“Life without actions; life entirely resolved into affections and
half-sensual thoughts; do-nothingness setting up for a virtue;
cowardliness with voluptuousness; fierce pride with nullity underneath
it; the strutting phrase of the most sensual of vagabonds, who has made
his system of philosophy and can give it eloquently forth: there is
Rousseau! A piety in which there is no religion; a severity which brings
corruption with it; a dogmatism which serves to ruin all authority:
there is Rousseau’s philosophy! To all tender, ardent, and elevated
natures, I say: Only Rousseau can detach you from religion, and only
true religion can cure you of Rousseau.”
I must yet find room, before I end, for one at least of Joubert’s
sayings on political matters; here, too, the whole man shows himself;
and here, too, the affinity with Coleridge is very remarkable. How true,
how true in France especially, is this remark on the contrasting
direction taken by the aspirations of the community in ancient and in
modern states:—
“The ancients were attached to their country by three things,—their
temples, their tombs, and their forefathers. The two great bonds which
united them to their government were the bonds of habit and antiquity.
With the moderns, hope and the love of novelty have produced a total
change. The ancients said _our forefathers_, we say _posterity_: we do
not, like them, love our _patria_, that is to say, the country and the
laws of our fathers, rather we love the laws and the country of our
children; the charm we are most sensible to is the charm of the future,
and not the charm of the past.”
And how keen and true is this criticism on the changed sense of the word
“liberty”:—
“A great many words have changed their meaning. The word _liberty_, for
example, had at bottom among the ancients the same meaning as the word
_dominion_. _I would be free_ meant, in the mouth of the ancient, _I
would take part in governing or administering the State_; in the mouth
of a modern it means, _I would be independent_. The word _liberty_ has
with us a moral sense; with them its sense was purely political.”
Joubert had lived through the French Revolution, and to the modern cry
for liberty he was prone to answer:—
“Let your cry be for free souls rather even than for free men. Moral
liberty is the one vitally important liberty, the one liberty which is
indispensable; the other liberty is good and salutary only so far as it
favors this. Subordination is in itself a better thing than
independence. The one implies order and arrangement; the other implies
only self-sufficiency with isolation. The one means harmony, the other a
single tone; the one is the whole, the other is but the part.”
“Liberty! liberty!” he cries again; “in all things let us have
_justice_, and then we shall have enough liberty.”
Let us have justice, and then we shall have enough liberty! The wise man
will never refuse to echo those words; but then, such is the
imperfection of human governments, that almost always, in order to get
justice, one has first to secure liberty.
I do not hold up Joubert as a very astonishing and powerful genius, but
rather as a delightful and edifying genius. I have not cared to exhibit
him as a sayer of brilliant epigrammatic things, such things as “Notre
vie est du vent tissu . . . les dettes abrègent la vie . . . celui qui a
de l’imagination sans érudition a des ailes et n’a pas de pieds (_Our
life is woven wind_ . . . _debts take from life_ . . . _the man of
imagination without learning has wings and no feet_),” though for such
sayings he is famous. In the first place, the French language is in
itself so favorable a vehicle for such sayings, that the making them in
it has the less merit; at least half the merit ought to go, not to the
maker of the saying, but to the French language. In the second place,
the peculiar beauty of Joubert is not there; it is not in what is
exclusively intellectual,—it is in the union of _soul_ with intellect,
and in the delightful, satisfying result which this union produces.
“Vivre, c’est penser et sentir son âme . . . le bonheur est de sentir
son âme bonne ... toute vérité nue et crue n’a pas assez passé par l’âme
... les hommes ne sont justes qu’envers ceux qu’ils aiment (_The essence
of life lies in thinking and being conscious of one’s soul ... happiness
is the sense of one’s soul being good ... if a truth is nude and crude,
that is a proof it has not been steeped long enough in the soul, ... man
cannot even be just to his neighbor, unless he loves him_);” it is much
rather in sayings like these that Joubert’s best and innermost nature
manifests itself. He is the most prepossessing and convincing of
witnesses to the good of loving light. Because he sincerely loved light,
and did not prefer to it any little private darkness of his own, he
found light; his eye was single, and therefore his whole body was full
of light. And because he was full of light, he was also full of
happiness. In spite of his infirmities, in spite of his sufferings, in
spite of his obscurity, he was the happiest man alive; his life was as
charming as his thoughts. For certainly it is natural that the love of
light, which is already, in some measure, the possession of light,
should irradiate and beatify the whole life of him who has it. There is
something unnatural and shocking where, as in the case of Coleridge, it
does not. Joubert pains us by no such contradiction; “the same
penetration of spirit which made him such delightful company to his
friends, served also to make him perfect in his own personal life, by
enabling him always to perceive and do what was right;” he loved and
sought light till he became so habituated to it, so accustomed to the
joyful testimony of a good conscience, that, to use his own words, “he
could no longer exist without this, and was obliged to live without
reproach if he would live without misery.”
