A discussion with Jonny Price, president of WeFunder.

Montaigne devotes a brief essay to a pair of pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, “Of Democritus and Heraclitus.” The former is reputed to have been a misanthrope, perhaps a melancholic. The latter was known as “the laughing philosopher.”  The essayist begins by weighing the importance of judgment in life generally and in the composition of his essays: “If it is a subject I do not understand at all, even on that I essay my judgment, sounding the ford from a good distance; and then, finding it too deep for my height, I stick to the bank.” That’s an admirable custom, one too few of us practice. Typically, Montaigne proceeds by association, not rigorous, thesis-like adherence to logic. He describes his method for writing an essay, and sounds very much like a blogger:   “I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all equally good to me. And I never plan to develop them completely. For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view. I would venture to treat some matter thoroughly, if I knew myself less well.”   As usual, Montaigne sounds remarkably like one of our contemporaries. There’s nothing stuffy or cautious about the way he proceeds. He’s good at producing vivid metaphors drawn from real life (“sometimes only to lick it”). He handles serious subjects almost casually, sometime humorously. Two-thirds of the way through his essay he finally introduces the philosophers of his title. Democritus, he writes, “finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears.”   You may think you know where he’s going with this but Montaigne is no Renaissance version of a virtue signaler. He endorses Democritus’ manner, “not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless.”   Robert Burton attributes his preface to The Anatomy of Melancholy to his persona/pseudonym “Democritus Junior,” who writes of his Greek forebear:   “After a wandering life, he settled at Abdera, a town in Thrace, and was sent for thither to be their lawmaker, recorder, or town-clerk, as some will; or as others, he was there bred and born. Howsoever it was, there he lived at last in a garden in the suburbs, wholly betaking himself to his studies and a private life, ‘saving that sometimes he would walk down to the haven and laugh heartily at such variety of ridiculous objects, which there he saw.’ Such a one was Democritus.”   [The Montaigne passages are from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, 1957).]

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Here I encounter yet again the bothersome issue of major vs. minor writers. When “minor” is used as a purely dismissive judgment, beware. There are minor writers who write beautifully and earn our respect and even love – Max Beerbohm is the first who comes to mind – and others who never transcend their triviality. Say, Carl Sandburg. No serious reader reads Shakespeare exclusively, and consider the poor soul who consumes a steady diet of Sandburg.  I was surprised in 2023 when The European Conservative, of all journals, published an essay titled “A.E. Housman, Poet and Pessimist” by the American writer Thomas Banks. He makes his judgment clear in the first sentence: “[I]t is not likely that either the critic or the lay reader would represent him as a major poet.” To substantiate his conclusion, Banks cites the relatively small quantity of poems Housman produced and continues: “Additionally, the verse he wrote, though for quality it is one of the most even bodies of composition in the English language, is as slender in its themes as it is slight in its volume.”   Does “slender in its themes” mean Housman’s themes are small in number or trivial in substance? There’s no law obligating poets to address some phantom number of subjects, and it’s surely not the latter. Consider XL from A Shropshire Lad, a poem that has mysteriously charmed me since I was a teenager:   “Into my heart an air that kills    From yon far country blows:  What are those blue remembered hills,    What spires, what farms are those?    “That is the land of lost content,   I see it shining plain,  The happy highways where I went    And cannot come again.”   I’ve been reading Landor lately and was pleased to see Banks liken him to Housman:   “Housman was not a dry man, and he cast less peaceful and somber a shadow on the page than he probably thought. Something like Walter Savage Landor’s ‘I strove with none, for none was worth my strife’ does not really get at the heart of the man, for in truth, Housman was professionally combative and none to suffer fools gladly. The same, ironically, could be said for the Romanesque Landor himself, whose notoriously acrimonious nature gives the lie to ‘The Dying Speech of the Old Philosopher.’”   Housman was Kingsley Amis’ favorite poet and Philip Larkin called him, with Larkin-esque authority, “the poet of unhappiness,” though he added provocatively that Housman “seems to have been a very nice man.” In more than his devotion to Juvenal, Housman reminds me of no other writer so much as Dr. Johnson. Consider the hatred of cant they shared, the passionate, sometimes tortured inner lives they led, and their devotion to scholarship. Banks respects Housman enough to take him seriously and not trivialize his poems. Nothing is accomplished by labeling a writer “major” or “minor,” except perhaps discouraging future readers. Banks acknowledges that Housman left us “a few poems of exquisite perfectionism.” He writes well, never raises the subject of Housman’s homosexuality and proves he has a sense of humor:   “Creation was for him pulvis et umbrae [dust and shadows] and no more, in spite of any appearance to the contrary. The vision addresses itself to the reader in nearly everything he wrote, and never is it mitigated by even an occasional coloring of optimism. The narrator of quite a number of the Shropshire poems tenders the eternal consolation of the glum, that at least our lot now is no worse than anyone’s ever was, and the present is no blacker than the past or future. The Valley of the Shadow of Death has no sunny uplands at either end of it, so let us study perseverance at the expense of hope. Of all mature attitudes, this is one of the least enviable. So, concluding, he was not one for causes. An intensely private man, he is a monument to a time, long since lost to us, when not every man or woman of letters felt the urge to pester the editor about the evils of processed food or Big Tobacco.”   Housman was born on this date, March 26, in 1859 and died at age seventy-seven in 1936. Go here and here to read more by Thomas Banks, a first-rate writer.