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.

Dance ought to give an idea of a—so to speak—incorporeal lightness and suppleness. The fine arts have for their exclusive merit, and ought to take as their purpose, the conjuring of souls by means of bodies.

The inarticulate accents of the passions are not more natural to man than poesy.

Well-ordered nature contemplated by a well-ordered man is the ground, the foundation, the essence of poetic beauty.

What does not transport is not poesy. The lyre is, in its way, a winged instrument.

There ought to be not only a poesy of images in a poem, but also a poesy of ideas.

A poet’s thought must be light, clean, distinct, complete; and his words must resemble his thoughts.

Cleanness, propriety of terms, and clarity are what is natural in thought. Transparency is its beauty. Consequently, to prove natural, there must be art in thought. The same is not true of sentiment: one is heat; the other, light.

Beautiful verses are those one exhales like sighs or perfumes.

Song is the speaking-voice of the imagination. One recounts a history; but one sings a fable. Reason talks; but imagination descants. If maxims and laws evince a sort of metre, it is that memory loves cadence and recollection delights in symmetry.

Words must detach easily from the page: that is, they must attach easily to the attention, to the memory; they must be easy to cite and to dislodge.

What they do not help one to see more clearly words, like glass, obscure.

 

Note

From Pensées: Édition complète (Paris: Perrin, 1920), titres xx–xxii. As a writer of maxims, Joubert, the most moralistic of the moralists, lacks that sliver of cruelty that makes, say, La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort and Rivarol into masters of their art. But there is gold to be found. I admit to taking some liberties where I felt a slight change would make the maxim land more surely. For example, my “sighs” is a loose translation of Joubert’s “sons.” For more of this sort of thing, see “Selections from Vauvenargues” (17 September 2020), “Some Maxims and Missiles of Rivarol” (24 December 2020) and “Rivarol on the Nobility and the People” (5 December 2021) on this blog and Remy de Gourmont, “Steps upon the Sand,” Azure Bell (20 October 2020).