Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel Part 12

And the appeal is one of those which move the heart, although profane ears neither hear it nor understand it.

What a stab there is in those words, _thou hast been_! when the sense of them becomes absolutely clear to us. One feels one's self sinking gradually into one's grave, and the past tense sounds the knell of our illusions as to ourselves. What is past is past: gray hairs will never become black curls again; the forces, the gifts, the attractions of youth, have vanished with our young days.

"Plus d'amour; partant plus de joie."

How hard it is to grow old, when we have missed our life, when we have neither the crown of completed manhood nor of fatherhood! How sad it is to feel the mind declining before it has done its work, and the body growing weaker before it has seen itself renewed in those who might close our eyes and honor our name! The tragic solemnity of existence strikes us with terrible force, on that morning when we wake to find the mournful word _too late_ ringing in our ears! "Too late, the sand is turned, the hour is past! Thy harvest is unreaped--too late! Thou hast been dreaming, forgetting, sleeping--so much the worse! Every man rewards or punishes himself. To whom or of whom wouldst thou complain?"--Alas!

April 21, 1865. (_Mornex_).--A morning of intoxicating beauty, fresh as the feelings of sixteen, and crowned with flowers like a bride. The poetry of youth, of innocence, and of love, overflowed my soul. Even to the light mist hovering over the bosom of the plain--image of that tender modesty which veils the features and shrouds in mystery the inmost thoughts of the maiden--everything that I saw delighted my eyes and spoke to my imagination. It was a sacred, a nuptial day! and the matin bells ringing in some distant village harmonized marvelously with the hymn of nature. "Pray," they said, "and love! Adore a fatherly and beneficent G.o.d." They recalled to me the accent of Haydn; there was in them and in the landscape a childlike joyousness, a nave grat.i.tude, a radiant heavenly joy innocent of pain and sin, like the sacred, simple-hearted ravishment of Eve on the first day of her awakening in the new world. How good a thing is feeling, admiration! It is the bread of angels, the eternal food of cherubim and seraphim.

I have not yet felt the air so pure, so life-giving, so ethereal, during the five days that I have been here. To breathe is a beat.i.tude. One understands the delights of a bird's existence--that emanc.i.p.ation from all enc.u.mbering weight--that luminous and empyrean life, floating in blue s.p.a.ce, and pa.s.sing from one horizon to another with a stroke of the wing. One must have a great deal of air below one before one can be conscious of such inner freedom as this, such lightness of the whole being. Every element has its poetry, but the poetry of air is liberty.

Enough; to your work, dreamer!

May 30, 1865.--All snakes fascinate their prey, and pure wickedness seems to inherit the power of fascination granted to the serpent.

It stupefies and bewilders the simple heart, which sees it without understanding it, which touches it without being able to believe in it, and which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles in Etna.

_Non possum capere te, cape me_, says the Aristotelian motto. Every diminutive of Beelzebub is an abyss, each demoniacal act is a gulf of darkness. Natural cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even in animals, cast lurid gleams, as it were, into that fathomless pit of Satanic perversity which is a moral reality.

Nevertheless behind this thought there rises another which tells me that sophistry is at the bottom of human wickedness, that the majority of monsters like to justify themselves in their own eyes, and that the first attribute of the Evil One is to be the father of lies. Before crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this. It is all very well to say that hatred is murder; the man who hates is determined to see nothing in it but an act of moral hygiene. It is to do himself good that he does evil, just as a mad dog bites to get rid of his thirst.

To injure others while at the same time knowingly injuring one's self is a step farther; evil then becomes a frenzy, which, in its turn, sharpens into a cold ferocity.

Whenever a man, under the influence of such a diabolical pa.s.sion, surrenders himself to these instincts of the wild or venomous beast he must seem to the angels a madman--a lunatic, who kindles his own Gehenna that he may consume the world in it, or as much of it as his devilish desires can lay hold upon. Wickedness is forever beginning a new spiral which penetrates deeper still into the abysses of abomination, for the circles of h.e.l.l have this property--that they have no end. It seems as though divine perfection were an infinite of the first degree, but as though diabolical perfection were an infinite of unknown power. But no; for if so, evil would be the true G.o.d, and h.e.l.l would swallow up creation. According to the Persian and the Christian faiths, good is to conquer evil, and perhaps even Satan himself will be restored to grace--which is as much as to say that the divine order will be everywhere re-established. Love will be more potent than hatred; G.o.d will save his glory, and his glory is in his goodness. But it is very true that all gratuitous wickedness troubles the soul, because it seems to make the great lines of the moral order tremble within us by the sudden withdrawal of the curtain which hides from us the action of those dark corrosive forces which have ranged themselves in battle against the divine plan.

