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Full text of "Amiel's journal; the Journal intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel"

V 

GIFT 



AMiEL's JOURNAL 

THE JOURNAL INTIME OF 
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL 

TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES 

Mrs. HUMPHREY WARD 




A. L. BURT COMPANY, PUBLISHERS, 



UNIVERSITY OF CAL1FOIH-TA 
SANTA BARBARA COLLEGE LiBRAKY 



7-5? 
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION. 

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

M. A. W. 



PREFACE. 

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

The difficulties of the translation have been sometimes 
considerable, owing, first of all, to those elliptical modes 
of speech which a man naturally employs when he is 
writing for himself and not for the public, but which a 
translator at all events is bound in some degree to expand. 
Every here and there Amiel expresses himself in a kind 
of shorthand, perfectly intelligible to a Frenchman, but for 
which an English equivalent, at once terse and clear, is 
hard to find. Another difficulty has been his constant use 
of a technical philosophical language, which, according to 
his French critics, is not French even philosophical 
French but German. Very often it has been impossible 
to give any other than a literal rendering of such passages, 
if the thought of the original was to be preserved; but in 
those cases where a choice was open to me, I have pre- 
ferred the more literary to the more technical expression; 
and I have been encouraged to do so by the fact that Amiel, 
when he came to prepare for publication a certain number 
of "Pensees," extracted frorp the Journal, and printed at 



Vi PREFACE. 

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

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

My warmest thanks are due to my friend and critic, M. 
Edmond Scherer, from whose valuable and interesting 
study, prefixed to the French Journal, as well as from cer- 
tain materials in his possession which he has very kindly 
allowed me to make use of, I have drawn by far the greater 
part of the biographical material embodied in the Introduc- 
tion. M. Scherer has also given me help and advice 
through the whole process of translation advice which his 
scholarly knowledge of English has made especially wortli 
having. 

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

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

MARY A. WARD. 



INTRODUCTION. 

IT WAS in the last days of December, 1882, that the first 
volume of Henri Frederic Amiel's " Journal Intime " was 
published at Geneva. The book, of which the general 
literary world knew nothing prior to its appearance, con- 
tained a long and remarkable Introduction from the pen of 
M. Bdmond Scherer, the well-known French critic, who 
had been for many years one of Amiel's most valued 
friends, and it was prefaced also by a little Avertissement, 
in which the " Editors " that is to say, the Genevese 
friends to whom the care and publication of the Journal 
had been in the first instance entrusted described in a 
few reserved and sober words the genesis and objects of the 
publication. Some thousands of sheets of Journal, cover- 
ing a period of more than thirty years, had come into the 
hands of Amiel's literary heirs. "They were written," 
said the Avertissement, "with several ends in view- 
Amiel recorded in them his various occupations, and the 
incidents of each day. He preserved in them his psycholog- 
ical observations, and the impressions produced on him by 
books. But his Journal was, above all, the confidant of 
his most private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby 
the thinker became conscious of his own inner life ; a safe 
shelter wherein his questionings of fate and the future, the 
voice of grief, of self-examination and confession, the soul's 
cry for inward peace, might make themselves freely heard. 
. In the directions concerning his papers which 
he left behind him, Amiel expressed the wish that his 
literary executors should publish those parts of the 
Journal which might seem to them to possess either inter- 
est as thought or value as experience. The publication 
of this volume is the fulfillment of this desire. The 



vii i INTROD DCT10N. 

reader wiil find in it, not a volume of Memoirs, but the 
confidences of a solitary thinker, the meditations of a phi- 
losopher for whom the things of the soul were the sovereign 
realities of existence." 

Thus modestly announced, the little volume made its 
quiet debut. It contained nothing, or almost nothing, 
of ordinary biographical material. M. Scherer's Intro- 
duction supplied such facts as were absolutely necessary 
to the understanding of Amiel's intellectual history, but 
nothing more. Everything of a local or private character 
that could be excluded was excluded. The object of the 
editors in their choice of passages for publication was 
declared to be simply " the reproduction of the moral and 
intellectual physiognomy of their friend," while M. Scherer 
expressly disclaimed any biographical intentions, and 
limited his Introduction as far as possible to "a study of 
the character and thought of Amiel." The contents of 
the volume, then, were purely literary and philosophical; 
its prevailing tone was a tone of introspection, and the 
public which can admit the claims and overlook the inher- 
ent defects of introspective literature has always been a 
small one. The writer of the Journal had been during 
his lifetime wholly unknown to the general European 
public. In Geneva itself he had been commonly regarded 
as a man who had signally disappointed the hopes and ex- 
pectations of his friends, whose reserve and indecision of 
character had in many respects spoiled his life, and alienated 
the society around him; while his professional lectures 
were generally pronounced dry and unattractive, and the 
few volumes of poems which represented almost his only 
contributions to literature had nowhere met with any real 
cordiality of reception. Those concerned, therefore, in the 
publication of the first volume of the Journal can hardly 
have had much expectation of a wide success. Geneva is 
not a favorable starting-point for a French book, and it 
may well have seemed that not even the support of M. 
Schecer's name would be likely to carry the volume beyond 
a small local circle. 



INTRODUCTION. ix 

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



X INTRODUCTION. 

distingue, M. Amiel de Geneve" Since then M. Renan 
has devoted two curious articles to the completed Journal 
in the Journal des Desbats. The first object of these 
reviews, no doubt, was not so much the critical apprecia- 
tion of Amiel as the development of certain paradoxes 
which have been haunting various corners of M. Kenan's 
mind for several years past, and to which it is to be hoped 
he has now given expression with sufficient emphasis and 
brnsquerie to satisfy even his passion for intellectual ad- 
venture. Still, the rank of the book was fully recognized, 
and tlie first article especially contained some remarkable 
criticisms, to which we shall find occasion to recur. " In 
these two volumes otpensees," said M. Eenan, " without any 
sacrifice of truth to artistic effect, we have both the perfect 
mirror of a modern mind of the best type, matured by the 
best modern culture, and also a striking picture of the 
sufferings which beset the sterility of genius. These two 
volumes may certainly be reckoned among the most inter- 
esting philosophical writings which have appeared of late 
years." 

M. Caro's article on the first volume of the Journal, in 
the Revue des Deux Mondes for February, 1883, may 
perhaps count as the first introduction of the book to the 
general cultivated public. He gave a careful analysis of 
the first half of the Journal resumed eighteen months 
later in the same periodical on the appearance of the 
second volume and, while protesting against what he con- 
ceived to be the general tendency and effect of Amiel's 
mental story, he showed himself fully conscious of the rare 
and delicate qualities of the new writer. " La reverie a 
reussi a notre auteur" he says, a little reluctantly for M. 
Caro has his doubts as to the legitimacy of reverie; " il en 
aufait une ceuvure qui restera." The same final judgment, 
accompanied by a very different series of comments, was 
pronounced on the Journal a year later by M.Paul Bourget, 
a young and rising writer, whose article is perhaps chiefly 
interesting as showing the kind of effect produced by 
Amiel's thought on minds of a type essentially alien from 



INTRODUCTION. xi 

his owu. There is a leaven of something positive and aus- 
tere, of something which, for want of a better name, one 
calls Puritanism, in Amiel, which escapes the author of 
"Une Cruelle Enigme." But whether he has understood 
Amiel or no, M. Bourget is fully alive to the mark which 
the Journal is likely to make among modern records of 
mental history. He, too, insists that the book is already 
famous and will remain so; in the first place, because of 
its inexorable realism and sincerity; in the second, because 
it is the most perfect example available of a certain variety 
of the modern mind. 

Among ourselves, although the Journal has attracted 
the attention of all who keep a vigilant eye on the progress 
of foreign literature, and although one or two appreciative 
articles have appeared on it in the magazines, the book has 
still to become generally known. One remarkable English 
testimony to it, however, must be quoted. Six months after 
the publication of the first volume, the late Mark Pattison, 
who since then has himself bequeathed to literature a strange 
and memorable fragment of autobiography, addressed a letter 
to M. Scherer as the editor of the "Journal Intime," which 
M. Scherer has since published, nearly a year after the 
death of the writer. The words have a strong and melan- 
choly 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 experi- 
ence. I say unique, but I can vouch that there is in exist- 
ence at least one other soul which has lived through the same 
struggles, mental and moral, as Amiel. In your pathetic 
description of the volonte qui voudrait vouloir, tnais impuis- 
sante a se fournir a elle-meme des motifs of the repug- 
nance for all action the soul petrified by the sentiment of 
the infinite, in all this I recognize myself. Celui qui a 
dechiffre le secret de la vie finie, qui en a lu le mot, est 



xii INTRODUCTION. 

sorli du monde des vivants, il est mort de fait. I can feel 
foicibly 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 contempor- 
aries who in his lifetime knew nothing of him. It is a nat- 
ural 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 inno- 
cent 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 person- 
alities 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 pres- 
ent writer access to certain manuscript material in his 
possession, even the sketch which follows, vague and imper- 
fect as it necessarily is, would have been impossible.* 

Henri Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva in September, 
1821. He belonged to one of the emigrant families, of 
which a more or less steady supply had enriched the little 
republic during the three centuries following the Reforma- 
tion. Amiel's ancestors, like those of Sismondi, left 

* Four or five articles on the subject of Amiel's life have been con- 
tributed to the Revue 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 
fnr the Durnoses of the present introduction 



INTRODUCTION'. xiii 

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 repub- 
lic, and would seem to have married and settled in the 
halcyon days following the restoration of Genevese inde- 
pendence in 1814. Amiel was born when the prosperity of 
Geneva was at its height, when the little state was admin- 
istered by men of European reputation, and Genevese 
society had power to attract distinguished visitors and ad- 
mirers 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 over- 
looking the woods of La Batie. Kossi 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 Eive, and the botanist Auguste-Pyrame 
de Candolle, kept the country abreast of European thought 
and speculation, while the mixed nationality of the place 
the blending in it of French keenness with Protestant 
enthusiasms and Protestant solidity was beginning to find 
inimitable and characteristic expression in the stories of 
Topffer. The country was governed by an aristocracy, 
which was not so much an aristocracy of birth as one of 
merit and intellect, and the moderate constitutional ideas, 
which represented the Liberalism of the post- Waterloo 
period were nowhere more warmly embraced or more intelli- 
gently carried out than in Geneva. 

During the years, however, which immediately followed 
Amiel's birth, some signs of decadence began to be visible 
in this brilliant Genevese society. The generation which 
had waited for, prepared, and controlled, the Eestoration 
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 



x i v INT ROD UCTION. 

been for awhile laid to sleep by the events of 1814. But 
the slumber was a short one at Geneva as elsewhere, and 
when Kossi 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 equili- 
brium 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 Eadical 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 whirl- 
pool of political change. 

In the same year 1833 that M. Rossi had left Geneva, 
Henri Frederic Amiel, at twelve years old, was left 
orphaned of both his parents. They had died comparatively 
young his mother was only just over thirty, and his 
father cannot have been much older. On the death of the 
mother the little family was broken up, the boy 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 member- 
ship, 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 academic, he would 
seem to have done only moderately as far as prizes and 
honors were concerned. We are told, however, that he 



INTRODUCTION. XV 

read enormously, and that he was, generally speaking, 
inclined rather to make friends with men older than him- 
self 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 Generese 
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 Esthetics 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 experi- 
ences of the same kind have followed each other in his 
intellectual experience, yet none has effaced the deep im- 
pression 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 exer- 
cised 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 pro- 
fessor 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. Kio's book, 
"L'Art Chretien," to the Bibliotheque Universelle de 
Geneve. We see in them the young student conscien- 
tiously writing his first review writing it at inordinate 
length, as young reviewers are apt to do, and treating the 



xvi INTRODUCTION. 

subject ab ovo in a grave, pontifical way, which is a little 
naive 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 melan- 
choly 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 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, how- 
ever, 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 metaphys- 
ical 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 



INTRODUCTION, xvii 

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 Dion, 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 some- 
thing 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 
AmiePs Wanderjahre, spent in a free, wandering student 
life, which left deep marks on his intellectual development. 
During four years, from 1844 to 1848, his headquarters 
were at Berlin; but every vacation saw him exploring 
some new country or fresh intellectual center Scandinavia 
in 1845, Holland in 1846, Vienna, Munich, and Tubingen 
in 1848, while Paris had already attracted him in 1841, and 
he was to make acquaintance with London ten years later, 
in 1851. No circumstances could have been more favor- 
able, one would have thought, to the development of such 



xviii INTRODUCTION. 

a nature. With his extraordinary power of " throwing him- 
self into the object " of effacing himself and his own per- 
sonality in the presence of the thing to be undertsood 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 iit 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 some- 
thing 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. 

Of these years of travel, however, the four years spent at 
Berlin were by far the most important. " It was at Heidel- 
berg 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, 



INTROD UCTION. xi x 

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 Kome. 
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.Kenan 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 Ger- 
man with French elements, of which there are such abun- 
dant 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 gr ancle 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 fruit- 
ful 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 intelli- 
gence." Quinet, pursuing a somewhat different line of 
thought, regards the worship of German ideas inaugurated 
in France by Madame de Stae'l 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 



xx INTRODUCTION. 

the mockery of Candide and the materialism of the Revo- 
lution. . . . Under the Restoration France continued 
to study German philosophy and poetry with profound 
veneration and submission. We imitated, translated, com- 
piled, 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 re- 
search 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 mys- 
tery 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 



INTRODUCTION. xtf 

talent," says M. Scherer, after dwelling on the rapid 
growth of his intellectual powers under German influence, 
" the profit which Amiel derived from his stay at Berlin is 
more doubtful. Too long contact with the German mind 
had led to the development in him of certain strangenesses 
of style which he had afterward to get rid of, and even 
perhaps of some habits of thought which he afterward felt 
the need of checking and correcting." This is very true. 
Amiel is no doubt often guilty, as M. Caro puts it, of 
attempts "to write German in French," and there are in 
his thought itself veins of mysticism, elements of Schwdr- 
merei, 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 coun- 
teracted the Hegelian influences brought to bear upon him 
at Berlin,* 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 In time," 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 ex- 
plain 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 pen 
de chaque chose et rien de V ensemble, a la franfaise," 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 feres 

* See a note, however, on the subject of Amiel's philosophic* I r- 
lationships, printed as an Appendix to the present volume. 



INTRODUCTION. 

atque rotundum. " And it was this antagonism, or rathei 
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 im- 
portant 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 BiUiotheque 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 pains- 
taking review of M. Rio is now in his turn a master. He 
speaks with dignity and authority, he has a graphic, vigor- 
ous 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 repre- 
sents a permanent note of character, a lasting attitude of 
mind. A great deal, of course, in the two papers is tech- 
nical and statistic, but what there is of general comment 
and criticism is so good that one is tempted to make some 
melancholy comparisons between them and another article 
in the Bibliotheque, that on Adolphe Pictet, written in 
1856, and from which we have already quoted. In 1848 
Amiel was for awhile master of his powers and his knowl- 
edge; no fatal divorce had yet taken place in him between 
the accumulating and producing faculties; he writes readily 



INTRODUCTION. xxiii 

ven 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 Ger- 
many 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 aesthetics and French 
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 fruit- 
ful development of his gifts. Unfortunately the appoint- 
ment, 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 



xxiv INTRODUCTION. 

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 intro- 
duced 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 pre- 
ceded 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 competi- 
tion 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 nor- 
mally and freely. For the defeated upper class very 
naturally shut their doors on the nominees of the new 
regime, 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 toth stirnu- 



INTRODUCTION. XX v 

lating atmosphere, the common intellectual interests of 
Berlin, and tormented with perhaps more than the ordi- 
nary 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. 
Lis 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 char- 
acter, 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 
Stael'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 motivt 
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 



INTRODUCTION. 

to me to be smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, 
and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and 
goodwill. But to 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 cheerful- 
ness 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 Saleve, 
Lamartine's Saleve aux ftancs azures; we dined there, and 
did not return till nightfall." They were days devoted to 
debauches 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 fete-day. In 
serious discussion he was a master of the unexpected, and 



INTRO D UCTION. xx v ii 

his energy, his entrain, affected us all. If his grammatical 
questions, his discussions of rhymes and synonyms, aston- 
ished 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 crea- 
tion. 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 il 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 unsound- 
ness and disease, which M. Caro calls "la maladie de 
V ideal? " 

Before we can answer the question we must go back a 
little and try to realize the intellectual and moral equip- 
ment 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, 



xxviii INTRODUCTION. 

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 ex- 
perienced 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 some- 
where 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 ex- 
citement and satisfaction of this passion. He 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 pro- 
portion 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 
detail " would probably have attracted his pliant, respon- 
sive 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 move- 
ment. 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 differ- 
ent and conflicting sections of philosophical opinion. He 
was under the spell of German synthesis, of that tradi- 
tional, involuntary effort which the German mind makes, 



INTRODUCTION. xxix 

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 ex- 
clusive, 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 ab- 
stract speculation. And the longer he lingered in the 
wilderness, unchecked by any sense of intellectual respon- 
sibility, 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 con- 
sciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beat- 
ing, and my life passing. It seems to me that I have be- 
come 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: "lam a spec- 
tator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men 
call individual life; lam conscious of an incessant meta- 
morphosis, 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 



xxx INTRODUCTION. 

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 change- 
less ocean of eternity. After all the bewildering distrac- 
tions 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 Mutter S 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 pensee specula- 
tive, deer its dansune 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 experi- 
ences 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 im- 
portance dwarfed reflections of ideal truths for which 
neither language nor institutions provide any adequate ex- 
pression ! 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. 

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 



INTRODUCTION. xxxi 

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 move- 
ment 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 inner- 
most 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 mys- 
terious 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 percep- 
tions 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 



xxxii INTRODUCTION. 

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 suc- 
cessful 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 con- 
tent with the second-best, or discover anything which satis- 
fies 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 kind- 
ness and beneficence; education to undertake; the thous- 
and and one moral relations which develop round the first 
all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes." But in vain. 
"Keality, 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 elas- 
ticity and immensity, to be free enough from the irrepar- 
able; 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. 



1NTROD UCTION. xxxiil 

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 wuole," 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 Schemed ismus. 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 wanting." 

So that as a professor he made no mark. He was con- 
scientiousness 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, [W.qr.e,, th^ study of literature, and the study of 
philosophy,; as, suchj r ,owe hjmjio.thing. But for the Journal 
hJs.^flar^Qf v tramingj^nd; : his,years of, Reaching would have 
loft equally little, .rQord\ behind,, f thjtfl. ^.'^i^.pupil^.a.t 
Gfenev.a," wr^tej^pne wh,o..was ? ,,h,imself ,among,tlie number,* 
;< never learned $o. appreciatp bjm :i a;t hJ^.^r.u&^yoijth., We 
did justice ,uo_doubt to, a k^p^ledge, as.varie^asj^t w,as 
wide, to his. vast stores o| rea$i#g, (( to 



we,,,like,d hjm 
w 

v, u'i:>rlii; inn. mutt 1 , 'u mn( m):..?:in! 



qf teaching, effectively, \yhat,hft knp-w$, aud.lias yet .redeemed 
all other incapacities in/th.e ffeUl of literary produptipn. .And 



' 'at the 
University of Brussels. ,ir f; v / ;ij. (;. 



x x xi v INT ROD UCTION. 

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, accom- 
paniment 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, liter- 
ature, 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 pensees intermin- 
gled 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 Stael, 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 pro- 
duction born of effort and difficulty; and the labor squan- 
dered on poetical forms, on metrical experiments and intri- 
cate problems of translation, as well as the occasional affec- 
tations 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. 



INTRODUCTION. xxxv 

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 ex- 
ternal 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 " V eblouissement de Vinfini" 
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 endan- 
gered. 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 dough'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 ! " 

And in close combination with the speculative sense, 
with the tendency which carries a man toward the content 
plative study of life and nature as a whole, is the critical 
sense the tendency which, in the realm of action and con- 
crete performance, carries him, as A.niiel expresses it, 
"droit au defant," and makes him conscious at once of 
the weak point, the germ of failure in a project or an 
action. It is another aspect of the same idiosyncrasy. " The 
point I have reached seems to be explained by a too rest- 



xxxvi INTRODUCTION. 

less search for perfection, by the abuse of the critical 
faculty, and by an unreasonable distrust of first impulses, 
first thoughts, first words. Confidence and spontaneity 
of life are drifting out of my reach, and this is why I can 
no longer act." For abuse of the critical faculty brings 
with it its natural consequences timidity of soul, paralysis 
of the will, complete self-distrust. " To know is enough 
for me; expression seems to me often a profanity. What 
I lack is character, will, individuality." "By what mys- 
tery," he writes to M. Soberer, " do others expect much 
from me? whereas I feel myself to be incapable of any- 
thing serious or important." Defiance and impuissance are 
the words constantly on his lips. " My friends see what I 
might have been; I see what I am." 

And yet the literary instinct remains, and must in some 
way be satisfied. And so he takes refuge in what he him- 
self calls scales, exercises, tours de force in verse-transla- 
tion of the most laborious and difficult kind, in ingenious 
vers cVoccasion, in metrical experiments and other literary 
trifling, as his friends think it. of the same sort. " I am 
afraid of greatness. I am not afraid of ingenuity ; all my 
published literary essays are little else than studies, games, 
exercises, for the purpose of testing myself. I play scales, 
as it were ; I run up and down my instrument. I train my 
hand and make sure of its capacity and skill. But the 
work itself remains unachieved. I am always preparing 
and never accomplishing, and my energy is swallowed up 
in a kind of barren curiosity." 

Not that he surrenders himself to the nature which is 
stronger than he all at once. His sense of duty rebels, his 
conscience suffers, and he makes resolution after resolution 
to shake himself free from the mental tradition which had 
taken such hold upon him to write, to produce, to satisfy 
his friends. In 1861, a year after M. Scherer had left 
Geneva, Amiel wrote to him, describing his difficulties and 
his discouragements, and asking, as one may ask an old 
friend of one's youth, for help and counsel. M. Scherer, 
much touched by the appeal, answered it plainly and 



INTRODUCTION. xxx vii 

frankly described the feeling of those who knew him as 
they watched his life slipping away unmarked by any of 
the achievements of which his youth had given promise, 
and pointed out various literary openings in which, if he 
were to put out his powers, he could not but succeed. To 
begin with, he urged him to join the Revue Germanique, 
then being started by Charles Dollfus, Kenan, Littre, and 
others. Amiel left the letter for three months unanswered 
and then wrote a reply which M. Scberer probably received 
with a sigh of impatience. For, rightly interpreted, it 
meant that old habits were too strong, and that the mo- 
mentary impulse had died away. When, a little later, 
"Les Etrangeres," a collection of verse-translations, came 
out, it was dedicated to M. Scherer, who did not, however, 
pretend to give it any very cordial reception. Amiel took 
his friend's coolness in very good part, calling him his 
"dear Rhadamanthus." "How little I knew!" cries M. 
Scherer. " What I regret is to have discovered too late by 
means of the Journal, the key to a problem which seemed 
to me hardly serious, and which I now feel to have been 
tragic. A kind of remorse seizes me that I was not able 
to understand my friend better, and to soothe his suffering 
by a sympathy which would have been a mixture of pity 
and admiration." 

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 ex- 
pression to them in the only way possible to me, and when 
I die it will be found that I too, like other men, have per- 
formed 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 
euch parts of it as might seem to them to possess any gen- 



ixxviii INTRODUCTION. 

eral 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 lacunce, the carelessness, inher- 
ent in this kind of monologue. The thoughts and senti- 
ments expressed have no other aim than sincerity of ren- 
dering." 

And his estimate of the value of the record thus pro- 
duced 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 fel- 
low-citizens. The Journal was a relief, the means of satis- 
fying 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 im- 
pressions 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 



INTRODUCTION. xxxix 

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 
Kambert toward 1870, for the improvement of secondary 
education throughout French-speaking Switzerland. One 
of his friends dwells with emphasis on his " sens profond 
des nationalites, 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 a priori beliefs and tradi- 
tions. 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 Komy, at 
Berlin,' are still in the minority. The doctrinaires who 



xl INTRODUCTION. 

would split her up and destroy her unity waste their breatri 
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, 
Beranger, Mignet, etc., as well as with Komantice like 
Alfred de Vignyand TheophileGautier. 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 Lis life fresh and vigorous by his open- 
ness 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 mo- 
tives 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. Prob- 
ably, 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," wrte* 



M. Soberer, "he was bright, sociable, a charming com- 
panion. Others who knew him better and longer than I 
say the same. The mobility of his disposition counter- 
acted 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 
lavtgh-.his hearty-student's laugh would have found it diffi- 
cult to identifyrhim with; the author/ of so many somber 
pages. *V:;<M. \Bivier, his old pupil, -remembers him as 
"strong. -and active, still handsome, .delightful in conversa- 
tion, ready to amuse and be amused.." ;,: Indeed, if the 
photographs of him are to be trusted, there must have 
been something" specially 'at'trafetiVe' in Jn'e^eT^itiYe, ex- 
pressiv^fape',' with /its loffcy fcrp^^ne^.^ye^^iaiid kindly 
mouth. It is thci : face of a.poet/rather^han: of .a student,, 
and makes one understand, certain other little pp.ints which 
his friends i^y^sU^j.^u for Jn^tan.ge, his^.lo.ve for and 
popularityiiWiUJa ohiLdr-ecu- ,:: m>= ut-^,i, ; oj w* u :: 

In his poems;'- : 'or ;at any n rate M i -the f -earMeir -ones, this 
^^SiMA? ^^iffiPrFA^xp^^ififtrMprOsportipnally,, than in 
the Journal. In tiMrfttbUBf ealted^" Gprains-dei Mil," pub- 
lished in il^4, 'an d'ContainiugiTerseii'WTitten: between the 
ages of eigttt'e'en ; 'toQ' thirty /"tfedfe^re ^o'eni's" addressed, 
now to his,$i&;te.r:< n-o^rto Ql4('Crenevesi3;,fi-ie:nd6y,and now to- 
famous memiof other countries'-whomihe^had seerivand made 
friends with^ti*' pasSlftg; ^tvMch^fead^Me^by side with the 
" Journal Intime;*' :>< brin^"a d^tain i!1 g'l^arri 'SMsparkle into 
aint 'Otherwise: somber.! picture. .Amis!' L was ,( never a;maatef: of 
ppetical .f orrft^; his,.versej compared: to'his <prose; isitamefand 
fettered;: it never reaches tire giow-.and splendor: of. xpres- 
sioDowhich mark : the finestipassages>ofvthe Journal. -It has 
ability*; tiionght^t-beauty even; of :-a certain \ i kind,"bulb no 
plastic power, nose^of :<the incommunicable magic whioh;a 
O,eprge,i Eliot seeks for in !aki, while it comes unaeke ; d,nt 
diecrkrwith: impeKisBstble'ioharm ' the commonplace mt#- 
physksvand the simpler emotions of a Tennyson 'Oi>""a 
Burns. Still .asuAnxielta. wock^ his .poetry has' an interest 



jlii INTRODUCTION. 

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 sor- 
rows 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 
Uself. And every now and then the poems add a detail, 
Ik new impression, which seems by contrast to give fresh 
Talue to the fine-spun speculations, the lofty despairs, of 
the Journal. Take these verses, written at twenty-one, 
Jo his younger sister : 

*' Treize ans ! et sur ton front aucun baiser de mere 
Ne viendra, pauvre enfant, invoquer le bonheur ; 
Treine ans ! et dans ce jour nul regard de ton pere 
Ne fera d'allegresse epanouir ton cceur. 

" Orplieline, c'est la le nom dont tu t'appelles, 
Oiseau ne dans un nid que la foudre a brise ; 
De la couvee, helas 1 seuls, trois petits, sans ailes 
Furent lances au vent, loin du reste ecrase. 

" Et, semes par 1'eclair sur les monts, dans les plaines, 
Un meme toit encor n'a pu les abriter, 
Et du foyer natal, inalgre leurs plaintes vaines 
Dieu, peut-etre longtemps, voudra les ecarter. 

' 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 benir." 

Tne last stanza is especially poor, and in none of them 
js there much poetical promise. But the pathetic image 
of a forlorn and orphaned childhood, " un nid que la 
foudre a brise," 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 God- 
son," or in the charming poem to Loulou, the little girl 
who at five years old, daisy in hand, had SAVorn him eternal 
friendship over Gretchen's game of " Er liebt mich liebt 
mich nicht" one hears the same tender note. 



1NTROD UCT10N. xli ii 

' Merc!, prophetique fleurette, 
Corolle a 1'oracle vai.iqueur, 
Car voila trois ans, paquerette, 
Que tu m'ouvris un petit cceur. 

" Et depuis trois hivers, rua belle, 
L'enfant aux grands yeux de velours 
Maintient son petit coeur fidele, 
Fidele comine aux premiers jours." 

His last poetical volume, "Jour a Jour," published in 
1880, is far more uniformly melancholyand 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 " Us tragedies 
que la pensee aperpoit et que VcBil ne volt 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 ex- 
pressed 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 a plaisir complique le bonheur, 
Et par un ideal frivole et suborneur 

Attache nos cosurs a la terre ; 
Dupes des faux deliors tenus pour I'lmportant, 
Mille choses pour nous ont du prix . . . et pourtant. 

Une seule etait necessaire. 

: * Sans fin nous prodiguons calculs, efforts, travaux ; 
Cependant, au milieu des succes, des bravos 
En nous quelque chose souoire ; 



INTRODUCTION. 

Multiphant nos pas et nos soins de fourmis, 
Nous voudrions nous faire une foule d'amis . . 
Pourtant un seul pouvait sufflre. 

" Victime des desirs, esclave des regrets, 
L'homme s'agite, et s'use, et vieillit sans progres 

Sur sa toile de Penelope ; 

Comtne 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 AmiePs prose outside the 
Journal there is no occasion to dwell. The two essays on 
Madame de Stael and Eousseau 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 con- 
taining the "Grains de Mils," are worthy of preservation. 
But in general, whatever he himself published was inferior 
fo 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 abun- 
dantly told in the Journal we must not repeat it here. 
He had neper 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 Viiiet; 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 AmiePs 
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 Intiine," as Joubert's 



INTRODUCTION. xlv 

"Correspondence" completes the "Pensees." There must 
be ample material for it; and Amiel's letters would prob- 
ably supply us with more of that literary and critical reflec- 
tion 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 forth- 
coming 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, pro- 
duced no appreciable effect on his generation ; but the post- 
humous 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 French- 
man will be inclined to apply Sainte-Beuve's remarks on 
Amiel's elder countryman, Kodolphe Tdpffer, to Amiel 
himself: " C'est ainsi qiCon ecrit dans les litteratures qui 
n'ont point de capitale, de quartier general dassigue, ou 
d' Academic; tfest ainsi qu'un Allemand, qu^un Ameri- 
cain, 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^ilaoltenu un evenement: il 



xl vi INTROD UCTION: 

a fallu lien des cir con stances pour y pr Sparer." No 
doubt the preparatory circumstance in AmiePs 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 enthu- 
siasm 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 "tfune 
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 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 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 gener- 
ations he has done for the spiritual life of this, and the 
wealth of poetical, scientific, and psychological faculty 
whioh he has brought to the analysis of human feeling and 
human perceptions places him so far as the present cen- 
tury 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 



INT ROD UCTION. x ] vii 

Guerin's a passing trouble, a mere quick outburst of 
passionate feeling. Amiel indeed has neither the con- 
tinuous romantic beauty nor the rich descriptive wealth of 
Senancour. The Dent du Midi, with its untrodden soli- 
tude, 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 
Neufchdtel these various pictures are the work of one of 
the most finished artists in words that literature has pro- 
duced. But how true George Sand's criticism is! "Chez 
Obermann la sensiMlite est active, V intelligence est paresseuse 
ou insuffisante. " He has a certain antique power of mak- 
ing 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 philoso- 
phical 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 primi- 
tive manners, and discussing Christianity in the tone of 
the "Encyclopedic." 

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-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 land- 
scape has a tame, didactic air. The Swiss thinker is too 
ready to make nature a mere vehicle of moral or philo- 
sophical thought; Maurice de Guerin loves her for herself 



slviii INTRODUCTION. 

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 experi- 
ence poetically told; it throws no light on the genesis and 
progress of the great forces which are molding and reno- 
vating 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 con- 
fession-writing. His book is representative of human ex- 
perience in its more intimate and personal forms to aii 
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 speci- 
men 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 under- 
stand. "Amiel," says M. Eenan, "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 certaic fatal 
spiritual weakness debarred him to a great extent tro' the 
world of practical life, his sympathy with action, whether 
it was the action of the politician or the social reformer. 



INTRODUCTION. xlix 

or mereiy 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 liter- 
ary 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 God and duty are 
the foundation of existence. Here, indeed, we come to the 
innermost secret of Amiel's charm, the fact which prob- 
ably goes farther than any other to explain his fascination 
for a large and growing class of readers. For, while he 
represents all the intellectual complexities of a time bewil- 
dered by the range and number of its own acquisitions, the 
religions 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 salva- 
tion, of redemption, and conversion, as if these things were 
realities. He asks me 'What does M. Eenan make of sin? ' 
ja?hbein,jecrois queje le supprime." But it is just because 



I INTRODUCTION. 

Amiel is profoundly sensitive to the problems of evil and 
responsibility, and M. Kenan dismisses them with this 
half-tolerant, half-skeptical smile, that M. Kenan'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 reli- 
gion. Religion, Amiel declares again and again, cannot 
be replaced by philosophy. The redemption of the 
intelligence is not the redemption of the heart. The phil- 
osopher 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 hell, 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 varia- 
tions 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 



INTRODUCTION. }{ 

intellect, and after all the storms of pessimism and necessi- 
tarianism have passed over him. The reconciliation of the 
two certitudes, 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 explana- 
tion another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity." "Na- 
ture 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 elabo- 
rated by human history, the only revelation of God. 

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 attempt- 
ing 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 God. 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 God. 
Religion is not a method ; it is a life a higher and super- 
natural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits ; 
a communion with God, 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 
God. And so what was an austere monologue becomes 



]ii INTRODUCTION. 

i hilogue, reluctance becomes docility, renunciation passes 
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 reli- 
gion 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 in- 
spiration and guidance for eighteen centuries in the reli- 
gious 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 nobler kind leaves 
an indelible impression on the nature which has once sur- 
rounded 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 passionate needs! Amiel, as 
soon as his reasoning faculty has once reached its maturity, 
never deceives himself as to the special claims of the reli- 
gion which by instinct and inheritance he loves ; he makes 



INTRODUCTION. liii 

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 passed 
away; and as years go on, with more and more clearness of 
conviction, he learns to regard all special belief s 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 con- 
tradictions, 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 sen- 
sitive to the need of faith as any that have gone before it ; 
more widely conscious than its predecessors of the limita- 
tions 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 nobility 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 foreshadow? the future. 



Hv INTRODUCTION. 

For the age of the preachers is passing 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 pur- 
suit 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 stead- 
fastness which is the inmost note of it to these medita* 
tive lives, which, through all the ebb and flow of thought, 
and in the dim ways of doubt and suffering, rich in knowl- 
edge, and yet rich in faith, grasp in new forms, and pro- 
claim to us in new words, 

" The mighty hopes which make us into." 



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 need- 
ful to possess God. 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 God. We must learn to detach ourselves 
from all that is capable of being lost, to bind ourselves abso- 
lutely only to what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy 
the rest as a loan, a usufruct. . . . To adore, to un- 
derstand, 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 God, 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 poten- 
tiality of greatness, and as it is impossible to be outside 
God, 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 



2 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

and inversely, the life of a gnat as infinite as that of a 
celestial body, with all its dust of nations, we feel our- 
selves 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 liftVEinxJpeCJ ' C \ T ^ ' T " ' r A 

AlHbdCtoin there is but oWe subject oi study.: the forms 
and metamorphoses of mind._All other subjects may be 
reduced to that; all other studies bring us back to this 



GENEVA, April'2'0; 1 'l'849.^-ii) is'<sixi years* to-day since 
I last left Geneva. How many journeys, how many im- 
pressions, observations, 1 thoughts, how many forms of 'men 
and things have smce then 'passed before me'attd in me! 

K?en ' 
>erhg" 

Three ''STJo'wstoi'mg -tnis" afterhodnV'-f'oor' ! blossomirrg 
plum-trees' iaiid.'^eatch tre^s! Wfiat a dMefence" from, six 
years "'ago, when the cherry-trees,' adorrie^i' in theirgreen 
spring dress and ludeir with their bridal 'ftttwers; 1 smiled 
atymy'ae^ariS!re 'Mong the" Vab dots' fields- -and the: 'lilacs 
of 1 Burgundy^'thJ 4 ^ gi'e'ai; '"gu^ts 1 of perftime : into mx- 
face!' '''.' V'"'. ar; - u ' v ' ;-..;.. 

May 3, 1840. I have iiefef' ir felt a'ny inward assurance 
of genius'^ or ; any presentiment of glory - or' of 'happiness. 
1 have neve'r seiii myself 'in imagination g^eafc^or 1 'famous, 
or even a h'usband, a father, 'an -mfluentiaJ eitizeiii '-This 
iiuTifference to the' future, this absolute self -distrust', are, 
no dpubt, to be "tat en'; .'as -signs. 1 Wl>at dreams I have are 
all' vague aiid in^efinit^, I ob^Wt ^t'to ]ftei -for T'ain ! now 
scarcely 'capable 1 df;ttving. ; Recognfife f^ur- plaice; let the 




useful so. Renounce yodrself, aec6p\t the"'e'ttp ; giveii ytU', 
with its'hdn'ey 'and its gaft,' : as it comes. !; Bring- God' d6wn 

"' ';>' ... ^ '.,( I, .'.;,' ifi;^.. "_! i ' .. 'i. i"-i t i-; ,j;>"(- ., .-- 

1 * AtrifeHeft Gen^Vli f6r Paris aod" Berlin in April, 1843,= the piwefjf 
ink yea*, 184lT43ihvjp^toep,fti?enlaiik Italy ^^U^t umC 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 3 

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 aAvay from you, and then you 
will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may 
happen to you. 

May 27j 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 re- 
served for self-devotion; it is what must have oftenest 
wrung the heart of the Son of man; and if God could 
suffer, it would be the wound we should be forever inflict- 
ing upon Him. He also He above all is the great mis- 
understood, 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 God; 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 grass and on the trees; to be so 
calmly happy is it not too much? is it deserved? let 
me enjoy it without reproaching heaven for its kindness; 
let me enjoy it with gratitude. The days of trouble come 
soon enough and are many enough. I have no presenti- 
ment 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 



4 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 

all miserable and ignoble things from me under thy boun- 
ties and splendors ! 

October 1, 1849. Yesterday, Sunday, 1 read through 
and made extracts from the gospel of St. John. It con- 
firmed me in my belief that about Jesus we must believe 
no one but Himself, and that what we have to do is to dis- 
cover the true image of the founder behind all the pris- 
matic 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 direc- 
tions. It is the historical task of Christianity to assume 
with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to 
be forever spiritualizing more and more her understand- 
ing 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 hell all these 
beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened, 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 recon- 
quered ; 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 God so much 
as God enters into him, or as Angelus,* I think, said, 
" the eye by which I see God is the same eye by which 
He sees me." 

* Angelus Silesius, otherwise Johannes Scheffler, the German seven- 
teenth century hymn-writer, whose tender and mystical verses have 
been popularized in England by Miss Winkworth's translations in the 
JLyra Germanica. 



A MIEDS JO URN A L. 5 

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 gods," and so would St. Paul, 
who tells us that we are of "the race of God." Our cen- 
tury 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 suffer- 
ing, of calumny, of sickness, of isolation, and of death. 
There is no serious piety without heroism. Heroism is the 
dazzling and glorious concentration of^tourage. 

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



December 30,1850. The relation of thought to action 
filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried 
toward a bizarre formula, which seems to have something 
of the night still clinging about it: Action is but 
coarsened thought; thought become concrete, obscure, and 
unconscious. It seemed to me that our most trifling ac- 
tions, of eating, walking, and sleeping, were the condensa- 
tion of a multitude of truths and thoughts, and that the 
wealth of ideas involved was in direct proportion to the 
commonness of the action (as our dreams are the more 
active, the deeper our sleep). We are hemmed round with 
mystery, and the greatest mysteries are contained in what 
we see and do every day. In all spontaneity the work of 
creation is reproduced in analogy. When the spontaneity 
is unconscious, you have simple action; when it is con- 
scious, intelligent and moral action. At bottom this is 
nothing more than the proposition of Hegel: ["What is 
rational is real; and what is real is rational;"] but it had 
never seemed to me more evident, more palpable. Every- 
thing which is, is thought, but not conscious and indi- 



6 A MI EL'S JO URN A L. 

vidual thought. The human intelligence is but the con- 
sciousness of being. It is what I have formulated before: 
Everything is a symbol of a symbol, and a symbol of what? 
of mind. 

. . . I have just been looking through the complete 
works of Montesquieu, and cannot yet make plain to my- 
self the impression left on me by this singular style, with 
its mixture of gravity and affectation, of carelessness and 
precision, of strength and delicacy; so full of sly intention 
for all its coldness, expressing at once inquisitiveness and 
indifference, abrupt, piecemeal, like notes thrown together 
haphazard, and yet deliberate. I seem to see an intelli- 
gence naturally grave and austere donning a dress of wit 
for convention's sake. The author desires to entertain as 
much as to teach, the thinker is also a bel-esprit, the juris- 
consult has a touch of the coxcomb, and a perfumed breath 
from the temple of Venus has penetrated the tribunal of 
Minos. Here we have austerity, as the century under- 
stood it, in philosophy or religion. In Montesquieu, the 
art, if there is any, lies not in the words but in the matter. 
The words run freely and lightly, but the thought is self- 
conscious. 



Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its 
minute of perfect beauty; so, in tbe garden of the soul 
each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one 
and only moment of expansive grace and radiant king- 
ship. Each star passes but once in the night through the 
meridian over our heads and shines there but an instant ; 
so, in the heaven of the mind each thought touches its 
zenith but once, and in that moment all its brilliancy and 
all its greatness culminate. Artist, poet, or thinker, if you 
want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, 
seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is 
their highest point. Before it, you have but vague out- 
lines or dim presentiments of them. After it you will have 
only weakened reminiscence or powerless regret; that 
moment is the moment of your ideal. 



A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 7 

Spite is anger which is afraid to show itself, it is an im- 
potent fury conscious of its impotence. 



Nothing resembles pride so much as discouragement. 



To repel one's cross is to make it heavier. 



In the conduct of life, habits count for more than max- 
ims, because habit is a living maxim, becomes flesh and 
instinct. To reform one's maxims is nothing: it is but to 
change the title of the book. To learn new habits is every- 
thing, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but 
a tissue of habits. 



February 17, 1851. I have been reading, for six or 
seven hours without stopping the Pensees of Joubert. I 
felt at first a very strong attraction toward the book, and 
a deep interest in it, but I have already a good deal cooled 
down. These scattered and fragmentary thoughts, falling 
upon one without a pause, like drops of light, tire, not my 
head, but reasoning power. The merits of Joubert consist 
in the grace of the style, the vivacity or finesse of the criti- 
cisms, the charm of the metaphors; but he starts many 
more problems than he solves, he notices and records more 
than he explains. His philosophy is merely literary and 
popular; his originality is only in detail and in execution. 
Altogether, he is a writer of reflections rather than a phi- 
losopher, a critic of remarkable gifts, endowed with ex- 
quisite sensibility, but, as an intelligence, destitute of the 
capacity for co-ordination. He wants concentration and 
continuity. It is not that he has no claims to be consid- 
ered a philosopher or an artist, but rather that he is both 
imperfectly, for he thinks and writes marvelously, on a 
small scale. He is an entomologist, a lapidary, a jeweler, 
a coiner of sentences, of adages, of criticisms, of aphorisms, 
counsels, problems; and his book, extracted from the ac- 
cumulations of his journal during fifty years of his life, 
is a collection of precious stones, of butterflies, coins and 



8 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

engraved gems. The whole, however, is more subtle than 
strong, more poetical than profound, and leaves upon the 
reader rather the impression of a great wealth of small 
curiosities of value, than of a great intellectual existence 
and a new point of view. The place of Joubert seems to 
me then, below and very far from the philosophers and the 
true poets, but honorable among the moralists and the 
critics. He is one of those men who are superior to their 
works, and who have themselves the unity which these 
lack. This first judgment is, besides, indiscriminate and 
severe. I shall have to modify it later. 

February 20th. I have almost finished these two volumes 
ofPtnsees and the greater part of the Correspondance. This 
last has especially charmed me ; it is remarkable for grace, 
delicacy, atticism, and precision. The chapters on meta- 
physics and philosophy are the most insignificant. All 
that has to do with large views with the whole of things,, 
is very little at Joubert's command; he has no philosophy 
of history, no speculative intuition. He is the thinker 
of detail, and his proper field is psychology and matters of 
taste. In this sphere of the subtleties and delicacies of 
imagination and feeling, within the circle of personal affec- 
tation and preoccupations, of social and educational inter- 
ests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine criti- 
cisms, in exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from 
flower to flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, 
an vEolian harp, a ray of furtive light stealing through the 
leaves. Taken as a whole, there is something impalpable 
and immaterial about him, which I will not venture to call 
effeminate, but which is scarcely manly. He wants bone 
and body: timid, dreamy, and clairvoyant ; , he hovers 
far above reality. He is rather a soul, a breath, than a 
man. It is the mind of a woman in the character of a 
child, so that we feel for him less admiration than tender- 
ness and gratitude. 

February 27, 1851. Read over the first book of Emile. 
I was revolted, contrary to all expectation, for I opened 
the book with a sort of hunger for style and beauty. I was 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 9 

conscious instead of an impression of heaviness and harsh- 
ness, of labored, hammering emphasis, of something vio- 
lent, passionate, and obstinate, without serenity, greatness, 
nobility. Both the qualities and the defects of the book 
produced in me a sense of lack of good manners, a blaze 
of talent, but no grace, no distinction, the accent of good 
company wanting. I understood how it is that Eousseau 
rouses a particular kind of repugnance, the repugnance of 
good taste, and I felt the danger to style involved in such 
a model as well as the danger to thought arising from a 
truth so alloyed and sophisticated. What there is of true 
and strong in Rousseau did not escape me, and I still ad- 
mired him, but his bad sides appeared to me with a clear- 
ness relatively new. 

(Same day.} The pensee-writeT is to the philosopher 
what the dilettante is to the artist. He plays with 
thought, and makes it produce a crowd of pretty things in 
detail, but he is more anxious about truths than truth, 
and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity, 
escapes him. He handles his instrument agreeably, but he 
does not possess it, still less does he create it. He is a gar- 
dener and not a geologist ; he cultivates the earth only so 
much as is necessary to make it produce for him flowers 
and fruits ; he does not dig deep enough into it to under- 
stand it. In a word, the pensee-writer deals with what 
is superficial and fragmentary. He is the literary, the 
oratorical, the talking or writing philosopher ; whereas the 
philosopher is the scientific pensee- writer. The pensee- 
writers serve to stimulate or to popularize the philosophers. 
They have thus a double use, besides their charm. They 
are the pioneers of the army of readers, the doctors of the 
crowd, the money-changers of thought, which they con- 
vert into current coin. The writer of pensee is a man of 
letters, though of a serious type, and therefore he is 
popular. The philosopher is a specialist, as far as the 
form of his science goes, though not in substance, and 
therefore he can never become popular. In France, for 
one philosopher (Descartes) there have been thirty 



1 AMIEL'S JO URN A L. 

writers of pensees\ in Germany, for ten such writers ther 
have been twenty philosophers. 

March 25, 1851. How many illustrious men whom I 
have known have been already reaped by death, Steifens, 
Marheineke, Neander, Mendelssohn, Thorwaldsen, Oelen- 
schlager, Geijer, Tegner, Oersted, Stuhr, Lachmaun; and 
with us, Sismondi, Topffer, de Candolle, savants, artists, 
poets, musicians, historians.* The old generation is going. 
What will the new bring us? What shall we ourselves 
contribute? A' few great old men Schelling, Alexander 
von Humboldt, Schlosser still link us with the glorious 
past. Who is preparing to bear the weight of the future? 
A shiver seizes us when the ranks grow thin around 
us, when age is stealing upon us, when we approach the 
zenith, and when destiny .sa^s to us: "Show what is in 
tluv! ]S r o\v is the moment, now is the hour, else fall back 
intJ nothingness ! It "is | thy turn i' Give the world thy 
measure, say thy word, ; "re veal' tfty'tiullity' of thy' capacity. 
Come forth' from" the ^Hade'j J ' ; It is no 7tfnger a' question oi 
promising, thou mustperforhi'. t: 'Tnetifeeof appreritic'eship 
i& over. Servant, show us what thmr hast doffe with thy 
talent." Speak riow,' > br' : be silent forever."' 'This appeal 



mont. : It cries, ; " rfe tnbtFr'e'ady $ Gfive"fcti account. 1 " GiVii 

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riai, *t HWi)e^Wth#8iKf l848:-*"> a}1 -/ 



AM1EU8 JOURNAL. U 

studies, thy talent, and thy works. Now and here is the 
hour of great hearts, the hour of heroism and of genius." 

April 6, 1851. Was there ever any one so vulnerable as 
I? If I were a father how many griefs and vexations, a 
child might cause me. As a husband I should have a thou- 
sand ways of suffering because my happiness demands a 
thousand conditions I. have a hea r t too easily reached, a 
too restless imagination; despair is easy to me, and every 
sensation reverberates again and again within me. What 
might be, spoils for me what is. What ought to be con- 
sumes me with sadness. So the 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 seemr 
to me to have enough elasticity and immensity, to be free, 
enough from the irreparable; practical life makes me- 
afraid. 

And yet, at the same time it attracts me ; I have need of it- 
Family life, especially, in all its delightfulness, in all its 
moral depth, appeals to me almost like a duty. Some- 
times I cannot escape from the ideal of it. A companions 
of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes;, 
within, a common worship, toward the world outside,, 
kindness and beneficence; educations to undertake,, the- 
thousand and one moral relations which develop- round 
the first, all these ideas intoxicate me sometimes. But. I 
put them aside because every hope is, as it were, an egg 
Avhence a serpent may issue instead of a dove, 'because 
every joy missed is a stab ; because every seed; confided to 
destiny contains an ear of grief which the future ma; 
develop. 

I am distrustful of myself and of happiness because J 
know myself. The ideal poisons for me all imperfect pos- 
session. Everything which compromises the future or 
destroys my inner liberty, which enslaves me- to things or 
obliges me to be other than I could and ought to be, all. 
which injures my idea of the perfect man,, hurts me mor- 
tally, degrades and wounds me in mind, even before- 



J 2 A MIEISS JO URN A L. 

hand. I abhor nseless regrets and repentances. The 
fatality of the consequences which follow upon every hu- 
man act, the leading idea of dramatic art and the most 
tragic element of life, arrests me more certainly than the 
arm of the Commandeur. I only act with regret, and almost 
by force. 

To be dependent is to me terrible; but to depend upon 
what is irreparable, arbitrary and unforeseen, and above 
all to be so dependent by my fault and through my own 
error, to give up liberty and hope, to slay sleep and hap- 
piness, this would be hell ! 

All that is necessary, providential, in short, unimputable, 
I could bear, 1 think, with some strength of mind. But 
responsiblity mortally envenoms grief; and as an act is 
essentially voluntary, therefore I act as little as possible. 

Last outbreak of a rebellious and deceitful self-will, crav- 
ing for repose for satisfaction, for independence! is there 
hot some relic of selfishness in such a disinterestedness, 
such a fear, such idle susceptibility. 

I wish to fulfill my duty, but whero is it, what is it? 
Here inclination comes in again and interprets the oracle. 
And the ultimate question is this: Does duty consist in 
obeying one's nature, even the best and most spiritual? or 
in conquering it? 

Life, is k essentially the education of the mind and 
intelligence, or that of the will? And does will show 
itself in strength or in resignation? If the aim of life is to 
teach us renunciation, then welcome sickness, hindrances, 
Bufferings of every kind ! But if its aim is to produce the 
perfect man, then one must watch over one's integrity of 
mind and body. To court trial is to tempt God. At 
bottom, the God of justice veils from me the God of love. 
I tremble instead of trusting. 

Whenever conscience speaks with a divided, uncertain, 
and disputed voice, it is not yet the voice of God. De- 
scend still deeper into yourself, until you hear nothing but 
a clear and undivided voice, a voice which does away with 
doubt and brings with it persuasion, light and serenity. 
Happy, says the apostle, are they who are at peace with 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 1$ 

themselves, and whose heart condemneth them not in the 
part they take. This inner identity, this unity of convic- 
tion, is all the more difficult the more the mind analyzes, 
discriminates, and foresees. It is difficult, indeed, for 
liberty to return to the frank unity of instinct. 

Alas ! we must then re-climb a thousand times the peaks 
already scaled, and reconquer the points of view already 
won, we must, fight the fight! The human heart, like 
kings, signs mere truces under a pretence of perpetual 
peace. The eternal life is eternally to be re-won. Alas,. 
yes ! peace itself is a struggle, or rather it is struggle and 
activity which are the law. We only find rest in effort, 
as the flame only finds existence in combustion. Hera- 
clitus ! the symbol of happiness is after all the same as 
that of grief; anxiety and hope, hell and heaven, are 
equally re&tless. The altar of Vesta and the sacrifice of 
Beelzebub burn with the same fire. Ah, yes, there you 
have life life double-faced and double-edged. The fire 
which enlightens is also the fire which consumes; the 
element of the gods may become that of the accursed. 

April 7, 1851. Read a part of Euge's* volume "Die 
Academie" (1848) where the humanism of the neo-Hegel- 
ians in politics, religion, and literature is represented by 
correspondents or articles (Kuno Fischer, Kollach, etc). 
They recall the philosophist party of the last century, able 
to dissolve anything by reason and reasoning, but unable to 
construct anything ; for construction rests upon feeling, 
instinct, and will. One finds them mistaking philosophic 
consciousness for realizing power, the redemption of the 
intelligence for the redemption of the heart, that is to say, 
the part for the whole. These papers make me understand 
the radical difference between morals and intellectualism. 
The writers of them wish to supplant religion by philos- 
ophy. Man is the principle of their religion, and intellect 

* Arnold Ruge, born in 1803, died at Brighton in 1880, principal 
editor of the Hcdlische, afterward the Deutsche Jahrbucher (1838 43), 
in which Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Louis Feuerbach wrote. H 
was a member of the parliament of Frankfort. 



14 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 

is the climax of man. Their religion, then, is the religion 
of intellect. There you have the two worlds: Christianity 
brings and preaches salvation by the conversion of the will, 
humanism by the emancipation of the mind. One attacks 
the heart, the other the brain. Both wish to enable man 
to reach his ideal. But the ideal differs, if not by its con- 
tent, at least by the disposition of its content, by the pre- 
dominance and sovereignity given to this for that inner 
power. For one, the mind is the organ of the soul; for 
the other, the soul is an inferior state of the mind; the 
one wishes to enlighten by making better, the other to 
make better by enlightening. It is the difference between 
Socrates and Jesus. 

The cardinal question is that of sin. The question of 
immanence or of dualism is secondary. The trinity, the 
life to come, paradise and hell, 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? 
How can man be led to be truly man? Is the ultimate 
root of his being responsibility, yes or no? And is doing 
or knowing the right, acting or thinking, his ultimate end? 
If science does not produce love it is insufficient. Now all 
that science gives is the amor intellectualis of Spinoza, light 
without warmth, a resignation which is contemplative and 
grandiose, but inhuman, because it is scarcely transmissi- 
ble and remains a privilege, one of the rarest of all. Moral 
love places the center of the individual in the center of 
being. It has at least salvation in principle, the germ of 
eternal life. To love is virtually to know; to know is not 
virtually to love; there you have the relation of these two 
modes of man. The redemption wrought by science or 
by intellectual love is then inferior to the redemption 
wrought by will or by moral love. The first may free a 
man from himself, it may enfranchise him from egotism. 
The second drives the ego out of itself, makes it active and 
fruitful. The one is critical, purifying, negative; the 
other is vivifying, fertilizing, positive. Science, however 
spiritual and substantial it may be in itself, is still formal 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 15 

relatively to love. Moral force is then the vital point. 
And this force is only produced by moral force. Like 
alone acts upon like. Therefore do not amend by reason- 
ing, but by example; approach feeling by feeling; do not 
hope to excite love except by love. Be what you wish 
others to become. Let yourself and not your words 
preach for you. 

Philosophy, then, to return to the subject, can never 
replace religion ; revolutionaries are not apostles, although 
the apostles may have been revolutionaries. To save 
from the outside to the inside and by the outside I un- 
derstand also the intelligence relatively to the will is an 
error and danger. The negative part of the humanist's 
work is good; it will strip Christianity of an outer shell, 
which has become superfluous; but Euge andFeuerbach 
cannot save humanity. She must have her saints and 
her heroes to complete the work of her philosophers. 
Science is the power of man, and love his strength; man 
becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only 
by the heart. Knowledge, love, power there is the com- 
plete life. 

June 16, 1851. This evening I walked up and down 
on the Pont des Bergues, under a clear, moonless heaven 
delighting in the freshness of the water, streaked with 
light from the two quays, and glimmering under the 
twinkling stars. Meeting all these different groups of young 
people, families, couples and children, who were returning to 
their homes, to their garrets or their drawing-rooms, singing 
or talking as they went, I felt a movement of sympathy for all 
these passers-by; my eyes and ears became those of a poet or 
a painter; while even one's mere kindly curiosity seems to 
bring with it a joy in living and in seeing others live. 

August 15, 1851. To know how to be ready, a great, 
thing, a precious gift, and one that implies calculation, 
grasp and decision. To be always ready a man must be> 
able to cut" a knot, for everything cannot be untied; he 
must know how to disengage what is essential from the 
detail in which it is enwrapped, for everything cannot be 



16 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 

equally considered; in a word, he mnst be able to simplify 
his duties, his business, and his life. To know how to 
be ready, is to know how to start. 

It is astonishing how all of us are generally cumbered up 
with the thousand and one hindrances and duties which 
are not such, but which nevertheless wind us about with 
their spider threads and fetter the movement of our wings. 
It is the lack of order which makes us slaves; the confu- 
sion of to-day discounts the freedom of to-morrow. 

Confusion is the enemy of all comfort, and confusion is 
born of procrastination. To know how to be ready we 
must be able to finish. Nothing is done but what is fin- 
ished. The things which we leave dragging behind us 
will start up again later on before us and harass our path. 
Let each day take thought for what concerns it, liquidate 
its own affairs and respect the day which is to follow, and 
then we shall be always ready. To know how to be ready 
is at bottom to know how to die. 

September 2, 1851. Read the work of Tocqueville ("De 
la Democrats en Amerique.") My impression is as yet a 
mixed one. A fine book, but I feel in it a little too much 
imitation of Montesquieu. This abstract, piquant, sen- 
tentious style, too, is a little dry, over-refined and mo- 
notonous. It has too much cleverness and not enough 
imagination. It makes one think, more than it charms, 
and though really serious, it seems flippant. His method 
of splitting up a thought, of illuminating a subject by suc- 
cessive facets, has serious inconveniences. We see the 
details too clearly, to the detriment of the whole. A mul- 
titude of sparks gives but a poor light. Nevertheless, the 
author is evidently a ripe and penetrating intelligence, who 
takes a comprehensive view of his subject, while at the 
same time possessing a power of acute and exhaustive 
analysis. 

September 6th. Tocqueville's book has on the whole a 
calming effect upon the mind, but it leaves a certain sense 
of disgust behind. It makes one realize the necessity of 
what is happening around us and the inevitableness of tb/ v 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 1? 

goal prepared for us; but it also makes it plain that the era 
of mediocrity in everything is beginning, and mediocrity 
freezes all desire. Equality engenders uniformity, and it 
is by sacrificing what is excellent, remarkable, and extra- 
ordinary that we get rid of what is bad. The whole be- 
comes less barbarous, and at the same time more vulgar. 

The age of great men is going; the epoch of the ant-hill, 
of life in multiplicity, is beginning. The century of indi- 
vidualism, if abstract equality triumphs, runs a great risk 
of seeing no more true individuals. By continual leveling 
and division of labor, society will become everything and 
man nothing. 

As the floor of valleys is raised by the denudation and 
washing down of the mountains, what is average will rise 
at the expense of what is great. The exceptional will 
disappear. A plateau with fewer and fewer undulations, 
without contrasts and without oppositions, such will be 
the aspect of human society. The statistician will register 
a growing progress, and the moralist a gradual decline: on 
the one hand, a progress of things ; on the other, a de- 
cline of souls. The useful will take the place of the beau- 
tiful, industry of art, political economy of religion, and 
arithmetic of poetry. The spleen will become the malady 
of a leveling age. 

Is this indeed the fate reserved for the democratic era? 
May not the general well-being be purchased too dearly at 
such a price? The creative force which in the beginning 
we see forever tending to produce and multiply differences, 
will it afterward retrace its steps and obliterate them one 
by one? And equality, which in the dawn of existence is 
mere inertia, torpor, and death, is it to become at last the 
natural form of life? Or rather, above the economic and 
political equality to which the socialist and non-socialist 
democracy aspires, taking it too often for the term of its 
efforts, will there not arise a new kingdom of mind, a 
church of refuge, a republic of souls, in which, far beyond 
the region of mere right and sordid utility, beauty, devo- 
tion, holiness, heroism, enthusiasm, the extraordinary, the 



18 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

infinite, shall have a worship and an abiding city? Utili 
tarian materialism, barren well-being, the idolatry of the 
flesh and of the "I," of the temporal and of mammon, 
are they to be the goal if our efforts, the final recompense 
promised to the labors of our race? I do not believe it. 
The ideal of humanity is something different and higher. 

But the animal in us must be satisfied first, and we must 
first banish from among us all suffering which is superfluous 
and has its origin in social arrangements, before we can 
return to spiritual goods. 

September 7, 1851. (Aix). It is ten o'clock at night. 
A strange and mystic moonlight, with a fresh breeze and 
a sky crossed by a few wandering clouds, makes our 
terrace delightful. These pale and gentle rays shed from 
the zenith a subdued and penetrating peace; it is like the 
calm joy or the pensive smile of experience, combined with 
a certain stoic strength. The stars shine, the leaves trem- 
ble in the silver light. Not a sound in all the landscape; 
great gulfs of shadow under the green alleys and at the 
corners of the steps. Everything is secret, solemn, mys- 
terious. 

night hours, hours of silence and solitude ! with you 
are grace and melancholy ; you sadden and you console. 
You speak to us of all that has passed away, and of all that 
must still die, but you say to us, "courage !" and you 
promise us rest. 

November 9, 1851. (Sunday). At the church of St. 
Gervais, a second sermon from Adolphe Monod, less gran- 
diose perhaps but almost more original, and to me more 
edifying than that of last Sunday. The subject was St. 
Paul or the active life, his former one having been St. 
John or the inner life, of the Christian. I felt the golden 
spell of eloquence: I found myself hanging on the lips of 
the orator, fascinated by his boldness, his grace, his energy, 
and his art, his sincerity, and his talent; and it was borne 
in upon me that for some men difficulties are a source of 
inspiration, so that what would make others stumble is 
for them the occasion of their highest tviumphs, He made 



AMIEVS JOURNAL. 19 

St. Paul cry during an hour and a half; he made an old 
nurse of him, he hunted up his old cloak, his prescriptions 
of water and wine to Timothy, the canvas that he mended, 
his friend Tychicus, in short, all that could raise a smile; 
and from it he drew the most unfailing pathos, the most 
austere and penetrating lessons. He made the whole St. 
Paul, martyr, apostle and man, his grief, his charities, 
his tenderness, live again before us, and this with a gran- 
deur, an unction, a warmth of reality, such as I had never 
seen equaled. 

How stirring is such an apotheosis of pain in our century 
of comfort, when shepherds and sheep alike sink benumbed 
in Capuan languors, such an apotheosis of ardent charity in 
a time of coldness and indifference toward souls, such an 
apotheosis of a human, natural, inbred Christianity, in an 
age, when some put it, so to speak, above man, and others 
below man ! Finally, as a peroration, he dwelt upon the 
necessity for a new people, for a stronger generation, if the 
world is to be saved from the tempests which threaten it. 
" People of God, awake ! Sow in tears, that ye may reap in 
triumph!" What a study is such a sermon! I felt all the 
extraordinary literary skill of it, while my eyes were still 
dim with tears. Diction, composition, similes, all is in- 
structive and precious to remember. I was astonished, 
shaken, taken hold of. 

November 18, 1851. The energetic subjectivity, which 
has faith in itself, which does not fear to be something 
particular and definite without any consciousness or shame 
of its subjective illusion, is unknown to me. I am, so far 
as the intellectual order is concerned, essentially objective, 
and my distinctive speciality, is to be able to place myself 
in all points of view, to see through all eyes, to emancipate 
myself, that is to say, from the individual prison. Hence 
aptitude for theory and irresolution in practice; hence 
critical talent and difficulty in spontaneous production. 
Hence, also, a continuous uncertainty of conviction and 
opinion, so long as my aptitude remained mere instinct; 
but now that it is conscious and possesses itself, it is able 



20 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 

to conclude and affirm in its turn, so that, after having 
brought disquiet, it now brings peace. It says: " There ia 
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, or 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. Then, in the light of the absolute, 
every idea becomes worth studying; in that of the infinite, 
every existence worth respecting; in that of the divine, 
every creature worth loving. 

December 2, 1851. Let mystery have its place in you; 
do not be always turning up your whole soil with the 
plowshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow 
corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may 
bring, and reserve a nook of shadow for the passing bird ; 
keep a place in your heart for the unexpected guests, an 
altar for the unknown God. Then if a bird sing among 
your branches, do not be too eager to tame it. If you are 
conscious of something new thought or feeling, wakening 
in the depths of your being do not be in a hurry to let 
in light upon it, to look at it; let the springing germ have 
the protection of being forgotten, hedge it round with 
quiet, and do not break in upon its darkness; let it take 
shape and grow, and not a word of your happiness to 
any one ! Sacred work of nature as it is, all conception 
should be enwrapped by the triple veil of modesty, silence 
and night. 



Kindness is the principle of tact, and respect for others 
the first condition of savoir-vivre. 



He who is silent is forgotten; he who abstains is taken 
at his word ; he who does not advance, falls back ; he who 
stops is overwhelmed, distanced, crushed; he who ceasea 
to grow greater becomes smaller; he who leaves off, giveb 
up ;' the stationary condition is the beginning of the end- -- 



AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 21 

it is the terrible symptom which precedes death. To live, 
is to achieve a perpetual triumph; it is to assert one's self 
against destruction, against sickness, against the annulling 
and dispersion of one's physical tjnd moral being. It is to 
will without ceasing, or rather to refresh one's will day by 
day. 



It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; 
it is the conscience which educates history. Fact is cor- 
rupting, it is we who correct it by the persistence of our 
ideal. The soul moralizes the past in order not to be de- 
moralized by it. Like the alchemists of the middle ages, she 
finds in the crucible of experience only the gold that she 
herself has poured into it. 



February 1, 1852. (Sunday). Passed the afternoon in 
reading the Monologues of Schleiermacher. This little 
book made an impression on me almost as deep as it did 
twelve years ago, when I read it for the first time. It 
replunged me into the inner world, to which I return 
with joy whenever I may have forsaken it. I was able 
besides, to measure my progress since then by the trans- 
parency of all the thoughts to me, and by the freedom with 
which I entered into and judged the point of view. 

It is great, powerful, profound, but there is still pride in 
it, and even selfishness. For the center of the universe is 
still the self, the great Ich of Fichte. The tameless lib- 
erty, the divine dignity of the individual spirit, expanding 
till it admits neither any limit nor anything foreign to 
itself, and conscious of a strength instinct with creative 
force, such is the point of view of the Monologues. 

The inner life in its enfranchisement from time, in its 
double end, the realization of the species and of the indi- 
viduality, in its proud dominion over all hostile circum- 
stances, in its prophetic certainty of the future, in its 
immortal youth, such is their theme. Through them we 
are enabled to enter into a life of monumental interest, 
wholly original and beyond the influence of anything ex- 



22 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 

terior, an astonishing example of the autonomy of the ego^ 
an imposing type of character, Zeno and Fichte in one. 
But still the motive power of this life is not religious; it is 
rather moral and philosophic. I see in it not so much a 
magnificent model to imitate as a precious subject of study. 
This ideal of a liberty, absolute, indefeasible, inviolably 
respecting itself above all, disdaining the visible an^ 
the universe, and developing itself after its own laws alone, 
is also the ideal of Emerson, the stoic of a young America. 
According to it, man finds his joy in himself, and, safe in 
the inaccessible sanctuary, of his personal consciousness, 
becomes almost a god.* He is himself principle, motive, 
and end of his own destiny; he is himself, and that is 
enough for him. This superb triumph of life is not far 
from being a sort of impiety, or at least a displacement of 
adoration. By the mere fact that it does away with hu- 
mility, such a superhuman point of view becomes danger- 
ous; it is the very temptation to which the first man 
succumbed, that of becoming his own master by becoming 
like unto the Elohim. Here then the heroism of the phi- 
losopher approaches temerity, and the Monologues are there- 
fore open to three reproaches: 

Ontologically, the position of man in the spiritual uni- 
verse is wrongly indicated; the individual soul, not being 
unique and not springing from itself, can it be conceived 
without God? Psychologically, the force of spontaneity in 
the ego is allowed a dominion too exclusive of any other. 
As a fact, it is not everything in man. Morally, evil is 
scarcely named, and conflict, the condition of true peace, 
is left out of count. So that the peace described in the! 
Monologues is neither a conquest by man nor a grace from 
heaven ; it is rather a stroke of good fortune. 

* Compare dough's lines : 

" Where are the great, whom thou would'st wish to praise thee ? 
Where are the pure, whom thou would'st choose to love thee ? 
Where are the brave, to stand supreme above thee? 
Whose high commands would cheer, whose chidings raise thee? 
Seek, seeker, in thyself ; submit to find 
In the stones, bread, and life iu the blank mind." 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 23 

February 2d. Still the Monologues. Critically I de- 
feuded myself enough against them yesterday ; I may aban- 
don myself now, without scruple and without danger, to the 
admiration and the sympathy with which they inspire me. 
This life so proudly independent, this sovereign concep- 
tion of human dignity, this actual possession of the uni- 
verse and the infinite, this perfect emancipation from all 
which passes, this calm sense of strength and superiority, 
this invincible energy of will, this infallible clearness of self- 
vision, this autocracy of the consciousness which is its own 
master, all these decisive marks of a royal personality of 
a nature Olympian, profound, complete, harmonious, pene- 
trate the mind with joy and heart with gratitude. What a 
life ! what a man ! These glimpses into the inner regions 
of a great soul do one good. Contact of this kind strength- 
ens, restores, refreshes. Courage returns as we gaze; 
when we see what has been, we doubt no more that it can 
be again. At the sight of a man we too say to ourselves, 
let us also be men. 

March 3, 1852. Opinion has its value and even its 
power: to have it against us is painful when we are among 
friends, and harmful in the case of the outer world. We 
should neither flatter opinion nor court it; but it is better, if 
we can help it, not to throw it on to a false scent. The 
first error is a meanness ; the second an imprudence. We 
should be ashamed of the one; we may regret the other. 
Look to yourself; you are much given to this last fault, 
and. it has already done you great harm. Be ready to bend 
your pride; abase yourself even so far as to show yourself 
ready and clever like others. This world of skillful ego- 
tisms and active ambitions, this world of men, in which 
one must deceive by smiled, conduct, and silence as much 
as by actual words, a world revolting to the proud and up- 
right soul, it is our business to learn to live in it ! Suc- 
cess is required in it: succeed. Only force is recognized 
there: be strong. Opinion seeks to impose her law upon 
all, instead of setting her at defiance, it would be better to 
struggle with her and conquer. ... I understand the 



24 A MI EL'S JO URNAL. 

indignation of contempt, and the wish to crush, ronseft 
irresistibly by all that creeps, all that is tortuous, oblique, 

ignoble But I cannot maintain such a 

mood, which is a mood of vengeance, for long. This 
world is a world of men, and these men are our brothers. 
We must not banish from us the divine breath, we must 
love. Evil must be conquered by good; and before all 
things one must keep a pure conscience. Prudence may 
be preached from this point of view too. " Be ye simple 
as the dove and prudent as the serpent," are the words of 
Jesus. Be careful of your reputation, not through vanity, 
but that you may not harm your life's work, and out 
of love for truth. There is still something of self-seeking 
in the refined disinterestedness which will not justify itself, 
that it may feel itself superior to opinion. It requires 
ability, to make what we seem agree with what we are, 
and humility, to feel that we are no great things. 

There, thanks to this journal, my excitement has passed 
away. I have just read the last book of it through again, 
and the morning has passed by. On the way I have been 
conscious of a certain amount of monotony. It does not 
signify ! These pages ure not written to be read ; they are 
written for my own consolation and warning. They are 
landmarks in my past; and some of the landmarks are 
funeral crosses, stone pyramids, withered stalks grown 
green again, white pebbles, coins all of them helpful 
toward finding one's way again through the Elysian fields 
of the soul. The pilgrim has marked his stages in it; he 
is able to trace by it his thoughts, his tears, his joys. This 
is my traveling diary: if some passages from it may be 
useful to others, and if sometimes even I have communi- 
cated such passages to the public, these thousand pages as 
a whole are only of value to me and to those who, after 
me, may take some interest in the itinerary of an obscurely 
conditioned soul, far from the world's noise and fame. 
These sheets will be monotonous when my life is so; they 
will repeat themselves when feelings repeat themselves; 
truth at any rate will be always there, and truth is their 
only muse, their only pretext, their only duty. 



AM1EVS JOURNAL. 25 

April 2, 1852. What a lovely walk! Sky clear, sun 
rising, all the tints bright, all the outlines sharp, save for 
the soft and misty infinite of the lake. A pinch of white 
frost, powdered the fields, lending a metallic relief to the 
hedges of green box, and to the whole landscape, still 
without leaves, an air of health and vigor, of youth and 
freshness. "Bathe, disciple, thy thirsty soul in the 
dew of the dawn ! " says Faust, to us, and he is right. The 
morning air breathes a new and laughing energy into veins 
and marrow. If every day is a repetition of life, every 
dawn gives signs as it were a new contract with- existence. 
At dawn everything is fresh, light, simple, as it is for chil- 
dren. At dawn spiritual truth, like the atmosphere, is 
more transparent, and our organs, like the young leaves, 
drink in the light more eagerly, breathe in more ether, and 
less of things earthly. If night and the starry sky speak 
to the meditative soul of God, of eternity and the infinite, 
the dawn is the time for projects, for resolutions, for the 
birth of action. While the silence and the " sad serenity 
of the azure vault," incline the soul to self-recollection, 
the vigor and gayety of nature spread into the heart and 
make it eager for life and living. Spring is upon us. 
Primroses and violets have already hailed her coming. 
Eash blooms are showing on the peach trees; the swollen 
buds of the pear trees and the lilacs point to the blossoming 
that is to be; the honeysuckles are already green. 

April 26, 1852. This evening a feeling of emptiness 
took possession of me; and the solemn ideas of duty, the 
future, solitude, pressed themselves upon me. I gave 
myself to meditation, a very necessary defense against the 
dispersion and distraction brought about by the day's work 
and its detail. Kead a part of Krause's book " UrMld 
derMenschheit,"* which answered marvelously to my 
thought and my need. This philosopher has always a 
beneficent effect upon me; his sweet religious serenity 

* Christian Frederick Krause, died 1832, Hegel's younger contem- 
porary, and the author of a system which he called panentheism 
Amiel alludes to it later on. 



26 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 

gains upon me and invades me. He inspires me with a 
sense of peace and infinity. 

Still I miss something, common worship, a positive re 
ligion, shared with other people. Ah! when will the 
church to which I belong in heart rise into being? I 
cannot like Scherer, content myself with being in the right 
all alone. I must have a less solitary Christianity. My 
religious needs are not satisfied any more than my social 
needs, or my needs of affection. Generally I am able to 
forget them and lull them to sleep. But at times they 
wake up with a sort of painful bitterness ... I waver 
between languor and ennui, between frittering myself away 
on the infinitely little, and longing after what is unknown 
and distant. It is like the situation which French novel- 
ists are so fond of, the story of a vie de province; only the 
province is all that is not the country of the soul, every 
place where the heart feels itself strange, dissatisfied, rest- 
less and thirsty. Alas! well understood, this place is the 
earth, this country of one's dreams is heaven, and this 
suffering is the eternal homesickness, the thirst for hap- 
piness. . 

"In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister," says 
Goethe. Male resignation, this also is the motto of those 
who are masters of the art of life; "manly," that is to sa} r , 
courageous, active, resolute, persevering, "resignation," 
that is to say, self-sacrifice, renunciation, limitation. 
Energy in resignation, there lies the wisdom of the sons of 

th, the only serenity possible in this life of struggle 
. t nd of combat. In it is the peace of martyrdom, in it 
too the promise of triumph. 

April 28, 1852. (Lancy.)* Once more I feel the spring 
languor creeping over me, the spring air about me. This 
morning the poetry of the scene, the song of the birds, he 
tranquil sunlight, the breeze blowing over the fresh green 
fields, all rose into and filled my heart. Now all is silent. 
silence, thou art terrible! terrible as that calm of the 

* A village near Geneva. 



AMIEISS JOURNAL. 27 

ocean which lets the eye penetrate the fathomless abysses 
below. Thou showest us iu ourselves depths which make 
us giddy, inextinguishable needs, treasures of suffering. 
Welcome tempests ! at least they blur and trouble the sur- 
face of these waters with their terrible secrets. Welcome 
the passion blasts which stir the waves of the soul, and so 
veil from us its bottomless gulfs ! In all of us, children of 
dust, sons of time, eternity inspires an involuntary anguish, 
and the infinite, a mysterious terror. We seem to be en- 
tering a kingdom of the dead. Poor heart, thy craving is 
for life, for love, for illusions ! And thou art right after all, 
for life is sacred. 

In these moments of tete-a-tete with the infinite, how 
different life looks! How all that usually occupies and 
excites us becomes suddenly puerile, frivolous and vain. 
We seem to ourselves mere puppets, marionettes, strutting 
seriously through a fantastic show, and mistaking gewgaws 
for things of great price. At such moments, how every- 
thing becomes transformed, 'how everything changes! 
Berkeley and Fichte seem right, Emerson too; the world 
is but an allegory; the idea is more real than the fact; 
fairy tales, legends, are as true as natural history, and 
even more true, for they are emblems of greater trans- 
parency. The only substance properly so called is the soul. 
What is all the rest? Mere shadow, pretext, figure, sym- 
bol, or dream. Consciousness alone is immortal, positive, 
perfectly real. The world is but a firework, a sublime' 
phantasmagoria, destined to cheer and form the soul. 
Consciousness is a universe, and its sun is love. . . . 

Already I am falling back into the objective life of 
thought. It delivers me from shall I say? no, it deprives 
me of the intimate life of feeling. Keflection solves 
reverie and burns her delicate wings. This is why science 
does not make men, but merely entities and abstractions. 
Ah, let us feel and live and beware of too much analysis! 
Let us put spontaneity, naivete before reflection, expe- 
rience beforestud^; let us make life itself our study. Shall 
[ then never have the heart of a woman to rest upon? a 



28 A MIKL'S JO URN A L. 

son in whom to live again, a little world where I may see 
flowering and blooming all that is stifled in me? I shrink 
and draw back, for fear of breaking my dream. I have 
staked so much on this card that I dare not play it. Let 
me dream again. . . . 

Do no violence to yourself, respect in yourself the oscil- 
lations of feeling. They are your life and your nature; 
One wiser than you ordained them. Do not abandon your- 
self altogether either to instinct or to will. Instinct is a 
siren, will a despot. Be neither the slave of your impulses 
and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract and gen- 
eral plan; be open to what life brings from within and 
without, and welcome the unforeseen; but give to your life 
unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your 
plan. Let what is natural in you raise itself to the level of 
the spiritual, and let the spiritual become once more nat- 
ural. Thus will your development be harmonious, and the 
peace of heaven will shine upon your brow; always on con- 
dition that your peace is made, and that you have climbed 
your Calvary. 

Afternoon Shall I ever enjoy again those marvelous 
reveries of past days, as, for instance, once, when I was 
still quite a youth, in the early dawn, sitting among the 
ruins of the castle of Faucigny ; another time in the moun- 
tains above Lavey, under the midday sun, lying under a 
J;ree and visited by three butterflies; and again another 
night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched full 
length upon the beach, my eyes wandering over the Milky 
Way? Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, im- 
mortal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to-carry 
the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the 
infinite? Divine moments, hours of ecstasy, when thought 
flies from world to world, penetrates the great enigma, 
breathes with a respiration large, tranquil, and profound, 
like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and boundless 
like the blue heaven ! Visits from the muse, Urania, who 
traces around the foreheads of those sh% loves the phos- 
phorescent nimbus of contemplative power, and who pours 



ARIEL'S JOURNAL. 29 

into their hearts the tranquil intoxication, if not the au- 
thority of genius, moments of irresistible intuition in 
which a man feels himself great like the universe and calm 
iike a god ! From the celestial spheres down to the shell 
or the moss, the whole of creation is then submitted to 
our gaze, lives in our breast, and accomplishes in us its 
eternal work with the regularity of destiny and the passionate 
ardor of love. What hours, what memories! The traces 
which remain to us of them are enough to fill us with 
respect and enthusiasm, as though they had been visits of 
the Holy Spirit. And then, to fall back again from these 
heights with their boundless horizons into the muddy ruts 
of triviality ! what a fall ! Poor Moses ! Thou too sawest 
undulating in the distance the ravishing hills of the prom- 
ised land, and it was thy fate nevertheless to lay thy weary 
bones in a grave dug in the desert! Which of us has not 
his promised land, his day of ecstasy and his death in 
exile? What a pale counterfeit is real life of the life we see 
in glimpses, and how these flaming lightnings of our pro- 
phetic youth make the twilight of our dull monotonous 
manhood more dark and dreary ! 

April 29 (Lancy). This morning the air was calm, 
the sky slightly veiled. I went out into the garden to see 
what progress the spring was making. I strolled from the 
irises to the lilacs, round the flower-beds, and in the shrub- 
beries. Delightful surprise ! at the corner of the walk, 
half hidden under a thick clump of shrubs, a small leaved 
chorchorus had flowered during the night. Gay and fresh 
as a bunch of bridal flowers, the little shrub glittered be- 
fore me in all the attraction of its opening beauty. What 
springlike innocence, what soft and modest loveliness, there 
was in these white corollas, opening gently to the sun, like 
thoughts which smile upon us at waking, and perched 
upon their young leaves of virginal green like bees upon 
the wing ! Mother of marvels, mysterious and tender na- 
ture, why do we not live more in thee? The poetical 
tfdneurs of Topffer, his Charles and Jules, the friends and 
passionate lovers of thy secret graces, the dazzled and rav- 



30 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

ished beholders of thy beauties, rose up in my memory, at 
once a reproach and a lesson. A modest garden and a 
country rectory, the narrow horizon of a garret, contain 
for those who know how to look and to wait more in- 
struction than a library, even than that of Mon oncle.* 
Yes, we are too busy, too encumbered, too much occupied, 
too active! We read too much! The one thing needful 
is to throw off all one's load of cares, of preoccupations, of 
pedantry, and to become again young, simple, child-like, 
living happily and gratefully in the present hour. "We 
must know how to put occupation aside, which does not 
mean that we must be idle. In an inaction which is medi- 
tative and attentive the wrinkles of the soul are smoothed 
away, and the soul itself spreads, unfolds, and springs 
afresh, and, like the trodden grass of the roadside or the 
bruised leaf of a plant, repairs its injuries, becomes new, 
spontaneous, true, and original. Keverie, like the rain of 
night, restores color and force to thoughts which have been 
blanched and wearied by the heat of the day. With gentle 
fertilizing power it awakens within us a thousand sleeping 
germs, and as though in play, gathers round us mate- 
rials for the future, and images for the use of talent. 
Reverie is the Sunday of thought; and who knows which 
is the more important and fruitful for man, the laborious 
tension of the week, or the life-giving repose of the 
Sabbath ? Thefldnerie so exquisitely glorified and sung 
by Topffer is not only delicious, but useful. It is like a 
bath which gives vigor and suppleness to the whole being, 
to the mind as to the body ; it is the sign and festival of 
liberty, a joyous and wholesome banquet, the banquet of 
the butterfly wandering from flower to flower over the 
hills and in the fields. And remember, the soul 
too is a butterfly. 

*Tlie allusions in this passage are to Topffer's best known books 
"La Presbytere " and "La Bibliotheque de mon Oncle," that airy chron- 
icle of a hundred romantic or vivacious nothings which has the young 
student Jules for its center. 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 31 

May 2, 1852. (Sunday) Lancy. This morning read the 
epistle of St. James, the exegetical volume of Cellerier* en 
this epistle, and a great deal of Pascal, after having first 
of all passed more than an hour in the garden with the 
children. I made them closely examine the flowers, the 
shrubs, the grasshoppers, the snails, in order to practice 
them in observation, in wonder, in kindness. 

How enormously important are these first conversations 
of childhood ! I felt it this morning with a sort of relig- 
ious terror. Innocence and childhood are sacred. The 
sower who casts in the seed, the father or mother casting 
in the fruitful word are accomplishing a pontifical act and 
ought to perform it with religious awe, with prayer and 
gravity, for they are laboring at the kingdom of God. All 
seed-sowing is a mysterious thing, whether the seed fall 
into the earth or into souls. Man is a husbandman; his 
whole work rightly understood is to develop life, to sow it 
everywhere. Such is the mission of humanity, and of this 
divine mission the great instrument is speech. We forget 
too often that language is both a seed-sowing and a revela- 
tion. The influence of a word in season, is it not incalcu- 
lable? What a mystery is speech! But we are blind to 
it, because we are carnal and earthy. AVe see the 
stones and the trees by the road, the furniture of our 
houses, all that is palpaple and material. We have no eyes 
for the invisible phalanxes of ideas which people the air 
and hover incessantly around each one of us. 

Every life is a profession of faith, and exercises an inev 
itable and silent propaganda. As far as lies in its powei, 
it tends to transform the universe and humanity into its 
own image. Thus we have all a cure of souls. Every 
man is the center of perpetual radiation like a luminous 
body; he is, as it were, a beacon which entices a ship upon 
the rocks if it does not guide it into port. Every man is a 

* Jacob-^lysee Cellerier, professor of theology at the Academy of 
Geneva, and son of the pastor of Satienv mentioned in Madame de 
Steel's " L'Allemagne." 



32 A MIKISS JO URN A L. 

priest, even involuntarily; his conduct is an unspoken 
sermon, which is forever preaching to others; but there 
are priests of Baal, of Moloch, and of all the false gods. 
Such is the. high importance of example. Thence comes 
the terrible responsibility which weighs upon us all. An 
evil example is a spiritual poison: it is the proclamation of 
1 a sacrilegious faith, of an impure God. Sin would be only 
an evil for him who commits it, were it not a crime toward 
the weak brethren, whom it corrupts. Therefore, it has 
been said : " It were better for a man not to have been born 
than to offend one of these little ones." 

May 6, 1852. It is women who, like mountain flowers, 
mark with most characteristic precision the gradation 
of social zones. The hierarchy of classes is plainly visible 
among them; it is blurred in the other sex. With 
women this hierarchy has the average regularity of nature; 
among men we see it broken by the incalculable varieties 
of human freedom. The reason is that the man on the 
whole, makes himself by his own activity, and that the 
woman, is, on the whole, made by her situation; that 
the one modifies and shapes circumstance by his own 
energy, while the gentleness of the other is dominated by 
and reflects circumstance; so that woman, so to speak, 
inclines to be species, and man to be individual. 

Thus, which is curious, women are at once the sex which 
is most constant and most variable. Most constant from 
the moral point of view, most variable from the social. A 
confraternity in the first case, a hierarchy in the second. 
All degrees of culture. and all conditions of society are 
clearly marked in their outward appearance, their man- 
ners and their tastes; but the inward fraternity is traceable 
in their feelings, their instincts, and their desires. The fem- 
inine sex represents at the same time natural and historical 
inequality ; it maintains the unity of the species and marks off 
the categories of society, it brings together and divides, it 
gathers and separates, it makes castes and breaks through 
them, according as it interprets its twofold role in the one 
sense or the other. At bottom, woman's mission is essn 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 33 

tially conservative, but she is a conservative without dis- 
crimination. On the one side, she maintains God's work 
in man, all that is lasting, noble, and truly human, in the 
race, poetry, religion, virtue, tenderness. On the other, 
she maintains the results of circumstance, all that is pass- 
ing, local, and artificial in society; that is to say, customs, 
absurdities, prejudices, littlenesses. She surrounds with the 
same respectful and tenacious faith the serious and the 
irivolous, the good and the bad. Well, what then ? 
Isolate if you can, the fire from its smoke. It is a divine 
law that you are are tracing, and therefore good. The 
woman preserves ; she is tradition as the man is progress. 
And if there is no family and no humanity without the 
two sexes, without these two forces there is no history. 

May 14, 1852. (Lancy.) Yesterday I was full of the 
philosophy of joy, of youth, of the spring, which smiles 
and the roses which intoxicate; I preached the doctrine of 
strength, and I forgot that, tried and afflicted like the 
two friends with whom I was walking, I should probably 
have reasoned and felt as they did. 

Our systems, it has been said, are the expression of our 
character, or the theory of our situation, that is to say, we 
like to think of what has been given as having been ac- 
quired, we take our nature for our own work, and our lot 
in life for our own conquest, an illusion born of vanity and 
also of the craving for liberty. We are unwilling to be the 
product of circumstances, or the mere expansion of an 
inner germ. And yet we have received everything, and 
the part which is really ours, is small indeed, for it is 
mostly made up of negation, resistance, faults. We receive 
everything, both life and happiness; but the manner in 
Avhich we receive, this is what is still ours. Let us then, 
receive trustfully without shame or anxiety. Let us hum- 
bly accept from God even our own nature, and treat it 
charitably, firmly, intelligently. Not that we are called 
upon to accept the evil and the disease in us, but let us 
accept ourselves in spite of the evil and the disease. And 
let us never be afraid of innocnt joy; God is good, and 



34 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 

what He does is well done ; resign yourself to everything 
even to happiness; ask for the spirit of sacrifice, of detach- 
ment, of renunciation, and above all, for the spirit of joy 
and gratitude, that genuine and religious optimism which 
sees in God a father, and asks no pardon for His benefits. 
We must dare to be happy, and dare to confess it, regard- 
ing ourselves always as the depositaries, not as the authors 
of our own joy. 



. . . This evening I saw the first glow-worm of the 
season in the turf beside the little winding road which 
descends from Lancy toward the town. It was crawling 
furtively under the grass, like a timid thought or a dawn- 
ing talent. 

June 17, 1852. Every despotism has a specially keen 
and hostile instinct for whatever keeps up human dignity, 
and independence. And it is curious to see scientific and 
realist teaching used everywhere as a means of stifling all 
freedom of investigation as addressed to moral questions 
under a dead weight of facts. Materialism is the auxiliary 
doctrine of every tyranny, whether of the one or of the 
masses. To crush what is spiritual, moral, human so to 
speak, in man, by specializing him ; to form mere wheels 
of the great social machine, instead of perfect individuals; 
to make society and not conscience the center of life, to 
enslave the soul to things, to de-personalize man, this is 
the dominant drift of our epoch. Everywhere you may 
see a tendency to substitute the laws of dead matter (num- 
ber, mass) for the laws of the moral nature (persuasion, 
adhesion, faith) equality, the principle of mediocrity, 
becoming a dogma; unity aimed at through uniformity; 
numbers doing duty for argument; negative liberty, 
which has no law in itself, and recognizes no limit ex- 
cept in force, everywhere taking the place of positive lib- 
erty, which means action guided by an inner law and 
curbed by a moral authority. Socialism versus individual- 
ism : this is how Vinet put the dilemma. I should say 
rather that it is only the eternal antagonism between letter 



AMJEL'S JOURNAL. 35 

and spirit, between form and matter, between the outward 
and the inward, appearance and reality, which is always 
present in every conception and in all ideas. 

Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything; makes 
everything vulgar and every truth false. And there is a 
religious and political materialism which spoils all that it 
touches, liberty, equality, individuality. So that there are 
two ways of understanding democracy. 

