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Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel

by Henri Frédéric Amiel · English · Gutenberg #8545 · 910,294 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Author: Henri Frédéric Amiel

Translator: Mrs. Humphry Ward


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8545]
                Most recently updated: October 31, 2016

Language: English

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Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team








AMIEL’S JOURNAL

By Henri-Frédéric Amiel

The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Translated, With an Introduction and Notes by Mrs. Humphrey Ward




PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.


In this second edition of the English translation of Amiel’s “Journal
Intime,” I have inserted a good many new passages, taken from the last
French edition (_Cinquiéme édition, revue et augmentée_.) But I have not
translated all the fresh material to be found in that edition nor have
I omitted certain sections of the Journal which in these two recent
volumes have been omitted by their French editors. It would be of no
interest to give my reasons for these variations at length. They depend
upon certain differences between the English and the French public,
which are more readily felt than explained. Some of the passages which I
have left untranslated seemed to me to overweight the introspective
side of the Journal, already so full--to overweight it, at any rate, for
English readers. Others which I have retained, though they often relate
to local names and books, more or less unfamiliar to the general public,
yet seemed to me valuable as supplying some of that surrounding detail,
that setting, which helps one to understand a life. Besides, we English
are in many ways more akin to Protestant and Puritan Geneva than the
French readers to whom the original Journal primarily addresses itself,
and some of the entries I have kept have probably, by the nature of
things, more savor for us than for them.

M. A. W.




PREFACE.


This translation of Amiel’s “Journal Intime” is primarily addressed to
those whose knowledge of French, while it may be sufficient to carry
them with more or less complete understanding through a novel or a
newspaper, is yet not enough to allow them to understand and appreciate
a book containing subtle and complicated forms of expression. I believe
there are many such to be found among the reading public, and among
those who would naturally take a strong interest in such a life and mind
as Amiel’s, were it not for the barrier of language. It is, at any rate,
in the hope that a certain number of additional readers may be thereby
attracted to the “Journal Intime” that this translation of it has been
undertaken.

The difficulties of the translation have been sometimes considerable,
owing, first of all, to those elliptical modes of speech which a man
naturally employs when he is writing for himself and not for the public,
but which a translator at all events is bound in some degree to expand.
Every here and there Amiel expresses himself in a kind of shorthand,
perfectly intelligible to a Frenchman, but for which an English
equivalent, at once terse and clear, is hard to find. Another difficulty
has been his constant use of a technical philosophical language, which,
according to his French critics, is not French--even philosophical
French--but German. Very often it has been impossible to give any
other than a literal rendering of such passages, if the thought of the
original was to be preserved; but in those cases where a choice was
open to me, I have preferred the more literary to the more technical
expression; and I have been encouraged to do so by the fact that Amiel,
when he came to prepare for publication a certain number of “Pensées,”
 extracted from the Journal, and printed at the end of a volume of poems
published in 1853, frequently softened his phrases, so that sentences
which survive in the Journal in a more technical form are to be found in
a more literary form in the “Grains de Mil.”

In two or three cases--not more, I think--I have allowed myself to
transpose a sentence bodily, and in a few instances I have added some
explanatory words to the text, which wherever the addition was of any
importance, are indicated by square brackets.

My warmest thanks are due to my friend and critic, M. Edmond Scherer,
from whose valuable and interesting study, prefixed to the French
Journal, as well as from certain materials in his possession which
he has very kindly allowed me to make use of, I have drawn by far the
greater part of the biographical material embodied in the Introduction.
M. Scherer has also given me help and advice through the whole process
of translation--advice which his scholarly knowledge of English has made
especially worth having.

In the translation of the more technical philosophical passages I have
been greatly helped by another friend, Mr. Bernard Bosanquet, Fellow of
University College, Oxford, the translator of Lotze, of whose care and
pains in the matter I cherish a grateful remembrance.

But with all the help that has been so freely given me, not only by
these friends but by others, I confide the little book to the public
with many a misgiving! May it at least win a few more friends and
readers here and there for one who lived alone, and died sadly persuaded
that his life had been a barren mistake; whereas, all the while--such
is the irony of things--he had been in reality working out the mission
assigned him in the spiritual economy, and faithfully obeying the secret
mandate which had impressed itself upon his youthful consciousness:
“_Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave
behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so_.”

MARY A. WARD.




INTRODUCTION


It was in the last days of December, 1882, that the first volume of
Henri Frédéric Amiel’s “Journal Intime” was published at Geneva. The
book, of which the general literary world knew nothing prior to its
appearance, contained a long and remarkable Introduction from the pen of
M. Edmond Scherer, the well-known French critic, who had been for many
years one of Amiel’s most valued friends, and it was prefaced also by
a little _Avertissement_, in which the “Editors”--that is to say, the
Genevese friends to whom the care and publication of the Journal had
been in the first instance entrusted--described in a few reserved and
sober words the genesis and objects of the publication. Some thousands
of sheets of Journal, covering a period of more than thirty years, had
come into the hands of Amiel’s literary heirs. “They were written,” said
the _Avertissement_, “with several ends in view. Amiel recorded in them
his various occupations, and the incidents of each day. He preserved in
them his psychological observations, and the impressions produced on
him by books. But his Journal was, above all, the confidant of his
most private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby the thinker became
conscious of his own inner life; a safe shelter wherein his questionings
of fate and the future, the voice of grief, of self-examination and
confession, the soul’s cry for inward peace, might make themselves
freely heard.

“... In the directions concerning his papers which he left behind him,
Amiel expressed the wish that his literary executors should publish
those parts of the Journal which might seem to them to possess either
interest as thought or value as experience. The publication of this
volume is the fulfillment of this desire. The reader will find in it,
_not a volume of Memoirs_, but the confidences of a solitary thinker,
the meditations of a philosopher for whom the things of the soul were
the sovereign realities of existence.”

Thus modestly announced, the little volume made its quiet _début_. It
contained nothing, or almost nothing, of ordinary biographical material.
M. Scherer’s Introduction supplied such facts as were absolutely
necessary to the understanding of Amiel’s intellectual history, but
nothing more. Everything of a local or private character that could
be excluded was excluded. The object of the editors in their choice of
passages for publication was declared to be simply “the reproduction
of the moral and intellectual physiognomy of their friend,” while M.
Scherer expressly disclaimed any biographical intentions, and limited
his Introduction as far as possible to “a study of the character
and thought of Amiel.” The contents of the volume, then, were
purely literary and philosophical; its prevailing tone was a tone of
introspection, and the public which can admit the claims and overlook
the inherent defects of introspective literature has always been a
small one. The writer of the Journal had been during his lifetime wholly
unknown to the general European public. In Geneva itself he had been
commonly regarded as a man who had signally disappointed the hopes and
expectations of his friends, whose reserve and indecision of character
had in many respects spoiled his life, and alienated the society around
him; while his professional lectures were generally pronounced dry and
unattractive, and the few volumes of poems which represented almost
his only contributions to literature had nowhere met with any real
cordiality of reception. Those concerned, therefore, in the publication
of the first volume of the Journal can hardly have had much expectation
of a wide success. Geneva is not a favorable starting-point for a
French book, and it may well have seemed that not even the support of M.
Scherer’s name would be likely to carry the volume beyond a small local
circle.

But “wisdom is justified of her children!” It is now nearly three years
since the first volume of the “Journal Intime” appeared; the impression
made by it was deepened and extended by the publication of the second
volume in 1884; and it is now not too much to say that this remarkable
record of a life has made its way to what promises to be a permanent
place in literature. Among those who think and read it is beginning to
be generally recognized that another book has been added to the books
which live--not to those, perhaps, which live in the public view, much
discussed, much praised, the objects of feeling and of struggle, but
to those in which a germ of permanent life has been deposited silently,
almost secretly, which compel no homage and excite no rivalry, and
which owe the place that the world half-unconsciously yields to them to
nothing but that indestructible sympathy of man with man, that eternal
answering of feeling to feeling, which is one of the great principles,
perhaps the greatest principle, at the root of literature. M. Scherer
naturally was the first among the recognized guides of opinion to
attempt the placing of his friend’s Journal. “The man who, during his
lifetime, was incapable of giving us any deliberate or conscious work
worthy of his powers, has now left us, after his death, a book which
will not die. For the secret of Amiel’s malady is sublime, and the
expression of it wonderful.” So ran one of the last paragraphs of the
Introduction, and one may see in the sentences another instance of that
courage, that reasoned rashness, which distinguishes the good from the
mediocre critic. For it is as true now as it was in the days when La
Bruyère rated the critics of his time for their incapacity to praise,
and praise at once, that “the surest test of a man’s critical power is
his judgment of contemporaries.” M. Renan, I think, with that exquisite
literary sense of his, was the next among the authorities to mention
Amiel’s name with the emphasis it deserved. He quoted a passage from
the Journal in his Preface to the “Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse,”
 describing it as the saying “_d’un penseur distingué, M. Amiel de
Genève_.” Since then M. Renan has devoted two curious articles to the
completed Journal in the _Journal des Desbats_. The first object of
these reviews, no doubt, was not so much the critical appreciation of
Amiel as the development of certain paradoxes which have been haunting
various corners of M. Renan’s mind for several years past, and to which
it is to be hoped he has now given expression with sufficient emphasis
and _brusquerie_ to satisfy even his passion for intellectual adventure.
Still, the rank of the book was fully recognized, and the first article
especially contained some remarkable criticisms, to which we shall find
occasion to recur. “In these two volumes of _pensées_,” said M. Renan,
“without any sacrifice of truth to artistic effect, we have both the
perfect mirror of a modern mind of the best type, matured by the best
modern culture, and also a striking picture of the sufferings which
beset the sterility of genius. These two volumes may certainly be
reckoned among the most interesting philosophical writings which have
appeared of late years.”

M. Caro’s article on the first volume of the Journal, in the _Revue
des Deux Mondes_ for February, 1883, may perhaps count as the first
introduction of the book to the general cultivated public. He gave a
careful analysis of the first half of the Journal--resumed eighteen
months later in the same periodical on the appearance of the second
volume--and, while protesting against what he conceived to be the
general tendency and effect of Amiel’s mental story, he showed himself
fully conscious of the rare and delicate qualities of the new
writer. “_La rêverie a réussi à notre auteur_,” he says, a little
reluctantly--for M. Caro has his doubts as to the legitimacy of
_rêverie_; “_Il en aufait une oeuvure qui restera_.” The same final
judgment, accompanied by a very different series of comments, was
pronounced on the Journal a year later by M. Paul Bourget, a young and
rising writer, whose article is perhaps chiefly interesting as showing
the kind of effect produced by Amiel’s thought on minds of a type
essentially alien from his own. There is a leaven of something positive
and austere, of something which, for want of a better name, one calls
Puritanism, in Amiel, which escapes the author of “Une Cruelle Enigme.”
 But whether he has understood Amiel or no, M. Bourget is fully alive
to the mark which the Journal is likely to make among modern records
of mental history. He, too, insists that the book is already famous and
will remain so; in the first place, because of its inexorable realism
and sincerity; in the second, because it is the most perfect example
available of a certain variety of the modern mind.

Among ourselves, although the Journal has attracted the attention of
all who keep a vigilant eye on the progress of foreign literature, and
although one or two appreciative articles have appeared on it in the
magazines, the book has still to become generally known. One remarkable
English testimony to it, however, must be quoted. Six months after the
publication of the first volume, the late Mark Pattison, who since then
has himself bequeathed to literature a strange and memorable fragment
of autobiography, addressed a letter to M. Scherer as the editor of the
“Journal Intime,” which M. Scherer has since published, nearly a year
after the death of the writer. The words have a strong and melancholy
interest for all who knew Mark Pattison; and they certainly deserve
a place in any attempt to estimate the impression already made on
contemporary thought by the “Journal Intime.”

“I wish to convey to you, sir,” writes the rector of Lincoln, “the
thanks of one at least of the public for giving the light to this
precious record of a unique experience. I say unique, but I can vouch
that there is in existence at least one other soul which has lived
through the same struggles, mental and moral, as Amiel. In your pathetic
description of the _volonté qui voudrait vouloir, mais impuissante à se
fournir à elle-même des motifs_--of the repugnance for all action--the
soul petrified by the sentiment of the infinite, in all this I recognize
myself. _Celui qui a déchiffré le secret de la vie finie, qui en a lu
le mot, est sorti du monde des vivants, il est mort de fait_. I can feel
forcibly the truth of this, as it applies to myself!

“It is not, however, with the view of thrusting my egotism upon you
that I have ventured upon addressing you. As I cannot suppose that so
peculiar a psychological revelation will enjoy a wide popularity, I
think it a duty to the editor to assure him that there are persons in
the world whose souls respond, in the depths of their inmost nature,
to the cry of anguish which makes itself heard in the pages of these
remarkable confessions.”

So much for the place which the Journal--the fruit of so many years of
painful thought and disappointed effort; seems to be at last securing
for its author among those contemporaries who in his lifetime knew
nothing of him. It is a natural consequence of the success of the
book that the more it penetrates, the greater desire there is to know
something more than its original editors and M. Scherer have yet told us
about the personal history of the man who wrote it--about his education,
his habits, and his friends. Perhaps some day this wish may find its
satisfaction. It is an innocent one, and the public may even be said
to have a kind of right to know as much as can be told it of the
personalities which move and stir it. At present the biographical
material available is extremely scanty, and if it were not for the
kindness of M. Scherer, who has allowed the present writer access to
certain manuscript material in his possession, even the sketch which
follows, vague and imperfect as it necessarily is, would have been
impossible.

[Footnote: Four or five articles on the subject of Amiel’s life have
been contributed to the _Révue Internationale_ by Mdlle. Berthe Vadier
during the passage of the present book through the press. My knowledge
of them, however, came too late to enable me to make use of them for the
purposes of the present introduction.]

Henri Frédéric Amiel was born at Geneva in September, 1821. He belonged
to one of the emigrant families, of which a more or less steady supply
had enriched the little republic during the three centuries following
the Reformation. Amiel’s ancestors, like those of Sismondi, left
Languedoc for Geneva after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His
father must have been a youth at the time when Geneva passed into the
power of the French republic, and would seem to have married and settled
in the halcyon days following the restoration of Genevese independence
in 1814. Amiel was born when the prosperity of Geneva was at its height,
when the little state was administered by men of European reputation,
and Genevese society had power to attract distinguished visitors and
admirers from all parts. The veteran Bonstetten, who had been the friend
of Gray and the associate of Voltaire, was still talking and enjoying
life in his _appartement_ overlooking the woods of La Bâtie. Rossi and
Sismondi were busy lecturing to the Genevese youth, or taking part in
Genevese legislation; an active scientific group, headed by the Pictets,
De la Rive, and the botanist Auguste-Pyrame de Candolle, kept the
country abreast of European thought and speculation, while the mixed
nationality of the place--the blending in it of French keenness with
Protestant enthusiasms and Protestant solidity--was beginning to find
inimitable and characteristic expression in the stories of Töpffer.
The country was governed by an aristocracy, which was not so much an
aristocracy of birth as one of merit and intellect, and the moderate
constitutional ideas which represented the Liberalism of the
post-Waterloo period were nowhere more warmly embraced or more
intelligently carried out than in Geneva.

During the years, however, which immediately followed Amiel’s birth,
some signs of decadence began to be visible in this brilliant Genevese
society. The generation which had waited for, prepared, and controlled,
the Restoration of 1814, was falling into the background, and the
younger generation, with all its respectability, wanted energy, above
all, wanted leaders. The revolutionary forces in the state, which had
made themselves violently felt during the civil turmoils of the period
preceding the assembly of the French States General, and had afterward
produced the miniature Terror which forced Sismondi into exile, had been
for awhile laid to sleep by the events of 1814. But the slumber was a
short one at Geneva as elsewhere, and when Rossi quitted the republic
for France in 1833, he did so with a mind full of misgivings as to the
political future of the little state which had given him--an exile and a
Catholic--so generous a welcome in 1819. The ideas of 1830 were shaking
the fabric and disturbing the equilibrium of the Swiss Confederation
as a whole, and of many of the cantons composing it. Geneva was still
apparently tranquil while her neighbors were disturbed, but no one
looking back on the history of the republic, and able to measure the
strength of the Radical force in Europe after the fall of Charles X.,
could have felt much doubt but that a few more years would bring Geneva
also into the whirlpool of political change.

In the same year--1833--that M. Rossi had left Geneva, Henri Frédéric
Amiel, at twelve years old, was left orphaned of both his parents. They
had died comparatively young--his mother was only just over thirty, and
his father cannot have been much older. On the death of the mother
the little family was broken up, the boy passing into the care of one
relative, his two sisters into that of another. Certain notes in
M. Scherer’s possession throw a little light here and there upon a
childhood and youth which must necessarily have been a little bare and
forlorn. They show us a sensitive, impressionable boy, of health rather
delicate than robust, already disposed to a more or less melancholy
and dreamy view of life, and showing a deep interest in those religious
problems and ideas in which the air of Geneva has been steeped since the
days of Calvin. The religious teaching which a Genevese lad undergoes
prior to his admission to full church membership, made a deep impression
on him, and certain mystical elements of character, which remained
strong in him to the end, showed themselves very early. At the college
or public school of Geneva, and at the académie, he would seem to have
done only moderately as far as prizes and honors were concerned. We
are told, however, that he read enormously, and that he was, generally
speaking, inclined rather to make friends with men older than himself
than with his contemporaries. He fell specially under the influence of
Adolphe Pictet, a brilliant philologist and man of letters belonging
to a well-known Genevese family, and in later life he was able, while
reviewing one of M. Pictet’s books, to give grateful expression to his
sense of obligation.

Writing in 1856 he describes the effect produced in Geneva by M.
Pictet’s Lectures on Aesthetics in 1840--the first ever delivered in a
town in which the Beautiful had been for centuries regarded as the rival
and enemy of the True. “He who is now writing,” says Amiel, “was then
among M. Pictet’s youngest hearers. Since then twenty experiences of the
same kind have followed each other in his intellectual experience, yet
none has effaced the deep impression made upon him by these lectures.
Coming as they did at a favorable moment, and answering many a positive
question and many a vague aspiration of youth, they exercised a decisive
influence over his thought; they were to him an important step in that
continuous initiation which we call life, they filled him with fresh
intuitions, they brought near to him the horizons of his dreams. And, as
always happens with a first-rate man, what struck him even more than the
teaching was the teacher. So that this memory of 1840 is still dear and
precious to him, and for this double service, which is not of the kind
one forgets, the student of those days delights in expressing to the
professor of 1840 his sincere and filial gratitude.”

