Chapter 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 classic, justifies us in placing, as we do, his name not only first but principal in the title 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 constitute after he died his title 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 classicist 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 aptitude for being patient. The
aptitude 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 aptitude 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 multitude 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 attitude of that firm and
passionless 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 Massillon'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.

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
constitutes 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 noble young suitor, the choice of her own affections.

Two volumes--both of "Thoughts," though one of them bears the title "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 God'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 noble. He was a profoundly religious soul. As the years went on with him, and he became more and more the passive 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 God, as Father, all the time that he regards God'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 God
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 Titanic; 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.

The following shows a good heart as well as a wise head:

The errand-woman has just brought me my letters. Poor little woman,
what a life! She spends her nights in going backwards and forwards
from her invalid husband to her sister, who is scarcely less helpless,
and her days are passed in labor. Resigned and indefatigable, she goes
on without complaining, till she drops.

Lives such as hers prove something.... The kingdom of God belongs not
to the most enlightened but to the best; and the best man is the most
unselfish man. Humble, constant, voluntary self-sacrifice--this is
what constitutes the true dignity of man.... Society rests upon
conscience and not upon science. Civilization is, first and foremost,
a moral thing.

He first passes judgment on Goethe, and then afterward checks himself:

He [Goethe] has so little soul. His way of understanding love,
religion, duty, and patriotism has something mean and repulsive in it.
There is no ardor, no generosity, in him. A secret barrenness, an
ill-concealed egotism, makes itself felt through all the wealth and
flexibility of his talent.

One must never be too hasty in judging these complex natures.
Completely lacking as he is in the sense of obligation and of sin,
Goethe nevertheless finds his way to seriousness through dignity.
Greek sculpture has been his school of virtue.

Under date 1874, Amiel asks a question and answers it. He had before said, "My creed has melted away":

_Is_ there a particular Providence directing all the circumstances of
our life, and therefore imposing all our trials upon us for
educational ends? Is this heroic faith compatible with our actual
knowledge of the laws of nature? Scarcely. But what this faith makes
objective we may hold as subjective truth.... What he [the moral
being] cannot change he calls the will of God, and to will what God
wills brings him peace.

A melancholy fall from his earlier state! A whole sky between such conscious false motions toward self-deceiving and the victory which overcomes the world, even our faith. Amiel had now definitely lost his health.

Toward the end, occurs this striking and illuminating word about one of the worst of human passions:

Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is precisely
love's contrary. Instead of wishing for the welfare of the object
loved, it desires the dependence of that object upon itself, and its
own triumph. Love is the forgetfulness of self; jealousy is the most
passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting,
and vain ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself. The
contrast is perfect.

Doubting Amiel still thinks that Christ is better than Buddha:

Sorrow is the most tremendous of all realities in the sensible world,
but the transfiguration of sorrow, after the manner of Christ, is a
more beautiful solution of the problem than the extirpation of sorrow,
after the method of Cakyamouni [Buddha].

Amiel was a naturally noble spirit, not equal to making for himself the career that he needed. But the right career, made for him, would have left to history and to literature a very different man from the writer of Amiel's "Journal."

The very latest conspicuous French candidate for renown as a writer of _pensees_ is Joseph ROUX, a rural Roman Catholic priest, and a man still living. Out of a volume of his "Thoughts" lately translated and published in America under the title of "Meditations of a Parish Priest," we show the following specimen of literary criticism peculiarly pertinent to the subject of the present chapter:

Pascal is somber, La Rochefoucauld bitter, La Bruyere malicious,
Vauvenargues melancholy, Chamfort acrimonious, Joubert benevolent,
Swetchine gentle.

Pascal seeks, La Rochefoucauld suspects, La Bruyere spies,
Vauvenargues sympathizes, Chamfort condemns, Joubert excuses,
Swetchine mourns.

Pascal is profound, La Rochefoucauld penetrating, La Bruyere
sagacious, Vauvenargues delicate, Chamfort paradoxical, Joubert
ingenious, Swetchine contemplative.

_Pensee_-writing has gained such headway in France, there is so much literary history behind it there, and it is in itself so fascinating a form of literary activity, that, in that country at least, the fashion will probably never pass away.