divine stasis. Deliberate philosophy begins in wonder and ends in some form of divine impassibility, whether contemplation of the eternal or the ataraxia of skepticism. Accidental philosophy ends in wonder, not at the rare and extraordinary but at the most familiar: what is did not have to be at all. (38) According to Hartle, whereas deliberate philosophy begins with wonder and ends by resolving it, Montaigne's accidental philosophy both begins and ends with wonder, which is thus never resolved. Like Hartle, I see wonder as a starting point for Montaigne, I would describe the difference between conventional philosophy and Montaigne's in terms of what hap-­ pens to wonder, and I find that Montaignian wonder does not disappear as it does for the philosophies that he critiques. Unlike Hartle's, however, my analysis leads me to propose that Montaigne does not conserve wonder but rather transforms it through his art of fragmentation. rS The treatment of Horace that I have demonstrated is not an exception but the rule in "C'est folie," as Montaigne repeatedly spins wonder away from knowledge in order to create doubt. In the process of elaborating his skepticism, Montaigne consistently refers to Latin pronouncements on

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admiratio in such a way as to short--circuit the conversion into firm belief or disbelief that they originally advocated. Montaigne proceeds in the essay to argue explicitly for the extension of wonder implied by his treatment of Horace: [A] Si nous appellons monstres ou miracles ce ou nostre raison ne peut aller, combien s'en presente il continuellement a nostre veue? Considerons au travers de quels nuages et commant a tastons on nous meine a la connoissance de la pluspart des chases qui nous sont entre mains: certes nous trouverons que c'est plustost accoustu-­ mance que science qui nous en oste 1' estrangete. ( I 79) [If we call prodigies or miracles whatever our reason cannot reach, how many of these appear continually to our eyes! Let us consider through what clouds and how gropingly we are led to the knowledge of most of the things that are right in our hands; assuredly we shall find that it is rather familiarity than knowledge that takes away their strangeness.] (I 32) Montaigne traces the premature demise of admiratio: if we realized that familiarity stems not from knowledge but from habit, we would recover our wonder ("miracle"). Montaigne adds to this statement a series of lines from Lucretius: [B] jam nemo, fessus satiate videndi, I Suspicere in cceli dignatur lucida templa.... [A] si nunc primum mortalibus adsint I Ex impro-­ viso, ceu sint objecta repente, IN il magis his rebus poterat mirabile dici, I Aut minus ante quod auderent fore credere gentes. ( I 79) [But no one now, so tired of seeing are our eyes, I Deigns to look up at the bright temples of the skies. . . . If they were here for the first time for men to see, I If they were set before us unexpectedly, I Nothing more mar ... velous than these things could be told, I Nothing more unbelievable for men of old.] (I 32-33) By saying that what one now takes for granted was wonderful when first witnessed, Lucretius appears to support Montaigne's case for protracting wonder ("mirabile"). But a return to De rerum natura reveals that the lines originally formed part of the opposite argument. By noting that what was once marvelous now makes sense, Lucretius actually prepares to announce the existence of other worlds; reminded that wonders cease, his readers

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will not be too astonished and accept the news reasonably. 19 Montaigne has again altered the trajectory of admiratio set by a Latin author. Montaigne tampers with admiratio a third time in a way that recalls his dissatisfaction with wonder in his meditation on Roman ruins in the Jour--­

nal de voyage. Sometime before his death in 1592 Montaigne added to his copy of the 1588 edition of the Essais a citation of Cicero's De natura deo--­

rum: "[C] Consuetudine oculorum assuescunt animi, neque admirantur, neque requirunt rationes earum rerum quas semper vident. La nouvellete des chases nous incite plus que leur grandeur a en rechercher les causes [The mind

becomes accustomed to things by the habitual sight of them, and neither wonders nor inquires about the reasons for the things it sees all the time. The novelty of things incites us more than their greatness to seek their causes]" ( I8o/133). Originally Cicero complains that habit prevents wonder and the inquiry into causes that wonder inspires only so that he may allay doubts about the rational order of the universe. If it were not for habit, wonder would lead to research, which would in turn lead to the acknowledgment of a univer-­ sal structure.20 Montaigne, however, uses Cicero's words to extend doubt, not knowledge. Montaigne uproots Cicero's admiratio from the process of acquiring knowledge and makes wonder lead to ignorance instead. Mon-­ taigne's paraphrase then adjusts the terms and changes the idea excerpted from Cicero: inquiry follows a sensation of novelty and not a sense of true grandeur. The notion that grandeur evokes more than the research incited by wonder suggests that Montaigne's essay shares the concern of his medi-­ tation in the Journal de voyage. Like the meditation, "C'est folie" critiques

admiratio as inadequate and uses skepticism to expand it to the point of sublimity, beyond the limits imposed by Latin authors such as Horace, Lucretius, and Cicero. This reading of "C'est folie" shows that the skeptical reform of wonder into sublimity that occurs in the Journal occurs also in the Essais. "C'est folie" also begins to suggest that the fragmentation associated with this process characterizes Montaigne's practice of fracturing the Latin he inserts into his French. The revision of wonder in "C'est folie" is ruinous. Ruin also describes how this revision occurs, the method used by Mon-­ taigne to operate on wonder: citation. Montaigne does not merely modify wonder in French. Rather, he reworks wonder as he fragments the authors he cites. Montaigne's fragmentation of admiratio is indistinguishable from his ruin of the Latin texts in which he finds admiratio expressed. Citation, as I remarked above, is basic to the Essais. The intimate, complex, and much studied relation between Montaignian writing and citing is beyond the scope of this discussion. 21 Instead, I want to suggest

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that the fragmentation evident in "C'est folie" not only describes Mon-­ taigne's practice of invoking Latin authorities, but also defines his literary enterprise. The dynamic of skepticism and sublimity that ruins grandeur also conceives the Essais. The pursuit of this hypothesis leads to the famous neighbors of "C'est folie." "De !'institution des enfans [On the Education of Children]" (I .26) and "De l'amitie [Of Friendship]" (I .28) are key statements of Montaigne's thought and art in the first book. The intermediate position of "C'est folie" allows it to play the pivotal role in the sequence of essays that generates Montaigne's major early conception of what the Essais are all about. In "C'est folie," Montaigne cites ruinously. In "De !'institution," he lays the groundwork for this practice by attributing the way he cites to the frag-­ mentary natures of his work and of his mind: 22

[C] OJe ne luitte point en gros ces vieux champions la, et corps a corps: c'est par reprinses, menues et legieres attaintes. Je ne m'y ahurte pas; je ne fay que les taster; et ne vay point tant comme je marchande d'aller. Si je leur pouvoy tenir palot, je serois honneste homme, car je ne les entreprens que par ou ils sont les plus roides. ( I47-48) [I do not wrestle with those old champions wholesale and body against body; I do so by snatches, by little light attacks. I don't go at them stub--­ bornly; I only feel them out; and I don't go nearly as much as I think about going. If I were a match for them I would be a good man, for I take them on only at their stiffest points.] (roB)

Montaigne imagines citation as a form of combat and himself as a combat-­ ant overmatched by the ancient authors whom he cites. He avoids full body contact ("corps a corps") in favor of an indirect approach that allows him to engage only parts of their bodies of work. Montaigne resorts to guerrilla tactics ("par reprinses, menues et legieres attaintes") because he lacks the heft to carry a straightforward encounter. Montaigne explains why he weighs so little in the very first sentences of the essay: [A] Je ne vis jamais pere, pour teigneux ou bosse que fut son fils, qui laissast de l'avoiier. Non pourtant, s'il n'est du tout enyvre de cet' affection, qu'il ne s'apen;oive de sa defaillance; mais tant y a qu'il est sien. Aussi moy, je voy, mieux que tout autre, que ce ne sont icy que resveries d'homme qui n'a gouste des sciences que la crouste

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premiere, en son enfance, et n'en a retenu qu'un general et informe visage: un peu de chaque chose, et rien du tout, a la Fran<;oise. (145-46)

[I have never seen a father who failed to claim his son, however mangy or

hunchbacked he was. Not that he does not perceive his defect, unless he is utterly intoxicated by his affection; but the fact remains that the boy is his. And so I myself see better than anyone else that these are nothing but reveries of a man who has tasted only the outer crust of sciences in his childhood, and has retained only a vague general picture of them: a little of everything and nothing thoroughly, French style.] ( ro6) The Essais are so light because their author digested little of an education that undernourished him in the first place by providing only the "crouste premiere" of the sciences. (When Montaigne describes his miseducation as "ala Fran<;oise," he alludes to a stereotype popular earlier in the sixteenth century of the French as uncultivated compared to some of their European neighbors.)23 This pedagogical malnourishment naturally resulted in an intellectual deformity: Montaigne possesses only the "informe visage" of knowledge. Montaigne's awareness of gaps in his education paradoxically informs his ideas about how to teach a child. (Montaigne frequently uses the verb

former to express the act of educating; the use of the noun formation in this sense did not emerge until the twentieth century.) The possession of informed judgment requires a proper estimation of the grandeur of the world and of one's insignificance relative to it:

[A] Mais qui se presente, comme dans un tableau, cette grande image de nostre mere nature en son entiere mageste; qui lit en son visage une si generale et constante variete; qui se remarque la dedans, et non soy, mais tout un royaume, comme un traict d'une pointe tres delicate: celuy --la seul estime les choses selon leur juste grandeur. Ce grand monde, que les uns multiplient encore comme especes soubs un genre, c'est le mirouer ou il nous faut regarder pour nous connoistre de bon biais. Somme, je veux que ce soit le livre de mon escholier. Tant d'humeurs, de sectes, de jugemens, d'opinions, de loix et de coustumes nous apprennent ajuger sainement des nos-­ tres, et apprennent nostre jugement a reconnoistre son imperfec-­ tion et sa naturelle foiblesse: qui n'est pas un legier apprentissage. (157-sS)

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[But whoever considers as in a painting the great picture of our mother Nature in her full majesty; whoever reads such universal and constant variety in her face; whoever finds himself there, and not merely himself, but a whole kingdom, as a dot made with a very fine brush; that man also estimates things according to their true proportions. This great world, which some multiply further as being only a species under one genus, is the mirror in which we must look at ourselves to recognize ourselves from the proper angle. In short, I want it to be the book of my student. So many humors, sects, judgments, opinions, laws, and customs teach us to judge sanely on our own, and teach our judgment to recognize its own imperfection and natural weakness, which is no small lesson.] (I I 6) Here, about a third of the way into the essay, Montaigne recalls the open-­ ing idea that truth has a "visage" that the mind reflects incompletely. (The terms have slightly shifted: whereas earlier knowledge was informe, now judgment is imparfait.) One cultivates one's judgment by recognizing how imperfect that judgment is. Judging well means judging things according to their "juste grandeur," which can only happen after taking into account the partiality of one's mind and the entirety of the world. This symbiosis between grandeur and fragment in "De !'institution" has an effect on "C'est folie." In "De !'institution" Montaigne characterizes education as the development of suffisance (capacities). (When, for exam-­ ple, Montaigne recommends modesty in conversation, he says that a child should be raised "[A] a estre espargnant et mesnagier de sa suffisance [to be sparing and thrifty with his ability]" [154/1 13].) As an essay with suffisance in its title, "C'est folie de rapporter le vray et le faux a nostre suffisance" evidently perpetuates the concerns of its predecessor. The definition of good judgment in "C'est folie" summarizes what Montaigne said in "De !'institution" about how to esteem: "[A] Il faut juger avec plus de reverence de cette infinie puissance de nature et plus de reconnaissance de nostre ignorance et foiblesse [We must judge with more reverence the infinite power of nature, and with more consciousness of our ignorance and weak-­ ness]" (180/133). In "C'est folie" Montaigne does not just repeat but applies the theory of suffisance that he proposed in "De !'institution." In the former essay Montaigne suggests that becoming suffisant requires recogniz .. ing how out of shape one's mind is. In the latter essay, he reforms suffisance by deforming wonder, the feeling that conventionally motivates educa-­ tion. Broken by this operation, wonder may be open to the great unknown. The ruinous energy that runs through "De !'institution" and "C'est folie" generates the sublimity of "De l'amitie," where Montaigne writes

