Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel Part 1

Amiel's Journal.

by Henri-Frederic Amiel.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.

In this second edition of the English translation of Amiel's "Journal Intime," I have inserted a good many new pa.s.sages, taken from the last French edition (_Cinquieme edition, revue et augmentee_.) But I have not translated all the fresh material to be found in that edition nor have I omitted certain sections of the Journal which in these two recent volumes have been omitted by their French editors. It would be of no interest to give my reasons for these variations at length. They depend upon certain differences between the English and the French public, which are more readily felt than explained. Some of the pa.s.sages which I have left untranslated seemed to me to overweight the introspective side of the Journal, already so full--to overweight it, at any rate, for English readers. Others which I have retained, though they often relate to local names and books, more or less unfamiliar to the general public, yet seemed to me valuable as supplying some of that surrounding detail, that setting, which helps one to understand a life. Besides, we English are in many ways more akin to Protestant and Puritan Geneva than the French readers to whom the original Journal primarily addresses itself, and some of the entries I have kept have probably, by the nature of things, more savor for us than for them.

M. A. W.

PREFACE.

This translation of Amiel's "Journal Intime" is primarily addressed to those whose knowledge of French, while it may be sufficient to carry them with more or less complete understanding through a novel or a newspaper, is yet not enough to allow them to understand and appreciate a book containing subtle and complicated forms of expression. I believe there are many such to be found among the reading public, and among those who would naturally take a strong interest in such a life and mind as Amiel's, were it not for the barrier of language. It is, at any rate, in the hope that a certain number of additional readers may be thereby attracted to the "Journal Intime" that this translation of it has been undertaken.

The difficulties of the translation have been sometimes considerable, owing, first of all, to those elliptical modes of speech which a man naturally employs when he is writing for himself and not for the public, but which a translator at all events is bound in some degree to expand.

Every here and there Amiel expresses himself in a kind of shorthand, perfectly intelligible to a Frenchman, but for which an English equivalent, at once terse and clear, is hard to find. Another difficulty has been his constant use of a technical philosophical language, which, according to his French critics, is not French--even philosophical French--but German. Very often it has been impossible to give any other than a literal rendering of such pa.s.sages, if the thought of the original was to be preserved; but in those cases where a choice was open to me, I have preferred the more literary to the more technical expression; and I have been encouraged to do so by the fact that Amiel, when he came to prepare for publication a certain number of "Pensees,"

extracted from the Journal, and printed at the end of a volume of poems published in 1853, frequently softened his phrases, so that sentences which survive in the Journal in a more technical form are to be found in a more literary form in the "Grains de Mil."

In two or three cases--not more, I think--I have allowed myself to transpose a sentence bodily, and in a few instances I have added some explanatory words to the text, which wherever the addition was of any importance, are indicated by square brackets.

My warmest thanks are due to my friend and critic, M. Edmond Scherer, from whose valuable and interesting study, prefixed to the French Journal, as well as from certain materials in his possession which he has very kindly allowed me to make use of, I have drawn by far the greater part of the biographical material embodied in the Introduction.

M. Scherer has also given me help and advice through the whole process of translation--advice which his scholarly knowledge of English has made especially worth having.

In the translation of the more technical philosophical pa.s.sages I have been greatly helped by another friend, Mr. Bernard Bosanquet, Fellow of University College, Oxford, the translator of Lotze, of whose care and pains in the matter I cherish a grateful remembrance.

But with all the help that has been so freely given me, not only by these friends but by others, I confide the little book to the public with many a misgiving! May it at least win a few more friends and readers here and there for one who lived alone, and died sadly persuaded that his life had been a barren mistake; whereas, all the while--such is the irony of things--he had been in reality working out the mission a.s.signed him in the spiritual economy, and faithfully obeying the secret mandate which had impressed itself upon his youthful consciousness: "_Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so_."

MARY A. WARD.

