Why should we ever treat of any dead authors but the famous ones? Mainly
for this reason: because, from these famous personages, home or foreign,
whom we all know so well, and of whom so much has been said, the amount
of stimulus which they contain for us has been in a great measure
disengaged; people have formed their opinion about them, and do not
readily change it. One may write of them afresh, combat received
opinions about them, even interest one’s readers in so doing; but the
interest one’s readers receive has to do, in general, rather with the
treatment than with the subject; they are susceptible of a lively
impression rather of the course of the discussion itself,—its turns,
vivacity, and novelty,—than of the genius of the author who is the
occasion of it. And yet what is really precious and inspiring, in all
that we get from literature, except this sense of an immediate contact
with genius itself, and the stimulus towards what is true and excellent
which we derive from it? Now in literature, besides the eminent men of
genius who have had their deserts in the way of fame, besides the
eminent men of ability who have often had far more than their deserts in
the way of fame, there are a certain number of personages who have been
real men of genius,—by which I mean, that they have had a genuine gift
for what is true and excellent, and are therefore capable of emitting a
life-giving stimulus,—but who, for some reason or other, in most cases
for very valid reasons, have remained obscure, nay, beyond a narrow
circle in their own country, unknown. It is salutary from time to time
to come across a genius of this kind, and to extract his honey. Often he
has more of it for us, as I have already said, than greater men; for,
though it is by no means true that from what is new to us there is most
to be learnt, it is yet indisputably true that from what is new to us we
in general learn most.
Of a genius of this kind, Joseph Joubert, I am now going to speak. His
name is, I believe, almost unknown in England; and even in France, his
native country, it is not famous. M. Sainte-Beuve has given of him one
of his incomparable portraits; but,—besides that even M. Sainte-Beuve’s
writings are far less known amongst us than they deserve to be,—every
country has its own point of view from which a remarkable author may
most profitably be seen and studied.
Joseph Joubert was born (and his date should be remarked) in 1754, at
Montignac, a little town in Périgord. His father was a doctor with small
means and a large family; and Joseph, the eldest, had his own way to
make in the world. He was for eight years, as pupil first, and
afterwards as an assistant-master, in the public school of Toulouse,
then managed by the Jesuits, who seem to have left in him a most
favorable opinion, not only of their tact and address, but of their
really good qualities as teachers and directors. Compelled by the
weakness of his health to give up, at twenty-two, the profession of
teaching, he passed two important years of his life in hard study, at
home at Montignac; and came in 1778 to try his fortune in the literary
world of Paris, then perhaps the most tempting field which has ever yet
presented itself to a young man of letters. He knew Diderot, D’Alembert,
Marmontel, Laharpe; he became intimate with one of the celebrities of
the next literary generation, then, like himself, a young
man,—Chateaubriand’s friend, the future Grand Master of the University,
Fontanes. But, even then, it began to be remarked of him, that M.
Joubert “_s’inquiétait de perfection bien plus que de gloire_—cared far
more about perfecting himself than about making himself a reputation.”
His severity of morals may perhaps have been rendered easier to him by
the delicacy of his health; but the delicacy of his health will not by
itself account for his changeless preference of being to seeming,
knowing to showing, studying to publishing; for what terrible public
performers have some invalids been! This preference he retained all
through his life, and it is by this that he is characterized. “He has
chosen,” Chateaubriand (adopting Epicurus’s famous words) said of him,
“_to hide his life_.” Of a life which its owner was bent on hiding there
can be but little to tell. Yet the only two public incidents of
Joubert’s life, slight as they are, do all concerned in them so much
credit that they deserve mention. In 1790 the Constituent Assembly made
the office of justice of the peace elective throughout France. The
people of Montignac retained such an impression of the character of
their young townsman,—one of Plutarch’s men of virtue, as he had lived
amongst them, simple, studious, severe,—that, though he had left them
for years, they elected him in his absence without his knowing anything
about it. The appointment little suited Joubert’s wishes or tastes; but
at such a moment he thought it wrong to decline it. He held it for two
years, the legal term, discharging its duties with a firmness and
integrity which were long remembered; and then, when he went out of
office, his fellow-townsmen reelected him. But Joubert thought that he
had now accomplished his duty towards them, and he went back to the
retirement which he loved. That seems to me a little episode of the
great French Revolution worth remembering. The sage who was asked by the
king, why sages were seen at the doors of kings, but not kings at the
doors of sages, replied, that it was because sages knew what was good
for them, and kings did not. But at Montignac the king—for in 1790 the
people in France was king with a vengeance—knew what was good for him,
and came to the door of the sage.
