Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born in Geneva September 27, 1821, and died there March 11, 1881. His ancestors were Huguenots who sought refuge in Switzerland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. There is no record that any of them achieved greatness or had greatness thrust upon them. Very little has been written of his parents, who died when he was twelve years old, or of his uncle and aunt, in whose house he was brought up apart from his two sisters. Allthose who have written about Amiel himself are singularly silent about his boyhood, so that we know practically nothing of the formative years of his life save that he was a sensitive, impressionable boy, more delicate than robust, disposed to melancholy, and with a deep interest in religious problems. In school and college he was studious but not brilliant; he had no interest in games or sports and made few intimacies, and these with men older than himself. When he was nineteen he came under the influence of a Genevan philologist and man of letters, Adolphe Picquet, whose lectures answered many a positive question and satisfied many a vague aspiration of this youth already in the meshes of mysticism. They exercised a decisive influence over his thought, filled him with fresh intuitions, and brought near to him the horizons of his dreams.
When he was twenty he went to Italy and stayed more than a year, and while there he wrote several articles on Christian Art, and a criticism of a book by M. Rio. The next four years he spent in Germany, where he studied philosophy, philology, mythology, and history. After this he travelled about the university cities of Central Europe for two years, principally Heidelberg, Munich, and Vienna; and in 1849, when he was twenty-eight years old, he returned to Geneva and secured the appointment of Professor of Moral Philosophy in the Academy there. The appointment was made by the Democratic Party, which had just then come into control of the Government.The Aristocratic Party, which had had things their own way since the days following the restoration of Geneva's independence in 1814, would have nothing to do with intellectual upstarts, puppets of the Radical Party, so Amiel, by nature and conviction a conservative, found himself in the right pew, but the wrong church; and many of his friends thought that the discouragement which was manifest in his writings and in his conduct may, in a measure at least, have been due to the conflict between his discomfiture and his duty.
He had few friends, but these he impressed enormously by his learning and his knowledge. He made no particular reputation as a professor or as a poet, and had it not been for the “Journal,” he would never have been heard of save by his friends and pupils. It is now forty years since the first volume of the book was published at Geneva. It had been put together from the thousands of sheets of diary which had come into the hands of his literary heirs. The Preface to the volume announced that this “Journal” was made up of his psychological observations and impressions produced on him by books. It was the confidant of his 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 future, the voice of grief, of self-examination and confession, the soul's cry for inward peace might make themselves freely heard.
It made a great noise in the world and the reverberations of it will not cease.
Some consider that the “Journal Intime” occupies a unique place in literature, not because it is a diary of introspection, but because of the tragedy which attended its production. This is the height of absurdity. There was no tragedy about its production. Amiel lived an unhealthy life, thwarted nature's laws, and nature exacted the penalty. N. J. Symons, in an article in theQueen's Quarterly, says, “To be gifted with the qualities of genius, yet to be condemned by some obscurepsychosis to perpetual sterility and failure; to live and die in the despairing recognition of this fact; and finally to win posthumous fame by the analysis and confession of one's failure is one of the most puzzling and pathetic of life's anomalies.” It would be if it were true. But what were the qualities of genius that Amiel had? And how did he display the obscure psychosis? He discharged the duties of a professor from the time he was twenty-eight until he was sixty. He poetised pleasantly; he communed with nature and got much pleasure from it; and he had very definite social adaptability. His general level of behaviour was high. He was a diligent, methodical worker; he reacted in a normal way to conventional standards; he had few personal biases or peculiarities and none that drew particular attention to him; and he seemed to have adjusted himself without great difficulty to the incidences of life that he encountered.
To say that such a man was the victim of some obscure psychosis is either to speak beyond the facts or to speak from the possession of some knowledge that is denied one familiar with his writings and what has been written about him.