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about his friendship with Etienne de la Boetie and invents a key structure of the Essais project.They met as fellow magistrates at the Bordeaux par-­ liament in 1557, when Montaigne was twenty--four and La Boetie twenty-­ seven. La Boetie died in 1663; Montaigne was permanently devastated. Eighteen years after La Boetie's death, as Montaigne traveled through Italy in search of cures for his kidney stones, he wrote in his]ournal, "Ce mesme matin ...je tombay en un pensement si penible de M.de La Boetie, et y fus si longtemps sans me raviser, que cela me fit grand mal [This morning I was overcome by such painful thoughts about Monsieur de La Boetie, and I was in this mood so long, without recovering, that it did me much harm]" (162/125). The impact of the absence of La Boetie on the Essais is well known. "De l'amitie" is the twenty--eighth of fifty--seven essays in the first book. Originally, Montaigne intended "De l'amitie" to introduce La Boetie's Discours de la servitude volontaire (Discourse on Voluntary Servi--­ tude), which would have occupied the central twenty--ninth position. When Montaigne learned that others had published the Discours, he replaced it with twenty--nine sonnets that La Boetie had written. When the sonnets also appeared elsewhere, Montaigne eliminated them as well, so that he gradually reduced his monument to his friend to nothing. Like the two previous essays, "De l'amitie" concerns suffisance. Mon-­ taigne begins by finding his capacities fragmentary compared to what La Boetie could do: [A] Considerant la conduite de la besongne d'un peintre que j'ay, il m'a pris envie de l'ensuivre.Il choisit le plus bel endroit et milieu de chaque paroy, pour y loger un tableau elaboure de toute sa suffisance; et, le vuide au tour, il le remplit de crotesques, qui sont peintures fantasques, n'ayant grace qu'en la variete et estrangete. Que sont--ce icy aussi, a la verite, que crotesques et corps mon-­ strueux, rappiecez de divers membres, sans certaine figure, n'ayants ordre, suite ny proportion que fortuite? Desinit in piscem mulier for--­ mosa superne. Je vay bien jusques ace second point avec mon pein-­ tre, mais je demeure court en l'autre et meilleure partie: car rna suffisance ne va pas si avant que d'oser entreprendre un tableau riche, poly et forme selon l'art.Je me suis advise d'en emprunter un d'Estienne de la Boitie, qui honorera tout le reste de cette besongne. (183) [As I was considering the way a painter I employ went about his work, I had a mind to imitate him. He chooses the best spot, the middle of each

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wall, to put a picture labored over with all his skill, and the empty space all around it he fills with grotesques, which are fantastic paintings whose only charm lies in their variety and strangeness. And what are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesques and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental? A lovely woman tapers off into a fish [Horace]. I do indeed go along with my painter in this sec-­

ond point, but I fall short in the first and better part; for my ability does not go far enough for me to dare to undertake a rich, polished picture, formed according to art. It has occurred to me to borrow one from Eti-­ enne de la Boetie, which will do honor to all the rest of this work.] ( 135) Montaigne compares La Boetie's work to a painting and his own essays to grotesques scribbled around it: pleasing but aimless designs that before completing one form initiate another. While La Boetie could produce something "forme," Montaigne's "suffisance" permits him only to create a work "rappiecez de divers metnbres." Montaigne's pieces-the Essais that he likens to grotesques-decorate the masterpiece of La Boetie. As "divers membres" arranged first around La Boetie's "corps forme" and then (after 1588) around its absence, the Essais represent the ruins of an antique coherence. Montaigne saw in his friend the last and best shot of the Renaissance to recover ancient virtue. In the Discours, which inspired Montaigne to meet its author, La Boetie boldly hoped that over French poetry "bientot les Grecs ni les Latins n'auront guere ... le droit d'a1nesse [soon the Greeks and Romans will hardly have . .. rights of seniority]" (I6o).24 After they met, Montaigne and La Boetie sought to have their friendship rival ancient examples of amicitia. Montaigne makes this ambition clear in the letter he wrote to his father describing La Boetie's death. According to Montaigne, the bedridden La Boetie willed his books to his friend with these words:

Mon frere, dit--il, que j'ayme si cherement, & que j'avois choisy parmy tant d'hommes, pour renouveller avec vous ceste vertueuse

& sincere amitie, de laquelle l'usage est par les vices des si long temps esloigne d'entre nous, qu'il n'en reste que quelques vieilles traces en la memoire de l'antiquite: Je vous supplie pour signal de mon affection envers vous, vouloir estre successeur de rna Biblio-­ thecque & de mes livres, que je vous donne: present bien petit, mais qui part de bon cueur: & que vous est convenable pour l'affection

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que vous avez aux lettres. Ce vous sera mnemosunon tui sodalis. (1352 )25 [My brother, whom I love so dearly and whom I chose out of so many men in order to renew with you that virtuous and sincere friendship, the practice of which has for so long been driven from among us by our vices that there remain of it only a few old traces in the memory of antiquity, I entreat you to accept as a legacy my library and my books, which I give you as a sign of my affection toward you: a very small present, but one which comes from a willing heart and which is appropriate for you because of your fondness for letters. It will be a remembrance of your friend.]

(rosa) Alive, La Boetie inspired Montaigne to join him in his pursuit of ancient grandeur. Dead, La Boetie provided Montaigne with the field of ruins where he could cultivate his Essais. Back in the Essais, Montaigne remembers his friend as a man "[A]

a

la

vieille marque [of the old stamp]," who would have produced, given a longer life, "grands effects [great results]" (659/soo). This description (in "De la pre£sumption [Of Presumption]" [2.17]) of La Boetie's potential effect recalls another passage in "De l'amitie" where Montaigne implies that his feelings for La Boetie empower and shape the Essais. The intensity of this passion surpasses even what the ancient theories of friendship could account for: [A] Tout ainsi que cil qui fut rencontre a chevauchons sur un baton, se jouant avec ses enfants, pria l'homme qui l'y surprint, de n'en rien dire, jusques a ce qu'il fut pere luy--mesme, estimant que la passion qui luy naistroit lors en l'ame le rendroit juge equitable d'une telle action: je souhaiterois aussi parler

a

des gens qui eussent essaye ce

que je dis. Mais, s<;achant combien c'est chose eslongnee du com-­ mun usage qu'une telle amitie, et combien elle est rare, je ne m'at-­ tens pas d'en trouver aucun bon juge. Car les discours mesmes que l'antiquite nous a laisse sur ce subject, me semblent laches au pris du sentiment que j'en ay. Et, en ce poinct, les effects surpassent les pre-­ ceptes mesmes de la philosophie. ( I 92) []ust as the man who was found astride a stick, playing with his children, asked the man who surprised him thus to say nothing about it until he was a father himself, in the belief that the passion which would then be born in

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his soul would make him an equitable judge of such an act, so I should like to talk to people who have experienced what I tell. But knowing how far from common usage and how rare such a friendship is, I do not expect to find any good judge of it. For the very discourses that antiquity has left us on this subject seem to me weak compared with the feeling I have. And in this particular the facts surpass even the precepts of philosophy.] ( 142-43) In the typography of the Essais published during Montaigne's lifetime, fs closely resembles's. The word "effects," therefore, looks as well as sounds a lot like "essais." This visual similarity suggests that the Essais are the effects of friendship and are thus written to express the sensation of having known La Boetie. Furthermore, the typographical relation between effects and essais identifies the latter as ruins of the former. Because the long s constitutes the stem of the f without the crosspiece, the "ss" of "essais" are fragments of the "ff' of "effects."26 Montaigne defines his work as the art of deconstruction. The negative archaeology of the Essais also surfaces through Mon-­ taigne's most famous and direct attempt to explain his feelings for La Boetie: "[A] Si on me presse de dire pourquoy je l'aymois, je sens que cela ne se peut exprimer, [C] qu'en respondant: Par ce que c'estoit luy; par ce que c'estoit moy [If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I]" (I.28.I88/139). "Par ce que c'estoit luy; par ce que c'estoit moy" is an instance of parataxis. Montaigne juxtaposes two dependent clauses while omitting any connective that would clarify their relation. Such disjunctive writing occurs rarely in the Renaissance, but even in Montaigne "par ce que c'estoit luy; par ce que c'estoit moy" is extraordinarily incoherent. Montaigne wrote it as a marginal addition to the 1588 Essais, one of the hundreds of allongeails that signal the unfinished nature of his work. Fur-­ thermore, the actual emendation is written in two different inks and thus likely at two different times. Even what editors print as a period (after "moy") in fact looks more like what the curator of the Bordeaux manu-­ script described to me as a "point baveux" (drooling end--stop) or a comma. Perhaps Montaigne intended to continue, so that what he says represents only part of what he could or wanted to say about his great friend. One commentator has read this statement as sublime by comparing it to the trend--setting translation of Longinus made by Boileau in the seventeenth century.27 According to this reading, Montaigne anticipates Boileau's

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interest in a discourse that conveys the force of the real by disjoining it from all real attributes. A stronger and more native connection to sublimity exists here than

such an analysis suggests, however. Like the ruins of Rome in the Journal, the fragments of syntax in "De l'amitie" say more by saying less. Montaigne represents a wealth of emotion by impoverishing his prose. We have traced through the two previous essays the development of a theory and practice of sublimity to suit skepticism (and vice versa). From this perspective, the stylistic experiment of "De l'amitie" looks less like the anticipation of an Enlightenment vogue than the culmination of the work on the idea of

suffisance that "De !'institution," "C'est folie," and "De l'amitie" collec-­ tively undertake. The climactic ruin of the third essay takes shape under the pressure of the skepticism of the previous two, a skepticism itself forged by Montaigne's critique of wonder as an inadequate response to grandeur. Our effort to uncover the basis of the skepticism of the Essais has exposed their sublimity. The skepticism of "C'est folie" tears open the end of wonder. This rupture, in turn, is both prepared by the discussion of vio-­ lent citation in "De !'institution" and developed into the practice of frag-­ mentary writing in "De l'amitie." The Essais are the effects of Montaigne's love for La Boetie, and the more completely they attempt to express this sensation, the more completely they fall apart. Their most sensational moment is the moment when their characteristic fragmentation reaches its most intense pitch on every level down to punctuation and ink. Through their skepticism, the Essais ruin great things in order to express and appropriate their power. My first line of inquiry into the Essais began with "C'est folie" and its skepticism. I now want to start again, but with the sublimity of "Du jeune Caton" instead. Critics have identified this essay as sublime primarily by connecting it to Longinus.28 Montaigne's essay about the great Roman leads him into a discussion of great poetry that resembles its discussion in

Peri hypsous. This similarity indicates, according to these critics, that Montaigne knew and was influenced by the Hellenistic treatise. Despite such analyses, there is much more, or rather, as I will argue, less to say about this essay. My reading considers not so much the matter of whether or to what extent Longinus may have influenced Montaigne as the matter of why and how the appeal to a certain register of grandeur occurs in the essay. Sublimity for Montaigne does not depend on any references to Longinus, which may or may not exist-the efforts to identify such refer-­ ences remain, in my opinion, inconclusive. Rather, sublimity is the func-­ tion of the shortcomings of all references to the grandeur that paradoxi--

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cally constitutes the subject of an essay unable to refer to it. The sublime emerges through a series of detachments from grandeur, detachments that are the effects of a skepticism itself caused by a relentlessly demanding notion of eminence. Interpretations of "Du jeune Caton" as sublime focus tightly on the ecstatic allongeail that dominates the end of the essay. I will widen the focus to the entire text and beyond in order to argue that the climactic sublimities of the allongeail form part of a pattern that develops throughout "Du jeune Caton" and the series of essays to which it belongs. In doing so, I will suggest that a Catonian notion of sublimity develops in the first book of the Essais. Of course, Montaigne has heroes other than Cato-Alexander the Great, Epaminondas (the Theban general), Julian the Apostate, and especially Socrates, whom Montaigne seems to prefer to Cato in "De la phisionomie" (1037-38B).29 However, my argument con-­ cerns not Montaigne's respect for ancient figures as moral exemplars but rather his use of one such figure to conceive the style of his prose. While I treat the Catonian sublime, a treatment of the Socratic sublime is also pos-­ sible, since Socrates represents for Montaigne a way to write as well as live: [B] Socrates faict mouvoir son arne d'un mouvement naturel et commun. Ainsi diet un paysan, ainsi diet une femme. [C] Il n'a jamais en la bouche que cochers, menuisiers, savetiers et ma<;ons. [B] Ce sont inductions et similitudes tirees des plus vulgaires et cogneues actions des hommes; chacun 1' entend. ( I 037)