What is threatened to-day is moral liberty, conscience, 
respect for the soul, the very nobility of man. To defend 
the soul, its interests, its rights, its dignity, is the most 
pressing duty for whoever sees the danger. What the 
writer, the teacher, the pastor, the philosopher, has to do, 
is to defend humanity in man. Man ! the true man, the 
ideal man! Such should be their motto, their rallying cry. 
War to all that debases, diminishes, hinders, and degrades 
him; protection for all that fortifies, ennobles, and raises 
him. The test of every religious, political, or educational 
system, is the man which it forms. If a system injures 
the intelligence it is bad. If it injures the character it is 
vicious. If it injures the conscience it is criminal. 

August 12, 1852. (Lancy.) Each sphere of being tends 
toward a higher sphere, and has already revelations and 
presentiments of it. The ideal under allj its forms is the 
anticipation and the prophetic vision of that existence,, 
higher than his own, toward which every being perpetually 
aspires. And this higher and more dignified existence is 
more inward in character, that is to say, more spiritual. 
Just as volcanoes reveal to us the secrets of the interior of 
the globe, so enthusiasm and ecstasy are the passing ex- 
plosions of this inner world of the soul; and human life is 
but the preparation and the means of approach to this 
spiritual life. The degrees of initiation are innumerable. 
Watch, then, disciple of life, watch and labor toward the 
development of the angel within thee! For the divine 
Odyssey is but a series of more and more ethereal meta r 
morphoses, in which each form, the result of what goee< 
before, is the condition of those which follow. The di- 



36 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

vine life is a series of successive deaths, in which the mind 
throws off its imperfections and its symbols, and yields to 
the growing attraction of the ineffable center of gravita- 
tion, the sun of intelligence and love. Created spirits in 
the accomplishment of their destinies tend, so to speak, to 
form constellations and milky ways within the empyrean 
of the divinity; in becoming gods, they surround the 
throne of the sovereign with a sparkling court. In their 
greatness lies their homage. The divinity with which 
they are invested is the noblest glory of God. God is the 
father of spirits, and the constitution of the eternal king- 
dom rests on the vassalship of love. 

September 27, 1852. (Lancy.) To-day I complete my 
thirty-first year. . 

The most beautiful poem there is, is life life which dis- 
cerns its own story in the making, in which inspiration 
and self-consciousness go together and help each other, life 
which knows itself to be the world in little, a repetition in 
miniature of the divine universal poem. Yes, be man; 
that is to say, be nature, be spirit, be the image of God, 
be what is greatest, most beautiful, most lofty in all 
the spheres of being, be infinite will and idea, a reproduc- 
tion of the great whole. And be everything while being 
.nothing, effacing thyself, letting God enter into thee as 
the air enters an empty space, reducing the ego to the 
mere vessel which contains the divine essence. Be hum- 
ble, devout, silent, that so thou mayest hear within the 
depths of thyself the subtle and profound voice; be spirit- 
ual and pure, that so thou mayest have communion with 
the pure spirit. Withdraw thyself often into the sanctuary 
of thy inmost consciousness; become once more point and 
atom, that so thou mayest free thyself from space, time, 
matter, temptation, dispersion, that thou mayest escape 
thy very organs themselves and thine own life. That is 
to say, dis often, and examine thyself in the presence of 
tfris death, as a preparation for the last death. He who 
can without shuddering confront blindness, deafness, 
paralysis, disease, betrayal, poverty; he who can without 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 37 

terror appear before the sovereign justice, he alone can 
oall himself prepared for partial or total death. How 
far am I from anything of the sort, how far is my heart 
from any such stoicism ! But at least we can try to detach 
ourselves from all that can be taken away from us, to 
accept everything as a loan and a gift, arid to cling only to 
the imperishable this at any rate we can attempt. To 
believe in a good and fatherly God, who educates us, who 
tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, who punishes only 
when he must, and takes away only with regret; this 
thought, or rather this conviction, gives courage and secu- 
rity. Oh, what need we have of love, of tenderness, of 
affection, of kindness, and how vulnerable we are, we the 
sons of God, we, immortal and sovereign beings ! Strong 
as the universe or feeble as the worm, according as we 
represent God or only ourselves, as we lean upon infinite 
being, or as we stand alone. 

The point of view of religion, of a religion at once active 
and moral, spiritual and profound, alone gives to life all 
the dignity and all the energy of which it is capable. Re- 
ligion makes invulnerable and invincible. Earth can only 
be conquered in the name of heaven. All good things are 
given over and above to him who desires but righteousness. 
To be disinterested is to be strong, and the world is at the 
feet of him whom it cannot tempt. Why? Because spirit is 
lord of matter, and the world belongs to God. "Be of 
good cheer," saith a heavenly voice, "I have overcome the 
world." 

Lord, lend thy strength to those who are weak in the 
flesh, but willing in the spirit! 

October 31, 1852. (Lancy.) Walked for half an hour 
in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape 
was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various 
shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant moun- 
tains, a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all 
sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of 
irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chas- 
ing each other through the sh^bberies. and playing games 



38 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. 
The ground strewn with leaves, brown, yellow, and red- 
dish; the trees half-stripped, some more, some less, and 
decked in ragged splendors of dark-red, scarlet, and yellow; 
the reddening shrubs and plantations; a few flowers still 
lingering behind, roses, nasturtiums, dahlias, shedding 
their petals round them; the bare fields, the thinned 
hedges; and the fir, the only green thing left, vigorous 
and stoical, like eternal youth braving decay; all these 
innumerable and marvelous symbols which forms colors, 
plants, and living beings, the earth and the sky, yield at all 
times to the eye which has learned to look for them, charmed 
and enthralled me. I wielded a poetic wand, and had but 
to touch a phenomenon to make it render up to me its 
moral significance. Every landscape is, as it were, a state 
of the soul, arid whoever penetrates into both is aston- 
ished to find how much likeness there is in each detail. 
True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, 
and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences 
is able at most to attain as a final result. The soul of 
nature is divined by the poet; the man of science, only 
serves to accumulate materials for its demonstration. 

November 6, 1852. I am capable of all the passions, 
for I bear them all within me. Like a tamer of wild 
beasts, I keep them caged and lassoed, but I sometimes 
hear them growling. I have stifled more than one nascent 
love. Why ? Because with that prophetic certainty 
which belongs to moral intuition, I felt it lacking in true 
life, and less durable than myself. I choked it down ir. 
the name of the supreme affection to come. The loves of 
sense, of imagination, of sentiment, I have seen through- 
and rejected them all; I sought the love which springs 
from the central profundities of being. And I still believe 
in it. I will have none of those passions of straw which 
dazzle, burn up, and wither; I invoke, I await, and I hope 
for the love which is great, pure and earnest, which lives and 
works in all the fibres and through all the powers of the 
soul. And even if I go lonely to the end, I would rather 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 39 

my hope and my dream died with me, than that my soul 
should content itself with any meaner union. 

November 8, 1852. Responsibility is my invisible 
nightmare. To suffer through one's own fault is a tor- 
ment worthy of the lost, for so grief is envenomed by 
ridicule, and the worst ridicule of all, that which springs 
from shame of one's self. I have only force and energy 
wherewith to meet evils coming from outside; but an irre- 
parable evil brought about by myself, a renunciation for 
life of my liberty, my peace of mind, the very thought of 
it is maddeni ng I expiate my privilege indeed. My priv- 
ilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully con- 
scious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more 
than that, to be in the secret of the tragi-comic itself, that 
is to say, to be unable to take my illusions seriously, to 
see myself, so to speak, from the theater on the stage, or 
to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into exist- 
ence. I feel myself forced to feign a particular interest 
in my individual part, while all the time I am living in the 
confidence of the poet who is playing with all these agents 
which seem so important, and knows all that they are ig- 
norant of. It is a strange position, and one which be- 
comes painful as soon as grief obliges me to betake myself 
once more to my own little role, binding me closely to it, 
and warning me that I am going too far in imagining my- 
self, because of my conversations with the poet, dispensed 
from taking up again my modest part of valet in the 
piece. Shakespeare must have experienced this feeling 
often, and Hamlet, I think, must express it somewhere. 
It is a Doppelgangerei, quite German in character, and 
which explains the disgust with reality and the repug- 
nance to public life, so common among the thinkers 
of Germany. There is, as it were, a degradation 
a gnostic fall, in thus folding one's wings and 
going back again into the vulgar shell of one's own in- 
dividuality. Without grief, which is the string of this 
venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, 
and the chosen souls would be lost for the race, like bal- 



40 AMI EL'S JO URN A. I. 

loons which, save for gravitation, would never return from 
the empyrean. 

How, then, is one to recover courage enough for action? 
By striving to restore in one's self something of that uncon- 
sciousness, spontaneity, instinct, which reconciles us to- 
earth and makes man useful and relatively happy. 

By believing more practically in the providence which 
pardons and allows of reparation. 

By accepting our human condition in a more simple 
and childlike spirit, fearing trouble less, calculating less, 
hoping more. For we decrease our responibility, if we 
decrease our clearness of vision, and fear lessens with the 
lessening of responsibility. 

By extracting a richer experience out of our losses and 
lessons. 

November 9, 1852. A few pages of the ChrestomatJiie 
Franpaise and Vinet's remarkable letter at the head of the 
volume, have given me one or two delightful hours. As a 
thinker, as a Christian, and as a man, Vinet occupies a 
typical place. His philosophy, his theology, his aesthetics, 
in short, his work, will be, or has been already surpassed at 
all points. His was a great soul and a fine talent. But 
neither were well enough served by circumstances. We 
see in him a personality worthy of all veneration, a man of 
singular goodness and a writer of distinction, but not quite 
a great man, nor yet a great writer. Profundity and pur- 
ity, these are what he posseses in a high degree, but not 
greatness, properly speaking. For that, he is a little too 
subtle and analytical, too ingenious and fine-spun; his 
thought is overladen with detail, and has not enough 
flow, eloquence, imagination, warmth, and largeness. 
Essentially and constantly meditative, he has not strength 
enough left to deal with what is outside him. The casu- 
istries of conscience and of language, eternal self-suspicion, 
and self-examination, his talent lies in these things, and is 
limited by them. Vinet wants passion, abundance, entrai- 
nement, and therefore popularity. The individualism 
which is his title to glory is also the ^ause of his weakness. 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 41 

We find in him always the solitary and the ascetic. His 
thought is, as it were, perpetually at church ; it is perpet- 
ually devising trials and penances for itself. Hence the 
air of scruple and anxiety which characterizes it even in its 
bolder flights. Moral energy, balanced by a disquieting 
delicacy of fibre; a fine organization marred, so to speak, by 
low health, such is the impression it makes upon us. Is 
it reproach or praise to say of Vinet's mind that it seems 
to one a force perpetually reacting upon itself? A warmer 
and more self-forgetful manner; more muscles, as it were, 
around the nerves, more circles of intellectual and histor- 
ical life around the individual circle, these are what Vinet, 
of all writers perhaps the one who makes us think most, 
is still lacking in. Less reflexivity and more plasticity, 
the eye more on the object, would raise the style of Vinet, 
so rich in substance, so nervous, so full of ideas, and vari- 
ety, into a grand style. Vinet, to sum up, is conscience 
personified, as man and as writer. Happy the literature 
and the society which is able to count at one time two or 
three like him, if not equal to him ! 

November 10, 1852. How much have we not to learn 
from the Greeks, those immortal ancestors of ours! And 
how much better they solved their problem than we have 
solved ours. Their ideal man is not ours, but they un- 
derstood -infinitely better than we how to reverence, cultivate 
and ennoble the man whom they knew. In a thousand re- 
spects we are still barbarians beside them, as Beranger 
said to me with a sigh in 1843 : barbarians in education, in 
eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in matters of art, etc. 
We must have millions of men in order to produce a few 
elect spirits: a thousand was enough in Greece. If the 
measure of a civilization is to be the number of perfected 
men that it produces, we are still far from this model 
people. The slaves are no longer below us, but they are 
among us. Barbarism is no longer at our frontiers; it 
lives side by side with us. We carry within us much 
greater things than they, but we ourselves are smaller. It 
u a strange result. Objective civilization preduced great 



4 3 AM1BVS JO URN A L. 

men while making no conscious effort toward such a result', 
subjective civilization produces a miserable and imperfect 
race, contrary to its mission and its earnest desire. The 
world grows more majestic but man diminishes. Why is 
this? 

We have too much barbarian blood in our veins, and we 
lack measure, harmony and grace. Christianity, in break- 
ing man up into outer and inner, the world into earth and 
heaven, hell and paradise, has decomposed the human unity, 
in order, it is true, to reconstruct it more profoundly and 
more truly. But Christianity has not yet digested this, 
powerful leaven. She has not yet conquered the true hu- 
manity; she is still living under the antimony of sin and 
grace, of here below and there above. She has not pene- 
trated into the whole heart of Jesus. She is still in the 
narthex of penitence ; she is not reconciled, and even the 
churches still wear the livery of service, and have none of 
the joy of the daughters of God, baptized of the Holy 
Spirit. 

Then, again, there is our excessive division of labor; our 
bad and foolish education which does not develop the 
whole man; and the problem of poverty. We have abol- 
ished slavery, but without having solved the question of 
labor. In law there are no more slaves, in fact, there are 
many. And while the majority of men are not free, the 
free man, in the true sense of the term can neither be con- 
ceived nor realized. Here are enough causes for our 
inferiority. 

November 12, 1852. St. Martin's summer is still linger- 
ing, and the days all begin in mist. I ran for a quarter of 
an hour round the garden to get some warmth and supple- 
ness. Nothing could be lovelier than the last rosebuds, 
or than the delicate gaufred edges of the strawberry leaves 
embroidered with hoar-frost, while above them Arachne's 
delicate webs hung swaying in the green branches of the 
pines, little ball-rooms for the fairies carpeted with pow- 
dered pearls and kept in place by a thousand dewy strands 
hanging from above like the chains of a lamp and support- 



AM1EUS JOURNAL. 43 

ing them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These 1 
little airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf- 
world and all the vaporous freshness of dawn. They re- 
called to me the poetry of the north, wafting to me a breath 
from Caledonia or Iceland or Sweden, Frithiof and the 1 
Edda, Ossian and the Hebrides. All that world of cold and 
mist, of genius and of reverie, where warmth comes not 
from the sun but from the heart where man is more notice- 
able than nature that chaste and vigorous world in which 
will plays a greater part than sensation and thought has more 
power than instinct in short the whole romantic cycle 
of German and northern poetry, awoke little by little in 
my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a 
poetry of bracing quality, and acts upon one like a moral 
tonic. Strange charm of imagination ! A twig of pine 
wood and a few spider-webs are enough to make countries, 
epochs, and nations live again before her. 

December 26, 1852. (Sunday.) If I reject many por- 
tions of our theology and of our church system, it is that I 
may the better reach the Christ himself. My philosophy 
allows me this. It does not state the dilemma as one of 
religion or philosophy, but as one of religion accepted or 
experienced, understood or not understood. For me phi- 
losophy is a manner of apprehending things, a mode of 
perception of reality. It does not create nature, man or 
God, but it finds them and seeks to understand them. 
Philosophy is consciousness taking account of itself with 
all that it contains. Now consciousness may contain a 
new life the facts of regeneration and of salvation, that is 
to say, Christian experience. The understanding of the 
Christian consciousness is an integral part of philosophy, 
as the Christian consciousness is a leading form of religious 
consciousness, and religious consciousness an essential form 
of consciousness. 



An error is the more dangerous in proportion to the 
degree of truth which it contains. 



44 AMI KISS JOURNAL. 

Look twice, if what you want is a just conception; look 
once, if what you want is a sense of beauty. 



A man only understands what is akin to something 
already existing in himself. 



Common sense is the measure of the possible; it is 
composed of experience and prevision; it is calculation 
applied to life. 



The wealth of each mind is proportioned to the number 
<md to the precision of its categories and its points of view. 



To feel himself freer than his neighbor is the reward of 
the critic. 

Modesty (pudeur) is always the sign and safeguard of 
a mystery. It is explained by its contrary profanation. 
Shyness or modesty is, in truth, the half-conscious sense 
of a secret of nature or of the soul too intimately individ- 
ual to be given or surrendered. It is exchanged. To sur- 
render what is most profound and mysterious in one's 
"being and personality at any price less than that of abso- 
lute reciprocity is profanation. 

January 6, 1853. Self-government with tenderness 
here you have the condition of all authority over children. 
The child must discover in us no passion, no weakness of 
which he can make use; he must feel himself powerless to 
deceive or to trouble us; then he will recognize in us his 
natural superiors, and he will attach a special value to our 
kindness, because he will respect it. The child who can 
rouse in us anger, or impatience, or excitement, feels him- 
self stronger than we. and a child only respects strength. 
The mother should consider herself as her child's sun, a 
changeless and ever radiant world, whither the small rest- 
less creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle, pas- 
sionate, full of storms, may come for fresh stores of light, 
warmth, and electricity, of calm and of courage. The 
mother represents goodness, providence, law; that is to 



AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 45 

say, the divinity, under that form of it which is accessible 
to childhood. If she is herself passionate, she will incul- 
cate on her child a capricious and despotic God, or even 
several discordant gods. The religion of a child depends 
on what its mother and its father are, and not on what 
they say. The inner and unconscious ideal which guides 
their life is precisely what touches the child; their words, 
their remonstrances, their punishments, their bursts of 
feeling even, are for him merely thunder and comedy; 
what they worship, this it is which his instinct divines and 
reflects. 

The child sees what we are, behind what we wish to be. 
Hence his reputation as a physiognomist. He extends his 
power as far as he can with each of us; he is the most 
subtle of diplomatists. Unconsciously he passes under the 
influence of each person about him, and reflects it while 
transforming it after his own nature. He is a magnifying 
mirror. This is why the first principle of education is: 
train yourself; and the first rule to follow if you wish to 
possess yourself of a child's will is: master your own. 

February 5, 1853 (seven o'clock in the morning). I am 
always astonished at the difference between one's inward 
mood of the evening and that of the morning. The pas- 
sions which are dominant in the evening, in the morning 
leave the field free for the contemplative part of the soul. 
Our whole being, irritated and overstrung by the nervous 
excitement of the day, arrives in the evening at the culmi- 
nating point of its human vitality; the same being, tran- 
quilized by the calm of sleep, is in the morning nearer 
heaven. We should weigh a resolution in the two balances, 
and examine an idea under the two lights, if we wish to 
minimize the chances of error by taking the average of our 
daily oscillations. Our inner life describes regular curves, 
barometical curves, as it were, independent of the accidental 
disturbances which the storms of sentiment and passion 
may raise in us. Every soul has its climate, or rather, is a 
climate; it has, so to speak, its own meteorology in the 
general meteorology of the soul. Psychology, therefore, 



46 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

cannot be complete so long as the physiology of our planet 
is itself incomplete that science to which we give nowa- 
days the insufficient name of physics of the globe. 

I became conscious this morning that what appears to us 
impossible is often an impossibility altogether subjective. 
Our mind, under the action of the passions, produces by a 
strange mirage gigantic obstacles, mountains or abysses, 
which stop us short. Breathe upon the passion and the 
phantasmagoria will vanish. This power of mirage, by 
'which we are, able to delude and fascinate ourselves, is a 
moral phenomenon worthy of attentive study. We make 
for ourselves, in truth, our own spiritual world monsters, 
chimeras, angels, we make objective what ferments in us. All 
is marvelous for the poet ; all is divine for the saint ; all is great 
for the hero; all is wretched, miserable, ugly, and bad for the 
base and sordid soul. The bad man creates around him a pan- 
demonium, the artist, an Olympus, the elect soul, a para- 
dise, which each of them sees for himself alone. We are 
all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things. We 
reward ourselves and punish ourselves without knowing it, 
so that all appears to change when we change. 

The soul is essentially active, and the activity of which 
we are conscious is but a part of our activity, and voluntary 
activity is but a part of our conscious activity. Here we 
have the basis of a whole psychology and system of morals. 
Man reproducing the world, surrounding himself with a 
nature which is the objective rendering of his spiritual na- 
ture, rewarding and punishing himself; the universe 
identical with the divine nature, and the nature of the 
perfect spirit only becoming understood according to the 
measure of our perfection; intuition the recompense of 
inward purity; science as the result of goodness; in short, 
a new phenomenology more complete and more moral, in 
which the total soul of things becomes spirit. This shall per- 
haps be my subject for my summer lectures. How much 
is contained in it ! the whole domain of inner education, all 
that is mysterious in our life, the relation of nature to 
spirit, of God and all other beings to man, the repetition 



AMIENS JOURNAL. 4? 

in miniature of the cosmogony, mythology, theology, 
and history of the universe, the evolution of mind, in a word 
the problem of problems into which I have often plunged 
but from which finite things, details, minutiae, have turned 
me back a thousand times. I return to the brink of the great 
abyss with the clear perception that here lies the problem 
of science, that to sound it is a duty, that God hides Him- 
self only in light and love, that He calls upon us to become 
spirits, to possess ourselves and to possess Him in the meas- 
ure of our strength and that it is our incredulity, our spir- 
itual cowardice, which is our infirmity and weakness. 

Dante, gazing into the three worlds with their divers 
heavens, saw under the form of an image what I would 
fain seize under a purer form. But he was a poet, 
and I shall only be a philosopher. The poet makes him- 
self understood by human generations and by the crowd; 
the philosopher addresses himself only to a few rare minds. 
The day has broken. It brings with it dispersion of thought 
in action. I feel myself de-magnetized, pure clairvoyance 
gives place to study, and the ethereal depth of the heaven 
of contemplation vanishes before the glitter of finite 
things. Is it to be regretted? No. But it proves that 
the hours most apt for philosophical thought are those 
which precede the dawn. 

February 10, 1853. This afternoon I made an excursion 
to the Saleve with ^my particular friends, Charles Heim, 
Edmond Scherer, Elie Lecoultre, and Ernest Naville. 
The conversation was of the most interesting kind, and 
prevented us from noticing the deep mud which hindered 
our walking. It was especially Scherer, Naville, and I 
who kept it alive. Liberty in God, the essence of Chris- 
tianity, new publications in philosophy, these were our 
three subjects of conversation. The principle result i'cr 
me was an excellent exercise in dialectic and in argumenta- 
tion with solid champions. If I learned nothing, many of 
my ideas gained new confirmation, and I was able to pene- 
trate more deeply into the minds of my friends. I am 
much nearer to Scherer than to JSTaville, but from him 
also I am in some degree anarted- . 



48 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 

It is a striking fact, not nnlike the changing of swords 
in "Hamlet," that the abstract minds, those which move 
from ideas to facts, are always fighting on behalf of concrete 
reality; while the concrete minds, which move from facts 
to ideas, are generally the champions of abstract notions. 
Each pretends to that over which he has least power ; each 
aims instinctively at what he himself lacks. It is an uncon- 
scious protest against the incompleteness of each separate 
nature. We all tend toward that which we possess least of, 
and our point of arrival is essentially different from our 
point of departure. The promised land is the land where 
one is not. The most intellectual of natures adopts an 
ethical theory of mind ; the most moral of natures has an 
intellectual theory of morals. This reflection was brought 
home to me in the course of our three or four hours' dis- 
cussion. Nothing is more hidden from us than the illusion 
which lives with us day by day, and our greatest illusion 
is to believe that we are what we think ourselves to be. 

The mathematical intelligence and the historical intelli- 
gence (the two classes of intelligences) can never under- 
stand each oth*j. When they succeed in doing so as to 
words, they diifer as to the things which the words mean. 
At the boUom of every discussion of detail between them 
reappears the problem of the origin of ideas. If the prob- 
lem is not present to them, there is confusion; if it is 
present to them, there is separation. They only agree as 
to the goal truth; but never as to the road, the method, 
and the criterion. 

Heim represented the impartiality of consciousness, 
Naville the morality of consciousness, Lecoultre the relig- 
ion of consciousness, Scherer the intelligence of conscious- 
ness, and I the consciousness of consciousness. A common 
ground, but differing individualites. Discrimen ingeniorum. 

What charmed me most in this long discussion was the 
sense of mental freedom which it awakened in me. To be 
able to set in motion the greatest subjects of thought without 
any sense of fatigue, to be greater than the world, to play with 
one's strength, this is what makes the well-being of intelli- 



A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 4i> 

gence, the Olympic festival of thought. Habere, non 
fiaberi. There is an equal happiness in the sense of recip- 
rocal confidence, of friendship, and esteem in the midst of 
conflict; like athletes, we embrace each other before and 
after the combat, and the combat is but a deploying of the 
forces of free and equal men. 

March 20, 1853. I sat up alone; two or three times I 
paid a visit to the children's room. It seemed to me, 
young mothers, that I understood you ! sleep is the mystery 
of life ; there is a profound charm in this darkness broken 
by the tranquil light of the night-lamp, and in this silence 
measured by the rhythmic breathings of two young sleeping 
creatures. It was brought home to me that I was looking 
on at a marvelous operation of nature, and I watched it in 
no profane spirit. I sat silently listening, a moved and 
hushed spectator of this poetry of the cradle, this ancient 
and ever new benediction of the family, this symbol of 
creation, sleeping under the wing of God, of our conscious- 
ness withdrawing into the shade that it may rest from the 
burden of thought, and of the tomb, that divine bed, 
where the soul in its turn rests from life. To sleep is to 
strain and purify our emotions, to deposit the mud of life, 
to calm the fever of the soul, to return into the bosom of 
maternal nature, thence to re-issue, healed and strong. 
Sleep is a sort of innocence and purification. Blessed be 
He who gave it to the poor sons of men as the sure and 
faithful companion of life, our daily healer and consoler. 

April 27, 1853. This evening I read the treatise by 
Nicole so much admired by Mme. de Sevigne: "Des 
mot/ens de conserver la paix avec les hommes." Wisdom so 
gentle and so insinuating, so shrewd, piercing, and yot 
humble, which divines so well the hidden thoughts and 
secrets of the heart, and brings them all into the sacred 
bondage of love to God and man, how good and delightful 
a thing it is! Everything in it is smooth, even well put 
together, well thought out, but no display, no tinsel, 110 
worldly ornaments of style. The moralist forgets himself 
and in us appeals only to the conscience. He becomes a 
confessor, a friend, a covmsftllor. 



gO AMTKL'8 JOURNAL. 

May 11, 1853. Psychology, poetry, philosophy, history, 
and science, I have swept rapidly to-day on the wings of 
the invisible hippogriff through all these spheres of 
thought. But the general impression has been one of 
tumult and anguish, temptation and disquiet. 

I love to plunge deep into the ocean of life; but it is not 
without losing sometimes all sense of the axis and the pole, 
without losing myself and feeling the consciousness of my 
own nature and vocation growing faint and wavering. 
The whirlwind of the wandering Jew carries me away, 
tears me from my little familiar enclosure, and makes me 
behold all the empires of men. In my voluntary abandon- 
ment to the generality, the universal, the infinite, my parti- 
cular ego evaporates like a drop of water in a furnace ; it 
only condenses itself anew at the return of cold, after en- 
thusiasm has died out and the sense of reality has returned. 
Alternate expansion and condensation, abandonment and 
recovery of self, the conquest of the world to be pursued 
on the one side, the deepening of consciousness on the 
other such is the play of the inner life, the march of the 
microcosmic mind, the marriage of the individual soul with 
the universal soul, the finite with the infinite, whence 
.springs the intellectual progress of man. Other betrothals 
unite the soul to God, the religious consciousness with the 
divine; these belong to the history of the will. And what 
precedes will is feeling, preceded itself by instinct. Man 
is only what he becomes profound truth; but he becomes 
only what he is, truth still more profound. What am I? 
Terrible question ! Problem of predestination, of birth, of 
liberty, there lies the abyss. And yet one must plunge 
into it, and I have done so. The prelude of Bach I 
heard this evening predisposed me to it; it paints the soul 
tormented and appealing and finally seizing upon God, 
and possessing itself of peace and the infinite with an all- 
prevailing fervor and passion. 

May 14, 1853. Third quartet concert. It was short. 
Variations for piano and violin by Beethoven, and two 
^quartets, not more. The quartets were perfectly clear and 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 51 

easy to understand. One was by Mozart and the other by 
Beethoven, so that I could compare the two masters. 
Their individuality seemed to become plain to me: Mozart 
grace, liberty, certainty, freedom, and precision of style, 
and exquisite and aristocratic beauty, serenity of soul, the 
health and talent of the master, both on a level with his 
genius; Beethoven more pathetic, more passionate, more 
torn with feeling, more intricate, more profound, less per- 
fect, more the slave of his genius, more carried away by his 
fancy or his passion, more moving, and more sublime than 
Mozart. Mozart refreshes you, like the " Dialogues"of Plato ; 
he respects you, reveals to you your strength, gives you 
freedom a^d balance. Beethoven seizes upon you ; he is 
more tragic and oratorical, while Mozart is more disinter- 
ested and poetical. Mozart is more Greek, and Beethoven 
/TITC Christian. One is serene, the other serious. The 
fir"t is stronger than destiny, because he takes life less pro- 
foundly; the second is less strong, because he has dared 
to measure himself against deeper sorrows. His talent is 
dfi always equal to his genius, and pathos is his dominant 
feature, as perfection is that of Mozart. In Mozart the 
bHance of the whole is perfect, and art triumphs; in Bee- 
fch-oven feeling governs everything and emotion troubles his 
H/t in proportion as it deepens it. 

July 26, 1853. Why do I find it easier and more satis- 
fj^tory, as a writer of verse, to compose in the short metres 
than in the long and serious ones? Why, in general, am I 
better fitted for what is difficult than for what is easy? 
Always for the same reason. I cannot bring myself to 
nM)ve freely, to show myself without a veil, to act on my 
o T rn account and act seriously, to believe in and assert my- 
s*~lf, whereas a piece of badinage which diverts attention 
f^om myself to the thing in hand, from the feeling to the^ 
sfcill of the writer, puts me at my ease. It is timidity 
i"hich is at the bottom of it. There is another reason, too 
I am afraid of greatness, I am not afraid of ingenuity, 
^.nd distrustful as I am both of my gift and my instru- 
ment, I like to reassure myself by an elaborate practice of : 



52 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 

execution. All my published literary essays, therefore, are 
little else than studies, games, exercises for the purpose of 
testing myself. I play scales, as it were; I run up and 
down my instrument, I train my hand and make sure of 
its capacity and skill. But the work itself remains una- 
chie^ed. My effort expires, and satisfied with the power to 
act I never arrive at the will to act. I am always prepar- 
ing and never accomplishing, and my energy is swallowed 
up in a kind of barren curiosity. Timidity, then, and 
curiosity these are the two obstacles which bar against me 
a literary career. Nor must procrastination be forgotten. 
I am always reserving for the future what is great, serious, 
and important, and meanwhile, I am eager to exhaust what 
is pretty and trifling. Sure of my devotion to things that 
are vast and profound, I am always lingering in their con- 
traries lest I should neglect them. Serious at bottom, I 
am frivolous in appearance. A lover of thought, I seem 
to care above all, for expression ; I keep the substance for 
myself, and reserve the form for others. So that the net 
result of my timidity is that I never treat the public seri- 
ously, and that I only show myself to it in what is amus- 
ing, enigmatical, or capricious; the result of my curiosity 
is that everything tempts me, the shell as well as the 
mountain, and that I lose myself in endless research ; while 
the habit of procrastination keeps me forever at prelimina- 
ries and antecedents, and production itself is never even 
begun. 

But if that is the fact, the fact might be different. I 
understand myself, but I do not approve myself. 

August 1, 1853. I have just finished Pelletan's book, 
" Profession de f oi du dix-nenvi^me Seicle. " It is a fine book 
Only one thing is wanting to it the idea of evil. It is a 
kind of supplement to the theory of Condorcet indefinite 
perfectibility, man essentially good, life, which is a physi- 
ological notion, dominating virtue, duty, and holiness, in 
short, a non-ethical conception of history, liberty identified 
with nature, the natural man taken for the whole man. 
The aspirations which such a book represents are generous 



AMIEVS JOURNAL. 53 

and poetical, but in the first place dangerous, since they 
lead to an absolute confidence in instinct; and in the second, 
credulous and unpractical, for they set before us a mere 
dream man, and throw a veil over both present and past 
reality. The book is at once the plea justificatory of prog- 
ress, conceived as fatal and irresistible, and an enthusiastic 
hymn to the triumph of humanity. It is earnest, but 
morally superficial ; poetical, but fanciful and untrue. It 
confounds the progress of the race with the progress of the 
individual, the progress of civilization with the advance of 
the inner life. Why? Because its criterion is quantita- 
tive, that is to say, purely exterior (having regard to the 
wealth of life), and not qualitative (the goodness of life). 
Always the same tendency to take the appearance for the- 
thing, the form for the substance, the law for the essence, 
always the same absence of moral personality, the same- 
obtuseness of conscience, which has never recognized 
sin present in the will, which places evil outside of man, 
moralizes from outside, and transforms to its own liking the 
whole lesson of history ! What is at fault is the philo- 
sophic superficiality of France, which she owes to her fatal 
notion of religion, itself due to a life fashioned by Cathol- 
icism and by absolute monarchy. 

Catholic thought cannot conceive of personality as 
supreme and conscious of itself. Its boldness and its weak- 
ness come from one and the same cause from an absence- 
of the sense of responsibility, from that vassal state of con- 
science which knows only slavery or anarchy, which pro- 
claims but does not obey the law, because the law is outside 
it, not within it. Another illusion is that of Quinet and 
Michelet, who imagine it possible to come out of Cathol- 
icism without entering into any other positive form of 
religion, and whose idea is to fight Catholicism by philos- 
ophy, a philosophy which is, after all, Catholic at bottom, 
since it springs from anti-Catholic reaction. The mind 
and the conscience, which have been formed by Catholi- 
cism, are powerless to rise to any other form of religion. 
From Catholicism, as from Epicureanism there is no re- 
turn. 



54 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 

October 11, 1853. My third day at Turin, is now over 
I have been able to penetrate farther than ever before into 
the special genius of this town and people. I have felt it 
live, have realized it little by little, as my intuition be- 
came more distinct. That is what I care for most: to 
seize the soul of things, the soul of a nation; to live the 
objective life, the life outside self; to find my way into 
a new moral country. I long to assume the citizenship of 
this unknown world, to enrich myself with thu fresh form 
of existence, to feel it from within, to link myself to it, 
and to reproduce it sympathetically ; this is the end and the 
rewar^ of my efforts. To-day the problem grew clear to 
me a* I stood on the terrace of the military hospital, in 
full view of the Alps, the weather fresh and clear in spite 
of a stormy sky. Such an intuition after all is nothing 
out a synthesis wrought by instinct, a synthesis to which 
everything streets, houses, landscape, accent, dialect, 
physiognomies, history, and habits contribute their share. 
I might call it the ideal integration of a people or its re- 
duction to the generating point," or an entering into its 
consciousness. This generating point explains everything 
else, art, religion, history, politics, manners; and without 
it nothing can be explained. The ancients realized their 
consciousness in the national God. Modern nationalities, 
more complicated and less artistic, are more difficult to 
decipher. What one seeks for in them is the dcemon, the 
fatum, the inner genius, the mission, the primitive disposi- 
tion, both what there is desire for and what there is power 
for, the force in them and its limitations. 

A pure and life-giving freshness of thought and of the 
spiritual life seemed to play about me, borne on the breeze 
descending from the Alps. I breathed an atmosphere of 
spiritual freedom, and I nailed with emotion and rapture 
the mountains whence was wafted to me this feeling of 
strength and purity. A thousand sensations, thoughts, 
and analogies crowded upon me. History, too, the history 
of the sub- Alpine countries, from the Ligurians to Hanni- 
bal, from Hannibal to Charlemagne , from Charlemagne to 



A MI BUS JO URNAL. 55 

Napoleon, passed through my mind. All the possible points 
of view, were, so to speak, piled upon each other, and one 
caught glimpses of some eccentrically across others. I was 
enjoying and I was learning. Sight passed into vision without 
a trace of hallucination, and the landscape was my guide, 
my Virgil. 

All this made me very sensible of the difference between 
me and the majority of travelers, all of whom have a 
special object, and content themselves with one thing or 
'with several, while I desire all or nothing, and am forever 
straining toward the total, whether of all possible objects, 
or of all the elements present in the reality. In other 
words, what I desire is the sum of all desires, and what I 
seek to know is the sum of all different kinds of knowl- 
edge. Always the complete, the absolute; the teres atque 
rotundum, sphericity, non-resignation. 

October 27, 1853. I thank Thee, my God, for the hour 
that I have just passed in Thy presence. Thy will wa& 
clear to me ; I measured my faults, counted my griefs, and 
felt Thy goodness toward me. I realized my own nothing- 
ness, Thou gavest me Thy peace. In bitterness there is 
sweetness; in affliction, joy; in submission, strength; 
in the God who punishes, the God who loves. To lose 
one's life that one may gain it, to offer it that one may 
receive it, to possess nothing that one may conquer all, to 
renounce self that God may give Himself to us, how im- 
possible a problem, and how sublime a reality ! No one 
truly knows happiness who has not suffered, and the re- 
deemed are happier than the elect. 

(Same day.) -The divine miracle par excellence consist? 
surely in the apotheosis of grief, the transfiguration of evil 
by good. The work of creation finds its consummation, 
aud the eternal will of the infinite mercy finds its fulfill- 
ment only in the restoration of the free creature to God 
and of an evil world to goodness, through love. Every 
soul in which conversion has taken place is a symbol of the 
history of the world. To be happy, to possess eternal life, 
to be in God, to be saved, all these are the same. All 



$Q AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

alike mean the solution of the problem, the aim of exist- 
ence- And happiness is cumulative, as misery may be. 
An eternal growth is an unchangeable peace, an ever pro- 
founder depth of apprehension, a possession constantly 
more intense and more spiritual of the joy of heaven this 
is happiness. Happiness has no limits, because God has 
neither bottom nor bounds, and because happiness is noth- 
ing but the conquest of God through love. 

The center of life is neither in thought nor in feeling, 
nor in will, nor even in consciousness, so far as it thinks, 
feels, or wishes. For moral truth may have been pene- 
trated and possessed in all these ways, and escape us still. 
Deeper even than consciousness there is our being itself, 
our very substance, our nature. Only those truths 
which have entered into this last region, which have be- 
come ourselves, become spontaneous and involuntary, in- 
stinctive and unconscious, are really our life that is to say 
something more than our property. So long as we are able 
to distinguish any space whatever between the truth and us 
we remain outside it. The thought, the feeling, the 
desire, the consciousness of life, are not yet quite life. 
But peace and repose can nowhere be found except in life, 
and in eternal life and the eternal life is the divine life, is 
God. To become divine is then the aim of life : then only can 
truth be said to be ours beyond the possibility of loss, because 
it is no longer outside us, nor even in us, but we are it,and it is 
we ; we ourselves are a truth, a will, a work of God. Liberty 
has become nature ; the creature is one with its creator one 
through love. It is what it ought to be; its education is 
finished, and its final happiness begins. The sun of time 
declines and the light of eternal blessedness arises. 

Our fleshly hearts may call this mysticism. It is the 
mysticism of Jesus: "I am one with my Father; ye shall 
be one with me. We will be one with you." 



Do not despise your situation; in it you must act, suffer, 
and conquer. From every point on earth we are equallv 
near to heaven and to the infinite. 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 55 

There are two states or conditions of pride. The first is 
one of self-approval, the second one of self-contempt. 
Pride is seen probably at its purest in the last. 



It is by teaching that we teach ourselves, by relating 
that we observe, by affirming that we examine, by show- 
ing that we look, by writing that we think, by pumping 
that we draw water into the well. 



February 1, 1854. A walk. The atmosphere incredi- 
bly pure, a warm caressing gentleness in the sunshine joy 
in one's whole being. Seated motionless upon a bench on 
the Tranchees, beside the slopes clothed with moss and 
tapestried with green, I passed some intense delicious mo- 
ments, allowing great elastic waves of music, wafted to me 
from a military band on the terrace of St. Antoine, to surge 
and bound through me. Every way I was happy, as idler, 
as painter, as poet. Forgotten impressions of childhood 
and youth came back to me all those indescribable effects 
wrought by color, shadow, sunlight, green hedges, and 
songs of birds, upon the soul just opening to poetry. I be- 
came again young, wondering, and simple, as candor and 
ignorance are simple. I abandoned myself to life and to 
nature, and they cradled me with an infinite gentleness. 
To open one's heart in purity to this ever pure nature, to 
allow this immortal life of things to penetrate into one's 
soul, is at the same time to listen to the voice of God. 
Sensation may be i prayer, and self-abandonment an act of 
devotion. 

February 18, 1854. Everything tends to become fixed, 
solidified, and crystallized in this French tongue of ours, 
which seeks form and not substance, the result and not 
its formation, what is seen rather than what is thought, 
the outside rather than the inside. 

We like the accomplished end and not the pursuit of the 
end, the goal and not the road, in short, ideas ready-made 
and bread ready-baked, the reverse of Lessing's principle. 
What we IOOK for above all are conclusions. This 



58 A MlttUS JO URN A L. 

clearness of the "ready-made" is a superficial clearness 
physical, outward, solar clearness, so to speak, but in the 
absence of a sense for origin and genesis it is the clearness 
of the incomprehensible, the clearness of opacity, the clear- 
ness of the obscure. We are always trifling on the surface. 
Our temper is formal that is to say, frivolous and ma- 
';erial, or rather artistic and not philosophical. For what 
it seeks is the figure, the fashion and manner of things, 
not their deepest life, their soul, their secret. 

March 16, 1854. (From Veevay to Geneva.) What 
message had this lake for me, with its sad serenity, its 
soft and even tranquility, in which was mirrored the cold mo- 
notonous pallor of mountains and clouds? That disen- 
chanted disillusioned life may still be traversed by duty,lit by 
a memory of heaven. I was visited by a clear and profound 
intuition of the flight of things, of the fatality of all life, of 
the melancholy which is below the surface of all exist- 
ence, but also of that deepest nepth which subsists forever 
beneath the fleeting wave. 

December 17, 1854. When we are doing nothing in 
particular, it is then that we are living through all our be- 
ing; and when we cease to add to our growth it is only that 
we may ripen and possess ourselves. W T ill is suspended, 
but nature and time are always active and if our life is no 
longer our work, the work goes on none the less. With 
us, without us, or in spite of us, our existence travels 
through its appointed phases, our invisible Psyche weaves 
the silk of its chrysalis, our destiny fulfills itself, and all 
the hours of life work together toward that flowering time 
which we call death. This activity, then, is inevitable 
and fatal; sleep and idleness do not interrupt it, but it 
nay become free and moral, a joy instead of a terror. 



Nothing is more characteristic of a man than the manner 
in which he behaves toward fools. 



It costs us a great deal of trouble not to be of the same 
opinion as our self-love, and not to be ready to believe in 
the good taste of those who believe in our merits. 



A MIKL'S JO UENAL. 59 

Does not true humility consist in accepting one's infirmity 
;as a trial, and one's evil disposition as a cross, in sacrificing 
all one's pretensions and ambitions, even those of con- 
science? True humility is contentment. 



A man only understands that of which he has already 
the beginnings in himself. 



Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and 
of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all 
moral authority. 



March 28, 1855. Not a blade of grass but has a story to 
tell, not a heart but has its romance, not a life which does 
:not hide a secret which is either its thorn or its spur. 
Everywhere grief, hope, comedy, tragedy ; even under the 
petrifaction of old age, as in the twisted forms of fossils, 
we may discover the agitations and tortures of youth. 
This thoaght is the magic wand of poets and of preachers: 
it strips the scales from our fleshly eyes, and gives us a 
'dear view into human life; it opens to the ear a world of 
unknown melodies, and makes us understand the thousand 
languages of nature. Thwarted love makes a man a poly- 
glot, and grief transforms him into a diviner and a sorcerer 

April 16, 1855. I realized this morning the prodigious 
effect of climate on one's state of mind. I was Italian or 
Spanish. In this blue and limpid air, and under this 
southern sun, the very walls smile at you. All the chest- 
nut trees were en fete; with their glistening buds shining 
like little flames at the curved ends of the branches, they 
Krere the candelabra of the spring decking the festival of 
eternal nature. How young everything was, how kindly, ho\v 
gracious ! the moist freshness of the grass, the transparent 
shadows in the courtyards, the strength of the old cathedral 
towers, the white edges of the roads. I felt myself a child ; 
the sap of life mounted again into my veins as it does in 
plants. How sweet a thing is a little simple enjoyment! 
And now, a brass band which has stopped in the street 



60 A MIKL'S JO URN A L. 

makes my heart leap as it did at eighteen. Thanks be cc 
God; there have been so many weeks and months when I 
thought myself an old man. Come poetry, nature, youth, 
and love, knead my life again with your fairy hands; 
weave round me once more your immortal spells; sing your 
siren melodies, make me drink of the cup of immortality, 
lead me back to the Olympus of the soul. Or rather, no 
paganism ! God of joy and of grief, do with me what Thou 
wilt; grief is good, and joy is good also. Thou art leading 
me now through joy. I take it from Thy hands, and I give 
Thee thanks for it. 

April 17, 1855. The weather is still incredibly brilliant, 
warm, and clear. The day is full of the singing of birds, 
the night is full of stars, nature has become all kindness, 
and it is a kindness clothed upon with splendor. 

For nearly two hours have I been lost in the contem- 
plation of this magnificent spectacle. I felt myself in the 
temple of the infinite, in the presence of the worlds, God's 
guest in this vast nature. The stars wandering in the pale 
ether drew me far away from earth. What peace beyond 
the power of words, what dews of life eternal, they shed 
on the adoring soul ! I felt the earth floating like a boat 
in this blue ocean. Such deep and tranquil delight nour- 
ishes the whole man, it purifies and ennobles. I surren- 
dered myself, I was all gratitude and docility. 

April 21, J 855. I have been reading a great deal : ethnog- 
raphy, comparative anatomy, cosmical systems. I have 
traversed the universe from the deepest depths of the 
empyrean to the peristaltic movements of the atoms in the 
elementary cell. I .have felt myself expanding in the in- 
finite, and enfranchised in spirit from the bounds of time 
and space, able to trace back the whole boundless creation 
to a point without dimensions, and seeing the vast multi- 
tude of suns, of milky ways, of stars, and nebulae, all exist- 
ent in the point. 

And on all sides stretched mysteries, marvels and prod- 
igies, without limit, without number, and without end. 
I felt the unfathomable thought of which the universe is 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 61 

the symbol live and burn within me; I touched, proved, 
tasted, embraced my nothingness and my immensity; I 
kissed the hem of the garments of God, and gave Him 
thanks for being Spirit and for being life. Such moments 
are glimpses of the divine. They make one conscious of 
one's immortality; they bring home to one that an eternity 
is not too much for the study of the thoughts and works 
of the eternal; they awaken in us an adoring ecstasy and 
the ardent humility of love. 

May 23, 1855. Every hurtful passion draws us to it, as 
an abyss does, by a kind of vertigo. Feebleness of will 
brings about weakness of head, and the abyss in spite of its 
horror, comes to fascinate us, as though it were a place of 
refuge. Terrible danger! For this abyss is within us; this 
gulf, open like the vast jaws of an infernal serpent bent on 
devouring us, is in the depth of our own being, and our 
liberty floats over this void, which is always seeking to 
swallow it up. Our only talisman lies in that concentra" 
tion of moral force which we call conscience, that small 
inextinguishable flame of which the light is duty and the 
warmth love. This little flame should be the star of our 
life ; it alone can guide our trembling ark across the tu- 
mult of the great waters ; it alone can enable us to escape 
the temptations of the sea, the storms and the monsters 
which are the offspring of night and the deluge. Faith 
in God, in a holy, merciful, fatherly God, is the divine ray 
which kindles this flame. 

How deeply I feel the profound and terrible poetry of 
all these primitive terrors from which have issued the vari- 
ous theogonies of the world, and how it all grows clear to 
me, and becomes a symbol of the one great unchang- 
ing thought, the thought of God about the universe' 
How present and sensible to my inner sense is the unity oi 
everything ! It seems to me that I am able to pierce to the 
sublime motive which, in all the infinite spheres of exist- 
ence, and through all the modes of space and time, every 
created form reproduces and sings within the bond of an 
eternal harmony. From the infernal shades I feel myself 



62 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

mounting toward the regions of light; my flight across 
chaos finds its rest in paradise. Heaven, hell, the world, 
are within ns. Man is the great abyss. 

July 27, 1855. So life passes away, tossed like a 
boat by the waves up and down, hither and thither, 
drenched by the spray, stained by the foam, now thrown 
upon the bank, now drawn back again according to the 
endless caprice of the water. Such, at least, is the life of 
the heart and the passions, the life which Spinoza and the 
stoics reprove, and which is the exact opposite of that 
serene and contemplative life, always equable like the star- 
light, in which man lives at peace, and sees everything 
under its eternal aspect; the opposite also of the life of con- 
science, in which God alone speaks, and all self-will sur- 
renders itself to His will made manifest. 

I pass from one to another of these three existences, 
which are equally known to me; but this very mobility 
deprives me of the advantages of each. For my heart is 
worn with scruples, the soul in me cannot crush the needs 
of the heart, and the conscience is troubled and no longer 
knows how to distinguish, in the chaos of contradictory 
inclinations, the voice of duty or the will of God. The 
want of simple faitl;, the indecision which springs from 
distrust of self, tend to make all my personal life a matter 
of doubt and uncertainty. I am afraid of the subjective 
life, and recoil from every enterprise, demand, or promise 
which may oblige me to realize myself; I feel a terror of 
action, and am only at ease in the impersonal, disinter- 
ested, and objective life of thought. The reason seems 
to be timidity, and the timidity springs from the exces- 
sive development of the reflective power which has almost 
destroyed in me all spontaneity, impulse, and instinct, 
and therefore all boldness and confidence. Whenever I 
am forced to act, 1 see cause for error and repentance every- 
where, everywhere hidden threats and masked vexations. 
From a child I have been liable to the disease of irony, and 
that it may not be altogether crushed by destiny, 
my nature seems to have armed itself with a cautio 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 63 

strong enough to prevail against any of life's blandish- 
ments. It is just this strength which is my weakness. I 
have a horror of being duped, above all, duped by myself, 
and I would rather cut myself off from all life's joys than 
deceive or be deceived. Humiliation, then, is the sorrow 
which I fear the most, and therefore it would seem as if 
pride were the deepest rooted of my faults. 

This may be logical, but it is not the truth : it seemr 
to me that it is really distrust, incurable doubt of th. 
future, a sense of the justice but not of the goodness of 
God in short, unbelief, which is my misfortune and my 
sin. Every act is a hostage delivered over to avenging 
destiny there is the instinctive belief which chills and 
freezes ; every act is a pledge confided to a fatherly prov- 
idence, there is the belief which calms. 

Pain seems to me a punishment and not a mercy : this is 
why I have a secret horror of it. And as I feel myself 
vulnerable at all points, and everywhere accessible to pain, 
I prefer to remain motionless, like a timid child, who, left 
alone in his father's laboratory, dares not touch any- 
thing for fear of springs, explosions, and catastrophes, 
which may burst from every corner at the least movement 
of his inexperienced hand?. I have trust in God directly 
and as revealed in nature, but I have a deep distrust of all 
free and evil agents. I feel or foresee evil, moral and 
physical, as the consequence of every error, fault, or sin, 
and I am ashamed of pain. 

At bottom, is it not a mere boundless self-love, the 
purism of perfection, an incapacity to accept our human 
condition, a tacit protest against the order of the world, 
which lies at the root of my inertia ? It means all or noth- 
ing, a vast ambition made inactive by disgust, a yearning 
that cannot be uttered for the ideal, joined with an of- 
ended dignity and a wounded pride which will have noth- 
ing to say to what they consider beneath them. It springs 
from the ironical temper which refuses to take either self 
or reality seriously, because it is forever comparing both 
with the dimly-seen infinite of its dreams. It is a state of 



64 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 

mental reservation in which one lends one's self to circnm 
stances for form's sake, but refuses to recognize them in 
one's heart because one cannot see the necessity or the di- 
vine order in them. I am disinterested because I am in 
different; I have nothing to say against what is, and yet 
I am never satisfied. I am too weak to conquer, and yet I 
[will not be conquered it is the isolation of the disen- 
chanted soul, which has put even hope away from it. 

But even this is a trial laid upon one. Its providential 
purpose is no doubt to lead one to that true renunciation of 
which charity is the sign and symbol. It is when one 
expects nothing more for one's self that one is able to love. 
To do good to men because we love them, to use every 
talent we have so as to please the Father from whom we 
hold it for His service, there is no other way of reaching 
and curing this deep discontent with life which hides itself 
under an appearance of indifference. 

September 4, 1855. In the government of the sonl the 
parliamentary form succeeds the monarchical. Good 
sense, conscience, desire, reason, the present and the past, 
the old man and the new, prudence and generosity, take 
up their parable in turn; the reign of argument begins; 
chaos replaces order, and darkness light. Simple will rep- 
resents the autocratic regime, interminable discussion the 
deliberate regime of the soul. The one is preferable from 
the theoretical point of view, the other from the practical. 
Knowledge and action are their two respective advantages. 
. ( But the best of all would be to be able to realize three 
powers in the soul. Besides the man of counsel we want 
the man of action and the man of judgment. In me, re- 
flection comes to no useful end, because it is forever return- 
ing upon itself, disputing and debating. I am wanting in 
both the general who commands and the judge who 
decides. 

Analysis is dangerous if it overrules the synthetic fac- 
ulty; reflection is to be feared if it destroys our power of 
intuition, and inquiry is fatal if it supplants faith. De- 
composition becomes deadly when it surpasses in strength 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 65 

the combining and constructive energies of life, and the 
separate action of the powers of the soul tends to mere 
disintegration and destruction as soon as it becomes impos- 
sible to bring them to bear as one undivided force. When 
the sovereign abdicates anarchy begins. 

It is just here that my danger lies. Unity of life, of 
force, of action, of expression, is becoming impossible to 
me; I am legion, division, analysis, and reflection; the 
passion for dialectic, for fine distinctions, absorbs and 
weakens me. The point which I have reached seems to be 
explained by a too restless search for perfection, by the 
abuse of the critical faculty, and by an unreasonable dis- 
trust of first impulses, first thoughts, first words. Unity 
and simplicity of being, confidence, and spontaneity of life, 
are drifting out of my reach, and this is why I can no 
longer act. 

Give up, then, this trying to know all, to embrace all. 
Learn to limit yourself, to content yourself with some 
definite thing, and some definite work; dare to be what 
you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you 
are not, and to believe in your own individuality. Self- 
distrust is destroying you ; trust, surrender, abandon your- 
self; "believe and thou shalt be healed." Unbelief is 
death, and depression and self -satire are alike unbelief. 



From the point of view of happiness, the problem of life 
is insoluble, for it is our highest aspirations which pre- 
vent us from being happy. From the point of view of 
duty, there is the same difficulty, for the fulfillment of 
duty brings peace, not happiness. It is divine love, the 
love of the holiest, the possession of God by faith, which 
solves the difficulty; for if sacrifice has itself become a joy, 
a lasting, growing and imperishable joy the soul is then 
secure of an all-sufficient and unfailing nourishment. 



January 21, 1856. Yesterday seems to me as far off as 
though it were last year. My memory holds nothing more 
of the past than its general plan, just as my eye perceives 



66 AMIEL'S JO URN A L. 

nothing more in the starry heaven. It is no more possible* 
for me to recover one of my days from the depths of mem- 
ory than if it were a glass of water poured into a lake; it 
is not so much a lost thing as a thing melted and fused; the 
individual has returned into the whole. The divisions of time 
are categories which have no power to mold my life, and 
leave no more lasting impression than lines traced by a 
stick in water. My life, my individuality, are fluid, there 
is nothing for it but to resign one's self. 

April 9, 1856. How true it is that our destinie& are- 
decided by nothings and that a small imprudence helped by 
some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop 
of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others 
shall be crucified. What happens is quite different from 
that we planned ; we planned a blessing and there springs 
from it a curse. How many times the serpent of fatality,, 
or rather the law of life, the force of things, intertwining 
itself with some very simple facts, cannot be cut away by 
any effort, and the logic of situations and characters leads 
inevitably to a dreaded denouement. It is the fatal spell of 
destiny, which obliges us to feed our grief from our own 
hand, to prolong the existence of our vulture, to throw 
into the furnace of our punishment and expiation, our 
powers, our qualities, our very virtues, one by one, and so 
forces us to recognize our nothingness, our dependence and 
the implacable majesty of law. Faith in a providence 
softens punishment but does not do away with it. The 
wheels of the divine chariot crush us first of all that justice 
may be satisfied and an example given to men, and then 
a hand is stretched out to us to raise us up, or at least to 
reconcile us with the love hidden under the justice. Par- 
don cannot precede repentance and repentance only begins 
with humility. And so long as any fault whatever appears 
trifling to us, so long as we see, not so much the cul- 
pability of as the excuses for imprudence or negligence, 
so long, in short, as Job murmurs and as providence 
is thought to be too severe, so long as there is any 
inner protestation against fate, or doubt as to the per- 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 07 

feet justice of God, there is not yet entire humility or true 
repentance. It is when we accept the expiation that it can 
be spared us; it is when we submit sincerely that grace can 
be granted to us. Only when grief finds its work done can 
God dispense us from it. Trial then only stops when it is 
useless: that is why it scarcely ever stops. Faith in the 
justice and love of the Father is the best and indeed the 
only support under the sufferings of this life. The foun- 
dation of all of our pains is unbelief; we doubt whether 
what happens to us ought to happen to us; we think our- 
selves wiser than providence, because to avoid fatalism wo 
believe in accident. Liberty in submission what a problem ! 
And yet that is what we must always come back to. 

May 7, 1856. I have been reading Rosenkrantz's" His- 
tory of Poetry"* all day: it touches upon all the great 
names of Spain, Portugal, and France, as far as Louis XV. 
It is a good thing to take these rapid surveys; the shift- 
ing point of view gives a perpetual freshness to the sub- 
ject and to the ideas presented, a literary experience 
which is always pleasant and bracing. For one of my 
temperament, this philosophic and morphological mode of 
embracing and expounding literary history has a strong 
attraction. But it is the antipodes of the French method 
of proceeding, which takes, as it were, only the peaks of 
the subject, links them together by theoretical figures and 
triangulations, and then assumes these lines to rep- 
resent the genuine face of the country. The real process 
of formation of a general opinion, of a public taste, of an 
established genre, cannot be laid bare by an abstract 
method, which suppresses the period of growth 
in favor of the final fruit, which prefers clear- 
ness of outline to fullness of statement, and sacrifices the 
preparation to the result, the multitude to the chosen type. 
This French method, however, is eminently characteristic, 
and it is linked by invisible ties to their respect for cus- 

*"Gescliiclite der Poesie," by Kosenkrantz, the pupil and biographer 
of Hegel. 



68 A MI KISS JO URN A L. 

torn and fashion, to the Catholic and dualist instinct which 
admits two truths, two contradictory worlds, and accepts 
quite naturally what is magical, incomprehensible, and 
arbitrary in God, the king, or language. It is the philoso- 
phy of accident become habit, instinct, nature and belief, 
it is the religion of caprice. 

By one of those eternal contrasts which redress the bal- 
ance of things, the romance peoples, who excel in the prac- 
tical matters of life, care nothing for the philosophy of it ; 
while the Germans, who know very little about the prac- 
tice of life, are masters of its theory. Every living being 
seeks instinctively to complete itself; this is the secret 
law according to which that nation whose sense of life is 
fullest and keenest, drifts most readily toward a mathe- 
matical rigidity of theory. Matter and form are the eter- 
nal oppositions, and the mathematical intellects are often 
attracted by the facts of life, just as the sensuous minds 
are often drawn toward the study of abstract law. Thus 
strangely enough, what we think we are is just what we 
are not: what we desire to be is what suits us least; our 
theories condemn us, and our practice gives the lie to our 
theories. And the contradiction is an advantage, for it is 
the source of conflict, of movement, and therefore a con- 
dition of progress. Every life is an inward struggle, every 
struggle supposes two contrary forces; nothing real is sim- 
ple, and whatever thinks itself simple is in reality the 
farthest from simplicity. Therefore it would seem that 
every state is a moment in a series; every being a com- 
promise between contraries. In concrete dialectic we have 
the key which opens to us the understanding of beings in 
the series of beings, of states in the series of moments; 
and it is in dynamics that we have the explanation of equi- 
librium. Every situation is an equilibrium of forces; every 
life is a struggle between opposing forces working within 
the limits of a certain equilibrium. 

These two principles have been often clear to me, but I 
have never applied them widely or rigorously enough. 

July 1, 1856. A man and still more a woman, always 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL, 6'J 

betrays something of his or her nationality. The women 
of Russia, for instance, like the lakes and rivers of their 
native country, seem to be subject to sudden and prolonged 
fits of torpor. In their movement, undulating and caress- 
ing like that of water, there is always a threat of unfore- 
seen frost. The high latitude, the difficulty of life, the 
inflexibility of their autocratic regime, the heavy and 
mournful sky, the inexorable climate, all these harsh fatal- 
ities have left their mark upon the Muscovite race. A 
certain somber obstinacy, a kind of primitive ferocity, a 
foundation of savage harshness which, under the influence 
of circumstances, might become implacable and pitiless; a 
cold strength, an indomitable power of resolution which 
would rather wreck the whole world than yield, the inde- 
structible instinct of the barbarian tribe, perceptible in the 
half-civilized nation, all these traits are visible to an at- 
tentive eye, even in the harmless extravagances and caprices 
of a young woman of this powerful race. Even in their 
badinage they betray something of that fierce and rigid 
nationality which burns its own towns and [as Napoleon 
said] keeps battalions of dead soldiers on their feet. 

What terrible rulers the Russians would be if ever they 
should spread the night of their rule over the countries of 
the south! They would bring us a polar despotism, 
tryanny such as the world has never known, silent as dark- 
ness, rigid as ice, insensible as bronze, decked with an 
outer amiability and glittering with the cold brilliancy of 
snow, a slavery without compensation or relief. Probably, 
however, they will gradually lose both the virtues and the 
defects of their semi-barbarism. The centuries as they 
pass will ripen these sons of the north, and they will enter 
into the concert of peoples in some other capacity than as 
a menace or a dissonance. They have only to transform 
their hardiness into strength, their cunning into grace, 
their Muscovitism into humanity, to win love instead of 
inspiring aversion or fear. 

July 3, 1856. The German admires form, but he has 
no genius for it. He is the opposite of the Greek ; he has 



70 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 

critical instinct, aspiration, and desire, but no serene com- 
mand of beauty. The south, more artistic, more self- 
satisfied, more capable of execution, rests idly in the sense 
of its own power to achieve. On one side you have ideas, 
on the other side, talent. The realm of Germany is beyond 
the clouds; that of the southern peoples is on this earth. 
The Germanic race thinks and feels; the southerners feel 
and express; the Anglo-Saxons will and do. To know, to 
feel, to act, there you have the trio of Germany, Italy, 
Kngland. France formulates, speaks, decides, and laughs. 
Thought, talent, will, speech; or, in other words science, 
art, action, proselytism. So the parts of the quartet are 
assigned. 

July 21, 1856. Mit sack und pack here I am back 
again in my town rooms. I have said good-bye to my 
friends and my country joys, to verdure, flowers, and hap- 
piness. Why did I leave them after all? The reason I 
gave myself was that I was anxious about my poor uncle, 
who is ill. But at bottom are there not other reasons ? 
Yes, several. There is the fear of making myself a burden 
upon the two or three families of friends who show me 
incessant kindness, for which I can make no return. 
There are my books, which call me back. There is the 
wish to keep faith with myself. But all that would be 
nothing, I think, without another instinct, the instinct of 
the wandering Jew, which snatches from me the cup I 
have but just raised to my lips, which forbids me any pro- 
longed enjoyment, and cries "go forward! Let there be 
no falling asleep, no stopping, no attaching yourself to this 
or that ! " This restless feeling is not the need of change. 
It is rather the fear of what I love, the mistrust of what 
charms me, the unrest of happiness. What a bizarre ten- 
dency, and what a strange nature ! not to be able to enjoy 
anything simply, naively, without scruple, to feel a force 
upon one impelling one to leave the table, for fear the meal 
should come to an end. Contradiction and mystery! not 
to use, for fear of abusing; to think one's self obliged to go, 
not because one has had enough, but because one has stayed 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 71 

awhile. I am indeed always the same; the being who 
wanders when he need not, the voluntary exile, the eternal 
traveler, the man incapable of repose, who, driven on by 
an inward voice, builds nowhere, buys and labors nowhere, 
but passes, looks, carnps, and goes. And is there not 
another reason for all this restlessness, in a certain sense of 
void? of incessant pursuit of something wanting ? of long- 
ing for a truer peace and a more entire satisfaction ? 
Neighbors, friends, relations, I love them all ; and so long 
as these affections are active, they leave in me no room for 
a sense of want. But yet they do not fill my heart; and 
that is why they have no power to fix it. I am always 
waiting for the woman and the work which shall be capa- 
ble of taking entire possession of my soul, and of becoming 
my end and aim. 

" Promenant par tout sejour 

Le deuil que tu celes, 
Psyche-papillon, un jour 
Puisses-tu trouver 1'amour 

Et perdre tes ailes ! " 

I have not given away my heart : hence this restlessness 
of spirit. I will not let it be taken captive by that which 
cannot fill and satisfy it; hence this instinct of pitiless 
detachment from all that charms me without permanently 
binding me; so that it seems as if my love of movement, 
which looks so like inconstancy, was at bottom only a per- 
petual search, a hope, a desire, and a care, the malady of 
the ideal. 

. . . Life indeed must always be a compromise be- 
.tween common sense and the ideal, the one abating nothing 
of its demands, the other acommodating itself to what is 
practicable and real. But marriage by common sense! 
arrived at by a bargain ! Can it be anything but a profana- 
tion? On the other, hand, is that not a vicious ideal which 
hinders life from completing itself, and destroys the 
family in germ ? Is there not too much of pride in 
my ideal, pride which will not accept the common des- 
tiny ? . . . 



72 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

Noon. I have been dreaming my head in my hand. 
About what? About happiness. I have as it were, been 
asleep on the fatherly breast of God. His will be done! 

August 3, 1856. A delightful Sunday afternoon at 
Pressy. Returned late, under a great sky magnificently 
starred, with summer lightning playing from a point be- 
hind the Jura. Drunk with poetry, and overwhelmed by 
sensation after sensation, I came back slowly, blessing the 
God of life, and plunged in the joy of the infinite. One 
thing only I lacked, a soul with whom to share it all for 
emotion and enthusiasm overflowed like water from a full 
cup. The Milky Way, the great black poplars, the ripple 
of the waves, the shooting stars, distant songs, the lamp- 
lit town, all spoke to me in the language of poetry. I felt 
myself almost a poet. The wrinkles of science disappeared 
under the magic breath of admiration; the old elasticity 
of soul, trustful, free, and living was mine once more. I 
was once more young, capable of self-abandonment and of 
love. All my barrenness had disappeared; the heavenly 
dew had fertilized the dead and gnarled stick; it began to 
be green and flower again. My God, how wretched 
should we be without beauty ! But with it, everything is 
born afresh in us; the senses, the heart, imagination, 
reason, will, come together like the dead bones of the 
prophet, and become one single and self-same energy. 
What is happiness if it is not this plentitude of existence, 
this close union with the universal and divine life? I have 
been happy a whole half day, and I have been brooding 
over my joy, steeping myself in it to the very depths of 
consciousness. 

October 22, 1856. We must learn to look upon life as 
an apprenticeship to a progressive renunciation, a perpet- 
ual diminution in our pretensions, our hopes, our powers, 
and our liberty. The circle grows narrower and narrower; 
we began with being eager to learn everything, to see every- 
thing, to tame and conquer everything, and in all direc- 
tions we reach our limit non plus ultra. Fortune, glory, 
love, power, health, happiness, long life, all these blessings 



A Ml EL'S JO URN A L. 73 

which have been possessed by other men seem at first 
promised and accessible to us, and then we have to put the 
dream away from us, to withdraw one personal claim after 
another to make ourselves small and humble, to submit 
to feel ourselves limited, feeble, dependent, ignorant and 
poor, and to throw ourselves upon God for all, recognizing 
our own worthl essness, and that AVC have no right to any- 
thing. It is in this nothingness that we recover something 
of life the divine spark is there at the bottom of it. 
Resignation comes to us, and, in believing love, we recon- 
quer the true greatness. 

October 27, 1856. In all the chief matters of life we 
are alone, and our true history is scarcely ever deciphered 
by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, 
rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and 
ourselves. Tears, griefs, depressions, disappointments, 
irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, 
deliberations, all these belong to our secret, and are almost 
all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to 
speak of them, and even when we write them down. 
What is most precious in us never shows itself, never finds 
an issue even in the closest intimacy. Only a part of it 
reaches our consciousness, it scarcely enters into action ex- 
cept in prayer, and is perhaps only perceived by God, for 
our past rapidly becomes strange to us. Our monad may 
be influenced by other monads, but none the less does it 
remain impenetrable to them in its essence; and we our- 
selves, when all is said, remain outside our own mystery. 
The center of our consciousness is unconscious, as the 
kernel of the sun is dark. All that we are, desire, do, and 
know, is more or less superficial, and below the rays and 
lightnings of our periphery there remains th darkness of 
unfathomable substance. 

I was then well-advised when, in my theory of the inner 
man, I placed. at the foundation of the self, after the seven 
spheres which the self contains had been successively dis- 
engaged, a lowest depth of darkness, the abyss of the un- 
revealed, the virtual pledge of an infinite future, the 



74 

obscure self, the pure subjectivity which is incapable o^ 
realizing itself in hiind) conscience, or reason, in the soul, 
the heart, the imagination, or the life of the senses, and 
which makes for itself attributes and conditions out of all 
these forms of its own life. 

But the obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. 
In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. 
Whether it call itself fatality, death, night, or matter, it is; 
the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty, and the spirit. 
For it represents resistance that is to say, the fulcrum of 
all activity, the occasion for its development and its 
triumph. 

December 17, 1856. This evening was the second 
quartet concert. It stirred me much more than the first; 
the music chosen was loftier and stronger. It was the 
quartet in D minor of Mozart, and the quartet in C 
major of Beethoven, separated by a Spohr concerto. This, 
last, vivid, and brilliant as a whole, has fire in the allegro,, 
feeling in the adagio, and elegance in the finale, but it is= 
the product of one fine gift in a mediocre personality.. 
With the two others you are at once in contact with 
genius; you are admitted to the secrets of two great souls.. 
Mozart stands for inward liberty, Beethoven for fcbe power 
of enthusiasm. The one sets us free, the other ravishes 
us out of ourselves. I do not think I ever felt more dis- 
tinctly than to-day, or with more intensity, the difference' 
between these two masters. Their two personalrtres be- 
came transparent to me, and I seemed to read them to; 
their depths. 

The work of Mozart, penetrated as it is with mmd and' 
thought, represents a solved problem, a balance- struck be- 
tween aspiration and executive capacity, the sovereignty 
of a grace which is always mistress of itself, marvelous-, 
harmony and perfect unity. His quartet describes a day 
in one of those Attic souls who pre-figure-on- earth- the; 
werenity of Elysium. The first scene is a pleasant conver- 
sation, like that of Socrates on the banks- of the- JJissus; its 1 
cnief mark is an exquisite url>s<iutv. The- second scene is- 



A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 7fr 

deeply pathetic. A cloud has risen in the blue of this> 
Greek heaven. A storm, such as life inevitably brings 
with it, even in the case of great souls who love and es- 
teem each other, has come to trouble the original harmony. 
What is the cause of it a misunderstanding, apiece of neg- 
lect ? Impossible to say, but it breaks out notwithstand- 
ing. The andante is a scene of reproach and complaint,, but 
as between "immmortals. What loftiness in complaint,, 
what dignity, what feeling, what noble sweetness in re- 
proach ! The voice trembles and grows graver, but remains 
affectionate and dignified. Then, the storm has passed,, 
the sun has come back, the explanation has taken place, 
peace is re-established. The third scene paints the bright- 
ness of reconciliation. Love, in its restored coafidence, 
and as though in sly self-testing, permits itself even gentle 
mocking and friendly badinage. And the finale fcrings us 
back to that tempered gaiety and happy serenity, that su- 
preme freedom, flower of the inner life, which is the 
leading motive of the whole composition. 

In Beethoven's on the other hand, a spirit of tragic- 
irony paints for you the mad tumult of existence as it 
dances forever above the threatening abyss of the infinite. 
No more unity, no more satisfaction, no more serenity I W r e 
are spectators of the eternal duel between the great forces,, 
that of the abyss which absorbs all finite things, and that 
of life which defends and asserts itself, expands, and en- 
joys. The first bars break the seals and open the caverns- 
of the great deep. The struggle begins. It is long. Life 
is born, and disports itself gay and careless as the butterfly 
which flutters above a precipice. Then it expands the 
realm of its conquests, and chants its successes. It founds 
a kingdom, it constructs a system of nature. But the ty- 
phon rises from the yawning gulf, and the Titans beat 
upon the gates of the new empire. A battle of giants be- 
gins. You hear the tumultuous efforts of the powers of 
chaos. Life triumphs at last, but the victory is not final,, 
and through all the intoxication of it there is a certain 
note of terror and bewilderment. The soul of Beethoven 



76 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

was a tormented soul. The passion and the awe of the 
infinite seemed to toss it to and fro from heaven to hell. 
Hence its vastness. AVhich is the greater, Mozart or Bee- 
thoven? Idle question! The one is more perfect, the 
other more colossal. The first gives you the peace of per- 
fect art, beauty, at first sight. The second gives you sub- 
limity, terror, pity, a beauty of second impression. The 
one gives that for which the other rouses a desire. Mozart 
has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean ; Beetho- 
ven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of 
air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on 
the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs 
shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be 
they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, 
each does us good. Our love is due to both. 



To judge is to see clearly, to care for what is just and 
therefore to be impartial, more exactly, to be disinterested, 
more exactly still, to be impersonal. 



To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of 
talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of 
genius. 



Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires 
but according to our powers. 



If nationality is consent, the state is compulsion. 



Self-interest is but the survival of the animal in us. 
Humanity only begins for man with self -surrender. 



The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness 
before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you 
must accept regret. 



Without passion man is a mere latent force and possibil- 
ity, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before 
it can give forth its spark. 



AMIKUS JOURNAL. 77 

February 3, 1857. The phantasmagoria of the soul 
cradles and soothes me as though I were an Indian 
yoghi, and everything, even my own life, becomes to me 
smoke, shadow, vapor, and illusion. I hold so lightly to 
all phenomena that they end by passing over me like gleams 
over a landscape, and are gone without leaving any im- 
pression. Thought is a kind of opium ; it can intoxicate 
us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the 
mountains and everything that exists. It is by love only 
that one keeps hold upon reality, that one recovers one's 
proper self, that one becomes again will, force, and indi- 
viduality. Love could do everything with me; by myself 
and for myself I prefer to be nothing. . . 

I have the imagination of regret and not that of hope. 
My clear-sightedness is retrospective, and the result with 
me of disinterestedness and prudence is that I attach 
myself to what I have no chance of obtaining. . . . 

May 27, 1857. (Vandceuvres*.) We are going down 
to Geneva to hear the " Tannhiiuser" of Kichard Wagner 
performed at the theater by the German troup now passing 
through. Wagner's is a powerful mind endowed with 
strong poetical sensitiveness. His work is even more poet- 
ical than musical. The suppression of the lyrical element, 
and therefore of melody, is with him a systematic parti 
pris. No more duos or trios; monologue and the aria are 
alike done away with. There remains only declamation, 
the recitative, and the choruses. In order to avoid the con- 
ventional in singing, Wagner falls into another conven- 
tion that of not singing at all. He subordinates the 
voice to articulate speech, and for fear lest the muse should 
take flight he clips her wings. So that his works are 
rather symphonic dramas than operas. The voice is 
brought down to the rank of an instrument, put on a level 
with the violins, the hautboys, and the drums, and 
treated instrumentally. Man is deposed from his superior 
position, and the center of gravity of the work passes into 

* Also a village in the neighborhood of Geneva. 



78 A MIKL'S JO URN A L. 

the baton of the conductor. It is music depersonalized, 
neo-Hegeliau music music multiple instead of in- 
dividual. If this is so, it is indeed the music of the 
future, the music of the socialist democracy replacing the 
art which is aristocratic, heroic, or subjective. 

The overture pleased me even less than at the first hear- 
ing: it is like nature before man appeared. Everything 
in it is enormous, savage, elementary, like the murmur of 
forests and the roar of animals. It is forbidding and 
obscure, because man, that is to say, mind, the key of the 
enigma, personality, the spectator, is wanting to it. 

The idea of the piece is grand. It is nothing less than 
the struggle of passion and pure love, of flesh and spirit, 
of the animal and the angel in man. The music is always 
expressive, the choruses very beautiful, the orchestration 
skillful, but the whole is fatiguing and excessive, too full, 
too laborious. When all is said, it lacks gayety, ease, natural- 
ness and vivacity it has no smile, no wings. Poetically one 
is fascinated, but one's musical enjoyment is hesitating, 
often doubtful, and one recalls nothing but the general 
impression Wagner's music represents the abdication of 
the self, and the emancipation of all the forces once under its 
rule. It is a falling back into Spinozism the triumph 
of fatality. This music has its root and its fulcrum in 
two tendencies of the epoch, materialism and socialism 
each of them ignoring the true value of the human 
personality, and drowning it in the totality of nature or of 
society. 

June 17, 1857. (Vandceuvres). I have just followed 
Maine de Biran from his twenty-eighth to his forty-eighth 
year by means of his journal, and a crowd of thoughts have 
besieged me. Let me disengage those which concern my- 
self. In this eternal self-chronicler and observer I seem 
to see myself reflected with all my faults, indecision, dis- 
couragement, over-dependence on sympathy, difficulty of 
finishing, with my habit of watching myself feel and live, 
with my growing incapacity for practical action, with my 
aptitude for psychological study. But I have also discov 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 79 

ered some differences which cheer and console me. This 
nature is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in 
me. It is one of my departments. It is not the whole of 
my territory, the whole of my inner kingdom. Intellect- 
ually, I am more objectire and more constructive; 
my horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of men, 
things, countries, peoples and books ; I have a greater mass 
of experiences in a word, I feel that I have more culture, 
greater wealth, range, and freedom of mind, in spite of 
my wants, my limits, and my weaknesses. Why does 
Maine de Biran make will the whole of man? Perhaps 
because he had too little will. A man esteems most highly 
what he himself lacks, and exaggerates what he longs to 
possess. Another incapable of thought, and meditation, 
would have made self-consciousness the supreme thing. 
Only the totality of things has an objective value. As 
soon as one isolates a part from the whole, as soon as one 
chooses, the choice is involuntarily and instinctively dic- 
tated by subjective inclinations which obey one or other of 
the two opposing laws, the attraction of similars or the 
affinity of contraries. 

Five o'clock. The morning has passed like a dream. 
I went on with the journal of Maine de Biran down to th 
end of 1817. After dinner I passed my time with the birds 
in the open air, wandering in the shady walks which 
wind along under Pressy. The sun was brilliant and the 
air clear. The midday orchestra of nature was at its best. 
Against the humming background made by a thousand 
invisible insects there rose the delicate caprices and impro- 
visations of the nightingale singing from the ash-trees, or of 
the hedge-sparrows and the chaffinches in their nests. The 
hedges are hung with wild roses, the scent of the acacia 
still perfumes the paths; the light down of the poplar 
'seeds floated in the air like a kind of warm, fair-weathei 
snow. I felt myself as gay as a butterfly. On coming in 
I read the three first books of that poem " Corinne," 
which I have not seen since I was a youth. Now as I read 
it again, I look at it across interposing memories; the 



80 A Ml EL' 8 JO V RNAL. 

romantic interest of it seems to me to have vanished, but 
not the poetical, pathetic, or moral interest. 

June 18th. I have just been spending three hours in 
the orchard under the shade of the hedge, combining the 
spectacle of a beautiful morning with reading and taking a 
turn between each chapter. Now the sky is again covered 
with its white veil of cloud, and I have come up with 
Biran, whose "Pensee" I have just finished, and Corinne, 
whom I have followed with Oswald in their excursions 
among the monuments of the eternal city. Nothing is so 
melancholy and wearisome as this journal of Maine de 
Biran. This unchanging monotony of perpetual reflection 
has an enervating and depressing effect upon one. Here, 
then, is the life of a distinguished man seen in its most 
intimate aspects! It is one long repetition, in which the 
only change is an almost imperceptible displacement of 
center in the writer's manner of viewing himself. This 
thinker takes thirty years to move from the Epicurean 
quietude to the quietism of Fenelon, and this only specula- 
tively, for his practical life remains the same, and all his 
anthropological discovery consists in returning to the 
theory of the three lives, lower, human, and higher, which 
is in Pascal and in Aristotle. And this is what they call a 
philosopher in France! Beside the great philosophers, 
how poor and narrow seems such an intellectual life! It 
is the journey of an ant, bounded by the limits of a 
field; of a mole, who spends his days in' the construction of 
a mole-hill. How narrow and stifling the swallow who flies 
across the whole Old World, and whose sphere of life em- 
braces Africa and Europe, would find the circle with which 
the mole and the ant are content ! This volume of Biran 
produces in me a sort of asphyxia; as I assimilate it, it 
seems to paralyze me; I am chained to it by some spell of 
secret sympathy. I pity, and I am afraid of my pity, for 
I feel how near I am to the same evils and the same 
faults. . . . 

Ernest Naville's introductory essay is full of interest, 
written in a serious and noble style; but it is almost as sad 



A MIEISS JO URNAL. 81 

as it is ripe and mature. What displeases me in it a little 
is its exaggeration of the merits of Biran. For the rest, 
the small critical impatience which the volume has stirred 
in me will be gone by to-morrow. Maine de Biran is an 
important link in the French literary tradition. It is from 
him that our Swiss critics descend, Naville father and son, 
Secretan. He is the source of our best contemporary 
psychology, for Stapfer, Koyer-Collard, and Cousin called 
him their master, and Ampere, his junior by nine years, 
was his friend. 

July 25, 1857. (Vandoeuvres). At ten o'clock this even- 
ing, unrler a starlit sky, a group of rustics under the win- 
dows of the salon employed themselves in shouting dis 
agreeable songs. Why is it that this tuneless shrieking of 
false notes and scoffing words delights these people? Why 
is it that this ostentatious parade of ugliness, this jarring 
vulgarity and grimacing is their way of finding expression 
and expansion in the great solitary and tranquil night? 

Why? Because of a sad and secret instinct. Because 
of the need they have of realizing themselves as individuals, 
of asserting themselves exclusively, egotistically, idola- 
trously opposing the self in them to everything else, plac- 
ing it in harsh contrast with the nature which enwraps us, 
with the poetry which raises us above ourselves, with the 
harmony which binds us to others, with the adoration 
which carries us toward God. No, no, no ! Myself only, 
and that is enough ! Myself by negation, by ugliness, by 
grimace and irony ! Myself, in my caprice, in my independ- 
ence, in my irresponsible sovereignty ; myself, set free by 
laughter, free as the demons are, and exulting in my 
freedom ; I, master of myself, invincible and self-sufficient, 
living for this one time yet by and for myself ! This is 
what seems to me at the bottom of this merry-making. 
One hears in it an echo of Satan, the temptation to make 
self the center of all things, to be like an Elohim, the 
worst and last revolt of man. It means also, perhaps, 
some rapid perception of what is absolute in personality, 
some rough exaltation of the subject, the individual, who 



32 A MI EL'S JO URNAL. 

thus claims, by abusing them, the rights of subjective ex- 
istence. If so, it is the caricature of our most precious 
privilege, the parody of our apotheosis, a vulgarizing of 
our highest greatness. Shout away, then, drunkards! 
Your ignoble concert, with all its repulsive vulgarity, still 
reveals to us, without knowing it, something of the maj- 
esty of life and the sovereign power of the soul. 

September 15, 1857. I have just finished Sismondi's 
journal and correspondence. Sismondi is essentially the 
honest man, conscientious, upright, respectable, the friend 
of the public good and the devoted upholder of a great 
cause, the amelioration of the-common lot of men. Char- 
acter and heart are the dominant elements in his individ- 
uality, and cordiality is the salient feature of his nature. 
Sismondi's is a most encouraging example. With average 
faculties, very little imagination, not much taste, not 
much talent, without subtlety of feeling, without great 
elevation or width or profundity of mind, he yet succeeded 
in achieving a career which was almost illustrious, and he 
has left behind him some sixty volumes, well-known and 
well spoken of. How was this? His love for men on the 
one side, and his passion for work en the other, are the 
two factors in his fame. In political economy, in literary 
or political history, in personal action, Sismondi showed 
<xo genius scarcely talent; but in all he did there was 
solidity, loyalty, good sense and integrity. The poetical, 
artistic and philosophic sense is deficient in him, but he 
attracts and interests us by his moral sense. We see in 
him the sincere writer, a man of excellent heart, a good 
citizen and wvm friend, worthy and honest in the widest 
sense of tb-s >erms, not brilliant, but inspiring trust and 
confidence iy his character, his principles and his virtues. 
More tha'i this, he is the best type of good Genevese lib- 
eralism, ; ^publican but not democratic, Protestant but not 
Calvini',, human but not socialist, progressive but without 
any sympathy with violence. He was a conservative 
without either egotism or hypocrisy, a patriot without 
larrowness. In his theories he was governed by experi- 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 83 

ence and observation, and in his practice by general ideas. 
A laborious philanthropist, the past and the present were 
to him but fields of study, from which useful lessons might 
be gleaned. Positive and reasonable in temper, his mind 
was set upon a high average well-being for human society, 
and his efforts were directed toward founding such i. 
social science as might most readily promote it. 

September 24, 1857. In the course of much thought 
yesterday about " Atala" and " Rene, "Chateaubriand became 
clear to me. I saw in him a great artist but not a great 
man, immense talent but a still vaster pride a nature at 
once devoured with ambition and unable to find anything 
to love or admire in the world except itself indefatigable in 
labor and capable of everything except of true devotion, 
self-sacrifice and faith. Jealous of all success, he was 
always on the opposition side, that he might be the better 
able to disavow all services received, and to hold aloof 
from any other glory but his own. Legitimist under the 
empire, a parliamentarian ander the legitimist regime, 
republican under the constitutional monarchy, defending 
Christianity when France was philosophical, and taking a 
distaste for religion as soon as it became once more a 
serious power, the secret of these endless contradictions in 
him- was simply the desire to reign alone like the sun a 
devouring thirst for applause, an incurable and insatiable 
vanity, which, with the true, fierce instinct of tyranny, 
would endure no brother near the throne. A man of mag- 
nificent imagination but of poor character, of indisputable 
power, but cursed with a cold egotism and an incurable 
barrenness of feeling, which made it impossible for him to 
tolerate about him anybody but slaves or adorers. A tor- 
ment d soul and miserable life, when all is said, under its 
aureole of glory and its crown of laurels! 

Essentially jealous and choleric, Chateaubriand from the 
beginning was inspired by mistrust, by the passion for 
contradicting, for crushing and conquering. This motive 
may always be traced in him. Rousseau seems to me his 
point of departure, the man who suggested to him by 



84 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

contrast and opposition all his replies and attacks. Rous- 
seau is revolutionary: Chateaubriand therefore writes his 
" Essay on Revolutions." Rousseau is republican and Protes- 
tant; Chateaubriand will be royalist and Catholic. Rous- 
seau is bourgeois; Chateaubriand will glorify nothing but 
noble birth, honor, chivalry and deeds of arms. Rousseau 
conquered nature for French letters, above all the nature 
of the mountains and of the Swiss and Savoy, and lakes. 
He pleaded for her against civilization. Chateaubriand 
will take possession of a new and colossal nature, of the 
ocean, of America; but he will make his savages speak the 
language of Louis XIV., he will bow Atala before a 
Catholic missionary, and sanctify passions born on the 
banks of the Mississippi by the solemnities of Catholic 
ceremonial. Rousseau was the apologist of reverie; Cha- 
teaubriand will build the monument of it in order to break 
it in Rene. Rousseau preaches Deism with all his elo- 
quence in the "Vicaire Savoyard;" Chateaubriand sur- 
rounds the Roman creed with all the garlands of his poetry in 
the" Genie du Christianisme." Rousseau appeals to natural 
law and pleads for the future of nations; Chateaubriand 
will only sing the glories of the past, the ashes of history 
and the noble ruins of empires. Always a rdle to be filled, 
cleverness to be displayed, a parti-pris to be upheld and 
fame to be won his theme, one of imagination, his faith 
one to order, but sincerity, loyalty, candor, seldom or 
never! Always a real indifference simulating a passion for 
truth; always an imperious thirst for glory instead of 
devotion to the good; always the ambitious artist, never 
the citizen, the believer, the man. Chateaubriand posed 
all his life as the wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon 
a pygmy world, and contemptuously affecting to desire 
nothing from it, though at the same time wishing it to be 
believed that he could if he pleased possess himself of 
everything by mere force of genius. He is the type of an 
untoward race, and the father of a disagreeable lineage. 

But to return to the two episodes. " Rene" seems to me 
very superior to " Atala.' r Both the stories show a talent of 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 85 

the first rank, but of the two the beauty of " Atala" is of 
the more transitory kind. The attempt to render in the 
style of Versailles the loves of a Natchez and a Seminole, 
and to describe the manners of the adorers of the Manitous 
in the tone of Catholic sentiment, was an attempt too 
violent to succeed. But the work is a tour de force of 
style, and it was only by the polished classicism of the 
form, that the romantic matter of the sentiments and the 
descriptions could have been imported into the colorless 
literature of the empire. " Atala" is already old-fashioned 
and theatrical in all the parts which are not descriptive or 
European that is to say, throughout all the sentimental 
savagery. 

" Rene" is infinitely more durable. Its theme, which is the 
malady of a whole generation distaste for life brought 
about by idle reverie and the ravages of a vague and 
unmeasured ambition is true to reality. Without know- 
ing or wishing it, Chateaubriand has been sincere, for Ren6 
is himself. This little sketch is in every respect a master- 
piece. It is not, like " Atala," spoilt artistically by intentions 
alien to the subject, by being made the means of expres- 
sion of a particular tendency. Instead of taking a passion 
for Kene, indeed, future generations will scorn and wonder 
at him ; instead of a hero they will see in him a patho- 
logical case; but the work itself, like the Sphinx, will 
endure. A work of art will bear all kinds of interpreta- 
tions; each in turn finds a basis in it, while the work 
itself, because it represents an idea, and therefore partakes 
of the richness and complexity which belong to ideas, 
suffices for all and survives all. A portrait proves what- 
ever one asks of it. Even in its forms of style, in the dis- 
dainful generality of the terms in which the story is told, 
in the terseness of the sentences, in the sequence of the 
images and of the pictures, traced with classic purity and 
marvelous vigor, " Rene" maintains its monumental charac- 
ter. Carved, as it were, in material of the present cen- 
tury, with the tools of classical art, " Rene" is the immortal 
cameo of Chateaubriand. 



86 A MIEUS JO URN A L. 

We are never more discontented with others than when 
we are discontented with ourselves. The consciousness of 
wrong-doing makes us irritable, and our heart in its 
cunning quarrels with what is outside it, in order that it 
may deafen the clamor within. 

The faculty of intellectual metamorphosis is the first 
and indispensable faculty of the critic; without it he is 
not apt at understanding other minds, and ought, there- 
tore, if he love truth, to hold his peace. The conscien- 
tious critic must first criticise himself; what we do not 
understand we have not the right to judge. 



June 14, 1858. Sadness and anxiety seem to be increas- 
ing upon me. Like cattle in a burning stable, I cling to 
what consumes me, to the solitary life which does me 
so much harm. I let myself be devoured by inward 
suffering. . . . 

Yesterday, however, I struggled against this fatal ten- 
dency. I went out into the country, and the children's 
caresses restored to me something of serenity and calm. 
After we had dined out of doors all three sang some songs 
and school hymns, which were delightful to listen to. 
The spring fairy had been scattering flowers over the 
fields with lavish hands; it was a little glimpse of para- 
dise. It is true, indeed, that the serpent too was not far 
off. Yesterday there was a robbery close by the house, 
and death had visited another neighbor. Sin and death 
lurk around every Eden, and sometimes within it. Hence 
the tragic beauty, the melancholy poetry of human destiny. 1 
Flowers, shade, a fine view, a sunset sky, joy, grace, feel- 
ing, abundance and serenity, tenderness and song here 
you have the element of beauty: the dangers of the present 
and the treacheries of the future, here is the element of 
pathos. The fashion of this world passeth away. Unless 
#e have laid hold upon eternity, unless we take the 
religious view of life, these bright, fleeting days can only 
be a subject for terror. Happiness should be a prayer - 



A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 8? 

and grief also. Faith in the moral order, in the protect- 
ing fatherhood of God, appeared to me in all its serious 
sweetness. 

