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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

Suppositions that lead the mind and the pen to monstrous thoughts.

February 15.

An ordinary work needs only a subject. But a beautiful work needs a germ that develops of itself in the mind like a plant.

February 16.

In the temperate and in all that is lower, one depends despite oneself on the times in which one lives, and however unwillingly one speaks like all one’s contemporaries. But in the beautiful and the sublime, and in all that partakes of them in any way whatever, one leaves the times behind, depends on none, and in whatever century one lives one can be perfect; only with more difficulty in certain times than in others.

February 17.

— And the human heart went mad.

For time calms intoxications. That of friendship, a long fidelity to its first admirations.

These flowers of the mind at least keep the imagination in joy. They enliven and rest reflection.

Voltaire’s verse. It passes before attention rapidly and cannot stop there, because of the impulse of speed the poet’s mind imparted to it in casting it onto his paper.

February 18.

— and even these false brilliancies, taste forgives them, provided one senses at all that the author’s mind could have been ingenuously seduced by them. It is pretension, not error or a mistake, that revolts.

Voltaire spread through language an elegance that [has] banished bonhomie from it. Rousseau took wisdom from souls by speaking to them of virtue. Buffon fills the mind with bombast. Montesquieu, he is the wisest, but he seems to teach the art of making empires: one believes one is learning it while listening to him and every time one reads him.

February 19.

Style. The figure must enter the mind all at once and whole as soon as it is complete. Everything of it that remains in the book without detaching itself on its own to apply itself to memory is a fault, however finely filed it may be, and however finished it may at first appear.

February 20.

“Not without the gods.” (Horat.) — Not even a book, if it is beautiful.

O eternal wisdom!

Like those engravings in which the plate is never clean, but the figures are beautiful.

Those who never think beyond what they say and never see beyond what they think always have a very decided style.

T171.Germe retains the developing organic seed or germ, explicitly compared to a plant. A subject alone suffices for an ordinary work; beauty requires this self-developing principle.

T172.The temperate is the nominal middle or moderated register, in contrast with the beautiful and sublime. None refers to the times or ages just mentioned, not to individual people. The possibility of perfection in any century remains qualified by the different difficulty of achieving it.

T381.The second sentence in paragraph 2 remains a verbless fragment; no calming verb is supplied.

T173.The second sentence remains a fragment: That of friendship has no supplied predicate. Long fidelity to its first admirations is not silently made the means by which time calms friendship. The plural intoxications remains.

T174.Verse renders plural vers collectively. The lines cannot stop before attention because they retain the impulse imparted when the poet cast them onto paper. The physical account of their motion is not reduced to a judgment that the verse is merely superficial.

T175.Brillans retains figurative glitter or brilliance that may be false. Ingénûment means ingenuously or without guile, not ingeniously. Taste can forgive the author’s mistaken attraction; the distinction between pretension and error remains.

T176.Bonhomie is good-natured simplicity, which Joubert says elegance has banished. [Has] reproduces Beaunier’s supplied [a]. Bombast renders the French plural emphases collectively, as instances of inflated expression. The detached Montesquieu, he remains, and the making-empires image repeats the earlier entry.

T177.Figure is retained rather than narrowed to a particular rhetorical device. The whole figure must detach itself from the book and apply itself to memory. Filed preserves the physical working of a surface in limé, rather than reducing the word to merely careful writing.

T178.The Latin corresponds to Horace, Odes III.4.20, where the checked text has non sine dis. Beaunier prints diis. The original describes the poet as a child protected by the gods; Joubert applies the fragment to a beautiful book. The English translates the quotation independently and adds no verb to Joubert’s following fragment.

T386.The Latin attribution Horat. is printed in the text; the Latin sentence is italic. The second paragraph starts with O, without a circumflex.

T179.Planche is the printing plate of the engraving. The contrast is between an unclean plate and beautiful figures; the kind of plate material is not specified. The opening plural comparison remains without a supplied subject.

T180.Décidé means assured or categorical in manner. The style’s assurance is set beside the limits of its writers’ thinking and seeing; no explanatory judgment is added to the body.