MICHEL de Montaigne (1533–92) was one of the great originals of world literature. He perfected a new literary genre in which he asked himself whether the teachings of past generations really corresponded to his own experience of the world and what he discovered through his critical reading. Montaigne’s Essais question and test (essayer) received wisdom. He was sympathetic to scepticism, and his longest chapter, the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’, gives a careful account of the sceptical position, but far from suspending judgement, as the sceptics advised, Montaigne’s aim was to make judgements which better suited his own experience of the world. He was also sympathetic to the epicurean position, intent on valuing the pleasures of life, intellectual as well as physical. He discusses a wide range of subjects, including: proper conduct in politics and war, attitudes to death, pain, and poverty, the advantages and disadvantages of habit, the differences between the old world and the new, sex, friendship, education, reading, travel, vanity, pride, and family life. Since many of his arguments are illustrated with stories about his own life, the Essais also provide a self-portrait of a thoughtful man living in times of civil war and suffering the terrible pain of kidney stones. Because Montaigne is so engaging and frank, and because he discusses so many subjects in such original ways, his readers usually feel that they have come to know him personally. The French learned society dedicated to his work is called the Société des Amis de Michel de Montaigne.1
Montaigne’s method of writing is based on reading, taking a received idea, finding stories and opinions to support that view, and then making counter-arguments which were prompted or supported by examples taken from his reading or narratives of his own life. He aimed to be as frank as possible about his opinions and experiences. Typically his chapters grew by accretion. He would reread a section of his text and ask himself whether he really agreed with what he had written. Sometimes his new reading in oriental history or accounts of the conquest of the New World would lead him to add new comments and examples. Above all, he frequently reread a few favourite classical authors (Plutarch, Seneca, Horace, Virgil, Lucretius, and Catullus) and inserted numerous quotations or paraphrases of them in his work, often in Latin, rather than French.
This method of writing, which includes so many sentences from other writers and so many changes of mind, leads to a quality of changeability in the text which both serves to represent the twisting and turning of a mind in motion and enables many different people to feel that Montaigne speaks directly to their experience. Montaigne notices this feeling himself, writing of changeability in his own reading of texts, and of finding different meanings in his own book:
I pick up some book: I may have discovered outstanding beauties in a particular passage which really struck home: another time I happen on the same passage and it remains an unknown shapeless lump for me … Even in the case of my own writings I cannot always recover the flavour of my original meaning; I do not know what I wanted to say and burn my fingers making corrections and giving it some new meaning for want of recovering the original meaning which was better. I go backwards and forwards: my judgement does not always march straight ahead, but floats and bobs about,
Velut minuta magno
Deprensa navis in mari vesaniente vento
(Like a tiny boat buffeted on the ocean by a raging tempest, Catullus 25.12)
Many’s the time I have taken an opinion contrary to my own and (as I am fond of doing) tried defending it for the fun of the exercise: then, once my mind has really applied itself to that other side, I get so firmly attached to it that I forget why I held the original opinion and give it up. (II, 12, P600, S637–8)2
Two years after the death of his father, in 1570 Montaigne gave up his magistracy in Bordeaux and went to live on and manage the family estate in Montaigne in the Dordogne. Around 1572 he began to compose his Essais, in order to tame the wild fantasies of his idle brain by recording them, as he jokingly claims (I.8, P54–5, S28–9). He sent a first version, in two books, with a total of ninety-four chapters, to the Bordeaux printer Simon Millanges in 1580. He added a few short passages (including one on visiting the poet Tasso, confined in his madness, during his trip to Italy in 1580–1) to the second Bordeaux edition of 1582. The 1588 Paris edition contained a new third book of thirteen generally long chapters and large additions to most of the previous ones. Together these changes doubled the size of the book. At the time of his death he had already made extensive further revisions (mostly additions) which are incorporated in the posthumous 1595 edition, seen through the press by Marie de Gournay, and are represented in a copy of the 1588 edition with manuscript additions by Montaigne and his secretaries, known as the Bordeaux copy.
