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.

Remy de Gourmont, “Nietzsche and Princess Bovary” (1903/05)

Draft translation of “Nietzsche et la princesse Bovary,” Épilogues: Réflexions sur la vie: 1902–1904 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1905), p. 131, dated February 1903. A caustic portrait of pretension to Nietzschean worldliness.

PDF of this translation at academia.edu.

 

It was said she read Nietzsche, that lamentable little princess whose ideal was to resemble those unhinged and idiotically perverse little bourgeois girls; and that her husband deplored her frequenting a stupefying moralist. These words were written; had they been said, Prince Bovary would be a fool. But there is no doubt that he has not read Nietzsche himself; and certainly if his wife has read him, she has understood nothing of him. Otherwise she would have stayed at home, would have disguised her vices, presented her people with at least the appearance of an aristocratic superiority. Nietzsche never counselled anyone with weakness; but to princes and to masters he preached hardness, towards themselves first of all. Had she read her Nietzsche, she would have learnt that the search for happiness (the happiness of romance and roman) is the blatant sign of a slave-sensibility, and that, of all lapses, the worst is that of the privileged who abdicate their power or merely renounce its outermost expressions. Nietzsche’s power is not stupefying; but, like alcohol, it may be too stiff a brew for stupefied organisms.

Remy de Gourmont, “Nietzsche’s Death” (1900/04)

Draft translation of “La Mort de Nietzsche,” Épilogues: Réflexions sur la vie: 1899–1901 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1904), pp. 185–91, dated October 1900. A eulogy of the recently-departed Nietzsche. As in “Nietzsche on the Mountain,” Gourmont is convinced of Nietzsche’s world-historical importance as early as 1900: so before Fascism, psychoanalysis or postmodernism.

PDF of this translation at academia.edu.

 

It is a non-event, since the man of the highest and freest intelligence of the century fell, ten years ago, into the deep shadows of unintelligence. A contrast that would enliven the discourse of a rhetorician: the very same by whom the mind was liberated has died the prisoner of stupidity, whether an unfortunate heredity is to blame, or whether Nietzsche abused his own intellectual energy. To endeavour to understand everything, to feel everything, to judge everything—and not according to the common principles of everyday philosophy, but according to personal and quite new ideas and methods—is not without its dangers. And it also happens that the bravest is seized by fear upon finding himself alone in his opinion. But what do causes matter, when that is a matter of an unending chain; when all is determined; when the genius of a Nietzsche, no less than the stupidity of the man in the street, are bound to a psychological state? And what does even that madness or that ultimate stupor matter if, throughout his years of activity, Nietzsche unleashed a superior intellectual force? Ought sickness lead us to disregard the forerunning years of health and vigour; or ought the smith’s wrist that softens and flops keep us from the fact that he, in the fulness of his virility, melted and mastered iron?

Remy de Gourmont, “Nietzsche and the Affair” (1899/1904)

Draft translation of “Nietzsche et l’affaire,” Épilogues: Réflexions sur la vie: 1899–1901 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1904), pp. 90–2, dated October 1899. Gourmont advances an ironically antidreyfusard position: Dreyfus’ guilty verdict is “favourable to civilization,” to the “mechanism of social conventions” understood as “forces”; “Right” or “Justice” do not enter into it.

PDF of this translation at academia.edu.

 

I do not know if we can say that, in the present Affair, Force has triumphed over Right, even if we retain the common senses of these words, such as Mr. Havet might understand, on a good day; but if we suppose as much, the spectacle would be salutary and opportune. Every right being founded upon force, it would be no bad thing if this mechanism of social conventions were sometimes set in motion before the astounded populace, and if we were to witness the brutal motion of causes in the open air. But there is no Right opposed to Force. There are forces; and in this case it is the force of cohesion that has prevailed over the force of disaggregation. The Dreyfus Affair is a problem of mechanics; it has been provisionally resolved in a manner extremely favourable to civilization [1].

Han Ryner contra Nietzsche: Four Texts (1904, 1922, 1928)

Draft translations of:

1. From “Quelques philosophes,” Prostitués: études critiques sur les gens de lettres d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Société Parisienne d’édition, 1904), pp. 325–34.

2. From “Suite de l’Histoire de la Sagesse,” La Sagesse qui rit (Paris: Monde Moderne, 1928), pp. 153–4.

3. From Des diverses sortes d’individualisme (Paris: Fauconnier, 1922), pp. 18–21.

4. From ibid., pp. 29–30.

Han Ryner critiques Nietzsche from an individualist-anarchist perspective. His characterization of Nietzsche as a “Hegelian” is strikingly odd; perhaps he means what we would by “idealist.” In the first text, Ryner argues for the incoherence of the Overman-ideal in light of the “eternal return.” In the third, he suggests that the master is slave to his slaves’ image of himself. In the fourth, he offers a pacifistic sort of self-mastery as an alternative reading of Nietzsche.