Although Montaigne's Victorian and modem heirs rarely write from such explicitly skeptical premises, some, like Ruskin, Lawrence, Mailer, and Didion, frequently cite autobiography for much the same reason as had their predecessor -- to convince their readers by purporting to reveal the surroundings within which an idea took shape. Although the conception of the sage as master of experience does not demand that he write directly from his own experience, many such passages in fact take the form of autobiographical records. For example, we recall that when Ruskin attacks Poussin's La Riccia he proceeds by comparing the painting with a word-painting of the scene itself, which he begins by explicitly stating that his knowledge of the actual landscape derives from personal experience: "Not long ago," he informs the reader, "I was slowly descending this very bit of carriage-road, the first turn after you leave Albano" (3.278). Unlike his mention in "Traffic" of his encounter with a book on the diffusion of taste, this citation of personal experience emphasizes, not his intellectual acuity, but his capacity for experience. It also emphasizes, as do most such word-paintings in autobiographical passages, that the writer has a personally achieved, rather than a secondhand, knowledge.

Ruskin frequently asserts that he has such personal knowledge, particularly in is earlier writings on art, and whereas his brilliant bird's-eye view of the Mediterranean in The Stones of Venice (10.186-87) obviously exemplifies a purely imagined sight, his opening discussion of the doges' tombs (9.48-51), like his tour of Torcello (10.17-19) and the inside of St. Mark's (10.85-89), are presented the records of personal experience by a master of vision.

This entire matter of citing one's own experiences -- or as Arnold puts it so well, using oneself as a corpus vile -- relates intimately to the common technique of creating ethos by confessions of weakness, shortcomings, and error. Once again, Montaigne provides both an example and a source of this means of creating credibility. many passages in the Essays demonstrate, he reveals his most intimate personal habits and preferences, willingly informing the reader of matters generally hidden or ignored. We learn his fears, is preferences in eating and sleeping, the minor details of his health, the frequency and method of his urinating and defecating. such revelations of private facts are closely related to the common technique used by the sages for which Montaigne also provides many precedent -- the creation of ethos by confessing one's shortcomings -- for in both cases one attempts to win the audience's allegiance by sharing details with it that one usually keeps secret. As Emerson points out:

Montaigne is the frankest and honestest of all writers. His French freedom runs into grossness; but he has anticipated all censure by the bounty of his own confessions.... nobody can think or say worse of him than he does.... But, with this really superfluous frankness, the opinion of an invincible probity grows into every reader's mind. ["Montaigne; or, the Skeptic," 698].

Emerson's comment is particularly valuable, since it provides evidence of the effect such techniques had upon one nineteenth-century reader.

Montaigne's means of creating this impression of "invincible probity" take many forms, not all of which exemplify authentic revelation or confession. For example, although he accuses himself in "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions" of a multitude of shortcomings -- he is alternately chaste and lascivious, clever and stupid, surly and affable, lying and truthful (242) -- such citations of his own flaws hardly constitute his true confessional mode, since he cites himself as a typical instance of flaws and inconsistencies that he believes to be shared by all people. He uses the true confessional mode, however, in "Of Cruelty" when he insists that he is hardly a virtuous man. "I am so far from having arrived at that first and most perfect degree of excellence where virtue becomes a habit," he confesses, "that even of the second degree I have hardly given any proof. I have not put myself to great effort to curb the desires by which I have found myself pressed. My virtue is a virtue, or should I say an innocence, that is accidental and fortuitous" (311). Such confessions urge upon us that the author is frank, sincere, and honest, that one who so willingly reveals his own shortcomings, intellectual, social, and moral, can be trusted to tell the truth.