Unique the “Journal Intime” unquestionably is, in that it is the sincere confession of failure, both as a man and as a writer, of a man whose intellectual qualities justified his friends in expecting from him a large measure of success as both. Both admirers and critics agree that Amiel's failure was his refusal or his inability to act. This refusal to act was not the expression of some obscure psychosis, but was entirely consistent with his philosophy of life, which was arrived at through a logical process of thought. “Men's thoughts are made according to their nature,” says Bacon. It is to Amiel's nature, or temperament, or personality, that we must look for the answer to the question: To what can his confessed failure be charged?
Any estimate of personality must weigh not only the capacity for dealing with thoughts, but the capacity for dealingwith men and with things as well. Intellectual qualities are of value only in relation to the dynamic quality of the mind; emotional qualities must be measured by the reactions to the environment; and the individual, in the last analysis, must take his standing among his fellows upon his acts, not upon his thoughts. In a balanced personality act harmonises with thought, is conditioned and controlled by it. Purely impulsive action carried to the extreme means insanity, and in milder degrees it exhibits itself in all grades and forms of what is known as lack of self-control. Such action is too familiar to call for comment. But there is the opposite type of individual whose impulses are not impelling enough to lead to expression in outward form of either thoughts or emotions. Such thoughts and emotions are turned back upon themselves and, like a dammed-up stream, whirl endlessly around the spring, the ego, until the individual becomes predominantly introspective and egocentric.
Amiel possessed the power of clear logical thought to a high degree, but he limited its expression largely to the introspective musings of the diary. Aside from his daily life, which was narrow but normal and conventional, it is to Amiel's deepest interests and admirations as revealed by his diary that one must look for light upon his emotional make-up. The things with which he occupied himself were extremely few: introspective literature, philosophy and religion, and contemplation of God and the hereafter. The diary covers the years of his life from twenty-seven to sixty, the entire fruitful span of most men's lives. During all of this time his interests showed little or no variation. Nowhere throughout the record do we find any evidence of interest in the developments which were shaping the course of the world's history. Still less do we find any indication of a desire or a conscience to participate in such history. Amiel evidently felt no urge to be an actor in the drama. He was not even a critic or an interested on-looker. Ratherdid he prefer to withdraw to a sheltered distance and forget the reverberations of the struggle in contemplation of abstractions.
He lived in an era in which the world was revolutionised. The most deforming institution which civilisation has ever tolerated, slavery, was razed and dismantled; yet he never said a word about it. He was a witness of one of the greatest transformations that has ever been wrought, the making of things by machinery rather than by hand; and he never commented on it. His life was contemporaneous with the beginning of discovery in science, such as the origin of species and the general evolutionary doctrine associated with Darwin's name; and it seems only to have excited his scorn.
“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 independence 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 involuntary unions—the object of which is to increase the sum of happiness, and to satisfy the aspiration of the individual. 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 tyrannise over man until he has invented artificial warmth, artificial light, and machinery. Human industry is throughout an emancipation 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 towards life, happiness,justice, and wisdom. Greed and gluttony are the starting-point, intelligence and generosity the goal.”
“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 independence 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 involuntary unions—the object of which is to increase the sum of happiness, and to satisfy the aspiration of the individual. 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 tyrannise over man until he has invented artificial warmth, artificial light, and machinery. Human industry is throughout an emancipation 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 towards life, happiness,justice, and wisdom. Greed and gluttony are the starting-point, intelligence and generosity the goal.”
Nor is there anything in the “Journal Intime” to indicate that he had ever heard of Pasteur, or Morton, or Simpson, who laid the foundation of a diseaseless world and a painless world. His diary is a record of his own thoughts, to be sure, but one's thoughts are engendered, in a measure at least, by what is going on in the world. An inhabitant of any other world whose knowledge of this could be obtained only from Amiel's book, would be left with an abysmal ignorance of the subject. He would learn something of the German philosophers and of French littérateurs and of Amiel's ideas of God and of infinity.
Schopenhauer says that
“It is not by the unification of the intellect and the will that man attains to higher truth, but by their dissociation. When the intellect casts off the yoke of the will it rises above the illusion of finite life and attains a vision of transcendent truth. When one can contemplate without will, beyond, when he can dissolve the life instinct in pure thought, then he possesses the field of higher truth, then he is on the avenue that leads to Nirvana.”
