Amiel's Journal

Curious words for a beginner of twenty-one! There is a touch, no doubt, of youth and fatuity in the passage; one feels how much the vague sonorous phrases have pleased the writer’s immature literary sense; but there is something else too—there is a breath of that same speculative passion which burns in the Journal, and one hears, as it were, the first accents of a melancholy, the first expression of a mood of mind, which became in after years the fixed characteristic of the writer. “At twenty he was already proud, timid, and melancholy,” writes an old friend; and a little farther on, “Discouragement took possession of him very early.”

However, in spite of this inbred tendency, which was probably hereditary and inevitable, the years which followed these articles, from 1842 to Christmas, 1848, were years of happiness and steady intellectual expansion. They were Amiel’s Wanderjahre, spent in a free, wandering student life, which left deep marks on his intellectual development. During four years, from 1844 to 1848, his headquarters were at Berlin; but every vacation saw him exploring some new country or fresh intellectual center—Scandinavia in 1845, Holland in 1846, Vienna, Munich, and Tübingen in 1848, while Paris had already attracted him in 1841, and he was to make acquaintance with London ten years later, in 1851. No circumstances could have been more favorable, one would have thought, to the development of such a nature. With his extraordinary power of “throwing himself into the object”—of effacing himself and his own personality in the presence of the thing to be understood and absorbed—he must have passed these years of travel and acquisition in a state of continuous intellectual energy and excitement. It is in no spirit of conceit that he says in 1857, comparing himself with Maine de Biran, “This nature is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in me. My horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of men, things, countries, peoples, books; I have a greater mass of experiences.” This fact, indeed, of a wide and varied personal experience, must never be forgotten in any critical estimate of Amiel as a man or writer. We may so easily conceive him as a sedentary professor, with the ordinary professorial knowledge, or rather ignorance, of men and the world, falling into introspection under the pressure of circumstance, and for want, as it were, of something else to think about. Not at all. The man who has left us these microscopic analyses of his own moods and feelings, had penetrated more or less into the social and intellectual life of half a dozen European countries, and was familiar not only with the books, but, to a large extent also, with the men of his generation. The meditative and introspective gift was in him, not the product, but the mistress of circumstance. It took from the outer world what that world had to give, and then made the stuff so gained subservient to its own ends.

Of these years of travel, however, the four years spent at Berlin were by far the most important. “It was at Heidelberg and Berlin,” says M. Scherer, “that the world of science and speculation first opened on the dazzled eyes of the young man. He was accustomed to speak of his four years at Berlin as ‘his intellectual phase,’ and one felt that he inclined to regard them as the happiest period of his life. The spell which Berlin laid upon him lasted long.” Probably his happiness in Germany was partly owing to a sense of reaction against Geneva. There are signs that he had felt himself somewhat isolated at school and college, and that in the German world his special individuality, with its dreaminess and its melancholy, found congenial surroundings far more readily than had been the case in the drier and harsher atmosphere of the Protestant Rome. However this may be, it is certain that German thought took possession of him, that he became steeped not only in German methods of speculation, but in German modes of expression, in German forms of sentiment, which clung to him through life, and vitally affected both his opinions and his style. M. Renan and M. Bourget shake their heads over the Germanisms, which, according to the latter, give a certain “barbarous” air to many passages of the Journal. But both admit that Amiel’s individuality owes a great part of its penetrating force to that intermingling of German with French elements, of which there are such abundant traces in the “Journal Intime.” Amiel, in fact, is one more typical product of a movement which is certainly of enormous importance in the history of modern thought, even though we may not be prepared to assent to all the sweeping terms in which a writer like M. Taine describes it. “From 1780 to 1830,” says M. Taine, “Germany produced all the ideas of our historical age, and during another half-century, perhaps another century, notre grande affaire sera de les repenser.” He is inclined to compare the influence of German ideas on the modern world to the ferment of the Renaissance. No spiritual force “more original, more universal, more fruitful in consequences of every sort and bearing, more capable of transforming and remaking everything presented to it, has arisen during the last three hundred years. Like the spirit of the Renaissance and of the classical age, it attracts into its orbit all the great works of contemporary intelligence.” Quinet, pursuing a somewhat different line of thought, regards the worship of German ideas inaugurated in France by Madame de Staël as the natural result of reaction from the eighteenth century and all its ways. “German systems, German hypotheses, beliefs, and poetry, all were eagerly welcomed as a cure for hearts crushed by the mockery of Candide and the materialism of the Revolution.... Under the Restoration France continued to study German philosophy and poetry with profound veneration and submission. We imitated, translated, compiled, and then again we compiled, translated, imitated.” The importance of the part played by German influence in French Romanticism has indeed been much disputed, but the debt of French metaphysics, French philology, and French historical study, to German methods and German research during the last half-century is beyond dispute. And the movement to-day is as strong as ever. A modern critic like M. Darmstetter regards it as a misfortune that the artificial stimulus given by the war to the study of German has, to some extent, checked the study of English in France. He thinks that the French have more to gain from our literature—taking literature in its general and popular sense—than from German literature. But he raises no question as to the inevitable subjection of the French to the German mind in matters of exact thought and knowledge. “To study philology, mythology, history, without reading German,” he is as ready to confess as any one else, “is to condemn one’s self to remain in every department twenty years behind the progress of science.”

