A pure and life-giving freshness of thought and of the spiritual life

seemed to play about me, borne on the breeze descending from the Alps.

I breathed an atmosphere of spiritual freedom, and I hailed with emotion

and rapture the mountains whence was wafted to me this feeling of

strength and purity. A thousand sensations, thoughts, and analogies

crowded upon me. History, too, the history of the sub-Alpine countries,

from the Ligurians to Hannibal, from Hannibal to Charlemagne, from

Charlemagne to Napoleon, passed through my mind. All the possible

points of view, were, so to speak, piled upon each other, and one caught

glimpses of some eccentrically across others. I was enjoying and I was

learning. Sight passed into vision without a trace of hallucination, and

the landscape was my guide, my Virgil.

All this made me very sensible of the difference between me and the

majority of travelers, all of whom have a special object, and content

themselves with one thing or with several, while I desire all or

nothing, and am forever straining toward the total, whether of all

possible objects, or of all the elements present in the reality. In

other words, 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_, sphericity,

non-resignation.

October 27, 1853.--I thank Thee, my God, for the hour that I have just

passed in Thy presence. Thy will was clear to me; I measured my faults,

counted my griefs, and felt Thy goodness toward me. I realized my own

nothingness, Thou gavest me Thy peace. In bitterness there is sweetness;

in affliction, joy; in submission, strength; in the God who punishes,

the God who loves. To lose one’s life that one may gain it, to offer it

that one may receive it, to possess nothing that one may conquer all, to

renounce self that God may give Himself to us, how impossible a problem,

and how sublime a reality! No one truly knows happiness who has not

suffered, and the redeemed are happier than the elect.

(Same day.)--The divine miracle _par excellence_ consists surely in the

apotheosis of grief, the transfiguration of evil by good. The work of

creation finds its consummation, and the eternal will of the infinite

mercy finds its fulfillment only in the restoration of the free creature

to God and of an evil world to goodness, through love. Every soul in

which conversion has taken place is a symbol of the history of the

world. To be happy, to possess eternal life, to be in God, to be saved,

all these are the same. All alike mean the solution of the problem,

the aim of existence. And happiness is cumulative, as misery may be.

An eternal growth is an unchangeable peace, an ever profounder depth of

apprehension, a possession constantly more intense and more spiritual of

the joy of heaven--this is happiness. Happiness has no limits, because

God has neither bottom nor bounds, and because happiness is nothing but

the conquest of God through love.

The center of life is neither in thought nor in feeling, nor in will,

nor even in consciousness, so far as it thinks, feels, or wishes. For

moral truth may have been penetrated and possessed in all these ways,

and escape us still. Deeper even than consciousness there is our being

itself, our very substance, our nature. Only those truths which have

entered into this last region, which have become ourselves, become

spontaneous and involuntary, instinctive and unconscious, are really our

life--that is to say something more than our property. So long as we

are able to distinguish any space whatever between the truth and us

we remain outside it. The thought, the feeling, the desire, the

consciousness of life, are not yet quite life. But peace and repose can

nowhere be found except in life, and in eternal life and the eternal

life is the divine life, is God. To become divine is then the aim of

life: then only can truth be said to be ours beyond the possibility of

loss, because it is no longer outside us, nor even in us, but we are it,

and it is we; we ourselves are a truth, a will, a work of God. Liberty

has become nature; the creature is one with its creator--one through

love. It is what it ought to be; its education is finished, and its

final happiness begins. The sun of time declines and the light of

eternal blessedness arises.

Our fleshly hearts may call this mysticism. It is the mysticism of

Jesus: “I am one with my Father; ye shall be one with me. We will be one

with you.”

Do not despise your situation; in it you must act, suffer, and conquer.

From every point on earth we are equally near to heaven and to the

infinite.

There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is one of

self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. Pride is seen probably

at its purest in the last.

* * * * *

It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating that we observe,

by affirming that we examine, by showing that we look, by writing that

we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.

* * * * *

February 1, 1854.--A walk. The atmosphere incredibly pure, a warm

caressing gentleness in the sunshine--joy in one’s whole being. Seated

motionless upon a bench on the Tranchées, beside the slopes clothed with

moss and tapestried with green, I passed some intense delicious moments,

allowing great elastic waves of music, wafted to me from a military band

on the terrace of St. Antoine, to surge and bound through me. Every way

I was happy, as idler, as painter, as poet. Forgotten impressions of

childhood and youth came back to me--all those indescribable effects

wrought by color, shadow, sunlight, green hedges, and songs of birds,

upon the soul just opening to poetry. I became again young, wondering,

and simple, as candor and ignorance are simple. I abandoned myself to

life and to nature, and they cradled me with an infinite gentleness.

To open one’s heart in purity to this ever pure nature, to allow this

immortal life of things to penetrate into one’s soul, is at the same

time to listen to the voice of God. Sensation may be a prayer, and

self-abandonment an act of devotion.

February 18, 1854.--Everything tends to become fixed, solidified, and

crystallized in this French tongue of ours, which seeks form and not

substance, the result and not its formation, what is seen rather than

what is thought, the outside rather than the inside.

We like the accomplished end and not the pursuit of the end, the goal

and not the road, in short, ideas ready-made and bread ready-baked,

the reverse of Lessing’s principle. What we look for above all are

conclusions. This clearness of the “ready-made” is a superficial

clearness--physical, outward, solar clearness, so to speak, but in the

absence of a sense for origin and genesis it is the clearness of

the incomprehensible, the clearness of opacity, the clearness of

the obscure. We are always trifling on the surface. Our temper is

formal--that is to say, frivolous and material, or rather artistic and

not philosophical. For what it seeks is the figure, the fashion and

manner of things, not their deepest life, their soul, their secret.

March 16, 1854. (From Veevay to Geneva.)--What message had this lake for

me, with its sad serenity, its soft and even tranquility, in which

was mirrored the cold monotonous pallor of mountains and clouds? That

disenchanted disillusioned life may still be traversed by duty, lit by a

memory of heaven. I was visited by a clear and profound intuition of the

flight of things, of the fatality of all life, of the melancholy which

is below the surface of all existence, but also of that deepest depth

which subsists forever beneath the fleeting wave.

December 17, 1854.--When we are doing nothing in particular, it is then

that we are living through all our being; and when we cease to add to

our growth it is only that we may ripen and possess ourselves. Will is

suspended, but nature and time are always active and if our life is no

longer our work, the work goes on none the less. With us, without us, or

in spite of us, our existence travels through its appointed phases, our

invisible Psyche weaves the silk of its chrysalis, our destiny fulfills

itself, and all the hours of life work together toward that flowering

time which we call death. This activity, then, is inevitable and fatal;

sleep and idleness do not interrupt it, but it may become free and

moral, a joy instead of a terror.

Nothing is more characteristic of a man than the manner in which he

behaves toward fools.

It costs us a great deal of trouble not to be of the same opinion as our

self-love, and not to be ready to believe in the good taste of those who

believe in our merits.

Does not true humility consist in accepting one’s infirmity as a

trial, and one’s evil disposition as a cross, in sacrificing all one’s

pretensions and ambitions, even those of conscience? True humility is

contentment.

* * * * *

A man only understands that of which he has already the beginnings in

himself.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret

of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

* * * * *

March 28, 1855.--Not a blade of grass but has a story to tell, not a

heart but has its romance, not a life which does not hide a secret

which is either its thorn or its spur. Everywhere grief, hope, comedy,

tragedy; even under the petrifaction of old age, as in the twisted forms

of fossils, we may discover the agitations and tortures of youth. This

thought is the magic wand of poets and of preachers: it strips the

scales from our fleshly eyes, and gives us a clear view into human life;

it opens to the ear a world of unknown melodies, and makes us understand

the thousand languages of nature. Thwarted love makes a man a polyglot,

and grief transforms him into a diviner and a sorcerer.

April 16, 1855.--I realized this morning the prodigious effect of

climate on one’s state of mind. I was Italian or Spanish. In this blue

and limpid air, and under this southern sun, the very walls smile at

you. All the chestnut trees were en fete; with their glistening buds

shining like little flames at the curved ends of the branches, they were

the candelabra of the spring decking the festival of eternal nature. How

young everything was, how kindly, how gracious! the moist freshness of

the grass, the transparent shadows in the courtyards, the strength of

the old cathedral towers, the white edges of the roads. I felt myself a

child; the sap of life mounted again into my veins as it does in plants.

How sweet a thing is a little simple enjoyment! And now, a brass

band which has stopped in the street makes my heart leap as it did at

eighteen. Thanks be to God; there have been so many weeks and months

when I thought myself an old man. Come poetry, nature, youth, and love,

knead my life again with your fairy hands; weave round me once more your

immortal spells; sing your siren melodies, make me drink of the cup

of immortality, lead me back to the Olympus of the soul. Or rather, no

paganism! God of joy and of grief, do with me what Thou wilt; grief is

good, and joy is good also. Thou art leading me now through joy. I take

it from Thy hands, and I give Thee thanks for it.

April 17, 1855.--The weather is still incredibly brilliant, warm, and

clear. The day is full of the singing of birds, the night is full of

stars, nature has become all kindness, and it is a kindness clothed upon

with splendor.

For nearly two hours have I been lost in the contemplation of this

magnificent spectacle. I felt myself in the temple of the infinite, in

the presence of the worlds, God’s guest in this vast nature. The stars

wandering in the pale ether drew me far away from earth. What peace

beyond the power of words, what dews of life eternal, they shed on the

adoring soul! I felt the earth floating like a boat in this blue ocean.

Such deep and tranquil delight nourishes the whole man, it purifies and

ennobles. I surrendered myself, I was all gratitude and docility.

April 21, 1855.--I have been reading a great deal: ethnography,

comparative anatomy, cosmical systems. I have traversed the universe

from the deepest depths of the empyrean to the peristaltic movements of

the atoms in the elementary cell. I have felt myself expanding in the

infinite, and enfranchised in spirit from the bounds of time and space,

able to trace back the whole boundless creation to a point without

dimensions, and seeing the vast multitude of suns, of milky ways, of

stars, and nebulae, all existent in the point.

And on all sides stretched mysteries, marvels and prodigies, without

limit, without number, and without end. I felt the unfathomable thought

of which the universe is the symbol live and burn within me; I touched,

proved, tasted, embraced my nothingness and my immensity; I kissed the

hem of the garments of God, and gave Him thanks for being Spirit and

for being life. Such moments are glimpses of the divine. They make one

conscious of one’s immortality; they bring home to one that an eternity

is not too much for the study of the thoughts and works of the eternal;

they awaken in us an adoring ecstasy and the ardent humility of love.

May 23, 1855.--Every hurtful passion draws us to it, as an abyss does,

by a kind of vertigo. Feebleness of will brings about weakness of head,

and the abyss in spite of its horror, comes to fascinate us, as though

it were a place of refuge. Terrible danger! For this abyss is within

us; this gulf, open like the vast jaws of an infernal serpent bent on

devouring us, is in the depth of our own being, and our liberty floats

over this void, which is always seeking to swallow it up. Our only

talisman lies in that concentration of moral force which we call

conscience, that small inextinguishable flame of which the light is duty

and the warmth love. This little flame should be the star of our life;

it alone can guide our trembling ark across the tumult of the great

waters; it alone can enable us to escape the temptations of the sea, the

storms and the monsters which are the offspring of night and the deluge.

