[2] Spirit of flame by his very nature, not only illumined but luminous, Plato shines by his own light. The splendour of his thought colours his language. Brilliance in him is born of the sublime.
[3] Plato spoke to an extremely ingenious people, and was bound to speak as he did.
[4] Seek only in Plato for forms and ideas; that is what he sought himself. There is more light in him than there are objects, more form than matter. We must breathe him, but not feed upon him.
[5] 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. [M.A.]
[6] Plato loses himself in the void, but one sees the play of his wings, one hears their rustle. [M.A.]
[7] In Plato, Socrates too often appears as the philosopher by profession, instead of being content to show himself as the philosopher by nature and goodness.
[8] Homer wrote to be sung, Sophocles to be declaimed, Herodotus to be recited, and Xenophon to be read. From purposes so varied innumerable differences in their style were sure to arise.
[9] No writer had greater boldness of expression than Cicero. You think him cautious and almost timid; and yet no tongue was ever less so than his. His eloquence is limpid; but when it must, it flows in great rapids and cascades.
[10] There are a thousand ways of preparing and seasoning speech; Cicero liked them all.
[11] In Catullus are found two things which make the worst combination in the world: affectation and coarseness. Generally, however, the principal idea in each of his little pieces is of a happy and innocent kind; his airs are pretty, but his instrument is vulgar.
[12] Horace contents the mind, but he does not rejoice the taste. Virgil satisfies taste as much as thought. The recollection of his verses is as delightful as the reading of them.
[13] In Horace there is not one expression nor, so to speak, one word, that Virgil would have wished to use, so different are their styles.
[14] Take away Juvenal’s gall, and Virgil’s wisdom, and you will have two bad authors.
[15] Plutarch, in interpreting Plato, is clearer than he, and yet has less light, and gives the soul less joy.
[16] The style of Tacitus, although less beautiful, less rich in pleasing colour and in variety of expression, is perhaps more perfect than even that of Cicero; for every word in it has been thought over, and has its exact weight, measure, and quantity. Now, supreme perfection lies in the perfect union of perfect elements.
[17] In Tacitus, we must not only look for the orator and the writer, but for the painter, the inimitable painter, of actions and thoughts.
[18] In the narratives of Tacitus the interest of the story will not allow us to read little at a time, and the depth and grandeur of expression will not allow us to read much. The mind, as if divided between curiosity which leads it on, and attention which holds it back, feels a certain fatigue; the writer, in fact, takes possession of the reader, to the point of doing him violence.
[19] The style of Tacitus was made to paint dark souls and disastrous times. 19
[1] ST. THOMAS and St. Augustine are the Aristotle and the Plato of theology. But St. Thomas is more Aristotelian than St. Augustine is Platonic.
II. Religious Writers
[1] ST. THOMAS and St. Augustine are the Aristotle and the Plato of theology. But St. Thomas is more Aristotelian than St. Augustine is Platonic.
[2] Pascal speaks the language of a Christian misanthropy that is at once strong and gentle. As there are few who have the feeling, so are there few who have had the style. He had a power of strong conception, but he invented nothing; that is to say, he discovered nothing new in metaphysics.
[3] The greater number of Pascal’s thoughts on law, habits, customs, are only the thoughts of Montaigne that he has recast. Behind the thought of Pascal you see the attitude of that firm and passionless mind: it is this, above all, which makes it so imposing.
[4] In Bossuet’s style a Gallic frankness and good temper make themselves felt, and yet with dignity. He is stately and sublime—popular, and almost naïf.
[5] Voltaire is clear like water, and Bossuet clear like wine: but it is enough; he nourishes and fortifies.
[6] 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 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. [M.A.]
[7] Fénelon knows how to plead, but not how to teach. As a philosopher he is almost divine; as a theologian almost ignorant.
[8] Fénelon had that happy type of mind, talent, and character which never fails to give everybody the impression of being better than it is. In the same way we attribute to Racine what belongs only to Virgil, and always expect to find in Raphael beauties which are perhaps more often to be met with in the works of two or three other painters than in his own.
III. Metaphysicians
[1] BACON put his imagination into physical science as Plato had put his into metaphysics; Bacon was as bold and adventurous in building up conjectures by the aid of experience as Plato was magnificent in the setting forth of probabilities. Plato, at least, gives his ideas as ideas; but Bacon gives his as facts. Therefore he is more misleading in natural science than the other in metaphysics. See his Historia Vitæ et Mortis. Nevertheless both were great and splendid minds. Both clove a broad way through literary space; Bacon with the light firmness of his tread, Plato with the broad sweep of his wing.
