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Amiel's Journal

Mrs. Humphrey Ward

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Title: Amiel's Journal

Author: Mrs. Humphrey Ward

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THE JOURNAL INTIME OF HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL

TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES

By Mrs. HUMPHREY WARD

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 primarily 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 appreciate

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

ads:

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 preferred 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 from the Journal, and printed at 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 certain 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 Introduction.

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 worth 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 matter 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 impressed 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, contained a long and remarkable Introduction from the pen of

M. Edmond 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, covering 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 psychological 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

interest as thought or value as experience. The publication of this

volume is the fulfillment of this desire. The reader will find in it,

_not a volume of Memoirs_, but the confidences of a solitary thinker,

the meditations of a philosopher 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 Introduction 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 inherent 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

expectations 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.

Scherer's name would be likely to carry the volume beyond a small local

circle.

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 remarkable

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 wonderful." So ran one of the last paragraphs of the

Introduction, and one may see in the sentences another instance of that

courage, that reasoned rashness, which distinguishes the good from the

mediocre critic. For it is as true now as it was in the days 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. Renan, 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 "_d'un penseur 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 appreciation of

Amiel as the development of certain paradoxes which have been haunting

various corners of M. Renan's mind for several years past, and to which

it is to be hoped he has now given expression with sufficient emphasis

and _brusquerie_ to satisfy even his passion for intellectual adventure.

Still, the rank of the book was fully recognized, and the first article

especially contained some remarkable criticisms, to which we shall find

occasion to recur. "In these two volumes of _pensees_," said M. Renan,

"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 interesting 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 conceived 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 oeuvure 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 his own. There is a leaven of something positive

and austere, 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 melancholy

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 experience. I say unique, but I can vouch

that there is in existence 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, mais impuissante a se

fournir a elle-meme des motifs_--of the repugnance 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 sorti du monde des vivants, il est mort de fait_. I can feel

forcibly 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 contemporaries who in his lifetime knew

nothing of him. It is a natural 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 innocent 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

personalities 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 present writer access to

certain manuscript material in his possession, even the sketch which

follows, vague and imperfect as it necessarily is, would have been

impossible.

[Footnote: Four or five articles on the subject of Amiel's life have

been contributed 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 for the

purposes of the present introduction.]

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 Reformation. Amiel's ancestors, like those of Sismondi, left

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 republic, and would seem to have married and settled

in the halcyon days following the restoration of Genevese independence

in 1814. Amiel was born when the prosperity of Geneva was at its height,

when the little state was administered by men of European reputation,

and Genevese society had power to attract distinguished visitors and

admirers 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_ overlooking the woods of La Batie. Rossi 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 Rive, 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 Toepffer. 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

intelligently 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 Restoration 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 been

for awhile laid to sleep by the events of 1814. But the slumber was a

short one at Geneva as elsewhere, and when Rossi 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 equilibrium 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 Radical 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 whirlpool 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 membership, 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 academie, he would seem to have

done only moderately as far as prizes and honors were concerned. We are

told, however, that he read enormously, and that he was, generally

speaking, inclined rather to make friends with men older than himself

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 Genevese 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 Aesthetics 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 experiences of the

same kind have followed each other in his intellectual experience, yet

none has effaced the deep impression 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 exercised 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

professor 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. Rio's

book, "L'Art Chretien," to the _Bibliotheque Universelle de Geneve_. We

see in them the young student conscientiously writing his first

review--writing it at inordinate length, as young reviewers are apt to

do, and treating the 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 melancholy 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, however, 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 metaphysical

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 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 Ilion, 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 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 Tuebingen 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 Stael 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 _Schwaermerei_, 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,

a la francaise_," 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 _Bibliotheque 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 _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 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 _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 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 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 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 Saleve, Lamartine's _Saleve aux flancs 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

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'ideal_?"

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

detail_" 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."

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 abstract speculation. And the longer he

lingered in the wilderness, unchecked by any sense of intellectual

responsibility, 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

consciousness is withdrawn into itself; I hear my heart beating, and my

life passing. It seems to me that I have become 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: "I am a

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--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

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 Muetter_,' 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 speculative, decrits dans

une 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 experiences 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 importance--dwarfed reflections of ideal truths for which

neither language nor institutions provide any adequate expression! 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 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 movement 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 innermost

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 mysterious 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 perceptions 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 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 successful 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 content with the second-best, or discover

anything which satisfies 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

kindness and beneficence; education to undertake; the thousand and one

moral relations which develop round the first--all these ideas

intoxicate me sometimes." But in vain. "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 seems to me to have enough elasticity and

immensity, to be free enough from the irreparable; 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. 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 whole," 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 _Schematismus_. 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 conscientiousness 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 were,

the study of literature, and the study of philosophy as such, owe him

nothing. But for the Journal his years of training and his years of

teaching would have left equally little record behind them. "His pupils

at Geneva," writes one who was himself among the number, [Footnote: M.

Alphonse Rivier, now Professor of International Law at the University

of Brussels.] "never learned to appreciate him at his true worth. We did

justice no doubt to a knowledge as varied as it was wide, to his vast

stores of reading, to that cosmopolitanism of the best kind which he had

brought back with him from his travels; we liked him for his indulgence,

his kindly wit. But I look back without any sense of pleasure to his

lectures."

Many a student, however, has shrunk from the burden and risks of family

life, and has found himself incapable of teaching effectively what he

knows, and has yet redeemed all other incapacities in the field of

literary production. And 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, accompaniment 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, literature, 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_ intermingled 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 production born of effort and

difficulty; and the labor squandered on poetical forms, on metrical

experiments and intricate problems of translation, as well as the

occasional affectations 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.

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

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 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 _"l'eblouissement de l'infini_."

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 endangered. 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 Clough'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 contemplative study of life and nature as

a whole, is the critical sense--the tendency which, in the realm of

action and concrete performance, carries him, as Amiel expresses it,

_"droit au defaut,"_ 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 restless 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 mystery," he writes to M.

Scherer, "do others expect much from me? whereas I feel myself to be

incapable of anything 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 himself calls scales,

exercises, _tours de force_ in verse-translation of the most laborious

and difficult kind, in ingenious _vers d'occasion_, 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

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, Renan, Littre, and others. Amiel left the

letter for three months unanswered and then wrote a reply which M.

Scherer probably received with a sigh of impatience. For, rightly

interpreted, it meant that old habits were too strong, and that the

momentary 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

expression to them in the only way possible to me, and when I die it

will be found that I too, like other men, have performed the task

appointed me, and contributed my quota to the human store?" It is clear

that very early he began to regard it as possible that portions of the

Journal should be published after his death, and, as we have seen, he

left certain "literary instructions," dated seven years before his last

illness, in which his executors were directed to publish such parts of

it as might seem to them to possess any general interest. But it is

clear also that the Journal was not, in any sense, written for

publication. "These pages," say the Geneva editors, "written _au courant

de la plume_--sometimes in the morning, but more often at the end of the

day, without any idea of composition or publicity--are marked by the

repetition, the _lacunae_, the carelessness, inherent in this kind of

monologue. The thoughts and sentiments expressed have no other aim than

sincerity of rendering."

And his estimate of the value of the record thus produced was, in

general, a low one, especially during the depression and discouragement

of his later years. "This Journal of mine," he writes in 1876,

"represents the material of a good many volumes; what prodigious waste

of time, of thought, of strength! It will be useful to nobody, and even

for myself--it has rather helped me to shirk life than to practice it."

And again: "Is everything I have produced, taken together--my

correspondence, these thousands of Journal pages, my lectures, my

articles, my poems, my notes of different kinds--anything better than

withered leaves? To whom and to what have I been useful? Will my name

survive me a single day, and will it ever mean anything to anybody? A

life of no account! When all is added up--nothing!" In passages like

these there is no anticipation of any posthumous triumph over the

disapproval of his friends and the criticism of his fellow-citizens. The

Journal was a relief, the means of satisfying a need of expression which

otherwise could find no outlet; "a grief-cheating device," but nothing

more. It did not still the sense of remorse for wasted gifts and

opportunities which followed poor Amiel through the painful months of

his last illness. Like Keats, he passed away, feeling that all was over,

and the great game of life lost forever.

It still remains for us to gather up a few facts and impressions of a

different kind from those which we have been dwelling on, which may

serve to complete and correct the picture we have so far drawn of the

author of the Journal. For Amiel is full of contradictions and

surprises, which, are indeed one great source of his attractiveness. Had

he only been the thinker, the critic, the idealist we have been

describing, he would never have touched our feeling as he now does; what

makes him so interesting is that there was in him a _fond_ of heredity,

a temperament and disposition, which were perpetually reacting against

the oppression of the intellect and its accumulations. In his hours of

intellectual concentration he freed himself from all trammels of country

or society, or even, as he insists, from all sense of personality. But

at other times he was the dutiful son of a country which he loved,

taking a warm interest in everything Genevese, especially in everything

that represented the older life of the town. When it was a question of

separating the Genevese state from the church, which had been the center

of the national life during three centuries of honorable history, Amiel

the philosopher, the cosmopolitan, threw himself ardently on to the side

of the opponents of separation, and rejoiced in their victory. A large

proportion of his poems deal with national subjects. He was one of the

first members of "_L'Institut Genevois_," founded in 1853, and he took a

warm interest in the movement started by M. Eugene Rambert toward 1870,

for the improvement of secondary education throughout French-speaking

Switzerland. One of his friends dwells with emphasis on his "_sens

profond des 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 traditions. It pleases him to see that there is a

force in the Genevese nationality which resists the leveling influences

of a crude radicalism; it rejoices him that Geneva "has not yet become a

mere copy of anything, and that she is still capable of deciding for

herself. Those who say to her, 'Do as they do at New York, at Paris, at

Rome, at Berlin,' are still in the minority. The _doctrinaires_ who

would split her up and destroy her unity waste their breath upon her.