Of this great movement, already so productive, Amiel is then a fresh and remarkable instance. Having caught from the Germans not only their love of exact knowledge but also their love of vast horizons, their insatiable curiosity as to the whence and whither of all things, their sense of mystery and immensity in the universe, he then brings those elements in him which belong to his French inheritance—and something individual besides, which is not French but Genevese—to bear on his new acquisitions, and the result is of the highest literary interest and value. Not that he succeeds altogether in the task of fusion. For one who was to write and think in French, he was perhaps too long in Germany; he had drunk too deeply of German thought; he had been too much dazzled by the spectacle of Berlin and its imposing intellectual activities. “As to his literary talent,” says M. Scherer, after dwelling on the rapid growth of his intellectual powers under German influence, “the profit which Amiel derived from his stay at Berlin is more doubtful. Too long contact with the German mind had led to the development in him of certain strangenesses of style which he had afterward to get rid of, and even perhaps of some habits of thought which he afterward felt the need of checking and correcting.” This is very true. Amiel is no doubt often guilty, as M. Caro puts it, of attempts “to write German in French,” and there are in his thought itself veins of mysticism, elements of Schwärmerei, here and there, of which a good deal must be laid to the account of his German training.

M. Renan regrets that after Geneva and after Berlin he never came to Paris. Paris, he thinks, would have counteracted the Hegelian influences brought to hear upon him at Berlin, [Footnote: See a not, however, on the subject of Amiel’s philosophical relationships, printed as an Appendix to the present volume.] would have taught him cheerfulness, and taught him also the art of writing, not beautiful fragments, but a book. Possibly—but how much we should have lost! Instead of the Amiel we know, we should have had one accomplished French critic the more. Instead of the spiritual drama of the “Journal Intime,” some further additions to French belles lettres; instead of something to love, something to admire! No, there is no wishing the German element in Amiel away. Its invading, troubling effect upon his thought and temperament goes far to explain the interest and suggestiveness of his mental history. The language he speaks is the language of that French criticism which—we have Sainte-Beuve’s authority for it—is best described by the motto of Montaigne, “Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l’ensemble, à la française,” and the thought he tries to express in it is thought torn and strained by the constant effort to reach the All, the totality of things: “What I desire is the sum of all desires, and what I seek to know is the sum of all different kinds of knowledge. Always the complete, the absolute, the teres atque rotundum.” And it was this antagonism, or rather this fusion of traditions in him, which went far to make him original, which opened to him, that is to say, so many new lights on old paths, and stirred in him such capacities of fresh and individual expression.

