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 _volontộ qui voudrait vouloir, mais impuissante se fournir elle-mờme 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 dộchiffrộ 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 assure 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 manuscript 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 _Rộvue
Internationale_ by Mdlle. Berthe Vadier during the passage 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 Frộdộric 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 passed 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 associate of Voltaire, was still talking and enjoying life in his appartement overlooking the woods of
La Bõtie. 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 Tửpffer. 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 constitutional 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
Amiel's Journal 5
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 assembly 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 Frộdộric 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
passing 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 membership, 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 acadộmie, 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 gratitude."
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 Chrộtien," to the _Bibliothốque Universelle
de Genốve_. 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 naùve 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 passage. As to the Christian feeling, we find M. Rio described as belonging to "that noble school
Amiel's Journal 6
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 analytical 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 passage;
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 passion 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 Tỹbingen in 1848, while Paris had already attracted him in 1841, and he was to
make acquaintance with London ten years later, in 1851. No circumstances 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 passed 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 mass 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 circumstance, and for want, as it were, of something else to think about. Not at all. The man who
has left us these microscopic analyses 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 circumstance. It took from the outer world what that world had to give, and then
made the stuff so gained subservient to its own ends.
Amiel's Journal 7
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
passages 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 assent 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 classical age, it attracts into its orbit all
the great works of contemporary intelligence." Quinet, pursuing a somewhat different line of thought, regards
the worship of German ideas inaugurated in France by Madame de Staởl 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
Amiel's Journal 8
in his thought itself veins of mysticism, elements of _Schwọrmerei_, 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 relationships, 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
wishing 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, la franỗaise_," 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 apprenticeship 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 passed 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
_Bibliothốque 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 attitude 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 _Bibliothốque_, 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 accumulating 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."
His return, moreover, was marked by a success which seemed to secure him at once an important position in
his native town. After a public competition he was appointed, in 1849, professor of esthetics and French
Amiel's Journal 9
literature at the Academy of Geneva, a post which he held for four years, exchanging it for the professorship
of moral philosophy in 1854. Thus at twenty-eight, without any struggle to succeed, he had gained, it would
have seemed, that safe foothold in life which should be all the philosopher or the critic wants to secure the full
and fruitful development of his gifts. Unfortunately the appointment, instead of the foundation and support,
was to be the stumbling block of his career. Geneva at the time was in a state of social and political ferment.
After a long struggle, beginning with the revolutionary outbreak of November, 1841, the Radical party, led by
James Fazy, had succeeded in ousting the Conservatives that is to say, the governing class, which had ruled
the republic since the Restoration from power. And with the advent of the democratic constitution of 1846,
and the exclusion of the old Genevese families from the administration they had so long monopolized, a
number of subsidiary changes were effected, not less important to the ultimate success of Radicalism than the
change in political machinery introduced by the new constitution. Among them was the disappearance of
almost the whole existing staff of the academy, then and now the center of Genevese education, and up to
1847 the stronghold of the moderate ideas of 1814, followed by the appointment of new men less likely to
hamper the Radical order of things.
Of these new men Amiel was one. He had been absent from Geneva during the years of conflict which had
preceded Fazy's triumph; he seems to have had no family or party connections with the leaders of the defeated
side, and as M. Scherer points out, he could accept a non-political post at the hands of the new government,
two years after the violent measures which had marked its accession, without breaking any pledges or
sacrificing any convictions. But none the less the step was a fatal one. M. Renan is so far in the right. If any
timely friend had at that moment succeeded in tempting Amiel to Paris, as Guizot tempted Rossi in 1833,
there can be little question that the young professor's after life would have been happier and saner. As it was,
Amiel threw himself into the competition for the chair, was appointed professor, and then found himself in a
hopelessly false position, placed on the threshold of life, in relations and surroundings for which he was
radically unfitted, and cut off by no fault of his own from the milieu to which he rightly belonged, and in
which his sensitive individuality might have expanded normally and freely. For the defeated upper class very
naturally shut their doors on the nominees of the new _rộgime_, and as this class represented at that moment
almost everything that was intellectually distinguished in Geneva, as it was the guardian, broadly speaking, of
the scientific and literary traditions of the little state, we can easily imagine how galling such a social
ostracism must have been to the young professor, accustomed to the stimulating atmosphere, the common
intellectual interests of Berlin, and tormented with perhaps more than the ordinary craving of youth for
sympathy and for affection. In a great city, containing within it a number of different circles of life, Amiel
would easily have found his own circle, nor could political discords have affected his social comfort to
anything like the same extent. But in a town not much larger than Oxford, and in which the cultured class had
hitherto formed a more or less homogeneous and united whole, it was almost impossible for Amiel to escape
from his grievance and establish a sufficient barrier of friendly interests between himself and the society
which ignored him. There can be no doubt that he suffered, both in mind and character, from the struggle the
position involved. He had no natural sympathy with radicalism. His taste, which was extremely fastidious, his
judgment, his passionate respect for truth, were all offended by the noise, the narrowness, the dogmatism of
the triumphant democracy. So that there was no making up on the one side for what he had lost on the other,
and he proudly resigned himself to an isolation and a reserve which, reinforcing, as they did, certain native
weaknesses of character, had the most unfortunate effect upon his life.