This process of continual revision has caused problems for editors, readers, and translators. For about three centuries (and for Florio) editions of Montaigne were based on the 1595 edition. Most twentieth-century editions, including the long-standard Villey-Saulnier edition (3rd edition, Paris, 1965) are based on the Bordeaux copy and divide the text into three layers, text originating in 1580 (A), additions in 1588 (B), and new material in the Bordeaux copy (C), which was believed to be more authentic than the 1595 edition. This method of representing the text is very helpful to readers in showing how the text developed, but the editors were at times selective in the changes they recorded, rarely noting single word changes, for example. The Villey-Saulnier text is the basis for the two best-known modern English translations, by Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957) and Michael Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). Subsequent bibliographical studies have tended to vindicate the text of 1595, which is now generally believed to be a faithful representation of a second copy of the 1588 edition with manuscript additions sometimes different from those in the Bordeaux copy, which has not survived.3 The most recent edition by J. Balsamo, M. Magnien, and C. Magnien-Simonet (P) presents the printed text of 1595 but reports all previous versions, and variants from the Bordeaux copy, in notes printed after the text. For readers concerned with English versions of Montaigne, this new edition corresponds to the edition which Florio translated from, but sometimes differs from the text translated by Frame and Screech.4
It is easy to exaggerate the extent to which Montaigne retired from the world in 1570. He managed his estates. He took part in various negotiations between Henri III and the Protestant Henri de Navarre, who was eventually in 1593 to convert to Catholicism and become King of France as Henri IV. At the King’s command, he became Mayor of Bordeaux in 1581 and served a rare second term up to 1585.5 His observations on the best manner of conducting oneself in military and political affairs reflect serious personal experience as well as wide reading and deep questioning. It has been suggested that writing and publishing the Essais was partly motivated by the desire to improve his political and social standing. At any rate, there is no doubt that the book was successful from the first, drawing compliments from Henri III and making Montaigne much more widely known.6
Some of Montaigne’s earliest readers were English, including Anthony Bacon, who twice met Montaigne, and his brother Francis, whose somewhat different Essays first published in 1597, pay Montaigne the compliment of copying his title and of a few silent borrowings.7 Soon other writers were copying Montaigne’s titles and in 1600 Sir William Cornwallis published his Essays, which openly acknowledged a debt to Montaigne, acquired by reading some of them in English translation.8 On 20 October 1595 ‘The Essais of Michaell Lord Mountene’ was entered in the Stationers’ Register of books due to be published by Edward Agger.9 This probably implies that an English version was being considered, but nothing appeared from that source. On 4 June 1600 ‘The Essais of Michell lord of Montaigne, translated into Englishe by John Florio’ were licensed to Edward Blount, who was involved in the eventual publication of Florio’s version in 1603.
John Florio (1553–1626) was born in London to an English mother. His father Michelangelo, an Italian Protestant pastor, left England with the family in 1554 on the accession of Mary, to live first in Strasbourg and then in Soglio in the Val Bregaglia in Switzerland. By 1563 John was at school in Tübingen, staying with the Italian Protestant bishop Pietro Paolo Vergerio. John Florio returned to England in the first half of the 1570s. In 1576 he was tutoring in Italian at Oxford.10 His first book, First Fruits, a bilingual edition of conversational phrases, extracts from poetry, and moral dialogues, intended to teach Italian to the English, and English to Italian merchants, was published from London in 1578. Frances Yates has shown that in places Florio’s text relies on Antonio de Guevara and on moral axioms taken from Lodovico Guicciardini’s Hore di Ricreatione and translated into English in James Sanford’s The Garden of Pleasure (London, 1573).11 In 1580, commissioned by Hakluyt, Florio translated the Navigations and Discoveries of the French sailor Jacques Cartier, from the Italian version by Ramusio.12 From 1583 onwards he was employed at the French embassy in London as a tutor and an interpreter. While working there he met and befriended the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno.13 In 1591 he published his Second Fruits, a series of twelve dialogues for language teaching which are less moralistic and offer a more dramatized portrayal of the social life of privileged young men than the First Fruits. The Second Fruits are also studded with Italian proverbs which are collected in Florio’s Giardino di Recreatione (1591).14 At about this time or soon after, certainly by 1594, Florio entered the service of the Earl of Southampton as his Italian tutor. Florio dedicated his Italian–English dictionary, the Worlde of Wordes, to Southampton in 1598, saying that he had been living under his patronage for several years.15