“It is not by the unification of the intellect and the will that man attains to higher truth, but by their dissociation. When the intellect casts off the yoke of the will it rises above the illusion of finite life and attains a vision of transcendent truth. When one can contemplate without will, beyond, when he can dissolve the life instinct in pure thought, then he possesses the field of higher truth, then he is on the avenue that leads to Nirvana.”
Higher truth is possible only through the annihilation of the will, and if this annihilation is done after taking thought, that is after planning to do it and determining to do it, the price that one has to pay, or the penalty that is exacted, is an incapacity or diminished capacity for practical life. Amiel was a real mystic, not by choice, perhaps, but by birth. He was proud of it in his youth and early maturity; he questioned it in his late maturity; and regretted it in his senescence. When he was fifty years old he wrote,
“The man who gives himself to contemplation looks on at rather than directs his life, is a spectator rather than an actor, seeks rather to understand than to achieve. Is this mode ofexistence illegitimate, immoral? 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 western 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.... Having early caught 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, nor for succeeding. I have seen nothing clearly except my own deficiencies and the superiority of others.... 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.”
“The man who gives himself to contemplation looks on at rather than directs his life, is a spectator rather than an actor, seeks rather to understand than to achieve. Is this mode ofexistence illegitimate, immoral? 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 western 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.... Having early caught 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, nor for succeeding. I have seen nothing clearly except my own deficiencies and the superiority of others.... 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.”
If Amiel had been a real Christian, that is, if he had taken his orientation and orders from Christ, he would have had no doubt whether such a mode of existence was illegitimate and immoral or not. He could have found specific instruction telling him he was bound to act. He was a nominal Christian, but ade factoBuddhist.
Next to the output of a man's activity as shown by his work, his selection of recreational outlets for his emotional life is illuminating. What were Amiel's amusements? So far as the diary shows, day dreaming, poetising, fancy, and a contemplation of nature furnished the only outlets for his more organised emotional nature. For play in any form he apparently felt no need.
There is a type of individual whose failure to bring his performance up to the standard which his intelligence would seem to warrant takes the form of inability to face concrete situations. Unable to adjust himself to his environment when realities present difficulties that call for solution, such an individualbecomes burdened with a sense of his own inadequacy; and from this he is inclined to seek escape in impersonal abstractions, usually described by him as ideals. Mystic philosophy in some form is the frequent refuge of such tender souls from their own sense of inability to cope with life and its concrete problems.
Throughout the record divergence between ideals and acts stands out. Idealism is everywhere pled as the basis of the hesitation to act. The conscious and foredoomed disparity between conception and realisation is made the excuse for the absence of effort.
“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 like a duty. Sometimes I cannot escape from the ideal of it. A companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within, a common worship, towards 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 whence 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 may develop.”“I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.—Recognise your place; let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be more useful so. Renounce yourself, accept the cup given you, with its honey and its gall, as it comes. Bring God down into your heart. Embalm your soul in him now, make within you a temple for the Holy Spirit; be diligent in goodworks, make others happier and better. Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.”
“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 like a duty. Sometimes I cannot escape from the ideal of it. A companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within, a common worship, towards 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 whence 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 may develop.”
“I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any presentiment of glory or happiness. I have never seen myself in imagination great or famous, or even a husband, a father, an influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this absolute self-distrust, are, no doubt, to be taken as signs. What dreams I have are vague and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of living.—Recognise your place; let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feeling and ideas; you will be more useful so. Renounce yourself, accept the cup given you, with its honey and its gall, as it comes. Bring God down into your heart. Embalm your soul in him now, make within you a temple for the Holy Spirit; be diligent in goodworks, make others happier and better. Put personal ambition away from you, and then you will find consolation in living or in dying, whatever may happen to you.”