June 26, 1865.--One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical _resume_ of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma. Sometimes it is the mere overflow of the soul, the running over of the cup of reverie. All that one cannot or will not say, all that one refuses to confess even to one's self--confused desires, secret trouble, suppressed grief, smothered conflict, voiceless regret, the emotions we have struggled against, the pain we have sought to hide, our superst.i.tious fears, our vague sufferings, our restless presentiments, our unrealized dreams, the wounds inflicted upon our ideal, the dissatisfied languor, the vain hopes, the mult.i.tude of small indiscernible ills which acc.u.mulate slowly in a corner of the heart like water dropping noiselessly from the roof of a cavern--all these mysterious movements of the inner life end in an instant of emotion, and the emotion concentrates itself in a tear just visible on the edge of the eyelid.

For the rest, tears express joy as well as sadness. They are the symbol of the powerlessness of the soul to restrain its emotion and to remain mistress of itself. Speech implies a.n.a.lysis; when we are overcome by sensation or by feeling a.n.a.lysis ceases, and with it speech and liberty. Our only resource, after silence and stupor, is the language of action--pantomime. Any oppressive weight of thought carries us back to a stage anterior to humanity, to a gesture, a cry, a sob, and at last to swooning and collapse; that is to say, incapable of bearing the excessive strain of sensation as men, we fall back successively to the stage of mere animate being, and then to that of the vegetable. Dante swoons at every turn in his journey through h.e.l.l, and nothing paints better the violence of his emotions and the ardor of his piety.

... And intense joy? It also withdraws into itself and is silent. To speak is to disperse and scatter. Words isolate and localize life in a single point; they touch only the circ.u.mference of being; they a.n.a.lyze, they treat one thing at a time. Thus they decentralize emotion, and chill it in doing so. The heart would fain brood over its feeling, cheris.h.i.+ng and protecting it. Its happiness is silent and meditative; it listens to its own beating and feeds religiously upon itself.

August 8, 1865. (_Gryon sur Bex_).--Splendid moonlight without a cloud.

The night is solemn and majestic. The regiment of giants sleeps while the stars keep sentinel. In the vast shadow of the valley glimmer a few scattered roofs, while the torrent, organ-like, swells its eternal note in the depths of this mountain cathedral which has the heavens for roof.

A last look at this blue night and boundless landscape. Jupiter is just setting on the counterscarp of the Dent du Midi. Prom the starry vault descends an invisible snow-shower of dreams, calling us to a pure sleep.

Nothing of voluptuous or enervating in this nature. All is strong, austere and pure. Good night to all the world!--to the unfortunate and to the happy. Rest and refreshment, renewal and hope; a day is dead--_vive le lendemain!_ Midnight is striking. Another step made toward the tomb.

August 13, 1865.--I have just read through again the letter of J. J.

Rousseau to Archbishop Beaumont with a little less admiration than I felt for it--was it ten or twelve years ago? This emphasis, this precision, which never tires of itself, tires the reader in the long run. The intensity of the style produces on one the impression of a treatise on mathematics. One feels the need of relaxation after it in something easy, natural, and gay. The language of Rousseau demands an amount of labor which makes one long for recreation and relief.

But how many writers and how many books descend from our Rousseau! On my way I noticed the points of departure of Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Proudhon. Proudhon, for instance, modeled the plan of his great work, "De la Justice dang l'Eglise et dans la Revolution," upon the letter of Rousseau to Beaumont; his three volumes are a string of letters to an archbishop; eloquence, daring, and elocution are all fused in a kind of _persiflage_, which is the foundation of the whole.

How many men we may find in one man, how many styles in a great writer!

