is is not the place, nor am I the person, to attempt a
systematic estimate of the most enduring of French writers, who has
stirred to their best efforts the ablest of French critics; but I must
needs try to indicate briefly, as I see it, his significance in general
European culture. And I would put it that Montaigne is really, for the
civilised world at this day, what Petrarch has been too enthusiastically
declared to be--the first of the moderns. He is so as against even the
great Rabelais, because Rabelais misses directness, misses universality,
misses lucidity, in his gigantic mirth; he is so as against Petrarch,
because he is emphatically an impressionist where Petrarch is a framer
of studied compositions; he is so against Erasmus, because Erasmus also
is a framer of artificial compositions in a dead language, where
Montaigne writes with absolute spontaneity in a language not only
living but growing. Only Chaucer, and he only in the Canterbury Tales,
can be thought of as a true modern before Montaigne; and Chaucer is
there too English to be significant for all Europe. The high figure of
Dante is decisively mediaeval: it is the central point in mediaeval
literature. Montaigne was not only a new literary phenomenon in his own
day: he remains so still; for his impressionism, which he carried to
such lengths in originating it, is the most modern of literary
inspirations; and all our successive literary and artistic developments
are either phases of the same inspiration or transient reactions against
it. Where literature in the mass has taken centuries to come within
sight of the secret that the most intimate form of truth is the most
interesting, he went, in his one collection of essays, so far towards
absolute self-expression that our practice is still in the rear of his,
which is quite too unflinching for contemporary nerves. Our _bonne foi_
is still sophisticated in comparison with that of the great Gascon. Of
all essayists who have yet written, he is the most transparent, the most
sincere even in his stratagems, the most discursive, the most
free-tongued, and therefore the most alive. A classic commonplace
becomes in his hands a new intimacy of feeling: where verbal
commonplaces have, as it were, glazed over the surface of our sense, he
goes behind them to rouse anew the living nerve. And there is no theme
on which he does not some time or other dart his sudden and searching
glance. It is truly said of him by Emerson