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There never was a literary age whose dominant taste was not
unhealthy.
JOSEPH JOUBERT
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There never was a literary age whose dominant taste was not
unhealthy.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v14 - Ibn to Juv
Then he overthrew the
pagan altar, and cried out, “If any one has zeal for the lands of
his country and the worship of God, let him follow me;" and
fied to the desert with his sons, abandoning all his property in
the town. Many others followed him, and dwelt in caves in the
desert with their wives and children. When the King's generals
heard of this, they took the troops in the citadel at Jerusalem
and went in pursuit of the fugitives; and having overtaken them,
tried first to persuade them to take counsel of prudence and not
compel the soldiers to treat them according to the laws of war.
Meeting with a refusal, they assailed them on the Sabbath, and
burnt them unresisting in the caves.
Many of those
who escaped joined Mattathias and appointed him their ruler.
So Mattathias got a great army about him, and over-
threw their idolatrous altars, and slew those that broke their
laws, all he could lay hands on.
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JOSEPH JOUBERT
(1754-1824)
BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
OSEPH JOUBERT, who has now succeeded to the place long held
by La Rochefoucauld as the best author of aphorisms, was
first introduced to the general world of English-speaking
readers by Matthew Arnold in 1865: but he was known to many, at
least in America, through what Sainte-Beuve had said of him; and
Mr. Stedman thinks that Edgar Poe, whose French reading was very
discursive, had known him even before Sainte-Beuve wrote. Joubert,
who was born in 1754, died May 4th, 1824; and a tribute was paid to
his memory, a day or two after his death, by Châteaubriand, which
might well have arrested the attention of Poe. In 1838 Châteaubriand
edited his works. It is, however, fair to say that as Ruskin vastly
expanded the reputation of Turner, though he did not create it, so
the present renown of Joubert is due largely to the generous tribute
of Arnold.
With the praise due to generosity the recognition of Arnold's serv-
ice must end. It was hardly possible to set readers more distinctly
on the wrong track in respect to an author than to compare, as
Arnold does, Joubert to Coleridge; making this comparison indeed
the keynote of his essay It is difficult. were not Arnold so em-
phatically a man of whims — to find common ground between the
tersest writer of his time and the most diffuse; the most determined
and the most irresolute; the most clear-cut and the most misty.
With all the great merits and services of Coleridge, and the fact that
he had occasionally the power of making an incisive detached remark,
the fact remains undisputed of the wandering and slumberous quality
of his mind, and of the concentration in him of many of the precise
qualities that Joubert spent his life in combating. The best course
to be adopted by any reader of Joubert is therefore to cut adrift
from Arnold, and turn to the original book,- not the volume of
letters, which is less satisfactory, but to the original volume of
Pensées, which contain within four hundred pages more of the con-
densed essence of thought than can be found anywhere else in a
series of volumes.
Joubert was born in 1754 in Montignac, a small town of Périgord,
France; studied and also taught at the College of Toulouse; went in
XIV-525
-
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JOSEPH JOUBERT
1778 to Paris; knew Diderot, Marmontel, Châteaubriand, D'Alembert:
was chosen during his absence in 1790 chief magistrate of his native
town, served in that capacity two years and was re-elected, but
declined to serve; took up his residence in 1792 at Villeneuve in
Brittany, and spent his later life between that town and Paris; in
1809 was appointed by Napoleon Bonaparte a regent of the Univer-
sity, and died in 1824. He lived through the French Revolution, and
through the period of the Encyclopædists; but he preserved not
merely his life but his faith. He was in the habit, from twenty
years old to seventy, of writing down his detached thoughts, often
previously molded by conversation; his rooms at the top of a tall
house in the Rue St. Honoré being the resort of the brightest minds
in Paris. Fourteen years after his death, both his thoughts and
his correspondence were collected and given to the world; but the
thoughts afford by far the more interesting volume of the two.
As Arnold has misled readers by his comparison with Coleridge,
so his total estimate of Joubert is probably below the truth; because
the crowning quality of Joubert – severe and sublimated concentra.
tion was remote from Arnold's own temperament. The Englishman
was constitutionally discursive and long-winded. Nothing better was
ever said about Homer than he has incidentally said in his essay on
translating him: the trouble is that it takes him nearly a hundred
and fifty pages to say it. It is certain that Joubert never would have
written such a paper; it is very doubtful whether he could even have
read it. Arnold's favorite amusement - perhaps a tradition from his
father's sermons — was to begin an essay with a quotation from some
one, to attach every succeeding point of his essay to this text, to
play with it as a cat plays with a mouse, and then at the close to
take it for granted that he had proved its soundness: this was wholly
foreign to Joubert. It is however in Joubert that we find invariably
the sweetness and light which Arnold preached, but did not always
practice.
It is for this reason perhaps that Arnold dislikes the first or per-
sonal chapter of Joubert's Pensées': “It has,” he says, “some fanci-
fulness and affectation about it; the reader should begin with the
second. ” But if the reader takes this unwise advice he will miss the
whole personal equation of Joubert, and misinterpret him again
and again. He will miss also some of his finest thoughts; as where
he anticipates Emerson in one of the latter's most noted passages by
saying, "I dislike to quit Paris, because it involves separation from
my friends; and to quit the country, because it implies separation
from myself. ” He also anticipates a passage once famous in Miss
Edgeworth’s Helen' when he writes, “I even like better those who
make vice amiable than those who make virtue unattractive. He
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((
writes finely of his own experience: “My soul dwells in a region
where all passions have passed; I have known them all. ” With the
experience which years bring to all writers, he thus sums up their
result: “I needed age in order to learn what I desired to know; and
I should need youth in order to utter well what I now know. ” This
suggests, but not too sadly, that great summary of existence by St.
Augustine, -- "Now that I begin to know something, I die. And he
thus sums up the beginning and the end of his method of writing,
the very keystone of the arch of his fame: "If there is a man tor-
mented by the accursed ambition to put a whole book into a page, a
whole page into a phrase, and that phrase into a word, it is I. ”
All these passages are from that first chapter, The author por-
trayed by himself, which Mr. Arnold injudiciously advises readers to
omit. Then follows his chapter on piety, of which he finely says:
«Piety is a sublime wisdom, surpassing all others; a kind of gen-
ius, which gives wings to the mind. No one is wise unless he is
pious. Again, Piety is a species of modesty. It leads us to shield
our thought, as modesty bids us shield our eyes, before all forbid-
den things. ” And again, in one of his fine condensations he says,
«Heaven is for those who think about it. ” (Le ciel est pour ceux
qui y pensent). Then follow chapters covering Man, The Soul, Mod-
esty, The Various Times of Life, Death, The Family, Good Manners,
Truth, Illusion, Philosophy, Light, Governments, Liberty and Law,
Antiquity, Education, The Fine Arts, Style, The Qualities of an
Author; including also many other themes, and finally closing with
Literary Judgments - these covering authors ancient and modern.
The book is admirably edited, and adds to its merits that of an
analytical table at the end, so that it is practically a dictionary of
quotations. The late Mr. George H. Calvert, of Newport, R. I. ,
translates a portion of it — less than half — with a preliminary notice
(Boston, 1867); but the translations are not always felicitous, though
the feeling shown is always sympathetic.
Joubert sometimes suggests Montaigne, but with great differences:
he is never garrulous and never coarse. In him we taste in full the
exquisite felicity, the limpid clearness, the well-defined accuracy of
the French tradition, without the smallest trace of that refined indeli-
cacy in which vice does not lose half its evil by losing all its gross-
In him his native idiom stands out clearly for what it is, –
the lineal successor of the Greek, if the Greek can have a successor.
Then, the national virtues of courtesy, amiability, and bonhomie shine
out supreme: he goes, for instance, the whole round of his contem-
poraries, speaking his mind freely, yet without an unkind word; and
although a devout Catholic, he handles the Jansenists without a trace
of the odium theologicum.
ness.
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This refinement is the more remarkable in Joubert, because he
owed much to Rousseau in style, and was the originator of that often
quoted phrase concerning him, that he was the first person who gave
bowels to words,- in the sense used symbolically for that word in the
Bible. But he demands that this power of tender expression should
be always chaste; and in the very last of his maxims says that art
should always keep within the realm of beauty, and should never
forget the ancient religious precept, “Outside the temple and the
sacrifice, make no display of the intestines of the victim. ” And he
indicates the high standard of French courtesy by uniformly resting
it on noble motives. “Politeness,” he says, “is to kindness of heart
[bonté] what words are to thought. It does not merely influence the
manners, but even the mind and heart; it moderates and softens all
feelings, opinions, and words. ” And in another place he says in
yet more condensed form, «Courtesy is the very flower of humanity.
He who is not quite courteous is not quite human. ”
»
Tow Higginoon
.
OF MAN
T"
He body is the tent where our existence is encamped.
The voice is a human sound which nothing lifeless can
perfectly imitate. It has an authority and an impressiveness
which writing wants. It is not merely air, but air modulated by
us, impregnated with our warmth, and as it were enveloped in
the haze of our atmosphere; from which an emanation attends
it, and which gives it a certain form and certain virtues fitted to
act on the mind. Speech is only thought incorporated,
The more I think on it, the more I see that the mind is
something outside of the soul, as the hands are outside of the
body, the eyes outside of the head, the branches outside of the
trunk. It helps to do more, but not to be more.
The mind is a fire of which thought is the flame.
The imagination is the eye of the soul.
