Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel Part 2

Pourtant un seul pouvait suffire.

"Victime des desirs, esclave des regrets, L'homme s'agite, et s'use, et vieillit sans progres Sur sa toile de Penelope; Comme un sage mourant, puissions-nous dire en paix J'ai trop longtemps erre, cherche; je me trompais; Tout est bien, mon Dieu m'enveloppe."

Upon the small remains of Amiel's prose outside the Journal there is no occasion to dwell. The two essays on Madame de Stael and Rousseau contain much fine critical remark, and might find a place perhaps as an appendix to some future edition of the Journal; and some of the "Pensees," published in the latter half of the volume containing the "Grains de Mils," are worthy of preservation. But in general, whatever he himself published was inferior to what might justly have been expected of him, and no one was more conscious of the fact than himself.

The story of his fatal illness, of the weary struggle for health which filled the last seven years of his life, is abundantly told in the Journal--we must not repeat it here. He had never been a strong man, and at fifty-three he received, at his doctor's hands, his _arret de mort_.

We are told that what killed him was "heart disease, complicated by disease of the larynx," and that he suffered "much and long." He was buried in the cemetery of Clarens, not far from his great contemporary Alexander Vinet; and the affection of a sculptor friend provided the monument which now marks his resting-place.

We have thus exhausted all the biographical material which is at present available for the description of Amiel's life and relations toward the outside world. It is to be hoped that the friends to whom the charge of his memory has been specially committed may see their way in the future, if not to a formal biography, which is very likely better left unattempted, at least to a volume of Letters, which would complete the "Journal Intime," as Joubert's "Correspondence" completes the "Pensees."

There must be ample material for it; and Amiel's letters would probably supply us with more of that literary and critical reflection which his mind produced so freely and so well, as long as there was no question of publication, but which is at present somewhat overweighted in the "Journal Intime."

But whether biography or correspondence is ever forthcoming or not, the Journal remains--and the Journal is the important matter. We shall read the Letters if they appear, as we now read the Poems, for the Journal's sake. The man himself, as poet, teacher, and _litterateur_, produced no appreciable effect on his generation; but the posthumous record of his inner life has stirred the hearts of readers all over Europe, and won him a niche in the House of Fame. What are the reasons for this striking transformation of a man's position--a transformation which, as M.

Scherer says, will rank among the curiosities of literary history?

In other words, what has given the "Journal Intime" its sudden and unexpected success?

In the first place, no doubt, its poetical quality, its beauty of manner--that fine literary expression in which Amiel has been able to clothe the subtler processes of thought, no less than the secrets of religious feeling, or the aspects of natural scenery. Style is what gives value and currency to thought, and Amiel, in spite of all his Germanisms, has style of the best kind. He possesses in prose that indispensable magic which he lacks in poetry.

His style, indeed, is by no means always in harmony with the central French tradition. Probably a Frenchman will be inclined to apply Sainte-Beuve's remarks on Amiel's elder countryman, Rodolphe Topffer, to Amiel himself: "_C'est ainsi qu'on ecrit dans les litteratures qui n'ont point de capitale, de quartier general cla.s.sique, ou d'Academie; c'est ainsi qu'un Allemand, qu'un Americain, ou meme un Anglais, use a son gre de sa langue. En France au contraire, ou il y a une Academie Francaise ... on doit trouver qu'un tel style est une tres-grande nouveaute et le succes qu'il a obtenu un evenement: il a fallu bien des circonstances pour y preparer_." No doubt the preparatory circ.u.mstance in Amiel's case has been just that Germanization of the French mind on which M. Taine and M. Bourget dwell with so much emphasis. But, be this as it may, there is no mistaking the enthusiasm with which some of the best living writers of French have hailed these pages--instinct, as one declares, "with a strange and marvelous poetry;" full of phrases "_d'une intense suggestion de beaute_;" according to another. Not that the whole of the Journal flows with the same ease, the same felicity. There are a certain number of pa.s.sages where Amiel ceases to be the writer, and becomes the technical philosopher; there are others, though not many, into which a certain German heaviness and diffuseness has crept, dulling the edge of the sentences, and r.e.t.a.r.ding the development of the thought. When all deductions have been made, however, Amiel's claim is still first and foremost, the claim of the poet and the artist; of the man whose thought uses at will the harmonies and resources of speech, and who has attained, in words of his own, "to the full and masterly expression of himself."