We have been carried forward, however, a little too far by this general discussion of Amiel’s debts to Germany. Let us take up the biographical thread again. In 1848 his Berlin apprenticeship came to an end, and he returned to Geneva. “How many places, how many impressions, observations, thoughts—how many forms of men and things—have passed before me and in me since April, 1843,” he writes in the Journal, two or three months after his return. “The last seven years have been the most important of my life; they have been the novitiate of my intelligence, the initiation of my being into being.” The first literary evidence of his matured powers is to be found in two extremely interesting papers on Berlin, which he contributed to the Bibliothèque Universelle in 1848, apparently just before he left Germany. Here for the first time we have the Amiel of the “Journal Intime.” The young man who five years before had written his painstaking review of M. Rio is now in his turn a master. He speaks with dignity and authority, he has a graphic, vigorous prose at command, the form of expression is condensed and epigrammatic, and there is a mixture of enthusiasm and criticism in his description of the powerful intellectual machine then working in the Prussian capital which represents a permanent note of character, a lasting attitude of mind. A great deal, of course, in the two papers is technical and statistic, but what there is of general comment and criticism is so good that one is tempted to make some melancholy comparisons between them and another article in the Bibliothèque, that on Adolphe Pictet, written in 1856, and from which we have already quoted. In 1848 Amiel was for awhile master of his powers and his knowledge; no fatal divorce had yet taken place in him between the accumulating and producing faculties; he writes readily even for the public, without labor, without affectations. Eight years later the reflective faculty has outgrown his control; composition, which represents the practical side of the intellectual life, has become difficult and painful to him, and he has developed what he himself calls “a wavering manner, born of doubt and scruple.”

How few could have foreseen the failure in public and practical life which lay before him at the moment of his reappearance at Geneva in 1848! “My first meeting with him in 1849 is still vividly present to me,” says M. Scherer. “He was twenty-eight, and he had just come from Germany laden with science, but he wore his knowledge lightly, his looks were attractive, his conversation animated, and no affectation spoiled the favorable impression he made on the bystander—the whole effect, indeed, was of something brilliant and striking. In his young alertness Amiel seemed to be entering upon life as a conqueror; one would have said the future was all his own.”

His return, moreover, was marked by a success which seemed to secure him at once an important position in his native town. After a public competition he was appointed, in 1849, professor of esthetics and French literature at the Academy of Geneva, a post which he held for four years, exchanging it for the professorship of moral philosophy in 1854. Thus at twenty-eight, without any struggle to succeed, he had gained, it would have seemed, that safe foothold in life which should be all the philosopher or the critic wants to secure the full and fruitful development of his gifts. Unfortunately the appointment, instead of the foundation and support, was to be the stumbling block of his career. Geneva at the time was in a state of social and political ferment. After a long struggle, beginning with the revolutionary outbreak of November, 1841, the Radical party, led by James Fazy, had succeeded in ousting the Conservatives—that is to say, the governing class, which had ruled the republic since the Restoration—from power. And with the advent of the democratic constitution of 1846, and the exclusion of the old Genevese families from the administration they had so long monopolized, a number of subsidiary changes were effected, not less important to the ultimate success of Radicalism than the change in political machinery introduced by the new constitution. Among them was the disappearance of almost the whole existing staff of the academy, then and now the center of Genevese education, and up to 1847 the stronghold of the moderate ideas of 1814, followed by the appointment of new men less likely to hamper the Radical order of things.

