' With touching ingenuousness he confesses
his weaknesses and his vanities, of which he scarcely dares to think any
longer. The descriptions he often gives of himself--such as, 'a dreamer'
(_songe-creux_), 'soft' (_molle_), 'heavy' (_poisante_), 'pensive,' and so
forth [32]--prove that he cannot have arrived at a pure enjoyment of
life. He questions the happiness of being a husband and father. We
shall touch upon his views as regards woman, and many other peculiarities
of his, in the passages of 'Hamlet' referring to them.
In nothing does Montaigne arrive at any clear conclusion within himself.
Though he knows how to speak much and well about everything, it is all
mere _bel esprit_, a display of glittering words, hollow verbiage,
which only lands us in a labyrinth of contradictions, from which we
seek an issue as vainly as the author himself. Striving, through all his
life, to arrive at a knowledge of himself, he at last lays down his arms,
considering the attempt a fruitless and impossible task, and, in his last
Essay, [33] he makes this avowal:--
'That which in Perseus, the King of Macedon, was remarked as a rare
thing--viz. that his mind, not settling down into any kind of condition,
went wandering through every manner of life, thus showing such flighty
and erratic conduct that neither he nor others knew what sort of man he
was: this seems to me to apply nearly to the whole world, and more
especially to one of that ilk whom this description would eminently fit.
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