Joseph Joubert on the Arts

The Beautiful! ’Tis but beauty seen through the eyes of the soul.

Common or plainly genuine truths cannot be the object of art. Illusion upon a true foundation: that is the secret of the fine arts.

There are many beauties which would not be natural were it not for the efforts of art.

The object of art is to unite matter with forms, which are the truest, fairest and purest things in nature.

Beautiful lines are the foundation of all beauty. There are arts in which they must be visible, such as architecture, which is happy to flaunt them. There are others, such as sculpture, in which one ought to disguise them with care. In painting, they are always sufficiently veiled by colour. Nature hides them, buries and covers them, in living beings. The latter, if they are to be beautiful, must show their lines but little: for the skeleton is in the line and life in the contour.

An English Moralist: “Tom Brown of Facetious Memory”

Tom Brown (1662–1704) is interesting for all sorts of reasons. “T*m Br*wn of facetious memory,” as Addison called him in The Spectator, 567 (14 July 1717), is almost exclusively remembered for his imitation of Martial, 1.13; but I like to remember him for his maxims (or “Laconics,” as he called them).

Is he the earliest conscious English imitator of La Rochefoucauld? He has certainly left us an extensive and interesting body of “short amusements” and “maxims of state and conversation,” which, though, of course, of a lower quality than La Rochefoucauld’s, are by no means of low quality. And yet they have hardly been noticed.

Here follows a list gathering what I have found of his maxims so far, and which I will augment if I find more.

Rivarol on the Nobility and the People

On the Nobility

The nobility is an instrument polished by time.

The nobility, in the eyes of the people, is a sort of religion of which gentlemen are the priests and towards which, among the bourgeois, more are impious than are unbelieving.

The nobles are more or less ancient coins which time has turned into medals.

 

On the People

Sovereigns ought never to forget that, the people being a permanent child, the government must always be a father.