Of these new men Amiel was one. He had been absent from Geneva during the years of conflict which had preceded Fazy’s triumph; he seems to have had no family or party connections with the leaders of the defeated side, and as M. Scherer points out, he could accept a non-political post at the hands of the new government, two years after the violent measures which had marked its accession, without breaking any pledges or sacrificing any convictions. But none the less the step was a fatal one. M. Renan is so far in the right. If any timely friend had at that moment succeeded in tempting Amiel to Paris, as Guizot tempted Rossi in 1833, there can be little question that the young professor’s after life would have been happier and saner. As it was, Amiel threw himself into the competition for the chair, was appointed professor, and then found himself in a hopelessly false position, placed on the threshold of life, in relations and surroundings for which he was radically unfitted, and cut off by no fault of his own from the milieu to which he rightly belonged, and in which his sensitive individuality might have expanded normally and freely. For the defeated upper class very naturally shut their doors on the nominees of the new régime, and as this class represented at that moment almost everything that was intellectually distinguished in Geneva, as it was the guardian, broadly speaking, of the scientific and literary traditions of the little state, we can easily imagine how galling such a social ostracism must have been to the young professor, accustomed to the stimulating atmosphere, the common intellectual interests of Berlin, and tormented with perhaps more than the ordinary craving of youth for sympathy and for affection. In a great city, containing within it a number of different circles of life, Amiel would easily have found his own circle, nor could political discords have affected his social comfort to anything like the same extent. But in a town not much larger than Oxford, and in which the cultured class had hitherto formed a more or less homogeneous and united whole, it was almost impossible for Amiel to escape from his grievance and establish a sufficient barrier of friendly interests between himself and the society which ignored him. There can be no doubt that he suffered, both in mind and character, from the struggle the position involved. He had no natural sympathy with radicalism. His taste, which was extremely fastidious, his judgment, his passionate respect for truth, were all offended by the noise, the narrowness, the dogmatism of the triumphant democracy. So that there was no making up on the one side for what he had lost on the other, and he proudly resigned himself to an isolation and a reserve which, reinforcing, as they did, certain native weaknesses of character, had the most unfortunate effect upon his life.

In a passage of the Journal written nearly thirty years after his election he allows himself a few pathetic words, half of accusation, half of self-reproach, which make us realize how deeply this untowardness of social circumstance had affected him. He is discussing one of Madame de Staël’s favorite words, the word consideration. “What is consideration?” he asks. “How does a man obtain it? how does it differ from fame, esteem, admiration?” And then he turns upon himself. “It is curious, but the idea of consideration has been to me so little of a motive that I have not even been conscious of such an idea. But ought I not to have been conscious of it?” he asks himself anxiously—“ought I not to have been more careful to win the good opinion of others, more determined to conquer their hostility or indifference? It would have been a joy to me to be smiled upon, loved, encouraged, welcomed, and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and goodwill. But to hunt down consideration and reputation—to force the esteem of others—seemed to me an effort unworthy of myself, almost a degradation. A struggle with unfavorable opinion has seemed to me beneath me, for all the while my heart has been full of sadness and disappointment, and I have known and felt that I have been systematically and deliberately isolated. Untimely despair and the deepest discouragement have been my constant portion. Incapable of taking any interest in my talents for their own sake, I let everything slip as soon as the hope of being loved for them and by them had forsaken me. A hermit against my will, I have not even found peace in solitude, because my inmost conscience has not been any better satisfied than my heart.”

Still one may no doubt easily exaggerate this loneliness of Amiel’s. His social difficulties represent rather a dull discomfort in his life, which in course of time, and in combination with a good many other causes, produced certain unfavorable results on his temperament and on his public career, than anything very tragic and acute. They were real, and he, being what he was, was specially unfitted to cope with and conquer them. But he had his friends, his pleasures, and even to some extent his successes, like other men. “He had an elasticity of mind,” says M. Scherer, speaking of him as he knew him in youth, “which reacted against vexations from without, and his cheerfulness was readily restored by conversation and the society of a few kindred spirits. We were accustomed, two or three friends and I, to walk every Thursday to the Salève, Lamartine’s Salève aux flancs azurés; we dined there, and did not return till nightfall.” They were days devoted to débauches 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 fête-day. In serious discussion he was a master of the unexpected, and his energy, his entrain, affected us all. If his grammatical questions, his discussions of rhymes and synonyms, astonished us at times, how often, on the other hand, did he not give us cause to admire the variety of his knowledge, the precision of his ideas, the charm of his quick intelligence! We found him always, besides, kindly and amiable, a nature one might trust and lean upon with perfect security. He awakened in us but one regret; we could not understand how it was a man so richly gifted produced nothing, or only trivialities.”