The other incident was this. When Napoleon, in 1809, reorganized the
public instruction of France, founded the University, and made M. de
Fontanes its Grand Master, Fontanes had to submit to the Emperor a list
of persons to form the council or governing body of the new University.
Third on his list, after two distinguished names, Fontanes placed the
unknown name of Joubert. “This name,” he said in his accompanying
memorandum to the Emperor, “is not known as the two first are; and yet
this is the nomination to which I attach most importance. I have known
M. Joubert all my life. His character and intelligence are of the very
highest order. I shall rejoice if your Majesty will accept my guarantee
for him.” Napoleon trusted his Grand Master, and Joubert became a
councilor of the University. It is something that a man, elevated to the
highest posts of State, should not forget his obscure friends; or that,
if he remembers and places them, he should regard in placing them their
merit rather than their obscurity. It is more, in the eyes of those whom
the necessities, real or supposed, of a political system have long
familiarized with such cynical disregard of fitness in the distribution
of office, to see a minister and his master alike zealous, in giving
away places, to give them to the best men to be found.
Between 1792 and 1809 Joubert had married. His life was passed between
Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where his wife’s family lived,—a pretty little
Burgundian town, by which the Lyons railroad now passes,—and Paris.
Here, in a house in the Rue St.-Honoré, in a room very high up, and
admitting plenty of the light which he so loved,—a room from which he
saw, in his own words, “a great deal of sky and very little
earth,”—among the treasures of a library collected with infinite pains,
taste, and skill, from which every book he thought ill of was rigidly
excluded,—he never would possess either a complete Voltaire or a
complete Rousseau,—the happiest hours of his life were passed. In the
circle of one of those women who leave a sort of perfume in literary
history, and who have the gift of inspiring successive generations of
readers with an indescribable regret not to have known them,—Pauline de
Montmorin, Madame de Beaumont,—he had become intimate with nearly all
which at that time, in the Paris world of letters or of society, was
most attractive and promising. Amongst his acquaintances one only misses
the names of Madame de Staël and Benjamin Constant. Neither of them was
to his taste, and with Madame de Staël he always refused to become
acquainted; he thought she had more vehemence than truth, and more heat
than light.
Years went on, and his friends became conspicuous authors or statesmen;
but Joubert remained in the shade. His constitution was of such
fragility that how he lived so long, or accomplished so much as he did,
is a wonder: his soul had, for its basis of operations, hardly any body
at all: both from his stomach and from his chest he seems to have had
constant suffering, though he lived by rule, and was as abstemious as a
Hindoo. Often, after overwork in thinking, reading, or talking, he
remained for days together in a state of utter prostration,—condemned to
absolute silence and inaction; too happy if the agitation of his mind
would become quiet also, and let him have the repose of which he stood
in so much need. With this weakness of health, these repeated
suspensions of energy, he was incapable of the prolonged contention of
spirit necessary for the creation of great works. But he read and
thought immensely; he was an unwearied note-taker, a charming
letter-writer; above all, an excellent and delightful talker. The gaiety
and amenity of his natural disposition were inexhaustible; and his
spirit, too, was of astonishing elasticity; he seemed to hold on to life
by a single thread only, but that single thread was very tenacious. More
and more, as his soul and knowledge ripened more and more, his friends
pressed to his room in the Rue St.-Honoré; often he received them in
bed, for he seldom rose before three o’clock in the afternoon; and at
his bedroom-door, on his bad days, Madame Joubert stood sentry, trying,
not always with success, to keep back the thirsty comers from the
fountain which was forbidden to flow. Fontanes did nothing in the
University without consulting him, and Joubert’s ideas and pen were
always at his friend’s service.
