Yeah, yeah, I know: who cares about what Montaigne has to say about Cato the Younger? Well, as usual, M. uses the occasion of a brief (3+ pages) essay on Cato to digress into the nature and impact of poetry.
The essay begins with a gorgeous little passage about M.’s unwillingness to judge other people by using himself as a baseline:
I believe in and conceive a thousand contrary ways of life; and in contrast with the common run of men, I more easily admit difference than resemblance between us. I am as ready as you please to acquit another man from sharing my conditions and principles. I consider him simply in himself, without relation to others; I mold him to his own model.
From here, there’s a little digression about how virtue doesn’t exist in “modern times,” which unfortunately put me in mind of the great Ali G monologue about “Respek”:
Respek is important. Da sad ting is, there is so little respek left in the world that if you look up the word in the dictionary, you’ll find it’s been taken out. You should learn to Respek everyone: animals, children, bitches, mingers, spazmos, lezzies, fatty boombas, and even gaylords. So to all you lot out there, but mainly to the normal people: Respek, westside.
But that gets us off the subject, namely Montaigne’s vivid description of poetry, its audience, its critics and the chain of art:
We have many more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to create it than to understand it. On a certain low level it can be judged by precepts and by art. But the good, supreme, divine poetry is above the rules and reason. Whoever discerns its beauty with a firm, sedate gaze does not see it, any more than he sees the splendor of a lightning flash. It does not persuade our judgment, it ravishes and overwhelms it.
The frenzy that goads the man who can penetrate it also strikes a third person on hearing him discuss it and recite it, as a magnet not only attracts a needle but infuses into it its own faculty of attracting others. And it is seen more clearly in the theater that the sacred inspiration of the muses, after first stirring the poet to anger, sorrow and hatred and transporting him out of himself wherever they will, then through the poet strikes the actor, and through the actor consecutively a whole crowd. It is the chain of our needles, hanging one form the other.
Booyakasha.