Compassion's Edge. Katherine Ibbett

I seldom read in histories of such commotions in other states without regretting that I could not be present to consider them better, so my curiosity makes me feel some satisfaction at seeing with my own eyes this notable spectacle of our public death, its symptoms and its form. And since I cannot retard it, I am glad to be destined to be able to watch it and learn from it.

      Thus do we eagerly seek to recognize, even in shadow and in the fiction of the theatres, the representation of the tragic play of human fortune.

      Not that we lack compassion for what we hear; but the exceptional nature of these pathetic (pitoyables) events arouses a pain that gives us pleasure.]⁶²

      Montaigne’s discussion of spectacle distinguishes between reading accounts of change and seeing them with his own eyes; to this extent he stays within the rhetoric of the eyewitness so important to much writing of the religious wars. But his positioning as reader or witness is very different from that posited by partisan writers. Both reading and seeing allow him to exercise his curiosity, a notion that sets him apart from the partisan spectator. As Neil Kenny describes, early modern curiosity is not only the desire for knowledge; the term also marks a diligence or care (the terms are related) for the object of curiosity. In the sixteenth century it was frowned upon by Catholic and Calvinist orthodoxy alike.⁶³ Montaigne’s curiosity to look upon the spectacle of the wars makes him an observer who is not disinterested, but neither is he blindly driven by affect. His reappraisal of the arousal of pity makes room for an entirely different sort of reading.

      Montaigne continues with a statement of some embarrassment at how little these public misfortunes have cost him as a moderate sheltered from the effects of partisan opinion, concluding: “Aussi qu’en matiere d’interests publiques, à mesure que mon affection est plus universellement espandue, elle en est plus foible.” [“Also, in the matter of public calamities, the more universally my sympathy is dispersed, the weaker it is.”]⁶⁴ Montaigne’s pitiful spectacle allows for a less ferociously partisan response and affords its onlooker something almost pleasurable. Where the wartime rhetoric sought to direct and focus affective response, here Montaigne speaks of diffused affections. In this model, one can feel—pitifully, pleasurably—in response to what one sees, but this feeling does not compel communitarian identification nor partisan action. The Essais draft a new model of political spectatorship, moving away from the exemplary toward an imagining of things invisible to the public eye. In “De la gloire” (II, 16) Montaigne inquires into the status of deeds unwitnessed but not unwasted: “Combien de belles action particulières s’ensevelissent dans la foule d’une bataille?” [“How many fine individual actions are buried in the press of a battle!”]⁶⁵ Where Protestant writers build a pitiful spectacle and imagine that the right sort of audience will come, Montaigne is uncertain that any spectacle can give rise to a predictable outcome. How many pitiful sights disappear without anyone being moved at all?

      This hesitation about the legitimacy of the pitiful spectacle structures the extraordinary opening essay of Montaigne’s Essais, “Par divers moyens on arrive à pareille fin,” probably written in 1578 and first published as the opening to the first edition of 1580.⁶⁶ Montaigne begins the essay and his book by first explaining a military strategy and then complicating the notion that a strategy can be explained at all:

      La plus commune façon d’amollir les cœurs de ceux qu’on a offensez, lors qu’ayant la vengeance en main, ils nous tiennent à leur mercy, c’est de les esmouvoir par submission à commiseration et à pitié. Toutesfois la braverie, et la constance, moyens tous contraires, ont quelquefois servi à ce mesme effect.⁶⁷

      [The commonest way of softening the hearts of those we have offended, when, vengeance in hand, they hold us at their mercy, is by submission to move them to commiseration and pity. However, audacity and steadfastness, entirely contrary means, have sometimes served to produce the same effect.]⁶⁸

      Montaigne’s exploration of how to soften a victor’s heart is, David Quint suggests, a refraction of his thinking about and through the Wars of Religion.⁶⁹ But unlike the other accounts of pity we have seen stemming from those wars, Montaigne’s essay does not let us rest with an easy distinction between subject and object of pity, pitier and pitied. And unlike most writers discussed throughout this book, he does not deliberate on how or when to grant compassion but rather on how to get it. Montaigne draws on the familiar language of writing the wars but also in this first essay of his book sets a deliberately new tone as thinker, writer, and perhaps most of all reader. “Par divers moyens” sets up reading as a form of response to the wars.

      Montaigne’s essay is in part, of course, a reading of and meditation on Seneca, whose essay “De clementia” [“On Mercy”] written for Emperor Nero famously distinguishes between mercy and pity in order to dismiss the latter.⁷⁰ In granting clemency, writes Seneca, we gain security and thus exercise a reasoned mercy; but in pity we lose that rationality and lose our security, too. Seneca’s distinctions between different categories of emotion, attitude, and effect also structure Montaigne’s essay, but where Seneca uses those distinctions to push some categories of emoters aside—notably those who respond to suffering but not its cause—Montaigne lets no distinction remains secure for long. He begins with the example of Edward, prince of Wales, hailed for his greatness, who responded not to supplications but only to the bold resistance of three gentlemen whose “notable vertu” [“remarkable valor”] eventually causes him to “faire misericorde à tous les autres habitans de la ville” [“show mercy to all the inhabitants of the city”].⁷¹ Here greatness responds to the greatness it recognizes in others; compassion, in this instance, responds by following similarity.

      The following example gives us the prince Scanderberg, who on the point of killing a soldier is struck by the “resolution” of his foe and desists. Here great nobility reaches across difference and responds to the great virtue of a common man; Montaigne notes that Scanderberg’s refusal to act might be read differently by those “qui n’auront leu” [“who have not read”] (8, 3) the strength and valor of the prince, who might imagine his inaction to be a sign of weakness. In this phrasing, what we see is bolstered by reading; the text hesitates between imagining that we might read the person or have read about the person (Donald Frame translates the line in full as “who have not read about”). Montaigne puts the two practices—reading texts and reading people—in necessary relation with one another.

      Earlier in this chapter we saw how compassion proceeds through and constructs rigorous social structures. In “Par divers moyens,” Montaigne moves carefully through a range of such structures, trying out each variation in turn. Already in his first examples of mercy in response to audacity, we see the structural underpinning of supplication and response. In responding to another, we respond across or behind a mesh of similarities and differences: rank, gender, courage. In his third example Montaigne worries at the gendered distinctions between male virtue and womanly softness that are so important to the Stoic tradition: the “cœur magnanime” (8) of the noble women who “great-heartedly” (3) carry their duke and their households on their shoulders so impressed Emperor Conrad that his hatred for the duke is lost and he begins to treat them “humainement” [“humanely”] (8, 4).⁷² Here the emperor responds across a gender distinction but within the circle of nobles. His human treatment is of humans who are, in some way, like him. In this example, you get a better result from your valor if you are the right sort of person to start with. Although Montaigne began by announcing that he would study “the commonest way,” up to this point it looks as though the common way depends almost exclusively on being born noble.

      From these historical examples Montaigne falls back upon himself, in what Quint has described as “from an ethical standpoint, the single most important contribution to the self-portrait that will be a major project of his book.”⁷³ We swing from one perspective to another. Leaving behind the position of the vanquished, Montaigne notes that either supplication or Stoicism would undo him were he the victor, “car j’ay une merveilleuse lascheté vers la misericorde et la mansuetude. Tant y a qu’à mon advis je serois pour me rendre plus naturellement à la compassion qu’à l’estimation” (8). [“I am wonderfully lax in the direction of mercy and gentleness.