Rousseau, for instance, has created a number of different _genres_.

Imagination transforms him, and he is able to play the most varied parts with credit, among them even that of the pure logician. But as the imagination is his intellectual axis--his master faculty--he is, as it were, in all his works only half sincere, only half in earnest. We feel that his talent has laid him the wager of Carneades; it will lose no cause, however bad, as soon as the point of honor Is engaged. It is indeed the temptation of all talent to subordinate things to itself and not itself to things; to conquer for the sake of conquest, and to put self-love in the place of conscience. Talent is glad enough, no doubt, to triumph in a good cause; but it easily becomes a free lance, content, whatever the cause, so long as victory follows its banner. I do not know even whether success in a weak and bad cause is not the most flattering for talent, which then divides the honors of its triumph with nothing and no one.

Paradox is the delight of clever people and the joy of talent. It is so pleasant to pit one's self against the world, and to overbear mere commonplace good sense and vulgar plat.i.tudes! Talent and love of truth are then not identical; their tendencies and their paths are different.

In order to make talent obey when its instinct is rather to command, a vigilant moral sense and great energy of character are needed. The Greeks--those artists of the spoken or written word--were artificial by the time of Ulysses, sophists by the time of Pericles, cunning, rhetorical, and versed in all the arts of the courtier down to the end of the lower empire. From the talent of the nation sprang its vices.

For a man to make his mark, like Rousseau by polemics, is to condemn himself to perpetual exaggeration and conflict. Such a man expiates his celebrity by a double bitterness; he is never altogether true, and he is never able to recover the free disposal of himself. To pick a quarrel with the world is attractive, but dangerous.

J. J. Rousseau is an ancestor in all things. It was he who founded traveling on foot before Topffer, reverie before "Rene," literary botany before George Sand, the wors.h.i.+p of nature before Bernardin de S.

Pierre, the democratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political discussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and Renan, the science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure. He made music the fas.h.i.+on, and created the taste for confessions to the public. He formed a new French style--the close, chastened, pa.s.sionate, interwoven style we know so well. Nothing indeed of Rousseau has been lost, and n.o.body has had more influence than he upon the French Revolution, for he was the demiG.o.d of it, and stands between Neckar and Napoleon. n.o.body, again, has had more than he upon the nineteenth century, for Byron, Chateaubriand, Madame de Stael, and George Sand all descend from him.

And yet, with these extraordinary talents, he was an extremely unhappy man--why? Because he always allowed himself to be mastered by his imagination and his sensations; because he had no judgment in deciding, no self-control in acting. Regret indeed on this score would be hardly reasonable, for a calm, judicious, orderly Rousseau would never have made so great an impression. He came into collision with his time: hence his eloquence and his misfortunes. His nave confidence in life and himself ended in jealous misanthropy and hypochondria.

What a contrast to Goethe or Voltaire, and how differently they understood the practical wisdom of life and the management of literary gifts! They were the able men--Rousseau is a visionary. They knew mankind as it is--he always represented it to himself either whiter or blacker than it is; and having begun by taking life the wrong way, he ended in madness. In the talent of Rousseau there is always something unwholesome, uncertain, stormy, and sophistical, which destroys the confidence of the reader; and the reason is no doubt that we feel pa.s.sion to have been the governing force in him as a writer: pa.s.sion stirred his imagination, and ruled supreme over his reason.

Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults--a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

The unfinished is nothing.

Great men are the true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary--they are in the true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be.

January 7, 1866.--Our life is but a soap-bubble hanging from a reed; it is formed, expands to its full size, clothes itself with the loveliest colors of the prism, and even escapes at moments from the law of gravitation; but soon the black speck appears in it, and the globe of emerald and gold vanishes into s.p.a.ce, leaving behind it nothing but a simple drop of turbid water. All the poets have made this comparison, it is so striking and so true. To appear, to s.h.i.+ne, to disappear; to be born, to suffer, and to die; is it not the whole sum of life, for a b.u.t.terfly, for a nation, for a star?

Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea almost at the same moment. The thought of a planet can only be worked out by nature with labor and effort, but supreme intelligence sums up the whole in an instant. Time is then the successive dispersion of being, just as speech is the successive a.n.a.lysis of an intuition or of an act of will. In itself it is relative and negative, and disappears within the absolute being. G.o.d is outside time because he thinks all thought at once; Nature is within time, because she is only speech--the discursive unfolding of each thought contained within the infinite thought. But nature exhausts herself in this impossible task, for the a.n.a.lysis of the infinite is a contradiction. With limitless duration, boundless s.p.a.ce, and number without end, Nature does at least what she can to translate into visible form the wealth of the creative formula.

By the vastness of the abysses into which she penetrates, in the effort--the unsuccessful effort--to house and contain the eternal thought, we may measure the greatness of the divine mind. For as soon as this mind goes out of itself and seeks to explain itself, the effort at utterance heaps universe upon universe, during myriads of centuries, and still it is not expressed, and the great harangue must go on for ever and ever.

The East prefers immobility as the form of the Infinite: the West, movement. It is because the West is infected by the pa.s.sion for details, and sets proud store by individual worth. Like a child upon whom a hundred thousand francs have been bestowed, he thinks she is multiplying her fortune by counting it out in pieces of twenty sous, or five centimes. Her pa.s.sion for progress is in great part the product of an infatuation, which consists in forgetting the goal to be aimed at, and absorbing herself in the pride and delight of each tiny step, one after the other. Child that she is, she is even capable of confounding change with improvement--beginning over again, with growth in perfectness.

At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction; he has a secret horror of all which makes him feel his own littleness; the eternal, the infinite, perfection, therefore scare and terrify him. He wishes to approve himself, to admire and congratulate himself; and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness. This is what makes the real pettiness of so many of our great minds, and accounts for the lack of personal dignity among us--civilized parrots that we are--as compared with the Arab of the desert; or explains the growing frivolity of our ma.s.ses, more and more educated, no doubt, but also more and more superficial in all their conceptions of happiness.

Here, then, is the service which Christianity--the oriental element in our culture--renders to us Westerns. It checks and counterbalances our natural tendency toward the pa.s.sing, the finite, and the changeable, by fixing the mind upon the contemplation of eternal things, and by Platonizing our affections, which otherwise would have too little outlook upon the ideal world. Christianity leads us back from dispersion to concentration, from worldliness to self-recollection. It restores to our souls, fevered with a thousand sordid desires, n.o.bleness, gravity, and calm. Just as sleep is a bath of refres.h.i.+ng for our actual life, so religion is a bath of refres.h.i.+ng for our immortal being. What is sacred has a purifying virtue; religious emotion crowns the brow with an aureole, and thrills the heart with an ineffable joy.

I think that the adversaries of religion as such deceive themselves as to the needs of the western man, and that the modern world will lose its balance as soon as it has pa.s.sed over altogether to the crude doctrine of progress. We have always need of the infinite, the eternal, the absolute; and since science contents itself with what is relative, it necessarily leaves a void, which it is good for man to fill with contemplation, wors.h.i.+p, and adoration. "Religion," said Bacon, "is the spice which is meant to keep life from corruption," and this is especially true to-day of religion taken in the Platonist and oriental sense. A capacity for self-recollection--for withdrawal from the outward to the inward--is in fact the condition of all n.o.ble and useful activity.

This return, indeed, to what is serious, divine, and sacred, is becoming more and more difficult, because of the growth of critical anxiety within the church itself, the increasing worldliness of religious preaching, and the universal agitation and disquiet of society. But such a return is more and more necessary. Without it there is no inner life, and the inner life is the only means whereby we may oppose a profitable resistance to circ.u.mstance. If the sailor did not carry with him his own temperature he could not go from the pole to the equator, and remain himself in spite of all. The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all; he is not distinct, free, original, a cause--in a word, _some one_. He is one of a crowd, a taxpayer, an elector, an anonymity, but not a man. He helps to make up the ma.s.s--to fill up the number of human consumers or producers; but he interests n.o.body but the economist and the statistician, who take the heap of sand as a whole into consideration, without troubling themselves about the uninteresting uniformity of the individual grains. The crowd counts only as a ma.s.sive elementary force--why? because its const.i.tuent parts are individually insignificant: they are all like each other, and we add them up like the molecules of water in a river, gauging them by the fathom instead of appreciating them as individuals. Such men are reckoned and weighed merely as so many bodies: they have never been individualized by conscience, after the manner of souls.