" Pense, aime, agis et souffre en Dieu 
C'est la grande science." 

July 18, 1858. To-day I have been deeply moved by 
the nostalgia of happiness and by the appeals of memory. 
,My old self, the dreams which used to haunt me in Ger- 
'many, passionate impulses, high aspirations, all revived in 
me at once with unexpected force. The dread lest I 
should have missed my destiny and stifled my true nature, 
lest I should have buried myself alive, passed through me 
like a shudder. Thirst for the unknown, passionate love 
of life, the yearning for the blue vaults of the infinite and 
the strange worlds of the ineffable, and that sad ecstasy 
which the ideal wakens in its beholders all these carried 
me away in a whirlwind of feeling that I cannot describe. 
Was it a warning, a punishment, a temptation? Was it a 
secret protest, or a violent act of rebellion on the part of a 
nature which is unsatisfied? the last agony of happiness 
and of a hope that will not die? 

What raised all this storm? Nothing but a book the 
first number of the "Revue Germanique." The articles 
of Dollfus, Eenan, Littre, Montegut, Taillandier, by 
recalling to me some old and favorite subjects, made me 
forget ten wasted years, and carried me back to my univer- 
sity life. I was tempted to throw off my Genevese garb 
and to set off, stick in hand, for any country that might 
offer stripped and poor, but still young, enthusiastic, and 
alive, full of ardor and of faith. 

. . . I have been dreaming alone since ten o'clock at 
the wirdow, while the stars twinkled among the clouds, 
and the lights of the neighbors disappeared one by one in 
the houses round. Dreaming of what? Of the meaning 
of this tragic comedy which we call life. Alas! alas! I 
was as melancholy as the preacher. A hundred years 
seemed to me a dream, life a breath, and everything a 



88 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 

nothing. What tortures of mind and soul, and all that 
we may die in a few minutes! What should interest us, 
and why? 

" Le temps n'est rien pour Pfime, enfant, ta vie est pleine, 
Et ce jour vaut cent ans, s'il te fait trouver Dieu." 

To make an object for myself, to hope, to straggle, 
seems to me more and more impossible and amazing. At 
twenty I was the embodiment of curiosity, elasticity and 
spiritual ubiquity; at thirty-seven I have not a will, a 
desire, or a talent left ; the fireworks of my youth have 
left nothing but a handful of ashes behind them. 

December 13, 1858. Consider yourself a refractory 
pupil for whom you are responsible as mentor and tutor. 
To sanctify sinful nature, by bringing it gradually under 
the control of the angel within us, by the help of a holy 
God, is really the whole of Christian pedagogy and of 
religious morals. Our work my work consists in tam- 
ing, subduing, evangelizing and angelizing the evil self; 
and in restoring harmony with the good self. Salvation 
lies in abandoning the evil self in principle and in taking 
refuge with the other, the divine self, in accepting with 
courage and prayer the task of living with one's own demon, 
and making it into a less and less rebellious instrument of 
good. The Abel in us must labor for the salvation of the 
Cain. To undertake it is to be converted, and this conver- 
sion must be repeated day by day. Abel only redeems 
and touches Cain by exercising him constantly in good 
works. To do right is in one sense an act of violence; it 
is suffering, expiation, a cross, for it means the conquest 
and enslavement of self. In another sense it is the 
apprenticeship to heavenly things, sweet and secret joy, 
contentment and peace. Sanctification implies perpetual 
martyrdom, but it is a martyrdom which glorifies. A 
crown of thorns is the sad eternal symbol of the life of the 
saints. The best measure of the profundity of any reli- 
gious doctrine is given by its conception of sin and the 
cure of sin. 



A Ml EL'S JO URN A L. 89 

A duty is no sooner divined than from that very moment 
it. becomes binding upon us. 



Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that 
can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes 
into being is nothing. 

July 14, 1859. I have just read "Faust" again. Alas, 
every year I am fascinated afresh by this somber figure, 
this restless life. It is the type of suffering toward which 
I myself gravitate, and I am always finding in the poem 
words which strike straight to my heart. Immortal, 
malign, accursed type! Specter of my own conscience, 
ghost of my own torment, image of the ceaseless struggle 
of the soul which has not yet found its true aliment, 
its peace, its faith art thou not the typical example of a 
life which feeds upon itself, because it has not found its 
God, and which, in its wandering flight across the worlds, 
carries within it, like a comet, an inextinguishable flame of 
desire, and an agony of incurable disillusion? I also am 
reduced to nothingness, and I shiver on the brink of the 
great empty abysses of my inner being, stifled by longing 
for the unknown, consumed with the thirst for the infi- 
nite, prostrate before the ineffable. I also am torn some- 
times by this blind passion for life, these desperate 
struggles for happiness, though more often I am a prey to 
complete exhaustion and tactiturn despair. What is the 
reason of it all? Doubt doubt of one's self, of thought, of 
men, and of life doubt which enervates the will and 
weakens all our powers, which makes us forget God and 
neglect prayer and duty that restless and corrosive doubt 
which makes existence impossible and meets all hope with 
satire. 

July 17, 1859. Always and everywhere salvation is tor- 
ture, deliverance means death, and peace lies in sacrifice. 
If we would win oiir pardon, we must kiss the fiery cruci- 
fix. Life is a series of agonies, a Calvary, which we can 
only climb on bruised and aching knees. We seek distrac- 
tions; we wander away; we deafen and stupefy ourselves 



90 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

that we may escape the test; we turn away our eyes from 
the via dolorosa; and yet there is no help for it we must 
come back to it in the end. What we have to recognize is 
tliut each of us carries within himself his own executioner 
his demon, his hell, in his sin ; that his sin is his idol, and 
that this idol, which seduces the desire of his heart, is his 
curse. 

Die unto sin! This great saying of Christianity xemains 
still the highest theoretical solution of the inner life. Only 
in it is there any peace of conscience ; and without this 
peace there is no peace. . . . 

I have, just read seven chapters of the gospel. Nothing 
calms me so much. To do one's duty in love and obedi- 
ence, to do what is right these are the ideas which remain 
with one. To live in God and to do his work this is 
religion, salvation, life eternal; this is both the effect and 
the sign of love and of the Holy Spirit; this is the new 
man announced by Jesus, and the new life into which we 
enter by the second birth. To be born again is to renounce 
the old life, sin, and the natural man, and to take to one's 
self another principle of life. It is to exist for God with 
another self, another will, another love. 

August 9, 1859. Nature is forgetful: the world 13 
almost more so. However little the individual may lend 
himself to it, oblivion soon covers him like a shroud. 
This rapid and inexorable expansion of the universal life, 
which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual 
being, which effaces our existence and annuls all memory 
of us, fills me with unbearable melancholy. To be born, 
to struggle, to disappear there is the whole ephemeral 
drama of human life. Except in a few hearts, and not 
even always in one, our memory passes like a ripple on the 
water, or a breeze in the air. If nothing in us is immortal, 
what a small thing is life. Like a dream which trembles 
and dies at the first glimmer of dawn, all my past, all my 
present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my conscious- 
ness at the moment when it returns upon itself. I feel 
myself then stripped and empty, like a convalescent who 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 91 

remembers nothing. My travels, my reading, my studies, 
my projects, my hopes, have faded from my mind. It is a 
singular state. All my faculties drop away from me like 
a cloak that one takes off, like the chrysalis case of a larva. 
I feel myself returning into a more elementary form. I 
behold my own unclothing; I forget, still more than I am 
forgotten; I pass gently into the grave while still living, 
and I feel, as it were, the indescribable peace of annihila- 
tion, and the dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious 
of the river of time passing before and in me, of the impal- 
pable shadows of life gliding past me, but nothing breaks 
the cateleptic tranquillity which enwraps me. 

I come to understand the Buddhist trance of the Soufis, 
the kief of the Turk, the "ecstasy" of the orientals, and 
yet I am conscious all the time that the pleasure of it is 
deadly, that, like the use of opium or of hasheesh, it is a 
kind of slow suicide, inferior in all respects to the joys of 
action, to the sweetness of love, to the beauty of enthu- 
siasm, to the sacred savor of accomplished duty. 

November 28, 1859. This evening I heard the first lec- 
ture of Ernest Naville* on "The Eternal Life." It was 
admirably sure in touch, true, clear, and noble through- 
out. He proved that, whether we would or no, we were 
bound to face the question of another life. Beauty of 
character, force of expression, depth of thought, were all 
equally visible in this extemporized address, which was as 
closely reasoned as a book, and can scarcely be disentangled 
from the quotations of which it was full. The great 
room of the Casino was full to the doors, and one saw a 
fairly large number of white heads. 

* The well-known Genevese preacher and writer, Ernest Naville, 
the son of a Genevese pastor, was born in 1816, became professor at 
the Academy of Geneva in 1844, lost his post after the revolution of 
1846, and, except for a short interval in 1860, has since then held 
no official position. His courses of theological lectures, delivered at 
intervals from 1859 onward, were an extraordinary success. They 
were at first confined to rnen only, and an audience of two thousand 
persons sometimes assembled to hear them. To literature he is 
mainly known as the editor of Maine de Biran's Journal. 



92 AMIEL't, JOURNAL. 

December 13, 1859. Fifth lecture on " The Eternal Life" 
("The Proof of the Gospel by the Supernatural.") The 
same talent and great eloquence; but the orator does not 
understand that the supernatural must either be histori- 
cally proved, or, supposing it cannot be proved, that it 
must renounce all pretensions to overstep the domain of 
faith and to encroach upon that of history and science. 
He quotes Strauss, Kenan, Scherer, but he touches only 
the letter of them, not the spirit. Everywhere one sees 
the Cartesian dualism and a striking want of the genetic, 
historical, and critical sense. The idea of a living evolu- 
tion has not penetrated into the consciousness of the orator. 
With every intention of dealing with things as they are, 
he remains, in spite of himself, subjective and oratorical. 
There is the inconvenience of handling a matter polemi- 
cally instead of in the spirit of the student. Naville's 
moral sense is too strong for his discernment and prevents 
him from seeing what he does not wish to see. In his 
metaphysic, will is placed above intelligence, and in his 
personality the character is superior to the understanding, 
as one might logically expect. And the consequence is, 
that he may prop up what is tottering, but he makes no 
conquests; he may help to preserve existing truths and 
beliefs, but he is destitute of initiative or vivifying power. 
He is a moralizing but not a suggestive or stimulating 
influence. A popularizer, apologist and orator of the 
greatest merit, he is a schoolman at bottom ; his arguments 
are of the same type as those of the twelfth century, and 
he defends Protestantism in the same way in which Cathol- 
icism has been commonly defended. The best way of 
demonstrating the insufficiency of this point of view is to 
show by history how incompletely it has been superseded. 
The chimera of a simple and absolute truth is wholly 
Catholic and anti-historic. The mind of Naville is mathe- 
matical and his objects moral. His strength lies in mathe- 
maticizing morals. As soon as it becomes a question of 
development, metamorphosis, organization as soon as he 
is brought into contact with the mobile world of actual 



AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 93 

life, especially of the spiritual life, he has no longer any- 
thing serviceable to say. Language is for him a system of 
fixed signs; a man, a people, a book, are so many geomet- 
rical figures of which we have only to discover the 
properties. 

December 15th. Naville's sixth lecture, an admirable 
one, because it did nothing more than expound the Chris- 
tian doctrine of eternal life. As an extempore perform- 
ance marvelously exact, finished, clear and noble, marked 
by a strong and disciplined eloquence. There was not a 
single reservation to make in the name of criticism, his- 
tory or philosophy. It was all beautiful, noble, true and 
pure. It seems to me that Naville has improved in the 
art of speech during these latter years. He has always had 
a kind of dignified and didactic beauty, but he has now 
added to it the contagious cordiality and warmth of feeling 
which complete the orator; he moves the whole man, 
beginning with the intellect but finishing with the heart. 
He is now very near to the true virile eloquence, and 
possesses one species of it indeed very nearly in perfection. 
He has arrived at the complete command of the resources 
of his own nature, at an adequate and masterly expression 
of himself. Such expression is the joy and glory of the 
oratorical artist as of every other. Naville is rapidly 
becoming a model in the art of premeditated and self- 
controlled eloquence. 

There is another kind of eloquence that which seems 
inspired, which finds, discovers, and illuminates by bounds 
and flashes, which is born in the sight of the audience and 
transports it. Such is not Naville's kind. Is it better 
worth having? I do not know. 



Every real need is stilled, and every vice is stimulated 
by satisfaction. 

Obstinacy is will asserting itself without being able to 
justify itself. It is persistence without a plausible motive. 
It is the tenacity of self-love substituted for the tenacity 
of reason or conscience. 



94 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 

It is not what he has, nor even what he does, which 
directly expresses the worth of a man, but what he is. 

What comfort, what strength, what economy there is in 
order material order, intellectual order, moral order. To 
know where one is going and what one wishes this is 
order; to keep one's word and one's engagements again 
order; to have everything ready under one's hand, to be 
able to dispose of all one's forces, and to have all one'a 
means of whatever kind under command still order; to 
discipline one's habits, one's effort, one's wishes; to organ- 
ize one's life, to distribute one's time, to take the measure of 
one's duties and make one's rights respected ; to employ 
one's capital and resources, one's talent and one's chances 
profitably all this belongs to and is included in the word 
order. Order means light and peace, inward liberty and 
free command over one's self ; order is power. ^Esthetic and 
moral beauty consist, the first in a true perception of 
order, and the second in submission to it, and in the reali- 
zation of it, by, in, and around one's self. Order is man's 
greatest need and his true well-being. 

April 17, I860. The cloud has lifted; I am better. I 
have been able to take my usual walk on the Treille; all 
the buds were opening and the young shoots were green 
on all the branches. The rippling of clear water, the 
merriment of birds, the young freshness of plants, and 
the noisy play of children, produce a strange effect upon 
an invalid. Or rather it was strange to me to be looking 
at such things with the eyes of a sick and dying man ; it 
was my first introduction to a new phase of experience. 
There is a deep sadness in it. One feels one's self cut off 
from nature outside her communion as it were. She is 
strength and joy and eternal health. "Room for the 
living," she cries to us; "do not come to darken my blue 
sky with your miseries; each has his turn: begone!" But 
to strengthen our own courage, we must say to ourselves, 
No; it is good for the world to see suffering and weakness; 
the sight adds zest to the joy of the happy and the care- 



AMIKUS JO URN A L. 95 

less, and is rich in warning for all who think. Life has 
been lent to us, and we owe it to our traveling companions 
to let them see what use we make of it to the end. We 
must show our brethren both how to live and how to die. 
These first summonses of illness have besides a divine 
value; they give us glimpses behind the scenes of life; 
they teach us something of its awful reality and its inevi 
table end. They teach us sympathy. They warn us to 
redeem the time while it is yet day. They awaken in us 
gratitude for the blessings which are still ours, and humil- 
ity for the gifts which are in us. So that, evils though 
they seem, they are really an appeal to us from on high, a 
touch of God's fatherly scourge. 

How frail a thing is health, and what a thin envelope 
protects our life against being swallowed up from without, 
or disorganized from within! A breath, and the boat 
springs a leak or founders; a nothing, and all is endan- 
gered ; a passing cloud, and all is darkness ! Life is indeed 
a flower which a morning withers and the beat of a passing 
wing breaks down; it is the widow's lamp, which the 
slightest blast of air extinguishes. In order to realize the 
poetry which clings to morning roses, one needs to have just 
escaped from the claws of that vulture which we call ill- 
ness. The foundation and the heightening of all things 
is the graveyard. The only certainty in this world of vain 
agitations and endless anxieties, is the certainty of death, 
and that which is the foretaste and small change of death 
pain. 

As long as we turn our eyes away from this implacable 
reality, the tragedy of life remains hidden from us. As 
soon as we look at it face to face, the true proportions of 
everything reappear, and existence becomes solemn again. 
It is made clear to us that we have been frivolous and 
petulant, intractable and forgetful, and that we have been 
wrong. 

We must die and give an account of our life: here in all 
its simplicity is the teaching of sickness! "Do with all 
diligence Avhat you have to do; reconcile yourself with the 



96 AM J EL' 8 JOURNAL. 

law of the universe; think of your duty; prepare yourself 
for departure:" such is the cry of conscience and of 
reason. 

May 3, 1860. Edgar Quinet has attempted everything: 
he has aimed at nothing but the greatest things; he is 
rich in ideas, a master of splendid imagery, serious, enthu- 
siastic, courageous, a noble writer. How is it, then, that he 
has not more reputation? Because he is too pure; be- 
cause he is too uniformly ecstatic, fantastic, inspired 
a mood which soon palls on Frenchmen. Because 
he is too single-minded, candid, theoretical, and spec- 
ulative, too ready to believe in the power of words 
and of ideas, too expansive and confiding; while at the 
same time he is lacking in the qualities which amuse 
clever people in sarcasm, irony, cunning andfinesse. He 
is an idealist reveling in color: a Platonist brandishing 
the thyrsus of the Menads. At bottom his is a mind of no 
particular country. It is in vain that he satirizes Germany 
and abuses England; he does not make himself any more 
of a Frenchman by doing so. It is a northern intellect 
wedded to a southern imagination, but the marriage has 
not been a happy one. He has the disease of chronic 
magniloquence, of inveterate sublimity; abstractions for 
him become personified and colossal beings, which act or 
speak in colossal fashion; he is intoxicated with the infi- 
nite. But one feels all the time that his creations are only 
individual monologues; he cannot escape from the bounds 
of a subjective lyrism. Ideas, passions, anger, hopes, 
complaints he himself is present in them all. We never 
have the delight of escaping from his magic circle, of 
seeing truth as it is, of entering into relation with the 
phenomena and the beings of whom he speaks, with the 
reality of things. This imprisonment of the author within 
his personality looks like conceit. But on the contrary, 
it is because the heart is generous that the mind is egotis- 
tical. It is because Quinet thinks himself so much of a 
Frenchman that he is it so little. These ironical compen- 
sations of destiny are very familiar to me : I have often 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 97 

observed them. Man is nothing but contradiction : the less 
he knows it the more dupe he is. In consequence of his 
small capacity for seeing things as they are, Quinet has 
neither much accuracy nor much balance of mind. He 
recalls Victor Hugo, Avith much less artistic power but 
more historical sense. His principal gift is a great com- 
mand of imagery and symbolism. He seems to me a 
Gorres* transplanted to Tranche Comte, a sort of super- 
numerary prophet, with whom his nation hardly knows 
what to do, seeing that she loves neither enigmas nor 
ecstasy nor inflation of language, and that the intoxication 
of the tripod bores her. 

The real excellence of Quinet seems to me to lie in his 
historical works ("Marnix," "L'ltalie," "LesRoumains"), 
and especially in his studies of nationalities. He was born, 
to understand these souls, at once more vast and more 
sublime than individual souls. 

(Later). I have been translating into verse that page of 
Goethe's "Faust" in which is contained his pantheistic 
confession of faith. The translation is not bad, I think. 
But what a difference between the two languages in the 
matter of precision! It is like the difference between 
stump and graving-tool the one shoAving the effort, the 
other noting the result of the act; the one making you feel 
all that is merely dreamed or vague, formless or vacant, the 
other determining, fixing, giving shape even to the indefi- 
nite; the one representing the cause, the force, the limbo 
whence things issue, the other the things themselves. 
German has the obscure depth of the infinite, French the 
clear brightness of the finite. 

May 5, 1860. To grow old is more difficult than to die, 
because to renounce a good once and for all, costs less than 
to renew the sacrifice day by day and in detail. To bear 
with one's own decay, to accept one's own lessening 
capacity, is a harder and rarer virtue than to face death. 

* Joseph Gcerres, a German mystic and disciple of Schelling. He 
published, among other works, " Mythengeschichte der Asiatischen 
Welt," and " Christliche Mystik.'"" 



98 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

There is a halo round tragic and premature death ; there 
is but a long sadness in declining strength. But look 
closer: so studied, a resigned and religious old age will 
often move us more than the heroic ardor of young years. 
The maturity of the soul is worth more than the first 
brilliance of its faculties, or the plentitude of its strength, 
and the eternal in us can but profit from all the ravages 
made by time. There is comfort in this thought. 

May 22, 1860. There is in me a secret incapacity for 
expressing my true feeling, for saying what pleases others, 
for bearing witness to the present a reserve which I have 
often noticed in myself with vexation. My heart never 
dares to speak seriously, either because it is ashamed of 
being thought to flatter, or afraid lest it should not find 
exactly the right expression. I am always trifling with 
the present moment. Feeling in me is retrospective. My 
refractory nature is slow to recognize the solemnity of the 
hour in which I actually stand. An ironical instinct, 
born of timidity, makes me pass lightly over what I have 
on pretence of waiting for some other thing at some other 
time. Fear of being carried away, and distrust of myself 
pursue me even in moments of emotion; by a sort of 
invincible pride, I can never persuade myself to say to any 
particular instant: "Stay! decide for me; be a supreme 
moment! stand out from the monotonous depths of eter- 
nity and mark a unique experience in my life !" I trifle, 
even with happiness, out of distrust of the future. 

May 27, 1860. (Sunday). I heard this morning a ser- 
mon on the Holy Spirit good but insufficient. Why was 
I not edified? Because there was no unction. Why was. 
there no unction? Because Christianity from this rational- 
istic point of view ia a Christianity of dignity, not of hu- 
mility. Penitence, the struggles of weakness, austerity, 
find no place in it. The law is effaced, holiness and mys- 
ticism evaporate ; the specifically Christian accent is want- 
ing. My impression is always the same faith is made a 
dull poor thing by these attempts to reduce it to simple 
moral psychology. I am oppressed by a feeling of inap- 



A Ml EL'S JO URN A L. 99 

propriateness and malaise at the sight of philosophy in the 
pulpit. " They have taken away my Saviour, and I know 
not where they have laid him;" so the simple folk have a 
right to say, and I repeat it with them. Thus, while 
some shock me by their sacerdotal dogmatism, others repel 
me by their rationalizing laicism. It seems to me that 
good preaching ought to combine, as Schleiermacher did, 
perfect moral humility with energetic independence of 
thought, a profound sense of sin with respect for criticism 
and a passion for truth. 



The free being who abandons the conduct of himself, 
yields himself to Satan; in the moral world there is no 
ground without a master, and the waste lands belong to 
the Evil One. 

The poetry of childhood consists in simulating and fore- 
stalling the future, just as the poetry of mature life con- 
sists often in going backward to some golden age. Poetry 
is always in the distance. The whole art of moral govern- 
ment lies in gaining a directing and shaping hold over the 
poetical ideals of an age. 

January 9, 1861. I have just come from the inaugural 
lecture of Victor Cherbuliez in a state of bewildered ad- 
miration. As a lecture it was exquisite : if it was a recita- 
tion of prepared matter, it was admirable; if an extem- 
pore performance, it was amazing. In the face of supe- 
riority and perfection, says Schiller, we have but one 
resource to love them, which is what I have done. I had 
the pleasure, mingled with a little surprise, of feeling in 
myself no sort of jealousy toward this young conqueror. 

March 15th. This last lecture in Victor Cherbuliez's 
course on "Chivalry," which is just over, showed the same 
magical power over his subject as that with which he began 
the series two months ago. It was a triumph and a har- 
vest of laurels. Cervantes, Ignatius Loyola, and the heri- 
tage of chivalry that is to say, individualism, honor, the 
poetry of the present and the poetry of contrasts, modern 
liberty and progress have been the subjects of this 
lecture. 



100 A KIEL'S JO URNAL. 

The general impression left upon me all along has been 
one of admiration for the union in him of extraordinary 
skill in execution with admirable cultivation of mind. 
With what freedom of spirit he uses and wields his vast 
erudition, and what capacity for close attention he must 
have to be able to carry the weight of a whole improvised 
speech with the same ease as though it were a single sen- 
tence ! I do not know if I am partial, but I find no occa- 
sion for anything but praise in this young wizard and his 
lectures. The fact is, that in my opinion we have now 
one more first rate mind, one more master of language 
among us. This course, with the " Causeries Atheniennes," 
seems to me to establish Victor Cherbuliez's position at 
Geneva. 

March 17, 1861. This afternoon a homicidal languor 
seized hold upon me disgust, weariness of life, mortal sad- 
ness. I wandered out into the churchyard, hoping to find 
quiet and peace there, and so to reconcile myself with 
duty. Vain dream ! The place of rest itself had become 
inhospitable. Workmen were stripping and carrying away 
the turf, the trees were dry, the wind cold, the sky gray 
something arid, irreverent, and prosaic dishonored the 
resting-place of the dead. I was struck with something 
wanting in our national feeling respect for the dead, the 
poetry of the tomb, the piety of memory. Our churches 
are too little open ; our churchyards too much. The result 
in both cases is the same. The tortured and trembling 
heart which seeks, outside the scene of its daily miseries, 
to find some place where it may pray in peace, or pour out 
its grief before God, or meditate in the presence of eternal 
things, with us has nowhere to go. Our church ignores 
these wants of the soul instead of divining and meeting 
them. She shows very little compassionate care for her 
children, very little wise consideration fov the more deli- 
cate griefs, and no intuition of the deeper mysteries of ten- 
derness, no religious suavity. Under a pretext of spiritual- 
ity we are always checking legitimate aspirations. We 
have lost the mystical sense; and what is religion without 
mysticism? A rose without perfume. 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 101 

The words repentance and sanctification are always on 
our lips. But adoration and consolation are also two 
essential elements in religion, and we ought perhaps to 
make more room for them than we do. 

April 28, 1861. In the same way as a dream transforms 
according to its nature, the incidents of sleep, so the soul 
converts into psychical phenomena the ill-defined impressions 
of the organism. An uncomfortable attitude becomes night- 
mare ; an atmosphere charged with storm becomes moral 
torment. Not mechanically and by direct causality; but 
imagination and conscience engender, according to their 
own nature, analogous effects; they translate into their 
own language, and cast into their own mold, whatever 
reaches them from outside. Thus dreams may be helpful 
to medicine and to divination, and states of weather may 
stir up and set free within the soul vague and hidden 
evils. The suggestions and solicitations which act upon 
life come from outside, but life produces nothing but 
itself after all. Originality consists in rapid and clear 
reaction against these outside influences, in giving to them 
our individual stamp. To think is to withdraw, as it 
were, into one's impression to make it clear to one's self, 
and then to put it forth in the shape of a personal judg- 
ment. In this also consists self-deliverance, self-enfran- 
chisement, self-conquest. All that comes from outside is 
a question to which we owe an answer a pressure to be 
met by counter-pressure, if we are to remain free and 
living agents. The development of our unconscious 
nature follows the astronomical laws of Ptolemy; every- 
thing in it is change cycle, epi-cycle, and metamorphosis. 

Every man then possesses in himself the analogies and 
rudiments of all things, of all beings, and of all forms of 
life. He who knows how to divine the small beginnings, 
the germs and symptoms of things, can retrace in himself 
the universal mechanism, and divine by intuition the 
series which he himself will not finish, such as vegetable 
and animal existences, human passions and crises, the 
diseases of the soul and those of the body. The mind 

UNIVERSITY OF CALlK.Kr -A 

RARRARA COLLEGE LIBRARY 



102 AMIKL'H JOURNAL. 

which is subtle and powerful may penetrate all these poten- 
tialities, and make every point flash out the world which 
it contains. This is to be conscious of and to possess the 
general life, this is to enter into the divine sanctuary of. 
contemplation. 

September 12, 1861. In me an intellect which would 
fain forget itself in things, is contradicted by a heart 
which yearns to live in human beings. The uniting link of 
the two contradictions is the tendency toward self-aban- 
donment, toward ceasing to will and exist for one's self, 
toward laying down one's own personality, and losing 
dissolving one's self in love and contemplation. What I 
lack above all things is character, will, individuality. 
But, as always happens, the appearance is exactly the 
contrary of the reality, and my outward life the reverse of 
my true and deepest aspiration. I whose whole being 
heart and intellect thirsts to absorb itself in reality, in its 
neighbor man, in nature and in God, I, whom solitude 
devours and destroys, I shut myself up in solitude and 
seem to delight only in myself and to be sufficient for my- 
self. Pride and delicacy of soul, timidity of heart, have 
made me thus do violence to all my instincts and invert 
the natural order of my life. It is not astonishing that 
I should be unintelligible to others. In fact I have always 
avoided what attracted me, and turned my back upon the 
point where secretly I desired to be. 

" Deux instincts sont en moi: vertige et deraison; 
J'ai 1'effroi du bonbeur et la soif du poison." 

It is the Nemesis which dogs the steps of life, the secret 1 
instinct and power of death in us, which labors continually 
for the destruction of all that seeks to be, to take form, to 
exist; it is the passion for destruction, the tendency 
toward suicide, identifying itself with the instinct of self- 
preservation. This antipathy toward all that does one 
good, all that nourishes and heals, is it not a mere varia- 
tion of the antipathy to moral light and regenerative 
truth? Does not sin also create a thirst for death, a grow- 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 103 

ing passion for what does harm? Discouragement has 
been my sin. Discouragement is an act of unbelief. 
Growing weakness has been the consequence of it; the 
principle of death in me and the influence of the Prince 
of Darkness have waxed stronger together. My . will in 
abdicating has yielded up the scepter to instinct; and as 
the corruption of the best results in what is worst, love of 
the ideal, tenderness, unworldliness, have led me to a .state 
in which I shrink from hope and crave for annihilation. 
Action is my cross. 

October 11, 1861. (Heidelberg}. After eleven days jour- 
ney, here I am under the roof of my friends, in their hos- 
pitable house on the banks of the Neckar, with its garden 
climbing up the side of the Heiligenberg. . . Blazing 
sun ; my room is flooded with light and warmth. Sitting 
opposite the Geisberg, I write to the murmur of the 
Neckar, which rolls its green waves, flecked with silver, 
exactly beneath the balcony on which my room opens. A 
great barge coming from Heilbron passes silently under 
my eyes, while the wheels of a cart which I cannot see 
are dimly heard on the road which skirts the river. Dis- 
tant voices of children, of cocks, of chirping sparrows, the 
clock of the Church of the Holy Spirit, which chimes the 
hour, serve to gauge, without troubling, the general tran- 
quility of the scene. One feels the hours gently slipping 
by, and time, instead of flying, seems to hover. A peace 
beyond words steals into my heart, an impression of morn- 
ing grace, of fresh country poetry which brings back the 
sense of youth, and has the true German savor. 
Two decked barges carrying red flags, each with a train of 
flat boats filled with coal, are going up the river and mak- 
ing their way under the arch of the great stone bridge. 
I stand at the window and see a whole perspective of boats 
sailing in both directions; the Neckar is as animated as 
the street of some great capital; and already on the slope 
of the wooded mountain, streaked by the smoke-wreaths 
of the town, the castle throws its shadow like a vast 
drapery, and traces the outlines of its battlements and 



104 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

turrets. Higher up, in front of me, rises the dark profile 
of the Molkenkur; higher still, in relief against the daz- 
zling east, I can distinguish the misty forms of the two 
towers of the Kaiserstuhl and the Trutzheinrich. 

But enough of landscape. My host, Dr. George Weber, 
tells me that his manual of history is translated into Polish, 
Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and French, and that of his great 
" Universal History" three volumes are already published. 
What astonishing power of work, what prodigious tenacity, 
what solidity ! deutscher Fleiss! 

November 25, 1861. To understand a drama requires 
the same mental operation as to understand an existence, a 
biography, a man. It is a putting back of the bird into 
the egg, of the plant into its seed, a reconstitution of the 
whole genesis of the being in question. Art is simply the 
bringing into relief of the obscure thought of nature; a 
simplification of the lines, a falling into place of groups 
otherwise invisible. The fire of inspiration brings out, as 
it were, designs traced beforehand in sympathetic ink. 
The mysterious grows clear, the confused plain; what is 
complicated becomes simple what is accidental, necessary. 

In short, art reveals nature by interpreting its' inten- 
tions and formulating its desires. Every ideal is the key 
of a long enigma. The great artist is the simplifier. 

Every man is a tamer of wild beasts, and these wild 
beasts are his passions. To draw their teeth and claws, to 
muzzle and tame them, to turn them into servants and 
domestic animals, fuming, perhaps, but submissive in 
this consists personal education. 

February 3, 1862. Self-criticism is the corrosive of all 
oratorical or literary spontaneity. The thirst to know 
turned upon the self is punished, like the curiosity of 
Psyche, by the flight of the thing desired. Force should 
remain a mystery to itself; as soon as it tries to penetrate 
its own secret it vanishes away. The hen Avith the golden 
eggs becomes unfruitful 'as soon as she tries to find out 
why her eggs are golden. The consciousness of conscious- 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 105 

ness is the term and end of analysis. True, but analysis 
pushed to extremity devours itself, like the Egyptian 
serpent. We must give it some external matter to crush 
and dissolve if we wish to prevent its destruction by its ac- 
tion upon itself. "We are, and ought to be, obscure to 
ourselves," said Goethe, "turned outward, and working 
upon the world which surrounds us." Outward radiation 
constitutes health ; a too continuous concentration upon 
what is within brings us back to vacuity and blank. It is 
better that life should dilate and extend itself in ever- 
widening circles, than that it should be perpetually dimin- 
ished and compressed by solitary contraction. Warmth 
tends to make a globe out of an atom ; cold, to reduce a 
globe to the dimensions of an atom. Analysis has been to 
me self-annulling, self -destroy ing. 

April 23, 1862. (Mornex sur Saleve). I was awakened 
by the twittering of the birds at a quarter to five, and saw, 
as I threw open my windows, the yellowing crescent of the 
moon looking in upon me, while the east was just faintly 
whitening. An hour later it was delicious out of doors. 
The anemones were still closed, the apple-trees in full 
flower: 

" Ces beaux poinmiers, coverts de leurs fleurs etoileeus, 
Neige odorante du printemps." 

The view was exquisite, and nature, in full festival, spread 
freshness and joy around her. I breakfasted, read the 
paper, and here I am. The ladies of the pension are still 
under the horizon. I pity them for the loss of two or 
three delightful hours. 

Eleven o'clock. Preludes, scales, piano-exercises going 
on under my feet. In the garden children's voices. I 
have just finished Rosenkranz on "Hegel's Logic," and 

have run through a few articles in the Reviews 

The limitation of the French mind consists in the insuffi- 
ciency of its spiritual alphabet, which does not allow it to 
translate the Greek, German, or Spanish mind without 
changing the accent. The hospitality of French manners 



1 06 AMIKU8 JO UHNA L, 

is not completed by a real hospitality of thought* \ a -. 
My nature is just the opposite. I am individual in the 
presence of men, objective in the presence of things. I 
attach myself to the object, and absorb msyelf in it; I 
detach myself from subjects \i.e. persons], and hold myself 
on my guard against them. I feel myself different from 
the mass of men, and akin to the great whole of nature. 
My way of asserting myself is in cherishing this sense of 
sympathetic unity with life, which I yearn to understand, 
and in repudiating the tyranny of commonplace. All that 
is imitative and artificial inspires me with a secret repul- 
sion, while the smallest true and spontaneous existence 
(plant, animal, child) draws and attracts me. I feel 
myself in community of spirit with the Goethes, the 
Hegels, the Schleiermachers, the Leibnitzes, opposed as 
they are among themselves; while the French mathema- 
ticians, philosophers, or rhetoricians, in spite of their high 
qualities, leave me cold, because there is in them no sense 
of the whole, the sum of things* because they bave no 

*Tbe following passage from Sainte-Beuve may be taken asakind 
of answer by anticipation to this accusation, wbicb Amiel brings, 
more than once in the course of the Journal : 

" Toute nation livree & elle-meme et a son propre genie se fait une 
critique litteraire qui y est conforme. La France en son beaii temps. 
a eu la sienne, qui ne ressemble ni a celle de 1'Allemagne ni a celle 
de ses autres voisins un peu plus superficielle, dira-t-on je ne le 
crois pas : mais plus vive, moinschargee d'erudition, moins thorique 
et systematique, plus confiante au sentiment immediat tin gout. Un 
peu de chnque chose et rien de V ensemble, d la Franfaiw : telle etait la 
devise de Montaigne et telle est aussi la devise de la critique 
francaise. Nous ne sommes pas synthetigues, comme dira4ent les 
Allemands; le mot meme n'est pas francaise. L'imagination de 
detail nous suffit. Montaigne, La Fontaine Madame de Sevigne, 
sont volontiers nos livres de chevet." 

The French critic then goes on to give a rapid sketch of the au- 
thors and the books, "qui ont peu a peu forme comme notre 
rhetorique." French criticism of the old characteristic kind rests 
ultimately upon the minute and delicate knowledge of a few Greek 
and Latin classics. Arnauld, Boileau, Fenelcn, Rollir), Racine fils, 
Voltaire, La Harpe, Marmontel, Delille, Fontanea, and Chateaubriand 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 10? 

grasp of reality in its fullness, and therefore either cramp 
and limit me or awaken my distrust. The French lack 
that intuitive faculty to which the living unity of things 
is revealed, they have very little sense of what is sacred, 
very little penetration into the mysteries of being. What 
they excel in is the construction of special sciences; the 
art of writing a book, style, courtesy, grace, literary 
models, perfection and urbanity; the spirit of order, the 
art of teaching, discipline, elegance, truth of detail, power 
of arrangement; the desire and the gift for proselytism, 
the vigor necessary for practical conclusions. But if you 
wish to travel in the " Inferno" or the " Paradiso" you must 
take other guides. Their home is on the earth, in the 
region of the finite, the changing, the historical, and the 
diverse. Their logic never goes beyond the category of 
mechanism nor their metaphysic beyond dualism. When 
they undertake anything else they are doing violence to 
themselves. 

April 24th. (Noon}. All around me profound peace, the 
silence of the mountains in spite of a full house and a 
neighboring village. No sound is to be heard but the 

in one aspect, are the typical names of this tradition, the creators and 
rnaintainers of this common literary fan ds, this "sorte de circulation 
courante a 1'usage des gens instruits. J'avoue ma faiblesse : nous 
sommes devenus bien plus forts dans la dissertation erudite, mais 
j'aurais un eternel regret pour cette moyenne et plus libre habitude 
litteraire qui laissait a 1'imagination tout son espace et a 1'esprit tout 
son jeu; qui formait une atmosphere saine et facile ou le talent 
respirait et se mouvait a son gre: cette atmosphere-la, je ne la trouvo 
plus, et je la regrette." (Chateaubriand et son Groupe Litteraire, 
vol. i. p. 811.) 

The following pensee of La Bruyere applies to the second half of 
Amiel's criticism of the French mind: " If you wish to travel in the 
Inferno or the Paradiso you must take other guides," etc. 

" Un hornme ne Chretien et Francois se trouve contraint dans la 
satyre; les grands sujets lui sont defendus, il les entame quelquefois, 
et se detourne ensuite sur de petites choses qu'il releve par la beaute 
de son genie et de son style." Les Caracteres, etc., " Des Outrages- 
de V Esprit." 



108 -4 Ml EL'S JO URNAL. 

murmur of the flies. There is something very striking m 
this calm. The middle of the day is like the middle of 
the night. Life seems suspended just when it is most in- 
tense. These are the moments in which one hears the 
infinite and perceives the ineffable. Victor Hugo, in his 
"Contemplations," has been carrying me from world to 
world, and since then his contradictions have reminded me 
of the convinced Christian with whom I was talking yes- 
terday in a house near by. . . The same sunlight floods 
both the book and nature, the doubting poet and the be- 
lieving preacher, as well as the mobile dreamer, who, in 
the midst of all these various existences, allows himself to 
be swayed by every passing breath, and delights, stretched 
along the car of his balloon, in floating aimlessly through 
all the sounds and shallows of the ether, and in realizing 
within himself all the harmonies and dissonances of the 
soul, of feeling, and of thought. Idleness and contempla- 
tion! Slumber of the will, lapses of the vital force, indo- 
lence of the whole being how well I know you ! To love, 
to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand all these are 
possible to me if only I may be relieved from willing. 7.t 
is my tendency, my instinct, my fault, my sin. I have a 
sort of primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of hatred, 
of all which dissipates the soul and makes it dependent 
upon 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 enongh 
to make me forget every desire, and to quench in me both 
the wish to produce and the power to execute. Intellec- 
tual Epicureanism is always threatening to overpowei me. 
I can only combat it by the idea of duty; it is as the poet 
has said : 

" Ceux qui vivent, ce sont ceux qui lattent; ce sont 
Ceux dont un dessein ferine emplit I'aine etle front, 
Ceux qui d'un haut destin gravissent Fapre cime, 
Ceux qui marchent pensifs, epris d'un but sublime, 
Ayant devant les yeux sans cesse, nuit et jour, 
Ou quelque saint labeur ou quelque grand amour! " * 



* Victor Hugo, " Lea Cbatiments." 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

Five o'clock. In the afternoon our little society met in 
general talk upon the terrace. Some amount of familiarity 
and friendliness begins to show itself in our relations to 
each other. I read over again with emotion some passages 
of " Jocelyn." How admirable it is! 

" II se fit de sa vie line plus male idee: 

Sa douleur d'un seul trait ne 1'avait pas videe: 
Mais, adorant de Dieu le severe desseiu, 
II sut la porter pleine et pure dans son sein, 
Et ne se batant pas de la repandre toute, 
Sa resignation 1'epancba goutte a goutte, 
Selon la circonstance et le besoin d'autrui, 
Pour tout vivifier sur terre autour de lui." * 

The true poetry is that which raises you, as this does, 
toward heaven, and fills you with divine emotion; which 
sings of love and death, of hope and sacrifice, and awakens 
the sense of the infinite. "Jocelyn" always stirs in me 
impulses of tenderness which it would be hateful to me to 
see profaned by satire. As a tragedy of feeling, it has no 
parallel in French, for purity, except " Paul et Virginie," 
and I think that I prefer "Jocelyn." To be just, one 
ought to read them side by side. 

Six o'clock. One more day is drawing to its close. 
With the exception of Mont Blanc, all the mountains have 
already lost their color. The evening chill succeeds the 
heat of the afternoon. The sense of the implacable flight 
of things, of the resistless passage of the hours, seizes upon 
me afresh and oppresses me. . 

" Nature au front serein, comme vous oubliez! " 

In vain we cry with the poet, "0 time, suspend thy 
flight!". . . And what days, after all, would we keep 
and hold? Not only the happy days, but the lost days! 
The first have left at least a memory behind them, the 
others nothing but a regret which is almost a remorse. . 

Eleven o^clock. A gust of wind. A few clouds in the 
sky. The nightingale is silent. On the other hand, the 
cricket and the river are still singing. 

* Epilogue of " Jocelyn." 



HO AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

August 9, 1862. Life, which seeks its own contiun 
ance, tends to repair itself without our help. It mends its 
spider's webs when they have been torn; it re-establishes 
in us the conditions of health, and itself heals the injuries 
inflicted upon it; it binds the bandage again upon our 
eyes, brings back hope into our hearts, breathes health 
once more into our organs, and regilds the dream of our 
imagination. But for this, experience would have hope- 
lessly withered and faded us long before the time, and the 
.youth would be older than the centenarian. The wise 
part of us, then, is that which is unconscious of itself; and 
what is most reasonable in man are those elements in him 
which do not reason. Instinct, nature, a divine, an imper- 
sonal activity, heal in us the wounds made by our own 
follies; the invisible genius of our life is never tired of 
providing material for the prodigalities of the self. The 
essential, maternal basis of our conscious life, is therefore 
that unconscious life which we perceive no more than the 
outer hemisphere of the moon perceives the earth, while 
all the time indissolubly and eternally bound to it. It 
is our a.v rixftoov, to speak with Pythagoras. 

November 7, 1862. How malign, infectious, and un- 
wholesome is the eternal smile of that indifferent criti- 
cism, that attitude of ironical contemplation, which cor- 
rodes and demolishes everything, that mocking pitiless 
temper, which .holds itself aloof from every personal duty 
and every vulnerable affection, and cares only to under- 
stand without committing itself to action ! Criticism be- 
come a habit, a fashion, and a system, means the destruc- 
tion of moral energy, of faith, and of all spiritual force. 
One of my tendencies leads me in this direction, but I 
recoil before its results when I come across more emphatic 
types of it than myself. And at least I cannot reproach 
myself with having ever attempted to destroy the moral 
force of others ; my reverence for life forbade it, and my 
self-distrust has taken from me even the temptation to it. 

This kind of temper is very dangerous among us, for it 
flatters all the worst instincts of men indiscipline, irrev- 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. Ill 

erence, selfish individualism and it ends in social atom- 
ism* Minds inclined to mere negation are only harmless 
in great political organisms, which go without them and in 
spite of them. The multiplication of them among our- 
selves will bring about the ruin of our little countries, for 
small states only live by faith and will. Woe to the society 
where negation rules, for life is an affirmation; and a 
society, a country, a nation, is a living whole capable of 
death. No nationality is possible without prejudices, for 
public spirit and national tradition are but webs woven out 
of innumerable beliefs which have been acquired, admitted, 
and continued without formal proof and without discus- 
sion. To act, we must believe ; to believe, we must make 
up our minds, affirm, decide, and in reality prejudge the 
question. He who will only act upon a full scientific cer- 
titude is unfit for practical life. But we are made for 
action, and we cannot escape from duty. Let us not, 
then, condemn prejudice so long as we have nothing but 
doubt to put in its place, or laugh at' thosi whom we 
should be incapable of consoling! This, at least, is my 
point of view. 

Beyond the element which is common to all men there 
is an element which separates them. This element may 
be religion, country, language, education. But all these 
being supposed common, there still remains something 
which serves as a line of demarcation namely, the ideal. 
To have an ideal or to have none, to have this ideal or that 
this is what digs gulfs between men, even between those 
who live in the same family circle, under the same roof or 
in the same room. You must love with the same love, 
think with the same thought as some one else, if you are 
to escape solitude. 

Mutual respect implies discretion and reserve even in 
love itself; it means preserving as much liberty as possible 
to those whose life we share. We must distrust our 
instinct of intervention, for the desire to make one's own 
will prevail is often disguised under the mask of solicitude. 



1 ] 2 A MIEV8 JO URN A L. 

How many times we become hypocrites simply by 
remaining the same outwardly and toward others, when 
we know that inwardly and to ourselves we are different. 
It is not hypocrisy in the strict sense, for we borrow no 
other personality than our own; still, it is a kind of decep- 
tion. The deception humiliates us, and the humiliation 
is a chastisement which the mask inflicts upon the face, 
which our past inflicts upon our present. Such humilia- 
tion is good for us; for it produces shame, and shame 
gives birth to repentance. Thus in an upright soul good 
springs out of evil, and it falls only to rise again. 

January 8, 1863. This evening I read through the 
"Cid" and "Rodogune." My impression is still a mixed 
and confused one. There is much disenchantment in my 
admiration, and a good deal of reserve in my enthusiasm. 
What displeases me in this dramatic art, is the mechanical 
abstraction of the characters, and the scolding, shrewish 
tone of the interlocutors. I had a vague impression of 
listening to gigantic marionettes, perorating through a 
trumpet, with the emphasis of Spaniards. There is power 
in it, but we have before us heroic idols rather than human 
beings. The element of artificiality, of strained pomposity 
and affectation, which is the plague of classical tragedy, is 
everywhere apparent, and one hears, as it were, the cords 
and pulleys of these majestic colossi creaking and groaning. 
I much prefer Racine and Shakespeare; the one from the 
point of view of aesthetic sensation, the other from that of 
psychological sensation. The southern theater can never 
free itself from masks. Comic masks are bearable, but in 
the case of tragic heroes, the abstract type, the mask, 
make one impatient. I can laugh with personages of tin 
and pasteboard : I can only weep with the living, or what 
resembles them. Abstraction turns easily to caricature; 
it is apt to engender mere shadows on the wall, mere 
ghosts and puppets. It is psychology of the first degree 
elementary pyschology just as the colored pictures of 
Germany are elementary painting. And yet with all this. 



AMIEL'S JO URNAL. 1 13 

you have a double-distilled and often sophistical refine- 
ment : just as savages are by no means simple. The fine 
Bide of it all is the manly vigor, the bold frankness of 
ideas, words, and sentiments. Why is it that we find so 
large an element of factitious grandeur, mingled with true 
grandeur, in this drama of 1640, from which the whole 
dramatic development of monarchical France was to 
spring? Genius is there, but it is hemmed round by a 
conventional civilization, and, strive as he may, no man 
wears a wig with impunity. 

January 13, 1863. To-day it has been the turn of 
"Polyeucte" and "La Morte de Pompee." Whatever 
one's objections may be, there is something grandiose in 
the style of Corneille which reconciles you at last even to 
his stiff, emphatic manner, and his over-ingenious rhetoric. 
But it is the dramatic genre which is false. His heroes 
are roles rather than men. They pose as magnanimity, 
virtue, glory, instead of realizing them before us. They 
are always en scene, studied by others, or by themselves. 
With them glory that is to say, the life of ceremony and 
of affairs, and the opinion of the public replaces nature 
becomes nature. They never speak except ore rotunda, 
in cothurnus, or sometimes on stilts. And what con- 
summate advocates they all are ! The French drama is an 
oratorical tournament, a long suit between opposing 
parties, on a day which is to end with the death of some- 
body, and where all the personages represented are in haste 
to speak before the hour of silence strikes. Elsewhere, 
speech serves to make action intelligible; in French 
tragedy action is but a decent motive for speech. It is the 
procedure calculated to extract the finest possible speeches 
from the persons who are engaged in the action, and who 
represent different perceptions of it at different moments 
and from different points of view. Love and nature, duty 
and desire, and a dozen other moral antitheses, are the 
limbs moved by the wire of the dramatist, who makes 
them fall into all the tragic attitudes. What is really 
curious and amusing is that the people of all others the 



114 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 

most vivacious, gay, and intelligent, should have always 
understood the grand style in this pompous, pedantic 
fashion. But it was inevitable. 

April 8, 1863. I have been turning over the 3,500 
pages of " Les Miserables," trying to understand the guid- 
ing idea of this vast composition. The fundamental idea 
of " Les Miserables " seems to be this. Society engenders 
certain frightful evils prostitution, vagabondage, rogues, 
thieves, convicts, war, revolutionary clubs and barricades. 
She ought to impress this fact on her mind, and not treat 
all those who come in contact with her law as mere mon- 
sters. The task before us is to humanize law and opinion, 
to raise the fallen as well as the vanquished, to create a 
social redemption. How is this to be done? By enlight- 
ening vice and lawlessness, and so diminishing the sum of 
them, and by bringing to bear upon the guilty the healing 
influence of pardon. At bottom is it not a Christianiza- 
tion of society, this extension of charity from the sinner to 
the condemned criminal, this application to our present 
life of what the church applies more readily to the other? 
Struggle to restore a human soul to order and to righteous- 
ness by patience and by love, instead of crushing it by 
your inflexible vindictiveness, your savage justice! Such 
is the cry of the book. It is great and noble, but it is a 
little optimistic and Rousseau-like. According to it the 
individual is always innocent and society always respon- 
sible, and the ideal before us for the twentieth century is a 
sort of democratic age of gold, a universal republic from 
which war, capital punishment, and pauperism will have 
disappeared. It is the religion and the city of progress ; 
in a word, the Utopia of the eighteenth century revived on 
a great scale. There is a great deal of generosity in it, 
mixed with not a little fanciful extravagance. The fan- 
cifulness consists chiefly in a superficial notion of evil. 
The author ignores or pretends to forget the instinct of 
perversity, the love of evil for evil's sake, which is con- 
tained in the human heart. 

The great and salutary idea of the book, is that honesty 



A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 115 

before the law is a cruel hypocrisy, in so far as it arrogates 
to itself the right of dividing society according to its own 
standard into elect and reprobates, and thus confounds the 
relative with the absolute. The leading passage is that in 
which Javert, thrown off the rails, upsets the whole moral 
system of the strict Javort, half spy, half priest of the 
irreproachable police-officer. In this chapter the writer 
shows us social charity illuminating and transforming a 
harsh and unrighteous justice. Suppression of the social 
hell, that is to say, of all irreparable stains, of all social 
outlawries for which there is neither end nor hope it is 
an essentially religious idea. 

The erudition, the talent, the brilliancy of execution, 
shown in the book are astonishing, bewildering almost. Its 
faults are to be found in the enormous length allowed to 
digressions and episodical dissertations, in the exaggera- 
tion of all the combinations and all the theses, and, finally, 
in something strained, spasmodic, and violent in the style, 
which is very different from the style of natural eloquence 
or of essential truth. Effect is the misfortune of Victor 
Plugo, because he makes it the center of his aesthetic sys- 
tem; and hence exaggeration, monotony of emphasis, 
theatricality of manner, a tendency to force and over-drive. 
A powerful artist, but one with whom you never forget 
the artist; and a dangerous model, for the master himself 
is already grazing the rock of burlesque, and passes from 
the sublime to the repulsive, from lack of power to produce 
one harmonious impression of beauty. It is natural 
enough that he should detest Racine. 

But what astonishing philological and literary power hae 
Victor Hugo! He is master of all the dialects contained 
m our language, dialects of the courts of law, of the stock- 
exchange, of war, and of the sea, of philosophy and the 
convict-gang, the dialects of trade and of archaeology, of 
the antiquarian and the scavenger. All the bric-a-brac of 
history and of manners, so to speak, all the curiosities of 
soil, and subsoil, are known and familiar to him. He 
seems to have turned his Paris over and over, and to know 



116 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

it body and soul as one knows the contents of one's pocket. 
What a prodigious memory and what a lurid imagination ! 
He is at once a visionary and yet master of his dreamte; he 
summons up and handles at will the hallucinations of 
opium or of hasheesh, without ever becoming their dupe; 
he makes of madness one of his tame animals, and bestrides, 
with equal coolness, Pegasus or Nightmare, the Hippogritf 
or the Chimera. As a psychological phenomenon he is of 
the deepest interest. Victor Hugo draws in sulphuric 
acid, he lights his pictures with electric light. He deafens, 
blinds, and bewilders his reader rather than he charms or 
persuades him. Strength carried to such a point as this is 
a fascination; without seeming to take you captive, it 
makes you its prisoner; it does not enchant you, but it 
holds you spellbound. His ideal is the extraordinary k the 
gigantic, the overwhelming, the incommensurable. His 
most characteristic words are immense, colossal, enormous, 
huge, monstrous. He finds a way of making even child- 
nature extravagant and bizarre. The only thing which 
seems impossible to him is to be natural. In short, his 
passion is grandeur, his fault is excess; his distinguishing 
mark is a kind of Titanic power with strange dissonances 
of puerility in its magnificence. Where he is weakest is, 
in measure, taste, and sense of humor: he fails in esprit, 
in the subtlest sense of the word. Victor Hugo is a galli- 
cized Spaniard, or rather he unites all the extremes of 
south and north, the Scandinavian and the African. Gaul 
has less part in him than any other country. And yet, by 
a caprice of destiny, he is one of the literary geniuses of 
France in the nineteenth century ! His resources are inex- 
haustible, and age seems to have no power over him. 
What an infinite store of words, forms, and ideas he carries 
about with him, and what a pile of works he has left be- 
hind him to mark his passage ! His eruptions are like 
those of a volcano; and, fabulous workman that he is, he 
goes on forever raising, destroying, crushing, and rebuild 
ing a world of his own creation, and a world rather Hindc i 
than Hellenic. 



ANIEV8 JO URNAL. 117 

He amazes me : and yet I prefer those men of genius 
who awaken in me the sense of truth, and who increase 
the sum of one's inner liberty. In Hugo one feels the 
effort of the laboring Cyclops ; give me rather the sonorous 
bow of Apollo, and the tranquil brow of the Olympian 
Jove. His type is that of the Satyr in the " Legende des 
Siecles," who crushes Olympus, a type midway between 
the ugliness of the faun and the overpowering sublimity 
of the great Pan. 

May 23, 1863. Dull, cloudy, misty weather; it rained 
in the night and yet the air is heavy. This somber reverie 
of earth and sky has a sacredness of its own, but it fills 
the spectator with a vague and stupefying ennui. Light 
brings life: darkness may bring thought, but a dull day- 
light, the uncertain glimmer of a leaden sky, merely make 
one restless and weary. These indecisive and chaotic states 
of nature are ugly, like all amorphous things, like smeared 
colors, or bats, or the viscous polyps of the sea. The 
source of all attractiveness is to be found in character, in 
sharpness of outline, in individualization. All that is con- 
fused and indistinct, without form, or sex, or accent, is 
antagonistic to beauty ; for the mind's first need is light; 
light means order, and order means, in the first place, the 
distinction of the parts, in the second, their regular ac- 
tion. Beauty is based on reason. 

August 7, 1863. A walk after supper, a sky sparkling 
with stars, the Milky Way magnificent. Alas ! all the same 
my heart is heavy. At bottom I am always brought up 
against an incurable distrust of myself and of life, which 
toward my neighbor has become indulgence, but for my- 
self has led to a regime of absolute abstention. All or 
nothing! This is my inborn disposition, my primitive 
stuff, my "old man." And yet if some one will but give 
me a little love, will but penetrate a little into my inner 
feeling, I am happy and ask for scarcely anything else. A 
child's caresses, a friend's talk, are enough to make me 
gay and expansive. So then I aspire to the infinite, and 
yet a very little contents me; everything disturbs me and 



118 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 

the least thing calms me. I have often surprised in my 
self the wish for death, and yet my ambitions for happi- 
ness scarcely go beyond those of the bird : wings ! sun ! a 
nest! I persist in solitude because of a taste for it, so 
people think. No, it is from distaste, disgust, from shame 
at my own need of others, shame at confessing it, a fear of 
passing into bondage if I do confess it. 

September 2, 1863. How shall I find a name for that 
subtle feeling which seized hold upon me this morning in the 
twilight of waking? It was a reminiscence, charming 
indeed, but nameless, vague, and featureless, like the 
figure of a woman seen for an instant by a sick man in the 
uncertainty of delirium, and across the shadows of his 
darkened room. I had a distinct sense of a form which I 
had seen somewhere, and which had moved and charmed 
me once, and then had fallen back with time into the 
catacombs of oblivion. But all the rest was confused: 
place, occasion, and the figure itself, for I saw neither the 
face nor its expression. The whole was like a fluttering 
veil under which the enigma the secret, of happiness 
might have been hidden. And I was awake enough to be 
sure that it was not a dream. 

In impressions like these we recognize the last trace of 
things v-jhich are sinking out of sight and call within us, of 
memories which are perishing. It is like a shimmering 
marsh-light falling upon some vague outline of which one 
scarcely knows whether it represents a pain or a pleasure 
a gleam upon a grave. How strange ! One might al- 
most call such things the ghosts of the soul, reflections of 
past happiness, the manes of our dead emotions. If, as 
the Talmud, I think, says, every feeling of love gives 
birth involuntarily to an invisible genius or spirit which 
yearns to complete its existence, and these glimmering 
phantoms, which have never taken to themselves form and 
reality, are still wandering in the limbo of the soul, what 
is there to astonish us in the strange apparitions which 
sometimes come to visit our pillow? At any rate, the fact 
remains that I was not able to force the phantom to tell me its 



A MIEUS JO URNAL. lift- 

name, nor to give any shape or distinctness to my remi- 
niscence. 

What a melancholy aspect life may wear to us when we 
are floating down the current of such dreamy thoughts as- 
these! It seems like some vast nocturnal shipwreck in 
which a hundred loving voices are clamoring for help, 
while the pitiless mounting wave is silencing all the cries 
one by one, before we have been able, in this darkness of 
death, to press a hand or give the farewell kiss. From 
such a point of view destiny looks harsh, savage, and 
cruel, and the tragedy of life rises like a rock in the midst 
of the dull waters of daily triviality. It is impossible not 
to be serious under the weight of indefinable anxiety pro- 
duced in us by such a spectacle. The surface of things 
may be smiling or commonplace, but the depths below are 
austere and terrible. As soon as we touch upon eternal 
things, upon the destiny of the soul, upon truth or duty, 
upon the secrets of life and death, we become grave 
whether we will or no. 

Love at its highest point love sublime, unique, invin- 
cible leads us straight to the brink of the great abyss, for 
it speaks to us directly of the infinite and of eternity. It 
is eminently religious; it may even become religion. 
When all around a man is wavering and changing, when 
everything is growing dark and featureless to him in the 
far distance of an unknown future, when the world seems 
but a fiction or a fairy tale, and the universe a chimera, 
when the whole edifice of ideas vanishes in smoke, and all 
realities are penetrated with doubt, what is the fixed point 
which may still be his? The faithful heart of a woman! 
There he may rest his head; there he will find strength 
to live, strength to believe, and, if need be, strength to 
die in peace with a benediction on his lips. Who knows 
if love and its beatitude, clear manifestation as it is of the 
universal harmony of things, is not the best demonstra- 
tion of a fatherly and understanding God, just as it is the- 
shortest road by which to reach him? Love is a faith, and", 
one faith leads to another. And this faith is happiness, 



120 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

light and force. Only by it does a man enter into the 
series of the living, the awakened, the happy, the redeemed 
of those true men who know the value of existence and 
who labor for the glory of God and of the truth. Till 
then we are but babblers and chatterers, spendthrifts of 
our time, our faculties and our gifts, without aim, without 
real joy weak, infirm, and useless beings, of no account 
in the scheme of things. Perhaps it is through love that 
I shall find my way back to faith, to religion, to energy, to 
concentration. It seems to me, at least, that if I could 
but find my work-fellow and my destined companion, all 
the rest would be added unto me, as though to confound 
my unbelief and make me blush for my despair. Believe, 
then, in a fatherly Providence, and dare to love! 

November 25, 1863. Prayer is the essential weapon of 
all religions. He who can no longer pray because he 
doubts whether there is a being to whom prayer ascends 
and from whom blessing descends, he indeed is cruelly 
solitary and prodigiously impoverished. And you, what 
do you believe about it? At this moment I should find it 
very difficult to say. All my positive beliefs are in the 
crucible ready for any kind of metamorphosis. Truth 
above all, even when it upsets and overwhelms us! But 
what I believe is that the highest idea we can conceive of 
the principle of things will be the truest, and that the 
truest truth is that which makes man the most wholly 
good, wisest, greatest, and happiest. 

My creed is in transition. Yet I still believe in God, 
and the immortality of the soul. I believe in holiness, 
truth, beauty; I believe in the redemption of the soul by 
fait! in forgiveness. I believe in love, devotion, honor. 
I believe in duty and the moral conscience. I believe 
even in prayer. I believe in the fundamental intuitions 
of the human race, and in the great affirmations of the 
inspired of all ages. I believe that our higher nature is 
our truer nature. 

Can one get a theology and a theodicy out of this? 
Probably, but just now I do not see it distinctly. It is so 



AMIEL'8 JOURNAL. 12 i 

long since I have ceased to think about my own meta- 
physic, and since I have lived in the thoughts of others, 
that I am ready even to ask myself whether the crystalliza- 
tion of my beliefs is necessary. Yes, for preaching and 
acting; less for studying, contemplating and learning. 

December 4, 1863. The whole secret of remaining 
young in spite of years, and even of gray hairs, is to cher- 
ish enthusiasm in one's self by poetry, by contemplation, 
by charity that is, in fewer words, by the maintenance 
of harmony in the soul. When everything is in its right 
place within us, we ourselves are in equilibrium with the 
whole work of God. Deep and grave enthusiasm for the 
eternal beauty and the eternal order, reason touched with 
emotion and a serene tenderness of heart these surely are 
the foundations of wisdom. 

Wisdom ! how inexhaustible a theme ! A sort of peace- 
ful aureole surrounds and illumines this thought, in which 
are summed up all the treasures of moral experience, and 
which is the ripest fruit of a well-spent life. Wisdom 
never grows old, for she is the expression of order itself 
that is, of the Eternal. Only the wise man draws from 
life, and from every stage of it, its true savor, because 
only he feels the beauty, the dignity, and the value of life. 
The flowers of youth may fade, but the summer, the 
autumn, and even the winter of human existence, have 
their majestic grandeur, which the wise man recognizes 
and glorifies. To see all things in God ; to make of one's 
own life a journey toward the ideal ; to live with gratitude, 
with devoutness, with gentleness and courage; this was 
the splendid aim of Marcus Aurelius. And if you add to 
it the humility which kneels, and the charity which gives, 
you have the whole wisdom of the children of God, the 
immortal joy which is the heritage of the true Christian. 
But what a false Christianity is that which slanders wis- 
dom and seeks to do without it! In such a case I am on 
the side of wisdom, which is, as it were, justice done to 
God, even in this life. The relegation of life to some 
distant future, and the separation of the holy man from 



AHIEL'S JO URN A L. 

the virtuous man, are the signs of a false religious concep- 
tion. This error is, in some degree, that of the whole 
Middle Age, and belongs, perhaps, to the essence of 
Catholicism. But the true Christianity must purge itself 
from so disastrous a mistake. The eternal life is not the 
future life; it is life in harmony with the true order of 
things life in God. We must learn to look upon time as 
a movement of eternity, as an undulation in the ocean of 
being. To live, so as to keep this consciousness of ours in 
perpetual relation with the eternal, is to be wise; to live, 
so as to personify and embody the eternal, is to be 
religious. 



The modern leveler, after having done away with con- 
ventional inequalities, with arbitrary privilege and histori- 
cal injustice, goes still farther, and rebels against the 
inequalities of merit, capacity, and virtue. Beginning 
with a just principle, he develops it into an unjust one. 
Inequality may be as true and as just as equality: it 
depends upon what you mean by it. But this is precisely 
what nobody cares to find out. All passions dread the 
light, and the modern zeal for equality is a disguised hatred 
which tries to pass itself off as love. 



Liberty, equality bad principles! The only true prin- 
ciple for humanity is justice, and justice toward the feeble 
becomes necessarily protection or kindness. 



April 2, 1864. To-day April has been displaying her 
showery caprices. We have had floods of sunshine fol- 
lowed by deluges of rain, alternate tears and smiles from 
the petulant sky, gusts of wind and storms. The weather 
is like a spoiled child whose wishes and expression change 
twenty times in an hour. It is a blessing for the plants, 
and means an influx of life through all the veins of the 
spring. The circle of mountains which bounds the valley 
is covered with white from top to toe, but two hours of 
sunshine would melt the snow away. The snow itself is 



AM1KUS JOURNAL. 123 

but a new caprice, a simple stage decoration ready to dis- 
appear at the signal of the scene-shifter. 

How sensible I am to the restless change which rules the 
world. To appear, and to vanish there is the biography 
of all individuals, whatever may be the length of the 
cycle of existence which they describe, and the drama of 
the universe is nothing more. All life is the shadow of a 
smoke-wreath, a gesture in the empty air, a hieroglyph 
traced for an instant in the sand, and effaced a moment 
afterward by a breath of wind, an air-bubble expanding 
and vanishing on the surface of the great river of being 
an appearance, a vanity, a nothing. But this nothing is, 
however, the symbol of the universal being, and this pass- 
ing bubble is the epitome of the history of the world. 

The man who has, however imperceptibly, helped in 
the work of the universe, has lived; the man who has 
been conscious, in however small a degree, of the cosmical 
movement, has lived also. The plain man serves the 
world by his action and as a wheel in the machine; the 
thinker serves it by his 'intellect, and as a light upon its 
path. The man of meditative soul, who raises and com- 
forts and sustains his traveling companions, mortal and 
fugitive like himself, plays a nobler part still, for he 
unites the other two utilities. Action, thought, speech, 
are the three modes of human life. The artisan, the sa- 
vant, and the orator, are all three God's workmen. To 
do, to discover, to teach these three things are all labor, 
all good, all necessary. Will-o'-the-wisps that we are, we 
may yet leave a trace behind us; meteors that we are, we 
may yet prolong our perishable being in the memory of 
men, or at least in the contexture of after events. Every- 
thing disappears, but nothing is lost, and the civilization 
or city of man is but an immense spiritual pyramid, built 
up out of the work of all that has ever lived under the 
forms of moral being, just as our calcareous mountains 
are made of the debris of myriads of nameless creatures 
who have lived under the forms of microscopic animal life. 

April 5, 1864. I have been reading "Prince Vitale" 



124 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

for the second time, and have been lost in admiration of 
it. What wealth of color, facts, ideas what learning, 
what fine-edged satire, what esprit^ science, and talent, 
and what an irreproachable finish of style so limpid, and 
yet so profound ! It is not heartfelt and it is not spontane- 
ous, but all other kinds of merit, culture, and cleverness 
the author possesses. It would be impossible to be more 
penetrating, more subtle, and less fettered in mind, than 
this wizard of language, with his irony and his chameleon- 
like variety. Victor Cherbuliez, like the sphinx, is able 
to play all lyres, and takes his profit from them all, with a 
Goethe-like serenity. It seems as if passion, grief, and 
error had no hold on this impassive soul. The key of 
his thought is to be looked for in Hegel's " Phenomenology 
of Mind," remolded by Greek and French influences. 

His faith, if he has one, is that of Strauss Humanism. 
But he is perfectly master of himself and of his utter- 
ances, and will take good care never to preach anything 
prematurely. 

What is there quite at the bottom of this deep spring? 

In any case a mind as free as any can possibly be from 
stupidity and prejudice. One might almost say that 
Cherbuliez knows all that he wishes to know, without the 
trouble of learning it. He is a calm Mephistopheles, 
with perfect manners, grace, variety, and an exquisite 
urbanity; and Mephisto is a clever jeweler; and this 
jeweler is a subtle musician ; and this fine singer and story- 
teller, with his amber-like delicacy and brilliancy, is mak- 
ing mock of us all the while. He takes a malicious 
pleasure in withdrawing his own personality from scrutiny 
and divination, while he himself divines everything, and 
he likes to make us feel that although he holds in his hand 
the secret of the universe, he will only unfold his prize at 
his own time, and if it pleases him. Victor Cherbuliez 
is a little like Proudhon and plays with paradoxes, to 
shock the bourgeois. Thus he amuses himself with run- 
ning down Luther and the Reformation in favor of the 
Renaissance. Of the troubles of conscience he seems to 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 125 

know nothing. His supreme tribunal is reason. At bot- 
tom he is Hegelian and intellectualist. But it is a splendid 
organization. Only sometimes he must be antipathetic to 
those men of duty who make renunciation, sacrifice, and 
humility the measure of individual worth. 

July, 1864. Among the Alps I become a child again, 
with all the follies and naivete of childhood. Shaking oif 
the weight of years, the trappings of office, and all the 
tiresome and ridiculous caution with which one lives, I 
plunge into the full tide of pleasure, and amuse myself 
sans fapon, as it comes. In this careless light-hearted 
mood, my ordinary formulas and habits fall away from me 
so completely that I feel myself no longer either towns- 
man, or professor, or savant, or bachelor, and I remember 
no more of my past than if it were a dream. It is like a 
bath in Lethe. 

It makes me really believe that the smallest illness would 
destroy my memory, and wipe out all my previous exist- 
ence, when I see with what ease I become a stranger to 
tayself, and fall back once more into the condition of a 
<')lank sheet, a tabula rasa. Life wears such a dream- 
tspect to me that I can throw myself without any difficulty 
into the situation of the dying, before whose eyes all this 
tumult of images and forms fades into nothingness. I 
have the inconsistency of a fluid, a vapor, a cloud, and all 
is easily unmade or transformed in me; everything passes 
and is effaced like the waves which follow each other on 
the sea. When I say all, I mean all that is arbitrary, in- 
different, partial, or intellectual in the combinations of 
one's life. For I feel that the things of the soul, our im- 
mortal aspirations, our deepest affections, are not drawn 
into this chaotic whirlwind of impressions. It is the finite 
things which are mortal and fugitive. Every man feels it 
on his deathbed. I feel it during the whole of life; that 
is the only difference between me and others. Excepting 
only love, thought, and liberty, almost everything is now 
a matter of indifference to me, and those objects which 
excite the desires of most men, rouse in me little more 



J26 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

than curiosity. What does it mean detachment of soul, 
disinterestedness, weakness, or wisdom? 

September 19, 1864. I have been living for two hours 
with a noble soul with Eugenie de Guerin, the pious hero- 
ine of fraternal love. How many thoughts, feelings, griefs, 
in this journal of six years! How it makes one dream, 
think and live ! It produces a certain homesick impression 
on me, a little like that of certain forgotten melodies 
whereof the accent touches the heart, one knows not why. 
It is as though far-off paths came back to me, glimpses of 
youth, a confused murmur of voices, echoes from my past. 
Purity, melancholy, piety, a thousand memories of a past 
existence, forms fantastic ?nd intangible, like the fleeting 
shadows of a dream at waking, began to circle round the 
astonished reader. 

September 20, 1864. Read Eugenie de Guerin's vol- 
ume again right and left with a growing sense of attrac- 
tion. Everything is heart, force, impulse, in these pages 
which have the power of oiucerity and a brilliance of 
suffused poetry. A great and strong soul, a clear mind, 
distinction, levation, the freedom of unconscious talent, 
reserve and depth nothing is wanting for this Sevigne of 
the fields, who has to hold herself in with both hands lest 
she should write verse, so strong in her is the artistic 
impulse. 

October 16, 1864. I have just read a part of Eugenie 
de Gueriu's journal over again. It charmed me a little 
less than the first time. The nature seemed to me as 
beautiful, but the life of Eugenie was too empty, and the 
circle of ideas which occupied her, too narrow. 

It is touching and wonderful to see how little space is 
enough for thought to spread its wings in, but this per- 
petual motion within the four walls of a cell ends none the 
less by becoming wearisome to minds which are accustomed 
to embrace more objects in their field of vision. Instead 
of a garden, the world; instead of a library, the whole of 
literature; instead of three or four faces, a whole people 
and all history this is what the virile, the philosophic 



A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 127 

temper demands. Men must have more air, more room, 
more horizon, more positive knowledge, and they end by 
suffocating in this little cage where Eugenie lives and 
moves, though the breath of heaven blows into it and the 
radiance of the stars shines down upon it. 

October 27, 1864. (Promenade de la Treille). The air 
this morning was so perfectly clear and lucid that one 
might have distinguished a figure on the Vouache.* This 
level and brilliant sun had set fire to the whole range of 
autumn colors; amber, saffron, gold, sulphur, yellow 
ochre, orange, red, copper-color, aquamarine, amaranth, 
shone resplendent on the leaves which were still hanging 
from the boughs or had already fallen beneath the trees. It 
was delicious. The martial step of our two battalions going 
out to their drilling-ground, the sparkle of the guns, the 
song of the bugles, the sharp distinctness of the house 
outlines, still moist with the morning dew, the trans- 
parent coolness of all the shadows every detail in the 
scene was instinct with a keen and wholesome gayety. 

There are two forms of autumn: there is the misty 
and dreamy autumn, there is the vivid and brilliant 
autumn: almost the difference between the two sexes. 
The very word autumn is both masculine and feminine. 
Has not every season, in some fashion, its two sexes? Has 
it not its minor and its major key, its two sides of light 
and shadow, gentleness and force? Perhaps. All that 
is perfect is double; each face has two profiles, each coin 
two sides. The scarlet autumn stands for vigorous activ- 
ity : the gray autumn for meditative feeling. The one is 
expansive and overflowing; the other still and withdrawn. 
Yesterday our thoughts were with the dead. To-day we 
are celebrating the vintage. 

November 16, 1864. Heard of the death of . Will 

and intelligence lasted till there was an effusion on the 
brain which stopped everything. 

A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the 

* The Voudche is the hill which bounds the horizon of Geneva to 
the south-west. 



A Ml EL'S JO URNAL 

brain, and a man is out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, 
his thought vanishes, the world disappears from him like a 
dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our 
individual existence! Fragility, appearance, nothingness. 
'* If it were for our powers of self-detraction and forgetful- 
ness, all the fairy world which surrounds and draws us 
would seem to us but a broken spectre in the darkness, 
an empty appearance, a fleeting hallucination. Appeared 
disappeared there is the whole history of a man, or of 
a world, or of an infusoria. 

Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner 
prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode 
under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous 
in idea. The eye does not see a sphere all at once 
although the sphere exists all at once. Either the sphere 
must turn before the eye which is looking at it, or the eye 
must go round the sphere. In the first case it is the world 
which unrolls, or seems to unroll in time; in the second 
case it is our thought which successively analyzes and 
recomposes. For the supreme intelligence there is no 
time; what will be, is. Time and space are fragments of 
the infinite for the use of finite creatures. God permits 
them, that he may not be alone. They are the mode 
under which creatures are possible and conceivable. Let 
us add that they are also the Jacob's ladder of innumer- 
able steps by which the creation reascends to its Creator, 
participates in being, tastes of life, perceives the absolute, 
and can adore the fathomless mystery of the infinite 
"divinity. That is the other side of the question. Our 
life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath 
of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in pene- 
trating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the change- 
less and the eternal. To escape by the ecstasy of inward 
vision from the whirlwind of time, to see one's self sub specie 
eterni is the word of command of all the great religions of 
the higher races; and this psychological possibility is the 
foundation of all great hopes. The soul may be immortal 
because she is fitted to rise toward that which is neither 



AMIEL' 8 JOURNAL. 129 

born nor dies, toward that which exists substantially, 
necessarily, invariably, that is to say toward God. 

To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. 
To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; 
we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece 
of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep 
up the attraction and vary the song. 



The germs of all things are in every heart, and the 
greatest criminals as well as the greatest heroes are but 
different modes of ourselves. Only evil grows of itself, 
while for goodness we want effort and courage. 



Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the 
end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world 
where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall 
love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The 
gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, 
every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the 
universe. 



A man takes to "piety" from a thousand different 
reasons from imitation or from eccentricity, from bravado 
or from reverence, from shame of the past or from terror 
of the future, from weakness and from pride, for pleasure's 
sake or for punishment's sake, in order to be able to judge, 
or in order to escape being judged, and for a thousand 
other reasons; but he only becomes truly religious for 
religion's sake. 



January 11, 1865. It is pleasant to feel nobly that 
is to say, to live above the lowlands of vulgarity. Manu- 
facturing Americanism and Csesarian democracy tend 
equally to the multiplying of crowds, governed by appetite, 
applauding charlatanism, vowed to the worship of mam- 
mon and of pleasure, and adoring no other God than force. 
What poor samples of mankind they are who make up this 
growing majority! Oh, let us remain faithful to the altar* 



130 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

of the ideal! It is possible that the spiritualists may 
become the stoics of a new epoch of Caesarian rule. 
Materialistic naturalism has the wind in its sails, and a 
general moral deterioration is preparing. No matter, so 
long as the salt does not lose its savor, and so long as the 
friends of the higher life maintain the fire of Vesta. 
The wood itself may choke the flame, but if the flame 
persists, the fire will only be the more splendid in the end. 
The great democratic deluge will not after all be able to 
effect what the invasion of the barbarians was powerless to 
bring about; it will not' drown altogether the results of 
the higher culture; but we must resign ourselves to the 
fact that it tends in the beginning to deform and vulgarize 
everything. It is clear that aesthetic delicacy, elegance, 
distinction, and nobleness that atticism, urbanity, what- 
ever is suave and exquisite, fine and subtle all that 
makes the charm of the higher kinds of literature and of 
aristocratic cultivation vanishes simultaneously with the 
society which corresponds to it. If, as Pascal,* I think, 
says, the more one develops, the more difference one ob- 
serves between man and man, then we cannot say that the 
democratic instinct tends to mental development, since it 
tends to make a man believe that the pretensions nave 
only to be the same to make the merits equal also. 

March 20, 1865. I have just heard of fresh cases of 
insubordination among the students. Our youth become 
less and less docile, and seem to take for their motto, 
" Our master is our enemy." The boy insists upon having 
the privileges of the young man, and the young man 
tries to keep those of the gamin. At bottom all this is 
the natural consequence of our system of leveling democ- 
racy. As soon as difference of quality is, in politics, 
officially equal to zero, the authority of age, of knowledge, 
and of function disappears. 

* The saying of Pascal's alluded to is in the Pensecs, Art.xi.No.10: 
" A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes 
originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de difference 
entre les homines." 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 131 

The only counterpoise of pure equality is military dis- 
cipline. In military uniform, in the police court, in 
prison, or on the execution ground, there is no reply pos- 
sible. But is it not curious that the regime of individual 
right should lead to nothing but respect for brute 
strength? Jacobinism brings with it Caesarism; the rule 
of the tongue leads to the rule of the sword. Democracy 
and liberty are not one but two. A republic supposes a 
high state of morals, but no such state of morals is pos- 
sible without the habit of respect; and there is no respect 
without humility. Now the pretension that every man 
has the necessary qualities of a citizen, simply because 
he was born twenty-one years ago, is as much as to say 
that labor, merit, virtue, character, and experience are to 
count for nothing ; and we destroy humility when we pro- 
claim that a man becomes the equal of all other men, by 
the mere mechanical and vegetative process of natural 
growth. Such a claim annihilates even the respect for 
age; for as the elector of twenty-one is worth as much as 
the elector of fifty, the boy of nineteen has no serious 
reason to believe himself in any way the inferior of his 
elder by one or two years. Thus the fiction on which the 
political order of democracy is based ends in something 
altogether opposed to that which democracy desires: its 
aim was to increase the whole sum of liberty; but the 
result is to diminish it for all. 

The modern state is founded on the philosophy of atom- 
ism. Nationality, public spirit, tradition, national man- 
ners, disappear like so many hollow and worn-out entities ; 
nothing remains to create movement but the action of 
molecular force and of dead weight. In such a theory 
liberty is identified with caprice, and the collective reason 
and age-long tradition of an old society are nothing more 
than soap-bubbles which the smallest urchin may shiver 
with a snap of the fingers. 

Does this mean that I am an opponent of democracy? 
Not at all. Fiction for fiction, it is the least harmful. 
But it is well not to confound its promises with realities. 



1 32 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 

The fiction consists in the postulate of all democratic 
government, that the great majority of the electors in a 
state are enlightened, free, honest, and patriotic whereas 
such a postulate is a mere chimera. The majority in any 
state is necessarily composed of the most ignorant, the 
poorest, and the least capable ; the state is therefore at the 
mercy of accident and passion, and it always ends by suc- 
cumbing at one time or another to the rash conditions 
which have been made for its existence. A man who con- 
demns himself to live upon the tight-rope must inevitably 
fall ; one has no need to be a prophet to foresee such a 
result. 

"Aptdror nkv vS<ap, said Pindar; the best thing in the 
world is wisdom, and, in default of wisdom, science. 
States, churches, society itself, may fall to pieces; science 
alone has nothing to fear until at least society once more 
falls a prey to barbarism. Unfortunately this triumph of 
barbarism is not impossible. The victory of the socialist 
Utopia, or the horrors of a religious war, reserve for us 
perhaps even this lamentable experience. 

April 3, 1865. What doctor possesses such curative 
resources as those latent in a spark of happiness or a single 
ray of hope? The mainspring of life is in the heart. Joy 
is the vital air of the soul, and grief is a kind of asthma 
complicated by atony. Our dependence upon surrounding 
circumstances increases with our own physical weakness, 
and on the other hand, in health there is liberty. Health 
is the first of all liberties, and happiness gives us the 
energy which is the basis of health. To make any one 
happy, theij, is strictly to augment his store of being, to 
double the intensity of his life, to reveal him to himself, 
to ennoble him and transfigure him. Happiness does 
away with ugliness, and even makes the beauty of beauty. 
The man who doubts it, can never have watched the first 
gleams of tenderness dawning in the clear eyes of one who 
loves; sunrise itself is a lesser marvel. In paradise, then, 
everybody will be beautiful. For, as the righteous soul is 
naturally beautiful, as the spiritual body is but the 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 133 

visibility of the soul, its impalpable and angelic form, and 
as happiness beautifies all that it penetrates or even 
touches, ugliness will have no more place in the universe, 
and will disappear with grief, sin, and death. 

To the materialist philosopher the beautiful is a mere 
accident, and therefore rare. To the spiritualist philoso- 
pher the beautiful is the rule, the law, the universal 
foundation of things, to which every form returns as soor 
as the force of accident is withdrawn. Why are we ugly? 
Because we are not in the angelic state, because we are 
evil, morose, and unhappy. 

Heroism, ecstasy, prayer, love, enthusiasm, weave a 
halo round the brow, for they are a setting free of the 
soul, which through them gains force to make its envelope 
transparent and shine through upon all around it. Beauty 
is, then, a phenomenon belonging to the spiritualization 
of matter. It is a momentary transfiguration of the privi- 
leged object or being a token fallen from heaven to earth 
in order to remind us of the ideal world. To study it, is 
to Platonize almost inevitably. As a powerful electric 
current can render metals luminous, and reveal their 
essence by the color of their flame, so intense life and 
supreme joy can make the most simple mortal dazzlingly 
beautiful. Man, therefore, is never more truly man than 
in these divine states. 

The ideal, after all, is truer than the real: for the ideal 
is the eternal element in perishable things: it is their 
type, their sum, their raison d'etre, their formula in the 
book of the Creator, and therefore at once the most exact 
and the most condensed expression of them. 

April 11, 1865. I have been measuring and making a 
trial of the new gray plaid which is to take the place of 
my old mountain shawl. The old servant which has been 
my companion for ten years, and which recalls to me so 
many poetical and delightful memories, pleases me better 
than its brilliant successor, even though this last has been 
a present from a friendly hand. But can anything take 
the place of the nast and have not even the inanimate 



134 AMIK1SS JOURNAL. 

witnesses ef our life voice and language for us? Glion, 
Villars, Albisbrunnen, the Righi, the Chamossaire, and a 
hundred other places, have loft something of themselves 
behind them in the meshes of this woolen stuff which 
makes a part of my most intimate history. The shawl, 
besides, is the only chivalrous article of dress which is still 
left to the modern traveler, the only thing about him 
which may be useful to others than himself, and by means 
of which he may still do his devoir to fair women! How 
many times mine has served them for a cushion, a cloak, 
a shelter, on the damp grass of the Alps, on seats of hard 
rock, or in the sudden cool of the pinewood, during the 
walks, the rests, the readings, and the chats of mountain 
life! How many kindly smiles it has won for me! Even 
its blemishes are dear to me, for each darn and tear has its 
story, each scar is an armorial bearing. This tear was 
made by a hazel tree under Jaman that by the buckle of 
a strap on the Frohnalp that, again, by a bramble at 
Charnex; and each time fairy needles have repaired the 
injury. 

" Mon vieux rnanteau, que je vous remercie 
Car c'est a vous que je dois ces plaisirs! " 

And has it not been to me a friend in suffering, a com- 
panion in good and evil fortune? It reminds me of that 
centaur's tunic which could not be torn off without carry- 
ing away the flesh and blood of its wearer. I am unwilling 
to give it up; whatever giatitude for the past, and what- 
ever piety toward my vanished youth is in me, seem to 
forbid it. The warp of this rag is woven out of Alpine 
joys, and its woof out of human affections. It also says 
to me in its own way : 

"Pauvre bouquet, fleurs aujourd'hui fanees! " 

And the appeal is one of those which move the heart, 
although profane ears neither hear it nor understand it. 
What a stab there is in those words, thou hast been! 
when the sense of them becomes absolutely clear to us. 
One feels one's self sinking gradually into one's grave, and 



AMIEUS JO URN A L. 135 

the past tense sounds the knell of our illusions as to our- 
selves. What is past is past : gray hairs will never become 
black curls again; the forces, the gifts, the attractions of 
youth, have vanished with our young days. 

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

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

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



136 AMIEVS JO URNAL. 

I have not yet felt the air so pure, so life-giving, so ethereal, 
during the five days that I have been here. To breathe is 
a beatitude. One understands the delights of a bird's 
existence that emancipation from all encumbering weight 
that luminous and empyrean life, floating in blue space, 
and passing from one horizon to another with a stroke of 
the wing. One must have a great deal of air below one 
before one can be conscious of such inner freedom as this, 
such lightness of the whole being. Every element has its 
poetry, but the poetry of air is liberty. Enough ; to your 
work, dreamer! 

May 30, 1865. All snakes fascinate their prey, and pure 
wickedness seems to inherit the power of fascination 
granted to the serpent. It stupefies and bewilders the 
simple heart, which sees it without understanding it, 
which touches it without being able to believe in it, and 
which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles 
in Etna, fi/on possum capere te, cape me, says the 
Aristotelian motto. Every diminutive of Beelzebub is an 
abyss, each demoniacal act is a gulf of darkness. Natural 
cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even in animals, cast 
lurid gleams, as it were, into that fathomless pit of Satanic 
perversity which is a moral reality. 

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

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



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 137 

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

June 26, 1865. One may guess the why and wherefore 
of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. 
A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous 
impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts ! 
It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the 
East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a 
single aroma. Sometimes it is the mere overflow of the 
soul, the running over of the cup of reverie. All that one 
cannot or will not say, all that one refuses to confess even 
to one's self confused desires, secret trouble, suppressed 
grief, smothered conflict, voiceless regret, the emotions 
we have struggled against, the pain we have sought to 
hide, our superstitious fears, our vague sufferings, our rest- 
less presentiments, our unrealized dreams, the wound? 



a 38 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 

inflicted upon our ideal, the dissatisfied languor, the va:.s 
hopes, the multitude of small indiscernible ills which 
accumulate slowly in a corner of the heart like water 
dropping noiselessly from the roof of a cavern all these 
mysterious movements of the inner life end in an instant 
of emotion, and the emotion concentrates itself in a tear 
just visible en the edge of the eyelid. 

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

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

Augusts, 1865. (Gryonsur Bex). Splendid moonlight 
without a cloud. The night is solemn and majestic. The 
regiment of giants sleeps while the stars keep sentinel. 
In the vast shadow of the valley glimmer a few scattered 
roofs, while the torrent, organ-like, swells its eternal note 
in the depths of this mountain cathedral which has the 
heavens for roof. 



JOURNAL. 139- 

A last look at this blue night and boundless landscape. 
Jupiter is just setting on the counterscarp of the Dent 
du Midi. From the starry vault descends an invisible 
snow-shower jot dreams, calling us to a pure sleep. 
Nothing of voluptuous or enervating in this nature. All 
is strong, austere and pure. Good night to all the world ! 
to the unfortunate and to the happy. Eest and refresh- 
ment, renewal and hope; a day is dead vive le lendemain! 
Midnight is striking. Another step made toward the 
tomb. 

August 13, 1865. I have just read through again the 
letter of J. J. Rousseau to Archbishop Beaumont with a 
little less admiration than I felt for it was it ten or 
twelve years ago? This emphasis, this precision, which 
never tires of itself, tires the reader in the long run. The 
intensity of the style produces on one the impression of a 
treatise on mathematics. One % feels the need of relaxation 
after it in something easy, natural, and gay. The 
language of Rousseau demands an amount of labor which 
makes one long for recreation and relief. 

But how many writers and how many books descend 
from our Rousseau! On my way I noticed the points; 
of departure of Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Proudhon. 
Proudhon, for instance, modeled the plan of his great 
work, "De la Justice dans 1'Eglise et dans la Revolution," 
upon the letter of Rousseau to Beaumont; his three vol- 
umes are a string of letters to an archbishop ; eloquence, 
daring, and elocution are all fused in a kind of persiflage* 
which is the foundation of the whole. 

How many men we may find in one man, how many 
styles in a great writer! Rousseau, for instance, has 
created a number of different genres. Imagination trans- 
forms him, and he is able to play the most varied parts 
with credit, among them even that of the pure logician. 
But as the imagination is his intellectual axis his master 
faculty he is, as it were, in all his works only hall 
sincere, only half in earnest. We feel that his talent has 
laid him the wager of Carneades; it will lose no cause. 



140 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

however bad, as soon as the point of honor is engaged. It 
is indeed the temptation of all talent to subordinate things 
to itself and not itself to things; to conquer for the sake of 
conquest, and to put self-love in the place.of conscience. 
Talent is glad enough, no doubt, to triumph in a good 
cause; but it easily becomes a free lance, content, what- 
ever the cause, so long as victory follows its banner. I do 
not know even whether success in a weak and bad cause is 
not the most flattering for talent, which then divides the 
honors of its triumph with nothing and no one. 