Then to the poetical beauty of manner which first helped the book to penetrate, _faire sa trouee_, as the French say, we must add its extraordinary psychological interest. Both as poet and as psychologist, Amiel makes another link in a special tradition; he adds another name to the list of those who have won a hearing from their fellows as interpreters of the inner life, as the revealers of man to himself.

He is the successor of St. Augustine and Dante; he is the brother of Obermann and Maurice de Guerin. What others have done for the spiritual life of other generations he has done for the spiritual life of this, and the wealth of poetical, scientific, and psychological faculty which he has brought to the a.n.a.lysis of human feeling and human perceptions places him--so far as the present century is concerned--at the head of the small and delicately-gifted cla.s.s to which he belongs. For beside his spiritual experience Obermann's is superficial, and Maurice de Guerin's a pa.s.sing trouble, a mere quick outburst of pa.s.sionate feeling.

Amiel indeed has neither the continuous romantic beauty nor the rich descriptive wealth of Senancour. The Dent du Midi, with its untrodden solitude, its primeval silences and its hovering eagles, the Swiss landscape described in the "Fragment on the Ranz des Vaches," the summer moonlight on the Lake of Neufchatel--these various pictures are the work of one of the most finished artists in words that literature has produced. But how true George Sand's criticism is! "_Chez Obermann la sensibilite est active, l'intelligence est paresseuse ou insuffisante._"

He has a certain antique power of making the truisms of life splendid and impressive. No one can write more poetical exercises than he on the old text of _pulvis et umbra sumus_, but beyond this his philosophical power fails him. As soon as he leaves the region of romantic description how wearisome the pages are apt to grow! Instead of a poet, "_un ergoteur Voltairien_;" instead of the explorer of fresh secrets of the heart, a Parisian talking a cheap cynicism! Intellectually, the ground gives way; there is no solidity of knowledge, no range of thought. Above all, the scientific idea in our sense is almost absent; so that while Amiel represents the modern mind at its keenest and best, dealing at will with the vast additions to knowledge which the last fifty years have brought forth, Senancour is still in the eighteenth-century stage, talking like Rousseau of a return to primitive manners, and discussing Christianity in the tone of the "Encyclopedie."

Maurice de Guerin, again, is the inventor of new terms in the language of feeling, a poet as Amiel and Senancour are. His love of nature, the earth-pa.s.sion which breathes in his letters and journal, has a strange savor, a force and flame which is all his own. Beside his actual sense of community with the visible world, Amiel's love of landscape has a tame, didactic air. The Swiss thinker is too ready to make nature a mere vehicle of moral or philosophical thought; Maurice de Guerin loves her for herself alone, and has found words to describe her influence over him of extraordinary individuality and power. But for the rest the story of his inner life has but small value in the history of thought. His difficulties do not go deep enough; his struggle is intellectually not serious enough--we see in it only a common incident of modern experience poetically told; it throws no light on the genesis and progress of the great forces which are molding and renovating the thought of the present--it tells us nothing for the future.