INTRODUCTION

It was in the last days of December, 1882, that the first volume of Henri Frederic Amiel's "Journal Intime" was published at Geneva. The book, of which the general literary world knew nothing prior to its appearance, contained a long and remarkable Introduction from the pen of M. Edmond Scherer, the well-known French critic, who had been for many years one of Amiel's most valued friends, and it was prefaced also by a little _Avertiss.e.m.e.nt_, in which the "Editors"--that is to say, the Genevese friends to whom the care and publication of the Journal had been in the first instance entrusted--described in a few reserved and sober words the genesis and objects of the publication. Some thousands of sheets of Journal, covering a period of more than thirty years, had come into the hands of Amiel's literary heirs. "They were written," said the _Avertiss.e.m.e.nt_, "with several ends in view. Amiel recorded in them his various occupations, and the incidents of each day. He preserved in them his psychological observations, and the impressions produced on him by books. But his Journal was, above all, the confidant of his most private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby the thinker became conscious of his own inner life; a safe shelter wherein his questionings of fate and the future, the voice of grief, of self-examination and confession, the soul's cry for inward peace, might make themselves freely heard.

"... In the directions concerning his papers which he left behind him, Amiel expressed the wish that his literary executors should publish those parts of the Journal which might seem to them to possess either interest as thought or value as experience. The publication of this volume is the fulfillment of this desire. The reader will find in it, _not a volume of Memoirs_, but the confidences of a solitary thinker, the meditations of a philosopher for whom the things of the soul were the sovereign realities of existence."

Thus modestly announced, the little volume made its quiet _debut_. It contained nothing, or almost nothing, of ordinary biographical material.

M. Scherer's Introduction supplied such facts as were absolutely necessary to the understanding of Amiel's intellectual history, but nothing more. Everything of a local or private character that could be excluded was excluded. The object of the editors in their choice of pa.s.sages for publication was declared to be simply "the reproduction of the moral and intellectual physiognomy of their friend," while M.

Scherer expressly disclaimed any biographical intentions, and limited his Introduction as far as possible to "a study of the character and thought of Amiel." The contents of the volume, then, were purely literary and philosophical; its prevailing tone was a tone of introspection, and the public which can admit the claims and overlook the inherent defects of introspective literature has always been a small one. The writer of the Journal had been during his lifetime wholly unknown to the general European public. In Geneva itself he had been commonly regarded as a man who had signally disappointed the hopes and expectations of his friends, whose reserve and indecision of character had in many respects spoiled his life, and alienated the society around him; while his professional lectures were generally p.r.o.nounced dry and unattractive, and the few volumes of poems which represented almost his only contributions to literature had nowhere met with any real cordiality of reception. Those concerned, therefore, in the publication of the first volume of the Journal can hardly have had much expectation of a wide success. Geneva is not a favorable starting-point for a French book, and it may well have seemed that not even the support of M.

Scherer's name would be likely to carry the volume beyond a small local circle.

But "wisdom is justified of her children!" It is now nearly three years since the first volume of the "Journal Intime" appeared; the impression made by it was deepened and extended by the publication of the second volume in 1884; and it is now not too much to say that this remarkable record of a life has made its way to what promises to be a permanent place in literature. Among those who think and read it is beginning to be generally recognized that another book has been added to the books which live--not to those, perhaps, which live in the public view, much discussed, much praised, the objects of feeling and of struggle, but to those in which a germ of permanent life has been deposited silently, almost secretly, which compel no homage and excite no rivalry, and which owe the place that the world half-unconsciously yields to them to nothing but that indestructible sympathy of man with man, that eternal answering of feeling to feeling, which is one of the great principles, perhaps the greatest principle, at the root of literature. M. Scherer naturally was the first among the recognized guides of opinion to attempt the placing of his friend's Journal. "The man who, during his lifetime, was incapable of giving us any deliberate or conscious work worthy of his powers, has now left us, after his death, a book which will not die. For the secret of Amiel's malady is sublime, and the expression of it wonderful." So ran one of the last paragraphs of the Introduction, and one may see in the sentences another instance of that courage, that reasoned rashness, which distinguishes the good from the mediocre critic. For it is as true now as it was in the days when La Bruyere rated the critics of his time for their incapacity to praise, and praise at once, that "the surest test of a man's critical power is his judgment of contemporaries." M. Renan, I think, with that exquisite literary sense of his, was the next among the authorities to mention Amiel's name with the emphasis it deserved. He quoted a pa.s.sage from the Journal in his Preface to the "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse,"

describing it as the saying "_d'un penseur distingue, M. Amiel de Geneve_." Since then M. Renan has devoted two curious articles to the completed Journal in the _Journal des Desbats_. The first object of these reviews, no doubt, was not so much the critical appreciation of Amiel as the development of certain paradoxes which have been haunting various corners of M. Renan's mind for several years past, and to which it is to be hoped he has now given expression with sufficient emphasis and _brusquerie_ to satisfy even his pa.s.sion for intellectual adventure.