[Socrates makes his soul move with a natural and common motion. So says a peasant, so says a woman. His mouth is full of nothing but carters, joiners, cobblers, and masons. His are inductions and similes drawn from the commonest and best---known actions of men; everyone understands him.] (793) Socrates' language fascinates Montaigne insofar as it expresses grandeur paradoxically through simple and even crude forms of expression. Mon-­ taigne's juxtaposition of Cato and Socrates, therefore, signals not only a moral difference between them but also an aesthetic continuity from one to the other. Montaigne's interest in Cato prepares his investment in Socrates. It is this kind of interrelation that eludes, in my opinion, the teleological view of the Essais originally proposed by Villey and still held by some critics today. If Montaigne's thought and art go through stages, these do not necessarily preclude one another, and insofar as Montaigne

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retains and elaborates his Catonian essays through I592, he never aban-­ dons Cato as a figure of grandeur. Montaigne's first substantial reference to Cato occurs in "De l'institu-­ tion," where earlier we found Montaigne's description of his combative approach to citation. In fact, Montaigne discusses fragmentary writing as well as citing in "De !'institution." Toward the end of the essay, Mon-­ taigne criticizes the polished, well--rounded eloquence classically advo-­ cated by Cicero and opposes to it a discourse characterized by ruggedness, difficulty, and even incoherence. Citing Horace, Montaigne recommends dismemberment as the test of good poetry: even the scattered pieces ("dis--­ jecti membra") of a good poem will be beautiful: "[A] les pieces mesmes en seront belles" (I 70). "Le parler que j 'ayme," continues Montaigne, [A] c'est un parler simple et naif, tel sur le papier qu'a la bouche; un parler succulent et nerveux, court et serre, [C] non tant delicat et peigne comme vehement et brusque: HC£c demum sapiet dictio, que£ feriet, [A] plustost difficile qu'ennuieux, esloingne d'affectation, desregle, descousu et hardy: chaque lopin y face son corps. (I 7I-72) [The speech I love is a simple, natural speech, the same on paper as in the mouth; a speech succulent and sinewy, brief and compressed, not so much dainty and well---combed as vehement and brusque: The speech that strikes the mind will have most taste; rather difficult than boring, remote from affectation, irregular, disconnected and bold; each bit mak--­ ing a body in itself.] (I 2 7)

A certain lack of articulation strengthens speech. It is according to this logic that speech that is "descousu" ("disjointed"; literally "torn" or "unsewn") can also be "nerveux" ("solid"; literally "possessing strong liga-­ ments or tendons"). Just before Montaigne discusses this preference for a broken style, he mentions Cato for the last time in the Essais prior to "Du jeune Caton": "[A] Au fort de l'eloquence de Cicero, plusieurs en entroient en admiration; mais Caton, n'en faisant que rire: Nous avons, disoit--il, un plaisant consul [When Cicero's eloquence was at its height, many were struck with admiration; but Cato only laughed and said: 'We have an amusing consul']" (I 70/I 26). This confrontation between Cato and Cicero introduces the issue of fragmentary writing in several ways. First, whereas Cicero was famous for the copiousness of his compositions,3° Cato was famous for cutting himself into pieces: as Montaigne puts it in "Du dormir [Of Sleep]" (I.44), Cato lit--

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erally undid himself ("[A] se deffaire" [271]) when he tore into his own bowels rather than live under Julius Caesar in the aftermath of the Roman republic. Cato's suicide appealed to Montaigne aesthetically as well as politically.31 As a hero admired for autodismemberment, Cato's special style of dying suggested a special style of writing, an alternative to the grand style of Cicero. Second, because Cato built his reputation by demolishing himself, he also represented the problem of Renaissance grandeur. In the

Life of Phocion (the companion to the Life of Cato in the edition of the Par--­ allel Lives read by Montaigne), Plutarch compares Phocion to Cato, whose l'innocence ancienne, etant deja de si longtemps sortie hors d'usage, et venant lors apres si long intervalle a se montrer parmi les vies corrompues et les mceurs gatees de ce temps--la, lui acquit une grande gloire et grande renommee; mais, au demeurant, elle ne se trouva pas sortable a mettre en ceuvre, ni propre a employer aux affaires, parce que la gravite et perfection de sa vertu etait dispro-­ portionnee a la corruption de ce siecle--la. (2.490 )32

[old---fashioned character . . . which, after a long lapse of time, made its appearance among lives that were corrupted and customs that were debased, enjoyed great repute and fame, but was not suited to the needs of men because of the weight and grandeur of its virtue, which were out of all proportion to the immediate times.] ( 8. I 5 I) 33 Even in antiquity, Cato was too great for the times. Montaigne found in Plutarch a portrait of Cato that raised the problem of grandeur in a small age and suggested a ruinous solution.34 Third, Cato offers-or rather, Montaigne makes Cato offer-the possibility of surpassing Ciceronian wonder through sublimity. Montaigne takes the anecdote about Cato and Cicero in "De !'institution" from Plutarch's Life of Cicero. Plutarch describes Cicero as particularly good at mockery and cites his public ridicule of Cato's Stoicism as an example of this talent. According to Plutarch, Cicero's joke made everyone laugh except Cato himself, who quipped, "Que nous avons un grand rieur et un grand moqueur de consul seigneurs [what a great laugher and joker of a consul we have, gentle-­ men]!" (2.795). Montaigne's revision of Plutarch anticipates the sublimity of "Du jeune Caton." According to Plutarch, the public laughs in response to Cicero's deft mockery of Cato; in Montaigne's version, the public admires Cicero's eloquence and it is Cato who has the last laugh. Mon-­ taigne makes Cicero stand for an admiration that Cato reveals as incom--

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plete. In doing so, Montaigne implies that since Cato laughs at what nor-­ mally induces wonder, he may have more than wonder to offer. In light of Cato's associations in Plutarch and Montaigne with dis-­ memberment, grandeur, anti--Ciceronianism, and superwonderful elo-­ quence, it makes sense that "Du jeune Caton" would concern sublimity. The critical consensus about the essay, therefore, is generally right. How-­ ever, "Du jeune Caton" is not sublime because it adheres to a Longinian notion of grandeur. Rather, it is sublime because in it Montaigne estab-­ lishes the Essais as an alternative testimony of grandeur by adhering to no notion of grandeur whatsoever. "Du jeune Caton" belongs to a line of essays, including "De la coustume et de ne changer aisement une loy receue [Of Custom, and Not Easily Changing an Accepted Law]" (1.23), "Des cannibales [Of Cannibals]" (1.31), and "De l'usage de se vestir [Of the Custom of Wearing Clothes]"

( I. 36), in which Montaigne cultivates an anthropology of skeptical detachment. In the latter essay, for example, Montaigne establishes the diversity of forms assumed by human beings by observing the variety of their sartorial customs. In doing so, Montaigne nourishes an anthropology made possible by skepticism. Montaigne's observation of diversity casts doubt on the existence of any trait essential to humans that would distin-­ guish them from animals. The erosion of this distinction transforms man into another object of science to be studied on equal terms with animals, plants, and minerals. "De l'usage de se vestir," like "De la coustume" and "Des cannibales," merges the categories of human being and creature and thus creates a basis for what would eventually become the modern study of mankind.35 The first two sentences of "Du jeune Caton"-"[A] Je n'ay point cette erreur commune de juger d'un autre selon que je suis. J'en croy aysement des chases diverses

a

moy [I do not share that common error of judging

another by myself. I easily believe that another man may have qualities different from mine]" (229/169)-sustain the concern of "Du l'usage de se vestir" with the diversity of forms assumed by human beings. Montaigne declares the absence of a common standard to apply in one's judgments of others. Basic to "Du jeune Caton" is thus a skepticism that involves the admission of diversity and the practice of detachment. As an essay about an eminent Roman, one would expect "Du jeune Caton" to bring the skepticism inherited from "De l'usage de se vestir" to bear on the issue of grandeur. And in fact Montaigne quickly juxtaposes his refusal to judge with his capacity to honor what is great:

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[C] Pour n'estre continent, je ne laisse d'advouer sincerement la continence des Feuillans et des Capuchins, et de bien trouver l'air de leur train: je m'insinue, par imagination, fort bien en leur place. Et si les ayme et les honore d'autant plus qu'il sont autres que moy. Je desire singulierement qu'on nous juge chascun a part soy, et qu'on ne me tire en consequence des communs exemples. [A] Ma foiblesse n'altere aucunement les opinions que je dois avoir de la force et vigueur de ceux qui le meri tent. [C] Sunt qui nihil laudent, nisi quod

se imitari posse confidunt. [A] Rampant au limon de la terre, je ne laisse pas de remerquer, jusques dans les nues, la hauteur inimitable d'aucunes ames heroi:ques. (229) [I do not fail, just because I am not continent, to acknowledge sincerely the continence of the Feuillants and the Capuchins, and to admire the manner of their life. I can very well insinuate myself by imagination into their place, and I love and honor them all the more because they are dif-­ ferent from me. I have a singular desire that we should each be judged in ourselves apart, and that I may not be measured in conformity with the common patterns. My weakness in no way alters my necessarily high regard for the strength and vigor of those who deserve it. There are men who praise nothing except what they are confident they can imi-­ tate. Crawling in the slime of the earth, I do not fail to observe, even in the clouds, the inimitable loftiness of certain heroic souls.] (I 6g) However limited Montaigne's own capacities, they do not prevent him from appreciating the capacities of others. The fact that Montaigne insists on his skeptical appreciation of grandeur repeatedly-four times in the passage just cited-indicates the extent to which such appreciation resists conventional wisdoms of the Renaissance. The restriction of judgment by skepticism prevents the con-­ tact that appraisals of grandeur usually require. In my first chapter, we saw that Montaignian doubt releases the grasp of eminence supposed by admir-­ ing meditations on Roman ruins. Because skepticism undoes adherence to all beliefs and theories, it prevents the apprehensions assumed by them. This is why in "Du jeune Caton" Montaigne mentions standard ways to recuperate grandeur only to reject them as dead ends. He avoids judgments according to the "communs exemples"; the "hauteur" he notices in others is "inimitable." The systems of exemplarity and imitation belonged to a group of strategies developed in the Renaissance to make ancient grandeur

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reappear in a modern setting. Montaigne's doubt undermines the emi-­ nence that such strategies were devised to recover. However, Montaigne's skepticism does not simply eliminate Renais-­ sance procedures of representation; it also replaces them. More than deny that his skeptical detachment implies insensitivity, Montaigne claims that the opposite is true. "D'autant plus" suggests that skepticism actually gen-­ erates honor. Montaigne's incapacity to judge others augments his capac-­ ity to respect them. It is precisely the corrosive action of Montaigne's skep-­ ticism that constitutes his testimony of Cato's eminence. How this can be so is what "Du jeune Caton" is about. "Du jeune Caton" concerns how skepticism provides superior access to grandeur than do the routes so far established by Renaissance culture. Montaigne's reference to Cicero on competing forms of eloquence confirms this concern. The citation, from the Tusculan Disputations, has Cicero saying that some men only respect what they can reproduce. Such men presume their own genus dicendi to be the highest of high styles. In the context of the Disputations, Cicero defends his style against Attic elo-­ quence. In doing so, he unhesitatingly refers to his style as the most emi-­ nent ("bene dicendi finis" [2. I. 3]) .36 Montaigne, however, in appropriat-­ ing Cicero's depiction of his rhetorical enemies, interrupts Cicero's self--satisfied references to his own style. By humbling Ciceronian arro-­ gance, Montaigne argues not only that praise and the failure of imitation are compatible (as does Cicero), but also that they are interdependent. For Cicero, praise may succeed when imitation fails; for Montaigne, imitation must fail for praise to succeed. This interest in relating doubt and grandeur despite Renaissance con-­ vention shapes the entire essay. Montaigne writes about Cato by resisting the knowledge of him supposed by representations of eminence. Through-­ out "Du jeune Caton" Montaigne dismantles a series of standard construc-­ tions of grandeur as he tests the power of skeptical detachment. By refus-­ ing to understand Cato, Montaigne intensifies his connection to him. We have already noticed the collapses of imitation and exemplarity. The rest of the essay is strewn with more debris of reconstructions of ancient virtue, the chief quality of Catonian grandeur. Each attempt to reconstruct comes up short, and yet these shortcomings collectively yield a sense of how great Cato was. Another instance of detachment follows Montaigne's lament that "[A] il ne se recognoit plus d'action vertueuse [there are no more virtuous actions to be seen]" (230/1 70 ). This pessimism about present virtue never--

