“Fiction has no business to exist unless it is more beautiful than
reality. Certainly the monstrosities of fiction may be found in the
booksellers’ shops; you buy them there for a certain number of francs,
and you talk of them for a certain number of days; but they have no
place in literature, because in literature the one aim of art is the
beautiful. Once lose sight of that, and you have the mere frightful
reality.”
That is just the right criticism to pass on these “monstrosities:” _they
have no place in literature_, and those who produce them are not really
men of letters. One would think that this was enough to deter from such
production any man of genuine ambition. But most of us, alas! are what
we must be, not what we ought to be,—not even what we know we ought to
be.
The following, of which the first part reminds one of Wordsworth’s
sonnet, “If thou indeed derive thy light from heaven,” excellently
defines the true salutary function of literature, and the limits of this
function:—
“Whether one is an eagle or an ant, in the intellectual world, seems to
me not to matter much; the essential thing is to have one’s place marked
there, one’s station assigned, and to belong decidedly to a regular and
wholesome order. A small talent, if it keeps within its limits and
rightfully fulfils its task, may reach the goal just as well as a
greater one. To accustom mankind to pleasures which depend neither upon
the bodily appetites nor upon money, by giving them a taste for the
things of the mind, seems to me, in fact, the one proper fruit which
nature has meant our literary productions to have. When they have other
fruits, it is by accident, and, in general, not for good. Books which
absorb our attention to such a degree that they rob us of all fancy for
other books, are absolutely pernicious. In this way they only bring
fresh crotchets and sects into the world; they multiply the great
variety of weights, rules, and measures already existing; they are
morally and politically a nuisance.”
Who can read these words and not think of the limiting effect exercised
by certain works in certain spheres and for certain periods; exercised
even by the works of men of genius or virtue,—by the works of Rousseau,
the works of Wesley, the works of Swedenborg? And what is it which makes
the Bible so admirable a book, to be the one book of those who can have
only one, but the miscellaneous character of the contents of the Bible?
Joubert was all his life a passionate lover of Plato; I hope other
lovers of Plato will forgive me for saying that their adored object has
never been more truly described than he is here:—
“Plato shows us nothing, but he brings brightness with him; he puts
light into our eyes, and fills us with a clearness by which all objects
afterwards become illuminated. He teaches us nothing; but he prepares
us, fashions us, and makes us ready to know all. Somehow or other, the
habit of reading him augments in us the capacity for discerning and
entertaining whatever fine truths may afterwards present themselves.
Like mountain-air, it sharpens our organs, and gives us an appetite for
wholesome food.”
“Plato loses himself in the void” (he says again); “but one sees the
play of his wings, one hears their rustle.” And the conclusion is: “It
is good to breathe his air, but not to live upon him.”
As a pendant to the criticism on Plato, this on the French moralist
Nicole is excellent:—
“Nicole is a Pascal without style. It is not what he says which is
sublime, but what he thinks; he rises, not by the natural elevation of
his own spirit, but by that of his doctrines. One must not look to the
form in him, but to the matter, which is exquisite. He ought to be read
with a direct view of practice.”
English people have hardly ears to hear the praises of Bossuet, and the
Bossuet of Joubert is Bossuet at his very best; but this is a far truer
Bossuet than the “declaimer” Bossuet of Lord Macaulay, himself a born
rhetorician, if ever there was one:—
“Bossuet employs all our idioms, as Homer employed all the dialects. The
language of kings, of statesmen, and of warriors; the language of the
people and of the student, of the country and of the schools, of the
sanctuary and of the courts of law; the old and the new, the trivial and
the stately, the quiet and the resounding,—he turns all to his use; and
out of all this he makes a style, simple, grave, majestic. His ideas
are, like his words, varied,—common and sublime together. Times and
doctrines in all their multitude were ever before his spirit, as things
and words in all their multitude were ever before it. He is not so much
a man as a human nature, with the temperance of a saint, the justice of
a bishop, the prudence of a doctor, and the might of a great spirit.”
