Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett
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response to animal suffering in “De la cruauté” (II, 11), or in “De l’expérience” (III, 13) where he speaks of a “naturelle compassion, qui peut infiniement en moy” (1100) [“natural compassion, which has infinite power over me”] (1028) for those he sees suffering in war. This preferential option for pity is, he acknowledges, something that sets him apart from the Stoics, who “veulent qu’on secoure les affligez, mais non pas qu’on flechisse et compatisse avec eux” (8) [want us to succor the afflicted, but not to unbend and sympathize with them”] (4), and as he goes on to note it is “des femmes, des enfans, et du vulgaire” (8) [“women, children, and the common herd”] (4) who are most prone to it. He continues by turning to “ames moins genereuses,” “less lofty souls”, the “peuple” who might be imagined in Stoic terms to be prone to pity. Yet in the example of the Theban people, they too yield to valor rather than supplication: they respond sympathetically to difference rather than sameness, as does Montaigne.
What can we make of this aside on the self which surges up in the midst of the essay’s strange dialectical proceedings? Montaigne’s procedure in this essay is based on Renaissance rhetorical training.74 Peter Mack suggests he takes his cue from the Renaissance rhetorician Agricola, who asks in De inventione dialectica “For if we are more likely to pity gladiators the less they beg for life, how much more will a very brave man who despises danger move us?”75 But Montaigne’s method also and more importantly suggests a particular disposition of the self. Quint argues that it is not only through commiseration that Montaigne eagerly takes up the “mollesse” or softness criticized by the Stoics, but also through his continual practice of seeing more than one side, practicing “mollesse” as what Quint calls an ethical pliancy.76 Montaigne’s acknowledgment of his own pity, and perhaps of his womanliness or vulgarity, is the pivot point of the essay: we pirouette from imagining the position of the pitied to that of the pitier and back again. Where the pitiful spectacles seen earlier in this chapter allowed for only one proper perspective, Montaigne allows himself to try out all positions in response, asking himself: Am I like this historical example, or unlike?
The sifting of similarity and difference that structures the essay’s examples is also crucial as a structuring pattern within each individual example. Montaigne tries out the same but different story again and again in order to establish some sort of common rule for finding commiseration, the emotion which brings people together in common emotion. Distinctions of rank and gender are crucial to the careful choreography of sameness and difference in this essay. Sometimes the great are moved by great virtue (sameness), sometimes the people are (difference); sometimes the greatest, Alexander, is not moved by the valor of Betis for in his greatness he cannot see how uncommon it is: “Seroit-ce que la hardiesse luy fut si commune que, pour ne l’admirer point, il la respectast moins?” (9–10). [“Could it be that hardihood was so common to Alexander that, not marveling at it, he respected it the less?”] (5).77 In moving through these examples, Montaigne essays the distinctions between pity and valor, victor and vanquished, noble and common, men and women. From this play of sameness and difference, we see the trickiness of finding a common ground from which one can acknowledge difference. Montaigne tries out different ways to make bonds signify something, looking at the connections between diverse historical examples or between diverse human positions and experiences. Where Seneca (and the Stoic tradition in general) dismissed compassion as a character problem, Montaigne reads it as a structural one. His essay explores not the intention of emotion but rather the edges of its complicated organizational patterns.78
Montaigne eventually rereads and revises one essay into another as he adds a palimpsest of objections to his original premise. In parsing these examples, Montaigne gropes his way toward finding a pattern of similarities, examples that can be followed or understood, only to break that pattern in later revisions of the essay by proffering up differences: in the B text (the revision of 1588), the great Alexander who shows cruelty to the obstinate Betis; in the C text (the revision of 1595), Dionysius the Elder who drowns the valorous Phyto because although he, as a great man, is unmoved by Phyto’s valor he fears that the rank and file might admire it. (Dionysius, like Montaigne, fears what will come from spectacle, even if his reaction to that—to kill Phyto away from view—is not necessarily what Montaigne, whose vulgar “mollesse” makes him more akin to the soldiers, would admire.) In a final addition to the essay, Dionysius is moved to act against Phyto because he is a reader, this time reading not the foe but rather the emotions of his soldiers (i.e., reading their reading of the enemy):
Dionysius, lisant dans les yeux de la commune [la foule] de son armée qu’au lieu de s’animer des bravades de cet ennemy vaincu, au mespris de leur chef et de son triomphe, elle alloit s’amolissant par l’estonnement d’une si rare vertu. (9)
[Dionysius, reading in the eyes of the rank and file of his army that, disregarding their leader and his triumph, they were softened by astonishment at such rare valor.]79
Reading, then, is necessarily a form of interpretation and judgment of events: a method that can lead to widely diverse ends, since we can never be sure what will stem from such readings.80 In the example of Dionysius, it is a way of responding to “la commune” and acting against them; but it is also, contradictorily, a way of establishing some sort of commonality. If Montaigne’s essay reads and rehearses the structures of compassion, it also reaches across them to imagine the sort of common ground between different sorts of text and between writer and reader that can be shared in the process of essaying and reading.81 Montaigne’s opening shot of the Essais functions as something like a rhetorical captatio benevolentiae to garner the goodwill of his audience. By setting out his own vulnerability, he also asks the reader to take mercy on his book.
Montaigne returns to this link between reading and compassion in an essay that has often been read in a pair with “Par divers moyens”: “Divers evenemens de mesme conseil” (I, 24).82 He begins with the story of François duc de Guise, the notoriously unmerciful leader of the Catholic extremist faction, and describes his clemency to someone who has plotted against his life, noting without further comment on Guise’s reputation that this did not save him from another and this time successful attempt on his life. This story becomes part of a larger meditation on fortune, a question brewing in “Par divers moyens” but brought to explicit articulation here. Montaigne notes that fortune has a large part in both writing—which escapes from the author’s intention—and in military enterprises. But in both, he counters that the capacity to read—to sift and to judge—is something more within our own control. Thus, “Un suffisant lecteur descouvre souvant és ecrits d’autruy des perfections autres que celles que l’autheur y a mises et apperceües, et y preste des sens et des visages plus riches” (127). [“An able reader often discovers in other men’s writings perfections beyond those that the author put in or perceived, and lends them richer meanings and aspects”] (112). The “visage” or face (Frame has it as “aspect”) that we discover in reading is significant, for when Guise speaks to the plotter he knows he is guilty from reading his face: “votre visage le montre” (124) [“your face shows it”] (109). Skillful reading does not save Guise, but it helps him understand what he faces.
In “De la diversion” (III, 4) Montaigne returns again to this question of clemency, recounting how he counseled a young prince (probably Henri de Navarre) away from revenge by diverting him with the idea of “clemence et bonté” (835) [“clemency and kindness”] (769) not solely by praising these virtues but by suggesting what he might gain in them: “Je le destournay à l’ambition” (835). [“I diverted him to ambition”].83 Montaigne nips at the relation between emotion and belief. Just as Henri might not believe in clemency but believes it might stand him in good stead (like Guise), so readers can be moved by fictional regrets even when they do not believe them: “Ainsi nous troublent l’âme les plaintes de fables; et les regrets de Didon et d’Ariadné passionnent ceux mesmes qi ne les croyent point en Virgile et en Catulle” (837). [“Thus the laments in fiction trouble our souls, and in Virgil and Catullus the regrets of Dido and Ariadne impassion even those who do not believe in them”] (771). (We will see the power of these same fictional regrets return in Chapter 2.) Montaigne is untroubled by the