An Anglo-Italian Protestant who had been educated in Germany and had worked in the French embassy, Florio was a language teacher who composed and compiled moral dialogues, collections of proverbs, and the first large-scale Italian–English dictionary (which defined 46,000 words, expanded in the second edition of 1611 to around 74,000)16 and translated a travel narrative. It is easy to understand how reading Montaigne’s Essais, which also used classical ethical writings and their modern compilations, proverbs, and histories of the New World, might have appealed to Florio. In his dedicatory epistles Florio thanks Sir Edward Wotton as his ‘not-to-be-denied Benefactor’, while recalling the way in which Lady Anne Harrington had encouraged him from the point when he had completed only one chapter of the work.17 He explains that he was attracted above all by the work’s
so pleasing passages, so judicious discourses, so delightsome varieties, so persuasive conclusions, such learning of all sortes, and above all, so elegant a French stile, as (I thinke) for ESSAYES, I may say of him, as he in this Booke, did of Homer: Heere shines in him the greatest wit without example, without exception, deserving for his composition to be entituled, Sole Maister of Essayes. (Florio, II, 4)
He also mentions the help which he has received from the learning of Thomas Diodati and John Harrington in unravelling the difficulties of the text, and from Dr Matthew Gwinne, who has translated and as far as possible identified for him ‘what Latine prose, Greeke, Latine, Italian or French Poesie should crosse my way’, 18 thus allowing Florio to provide English versions of almost all the foreign language quotations, a help which Montaigne did not provide for his French readers.
In a slightly paradoxical consensus, critics who have compared the translation to Montaigne’s original in detail agree that Florio’s work contains omissions, mistakes, misunderstandings, and additions, and yet that it is a highly successful translation, which nevertheless retains ‘the essential spirit’ of Montaigne’s book.19 Matthiessen and Yates have collected representative examples of Florio’s errors;20 some derive from misunderstanding of the sentence structure or of vocabulary. Several involve mistakes of number or tense. Some are easy for the reader to correct, while others create nonsense for a sentence or two. (We will come across a few instances below.) This is regrettable, but it doesn’t matter a great deal. Montaigne is so rich, he says so many different things, that it is impossible for a reader to respond to and remember every aspect of a twenty-page segment, never mind of the whole. If Florio fluffs some of the lines, he conveys enough of the others with vitality and expressiveness to justify any reader’s attention. For such a long and difficult text there are surprisingly few errors. Indeed, there are some French scholars of Montaigne who, when they are in doubt about Montaigne’s meaning, consult Florio as one source of possible resolutions.
Florio also adds to the text. On most pages there will be several examples of Florio doubling a verb or a noun, but doubling is also a very strong characteristic of Montaigne’s own style. Sometimes Montaigne used to remove doublets in the process of revision, but he also used to add others.21 Florio’s preference for alliteration in his doublets is not shared by Montaigne, but it is very characteristic of sixteenth-century English prose and would have seemed very natural to Florio’s readers. Florio likes to add in proverbs and idiomatic English expressions; Montaigne too liked proverbs and idioms. Thus, for example, when Montaigne explains that since all men are unfaithful it is only just that most of them should also be cuckolds,
Chacun de vous a fait quelqu’un coqu: or nature est toute en pareilles, en compensation et vicissitude. La frequence de cet accident en doibt mes-huy avoir moderé l’aigreur: le voylà tantost passé en coustume. (III, 5, P913)
Florio adds a pair of proverbs to reinforce the point, but manages to recover the brevity and force of the conclusion.