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OF THE NATURE OF MINDS
M
EN measure minds by their stature: it would be better to
estimate them by their beauty.
Nature has made two kinds of fine intellects: some to
produce thoughts and beautiful actions, others to admire them.
Heaven rarely grants to the same men the power of thinking
well, of speaking well, and of acting well in all things.
One is never mediocre when he has plenty of good sense and
good feeling
Sometimes great minds are nevertheless false minds. They
are well-constructed compasses, but whose needles, affected by
the influence of some neighboring object, always turn away from
the north.
He who has imagination without learning has wings without
feet.
OF VIRTUE AND MORALITY
E
VERYTHING may be learned even virtue.
We should do everything to let good people have their
own way.
Do not cut what you can untie.
To be always occupied with the duties of others, never with
our own — alas!
There are those who have only fragments: they have not
enough of the material to make a coat.
Without duty, life is soft and boneless; it can no longer sus-
tain itself.
Not only is there no virtue where there is no rule and law,
but there is not even pleasure. The plays of children themselves
have laws, and would not exist without them; these laws are
always a form of restraint, and nevertheless, the more strictly
they are obeyed the greater is the amusement.
OF THE FAMILY
W
E SHOULD choose for a wife only such a woman as we should
choose for a friend were she a man.
Nothing does a woman so much honor as her patience,
and nothing so little as the patience of her husband.
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We should wear our velvet inside; that is, be most amiable to
those with whom we dwell at home.
The pleasure of pleasing is a legitimate one, and the desire to
rule repulsive.
We should carry with us that indulgence and that habit of
attention which call the thoughts of others into bloom.
We should pique ourselves on being reasonable, not on being
right; on sincerity, not infallibility.
It is better to win than to command.
Before speaking ill of an eminent man, it might be well to
wait till he has done ill.
A small supply of everything, a surfeit of nothing, - this is
the key to moderation, wisdom, and content.
-
OF EDUCATION
C*
HILDREN need models rather than critics.
Education should be tender and strict, and not cold and
relaxing
In rearing a child, think of its old age.
People regard young men as merely students; but I see in
them young men also.
To teach is to learn twice over.
To have shared the mode of education common to all is a
great advantage to gifted minds, because they are thus kept in
touch with others.
OF THE PASSIONS
Wha
HATEVER purifies the passions makes them stronger, more
lasting, and more enjoyable.
We exhaust in the passions the material that was given
us for happiness.
Passions are but nature: it is the not repenting that yields
corruption.
Repentance is a natural effort which drives from the soul the
elements of its corruption.
Into every kind of excess there enters a certain coldness of
soul: it is a thoughtful and deliberate abuse of pleasure.
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The blind are cheerful, because their minds are not distracted
from dwelling on the things that make them happy, and because
they have yet more ideas than we have sights. It is a compen-
a
sation granted them by Heaven.
We always lose the friendship of those who have lost our
esteem.
Often our fine qualities are loved and praised only because our
defects temper their brilliancy. It often even happens that we
are loved rather for our defects than for our virtues.
We should make ourselves beloved, for men are only just
towards those whom they love.
The punishment of those who have loved women too much is
to love nothing else.
Tenderness is the calm of passion.
Man is a kind of rash being, who may exist after a fashion
half-way, but whose existence is the more delightful the more
complete it is.
One likes to do good deeds in one's own way.
Ambition is pitiless: every merit that it cannot use is con-
temptible in its eyes.
No one is good, one cannot be useful and deserves not to be
loved, if he has not something heavenly, either in his intellect
through thoughts, or in his will through affections directed on
high.
It is a blessing, a great good fortune, to be born good.
Unless we keep watch on ourselves, we shall find ourselves
condemning the unfortunate.
Be gentle and indulgent to all others; be not so to yourself.
The pleasure of giving is essential to true happiness; but the
poor may possess it.
When you give, give joyfully and in smiling.
Proud natures love those to whom they do a service.
Ornaments were the inventions of modesty.
"God will punish,” say the Orientals, “him who sees and
him who is seen. ” Beautiful and formidable recommendation of
modesty.
A spider's web made of silk and light were not more difficult
to create than to answer this question, What is modesty ?
C
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JOSEPH JOUBERT
OF SOCIETY
T°
SEE the world is to judge the judges.
The attention of the listener affords a sort of accompa-
niment to the music of the talk.
If one has two names, he should be addressed by that which
is the more beautiful, the sweeter, the more sonorous.
Grace copies modesty as politeness copies kindness of heart.
OF DIFFERENT AGES
N°
TOTHING is so hard to children as reflection. This is because
the final and essential destiny of the soul is to see, to
know, and not to reflect. To reflect is one of the toils of
life; a means of arriving, a route, a passage, and not a centre.
To know and be known,- these are the two points of repose;
such will be the happiness of souls.
Address yourself to young people: they know it all.
There is nothing good in man but his young feelings and his
old thoughts.
Two ages of life should be sexless: the child and the aged
man should be as modest as women.
Old age robs the man of sense only of those qualities that are
useless to wisdom.
It would seem that for certain intellectual product the winter
of the body is the autumn of the soul.
The residuum of human wisdom, refined by age, is perhaps
the best thing we have.
Life's evening brings with it its lamp.
Those who have a long old age are, as it were, purified of
the body.
Old age must have had most honor in times when each man
could not know much more than what he had seen.
It is well to treat our life as we treat our writings: to pro-
vide that the beginning, the middle, and the end are in pro-
portion, in harmony. For this object we need to make many
erasures.
There is a time when the body's forces change place and con-
centrate themselves in the mind.
To be born obscure and die famous are the two boundaries
of human happiness.
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The deliberation of old age makes it easier to be patient in
labor.
We are all priests of Vesta, and life is the sacred fire which
we are to prolong until God extinguishes it.
A beautiful old age is for all beholders a delightful promise,
since each can hope the same for him or his.
old men constitute the true majority among the people.
Only robust old men have the dignity of old age, and they
are the only ones who can justly speak of it.
Courtesy softens wrinkles.
One loves an old man as a perishable treasure; a ripe fruit
whose fall one must expect.
In neat and fresh garments old age finds a sort of youth with
which to surround itself.
No one is truly happy in old age except the aged priest and
those of similar type.
It is a good thing to die still lovable; if one only can.
Patience and trial, courage and death, resignation and neces-
sity, arrive usually together. Indifference to life comes when it
is no longer possible to preserve life.
OF POETRY
PoEphers. " In seeking what is beautiful, they find
more truths
have a
,
than philosophers in seeking what is true.
Poets are more inspired by the images of objects than even
by their presence.
The poet should not traverse at a walk an interval which
might be cleared at a bound.
In the poetic style every word resounds like the twang of a
lyre well strung, and leaves after it a number of undulations.
Like the nectar of the bee, which turns to honey the dust of
flowers, or like that liquor which converts lead into gold, the poet
has a breath that fills out words, gives them light and color. He
knows wherein consists their charm, and by what art enchanted
structures may be built with them.
To fill an old word with new meaning, of which usage or
age had emptied it, so to speak,—this is not innovation, it is re-
juvenation. We enrich languages by digging into them. They
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JOSEPH JOUBERT
should be treated like fields: to make them fertile in old age,
they must be stirred at great depths.
Before employing a beautiful word, make a place for it.
OF STYLE
Wa
ELL-CHOSEN words are abridged sentences.
Literary style consists in giving a body and a shape to
the thought by the phrase.
Attention has a narrow mouth; we must pour into it what we
say very carefully, and as it were drop by drop.
Only the temperate style is classic.
It is a great art, that of knowing how to point one's thought
and pierce the attention.
Each author has his own dictionary.
It needs more clearness of intellect and more delicate tact to
be a great writer than a great thinker.
NE
OF THE QUALITIES OF THE WRITER
TEVER write anything that does not give you enjoyment: emo-
tion passes easily from the writer to the reader.
The fine feelings and ideas that we wish to set forth in
our writings should become familiar to us, in order that the ease
and charm of intimacy be felt in their expression.
All that we say should be suffused with ourselves, with our
soul. This operation is long, but it immortalizes everything.
The mind conceives with pain, but brings forth with delight.
When writing we should recollect that scholars are present;
but it is not to them that we should speak.
An ordinary book needs only a subject; but for a fine work
there is a germ which develops itself in the mind like a plant.
The sole beautiful works are those that have been for a long
while, if not worked over, at least meditated upon.
Many useless phrases come into the head, but the mind grinds
its colors out of them.
In the mind of certain writers nothing is grouped or draped
or modeled; their pages only offer a flat surface on which words
roll.
The end of a work should always suggest the beginning.
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There never was a literary age whose dominant taste was not
unhealthy. The success of excellent authors consists in making
wholesome works agreeable to morbid tastes.
Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.
When in any nation an individual is born who is capable of
producing a great thought, another is born capable of compre-
hending it and admiring it.
Beautiful works do not intoxicate, but enchant.
It is not the opinions of authors, and that part of their teach-
ings which we call assertions, that most instruct and nourish the
mind. In great writers there is an invisible and subtle juice,
imbibed in reading them,- an indescribable fluid, a salt, a prin-
ciple more nutritive than all the rest.
Between esteem and contempt, there is in literature a path
which offers success without glory, and is also obtained without
merit.
It is worth a hundred times more to adapt a work to the
nature of the human mind than to what is called the state of
society. In man there is something immutable; thence it is that
in the arts and works of art there are fixed rules,— beauties that
will always please, or else contrivances that will please but for
a short time.