In a passage of the Journal written nearly thirty years after his election he allows himself a few pathetic words,
half of accusation, half of self-reproach, which make us realize how deeply this untowardness of social
circumstance had affected him. He is discussing one of Madame de Staởl's favorite words, the word
consideration. "What is _consideration_?" he asks. "How does a man obtain it? how does it differ from fame,
esteem, admiration?" And then he turns upon himself. "It is curious, but the idea of consideration has been to
me so little of a motive that I have not even been conscious of such an idea. But ought I not to have been
conscious of it?" he asks himself anxiously "ought I not to have been more careful to win the good opinion of
others, more determined to conquer their hostility or indifference? It would have been a joy to me to be smiled
upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and goodwill. But to
Amiel's Journal 10
hunt down consideration and reputation to force the esteem of others seemed to me an effort unworthy of
myself, almost a degradation. A struggle with unfavorable opinion has seemed to me beneath me, for all the
while my heart has been full of sadness and disappointment, and I have known and felt that I have been
systematically and deliberately isolated. Untimely despair and the deepest discouragement have been my
constant portion. Incapable of taking any interest in my talents for their own sake, I let everything slip as soon
as the hope of being loved for them and by them had forsaken me. A hermit against my will, I have not even
found peace in solitude, because my inmost conscience has not been any better satisfied than my heart."
Still one may no doubt easily exaggerate this loneliness of Amiel's. His social difficulties represent rather a
dull discomfort in his life, which in course of time, and in combination with a good many other causes,
produced certain unfavorable results on his temperament and on his public career, than anything very tragic
and acute. They were real, and he, being what he was, was specially unfitted to cope with and conquer them.
But he had his friends, his pleasures, and even to some extent his successes, like other men. "He had an
elasticity of mind," says M. Scherer, speaking of him as he knew him in youth, "which reacted against
vexations from without, and his cheerfulness was readily restored by conversation and the society of a few
kindred spirits. We were accustomed, two or three friends and I, to walk every Thursday to the Salốve,
Lamartine's _Salốve aux flancs azurộs_; we dined there, and did not return till nightfall." They were days
devoted to _dộbauches platoniciennes_, to "the free exchange of ideas, the free play of fancy and of gayety.
Amiel was not one of the original members of these Thursday parties; but whenever he joined us we regarded
it as a fờte-day. In serious discussion he was a master of the unexpected, and his energy, his entrain, affected
us all. If his grammatical questions, his discussions of rhymes and synonyms, astonished us at times, how
often, on the other hand, did he not give us cause to admire the variety of his knowledge, the precision of his
ideas, the charm of his quick intelligence! We found him always, besides, kindly and amiable, a nature one
might trust and lean upon with perfect security. He awakened in us but one regret; _we could not understand
how it was a man so richly gifted produced nothing, or only trivialities_."
In these last words of M. Scherer's we have come across the determining fact of Amiel's life in its relation to
the outer world that "sterility of genius," of which he was the victim. For social ostracism and political
anxiety would have mattered to him comparatively little if he could but have lost himself in the fruitful
activities of thought, in the struggles and the victories of composition and creation. A German professor of
Amiel's knowledge would have wanted nothing beyond his Fach, and nine men out of ten in his
circumstances would have made themselves the slave of a magnum opus, and forgotten the vexations of
everyday life in the "douces joies de la science." But there were certain characteristics in Amiel which made it
impossible which neutralized his powers, his knowledge, his intelligence, and condemned him, so far as his
public performance was concerned, to barrenness and failure. What were these characteristics, this element of
unsoundness and disease, which M. Caro calls "_la maladie de l'idộal_?"
