Restraint and Rhetorical Craftiness: Emphasis as a Means of Figured Speech in Montaigne's Essays

Abstract

One of the strongest voices against rhetorical excess in the Renaissance can be found in Montaigne's Essays. It is no wonder, then, that the author's own style has often been associated with a Stoic terseness that matches a professed goal of writing sans estude et artifice—in other words, without rhetoric. But when we consider the volatile political context in which Montaigne was writing, it becomes apparent that his stylistic restraint accomplishes far more than an effect of transparency. Focusing on the figure of emphasis-one in which the rhetor allows his audience to infer an additional meaning from what he says or does not say—this article explores the connection between the restraint of Montaigne's prose style and the classical art of covert argument.

Notes

1. “[C]ar la bestise et facilité, qui se trouve en la commune, et qui la rend subjecte à estre maniée et contournée par les oreilles, au doux son de cette harmonie, sans venir à poiser et connoistre la verité des choses par la force de raison” (Montaigne 2007, 325).

2. “Ains farcies et pleines de beaux discours de sapience, par lesquelles on se rend non plus eloquent, mais plus sage, et qui nous apprennent non à bien dire, mais à bien faire” (Montaigne 2007, 256).

3. “Au rebours, c'est aux paroles à servir et à suivre, … et q'elles remplissent de façon l'imagination de celuy qui escoute, q'il n'aye aucune souvenance des mots” (Montaigne 2007, 178).

4. This characterization of Montaigne's style is one advanced especially in Morris Croll's (1989) Style, Rhetoric, and Rhythm. See “Essay Four: Attic Prose: Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon” (167–188) and “Essay Five: The Baroque Style in Prose” (207–230).

5. For more on “figured speech” in classical rhetoric, see Ahl 1984.

6. “Je me suis mis à les faire plus longs: qui requierent de la proposition et du loisir assigné” (Montaigne 2007, 1042). For more on this point, see Antoine Compagnon, “A Long Short Story: Montaigne's Brevity” (1983, 30–32).

7. No doubt because of this paradox, Croll has avoided identifying Montaigne entirely with a style coupé. According to Croll, Montaigne's style is, in both theory and practice, a variation on Lipsius’ “Stoic model of style” (1989, 181), one which focuses on “Senecan imitation”” (175) and which has as its chief characteristics a propensity for short sentences, omission of conjunctions, brusque rhythm, frequent use of parentheses, and the use of “pointes” (acumina) or subtle thoughts that challenge the vivacity of the readers’ minds (29). Yet for Montaigne this Stoic style is only a “doorway” (178) to a freer one that he does not fully develop until the later chapters of the Essays—a style which does not limit its choice of writers for imitation to Seneca and which allows for “the greatest possible naturalness” (181). This “Libertine” style, as Croll calls it, blends a style coupé, sentences with short, disconnected, asymmetrical members that are ordered in a way that reflects the writer's thought process as it unfolds, and a “loose style,” with sentences progressing in an interrupted symmetry and usually having long members joined by connectives but only “in a loose and casual manner” (210).

8. “J'entends que la matiere se distingue soy-mesmes. Elle montre assez où elle se change, où elle conclud, où elle commence, où elle se reprend: sans l'entrelasser de parolles, de liaison, et de cousture, introduictes pour le service des oreilles foibles, ou nonchallantes: et sans me bloser moy-mesme” (Montaigne 2007, 1041).

9. “Le parler que J'ayme, c'est un parler simple et naïf, tel sur le papier q’à la bouche: un parler succulent et nerveux, court et serré, non tant delicat et peigné, comme vehement et brusque … Plutost difficile q'ennuieux, esloingé d'affectation: desreglé, descousu, et hardy: chaque lopin y face son corps: non pedantesque, non fratesque, non pleideresque, mais plustost soldatesque, comme Suetone appelle celuy de Julius Caesar. Et si ne sens pas bien, pourquoy il l'en appelle. J'ay volontiers imité cette desbauche qui se voit en nostre jeunesse, au port de leurs vestemens” (Montaigne 2007, 178).

