New at IWP Books: Anne Goodwin Winslow, 1945, A Winter in Geneva and Other Stories.

“These were strange thoughts to be going with her about this familiar place, where she believed they had never been before. Was it only inanimate things that stayed with us long enough to be really familiar, really ours, as our thoughts and feelings could not be because we were always having new ones? We had a perfect mania for replacing them — even the ones we liked the best. Any poet who imagined he had written something more enduring than bronze had better publish it right away, or lose it — or at any rate stop thinking about it; for if he kept it in mind, as people say, he was absolutely sure to change it, that being apparently what one’s mind was for. One could hold a beloved object in one’s hands, at least for a while, without doing anything to it; one could even imagine holding it so until it and the hands had both grown old; but the mind was not respectful like that — not even of beauty, and less than anything of love.”

Admirers of Winslow include Jacques Barzun and Albert Jay Nock.

“As Joubert says, ‘we only know just what we meant to say, after we have said it.’ And as M. V. Egger remarks, ‘before speaking, one barely knows what one intends to say, but afterwards one is filled with admiration and surprise at having said and thought it so well.'” (William James, The Principles of Psychology)

A second selection from Joubert’s thought, translated by Katharine Littleton and published in 1898, now at IWP Books. “To perform the smallest actions from the greatest motives, and to see in the smallest things the widest relations, is the best way of perfecting within us our feeling self and our thinking self.”

“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.