When he was in the country, at Villeneuve, the young priests of his
neighborhood used to resort to him, in order to profit by his library
and by his conversation. He, like our Coleridge, was particularly
qualified to attract men of this kind and to benefit them: retaining
perfect independence of mind, he was a religious philosopher. As age
came on, his infirmities became more and more overwhelming; some of his
friends, too, died; others became so immersed in politics, that Joubert,
who hated politics, saw them seldomer than of old; but the moroseness of
age and infirmity never touched him, and he never quarreled with a
friend or lost one. From these miseries he was preserved by that quality
in him of which I have already spoken; a quality which is best expressed
by a word, not of common use in English,—alas, we have too little in our
national character of the quality which this word expresses,—his inborn,
his constant amenity. He lived till the year 1824. On the 4th of May in
that year he died, at the age of seventy. A day or two after his death
M. de Chateaubriand inserted in the _Journal des Débats_ a short notice
of him, perfect for its feeling, grace, and propriety. _On ne vit dans
la mémoire du monde_, he says and says truly, _que par des travaux pour
le monde_,—“a man can live in the world’s memory only by what he has
done for the world.” But Chateaubriand used the privilege which his
great name gave him to assert, delicately but firmly, Joubert’s real and
rare merits, and to tell the world what manner of man had just left it.
Joubert’s papers were accumulated in boxes and drawers. He had not meant
them for publication; it was very difficult to sort them and to prepare
them for it. Madame Joubert, his widow, had a scruple about giving them
a publicity which her husband, she felt, would never have permitted.
But, as her own end approached, the natural desire to leave of so
remarkable a spirit some enduring memorial, some memorial to outlast the
admiring recollection of the living who were so fast passing away, made
her yield to the entreaties of his friends, and allow the printing, but
for private circulation only, of a volume of his fragments.
Chateaubriand edited it; it appeared in 1838, fourteen years after
Joubert’s death. The volume attracted the attention of those who were
best fitted to appreciate it, and profoundly impressed them. M.
Sainte-Beuve gave of it, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, the admirable
notice of which I have already spoken; and so much curiosity was excited
about Joubert, that the collection of his fragments, enlarged by many
additions, was at last published for the benefit of the world in
general. It has since been twice reprinted. The first or preliminary
chapter has some fancifulness and affectation in it; the reader should
begin with the second.
I have likened Joubert to Coleridge; and indeed the points of
resemblance between the two men are numerous. Both of them great and
celebrated talkers, Joubert attracting pilgrims to his upper chamber in
the Rue St.-Honoré, as Coleridge attracted pilgrims to Mr. Gilman’s at
Highgate; both of them desultory and incomplete writers,—here they had
an outward likeness with one another. Both of them passionately devoted
to reading in a class of books, and to thinking on a class of subjects,
out of the beaten line of the reading and thought of their day; both of
them ardent students and critics of old literature, poetry, and the
metaphysics of religion; both of them curious explorers of words, and of
the latent significance hidden under the popular use of them; both of
them, in a certain sense, conservative in religion and politics, by
antipathy to the narrow and shallow foolishness of vulgar modern
liberalism;—here they had their inward and real likeness. But that in
which the essence of their likeness consisted is this,—that they both
had from nature an ardent impulse for seeking the genuine truth on all
matters they thought about, and a gift for finding it and recognizing it
when it was found. To have the impulse for seeking this truth is much
rarer than most people think; to have the gift for finding it is, I need
not say, very rare indeed. By this they have a spiritual relationship of
the closest kind with one another, and they become, each of them, a
source of stimulus and progress for all of us.
Coleridge had less delicacy and penetration than Joubert, but more
richness and power; his production, though far inferior to what his
nature at first seemed to promise, was abundant and varied. Yet in all
his production how much is there to dissatisfy us! How many reserves
must be made in praising either his poetry, or his criticism, or his
philosophy! How little either of his poetry, or of his criticism, or of
his philosophy, can we expect permanently to stand! But that which will
stand of Coleridge is this: the stimulus of his continual effort,—not a
moral effort, for he had no morals,—but of his continual instinctive
effort, crowned often with rich success, to get at and to lay bare the
real truth of his matter in hand, whether that matter were literary, or
philosophical, or political, or religious; and this in a country where
at that moment such an effort was almost unknown; where the most
powerful minds threw themselves upon poetry, which conveys truth,
indeed, but conveys it indirectly; and where ordinary minds were so
habituated to do without thinking altogether, to regard considerations
of established routine and practical convenience as paramount, that any
attempt to introduce within the domain of these the disturbing element
of thought, they were prompt to resent as an outrage. Coleridge’s great
usefulness lay in his supplying in England, for many years and under
critical circumstances, by the spectacle of this effort of his, a
stimulus to all minds capable of profiting by it; in the generation
which grew up around him. His action will still be felt as long as the
need for it continues. When, with the cessation of the need, the action
too has ceased, Coleridge’s memory, in spite of the disesteem—nay,
repugnance—which his character may and must inspire, will yet forever
remain invested with that interest and gratitude which invests the
memory of founders.