She divines the snare laid for her, and turns away. I like this proof of

vitality."

His love of traveling never left him. Paris attracted him, as it

attracts all who cling to letters, and he gained at one time or another

a certain amount of acquaintance with French literary men. In 1852 we

find him for a time brought into contact with Thierry, Lamennais,

Beranger, Mignet, etc., as well as with Romantics like Alfred de Vigny

and Theophile Gautier. There are poems addressed to De Vigny and Gautier

in his first published volume of 1854. He revisited Italy and his old

haunts and friends in Germany more than once, and in general kept the

current of his life fresh and vigorous by his openness to impressions

and additions from without.

He was, as we have said, a delightful correspondent, "taking pains with

the smallest note," and within a small circle of friends much liked. His

was not a nature to be generally appreciated at its true value; the

motives which governed his life were too remote from the ordinary

motives of human conduct, and his characteristics just those which have

always excited the distrust, if not the scorn, of the more practical and

vigorous order of minds. Probably, too--especially in his later

years--there was a certain amount of self-consciousness and

artificiality in his attitude toward the outer world, which was the

result partly of the social difficulties we have described, partly of

his own sense of difference from his surroundings, and partly again of

that timidity of nature, that self-distrust, which is revealed to us in

the Journal. So that he was by no means generally popular, and the great

success of the Journal is still a mystery to the majority of those who

knew him merely as a fellow-citizen and acquaintance. But his friends

loved him and believed in him, and the reserved student, whose manners

were thought affected in general society, could and did make himself

delightful to those who understood him, or those who looked to him for

affection. "According to my remembrance of him," writes M. Scherer, "he

was bright, sociable, a charming companion. Others who knew him better

and longer than I say the same. The mobility of his disposition

counteracted his tendency to exaggerations of feeling. In spite of his

fits of melancholy, his natural turn of mind was cheerful; up to the end

he was young, a child even, amused by mere nothings; and whoever had

heard him laugh his hearty student's laugh would have found it difficult

to identify him with the author of so many somber pages." M. Rivier, his

old pupil, remembers him as "strong and active, still handsome,

delightful in conversation, ready to amuse and be amused." Indeed, if

the photographs of him are to be trusted, there must have been something

specially attractive in the sensitive, expressive face, with its lofty

brow, fine eyes, and kindly mouth. It is the face of a poet rather than

of a student, and makes one understand certain other little points which

his friends lay stress on--for instance, his love for and popularity

with children.

In his poems, or at any rate in the earlier ones, this lighter side

finds more expression, proportionally, than in the Journal. In the

volume called "Grains de Mil," published in 1854, and containing verse

written between the ages of eighteen and thirty, there are poems

addressed, now to his sister, now to old Genevese friends, and now to

famous men of other countries whom he had seen and made friends with in

passing, which, read side by side with the "Journal Intime," bring a

certain gleam and sparkle into an otherwise somber picture. Amiel was

never a master of poetical form; his verse, compared to his prose, is

tame and fettered; it never reaches the glow and splendor of expression

which mark the finest passages of the Journal. It has ability,

thought--beauty even, of a certain kind, but no plastic power, none of

the incommunicable magic which a George Eliot seeks for in vain, while

it comes unasked, to deck with imperishable charm the commonplace

metaphysic and the simpler emotions of a Tennyson or a Burns. Still as

Amiel's work, his poetry has an interest for those who are interested in

him. Sincerity is written in every line of it. Most of the thoughts and

experiences with which one grows familiar in the Journal are repeated in

it; the same joys, the same aspirations, the same sorrows are visible

throughout it, so that in reading it one is more and more impressed with

the force and reality of the inner life which has left behind it so

definite an image of itself. And every now and then the poems add a

detail, a new impression, which seems by contrast to give fresh value to

the fine-spun speculations, the lofty despairs, of the Journal. Take

these verses, written at twenty-one, to his younger sister:

"Treize ans! et sur ton front aucun baiser de mere

Ne viendra, pauvre enfant, invoquer le bonheur;

Treize ans! et dans ce jour mil regard de ton pere

Ne fera d'allegresse epanouir ton coeur.

"Orpheline, c'est la le nom dont tu t'appelles,

Oiseau ne dans un nid que la foudre a brise;

De la couvee, helas! seuls, trois petits, sans ailes

Furent lances au vent, loin du reste ecrase.

"Et, semes par l'eclair sur les monts, dans les plaines,

Un meme toit encor n'a pu les abriter,

Et du foyer natal, malgre 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."

The last stanza is especially poor, and in none of them is there much

poetical promise. But the pathetic image of a forlorn and orphaned

childhood, "_un nid que la foudre a 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 Godson," or in the charming

poem to Loulou, the little girl who at five years old, daisy in hand,

had sworn him eternal friendship over Gretchen's game of "_Er liebt

mich--liebt mich nicht_," one hears the same tender note.

"Merci, prophetique fleurette,

Corolle a l'oracle vainqueur,

Car voila trois ans, paquerette,

Que tu m'ouvris un petit coeur.

"Et depuis trois hivers, ma belle,

L'enfant aux grands yeux de velours

Maintient son petit coeur fidele,

Fidele comme aux premiers jours."

His last poetical volume, "Jour a Jour," published in 1880, is far more

uniformly melancholy and didactic in tone than the two earlier

collections from which we have been quoting. But though the dominant

note is one of pain and austerity, of philosophy touched with emotion,

and the general tone more purely introspective, there are many traces in

it of the younger Amiel, dear, for very ordinary human reasons, to his

sisters and his friends. And, in general, the pathetic interest of the

book for all whose sympathy answers to what George Sand calls "_les

tragedies que la pensee apercoit et que l'oeil ne voit point_" is very

great. Amiel published it a year before his death, and the struggle with

failing power which the Journal reveals to us in its saddest and most

intimate reality, is here expressed in more reserved and measured form.

Faith, doubt, submission, tenderness of feeling, infinite aspiration,

moral passion, that straining hope of something beyond, which is the

life of the religious soul--they are all here, and the _Dernier Mot_

with which the sad little volume ends is poor Amiel's epitaph on

himself, his conscious farewell to that more public aspect of his life

in which he had suffered much and achieved comparatively so little.

"Nous avons a plaisir complique le bonheur,

Et par un ideal frivole et suborneur

Attache nos coeurs a la terre;

Dupes des faux dehors tenus pour l'important,

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 soupire;

Multipliant nos pas et nos soins de fourmis,

Nous vondrions nous faire une foule d'amis....

Pourtant un seul pouvait suffire.

"Victime des desirs, esclave des regrets,

L'homme s'agite, et s'use, et vieillit sans progres

Sur sa toile de Penelope;

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."

Upon the small remains of Amiel's prose outside the Journal there is no

occasion to dwell. The two essays on Madame de Stael and Rousseau

contain much fine critical remark, and might find a place perhaps as an

appendix to some future edition of the Journal; and some of the

"Pensees," published in the latter half of the volume containing the

"Grains de Mils," are worthy of preservation. But in general, whatever

he himself published was inferior to what might justly have been

expected of him, and no one was more conscious of the fact than himself.

The story of his fatal illness, of the weary struggle for health which

filled the last seven years of his life, is abundantly told in the

Journal--we must not repeat it here. He had never been a strong man, and

at fifty-three he received, at his doctor's hands, his _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 Vinet; and the affection of a sculptor friend provided the

monument which now marks his resting-place.

We have thus exhausted all the biographical material which is at present

available for the description of Amiel's life and relations toward the

outside world. It is to be hoped that the friends to whom the charge of

his memory has been specially committed may see their way in the future,

if not to a formal biography, which is very likely better left

unattempted, at least to a volume of Letters, which would complete the

"Journal Intime," as Joubert's "Correspondence" completes the "Pensees."

There must be ample material for it; and Amiel's letters would probably

supply us with more of that literary and critical reflection which his

mind produced so freely and so well, as long as there was no question of

publication, but which is at present somewhat overweighted in the

"Journal Intime."

But whether biography or correspondence is ever forthcoming or not, the

Journal remains--and the Journal is the important matter. We shall read

the Letters if they appear, as we now read the Poems, for the Journal's

sake. The man himself, as poet, teacher, and _litterateur_, produced no

appreciable effect on his generation; but the posthumous record of his

inner life has stirred the hearts of readers all over Europe, and won

him a niche in the House of Fame. What are the reasons for this striking

transformation of a man's position--a transformation which, as M.

Scherer says, will rank among the curiosities of literary history? In

other words, what has given the "Journal Intime" its sudden and

unexpected success?

In the first place, no doubt, its poetical quality, its beauty of

manner--that fine literary expression in which Amiel has been able to

clothe the subtler processes of thought, no less than the secrets of

religious feeling, or the aspects of natural scenery. Style is what

gives value and currency to thought, and Amiel, in spite of all his

Germanisms, has style of the best kind. He possesses in prose that

indispensable magic which he lacks in poetry.

His style, indeed, is by no means always in harmony with the central

French tradition. Probably a Frenchman will be inclined to apply

Sainte-Beuve's remarks on Amiel's elder countryman, Rodolphe Toepffer, to

Amiel himself: "_C'est ainsi qu'on ecrit dans les litteratures qui n'ont

point de capitale, de quartier general classique, ou d'Academie; c'est

ainsi qu'un Allemand, qu'un Americain, 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'il a obtenu un evenement: il a fallu bien des circonstances

pour y preparer_." No doubt the preparatory circumstance in Amiel's case

has been just that Germanization of the French mind on which M. Taine

and M. Bourget dwell with so much emphasis. But, be this as it may,

there is no mistaking the enthusiasm with which some of the best living

writers of French have hailed these pages--instinct, as one declares,

"with a strange and marvelous poetry;" full of phrases "_d'une intense

suggestion de 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 generations he has done for the spiritual life of this,

and the wealth of poetical, scientific, and psychological faculty which

he has brought to the analysis of human feeling and human perceptions

places him--so far as the present century is concerned--at the head of

the small and delicately-gifted class to which he belongs. For beside

his spiritual experience Obermann's is superficial, and Maurice de

Guerin's a passing trouble, a mere quick outburst of passionate feeling.

