French Classics Part 35

Voltaire's judgment was correct, his imagination rich, his intellect agile, his taste lively, and his moral sense ruined.

It is impossible for Voltaire to satisfy, and impossible for him not to please.

In Voltaire, as in the monkey, the movements are charming and the features hideous. One always sees in him, at the end of a clever hand, an ugly face.

That oratorical "authority" [weight of personal character] of which the ancients speak--you feel it in Bossuet more than in any other man; after him, in Pascal, in La Bruyere, in J. J. Rousseau even, but never in Voltaire.

The style of Rousseau makes upon the soul the impression which the flesh of a lovely woman would make in touching us. There is something of the woman in his style.

Racine and Boileau are not fountain-heads. A fine choice in imitation const.i.tutes their merit. It is their books that imitate books, not their souls that imitate souls. Racine is the Virgil of the unlettered.

Moliere is comic in cold blood. He provokes laughter and does not laugh. Herein lies his excellence.

Bernardin [St. Pierre] writes by moonlight, Chateaubriand by sunlight.

The quality of both writers is such that we seem simply to be making the transition from masculine to feminine in going, as now we do, from Joubert to Madame Swetchine.

Madame SWETCHINE lives, and deserves to live, in French literature--for, though Russian, she wrote in French--by the incomparable exquisiteness of her personal, expressing itself in her literary, quality. Purest of pure was she, as in what she wrote, so in what she was. Through sympathetic contemporary description she makes an impression as of one of Fra Angelico's female saints released for a life from the fixed canonization of the canvas.

Madame Swetchine's life was chiefly spent in Paris, where the French language, already long before, in St. Petersburg, grown easy and tripping on her tongue, became to her a second, perhaps more familiar, vernacular. She was a high-born, high-bred, refined, and elegant woman of the world--woman in the world we should rather say, for, in the truest sense, _of_ it she never was--who held brilliant, choicely-frequented _salons_, but who, without ostentation and without affectation, would go from her oratory, which indeed seems to have been a private "chapel," in the full ecclesiastic sense of that word, to her drawing-room; who had even, as Sainte-Beuve indulgently, but with something of his inseparable irony, intimates, the effect of vibrating from the one to the other in the course of the same evening. Madame Swetchine was married young very unequally to a man twenty-five years her senior; but she set the edifying example of half a century's wifely devotion to that husband whom, at the wish of her father, well beloved, she had dutifully accepted in place of a n.o.ble young suitor, the choice of her own affections.

Two volumes--both of "Thoughts," though one of them bears the t.i.tle "Airelles"--shut up within themselves the fragrance that was Madame Swetchine. We cull a few specimens:

Often one is prophet for others only because one is historian for one's self.

The chains which bind us the closest are those which weigh on us the least.

The best of lessons for many persons would be to listen at key-holes; it is a pity for their sake that this is not honorable.

Go always beyond designated duties, and remain within permitted pleasures.

Upon the whole, there is in life only what we put there.

I love knowledge; I love intellect; I love faith--simple faith--yet more, I love G.o.d's shadow better than man's light.

He who has ceased to enjoy his friend's superiority has ceased to love him.

Since there must be chimeras, why is not perfection the chimera of all men?

"Woman is in some sort divine," said the ancient German. "Woman," says the follower of Mahomet, "is an amiable creature who only needs a cage." "Woman," says the European, "is a being nearly our equal in intelligence, and perhaps our superior in fidelity." Everywhere something detracted from our dignity!

No two persons ever read the same book or saw the same picture.

Strength alone knows conflict. Weakness is below even defeat, and is born vanquished.

We are rich only through what we give, and poor only through what we refuse.

Madame Swetchine was a woman of wealth and of leisure so-called; but it may be doubted whether any poor woman in Paris worked harder. She carried with her when she went hence what, through all her conscientious activity, outward and inward, she had in her own being become; and she found besides that ample further reward, unknown, which she had thus grown capable of receiving.

Henri Frederic AMIEL, who lived an almost silent life of sixty years--not quite silent, for he piped a volume or two of ineffectual verse--became a bruit of marvel and of praise soon after his death, through the publication from his "Journal Intime" ["Private Journal"] of a select number of his "Thoughts" found recorded there. How permanent a glow may prove to be the brightness of fame for Amiel thus suddenly outbursting, time only will decide. Already two very opposite opinions find expression concerning his merit--one applausive to the point almost of veneration, the other very freely irreverent.

Both these two contradictory opinions admit of being apparently justified from the text of his "Journal." Take the following for an example on one side:

Is not mind simply that which enables us to merge finite reality in the infinite possibility around it? Or, to put it differently, is not mind the universal virtuality, the universe latent? If so, its zero would be the germ of the infinite, which is expressed mathematically by the double zero (00).

