Chapter 4

Was it that all the while Amiel felt himself sure of his _revanche_ that he knew the value of all those sheets of Journal which were slowly accumulating under his hand? Did he say to himself sometimes: “My friends are wrong; my gifts and my knowledge are not lost; I have given expression to them in the only way possible to me, and when I die it will be found that I too, like other men, have performed the task appointed me, and contributed my quota to the human store?” It is clear that very early he began to regard it as possible that portions of the Journal should be published after his death, and, as we have seen, he left certain “literary instructions,” dated seven years before his last illness, in which his executors were directed to publish such parts of it as might seem to them to possess any general interest. But it is clear also that the Journal was not, in any sense, written for publication. “These pages,” say the Geneva editors, “written _au courant de la plume_--sometimes in the morning, but more often at the end of the day, without any idea of composition or publicity--are marked by the repetition, the _lacunae_, the carelessness, inherent in this kind of monologue. The thoughts and sentiments expressed have no other aim than sincerity of rendering.”

And his estimate of the value of the record thus produced was, in general, a low one, especially during the depression and discouragement of his later years. “This Journal of mine,” he writes in 1876, “represents the material of a good many volumes; what prodigious waste of time, of thought, of strength! It will be useful to nobody, and even for myself--it has rather helped me to shirk life than to practice it.” And again: “Is everything I have produced, taken together--my correspondence, these thousands of Journal pages, my lectures, my articles, my poems, my notes of different kinds--anything better than withered leaves? To whom and to what have I been useful? Will my name survive me a single day, and will it ever mean anything to anybody? A life of no account! When all is added up--nothing!” In passages like these there is no anticipation of any posthumous triumph over the disapproval of his friends and the criticism of his fellow-citizens. The Journal was a relief, the means of satisfying a need of expression which otherwise could find no outlet; “a grief-cheating device,” but nothing more. It did not still the sense of remorse for wasted gifts and opportunities which followed poor Amiel through the painful months of his last illness. Like Keats, he passed away, feeling that all was over, and the great game of life lost forever.

It still remains for us to gather up a few facts and impressions of a different kind from those which we have been dwelling on, which may serve to complete and correct the picture we have so far drawn of the author of the Journal. For Amiel is full of contradictions and surprises, which, are indeed one great source of his attractiveness. Had he only been the thinker, the critic, the idealist we have been describing, he would never have touched our feeling as he now does; what makes him so interesting is that there was in him a _fond_ of heredity, a temperament and disposition, which were perpetually reacting against the oppression of the intellect and its accumulations. In his hours of intellectual concentration he freed himself from all trammels of country or society, or even, as he insists, from all sense of personality. But at other times he was the dutiful son of a country which he loved, taking a warm interest in everything Genevese, especially in everything that represented the older life of the town. When it was a question of separating the Genevese state from the church, which had been the center of the national life during three centuries of honorable history, Amiel the philosopher, the cosmopolitan, threw himself ardently on to the side of the opponents of separation, and rejoiced in their victory. A large proportion of his poems deal with national subjects. He was one of the first members of “_L’Institut Genevois_,” founded in 1853, and he took a warm interest in the movement started by M. Eugene Rambert toward 1870, for the improvement of secondary education throughout French-speaking Switzerland. One of his friends dwells with emphasis on his “_sens profond des nationalités, des langues, des villes_”--on his love for local characteristics, for everything deep-rooted in the past, and helping to sustain the present. He is convinced that no state can live and thrive without a certain number of national prejudices, without _à priori_ beliefs and traditions. It pleases him to see that there is a force in the Genevese nationality which resists the leveling influences of a crude radicalism; it rejoices him that Geneva “has not yet become a mere copy of anything, and that she is still capable of deciding for herself. Those who say to her, ‘Do as they do at New York, at Paris, at Rome, at Berlin,’ are still in the minority. The _doctrinaires_ who would split her up and destroy her unity waste their breath upon her. She divines the snare laid for her, and turns away. I like this proof of vitality.”