There is none of you all but hath made one Cuckold or other. Now nature stood ever even on this point, Kae mee Ile kae thee, and ever ready to be even always on recompences and vicissitude of things and to give as good as one brings. The long-continued frequence of this accident, should by this time have seasoned the bitter taste thereof. It is almost become a custome. (Florio, III, 97)
Here, as often, Florio retains some of Montaigne’s key words (nature, compensation, vicissitude, frequence, and custome), while adding native English phrases which clarify the meaning. Many of Florio’s importations have become naturalized English words, but some, as Matthiessen shows, have not (Translation, 120–1). Florio sometimes adds explanations which a French reader would not have needed (noting, for example that the Louvre is ‘the pallace of our Kings in Paris’);22 so much the better for the English reader. Sometimes he adapted cultural references, replacing ‘les Basques et les Troglodytes’, with ‘the Cornish, the Welch, or Irish’. Sometimes he elaborates to convey a London flavour, as when ‘la tourbe des escrivailleurs’ becomes ‘the common-rabble of Scriblers and blur-papers which now adayes stuffe Stationers shops’.23 Matthiessen uses italics to show how Florio elaborates the detail of Montaigne’s anecdote about the bearded old man he once met, who had, until the age of 22, been the woman Marie Germain:
He saith, that upon a time leaping, and straining himselfe to overleape another, he wot not how, but where before he was a woman he suddenly felt the instrument of a man to come out of him; and to this day the maidens of that towne and countrie have a song in use, by which they warn one another, when they are leaping, not to straine themselves overmuch, or open their legs too wide, for feare they should be turned to boies, as Marie Germane was. (Florio I, 94; Matthiessen, Translation, 137)
Florio’s additions here, which almost seem inspired by Erasmus’s methods for producing copia of things, make the story more vivid and enjoyable. More than for most writers, Montaigne’s was an open text, which he added to when he pleased; for Florio to add a little more, even if sometimes it is more English than Montaigne, does not harm the translation in any important way. Indeed, it may help naturalize the text for English readers.
Florio’s longest addition, noted by Frances Yates, inserts twelve lines or so to ‘On the Education of Children’ (II.25):
Madame, Learning joined with true knowledge is an especiall and graceful ornament, and an implement of wonderfull use and consequence, namely in persons raised to that degree of fortune, wherein you are. And in good truth, learning hath not her owne true forme, nor can she make shew of her beauteous lineaments, if she fall into the hands of base and vile persons. For, as famous Torquato Tasso saith: ‘Philosophie being a rich and noble Queene, and knowing her own worth, graciously smileth upon and lovingly embraceth Princes and noble men, if they become suitors to her, admitting them as her minions, and gently affording them all the favours she can; whereas upon the contrarie, if she be wooed, and sued unto by clownes, mechanicall fellows, and such base kind of people, she holds herself disparaged and disgraced, as holding no proportion with them. And therefore see we by experience, that if a true Gentleman, or nobleman follow her with attention, and woo her with importunitie, he shall learne and know more of her, and prove a better scholler in one yeare, than an ungentle or base fellow shall in seven, though he pursue her never so attentively.’ (Florio, II, 153–4)
We are quite justified in condemning these sentiments, but we need to put them in context. Montaigne, in the first five lines, is urging an aristocratic lady to give her son a liberal and literary education; he wants to assure her that it will be worthwhile. Florio, no doubt thinking of the aristocratic ladies to whom his edition is dedicated, adds the long supporting quotation from Tasso. Montaigne would probably not have quoted this passage at such length, but to back up an opinion expressed in his own voice with a quotation found later through his reading is absolutely characteristic of the way he revises his text. It is quite understandable that Florio, as a commoner seeking to renew aristocratic patronage, should add to the flattery which Montaigne, more conceitedly in view of his own social standing, had begun. In the literal sense, this is not translation, but neither does it falsify the original.
Matthiessen and Yates have drawn attention to a change which Florio made on the grounds of his religious beliefs. Where Montaigne wrote ‘des erreurs de Wiclef’ (I.3, P41), Florio referred to ‘Wickliff’s opinions’ (I, p. 28). On other occasions, though, Florio translated Montaigne’s criticism of Elizabethan policy or the Protestant religion without alteration. In the eighteenth chapter of the first book (‘That we should not judge of our happiness until after our death’), Montaigne gives as one of his examples of an honourable life ended by a miserable death an unmistakeable condemnation of the execution of Mary Stuart.