Amiel’s first literary production, or practically his first, seems to
have been the result partly of these lectures, and partly of a visit
to Italy which began in November, 1841. In 1842, a year which was spent
entirely in Italy and Sicily, he contributed three articles on M. Rio’s
book, “L’Art Chrétien,” to the _Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève_.
We see in them the young student conscientiously writing his first
review--writing it at inordinate length, as young reviewers are apt to
do, and treating the subject _ab ovo_ in a grave, pontifical way, which
is a little naïve and inexperienced indeed, but still promising, as all
seriousness of work and purpose is promising. All that is individual in
it is first of all the strong Christian feeling which much of it shows,
and secondly, the tone of melancholy which already makes itself felt
here and there, especially in one rather remarkable passage. As to the
Christian feeling, we find M. Rio described as belonging to “that noble
school of men who are striving to rekindle the dead beliefs of France,
to rescue Frenchmen from the camp of materialistic or pantheistic ideas,
and rally them round that Christian banner which is the banner of
true progress and true civilization.” The Renaissance is treated as a
disastrous but inevitable crisis, in which the idealism of the Middle
Ages was dethroned by the naturalism of modern times--“The Renaissance
perhaps robbed us of more than it gave us”--and so on. The tone of
criticism is instructive enough to the student of Amiel’s mind, but the
product itself has no particular savor of its own. The occasional note
of depression and discouragement, however, is a different thing; here,
for those who know the “Journal Intime,” there is already something
characteristic, something which foretells the future. For instance,
after dwelling with evident zest on the nature of the metaphysical
problems lying at the root of art in general, and Christian art in
particular, the writer goes on to set the difficulty of M. Rio’s
task against its attractiveness, to insist on the intricacy of the
investigations involved, and on the impossibility of making the two
instruments on which their success depends--the imaginative and the
analytical faculty--work harmoniously and effectively together. And
supposing the goal achieved, supposing a man by insight and patience has
succeeded in forcing his way farther than any previous explorer into the
recesses of the Beautiful or the True, there still remains the
enormous, the insuperable difficulty of expression, of fit and adequate
communication from mind to mind; there still remains the question
whether, after all, “he who discovers a new world in the depths of the
invisible would not do wisely to plant on it a flag known to himself
alone, and, like Achilles, ‘devour his heart in secret;’ whether the
greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better
have remained buried in the brain which had found the key to them,
and whether the deepest thinkers--those whose hand has been boldest in
drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries
beyond it--had not better, like the prophetess of Ilion, have kept for
heaven, and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which human tongue cannot
truly express, nor human intelligence conceive.”

Curious words for a beginner of twenty-one! There is a touch, no doubt,
of youth and fatuity in the passage; one feels how much the vague
sonorous phrases have pleased the writer’s immature literary sense; but
there is something else too--there is a breath of that same speculative
passion which burns in the Journal, and one hears, as it were, the first
accents of a melancholy, the first expression of a mood of mind, which
became in after years the fixed characteristic of the writer. “At twenty
he was already proud, timid, and melancholy,” writes an old friend;
and a little farther on, “Discouragement took possession of him _very
early_.”

However, in spite of this inbred tendency, which was probably hereditary
and inevitable, the years which followed these articles, from 1842
to Christmas, 1848, were years of happiness and steady intellectual
expansion. They were Amiel’s _Wanderjahre_, spent in a free, wandering
student life, which left deep marks on his intellectual development.
During four years, from 1844 to 1848, his headquarters were at
Berlin; but every vacation saw him exploring some new country or fresh
intellectual center--Scandinavia in 1845, Holland in 1846, Vienna,
Munich, and Tübingen in 1848, while Paris had already attracted him in
1841, and he was to make acquaintance with London ten years later, in
1851. No circumstances could have been more favorable, one would have
thought, to the development of such a nature. With his extraordinary
power of “throwing himself into the object”--of effacing himself and
his own personality in the presence of the thing to be understood and
absorbed--he must have passed these years of travel and acquisition in
a state of continuous intellectual energy and excitement. It is in no
spirit of conceit that he says in 1857, comparing himself with Maine de
Biran, “This nature is, as it were, only one of the men which exist
in me. My horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of men, things,
countries, peoples, books; I have a greater mass of experiences.” This
fact, indeed, of a wide and varied personal experience, must never be
forgotten in any critical estimate of Amiel as a man or writer. We
may so easily conceive him as a sedentary professor, with the ordinary
professorial knowledge, or rather ignorance, of men and the world,
falling into introspection under the pressure of circumstance, and for
want, as it were, of something else to think about. Not at all. The
man who has left us these microscopic analyses of his own moods and
feelings, had penetrated more or less into the social and intellectual
life of half a dozen European countries, and was familiar not only with
the books, but, to a large extent also, with the men of his generation.
The meditative and introspective gift was in him, not the product, but
the mistress of circumstance. It took from the outer world what that
world had to give, and then made the stuff so gained subservient to its
own ends.

Of these years of travel, however, the four years spent at Berlin were
by far the most important. “It was at Heidelberg and Berlin,” says M.
Scherer, “that the world of science and speculation first opened on the
dazzled eyes of the young man. He was accustomed to speak of his four
years at Berlin as ‘his intellectual phase,’ and one felt that he
inclined to regard them as the happiest period of his life. The spell
which Berlin laid upon him lasted long.” Probably his happiness in
Germany was partly owing to a sense of reaction against Geneva. There
are signs that he had felt himself somewhat isolated at school and
college, and that in the German world his special individuality, with
its dreaminess and its melancholy, found congenial surroundings far more
readily than had been the case in the drier and harsher atmosphere of
the Protestant Rome. However this may be, it is certain that German
thought took possession of him, that he became steeped not only in
German methods of speculation, but in German modes of expression, in
German forms of sentiment, which clung to him through life, and vitally
affected both his opinions and his style. M. Renan and M. Bourget shake
their heads over the Germanisms, which, according to the latter, give a
certain “barbarous” air to many passages of the Journal. But both admit
that Amiel’s individuality owes a great part of its penetrating force
to that intermingling of German with French elements, of which there
are such abundant traces in the “Journal Intime.” Amiel, in fact, is
one more typical product of a movement which is certainly of enormous
importance in the history of modern thought, even though we may not be
prepared to assent to all the sweeping terms in which a writer like
M. Taine describes it. “From 1780 to 1830,” says M. Taine, “Germany
produced all the ideas of our historical age, and during another
half-century, perhaps another century, _notre grande affaire sera de les
repenser_.” He is inclined to compare the influence of German ideas on
the modern world to the ferment of the Renaissance. No spiritual force
“more original, more universal, more fruitful in consequences of every
sort and bearing, more capable of transforming and remaking everything
presented to it, has arisen during the last three hundred years. Like
the spirit of the Renaissance and of the classical age, it attracts into
its orbit all the great works of contemporary intelligence.” Quinet,
pursuing a somewhat different line of thought, regards the worship of
German ideas inaugurated in France by Madame de Staël as the natural
result of reaction from the eighteenth century and all its ways. “German
systems, German hypotheses, beliefs, and poetry, all were eagerly
welcomed as a cure for hearts crushed by the mockery of Candide and the
materialism of the Revolution.... Under the Restoration France continued
to study German philosophy and poetry with profound veneration and
submission. We imitated, translated, compiled, and then again we
compiled, translated, imitated.” The importance of the part played by
German influence in French Romanticism has indeed been much disputed,
but the debt of French metaphysics, French philology, and French
historical study, to German methods and German research during the last
half-century is beyond dispute. And the movement to-day is as strong
as ever. A modern critic like M. Darmstetter regards it as a misfortune
that the artificial stimulus given by the war to the study of German
has, to some extent, checked the study of English in France. He thinks
that the French have more to gain from our literature--taking literature
in its general and popular sense--than from German literature. But he
raises no question as to the inevitable subjection of the French to
the German mind in matters of exact thought and knowledge. “To study
philology, mythology, history, without reading German,” he is as ready
to confess as any one else, “is to condemn one’s self to remain in every
department twenty years behind the progress of science.”

Of this great movement, already so productive, Amiel is then a fresh and
remarkable instance. Having caught from the Germans not only their
love of exact knowledge but also their love of vast horizons, their
insatiable curiosity as to the whence and whither of all things, their
sense of mystery and immensity in the universe, he then brings those
elements in him which belong to his French inheritance--and something
individual besides, which is not French but Genevese--to bear on his
new acquisitions, and the result is of the highest literary interest and
value. Not that he succeeds altogether in the task of fusion. For
one who was to write and think in French, he was perhaps too long in
Germany; he had drunk too deeply of German thought; he had been too
much dazzled by the spectacle of Berlin and its imposing intellectual
activities. “As to his _literary_ talent,” says M. Scherer, after
dwelling on the rapid growth of his intellectual powers under German
influence, “the profit which Amiel derived from his stay at Berlin is
more doubtful. Too long contact with the German mind had led to the
development in him of certain strangenesses of style which he had
afterward to get rid of, and even perhaps of some habits of thought
which he afterward felt the need of checking and correcting.” This
is very true. Amiel is no doubt often guilty, as M. Caro puts it, of
attempts “to write German in French,” and there are in his thought
itself veins of mysticism, elements of _Schwärmerei_, here and there, of
which a good deal must be laid to the account of his German training.

M. Renan regrets that after Geneva and after Berlin he never came to
Paris. Paris, he thinks, would have counteracted the Hegelian influences
brought to hear upon him at Berlin, [Footnote: See a not, however,
on the subject of Amiel’s philosophical relationships, printed as an
Appendix to the present volume.] would have taught him cheerfulness, and
taught him also the art of writing, not beautiful fragments, but a book.
Possibly--but how much we should have lost! Instead of the Amiel we
know, we should have had one accomplished French critic the more.
Instead of the spiritual drama of the “Journal Intime,” some further
additions to French _belles lettres_; instead of something to love,
something to admire! No, there is no wishing the German element in Amiel
away. Its invading, troubling effect upon his thought and temperament
goes far to explain the interest and suggestiveness of his mental
history. The language he speaks is the language of that French criticism
which--we have Sainte-Beuve’s authority for it--is best described by the
motto of Montaigne, “_Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l’ensemble, à la
française_,” and the thought he tries to express in it is thought torn
and strained by the constant effort to reach the All, the totality of
things: “What I desire is the sum of all desires, and what I seek
to know is the sum of all different kinds of knowledge. Always the
complete, the absolute, the _teres atque rotundum_.” And it was this
antagonism, or rather this fusion of traditions in him, which went far
to make him original, which opened to him, that is to say, so many new
lights on old paths, and stirred in him such capacities of fresh and
individual expression.

We have been carried forward, however, a little too far by this general
discussion of Amiel’s debts to Germany. Let us take up the biographical
thread again. In 1848 his Berlin apprenticeship came to an end, and
he returned to Geneva. “How many places, how many impressions,
observations, thoughts--how many forms of men and things--have passed
before me and in me since April, 1843,” he writes in the Journal, two or
three months after his return. “The last seven years have been the most
important of my life; they have been the novitiate of my intelligence,
the initiation of my being into being.” The first literary evidence of
his matured powers is to be found in two extremely interesting papers on
Berlin, which he contributed to the _Bibliothèque Universelle_ in 1848,
apparently just before he left Germany. Here for the first time we have
the Amiel of the “Journal Intime.” The young man who five years before
had written his painstaking review of M. Rio is now in his turn a
master. He speaks with dignity and authority, he has a graphic, vigorous
prose at command, the form of expression is condensed and epigrammatic,
and there is a mixture of enthusiasm and criticism in his description of
the powerful intellectual machine then working in the Prussian capital
which represents a permanent note of character, a lasting attitude
of mind. A great deal, of course, in the two papers is technical and
statistic, but what there is of general comment and criticism is so good
that one is tempted to make some melancholy comparisons between them and
another article in the _Bibliothèque_, that on Adolphe Pictet, written
in 1856, and from which we have already quoted. In 1848 Amiel was for
awhile master of his powers and his knowledge; no fatal divorce had yet
taken place in him between the accumulating and producing faculties; he
writes readily even for the public, without labor, without affectations.
Eight years later the reflective faculty has outgrown his control;
composition, which represents the practical side of the intellectual
life, has become difficult and painful to him, and he has developed what
he himself calls “a wavering manner, born of doubt and scruple.”

How few could have foreseen the failure in public and practical life
which lay before him at the moment of his reappearance at Geneva in
1848! “My first meeting with him in 1849 is still vividly present to
me,” says M. Scherer. “He was twenty-eight, and he had just come from
Germany laden with science, but he wore his knowledge lightly, his looks
were attractive, his conversation animated, and no affectation spoiled
the favorable impression he made on the bystander--the whole effect,
indeed, was of something brilliant and striking. In his young alertness
Amiel seemed to be entering upon life as a conqueror; one would have
said the future was all his own.”

His return, moreover, was marked by a success which seemed to secure
him at once an important position in his native town. After a public
competition he was appointed, in 1849, professor of esthetics and French
literature at the Academy of Geneva, a post which he held for four
years, exchanging it for the professorship of moral philosophy in 1854.
Thus at twenty-eight, without any struggle to succeed, he had gained,
it would have seemed, that safe foothold in life which should be all
the philosopher or the critic wants to secure the full and fruitful
development of his gifts. Unfortunately the appointment, instead of the
foundation and support, was to be the stumbling block of his career.
Geneva at the time was in a state of social and political ferment. After
a long struggle, beginning with the revolutionary outbreak of November,
1841, the Radical party, led by James Fazy, had succeeded in ousting the
Conservatives--that is to say, the governing class, which had ruled the
republic since the Restoration--from power. And with the advent of the
democratic constitution of 1846, and the exclusion of the old Genevese
families from the administration they had so long monopolized, a number
of subsidiary changes were effected, not less important to the ultimate
success of Radicalism than the change in political machinery introduced
by the new constitution. Among them was the disappearance of almost the
whole existing staff of the academy, then and now the center of Genevese
education, and up to 1847 the stronghold of the moderate ideas of 1814,
followed by the appointment of new men less likely to hamper the Radical
order of things.

Of these new men Amiel was one. He had been absent from Geneva during
the years of conflict which had preceded Fazy’s triumph; he seems to
have had no family or party connections with the leaders of the defeated
side, and as M. Scherer points out, he could accept a non-political post
at the hands of the new government, two years after the violent
measures which had marked its accession, without breaking any pledges or
sacrificing any convictions. But none the less the step was a fatal one.
M. Renan is so far in the right. If any timely friend had at that moment
succeeded in tempting Amiel to Paris, as Guizot tempted Rossi in 1833,
there can be little question that the young professor’s after life would
have been happier and saner. As it was, Amiel threw himself into the
competition for the chair, was appointed professor, and then found
himself in a hopelessly false position, placed on the threshold of life,
in relations and surroundings for which he was radically unfitted, and
cut off by no fault of his own from the _milieu_ to which he rightly
belonged, and in which his sensitive individuality might have expanded
normally and freely. For the defeated upper class very naturally shut
their doors on the nominees of the new _régime_, and as this class
represented at that moment almost everything that was intellectually
distinguished in Geneva, as it was the guardian, broadly speaking,
of the scientific and literary traditions of the little state, we can
easily imagine how galling such a social ostracism must have been to the
young professor, accustomed to the stimulating atmosphere, the common
intellectual interests of Berlin, and tormented with perhaps more than
the ordinary craving of youth for sympathy and for affection. In a great
city, containing within it a number of different circles of life, Amiel
would easily have found his own circle, nor could political discords
have affected his social comfort to anything like the same extent. But
in a town not much larger than Oxford, and in which the cultured class
had hitherto formed a more or less homogeneous and united whole, it was
almost impossible for Amiel to escape from his grievance and establish a
sufficient barrier of friendly interests between himself and the society
which ignored him. There can be no doubt that he suffered, both in
mind and character, from the struggle the position involved. He had
no natural sympathy with radicalism. His taste, which was extremely
fastidious, his judgment, his passionate respect for truth, were all
offended by the noise, the narrowness, the dogmatism of the triumphant
democracy. So that there was no making up on the one side for what he
had lost on the other, and he proudly resigned himself to an isolation
and a reserve which, reinforcing, as they did, certain native weaknesses
of character, had the most unfortunate effect upon his life.

In a passage of the Journal written nearly thirty years after his
election he allows himself a few pathetic words, half of accusation,
half of self-reproach, which make us realize how deeply this
untowardness of social circumstance had affected him. He is discussing
one of Madame de Staël’s favorite words, the word _consideration_. “What
is _consideration_?” he asks. “How does a man obtain it? how does it
differ from fame, esteem, admiration?” And then he turns upon himself.
“It is curious, but the idea of consideration has been to me so little
of a motive that I have not even been conscious of such an idea.
But ought I not to have been conscious of it?” he asks himself
anxiously--“ought I not to have been more careful to win the good
opinion of others, more determined to conquer their hostility or
indifference? It would have been a joy to me to be smiled upon, loved,
encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so ready to give,
kindness and goodwill. But to hunt down consideration and reputation--to
force the esteem of others--seemed to me an effort unworthy of myself,
almost a degradation. A struggle with unfavorable opinion has seemed to
me beneath me, for all the while my heart has been full of sadness
and disappointment, and I have known and felt that I have been
systematically and deliberately isolated. Untimely despair and the
deepest discouragement have been my constant portion. Incapable of
taking any interest in my talents for their own sake, I let everything
slip as soon as the hope of being loved for them and by them had
forsaken me. A hermit against my will, I have not even found peace in
solitude, because my inmost conscience has not been any better satisfied
than my heart.”

Still one may no doubt easily exaggerate this loneliness of Amiel’s.
His social difficulties represent rather a dull discomfort in his life,
which in course of time, and in combination with a good many other
causes, produced certain unfavorable results on his temperament and on
his public career, than anything very tragic and acute. They were real,
and he, being what he was, was specially unfitted to cope with and
conquer them. But he had his friends, his pleasures, and even to some
extent his successes, like other men. “He had an elasticity of mind,”
 says M. Scherer, speaking of him as he knew him in youth, “which
reacted against vexations from without, and his cheerfulness was readily
restored by conversation and the society of a few kindred spirits. We
were accustomed, two or three friends and I, to walk every Thursday to
the Salève, Lamartine’s _Salève aux flancs azurés_; we dined there, and
did not return till nightfall.” They were days devoted to _débauches
platoniciennes_, to “the free exchange of ideas, the free play of
fancy and of gayety. Amiel was not one of the original members of
these Thursday parties; but whenever he joined us we regarded it as a
fête-day. In serious discussion he was a master of the unexpected,
and his energy, his _entrain_, affected us all. If his grammatical
questions, his discussions of rhymes and synonyms, astonished us at
times, how often, on the other hand, did he not give us cause to admire
the variety of his knowledge, the precision of his ideas, the charm
of his quick intelligence! We found him always, besides, kindly and
amiable, a nature one might trust and lean upon with perfect security.
He awakened in us but one regret; _we could not understand how it was a
man so richly gifted produced nothing, or only trivialities_.”

In these last words of M. Scherer’s we have come across the determining
fact of Amiel’s life in its relation to the outer world--that “sterility
of genius,” of which he was the victim. For social ostracism and
political anxiety would have mattered to him comparatively little if he
could but have lost himself in the fruitful activities of thought, in
the struggles and the victories of composition and creation. A German
professor of Amiel’s knowledge would have wanted nothing beyond his
_Fach_, and nine men out of ten in his circumstances would have made
themselves the slave of a _magnum opus_, and forgotten the vexations
of everyday life in the “_douces joies de la science_.” But there
were certain characteristics in Amiel which made it impossible--which
neutralized his powers, his knowledge, his intelligence, and condemned
him, so far as his public performance was concerned, to barrenness and
failure. What were these characteristics, this element of unsoundness
and disease, which M. Caro calls “_la maladie de l’idéal_?”

