“My path lay beside the green waters of the Thiele. Feeling inclined
to muse, and finding the night so warm that there was no hardship in
being all night out of doors, I took the road to Saint Blaise. I
descended a steep bank, and got upon the shore of the lake where its
ripple came up and expired. The air was calm; every one was at rest; I
remained there for hours. Towards morning the moon shed over the earth
and waters the ineffable melancholy of her last gleams. Nature seems
unspeakably grand, when, plunged in a long reverie, one hears the
rippling of the waters upon a solitary strand, in the calm of a night
still enkindled and luminous with the setting moon.
“Sensibility beyond utterance, charm and torment of our vain years;
vast consciousness of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and
everywhere impenetrable; all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom,
delicious self-abandonment—everything that a mortal heart can contain
of life-weariness and yearning, I felt it all, I experienced it all,
in this memorable night. I have made a grave step towards the age of
decline, I have swallowed up ten years of life at once. Happy the
simple, whose heart is always young!”
No translation can render adequately the cadence of diction, the “dying
fall” of reveries like those of Sénancour or Rousseau. But even in a
translation we must surely perceive that the magic of style is with
Sénancour’s feeling for nature, not Amiel’s; and in the original this is
far more manifest still.
Magic of style is creative: its possessor himself creates, and he
inspires and enables his reader in some sort to create after him. And
creation gives the sense of life and joy; hence its extraordinary value.
But eloquence may exist without magic of style, and this eloquence,
accompanying thoughts of rare worth and depth, may heighten their effect
greatly. And M. Scherer says that Amiel’s speculative philosophy is “on
a far other scale of vastness” than Sénancour’s, and therefore he gives
the preference to the eloquence of Amiel, which clothes and conveys this
vaster philosophy. Amiel was no doubt greatly Sénancour’s superior in
culture and instruction generally; in philosophical reading and what is
called philosophical thought he was immensely his superior. My sense for
philosophy, I know, is as far from satisfying Mr. Frederic Harrison as
my sense for Hugo’s poetry is from satisfying Mr. Swinburne. But I am
too old to change and too hardened to hide what I think; and when I am
presented with philosophical speculations and told that they are “on a
high scale of vastness,” I persist in looking closely at them and in
honestly asking myself what I find to be their positive value. And we
get from Amiel’s powers of “speculative intuition” things like this—
“Created spirits in the accomplishment of their destinies tend, so to
speak, to form constellations and milky ways within the empyrean of
the divinity; in becoming gods, they surround the throne of the
sovereign with a sparkling court.”