The style of Rousseau makes upon the soul the impression which the flesh of a lovely woman would make in touching us. There is something of the woman in his style.
Racine and Boileau are not fountain-heads. A fine choice in imitation constitutes their merit. It is their books that imitate books, not their souls that imitate souls. Racine is the Virgil of the unlettered.
Molière is comic in cold blood. He provokes laughter and does not laugh. Herein lies his excellence.
Bernardin [St. Pierre] writes by moonlight, Chateaubriand by sunlight.
The quality of both writers is such that we seem simply to be making the transition from masculine to feminine in going, as now we do, from Joubert to Madame Swetchine.
Madame Swetchine lives, and deserves to live, in French literature—for, though Russian, she wrote in French—by the incomparable exquisiteness of her personal, expressing itself in her literary, quality. Purest of pure was she, as in what she wrote, so in what she was. Through sympathetic contemporary description she makes an impression as of one of Fra Angelico’s female saints released for a life from the fixed canonization of the canvas.
Madame Swetchine’s life was chiefly spent in Paris, where the French language, already long before, in St. Petersburg, grown easy and tripping on her tongue, became to her a second, perhaps more familiar, vernacular. She was a high-born, high-bred, refined, and elegant woman of the world—woman in the world we should rather say, for, in the truest sense, of it she never was—who held brilliant, choicely-frequented salons, but who, without ostentation and without affectation, would go from her oratory, which indeed seems to have been a private “chapel,” in the full ecclesiastic sense of that word, to her drawing-room; who had even, as Sainte-Beuve indulgently, but with something of his inseparable irony, intimates, the effect of vibrating from the one to the other in the course of the same evening. Madame Swetchine was married young very unequally to a man twenty-five years her senior; but she set the edifying example of half a century’s wifely devotion to that husband whom, at the wish of her father, well beloved, she had dutifully accepted in place of a noble young suitor, the choice of her own affections.
Two volumes—both of “Thoughts,” though one of them bears the title “Airelles”—shut up within themselves the fragrance that was Madame Swetchine. We cull a few specimens:
Often one is prophet for others only because one is historian for one’s self.
The chains which bind us the closest are those which weigh on us the least.