About a year and a half ago I chanced for the first time to read
Amiel's book, _Fragments d'un Journal Intime_. I was struck by the
significance and profundity of its contents, the beauty of the
exposition, and, above all, the sincerity of this book. As I read
it, I marked down the passages which more particularly startled
me. My daughter undertook to translate these passages, and thus
were formed the extracts from the _Fragments d'un Journal Intime_,
that is, the extracts from the extracts of Amiel's diary in several
volumes not yet printed, which he conducted from day to day for the
period of thirty years.
Henri Amiel was born in Geneva in 1821 and was early left an
orphan. Having graduated from the higher courses in Geneva, Amiel
went abroad and there passed several years at the universities of
Heidelberg and Berlin. Upon returning in 1849 to his home, he at
the age of twenty-eight years received in the Geneva Academy a
professorship, at first of æsthetics, and later of philosophy, and
this he held until his death.
Amiel's whole life was passed in Geneva, where he died in 1881,
having in no way risen above the large number of the most ordinary
of professors, who, mechanically compiling their lectures from the
latest books in their particular specialties, just as mechanically
transmit them to their hearers, and from a still greater number
of poets without contents, who furnish these quite useless, but
still marketable wares to periodicals that are published in tens of
thousands of copies.
Amiel did not have the slightest success either in the learned or
in the literary field. As he was approaching old age, he wrote of
himself as follows:
"What have I been able to extract from those gifts which were
bestowed upon me, from the peculiar conditions of my life of half
a century? Are all my collected scribblings, my correspondence,
these thousands of intimate pages, my lectures, my articles, my
verses, my different notes anything but dry leaves? To whom and
for what have I ever been of any use? And will my name live a day
longer than I myself, and will it have any significance for any one?
Insignificant, empty life! _Vie nulle._"
About Amiel and his diary two well-known French writers, his friend,
the well-known critic, E. Scherer, and the philosopher, Caro, have
written after his death. Interesting is that sympathetic, but
partially patronizing air with which both these authors treat Amiel,
when they regret that he was deprived of those qualities which are
necessary for the performance of real work. And yet, the real work
of these two writers--the critical labours of E. Scherer and the
philosophic labours of Caro--will hardly much outlive their authors,
while the accidental, not real work of Amiel, his diary, will always
remain a live book, necessary for men and influencing them for the
good.
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure in which
he reveals to us the inner working of his soul, of course, if this
work is new, and not previously accomplished. No matter what he may
write, a drama, a learned work, a story, a philosophic treatise, a
lyric poem, a criticism, a satire, it is only this inner work of his
soul which is dear to us, and not the architectural structure in
which he, for the most part, and I think, always, distorting them,
clothes his thoughts and feelings.
Everything which Amiel poured into a ready mould, his lectures,
treatises, poems, was completely dead; but his diary, where, without
thinking of the form, he spoke only to himself, full of life,
wisdom, instruction, consolation, will for ever remain one of the
best books accidentally left to us by such men as Marcus Aurelius,
Pascal, Epictetus.
Pascal says: "There are but three kinds of people: those who, having
found God, serve Him; those who, not having found Him, are busy
seeking Him, and those who, not having found Him, none the less do
not seek Him.
"The first are sensible and happy, the last are senseless and
unhappy, the second are unhappy, but sensible."
I think that the difference established by Pascal between the first
and the second, between those who, as he says in another passage,
having found God, serve Him with their whole hearts, and those who,
not having found Him, seek Him with their whole hearts, is not only
not so great as he thought, but does not even exist. I think that
those who with their whole hearts and suffering ("_en gemissant_,"
as Pascal says) seek God, already serve Him. They serve Him with
this, that with these sufferings of their seeking they lay out
and open for others the road to God, as Pascal himself did in his
thoughts, and as Amiel did all his life in his diary.
Amiel's whole life, as it is presented to us in this diary, is full
of this seeking after God, which is suffering with the whole heart.
The contemplation of this seeking is the more instructive in that
it never ceases to be a seeking, never stops, never passes into the
consciousness of the acquisition of truth and into instruction.
Amiel says neither to himself nor to others: "I now know the
truth,--hear me!" On the contrary, it seems to him, as is proper
for him who sincerely seeks the truth, that the more he finds out,
the more he has still left to know, and he, without stopping, does
everything he can for the purpose of finding out more and more of
the truth, and so constantly feels his ignorance. He constantly
dwells upon what Christianity and the condition of a Christian
ought to be, without for a moment dwelling on the thought that
Christianity is precisely what he professes, and that he himself
personifies the condition of a Christian. And yet his whole diary
is full of expressions of the profoundest Christian understanding
and feeling. These expressions act most powerfully on the reader on
account of their very unconsciousness and sincerity. He speaks with
himself, without thinking that he is heard, without trying to appear
sure of what he is not sure, without concealing his suffering and
his seeking.
It is as though we were present, without the master's knowledge, at
the most secret, profound, impassioned inner work of the soul, which
is generally concealed from the view of an outsider.
For this reason it is possible to find many statelier and more
eloquent expressions of Amiel's religious feeling, but it is hard
to find such as are more intimate and more heart-stirring. Shortly
before his death, when he knew that his disease might any day end in
strangulation, he wrote:
"When you no longer reflect that you have tens of years, one year,
a month free before yourself, when you already count tens of hours,
and the future night bears in itself the menace of the unexplored,
it is evident that you decline art, science, politics, and are
satisfied with conversing with yourself, and that is possible until
the very end. This inward conversation is the only thing which
is left to him who is sentenced to death and whose execution is
delayed. He (this condemned man) concentrates upon himself. He no
longer emits rays, but only converses with his soul. He no longer
acts, but only contemplates.... Like a hare, he returns to his lair
to die; and this lair is his conscience, his thought. So long as he
can hold a pen and has a moment of solitude, he concentrates himself
before this echo of himself and holds converse with God.
"This, by the way, is not a moral investigation, a repentance, a
call. It is only the 'amen' of submission.
"My child, give me your heart.
"Renunciation and agreement are less difficult for me than for
others, because I want nothing. I should only want not to suffer.
Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane asked for the same. Let us do
the same that He did. 'Nevertheless not as I will but as Thou
wilt,'--and we will wait."
Such he is on the day before his death. He is not less sincere and
serious throughout his whole diary, in spite of the elegance, and
now and then choiceness of his diction, which became a habit with
him. In the course of all the thirty years of his diary he feels
that we all so thoroughly forget, that we are all condemned to death
and that our execution is only delayed. And it is for this very
reason that this book is so sincere, serious, and useful.
_1893._