La plus belle Royne, vefve du plus grand Roy de la Chrestienté, vient elle pas de mourir par la main d’un Bourreau? Indigne et barbare cruauté! (I.18, P80)
Florio translates this directly, with the slight alteration of widow to wife:
The fairest Queene, wife to the greatest King of Christendome, was she not lately seene to die by the hands of an executioner? Oh unworthie and barbarous crueltie! (Florio, I, 71)
Florio makes no attempt to soften Montaigne’s criticism of Elizabeth. Expressing his sorrow at changes of religion on the other side of the channel, Montaigne writes:
Depuis que je suis nay, j’ay veu trois et quatre fois, rechanger celles [i.e. les loix] des Anglois noz voisins, non seulement en subject politique, qui est celuy qu’on veut dispenser de constance, mais au plus important subject qui puisse estre, à sçavoir de la religion. (II.12, P614)
Florio makes some small expansions but reports this without altering the charge of flightiness which a Protestant subject of Elizabeth would presumably have resented:
I have since I was borne, scene those [i.e. the laws] of our neighbours the Englishmen changed and rechanged three or four times, not only in politike subjects, which is that some will dispense of constancy, but in the most important subject, that can possibly be, that is to say, in religion. (Florio I, 296)
If anything, Florio’s habit of doubling verbs here (‘changed and rechanged’) makes the accusation seem worse. He spoils the effect of Montaigne’s throw-away summary of this section, through not quite grasping the implication. Montaigne wrote
Quelle bonté est-ce, que je voyois hyer en credit, et demain ne l’estre plus: et que le traject d’une riviere fait crime? (II.12, P615)
Florio gives
What goodnesse is that, which but yesterday I saw in credit and esteeme, and tomorrow to have lost all reputation, and that the crossing of a river is made a crime? (II, 297)
The sense here needs to be ‘and the crossing of a river makes something a crime’. Screech translates
What kind of good can it be which was honoured yesterday but not today and which becomes a crime when you cross a river! (S653)
which alters the original a bit more than Florio does but conveys the throw-away tone much better. In this case, apart from the misunderstanding, Florio’s tendency to make things longer and heavier works against what Montaigne writes. The first chapter of the second book ends with phrases of self-conscious brevity, making a joke of the paradoxical recommendation that people should give up making judgements.
Il faut sonder jusqu’au dedans, et voir par quels ressors se donne le bransle. Mais d’autant que c’est une hazardeuse et haute entreprinse, je voudrois que moins de gens s’en meslassent. (II.1, P358)
Florio takes his often successful approach of making things clearer and more concrete, but loses the wit and ironic force of the conclusion.
A man must thorowly sound himselfe, and dive into his heart, and there see by what wards or springs the motions stirre. But forasmuch as it is a hazardous and high enterprise, I would not have so many meddle with it as doe. (II, 15)
The first sentence here is very forceful and concrete, though without the concision of the original. The second suffers by staying too close to Montaigne’s vocabulary and word order until the end, when English grammar requires an addition. Reluctantly, but for the sake of honesty, I’ll give one more example of Florio not quite conveying the sense of his original. In book III chapter 5, Montaigne is discussing the importance of the phallus in religions and folk customs:
Les plus sages matrons à Rome, estoient honorées d’offrir des fleurs et coronnes au Dieu Priapus: Et sur ses parties moins honnestes faisoit-on soir les vierges au temps de leurs nopces. (P901)
Florio translates:
The greatest and wisest matrons of Rome were honoured for offering flowers and garlands to God Priapus. And when their virgins were married, they (during the nuptials) were made to sit upon their privities. (III, 83)
Florio here seems to mistake the interpretation of both the preposition in the first sentence and the singular possessive pronoun in the second. Screech conveys the meaning of both words more accurately:
The wisest of the Roman matrons were granted the honour of offering crowns of flowers to the God Priapus; when their maidens came to marry, they were required to squat over its less decent parts. (S969)
But when you take the opposite approach and turn to your favourite passages of Montaigne, most of the time Florio conveys Montaigne’s meaning very well and sometimes he writes superb English, largely as a result of his small changes in focus. Here, for example, Florio translates Montaigne on the contrast between man’s large ambitions and his wretched nature:
Let us now but consider man alone without other help, armed but with his owne weapons, and unprovided of the grace of God, which is all his honour, all his strength, and all the ground of his being. Let us see what hold-fast, or free-hold he hath in this gorgeous, and goodly equipage. Let him with the utmost power of his discourse make me understand, upon what foundation, he hath built those great advantages and odds, he supposeth to have over other creatures. Who hath perswaded him, that this admirable moving of heavens vaults; that the eternal light of these lampes so fiercely rowling over his head; that the horror-moving and continuall motion of this infinite vaste Ocean, were established and continue so many ages for his commoditie and service? Is it possible to imagine any thing so ridiculous, as this miserable and wreched creature, which is not so much as master of himselfe, exposed and subject to offences of all things and yet dareth call himselfe Master and Emperour of this Universe? (II, 139)
The force of this passage is built on contrasts, particularly in the first, fourth, and fifth sentences. In the first sentence, announcing the idea to be explored, man alone, without help and armed only with his own weapons, is contrasted with God, as the source of honour, strength, and being. The fourth sentence encompasses a triple description of the grandeur of the universe, which is the main focus of the sentence, within a mocking question (Who has persuaded man that the whole world exists only for his benefit?). The fifth sentence contrasts the miserableness and wretchedness of man, not even master of himself, with his claim to be master and emperor of the world. The contrast is introduced as the most ridiculous proposition that could be entertained.