Faith in God, in a holy, merciful, fatherly God, is the divine ray which

kindles this flame.

How deeply I feel the profound and terrible poetry of all these

primitive terrors from which have issued the various theogonies of the

world, and how it all grows clear to me, and becomes a symbol of the

one great unchanging thought, the thought of God about the universe! How

present and sensible to my inner sense is the unity of everything! It

seems to me that I am able to pierce to the sublime motive which, in all

the infinite spheres of existence, and through all the modes of space

and time, every created form reproduces and sings within the bond of an

eternal harmony. From the infernal shades I feel myself mounting toward

the regions of light; my flight across chaos finds its rest in paradise.

Heaven, hell, the world, are within us. Man is the great abyss.

July 27, 1855.--So life passes away, tossed like a boat by the waves

up and down, hither and thither, drenched by the spray, stained by the

foam, now thrown upon the bank, now drawn back again according to the

endless caprice of the water. Such, at least, is the life of the heart

and the passions, the life which Spinoza and the stoics reprove, and

which is the exact opposite of that serene and contemplative life,

always equable like the starlight, in which man lives at peace, and sees

everything tinder its eternal aspect; the opposite also of the life

of conscience, in which God alone speaks, and all self-will surrenders

itself to His will made manifest.

I pass from one to another of these three existences, which are equally

known to me; but this very mobility deprives me of the advantages of

each. For my heart is worn with scruples, the soul in me cannot crush

the needs of the heart, and the conscience is troubled and no longer

knows how to distinguish, in the chaos of contradictory inclinations,

the voice of duty or the will of God. The want of simple faith, the

indecision which springs from distrust of self, tend to make all my

personal life a matter of doubt and uncertainty. I am afraid of the

subjective life, and recoil from every enterprise, demand, or promise

which may oblige me to realize myself; I feel a terror of action, and

am only at ease in the impersonal, disinterested, and objective life of

thought. The reason seems to be timidity, and the timidity springs

from the excessive development of the reflective power which has almost

destroyed in me all spontaneity, impulse, and instinct, and therefore

all boldness and confidence. Whenever I am forced to act, I see cause

for error and repentance everywhere, everywhere hidden threats and

masked vexations. From a child I have been liable to the disease of

irony, and that it may not be altogether crushed by destiny, my nature

seems to have armed itself with a caution strong enough to prevail

against any of life’s blandishments. It is just this strength which is

my weakness. I have a horror of being duped, above all, duped by myself,

and I would rather cut myself off from all life’s joys than deceive or

be deceived. Humiliation, then, is the sorrow which I fear the most,

and therefore it would seem as if pride were the deepest rooted of my

faults.

This may be logical, but it is not the truth: it seems to me that it is

really distrust, incurable doubt of the future, a sense of the justice

but not of the goodness of God--in short, unbelief, which is my

misfortune and my sin. Every act is a hostage delivered over to avenging

destiny--there is the instinctive belief which chills and freezes; every

act is a pledge confided to a fatherly providence, there is the belief

which calms.

Pain seems to me a punishment and not a mercy: this is why I have a

secret horror of it. And as I feel myself vulnerable at all points, and

everywhere accessible to pain, I prefer to remain motionless, like a

timid child, who, left alone in his father’s laboratory, dares not touch

anything for fear of springs; explosions, and catastrophes, which may

burst from every corner at the least movement of his inexperienced

hands. I have trust in God directly and as revealed in nature, but I

have a deep distrust of all free and evil agents. I feel or foresee

evil, moral and physical, as the consequence of every error, fault, or

sin, and I am ashamed of pain.

At bottom, is it not a mere boundless self-love, the purism of

perfection, an incapacity to accept our human condition, a tacit protest

against the order of the world, which lies at the root of my inertia?

It means _all or nothing_, a vast ambition made inactive by disgust, a

yearning that cannot be uttered for the ideal, joined with an offended

dignity and a wounded pride which will have nothing to say to what they

consider beneath them. It springs from the ironical temper which

refuses to take either self or reality seriously, because it is forever

comparing both with the dimly-seen infinite of its dreams. It is a state

of mental reservation in which one lends one’s self to circumstances for

form’s sake, but refuses to recognize them in one’s heart because one

cannot see the necessity or the divine order in them. I am disinterested

because I am indifferent; I have nothing to say against what is, and yet

I am never satisfied. I am too weak to conquer, and yet I will not be

Conquered--it is the isolation of the disenchanted soul, which has put

even hope away from it.

But even this is a trial laid upon one. Its providential purpose is no

doubt to lead one to that true renunciation of which charity is the sign

and symbol. It is when one expects nothing more for one’s self that one

is able to love. To do good to men because we love them, to use every

talent we have so as to please the Father from whom we hold it for

His service, there is no other way of reaching and curing this

deep discontent with life which hides itself under an appearance of

indifference.

September 4, 1855.--In the government of the soul the parliamentary form

succeeds the monarchical. Good sense, conscience, desire, reason, the

present and the past, the old man and the new, prudence and generosity,

take up their parable in turn; the reign of argument begins; chaos

replaces order, and darkness light. Simple will represents the

autocratic _régime_, interminable discussion the deliberate regime of

the soul. The one is preferable from the theoretical point of view, the

other from the practical. Knowledge and action are their two respective

advantages.

But the best of all would be to be able to realize three powers in the

soul. Besides the man of counsel we want the man of action and the man

of judgment. In me, reflection comes to no useful end, because it is

forever returning upon itself, disputing and debating. I am wanting in

both the general who commands and the judge who decides.

Analysis is dangerous if it overrules the synthetic faculty; reflection

is to be feared if it destroys our power of intuition, and inquiry

is fatal if it supplants faith. Decomposition becomes deadly when it

surpasses in strength the combining and constructive energies of life,

and the _separate_ action of the powers of the soul tends to mere

disintegration and destruction as soon as it becomes impossible to bring

them to bear as _one_ undivided force. When the sovereign abdicates

anarchy begins.

It is just here that my danger lies. Unity of life, of force, of action,

of expression, is becoming impossible to me; I am legion, division,

analysis, and reflection; the passion for dialectic, for fine

distinctions, absorbs and weakens me. The point which 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. Unity and simplicity of being,

confidence, and spontaneity of life, are drifting out of my reach, and

this is why I can no longer act.

Give up, then, this trying to know all, to embrace all. Learn to

limit yourself, to content yourself with some definite thing, and some

definite work; dare to be what you are, and learn to resign with a good

grace all that you are not, and to believe in your own individuality.

Self-distrust is destroying you; trust, surrender, abandon yourself;

“believe and thou shalt be healed.” Unbelief is death, and depression

and self-satire are alike unbelief.

* * * * *

From the point of view of happiness, the problem of life is insoluble,

for it is our highest aspirations which prevent us from being happy.

From the point of view of duty, there is the same difficulty, for the

fulfillment of duty brings peace, not happiness. It is divine love, the

love of the holiest, the possession of God by faith, which solves the

difficulty; for if sacrifice has itself become a joy, a lasting, growing

and imperishable joy--the soul is then secure of an all-sufficient and

unfailing nourishment.

* * * * *

January 21, 1856.--Yesterday seems to me as far off as though it were

last year. My memory holds nothing more of the past than its general

plan, just as my eye perceives nothing more in the starry heaven. It

is no more possible for me to recover one of my days from the depths of

memory than if it were a glass of water poured into a lake; it is not

so much a lost thing as a thing melted and fused; the individual has

returned into the whole. The divisions of time are categories which

have no power to mold my life, and leave no more lasting impression than

lines traced by a stick in water. My life, my individuality, are fluid,

there is nothing for it but to resign one’s self.

April 9, 1856.--How true it is that our destinies are decided by

nothings and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant

accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the

trees on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified. What happens

is quite different from that we planned; we planned a blessing and there

springs from it a curse. How many times the serpent of fatality, or

rather the law of life, the force of things, intertwining itself with

some very simple facts, cannot be cut away by any effort, and the logic

of situations and characters leads inevitably to a dreaded _dénouement_.

It is the fatal spell of destiny, which obliges us to feed our grief

from our own hand, to prolong the existence of our vulture, to throw

into the furnace of our punishment and expiation, our powers, our

qualities, our very virtues, one by one, and so forces us to recognize

our nothingness, our dependence and the implacable majesty of law. Faith

in a providence softens punishment but does not do away with it. The

wheels of the divine chariot crush us first of all that justice may be

satisfied and an example given to men, and then a hand is stretched out

to us to raise us up, or at least to reconcile us with the love hidden

under the justice. Pardon cannot precede repentance and repentance only

begins with humility. And so long as any fault whatever appears trifling

to us, so long as we see, not so much the culpability of as the excuses

for imprudence or negligence, so long, in short, as Job murmurs and as

providence is thought to be too severe, so long as there is any inner

protestation against fate, or doubt as to the perfect justice of God,

there is not yet entire humility or true repentance. It is when we

accept the expiation that it can be spared us; it is when we submit

sincerely that grace can be granted to us. Only when grief finds its

work done can God dispense us from it. Trial then only stops when it is

useless: that is why it scarcely ever stops. Faith in the justice and

love of the Father is the best and indeed the only support under the

sufferings of this life. The foundation of all of our pains is unbelief;

we doubt whether what happens to us ought to happen to us; we think

ourselves wiser than providence, because to avoid fatalism we believe in

accident. Liberty in submission--what a problem! And yet that is what we

must always come back to.

May 7, 1856.--I have been reading Rosenkrantz’s “History of Poetry”

[Footnote: “Geschichte der Poesie,” by Rosenkrantz, the pupil and

biographer of Hegel] all day: it touches upon all the great names of

Spain, Portugal, and France, as far as Louis XV. It is a good thing to

take these rapid surveys; the shifting point of view gives a perpetual

freshness to the subject and to the ideas presented, a literary

experience which is always pleasant and bracing. For one of my

temperament, this philosophic and morphological mode of embracing and

expounding literary history has a strong attraction. But it is the

antipodes of the French method of proceeding, which takes, as it were,

only the peaks of the subject, links them together by theoretical

figures and triangulations, and then assumes these lines to represent

the genuine face of the country. The real process of formation of a

general opinion, of a public taste, of an established _genre_, cannot be

laid bare by an abstract method, which suppresses the period of growth

in favor of the final fruit, which prefers clearness of outline to

fullness of statement, and sacrifices the preparation to the result, the

multitude to the chosen type. This French method, however, is eminently

characteristic, and it is linked by invisible ties to their respect for

custom and fashion, to the Catholic and dualist instinct which admits

two truths, two contradictory worlds, and accepts quite naturally

what is magical, incomprehensible, and arbitrary in God, the king,

or language. It is the philosophy of accident become habit, instinct,

nature and belief, it is the religion of caprice.

By one of those eternal contrasts which redress the balance of things,

the romance peoples, who excel in the practical matters of life, care

nothing for the philosophy of it; while the Germans, who know very

little about the practice of life, are masters of its theory. Every

living being seeks instinctively to complete itself; this is the secret

law according to which that nation whose sense of life is fullest and

keenest, drifts most readily toward a mathematical rigidity of theory.