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theless implies its existence in the past, and so leads Montaigne to con-­ sider an example of ancient virtue:

[C] En cette grande bataille de Potidee que les Grecs sous Pausanias gaignerent contre Mardonius et les Perses, les victorieux, suivant leur coustume, venants a partir entre eux la gloire de 1' exploit, attribuerent a la nation Spartiate la precellence de valeur en ce combat. Les Spartiates, excellens juges de la vertu, quand il vin-­ drent a decider a quel particulier debvoit demeurer l'honneur d'avoir le mieux faict en cette journee, trouverent qu'Aristodeme s'estoit le plus courageusement hazarde; mais pourtant ils ne luy en donnerent point le prix, par ce que sa vertu avoit este incitee du desir de se purger du reproche qu'il avoit encouru au faict des Ther-­ mopyles, et d'un appetit de mourir courageusement pour garantir sa honte passee. (230)

[In that great battle of Potidaea that the Greeks under Pausanias won against Mardonius and the Persians, the victors, according to their cus--­ tom, when they came to divide among themselves the glory of the exploit, attributed to the Spartan nation the preeminence of valor in this combat. The Spartans, excellent judges of valor, when they came to decide to what particular man should go the honor of having done best on that day, found that Aristodemus had hazarded his life the most courageously; but they did not give him the prize, because his valor had been incited by the desire to purge himself of the reproach he had incurred in the Thermopylae action, and by a craving to die courageously in order to make up for his past shame.] (I 70) After winning the battle of Potidaea, the Spartans-"excellens juges de la vertu"-sought to decide whom to honor most highly. They had observed the singular courage of Aristodemus, but still withheld the prize from him. Montaigne's story suggests that the ancients had as much trouble judging virtue as do the moderns. However, in Herodotus, Montaigne's source for this story, the Spartans' uncertainty about the virtue of Aristodemus is momentary and succeeded immediately by the honors conferred by them instead.37 By suppressing these successful judgments, Montaigne erases antiquity as the site of grandeur that he just implied it to be. In Montaigne's version of the Spartan attempt to judge virtue, the word "mais [but]" represents the breaking point, where skeptical detach--

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ment undoes the apprehension of grandeur. Mais occurs six more times in "Du jeune Caton" (about a page and a half in the Villey edition), includ-­ ing four appearances in the allongeail. The fact that the allongeail culmi-­ nates a pattern introduced earlier in the essay means that its sublimity is not the isolated event that commentators have taken it to be. At the end of "Du jeune Caton," the fragments wrought by skepticism throughout the essay amount to a sublime ruin. Mais continues to fragment grandeur in its further appearances before

the allongeail. Montaigne condemns the "mesdisances [calumny]" of those who attribute vicious intentions to noble acts and denigrate their agents, whom he vows to "[C] recharger d'honneur, autant que mon invention pourroit en interpretation et favorable circonstance [restore to their places of honor, as far as my ingenuity allows me to interpret them in a favorable light]" (23I/I7o). This optimism about his restorative capaci-­ ties immediately buckles, however: "[C] Mais il faut croire que les efforts de nostre conception sont loing au--dessous de leur merite [But we are forced to believe that our powers of conception are far beneath their merit]" (23I/I7o). This fall, in turn, gives way to another rise, as Mon-­ taigne proceeds to suggest that worthy people can movingly represent virtue: "[C] C'est l'office des gens de bien de peindre la vertu la plus belle qui se puisse; et ne nous messieroit pas, quand la passion nous trans-­ porteroit a la faveur de si sainctes formes [It is the duty of good men to portray virtue as being as beautiful as possible; and it would not be unbe-­ coming to us if passion carried us away in favor of such sacred models]" (I 70/23I). Montaigne then upholds the integrity of Cato's "belle action" despite the blinkered perception of those who fail to see it, "[A] pour n'avoir pas la veue assez forte et assez nette pour concevoir la splendeur de la vertu en sa purete naifve [from not having their sight strong enough and clear enough, or properly trained, to conceive of the splendor of virtue in its native purity]" (23I/I7o). But this bridge to Catonian grandeur also collapses with a third mais: "[A] Mais je ne suis pas icy a mesmes pour traicter ce riche argument [But I am not equipped to treat this rich subject here]" (23I/I 7I). As earlier in the essay, the ties to grandeur successively made and undone by Montaigne consist of notions important to the poetic and rhetorical culture of Renaissance France. Earlier, Montaigne implied the limitations of imitation and exemplarity as paths to glory. Here "inven-­ tion" and "naivete" fall short. Like the former pair, these concepts were deployed by theorists to claim and explain the power of new literature to

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re--create the contact with grandeur that the ancients enjoyed. They were used particularly to explain the inspired and inspirational status of the Renaissance poet in touch with the Muses.38 The third mais appears on the verge of the famous allongeail. In the first

(I s8o) version of the essay, Montaigne would then have said that he only wants to "[A] faire luiter ensemble les traits de cinq poetes Latins sur la louange de Caton [put into contention the lines of five Latin poets in praise of Cato]" (2 3 I/I 7 I), and then he would have offered the "traits" themselves. Montaigne substitutes Latin "traits" for what would have been his "traitement" if he had felt himself capable of it. The allongeail itself is confusing. It describes how five "traits" should be found, while also describing three ways in which Montaigne has been diversely moved by poetry, corresponding to three poets. It also describes, on the one hand, the feeling of the properly nurtured, and, on the other hand, Montaigne's own natural feeling. In the allongeail, the one kind of elevation certainly recognizable to French Renaissance readers is not Longinian but Platonic:

[C] Elle ne pratique point nostre jugement: elle le ravit et ravage. La fureur qui espoin<;onne celuy qui la s<;ait penetrer, fiert encores un tiers ala luy ouyr traitter et reciter: comme l'aymant, non seulement attire un' aiguille, mais infond encores en icelle sa faculte d'en attirer d'autres. Et il se void plus clairement aux theatres, que l'in-­ spiration sacree des muses, ayant premierement agite le poete a la cholere, au deuil, a la hayne, et hors de soy ou elles veulent, frappe encore tout un peuple. C'est 1' enfileure de noz aiguilles, suspendues l'une de l'autre. Des rna prerniere enfance, la poesie a eu cela, de rne transpercer et transporter. (2 3 2)

[It does not persuade our judgment, it ravishes and overwhelms it. The frenzy that goads the man who can penetrate it also strikes a third person on hearing him discuss it and recite it, as a magnet not only attracts a nee-­ dle but infuses into it its own faculty of attracting others. And it is seen more clearly in the theater that the sacred inspiration of the muses, after first stirring the poet to anger, sorrow, and hatred and transporting him out of himself wherever they will, then through the poet strikes the actor, and through the actor consecutively a whole crowd. It is the chain of our needles, hanging one from the other. From my earliest childhood poetry has had that power to transpierce and transport me.] (I 7 I)

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Montaigne's use of the figure of magnetism to suggest how poetry is both inspired and inspiring stems ultimately from Plato's Ion and more locally from Marsilio Ficino's Platonic translations and commentaries and from the Pleiade. In Plato's dialogue, Socrates attributes poetry to a "divine force," whose effect he compares to that of a magnet, which not only pulls [iron rings], it also puts power in the rings, so that they in turn can do just what the [magnet] does-pull other rings­ so that there's sometimes a very long chain of iron pieces and rings hanging from one another. And the power in all of them depends on this [magnet]. In the same way, the Muse makes some people inspired herself, and then through those who are inspired a chain of other enthusiasts is suspended. (533D-E)39 Just as a magnet magnetizes a ring, which in turn magnetizes a second ring, which in turn magnetizes a third, and so forth, so the Muse inspires the poet, who in turn inspires the readers of his poetry. Ficino, particularly in his letter on divino furore and in his commen-­ taries on the Ion, the Symposium, and the Phaedrus (which he also trans-­ lated into Latin as part of his Platonis Opera omnia), developed this account of poetic inspiration into a theory of knowledge. This theory per-­ mitted movement from the bottom to the top of the Platonic hierarchy­ from matter to idea, from particular to universal, from man to God. Ficino plotted these trajectories along a series of "furies" or degrees of spiritual elevation. The human soul, once fallen into the body, must ascend through four such "furies" (poetry, mystery, prophecy, and love) in order to reunite with God and thereby achieve enlightenment.4° Ficino's Neopla-­ tonic theory of inspiration, along with the figure of the magnet that he also borrowed from Plato, spread widely in sixteenth--century France.41 Among its most important purveyors was the group of poets known as the Plei-­ ade.42 Its leader Pierre de Ronsard sought to elevate his own status as well as that of poetry itself by publishing his Quatre premiers livres des odes in 1550. On the one hand, as he makes obvious in the "Ode au Roy Henry II," Ronsard jockeys for position-and money-at court.43 Ronsard implies that the king will get a bigger bang for his buck by supporting a poet who writes long poems (i.e., odes, and eventually an epic) than by supporting a poet who writes short ones (i.e., sonnets). On the other hand, by supplementing his imitation of the Pindaric ode with Ficinian fury, Ronsard confers on poetry a special independence. In the "Ode a Michel de l'Hospital," Jupiter proclaims to the Muses:

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Vostre mestier, race gentille, Les autres mestiers passera, D'autant qu'esclave il ne sera De l'art aux Muses inutile. Par art le navigateur Dans la mer manie et vire La bride de son navire: Par art plaide l'Orateur, Par art les Rois sont guerriers, Par art se font les ouvriers: Mais si vaine experience Vous n'aurez de tel erreur, Sans plus rna sainte fureur Polira vostre science. Comme l'Aimant sa force inspire Au fer qui le touche de pres, Puis soudain ce fer tire tire Un autre qui en tire apres: Ainsi du bon fils de Latonne Je raviray l'esprit a moy, Luy, du pouvoir que je luy donne, Ravira les vostres a soy: Vous par la force Apollinee Ravirez les Poetes saints, Eux de vostre puissance attaints Raviront la tourbe estonnee.