Amiel indeed has neither the continuous romantic beauty nor the rich

descriptive wealth of Senancour. The Dent du Midi, with its untrodden

solitude, its primeval silences and its hovering eagles, the Swiss

landscape described in the "Fragment on the Ranz des Vaches," the summer

moonlight on the Lake of Neufchatel--these various pictures are the work

of one of the most finished artists in words that literature has

produced. But how true George Sand's criticism is! "_Chez Obermann la

sensibilite est active, l'intelligence est paresseuse ou insuffisante._"

He has a certain antique power of making the truisms of life splendid

and impressive. No one can write more poetical exercises than he on the

old text of _pulvis et umbra sumus_, but beyond this his philosophical

power fails him. As soon as he leaves the region of romantic description

how wearisome the pages are apt to grow! Instead of a poet, "_un

ergoteur Voltairien_;" instead of the explorer of fresh secrets of the

heart, a Parisian talking a cheap cynicism! Intellectually, the ground

gives way; there is no solidity of knowledge, no range of thought. Above

all, the scientific idea in our sense is almost absent; so that while

Amiel represents the modern mind at its keenest and best, dealing at

will with the vast additions to knowledge which the last fifty years

have brought forth, Senancour is still in the eighteenth-century stage,

talking like Rousseau of a return to primitive manners, and discussing

Christianity in the tone of the "Encyclopedie."

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 landscape has a

tame, didactic air. The Swiss thinker is too ready to make nature a mere

vehicle of moral or philosophical thought; Maurice de Guerin loves her

for herself alone, and has found words to describe her influence over

him of extraordinary individuality and power. But for the rest the story

of his inner life has but small value in the history of thought. His

difficulties do not go deep enough; his struggle is intellectually not

serious enough--we see in it only a common incident of modern experience

poetically told; it throws no light on the genesis and progress of the

great forces which are molding and renovating the thought of the

present--it tells us nothing for the future.

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 confession-writing. His book is representative of human

experience in its more intimate and personal forms to an 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 specimen 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 understand. "Amiel,"

says M. Renan, "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 certain fatal

spiritual weakness debarred him to a great extent from the world of

practical life, his sympathy with action, whether it was the action of

the politician or the social reformer, or merely 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 literary 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

probably 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 bewildered by the range and number

of its own acquisitions, the religious 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 salvation, of redemption, and

conversion, as if these things were realities. He asks me 'What does M.

Renan make of sin?' _Eh bien, je crois que je le supprime_." But it is

just because Amiel is profoundly sensitive to the problems of evil and

responsibility, and M. Renan dismisses them with this half-tolerant,

half-skeptical smile, that M. Renan'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 religion.

Religion, Amiel declares again and again, cannot be replaced by

philosophy. The redemption of the intelligence is not the redemption of

the heart. The philosopher 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 variations 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

intellect, and after all the storms of pessimism and necessitarianism

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

explanation another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity." "Nature 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 elaborated 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 attempting 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 supernatural 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 dialogue, 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 religion 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

inspiration and guidance for eighteen centuries in the religious

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 surrounded 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 religion which by instinct and inheritance he loves; he makes 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 beliefs

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 contradictions, 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 sensitive to the need of faith as any

that have gone before it; more widely conscious than its predecessors of

the limitations 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 foreshadows the future. 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 pursuit 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 steadfastness which is the inmost note of it--to these

meditative lives, which, through all the ebb and flow of thought, and in

the dim ways of doubt and suffering, rich in knowledge, and yet rich in

faith, grasp in new forms, and proclaim to us in new words,

"The mighty hopes which make us men."

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 needful--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 absolutely only to

what is absolute and eternal, and to enjoy the rest as a loan, a

usufruct.... To adore, to understand, 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 potentiality 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 and

inversely, the life of a gnat as infinite as that of a celestial body,

with all its dust of nations, we feel ourselves 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 little Europe.

At bottom there is but one subject of study: the forms and metamorphoses

of mind. All other subjects may be reduced to that; all other studies

bring us back to this study.

GENEVA, April 20, 1849.--It is six years [Footnote: Amiel left Geneva

for Paris and Berlin in April, 1848, the preceding year, 1841-42,

having been spent in Italy and Sicily.] to-day since I last left Geneva.

How many journeys, how many impressions, observations, thoughts, how

many forms of men and things have since then passed before me and in me!

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.

Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor blossoming plum-trees and peach

trees! What a difference from six years ago, when the cherry-trees,

adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their bridal flowers,

smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and the lilacs of

Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into my face!...

May 3, 1849.--I have never felt any inward assurance of genius, or any

presentiment of glory or of 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 all vague

and indefinite; I ought not to live, for I am now scarcely capable of

living. Recognize your place; 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. 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 good works, 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.

May 27, 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 reserved 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 inflicting upon Him. He also--He

above all--is the great misunderstood, 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? O let me enjoy it with gratitude. The days of trouble

come soon enough and are many enough. I have no presentiment 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 all

miserable and ignoble things from me under thy bounties and splendors!

October 1, 1849.--Yesterday, Sunday, I read through and made extracts

from the gospel of St. John. It confirmed me in my belief that about

Jesus we must believe no one but Himself, and that what we have to do is

to discover the true image of the founder behind all the prismatic

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

directions. 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 understanding 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 reconquered; 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, [Footnote: Angelus Silesius, otherwise Johannes

Soheffler, the German seventeenth century hymn-writer, whose tender and

mystical verses have been popularized in England by Miss Winkworth's

translations in the _Lyra Germanica_.] I think, said, "the eye by which

I see God is the same eye by which He sees me."

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

century 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 suffering, of calumny, of sickness,

of isolation, and of death. There is no serious piety without heroism.

Heroism is the dazzling and glorious concentration of courage.

* * * * *

Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive 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 actions, of eating, walking, and

sleeping, were the condensation 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 conscious, 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. Everything which

is, is thought, but not conscious and individual thought. The human

intelligence is but the consciousness 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 myself 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 intelligence 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 jurisconsult 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 understood 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 the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its

flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and

radiant kingship. 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 outlines or dim

presentiments of them. After it you will have only weakened reminiscence

or powerless regret; that moment is the moment of your ideal.

Spite is anger which is afraid to show itself, it is an impotent 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 maxims, 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 everything, 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 criticisms, 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

philosopher, a critic of remarkable gifts, endowed with exquisite

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 considered 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 accumulations of his journal during

fifty years of his life, is a collection of precious stones, of

butterflies, coins and 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 of _Pensees_

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 metaphysics 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 affectation and preoccupations, of social and educational

interests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine criticisms, in

exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from flower to flower, a

teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, an Aeolian 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 tenderness 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 conscious instead of an impression of

heaviness and harshness, of labored, _hammering_ emphasis, of something

violent, 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 Rousseau 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 admired him, but his bad sides appeared to me

with a clearness relatively new.

(_Same day._)--The _pensee_-writer 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 gardener 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 understand 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 convert 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 writers of _pensees_; in

Germany, for ten such writers there have been twenty philosophers.

March 25, 1851.--How many illustrious men whom I have known have been

already reaped by death, Steffens, Marheineke, Neander, Mendelssohn,

Thorwaldsen, Oelenschlaeger, Geijer, Tegner, Oersted, Stuhr, Lachmann;

and with us, Sismondi, Toepffer, de Candolle, savants, artists, poets,

musicians, historians. [Footnote: Of these Marheineke, Neander, and

Lachmann had been lecturing at Berlin during Amiel's residence there.

The Danish dramatic poet Oelenschlaeger and the Swedish writer Tegner

were among the Scandinavian men of letters with whom he made

acquaintance during his tour of Sweden and Denmark in 1845. He probably

came across the Swedish historian Geijer on the same occasion. Schelling

and Alexander von Humboldt, mentioned a little lower down, were also

still holding sway at Berlin when he was a student. There is an

interesting description in one of his articles on Berlin, published in

the _Bibliotheque Universelle de Geneve_, of a university ceremonial

there in or about 1847, and of the effect produced on the student's

young imagination by the sight of half the leaders of European research

gathered into a single room. He saw Schlosser, the veteran historian, at

Heidelberg at the end of 1843.] 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 says to

us: "Show what is in thee! Now is the moment, now is the hour, else fall

back into nothingness! It is thy turn! Give the world thy measure, say

thy word, reveal thy nullity or thy capacity. Come forth from the shade!

It is no longer a question of promising, thou must perform. The time of

apprenticeship is over. Servant, show us what thou hast done with thy

talent. Speak now, or be silent forever." This appeal of the conscience

is a solemn summons in the life of every man, solemn and awful as the

trumpet of the last judgment. It cries, "Art thou ready? Give an

account. Give an account of thy years, thy leisure, thy strength, thy

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 thousand ways of suffering because my happiness

demands a thousand conditions I have a heart 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 consumes 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 seems 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. 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, 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 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 am distrustful of myself and of happiness because I know myself. The

ideal poisons for me all imperfect possession. 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 mortally, degrades

and wounds me in mind, even beforehand. I abhor useless regrets and

repentances. The fatality of the consequences which follow upon every

human 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 happiness, this would be hell!

All that is necessary, providential, in short, _unimputable_, I could

bear, I think, with some strength of mind. But responsibility 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, craving for

repose for satisfaction, for independence! is there not some relic of

selfishness in such a disinterestedness, such a fear, such idle

susceptibility.

I wish to fulfill my duty, but where 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 it 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, sufferings 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. Descend 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

themselves, and whose heart condemneth them not in the part they take.