Before we can answer the question we must go back a little and try
to realize the intellectual and moral equipment of the young man of
twenty-eight, who seemed to M. Scherer to have the world at his feet.
What were the chief qualities of mind and heart which Amiel brought back
with him from Berlin? In the first place, an omnivorous desire to
know: “Amiel,” says M. Scherer, “read everything.” In the second,
an extraordinary power of sustained and concentrated thought, and a
passionate, almost a religious, delight in the exercise of his power.
Knowledge, science, stirred in him no mere sense of curiosity or cold
critical instinct--“he came to his desk as to an altar.” “A friend who
knew him well,” says M. Scherer, “remembers having heard him speak with
deep emotion of that lofty serenity of mood which he had experienced
during his years in Germany whenever, in the early morning before dawn,
with his reading-lamp beside him, he had found himself penetrating once
more into the region of pure thought, ‘conversing with ideas, enjoying
the inmost life of things.’” “Thought,” he says somewhere in the
Journal, “is like opium. It can intoxicate us and yet leave us broad
awake.” To this intoxication of thought he seems to have been always
specially liable, and his German experience--unbalanced, as such an
experience generally is with a young man, by family life, or by any
healthy commonplace interests and pleasures--developed the intellectual
passion in him to an abnormal degree. For four years he had devoted
himself to the alternate excitement and satisfaction of this passion.
He had read enormously, thought enormously, and in the absence of
any imperative claim on the practical side of him, the accumulative,
reflective faculties had grown out of all proportion to the rest of the
personality. Nor had any special subject the power to fix him. Had he
been in France, what Sainte-Beuve calls the French “_imagination de
détail_” would probably have attracted his pliant, responsive nature,
and he would have found happy occupation in some one of the innumerable
departments of research on which the French have been patiently spending
their analytical gift since that general widening of horizons which
accompanied and gave value to the Romantic movement. But instead he was
at Berlin, in the center of that speculative ferment which followed the
death of Hegel and the break-up of the Hegelian idea into a number of
different and conflicting sections of philosophical opinion. He was
under the spell of German synthesis, of that traditional, involuntary
effort which the German mind makes, generation after generation, to
find the unity of experience, to range its accumulations from life
and thought under a more and more perfect, a more and more exhaustive,
formula. Not this study or that study, not this detail or that, but the
whole of things, the sum of Knowledge, the Infinite, the Absolute, alone
had value or reality. In his own words: “There is no repose for the mind
except in the absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul
except in the divine. Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy
to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that
is exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my
end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.”

It was not, indeed, that he neglected the study of detail; he had a
strong natural aptitude for it, and his knowledge was wide and real; but
detail was ultimately valuable to him, not in itself, but as food for a
speculative hunger, for which, after all, there is no real satisfaction.
All the pleasant paths which traverse the kingdom of Knowledge, in which
so many of us find shelter and life-long means of happiness, led Amiel
straight into the wilderness of abstract speculation. And the longer
he lingered in the wilderness, unchecked by any sense of intellectual
responsibility, and far from the sounds of human life, the stranger
and the weirder grew the hallucinations of thought. The Journal gives
marvelous expression to them: “I can find no words for what I feel. My
consciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my
life passing. It seems to me that I have become a statue on the banks
of the river of time, that I am the spectator of some mystery, and
shall issue from it old, or no longer capable of age.” Or again: “I am
a spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men call
individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an
irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me--and
this phenomenology of myself serves as a window opened upon the mystery
of the world. I am, or rather my sensible consciousness is, concentrated
upon this ideal standing-point, this invisible threshold, as it were,
whence one hears the impetuous passage of time, rushing and foaming
as it flows out into the changeless ocean of eternity. After all the
bewildering distractions of life--after having drowned myself in a
multiplicity of trifles and in the caprices of this fugitive existence,
yet without ever attaining to self-intoxication or self-delusion--I come
again upon the fathomless abyss, the silent and melancholy cavern, where
dwell ‘_Die Mütter_,’ where sleeps that which neither lives nor dies,
which has neither movement nor change, nor extension, nor form, and
which lasts when all else passes away.”

Wonderful sentences! “_Prodiges de la pensée speculative, décrits
dans une langue non moins prodigieuse_,” as M. Scherer says of the
innumerable passages which describe either this intoxication of the
infinite, or the various forms and consequences of that deadening of
personality which the abstract processes of thought tend to produce.
But it is easy to understand that a man in whom experiences of this kind
become habitual is likely to lose his hold upon the normal interests
of life. What are politics or literature to such a mind but fragments
without real importance--dwarfed reflections of ideal truths for which
neither language nor institutions provide any adequate expression! How
is it possible to take seriously what is so manifestly relative and
temporary as the various existing forms of human activity? Above all,
how is it possible to take one’s self seriously, to spend one’s thought
on the petty interests of a petty individuality, when the beatific
vision of universal knowledge, of absolute being, has once dawned on
the dazzled beholder? The charm and the savor of everything relative and
phenomenal is gone. A man may go on talking, teaching, writing--but the
spring of personal action is broken; his actions are like the actions of
a somnambulist.

No doubt to some extent this mood is familiar to all minds endowed with
the true speculative genius. The philosopher has always tended to become
unfit for practical life; his unfitness, indeed, is one of the comic
motives, so to speak, of literature. But a mood which, in the great
majority of thinkers, is intermittent, and is easily kept within bounds
by the practical needs, the mere physical instincts of life, was in
Amiel almost constant, and the natural impulse of the human animal
toward healthy movement and a normal play of function, never very strong
in him, was gradually weakened and destroyed by an untoward combination
of circumstances. The low health from which he suffered more or less
from his boyhood, and then the depressing influences of the social
difficulties we have described, made it more and more difficult for the
rest of the organism to react against the tyranny of the brain. And as
the normal human motives lost their force, what he calls “the Buddhist
tendency in me” gathered strength year by year, until, like some strange
misgrowth, it had absorbed the whole energies and drained the innermost
life-blood of the personality which had developed it. And the result
is another soul’s tragedy, another story of conflict and failure, which
throws fresh light on the mysterious capacities of human nature, and
warns us, as the letters of Obermann in their day warned the generation
of George Sand, that with the rise of new intellectual perceptions
new spiritual dangers come into being, and that across the path of
continuous evolution which the modern mind is traversing there lies many
a _selva oscura_, many a lonely and desolate tract, in which loss and
pain await it. The story of the “Journal Intime” is a story to make us
think, to make us anxious; but at the same time, in the case of a nature
like Amiel’s, there is so much high poetry thrown off from the long
process of conflict, the power of vision and of reproduction which the
intellect gains at the expense of the rest of the personality is in many
respects so real and so splendid, and produces results so stirring often
to the heart and imagination of the listener, that in the end we put
down the record not so much with a throb of pity as with an impulse of
gratitude. The individual error and suffering is almost forgotten; all
that we can realize is the enrichment of human feeling, the quickened
sense of spiritual reality bequeathed to us by the baffled and solitary
thinker whose _via dolorosa_ is before us.

The manner in which this intellectual idiosyncrasy we have been
describing gradually affected Amiel’s life supplies abundant proof of
its actuality and sincerity. It is a pitiful story. Amiel might have
been saved from despair by love and marriage, by paternity, by strenuous
and successful literary production; and this mental habit of his--this
tyranny of ideal conceptions, helped by the natural accompaniment of
such a tyranny, a critical sense of abnormal acuteness--stood between
him and everything healing and restoring. “I am afraid of an imperfect,
a faulty synthesis, and I linger in the provisional, from timidity and
from loyalty.” “As soon as a thing attracts me I turn away from it; or
rather, I cannot either be content with the second-best, or discover
anything which satisfies my aspiration. The real disgusts me, and I
cannot find the ideal.” And so one thing after another is put away.
Family life attracted him perpetually. “I cannot escape,” he writes,
“from the ideal of it. A companion, of my life, of my work, of my
thoughts, of my hopes; within a common worship--toward the world outside
kindness and beneficence; education to undertake; the thousand and
one moral relations which develop round the first--all these ideas
intoxicate me sometimes.” But in vain. “Reality, the present, the
irreparable, the necessary, repel and even terrify me. I have too much
imagination, conscience, and penetration and not enough character.
_The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and
immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life makes
me afraid._ I am distrustful of myself and of happiness because I know
myself. The ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. And I abhor
useless regrets and repentance.”

It is the same, at bottom, with his professional work. He protects the
intellectual freedom, as it were, of his students with the same
jealousy as he protects his own. There shall be no oratorical device,
no persuading, no cajoling of the mind this way or that. “A professor
is the priest of his subject, and should do the honors of it gravely and
with dignity.” And so the man who in his private Journal is master of an
eloquence and a poetry, capable of illuminating the most difficult and
abstract of subjects, becomes in the lecture-room a dry compendium
of universal knowledge. “Led by his passion for the whole,” says M.
Scherer, “Amiel offered his hearers, not so much a series of positive
teachings, as an index of subjects, a framework--what the Germans call
a _Schematismus_. The skeleton was admirably put together, and excellent
of its kind, and lent itself admirably to a certain kind of analysis
and demonstration; but it was a skeleton--flesh, body, and life were
wanting.”

So that as a professor he made no mark. He was conscientiousness itself
in whatever he conceived to be his duty. But with all the critical and
philosophical power which, as we know from the Journal, he might have
lavished on his teaching, had the conditions been other than they were,
the study of literature, and the study of philosophy as such, owe him
nothing. But for the Journal his years of training and his years of
teaching would have left equally little record behind them. “His pupils
at Geneva,” writes one who was himself among the number, [Footnote: M.
Alphonse Rivier, now Professor of International Law at the University
of Brussels.] “never learned to appreciate him at his true worth. We did
justice no doubt to a knowledge as varied as it was wide, to his vast
stores of reading, to that cosmopolitanism of the best kind which he had
brought back with him from his travels; we liked him for his indulgence,
his kindly wit. But I look back without any sense of pleasure to his
lectures.”

Many a student, however, has shrunk from the burden and risks of family
life, and has found himself incapable of teaching effectively what
he knows, and has yet redeemed all other incapacities in the field of
literary production. And here indeed we come to the strangest feature in
Amiel’s career--his literary sterility. That he possessed literary
power of the highest order is abundantly proved by the “Journal Intime.”
 Knowledge, insight, eloquence, critical power--all were his. And
the impulse to produce, which is the natural, though by no means the
invariable, accompaniment of the literary gift, must have been fairly
strong in him also. For the “Journal Intime” runs to 17,000 folio pages
of MS., and his half dozen volumes of poems, though the actual quantity
is not large, represent an amount of labor which would have more than
carried him through some serious piece of critical or philosophical
work, and so enabled him to content the just expectations of his world.
He began to write early, as is proved by the fact that at twenty he was
a contributor to the best literary periodical which Geneva possessed. He
was a charming correspondent, and in spite of his passion for abstract
thought, his intellectual interest, at any rate, in all the activities
of the day--politics, religious organizations, literature, art--was of
the keenest kind. And yet at the time of his death all that this
fine critic and profound thinker had given to the world, after a life
entirely spent in the pursuit of letters, was, in the first place, a
few volumes of poems which had had no effect except on a small number
of sympathetic friends; a few pages of _pensées_ intermingled with the
poems, and, as we now know, extracted from the Journal; and four or five
scattered essays, the length of magazine articles, on Mme. de Staël,
Rousseau, the history of the Academy of Geneva, the literature of
French-speaking Switzerland, and so on! And more than this, the
production, such as it was, had been a production born of effort and
difficulty; and the labor squandered on poetical forms, on metrical
experiments and intricate problems of translation, as well as the
occasional affectations of the prose style, might well have convinced
the critical bystander that the mind of which these things were the
offspring could have no real importance, no profitable message, for the
world.

The whole “Journal Intime” is in some sense Amiel’s explanation of these
facts. In it he has made full and bitter confession of his weakness, his
failure; he has endeavored, with an acuteness of analysis no other hand
can rival, to make the reasons of his failure and isolation clear
both to himself and others. “To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to
understand--all these are possible to me if only I may be dispensed from
willing--I have a sort of primitive horror of ambition, of struggle,
of hatred, of all which dissipates the soul and makes it dependent on
external things and aims. The joy of becoming once more conscious
of myself, of listening to the passage of time and the flow of the
universal life, is sometimes enough to make me forget every desire and
to quench in me both the wish to produce and the power to execute.” It
is the result of what he himself calls _“l’éblouissement de l’infini_.”
 He no sooner makes a step toward production, toward action and the
realization of himself, than a vague sense of peril overtakes him.
The inner life, with its boundless horizons and its indescribable
exaltations, seems endangered. Is he not about to place between himself
and the forms of speculative truth some barrier of sense and matter--to
give up the real for the apparent, the substance for the shadow? One is
reminded of Clough’s cry under a somewhat similar experience:

  “If this pure solace should desert my mind,
  What were all else? I dare not risk the loss.
  To the old paths, my soul!”

And in close combination with the speculative sense, with the tendency
which carries a man toward the contemplative study of life and nature
as a whole, is the critical sense--the tendency which, in the realm of
action and concrete performance, carries him, as Amiel expresses it,
_“droit au défaut,”_ and makes him conscious at once of the weak point,
the germ of failure in a project or an action. It is another aspect of
the same idiosyncrasy. “The point I have reached seems to be explained
by a too restless search for perfection, by the abuse of the critical
faculty, and by an unreasonable distrust of first impulses, first
thoughts, first words. Confidence and spontaneity of life are drifting
out of my reach, and this is why I can no longer act.” For abuse of the
critical faculty brings with it its natural consequences--timidity of
soul, paralysis of the will, complete self-distrust. “To know is
enough for me; expression seems to me often a profanity. What I lack
is character, will, individuality.” “By what mystery,” he writes to M.
Scherer, “do others expect much from me? whereas I feel myself to
be incapable of anything serious or important.” _Défiance_ and
_impuissance_ are the words constantly on his lips. “My friends see what
I might have been; I see what I am.”

And yet the literary instinct remains, and must in some way be
satisfied. And so he takes refuge in what he himself calls scales,
exercises, _tours de force_ in verse-translation of the most laborious
and difficult kind, in ingenious _vers d’occasion_, in metrical
experiments and other literary trifling, as his friends think it, of the
same sort. “I am afraid of greatness. I am not afraid of ingenuity;
all my published literary essays are little else than studies, games,
exercises, for the purpose of testing myself. I play scales, as it were;
I run up and down my instrument. I train my hand and make sure of its
capacity and skill. But the work itself remains unachieved. I am always
preparing and never accomplishing, and my energy is swallowed up in a
kind of barren curiosity.”

Not that he surrenders himself to the nature which is stronger than he
all at once. His sense of duty rebels, his conscience suffers, and he
makes resolution after resolution to shake himself free from the mental
tradition which had taken such hold upon him--to write, to produce, to
satisfy his friends. In 1861, a year after M. Scherer had left Geneva,
Amiel wrote to him, describing his difficulties and his discouragements,
and asking, as one may ask an old friend of one’s youth, for help and
counsel. M. Scherer, much touched by the appeal, answered it plainly and
frankly--described the feeling of those who knew him as they watched
his life slipping away unmarked by any of the achievements of which his
youth had given promise, and pointed out various literary openings in
which, if he were to put out his powers, he could not but succeed. To
begin with, he urged him to join the _Revue Germanique,_ then being
started by Charles Dollfus, Renan, Littré, and others. Amiel left the
letter for three months unanswered and then wrote a reply which M.
Scherer probably received with a sigh of impatience. For, rightly
interpreted, it meant that old habits were too strong, and that the
momentary impulse had died away. When, a little later, “Les Etrangères,”
 a collection of verse-translations, came out, it was dedicated to M.
Scherer, who did not, however, pretend to give it any very cordial
reception. Amiel took his friend’s coolness in very good part, calling
him his “dear Rhadamanthus.” “How little I knew!” cries M. Scherer.
“What I regret is to have discovered too late by means of the Journal,
the key to a problem which seemed to me hardly serious, and which I now
feel to have been tragic. A kind of remorse seizes me that I was not
able to understand my friend better, and to soothe his suffering by a
sympathy which would have been a mixture of pity and admiration.”

Was it that all the while Amiel felt himself sure of his _revanche_
that he knew the value of all those sheets of Journal which were slowly
accumulating under his hand? Did he say to himself sometimes: “My
friends are wrong; my gifts and my knowledge are not lost; I have given
expression to them in the only way possible to me, and when I die
it will be found that I too, like other men, have performed the task
appointed me, and contributed my quota to the human store?” It is clear
that very early he began to regard it as possible that portions of the
Journal should be published after his death, and, as we have seen, he
left certain “literary instructions,” dated seven years before his last
illness, in which his executors were directed to publish such parts
of it as might seem to them to possess any general interest. But it
is clear also that the Journal was not, in any sense, written for
publication. “These pages,” say the Geneva editors, “written _au courant
de la plume_--sometimes in the morning, but more often at the end of
the day, without any idea of composition or publicity--are marked by the
repetition, the _lacunae_, the carelessness, inherent in this kind of
monologue. The thoughts and sentiments expressed have no other aim than
sincerity of rendering.”

And his estimate of the value of the record thus produced was, in
general, a low one, especially during the depression and discouragement
of his later years. “This Journal of mine,” he writes in 1876,
“represents the material of a good many volumes; what prodigious waste
of time, of thought, of strength! It will be useful to nobody, and even
for myself--it has rather helped me to shirk life than to practice
it.” And again: “Is everything I have produced, taken together--my
correspondence, these thousands of Journal pages, my lectures, my
articles, my poems, my notes of different kinds--anything better than
withered leaves? To whom and to what have I been useful? Will my name
survive me a single day, and will it ever mean anything to anybody? A
life of no account! When all is added up--nothing!” In passages like
these there is no anticipation of any posthumous triumph over the
disapproval of his friends and the criticism of his fellow-citizens. The
Journal was a relief, the means of satisfying a need of expression which
otherwise could find no outlet; “a grief-cheating device,” but nothing
more. It did not still the sense of remorse for wasted gifts and
opportunities which followed poor Amiel through the painful months of
his last illness. Like Keats, he passed away, feeling that all was over,
and the great game of life lost forever.

It still remains for us to gather up a few facts and impressions of
a different kind from those which we have been dwelling on, which may
serve to complete and correct the picture we have so far drawn of
the author of the Journal. For Amiel is full of contradictions and
surprises, which, are indeed one great source of his attractiveness.
Had he only been the thinker, the critic, the idealist we have been
describing, he would never have touched our feeling as he now does; what
makes him so interesting is that there was in him a _fond_ of heredity,
a temperament and disposition, which were perpetually reacting against
the oppression of the intellect and its accumulations. In his hours of
intellectual concentration he freed himself from all trammels of country
or society, or even, as he insists, from all sense of personality.
But at other times he was the dutiful son of a country which he loved,
taking a warm interest in everything Genevese, especially in everything
that represented the older life of the town. When it was a question of
separating the Genevese state from the church, which had been the center
of the national life during three centuries of honorable history, Amiel
the philosopher, the cosmopolitan, threw himself ardently on to the side
of the opponents of separation, and rejoiced in their victory. A large
proportion of his poems deal with national subjects. He was one of the
first members of “_L’Institut Genevois_,” founded in 1853, and he took a
warm interest in the movement started by M. Eugene Rambert toward 1870,
for the improvement of secondary education throughout French-speaking
Switzerland. One of his friends dwells with emphasis on his “_sens
profond des nationalités, des langues, des villes_”--on his love for
local characteristics, for everything deep-rooted in the past, and
helping to sustain the present. He is convinced that no state can live
and thrive without a certain number of national prejudices, without _à
priori_ beliefs and traditions. It pleases him to see that there is a
force in the Genevese nationality which resists the leveling influences
of a crude radicalism; it rejoices him that Geneva “has not yet become
a mere copy of anything, and that she is still capable of deciding for
herself. Those who say to her, ‘Do as they do at New York, at Paris,
at Rome, at Berlin,’ are still in the minority. The _doctrinaires_ who
would split her up and destroy her unity waste their breath upon her.
She divines the snare laid for her, and turns away. I like this proof of
vitality.”