It is not enough to write so as to attract and hold attention:
we must repay it.
Does literary talent need to avail itself of passion ? Yes, of
manifold passion restrained.
The extent of a palace is measured from east to west, or from
north to south; but that of a literary work, from the earth to
heaven: so that there may sometimes be found as much range
and power of mind in a few pages — in an ode, for example -as
in a whole epic poem.
It is better to be exquisite than to be ample. Dealers respect
big books, but readers prefer small ones, — they last longer and
go farther. Virgil and Horace have left but one volume. Homer,
Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Terence not more. Menan-
der, who delights us, is reduced to a few leaves. Without Te.
lemachus, who would know Fénelon? Who would know Bossuet
without his Funeral Orations and his Discourse on Universal
History? Pascal, La Bruyère, Vauvenargues, and La Roche-
foucauld, Boileau, Racine, and La Fontaine, occupy little space,
and are the delight of the cultivated. The best writers write
## p. 8396 (#608) ###########################################
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JOSEPH JOUBERT
little, because they need to reduce to beauty their abundance and
wealth.
Remember what St. Francis of Sales said in speaking of the
Imitation of Jesus Christ': "I have sought repose everywhere,
and have only found it in a small corner with a small book. ”
Happy the author who can supply the need.
Force is not energy: some authors have more muscle than
talent.
Where there is no delicacy of touch, there is no literature.
In literary work, fatigue is what gives to the writer warning
of loss of power for the moment.
Indolence as well labor is sometimes needed by the
mind.
If a work shows the file, it is because it is not sufficiently
polished; if it smells of the oil, it is because one has not sat up
late enough over it [qu'on a trop peu veillé ].
What with the fever of the senses, the delirium of the heart,
and the weakness of the mind; with the storms of time and the
great trials of life; with hunger, thirst, dishonor, illness, and
death, - one can construct any number of romances that will
bring tears; but the soul says, “You do me harm! »
It is not needful that love should be introduced into a book;
but there should always be an impression of tenderness.
as
LITERARY JUDGMENTS
T*
WHERE never will be an endurable translation of Homer unless
all the words can be chosen with art, and be full of variety,
of freshness, and of grace.
The diction moreover must be
as antique, as simple, as the manners, the events, and the per-
sonages described. With our modern style everything is distorted
in Homer, and his heroes seem grotesque figures that take grave
and proud attitudes.
Plato found philosophy made of bricks, and rebuilt it of
gold.
In Plato, seek only forins and ideas: this is what he himself
sought. There is in him more of light than of objects, more
form than substance. He should be inhaled, not fed upon.
Plato loses himself in the void; but we see the play of his
wings and hear their sound.
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Aristotle rectified all the rules, and in all the sciences added
new truths to those already known. His works are an ocean of
instruction, as it were the encyclopædia of antiquity.
The Memorabilia' of Xenophon are a fine thread with which
he has the art of weaving magnificent lace, but with which we
can sew nothing.
Cicero is in philosophy a sort of moon. His doctrine has a
light extremely soft, but borrowed; a light wholly Greek, which
the Roman softened and weakened.
There are a thousand ways of employing and seasoning words:
Cicero loved them all.
In Catullus one finds two things, than the union of which
nothing can be worse: affected delicacy with grossness.
It is the symmetries in the style of Seneca that make him
quoted.
I look upon Plutarch's Lives' as one of the most precious
monuments left to us by antiquity. There we are shown what-
ever has appeared that is great in the human race, and the best
that men have done is put before us as an example. The whole
of ancient wisdom is there. For the writer I have not the same
esteem that I have for his work.
In the annals of Tacitus there is a narrative interest which
will not let us read little, and a depth and grandeur of expres-
sion which will not permit us to read much. The mind, divided
between the curiosity which absorbs it and the attention which
holds it, experiences some fatigue: the writer takes possession of
the reader even to doing him violence.
Most of the thoughts of Pascal on laws, usages, customs, are
but the thoughts of Montaigne recast.
Fénelon dwells amid the valleys and slopes of thought; Bos-
suet on its elevations and mountain peaks.
M. de Beausset says of Fénelon, “He loved men more than he
knew them. ” This phrase is charming: it would be impossible to
praise with more wit what one blames, or to praise more highly
while blaming
Voltaire retained through life, in the world and in affairs, a
very strong impress from the influence of his first masters. Im-
petuous as a poet, and polite as a courtier, he knows how to be
as insinuating and crafty as any Jesuit. No one
No one ever followed
more carefully, and with more art and skill, the famous maxim
he so ridiculed: To be all things to all men.
## p. 8398 (#610) ###########################################
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JOSEPH JOUBERT
Voltaire is sometimes sad, or he is excited; but he is never
serious. His graces even are impudent.
There are faults hard to recognize, that have not been classed
or defined or christened. Voltaire is full of them.
It is impossible that Voltaire should satisfy, and impossible
that he should not please.
Voltaire introduced and put into vogue such luxury in literary
work, that one can no longer offer common food except on dishes
of gold or silver.
J. J. Rousseau had a voluptuous nature. In his writings the
soul is blended with the body, and never leaves it. No man ever
gave such an impression of flesh absolutely mingled with spirit,
and of the delights of their marriage.
Rousseau gave, if I may so speak, bowels to words; infused
into them such a charm, savors so penetrating, energies so potent,
that his writings affect the soul somewhat as do those forbidden
pleasures that extinguish taste and intoxicate reason.
When we read Buffon, re think ourselves learned; when we
have read Rousseau, we think ourselves virtuous: but for all that
we are neither.
For thirty years Petrarch adored, not the person, but the
image of Laura: so much easier is it to maintain unchanged
one's sentiments and one's ideas than one's sensations. Thence
came the fidelity of the ancient knights.
No man knows better than Racine how to weave words, senti-
ments, thoughts, actions, events; and with him events, thoughts,
sentiments, words, are all woven of silk.
Racine and Boileau are not fountains of water. A fine choice
in imitation makes their merit. It is their books that copy books,
and not their souls that copy souls. Racine is the Virgil of the
ignorant.
Molière is coolly comic; he makes others laugh without laugh-
ing himself: there lies his excellence.
Alfieri is but a convict, whom nature condemns to the galleys
of the Italian Parnassus.
In La Fontaine there is an affluence of poetry which is found
in no other French author.
Piron: He was a poet who played well on his jew's-harp.
All the above translations were made by Colonel Higginson for this work.
## p. 8399 (#611) ###########################################
8399
SYLVESTER JUDD
(1813-1853)
YLVESTER JUDD was a figure in his place and time, as cler-
gyman, lecturer, and author. And he is still a figure in
American literature; for he wrote a novel - Margaret'-
which must be recognized in the evolution of the native fiction, and
is, judged by critical standards, a work of remarkable literary and
spiritual power.
Judd was born at Westhampton, Massachusetts, July 23d, 1813.
father was a noted antiquarian. The son got his Yale degree in 1836,
and then declined a professorship in Miami
College to enter the Harvard Divinity School.
In 1840 he became pastor of the Unitarian
Church at Augusta, Maine, continuing in
the one parish until his death, January 20th,
1853. While yet a theological student he
published A Young Man's Account of his
Conversion from Calvinism, interesting as
showing his serious nature and subjective
tendency. At thirty he was working on
(Margaret,' which was printed in 1845; a
revised edition in 1851; and a fine edition,
with illustrations by Darley, in 1856.
In his ministerial work Judd developed SYLVESTER JUDD
the idea that all his congregation were born
into full church privileges, and many other Maine parishes accepted
his teaching He was much in demand as a lecturer on temperance
and other social topics. The same spirit of earnest didacticism runs
through his noted novel. It is a loosely constructed story of old
New England life, with fine descriptions of nature. The tale is made
the vehicle of the conveyance of Judd's views on liberal Christianity,
temperance, and universal peace. Thus it is a pioneer example of
“purpose » fiction in American literature. The full title of the story,
Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom; includ-
ing sketches of a place not before described, called Mons Christi,?
conveys a sense of this in language that now sounds stilted and sen-
timental.
## p. 8400 (#612) ###########################################
8400
SYLVESTER JUDD
But were Margaret' nothing more than an ill-disguised sermon, it
would not be the remarkable book it indubitably is. Judd was first
of all a literary man when he made it. It was written, as he says
in the preface to the edition of 1851, "out of his heart and hope. "
And again: “This book was written for the love of the thing. ” It
depicts with vigor and
picturesqueness the crude, hearty New England
country life of the period transitional between the Revolution and the
settled Republic. Judd's genius puts before the reader the essential
homely details of that life, described realistically and with great
sympathy; the realism being relieved by descriptive passages of deli-
cate beauty, or mystical imaginings in
a high vein of poetry. And
in the midst of the other admirable chara
cter sketches is the strik-
ing central conception of Margaret herself,
echild of nature and of
dreams, a wood-flower growing up wild, to tur
out a noble woman
who rebukes even as she transcends the harshnes
vis, narrowness, and
illiteracy that surround her. She is a lovely creat
eion, which only
a writer of rare gifts could have evolved.
parts; but the earlier portion of the novel, dealing with th
e heroine's
childhood, is still an unsurpassed picture in its way.
Judd's other works include Philo: An Evangeliad' (1850), and the
didac-
tic poem defending the Unitarian position; Richard Edney an Var-
Governor's Family' (1850), another novel not dissimilar from
garet' in purpose, but without its charm; and a posthumous wo
(The Church: In a Series of Discourses) (1854). He left in manu
script a tragedy called "White Hills, showing the evils of avarice.