This inner identity, this unity of conviction, 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. O Heraclitus! the symbol of happiness is after

all the same as that of grief; anxiety and hope, hell and heaven, are

equally restless. 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 Ruge's [Footnote: Arnold Ruge, born in

1803, died at Brighton in 1880, principal editor of the _Hallische_,

afterward the _Deutsche Jahrbuecher_ (1838-43), in which Strauss, Bruno

Bauer, and Louis Feuerbach wrote. He was a member of the parliament of

Frankfort.] volume "_Die Academie_" (1848) where the humanism of the

neo-Hegelians 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 philosophy. Man is the principle of their religion, and

intellect 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 content, at least by the disposition of its content, by the

predominance and sovereignty 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

transmissible 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

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 reasoning, 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 understand 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 Ruge and Feuerbach 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 complete 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 equally considered; in a word,

he must 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 confusion 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 finished. 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 Democratie 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, sententious style, too, is a little dry, over-refined and

monotonous. 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 successive facets, has serious inconveniences. We see the

details too clearly, to the detriment of the whole. A multitude 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 the 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 extraordinary that we get

rid of what is bad. The whole becomes 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 individualism, 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 decline of souls. The useful will

take the place of the beautiful, 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, devotion, holiness, heroism,

enthusiasm, the extraordinary, the infinite, shall have a worship and an

abiding city? Utilitarian 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 tremble 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,

mysterious.

O 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 grandiose 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 triumphs. He made 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 grandeur, 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 instructive

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 to conclude and affirm in its turn, so that, after having brought

disquiet, it now brings peace. It says: "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, 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 ceases to grow greater 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 one's self 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.

* * * * *

It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the

conscience which educates history. Fact is corrupting, it is we who

correct it by the persistence of our ideal. The soul moralizes the past

in order not to be demoralized 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 transparency 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 liberty, 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 individuality, in its proud

dominion over all hostile circumstances, 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 exterior, 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, inviolable, respecting itself

above all, disdaining the visible and 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. [Footnote: Compare Clough'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 in the blank mind."]

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 humility, such a

superhuman point of view becomes dangerous; 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 philosopher

approaches temerity, and the _Monologues_ are therefore open to three

reproaches: Ontologically, the position of man in the spiritual

universe 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.

February 2d.--Still the _Monologues_. Critically I defended myself

enough against them yesterday; I may abandon 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 conception

of human dignity, this actual possession of the universe 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, penetrate 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 strengthens, 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 egotisms

and active ambitions, this world of men, in which one must deceive by

smiles, conduct, and silence as much as by actual words, a world

revolting to the proud and upright soul, it is our business to learn to

live in it! Success 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 indignation of contempt, and the wish to

crush, roused 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 are 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

communicated 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.

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, O 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 children. 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. Rash 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. Read a part of Krause's book "_Urbild der

Menschheit_" [Footnote: Christian Frederick Krause, died 1832, Hegel's

younger contemporary, and the author of a system which he called

_panentheism_--Amiel alludes to it later on.] which answered marvelously

to my thought and my need. This philosopher has always a beneficent

effect upon me; his sweet religious serenity gains upon me and invades

me. He inspires me with a sense of peace and infinity.

Still I miss something, common worship, a positive religion, 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 novelists 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, restless 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 happiness.

"_In der Beschraenkung 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 say, courageous, active, resolute,

persevering, "resignation," that is to say, self-sacrifice,

renunciation, limitation. Energy in resignation, there lies the wisdom

of the sons of earth, the only serenity possible in this life of

struggle and of combat. In it is the peace of martyrdom, in it too the

promise of triumph.

April 28, 1852. (Lancy.) [Footnote: A village near Geneva.]--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, the tranquil

sunlight, the breeze blowing over the fresh green fields, all rose into

and filled my heart. Now all is silent. O silence, thou art terrible!

terrible as that calm of the ocean which lets the eye penetrate the

fathomless abysses below. Thou showest us in ourselves depths which make

us giddy, inextinguishable needs, treasures of suffering. Welcome

tempests! at least they blur and trouble the surface of these waters

with their terrible secrets. Welcome the passion blasts which stir the

wares 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 entering 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 everything

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 transparency. The only

substance properly so called is the soul. What is all the rest? Mere

shadow, pretext, figure, symbol, 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. Reflection 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, experience before study; let

us make life itself our study. Shall I then never have the heart of a

woman to rest upon? a 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 oscillations of

feeling. They are your life and your nature; One wiser than you ordained

them. Do not abandon yourself 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 general

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

natural. Thus will your development be harmonious, and the peace of

heaven will shine upon your brow; always on condition 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 mountains above Lavey, under the midday sun, lying under a

tree 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, immortal, 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 she loves the phosphorescent nimbus of

contemplative power, and who pours into their hearts the tranquil

intoxication, if not the authority of genius, moments of irresistible

intuition in which a man feels himself great like the universe and calm

like 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 promised 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 prophetic

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 shrubberies. 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 before 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 nature, why do we not live more in thee?

The poetical _flaneurs_ of Toepffer, his Charles and Jules, the friends

and passionate lovers of thy secret graces, the dazzled and ravished

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

instruction than a library, even than that of _Mon oncle_. [Footnote:

The allusions in this passage are to Toepffer's best known books--"La

Presbytere" and "La Bibliotheque de mon Oncle," that airy chronicle of a

hundred romantic or vivacious nothings which has the young student Jules

for its center.] 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 meditative

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. Reverie, 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 materials 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? The _flanerie_ so exquisitely

glorified and sung by Toepffer 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.

May 2, 1852. (Sunday) Lancy.--This morning read the epistle of St.

James, the exegetical volume of Cellerier [Footnote: Jacob-Elysee

Cellerier, professor of theology at the Academy of Geneva, and son of

the pastor of Satigny mentioned in Madame de Stael's "L'Allemagne."] on

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 religious 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 revelation. The influence of a word

in season, is it not incalculable? What a mystery is speech! But we are

blind to it, because we are carnal and earthy. We see the stones and the

trees by the road, the furniture of our houses, all that is palpable 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 inevitable and

silent propaganda. As far as lies in its power, 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 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 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 manners and their

tastes; but the inward fraternity is traceable in their feelings, their

instincts, and their desires. The feminine 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 essentially conservative, but

she is a conservative without discrimination. 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 passing, 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 frivolous, 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 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 acquired, 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

which we receive, this is what is still ours. Let us then, receive

trustfully without shame or anxiety. Let us humbly 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 innocent joy; God is good, and what He does is well

done; resign yourself to everything, even to happiness; ask for the

spirit of sacrifice, of detachment, 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, regarding 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 dawning 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 (number, 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 except in force, everywhere taking the place of

positive liberty, which means action guided by an inner law and curbed

by a moral authority. Socialism _versus_ individualism: this is how

Vinet put the dilemma. I should say rather that it is only the eternal

antagonism between letter 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 all 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 explosions 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

metamorphoses, in which each form, the result of what goes before, is

the condition of those which follow. The divine 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 gravitation, 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 kingdom 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 discerns 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 reproduction 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 humble, devout, silent,

that so thou mayest hear within the depths of thyself the subtle and

profound voice; be spiritual 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, die often, and examine thyself in the presence

of this death, as a preparation for the last death. He who can without

shuddering confront blindness, deafness, paralysis, disease, betrayal,

poverty; he who can without terror appear before the sovereign justice,

he alone can call 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, and 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 security. 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. Religion 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

mountains, 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 chasing each other through the

Shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding

schoolboys. The ground strewn with leaves, brown, yellow, and reddish;

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, and whoever penetrates

into both is astonished 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 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.

November 8, 1852.--Responsibility is my invisible nightmare. To suffer

through one's own fault is a torment 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 irreparable evil brought about by

myself, a renunciation for life of my liberty, my peace of mind, the

very thought of it is maddening--I expiate my privilege indeed. My

privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully conscious 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

existence. 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 ignorant of. It is a strange position, and one

which becomes 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 myself, 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 _Doppelgaengerei_,

quite German in character, and which explains the disgust with reality

and the repugnance 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 individuality. 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 balloons 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 unconsciousness, 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

responsibility, 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 _Chrestomathie Francaise_ 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

esthetics, 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 purity, these are what he possesses 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 casuistries

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, _entrainement_, and therefore

popularity. The individualism which is his title to glory is also the

cause of his weakness.

We find in him always the solitary and the ascetic. His thought is, as

it were, perpetually at church; it is perpetually 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 historical 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 variety, 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

understood infinitely better than we how to reverence, cultivate and

ennoble the man whom they knew. In a thousand respects 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 is a strange result. Objective

civilization produced great 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 breaking 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 humanity; she is

still living under the antimony of sin and grace, of here below and

there above. She has not penetrated 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 abolished 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 conceived nor realized. Here are

enough causes for our inferiority.

November 12, 1852.--St. Martin's summer is still lingering, and the days

all begin in mist. I ran for a quarter of an hour round the garden to

get some warmth and suppleness. 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 powdered pearls and kept in place by a

thousand dewy strands hanging from above like the chains of a lamp and

supporting them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These little

airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world and all

the vaporous freshness of dawn. They recalled to me the poetry of the

north, wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or Iceland or Sweden,

Frithiof and the 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 noticeable 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 portions 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 philosophy 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.