Paradox is the delight of clever people and the joy of 
talent. It is so pleasant to pit one's self against the world, 
and to overbear mere commonplace good sense and vulgar 
platitudes! Talent and love of truth are then not iden- 
tical; their tendencies and their paths are different. In 
order to make talent obey when its instinct is rather to 
command, a vigilant moral, sense and great energy of char- 
acter are needed. The Greeks those artists of the spoken 
or written word were artificial by the time of Ulyspes, 
sophists by the time of Pericles, cunning, rhetorical, and 
versed in all the arts of the courtier down to the end of 
the lower empire. From the talent of the nation sprang 
its vices. 

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

J. J. Rousseau is an ancestor in all things. It was he 
who founded traveling on foot before Topffer, reverie 
before " Rene," literary botany before George Sand, the wor- 
ship of nature before Bernardin de S. Pierre, the demo- 
cratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political dis- 
cussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and 
Renan, the science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and 
Alpine description before De Saussure. He made music 
the fashion, and created the taste for confessions to th 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. Ul 

public. He formed a new French style the close, chas- 
tened, passionate, interwoven style we know so well. 
Nothing indeed of Eousseau has been lost, and nobody has 
had more influence than he upon the French Revolution, 
for he was the demigod of it, and stands between Neckar 
and Napoleon. Nobody, again, has had more than he 
upon the nineteenth century, for Byron, Chateaubriand, 
Madame de Stae'l, and George Sand all descend from him. 

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

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



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

The unfinished is nothing. 



Great men are the true men, the men in whom nature 



142 A Mim:S JO URN A L. 

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



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

Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a concep- 
tion. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since 
it perceives the two ends of an idea almost at the same 
moment. The thought of a planet can only be worked 
out by nature with labor and effort, but supreme intelli- 
gence sums up the whole in an instant. Time is then the 
successive dispersion of being, just as speech is the suc- 
cessive analysis of an intuition or of an act of will. In 
itself it is relative and negative, and disappears within the 
absolute being. God is outside time because he thinks all 
thought at once; Nature is within time because she is 
only speech the discursive unfolding of each thought 
contained within the infinite thought. But nature exhausts 
herself in this impossible task, for the analysis of the 
infinite is a contradiction. With limitless duration, bound- 
less space, and number without end, Nature does at least 
what she can to translate into visible form the wealth of 
the creative formula. By the vastness of the abysses into 
which she penetrates, in the effort the unsuccessful effort 
to house and contain the eternal thought, we may meas- 
ure the greatness of the divine mind. For as soon as this 
mind goes out of itself and seeks to explain itself, the 
effort at utterance heaps universe upon universe, during 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 143 

myriads of centuries, and still it is not expressed, and the 
great harangue must go on for ever and ever. 

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

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

Here, then, is the service which Christianity the 
oriental element in our culture renders to us Westerns. 
It checks and counterbalances our natural tendency toward 
the passing, the finite, and the changeable, by fixing the 
mind upon the contemplation of eternal things, and by 
Platonizing our affections, which otherwise would have 
too little outlook upon the ideal world. Christianity leads 
us back from dispersion to concentration, from worldliness 
to self-recollection. It restores to our souls, fevered with a 



1 44 AMIRL'S JO URNAL. 



thousand sordid desires, nobleness, gravity, and calm. 
Just as sleep is a bath of refreshing for our actual life, 
so religion is a bath of refreshing for our immortal being. 
What is sacred has a purifying virtue; religious emotion 
crowns the brow with an aureole, and thrills the heart with 
an ineffable joy. 

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

This return, indeed, to what is serious, divine, and 
sacred, is becoming more and more difficult, because of the 
growth of critical anxiety within the church itself, the 
increasing worldliness of religious preaching, and the uni- 
versal agitation and disquiet of society. But such a return 
is more and more necessary. Without it there is no inner 
life, and the inner life is the only means whereby we may 
oppose a profitable resistance to circumstance. If the 
sailor did not carry with him his own temperature he 
could not go from the pole to the equator, and remair 
himself in spite of all. The man who has no refuge in 
himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the 
outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a 
personality at all; he is not distinct, free, original, a cause 
in a word, some one. He is one of a crowd, a taxpayer, 
an elector, an anonymity, but not a man. He helps to 
make up the mass to fill np the number of human con- 
sumers or producers; but he interests nobody but the 



AMIEL'8 JOURNAL. 145 

economist and the statistician, who take the heap of sand 
as a whole into consideration, without troubling them- 
selves about the uninteresting uniformity of the individual 
grains. The crowd counts only as a massive elementary 
force why? because its constituent parts are individually 
insignificant: they are all like each other, and we add 
them up like the molecules of water in a river, gauging 
them by the fathom instead of appreciating them as indi- 
viduals. Such men are reckoned and weighed merely as 
so many bodies: they have never been individualized by 
conscience, after the manner of souls. 

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

January 21, 1866. This evening after supper I did not 
know whither to betake my solitary self. I was hungry 
for conversation, society, exchange of ideas. It occurred 

to me to go and see our friends, the s ; they were at 

supper. Afterward we went into the salon : mother and 
daughter sat down to the piano and sang a duet by 
Boi'eldieu. The ivory keys of the old grand piano, which 
the mother had played on before her marriage, and which 
has followed and translated into music the varying fortunes 
of the family, were a little loose and jingling; but the 
poetry of the past sang in this faithful old servant, which 
had been a friend in trouble, a companion in vigils, and 
the echo of a lifetime of duty, affection, piety and virtue. 
I was more moved than I can say. It was like a scene of 
Dickens, and I felt a rush of sympathy, untouched either 
by egotism or by melancholy. 

Twenty-five years! It seems to me a dream as far as I 
am concerned, and I can scarcely believe my eyes, or this 
inanimate witness to so many lustres passed away. How 



1 46 A KIEL'S JO URN A L. 

strange a thing to have lived, and to feel myself so far 
from a past which yet is so present to me! One does not 
know whether one is sleeping or waking. Time is but the 
:space between our memories; as soon as we cease to per- 
ceive this space, time has disappeared. The whole life of 
an old man may appear to him no longer than an hour, or 
less still; and as soon as time is but a moment to us, we 
have entered upon eternity. Life is but the dream of a 
.shadow ; I felt it anew this evening with strange intensity. 

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

What is it which makes the charm of this existence out- 
wardly so barren and empty? Liberty! What does the 
absence of comfort and of all else that is wanting to these 
rooms matter to me? These things are indifferent to me. 
I find under this roof light, quiet, shelter. I am near to 
a sister and her children, whom I love; my material life is 

assured that ought to be enough for a bachelor 

Am I not, besides, a creature of habit? more attached to 
the ennuis I know, than in love with pleasures unknown 
to me. I am, then, free and not unhappy. Then I am 
well off here, and I should be ungrateful to complain. 
Nor do I. It is only the heart which sighs and seeks for 
something more and better. The heart is an insatiable 
glutton, as we all know and for the rest, who is without 
yearnings? It is our destiny here below. Only some go 
through torments and troubles in order to satisfy them- 
selves, and all without success; others foresee the inevi- 
table result, and by a timely resignation save themselves a 
barren and fruitless effort. Since we cannot be happy, 



A Ml EL' 8 JO URN A L. 147 

why give ourselves so much trouble? It is best to limit 
one's self to what is strictly necessary, to live austerely 
and by rule, to content one's self with a little, and to 
attach no value to anything but peace of conscience and 
a sense of duty done. 

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

It is a long while now since this has been plain to me, 
and since this religious renunciation has been sweet and 
familiar to me. It is the outward distractions of life, the 
examples of the world, and the irresistible influence exerted 
upon us by the current of things which make us forget 
the wisdom we have acquired and the principles we have 
adopted. That is why life is such weariness! This 
eternal beginning over again is tedious, even to repulsion. 
It would be so good to go to sleep when we have gathered 
the fruit of experience* when we are no longer in opposi- 
tion to the supreme will, when we have broken loose from 
self, when we are at peace with all men. Instead of this, 
the old round of temptations, disputes, ennuis, and for- 
gettings, has to be faced again and again, and we fall back 
into prose, into commonness, into vulgarity. How melan- 
choly, how humiliating! The poets are wise in withdraw- 
ing their heroes more quickly from the strife, and in not 
dragging them after victory along the common rut of 
barren days. " Whom the gods love die young," said the 
proverb of antiquity. 

Yes, but it is our secret self-love which is set upon thk 
favor from on high; such may be our, desire, but such is 
not the will of God. We are. to be exercised, humbled, 
tried, and tormented to the end. It is our patience which 
is the touchstone of our virtue. To bear with life even 
when illusion and hope are gone; to accept this position 
of perpetual war, while at the same time loving only peace ; 
to stay patiently in the world, even when it repels us as a 



148 AMIEIS8 JOURNAL. 

place of low company, and seems to us a mere arena of bad 
passions; to remain faithful to one's own faith without 
breaking with the followers of the false gods; to make no 
attempt to escape from the human hospital, long-suffering 
and patient as Job upon his dung hill this is duty. 
When life ceases to be a promise it does not cease to be a 
task ; its true name even is trial. 

April 2, 1866. (Mornex). The snow is melting and a 
damp fog is spread over everything. The asphalt gallery 
which runs along the salon is a sheet of quivering water 
starred incessantly by the hurrying drops falling from the 
sky. It seems as if one could touch the horizon with one's 
hand, and the miles of country which were yesterday 
visible are all hidden under a thick gray curtain. 

This imprisonment transports me to Shetland, to Spitz- 
bergett, to Norway, to the Ossianic countries jof mist, 
where man, thrown back upon himself, feels his heart beat 
more quickly and his thought expand more freely so long, 
at least, as he is not frozen and congealed by cold. Fog 
has certainly a poetry of its own a grace, a dreamy 
charm. It does for the daylight what a lamp does for us 
at night; it turns the mind toward meditation; it throws 
the soul back on itself. The sun, as it were, sheds us 
abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us 
together and concentrates us it is cordial, homely, charged 
with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the 
epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegaic and religious. 
Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith m 
near protectors. When the great world is shut oif from 
us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded 
in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only 
reality then is the family, and, within the family, the 
heart; and the greatest thoughts come from the heart so 
says the moralist. 

"April 6, 1866. The novel by Miss Mulock, "John 
Halifax, Gentleman," is a bolder book than it seems, for 
it attacks in the English way the social problem of equality. 
And the solution reached is that every one may become a 



A MIEUS JO URN A L. 149 

gentleman, even though he may be born in the gutter. In 
its way the story protests against conventional superiorities, 
and shows that true nobility consists in character, in per- 
sonal merit, in moral distinction, in elevation of feeling 
and of language, in dignity of life, and in self-respect. 
This is better than Jacobinism, and the opposite of the 
mere brutal passion for equality. Instead of dragging 
everybody down, the author simply proclaims the right of 
every one to rise. A man may be born rich and noble he 
is not born a gentleman. This word is the Shibboleth of 
England; it divides her into two halves, and civilized 
society into two castes. Among gentlemen courtesy, 
equality, and politeness; toward those below contempt, 
disdain, coldness and indifference. It is the old separation 
between the ingenui and all others; between the ihevQepoi 
and the /Scfvav&ot, the continuation of the feudal division 
between the gentry and the roturiers. 

What, then, is a gentleman? Apparently he is the free 
man, the man who is stronger than things,and believes in 
personality as superior to all the accessory attributes of 
fortune, such as rank and power, and as constituting what 
is essential, real, and intrinsically valuable in the indi- 
vidual. Tell me what you are, and I will tell you what 
you are worth. "God and my Eight; " there is the only 
motto he believes in. Such an ideal is happily opposed to 
that vulgar ideal which is equally English, the ideal of 
wealth, with its formula, " How much is he worth? " In a 
country where poverty is a crime, it is good to be able to 
say that a nabob need not as such be a gentleman. The 
mercantile ideal and the chivalrous ideal counterbalance 
each other; and if the 0119 produces the ugliness of 
English society and its brutal side, the other serves as a 
compensation. 

The gentleman, then, is the man who is master of him- 
self, who respects himself, and makes others respect him. 
The essence of gentlemanliness is self-rule, the sovereignty 
of the soul. It means a character which possesses itself, 
9 force which governs itself, a liberty which affirms and 



1 50 A KIEL'S JO URNAL. 

regulates itself, according to the type of true dignity. 
Such an ideal is closely akin to the Roman type of dig nit as 
cum auctoritate. It is more moral than intellectual, and 
is particularly suited to England, which is pre-eminently 
the country of will. But from self-respect a thousand 
other things are derived such as the care of a man's per- 
son, of his language, of his manners; watchfulness over his 
body and over his soul; dominion over his instincts and 
hin passions; the effort to be self-sufficient; the pride which 
will accept no favor; carefulness not to expose himself to 
any humiliation or mortification, and to maintain himself 
independent of any human caprice; the constant protection 
of his honor and of his self-respect. Such a condition of 
sovereignty, insomuch as it is only easy to the man who is 
well-born, well-bred, and rich, was naturally long identi- 
fied with birth, rank, and above all with property. The 
idea "gentleman" is, then, derived from feudality; it is, 
as it were, a milder version of the seigneur. 

In order to lay himself open to no reproach, a gentleman 
will keep himself irreproachable; in order to be treated 
with consideration, he will always be careful himself to 
observe distances, to apportion respect, and to observe all 
the gradations of conventional politeness, according to 
rank, age, and situation. Hence it follows that he will be 
imperturbably cautious in the presence of a stranger, whose 
name and worth are unknown to him, and to whom he 
might perhaps show too much or too little courtesy. He 
ignores and avoids him; if he is approached, he turns 
away, if he is addressed, he answers shortly and with 
hauteur. His politeness is not human and general, but 
indiridual and relative to persons. This is why every 
Englishman contains two different men one turned toward 
the world, and another. The first, the outer man, is a 
citadel, a cold and angular wall ; the other, the inner man, 
is a sensible, affectionate, cordial, and loving creature. 
Such a type is only formed in a moral climate full of 
icicles, where, in the face of an indifferent world, the 
hearth alone is hospitable 



AM1EUS JOURNAL. 151 

So that an analysis of the national type of gentlemen 
reveals to us the nature and the history of the nation, as 
the fruit reveals the tree. 

April 7, 1866. If philosophy is the art of understanding, 
it is evident that it must begin by saturating itself with 
facts and realities, and that premature abstraction kills it, 
just as the abuse of fasting destroys the body at the age of 
growth. Besides, we only understand that which is 
already within us. To understand is to possess the thing 
understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence. 
Instead, then, of first dismembering and dissecting the 
object to be conceived, we should begin by laying hold of 
it in its ensemble, then in its formation, last of all in its 
parts. The procedure is the same, whether we study a watch 
or a plant, a work of art or a character. We must study, 
respect, and question what we want to know, instead of 
massacring it. We must assimilate ourselves to things and 
surrender ourselves to them ; we must open our minds with 
docility to their influence, and steep ourselves in their 
spirit and their distinctive form, before we offer violence to 
them by dissecting them. 

April 14, 1866. Panic, confusion, sauve qui pent on 
the Bourse at Paris. In our epoch of individualism, and 
of "each man for himself and God for all," the movements 
of the public funds are all that now represent to us the 
beat of the common heart. The solidarity of interests 
which they imply counterbalances the separateness of 
modern affections, and the obligatory sympathy they im- 
pose upon us recalls to one a little the patriotism which 
bore the forced taxes of old days. We feel ourselves 
bound up with and compromised in all the world's affairs, 
and we must interest ourselves wnetner we will or no in 
the terrible machine whose wheels may crush us at 'any 
moment. Credit produces a restless society, trembling 
perpetually for the security of its artificial basis. Some- 
times society may forget for awhile that it is dancing 
upon a volcano, but the least rumor of war recalls the fact 
to it inexorably. Card-houses are easily ruined. 



152 A MIEUS JO URNAL. 

All this anxiety is intolerable to those tiumoie .itne 
investors who, having no wish to be rich, ask only to be 
able to go about their work in peace. But no; tyrant that 
it is, the world cries to us, "Peace, peace there is no 
peace: whether you will or no you shall suffer and tremble 
with me!" To accept humanity, as one does nature, and 
to resign one's self to the will of an individual, as one does 
to destiny, is not easy. We bow to the government of 
God, but we turn against the despot. No man likes to 
share in the shipwreck of a vessel in which he has been 
embarked by violence, and which has been steered con- 
trary to his wish and his opinion. And yet such is perpet- 
ually the case in life. We all of us pay for the faults of 
the few. 

Human solidarity is a fact more evident and more cer- 
tain than personal responsibility, and even than individual 
liberty. Our dependence has it over our independence; 
for we are only independent in will and desire, while we 
are dependent upon our health, upon nature and society ; 
in short, upon everything in us and without us. Our 
liberty is confined to one single point. We may protest 
against all these oppressive and fatal powers; we may say, 
Crush me you will never win my consent ! We may, by 
an exercise of will, throw ourselves into opposition to 
necessity, and refuse it homage and obedience. In that 
consists our moral liberty. But except for that, we belong, 
body and goods, to the world. We are its playthings, as 
the dust is the plaything of the wind, or the dead leaf of 
the floods. God at least respects our dignity, but the 
world rolls us contemptuously along in its merciless waves, 
in order to make it plain that we are its thing and its 
chattel. 

All theories of the nullity of the individual, all pantheis- 
tic and materialist conceptions, are now but so much 
forcing of an open door, so much slaying of the slain. As 
eoon as we cease to glorify this imperceptible point of con- 
science, and to uphold the value of it, the individual be- 
somes naturally a mere atom in the human mass, which i 



AMIEVS JOURNAL'. 153 

but an atom in the planetary mass, which is a mere 
nothing in the universe. The individual is then but a 
nothing of the third power, with a capacity for measuring 
its nothingness ! Thought leads to resignation. Self-doubt 
leads to passivity, and passivity to servitude. From this a 
voluntary submission is the only escape, that is to say, a 
state of dependence religiously accepted, a vindication ol 
ourselves as free beings, bowed before duty only. Duty 
thus becomes our principle of action, our source of energy, 
the guarantee of our partial independence of the world, 
the condition of our dignity, the sign of our nobility. The 
world can neither make me will nor make me will my 
duty; here I am my own and only master, and treat with 
it as sovereign with sovereign. It holds my body in its 
clutches; but my soul escapes and braves it. My thought 
and my love, my faith and my hope, are beyond its reach. 
My true being, the essence of my nature, myself, remain 
inviolate and inaccessible to the world's attacks. In this 
respect we are greater than the universe, which has mass 
and not will; we become once more independent even in 
relation to the human mass, which also can destroy nothing 
more than our happiness, just as the mass of the universe 
can destroy nothing more than our body. Submission, 
then, is not defeat; on the contrary, it is strength. 

April 28, 1866. I have just read the proems-verbal of 
the Conference of Pastors held on the 15th and 16th of 
April at Paris. The question of the supernatural has split 
the church of France in two. The liberals insist upon 
individual right; the orthodox upon the notion of a 
church. And it is true indeed that a church is an affirma- 
tion, that it subsists by the positive element in it, by defi- 
nite belief; the pure critical element dissolves it. Protes- 
tantism is a combination of two factors the authority of 
the Scriptures and free inquiry; as soon as one of these 
factors is threatened or disappears, Protestantisni dis- 
appears; a new form of Christianity succeeds it, as, for 
example, the church of the Brothers of the Holy Ghost, or 
that of Christian Theism. As far as I am concerned, I see 



1 54 AMtKL'S JO URN A L. 

nothing objectionable in such a result, but I think the 
friends of the Protestant church are logical in their 
refusal to abandon the apostle's creed, and the individual- 
ists are illogical in imagining that they can keep Protes- 
tantism and do away with authority. 

It is a question of method which separates the two 
camps. I am fundamentally separated from both. As 1 
understand it, Christianity is above all religions, and 
religion is not a method, it is a life, a higher and super- 
natural life, mystical in its root and practical in its fruits, 
a communion with God, a calm and deep enthusiasm, a 
love which radiates, a force which acts, a happiness which 
overflows. Religion, in short, is a state of the soul. 
These quarrels as to method have their value, but it is a 
secondary value; they will never console a heart or edify 
a conscience. This is why I feel so little interest in theso 
ecclesiastical struggles. Whether the one party or the 
other gain the majority and the victory, what is essen- 
tial is in no way profited, for dogma, criticism, the church, 
are not religion ; and it is religion, the sense of a divine 
life, which matters. " Seek ye first the kingdom of God 
and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added 
unto you." The most holy is the most Christian; this 
will always be the criterion which is least deceptive. " By 
this ye shalj know my disciples, if they have love one to 
another. " 

As is the worth of the individual, so is the worth of his 
religion. Popular instinct and philosophic reason are at 
one on this point. Be good and pious, patient and heroic, 
faithful and devoted, humble and charitable; the cate- 
chism which has taught you these things is beyond the 
reach of blame. By religion we live in God; but all these 
quarrels lead to nothing but life with men or with cassocks. 
There is therefore no equivalence between the two points 
of view. 

Perfection as an end a noble example for sustenance on 
the way the divine proved by its own excellence, is not 
this the whole of Christianity? God manifest in all men, 
is ;x>t this its true goal and consummation? 



AMIEU s JOURNAL: 155 

September 20, 1866. My old friends are, I am afraid, 
disappointed in me ; they think that I do nothing, that I 
have deceived their expectations and their hopes. I, too, 
am disappointed. All that would restore my self-respect 
and give me a right to be proud of myself, seems to me 
unattainable and impossible, and I fall back upon triviali- 
ties, gay talk, distractions. I am always equally lacking 
in hope, in faith, in resolution. The only difference is 
that my weakness takes sometimes the form of despairing 
.nelancholy and sometimes that of a cheerful quietism. 
And yet I read, I talk, I teach, I write, but to no effect; 
it is as though I were walking in my sleep. The Buddhist 
tendency in me blunts the faculty of free self-government 
and weakens the power of action; self-distrust kills all 
desire, and reduces me again and again to a fundamental 
skepticism. I care for nothing but the serious and the 
real, and I can take neither myself nor my circumstances 
seriously. I hold my own personality, my own aptitudes, 
my own aspirations, too cheap. I am forever making 
light of myself in the name of all that is beautiful and ad- 
mirable. In a word, I bear within me a perpetual self- 
detractor, and this is what takes all spring out of my life. 
I have been passing the evening with Charles Heim, who, 
in his sincerity, has never paid me any literary compli- 
ment. As I love and respect him, he is forgiven. Self- 
love has nothing to do with it and yet it would be sweet 
to be praised by so upright a friend ! It is depressing to 
feel one's self silently disapproved of; I will try to satisfy 
him, and to think of a book which may please both him 
and Scherer. 

October 6, 1866. I have just picked up on the stairs a 
little yellowish cat, ugly and pitiable. Now, curled up in 
& chair at my side, he seems perfectly happy, and as if he 
wanted nothing more. Far from being wild, nothing will 
induce him to leave me, and he has followed me from room 
to room all day. I have nothing at all that is eatable in 
the house, but what I have I give him that is to say, a 
look and a caress and that seems to be enough for him, 



1,^6 AMI BUS JOURNAL. 

at least for the moment. Small animals, small children, 
young lives they are all the same as far as the need of 
protection and of gentleness is concerned. . . . People 
have sometimes said to me that weak and feeble creatnres 
are happy with me. Perhaps such a fact has to do with 
some special gift or beneficent force which flows from one 
when one is in the sympathetic state. I have often a direct 
perception of such a force; but I am no ways proud of it, 
nor do I look upon it as anything belonging to me, but 
simply as a natural gift. It seems to me sometimes as 
though I could woo the birds to build in my beard as they 
do in the headgear of some cathedral saint! After all, this 
is the natural state and the true relation of man toward all 
inferior creatures. If man was what he ought to be he 
would be adored by the animals, of whom he is too often 
the capricious and sanguinary tyrant. The legend of Saint 
Francis of Assisi is not so legendary as we think ; and it is 
not so certain that it was the wild beasts who attacked 
man first. . . . But to exaggerate nothing, let us 
leave on one side -the beasts of prey, the carnivora, and 
those that live by rapine and slaughter. How many other 
species are there, by thousands and tens of thousands, who 
ask peace from us and with whom we persist in waging a 
brutal war? Our race is by far the most destructive, the 
most hurtful, and the most formidable, of all the species 
of the planet. It has even invented for its own use the 
right of the strongest a divine right which quiets its 
conscience in the face of the conquered and the oppressed; 
we have outlawed all that lives except ourselves. Revolt- 
ing and manifest abuse; notorious and contemptible breach 
of the law of justice! The bad faith and hypocrisy of it 
are renewed on a small scale by all successful usurpers. 
We are always making God our accomplice, that so we 
may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful mas- 
sacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have 
never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious 
enormity. So that what, in the beginning, was the rela- 
tion of man to the animal becomes that of people to 
people and man to man. 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 15? 

If so, we have before us an expiation too seldom noticed 
but altogether just. All crime must be expiated, and 
slavery is the repetition among men of the sufferings 
brutally imposed by man upon other living beings; it is 
the theory bearing its fruits. The right of man over the 
animal seems to me to cease with the need of defense and 
of subsistence. So that all unnecesasry murder and tor- 
ture are cowardice and even crime. The animal renders a 
service of utility; man in return owes it a meed of protec- 
tion and of kindness. In a word, the animal has claims on 
man, and the man has duties to the animal. Buddhism, no 
doubt, exaggerates this truth, but the Westerns leave it out 
of count altogether. A day will come, however, when our 
standard will be higher, our humanity more exacting, 
than it is to-day. Homo homini lupus, said Hobbes: the 
time will come when man will be humane even for the 
wolf homo lupo homo. 

December 30, 1866. Skepticism pure and simple as the 
only safeguard of intellectual independence such is the 
point of view of almost all our young men of talent. 
Absolute freedom from credulity seems to them the glory 
of man. My impression has always been that this exces- 
sive detachment of the individual from all received preju- 
dices and opinions in reality does the work of tyranny. 
This evening, in listening to the conversation of some of 
our most cultivated men, I thought of the Eenaissance, of 
the Ptolemies, of the reign of Louis XV., of all those 
times in which the exultant anarchy of the intellect has 
had despotic government for its correlative, and, on the 
other hand, of England, of Holland, of the United States, 
countries in which political liberty is bought at the price 
of necessary prejudices and a priori opinions. 

That society may hold together at all, we must have a 
principle of cohesion that is to say, a common belief, 
principles recognized and undisputed, a series of practical 
axioms and institutions which are not at the mercy of 
every caprice of public opinion. By treating everything as 
if it were an open question, we endanger everything. 



158 A MILL'S JO URN A L. 

Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny. " If a people will not 
believe it must obey," said Tocqueville. All liberty im- 
plies dependence, and has its conditions ; this is what nega- 
tive and quarrelsome minds are apt to forget. They think 
they can do away with religion ; they do not know that 
religion is indestructible, and that the question is simply, 
Which will you have? Voltaire plays the game of Loyola, 
and vice versd. Between these two there is no peace, nor 
can there be any for the society which has once thrown 
itself into the dilemma. The only solution lies in a free 
religion, a religion of free choice and free adhesion. 

December 23, 1866. It is raining over the whole sky 
as far at least as I can see from my high point of observa- 
tion. All is gray from the Saleve to the Jura, and from 
the pavement to the clouds; everything that one sees or 
touches is gray; color, life, and gayety are dead each 
living thing seems to lie hidden in its own particular shell. 
What are the birds doing in such weather as this? We 
who have food and shelter, fire on the hearth, books around 
us, portfolios of engravings close at hand, a nestful of 
dreams in the heart, and a whirlwind of thoughts ready to 
rise from the ink-bottle we find nature ugly and triste^ 
and turn away our eyes from it; but you, poor sparrows, 
what can you be doing? Bearing and hoping and wait- 
ing? After all, is not this the task of each one of us? 

I have just been reading over a volume of this Journal, 
and feel a little ashamed of the languid complaining tone 
of so much of it. These pages reproduce me very imper- 
fectly, and there are many things in me of which I find 
no trace in them. I suppose it is because, in the first 
place, sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy ; 
and in the next, because I depend so much upon surround- 
ing circumstances. When there is no call upon me, and 
nothing to put me to the test, I fall back into melancholy ; 
and so the practical man, the cheerful man, the literary 
man, does not appear in these pages. The portrait is lack- 
ing in proportion and breadth ; it is one-sided, and wants 
a center; it has, as it were, been painted from too near. 



A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 159 

The true reason why we know ourselves so little lies in 
the difficulty we find in standing at a proper distance from 
ourselves, in taking up the right point of view, so that 
the details may help rather than hide the general effect. 
We must learn to look at ourselves socially and historically 
if we wish to have an exact idea of our relative worth, and 
to look at our life as a whole, or at least as one complete 
period of life, if we wish to know what we are and what 
we are not. The ant which crawls to and fro over a face, 
the fly perched upon the forehead of a maiden, touch them 
indeed, but do not see them, for they never embrace the 
whole at a glance. 

Is it wonderful that misunderstandings should play so 
great a part in the world, when one sees how difficult it is 
to produce a faithful portrait of a person whom one has 
been studying for more than twenty years? Still, the 
effort has not been altogether lost; its reward has been the 
sharpening of one's perceptions of the outer world. If I 
have any special power of appreciating different shades of 
mind, I owe it no doubt to the analysis I have so per- 
petually and unsuccessfully practiced on myself. In fact, 
I have always regarded myself as matter for study, and 
what has interested me most in myself has been the pleas- 
ure of having under my hand a man, a person, in whom, 
as an authentic specimen of human nature, I could follow, 
without importunity or indiscretion, all the metamor- 
phoses, the secret thoughts, the heart-beats, and the 
temptations of humanity. My attention has been drawn 
to myself impersonally and philosophically. One uses what 
one has, and one must shape one's arrow out of one's own 
wood. 

To arrive at a faithful portrait, succession must be con- 
rerted into simultaneousness, plurality into unity, and all 
the changing phenomena must be traced back to their 
essence. There are ten men in rne, according to time, 
place, surrounding, and occasion; and in their restless 
diversity I am forever escaping myself. Therefore, what- 
ever I may reveal of my past, of my Journal, or of myself, 



160 ^ MIEL'S JO URNAL. 

is of no use to him who is without the poetic intuition, and 
cannot recompose me as a whole, with or in spite of the 
elements which I confide to him. 

I feel myself a chameleon, a kaleidoscope, a Proteus; 
changeable in every way, open to every kind of polariza- 
tion; fluid, virtual, and therefore latent latent even in 
manifestation, and absent even in presentation. I am 
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. I am sensible of the flight, 
the revival, the modification, of all the atoms of my being, 
all the particles of my river, all the radiations of my 
special force. 

This phenomenology of myself serves both as the magic 
lantern of my own destiny, and 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 Mutter,"* where sleeps that which neither 

* ' 'Die Mutter " an allusion to a strange and enigmatical, but very 
effective conception in " Faust " (Part II. Act I. Scene v.) Die Mutter 
are the prototypes, the abstract forms, the generative ideas, of 
things. " Sie sehn dich nicht, denn Schemen sehn sie nur." Goethe 
borrowed the term from a passage of Plutarch's, but he has made 
the idea half Platonic, half legendary. Amiel, however, seems 
rather to have in his mind Faust's speech in Scene vii, than the 
speech of Mephistopheles in Scene v: 

" In eurem Namen, Mutter, die ihr thront 
Im Qranzenlosen, ewig einsam wohnt, 
Und doch gesellig! Euer haupt umschweben 
Des Lebens Bilder. regsam, ohne Leben. 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 161 

lives nor dies, that which has neither movement, nor 
change, nor extension, nor form, and which lasts when all 
else passes away. 

" Dans 1'eternel azur de 1'insondable espace 
S'enveloppe de paix notre globe agitee: 
Homme, enveloppe ainsi tes jours, reve qui passe, 
Du caline firmament de ton eternite." 

(H. F. AMIEL, Penseroto.) 

Geneva, January 11, 1867. 

" Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, 
Labuntur anni. ..." 

I hear the drops of my life falling distinctly one hy one 
into the devouring abyss of eternity. I feel my days flying 
before the pursuit of death. All that remains to me of 
weeks, or months, or years, in which I may drink in the 
light of the sun, seems to me no more than a single night, 
a summer night, which scarcely counts, because it will so 
soon be at an end. 

Death! Silence! Eternity! What mysteries, what names 
of terror to the being who longs for happiness, immortality, 
perfection! Where shall I be to-morrow in a little while 
when the breath of life has forsaken me? Where will 
those be whom I love ? Whither are we all going? The 
eternal problems rise before us in their implacable 
solemnity. Mystery on all sides ! And faith the only star 
in this darkness and uncertainty ! 

No matter ! so long as the world is the work of eternal 
goodness, and so long as conscience has not deceived us. 
To give happiness and to do good, there is our only law, 
our anchor of salvation, our beacon light, our reason for 
existing. All religious may crumble away; so long as this 
survives we have still an ideal, and life is worth living. 

Nothing can lessen the dignity and value of humanity 

Was einrnal war, in allem Glanz und Scbein, 
Es regt sich dort; denn es will ewig sein. 
Und ibr vertbeilt es, allgewaltige Macbte, 
Zurn Zelt des Tages, zum Gewo'lb' der Nfichte." 



162 ^ MIKL'S JO URNAL. 

so long as the religion of love, of unselfishness and devotion 
endures; and none can destroy the altars of this faith for 
us so long as we feel ourselves still capable of love. 

April 15, 1867. (Sevens. M.). Rain storms in the night 
the weather is showing its April caprice. From the 
window one sees a gray and melancholy sky, and roofs glis- 
tering with rain. The spring is at its work. Yes, and 
the implacable flight of time is driving us toward the grave. 
Well each has his turn ! 

" Allez, allez, 6 jeunes filles, 
Cueillir des bleuets dans les blesl " 

I am overpowered with melancholy, languor, lassitude. 
A longing for the last great sleep has taken possession of 
me, combated, however, by a thirst for sacrifice sacrifice 
heroic and long-sustained. Are not both simply ways of 
escape from one's self ? "Sleep, or self-surrender, that I 
may die to self!" such is the cry of the heart. Poor 
heart ! 

April 17, 1867. Awake, thou that sleepest, and rise 
from the dead. 

What needs perpetually refreshing and renewing in me 
is my store of courage. By nature I am so easily disgusted 
with life, I fall a prey so readily to despair and pessimism. 

" The happy man, as this century is able to produce 

him," according to Madame , is a Weltmude, one who 

keeps a brave face before the world, and distracts himself 
as best he can from dwelling upon the thought which is 
hidden at his heart a thought which has in it the sadness 
of death the thought of the irreparable. The outward 
peace of such a man is but despair well masked; his gayety 
is the carelessness of a heart which has lost all its illusions, 
and has learned to acquiesce in an indefinite putting off of 
happiness. His wisdom is really acclimatization to sacri- 
fice, his gentleness should be taken to mean privation 
patiently borne rather than resignation. In a word, he 
submits to an existence in which he frels no joy, and he 
cannot hide from himself that all the alleviations with 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 163 

which it is strewn cannot satisfy the soul. The thirst for 
the infinite is never appeased. God is wanting. 

To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, 
pardoned, and sustained by a supreme power, to feel him- 
self in the right road, at the point where God would have 
him be in order with God and the universe. This faith 
gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is, 
seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous. It may as well not 
be, as be. Nothing in my own circumstances seems to me 
providential. All appears to me left to my own responsi- 
bility, and it is this thought which disgusts me with the 
government of my own life. I longed to give myself up 
wholly to some great love, some noble end; I would wil- 
lingly have lived and died for the ideal that is to say, for 
a holy cause. But once the impossibility of this made 
clear to me, I have never since taken a serious interest in 
anything, and have, as it were, but amused myself with 
a destiny of which I was no longer the dupe. 

Sybarite and dreamer, will you go on like this to the end 
forever tossed backward and forward between duty and 
happiness, incapable of choice, of action? Is not life 
the test of our moral force, and all these inward waver- 
ings, are they not temptations of the soul? 

September 6, 1867, Weissenstein.* (Ten o'clock in the 
morning}. A marvelous view of blinding and bewildering 
beauty. Above a milky sea of cloud, flooded with morning 
light, the rolling waves of which are beating up against 
the base of the wooded steeps of the Weissenstein, the vast 
circle of the Alps soars to a sublime height. The eastern 
side of the horizon is drowned in the splendors of the 
rising mists; but from the Todi westward, the whole 
chain floats pure and clear between the milky plain and the 
pale blue sky. The giant assembly is sitting in council 
above the valleys and the lakes still submerged in vapor. 
The Clariden, the Spannorter, the Titlis, then the Bernese 
colossi from the Wetterhorn to the Diablerets, then the 

* Weissenstein is a high point in the Jura, above Soleure. 



164 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

peaks of Vaud, Valais, and Fribourg, and beyond these 
high chains the two kings of the Alps, Mont Blanc, of a 
pale pink, and the bluish point of Monte Rosa, peering 
out through a cleft in the Doldenhorn such is the com- 
position of the great snowy amphitheatre. The outline 
of the horizon takes all possible forms: needles, ridges, 
battlements, pyramids, obelisks, teeth, fangs, pincers, 
horns, cupolas; the mountain profile sinks, rises again, 
twists and sharpens itself in a thousand ways, but always 
so as to maintain an angular and serrated line. Only the 
inferior and secondary groups of mountians show any large 
curves or sweeping undulations of form. The Alps are 
more than an upheaval; they are a tearing and gashing of 
the earth's surface. Their granite peaks bite into the sky 
instead of caressing it. The Jura, on the contrary, 
spreads its broad back complacently under the blue dome 
of air. 

Eleven o'clock. The sea of vapor has risen and attacked 
the mountains, which for a long time overlooked it like 
so many huge reefs. For awhile it surged in vain over 
the lower slopes of the Alps. Then rolling back upon 
itself, it made a more successful onslaught upon the Jura, 
and now we are enveloped in its moving waves. The 
milky sea has become one vast cloud, which has swallowed 
up the plain and the mountains, observatory and observer. 
Within this cloud one may hear the sheep-bells ringing, 
and see the sunlight darting hither and thither. Strange 
and fanciful sight! 

The Hanoverian pianist has gone; the family from 
Colmar has gone; a young girl and her brother have 
arrived. The girl is very pretty, and particularly dainty 
and elegant in all her ways; she seems to touch things only 
with the tips of her fingers; one compares her to an 
ermine, a gazelle. But at the same time she has no inter- 
ests, does not know how to admire, and thinks of herself 
more than of anything else. This perhaps is a drawback 
inseparable from a beauty and a figure which attract all 
eyes. She is, besides, a tovvnswoman to the core, and 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 165 

feels herself out of place in this great nature, which prob- 
ably seems to her barbarous and ill-bred. At any rate she 
does not let it interfere with her in any way, and parades 
herself on the mountains with her little bonnet and her 
scarcely perceptible sunshade, as though she were on the 
boulevard. She belongs to that class of tourists so amus- 
ingly drawn by Topffer. Character : naive conceit. Coun- 
try: France. Standard of life : fashion. Some cleverness 
but no sense of reality, no understanding of nature, no 
consciousness of the manifold diversities of the world and 
of the right of life to be what it is, and to follow its own 
way and not ours. 

This ridiculous element in her is connected with the 
same national prejudice which holds France to be the cen- 
ter point of the world, and leads Frenchmen to neglect 
geography and languages. The ordinary French towns- 
man is really deliciously stupid in spite of all his natural 
cleverness, for he understands nothing but himself. His 
pole, his axis, his center, his all is Paris or even less 
Parisian manners, the taste of the day, fashion. Thanks 
to this organized fetishism, we have millions of copies of 
one single original pattern ; a whole people moving together 
like bobbins in the same machine, or the legs of a single 
corps d* armee. The result is wonderful but wearisome; 
wonderful in point of material strength, wearisome 
psychologically. A hundred thousand sheep are not more 
instructive than one sheep, but they furnish a hundred 
thousand times more wool, meat, and manure. This is all, 
you may say, that the shepherd that is, the master 
requires. Very well, but one can only maintain breeding- 
farms or monarchies on these principles. For a republic 
you must have men: it cannot get on without indi- 
vidualities. 

Noon. An exquisite effect. A great herd of cattle are 
running across the meadows under my window, which is 
just illuminated by a furtive ray of sunshine. The picture 
has a ghostly suddenness and brilliancy; it pierces the 
mists which close upon it, like the slide of a magic lantern. 



166 AMIEL'8 JO URN A L. 

What a pity I must leave this place now that everything 
is so bright! 



The calm sea says more to the thoughtful soul than the 
same sea in storm and tumult. But we need the under- 
standing of eternal things and the sentiment of the infinite 
to be able to feel this. The divine state par excellence is 
that of silence and repose, because all speech and all action 
are in themselves limited and fugitive. Napoleon with 
his arms crossed over his breast is more expressive than the 
furious Hercules beating the air with his athlete's fists. 
People of passionate temperament never understand this. 
They are only sensitive to the energy of succession; they 
know nothing of the energy of condensation. They can 
only be impressed by acts and effects, by noise and effort. 
They have no instinct of contemplation, no sense of the 
pure cause, the fixed source of all movement, the principle 
of all effects, the center of all light, which does not need 
to spend itself in order to be sure of its own wealth, nor to 
throw itself into violent motion to be certain of its own 
power. The art of passion is sure to please, but it is not 
the highest art; it is true, indeed, that under the rule of 
democracy, the serener and calmer forms of art become 
more and more difficult; the turbulent herd no longer 
knows the gods. 



Minds accustomed to analysis never allow objections 
more than a half -value, because they appreciate the 
variable and relative elements which enter in. 



A well-governed mind learns in time to find pleasure in 
nothing but the true and the just. 

January 10, 1868. (Eleven p. M.). We have had a phil- 
osophical meeting at the house of Edouard Claparede.* 
The question on the order of the day was the nature of 
sensation. Claparede pronounced for the absolute subjec- 
tivity of all experience in other words, for pure idealism 

* Edouard Claparede. a Qenevese naturalist, born 1832. died 1871. 



AMIKL'S JO URNAL. 167 

which is amusing, from a naturalist. According to him 
the ego alone exists, and the universe is but a projection of 
the ego, a phantasmagoria which we ourselves create with- 
out suspecting it, believing all the time that we are 
lookers-on. It is our noiimenon which objectifies itself as 
phenomenon. The ego, according to him, is a radiating 
force which, modified without knowing what it is that 
modifies it, imagines it, by virtue of the principle of 
causality that is to say, produces the great illusion of the 
objective world in order so to explain itself. Our waking 
life, therefore, is but a more connected dream. The self 
is an unknown which gives birth to an infinite number of 
unknowns, by a fatality of its nature. Science is summed 
up in the consciousness that nothing exists but conscious- 
ness. In other words, the intelligent issues from the 
unintelligible in order to return to it, or rather the ego 
explains itself by the hypothesis of the non-ego, while in 
reality it is but a dream, dreaming itself. We might say 
with Scarron: 

" Et je vis 1'ombre d'un esprit 
Qui tracjait 1'ombre d'un systeme 
Avec 1'ombre de 1'ombre meine." 

This abolition of nature by natural science is logical, and 
it was, in fact, Schelling's starting-point. From the 
standpoint of physiology, nature is but a necessary illusion, 
a constitutional hallucination. We only escape from this 
bewitchment by the moral activity of the ego, which feels 
itself a cause and a free cause, and which by its responsi- 
bility breaks the spell and issues from the enchanted circle 
of Maia. 

Maia! Is she indeed the true goddess? Hindoo wisdom 
long ago regarded the world as the dream of Brahma. 
Must we hold with Fichte that it is the individual dream 
of each individual ego? Every fool would then be a cos- 
mogonic poet producing the firework of the universe under 
the dome of the infinite. But why then give ourselves 
such gratuitous trouble to learn? In our dreams, at least, 
nightmare excepted, we endow ourselves with complete 



168 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

ubiquity, liberty and omniscience. Are we then less 
ingenious and inventive awake than asleep? 

January 25, 1868. It is when the outer man begins to 
decay that it becomes vitally important to us to believe in 
immortality, and to. feel with the apostle that the inner 
man is renewed from day to day. But for those who doubt 
it and have no hope of it? For them the remainder of 
life can only be the compulsory dismemberment of their 
small empire, the gradual dismantling of their being by 
inexorable destiny. How hard it is to bear this long- 
drawn death, of which the stages are melancholy and the 
end inevitable ! It is easy to see why it was that stoicism 
maintained the right of suicide. What is my real faith ? 
Has the universal, or at any rate the very general and 
common doubt of science, invaded me in my turn? I have 
defended the cause of the immortality of the soul against 
those who questioned it, and yet when I have reduced them 
to silence, I have scarcely known whether at bottom I was 
not after all on their side. I try to do without hope ; 
but it is possible that I have no longer the strength for it, 
and that, like other men, I must be sustained and consoled 
by a belief, by the belief in pardon and immortality that 
is to say, by religious belief of the Christian type. Reason 
and thought grow tired, like muscles and nerves. They 
must have their sleep, and this sleep is the relapse into the 
tradition of childhood, into the common hope. It takes 
so much effort to maintain one's self in an exceptional 
point of view, that one falls back into prejudice by pure 
exhaustion, just as the man who stands indefinitely always 
ends by sinking to the ground and reassuming the hori- 
zontal position. 

What is to become of us when everything leaves us 
health, joy, affections, the freshness of sensation, memory, 
capacity for work when the sun seems to us to have lost 
its warmth, and life is stripped of all its charm? What is 
to become of us without hope? Must we either harden or 
forget? There is but one answer keep close to duty. 
Never mind the future, if only you have peace of con- 



A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 169 

science, if you feel yourself reconciled, and in harmony 
with the order of things. Be what you ought to be; the 
rest is God's affair. It is for him to know what is best, to 
take care of his own glory, to ensure the happiness of what 
depends on him, whether by another life or by annihila- 
tion. And supposing that there were no good and holy 
God, nothing but universal being, the law of the all, an 
ideal without hypostasis or reality, duty would still be the 
key of the enigma, the pole-star of a wandering humanity. 

" Fais ce que dois, advienne que pourra." 

January 26, 1868. Blessed be childhood, which brings 
down something of heaven into the midst of our rough earth- 
liness. These eighty thousand daily births, of which statis- 
tics tell us, represent as it were an effusion of innocence and 
freshness, struggling not only against the death of tlxe 
race, but against human corruption, and the universal 
gangrene of sin. All the good and wholesome feeling 
which is intertwined with childhood and the cradle is one 
of the secrets of the providential government of the world. 
Suppress this life-giving dew, and human society would be 
scorched and devastated by selfish passion. Supposing that 
humanity had been composed of a thousand millions of 
immortal beings, whose number could neither increase nor 
diminish, where should we be, and what should we be! A 
thousand times more learned, no doubt, but a thousand 
times more evil. There would have been a vast accumula- 
tion of science, but all the virtues engendered by suffering 
and devotion that is to say, by the family and society 
would have no existence. And for this there would be no 
compensation. 

Blessed be childhood for the good that it does, and for 
the good which it brings about carelessly and unconsciously 
by simply making us love it and letting itself be loved. 
What little of paradise we see still on earth is due to its 
presence among us. Without fatherhood, without mother- 
hood, I think that love itself would not be enough to pre- 
vent men from devouring each other men, that is to say, 



170 AMiEtis JOURNAL. 

such fts human passions have made them, The angels 
have no need of birth and death as foundations for theif 
life, because their life is heavenly. 

February 16, 1868. I have been finishing About's 
"Mainfroy (Les Manages de Province)." What subtlety, 
what cleverness, what verve, what aplomb! About is a 
master of epithet, of quick, light-winged satire. For all 
his cavalier freedom of manner, his work is conceived at 
bottom in a spirit of the subtlest irony, and his detach- 
ment of mind is so great that he is able to make sport of 
everything, to mock at others and himself, while all the 
time amusing himself extremely with his own ideas and 
inventions. This is indeed the characteristic mark, the 
common signature, so to speak, of esprit like his. 

Irrepressible mischief, indefatigable elasticity, a power 
of luminous mockery, delight in the perpetual discharge 
of innumerable arrows from an inexhaustible quiver, the 
unquenchable laughter of some little earth-born demon, 
perpetual gayety, and a radiant force of epigram there 
are all these in the true humorist. Stulti sunt innumer- 
abiles, said Erasmus, the patron of all these dainty 
mockers. Folly, conceit, foppery, silliness, affectation,, 
hypocrisy, attitudinizing and pedantry of all shades, and 
in all forms, everything that poses, prances, bridles, struts, 
bedizens, and plumes itself, everything that takes itself 
seriously and tries to impose itself on mankind all this is 
the natural prey of the satirist, so many targets ready for 
his arrows, so many victims offered to his attack. And 
we all know how rich the world is in prey of this kind ! 
An alderman's feast of folly is served up to him in per- 
petuity; the spectacle of society offers him an endless noce 
de Gamache.* With what glee he raids through his 
domains, and what signs of destruction and massacre mark 
the path of the sportsman ! His hand is infallible like his 
glance. The spirit of sarcasm lives and thrives in the 

* Nocede Qamache "repastressomptueux." Littre. The allusion, 
of course, is to Don Quixote, Part II. chap. xx. " Donde se cuentan-. 
las bodas de Baraacho el ricb. con el suceso de Basilio el pobre." 



AMIEISS JOURNAL. 171 

midst of universal wreck; its balls are enchanted and 
itself invulnerable, and it braves retaliations and reprisals 
because itself is a mere flash, a bodiless and magical 
nothing. 

Clever men will recognize and tolerate nothing but 
cleverness; every authority rouses their ridicule, every 
superstition amuses them, every convention moves them to 
contradiction. Only force finds favor in their eyes, and 
they have no toleration for anything that is not purely 
natural and spontaneous. And yet ten clever men are not 
worth one man of talent, nor ten men of talent worth one 
man of genius. And in the individual, feeling is more 
than cleverness, reason is worth as much as feeling, and 
conscience has it over reason. If, then, the clever man is 
not mockable, he may at least be neither loved, nor con- 
sidered, nor esteemed. He may make himself feared, it is 
true, and force others to respect his independence; but 
this negative advantage, which is the result of a negative 
superiority, brings no happiness with it. Cleverness is 
serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing. 

March 8, 1868. Madame kept me to have tea with 

three young friends of hers three sisters, I think. The 
two youngest are extremely pretty, the dark one as pretty 
as the blonde. Their fresh faces, radiant with the 
bloom of youth, were a perpetual delight to the eye. 
This electric force of beauty has a beneficent effect 
upon the man of letters; it acts as a real restora- 
tive. Sensitive, impressionable, absorbent as I am, the 
neighborhood of health, of beauty, of intelligence. and of 
goodness, exercises a powerful influence upon my whole 
being; and in the same way I am troubled and affected 
just as easily by the presence near me of troubled lives or 

diseased souls. Madame said of me that I must be 

"superlatively feminine" in all my perceptions. This 
ready sympathy rnd sensitiveness is the reason of it. If I 
had but desired it ever so little, I should have had the 
magical clairvoyance of the somnambulist, and could have 
reproduced in myself a number of strange phenomena. I 



172 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

know it, but I have always been on my guard against it, 
whether from indifference or from prudence. When I 
think of the intuitions of every kind which have come to 
me since my youth, it seems to me that I have lived a 
multitude of lives. Every characteristic individuality 
shapes itself ideally in me, or rather molds me for the mo- 
ment into its own image; and I have only to turn my 
attention upon myself at such a time to be able to under- 
stand a new mode of being, a new phase of human nature. 
In this way I have been, turn by turn, mathematician, 
musician, savant, monk, child, or mother. In these states 
of universal sympathy I have even seemed to myself some- 
times to enter into the condition of the animal or the 
plant, and even of an individual animal, of a given plant. 
This faculty of ascending and descending metamorphosis, 
this power of simplifying or of adding to one's individual- 
ity, has sometimes astounded my friends, even the most 
subtle of them. It has to do no doubt with the extreme 
facility which I have for impersonal and objective thought, 
and this again accounts for the difficulty which I feel in 
realizing my own individuality, in being simply one man 
having his proper number and ticket. To withdraw 
within my own individual limits has always seemed to me 
a strange, arbitrary, and conventional process. I seem to 
myself to be a mere conjuror's apparatus, an instrument of 
vision and perception, a person without personality, a sub- 
ject without any determined individuality- -an instance, 
to speak technically, of pure " determinability " and 
"formability," and therefore I can only resign myself with 
difficulty to play the purely arbitrary part of a private citi- 
zen, inscribed upon the roll of a particular town or a par- 
ticular country. In action I feel myself out of place; my 
true milieu is contemplation. Pure virtuality and perfect 
equilibrium in these I am most at home. There I feel 
myself free, disinterested, and sovereign. Is it a call or a 
temptation? 

It represents perhaps the oscillation between the two 
geniuses, the Greek and the Roman, the eastern and the 



A Ml EL' '8 JO URNAL. 

western, the ancient and the Christian, or the struggle 
between the two ideals, that of liberty and that of holiness. 
Liberty raises us to the gods; holiness prostrates us on the 
ground. Action limits us; whereas in the state of con- 
templation we are endlessly expansive. Will localizes us; 
thought universalizes us. My soul wavers between half a 
dozen antagonistic general conceptions, because it is 
responsive to all the great instincts of human nature, and 
its aspiration is to the absolute, which is only to be reached 
through a succession of contraries. It has taken me a 
great deal of time to understand myself, and I frequently 
find myself beginning over again the study of the oft-solved 
problem, so difficult is it for us to maintain any fixed point 
within us. I love everything, and detest one thing only 
the hopeless imprisonment of my being within a single 
arbitrary form, even were it chosen by myself. Liberty 
for the inner man is then the strongest of my passions 
perhaps my only passion. Is such a passion lawful? It 
has been my habit to think so, but intermittently, by fits, 
and starts. I am not perfectly sure of it. 

March 17, 1868. Women wish to be loved without a 
why or a wherefore; not because they are pretty, or good, 
or well bred, or graceful, or intelligent, but because they 
are themselves. All analysis seems to them to imply a loss 
of consideration, a subordination of their personality to 
something which dominates and measures it. They will 
have none of it; and their instinct is just. As soon as we- 
can give a reason for a feeling we are no longer under the 
spell of it; we appreciate, we weigh, we are free, at least 
in principle. Love must always remain a fascination, a 
witchery, if the empire of woman is to endure. Once the 
mystery gone, the power goes with it. Love must always 
seem to us indivisible, insoluble, superior to all analysis, if 
it is to preserve that appearance of infinity, of something 
supernatural and miraculous, which makes its chief beauty. 
The majority of beings despise what they understand, and 
bow only before the inexplicable. The feminine triumph 
par excellence is to convict of obscurity that virile intelli- 



174 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 

gence which makes so much pretense to enlightenment 
And when a woman inspires love, it is then especially that 
.she enjoys this proud triumph. I admit that her exulta- 
tion has its grounds. Still, it seems to me that love true 
and profound love should be a source of light and calm, 
a religion and a revelation, in which there is no place left 
for the lower victories of vanity. Great souls care only 
for what is great, and to the spirit which hovers in the 
jsight of the Infinite, any sort of artifice seems a disgraceful 
puerility. 

March 19, 1868. What we call little things are merely 
the causes of great things; they are the beginning, the 
embryo, and it is the point of departure which, generally 
speaking, decides the whole future of an existence. One 
single black speck may be the beginning of a gangrene, 
of a storm, of a revolution. From one insignificant mis- 
understanding hatred and separation may finally issue. 
An enormous avalanche begins by the displacement of one 
atom, and the conflagration of a town by the fall of a 
match. Almost everything comes from almost nothing, 
one might think. It is only the first crystallization which 
is the affair of mind ; the ultimate aggregation is the affair 
of mass, of attraction, of acquired momentum, of mechani- 
cal acceleration. History, like nature, illustrates for us 
the application of the law of inertia and agglomeration 
which is put lightly in the proverb, "Nothing succeeds like 
success." Find the right point at starting; strike straight, 
begin well; everything depends on it. Or more simply 
still, provide yourself with good luck for accident plays 
a vast part in human affairs. Those who have succeeded 
most in this world (Napoleon or Bismarck) confess it; 
calculation is not without its uses, but chance makes mock 
of calculation, and the result of a planned combination is 
in no wise proportional to its merit. From the super- 
natural point of view people say: "This chance, as you 
call it, is, in reality, the action of providence. Man may 
give himself what trouble he will God leads him all the 
same." Only, unfortunately, this supposed intervention 



AMIEL'8 JO URNAL. 1 75. 

as often as not ends in the defeat of zeal, virtue, and 
devotion, and the success of crime, stupidity, and selfish- 
ness. Poor, sorely-tried Faith ! She has but one way out 
of the difficulty the word Mystery ! It is in the origins 
of things that the great secret of destiny lies hidden, 
although the breathless sequence of after events has oftenj 
many surprises for us too. So that at first sight history 
seems to us accident and confusion; looked at for the 
second time, it seems to us logical and necessary; looked 
at for the third time, it appears to us a mixture of neces- 
sity and liberty; on the fourth examination we scarcely 
know what to think of it, for if force is the source of right, 
and chance the origin of force, we come back to our first 
explanation, only with a heavier heart than when we 
began. 

Is Democritus right after all? Is chance the foundation 
of everything, all laws being but the imaginations of our 
reason, which, itself born of accident, has a certain power 
of self-deception and of inventing laws which it believes to 
be real and objective, just as a man who dreams of a meal 
thinks that he is eating, while in reality there is neither 
table, nor food, nor guest nor nourishment? Every thing- 
goes on as if there were order and reason and logic- in the 
world, while in reality everything is fortuitous, accidental, 
and apparent. The universe is but the kaleidoscope 
which turns within the mind of the so-called thinking 
being, who is himself a curiosity without a cause, an acci- 
dent conscious of the great accident around him, and who 
amuses himself with it so long as the phenomenon of his 
vision lasts. Science is a lucid madness occupied in tabu- 
lating its own necessary hallucinations. The philosopher 
laughs, for he alone escapes being duped, while he sees 
other men the victims of persistent illusion. He is like 
some mischievous spectator of a ball who has cleverly 
taken all the strings from the violins, and yet sees musi- 
cians and -dancers moving and pirouetting before him as 
though the music were still going on. Such an experience 
would delight him as proving that the universal St. Vitus' 



176 -4 MIEISS JO URN A L. 

dance is also nothing but an aberration of the inner con- 
sciousness, and that the philosopher is in the right of it as 
against the general credulity. Is it not even enough sim- 
ply to shut one's ears in a ballroom, to believe one's self in 
a madhouse? 

The multitude of religions on the earth must have very 
much the same effect upon the man who has killed the 
^eligious idea in himself. But it is a dangerous attempt, 
this repudiation of the common law of the race this 
claim to be in the right, as against all the world. 

It is not often that the philosophic scoffers forget them- 
selves for others. Why should they? Self-devotion is a 
serious thing, and seriousness would be inconsistent with 
their role of mockery. To be unselfish we must love; to 
love we must believe in the reality of what we love; we 
must know how to suffer, how to forget ourselves, how to 
jield ourselves up in a word, how to be serious. A spirit 
of incessant mockery means absolute isolation; it is the 
sign of a thoroughgoing egotism. If we wish to do good 
to men we must pity and not despise them. We must 
learn to say of them, not "What fools! " but "What unfor- 
tunates ! " The pessimist or the nihilist seems to me less 
cold and icy than the mocking atheist. He reminds me of 
the somber words of " Ahasverus :" 

" Vous qui manque/- de charite, 
Tremblez a mon supplice etrange: 
Ce n'est point sa divinite, 
C'est 1'humanite que Dieu venge! "* 

It is oetter to be lost than to be saved all alone; and it is a 
wrong to one's kind to wish to be wise without making 
others share our wisdom. It is, besides, an illusion to sup- 
pose that such a privilege is possible, when everything 

* The quotation is from Quinet's "Ahasverus " (first published 1833), 
that strange Welt-gedicht, which the author himself described as 
" 1'histoire du monde, de Dieu dans le monde, et enfin du doute dans 
le monde," and which, with Faust, probably suggested the unfinished 
but in many ways brilliant performance of the young Spaniard, 
Espronceda El Diablo Mundo. 



A KIEL'S JO URN A L. 177 

proves the solidarity of individuals, and when no one can 
think at all except by means of the general store of 
thought, accumulated and refined by centuries of cultiva- 
tion and experience. Absolute individualism is an absurd- 
ity. A man may be isolated in his own particular and 
temporary milieu, but every one of our thoughts or feel- 
ings finds, has found, and will find, its echo in humanity. 
Such an echo is immense and far-resounding in the case ol 
those representative men who have been adopted by great 
fractions of humanity as guides, revealers, and reformers; 
but it exists for everybody. Every sincere utterance of 
the soul, every testimony faithfully borne to a personal 
conviction, is of use to some one and some thing, even 
when you know it not, and when your mouth is stopped 
by violence, or the noose tightens round your neck. A 
word spoken to some one preserves an indestructible influ- 
ence, just as any movement whatever may be metamor- 
phosed, but not undone. Here, then, is a reason for not 
mocking, for not being silent, for affirming, for acting. 
We must have faith in truth ; we must seek the true and 
spread it abroad; we must love men and serve them. 

April 9, 1868. I have been spending three hours over 
Lotze's big volume ("Geschichte der Aesthetikin Deutsch- 
land"). It begins attractively, but the attraction wanes, 
and by the end I was very tired of it. Why? Because 
the noise of a mill-wheel sends one to sleep, and these 
pages without paragraphs, these interminable chapters, 
and this incessant, dialectical clatter, affect me as though 
I were listening to a word-mill. I end by yawning like 
any simple non -philosophical mortal in the face of all this 
heaviness and pedantry. Erudition, and even thought, 
are not everything. An occasional touch of esprit, a little 
sharpness of phrase, a little vivacity, imagination, and 
grace, would spoil neither. Do these pedantic books leave 
a single image or formula, a single new or striking fact 
behind them in the memory, when one puts them down? 
No ; nothing but confusion and fatigue. Oh for clearness, 
terseness, brevity! Diderot. Voltaire, and even Galiani! 



378 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

A short article by Sainte-Beuve, Scherer, Kenan, Victor 
Oherbuliez, gives one more pleasure, and makes one think 
niul reflect more, than a thousand of these heavy German 
pages, stuffed to the brim, and showing rather the work 
itself than its results. The Germans gather fuel for the 
pile: it is the French who kindle it. For heaven's sake,' 
spare me your lucubrations; give me facts or ideas. Keep 
your vats, your must, your dregs, in the background. 
What I ask is wine wine which will sparkle in the glass, 
and stimulate intelligence instead of weighing it down. 

April 11, 1868. (Mornex sur Saleve). I left town in a 
great storm of wind, which was raising clouds of dust 
along the suburban roads, and two hours later I found 
myself safely installed among the mountains, just like last 
year. I think of staying a week here. . . . The 
sounds of the village are wafted to my open window, 
barkings of distant dogs, voices of women at the fountain, 
the songs of birds in the lower orchards. The green car- 
pet of the plain is dappled by passing shadows thrown 
upon it by the clouds ; the landscape has the charm of deli- 
cate tint and a sort of languid grace. Already I am full 
of a sense of well-being, I am tasting the joys of that con- 
templative state in which the soul, issuing from itself, 
becomes as it were the soul of a country or a landscape, 
and feels living within it a multitude of lives. Here is 
no more resistance, negation, blame ; everything is affirma- 
tive; I feel myself in harmony with nature and with sur- 
roundings, of which I seem to myself the expression. The 
heart opens to the immensity of things. This is what I 
love ! Nam mihires, non me rebus submitters conor. 

April 12, 1868. (Easter Day], Mornex Eight A. M. 
The day has opened solemnly and religiously. There is a 
tinkling of bells from the valley : even the fields seem to be 
breathing forth a canticle of praise. Humanity must 
have a worship, and, all things considered, is not the 
Christian worship the best among those which have ex- 
isted on a large scale? The religion of sin, of repentance, 
and reconciliation the religion of the new birth and 



AMIEVS JOURNAL. 179 

of eternal life is not a religion to be ashamed of. In 
spite of all the aberrations of fanaticism, all the supersti- 
tions of formalism, all the ugly superstructures of 
hypocrisy, all the fantastic puerilities of theology, the gos- 
pel has modified the world and consoled mankind. Chris- 
tian humanity is not much better than pagan humanity, 
but it would be much worse without a religion, and with= 
out this religion. Every religion proposes an ideal and a 
model; the Christian ideal is sublime, and its model of a 
divine beauty. 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 cate- 
chisms, and yet love the Holy and the Just, who came to 
save and not to curse. Jesus will always supply us with 
the best criticism of Christianity, and when Christianity 
has passed away the religion of Jesus will in all probability 
survive. After Jesus as God we shall come back to faith 
in the God of Jesus. 

Five o'clock p. M. I have been for a long walk through 
Cezargues, Eseri, and the Yves woods, returning by the 
Pont du Loup. The weather was cold and gray. A 
great popular merrymaking of some sort, with its multi- 
tude of blouses, and its drums and fifes, has been going on 
riotously for an hour under my window. The crowd has 
sung a number of songs, drinking songs, ballads, 
romances, but all. more or less heavy and ugly. The muse 
has never touched our country people, and the Swiss race 
is not graceful even in its gayety. A bear in high spirits 
this is what one thinks of. The poetry it produces, too, is 
desperately vulgar and commonplace. Why? In the first 
place, because, in spite of the pretenses of our democratic 
philosophies, the classes whose backs are bent with manual 
labor are aesthetically inferior to the others. In the next 
place, because our old rustic peasant poetry is dead, and 
the peasant, when he tries to share the music or the poetry 
of the cultivated classes, only succeeds in caricaturing it, 
and not in copying it. Democracy, by laying it down that 
there is but one class for all men, has in fact done a wrong 



180 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 

to everything that is not first-rate. As we can no longer 
without offense judge meii according to a certain recog- 
nized order, we can only compare them to the best that 
exists, and then they naturally seem to us more mediocre, 
more ugly, more deformed than before. If the passion for 
equality potentially raises the average, it really degrades 
nineteen-twentieths of individuals below their former 
place. There is a progress in the domain of law and a 
falling back in the domain of art. And meanwhile the 
artists see multiplying before them their bete-noire, the 
bourgeois, the Philistine, the presumptuous ignoramus, the 
quack who plays at science, and the feather-brain who 
thinks himself the equai of the intelligent. 

"Commonness will prevail," as De Candolle said in 
speaking of the graminaceous plants. The era of equality 
means the triumph of mediocrity. It is disappointing, 
but inevitable; for it is one of time's revenges. Humanity, 
after having organized itself on the basis of the dissimi- 
larity of individuals, is now organizing itself on the basis 
of their similarity, and the one exclusive principle is about 
as true as the other. Art no doubt will lose, but justice 
will gain. Is not universal leveling-down the law of 
nature, and when all has been leveled will not all have 
been destroyed? So that the world is striving with all its 
force for the destruction of what it has itself brought 
forth. Life is the blind pursuit of its own negation; as 
has been said of the wicked, nature also works for her 
own disappointment, she labors at what she hates, she 
weaves her own shroud, and piles up the stones of her own 
tomb. God may well forgive us, for '" we know not what 
to do." 

Just as the sum of force is always identical in the mate- 
rial universe, and presents a spectacle not of diminution 
nor of augmentation but simply of constant metamor- 
phosis, so it is not impossible that the sum of good is in 
reality always the same, and that therefore all progress on 
one side is compensated inversely on another side. If this 
were so we ought never to say that period or a people is 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 181 

absolutely and as a whole superior to another time or another 
people, but only that there is superiority in certain points. 
The great difference between man and man would, on. 
these principles, consist in the art of transforming vitality 
into spirituality, and latent power into useful energy. 
4 The same difference would hold good between nation and 
nation, so that the object of the simultaneous or succes- 
sive competition of mankind in history would be the ex- 
traction of the maximum of humanity from a given 
amount of animality. Education, morals, and politics 
would be only variations of the same art, the art of living 
that is to say, of disengaging the pure form and subtlest 
essence of our individual being. 

April 26, 1868. (Sunday, Mid-day}. A gloomy morn- 
ing. On all sides a depressing outlook, and within, dis- 
gust with self. 

Ten P. M. Visits and a walk. I have spent the evening 
alone. Many things to-day have taught me lessons of wis- 
dom. I have seen the hawthorns covering themselves with 
blossom, and the whole valley springing up afresh under 
the breath of the spring. I have been the spectator of 
faults of conduct on the part of old men who will not 
grow old, and whose heart is in rebellion against the 
natural law. I have watched the working of marriage in 
its frivolous and commonplace forms, and listened to 
trivial preaching. I have been a witness of griefs without 
hope, of loneliness that claimed one's pity. I have lis- 
tened to pleasantries on the subject of madness, and to the 
merry songs of the birds. And everything has had the 
same message for me : " Place yourself once more in har- 
, mony with the universal law; accept the will of God; 
make a religious use of life ; work while it is yet day ; be 
at once serious and cheerful; know how to repeat with 
the apostle, ' I have learned in whatsoever state I am 
therewith to be content.' " 

August 26, 1868. After all the storms of feeling within 
and the organic disturbances without, which during these 
latter months ha~v a pinned me so closely to my own indi- 



182 A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 

vidnal existence, shall I ever be able to reascend into the 
region of pure intelligence, to enter again upon the disin- 
terested and impersonal life, to recover my old indifference 
toward subjective miseries, and regain a purely scientific 
and contemplative state of mind? Shall I ever succeed 
la forgetting all the needs which bind me to earth an(} 
to humanity? Shall I ever become pure spirit? Alas 
I cannot persuade myself to believe it possible for au 
inatant. I see infirmity and weakness close upon me, I 
feel I cannot do without affection, and I know that I have 
no ambition, and that my faculties are declining. I 
remember that I am forty-seven years old, and that all my 
brood of youthful hopes has flown away. So that there 
is no deceiving myself as to the fate which awaits me: 
increasing loneliness, mortification of spirit, long-con- 
tinued regret, melancholy neither to be consoled nor con- 
fessed, a mournful old age, a slow decay, a death in the 
desert ! 

Terrible dilemma ! Whatever is still possible to me has 
lost its savor, while all that I could still desire escapes me, 
and will always escape me. Every impulse ends in weari- 
ness and disappointment. Discouragement, depression, 
weakness, apathy ; there is the dismal series which must 
be forever begun and re-begun, while we are still rolling 
up the Sisyphean rock of life. Is it not simpler and 
shorter to plunge head-foremost into the gulf? 

No, rebel as we may, there is but one solution to sub- 
mit to the general order, to accept, to resign ourselves, 
and to do still what we can. It is our self-will, our aspira- 
tions, our dreams, that must be sacrificed. We must give 
np the hope of happiness once for all ! Immolation of the 
self ueath to self this is the only suicide which is either 
useful or permitted. In my present mood of indifference 
and disinterestedness, there is some secret ill-humor, some 
wounded pride, a little rancor; there is selfishness in 
short, since a premature claim for rest is implied in it. 
Absolute disinterestedness is only reached in that perfect 
humility which tramples the self under foot for the glcry 
of God. 






AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 183 

I have no more strength left, I wish for nothing; but 
that is not what is wanted. I must wish what God wishes; 
I must pass from indifference to sacrifice, and from sacri- 
fice to self-devotion. The cup which i would fain put 
away from me is the misery of living, the shame of exist- 
ing and suffering as a common creature who has missed his 
vocation; it is the bitter and increasing humiliation of 
declining power, of growing old under the weight of one's 
>own disapproval, and the disappointment of one's friends! 
"Wilt thou be healed?" was the text of last Sunday's 
sermon. " Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy- 
laden, and I will give you rest. " " And if our heart con- 
demn us, God is greater than our heart." 

August 27, 1868. To-day I took up the " Penseroso"* 
again. I have often violated its maxims and forgotten its 
lessons. Still, this volume is a true son of my soul, and 
breathes the true spirit of the inner life. Whenever I 
wish to revive my consciousness of my own tradition, it is 
pleasant to me to read over this little gnomic collection 
which has had such scant justice done to it, and which, 
were it another's, I should often quote. I. like to feel 
that in it I have attained to that relative truth which may 
be defined as consistency with self, the harmony of appear- 
ance with reality, of thought with expression in other 
words, sincerity, ingenuousness, inwardness. It is personal 
experience in the strictest sense of the word. 

September 21, 1868. ( Villars). A lovely autumn effect. 
Everything was veiled in gloom this morning, and a gray 
mist of rain floated between us and the whole circle of 
mountains. Now the strip of blue sky which made its 
appearance at first behind the distant peaks has grown 

* " II Penseroso," poesies-maximes par H. F. Amiel: Geneve, 1858. 
This little book, which contains one hundred and thirty-three maxims, 
several of which are quoted in the Jorunal Intime, is prefaced fey a 
motto translated from Shelley "Ce n'est pas la science qui nous 
manque, a nous modernes; nous 1'avons surabondamment. . . . 
Mais ce que nous avons absorbe nous absorbe. . . . C qui nrais 
manque c'est la poesie de la vie." 



1 84 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 

larger, has mounted to the zenith, and the dome of 
heaven, swept almost clear of cloud, sends streaming down 
upon us the pale rays of a convalescent sun. The day 
now promises kimdly, and all is well that ends well. 

Thus after a season of tears a sober and softened joy may 
.return to us. Say to yourself that you are entering upon 
the autumn of your life; that the graces of spring and 
the splendors of summer are irrevocably gone, but that 
autumn too has its beauties. The autumn weather is 
often darkened by rain, cloud, and mist, but the air is 
still soft, and the sun still delights the eyes, and touches 
the yellowing leaves caressingly ; it is the time for fruit, 
for harvest, for the vintage, the moment for making pro- 
vision for the winter. Here the herds of milch-cows have 
already come down to the level of the clidlet, and next 
week they will be lower than we are. This living barom- 
eter is a warning to us that the time has come to say fare- 
well to the mountains. There is nothing to gain, and 
everything to lose, by despising the example of nature, and 
making arbitrary rules of life for one's self. Our liberty, 
wisely understood, is but a voluntary 'obedience to the 
universal laws of life. My life has reached its month of 
September. May I recognize it in time, and suit thought 
and action to the fact! 

November 13, 1868. I am reading part of two books 
by Charles Socretan* "Recherches sur la Methode," 1857; 
" Precis elementaire de Philosophic, " 1868. The philosophy 
of Secretan is the philosophy of Christianity, considered as 
the one true religion. Subordination of nature to intelli- 
gence, of intelligence to will, and of will to dogmatic faith 
such is its general framework. Unfortunately there are 
no signs of critical, or comparative, or historical study in 
it, and as an apologetic in which satire is curiously mingled 
"with glorification of the religion of love it leaves upon one 

* diaries Secretan, a Lausanne professor, the friend of Vinet 
born 1819. He published " Lemons sur la Philosophic de Leibnitz," 
" Philosophic de la Liberte," " La liaison et le Christ ianisme," etc. 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 185 

an impression of parti pris. A philosophy of religion,- 
apart from the comparative science of religions, and apart 
also from a disinterested and general philosophy of history, 
must always be more or less arbitrary and factitious. It is 
only pseudo-scientific, this reduction of human life to three 
spheres industry, law, and religion. The author seems 
to me to possess a vigorous and profound mind, rather 
than a free mind. Not only is he dogmatic, but he dogma- 
tizes in favor of a given religion, to which his whole 
allegiance is pledged. Besides, Christianity being an X 
which each church defines in its own way, the author takes 
the same liberty, and defines the X in his way ; so that he 
is at once too free and not free enough; too free in respect 
to historical Christianity, not free enough in respect to 
Christianity as a particular church. He does not satisfy 
the believing Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed Churchman, 
or Catholic; and he does not satisfy the freethinker. 
This Schellingian type of speculation, which cbnsists in 
logically deducing a particular religion that is to say, in 
making philosophy the servant of Christian theology is a 
legacy from the Middle Ages. 

After belief comes judgment; but a believer is not a 
judge. A fish lives in the ocean, but it cannot see all 
around it; it cannot take a view of the whole; therefore it 
cannot judge what the ocean is. In order to understand 
Christianity we must put it in its historical place, in its 
proper framework; we must regard it as a part of the 
religious development of humanity, and so judge it, not 
from a Christian point of view, but from a human point 
of view, sine ira nee studio. 

December 16, 1868. I am in the most painful state of 
anxiety as to my poor kind friend, Charles Heim. . . . 
Since the 30th of November I have had no letter from the 
dear invalid, who then said his last farewell to me. How 
long these two weeks have seemed to me and how keenly 
I have realized that strong craving which many feel for the 
last words, the last looks, of those they love! Such words 
laid looks are a kind of testament. They have a solemn 



186 AMIfSL'S JO URN A L. 

and sacred character which is not merely an effect of our 
imagination. For that which is on the brink of death 
already participates to some extent in eternity. A dying 
man seems to speak to us from beyond the tomb ; what he 
says has the effect upon us of a sentence, an oracle, an 
injunction; we look upon him as one endowed with 
second sight. Serious and solemn words come naturally 
to the man who feels life escaping him, and the grave 
opening before him. The depths of his nature are then 
revealed ; the divine within him need no longer hide itself. 
Oh, do not let us wait to be just or pitiful or demonstra- 
tive toward those we love until they or we are struck down 
by illness or threatened with death ! Life is short and we 
have never too much time for gladdening the hearts of 
those who are traveling the dark journey with us. Oh, 
be swift to love, make haste to be kind ! 

December 26, 1868. My dear friend died this morning 
at Hyeres. A beautiful soul has returned to heaven. So 
he has ceased to suffer! Is he happy now? 



If men are always more or less deceived on the subject 
of women, it is because they forget that they and women 
do not speak altogether the same language, and that 
words have not the same weight or the same meaning for 
them, especially in questions of feeling. Whether from 
shyness or precaution or artifice, a woman never speaks 
out ^her whole thought, and moreover what she herself 
knows of it is but a part of what it really is. Complete 
frankness seems to be impossible to her, and complete 
self-knowledge seems to be forbidden her. If she is a 
sphinx to us, it is because she is a riddle of doubtful 
meaning even to herself. She has no need of perfidy, for 
she is mystery itself. A woman is something fugitive, 
irrational, indeterminable, illogical, and contradictory. 
A great deal of forbearance ought to be shown her, and a 
good deal of prudence exercised with regard to her, for 
she may bring about innumerable evils without knowing 
it. Capable of all kinds of devotion, and of all kinds of 



AM1KIS8 JOURNAL. 187 

treason, "monstre incomprehensible," raised to the second 
power, she is at once the delight and the terror of man. 



The more a man loves, the more he suffers. The sum 
of possible grief for each soul is in proportion to its degree 
of perfection. 



He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the 
power of being magnanimous. 



Doubt of the reality of love ends by making us doubt 
everything. The final result of all deceptions and dis- 
appointments is atheism, which may not always yield up 
its name and secret, but which lurks, a masked specter, 
within the depths of thought, as the last supreme ex- 
plainer. "Man is what his love is," and follows the for- 
tunes of his love. 



The beautiful souls of the world have an ai t of saintly 
alchemy, by which bitterness is converted into kindness, 
the gall of human experience into gentleness, ingratitude 
into benefits, insults into pardon. And the transforma- 
tion ought to become so easy and habitual that the 
lookers-on may think it spontaneous, and nobody give us 
credit for it. 

January 27, 1869. What, then, is the service rendered 
to the world by Christianity? The proclamation of "good 
news." And what is this "good news? " The pardon of 
sin. The God of holiness loving the world and reconciling 
it to himself by Jesus, in order to establish the kingdom 
of God, the city of souls, the life of heaven upon earth 
here you have the whole of it; but in this is a revolution. 
" Love ye one another, as I have loved you ; " " Be ye one 
with me, as I am one with the Father : " for this is lif a 
eternal, here is perfection, salvation, joy. Faith in the 
fatherly love of God, who punishes and pardons for our 
good, and who desires not the death of the sinner, but 
his conversion and his life here is the motive power of the 
redeemed. 



188 AMI EL' 8 JOURNAL. 

What we call Christianity is a vast ocean, into which flow 
a number of spiritual currents of distant and various 
origin ; certain religions, that is to say, of Asia and of 
Europe, the great ideas of Greek wisdom, and especially 
those of Platonism. Neither its doctrine nor its morality, 
as they have been historically developed, are new or spon- 
taneous. What is essential and original in it is the prac- 
tical demonstration that the human and the divine nature 
may co-exist, may become fused into one sublime flame; 
that holiness and pity, justice and mercy, may meet 
together and become one, in man and in God. What is 
specific in Christianity is Jesus the religious conscious- 
ness of Jesus. The sacred sense of his absolute union with 
God through perfect love and self-surrender, this pro- 
found, invincible, and tranquil faith of his, has become a 
religion ; the faith of Jesus has become the faith of mil- 
lions and millions of men. From this torch has sprung a 
vast conflagration. And such has been the brilliancy and 
the radiance both of revealer and revelation, that the 
astonished world has forgotten its justice in its admiration, 
and has referred to one single benefactor the whole of 
those benefits which are its heritage from the past. 

The conversion of ecclesiastical and confessional Chris- 
tianity into historical Christianity is the work of biblical 
science. The conversion of historical Christianity into 
philosophical Christianity is an attempt which is to some 
extent an illusion, since faith cannot be entirely resolved 
into science. The transference, however, of Christianity 
from the region of history to the region of psychology is 
the great craving of our time. What we are trying to 
arrive at is the eternal gospel. But before we can reach 
it, the comparative history and philosophy of religions 
must assign to Christianity its true place, and must judge 
it. The religion, too, which Jesus professed must be dis- 
entangled from the religion which has taken Jesus for its 
object. And when at last we are able to point out the 
state of consciousness which is the primitive cell, the prin- 
ciple of the eternal gospel, we shall have reached our goal, 
for in it is the punctum saliens of pure religion. 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 189 

Perhaps the extraordinary will take the place of the 
supernatural, and the great geniuses of the world will come 
to be regarded as the messengers of God in history, as the 
providential revealers through whom the spirit of God 
works upon the human mass. What is perishing is not 
the admirable and the adorable; it is simply the arbitrary, 
the accidental, the miraculous. Just as the poor illumina- 
tions of a village fete, or the tapers of a procession, are put 
out by the great marvel of the sun, so the small local 
miracles, with their meanness and doubtfulness, will sink 
into insignificance beside the law of the world of spirits, 
the incomparable spectacle of human history, led by that 
all-powerful Dramaturgus whom we call God. Utinam! 

March 1, 1869. Impartiality and objectivity are as rare 
as justice, of which they are but two special forms. Self- 
interest is an inexhaustible source of convenient illusions. 
The number of beings who wish to see truly is extra- 
ordinarily small. What governs men is the fear of truth, 
unless truth is useful to them, which is as much as to say 
that self-interest is the principle of the common philosophy 
or that truth is made for us but not we for truth. As 
this fact is humiliating, the majority of people will neither 
recognize nor admit it. And thus a prejudice of self-love 
protects all the prejudices of the understanding, which 
are themselves the result of a stratagem of the ego. 
Humanity has always slain or persecuted those who have 
disturbed this selfish repose of hers. She only improves 
in spite of herself. The only progress which she desires 
is an increase of enjoyments. All advances in justice, in 
morality, in holiness, have been imposed upon or forced 
from her by some noble violence. Sacrifice, which is the 
passion of great souls, has never been the law of societies. 
It is too often by employing one vice against another for 
example, vanity against cupidity, greed against idleness 
that the great agitators have broken through routine. In 
a word, the human world is almost entirely directed by the 
law of nature, and the law of the spirit, which is the leaven 
of its coarse paste, has but rarely succeeded in raising it 
into generous expansion* 



190 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

From the point of view of the ideal, humanity is trlstt> 
and ugly. But if we compare it with its probable origins, 
we see that the human race has not altogether wasted its 
time. Hence there are three possible views of history, 
the view of the pessimist, who starts from the ideal; the 
view of the optimist, who compares the past with the 
present; and the view of the hero-worshiper, who sees 
that all progress whatever has cost oceans of blood and 
' tears. 

European hypocrisy veils its face before the voluntary 
suicide of those Indian fanatics who throw themselves 
under the wheels of their goddess' triumphal car. And 
yet these sacrifices are but the symbol of what goes on in 
Europe as elsewhere, of that offering of their life which is 
made by the martyrs of all great causes. We may even say 
that the fierce and sanguinary goddess is humanity itself, 
which is only spurred to progress by remorse, and repents 
only when the measure of its crimes runs over. The 
fanatics who sacrifice themselves are an eternal protest 
against the universal selfishness. We have only overthrown 
those idols which are tangible and visible, but perpetual 
sacrifice still exists everywhere, and everywhere the elite 
of each generation suffers for the salvation of the multi- 
tude. It is the austere, bitter, and mysterious law of 
solidarity. Perdition and redemption in and through each 
other is the destiny of men. 

March 18, 1869 (Thursday}. Whenever I come back 
from a walk outside the town I am disgusted and repelled 
by this cell of mine. Out of doors, sunshine, birds, spring, 
beauty, and life; in here, ugliness, piles of paper, melan- 
choly, and death. And yet my walk was one of the saddest 
possible. I wandered along the Rhone and the Arve, and 
all the memories of the past, all the disappointments of 
the present and all the anxieties of the future laid siege 
to my heart like a whirlwind of phantoms. I took 
account of my faults, and they ranged themselves in battle 
against me. The vulture of regret gnawed at my heart, 
and the sense of the irreparable choked me like the iron 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 191 

collar of the pillory. It seemed to me that I had failed in 
the task of life, and that now life was failing me. Ah ! 
how terrible spring is to the lonely ! All the needs which 
had been lulled to sleep start into life again, all the 
sorrows which had disappeared are reborn, and the old man 
which had been gagged and conquered rises once more and 
makes his groans heard. It is as though all the old 
wounds opened and bewailed themselves afresh. Just 
when one had ceased to think, when one had succeeded in 
deadening feeling by work or by amusement, all of a 
sudden the heart, solitary captive that it is, sends a cry 
from its prison depths, a cry which shakes to its founda- 
tions the whole surrounding edifice. 

Even supposing that one had freed one's self from all 
other fatalities, there is still one yoke left from which it is 
impossible to escape that of Time. I have succeeded in 
avoiding all other servitudes, but I had reckoned without 
the last the servitude of age. Age comes, and its weight 
is equal to that of all other oppressions taken together. 
Man, under his mortal aspect, is but a species of ephemera. 

As I looked at the banks of the Ehone, which have seen 
the river flowing past them some ten or twenty thousand 
years, or at the trees forming the avenue of the cemetery, 
which, foi* two centuries, have been the witnesses of so 
many funeral processions ; as I recognized the walls, the 
dykes, the paths, which saw me playing as a child, and 
watched other children running over that grassy plain of 
Plain Palais which bore my own childish steps I had the 
sharpest sense of the emptiness of life and the flight of 
things. I felt the shadow of the upas tree darkening over 
me. I gazed into the great implacable abyss in which are 
swallowed up all those phantoms which call themselves 
living beings. I saw that the living are but apparitions 
hovering for a moment over the earth, made out of the 
ashes of the dead, and swiftly re-absorbed by eternal night, 
as the will-o'-the-wisp sinks into the marsh. The nothing- 
ness of our joys, the emptiness of our existence, and the 
futility of our ambitions, filled me with a quiet disgust. 



1 92 AMI EL' 8 JO URNAL. 

From regret to disenchantment I floated on to Buddhism, 
to universal weariness. Ah, the hope of a blessed immor 
tality would be better worth having ! 

With what different eyes one looks at life at ten, at 
twenty, at thirty, at sixty! Those who live alone are 
specially conscious of this psychological metamorphosis. 
Another thing, too, astonishes them; it is the universal 
conspiracy which exists for hiding the sadnoss of the 
world, for making men forget suffering, sickness, and 
death, for smothering the wails and sobs which issue from 
every house, for painting and beautifying the hideous face 
of reality. Is it out of tenderness for childhood and 
youth, or is it simply from fear, that we are thus careful 
to veil the sinister truth? Or is it from a sense of 
equity ? and does life contain as much good as evil per- 
haps more? However it may be, men feed themselves 
rather upon illusion than upon truth. Each one unwinds 
his own special reel of hope, and as soon as he has come to 
the end of it he sits him down to die, and lets his sons and 
his grandsons begin the same experience over again. We 
all pursue happiness, and happiness escapes the pursuit 
of all. 

The only viaticum which can help us in the journey ot 
life is that furnished by a great duty and some serious 
affections. And even affections die, or at least their 
objects are mortal; a friend, a wife, a child, a country, a 
church, may precede us in the tomb; duty alone lasts as 
, long as we. 

This maxim exorcises the spirits of revolt, of anger, dis- 
conragement, vengeance, indignation, and ambition, which 
rise one after another to tempt and trouble the heart, 
swelling with the sap of the spring. all ye saints of the 
East, of antiquity, of Christianity, phalanx of heroes! Ye 
too drank deep of weariness and agony of soul, but ye 
triumphed over both. Ye who have come forth victors 
from the strife, shelter us under your palms, fortify us by 
your example ! 
. April 6, 1869. Magnificent weather. The Alps are 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL 193 

dazzling under their silver haze. Sensations 01 afl kinds 
have been crowding upon me ; the delights of a walk under 
the rising sun, the charms of a wonderful view, longing- 
for travel, and thirst for joy, hunger for work, for emo- 
tion, for life, dreams of happiness and of love. A passion- 
ate wish to live, to feel, to express, stirred the depths of 
my heart. It was a sudden re-awakening of youth, a flash 
of poetry, a renewing of the soul, a fresh growth of the 
wings of desire. I was overpowered by a host of conquer- 
ing, vagabond, adventurous aspirations. I forgot my age, 
my obligations, my duties, my vexations, and youth leaped 
within me as though life were beginning again. It was as 
though something explosive had caught fire, and one's 
soul were scattered to the four winds; in such a mood one 
would fain devour the whole world, experience everything, 
see everything. Faust's ambition enters into one, universal 
desire a horror of one's own prison cell. One throws off 
one's hair shirt, and one would fain gather the whole of 
nature into one's arms and heart. ye passions, a ray of 
sunshine is enough to rekindle you all ! The cold black 
mountain is a volcano once more, and melts its snowy 
crown with one single gust of flaming breath. It is the 
spring which brings about these sudden and improbable 
resurrections, the spring which, sending a thrill and 
tumult of life through all that lives, is the parent of impet- 
uous desires, of overpowering inclinations, of unforeseen 
and inextinguishable outbursts of passion. It breaks 
through the rigid bark of the trees, and rends the mask 
on the face of asceticism ; it makes the monk tremble in 
the shadow of his convent, the maiden behind the curtains 
of her room, the child sitting on his school bench, the old 
man bowed under his rheumatism. 

" O Hymen, Hymemee! " 

April 24, 1869. Is Nemesis indeed more real than 
Providence, the jealous God more true than the good 
God? grief more certain than joy? darkness more secure 
of victory than light? Is it pessimism or optimism which 



104 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

is nearest the truth, and which Leibnitz or Schopenhauei 
has best understood the universe? Is it the healthy 
man or the sick man who sees best to the bottom of 
things? which is in the right? 

Ah ! the problem of grief and evil is and will be always 
the greatest enigma of being, only second to the exist- 
ence of being itself. The common faith of humanity has 
assumed the victory of good over evil. But if good consists 
not in the result of victory, but in victory itself, then good 
implies an incessant and infinite contest, interminable 
struggle, and a success forever threatened. And if this 
is life, is not Buddha right in regarding life as synonymous 
with evil since it means perpetual restlessness and endless 
war? Repose according to the Buddhist is only to be found in 
annihilation. The art of self-annihilation, of escaping the 
world's vast machinery of suffering, and the misery of 
renewed existence the art of reaching Nirvana, is to him 
the supreme art, the only means of deliverance. The 
Christian says to God: Deliver us from evil. The 
Buddhist adds: And to that end deliver us from finite 
existence, give us back to nothingness! The first believes 
that when he is enfranchised from the body he will enter 
upon eternal happiness; the second believes that individual- 
ity is the obstacle to all repose, and he longs for the dissolu- 
tion of the soul itself. The dread of the first is the paradise 
of the second. 

One thing only is necessary the committal of the soul 
to God. Look that thou thyself art in order, and leave to 
God the task of unraveling the skein of the world and of 
destiny. Whafe do annihilation or immortality matter? 
What is to be, will be. And what will be, will be for the 
best. Faith in good perhaps the individual wants 
nothing more for his passage through life. Only he must 
have taken sides with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and 
Zeno, against materialism, against the religion of accident 
and pessimism. Perhaps also he must make up his mind 
against the Buddhist nihilism, because a man's system of 
conduct is diametrically opposite according as he labors to 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 195 

increase his life or to lessen it, according as he aims at 
cultivating his faculties or at systematically deadening 
them. 

