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[1786]
England and the English.
— Royal Society. Fontanes was told there that people lived a little longer in France than in England, and that, by the calculations that had been made, the excess was probably about eleven months for each individual.
Reynolds and West-Bartolozzi.
— The great there have more clothes and more meats than the people; but the people eat the same meat and dress in the same cloth as the great.
— They seek to make their pronunciations harmonious. This is a care taken by all peoples whose language is rough. They claim to have in theirs the susurri of the Latins.
— This clergyman asked whether there was anything great among the people: Est ne aliquid magnam? They esteem a nation only for the political role it is capable of playing.
One could have answered him that there was in this people something lovable, gentle, cheerful, hospitable, and also proud and bold when the nation was at war. I do not know whether this answer would have given him a sufficiently favorable opinion of us.
— Pitt is handsome as Solon must have been at thirty. There is much laughter in the House of Commons.
— Lord Pulteney, miserly, extremely polite.
— They say: “We have no Buffon.”
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Note: “All your ideas smile on me.”
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The dog and the cats. La Fontaine would not have made his fables there. The horses.
The young girls. Modesty. The beds.
Plumpness.
This people is peaceful whenever it is not violently agitated, and its character takes the place of policing. It has a composed disposition that gives the passions time to gather slowly and grow; and so its feelings are strong.
— Mrs. Sidons.
— Molière does not make them laugh. Locke has few followers there: “He denied innate ideas,” they say, “and was right to do so; but he also denied innate perceptions, and he was wrong.”
Polite since the last war. “They are a lovable people,” he says, speaking of the French. French dog. Racall.
There is not a single sign in London whose inscription is French: the people would not tolerate it.
The Negro stretched out on the snow. A beggar woman with bare breasts.
Today in London they speak of our ministers as their creatures speak of them at Versailles in their antechambers.
Clothes, buttons. All manufactures encouraged at once. Anyone who is not well dressed is despised there either as a man of dissolute conduct or as a citizen useless to his country’s prosperity.
At this moment he is occupied with Norway.
[1786.]
Thought forms in the soul as clouds form in the air.
[1786.]
The more spring the fibers of a brain must have, says the Abbé Dubos, the greater the number of these fibers, the more time they need to acquire all the qualities of which they are capable.
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“I asked several musicians,” says the Abbé Dubos, “whether it would be very difficult to invent characters with which the declamation used in our theater could be written in notes. They answered that it was possible, and even that declamation could be written in notes using the scale of our music, provided that the notes were given only half the ordinary interval. For example, notes that rise by a semitone would have only a quarter-tone interval in declamation...” etc...
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When Saint Ambrose composed the chant that bears his name, the theaters were still open. They were closed forever only after Rome had been taken and sacked by Attila. Fifty years later, Saint Gregory regulated the chant called Gregorian. It is all the more probable that these ecclesiastical chants resemble the chant of the theaters because the severest writers among the Christians had decided that this profane chant could [not] be used for the praises of God.
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Let this fact be a measure of art among the ancients. Under Augustus, the pantomime Bathyllus performed a monologue ending with the words, Agamemnon the great. To express them, Bathyllus made all the gestures of a man who wishes to measure another man taller than himself. Pylades called out to him from the pit: “My friend, you do make your Agamemnon a tall man, but you do not make him a great man.” The people wanted Pylades to play the same role at once. He did so. And when he performed the passage at which he had so loudly corrected his rival, he represented by his gesture and posture the demeanor of a man plunged in deep meditation, to express the distinctive character of a great man; thus showing that a man greater than others was a man who thought more deeply than they did. The people applauded, etc. (See the Abbé Dubos, Volume I.)
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In Cicero’s time people complained that actors and musicians were departing from ancient gravity to plunge into mad haste and vivacity. The spectators nevertheless still demanded so much wisdom and sobriety in expression that they blamed Pylades for giving his gesture too much freedom one day when he was playing Hercules in his frenzy. He took off his mask and shouted at them: “Fools that you are! I am portraying a greater fool than you.”
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Note very carefully. The Pythagoreans had symphonies they used at bedtime to calm the tumultuous ideas that the day’s agitations leave in the imagination... They used others of an opposite character on awakening, to set the spirits better in motion and thus make themselves more disposed to application. The Abbé Dubos thinks that Lully’s air called Logistille in the opera Roland is of the first kind, and that the first dance air in the prologue to Amadis, by the same musician, is of the second kind (Vol. I).
The ancient figure we call the Antinous is also called the Latin.
Marforio is evidently a river; his reclining bearing, his leaning posture, his watery and washed character: everything proves it.
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On style. An imitation must be composed only of images. The poet makes an impassioned man speak; he must put into his mouth expressions that are only the image of the words a truly impassioned man would use. If the painter colors some object, likewise the colors he uses must be only an image of the real colors. A musician must use only images of real sounds, and not the real sounds themselves. The actor must observe the same law in choosing his tones and gestures. It is the great rule, the first rule, the sole rule. All excellent artists have observed and glimpsed it, but no one has ever proposed it. I do so today with all the more confidence because it proves itself through its self-evidence, like all principles born of the essence of things. “The copy of the object,” says the Abbé Dubos, speaking of every imitation, “must arouse in us a copy of the passion the object would have aroused there.” This expression, so important is it, must suffice to make the name of this learned man worthy of immortality, etc., etc., etc.”
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Look at these two landscapes by Poussin. The first makes one love solitude; the other makes one love inhabited places.