His love of traveling never left him. Paris attracted him, as it
attracts all who cling to letters, and he gained at one time or another
a certain amount of acquaintance with French literary men. In 1852
we find him for a time brought into contact with Thierry, Lamennais,
Béranger, Mignet, etc., as well as with Romantics like Alfred de Vigny
and Théophile Gautier. There are poems addressed to De Vigny and Gautier
in his first published volume of 1854. He revisited Italy and his old
haunts and friends in Germany more than once, and in general kept the
current of his life fresh and vigorous by his openness to impressions
and additions from without.

He was, as we have said, a delightful correspondent, “taking pains with
the smallest note,” and within a small circle of friends much liked.
His was not a nature to be generally appreciated at its true value;
the motives which governed his life were too remote from the ordinary
motives of human conduct, and his characteristics just those which have
always excited the distrust, if not the scorn, of the more practical
and vigorous order of minds. Probably, too--especially in his
later years--there was a certain amount of self-consciousness and
artificiality in his attitude toward the outer world, which was the
result partly of the social difficulties we have described, partly of
his own sense of difference from his surroundings, and partly again of
that timidity of nature, that self-distrust, which is revealed to us in
the Journal. So that he was by no means generally popular, and the great
success of the Journal is still a mystery to the majority of those who
knew him merely as a fellow-citizen and acquaintance. But his friends
loved him and believed in him, and the reserved student, whose manners
were thought affected in general society, could and did make himself
delightful to those who understood him, or those who looked to him for
affection. “According to my remembrance of him,” writes M. Scherer, “he
was bright, sociable, a charming companion. Others who knew him
better and longer than I say the same. The mobility of his disposition
counteracted his tendency to exaggerations of feeling. In spite of his
fits of melancholy, his natural turn of mind was cheerful; up to the
end he was young, a child even, amused by mere nothings; and whoever had
heard him laugh his hearty student’s laugh would have found it difficult
to identify him with the author of so many somber pages.” M. Rivier,
his old pupil, remembers him as “strong and active, still handsome,
delightful in conversation, ready to amuse and be amused.” Indeed, if
the photographs of him are to be trusted, there must have been something
specially attractive in the sensitive, expressive face, with its lofty
brow, fine eyes, and kindly mouth. It is the face of a poet rather than
of a student, and makes one understand certain other little points which
his friends lay stress on--for instance, his love for and popularity
with children.

In his poems, or at any rate in the earlier ones, this lighter side
finds more expression, proportionally, than in the Journal. In the
volume called “Grains de Mil,” published in 1854, and containing
verse written between the ages of eighteen and thirty, there are poems
addressed, now to his sister, now to old Genevese friends, and now to
famous men of other countries whom he had seen and made friends with
in passing, which, read side by side with the “Journal Intime,” bring
a certain gleam and sparkle into an otherwise somber picture. Amiel was
never a master of poetical form; his verse, compared to his prose, is
tame and fettered; it never reaches the glow and splendor of expression
which mark the finest passages of the Journal. It has ability,
thought--beauty even, of a certain kind, but no plastic power, none of
the incommunicable magic which a George Eliot seeks for in vain, while
it comes unasked, to deck with imperishable charm the commonplace
metaphysic and the simpler emotions of a Tennyson or a Burns. Still as
Amiel’s work, his poetry has an interest for those who are interested in
him. Sincerity is written in every line of it. Most of the thoughts and
experiences with which one grows familiar in the Journal are repeated
in it; the same joys, the same aspirations, the same sorrows are visible
throughout it, so that in reading it one is more and more impressed
with the force and reality of the inner life which has left behind it
so definite an image of itself. And every now and then the poems add a
detail, a new impression, which seems by contrast to give fresh value
to the fine-spun speculations, the lofty despairs, of the Journal. Take
these verses, written at twenty-one, to his younger sister:

  “Treize ans! et sur ton front aucun baiser de mère
  Ne viendra, pauvre enfant, invoquer le bonheur;
  Treize ans! et dans ce jour mil regard de ton père
  Ne fera d’allégresse épanouir ton coeur.

  “Orpheline, c’est là le nom dont tu t’appelles,
  Oiseau né dans un nid que la foudre a brisé;
  De la couvée, hélas! seuls, trois petits, sans ailes
  Furent lancés au vent, loin du reste écrasé.

  “Et, semés par l’éclair sur les monts, dans les plaines,
  Un même toit encor n’a pu les abriter,
  Et du foyer natal, malgré leurs plaintes vaines
  Dieu, peut-être longtemps, voudra les écarter.

  “Pourtant console-toi! pense, dans tes alarmes,
  Qu’un double bien te reste, espoir et souvenir;
  Une main dans le ciel pour essuyer tes larmes;
  Une main ici-bas, enfant, pour te bénir.”

The last stanza is especially poor, and in none of them is there much
poetical promise. But the pathetic image of a forlorn and orphaned
childhood, “_un nid que la foudre a brisé_,” which it calls up, and the
tone of brotherly affection, linger in one’s memory. And through much
of the volume of 1863, in the verses to “My Godson,” or in the charming
poem to Loulou, the little girl who at five years old, daisy in hand,
had sworn him eternal friendship over Gretchen’s game of “_Er liebt
mich--liebt mich nicht_,” one hears the same tender note.

  “Merci, prophétique fleurette,
  Corolle à l’oracle vainqueur,
  Car voilà trois ans, paquerette,
  Que tu m’ouvris un petit coeur.

  “Et depuis trois hivers, ma belle,
  L’enfant aux grands yeux de velours
  Maintient son petit coeur fidèle,
  Fidèle comme aux premiers jours.”

His last poetical volume, “Jour à Jour,” published in 1880, is far
more uniformly melancholy and didactic in tone than the two earlier
collections from which we have been quoting. But though the dominant
note is one of pain and austerity, of philosophy touched with emotion,
and the general tone more purely introspective, there are many traces in
it of the younger Amiel, dear, for very ordinary human reasons, to his
sisters and his friends. And, in general, the pathetic interest of the
book for all whose sympathy answers to what George Sand calls “_les
tragédies que la pensée aperçoit et que l’oeil ne voit point_” is very
great. Amiel published it a year before his death, and the struggle with
failing power which the Journal reveals to us in its saddest and most
intimate reality, is here expressed in more reserved and measured form.
Faith, doubt, submission, tenderness of feeling, infinite aspiration,
moral passion, that straining hope of something beyond, which is the
life of the religious soul--they are all here, and the _Dernier Mot_
with which the sad little volume ends is poor Amiel’s epitaph on
himself, his conscious farewell to that more public aspect of his life
in which he had suffered much and achieved comparatively so little.

  “Nous avons à plaisir compliqué le bonheur,
  Et par un idéal frivole et suborneur
    Attaché nos coeurs à la terre;
  Dupes des faux dehors tenus pour l’important,
  Mille choses pour nous ont du prix ... et pourtant
    Une seule était nécessaire.

  “Sans fin nous prodiguons calculs, efforts, travaux;
  Cependant, au milieu des succès, des bravos
  En nous quelque chose soupire;
  Multipliant nos pas et nos soins de fourmis,
  Nous vondrions nous faire une foule d’amis....
       Pourtant un seul pouvait suffire.

  “Victime des désirs, esclave des regrets,
  L’homme s’agite, et s’use, et vieillit sans progrès
       Sur sa toile de Pénélope;
  Comme un sage mourant, puissions-nous dire en paix
  J’ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; je me trompais;
         Tout est bien, mon Dieu m’enveloppe.”

Upon the small remains of Amiel’s prose outside the Journal there is
no occasion to dwell. The two essays on Madame de Staël and Rousseau
contain much fine critical remark, and might find a place perhaps as
an appendix to some future edition of the Journal; and some of the
“Pensées,” published in the latter half of the volume containing the
“Grains de Mils,” are worthy of preservation. But in general, whatever
he himself published was inferior to what might justly have been
expected of him, and no one was more conscious of the fact than himself.

The story of his fatal illness, of the weary struggle for health which
filled the last seven years of his life, is abundantly told in the
Journal--we must not repeat it here. He had never been a strong man, and
at fifty-three he received, at his doctor’s hands, his _arrêt de mort_.
We are told that what killed him was “heart disease, complicated by
disease of the larynx,” and that he suffered “much and long.” He was
buried in the cemetery of Clarens, not far from his great contemporary
Alexander Vinet; and the affection of a sculptor friend provided the
monument which now marks his resting-place.

We have thus exhausted all the biographical material which is at present
available for the description of Amiel’s life and relations toward the
outside world. It is to be hoped that the friends to whom the charge of
his memory has been specially committed may see their way in the
future, if not to a formal biography, which is very likely better left
unattempted, at least to a volume of Letters, which would complete the
“Journal Intime,” as Joubert’s “Correspondence” completes the “Pensées.”
 There must be ample material for it; and Amiel’s letters would probably
supply us with more of that literary and critical reflection which his
mind produced so freely and so well, as long as there was no question
of publication, but which is at present somewhat overweighted in the
“Journal Intime.”

But whether biography or correspondence is ever forthcoming or not, the
Journal remains--and the Journal is the important matter. We shall read
the Letters if they appear, as we now read the Poems, for the Journal’s
sake. The man himself, as poet, teacher, and _littérateur_, produced no
appreciable effect on his generation; but the posthumous record of his
inner life has stirred the hearts of readers all over Europe, and won
him a niche in the House of Fame. What are the reasons for this striking
transformation of a man’s position--a transformation which, as M.
Scherer says, will rank among the curiosities of literary history?
In other words, what has given the “Journal Intime” its sudden and
unexpected success?

In the first place, no doubt, its poetical quality, its beauty of
manner--that fine literary expression in which Amiel has been able to
clothe the subtler processes of thought, no less than the secrets of
religious feeling, or the aspects of natural scenery. Style is what
gives value and currency to thought, and Amiel, in spite of all his
Germanisms, has style of the best kind. He possesses in prose that
indispensable magic which he lacks in poetry.

His style, indeed, is by no means always in harmony with the central
French tradition. Probably a Frenchman will be inclined to apply
Sainte-Beuve’s remarks on Amiel’s elder countryman, Rodolphe Töpffer, to
Amiel himself: “_C’est ainsi qu’on écrit dans les littératures qui n’ont
point de capitale, de quartier général classique, ou d’Académie; c’est
ainsi qu’un Allemand, qu’un Américain, ou même un Anglais, use à son gré
de sa langue. En France au contraire, où il y a une Académie Française
... on doit trouver qu’un tel style est une très-grande nouveauté et le
succés qu’il a obtenu un evènement: il a fallu bien des circonstances
pour y préparer_.” No doubt the preparatory circumstance in Amiel’s case
has been just that Germanization of the French mind on which M. Taine
and M. Bourget dwell with so much emphasis. But, be this as it may,
there is no mistaking the enthusiasm with which some of the best living
writers of French have hailed these pages--instinct, as one declares,
“with a strange and marvelous poetry;” full of phrases “_d’une intense
suggestion de beauté_;” according to another. Not that the whole of the
Journal flows with the same ease, the same felicity. There are a certain
number of passages where Amiel ceases to be the writer, and becomes the
technical philosopher; there are others, though not many, into which a
certain German heaviness and diffuseness has crept, dulling the edge of
the sentences, and retarding the development of the thought. When all
deductions have been made, however, Amiel’s claim is still first and
foremost, the claim of the poet and the artist; of the man whose
thought uses at will the harmonies and resources of speech, and who has
attained, in words of his own, “to the full and masterly expression of
himself.”

Then to the poetical beauty of manner which first helped the book
to penetrate, _faire sa trouée_, as the French say, we must add its
extraordinary psychological interest. Both as poet and as psychologist,
Amiel makes another link in a special tradition; he adds another name
to the list of those who have won a hearing from their fellows as
interpreters of the inner life, as the revealers of man to himself.
He is the successor of St. Augustine and Dante; he is the brother of
Obermann and Maurice de Guérin. What others have done for the spiritual
life of other generations he has done for the spiritual life of this,
and the wealth of poetical, scientific, and psychological faculty which
he has brought to the analysis of human feeling and human perceptions
places him--so far as the present century is concerned--at the head of
the small and delicately-gifted class to which he belongs. For beside
his spiritual experience Obermann’s is superficial, and Maurice de
Guérin’s a passing trouble, a mere quick outburst of passionate feeling.
Amiel indeed has neither the continuous romantic beauty nor the rich
descriptive wealth of Senancour. The Dent du Midi, with its untrodden
solitude, its primeval silences and its hovering eagles, the Swiss
landscape described in the “Fragment on the Ranz des Vaches,” the summer
moonlight on the Lake of Neufchâtel--these various pictures are the
work of one of the most finished artists in words that literature has
produced. But how true George Sand’s criticism is! “_Chez Obermann la
sensibilité est active, l’intelligence est paresseuse ou insuffisante._”
 He has a certain antique power of making the truisms of life splendid
and impressive. No one can write more poetical exercises than he on the
old text of _pulvis et umbra sumus_, but beyond this his philosophical
power fails him. As soon as he leaves the region of romantic description
how wearisome the pages are apt to grow! Instead of a poet, “_un
ergoteur Voltairien_;” instead of the explorer of fresh secrets of the
heart, a Parisian talking a cheap cynicism! Intellectually, the ground
gives way; there is no solidity of knowledge, no range of thought. Above
all, the scientific idea in our sense is almost absent; so that while
Amiel represents the modern mind at its keenest and best, dealing at
will with the vast additions to knowledge which the last fifty years
have brought forth, Senancour is still in the eighteenth-century stage,
talking like Rousseau of a return to primitive manners, and discussing
Christianity in the tone of the “Encyclopédie.”

Maurice de Guérin, again, is the inventor of new terms in the language
of feeling, a poet as Amiel and Senancour are. His love of nature, the
earth-passion which breathes in his letters and journal, has a strange
savor, a force and flame which is all his own. Beside his actual sense
of community with the visible world, Amiel’s love of landscape has a
tame, didactic air. The Swiss thinker is too ready to make nature a mere
vehicle of moral or philosophical thought; Maurice de Guérin loves her
for herself alone, and has found words to describe her influence over
him of extraordinary individuality and power. But for the rest the story
of his inner life has but small value in the history of thought. His
difficulties do not go deep enough; his struggle is intellectually not
serious enough--we see in it only a common incident of modern experience
poetically told; it throws no light on the genesis and progress of
the great forces which are molding and renovating the thought of the
present--it tells us nothing for the future.

No--there is much more in the “Journal Intime” than the imagination or
the poetical glow which Amiel shares with his immediate predecessors
in the art of confession-writing. His book is representative of human
experience in its more intimate and personal forms to an extent hardly
equaled since Rousseau. For his study of himself is only a means to an
end. “What interests me in myself,” he declares, “is that I find in my
own case a genuine example of human nature, and therefore a specimen of
general value.” It is the human consciousness of to-day, of the modern
world, in its two-fold relation--its relation toward the infinite and
the unknowable, and its relation toward the visible universe which
conditions it--which is the real subject of the “Journal Intime.” There
are few elements of our present life which, in a greater or less degree,
are not made vocal in these pages. Amiel’s intellectual interest is
untiring. Philosophy, science, letters, art--he has penetrated the
spirit of them all; there is nothing, or almost nothing, within the wide
range of modern activities which he has not at one time or other felt
the attraction of, and learned in some sense to understand. “Amiel,”
 says M. Renan, “has his defects, but he was certainly one of the
strongest speculative heads who, during the period from 1845 to 1880,
have reflected on the nature of things.” And, although a certain fatal
spiritual weakness debarred him to a great extent from the world of
practical life, his sympathy with action, whether it was the action
of the politician or the social reformer, or merely that steady
half-conscious performance of its daily duty which keeps humanity
sweet and living, was unfailing. His horizon was not bounded by his own
“prison-cell,” or by that dream-world which he has described with so
much subtle beauty; rather the energies which should have found their
natural expression in literary or family life, pent up within the mind
itself, excited in it a perpetual eagerness for intellectual discovery,
and new powers of sympathy with whatever crossed its field of vision.

So that the thinker, the historian, the critic, will find himself at
home with Amiel. The power of organizing his thought, the art of writing
a book, _monumentum aere perennius_, was indeed denied him--he
laments it bitterly; but, on the other hand, he is receptivity itself,
responsive to all the great forces which move the time, catching and
reflecting on the mobile mirror of his mind whatever winds are blowing
from the hills of thought.

And if the thinker is at home with him, so too are the religious minds,
the natures for whom God and duty are the foundation of existence. Here,
indeed, we come to the innermost secret of Amiel’s charm, the fact which
probably goes farther than any other to explain his fascination for a
large and growing class of readers. For, while he represents all the
intellectual complexities of a time bewildered by the range and number
of its own acquisitions, the religious instinct in him is as strong
and tenacious as in any of the representative exponents of the life of
faith. The intellect is clear and unwavering; but the heart clings to
old traditions, and steadies itself on the rock of duty. His Calvinistic
training lingers long in him; and what detaches him from the Hegelian
school, with which he has much in common, is his own stronger sense of
personal need, his preoccupation with the idea of “sin.” “He speaks,”
 says M. Renan contemptuously, “of sin, of salvation, of redemption, and
conversion, as if these things were realities. He asks me ‘What does M.
Renan make of sin?’ _Eh bien, je crois que je le supprime_.” But it is
just because Amiel is profoundly sensitive to the problems of evil and
responsibility, and M. Renan dismisses them with this half-tolerant,
half-skeptical smile, that M. Renan’s “Souvenirs” inform and entertain
us, while the “Journal Intime” makes a deep impression on that moral
sense which is at the root of individual and national life.

The Journal is full, indeed, of this note of personal religion.
Religion, Amiel declares again and again, cannot be replaced by
philosophy. The redemption of the intelligence is not the redemption of
the heart. The philosopher and critic may succeed in demonstrating that
the various definite forms into which the religious thought of man has
thrown itself throughout history are not absolute truth, but only the
temporary creations of a need which gradually and surely outgrows them
all. “The Trinity, the life to come, paradise and hell, may cease to
be dogmas and spiritual realities, the form and the letter may vanish
away--the question of humanity remains: What is it which saves?” Amiel’s
answer to the question will recall to a wide English circle the method
and spirit of an English teacher, whose dear memory lives to-day in many
a heart, and is guiding many an effort in the cause of good--the method
and spirit of the late Professor Green of Balliol. In many respects
there was a gulf of difference between the two men. The one had all the
will and force of personality which the other lacked. But the ultimate
creed of both, the way in which both interpret the facts of nature and
consciousness, is practically the same. In Amiel’s case, we have to
gather it through all the variations and inevitable contradictions of a
Journal which is the reflection of a life, not the systematic expression
of a series of ideas, but the main results are clear enough. Man is
saved by love and duty, and by the hope which springs from duty, or
rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from
the soil. Conscience and the moral progress of the race--these are his
points of departure. Faith in the reality of the moral law is what he
clings to when his inherited creed has yielded to the pressure of the
intellect, and after all the storms of pessimism and necessitarianism
have passed over him. The reconciliation of the two certitudes, the two
methods, the scientific and the religious, “is to be sought for in that
moral law which is also a fact, and every step of which requires for its
explanation another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity.” “Nature is the
virtuality of mind, the soul the fruit of life, and liberty the flower
of necessity.” Consciousness is the one fixed point in this boundless
and bottomless gulf of things, and the soul’s inward law, as it has been
painfully elaborated by human history, the only revelation of God.

