Part 34 (1/2)

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.