After this on Bossuet, I must quote a criticism on Racine, to show that
Joubert did not indiscriminately worship all the French gods of the
grand century:—
“Those who find Racine enough for them are poor souls and poor wits;
they are souls and wits which have never got beyond the callow and
boarding-school stage. Admirable, as no doubt he is, for his skill in
having made poetical the most humdrum sentiments and the most middling
sort of passions, he can yet stand us in stead of nobody but himself. He
is a superior writer; and, in literature, that at once puts a man on a
pinnacle. But he is not an inimitable writer.”
And again: “The talent of Racine is in his works, but Racine himself is
not there. That is why he himself became disgusted with them.” “Of
Racine, as of his ancients, the genius lay in taste. His elegance is
perfect, but it is not supreme, like that of Virgil.” And, indeed, there
is something _supreme_ in an elegance which exercises such a fascination
as Virgil’s does; which makes one return to his poems again and again,
long after one thinks one has done with them; which makes them one of
those books that, to use Joubert’s words, “lure the reader back to them,
as the proverb says good wine lures back the wine-bibber.” And the
highest praise Joubert can at last find for Racine is this, that he is
the Virgil of the ignorant;—“_Racine est le Virgile des ignorants._”
Of Boileau, too, Joubert says: “Boileau is a powerful poet, but only in
the world of half poetry.” How true is that of Pope also! And he adds:
“Neither Boileau’s poetry nor Racine’s flows from the fountain-head.” No
Englishman, controverting the exaggerated French estimate of these
poets, could desire to use fitter words.
I will end with some remarks on Voltaire and Rousseau, remarks in which
Joubert eminently shows his prime merit as a critic,—the soundness and
completeness of his judgments. I mean that he has the faculty of judging
with all the powers of his mind and soul at work together in due
combination; and how rare is this faculty! how seldom is it exercised
towards writers who so powerfully as Voltaire and Rousseau stimulate and
call into activity a single side in us!
“Voltaire’s wits came to their maturity twenty years sooner than the
wits of other men, and remained in full vigor thirty years longer. The
charm which our style in general gets from our ideas, his ideas get from
his style. Voltaire is sometimes afflicted, sometimes strongly moved;
but serious he never is. His very graces have an effrontery about them.
He had correctness of judgment, liveliness of imagination, nimble wits,
quick taste, and a moral sense in ruins. He is the most debauched of
spirits, and the worst of him is that one gets debauched along with him.
If he had been a wise man, and had had the self-discipline of wisdom,
beyond a doubt half his wit would have been gone; it needed an
atmosphere of _licence_ in order to play freely. Those people who read
him every day, create for themselves, by an invincible law, the
necessity of liking him. But those people who, having given up reading
him, gaze steadily down upon the influences which his spirit has shed
abroad, find themselves in simple justice and duty compelled to detest
him. It is impossible to be satisfied with him, and impossible not to be
fascinated by him.”
The literary sense in us is apt to rebel against so severe a judgment on
such a charmer of the literary sense as Voltaire, and perhaps we English
are not very liable to catch Voltaire’s vices, while of some of his
merits we have signal need; still, as the real definitive judgment on
Voltaire, Joubert’s is undoubtedly the true one. It is nearly identical
with that of Goethe. Joubert’s sentence on Rousseau is in some respects
more favorable:—
“That weight in the speaker (_auctoritas_) which the ancients talk of,
is to be found in Bossuet more than in any other French author; Pascal,
too, has it, and La Bruyère; even Rousseau has something of it, but
Voltaire not a particle. I can understand how a Rousseau—I mean a
Rousseau cured of his faults—might at the present day do much good, and
may even come to be greatly wanted; but under no circumstances can a
Voltaire be of any use.”
The peculiar power of Rousseau’s style has never been better hit off
than in the following passage:—
“Rousseau imparted, if I may so speak, _bowels of feeling_ to the words
he used (_donna des entrailles à tous les mots_), and poured into them
such a charm, sweetness so penetrating, energy so puissant, that his
writings have an effect upon the soul something like that of those
illicit pleasures which steal away our taste and intoxicate our reason.”