10. One important exception is Floyd Gray's Le style de Montaigne, which argues that Montaigne's sentences typically take the form of “une phrase ondulante, qui avance lentement, en amassant des détails” (1958, 26), a style that would seem in sharp contrast to one of Stoic brevity and simplicity. And for this reason, Gray concludes, Montaigne did not actually practice the style that he advocated: “Il faut admettre que Montaigne passe par une sorte de période de don-quichottisme philosophique et stylistique, où il se considère comme un stoïcien, et où il croit son langage’ simple et naïf, succulent et nerveux, court et serré, vehement et brusque’ … Mais son idéal du style est précisément le style q'il n'a pas, qui est d'habitude le contraire du sien, et cette phrase nerveuse et courte de Salluste, de Caesar, de Sénèque lui est interdite… . La phrase coupée et l'homme stoïque impliquent tous deux une sorte de ‘roidissement’, de rhetorique même, que Montaigne, tout nonchalant q'il est, admire comme quelque chose dont il n'est pas capable” (1958, 28).

11. These adjectives in fact correspond almost exactly to the stylistic qualities that Erasmus praises in a letter from 1527, in which the humanist condemns the slavish imitators of Cicero. Compagnon cites the relevant line from the letter as ““malim aliquod dicendi genus solidius, adstrictius, nervosius, minus comptum magisque masculum,” and observes, “All these qualities can be found in Montaigne: solidius = solid; adstrictuius = brief and compressed; nervosius = sinewy; minus comptum = irregular, unkempt; magisque masculum = soldierly” (1983, 34). For more on the connection between Montaigne and Erasmus with respect to this description, see also Philips 1976.

12. “J'ay naturellement un stile comique et privé : Mais c'est d'une forme mienne, inepte aux negotiations publiques, comme en toutes façons est mon langage, trop serré, desordonné, couppé, particulier: Et ne m'entens pas en lettres ceremonieuses, qui n'ont autre substance, que d'une belle enfileure de paroles courtoises” (Montaigne 2007, 256).

13. “Je hay à mort de sentir au flateur. Qui faict que je me jette naturellement à un parler sec, rond et cru, qui tire à qui ne me cognoit d'ailleurs, un peu vers le dedaigneux” (Montaigne 2007, 257).

14. For more on Lipsian acumen, see Fumaroli 1994, 158. In a letter from 1577, Lipsius himself already suggests the importance of allusiveness for his new “condensed” style: “For this is a different kind of writing from my earlier style, without showiness, without luxuriance without the Tullian concinnities; condensed everywhere and I know not whether of too studied a brevity. But this is what captivates me now. They celebrate Timanthes the painter because there was always something more to be understood in his works than was actually painted. I should like this in my style” (qtd. in Croll 1989, 172). Lipsius, then, has not sought to create writing that is “clear on its face” but, on the contrary, connects his economy of words with a depth of thought that can only be achieved through the subtle device of acumen. On the other hand, as Compagnon points out with respect to Montaigne, “[S]ubtilitas must not be too difficult, it must not become obscuritas, a word which appears frequently in Montaigne as a term of reproof” (1983, 36). Similarly, in the Epistolica institutio (1591), Lipsius warns his readers that while brevity and clarity are both virtues, the former can threaten the latter: “You must therefore write clearly—and, if you can briefly; but on the condition that you know brevity to be a matter of praise, clarity of necessity” (1996, 29).

15. “Elles signifient, plus q'elles ne disent” (Montaigne 2007, 916).

16. “Et combien y ay-je espandu d'histoires que ne disent mot, lesquelles qui voudra esplucher un peu ingenieusement, en produira infinis Essais. Ny elles, ny mes allegations, ne servent pas tousjours simplement d'exemple, d'authorité 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 souvent, à gauche, un ton plus delicat, et pour moy, qui n'en veux en ce lieu exprimer d'avantage, et pour ceux qui rencontreront mon air” (Montaigne 2007, 255).

17. Margaret McGowan adds that this style décousu, in which “phrases heurtées et disloquées dans leur forme” often remain incomplete, provided Montaigne with the advantage of not saying everything and hence protecting the author at a time when “le tout dire entraînait des risques sérieux” 2001, 43).