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 and 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 individual to be given or surrendered. It is _exchanged_. To

surrender what is most profound and mysterious in one's being and

personality at any price less than that of absolute 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 himself 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

restless creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle,

passionate, 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 say, the divinity, under that form of it

which is accessible to childhood. If she is herself passionate, she will

inculcate 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 passions 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 culminating point of its human

vitality; the same being, tranquilized 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, cannot be complete so

long as the physiology of our planet is itself incomplete--that science

to which we give nowadays 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 pandemonium, the

artist, an Olympus, the elect soul, a paradise, 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

nature, 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 perhaps 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 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 Himself only in

light and love, that He calls upon us to become spirits, to possess

ourselves and to possess Him in the measure of our strength and that it

is our incredulity, our spiritual 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 himself

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 Christianity, new publications

in philosophy, these were our three subjects of conversation. The

principle result for me was an excellent exercise in dialectic and in

argumentation with solid champions. If I learned nothing, many of my

ideas gained new confirmation, and I was able to penetrate more deeply

into the minds of my friends. I am much nearer to Scherer than to

Naville, but from him also I am in some degree separated.

It is a striking fact, not unlike 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 unconscious 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' discussion. 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 intelligence (the two

classes of intelligences) can never understand each other. When they

succeed in doing so as to words, they differ as to the things which the

words mean. At the bottom of every discussion of detail between them

reappears the problem of the origin of ideas. If the problem 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 religion of consciousness, Scherer the

intelligence of consciousness, and I the consciousness of consciousness.

A common ground, but differing individualities. _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 intelligence, the Olympic festival of thought. _Habere,

non haberi_. There is an equal happiness in the sense of reciprocal

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 consciousness

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 moyens de conserver la paix avec les

hommes._" Wisdom so gentle and so insinuating, so shrewd, piercing, and

yet 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, no

worldly ornaments of style. The moralist forgets himself and in us

appeals only to the conscience. He becomes a confessor, a friend, a

counsellor.

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 abandonment to the generality,

the universal, the infinite, my particular _ego_ evaporates like a drop

of water in a furnace; it only condenses itself anew at the return of

cold, after enthusiasm 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 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

perfect, 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 and balance. Beethoven seizes

upon you; he is more tragic and oratorical, while Mozart is more

disinterested and poetical. Mozart is more Greek, and Beethoven more

Christian. One is serene, the other serious. The first is stronger than

destiny, because he takes life less profoundly; the second is less

strong, because he has dared to measure himself against deeper sorrows.

His talent is not always equal to his genius, and pathos is his

dominant feature, as perfection is that of Mozart. In Mozart the balance

of the whole is perfect, and art triumphs; in Beethoven feeling governs

everything and emotion troubles his art in proportion as it deepens it.

July 26, 1853.--Why do I find it easier and more satisfactory, 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 move freely, to show myself without a veil, to act on my own

account and act seriously, to believe in and assert myself, whereas a

piece of badinage which diverts attention from myself to the thing in

hand, from the feeling to the skill of the writer, puts me at my ease.

It is timidity which is at the bottom of it. There is another reason,

too--I am afraid of greatness, I am not afraid of ingenuity, and

distrustful as I am both of my gift and my instrument, I like to

reassure myself by an elaborate practice of 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 unachieved. My effort

expires, and satisfied with the _power_ to act I never arrive at the

will to act. I am always preparing 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 contraries 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 seriously, and that I only show myself to it in what is

amusing, 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 preliminaries 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

foi du dix-neuvieme Siecle." 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 physiological 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 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 progress, 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 quantitative, 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 philosophic superficiality of France, which she owes to her

fatal notion of religion, itself due to a life fashioned by Catholicism

and by absolute monarchy.

Catholic thought cannot conceive of personality as supreme and conscious

of itself. Its boldness and its weakness come from one and the same

cause--from an absence of the sense of responsibility, from that vassal

state of conscience which knows only slavery or anarchy, which

proclaims 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 Catholicism without entering into any other

positive form of religion, and whose idea is to fight Catholicism by

philosophy, 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 Catholicism, are powerless to rise to any

other form of religion. From Catholicism, as from Epicureanism there is

no return.

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 became 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 this 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 reward of my efforts. To-day the problem grew clear to me as 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 reduction 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 daemon, the fatum, the inner genius, the

mission, the primitive disposition, 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 hailed 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 Hannibal, from Hannibal to Charlemagne, from

Charlemagne to 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 knowledge. 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 was clear to me; I measured my faults,

counted my griefs, and felt Thy goodness toward me. I realized my own

nothingness, 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 impossible a problem,

and how sublime a reality! No one truly knows happiness who has not

suffered, and the redeemed are happier than the elect.

(Same day.)--The divine miracle _par excellence_ consists surely in the

apotheosis of grief, the transfiguration of evil by good. The work of

creation finds its consummation, and the eternal will of the infinite

mercy finds its fulfillment 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 alike mean the solution of the problem, the

aim of existence. And happiness is cumulative, as misery may be. An

eternal growth is an unchangeable peace, an ever profounder 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 nothing 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 penetrated 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 become ourselves, become

spontaneous and involuntary, instinctive 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 equally near to heaven and to the

infinite.

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 showing that we look, by writing that

we think, by pumping that we draw water into the well.

* * * * *

February 1, 1854.--A walk. The atmosphere incredibly 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 moments,

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 became 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 a 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 look for above all are

conclusions. This 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 clearness of the

obscure. We are always trifling on the surface. Our temper is

formal--that is to say, frivolous and material, 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 monotonous pallor of mountains and clouds? That

disenchanted 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 existence, but also of that deepest depth

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 being; and when we cease to add to

our growth it is only that we may ripen and possess ourselves. Will 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 may 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.

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 conscience? 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

thought is the magic wand of poets and of preachers: it strips the

scales from our fleshly eyes, and gives us a clear 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 polyglot,

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 chestnut trees were en fete; with their glistening buds

shining like little flames at the curved ends of the branches, they were

the candelabra of the spring decking the festival of eternal nature. How

young everything was, how kindly, how 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 makes my heart leap as it did at

eighteen. Thanks be to 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 contemplation 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 nourishes the whole man, it purifies and

ennobles. I surrendered myself, I was all gratitude and docility.

April 21, 1855.--I have been reading a great deal: ethnography,

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

infinite, 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 multitude of suns, of milky ways, of

stars, and nebulae, all existent in the point.

And on all sides stretched mysteries, marvels and prodigies, without

limit, without number, and without end. I felt the unfathomable thought

of which the universe is 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 concentration 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 tumult 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 various theogonies of the

world, and how it all grows clear to me, and becomes a symbol of the one

great unchanging thought, the thought of God about the universe! How

present and sensible to my inner sense is the unity of everything! It

seems to me that I am able to pierce to the sublime motive which, in all

the infinite spheres of existence, 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 mounting toward

the regions of light; my flight across chaos finds its rest in paradise.

Heaven, hell, the world, are within us. 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 starlight, in which man lives at peace, and sees

everything tinder its eternal aspect; the opposite also of the life of

conscience, in which God alone speaks, and all self-will surrenders

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 faith, 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, disinterested, and objective life of

thought. The reason seems to be timidity, and the timidity springs from

the excessive 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, I see cause

for error and repentance everywhere, 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 caution strong enough to prevail

against any of life's blandishments. 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 seems to me that it is

really distrust, incurable doubt of the 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 providence, 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

anything for fear of springs; explosions, and catastrophes, which may

burst from every corner at the least movement of his inexperienced

hands. 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 nothing_, a vast ambition made inactive by disgust, a

yearning that cannot be uttered for the ideal, joined with an offended

dignity and a wounded pride which will have nothing 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 mental reservation in which one lends one's self to circumstances for

form's sake, but refuses to recognize them in one's heart because one

cannot see the necessity or the divine order in them. I am disinterested

because I am indifferent; 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 disenchanted 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 soul 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 represents 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, reflection comes to no useful end, because it is

forever returning 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 faculty; reflection

is to be feared if it destroys our power of intuition, and inquiry is

fatal if it supplants faith. Decomposition becomes deadly when it

surpasses in strength 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 impossible 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 distrust 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 yourself;

"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 prevent 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 nothing more in the starry heaven. It is

no more possible for me to recover one of my days from the depths of

memory 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 destinies 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. Pardon 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 culpability 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 perfect 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 foundation of all of our pains is unbelief;

we doubt whether what happens to us ought to happen to us; we think

ourselves wiser than providence, because to avoid fatalism we 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 "History of Poetry"

[Footnote: "Geschichte der Poesie," by Rosenkrantz, the pupil and

biographer of Hegel] 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 shifting point of view gives a perpetual

freshness to the subject 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 represent

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 clearness 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

custom 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 philosophy of accident become habit, instinct,

nature and belief, it is the religion of caprice.

By one of those eternal contrasts which redress the balance of things,

the romance peoples, who excel in the practical matters of life, care

nothing for the philosophy of it; while the Germans, who know very

little about the practice 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 mathematical rigidity of theory.

Matter and form are the eternal 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 condition of progress. Every life is an inward struggle, every

struggle supposes two contrary forces; nothing real is simple, 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 compromise 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 equilibrium. 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 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

caressing like that of water, there is always a threat of unforeseen

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 fatalities 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 indestructible instinct of the barbarian tribe,

perceptible in the half-civilized nation, all these traits are visible

to an attentive 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, tyranny such as the world has never known,

silent as darkness, 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 critical instinct, aspiration, and

desire, but no serene command 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, England. 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 happiness. 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 prolonged

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_

tendency, 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 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, camps, 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 longing 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 capable 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 l'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

perpetual search, a hope, a desire, and a care, the malady of the ideal.

... Life indeed must always be a compromise between common sense and the

ideal, the one abating nothing of its demands, the other accommodating

itself to what is practicable and real. But marriage by common sense!

arrived at by a bargain! Can it be anything but a profanation? 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

destiny?...

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 behind 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 perpetual 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 everything, to tame and conquer everything, and in all directions we

reach our limit--_non plus ultra_. Fortune, glory, love, power, health,

happiness, long life, all these blessings 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 worthlessness, and that we have no

right to anything. 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 reconquer 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

except 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 ourselves, 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 the 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 disengaged, a lowest depth of darkness,

the abyss of the un-revealed, the virtual pledge of an infinite future,

the obscure self, the pure subjectivity which is incapable of realizing

itself in mind, 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 the power of enthusiasm. The

one sets us free, the other ravishes us out of ourselves. I do not think

I ever felt more distinctly than to-day, or with more intensity, the

difference between these two masters. Their two personalities became

transparent to me, and I seemed to read them to their depths.