M. de Rémusat, indeed, reproaches Coleridge with his _jugements
saugrenus_; the criticism of a gifted truth-finder ought not to be
_saugrenu_, so on this reproach we must pause for a moment. _Saugrenu_
is a rather vulgar French word, but, like many other vulgar words, very
expressive; used as an epithet for a judgment, it means something like
_impudently absurd_. The literary judgments of one nation about another
are very apt to be _saugrenus_. It is certainly true, as M. Sainte-Beuve
remarks in answer to Goethe’s complaint against the French that they
have undervalued Du Bartas, that as to the estimate of its own authors
every nation is the best judge; the _positive_ estimate of them, be it
understood, not, of course, the estimate of them in comparison with the
authors of other nations. Therefore a foreigner’s judgments about the
intrinsic merit of a nation’s authors will generally, when at complete
variance with that nation’s own be wrong; but there is a permissible
wrongness in these matters, and to that permissible wrongness there is a
limit. When that limit is exceeded, the wrong judgment becomes more than
wrong, it becomes _saugrenu_, or impudently absurd. For instance, the
high estimate which the French have of Racine is probably in great
measure deserved; or, to take a yet stronger case, even the high
estimate which Joubert had of the Abbé Delille is probably in great
measure deserved; but the common disparaging judgment passed on Racine
by English readers is not _saugrenu_, still less is that passed by them
on the Abbé Delille _saugrenu_, because the beauty of Racine, and of
Delille too, so far as Delille’s beauty goes, is eminently in their
language, and this is a beauty which a foreigner cannot perfectly
seize;—this beauty of diction, _apicibus verborum ligata_, as M.
Sainte-Beuve, quoting Quintilian, says of Chateaubriand’s. As to
Chateaubriand himself, again, the common English judgment, which stamps
him as a mere shallow rhetorician, all froth and vanity, is certainly
wrong, one may even wonder that we English should judge Chateaubriand so
wrongly, for his power goes far beyond beauty of diction; it is a power,
as well, of passion and sentiment, and this sort of power the English
can perfectly well appreciate. One production of Chateaubriand’s,
_René_, is akin to the most popular productions of Byron,—to the _Childe
Harold_ or _Manfred_,—in spirit, equal to them in power, superior to
them in form. But this work, I hardly know why, is almost unread in
England. And only consider this criticism of Chateaubriand’s on the true
pathetic! “It is a dangerous mistake, sanctioned, like so many other
dangerous mistakes, by Voltaire, to suppose that the best works of
imagination are those which draw most tears. One could name this or that
melodrama, which no one would like to own having written, and which yet
harrows the feelings far more than the _Æneid_. The true tears are those
which are called forth by the _beauty_ of poetry; there must be as much
admiration in them as sorrow. They are the tears which come to our eyes
when Priam says to Achilles, ἔτλην δ’, oἷ’ οὔπω ...—‘And I have
endured,—the like whereof no soul upon the earth hath yet endured,—to
carry to my lips the hand of him who slew my child;’ or when Joseph
cries out: ‘I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt.’” Who
does not feel that the man who wrote that was no shallow rhetorician,
but a born man of genius, with the true instinct of genius for what is
really admirable? Nay, take these words of Chateaubriand, an old man of
eighty, dying, amidst the noise and bustle of the ignoble revolution of
February 1848: “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, quand donc, quand donc serai-je
délivré de tout ce monde, ce bruit; quand donc, quand donc cela
finira-t-il?” Who, with any ear, does not feel that those are not the
accents of a trumpery rhetorician, but of a rich and puissant
nature,—the cry of the dying lion? I repeat it, Chateaubriand is most
ignorantly underrated in England; and we English are capable of rating
him far more correctly if we knew him better. Still Chateaubriand has
such real and great faults, he falls so decidedly beneath the rank of
the truly greatest authors, that the depreciatory judgment passed on him
in England, though ignorant and wrong, can hardly be said to transgress
the limits of permissible ignorance; it is not a _jugement saugrenu_.
But when a critic denies genius to a literature which has produced
Bossuet and Molière, he passes the bounds; and Coleridge’s judgments on
French literature and the French genius are undoubtedly, as M. de
Rémusat calls them, _saugrenus_.