To employ one's individual efforts for the increase of 
good in the world this modest ideal is enough for us. To 
help forward the victory of good has been the common aim 
of saints and sages. Socii Dei sumus was the word of 
Seneca, who had it from Cleanthus. 

April 30, 1869. I have just finished Vacherot's* book 
"La Eeligion," 1869, and it has set me thinking. I 
have a feeling that his notion of religion is not rigorous 
and exact, and that therefore his logic is subject to correc- 
tion. If religion is a psychological stage, anterior to that 
of reason, it is clear that it will disappear in man, but if, 
on the contrary, it is a mode of the inner life, it may and 
must last, as long as the need of feeling, and alongside 
the need of thinking. The question is between theism and 
non-theism. If God is only the category of the ideal, 
religion will vanish, of course, like the illusions of youth. 
But if Universal Being can be felt and loved at the same 
time as conceived, the philosopher may be a religious man 
just as he may be an artist, an orator, or a citizen. He 
may attach himself to a worship or ritual without deroga- 
tion. I myself incline to this solution. To me religion is 
hfe before God and in God. 

And even if God were defined as the universal life, so 

* Etienne Vaclierot, a French philosophical writer, who owed his 
first successes in life to the friendship of Cousin, and was later 
brought very much into notice by his controversy with the Abbe 
Gratry, by the prosecution brought against him in consequence of 
his book, " La Democratic " (1859), and by his rejection at the hands of 
the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1865, for the same 
kind of reasons which had brought about the exclusion of Littre in 
the preceding year. In 1868, however, he became a member of the 
Institute in succession to Cousin. A Liberal of the old school, he 
has separated himself from the republicans since the war, and has 
made himself felt asasevere critic of republican blunders in the Revue 
des deux Mondes. La Religion, which discusses the psychological 
origins of the religious sense, was published in 1868. 



196 AMIEUS JOURNAL. 

long as this life is positive and not negative, the soul 
penetrated with the sense of the infinite is in the religious 
state. Religion differs from philosophy as the simple and 
spontaneous self differs from the reflecting self, as synthetic 
intuition differs from intellectual analysis. We are 
initiated into the religious state by a sense of voluntary 
dependence on, and joyful submission to the principle of 
order and of goodness. Religious emotion makes man 
conscious of himself; he finds his own place within the 
infinite unity, and it is this perception which is sacred. 

But in spite of these reservations I am much impressed 
by the book, which is a fine piece of work, ripe and 
serious in all respects. 

May 13, 1869. A break in the clouds, and through the 
blue interstices a bright sun throws flickering and uncer- 
tain rays. Storms, smiles, whims, anger, tears it is May, 
and nature is in its feminine phase! She pleases our fancy, 
stirs our heart, and wears out our reason by the endless 
succession of her caprices and the unexpected violence of 
her whims. 

This recalls to me the 213th verse of the second book of 
the Laws of Manou. " It is in the nature of the feminine 
sex to seek here below to corrupt men, and therefore wise 
men never abandon themselves to the seductions of 
women." The same code, however, says: "Wherever 
women are honored the gods are satisfied." And again: 
" In every family where the husband takes pleasure in his 
wife, and the wife in her husband, happiness is ensured." 
And again: " One mother is more venerable than a thous- 
and fathers." But knowing what stormy and irrational 
elements there are in this fragile and delightful creature, 
Manou concludes: "At no age ought a woman to be 
allowed to govern herself as she pleases." 

Up to the present day, in several contemporary and 
neighboring codes, a woman is a minor all her life. Why? 
Because of her dependence upon nature, and of her sub- 
jection to passions which are the diminutives of madness; 
in other words, because the soul of a woman has some- 



AMIKL'S JO URNAL. 197 

thing obscure and mysterious in it, which lends itself to 
all superstitions and weakens the energies of man. To 
man belong law, justice, science, and philosophy, all that 
is disinterested, universal, and rational. Women, on the 
contrary, introduce into everything favor, exception, and 
personal prejudice. As soon as a man, a people, a litera- 
ture, an epoch, become feminine in type, they sink in the 
scale of things. As soon as a woman quits the state of 
subordination in which her merits have free play, we see a 
rapid increase in her natural defects. Complete equality 
with man makes her quarrelsome; a position of supremacy 
makes her tyrannical. To honor her and to govern her 
will be for a long time yet the best solution. When educa- 
tion has formed strong, noble, and serious women in whom 
conscience and reason hold sway over the effervescence of 
fancy and sentimentality, then we shall be able not only 
to honor woman, but to make a serious end of gaining her 
consent and adhesion. Then she will be truly an equal, 
a work-fellow, a companion. At present she is so only in 
theory. The moderns are at work upon the problem, and 
have not solved it yet. 

June 15, 1869. The great defect of liberal Christianity* 
is that its conception of holiness is a frivolous one, or, what 
comes to the same thing, its conception of sin is a super- 
ficial one. The defects of the baser sort of political 
liberalism recur in liberal Christianity; it is only half 
serious, and its theology is too much mixed with worldli- 
ness. The sincerely pious folk look upon the liberals as 
persons whose talk is rather profane, and who offend 
religious feelings by making sacred subjects a theme for 
rhetorical display. They shock the convenances of senti- 
ment, and affront the delicacy of conscience by the indis- 
creet familiarities they take with the great mysteries of 
the inner life. They seem to be mere clever special 

* At this period the controversy between the orthodox party and 
" Liberal Christianity " was at ; .ts height, both in Geneva and 
throughout Switzerland 



]98 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 

pleaders, religious rhetoricians like the Greek sophists, 
rather than guides in the narrow road which leads to 
salvation. 

It is not to the clever folk, nor even to the scientific 
folk, that the empire over souls belongs, but to those who 
impress us as having conquered nature by grace, passed 
through the burning bush, and as speaking, not the lan- 
guage of human wisdom, but that of the divine will. In 
religious matters it is holiness which gives authority; it is 
love, or the power of devotion and sacrifice, which goes to 
the heart, which moves and persuades. 

What all religious, poetical, pure, and tender souls are 
least able to pardon is the diminution or degradation of 
their ideal. We must never rouse an ideal against us; our 
business is to point men to another ideal, purer, higher, 
more spiritual than the old, and so to raise behind a lofty 
summit one more lofty still. In this way no one is 
despoiled; we gain men's confidence, while at the same 
time forcing them to think, and enabling those minds 
which are already tending toward change to perceive new 
objects and goals for thought. Only that which is replaced 
is destroyed, and an ideal is only replaced by satisfying the 
conditions of the old with some advantages over. 

Let the liberal Protestants offer us a spectacle of Chris- 
tian virtue of a holier, intenser, and more intimate kind 
than before; let us see it active in their persons and in 
their influence, and they will have furnished the proof 
demanded by the Master ; the tree will be judged by its 
fruits. 



June 22, 1869 (Nine A.. M). Gray and lowering 
weather. A fly lies dead of cold on the page of my book, 
in full summer! What is life? I said to myself, as I 
looked at the tiny dead creature. It is a loan, as move- 
ment is. The universal life is a sum total, of which th* 
units are visible here, there, and everywhere, just as an 
electric wheel throws off sparks along its whole surface. 
Life passes through us; we do not possess it. Him 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 199 

admits three ultimate principles:* the atom, the force, 
the soul; the force which acts upon atoms, the soul which 
acts upon force. Probably he distinguishes between anony 
mous souls and personal souls. Then my fly would be an 
anonymous soul. 

(Same day}. The national churches are all up in arms 
against so-called Liberal Christianity; Basle and Zurich 
began the fight, and now Geneva has entered the lists too. 
Gradually it is becoming plain that historical Protestantism 
has no longer a raison d'etre between pure liberty and 
pure authority. It is, in fact, a provisional stage, founded 
on the worship of the Bible that is to say, on the idea of 
a written revelation, end of a book divinely inspired, and 
therefore authoritative. When once this thesis has been 
relegated to the rank of a fiction Protestantism crumbles 
away. There is nothing for it but to retire upon natural 
religion, or the religion of the moral consciousness. M. M. 
Reville, Coquerel, Fontan6s, Buisson,f accept this logical 
outcome. They are the advance-guard of Protestantism 
And the laggards of free thought. 

Their mistake is in not seeing that all institutions rest 
upon a legal fiction, and that every living thing involves 

* Gustave-Adolphe Him, a French physicist, born near Colraar, 
1815, became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences in 
1867. The book of his to which Amiel refers is no doubt Conse- 
quences philosophiques et metaphysiques de la thermodyuamique, 
Analyse elementaire de Vunivers (1869). 

f The name of M. Albert Reville, the French Protestant theologian, 
is more or less familiar in England, especially since his delivery of 
the Hibbert lectures in 1884. Athanase Coquerel, born 1820, died 
1876, the well-known champion of liberal ideas in the French 
Protestant Church, was suspended from his pastoral functions by 
the Consistory of Paris, on account of his review of M. Kenan's 
" Vie de Jesus " in 1864. Ferdinand-Edouard Buisson, a liberal Protes- 
tant, originally a professor at Lausanne, was raised to the important 
functions of Director of Primary Instruction by M. Ferry in 1879. 
He was denounced by Bishop Dupanloup, in the National Assembly 
of 1871, as the author of certain liberal pamphlets on the dangers 
connected with Scripture-teaching in schools, and, for the time, lost 
his employment under the Ministry of Education. 



200 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

a logical absurdity. It may be logical to demand a church 
based on free examination and absolute sincerity; but to 
realize it is a different matter. A church lives by what is 
positive, and this positive element necessarily limits inves- 
tigation. People confound the right of the individual, 
which is to be free, with the duty of the institution, which 
is to be something. They take the principle of science to 
be the same as the principle of the church, which is a 
m atake. They will not see that religion is different from 
philosophy, and that the one seeks union by faith, while the 
other upholds the solitary independence of thought. That 
the bread should be good it must have leaven ; but the 
leaven is not the bread. Liberty is the means whereby 
we arrive at an enlightened faith granted; but an assem- 
bly of people agreeing only upon this criterion and this 
method could not possibly found a church, for they might 
differ completely as to the results of the method. Sup- 
pose a newspaper the writers of which were of all possible 
parties it would no doubt be a curiosity in journalism, 
but it would have no opinions, no faith, no creed. A 
drawing-room filled with refined people, carrying on polite 
discussion, is not a church, and a dispute, however cour- 
teous, is not worship. It is a mere confusion of kinds. 

July 13, 1869. Lamennais, Heine the one the victim 
of a mistaken vocation, the other of a tormenting craving 
to astonish and mystify his kind. The first was wanting 
in common sense; the second was wanting in seriousness. 
The Frenchman was violent, arbitrary, domineering; the 
German was a jesting Mephistopheles, with a horror of 
Philistinism. The Breton was all passion and melancholy; 
the Hamburger all fancy and satire. Neither developed 
freely nor normally. Both of them, because of an initial 
mistake, threw themselves into an endless quarrel with 
the world. Both were revolutionists. They were not 
fighting for the good cause, for impersonal truth; both 
were rather the champions of their own pride. Both 
suffered greatly, and died isolated, repudiated, and reviled. 
Men of magnificent talents, both of them, but men of 



A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 201 

small wisdom, who did more harm than good to themselves 
and to others! It is a lamentable existence which wears 
itself out in maintaining a first antagonism, or a first 
blunder. The greater a man's intellectual power, the 
more dangerous is it for him to make a false start and to 
begin life badly. 

July 20, 1869. I have been reading over again five or 
six chapters, here and there, of Kenan's "St. Paul." An- 
alyzed to the bottom, the writer is a freethinker, but a free 
thinker whose flexible imagination still allows him the deli- 
cate epicurism of religious emotion. In his eyes the man 
who will not lend himself to these graceful fancies is vul- 
gar, and the man who takes them seriously is prejudiced. 
He is entertained by the variations of conscience, but he is 
too clever to laugh at them. The true critic neither con- 
cludes nor excludes; his pleasure is to understand without 
believing, and to profit by the results of enthusiasm, while 
still maintaining a free mind, unembarrassed by illusion. 
Such a mode of proceeding has a look of dishonesty; it is 
nothing, however, but the good-tempered irony of a 
highly-cultivated mind, which will neither be ignorant of 
anything nor duped by anything. It is the dilettantism 
of the Kenaissance in its perfection. At the same time 
what innumerable proofs of insight and of exultant 
scientific power ! 

August 14, 1869.- In the name of heaven, who art thou? 
what wilt thou wavering inconstant creature? What 
future lies before thee? What duty or what hope appeals 
to thee? 

My longing, my search is for love, for peace, for some- 
thing to fill my heart ; an idea to defend ; a work to which 
I might devote the rest of my strength; an affection which 
might quench this inner thirst; a cause for which I might 
die with joy. But shall I ever find them? I long for all 
that is impossible and inaccessible: for true religion, 
serious sympathy, the ideal life ; for paradise, immortality, 
holiness, faith, inspiration, and I know not what besides ! 
What I really want is to die and to be born again, trans- 



202 AMI ED 8 JOURNAL. 

formed myself, and in a different world. And I can 
neither stifle these aspirations nor deceive myself as to the 
possibility of satisfying them. I seem condemned to roll 
forever the rock of Sisyphus, and to feel that slow wear- 
ing away of the mind which befalls the man whose voca- 
tion and destiny are in perpetual conflict. " A Christian 
heart and a pagan head," like Jacobi; tenderness and 
pride ; width of mind and feebleness of will ; the two men 
of St. Paul; a seething chaos of contrasts, antinomies, 
and contradictions; humility and pride; childish simplicity 
and boundless mistrust; analysis and intuition; patience 
and irritability; kindness and dryness of heart ; carelessness 
and anxiety; enthusiasm and languor; indifference and 
passion ; altogether a being incomprehensible and intoler- 
able to myself and to others ! 

Then from a state of conflict I fall back into the fluid, 
vague, indeterminate state, which feels all form to be a 
mere violence and disfigurement. All ideas, principles, 
acquirements, and habits are effaced in me like the ripplea 
on a wave, like the convolutions of a cloud. My personal- 
ity has the least possible admixture of individuality. I 
am to the great majority of men what the circle is to rectili- 
near figures; I am everywhere at home, because I have no 
particular and nominative self. Perhaps, on the whole, 
this defect has good in it. Though I am less of a man, I 
am perhaps nearer to the man ; perhaps rather more man. 
There is less of the individual, but more of the species, in 
me. My nature, which is absolutely unsuited for practical 
life, shows great aptitude for psychological study. It 
prevents me from taking sides, but it allows me to under- 
stand all sides. It is not only indolence which prevents 
me from drawing conclusions; it is a sort of a secret aver- 
sion to all intellectual proscription. I have a feeling that 
something of everything is wanted to make a world, that 
all citizens have a right in the state, and that if every 
opinion is equally insignificant in itself, all opinions have 
some hold upon truth. To live and let live, think and 
tet think, are maxims which are equally dear to me. My 



AMI fiV 8 JOURNAL. 20S 

tendency is always to the whole, to the totality, to the 
general balance of things. What is difficult to me is to 
exclude, to condemn, to say no; except, indeed, in the 
presence of the exclusive. I am always fighting for the 
absent, for the defeated cause, for that portion of truth 
which seems to me neglected; my aim is to complete every 
thesis, to see round every problem, to study a thing from 
all its possible sides. Is this skepticism? Yes, in its result, 
but not in its purpose. It is rather the sense of the abso- 
lute and the infinite reducing to their proper value and 
relegating to their proper place the finite and the relative. 
But here, in the same way, my ambition is greater than 
my power; my philosophical perception is superior to my 
speculative gift. I have not the energy of my opinions; 
I have far greater width than inventiveness of thought, 
and, from timidity, I have allowed the critical intelligence 
in me to swallow up the creative genius. Is it indeed 
from timidity? 

Alas! with a little more ambition, or a little more good 
luck, a different man might have been made out of me, 
and such as my youth gave promise of. 

August 16, 1869. I have been thinking over Schopen- 
hauer. It has struck me and almost terrified me to see 
how well I represent Schopenhauer's typical man, for 
whom "happiness is a chimera and suffering a reality," 
for whom " the negation of will and of desire is the only 
road to deliverance," and "the individual life is a misfor- 
tune from which impersonal contemplation is the only 
enfranchisement," etc. But the principle that life is an 
evil and annihilation a good lies at the root of the system, 
and this axiom I have never dared to enunciate in any 
general way, although I have admitted it here and there 
in individual cases. What I still like in the misanthrope 
of Frankfort, is his antipathy to current prejudice, to 
European hobbies, to western hypocrisies, to the successes 
of the day. Schopenhauer is a man of powerful mind, 
who has put away from him all illusions, who professes 
Buddhism in the full flow of modern Germany, and abso- 



204 AMIKISS JOURNAL. 

lute detachment of mind in the very midst of the nine- 
teenth-century orgie. His great defects are barrenness of 
soul, a proud and perfect selfishness, an adoration of 
genius which is combined with complete indifference to 
the rest of the world, in spite of all his teaching of resigna- 
tion and sacrifice. He has no sympathy, no humanity, no 
love. And here I recognize the unlikeness between us. 
Pure intelligence and solitary labor might easily lead me to 
his point of view ; but once appeal to the heart, and I feel 
the contemplative attitude untenable. Pity, goodness, 
charity, and devotion reclaim theii rights, and insist even 
upon the first place. 

August 29, 1869. Schopenhauer preaches imperson- 
ality, objectivity, pure contemplation, the negation of will, 
calmness, and disinterestedness, an aesthetic study of the 
world, detachment from life, the renunciation of all desire, 
solitary meditation, disdain of the crowd, and indifference 
to all that the vulgar covet. He approves all my defects, 
my childishness, my aversion to practical life, my antipathy 
to the utilitarians, my distrust of all desire. In a word, 
he flatters all my instincts; he caresses and justifies them. 

This pre-established harmony between the theory of 
Schopenhauer and my own natural man causes me pleasure 
mingled with terror. I might indulge myself in the 
pleasure, but that I fear to delude and stifle conscience. 
Besides, I feel that goodness has no tolerance for this 
contemplative indifference, and that virtue consists in self- 
conquest. 

August 30, 1869. Still some chapters of Schopenhauer. 
Schopenhauer believes in the unchangeableness of innate 
tendencies in the individual, and in the invariability of the 
primitive disposition. He refuses to believe in the new 
man, in any real progress toward perfection, or in any posi- 
tive improvement in a human being. Only the appear- 
ances are refined; there is no change below the surface. 
Perhaps he confuses temperament, character, and indi- 
viduality? I incline to think that individuality is fatal 
and primitive, that temperament reaches far back, but ia 



A \1 1 KL't* JO URNAL. 205 

alternable, and that character is more recent and susceptible 
of voluntary or involuntary modifications. Individuality 
is a matter of psychology, temperament, a matter of sensa- 
tion or aesthetics; character alone is a matter of morals. 
Liberty and the use of it count for nothing in the first 
two elements of our being ; character is a historical fruit, 
and the result of a man's biography. For Schopenhauer, 
character is identified with temperament just as will with 
passion. In short, he simplifies too much, and looks at 
man from that more elementary point of view which is 
only sufficient in the case of the animal. That spontaneity 
which is vital or merely chemical he already calls will. 
Analogy is not equation; a comparison is not reason; 
similes and parables are not exact language. Many of 
Schopenhauer's originalities evaporate when we come to 
translate them into a more close and precise terminology. 

Later. One has merely to turn over the "Licht- 
strahlem " of Herder to feel the difference between him and 
Schopenhauer. The latter is full of marked features and 
of observations which stand out from the page and leave a 
clear and vivid impression. Herder is much less of a 
writer; his ideas are entangled in his style, and he has no 
brilliant condensations, no jewels, no crystals. While he 
proceeds by streams and sheets of thought which have no 
definite or individual outline, Schopenhauer breaks the 
current of his speculation with islands, striking, original, 
and picturesque, which engrave themselves in the memory. 
It is the same difference as there is between Nicole and 
Pascal, between Bayle and Satin-Simon. 

What is the faculty which gives relief, brilliancy, and 
incisiveness to thought? Imagination. Under its influ- 
ence expression becomes concentrated, colored, and strength- 
ened, and by the power it has of individualizing all it 
touches, it gives life and permanence to the material on 
which it works. A writer of genius changes sand into glass 
and glass into crystal, ore into iron and iron into steel; 
he marks with his own stamp every idea he gets hold of. 
He borrows much from the common stock, and gives back 



206 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 

nothing; but even his robberies are willingly reckoned to 
him as private property. He has, as it were, carte blanche, 
and public opinion allows him to take what he will. 

August 31, 1869. I have finished Schopenhauer. My 
mind has been a tumult of opposing systems Stoicism, 
Quietism, Buddhism, Christianity. Shall I never be at 
peace with myself? If impersonality is a good, why am I 
not consistent in the pursuit of it? and if it is a tempta- 
tion, why return to it, after having judged and con- 
quered it? 

Is happiness anything more than a conventional fiction? 
The deepest reason for my state of doubt is that the 
supreme end and aim of life seems to me a mere lure and 
deception. The individual is an eternal dupe, who never 
obtains what he seeks, and who is forever deceived by 
hope. My instinct is in harmony with the pessimism of 
Buddha and of Schopenhauer. It is a doubt which never 
leaves me even in my moments of religions fervor. Nature 
is indeed for me a Mai'a; and I look at her, as it were, 
with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skep- 
tical. What, then, do I believe in? I do not know. And 
what is it I hope for? It would be difficult to say. Folly! 
I believe in goodness, and I hope that good will prevail. 
Deep within this ironical and disappointed being of mine 
there is a child hidden a frank, sad, simple creature, who 
believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all heavenly 
superstitions. A whole millennium of idylls sleeps in my 
heart; I am a pseudo-skeptic, a pseudo-scoffer. 

" Borne dans sa nature, infini dans ses vceux, 
L'homme est un dieu tombe qui se souvient des cieux." 

October 14, 1869. Yesterday, Wednesday, death of 
Sainte Beuve. What a loss! 

October 16, 1869. Laboremus seems to have been the 
motto of Sainte-Beuve, as it was that of Septimius Se7erus. 
He died in harness, and up to the evening before his last 
day he still wrote, overcoming the sufferings of the body 



AMIEDS JOURNAL. 207 

by the energy of the mind. To-day, at this very moment, 
they are laying him in the bosom of mother earth. He 
refused the sacraments of the church ; he never belonged 
to any confession ; he was one of the " great diocese " 
that of the independent seekers of truth, and he allowed 
himself no final moment of hypocrisy. He would have 
nothing to do with any one except God only or rather 
the mysterious Isis beyond the veil. Being unmarried, he 
died in the arms of his secretary. He was sixty-five years 
old. His power of work and of memory was immense and 
intact. What is Scherer thinking about this life and this 
death? 

October 19, 1869. An admirable article by Edmond 
Scherer on Sainte-Beuve in the Temps. He makes him 
the prince of French critics and the last representative of 
the epoch of literary taste, the future belonging to the 
bookmakers and the chatterers, to mediocrity and to 
violence. The article breathes a certain manly melan- 
choly, befitting a funeral oration over one who was a mas- 
ter in the things of the mind. The fact is, that Sainte- 
Beuve leaves a greater void behind him than either 
Beranger or Lamartine; their greatness was already dis- 
tant, historical; he was still helping us to think. The true 
critic acts as a fulcrum for all the world. He represents 
the public judgment, that is to say the public reason, the 
touchstone, the scales, the refining rod, which tests the 
value of every one and the merit of every work. Infalli- 
bility of judgment is perhaps rarer than anything else, so 
fine a balance of qualities does it demand qualities both 
natural and acquired, qualities of mind and heart. What 
years of labor, what study and comparison, are needed to 
bring the critical judgment to maturity! Like Plato's 
sage, it is only at fifty that the critic rises to the true 
height of his literary priesthood, or, to put it less 
pompously, of his social function. By then only can he 
hope for insight into all the modes of being, and for mas- 
tery of all possible shades of appreciation. And Sainte 
Beuve joined to this infinitely refined culture a prodigious 



208 A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 

memory, and an incredible multitude of facts and anecdote* 
stored up for the service of his thought. 

December 8, 1869. Everything has chilled me this 
morning; the cold of the season, the physical immobility 
around me, but, above all, Hartman's "Philosophy of the 
Unconscious." This book lays down the terrible thesis 
that creation is a mistake; being, such as it is, is not as 
good as non-being, and death is better than life. 

I felt the same mournful impression that Obermann left 
upon me in my youth. The black melancholy of Bud- 
dhism encompassed and overshadowed me. If, in fact, it 
is only illusion which hides from us the horror of existence 
and makes life tolerable to us, then existence is a snare 
and life an evil. Like the Greek Annikeris, we ought to 
counsel suicide, or rather with Buddha and Schopenhauer 
we ought to labor for the radical extirpation of hope and 
desire the causes of life and resurrection. Not to rise 
again; there is the point, and there is the difficulty. 
Death is simply a beginning again, whereas it is annihila- 
tion that we have to aim at. Personal consciousness being 
the root of all our troubles, we ought to avoid the tempta- 
tion to it and the possibility of it as diabolical and abomi- 
nable. What blasphemy! And yet it is all logical; it is 
the philosophy of happiness carried to its farthest point. 
Epicurism must end in despair. The philosophy of duty 
is less depressing. But salvation lies in the conciliation of 
duty and happiness, in the union of the individual will 
with the divine will, and in the faith that this supreme 
will is directed by love. 



It is as true that real happiness is good, as that the good 
become better under the purification of trial. Those who 
have not suffered are still wanting in depth ; but a man 
who has not got happiness cannot impart it. We can only 
give what we have. Happiness, grief, gayety, sadness, are 
by nature contagious. Bring your health and your 
strength to the weak and sickly, and so you will be of use 
to them. Give them, not your weakness, but your energy, 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 2b. 

BO you will revive and lift them up. Life alone can 
rekindle life. What others claim from us is not our thirst 
and our hunger, but our bread and our gourd. 

The benefactors of humanity are those who have thought 
great thoughts about her; but her masters and her idols 
are those who have flattered and despised her, those who 
have muzzled and massacred her, inflamed her with 
fanaticism or used her for selfish purposes. Her bene- 
factors are the poets, the artists, the inventors, the apostles 
and all pure hearts. Her masters are the Caesars, the 
Constan tines, the Gregory VII. 's, the Innocent III.'s, the 
Borgias, the Napoleons. 



Every civilization is, as it were, a dream of a thousand 
years, in which heaven and earth, nature and history, 
appear to men illumined by fantastic light and represent- 
ing a drama which is nothing but a projection of the soul 
itself, influenced by some intoxication I was going to say 
hallucination or other. Those who are widest awake 
still see the real world across the dominant illusion of their 
race or time. And the reason is that the deceiving light 
starts from our own mind: the light is our religion. Every- 
thing changes with it. It is religion which gives to our 
kaleidoscope, if not the material of the figures, at least 
their color, their light and shade, and general aspect. 
Every religion makes men see the world and humanity 
under a special light; it is a mode of apperception, which 
can only be scientifically handled when we have cast it 
aside, and can only be judged when we have replaced it 
by a better. 



February 23, 1870. There is in man an instinct of 
revolt, an enemy of all law, a rebel which will stoop to no 
yoke, not even that of reason, duty, and wisdom. This 
element in us is the root of all sin das radicale Bose of 
Kant. The independence which is the condition of indi- 
viduality is at the same time the eternal temptation of the 
individual. That which makes us beings makes us also 
sinners. 



^ 1 AMIEL'8 JO URNAL. 

Sin is, then, in our very marrow, it circulates in us like 
the blood in our veins, it is mingled with all our substance.* 
Or rather 1 am wrong: temptation is our natural state, 
but sin is not necessary. Sin consists in the voluntary 
confusion of the independence which is good with the 
independence which is bad ; it is caused by the half-indul 
gence granted to a first sophism. We shut our eyes to the 
beginnings of evil because they are small, and in this 
weakness is contained the germ of our defeat. Prlncipiis 
vbsta this maxim dutifully followed would preserve ua 
from almost all our catastrophes. 

We will have no other master but our caprice that is 
to say, our evil self will have no God, and the foundation 
of our nature is seditious, impious, insolent, refractory, 
opposed to, and contemptuous of all that tries to rule it, 

* This is one of the passages which rouses M. Kenan's wonder. 
"Voila la grande difference," he writes, " entre 1'education catho- 
lique et 1'education protestante. Ceux qui comme moi ont recju une 
education catholique en ont garde de profonds vestiges. Mais ces 
vestiges ne sont pas des dogmes, ce sont des reves. Uuefois ce grand 
rideau de drap d'or, bariole de sole, d'indienne et de calicot, par 
lequel le catholicisme nous masque la vue du monde, une fois, dis-je 
ce rideau dechire, on voit 1'univers en sa splendeur infinie, la nature 
en sa haute et pleine majeste. Le protestant le plus libre garde 
souvent quelque chose de triste, un fond d'austferite intellectuelle 
analogue au pessimisine slave." (Journal des Debate, September 30, 
1884). 

One is reminded of Mr. Morley's criticism of Emerson. Emerson, 
he points out, has almost nothing to say of death, and " little to say 
of that horrid burden and impediment on the soul which the 
churches call sin, and which, by whatever name we call it, is a very 
real catastrophe in the moral nature of man the courses of nature, 
and the prodigious injustices of man in society affect him with 
neither horror nor awe. He will see no monster if he can help 
it." 

Here, then, we have the eternal difference between the two orders 
of temperament the men whose overflowing energy forbids them to 
realize the ever-recurring defeat of the human spirit at the hands of 
circumstance, like Renan and Emerson, and the men for whom 
" horror and awe " are interwoven witb experience, like Amiel. 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 211 

and therefore contrary to order, ungovernable and nega- 
tive. It is this foundation which Christianity calls the 
natural man. But the savage which is within us, and con- 
stitutes the primitive stuff of us, must be disciplined and 
civilized in order to produce a man. And the man must 
be patiently cultivated to produce a wise man, and the 
wise man must be tested and tried if he is to become 
righteous. And the righteous man must have substituted 
the will of God for his individual will, if he is to become a 
saint. And this new man, this regenerate being, is the 
spiritual man, the heavenly man, of which the Vedas 
speak as well as the gospel, and the Magi as well as the 
Neo-Platonists. 

March 17, 1870. This morning the music of a brass 
band which had stopped under my windows moved me 
almost to tears. It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic 
power over me; it set me dreaming of another world, of 
infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions 
are the echoes of paradise in the soul ; memories of ideal 
spheres, whose sad sweetness ravishes and intoxicates the 
heart. Plato! Pythagoras! ages ago you heard these 
harmonies surprised these moments of inward ecstasy 
knew these divine transports ! If music thus carries us to 
heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfec- 
tion, prefection is our dream, and our dream is heaven. 
This world of quarrels and of bitterness, of selfishness, 
ugliness, and misery, makes us long involuntarily for the 
eternal peace, for the adoration which has no limits, and 
the love which has no end. It is not so much the infinite 
as the beautiful that we yearn for. It is not being, or the 
limits of being, which weigh upon us; it is evil, in us and 
without us. It is not at all necessary to be great, so long 
as we are in harmony with the order of the universe. 
Moral ambition has no pride; it only desires to fill its 
place, and make its note duly heard in the universal con- 
cert of the God of love. 

March 30, 1870. Certainly, nature is unjust and shame- 
less, wthout probity, and without faith. Her only alterna- 



212 A KIEL'S JO URNAL. 

tives are gratuitous favor or mad aversion, and her onlj 
way of redressing an injustice is to commit another. The 
happiness of the few is expiated by the misery of the 
greater number. It is useless to accuse a blind force. 

The human conscience, however, revolts against this law 
of nature, and to satisfy its own instinct of justice it has 
imagined two hypotheses, out of which it has made for 
itself a religion the idea of an individual providence, and 
the hypothesis of another life. 

In these we have a protest against nature, which is thus 
declared immoral and scandalous to the moral sense. Man 
believes in good, and that he may ground himself on jus- 
tice be maintains that the injustice all around him is but 
an appearance, a mystery, a cheat, and that justice will be 
done. Fiat justitia, pereat mundus ! 

It is a great act of faith. And since humanity has not 
made itself, this protest has some chance of expressing a 
truth. If there is conflict between the natural world and 
the moral world, between reality and conscience, con- 
science must be right. 

It is by no means necessary that the universe should 
exist, but it is necessary that justice should be done, and 
atheism is bound to explain the fixed obstinacy of con- 
science on this point. Nature is not just; we are the pro- 
ducts of nature . why are we always claiming and prophesy- 
ing justice? why does the effect rise up against its cause? 
It is a singular phenomenon. Does the protest come 
from any puerile blindness of human vanity? No, it is 
the deepest cry of our being, and it is for the honor of 
God that the cry is uttered. Heaven and earth may pass 
away, but good ought to be, and injustice ought not to 
be. Such is the creed of the human race. Nature will 
be conquered by spirit; the eternal will triumph over 
time. 

April 1, 1870. I am inclined to believe that for a 
woman love is the supreme authority that which judges 
the rest and decides what is good or evil. For a man, love 
is subordinate to right. It is a gieat passion, but it is 



AMIEL'8 JO URNAL. 21 3 

not the source of order, the synonym of reason, the 
criterion of excellence. It would seem, then, that a 
woman places her ideal in the perfection of love, and a 
man in the perfection of justice. It was in this sense that 
St. Paul was able to say, " The woman is the glory of the 
man, and the man is the glory of God." Thus the woman 
who absorbs herself in the object of her love is, so to 
speak, in the line of nature; she is truly woman, she 
realizes her fundamental type. On the contrary, the man 
who should make life consist in conjugal adoration, and 
who should imagine that he has lived suificiently when he 
has made himself the priest of a beloved woman, such a 
one is but half a man; he is despised by the world, and 
perhaps secretly disdained by women themselves. The 
woman who loves truly seeks to merge her own individual- 
ity in that of the man she loves. She desires that her love 
should make him greater, stronger, more masculine, and 
more active. Thus each sex plays its appointed part: the 
woman is first destined for man, and man is destined for 
society. "Woman owes herself to one, man owes himself 
to all; and each obtains peace and happiness only when he 
or she has recognized this law and accepted this balance 
of things. The same thing may be a good in the woman 
and an evil in the man, may be strength in her, weakness 
in him. 

There is then a feminine and a masculine morality 
preparatory chapters, as it were, to a general human moral- 
ity. Below the virtue which is evangelical and sexless, 
there is a virtue of sex. And this virtue of sex is the occa- 
sion of mutual teaching, for each of the two incarnations 
of virtue makes it its business to convert the other, the 
first preaching love in the ears of justice, the second jus- 
tice in the ears of love. And so there is produced an 
oscillation and an average which represent a social state, 
an epoch, sometimes a whole civilization. 

Such at least is our European idea of the harmony of the 
sexes in a graduated order of functions. America is on 
the road to revolutionize this ideal by the introduction of 



214 A MIKL'S JO ITIINA L. 

the democratic principle of the equality of individuals in a 
general equality of functions. Only, when there is nothing 
left but a multitude of equal individualities, neither young 
nor old, neither men nor women, neither benefited nor 
benefactors all social difference will turn upon money. 
The whole hierarchy will rest upon the dollar, and the 
most brutal, the most hideous, the most inhuman of 
inequalities will be the fruit of the passion for equality. 
What a result! Plutolatry the worship of wealth, the 
madness of gold to it will be confided the task of chastis- 
ing a false principle and its followers. And plutocracy 
will be in its turn executed by equality. It would be a 
strange end for it, if Anglo-Saxon individualism were 
ultimately swallowed up in Latin socialism. 

It is my prayer that the discovery of an equilibrium 
between the two principles may be made in time, before 
the social war, with all its terror and ruin, overtakes us. 
But it is scarcely likely. The masses are always ignorant 
and limited, and only advance by a succession of contrary 
errors. They reach good only by the exhaustion of evil. 
They discover the way out, only after having run their 
heads against all other possible issues. 

April 15, 1870. Crucifixion! That is the word we 
have to meditate to-day. Is it not Good Friday? 

To curse grief is easier than to bless it, but to do so is 
to fall back into the point of view of the earthly, the 
carnal, the natural man. By what has Christianity sub- 
dued the world if not by the apotheosis of grief, by its 
marvelous transmutation of suffering into triumph, of the 
crown of thorns into the crown of glory, and of a gibbet 
into a symbol of salvation? What does the apotheosis of 
the Cross mean, if not the death of death, the defeat of 
sin, the beatification of martyrdom, the raising to the skies 
of voluntary sacrifice, the defiance of pain? "0 Death, 
where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?" By 
Jong brooding over this theme the agony of the just, 
peace in the midst of agony, and the heavenly beauty of 
such peace -humanity came to understand that a new 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 215 

religion was born a new mode, that is to say, of explain- 
ing life and of understanding suffering. 

Suffering was a curse from which man fled; now it 
becomes a purification of the soul, a sacred trial sent 
by eternal love, a divine dispensation meant to sanctify 
and ennoble us, an acceptable aid to faith, a strange 
initiation into happiness. power of belief ! All remains 
the same, and yet all is changed. A new certitude arises 
to deny the apparent and the tangible; it pierces through 
the mystery of things, it places an invisible Father behind 
visible nature, it shows us joy shining through tears, and 
makes of pain the beginning of joy. 

And so, for those who have believed, the tomb becomes 
heaven, and on the funeral pyre of life they sing the 
hosanna of immortality; a sacred madness has renewed 
the face of the world for them, and when they wish to 
explain what they feel, their ecstasy makes them incom- 
prehensible; they speak with tongues. A wild intoxication 
of self-sacrifice, contempt for deach, the thirst for eternity, 
the delirium of love these are what the unalterable 
gentleness of the Crucified has had power to bring forth. 
By his pardon of his executioners, and by that unconquer- 
abe sense in him of an indissoluble union with God, Jesus, 
on his cross, kindled an inextinguishable fire and revolu- 
tionized the world. He proclaimed and realized salvation 
by faith in the infinite mercy, and in the pardon granted 
to simple repentance. By his saying, "There is more joy 
in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over 
ninety and nine just persons who need no repentance," 
he made humility the gate of entrance into paradise. 

Crucify the rebellious self, mortify yourself wholly, 
give up all to God, and the peace which is not of this 
world will descend upon you. For eighteen centuries 
no grander word has been spoken; and although hu- 
manity is forever seeking after a more exact and complete 
application of justice, yet her secret faith is not in justice 
but in pardon, for pardon alone conciliates the spotless 
purity of perfection with the infinite pity due to weakness 



216 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 

that is to say, it aione preserves and aeiends the idea of 
holiness, while it allows full scope to that of love. The 
gospel proclaims the ineffable consolation, the good news, 
which disarms all earthly griefs, and robs even death of its 
terrors the news of irrevocable pardon, that is to say, of 
eternal life. The Cross is & 'j*fTarantee of the gospel. 

Therefore it has been its standard. 

May 7, 1870. The faith which clings to its idols and 
resists all innovation is a retarding and conservative force; 
but it is the property of all religion to serve as a curb to 
our lawless passion for freedom, and to steady and quiet 
our restlessness of temper. Curiosity is the expansive 
force, which, if it were allowed an unchecked action upon 
us, would disperse and volatilize us ; belief represents the 
force of gravitation and cohesion which makes separate 
bodies and individuals of us. Society lives by faith, 
develops by science. Its basis then is the mysterious, the 
unknown, the intangible religion while the fermenting 
principle in it is the desire of knowledge. Its permanent 
substance is the uncomprehended or the divine; its chang- 
ing form is the result of its intellectual labor. The uncon- 
scious adhesions, the confused intuitions, the obscure pre- 
sentiments, which decide the first faith of a people, are 
then of capital importance in its history. All history 
moves between the religion which is the genial instinctive 
and fundamental philosophy of a race, and the philosophy 
which is the ultimate religion the clear perception, that 
is to say, of those principles which have engendered the 
whole spiritual development of humanity. 

It is always the same thing which is, which was, and 
which will be; but this thing the absolute betrays with 
more or less transparency and profundity the law of its life 
and of its metamorphoses. In its fixed aspect it is called 
God; in its mobile aspect the world or nature. God is 
present in nature, but nature is not God ; there is a nature 
in God, but it is not God himself. I am neither for imma- 
nence nor for transcendence taken alone. 

May 9, 1870. Disraeli, in his new novel, "Lothair," 



AMIEL'8 JOURNAL. 217 

shows that the two great rorces 01 tne present are Kevolu- 
tion and Catholicism, and that the free nations are lost if 
either of these two forces triumphs. It is exactly my own 
idea. Only, while in France, in Belgium, in Italy, and 
in all Catholic societies, it is only by checking one of these 
forces by the other that the state and civilization can .be 
maintained, the Protestant countries are better off; in 
them there is a third force, a middle faith between the 
two other idolatries, which enables them to regard liberty 
not as a neutralization of two contraries, but as a moral 
reality, self-subsistent, and possessing its own center of 
gravity and motive force. In the Catholic world religion 
and liberty exclude each other. In the Protestant world 
they accept each other, so that in the second case there is 
a smaller waste of force. 

Liberty is the lay, the philosophical principle. It ex- 
presses the juridical and social aspiration of the race. But 
as there is no society possible without regulation, without 
control, without limitations on individual liberty, above all 
without moral limitations, the peoples which are legally the 
freest do well to take their religious consciousness for 
check and ballast. In mixed states, Catholic or free- 
thinking, the limit of action, being a merely penal one, 
invites incessant contravention. 

The puerility of the freethinkers consists in believing 
that a free society can maintain itself and keep itself 
together without a common faith, without a religious 
prejudice of some kind. Where lies the will of God? Is 
it the common reason which expresses it, or rather, are a 
clergy or a church the depositories of it? So long as the 
response is ambiguous and equivocal in the eyes of half or 
the majority of consciences and this is the case in all 
Catholic states public peace is impossible, and public law 
is insecure. If there is a God, we must have him on our 
side, and if there is not a God, it would be necessary first 
of all to convert everybody to the same idea of th lawful 
and the useful, to reconstitute, that is to say, a lay reli- 
gion, before anything politically solid could be built. 



218 AM I BUS JOURNAL. 

Liberalism is merely feeding upon abstractions, when it 
persuades itself that liberty is possible without free indi- 
viduals, and when it will not recognize that liberty in the 
individual is the fruit of a foregoing education, a moral 
education, which presupposes a liberating religion. To 
preach liberalism to a population jesuitized by education, 
is to press the pleasures of dancing upon a man who has 
lost a leg. How is it possible for a child who has never 
been out of swaddling clothes to walk? How can the abdi- 
cation of individual conscience lead to the government of 
individual conscience? To be free, is to guide one's self, 
to have attained one's majority, to be emancipated, master 
of one's actions, and judge of good and evil; but ultra- 
montane Catholicism never emancipates its disciples, who 
are bound to admit, to believe, and to obey, as they are 
told, because they are minors in perpetuity, and the clergy 
alone possess the law of right, the secret of justice, and 
the measure of truth. This is what men are landed in b** 
the idea of an exterior revelation, cleverly made use of by 
a patient priesthood. 

But what astonishes me is the short-sight of the states- 
men of the south, who do not see that the question of ques- 
tions is the religious question, and even now do not recog- 
nize that a liberal state is wholly incompatible with an 
anti-liberal religion, and almost equally incompatible with 
the absence of religion. They confound accidental con- 
quests and precarious progress with lasting results. 

There is some probability that all this noise which is 
made nowadays about liberty may end in the suppression 
of liberty ; it is plain that the internationals, the irrecon- 
cilables, and the ul tramontanes, are, all three of them, 
aiming at absolutism, at dictatorial omnipotence. Happily 
they are not one but many, and it will not be difficult to 
turn them against each other. 

If liberty is to be saved, it will not be by the doubters, 
the men of science, or the materialists; it will be by 
religious conviction, by the faith of individuals who be- 
lieve that God wills man to be free but also pure; it wiU 



A Ml EL'S JO URN A L. 219 

be by the seekers after holiness, by those old-fashioned 
pious persons who speak of immortality and eternal life, 
and prefer the soul to the whole world; it will be by the 
enfranchised children of the ancient faith of the human 
race. 

June 5, 1870. The efficacy of religion lies precisely in 
that which is not rational, philosophic, nor external ; its 
efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extra- 
ordinary. Thus religion attracts more devotion in propor- 
tion as it demands more faith that is to say, as it becomes 
more incredible to the profane mind. The philosopher 
aspires to explain away all mysteries, to dissolve them into 
light. It is mystery, on the other hand, which the reli- 
gious instinct demands and pursues; it is mystery which 
constitutes the essence of worship, the power of prosely- 
tism. When the cross became the "foolishness" of the 
cross, it took possession of the masses. And in our own 
day, those who wish to get rid of the supernatural, to 
enlighten religion, to economize faith, find themselves 
deserted, like poets who should declaim against poetry, or 
women who should decry love. Faith consists in the 
acceptance of the incomprehensible, and even in the pur- 
suit of the impossible, and is self-intoxicated with its own 
sacrifices, its own repeated extravagances. 

It is the forgetfulness of this psychological law which 
stultifies the so-called liberal Christianity. It is the 
realization of it which constitutes the strength of Cathol- 
icism. 

Apparently no positive religion can survive the super- 
natural element which is the reason for its existence. 
Natural religion seems to be the tomb of all historic cults. 
All concrete religions die eventually in the pure air of 
philosophy. So long then as the life of nations is in need 
of religion as a motive and sanction of morality, as food 
foi faith, hope, and charity, so long will the masses turn 
away from pure reason and naked truth, so long will they 
adore mystery, so long and rightly so will they rest in 
faith, the only region where the ideal presents itself tc 
them in an attractive form. 



220 A MIRVS JO URN A L. 

June 9, 1870. At bottom, everything depends upon the 
presence or absence of one single element in the soul 
hope. All the activity of man, all his efforts and all his 
enterprises, presuppose a hope in him of attaining an end. 
Once kill this hope and his movements become senseless, 
spasmodic, and convulsive, like those of some one falling 
from a height. To struggle with the inevitable has some- 
thing childish in it. To implore the law of gravitation to 
suspend its action would no doubt be a grotesque prayer. 
Very well! but when a man loses faith in the efficacy of 
his efforts, when he says to himself, " You are incapable 
of realizing your ideal ; happiness is a chimera, progress is 
an illusion, the passion for perfection is a snare; and sup- 
posing all your ambitions were gratified, everything would 
still be vanity," then he comes to see that a little blind- 
ness is necessary if life is to be carried on, and that illusion 
is the universal spring of movement. Complete disillu- 
sion would mean absolute immobility. He who has 
deciphered the secret and read the riddle of finite life 
escapes from the great wheel of existence; he has left the 
world of the living he is already dead. Is this the mean- 
Ing of the old belief that to raise the veil of Isis or to 
behold God face to face brought destruction upon the rash 
mortal who attempted it? Egypt and Judea had recorded 
the fact, Buddha gave the key to it; the individual life is 
a nothing ignorant of itself, and as soon as this nothing 
knows itself, individual life is abolished in principle. For 
as soon as the illusion vanishes, Nothingness resumes its 
eternal sway, the suffering of life is over, error has disap 
peared, time and form have ceased to be for this enfran- 
chised individuality; the colored air-bubble has burst in 
the infinite space, and the misery of thought has sunk to 
rest in the changeless repose of all-embracing Nothing. 
The absolute, if it were spirit, would still be activity, 
and it is activity, the daughter of desire, which is incom- 
patible with the absolute. The absolute, then, must be 
the zero of all determination, and the only manner of 
being suited to it is Non-being. 



A MIEU8 JO URN A L. 221 

July 2, 1870. One of the vices of France is the frivolity 
which substitutes public conventions for truth, and abso- 
lutely ignores personal dignity and the majesty of con- 
science. The French are ignorant of the A B C of indi- 
vidual liberty, and still show an essentially catholic intoler- 
ance toward the ideas which have not attained universality 
or the adhesion of the^ majority. The nation is an army 
which can bring to bear mass, number, and force, but not 
an assembly of free men in which each individual depends 
for his value on himself. The eminent Frenchman 
depends upon others for his value; if he possess stripe, 
cross, scarf, sword, or robe in a word, function and 
decoration then he is held to be something, and he feels 
himself somebody. It is the symbol which establishes 
his merit, it is the public which raises him from nothing, 
as the sultan creates his viziers. These highly-trained 
and social races have an antipathy for individual independ- 
ence; everything with them must be founded upon 
authority military, civil, or religious, and God himself is 
non-existent until he has been established by decree. 
Their fundamental dogma is that social omnipotence 
which treats the pretension of truth to be true without 
any official stamp, as a mere usurpation and sacrilege, and 
scouts the claim of the individual to possess either a sepa- 
rate conviction or a personal value. 

July 20, 1870 (Bellalpe). A marvelous day. The pano- 
rama before me is of a grandiose splendor ; it is a symphony 
of mountains, a cantata of sunny Alps. 

I am dazzled and oppressed by it. The feeling upper- 
most is one of delight in being able to admire, of joy, that 
is to say, in a recovered power of contemplation which is 
the result of physical relief, in being able at last to forget 
myself and surrender myself to things, as befits a man in 
my state of health. Gratitude is mingled with enthu- 
Biasm. I have just spent two hours of continuous delight 
at the foot of the Sparrenhorn, the peak behind us. A 
flood of sensations overpowered me. I could only look, 
feel, dream, and think. 



222 A MIEUS JO URN A L. 

Later. Ascent of the Sparrenhorn. The peak of it Is 
not very easy to climb, because of the masses of loose 
stones and the steepness of the path, which runs between 
two abysses. But how great is one's reward! 

The view embraces the whole series of the Valais Alps 
from the Furka to the Combin; and even beyond the 
Furka one sees a few peaks of the Ticino and the Rhaetian 
Alps; while if you turn you see 'behind you a whole polar 
world of snowfields and glaciers forming the southern side 
of the enormous Bernese group of the Finsteraarahorn, the 
Monch, and the Jungfrau. The near representative of 
the group is the Aletschhorn, whence diverge like so many 
ribbons the different Alefcsch glaciers which wind about 
the peak from which I saw them. I could study the 
different zones, one above another fields, woods, grassy 
Alps, bare rock and snow, and the principle types of 
mountain; the pagoda-shaped Mischabel, with its four 
aretes as flying buttresses and its staff of nine clustered 
peaks; the cupola of the Fletchhorn, the dome of Monte 
Rosa, the pyramid of the Weisshorn, the obelisk of the 
Cervin. 

Round me fluttered a multitude of butterflies and 
brilliant green-backed flies; but nothing grew except a 
few lichens. The deadness and emptiness of the upper 
Aletsch glacier, like some vast white street, called up the 
image of an icy Pompeii. All around boundless silence. 
On my way back I noticed some effects of sunshine the 
close elastic mountain grass, starred with gentian, forget- 
me-not, and anemones, the mountain cattle standing out 
against the sky, the rocks just piercing the soil, various 
circular dips in the mountain side, stone waves petrified 
thousands of thousands of years ago, the undulating 
ground, the tender quiet of the evening ; and I invoked 
the soul of the mountains and the spirit of the heights ! 

July 22, 1870 (Bellalpe). The sky, which was misty 
and overcast this morning, has become perfectly blue again, 
and the giants of the Valais are bathed in tranquil light. 

Whence this solemn melancholy which oppresses and 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 223 

pursues me? I have just read a series of scientific books 
(Bronn on the "Laws of Palaeontology," Karl Hitter on 
the "Law of Geographical Forms"). Are they the cause 
of this depression? or is it the majesty of this immense 
landscape, the splendor of this setting sun, which brings 
the tears to my eyes? 

" Creature d'un jour qui t'agites une heure," 

what weighs upon thee I know it well is the sense of 
thine utter nothingness! . . . The names of great 
men hover before my eyes like a secret reproach, and this 
grand impassive nature tells me that to-morrow I shall 
have disappeared, butterfly that I am, without having 
lived. Or perhaps it is the breath of eternal things which 
stirs in me the shudder of Job. What is man this weed 
which a sunbeam withers? What is our life in the infinite 
abyss? I feel a sort of sacred terror, not only for myself, 
but for my race, for all that is mortal. Like Buddha, I 
feel the great wheel turning the wheel of universal illu- 
sion and the dumb stupor which enwraps me is full of 
anguish. Isis lifts the corner of her veil, and he who per- 
ceives the great mystery beneath is struck with giddiness. 
I can scarcely breathe. It seems to me that I am hanging 
by a thread above the fathomless abyss of destiny. Is 
this the Infinite face to face, an intuition of the last great 
death? 

" Creature d'un jour qui t'agites une heure, 

Ton ame est immortelle et tes pleurs vont finir." 

Finir? When depths of ineffable desire are opening in 
the heart, as vast, as yawning as the immensity which 
surrounds us? Genius, self-devotion, love all these crav- 
ings quicken into life and torture me at once. Like the 
shipwrecked sailor about to sink under the waves, I am 
conscious of a mad clinging to life, and at the same time 
of a rush of despair and repentance, which forces from me 
a cry for pardon. And then all this hidden agony dissolves 
in wearied submission. "Resign yourself to the inevi- 
table! Shroud away out of sight the flattering delusions of 



224 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

youth! Live and die in the shade! Like the insects 
humming in the darkness, offer up your evening prayer. 
Be content to fade out of life without a murmur whenever 
the Master of life shall breathe upon your tiny flame ! It 
is out of myriads of unknown lives that every clod of 
earth is built up. The infusoria do not count until they 
are millions upon millions. Accept your nothingness." 
Amen! 

But there is no peace except in order, in law. Am I in 
order? Alas, no! My changeable and restless nature will 
torment me to the end. I shall never see plainly what I 
ought to do. The love of the better will have stood 
between me and the good. Yearning for the ideal will 
have lost me reality. Vague aspiration and undefined 
desire will have been enough to make my talents useless, 
and to neutralize my powers. Unproductive nature that I 
am, tortured by the belief that production was required of 
me, may not my very remorse be a mistake and a super- 
fluity? 

Scherer's phrase come? back to me, "We must accept 
ourselves as we are." 

September 8, 1870 (Zurich). All the exiles are return- 
ing to Paris Edgar Quinet, Louis Blanc, Victor Hugo. 
By the help of their united experience will they succeed in 
maintaining the republic? It is to be hoped so. But the 
past makes it lawful to doubt. While the republic is in 
reality a fruit, the French look uj3on.it as a seed-sowing. 
Elsewhere such a form of - '-gdi iCftWiieirt presupposes free 
men; in France it is anjd^a^ust bean instrument of instruc- 
tion and protection P^^ice has once more placed sover- 
eignty in the hands of universal suffrage, as though the 
multitude were already enlightened, judicious, and reason- 
able, and now her task is to train and discipline the force 
which, by a fiction, is master. 

The ambition of France is set upon self-government, 
but her capacity for it has still to be proved. For eighty 
years she has confounded revolution with liberty; will she 
now give proof of amendment and of wisdom? Such a 



A MIEUS JO URNAL. 225 

change is not impossible. Let us wait for it with sympathy, 
but also with caution. 

September 12, 1870 (Basle). The old Rhine is mur- 
muring under my window. The wide gray stream rolls its 
great waves along and breaks against the arches of the 
bridge, just as it did ten years or twenty years ago; the 
red cathedral shoots its arrow-like spires toward heaven; 
the ivy on the terraces which fringe the left bank of the 
Rhine hangs over the walls like a green mantle ; the inde- 
fatigable ferry-boat 'goes and comes as it did of yore ; in a 
word, things seem to .be eternal, while man's hair turns 
gray and his heart grows old. I came here first as a stu- 
dent, then as a professor. Now I return to it at the down- 
ward turn of middle age, and nothing in the landscape has 
changed except myself. 

The melancholy of memory may be commonplace and 
puerile all the same it is true, it is inexhaustible, and the 
poets of all times have been open to its attacks. 

At bottom, what is individual life? A variation of an 
eternal theme to be born, to live, to feel, to hope, to 
love, to suffer, to weep, to die. Some would add to these, 
to grow rich, to think, to conquer; but in fact, whatever 
frantic efforts one may make, however one may strain and 
excite one's self, one can but cause a greater or slighter 
undulation in the line of one's destiny. Supposing a man 
renders the series of fundamental phenomena a little more 
evident to others or a little more distinct to himself, what 
does it matter? The whole is still nothing but a fluttering 
of the infinitely little, the insignificant repetition of an 
invariable theme. In truth, whether the individual exists 
or no, the difference is so absolutely imperceptible in the 
whole of things that every complaint and every desire is 
ridiculous. Humanity in its entirety is but a flash in the 
duration of the planet, and the planet may return to the 
gaseous state without the sun's feeling it even for a 
second. The individual is the infinitesimal of nothing. 

What, then, is nature? Nature is Maia that is to say, 
an incessant, fugitive, indifferent series of phenomena, the 



226 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 

manifestation of all possibilities, the inexhaustible play ol 
all combinations. 

And is Maia all the while performing for the amusement 
of somebody, of some spectator Brahma? Or is Brahma 
working out some serious and unselfish end? From the 
theistic point of view, is it the purpose of God to make 
souls, to augment the sum of good and wisdom by the 
multiplication of himself in free beings facets which may 
flash back to him his own holiness and beauty? This con- 
ception is far more attractive to the heart. But is it more 
true? The moral consciousness affirms it. If man is 
capable of conceiving goodness, the general principle of 
things, which cannot be inferior to man, must be good. 
The philosophy of labor, of duty, of effort, is surely 
superior to that of phenomena, chance, and universal 
indifference. If so, the whimsical Mai'a would be subor- 
dinate to Brahma, the eternal thought, and Brahma would 
be in his turn subordinate to a holy God. 

October 25, 1870 (Geneva). "Each function to the 
most worthy:" this maxim governs all constitutions, and 
serves to test them. Democracy is not forbidden to apply 
it, but democracy rarely does apply it, because she holds, 
for example, that the most worthy man is the man who 
pleases her, whereas he who pleases her is not always the 
most worthy, and because she supposes that reason guides 
the masses, whereas in reality they are most commonly led 
by passion. And in the end every falsehood has to be 
expiated, for truth always takes its revenge. 

Alas, whatever one may say or do, wisdom, justice, 
reason, and goodness will never be anything more than 
special cases and the heritage of a few elect souls. Moral 
and intellectual harmony, excellence in all its forms, will 
always be a rarity of great price, an isolated chef d'ceuvre. 
All that can be expected from the most perfect institutions 
is that they should make it possible for individual excel- 
lence to develop itself, not that they should produce the 
excellent individual. Virtue and genius, grace and beauty, 
will always constitute a noblesse such as no form of govern- 



AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 22? 

ment can manufacture. It is of no use, therefore, to ex- 
cite one's self for or against revolutions which have only an 
importance of the second order an importance which I 
do not wish either to diminish or to ignore, but an impor- 
tance which, after all, is mostly negative. The political 
life is but the means of the true life. 

October 26, 1870. Sirocco. A bluish sky. The leafy 
crowns of the trees have dropped at their feet; the finger 
of winter has touched them. The errand-woman has just 
brought me my letters. Poor little woman, what a life ! 
She spends her nights in going backward and forward 
from her invalid husband to her sister, who is scarcely less 
helpless, and her days are passed in labor. Kesigned and 
indefatigable, she goes on without complaining, till she 
drops. 

Lives such as hers prove something : that the true igno- 
rance is moral ignorance, that labor and suffering are the 
lot of all men, and that classification according to a 
greater or less degree of folly is inferior to that which 
proceeds according to a greater or less degree of virtue. 
The kindgom of God belongs not to the most enlightened 
but to the best; and the best man is the most unselfish 
man. Humble, constant, voluntary self-sacrifice this is 
what constitutes the true dignity of man. And therefore 
is it written, "The last shall be first." Society rests upon 
conscience and not upon science. Civilization is first and 
foremost a moral tiling. Without honesty, without 
respect for law, without the worship of duty, without the 
love of one's neighbor in a word, without virtue the 
whole is menaced and falls into decay, and neither letters 
nor art, neither luxury nor industry, nor rhetoric, nor the 
policeman, nor the custom-house officer, can maintain 
erect and whole an edifice of which the foundations are 
unsound. 

A state founded upon interest alone and cemented by 
fear is an ignoble and unsafe construction. The ultimate 
ground upon which every civilization rests is the average 
morality of the masses, and a sufficient amount of prac- 



228 A MIKUS JOURNAL. 

tical righteousness. Duty is what upholds all. So that 
those who humbly and unobtrusively fulfill it, and set a good 
example thereby, are the salvation and the sustenance of 
this brilliant world, which knows nothing about them. 
Ten righteous men would have saved Sodom, but thous- 
ands and thousands of good homely folk are needed to 
preserve a people from corruption and decay. 

If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, 
it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady 
of the cultivated classes. The modern separation of 
enlightenment and virtue, of thought and conscience, of 
the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and vulgar 
crowd, is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty. 
When any society produces an increasing number of literary 
exquisites, of satirists, skeptics, and beaux esprits, some 
chemical disorganization of fabric may be inferred. Take, 
for example, the century of Augustus, and that oi Louis 
XV. Our cynics and railers are mere egotists, who stand 
aloof from the common duty, and in their indolent remote- 
ness are of no service to society against any ill which may 
attack it. Their cultivation consists in having got rid of 
feeling. And thus they fall farther and farther away from 
true humanity, and approach nearer to the demoniacal 
nature. What was it that Mephistopheles lacked? Not 
intelligence certainly, but goodness. 

October 28, 1870. It is strange to see how completely 
justice is forgotten in the presence of great international 
struggles. Even the great majority of the spectators are 
no longer capable of judging except as their own personal 
tastes, dislikes, fears, desires, interests, or passions may 
dictate that is to say, their judgment is not a judgment 
at all. How many people are capable of delivering a fair 
verdict on the struggle now going on? Very few! This 
horror of equity, this antipathy to justice, this rage 
against a merciful neutrality, represents a kind of eruption 
of animal passion in man, a blind fierce passion, which is 
absurd enough to call itself a reason, whereas it is nothing 
but a force. 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 229 

November 16, 1870. We are struck by something bewil- 
dering and ineffable when we look down into the depths of 
an abyss; and every soul is an abyss, a mystery of love 
and piety. A sort of sacred emotion descends upon me 
whenever I penetrate the recesses of this sanctuary of man, 
and hear the gentle murmur of the prayers, hymns, and 
supplications which rise from the hidden depths of the 
heart. These involuntary confidences fill me with a ten- 
der piety and a religious awe and shyness. The whole ex- 
perience seems to me as wonderful as poetry, and divine 
with the divineness of birth and dawn. Speech fails me, 
I bow myself and adore. And, whenever I am able, I 
strive also to console and fortify. 

December 6, 1870. "Dauer im Wechsel" "Persistence 
in change." This title of a poem by Goethe is the sum- 
ming up of nature. Everything changes, but with such 
unequal rapidity that one existence appears eternal to 
another. A geological age, for instance, compared to the 
duration of any living being, the duration of a planet com- 
pared to a geological age, appear eternities our life, too, 
compared to the thousand impressions which pass across us 
in an hour. Wherever one looks, one feels one's self over- 
whelmed by the infinity of infinites. The universe, 
seriously studied, rouses one's terror. Everything seems 
so relative that it is scarcely possible to distinguish whether 
anything has a real value. 

Where is the fixed point in this boundless and bottom- 
less gulf? Must it not be that which perceives the relations 
of things in other words, thought, infinite thought? 
The perception of ourselves within the infinite thought, 
the realization of ourselves in God, self-acceptance in 
him, the harmony of our will with his in a word, religion 
here alone is firm ground. Whether this thought be 
free or necessary, happiness lies in identifying one's self 
with it. Both the stoic and the Christian surrender 
themselves to the Being of beings, which the one calls 
sovereign wisdom and the other sovereign goodness. St. 
John says, "God is Light." "God is Love." The Brahmin 



230 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

says, "God is the inexhaustible fount of poetry." Let us 
say, "God is perfection." And man? Man, for all his 
inexpressible insignificance and frailty, may still apprehend 
the idea of perfection, may help forward the supreme will, 
and die with Hosanna on his lips ! 



All teaching depends upon a certain presentiment and 
preparation in the taught ; we can only teach others prof- 
itably what they already virtually know ; we can only give 
them what they had already. This principle of education 
is also a law of history. Nations can only be developed on 
the lines of their tendencies and aptitudes. Try them on 
any other and they are rebellious and incapable of improve- 
ment. 



By despising himself too much a man comes to be worthy 
of his own contempt. 



Its way of suffering is the witness which a soul bears to 
itself. 



The beautiful is superior to the sublime because it lasts 
and does not satiate, while the sublime is relative, tempo- 
rary and violent. 



February 4, 1871. Perpetual effort is the characteristic 
of modern morality. A painful process has taken the 
place of the old harmony, the old equilibrium, the old joy 
and fullness of being. We are all so many fauns, satyrs, 
or Silenuses, aspiring to become angels; so many deformi- 
ties laboring for our own embellishment; so many clumsy 
chrysalises each working painfully toward the development 
of the butterfly within him. Our ideal is no longer a 
serene beauty of soul ; it is the agony of Laocoon struggling 
with the hydra of evil. The lot is cast irrevocably. There 
are no more happy whole-natured men among us, nothing 
but so manv candidates for heaven, galley-slaves on earth. 



AMIEL'S JO URNAL. 23 1 

"Nous ramons notre vie en attendant le port." 

Moliere said that reasoning banished reason. It is pos- 
sible also that the progress toward perfection we are so 
proud of is only a pretentious imperfection. Duty seems 
now to be more negative than positive; it means lessening 
evil rather than actual good; it is a generous discontent, 
but not happiness; it is an incessant pursuit of an unattain- 
able goal, a noble madness, but not reason; it is homesick- 
ness for the impossible pathetic and pitiful, but still not 
wisdom. 

The being which has attained harmony, and every being 
may attain it, has found its place in the order of the uni- 
verse, and represents the divine thought at least as clearly 
as a flower or a solar system. Harmony seeks nothing out- 
side itself. It is what it ought to be; it is the expression 
of right, order, law, and truth; it is greater than time, 
and represents eternity. 

February 6, 1871. I am reading Juste Olivier's " Chan- 
sons du Soir" over again, and all the melancholy of the 
poet seems to pass into my veins. It is the revelation of a 
complete existence, and of a whole world of melancholy 
reverie. 

How much character there is in "Musette," the 
"Chanson de 1'Alouette," the "Chant du Eetour," and 
the "Gaite," and how much freshness in "Lina," and 
"A ma fille! " But the best pieces of all are " Au dela," 
"Homunculus," "La Trompeuse," and especially "Frere 
Jacques," its author's masterpiece. To these may be 
added the " Marionettes" and the national song, " Helvetic." 
Serious purpose and intention disguised in gentle gayety 
and childlike badinage, feeling hiding itself under a smile 
of satire, a resigned and pensive wisdom expressing itself in 
rustic round or ballad, the power of suggesting everything 
in a nothing these are the points in which the Vaudois 
poet triumphs. On the reader's side there is emotion and 
surprise, and on the author's a sort of pleasant slyness 
which seems to delight in playing tricks upon you, only 



232 AMI EL' 8 JOURNAL. 

tricks of the most dainty and brilliant kind. Juste Olivier 
has the passion we might imagine a fairy to have for deli- 
cate mystification. He hides his gifts. He promises 
nothing and gives a great deal. His generosity, which is 
prodigal, has a surly air; his simplicity is really subtlety; 
his malice pure tenderness; and his whole talent is, as it 
were, the fine flower of the Vaudois mind in its sweetest 
and dreamiest form. 

February 10, 1871. My reading for this morning has 
been some vigorous chapters of Taine's "History of 
English Literature." Taine is a writer whose work always 
produces a disagreeable impression upon me, as though of 
a creaking of pulleys and a clicking of machinery; there 
is a smell of the laboratory about it. His style is the style 
of chemistry and technology. The science of it is inex- 
orable; it is dry and forcible, penetrating and hard, strong 
and harsh, but altogether lacking in charm, humanity, 
nobility, and grace. The disagreeable effect which it 
makes on one's taste, ear, and heart, depends probably 
upon two things: upon the moral philosophy of the 
author and upon his literary principles. The profound 
contempt for humanity which characterizes the physiolog- 
ical school, and the intrusion of technology into literature 
inaugurated by Balzac and Stendhal, explain the underly- 
ing aridity of which one is sensible in these pages, and 
which seems to choke one like the gases from a manufac- 
tory of mineral products. The book is instructive in the 
hightst degree, but instead of animating and stirring, it 
parches, corrodes, and saddens its reader. It excites no 
feeling whatever; it is simply a means of information. I 
imagine this kind of thing will be the literature of the 
future a literature a V Americaine, as different as possible 
from Greek art, giving us algebra instead of life, the for- 
mula instead of the image, the exhalations of the cruciblo 
instead of the divine madness of Apollo. Cold vision will 
replace the joys of thought, and we shall see the death of 
poetry, flayed and dissected by science. 

February 15, 1871. Without intending it, nations edu- 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 233 

cate each other, while having apparently nothing in view 
but their own selfish interests. It was France who made 
the Germany of the piresent, by attempting its destruction 
during ten generations; it is Germany who will regenerate 
contemporary France, by the effort to crush her. Revolu- 
tionary France will teach equality to the Germans, who are 
by nature hierarchical. Germany will teach the French 
that rhetoric is not science, and that appearance is not as 
valuable as reality. The worship of prestige that is to 
say, of falsehood ; the passion for vainglory that is to say, 
for smoke and noise; these are what must die in the inter- 
ests of the world. It is a false religion which is being 
destroyed. I hope sincerely that this war will issue in a 
new balance of things better than any which has gone be- 
fore a new Europe, in which the government of the 
individual by himself will be the cardinal principle of 
society, in opposition to the Latin principle, which regards 
the individual as a thing,- a means to an end, an instru- 
ment of the church or of the state. 

In the order and harmony which would result from free 
adhesion and voluntary submission to a common ideal, we 
should see the rise of a new moral world. It would be an 
equivalent, expressed in lay terms, to the idea of a universal 
priesthood. The model state ought to resemble a great 
musical society in which every one submits to be organized, 
subordinated, and disciplined for the sake of art, and for 
the sake of producing a masterpiece. Nobody is coerced, 
nobody is made use of for selfish purposes, nobody plays a 
hypocritical or selfish part. All \ ring their talent to the 
common stock, and contribute knowingly and gladly to 
the common wealth. Even self-love itself is obliged to 
help on the general action, under pain of rebuff should it 
make itself apparent. 

February 18, 1871. It is in the novel that the average 
vulgarity of German society, and its inferiority to the 
societies of France and England, are most clearly visible. 
The notion of " bad taste " seems to have no place in Ger- 
man aesthetics. Their elegance has no grace in it; and 



234 AMltiL'B JOURNAL. 

they cannot understand the enormous difference there is 
between distinction (what is gentlemanly, ladylike), and 
their stiff vornehmlichkeit. Their imagination lacks style, 
training, education, and knowledge of the world; it has 
an ill-bred air even in its Sunday dress. The race is 
poetical and intelligent, but common and ill-mannered. 
Pliancy and gentleness, manners, wit, vivacity, taste, 
dignity, and charm, are qualities which belong to others. 

Will that inner freedom of soul, that profound harmony 
of all the faculties which I have so often observed among 
the best Germans, ever come to the surface? Will the 
conquerors of to-day ever learn to civilize and soften their 
forms of life? It is by their future novels that we shall 
be able to judge. As soon as they are capable of the novel 
of " good society " they will have excelled all rivals. Till 
then, finish, polish, the maturity of social culture, are 
beyond them ; they may have humanity of feeling, but the 
delicacies, the little perfections of life, are unknown to 
them. They may be honest and well-meaning, but they 
are utterly without savoir vivre. 

February 22, 1871. Soiree at the M . About 

thirty people representing our best society were there, a 
happy mixture of sexes and ages. There were gray heads, 
young girls, bright faces the whole framed in some 
Aubusson tapestries which made a charming background, 
and gave a soft air of distance to the brilliantly-dressed 
groups. 

In society people are expected to behave as if they lived 
on ambrosia and concerned themselves with nothing but 
the loftiest interests. Anxiety, need, passion, have no exist- 
ence. All realism is suppressed as brutal. In a word, 
what we call " society " proceeds for the moment on the 
flattering illusory assumption that it is moving in an 
ethereal atmosphere and breathing the air of the gods. 
All vehemence, all natural expression, all real suffering, all 
careless familiarity, or any frank sign of passion, are start- 
ling and distasteful in this delicate milieu ; they at once 
destroy the common work, the cloud palace, the magical 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 235 

architectural whole, which has been raised by the general 
consent and effort. It is like the sharp cock-crow which 
breaks the spell of all enchantments, and puts the fairies 
to flight. These select gatherings produce, without know- 
ing it, a sort of concert for eyes and ears, an improvised 
work of art. By the instinctive collaboration of every- 
body concerned, intellect and taste hold festival, and the 
associations of reality are exchanged for the associations of 
imagination. So understood, society is a form of poetry; 
the cultivated classes deliberately recompose the idyll of 
the past and the buried world of Astrea. Paradox or no, 1 
believe that these fugitive attempts to reconstruct a dream 
whose only end is beauty represent confused reminiscences 
of an age of gold haunting the human heart, or rather 
aspirations toward a harmony of things which every daj 
reality denies to us, and of which art alone gives us a 
glimpse. 

April 28, 1871. For a psychologist it is extremely inter- 
esting to be readily and directly conscious of the complica- 
tions of one's own organism and the play of its several 
parts. It seems to me that the sutures of my being are be- 
coming just loose enough to allow me at once a clear percep- 
tion of myself as a whole and a distinct sense of my own brit- 
tleness. A feeling like this makes personal existence a 
perpetual astonishment and curiosity. Instead of only 
seeing the world Avhich surrounds me, I analyze myself. 
Instead of being single, all of a piece, I become legion, mul- 
titude, a whirlwind a very cosmos. Instead of living on 
the surface, I take possession of my inmost self , I apprehend 
myself, if not in my cells and atoms, at least so far as my 
groups of organs, almost my tissues, are concerned. In 
other words, the central monad isolates itself from all the 
subordinate monads, that it may consider them, and finds 
its harmony again in itself. 

Health is the perfect balance between our organism, 
with all its component parts, and the outer world; it serves, 
us especially for acquiring a knowledge of that world. 
Organic disturbance obliges us to set up a fresh and more 



236 AMJKL'S JOURNAL. 

spiritual equilibrium, to withdraw within the soul. 
Thereupon our bodily constitution itself becomes the ob- 
ject of thought. It is no longer we, although it may 
belong to us; it is nothing more than the vessel in which 
we make the passage of life, a vessel of which we study the 
weak points and the structure without identifying it with 
our own individuality. 

Where is the ultimate residence of the self? In thought, 
or rather in consciousness. But below consciousness there 
is its germ, the punctum saliens of spontaneity; for con- 
sciousness is not primitive, it becomes. The question is, 
can the thinking monad return into its envelope, that is 
to say, into pure spontaneity, or even into the dark abyss 
of virtuality? I hope not. The kingdom passes; the 
king remains; or rather is it the royalty alone which sub- 
sists that is to say, the idea the personality begin in its 
turn merely the passing vesture of the permanent idea? Is 
Leibnitz or Hegel right? Is the individual immortal 
under the form of the spiritual body? Is he eternal under 
the form of the individual idea? Who saw most clearly, 
St. Paul or Plato? The theory of Leibnitz attracts me 
most because it opens to us an infinite of duration, of mul- 
titude, and evolution. For a monad, which is the virtual 
universe, a whole infinite of time is not too much to develop 
the infinite within it. Only one must admit exterior 
actions and influences which affect the evolution of the 
monad. Its independence must be a mobile and increasing 
quantity between zero and the infinite, without ever reach- 
ing either completeness or nullity, for the monad can be 
neither absolutely passive nor entirely free. 

June 21, 1871. The international socialism of the 
ouvriers, ineffectually put down in Paris, is beginning to 
celebrate its approaching victory. For it there is neither 
country, nor memories, nor property, nor religion. There 
is nothing and nobody but itself. Its dogma is equality, 
its prophet is Mably, and Babceuf is its god.* 

* Mably, the Abbe Mably, 1709-85, one of the precursors of the 
revolution, the professor of a cultivated and classical communisn 



A MJKL'S JO URNAL. 23 7 

How is the conflict to be solved, since there is no longer 
one single common principle between the partisans and the 
enemies of the existing form of society, between liberalism 
and the worship of equality? Their respective notions of 
man,duty,happiness that is to say,of life and its end differ 
radically. I suspect that the communism of the Interna- 
tionale is merely the pioneer of Eussian nihilism, which 
will be the common grave of the old races and the servile 
races, the Latins and the Slavs. If so, the salvation of 
humanity will depend upon individualism of the brutal 
American sort. I believe that the nations of the present 
are rather tempting chastisement than learning wisdom. 
Wisdom, which means balance and harmony, is only met 
with in individuals. Democracy, which means the rule of 
the masses, gives preponderance to instinct, to nature, to 
the passions that is to say, to blind impulse, to elemental 
gravitation, to generic fatality. Perpetual vacillation 
between contraries becomes its only mode of progress, be- 
cause it represents that childish form of prejudice which 
falls in love and cools, adores, and curses, with the same 
haste and unreason. A succession of opposing follies 
gives an impression of change which the people readily 
identify with improvement, as though Enceladus was 
more at ease on his left side than on his right, the weight 
of the volcano remaining the same. The stupidity of 
Demos is only equaled by its presumption. It is like a 
youth with all his animal and none of his reasoning powers 
developed. 

Luther's comparison of humanity to a drunken peasant, 
always ready to fall from his horse on one side or the 
other, has always struck me as a particularly happy one. 
It is not that I deny the right of the democracy, but I 

based on a study of antiquity, which Babeuf and others like him, 
in the following generation, translated into practical experiment. 
" Caius Gracchus" Babeuf, born 1764, and guillotined in 1797 for a con- 
spiracy against the Directory, is sometimes called the first French 
socialist. Perhaps socialist doctrines, properly so called, may be said 
to make their first entry into the region of popular debate and practi- 
cal agitation with his " Manifesto des figaux," issued April 1796. 



^ MIEL'S JO URN A L. 

ihave no sort of illusion as to the use it will make of its 
right, so long, at any rate, as wisdom is the exception and 
conceit the rule. Numbers make law, but goodness has 
nothing to do with figures. Every fiction is self-expiating, 
and democracy rests upon this legal fiction, that the 
majority has not only force but reason on its side that it 
possesses not only the right to act but the wisdom neces* 
sary for action. The fiction is dangerous because of its 
flattery; the demagogues have always flattered the private 
feelings of the masses. The masses will always be below 
the average. Besides, the age of majority will be lowered, 
the barriers of sex will be swept away, and democracy will 
finally make itself absurd by handing over the decision of 
all that is greatest to all that is most incapable. Such an 
end will be the punishment of its abstract principle of 
equality, which dispenses the ignorant man from the 
necessity of self -train ing, the foolish man from that of 
.self-judgment, and tells the child that there is no need for 
him to become a man, and the good-for-nothing that self- 
improvement is of no account. Public law, founded upon 
virtual equality, will destroy itself by its consequences. It 
will not recognize the inequalities of worth, of merit, and 
of experience; in a word, it ignores individual labor, and 
it will end in the triumph of platitude and the residuum. 
The regime of the Parisian Commune has shown us what 
kind of material comes to the top in these days of frantic 
vanity and universal suspicion. 

Still, humanity is tough, and survives all catastrophes. 
Only it makes one impatient to see the race always taking 
the longest road to an end, and exhausting all possible 
faults before it is able to accomplish one definite step 
'toward improvement. These innumerable follies, that are 
to be and must be, have an irritating effect upon me. The 
more majestic is the history of science, the more intoler- 
able is the history of politics and religion. The mode of 
progress in the moral world seems an abuse of the patience 
of God. 

Enough ! There is no help in misanthropy and pessi- 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 239 

mism. If our race vexes us, let us keep a decent silence on 
the matter. We are imprisoned on the same ship, and we 
shall sink with it. Pay your own debt, and leave the rest 
to God. Sharer, as you inevitably are, in the sufferings 
of your kind, set a good example; that is all which is 
asked of you. Do all the good you can, and say all the 
truth you know or believe; and for the rest be patient, 
resigned, submissive. God does his business, do yours. 

July 29, 1871. So long as a man is capable of self- 
renewal he is a living being. Goethe, Schleiermacher and 
Humboldt, were masters of the art. If we are to remain 
among the living there must be a perpetual revival of 
youth within us, brought about by inward change and by 
love of the Platonic sort. The soul must be forever 
recreating itself, trying all its various modes, vibrating in 
all its fibres, raising up new interests for itself. 

The " Epistles " and the " Epigrams " of Goethe which 
I have been reading to-day do not make one love him. 
Why? Because he has so little soul. His way of under- 
standing love, religion, duty, and patriotism has something 
mean and repulsive in it. There is no ardor, no generosity 
in him. A secret barrenness, an ill-concealed egotism, 
makes itself felt through all the wealth and flexibility of 
his talent. It is true that the egotism of Goethe has at 
least this much that is excellent in it, that it respects the 
liberty of the individual, and is favorable to all originality. 
But it will go out of its way to help nobody; it will give 
itself no trouble for anybody; it will lighten nobody else's 
burden; in a word, it does away with charity, the great 
Christian virtue. Perfection for Goethe consists in per- 
sonal nobility, not in love; his standard is aesthetic, not 
moral. He ignores holiness, and has never allowed him- 
self to reflect on the dark problem of evil. A Spinozist 
to the core, he believes in individual luck, not in liberty, 
nor in responsibility. He is a Greek of the great time, to 
whom the inward crises of the religious consciousness are 
unknown. He represents, then, a state of soul earlier than 
or subsequent to Christianity, what the prudent critics of 



240 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 

our time call the "modern spirit; " and only one tendency 
of the modern spirit the worship of nature. For Goethe 
stands outside all the social and political aspirations of the 
generality of mankind; he takes no more interest than 
Nature herself in the disinherited, the feeble, and the 
oppressed. . . . 

The restlessness of our time does not exist for Goethe and 
his school. It is explicable enough. The deaf have no sense 
of dissonance. The man who knows nothing of the voice 
of conscience, the voice of regret or remorse, cannot even 
guess at the troubles of those who live under two masters 
and two laws, and belong to two worlds that of nature 
and that of liberty. For himself, his choice is made. But 
humanity cannot choose and exclude. All needs are vocal 
at once in the cry of her suffering. She hears the men of 
science, but she listens to those who talk to her of religion; 
pleasure attracts her, but sacrifice moves her; and she 
hardly knows whether she hates or whether she adores the 
crucifix. 

Later. Still re-reading the sonnets and the miscellaneous 
poems of Goethe. The impression left by this part of the 
" Gedichte " is much more favorable than that made upon 
me by the "Elegies " and the "Epigrams." The "Water 
Spirits " and " The Divine " are especially noble in feeling. 
One must never be too hasty in judging these complex 
natures. Completely lacking as he ia in the sense of obli- 
gation and of sin, Goethe nevertheless finds his way to 
seriousness through dignity. Greek sculpture has been 
his school of virtue. 

August 15, 1871. Re-read, for the second time, Kenan's 
"Vie de Jesus," in the sixteenth popular edition. The 
most characteristic feature of this analysis of Christianity 
is that sin plays no part at all in it. Now, if anything 
explains the success of the gospel among men, it is that it 
brought them deliverance from sin in a word, salvation. 
A man, however, is bound to explain a religion seriously, 
and not to shirk the very center of his subject. This 
white-marble Christ is not the Christ who inspired the 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 241 

martyrs and has dried so many tears. The author lacks 
moral seriousness, and confounds nobility of character 
with holiness. He speaks as an artist conscious of a 
pathetic subject, but his moral sense is not interested in 
the question. It is not possible to mistake the epicurean- 
ism of the imagination, delighting itself in an aesthetic 
spectacle, for the struggles of a soul passionately in search 
of truth. In Eenan there are still some remains of priestly 
ruse; he strangles with sacred cords. His tone of con- 
temptuous indulgence toward a more or less captious clergy 
might be tolerated, but he should have shown a more 
respectful sincerity in dealing with the sincere and the 
spiritual. Laugh at Pharisaism as you will, but speak 
simply and plainly to honest folk.* 

Later. To understand is to be conscious of the funda- 
mental unity of the thing to be explained that is to say, to 
conceive it in its entirety both of life and development, to 
be able to remake it by a mental process without making a 
mistake, without adding or omitting anything. It means, 
first, complete identification of the object, and then the 
power of making it clear to others by a full and just inter- 
pretation. To understand is more difficult than to judge, 
for understanding is the transference of the mind into the 
conditions of the object, whereas judgment is simply the 
enunciation of the individual opinion. 

Augustus, 1871. (Charnex-sur-Montreux). Magnificent 
weather. The morning seems bathed in happy peace, and 
a heavenly fragrance rises from mountain and shore; it is 
as though a benediction were laid upon us. No vulgar 
intrusive noise disturbs the religious quiet of the scene. 
One might believe one's self in a church a vast temple in 
which every being and every natural beauty has its place. 
T dare not breathe for fear of putting the dream to flight 
a dream traversed by angels. 

* " 'Persifflez les pharisa'ismes, niais parlez droit aux honnetes 
gens ' me dit Amiel, avec ;;ne certaine aigreur. Mon Dieu, que les 
honnetes gens sont souvent exposes a etre des pkarisiens sans le 
eavoirl " -(M. Kenan's article, already quoted). 



342 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

" Comme autrefois j 'en tends dans leather infini 
La inusique da temps et I'kosanna des mondes." 

In these heavenly moments the cry of Pauline rises to 
one's lips.* "I feel! I believe! I see!" All the miseries, 
the cares, the vexations of life, are forgotten ; the universal 
joy absorbs us; we enter into the divine order, and into, 
the blessedness of the Lord. Labor and tears, sin, pain, 
and death have passed away. To exist is to bless ; life is 
happiness. In this sublime pause of things all dissonances 
have disappeared. It is as though creation were but one 
vast symphony, glorifying the God of goodness with an 
inexhaustible wealth of praise and harmony. We question 
no longer whether it is so or not. We have ourselves be- 
come notes in the great concert; and the soul breaks the 
silence of ecstasy only to vibrate in unison with the 
eternal joy. 

September 22, 1871. (Charnex). Gray sky a melan- 
choly day. A friend has left me, the sun is unkind and 
capricious. Everything passes away, everything forsakes 
us. And in place of all we have lost,* age and gray hairs! 

. . . After dinner I walked to Ohailly between two 
showers. A rainy landscape has a great charm for me; 
the dark tints become more velvety, the softer tones more 
ethereal. The country in rain is like a face with traces of 
tears upon it less beautiful no doubt, but more expressive. 

Behind the beauty which is superficial, gladsome, 
radiant, and palpable, the aesthetic sense discovers another 
order of beauty altogether, hidden, veiled, secret and mys- 
erious, akin to moral beauty. This sort of beauty only 
reveals itself to the initiated, and is all the more exquisite 
for that. It is a little like the refined joy of sacrifice, like 
the madness of faith, like the luxury of grief; it is not 

* " Polyeucte," Act. V. Scene v. 

; Mon epoux en mourant m'a laisse ses luruieres; 
Son sang dont tes bourreawx viennent de me couvrir 
M'a dessille les yeux et me les vient d'ouvrir. 
Je vois, je sais, je crois " 



AMI EL' 8 JOURNAL. 

within the reach of all the world. Its attraction is pecu- 
liar, and affects one like some strange perfume, or bizarre 
melody. When once the taste for it is set up the mind 
takes a special and keen delight in it, for one finds in it 

" Son bien premierement, puis le dedain d'autrui," 

and it is pleasant to one's vanity not to be of the same 
opinion as the common herd. This, however, is not pos- 
sible with things which are evident, and beauty which is 
incontestable. Charm, perhaps, is a better name for the 
esoteric and paradoxical beauty, which escapes the vulgar, 
and appeals to our dreamy, meditative side. Classical 
beauty belongs, so to speak, to all eyes; it has ceased to- 
belong to itself. Esoteric beauty is shy and retiring. It 
only unveils itself to unsealed eyes, and bestows its favors, 
only upon love. 

This is why my friend , who places herself imme- 
diately in relation with the souls of those she meets, does, 
not see the ugliness of people when once she is interested 
in them. She likes and dislikes, and those she likes are 
beautiful, those she dislikes are ugly. There is nothing 
more complicated in it than that. For her, aesthetic con- 
siderations are lost in moral sympathy ; she looks with her 
heart only; she passes by the chapter of the beautiful, and 
goes on to the chapter of charm. I can do the same; only 
it is by reflection and on second thoughts; my friend does, 
it involuntarily and at once; she has not the artistic fiber. 
The craving for a perfect correspondence between the 
inside and the outside of things between matter and form 
is not in her nature. She does not suffer from ugliness, 
she scarcely perceives it. As for me, I can only forget 
what shocks me, I cannot help being shocked. All 
corporal defects irritate me, and the want of beauty in 
women, being something which ought not to exist, shocks 
me like a tear, a solecism, a dissonance, a spot of ink in 
a word, like something out of order. On the other hand,, 
beauty restores and fortifies me like some miraculous food,, 
like Olympian ambrosia. 



X>4 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

" Que le bon soit toujours camarade du beau 

Des demain je chercherai femme. 
Mais comme le divorce entre eux n'est pas nouveau, 
Et que peu de beaux corps, hotes d'une belle ame, 

Assemblent 1'un et 1'autre point " 

I will not finish, for after all one mnst resign one's self. 
A beautiful soul in a healthy body is already a rare and 
blessed thing; and if one finds heart, common sense, intel- 
lect, and courage into the bargain, one may well do with- 
out that ravishing dainty which we call beauty, and almost 
without that delicious seasoning which we call grace. We 
do without with a sigh, as one does without a luxury. 
Happy we, to possess what is necessary. 

December 29, 1871. I have been reading Bahnsen 
("Critique de 1'evolutionismede Hegel-Hartmann, au nom 
des principes de Schopenhauer"). What a writer! Like a 
cuttle-fish in water, every movement produces a cloud of 
ink which shrouds his thought in darkness. And what a 
doctrine! A thoroughgoing pessimism, which regards the 
world as absurd, "absolutely idiotic," and reproaches Hart- 
mann for having allowed the evolution of the universe some 
little remains of logic, while, on the contrary, this evolu- 
tion is eminently contradictory, and there is no reason any- 
where except in the poor brain of the reasoner. Of all 
possible worlds that which exists is the worst. Its only 
excuse is that it tends of itself to destruction. The hope 
of the philosopher is that reasonable beings will shorten 
their agony and hasten the return of everything to nothing. 
It is the philosophy of a desperate Satanism, which has 
not even the resigned perspectives of Buddhism to oifer 
to the disappointed and disillusioned soul. The individual 
can but protest and curse. This frantic Sivaism is devel- 
oped from the conception which makes the world the pro- 
duct of blind will, the principle of everything. 

The acrid blasphemy of the doctrine naturally leads the 
writer to indulgence in epithets of bad taste which prevent 
our regarding his work as the mere challenge of a para- 
doxical theorist. We have really to do with a theophobist, 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 245 

whom faith in goodness rouses to a fury of contempt. In 
order to hasten the deliverance of the world, he kills all 
consolation, all hope, and all illusion in the germ, and 
substitutes for the love of humanity which inspired 
Oakyamouni, that Mephistophelian gall which defiles, 
. .vi tliers, and corrodes everything it touches. 

Evolutionism, fatalism, pessimism, nihilism how strange 
. , is to see this desolate and terrible doctrine growing and 
< Banding at the very moment when the German nation 
i> celebrating its greatness and its triumphs! The con- 
trust is so startling that it sets one thinking. 

This orgieof philosophic thought, identifying error with 
existence itself, and developing the axiom of Proudhon 
"Evil is God," will bring back the mass of mankind to the 
Christian theodicy, which is neither optimist nor pessimist, 
but simply declares that the felicity which Christianity 
calls eternal life is accessible to man. 

Self-mockery, starting from a horror of stupidity and 
hypocrisy, and standing in the way of all wholeness of 
mind and all true seriousness this is the goal to which 
intellect brings us at last, unless conscience cries out. 

The mind must have for ballast the clear conception of 
duty, if it is not to fluctuate between levity and despair. 



Before giving advice we must have secured its accept- 
ance, or rather, have made it desired. 



If we begin by overrating the being we love, we shall 
end by treating it with wholesale injustice. 

It is dangerous to abandon one's self to the luxury of 
grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for 
recovery. 



We learn to recognize a mere blunting of the conscience 
in that incapacity for indignation which is not to be con- 
founded with the gentleness of charity, or the reserve of 
humility. 