[Your craft, 0 noble breed, will surpass other crafts, inasmuch as it will not be the slave of technical skill, which is of no use to the Muses. Through technical skill the navigator at sea controls and pulls the reins of his ship; through technical skill the Orator pleads his case, through technical skill Kings becomes warriors, through technical skill artisans learn their trade; but you will not have the sterile experience of such an aberration, because my divine fury will suffice to perfect your erudition. Just as the Magnet communicates its force to a piece of iron that comes into close contact with it, and then instantly this iron, which is attracted, attracts another, which attracts others after it, just so shall I ravish the spirit of Latona's noble son, while he in turn, with the power that I give him, will ravish your spirits; you, by the might of Apollo, will ravish the saintly Poets, while they, under the influence of your potency, will ravish the awestruck multitude. }44

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Ronsard recruits the notion of fury, and its comparison to a magnet, in order to claim that poetic creation and reception depend on nothing but God. In this Neoplatonic light, poetry has an eminence impervious to values based in other domains, even royal ones. Divine fury thus pro-­ vides poetic activity with the ultimate authority, protecting poetry against the attempts of its artistic, intellectual, and political rivals to degrade its status. 45 Once Montaigne displays the Neoplatonic chain of transports, stretch-­ ing from the aesthetic experience of readers to the divinity that inspired the ancient poets, he breaks the sequence with another mais: [C] Mais ce ressentiment bien vif qui est naturellement en moy, a este diversement manie par diversite de formes, non tant plus hautes et plus basses (car c'estoient toujours des plus hautes en chaque espece) comme differentes en couleur: premieretnent une fluidite gaye et ingenieuse; depuis une subtilite aigue et relevee; enfin une force meure et constante. (232)

[But this very lively feeling that is natural in me has been variously affected by a variety of forms, not so much higher or lower (for they were always of the highest in each kind) as different in color: first a gay and ingenious fluency; then a keen and lofty subtlety; finally a mature and constant power.] (I 7 I) By introducing the diverse ways that poetry moves him, Montaigne inter-­ rupts the soul's contact with divinity that poetry enables for Renaissance Neoplatonism. Montaigne refuses to ascend the Neoplatonic ladder that leads to human recollection of originary grandeur. Montaigne's abandon-­ ment of the Neoplatonic scale signals its insufficiency as a measure of the sublimity that interests him. On the whole, "Du jeune Caton" (especially the allongeail) experiments with a series of responses or strategies or notions that all concern grandeur, how to represent it, imitate it, honor it: invention, imitation, admiration, education, naivete, fury. Each of these notions Montaigne brings up and cuts down, so that "Du jeune Caton" represents their failures. Montaigne makes a wreck out of these notions by variously depriving them of their theoretical support systems or by adding reservations about their adequacy. Having undercut perhaps the most extravagant Renaissance theory of how poetry communicates grandeur (furor poeticus), Montaigne moves to

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poetry itself, the "traits" he originally promised, five Latin, poetic descrip-­ tions of Cato: [A] Sit Cato, dum vivit, sane vel CC£sare major, diet l'un. Et invictum, devicta morte, Catonem, diet l'autre. Et l'autre, parlant des guerres civiles d'entre CC£sar et Pompeius, Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Catoni. Et le quatriesme, sur les louanges de CC£sar: Et cuncta ter--­ rarum subacta, / PrC£ter atrocem animum Catonis. Et le maistre du chceur, apres avoir etale les noms des plus grands Romains en sa peinture, finit en cette maniere: his dantem jura Catonem. (232) [Let Cato outdo even Caesar, while he lives, says one. Cato unvan-­ quished, having vanquished death, says another. And another, speak--­ ing of the civil wars between Caesar and Pompey, The gods chose the victorious case, Cato the vanquished. And the fourth, in praise of Caesar: This earth of ours he subjugated whole, /Excepting Cato's unrelenting soul. And the master of the choir, after displaying in his painting the names of the greatest Romans, ends in this wise: And Cato, giving them their laws.] (I 7 I -72) Here in the final exertion of the essay detachment becomes ruin. Mon-­ taigne takes assorted fragments of Roman verse and scatters the field of his French with their Latin. He gives Virgil the last word but permits only the hemistich left over from tearing the original verse apart at the caesura. (The entire line reads, "secretosque pios, his dantem iura Catonem [and far apart, the good, with Cato giving them laws].")46 As Montaigne does in the Journal, he creates through skeptical detachments a Roman ruin that pre-­ sents grandeur by preventing its conception. "Du jeune Caton" does not adhere to the Longinian sublime or to any one notion of elevation so much as it presents and prevents a series of attempts to testify to the ancient grandeur that Cato embodies. Each of these efforts falls short, as an implicit skepticism perpetually insists on the inconceivability of Catonian emi-­ nence. The result, however fragmentary, is sublime: these shortcomings collectively attest to the "hauteur inimitable" that is the basic concern of the essay. Montaigne's skeptical refusal to embrace any one testimony of grandeur signals the sublimity of the grandeur in question. The explosion that punctuates "Du jeune Caton" does not exhaust the ruinous energy that Montaigne conducts through his Roman hero. The following essays harness it. In "Comme nous pleurons et rions d'une

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mesme chose [How We Cry and Laugh for the Same Thing]" (1.38), "De la solitude [Of Solitude]" (1.39), and "Consideration sur Ciceron [A Con-­ sideration upon Cicero]" ( I .40) Montaigne uses the power of ruin to drive and orient his discourse over a series of key issues: the soul, language, free-­ dom, and the style of the Essais. In "Comme nous pleurons et rions" Montaigne uses Catonian dismem-­ berment to craft notions of a mercurial soul and its language. The essay begins by recounting the reactions of four victors to the defeats of their enemies:

[A] Quand nous rencontrons dans les histoires, qu'Antigonus sceut tres--mauvais gre a son fils de luy avoir presente la teste du Roy Pyrrhus, son ennemy, qui venoit sur l'heure mesme d'estre tue com-­ batant contre luy, et que, l'ayant veue, il se print bien fort a pleurer; et que le Due Rene de Lorraine pleignit aussi la mort du Due Charles de Bourgoigne qu'il venoit de deffaire, et en porta le deuil en son enterrement; et que, en la bataille d'Auroy que le Comte de Montfort gaigna contre Charles de Blois, sa partie pour le Duche de Bretaigne, le victorieux, rencontrant le corps de son ennemy tres-­ passe, en mena grand deuil, il ne faut pas s'escrier soudain: Et cosi

aven che l' animo ciascuna I Sua passion sotto el contrario manto I Rico--­ pre con la vista hor' chiara hor bruna. Quand on presenta a c�sar la ' teste de Pompeius, les histoires disent qu'il en destourna sa veue

comme d'un vilain et mal plaisant spectacle. (233)

[We read in the history books that Antigonus was very angry with his son for having presented him with the head of his enemy King Pyrrhus, who that very moment had been killed fighting against him, and that upon see--­ ing it he began to weep very hard; and that Duke Rene of Lorraine also lamented the death of Duke Charles of Burgundy, whom he had just defeated, and wore mourning at his burial; and that in the battle of Auray, which the count of Montfort won against Charles of Blois, his rival for the duchy of Brittany, the victor, coming upon the body of his dead enemy, showed great sorrow over it. But in reading of these events we should not immediately exclaim: And thus it happens that each soul conceals, I Showing the opposite, now gay, now sad, I The pas-­ sion that it genuinely feels. When they presented Caesar with the head

of Pompey, the histories say, he turned his eyes away as from an ugly and unpleasant sight.] (I 72)

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Although Montaigne's primary interest here is the variety of human responses to the same event, the event that he chooses recalls the previous essay. Defeat in these cases has the literal sense of an undoing. The first and last examples involve decapitation, and to describe the second Mon-­ taigne employs "deffaire," the same verb he uses in "Du dormir" to describe Cato's self--evisceration. Montaigne characteristically concludes from his examples that human souls are "[A] agites de diverses passions [agitated by diverse passions]" (234/173). He then just as characteristically introduces himself as evi-­ dence of such inconsistency: [B] Quand je tance avec mon valet, je tance du meilleur courage que j'aye, ce sont vrayes et non feintes imprecations; mais, cette fumee passee, qu'il ayt besoing de moy, je luy bien feray volontiers: je tourne a l'instant le fueillet. [C] Quand je l'appelle un badin, un veau, je n'entrepren pas de luy coudre a jamais ces tiltres; ny ne pense me desdire pour le nommer tantost honeste homme. (234) [When I scold my valet, I scold him with all my heart; my imprecations are real, not feigned. But when the smoke has blown away, let him need my help, and I am glad to do him a service; I instantly turn over the leaf. When I call him a clown or a calf, I do not undertake to sew those labels on him forever; nor do I think I contradict myself when I presently call him a fine fellow.] (I 73) The mercurial soul requires mercurial equipment. In particular, language must consist of detachable units: its words are non cousus (unsewn), so that they may quit one object and be attached to another.47 Such modular lan-­ guage allows the soul to express its essentially incoherent nature: "[A] voulans de toute cette suite continuer un corps nous nous trompons [we are wrong to try to compose a continuous body out of all this succession of feelings]" (236/174). One may fashion a body from human existence only by ignoring the fact that its members do not fit together. In "Comme nous pleurons et rions" the dismemberment inherited from "Du jeune Caton" informs notions of a soul and a language whose basic feature is discontinuity. Dismemberment also defines the independence of the self that "De la solitude" proposes. According to Montaigne, the estab-­ lishment of selfhood involves the discipline of undoing one's connections to the world. The essay is studded with terms of separation: "a part,"

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"defaire" (four times),"demesler,""descharger,""desprendre,""despetrer," and"desnouer" (twice).As models of constructive detachment Montaigne mentions men-Stilpo and Paulinus-who thrived on fragmentation: [A] Stilpon, estant eschappe de l'embrasement de sa ville, ou il avoit perdu femme, enfans et chevance, Demetrius Poliorcetes, le voyant en une si grande ruine de sa patrie le visage non effraye, luy demanda s'il n'avoit pas eu du dommage. Il respondit que non, et qu'il n'y avoit, Dieu mercy, rien perdu de sien.... Quand la ville de Nole fut ruinee par les Barbares, Paulinus, qui en estoit Evesque, y ayant tout perdu, et leur prisonnier, prioit ainsi Dieu: Seigneur, garde moy de sentir cette perte, car tu s<;ais qu'ils n'ont encore rien touche de Ce qui est a moy. (240-4 I ) [After S tilpo escaped the burning of his city, in which he had lost wife, children, and property, Demetrius Poliorcetes, seeing him unperturbed in expression amid the great ruin of his country, asked him if he had not suf-­ fered loss. No, he replied; thanks to God he had lost nothing of his own. . . . When the city of Nola was ruined by the barbarians, Paulinus, the bishop of the city, who had lost everything and had been taken prisoner, prayed God thus: "Lord, keep me from feeling this loss; for Thou know--­ est that they have yet touched nothing of what is mine."] (I 77)

The disasters that strike Stilpo and Paulinus make rather than break them. In their cases, ruin presents an opportunity to indicate what is inalienably theirs and thus to build a definition of who they essentially are.Their sto-­ ries inspire Montaigne to suggest, in a celebrated passage, the construction of an" [A] arriereboutique [back shop]" (241/1 77), where one is free to be oneself. Toward the end of "De la solitude" the Catonian foundation of this sheltered self becomes obvious.Montaigne refines his notion of solitude by contrasting the views of Pliny and Cicero to those of Epicurus and Seneca on the subject of retirement. He rejects the retirement recommended by the first two as surreptitious engagement: "[A] A ce que je voy, ceux--cy n'ont que les bras et les jambes hors de la presse; leur arne, leur intention y demeure engagee plus que jamais [As far as I can see, these men have only their arms and legs outside the crowd; their souls, their intentions, are more than ever in the thick of it]" (246/182). Montaigne prefers solitude as conceived by the latter pair, who advise,"[A] defaites--vous de tout soing