His love of traveling never left him. Paris attracted him, as it attracts all who cling to letters, and he gained at one time or another a certain amount of acquaintance with French literary men. In 1852 we find him for a time brought into contact with Thierry, Lamennais, Béranger, Mignet, etc., as well as with Romantics like Alfred de Vigny and Théophile Gautier. There are poems addressed to De Vigny and Gautier in his first published volume of 1854. He revisited Italy and his old haunts and friends in Germany more than once, and in general kept the current of his life fresh and vigorous by his openness to impressions and additions from without.

He was, as we have said, a delightful correspondent, “taking pains with the smallest note,” and within a small circle of friends much liked. His was not a nature to be generally appreciated at its true value; the motives which governed his life were too remote from the ordinary motives of human conduct, and his characteristics just those which have always excited the distrust, if not the scorn, of the more practical and vigorous order of minds. Probably, too--especially in his later years--there was a certain amount of self-consciousness and artificiality in his attitude toward the outer world, which was the result partly of the social difficulties we have described, partly of his own sense of difference from his surroundings, and partly again of that timidity of nature, that self-distrust, which is revealed to us in the Journal. So that he was by no means generally popular, and the great success of the Journal is still a mystery to the majority of those who knew him merely as a fellow-citizen and acquaintance. But his friends loved him and believed in him, and the reserved student, whose manners were thought affected in general society, could and did make himself delightful to those who understood him, or those who looked to him for affection. “According to my remembrance of him,” writes M. Scherer, “he was bright, sociable, a charming companion. Others who knew him better and longer than I say the same. The mobility of his disposition counteracted his tendency to exaggerations of feeling. In spite of his fits of melancholy, his natural turn of mind was cheerful; up to the end he was young, a child even, amused by mere nothings; and whoever had heard him laugh his hearty student’s laugh would have found it difficult to identify him with the author of so many somber pages.” M. Rivier, his old pupil, remembers him as “strong and active, still handsome, delightful in conversation, ready to amuse and be amused.” Indeed, if the photographs of him are to be trusted, there must have been something specially attractive in the sensitive, expressive face, with its lofty brow, fine eyes, and kindly mouth. It is the face of a poet rather than of a student, and makes one understand certain other little points which his friends lay stress on--for instance, his love for and popularity with children.

In his poems, or at any rate in the earlier ones, this lighter side finds more expression, proportionally, than in the Journal. In the volume called “Grains de Mil,” published in 1854, and containing verse written between the ages of eighteen and thirty, there are poems addressed, now to his sister, now to old Genevese friends, and now to famous men of other countries whom he had seen and made friends with in passing, which, read side by side with the “Journal Intime,” bring a certain gleam and sparkle into an otherwise somber picture. Amiel was never a master of poetical form; his verse, compared to his prose, is tame and fettered; it never reaches the glow and splendor of expression which mark the finest passages of the Journal. It has ability, thought--beauty even, of a certain kind, but no plastic power, none of the incommunicable magic which a George Eliot seeks for in vain, while it comes unasked, to deck with imperishable charm the commonplace metaphysic and the simpler emotions of a Tennyson or a Burns. Still as Amiel’s work, his poetry has an interest for those who are interested in him. Sincerity is written in every line of it. Most of the thoughts and experiences with which one grows familiar in the Journal are repeated in it; the same joys, the same aspirations, the same sorrows are visible throughout it, so that in reading it one is more and more impressed with the force and reality of the inner life which has left behind it so definite an image of itself. And every now and then the poems add a detail, a new impression, which seems by contrast to give fresh value to the fine-spun speculations, the lofty despairs, of the Journal. Take these verses, written at twenty-one, to his younger sister:

“Treize ans! et sur ton front aucun baiser de mère Ne viendra, pauvre enfant, invoquer le bonheur; Treize ans! et dans ce jour mil regard de ton père Ne fera d’allégresse épanouir ton coeur.

“Orpheline, c’est là le nom dont tu t’appelles, Oiseau né dans un nid que la foudre a brisé; De la couvée, hélas! seuls, trois petits, sans ailes Furent lancés au vent, loin du reste écrasé.