246 AMIKL'S JO URN A L, 

February 7, 1872. Without faith a man can do nothing. 

But faith can stifle all science. 

What, then, is this Proteus, and whence? 

Faith is a certitude without proofs. Being a certitude, 
it is an energetic principle of action. Being without 
proof, it is the contrary of science. Hence its two aspects; 
and its two effects. Is its point of departure intelligence? 
No. Thought may shake or strengthen faith; it cannot 
produce it. Is its origin in the will? No; good will may 
favor it, ill-will may hinder it, but no one believes by will, 
and faith is not a duty. Faith is a sentiment, for it is a 
hope; it is an instinct, for it precedes all outward instruc- 
tion. Faith is the heritage of the individual at birth; it 
is that which binds him to the whole of being. The indi- 
vidual only detaches himself with difficulty from the 
maternal breast; he only isolates himself by an effort from 
the nature around him, from the love which enwraps him, 
the ideas in which he floats, the cradle in which he lies. 
He is born in union with humanity, with the world, and 
with God. The trace of this original union is faith. 
Faith is the reminiscence of that vague Eden whence our 
individuality issued, but which it inhabited in the som- 
nambulist state anterior to the personal life. 

Our individual life consists in separating ourselves from 
our milieu; in so reacting upon it that we apprehend it 
consciously, and make ourselves spiritual personalities 
that is to say, intelligent and free. Our primitive faith is 
nothing more than the neutral matter which our experi- 
ence of life and things works up a fresh, and which may be 
so affected by our studies of every kind as to perish com- 
pletely in its original form. We ourselves may die before 
we have been able to recover the harmony of a personal 
faith which may satisfy our mind and conscience as well as 
our hearts. But the need of faith never leaves us. It is 
the postulate of a higher truth which is to bring all things 
into harmony. It is the stimulus of research ; it holds out 
to us the reward, it points us to the goal. Such at least is 
the true, the excellent faith. That which is a mere preju- 



AMI KL'S JOURNAL. 247 

dice of childhood, which has never known doubt, which 
ignores science, which cannot respect or understand or 
tolerate different convictions such a faith is a stupidity 
and a hatred, the mother of all fanaticisms. We may then 
repeat of faith what ^Esop said of the tongue 

" Quid medius lingua, lingua quid pejus eadem?" 

To draw the poison-fangs of faith in ourselves, we must 
subordinate it to the love of truth. The supreme worship 
of the true is the only means of purification for all religions 
all confessions, all sects. Faith should only be allowed 
the second place, for faith has a judge in truth. When 
she exalts herself to the position of supreme judge the 
world is enslaved: Christianity, from the fourth to the 
seventeenth century, is the proof of it. . . Will the 
enlightened faith ever conquer the vulgar faith? We 
must look forward in trust to a better future. 

The difficulty, however, is this. A narrow faith has 
much more energy than an enlightened faith; the world 
belongs to will much more than to wisdom. It is not 
then certain that liberty will triumph over fanaticism; 
and besides, independent thought will never have the force 
of prejudice. The solution is to be found in a division of 
labor. After those whose business it will have been to 
hold up to the world th.e ideal of a pure and free faith, 
will come the men of violence, who will bring the new 
creed within the circle of recognized interests, preju- 
dices, and institutions. Is not this just what happened to 
Christianity? After the gentle Master, the impetuous 
Paul and the bitter Councils. It is true that this is what 
corrupted the gospel. But still Christianity has done 
more good than harm to humanity, and so the world ad- 
vances, by the successive decay of gradually improved 
ideals. 

June 19, 1872. The wrangle in the Paris Synod still 
goes on.* The supernatural is the stone of stumbling. 

* A synod of the Reformed churches of France was then occupied 
in determining the constituent conditions of Protestant belief. 



248 -^ MIEL'S JO URNAL. 

It might be possible to agree on the idea of the divine; 
but no, that is not the question the chaff must be sepa- 
rated from the good grain. The supernatural is miracle, 
and miracle is an objective phenomenon independent of all 
preceding casuality. Now, miracle thus understood can- 
not be proved experimentally; and besides, the subjective 
phenomena, far more important than all the rest, are left 
out of account in the definition. Men will not see that 
miracle is a perception of the soul; a vision of the divine 
behind nature; a psychical crisis, analogous to that of 
^Eneas on the last day of Troy, which reveals to us the 
heavenly powers prompting and directing human action. 
For the indifferent there are no miracles. It is only the 
religious souls who are capable of recognizing the finger 
of God in certain given facts. 

The minds which have reached the doctrine of imma- 
nence are incomprehensible to the fanatics of transcend- 
ence. They will never understand these last that the 
panentheism of Krause is ten times more religious than their 
dogmatic supernaturalism. Their passion for the facts 
which are objective, isolated, and past, prevents them from 
seeing the facts which are eternal and spiritual. They 
can only adore what comes to them from without. As 
soon as their dramaturgy is interpreted symbolically all 
seems to them lost. They must have their local prodigies 
their vanished unverifiable miracles, because for them the 
divine is there and only there. 

This faith can hardly fail to conquer among the races 
pledged to the Cartesian dualism, who call the incompre- 
hensible clear, and abhor what is profound. Women also 
will always find local miracle more easy to understand 
than universal miracle, and the visible objective interven- 
tion of God more probable than his psychological and 
inward action. The Latin world by its mental form is 
doomed to petrify its abstractions, and to remain forever 
outside the inmost sanctuary of life, that central hearth 
where ideas are still undivided, without shape or deter- 
mination. The Latin mind makes everything objective, 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

because it remains outside things, and outside itself. It is 
like the eye which only perceives what is exterior to it, and 
which cannot see itself except artificially, and from a dis- 
tance, by means of the reflecting surface of a mirror. 

August 30, 1872. A priori speculations weary me now 
as much as anybody. All the different scholasticisms 
make me doubtful of what they profess to demonstrate, 
because, instead of examining, they affirm from the 
beginning. Their object is to throw up entrenchments 
around a prejudice, and not to discover the truth. They 
accumulate that which darkens rather than that which 
enlightens. They are descended, all of them, from the 
Catholic procedure, which excludes comparison, informa- 
tion, and previous examination. Their object is to trick 
men into assent, to furnish faith with arguments, and to 
suppress free inquiry. But to persuade me, a man must 
have no parti pris, and must begin with showing a temper 
of critical sincerity; he must explain to me how the matter 
lies, point out to me the questions involved in it, their 
origin, their difficulties, the different solutions attempted, 
and their degree of probability. He must respect my 
reason, my conscience, and my liberty. All scholasticism 
is an attempt to take by storm ; the authority pretends to 
explain itself, but only pretends, and its deference is 
merely illusory. The dice are loaded and the premises are 
pre-judged. The unknown is taken as known, and all the 
rest is deduced from it. 

Philosophy means the complete liberty of the mind, and 
therefore independence of all social, political, or religious 
prejudice. It is to begin with neither Christian nor 
pagan, neither monarcchial nor democratic, neither socialist 
nor individualist; it is critical and impartial; it loves one 
thing only truth. If it disturbs the ready-made opinions 
of the church or the state of the historical medium in 
which the philosopher happens to have been born, so 
much the worse, but there is no help for it. 

" Est ut est aut non est." 



250 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

Philosophy means, first, doubt; and afterward the con- 
sciousness of what knowledge means, the consciousness of 
uncertainty and of ignorance, the consciousness of limit, 
shade, degree, possibility. The ordinary man doubts 
nothing and suspects nothing. The philosopher is ruore 
cautious, but he is thereby unfitted for action, because, 
although he sees the goal less dimly than others, he sees 
his own weakness too clearly, and has no illusions as to his 
chances of reaching it. 

The philosopher is like a man fasting in the midst of 
universal intoxication. He alone perceives the illusion of 
which all creatures are the willing playthings; he is less 
duped than his neighbor by his own nature. He judges 
more sanely, he sees things as they are. It is in this that 
his liberty consists in the ability to see clearly and soberly, 
in the power of mental record. Philosophy has for its 
foundation critical lucidity. The end and climax of it 
would be the intuition of the universal law, of the first 
principle and the final aim of the universe. Not to be 
deceived is its first desire; to understand, its second. 
Emancipation from error is the condition of real knowl- 
edge. The philosopher is a skeptic sjeeking a plausible 
hypothesis, which may explain to him the whole of his 
experiences. When he imagines that he has found such a 
key to life he offers it to, but does not force it on his fel- 
low men. 

October 9, 1872. I have been taking tea at the M's. 
These English homes are very attractive. They are the 
recompense and the result of a long-lived civilization, and 
of an ideal untiringly pursued. What ideal? That of a 
moral order, founded on respect for self and for others, 
and on reverence for duty in a word, upon personal worth 
and dignity. The master shows consideration to his 
guests, the children are deferential to their parents, and 
every one and everything has its place. They understand 
both how to command and how to obey. The little world 
is well governed, and seems to go of itself; duty is the 
genius loci but duty tinged with a reserve and self-con- 



AMIRL'S JOURNAL. 251 

trol which is the English characteristic. The children are 
the great test of this domestic system ; they are happy, 
smiling, trustful, and yet no trouble. One feels that they 
know themselves to be loved, but that they know also 
that they must obey. Our children behave like masters of 
the house, and when any definite order comes to limit 
their encroachments they see in it an abuse of power, an 
arbitrary act. Why? Because it is their principle to be- 
lieve that ererything turns round them. Our children 
may be gentle and affectionate, but they are not grateful, 
and they know nothing of self-control. 

How do English mothers attain this result? By a 
rule which is impersonal, invariable, and firm; in other 
words, by law, which forms man for liberty, while arbi- 
trary decree only leads to rebellion and attempts at emanci- 
pation. This method has the immense advantage of form- 
ing characters which are restive under arbitrary authority, 
and yet amenable to justice, conscious of what is due to 
them and what they owe to others, watchful over con- 
science, and practiced in self-government. In every English 
child one feels something of the national motto " God and 
my right," and in every English household one has a sense 
that the home is a citadel, or better still, a ship in which 
every one has his place. Naturally in such a world the 
value set on family life corresponds with the cost of pro- 
ducing it; it is sweet to those whose efforts maintain it. 

October 14,1872. The man who gives himself to con- 
templation looks on at, rather than directs his life, is rather 
a spectator than an actor, seeks rather to understand than 
to achieve. Is this mode of existence illegitimate, im- 
moral? Is one bound to act? Is such detachment an 
idiosyncrasy to be respected or a sin to be fought against? I 
have always hesitated on this point, and I have wasted years 
in futile self-reproach and useless fits of activity. My west- 
ern conscience, penetrated as it is with Christian morality, 
has always persecuted my oriental quietism and Buddhist 
tendencies. I have not dared to approve myself, I have 
not known how to correct myself. In this, as in all else, 



252 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

I have remained divided and perplexed, wavering between 
two extremes. So equilibrium is somehow preserved, but 
the crystallization of action or thought becomes impos- 
sible. 

Having early a glimpse of the absolute, I have never had 
the indiscreet effrontery of individualism. What right 
have I to make a merit of a defect? I have never been 
able to see any necessity for imposing myself upon others, 
iior for succeeding. I have seen nothing clearly except 
my own deficiencies and the superiority of others. That 
is not the way to make a career. With varied aptitudes 
and a fair intelligence, I had no dominant tendency, no 
imperious faculty, so that while by virtue of capacity 
I felt myself free, yet when free I could not discover what 
was best. Equilibrium produced indecision, and indecision 
has rendered all my faculties barren. 

November 8, 1872. (Friday}. I have been turning over 
the " Stoics " again. Poor Louisa Siefert!* Ah! we play 
the stoic, and all the while the poisoned arrow in the side 
pierces and wounds, lethalis arundo. What is it that, like 
all passionate souls, she really craves for? Two things 
which are contradictory glory and happiness. She adores 
two incompatibles the Reformation and the Revolution, 
France and the contrary of France; her talent itself is a 
combination of two opposing qualities, inwardness and 
brilliancy, noisy display and lyrical charm. She dislocates 
the rhythm of her verse, while at the same time she has a 
sensitive ear for rhyme. She is always wavering between 
Valmore and Baudelaire, between Leconte de Lisle and 
Sainte-Beuve that is to say, her taste is a bringing 
together of extremes. She herself has described it: 

" Toujours extreme en mes desirs, 
Jadis, enfant joyeuse et folle, 
Souvent une seule parole 
Bouleversait tous mes plaisirs." 

* Louise Siefert, a modern French poetess, died 1879. In addition 
to "Les Stoi'ques," she published "L'Annee Republicaine," Paris 
1869, and other works. 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 253 

But what a fine instrument she possesses! what strength 
of soul ! what wealth of imagination ! 

December 3, 1872. What a strange dream! I was 
under an illusion and yet not under it ; I was playing a 
comedy to myself, deceiving my imagination without being 
able to deceive my consciousness. This power which 
dreams have of fusing incompatibles together, of uniting 
what is exclusive, of identifying yes and no, is what is 
most wonderful and most symbolical in them. In a dream 
our individuality is not shut up within itself; it envelops, 
so to speak, its surroundings; it is the landscape, and all 
that it contains, ourselves included. But if our imagina- 
tion is not our OAvn, if it is impersonal, then personality is 
but a special and limited case of its general functions. A 
fortiori it would be the same for thought. And if so, 
thought might exist without possessing itself individually, 
without embodying itself in an ego. In other words, dreams 
lead us to the idea of an imagination enfranchised from 
the limits of personality, and even of a thought which 
should be no longer conscious. The individual who dreams 
is on the way to become dissolved in the universal phantas- 
magoria of Ma'ia. Dreams are excursions into the limbo 
of things, a semi-deliverance from the human prison. 
The man who dreams is but the locale of various phenomena 
of which he is the spectator in spite of himself ; he is pas- 
sive and impersonal ; he is the plaything of unknown vibra- 
tions and invisible sprites. 

The man who should never issue from the state of dream 
would have never attained humanity, properly so called, 
but the man who had never dreamed would only know the 
mind in its completed or manufactured state, and would 
not be able to understand the genesis of personality; he 
would be like a crystal, incapable of guessing what 
crystallization means. So that the waking life issues from 
the dream life, as dreams are an emanation from the nerv- 
ous life, and this again is the fine flower of organic life. 
Thought is the highest point of a series of ascending meta- 
morphoses, which is called nature. Personality by means 



254 AMIRL'S JOURNAL. 

of thought recovers in inward profundity what it has lost 
in extension, and makes up for the rich accumulations of 
receptive passivity by the enormous privilege of that em- 
pire over self which is called liberty. Dreams, by confus- 
ing and suppressing all limits, make us feel, indeed, the 
severity of the conditions attached to the higher existence; 
but conscious and voluntary thought alone brings knowl- 
edge and allows us to act that is to say, is alone capable 
of science and of perfection. Let us then take pleasure in 
dreaming for reasons of psychological curiosity and mental 
recreation; but let us never speak ill of thought, which is 
our strength and our dignity. Let us begin as Orientals, 
and end as Westerns, for these are the two halves of 
wisdom. 

December 11, 1872. A deep and dreamless sleep and 
now I wake up to the gray, lowering, rainy sky, which has 
kept us company for so long. The air is mild, the general 
outlook depressing. I think that it is partly the fault of 
my windows, which are not very clean, and contribute by 
their dimness to this gloomy aspect of the outer world. 
Rain and smoke have besmeared them. 

Between us and things how many screens there are! 
Mood, health, the tissues of the eye, the window-panes of 
our cell, mist, smoke, rain, dust, and light itself and all 
infinitely variable ! Heraclitus said : " No man bathes twice 
in the same river." I feel inclined to say; No one sees the 
same landscape twice over, for a window is one kaleido- 
scope, and the spectator another. 

What is madness? Illusion, raised to the second power. 
A sound mind establishes regular relations, & modus vivendi^ 
between things, men, and iteelf, and it is under the delu- 
sion that it has got hold of stable truth and eternal fact. 
Madness does not even see what sanity sees, deceiving itself 
all the while by the belief that it sees better than sanity. 
The sane mind or common sense confounds the fact of ex- 
perience with necessary fact, and assumes in good faith 
that what is, is the measure of what may be; while mad- 
ness cannot perceive any difference between what is and 
what it imagines it confounds its dreams with reality. 



AMIENS JOURNAL. #55 

Wisdom consists in rising superior both to madness and 
to common sense, and in lending one's self to the universal 
illusion without becoming its dupe. It is best, on the 
whole, for a man of taste who knows how to be gay with 
the gay, and serious with the serious, to enter into the 
game of Mai'a, and to play his part with a good grace in the 
fantastic tragi-comedy which is called the Universe. It 
seems to me that here intellectualism reaches its limit.* 
The mind, in its intellectual capacity, arrives at the 
intuition that all reality is but the dream of a dream. 
What delivers us from the palace of dreams is pain, per- 
sonal pain ; it is also the sense of obligation, or that which 
combines the two, the pain of sin ; and again it is love ; in 
short, the moral order. What saves us from the sorceries 
of Mai'a is conscience ; conscience dissipates the narcotic 
vapors, the opium-like hallucinations, the placid stupor of 
contemplative indifference. It drives us into contact 
with the terrible wheels within wheels of human suffering 
and human responsibility; it is the bugle-call, the cock- 
crow, which puts the phantoms to flight; it is the armed 
archangel who chases man from an artificial paradise. 
Intellectualism may be described as an intoxication con- 
scious of itself; the moral energy which replaces it, on the 
other hand, represents a state of fast, a famine and a sleep 
less thirst. Alas ! Alas ! 

* " We all believe in duty," says M. Renan, " and in the triumph 
of righteousness;" but it is possible notwithstanding, " que tout le 
contraire soit vrai et que le monde ne soit qu'une aruusante feerie 
dont aucun dieu ne se soucie. II faut done nous arranger de maniere 
a ceque, dans le cas ou le seconde hypothese serait la vraie, nous 
n'ayons pas ete trop dupes." 

This strain of remark, which is developed at considerable length, 
is meant as a criticism of Amiel's want of sensitiveness to the irony 
of things. But in reality, as the passage in the text shows, M. 
Renan is only expressing a feeling with which Amiel was just as 
familiar as his critic. Only he is delivered from this last doubt of all 
by his habitual seriousness; by that sense of "horror and awe" 
which M. Renan puts away from him. Conscience saves him " from 
the sorceries of Mai'a " 



256 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 

Those who have the most frivolous idea of sin are just 
those who suppose that there is a fixed gulf between good 
people and others. 



The ideal which the wife and mother makes for herself, 
the manner in which she understands duty and life, con- 
tain the fate of the community. Her faith becomes the 
star of the conjugal ship, and her love the animating prin- 
ciple that fashions the future of all belonging to her. 
Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She 
carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle. 



Perhaps it is not desirable that a woman should be free 
in mind; she would immediately abuse her freedom. She 
cannot become philosophical without losing her special 
gift, which is the worship of all that is individual, the 
defense of usage, manners, beliefs, traditions. Her r61e is 
to slacken the combustion of thought It is analogous to 
that of azote in vital air. 



In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past a 
pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has 
disappeared. 

January 6, 1873. I have been reading the seven 
tragedies of JEschylus, in the translation of Leconte de 
Lisle. The "Prometheus" and the "Eumenides" are 
greatest where all is great; they have the sublimity of the 
old prophets. Both depict a religious revolution a pro- 
found crisis in the life of humanity. In " Prometheus " 
it is civilization wrenched from the jealous hands of the 
gods; in the "Eumenides" it is the transformation of the 
idea of justice, and the substitution of atonement and par- 
don for the law of implacable revenge. "Prometheus" 
shows us the martyrdom which waits for all the saviors of 
men ; the " Eumenides " is the glorification of Athens and 
the Areopagus that is to say, of a truly human civiliza- 
tion. How magnificent it is as poetry, and how small the 
adventures of individual passion seem beside this colossal 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL 257 

type of tragedy, of which the theme is the destinies of 
nations ! 

March 31, 1873. (4 p. M.) 

" En quel songe 

Se plonge 
Mon coeur, et que veut-il? " 

ji?or an hour past I have been the prey of a vague 
anxiety; I recognize my old enemy. . . . It is a sense 
of void and anguish; a sense of something lacking: what? 
Love, peace God perhaps. The feeling is one of pure 
want unmixed with hope, and there is anguish in it be- 
cause I can clearly distinguish neither the evil nor its 
remedy. 

" O printemps sans pitie, dans 1'ame endolorie, 
Avec tes chants d'oiseaux, tes brises, ton azur, 
Tu creuses sourderaent, conspirateur obscur, 
Le gouffre des langueurs et de la reverie." 

Of all the hours of the day, in fine weather, the after- 
noon, about 3 o'clock, is the time which to me is most 
difficult to bear. I never feel more strongly than I do then, 
"le vide effrayant de la vie," the stress of mental anxiety, 
or the painful thirst for happiness. This torture born of 
the sunlight is a strange phenomenon. Is it that the sun, 
just as it brings out the stain upon a garment, the wrinkles 
in a face, or the discoloration of the hair, so also it illu- 
mines within exorable distinctness the scars and rents of the 
heart? Does it rouse in us a sort of shame of existence? 
In any case the bright hours of the day are capable of 
flooding the whole soul with melancholy, of kindling in us 
the passion for death, or suicide, or annihilation, or of 
driving us to that which is next akin to death, the deaden- 
ing of the senses by the pursuit of pleasure. They rouse 
in the lonely man a horror of himself; they make him 
long to escape from his own misery and solitude 
" Le cceur trempe sept fois dans le neant divin." 

People talk of the temptations to crime connected with 
darkness, but the dumb sense of desolation which is often 



258 AMIJW8 JOURNAL. 

the product of the most brilliant moment of daylight must 
not be forgotten either. From the one, as from the other, 
God is absent; but in the first case a man follows his senses 
and the cry of his passion ; in the second, he feels himself 
lost and bewildered, a creature forsaken by all the world. 

" En nous sont deux instincts qui bravent la raison, 
C'est 1'effroi du bonbeur et la soif du poison. 
Cosur solitaire, a toi prends garde! " 

April 3, 1873. I have been to see my friends . 

Their niece has just arrived with two of her children, and 
the conversation turned on Father Hyacinthe's lecture. 

Women of an enthusiastic temperament have a curious 
way of speaking of extempore preachers and orators. They 
imagine that inspiration radiates from a crowd as such, 
and that inspiration is all that is wanted. Could there be 
a more naif and childish explanation of what is really a 
lecture in which nothing has been left to accident, neither 
the plan, nor the metaphors, nor even the length of the 
whole, and where everything has been prepared with the 
greatest care! But women, in their love of what is mar- 
velous and miraculous, prefer to ignore all this. The 
meditation, the labor, the calculation of effects, the art, in 
a word, which have gone to the making of it, diminishes 
for them the value of the thing, and they prefer to believe 
it fallen from heaven, or sent down from on high. They 
ask for bread, but cannot bear the idea of a baker. The 
sex is superstitious, and hates to understand what it wishes 
to admire. It would vex it to be forced to give the smaller 
share to feeling, and the larger share to thought. It 
wishes to believe that imagination can do the work of 
reason, and feeling the work of science, and it never asks 
itself how it is that women, so rich in heart and imagina- 
tion, have never distinguished themselves as orators that is 
to say, have never known how to combine a multitude of 
facts, ideas, and impulses, into one complex unity. Enthu- 
siastic women never even suspect the difference that there 
is between the excitement of a popular harangue, which is 
nothing but a mere passionate outburst, and the unfold- 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 259 

ing of a didactic process, the aim of which is to prove 
something and to convince its hearers. Therefore, for 
them, study, reflection, technique, count as nothing; the 
improvisatore mounts upon the tripod, Pallas all armed 
issues from his lips, and conquers the applause of the 
dazzled assembly. 

Evidently women divide orators into two groups; the 
artisans of speech, who manufacture their laborious dis- 
courses by the aid of the midnight lamp, and the inspired 
souls, who simply give themselves the trouble to be born. 
They will never understand the saying of Quintilian, "Fit 
<orator, nascitur poeta." 

The enthusiasm which acts is perhaps an enlightening 
force, but the enthusiasm which accepts is very like blind- 
ness. For this latter enthusiasm confuses the value of 
things, ignores their shades of difference, and is an obstacle 
to all sensible criticism and all calm judgment. The 
"Ewig-Weibliche " favors exaggeration, mysticism, senti- 
mentalism all that excites and startles. It is the enemy 
of clearness, of a calm and rational view of things, the 
antipodes of criticism and of science. I have had only too 
much sympathy and weakness for the feminine nature. 
The very excess of my former indulgence toward it makes 
me now more conscious of its infirmity. Justice and 
science, law and reason, are virile things, and they come 
before imagination, feeling, reverie, and fancy. When one 
reflects that Catholic superstition is maintained by women, 
one feels how needful it is not to hand over the reins to 
the "Eternal Womanly." 

May 23, 1873. The fundamental error of France lies in 
her psychology. France has always believed that to say a 
thing is the same as to do it, as though speech were action, 
as though rhetoric were capable of modifying the tenden- 
cies, habits, and character of real beings, and as though 
verbiage were an efficient substitute for will, conscience, 
and education. 

France proceeds by bursts of eloquence, of cannonading, 
or of law-making; she thinks that so she can change the 



260 AM1EU 8 JOURNAL. 

nature of things; and she produces only phrases and ruins. 
She has never understood the first line of Montesquieu : 
" Laws are necessary relations, derived from the nature of 
things." She will not see that her incapacity to organize 
liberty comes from her own nature; from the notions 
which she has of the individual, of society, of religion, of 
law, of duty from the manner in which she brings up 
children. Her way is to plant trees downward, and then 
she is astonished at the result! Universal suffrage, with 
a bad religion and a bad popular education, means perpet- 
tual wavering between anarchy and dictatorship, between 
the red and the black, between Dan ton and Loyola. 

How many scapegoats will France sacrifice before it 
occurs to her to beat her own breast in penitence? 

August 18, 1873. (Scheveningeri). Yesterday, Sunday, 
the landscape was clear and distinct, the air bracing, the 
sea bright and gleaming, and of an ashy-blue color. There 
were beautiful effects of beach, sea, and distance; and 
dazzling tracks of gold upon the waves, after the sun had 
sunk below the bands of vapor drawn across the middle 
sky, and before it had disappeared in the mists of the sea 
horizon. The place was very full. All Scheveningen and 
the Hague, the village and the capital, had streamed out 
on to the terrace, amusing themselves at innumerable 
tables, and swamping the strangers and the bathers. The 
orchestra played some Wagner, some Auber, and some 
waltzes. What was all the world doing? Simply enjoy- 
ing life. 

A thousand thoughts wandered through my brain. I 
thought how much history it had taken to make what I 
saw possible; Judaea, Egypt. Greece, Germany. Gaul; all 
the centuries from Moses to Napoleon, and all the zones 
from Batavia to Guiana, had united in the formation of 
this gathering. The industry, the science, the art, the 
geography, the commerce, the religion of the whole human 
race, are repeated in every human combination; and what 
we see before our own eyes at any given moment i inex- 
plicable without reference to all that has ever been. This 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 261 

interlacing of the ten thousand threads which necessity 
weaves into the production of one single phenomenon is a 
stupefying thought. One feels one's self in the presence 
of law itself allowed a glimpse of the mysterious work- 
bhop of nature. The ephemeral perceives the eternal. 

What matters the brevity of the individual span, seeing 
ihat the generations, the centuries, and the worlds them- 
selves are but occupied forever with the ceaseless repro- 
duction of the hymn of life, in all the hundred thousand 
modes and variations which make up the universal sym- 
phony? The motive is always the same; the monad has 
but one law: all truths are but the variation of one single 
truth. The universe represents the infinite wealth of the 
Spirit seeking in vain to exhaust all possibilities, and the 
goodness of the Creator, who would fain share with the 
created all that sleeps within the limbo of Omnipotence. 

To contemplate and adore, to receive and give back, to 
have uttered one's note and moved one's grain of sand, is 
all which is expected from such insects as we are; it is 
enough to give motive and meaning to our fugitive appari- 
tion in existence. . . . 

After the concert was over the paved esplanade behind 
fhe hotels and the two roads leading to the Hague were 
alive with people. One might have fancied one's self upon 
one of the great Parisian boulevards just when the theaters 
are emptying themselves there were so many carriages, 
omnibuses, and cabs. Then, when the human tumult had 
disappeared, the peace of the starry heaven shone out 
resplendent, and the dreamy glimmer of the Milky Way 
was only answered by the distant murmur of the ocean. 

Later. What is it which has always come between real 
life and me? What glass screen has, as it were, interposed 
itself between me and the enjoyment, the possession, the 
contact of things, leaving me only the r61e of the looker-on? 

False shame, no doubt. I have been ashamed to desire. 
Fatal result of timidity, aggravated by intellectual delu- 
sion ! This renunciation beforehand of all natural ambi- 
tions, this systematic cutting aside of all longings and all 



262 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 

desires, has perhaps been false in idea; it has been too 
like a foolish, self-inflicted mutilation. 
Fear, too, has had a large share in it 

" La peur de ce que j'aiine est ma fatalite." 

I very soon discovered that it was simpler for me to give 
up a wish than to satisfy it. Not being able to obtain all 
that my nature longed for, I renounced the whole en bloc, 
without even taking the trouble to determine in detail 
what might have attracted me ; for what was the good of 
stirring up trouble in one's self and evoking images of 
inaccessible treasure? 

Thus I anticipated in spirit all possible disillusions, in 
the true stoical fashion. Only, with singular lack of 
logic, I have sometimes allowed regret to overtake me, and 
I have looked at conduct founded upon exceptional prin- 
ciples with the eyes of the ordinary man. I should have 
been ascetic to the end ; contemplation ought to have been 
enough for me, especially now, when the hair begins to 
whiten. But, after all, I am a man, and not a theorem. 
A system cannot suffer, but I suffer. Logic makes only 
one demand that of consequence; but life makes a thous- 
and ; the body wants health, the imagination cries out for 
beauty, and the heart for love; pride asks for consideration, 
the soul yearns for peace, the conscience for holiness; our 
whole being is athirst for happiness and for perfection; 
and we, tottering, mutilated, and incomplete, cannot 
always feign philosophic insensibility; we stretch out our 
arms toward life, and we say to it under our breath, " Why 
why hast thou deceived me? " 

August 19, 1873. (Scheveningen) . I have had a morning 
walk. It has been raining in the night. There are large 
clouds all round; the sea, veined with green and drab, has 
put on the serious air of labor. She is about her business, 
in no threatening but at the same time in no lingering 
mood. She is making her clouds, heaping up her sands, 
visiting her shores and bathing them with foam, gathering 
up her floods for the tide, carrying the ships to their 



AMIEL'S JO URN A L. 263 

destinations, and feeding the universal life. I found in a 
hidden nook a sheet of fine sand which the water had fur- 
rowed and folded like the pink palate of a kitten's mouth, 
or like a dappled sky. Everything repeats itself by analogy, 
and each little fraction of the earth reproduces in a smaller 
and individual form all the phenomena of the planet. 
Farther on I came across a bank of crumbling shells, and it 
was borne in upon me that the sea-sand itself might well 
be only the detritus of the organic life of preceding eras, a 
vast monument or pyramid of immemorial age, built up 
by countless generations of molluscs who have labored at 
the architecture of the shores like good workmen of God. 
If the dunes and the mountains are the dust of living 
creatures who have preceded us, how can we doubt but 
that our death will be as serviceable as our life, and that 
nothing which has been lent is lost? Mutual borrowing 
and temporary service seem to be the law of existence. 
Only, the strong prey upon and devour the weak, and the 
concrete inequality of lots within the abstract equality of 
destinies wounds and disquiets the sense of justice. 

Same day. A new spirit governs and inspires the 
generation which will succeed me. It is a singular sensa- 
tion to feel the grass growing under one's feet, to see one's 
self intellectually uprooted. One must address one's con- 
temporaries. Younger men will not listen to you. Thought, 
like love, will not tolerate a gray hair. Knowledge herself 
loves the young, as Fortune used to do in olden days. 
Contemporary civilization does not know what to do with 
old age; in proportion as it defies physical experiment, it 
despises moral experience. One sees therein the triumph 
of Darwinism ; it is a state of war, and war must have 
young soldiers; it can only put up with age in its leaders 
when they have the strength and the mettle of veterans. 

In point of fact, one must either be strong or disappear, 
either constantly rejuvenate one's self or perish. It is as 
though the humanity of our day had, like the migratory 
birds, an immense voyage to make across space; she can 
no longer support the weak or help on the laggards. The 



264 A MIEUS JO URNAL. 

great assault upon the future makes her hard and pitiless 
to all who fall by the way. Her motto is, " The devil take 
the hindmost." 

The worship of strength has never lacked altars, but it 
looks as though the more we talk of justice and humanity, 
the more that other god sees his kingdom widen. 

August 20, 1873. (Scheveningeri). I have now watched 
the sea which beats upon this shore under many different 
aspects. On the whole, I should class it with the Baltic. 
As far as color, effect, and landscape go, it is widely differ- 
ent from the Breton or Basque ocean, and, above all, from 
the Mediterranean. It never attains to the blue-green of 
the Atlantic, nor the indigo of the Ionian Sea. Its scale 
of color runs from flint to emerald, and when it turns to 
blue, the blue is a turquoise shade splashed with gray 
The sea here is not amusing itself; it has a busy and 
serious air, like an Englishman or a Dutchman. Neither 
polyps nor jelly-fish, neither sea-weed nor crabs enliven 
the sands at low water; the sea life is poor and meagre. 
What is wonderful is the struggle of man against a miserly 
and formidable power. Nature has done little for him, 
but she allows herself to be managed. Stepmother though 
she be, she is accommodating, subject to the occasional 
destruction of a hundred thousand lives in a single inun- 
dation. 

The air inside the dune is altogether different from that 
outside it. The air of the sea is life-giving, bracing, 
oxydized; the air inland is soft, relaxing, and warm. In 
the same way there are two Hollands in every Dutchman : 
there is the man of the polder, heavy, pale, phlegmatic, 
slow, patient himself, and trying to the patience of otheie, 
and there is the man of the dune, of the harbor, the shore, 
the sea, who is tenacious, seasoned, persevering, sunburned, 
daring. Where the two agree is in calculating prudence, 
and in methodical persistency of effort. 

August 22, 1873. (Scheveningen). The weather is rainy, 
the whole atmosphere gray; it is a time favorable to 
thought and meditation. I have a liking for such days as 



AMIKU 8 JOURNAL. *65 

these; they revive one's converse with one's self and make 
it possible to live the inner life; they are quiet and peace- 
ful, like a song in a minor key. We are nothing but 
thought, but we feel our life to its very center. Our very 
sensations turn to reverie. It is a strange state of mind; 
it is like those silences in worship which are not the empty 
moments of devotion, but the full moments, and which are 
so because at such times the soul, instead of being polar- 
ized, dispersed, localized, in a single impression or thought, 
feels her own totality and is conscious of herself. She 
tastes her own substance. She is no longer played upon, 
colored, set in motion, affected, from without; she is in 
equilibrium and at rest. Openness and self-surrender 
become possible to her; she contemplates and she adores. 
She sees the changeless and the eternal enwrapping all the 
phenomena of time. She is in the religious state, in har- 
mony with the general order, or at least in intellectual 
harmony. Few holiness, indeed, more is wanted a har- 
mony of will, a perfect self-devotion, death to self and 
absolute submission. 

Psychological peace that harmony which is perfect but 
virtual is but the zero, the potentiality of all numbers; 
it is not that moral peace which is victorious over all ills, 
which is real, positive, tried by experience, and able to 
face whatever fresh storms may assail it. 

The peace of fact is not the peace of principle. There 
are indeed two happinesses, that of nature and that of con- 
quest two equilibria, that of Greece and that of Nazareth 
two kingdoms, that of the natural man and that of the 
regenerate man. 

Later. (Scheveningeri). Why do doctors so often make 
mistakes? Because they are not sufficiently individual in 
their diagnoses or their treatment. They class a sick man 
ander some given department of their nosology, whereas 
every invalid is really a special case, a unique example. 
How is it possible that so coarse a method of sifting should 
produce judicious therapeutics? Every illness is a factor 
simple or complex, which is multiplied by a second factor, 



263 4 MIEL'8 JO URN A L. 

invariably complex the individual, that is to say, who is 
suffering from it, so that the result is a special problem, 
demanding a special solution, the more so the greater the 
remoteness of the patient from childhood or from country 
life. 

The principal grievance which I have against the doctors 
is that they neglect the real problem, which is to seize the 
unity of the individual who claims their care. Their 
methods of investigation are far too elementary ; a doctor 
who does not read you to the bottom is ignorant of essen 
tials. To me the ideal doctor would be a man endowed 
with profound knowledge of life and of the soul, intuitively 
divining any suffering or disorder of whatever kind, and 
restoring peace by his mere presence. Such a doctor is 
possible, but the greater number of them lack the higher 
and inner life, they know nothing of the transcendent labor- 
atories of nature; they seem to me superficial, profane, 
strangers to divine things, destitute of intuition and sym- 
pathy. The model doctor should be at once a genius, a 
saint, a man of God. 

September 11, 1873. (Amsterdam). The doctor has just 
gone. He says I have fever about me, and does not think 
that I can start for another three days without imprud- 
ence. I dare not write to my Genevese friends and tell 
them that I am coming back from the sea in a radically 
worse state of strength and throat than when I went there, 
and that I have only wasted my time, my trouble, my 
money, and my hopes. . . . 

This contradictory double fact on the one side an eager 
hopefulness springing up afresh after all disappointments, 
and on the other an experience almost invariably unfavor 
able can be explained like all illusions by the whim of 
nature, which either wills us to be deceived or wills us ^o 
act as if we were so. 

Skepticism is the wiser course, but in delivering us from 
error it tends to paralyze life. Maturity of mind consists 
in taking part in the prescribed game as seriously as though 
one believed in it. Good-humored compliance, tempered 



AMTEL'8 JOURNAL. 267 

by a smile, is, on the whole, the best line to tale; one 
lends one's self to an optical illusion, and the voluntary 
concession has an air of liberty. Once imprisoned in exist- 
ence, we must submit to its laws with a good grace; to- 
rebel against it only ends in impotent rage, when once we- 
have denied ourselves the solution of suicide. 

Humility and submission, or the religious point of view; 
clear-eyed indulgence with a touch of irony, or the point 
of view of worldly wisdom those two attitudes are pos- 
sible. The second is sufficient for the minor ills of life, 
the other is perhaps necessary in the greater ones. The- 
pessimism of Schopenhauer supposes at least health and 
intellect as means of enduring the rest of life. But opti- 
mism either of the stoical or the Christian sort is needed to 
make it possible for us to bear the worst sufferings of flesh,, 
heart and soul. If we are to escape the grip of despair, we. 
must believe either that the whole of things at least is good,, 
or that grief is a fatherly grace, a purifying trial. 

There can be no doubt that the idea of a happy immor- 
tality, serving as a harbor of refuge from the tempests of 
this mortal existence, and rewarding the fidelity, the 
patience, the submission, and the courage of the travelers 
on life's sea there can be no doubt that this idea, the 
strength of so many generations, and the faith of the 
church, carries with it inexpressible consolation to those- 
who are wearied, burdened, and tormented by pain and 
suffering. To feel one's self individually cared for and 
protected by God gives a special dignity and beauty to life. 
Monotheism lightens the struggle for existence. But does 
the study of nature allow of the maintenance of those local 
revelations which are called Mosaism, Christianity, Islam- 
ism? These religions founded upon an infantine cosmogony, 
and upon a chimerical history of humanity, can they bear 
confronting with modern astronomy and geology? The 
present mode of escape, which consists in trying to satisfy 
the claims of both science and faith of the science which 
contradicts all the ancient beliefs, and the faith which, in 
the case of things that are beyond nature and incapable of 



268 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

verification, affirms them on her own responsibility only 
this mode of escape cannot last forever. Every fresh 
cosmical conception demands a religion which corre- 
sponds to it. Our age of transition stands bewildered 
between the two incompatible methods, the scientific 
method and the religious method, and between the two 
certitudes, which contradict each other. 

Surely the reconciliation of the two must be sought for 
in the moral law, which is also a fact, and every step of 
which requires for its explanation another cosmos than the 
cosmos of necessity. Who knows if necessity is not a par- 
ticular case of liberty, and its condition? Who knows if 
nature is not a laboratory for the fabrication of thinking 
beings who are ultimately to become free creatures? 
Biology protests, and indeed the supposed existence of souls, 
independently of time, space, and matter, is a fiction of 
faith, less logical than the Platonic dogma. But the ques- 
tion remains open. We may eliminate the idea of purpose 
from nature, yet, as the guiding conception of the highest 
being of our planet, it is a fact, and a fact which postu- 
lates a meaning in the history of the universe. 

My thought is straying in vague paths: why? because I 
have no creed. All my studies end in notes of interroga- 
tion, and that I may not draw premature or arbitrary 
conclusions I draw none. 

Later on. My creed has melted away, but I believe in 
good, in the moral order, and in salvation; religion for me 
is to live and die in God, in complete abandonment to the 
holy will which is at the root of nature and destiny. I 
believe even in the gospel, the good news that is to say, 
in the reconciliation of the sinner with God, by faith in the 
love of a pardoning Father. 

October 4, 1873. (Geneva). I have been dreaming a long 
while in the moonlight, which floods my room with a 
radiance, full of vague mystery. The state of mind 
induced in us by this fantastic light is itself so dim and 
ghost-like that analysis loses its way in it, and arrives at 
nothing articulate. It is something indefinite and intau- 



AMIEL'8 

gible, like the noise of waves which is made up of a thous- 
and fused and mingled sounds. It is the reverberation of 
all the unsatisfied desires of the soul, of all the stifled sor- 
rows of the heart, mingling in a vague sonorous whole, and 
dying away in cloudy murmurs. All those imperceptible 
regrets, which never individually reach the consciousness, 
accumulate at last into a definite result; they become the 
voice of a feeling of emptiness and aspiration ; their tone is 
melancholy itself. In youth the tone of these ^Eolian 
vibrations of the heart is all hope a proof that these thou- 
sands of indistinguishable accents make up indeed the 
fundamental note of our being, and reveal the tone of 
our whole situation. Tell me what you feel in your soli- 
tary room when the full moon is shining in upon you and 
your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you 
are, and I shall know if you are happy. 



The best path through life is ..the high road, which 
initiates us at the right moment into all experience. Ex- 
ceptional itineraries are suspicious, and matter for anxiety. 
What is normal is at once most convenient, most honest, 
and most wholesome. Cross roads may tempt us for one 
reason or another, but it is very seldom that we do not 
come to regret having taken them. 



Each man begins the world afresh, and not one fault of 
the first man has been avoided by his remotest descendant. 
The collective experience of the race accumulates, but 
individual experience dies with the individual, and the 
result is that institutions become wiser and knowledge as 
such increases; but the young man, although more culti- 
rated, is just as presumptuous, and not less fallible to-day 
than he ever was. So that absolutely there is progress, 
and relatively there is none. Circumstances improve, but 
merit remains the same. The whole is better, perhaps, 
but man is not positively better he is only different. His 
defects and his virtues change li:eir form, but the total 
balance does not show him to be the richer. A thousand 



270 , A MfKL'8 JO URN A L. 

things advance, nine hundred and ninety-eight fall back 
this is progress. There is nothing in it to be proud of, 
but something, after all, to console one. 

February 4, 1874. I am still reading the "Origines du 
Christianisme " by Ernest Havet.* I like the book and I 
dislike it. I like it for its independence and courage; I 
dislike it for the insufficiency of its fundamental ideas, 
and the imperfection of its categories. 

The author, for instance, has no clear idea of religion; 
and his philosophy of history is superficial. He is a 
Jacobin. " The Republic and Free Thought " he cannot 
get beyond that. This curt and narrow school of opinion 
is the refuge of men of independent mind, who have been 
scandalized by the colossal fraud of ultramontanism ; but 
it leads rather to cursing history than to understanding 
it. It is the criticism of the eighteenth century, of which 
the general result is purely negative. But Voltairianism 
is only the half of the philosophic mind. Hegel frees 
thought in a very different way. 

Havet, too, makes another mistake. He regards Chris- 
tianity as synonymous with Roman Catholicism and with 
the church. I know very well that the Roman Church 
does the same, and that with her the assimilation is a mat- 
ter of sound tactics; but scientifically it is inexact. We 
ought not even to identify Christianity with the gospel, 
nor the gospel with religion in general. It is the business 
of critical precision to clear away these perpetual confu- 
sions in which Christian practice and Christian preaching 
abound. To disentangle ideas, to distinguish and limit 
them, to fit them into their true place and order, is tho 
first duty of science whenever it lays hands upon such 

* Ernest Havet, born 1813, a distinguished French scholar and 
professor. He became professor of Latin oratory at the College de 
France in 1855, and a member of the Institute in January, 1880. His 
admirable edition of the "Pensees de Pascal " is well-known. "L 
Christianisme et ses Origines," an important book, in four volumes, 
was developed from a series of articles in the Revue dea deux Mondes, 
and the Revue Contemporaine. 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 271 

chaotic and complex things as manners, idioms, or beliefs. 
Entanglement is the condition of life; order and clearness 
are the signs of serious and successful thought. 

Formerly it was the ideas of nature which were a tissue 
of errors and incoherent fancies; now it is the turn of 
moral and psychological ideas. The best issue from the 
present Babel would be the formation or the sketching out 
of a truly scientific science of man. 

February 16, 1874. The multitude, who already possess 
force, and even, according to the Republican view, right, 
have always been persuaded by the Cleons of the day that 
enlightenment, wisdom, thought, and reason, are also 
theirs. The game of these conjurors and quacks of uni- 
versal suffrage has always been to flatter the crowd in order 
to make an instrument of it. They pretend to adore the 
puppet of which they pull the threads. 

The theory of radicalism is a piece of juggling, for it 
supposes premises of which it knows the falsity; it manu- 
factures the oracle whose revelations it pretends to adore; 
it proclaims that the multitude creates a brain for itself, 
while all the time it is the clever man who is the brain of 
the multitude, and suggests to it what it is supposed to 
invent. To reign by flattery has been the common practice 
of the courtiers of all despotisms, the favorites of all 
tyrants; it is an old and trite method, but none the less 
odious for that. 

The honest politician should worship nothing but reason 
and justice, and it is his business to preach them to the 
masses, who represent, on an average, the age of childhood 
and not that of maturity. We corrupt childhood if we tell 
it that it cannot be mistaken, and that it knows more than 
its elders. We corrupt the masses when we tell them that 
they are wise and far-seeing and possess the gift of 
infallibility. 

It is one of Montesquieu's subtle remarks, that the more 
wise men you heap together the less wisdom you will ob- 
tain. Radicalism pretends that the greater number of 
illiterate, passionate, thoughtless above all, young people,, 



272 AMI KL' 8 JOURNAL. 

you heap together, the greater will be the enlightenment 
resulting. The second thesis is no doubt the repartee to 
the first, but the joke is a bad one. All that can be got 
from a crowd is instinct or passion; the instinct may be 
good, but the passion may be bad, and neither is the 
instinct capable of producing a clear idea, nor the passion 
of leading to a just resolution. 

A crowd is a material force, and the support of numbers 
gives a proposition the force of law; but that wise and 
ripened temper of mind which takes everything into 
account, and therefore tends to truth, is never engendered 
by the impetuosity of the masses. The masses are the 
material of democracy, but its form that is to say, the 
laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility 
can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no 
means a universal property. The fundamental error of 
the radical theory is to confound the right to do good with 
good itself, and universal suffrage with universal wisdom. 
It rests upon a legal fiction, which assumes a real equality 
of enlightenment and merit among those whom it declares 
electors. It is quite possible, however, that these electors 
may not desire the public good, and that even if they do, 
they may be deceived as to the manner of realizing it. 
Universal suffrage is not a dogma it is an instrument; 
and according to the population in whose hands it is 
placed, the instrument is serviceable or deadly to the pro- 
prietor. 

February 27, 1874. Among the peoples, in whom the 
social gifts are the strongest, the individual fears ridicule 
above all things, and ridicule is the certain result of 
originality. No one, therefore, wishes to make a party of 
his own; every one wishes to be on the side of all the 
world. "All the world" is the greatest of powers; it is 
sovereign, and calls itself we. We dress, we dine, toe walk, 
we go out, we come in, like this, and not like that. This 
we is always right, whatever it does. The subjects of We 
are more prostrate than the slaves of the East before the 
Padishah. The good pleasure of the sovereign decides 



ANIEUS JOURNAL. 273 

every appeal ; his caprice is law. What we does or says is 
called custom, what it thinks is called opinion, what it be- 
lieves to be beautiful or good is called fashion. Among such 
nations as these we is the brain, the conscience, the reason, 
the taste, and the judgment of all. The individual finds 
everything decided for him without his troubling about 
it. He is dispensed from the task of finding out anything 
whatever. Provided that he imitates, copies, and repeats 
the models furnished by we, he has nothing more to fear. 
He knows all that he need know, and has entered into 
salvation. 

April 29, 1874. Strange reminiscence! At the end of 
the terrace of La Treille, on the eastern side, as I looked 
down the slope, it seemed to me that I saw once more in 
imagination a little path which existed there when I was 
a child, and ran through the bushy underwood, which was 
thicker then than it is now. It is at least forty years since 
this impression disappeared from my mind. The revival 
of an image so dead and so forgotten set me thinking. 
Consciousness seems to be like a book, in which the leaves 
turned by life successively cover and hide each other in 
spite of their semi-transparency; but although the book 
may be open at the page of the present, the wind, for a 
few seconds, may blow back the first pages into view. 

And at death will these leaves cease to hide each other, 
and shall we see all our past at once? Is death the passage 
from the successive to the simultaneous that is to say, 
from time to eternity? Shall we then understand, in its 
unity, the poem or mysterious episode of our existence, 
which till then we have spelled out phrase by phrase? And 
is this the secret of that glory which so often enwraps the 
brow and countenance of those who are newly dead? If 
so, death would be like the arrival of a traveler at the top 
of a great mountain, whence he sees spread out before him 
the whole configuration of the country, of which till then 
he had had but passing glimpses. To be able to overlook 
one's own history, to divine its meaning in the general con- 
cert and in the divine plan, would be the beginning of 



274 AMfKL'S JOURNAL. 

eternal felicity. Till then we had sacrificed ourselves to 
the universal order, but then we should understand and 
-appreciate the beauty of that order. We had toiled and 
labored under the conductor of the orchestra; and we 
should find ourselves become surprised and delighted 
hearers. We had seen nothing but our own little path in 
the mist; and suddenly a marvelous panorama and bound- 
less distances would open before our dazzled eyes. Why 
not? 

May 31, 1874. I have been reading the philosophical 
poems of Madame Ackermann. She has rendered in fine 
verse that sense of desolation which has been so often 
stirred in me by the philosophy of Schopenhauer, of Hurt- 
mann, Comte, and Darwin. What tragic force and power! 
What thought and passion! She has courage for every- 
thing, and attacks the most tremendous subjects. 

Science is implacable; will it suppress all religions? All 
those which start from a false conception of nature, cer- 
tainly. But if the scientific conception of nature proves 
incapable of bringing harmony and peace to man, what 
will happen? Despair is not a durable situation. We 
.shall have to build a moral city without God, without an 
immortality of the soul, without hope. Buddhism and 
-stoicism present themselves as possible alternatives. 

But even if we suppose that there is no finality in the 
cosmos, it is certain that man has ends at which he aims, 
and if so the notion of end or purpose is a real phenome- 
non, although a limited one. Physical science may very 
well be limited by moral science, and vice versd. .But if 
these two conceptions of the world are in opposition, which 
must give way? . 

I still incline to believe that nature is the virtuality of 
mind that the soul is the fruit of life, and liberty the 
flower of necessity that all is bound together, and that 
nothing can be done without. Our modern philosophy 
has returned to the point of view of the lonians, the 
tpvGixoi, or naturalist thinkers. But it will have to 
pass once more through Plato and through Aristotle. 



AMI IW 8 JOURNAL. 275 

through the philosophy of "goodness" and "purpose," 
through the science of mind. 

July 3, 1874. Kebellion against common sense is a piece 
of childishness of which I am quite capable. But it does 
not last long. I am soon brought back to the advantages 
and obligations of my situation ; I return to a calmer self- 
consciousness. It is disagreeable to me, no doubt, tc 
realize all that is hopelsesly lost to me, all that is now and 
will be forever denied to me ; but I reckon up my privileges 
as well as my losses I lay stress on what I have, and not only 
on what I want. And so I escape from that terrible 
dilemma of "all or nothing," which for me always ends in 
the adoption of the second alternative. It seems to me at 
such times that a man may without shame content him- 
self with being some thing and some one 

" Ni si haut, ni si has . . ." 

These brusque lapses into the formless, indeterminate 
state, are the price of my critical faculty. All my former 
habits become suddenly fluid; it seems tome that I am 
beginning life over again, and that all my acquired capital 
has disappeared at a stroke. I am forever new-born; I 
am a mind which has never taken to itself a body, a coun- 
try, an avocation, a sex, a species. Am I even quite sure 
of being a man, a European, an inhabitant of this earth? 
It seems to me so easy to be something else, that to be 
what I am appears to me a mere piece of arbitrary choice. 
I cannot possibly take an accidental structure of which the 
value is purely relative, seriously. When once a man has 
touched the absolute, all that might be other than what it 
is seems to him indifferent. All these ants pursuing their 
private ends excite his mirth. He looks down from the 
moon upon his hovel; he beholds the earth from the 
heights of the sun; he considers his life from the point of 
view of the Hindoo pondering the days of Brahma; he 
sees the finite from the distance of the infinite, and 
thenceforward the insignificance of all those things which 
men hold to be important makes effort ridiculoup, passion 
burlesque, and prejudice absurd. 



276 A MIEL'fl Jfl URNAL. 

August 7, 1874. (Clarens). A day perfectly beautiful, 
luminous, limpid, brilliant. 

I passed the morning in the churchyard; the "Oasis" 
was delightful. Innumerable sensations, sweet and serious, 
peaceful and solemn, passed over me. . . . Around 
me Eussians, English, Swedes, Germans, were sleeping 
their last sleep under the shadow of the Cubly. The land- 
scape was one vast splendor; the woods were deep and mys- 
terious, the roses full blown; all around me were butter- 
flies a noise of wings the murmur of birds. I caught 
glimpses through the trees of distant mists, of soaring 
mountains, of the tender blue of the lake. . . A little 
conjunction of things struck me. Two ladies were tend- 
ing and watering a grave; two nurses were suckling their 
children. This double protest against death had something 
touching and poetical in it. "Sleep, you who are dead; 
we, the living, are thinking of you, or at least carrying on 
the pilgrimage of the race ! " such seemed to me the words 
in my ear. It was clear to me that the Oasis of Clarens is 
the spot in which I should like to rest. Here I am 
surrounded with memories; here death is like a sleep a 
sleep instinct with hope. 



Hope is not forbidden us, but peace and submission are 
the essentials. 

September 1, 1874. (Clarens). On waking it seemed to 
me that I was staring into the future with wide startled 
eyes. Is it indeed to me that these things apply.* Inces- 
sant and growing humiliation, my slavery becoming heavier, 
my circle of action steadily narrower! . . . What is 
hateful in my situation is that deliverance can never be 
hoped for, and that one misery will succeed another in 
such a way as to leave me no breathing space, not even in 
the future, not even in hope. All possibilities are closed 
to me, one by one. It is difficult for the natural man to 
escape from a dumb rage against inevitable agony. 

* Amiel bad just received at the hands of his doctor the medical 
verdict, which was his arret de mort. 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 277 

Noon. An indifferent nature? A Satanic principle of 
things? A good and just God? Three points of view. 
The second is improbable and horrible. The first appeals 
to our stoicism. My organic combination has never been 
anything but mediocre; it has lasted as long as it could. 
Every man has his turn, and all must submit. To die 
quickly is a privilege ; I shall die by inches. Well, submit. 
Rebellion would be useless and senseless. After all, I 
belong to the better-endowed half of human-kind, and my 
lot is superior to the average. 

But the third point of view alone can give joy. Only is 
it tenable? Is there a particular Providence directing all 
the circumstances of our life, and therefore imposing all 
our trials upon us for educational ends? Is this heroic 
faith compatible with our actual knowledge of the laws of 
nature? Scarcely. But what this faith makes objective 
we may hold as subjective truth. The moral being may 
moralize his sufferings by using natural facts for his own 
inner education. What he cannot change he calls the will 
of God, and to will what God wills brings him peace. 

To nature both our continued existence and our morality 
are equally indifferent. But God, on the other hand, if 
God is, desires our sanctifi cation ; and if suffering purifies 
us, then we may console ourselves or suffering. This is 
what makes the great advantage of the Christian faith; it 
is the triumph over pain, the victory over death. There is 
but one thing necessary death unto sin, the immolation 
of our selfish will, the filial sacrifice of our desires. Evil 
consists in living for self that is to say, for one's own 
vanity, pride, sensuality, or even health. Righteousness 
consists in willingly accepting one's lot, in submitting to, 
and espousing the destiny assigned us, in willing what 
God commands, in renouncing what he forbids us, in con- 
senting to what he takes from us or refuses us. 

In my own particular case, what has been taken from 
me is health that is to say, the surest basis of all inde- 
pendence; but friendship and material comfort are still 
left to me; I am neither called upon to bear the slavery of 
poverty nor the hell of absolute isolation. 



278 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 

Health cut off, means marriage, travel, study, and 
forbidden or endangered. It means life reduced in attrac- 
tiveness and utility by five-sixths. 

Thy will be done! 

September 14, 1874. (Charnex). A long walk and con- 
versation with . We followed a high mountain path. 

Seated on the turf, and talking with open heart, our eyea 
wandered over the blue immensity below us, and the smil- 
ing outlines of the shore. All was friendly, azure-tinted, 
caressing, to the sight. The soul I was reading was 
profound and pure. Such an experience is like a flight 
into paradise. A few light clouds climbed the broad 
spaces of the sky, steamers made long tracks upon the 
water at our feet, white sails were dotted over the vast dis- 
tance of the lake, and sea-gulls like gigantic butterflies 
quivered above its rippling surface. 

September 21, 1874. (Charnez). A wonderful day! 
Never has the lake been bluer, or the landscape softer. It 
was enchanting. But tragedy is hidden under the 
eclogue; the serpent crawls under the flowers. All the 
future is dark. The phantoms which for three or four 
weeks I have been able to keep at bay, wait for me behind 
the door, as the Eumenides waited for Orestes. Hemmed 
in on all sides ! 

" On ne croit plu3 a son etoile, 
On sent que derriere la toile 
Sont le deuil, les maux et la mort." 

For a fortnight I have been happy, and now this happi- 
ness is going. 

There are no more birds, but a few white or blue butter- 
flies are still left. Flowers are becoming rare a few 
daisies in the fields, some blue or yellow chicories and col- 
chicums, some wild geraniums growing among fragments 
of old walls, and the brown berries of the privet this is 
all we were able to find. In the fields they are digging 
potatoes, beating down the nuts, and beginning the apple 
harvest. The leaves are thinning and changing color; I 
watch them turning red on the pear-trees, gray on the 



AMIKUS JOURNAL. 

plums, yellow on the walnut-trees, and tinging the 
thickly-strewn turf with shades of reddish-brown. We 
are nearing the end of the fine weather; the coloring is 
the coloring of late autumn; there is no need now to keep 
out of the sun. Everything is soberer, more measured, 
more fugitive, less emphatic. Energy is gone, youth is 
past, prodigality at an end, the summer over. The year 
is on the wane and tends toward winter; it is once more 
in harmony with my owi>. age and position, and next Sun- 
day it will keep my birthday. All these different con- 
sonances form a melancholy harmony. 



The distinguishing mark of religion is not so much 
liberty as obedience, and its value is measured by the sac- 
rifices which it can extract from the individual. 



A young girl's love is a kind of piety. We must approach 
it with adoration if we are not to profane it, and with 
poetry if we are to understand it. If there is anything 
in the world which give& ns a sweet, ineffable impression 
of the ideal, it is this trembling modest love. To deceive 
it would be a crime. Merely xo watch its unfolding life 
is bliss to the beholder ; he sees in it the birth of a divine 
marvel. When the garland of youth fades on our brow, 
let us try at least to have the virtues of maturity ; may we 
grow better, gentler, graver, like the fruit of the vine, 
while its leaf withers and falls. 



To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, 
and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of 
living. 



He who asks of life nothing but the improvement of his 
cwu nature, and a continuous moral progress toward 
inward contentment and religious submission, is less liable 
than any one else to miss and waste life. 

January 2, 1875. (Hyeres.) In spite of my sleeping 
draught I have hau. a bad night. Once it seemed as if 1 
must choke, for I could breathe neither way. 



280 AMI EL'S JOURNAL. 

Could I be more fragile, more sensitive, more vulner- 
able! People talk to me as if there were still a creei 
before me, while all the time I know that the ground ia 
slipping from under me, and that the defense of my 
health is already a hopeless task. At bottom, I am only 
living on out of complaisance and without a shadow of 
eelf-delusion. I know that not one of my desires will be 
realized, and for a long time I have had no desires at all. 
I simply accept what comes to me as though it were a bird 
perching on my window. I smile at it, but I know very 
well that my visitor has wings and will not stay long. 
The resignation which comes from despair has a kind of 
melancholy sweetness. It looks at life as a man sees it 
from his death-bed, and judges it without bitterness and 
without vain regrets. 

I no longer hope to get well, or to be useful, or to be 
happy. I hope that those who have loved me will love me 
to the end; I should wish to have done them some good, 
and to leave them a tender memory of myself. I wish to 
die without rebellion and without weakness; that is about 
all. Is this relic of hope and of desire still too much? 
Let all be as God will. I resign myself into his hands. 

January 22, 1875. (Hyeres). The French mind, accord- 
ing to Gioberti, apprehends only the outward form of 
truth, and exaggerates it by isolating it, so that it acts as 
a solvent upon the realities with which it works. It takes 
the shadow for the substance, the word for the thing, 
appearance for reality, and abstract formula for truth. It 
lives in a world of intellectual assignats. If you talk to a 
Frenchman of art, of language, of religion, of the state, 
of duty, of the family, you feel in his way of speaking 
thai his thought remains outside the subject, that he 
never penetrates into its substance, its inmost core. He 
is not striving to understand it in its essence, but only to 
say something plausible about it. On his lips the noblest 
words become thin and empty; for example mind, idea, 
religion. The French mind is superficial and yet not com- 
prehensive; it has an extraordinarily fine edge, and yet no 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 281 

penetrating power. Its desire is to enjoy its own resources 
by the help of things, but it has none of the respect, the 
disinterestedness, the patience, and the self-forgetfulness, 
which are indispensable if we wish to see things as they are. 
Far from being the philosophic mind, it is a mere counter- 
feit of it, for it does not enable a man to solve any prob- 
lem whatever, and remains incapable of understanding all 
that is living, complex, and concrete. Abstraction is its 
original sin, presumption its incurable defect, and plausi- 
bility its fatal limit. 

The French language has no power of expressing truths 
of birth and germination; it paints effects, results, the 
caput mortuum, but not the cause, the motive power, 
the native force the development of any phenomenon what- 
ever. It is analytic and descriptive, but it explains nothing, 
for it avoids all beginnings and processes of formation. 
With it crystallization is not the mysterious act itself by 
which a substance passes from the fluid state to the solid 
state. It is the product of that act. 

The thirst for truth is not a French passion. In every- 
thing appearance is preferred to reality, the outside to the 
inside, the fashion to the material, that which shines to 
that which profits, opinion to conscience. That is to say, 
the Frenchman's center of gravity is always outside him 
he is always thinking of others, playing to the gallery. To 
him individuals are so many zeros; the unit which turns 
them into a number must be added from outside ; it may 
be royalty, the writer of the day, the favorite newspaper, 
or any other temporary master of fashion. All this is 
probably the result of an exaggerated sociability, which 
weakens the soul's forces of resistence, destroys its capacity 
for investigation and personal conviction, and kills in it 
the worship of the ideal. 

January 27, 1875. (Hyeres). The whole atmosphere has 
a luminous serenity, a limpid clearness. The islands are 
like swans swimming in a golden stream. Peace, splendor, 
boundless space! . . . And I meanwhile look quietly 
on while the soft hours glide away. I long to catch the 



282 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

wild bird, happiness, and tame it. Above all, I long S 
share it with others. These delicious mornings impress 
me indescribably. They intoxicate me, they carry me 
away. I feel beguiled out of myself, dissolved in sunbeams, 
breezes, perfumes, and sudden impulses of joy. And yet 
all the time I pine for I know not what intangible Eden. 

Lamartine in the " Preludes" has admirably described this 
oppressive effect of happiness on fragile human nature. 
I suspect that the reason for it is that the finite creature 
feels itself invaded by the infinite, and the invasion pro- 
duces dizziness, a kind of vertigo, a longing to fling one's 
self into the great gulf of being. To feel life too intensely 
is to yearn for death; and for man, to die means to become 
like unto the gods to be initiated into the great mystery. 
Pathetic and beautiful illusion. 

Ten o'clock in the evening. From one end to the other 
the day has been perfect, and my walk this afternoon to 
Beau Vallon was one long delight. It was like an expedi- 
tion into Arcadia. Here was a wild and woodland corner, 
which would have made a fit setting for a dance of nymphs, 
and there an ilex overshadowing a rock, which reminded 
me of an ode of Horaca or a drawing of Tibur. I felt a 
kind of certainty that the landscape had much that was 
Greek in it. And what made the sense of resemblance 
one more striking was the sea, which one feels to be always 
near, though one may not see it, and which any turn of 
the valley may bring into view. We found out a little 
tower with an overgrown garden, of which the owner 
might have been taken for a husbandman of the Odyssey. 
He could scarcely speak any French, but was not without 
a certain grave dignity. I translated to him the inscrip- 
tion on his sun-dial, " Hora est benefaciendi," which is 
beautiful, and pleased him greatly. It would be an 
inspiring place to write a novel in. Only I do not know 
whether the little den would have a decent room, and one 
would certainly have to live upon eggs, milk, and figs, like 
Philemon. 

February 15, 1875. (Hyeres). I have just been reading 



AMIEL'S JO URNAL. 283 

che two last " Discours " at the French Academy, -linger- 
ing over every word and weighing every idea. This kind 
of writing is a sort of intellectual dainty, for it is the art 
"of expressing truth with all the courtesy and finesse pos- 
sible; " the art of appearing perfectly at ease without the 
smallest loss of manners; of being gracefully sincere, and 
of making criticism itself a pleasure to the person criti- 
cized. Legacy as it is from the monarchical tradition, this 
particular kind of eloquence is the distinguishing mark 
of those men of the world who are also men of breeding, 
and those men of letters who are also gentlemen. Democ- 
racy could never have invented it, and in this delicate 
genre of literature France may give points to all rival 
peoples, for it is the fruit of that refined and yet vigorous 
social sense which is produced by court and drawing-room 
life, by literature and good company, by means of a 
mutual education continued for centuries. This compli- 
cated product is as original in its way as Athenian elo- 
quence, but it is less healthy and less durable. If ever 
France becomes Americanized this genre at least will per- 
ish, without hope of revival. 

April 16, 1875. (Hyeres). I have already gone through 
the various emotions of leave-taking. I have been wander- 
ing slowly through the streets and up the castle hill, 
gathering a harvest of images and recollections. Already 
I am full of regret that I have not made a better study of 
the country, in which I have now spent four montns and 
more. It is like what happens when a friend dies; we 
accuse ourselves of having loved him too little, or loved 
him ill; or it is like our own death, when we look back 
upon life and feel that it has been misspent. 

August 16, 1875. Life is but a daily oscillation between 
revolt and submission, between the instinct of the ego, 
which is to expand, to take delight in its own tranquil 
sense of inviolability, if not to triumph in its own sover- 
eignty, and the instinct of the soul, which is to obey the 
universal order, to accept the will of God. 

The cold renunciation of disillusioned reason brings no 



284 AMIEDS JOURNAL. 

real peace. Peace is only to be found in reconciliation with 
destiny, when destiny seems, in the religious sense of the 
word, good; that is to say, when man feels himself directly in 
the presence of God. Then, and then only, does the will 
acquiesce. Nay more, it only completely acquiesces when 
it adores. The soul only submits to the hardness of fate 
by virtue of its discovery of a sublime compensation the 
loving kindness of the Almighty. That is to say, it can- 
not resign itself to lack or famine, it shrinks from the 
void around it, and the happiness either of hope or faith is 
essential to it. It may very well vary its objects, but some 
object it must have. It may renounce its former idols, 
but it will demand another cult. The soul hungers and 
thirsts after happiness, and it is in vain that everything 
deserts it it will never submit to its abandonment. 

August 28, 1875. (Geneva). A word used by Sainte- 
Beuve a propos of Benjamin Constant has struck me : it is 
the word consideration. To possess or not to possess 
consideration was to Madame de Stae'l a matter of su- 
preme importance the loss of it an irreparable evil, 
the acquirement of it a pressing necessity. What, then, 
is this good thing? The esteem of the public. And how 
is it gained? By honorable character and life, combined 
with a certain aggregate of services rendered and of suc- 
cesses obtained. It is not exactly a good conscience, but it 
is something like it, for it is the witness from without, if 
not the witness from within. Consideration is not reputa- 
tion, still less celebrity, fame, or glory; it has nothing to 
do with savoir faire, and is not always the attendant of 
talent or genius. It is the reward given to constancy in 
duty, to probity of conduct. It is the homage rendered to 
a life held to be irreproachable. It is a little more than 
esteem, and a little less than admiration. To enjoy public 
consideration is at once a happiness and a power. The 
loss of it is a misfortune and a source of daily suffering. 
Here am I, at the age of fifty-three, without ever having 
given this idea the smallest place in my life. It is 
curious, but the desire for consideration has been to me so 



AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 285 

!ittle of a motive that I have not even been conscious of 
such an idea at all. The fact shows, I suppose, that for 
me the audience, the gallery, the public, has never had 
more than a negative importance. I have neither asked 
nor expected anything from it, not even justice; and to be 
a dependent upon it, to solicit its suffrages and its good 
graces, has always seemed to me an act of homage and 
flunkeyism against which my pride has instinctively 
rebelled. I have never even tried to gain the good will of 
a coterie or a newspaper, nor so much as the vote of an 
elector. And yet 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 good will. But 
to hunt down consideration and reputation to force the 
esteem of others seemed to me an effort unworthy of my- 
self, almost a degradation. I have never even thought 
of it. 

Perhaps I have lost consideration by my indifference to 
it. Probably I have disappointed public expectation by 
thus allowing an over-sensitive and irritable consciousness 
to lead me into isolation and retreat. I know that the 
world, which is only eager to silence you when you do 
speak, is angry with your silence as soon as its own action 
has killed in you the wish to speak. No doubt, to be silent 
with a perfectly clear conscience a man must not hold a 
public office. I now indeed say to myself that a professor 
is morally bound to justify his position by publication; 
that students, authorities, and public are placed thereby in 
a healthier relation toward him ; that it is necessary for his 
good repute in the world, and for the proper maintenance 
of his position. But this point of view has not been a 
familiar one to me. I have endeavored to give conscien- 
tious lectures, and I have discharged all the subsidiary 
duties of my post to the best of my ability; but I have 
never been able to bend myself to a struggle with hostile 
opinion, 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. Prema- 



286 ARIEL'S JOURNAL. 

ture despair and the deepest discouragement have been my 
constant portion. Incapable of taking any interest in my 
talents for my 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. 

Does not all this make up a melancholy lot, a barren 
failure of a life? What use have I made of my gifts, of 
my special circumstances, of my half -century of existence? 
What have 1 paid back to my country? Are all the docu- 
ments I have produced, taken together, my correspond- 
ence, 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! A great many comings and goings, a great 
many scrawls for nothing. When all is added up 
nothing! And worst of all, it has not been a life used up 
in the service of some adored object, or sacrificed to any 
future hope. Its sufferings will have been vain, its renun- 
ciations useless, its sacrifices gratuitous, its dreariness 
without reward. . . . No, I am wrong; it will have 
had .its secret treasure, its sweetness, its reward. It will 
have inspired a few affections of great price ; it will have 
given joy to a few souls; its hidden existence will have 
had some value. Besides, if in itself it has been nothing, 
it has understood much. If it has not been in harmony 
with the great order, still it has loved it. If it has missed 
happiness and duty, it has at least felt its own nothing- 
ness, and implored its pardon. 

Later on. There is a great affinity in me with the 
Hindoo genius that mind, vast, imaginative, loving, 
dreamy, and speculative, but destitute of ambition, person- 
ality, and will. Pantheistic disinterestedness, the efface- 
ment of the self in the great whole, womanish gentleness, 
a horror of slaughter, antipathy to action these are all 



A MIEISS JO URNAL. 287 

present in my nature, in the nature at least which has 
been developed by years and circumstances. Still the West 
has also had its part in me. What I have found difficult 
is to keep up a prejudice in favor of any form, nationality, 
or individuality whatever. Hence my indifference to my 
own person, my own usefulness, interest, or opinions of 
the moment. What does it all matter? Omnis determinatio 
est negatio. Grief localizes us, love particularizes us, but 
r/hought delivers us from personality. . . . To be a 
-nan is a poor thing, to be a man is well ; to be the man 
man in essence and in principle that alone is to be desird. 

Yes, but in these Brahmanic aspirations what becomes 
of the subordination of the individual to duty? Pleasure 
may lie in ceasing to be individual, but duty lies in per- 
forming the microscopic task allotted to us. The problem 
set before us is to bring our daily task into the temple of 
contemplation and ply it there, to act as in the presence 
of God, to interfuse one's little part with religion. So 
only can we inform the detail of life, all that is passing, 
temporary, and insignificant, with beauty and nobility. 
So may we dignify and consecrate the meanest of occupa- 
tions. So may we feel that we are paying our tribute to 
the universal work and the eternal will. So are we recon- 
ciled with life and delivered from the fear of death. So 
are we in order and at peace. 

September 1, 1875. I have been working for some hours 
at my article on Mme. de Stae'l, but with what labor, what 
painful elfort! Wlien I write for publication every word 
is misery, and my pen stumbles at every line, so anxious 
am I to find the ideally best expression, and so great is the 
number of possibilities which open before me at every 
step. 

Composition demands a concentration, decision, and 
pliancy which I no longer possess. I cannot fuse together 
materials and ideas. If we are to give anything a form, 
we must, so to speak, be the tyrants of it.* We must 

* Compare this paragraph from the "Pensees" of a new writer, 
M. Joseph Roux. a country cure, living in a remote part ol the Ha* 



283 A MIKL'S JO URNAL. 

treat our subject brutally, and not be always trembling 
lest we are doing it a wrong. We must be able to trans- 
mute and absorb it into our own substance. This sort of 
confident effrontery is beyond me: my whole nature tends 
to that impersonality which respects and subordinates 
itself to the object; it is love of truth which holds me back 
.from concluding and deciding. And then I am always 
retracing my steps: instead of going forward I work in 
a circle : I am afraid of having forgotten a point, of having 
exaggerated an expression, of having used a word out of 
place, while all the time I ought to have been thinking of 
essentials and aiming at breadth of treatment. I do not 
know how to sacrifice anything, how to give up anything 
whatever. Hurtful timidity, unprofitable conscientious- 
ness, fatal slavery to detail ! 

In reality I have never given much thought to the art 
of writing, to the best way of making an article, an essay, 
a book, nor have I ever methodically undergone the 
writer's apprenticeship ; it would have been useful to me, 
and I was always ashamed of what was useful. I have felt, 
as it were, a scruple agamst trying to surprise the secret of 
the masters of literature, against picking chef-tfwuvres to 
pieces. When I think that I have always postponed the 
serious study of the art of writing, from a sort of awe of 
it, and a secret love of its beauty, I am furious with my 
own stupidity, and with my own respect. Practice and 
routine would have given me that ease, lightness, and 
assurance, without which the natural gift and impulse dies 
away. But on the contrary, I have developed two opposed 
habits of mind, the habit of scientific analysis which ex- 
hausts the material offered to it, and the habit of imme- 
diate notation of passing impressions. The art of compo- 
sition lies between the two; you want for it both the 

Limousin, whose thoughts have been edited and published this year 
by M. Paul Marieton (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre): 

" Le verbe ne souffre et ne connait que la volonte qui le dompte, 
et n'einporte loin sans peril que 1'intelligence qui lui menage avec 
empire 1'eperon et le frein." 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 039 

living unity of the thing and the sustained operation of 
thought. 

October 25, 1875. I have been listening to M. Taine's 
first lecture (on the "Ancien Kegime") delivered in the 
university hall. It was an extremely substantial piece of 
work clear, instructive, compact, and full of matter. 
As a writer he shows great skill in the French method of 
simplifying his subject by massing it in large striking divi- 
sions ; his great defect is a constant straining after points ; 
his principal merit is the sense he has of historical reality, 
his desire to see things as they are. For the rest, he has 
extreme openness of mind, freedom of thought, and 
precision of language. The hall was crowded. 

October 26, 1875. All origins are secret; the principle 
of every individual or collective life is a mystery that is 
to say, something irrational, inexplicable, not to be 
defined. We may even go farther and say, Every indi- 
viduality is an insoluble enigma, and no beginning ex- 
plains it. In fact, all that has become may be explained 
retrospectively, but the beginning of anything whatever 
did not become. It represents always the "fiat lux," the 
initial miracle, the act of creation; for it is the conse- 
quence of nothing else, it simply appears among anterior 
things which make a milieu, an occasion, a surrounding 
for it, but which are witnesses of its appearance without 
understanding whence it comes. 

Perhaps also there are no true individuals, and, if so, no 
beginning but one only, the primordial impulse, the first 
movement. All men on this hypothesis would be but 
man in two sexes; man again might be reduced to the 
animal, the animal to the plant, and the only individuality 
left would be a living nature, reduced to a living matter, 
to the hylozoism of Thales. However, even upon this 
hypothesis, if there were but one absolute beginning, rela- 
tive beginnings would still remain to us as multiple sym- 
bols of the absolute. Every life, called individual for con- 
venience sake and by analogy, would represent in miniature 
the history of the world, and would be to the eye of the 
philosopher a miscroscopic compendium of it. 



290 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

The history of the formation of ideas is what frees the 
mind. 



A philosophic truth does not become popular until some 
eloquent -soul has humanized it or some gifted personality 
has translated and embodied it. Pure truth cannot be 
assimilated by the crowd; it must be communicated by 
contagion. 

January 30, 1876. After dinner I went two steps off, to 
Marc Monnier's, to hear the "Luthier de Cremone," a 
one-act comedy in verse, read by the author, Franqois 
Coppee. 

It was a feast of fine sensations, of literary dainties. For 
the little piece is a pearl. It is steeped in poetry, and 
every line is a fresh pleasure to one's taste. 

This young maestro is like the violin he writes about, 
vibrating and passionate; he has, besides delicacy, point, 
grace, all that a writer wants to make what is simple, naive, 
heartfelt, and out of the beaten track, acceptable to a cul- 
tivated society. 

How to return to nature through art: there is the 
problem of all highly composite literatures like our own. 
Rousseau himself attacked letters with all the resources of 
the art of writing, and boasted the delights of savage life 
with a skill and adroitness developed only by the most 
advanced civilization. And it is indeed this marriage of con- 
traries which charms us; this spiced gentleness, this 
learned innocence, this calculated simplicity, this yes and 
no, this foolish wisdom. It is the supreme irony of such 
combinations which tickles the taste of advanced and arti- 
ficial epochs, epochs when men ask for two sensations at 
once, like the contrary meanings fused by the smile of La 
Gioconda. And our satisfaction, too, in work of this kind 
is best expressed by that ambiguous curve of the lip which 
says: I feel your charm, but I am not your dupe; I see the 
illusion both from within and from without; I yield to 
you, but I understand you; I am complaisant, but I am 
proud ; I am open to sensations, yet not the slave of any ; 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL, 291 

you have talent, I have subtlety of perception; we are 
quits, and we understand each other. 

February 1, 1876. This evening we talked of the infin- 
itely great and the infinitely small. The great things of 

the universe are for so much easier to understand 

than the small, because all greatness is a multiple of her- 
self, whereas she is incapable of analyzing what requires a 
different sort of measurement. 

It is possible for the thinking being to place himself in 
all points of view, and to teach his soul to live under the 
most different modes of being. But it must be confessed 
that very few profit by the possibility. Men are in general 
imprisoned, held in a vice by their circumstances almost 
as the animals are, but they have very little suspicion of it 
because they have so little faculty of self-judgment. It is 
only the critic and the philosopher who can penetrate into 
all states of being, and realize their life from within. 

When the imagination shrinks in fear from the phan- 
toms which it creates, it may be excused because it is 
imagination. But when the intellect allows itself to be 
tyrannized over or terrified by the categories to which 
itself gives birth, it is in the wrong, for it is not allowed 
to intellect the critical power of man to be the dupe of 
anything. 

Now, in the superstition of size the mind is merely the 
dupe of itself, for it creates the notion of space. The 
created is not more than the creator, the son not more than 
the father. The point of view wants rectifying. The mind 
has to free itself from space, which gives it a false notion 
of itself, but it can only attain this freedom by reversing 
things and by learning to see space in the mind instead of 
the mind in space. How can it do this? Simply by 
reducing space to its virtuality. Space is dispersion ; mind 
is concentration. 

And that is why God is present everywhere, without 
taking up a thousand millions of cube leagues, nor a hun- 
dred times more nor a hundred times less. 

In the state of thought the universe occupies but a single 



292 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

point; but in the state of dispersion and analysis this 
thought requires the heaven of heavens for its expansion. 

In the same way, time and number are contained in the 
mind. Man, as mind, is not their inferior, but their 
superior. 

It is true that before he can reach this state of freedom 
his own body must appear to him at will either speck or 
world that is to say, he must be independent of it. bo 
long as the self still feels itself spatial, dispersed, corporeal, 
it is but a soul, it is not a mind ; it is conscious of itself 
only as the animal is, the impressionable, affectionate, 
active and restless animal. 

The mind being the subject of phenomena cannot be 
itself phenomenal; the mirror of an image, if it was an 
image, could not be a mirror. There can be no echo with- 
out a noise. Consciousness means some one who experi- 
ences something. And all the somethings together cannot 
take the place of the some one. The phenomenon exists 
only for a point which is not itself, and for which it is an 
object. The perceptible supposes the perceiver. 

May 15, 1876. This morning I corrected the proofs of 
the "Etrangeres."* Here at least is one thing off my 
hands. The piece of prose theorizing which ends the vol- 
ume pleased and satisfied me a good deal more than my 
new meters. The book, as a whole, may be regarded as an 
attempt to solve the problem of French verse-translation 
considered as a special art. It is science applied to poetry. 
It ought not, I think, to do any discredit to a philosopher, 
for, after all, it is nothing but applied psychology. 

Do I feel any relief, any joy, pride, hope? Hardly. It 
seems to me that I feel nothing at all, or at least my feel- 
ing is so vague and doubtful that I cannot analyze it. 
On the whole, I am rather tempted to say to myself, how 
much labor for how small a result Much ado about 
nothing! And yet the work in itself is good, is successful. 
But what does verse- translation matter? Already my 

* Les Etrangeres: Poesies traduites de diverges literatures, par H 
F. Amiel, 1876. 



A MIEUS JO URN A L. 293 

interest in it is fading; my mind and my energies clamor 
for something else. 

What will Edmond Scherer say to the volume? 



To the inmost self of me this literary attempt is quite 
indifferent a Lilliputian affair. In comparing my work 
with other work of the same kind, I find a sort of relative 
satisfaction; but I see the intrinsic futility of it, and the 
insignificance of its success or failure. I do not believe 
in the public; I do not believe in my own work; I have 
no ambition, properly speaking, and I blow soap-bubbles 
for want of something to do. 

" Car le neant peut seal bien cafiaer rinfini." 

Self-satire, disillusion, absence of prejudice, may be 
freedom, but they are not strength. 

July 12, 1876. Trouble on trouble. My cough has 
been worse than ever. I cannot see that the fine weather 
or the holidays have made any change for the better in my 
state of health. On the contrary, the process of demoli- 
tion seems more rapid. It is a painful experience, this 
premature decay ! . . . " Apr&s tant de malheurs, que 
vous reste-t-il? Moi." This "moi" is the central con- 
sciousness, the trunk of all the branches which have been 
cut away, that which bears every successive mutilation. 
Soon I shall have nothing else left than bare intellect. 
Death reduces us to the mathematical "point ;" the 
destruction which precedes it forces us back, as it were, by 
a series of ever-narrowing concentric circles to this last 
inaccessible refuge. Already I have a foretaste of that 
zero in which all forms and all modes are extinguished. 
I see how we return into the night, and inversely I under- 
stand how we issue from it. Life is but a meteor, of 
which the whole brief course is before me. Birth, life, 
death assume a fresh meaning to us at each phase of our 
existence. To see one's self as a firework in the darkness 
to become a witness of one's own fugutive phenomenon 
this is practical psychology. I prefer indeed the spec- 



#94 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

tacle of the world, which is a vaster and more splendid 
firework ; but when illness narrows my horizon and makes 
me dwell perforce upon my own miseries, these miseries 
are still capable of supplying food for my psychological 
curiosity. What interests me in myself, in spite of my 
repulsions is, that I find in my own case a genuine exam- 
ple of human nature, and therefore a specimen of general 
value. The sample enables me to understand a multitude 
of similar situations, and numbers of my fellow-men. 

To enter consciously into all possible modes of being 
would be sufficient occupation for hundreds of centuries 
at least for our finite intelligences, which are conditioned 
by time. The progressive happiness of the process, indeed 
may be easily poisoned and embittered by the ambition 
which asks for everything at once, and clamors to reach 
the absolute at a bound. But it may be answered that 
aspirations are necessarily prophetic, for they could only 
have come into being under the action of the same cause 
which will enable them to reach their goal. The soul can 
only imagine the absolute because the absolute exists; our 
consciousness of a possible perfection is the guarantee that 
perfection will be realized. 

Thought itself is eternal. It is the consciousness of 
thought which is gradually achieved through the long suc- 
cession of ages, races, and humanities. Such is the doctrine 
of Hegel. The history of the mind is, according to him 
one of approximation to the absolute, and the absolute 
differs at the two ends of the story. It was at the begin 
ning; it knows itself at the end. Or rather it advances in 
rhe possession of itself with the gradual unfolding of crea- 
tion. Such also was the conception of Aristotle. 

If the history of the mind and of consciousness is the 
very marrow and essence of being, then to be driven back 
on psychology, even personal psychology, is to be still 
occupied with the main question of things, to keep to the 
subject, to feel one's self in the center of the universal 
drama. There is comfort in the idea. Everything else 
may be taken away from us, but if thought remains we 



A KIEL'S JO URNAL. 295 

are still connected by a magic thread with the axis of the 
world. But we may lose thought and speech. Then 
nothing remains but simple feeling, the sense of the pres- 
ence of God and of death in God the last relic of the 
human privilege, which is to participate in the whole, to 
commune with the absolute. 

" Ta vie est un eclair qui meurt dans son nuage, 
Mais 1'eclair t'a sauve s'il t'a fait voir le ciel." 

July 26, 1876. A private journal is a friend to idleness. 
It frees us from the necessity of looking all round a sub- 
ject, it puts up with every kind of repetition, it accom- 
panies all the caprices and meanderings of the inner life, 
and proposes to itself no definite end. This journal of 
mine 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. A 
journal takes the place of a confidant, that is, of friend or 
wife; it becomes a substitute for production, a substitute 
for country and public. It is a grief -cheating device, a 
mode of escape and withdrawal; but, factotum as it is, 
though it takes the place of everything, properly speaking 
it represents nothing at all. . . 

What is it which makes the history of a soul? It is the 
stratification of its different stages of progress, the story 
of its acquisitions and of the general course of its destiny. 
Before my history can teach anybody anything, or even 
interest myself, it must be disentangled from its materials, 
distilled and simplified. These thousands of pages are but 
the pile of leaves and bark from which the essence has still 
to be extracted. A whole forest of cinchonas are worth 
but one cask of quinine. A whole Smyrna rose-garden 
goes to produce one vial of perfume. 

This mass of written talk, the work of twenty-nine years, 
may in the end be worth nothing at all; for each is only 
interested in his own romance, his own individual life. 
Even I perhaps shall never have time to read them over 



296 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

myself. So so what? I shall have lived iny life, and 
life consists in repeating the human type, and the burden 
of the human song, as myriads of my kindred have done, 
are doing, and will do, century after century. To rise to 
consciousness of this burden and this type is something, 
and we can scarcely achieve anything further. The reali- 
zation of the type is more complete, and the burden a 
more joyous one, if circumstances are kind and propitious, 
but whether the puppets have done this or that 

" Trois p'tits tours et puis s'en vontl " 

everything falls into the same gulf at last, and comes to 
very much the same thing. 

To rebel against fate to try to escape the inevitable 
issue is almost puerile. When the duration of a cen- 
tenarian and that of an insect are quantities sensibly 
equivalent and geology and astronomy enable us to regard 
such durations from this point of view what is the mean- 
ing of all our tiny efforts and cries, the value of our anger, 
our ambition, our hope? For the dream of a dream it is 
absurd to raise these make-believe tempests. The forty 
millions of infusoria which make up a cube-inch of chalk 
do they matter much to us? and do the forty millions of 
men who make up France matter any more to an inhabi- 
tant of the moon or Jupiter? 

To be a conscious monad a nothing which knows itself 
to be the miscroscopic phantom of the universe : this is all 
we can ever attain to. 

September 12, 1876. What is your own particular ab- 
surdity? Why, simply that you exhaust yourself in trying 
to understand wisdom without practicing it, that you are 
always making preparations for nothing, that you live 
without living. Contemplation which has not the courage 
to be purely contemplative, renunciation which does not 
renounce completely, chronic contradiction there is your 
case. Inconsistent skepticism, irresolution, not convinced 
but incorrigible, weakness which will not accept itself and 
cannot transform itself into strength there is your misery. 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 29? 

The comic side of it lies in capacity to direct others, 
becoming incapacity to direct one's self, in the dream of 
the infinitely great stopped short by the infinitely little, 
in what seems to be the utter r.selessness of talent. To 
arrive at immobility by excess of motion, at zero from 
abundance of numbers, is a strange farce, a sad comedy; 
the poorest gossip can laugh at its absurdity. 

September 19, 1876. My reading to-day has been 
Doudan's "Lettres et Melanges."* A fascinating book! 
Wit, grace, subtlety, imagination, thought these letters 
possess them all. How much I regret that I never knew 
the man himself. He was a Frenchman of the best type, 
tin delicat n& sublime, to quote Sainte-Bevue's expression. 
Fastidiousness of temper, and a too keen love of perfec- 
tion, led him to withhold his talent from the public, but 
while still living, and within his own circle, he was the 
recognized equal of the best. He scarcely lacked any- 
thing except that fraction of ambition, of brutality and 
material force which are necessary to success in this world; 
but he was appreciated by the best society of Paris, and 
he cared for nothing else. He reminds me of Joubert. 

September 20th. To be witty is to satisfy another's 
wits by the bestowal on him of two pleasures, that of 
understanding one thing and that of guessing another, 
and so achieving a double stroke. 

Thus Doudan scarcely ever speaks out his thought 
directly; he disguises and suggests it by imagery, allusion, 
hyperbole; he overlays it with light irony and feigned 
anger, with gentle mischief and assumed humility. The 
more the thing to be guessed differs from the thing said, 
the more pleasant surprise there is for the interlocutor or 
the correspondent concerned. These charming and deli- 

* Ximenes Doudan, born in 1800, died 1872, the brilliant friend 
and tutor of the De Broglie family, whose conversation was so much 
sought after in life, and whose letters have been so eagerly read in 
France since his death. Compare M. Scherer's two articles on 
Doudan's " Lettres " and " Pensees" in his last published volume of 
Assays. 



298 AMIKL'B JOURNAL. 

cate ways of expression allow a man to teach what he will 
without pedantry, and to venture what he will without 
offense. There is something Attic and aerial in them; 
they mingle grave and gay, fiction and truth, with a light 
grace of touch such as neither La Fontaine nor Alcibiades 
would have been ashamed of. Socratic badinage like this 
presupposes a free and equal mind, victorious over physical 
ill and inward discontents. Such delicate playfulness is 
the exclusive herita fe ^ of those rare natures iu whom sub- 
dety is the disguise of superiority, and taste its revelation. 
What balance of faculties and cultivation it requires! 
What personal distinction it shows: F^rhaps only a 
valetudinarian would have been capable of this morbidezza 
of touch, this marriage of virile thought and feminine 
caprice. If there is excess anywhere, it lies perhaps in a 
certain effeminacy of sentiment. Doudan can put up 
with nothing but what is perfect nothing but what is 
absolutely harmonious; all that is rough, harsh, powerful, 
brutal, and unexpected, throws him into convulsions. 
Audacity boldness of all kinds repels him. This 
Athenian of the Komaii time is a true disciple of Epicurus 
in all matters of sight, hearing, and intelligence a crum- 
pled rose-leaf disturbs him. 