Still, the rank of the book was fully recognized, and the first article especially contained some remarkable criticisms, to which we shall find occasion to recur. "In these two volumes of _pensees_," said M. Renan, "without any sacrifice of truth to artistic effect, we have both the perfect mirror of a modern mind of the best type, matured by the best modern culture, and also a striking picture of the sufferings which beset the sterility of genius. These two volumes may certainly be reckoned among the most interesting philosophical writings which have appeared of late years."

M. Caro's article on the first volume of the Journal, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ for February, 1883, may perhaps count as the first introduction of the book to the general cultivated public. He gave a careful a.n.a.lysis of the first half of the Journal--resumed eighteen months later in the same periodical on the appearance of the second volume--and, while protesting against what he conceived to be the general tendency and effect of Amiel's mental story, he showed himself fully conscious of the rare and delicate qualities of the new writer. "_La reverie a reussi a notre auteur_," he says, a little reluctantly--for M. Caro has his doubts as to the legitimacy of _reverie_; "_Il en aufait une oeuvure qui restera_." The same final judgment, accompanied by a very different series of comments, was p.r.o.nounced on the Journal a year later by M. Paul Bourget, a young and rising writer, whose article is perhaps chiefly interesting as showing the kind of effect produced by Amiel's thought on minds of a type essentially alien from his own. There is a leaven of something positive and austere, of something which, for want of a better name, one calls Puritanism, in Amiel, which escapes the author of "Une Cruelle Enigme."

But whether he has understood Amiel or no, M. Bourget is fully alive to the mark which the Journal is likely to make among modern records of mental history. He, too, insists that the book is already famous and will remain so; in the first place, because of its inexorable realism and sincerity; in the second, because it is the most perfect example available of a certain variety of the modern mind.

Among ourselves, although the Journal has attracted the attention of all who keep a vigilant eye on the progress of foreign literature, and although one or two appreciative articles have appeared on it in the magazines, the book has still to become generally known. One remarkable English testimony to it, however, must be quoted. Six months after the publication of the first volume, the late Mark Pattison, who since then has himself bequeathed to literature a strange and memorable fragment of autobiography, addressed a letter to M. Scherer as the editor of the "Journal Intime," which M. Scherer has since published, nearly a year after the death of the writer. The words have a strong and melancholy interest for all who knew Mark Pattison; and they certainly deserve a place in any attempt to estimate the impression already made on contemporary thought by the "Journal Intime."

"I wish to convey to you, sir," writes the rector of Lincoln, "the thanks of one at least of the public for giving the light to this precious record of a unique experience. I say unique, but I can vouch that there is in existence at least one other soul which has lived through the same struggles, mental and moral, as Amiel. In your pathetic description of the _volonte qui voudrait vouloir, mais impuissante a se fournir a elle-meme des motifs_--of the repugnance for all action--the soul petrified by the sentiment of the infinite, in all this I recognize myself. _Celui qui a dechiffre le secret de la vie finie, qui en a lu le mot, est sorti du monde des vivants, il est mort de fait_. I can feel forcibly the truth of this, as it applies to myself!

"It is not, however, with the view of thrusting my egotism upon you that I have ventured upon addressing you. As I cannot suppose that so peculiar a psychological revelation will enjoy a wide popularity, I think it a duty to the editor to a.s.sure him that there are persons in the world whose souls respond, in the depths of their inmost nature, to the cry of anguish which makes itself heard in the pages of these remarkable confessions."

So much for the place which the Journal--the fruit of so many years of painful thought and disappointed effort; seems to be at last securing for its author among those contemporaries who in his lifetime knew nothing of him. It is a natural consequence of the success of the book that the more it penetrates, the greater desire there is to know something more than its original editors and M. Scherer have yet told us about the personal history of the man who wrote it--about his education, his habits, and his friends. Perhaps some day this wish may find its satisfaction. It is an innocent one, and the public may even be said to have a kind of right to know as much as can be told it of the personalities which move and stir it. At present the biographical material available is extremely scanty, and if it were not for the kindness of M. Scherer, who has allowed the present writer access to certain ma.n.u.script material in his possession, even the sketch which follows, vague and imperfect as it necessarily is, would have been impossible.