[2] Hobbes, it is said, was a bad-tempered man; this does not surprise me. Bad temper more than anything else makes the mind and tone decided; it is what irresistibly leads us to concentrate our ideas. It abounds in lively expression; but, to become philosophical, it must spring exclusively from the unreasonableness of others, and not from our own; from the evil mind of the time in which we live, and not from our own evil mind.
[3] Locke’s book is imperfect. His whole subject is not in it, because it was not in the author’s mind beforehand. He throws himself upon the lesser parts of it, which he divides and subdivides forever. He leaves the trunk for the branches, and his work has too many ramifications.
[4] Locke shows himself nearly always to be an inventive logician, but a bad metaphysician; in fact, an enemy to metaphysics. He was not merely destitute of metaphysic, he was incapable of it, and hostile to it. A good questioner, a good experimenter, but without light; a blind man who makes good use of his stick.
[5] Kant seems to have made a laborious language for himself, and as it was laborious to him to construct, so is it laborious to us to read. Thence, doubtless, it arises that he has often mistaken his method for his matter. He thought he was making ideas when he was only making phrases. His language and his concepts have something so opaque about them, that it was impossible for him not to believe that there was some solidity in them. Our French transparency and lightness deceive us less. Here is a subject for treatment: ‘Of the deceptions that the mind practises upon itself, according to the nature of the language that it employs.’
[6] One is tempted to say to Kant, ‘Show us where the unknown begins’: that we never see.
IV. Prose Writers, Philosophers, Political Writers
[1] ALL the old French prose was modified by the style of Amyot, and by the character of the work that he had translated. The rest were but commentators. Plutarch himself is nothing more; a commentator, not of words, but of thoughts.
[2] In France, Amyot’s translation has become an original work from which people like to quote.
[3] Nothing illuminates like a joke; nothing is so nimble and gay as the wantonness of wit. The gaiety of Gramont and Hamilton is less elegant than that of Voltaire; but it is more exquisite, more charming, more perfect.
[4] In Montesquieu there are political ideas, but no political feeling. His works are nothing but a series of considerations. It is political feeling, however, that makes the soul and life of a State. Apart from it, the activity of empires has no motive power from within.
[5] Montesquieu was a fine brain without discretion.
[6] The mind of Montesquieu perpetually emits sparks which dazzle, delight, and even inflame, but illuminate little. His is a mind full of juggleries, with which he blinds his readers. One learns better how to be a king from one page of The Prince than from four volumes of the Esprit des Lois.
[7] Montesquieu was a master of terse expression; he knew how to make little phrases say great things.
[8] Voltaire has spread an elegance throughout the language which tends to banish kindliness. Rousseau has robbed souls of their wisdom, whilst talking to them of virtue. Buffon gives the mind a taste for magniloquent phrases. Montesquieu is the wisest; but he seems to teach the art of making empires; one thinks one learns it by listening to him; and every time one reads him, one is tempted to try and build one.
[9] Voltaire’s mind came to its maturity twenty years earlier than the minds of other men, and remained in full vigour thirty years later. Our ideas sometimes lend charm to our style; his style lent it to all his ideas.
[10] Voltaire’s mind was skilful, adroit, doing everything that he wanted, and doing it well and quickly, but incapable of maintaining the highest level. He had the gift of raillery, but he did not know the science of it; he never knew what things may be laughed at, and what things may not. He is a writer against whose wonderful elegance we should be on our guard, or we shall never think anything serious. At once active and brilliant, he occupied the region that lies between folly and good sense, and alternated perpetually between the two. He had a great deal of the good sense that is useful to satire; that is to say, an unfailing eye for the ills and defects of society; but he never looked for the remedy. One would have said that they existed solely for his malice and amusement; for he either mocked at them or was irritated by them, without ever pausing to pity them.
[11] Voltaire would have patiently read through thirty or forty folio volumes to find one small irreligious joke.
[12] Voltaire is sometimes sad: he has emotion; but he is never serious. His very graces have an effrontery about them.
[13] There are some faults that are difficult to perceive, which have not been classified or determined, and which have no name. Voltaire is full of them.
[14] Voltaire knew the light and disported himself in it, but in order that he might scatter and deflect all its rays, like a mischievous child. He is a goblin, who in the course of his evolutions sometimes takes on the shape and air of high genius.
[15] Voltaire had correctness of judgment, liveliness of imagination, nimble wits, quick taste, and a moral sense in ruins. [M.A.]