" Une ombre, un souffle, un rien, tout lui donnait la fievre." 

What all this softness wants is strength, creative and 
muscular force. His range is not as wide as I thought it 
at first. The classical world and the Kenaissance that 
is to say, the horizon of La Fontaine is his horizon. He 
is out of his element in the German or Slav literatures. 
He knows nothing of Asia. Humanity for him is not 
much larger than France, and he has never made a bible 
of Nature. In music and painting he is more or less ex- 
clusive. In philosophy he stops at Kant. To sum up: 
he is a man of exquisite and ingenious taste, but he is not 
a first-rate critic, still less a poet, philosopher, or artist. 
He was an admirable talker, a delightful letter writer, 
who might have became an author had he chosen to con- 



A MIKL'S JO URN A L. 

centrate himself. I must wait for the second volume in 
order to review and correct this preliminary impression. 

Midday. I have now gone once more through the 
whole volume, lingering over the Attic charm of it, and 
meditating on the originality and distinction of the man's 
organization. Doudan was a keen penetrating psycholo- 
gist, a diviner of aptitudes, a trainer of minds, a man of 
infinite taste and talent, capable of every nuance and of 
every delicacy ; but his defect was a want of persevering 
'energy of thought, a lack of patience in execution. 
Timidity, unworldliness, indolence, indifference, confined 
him to the role of the literary counsellor and made him 
judge of the field in which he ou ght rather to have fought. 
But do I mean to blame him? no indeed! In the first 
place, it would be to fire on my allies; in the second, very 
likely he chose the better part. 

Was it not Goethe who remarked that in the neighbor- 
hood of all famous men we find men who never achieve 
fame, and yet were esteemed by those who did, as their 
equals or superiors? Descartes, I think, said the same 
thing. Fame will not run after the men who are afraid 
,)f her. She makes mock of those trembling and respect- 
ful lovers who deserve but cannot force her favors. The 
public is won by the bold, imperious talents by the enter- 
prising and the skillful. It does not believe in modesty, 
which it regards as a device of impotence. The golden 
book contains but a section of the true geniuses; it names 
those only who have taken glory by storm. 

November 15, 1876. I have been reading "L'Avenir 
Eeligieux des Peuples Civilises," by Emile de Laveleye. 
The theory of this writer is that the gospel, in its pure 
form, is capable of providing the religion of the future, 
and that the abolition of all religious principle, which is 
what the socialism of the present moment demands, is as. 
much to be feared as Catholic superstition. The Protestant 
method, according to him, is the means of transition 
whereby sacerdotal Christianity passes into the pure religion 
of the gospel. Laveleye does not think that civilization 



500 A MIEUS JO URNAL. 

can last without the belief in God and in another life. 
Perhaps he forgets that Japan and China prove the con- 
trary. But it is enough to determine him against atheism 
if it can be shown that a general atheism would bring 
about a lowering of the moral average. After all, how- 
ever, this is nothing but a religion of utilitarianism. A 
belief is not true because it is useful. And it is truth 
alone scientific, established, proved, and rational truth 
which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened 
minds of all classes. We may still say perhaps, "faith 
governs the world " but the faith of the present is no 
longer in revelation or in the priest it is in reason and in 
science. Is there a science of goodness and happiness? 
that is the question. Do justice and goodness depend 
upon any particular religion? How are men to be made 
free, honest, just, and good? there is the point. 

On my way through the book I perceived many new 
applications of my law of irony. Every epoch has two con- 
tradictory aspirations which are logically antagonistic and 
practically associated. Thus the philosophic materialism 
of the last century was the champion of liberty. And at 
the present moment we find Darwinians in love with 
equality, while Darwinism itself is based on the right of 
the stronger. Absurdity is interwoven with life: real 
beings are animated contradictions, absurdities brought 
into action. Harmony with self woulet- mean peace, 
repose, and perhaps immobility By far the greater num- 
ber of human beings can only conceive action,* or practice 
it, under the form of war a war of competition at home, 
a bloody war of nations abroad, and finally war with self. 
So that life is a perpetual combat; it wills that which it 
wills not, and wills not that it wills. Hence what I call 
the law of irony that is to say, the refutation of the self 
by itself, the concrete realization of the absurd. 

Is such a result inevitable? I think not. Struggle is 
the caricature of harmony, and harmony, which is the 
association, of contraries, is also a principle of movement. 
War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it mean* 



A MIKL S JO URNAL. 301 

the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslave- 
ment of the conquered. Mutual respect would be a better 
way out of difficulties. Conflict is the result of the selfish- 
ness which will acknowledge no other limit than that of 
external force. The laws of animality govern almost the 
whole of history. The history of man is essentially 
zoological; it becomes human late in the day, and then 
only in the beautiful souls, the souls alive to justice, good- 
ness, enthusiasm, and devotion. The angel shows itself 
rarely and with difficulty through the highly-organized 
brute. The divine aureole plays only with a dim and 
fugitive light around the brows of the world's governing 
race. 

The Christian nations offer many illustrations of the law 
of irony. They profess the citizenship of heaven, the 
exclusive worship of eternal good; and never has the 
hungry pursuit of perishable joys, the love of this world, 
or the thirst for conquest, been stronger or more active 
than among these nations. Their official motto is exactly 
the reverse of their real aspiration. Under a false flag 
they play the smuggler with a droll ease of conscience. 
Is the fraud a conscious one? No it is but an application 
of the law of irony. The deception is so common a one 
that the delinquent becomes unconscious of it. Every 
nation gives itself the lie in the course of its daily life, 
and not one feels the ridicule of its position. A man must 
be a Japanese to .perceive the burlesque contradictions of 
the Christian civilization. He must be a native of the 
moon to understand the stupidity of man and his state of 
constant delusion. The philosopher himself falls under 
the law of irony, for after having mentally stripped him- 
self of all prejudice having, that is to say, wholly laid 
aside his own personality, he finds himself slipping back 
perforce into the rags he had taken off, obliged to eat and 
drink, to be hungry, cold, thirsty, and to behave like all 
other mortals, after having for a moment behaved like no 
other. This is the point where the comic poets are lying 
in wait for him ; the animal needs revenge themselves for 



302 A KIEL'S JO URN A L, 

his flight into the Empyrean, and mock him by their cry: 
Thou art dust, thou art nothing, thou art man! 

November 26, 1876. I have just finished a novel of 
Cherbuliez, "Le fiance de Mademoiselle de St. Maur." It 
is a jeweled mosaic of precious stones, sparkling with a 
thousand lights. But the heart gets little from it. The 
Mephistophelian type of novel leaves one sad. This subtle, 
refined world is strangely near to corruption; these artificial 
: women have an air of the Lower Empire. There is not a 
character who is not witty, and neither is there one who 
has not bartered conscience for cleverness. The elegance 
of the whole is but a mask of immorality. These stories 
of feeling in which there is no feeling make a strange and 
painful impression upon me. 

December 4, 1876. I have been thinking a great deal of 
Victor Cherbuliez. Perhaps his novels make up the 
most disputable part of his work they are so much wanting 
in simplicity, feeling, reality. And yet what knowledge, 
style, wit, and subtlety how much thought everywhere, 
and what mastery of language! He astonishes one; 1 
cannot but admire him. 

Cherbuliez 's mind is of immense range, clear-sighted, 
keen, full of resource; he is an Alexandrian exquisite, 
substituting for the feeling which makes men earnest the 
irony which leaves them free. Pascal would say of him 
" He has never risen from the order of thought to the order 
of charity." But we must not be ungrateful. A Lucian 
is not worth an Augustine, but still he is Lucian. Those 
who enfranchise the mind render service to man as well as 
those who persuade the heart. After the leaders come the 
liberators, and the negative and critical minds have their 
1 place and function beside the men of affirmation, the con- 
vinced and inspired souls. The positive element in Victor 
Cherbuliez's work is beauty, not goodness, not moral or 
religious life. ^Esthetically he is serious ; what he respects 
is style. And therefore he has found his vocation ; for he 
is first and foremost a writer a consummate, exquisite, 
and model writer. He does not win our love, but he 
claims our homage. 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 303 

In every union there is a mystery a certain invisible 
bond which must not be disturbed. This vital bond in the 
filial relation is respect ; in friendship, esteem ; in marriage, 
confidence; in the collective life, patriotism; in the reli- 
gious life, faith. Such points are best left untouched by 
speech, for to touch them is almost to profane them. 



Men of genius supply the substance of history, while the 
mass of men are but the critical filter, the limiting, slack- 
ening, passive force needed for the modification of the 
ideas supplied by genius. Stupidity is dynamically the 
necessary balance of intellect. To make an atmosphere 
which human life can breathe, oxygen must be combined 
with a great deal with three-fourths of azote. And so, 
to make history, there must be a great deal of resistance to 
conquer and of weight to drag. 

January 5, 1877. This morning I am altogether miser- 
able, half-stifled by bronchitis walking a difficulty the 
brain weak this last the worst misery of all, for thought 
is my only weapon against my other ills. Eapid deteriora- 
tion of all the bodily powers, a dull continuous waste of 
vital organs, brain decay: this is the trial laid upon me, a 
trial that no one suspects ! Men pity you for growing old 
outwardly; but what does that matter? nothing, so long 
as the faculties are intact. This boon of mental sound- 
ness to the last has been granted to so many students that 
I hoped for it a little. Alas, must I sacrifice that too? 
Sacrifice is almost easy when we believe it laid upon us, 
asked of us, rather, by a fatherly God and a watchful 
Providence; but I know nothing of this religious joy. 
The mutilation of the self which is going on in me lowers 
and lessens me without doing good to anybody. Supposing 
I became blind, who would be the gainer? Only one 
motive remains to me that of manly resignation to the 
inevitable the wish to set an example to others the stoic 
view of morals pure and simple. 

This moral education of the individual soul is it then 
wasted? When our planet, has accomplished the cycle of 



304 A MIEU8 JO URNAL. 

its destinies, of what use will it have been to any one or 
anything in the universe? Well, it will have sounded its 
note in the symphony of creation. And for us, individual 
atoms, seeing monads, we appropriate a momentary con- 
sciousness of the whole and the unchangeable, and then we 
disappear. Is not this enough? No, it is not enough, 
for if there is not progress, increase, profit, there is nothing 
but a mere chemical play and balance of combinations. 
Brahma, after having created, draws his creation back into 
the gulf. If we are a laboratory of the universal mind, 
may that mind at least profit and grow by us ! If we 
realize the supreme will, may God have the joy of it! If 
the trustful humility of the soul rejoices him more than 
the greatness of intellect, let us enter into his plan, his in- 
tention. This, in theological language, is to live to the 
glory of God. Keligion consists in the filial acceptation 
of the divine will whatever it be, provided we see it dis- 
tinctly. Well, can we doubt that decay, sickness, death, 
are in the programme of our existence? Is not destiny the 
inevitable? And is not destiny the anonymous title of 
him or of that which the religions call God? To descend 
without murmuring the stream of destiny, to pass without 
revolt through loss after loss, and diminution after diminu- 
tion, with no other limit than zero before us this is what 
is demanded of us. Involution is as natural as evolution. 
We sink gradually back into the darkness, just as we issued 
gradually from it. The play of faculties and organs, the 
grandiose apparatus of life, is put back bit by bit into the 
box. We begin by instinct; at the end comes a clearness 
of vision which we must learn to bear with and to employ 
without murmuring upon our own failure and decay. A 
musical theme once exhausted, finds its due refuge and 
repose in silence. 

February 6, 1877. I spent the evening with the , 

and we talked of the anarchy of ideas, of the general want 
of culture, of what it is which keeps the world going, and 
of the assured march of science in the midst of universal 
passion and superstition. 



AMIEL'S JO URN A L. 305 

What is rarest in the world is fair-mindedness, method, 
the critical view, the sense of proportion, the capacity for 
distinguishing. The common state of human thought is 
one of confusion, incoherence, and presumption, and the 
common state of human hearts is a state of passion, in 
which equity, impartiality, and openness to impressions 
are unattainable. Men's wills are always in advance of 
their intelligence, their desires ahead of their will, and 
accident the source of their desires; so that they express 
merely fortuitous opinions which are not worth the trouble 
of taking seriously, and which have no other account to 
give of themselves than this childish one : I am, because I 
am. The art of finding truth is very little practiced ; it 
scarcely exists, because there is no personal humility, nor 
even any love of truth among us. We are covetous 
enough of such knowledge as may furnish weapons to our 
hand or tongue, as may serve our vanity or gratify our 
craving for power; but self-knowledge, the criticism of our 
own appetites and prejudices, is unwelcome and disagree- 
able to us. 

Man is a willful and covetous animal, who makes use of 
his intellect to satisfy his inclinations, but who cares, 
nothing for truth, who rebels against personal disci- 
pline, who hates disinterested thought and the idea of 
self -education. Wisdom offends him, because it rouses in 
him disturbance and confusion, and because he will not see 
himself as he is. 

The great majority of men are but tangled skeins, im- 
perfect keyboards, so many specimens of restless or stag- 
nant chaos and what makes their situation almost hope- 
less is the fact that they take pleasure in it. There is no 
curing a sick man who believes himself in health. 

April 5, 1877. I have been thinking over the pleasant 
evening of yesterday, an experience in which the sweets of 
friendship, the charm of mutual understanding, aesthetic 
pleasure, and a general sense of comfort, were happily 
combined and intermingled. There was not a crease in the 
rose-leaf. Why? Because "all that is pure, all that is 



306 AMI KU 8 JOURNAL. 

honest, all that is excellent, all that is lovely and of good 
report," was there gathered together. "The incorrup- 
tibility of a gentle and quiet spirit," innocent mirth, faith- 
fulness <:o duty, fine taste and sympathetic imagination, 
form an attractive and wholesome milieu in which the soul 
may rest. 

The party which celebrated the last day of vacation 
gave much pleasure, and not to me only. Is not making 
others happy the best happiness? To illuminate for an 
instant the depths of a deep soul, to cheer those who bear 
by sympathy the burdens of so many sorrow-laden hearts 
and suffering lives, is to me a blessing and a precious privi- 
lege. There is a sort of religious joy in helping to renew 
the strength and courage of noble minds. We are sur- 
prised to find ourselves the possessors of a power of which 
we are not worthy, and we long to exercise it purely and 
seriously. 

I feel most strongly that man, in all that he does or can 
do which is beautiful, great, or good is but the organ 
and the vehicle of something or some one higher than 
himself. This feeling is religion. The religious man 
takes part with a tremor of sacred joy in these phenomena 
of which he is the intermediary out not the source, of 
which he is the scene, but noc ^he author, or rather, the 
poet. He lends them voice, <md will, and help, but he is 
respectfully careful to efface himself, that he may alter as 
little as possible tne Mgher work of the genius who is 
making a momentary use of him. A pure emotion deprives 
him of personality and annihilates the self in him. Self 
oiust perforce disappear when it is the Holy Spirit who 
ipeaks, when it is God who acts. This is the mood in 1 ' 
which the prophet hears the call, the young mother feels 
the movement of the child within, the preacher watches 
the tears of his audience. So long as we are conscious of 
self we are limited, selfish, held in bondage; when we are 
in harmony with the universal order, when we vibrate in 
unison with God, self disappears. Thus, in a perfectly 
harmonious choir, the individual cannot hear himself 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 307 

anless he makes a false note. The religious state is one of 
deep enthusiasm, of moved contemplation, of tranquil 
ecstasy. But how rare a state it is for us poor creatures 
harassed by duty, by necessity, by the wicked world, by 
sin, by illness! It is the state which produces inward 
happiness; but alas! the foundation of existence, the com- 
mon texture of our days, is made up of action, effort 
struggle, and therefore dissonance. Perpetual conflict, 
interrupted by short and threatened truces there is a true 
picture of our human condition. 

Let us hail, then, as an echo from heaven, as the fore- 
taste of a more blessed economy, these brief moments of 
perfect harmony, these halts between two storms. Peace 
is not in itself a dream, but we know it only as the result 
of a momentary equilibrium an accident. "Happy are 
the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of 
God." 

April 26, 1877. I have been turning over again the 
"Paris" of Victor Hugo (1867). For ten years event after 
event has given the lie to the prophet, but the confidence 
of the prophet in his own imaginings is not therefore a whit 
diminished. Humility and common sense are only fit for 
Lilliputians. Victor Hugo superbly ignores everything 
that he has not foreseen. He does not see that pride is a. 
limitation of the mind, and that a pride without limita- 
tions is a littleness of soul. If he could but learn to com- 
pare himself with other men, and France with other nations, 
he would see things more truly, and would not fall into 
these mad exaggerations, these extravagant judgments. 
But proportion and fairness will never be among the 
strings at his command. He is vowed to the Titanic; his 
gold is always mixed with lead, his insight with childish- 
ness, his reason with madness. He cannot be simple; the 
only light he has to give blinds you like that of a fire. He 
astonishes a reader and provokes him, he moves him and 
annoys him. There is always some falsity of note in him, 
which accounts for the malaise he so constantly excites in 
me. The great poet in him cannot shake off the charlatan. 



308 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

A few shafts of Voltairean irony would have shriveled the 
inflation of his genius and made it stronger by making it 
saner. It is a public misfortune that the most powerful 
poet of a nation should not have better understood his r61e, 
and that, unlike those Hebrew prophets who scourged 
because they loved, he should devote himself proudly and 
systematically to the flattery of his countrymen. France 
is the world; Paris is France; Hugo is Paris; peoples, 
bow down! 

May 2, 1877. Which nation is best worth belonging to? 
There is not one in which the good is not counterbalanced 
by evil. Each is a caricature of man, a proof that no one 
among them deserves to crush the others, and that all 
have something to learn from all. I am alternately struck 
with the qualities and with the defects of each, which is 
perhaps lucky for a critic. I am conscious of no prefer- 
ence for the defects of north or south, of west or east ; and 
I should find a difficulty in stating my own predilections. 
Indeed I myself am wholly indifferent in the matter, for 
to me the question is not one of liking or of blaming, but 
of understanding. My point of view is philosophical that 
is to say, impartial and impersonal. The only type which 
pleases me is perfection man, in short, the ideal man. 
As for the national man, I bear with and study him, but I 
have no admiration for him. I can only admire the fine 
specimens of the race, the great men, the geniuses, the 
lofty characters and noble souls, and specimens of these 
are to be found in all the ethnographical divisions. The 
" country of my choice " (to quote Madame de Stael) is 
with the chosen souls. I feel no greater inclination 
toward the French, the Germans, the Swiss, the English, 
the Poles, the Italians, than toward the Brazilians or the 
Chinese. The illusions of patriotism, of Chauvinist, 
family, or professional feeling, do not exist for me My 
tendency, on the contrary, is to feel with increased force 
the lacunae, deformities, and imperfections of the group to 
which I belong. My inclination is to see things as they 
are, abstracting mv own individuality, and suppressing all 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 309 

personal will and desire; so that I feel antipathy, not 
toward this or that, but toward error, prejudice, stupidity, 
exclusiveness, exaggeration. I love only justice and fair- 
ness. Anger and annoyance are with me merely superficial ; 
the fundamental tendency is toward impartial ty and detach- 
ment. Inward liberty and aspiration toward the true 
these are what I care for and take pleasure in. 

June 4, 1877. I have just heard the "Romeo and 
Juliet " of Hector Berlioz. The work is entitled "Dramatic 
symphony for orchestra, with choruses." The execution 
was extremely good. The work is interesting, careful, 
curious, and suggestive, but it leaves one cold. When I 
come to reason out my impression I explain it in this way. 
To subordinate man to things to annex the human voice, 
as a mere supplement, to the orchestra is false in idea. 
To make simple narrative out of dramatic material, is a. 
derogation, a piece of levity. A Romeo and Juliet in 
which there is no Romeo and no Juliet is an absurdity. 
To substitute the inferior, the obscure, the vague, for the- 
higher and the clear, is a challenge to common sense. It 
is a violation of that natural hierarchy of things which is 
never violated with impunity. The musician has put 
together a series of symphonic pictures, without any inner 
connection, a string of riddles, to which a prose text alone 
supplies meaning and unity. The only intelligible voice- 
which is allowed to appear in the work is that of Friar 
Laurence: his sermon could not be expressed in chords, 
and is therefore plainly sung. But the moral of a play is 
not the play, and the play itself has been elbowed out by 
recitative. 

The musician of the present day, not being able to give 
us what is beautiful, torments himself to give us what is 
new. False originality, false grandeur, false genius! This 
labored art is wholly antipathetic to me. Science simulat- 
ing genius is but a form of quackery. 

Berlioz as a critic is cleverness itself; as a musician he- 
is learned, inventive, and ingenious, but he is trying to 
achieve the greater when he cannot compass the lesser. 



SI AMIEL'S JO URNAL. 

Thirty years ago, at Berlin, the same impression was left 
upon me by his "Infancy of Christ," which I heard him 
conduct himself. His art seems to me neither fruitful nor 
wholesome; there is no true and solid beauty in it. 

I ought to say, however, that the audience, which was 
u fairly full one, seemed very well satisfied. 

July 17, 1877. Yesterday I went through my La Fon- 
taine, and noticed the omissions in him. He has neither 
butterfly nor rose. He utilizes neither the crane, nor the 
quail, nor the dromedary, nor the lizard. There is not a 
single echo of chivalry in him. For him, the history of 
France dates from Louis XIV. His geography only 
ranges, in reality, over a few square miles, and touches 
neither the Rhine nor the Loire, neither the mountains nor 
the sea. He never invents his subjects, but indolently 
takes them ready-made from elsewhere. But with all this 
what an adorable writer, what a painter, what an observer, 
what a humorist, what a story-teller! I am never tired 
of reading him, though I know half his fables by heart. 
In the matter of vocabulary, turns, tones, phrases, idioms, 
his style is perhaps the richest of the great period, for it 
combines, in the most skillful way, archaism and classic 
finish, the Gallic and the French elements. Variety, 
satire, finesse, feeling, movement, terseness, suavity, grace, 
gayety, at times even nobleness, gravity, grandeur every- 
thing is to be found in him. And then the happiness of 
the epithets, the piquancy of the sayings, the felicity of 
his rapid sketches and unforeseen audacities, and the unfor- 
gettable sharpness of phrase ! His defects are eclipsed by 
his immense variety of different aptitudes. 

One has only to compare his " Woodcutter and Death " 
with that of Boileau in order to estimate the enormous 
difference between the artist and the critic who found fault 
with his work. La Fontaine gives you a picture of the 
poor peasant under the monarchy; Boileau shows you 
nothing but a man perspiring under a heavy load. The 
first is a historical witness, the second a mere academic 
rhymer. From La Fontaine it is possible to reconstruct 



AM1KUS JOURNAL. 311 

the whole society of his epoch, and the old Champenois 
with his beasts remains the only Homer France has ever 
possessed. He has as many portraits of men and women 
as La Bruyere, and Moliere is not more humorous. 

His weak side is his epicureanism, with its tinge of gross- 
ness. This, no doubt, was what made Lamartine dislike 
him. - The religious note is absent from his lyre; there is 
nothing in him which shows any contact with Christianity, 
,any knowledge of the sublimer tragedies of the soul. Kind 
'nature is his goddess, Horace his prophet, and Montaigne 
his gospel. In other words, his horizon is that of the 
Renaissance. This pagan island in the full Catholic 
stream is very curious; the paganism of it is so perfectly 
sincere and naive. But indeed, Reblais, Moliere, Saint 
Evremond, are much more pagan than Voltaire. It is as 
though, for the genuine Frenchman, Christianity was a 
mere pose or costume something which has nothing to do 
with the heart, with the real man, or his deeper nature. 
This division of things is common in Italy too.- It is the 
natural effect of political religions: the priest becomes 
separated from the layman, the believer from the man, 
worship from sincerity. 

July 18, 1877. I have just come across a character in a 
novel with a passion for synonyms, and I said to myself: 
Take care that is your weakness too. In your search 
for close and delicate expression, you run through the 
whole gamut of synonyms,and your pen works too often in 
series of three. Beware! Avoid mannerisms and tricks; 
they are signs of weakness. Subject and occasion only 
must govern the use of words. Procedure by single epithet 
gives strength; the doubling of a word gives clearness* 
because it supplies the two extremities of the series; the 
trebling of it gives completeness by suggesting at once the 
beginning, middle, and end of the idea; while a quadruple 
phrase may enrich by force of enumeration. 

Indecision being my principal defect, I am fond of a 
plurality of phrases which are but so many successive 
approximations and corrections. I am especially fond of 



315> AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

them in this journal, where I write as it comes. In serious 
composition two is, on the whole, my category. But it 
would be well to practice one's self in the use of the single 
word of the shaft delivered promptly and once for all. 
I should have indeed to cure myself of hesitation first. 
I see too many ways of saying things; a more decided 
mind hits on the right way at once. Singleness of phrase 
implies courage, self-confidence, clear-sightedness. To 
attain it there must be no doubting, and I am always 
doubting. And yet 

" Quiconque est loup agisse en loup; 
C'est le plus certain de beaucoup." 

I wonder whether I should gain anything by the attempt 
to assume a character which is not mine. My wavering 
manner, born of doubt and scruple, has at least the ad- 
vantage of rendering all the different shades of my thought, 
and of being sincere. If it were to become terse, affirma- 
tive, resolute, would it not be a mere imitation? 

A private journal, which is but a vehicle for meditation 
and reverie, beats about the bush as it pleases without 
being bound to make for any definite end. Conversation 
with self is a gradual process of thought-clearing. Hence 
all these synonyms, these waverings, these repetitions and 
returns upon one's self. Affirmation may be brief; inquiry 
takes time; and the line which thought follows is neces- 
sarily an irregular one. 

I am conscious indeed that at bottom there is but one 
right expression; * but in order to find it I wish to make 
my choice among all that are like it; and my mind 
instinctively goes through a series of verbal modulations in 

* Compare La Bruyere: 

" Entre toutes les differentes expressions qui peuvent rendre une 
seule de nos pensees il n'y en a qu'une qui soit la bonne; on ne la 
rencontre pas toujours en parlant ou en ecrivant: il est vray nean- 
moins qu'elle existe, que tout ce qui ne 1'est point est foible, 
et ne satisfait point un homme d'esprit qui veut se faire 
entendre." 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 31$ 

search of thac shade which may most accurately render the 
idea. Or sometimes it is the idea itself which has to be 
turned over and over, that I may know it and apprehend 
it better. I think, pen in hand; it is like the disentan- 
glement, the winding-off of a skein. Evidently the corre- 
sponding form of style cannot' have the qualities which 
belong to thought which is already sure of itself, and only 
seeks to communicate itself to others. The function of 
the private journal is one of observation, experiment, 
analysis, contemplation; that of the essay or article is to 
provoke reflection ; that of the book is to demonstrate. 

July 21, 1877. A superb night a starry sky Jupiter 
and Phoebe holding converse before my windows. Grandiose 
effects of light and shade over the courtyard. A sonata rose 
from the black gulf of shadow like a repentant prayer 
wafted from purgatory. The picturesque was lost in poetry, 
and admiration in feeling. 

July 30, 1877. . . makes a very true remark about 
Eenan, a propos of the volume of "Les Evangiles." He 
brings out the contradiction between the literary taste of 
the artist, which is delicate, individual, and true, and the 
opinions of the critic, which are borrowed, old-fashioned 
and wavering. This hesitancy of choice between the 
beautiful and the true, between poetry and prose, between 
art and learning, is, in fact, characteristic. Renan has a 
keen love for science, but he has a still keener love for 
good writing, and, if necessary, he will sacrifice the exact 
phrase to the beautiful phrase. Science is his material 
rather than his object; his object is style . A fine passage 
is ten times more precious in his eyes than the discovery of 
a fact or the rectification of a date. And on this point I 
am very much with him, for a beautiful piece of writing 
is beautiful by virtue of a kind of truth which is truer 
than any mere record of authentic foots. Eousseau also 
thought the same. A chronicler may be able to correct 
Tacitus, but Tacitus survives all the chroniclers. I know 
well that the aesthetic temptation is the French tempta- 
tion; I have often bewailed it, and yetj if I desired any- 



314 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 

thing, it would be to be a writer, a great writer. To 
leave a monument behind, aere perennius, an imper- 
ishable work which might stir the thoughts, the feelings, 
the dreams of men, generation after generation this is the 
only glory which I could wish for, if I were not weaned 
even from this wish also. -A book would be my ambition, 
if ambition were not vanity and vanity of vanities. 

August 11, 1877. The growing triumph of Darwinism 
that is to say of materialism, or of force threatens the 
conception of justice. But justice will have its turn. 
The higher human law cannot be the offspring of animality. 
Justice is the right to the maximum of individual independ- 
ence compatible with the same liberty for others; in other 
words, it is respect for man, for the immature, the small, 
the feeble ; it is the guarantee of those human collectivities, 
associations, states, nationalities those voluntary or invol- 
untary unions the object of which is to increase the sun? 
of happiness, and to satisfy the aspiration of the indi- 
vidual. That some should make use of others for their 
own purposes is an injury to justice. The right of the 
stronger is not a right, but a simple fact, which obtains 
only so long as there is neither protest nor resistance. It 
is like cold, darkness, weight, which tyrannize over man 
until he has invented artificial warmth, artificial light, 
and machinery. Human industry is throughout an eman- 
cipation from brute nature, and the advances made by 
justice are in the same way a series of rebuffs inflicted 
upon the tyranny of the stronger. As the medical art 
consists in the conquest of disease, so goodness consists in 
the conquest of the blind ferocities and untamed appetites 
of the human animal. I see the same law throughout 
increasing emancipation of the individual, a continuous 
ascent of being toward life, happiness, justice, and wisdom. 
Greed and gluttony are the starting-point, intelligence and 
generosity the goal. 

August 21, 1877. (Batlis of Ems). In the salon there 
has been a performance in chorus of " Lorelei " and other 
popular airs. What in our country is only done for wor- 



AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 315 

ship is done also in Germany for poetry and music. Voices 
blend together; art shares the privilege of religion. It is a 
trait which is neither French nor English, nor, I think, 
Italian. The spirit of artistic devotion, of impersonal 
combination, of common, harmonious, disinterested action, 
is specially German; it makes a welcome balance to cer- 
tain clumsy and prosaic elements in the race. 

Later. Perhaps the craving for independence of thought 
the tendency to go back to first principles is really 
proper to the Germanic mind only. The Slavs and the 
Latins are governed rather by the collective wisdom of the 
community, by tradition, usage, prejudice, fashion; or, if 
they break through these, they are like slaves in revolt, 
without any real living apprehension of the law inherent 
in things the true law, which is neither written, nor 
arbitrary, nor imposed. The German wishes to get at 
nature; the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the Kussian, stop 
at conventions. The root of the problem is in the ques- 
tion of the relations between God and the world. Imma- 
nence or transcendence that, step by step, decides the 
meaning of everything else. If the mind is radically exter- 
nal to things, it is not called upon to conform to them. 
If the mind is destitute of native truth, it must get its 
truth from outside, by revelations. And so you get 
thought despising nature, and in bondage to the church 
so you have the Latin world ! 

November 6, 1877. (Geneva). We talk of love many 
years before we know anything about it, and we think we 
know it because we talk of it, or because we repeat what 
other people say of it, or what books tell us about it. So 
that there are ignorances of different degrees, and degrees 
of knowledge which are quite deceptive. One of the 
worst plagues of society is this thoughtless inexhaustible 
verbosity, this careless use of words, this pretense of 
knowing a thing because we talk about it these counter- 
feits of belief, thought, love, or earnestness, which all the 
while are mere babble. The worst of it is, that as self-love 
is behind the babble, these ignorances of society are in 



316 AMIEL'8 JOURNAL. 

general ferociously affirmative ; chatter mistakes itself f 01 
opinion, prejudice poses as principle. Parrots behave as 
though they were thinking beings; imitations give them- 
selves out as originals; and politeness demands the accept- 
ance of the convention. It is very wearisome. 

Language is the vehicle of this confusion, the instru- 
ment of this unconsicous fraud, and all evils of the kind 
are enormously increased by universal education, by the 
periodical press, and by all the other processes of vulgariza- 
tion in use at the present time. Every one deals in paper 
money; few have ever handled gold. We live on symbols, 
and even, on the symbols of symbols; we have never 
grasped or verified things for ourselves; we judge every- 
thing, and we know nothing. 

How seldom we meet with originality, individuality, 
sincerity, nowadays! with men who are worth the trouble 
of listening to! The true self in the majority is lost in the 
borrowed self. How few are anything else than a bundle 
of inclinations anything more than animals whose lan- 
guage and whose gait alone recall to us the highest rank 
m nature ! 

The immense majority of our species are candidates for 
humanity, and nothing more. Virtually we are men ; we 
might be, we ought to be, men ; but practically we do not 
succeed in realizing the type of our race. Semblances and 
counterfeits of men fill up the habitable earth, people the 
islands and the continents, the country and the town. If 
we wish to respect men we must forget what they are, and 
think of the ideal which they carry hidden within them, 
of the just man and the noble, the man of intelligence and 
goodness, inspiration and creative force, who is loyal and 
true, faithful and trustworthy, of the higher man, in 
short, and that divine thing we call a soul. The only men 
who deserve the name are 'the heroes, the geniuses, the 
saints, the harmonious, puissant, and perfect samples of 
the race. 

Very few individuals deserve to be listened to, but all 
deserve that our curiosity with regard to them should be a 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 317 

pitiful curiosity that the insight AVG bring to bear on them 
should be charged with humility. Are we not all ship- 
wrecked, diseased, condemned to death? Let each work 
out his own salvation, and blame no one but himself; so 
the lot of all will be bettered. Whatever impatience we 
may feel toward our neighbor, and whatever indignation 
our race may rouse in us, we are chained one to another, 
and, companions in labor and misfortune, have everything 
to lose by mutual recrimination and reproach. Let us be 
silent as to each other's weakness, helpful, tolerant, nay, 
tender toward each other! Or, if we cannot feel tender- 
ness, may we at least feel pity ! May we put away from us 
the satire which scourges and the anger which brands; the 
oil and wine of the good Samaritan are of more avail. We 
may make the ideal a reason for contempt; but it is more 
beautiful to make it a reason for tenderness. 

December 9, 1877. The modern haunters of Parnassus* 
carve urns of agate and of onyx, but inside the urns what 
is there? ashes. Their work lacks feeling, seriousness, 
sincerity, and pathos in a word, soul and moral life. I 
cannot bring myself to sympathize with such a way of 
understanding poetry. The talent shown is astonishing, 
but stuff and matter are wanting. It is an effort of the 
imagination to stand alone a substitute for everything 
else. We find metaphors, rhymes, music, color, but not 
man, not humanity. Poetry of this factitious kind may 
beguile one at twenty, but what can one make of it at 
fifty? It reminds me of Pergamos, of Alexandria, of all 
the epochs of decadence when beauty of form hid poverty 
of thought and exhaustion of feeling. I strongly share 
the repugnance which this poetical school arouses in simple 
people. It is as though it only cared to please the world- 

* Amiel's expression is Les Parnassieus, an old name revived, 
which nowadays describes the younger school of French poetry 
represented by such names as Theophile Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, 
Theodore de Bauville, and Baudelaire. The modern use of the 
word dates from the publication of " La Parnasse Contemporain " 
(Lemerre, 1866). 



318 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 

worn, the ovei -subtle, the corrupted, while it ignores all 
normal healthy life, virtuous habits, pure affections, steady 
labor, honesty, and duty. It is an affectation, and because 
it is an affectation the school is struck with sterility. 
The reader desires in the poet something better than a 
juggler in rhyme, or a conjurer in verse; he looks to find 
in him a painter of life, a being who thinks, loves, and has 
a conscience, who feels passion and repentance. 



Composition is a process of combination, in which 
thought puts together complementary truths, and talent 
fuses into harmony the most contrary qualities of style. 

So that there is no composition without effort, without 
pain even, as in all bringing forth. The reward is the 
giving birth to something living something, that is to 
say, which, by a kind of magic, makes a living unity out 
of such opposed attributes as orderliness and spontaneity, 
thought and imagination, solidity and charm. 

The true critic strives for a clear vision of things as they 
are for justice and fairness; his effort is to get free from 
himself, so that he may in no way disfigure that which he 
wishes to understand or reproduce. His superiority to 
the common herd lies in this effort, even when its success 
is only partial. He distrusts his own senses, he sifts his 
own impressions, by returning upon them from different 
sides and at different times, by comparing, moderating, 
shading, distinguishing, and so endeavoring to approach 
more and more nearly to the formula which represents the 
maximum of truth. 



Is it not the sad natures who are most tolerant of gayety? 
They know that gayety means impulse and vigor, that 
generally speaking it is disguised kindliness, and that if it 
were a mere affair of temperament and mood, still it is a 
blessing. 



The art which is grand and yet simple is that which pre- 
supposes the greatest elevation both in artist and in public. 



AMIEDS JOURNA.^. 319 

How much folly is compatible with ultimate wisdom and 
prudence? It is difficult to say. The cleverest folk are 
those who discover soonest how to utilize their neighbor's 
experience, and so get rid in good time of their natural 
presumption. 

We must try to grasp the spirit of things, to see cor- i 
rectly, to speak to the point, to give practicable advice, to 
act on the spot, to arrive at the proper moment, to stop in 
time. Tact, measure, occasion all these deserve our 
cultivation and respect. 



April 22, 1878. Letter from my cousin Julia. These 
kind old relations find it very difficult to understand a 
man's life, especially a student's life. The hermits of 
reverie are scared by the busy world, and feel themselves 
out of place in action. But after all, we do not change at 
seventy, and a good, pious old lady, half-blind and living 
in a village, can no longer extend her point of view, nor 
form any idea of existences which have no relation with 
her own. 

What is the link by which these souls, shut in and 
encompassed as they are by the details of daily life, lay 
hold on the ideal? The link of religious aspiration. Faith 
is the plank which saves them. They know the 
meaning of the higher life; their soul is athirst for 
heaven. Their opinions are defective, but their moral 
experience is great; their intellect is full of darkness 
but their souls is full of light. We scarcely know how to 
talk to them about the things of earth, but they are ripe 
and mature in the things of the heart. If they cannot 
understand us, it is for us to make advances to them, to 
speak their language, to enter into their range of ideas, 
their modes of feeling. We must approach them on their 
noble side, and, that we may show them the more respect, 
induce them to open to us the casket of their most 
treasured thoughts. There is always some grain of gold at 
the bottom of every honorable old age. Let it be our busi 
ness to give it an opportunity of showing itself to affection- 
ate eyes. 



320 A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 

May 10, 1878. I have just come back from a solitary 
walk. I heard nightingales, saw white lilac and orchard 
trees in bloom. My heart is full of impressions showered 
upon it by the chaffinches, the golden orioles, the grass- 
hoppers, the hawthorns, and the primroses. A dull, gray, 
fleecy sky brooded with a certain melancholy over the nuptial 

' splendors of vegetation. Many painful memories stirred 
afresh in me; at Pre PEv6que, at Jargonnant, at "Viller- 
euse, a score of phantoms phantoms of youth rose with 
sad eyes to greet me. The walls had changed, and roads 
which were once shady and dreamy I found now waste and 
treeless. But at the first trills of the nightingale a flood 
of tender feeling filled my heart. I felt myself soothed, 
grateful, melted; a mood of serenity and contemplation 
took possession of me. A certain little path, a very king- 
dom of green, with fountain, thickets, gentle ups and 
downs, and an abundance of singing-birds, delighted me, 
and did me inexpressible good. Its peaceful remoteness 
brought back the bloom of feeling. I had need of it. 

May 19, 1878. Criticism is above all a gift, an intui- 
tion, a matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or 
demonstrated it is an art. Critical genius means an apti- 
tude for discerning truth under appearances or in disguises 
which conceal it; for discovering it in spite of the errors of 
testimony, the frauds of tradition, the dust of time, the 
loss or alteration of texts. It is the sagacity of the hunter 
whom nothing deceives for long, and whom no ruse can 
throw off the trail. It is the talent of the Juge d'lnstruc- 

' tion, who knows how to interrogate circumstances, and to 
extract an unknown secret from a thousand falsehoods. 
The true critic can understand everything, but he will be 
the dupe of nothing, and to no convention will he sacrifice 
his duty, which is to find out and proclaim truth. Com- 
petent learning, general cultivation, absolute probity, 
accuracy of general view, human sympathy and technical 
capacity how many things are necessary to the critic, 
without reckoning grace, delicacy, savoir vivre, and the 
gift of happy phrase-making ! 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 321 

July 26, 1878. Every morning I wake up with the same 
sense of vain struggle against a mountain tide which js 
about to overwhelm me. I shall die by suffocation, and 
the suffocation has begun; the progress it has already 
made stimulates it to go on. 

How can one make any plans when every day brings 
with it some fresh misery? I cannot even decide on a line 
of action in a situation so full of confusion and uncertainty 
in which I look forward to the worst, while yet all is 
doubtful. Have I still a few years before me or only a 
few months? Will death be slow or will it come upon me 
as a sudden catastrophe? How am I to bear the days as 
they come? how am I to fill them? How am I to die with 
calmness and dignity? I know not. Everything I do for 
the first time I do badly; but here everything is new; 
there can be no help from experience; the end must be a 
chance! How mortifying for one who has set so great a 
price upon independence to depend upon a thousand 
unforeseen contingencies ! He knows not how he will act 
or what he will become; he would fain speak of these 
things with a friend of good sense and good counsel but 
who? He dares not alarm the affections which are most 
his own, and he is almost sure that any others would try 
to distract his attention, and would refuse to see the posi- 
tion as it is. 

And while I wait (wait for what? certainty?) the weeks 
flow by like water, and strength wastes away like a smok- 
ing candle. . . . 

Is one free to let one's self drift into death without resist- 
ance? Is self-preservation a duty? Do we owe it to those 
who love us to prolom; this desperate struggle to its utmost 
limit? I think so, but it is one fetter the more. For we 
must then feign a hope which we do not feel, and hide the 
absolute discouragement of which the heart is really full. 
Well, why not? Those who succumb are bound in gener- 
osity not to cool the ardor of those who are still battling, 
still enjoying. 

Two parallel roads lead to the same result; meditation 



322 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

paralyzes me, physiology condemns me. My soul is dying, 
my body is dying. In every direction the end is closing 
upon me. My own melancholy anticipates and endorses 
the medical judgment which says, " Your journey is done." 
The two verdicts point to the same result that I have no 
longer a future. And yet there is a side of me which 
says. "Absurd!" which is incredulous, and inclined to 
regard it all as a bad dream. In vain the reason asserts it; 
the mind's inward assent is still refused. Another contra- 
diction 1 

I have not the strength to hope, and I have not tha 
strength to submit. I believe no longer, and I believe 
still. I feel that I am dying, and yet I cannot realize that 
I am dying. Is it madness already? No, it is human 
nature taken in the act; it is life itself which is a contra- 
diction, for life means an incessant death and a daily resur- 
rection; it affirms and it denies, it destroys and constructs, 
it gathers and scatters, it humbles and exalts at the same 
time. To live is to die partially to feel one's self in the 
heart of a whirlwind of opposing forces to be an enigma. 

If the invisible type molded by these two contradictory 
currents if this form which presides over all my changes 
of being has itself general and original value, what does 
it matter whether it carries on the game a few months or 
years longer, or not? It has done what it had to do, it 
h*.s represented a certain unique combination, one particu- 
lar expression of the race. These types are shadows 
manes. Century after century employs itself in fashioning 
them. Glory fame is the proof that one type has 
seemed to the other types newer, rarer, and more beautiful 
than the rest. The common types are souls too, only they 
have no interest except for the Creator, and for a small 
number of individuals. 

To feel one's own fragility is well, but to be indifferent 
to it is better. To take the measure of one's own misery 
is profitable, but to understand its raison d'etre is still 
more profitable. To mourn for one's self is a last sign of 
vanity; we ought only to regret that which has real value, 



AMI KL'S JOURNAL. 323 

and to regret one's self, is to furnish involuntary evidence 
that one had attached importance to one's self. At the 
same time it is a proof of ignorance of our true worth and 
function. It is not necessary to live, but it is necessary to 
preserve one's type unharmed, to remain faithful to one's 
idea, to protect one's monad against alteration and degra 
dation. 

November 7, 1878. To-day we have been talking of 
realism in painting, and, in connection with it, of that poet- 
ical and artistic illusion which does not aim at being con- 
founded with reality itself. Eealism wishes to entrap sen- 
sation ; the object of true art is only to charm the imagina- 
tion, not to deceive the eye. When we see a good portrait 
we say, "It is alive!" in other words, our imagination 
lends it life. On the other hand, a wax figure produces a 
sort of terror in us; its frozen life-likeness makes a death- 
like impression on us, and we say, "It is a ghost! " In the 
one case we see what is lacking, and demand it; in the other 
we see what is given us, and we give on our side. Art, 
then, addresses itself to the imagination; everything that 
appeals to sensation only is below art, almost outside art. 
A work of art ought to set the poetical faculty in us to 
work, it ought to stir us to imagine, to complete our per- 
ception of a thing. And we can only do this when the 
artist leads the way. Mere copyist's painting, realistic 
reproduction, pure imitation, leave us cold because their 
author is a machine, a mirror, an iodized plate, and not 
a soul. 

Art lives by appearances, but these appearances are 
spiritual visions, fixed dreams. Poetry represents to us 
nature become con-substantial with the soul, because in it 
nature is only a reminiscence touched with emotion, an 
image vibrating with our own life, a form without weight 
in short, a mode of the soul. The poetry which is most 
real and objective is the expression of a soul which throws 
itself into things, and forgets itself in their presence more 
readily than others; but still, it is the expression of the 
soul, and hence what we call style. Style may be only col- 



3-24 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

lective, hieratic, national, so long as the artist is still the 
interpreter of the community; it tends to become personal 
in proportion as society makes room for individuality and 
favors its expansion. 



There is a way of killing truth hy truths, tinder the 
pretense that we want to study it more in detail we pul- 
verize the statue it is an absurdity of which our pedantry 
is constantly guilty. Those who can only see the fragments 
of a thing are to me esprits faux, just as much as those 
who disfigure the fragments. The good critic ought to be 
master of the three capacities, the three modes of seeing 
men and things he should be able simultaneously to see 
them as they are, as they might be, and as they ought 
to be. 



Modern culture is a delicate electuary made up of varied 
savors and subtle colors, which can be more easily felt 
than measured or defined. Its very superiority consists in 
the complexity, the association of contraries, the skillful 
combination it implies. The man of to-day, fashioned by 
the historical and geographical influences of twenty coun- 
tries and of thirty centuries, trained and modified by all 
the sciences and all the arts, the supple recipient of all 
literatures, is an entirely new product. He finds affinities, 
relationships, analogies everywhere, but at the same time 
he condenses and sums up what is elsewhere scattered. He 
is like the smile of La Gioconda, which seems to reveal a 
soul to the spectator only to leave him the more certainly 
tinder a final impression of mystery, so many different 
things are expressed in it at once. 



To understand things we must have been once in them 
and then have come out of them; so that first there must 
be captivity and then deliverance, illusion followed by 
disillusion, enthusiasm by disappointment. He who is still 
under the spell, and he who has never felt the spell, are 
equally incompetent. We only know well what we have 



A MTKL'S JO URNAL. 325 

first believed, then judged. To understand we must be 
free, yet not have been always free. The same truth holds, 
whether it is a question of love, of art, of religion, or of 
patriotism. Sympathy is a first condition of criticism; 
reason and justice presuppose, at their origin, emotion. 



What is an intelligent man? A man who enters with 
case and completeness into the spirit of things and the 
intention of persons, and who arrives at an end by the 
shortest route. Lucidity and suppleness of thought, 
critical delicacy and inventive resource, these are his 
attributes. 



Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into 
flour springs and germinates no more. 



January 3, 1879. Letter from . This kind friend 

of mine has no pity. ... I have been trying to quiet 
his over-delicate susceptibilities. . . It is difficult to 
write perfectly easy letters when one finds them studied 
with a magnifying glass, and treated like monumental 
inscriptions, in which each character has been deliberately 
engraved with a view to an eternity of life. Such dispro- 
portion between the word and its commentary, between 
the playfulness of the writer and the analytical temper of 
the reader, is not favorable to ease of style. One dares not 
be one's natural self with these serious folk who attach 
importance to everything; it is difficult to write open- 
heartedly if one must weigh every phrase and every word. 

Esprit means taking things in the sense which they are 
meant to have, entering into the tone of other people, being 
able to place one's self on the required level; esprit is that 
just and accurate sense which divines,appreciates,and weighs 
quickly, lightly, and well. The mind must have its play, 
the Muse is winged the Greeks knew it, and Socrates. 

January 13, 1879. It is impossible for me to remember 
what letters I wrote yesterday, A single night digs a gulf 
between the self of yesterday and the self of to-day. My 



326 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

life is without unity of action, because my actions them- 
selves are escaping from the control of memory. My men- 
tal power, occupied in gaining possession of itself under 
the form of consciousness, seems to be letting go its hold 
on all that generally peoples the understanding, as the 
glacier throws off the stones and fragments fallen into its 
crevasses, that it may remain pure crystal. The philosophic 
mind is loth to overweight itself with too many material 
facts or trivial memories. Thought clings only to thought 
that is to say, to itself, to the psychological process. 
The mind's only ambition is for an enriched experience. 
It finds its pleasure in studying the play of its own facul- 
ties, and the study passes easily into an aptitude and habit. 
Keflection becomes nothing more than an apparatus for 
the registration of the impressions, emotions, and ideas 
which pass across the mind. The whole moulting process 
is carried on so energetically that the mind is not only 
unclothed, but stripped of itself, and, so to speak, 
de-substantiated. The wheel turns so quickly that it 
melts around the mathematical axis, which alone remainc 
cold because it is impalpable, and has no thickness. All 
this is natural enough, but very dangerous. 

So long as one is numbered among the living so long, 
that is to say, as one is still plunged in the world of men, 
a sharer of their interests, conflicts, vanities, passions, and 
duties, one is bound to deny one's self this subtle state of 
consciousness ; one must consent to be a separate individual, 
having one's special name, position, age, and sphere of 
activity. In spite of all the temptations of impersonality, 
one must resume the position of a being imprisoned within 
certain limits of time and space, an individual with special 
surroundings, friends, enemies, profession, country, bound 
to house and feed himself, to make up his accounts and 
look afcer his affairs; in short, one must behave like all 
tne world. There are days when all these details seem to 
me a dream when I wonder at the desk under my hand, 
at my body itself when I ask myself if there is a street 
before my house, and if all this geographical and topo- 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 327 

graphical phantasmagoria is indeed real. Time and space 
become then mere specks; I become a sharer in a purely 
spiritual existence ; I see myself sub specie ceternitatis. 

Is not mind simply that which enables us to merge 
finite reality in the infinite possibility around it? Or, to 
put it differently, is not mind the universal virtuality, the 
universe latent? If so, its zero would be the germ of the 
infinite, which is expressed mathematically by the double 
zero (00). 

Deduction: that the mind may experience the infinite 
in itself; that in the human individual there arises some- 
times the divine spark which reveals to him the existence 
of the original, fundamental, principal Being, within 
which all is contained like a series within its generating 
formula. The universe is but a radiation of mind; and 
the radiations of the Divine mind are for us more than 
appearances; they have a reality parallel to our own. The 
radiations of our mind are imperfect reflections from the 
great show of fireworks set in motion by Brahma, and 
great art is great only because of its conformities with the 
Divine order with that which is. 

Ideal conceptions are the mind's anticipation of such an 
order. The mind is capable of them because it is mind, 
and, as such, perceives the Eternal. The real, on the 
contrary, is fragmentary and passing. Law alone is eternal. 
The ideal is then the imperishable hope of something better 
the mind's involuntary protest against the present, the 
leaven of the future working in it. It is the supernatural 
in us, or rather the super-animal, and the ground of human 
progress. He who has no ideal contents himself with what 
is; he has no quarrel with facts, which for him are identi- 
cal with the just, the good, and the beautiful. 

But why is the divine radiation imperfect? Because it 
is still going on. Our planet, for example, is in the mid- 
course of its experience. Its flora and fauna are still chang- 
ing. The evolution of humanity is nearer its origin than 
its close. The complete spiritualization of the animal 
element in nature seems to be singularly difficult, and it is 



328 AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 

the task of our species. Its performance is hindered b^ 
error, evil, selfishness, and death, without counting telluric 
catastrophes. The edifice of a common happiness, a com- 
mon science of morality and justice, is sketched, but only 
sketched. A thousand retarding and perturbing causes 
hinder this giant's task, in which nations, races, and con- 
tinents take part. At the present moment humanity is 
not yet constituted as a physical unity, and its general 
ducation is not yet begun. All our attempts at order as 
yet have been local crystallizations. Now, indeed, the 
different possibilities are beginning to combine (union of 
posts and telegraphs, universal exhibitions, voyages round 
the globes, international congresses, etc.). Science and 
common interest are binding together the great fractions 
of humanity, which religion and language have kept 
apart. A year in which there has been talk of a network 
of African railways, running from the coast to the center 
and bringing the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the 
Indian Ocean into communication with each other such 
a year is enough to mark a new epoch. The fantastic 
has become the conceivable, the possible tends to become 
the real; the earth becomes the garden of man. Man's 
chief problem is how to make the cohabitation of the 
individuals of his species possible; how, that is to say, to 
secure for each successive epoch the law, the order, the 
equilibrium which befits it. Division of labor allows him 
to explore in every direction at once; industry, science, 
art, law, education, morals, religion, politics, and economi- 
3al relations all are in process of birth. 

Thus everything may be brought back to zero by the 
mind, but it is a fruitful zero a zero which contains the 
universe and, in particular, humanity. The mind has no 
more difficulty in tracking the real within the innumerable 
than in apprehending infinite possibility. 00 may issue 
from 0, or may return to it. 

January 19, 1879. Charity goodness places a volun- 
tary curb on acuteness of perception; \t screens and 
softens the rays of a too vivid insight; it refuses to see too 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 329 

clearly the ugliness and misery of the great intellectual 
hospital around it. True goodness is loth to recognize 
any privilege in itself; it prefers to be humble and chari- 
table; it tries not to see what stares it in the face that is 
to say, the imperfections, infirmities, and errors of human- 
kind ; its pity puts on airs of approval and encouragement. 
It triumphs over its own repulsions that it may help and 
raise. 

It has often been remarked that Vinet praised weak 
things. If so, it was not from any failure in his own 
critical sense; it was from charity. "Quench not the 
smoking flax," to which I add, "Never give unnecessary 
pain. The cricket is not the nightingale; why tell him 
so? Throw yourself into the mind of the cricket the 
process is newer and more ingenious; and it is what 
charity commands. 

Intellect is aristocratic, charity is democratic. In a 
democracy the general equality of pretensions, combined 
with the inequality of merits, creates considerable practical 
difficulty; some get out of it by making their prudence a 
muzzle on their frankness; others, by using kindness as a 
corrective of perspicacity. On the whole, kindness is 
safer than reserve; it inflicts no wound, and kills nothing. 

Charity is generous; it runs a risk willingly, and 'in 
spite of a hundred successive experiences, it thinks no evil 
at the hundred-and-first. We cannot be at the same time 
kind and wary, nor can we serve two masters love and 
selfishness. We must be knowingly rash, that we may not 
be like the clever ones of the world, who never forget their 
own interests. We must be able to submit to being 
deceived; it is the sacrifice which interest and self-love 
owe to conscience. The claims of the soul must be satis- 
fied first if we are to be the children of God. 

Was it not Bossuet who said, " It is only the great souls 
who know all the grandeur there is in charity?" 

January 21, 1879. At first religion holds the place of 
science and philosophy ; afterward she has to learn to con/ 
fine herself to her own domain which is in the inmr 



330 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

depths of conscience, in the secret recesses of the 
where life communes with the Divine will and the universal 
order. Piety is the daily renewing of the ideal, the steady- 
ing of our inner being, agitated, troubled, and embittered 
by the common accidents of existence. Prayer is the 
spiritual balm, the precious cordial which restores to us 
peace and courage. It reminds us of pardon and of duty. 
It says to us, "Thou art loved love; thou hast received 
give; thou must die labor while thou canst; overcome 
anger by kindness; overcome evil with good. What does 
the blindness of opinion matter, or misunderstanding, or 
ingratitude? Thou art neither bound to follow the com- 
mon example nor to succeed. Fais ce que dois, advienne 
que pourra. Thou hast a witness in thy conscience; and 
thy conscience is God speaking to thee! " 

March 3, 1879. The sensible politician is governed by 
consideration.! of social utility, the public good, the greatest 
attainable good ; the political windbag starts from the idea 
of the rights of the individual abstract rights, of which 
the extent is affirmed, not demonstrated, for the political 
right of the individual is precisely what is in question. 
The revolutionary school always forgets that right apart 
from duty is a compass with one leg. The notion of right 
inflates the individual fills him with thoughts of self and 
of what others owe him, while it ignores the other side of 
\che question, and extinguishes his capacity for devoting 
himself to a common cause. The state becomes a shop 
with self-interest for a principle or rather an arena, in 
which every combatant fights for his own hand only. In 
either case self is the motive power. 

Church and state ought to provide two opposite careers 
for the individual; in the state he should be called on to 
give proof of merit that is to say, he should earn his 
rights by services rendered; in the church his task should 
be to do good while suppressing his own merits, by a volun- 
tary act of humility. 

Extreme individualism dissipates the moral substance of 
the individual. It leads him to subordinate everything to 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 331 

himself, and to think the world, society, the state, made 
for him. I am chilled by its lack of gratitude, of the 
spirit of deference, of the instinct of solidarity. It is an 
ideal without beauty and without grandeur. 

But, as a consolation, the modern ze?,l for equality 
makes a counterpoise for Darwinism, just as one wolf holds 
another wolf in check. Neither, indeed, acknowledges 
the claim of duty. The fanatic for equality affirms his 
right not to be eaten by his neighbor; the Darwinian 
states the fact that the big devour the little, and adds so 
much the better. Neither the one nor the other has a word 
to say of love, of eternity, of kindness, of piety, of volun- 
tary submission, of self-surrender. 

All forces and all principles are brought into action at 
once in this world. The result is, on the whole, good. 
But the struggle itself is hateful because it dislocates truth 
and shows us nothing but error pitted against error, party 
against party ; that is to say, mere halves and fragments of 
being monsters against monsters. A nature in love with 
beauty cannot reconcile itself to the sight; it longs for 
harmony, for something else than perpetual dissonance. 
The common condition of human society must indeed be 
accepted; tumult, hatred, fraud, crime, the ferocity of 
self-interest, the tenacity of prejudice, are perennial; but 
the philosopher sighs over it; his heart is not in it; his 
ambition is to see human history from a height; his ear is 
set to catch the music of the eternal spheres. 

March 15, 1879. I have been turrjng over "Les his- 
tories de mon Parrain " by Stahl, and a few chapters of 
" Nos Fils et nos Filles " by Legouve. These writers 
press wit, grace, gayety, and charm into the service of 
goodness; their desire is to show that virtue is not so dull 
nor common sense so tiresome as people believe. They 
are persuasive moralists, captivating story-tellers; they 
rouse the appetite for good. This pretty manner of theirs, 
however, has its dangers. A moral wrapped up in sugar 
goes down certainly, but it may be feared that it only goes 
down because of its sugar. The Sybarites of to-day will 



332 AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 

toierate a sermon which is delicate enough to flatter theii 
literary sensuality; but it is their taste which is charmed, 
not their conscience which is awakened; their principle 
of conduct escapes untouched. 

Amusement, instruction, morals, are distinct genres. 
They may no doubt be mingled and combined, but if we 
wish to obtain direct and simple effects, we shall do best 
to keep them apart. The well-disposed child, besides, 
does not like mixtures which have something of artifice 
and deception in them. Duty claims obedience; study 
requires application; for amusement, nothing is wanted 
but good temper. To convert obedience and application 
into means of amusement is to weaken the will and the 
intelligence. These efforts to make virtue the fashion 
are praiseworthy enough, but if they do honor to the 
writers, on the other hand they prove the moral anaemia 
of society. When the digestion is unspoiled, so much per- 
suading is not necessary to give it a taste for bread. 

May 22, 1879. (Ascension Day). Wonderful and delicious 
weather. Soft, caressing sunlight the air a limpid blue 
twitterings of birds; even the distant voices of the city 
have something young and springlike in them. It is indeed 
a new birth. The ascension of the Saviour of men is sym- 
bolized by this expansion, this heavenward yearning of 
nature. ... I feel myself born again; all the win- 
dows of the soul are clear. Forms, lines, tints, reflections, 
sounds, contrasts, and harmonies, the general play and 
interchange of things it is all enchanting! The atmos- 
phere is steeped in joy. May is in full beauty. 

In my courtyard the ivy is green again, the chestnut 
tree is full of leaf, the Persian lilac beside the little foun- 
tain is flushed with red, and just about to flower; through 
the wide openings to the right and left of the old College 
of Calvin I see the Saleve above the trees of St. Antoine, 
the Voiron above the hill of Cologny; while the three 
flights of steps which, from landing to landing, lead 
between two high walls from the Rue Verdaine to the 
terrace of the Tranohees, recall to one's imagination some 
old city of the south, a glimpse o Perugia or of Malaga. 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 333 

All the bells are ringing. It is the hour of worship. A 
historical and religious impression mingles with the pictur- 
esque, the musical, the poetical impressions of the scene. 
All the peoples of Christendom all the churches scattered 
over the globe are celebrating at this moment the glory 
of the Crucified. 

And what are those many nations doing who have other 
prophets, and honor the Divinity in other ways? the 
Jews, the Mussulmans, the Buddhists, the Vishnuists, the 
Guebers? They have other sacred days, other rites, other 
solemnities, other beliefs. But all have some religion, 
some ideal end for life all aim at raising man above the 
sorrows and smallnesses of the present, and of the indi- 
vidual existence. All have faith in something greater 
than themselves, all pray, all bow, all adore; all see beyond 
nature, Spirit, and beyond evil, Good. All bear witness 
to the Invisible. Here we have the link which binds all 
peoples together. All men are equally creatures of sorrow 
and desire, of hope and fear. All long to recover some- 
lost harmony with the great order of things, and to feel 
themselves approved and blessed by the Author of the uni- 
verse. All know what suffering is, and yearn for happi- 
ness. All know what sin is, and feel the need of pardon. 

Christianity reduced to its original simplicity is the 
reconciliation of the sinner with God, by means of the cer- 
tainty that God loves in spite of everything, and that he 
chastises because he loves. Christianity furnished a new 
motive and a new strength for the achievement of moral 
perfection. It made holiness attractive by giving to it the 
air of filial gratitude. 

June 28, 1879. Last lecture of the term and of the 
academic year. I finished the exposition of modern 
philosophy, and wound up my course with the precision I 
wished. The circle has returned upon itself. In order 
to do this I have divided my hour into minutes, calculated 
my material, and counted every stitch and point. This, 
However, is but a very small part of the professorial science. 
It is a more difficult matter to divide one's whole material 



334 AMIKL'8 JO URN A L. 

into a given number of lectures, to determine the right 
proportions of the different parts, and the normal 3peed of 
delivery to be attained. The ordinary lecturer may achieve 
a series of complete seances the unity being the seance. 
But a scientific course ought to aim at something more 
&t a general unity of subject and of exposition. 

Has this concise, substantial, closely-reasoned kind of 
work been useful to my class? I cannot tell. Have my 
students liked me this year? I am not sure, but I hope 
BO. It seems to me they have. Only, if I have pleased 
them, it cannot have been in any case more than a succe* 
d'estime; I have never aimed at any oratorical success. 
My only object is to light up for them a complicated and 
difficult subject. I respect myself too much, and I respect 
my class too much, to attempt rhetoric. My role is to 
help them to understand. Scientific lecturing ought to 
be, above all things, clear, instructive, well put together, 
and convincing. A lecturer has nothing to do with pay- 
ing court to the scholars, or with showing off the master; 
his business is one of serious study and impersonal exposi- 
tion. To yield anything on this point would seem to me 
a piece of mean utilitarianism. I hate everything that 
savors of cajoling and coaxing. All such ways are mere 
attempts to throw dust in men's eyes, mere forms of 
coquetry and stratagem. A professor is the priest of his 
subject; he should do the honors of it gravely and with 
dignity. 

September 9, 1879. "Non-being is perfect. Being, im- 
perfect : " this horrible sophism becomes beautiful only in 
the Platonic system, because there Non-being is replaced 
by the Idea, which is, and which is divine. 

The ideal, the chimerical, the vacant, should not be 
^llowed to claim so great a superiority to the Real, which, 
on its side, has the incomparable advantage of existing. 
The Ideal kills enjoyment and content by disparaging the 
present and actual. It is the voice which says No, like 
Mephistopheles. No, you have not succeeded; no, your 
work is "ot good; no, you are not happy; no, you shall 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 335 

not find rest all that you see and all that you do is 
insufficient, insignificant, overdone, badly done, imper- 
fect. The thirst for the ideal is like the goad of Siva, which 
only quickens life to hasten death. Incurable longing 
that it is, it lies at the root both of individual suffering 
and of the progress of the race. It destroys happiness in ' 
the name of dignity. 

The only positive good is order, the return therefore to 
order and to a state of equilibrium. Thought without 
action is an evil, and so is action without thought. The 
ideal is a poison unless it be fused with the real, and the 
real becomes corrupt without the perfume of the ideal. 
Nothing is good singly wichout its complement and its 
contrary. Self-examination is dangerous if it encroaches 
upon self-devotion ; reverie is hurtful when it stupefies the 
will ; gentleness is an evil when it lessens strength ; con- 
templation is fatal when it destroys character. "Too 
much" and "too little " sin equally against wisdom. Ex- 
cess is one evil, apathy another. Duty may be defined as 
energy tempered by moderation; happiness, as inclination 
calmed and tempered by self-control. 

Just as life is only lent us for a few years, but is not in- 
herent in us, so the good which is in us is not our own. 
It is not difficult to think of one's self in this detached 
spirit. It only needs a little self-knowledge, a little intui- 
tive preception of the ideal, a little religion. There is even 
much sweetness in this conception that we are nothing of 
ourselves, and that yet it is granted to us to summon each 
other to life, joy, poetry and holiness. 

Another application of the law of irony: Zeno, a fatalist 
by theory, makes his disciples heroes; Epicurus, the up- 
holder of liberty, makes his disciples languid and effemin- 
ate. The ideal pursued is the decisive point; the stoical 
ideal is duty, whereas the Epicureans make an ideal out of 
an interest. Two tendencies, two systems of morals, two 
worlds. In the same way the Jansenists, and before them 
the great reformers, are for predestination, the Jesuits for 
free-will and yet the first founded liberty, the second 



B36 AMI BUS JOURNAL 

slavery of conscience. What matters then is not th 
theoretical principle ; it is the secret tendency, the aspira- 
tion, the aim, which is the essential thing. 



At every epoch there lies, beyond the domain of what 
man knows, the domain of the unknown, in which faith 
has its dwelling. Faith has no proofs, but only itself, to 
offer. It is born spontaneously in certain commanding 
souls; it spreads its empire among the rest by imitation 
and contagion. A great faith is but a great hope which 
becomes certitude as we move farther and farther from the 
founder of it; time and distance strengthen it, until at 
last the passion for knowledge seizes upon it, questions, and 
examines it. Then all which had once made its strengtli 
becomes its weakness; the impossibility of verification, ex- 
altation of feeling, distance. 



At what age is our view clearest, our eye truest? Surelv 

j * 

in old age, before the infirmities come which weaken or 
embitter. The ancients were right. The old man who is 
,at once sympathetic and disinterested, necessarily develops 
the spirit of contemplation, and it is given to the spirit of 
contemplation to see things most truly, because it alone 
perceives them in their relative and proportional value. 

January 2, 1880. A sense of rest, of deep quiet even. 
Silence within and without. A quietly-burning fire. A 
sense of comfort. The portrait of my mother seems to 
smile upon me. I am not dazed or stupid, but only happy 
in this peaceful morning. Whatever may be the charm of 
emotion, I do not know whether it equals the sweetness of 
those hours of silent meditation, in which we have a 
glimpse and foretaste of the contemplative joys of paradise. 
Desire and fear, sadness and care, are done away. Exist- 
ence is reduced to the simplest form, the most ethereal 
mode of being, that is, to pure self-consciousness. It is a 
state of harmony, without tension and without disturb- 
ance, the dominical state of the soul, perhaps the state 
which awaits it beyond the grave. It is happiness as the 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 337 

orientals understand it, the happiness of the anchorite, Avho 
neither struggles nor wishes any more, but simply adores 
and enjoys. It is difficult to find words in which to ex- 
press this moral situation, for our languages can only 
render the particular and localized vibrations of life; they 
are incapable of expressing this motionless concentration, 
this divine quietude, this state of the resting ocean, which 
reflects the sky, and is master of its own profundities. 
Things are then re-absorbed into their principles ; memories 
are swallowed up in memory; the soul is only soul, and ia 
no longer conscious of itself in its individuality and sepa- 
rateness. It is something which feels the universal life, a 
sensible atom of the Divine, of God. It no longer appro- 
priates anything to itself, it is conscious of no void. Only 
the Yogis and Soufis perhaps have known in its profund- 
ity this humble and yet voluptuous state, which combines 
the joys of being and of non-being, which is neither reflec- 
tion nor will, which is above both the moral existence and 
the intellectual existence, which is the return to unity, to 
the pleroma, the vision of Plotinus and of Proclus 
Nirvana in its most attractive form. 

It is clear that the western nations in general, and 
especially the Americans, know very little of this state of 
feeling. For them life is devouring and incessant activity. 
They are eager for gold, for power, for dominion; their 
aim is to crush men and to enslave nature. They show an 
obstinate interest in means, and have not a thought for 
the end. They confound being with individual being, and 
the expansion of the self with happiness that is to say, 
they do not live by the soul ; they ignore the unchangeable 
and the eternal; they live at the periphery of their being, 
because they are unable to penetrate to its axis. They are 
excited, ardent, positive, because they are superficial. 
Why so much effort, noise, struggle, and greed? it is all 
a mere stunning and deafening of the self. When death 
comes they recognize that it is so why not then admit it 
sooner? Activity is only beautiful when it is holy that 
is to say, when it is snent in the service of that which 
passeth not awav 



338 ^ MIEVR JO URN A L. 

February 6, 1880. A feeling article by Edmond Scherei 
on the death of Bersot, the director of the " Ecole Nor- 
male," a philosopher who bore like a stoic a terrible 
disease, and who labored to the last without a complaint. 
. . I have just read the four orations delivered over 
his grave. They have brought the tears to my eyes. In 
the last days of this brave man everything was manly, 
noble, moral, and spiritual. Each of the speakers paid 
homage to the character, the devotion, the constancy, and 
the intellectual elevation of the dead. " Let us learn from 
him how to live and how to die." The whole funeral cere- 
mony had an antique dignity. 

February 7, 1880. Hoar-frost and fog, but the general 
aspect is bright and fairylike, and has nothing in common 
with the gloom in Paris and London, of which the news- 
papers tell us. 

This silvery landscape has a dreamy grace, a fanciful 
charm, which are unknown both to the countries of the sun 
and to those of coal-smoke. The trees seem to belong to 
another creation, in which white has taken the place of 
green. As one gazes at these alleys, these clumps, these 
groves and arcades, these lace-like garlands and festoons, 
one feels no wish for anything else ; their beauty is original 
and self-sufficing, all the more because the ground pow- 
dered with snow, the sky dimmed with mist, and the 
smooth soft distances, combine to form a general scale of 
color, and a harmonious whole, which charms the eye. No 
harshness anywhere all is velvet. My enchantment 
beguiled me out both before and after dinner. The im- 
pression is that of a fete, and the subdued tints are, or seem' 
to be, a mere coquetry of winter which has set itself to 
paint something without sunshine, and yet to charm the 
spectator. 

February 9, 1880. Life rushes on so much the worse 
for the weak and the stragglers. As soon as a man's tendo 
Achillis gives way he finds himself trampled under foot 
by the young, the eager, the voracious. " Vae victis, 
vae debilibus!" yells the crowd, which in its turn is storm- 



A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 339 

ing the goods of this world. Every man is always in some 
other man's way, since, however small he may make him- 
self, he still occupies some space, and however little he may 
envy or possess, he is still sure to be envied and his goods 
coveted by some one else. Mean world! peopled by a 
mean race! To console ourselves we must think of the 
exceptions of the noble and generous souls. There are 
such. What do the rest matter! The traveler crossing 
the desert feels himself surrounded by creatures thirsting 
for his blood; by day vultures fly about his head; by night 
scorpions creep into his tent, jackals prowl around his 
camp-fire, mosquitoes prick and torture him with their 
greedy sting; everywhere menace, enmity, ferocity. But 
far beyond the horizon, and the barren sands peopled by 
these hostile hordes, the wayfarer pictures to himself a few 
loved faces aud kind looks, a few true hearts which follow 
him in their dreams and smiles. When all is said, indeed, 
we defend ourselves a greater or lesser number of years, 
but we are always conquered and devoured in the end; 
there is no escaping the grave and its worm. Destruction 
is our destiny, and oblivion our portion. ... i 

How near is the great gulf! My skiff is thin as a nut- 
shell, or even more fragile still. Let the leak but widen a 
little and all is over for the navigator. A mere nothing 
separates me from idiocy, from madness, from death. The 
slightest breach is enough to endanger all this frail, ingeni- 
ous edifice, which calls itself my being and my life. 

Not even the dragonfly symbol is enough to express its 
frailty; the soap-bubble is the best poetical translation of, 
all this illusory magnificence, this fugutive apparition of 
the tiny self, which is we, and we it. 

. . . A miserable night enough. Awakened three 
or four times by my bronchitis. Sadness restlessness. 
One of these winter nights, possibly, suffocation will come. 
I realize that it would be well to keep myself ready, to put 
everything in order. ... To begin with, let me wipe 
out all personal grievances and bitternesses; forgive all, 
judge no one; in enmity and ill-will, see only misunder- 



340 A MIEL'S JO URN A L. 

standing. "As much as lieth in you, be at peace with all 
men." On the bed of death the soul should have no eyes 
but for eternal things. All the littlenesses of life disappear. 
The fight is over. There should be nothing left now but 
emembrance of past blessings adoration of the ways of 
God. Our natural instinct leads us back to Christian 
humility and pity. <; Father, forgive us our trespasses, as 
we forgive them who trespass against us." 

Prepare thyself as though the coming Easter were thy 
last, for thy days henceforward shall be few and evil. 

February 11, 1880. Victor de Laprade* has elevation, 
grandeur, nobility, and harmony. What is it, then, that 
he lacks? Ease, and perhaps hurnor. Hence the monoto- 
nous solemnity, the excess of emphasis, the over-intensity, 
the inspired air, the statue-like gait, which annoy one in 
him. His is a muse which never lays aside the cothurnus, 
and a royalty which never puts off its crown, even in sleep. 
The total absence in him of playfulness, simplicity, 
familiarity, is a great defect. De Laprade is to the ancients 
as the French tragedy is to that of Euripides, or as the wig 
of Louis XIV. to the locks of Apollo. His majestic airs 
are wearisome and factitious. If there is not exactly affec- 
tation in them, there is at least a kind of theatrical and 
sacerdotal posing, a sort of professional attitudinizing. 
Truth is not as fine as this, but it is more living, more 
pathetic, more varied. Marble images are cold. Was it 
not Musset who said, " If De Laprade is a poet, then I am 
not one?" 

February 27, 1880. I have finished translating twelve 
or fourteen little poems by Petofi. They have a strange 
kind of savor. There is something of the Steppe, of the 
East, of Mazeppa, of madness, in these songs, which seem 

* Victor de Laprade, born 1812, first a disciple and imitator of 
Edgar Quinet. then the friend of Lamartine, Lamennais, George 
Sand, Victor Hugo; admitted to the Academy in 1857 in succession 
to Alfred de Musset. He wrote " Parf urns de Madeleine," 3839; 
" Odes et Poemes," 1843; " Poemes Evangeliques," 1852: " Idylles 
Heroiques," 1858, etc- etc 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 341 

to go to the beat of a riding-whip. What force and pas- 
sion, what savage brilliancy, what wild and grandiose 
images, there are in them ! One feels that the Magyar is a 
kind of Centaur, and that he is only Christian and Euro- 
pean by accident. The Hun in him tends toward the 
Arab. 

March 20, 1880. I have been reading "La Banniere 
Bleue " a history of the world at the time of Genghis 
Khan, under the form of memoirs. It is a Turk, Oui'gour, 
who tells the story. He shows us civilization from the 
wrong side, or the other side, and the Asiatic nomads 
appear as the scavengers of its corruptions. 

Genghis proclaimed himself the scourge of God, and he 
did in fact realize the vastest empire known to history, 
stretching from the Blue Sea to the Baltic, and from the 
vast plains of Siberia to the banks of the sacred Ganges. 
The most solid empires of the ancient world were over- 
thrown by the tramp of his horsemen and the shafts of his 
archers. From the tumult into which he threw the 
western continent there issued certain vast results: the 
fall of the Byzantine empire, involving the Renaissance, 
the voyages of discovery in Asia, undertaken from both 
sides of the globe that is to say, Gama and Columbus; 
the formation of the Turkish empire; and the preparation 
of the Russian empire. This tremendous hurricane, 
starting from the high Asiatic tablelands, felled the decay- 
ing oaks and worm-eaten buildings of the whole ancient 
world. The descent of the yellow, flat-nosed Mongols upon 
Europe is a historical cyclone which devastated and puri- 
fied our thirteenth century, and broke, at the two ends of 
the known world, through two great Chinese walls that 
which protected the ancient empire of the Center, and 
that which made a barrier of ignorance and superstition 
round the little world of Christendom. Attila, Genghis, 
Tamerlane, ought to range in the memory of men with 
Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon. They roused whole 
peoples into action, and stirred the depths of human life, 
they powerfulJv affected ethnography, they let loose rivera 



342 AMIRL' 8 JOURNAL. 

of blood, and renewed the face of things. The Quakers 
will not see that there is a law of tempests in history as in 
nature. The revilers of war are like the revilers of thun- 
der, storms, and volcanoes; they know not what they do. 
Civilization tends to corrupt men, as large towns tend to 
vitiate the air. , 

"Nos patimur longse pacis mala." 

Catastrophes bring about a violent restoration of equili- 
brium ; they put the world brutally to rights. Evil chas- 
tises itself, and the tendency to ruin in human things sup- 
plies the place of the regulator who has not yet been dis- 
covered. No civilization can bear more than a certain 
proportion of abuses, injustice, corruption, shame, and 
crime. When this proportion has been reached, the 
boiler bursts, the palace falls, the scaffolding breaks down ; 
institutions, cities, states, empires, sink into ruin. The 
evil contained in an organism is a virus which preys upon 
it, and if it is not eliminated ends by destroying it. And 
as nothing is perfect, nothing can escape death. 

May 19, 1880. Inadaptibility, due either to mysticism 
or stiffness, delicacy or disdain, is the misfortune or at all 
events the characteristic of my life. I have not been able 
to fit myself to anything, to content myself with anything. 
I have never had the quantum of illusion necessary for risk- 
ing the irreparable. I have made use of the ideal itself to 
keep me from any kind of bondage. It was thus with 
marriage: only perfection would have satisfied me; and, 
on the other hand, I was not worthy of perfection. 
So that, finding no satisfaction in things, I 
tried to extirpate desire, by which things enslave us. 
Independence has been my refuge; detachment my strong- 
hold. I have lived the impersonal life in the world, yet 
not in it, thinking much, desiring nothing. It is a state 
of mind which corresponds with what in women is called a 
broken heart; and it is in fact like it, since the character- 
istic common to both is despair. When one knows that one 
will never possess what one could have loved, and that one 



AM1KUS JOURNAL. 343 

can be content with nothing less, one has, so to speak, 
left the world, one has cut the golden hair, parted with 
all that makes human life that is to say, illusion the 
incessant effort toward an apparently attainable end. 

May 31, 1880. Let us not be over-ingenious. There is 
no help to be got out of subtleties. Besides, one must 
live. It is best and simplest not to quarrel with any illu- 
,sion, and to accept the inevitable good-temperedly. Plunged 
as we are in human existence, we must take it as it comes, 
not too bitterly, nor too tragically, without horror and 
without sarcasm, without misplaced petulance or a too 
exacting expectation ; cheerfulness, serenity, and patience, 
these are best let us aim at these. Our business is to 
treat life as the grandfather treats his granddaughter, or 
the grandmother her grandson; to enter into the pretenses 
of childhood and the fictions of youth, even when we our- 
selves have long passed beyond them. It is probable that 
God himself looks kindly upon the illusions of the human 
race, so long as they are innocent. There is nothing evil 
but sin that is, egotism and revolt. And as for error, 
man changes his errors frequently, but error of some sort 
is always with him. Travel as one may, one is always 
somewhere, and one's mind rests on some point of truth, 
as one's feet rest upon some point of the globe. 

Society alone represents a more or less complete unity. 
The individual must content himself with being a stone 
in the building, a wheel in the immense machine, E word 
in the poem. He is a part of the family, of the state, of 
humanity, of all the special frgaments formed by human 
interests, beliefs, aspirations, and labors. The loftiest 
souls are those who are conscious of the universal sym- 
phony, and who give their full and willing collaboration to 
this vast and complicated concert Avhich we call civilization. 

In principle .the mind is capable of suppressing all the 
limits which it discovers in itself, limits of language, 
nationality, religion, race, or epoch. But it must be ad- 
mitted that the more the mind spiritualizes and generalizes 
itself, the less hold it has on other minds, which no 



344 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

longer understand it or know what to do with it. Influ 
ence belongs to men of action, and for purposes of actiou 
nothing is more useful than narrowness of thought com- 
bined with energy of will. 

The forms of dreamland are gigantic, those of action are 
small and dwarfed. To the minds imprisoiied in things, 
belong success, fame, profit; a great deal no doubt; but 
they know nothing of the pleasures of liberty or the joy 
of penetrating the infinite. However, I do not mean to 
put one class before another; for every man is happy 
according to his nature. History is made by combatants 
and specialists ; only it is perhaps not a bad thing that in 
the midst of the devouring activities of the western world, 
there should be a few Brahmanizing souls. 

. . . This soliloquy means what? That reverie 
turns upon itself as dreams do; that impressions added 
together do not always produce a fair judgment; that a 
private journal is like a good king, and permits repetitions, 
outpourings, complaint. . . . These unseen effusions 
are the conversation of thought with itself the arpeggios 
involuntary but not unconscious, of that ^Eolian harp we 
bear within us. Its vibrations compose no piece, exhaust 
no theme, achieve no melody, carry out no programme, 
but they express the innermost life of man. 

June 1, 1880. Stendhal's "La Chartreuse de Parme." 
A remarkable book. It is even typical, the first of a 
class. Stendhal opens the series of naturalist novels, 
which suppress the intervention of the moral sense, and 
scoff at the claim of free-will. Individuals are irrespon- 
sible; they are governed by their passions, and the play of 
human passions is the observer's joy, the artist's material. 
Stendhal is a novelist after Taine's heart, a faithful 
painter who is neither touched nor angry, and whom every- 
thing amuses the knave and the adventuress as well as 
honest men and women, but who has neither faith, nor 
preference, nor ideal. In him literature is subordinated to 
natural history, to science. It no longer forms part of the 
humanities, it no longer gives man the honor of a separate 



AMIEUS JOURNAL. 345 

rank. It classes him with the ant, the beaver, and the 
monkey. And this moral indifference to morality leads 
direct to immorality. 

The vice of the whole school is cynicism, contempt for 
man, whom they degrade to the level of the brute; it is 
the worship of strength, disregard of the soul, a want of 
generosity, of reverence, of nobility, which shows itself in 
spite of all protestations to the contrary ; in a word, it is 
inhumanity. No man can be a naturalist with impunity : 
he will be coarse even with the most refined culture. A 
free mind is a great thing no doubt, but loftiness of heart, 
belief in goodness, capacity for enthusiasm and devotion, 
the thirst after perfection and holiness, are greater things 
still. 

June 7, 1880. I am reading Madame Necker de 
Saussure* again. "L'Education progressive" is an ad- 
mirable book. What moderation and fairness of view, 
what reasonableness and dignity of manner ! Everything 
in it is of high quality observation, thought, and style. 
The reconciliation of science with the ideal, of philosophy 
with religion, of psychology with morals, which the book 
attempts, is sound and beneficent. It is a fine book a 
classic and Geneva maybe proud of a piece of work which 
shows such high cultivation and so much solid wisdom. 
Here we have the true Grenevese literature, the central 
tradition of the country. 

Later. I have finished the third volume of Madame 
Necker. The elevation and delicacy, the sense and serious- 
ness, the beauty and perfection of the whole are astonish- 

* Madame Necker de Saussure was the daughter of the famous 
geologist, De Saussure; she married a nephew of Jacques Necker, 
and was therefore cousin by marriage of Madame de Stael. She is 
often supposed to be the original of Madame de Cerlebe in " Del- 
phine," and the Notice sur le Caractere et les Merits de Mdme. de 
Stael, prefixed to the authoritative edition of Madame de StaeTs 
collected works, is by her. Philanthropy and education were her 
two main interests, but she had also a very large amount of general 
literary cultivation, as was proved by her translation of Schlegel'a 
" Lectures on Dramatic Literature." 



346 A MIEL'S JOURNAL. 

ing. A few harshnesses or inaccuracies of language do no; 
matter. I feel for the author a respect mingled with 
emotion. How rare it is to find a book in which every- 
thing is sincere and everything is true! 

June 26, 1880. Democracy exists; it is mere loss of 
time to dwell upon its absurdities and defects. Every 
regime has its weaknesses, and this regime is a lesser evil 
than others. On things its effect is unfavorable, but on 
the other hand men profit by it, for it develops the indi- 
vidual by obliging every one to take interest in a multitude 
of questions. It makes bad work, but it produces citizens. 
This is its excuse, and a more than tolerable one; in the 
eyes of the philanthropist, indeed, it is a serious title to 
respect, for, after all, social institutions are made for man, 
and not vice versd. 

June 27, 1880. I paid a visit to my friends , and we 

resumed the conversation of yesterday. We talked of the 
ills which threaten democracy and which are derived from 
the legal fiction at the root of it. Surely the remedy 
consists in insisting everywhere upon the truth which 
democracy systematically forgets, and which is its proper 
makeweight on the inequalities of talent, of virtue, and 
merit, and on the respect due to age, to capacity, to serv- 
vices rendered. Juvenile arrogance and jealous ingratitude 
must be resisted all the more strenuously because social 
forms are in their favor; and when the institutions of a 
country lay stress only on the rights of the individual, it is 
the business of the citizen to lay all the more stress on 
duty. There must be a constant effort to correct the pre- 
vailing tendency of things. All this, it is true, is nothing 
but palliative, but in human society one cannot hope for 
more. 

Later. Alfred de Vigny is a sympathetic writer, 
with a meditative turn of thought, a strong and supple 
talent. He possesses elevation, independence, seriousness, 
originality, boldness and grace ; he has something of every- 
thing. He paints, describes, and judges well; he thinks, 
and has the courage of his opinions. His defect lies in au 



AMIUL'S JOURNAL. 347 

excess of -self-respect, jji a British pride and reserve which 
give him a horror of familiarity and a terror of letting him- 
self go. This tendency has naturally injured his popularity 
as a writer with a public whom he holds at arm's length 
as one might a troublesome crowd. The French race has 
never cared much about the inviolability of personal con- 
science ; it does not like stoics shut up in their own dignity 
as in a tower, and recognizing no master but God, duty or 
faith. Such strictness annoys and irritates it; it is merely 
piqued and made impatient by anything solemn. It repu- 
diated Protestantism for this very reason, and in all crises 
it has crushed those who have not yielded to the passionate 
current of opinion. 

July 1, 1880. (Three o' 'clock). The temperature is 
oppressive; I ought to be looking over my notes, and think- 
ing of to-morrow's examinations. Inward distaste 
emptiness discontent. Is it trouble of conscience, or sor- 
row of heart? or the soul preying upon itself? or merely .a 
sense of strength decaying and time running to waste? Is 
sadness or regret or fear at the root of it? I do not 
know; but this dull sense of misery has danger in it; it 
leads to rash efforts and mad decisions. Oh, for escape 
from self, for something to stifle the importunate voice of 
want and yearning! Discontent is the father of tempta- 
tion. How can we gorge the invisible serpent hidden at 
the bottom of our well gorge it so that it may sleep? 

At the heart of all this rage and vain rebellion there lies 
what? Aspiration, yearning! We are athirst for the 
infinite for love for I know not what. It is the instinct 
of hapmness, which, like some wild animal, is restless for 
its prey. It is God calling God avenging himself. 

July 4, 1880. (Sunday, half -past eight in the morning}. 
The sun has come out after heavy rain. May one take 
it as an omen on this solemn day? The great voice of 
Clemence has just been sounding in our ears. The bell's 
deep vibrations went to my heart. For a quarter of an hour 
the pathetic appeal went on u Geneva, Geneva, remember! 
I am called Clemence I am the voice of church and of 



348 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

country. People of Geneva, serve. God and be at peace 
together."* 

Seven o^clock in the evening. CUmence has been ringing 
again, during the last half -hour of the scrutin. Now that 
she has stopped, the silence has a terrible seriousness, like 
that which weighs upon a crowd when it is waiting for the 
return of the judge and the delivery of the death sentence. 
The fate of the Genevese church and country is now in 
the voting box. 

Eleven o'clock in the evening. Victory along the whole 
line. The Ayes have carried little more than two-sevenths 

of the vote. At my friend 's house I found them all 

full of excitement, gratitude, and joy. 

July o, 1880. There are some words which have still a 
magical virtue with the mass of the people: those of State, 
Republic, Country, Nation, Flag, and even, I think, 
Church. Our skeptical and mocking culture knows 
nothing of the emotion, the exaltation, the delirium, which 
these words awaken in simple people. The biases of the 
world have no idea how the popular mind vibrates to these 
appeals, by which they themselves are untouched. It is 
their punishment; it is also their infirmity. Their temper 
is satirical and separatist; they live in isolation and 
sterility. 

I feel again what I felt at the time of the Rousseau cen- 
tenary ; my feeling and imagination are chilled and repelled 
by those Pharisaical people who think themselves too good 
to associate with the crowd. 

At the same time, I suffer from an inward contradiction, 
from a two-fold, instinctive repugnance an aesthetic 
repugnance toward vulgarity of every kind, a moral repug- 
nance toward barrenness and coldness of heart. 

So that personally I am only attracted by the individuals 
of cultivation and eminence, while on the other hand 

*A law to bring about separation between Church and State, 
adopted by the Great Council, was on this day submitted to the vote 
or the Genevese people. It was rejected by a large majority (9,30tf 
against 4,044). [S.] 



AM1EUS JO URNAL 349 

nothing is sweeter to me than to feel myself vibrating in 
sympathy with the national spirit, with the feeling of the 
masses. I only care for the two extremes, and it is this 
which separates me from each of them. 

Our everyday life, split up as it is into clashing parties 
and opposed opinions, and harassed by perpetual disorder 
and discussion, is painful and almost hateful to me. A 
thousand things irritate and provoke me. But perhaps it 
would be the same elsewhere. Very likely it is the inevi- 
table way of the world which displeases me the sight of 
what succeeds, of what men approve or blame, of what 
they excuse or accuse. I need to admire, to feel myself in 
sympathy and in harmony with my neighbor, with the 
march of things, and the tendencies of those around me, 
and almost always I have had to give up the hope of it. I 
take refuge in retreat, to avoid discord. But solitude is 
only a pis-aller. 

July 6, 1880. Magnificent weather. The college prize- 
day.* Toward evening I went with our three ladies to 
the plain of Plainpalais. There was an immense crowd, 
and I was struck with the bright look of the faces. The 
festival wound up with the traditional fireworks, under a 
calm and starry sky. Here we have the republic indeed, 
I thought as I came in. For a whole week this people has 
been out-of-doors, camping, like the Athenians on the 
Agora. Since Wednesday lectures and public meetings 
have followed one another without intermission ; at home 
there are pamphlets and the newspapers to be read; while 
speech-making goes on at the clubs. On Sunday, plebiscite; 
Monday, public procession, service at St. Pierre, speeches 
on the Molard, festival for the adults. Tuesday, the col- 
lege f6te-day. Wednesday, the fte-day of the primary 
schools. 

