112 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[2nd s. VIII. Aug. 6, '59. 



Holbachists ! Against the barbarous invasion 

 Monsieur de Buffon arose, and Scattered with the 

 one thunderbolt of his Academic Discourse the 

 whole host of the anti-stylists. So at least he 

 thought ; and so thought his friends at Montbar. 

 But the while, the Attilas and Gengiskhans of the 

 French language, the Mercier?, Retifs, and others, 

 continued their inroads, and paved the way to the 

 more modern affray of the Romanticists, which 

 took place between 1815 and 1840. 



Buffon was no|y;he man to defend his cause on 

 rhetoric or pedantic grounds only. He clung re- 

 solutely, bravely, as a man of genius could not fail 

 to do, to the very same Platonic principle of 

 spiritual unity advocated by Coleridge and De 

 Quincey, by Fenelon and Mallebranche ; made 

 light of the external facts and the dry documents 

 which could be treasured up in the mind of man ; 

 asserted the supreme empire of the mind, as being 

 the true and only source of illumination ; and 

 from the very depths of the egoite — the '■^Ichheit" 

 as German philosophers express it, from *he very 

 essence of man — of the spiritual, not the bodily 

 man — he drew the power, essence, and colour of 

 what he called "style." Nothing can be more 

 perspicuous, more striking and masterly, than the 

 exposition of his principles as contained in the 

 following well-rounded and marvellously poised 

 period. I copy it literally from the first genuine 

 text*, printed some months only after his Aca- 

 demic speech was uttered, under Buffon's own 

 eyes : — 



" Les ouvrages bien ecrits serontJes seuh qui passeront a 

 la posiSritS : la multitude des connaissances, la singularity 

 des faits, la nouveautS meme des decouvertes ne sont pas de 

 surs garans de Viinmortalite ; si les ouvrages qui les con- 

 iiennent ne roulent que sur de petits objets, s'ils sont Scrits 

 sans gout, sans nobfense et sans ginie, Us pSriront parceque les 

 connaissances, les faits, les decouvertes s'enlevent aisement, se 

 transportent et gagnent meme a etre mis en ceuvre par des 

 mains plus habiles. Ces chases sont hors de Vhomme, le style 

 EST i/homme m£me." 



The contradistinction between man and nature ; 

 between the Egoite, having its peculiar utterance 

 in " Style," and the non-moi, considered as sub- 

 dued by that egoite ; between external facts and 

 the plastic power of the mind, grasping at objects 

 and taking hold of, dominion over, and possession 

 of them ; between the Objective and the Subjective ; 

 appears in bold relief, most clearly, under the 

 most genial light, in the celebrated phrase of Buf- 

 fon. The accomplished writer never wrote le 

 style est de Vhomme ("style comes from man"), at 

 once a truism and a barbarism ; he did not print 

 le style, c'est Vhomme ; the ambiguous vulgarity of 

 the expression could never have flowed from his 

 correct and elegant pen : such is the awkward 

 position of the particle ce in that sentence, that it 

 may signify two things at once — either Vhomme, 



* Recueil de I'Academie Frangaise, torn, xxxvi. de 1747 

 a 1753 (Paris, Bernard Brunet), pp. 337, 338. 



CELA. est le style, or le style, cela. est Vhomme, 

 two substantives and two subjects for one single 

 verb ! Buffon would have shuddered at the 

 thought. 



At all events, neither critic nor caviller can 

 weaken the authority of the standard-text, revised 

 by Buffon himself, and published with his own con- 

 sent, a few months after he took his seat among 

 the Academic brotherhood. The axiom passed 

 current Qe style est Vhomme meme) through ten 

 subsequent editions ; was so quoted by the Abbe 

 Maury, Mirabeau, Madame de Stael, and became 

 one of the standing apophthegms and favourite 

 commonplaces, so dear to conversationalists and 

 metaphysicians. Rapet's, Bernard's, Richard's, 

 Pourrat's, Duthillceul's, Floureus's editions are 

 unanimous in that respect. Two only differ — 

 Bastien's edition (an. viii. vol. i. p. 148.), and 

 Didot's (1843, vol. i. p. 28.) 



Bastien, or his corrector of the press, commit- 

 ted a strange blunder, or rather two blunders at 

 once: he wholly omitted the sentence — le style 

 est Vhomme meme ; which words " tomberent dans 

 la casse," as French typographers use to word it. 

 The result was a nonsensical compound, of which 

 the beginning flatly contradicts the rest, and 

 which no French detective literary officer ever 

 until now denounced to the competent authorities. 

 The error was quite involuntary. For Bastien 

 himself reinstalled the omitted incise in its true 

 place, when he chose the whole period of Buffon 

 for an epigraph to his entire edition. However, 

 he managed to insert a new couple of fresh blun- 

 ders in that very same quotation : sont instead of 

 seront ; quantite instead of multitude. 



We are far from having exhausted the annals 

 of that single erratic phrase. As, in 1842, 

 M. Didot prepared for the press his new edition 

 of Buffon's Works, the gentleman who was en- 

 trusted by him with the correction and revisal of 

 the sheets, probably (but I do not vouch for the 

 fact) a native from the Rhenish French provinces, 

 or perhaps a German, felt the same scruples as 

 the learned Mr. Steinmetz, about Buffon's axiom, 

 which indeed by the subtle delicacy of the shades 

 may be, and must ever be, a very hard stumbling- 

 block to any foreigner. He thought, too, that a 

 printer's omission of the preposition de had spoiled 

 and subverted Buffon's prose ; so he took the un- 

 warrantable freedom to fill up the phrase, which 

 to his eyes was incorrect, and wrote le style est de 

 Vhomme. As error ever fosters error, he admitted 

 a second fault in the text, Bastien's qvMntite for 

 multitude — a vulgar for an elegant, a vague in- 

 stead of a precise expression. 



Nobody stirred : Buffon was maimed in Didot's 

 edition. Tlie publishers of the following editions, 

 getting rid, every one of them, of the pretended 

 amelioration introduced by the Edition Didot, 

 only reverted to the true old version, and printed 