No--there is much more in the "Journal Intime" than the imagination or the poetical glow which Amiel shares with his immediate predecessors in the art of confession-writing. His book is representative of human experience in its more intimate and personal forms to an extent hardly equaled since Rousseau. For his study of himself is only a means to an end. "What interests me in myself," he declares, "is that I find in my own case a genuine example of human nature, and therefore a specimen of general value." It is the human consciousness of to-day, of the modern world, in its two-fold relation--its relation toward the infinite and the unknowable, and its relation toward the visible universe which conditions it--which is the real subject of the "Journal Intime." There are few elements of our present life which, in a greater or less degree, are not made vocal in these pages. Amiel's intellectual interest is untiring. Philosophy, science, letters, art--he has penetrated the spirit of them all; there is nothing, or almost nothing, within the wide range of modern activities which he has not at one time or other felt the attraction of, and learned in some sense to understand. "Amiel,"

says M. Renan, "has his defects, but he was certainly one of the strongest speculative heads who, during the period from 1845 to 1880, have reflected on the nature of things." And, although a certain fatal spiritual weakness debarred him to a great extent from the world of practical life, his sympathy with action, whether it was the action of the politician or the social reformer, or merely that steady half-conscious performance of its daily duty which keeps humanity sweet and living, was unfailing. His horizon was not bounded by his own "prison-cell," or by that dream-world which he has described with so much subtle beauty; rather the energies which should have found their natural expression in literary or family life, pent up within the mind itself, excited in it a perpetual eagerness for intellectual discovery, and new powers of sympathy with whatever crossed its field of vision.

So that the thinker, the historian, the critic, will find himself at home with Amiel. The power of organizing his thought, the art of writing a book, _monumentum aere perennius_, was indeed denied him--he laments it bitterly; but, on the other hand, he is receptivity itself, responsive to all the great forces which move the time, catching and reflecting on the mobile mirror of his mind whatever winds are blowing from the hills of thought.

And if the thinker is at home with him, so too are the religious minds, the natures for whom G.o.d and duty are the foundation of existence. Here, indeed, we come to the innermost secret of Amiel's charm, the fact which probably goes farther than any other to explain his fascination for a large and growing cla.s.s of readers. For, while he represents all the intellectual complexities of a time bewildered by the range and number of its own acquisitions, the religious instinct in him is as strong and tenacious as in any of the representative exponents of the life of faith. The intellect is clear and unwavering; but the heart clings to old traditions, and steadies itself on the rock of duty. His Calvinistic training lingers long in him; and what detaches him from the Hegelian school, with which he has much in common, is his own stronger sense of personal need, his preoccupation with the idea of "sin." "He speaks,"

says M. Renan contemptuously, "of sin, of salvation, of redemption, and conversion, as if these things were realities. He asks me 'What does M.

Renan make of sin?' _Eh bien, je crois que je le supprime_." But it is just because Amiel is profoundly sensitive to the problems of evil and responsibility, and M. Renan dismisses them with this half-tolerant, half-skeptical smile, that M. Renan's "Souvenirs" inform and entertain us, while the "Journal Intime" makes a deep impression on that moral sense which is at the root of individual and national life.

The Journal is full, indeed, of this note of personal religion.

Religion, Amiel declares again and again, cannot be replaced by philosophy. The redemption of the intelligence is not the redemption of the heart. The philosopher and critic may succeed in demonstrating that the various definite forms into which the religious thought of man has thrown itself throughout history are not absolute truth, but only the temporary creations of a need which gradually and surely outgrows them all. "The Trinity, the life to come, paradise and h.e.l.l, may cease to be dogmas and spiritual realities, the form and the letter may vanish away--the question of humanity remains: What is it which saves?" Amiel's answer to the question will recall to a wide English circle the method and spirit of an English teacher, whose dear memory lives to-day in many a heart, and is guiding many an effort in the cause of good--the method and spirit of the late Professor Green of Balliol. In many respects there was a gulf of difference between the two men. The one had all the will and force of personality which the other lacked. But the ultimate creed of both, the way in which both interpret the facts of nature and consciousness, is practically the same. In Amiel's case, we have to gather it through all the variations and inevitable contradictions of a Journal which is the reflection of a life, not the systematic expression of a series of ideas, but the main results are clear enough. Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope which springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil. Conscience and the moral progress of the race--these are his points of departure. Faith in the reality of the moral law is what he clings to when his inherited creed has yielded to the pressure of the intellect, and after all the storms of pessimism and necessitarianism have pa.s.sed over him. The reconciliation of the two cert.i.tudes, the two methods, the scientific and the religious, "is to be sought for in that moral law which is also a fact, and every step of which requires for its explanation another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity." "Nature is the virtuality of mind, the soul the fruit of life, and liberty the flower of necessity." Consciousness is the one fixed point in this boundless and bottomless gulf of things, and the soul's inward law, as it has been painfully elaborated by human history, the only revelation of G.o.d.

