Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

Mapping Woolf’s Montaignian Modernism
added). It his here, almost ten pages into the nearly ninety-page chapter, that he hearkens
Montaigne’s essay “Of Cruelty” in an attempt to make sense of these terrible eff ects. But
it is not so much the quotation itself—relating Montaigne’s skittishness about seeing even
chickens, pigs, and hares being killed—as what Montaigne stands for that is of interest to
Leonard. Having had his say nearly four hundred years before Leonard pens this fi nal fragment
of his memoir, Montaigne was, Leonard believes, the “fi rst person in the world to
express this intense, personal horror of cruelty. He was, too, the fi rst completely modern
man…a man of the Renaissance, that movement…which created a new modern civilization”
that “was destroyed in 1914” (18). Th e non-believer Leonard idealizes—we might
even say he secularly canonizes—Montaigne as a saint of the very civilized modernity he is
mourning. In fact, writing in a review more than forty years earlier Leonard, perhaps seeing
his own image in Montaigne’s self-portrait—as writers like his wife Virginia and André
Gide had observed the Frenchman’s Essais often compel people to do—had referred to the
ostensibly Catholic agnostic as one who disbelieved in God (“Montaigne” 778). Virginia
Woolf, by contrast, seems to be more careful about preserving Montaigne’s skepticism as
well as her own agnosticism. At the very end of her 1924 essay on the Frenchman, she
assumes his voice asking “is the beauty of this world enough, or is there, elsewhere, some
explanation of the mystery? To this what answer can there be? Th ere is none. Th ere is only
one more question: ‘Que scais-je?’” (CR1 68).
In the earlier 1927 review of a new Montaigne translation, Leonard, still rattled by
the First World War, would begin to speak of two Montaignes. Th e traditional Montaigne,
he writes, “is the man and writer whom thousands have recognized and loved;
perhaps the most loveable, wisest, sanest, and wittiest Frenchman who ever wrote a book;
the man who asks the question: ‘Que sçay-je?’ and wrote a masterpiece in not answering
it.” Th is fi rst Montaigne, continues Leonard, echoing his own wife’s description of the
Frenchman three years earlier, is the one we can still “see and hear, sitting in his library
…with a half-smile on his lips…engaged in…conversation.” 7 But inspired by recent work
on Montaigne that had clearly gained a political charge in the aftermath of the First World
War—just as our own work today may be charged by the war in Iraq—Leonard speaks
of a second Montaigne who writes with a “defi nite and persistent” purpose—a man who
“lived in a time of horrible chaos and cruelty, and barbarism due to the struggles of religious
sects [fi ghting]…in the name of absolute truth.” In such an atmosphere, Leonard
reminds us, Montaigne rejected these absolute truths, and managed to be nothing less
than one of the most “humane, rational, and civilized men that [had] ever lived.” With
great “persistence and subtlety,” this second Montaigne, according to Leonard, “used his
Essays to attack the religious beliefs in France that were making life intolerable.” And
since it was impossible to attack them directly—indeed, Montaigne protected himself by
professing Catholicism—he “adopted a method of attrition pursued through perpetual
irony, innuendo, and asides” (778).
It is interesting to note that in studies of Leonard’s wife’s work over the last forty
years, two Woolfs, we all know, tended to emerge as well. On the one hand, there was the
apolitical one who shied away from the public activism of her husband, relied too much
on charm and the lessons of her “tea-table training” to be an eff ective feminist writer, and
escaped into a myth of androgyny that Elaine Showalter famously asserts betrayed the
claims of diff erence so important to the feminist project (263-97). On the other hand,
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