[16] Voltaire is never alone with himself in his writings. Like a perpetual journalist, he entertained the public every day with the events of the day before. His temper was of more use to him in writing than his reason or his knowledge. Some hatred or some scorn made him write all his works. Even his tragedies are but a satire on some opinion.
[17] To despise and cry down the times of which we treat, as Voltaire did, is to take all the interest out of the history we write.
[18] Voltaire 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…. [M.A.] 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 or duty compelled to detest him.
[19] It is impossible to be satisfied with Voltaire, and impossible not to be fascinated by him.
[20] Voltaire has charming movements, and hideous features, like the monkey. One can always see in him, behind the skilful hand, an ugly face.
[21] Voltaire had the art of familiar style. He gave it every form, every charm, every beauty of which it is susceptible; and because he used it in treating all subjects, his deluded age believed that he had excelled in all. Those who praise him for his taste perpetually confound taste and brilliance. One never likes him; but one admires him. He enlivens, he dazzles; it is to the mind’s love of movement that he appeals, and not to taste.
[22] I see very well that a Rousseau, I mean an amended Rousseau, might be very useful nowadays, might even be necessary; but at no time can a Voltaire be good for anything.
[23] Voltaire has introduced a fashion of such luxury, in intellectual work, that one can no longer offer ordinary viands in anything but gold and silver dishes. So much trouble to please the reader is rather a sign of vanity than virtue, of the wish to beguile than the wish to serve, of ambition rather than authority, of art rather than nature; and all these charms point rather to a great master than a great man.
[24] Voltaire, by his influence and the lapse of time, has blunted the severity of reason in most of us. He has infected the air of his age, and imposed his taste even on his enemies, and his judgments on his critics.
[25] J. J. Rousseau had a voluptuous mind. The soul in his writings is always mingled with the body, and never separates from it. No man has made us feel more vividly than he the contrast of flesh with spirit, and the delights of their union.
[26] Rousseau imparted, if I may so speak, bowels of feeling to the words he used (donna des entrailles ô 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. [M.A.]
[27] Give malice to Fénelon and calm to Rousseau—you would make out of them two bad authors. The gift of the first lay in his reasonableness; of the second in his folly. So long as nothing stirred his passions, Rousseau was second-rate: everything that made him good made him vulgar. The genius of Fénelon, on the contrary, lay in his goodness.
[28] When we have read Buffon, we think ourselves learned. When we have read Rousseau we think ourselves virtuous; for all that, we are neither the one nor the other.
[29] An irreligious piety, a corrupting austerity, a dogmatism that destroys all authority; that is the character of Rousseau’s philosophy.
[30] 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; [M.A.] the beggar warming himself in the sun, and finding his delight in scorning the human race—that is Rousseau.
[31] I speak to the tender souls, the ardent souls, the lofty souls, to the souls born with one or other of these distinctive characters of religion, and I say to them, ‘Nothing but Rousseau can separate you from religion, and nothing but religion can cure you of Rousseau.’
[32] Diderot and the philosophers drew their learning from their brains, and their arguments from their passions or their fancies.
[33] There is, in the style of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, a prism, which tires the eyes. When one has been reading him for a long time, it is delightful to see that the grass and the trees in the country have less colour than they have in his writings. His harmonies make us love the dissonances that he banished from the world, and that we meet with at every step. Nature has its music certainly; but happily it is rare. If real life gave us the melodies that these gentlemen find everywhere, we should live in a state of ecstatic langour; and we should die of drowsiness.
V. Poets and Novelists
[1] PETRARCH for thirty years adored not the person, but the image of Laura; so much easier is it to preserve our feelings and ideas than our sensations. Hence the fidelity of the old knights.
[2] Petrarch thought little of his Italian poetry, whereby he became immortal; he preferred his Latin. This is because his age loved Latin, but did not yet love Italian.
[3] The dic mihi, musa is wanting in the tales of Boccaccio. He adds nothing to what has been told him, and his invention never goes beyond the field of his memory. His story ends where the popular tale ends; he respects it as he might respect truth.
[4] Tasso was a profound thinker upon his art, and it would be a service rendered to letters to examine his prose works and his literary principles. This character of a thinker, moreover, shows itself even in his verses: they have a form that would be suitable to maxims. The poet in him has no kinship with the ancient poets, but there is some kinship between him and the philosophers of old.
[5] ‘Et souvent avec Dieu balance la victoire.’ —There is the unpardonable fault of Milton’s poem.
[6] There may be a loftiness of soul that contributes nothing to the practice of the arts nor to the beauty of composition, while it does add to the respect which the merit of the author, as shown in his work, inspires in us.