Matter and form are the eternal oppositions, and the mathematical

intellects are often attracted by the facts of life, just as the

sensuous minds are often drawn toward the study of abstract law. Thus

strangely enough, what we think we are is just what we are not: what we

desire to be is what suits us least; our theories condemn us, and our

practice gives the lie to our theories. And the contradiction is an

advantage, for it is the source of conflict, of movement, and therefore

a condition of progress. Every life is an inward struggle, every

struggle supposes two contrary forces; nothing real is simple,

and whatever thinks itself simple is in reality the farthest from

simplicity. Therefore it would seem that every state is a moment in

a series; every being a compromise between contraries. In concrete

dialectic we have the key which opens to us the understanding of beings

in the series of beings, of states in the series of moments; and it is

in dynamics that we have the explanation of equilibrium. Every situation

is an _equilibrium_ of forces; every life is a _struggle_ between

opposing forces working within the limits of a certain equilibrium.

These two principles have been often clear to me, but I have never

applied them widely or rigorously enough.

July 1, 1856.--A man and still more a woman, always betrays something

of his or her nationality. The women of Russia, for instance, like the

lakes and rivers of their native country, seem to be subject to

sudden and prolonged fits of torpor. In their movement, undulating and

caressing like that of water, there is always a threat of unforeseen

frost. The high latitude, the difficulty of life, the inflexibility of

their autocratic _régime_, the heavy and mournful sky, the inexorable

climate, all these harsh fatalities have left their mark upon the

Muscovite race. A certain somber obstinacy, a kind of primitive

ferocity, a foundation of savage harshness which, under the influence of

circumstances, might become implacable and pitiless; a cold strength, an

indomitable power of resolution which would rather wreck the whole

world than yield, the indestructible instinct of the barbarian tribe,

perceptible in the half-civilized nation, all these traits are visible

to an attentive eye, even in the harmless extravagances and caprices

of a young woman of this powerful race. Even in their _badinage_ they

betray something of that fierce and rigid nationality which burns its

own towns and [as Napoleon said] keeps battalions of dead soldiers on

their feet.

What terrible rulers the Russians would be if ever they should spread

the night of their rule over the countries of the south! They would

bring us a polar despotism, tyranny such as the world has never known,

silent as darkness, rigid as ice, insensible as bronze, decked with

an outer amiability and glittering with the cold brilliancy of snow,

a slavery without compensation or relief. Probably, however, they will

gradually lose both the virtues and the defects of their semi-barbarism.

The centuries as they pass will ripen these sons of the north, and they

will enter into the concert of peoples in some other capacity than as a

menace or a dissonance. They have only to transform their hardiness into

strength, their cunning into grace, their Muscovitism into humanity, to

win love instead of inspiring aversion or fear.

July 3, 1856.--The German admires form, but he has no genius for it. He

is the opposite of the Greek; he has critical instinct, aspiration, and

desire, but no serene command of beauty. The south, more artistic, more

self-satisfied, more capable of execution, rests idly in the sense of

its own power to achieve. On one side you have ideas, on the other side,

talent. The realm of Germany is beyond the clouds; that of the southern

peoples is on this earth. The Germanic race thinks and feels; the

southerners feel and express; the Anglo-Saxons will and do. To know, to

feel, to act, there you have the trio of Germany, Italy, England. France

formulates, speaks, decides, and laughs. Thought, talent, will, speech;

or, in other words science, art, action, proselytism. So the parts of

the quartet are assigned.

July 21, 1856.--_Mit sack und pack_ here I am back again in my town

rooms. I have said good-bye to my friends and my country joys, to

verdure, flowers, and happiness. Why did I leave them after all? The

reason I gave myself was that I was anxious about my poor uncle, who is

ill. But at bottom are there not other reasons? Yes, several. There is

the fear of making myself a burden upon the two or three families of

friends who show me incessant kindness, for which I can make no return.

There are my books, which call me back. There is the wish to keep faith

with myself. But all that would be nothing, I think, without another

instinct, the instinct of the wandering Jew, which snatches from me the

cup I have but just raised to my lips, which forbids me any prolonged

enjoyment, and cries “go forward! Let there be no falling asleep, no

stopping, no attaching yourself to this or that!” This restless feeling

is not the need of change. It is rather the fear of what I love, the

mistrust of what charms me, the unrest of happiness. What a _bizarre_

tendency, and what a strange nature! not to be able to enjoy anything

simply, naïvely, without scruple, to feel a force upon one impelling

one to leave the table, for fear the meal should come to an end.

Contradiction and mystery! not to use, for fear of abusing; to think

one’s self obliged to go, not because one has had enough, but because

one has stayed awhile. I am indeed always the same; the being who

wanders when he need not, the voluntary exile, the eternal traveler,

the man incapable of repose, who, driven on by an inward voice, builds

nowhere, buys and labors nowhere, but passes, looks, camps, and goes.

And is there not another reason for all this restlessness, in a certain

sense of void? of incessant pursuit of something wanting? of longing

for a truer peace and a more entire satisfaction? Neighbors, friends,

relations, I love them all; and so long as these affections are active,

they leave in me no room for a sense of want. But yet they do not _fill_

my heart; and that is why they have no power to fix it. I am always

waiting for the woman and the work which shall be capable of taking

entire possession of my soul, and of becoming my end and aim.

“Promenant par tout séjour

Le deuil que tu cèles,

Psyché-papillon, un jour

Puisses-tu trouver l’amour

Et perdre tes ailes!”

I have not given away my heart: hence this restlessness of spirit. I

will not let it be taken captive by that which cannot fill and satisfy

it; hence this instinct of pitiless detachment from all that charms

me without permanently binding me; so that it seems as if my love

of movement, which looks so like inconstancy, was at bottom only a

perpetual search, a hope, a desire, and a care, the malady of the ideal.

... Life indeed must always be a compromise between common sense and the

ideal, the one abating nothing of its demands, the other accommodating

itself to what is practicable and real. But marriage by common sense!

arrived at by a bargain! Can it be anything but a profanation? On

the other, hand, is that not a vicious ideal which hinders life from

completing itself, and destroys the family in germ? Is there not too

much of pride in my ideal, pride which will not accept the common

destiny?...

Noon.--I have been dreaming--my head in my hand. About what? About

happiness. I have as it were, been asleep on the fatherly breast of God.

His will be done!

August 3, 1856.--A delightful Sunday afternoon at Pressy. Returned late,

under a great sky magnificently starred, with summer lightning playing

from a point behind the Jura. Drunk with poetry, and overwhelmed by

sensation after sensation, I came back slowly, blessing the God of life,

and plunged in the joy of the infinite. One thing only I lacked, a soul

with whom to share it all--for emotion and enthusiasm overflowed like

water from a full cup. The Milky Way, the great black poplars, the

ripple of the waves, the shooting stars, distant songs, the lamp-lit

town, all spoke to me in the language of poetry. I felt myself almost

a poet. The wrinkles of science disappeared under the magic breath of

admiration; the old elasticity of soul, trustful, free, and living was

mine once more. I was once more young, capable of self-abandonment

and of love. All my barrenness had disappeared; the heavenly dew had

fertilized the dead and gnarled stick; it began to be green and flower

again. My God, how wretched should we be without beauty! But with it,

everything is born afresh in us; the senses, the heart, imagination,

reason, will, come together like the dead bones of the prophet, and

become one single and self-same energy. What is happiness if it is not

this plentitude of existence, this close union with the universal

and divine life? I have been happy a whole half day, and I have been

brooding over my joy, steeping myself in it to the very depths of

consciousness.

October 22, 1856.--We must learn to look upon life as an apprenticeship

to a progressive renunciation, a perpetual diminution in our

pretensions, our hopes, our powers, and our liberty. The circle grows

narrower and narrower; we began with being eager to learn everything, to

see everything, to tame and conquer everything, and in all directions we

reach our limit--_non plus ultra_. Fortune, glory, love, power, health,

happiness, long life, all these blessings which have been possessed by

other men seem at first promised and accessible to us, and then we have

to put the dream away from us, to withdraw one personal claim after

another to make ourselves small and humble, to submit to feel ourselves

limited, feeble, dependent, ignorant and poor, and to throw ourselves

upon God for all, recognizing our own worthlessness, and that we have no

right to anything. It is in this nothingness that we recover something

of life--the divine spark is there at the bottom of it. Resignation

comes to us, and, in believing love, we reconquer the true greatness.

October 27, 1856.--In all the chief matters of life we are alone, and

our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part

of the drama is a monologue, rather an intimate debate between God, our

conscience, and ourselves. Tears, griefs, depressions, disappointments,

irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties,

deliberations, all these belong to our secret, and are almost all

incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them,

and even when we write them down. What is most precious in us never

shows itself, never finds an issue even in the closest intimacy. Only

a part of it reaches our consciousness, it scarcely enters into action

except in prayer, and is perhaps only perceived by God, for our past

rapidly becomes strange to us. Our monad may be influenced by other

monads, but none the less does it remain impenetrable to them in its

essence; and we ourselves, when all is said, remain outside our own

mystery. The center of our consciousness is unconscious, as the kernel

of the sun is dark. All that we are, desire, do, and know, is more or

less superficial, and below the rays and lightnings of our periphery

there remains the darkness of unfathomable substance.

I was then well-advised when, in my theory of the inner man, I placed

at the foundation of the self, after the seven spheres which the self

contains had been successively disengaged, a lowest depth of darkness,

the abyss of the un-revealed, the virtual pledge of an infinite future,

the obscure self, the pure subjectivity which is incapable of realizing

itself in mind, conscience, or reason, in the soul, the heart, the

imagination, or the life of the senses, and which makes for itself

attributes and conditions out of all these forms of its own life.

But the obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the

opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call itself

fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light,

of liberty, and the spirit. For it represents _resistance_--that is to

say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and

its triumph.

December 17, 1856.--This evening was the second quartet concert. It

stirred me much more than the first; the music chosen was loftier and

stronger. It was the quartet in D minor of Mozart, and the quartet in C

major of Beethoven, separated by a Spohr concerto. This last, vivid, and

brilliant as a whole, has fire in the allegro, feeling in the adagio,

and elegance in the _finale_, but it is the product of one fine gift in

a mediocre personality. With the two others you are at once in contact

with genius; you are admitted to the secrets of two great souls. Mozart

stands for inward liberty, Beethoven for the power of enthusiasm. The

one sets us free, the other ravishes us out of ourselves. I do not think

I ever felt more distinctly than to-day, or with more intensity, the

difference between these two masters. Their two personalities became

transparent to me, and I seemed to read them to their depths.

