“A pair of moralists who expressed themselves in maxims, Chamfort and Joubert, are not well enough known to be widely enjoyed and appreciated, regrettably. The former, who committed suicide in prison to foil the guillotine, had been a good republican and patriot before his arrest and was known for his sayings in the astringent vein. Even more persistently than Swift or La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort views men acting en masse as hateful or contemptible. As in Swift, it is affection for individuals that prompts the revulsion. As for Joubert, who survived the Terror to become one of the most sought-after conversationalists of the ensuing two decades, he is less biting than Chamfort but an equally keen observer. His epigrams do not attack but explain and advise. Needless to say, both aphorists are masters of the art of condensing thought and are proportionably difficult to translate.” (Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence)

Translations of both at IWP Books.

New at IWP Articles: Joubert by Matthew Arnold, 1865.

“The new men of the new generations… will say of him: ‘He lived in the Philistine’s day, in a place and time when almost every idea current in literature had the mark of Dagon upon it, and not the mark of the children of light. Nay, the children of light were as yet hardly so much as heard of: the Canaanite was then in the land. Still, there were even then a few, who, nourished on some secret tradition, or illumined, perhaps, by a divine inspiration, kept aloof from the reigning superstitions, never bowed the knee to the gods of Canaan; and one of these few was called Joubert.'”

New at IWP Books: Pensées and Letters of Joseph Joubert, Translated by H. P. Collins, 1928.

“Few thoughts and infinite apprehensions; much sensibility and little feeling — if you prefer to put it so, few fixed ideas and many floating ideas; emotions acute but never constant; disbelief in moral obligation and faith in novelty; positive minds and wavering opinions; the assertiveness of doubt; self-assurance and contempt for others; attention to every fanatical doctrine and indifference to cultured thought: these are the faults of our age.”

The Whispers of Joseph Joubert by Mark LaFlaur.

New at IWP Books: Maxims and Considerations of Chamfort, Translated by E. Powys Mathers, 1926

The translation by Powys Mathers was originally published in two volumes, and only 550 copies were printed. The second volume is available on the Internet Archive, but not the first, and I could not find the first elsewhere on the Internet either. There is one copy of the two volumes on AbeBooks for $375. Luckily the National Library of Australia has a copy, which is the one I used to produce the IWP edition of the book (two volumes in one).

New at IWP Books: The Characters of Jean De La Bruyère, Translated by Helen Stott, 1890.

Jacques Barzun on La Bruyère: “La Bruyère’s exercise of free speech is remarkable. The chapter on the nobility is more daring than Molière’s ridicule of the marquis, because the author speaking in his own voice discusses the ways of an entire class. His targets are named in his chapter headings; the list covers all of society: the Great, the Wealthy, the Town, the Court, the Sovereign, Man and the Morals of Our Time, Fashion, Preachers, Freethinkers, Journalists, and a few more who appear scattered among the rest. By the end of this procession one has the feeling that one has read a novel — or more exactly, a novelist’s notes for one, with the fullness Henry James adopted when describing his projected works.” (From Dawn to Decadence)

New at IWP Books: The Reflections and Maxims of Vauvenargues, Translated by F. G. Stevens, 1940. Maxim 281: “It is a misfortune that men cannot ordinarily possess a talent without some desire to disparage all others. If they have subtlety, they decry force; if they are geometrists or physicians, they attack poetry and rhetoric. And the mass of mankind, who forget that those who have won distinction in one field may be bad judges of a different kind of talent, allow themselves to be prejudiced by their verdicts. So, when metaphysics or algebra are the fashion, it is metaphysicians or algebrists who make the reputation of poets and musicians, and vice versa; the dominating mind compels others to submit to its own jurisdiction, and generally to its errors.”

C. H. Sisson on Vauvenargues.

New at IWP Books: Aphorisms by John Morley, 1887.

New at IWP Books: Woodrow Wilson on Walter Bagehot, 1895, 1898. “Woodrow Wilson, who learned so much from Bagehot, and who has written the best short study of him…” (Jacques Barzun).

From the Translator’s Preface to Invertebrate Spain: “The first three essays herein presented were taken from the volume whose Spanish title, España Invertebrada, provided the subject as well as the title for this book. The others were chosen from other volumes of Señor Ortega’s work because they shed added light on problems which he indicated in that famous analysis, or because they were pertinent to aspects of the present struggle.” Not a full translation, then, of España Invertebrada.

From Ortega y Gasset, Invertebrate Spain:

…the amalgamating process which takes place in the formation of any great nation is a labor of totalization; in that process, social groups which have hitherto led independent lives become integrated as parts of a whole. Disintegration is an inverse process: parts of the whole begin to live as separate groups. I call this phenomenon particularism… The essence of particularism is that each group ceases to feel itself part of a whole, and therefore ceases to share the feelings of the rest. The hopes and needs of the others mean nothing to it, and it does nothing to help them win their hearts’ desires. Since the current of sympathy is cut, the woes that afflict a neighbor have no effect on the other groups, and he is left abandoned in weakness and misfortune. On the other hand, hyper-sensitiveness to one’s own ailments is a characteristic of this social state. Disagreements or difficulties which are easily borne during periods of cohesion come to be intolerable when the spirit of a national life in common has disintegrated.

Is it, then, so strange that the majority of Spaniards, and even of the best Spaniards, should finally begin to ask themselves, “What are we living together for?” Because living is something done with a forward motion, it is an activity which moves from the present toward the immediate future. For living, an echo of the past is not enough, and much less for living together. That is why Renan said that a nation is, by the very act of existing, a daily plebiscite. Every day, in the secrecy of every heart, there is a fateful balloting which decides whether or not the nation can, in truth, go on being a nation. In what activity is the government going to ask our enthusiastic collaboration tomorrow? For a long, long time, indeed for centuries, the government has been pretending that we Spaniards existed merely that it might give itself the pleasure of existing. As the pretext grew more and more meager, Spain went on wasting away…. Today we are not so much a people as a cloud of dust that was left hovering in the air when a great people went galloping down the high road of history.