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.”