In these last words of M. Scherer’s we have come across the determining fact of Amiel’s life in its relation to the outer world—that “sterility of genius,” of which he was the victim. For social ostracism and political anxiety would have mattered to him comparatively little if he could but have lost himself in the fruitful activities of thought, in the struggles and the victories of composition and creation. A German professor of Amiel’s knowledge would have wanted nothing beyond his Fach, and nine men out of ten in his circumstances would have made themselves the slave of a magnum opus, and forgotten the vexations of everyday life in the “douces joies de la science.” But there were certain characteristics in Amiel which made it impossible—which neutralized his powers, his knowledge, his intelligence, and condemned him, so far as his public performance was concerned, to barrenness and failure. What were these characteristics, this element of unsoundness and disease, which M. Caro calls “la maladie de l’idéal?”

Before we can answer the question we must go back a little and try to realize the intellectual and moral equipment of the young man of twenty-eight, who seemed to M. Scherer to have the world at his feet. What were the chief qualities of mind and heart which Amiel brought back with him from Berlin? In the first place, an omnivorous desire to know: “Amiel,” says M. Scherer, “read everything.” In the second, an extraordinary power of sustained and concentrated thought, and a passionate, almost a religious, delight in the exercise of his power. Knowledge, science, stirred in him no mere sense of curiosity or cold critical instinct—“he came to his desk as to an altar.” “A friend who knew him well,” says M. Scherer, “remembers having heard him speak with deep emotion of that lofty serenity of mood which he had experienced during his years in Germany whenever, in the early morning before dawn, with his reading-lamp beside him, he had found himself penetrating once more into the region of pure thought, ‘conversing with ideas, enjoying the inmost life of things.’” “Thought,” he says somewhere in the Journal, “is like opium. It can intoxicate us and yet leave us broad awake.” To this intoxication of thought he seems to have been always specially liable, and his German experience—unbalanced, as such an experience generally is with a young man, by family life, or by any healthy commonplace interests and pleasures—developed the intellectual passion in him to an abnormal degree. For four years he had devoted himself to the alternate excitement and satisfaction of this passion. He had read enormously, thought enormously, and in the absence of any imperative claim on the practical side of him, the accumulative, reflective faculties had grown out of all proportion to the rest of the personality. Nor had any special subject the power to fix him. Had he been in France, what Sainte-Beuve calls the French “imagination de détail” would probably have attracted his pliant, responsive nature, and he would have found happy occupation in some one of the innumerable departments of research on which the French have been patiently spending their analytical gift since that general widening of horizons which accompanied and gave value to the Romantic movement. But instead he was at Berlin, in the center of that speculative ferment which followed the death of Hegel and the break-up of the Hegelian idea into a number of different and conflicting sections of philosophical opinion. He was under the spell of German synthesis, of that traditional, involuntary effort which the German mind makes, generation after generation, to find the unity of experience, to range its accumulations from life and thought under a more and more perfect, a more and more exhaustive, formula. Not this study or that study, not this detail or that, but the whole of things, the sum of Knowledge, the Infinite, the Absolute, alone had value or reality. In his own words: “There is no repose for the mind except in the absolute; for feeling except in the infinite; for the soul except in the divine. Nothing finite is true, is interesting, is worthy to fix my attention. All that is particular is exclusive, and all that is exclusive repels me. There is nothing non-exclusive but the All; my end is communion with Being through the whole of Being.”