Before we can answer the question we must go back a little and try to realize the intellectual and moral
equipment of the young man of twenty-eight, who seemed to M. Scherer to have the world at his feet. What
were the chief qualities of mind and heart which Amiel brought back with him from Berlin? In the first place,
an omnivorous desire to know: "Amiel," says M. Scherer, "read everything." In the second, an extraordinary
power of sustained and concentrated thought, and a passionate, almost a religious, delight in the exercise of
his power. Knowledge, science, stirred in him no mere sense of curiosity or cold critical instinct "he came to
his desk as to an altar." "A friend who knew him well," says M. Scherer, "remembers having heard him speak
with deep emotion of that lofty serenity of mood which he had experienced during his years in Germany
whenever, in the early morning before dawn, with his reading-lamp beside him, he had found himself
penetrating once more into the region of pure thought, 'conversing with ideas, enjoying the inmost life of
things.'" "Thought," he says somewhere in the Journal, "is like opium. It can intoxicate us and yet leave us
broad awake." To this intoxication of thought he seems to have been always specially liable, and his German
experience unbalanced, as such an experience generally is with a young man, by family life, or by any
healthy commonplace interests and pleasures developed the intellectual passion in him to an abnormal
degree. For four years he had devoted himself to the alternate excitement and satisfaction of this passion. He
Amiel's Journal 11
had read enormously, thought enormously, and in the absence of any imperative claim on the practical side of
him, the accumulative, reflective faculties had grown out of all proportion to the rest of the personality. Nor
had any special subject the power to fix him. Had he been in France, what Sainte-Beuve calls the French
"_imagination de dộtail_" would probably have attracted his pliant, responsive nature, and he would have
found happy occupation in some one of the innumerable departments of research on which the French have
been patiently spending their analytical gift since that general widening of horizons which accompanied and
gave value to the Romantic movement. But instead he was at Berlin, in the center of that speculative ferment
which followed the death of Hegel and the break-up of the Hegelian idea into a number of different and
conflicting sections of philosophical opinion. He was under the spell of German synthesis, of that traditional,
involuntary effort which the German mind makes, generation after generation, to find the unity of experience,
to range its accumulations from life and thought under a more and more perfect, a more and more exhaustive,
formula. Not this study or that study, not this detail or that, but the whole of things, the sum of Knowledge,
the Infinite, the Absolute, alone had value or reality. In his own words: "There is no repose for the mind
except in the absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul except in the divine. Nothing finite is true,
is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels
me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of
Being."
It was not, indeed, that he neglected the study of detail; he had a strong natural aptitude for it, and his
knowledge was wide and real; but detail was ultimately valuable to him, not in itself, but as food for a
speculative hunger, for which, after all, there is no real satisfaction. All the pleasant paths which traverse the
kingdom of Knowledge, in which so many of us find shelter and life-long means of happiness, led Amiel
straight into the wilderness of abstract speculation. And the longer he lingered in the wilderness, unchecked
by any sense of intellectual responsibility, and far from the sounds of human life, the stranger and the weirder
grew the hallucinations of thought. The Journal gives marvelous expression to them: "I can find no words for
what I feel. My consciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my life passing. It seems
to me that I have become a statue on the banks of the river of time, that I am the spectator of some mystery,
and shall issue from it old, or no longer capable of age." Or again: "I am a spectator, so to speak, of the
molecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an
irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me and this phenomenology of myself serves as
a window opened upon the mystery of the world. I am, or rather my sensible consciousness is, concentrated
upon this ideal standing-point, this invisible threshold, as it were, whence one hears the impetuous passage of
time, rushing and foaming as it flows out into the changeless ocean of eternity. After all the bewildering
distractions of life after having drowned myself in a multiplicity of trifles and in the caprices of this fugitive
existence, yet without ever attaining to self-intoxication or self-delusion I come again upon the fathomless
abyss, the silent and melancholy cavern, where dwell '_Die Mỹtter_,' where sleeps that which neither lives nor
dies, which has neither movement nor change, nor extension, nor form, and which lasts when all else passes
away."