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de nom et de gloire [rid yourself of all care for reputation and glory]" and "[A] presentez vous toujours en !'imagination Caton, Phocion et Aristides [keep ever in your mind Cato, Phocion, and Aristides]" (247/182-83). The example of Cato encourages the effort to remove the self from worldly concerns. For those who seek models of self-detachment, Cato should come first to mind. In "Consideration sur Ciceron" Montaigne builds Catonian undoing into a theory of what makes the Essais great. He begins by deriding the let-­ ters of Pliny and Cicero, whose retirements he critiqued in "De la soli-­ tude," as "[A] infinis tesmoignages de nature outre mesure ambitieuse [numberless proofs of their immeasurably ambitious nature]" (249/183). Montaigne then justifies this verdict by noting that Pliny and Cicero sought glory from their words rather than from their actions. Tuming once again to himself, he states that he does not like to hear someone praise the language of the Essais. This is for two reasons. To dwell on the style of writing slights its substance. And in the case of the Essais it is their sub-­ stance that deserves attention, because it surpasses the materials of other discourses: "[C] Si suis je trompe, si guere d'autres donnent plus a prendre en la matiere, et comment que ce soit, mal ou bien, si nul escrivain l'a semee ny guere plus materielle ny au mains plus drue en son papier [Yet I am much mistaken if many other writers offer more to take hold of in their material than I do, and, whether for better or for worse, if any writer has sown his materials more substantially or at least more thickly on his paper]" (251/185). Montaigne claims that the Essais are uniquely dense. They function, he suggests, as an optimum facility for intellectual storage, whose form holds a maximum of material. The Essais have more to them per unit of paper and ink than any other book. Montaigne immediately explains how he makes his writing transcendently substantial: [C] Pour en ranger davantage, je n'en entasse que les testes. Que j'y attache leur suitte, je muliplieray plusieurs fois ce volume. Et com-­ bien y ay--je espandu d'histoires qui ne disent mot, lesquelles qui voudra esplucher un peu ingenieusement, en produira infinis Essais. Ny elles, ny mes allegations ne servent pas toujous simplement d'ex-­ emple, d'authorite ou d'ornement. Je ne les regarde pas seulement par l'usage que j'en tire. Elles portent souvent, hors de mon propos, la semence d'une matiere plus riche et plus hardie et sonnent a gauche un ton plus delicat, et pour moy qui n'en veux exprimer d'avantage, et pour ceux qui rencontreront mon air. (251)

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[In order to get more in, I pile up only the headings of subjects. Were I to add on their consequences, I would multiply this volume many times over. And how many stories have I spread around which say nothing of themselves, but from which anyone who troubles to pluck them with a lit--­ tle ingenuity will produce numberless essays. Neither these stories nor my quotations serve always simply for example, authority, or ornament. I do not esteem them solely for the use I derive from them. They often bear, outside of my subject, the seeds of a rich and bolder material, and sound obliquely a subtler note, both for myself, who do not wish to express any--­ thing more, and for those who get my drift.] ( 185) Essay writing involves a process of fragmentation. Before Montaigne inserts material into an essay, he decapitates it, keeping the capital points ("testes") and discarding the rest ("suitte"). This subtraction paradoxically adds to the Essais. As a result of being cut from their bodies, the headings that make it into the text acquire a capacity to communicate excessively, to convey more-more delicacy, more boldness, more richness-than they actually contain. This production of meaning is both positive and nega-­ tive, since the Essais say both more and less: they create another dimen-­ sion by undoing what others have done. What the Essais can do by undoing is sublime. Montaigne sees in his work the potential for "infinis Essais," which echoes his assessment of Cicero's letters as "infinis tesmoignages" of vanity. Montaigne thus claims for his writing the grandeur that he denies to Cicero's. By attributing to his

Essais the fulfillment of Cicero's empty boasting, Montaigne theorizes the inadequacy of the greatness credited traditionally to classical copia and particularly to Ciceronian copia as an ideal of epistolary rhetoric. Like admiratio and furor, copia proves too small to hold the grandeur that Mon-­ taigne feels he must convey. To this point I have investigated ways in which the Essais realize the conception of a ruinous testimony of grandeur suggested in Montaigne's meditation on the ruins of Rome in the Journal de voyage. My hunch was that a moment as charged as the meditation may offer a key to the master-­ work. Testing this hypothesis has led through a stretch of essays in book

I

from "De !'institution des enfants" to "Consideration sur Ciceron." Any such test, however, must confront "De la vanite [Of Vanity]" (3.9). Whereas the essays discussed so far mostly predate the meditation and thus anticipate it, "De la vanite" postdates and reflects on the meditation. "De la vanite" concerns travel and especially Montaigne's visit to Rome. This essay thus promises to extend his meditation and its theory of the Essais.

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"De la vanite" is renowned for the range of its issues and the abruptness of the transitions between the passages that treat them. Five centuries of readers have attempted either to discover its coherence or come to terms with its incoherence. Recent critics have argued that "De la vanite" indeed holds together, albeit by unorthodox means. Notions such as "ecri-­ ture excrementale," "deflexion," and "montage" have emerged as defi .. nitions of a "new poetics" that allows this special integrity.48 The follow-­ ing interpretation of "De la vanite" accepts the idea of a new poetics but defines it as sublimity. The force of this redefinition draws not only on "De la vanite" itself but also on the previous essais analyzed. Montaigne's essays may be modular units, as they are often treated, but they are also parts of a whole. In "De la vanite" the embryonic theory of sublimity evident in "Consideration sur Ciceron" receives its most extensive expression, justification, and mise en ceuvre. When Montaigne writes about "vanite," he writes about writing. He uses the words "vanite" and "vain" to describe the humanity that his Essais express. "Au Lecteur [To the Reader]" concludes, "[A] Ainsi, lecteur, je suis moy--mesmes la matiere de mon livre: ce n'est pas raison que tu employes ton loisir en un subject si frivole et si vain [Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject]" (3/2). In the first essay of the first book ("Par divers moyens on arrive a pareille fin [By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same End]"), Montaigne applies this judgment of him-­ self to all of humanity: "[C] Certes, c'est un subject merveilleusement vain, divers, et ondoyant, que l'homme [Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, undulating object]" (9/5). Ironically, this is one verdict of Mon-­ taigne's judgment that holds steady throughout the Essais. In the last essay of the third book ("De !'experience [Of Experience]"), Montaigne remarks about human laws, "[C] Elles sont souvent faictes par des sots, plus souvent par des gens qui, en haine d'equalite, ont faute d'equite, mais tousjours par des hommes, autheurs vains et irresolus [They are often made by fools, more often by people who, in their hatred of equality, are wanting in equity; but always by men, vain and irresolute authors]" ( 1072/821 ). The vanity of what Montaigne writes implies the vanity of how he writes. An anxiety about style that runs throughout the Essais reaches a crisis at the very start of "De la vanite."49 Referring to this title, Montaigne says, "[B] Il n'en est a l'avanture aucune plus expresse que d'en escrire si vainement [There is perhaps no more obvious vanity than to write of it so vainly]" (845/721). Montaigne suggests that writing vainly about vanity is an extreme instance of the transgression. He raises the prospect that the

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Essais, like their subject, lead nowhere and amount to nothing. This pos-­ sibility leads Montaigne to wonder whether the "babble" of his age has any point ("[B] Que doit produire le babil [What must prattle produce]?" [946/721]) and whether such longiloquence is a sign of troubled times: "[B] L' escrivaillerie semble estre quelque simptome d'un siecle desborde. Quand escrivismes nous tant que depuis que nous sommes en trouble? quand les Romains tant que lors de leur ruyne? [Scribbling seems to be a sort of symptom of an unruly age. When did we write so much as since our dissensions began? When did the Romans write so much as in the time of their downfall?]" (946/72 I -22). The style of the Essais thus arises immediately as an issue in "De la van-­ ite" and rapidly gets associated with Roman ruin. This association resur-­ faces toward the end of the essay, as we will see. In the interim, Montaigne puts the ruins on a tour of various problems related to travel. This peregri-­ nation of the ruins allows Montaigne to test and develop their construc-­ tive capacity. As a result of these experiments-or essais, as Montaigne would call them-the ruins return to the issue of essayistic style prepared to support its sublimity. Despite his love of travel, Montaigne portrays it as a potentially disrup-­ tive separation from family, friends, and home. This threat inspires Mon-­ taigne to entertain skeptically the possibility that the opposite is true: per-­ haps voyaging promotes not ruin but wholeness. For example, while at home small problems distract Montaigne, on the road they are out of sight and he can see the big picture:

[B] Quand je considere mes affaires de loing et en gros, je trouve, soit pour n'en avoir la memoire guere exacte, qu'ils sont allez jusques a cette heure en prosperant outre mes contes et mes raisons. ]'en retire, ce me semble, plus qu'il n'y en a; leur bon heur me trahit. Mais suis--je au dedans de la besongne, voy--je marcher toutes ces parcelles, Tum ver6 in curas animum diducimur omnes, mille chases m'y donnent a desirer et craindre. (951) [When I consider my affairs from a distance and as a whole, I find, pos--­ sibly because my memory of them is scarcely exact, that they have gotten along until now, and prospered beyond my expectations and calculations. It seems to me that I get more out of them than is in them; their success fools me. But when I am in the midst of the job, and see all these parts in operation, Then is our soul distraught with countless cares, a thou--­ sand things give me reason to desire and fear.] (725)

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Montaigne's absence anesthetizes him to the sensation that things fall apart: "[B] Absent, je me despouille de tous tels pensmens; et sentirois mains lors la ruyne d'une tour que je ne faicts present la cheute d'une ardoyse [Absent from home, I strip off all such thoughts; and I should then feel less the ruin of a tower than I feel, when present, the fall of a tile]" (954/728). In response to the argument that a married traveler impairs the health of his household, Montaigne insists that by strategi-­ cally wedding an efficient housekeeper a man can leave home without destroying it: "[B] La plus utile et honnorable science et occupation a une femme, c'est la science du mesnage....C'est sa maistresse qualite, et qu'on doibt chercher avant tout autre, comme le seul doire qui sert a ruyner ou sauver nos maisons [The most useful and honorable science and occupation for a woman is the science of housekeeping ....This is her ruling quality, which a man should seek out before any other, as the sole dowry on which the ruin or salvation of our households depends]" (975/745). To the objection that the voyager risks dying alone, Mon-­ taigne counters that death among loved ones has a ruinous effect: "[B] Nous avons loy de nous appuyer, non pas de nous coucher si lourdement sur autruy et nous estayer en leur ruyne [We have a right to lean, but not to lie down so heavily, on others, or to find our support in their ruin]" (981/750). At this point in the essay-nearly two--thirds of the way through-the question of ruin begins to leave the subject of travel and rejoin the matter of writing.The specter of death recalls to Montaigne the impermanence of the Essais. He remarks that the instability of his book obliges him to com-­ pose it not in Latin but in French, a language inclined to volatility: [B] J'escris mon livre a peu d'hommes et a peu d'annees. Si <;'eust este une matiere de duree, il l'eust fallu commettre a un langage plus ferme.Selon la variation continuelle qui a suivy le nostre jusques a cette heure, qui peut esperer que sa forme presente soit en usage, d'icy a cinquante ans? (982)

[I write my book for few men and for few years. If it had been durable matter, it would have had to be committed to a more stable language. In view of the continual variation that has prevailed in ours up to now, who can hope that its present form will be in use fifty years from now?] ( 7 5 I) The civil wars that threaten to tear France apart, furthermore, require a defective form of writing:

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[B] J'apen;ois ...ces desmambremens de la France et divisions ou nous sommes tombez: chacun se travaille a deffendre sa cause, mais, jusques aux meilleurs, avec desguisement et mensonge. Qui en escriroit rondement en escriroit temererement et vitieusement. (993)

[I perceive in the strife that is tearing France to pieces and dividing us into factions, each man labors to defend his cause-but even the best of them resort to dissimulation and lying. Whoever would write about them roundly would write about them rashly and harmfully.] (76o) By "rondement" Montaigne means "forthrightly" or "bluntly" but he also irnplies the Ciceronian well--roundedness that his Essais eschew. As a result of the experimentation I have traced, ruin returns to writing from its tour of travel--related problems charged with senses of wholeness and thus prepared to express and generate the sublimity of a fragmented style.As Montaigne's discussion of potentially ruinous travel increasingly becomes a discussion of potentially ruinous writing, Rome in particular emerges as an authority for how the Essais are written. Montaigne's discussion of his style in "De la vanite" is the most exten-­ sive of the Essais. He addresses in general the disorderly conduct of his dis-­ course and in particular the absence of transitions that would connect firmly his diverse subjects.He does not admit that these disjunctions nec-­ essarily lose the reader; on the contrary, they have the potential to excite and fix attention.Montaigne himself loves "[B] l'alleure poetique, a sauts et a gambades [the poetic gait, by leaps and gambols]" (994/761 ). Such style does not distract Montaigne but rather captivates him: "[B] Je vois au change, indiscrettement et tumultuairement [I seek out change indiscrim-­ inately and tumultuously]" (994/761 ).If attention to the Essais dissipates, it is the fault of the reader, not the writer, who dutifully fulfills "[C] quelque obligation particuliere a ne dire qu'a demy, a dire confusement, a dire discordamment [some personal obligation to speak only by halves, to speak confusedly, to speak discordantly]" (995-96/762 ). The climactic justification of the capacity of the Essais to establish attention on the basis of fragmentation involves Rome and its ruins: [B] J'ay veu ailleurs des maisons ruynees, et des statues, et du ciel, et de la terre: ce sont tousjours des hommes. Tout cela est vray; et si pourtant ne s<;auroy revoir si souvant le tombeau de cette ville, si grande et si puissante, que je ne l'admire et revere. (996)