[Footnote: Four or five articles on the subject of Amiel's life have been contributed to the _Revue Internationale_ by Mdlle. Berthe Vadier during the pa.s.sage of the present book through the press. My knowledge of them, however, came too late to enable me to make use of them for the purposes of the present introduction.]

Henri Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva in September, 1821. He belonged to one of the emigrant families, of which a more or less steady supply had enriched the little republic during the three centuries following the Reformation. Amiel's ancestors, like those of Sismondi, left Languedoc for Geneva after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. His father must have been a youth at the time when Geneva pa.s.sed into the power of the French republic, and would seem to have married and settled in the halcyon days following the restoration of Genevese independence in 1814. Amiel was born when the prosperity of Geneva was at its height, when the little state was administered by men of European reputation, and Genevese society had power to attract distinguished visitors and admirers from all parts. The veteran Bonstetten, who had been the friend of Gray and the a.s.sociate of Voltaire, was still talking and enjoying life in his _appartement_ overlooking the woods of La Batie. Rossi and Sismondi were busy lecturing to the Genevese youth, or taking part in Genevese legislation; an active scientific group, headed by the Pictets, De la Rive, and the botanist Auguste-Pyrame de Candolle, kept the country abreast of European thought and speculation, while the mixed nationality of the place--the blending in it of French keenness with Protestant enthusiasms and Protestant solidity--was beginning to find inimitable and characteristic expression in the stories of Topffer.

The country was governed by an aristocracy, which was not so much an aristocracy of birth as one of merit and intellect, and the moderate const.i.tutional ideas which represented the Liberalism of the post-Waterloo period were nowhere more warmly embraced or more intelligently carried out than in Geneva.

During the years, however, which immediately followed Amiel's birth, some signs of decadence began to be visible in this brilliant Genevese society. The generation which had waited for, prepared, and controlled, the Restoration of 1814, was falling into the background, and the younger generation, with all its respectability, wanted energy, above all, wanted leaders. The revolutionary forces in the state, which had made themselves violently felt during the civil turmoils of the period preceding the a.s.sembly of the French States General, and had afterward produced the miniature Terror which forced Sismondi into exile, had been for awhile laid to sleep by the events of 1814. But the slumber was a short one at Geneva as elsewhere, and when Rossi quitted the republic for France in 1833, he did so with a mind full of misgivings as to the political future of the little state which had given him--an exile and a Catholic--so generous a welcome in 1819. The ideas of 1830 were shaking the fabric and disturbing the equilibrium of the Swiss Confederation as a whole, and of many of the cantons composing it. Geneva was still apparently tranquil while her neighbors were disturbed, but no one looking back on the history of the republic, and able to measure the strength of the Radical force in Europe after the fall of Charles X., could have felt much doubt but that a few more years would bring Geneva also into the whirlpool of political change.

In the same year--1833--that M. Rossi had left Geneva, Henri Frederic Amiel, at twelve years old, was left orphaned of both his parents. They had died comparatively young--his mother was only just over thirty, and his father cannot have been much older. On the death of the mother the little family was broken up, the boy pa.s.sing into the care of one relative, his two sisters into that of another. Certain notes in M. Scherer's possession throw a little light here and there upon a childhood and youth which must necessarily have been a little bare and forlorn. They show us a sensitive, impressionable boy, of health rather delicate than robust, already disposed to a more or less melancholy and dreamy view of life, and showing a deep interest in those religious problems and ideas in which the air of Geneva has been steeped since the days of Calvin. The religious teaching which a Genevese lad undergoes prior to his admission to full church members.h.i.+p, made a deep impression on him, and certain mystical elements of character, which remained strong in him to the end, showed themselves very early. At the college or public school of Geneva, and at the academie, he would seem to have done only moderately as far as prizes and honors were concerned. We are told, however, that he read enormously, and that he was, generally speaking, inclined rather to make friends with men older than himself than with his contemporaries. He fell specially under the influence of Adolphe Pictet, a brilliant philologist and man of letters belonging to a well-known Genevese family, and in later life he was able, while reviewing one of M. Pictet's books, to give grateful expression to his sense of obligation.

Writing in 1856 he describes the effect produced in Geneva by M.

Pictet's Lectures on Aesthetics in 1840--the first ever delivered in a town in which the Beautiful had been for centuries regarded as the rival and enemy of the True. "He who is now writing," says Amiel, "was then among M. Pictet's youngest hearers. Since then twenty experiences of the same kind have followed each other in his intellectual experience, yet none has effaced the deep impression made upon him by these lectures.