Arethusa Hall in 1854 published “The Life and Character of Sylvester
Judd.
The book fos unequal in
THE SNOW-STORM
From Margaret?
T
is the middle of winter, and is snowing, and has been all
night, with a strong northeast wind. Let us take a moment
when the storm intermits, and look in at Margaret's and see
how they do. But we cannot approach the place by any ordi-
nary locomotion: the roads, lanes, and by-paths are blocked up;
no horse or ox could make his way through this great Sahara
of snow.
If we are disposed to adopt the means of conveyance
formerly so much in vogue, whether snow-shoes or magic, we
may possibly get there. The house or hut is half sunk in the
general accumulation, as if it had foundered and was going to
the bottom; the face of the pond is smooth, white, and stiff as
## p. 8401 (#613) ###########################################
SYLVESTER JUDD
8401
21
ces
death; the oxen and the cow in the barn-yard, in their storm
fleeces, look like a new variety of sheep. All is silence and life-
lessness, and if you please to say, desolation. Hens there are
none, nor turkeys, nor ducks, nor birds, nor Bull, nor Margaret.
If you see any signs of a human being, it is the dark form of
Hash, mounted on snow-shoes, going from the house to the barn.
Yet there are what by a kind of provincial misnomer is called
the black growth,- pines and firs, green as in summer,--some
flanking the hill behind, looking like the real snowballs, blossom-
ing in midwinter and nodding with large white flowers. But
there is one token of life, - the smoke of the stunt gray chim-
ney, which, if you regard it as one, resembles a large, elongated,
transparent balloon; or if you look at it by piecemeal, it is a
beautiful current of bluish-white vapor, flowing upward unend-
ingly: and prettily is it striped and particolored, as it passes
successively the green trees, bare rocks, and white crown of
Indian's Head; nor does its interest cease even when it dis-
appears among the clouds. Some would dwell a good while on
that smoke, and see in it many outshows and denotements of
spiritualities; others would say, the house is buried so deep it
must come from the hot, mischief-hatching heart of the earth;
others still would fancy the whole region to be in its winding-
sheet, and that if they looked into the house they would behold
the dead faces of their friends. Our own notion is that that
smoke is a quiet, domestic affair; that it even has the flavor of
some sociable cookery, and is legitimately issued from a grateful
and pleasant fire; and that if we should go into the house we
should find the family as usual there: a suggestion which, as
the storm begins to renew itself, we shall do well to take the
opportunity to verify.
Flourishing in the midst of snowbanks, unmoved amid the
fiercest onsets of the storm, comfortable in the extremity of
winter, the family are all gathered in the kitchen, and occupied
as may be. In the cavernous fireplace burns a great fire, com-
posed of a huge green backlog and forestick, and a high cobwork
of crooked and knotty refuse wood. The flame is as bright and
golden as in Windsor Palace, or Fifth Avenue, New York,
smoke goes off out-doors with no more hesitancy than if it was
summer-time. The wood sings, the sap drops on the hot coals,
and explodes as if it was Independence Day. Great red coals
roll out on the hearth, sparkle a semibrief, lose their grosser
XIV-526
## p. 8402 (#614) ###########################################
8402
SYLVESTER JUDD
substance, indicate a more ethereal essence in prototypal forms
of white down-like cinders, and then dissolve into brown ashes.
To a stranger the room has a sombre aspect, rather heightened
than relieved by the light of the fire burning so brightly at mid-
day. The only connection with the external world is by a rude
aperture through the sides of the building; — yet when the outer
light is so obscured by a storm, the bright fire within must
anywhere be pleasant. In one corner of the room is Pluck, in a
red flannel shirt and leather apron, at work on his kit mending
shoes; with long and patient vibration and equipoise he draws
the threads, and interludes the strokes with snatches of songs,
banter, and laughter. The apartment seems converted into a
workshop, for next the shoemaker stands the shingle-maker,
Hash, who with froe in one hand and mallet in the other, by
dint of smart percussion is endeavoring to rive a three-cornered
billet of hemlock, In the centre sits Brown Moll, with bristling
and grizzly hair, and her inseparable pipe, winding yarn from a
swift. Nearer the fire are Chilion and Margaret: the latter with
the 'Orbis Pictus,' or World Displayed, a book of Latin and Eng-
lish, adorned with cuts, which the Master lent her; the former
with his violin, endeavoring to describe the notes in Dr. Byles's
Collection of Sacred Music,' also a loan of the Master's, and at
intervals trailing on the lead of his father in some popular air.
We shall also see that one of Chilion's feet is raised on a stool,
bandaged, and apparently disabled. Bull, the dog, lies rounded
on the hearth, his nose between his paws, fast asleep. Dick, the
gray squirrel, sits swinging listlessly in his wire wheel, like a
duck on a wave. Robin, the bird, in its cage, shrugs and folds
itself into its feathers, as if it were night. Over the fireplace, on
the rough stones of the chimney, which day and night through
all the long winter never cease to be warm, are Margaret's
flowers: a blood-root, in the marble pot Rufus Palmer gave her,
and in wooden moss-covered boxes, pinks, violets, and buttercups,
green and flowering. Here also, as a sort of mantel-tree orna-
ment, sits the marble kitten that Rufus made, under a cedar
twig. At one end of the crane, in the vacant side of the fire-
place, hang rings of pumpkin-rinds drying for beer. On the
walls, in addition to what was there last summer, are strings of
dried apples. There is also a draw-horse, on which Hash smooths
and squares his shingles; and a pile of fresh, sweet-scented white
shavings and splinters. Through the yawns of the back door,
## p. 8403 (#615) ###########################################
SYLVESTER JUDD
8403
and sundry rents in the logs of the house, filter in unweariedly
fine particles of snow; and thus along the sides of the rooms
rise little cone-shaped, marble-like pilasters.
Within doors is a mixed noise of miscellaneous operations;
without is the rushing of the storm. Pluck snip-snaps with his
wife, cracks on Hash, shows his white teeth to Margaret; Chilion
asks his sister to sing; Hash orders her to bring a coal to light
his pipe; her mother gets her to pick a snarl out of the yarn.
She climbs upon a stool and looks out of the window. The
scene is obscured by the storm; the thick driving fakes throw
a brownish mizzly shade over all things,-air, trees, hills, and
every avenue the eye has been wont to traverse.
The light
tufts hiss like arrows as they shoot by. The leafless butternut,
whereon the whippoorwill used to sing and the yellow warbler
make its nest, sprawls its naked arms and moans pitifully in the
blast; the snow that for a moment is amassed upon it falls to
the ground like a harvest of alabaster fruit. The peach-tree that
bears Margaret's own name, and is of her own age, seems to be
drowning in the snow. Water drops from the eaves, occasioned
by the snow melting about the chimney.
«I shouldn't wonder if we had a
snow-storm before it's
over, Molly,” said Pluck, strapping his knife on the edge of the
kit.
"And you are getting ready for it fast,” rejoined his wife.
"I should be thankful for those shoes any time before next July.
I can't step out without wetting my feet. ”
«Wetting is not so bad after all,” answered Pluck.
part I keep too dry. — Who did the Master tell you was the god
of shoemakers ? ” he asked, addressing Margaret.
«St. Crispin,” replied the child.
“Guess I'll pay him a little attention," said the man, going to
the rum bottle that stood by the chimney. "I feel some interest
in these things, and I think I have some reason to indulge a
hope that I am among the elect. ”
«He wouldn't own you,” said his wife, tartly.
“Why, dear? ”
“Because you are not a man; you are not the thrum of one.
Scrape you all up, and we shouldn't get lint enough to put on
Chilion's foot. ”
«Look at that,” said her husband, exposing his bare arm,
flabby and swollen; "what do you think now? ”
« For my
»
## p. 8404 (#616) ###########################################
8404
SYLVESTER JUDD
are
(C
“Mutton fat! Try you out, run you into cakes, make a pres-
ent of you to your divinity to grease his boots with. — The fire is
getting low, Meg: can't you bring in some wood ? »
"You are a woman really! ” retorted Pluck, “to send the child
out in such a storm, when it would take three men to hold one's
head on. ”
“Ha, ha! » laughed out his spouse. “You must have stitched
your own on; I don't wonder you afraid. That is the
way you lost your ear, trying to hold on your head in a storm,
ha, ha! ”
“Well,” rejoined Pluck, "you think you are equal to three
men in wit, learning, providing, don't you ? ”
“Mayhaps so. "
"And weaving, spinning, coloring, reeling, twisting, cooking,
clinching, henpecking, I guess you are. Can you tell, dearest
Maria, what is Latin for the Widow's Obed's red hair ?
"I can for the maggot that makes powder-post of our whole
family, Didymus Hart. ”
Pluck laughed, and staggered towards his bench.
“I knew we should have a storm," said his wife, "after such
a cold spell: I saw a Bull's Eye towards night; my corns have
been pricking more than usual; a flight of snow-birds went by
day before yesterday. And it won't hold up till after the full,
and that's to-night. ”
"I thought as much too,” answered Pluck.
pagan altar, and cried out, “If any one has zeal for the lands of
his country and the worship of God, let him follow me;" and
fied to the desert with his sons, abandoning all his property in
the town. Many others followed him, and dwelt in caves in the
desert with their wives and children. When the King's generals
heard of this, they took the troops in the citadel at Jerusalem
and went in pursuit of the fugitives; and having overtaken them,
tried first to persuade them to take counsel of prudence and not
compel the soldiers to treat them according to the laws of war.