He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions--such a man is a mere article of the world's furniture--a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being--an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weatherc.o.c.k the humble servant of the air in motion.

January 21, 1866.--This evening after supper I did not know whither to betake my solitary self. I was hungry for conversation, society, exchange of ideas. It occurred to me to go and see our friends, the----s; they were at supper. Afterward we went into the _salon_: mother and daughter sat down to the piano and sang a duet by Boeldieu.

The ivory keys of the old grand piano, which the mother had played on before her marriage, and which has followed and translated into music the varying fortunes of the family, were a little loose and jingling; but the poetry of the past sang in this faithful old servant, which had been a friend in trouble, a companion in vigils, and the echo of a lifetime of duty, affection, piety and virtue. I was more moved than I can say. It was like a scene of d.i.c.kens, and I felt a rush of sympathy, untouched either by egotism or by melancholy.

Twenty-five years! It seems to me a dream as far as I am concerned, and I can scarcely believe my eyes, or this inanimate witness to so many l.u.s.tres pa.s.sed away. How strange a thing _to have lived_, and to feel myself so far from a past which yet is so present to me! One does not know whether one is sleeping or waking. Time is but the s.p.a.ce between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this s.p.a.ce, time has disappeared. The whole life of an old man may appear to him no longer than an hour, or less still; and as soon as time is but a moment to us, we have entered upon eternity. Life is but the dream of a shadow; I felt it anew this evening with strange intensity.

January 29, 1866. (_Nine o'clock in the morning_).--The gray curtain of mist has spread itself again over the town; everything is dark and dull. The bells are ringing in the distance for some festival; with this exception everything is calm and silent. Except for the crackling of the fire, no noise disturbs my solitude in this modest home, the shelter of my thoughts and of my work, where the man of middle age carries on the life of his student-youth without the zest of youth, and the sedentary professor repeats day by day the habits which he formed as a traveler.

What is it which makes the charm of this existence outwardly so barren and empty? Liberty! What does the absence of comfort and of all else that is wanting to these rooms matter to me? These things are indifferent to me. I find under this roof light, quiet, shelter. I am near to a sister and her children, whom I love; my material life is a.s.sured--that ought to be enough for a bachelor.... Am I not, besides, a creature of habit? more attached to the _ennuis_ I know, than in love with pleasures unknown to me. I am, then, free and not unhappy. Then I am well off here, and I should be ungrateful to complain. Nor do I. It is only the heart which sighs and seeks for something more and better.

The heart is an insatiable glutton, as we all know--and for the rest, who is without yearnings? It is our destiny here below. Only some go through torments and troubles in order to satisfy themselves, and all without success; others foresee the inevitable result, and by a timely resignation save themselves a barren and fruitless effort. Since we cannot be happy, why give ourselves so much trouble? It is best to limit one's self to what is strictly necessary, to live austerely and by rule, to content one's self with a little, and to attach no value to anything but peace of conscience and a sense of duty done.

It is true that this itself is no small ambition, and that it only lands us in another impossibility. No--the simplest course is to submit one's self wholly and altogether to G.o.d. Everything else, as saith the preacher, is but vanity and vexation of spirit.

It is a long while now since this has been plain to me, and since this religious renunciation has been sweet and familiar to me. It is the outward distractions of life, the examples of the world, and the irresistible influence exerted upon us by the current of things which make us forget the wisdom we have acquired and the principles we have adopted. That is why life is such weariness! This eternal beginning over again is tedious, even to repulsion. It would be so good to go to sleep when we have gathered the fruit of experience, when we are no longer in opposition to the supreme will, when we have broken loose from self, when we are at peace with all men. Instead of this, the old round of temptations, disputes, _ennuis_, and forgettings, has to be faced again and again, and we fall back into prose, into commonness, into vulgarity.

How melancholy, how humiliating! The poets are wise in withdrawing their heroes more quickly from the strife, and in not dragging them after victory along the common rut of barren days. "Whom the G.o.ds love die young," said the proverb of antiquity.