Coming as they did at a favorable moment, and answering many a positive question and many a vague aspiration of youth, they exercised a decisive influence over his thought; they were to him an important step in that continuous initiation which we call life, they filled him with fresh intuitions, they brought near to him the horizons of his dreams. And, as always happens with a first-rate man, what struck him even more than the teaching was the teacher. So that this memory of 1840 is still dear and precious to him, and for this double service, which is not of the kind one forgets, the student of those days delights in expressing to the professor of 1840 his sincere and filial grat.i.tude."

Amiel's first literary production, or practically his first, seems to have been the result partly of these lectures, and partly of a visit to Italy which began in November, 1841. In 1842, a year which was spent entirely in Italy and Sicily, he contributed three articles on M. Rio's book, "L'Art Chretien," to the _Bibliotheque Universelle de Geneve_.

We see in them the young student conscientiously writing his first review--writing it at inordinate length, as young reviewers are apt to do, and treating the subject _ab ovo_ in a grave, pontifical way, which is a little nave and inexperienced indeed, but still promising, as all seriousness of work and purpose is promising. All that is individual in it is first of all the strong Christian feeling which much of it shows, and secondly, the tone of melancholy which already makes itself felt here and there, especially in one rather remarkable pa.s.sage. As to the Christian feeling, we find M. Rio described as belonging to "that n.o.ble school of men who are striving to rekindle the dead beliefs of France, to rescue Frenchmen from the camp of materialistic or pantheistic ideas, and rally them round that Christian banner which is the banner of true progress and true civilization." The Renaissance is treated as a disastrous but inevitable crisis, in which the idealism of the Middle Ages was dethroned by the naturalism of modern times--"The Renaissance perhaps robbed us of more than it gave us"--and so on. The tone of criticism is instructive enough to the student of Amiel's mind, but the product itself has no particular savor of its own. The occasional note of depression and discouragement, however, is a different thing; here, for those who know the "Journal Intime," there is already something characteristic, something which foretells the future. For instance, after dwelling with evident zest on the nature of the metaphysical problems lying at the root of art in general, and Christian art in particular, the writer goes on to set the difficulty of M. Rio's task against its attractiveness, to insist on the intricacy of the investigations involved, and on the impossibility of making the two instruments on which their success depends--the imaginative and the a.n.a.lytical faculty--work harmoniously and effectively together. And supposing the goal achieved, supposing a man by insight and patience has succeeded in forcing his way farther than any previous explorer into the recesses of the Beautiful or the True, there still remains the enormous, the insuperable difficulty of expression, of fit and adequate communication from mind to mind; there still remains the question whether, after all, "he who discovers a new world in the depths of the invisible would not do wisely to plant on it a flag known to himself alone, and, like Achilles, 'devour his heart in secret;' whether the greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better have remained buried in the brain which had found the key to them, and whether the deepest thinkers--those whose hand has been boldest in drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries beyond it--had not better, like the prophetess of Ilion, have kept for heaven, and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which human tongue cannot truly express, nor human intelligence conceive."

Curious words for a beginner of twenty-one! There is a touch, no doubt, of youth and fatuity in the pa.s.sage; one feels how much the vague sonorous phrases have pleased the writer's immature literary sense; but there is something else too--there is a breath of that same speculative pa.s.sion which burns in the Journal, and one hears, as it were, the first accents of a melancholy, the first expression of a mood of mind, which became in after years the fixed characteristic of the writer. "At twenty he was already proud, timid, and melancholy," writes an old friend; and a little farther on, "Discouragement took possession of him _very early_."

However, in spite of this inbred tendency, which was probably hereditary and inevitable, the years which followed these articles, from 1842 to Christmas, 1848, were years of happiness and steady intellectual expansion. They were Amiel's _Wanderjahre_, spent in a free, wandering student life, which left deep marks on his intellectual development.