The architecture of this passage and the structure of the individual sentences are all Montaigne’s (P470–1). Florio’s only significant additions are the alliterated doublings in the second sentence where ‘tenue’ becomes ‘hold-fast or free-hold’ and ‘bel equipage’ becomes ‘gorgeous, and goodly equipage’, which together slightly spoil the terseness of Montaigne’s second sentence, in contrast to the other four sentences and the expansion in the third sentence of ‘avantages’ to ‘advantages and odds’. The moments of contrast, the triplings, and the build-up to the rhetorical questions are all Montaigne’s. And yet, thanks to Florio’s choice of apt and concrete equivalents this is an extraordinary passage of English prose, at the same time more restrained and more magnificent than Lyly or Sidney could have managed. Florio had the taste to recognize the superb formal shape which Montaigne had created and he had the breadth of vocabulary from which to choose equivalent terms which could fit into Montaigne’s structure and deliver a similar combination of the descriptive and the expressive. Here is Florio’s version of one of the central arguments of ‘On Vanity’ (III, 9):
You will say, there is vanitie in this amusement. But where not? And these goodly precepts are vanitie, and Meere vanitie is all worldly wisedome. Dominus novit cogitationes sapientum, quoniam vanae sunt (Psalm 93.11). The Lord knows the thoughtes of the wise, that they are vaine. Such exquisite subtilities are onely fit for sermons. They are discourses that will send us into the other world on horsebacke. Life is a materiall and corporall motion, an action imperfect and disordered by its owne essence: I employ or apply my selfe to serve it according to it selfe … To what purpose are these heaven-looking and nice points of Philosophie, on which no humane being can establish and ground it selfe? And to what end serve these rules that exceed our use and excell our strength? I often see that there are certaine Ideaes or formes of life proposed unto us, which neither the proposer nor the Auditors have any hope at all to follow; and which is worse, no desire to attaine. Of the same paper, whereon a Judge writ but even now the condemnation against an adulterer, hee will teare a scantlin, thereon to write some love-lines to his fellow-judges wife. The same woman from whom you have come lately, and with whom you have committed that unlawfull-pleasing sport, will soone after even in your presence, raile and scold more bitterly against the same fault in her neighbour than ever Portia or Lucrece could. And some condemne men to die for crimes that themselves esteeme no faults … Human wisedome could never reach the duties, or attaine the devoirs it had prescribed unto it selfe. And had it at any time attained them, then would it doubtlesse prescribe some others beyond them, to which it might ever aspire and pretend. So great an enemy is our condition unto consistence. (Florio, III, 236–7, 239, italics as in original; P1034–5, 1036)
This passage combines unsettling reversals of perspective, general statements about human life, rhetorical questions, and detailed dramatic vignettes. It advances a profound critique of existing ethical teachings, arguing that they are no less vain than all other human activities, that indeed there may be something in human nature that causes people to establish moral rules which they can never live up to. It is dizzyingly impressive as a piece of thought and extraordinarily effectively expressed.
