YEAR 1787

January 14, 1787.

Met Mercier in a café. What an opinion he has of the arts. In architecture he esteems only the mason. A beautiful statue is for him only a useless object of luxury and decoration. He esteems a beautiful painting no more than a beautiful diamond. He told me he intended shortly to publish a work to prove the uselessness of the fine arts. He expressed himself on this subject with much verve and clarity. He spoke of it truly with the eloquence given by a lively, considered, and determined enmity.

February 3, 1787.

[Diodorus of Sicily.]

[This concerns a story of seals reported by Diodorus.]

He regards this as more incredible than the rest! This man, wise in other respects, is not ashamed to reason so badly. Ah! Herodotus was a hundred times wiser than he. He reports prodigies and oracles. But men’s errors and narratives are one of the facts of history. As for things essentially contrary to nature, they ought no more to be found in books than they are found in the world. And a man of beautiful imagination will never adopt them or even remember them. This faculty gives a marvelous instinct for judging what is possible or not in each established or supposed order.

Perfumes, he says, which make our greatest delights.

It appears that he himself was very sensitive to the smell of perfumes; he speaks of them with sensual pleasure. His style grows beautiful; it has brilliance and grace when Arabia is in question, and above all the Sabaeans.

— When one reads in history that, in the war of the Gorgons, the victorious Amazons “put many of their female enemies to the sword,” that feminine ending makes one shudder. Put “enemies,” and you will read the sentence without emotion. It is because women are not, in fact, born to die by the sword, by combat, by wounds, and by the violent spilling of their blood.

— Among the ancients, events were rare and the stars had not been counted. When, looking at the sky, they were struck by some star or constellation that had until then escaped their wandering and distracted gaze, they seldom failed to consecrate it to the principal figure in the event then occupying their minds, thus assimilating the two and wishing to merge the memory of two novelties that most occupied their eyes and thought at the same time. A fairly natural inclination also made them take these appearances for metamorphoses. Seeing one man fewer in the universe and one star more in the sky, it was easy for them to think that the souls of great men, on leaving the earth, had attached themselves to the firmament, and that heaven enriched itself with all our great losses.

— Observe well that the ancients, who had respect for error, had still more for knowledge, and that among them the privileges of history were such that it could freely tell the truth even when speaking of the gods. See what Diodorus says of it everywhere.

— Daphne was the daughter of the seer Tiresias. The Epigoni brought her from Thebes to Delphi. She wrote a great number of oracles in several different manners. “It is said,” adds Diodorus, “that the poet Homer appropriated several of Daphne’s verses and used them to adorn his poems.” But what use could verses of oracles have been to Homer? At most they could supply him with a few maxims that he inserted into his narratives, as a beautiful woman puts a diamond in her hair without being accused of having a borrowed beauty. On the contrary, through the art of arranging this foreign adornment she shows a taste and discernment that are her own, and that heighten her merit more than the ornament she takes from elsewhere heightens her beauty.

— “It is related that after the abduction of Proserpina, Ceres, who did not know where to find her daughter, having lit torches at the flames of Mount Etna...” I have seen an excellent drawing by Fragonard that represented Ceres borne through the air in a chariot drawn by dragons, holding torches high as she looked down at the earth and searched it with her eyes for her daughter. In painting this subject, the flame of these torches would have to be given a particular character, partaking somewhat of the volcano where they were lit. They ought to look like a burning torch and show a glow rather than light. — (February 3, 1787.)

February 15, 1787.

[Concerning Amerigo Vespucci.]

One sees, too, that he looked for no great advantage in his undertakings beyond the opportunity to become and show himself learned, and in his accounts he always wishes to appear imbued with literary learning. He writes them more as a man whose memory recalls beautiful descriptions than as a man whose imagination presents beautiful objects. No great principle of morality ever guided him; he had only elevation of mind and boldness. He found it beautiful to guide himself at sea and in new countries by the rules of astronomy, a science then little known and little advanced. He thought it glorious to give sovereigns new empires. Such was the double role he aspired to, and which honored him in his own eyes.

Note. In the outline of his life, whether through the fault of his accounts or through his historian’s ignorance, the places he discovered are neither named nor determined by their exact position, with one or two exceptions. He died in 1516.

March 2, 1787.

Fontanes spoke to me of the sensations experienced on high mountains. He was returning from the Alps.

He told me that the clouds one sees scattered below one’s feet give the prospect something magical. Effects of the purity of the air. Junction of the Rhône and the Saône. Majesty of the fir. Etc.

Note. The fir is the only tree from which masts suitable for our ships can be made.

March 3, 1787.

Measured movements, such as those of dancing and even of military marches, give the body quite a different exercise and produce quite different effects on the humors from the uneven, varied movements without cadence of easy, free, ordinary walking.

April 1787.

In the plains of Gentilli.

Why do I see women plowing? Have war or plague destroyed all your males? And are there no longer on this earth any strong, fully formed human beings except unmarried women and widows? Have all the young men perished, as well as the husbands? And have those horses I see harnessed returned alone from the army?

May 4, 1787.

Every work of genius, epic or didactic, is too long if it cannot be read in a day.

No individual date printed

One loves only once, the songs say; that is, there is only one age truly fitted for love.

No individual date printed

Winter, which rests the earth...

May 9, 1787.

He, says Socrates in the fifth dialogue of the Republic, he who, possessing a moderate power, is discontented and wishes to enjoy an unlimited power will sooner or later learn to his cost the truth of Hesiod’s saying: “Half is better than the whole.”

June 30.

The popular Venus...

July 1, 1787.

Apparent breadth of the fields on Sunday. Arises from two causes: absence of sounds and absence of visible objects.

Noise that comes from a single place makes those around it seem deserted. When it comes from several, it makes even the intervals seem peopled.

It is to the mind, to the soul still more than to the eyes, that the countryside then seems broad, immense, uninhabited.