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8I

[I have seen elsewhere ruined houses, and statues both divine and human: it is always man we are dealing with. All that is true; and yet I could not revisit the tomb of that great and mighty city so often that I would not marvel at it and revere it.] ( 762) Here Montaigne himself finally compares the Essais to ruins and credits them with an open--ended admiratio. In doing so, he makes explicit the implications of the Journal de voyage. And yet, this reference to Rome is implicit. As a result, it has a double impact. First, Montaigne's personal experience substantiates the theory that the brittleness of his work consol-­ idates its integrity. The permanent appeal of the ruins of Rome corrobo-­ rates the effect that Montaigne claims for the Essais. Second, the implicit-­ ness of Montaigne's reference puts his theory into practice. Even for the notoriously elliptical Essais, the transition from the vanity of Montaigne's style to the ruins of Rome is especially abrupt and oblique. The omission of anything that would join these matters more securely has led editors to supply explanatory footnotes. Donald Frame, for example, in the transla-­ tion I have been citing, comments, "Montaigne's mind is already so full of Rome as he starts this paragraph that he seems to forget he has not yet mentioned it in this connection" ( 762). But such annotation ignores the fact that Montaigne is in the process of explaining the powerful fragility of the Essais exemplified by their precarious transitions. Montaigne has just made the transition to the subject of his style by declaring, "[B] Cette far-­ cisseure est un peu hors de mon theme. Je m'esgare, mais plustot par licence que par mesgarde. Mes fantaisies se suyvent, mais par fois c'est de loing, et se regardent, mais d'une veue oblique [This stuffing is a little out of my subject. I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness. My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance]" (994/761 ). The inarticulateness at the climax of a passage about the power of the absence of articulation is not Montaigne's accident but rather his attempt to have his writing per-­ form what it proposes. Such an attempt has the force of what we call a speech act and what Montaigne calls an essai. Nor is it by accident that the ruins of Rome occupy this crack in the monumental structure of "De la vanite," this make--or--break moment, where the capacity of the Essais to hold together through divisive pressure is most urgently tested. The ruins emerge here, because Montaigne has invested in them as a way to represent and realize the sublimity of his work, the power of the Essais to hold together by virtue of the pressure to fall apart.

CHAPTER THREE

Comus and the Invention of Milton's Grand Style

MILTON HAS LONG

been celebrated as the supreme instance of the En-­

glish sublime. In the same year that Boileau's translation of Longinus appeared (1674), Andrew Marvell introduced a "sublime" Paradise Lost to readers of its second edition. Ever since, Milton has served as a whetstone on which theorists have defined and refined their notions of sublimity.

1

The inclusion of Milton as a complement to Montaigne in this study should, therefore, feel familiar. But not entirely, for Milton has rarely been considered as skeptical. There are several reasons for this lack of attention. Among the most important is the fact that Milton consistently assumes postures of firm belief in religious and political matters. Milton's Puritan and republican views would apparently leave little room for what in the seventh Prolusion he calls "the Sceptics' timid suspension of judgment" (1.302).2 Such an explicit disapproval, corroborating what Milton's strong beliefs imply, has kept the case for his skepticism closed. There is now cause, however, to reopen it. For one thing, the new his-­ toriography of skepticism recognizes what I have called its "stealth," the impact that skepticism can have despite one's reticence about or even rejection of it.3 As I shall show, even the very disavowal of skepticism just mentioned lacks conviction. Recent scholarship on Milton's relation to

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the new, skepticism--infused science of the seventeenth century provides another impetus to reexamine Milton's statement in Prolusion 7· A series of articles and books have revised the notion of Milton (accepted through-­ out most of the twentieth century) as scientifically retrograde or out of touch.4 Critics have begun to see that Milton's political and theological commitments do not preclude engagements with empirical and experi-­ mental modes of epistemology. One of Milton's major connections to the new scientific scene was the work of Francis Bacon. As a student from 1625 to 1632 at Cambridge­ Bacon's alma mater-Milton supported a Baconian reform of the curricu-­ lum.s Although Bacon did not call himself a skeptic, skepticism clearly had a massive influence on Bacon's thought. He read Montaigne's work and adopted its title for his own Essayes. In the Advancement of Learning and the Novum organum Bacon's effort to loosen the hold of Scholastic philosophy on the academy inspired him to deploy skeptical arguments. This skepticism proved difficult to dislodge once introduced, so that Bacon's readers were often left with as strong an impression of skepticism as of the science that the former was supposed to make possible. Thus Ben Jonson remarks that the Novum organum "openeth all defects of learning whatsoever" (8.592), whereas Bacon would have preferred to hear that it

advances learning.6 Marin Mersenne, who followed developments in English science closely from Paris, saw Bacon as essentially a skeptic. Bacon classified var-­ ious obstacles encountered by an inquiring mind. These obstacles, called "Idols of the Mind" in the Novum organum, impede the advancement of learning and include the tendency of the senses and emotions to distort perceptions ("Idols of the Tribe"), the aberrations instilled by one's partic-­ ular nature, education, and environment ("Idols of the Cave"), and the imprecise application of words to objects ("Idols of the Marketplace").? Bacon's Idols reformulated skeptical explanations of how appearances fail to report reality and in the process helped introduce skepticism into the mainstream of English thought.8 Bacon proposes the circumvention of the Idols through "helps" such as scientific instruments ( 79). According to Mersenne, however, Bacon's Idols reproduce old skeptical problems that such aids cannot resolve. In La verite des sciences contre les Sceptiques ou

Pyrrhoniens (The Truth of Knowledge against Skeptics or Pyrrhonians) (1625), Mersenne says that when Bacon formulated the Idols he in part "eut du imiter les Sceptiques [must have imitated the Skeptics]" (289-90).9 And the experiments that Bacon describes still leave one "dans une si grande disette de sciences, et dans les tenebres de l'ignorance [in such a great

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shortage of knowledge, and in the shadows of ignorance]" (295). The Idols are made out of skepticism, and so they make one skeptical. That Mersenne (and Jonson) could take Bacon as an instigator of skep-­ ticism makes sense in light of how Bacon frames his account of the Idols in the Novum organum. As he introduces them, he admits some similarity between his and skeptical thinking: My way and the reasoning of those who maintained Acatalepsy are rather alike in their beginnings but end up being very far apart and opposite to each other. For the latter insist simply that nothing can be known, whereas I say that not much in nature can be known by the way now in use. But thereafter they destroy the authority of the sense and intellect, whereas I think up and furnish helps for them.

(79) Bacon's "helps" make the crucial difference between his method and that of the skeptics ("those who maintained Acatalepsy"). When he concludes his account of the Idols, he again distinguishes them carefully from skepticism: Now the intellect should also be on guard against the recklessness with which philosophies grant and withhold assent, for recklessness of this sort seems to fix and in a way perpetuate the Idols, and stop us approaching and removing them. Now this excess is of two kinds: the one of those who are too quick to pontificate, and render the sciences arbitrary and doctrinaire; the other of those who have brought in Acatalepsy, and inquiry vague and endless; and the for-­ mer sinks the intellect, while the latter saps it. ( I 07) In adopting a stance toward epistemological difficulty, one must take care not to fall into skepticism or its opposite, dogmatism. Both of these state-­ ments about the Idols register a concern that they may unleash doubt rather than control it. Bacon attempts to determine the Idols' interpreta-­ tion and in doing so registers a fear that they could be read as Jonson and Mersenne in fact read them. Milton's Baconianism manifests some of the same skepticism that pre-­ occupied Bacon himself. Prolusion 7 is Milton's first major work in prose. He probably wrote it in the summer of 1632, toward the end of his time at Cambridge; in it he sets himself intellectual and artistic trajectories that he would follow for decades to come. The Oratio pro arte is inspired by Bacon's Advancement. Mounting a defense of learning against ignorance

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(the topic of the exercise), Milton expresses a series of Baconian view-­ points: learning extends man's dominion over nature ( I.296 ); learning dis-­ tinguishes man from beast (I.299); the elimination of the "monkish dis-­ ease" of Scholastic science will enable learning (I.30I). About skepticism, Milton admonishes, Let the idle now cease to upbraid us with the uncertainties and per-­ plexities of learning, which are indeed the fault not so much of learning as of the frailty of man. It is this consideration, gentlemen, which disproves or mitigates or compensates for Socrates' famous ignorance and the Sceptics' timid suspension of judgment. (I.302) Milton's thought here reflects Bacon's on several levels. Like Bacon, Mil-­ ton sees skepticism as an issue. (An important difference between Bacon-­ ian and Scholastic thinking is the engagement of skepticism by the for-­ mer.) And like Bacon, Milton blames the uncertainties of learning on man's cognitive shortcomings (although he does not mention the "helps" that Bacon sought as remedies). Like other readers of Bacon, however, Mil-­ ton seems to be unsure about the effect on skepticism of attributing uncer-­ tainty to man's misperceptions. What happens to skepticism in the Bacon-­ ian scheme is unclear to Milton: is skepticism "disproven," "mitigated," or

I "compensated for" ["aut resellit, aut consolatum, aut compenset"] ? o

Milton's Baconianism, and the skeptical influence that accompanies it, stretches far into his careers in prose and poetry. One could point to Mil-­ ton's call for the liberty to make-and the necessity of making-errors on the road to truth in Areopagitica.

II

Raphael's "doubtful" answer of Adam's

question about "celestial motions," which amounts to a careful balancing act between Ptolemaic and Copernican hypotheses, also manifests Bacon-­ I2

ian skepticism.

In this chapter, however, I focus on Comus, Milton's

next major work after the seventh Prolusion and the longest piece of poetry that he wrote before Paradise Lost. In order to get at the roots of Milton's skepticism-and his sublimity­ ! will consider

Comus as an early instance of his well--known and career-­

long habit of breaking and recasting literary forms. I will show how in the masque this process of aesthetic reformation involves skepticism and how it produces sublimity. The most obvious place to look for the Miltonic sub-­ lime is Paradise Lost (the subject of the next chapter). Comus, however, displays several elements of the epic in their formative stages. Most impor-­ tant, in Comus Milton dramatizes the story of how he invented the grand style that he became famous for.

