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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1806

Our more adorned memory, our taste itself accustomed to a richer eloquence, through the quantity of good books, no longer permit us, even despite our efforts, so simple a sobriety.

January 13.

Of taste, of its powers. Whether, in works of the mind, the jurisdiction of this faculty extends to all things. Whether there are ornaments of which taste should not be the judge. Should taste judge light, brilliance, etc.

Our taste has softness, like our morals. Our poetics, like our morality, preaches only what flatters us.

Make little sentences say great things. Montesquieu had this talent.

Poetics brings everything back to taste, as our morality brings everything back to feelings, and as our ideology brings everything back to sensations.

There are ornaments, charms, that taste neither approves nor condemns. It does not concern itself with them. The mind’s sight alone has them within its jurisdiction. In a word, as I said once before, taste should judge, and can even judge, only flavors or what is analogous and corresponds to them. Judgment properly so called must decide all the rest.

In modern literature, emphasis (which is a character of style rather than a figure, and a fault rather than a character) consists in exaggerating through words the greatness of what one speaks of. It differs from swelling because it adds less bulk than grandeur. (The ancients understood it differently.)

Every good proverb is ordinarily allegorical.

January 14.

“These songs that gargle the throat,” says Geoffroy; and that one may indeed call harmonious gargles. Our dancing also has measured gargouillades. And in this kind our dancers do with their legs what our singers do with their throat.

January 15.

— and to take as matter pastes one can knead, of a volume small enough not to exceed our hands.

Of taste and judgment. Their literary powers and the limits of their functions in criticism. The error of our modern poetics, which would have taste judge everything.

Friday, January 17.

A sure taste is one that knows how to distinguish matter from form and to separate the faults of form from the excellence of substance, and the faults of substance from the excellence of form. A sure taste also knows how to distinguish in literature the good from the bad, the bad from the worse, and the good from the better. Experience is necessary to this discernment.

T21.Powers renders attributions in the surrounding image of jurisdiction and judgment. The two Whether clauses remain inquiries without a supplied governing verb. The final question retains the source’s ending in etc. without an added question mark.

T242.The Si and S’il clauses remain indirect inquiries without supplied governing verbs. The final interrogative ends in etc. with a period, not an added question mark.

T22.Poetics is the theory of poetry; ideology here concerns the account of ideas and their relation to sensations. It does not name a modern political platform. The three repetitions of brings everything back preserve the parallel claims.

T23.Emphasis here names emphase as Joubert defines it: verbal exaggeration of greatness, rather than mere stress or insistence. He distinguishes adding bulk from adding grandeur and then warns that the ancients used the term differently. This technical discussion keeps the cognate term; the earlier descriptive emphatique is rendered grandiloquent.

T24.Gargouillade is an actual dance term, recorded as a dance step by the Académie in 1835. Its sound joins Joubert’s gargarizent and gargarismes, a verbal chain only partly reproducible in English. Measured retains the reference to ordered movement. The relative continuation after Geoffroy is not completed into a new assertion.

T25.The initial and to take remains an infinitive fragment. Pastes preserves the pliable material and kneading image; the measure remains what does not exceed the hands, without replacing them by an abstract capacity.

T247.Paitrir and assés remain as printed; the initial infinitive fragment has no supplied governing clause.

T26.Matter renders matière, and substance renders fonds. The reciprocal distinction between the faults of one and the excellence of the other remains, as do the three separate comparisons of good, bad, worse, and better.