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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[Malebranche.]

December 18.

This Abbé Arnaud is a little like a drum, a little hollow, resounding. Yet his Essay on Melodrama is very good. See also his Discourse on Languages.

December 24.

Plato. Disposes the soul to have lofty thoughts.

L. L. This intrepidity of good opinion, this tone of infallibility, this assurance of oneself, this air of natural dominion. He wants to dominate through truth, and everything he believes seems true to him.

L. and L. Yes. All his talent for criticism comes from a defect of his mind, which finds important what is not, and which has the power and the patience to give a bad work all the attention that is due to good ones.

(The impropriety of examining a bad work seriously and line by line.)

December 25.

Age. Spirit of censure, tone of a disdain that moderates itself, intention to destroy.

There is a manner that belongs to the thing, one that belongs to the genre, one that belongs to the man, one that belongs to the trade or to artifice. It consists in evasion. That is the one that is worth nothing.

Voltaire. That is because there is also manner in the manner in which we live; and the faults of his style are matched to those of our mores. But peoples who have other ones (faults) will not be able to bear his, and his own nation, if it becomes better, will banish him.

Dance is the necessary effect of certain airs whose beat it in some sense marks. As soon as man had imagined these, they produced dance.

The only one of our dances that had a moral character (or, as the Chinese say, taught virtue), the minuet, has disappeared, and with it dignity in pleasures.

All those that have remained to us... accustom the soul to disorder, to haste, to madness.

December 30.

“And often holds victory in the balance against God.” (Boileau.) There lies the unpardonable fault of John Milton’s poem.

T40.The French gives Arnaud something of a drum’s character; a little like a drum makes the comparison intelligible in English while retaining hollow and resounding. The two titles are translated as part of Joubert’s text, without claiming these as established English publication titles.

T296.The printed 18 décembre follows the previous page’s 24 décembre; source order is retained rather than corrected to chronology.

T41.The printed L. L. and the following L. et L. are retained without assigning a name. Good opinion is left without an added object: the context suggests self-assurance and confidence in one’s own judgments, but the phrase does not explicitly say of oneself. The singular his and he remain despite the later and between the initials.

T42.The first three manners can be characteristic styles; the dismissive judgment is directed at the last, that of the trade or artifice. The following It refers to that last manner. Repeating manner avoids making all four varieties into affectations.

T43.The repeated manière is deliberate: the first occurrence names mannerism, the second the manner of living. Mores retains the collective habits and conduct of mœurs. The parenthetical faults clarifies other ones in the source itself.

T44.Airs are tunes; dance marks their musical beat. The English reads the printed eût imaginé as the past act of imagining them. The claim that the tunes necessarily produce dance remains Joubert’s.

T298.Both eût forms have a printed circumflex, including the tense after Dès que. The three dots after restées remain before the finite accoutument.

T45.Moral character and taught virtue remain distinct formulations. The attribution to the Chinese is Joubert’s own, without a supplied Chinese text or authority. The following ellipsis leaves the other dances unnamed.

T46.The line is from Boileau’s Art poétique, canto III. Its subject, the devil, appears in the preceding lines and is absent from Joubert’s excerpt. Against God renders the contest implied by avec Dieu, while holds victory in the balance retains the balancing image. Joubert applies the criticism to Milton; the English does not add the poem’s title to his text.