Wonderful sentences! "_Prodiges de la pensộe speculative, dộcrits dans une langue non moins prodigieuse_,"
as M. Scherer says of the innumerable passages which describe either this intoxication of the infinite, or the
various forms and consequences of that deadening of personality which the abstract processes of thought tend
to produce. But it is easy to understand that a man in whom experiences of this kind become habitual is likely
to lose his hold upon the normal interests of life. What are politics or literature to such a mind but fragments
without real importance dwarfed reflections of ideal truths for which neither language nor institutions
provide any adequate expression! How is it possible to take seriously what is so manifestly relative and
temporary as the various existing forms of human activity? Above all, how is it possible to take one's self
seriously, to spend one's thought on the petty interests of a petty individuality, when the beatific vision of
universal knowledge, of absolute being, has once dawned on the dazzled beholder? The charm and the savor
of everything relative and phenomenal is gone. A man may go on talking, teaching, writing but the spring of
personal action is broken; his actions are like the actions of a somnambulist.
Amiel's Journal 12
No doubt to some extent this mood is familiar to all minds endowed with the true speculative genius. The
philosopher has always tended to become unfit for practical life; his unfitness, indeed, is one of the comic
motives, so to speak, of literature. But a mood which, in the great majority of thinkers, is intermittent, and is
easily kept within bounds by the practical needs, the mere physical instincts of life, was in Amiel almost
constant, and the natural impulse of the human animal toward healthy movement and a normal play of
function, never very strong in him, was gradually weakened and destroyed by an untoward combination of
circumstances. The low health from which he suffered more or less from his boyhood, and then the depressing
influences of the social difficulties we have described, made it more and more difficult for the rest of the
organism to react against the tyranny of the brain. And as the normal human motives lost their force, what he
calls "the Buddhist tendency in me" gathered strength year by year, until, like some strange misgrowth, it had
absorbed the whole energies and drained the innermost life-blood of the personality which had developed it.
And the result is another soul's tragedy, another story of conflict and failure, which throws fresh light on the
mysterious capacities of human nature, and warns us, as the letters of Obermann in their day warned the
generation of George Sand, that with the rise of new intellectual perceptions new spiritual dangers come into
being, and that across the path of continuous evolution which the modern mind is traversing there lies many a
selva oscura, many a lonely and desolate tract, in which loss and pain await it. The story of the "Journal
Intime" is a story to make us think, to make us anxious; but at the same time, in the case of a nature like
Amiel's, there is so much high poetry thrown off from the long process of conflict, the power of vision and of
reproduction which the intellect gains at the expense of the rest of the personality is in many respects so real
and so splendid, and produces results so stirring often to the heart and imagination of the listener, that in the
end we put down the record not so much with a throb of pity as with an impulse of gratitude. The individual
error and suffering is almost forgotten; all that we can realize is the enrichment of human feeling, the
quickened sense of spiritual reality bequeathed to us by the baffled and solitary thinker whose via dolorosa is
before us.
The manner in which this intellectual idiosyncrasy we have been describing gradually affected Amiel's life
supplies abundant proof of its actuality and sincerity. It is a pitiful story. Amiel might have been saved from
despair by love and marriage, by paternity, by strenuous and successful literary production; and this mental
habit of his this tyranny of ideal conceptions, helped by the natural accompaniment of such a tyranny, a
critical sense of abnormal acuteness stood between him and everything healing and restoring. "I am afraid of
an imperfect, a faulty synthesis, and I linger in the provisional, from timidity and from loyalty." "As soon as a
thing attracts me I turn away from it; or rather, I cannot either be content with the second-best, or discover
anything which satisfies my aspiration. The real disgusts me, and I cannot find the ideal." And so one thing
after another is put away. Family life attracted him perpetually. "I cannot escape," he writes, "from the ideal of
it. A companion, of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within a common worship toward the
world outside kindness and beneficence; education to undertake; the thousand and one moral relations which
develop round the first all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes." But in vain. "Reality, the present, the
irreparable, the necessary, repel and even terrify me. I have too much imagination, conscience, and
penetration and not enough character. _The life of thought alone seems to me to have enough elasticity and
immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; practical life makes me afraid._ I am distrustful of myself
and of happiness because I know myself. The ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. And I abhor
useless regrets and repentance."