The only but the sufficient revelation! For this first article of a reasonable creed is the key to all else--the clue which leads the mind safely through the labyrinth of doubt into the presence of the Eternal.

Without attempting to define the indefinable, the soul rises from the belief in the reality of love and duty to the belief in "a holy will at the root of nature and destiny"--for "if man is capable of conceiving goodness, the general principle of things, which cannot be inferior to man, must be good." And then the religious consciousness seizes on this intellectual deduction, and clothes it in language of the heart, in the tender and beautiful language of faith. "There is but one thing needful--to possess G.o.d. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, are so many ways of approaching the Divine, so many modes of tasting and adoring G.o.d. Religion is not a method; it is a life--a higher and supernatural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits; a communion with G.o.d, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which overflows." And the faith of his youth and his maturity bears the shock of suffering, and supports him through his last hours. He writes a few months before the end: "The animal expires; man surrenders his soul to the author of the soul." ... "We dream alone, we suffer alone, we die alone, we inhabit the last resting-place alone. But there is nothing to prevent us from opening our solitude to G.o.d. And so what was an austere monologue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes docility, renunciation pa.s.ses into peace, and the sense of painful defeat is lost in the sense of recovered liberty"--_"Tout est bien, mon Dieu m'enveloppe."_

Nor is this all. It is not only that Amiel's inmost thought and affections are stayed on this conception of "a holy will at the root of nature and destiny"--in a certain very real sense he is a Christian. No one is more sensitive than he to the contribution which Christianity has made to the religious wealth of mankind; no one more penetrated than he with the truth of its essential doctrine "death unto sin and a new birth unto righteousness." "The religion of sin, of repentance and reconciliation," he cries, "the religion of the new birth and of eternal life, is not a religion to be ashamed of." The world has found inspiration and guidance for eighteen centuries in the religious consciousness of Jesus. "The gospel has modified the world and consoled mankind," and so "we may hold aloof from the churches and yet bow ourselves before Jesus. We may be suspicious of the clergy and refuse to have anything to do with catechisms, and yet love the Holy and the Just who came to save and not to curse." And in fact Amiel's whole life and thought are steeped in Christianity. He is the spiritual descendant of one of the intensest and most individual forms of Christian belief, and traces of his religious ancestry are visible in him at every step.

Protestantism of the sincerer and n.o.bler kind leaves an indelible impression on the nature which has once surrounded itself to the austere and penetrating influences flowing from the religion of sin and grace; and so far as feeling and temperament are concerned, Amiel retained throughout his life the marks of Calvinism and Geneva.

And yet how clear the intellect remains, through all the anxieties of thought, and in the face of the soul's dearest memories and most pa.s.sionate needs! Amiel, as soon as his reasoning faculty has once reached its maturity, never deceives himself as to the special claims of the religion which by instinct and inheritance he loves; he makes no compromise with dogma or with miracle. Beyond the religions of the present he sees always the essential religion which lasts when all local forms and marvels have pa.s.sed away; and as years go on, with more and more clearness of conviction, he learns to regard all special beliefs and systems as "prejudices, useful in practice, but still narrownesses of the mind;" misgrowths of thought, necessary in their time and place, but still of no absolute value, and having no final claim on the thought of man.

