French Classics Part 34

XXIV.

JOUBERT: 1754-1824; Madame Swetchine: 1782-1859; Amiel: 1821-1881.

We come now to that nineteenth-century group, foreshadowed on an earlier page, of French _pensee_-writers.

The longer lapse of time in JOUBERT'S case, constantly confirming his claim to be a true cla.s.sic, justifies us in placing, as we do, his name not only first but princ.i.p.al in the t.i.tle to the present chapter.

Joseph Joubert presents the singular case of a man of letters living to a good old age, whose published literary work, and, therefore, whose literary fame, are wholly posthumous. He left behind him more than two hundred blank books filled with notes of thoughts which were to const.i.tute after he died his t.i.tle to enduring remembrance.

Everything important surviving from his pen exists in the form of what the French call _pensees_. The sense of this word one of Joubert's own _pensees_ very well expresses:

I should like to convert wisdom into coin, that is, mint it into _maxims_, into _proverbs_, into _sentences_, easy to keep and to circulate.

Another of his _pensees_ confesses, perhaps we should say rather, professes, what the ambition was that this most patient of writers indulged with reference to the literary form of his work:

If there exists a man tormented by the accursed ambition of putting a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and that phrase into a word, that man is myself.

Joubert was a natural unchangeable cla.s.sicist in taste and spirit. The Periclean age of Greece, the Augustan age of Rome, the "great age" of France, that of Louis XIV., supplied Joubert with most of the books that fed his mind. He remained distinctively Christian in creed, though not nicely orthodox according to any accepted standard. Like so many of his literary compatriots, Joubert owed a great debt, for intellectual quickening, shaping, and refining, to brilliant and beautiful women.

We show a few, too few, specimens that may indicate this gifted Frenchman's rare and precious quality:

Religion is a fire to which example furnishes fuel, and which goes out if it does not spread.

The Bible is to the religions [of mankind], what the Iliad is to poetry.

A comparison, the latter foregoing, however faulty by defect we may justly esteem it, loyally designed, of course, by the author to render profound homage to the Bible.

Only just the right proportion of wit should be put into a book; in conversation a little too much is allowable.

We may convince others by our arguments; but we can persuade them only by their own.

Frankness is a natural quality; constant veracity is a virtue.

In pondering such golden sentences, one is constantly incited to make maxims one's self; which, indeed, is a part of the value of this kind of literature.

Gravity is but the rind of wisdom; but it is a preservative rind.

The foregoing happy English rendering of the French maxim we borrow from Mr. Henry Attwell, who has published a selection of Joubert's _pensees_ translated, the translation being accompanied with the original text.

Children have more need of patterns than of critics.

Children should be made reasonable, but they should not be made reasoners. The first thing to teach them is that it is reasonable for them to obey and unreasonable for them to dispute. Without that, education would waste itself in bandying arguments, and every thing would be lost if all teachers were not clever cavillers.

In a poem there should be not only poetry of images, but poetry of ideas.

Words, like lenses, darken whatever they do not help us see.

Buffon says that genius is but the apt.i.tude for being patient. The apt.i.tude for a long-continued and unwearying effort of attention is indeed, the genius of observation; but there is another genius, that of invention, which is apt.i.tude for a quick, prompt, and ever-active energy of penetration.

Buffon's is a good working definition, to say the least--for genius of any sort.

The end of a production should always call to mind its beginning.

This may be compared to the law in musical composition requiring that a piece end in the key in which it began.

Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.

"Artistic," instead of "literary," Joubert might have widened his "thought" by saying.

When there is born in a nation a man capable of producing a great thought, another is born there capable of understanding it and of admiring it.

That which astonishes, astonishes once; but that which is admirable is more and more admired.

Fully to understand a great and beautiful thought requires, perhaps, as much time as to conceive it.

A few individual literary judgments now, and we shall have shown from Joubert all that our room will admit:

Seek in Plato forms and ideas only. These are what he himself sought.

There is in him more light to see by than objects to see, more form than substance. We should breathe him and not feed on him.

Homer wrote to be sung, Sophocles to be declaimed, Herodotus to be recited, and Xenophon to be read. From these different destinations of their works, there could not but spring a mult.i.tude of differences in their style.

Xenophon wrote with a swan's quill, Plato with a pen of gold, and Thucydides with a stylus of bronze.

In Plato the spirit of poetry gives life to the languors of dialectics.

Plato loses himself in the void; but one sees the play of his wings; one hears the noise of their motion.

Cicero is, in philosophy, a kind of moon. His teaching sheds a light, very soft, but borrowed, a light altogether Greek, which the Roman has softened and enfeebled.

Horace pleases the intellect, but he does not charm the taste. Virgil satisfies the taste no less than the reflective faculty. It is as delightful to remember his verses as to read them.

There is not in Horace a single turn, one might almost say a single word, that Virgil would have used, so different are their styles.

Behind the thought of Pascal, we see the att.i.tude of that firm and pa.s.sionless intellect. This it is, more than all else, which makes him so imposing.

Fenelon knows how to pray, but he does not know how to instruct We have in him a philosopher almost divine, and a theologian almost without knowledge.

M. de Bausset says of Fenelon: "He loved men better than he knew them." Charmingly spoken; it is impossible to praise more wittily what one blames, or better to praise in the very act of blaming.

The plan of Ma.s.sillon's sermons is insignificant, but their bas-reliefs are superb.

Montesquieu appears to teach the art of making empires; you seem to yourself to be learning it when you listen to him, and every time you read him you are tempted to go to work and construct one.