PART VI

INTRODUCTION TO AMIEL'S "JOURNAL."

ABOUT eighteen months ago I chanced for the first time to read Amiel's book, Fragments d'un journal intime.

struck by the importance and profundity of its contents, the beauty of its presentation, and above all by the sincerity of this book.

While reading it I marked the passages which specially struck me. My daughter1 undertook to translate these passages and in this way these extracts from Fragments d'un journal intime were formed: that is to say, they are extracts from the whole many-volumed diary Amiel wrote day by day during thirty years, much of which remained unprinted.

Henri Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821, and was soon left an orphan. Having completed a course of higher education at Geneva, Amiel went abroad and spent some years at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. Returning in 1849 to his native land he, a young man of 28, obtained a professorship at the Geneva Academy, first of Esthetics and afterwards of Philosophy, which he held till his death.

Amiel's whole life was passed at Geneva, where he died in 1881, in no way distinguished from the large number of those ordinary professors who, mechanically compiling their lectures from the latest books on their specialities, pass them on in an equally mechanical way to their hearers, and from the yet greater number of writers of verse lacking in sub

1 That is, Márya Lvóvna, Tolstoy's second daughter, who was devoted both to her father and to his teachings.

stance, who supply these wares, which though no one needs them are still sold by tens of thousands in the periodicals that are published.

Amiel had not the slightest success either in the academic or literary field. When he was already approaching old age he wrote of himself as follows:

"What have I been able to extract from the gifts bestowed upon me, and from the special circumstances of my life of half-a-century? What have I drawn from my soil? Is all my scribbling collected together-my correspondence, these thousands of sincere pages, my lectures, my articles, my verses, my various memoranda-anything but a collection of dry leaves? To whom and for what have I been of use? And will my name live for even a day after me, and will it have any meaning for anyone? An insignificant, empty life! Vie nulle!"

Two well-known French authors have written on Amiel and his Journal since his death-his friend, the well-known critic, E. Scherer, and the philosopher Caro. It is interesting to note the sympathetic but rather patronizing tone in which both these writers refer to Amiel, regretting that he lacked the qualities necessary for the production of real works. Yet the real works of these two writers-the critical works of Scherer and the philosophical works of Caro-will hardly long outlive their authors, while the accidental, unreal work of Amiel, his Journal, will always remain a living book, needed by men and fruitfully affecting them.

For a writer is precious and necessary for us only to the extent to which he reveals to us the inner labour of his soul -supposing, of course, that his work is new and has not been done before. Whatever he may write a play, a learned work, a story, a philosophic treatise, lyric verse, a criticism, a satire what is precious to us in an author's work is only that inner labour of his soul, and not the architectural struc

ture in which usually, and I think always, distorting it, he packs his thoughts and feelings.

All that Amiel poured into a ready mould: his lectures, treatises, poems, are dead; but his Journal, where, without thinking of the form, he only talked to himself, is full of life, wisdom, instruction, consolation, and will ever remain one of those best of all books which have been left to us accidentally by such men as Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, and Epictetus.

Pascal says: "There are only three kinds of people: those who, having found God, serve Him; those who, not having found Him, are engaged in seeking Him, and those who, though they have not found Him, do not seek Him.

"The first are sensible and happy; the last are senseless and unhappy; the second are unhappy, but sensible."

I think that the contrast Pascal makes between the first and the second groups, between those who, as he says in another place, having found God, serve Him with their whole heart, and those who, not having found Him, seek Him with their whole heart, is not only not so great as he thought, but does not exist at all. I think that those who with their whole heart and with suffering (en gémissant, as Pascal says) seek God, are already serving Him. They are serving Him because by the suffering they endure in their search they are laying, and revealing to others, the road to God, as Pascal himself did in his Pensées, and as Amiel did all his life in his Journal.

Amiel's whole life, as presented to us in this Journal, is full of this suffering and whole-hearted search for God. And the contemplation of this search is the more instructive because it never ceases to be a search, never becomes settled, and never passes into a consciousness of having attained the truth, or into a teaching. Amiel is not saying either to himself or to others, "I now know the truth-hear me!" On the

contrary it seems to him, as is natural to one who is sincerely seeking truth, that the more he knows the more he needs to know, and he unceasingly does all he can to learn more and more of truth, and is therefore constantly aware of his ignorance. He is continually speculating on what Christianity and the condition of a Christian should be, never for a moment pausing on the thought that Christianity is the very thing that he is professing, and that he is himself realizing the condition of a Christian. And yet the whole Journal is full of expressions of the most profound Christian understanding and feeling. And these expressions act on the reader with special force just by their unconsciousness and sincerity. He is talking to himself, not thinking that he is overheard, neither attempting to appear convinced of what he is not convinced of, nor hiding his sufferings and his search.

It is as if one were present without a man's knowledge at the most secret, profound, impassioned inner working of his soul, usually hidden from an outsider's view.

And therefore while one may find many more shapely and elegant expressions of religious feeling than Amiel's, it is difficult to find any more intimate or more heart-searching. Not long before his death, knowing that his illness might any day end in strangulation, he wrote:

"When you no longer dream that you have at your disposal tens of years, a year, or a month, when you already reckon in tens of hours and the coming night brings with it the menace of the unknown, obviously one renounces art, science, politics, and is content to talk with oneself, and that is possible up to the very end. This inner conversation is the only thing left to him who is sentenced to death but whose execution is delayed. He (this condemned man) concentrates within himself. He no longer emits rays, but only talks with his own soul. He no longer acts, but contemplates . . . .. Like

a hare he returns to his lair, and that lair is his conscience, his thought. As long as he can hold a pen and has a moment of solitude he concentrates before that echo of himself, and holds converse with God.

"This is however not a moral investigation, not a repentance, not an appeal; it is only an 'Amen' of submission. "My child, give me thine heart.'

"Renunciation and agreement are less difficult for me than for others, because I want nothing. I should only like not to suffer. Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane prayed for that same thing. Let us say with him: 'Nevertheless, not

my will, but thine, be done!' and let us wait."

Such was he on the eve of his death. He is not less sincere and serious throughout his Journal, in spite of the elegance, and (in passages) apparent choiceness of his phrasing, which had become a habit with him. In the course of the whole thirty years of his Journal he felt what we all so carefully forget-that we are all sentenced to death and our execution is only deferred. And that is why this book is so sincere, serious, and useful.