Complaining of a restless feeling which was not the need for change, he said,
“It is rather the fear of what I love, the mistrust of what charms me, the unrest of happiness.... And is there not another reason for all this restlessness, in a certain sense of void—of incessant pursuit of something wanting?—of longing for a truer peace and a more entire satisfaction? Neighbours, 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 notfillmy 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 capable of taking entire possession of my soul, and of becoming my end and aim.”
“It is rather the fear of what I love, the mistrust of what charms me, the unrest of happiness.... And is there not another reason for all this restlessness, in a certain sense of void—of incessant pursuit of something wanting?—of longing for a truer peace and a more entire satisfaction? Neighbours, 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 notfillmy 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 capable of taking entire possession of my soul, and of becoming my end and aim.”
Amiel's life was a constant negation. His ideals were all concerned with concepts of perfection, with the absolute, and being sane enough to realise the impossibility of attaining such perfection, he refused compromises. He would not play the game for its own sake, nor for the fine points. If he could not win all the points—and being sane he knew beforehand that he could not—he preferred not to play at all. But he made a virtue of his weakness and called it idealism. Had he possessed the courage to hitch his wagon to a star—and let the star carry him where it would; had he heeded the warning,
“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghostIs—the unlit lamp and the ungird loin”;
“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghostIs—the unlit lamp and the ungird loin”;
“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghostIs—the unlit lamp and the ungird loin”;
or gone the way of thousands of practical idealists who have made their idealism an incentive to action and thereby left the world richer for having passed through it, he would have needed no excuse for his failure to attain perfection. On the contrary, he would have learned with the sureness of a hard-learned lesson that idealism is worth our loyalty onlywhen it becomes an inspiration to living, and that it is worse than futile when it serves merely as a standard for thought or an excuse for failure.
Amiel coddled his sensibilities for fear of rebuff; he hid his intellectuality in the diary lest he should suffer from the clear light of publicity; he denied life out of apprehension that life might bruise his ego. He told himself that he was protecting his idealism. In reality he was protecting his egoism. If he had been the victim of a psychosis he would not have recognised his limitations nor stated them so clearly. It was sanity that enabled him to see the impossibility of attaining the perfection of which he dreamed and wrote. It was cowardice, not a psychosis, which made him refuse to act in the face of this knowledge. Had he been a Roman Catholic, he might have rested upon the conception of absolute perfection offered in the authority of the Church and the life of the cloister. But being a Protestant, both by inheritance and by conscience, he had to think things out for himself; and the more he thought the wider became the breach between his conception of perfection and his hope of realising it. He was tortured by a conscience goading him to action and a temperament paralysing him with the fear that the end would fall short of anticipation. He lacked the moral courage to put his power to the test and be disappointed. He was without the stamina of the man who fights and runs away. He was too much of an egoist to risk a losing game, and in consequence he never tasted the sweet flavour of work well done—even though the end was apparent failure.
The growing sense of inadequacy between the conscience to act and the temperament to deny action is written plainly in these random quotations from the “Journal” during the record of many years. At thirty he wrote,
“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 ceases to growgreater becomes smaller; he who leaves off gives up; the stationary condition is the beginning of the end—it is the terrible symptom which precedes death. To live, is to achieve a perpetual triumph; it is to assert oneself against destruction, against sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of one's physical and moral being. It is to will without ceasing, or rather to refresh one's will day by day.”
“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 ceases to growgreater becomes smaller; he who leaves off gives up; the stationary condition is the beginning of the end—it is the terrible symptom which precedes death. To live, is to achieve a perpetual triumph; it is to assert oneself against destruction, against sickness, against the annulling and dispersion of one's physical and moral being. It is to will without ceasing, or rather to refresh one's will day by day.”
Ten years later when the conflict was closing in upon him he wrote,
“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 towards self-abandonment, towards ceasing to will and exist for oneself, towards laying down one's own personality, and losing—dissolving—oneself in love and anticipation. 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 neighbour 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 myself.”
“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 towards self-abandonment, towards ceasing to will and exist for oneself, towards laying down one's own personality, and losing—dissolving—oneself in love and anticipation. 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 neighbour 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 myself.”