The only but the sufficient revelation! For this first article of a
reasonable creed is the key to all else--the clue which leads the mind
safely through the labyrinth of doubt into the presence of the Eternal.
Without attempting to define the indefinable, the soul rises from the
belief in the reality of love and duty to the belief in “a holy will at
the root of nature and destiny”--for “if man is capable of conceiving
goodness, the general principle of things, which cannot be inferior to
man, must be good.” And then the religious consciousness seizes on this
intellectual deduction, and clothes it in language of the heart, in
the tender and beautiful language of faith. “There is but one thing
needful--to possess God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and
soul, are so many ways of approaching the Divine, so many modes of
tasting and adoring God. Religion is not a method; it is a life--a
higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its
fruits; a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which
radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows.” And the
faith of his youth and his maturity bears the shock of suffering, and
supports him through his last hours. He writes a few months before the
end: “The animal expires; man surrenders his soul to the author of the
soul.” ... “We dream alone, we suffer alone, we die alone, we inhabit
the last resting-place alone. But there is nothing to prevent us from
opening our solitude to God. And so what was an austere monologue
becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes docility, renunciation passes into
peace, and the sense of painful defeat is lost in the sense of recovered
liberty”--_“Tout est bien, mon Dieu m’enveloppe.”_

Nor is this all. It is not only that Amiel’s inmost thought and
affections are stayed on this conception of “a holy will at the root of
nature and destiny”--in a certain very real sense he is a Christian. No
one is more sensitive than he to the contribution which Christianity has
made to the religious wealth of mankind; no one more penetrated than he
with the truth of its essential doctrine “death unto sin and a new
birth unto righteousness.” “The religion of sin, of repentance and
reconciliation,” he cries, “the religion of the new birth and of
eternal life, is not a religion to be ashamed of.” The world has
found inspiration and guidance for eighteen centuries in the religious
consciousness of Jesus. “The gospel has modified the world and consoled
mankind,” and so “we may hold aloof from the churches and yet bow
ourselves before Jesus. We may be suspicious of the clergy and refuse to
have anything to do with catechisms, and yet love the Holy and the Just
who came to save and not to curse.” And in fact Amiel’s whole life and
thought are steeped in Christianity. He is the spiritual descendant of
one of the intensest and most individual forms of Christian belief,
and traces of his religious ancestry are visible in him at every step.
Protestantism of the sincerer and nobler kind leaves an indelible
impression on the nature which has once surrounded itself to the austere
and penetrating influences flowing from the religion of sin and grace;
and so far as feeling and temperament are concerned, Amiel retained
throughout his life the marks of Calvinism and Geneva.

And yet how clear the intellect remains, through all the anxieties
of thought, and in the face of the soul’s dearest memories and most
passionate needs! Amiel, as soon as his reasoning faculty has once
reached its maturity, never deceives himself as to the special claims
of the religion which by instinct and inheritance he loves; he makes
no compromise with dogma or with miracle. Beyond the religions of the
present he sees always the essential religion which lasts when all local
forms and marvels have passed away; and as years go on, with more and
more clearness of conviction, he learns to regard all special beliefs
and systems as “prejudices, useful in practice, but still narrownesses
of the mind;” misgrowths of thought, necessary in their time and place,
but still of no absolute value, and having no final claim on the thought
of man.

And it is just here--in this mixture of the faith which clings and
aspires, with the intellectual pliancy which allows the mind to sway
freely under the pressure of life and experience, and the deep respect
for truth, which will allow nothing to interfere between thought and
its appointed tasks--that Amiel’s special claim upon us lies. It is this
balance of forces in him which makes him so widely representative of the
modern mind--of its doubts, its convictions, its hopes. He speaks for
the life of to-day as no other single voice has yet spoken for it; in
his contradictions, his fears, his despairs, and yet in the constant
straining toward the unseen and the ideal which gives a fundamental
unity to his inner life, he is the type of a generation universally
touched with doubt, and yet as sensitive to the need of faith as any
that have gone before it; more widely conscious than its predecessors
of the limitations of the human mind, and of the iron pressure of man’s
physical environment; but at the same time--paradox as it may seem--more
conscious of man’s greatness, more deeply thrilled by the spectacle of
the nobility and beauty interwoven with the universe.

And he plays this part of his so modestly, with so much hesitation,
so much doubt of his thought and of himself! He is no preacher, like
Emerson and Carlyle, with whom, as poet and idealist, he has so much in
common; there is little resemblance between him and the men who
speak, as it were, from a height to the crowd beneath, sure always of
themselves and what they have to say. And here again he represents the
present and foreshadows the future. For the age of the preachers is
passing those who speak with authority on the riddles of life and nature
as the priests of this or that all-explaining dogma, are becoming less
important as knowledge spreads, and the complexity of experience is made
evident to a wider range of minds. The force of things is against _the
certain people_. Again and again truth escapes from the prisons made for
her by mortal hands, and as humanity carries on the endless pursuit she
will pay more and more respectful heed to voices like this voice of the
lonely Genevese thinker--with its pathetic alterations of hope and fear,
and the moral steadfastness which is the inmost note of it--to these
meditative lives, which, through all the ebb and flow of thought, and in
the dim ways of doubt and suffering, rich in knowledge, and yet rich in
faith, grasp in new forms, and proclaim to us in new words,

  “The mighty hopes which make us men.”




AMIEL’S JOURNAL.


       *       *       *       *       *

[Where no other name is mentioned, Geneva is to be understood as the
author’s place of residence.]

BERLIN, July 16. 1848.--There is but one thing needful--to possess
God. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external
resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many modes
of tasting and of adoring God. We must learn to detach ourselves from
all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only
to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, a
usufruct.... To adore, to understand, to receive, to feel, to give, to
act: there is my law my duty, my happiness, my heaven. Let come what
come will--even death. Only be at peace with self, live in the presence
of God, in communion with Him, and leave the guidance of existence to
those universal powers against whom thou canst do nothing! If death
gives me time, so much the better. If its summons is near, so much the
better still; if a half-death overtake me, still so much the better,
for so the path of success is closed to me only that I may find opening
before me the path of heroism, of moral greatness and resignation. Every
life has its potentiality of greatness, and as it is impossible to be
outside God, the best is consciously to dwell in Him.

BERLIN, July 20, 1848.--It gives liberty and breadth to thought,
to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal
history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology
from the point of view of astronomy. When the duration of a man’s life
or of a people’s life appears to us as microscopic as that of a fly and
inversely, the life of a gnat as infinite as that of a celestial body,
with all its dust of nations, we feel ourselves at once very small and
very great, and we are able, as it were, to survey from the height of
the spheres our own existence, and the little whirlwinds which agitate
our little Europe.

At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses
of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies
bring us back to this study.

GENEVA, April 20, 1849.--It is six years [Footnote: Amiel left Geneva
for Paris and Berlin in April, 1848, the preceding year, 1841-42, having
been spent in Italy and Sicily.] to-day since I last left Geneva. How
many journeys, how many impressions, observations, thoughts, how many
forms of men and things have since then passed before me and in me! The
last seven years have been the most important of my life: they have been
the novitiate of my intelligence, the initiation of my being into being.

Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees and peach
trees! What a difference from six years ago, when the cherry-trees,
adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their bridal flowers,
smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and the lilacs of
Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!...

May 3, 1849.--I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or
any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in
imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential
citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust,
are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague
and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable
of living. Recognize your place; let the living live; and you, gather
together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas;
you will be most useful so. Renounce yourself, accept the cup given
you, with its honey and its gall, as it comes. Bring God down into your
heart. Embalm your soul in Him now, make within you a temple for the
Holy Spirit, be diligent in good works, make others happier and better.

Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation
in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.

May 27, 1849.--To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is
the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and
melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand; it
is the cruelest trial reserved for self-devotion; it is what must have
oftenest wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if God could suffer, it
would be the wound we should be forever inflicting upon Him. He also--He
above all--is the great misunderstood, the least comprehended. Alas!
alas! never to tire, never to grow cold; to be patient, sympathetic,
tender; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope
always, like God; to love always--this is duty.

June 3, 1849.--Fresh and delicious weather. A long morning walk.
Surprised the hawthorn and wild rose-trees in flower. From the fields
vague and health-giving scents. The Voirons fringed with dazzling mists,
and tints of exquisite softness over the Salève. Work in the fields, two
delightful donkeys, one pulling greedily at a hedge of barberry. Then
three little children. I felt a boundless desire to caress and play
with them. To be able to enjoy such leisure, these peaceful fields, fine
weather, contentment; to have my two sisters with me; to rest my eyes on
balmy meadows and blossoming orchards; to listen to the life singing in
the grass and on the trees; to be so calmly happy--is it not too much?
is it deserved? O let me enjoy it with gratitude. The days of trouble
come soon enough and are many enough. I have no presentiment of
happiness. All the more let me profit by the present. Come, kind nature,
smile and enchant me! Veil from me awhile my own griefs and those of
others; let me see only the folds of thy queenly mantle, and hide all
miserable and ignoble things from me under thy bounties and splendors!

October 1, 1849.--Yesterday, Sunday, I read through and made extracts
from the gospel of St. John. It confirmed me in my belief that about
Jesus we must believe no one but Himself, and that what we have to do
is to discover the true image of the founder behind all the prismatic
reactions through which it comes to us, and which alter it more or less.
A ray of heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ
has been broken into a thousand rainbow colors and carried in a thousand
directions. It is the historical task of Christianity to assume
with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to be forever
spiritualizing more and more her understanding of the Christ and of
salvation.

I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and formalism which
still exists nineteen centuries after the Redeemer’s proclamation,
“it is the letter which killeth”--after his protest against a dead
symbolism. The new religion is so profound that it is not understood
even now, and would seem a blasphemy to the greater number of
Christians. The person of Christ is the center of it. Redemption,
eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment,
Satan, heaven and hell--all these beliefs have been so materialized and
coarsened, that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of
things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian
boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the church
which is heretical, the church whose sight is troubled and her heart
timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine, there is a
relative revelation; each man enters into God so much as God enters
into him, or as Angelus, [Footnote: Angelus Silesius, otherwise Johannes
Soheffler, the German seventeenth century hymn-writer, whose tender and
mystical verses have been popularized in England by Miss Winkworth’s
translations in the _Lyra Germanica_.] I think, said, “the eye by which
I see God is the same eye by which He sees me.”

Christianity, if it is to triumph over pantheism, must absorb it. To
our pusillanimous eyes Jesus would have borne the marks of a hateful
pantheism, for he confirmed the Biblical phrase “ye are gods,” and
so would St. Paul, who tells us that we are of “the race of God.”
 Our century wants a new theology--that is to say, a more profound
explanation of the nature of Christ and of the light which it flashes
upon heaven and upon humanity.

       *       *       *       *       *

Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh--that is to
say, over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness,
of isolation, and of death. There is no serious piety without heroism.
Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.

       *       *       *       *       *

Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world
while at the same time detaching us from it.

       *       *       *       *       *

December 30, 1850.--The relation of thought to action filled my mind on
waking, and I found myself carried toward a bizarre formula, which seems
to have something of the night still clinging about it: _Action is but
coarsened thought_; thought become concrete, obscure, and unconscious.
It seemed to me that our most trifling actions, of eating, walking, and
sleeping, were the condensation of a multitude of truths and thoughts,
and that the wealth of ideas involved was in direct proportion to the
commonness of the action (as our dreams are the more active, the deeper
our sleep). We are hemmed round with mystery, and the greatest mysteries
are contained in what we see and do every day. In all spontaneity the
work of creation is reproduced in analogy. When the spontaneity is
unconscious, you have simple action; when it is conscious, intelligent
and moral action. At bottom this is nothing more than the proposition of
Hegel: [“What is rational is real; and what is real is rational;”] but
it had never seemed to me more evident, more palpable. Everything which
is, is thought, but not conscious and individual thought. The human
intelligence is but the consciousness of being. It is what I have
formulated before: Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol of
what? of mind.

... I have just been looking through the complete works of Montesquieu,
and cannot yet make plain to myself the impression left on me by
this singular style, with its mixture of gravity and affectation, of
carelessness and precision, of strength and delicacy; so full of sly
intention for all its coldness, expressing at once inquisitiveness and
indifference, abrupt, piecemeal, like notes thrown together haphazard,
and yet deliberate. I seem to see an intelligence naturally grave and
austere donning a dress of wit for convention’s sake. The author desires
to entertain as much as to teach, the thinker is also a _bel-esprit_,
the jurisconsult has a touch of the coxcomb, and a perfumed breath from
the temple of Venus has penetrated the tribunal of Minos. Here we have
austerity, as the century understood it, in philosophy or religion. In
Montesquieu, the art, if there is any, lies not in the words but in
the matter. The words run freely and lightly, but the thought is
self-conscious.

       *       *       *       *       *

Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect
beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were,
its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and
radiant kingship. Each star passes but once in the night through the
meridian over our heads and shines there but an instant; so, in the
heaven of the mind each thought touches its zenith but once, and in that
moment all its brilliancy and all its greatness culminate. Artist,
poet, or thinker, if you want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your
feelings, seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is
their highest point. Before it, you have but vague outlines or dim
presentiments of them. After it you will have only weakened reminiscence
or powerless regret; that moment is the moment of your ideal.

Spite is anger which is afraid to show itself, it is an impotent fury
conscious of its impotence.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement.

       *       *       *       *       *

To repel one’s cross is to make it heavier.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the conduct of life, habits count for more than maxims, because habit
is a living maxim, becomes flesh and instinct. To reform one’s maxims is
nothing: it is but to change the title of the book. To learn new habits
is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a
tissue of habits.

       *       *       *       *       *

February 17, 1851.--I have been reading, for six or seven hours without
stopping the _Pensées_ of Joubert. I felt at first a very strong
attraction toward the book, and a deep interest in it, but I have
already a good deal cooled down. These scattered and fragmentary
thoughts, falling upon one without a pause, like drops of light, tire,
not my head, but reasoning power. The merits of Joubert consist in the
grace of the style, the vivacity or _finesse_ of the criticisms, the
charm of the metaphors; but he starts many more problems than he solves,
he notices and records more than he explains. His philosophy is
merely literary and popular; his originality is only in detail and
in execution. Altogether, he is a writer of reflections rather than
a philosopher, a critic of remarkable gifts, endowed with exquisite
sensibility, but, as an intelligence, destitute of the capacity for
co-ordination. He wants concentration and continuity. It is not that he
has no claims to be considered a philosopher or an artist, but rather
that he is both imperfectly, for he thinks and writes marvelously, _on a
small scale_. He is an entomologist, a lapidary, a jeweler, a coiner of
sentences, of adages, of criticisms, of aphorisms, counsels, problems;
and his book, extracted from the accumulations of his journal during
fifty years of his life, is a collection of precious stones, of
butterflies, coins and engraved gems. The whole, however, is more subtle
than strong, more poetical than profound, and leaves upon the reader
rather the impression of a great wealth of small curiosities of value,
than of a great intellectual existence and a new point of view.
The place of Joubert seems to me then, below and very far from the
philosophers and the true poets, but honorable among the moralists and
the critics. He is one of those men who are superior to their works, and
who have themselves the unity which these lack. This first judgment is,
besides, indiscriminate and severe. I shall have to modify it later.

February 20th.--I have almost finished these two volumes of _Pensées_
and the greater part of the _Correspondance_. This last has especially
charmed me; it is remarkable for grace, delicacy, atticism, and
precision. The chapters on metaphysics and philosophy are the most
insignificant. All that has to do with large views with the whole of
things, is very little at Joubert’s command; he has no philosophy of
history, no speculative intuition. He is the thinker of detail, and his
proper field is psychology and matters of taste. In this sphere of the
subtleties and delicacies of imagination and feeling, within the circle
of personal affectation and preoccupations, of social and educational
interests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine criticisms,
in exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from flower to flower, a
teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, an Aeolian harp, a ray of furtive
light stealing through the leaves. Taken as a whole, there is something
impalpable and immaterial about him, which I will not venture to call
effeminate, but which is scarcely manly. He wants bone and body: timid,
dreamy, and _clairvoyant_, he hovers far above reality. He is rather a
soul, a breath, than a man. It is the mind of a woman in the character
of a child, so that we feel for him less admiration than tenderness and
gratitude.

February 27, 1851.--Read over the first book of _Emile_. I was revolted,
contrary to all expectation, for I opened the book with a sort of
hunger for style and beauty. I was conscious instead of an impression of
heaviness and harshness, of labored, _hammering_ emphasis, of something
violent, passionate, and obstinate, without serenity, greatness,
nobility. Both the qualities and the defects of the book produced in
me a sense of lack of good manners, a blaze of talent, but no grace, no
distinction, the accent of good company wanting. I understood how it is
that Rousseau rouses a particular kind of repugnance, the repugnance of
good taste, and I felt the danger to style involved in such a model
as well as the danger to thought arising from a truth so alloyed and
sophisticated. What there is of true and strong in Rousseau did not
escape me, and I still admired him, but his bad sides appeared to me
with a clearness relatively new.

(_Same day._)--The _pensée_-writer is to the philosopher what the
_dilettante_ is to the artist. He plays with thought, and makes it
produce a crowd of pretty things in detail, but he is more anxious about
truths than truth, and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its
unity, escapes him. He handles his instrument agreeably, but he does
not possess it, still less does he create it. He is a gardener and not a
geologist; he cultivates the earth only so much as is necessary to make
it produce for him flowers and fruits; he does not dig deep enough into
it to understand it. In a word, the _pensée_-writer deals with what is
superficial and fragmentary. He is the literary, the oratorical,
the talking or writing philosopher; whereas the philosopher is the
scientific _pensée_-writer. The _pensée_-writers serve to stimulate or
to popularize the philosophers. They have thus a double use, besides
their charm. They are the pioneers of the army of readers, the doctors
of the crowd, the money-changers of thought, which they convert into
current coin. The writer of _pensée_ is a man of letters, though of
a serious type, and therefore he is popular. The philosopher is a
specialist, as far as the form of his science goes, though not in
substance, and therefore he can never become popular. In France, for one
philosopher (Descartes) there have been thirty writers of _pensées_; in
Germany, for ten such writers there have been twenty philosophers.