During four years, from 1844 to 1848, his headquarters were at Berlin; but every vacation saw him exploring some new country or fresh intellectual center--Scandinavia in 1845, Holland in 1846, Vienna, Munich, and Tubingen in 1848, while Paris had already attracted him in 1841, and he was to make acquaintance with London ten years later, in 1851. No circ.u.mstances could have been more favorable, one would have thought, to the development of such a nature. With his extraordinary power of "throwing himself into the object"--of effacing himself and his own personality in the presence of the thing to be understood and absorbed--he must have pa.s.sed these years of travel and acquisition in a state of continuous intellectual energy and excitement. It is in no spirit of conceit that he says in 1857, comparing himself with Maine de Biran, "This nature is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in me. My horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of men, things, countries, peoples, books; I have a greater ma.s.s of experiences." This fact, indeed, of a wide and varied personal experience, must never be forgotten in any critical estimate of Amiel as a man or writer. We may so easily conceive him as a sedentary professor, with the ordinary professorial knowledge, or rather ignorance, of men and the world, falling into introspection under the pressure of circ.u.mstance, and for want, as it were, of something else to think about. Not at all. The man who has left us these microscopic a.n.a.lyses of his own moods and feelings, had penetrated more or less into the social and intellectual life of half a dozen European countries, and was familiar not only with the books, but, to a large extent also, with the men of his generation.

The meditative and introspective gift was in him, not the product, but the mistress of circ.u.mstance. It took from the outer world what that world had to give, and then made the stuff so gained subservient to its own ends.

Of these years of travel, however, the four years spent at Berlin were by far the most important. "It was at Heidelberg and Berlin," says M.

Scherer, "that the world of science and speculation first opened on the dazzled eyes of the young man. He was accustomed to speak of his four years at Berlin as 'his intellectual phase,' and one felt that he inclined to regard them as the happiest period of his life. The spell which Berlin laid upon him lasted long." Probably his happiness in Germany was partly owing to a sense of reaction against Geneva. There are signs that he had felt himself somewhat isolated at school and college, and that in the German world his special individuality, with its dreaminess and its melancholy, found congenial surroundings far more readily than had been the case in the drier and harsher atmosphere of the Protestant Rome. However this may be, it is certain that German thought took possession of him, that he became steeped not only in German methods of speculation, but in German modes of expression, in German forms of sentiment, which clung to him through life, and vitally affected both his opinions and his style. M. Renan and M. Bourget shake their heads over the Germanisms, which, according to the latter, give a certain "barbarous" air to many pa.s.sages of the Journal. But both admit that Amiel's individuality owes a great part of its penetrating force to that intermingling of German with French elements, of which there are such abundant traces in the "Journal Intime." Amiel, in fact, is one more typical product of a movement which is certainly of enormous importance in the history of modern thought, even though we may not be prepared to a.s.sent to all the sweeping terms in which a writer like M. Taine describes it. "From 1780 to 1830," says M. Taine, "Germany produced all the ideas of our historical age, and during another half-century, perhaps another century, _notre grande affaire sera de les repenser_." He is inclined to compare the influence of German ideas on the modern world to the ferment of the Renaissance. No spiritual force "more original, more universal, more fruitful in consequences of every sort and bearing, more capable of transforming and remaking everything presented to it, has arisen during the last three hundred years. Like the spirit of the Renaissance and of the cla.s.sical age, it attracts into its...o...b..t all the great works of contemporary intelligence." Quinet, pursuing a somewhat different line of thought, regards the wors.h.i.+p of German ideas inaugurated in France by Madame de Stael as the natural result of reaction from the eighteenth century and all its ways. "German systems, German hypotheses, beliefs, and poetry, all were eagerly welcomed as a cure for hearts crushed by the mockery of Candide and the materialism of the Revolution.... Under the Restoration France continued to study German philosophy and poetry with profound veneration and submission. We imitated, translated, compiled, and then again we compiled, translated, imitated." The importance of the part played by German influence in French Romanticism has indeed been much disputed, but the debt of French metaphysics, French philology, and French historical study, to German methods and German research during the last half-century is beyond dispute. And the movement to-day is as strong as ever. A modern critic like M. Darmstetter regards it as a misfortune that the artificial stimulus given by the war to the study of German has, to some extent, checked the study of English in France. He thinks that the French have more to gain from our literature--taking literature in its general and popular sense--than from German literature. But he raises no question as to the inevitable subjection of the French to the German mind in matters of exact thought and knowledge. "To study philology, mythology, history, without reading German," he is as ready to confess as any one else, "is to condemn one's self to remain in every department twenty years behind the progress of science."