The work of Mozart, penetrated as it is with mind and thought,

represents a solved problem, a balance struck between aspiration and

executive capacity, the sovereignty of a grace which is always mistress

of itself, marvelous harmony and perfect unity. His quartet describes a

day in one of those Attic souls who pre-figure on earth the serenity

of Elysium. The first scene is a pleasant conversation, like that of

Socrates on the banks of the Ilissus; its chief mark is an exquisite

urbanity. The second scene is deeply pathetic. A cloud has risen in the

blue of this Greek heaven. A storm, such as life inevitably brings with

it, even in the case of great souls who love and esteem each other,

has come to trouble the original harmony. What is the cause of it--a

misunderstanding, apiece of neglect? Impossible to say, but it breaks

out notwithstanding. The andante is a scene of reproach and complaint,

but as between immortals. What loftiness in complaint, what dignity,

what feeling, what noble sweetness in reproach! The voice trembles and

grows graver, but remains affectionate and dignified. Then, the storm

has passed, the sun has come back, the explanation has taken place,

peace is re-established. The third scene paints the brightness of

reconciliation. Love, in its restored confidence, and as though in

sly self-testing, permits itself even gentle mocking and friendly

_badinage_. And the _finale_ brings us back to that tempered gaiety and

happy serenity, that supreme freedom, flower of the inner life, which is

the leading motive of the whole composition.

In Beethoven’s on the other hand, a spirit of tragic irony paints

for you the mad tumult of existence as it dances forever above the

threatening abyss of the infinite. No more unity, no more satisfaction,

no more serenity! We are spectators of the eternal duel between the

great forces, that of the abyss which absorbs all finite things, and

that of life which defends and asserts itself, expands, and enjoys. The

first bars break the seals and open the caverns of the great deep. The

struggle begins. It is long. Life is born, and disports itself gay and

careless as the butterfly which flutters above a precipice. Then it

expands the realm of its conquests, and chants its successes. It founds

a kingdom, it constructs a system of nature. But the typhon rises from

the yawning gulf, and the Titans beat upon the gates of the new empire.

A battle of giants begins. You hear the tumultuous efforts of the powers

of chaos. Life triumphs at last, but the victory is not final, and

through all the intoxication of it there is a certain note of terror and

bewilderment. The soul of Beethoven was a tormented soul. The passion

and the awe of the infinite seemed to toss it to and fro from heaven

to hell, Hence its vastness. Which is the greater, Mozart or Beethoven?

Idle question! The one is more perfect, the other more colossal. The

first gives you the peace of perfect art, beauty, at first sight. The

second gives you sublimity, terror, pity, a beauty of second impression.

The one gives that for which the other rouses a desire. Mozart has

the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic

grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the

soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of

Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed

be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us

good. Our love is due to both.

* * * * *

To judge is to see clearly, to care for what is just and therefore to be

impartial, more exactly, to be disinterested, more exactly still, to be

impersonal.

* * * * *

To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do

what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius.

* * * * *

Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires but according to

our powers.

* * * * *

If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion.

* * * * *

Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. Humanity only

begins for man with self-surrender.

* * * * *

The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he

decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.

* * * * *

Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the

flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its

spark.

February 3, 1857.--The phantasmagoria of the soul cradles and soothes

me as though I were an Indian yoghi, and everything, even my own life,

becomes to me smoke, shadow, vapor, and illusion. I hold so lightly

to all phenomena that they end by passing over me like gleams over a

landscape, and are gone without leaving any impression. Thought is a

kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can

make transparent the mountains and everything that exists. It is by love

only that one keeps hold upon reality, that one recovers one’s proper

self, that one becomes again will, force, and individuality. Love

could do everything with me; by myself and for myself I prefer to be

nothing....

I have the imagination of regret and not that of hope. My

clear-sightedness is retrospective, and the result with me of

disinterestedness and prudence is that I attach myself to what I have no

chance of obtaining....

May 27, 1857. (Vandoeuvres. [Footnote: Also a village in the

neighborhood of Geneva.])--We are going down to Geneva to hear the

“Tannhäuser” of Richard Wagner performed at the theater by the German

troup now passing through. Wagner’s is a powerful mind endowed with

strong poetical sensitiveness. His work is even more poetical than

musical. The suppression of the lyrical element, and therefore of

melody, is with him a systematic _parti pris_. No more duos or trios;

monologue and the _aria_ are alike done away with. There remains only

declamation, the recitative, and the choruses. In order to avoid the

conventional in singing, Wagner falls into another convention--that of

not singing at all. He subordinates the voice to articulate speech, and

for fear lest the muse should take flight he clips her wings. So that

his works are rather symphonic dramas than operas. The voice is brought

down to the rank of an instrument, put on a level with the violins, the

hautboys, and the drums, and treated instrumentally. Man is deposed from

his superior position, and the center of gravity of the work passes into

the baton of the conductor. It is music depersonalized, neo-Hegelian

music--music multiple instead of individual. If this is so, it is indeed

the music of the future, the music of the socialist democracy replacing

the art which is aristocratic, heroic, or subjective.

The overture pleased me even less than at the first hearing: it is

like nature before man appeared. Everything in it is enormous, savage,

elementary, like the murmur of forests and the roar of animals. It is

forbidding and obscure, because man, that is to say, mind, the key of

the enigma, personality, the spectator, is wanting to it.

The idea of the piece is grand. It is nothing less than the struggle of

passion and pure love, of flesh and spirit, of the animal and the angel

in man. The music is always expressive, the choruses very beautiful, the

orchestration skillful, but the whole is fatiguing and excessive,

too full, too laborious. When all is said, it lacks gayety, ease,

naturalness and vivacity--it has no smile, no wings. Poetically one is

fascinated, but one’s musical enjoyment is hesitating, often doubtful,

and one recalls nothing but the general impression--Wagner’s music

represents the abdication of the self, and the emancipation of all the

forces once under its rule. It is a falling back into Spinozism--the

triumph of fatality. This music has its root and its fulcrum in two

tendencies of the epoch, materialism and socialism--each of them

ignoring the true value of the human personality, and drowning it in the

totality of nature or of society.

June 17, 1857. (Vandoeuvres).--I have just followed Maine de Biran from

his twenty-eighth to his forty-eighth year by means of his journal,

and a crowd of thoughts have besieged me. Let me disengage those which

concern myself. In this eternal self-chronicler and observer I seem to

see myself reflected with all my faults, indecision, discouragement,

over-dependence on sympathy, difficulty of finishing, with my habit of

watching myself feel and live, with my growing incapacity for practical

action, with my aptitude for psychological study. But I have also

discovered some differences which cheer and console me. This nature

is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in me. It is one of my

departments. It is not the whole of my territory, the whole of my inner

kingdom. Intellectually, I am more objective and more constructive;

my horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of men, things, countries,

peoples and books; I have a greater mass of experiences--in a word, I

feel that I have more culture, greater wealth, range, and freedom of

mind, in spite of my wants, my limits, and my weaknesses. Why does Maine

de Biran make _will_ the whole of man? Perhaps because he had too little

will. A man esteems most highly what he himself lacks, and exaggerates

what he longs to possess. Another incapable of thought, and meditation,

would have made self-consciousness the supreme thing. Only the totality

of things has an objective value. As soon as one isolates a part from

the whole, as soon as one chooses, the choice is involuntarily and

instinctively dictated by subjective inclinations which obey one or

other of the two opposing laws, the attraction of similars or the

affinity of contraries.

Five o’clock.--The morning has passed like a dream. I went on with the

journal of Maine de Biran down to the end of 1817. After dinner I passed

my time with the birds in the open air, wandering in the shady walks

which wind along under Pressy. The sun was brilliant and the air clear.

The midday orchestra of nature was at its best. Against the humming

background made by a thousand invisible insects there rose the delicate

caprices and improvisations of the nightingale singing from the

ash-trees, or of the hedge-sparrows and the chaffinches in their nests.

The hedges are hung with wild roses, the scent of the acacia still

perfumes the paths; the light down of the poplar seeds floated in the

air like a kind of warm, fair-weather snow. I felt myself as gay as

a butterfly. On coming in I read the three first books of that poem

“Corinne,” which I have not seen since I was a youth. Now as I read it

again, I look at it across interposing memories; the romantic interest

of it seems to me to have vanished, but not the poetical, pathetic, or

moral interest.

June 18th.--I have just been spending three hours in the orchard under

the shade of the hedge, combining the spectacle of a beautiful morning

with reading and taking a turn between each chapter. Now the sky is

again covered with its white veil of cloud, and I have come up with

Biran, whose “Pensée” I have just finished, and Corinne, whom I have

followed with Oswald in their excursions among the monuments of the

eternal city. Nothing is so melancholy and wearisome as this journal of

Maine de Biran. This unchanging monotony of perpetual reflection has an

enervating and depressing effect upon one. Here, then, is the life of

a distinguished man seen in its most intimate aspects! It is one

long repetition, in which the only change is an almost imperceptible

displacement of center in the writer’s manner of viewing himself. This

thinker takes thirty years to move from the Epicurean quietude to the

quietism of Fénélon, and this only speculatively, for his practical

life remains the same, and all his anthropological discovery consists

in returning to the theory of the three lives, lower, human, and higher,

which is in Pascal and in Aristotle. And this is what they call a

philosopher in France! Beside the great philosophers, how poor and

narrow seems such an intellectual life! It is the journey of an ant,

bounded by the limits of a field; of a mole, who spends his days in the

construction of a mole-hill. How narrow and stifling the swallow who

flies across the whole Old World, and whose sphere of life embraces

Africa and Europe, would find the circle with which the mole and the ant

are content! This volume of Biran produces in me a sort of asphyxia;

as I assimilate it, it seems to paralyze me; I am chained to it by some

spell of secret sympathy. I pity, and I am afraid of my pity, for I feel

how near I am to the same evils and the same faults....

Ernest Naville’s introductory essay is full of interest, written in

a serious and noble style; but it is almost as sad as it is ripe and

mature. What displeases me in it a little is its exaggeration of the

merits of Biran. For the rest, the small critical impatience which the

volume has stirred in me will be gone by to-morrow. Maine de Biran is an

important link in the French literary tradition. It is from him that

our Swiss critics descend, Naville father and son, Secrétan. He is the

source of our best contemporary psychology, for Stapfer, Royer-Collard,

and Cousin called him their master, and Ampère, his junior by nine

years, was his friend.

July 25, 1857. (Vandoeuvres).--At ten o’clock this evening, under a

starlit sky, a group of rustics under the windows of the salon employed

themselves in shouting disagreeable songs. Why is it that this tuneless

shrieking of false notes and scoffing words delights these people? Why

is it that this ostentatious parade of ugliness, this jarring vulgarity

and grimacing is their way of finding expression and expansion in the

great solitary and tranquil night?

Why? Because of a sad and secret instinct. Because of the need they

have of realizing themselves as individuals, of asserting themselves

exclusively, egotistically, idolatrously--opposing the self in them

to everything else, placing it in harsh contrast with the nature which

enwraps us, with the poetry which raises us above ourselves, with the

harmony which binds us to others, with the adoration which carries

us toward God. No, no, no! Myself only, and that is enough! Myself by

negation, by ugliness, by grimace and irony! Myself, in my caprice, in

my independence, in my irresponsible sovereignty; myself, set free by

laughter, free as the demons are, and exulting in my freedom; I, master

of myself, invincible and self-sufficient, living for this one time

yet by and for myself! This is what seems to me at the bottom of this

merry-making. One hears in it an echo of Satan, the temptation to make

self the center of all things, to be like an Elohim, the worst and last

revolt of man. It means also, perhaps, some rapid perception of what

is absolute in personality, some rough exaltation of the subject, the

individual, who thus claims, by abasing them, the rights of subjective

existence. If so, it is the caricature of our most precious privilege,

the parody of our apotheosis, a vulgarizing of our highest greatness.

