“Is not mind the universal virtuality, the universe latent? If so, its
zero would be the germ of the infinite, which is expressed
mathematically by the double zero (00).”
Or, to let our philosopher develop himself at more length, let us take
this return to the zero, which Mrs. Humphry Ward prefers here to render
by _nothingness_:—
“This psychological reinvolution is an anticipation of death; it
represents the life beyond the grave, the return to Scheol, the soul
fading into the world of ghosts or descending into the region of _Die
Mütter_; it implies the simplification of the individual who, allowing
all the accidents of personality to evaporate, exists henceforward
only in the invisible state, the state of point, of potentiality, of
pregnant nothingness. Is not this the true definition of mind? is not
mind, dissociated from space and time, just this? Its development,
past or future, is contained in it just as a curve is contained in its
algebraical formula. This nothing is an all. This _punctum_ without
dimensions is a _punctum saliens_.”
French critics throw up their hands in dismay at the violence which the
Germanized Amiel, propounding his speculative philosophy, often does to
the French language. My objection is rather that such speculative
philosophy, as that of which I have been quoting specimens has no value,
is perfectly futile. And Amiel’s Journal contains far too much of it.
What is futile we may throw aside; but when Amiel tells us of his
“protean nature essentially metamorphosable, polarizable, and virtual,”
when he tells us of his longing for “totality,” we must listen, although
these phrases may in France, as M. Paul Bourget says, “raise a shudder
in a humanist trained on Livy and Pascal.” But these phrases stood for
ideas which did practically rule, in a great degree, Amiel’s life, which
he often develops not only with great subtlety, but also with force,
clearness, and eloquence, making it both easy and interesting to us to
follow him. But still, when we have the ideas present before us, I shall
ask, what is their value, what does Amiel obtain in them for the service
of either himself or other people?
Let us take first what, adopting his own phrase, we may call his
“bedazzlement with the infinitê,” his thirst for “totality.” _Omnis
determinatio est negatio._ Amiel has the gift and the bent for making
his soul “the capacity for all form, not _a_ soul but _the_ soul.” He
finds it easier and more natural “to be _man_ than _a_ man.” His
permanent instinct is to be “a subtle and fugitive spirit which no base
can absorb or fix entirely.” It costs him an effort to affirm his own
personality: “the infinite draws me to it, the _Henosis_ of Plotinus
intoxicates me like a philter.”
It intoxicates him until the thought of absorption and extinction, the
_Nirvâna_ of Buddhism, becomes his thought of refuge:—
“The individual life is a nothing ignorant of itself, and as soon as
this nothing knows itself, individual life is abolished in principle.
For as soon as the illusion vanishes, Nothingness resumes its eternal
sway, the suffering of life is over, error has disappeared, time and
form have for this enfranchised individuality ceased to be; the
colored air-bubble has burst in the infinite space, and the misery of
thought has sunk to rest in the changeless repose of all—embracing
Nothing.”
With this bedazement with the infinite and this drift towards Buddhism
comes the impatience with all production, with even poetry and art
themselves, because of their necessary limits and imperfection:—
“Composition demands a concentration, decision, and pliancy which I no
longer possess. I cannot fuse together materials and ideas. If we are
to give anything a form we must, so to speak, be the tyrants of it. We
must treat our subject brutally and not be always trembling lest we
should be doing it a wrong. We must be able to transmute and absorb it
into our own substance. This sort of confident effrontery is beyond
me; my whole nature tends to that impersonality which respects and
subordinates itself to the object; it is love of truth which holds me
back from concluding and deciding.”
The desire for the all, the impatience with what is partial and limited,
the fascination of the infinite, are the topics of page after page in
the Journal. It is a prosaic mind which has never been in contact with
ideas of this sort, never felt their charm. They lend themselves well to
poetry, but what are we to say of their value as ideas to be lived with,
dilated on, made the governing ideas of life? Except for use in passing,
and with the power to dismiss them again, they are unprofitable.
Shelley’s
“Life like a dome of many-colored glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity
Until death tramples it to fragments”
has value as a splendid image nobly introduced in a beautiful and
impassioned poem. But Amiel’s “colored air-bubble,” as a positive piece
of “speculative intuition,” has no value whatever. Nay, the thoughts
which have positive truth and value, the thoughts to be lived with and
dwelt upon, the thoughts which are a real acquisition for our minds, are
precisely thoughts which counteract the “vague aspiration and
indeterminate desire” possessing Amiel and filling his Journal: they are
thoughts insisting on the need of limit, the feasibility of performance.
Goethe says admirably—
“Wer grosses will muss sich zusammenraffen:
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.”