The work of Mozart, penetrated as it is with mind and thought,

represents a solved problem, a balance struck between 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 serenity of

Elysium. The first scene is a pleasant conversation, like that of

Socrates on the banks of the Ilissus; its chief mark is an exquisite

urbanity. The second scene is 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 esteem each other, has

come to trouble the original harmony. What is the cause of it--a

misunderstanding, apiece of neglect? Impossible to say, but it breaks

out notwithstanding. The andante is a scene of reproach and complaint,

but as between immortals. What loftiness in complaint, what dignity,

what feeling, what noble sweetness in reproach! 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 brightness of

reconciliation. Love, in its restored confidence, and as though in sly

self-testing, permits itself even gentle mocking and friendly

_badinage_. And the _finale_ brings us back to that tempered gaiety and

happy serenity, that supreme 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! We 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 enjoys. 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 typhon rises from

the yawning gulf, and the Titans beat upon the gates of the new empire.

A battle of giants begins. 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 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. Which is the greater, Mozart or Beethoven?

Idle question! The one is more perfect, the other more colossal. The

first gives you the peace of perfect art, beauty, at first sight. The

second gives you sublimity, 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; Beethoven 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 possibility, like the

flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its

spark.

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 impression. 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 individuality. 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. (Vandoeuvres. [Footnote: Also a village in the

neighborhood of Geneva.])--We are going down to Geneva to hear the

"Tannhaeuser" of Richard 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 poetical 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

conventional in singing, Wagner falls into another convention--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

the baton of the conductor. It is music depersonalized, neo-Hegelian

music--music multiple instead of individual. 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 hearing: 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,

naturalness 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. (Vandoeuvres).--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 myself. In this eternal self-chronicler and observer I seem to

see myself reflected with all my faults, indecision, discouragement,

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

discovered 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. Intellectually, I am more objective 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 dictated 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 the 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 improvisations 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-weather 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 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 speculatively, 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 embraces

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 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, Royer-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 evening, under a

starlit sky, a group of rustics under the windows of the salon employed

themselves in shouting disagreeable 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, idolatrously--opposing the self in them to

everything else, placing 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 independence, 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 thus claims, by abasing them, the rights of subjective

existence. 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 majesty 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.

Character and heart are the dominant elements in his individuality, 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 on the other, are

the two factors in his fame. In political economy, in literary or

political history, in personal action, Sismondi showed no

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 warm friend, worthy and honest in the widest sense of

terms, not brilliant, but inspiring trust and confidence by his

character, his principles and his virtues. More than this, he is the

best type of good Genevese liberalism, republican but not democratic,

Protestant but not Calvinist, human but not socialist, progressive but

without any sympathy with violence. He was a conservative without either

egotism or hypocrisy, a patriot without narrowness. In his theories he

was governed by experience 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 a 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 tinder 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 magnificent 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 tormented 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 contrast and

opposition all his replies and attacks, Rousseau is revolutionary:

Chateaubriand therefore writes his "Essay on Revolutions." Rousseau is

republican and Protestant; Chateaubriand will be royalist and Catholic.

Rousseau 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;

Chateaubriand will build the monument of it in order to break it in

Rene. Rousseau preaches Deism with all his eloquence in the "Vicaire

Savoyard;" Chateaubriand surrounds 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 role 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.'" Both the stories show a talent of 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 knowing or wishing it, Chateaubriand has been sincere, for Rene

is himself. This little sketch is in every respect a masterpiece. It is

not, like "Atala," spoilt artistically by intentions alien to the

subject, by being made the means of expression of a particular tendency.

Instead of taking a passion for Rene, indeed, future generations will

scorn and wonder at him; instead of a hero they will see in him a

pathological case; but the work itself, like the Sphinx, will endure. A

work of art will bear all kinds of interpretations; 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 whatever one asks

of it. Even in its forms of style, in the disdainful 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 character.

Carved, as it were, in material of the present century, with the tools

of classical art, "Rene" is the immortal cameo of Chateaubriand.

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, therefore, if he love truth, to hold his peace. The

conscientious 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 increasing 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 tendency. 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 paradise. 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. Flowers, shade, a fine view, a

sunset sky, joy, grace, feeling, 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 we 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--and grief also. Faith in the moral order, in the protecting

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 Germany, 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, Renan, Littre, Montegut,

Taillandier, by recalling to me some old and favorite subjects, made me

forget ten wasted years, and carried me back to my university 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 window, 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 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 l'ame, 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 struggle, 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 taming, 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 conversion 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 religious doctrine is given by its conception of

sin and the cure of sin.

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

infinite, prostrate before the ineffable. I also am torn sometimes by

this blind passion for life, these desperate struggles for happiness,

though more often I am a prey to complete exhaustion and taciturn

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 torture, deliverance

means death, and peace lies in sacrifice. If we would win our pardon, we

must kiss the fiery crucifix. Life is a series of agonies, a Calvary,

which we can only climb on bruised and aching knees. We seek

distractions; we wander away; we deafen and stupefy ourselves that we

may escape the test; we turn away oar 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 that 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 remains 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 obedience, 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 is 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

consciousness at the moment when it returns upon itself. I feel myself

then stripped and empty, like a convalescent who 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 annihilation, and the dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious

of the river of time passing before and in me, of the impalpable 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

enthusiasm, to the sacred savor of accomplished duty. November 28,

1859.--This evening I heard the first lecture of Ernest Naville

[Footnote: 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 men 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.] on "The Eternal Life." It was

admirably sure in touch, true, clear, and noble throughout. 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.

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

historically 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, Renan, 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 evolution 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 polemically

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 Catholicism 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 mathematical and his objects moral. His strength lies in

_mathematicizing_ 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 life, especially of the

spiritual life, he has no longer anything serviceable to say. Language

is for him a system of fixed signs; a man, a people, a book, are so many

geometrical 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 Christian doctrine of eternal life. As

an extempore performance--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, history 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.

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's means of

whatever kind under command--still order; to discipline one's habits,

one's effort, one's wishes; to organize 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. Aesthetic and moral beauty consist, the

first in a true perception of order, and the second in submission to it,

and in the realization of it, by, in, and around one's self. Order is

man's greatest need and his true well-being.

April 17, 1860.--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 careless, 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

inevitable 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 humility 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

endangered; 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 illness. 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 what you have to do;

reconcile yourself with the 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, enthusiastic, courageous, a noble writer. How

is it, then, that he has not more reputation? Because he is too pure;

because he is too uniformly ecstatic, fantastic, inspired--a mood which

soon palls on Frenchmen. Because he is too single-minded, candid,

theoretical, and speculative, 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 and _finesse_. 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 infinite. 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 egotistical. It is because Quinet

thinks himself so much of a Frenchman that he is it so little. These

ironical compensations of destiny are very familiar to me: I have often

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, with much less artistic power but more

historical sense. His principal gift is a great command of imagery and

symbolism. He seems to me a Goerres [Footnote: Joseph Goerres, a German

mystic and disciple of Schelling. He published, among other works,

"Mythengeschichte der Asiatischen Welt," and "Christliche Mystik."]

transplanted to Franche Comte, a sort of supernumerary 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'Italie," "Les Roumains"), 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 showing 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 indefinite; 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.

* * * * *

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 eternity 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 sermon 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

rationalistic point of view is a Christianity of _dignity_, not of

humility. Penitence, the struggles of weakness, austerity, find no place

in it. The law is effaced, holiness and mysticism evaporate; the

specifically Christian accent is wanting. 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

inappropriateness 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 forestalling the

future, just as the poetry of mature life consists often in going

backward to some golden age. Poetry is always in the distance. The whole

art of moral government 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 admiration. As a lecture it was

exquisite: if it was a recitation of prepared matter, it was admirable;

if an extempore performance, it was amazing. In the face of superiority

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 harvest of laurels. Cervantes, Ignatius Loyola, and the

heritage 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.

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 sentence! I do not know if I am partial, but

I find no occasion 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 sadness. 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 for

the more delicate griefs, and no intuition of the deeper mysteries of

tenderness, no religious suavity. Under a pretext of spirituality we are

always checking legitimate aspirations. We have lost the mystical sense;

and what is religion without mysticism? A rose without perfume.

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 nightmare; 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 judgment. In this also consists

self-deliverance, self-enfranchisement, 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; everything 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 which is subtle and powerful may penetrate

all these potentialities, 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-abandonment, 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 myself. 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 l'effroi du bonheur et la soif du poison."

It is the Nemesis which dogs the steps of life, the secret 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 variation of the

antipathy to moral light and regenerative truth? Does not sin also

create a thirst for death, a growing 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 journey, here I am

under the roof of my friends, in their hospitable 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. Distant 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

tranquility 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 morning 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 making 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 turrets. Higher up, in front of me, rises the dark

profile of the Molkenkur; higher still, in relief against the dazzling

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! _O 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 intentions 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 with the golden eggs

becomes unfruitful as soon as she tries to find out why her eggs are

golden. The consciousness of consciousness 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 action 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 diminished 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-destroying.