Joubert was not famous while he lived, and he will not be famous now
that he is dead. But, before we pity him for this, let us be sure what
we mean, in literature, by _famous_. There are the famous men of
genius in literature,—the Homers, Dantes, Shakspeares: of them we need
not speak; their praise is forever and ever. Then there are the famous
men of ability in literature: their praise is in their own generation.
And what makes this difference? The work of the two orders of men is
at the bottom the same,—_a criticism of life_. The end and aim of all
literature, if one considers it attentively, is, in truth, nothing but
that. But the criticism which the men of genius pass upon human life
is permanently acceptable to mankind; the criticism which the men of
ability pass upon human life is transitorily acceptable. Between
Shakspeare’s criticism of human life and Scribe’s the difference is
there;—the one is permanently acceptable, the other transitorily.
Whence then, I repeat, this difference? It is that the acceptableness
of Shakspeare’s criticism depends upon its inherent truth: the
acceptableness of Scribe’s upon its suiting itself, by its
subject-matter, ideas, mode of treatment, to the taste of the
generation that hears it. But the taste and ideas of one generation
are not those of the next. This next generation in its turn
arrives;—first its sharpshooters, its quick-witted, audacious light
troops; then the elephantine main body. The imposing array of its
predecessor it confidently assails, riddles it with bullets, passes
over its body. It goes hard then with many once popular reputations,
with many authorities once oracular. Only two kinds of authors are
safe in the general havoc. The first kind are the great abounding
fountains of truth, whose criticism of life is a source of
illumination and joy to the whole human race forever,—the Homers, the
Shakspeares. These are the sacred personages, whom all civilized
warfare respects. The second are those whom the out-skirmishers of the
new generation, its forerunners,—quick-witted soldiers, as I have
said, the select of the army,—recognize, though the bulk of their
comrades behind might not, as of the same family and character with
the sacred personages, exercising like them an immortal function, and
like them inspiring a permanent interest. They snatch them up, and set
them in a place of shelter, where the on-coming multitude may not
overwhelm them. These are the Jouberts. They will never, like the
Shakspeares, command the homage of the multitude; but they are safe;
the multitude will not trample them down. Except these two kinds, no
author is safe. Let us consider, for example, Joubert’s famous
contemporary, Lord Jeffrey. All his vivacity and accomplishment avail
him nothing; of the true critic he had in an eminent degree no
quality, except one,—curiosity. Curiosity he had, but he had no gift
for truth; he cannot illuminate and rejoice us; no intelligent
out-skirmisher of the new generation cares about him, cares to put him
in safety; at this moment we are all passing over his body. Let us
consider a greater than Jeffrey, a critic whose reputation still
stands firm,—will stand, many people think, forever,—the great apostle
of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay. Lord Macaulay was, as I have
already said, a born rhetorician; a splendid rhetorician doubtless,
and, beyond that, an _English_ rhetorician also, an _honest_
rhetorician; still, beyond the apparent rhetorical truth of things he
never could penetrate; for their vital truth, for what the French call
the _vraie vérité_, he had absolutely no organ; therefore his
reputation, brilliant as it is, is not secure. Rhetoric so good as his
excites and gives pleasure; but by pleasure alone you cannot
permanently bind men’s spirits to you. Truth illuminates and gives
joy, and it is by the bond of joy, not of pleasure, that men’s spirits
are indissolubly held. As Lord Macaulay’s own generation dies out, as
a new generation arrives, without those ideas and tendencies of its
predecessor which Lord Macaulay so deeply shared and so happily
satisfied, will he give the same pleasure? and, if he ceases to give
this, has he enough of light in him to make him last? Pleasure the new
generation will get from its own novel ideas and tendencies; but light
is another and a rarer thing, and must be treasured where-ever it can
be found. Will Macaulay be saved, in the sweep and pressure of time,
for his light’s sake, as Johnson has already been saved by two
generations, Joubert by one? I think it very doubtful. But for a
spirit of any delicacy and dignity, what a fate, if he could foresee
it! to be an oracle for one generation, and then of little or no
account forever. How far better, to pass with scant notice through
one’s own generation, but to be singled out and preserved by the very
iconoclasts of the next, then in their turn by those of the next, and
so, like the lamp of life itself, to be handed on from one generation
to another in safety! This is Joubert’s lot, and it is a very enviable
one. The new men of the new generations, while they let the dust
deepen on a thousand Laharpes, will say of him: “He lived in the
Philistine’s day, in a place and time when almost every idea current
in literature had the mark of Dagon upon it, and not the mark of the
children of light. Nay, the children of light were as yet hardly so
much as heard of: the Canaanite was then in the land. Still, there
were even then a few, who, nourished on some secret tradition, or
illumined, perhaps, by a divine inspiration, kept aloof from the
reigning superstitions, never bowed the knee to the gods of Canaan;
and one of these few was called _Joubert_.”