Meeting with a refusal, they assailed them on the Sabbath, and
burnt them unresisting in the caves.
Many of those
who escaped joined Mattathias and appointed him their ruler.
So Mattathias got a great army about him, and over-
threw their idolatrous altars, and slew those that broke their
laws, all he could lay hands on.
## p. 8385 (#597) ###########################################
8385
JOSEPH JOUBERT
(1754-1824)
BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
OSEPH JOUBERT, who has now succeeded to the place long held
by La Rochefoucauld as the best author of aphorisms, was
first introduced to the general world of English-speaking
readers by Matthew Arnold in 1865: but he was known to many, at
least in America, through what Sainte-Beuve had said of him; and
Mr. Stedman thinks that Edgar Poe, whose French reading was very
discursive, had known him even before Sainte-Beuve wrote. Joubert,
who was born in 1754, died May 4th, 1824; and a tribute was paid to
his memory, a day or two after his death, by Châteaubriand, which
might well have arrested the attention of Poe. In 1838 Châteaubriand
edited his works. It is, however, fair to say that as Ruskin vastly
expanded the reputation of Turner, though he did not create it, so
the present renown of Joubert is due largely to the generous tribute
of Arnold.
With the praise due to generosity the recognition of Arnold's serv-
ice must end. It was hardly possible to set readers more distinctly
on the wrong track in respect to an author than to compare, as
Arnold does, Joubert to Coleridge; making this comparison indeed
the keynote of his essay It is difficult. were not Arnold so em-
phatically a man of whims — to find common ground between the
tersest writer of his time and the most diffuse; the most determined
and the most irresolute; the most clear-cut and the most misty.
With all the great merits and services of Coleridge, and the fact that
he had occasionally the power of making an incisive detached remark,
the fact remains undisputed of the wandering and slumberous quality
of his mind, and of the concentration in him of many of the precise
qualities that Joubert spent his life in combating. The best course
to be adopted by any reader of Joubert is therefore to cut adrift
from Arnold, and turn to the original book,- not the volume of
letters, which is less satisfactory, but to the original volume of
Pensées, which contain within four hundred pages more of the con-
densed essence of thought than can be found anywhere else in a
series of volumes.
Joubert was born in 1754 in Montignac, a small town of Périgord,
France; studied and also taught at the College of Toulouse; went in
XIV-525
-
## p. 8386 (#598) ###########################################
8386
JOSEPH JOUBERT
1778 to Paris; knew Diderot, Marmontel, Châteaubriand, D'Alembert:
was chosen during his absence in 1790 chief magistrate of his native
town, served in that capacity two years and was re-elected, but
declined to serve; took up his residence in 1792 at Villeneuve in
Brittany, and spent his later life between that town and Paris; in
1809 was appointed by Napoleon Bonaparte a regent of the Univer-
sity, and died in 1824. He lived through the French Revolution, and
through the period of the Encyclopædists; but he preserved not
merely his life but his faith. He was in the habit, from twenty
years old to seventy, of writing down his detached thoughts, often
previously molded by conversation; his rooms at the top of a tall
house in the Rue St. Honoré being the resort of the brightest minds
in Paris. Fourteen years after his death, both his thoughts and
his correspondence were collected and given to the world; but the
thoughts afford by far the more interesting volume of the two.
As Arnold has misled readers by his comparison with Coleridge,
so his total estimate of Joubert is probably below the truth; because
the crowning quality of Joubert – severe and sublimated concentra.
tion was remote from Arnold's own temperament. The Englishman
was constitutionally discursive and long-winded. Nothing better was
ever said about Homer than he has incidentally said in his essay on
translating him: the trouble is that it takes him nearly a hundred
and fifty pages to say it. It is certain that Joubert never would have
written such a paper; it is very doubtful whether he could even have
read it. Arnold's favorite amusement - perhaps a tradition from his
father's sermons — was to begin an essay with a quotation from some
one, to attach every succeeding point of his essay to this text, to
play with it as a cat plays with a mouse, and then at the close to
take it for granted that he had proved its soundness: this was wholly
foreign to Joubert. It is however in Joubert that we find invariably
the sweetness and light which Arnold preached, but did not always
practice.
It is for this reason perhaps that Arnold dislikes the first or per-
sonal chapter of Joubert's Pensées': “It has,” he says, “some fanci-
fulness and affectation about it; the reader should begin with the
second. ” But if the reader takes this unwise advice he will miss the
whole personal equation of Joubert, and misinterpret him again
and again. He will miss also some of his finest thoughts; as where
he anticipates Emerson in one of the latter's most noted passages by
saying, "I dislike to quit Paris, because it involves separation from
my friends; and to quit the country, because it implies separation
from myself. ” He also anticipates a passage once famous in Miss
Edgeworth’s Helen' when he writes, “I even like better those who
make vice amiable than those who make virtue unattractive. He
## p. 8387 (#599) ###########################################
JOSEPH JOUBERT
8387
((
writes finely of his own experience: “My soul dwells in a region
where all passions have passed; I have known them all. ” With the
experience which years bring to all writers, he thus sums up their
result: “I needed age in order to learn what I desired to know; and
I should need youth in order to utter well what I now know. ” This
suggests, but not too sadly, that great summary of existence by St.
Augustine, -- "Now that I begin to know something, I die. And he
thus sums up the beginning and the end of his method of writing,
the very keystone of the arch of his fame: "If there is a man tor-
mented by the accursed ambition to put a whole book into a page, a
whole page into a phrase, and that phrase into a word, it is I. ”
All these passages are from that first chapter, The author por-
trayed by himself, which Mr. Arnold injudiciously advises readers to
omit. Then follows his chapter on piety, of which he finely says:
«Piety is a sublime wisdom, surpassing all others; a kind of gen-
ius, which gives wings to the mind. No one is wise unless he is
pious. Again, Piety is a species of modesty. It leads us to shield
our thought, as modesty bids us shield our eyes, before all forbid-
den things. ” And again, in one of his fine condensations he says,
«Heaven is for those who think about it. ” (Le ciel est pour ceux
qui y pensent). Then follow chapters covering Man, The Soul, Mod-
esty, The Various Times of Life, Death, The Family, Good Manners,
Truth, Illusion, Philosophy, Light, Governments, Liberty and Law,
Antiquity, Education, The Fine Arts, Style, The Qualities of an
Author; including also many other themes, and finally closing with
Literary Judgments - these covering authors ancient and modern.
The book is admirably edited, and adds to its merits that of an
analytical table at the end, so that it is practically a dictionary of
quotations. The late Mr. George H. Calvert, of Newport, R. I. ,
translates a portion of it — less than half — with a preliminary notice
(Boston, 1867); but the translations are not always felicitous, though
the feeling shown is always sympathetic.
Joubert sometimes suggests Montaigne, but with great differences:
he is never garrulous and never coarse. In him we taste in full the
exquisite felicity, the limpid clearness, the well-defined accuracy of
the French tradition, without the smallest trace of that refined indeli-
cacy in which vice does not lose half its evil by losing all its gross-
In him his native idiom stands out clearly for what it is, –
the lineal successor of the Greek, if the Greek can have a successor.
Then, the national virtues of courtesy, amiability, and bonhomie shine
out supreme: he goes, for instance, the whole round of his contem-
poraries, speaking his mind freely, yet without an unkind word; and
although a devout Catholic, he handles the Jansenists without a trace
of the odium theologicum.
ness.
## p. 8388 (#600) ###########################################
8388
JOSEPH JOUBERT
This refinement is the more remarkable in Joubert, because he
owed much to Rousseau in style, and was the originator of that often
quoted phrase concerning him, that he was the first person who gave
bowels to words,- in the sense used symbolically for that word in the
Bible. But he demands that this power of tender expression should
be always chaste; and in the very last of his maxims says that art
should always keep within the realm of beauty, and should never
forget the ancient religious precept, “Outside the temple and the
sacrifice, make no display of the intestines of the victim. ” And he
indicates the high standard of French courtesy by uniformly resting
it on noble motives. “Politeness,” he says, “is to kindness of heart
[bonté] what words are to thought. It does not merely influence the
manners, but even the mind and heart; it moderates and softens all
feelings, opinions, and words. ” And in another place he says in
yet more condensed form, «Courtesy is the very flower of humanity.
He who is not quite courteous is not quite human. ”
»
Tow Higginoon
.
OF MAN
T"
He body is the tent where our existence is encamped.
The voice is a human sound which nothing lifeless can
perfectly imitate. It has an authority and an impressiveness
which writing wants. It is not merely air, but air modulated by
us, impregnated with our warmth, and as it were enveloped in
the haze of our atmosphere; from which an emanation attends
it, and which gives it a certain form and certain virtues fitted to
act on the mind. Speech is only thought incorporated,
The more I think on it, the more I see that the mind is
something outside of the soul, as the hands are outside of the
body, the eyes outside of the head, the branches outside of the
trunk. It helps to do more, but not to be more.
The mind is a fire of which thought is the flame.
The imagination is the eye of the soul.
## p. 8389 (#601) ###########################################
JOSEPH JOUBERT
8389
OF THE NATURE OF MINDS
M
EN measure minds by their stature: it would be better to
estimate them by their beauty.
Nature has made two kinds of fine intellects: some to
produce thoughts and beautiful actions, others to admire them.