“He who will do great things must pull himself together: it is in
working within limits that the master comes out.” Buffon says not less
admirably—
“Tout sujet est un; et quelque vaste qu’il soit, il peut être renfermé
dans un seul discours.”
“Every subject is one; and however vast it may be is capable of being
contained in a single discourse.” The ideas to live with, the ideas of
sterling value to us, are, I repeat, ideas of this kind: ideas staunchly
counteracting and reducing the power of the infinite and indeterminate,
not paralyzing us with it.
And indeed we have not to go beyond Amiel himself for proof of this.
Amiel was paralyzed by living in these ideas of “vague aspiration and
indeterminate desire,” of “confounding his personal life in the general
life,” by feeding on these ideas, treating them as august and precious,
and filling hundreds of pages of Journal with them. He was paralyzed by
it, he became impotent and miserable. And he knew it, and tells us of it
himself with a power of analysis and with a sad eloquence which to me
are much more interesting and valuable than his philosophy of Maïa and
the Great Wheel. “By your natural tendency,” he says to himself, “you
arrive at disgust with life, despair, pessimism.” And again: “Melancholy
outlook on all sides. Disgust with myself.” And again: “I cannot deceive
myself as to the fate in store for me: increasing isolation, inward
disappointment, enduring regrets, a melancholy neither to be consoled
nor confessed, a mournful old age, a slow agony, a death in the desert.”
And all this misery by his own fault, his own mistakes. “To live is to
conquer incessantly; one must have the courage to be happy. I turn in a
vicious circle; I have never had clear sight of my true vocation.”
I cannot, therefore, fall in with that particular line of admiration
which critics, praising Amiel’s Journal, have commonly followed. I
cannot join in celebrating his prodigies of speculative intuition, the
glow and splendor of his beatific vision of absolute knowledge, the
marvelous pages in which his deep and vast philosophic thought is laid
bare, the secret of his sublime malady is expressed. I hesitate to admit
that all this part of the Journal has even a very profound pyschological
interest: its interest is rather pathological. In reading it we are not
so much pursuing a study of psychology as a study of mental pathology.
But the Journal reveals a side in Amiel which his critics, so far as I
have seen, have hardly noticed, a side of real power, originality, and
value. He says himself that he never had clear sight of his true
vocation: well, his true vocation, it seems to me, was that of a
literary critic. Here he is admirable: M. Scherer was a true friend when
he offered to introduce him to an editor, and suggested an article on
Uhland. There is hardly a literary criticism in these two volumes which
is not masterly, and which does not make one desire more of the same
kind. And not Amiel’s literary criticism only, but his criticism of
society, politics, national character, religion, is in general well
informed, just, and penetrating in an eminent degree. Any one single
page of this criticism is worth, in my opinion, a hundred of Amiel’s
pages about the Infinite Illusion and the Great Wheel. It is to this
side in Amiel that I desire now to draw attention. I would have
abstained from writing about him if I had only to disparage and to find
fault, only to say that he had been overpraised, and that his dealings
with Maïa seemed to me profitable neither for himself nor for others.
Let me first take Amiel as a critic of literature, and of the literature
which he naturally knew best, French literature. Hear him as a critic on
the best of critics, Sainte-Beuve, of whose death (1869) he had just
heard:—
“The fact is, Sainte-Beuve leaves a greater void behind him than
either Béranger or Lamartine; their greatness was already distant,
historical; he was still helping us to think. The true critic supplies
all the world with a basis. He represents the public judgment, that is
to say, the public reason, the touchstone, the scales, the crucible,
which tests the value of each man and the merit of each work.
Infallibility of judgment is perhaps rarer than anything else, so fine
a balance of qualities does it demand—qualities both natural and
acquired, qualities of both mind and heart. What years of labor, what
study and comparison, are needed to bring the critical judgment to
maturity! Like Plato’s sage, it is only at fifty that the critic is
risen to the true height of his literary priesthood, or, to put it
less pompously, of his social function. Not till then has he compassed
all modes of being, and made every shade of appreciation his own. And
Saint-Beuve joined to this infinitely refined culture a prodigious
memory and an incredible multitude of facts and anecdotes stored up
for the service of his thought.”
The criticism is so sound, so admirably put, and so charming, that one
wishes Sainte-Beuve could have read it himself.