And yet, such is the impetuosity of our poor human nature, such its
proneness to rush to a decision with imperfect knowledge, that his
having delivered a _saugrenu_ judgment or two in his life by no means
proves a man not to have had, in comparison with his fellow-men in
general, a remarkable gift for truth, or disqualifies him for being, by
virtue of that gift, a source of vital stimulus for us. Joubert had far
less smoke and turbid vehemence in him than Coleridge; he had also a far
keener sense of what was absurd. But Joubert can write to M. Molé (the
M. Molé who was afterwards Louis Philippe’s well-known minister): “As to
your Milton, whom the merit of the Abbé Delille” (the Abbé Delille
translated _Paradise Lost_) “makes me admire, and with whom I have
nevertheless still plenty of fault to find, why, I should like to know,
are you scandalized that I have not enabled myself to read him? I don’t
understand the language in which he writes, and I don’t much care to. If
he is a poet one cannot put up with, even in the prose of the younger
Racine, am I to blame for that? If by force you mean beauty manifesting
itself with power, I maintain that the Abbé Delille has more force than
Milton.” That, to be sure, is a petulant outburst in a private letter;
it is not, like Coleridge’s, a deliberate proposition in a printed
philosophical essay. But is it possible to imagine a more perfect
specimen of a _saugrenu_ judgment? It is even worse than Coleridge’s,
because it is _saugrenu_ with reasons. That, however, does not prevent
Joubert from having been really a man of extraordinary ardor in the
search for truth, and of extraordinary fineness in the perception of it;
and so was Coleridge.
Joubert had around him in France an atmosphere of literary,
philosophical, and religious opinion as alien to him as that in England
was to Coleridge. This is what makes Joubert, too, so remarkable, and it
is on this account that I begged the reader to remark his date. He was
born in 1754; he died in 1824. He was thus in the fulness of his powers
at the beginning of the present century, at the epoch of Napoleon’s
consulate. The French criticism of that day—the criticism of Laharpe’s
successors, of Geoffroy and his colleagues in the _Journal des
Débats_—had a dryness very unlike the telling vivacity of the early
Edinburgh reviewers, their contemporaries, but a fundamental narrowness,
a want of genuine insight, much on a par with theirs. Joubert, like
Coleridge, has no respect for the dominant oracle; he treats his
Geoffroy with about as little deference as Coleridge treats his Jeffrey.
“Geoffroy,” he says in an article in the _Journal des Débats_
criticising Chateaubriand’s _Génie du Christianisme_—“Geoffroy in this
article begins by holding out his paw prettily enough; but he ends by a
volley of kicks, which lets the whole world see but too clearly the four
iron shoes of the four-footed animal.” There is, however, in France a
sympathy with intellectual activity for its own sake, and for the sake
of its inherent pleasurableness and beauty, keener than any which exists
in England; and Joubert had more effect in Paris,—though his
conversation was his only weapon, and Coleridge wielded besides his
conversation his pen,—than Coleridge had or could have in London. I
mean, a more immediate, appreciable effect; an effect not only upon the
young and enthusiastic, to whom the future belongs, but upon formed and
important personages to whom the present belongs, and who are actually
moving society. He owed this partly to his real advantages over
Coleridge. If he had, as I have already said, less power and richness
than his English parallel, he had more tact and penetration. He was more
_possible_ than Coleridge; his doctrine was more intelligible than
Coleridge’s, more receivable. And yet with Joubert, the striving after a
consummate and attractive clearness of expression came from no mere
frivolous dislike of labor and inability for going deep, but was a part
of his native love of truth and perfection. The delight of his life he
found in truth, and in the satisfaction which the enjoying of truth
gives to the spirit; and he thought the truth was never really and
worthily said, so long as the least cloud, clumsiness, and repulsiveness
hung about the expression of it.
Some of his best passages are those in which he upholds this doctrine.
Even metaphysics he would not allow to remain difficult and abstract: so
long as they spoke a professional jargon, the language of the schools,
he maintained,—and who shall gainsay him?—that metaphysics were
imperfect; or, at any rate, had not yet reached their ideal perfection.
“The true science of metaphysics,” he says, “consists not in rendering
abstract that which is sensible, but in rendering sensible that which is
abstract; apparent that which is hidden; imaginable, if so it may be,
that which is only intelligible; and intelligible, finally, that which
an ordinary attention fails to seize.”