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This argument will most likely feel unfamiliar to those who more read-­ ily see in the masque preoccupations that its recent critics have remarked, such as the controversy over holiday pastimes and the Castlehaven scan-­ dal. r3 My reading does not exclude these interpretations of Comus as an expression of political, religious, or sexual ideologies. I do want to say, though, that Comus is also about aesthetics and epistemology, and that such an understanding can help account for certain features of the masque that ideological readings do not explain adequately-as well as the fea-­ tures that they do explain. The main feature that I have in mind is echo in its various forms: the close and distant repetitions and doublings that saturate Milton's poetry, the pairs of characters and episodes, and above all the Lady's song to Echo. These echoes carry a skeptical charge that generates sublimity. Stephen Orgel, in a fresh and provocative article, has also noticed echo as a missing link in ideological readings, and he uses it to call into question how radi-­ cal Comus really is. r4 I want to argue that Comus is aesthetically radical through its unique employment of echo and the skepticism implicit in it. The skeptical value of echo comes into focus through the Baconian perspective on Milton that I have begun to develop. As Penelope Gouk has shown, in the seventeenth century music was considered a science and was crucial to the process whereby the new science absorbed what was known as "natural magic" or the exploration and production of effects by hidden causes that occurred in the usual course of natural events. rs Bacon in particular proposed a science of acoustics dedicated to the production and study of natural and artificial sounds. According to Aristotle, hearing is the most important sense in the acquisition of knowledge. 16 In Sylva syl--­ varum, Bacon envisions a series of experiments designed to capitalize on

the heuristic potential of sounds. Bacon focuses especially on what he termed the "majoration" of sounds, their prolongation, augmentation, and propagation, which reflected his interest in extending human mastery over nature. r7 Echo, as a major example of natural majoration, thus fascinates Bacon. "Saloman's House," the college of natural philosophy imagined by Bacon in the New Atlantis and whose purpose involves "enlarging the bounds of Human Empire" (48o), has what he calls "sound--houses" (485). rS These structures are spaces for experimenting with acoustical phenomena, including "divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and as it were tossing it: and some that give back the voice louder than it came; some shriller, and some deeper; yea, some ren-­ dering the voice differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they

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receive" (485). As this passage indicates, Bacon's concern with echo coin-­ cides with his acknowledgment of the complexity of its permutations. The depth of this concern comes across in Bacon's interpretation of the fabled marriage of Echo and Pan as part of his "First Example of Philoso-­ phy according to the Fables of the Ancients" in the De augmentis (8.444). r9 According to Bacon, "Pan (as the name itself imports) repre-­ sents and denotes the Universe, or the All of Things" (8.446). Echo, on the other hand, insofar as it simply reflects the natural world symbolized by Pan, represents philosophy: "It is no marvel," says Bacon, ...if no loves are attributed to Pan, besides his marriage with Echo. For the world enjoys itself, and in itself all things that are.Now he who is in love wants something; and where there is plenty of every-­ thing there is no room for want. The world therefore can have no loves, nor any want (being content with itself), unless it be of dis--­ course. Such is the nymph Echo, a thing not substantial but only a voice .... it is well devised that of all words and voices Echo alone should be chosen for the world's wife; for that is the true philosophy which echoes most faithfully the voices of the world itself, and is written as it were at the world's own dictation; being nothing else than the image and reflexion thereof, to which it adds nothing of its own, but only iterates and gives it back. (8.456) Bacon has Echo stand for the perfect harmony between human thought and the natural world that he aspired to achieve through his philosophy. However, when Bacon considers how to experiment with echo, he recog-­ nizes how unpredictable it truly is. The echoes in the utopian "sound-­ houses" of the New Atlantis happen variably: echoes may report a sound not just once but "many times," they may be "louder," "shriller," or "deeper" than their sources, or they may even be something altogether dif .. ferent. In other words, despite Bacon's idealistic version of the myth of Echo, as an actual phenomenon echo seems to have a mind of its own. As a result, echo is not absorbed into the empire of natural elements under human control envisioned by Baconian epistemology but rather remains a stubborn pocket of resistance.Thus in Sylva sylvarum Bacon dif .. ferentiates between the reflections of light and sound in terms of control: "The reflexion of species visible, by mirrors, you may command; because passing in right lines, they may be guided to any point: but the reflexion of sounds is hard to master; because the sound filling great spaces in arched

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lines, cannot be so guided" (283). Whereas one may "command" visual reflection, echo is recalcitrant.The refusal of echo to submit to the very domination that his entire program of natural philosophy is intended to realize fascinates Bacon: There are certain letters that an echo will hardly express: as S for one, especially being principal in a word. I remember well, that when I went to the echo at Pont--Charenton, there was an old Parisian, who took it to be the work of spirits, and of good spirits. For (said he) call Satan and the echo will not deliver back the devil's name; but will say, va t'en; which is as much in French as

apage or avoid. (286) Here Bacon seems drawn to echo precisely for its resistance to natural explanation and scientific manipulation. Perhaps Bacon identifies echo with philosophy because a knowledge of how to guide such a slippery phe-­ nomenon as echo would indeed be the kind of know--how that he idealizes. As long as that knowledge remains unattained, however, echo must mean ignorance as well as knowledge, skepticism as well as science.20 The epistemological stakes of sound and echo for Baconian science apply also to the masque. Gouk has suggested that Bacon modeled the sound--houses of the New Atlantis on masques.An examination of his essay "Of Masques and Triumphs" confirms that she is right and, furthermore, that Bacon found the scientific value of masques specifically in their echoic characteristics.This text, which first appeared in the I 62 5 edition of the Essayes, reflects its author's perspective as the producer of two Jacobean masques (The Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray's Inn [I6I3] and The Masque of Flowers [I6I4]). Bacon is most meticulous about how masques sound.For example, he does not like boy sopranos, and he insists that the machinery required to change scenes operate noiselessly. He is especially preoccupied with the placement of musicians and singers in a performance space:

Severall Quires, placed one over against another, and taking the Voice by Catches, Antheme wise, give great pleasure....Let the Songs be Loud, and Cheerefull, and not Chirpings, or Pulings. Let the Musicke likewise, be Sharpe, and Loud, and Well Placed. (II7-I8)21 By "Quires" Bacon means groups of voices or instruments, by "Catches" fragments or separate phrases, and by "Antheme wise" in the manner of an

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anthem, that is, a text sung by multiple choirs. Bacon has in mind anti-­ phonic music performed by an ensemble distributed throughout a cham-­ ber. Such an arrangement favored the production of echoic effects, which created the illusion of a greater volume or sonority than the output of a conventional ensemble.22 The preceding points about Bacon, echo, and the masque support the viability of reading Comus as a work of art engaged with contemporary sci-­ ence. The genre of the masque came to Milton loaded with epistemologi-­ cal risks and opportunities that the young man who had recently written the seventh Prolusion would not ignore.My Baconian remarks also suggest the possibility of reading Comus as a version of Bacon's sound--house. Such a reading would have some critical precedent in Angus Fletcher's sugges-­ tive remark (without, however, reference to Bacon) that "Milton uses the night scene of his fable to create a resonant acoustical vault....The Maske at Ludlow is a study in listening" ( 166). But by relating Milton's masque to

Bacon's sound--houses I do not mean that Comus realizes the utopian sci-­ ence of the New Atlantis. Rather, Baconian acoustics makes audible the significance of the behavior of echo in Comus. Comus itself, moreover, helps us hear why echo behaves as it does: to

advance the search of a poet for style. I will now argue that echo operates in Comus in ways that Bacon feared it would, in ways that entrenched skepticism against the empire of human science. This operation contra-­ dicted the usual function of echo in masques, which served to further an advancement of learning about the grandeur of royalty. In Comus echo functions in such a way as not to overcome doubt about grandeur but rather to incorporate doubt into grandeur. This doubtful-as opposed to doubtless-grandeur constitutes Milton's grand style. I will argue, in other words, that Comus is about a poet looking for style in an age of confusion, when skepticism is acquiring a foothold in English culture. Milton finds this style not by getting around skepticism but by getting into it. Masques, Elizabeth, Jacobean, and Caroline, were about power and knowledge. There were of course variations among masques, and some criticized as well as complimented their benefactors.23 Nevertheless, the point of any masque was essentially to make known the authority of the person who had commanded its composition and performance.24 It thus makes sense that the genre would interest Bacon, who saw science as the key to transforming the natural world into a human empire. It also stands to reason that echo would interest the practitioners of the genre: just as control over echo heralds the rise of Baconian empire, so masques deployed echoes to symbolize their ideal union of knowledge and power.

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On the one hand, therefore, masques involved the elimination of doubt about royal or noble power. On the other hand, this elimination was often represented by a successful manipulation of echo. The echoes of masques reflected the importance of wonder to them. The audience of a masque expected to admire wonderful things. For won-­ der made magnificence known. Aristotle, the authority whose notions Jonson used to articulate the power and function of his masques, had described wonder as what induced people to philosophize and thereby to know things. By wondering about enigmatic effects, one came to know their causes. This is the same admiratio critiqued by Montaigne. (We shall see shortly a similar critique by Milton.) The educational orientation of wonder served the complimentary purpose of the masque by allowing it to draw attention away from its own spectacular effects and toward their royal cause. The admiration generated by the spectacle triggered a deduc-­ tion that led to the acknowledgment of royalty as the origin of wonder.25 In Jonson's crucial prefatory remarks to his documentation of The Masque

of Blacknesse (I 6os) , he considers why such an ephemeral event deserves to be recorded in the first place. His words indicate the importance that he attributes to the genre: The honor, and splendor of these spectacles was such in the perfor-­ mance, as could those houres have lasted, this of mine, now, had been a most unprofitable worke. But (when it is the fate, even of the greatest, and most absolute births, to need, and borrow a life of pos-­ teritie) little had beene done to the studie of magnificence in these, if presently with the rage of the people, who (as a part of greatnesse) are priviledged by custome, to deface their carkasses, the spirits had also perished. ( 7. I 69, I I. I-9) Jonson justifies his report of the sights and sounds of a masque as a contri-­ bution to the "studie of magnificence." By specifying magnificence as the quality of a masque that requires study, Jonson appeals to a popular Renaissance notion of aesthetic experience inherited from Aristotle.26 In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines "magnificence" as the way that a great man (such as a monarch) manifests his greatness. More precisely, magnificence reveals greatness by virtue of the response it produces: [The magnificent man] will consider how the result can be made most beautiful and most becoming rather than for how much it can

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be produced and how it can be produced most cheaply. It is neces-­ sary, then, that the magnificent man be also liberal. For the liberal man also will spend what he ought and as he ought; and it is in these matters that the greatness implied in the name of the magnificent man-his bigness, as it were-is manifested, since liberality is con-­ cerned with these matters; and at an equal expense he will produce a more magnificent result. For a possession and a result have not the same excellence. The most valuable possession is that which is worth most, e.g. gold, but the most valuable result is that which is great and beautiful (for the contemplation of such a thing inspires admiration, and so does magnificence). (1122b8-17) Unlike a valuable possession, a magnificent work of art is not just appraised but admired. Magnificence calls attention to a man's greatness because it arouses admiration. Admiration performs this function because according to Aristotle the admirer seeks to know the cause of his won-­ der.27 Jonson adopts Aristotle's theory of magnificence-and the knowl-­ edge--oriented conception of wonder on which it rests-in order to explain how the masque works as a testimony of grandeur. By designating his masques as exercises in "magnificence," Jonson implies that they enlighten an otherwise skeptical audience. Jonson's masques in fact follow scientific trajectories oriented by won-­ der. In The Masque of Blacknesse, the one prefaced by Janson's description of his masques as "magnificent," progress transpires via admiration toward epistemological-as well as, obviously, epidermic-enlightenment. A "miracle" motivated the voyage undertaken by the daughters of the Niger (7:174, 1.18o): a face appeared to them, wherein they read that "they a Land must forthwith seeke, I Whose termination (of the Greeke) I Sounds TANIA,

"

a land ruled by "a greater Light [King James], I Who formes all

beauty, with his sight" (7.175, lines 188-90, 194-95). Having started the daughters' quest for enlightenment ("miracle" stems from the same Latin root-miror-as "admire"), admiration surfaces again when they receive further instructions. .!Ethiopia, the Ethiopian moon, pinpoints their desti-­ nation by rounding out

"

TANIA

"

to

"

BRITANIA,

which the triple world

admires" (7.176, line 241). Wonder occurs at both ends of the process of learning to recognize the greatness of British royalty, registering both the mystery that spurs curiosity and the knowledge that satisfies it.28 These examples illustrate how the educational bias of admiratio served the goal of the masque to make power known. Thus in Jonson's Vision of Delight it is Wonder whose admiring questions reveal King James as the

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driving force of the show (7.469). This is only, moreover, the tip of an ice-­ berg: many masques relied on wonder to describe and motivate an episte-­ mological drama whose happy ending was knowledge.29 In other words, to function properly as a sign of magnificence, a masque depended on a cate-­ gory of attention defined by the exclusion of skepticism. Inherent in the notion of wonder to which the masque form subscribed was the assump-­ tion that any doubt about the source of masque wonders, marvels, and mir-­ acles was only temporary and in the end not to be tolerated. Just as masques connect generally to the scientific empire--building t