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Footnote 48:
Published in _Macmillan’s Magazine_, September 1887.
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It is somewhat late to speak of Amiel, but I was late in reading him.
Goethe says that in seasons of cholera one should read no books but such
as are tonic, and certainly in the season of old age this precaution is
as salutary as in seasons of cholera. From what I heard I could clearly
make out that Amiel’s Journal was not a tonic book: the extracts from it
which here and there I fell in with did not much please me; and for a
good while I left the book unread.
But what M. Edmond Scherer writes I do not easily resist reading, and I
found that M. Scherer had prefixed to Amiel’s Journal a long and
important introduction. This I read; and was not less charmed by the
_mitis sapientia_, the understanding, kindness and tenderness, with
which the character of Amiel himself, whom M. Scherer had known in
youth, was handled, than interested by the criticism on the Journal.
Then I read Mrs. Humphry Ward’s interesting notice, and then—for all
biography is attractive, and of Amiel’s life and circumstances I had by
this time become desirous of knowing more—the _Etude Biographique_ of
Mademoiselle Berthe Vadier.
Of Amiel’s cultivation, refinement, and high feeling, of his singular
graces of spirit and character, there could be no doubt. But the
specimens of his work given by his critics left me hesitating. A poetess
herself, Mademoiselle Berthe Vadier is much occupied with Amiel’s
poetry, and quotes it abundantly. Even Victor Hugo’s poetry leaves me
cold, I am so unhappy as not to be able to admire _Olympio_; what am I
to say, then, to Amiel’s
“Journée
Illuminée,
Riant soleil d’avril,
En quel songe
Se plonge
Mon cœur, et que veut-il”?
But M. Scherer and other critics, who do not require us to admire
Amiel’s poetry, maintain that in his Journal he has left “a book which
will not die,” a book describing a malady of which “the secret is
sublime and the expression wonderful”; a marvel of “speculative
intuition,” a “psychological experience of the utmost value.” M. Scherer
and Mrs. Humphry Ward give Amiel’s Journal very decidedly the preference
over the letters of an old friend of mine, Obermann. The quotations made
from Amiel’s Journal by his critics failed, I say, to enable me quite to
understand this high praise. But I remember the time when a new
publication by George Sand or by Sainte-Beuve was an event bringing to
me a shock of pleasure, and a French book capable of renewing that
sensation is seldom produced now. If Amiel’s Journal was of the high
quality alleged, what a pleasure to make acquaintance with it, what a
loss to miss it! In spite, therefore, of the unfitness of old age to
bear atonic influences, I at last read Amiel’s Journal,—read it
carefully through. Tonic it is not; but it is to be read with profit,
and shows, moreover, powers of great force and value, though not quite,
I am inclined to think, in the exact line which his critics with one
consent indicate.
In speaking of Amiel at present, after so much has been written about
him, I may assume that the main outlines of his life are known to my
readers: that they know him to have been born in 1821 and to have died
in 1881, to have passed the three or four best years of his youth at the
University of Berlin, and the remainder of his life mostly at Geneva, as
a professor, first of æsthetics, afterwards of philosophy. They know
that his publications and lectures, during his lifetime, disappointed
his friends, who expected much from his acquirements, talents, and
vivacity; and that his fame rests upon two volumes of extracts from many
thousand pages of a private journal, _Journal Intime_, extending over
more than thirty years, from 1848 to 1881, which he left behind him at
his death. This Journal explains his sterility; and displays in
explaining it, say his critics, such sincerity, with such gifts of
expression and eloquence, of profound analysis and speculative
intuition, as to make it most surely “one of those books which will not
die.”
The sincerity is unquestionable. As to the gifts of eloquence and
expression, what are we to say? M. Scherer speaks of an “ever new
eloquence” pouring itself in the pages of the Journal: M. Paul Bourget,
of “marvelous pages” where the feeling for nature finds an expression
worthy of Shelley or Wordsworth: Mrs. Humphry Ward, of “magic of style,”
of “glow and splendor of expression,” of the “poet and artist” who
fascinates us in Amiel’s prose. I cannot quite agree. Obermann has been
mentioned: it seems to me that we have only to place a passage from
Sénancour beside a passage from Amiel, to perceive the difference
between a feeling for nature which gives magic to style and one which
does not. Here and throughout I am to use as far as possible Mrs.
Humphry Ward’s translation, at once spirited and faithful, of Amiel’s
Journal. I will take a passage where Amiel has evidently some
reminiscence of Sénancour (whose work he knew well), is inspired by
Sénancour—a passage which has been extolled by M. Paul Bourget:—
“Shall I ever enjoy again those marvelous reveries of past days,—as,
for instance, once, when I was still quite a youth in the early dawn
sitting amongst the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; another time in
the mountains above Lancy, under the mid-day sun, lying under a tree
and visited by three butterflies; and again another night on the sandy
shore of the North Sea, stretched full length upon the beach, my eyes
wandering over the Milky Way? Will they ever return to me, those
grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams in which one seems to carry the
world in one’s breast, to touch the stars, to possess the infinite?
Divine moments, hours of ecstasy, when thought flies from world to
world, penetrates the great enigma, breathes with a respiration large,
tranquil, and profound like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and
boundless like the blue heaven! Visits from the Muse Urania, who
traces around the foreheads of those she loves the phosphorescent
nimbus of contemplative power, and who pours into their hearts the
tranquil intoxication, if not the authority of genius,—moments of
irresistible intuition in which a man feels himself great as the
universe and calm like God!... What hours, what memories!”