Geneva is a caldron always at boiling-point, a furnace 
of which the fires are never extinguish 3d. Vulcan had 
more than one forge, and Geneva is certainly one of those 

* The prize-giving at the College of Geneva is made the occasion 
of a national festival. 



350 -A- MIKV8 JO URN A L. 

world-anvils on which the greatest number of projects 
have been hammered out. When one thinks that the 
martyrs of all causes Lave been at work here, the mystery 
is explained a little; but the truest explanation is that 
Geneva republican, protestant, democratic, learned, and 
enterprising Geneva has for centuries depended on her- 
self alone for the solution of her own difficulties. Since 
the Reformation she has been always on the alert, march- 
1 ing with a lantern in her left hand and a sword in her 
right. It pleases me to see that she 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. Only that which is original has a suffi- 
cient reason for existence. A country in which the word 
of command comes from elsewhere is nothing more than 
a province. This is what our Jacobins and our Ultramon- 
tanes never will recognize. Neither of them understand 
the meaning of self-government, and neither of them have 
any idea of the dignity of a historical state and an inde- 
pendent people. 

Our small nationalities are ruined by the hollow cosmo- 
politan formulae which have an equally disastrous effect 
upon art and letters. The modern isms are so many acids 
which dissolve everything living and concrete. No one 
achieves a masterpiece, nor even a decent piece of work, by 
the help of realism, liberalism, or romanticism. Separa- 
tism has even less virtue than any of the other isms, for it 
is the abstraction of a negation, the shadow of a shadow. 
The various isms of the present are not fruitful principles: 
they are hardly even explanatory formulae. They are 
rather names of disease, for they express some element in 
excess, some dangerous and abusive exaggeration. Exam- 
ples: empiricism, idealism, radicalism. What is best 
among things and most perfect among beings slips through 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 35L 

these categories. The man who is perfectly well is neither 
sanguineous [to use the old medical term] nor bilious 
nor nervous. A normal republic contains opposing parties 
and points of view, but it contains them, as it were, in a 
state of chemical combination. All the colors are con- 
tained in a ray of light, while red alone does not contain a 
sixth part of the perfect ray. 

July 8, 1880. It is thirty years since I read Waagen's 

book on "Museums," which my friend is now reading. 

It was in 1842 that I was wild for pictures; in 1845 that 
I was studying Krause's philosophy ; in 1850 that I became 

professor of aesthetics. may be the same age as I am; 

it is none the less true that when a particular stage has 
become to me a matter of history, he is just arriving at it. 
This impression of distance and remoteness is a strange 
one. I begin to realize that my memory is a great cata 
comb, and that below my actual standing-ground there is 
layer after layer of historical ashes. 

Is the life of mind something like that of great trees of 
immemorial growth? Is the living layer of consciousness 
super-imposed upon hundreds of dead layers? Dead? No 
doubt this is too much to say, but still, when memory is 
slack the past becomes almost as though it had never been. 
To remember that we did know once is not a sign of 
possession but a sign of loss; it is like the number of an 
engraving which is no longer on its nail, the title of a vol- 
ume no longer to be found on its shelf. My mind is the 
empty frame of a thousand vanished images. Sharpened 
by incessant training, it is all culture, but it has retained 
hardly anything in its meshes. It is without matter, and 
is only form. It no longer has knowledge; it has become 
method. It is etherealized, algebraicized. Life has treated 
it as death treats other minds; it has already prepared it 
for a further metamorphosis. Since the age of sixteen on- 
ward I have been able to look at things with the eyes of a 
blind man recently operated upon that is to say, I have 
been able to suppress in myself the results of the long edu- 
cation of sight, and to abolish distances; and now I find 



352 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

myself regarding existence as though from beyond the 
tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, aa 
it were, outside my own body and individuality; I am 
depersonalized, detached, cut adrift. Is this madness? 
No. Madness means the impossibility of recovering one's 
normal balance after the mind has thus played truant 
among alien forms of being, and followed Dante to invisible 
worlds. Madness means incapacity for self-judgment and 
self-control. Whereas it seems to me that my mental 
transformations are but philosophical experiences. I am 
tied to none. I am but making psychological investiga- 
tions. At the same time I do not hide from myself that 
such experiences weaken the hold cf common sense, be- 
cause they act as solvents of all personal interests and preju- 
dices. I can only defend myself against them by return- 
ing to the common life of men, and by bracing and 
fortifying the will. 

July 14, 1880. What is the book which, of all Genev^se 
literature, I would soonest have written? Perhaps that 
of Madame Necker de Saussure, or Madame de Stae'Ps 
"L'Allemagne." To a Genevese, moral philosophy is still 
the most congenial and remunerative of studies. Intellec- 
tual seriousness is what suits us least ill. History, politics, 
economical science, education, practical philosophy ^these 
are our subjects. We have everything to lose in the 
attempt to make ourselves mere Frenchified copies of the 
Parisians : by so doing we are merely carrying water to the 
Seine. Independent criticism is perhaps easier at Geneva 
than at Paris, and Geneva ought to remain faithful to 
her own special line, which, as compared with that of 
France, is one of greater freedom from the tyranny of 
taste and fashion on the one hand, and the tyranny of 
ruling opinion on the other of Catholicism or Jacobinism. 
Geneva should be to La Grande Nation what Diogenes 
was to Alexander; her role is to represent the independ- 
ent thought and the free speech which is not dazzled by 
prestige, and does not blink the truth. It is true that the 
role is an ungrateful one, that it lends itself to sarcasm and 
misrepresentation but W matter? 



AMIKL'S JOURNAL. 353 

July 28, 1880. This afternoon I have had a walk in the 
sunshine, and have just come back rejoicing in a renewed 
-communion with nature. The waters of the Rhone and 
the Arve, the murmur of the river, the austerity of its 
banks, the brilliancy of the foliage, the play of the leaves, 
the splendor of the July sunlight, the rich fertility of the 
fields, the lucidity of the distant mountains, the whiteness 
of the glaciers under the azure serenity of the sky, the 
sparkle and foam of the mingling rivers, the leafy masses 
of the La Batie woods all and everything delighted me. 
It seemed to me as though the years of strength had come 
back to me. I was overwhelmed with sensations. I was 
surprised and grateful. The universal life carried me on 
its breast; the summer's caress went to my heart. Once 
more my eyes beheld the vast horizons, the soaring peaks, 
the blue lakes, the winding valleys, and all the free outlets 
of old days. And yet there was no painful sense of long- 
ing. The scene left upon me an indefinable impression, 
which was neither hope, nor desire, nor regret, but rather 
a sense of emotion, of passionate impulse, mingled with 
admiration and anxiety. I am conscious at once of joy 
and of want; beyond what I possess I see the impossible 
and the unattainable; I guagemyown wealth and poverty; 
in a word, I am and I am not my inner state is one of 
contradiction, because it is one of transition. The ambiguity 
of it is characteristic of human nature, which is ambig- 
uous, because it is flesh becoming spirit, space changing 
into thought, the Finite looking dimly out upon the 
Infinite, intelligence working its way through love and 
pain. 

Man is the sensoriiim commune of nature, the point at 
which all values are interchanged. Mind is the plastic 
medium, the principle, and the result of all; at once 
material and laboratory, product and formula, sensation, 
expression, and law; that which is, that which does, that 
which knows. All is not mind, but mind is in all, and 
contains all. It is the consciousness of being that is, 
Being raised to the second power. If the universe sub- 



35 4 AMIEL'S JO URNAL. 

sists, it is because the Eternal mind loves to perceive its 
own content, in all its wealth and expansion especially 
in its stages of preparation. Not that God is an egotist. 
He allows myriads upon myriads of suns to disport them- 
selves in his shadow; he grants life and consciousness to 
innumerable multitudes of creatures who thus participate 
in being and in nature; and all these animated monads 
multiply, so to speak, his divinity. 

August 4, 1880. I have read a few numbers of the 
FeuiUe Cent rale de Zoftngen.* It is one of those perpet- 
ual new beginnings of youth which thinks it is producing 
something fresh when it is only repeating the old 

Nature is governed by continuity the continuity of 
repetition; it is like an oft-told tale, or the recurring 
burden of a song. The rose-trees are never tired of rose- 
bearing, the birds of nest-building, young hearts of loving, 
or young voices of singing the thoughts and feelings 
which have served their predecessors a hundred thousand 
times before. Profound monotony in universal movement 
there is the simplest formula furnished by the spectacle 
of the world. All circles are alike, and every existence 
tends to trace its circle. 

How, then, is fastidium to be avoided? By shutting 
our eyes to the general uniformity, by laying stress upon, 
the small differences which exist, and then by learning to 
enjoy repetition. What to the intellect is old and worn- 
out is perennially young and fresh to the heart; curiosity 
is insatiable, but love is never tired. The natural preserva- 
tive against satiety, too, is work. What we do may weary 
others, but the personal effort is at least useful to its 
author. Where every one works, the general life is sure 
to possess charm and savor, even though it repeat forever 
the same song, the same aspirations, the same prejudices, 
and the same sighs. "To every man his turn," is the 
motto of mortal beings. If what they do is old, they 

*The journal of a students' society, drawn from the different 
cantons of Switzerland, which meets every year in the little town of 
Zofingen 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 355 

themselves are new; when they imitate, they think they 
are inventing. They have received, and they transmit. 
E sempre bene! 

August 24, 1880. As years go on I love the beautiful 
more than the sublime, the smooth more than the rough, 
the calm nobility of Plato more than the fierce holiness of 
the world's Jeremiahs. The vehement barbarian is to me 
the inferior of the mild and playful Socrates. My taste is 
for the well-balanced soul and the well-trained heart for 
a liberty which is not harsh and insolent, like that of the 
newly enfranchised slave, but lovable. The temperament 
which charms me is that in which one virtue leads natur- 
ally to another. All exclusive and sharply-marked qualities 
are but so many signs of imperfection. 

August 29, 1880. To-day I am conscious of improve- 
ment. I am taking advantage of it to go back to my 
neglected work and my interrupted habits; but in a Aveek 
I have grown several months older that is easy to see. 
The affection of those around me makes them pretend not 
to see it; but the looking-glass tells the truth. The fact 
does not take away from the pleasure of convalescence; 
but still one hears in it the shuttle of destiny, and death 
seems to be nearing rapidly, in spite of the halts and truces 
which are granted one. The most beautiful existence, it 
seems to me, would be that of a river which should get 
through all its rapids and waterfalls not far from its rising, 
and should then in its widening course form a succession 
of rich valleys, and in each of them a lake equally but 
diversely beautiful, to end, after the plains of age were 
past, in the ocean where all that is weary and heavy-laden 
comes to seek for rest. How few there are of these full, 
fruitful, gentle lives! What is the use of wishing for or 
regretting them? It is wiser and harder to see in one's 
own lot the best one could have had, and to say to one's 
self that after all the cleverest tailor cannot make us a 
coat to fit us more closely than our skin. 

" Le vrai nom du bonheur est le contentement." 



356 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

. . . The essential thing for every one is to accept 
his destiny. Fate has deceived you ; you have sometimes 
grumbled at your lot; well, no more mutual reproaches; 
go to sleep in peace. 

August 30, 1880. (Tivo o'clock). Rumblings of a grave 
and distant thunder. The sky is gray but rainless; the 
sharp little cries of the birds show agitation and fear ; one 
might imagine it the prelude to a symphony or a catas- 
trophe. 

" Quel eclair te traverse, 6 mon coeur soucieux?" 

Strange all the business of the immediate neighborhood 
is going on; there is even more movement than usual; 
and yet all these noises are, as it were, held suspended in 
the silence in a soft, positive silence, which they cannot 
disguise silence akin to that which, in every town, on 
one day of the week, replaces the vague murmur of the 
laboring hive. Such silence at such an hour is extra- 
ordinary. There is something expectant, contemplative, 
almost anxious in it. Are there days on which " the little 
breath " of Job produces more effect than tempest? on 
which a dull rumbling on the distant horizon is enough to 
suspend the concert of voices, like the roaring of a desert 
lion at the fall of night? 

September 9, 1880. It seems to me that with the 
decline of my active force I am becoming more purely 
spirit; everything is growing transparent to me. I see 
the types, the foundation of beings, the sense of things. 

All personal events, all particular experiences, are to me 
texts for meditation, facts to be generalized into laws, 
realities to be reduced to ideas. Life is only a document 
to be interpreted, matter to be spiritualized. Such is the 
life of the thinker. Every day he strips himself more and 
more of personality. If he consents to act and to feel, it is 
that he may the better understand ; if he wills, it is that 
he may know what will is. Although it is sweet to him to 
be loved, and he knows nothing else so sweet, yet there 
also he seems to himself to be the occasion of the phenom- 



A MIEVS JO URNAL. 357 

enon rather than its end. He contemplates the spectacle 
of love, and love for him remains a spectacle. He does 
not even believe his body his own ; he feels the vital whirl- 
wind passing through him lent to him, as it were, for a 
moment, in order that he may perceive the cosmic vibra- 
tions. He is a mere thinking subject ; he retains only the 
form of things; he attributes to himself the material 
possession of nothing whatsoever; he asks nothing from 
life but wisdom. This temper of mind makes him incom- 
prehensible to all that loves enjoyment, dominion, posses- 
sion. He is fluid as a phantom that we see but cannot 
grasp ; he resembles a man, as the manes of Achilles or 
the shade of Creusa resembled the living. Without having 
died, I am a ghost. Other men are dreams to me, and I 
am a dream to them. 

Later. Consciousness in me takes no account of the 
category of time, and therefore all those partitions which 
tend to make of life a palace with a thousand rooms, do 
not exist in my case ; I am still in the primitive unicellular 
state. I possess myself only as Monad and as Ego, and I 
feel my faculties themselves reabsorbed into the substance 
which they have individualized. All the endowment of 
animality is, so to speak, repudiated; all the product of 
study and of cultivation is in the same way annulled; the 
whole crystallization is redissolved into fluid; the whole 
rainbow is withdrawn within the dewdrop; consequences 
return to the principle, effects to the cause, the bird to 
the egg, the organism to its germ. 

This psychological reinvolution is an anticipation of death ; 
it represents the life beyond the grave, the return to 
scheol, the soul fading into the world of ghosts, or descend- 
ing into the region of Die Mutter; it implies the simplifi- 
cation of the individual who, allowing all the accidents of 
personality to evaporate, exists henceforward only in the 
indivisible state, the state of point, of potentiality, of preg- 
nant nothingness. Is not this the true definition of mind? 
is not mind, dissociated from space and time, just this? 
Its development, past or future, is contained in it just as 



358 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

a curve is contained in its algebraical formula. This 
nothing is an all. This punctum without dimensions is a 
punctum saliens. What is the acorn but the oak which 
has lost its branches, its leaves, its trunk, and its roots 
that is to say, all its apparatus, its forms, its particularities 
but which is still present in concentration, in essence,, 
in a force which contains the possibility of complete 
revival? 

This impoverishment, then, is only superficially a loss, a 
reduction. To be reduced to those elements in one which 
are eternal, is indeed to die but not to be annihilated : it i& 
simply to become virtual again. 

October 9, 1880. (Clarens). A walk. Deep feeling and 
admiration. Nature was so beautiful, so caressing, so 
poetical, so maternal. The sunlight, the leaves, the sky, 
the bells, all said to me " Be of good strength and cour- 
age, poor bruised one. This is nature's kindly season; 
here is forgetfulness, calm, and rest. Faults and troubles, 
anxieties and regrets, cares and wrongs, are but one and 
the same burden. We make no distinctions; we comfort 
all sorrows, we bring peace, and with us is consolation. 
Salvation to the weary, salvation to the afflicted, salvation 
to the sick, to sinners, to all that suffer in heart, in con- 
science, and in body. We are the fountain of blessing; 
drink and live! God maketh his sun to rise upon the just 
and upon the unjust. There is nothing grudging in his 
munificence; he does not weigh his gifts like a money- 
changer, or number them like a cashier. Come there is 
enough for all !" 

October 29, 1880. (Geneva). The ideal which a man pro- 
fesses may itself be only a matter of appearance a device 
for misleading his neighbor, or deluding himself. The 
individual is always ready to claim for himself the merits 
of the badge under which he fights; whereas, generally 
speaking, it is the contrary which happens. The nobler 
the badge, the less estimable is the wearer of it. Such at 
least is the presumption. It is extremely dangerous to 
pride one's self on any moral or religious specialty what- 



AMIEVS JOURNAL. 359 

ever. Tell me what you pique yourself upon, and I wili 
tell you what you are not. 

But how are we to know what an individual is? First 
of all by his acts ; but by something else too something 
which is only perceived by intuition. Soul judges soul by 
elective affinity, reaching through and beyond both words 
and silence, looks and actions. 

The criterion is subjective, I allow, and liable to error; 
but in the first place there is no safer one, and in the next, 
the accuracy of the judgment 'is in proportion to the moral 
culture of the judge. Courage is an authority on courage, 
goodness on goodness, nobleness on nobleness, loyalty on 
uprightness. We only truly know what we have, or what 
we have lost and regret, as, for example, childish inno- 
cence, virginal purity, or stainless honor. The truest and 
best judge, then, is Infinite Goodness, and next to it, the 
regenerated sinner or the saint, the man tried by experi- 
ence or the sage. Naturally, the touchstone in us becomes 
finer and truer the better we are. 

November 3, 1880. What impression has the story I 
have just read made upon me? A mixed one. The imag- 
ination gets no pleasure out of it, although the intellect is 
amused. Why? Because the author's mood is one of 
incessant irony and persiflage. The Voltairean tradition 
has been his guide a great deal of wit and satire, very 
little feeling, no simplicity. It is a combination of qualities 
which serves eminently well for satire, for journalism, and 
for paper warfare of all kinds, but which is much less suita- 
ble to the novel or short story, for cleverness is not poetry, 
ani the novel is still within the domain of poetry, although 
on the frontier. The vague discomfort aroused in one by 
these epigrammatic productions is due probably to a confu- 
sion of kinds. Ambiguity of style keeps one in a perpetual 
state of tension and self-defense; we ought not to be left 
in doubt whether the speaker is jesting or serious, mocking 
or tender. Moreover, banter is not humor, and never 
will be. I think, indeed, that the professional wit finds a 
difficulty in being genuinely comic, for want of depth and 



360 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

disinterested feeling. To laugh at things and people ia 
not really a joy ; it is at best but a cold pleasure. Buffoon- 
ery is wholesomer, because it is a little more kindly. The 
reason why continuous sarcasm repels us is that it lacks 
two things humanity and seriousness. Sarcasm implies 
pride, since it means putting one's self above others and 
levity, because conscience is allowed no voice in controlling 
it. In short, we read satirical books, but we only love and 
cling to the books in which there is heart. 

November 22, 1880. Ho'w is ill-nature to be met and 
overcome? First, by humility: -when a man knows his 
own weaknesses, why should he be angry with others for 
pointing them out? No doubt it is not very amiable of 
them to do so, but still, truth is on their side. Secondly, 
by reflection: after all we are what we are, and if we have 
been thinking too much of ourselves, it is only an opinion 
to be modified; the incivility of our neighbor leaves us 
what we were before. Above all, by pardon : there is only 
one way of not hating those who do us wrong, and that is 
by doing them good; anger is best conquered by kindness. 
Such a victory over feeling may not indeed affect those 
who have wronged us, but it is a valuable piece of self-dis- 
cipline. It is vulgar to be angry on one's own account; 
we ought only to be angry for great causes. Besides, the 
poisoned dart can only be extracted from the wound by the 
balm of a silent and thoughtful charity. Why do we let 
human malignity embitter us? why should ingratitude, 
jealousy perfidy even enrage us? There is no end to 
recriminations, complaints, or reprisals. The simplest 
plan is to blot everything out. Anger, rancor, bitterness, 
trouble the soul. Everyman is a dispenser of justice; but 
there is one wrong that he is not bound to punish that 
of which he himself is the victim. Such a wrong is to be 
healed, not avenged. Fire purifies all. 

" Mon ame est comme un feu qui devore et parfume 
Ce qu'on jette pour le ternir." 

December 27, 1880. In an article I have just read, 



A MTEL'8 JO URNAL. 361 

Biedermann reproaches Strauss with being too negative, 
and with having broken with Christianity. The object 
to be pursued, according to him, should be the freeing of 
religion from the mythological element, and the substitu- 
tion of another point of view for the antiquated dualism of 
orthodoxy this other point of view to be the victory over 
the world, produced by the sense of divine sonship. 

It is true that another question arises: has not a religion 
which has separated itself from special miracle, from local 
interventions of the supernatural, and from mystery, lost 
its savor and its efficacy? For the sake of satisfying a 
thinking and instructed public, is it wise to sacrifice the 
influence of religion over the multitude? Answer. A 
pious fiction is still a fiction. Truth has the highest 
claim. It is for the world to accommodate itself to truth, 
and not vice versa. Copernicus upset the astronomy of 
the Middle Ages so much the worse for it! The Eternal 
Gospel revolutionizes modern churches what matter! 
When symbols become transparent, they have no further 
binding force. We see in them a poem, an allegory, a 
metaphor; but we believe in them no longer. 

Yes, but still a certain esotericism is inevitable, since 
critical, scientific, and philosophical culture is only attain- 
able by a minority. The new faith must have its symbols 
too. At present the effect it produces on pious souls is a 
more or less profane one ; it has a disrespectful, incredu- 
lous, frivolous look, and it seems to free a man from tradi- 
tional dogma at the cost of seriousness of conscience. 
How are sensitiveness of feeling, the sense of sin, the desire 
for pardon, the thirst for holiness, to be preserved among 
us, when the errors which have served them so long for 
support and food have been eliminated? Is not illusion 
indispensable? is it not the divine process of education? 

Perhaps the best way is to draw a deep distinction 
between opinion and belief, and between belief and science. 
The mind which discerns these different degrees may 
aHow itself imagination and faith, and still remain within 
the lines of progress. 



362 AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 

December 28, 1880. There are two modes of classing 
the people we know: the first is utilitarian it starts from 
ourselves, divides our friends from our enemies, and dis- 
tinguishes those who are antipathetic to us, those who are 
indifferent, those who can serve or harm us; the second is 
disinterested it classes men according to their intrinsic 
value, their own qualities and defects, apart from the feel- 
ings which they have for us, or we for them. 

My tendency is to the second kind of classification. I 
appreciate men less by the special affection which they 
show to me than by their personal excellence, and I cannot 
confuse gratitude with esteem. It is a happy thing for us 
when the two feelings can be combined; and nothing is 
more painful than to owe gratitude where yet we can feel 
neither respect nor confidence. 

I am not very willing to believe in the permanence of 
accidental states. The generosity of a miser, the good 
nature of an egotist, the gentleness of a passionate tem- 
perament, the tenderness of a barren nature, the piety of a 
dull heart, the humility of an excitable self-love, interest 
me as phenomena nay, even touch me if I am the object 
of them, but they inspire me with very little confidence. 
I foresee the end of them too clearly. Every exception 
tends to disappear and to return to the rule. All privilege 
is temporary, and besides, I am less flattered than anxious 
when I find myself the object of a privilege. 

A man's primitive character may be covered over by 
alluvial deposits of culture and acquisition none the less 
is it sure to come to the surface when years have worn 
away all that is accessory and adventitious. I admit indeed 
the possibility of great moral crises which sometimes 
revolutionize the soul, but I dare not reckon on them. It 
is a possibility not a probability. In choosing one's 
friends we must choose those whose qiialities are inborn, 
and their virtues virtues of temperament. To lay the foun- 
dations of friendship on borrowed or added virtues is to build 
on an artificial soil; we run too many risks by it. 

Exceptions are snares, and we ought above all to distrust 



AMIKL'S JO URN A L. 

.hem when they charm our vanity. To catch and fix a 
fickle heart is a task which tempts all women ; and a man 
finds something intoxicating in the tears of tenderness and 
joy which he alone has had the power to draw from a 
proud woman. But attractions of this kind are deceptive. 
Affinity of nature founded on worship of the same ideal, 
and perfect in proportion to perfectness of soul, is the only 
affinity which is worth anything. True love is that which 
ennobles the personality, fortifies the heart, and sanctifies 
the existence. And the being we love must not be myster- 
ious and sphinx-like, but clear and limpid as a diamond ; 
so that admiration and attachment may grow with knowl- 
edge. 



Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is 
precisely love's contrary. Instead of wishing for the wel- 
fare of the object loved, it desires the dependence of that 
object upon itself, and its own triumph. Love is the for- 
getfulness of self; jealousy is the most passionate form of 
egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain 
ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself. The 
contrast is perfect. 



Austerity in women is sometimes the accompaniment of 
a rare power of loving. And when it is so their attach- 
ment is strong as death ; their fidelity as resisting as the- 
diamond; they are hungry for devotion and athirst for 
sacrifice. Their love is a piety, their tenderness a religion,, 
and they triple the energy of love by giving to it the sanc- 
tity of duty. 



To the spectator over fifty, the world certainly presents 
a good deal that is new, but a great deal more which is 
only the old furbished up mere plagiarism and modifica- 
tion, rather than amelioration. Almost everything is a 
copy of a copy, a reflection of a reflection, and the perfect 
being is as rare now as he ever was. Let us not complain 
of it: it is the reason why the world lasts. Humanity 
improves but slowly; that is why history goes on. 



364 AM1EU8 JOURNAL. 

Is not progress the goad of Siva? It excites the torch 
to burn itself away; it hastens the approach of death. 
Societies which change rapidly only reach their final catas- 
trophe the sooner. Children who are too precocious never 
reach maturity. Progress should be the aroma of life, not 
its substance. 



Man is a passion which brings a will into play, which 
works an intelligence and thus the organs which seem to 
be in the service of intelligence, are in reality only the 
agents of passion. For all the commoner sorts of being, 
determinism is true: inward liberty exists only as an ex- 
ception and as the result of self-conquest. And even he 
who has tasted liberty is only free intermittently and by 
moments. True liberty, then, is not a continuous state ; 
it is not an indefeasible and invariable quality. We are 
free only so far as we are not dupes of ourselves, our pre- 
texts, our instincts, our temperament. We are freed by 
energy and the critical spirit that is to say, by detach- 
ment of soul, by self-government. So that we are enslaved, 
but susceptible of freedom ; we are bound, but capable of 
shaking off our bonds. The soul is caged, but it has 
power to flutter within its cage. 



Material results are but the tardy sign of invisible activi- 
ties. The bullet has started long before the noise of the 
report has reached us. The decisive events of the world 
take place in the intellect. 



Sorrow is the most tremendous of all realities in the sen- 
sible world, but the transfiguration of sorrow after the 
manner of Christ is a more beautiful solution of the prob- 
lem than the extirpation of sorrow, after the method of 
Cakyamouni. 



Life should be a giving birth to the soul, the develop- 
ment of a higher mode of reality. The animal must be 
humanized: flesh must be made spirit; physiological activ- 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 365 

ity must be transmuted into intellect and conscience, into 
reason, justice, and generosity, as the torch is transmuted 
into life and warmth. The blind, greedy, selfish nature 
of man must put on beauty and nobleness. This heavenly 
alchemy is what justifies our presence on the earth : it is 
our mission and our glory. 



To renounce happiness and think only 01 duty, to put 
conscience in the place of feeling this voluntary martyr- 
dom has its nobility. The natural man in us flinches, but 
the better self submits. To hope for justice in the woild 
is a sign of sickly sensibility; we must be able to do with- 
out it. True manliness consists in such independence. 
Let the world think what it will of us, it is its own affair. 
If it will not give us the place which is lawfully ours until 
after our death, or perhaps not at all, it is but acting 
within its right. It is our business to behave as though 
our country were grateful, as though the world were equi- 
table, as though opinion were clear-sighted, as though life 
were just, as though men were good. 



Death itself may become matter of consent, and there- 
fore a moral act. The animal expires; man surrenders his 
soul to the author of the soul. 

[With the year 1881, beginning with the month of 
January, we enter upon the last period of Amiel's illness. 
Although he continued to attend to his professional duties, 
and never spoke of his forebodings, he felt himself mortally 
ill, as we shall see by the following extracts from the 
Journal. Amiel wrote up to the end, doing little else, 
however, toward the last than record the progress of his 
disease, and the proofs of interest and kindliness which he 
received. After weeks of suffering and pain a state of ex- 
treme weakness gradually gained upon him. His last lines 
are dated the 29th of April; it was on the llth of May 
that he succumbed, without a struggle, to the complicated 
disease from which he suffered. S. J 

January 5, 1881. I think I fear shame more than death. 



366 AMIEL'8 JO URN A L. 

Tacitus said: Omnia serviliter pro dominations. My ten- 
dency is just the contrary. Even when it is voluntary, 
dependence is a burden to me. I should blush to find my- 
self determined by interest, submitting to constraint, or 
becoming the slave of any will whatever. To me vanity is 
slavery, self-love degrading, and utilitarianism meanness. 
I detest the ambition which makes you the liege man of 
something or some one I desire to be simply my own 
master. 

If I had health I should be the freest man I know. 
Although perhaps a little hardness of heart would be desir- 
able to make me still more independent. 

Let me exaggerate nothing. My liberty is only negative. 
Nobody has any hold over me, but many things have be- 
come impossible to me, and if I were so foolish as to wish 
for them, the limits of my liberty would soon become 
apparent. Therefoie I take care not to wish for them, and 
not to let my thoughts dwell on them. I only desire what 
I am able for, and in this way I run my head against no 
wall, I cease even to be conscious of the boundaries which 
enclose me. I take care to wish for rather less than is in 
my power, that I may not even be reminded of the ob- 
stacles in my way. Renunciation is the safeguard of dig- 
nity. Let us strip ourselves if we would not be stripped. 
He who has freely given up his life may look death in the 
face: what more can it take away from him? Do away 
with desire and practice charity there you have the whole 
method of Buddha, the whole secret of the great Deliver- 
ance. . . . 

It is snowing, and my chest is troublesome. So that I 
depend on nature and on God. But I do not depend on 
human caprice; this is the point to be insisted on. It is 
true that my chemist may make a blunder and poison me, 
my banker may reduce me to pauperism, just as an earth- 
quake may destroy my house without hope of redress. 
Absolute independence, therefore, is a pure chimera. 
But I do possess relative independence that of the stoic 
who withdraws into the fortress of his will, and shuts the 
gates behind him. . 



AMIKL'8 JOURNAL. 36? 

" Jurons, excepte Dieu, de n'avoir point de maitre." 

Th> oath of old Geneva remains my motto still. 

January 10, 1881. To let one's self be troubled by the 
ill-will, the ingratitude, the indifference, of others, is a 
weakness to which I am very much inclined. It is painful 
to me to be misunderstood, ill-judged. I am wanting in 
manly hardihood, and the heart in me is more vulnerable 
than it ought to be. It seems to me, however, that I have 
grown tougher in this respect than I used to be. The 
malignity of the world troubles me less than it did. Is it 
the result of philosophy, or an effect of age, or simply 
caused by the many proofs of respect and attachment that 
I have received? These proofs were just what were want- 
ing to inspire me with some self-respect. Otherwise I 
should have so easily believed in my own nullity and in the 
insignificance of all my efforts. Success is necessary for 
the timid, praise is a moral stimulus, and admiration a 
strengthening elixir. We think we know ourselves, but 
as long as we are ignorant of our comparative value, our 
place in the social assessment, we do not know ourselves 
well enough. If we are to act with effect, we must count 
for something with our fellow-men ; we must feel ourselves 
possessed of some weight and credit with them, so that 
our effort may be rightly proportioned to the resistance 
which has to be overcome. As long as we despise opinion 
we are without a standard by which to measure ourselves; 
we do not know our relative power. I have despised 
opinion too much, while yet I have been too sensitive to in- 
justice. These two faults have cost me dear. I longed 
for kindness, -sympathy, and equity, but my pride forbade 
me to ask for them, or to employ any address or calcula- 
tion to obtain them. . . . I do not think I have been 
wrong altogether, for all through I have been in harmony 
with my best self, but my want of adaptibility has worn 
me out, to no purpose. Now, indeed, I am at peace 
within, but my career is over, my strength is running out, 
and my life is near its end. 

" II n'est plus temps pour rien execute pour mourn." 



368 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

This is why I can look at it all historically. 

January 23, 1881. A tolerable night, but this morning 
the cough has been frightful. Beautiful weather, the 
windows ablaze with sunshine. With my feet on the fen- 
der I have just finished the newspaper. 

At this moment I feel well, and it seems strange to me 
that my doom should be so near. Life has no sense of 
kinship with death. This is why, no doubt, a sort of 
mechanical instinctive hope is forever springing up afresh 
in us, troubling our reason, and casting doubt on the ver- 
dict of science. All life is tenacious and persistent. It is 
like the parrot in the fable, who, at the very moment 
when its neck is being wrung, still repeats with its last 
breath : 

" Cela, cela, ne sera rien." 

The intellect puts the matter at its worst, but the animal 
protests. It will not believe in the evil till it comes. 
Ought one to regret it? Probab.y not. It is nature's will 
that life should defend itself against death ; hope is only 
the love of life ; it is an organic impulse which religion has 
taken under its protection. Who knows? God may save 
us, may work a miracle. Besides, are we ever sure that 
there is no remedy? Uncertainty is the refuge of hope. 
We reckon the doubtful among the chances in our favor. 
Mortal frailty clings to every support. How be angry with 
it for so doing? Even with all possible aids it hardly evei 
escapes desolation and distress. The supreme solution is, 
and always will be, to see in necessity the fatherly will of 
God, and so to submit ourselves and bear our cross bravely, 
as an offering to the Arbiter of human destiny. The sol- 
dier does not dispute the order given him : he obeys aiid 
dies without murmuring. If he waited to understand the 
use of his sacrifice, where would his submission be? 

It occurred to me this morning how little we know of 
each other's physical troubles ; even those nearest and dear- 
est to us know nothing of our conversations with the King 
of Terrors. There arp thoughts which brook no confidant; 



' AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 3G9 

there are griefs which cannot be shared. Consideration for 
others even bids us conceal them. 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 God. And so what was an austere mono- 
logue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes docility, 
renunciation passes into peace, and the sense of painful 
defeat is lost in the sense of recovered liberty. 

" Vouloir se que Dieu veut est la seule science 
Qui nous met en repos." 

None of us can escape the play of contrary impulse; but as 
soon as the soul has once recognized the order of things, 
and submitted itself thereto, then all is well. 

" 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." 

January 28, 1881. A terrible night. For three or four 
hours I struggled against suffocation and looked death in 
the face. ... It is clear that what awaits me is 
suffocation asphyxia. I shall die by choking. 

I should not have chosen such a death; but when there 
is no option, one must simply resign one's self, and at 
once. . . . Spinoza expired in the presence of the doc- 
tor whom he had sent for. I must familiarize myself with 
the idea of dying unexpectedly, some fine night, strangled 
by laryngitis. The last sigh of a patriarch surrounded by 
his kneeling family is more beautiful: my fate indeed lacks 
beauty, grandeur, poetry; but stoicism consists in renun- 
ciation. Abstine et sustine. 

I must remember besides that I have faithful friends; it 
is better not to torment them. The last journey is only 
made more painful by scenes and lamentations: one word 
is worth all others "Thy will, not mine, be done!'* 
Leibnitz was accompanied to the grave by his servant only. 
The loneliness of the deathbed and the tomb is not an 
evil. The great mystery cannot be shared. The dialogue 
between the soul and the King of Terrors needs no wit- 



370 AMI KU 8 JOURNAL. 

nesses. It is the living who cling to the thought of last 
greetings And, after all, no one knows exactly what is 
reserved for him. What will be will be. We have but to 
say, "Amen." 

February 4, 1881. It is a strange sensation that of lay- 
ing one's self down to rest with the thought that perhaps 
one will never see the morrow. Yesterday I felt it 
strongly, and yet here I am. Humility is made easy by 
the sense of excessive frailty, but it cuts away all ambition. 

" Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensees." 

A long piece of work seems absurd one lives but from 
day to day. 

When a man can no longer look forward in imagination 
to five years, a year, a month, of free activity when he 
is reduced to counting the hours, and to seeing in the com- 
ing night the threat of an unknown fate it is plain that 
he must give up art, science, and politics, and that he must 
be content to hold converse with himself, the one possi- 
bility which is his till the end. Inward soliloquy is the 
only resource of the condemned man whose execution is 
delayed. He withdraws upon the fastnesses of conscience. 
His spiritual force no longer radiates outwardly ; it is con- 
sumed in self-study. Action is cut off only contempla- 
tion remains. He still writes to those who have claims 
upon him, but he bids farewell to the public, and retreats 
into himself. Like the hare, he comes back to die in his 
form, and this form is his consciousness, his intellect 
the journal, too, which has been the companion of his 
inner life. As long as he can hold a pen, as long as he has 
a moment of solitude, this echo of himself still claims his' 
meditation, still represents to him his converse with his 
God. 

In all this, however, there is nothing akin to self-exami- 
nation: it is not an act of contrition, or a cry for help. It 
is simply an Amen of submission " My child, give me thy 
heart!" 

Renunciation and acquiescence are less difficult to me 



A Ml EL'S JO URNAL. 371 

than to others, for I desire nothing. I could only wish not 
to suffer, but Jesus on Gethesemane allowed himself to 
make the same prayer; let us add to it the words that he 
did: "Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done," 
and wait. 

. . . For many years past the immanent God has 
been more real to me than the transcendent God, and the 
religion of Jacob has been more alien to me than that of 
Kant, or even Spinoza. The whole Semitic dramaturgy 
has come to seem to me a work of the imagination. The 
apostolic documents have changed in value and meaning 
to my eyes. Belief and truth have become distinct to me 
with a growing distinctness. Religious psychology has 
become a simple phenomenon, and has lost its fixed and 
absolute value. The apologetics of Pascal, of Leibnitz, of 
Secretan, are to me no more convincing than those of the 
Middle Ages, for they presuppose what is really in ques- 
tion a revealed doctrine, a definite and unchangeable 
Christianity. It seems to me that what remains to me 
from all my studies is a new phenomenology of mind, 
an intuition of universal metamorphosis. All particular 
convictions, all definite principles, all clear-cut formulas 
and fixed ideas, are but prejudices, useful in practice, but 
still narrownesses of the mind. The absolute in detail is 
absurd and contradictory. All political, religious, aesthetic, 
or literary parties are protuberances, misgrowths of 
thought. Every special belief represents a stiffening and 
thickening of thought; a stiffening, however, which .is 
necessary in its time and place. Our monad, in its think- 
ing capacity, overleaps the boundaries of time and space 
and of its own historical surroundings; but in its individual 
capacity, and for purposes of action, it adapts itself to cur- 
rent illusions, and puts before itself a definite end. It is 
lawful to be man, but it is needful also to be a man, to be 
an individual. Our role is thus a double one. Only, the 
philosopher is specially authorized to develop the first role, 
which the vast majority of humankind neglects. 

February 7, 1881. Beautiful sunshine to-day. But I 



372 AMIEU 8 JOURNAL. 

have scarcely spring enough left in me to notice it. Ad- 
miration, joy, presuppose a little relief from pain. Whereas 
my neck is tired with the weight of my head, and my heart 
is wearied with the weight of life; this is not the aesthetic 
state. 

I have been thinking over different things which I 
might, have written. But generally speaking we let what 
is most original and best in us be wasted. We reserve 
ourselves for a future which never comes. Omnis moriar. 

February 14, 1881. Supposing that my weeks are num- 
bered, what duties still remain to me to fulfill, that I may 
leave all in order? I must give every one his due; justice, 
prudence, kindness must be satisfied; the last memories 
must be sweet ones. Try to forget nothing useful, nor 
anybody who has a claim upon thee! 

February 15, 1881. I have, very reluctantly, given up 
my lecture at the university, and sent for my doctor. On 

my chimney-piece are the flowers which has sent me. 

Letters from London, Paris, Lausanne, Neuchdtel . . . 
They seem to me like wreaths thrown into a grave. 

Mentally I say farewell to all the distant friends whom i 
shall never see again. 

February 18, 1881. Misty weather. A fairly good 
night. Still, the emaciation goes on. That is to say, the 
vulture allows me some respite, but he still hovers over his 
prey. The possibility of resuming my official work seems 
like a dream to me. 

Although just now the sense of ghostly remoteness from 
life which I so often have is absent, I feel myself a prisoner 
for good, a hopeless invalid. This vague intermediate 
state, which is neither death nor life, has its sweetness, 
because if it implies renunciation, still it allows of thought. 
It is a reverie without pain, peaceful and meditative. Sur- 
rounded with affection and with books, I float down the 
stream of time, as once I glided over the Dutch canals, 
smoothly and noiselessly. It is as though I were once 
more on board the Treckschute. Scarcely can one hear 
even the soft ripple of the water furrowed by the baige, or 



AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 373 

the hoof of the towing horse trotting along the sandy path. 
A journey under these conditions has something fantastic 
in it. One is not sure whether one still exists, still 
belongs to earth. It is like the manes, the shadows, flitting 
through the twilight of the ina/iia regna. Existence has 
become fluid. From the standpoint of complete personal 
renunication I watch the passage of my impressions, my 
dreams, thoughts, and memories. . . . It is a mood 
of fixed contemplation akin to that which we attribute to 
the seraphim. It takes no interest in the individual self, 
but only in the specimen monad, the sample of the general 
history of mind. Everything is in everything, and the 
consciousness examines what it has before it. Nothing is 
either great or small. The mind adopts all modes, and 
everything is acceptable to it. In this state its relations 
with the body, with the outer world, and with other indi- 
viduals, fade out of sight. Selbst-bewusstsein becomes 
once more impersonal Bewusstsein, and before personality 
can be reacquired, pain, duty, and will must be brought 
into action. 

Are these oscillations between the personal and the im- 
personal, between pantheism and theism, between Spinoza 
and Leibnitz, to be regretted? No, for it is the one state 
which makes us conscious of the other. And as man is 
capable of ranging the two domains, why should he muti- 
late himself? 

February 22, 1881. The march of mind finds its typical 
expression in astronomy no pause, but no hurry; orbits, 
cycles, energy, but at the same time harmony; movement 
and yet order; everything has its own weight and its rela- 
tive weight, receives and gives forth light. Cannot this 
cosmic and divine become oars? Is the war of all against 
all, the preying of man upon man, a higher type of 
balanced action? I shrink form believing it. Some 
theorists imagine that the phase of selfish brutality is the 
last phase of all. They must be wrong. Justice will 
prevail, and justice is not selfishness. Independence of 
intellect, combined with goodness of heart, will be the 
agents of a result, which will be the compromise required. 



374 -A MIEL'S JO URNAL. 

March 1, 1881. I have just been glancing over the 
affairs of the world in the newspaper. What a Babel it is ! 
But it is very pleasant to be able to make the tour of the 
planet and review the human race in an hour. It gives 
one a sense of ubiquity. A newspaper in the twentieth 
century will be composed of eight or ten daily bulletins \ 
political, religious, scientific, literary, artistic, commercial, 
meteorological, military, economical, social, legal, and 
financial; and will be divided into two parts only Urbs 
and Orbis. The need of totalizing, of simplifying, will 
bring about the general use of such graphic methods as 
permit of series and comparisons. We shall end by feeling 
the pulse of the race and the globe as easily as that of a 
sick man, and we shall count the palpitations of the uni- 
versal life, just as we shall hear the grass growing, or the 
.sunspots clashing, and catch the first stirrings of volcanic 
disturbances. Activity will become consciousness; the 
earth will see herself. Then will be the time for her to 
blush for her disorders, her hideousness, her misery, her 
crime and to throw herself at last with energy and per- 
severance into the pursuit of justice. When humanity has 
-cut its wisdom-teeth, then perhaps it will have the grace 
to reform itself, and the will to attempt a systematic 
reduction of the share of the evil in the world. The 
Weltgeist will pass from the state of instinct to the moral 
state. War, hatred, selfishness, fraud, the right of the 
.stronger, will be held to be old-world barbarisms, mere 
diseases of growth. The pretenses of modern civilization 
will be replaced by real virtues. Men will be brothers, 
peoples will be friends, races will sympathize one with 
another, and mankind will draw from love a principle of 
emulation, of invention, and of zeal, as powerful as any 
furnished by the vulgar stimulant of interest. This 
millennium will it ever be? It is at least an act of piety 
to believe in it. 

March 14, 1881. I have finished Merimee's letters to 
Panizzi. Merimee died of the disease which torments me 
"Je tousse, et je'touffe." Bronchitis and asthma, 






AMIEL'^ JOURNAL. 375 

whence defective assimilation, and finally exhaustion. He, 
too, tried arsenic, wintering at Cannes, compressed air. 
All was useless. Suffocation and inanition carried off the 
author of "Colomba." Hie tua res agitur. The gray, 
heavy sky is of the same color as my thoughts. And yet 
the irrevocable has its own sweetness and serenity. The 
fluctuations of illusion, the uncertainties of desire, the 
leaps and bounds of hope, give place to tranquil resigna- 
tion. One feels as though one were already beyond the 
grave. It is this very week, too, I remember, that my 
corner of ground in the Oasis is to be bought. Everything 
draws toward the end. Festinat ad eventum. 

March 15, 1881. The "Journal" is full of details of the 
horrible affair at Petersburg. How clear it is that such 
catastrophes as this, in which the innocent suffer, are the 
product of a long accumulation of iniquities. Historical 
justice is, generally speaking, tardy so tardy that it be- 
comes unjust. The Providential theory is really based OD 
human solidarity. Louis XVI. pays for Louis XV. , Alex- 
ander II. for Nicholas. We expiate the sins of our fathers, 
and our grandchildren will be punished for ours. A double 
injustice! cries the individual. And he is right it the 
individualist principle is true. But is it true? That is 
the point. It seems as though the individual part of 
each man's destiny were but one section of that des- 
tiny. Morally we are responsible for what we> Ourselves 
have willed, but socially, our happiness and unhappiness 
depend on causes outside our will. Keligion answers 
"Mystery, obscurity, submission, faith. Do your duty; 
leave the rest to God." 

March 16, 1881. A wretched night. A melancholy 
morning. . . . The two stand-bys of the doctor, 
digitalis and bromide, seem to have lost their power over 
me. Wearily and painfully I watch the tedious progress of 
my own decay. What efforts to keep one's self from 
dying! I am worn out with the struggle. 

Useless and incessant struggle is a humiliation to one's 
manhood. The lion finds the gnat the most intolerable of 



376 AMIEL'S JOURNAL. 

his foes. The natural man feels the same. But tne 
spiritual man must learn the lesson of gentleness and long- 
suffering. The inevitable is the will of God. We might 
have preferred something else, but it is our business to 
accept the lot assigned us. ... One thing only is 
necessary 

" Garde en mon cceur la foi dans ta volontfi sainte, 
Et de moi fais, 6 Dieu, tout ce que tu voudras." 

Later. One of my students has just brought me a sym- 
pathetic message from my class. My sister sends me a pot 

of azaleas, rich in flowers and buds; sends roses and 

violets: every one spoils me, which proves that I am ill. 

March 19, 1881. Distaste discouragement. My heart 
is growing cold. And yet what affectionate care, what 
tenderness, surrounds me! . . . But without health, 
what can one do with all the rest? What is the good of it 
all to me? What was the good of Job's trials? They 
ripened his patience ; they exercised his submission. 

Come, let me forget myself, let me shake off this melan- 
choly, this weariness. Let me think, not of all that is lost, 
but of all that I might still lose. I will reckon up my 
privileges ; I will try to be worthy of my blessings. 

March 21, 1881. This invalid life is too Epicurean. 
For five or six weeks now I have done nothing else but 
wait, nurse myself, and amuse myself, and how weary one 
gets of it ! What I want is work. It is work which gives 
flavor to life. Mere existence without object and without 
effort is a poor thing. Idleness leads to languor, and 
languor to disgust. Besides, here is the spring again, the 
season of vague desires, of dull discomforts, of dim aspira- 
tions, of sighs without a cause. We dream wide-awake. 
We search darkly for we know not what; invoking the 
while something which has ho name, unless it be happiness 
or death. 

March 28, 1881. I cannot work; I find it difficult to 
exist. One may be glad to let one's friends spoil one for a 
few months ; it is an experience which is good for us all ; 



AM1EDS JOURNAL. 377 

but afterward? How much better to make room for the 
living, the active, the productive. 

" Tircis, voici le temps de prendre sa retraite." 
Is it that I care so much to go on living? I think not. 
It is health that 1 long for freedom from suffering. 

And this desire being vam, I can find no savor in any- 
thing else. Satiety. Lassitude. Eenunciation. Abdica- 
tion. "In your patience possess ye your souls." 

April 10, 1881. (Sunday}. Visit to . She read over 

to me letters of 1844 to 1845 letters of mine. So much 
promise to end in so meager a result! What creatures we 
are ! I shall end like the Khine, lost among the sands, and 
the hour is close by when my thread of water will have 
disappeared. 

Afterward I had a little walk in the sunset. There was 
an effect of scattered rays and stormy clouds; a green haze 
envelops all the trees 

" Et tout renait, et deja 1'aubepine 
A vu 1'abeille accourir a ses fleurs," 

but to me it all seems strange already. 

Later. What dupes we are of our own desires! . . . 
Destiny has two ways of crushing us by refusing our 
wishes and by fulfilling them. But he who only wills what 
God wills escapes both catastrophes. "All things work 
together for his good." 

April 14, 1881. Frightful night; the fourteenth 
Cunning, in which I have been consumed by sleepless- 
ness. . . . 

April 15, 1881. To-morrow is Good Friday, the festival 
of pain. I know what it is to spend days of anguish and 
nights of agony. Let me bear my cross humbly. . . . 
I have no more future. My duty is to satisfy the claims 
of the present, and to Jeave everything in order. Let me 
try to end well, seeing that to undertake and even to con- 
tinue, are closed to me. 

April 19, 1881. A terrible sense of oppression. My 
flesh and my heart fail me. 

"Que vivre eat difficile, 6 mon cceur fatigue!" 



INDEX. 



About's satire and irony, 170. 

Absolute, Amiel's craving for the, 55; conception of the, '275, 294. 

Absolutism, 218. 

Accident, philosophy of 67, 68; and Providence, 174. 

Ackermann, poems of Madame, 274. 

Acorn and Oak, 358. 

Action, Amiel's cross, 102; ^concrete thought, 5; how to recover cour- 
age for; 40, requisites, for, 344. 

Activity of the Western Nations, unholy, 337. 

Adoration and consolation essential in religion, 101. 

Advice, giving, 245. 

./Eschylus' and "Prometheus Eumenides," 256. 

Affected poets, 317. 

Affirmation and examination, 249. 

Age, loss of respect for, 130; the servitude of, 191. 

Alcibiades, 298. 

Algebra v. life, 232. 

All or nothing, 275. 

Alps, the, 55, 164 221. 

Ambition, Amiel's horror of, 106, 293; moral, 211. 

Americans, the, 337. 

Amusement and instruction, 332. 

Analysis, extreme, 104; kills spontaneity, 324; of self, Amiel's, 158, 
woman's dislike of, 173. 

Analytic minds, 166. 

Anger, conquest of, 360. 

Animality, the laws of, 300. 

Animals, treatment of, 156. 

Annihilation of Buddha, 194. 

Anonymous souls, 199. 

Ant v. swallow, 80. 

A priori speculations, 249. 

Arcadia, an expedition into, 281. 

Aristotle, 294. 

Art, decadence of, 180; grand and simple, 318; and imagination, 323, 
reveals Nature, 104. 

Ascension Day. 332. 

" Atala " and " Rene," Chateaubriand's, 83, 84. 

Atheism, effects of, 300. 

Atomism, philosophy of, 131. 

Attila, 341. 

Augustine and Lucian contrasted, 302. 

Authority v. liberty, 199. 

Autumn, melancholy of, 278; of life, 183; two-fold, 127. 



380 INDEX 

Azote, woman the social, 256. 

Babble, ignorant, 315. 
Bach's prelude, 50. 
Bacon on religion, 144. 
Babnsen's pessimism, 244. 
Balzac, 232. 

Banniere, Bleue, la, 341. 
Banter not humor, 359. 
Barbarism, possible triumph of, 132. 
Basle, 225. 

Bayle and Saint Simon, 205. 

Beauty, female, 171; v. goodness, 302; and pathos, 86, 87; and ugli- 
ness, 244; universal in Paradise, 132. 
Beauty =the spiritual ization of matter, 133. 
Beethoven and Mozart contrasted, 50. 
Being consciousness of, 353, and non-being, 334. 
Beranger, 207. 
Berkeley, 27. 

Berlioz, " Romeo and Juliet," 309. 
Bevmsstsein, 373. 
Biedermann on Strauss, 361. 
Biran's Journal, 78, 79. 
Birds in bad weather, 158. 
Bismarck, 174. 
Biases of the world, 348. 
Boileau and Fontaine contrasted, 310. 
Book, function of the, 313. 
Bossuet on charity, 329. 

Bourse, movements of the (the beat of the common heart), 151. 
Brahma, 226, his dream, 167. 
Brahmanic aspirations, 287. 
Brahtnanizing souls, 344. 
Brain decay, Amiel's, 303. 
Buddha, 223, method of, 366. 
Buddhism, 194, 208, 274. 
Buddhist tendency of Amiel, 155. 
Buisson, 199. 

Caesarism the counterpoise of equality, 131. 

Cartesian dualism, 248 

Catholic superstition, 259 

Catholicism, 53, essence of, 122; and revolution, 217. 

Cauteries Athenienes, Cherbuliez, 100. 

Cellerier on St. James, 31. 

Chance and Providence, 174. 

Change not improvement, 143; persistence in, 229; rules the world, 

Changeable character, Amiel's 159, 172. 

Character, how to judge, 359; temperament, and individuality, 204; 

and will, Amiel's lack of, 102. 
Charity, democratic character of, 328. 
Charm, 243. 



INDEX. 381 

Chateaubriand, 83, 139; and Rousseau, 83. 

Oherbuliez, 178; Mephistophelean novel, 302; on chivalry, etc., 99, 

125. 

Cherry trees and lilacs, 2. 
Childhood, Amiel's second, 125; blessings of, 169; first conversations 

of, 31; revived impressions of, 273. 
Children, 86. 

Chivalry, Cherbuliez on, 99. 
Christendom and Ascension Day, 332. 

Christian nations, aspiration of, 299; preaching, confusions of, 270. 
Christianity a vast ocean, 188; different aspects of, 188; essence of, 47. 

from a human point of view, 184; historical aspects of, 247; 

liberal, 197; of dignity instead of humility, 98; and reconciliation, 

334; v. religion, 153; task of, 4, 5, 42; true, 122. 
Church and State, proper aims of, 329; separation, rejected by the 

Qenevese people, 348. 
Churches (the) and Jesus, 178. 
Churchyard, reflections in a, 276. 
" Cid " and "Rodogune," artificiality of, 112. 
Circumstances, force of, 290; influence of, 131. 
Civilization, corrupting tendency of, 342; confounded with the inner 

life, 53; in the light of religion, 209. 
Claparede, Edouard, 166. 
Classification of men, twofold, 362. 
Cleanthus, 195. 
Cleons, modern, 122. 
Clever folk defined, 319. 
Cleverness, negative character of, 170. 
Cohabitation of individuals, man's chief problem, 328. 
Cohesion essential to society, 157. 
Comic poets, role of the, 302. 

Common sense, 44; v. the ideal, 71; rebellion against, 274. 
Common sense worship, 26. 
Commune of Paris, 238. 
Compliance, good-humored, 266. 

Composition, Amiel's laborious, 287; the process of, 318. 
Compound character of Amiel, 201. 
Condorcet's theory, 52. 
Conflict, man's perpetual, 307. 
Conscience, 255; abdication of the, 217; appeal of, 10, 12; v. clever- 

ness, 301; corruption of the, 136; and faith, 60; and history, 21; 

individualized by, 145; v. reality, 212; v. taste, 331; the voice of 

God, 330. 

Consciousness compared to a book, 273. 

"Consideration," definition of, 284; unsought by Amiel, 285. 
Constant, Benjamin, 284. 

Contemplation, Amiel's milieu, 173; contrasted with action, 173; pas- 
sionate temperament incapable of, 166. 
Contentment, 356; apostolic, 181; and submission, 279. 
Contradictory aspirations, 300. 
Contraries, marriage of, 290. 
Coppee, Francois, 290. 
Coquerel, 199. 



382 INDEX. 

" Corinne," 80. 

Corneille's heroes, rSles not men, 113 

Courage, Amiel's want of, 261. 

Creation, the act of, 289 

Credulity, freedom from, 157. 

Creed, Amiel's want of a, 268. 

Critic, the, 44; the conscientious, 86; the true, 200, 207, 319, 320, 
323. 

Critical faculty, abuse of the, 65; lucidity, 250. 

Criticism a gift, 320; indifferent, 110. 

Cross, apotheosis of the, 214, 215; (one's) made heavier by repul- 
sion, 7. 

Crowd (the) and the individual, 145; instinct and passion of the, 272. 

Crowd worship, 129. 

Crucifixion, the, 214. 

Culture, modern, 324. 

Cynic, egotism of the, 228. 

Dante, 47; in hell, 138. 

Darwinism, 314; counterpoised by equality, 331; inconsistencies 
of, 300. 

Dead and living, the, 276; want of respect for the, 100. 

Death, 58; Amiel's anticipation of, 369, 370, 371; anticipation of, 321, 
322; certainty of, 95; death of, 214; speculations respecting, 273. 

De Candolle, 180. 

Democracy unfavorable to high art, 166; evil results of, 179; fickle- 
ness of, 237; fiction of, 130, 237; results of, 346; weakness of, 
227 

Democratic era, 18, 129, 130. 

Demos, stupidity of, 237. 

Dependence and liberty, 152. 

Depersonalization, Amiel's, 352. 

Descartes on fame, 299. 

Desert, the traveler of the, 339. 

Desolation and daylight, 258. 

Despair, resignation of, 280. 

Despotic government and intellectual anarchy, 157. 

Despotism, 152; and materialism, 35; of Russia, 69. 

Detritus of past eras, 262. 

Diderot, 177. 

"Die unto sin," 90. 

Discontentment, 86. 

Discouragement, Amiel's sin, 102. 

Discremen ingeniorum, 48. 

Disraeli's " Lothair," 216. 

Distilled history, 295. 

Divine, glimpses of the, 60; and human union, 187; will, acceptation 
of the, 305. 

Divinity, multiplication of, 354. 

Doctor, the model, 266. 

Doctors, causes of their mistakes, 265. 

Dollar, the almighty, 214. 

Double, a characteristic of perfection, 127. 



INDEX. 383 

Double-faced life, 13. 

Doubt, 89; and atheism, 187; and obedience, 158k 

Doudan's Lettres et Melanges, 297, 299 

Dragonfly symbol, 341. 

Dream-aspect of life, 126. 

Dreaming, 87. 

Dreamland and action, 344. 

Dreams, 186; helpfulness of, 101. 

Duped, fear of being, 187. 

Dupes, mental, 291. 

Dutchman, twofold aspect of the, 264. 

Duty, 4, 13, 76, 89, 228, 355; double power of, 5; ignored by both 
equality and Darwinism, 331; negative, 230; and pleasure. 286; 
power of the idea of, 108; the human pole-star, 169; the sign of 
nobility, 152, the viaticum of life, 192; and trial, 148; v. the in- 
dividual, 374. 

Dying, words and looks of the, 185, 186. 

East and West contrasted, 143. 

Ecclesiastical struggles, worthlessness of, 153. 

Education and development, 229, 230. 

Effect, the misfortune of Victor Hugo, 114. 

Effort of modern morality, 230. 

Ego, Claparede's view of the, 166. 

Egotism, 18, 22. 

Eighteenth century criticism, 270. 

Emerson's ideal, 22, 27. 

English children, 251; homes, attractiveness of, 250. 

Englishmen, twofold character of, 150. 

Enthusiasm, cultivation of, 121; two forms of, 258. 

Enthusiastic women, 258. 

Epicureanism, intellectual, 108. 

Epicurism, 208. 

Epicurus, 335. 

Epigrammatic productions, 359. 

Equality a bad principle, 122, 131; doctrines, 236; of functions, 

American, 213; results of, 17, 18, 179, 328; the counterpoise of 

Darwinism. 331. 
Equilibrium of forces, 68. 
" Errare, humanum est," 343. 
Error, emancipation from, 250. 
Errors, moral and psychological, 270. 
E sempre bene, 355. 
Esoteric beauty, 242. 
Esprit defined, 325. 
Essay, function of the, 313. 
Etrangeres, Armel's, 291 
Evil, problem of, 193; transfiguration of, 55; ignored by Pelletan, 

52; by V. Hugo, 114. 
Examination v. affirmation, 249. 
Example, a good, 236; importance of, 32. 
Existence, submission to the laws of, 267. 
Experience, individual and collective, 269. 



384 INDEX 

Extempore preachers, 268. 
Extremes, reconciliation of, 252. 

Fair mindedness, rarity of, 305. 

Fairy tales, their truth, 27. 

Fau ce que dois, admenne que pourra, 330. 

Faith defined, 246, has no proofs, 336; narrow v. enlightened, 247; 
of the present, the, 299, and science, 216; and truth, 246. 

False flag of Christendom, 301, originality, 310, shame, Amiel's, 
261. 

Fame, achievement of, 299. 

Family life, value of, 251. 

Fanatics, Indian, 189 

Fastidwm, how to avoid, 354. 

" Faust," 89. 

Feeling . irony, 301; precedes will, 50, respect for, 28. 

Feeling, suppression of, 228, 234, the bread of angels, 135, and 
thought. 258. 

Feminine nature, infirmity of the, 259. 

Festinat ad eoentum, 375. 

Feuerbach, 15 

Feudle Centrale de Zofingen, 354. 

Fiat justitia, pereat mundus, 212. 

Fichte, 21, 167. 

Finite, and infinite, 276. 

Plunene, 30 

Flattery of the multitude, 271. 

Fog, poetry of, I4b. 

Fontaine's defects and beauties, 810. 

Fontanes, 199 

Fools, behavior toward, 58. 

Force, external, 300 

Forces, opposing, 68 

Fragmentary contemplation, 324. 

France, Christianity in, 311, fundamental error of, 259, v. Geneva, 
352, and Germany, 234, philosophic superficiality of, 53, the 
center of the world, 165. 

Francis of Ass'si, 156 

Frankness and self-knowledge, women deficient in, 186. 

Freethinkers, puerility of the, 217. 

Freethought, republic of, 270. 

French Academy, eloquence of the, 283, drama, an oratorical tourna- 
ment, 113, and German literature contrasted, 177, ignorance of 
liberty, 221, literary method, 221; love of aesthetics, 313; mind, 
106,280, philosophy, 81, poets, modern, 317, symbolical authority 
of the, 221, republicanism, 224, vivacity of the, 113. 

Friends, choice of, 362 

Future state, mystery of the 161, 201. 

Gayety and sadness, 318. 

Galiani, 177. 

Gallery, playing to the, 281, 285. 



INDEX. 385 

Galley-slaves, modern, 230. 

Geneva, appeal to, 348; characteristics of, 349; v. France, 352; oath of 
old, 367. 

Genevese Liberalism, 82. 

Genghis Khan, 341. 

Genius and talent, 75; writers of, 206. 

Gentleman defined, 148, 149; the Shibboleth of England, 148. 

German and French literature contrasted, 178; novels, 233; society, 
vulgarity of, 233; thinkers, their repugnance to public life, 39. 

Germanic mind, tendency of the, 315. 

Germans, artistic devotion of the, 315; the masters of the philosophy 
of life, 68. 

Germany and France, 234. 

Germs of good and bad in every heart, 129. 

Gethsemane, 371. 

Ghost, Amiel a living, 357. 

Gifts considered acquisitions, 32. 

Gioberti on the French mind, 280. 

Qioconda, la, 290, 324. 

Glory of God, 304. 

Glow-worm, 34. 

God, communion with, 1; conquest of, 55, 66; harmony with, 163, 
181; life in, 123. 

"God and my right," 148, 251; and Nature contrasted, 141; recogni- 
tion of, 217; submission to, 147, 280, 368, 369, 375, 377; will 
of, 277. 

God's love and chastisement, 333; omnipresence, 291; perfection, 229. 

Goethe, 26; contrasted with Rousseau, 140; on fame, 299; on self- 
obscurity, 1C5. 

Goethe's want of soul, 239; complex nature, 239. 

" Good news," of Christianity, 187. 

"Good society," 232. 

Good, sum of, perhaps always the same, 180; victory of, 137, 193, 
194. 

Goodness and beauty, 301,302; character of, 328, 329; conquests of, 
314; philosophy of, 274; truest judge, 359. 

Gospel, Amiel's belief in the, 268; blessings of the, 178, 179; th 
Eternal, 188; why successful, 240, 241. 

Great men, 141, 142; and small things, 291. 

Greeks, changes in character of the, 140; lessons from the, 41. 

Grief, luxury of, 245; results of, 59, 60. 

Griefs which cannot be shared, 368. 

Growing old, 355. 

Habere non haberi, 49. 

Habit, Amiel a creature of, 140. 

Habits, life a tissue of, 7. 

Happiness, Amiel's thirst for, 257 ; contagious, 208 ; cumulative, 56 ; 
denned, 335, dreams about, 72, enjoyment of, 33, 34; impossible, 
145, 146; pursuit of, 192; the best, 306; universal yearning for, 
333. 

Harmony 211; blessings of, 230, 231; longing for, 831. 

Hartmann, 244; his " Philosophy cf the Unconscious," 206. 



386 INDEX. 

Havet's " Origines du Christianisme," 270. 

Head and Heart, 14. 

Healing power of life, 110. 

Health, frailty of, 95, loss of, 278; and happiness, 280; and the outer 

world, 235 
Heart and intellect, 320, 355; the mainspring of life, 132 149; 

yearnings of the, 146. 
Heartless books, 360. 
Heavenly moments, 241 
Hegel, 124, 270, 294; and Leibnitz, 236. 
Heim, Charles, 155, 185. 
Heine and Lamennais contrasted, 200 
Heraclitus, saying of, 254. 
Herder's " Lichtstrahlen," 205. 
Hermits and the world, 319. 
Heroism, 5. 

Hindoo genius, the, 286. 
Hirn's three principles, 198, 199. 

Historical justice, tardiness of, 375, law of tempests, 342. 
History and conscience, 21; three views of, 190, varied views of, 174. 
Holiness v. liberty, 173, requisites for, 265. 

Hope and duty, 168; influence of, 219, and melancholy, 269; not for- 
bidden, 276, 

flora est benefaciendi, 282. 
Horace, 311. 
Hugo, Victor, a Gallicized Spaniard, 116; Lis exaggerations, 307; his 

" Contemplations," 108; his literary and Titanic power, 116, 117; 

his " Miserables," 114; " Paris," 307. 
Human and Divine union, 188, life, the three modes of (action, 

thought, speech), 123, personality ignored, 78; solidarity, 152. 
Humanism and religion, 14, 15, of Cherbuliez, 124. 
Humanity, a higher standard of, 151; benefactors and masters of, 

209, candidates for, 310; ideal of, 18; slow development of, 300, 

326, 363, toughness of, 238. 
Humboldt, 239 

Humility precedes repentance, 66; (true), = contentment, 59. 
Humorist, the true. 170. 
Hyacinthe, Pere. 258. 
Hypocrisy and deception, 112. 

Ideal conceptions, 327. 

Ideal, diminution of the, 198; malady of the, 71; v. material, 129; v. 

real, 27, 35, 36, 133; thirst for the, 335. 
Ideals, hypocritical, 358. 
Ideas, anarchy of, 304: formation of, 290. 
Ill-health, Amiel's, 279, 293. 
Ill-nature, conquest of, 360. 
Illness, summonses of, 95. 
Illusion, benefit of, 220. 
Illusions, human, 175, 192, 342. 
Illustrious men, disappearance of, 10. 
Imagination v. character, 11; enfranchised, 253; influence of, 205; of 

Rousseau, 139. 



INDEX. 387 

Immortality, belief in, 168; consolations of, 267; and annihilation, 
91. 

Impersonality, 206; temptations of, 326. 

Indecision, 76; Amiel's, 311. 

Independence, Amiel's. 366; twofold aspect, of, 210. 

Independent thought of Geneva, 352. 

Indifference of cultivated classes, 228. 

Indignation, incapacity for, 245. 

Individual and society, 343; (the) B. duty, 346. 

Individualism an absurdity, 177; epoch of, 151; and equality, 17; 
evils of, 330. 

Individuality=character and temperament, 205, rarity of, 316. 

Inevitable, Amiel's resignation to the, 303; acceptance of the, 343; 
the, 296. 

Infallibility of judgment rare, 207. 

Infinite, communion with the, 27, 28; penetration of the, 344; thirst 
for the, 347. 

Infinites, infinity of, 229. 

Influence of men of action, 343. 

Injustice, Amiel too sensitive to, 367. 

Inner life essential, 144. 

Instinct precedes feeling, 50. 

Institutions, capacity of, 226. 

Instruction and amusement, 332. 

Insubordination, increase of, 130. 

Intellect, aristocratic character of the, 329; and heart, 319, 355; re- 
ligion of, 14; and stupidity, 303. 

Intellectualism, 255. 

Interests, want of, 165. 

International influences, 234. 

Internationale, the, 237. 

Introspection, 235. 

In-tuition, 359. 

Invalid, individuality of every, 265, 266. 

Invisible, the universal witness to the, 333. 

Involution, 304. 

Irony, law of, 301. 

Irreparable, thought of the, 162, 191. 

Isms, the modern, 350. 

Italy, Christianity in, 311. 

Jansenists v. Jesuits, 335. 
Jesuits v. Jansenists, 335. 
Jesus and the churches, 181; and Socrates, 14; comprehension of, 4, 

5; faith of, 187. 

Job's murmurings, 376; trials, 66. 

" Jocelyn " and " Paul et Virginie," tenderness and purity of, 109. 
"John Halifax, Gentleman," 148. 
Joubert, 7; Doudan's resemblance to, 297. 
Journal, Amiel's estimate of his, 295; function of the private, 24, 

312, 313. 

Joy expressed by tears, 138. 
Judaism of nineteenth century, 4. 



388 INDEX: 

Judgment, impersonality of, 76; of character, 359; self-interested, 
228; and understanding, 241. 

Justice defined, 814; forgetfulness of, 228; v. love, 212; will ulti- 
mately prevail, 373. 

Kant's radicate Bose, 209. 

Kindness and wariness incompatible, 329; the principle of tact, 20. 

Krause's religious serenity, 25. 

Laboremus, 206. 

Laborious lives, 227. 

Labor question unsolved, 42. 

La Bruyere, 311. 

La Fontaine, 298. 

Lamartine, 207; his "Preludes," 282; his dislike of Fontaine, 310. 
311. 

Lamennais, 139; contrasted with Heine, 200. 

Laprade, Victor de, affectation of, 340. 

Last words and looks of the dying, 185, 186. 

Latent genius, 89. 

Latin world, the, 248, 815. 

Laveleye's " L'Avenir Religieux," 299. 

Law, eternity of, 327. 

Lectures, Amiel's, 333. 

Legal fictions and institutions, 199. 

Legouve's NosJUs et nosJUles, 331. 

Leibnitz, 194; v. Hegel, 236; and Spinoza, 373. 

Lessing's principle, 57. 

Letter and spirit, 34. 

Letters, studied, 325. 

Leveler, the modern, 122. 

Leveling down, 181. 

Liberalism, political, 200. 

Liberty and religion, 217; and revolution, 224; diminished by de- 
mocracy, 131; in God, 47; possible suppression of, 218; the true 
friends of, 218; true, 364; v. authority, 200; v. holiness,. 173. 

Life, aim of, 58; a calvary, 89; a dream, 167; a perpetual combat, 
300; brevity of, 125, 142, 145, 162. 191, 223, 225, 293; definition 
of, 295; different aspects of, 191; drama, a monologue, 75; frail- 
ity of, 339; matter to be spiritualized, 356; melancholy aspect of, 
119; ocean of, 50; proper treatment of , 343; the Divine, 35; the 
true, 365; tenacity of, 368; . logic, 262, 263. 

Light and beauty, 117; without warmth, 14. 

Link of humanity, the, 333. 

Literary ambition, Amiel's, 313; career, Amiel's impediments to a, 
52; " gentlemen," 282. 

Literature and science, 233. 

Little things, influence of, 174. 

Logic v. life, 262, 263. 

"Lorelei," 314. 

Lotze, 177. 

Lovable, Amiel's taste for the, 355. 

Love, 24, 77; a young girl's, 279; and contemplation, 102; and 



INDEX. 

knowledge, 14; and holiness, power of, 198; eminently religious, 
119, 161; tendency to postpone, 186; V. justice, 114, 212; woman's 
supreme authority, 212. 

Lucian and Augustine contrasted, 302. 

Luck, good, 174. 

Luther on humanity, 237. 

Madness denned, 254, 352. 

Maia, 225, 253, 255. 

Malignity of the world, 367. 

Man and woman contrasted, 213. 

" Man " in essence and principle, 287; the true, 35. 

Mannerisms, 311, 312. 

Manou on Woman, 196. 

Many, the, and the few, 152. 

Marcus Aurelius, aim of. 121. 

Martyrdom, nobility of, 365. 

Martyrs, 190. 

Masses, frivolity of the, 143; impetuosity of the, 272; the, and dem- 
agogues, 237, 238. 

Material results, 364. 

Materialism, 18, 35, 314. 

Mathematical and historical intelligence, 48; 0. sensuous minds, 68. 

May, caprices of, 196. 

Mediocrity, era of, 17; the result of equality, 180. 

Meditation, joys of silent, 336. 

Melancholy, Amiel's tendency to, 158, 162, 182, 222, 225, 231, 232, 
276, 285, 286; and hope, 269; below the surface, 58; universality 
of, 129. 

Memories, painful, 320. 

Memory a catacomb, Amiel's, 351; deficient, 65. 

Men and things, Amiel's relation to, 106. 

Mephistopheles, weakness of, 228. 

Merimee's letters to Panizzi, 374. 

Method in religion, secondary, 154. 

Michelet, 53. 

Milieu, a w-holesome, 306. 

Millennium, the, 374. 

Mind and soul, 292; and the infinite, 326; described, 353, 357 ; forms 
and metamorphoses of (the one subject of study), 2; not phenome- 
nal, 292; science of, 274; the march of, 373. 

Minds, abstract and concrete, 48; well governed, 166. 

Minors in perpetuity, 218. 

Miracles, 248. 

" Miserables," Victor Hugo's, 114. 

Misspent time, 283. 

Mist and sunshine, 148. 

Misunderstandings, 3, 159. 

Modern man, character of the, 143. 

"Modern spirit," the, 239. 

Modesty, 44. 

" Moi," the central consciousness, 29k 

Moliere, 311; on reasoning, 231. 



390 INDEX. 

Monad, the human, 261. 

Monads, conscious, 296. 

Mongol invasion, 341. 

Monod, Adolphe, 18. 

Montaigne, 311. 

Montesquieu, 260; saying of, 271. 

Moonlight reflections, 268. 

Moralists, sugar, 331. 

Moral law, reconciliation of faith and science by the, 268; philosophy 

of Geneva, 352; v. natural, 212; . physical science, 274. 
Morals, physchology and system of, 46. 
Morning and evening conditions, 45. 
Mortification, 215. 

Mozart and Beethoven contrasted, 61. 
" Much ado about nothing," 292. 
Mulock, Miss, 148. 
Multitude, flattery of the, 271. 

Music, Wagner's, depersonalized, 77, 78; effects of, 211. 
Musician, the modern, 809. 
Musset on De Laprade, 340. 
Mystery of Providence, 174. 
Mysticism, so-called, 56. 

Napoleon, 174. 

National competitions, 181; types, 151; preferences unknown to 
Amiel, 308. 

Nationalities, ancient and modern, 54; imply prejudice, 111; Quinet's 
studies of, 97. 

Nationality and the State, 76. 

Nations, destinies of ( JSschylus), 256. 

Natural man, the, 209; . moral, 212 

Naturalist thinkers (q>v6iHoi), 274. 

Nature, Auiiel's enjoyment, of, 163, 178, 183, 192, 221, 241, 278, 281, 
282, 313, 320, 332, 338, 353, 358; enjoyment of, 3, 15, 26, 27, 28, 
29, 37. 42, 57, 58. 80, 104, 105, 106. 127, 135; continuity of, 354; 
v. conventions, 315; and God contrasted, 142; the kindly voice of, 
358; the law of, 212; without man, 78; worship of, 240. 

Narille, Ernest. 80; on " The Eternal Life," 91, 93. 

Neckar, the river, 103. 

Necker de Saussure, Madame, 345, 352. 

Negative minds, danger of, 111. 

Neo-Hegelians, 13. 

New birth, the, 90. 

Nicole and Pascal, 205. 

Nihilism, Russian, 237. 

Nirvana, 337. 

Nobility, true, 149. 

Nobility and vulgarity, 129. 

Normal, the, to be chosen, 269. 

North, poetry of the, 43. 

Nostalgia of happiness, 87. 

Nothing is lost, 123. 

Nothingness. 220; man's, 224,225; realization of, 72, 78. 



INDEX. 391 

Obedience the chief mark of religion, 279. 

Obernmnn, 208. 

Oblivion man's portion, 389. 

Obscure self, the, 74, 75. 

Obstinacy, 93. 

Odyssey, the divine, 35. 

Old age, 319; our views clearest in, 336. 

Old, the art of growing, 279. 

Olivier's " Chansons du Soir," 231. 

Opinion, 23; and belief, 361; too much despised by Amiel, 367. 

Optimism and pessimism, 193, 267. 

Orators, 258, 259. 

Order, 94; attempts at, 328; harmony with universal, 306; and law, 

224; the only positive good, 335. 
Oriental element, benefit of the, 143; happiness, 336. 
Originality, modern lack of, 316; ridicule the result of, 272. 
Origins all secret, 389. 
Outside and inside, 15, 35, 57, 281. 
Overrating, result of, 245. 
Oxygen and azote, human, 303. 

Pain, 63, 67; and comfort, 19. 

Pantheism, 148; of Krause, 248. 

Pantheistic disinterestedness, 286. 

Paradise, echoes of, 211. 

Paradox, 140. 

Paris, the French townsman's axis, 165. 

Pascal, 302; and Nicole, 205; on development, 130. 

Passion and reason, 226. 

Passionless man, the, 76. 

Passions, life of the, 62; conquest of the, 104. 

Past, poetry of the, 145. Reminiscences of the, 133, 134; the inter- 
preter of the present, 260; woman, the priestess of the, 256. 

Patuos and beauty, 86. 

Patience, the test of virtue, 147. 

Peace, 307; true, 163; two-fold aspect of, 265. 

Pedantic books, 177. 

Pelletan's " Profession de fo'," 52. 

Pensee writers, 9. 

" Penseroso," Amiel's, 183. 

People, emotion of the, 349. 

Perfection as an end, 154; attainment of, 294; of God, 229; search 
for, 65. 

Persiflage, 359. 

Pessimism, 244; and optimism, 193, 267; Amiel's tendency to, 162; 
helplessness of, 206. 

Petofi's poems, 340. 

Pharisaical people, 348. 

Philistinism, increase of, 180. 

Philosopher, ambition of the, 331. 

Philosophy defined, 249, 250; and religion, 216. 

Physical v. moral science, 274. 



392 

Piety defined, 330; and religion contrasted, 120. 

Pity, exhibition of, 317; and contempt, 176. 

Plaid, the chivalrous, 134. 

Plato v. Saint Paul, 236. 

Plato's " Dialogues," 51. 

Playthings of the world, 152. 

Pleasure and duty, 286. 

Plotinus and Proclus, vision of, 337. 

Plutolatry, 214. 

Poet and philosopher contrasted, 47. 

Poetry flayed by science, 232; of childhood and mature age, 99; tlia 
expression of a soul, 323. 

Points, straining after, 289. 

Political liberty of England, 157; windbags, 330. 

Politician, aim of thelionest, 271. 

Popular harangues, 258. 

Portraits and wax figures contrasted, 823. 

Poverty a crime in England, 149. 

Practical life, Amiel unsuited for, 202. 

Prayer, blessings of, 330. 

Prejudice essential to nationalities, 111; better than doubt, 111. 

Prestige, French worship of, 234. 

Pride and discouragement, 7; moral and religious, 358; two condi- 
tions of, 57. 

Priesthood, domination of the, 218. 

"Prince Vitale," Cherbuliez, 123, 124. 

Principiis obsta, 210. 

Privilege only temporary, 362. 

Professor, obligations of a, 285. 

Professorial lectures, 333. 

Progress, absolute and relative, 269; results of, 363, 364; Victor 
Hugo's religion of, 114. 

Protestant v. Catholic countries, 217. 

Protestantism defined, 153; advance guard of, 199; historical, 199. 

Protestants, liberal, 199. 

Proudhon, 139; his axiom, 245. 

Providence, 277. 

Province defined, 350. 

Psychological study, Amiel's aptitude tor, xJOtf. 

Psychologist, the, 235. 

Psychology, applied, 293, 294. 

Punctum saliens, 358. 

Punishment softened by faith, 66. 

Quantitative and qualitative, 53. 

Quinet, 53. 

Quintilian, saying of, 259. 

Rabelais, 311. 
Racine, 112, 115. 
Radical jugglery, 271. 
Rain, the country in, 242. 
Rationalism, 98. 



INDEX. 393 

Ready-made ideas, 57. 

Real and ideal, 133, 334. 

Realism in painting, 323; suppression of, 233. 

Reality and appearance, 281; character with no sense of, 165. 

Reason and passion, 226. 

Reconciliation and Christianity, 333. 

Redeemed, motive power of the, 187. 

Regenerate man, 211. 

Reinvolution, psychological, 357. 

Religion and liberty, 217; and philosophy, 196, 200, 216; and piety 

contrasted, 129; indestructible, 158; life in God, 195; phases of, 

329, 330; refreshing power of, 144; and Utilitarianism, 900; 

without mysticism, 100. 

Religions, multitude of, 176; effect of political, 311. 
Religious man, the (an intermediary), 306; views, Amiel's, 371. 
Reminiscences, vague, 118. 
Renaissance, the, Fontaine's horizon, 811. 
Renan, 178; his object, style, 313. 
Renan's " Les Evangiles," 313; " Vie de Jesus," 240; "St. Paul," 

201. 

" Rene" and " Atala," Chateaubriand's, 83, 84. 
Renunciation, benefit of, 366. 
Repentance and sanctifi cation too exclusively preached, 101; simple, 

215. 

Republic, the normal, 351. 
Repugnance, Amiel's twofold, 348. 
Resignation, manly, 29. 
Responsibility, 12; dread of, 39. 
Restlessness, Amiel's, 70, 72. 
Reveries, 28, 30. 
Reville, 199. 
Revolt instinctive, 209. 

Revolution and Catholicism, 217; 0. liberty, 224. 
Ridicule, fear of. 272. 

Right apart from duty, a compass with one leg, 330. 
Rights' abstract, 330. 
River, a beautiful life compared to a, 355. 
Roads, high and cross, 269. 
Role, our twofold, 371. 
Romance peoples, the, 68. 

Rosenkrantz's " History of Poetry," 67; on Hegel's logic, 105. 
Rousseau and Chateaubriand, 83, 84; an ancestor in all things, 140; 

his letter to Archbishop Beaumont, 139; his regard for style, 

313; on savage life, 290. 
Ruge's " Die Academic," 13, 15. 
Russian national character, 68, 69. 

Sacerdotal dogmatism, 99. 

Sadness and gayety, 318. 

St. Evremond, 311; James' Epistle, 31; John's Gospel, 4; Martin's 

summer, 42; Paul and St. John, 18; Paul and Plato, 236; Simon 

and Bayle, 205. 
Sainte-Beuve, 178, 206, 284, 297. 



394 INDEX. 

Saintly alchemy, 187. 

Sanctification implies martyrdom, 88. 

Sarcasm, repulsiveness of, 360. 

Satan, possible conversion of, 137; the father of lies, 136; his 
territory, 99. 

Satiety, preservative against, 354. 

Satirist, the, 170. 

Savoir vivre, 234. 

Skepticism and intellectual independence, 157. 

Schelling, 167. 

Schellingian speculation, 185. 

Scherer, 26, 155, 178, 207, 224. 

Scheveningen, 260. 

Schiller on superiority and perfection, 99. 

Schleiermacher, 99, 239; his "Monologues," 21. 

Scholasticism, 249. 

Schopenhauer, 194, 203, 204, 208; his pessimism, 267. 

Science and faith, 216, 246, 267; and literature, 232; and religion, 
274; and wisdom, 132; march of, 304; weakness of, 27. 

Sea, the, 262; conversation of the, 166. 

Secretan's philosophy, 184. 

Secrets, hidden^ 59. 

Seed-sowing, 31. 

Self-abandonment, 102; annihilation of, 306; approval and self- 
contempt, 57, conquest, 88 ; contempt, excessive, 230 ; con- 
versation with, 312; criticism, 104; distrust. Amiel's, 62, 65, 
98, 155; education, hatred of, 305; gloriiication, 81; govern- 
ment misunderstood, 350; ignorance, cause of, 159: interest 
v. truth, 189; love, 58, 63; preservation a duty, 322; re- 
newal, 239; renunciation, 2. 64, 72, 182; rule the essence of 
gentlemanliness, 149; sacrifice, 227, 277. 

Selfishness and individual rights, 330. 

Seneca, 195. 

Sensation, nature of, 166. 

Sensorium commune of nature. 353. 

Separation of modern society, 228. 

Separatism, 350. 

Septimius Severus, motto of, 206. 

Sex, the virtue of, 213. 

Shadow and substance, 280. 

Shakespeare, 112. 

Siefert's, Louise, "Lea StoTques," 252. 

Silence and repose, 166; effect of, 26, 27; of nature, 356. 

Sin, definition of, 210; frivolous idea of, 256; pardon of, 187; 
the cardinal question, 14. 

Singing, rustic, 81 

Sismondi, 82. 

Sivaism, 244. 

Slavery, 42. 

Sleep. 49. 

Soap-bubble symbol, 339. 

Social charity and harsh justice, llo. 

Socialism, international, 236. 



INDEX. 395 

Society, 233; and the individual, 305 

t^ocii Deisumus (Seneca), 195. 

Socrates and Jesus, 14. 

Solitariness of life, 72. 

Solitary life, AmiePs, 86. 

Solitude, human, 368. 

Soul, abyss of the, 229; and mind, 292. 

Soul, dominical state of the, 336; ghosts of the, 118; history of a 

295; three powers of the (counsel, judgment, and action), 64. 
Soul's wants ignored by the Church, 100. 

Southern Europe, statesmen of, 218; theater, masks of the, 112. 
Sparrenhorn, ascent of the, 222. 
Speech, mystery of, 31. 
Spinoza, 62; and Leibnitz, 373. 
Spirit, voice of the Holy, 306. 
Spiritual existence, 327. 
Spontaneity, the question of, 236. 
Stael, Madame, de, 284, 287; on nationalities, 308; her " L'Alle- 

magne," 352. 

Stahl's " Les histoires de mon Parrain," 331. 
State, the model, 234; true foundations of a, 227. 
Statistical progress and moral decline, 17. 
Stendhal, 232. 

Stoicism, 274; and suicide. 168. 
Stoics, the, 62. 
Strauss, 361. 

Struggle of opposing forces, 331. 
Stupidity and intellect, 303. 
Style, Kenan's main object, 313. 
Sub-Alpine history, 54. 

Subjectivity and objectivity, 19,41, 42, 79, 106; of experience, 166. 
Submission, 129; not defeat, 153. 
Subtleties not helpful, 343. 
Subtlety and taste, 297. 
Success, 174. 
Suffering, way of, 230; produces depth, 208; triumph of, 214; resuh 

of, 277. 

Suffering, universality of, 333. 
Sunshine and mist contrasted, 148. 
Supernatural, the, 153, 247. 
Swiss critics, 81; ungracefulness of the, 179. 
Sybarites, modern, 331. 
Symbols, decay of, 361. 
Sympathy, 15, and criticism, 325, moral, 243; of Amiel, 155; with 

our fellows, 177. 

Symphonic pictures, Berlioz's, 309 
Synonyms, passion for, 311. 
Systems defined, 141. 

Tacitus v. the chroniclers, 313. 
Tact, measure, and occasion, 319. 
Taine on the Ancient Regime, 289. 
Taine's " English Literature," 232 



396 INDEX 

Talent and genius, 76; triumphs of, 140. 
Tamerlane, 841. 

Taste ignored in German aesthetics, 233; v. conscience, 381. 
Teaching, successful, 230; the art of, 129. 
Tears and joy, 215; origin of, 138. 
Temperament, character, and individuality, 204. 
Temptation our natural state, 210. 
Temptations, etc., never ending, 147. 
Tenderness toward our neighbors, 317. 
Thales, hylozoism of, 289. 
Theism, Christian, 153. 
Theory and practice, 19, 70. 
Thought and feeling, 259, a kind of opium, 77. 
Time, flight of, 109, 191. 

Timidity, Amiel's, 203, 288; and pride, Amiel's, 102. 
Tocqueville, 16, on obedience, 158. 
" To every man his turn," 354. 
Too late, 135. 

Toppfer, 30; his tourist class, 165. 
Totality, Amiel's tendency to, 203. 
Tradition v. force, 131. 
Trial and duty, 148. 
Trials, 67. 

True love defined, 367. 

Truth and error, 43; and faith, 246, 247; common fear of, 189; identi- 
fication with, 56; rarely sought for, 305; the test of religion, 299. 
Truthfulness, 59. 
Truths, philosophic, 290 
Turin, 54. 
Twentieth century, newspaper of the, 374. 

Ugliness and beauty, 248; disappearance of, 132. 

Unsconscious nature of life, 101, 110. 

Understanding and judgment, 241; the art of, 151; things, requisite* 

for, 324. 

Unexpected, the, 65. 
Unfinished, the, 141. 
Unions, a mystery in all, 303. 

Unity of action, Amiel's want of, 325, 326; of everything, 61. 
Universal suffrage, 272. 
Universe, different relations of the, 46. 
Unknown, domain of the, 336. 
Unselfishness implies love, 176. 
Usefulness, Anuel's doubts as to his, 285, 286. 
Utilitarian materialism, 18. 

Vacherot's " La Religion," 195. 

Vae victis, 338 

Vanity, the last sign of, 323. 

Vesta and Beelzebub, 13. 

Via dolorosa, 90. 

Vinet, 40; his praise of weak things, 320 

Virtue a sine qua non, 227. 



ItfDEX, 397 

Visionaries, good and bad, 46. 

Voltaire, 177, 311. 

Voltarianism, 270. 

Vnlgarization, causes of modern, 315. 

Vulgarity and nobility, 129. 

Wagner, 77. 

Want, sense of, 71. 

War, 300; uses of, 365. 

War rumors, lessons of, 341. 

Wariness and kindness incompatible, 329. 

Wasted life, 135. 

Watchwords of the people, 348. 

" We" always right, 272. 

Weak, charity toward the, 328, 339. 

Weather, caprices of the, 122. 

Weber, Dr. Ueorge, 104. 

Weltgeist, the, 374. 

Weltmude, the, 162. 

West and East contrasted, 143. 

Whole, sense of the, 106. 

Whole-natured men, disappearance of, 230. 

" Whom the gods love die young," 147. 

Wickedness, fascination of, 136. 

Will, England the country of, 150; feebleness of the, 61; proceeded 

by feeling and instinct, 50; the, 79. 
Winter in Switzerland, 338. 
Wisdom, 121; the heritage of the few, 226. 
Wisdom's two halves, 254. 
Wit, Doudan's, 297. 
Woman a "monstre incomprehensible," 186, 187; and man contrasted, 

212. 

Woman's faithful heart, 119; family influence, 256. 
Women, austere, 363; emancipation of, 196; Manou's views of, 196f 

never orators, 253, 258. 
Women's love, 173. 
Words, careless use of, 315. 
Work the flavor of life, 376. 
World, meanness of the, 339 
Worship, humanity needs a, 178. 
Worth, 94; individual, 154. 
Writing, the art, 288. 

Young, secret of remaining, 121. 

Youth and manhood, 29; renewal of, 193; revival of, 239. 

Youthful impressions, 57; presumptions, 269- 

Zeno, 22, 335. 

THE END. 



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