Take his bile from Juvenal and his wisdom from Virgil, and you will have two bad authors.

Enthusiasm and verve are two different qualities: verve stirs, and enthusiasm moves.

After enthusiasm, verve is the best thing for inspiration.

Boileau had verve, Lafontaine a perpetual enthusiasm. Horace had verve, Aristophanes too. Menander and Virgil had the gentlest and most exquisite enthusiasm there ever was.

J. B. Rousseau had more verve than Chaulieu. Chaulieu had more enthusiasm than Rousseau. Malherbe had as much enthusiasm as verve.

R—c—n had reason and taste in the highest degree. In his works, everything is of choice, nothing of necessity; and that is what constitutes his excellence.

Molière is comic in cold blood. He makes others laugh and does not laugh. That is what makes him a great comic author.

The comic author and the tragic author must remain meditative, the latter to be equal to his work, the former to be superior to his.

April 10.

“His madness is not a disease of the brain (Geoffroy says very well, speaking of Orestes’ frenzies); it is a disease of the soul.” Let us say, then, that if Montfleury killed himself playing this role, it was because he played it badly. He put the body in the place of the soul.

He passed through doing good: what beautiful praise! — And all those young demagogues who passed through doing evil! — Unfortunates!

One reads in today’s Publiciste (article Theater, Andromaque): “Right feelings, that is, those that have moral sanction, are the only ones that make a lasting impression.” So there is the Publiciste speaking like M. de Bonald.

Strength is not energy. Some authors have more muscles than talents.

— and to show, even in the character’s features, the destiny that awaits him, as one foresees the sacrifice even in the arrangement of the flowers with which the victim is crowned. The same writer (M. F.) observed very well that Homer foreshadowed all the sorrows of Andromache’s life in the tenderness of her farewells as Hector left for battle.

A face without features, a book from which nothing can be quoted.

J.-J. Rousseau, in his way of looking at morality, could have defined it as “the art of usefully increasing the passions.” And there would have been two fundamental errors in that. First as to usefulness; for there can be none in increasing the passions, that is, in giving men more passions than nature does, or passions greater than themselves. Second as to the respective functions; it may be useful to direct the passions in man by exercising them or, to speak more clearly, to train and accustom the passions to preserve some rectitude, some order, some propriety, some beauty, not only in their operations or their works but in their slightest movements. But to assign such a care to morality is to confuse everything: it concerns poetry. Morality is made only to repress, to contain. It is a rule, an immobile and immutable rule, and by that very fact it is a barrier. It is a bridle, not a goad.

Perhaps one loses one’s natural disposition more easily than one’s upbringing, — at least in manners.

April […]2.

The mask makes the actor, in the theater, but not in life.

April 11.

In today’s Publiciste, Mʳ F. Bonaldizes again. “So true is it, he says, etc. and that: chastity is the mother of noble feelings and high poetry.” (Article The Duke of Lanzun.) But we praise chastity as we do religion, without wanting it for ourselves.