Shout away, then, drunkards! Your ignoble concert, with all its

repulsive vulgarity, still reveals to us, without knowing it, something

of the majesty of life and the sovereign power of the soul.

September 15, 1857.--I have just finished Sismondi’s journal and

correspondence. Sismondi is essentially the honest man, conscientious,

upright, respectable, the friend of the public good and the devoted

upholder of a great cause, the amelioration of the common lot of men.

Character and heart are the dominant elements in his individuality, and

cordiality is the salient feature of his nature. Sismondi’s is a most

encouraging example. With average faculties, very little imagination,

not much taste, not much talent, without subtlety of feeling, without

great elevation or width or profundity of mind, he yet succeeded in

achieving a career which was almost illustrious, and he has left behind

him some sixty volumes, well-known and well spoken of. How was this? His

love for men on the one side, and his passion for work on the other,

are the two factors in his fame. In political economy, in literary

or political history, in personal action, Sismondi showed no

genius--scarcely talent; but in all he did there was solidity, loyalty,

good sense and integrity. The poetical, artistic and philosophic sense

is deficient in him, but he attracts and interests us by his moral

sense. We see in him the sincere writer, a man of excellent heart, a

good citizen and warm friend, worthy and honest in the widest sense

of terms, not brilliant, but inspiring trust and confidence by his

character, his principles and his virtues. More than this, he is the

best type of good Genevese liberalism, republican but not democratic,

Protestant but not Calvinist, human but not socialist, progressive but

without any sympathy with violence. He was a conservative without either

egotism or hypocrisy, a patriot without narrowness. In his theories

he was governed by experience and observation, and in his practice by

general ideas. A laborious philanthropist, the past and the present were

to him but fields of study, from which useful lessons might be gleaned.

Positive and reasonable in temper, his mind was set upon a high average

well-being for human society, and his efforts were directed toward

founding such a social science as might most readily promote it.

September 24, 1857.--In the course of much thought yesterday about

“Atala” and “René,” Châteaubriand became clear to me. I saw in him a

great artist but not a great man, immense talent but a still vaster

pride--a nature at once devoured with ambition and unable to find

anything to love or admire in the world except itself--indefatigable in

labor and capable of everything except of true devotion, self-sacrifice

and faith. Jealous of all success, he was always on the opposition side,

that he might be the better able to disavow all services received, and

to hold aloof from any other glory but his own. Legitimist under the

empire, a parliamentarian tinder the legitimist _régime_, republican

under the constitutional monarchy, defending Christianity when France

was philosophical, and taking a distaste for religion as soon as

it became once more a serious power, the secret of these endless

contradictions in him was simply the desire to reign alone like the

sun--a devouring thirst for applause, an incurable and insatiable

vanity, which, with the true, fierce instinct of tyranny, would endure

no brother near the throne. A man of magnificent imagination but of poor

character, of indisputable power, but cursed with a cold egotism and

an incurable barrenness of feeling, which made it impossible for him to

tolerate about him anybody but slaves or adorers. A tormented soul and

miserable life, when all is said, under its aureole of glory and its

crown of laurels!

Essentially jealous and choleric, Châteaubriand from the beginning was

inspired by mistrust, by the passion for contradicting, for crushing and

conquering. This motive may always be traced in him. Rousseau seems to

me his point of departure, the man who suggested to him by contrast

and opposition all his replies and attacks, Rousseau is revolutionary:

Châteaubriand therefore writes his “Essay on Revolutions.” Rousseau is

republican and Protestant; Châteaubriand will be royalist and Catholic.

Rousseau is _bourgeois_; Chateaubriand will glorify nothing but noble

birth, honor, chivalry and deeds of arms. Rousseau conquered nature for

French letters, above all the nature of the mountains and of the

Swiss and Savoy, and lakes. He pleaded for her against civilization.

Châteaubriand will take possession of a new and colossal nature, of the

ocean, of America; but he will make his savages speak the language of

Louis XIV., he will bow Atala before a Catholic missionary, and sanctify

passions born on the banks of the Mississippi by the solemnities

of Catholic ceremonial. Rousseau was the apologist of reverie;

Châteaubriand will build the monument of it in order to break it in

René. Rousseau preaches Deism with all his eloquence in the “Vicaire

Savoyard;” Châteaubriand surrounds the Roman creed with all the garlands

of his poetry in the “Génie du Christianisme.” Rousseau appeals to

natural law and pleads for the future of nations; Châteaubriand will

only sing the glories of the past, the ashes of history and the

noble ruins of empires. Always a rôle to be filled, cleverness to be

displayed, a _parti-pris_ to be upheld and fame to be won--his theme,

one of imagination, his faith one to order, but sincerity, loyalty,

candor, seldom or never! Always a real indifference simulating a passion

for truth; always an imperious thirst for glory instead of devotion to

the good; always the ambitious artist, never the citizen, the believer,

the man. Châteaubriand posed all his life as the wearied Colossus,

smiling pitifully upon a pygmy world, and contemptuously affecting

to desire nothing from it, though at the same time wishing it to be

believed that he could if he pleased possess himself of everything by

mere force of genius. He is the type of an untoward race, and the father

of a disagreeable lineage.

But to return to the two episodes. “René” seems to me very superior to

“Atala.’” Both the stories show a talent of the first rank, but of the

two the beauty of “Atala” is of the more transitory kind. The attempt to

render in the style of Versailles the loves of a Natchez and a Seminole,

and to describe the manners of the adorers of the Manitous in the tone

of Catholic sentiment, was an attempt too violent to succeed. But the

work is a _tour de force_ of style, and it was only by the polished

classicism of the form, that the romantic matter of the sentiments and

the descriptions could have been imported into the colorless literature

of the empire. “Atala” is already old-fashioned and theatrical in

all the parts which are not descriptive or European--that is to say,

throughout all the sentimental savagery.

“René” is infinitely more durable. Its theme, which is the malady of a

whole generation--distaste for life brought about by idle reverie and

the ravages of a vague and unmeasured ambition--is true to reality.

Without knowing or wishing it, Châteaubriand has been sincere, for René

is himself. This little sketch is in every respect a masterpiece. It

is not, like “Atala,” spoilt artistically by intentions alien to the

subject, by being made the means of expression of a particular tendency.

Instead of taking a passion for René, indeed, future generations will

scorn and wonder at him; instead of a hero they will see in him a

pathological case; but the work itself, like the Sphinx, will endure. A

work of art will bear all kinds of interpretations; each in turn finds

a basis in it, while the work itself, because it represents an idea, and

therefore partakes of the richness and complexity which belong to ideas,

suffices for all and survives all. A portrait proves whatever one asks

of it. Even in its forms of style, in the disdainful generality of the

terms in which the story is told, in the terseness of the sentences,

in the sequence of the images and of the pictures, traced with classic

purity and marvelous vigor, “René” maintains its monumental character.

Carved, as it were, in material of the present century, with the tools

of classical art, “René” is the immortal cameo of Châteaubriand.

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented

with ourselves. The consciousness of wrong-doing makes us irritable, and

our heart in its cunning quarrels with what is outside it, in order that

it may deafen the clamor within.

* * * * *

The faculty of intellectual metamorphosis is the first and indispensable

faculty of the critic; without it he is not apt at understanding other

minds, and ought, therefore, if he love truth, to hold his peace.

The conscientious critic must first criticise himself; what we do not

understand we have not the right to judge.

* * * * *

June 14, 1858.--Sadness and anxiety seem to be increasing upon me. Like

cattle in a burning stable, I cling to what consumes me, to the solitary

life which does me so much harm. I let myself be devoured by inward

suffering....

Yesterday, however, I struggled against this fatal tendency. I went out

into the country, and the children’s caresses restored to me something

of serenity and calm. After we had dined out of doors all three sang

some songs and school hymns, which were delightful to listen to. The

spring fairy had been scattering flowers over the fields with lavish

hands; it was a little glimpse of paradise. It is true, indeed, that the

serpent too was not far off. Yesterday there was a robbery close by the

house, and death had visited another neighbor. Sin and death lurk

around every Eden, and sometimes within it. Hence the tragic beauty,

the melancholy poetry of human destiny. Flowers, shade, a fine view, a

sunset sky, joy, grace, feeling, abundance and serenity, tenderness and

song--here you have the element of beauty: the dangers of the present

and the treacheries of the future, here is the element of pathos.

The fashion of this world passeth away. Unless we have laid hold upon

eternity, unless we take the religious view of life, these bright,

fleeting days can only be a subject for terror. Happiness should be

a prayer--and grief also. Faith in the moral order, in the protecting

fatherhood of God, appeared to me in all its serious sweetness.

“Pense, aime, agis et souffre en Dieu

C’est la grande science.”

July 18, 1858.--To-day I have been deeply moved by the _nostalgia_ of

happiness and by the appeals of memory. My old self, the dreams which

used to haunt me in Germany, passionate impulses, high aspirations, all

revived in me at once with unexpected force. The dread lest I should

have missed my destiny and stifled my true nature, lest I should have

buried myself alive, passed through me like a shudder. Thirst for the

unknown, passionate love of life, the yearning for the blue vaults

of the infinite and the strange worlds of the ineffable, and that sad

ecstasy which the ideal wakens in its beholders--all these carried me

away in a whirlwind of feeling that I cannot describe. Was it a warning,

a punishment, a temptation? Was it a secret protest, or a violent act of

rebellion on the part of a nature which is unsatisfied?--the last agony

of happiness and of a hope that will not die?

What raised all this storm? Nothing but a book--the first number of the

“_Revue Germanique_.” The articles of Dollfus, Renan, Littré, Montégut,

Taillandier, by recalling to me some old and favorite subjects, made me

forget ten wasted years, and carried me back to my university life. I

was tempted to throw off my Genevese garb and to set off, stick in hand,

for any country that might offer--stripped and poor, but still young,

enthusiastic, and alive, full of ardor and of faith.

... I have been dreaming alone since ten o’clock at the window, while

the stars twinkled among the clouds, and the lights of the neighbors

disappeared one by one in the houses round. Dreaming of what? Of the

meaning of this tragic comedy which we call life. Alas! alas! I was as

melancholy as the preacher. A hundred years seemed to me a dream, life

a breath, and everything a nothing. What tortures of mind and soul, and

all that we may die in a few minutes! What should interest us, and why?

“Le temps n’est rien pour l’âme, enfant, ta vie est pleine,

Et ce jour vaut cent ans, s’il te fait trouver Dieu.”

To make an object for myself, to hope, to struggle, seems to me more

and more impossible and amazing. At twenty I was the embodiment of

curiosity, elasticity and spiritual ubiquity; at thirty-seven I have not

a will, a desire, or a talent left; the fireworks of my youth have left

nothing but a handful of ashes behind them.

December 13, 1858.--Consider yourself a refractory pupil for whom you

are responsible as mentor and tutor. To sanctify sinful nature, by

bringing it gradually under the control of the angel within us, by the

help of a holy God, is really the whole of Christian pedagogy and of

religious morals. Our work--my work--consists in taming, subduing,

evangelizing and _angelizing_ the evil self; and in restoring harmony

with the good self. Salvation lies in abandoning the evil self in

principle and in taking refuge with the other, the divine self, in

accepting with courage and prayer the task of living with one’s own

demon, and making it into a less and less rebellious instrument of good.

