Montaigne Commentary Anastasia Cooke

In this passage, Montaigne is concerned with the dichotomy and competition between human
nature and human artifice, arguing that the former is inherently superior to the latter; in this
way the Brazilians are painted by him as infinitely better than any European society. He
matches the boldness of this claim with the boldness of his attempt to persuade. It may be
noted that the end of the passage was translated into English and used virtually unaltered by
Shakespeare in his play The Tempest, a testament to its power and originality.

From the outset, Montaigne clearly argues that the Brazilians, who exist in a primitive state
and are governed only by ‘les loix naturelles’, are purer and more innocent than European
civilisations which are founded on human ‘artifice’. He is writing to persuade, and uses
emphatic devices such as the repetition of ‘fort’ in the opening of the passage to underline
how little the Brazilians have deviated from nature. He also repeats the phrase ‘nous voyons
par experience’ which lends his argument a factual weight, although the extent to which this
is true is perhaps to be questioned, given that he only once briefly met a few Brazilians
outside of their natural homeland. More compellingly in his effort to convince the reader of
his argument he also employs a personal approach, using the first person: ‘il me semble’,
‘diroy je’. Montaigne then attempts to demonstrate that the extent to which the Brazilians are
‘si pure et simple’ is almost incomprehensible to European society, whose ‘poesie’ and
‘philosophie’ cannot imitate this loyalty to nature. His use of the verb ‘feindre’ here is
significant as it highlights the artifice and falsity of European civilisation. He further attempts
to show the originality of his own conceit by bringing into his discourse the figures of
‘Licurgus et Platon’ and suggesting that even they, Classical scholars revered by humanists at
the time of his writing, were unable to conceive of an ideal society even close to ‘cette
perfection’. This is stressed by the polysyndeton of ‘nul(le)’ in his list of all the things about
the Brazilians that would have seemed extraordinary to them, with the negative construction
showing what the Brazilians lack conversely painting them as all the richer for it.

One aspect of the two cultures that Montaigne however does not explicitly mention and
compare is religion, perhaps because he was writing at a time of such intolerance and
hostility between branches of even the same religion within France, that to bring religion
overtly into his argument would have undoubtedly met with strong resistance and
condemnation. Yet this does not mean that the lexicon and associations of religion are not
present in Montaigne’s discourse. There is a latent comparison of the Brazilians with Adam
and Eve before the Fall: Montaigne emphasises their nakedness and their ‘naifveté’ (a word
of particularly religious connotations, especially when partnered with ‘originelle’). Yet this is
not to suggest that the Brazilian people are religious in any Christian sense, as we are told
that they have ‘nul usage du vin ou du bled’, a pointed reminder that they thus cannot have
Holy Mass. It is more to convey a sense that the incorruptibility of the Brazilians is because
they remain in their primal, original state. Montaigne also suggest this through his listing of
the vices that are unknown to the Brazilians: ‘la mensonge, la trahison, la dissimulation,
l’avarice, l’envie, la detraction, [et] le pardon’. This strongly evokes the ancient Greek myth
of Pandora’s Box, consequently implying that the Brazilians exist in that state of purity and
perfection known to mankind before Pandora opened the box and let all of these evils into the
world. The departure from standard syntax in this sentence by not having a verb arguably
amplifies the emphatic effect of the list. Montaigne is therefore painting the Brazilians as
existing in a completely primordial, prelapsarian state that is beyond religion, in contrast to
French society that at the time was ripping itself apart and indulging in religious savagery.

However, arguably Montaigne is somewhat frustrated in his message since his own
occupation as a writer is one of ‘artifice’ and thus his task of promoting nature over art is
constitutionally paradoxical. His use of Latin quotations from Seneca and Virgil, figures
whose literary and philosophical craft can be said to be the ultimate embodiment of human
artifice, in particular negates his previous condemnation of this very same artifice. That said,
this is to judge Montaigne from the standpoint of moral relativism when in the wider context
of his essay he has only ever attempted to be a cultural relativist, so arguably this innate
contradiction between his argument and his method of deploying it does not actually detract
much from his assertion of the supremacy of nature over art. Montaigne is not preaching a
European conversion to the natural virtues exhibited by the Brazilians as he is conscious of
the unbridgeable cultural difference between the two peoples. This is evidenced on a
fundamental lexical level through the opposition throughout the passage between ‘nous’,
‘nostre’ and ‘ils’, ‘leur’.
To conclude, within this passage Montaigne has set himself a task that is by nature at odds
with his mode of carrying it out; how can he persuade an audience that having ‘nul
cognoissance de lettres’ is a purer and nobler way of living when he himself employs the art
of writing, and in such a literary manner, to convey this message? Thus the more he attempts
to persuade through the application of sophisticated literary techniques and reference to
classical scholarship, the more his message in almost invalidated. However, perhaps this is to
judge him too harshly, as it must be acknowledged than in a time of such intolerance his ideas
were fresh and clear-sighted, and certainly convincing enough to have initiated the
Enlightenment exaltation of the ‘noble savage’.