March 25, 1851.--How many illustrious men whom I have known have been
already reaped by death, Steffens, Marheineke, Neander, Mendelssohn,
Thorwaldsen, Oelenschläger, Geijer, Tegner, Oersted, Stuhr, Lachmann;
and with us, Sismondi, Töpffer, de Candolle, savants, artists, poets,
musicians, historians. [Footnote: Of these Marheineke, Neander, and
Lachmann had been lecturing at Berlin during Amiel’s residence there.
The Danish dramatic poet Oelenschläger and the Swedish writer
Tegner were among the Scandinavian men of letters with whom he made
acquaintance during his tour of Sweden and Denmark in 1845. He probably
came across the Swedish historian Geijer on the same occasion. Schelling
and Alexander von Humboldt, mentioned a little lower down, were
also still holding sway at Berlin when he was a student. There is an
interesting description in one of his articles on Berlin, published in
the _Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève_, of a university ceremonial
there in or about 1847, and of the effect produced on the student’s
young imagination by the sight of half the leaders of European research
gathered into a single room. He saw Schlosser, the veteran historian, at
Heidelberg at the end of 1843.] The old generation is going. What will
the new bring us? What shall we ourselves contribute? A few great old
men--Schelling, Alexander von Humboldt, Schlosser--still link us with
the glorious past. Who is preparing to bear the weight of the future?
A shiver seizes us when the ranks grow thin around us, when age is
stealing upon us, when we approach the zenith, and when destiny says to
us: “Show what is in thee! Now is the moment, now is the hour, else fall
back into nothingness! It is thy turn! Give the world thy measure, say
thy word, reveal thy nullity or thy capacity. Come forth from the shade!
It is no longer a question of promising, thou must perform. The time of
apprenticeship is over. Servant, show us what thou hast done with thy
talent. Speak now, or be silent forever.” This appeal of the conscience
is a solemn summons in the life of every man, solemn and awful as
the trumpet of the last judgment. It cries, “Art thou ready? Give an
account. Give an account of thy years, thy leisure, thy strength, thy
studies, thy talent, and thy works. Now and here is the hour of great
hearts, the hour of heroism and of genius.”

April 6, 1851.--Was there ever any one so vulnerable as I? If I were
a father how many griefs and vexations, a child might cause me. As a
husband I should have a thousand ways of suffering because my happiness
demands a thousand conditions I have a heart too easily reached, a
too restless imagination; despair is easy to me, and every sensation
reverberates again and again within me. What might be, spoils for me
what is. What ought to be consumes me with sadness. So the reality, the
present, the irreparable, the necessary, repel and even terrify me. I
have too much imagination, conscience and penetration, and not enough
character. The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough
elasticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable;
practical life makes me afraid.

And yet, at the same time it attracts me; I have need of it. Family
life, especially, in all its delightfulness, in all its moral depth,
appeals to me almost like a duty. Sometimes I cannot escape from the
ideal of it. A companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my
hopes; within, a common worship, toward the world outside, kindness
and beneficence; educations to undertake, the thousand and one moral
relations which develop round the first, all these ideas intoxicate me
sometimes. But I put them aside because every hope is, as it were, an
egg whence a serpent may issue instead of a dove, because every joy
missed is a stab; because every seed confided to destiny contains an ear
of grief which the future may develop.

I am distrustful of myself and of happiness because I know myself.
The ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. Everything which
compromises the future or destroys my inner liberty, which enslaves me
to things or obliges me to be other than I could and ought to be, all
which injures my idea of the perfect man, hurts me mortally, degrades
and wounds me in mind, even beforehand. I abhor useless regrets and
repentances. The fatality of the consequences which follow upon every
human act, the leading idea of dramatic art and the most tragic element
of life, arrests me more certainly than the arm of the _Commandeur_. I
only act with regret, and almost by force.

To be dependent is to me terrible; but to depend upon what is
irreparable, arbitrary and unforeseen, and above all to be so dependent
by my fault and through my own error, to give up liberty and hope, to
slay sleep and happiness, this would be hell!

All that is necessary, providential, in short, _unimputable_, I could
bear, I think, with some strength of mind. But responsibility mortally
envenoms grief; and as an act is essentially voluntary, therefore I act
as little as possible.

Last outbreak of a rebellious and deceitful self-will, craving for
repose for satisfaction, for independence! is there not some relic
of selfishness in such a disinterestedness, such a fear, such idle
susceptibility.

I wish to fulfill my duty, but where is it, what is it? Here inclination
comes in again and interprets the oracle. And the ultimate question is
this: Does duty consist in obeying one’s nature, even the best and most
spiritual? or in conquering it?

Life, is it essentially the education of the mind and intelligence,
or that of the will? And does will show itself in strength or in
resignation? If the aim of life is to teach us renunciation, then
welcome sickness, hindrances, sufferings of every kind! But if its aim
is to produce the perfect man, then one must watch over one’s integrity
of mind and body. To court trial is to tempt God. At bottom, the God of
justice veils from me the God of love. I tremble instead of trusting.

Whenever conscience speaks with a divided, uncertain, and disputed
voice, it is not yet the voice of God. Descend still deeper into
yourself, until you hear nothing but a clear and undivided voice, a
voice which does away with doubt and brings with it persuasion, light
and serenity. Happy, says the apostle, are they who are at peace with
themselves, and whose heart condemneth them not in the part they take.
This inner identity, this unity of conviction, is all the more
difficult the more the mind analyzes, discriminates, and foresees. It is
difficult, indeed, for liberty to return to the frank unity of instinct.

Alas! we must then re-climb a thousand times the peaks already scaled,
and reconquer the points of view already won, we must _fight the fight_!
The human heart, like kings, signs mere truces under a pretence of
perpetual peace. The eternal life is eternally to be re-won. Alas, yes!
peace itself is a struggle, or rather it is struggle and activity
which are the law. We only find rest in effort, as the flame only finds
existence in combustion. O Heraclitus! the symbol of happiness is after
all the same as that of grief; anxiety and hope, hell and heaven, are
equally restless. The altar of Vesta and the sacrifice of Beelzebub burn
with the same fire. Ah, yes, there you have life--life double-faced and
double-edged. The fire which enlightens is also the fire which consumes;
the element of the gods may become that of the accursed.

April 7, 1851.--Read a part of Ruge’s [Footnote: Arnold Ruge, born in
1803, died at Brighton in 1880, principal editor of the _Hallische_,
afterward the _Deutsche Jahrbücher_ (1838-43), in which Strauss, Bruno
Bauer, and Louis Feuerbach wrote. He was a member of the parliament of
Frankfort.] volume “_Die Academie_” (1848) where the humanism of the
neo-Hegelians in politics, religion, and literature is represented by
correspondents or articles (Kuno Fischer, Kollach, etc). They recall the
_philosophist_ party of the last century, able to dissolve anything by
reason and reasoning, but unable to construct anything; for construction
rests upon feeling, instinct, and will. One finds them mistaking
philosophic consciousness for realizing power, the redemption of the
intelligence for the redemption of the heart, that is to say, the part
for the whole. These papers make me understand the radical difference
between morals and intellectualism. The writers of them wish to supplant
religion by philosophy. Man is the principle of their religion, and
intellect is the climax of man. Their religion, then, is the religion
of intellect. There you have the two worlds: Christianity brings and
preaches salvation by the conversion of the will, humanism by the
emancipation of the mind. One attacks the heart, the other the brain.
Both wish to enable man to reach his ideal. But the ideal differs, if
not by its content, at least by the disposition of its content, by the
predominance and sovereignty given to this for that inner power. For
one, the mind is the organ of the soul; for the other, the soul is
an inferior state of the mind; the one wishes to enlighten by making
better, the other to make better by enlightening. It is the difference
between Socrates and Jesus.

_The cardinal question is that of sin._ The question of immanence or of
dualism is secondary. The trinity, the life to come, paradise and hell,
may cease to be dogmas, and spiritual realities, the form and the letter
may vanish away, the question of humanity remains: What is it which
saves? How can man be led to be truly man? Is the ultimate root of his
being responsibility, yes or no? And is doing or knowing the right,
acting or thinking, his ultimate end? If science does not produce
love it is insufficient. Now all that science gives is the _amor
intellectualis_ of Spinoza, light without warmth, a resignation which
is contemplative and grandiose, but inhuman, because it is scarcely
transmissible and remains a privilege, one of the rarest of all. Moral
love places the center of the individual in the center of being. It has
at least salvation in principle, the germ of eternal life. _To love is
virtually to know; to know is not virtually to love_; there you have the
relation of these two modes of man. The redemption wrought by science or
by intellectual love is then inferior to the redemption wrought by
will or by moral love. The first may free a man from himself, it may
enfranchise him from egotism. The second drives the _ego_ out of itself,
makes it active and fruitful. The one is critical, purifying, negative;
the other is vivifying, fertilizing, positive. Science, however
spiritual and substantial it may be in itself, is still formal
relatively to love. Moral force is then the vital point. And this force
is only produced by moral force. Like alone acts upon like. Therefore do
not amend by reasoning, but by example; approach feeling by feeling;
do not hope to excite love except by love. Be what you wish others to
become. Let yourself and not your words preach for you.

Philosophy, then, to return to the subject, can never replace religion;
revolutionaries are not apostles, although the apostles may have been
revolutionaries. To save from the outside to the inside--and by the
outside I understand also the intelligence relatively to the will--is an
error and danger. The negative part of the humanist’s work is good; it
will strip Christianity of an outer shell, which has become superfluous;
but Ruge and Feuerbach cannot save humanity. She must have her saints
and her heroes to complete the work of her philosophers. Science is
the power of man, and love his strength; man _becomes_ man only by
the intelligence, but he _is_ man only by the heart. Knowledge, love,
power--there is the complete life.

June 16, 1851.--This evening I walked up and down on the Pont des
Bergues, under a clear, moonless heaven delighting in the freshness of
the water, streaked with light from the two quays, and glimmering under
the twinkling stars. Meeting all these different groups of young people,
families, couples and children, who were returning to their homes, to
their garrets or their drawing-rooms, singing or talking as they went,
I felt a movement of sympathy for all these passers-by; my eyes and
ears became those of a poet or a painter; while even one’s mere kindly
curiosity seems to bring with it a joy in living and in seeing others
live.

August 15, 1851.--To know how to be ready, a great thing, a precious
gift, and one that implies calculation, grasp and decision. To be always
ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied;
he must know how to disengage what is essential from the detail in which
it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be equally considered; in a word,
he must be able to simplify his duties, his business, and his life. To
know how to be ready, is to know how to start.

It is astonishing how all of us are generally cumbered up with the
thousand and one hindrances and duties which are not such, but which
nevertheless wind us about with their spider threads and fetter the
movement of our wings. It is the lack of order which makes us slaves;
the confusion of to-day discounts the freedom of to-morrow.

Confusion is the enemy of all comfort, and confusion is born of
procrastination. To know how to be ready we must be able to finish.
Nothing is done but what is finished. The things which we leave dragging
behind us will start up again later on before us and harass our path.
Let each day take thought for what concerns it, liquidate its own
affairs and respect the day which is to follow, and then we shall be
always ready. To know how to be ready is at bottom to know how to die.

September 2, 1851.--Read the work of Tocqueville (“_De la Democratie
en Amérique_.”) My impression is as yet a mixed one. A fine book, but
I feel in it a little too much imitation of Montesquieu. This abstract,
piquant, sententious style, too, is a little dry, over-refined and
monotonous. It has too much cleverness and not enough imagination. It
makes one think, more than it charms, and though really serious, it
seems flippant. His method of splitting up a thought, of illuminating
a subject by successive facets, has serious inconveniences. We see
the details too clearly, to the detriment of the whole. A multitude of
sparks gives but a poor light. Nevertheless, the author is evidently a
ripe and penetrating intelligence, who takes a comprehensive view of
his subject, while at the same time possessing a power of acute and
exhaustive analysis.

September 6th.--Tocqueville’s book has on the whole a calming effect
upon the mind, but it leaves a certain sense of disgust behind. It
makes one realize the necessity of what is happening around us and the
inevitableness of the goal prepared for us; but it also makes it plain
that the era of _mediocrity_ in everything is beginning, and mediocrity
freezes all desire. Equality engenders uniformity, and it is by
sacrificing what is excellent, remarkable, and extraordinary that we get
rid of what is bad. The whole becomes less barbarous, and at the same
time more vulgar.

The age of great men is going; the epoch of the ant-hill, of life in
multiplicity, is beginning. The century of individualism, if abstract
equality triumphs, runs a great risk of seeing no more true individuals.
By continual leveling and division of labor, society will become
everything and man nothing.

As the floor of valleys is raised by the denudation and washing down
of the mountains, what is average will rise at the expense of what is
great. The exceptional will disappear. A plateau with fewer and fewer
undulations, without contrasts and without oppositions, such will be
the aspect of human society. The statistician will register a growing
progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on the one hand, a
progress of things; on the other, a decline of souls. The useful will
take the place of the beautiful, industry of art, political economy of
religion, and arithmetic of poetry. The spleen will become the malady of
a leveling age.

Is this indeed the fate reserved for the democratic era? May not the
general well-being be purchased too dearly at such a price? The creative
force which in the beginning we see forever tending to produce and
multiply differences, will it afterward retrace its steps and obliterate
them one by one? And equality, which in the dawn of existence is mere
inertia, torpor, and death, is it to become at last the natural form of
life? Or rather, above the economic and political equality to which the
socialist and non-socialist democracy aspires, taking it too often for
the term of its efforts, will there not arise a new kingdom of mind, a
church of refuge, a republic of souls, in which, far beyond the region
of mere right and sordid utility, beauty, devotion, holiness, heroism,
enthusiasm, the extraordinary, the infinite, shall have a worship and an
abiding city? Utilitarian materialism, barren well-being, the idolatry
of the flesh and of the “I,” of the temporal and of mammon, are they to
be the goal if our efforts, the final recompense promised to the labors
of our race? I do not believe it. The ideal of humanity is something
different and higher.

But the animal in us must be satisfied first, and we must first banish
from among us all suffering which is superfluous and has its origin in
social arrangements, before we can return to spiritual goods.

September 7, 1851. (_Aix_).--It is ten o’clock at night. A strange
and mystic moonlight, with a fresh breeze and a sky crossed by a few
wandering clouds, makes our terrace delightful. These pale and gentle
rays shed from the zenith a subdued and penetrating peace; it is like
the calm joy or the pensive smile of experience, combined with a certain
stoic strength. The stars shine, the leaves tremble in the silver light.
Not a sound in all the landscape; great gulfs of shadow under the green
alleys and at the corners of the steps. Everything is secret, solemn,
mysterious.

O night hours, hours of silence and solitude! with you are grace and
melancholy; you sadden and you console. You speak to us of all that
has passed away, and of all that must still die, but you say to us,
“courage!” and you promise us rest.

November 9, 1851. (Sunday).--At the church of St. Gervais, a second
sermon from Adolphe Monod, less grandiose perhaps but almost more
original, and to me more edifying than that of last Sunday. The subject
was St. Paul or the active life, his former one having been St. John or
the inner life, of the Christian. I felt the golden spell of eloquence:
I found myself hanging on the lips of the orator, fascinated by his
boldness, his grace, his energy, and his art, his sincerity, and his
talent; and it was borne in upon me that for some men difficulties are
a source of inspiration, so that what would make others stumble is for
them the occasion of their highest triumphs. He made St. Paul _cry_
during an hour and a half; he made an old nurse of him, he hunted up his
old cloak, his prescriptions of water and wine to Timothy, the canvas
that he mended, his friend Tychicus, in short, all that could raise a
smile; and from it he drew the most unfailing pathos, the most austere
and penetrating lessons. He made the whole St. Paul, martyr, apostle and
man, his grief, his charities, his tenderness, live again before us,
and this with a grandeur, an unction, a warmth of reality, such as I had
never seen equaled.

How stirring is such an apotheosis of pain in our century of comfort,
when shepherds and sheep alike sink benumbed in Capuan languors, such
an apotheosis of ardent charity in a time of coldness and indifference
toward souls, such an apotheosis of a _human_, natural, inbred
Christianity, in an age, when some put it, so to speak, above man, and
others below man! Finally, as a peroration, he dwelt upon the necessity
for a new people, for a stronger generation, if the world is to be
saved from the tempests which threaten it. “People of God, awake! Sow
in tears, that ye may reap in triumph!” What a study is such a sermon!
I felt all the extraordinary literary skill of it, while my eyes were
still dim with tears. Diction, composition, similes, all is instructive
and precious to remember. I was astonished, shaken, taken hold of.

November 18, 1851.--The energetic subjectivity, which has faith in
itself, which does not fear to be something particular and definite
without any consciousness or shame of its subjective illusion, is
unknown to me. I am, so far as the intellectual order is concerned,
essentially objective, and my distinctive speciality, is to be able
to place myself in all points of view, to see through all eyes, to
emancipate myself, that is to say, from the individual prison. Hence
aptitude for theory and irresolution in practice; hence critical talent
and difficulty in spontaneous production. Hence, also, a continuous
uncertainty of conviction and opinion, so long as my aptitude remained
mere instinct; but now that it is conscious and possesses itself, it is
able to conclude and affirm in its turn, so that, after having brought
disquiet, it now brings peace. It says: “There is no repose for the mind
except in the absolute; for feeling, except in the infinite; for the
soul, except in the divine.” Nothing finite is true, is interesting, or
worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and
all that is exclusive, repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the
All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being. Then, in
the light of the absolute, every idea becomes worth studying; in that of
the infinite, every existence worth respecting; in that of the divine,
every creature worth loving.

December 2, 1851.--Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always
turning up your whole soil with the plowshare of self-examination, but
leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds
may bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird; keep a
place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an altar for the unknown
God. Then if a bird sing among your branches, do not be too eager to
tame it. If you are conscious of something new--thought or feeling,
wakening in the depths of your being--do not be in a hurry to let in
light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have the protection
of being forgotten, hedge it round with quiet, and do not break in
upon its darkness; let it take shape and grow, and not a word of your
happiness to any one! Sacred work of nature as it is, all conception
should be enwrapped by the triple veil of modesty, silence and night.

       *       *       *       *       *

Kindness is the principle of tact, and respect for others the first
condition of _savoir-vivre_.

       *       *       *       *       *

He who is silent is forgotten; he who abstains is taken at his word;
he who does not advance, falls back; he who stops is overwhelmed,
distanced, crushed; he who ceases to grow greater becomes smaller; he
who leaves off, gives up; the stationary condition is the beginning of
the end--it is the terrible symptom which precedes death. To live, is
to achieve a perpetual triumph; it is to assert one’s self against
destruction, against sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of
one’s physical and moral being. It is to will without ceasing, or rather
to refresh one’s will day by day.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the
conscience which educates history. Fact is corrupting, it is we who
correct it by the persistence of our ideal. The soul moralizes the past
in order not to be demoralized by it. Like the alchemists of the middle
ages, she finds in the crucible of experience only the gold that she
herself has poured into it.

       *       *       *       *       *

February 1, 1852. (Sunday).--Passed the afternoon in reading the
_Monologues_ of Schleiermacher. This little book made an impression on
me almost as deep as it did twelve years ago, when I read it for the
first time. It replunged me into the inner world, to which I return with
joy whenever I may have forsaken it. I was able besides, to measure my
progress since then by the transparency of all the thoughts to me, and
by the freedom with which I entered into and judged the point of view.

It is great, powerful, profound, but there is still pride in it, and
even selfishness. For the center of the universe is still the self, the
great _Ich_ of Fichte. The tameless liberty, the divine dignity of
the individual spirit, expanding till it admits neither any limit nor
anything foreign to itself, and conscious of a strength instinct with
creative force, such is the point of view of the _Monologues_.

The inner life in its enfranchisement from time, in its double end,
the realization of the species and of the individuality, in its proud
dominion over all hostile circumstances, in its prophetic certainty of
the future, in its immortal youth, such is their theme. Through them we
are enabled to enter into a life of monumental interest, wholly original
and beyond the influence of anything exterior, an astonishing example
of the autonomy of the _ego_, an imposing type of character, Zeno and
Fichte in one. But still the motive power of this life is not
religious; it is rather moral and philosophic. I see in it not so much a
magnificent model to imitate as a precious subject of study. This ideal
of a liberty, absolute, indefeasible, inviolable, respecting itself
above all, disdaining the visible and the universe, and developing
itself after its own laws alone, is also the ideal of Emerson, the stoic
of a young America. According to it, man finds his joy in himself,
and, safe in the inaccessible sanctuary, of his personal consciousness,
becomes almost a god. [Footnote: Compare Clough’s lines:

  “Where are the great, whom thou would’st wish to praise thee?
  Where are the pure, whom thou would’st choose to love thee?
  Where are the brave, to stand supreme above thee?
  Whose high commands would cheer, whose chidings raise thee?
  Seek, seeker, in thyself; submit to find
  In the stones, bread, and life in the blank mind.”]