It is the same, at bottom, with his professional work. He protects the intellectual freedom, as it were, of his
students with the same jealousy as he protects his own. There shall be no oratorical device, no persuading, no
cajoling of the mind this way or that. "A professor is the priest of his subject, and should do the honors of it
gravely and with dignity." And so the man who in his private Journal is master of an eloquence and a poetry,
capable of illuminating the most difficult and abstract of subjects, becomes in the lecture-room a dry
compendium of universal knowledge. "Led by his passion for the whole," says M. Scherer, "Amiel offered his
hearers, not so much a series of positive teachings, as an index of subjects, a framework what the Germans
call a Schematismus. The skeleton was admirably put together, and excellent of its kind, and lent itself
admirably to a certain kind of analysis and demonstration; but it was a skeleton flesh, body, and life were
Amiel's Journal 13
wanting."
So that as a professor he made no mark. He was conscientiousness itself in whatever he conceived to be his
duty. But with all the critical and philosophical power which, as we know from the Journal, he might have
lavished on his teaching, had the conditions been other than they were, the study of literature, and the study of
philosophy as such, owe him nothing. But for the Journal his years of training and his years of teaching would
have left equally little record behind them. "His pupils at Geneva," writes one who was himself among the
number, [Footnote: M. Alphonse Rivier, now Professor of International Law at the University of Brussels.]
"never learned to appreciate him at his true worth. We did justice no doubt to a knowledge as varied as it was
wide, to his vast stores of reading, to that cosmopolitanism of the best kind which he had brought back with
him from his travels; we liked him for his indulgence, his kindly wit. But I look back without any sense of
pleasure to his lectures."
Many a student, however, has shrunk from the burden and risks of family life, and has found himself
incapable of teaching effectively what he knows, and has yet redeemed all other incapacities in the field of
literary production. And here indeed we come to the strangest feature in Amiel's career his literary sterility.
That he possessed literary power of the highest order is abundantly proved by the "Journal Intime."
Knowledge, insight, eloquence, critical power all were his. And the impulse to produce, which is the natural,
though by no means the invariable, accompaniment of the literary gift, must have been fairly strong in him
also. For the "Journal Intime" runs to 17,000 folio pages of MS., and his half dozen volumes of poems, though
the actual quantity is not large, represent an amount of labor which would have more than carried him through
some serious piece of critical or philosophical work, and so enabled him to content the just expectations of his
world. He began to write early, as is proved by the fact that at twenty he was a contributor to the best literary
periodical which Geneva possessed. He was a charming correspondent, and in spite of his passion for abstract
thought, his intellectual interest, at any rate, in all the activities of the day politics, religious organizations,
literature, art was of the keenest kind. And yet at the time of his death all that this fine critic and profound
thinker had given to the world, after a life entirely spent in the pursuit of letters, was, in the first place, a few
volumes of poems which had had no effect except on a small number of sympathetic friends; a few pages of
_pensộes_ intermingled with the poems, and, as we now know, extracted from the Journal; and four or five
scattered essays, the length of magazine articles, on Mme. de Staởl, Rousseau, the history of the Academy of
Geneva, the literature of French-speaking Switzerland, and so on! And more than this, the production, such as
it was, had been a production born of effort and difficulty; and the labor squandered on poetical forms, on
metrical experiments and intricate problems of translation, as well as the occasional affectations of the prose
style, might well have convinced the critical bystander that the mind of which these things were the offspring
could have no real importance, no profitable message, for the world.
The whole "Journal Intime" is in some sense Amiel's explanation of these facts. In it he has made full and
bitter confession of his weakness, his failure; he has endeavored, with an acuteness of analysis no other hand
can rival, to make the reasons of his failure and isolation clear both to himself and others. "To love, to dream,
to feel, to learn, to understand all these are possible to me if only I may be dispensed from willing I have a
sort of primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of hatred, of all which dissipates the soul and makes it
dependent on external things and aims. The joy of becoming once more conscious of myself, of listening to
the passage of time and the flow of the universal life, is sometimes enough to make me forget every desire and
to quench in me both the wish to produce and the power to execute." It is the result of what he himself calls
_"l'ộblouissement de l'infini_." He no sooner makes a step toward production, toward action and the
realization of himself, than a vague sense of peril overtakes him. The inner life, with its boundless horizons
and its indescribable exaltations, seems endangered. Is he not about to place between himself and the forms of
speculative truth some barrier of sense and matter to give up the real for the apparent, the substance for the
shadow? One is reminded of Clough's cry under a somewhat similar experience:
"If this pure solace should desert my mind, What were all else? I dare not risk the loss. To the old paths, my
soul!"
Amiel's Journal 14
