Study in Sensibility
The Unselfish Egoist : A Life of Joseph Joubert. By Joan Evans (Longmans. 10s. 6d.)
JOSEPH JOUBERT was born in 1754 and died in 1824, and therefore lived through the most turbulent period which even French history records. He was educated in the village school at his native Montignac and then at the College of the Fathers of Christian Doctrine at Toulouse ; and the only formal jobs tie ever did were those of 7uge de Paix aT< Montignac during the later stages of the Republic, and inspector of schools during the later years of the
Enipire. The rest of his long life was spent in study, writing in note- books and personal romantic experiences ; and the mighty events of his times left him not unmoved—for most things moved him deeply —but unstimulated to any kind of action, even to literary production. When he died in 1824, as Miss Evans remarks, " he was known to a small literary circle in Paris as a critic of the most delicate sensibility, Wm published nothing ; ko a wider academic world, as the most disinterested of school inspectors ; and to his neighbours at Ville- neuve as the kindest of friends." It is remarkable that this man should have attracted so much attention from students of French literature and thought. M. Andre Beaunier has published much of his correspondence and his notebooks, on which his literary reputa- tion rests, though the latter were not published in full until 1938. During the last four years M. Tessonneau has added further to our knowledge of Joubert's work. Miss Joan Evans, using this mass of recently published material and her wide knowledge of the period, has produced in English an attractive study, liberally sprinkled with translated extracts from his letters and notebooks, which is the most authoritative English work on a tantalising and exasperating character.
His friend Chateaubriand described him as " un egoiste . . . qui ne s'occupait que des autres," and Miss Evans more pithily sums him up as "a Montaigne who did not write essays." Both judgements are apt. He had a 'genius for solitary reflection, for exquisitely chiselled and sensitive literary style, and above all for profound personal friendship. His thoughts and his friends were his whole life. He knew Diderot and Fontanes intimately, as well as Chateau- briand, and most of Miss Evans's book is concerned with his relations with these three men, and with the extraordinary women who played so large a part in his life—Pauline de Beaumont above all, Madame Restif de la Bretonne and Madame de Vintimille. In 1793 he married Adelaide Victorie Moreau, who bore him a son the following year and with whom he led a happy married life: but in the fashion of the romantic period this did nothing to prevent fervent " platonic" friendships with the wives of his friends. His friends, both male and female, were as wayward and as exasperating as himself, though they accomplished more: and his wife seems to have accepted them, as she accepted him, without audible murmur. " Madame Joubert," writes Miss Evans, " was wise enough to put no impediment in the way of Joubert's friendships. She knew that fine talk about books and ideas was a necessity to him ; she knew that she had neither time nor knowledge to provide it herself ; and if the company of the plain but pleasant Comtesse de Beaumont gave him pleasure, she saw no reason to disturb herself about it."
The chief fascination of Joubert for the modern reader is perhaps the almost perfect manifestation he offers of a man whose pensive sensitivity paralysed action, whose constantly projected literary masterpiece never neared completion or was destroyed before it was half-written, whose achievements lay entirely in the realm of personal reflection and penetrating philosophical judgement. His letters to his friends and his private notebooks are all he has left, but they are models of exquisite Frencll and of delicately turned sentiments and reflections. Miss Evans captures these qualities well in her trans- lations of the extracts and: in her own literary handling of the story of Joubert's life. The -chief defect of her book, to a more prosaic mind, is that the more mundane details of his life are obscured. It is not easy to discover from her account just how he managed to get enough to live on and keep his wife and family, in apparent comfort, while continuing his generosity towards his friends. In his earlier years he was kept by remittances from his father, a medical doctor of Montignac, and for a long time he and his wife lived in the house of his wife's family at Villeneuve. But apart from his two short-lived administrative posts, his activities led to more spending than earning of money. An invitation from Fontanes to write a little school-book evoked this characteristic response : " I will gladly mingle my thoughts with yours when we can talk together, but you must in no wise expect me to write anything which makes sense. I love blank paper more than ever, and I no longer wish to give myself the trouble of expressing carefully any thoughts but those worthy of being written upon silk or upon bronze. I am stingy with my ink, but I talk as much as anyone likes. I have, however, prescribed myself two or three little reveries of which the continuity exhausts me. You will see that one fine day I shall breathe my last in the middle of a beautiful phrase, filled with a beautiful thought. This is all the more likely, since for some time I have only tried to express the inexpressible."
His life is indeed what !mappens when a man devotes it to expressing the inexpressible: and Miss Evans has depicted it with a feeling and an ability which give her work lasting interest and value, if it be granted that depiction of such a life is worth while at all.
DAVID THOMSON.
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