[7] Racine’s genius lay in taste, as with the ancients. His elegance is perfect, but it is not supreme, like Virgil’s.
[8] Racine’s talent is in his works, but Racine himself is not there. And so he himself grew tired of them.
[9] 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. [M.A.]
[10] Boileau is a powerful poet, but in the world of half-poetry. [M.A.]
[11] Neither Racine’s poetry nor Boileau’s flow from the fountain-head. A fine choice of models is their gift. It is not that with their souls they copy souls, but that with their books they copy books. Racine is the Virgil of the ignorant.
[12] Molière is comic by dint of his unconcern; he makes men laugh, and does not laugh himself; and in this lies his excellence.
[13] In Tartufe Molière made mock of the forms of religious feeling, and that is certainly a great evil.
[14] Regnard is jocular like the valet, and Molière comic like the master.
[15] In La Fontaine there is a plenitude of poetry that is nowhere to be found in other French writers.
[16] Cervantes in his book has a middle-class (bourgeois) familiarity and good-nature, with which the translation of Florian is out of harmony. In translating Don Quixote, Florian has altered the lilt of the tune and the musical key of the original. He has changed the flow of an abundant spring into the leaping and murmuring of a rivulet; little sounds, little movements—very pleasant no doubt when it is a matter of a thread of water rolling over pebbles, but false and intolerable when applied to a wide stream flowing in full course over fine sand.
[17] There is in the world one woman of vast soul and lofty mind. Madame de Staël was born to excel in the moral life; but her imagination has been beguiled by something more brilliant than true good; the splendour of the flame and the fires have led her astray. She has taken the soul’s fevers for its faculties, excitement for a power, and our wanderings from the path for progress towards the goal. The passions, in her eyes, have become a kind of dignity and glory. She has wished to paint them as the finest thing in the world, and mistaking their enormity for their greatness, has made a monstrous romance.
VI. On Some Romances of the Time
A NOVEL, regarded as a work of art, should paint a flame, but not a furnace. To realise such destinies as these ladies imagine would be to plunge life into hell.
Misfortune, to be beautiful and interesting, must come from heaven, or at least from above. Here it strikes from below, it comes from too near; the sufferers have it in their blood.
Tragedy paints misfortune; but of a fine tone and fibre; calamities of another age, another world; sorrows that have little weight, little body, and last but a moment; griefs that interest the heart. Here, misfortune is present with us, it lasts for ever; it is made of iron rudely wrought; it strikes horror.
Catastrophe is all very well; but nobody likes to hear of torture. In these days we read only of the martyrs of love, some stretched on the rack of desire, others torn with remorse, all possessed by some passion that eats out their heart. In spite of all the fine qualities that are labelled and paraded before us, it is most true to say that we are looking rather at vulgar people than melancholy events. And so we give them little pity, and what we do give them is of the wrong kind.
Some have said ‘Human life is a black cloth wherein are woven a few white threads’; and others, ‘It is a white cloth wherein are woven a few black threads.’ But in these novels human life is a red and black cloth, evil interwoven with evil: nothing else.
Imagine a land that devours its own children, a starless heaven where only lightnings play, a parched earth where no dew falls, a horizon of brass round which the names of the most beautiful things go angrily echoing with a hollow and mournful sound—there is the land of the novelist. I have noticed that in these books one of the loveliest words of the language—the word happiness—rings as if it were spoken under vaults infernal; and the word pleasure is only frightful. A false and sickly sentiment breathes from every page. Youth appears as an age of fire consumed by its own flame; beauty as a victim destined only to the knife; suffering never ceases, madness is perpetual, and virtue itself, whether by what it experiences, or by the feelings that it inspires, is never without a stain. There is not a heroine in these books that might not reasonably be called a soiled and trodden rose.
I have seen the cells of the Salpêtrière and the furies of the Revolution, and I seem always by a dim combination of ideas to discern behind these monstrous scenes the bed-gowns of madwomen and the great cloak of Marat…. There are some books which naturally and inevitably produce the effect of being worse than they are, as some naturally and inevitably appear to be better than they are; the latter because they suggest ideas of beauty, goodness, perfection, which become, as it were, part of them; the former because they carry us into regions where dwell all the ugly ideas, and those also cling to them inseparably.
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 may 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. [M.A.] 8
How strange that women should have turned their backs on seemliness and beauty, and that women writers should have been the first to overstep these rules! There is, however, a literary moral sense, and it is more severe than any other, because it lays down the rules of taste—a faculty more delicate than chastity itself.
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