Here is everything: the necessity of choice which is the condition of good style, and which works so differently in ancient and modern times; the powers of “the word” in all their varied bearings; the excellence of archaism rightly understood, and the occasional charms of the kuria as a rest and interval for refreshment; the right to reinvest an old word with new meaning; the “science of names”; the placing of words; the freedom which the reader possesses of improving on his author by keeping his word and adding to his sense; the difference between musical and pictorial style; the impossibility of literature when words are used with an absolutely fixed value; the unpardonable sin of mere purism; the natural and justifiable idiosyncrasy of dictionary and even grammar in good writers, with the due guards against its excess; the variety of degree in which ancient authors are to be followed; the value and the danger of idioms. These and a hundred other things will all be found, sometimes of course (the fault of the form again) put too absolutely; sometimes, though very rarely, intermixed with things more dubious—but always present at short, at all but the shortest notice. Never, I think, did any critical writer enter so much into the marrow of things in so limited a space: the section is a sort of Tinctura Fortior, as the pharmacopœias say, or even like those older “drop-cordials” of story, where a vial the size of the little finger contained the virtue of a whole pharmacy.
Miscellaneous Criticisms.
These two sections form the aureus libellus of Joubert—if I knew a wealthy and sensible, intelligent and obliging bibliophile, they should be printed on vellum and adorned by the greatest decorative artists of the age, and bound in the simplest but the most perfect coat obtainable. We decline slightly with the two remaining chapters—though there is still plenty of gold to be found—and the decline is continuous. In the section “Des Qualités de L’écrivain et des Compositions Littéraires” we once more approach the merely philosophic side, and it is Joubert himself who has left us, apropos of Corinne, the memorable proposition that sometimes “un besoin de philosopher gâte tout.”[[217]] A fine distinction (not so expressed) between realist and idealist literature[[218]] is an instance of the consolation which is constantly occurring; but we must look for relapses. What do we learn by being told[[219]] that “Homer, Euripides, and Menander” (O groves of Blarney!) had more facilité pour le beau than Hesiod and Sophocles; Æschylus, Dante, and La Bruyère less than Fénelon and J. J. Rousseau? The context indeed shows (not by any means in so many words) what gloss is to be put on facilité and what on beau to get out Joubert’s meaning; but the result is not worth the trouble. And when we find afterwards that la facilité est opposée au sublime we agree, but, recurring, ask whether Homer is less sublime than Hesiod? The sub-sections on criticism (§ cxl. sq.) are excellent, and a fairly severe winnowing would leave a residue not much less valuable than in the other two: but the winnowing is necessary.
His individual judgments more dubious.
The fact may prepare the wary reader for some further inequality in the last section of “Jugements Littéraires,” with which should be taken certain letters to Molé in the Correspondance. To prevent disappointment and even puzzlement it is here necessary to remember Joubert’s “time, country, and circumstance.” He was a man, let it be repeated, of the mid-eighteenth century by birth; a Frenchman, and not, it would seem, by any means widely acquainted with foreign languages and literatures, except classics. He always speaks as if he could only read Milton in translations; his knowledge of Shakespeare, though he admired him, is derived from the same untrustworthy source; of any large part of English literature he necessarily knows nothing at all. Accordingly—in a fashion which is nearly unique in this history, but which is priceless in its unicity—the disadvantages which have been powerless to affect his general conceptions recover their hold upon him, to some extent, in particulars. He is still sound on what the general merits of poetry and of literature should be; but he sees those merits in the wrong place. At first sight, to an English reader who is not thoroughly broken to the ways of our difficult art, it may seem impossible, inconceivable, a bad joke, that the author of the aphorisms above quoted as to the necessity of “transport,” the power of words, and all the rest of it, should admire Delille and not admire Milton. But remember, he understood the words of Delille—they had, feeble as they were, the power to excite, according to his own true and profound theory, that poetry which was ready to answer and magnify them in his own soul. He did not understand the words of Milton, and they could not touch him; while he is certainly not to blame for not being touched by the words of Louis Racine.
The reason for this.
This is the most striking instance, the most astounding at first, the most illuminative afterwards; and it will give us a key to all the rest. It must for instance be a fresh stumbling-block, and no small one, to find Joubert, who could prefer Delille to Milton, quite cool, almost harsh, to Racine, saying that Racine is “the Virgil of the ignorant,” that those whom he suffices are “poor souls and poor wits.” But the way round the obstacle is perfectly clear to the practised traveller in our country. Racine’s was not the poetry of Joubert’s own time and generation; Delille’s was. His language, his words, his imagery could convey whatsoever of poetry was in them—though it might not be very much—to Joubert’s ears and wit and soul better than Racine’s could. And once more, as those ears and wit and soul were exquisitely sensitive to even a trace of poetry that did reach them, the difficulty becomes no difficulty at all, but, on the contrary, a real paradox of the most illuminating and helpful kind, constantly to be remembered, and especially good against those estimable doctrinaires who will have a hard and fast hierarchy in poetry, a “best, better, good, not so good, bad,” arranged in rigid classes. That is poetry to a man which produces on him such poetical effects as he is capable of receiving. The reader takes it, as the writer makes it, poeticamente. You may possibly—it is not certain, but it is possible—educate his poetic sense; say to it, “Friend, come up higher.” You may certainly remove merely mechanical obstacles, such as Joubert’s ignorance of English. But until something of this kind is done, it is better that the man should even excessively admire Burns or Béranger, Macaulay or Moore, than that he should simulate admiration of Shelley, or Hugo, or Heine. It would be pleasant to dwell on this, which has never, I think, been dwelt upon, or expounded fully before; but words to the wise must be here, as always, our motto: the hints given can easily here, as elsewhere, be expanded by those who have the wits and the inclination.