The rhythm and arrangement of Florio’s prose here owe everything to Montaigne. Florio’s extremely compressed second sentence exactly reproduces Montaigne’s ‘Mais où non’. The near-chiasmus in the third sentence (Precepts.vanity/Vanity.wisdom) is Montaigne’s. The Bible quotation is Montaigne’s, though, as usual, he does not add a translation into French. The move to the literal in the seventh sentence (‘on horseback’) exactly reproduces Montaigne’s ‘basté’ (saddled up). The first two doublings of the eighth sentence (material and corporal; imperfect and disordered) are Montaigne’s, though the third (employ or apply) is Florio’s addition; as is ‘heaven-looking and nice’ for Montaigne’s ‘eslevées’. ‘Scantlin’ is a magnificent equivalent for ‘lopin’. ‘Unlawfull-pleasing sport’ is less physical and more obvious in its opposition of morality and pleasure than ‘vous frotter illicitement’, but its overriding moral tone follows its original, as it needs to do in view of the opposition of ideas with ‘Judge’ in the previous sentence and Portia in this one. Florio doubles ‘raile and scold’ for ‘criera’, and adds Lucrece beside Portia. His ‘could never reach the duties or attain the devoirs’ is somewhat redundant for ‘n’arriva jamais aux devoirs’, but it explains the retained French word. ‘Aspire and pretend’ copies Montaigne’s words, while the final sentence is an exact and forceful rendition of ‘Tant nostre estat est ennemy de consistance’. Perhaps Montaigne’s passage is stronger for being slightly briefer than Florio’s, but Florio gives English readers almost everything they could want from a quite exceptional passage of writing. None of the English moralists of the period can come close to this.
My final example is a passage which I had thought would be impossible to do well in English, where Montaigne examines the vocabulary which produces the particular gravity of a passage in Lucretius describing the love making of Mars and Venus and continues to reflect on the special qualities of the greatest Latin poetry:
Their speech is altogether full and massie, with a naturall and constant vigor. They are all epigram, not only tail, but head, stomach and feet. There is nothing forced, nothing wrested, nothing limping; all marcheth with like tenour. Contextus totus virilis est, non sunt circa flosculos occupati.24 The whole composition or text is manly, they are not bebusied about Rhetoric flowers. This is not a soft quaint eloquence, and only without offence, it is sinnowie, materiall, and solid; not so much delighting, as filling and ravishing, and ravisheth most the strongest wits, the wittiest conceits. When I behold these gallant forms of expression, so lively, so nimble, so deepe: I say this is not to speake well, but to think wel. It is the quaintnesse or livelinesse of the conceit, that elevateth and puffes up the words. Pectus est quod disertum facit.25 It is a mans owne brest, that makes him eloquent. Our people terms judgement, language; and full conceptions, fine words. This pourtraiture is directed not so much by the hands dexterity, as by having the object more lively printed in the minde. Gallus speaks plainly, because he conceiveth plainly. Horace is not pleased with a sleight or superficiall expressing; it would betray him; he seeth more cleere and further into matters; his spirit pickes and ransaketh the whole store-house of words and figures to shew and present himselfe; and he must have them more then ordinary, as his conceit is beyond ordinary. Plutarch saith that he discerned the Latin tongue by things. Here likewise the sense enlighteneth and produceth the words; no longer windy or spongy, but of flesh and bone. They signifie more then they utter. (Florio, III, 100–1, P915–16)
The passage both describes and accounts for the forcefulness of the best Latin poetry. Montaigne regards such inspiring writing as a product of sharp perception and strong thought. The style he describes is lively, weighty, and thoughtful. The passage is characterized by vocabulary which is vivid and concrete, embodying some of the qualities it admires in the passage from Lucretius. It is as if Montaigne as reader claims for himself the same qualities which he finds in the passages he quotes, supporting the implication with the claim that the strongest intellects respond best to such powerful language. The idea that striking thought is required to produce forceful language is developed through a metaphor from painting, a comparison between Gallus and Horace, a justifying quotation from Plutarch, and a development of Plutarch’s idea in his own voice.
Florio follows Montaigne’s structures very closely in this passage. His wide vocabulary enables him to choose English words which have the physicality and gravity of the French words he is translating. Much of the weight of the passage derives from these carefully chosen words, but he enhances the effect by adding to Montaigne’s lists of qualifiers and adjectives (for example ‘nothing limping’ [l. 3], ‘quaint’ [l. 5], ‘materiall’ [l. 6], and ‘nimble’ [l. 8] are Florio’s additions). He supports ‘the strongest wits’ in line 7, translating ‘les plus forts esprits’, by the appositional addition of ‘the wittiest conceits’. He translates ‘gailliardise’, with the doubling ‘quaintnesse or livelinesse’ (line 9). Some of these additions look like alternative translations, helping to clarify Montaigne’s meaning, but their effect is to make the opening section of the passage even weightier. There are only two additions in the second half of the passage, when he offers the alternatives ‘shew and present’ (l. 17) for ‘representer’, and ‘windy or spongy’ (l. 19) for ‘de vent’. In lines 11–12, he inverts the order, possibly to clarify the logic of the sentence, but in so doing, he loses the near-chiasmus of Montaigne’s ‘jugement, langage, et beaux mots, les pleines conceptions’.