He is himself principle, motive, and end of his own destiny; he is
himself, and that is enough for him. This superb triumph of life is
not far from being a sort of impiety, or at least a displacement of
adoration. By the mere fact that it does away with humility, such a
superhuman point of view becomes dangerous; it is the very temptation
to which the first man succumbed, that of becoming his own master by
becoming like unto the Elohim. Here then the heroism of the philosopher
approaches temerity, and the _Monologues_ are therefore open to three
reproaches: Ontologically, the position of man in the spiritual universe
is wrongly indicated; the individual soul, not being unique and not
springing from itself, can it be conceived without God? Psychologically,
the force of spontaneity in the _ego_ is allowed a dominion too
exclusive of any other. As a fact, it is not everything in man. Morally,
evil is scarcely named, and conflict, the condition of true peace, is
left out of count. So that the peace described in the _Monologues_ is
neither a conquest by man nor a grace from heaven; it is rather a stroke
of good fortune.

February 2d.--Still the _Monologues_. Critically I defended myself
enough against them yesterday; I may abandon myself now, without scruple
and without danger, to the admiration and the sympathy with which they
inspire me. This life so proudly independent, this sovereign conception
of human dignity, this actual possession of the universe and the
infinite, this perfect emancipation from all which passes, this calm
sense of strength and superiority, this invincible energy of will, this
infallible clearness of self-vision, this autocracy of the consciousness
which is its own master, all these decisive marks of a royal personality
of a nature Olympian, profound, complete, harmonious, penetrate the
mind with joy and heart with gratitude. What a life! what a man! These
glimpses into the inner regions of a great soul do one good. Contact of
this kind strengthens, restores, refreshes. Courage returns as we gaze;
when we see what has been, we doubt no more that it can be again. At the
sight of a _man_ we too say to ourselves, let us also be men.

March 3, 1852.--Opinion has its value and even its power: to have it
against us is painful when we are among friends, and harmful in the case
of the outer world. We should neither flatter opinion nor court it; but
it is better, if we can help it, not to throw it on to a false scent.
The first error is a meanness; the second an imprudence. We should be
ashamed of the one; we may regret the other. Look to yourself; you are
much given to this last fault, and it has already done you great harm.
Be ready to bend your pride; abase yourself even so far as to show
yourself ready and clever like others. This world of skillful egotisms
and active ambitions, this world of men, in which one must deceive
by smiles, conduct, and silence as much as by actual words, a world
revolting to the proud and upright soul, it is our business to learn to
live in it! Success is required in it: succeed. Only force is recognized
there: be strong. Opinion seeks to impose her law upon all, instead of
setting her at defiance, it would be better to struggle with her and
conquer.... I understand the indignation of contempt, and the wish to
crush, roused irresistibly by all that creeps, all that is tortuous,
oblique, ignoble.... But I cannot maintain such a mood, which is a mood
of vengeance, for long. This world is a world of men, and these men
are our brothers. We must not banish from us the divine breath, we must
love. Evil must be conquered by good; and before all things one must
keep a pure conscience. Prudence may be preached from this point of
view too. “Be ye simple as the dove and prudent as the serpent,” are the
words of Jesus. Be careful of your reputation, not through vanity, but
that you may not harm your life’s work, and out of love for truth. There
is still something of self-seeking in the refined disinterestedness
which will not justify itself, that it may feel itself superior to
opinion. It requires ability, to make what we seem agree with what we
are, and humility, to feel that we are no great things.

There, thanks to this journal, my excitement has passed away. I have
just read the last book of it through again, and the morning has passed
by. On the way I have been conscious of a certain amount of monotony.
It does not signify! These pages are not written to be read; they are
written for my own consolation and warning. They are landmarks in my
past; and some of the landmarks are funeral crosses, stone pyramids,
withered stalks grown green again, white pebbles, coins--all of them
helpful toward finding one’s way again through the Elysian fields of the
soul. The pilgrim has marked his stages in it; he is able to trace by it
his thoughts, his tears, his joys. This is my traveling diary: if some
passages from it may be useful to others, and if sometimes even I have
communicated such passages to the public, these thousand pages as a
whole are only of value to me and to those who, after me, may take some
interest in the itinerary of an obscurely conditioned soul, far from the
world’s noise and fame. These sheets will be monotonous when my life is
so; they will repeat themselves when feelings repeat themselves; truth
at any rate will be always there, and truth is their only muse, their
only pretext, their only duty.

April 2, 1852.--What a lovely walk! Sky clear, sun rising, all the tints
bright, all the outlines sharp, save for the soft and misty infinite
of the lake. A pinch of white frost, powdered the fields, lending a
metallic relief to the hedges of green box, and to the whole landscape,
still without leaves, an air of health and vigor, of youth and
freshness. “Bathe, O disciple, thy thirsty soul in the dew of the dawn!”
 says Faust, to us, and he is right. The morning air breathes a new and
laughing energy into veins and marrow. If every day is a repetition of
life, every dawn gives signs as it were a new contract with existence.
At dawn everything is fresh, light, simple, as it is for children. At
dawn spiritual truth, like the atmosphere, is more transparent, and our
organs, like the young leaves, drink in the light more eagerly, breathe
in more ether, and less of things earthly. If night and the starry sky
speak to the meditative soul of God, of eternity and the infinite, the
dawn is the time for projects, for resolutions, for the birth of action.
While the silence and the “sad serenity of the azure vault,” incline the
soul to self-recollection, the vigor and gayety of nature spread into
the heart and make it eager for life and living. Spring is upon us.
Primroses and violets have already hailed her coming. Rash blooms are
showing on the peach trees; the swollen buds of the pear trees and
the lilacs point to the blossoming that is to be; the honeysuckles are
already green.

April 26, 1852.--This evening a feeling of emptiness took possession
of me; and the solemn ideas of duty, the future, solitude, pressed
themselves upon me. I gave myself to meditation, a very necessary
defense against the dispersion and distraction brought about by the
day’s work and its detail. Read a part of Krause’s book “_Urbild der
Menschheit_” [Footnote: Christian Frederick Krause, died 1832, Hegel’s
younger contemporary, and the author of a system which he called
_panentheism_--Amiel alludes to it later on.] which answered marvelously
to my thought and my need. This philosopher has always a beneficent
effect upon me; his sweet religious serenity gains upon me and invades
me. He inspires me with a sense of peace and infinity.

Still I miss something, common worship, a positive religion, shared with
other people. Ah! when will the church to which I belong in heart rise
into being? I cannot like Scherer, content myself with being in the
right all alone. I must have a less solitary Christianity. My religious
needs are not satisfied any more than my social needs, or my needs of
affection. Generally I am able to forget them and lull them to sleep.
But at times they wake up with a sort of painful bitterness ... I waver
between languor and _ennui_, between frittering myself away on the
infinitely little, and longing after what is unknown and distant. It is
like the situation which French novelists are so fond of, the story of
a _vie de province_; only the province is all that is not the country
of the soul, every place where the heart feels itself strange,
dissatisfied, restless and thirsty. Alas! well understood, this place is
the earth, this country of one’s dreams is heaven, and this suffering is
the eternal homesickness, the thirst for happiness.

“_In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister_,” says Goethe. _Mâle
résignation_, this also is the motto of those who are masters of the
art of life; “manly,” that is to say, courageous, active, resolute,
persevering, “resignation,” that is to say, self-sacrifice,
renunciation, limitation. Energy in resignation, there lies the wisdom
of the sons of earth, the only serenity possible in this life of
struggle and of combat. In it is the peace of martyrdom, in it too the
promise of triumph.

April 28, 1852. (Lancy.) [Footnote: A village near Geneva.]--Once more I
feel the spring languor creeping over me, the spring air about me. This
morning the poetry of the scene, the song of the birds, the tranquil
sunlight, the breeze blowing over the fresh green fields, all rose into
and filled my heart. Now all is silent. O silence, thou art terrible!
terrible as that calm of the ocean which lets the eye penetrate the
fathomless abysses below. Thou showest us in ourselves depths which
make us giddy, inextinguishable needs, treasures of suffering. Welcome
tempests! at least they blur and trouble the surface of these waters
with their terrible secrets. Welcome the passion blasts which stir the
wares of the soul, and so veil from us its bottomless gulfs! In all of
us, children of dust, sons of time, eternity inspires an involuntary
anguish, and the infinite, a mysterious terror. We seem to be entering a
kingdom of the dead. Poor heart, thy craving is for life, for love, for
illusions! And thou art right after all, for life is sacred.

In these moments of _tête-à-tête_ with the infinite, how different life
looks! How all that usually occupies and excites us becomes suddenly
puerile, frivolous and vain. We seem to ourselves mere puppets,
marionettes, strutting seriously through a fantastic show, and mistaking
gewgaws for things of great price. At such moments, how everything
becomes transformed, how everything changes! Berkeley and Fichte seem
right, Emerson too; the world is but an allegory; the idea is more real
than the fact; fairy tales, legends, are as true as natural history, and
even more true, for they are emblems of greater transparency. The only
substance properly so called is the soul. What is all the rest? Mere
shadow, pretext, figure, symbol, or dream. Consciousness alone is
immortal, positive, perfectly real. The world is but a firework,
a sublime phantasmagoria, destined to cheer and form the soul.
Consciousness is a universe, and its sun is love....

Already I am falling back into the objective life of thought. It
delivers me from--shall I say? no, it deprives me of the intimate life
of feeling. Reflection solves reverie and burns her delicate wings. This
is why science does not make men, but merely entities and abstractions.
Ah, let us feel and live and beware of too much analysis! Let us put
spontaneity, _naïveté_, before reflection, experience before study; let
us make life itself our study. Shall I then never have the heart of a
woman to rest upon? a son in whom to live again, a little world where I
may see flowering and blooming all that is stifled in me? I shrink and
draw back, for fear of breaking my dream. I have staked so much on this
card that I dare not play it. Let me dream again....

Do no violence to yourself, respect in yourself the oscillations of
feeling. They are your life and your nature; One wiser than you ordained
them. Do not abandon yourself altogether either to instinct or to
will. Instinct is a siren, will a despot. Be neither the slave of your
impulses and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract and general
plan; be open to what life brings from within and without, and welcome
the unforeseen; but give to your life unity, and bring the unforeseen
within the lines of your plan. Let what is natural in you raise itself
to the level of the spiritual, and let the spiritual become once more
natural. Thus will your development be harmonious, and the peace of
heaven will shine upon your brow; always on condition that your peace is
made, and that you have climbed your Calvary.

_Afternoon_--Shall I ever enjoy again those marvelous reveries of past
days, as, for instance, once, when I was still quite a youth, in the
early dawn, sitting among the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; another
time in the mountains above Lavey, under the midday sun, lying under a
tree and visited by three butterflies; and again another night on the
sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched full length upon the beach, my
eyes wandering over the Milky Way? Will they ever return to me, those
grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to carry
the world in one’s breast, to touch the stars, to possess the infinite?
Divine moments, hours of ecstasy, when thought flies from world to
world, penetrates the great enigma, breathes with a respiration large,
tranquil, and profound, like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and
boundless like the blue heaven! Visits from the muse, Urania, who traces
around the foreheads of those she loves the phosphorescent nimbus
of contemplative power, and who pours into their hearts the tranquil
intoxication, if not the authority of genius, moments of irresistible
intuition in which a man feels himself great like the universe and calm
like a god! From the celestial spheres down to the shell or the moss,
the whole of creation is then submitted to our gaze, lives in our
breast, and accomplishes in us its eternal work with the regularity of
destiny and the passionate ardor of love. What hours, what memories! The
traces which remain to us of them are enough to fill us with respect and
enthusiasm, as though they had been visits of the Holy Spirit. And then,
to fall back again from these heights with their boundless horizons into
the muddy ruts of triviality! what a fall! Poor Moses! Thou too sawest
undulating in the distance the ravishing hills of the promised land, and
it was thy fate nevertheless to lay thy weary bones in a grave dug in
the desert! Which of us has not his promised land, his day of ecstasy
and his death in exile? What a pale counterfeit is real life of the life
we see in glimpses, and how these flaming lightnings of our prophetic
youth make the twilight of our dull monotonous manhood more dark and
dreary!

April 29 (Lancy).--This morning the air was calm, the sky slightly
veiled. I went out into the garden to see what progress the spring was
making. I strolled from the irises to the lilacs, round the flower-beds,
and in the shrubberies. Delightful surprise! at the corner of the walk,
half hidden under a thick clump of shrubs, a small leaved _chorchorus_
had flowered during the night. Gay and fresh as a bunch of bridal
flowers, the little shrub glittered before me in all the attraction
of its opening beauty. What springlike innocence, what soft and modest
loveliness, there was in these white corollas, opening gently to the
sun, like thoughts which smile upon us at waking, and perched upon
their young leaves of virginal green like bees upon the wing! Mother of
marvels, mysterious and tender nature, why do we not live more in thee?
The poetical _flâneurs_ of Töpffer, his Charles and Jules, the friends
and passionate lovers of thy secret graces, the dazzled and ravished
beholders of thy beauties, rose up in my memory, at once a reproach and
a lesson. A modest garden and a country rectory, the narrow horizon of
a garret, contain for those who know how to look and to wait more
instruction than a library, even than that of _Mon oncle_. [Footnote:
The allusions in this passage are to Töpffer’s best known books--“La
Presbytère” and “La Bibliothèque de mon Oncle,” that airy chronicle of a
hundred romantic or vivacious nothings which has the young student
Jules for its center.] Yes, we are too busy, too encumbered, too much
occupied, too active! We read too much! The one thing needful is to
throw off all one’s load of cares, of preoccupations, of pedantry, and
to become again young, simple, child-like, living happily and gratefully
in the present hour. We must know how to put occupation aside, which
does not mean that we must be idle. In an inaction which is meditative
and attentive the wrinkles of the soul are smoothed away, and the soul
itself spreads, unfolds, and springs afresh, and, like the trodden grass
of the roadside or the bruised leaf of a plant, repairs its injuries,
becomes new, spontaneous, true, and original. Reverie, like the rain of
night, restores color and force to thoughts which have been blanched and
wearied by the heat of the day. With gentle fertilizing power it awakens
within us a thousand sleeping germs, and as though in play, gathers
round us materials for the future, and images for the use of talent.
_Reverie is the Sunday of thought_; and who knows which is the more
important and fruitful for man, the laborious tension of the week, or
the life-giving repose of the Sabbath? The _flânerie_ so exquisitely
glorified and sung by Töpffer is not only delicious, but useful. It is
like a bath which gives vigor and suppleness to the whole being, to the
mind as to the body; it is the sign and festival of liberty, a joyous
and wholesome banquet, the banquet of the butterfly wandering from
flower to flower over the hills and in the fields. And remember, the
soul too is a butterfly.

May 2, 1852. (Sunday) Lancy.--This morning read the epistle of St.
James, the exegetical volume of Cellérier [Footnote: Jacob-Élysée
Cellérier, professor of theology at the Academy of Geneva, and son of
the pastor of Satigny mentioned in Madame de Staël’s “L’Allemagne.”]
on this epistle, and a great deal of Pascal, after having first of all
passed more than an hour in the garden with the children. I made them
closely examine the flowers, the shrubs, the grasshoppers, the snails,
in order to practice them in observation, in wonder, in kindness.

How enormously important are these first conversations of childhood!
I felt it this morning with a sort of religious terror. Innocence and
childhood are sacred. The sower who casts in the seed, the father or
mother casting in the fruitful word are accomplishing a pontifical act
and ought to perform it with religious awe, with prayer and gravity, for
they are laboring at the kingdom of God. All seed-sowing is a mysterious
thing, whether the seed fall into the earth or into souls. Man is a
husbandman; his whole work rightly understood is to develop life, to
sow it everywhere. Such is the mission of humanity, and of this divine
mission the great instrument is speech. We forget too often that
language is both a seed-sowing and a revelation. The influence of a word
in season, is it not incalculable? What a mystery is speech! But we are
blind to it, because we are carnal and earthy. We see the stones and the
trees by the road, the furniture of our houses, all that is palpable
and material. We have no eyes for the invisible phalanxes of ideas which
people the air and hover incessantly around each one of us.

Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inevitable and
silent propaganda. As far as lies in its power, it tends to transform
the universe and humanity into its own image. Thus we have all a cure
of souls. Every man is the center of perpetual radiation like a luminous
body; he is, as it were, a beacon which entices a ship upon the rocks
if it does not guide it into port. Every man is a priest, even
involuntarily; his conduct is an unspoken sermon, which is forever
preaching to others; but there are priests of Baal, of Moloch, and of
all the false gods. Such is the high importance of example. Thence comes
the terrible responsibility which weighs upon us all. An evil example is
a spiritual poison: it is the proclamation of a sacrilegious faith, of
an impure God. Sin would be only an evil for him who commits it, were
it not a crime toward the weak brethren, whom it corrupts. Therefore, it
has been said: “It were better for a man not to have been born than to
offend one of these little ones.”

May 6, 1852.--It is women who, like mountain flowers, mark with most
characteristic precision the gradation of social zones. The hierarchy of
classes is plainly visible among them; it is blurred in the other sex.
With women this hierarchy has the average regularity of nature; among
men we see it broken by the incalculable varieties of human freedom. The
reason is that the man on the whole, makes himself by his own activity,
and that the woman, is, on the whole, made by her situation; that
the one modifies and shapes circumstance by his own energy, while the
gentleness of the other is dominated by and reflects circumstance;
so that woman, so to speak, inclines to be species, and man to be
individual.

Thus, which is curious, women are at once the sex which is most constant
and most variable. Most constant from the moral point of view, most
variable from the social. A confraternity in the first case, a hierarchy
in the second. All degrees of culture and all conditions of society
are clearly marked in their outward appearance, their manners and their
tastes; but the inward fraternity is traceable in their feelings, their
instincts, and their desires. The feminine sex represents at the same
time natural and historical inequality; it maintains the unity of the
species and marks off the categories of society, it brings together and
divides, it gathers and separates, it makes castes and breaks through
them, according as it interprets its twofold _rôle_ in the one sense or
the other. At bottom, woman’s mission is essentially conservative,
but she is a conservative without discrimination. On the one side,
she maintains God’s work in man, all that is lasting, noble, and truly
human, in the race, poetry, religion, virtue, tenderness. On the other,
she maintains the results of circumstance, all that is passing, local,
and artificial in society; that is to say, customs, absurdities,
prejudices, littlenesses. She surrounds with the same respectful and
tenacious faith the serious and the frivolous, the good and the bad.
Well, what then? Isolate if you can, the fire from its smoke. It is
a divine law that you are tracing, and therefore good. The woman
preserves; she is tradition as the man is progress. And if there is no
family and no humanity without the two sexes, without these two forces
there is no history.

May 14, 1852. (Lancy.)--Yesterday I was full of the philosophy of joy,
of youth, of the spring, which smiles and the roses which intoxicate;
I preached the doctrine of strength, and I forgot that, tried and
afflicted like the two friends with whom I was walking, I should
probably have reasoned and felt as they did.