Heaven rarely grants to the same men the power of thinking
well, of speaking well, and of acting well in all things.
One is never mediocre when he has plenty of good sense and
good feeling
Sometimes great minds are nevertheless false minds. They
are well-constructed compasses, but whose needles, affected by
the influence of some neighboring object, always turn away from
the north.
He who has imagination without learning has wings without
feet.
OF VIRTUE AND MORALITY
E
VERYTHING may be learned even virtue.
We should do everything to let good people have their
own way.
Do not cut what you can untie.
To be always occupied with the duties of others, never with
our own — alas!
There are those who have only fragments: they have not
enough of the material to make a coat.
Without duty, life is soft and boneless; it can no longer sus-
tain itself.
Not only is there no virtue where there is no rule and law,
but there is not even pleasure. The plays of children themselves
have laws, and would not exist without them; these laws are
always a form of restraint, and nevertheless, the more strictly
they are obeyed the greater is the amusement.
OF THE FAMILY
W
E SHOULD choose for a wife only such a woman as we should
choose for a friend were she a man.
Nothing does a woman so much honor as her patience,
and nothing so little as the patience of her husband.
## p. 8390 (#602) ###########################################
8390
JOSEPH JOUBERT
We should wear our velvet inside; that is, be most amiable to
those with whom we dwell at home.
The pleasure of pleasing is a legitimate one, and the desire to
rule repulsive.
We should carry with us that indulgence and that habit of
attention which call the thoughts of others into bloom.
We should pique ourselves on being reasonable, not on being
right; on sincerity, not infallibility.
It is better to win than to command.
Before speaking ill of an eminent man, it might be well to
wait till he has done ill.
A small supply of everything, a surfeit of nothing, - this is
the key to moderation, wisdom, and content.
-
OF EDUCATION
C*
HILDREN need models rather than critics.
Education should be tender and strict, and not cold and
relaxing
In rearing a child, think of its old age.
People regard young men as merely students; but I see in
them young men also.
To teach is to learn twice over.
To have shared the mode of education common to all is a
great advantage to gifted minds, because they are thus kept in
touch with others.
OF THE PASSIONS
Wha
HATEVER purifies the passions makes them stronger, more
lasting, and more enjoyable.
We exhaust in the passions the material that was given
us for happiness.
Passions are but nature: it is the not repenting that yields
corruption.
Repentance is a natural effort which drives from the soul the
elements of its corruption.
Into every kind of excess there enters a certain coldness of
soul: it is a thoughtful and deliberate abuse of pleasure.
## p. 8391 (#603) ###########################################
JOSEPH JOUBERT
8391
The blind are cheerful, because their minds are not distracted
from dwelling on the things that make them happy, and because
they have yet more ideas than we have sights. It is a compen-
a
sation granted them by Heaven.
We always lose the friendship of those who have lost our
esteem.
Often our fine qualities are loved and praised only because our
defects temper their brilliancy. It often even happens that we
are loved rather for our defects than for our virtues.
We should make ourselves beloved, for men are only just
towards those whom they love.
The punishment of those who have loved women too much is
to love nothing else.
Tenderness is the calm of passion.
Man is a kind of rash being, who may exist after a fashion
half-way, but whose existence is the more delightful the more
complete it is.
One likes to do good deeds in one's own way.
Ambition is pitiless: every merit that it cannot use is con-
temptible in its eyes.
No one is good, one cannot be useful and deserves not to be
loved, if he has not something heavenly, either in his intellect
through thoughts, or in his will through affections directed on
high.
It is a blessing, a great good fortune, to be born good.
Unless we keep watch on ourselves, we shall find ourselves
condemning the unfortunate.
Be gentle and indulgent to all others; be not so to yourself.
The pleasure of giving is essential to true happiness; but the
poor may possess it.
When you give, give joyfully and in smiling.
Proud natures love those to whom they do a service.
Ornaments were the inventions of modesty.
"God will punish,” say the Orientals, “him who sees and
him who is seen. ” Beautiful and formidable recommendation of
modesty.
A spider's web made of silk and light were not more difficult
to create than to answer this question, What is modesty ?
C
## p. 8392 (#604) ###########################################
8392
JOSEPH JOUBERT
OF SOCIETY
T°
SEE the world is to judge the judges.
The attention of the listener affords a sort of accompa-
niment to the music of the talk.
If one has two names, he should be addressed by that which
is the more beautiful, the sweeter, the more sonorous.
Grace copies modesty as politeness copies kindness of heart.
OF DIFFERENT AGES
N°
TOTHING is so hard to children as reflection. This is because
the final and essential destiny of the soul is to see, to
know, and not to reflect. To reflect is one of the toils of
life; a means of arriving, a route, a passage, and not a centre.
To know and be known,- these are the two points of repose;
such will be the happiness of souls.
Address yourself to young people: they know it all.
There is nothing good in man but his young feelings and his
old thoughts.
Two ages of life should be sexless: the child and the aged
man should be as modest as women.
Old age robs the man of sense only of those qualities that are
useless to wisdom.
It would seem that for certain intellectual product the winter
of the body is the autumn of the soul.
The residuum of human wisdom, refined by age, is perhaps
the best thing we have.
Life's evening brings with it its lamp.
Those who have a long old age are, as it were, purified of
the body.
Old age must have had most honor in times when each man
could not know much more than what he had seen.
It is well to treat our life as we treat our writings: to pro-
vide that the beginning, the middle, and the end are in pro-
portion, in harmony. For this object we need to make many
erasures.
There is a time when the body's forces change place and con-
centrate themselves in the mind.
To be born obscure and die famous are the two boundaries
of human happiness.
## p. 8393 (#605) ###########################################
JOSEPH JOUBERT
8393
The deliberation of old age makes it easier to be patient in
labor.
We are all priests of Vesta, and life is the sacred fire which
we are to prolong until God extinguishes it.
A beautiful old age is for all beholders a delightful promise,
since each can hope the same for him or his.
old men constitute the true majority among the people.
Only robust old men have the dignity of old age, and they
are the only ones who can justly speak of it.
Courtesy softens wrinkles.
One loves an old man as a perishable treasure; a ripe fruit
whose fall one must expect.
In neat and fresh garments old age finds a sort of youth with
which to surround itself.
No one is truly happy in old age except the aged priest and
those of similar type.
It is a good thing to die still lovable; if one only can.
Patience and trial, courage and death, resignation and neces-
sity, arrive usually together. Indifference to life comes when it
is no longer possible to preserve life.
OF POETRY
PoEphers. " In seeking what is beautiful, they find
more truths
have a
,
than philosophers in seeking what is true.
Poets are more inspired by the images of objects than even
by their presence.
The poet should not traverse at a walk an interval which
might be cleared at a bound.
In the poetic style every word resounds like the twang of a
lyre well strung, and leaves after it a number of undulations.
Like the nectar of the bee, which turns to honey the dust of
flowers, or like that liquor which converts lead into gold, the poet
has a breath that fills out words, gives them light and color. He
knows wherein consists their charm, and by what art enchanted
structures may be built with them.
To fill an old word with new meaning, of which usage or
age had emptied it, so to speak,—this is not innovation, it is re-
juvenation. We enrich languages by digging into them. They
## p. 8394 (#606) ###########################################
8394
JOSEPH JOUBERT
should be treated like fields: to make them fertile in old age,
they must be stirred at great depths.
Before employing a beautiful word, make a place for it.
OF STYLE
Wa
ELL-CHOSEN words are abridged sentences.
Literary style consists in giving a body and a shape to
the thought by the phrase.
Attention has a narrow mouth; we must pour into it what we
say very carefully, and as it were drop by drop.
Only the temperate style is classic.
It is a great art, that of knowing how to point one's thought
and pierce the attention.
Each author has his own dictionary.
It needs more clearness of intellect and more delicate tact to
be a great writer than a great thinker.
NE
OF THE QUALITIES OF THE WRITER
TEVER write anything that does not give you enjoyment: emo-
tion passes easily from the writer to the reader.
The fine feelings and ideas that we wish to set forth in
our writings should become familiar to us, in order that the ease
and charm of intimacy be felt in their expression.
All that we say should be suffused with ourselves, with our
soul. This operation is long, but it immortalizes everything.
The mind conceives with pain, but brings forth with delight.
When writing we should recollect that scholars are present;
but it is not to them that we should speak.
An ordinary book needs only a subject; but for a fine work
there is a germ which develops itself in the mind like a plant.
The sole beautiful works are those that have been for a long
while, if not worked over, at least meditated upon.
Many useless phrases come into the head, but the mind grinds
its colors out of them.
In the mind of certain writers nothing is grouped or draped
or modeled; their pages only offer a flat surface on which words
roll.
The end of a work should always suggest the beginning.
## p.
8395 (#607) ###########################################
JOSEPH JOUBERT
8395
There never was a literary age whose dominant taste was not
unhealthy. The success of excellent authors consists in making
wholesome works agreeable to morbid tastes.
Taste is the literary conscience of the soul.
When in any nation an individual is born who is capable of
producing a great thought, another is born capable of compre-
hending it and admiring it.
Beautiful works do not intoxicate, but enchant.
It is not the opinions of authors, and that part of their teach-
ings which we call assertions, that most instruct and nourish the
mind. In great writers there is an invisible and subtle juice,
imbibed in reading them,- an indescribable fluid, a salt, a prin-
ciple more nutritive than all the rest.
Between esteem and contempt, there is in literature a path
which offers success without glory, and is also obtained without
merit.