And it is just here--in this mixture of the faith which clings and aspires, with the intellectual pliancy which allows the mind to sway freely under the pressure of life and experience, and the deep respect for truth, which will allow nothing to interfere between thought and its appointed tasks--that Amiel's special claim upon us lies. It is this balance of forces in him which makes him so widely representative of the modern mind--of its doubts, its convictions, its hopes. He speaks for the life of to-day as no other single voice has yet spoken for it; in his contradictions, his fears, his despairs, and yet in the constant straining toward the unseen and the ideal which gives a fundamental unity to his inner life, he is the type of a generation universally touched with doubt, and yet as sensitive to the need of faith as any that have gone before it; more widely conscious than its predecessors of the limitations of the human mind, and of the iron pressure of man's physical environment; but at the same time--paradox as it may seem--more conscious of man's greatness, more deeply thrilled by the spectacle of the n.o.bility and beauty interwoven with the universe.

And he plays this part of his so modestly, with so much hesitation, so much doubt of his thought and of himself! He is no preacher, like Emerson and Carlyle, with whom, as poet and idealist, he has so much in common; there is little resemblance between him and the men who speak, as it were, from a height to the crowd beneath, sure always of themselves and what they have to say. And here again he represents the present and foreshadows the future. For the age of the preachers is pa.s.sing those who speak with authority on the riddles of life and nature as the priests of this or that all-explaining dogma, are becoming less important as knowledge spreads, and the complexity of experience is made evident to a wider range of minds. The force of things is against _the certain people_. Again and again truth escapes from the prisons made for her by mortal hands, and as humanity carries on the endless pursuit she will pay more and more respectful heed to voices like this voice of the lonely Genevese thinker--with its pathetic alterations of hope and fear, and the moral steadfastness which is the inmost note of it--to these meditative lives, which, through all the ebb and flow of thought, and in the dim ways of doubt and suffering, rich in knowledge, and yet rich in faith, grasp in new forms, and proclaim to us in new words,

"The mighty hopes which make us men."

AMIEL'S JOURNAL.

[Where no other name is mentioned, Geneva is to be understood as the author's place of residence.]

BERLIN, July 16. 1848.--There is but one thing needful--to possess G.o.d. All our senses, all our powers of mind and soul, all our external resources, are so many ways of approaching the divinity, so many modes of tasting and of adoring G.o.d. We must learn to detach ourselves from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves absolutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, a usufruct.... To adore, to understand, to receive, to feel, to give, to act: there is my law my duty, my happiness, my heaven. Let come what come will--even death. Only be at peace with self, live in the presence of G.o.d, in communion with Him, and leave the guidance of existence to those universal powers against whom thou canst do nothing! If death gives me time, so much the better. If its summons is near, so much the better still; if a half-death overtake me, still so much the better, for so the path of success is closed to me only that I may find opening before me the path of heroism, of moral greatness and resignation. Every life has its potentiality of greatness, and as it is impossible to be outside G.o.d, the best is consciously to dwell in Him.

BERLIN, July 20, 1848.--It gives liberty and breadth to thought, to learn to judge our own epoch from the point of view of universal history, history from the point of view of geological periods, geology from the point of view of astronomy. When the duration of a man's life or of a people's life appears to us as microscopic as that of a fly and inversely, the life of a gnat as infinite as that of a celestial body, with all its dust of nations, we feel ourselves at once very small and very great, and we are able, as it were, to survey from the height of the spheres our own existence, and the little whirlwinds which agitate our little Europe.

At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this study.

GENEVA, April 20, 1849.--It is six years [Footnote: Amiel left Geneva for Paris and Berlin in April, 1848, the preceding year, 1841-42, having been spent in Italy and Sicily.] to-day since I last left Geneva. How many journeys, how many impressions, observations, thoughts, how many forms of men and things have since then pa.s.sed before me and in me! 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.

Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees and peach trees! What a difference from six years ago, when the cherry-trees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and the lilacs of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!...

May 3, 1849.--I have never felt any inward a.s.surance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or of happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are all vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living. Recognize your place; 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. Renounce yourself, accept the cup given you, with its honey and its gall, as it comes. Bring G.o.d down into your heart. Embalm your soul in Him now, make within you a temple for the Holy Spirit, be diligent in good works, make others happier and better.

Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.

May 27, 1849.--To be misunderstood even by those whom one loves is the cross and bitterness of life. It is the secret of that sad and melancholy smile on the lips of great men which so few understand; it is the cruelest trial reserved for self-devotion; it is what must have oftenest wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if G.o.d could suffer, it would be the wound we should be forever inflicting upon Him. He also--He above all--is the great misunderstood, the least comprehended. Alas!

alas! never to tire, never to grow cold; to be patient, sympathetic, tender; to look for the budding flower and the opening heart; to hope always, like G.o.d; to love always--this is duty.

June 3, 1849.--Fresh and delicious weather. A long morning walk.

Surprised the hawthorn and wild rose-trees in flower. From the fields vague and health-giving scents. The Voirons fringed with dazzling mists, and tints of exquisite softness over the Saleve. Work in the fields, two delightful donkeys, one pulling greedily at a hedge of barberry. Then three little children. I felt a boundless desire to caress and play with them. To be able to enjoy such leisure, these peaceful fields, fine weather, contentment; to have my two sisters with me; to rest my eyes on balmy meadows and blossoming orchards; to listen to the life singing in the gra.s.s and on the trees; to be so calmly happy--is it not too much?

is it deserved? O let me enjoy it with grat.i.tude. The days of trouble come soon enough and are many enough. I have no presentiment of happiness. All the more let me profit by the present. Come, kind nature, smile and enchant me! Veil from me awhile my own griefs and those of others; let me see only the folds of thy queenly mantle, and hide all miserable and ign.o.ble things from me under thy bounties and splendors!

October 1, 1849.--Yesterday, Sunday, I read through and made extracts from the gospel of St. John. It confirmed me in my belief that about Jesus we must believe no one but Himself, and that what we have to do is to discover the true image of the founder behind all the prismatic reactions through which it comes to us, and which alter it more or less.

A ray of heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ has been broken into a thousand rainbow colors and carried in a thousand directions. It is the historical task of Christianity to a.s.sume with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to be forever spiritualizing more and more her understanding of the Christ and of salvation.

I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and formalism which still exists nineteen centuries after the Redeemer's proclamation, "it is the letter which killeth"--after his protest against a dead symbolism. The new religion is so profound that it is not understood even now, and would seem a blasphemy to the greater number of Christians. The person of Christ is the center of it. Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and h.e.l.l--all these beliefs have been so materialized and coa.r.s.ened, that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the church which is heretical, the church whose sight is troubled and her heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine, there is a relative revelation; each man enters into G.o.d so much as G.o.d enters into him, or as Angelus, [Footnote: Angelus Silesius, otherwise Johannes Soheffler, the German seventeenth century hymn-writer, whose tender and mystical verses have been popularized in England by Miss Winkworth's translations in the _Lyra Germanica_.] I think, said, "the eye by which I see G.o.d is the same eye by which He sees me."

Christianity, if it is to triumph over pantheism, must absorb it. To our pusillanimous eyes Jesus would have borne the marks of a hateful pantheism, for he confirmed the Biblical phrase "ye are G.o.ds," and so would St. Paul, who tells us that we are of "the race of G.o.d."

Our century wants a new theology--that is to say, a more profound explanation of the nature of Christ and of the light which it flashes upon heaven and upon humanity.

Heroism is the brilliant triumph of the soul over the flesh--that is to say, over fear: fear of poverty, of suffering, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation, and of death. There is no serious piety without heroism.

Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.

Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world while at the same time detaching us from it.