Try Amiel next on the touchstone afforded by that “half genius, half
charlatan,” Victor Hugo:—
“I have been again looking through Victor Hugo’s _Paris_ (1867). For
ten years event after event has given the lie to the prophet, but the
confidence of the prophet in his own imaginings is not therefore a
whit diminished. Humility and common sense are only fit for
Lilliputians. Victor Hugo superbly ignores everything which he has not
foreseen. He does not know that pride limits the mind, and that a
limitless pride is a littleness of soul. If he could but learn to rank
himself with other men and France with other nations, he would see
things more truly, and would not fall into his insane exaggerations,
his extravagant oracles. But proportion and justness his chords will
never know. He is vowed to the Titanic; his gold is always mixed with
lead, his insight with childishness, his reason with madness. He
cannot be simple; like the blaze of a house on fire, his light is
blinding. In short, he astonishes but provokes, he stirs but annoys.
His note is always half or two-thirds false, and that is why he
perpetually makes us feel uncomfortable. The great poet in him cannot
get clear of the charlatan. A few pricks of Voltaire’s irony would
have made the inflation of this genius collapse, and rendered him
stronger by rendering him saner. It is a public misfortune that the
most powerful poet of France should not have better understood his
_rôle_, and that, unlike the Hebrew prophets who chastised because
they loved, he flatters his fellow-citizens from system and from
pride. France is the world, Paris is France, Hugo is Paris. Bow down
and worship, ye nations!”
Finally, we will hear Amiel on a consummate and supreme French classic,
as perfect as Hugo is flawed, La Fontaine:—
“Went through my La Fontaine yesterday, and remarked his omissions....
He has not an echo of chivalry haunting him. His French history dates
from Louis XIV. His geography extends in reality but a few square
miles, and reaches neither the Rhine nor the Loire, neither the
mountains nor the sea. He never invents his subjects, but indolently
takes them ready-made from elsewhere. But with all this, what an
adorable writer, what a painter, what an observer, what a master of
the comic and the satirical, what a teller of a story! I am never
tired of him, though I know half his fables by heart. In the matter of
vocabulary, turns of expression, tones, idioms, his language is
perhaps the richest of the great period, for it combines skilfully the
archaic with the classical, the Gaulish element with what is French.
Variety, finesse, sly fun, sensibility, rapidity, conciseness,
suavity, grace, gaiety—when necessary nobleness, seriousness,
grandeur—you find everything in our fabulist. And the happy epithets,
and the telling proverbs, and the sketches dashed off and the
unexpected audacities, and the point driven well home! One cannot say
what he has not, so many diverse aptitudes he has.
“Compare his _Woodcutter and Death_ with Boileau’s, and you can
measure the prodigious difference between the artist and the critic
who wanted to teach him better. La Fontaine brings visibly before you
the poor peasant under the monarchy, Boileau but exhibits a drudge
sweating under his load. The first is a historic witness, the second a
school-versifier. La Fontaine enables you to reconstruct the whole
society of his age; the pleasant old soul from Champagne, with his
animals, turns out to be the one and only Homer of France.
“His weak side is his epicureanism, with its tinge of grossness. This,
no doubt, was what made Lamartine dislike him. The religious string is
wanting to his lyre, he has nothing which shows him to have known
either Christianity or the high tragedies of the soul. Kind Nature is
his goddess, Horace his prophet, and Montaigne his gospel. In other
words, his horizon is that of the Renascence. This islet of paganism
in the midst of a Catholic society is very curious; the paganism is
perfectly simple and frank.”
These are but notes, jottings in his Journal and Amiel passed from them
to broodings over the infinite, and personality, and totality. Probably
the literary criticism which he did so well, and for which he shows a
true vocation, gave him nevertheless but little pleasure because he did
it thus fragmentarily, and by fits and starts. To do it thoroughly, to
make his fragments into wholes, to fit them for coming before the
public, composition with its toils and limits was necessary. Toils and
limits composition indeed has; yet all composition is a kind of
creation, creation gives, as I have already said, pleasure, and when
successful and sustained, more than pleasure joy. Amiel, had he tried
the experiment with literary criticism, where lay his true vocation,
would have found it so. Sainte-Beuve, whom he so much admires, would
have been the most miserable of men if his production had been but a
volume or two of middling poems and a journal. But Sainte-Beuve’s motto,
as Amiel himself notices, was that of the Emperor Severus: _Laboremus_.
“Work,” Sainte-Beuve confesses to a friend, “is my sore burden, but it
is also my great resource. I eat my heart out when I am not up to the
neck in work; there you have the secret of the life I lead.” If M.
Scherer’s introduction to the _Revue Germanique_ could but have been
used, if Amiel could but have written the article on Uhland, and
followed it up by plenty of articles more!