It is worth a hundred times more to adapt a work to the
nature of the human mind than to what is called the state of
society. In man there is something immutable; thence it is that
in the arts and works of art there are fixed rules,— beauties that
will always please, or else contrivances that will please but for
a short time.
It is not enough to write so as to attract and hold attention:
we must repay it.
Does literary talent need to avail itself of passion ? Yes, of
manifold passion restrained.
The extent of a palace is measured from east to west, or from
north to south; but that of a literary work, from the earth to
heaven: so that there may sometimes be found as much range
and power of mind in a few pages — in an ode, for example -as
in a whole epic poem.
It is better to be exquisite than to be ample. Dealers respect
big books, but readers prefer small ones, — they last longer and
go farther. Virgil and Horace have left but one volume. Homer,
Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Terence not more. Menan-
der, who delights us, is reduced to a few leaves. Without Te.
lemachus, who would know Fénelon? Who would know Bossuet
without his Funeral Orations and his Discourse on Universal
History? Pascal, La Bruyère, Vauvenargues, and La Roche-
foucauld, Boileau, Racine, and La Fontaine, occupy little space,
and are the delight of the cultivated. The best writers write
## p. 8396 (#608) ###########################################
8396
JOSEPH JOUBERT
little, because they need to reduce to beauty their abundance and
wealth.
Remember what St. Francis of Sales said in speaking of the
Imitation of Jesus Christ': "I have sought repose everywhere,
and have only found it in a small corner with a small book. ”
Happy the author who can supply the need.
Force is not energy: some authors have more muscle than
talent.
Where there is no delicacy of touch, there is no literature.
In literary work, fatigue is what gives to the writer warning
of loss of power for the moment.
Indolence as well labor is sometimes needed by the
mind.
If a work shows the file, it is because it is not sufficiently
polished; if it smells of the oil, it is because one has not sat up
late enough over it [qu'on a trop peu veillé ].
What with the fever of the senses, the delirium of the heart,
and the weakness of the mind; with the storms of time and the
great trials of life; with hunger, thirst, dishonor, illness, and
death, - one can construct any number of romances that will
bring tears; but the soul says, “You do me harm! »
It is not needful that love should be introduced into a book;
but there should always be an impression of tenderness.
as
LITERARY JUDGMENTS
T*
WHERE never will be an endurable translation of Homer unless
all the words can be chosen with art, and be full of variety,
of freshness, and of grace.
The diction moreover must be
as antique, as simple, as the manners, the events, and the per-
sonages described. With our modern style everything is distorted
in Homer, and his heroes seem grotesque figures that take grave
and proud attitudes.
Plato found philosophy made of bricks, and rebuilt it of
gold.
In Plato, seek only forins and ideas: this is what he himself
sought. There is in him more of light than of objects, more
form than substance. He should be inhaled, not fed upon.
Plato loses himself in the void; but we see the play of his
wings and hear their sound.
## p. 8397 (#609) ###########################################
JOSEPH JOUBERT
8397
Aristotle rectified all the rules, and in all the sciences added
new truths to those already known. His works are an ocean of
instruction, as it were the encyclopædia of antiquity.
The Memorabilia' of Xenophon are a fine thread with which
he has the art of weaving magnificent lace, but with which we
can sew nothing.
Cicero is in philosophy a sort of moon. His doctrine has a
light extremely soft, but borrowed; a light wholly Greek, which
the Roman softened and weakened.
There are a thousand ways of employing and seasoning words:
Cicero loved them all.
In Catullus one finds two things, than the union of which
nothing can be worse: affected delicacy with grossness.
It is the symmetries in the style of Seneca that make him
quoted.
I look upon Plutarch's Lives' as one of the most precious
monuments left to us by antiquity. There we are shown what-
ever has appeared that is great in the human race, and the best
that men have done is put before us as an example. The whole
of ancient wisdom is there. For the writer I have not the same
esteem that I have for his work.
In the annals of Tacitus there is a narrative interest which
will not let us read little, and a depth and grandeur of expres-
sion which will not permit us to read much. The mind, divided
between the curiosity which absorbs it and the attention which
holds it, experiences some fatigue: the writer takes possession of
the reader even to doing him violence.
Most of the thoughts of Pascal on laws, usages, customs, are
but the thoughts of Montaigne recast.
Fénelon dwells amid the valleys and slopes of thought; Bos-
suet on its elevations and mountain peaks.
M. de Beausset says of Fénelon, “He loved men more than he
knew them. ” This phrase is charming: it would be impossible to
praise with more wit what one blames, or to praise more highly
while blaming
Voltaire retained through life, in the world and in affairs, a
very strong impress from the influence of his first masters. Im-
petuous as a poet, and polite as a courtier, he knows how to be
as insinuating and crafty as any Jesuit. No one
No one ever followed
more carefully, and with more art and skill, the famous maxim
he so ridiculed: To be all things to all men.
## p. 8398 (#610) ###########################################
8398
JOSEPH JOUBERT
Voltaire is sometimes sad, or he is excited; but he is never
serious. His graces even are impudent.
There are faults hard to recognize, that have not been classed
or defined or christened. Voltaire is full of them.
It is impossible that Voltaire should satisfy, and impossible
that he should not please.
Voltaire introduced and put into vogue such luxury in literary
work, that one can no longer offer common food except on dishes
of gold or silver.
J. J. Rousseau had a voluptuous nature. In his writings the
soul is blended with the body, and never leaves it. No man ever
gave such an impression of flesh absolutely mingled with spirit,
and of the delights of their marriage.
Rousseau gave, if I may so speak, bowels to words; infused
into them such a charm, savors so penetrating, energies so potent,
that his writings affect the soul somewhat as do those forbidden
pleasures that extinguish taste and intoxicate reason.
When we read Buffon, re think ourselves learned; when we
have read Rousseau, we think ourselves virtuous: but for all that
we are neither.
For thirty years Petrarch adored, not the person, but the
image of Laura: so much easier is it to maintain unchanged
one's sentiments and one's ideas than one's sensations. Thence
came the fidelity of the ancient knights.
No man knows better than Racine how to weave words, senti-
ments, thoughts, actions, events; and with him events, thoughts,
sentiments, words, are all woven of silk.
Racine and Boileau are not fountains of water. A fine choice
in imitation makes their merit. It is their books that copy books,
and not their souls that copy souls. Racine is the Virgil of the
ignorant.
Molière is coolly comic; he makes others laugh without laugh-
ing himself: there lies his excellence.
Alfieri is but a convict, whom nature condemns to the galleys
of the Italian Parnassus.
In La Fontaine there is an affluence of poetry which is found
in no other French author.
Piron: He was a poet who played well on his jew's-harp.
All the above translations were made by Colonel Higginson for this work.
## p. 8399 (#611) ###########################################
8399
SYLVESTER JUDD
(1813-1853)
YLVESTER JUDD was a figure in his place and time, as cler-
gyman, lecturer, and author. And he is still a figure in
American literature; for he wrote a novel - Margaret'-
which must be recognized in the evolution of the native fiction, and
is, judged by critical standards, a work of remarkable literary and
spiritual power.
Judd was born at Westhampton, Massachusetts, July 23d, 1813.
father was a noted antiquarian. The son got his Yale degree in 1836,
and then declined a professorship in Miami
College to enter the Harvard Divinity School.
In 1840 he became pastor of the Unitarian
Church at Augusta, Maine, continuing in
the one parish until his death, January 20th,
1853. While yet a theological student he
published A Young Man's Account of his
Conversion from Calvinism, interesting as
showing his serious nature and subjective
tendency. At thirty he was working on
(Margaret,' which was printed in 1845; a
revised edition in 1851; and a fine edition,
with illustrations by Darley, in 1856.
In his ministerial work Judd developed SYLVESTER JUDD
the idea that all his congregation were born
into full church privileges, and many other Maine parishes accepted
his teaching He was much in demand as a lecturer on temperance
and other social topics. The same spirit of earnest didacticism runs
through his noted novel. It is a loosely constructed story of old
New England life, with fine descriptions of nature. The tale is made
the vehicle of the conveyance of Judd's views on liberal Christianity,
temperance, and universal peace. Thus it is a pioneer example of
“purpose » fiction in American literature. The full title of the story,
Margaret: A Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom; includ-
ing sketches of a place not before described, called Mons Christi,?
conveys a sense of this in language that now sounds stilted and sen-
timental.
## p. 8400 (#612) ###########################################
8400
SYLVESTER JUDD
But were Margaret' nothing more than an ill-disguised sermon, it
would not be the remarkable book it indubitably is. Judd was first
of all a literary man when he made it. It was written, as he says
in the preface to the edition of 1851, "out of his heart and hope. "
And again: “This book was written for the love of the thing. ” It
depicts with vigor and
picturesqueness the crude, hearty New England
country life of the period transitional between the Revolution and the
settled Republic. Judd's genius puts before the reader the essential
homely details of that life, described realistically and with great
sympathy; the realism being relieved by descriptive passages of deli-
cate beauty, or mystical imaginings in
a high vein of poetry. And
in the midst of the other admirable chara
cter sketches is the strik-
ing central conception of Margaret herself,
echild of nature and of
dreams, a wood-flower growing up wild, to tur
out a noble woman
who rebukes even as she transcends the harshnes
vis, narrowness, and
illiteracy that surround her. She is a lovely creat
eion, which only
a writer of rare gifts could have evolved.
parts; but the earlier portion of the novel, dealing with th
e heroine's
childhood, is still an unsurpassed picture in its way.
