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June […].
In seeking only to write well, as in society when aspiring only to live decently, one —
Eloquence is a game, an art of spreading illusion over the actions of men.
I wanted to do without words, I disdained them: words take their revenge — through difficulty, etc.
June […].
One of the sewers of the human body, or that half-intestinal part; and that hair always hideous in sculpture, because the chisel can express it only through a disorder that is a true deformity.
Statues of the Egyptians, with a polish more finished than that of the Greeks. Finish is not a sign of greater perfection in art.
André Chénier’s line: “Come, there are other games...”
June 8.
On imitation. — The ancients, and Plato himself, never understood well how it should be the object of art; the moderns still less. Each person likes to see reproduced what he thinks, what he seeks, what he judges beautiful, what he conceives.
Indeed, music and dance have subjected to order and measure what is by nature most immoderate and excessive in the world, leaps and cries.
Spirit of mediation. Character of one kind of eloquence. That kind pleased the ancients. Such was Nestor’s.
Spirit of opposition and contradiction toward everyone. Character of another kind of eloquence; like that of Demosthenes, for example, that of J.-J. Rousseau.
All the same capacity to love, but not the same capacity to understand. The lights of the enlightened will serve as a spectacle for the others (as here below: heaven is like earth) and thus increase their happiness.
Saturday, June 9.
There are quotations one must use to give discourse more force and to give it tones that are, so to speak, cutting; in a word, to strengthen its full areas. There are others good for casting extent and space into it and, so to speak, sky, through more diluted tints. Such are Plato’s.
A kind of men so possessed by this love (of art) that they no longer regard art as a thing made for the world, but the world, manners, men, and society as things made for art. Subordinating everything, even morality, to statuary, they regret the loss of nudity, gymnastics, athletes, out of devotion to sculptors. That is because they love the arts more than manners and statues more than their children.