The Abel in us must labor for the salvation of the Cain. To undertake

it is to be converted, and this conversion must be repeated day by day.

Abel only redeems and touches Cain by exercising him constantly in good

works. To do right is in one sense an act of violence; it is suffering,

expiation, a cross, for it means the conquest and enslavement of self.

In another sense it is the apprenticeship to heavenly things, sweet

and secret joy, contentment and peace. Sanctification implies perpetual

martyrdom, but it is a martyrdom which glorifies. A crown of thorns is

the sad eternal symbol of the life of the saints. The best measure of

the profundity of any religious doctrine is given by its conception of

sin and the cure of sin.

A duty is no sooner divined than from that very moment it becomes

binding upon us.

* * * * *

Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to

come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing.

July 14, 1859.--I have just read “Faust” again. Alas, every year I am

fascinated afresh by this somber figure, this restless life. It is

the type of suffering toward which I myself gravitate, and I am always

finding in the poem words which strike straight to my heart. Immortal,

malign, accursed type! Specter of my own conscience, ghost of my own

torment, image of the ceaseless struggle of the soul which has not yet

found its true aliment, its peace, its faith--art thou not the typical

example of a life which feeds upon itself, because it has not found

its God, and which, in its wandering flight across the worlds, carries

within it, like a comet, an inextinguishable flame of desire, and an

agony of incurable disillusion? I also am reduced to nothingness, and

I shiver on the brink of the great empty abysses of my inner being,

stifled by longing for the unknown, consumed with the thirst for the

infinite, prostrate before the ineffable. I also am torn sometimes by

this blind passion for life, these desperate struggles for happiness,

though more often I am a prey to complete exhaustion and taciturn

despair. What is the reason of it all? Doubt--doubt of one’s self, of

thought, of men, and of life--doubt which enervates the will and

weakens all our powers, which makes us forget God and neglect prayer and

duty--that restless and corrosive doubt which makes existence impossible

and meets all hope with satire.

July 17, 1859.--Always and everywhere salvation is torture, deliverance

means death, and peace lies in sacrifice. If we would win our pardon,

we must kiss the fiery crucifix. Life is a series of agonies, a

Calvary, which we can only climb on bruised and aching knees. We seek

distractions; we wander away; we deafen and stupefy ourselves that we

may escape the test; we turn away oar eyes from the _via dolorosa_; and

yet there is no help for it--we must come back to it in the end. What

we have to recognize is that each of us carries within himself his own

executioner--his demon, his hell, in his sin; that his sin is his idol,

and that this idol, which seduces the desire of his heart, is his curse.

_Die unto sin!_ This great saying of Christianity remains still the

highest theoretical solution of the inner life. Only in it is there any

peace of conscience; and without this peace there is no peace....

I have just read seven chapters of the gospel. Nothing calms me so much.

To do one’s duty in love and obedience, to do what is right--these are

the ideas which remain with one. To live in God and to do his work--this

is religion, salvation, life eternal; this is both the effect and the

sign of love and of the Holy Spirit; this is the new man announced by

Jesus, and the new life into which we enter by the second birth. To be

born again is to renounce the old life, sin, and the natural man, and

to take to one’s self another principle of life. It is to exist for God

with another self, another will, another love.

August 9, 1859.--Nature is forgetful: the world is almost more so.

However little the individual may lend himself to it, oblivion soon

covers him like a shroud. This rapid and inexorable expansion of the

universal life, which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual

being, which effaces our existence and annuls all memory of us, fills me

with unbearable melancholy. To be born, to struggle, to disappear--there

is the whole ephemeral drama of human life. Except in a few hearts, and

not even always in one, our memory passes like a ripple on the water, or

a breeze in the air. If nothing in us is immortal, what a small thing is

life. Like a dream which trembles and dies at the first glimmer of

dawn, all my past, all my present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my

consciousness at the moment when it returns upon itself. I feel myself

then stripped and empty, like a convalescent who remembers nothing. My

travels, my reading, my studies, my projects, my hopes, have faded from

my mind. It is a singular state. All my faculties drop away from me like

a cloak that one takes off, like the chrysalis case of a larva. I

feel myself returning into a more elementary form. I behold my own

unclothing; I forget, still more than I am forgotten; I pass gently into

the grave while still living, and I feel, as it were, the indescribable

peace of annihilation, and the dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious

of the river of time passing before and in me, of the impalpable shadows

of life gliding past me, but nothing breaks the cateleptic tranquillity

which enwraps me.

I come to understand the Buddhist trance of the Soufis, the kief of the

Turk, the “ecstasy” of the orientals, and yet I am conscious all the

time that the pleasure of it is deadly, that, like the use of opium or

of hasheesh, it is a kind of slow suicide, inferior in all respects

to the joys of action, to the sweetness of love, to the beauty of

enthusiasm, to the sacred savor of accomplished duty. November 28,

1859.--This evening I heard the first lecture of Ernest Naville

[Footnote: The well-known Genevese preacher and writer, Ernest Naville,

the son of a Genevese pastor, was born in 1816, became professor at the

Academy of Geneva in 1844, lost his post after the revolution of

1846, and, except for a short interval in 1860, has since then held no

official position. His courses of theological lectures, delivered at

intervals from 1859 onward, were an extraordinary success. They were

at first confined to men only, and an audience of two thousand persons

sometimes assembled to hear them. To literature he is mainly known as

the editor of Maine de Biran’s Journal.] on “The Eternal Life.” It was

admirably sure in touch, true, clear, and noble throughout. He proved

that, whether we would or no, we were bound to face the question

of another life. Beauty of character, force of expression, depth of

thought, were all equally visible in this extemporized address, which

was as closely reasoned as a book, and can scarcely be disentangled from

the quotations of which it was full. The great room of the Casino was

full to the doors, and one saw a fairly large number of white heads.

December 13, 1859.--Fifth lecture on “The Eternal Life” (“The Proof of

the Gospel by the Supernatural.”) The same talent and great eloquence;

but the orator does not understand that the supernatural must either

be historically proved, or, supposing it cannot be proved, that it must

renounce all pretensions to overstep the domain of faith and to encroach

upon that of history and science. He quotes Strauss, Renan, Scherer, but

he touches only the letter of them, not the spirit. Everywhere one sees

the Cartesian dualism and a striking want of the genetic, historical,

and critical sense. The idea of a living evolution has not penetrated

into the consciousness of the orator. With every intention of dealing

with things as they are, he remains, in spite of himself, subjective and

oratorical. There is the inconvenience of handling a matter polemically

instead of in the spirit of the student. Naville’s moral sense is too

strong for his discernment and prevents him from seeing what he does not

wish to see. In his metaphysic, will is placed above intelligence, and

in his personality the character is superior to the understanding, as

one might logically expect. And the consequence is, that he may prop up

what is tottering, but he makes no conquests; he may help to preserve

existing truths and beliefs, but he is destitute of initiative or

vivifying power. He is a moralizing but not a suggestive or stimulating

influence. A popularizer, apologist and orator of the greatest merit, he

is a schoolman at bottom; his arguments are of the same type as those

of the twelfth century, and he defends Protestantism in the same way

in which Catholicism has been commonly defended. The best way of

demonstrating the insufficiency of this point of view is to show by

history how incompletely it has been superseded. The chimera of a simple

and absolute truth is wholly Catholic and anti-historic. The mind of

Naville is mathematical and his objects moral. His strength lies

in _mathematicizing_ morals. As soon as it becomes a question of

development, metamorphosis, organization--as soon as he is brought

into contact with the mobile world of actual life, especially of the

spiritual life, he has no longer anything serviceable to say. Language

is for him a system of fixed signs; a man, a people, a book, are so many

geometrical figures of which we have only to discover the properties.

December 15th.--Naville’s sixth lecture, an admirable one, because it

did nothing more than expound the Christian doctrine of eternal life. As

an extempore performance--marvelously exact, finished, clear and noble,

marked by a strong and disciplined eloquence. There was not a single

reservation to make in the name of criticism, history or philosophy. It

was all beautiful, noble, true and pure. It seems to me that Naville has

improved in the art of speech during these latter years. He has always

had a kind of dignified and didactic beauty, but he has now added to

it the contagious cordiality and warmth of feeling which complete

the orator; he moves the whole man, beginning with the intellect

but finishing with the heart. He is now very near to the true virile

eloquence, and possesses one species of it indeed very nearly in

perfection. He has arrived at the complete command of the resources of

his own nature, at an adequate and masterly expression of himself. Such

expression is the joy and glory of the oratorical artist as of every

other. Naville is rapidly becoming a model in the art of premeditated

and self-controlled eloquence.

There is another kind of eloquence--that which seems inspired, which

finds, discovers, and illuminates by bounds and flashes, which is born

in the sight of the audience and transports it. Such is not Naville’s

kind. Is it better worth having? I do not know.

* * * * *

Every real need is stilled, and every vice is stimulated by

satisfaction.

* * * * *

Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to justify itself.

It is persistence without a plausible motive. It is the tenacity of

self-love substituted for the tenacity of reason or conscience.

It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which directly expresses

the worth of a man, but what he is.

* * * * *

What comfort, what strength, what economy there is in _order_--material

order, intellectual order, moral order. To know where one is going

and what one wishes--this is order; to keep one’s word and one’s

engagements--again order; to have everything ready under one’s hand, to

be able to dispose of all one’s forces, and to have all one’s means of

whatever kind under command--still order; to discipline one’s habits,

one’s effort, one’s wishes; to organize one’s life, to distribute

one’s time, to take the measure of one’s duties and make one’s rights

respected; to employ one’s capital and resources, one’s talent and one’s

chances profitably--all this belongs to and is included in the word

_order_. Order means light and peace, inward liberty and free command

over one’s self; order is power. Aesthetic and moral beauty consist, the

first in a true perception of order, and the second in submission to it,

and in the realization of it, by, in, and around one’s self. Order is

man’s greatest need and his true well-being.

April 17, 1860.--The cloud has lifted; I am better. I have been able

to take my usual walk on the Treille; all the buds were opening and

the young shoots were green on all the branches. The rippling of clear

water, the merriment of birds, the young freshness of plants, and the

noisy play of children, produce a strange effect upon an invalid. Or

rather it was strange to me to be looking at such things with the eyes

of a sick and dying man; it was my first introduction to a new phase of

experience. There is a deep sadness in it. One feels one’s self cut off

from nature--outside her communion as it were. She is strength and joy

and eternal health. “Room for the living,” she cries to us; “do not come

to darken my blue sky with your miseries; each has his turn: begone!”

But to strengthen our own courage, we must say to ourselves, No; it is

good for the world to see suffering and weakness; the sight adds zest

to the joy of the happy and the careless, and is rich in warning for

all who think. Life has been lent to us, and we owe it to our traveling

companions to let them see what use we make of it to the end. We must

show our brethren both how to live and how to die. These first summonses

of illness have besides a divine value; they give us glimpses behind

the scenes of life; they teach us something of its awful reality and its

inevitable end. They teach us sympathy. They warn us to redeem the time

while it is yet day. They awaken in us gratitude for the blessings which

are still ours, and humility for the gifts which are in us. So that,

evils though they seem, they are really an appeal to us from on high, a

touch of God’s fatherly scourge.