At forty-seven, when most men's work is at the high tide of realisation, he said,
“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 sacrifice to self-devotion. The cup I would fain put away from me is the misery of living, the shame of existing 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.”
“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 sacrifice to self-devotion. The cup I would fain put away from me is the misery of living, the shame of existing 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.”
At fifty-four,
“What use have I made of my gifts, of my special circumstances, of my half century of existence? What have I paidback to my country?... Are all the documents I have produced ... anything better than withered leaves?... 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.”
“What use have I made of my gifts, of my special circumstances, of my half century of existence? What have I paidback to my country?... Are all the documents I have produced ... anything better than withered leaves?... 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.”
Psychology teaches that too much emphasis cannot be laid in education upon the reconciliation of ideals and performance, nor too much effort devoted to the formation of habits of facing concrete situations squarely, reaching definite decisions, and thereby making efforts, however ineffective and crude, to link ideals to action. It has been proved that if natural dispositions are ignored or denied by the repression of normal primary instincts, disassociation of personality is likely to be the result. Amiel's ineffectiveness, his lack of dynamic quality, while in no sense a psychosis, may be considered as a personality defect. How far this defect may have been conditioned by his denial of the basic springs of human action cannot be stated. Neither can it, in any impartial estimate of his life and personality, be ignored. Next to the instinct of self-preservation, the instinct for the preservation of the race to which one belongs is the dominant impulse of the individual. No system of thought, no plan of life can ignore it and not pay the penalty. Amiel's diary is full of such denials, and they frequently carry with them the consciousness that he realised the death sentence to aspiration and realisation which he was reading to himself between the lines.
Amiel was a shy, sensitive, solitary child. We know very little about his adolescent struggles and transition to heterosexual fixation. Indeed we do not know whether it ever came about, and that is where the chief hiatus in our knowledge of Amiel lies. As a youth he became intoxicated with philosophic idealism, and Hegel was for him the fountainhead of all philosophic thought.
There is nothing in the diary to indicate that the normal love-making of healthy youth had any part in his thoughtsor his life. Later, his sex consciousness colours the record to a great extent—indeed it might be said to give the colour to the book—but always in the guise of repressions, fears, hesitations, and longings for unattainable perfection, and finally of half-hearted regrets for his own denials.
“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 in 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 my hope and my dream died with me, than that my soul should content itself with any meaner union.”
“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 in 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 my hope and my dream died with me, than that my soul should content itself with any meaner union.”
This is the basis of monasticism in the Catholic Church, and it is, in my judgment, the most violent offence to God that can be given. Goethe says that he never wrote a new poem without having a new love affair. Amiel was intrigued by Goethe secondly only to Hegel. If he had copied Goethe more nearly in living, he might have said with him,
“Wonach soll man am Ende trachten?Die Welt zu Kennen und nicht zu Verachten.”
“Wonach soll man am Ende trachten?Die Welt zu Kennen und nicht zu Verachten.”
“Wonach soll man am Ende trachten?Die Welt zu Kennen und nicht zu Verachten.”
There have been books made up of beautiful quotations from Amiel's “Journal Intime,” which are supposed to help people live, to mitigate pain, to disperse apprehension, and to assuage misery. They are not a patch on the Bible or on the writings of Socrates.
“The oracle of today drops from his tripod on the morrow,” said John Morley. Will this apply to Amiel? Is he a passing fashion? And why has his popularity grown? The best answer to these questions is found in the nature of his audience. To what kind of people does Amiel appeal? To the contemporary purveyors of cloudy stuff; to mystics; to the tender-minded; to those who prefer the contemplation of far horizons to travelling the road just ahead. He does not appeal to anyone with fighting blood, whether he be facing the conflict with the glorious self-confidence of healthy untried youth, the magnetism of past success, the tried measure of his own limitations and powers, the scars of honest defeat, or the pluck of the one who fights a losing fight with more courage and idealism than he would have mustered for a winning one.
Amiel's tragedy was that he outraged nature's unique law and nature exacted the penalty. If the world had a few thousand Amiels and they got the whip hand, it might cease to exist.