I have quoted largely from Amiel’s literary criticism, because this side
of him has, so far as I have observed, received so little attention and
yet deserves attention so eminently. But his more general criticism,
too, shows, as I have said, the same high qualities as his criticism of
authors and books. I must quote one or two of his aphorisms; _L’esprit
sert bien à tout, mais ne suffit à rien_: “Wits are of use for
everything, sufficient for nothing.” _Une société vit de sa foi et se
développe par la science_: “A society lives on its faith and develops
itself by science.” _L’État liberal est irréalisable avec une religion
antilibérale, et presque irréalisable avec l’absence de religion_:
“Liberal communities are impossible with an anti-liberal religion, and
almost impossible with the absence of religion.” But epigrammatic
sentences of this sort are perhaps not so very difficult to produce, in
French at any rate. Let us take Amiel when he has room and verge enough
to show what he can really say which is important about society,
religion, national life and character. We have seen what an influence
his years passed in Germany had upon him: we have seen how severely he
judges Victor Hugo’s faults; the faults of the French nation at large he
judges with a like severity. But what a fine and just perception does
the following passage show of the deficiencies of Germany, the advantage
which the western nations have in their more finished civilization:—
“It is in the novel that the average vulgarity of German society, and
its inferiority to the societies of France and England are most
clearly visible. The notion of a thing’s _jarring on the taste_ is
wanting to German æsthetics. Their elegance knows nothing of grace;
they have no sense of the enormous distance between distinction
(gentlemanly, ladylike) and their stiff _Vornehmlichkeit_. Their
imagination lacks style, training, education and knowledge of the
world; it is stamped with an ill-bred air even in its Sunday clothes.
The race is practical and intelligent, but common and ill-mannered.
Ease, amiability, manners, wit, animation, dignity, charm, are
qualities which belong to others.
“Will that inner freedom of soul, that profound harmony of all the
faculties, which I have so often observed among the best Germans, ever
come to the surface? Will the conquerors of to-day ever civilize their
forms of life? It is by their future novels that we shall be able to
judge. As soon as the German novel can give us quite good society, the
Germans will be in the raw stage no longer.”
And this pupil of Berlin, this devourer of German books, this victim,
say the French critics, to the contagion of German style, after three
hours, one day, of a _Geschichte der Æsthetik in Deutschland_, breaks
out:—
“Learning and even thought are not everything. A little _esprit_,
point, vivacity, imagination, grace, would do no harm. Do these
pedantic books leave a single image or sentence, a single striking or
new fact, in the memory when one lays them down! No, nothing but
fatigue and confusion. Oh, for clearness, terseness, brevity! Diderot,
Voltaire, or even Galiani! A short article by Sainte-Beuve, Scherer,
Renan, Victor Cherbuliez, gives one more pleasure, and makes one
ponder and reflect more than a thousand of these German pages crammed
to the margin and showing the work itself rather than its result. The
Germans heap the faggots for the pile, the French bring the fire.
Spare me your lucubrations, give me facts or ideas. Keep your vats,
your must, your dregs, to yourselves; I want wine fully made, wine
which will sparkle in the glass, and kindle my spirits instead of
oppressing them.”
Amiel may have been led away _deteriora sequi_: he may have Germanized
until he has become capable of the verb _dépersonnaliser_ and the noun
_réimplication_; but after all, his heart is in the right place: _videt
meliora probatque_. He remains at bottom the man who said: _Le livre
serait mon ambition._ He adds, to be sure, that it would be _son
ambition_, “if ambition were not vanity, and vanity of vanities.”
Yet this disenchanted brooder, “full of a tranquil disgust at the
futility of our ambitions, the void of our existence,” bedazzled with
the infinite, can observe the world and society with consummate keenness
and shrewdness, and at the same time with a delicacy which to the man of
the world is in general wanting. Is it possible to analyze _le grand
monde_, high society, as the Old World knows it and America knows it
not, more acutely than Amiel does in what follows?—
“In society people are expected to behave as if they lived on ambrosia
and concerned themselves with no interests but such as are noble.
Care, need, passion, do not exist. All realism is suppressed as
brutal. In a word, what is called _le grand monde_ gives itself for
the moment the flattering illusion that it is moving in an ethereal
atmosphere and breathing the air of the gods. For this reason all
vehemence, any cry of nature, all real suffering, all heedless
familiarity, any genuine sign of passion, are startling and
distasteful in this delicate _milieu_, and at once destroy the
collective work, the cloud-palace, the imposing architectural creation
raised by common consent. It is like the shrill cock-crow which breaks
the spell of all enchantments, and puts the fairies to flight. These
select gatherings produce without intending it a sort of concert for
eye and ear, an improvised work of art. By the instinctive
collaboration of everybody concerned, wit and taste hold festival, and
the associations of reality are exchanged for the associations of
imagination. So understood, society is a form of poetry; the
cultivated classes deliberately recompose the idyll of the past, and
the buried world of Astræa. Paradox or not, I believe that these
fugitive attempts to reconstruct a dream, whose only end is beauty,
represent confused reminiscences of an age of gold haunting the human
heart; or rather, aspirations towards a harmony of things which
every-day reality denies to us, and of which art alone gives us a
glimpse.”
