[Footnote: Victor Hugo, “Les Chatiments.”]
_Five o’clock._--In the afternoon our little society met in general talk upon the terrace. Some amount of familiarity and friendliness begins to show itself in our relations to each other. I read over again with emotion some passages of “Jocelyn.” How admirable it is!
“Il se fit de sa vie une plus mâle idée: Sa douleur d’un seul trait ne l’avait pas vidée; Mais, adorant de Dieu le sévère dessein, Il sut la porter pleine et pure dans son sein, Et ne se hâtant pas de la répandre toute, Sa résignation l’épancha goutte à goutte, Selon la circonstance et le besoin d’autrui, Pour tout vivifier sur terre autour de lui.”
The true poetry is that which raises you, as this does, toward heaven, and fills you with divine emotion; which sings of love and death, of hope and sacrifice, and awakens the sense of the infinite. “Jocelyn” always stirs in me impulses of tenderness which it would be hateful to me to see profaned by satire. As a tragedy of feeling, it has no parallel in French, for purity, except “Paul et Virginie,” and I think that I prefer “Jocelyn.” To be just, one ought to read them side by side.
_Six o’clock._--One more day is drawing to its close. With the exception of Mont Blanc, all the mountains have already lost their color. The evening chill succeeds the heat of the afternoon. The sense of the implacable flight of things, of the resistless passage of the hours, seizes upon me afresh and oppresses me.
“Nature au front serein, comme vous oubliez!”
In vain we cry with the poet, “O time, suspend thy flight!”... And what days, after all, would we keep and hold? Not only the happy days, but the lost days! The first have left at least a memory behind them, the others nothing but a regret which is almost a remorse....
_Eleven o’clock._--A gust of wind. A few clouds in the sky. The nightingale is silent. On the other hand, the cricket and the river are still singing.
August 9, 1862.--Life, which seeks its own continuance, tends to repair itself without our help. It mends its spider’s webs when they have been torn; it re-establishes in us the conditions of health, and itself heals the injuries inflicted upon it; it binds the bandage again upon our eyes, brings back hope into our hearts, breathes health once more into our organs, and regilds the dream of our imagination. But for this, experience would have hopelessly withered and faded us long before the time, and the youth would be older than the centenarian. The wise part of us, then, is that which is unconscious of itself; and what is most reasonable in man are those elements in him which do not reason. Instinct, nature, a divine, an impersonal activity, heal in us the wounds made by our own follies; the invisible _genius_ of our life is never tired of providing material for the prodigalities of the self. The essential, maternal basis of our conscious life, is therefore that unconscious life which we perceive no more than the outer hemisphere of the moon perceives the earth, while all the time indissolubly and eternally bound to it. It is our [Greek: antichoon], to speak with Pythagoras.