Chapter 6 - Two Ways of Being Wise

Summary

This chapter extends philosophical comparison to Montaigne, whose first translator, Florio, was Shakespeare’s friend. The chapter focusses on likenesses and unlikenesses, but brings out a common wisdom. There are confluences of nature and taste. Both find pleasure the central motivation for literary study. Their essays take different forms but assert Reason’s instability; Montaigne’s array of topics remains prescient of Johnson’s. Thus, the “ondoyant et divers” qualities of Montaigne are reflected in the “mingled” drama Johnson attributed to Shakespeare; likewise, the Johnsonian flux of experience links Johnson’s Rasselas with Montaigne’s “Of Experience.” The tendency of Imagination to dominate reason recalls, similarly, Montaigne’s “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde.” The effort to live according to nature is defeated by nature. The chapter concludes with discussion of the Lives. Montaigne’s sense of the random and various ways by which life comes to an end anticipates Johnson’s accounts of the deaths of the poets.