The foregoing sentence is unintelligible enough to make, probably, the impression of pretty pure jargon on most minds. But in truth the amount of such writing in Amiel's "Journal" is proportionally very small.

Another line of entries in the "Journal" tending to reflect disparagement upon the writer consists of reiterated confessions on Amiel's part of morbid weakness of will, with habits of helpless morbid introspection, which, disappointing the hopes of his friends, practically shut him up his whole life long in a well-nigh total sterility of genius. On this count of the indictment against Amiel it is quite impossible to defend him. He was inexcusably non-productive. His "Journal" itself shows that its author should have done more than that.

This book, admirably translated into English by Mrs. Humphrey Ward, exhibits Amiel in the character of a man who always thought and felt and spoke and wrote on the side of what was pure and good and n.o.ble. He was a profoundly religious soul. As the years went on with him, and he became more and more the pa.s.sive prey of his own eternally active thought, there appear to be registered some decline from the simplicity, and some corruption from the wholesomeness, of his earlier religious experience. In fact, he at last seems to let go historical Christianity altogether, still clinging, however, pathetically to G.o.d, as Father, all the time that he regards G.o.d's fatherly providence over the world as only a subjective beautiful illusion of faith existing in his own imaginative mind!

Amiel judges the present age and the current tendency of things:

The age of great men is going.... By continual leveling and division of labor society will become everything and man nothing.... A plateau with fewer and fewer undulations, without contrasts and without oppositions--such will be the aspect of human society. The statistician will register a growing progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on the one hand, a progress of things; on the other, a decline of souls. The useful will take the place of the beautiful, industry of art, political economy of religion, and arithmetic of poetry.

He writes to himself a sort of "spiritual letter" that might almost have been Fenelon's (the date is 1852, he was therefore now thirty-one years old):

We receive everything, both life and happiness; but the _manner_ in which we receive, this is what is still ours. Let us, then, receive trustfully without shame or anxiety. Let us humbly accept from G.o.d even our own nature, and treat it charitably, firmly, intelligently.

Not that we are called upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let us accept ourselves in spite of the evil and the disease.

The first following "thought" is a deep intuition:

There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is one of self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. Pride is seen probably at its purest in the last.

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

Chateaubriand posed all his life as the wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon a pigmy world, and contemptuously affecting to desire nothing from it, though at the same time wishing it to be believed that he could if he pleased possess himself of every thing by mere force of genius.

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.

To grow old is more difficult than to die, because to renounce a good once and for all costs less than to renew the sacrifice day by day and in detail.

From entries fourteen years apart in date, we bring together, abridging them, two expressions of Amiel about Victor Hugo:

His ideal is the extraordinary, the gigantic, the overwhelming, the incommensurable. His most characteristic words are immense, colossal, enormous, huge, monstrous. He finds a way of making even child-nature extravagant and bizarre. The only thing which seems impossible to him is to be natural.

He does not see that pride is a limitation of the mind, and that a pride without limitations is a littleness of soul. If he could but learn to compare himself with other men, and France with other nations, he would see things more truly, and would not fall into these mad exaggerations, these extravagant judgments. But proportion and fairness will never be among the strings at his command. He is vowed to the t.i.tanic; his gold is always mixed with lead, his insight with childishness, his reason with madness. He cannot be simple; the only light he has to give blinds you like that of a fire. He astonishes a reader and provokes him, he moves him and annoys him. There is always some falsity of note in him, which accounts for the _malaise_ he so constantly excites in me. The great poet in him cannot shake off the charlatan. A few shafts of Voltairean irony would have shriveled the inflation of his genius and made it stronger by making it saner. It is a public misfortune that the most powerful poet of a nation should not have better understood his _role_, and that, unlike those Hebrew prophets who scourged because they loved, he should devote himself proudly and systematically to the flattery of his countrymen. France is the world; Paris is France; Hugo is Paris; peoples, bow down!

Amiel had a just perception of the immense healing virtue lodged in happiness:

What doctor possesses such curative resources as those latent in a spark of happiness or a single ray of hope?

A vent of frank French distaste for the German type of book. Amiel had been reading the great nineteenth-century philosopher Lotze:

The noise of a mill-wheel sends one to sleep, and these pages without paragraphs, these interminable chapters, and this incessant dialectical clatter, affect me as though I were listening to a word-mill. I end by yawning like any simple non-philosophical mortal in the face of all this heaviness and pedantry. Erudition and even thought are not everything. An occasional touch of _esprit_, a little sharpness of phrase, a little vivacity, imagination, and grace, would spoil neither.

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.