are inaccurate; half the inferences are mere guesses. And yet it changed the thought of the world. What is the explanation of this paradox?
Much, no doubt, was due to charm of style. If you want to be read, still more if you want to be widely read, you must be readable. In Montesquieu's time, books on political and legal science were, as a rule, unreadable. But the Spirit of Laws was, and still is, an eminently readable book. No one before Montesquieu had dealt in so lively and brilliant a manner with the dry subject of laws and political institutions. The book reflects the personality of the writer. His personality is not obtruded in the foreground, like that of Montaigne, but it is always present in the background, and its presence gives a human interest to an abstract topic. You see the two sides of the author; the favourite guest of Parisian salons, and the solitary student, the desultory and omnivorous reader. He lived, we must remember, in an age when conversation was cultivated as a fine art. That untranslatable word 'esprit,' which was in the mouth of every eighteenth-century Frenchman, meant, in its narrowest and most special sense, the essence of good conversation[1]. Montesquieu had, like other Frenchmen of his time, thought much about the art of conversation, and had practised it in the best salons—where, however, he had the reputation of being more of a listener than a talker—and the
- ↑ 'L'esprit de conversation est ce qu'on appelle de l'esprit parmi les Français. Il consiste à (sic) un dialogue ordinairement gai, dans lequel chacun, sans s'écouter beaucoup, parle et répond, et où tout se traite d'une manière coupée, prompte et vive.... Ce qu'on appelle esprit chez les Français n'est donc pas de l'esprit, mais un genre particulier de l'esprit.'—Montesquieu, Pensées (Collection Bordelaise), ii. 302, 303.