Of this great movement, already so productive, Amiel is then a fresh and remarkable instance. Having caught from the Germans not only their love of exact knowledge but also their love of vast horizons, their insatiable curiosity as to the whence and whither of all things, their sense of mystery and immensity in the universe, he then brings those elements in him which belong to his French inheritance--and something individual besides, which is not French but Genevese--to bear on his new acquisitions, and the result is of the highest literary interest and value. Not that he succeeds altogether in the task of fusion. For one who was to write and think in French, he was perhaps too long in Germany; he had drunk too deeply of German thought; he had been too much dazzled by the spectacle of Berlin and its imposing intellectual activities. "As to his _literary_ talent," says M. Scherer, after dwelling on the rapid growth of his intellectual powers under German influence, "the profit which Amiel derived from his stay at Berlin is more doubtful. Too long contact with the German mind had led to the development in him of certain strangenesses of style which he had afterward to get rid of, and even perhaps of some habits of thought which he afterward felt the need of checking and correcting." This is very true. Amiel is no doubt often guilty, as M. Caro puts it, of attempts "to write German in French," and there are in his thought itself veins of mysticism, elements of _Schwarmerei_, here and there, of which a good deal must be laid to the account of his German training.

M. Renan regrets that after Geneva and after Berlin he never came to Paris. Paris, he thinks, would have counteracted the Hegelian influences brought to hear upon him at Berlin, [Footnote: See a not, however, on the subject of Amiel's philosophical relations.h.i.+ps, printed as an Appendix to the present volume.] would have taught him cheerfulness, and taught him also the art of writing, not beautiful fragments, but a book.

Possibly--but how much we should have lost! Instead of the Amiel we know, we should have had one accomplished French critic the more.

Instead of the spiritual drama of the "Journal Intime," some further additions to French _belles lettres_; instead of something to love, something to admire! No, there is no wis.h.i.+ng the German element in Amiel away. Its invading, troubling effect upon his thought and temperament goes far to explain the interest and suggestiveness of his mental history. The language he speaks is the language of that French criticism which--we have Sainte-Beuve's authority for it--is best described by the motto of Montaigne, "_Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l'ensemble, a la francaise_," and the thought he tries to express in it is thought torn and strained by the constant effort to reach the All, the totality of things: "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_." And it was this antagonism, or rather this fusion of traditions in him, which went far to make him original, which opened to him, that is to say, so many new lights on old paths, and stirred in him such capacities of fresh and individual expression.

We have been carried forward, however, a little too far by this general discussion of Amiel's debts to Germany. Let us take up the biographical thread again. In 1848 his Berlin apprentices.h.i.+p came to an end, and he returned to Geneva. "How many places, how many impressions, observations, thoughts--how many forms of men and things--have pa.s.sed before me and in me since April, 1843," he writes in the Journal, two or three months after his return. "The last seven years have been the most important of my life; they have been the novitiate of my intelligence, the initiation of my being into being." The first literary evidence of his matured powers is to be found in two extremely interesting papers on Berlin, which he contributed to the _Bibliotheque Universelle_ in 1848, apparently just before he left Germany. Here for the first time we have the Amiel of the "Journal Intime." The young man who five years before had written his painstaking review of M. Rio is now in his turn a master. He speaks with dignity and authority, he has a graphic, vigorous prose at command, the form of expression is condensed and epigrammatic, and there is a mixture of enthusiasm and criticism in his description of the powerful intellectual machine then working in the Prussian capital which represents a permanent note of character, a lasting att.i.tude of mind. A great deal, of course, in the two papers is technical and statistic, but what there is of general comment and criticism is so good that one is tempted to make some melancholy comparisons between them and another article in the _Bibliotheque_, that on Adolphe Pictet, written in 1856, and from which we have already quoted. In 1848 Amiel was for awhile master of his powers and his knowledge; no fatal divorce had yet taken place in him between the acc.u.mulating and producing faculties; he writes readily even for the public, without labor, without affectations.

Eight years later the reflective faculty has outgrown his control; composition, which represents the practical side of the intellectual life, has become difficult and painful to him, and he has developed what he himself calls "a wavering manner, born of doubt and scruple."

How few could have foreseen the failure in public and practical life which lay before him at the moment of his reappearance at Geneva in 1848! "My first meeting with him in 1849 is still vividly present to me," says M. Scherer. "He was twenty-eight, and he had just come from Germany laden with science, but he wore his knowledge lightly, his looks were attractive, his conversation animated, and no affectation spoiled the favorable impression he made on the bystander--the whole effect, indeed, was of something brilliant and striking. In his young alertness Amiel seemed to be entering upon life as a conqueror; one would have said the future was all his own."