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 pommiers, coverts de leurs fleurs etoileens,

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 Rosenkrantz

on "Hegel's Logic," and have run through a few articles in the

Reviews.... The limitation of the French mind consists in the

insufficiency 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 is not completed by a real

hospitality of thought.... 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 myself 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 repulsion, 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 mathematicians, 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 [Footnote: The following passage

from Sainte-Beuve may be taken as a kind of answer by anticipation to

this accusation, which Amiel brings more than once in the course of the

Journal:

"Toute nation livree a elle-meme et a son propre genie se fait une

critique litteraire qui y est conforme. La France en son beau temps a eu

la sienne, qui ne ressemble ni a celle de l'Allemagne ni a celle de ses

autres voisins--un peu plus superficielle, dira-t-on--je ne le crois

pas: mais plus vive, moins chargee d'erudition, moins theorique et

systematique, plus confiante au sentiment immediat du gout. _Un peu de

chaque chose et rien de l'ensemble, a la Francaise_: telle etait la

devise de Montaigne et telle est aussi la devise de la critique

francaise. Nous ne sommes pas _synthetiques_, comme diraient 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 authors 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, Fenelon, Rollin, Racine _fils_, Voltaire, La Harpe,

Marmontel, Delille, Fontanes, and Chateaubriand in one aspect, are the

typical names of this tradition, the creators and maintainers of this

common literary _fonds_, this "sorte de circulation courante a l'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

l'imagination tout son espace et a l'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 trouve plus, et je la

regrette."--(_Chateaubriand et son Groupe Litteraire_, vol. i. p. 311.)

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 homme 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 Ouvrages

del'Esprit_."]--because they have no _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 murmur of the flies. There is something very

striking in this calm. The middle of the day is like the middle of the

night. Life seems suspended just when it is most intense. 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 yesterday in a house near

by.... The same sunlight floods both the book and nature, the doubting

poet and the believing 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

contemplation! Slumber of the will, lapses of the vital force, indolence

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. It 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 enough to make me forget every desire, and to quench in me

both the wish to produce and the power to execute. Intellectual

Epicureanism is always threatening to overpower 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 luttent; ce sont

Ceux dont un dessein ferme emplit l'ame et le front,

Ceux qui d'un haut destin gravissent l'apre 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!"

[Footnote: Victor Hugo, "Les Chatiments."]

_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!

"Il se fit de sa vie une plus male idee:

Sa douleur d'un seul trait ne l'avait pas videe;

Mais, adorant de Dieu le severe dessein,

Il sut la porter pleine et pure dans son sein,

Et ne se hatant pas de la repandre toute,

Sa resignation l'epancha goutte a goutte,

Selon la circonstance et le besoin d'autrui,

Pour tout vivifier sur terre autour de lui."

[Footnote: Epilogue of "Jocelyn."]

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, "O 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.

August 9, 1862.--Life, which seeks its own continuance, 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 hopelessly 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 impersonal 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 [Greek: antichoon], to speak with

Pythagoras.

November 7, 1862.--How malign, infectious, and unwholesome is the

eternal smile of that indifferent criticism, that attitude of ironical

contemplation, which corrodes and demolishes everything, that mocking

pitiless temper, which holds itself aloof from every personal duty and

every vulnerable affection, and cares only to understand without

committing itself to action! Criticism become a habit, a fashion, and a

system, means the destruction 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, irreverence, selfish

individualism--and it ends in social atomism. 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

ourselves 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 discussion. 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 certitude 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 those 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.

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 deception. 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 humiliation 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 psychology--just as the

colored pictures of Germany are elementary painting. And yet with all

this, you have a double-distilled and often sophistical refinement: just

as savages are by no means simple. The fine side 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 rotundo_, in _cothurnus_, or sometimes on

stilts. And what consummate 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 somebody, 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 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 guiding 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 monsters. 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 enlightening

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 Christianization 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 righteousness 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

responsible, 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 fancifulness 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 contained in the human heart.

The great and salutary idea of the book, is that honesty 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 Javert, 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 exaggeration 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 Hugo, because he

makes it the center of his aesthetic system; 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 has Victor Hugo! He

is master of all the dialects contained in 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 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 dreams; 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 Hippogriff 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, 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

gallicized 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

inexhaustible, 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 behind 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 rebuilding a world of his

own creation, and a world rather Hindoo than Hellenic.

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 daylight, 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 confused 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 action. 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 myself 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 the least thing calms me. I have often

surprised in my self the wish for death, and yet my ambitions for

happiness 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 which

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 almost 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 name, nor to give any shape or distinctness to my

reminiscence.

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. Prom 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 produced 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, invincible--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 demonstration 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, 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 faith 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 long since I have ceased to

think about my own metaphysic, and since I have lived in the thoughts of

others, that I am ready even to ask myself whether the crystallization

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 cherish 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 peaceful 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

wisdom 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 the virtuous man, are the signs of a false religious

conception. 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 conventional

inequalities, with arbitrary privilege and historical 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 principle 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 followed 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

but a new caprice, a simple stage decoration ready to disappear 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 passing

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 comforts 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 savant, 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. Everything 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" 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 spontaneous, 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 utterances, 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 storyteller, with his amber-like

delicacy and brilliancy, is making 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 running down Luther

and the Reformation in favor of the Renaissance. Of the troubles of

conscience he seems to know nothing. His supreme tribunal is reason. At

bottom 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 off 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 facon, 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 townsman, 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 existence, when I see with what

ease I become a stranger to myself, and fall back once more into the

condition of a blank sheet, a _tabula rasa_. Life wears such a

dream-aspect 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, indifferent,

partial, or intellectual in the combinations of one's life. For I feel

that the things of the soul, our immortal 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

OH 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 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 heroine 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 and 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 volume again right and

left with a growing sense of attraction. Everything is heart, force,

impulse, in these pages which have the power of sincerity and a

brilliance of suffused poetry. A great and strong soul, a clear mind,

distinction, elevation, 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 Guerin'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 perpetual 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 temper demands. Men

must have more air, more room, mere 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. [Footnote: The Vouache is the hill which bounds the

horizon of Geneva to the south-west.] 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 transparent

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

activity: 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 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

forgetfulness, 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 innumerable 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 penetrating

far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless 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 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. Manufacturing Americanism and Caesarian

democracy tend equally to the multiplying of crowds, governed by

appetite, applauding charlatanism, vowed to the worship of mammon 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 altars 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, whatever 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,

[Footnote: The saying of Pascal's alluded to is in the _Pensees_, 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 hommes."] I think, says, the more one develops, the more

difference one observes 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 have 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 democracy. As soon as difference of quality is,

in politics, officially equal to zero, the authority of age, of

knowledge, and of function disappears.

The only counterpoise of pure equality is military discipline. In

military uniform, in the police court, in prison, or on the execution

ground, there is no reply possible. 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 possible 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

proclaim 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 atomism. Nationality,

public spirit, tradition, national manners, 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. 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 succumbing at one time or another to the rash conditions which

have been made for its existence. A man who condemns himself to live

upon the tight-rope must inevitably fall; one has no need to be a

prophet to foresee such a result.

"[Greek: Aridton men udor]," 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, then, 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 _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 philosopher the beautiful is the

rule, the law, the universal foundation of things, to which every form

returns as soon 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 privileged 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 past, and have not

even the inanimate witnesses of our life voice and language for us?

Glion, Villars, Albisbrunnen, the Righi, the Chamossaire, and a hundred

other places, have left 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 manteau, 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 companion in good and

evil fortune? It reminds me of that centaur's tunic which could not be

torn off without carrying away the flesh and blood of its wearer. I am

unwilling to give it up; whatever gratitude for the past, and whatever

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 the past tense sounds the knell of our

illusions as to ourselves. 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 manhood nor of fatherhood! How sad it is

to feel the mind declining before it has done its work, and the body

growing 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! Every man

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

tender modesty which veils the features and shrouds in mystery 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.

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.

_Non 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.

Whenever a man, under the influence of such a diabolical passion,

surrenders himself to these instincts of the wild or venomous beast he

must seem to the angels a madman--a lunatic, who kindles his own Gehenna

that he may consume the world in it, or as much of it as his devilish

desires can lay hold upon. Wickedness is forever beginning 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 wickedness 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 themselves 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 restless presentiments,

our unrealized dreams, the wounds inflicted upon our ideal, the

dissatisfied languor, the vain 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 on 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 gesture, 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.

August 8, 1865. (_Gryon sur 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.

A last look at this blue night and boundless landscape. Jupiter is just

setting on the counterscarp of the Dent du Midi. Prom the starry vault

descends an invisible snow-shower of 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. Rest and refreshment, 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 dang l'Eglise et dans la Revolution," upon the letter of

Rousseau to Beaumont; his three volumes 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 transforms 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 half sincere, only half in earnest. We feel

that his talent has laid him the wager of Carneades; it will lose no

cause, 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,

whatever 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 identical; 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 character are needed. The

Greeks--those artists of the spoken or written word--were artificial by

the time of Ulysses, 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 conflict. 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 Toepffer, reverie before "Rene," literary botany

before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin de S. Pierre,

the democratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political

discussion 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 the public. He formed a new French style--the close,

chastened, passionate, interwoven style we know so well. Nothing indeed

of Rousseau 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 Stael, 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 Rousseau 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 differently 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 unconscious 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 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 conception. 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 intelligence

sums up the whole in an instant. Time is then the successive dispersion

of being, just as speech is the successive 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,

boundless 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 measure 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 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 individual worth. Like a child upon whom a

hundred thousand francs have been bestowed, he thinks she is multiplying

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 the 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-forgetfulness, self-distraction; he has a secret horror of all

which makes him feel his own littleness; 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 superficial 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 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

absolute; 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 universal 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 remain

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 up the number of human consumers or producers; but he

interests nobody but the economist and the statistician, who take the

heap of sand as a whole into consideration, without troubling themselves

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 individuals. 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 with the current, who does not guide himself according to

higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions--such a man is a

mere article of the 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 weathercock 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 Boieldieu. 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 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 perceive 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 outwardly 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 themselves, and all

without success; others foresee the inevitable result, and by a timely

resignation save themselves a barren and fruitless effort. Since we

cannot be happy, 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 simplest 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

opposition 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 forgettings, has to be faced again

and again, and we fall back into prose, into commonness, into vulgarity.