How frail a thing is health, and what a thin envelope protects our life

against being swallowed up from without, or disorganized from within! A

breath, and the boat springs a leak or founders; a nothing, and all

is endangered; a passing cloud, and all is darkness! Life is indeed a

flower which a morning withers and the beat of a passing wing breaks

down; it is the widow’s lamp, which the slightest blast of air

extinguishes. In order to realize the poetry which clings to morning

roses, one needs to have just escaped from the claws of that vulture

which we call illness. The foundation and the heightening of all things

is the graveyard. The only certainty in this world of vain agitations

and endless anxieties, is the certainty of death, and that which is the

foretaste and small change of death--pain.

As long as we turn our eyes away from this implacable reality, the

tragedy of life remains hidden from us. As soon as we look at it face to

face, the true proportions of everything reappear, and existence becomes

solemn again. It is made clear to us that we have been frivolous and

petulant, intractable and forgetful, and that we have been wrong.

We must die and give an account of our life: here in all its simplicity

is the teaching of sickness! “Do with all diligence what you have to

do; reconcile yourself with the law of the universe; think of your duty;

prepare yourself for departure:” such is the cry of conscience and of

reason.

May 3, 1860.--Edgar Quinet has attempted everything: he has aimed

at nothing but the greatest things; he is rich in ideas, a master of

splendid imagery, serious, enthusiastic, courageous, a noble writer. How

is it, then, that he has not more reputation? Because he is too pure;

because he is too uniformly ecstatic, fantastic, inspired--a mood

which soon palls on Frenchmen. Because he is too single-minded, candid,

theoretical, and speculative, too ready to believe in the power of words

and of ideas, too expansive and confiding; while at the same time he is

lacking in the qualities which amuse clever people--in sarcasm, irony,

cunning and _finesse_. He is an idealist reveling in color: a Platonist

brandishing the _thyrsus_ of the Menads. At bottom his is a mind of no

particular country. It is in vain that he satirizes Germany and abuses

England; he does not make himself any more of a Frenchman by doing so.

It is a northern intellect wedded to a southern imagination, but

the marriage has not been a happy one. He has the disease of chronic

magniloquence, of inveterate sublimity; abstractions for him become

personified and colossal beings, which act or speak in colossal fashion;

he is intoxicated with the infinite. But one feels all the time that

his creations are only individual monologues; he cannot escape from

the bounds of a subjective lyrism. Ideas, passions, anger, hopes,

complaints--he himself is present in them all. We never have the delight

of escaping from his magic circle, of seeing truth as it is, of entering

into relation with the phenomena and the beings of whom he speaks,

with the reality of things. This imprisonment of the author within his

personality looks like conceit. But on the contrary, it is because the

heart is generous that the mind is egotistical. It is because Quinet

thinks himself so much of a Frenchman that he is it so little. These

ironical compensations of destiny are very familiar to me: I have often

observed them. Man is nothing but contradiction: the less he knows it

the more dupe he is. In consequence of his small capacity for seeing

things as they are, Quinet has neither much accuracy nor much balance

of mind. He recalls Victor Hugo, with much less artistic power but more

historical sense. His principal gift is a great command of imagery and

symbolism. He seems to me a Görres [Footnote: Joseph Goerres, a German

mystic and disciple of Schelling. He published, among other works,

“Mythengeschichte der Asiatischen Welt,” and “Christliche Mystik.”]

transplanted to Franche Comté, a sort of supernumerary prophet, with

whom his nation hardly knows what to do, seeing that she loves neither

enigmas nor ecstasy nor inflation of language, and that the intoxication

of the tripod bores her.

The real excellence of Quinet seems to me to lie in his historical works

(“Marnix,” “L’Italie,” “Les Roumains”), and especially in his studies of

nationalities. He was born, to understand these souls, at once more vast

and more sublime than individual souls.

(_Later_).--I have been translating into verse that page of Goethe’s

“Faust” in which is contained his pantheistic confession of faith. The

translation is not bad, I think. But what a difference between the two

languages in the matter of precision! It is like the difference between

stump and graving-tool--the one showing the effort, the other noting the

result of the act; the one making you feel all that is merely dreamed or

vague, formless or vacant, the other determining, fixing, giving shape

even to the indefinite; the one representing the cause, the force, the

limbo whence things issue, the other the things themselves. German has

the obscure depth of the infinite, French the clear brightness of the

finite.

May 5, 1860.--To grow old is more difficult than to die, because to

renounce a good once and for all, costs less than to renew the sacrifice

day by day and in detail. To bear with one’s own decay, to accept one’s

own lessening capacity, is a harder and rarer virtue than to face death.

* * * * *

There is a halo round tragic and premature death; there is but a long

sadness in declining strength. But look closer: so studied, a resigned

and religious old age will often move us more than the heroic ardor

of young years. The maturity of the soul is worth more than the first

brilliance of its faculties, or the plentitude of its strength, and the

eternal in us can but profit from all the ravages made by time. There is

comfort in this thought.

May 22, 1860.--There is in me a secret incapacity for expressing my

true feeling, for saying what pleases others, for bearing witness to the

present--a reserve which I have often noticed in myself with vexation.

My heart never dares to speak seriously, either because it is ashamed of

being thought to flatter, or afraid lest it should not find exactly the

right expression. I am always trifling with the present moment. Feeling

in me is retrospective. My refractory nature is slow to recognize the

solemnity of the hour in which I actually stand. An ironical instinct,

born of timidity, makes me pass lightly over what I have on pretence of

waiting for some other thing at some other time. Fear of being carried

away, and distrust of myself pursue me even in moments of emotion; by

a sort of invincible pride, I can never persuade myself to say to any

particular instant: “Stay! decide for me; be a supreme moment! stand out

from the monotonous depths of eternity and mark a unique experience in

my life!” I trifle, even with happiness, out of distrust of the future.

May 27, 1860. (Sunday).--I heard this morning a sermon on the Holy

Spirit--good but insufficient. Why was I not edified? Because there was

no unction. Why was there no unction? Because Christianity from this

rationalistic point of view is a Christianity of _dignity_, not of

humility. Penitence, the struggles of weakness, austerity, find no

place in it. The law is effaced, holiness and mysticism evaporate; the

specifically Christian accent is wanting. My impression is always the

same--faith is made a dull poor thing by these attempts to reduce it

to simple moral psychology. I am oppressed by a feeling of

inappropriateness and _malaise_ at the sight of philosophy in the

pulpit. “They have taken away my Saviour, and I know not where they have

laid him;” so the simple folk have a right to say, and I repeat it with

them. Thus, while some shock me by their sacerdotal dogmatism, others

repel me by their rationalizing laicism. It seems to me that good

preaching ought to combine, as Schleiermacher did, perfect moral

humility with energetic independence of thought, a profound sense of sin

with respect for criticism and a passion for truth.

* * * * *

The free being who abandons the conduct of himself, yields himself to

Satan; in the moral world there is no ground without a master, and the

waste lands belong to the Evil One.

The poetry of childhood consists in simulating and forestalling the

future, just as the poetry of mature life consists often in going

backward to some golden age. Poetry is always in the distance. The whole

art of moral government lies in gaining a directing and shaping hold

over the poetical ideals of an age.

January 9, 1861.--I have just come from the inaugural lecture of Victor

Cherbuliez in a state of bewildered admiration. As a lecture it was

exquisite: if it was a recitation of prepared matter, it was admirable;

if an extempore performance, it was amazing. In the face of superiority

and perfection, says Schiller, we have but one resource--to love them,

which is what I have done. I had the pleasure, mingled with a little

surprise, of feeling in myself no sort of jealousy toward this young

conqueror.

March 15th.--This last lecture in Victor Cherbuliez’s course on

“Chivalry,” which is just over, showed the same magical power over his

subject as that with which he began the series two months ago. It was

a triumph and a harvest of laurels. Cervantes, Ignatius Loyola, and the

heritage of chivalry--that is to say, individualism, honor, the

poetry of the present and the poetry of contrasts, modern liberty and

progress--have been the subjects of this lecture.

The general impression left upon me all along has been one of admiration

for the union in him of extraordinary skill in execution with admirable

cultivation of mind. With what freedom of spirit he uses and wields his

vast erudition, and what capacity for close attention he must have to be

able to carry the weight of a whole improvised speech with the same ease

as though it were a single sentence! I do not know if I am partial, but

I find no occasion for anything but praise in this young wizard and his

lectures. The fact is, that in my opinion we have now one more first

rate mind, one more master of language among us. This course, with the

“Causeries Athéniennes,” seems to me to establish Victor Cherbuliez’s

position at Geneva.

March 17, 1861.--This afternoon a homicidal languor seized hold upon

me--disgust, weariness of life, mortal sadness. I wandered out into the

churchyard, hoping to find quiet and peace there, and so to reconcile

myself with duty. Vain dream! The place of rest itself had become

inhospitable. Workmen were stripping and carrying away the turf, the

trees were dry, the wind cold, the sky gray--something arid, irreverent,

and prosaic dishonored the resting-place of the dead. I was struck with

something wanting in our national feeling--respect for the dead, the

poetry of the tomb, the piety of memory. Our churches are too little

open; our churchyards too much. The result in both cases is the same.

The tortured and trembling heart which seeks, outside the scene of its

daily miseries, to find some place where it may pray in peace, or pour

out its grief before God, or meditate in the presence of eternal things,

with us has nowhere to go. Our church ignores these wants of the

soul instead of divining and meeting them. She shows very little

compassionate care for her children, very little wise consideration for

the more delicate griefs, and no intuition of the deeper mysteries of

tenderness, no religious suavity. Under a pretext of spirituality we are

always checking legitimate aspirations. We have lost the mystical sense;

and what is religion without mysticism? A rose without perfume.

The words _repentance_ and _sanctification_ are always on our lips.

But _adoration_ and _consolation_ are also two essential elements in

religion, and we ought perhaps to make more room for them than we do.

April 28, 1861.--In the same way as a dream transforms according to

its nature, the incidents of sleep, so the soul converts into psychical

phenomena the ill-defined impressions of the organism. An uncomfortable

attitude becomes nightmare; an atmosphere charged with storm becomes

moral torment. Not mechanically and by direct causality; but imagination

and conscience engender, according to their own nature, analogous

effects; they translate into their own language, and cast into their own

mold, whatever reaches them from outside. Thus dreams may be helpful to

medicine and to divination, and states of weather may stir up and

set free within the soul vague and hidden evils. The suggestions and

solicitations which act upon life come from outside, but life produces

nothing but itself after all. Originality consists in rapid and clear

reaction against these outside influences, in giving to them our

individual stamp. To think is to withdraw, as it were, into one’s

impression--to make it clear to one’s self, and then to put it forth

in the shape of a personal judgment. In this also consists

self-deliverance, self-enfranchisement, self-conquest. All that comes

from outside is a question to which we owe an answer--a pressure to be

met by counter-pressure, if we are to remain free and living agents. The

development of our unconscious nature follows the astronomical laws

of Ptolemy; everything in it is change--cycle, epi-cycle, and

metamorphosis.