Judd's other works include Philo: An Evangeliad' (1850), and the
didac-
tic poem defending the Unitarian position; Richard Edney an Var-
Governor's Family' (1850), another novel not dissimilar from
garet' in purpose, but without its charm; and a posthumous wo
(The Church: In a Series of Discourses) (1854). He left in manu
script a tragedy called "White Hills, showing the evils of avarice.
Arethusa Hall in 1854 published “The Life and Character of Sylvester
Judd.
The book fos unequal in
THE SNOW-STORM
From Margaret?
T
is the middle of winter, and is snowing, and has been all
night, with a strong northeast wind. Let us take a moment
when the storm intermits, and look in at Margaret's and see
how they do. But we cannot approach the place by any ordi-
nary locomotion: the roads, lanes, and by-paths are blocked up;
no horse or ox could make his way through this great Sahara
of snow.
If we are disposed to adopt the means of conveyance
formerly so much in vogue, whether snow-shoes or magic, we
may possibly get there. The house or hut is half sunk in the
general accumulation, as if it had foundered and was going to
the bottom; the face of the pond is smooth, white, and stiff as
## p. 8401 (#613) ###########################################
SYLVESTER JUDD
8401
21
ces
death; the oxen and the cow in the barn-yard, in their storm
fleeces, look like a new variety of sheep. All is silence and life-
lessness, and if you please to say, desolation. Hens there are
none, nor turkeys, nor ducks, nor birds, nor Bull, nor Margaret.
If you see any signs of a human being, it is the dark form of
Hash, mounted on snow-shoes, going from the house to the barn.
Yet there are what by a kind of provincial misnomer is called
the black growth,- pines and firs, green as in summer,--some
flanking the hill behind, looking like the real snowballs, blossom-
ing in midwinter and nodding with large white flowers. But
there is one token of life, - the smoke of the stunt gray chim-
ney, which, if you regard it as one, resembles a large, elongated,
transparent balloon; or if you look at it by piecemeal, it is a
beautiful current of bluish-white vapor, flowing upward unend-
ingly: and prettily is it striped and particolored, as it passes
successively the green trees, bare rocks, and white crown of
Indian's Head; nor does its interest cease even when it dis-
appears among the clouds. Some would dwell a good while on
that smoke, and see in it many outshows and denotements of
spiritualities; others would say, the house is buried so deep it
must come from the hot, mischief-hatching heart of the earth;
others still would fancy the whole region to be in its winding-
sheet, and that if they looked into the house they would behold
the dead faces of their friends. Our own notion is that that
smoke is a quiet, domestic affair; that it even has the flavor of
some sociable cookery, and is legitimately issued from a grateful
and pleasant fire; and that if we should go into the house we
should find the family as usual there: a suggestion which, as
the storm begins to renew itself, we shall do well to take the
opportunity to verify.
Flourishing in the midst of snowbanks, unmoved amid the
fiercest onsets of the storm, comfortable in the extremity of
winter, the family are all gathered in the kitchen, and occupied
as may be. In the cavernous fireplace burns a great fire, com-
posed of a huge green backlog and forestick, and a high cobwork
of crooked and knotty refuse wood. The flame is as bright and
golden as in Windsor Palace, or Fifth Avenue, New York,
smoke goes off out-doors with no more hesitancy than if it was
summer-time. The wood sings, the sap drops on the hot coals,
and explodes as if it was Independence Day. Great red coals
roll out on the hearth, sparkle a semibrief, lose their grosser
XIV-526
## p. 8402 (#614) ###########################################
8402
SYLVESTER JUDD
substance, indicate a more ethereal essence in prototypal forms
of white down-like cinders, and then dissolve into brown ashes.
To a stranger the room has a sombre aspect, rather heightened
than relieved by the light of the fire burning so brightly at mid-
day. The only connection with the external world is by a rude
aperture through the sides of the building; — yet when the outer
light is so obscured by a storm, the bright fire within must
anywhere be pleasant. In one corner of the room is Pluck, in a
red flannel shirt and leather apron, at work on his kit mending
shoes; with long and patient vibration and equipoise he draws
the threads, and interludes the strokes with snatches of songs,
banter, and laughter. The apartment seems converted into a
workshop, for next the shoemaker stands the shingle-maker,
Hash, who with froe in one hand and mallet in the other, by
dint of smart percussion is endeavoring to rive a three-cornered
billet of hemlock, In the centre sits Brown Moll, with bristling
and grizzly hair, and her inseparable pipe, winding yarn from a
swift. Nearer the fire are Chilion and Margaret: the latter with
the 'Orbis Pictus,' or World Displayed, a book of Latin and Eng-
lish, adorned with cuts, which the Master lent her; the former
with his violin, endeavoring to describe the notes in Dr. Byles's
Collection of Sacred Music,' also a loan of the Master's, and at
intervals trailing on the lead of his father in some popular air.
We shall also see that one of Chilion's feet is raised on a stool,
bandaged, and apparently disabled. Bull, the dog, lies rounded
on the hearth, his nose between his paws, fast asleep. Dick, the
gray squirrel, sits swinging listlessly in his wire wheel, like a
duck on a wave. Robin, the bird, in its cage, shrugs and folds
itself into its feathers, as if it were night. Over the fireplace, on
the rough stones of the chimney, which day and night through
all the long winter never cease to be warm, are Margaret's
flowers: a blood-root, in the marble pot Rufus Palmer gave her,
and in wooden moss-covered boxes, pinks, violets, and buttercups,
green and flowering. Here also, as a sort of mantel-tree orna-
ment, sits the marble kitten that Rufus made, under a cedar
twig. At one end of the crane, in the vacant side of the fire-
place, hang rings of pumpkin-rinds drying for beer. On the
walls, in addition to what was there last summer, are strings of
dried apples. There is also a draw-horse, on which Hash smooths
and squares his shingles; and a pile of fresh, sweet-scented white
shavings and splinters. Through the yawns of the back door,
## p. 8403 (#615) ###########################################
SYLVESTER JUDD
8403
and sundry rents in the logs of the house, filter in unweariedly
fine particles of snow; and thus along the sides of the rooms
rise little cone-shaped, marble-like pilasters.
Within doors is a mixed noise of miscellaneous operations;
without is the rushing of the storm. Pluck snip-snaps with his
wife, cracks on Hash, shows his white teeth to Margaret; Chilion
asks his sister to sing; Hash orders her to bring a coal to light
his pipe; her mother gets her to pick a snarl out of the yarn.
She climbs upon a stool and looks out of the window. The
scene is obscured by the storm; the thick driving fakes throw
a brownish mizzly shade over all things,-air, trees, hills, and
every avenue the eye has been wont to traverse.
The light
tufts hiss like arrows as they shoot by. The leafless butternut,
whereon the whippoorwill used to sing and the yellow warbler
make its nest, sprawls its naked arms and moans pitifully in the
blast; the snow that for a moment is amassed upon it falls to
the ground like a harvest of alabaster fruit. The peach-tree that
bears Margaret's own name, and is of her own age, seems to be
drowning in the snow. Water drops from the eaves, occasioned
by the snow melting about the chimney.
«I shouldn't wonder if we had a
snow-storm before it's
over, Molly,” said Pluck, strapping his knife on the edge of the
kit.
"And you are getting ready for it fast,” rejoined his wife.
"I should be thankful for those shoes any time before next July.
I can't step out without wetting my feet. ”
«Wetting is not so bad after all,” answered Pluck.
part I keep too dry. — Who did the Master tell you was the god
of shoemakers ? ” he asked, addressing Margaret.
«St. Crispin,” replied the child.
“Guess I'll pay him a little attention," said the man, going to
the rum bottle that stood by the chimney. "I feel some interest
in these things, and I think I have some reason to indulge a
hope that I am among the elect. ”
«He wouldn't own you,” said his wife, tartly.
“Why, dear? ”
“Because you are not a man; you are not the thrum of one.
Scrape you all up, and we shouldn't get lint enough to put on
Chilion's foot. ”
«Look at that,” said her husband, exposing his bare arm,
flabby and swollen; "what do you think now? ”
« For my
»
## p. 8404 (#616) ###########################################
8404
SYLVESTER JUDD
are
(C
“Mutton fat! Try you out, run you into cakes, make a pres-
ent of you to your divinity to grease his boots with. — The fire is
getting low, Meg: can't you bring in some wood ? »
"You are a woman really! ” retorted Pluck, “to send the child
out in such a storm, when it would take three men to hold one's
head on. ”
“Ha, ha! » laughed out his spouse. “You must have stitched
your own on; I don't wonder you afraid. That is the
way you lost your ear, trying to hold on your head in a storm,
ha, ha! ”
“Well,” rejoined Pluck, "you think you are equal to three
men in wit, learning, providing, don't you ? ”
“Mayhaps so. "
"And weaving, spinning, coloring, reeling, twisting, cooking,
clinching, henpecking, I guess you are. Can you tell, dearest
Maria, what is Latin for the Widow's Obed's red hair ?
"I can for the maggot that makes powder-post of our whole
family, Didymus Hart. ”
Pluck laughed, and staggered towards his bench.
“I knew we should have a storm," said his wife, "after such
a cold spell: I saw a Bull's Eye towards night; my corns have
been pricking more than usual; a flight of snow-birds went by
day before yesterday. And it won't hold up till after the full,
and that's to-night. ”
"I thought as much too,” answered Pluck.