18. Charles Rosen echoed this idea two years ago in the New York Review of Books, noting that the passage from “Reflections upon Cicero” essentially gives us “an open invitation to read between the lines” (2008, 48).

19. The association between Stoic style and figured speech is by no means unique to Montaigne. Seneca himself is one of the authors most often mentioned with respect to the theory and practice of figured speech in the classical period. See Ahl (1984, 199) and Montefusco (2003, 117). More recently, at the 2009 meeting of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Bé Breij presented the paper, “Figured Speech in Seneca's Oedipus.”

20. Unfortunately, to illustrate this point, Quintilian gives an example from the “Pro Ligario”—a problematic one because he seems to have misremembered the speech, and the idea that he claims Cicero has left out is in fact quite explicit. For a better example, though, we can turn to the one Demetrius gives of Plato's indirect reproach of Aristippus and Cleombotus in the Phaedo: the main character asks who was with Socrates before his execution and then lists a series of names, after which his interlocutor asks, “And what about Aristippus and Cleombrotus?” to which Phaedo replies, “They were in Aegina” (2005, sec. 287). What is left out is what the readers already understand: although Aristippus and Cleombrotus were not residing far from Socrates’ prison, they did not visit him.

21. Scaliger describes emphasis as a figure in which the rhetor implies more than what he says, sometimes by a pronoun and sometimes by a name (1586, III, lxxix). Susenbrotus's account is nearly identical with that of Quintilian's three types: one in which the rhetor conveys, through a single word, a more significant meaning than the word normally denotes; a second in which the rhetor means something that he does not say; and a third in which the rhetor presents a hidden meaning for the readers to decipher (1576, 44–46).

22. See Lestringant 1985 and O'Brien, Quainton, and Supple 1995.

23. In fact, the Catholic League was so dangerous that, in 1588, Henry III was forced to flee Paris because of angry Catholic mobs, and the following year he was assassinated by Jacques Clément, a Dominican monk.

24. He was still making additions to the 1588 version before his death in 1592; these additions were published in the posthumous 1595 edition.

25. Quint notes that “Montaigne's cannibals, who defy their captors and are cooked and eaten, bear an unsettling resemblance to the religious martyrs of “De l'yvrongnerie’ (2.2), who call upon persecutors to roast them in turn” (1998, xii).

26. In using the device of emphasis, Montaigne resembles the sort of writer Leo Strauss describes in his study of Persecution and the Art of Writing. For Strauss, whether it involves the threat of physical danger or of social ostracism (1952, 32–33), persecution “compels all writers who hold heterodox views to develop a peculiar technique of writing,” and this technique is one of “writing between the lines” (1952, 24). The idea of this covert communication is not to express the heterodox ideas to all readers but only to ones who are “trustworthy and intelligent” (1952, 25). Under the influence of persecution, Strauss suggests, great writers invite intelligent readers to read obliquely when they craft sentences that are deliberately ambiguous or deficient in their construction (1952, 26). In the case of Montaigne, then, we find every evidence of a deliberately “deficient” style, one that by the author's own account withholds the development of “bolder” ideas but leaves traces of them so that only the most astute of readers can draw them out. In short, this deficiency aptly describes the figure of emphasis.

27. In the seventeenth century, Montaigne was in fact placed on the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Authors. The principal objections against the Essays were that their author had used the pagan notion of “Fortuna” and Christian “Providence” interchangeably; had condemned torture; and had praised the work of the Protestant poet Theodore de Bèze.

28. “Cettuy-ci leur prognostique les choses à venir, et les evenemens q'ils doivent esperer de leurs entreprinses: les achemine ou destourne de la guerre: mais c'est par tel si que où il faut à bien deviner, et s'il leur advient autrement q'il ne leur a predit, il est haché en mille pieces, s'ils l'attrapent, et condamné pour faux Prophete. à cette cause celuy qui s'est une fois mesconté, on ne le void plus. c'est don de Dieu que la divination: voylà pourquoy ce devoit estre une imposture punissable d'en abuser” (Montaigne 2007, 214–215).