I remember reading in an American newspaper a solemn letter by an
excellent republican, asking what were a shopman’s or a laborer’s
feelings when he walked through Eaton or Chatsworth. Amiel will tell
him: they are “reminiscences of an age of gold haunting the human heart,
aspirations towards a harmony of things which every-day reality denies
to us.” I appeal to my friend the author of _Triumphant Democracy_
himself, to say whether these are to be had in walking through
Pittsburg.
Indeed it is by contrast with American life that _Nirvâna_ appears to
Amiel so desirable:—
“For the Americans, life means devouring, incessant activity. They
must win gold, predominance, power; they must crush rivals, subdue
nature. They have their heart set on the means, and never for an
instant think of the end. They confound being with individual being,
and the expansion of self with happiness. This means that they do not
live by the soul, that they ignore the immutable and eternal, bustle
at the circumference of their existence because they cannot penetrate
to its center. They are restless, eager, positive, because they are
superficial. To what end all this stir, noise, greed, struggle? It is
all a mere being stunned and deafened!”
Space is failing me, but I must yet find room for a less indirect
criticism of democracy than the foregoing remarks on American life:—
“_Each function to the most worthy_: this maxim is the professed rule
of all constitutions, and serves to test them. Democracy is not
forbidden to apply it; but Democracy rarely does apply it, because she
holds, for example, that the most worthy man is the man who pleases
her, whereas he who pleases her is not always the most worthy; and
because she supposes that reason guides the masses, whereas in reality
they are most commonly led by passion. And in the end every falsehood
has to be expiated, for truth always takes its revenge.”
What publicists and politicians have to learn is, that “the ultimate
ground upon which every civilization rests is the average morality of
the masses and a sufficient amount of practical righteousness.” But
where does duty find its inspiration and sanctions? In religion. And
what does Amiel think of the traditional religion of Christendom, the
Christianity of the Churches? He tells us repeatedly; but a month or two
before his death, with death in full view, he tells us with peculiar
impressiveness:—
“The whole Semitic dramaturgy has come to seem to me a work of the
imagination. The apostolic documents have changed in value and meaning
to my eyes. The distinction between belief and truth has grown clearer
and clearer to me. Religious psychology has become a simple
phenomenon, and has lost its fixed and absolute value. The apologetics
of Pascal, Leibnitz, Secrétan, appear to me no more convincing than
those of the Middle Age, for they assume that which is in question—a
revealed doctrine, a definite and unchangeable Christianity.”
Is it possible, he asks, to receive at this day the common doctrine of a
Divine Providence directing all the circumstances of our life, and
consequently inflicting upon us our miseries as means of education?
“Is this heroic faith compatible with our actual knowledge of the laws
of nature? Hardly. But what this faith makes objective we may take
subjectively. The moral being may moralize his suffering in turning
the natural fact to account for the education of his inner man. What
he cannot change he calls the will of God, and to will what God wills
brings him peace.”
But can a religion, Amiel asks again, without miracles, without
unverifiable mystery, be efficacious, have influence with the many? And
again he answers:—
“Pious fiction is still fiction. Truth has superior rights. The world
must adapt itself to truth, not truth to the world. Copernicus upset
the astronomy of the Middle Age; so much the worse for the astronomy.
The Everlasting Gospel is revolutionizing the Churches; what does it
matter?”
This is water to our mill, as the Germans say, indeed. But I have come
even thus late in the day to speak of Amiel, not because I found him
supplying water for any particular mill, either mine or any other, but
because it seemed to me that by a whole important side he was eminently
worth knowing, and that to this side of him the public, here in England
at any rate, had not had its attention sufficiently drawn. If in the
seventeen thousand pages of the Journal there are many pages still
unpublished in which Amiel exercises his true vocation of critic, of
literary critic more especially, let his friends give them to us, let M.
Scherer introduce them to us, let Mrs. Humphry Ward translate them for
us. But _sat patriæ Priamoque datum_: Maïa has had her full share of
space already: I will not ask for a word more about the infinite
illusion, or the double zero, or the Great Wheel.