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That: one must love only through force: through the force of a loving heart.
Brandy among savages is no worse an evil than such books among us.
That it is possible to distinguish (by the nature of their style), in the writers of every century, whether the expressions they used were current in their time or whether they created them.
The ancients gave wine of the first cuvée, and we make wine from pomace. We have something fuller in body, but less fine. They were farther from the lees.
All rentiers supporters of the revolution.
Of the eloquence of prefects.
January 23.
These words occur in a novel of the day, fairly well praised and written in fairly pure language: “I adored my brother, the sky, the trees...” I adored, that is to say, I loved very much. I loved very much the sky (that is to say, the air), the trees, and my brother! Alas! ho there! eheu!
...Yes—teaches us to love trees—and the air—which they call the sky.
—and sensations!
January 24.
It is satyrion. These are ill-prepared love potions. Bad tales of love: I do not like wines that intoxicate. It is the savages’ arek, a liquor they make by chewing a plant and throwing their chewed remnants into a basin.
...make love go to the head.
...great passions, great sword strokes.
With the fever of the senses, the delirium of the heart, and the weakness of the mind, with the storms of the times and the great scourges of life, fever, hunger, thirst, diseases, and death, one will make as many novels as one wishes that will make people weep. Yes, that makes one weep; but the soul says: “You hurt me.”
Add to them shipwrecks, suicides, prisons, and scaffolds.
I would willingly say, as a good moralist: prove, but do not approve.
To heap death upon death.
William Matkin (at Hakney in England, a child of six and a half. Had created in imagination a country named Allestone, of which he had constituted himself king and to which he gave laws. It was his utopia. As he lay dying, he looked at his maps. A prodigy of mind and erudition. What are the others? what are we, if not William Matkins. (See newspaper of January 28, 1803.)
...which opens to all that is useful and excludes all that is excess. For all her properties are those of a drawplate. She serves to measure out thought to us and etc. She stops at our surface the useless... She lessens their power; she makes gentle and moderate the indispensable movement that sets the will in play. She purifies all the causes of our determinations. Passions, feelings; pleasures, happiness. And transmits there the feeling of a peaceful felicity, as the air transmits light, as the eye transmits clarity. She establishes an even temperature in our sphere. She preserves in all our senses a lasting flexibility. She maintains in our mind a continual purity, that quality without which nothing takes on its growth or acquires its perfection. She sets herself like a brake against our premature flights. She keeps our impulses bridled, if I may express myself so; she defends us against ourselves. She assures our faculties the time and ease to unfold beyond reach and without irregularity in an unoccupied space and within a circumscribed center where the... nourishes them with its tranquil influences; and candor surrounds them like a transparent fluid. She puts the heart at rest and all our senses beyond tumult without impairing their mobility (or) incapable of constraining us during our developments, but capable of defending us by cushioning every shock. There is her destination. One conceives her necessity. What is to the young of birds etc.—And transmits movement there while keeping immobility.
And for example F. was wise only through his own wisdom. P. himself was strong only through his own nature. Whereas B. was strong with all human strengths, wise with all wisdoms; all the good sense of humankind and the knowledge of every century was in him.
To praise without rule or measure indicates little judgment. To make oneself admired to excess (when it happens through one’s own fault) indicates a deceptive merit that errs through some excess.
Thus P. is of the first class, but not in the first rank.