Our systems, it has been said, are the expression of our character, or
the theory of our situation, that is to say, we like to think of what
has been given as having been acquired, we take our nature for our own
work, and our lot in life for our own conquest, an illusion born of
vanity and also of the craving for liberty. We are unwilling to be the
product of circumstances, or the mere expansion of an inner germ. And
yet we have received everything, and the part which is really ours, is
small indeed, for it is mostly made up of negation, resistance, faults.
We receive everything, both life and happiness; but the _manner_ in
which we receive, this is what is still ours. Let us then, receive
trustfully without shame or anxiety. Let us humbly accept from God even
our own nature, and treat it charitably, firmly, intelligently. Not that
we are called upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let
us accept _ourselves_ in spite of the evil and the disease. And let us
never be afraid of innocent joy; God is good, and what He does is well
done; resign yourself to everything, even to happiness; ask for the
spirit of sacrifice, of detachment, of renunciation, and above all, for
the spirit of joy and gratitude, that genuine and religious optimism
which sees in God a father, and asks no pardon for His benefits. We must
dare to be happy, and dare to confess it, regarding ourselves always as
the depositaries, not as the authors of our own joy.

       *       *       *       *       *

... This evening I saw the first glow-worm of the season in the turf
beside the little winding road which descends from Lancy toward the
town. It was crawling furtively under the grass, like a timid thought or
a dawning talent.

June 17, 1852.--Every despotism has a specially keen and hostile
instinct for whatever keeps up human dignity, and independence. And it
is curious to see scientific and realist teaching used everywhere as
a means of stifling all freedom of investigation as addressed to moral
questions under a dead weight of facts. Materialism is the auxiliary
doctrine of every tyranny, whether of the one or of the masses. To crush
what is spiritual, moral, human so to speak, in man, by specializing
him; to form mere wheels of the great social machine, instead of perfect
individuals; to make society and not conscience the center of life, to
enslave the soul to things, to de-personalize man, this is the dominant
drift of our epoch. Everywhere you may see a tendency to substitute
the laws of dead matter (number, mass) for the laws of the moral nature
(persuasion, adhesion, faith) equality, the principle of mediocrity,
becoming a dogma; unity aimed at through uniformity; numbers doing
duty for argument; negative liberty, which has no law _in itself_, and
recognizes no limit except in force, everywhere taking the place of
positive liberty, which means action guided by an inner law and curbed
by a moral authority. Socialism _versus_ individualism: this is how
Vinet put the dilemma. I should say rather that it is only the eternal
antagonism between letter and spirit, between form and matter, between
the outward and the inward, appearance and reality, which is always
present in every conception and in all ideas.

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything; makes everything
vulgar and every truth false. And there is a religious and political
materialism which spoils all that it touches, liberty, equality,
individuality. So that there are two ways of understanding democracy....

What is threatened to-day is moral liberty, conscience, respect for the
soul, the very nobility of man. To defend the soul, its interests, its
rights, its dignity, is the most pressing duty for whoever sees the
danger. What the writer, the teacher, the pastor, the philosopher, has
to do, is to defend humanity in man. Man! the true man, the ideal man!
Such should be their motto, their rallying cry. War to all that
debases, diminishes, hinders, and degrades him; protection for all
that fortifies, ennobles, and raises him. The test of every religious,
political, or educational system, is the man which it forms. If a system
injures the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is
vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal.

August 12, 1852. (Lancy.)--Each sphere of being tends toward a higher
sphere, and has already revelations and presentiments of it. The ideal
under all its forms is the anticipation and the prophetic vision of that
existence, higher than his own, toward which every being perpetually
aspires. And this higher and more dignified existence is more inward in
character, that is to say, more spiritual. Just as volcanoes reveal to
us the secrets of the interior of the globe, so enthusiasm and ecstasy
are the passing explosions of this inner world of the soul; and human
life is but the preparation and the means of approach to this spiritual
life. The degrees of initiation are innumerable. Watch, then, disciple
of life, watch and labor toward the development of the angel within
thee! For the divine Odyssey is but a series of more and more ethereal
metamorphoses, in which each form, the result of what goes before, is
the condition of those which follow. The divine life is a series of
successive deaths, in which the mind throws off its imperfections and
its symbols, and yields to the growing attraction of the ineffable
center of gravitation, the sun of intelligence and love. Created spirits
in the accomplishment of their destinies tend, so to speak, to form
constellations and milky ways within the empyrean of the divinity;
in becoming gods, they surround the throne of the sovereign with a
sparkling court. In their greatness lies their homage. The divinity with
which they are invested is the noblest glory of God. God is the father
of spirits, and the constitution of the eternal kingdom rests on the
vassalship of love.

September 27, 1852. (Lancy.)--To-day I complete my thirty-first year....

The most beautiful poem there is, is life--life which discerns its own
story in the making, in which inspiration and self-consciousness go
together and help each other, life which knows itself to be the world in
little, a repetition in miniature of the divine universal poem. Yes, be
man; that is to say, be nature, be spirit, be the image of God, be what
is greatest, most beautiful, most lofty in all the spheres of being,
be infinite will and idea, a reproduction of the great whole. And be
everything while being nothing, effacing thyself, letting God enter into
thee as the air enters an empty space, reducing the _ego_ to the mere
vessel which contains the divine essence. Be humble, devout, silent,
that so thou mayest hear within the depths of thyself the subtle
and profound voice; be spiritual and pure, that so thou mayest have
communion with the pure spirit. Withdraw thyself often into the
sanctuary of thy inmost consciousness; become once more point and atom,
that so thou mayest free thyself from space, time, matter, temptation,
dispersion, that thou mayest escape thy very organs themselves and thine
own life. That is to say, die often, and examine thyself in the presence
of this death, as a preparation for the last death. He who can without
shuddering confront blindness, deafness, paralysis, disease, betrayal,
poverty; he who can without terror appear before the sovereign justice,
he alone can call himself prepared for partial or total death. How
far am I from anything of the sort, how far is my heart from any such
stoicism! But at least we can try to detach ourselves from all that can
be taken away from us, to accept everything as a loan and a gift, and
to cling only to the imperishable--this at any rate we can attempt. To
believe in a good and fatherly God, who educates us, who tempers the
wind to the shorn lamb, who punishes only when he must, and takes away
only with regret; this thought, or rather this conviction, gives
courage and security. Oh, what need we have of love, of tenderness, of
affection, of kindness, and how vulnerable we are, we the sons of God,
we, immortal and sovereign beings! Strong as the universe or feeble as
the worm, according as we represent God or only ourselves, as we lean
upon infinite being, or as we stand alone.

The point of view of religion, of a religion at once active and moral,
spiritual and profound, alone gives to life all the dignity and all
the energy of which it is capable. Religion makes invulnerable and
invincible. Earth can only be conquered in the name of heaven. All good
things are given over and above to him who desires but righteousness.
To be disinterested is to be strong, and the world is at the feet of
him whom it cannot tempt. Why? Because spirit is lord of matter, and
the world belongs to God. “Be of good cheer,” saith a heavenly voice, “I
have overcome the world.”

Lord, lend thy strength to those who are weak in the flesh, but willing
in the spirit!

October 31, 1852. (Lancy.)--Walked for half an hour in the garden. A
fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was
hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant
mountains, a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides
like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable
grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the
Shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding
schoolboys. The ground strewn with leaves, brown, yellow, and reddish;
the trees half-stripped, some more, some less, and decked in ragged
splendors of dark-red, scarlet, and yellow; the reddening shrubs and
plantations; a few flowers still lingering behind, roses, nasturtiums,
dahlias, shedding their petals round them; the bare fields, the thinned
hedges; and the fir, the only green thing left, vigorous and stoical,
like eternal youth braving decay; all these innumerable and marvelous
symbols which forms colors, plants, and living beings, the earth and the
sky, yield at all times to the eye which has learned to look for them,
charmed and enthralled me. I wielded a poetic wand, and had but to touch
a phenomenon to make it render up to me its moral significance. Every
landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates
into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each
detail. True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and
seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able at most
to attain as a final result. The soul of nature is divined by the
poet; the man of science, only serves to accumulate materials for its
demonstration.

November 6, 1852.--I am capable of all the passions, for I bear them all
within me. Like a tamer of wild beasts, I keep them caged and lassoed,
but I sometimes hear them growling. I have stifled more than one nascent
love. Why? Because with that prophetic certainty which belongs to moral
intuition, I felt it lacking in true life, and less durable than myself.
I choked it down in the name of the supreme affection to come. The loves
of sense, of imagination, of sentiment, I have seen through and rejected
them all; I sought the love which springs from the central profundities
of being. And I still believe in it. I will have none of those passions
of straw which dazzle, burn up, and wither; I invoke, I await, and I
hope for the love which is great, pure and earnest, which lives and
works in all the fibres and through all the powers of the soul. And even
if I go lonely to the end, I would rather my hope and my dream died with
me, than that my soul should content itself with any meaner union.

November 8, 1852.--Responsibility is my invisible nightmare. To suffer
through one’s own fault is a torment worthy of the lost, for so grief is
envenomed by ridicule, and the worst ridicule of all, that which springs
from shame of one’s self. I have only force and energy wherewith to
meet evils coming from outside; but an irreparable evil brought about
by myself, a renunciation for life of my liberty, my peace of mind,
the very thought of it is maddening--I expiate my privilege indeed. My
privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully conscious of
the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more than that, to be in the
secret of the tragi-comic itself, that is to say, to be unable to take
my illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, from the theater
on the stage, or to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into
existence. I feel myself forced to feign a particular interest in my
individual part, while all the time I am living in the confidence of the
poet who is playing with all these agents which seem so important, and
knows all that they are ignorant of. It is a strange position, and one
which becomes painful as soon as grief obliges me to betake myself once
more to my own little _rôle_, binding me closely to it, and warning me
that I am going too far in imagining myself, because of my conversations
with the poet, dispensed from taking up again my modest part of valet
in the piece. Shakespeare must have experienced this feeling often, and
Hamlet, I think, must express it somewhere. It is a _Doppelgängerei_,
quite German in character, and which explains the disgust with reality
and the repugnance to public life, so common among the thinkers of
Germany. There is, as it were, a degradation a gnostic fall, in thus
folding one’s wings and going back again into the vulgar shell of
one’s own individuality. Without grief, which is the string of this
venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, and the
chosen souls would be lost for the race, like balloons which, save for
gravitation, would never return from the empyrean.

How, then, is one to recover courage enough for action? By striving to
restore in one’s self something of that unconsciousness, spontaneity,
instinct, which reconciles us to earth and makes man useful and
relatively happy.

By believing more practically in the providence which pardons and allows
of reparation.

By accepting our human condition in a more simple and childlike spirit,
fearing trouble less, calculating less, hoping more. For we decrease our
responsibility, if we decrease our clearness of vision, and fear lessens
with the lessening of responsibility.

By extracting a richer experience out of our losses and lessons.

November 9, 1852.--A few pages of the _Chrestomathie Française_ and
Vinet’s remarkable letter at the head of the volume, have given me one
or two delightful hours. As a thinker, as a Christian, and as a man,
Vinet occupies a typical place. His philosophy, his theology, his
esthetics, in short, his work, will be, or has been already surpassed
at all points. His was a great soul and a fine talent. But neither were
well enough served by circumstances. We see in him a personality
worthy of all veneration, a man of singular goodness and a writer
of distinction, but not quite a great man, nor yet a great writer.
Profundity and purity, these are what he possesses in a high degree, but
not greatness, properly speaking. For that, he is a little too subtle
and analytical, too ingenious and fine-spun; his thought is overladen
with detail, and has not enough flow, eloquence, imagination, warmth,
and largeness. Essentially and constantly meditative, he has not
strength enough left to deal with what is outside him. The
casuistries of conscience and of language, eternal self-suspicion, and
self-examination, his talent lies in these things, and is limited by
them. Vinet wants passion, abundance, _entraînement_, and therefore
popularity. The individualism which is his title to glory is also the
cause of his weakness.

We find in him always the solitary and the ascetic. His thought is, as
it were, perpetually at church; it is perpetually devising trials
and penances for itself. Hence the air of scruple and anxiety which
characterizes it even in its bolder flights. Moral energy, balanced by a
disquieting delicacy of fibre; a fine organization marred, so to speak,
by low health, such is the impression it makes upon us. Is it
reproach or praise to say of Vinet’s mind that it seems to one a force
perpetually reacting upon itself? A warmer and more self-forgetful
manner; more muscles, as it were, around the nerves, more circles of
intellectual and historical life around the individual circle, these are
what Vinet, of all writers perhaps the one who makes us _think_ most, is
still lacking in. Less _reflexivity_ and more plasticity, the eye more
on the object, would raise the style of Vinet, so rich in substance, so
nervous, so full of ideas, and variety, into a grand style. Vinet,
to sum up, is conscience personified, as man and as writer. Happy the
literature and the society which is able to count at one time two or
three like him, if not equal to him!

November 10, 1852.--How much have we not to learn from the Greeks,
those immortal ancestors of ours! And how much better they solved their
problem than we have solved ours. Their ideal man is not ours, but they
understood infinitely better than we how to reverence, cultivate and
ennoble the man whom they knew. In a thousand respects we are still
barbarians beside them, as Béranger said to me with a sigh in 1843:
barbarians in education, in eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in
matters of art, etc. We must have millions of men in order to produce a
few elect spirits: a thousand was enough in Greece. If the measure of a
civilization is to be the number of perfected men that it produces, we
are still far from this model people. The slaves are no longer below us,
but they are among us. Barbarism is no longer at our frontiers; it lives
side by side with us. We carry within us much greater things than
they, but we ourselves are smaller. It is a strange result. Objective
civilization produced great men while making no conscious effort
toward such a result; subjective civilization produces a miserable and
imperfect race, contrary to its mission and its earnest desire. The
world grows more majestic but man diminishes. Why is this?

We have too much barbarian blood in our veins, and we lack measure,
harmony and grace. Christianity, in breaking man up into outer
and inner, the world into earth and heaven, hell and paradise, has
decomposed the human unity, in order, it is true, to reconstruct it more
profoundly and more truly. But Christianity has not yet digested this
powerful leaven. She has not yet conquered the true humanity; she is
still living under the antimony of sin and grace, of here below and
there above. She has not penetrated into the whole heart of Jesus. She
is still in the _narthex_ of penitence; she is not reconciled, and even
the churches still wear the livery of service, and have none of the joy
of the daughters of God, baptized of the Holy Spirit.

Then, again, there is our excessive division of labor; our bad and
foolish education which does not develop the whole man; and the problem
of poverty. We have abolished slavery, but without having solved the
question of labor. In law there are no more slaves, in fact, there are
many. And while the majority of men are not free, the free man, in the
true sense of the term can neither be conceived nor realized. Here are
enough causes for our inferiority.

November 12, 1852.--St. Martin’s summer is still lingering, and the days
all begin in mist. I ran for a quarter of an hour round the garden to
get some warmth and suppleness. Nothing could be lovelier than the last
rosebuds, or than the delicate gaufred edges of the strawberry leaves
embroidered with hoar-frost, while above them Arachne’s delicate webs
hung swaying in the green branches of the pines, little ball-rooms
for the fairies carpeted with powdered pearls and kept in place by a
thousand dewy strands hanging from above like the chains of a lamp and
supporting them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These little
airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world and all
the vaporous freshness of dawn. They recalled to me the poetry of the
north, wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or Iceland or Sweden,
Frithiof and the Edda, Ossian and the Hebrides. All that world of cold
and mist, of genius and of reverie, where warmth comes not from the sun
but from the heart where man is more noticeable than nature--that chaste
and vigorous world in which will plays a greater part than sensation and
thought has more power than instinct--in short the whole romantic cycle
of German and northern poetry, awoke little by little in my memory and
laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a poetry of bracing quality, and acts
upon one like a moral tonic. Strange charm of imagination! A twig of
pine wood and a few spider-webs are enough to make countries, epochs,
and nations live again before her.

December 26, 1852. (Sunday.)--If I reject many portions of our theology
and of our church system, it is that I may the better reach the Christ
himself. My philosophy allows me this. It does not state the dilemma
as one of religion or philosophy, but as one of religion accepted or
experienced, understood or not understood. For me philosophy is a manner
of apprehending things, a mode of perception of reality. It does not
create nature, man or God, but it finds them and seeks to understand
them. Philosophy is consciousness taking account of itself with all
that it contains. Now consciousness may contain a new life--the facts of
regeneration and of salvation, that is to say, Christian experience.
The understanding of the Christian consciousness is an integral part
of philosophy, as the Christian consciousness is a leading form of
religious consciousness, and religious consciousness an essential form
of consciousness.

       *       *       *       *       *

An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the degree of truth
which it contains.

Look twice, if what you want is a just conception; look once, if what
you want is a sense of beauty.

       *       *       *       *       *

A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in
himself.

       *       *       *       *       *

Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is composed of
experience and prevision; it is calculation applied to life.

       *       *       *       *       *

The wealth of each mind is proportioned to the number and to the
precision of its categories and its points of view.

       *       *       *       *       *

To feel himself freer than his neighbor is the reward of the critic.

Modesty (_pudeur_) is always the sign and safeguard of a mystery. It is
explained by its contrary--profanation. Shyness or modesty is, in
truth, the half-conscious sense of a secret of nature or of the soul too
intimately individual to be given or surrendered. It is _exchanged_.
To surrender what is most profound and mysterious in one’s being and
personality at any price less than that of absolute reciprocity is
profanation.

January 6, 1853.--Self-government with tenderness--here you have the
condition of all authority over children. The child must discover in us
no passion, no weakness of which he can make use; he must feel himself
powerless to deceive or to trouble us; then he will recognize in us his
natural superiors, and he will attach a special value to our kindness,
because he will respect it. The child who can rouse in us anger, or
impatience, or excitement, feels himself stronger than we, and a child
only respects strength. The mother should consider herself as her
child’s sun, a changeless and ever radiant world, whither the small
restless creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle,
passionate, full of storms, may come for fresh stores of light, warmth,
and electricity, of calm and of courage. The mother represents goodness,
providence, law; that is to say, the divinity, under that form of it
which is accessible to childhood. If she is herself passionate, she will
inculcate on her child a capricious and despotic God, or even several
discordant gods. The religion of a child depends on what its mother
and its father are, and not on what they say. The inner and unconscious
ideal which guides their life is precisely what touches the child; their
words, their remonstrances, their punishments, their bursts of feeling
even, are for him merely thunder and comedy; what they worship, this it
is which his instinct divines and reflects.

The child sees what we are, behind what we wish to be. Hence his
reputation as a physiognomist. He extends his power as far as he can
with each of us; he is the most subtle of diplomatists. Unconsciously
he passes under the influence of each person about him, and reflects it
while transforming it after his own nature. He is a magnifying mirror.
This is why the first principle of education is: train yourself; and the
first rule to follow if you wish to possess yourself of a child’s will
is: master your own.

February 5, 1853 (seven o’clock in the morning).--I am always astonished
at the difference between one’s inward mood of the evening and that
of the morning. The passions which are dominant in the evening, in the
morning leave the field free for the contemplative part of the soul. Our
whole being, irritated and overstrung by the nervous excitement of
the day, arrives in the evening at the culminating point of its human
vitality; the same being, tranquilized by the calm of sleep, is in the
morning nearer heaven. We should 

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