“Et, semés par l’éclair sur les monts, dans les plaines, Un même toit encor n’a pu les abriter, Et du foyer natal, malgré leurs plaintes vaines Dieu, peut-être longtemps, voudra les écarter.

“Pourtant console-toi! pense, dans tes alarmes, Qu’un double bien te reste, espoir et souvenir; Une main dans le ciel pour essuyer tes larmes; Une main ici-bas, enfant, pour te bénir.”

The last stanza is especially poor, and in none of them is there much poetical promise. But the pathetic image of a forlorn and orphaned childhood, “_un nid que la foudre a brisé_,” which it calls up, and the tone of brotherly affection, linger in one’s memory. And through much of the volume of 1863, in the verses to “My Godson,” or in the charming poem to Loulou, the little girl who at five years old, daisy in hand, had sworn him eternal friendship over Gretchen’s game of “_Er liebt mich--liebt mich nicht_,” one hears the same tender note.

“Merci, prophétique fleurette, Corolle à l’oracle vainqueur, Car voilà trois ans, paquerette, Que tu m’ouvris un petit coeur.

“Et depuis trois hivers, ma belle, L’enfant aux grands yeux de velours Maintient son petit coeur fidèle, Fidèle comme aux premiers jours.”

His last poetical volume, “Jour à Jour,” published in 1880, is far more uniformly melancholy and didactic in tone than the two earlier collections from which we have been quoting. But though the dominant note is one of pain and austerity, of philosophy touched with emotion, and the general tone more purely introspective, there are many traces in it of the younger Amiel, dear, for very ordinary human reasons, to his sisters and his friends. And, in general, the pathetic interest of the book for all whose sympathy answers to what George Sand calls “_les tragédies que la pensée aperçoit et que l’oeil ne voit point_” is very great. Amiel published it a year before his death, and the struggle with failing power which the Journal reveals to us in its saddest and most intimate reality, is here expressed in more reserved and measured form. Faith, doubt, submission, tenderness of feeling, infinite aspiration, moral passion, that straining hope of something beyond, which is the life of the religious soul--they are all here, and the _Dernier Mot_ with which the sad little volume ends is poor Amiel’s epitaph on himself, his conscious farewell to that more public aspect of his life in which he had suffered much and achieved comparatively so little.

“Nous avons à plaisir compliqué le bonheur, Et par un idéal frivole et suborneur Attaché nos coeurs à la terre; Dupes des faux dehors tenus pour l’important, Mille choses pour nous ont du prix ... et pourtant Une seule était nécessaire.

“Sans fin nous prodiguons calculs, efforts, travaux; Cependant, au milieu des succès, des bravos En nous quelque chose soupire; Multipliant nos pas et nos soins de fourmis, Nous vondrions nous faire une foule d’amis.... Pourtant un seul pouvait suffire.

“Victime des désirs, esclave des regrets, L’homme s’agite, et s’use, et vieillit sans progrès Sur sa toile de Pénélope; Comme un sage mourant, puissions-nous dire en paix J’ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; 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 Staël 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 “Pensées,” 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 _arrêt 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 “Pensées.” 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 _littérateur_, 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 Töpffer, to Amiel himself: “_C’est ainsi qu’on écrit dans les littératures qui n’ont point de capitale, de quartier général classique, ou d’Académie; c’est ainsi qu’un Allemand, qu’un Américain, ou même un Anglais, use à son gré de sa langue. En France au contraire, où il y a une Académie Française ... on doit trouver qu’un tel style est une très-grande nouveauté et le succés qu’il a obtenu un evènement: il a fallu bien des circonstances pour y préparer_.” No doubt the preparatory circumstance 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 beauté_;” according to another. Not that the whole of the Journal flows with the same ease, the same felicity. There are a certain number of passages 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 retarding 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 trouée_, 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 Guérin. 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 analysis 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 class to which he belongs. For beside his spiritual experience Obermann’s is superficial, and Maurice de Guérin’s a passing trouble, a mere quick outburst of passionate 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 Neufchâtel--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 sensibilité 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 “Encyclopédie.”

Maurice de Guérin, 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-passion 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 Guérin 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.