They have some troublesome forms, which if we forget discreetly and not erroneously, we suffer no loss of grace. I have often seen men uncivil through over-civility, and importunate out of courtesy. After all, the art of social tact[1] is a very useful art. Like grace and beauty, it conciliates the approaches of sociability and familiarity, and consequently opens the way for us to instruct ourselves by the examples of others, and to put into execution and make visible our own example, if there be in it any thing instructive and communicable.
CHAPTER XIV
THAT THE SAVOUR OF GOODS AND ILLS DEPENDS IN LARGE PART ON THE IDEA THAT WE HAVE OF THEM[2]
This title reminds one of Hamlet’s saying, “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
The opening sentence enlarges and defines the meaning of the title, and then Montaigne goes on to question whether this be true: let us see if this can be maintained.
He thinks that one proof that it is true is the difference of the ideas of different men about death: by one it is regarded as the most horrible of things, by another as the sovereign good of nature. As one way of meeting death he instances the many jokes that have been uttered by persons on their way to execution; as another, the women who bury or burn themselves with the dead bodies of their husbands, or the self-destruction of men and women in time of war or political trouble. (Here he tells a striking fact that he had learned from his father.) Then follows an inserted passage about the Jews in Portugal — from whom Montaigne’s mother was descended, which fact perhaps made their history the more interesting to him.
He then tells the story of Pyrrho pointing out in a storm at sea, for the emulation of his companions, the composure of a pig; and Montaigne questions whether we do not ill employ the intelligence that has been given us for our greatest good, in struggling against the universal order of things. L’universel ordre des choses — we have here, as has been remarked,[3] one of the Leit-motives of Montaigne’s thought.