The argument of this passage, that strong thoughts produce an effective style, could be applied to Florio, who writes a strong, forceful English by following the movement of Montaigne’s French arguments very closely and by choosing English words which convey the same qualities of weightiness, sharpness, and liveliness. Some of Florio’s additions give his sentences the sort of balance which contemporary English prose stylists sought for, as in the last phrase of ‘his spirit pickes and ransaketh the whole store-house of words and figures to shew and present himselfe’, but, in general, by following Montaigne so closely, he achieves an English prose style which is neither Ciceronian, nor Euphuistic, nor Senecan, though epigrammatic phrases can play a part in it. More importantly, he brings over for his English audience the thought and much of the tone of his original.
Florio’s translation of Montaigne was successful almost from its first publication in 1603. New editions appeared in 1613 and 1632. The book was owned by Ben Jonson, who borrowed from it in Timber, and Sir Walter Ralegh.26 It was extensively quoted in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Shakespeare used a section of ‘Des cannibales’ in The Tempest (1611) and may well have borrowed from Montaigne’s ideas, through Florio, in earlier plays. Marston (especially in The Dutch Courtesan) and Webster used phrases taken from Florio’s translation in their plays, both for the pithiness of the expression and for the frankness of some of his remarks on sexual behaviour.27 William Hamlin has collected the marginal notes of numerous readers of the first three editions of Florio and has noted its use in Samuel Daniel’s The Queen’s Arcadia (1605) and Richard Younge’s Drunkard’s Character (1638).28 He has edited a seventeenth-century English compilation of moral axioms which evidently draws on Florio.29 Warren Boutcher has shown that James Cleland borrowed from Florio in his Institution of a Young Nobleman (1605).30
Florio’s translation owes its success primarily to the quality of the original. Montaigne was an engaging writer and a perceptive critical thinker. His questioning attitude and his determination to test received ideas against the problems of living in the practical world, as well as his willingness to write about subjects which most other writers passed over, attracted early modern English readers. But Montaigne’s text is often difficult and his habit of adding in new stories, quotations, and reflections can make the line of the argument hard to follow. Florio’s translation is almost always lively, generally accurate, and it reads well in English. For the most part, the excellence of Florio’s English prose derives from the closeness with which he followed Montaigne’s sentence structures. Florio’s vocabulary usually has just the right mixture of concrete, physical objects and abstract concepts. Sometimes he finds breath takingly suitable English equivalents for difficult French words. Florio never wrote anything as good as his translation of Montaigne, though he did compile a superb dictionary; from the point of view of his English reception, Montaigne was fortunate to find a translator who appreciated the power of his sentence structures and had the breadth and liveliness of vocabulary to match his own ‘sinnowie, materiall, and solid’ language.
Boutcher, W. ‘Marginal Commentaries: The Cultural Transmission of Montaigne’s Essais in Shakespeare’s England’, in P. Kapitaniak and J.-M. Maguin, eds., Shakespeare et Montaigne (Montpellier: Société Française Shakespeare, 2004), 13–27.
Cave, T. How to Read Montaigne (London: Granta, 2007).
Friedrich, H. Montaigne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
Hamlin, W. M. ‘Florio’s Montaigne and the Tyranny of “Custome”: Appropriation, Ideology and Early English Readership of the Essayes’, Renaissance Quarterly, 63 (2010): 491–544.
Langer, U., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Mack, P. Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).
Matthiessen, F. O. Translation: An Elizabethan Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).
Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. Screech (Harmondsworth: Panguin, 1991).
—— Les Essais, ed. J. Balsamo, M. Magnien, and C. Magnien-Simonet (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).
—— The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, Translated by John Florio, ed. A. R. Waller, 3 vols. (London: Everyman’s Library, Dent, 1910).
Sayce, R. A. The Essays of Montaigne: A Critical Exploration (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972).
Yates, F. A. John Florio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934).