29. “[F]aut-il pas les punir, de ce q'ils ne maintiennent l'effect de leur promesse, et de la témérité de leur imposture?” (Montaigne 2007, 215).

30. “[C]hacun appelle barbarie, ce qui n'est pas de son usage” (Montaigne 2007, 211).

31. On the one hand, there were incidents such as the Affair of the Placards in 1534, in which Protestants posted printed condemnations of Catholics whom they accused of worshipping false gods. On the other hand, Catholic sermons, such as those of Simon Vigor, often identified the Huguenots as bearers of a “fausse religion” sent by the devil in order to cause discord on the earth.

32. “[U]n très-grand homme et rare” (Montaigne 2007, 707).

33. “Il nous estoit aspre à la verité, mais non pourtant cruel ennemy: Car noz gens mesmes recitent de luy cette histoire, que se promenant un jour autour de la ville de Chalcedoine, Maris évesque du lieu osa bien l'appeller meschant, traistre à Christ, et q'il n'en fit autre chose, sauf luy respondre: Va miserable, pleure la perte de tes yeux: à quoy l’évesque encore repliqua: Je rends graces à Jesus Christ, de m'avoir osté la veue, pour ne voir ton visage impudent” (Montaigne 2007, 708).

34. In 1576 Henry issued a decree allowing for “liberté de conscience” (the title of Montaigne's chapter), which gave Protestants freedom of worship in certain regions outside Paris, where the Catholics were unable to defeat them. Yet despite this apparent attempt at achieving peace, Henry still actively continued the religious wars against the Protestants.

35. “[E]nnemy de la Chrestienté, mais sans toucher au sang” (Montaigne 2007, 708).

36. For Margaret McGowan, the comparison between Julian and Henry—which Montaigne makes explicit at the end of the chapter—illustrates how Montaigne uses analogies to persuade covertly (1974, 105–125). While acknowledging the importance of analogies as a means of argument in the Essays, I would add only that these analogies are contained within the larger strategy of emphasis.

37. This suggested criticism of Henry III is all the more daring when we consider not only that Montaigne, as “maire” of Bordeaux, often served as an intermediary between the Henry III and the Protestant Henry of Navarre but also that he personally delivered to the king the 1580 version of the Essays.

38. “Nostre bastiment et public et privé, est plein d'imperfection: mais il n'y a rien d'inutile en nature … Nostre estre est simenté de qualitez maladives: l'ambition, la jalousie, l'envie, la vengeance, la superstition, le desespoir, logent en nous, d'une si naturelle possession que l'image s'en recognoist aussi aux beste” (Montaigne 2007, 830).

39. “[C]omme les venins à la conservation de nostre santé” (Montaigne 2007, 830).

40. s'ils deviennent excusables, d'autant q'ils nous font besoing, et que la necessité commune efface leur vraye qualité: il faut laisser jouer cette partie, aux citoyens plus vigoureux, et moins craintifs, qui sacrifient leur honneur et leur conscience, comme ces autres anciens sacrifierent leur vie, pour le salut de leur pays: Nous autres plus foibles prenons des rolles et plus aysez et moins hazardeux: Le bien public requiert q'on trahisse, et q'on mente, et q'on massacre: resignons cette commission à gens plus obeissans et plus soupples” (Montaigne 2007, 830).

41. “[U]n util inventé pour manier et agiter une tourbe, et commune desreiglée” (Montaigne 2007, 325).

42. “[D]e choses petites les faire paroistre et trouver grandes” (Montaigne 2007, 324).

43. See McGowan 1974.

44. Strauss notes further that, because covert argument often occurs through writing that seems to be poorly written, “the censor must prove not only that the author is intelligent and a good writer in general, for a man who intentionally blunders in writing must possess the art of writing, but above all that he was on the usual level of his abilities when writing the incriminating words. But how can that be proved, if even Homer nods from time to time?” (1952, 26).

45. “l'eloquence a fleury le plus à Rome lors que les affaires ont esté en plus mauvais estat, et que l'orage des guerres civiles les agitoit” (Montaigne 2007, 325).

46. “Il semble par là que les polices, qui dépendent d'un monarque, en ont moins de besoin que les autres” (Montaigne 2007, 325).