Every man then possesses in himself the analogies and rudiments of all

things, of all beings, and of all forms of life. He who knows how to

divine the small beginnings, the germs and symptoms of things, can

retrace in himself the universal mechanism, and divine by intuition the

series which he himself will not finish, such as vegetable and animal

existences, human passions and crises, the diseases of the soul and

those of the body. The mind which is subtle and powerful may penetrate

all these potentialities, and make every point flash out the world which

it contains. This is to be conscious of and to possess the general life,

this is to enter into the divine sanctuary of contemplation.

September 12, 1861.--In me an intellect which would fain forget itself

in things, is contradicted by a heart which yearns to live in human

beings. The uniting link of the two contradictions is the tendency

toward self-abandonment, toward ceasing to will and exist for

one’s self, toward laying down one’s own personality, and

losing--dissolving--one’s self in love and contemplation. What I lack

above all things is character, will, individuality. But, as always

happens, the appearance is exactly the contrary of the reality, and

my outward life the reverse of my true and deepest aspiration. I whose

whole being--heart and intellect--thirsts to absorb itself in reality,

in its neighbor man, in nature and in God, I, whom solitude devours

and destroys, I shut myself up in solitude and seem to delight only

in myself and to be sufficient for myself. Pride and delicacy of soul,

timidity of heart, have made me thus do violence to all my instincts and

invert the natural order of my life. It is not astonishing that I

should be unintelligible to others. In fact I have always avoided what

attracted me, and turned my back upon the point where secretly I desired

to be.

“Deux instincts sont en moi: vertige et déraison;

J’ai l’effroi du bonheur et la soif du poison.”

It is the Nemesis which dogs the steps of life, the secret instinct and

power of death in us, which labors continually for the destruction of

all that seeks to be, to take form, to exist; it is the passion for

destruction, the tendency toward suicide, identifying itself with the

instinct of self-preservation. This antipathy toward all that does one

good, all that nourishes and heals, is it not a mere variation of the

antipathy to moral light and regenerative truth? Does not sin also

create a thirst for death, a growing passion for what does harm?

Discouragement has been my sin. Discouragement is an act of unbelief.

Growing weakness has been the consequence of it; the principle of death

in me and the influence of the Prince of Darkness have waxed stronger

together. My will in abdicating has yielded up the scepter to instinct;

and as the corruption of the best results in what is worst, love of

the ideal, tenderness, unworldliness, have led me to a state in which I

shrink from hope and crave for annihilation. Action is my cross.

October 11, 1861. (_Heidelberg_).--After eleven days journey, here I am

under the roof of my friends, in their hospitable house on the banks of

the Neckar, with its garden climbing up the side of the Heiligenberg....

Blazing sun; my room is flooded with light and warmth. Sitting opposite

the Geisberg, I write to the murmur of the Neckar, which rolls its green

waves, flecked with silver, exactly beneath the balcony on which my room

opens. A great barge coming from Heilbron passes silently under my eyes,

while the wheels of a cart which I cannot see are dimly heard on the

road which skirts the river. Distant voices of children, of cocks, of

chirping sparrows, the clock of the Church of the Holy Spirit, which

chimes the hour, serve to gauge, without troubling, the general

tranquility of the scene. One feels the hours gently slipping by, and

time, instead of flying, seems to hover. A peace beyond words steals

into my heart, an impression of morning grace, of fresh country poetry

which brings back the sense of youth, and has the true German savor....

Two decked barges carrying red flags, each with a train of flat boats

filled with coal, are going up the river and making their way under the

arch of the great stone bridge. I stand at the window and see a whole

perspective of boats sailing in both directions; the Neckar is as

animated as the street of some great capital; and already on the slope

of the wooded mountain, streaked by the smoke-wreaths of the town, the

castle throws its shadow like a vast drapery, and traces the outlines of

its battlements and turrets. Higher up, in front of me, rises the dark

profile of the Molkenkur; higher still, in relief against the dazzling

east, I can distinguish the misty forms of the two towers of the

Kaiserstuhl and the Trutzheinrich.

But enough of landscape. My host, Dr. George Weber, tells me that his

manual of history is translated into Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Italian,

and French, and that of his great “Universal History”--three volumes

are already published. What astonishing power of work, what prodigious

tenacity, what solidity! _O deutscher Fleiss_!

November 25, 1861.--To understand a drama requires the same mental

operation as to understand an existence, a biography, a man. It is a

putting back of the bird into the egg, of the plant into its seed, a

reconstitution of the whole genesis of the being in question. Art is

simply the bringing into relief of the obscure thought of nature; a

simplification of the lines, a falling into place of groups otherwise

invisible. The fire of inspiration brings out, as it were, designs

traced beforehand in sympathetic ink. The mysterious grows clear, the

confused plain; what is complicated becomes simple--what is accidental,

necessary.

In short, art reveals nature by interpreting its intentions and

formulating its desires. Every ideal is the key of a long enigma. The

great artist is the simplifier.

Every man is a tamer of wild beasts, and these wild beasts are his

passions. To draw their teeth and claws, to muzzle and tame them, to

turn them into servants and domestic animals, fuming, perhaps, but

submissive--in this consists personal education.

February 3, 1862.--Self-criticism is the corrosive of all oratorical

or literary spontaneity. The thirst to know turned upon the self is

punished, like the curiosity of Psyche, by the flight of the thing

desired. Force should remain a mystery to itself; as soon as it tries to

penetrate its own secret it vanishes away. The hen with the golden eggs

becomes unfruitful as soon as she tries to find out why her eggs are

golden. The consciousness of consciousness is the term and end of

analysis. True, but analysis pushed to extremity devours itself, like

the Egyptian serpent. We must give it some external matter to crush

and dissolve if we wish to prevent its destruction by its action upon

itself. “We are, and ought to be, obscure to ourselves,” said Goethe,

“turned outward, and working upon the world which surrounds us.” Outward

radiation constitutes health; a too continuous concentration upon what

is within brings us back to vacuity and blank. It is better that life

should dilate and extend itself in ever-widening circles, than that it

should be perpetually diminished and compressed by solitary contraction.

Warmth tends to make a globe out of an atom; cold, to reduce a globe

to the dimensions of an atom. Analysis has been to me self-annulling,

self-destroying.

April 23, 1862. (_Mornex sur Salève_).--I was awakened by the twittering

of the birds at a quarter to five, and saw, as I threw open my windows,

the yellowing crescent of the moon looking in upon me, while the east

was just faintly whitening. An hour later it was delicious out of doors.

The anemones were still closed, the apple-trees in full flower:

“Ces beaux pommiers, coverts de leurs fleurs étoiléens,

Neige odorante du printemps.”

The view was exquisite, and nature, in full festival, spread freshness

and joy around her. I breakfasted, read the paper, and here I am. The

ladies of the _pension_ are still under the horizon. I pity them for the

loss of two or three delightful hours.

Eleven o’clock.--Preludes, scales, piano-exercises going on under my

feet. In the garden children’s voices. I have just finished Rosenkrantz

on “Hegel’s Logic,” and have run through a few articles in the

Reviews.... The limitation of the French mind consists in the

insufficiency of its spiritual alphabet, which does not allow it to

translate the Greek, German, or Spanish mind without changing the

accent. The hospitality of French manners is not completed by a

real hospitality of thought.... My nature is just the opposite. I am

individual in the presence of men, objective in the presence of things.

I attach myself to the object, and absorb myself in it; I detach myself

from subjects [_i.e._. persons], and hold myself on my guard against

them. I feel myself different from the mass of men, and akin to the

great whole of nature. My way of asserting myself is in cherishing this

sense of sympathetic unity with life, which I yearn to understand, and

in repudiating the tyranny of commonplace. All that is imitative and

artificial inspires me with a secret repulsion, while the smallest true

and spontaneous existence (plant, animal, child) draws and attracts me.

I feel myself in community of spirit with the Goethes, the Hegels, the

Schleiermachers, the Leibnitzes, opposed as they are among themselves;

while the French mathematicians, philosophers, or rhetoricians, in spite

of their high qualities, leave me cold, because there is in them no

sense of the whole, the sum of things [Footnote: The following passage

from Sainte-Beuve may be taken as a kind of answer by anticipation to

this accusation, which Amiel brings more than once in the course of the

Journal:

“Toute nation livrée à elle-même et à son propre génie se fait une

critique littéraire qui y est conforme. La France en son beau temps a eu

la sienne, qui ne ressemble ni à celle de l’Allemagne ni à celle de ses

autres voisins--un peu plus superficielle, dira-t-on--je ne le crois

pas: mais plus vive, moins chargée d’erudition, moins théorique et

systématique, plus confiante au sentiment immédiat du goût. _Un peu

de chaque chose et rien de l’ensemble, à la Française_: telle était

la devise de Montaigne et telle est aussi la devise de la critique

française. Nous ne sommes pas _synthétiques_, comme diraient les

Allemands; le mot même n’est pas française. L’imagination de détail nous

suffit. Montaigne, La Fontaine Madame de Sévigné, sont volontiers nos

livres de chevet.”

The French critic then goes on to give a rapid sketch of the authors

and the books, “qui ont peu a peu formé comme notre rhétorique.” French

criticism of the old characteristic kind rests ultimately upon the

minute and delicate knowledge of a few Greek and Latin classics.

Arnauld, Boileau, Fénélon, Rollin, Racine _fils_, Voltaire, La Harpe,

Marmontel, Delille, Fontanes, and Châteaubriand in one aspect, are the

typical names of this tradition, the creators and maintainers of this

common literary _fonds_, this “sorte de circulation courante à l’usage

des gens instruits. J’avoue ma faiblesse: nous sommes devenus bien plus

forts dans la dissertation érudite, mais j’aurais un éternel regret

pour cette moyenne et plus libre habitude littéraire qui laissait à

l’imagination tout son espace et à l’esprit tout son jeu; qui formait

une atmosphère saine et facile où le talent respirait et se mouvait

à son gré: cette atmosphère-là, je ne la trouve plus, et je la

regrette.”--(_Châteaubriand et son Groupe Littéraire_, vol. i. p. 311.)

The following _pensée_ of La Bruyère applies to the second half of

Amiel’s criticism of the French mind: “If you wish to travel in the

Inferno or the Paradiso you must take other guides,” etc.

“Un homme né Chrétien et François se trouve contraint dans la satyre;

les grands sujets lui sont défendus, il les entame quelquefois, et se

détourne ensuite sur de petites choses qu’il relève par la beauté de

son génie et de son style.”--_Les Caractères_, etc., “_Des Ouvrages

del’Esprit_.”]--because they have no _grasp_ of reality in its fullness,

and therefore either cramp and limit me or awaken my distrust. The

French lack that intuitive faculty to which the living unity of things

is revealed, they have very little sense of what is sacred, very little

penetration into the mysteries of being. What they excel in is the

construction of special sciences; the art of writing a book, style,

courtesy, grace, literary models, perfection and urbanity; the spirit of

order, the art of teaching, discipline, elegance, truth of detail,

power of arrangement; the desire and the gift for proselytism, the vigor

necessary for practical conclusions. But if you wish to travel in the

“Inferno” or the “Paradiso” you must take other guides. Their home is

on the earth, in the region of the finite, the changing, the historical,

and the diverse. Their logic never goes beyond the category of mechanism

nor their metaphysic beyond dualism. When they undertake anything else

they are doing violence to themselves.