Emerson, ‘Montaigne; Or, The Skeptic’
I was eager to read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Montaigne; Or, The Skeptic,” which was published in his Representative Men: Seven Lectures (1850). I was disappointed and had a similar experience in reading Emerson that I have discussed in an earlier post:
Non-Sequaciousness (Emerson; also Carlyle)
Among the objectives of my posts on this site is to discuss “bad writing” and why even purportedly good writers fail.
I am very interested in Montaigne. I wanted to know what Emerson had to say about him. On about the seventh or eighth page of the essay, I found what I was looking for.
I found it tough to wade through the long introduction, and I had to dig and “extract” the stuff that I was interested in and the ((to me) salient points from a mass of glowing verbiage.
In his essay on non-sequaciousness (published in 1900) , Patrick Dillon states
… Emerson is, of all modern writers, the least fitted to be relied on as a literary model. The sparks he emits and the shocks he causes are dazzling and exciting; and his ideas are brilliant as the cascade’s spray; but it will be admitted that the effect of such a writer, taken as a model £or literary novices, must be in the last degree disastrous. The youthful mind is vastly inclined to vagueness, and, like Milton’s spirits, “finds no end, in wandering mazes lost.” Whatever, then, tends to encourage this tendency, must be fatal to that ratiocination, which, says Cardinal Newman, “is the great principle of order in thinking, reducing chaos to harmony.
Try reading the first few pages or paragraphs of Emerson’s essay for yourself.
— posted by Roger W. Smith
November 2023
Roger's rhetoric 