How melancholy, how humiliating! The poets are wise in withdrawing 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 this 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 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 Spitzbergen, to Norway,

to the Ossianic countries of 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 in near protectors. When the great world is shut

off 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 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 personal 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 [Greek: eleutheroi] and the [Greek: banauphoi], 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

individual. Tell me what you are, and I will tell you what you are

worth. "God and my Right;" 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 one

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 himself, 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, a force which governs itself, a liberty which affirms

and regulates itself, according to the type of true dignity. Such an

ideal is closely akin to the Roman type of _dignitas 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 person, of his language, of his manners; watchfulness over his

body and over his soul; dominion over his instincts and his 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 identified 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 individual 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.

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 peut_ 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 impose 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 whether 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. Sometimes 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.

All this anxiety is intolerable to those humble little 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 contrary to his wish

and his opinion. And yet such is perpetually the case in life. We all of

us pay for the faults of the few.

Human solidarity is a fact more evident and more certain 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 pantheistic and

materialist conceptions, are now but so much forcing of an open door, so

much slaying of the slain. As soon as we cease to glorify this

imperceptible point of conscience, and to uphold the value of it, the

individual becomes naturally a mere atom in the human mass, which is 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 of 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 _proces-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 affirmation, that it subsists

by the positive element in it, by definite belief; the pure critical

element dissolves it. Protestantism 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, Protestantism disappears; 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 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 individualists are illogical in imagining

that they can keep Protestantism and do away with authority.

It is a question of method which separates the two camps. I am

fundamentally separated from both. As I understand it, Christianity is

above all religions, and religion is not a method, it is a life, a

higher and supernatural 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 these

ecclesiastical struggles. Whether the one party or the other gain the

majority and the victory, what is essential 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 shall 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 catechism 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 not this its true goal and

consummation?

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 trivialities,

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 melancholy 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 admirable. 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 compliment. 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 a 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, 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 creatures 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. Revolting

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 massacre 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 relation of man to the animal becomes that of people

to people and man to man.

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 unnecessary murder and torture are cowardice and even crime.

The animal renders a service of utility; man in return owes it a need of

protection 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 excessive

detachment of the individual from all received prejudices 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

Renaissance, 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.

Doubt is the accomplice of tyranny. "If a people will not believe it

must obey," said Tocqueville. All liberty implies dependence, and has

its conditions; this is what negative 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 versa_. 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 observation. 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 waiting? 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 imperfectly, 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 surrounding 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 lacking in

proportion and breadth; it is one-sided, and wants a center; it has, as

it were, been painted from too near.

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 perpetually 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 pleasure 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 metamorphoses, 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 converted into

simultaneousness, plurality into unity, and all the changing phenomena

must be traced back to their essence. There are ten men in me, according

to time, place, surrounding, and occasion; and in their restless

diversity I am forever escaping myself. Therefore, whatever I may reveal

of my past, of my Journal, or of myself, 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 polarization; fluid, virtual, and

therefore latent--latent even in manifestation, and absent even in

presentation. I am a 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 Muetter_,"

[Footnote: "_Die Muetter_"--an allusion to a strange and enigmatical,

but very effective conception in "Faust" (Part II. Act I. Scene v.) _Die

Muetter_ 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, Muetter, die ihr thront

Im Graenzenlosen, ewig einsam wohnt,

Und doch gesellig! Euer haupt umschweben

Des Lebens Bilder, regsam, ohne Leben."]

where sleeps that which neither lives nor dies, that which has neither

movement, nor change, nor extension, nor form, and which lasts when all

else passes away.

"Dans l'eternel azur de l'insondable espace

S'enveloppe de paix notre globe agitee:

Homme, enveloppe ainsi tes jours, reve qui passe,

Du calme firmament de ton eternite."

(H. P. AMIEL, _Penseroso_.)

Geneva, January 11, 1867.

"Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, Labuntar anni...."

I hear the drops of my life falling distinctly one by 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 religions 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 einmal war, in allem Glanz und Schein,

Es regt sich dort; denn es will ewig sein.

Und ihr vertheilt es, allgewaltige Maechte,

Zum Zelt des Tages, zum Gewoelb' der Naechte.

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--(_Seven_ A. 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 glistering 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, o jeunes filles,

Cueillir des bleuets dans les bles!"

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 _Weltmuede_, 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 sacrifice, his gentleness should be taken to mean

privation patiently borne rather than resignation. In a word, he submits

to an existence in which he feels no joy, and he cannot hide from

himself that all the alleviations with 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 himself 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 responsibility, 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 willingly 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 waverings, are they not temptations of the soul?

September 6, 1867, _Weissenstein_. [Footnote: Weissenstein is a high

point in the Jura, above Soleure.] (_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 Toedi 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 Spannoerter, the Titlis, then the Bernese _colossi_ from

the Wetterhorn to the Diablerets, then the 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 composition 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

mountains 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 interests, 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 townswoman to the core, and feels

herself out of place in this great nature, which probably 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 amusingly drawn by

Toepffer. Character: _naive_ conceit. Country: 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 center point of the world, and

leads Frenchmen to neglect geography and languages. The ordinary French

townsman 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

individualities.

_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.

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 understanding 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 philosophical meeting

at the house of Edouard Claparede. [Footnote: Edouard Claparede, a

Genevese naturalist, born 1832, died 1871.] The question on the order of

the day was the nature of sensation. Claparede pronounced for the

absolute subjectivity of all experience--in other words, for pure

idealism--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 without suspecting it,

believing all the time that we are lookers-on. It is our nouemenon 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 consciousness. 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 l'ombre d'un esprit

Qui tracait l'ombre d'um systeme

Avec l'ombre de l'ombre meme."

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

responsibility 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 cosmogonic 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 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 horizontal

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 conscience, 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 annihilation. 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 earthliness. These eighty thousand

daily births, of which statistics tell us, represent as it were an

effusion of innocence and freshness, struggling not only against the

death of the 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

accumulation 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

motherhood, I think that love itself would not be enough to prevent men

from devouring each other--men, that is to say, such as human passions

have made them. The angels have no need of birth and death as

foundations for their life, because their life is heavenly.

February 16, 1868.--I have been finishing About's "Mainfroy (Les

Mariages 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 detachment 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

innumerabiles_, 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 perpetuity; the spectacle of society offers

him an endless _noce de Gamache_. [Footnote: _Noce de Gamache_--"repas

tres somptueux."--Littre. The allusion, of course, is to Don Quixote,

Part II. chap. xx.--"Donde se cuentan las bodas de Bamacho el rico, con

el suceso de Basilio el pobre."] 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 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 considered, 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 restorative. 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 and

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

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 moment into its own

image; and I have only to turn my attention upon myself at such a time

to be able to understand 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 sometimes 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 individuality, 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

subject 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 citizen, inscribed upon the roll of a particular town

or a particular 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 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 contemplation

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 intelligence

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 exultation 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 sight 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 misunderstanding 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 mechanical 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 supernatural 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 as often as not ends in the defeat of zeal,

virtue, and devotion, and the success of crime, stupidity, and

selfishness. 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 often 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 necessity 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? Everything 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 accident 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 tabulating 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 musicians 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' dance is also nothing but an

aberration of the inner consciousness, and that the philosopher is in

the right of it as against the general credulity. Is it not even enough

simply 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 religious 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 themselves 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

yield 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 unfortunates!"

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 manquez de charite,

Tremblez a mon supplice etrange:

Ce n'est point sa divinite,

C'est l'humanite que Dieu venge!"

[Footnote: The quotation is from Quinet's "Ahasverus" (first published

1833), that strange _Welt-gedicht_, which the author himself described

as "l'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_.]

It is better 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 suppose that such a privilege is possible,

when everything 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 cultivation and experience.

Absolute individualism is an absurdity. A man may be isolated in his own

particular and temporary _milieu_, but every one of our thoughts or

feelings finds, has found, and will find, its echo in humanity. Such an

echo is immense and far-resounding in the case of 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

influence, just as any movement whatever may be metamorphosed, 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 Deutschland"). 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!

A short article by Sainte-Beuve, Scherer, Renan, Victor Cherbuliez,

gives one more pleasure, and makes one think and 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 carpet of the plain is dappled by passing shadows thrown upon it

by the clouds; the landscape has the charm of delicate tint and a sort

of languid grace. Already I am full of a sense of well-being, I am

tasting the joys of that contemplative 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 affirmative; I feel myself in

harmony with nature and with surroundings, 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 submittere 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 existed on a large scale? The religion

of sin, of repentance, and reconciliation--the religion of the new birth

and of eternal life--is not a religion to be ashamed of. In spite of all

the aberrations of fanaticism, all the superstitions of formalism, all

the ugly superstructures of hypocrisy, all the fantastic puerilities of

theology, the gospel has modified the world and consoled mankind.

Christian humanity is not much better than pagan humanity, but it would

be much worse without a religion, and without 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 catechisms, 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

multitude 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 to everything that is not first-rate. As we can

no longer without offense judge men according to a certain recognized

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 equal 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

dissimilarity 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 material universe,

and presents a spectacle not of diminution nor of augmentation but

simply of constant metamorphosis, 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 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. The same

difference would hold good between nation and nation, so that the object

of the simultaneous or successive competition of mankind in history

would be the extraction 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 morning. On all sides a

depressing outlook, and within, disgust with self.

_Ten_ P.M.--Visits and a walk. I have spent the evening alone. Many

things to-day have taught me lessons of wisdom. 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 listened 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 harmony 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 have pinned me so

closely to my own individual existence, shall I ever be able to reascend

into the region of pure intelligence, to enter again upon the

disinterested 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 in forgetting all the needs which

bind me to earth and to humanity? Shall I ever become pure spirit? Alas!

I cannot persuade myself to believe it possible for an instant. 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-continued regret, melancholy neither to be

consoled nor confessed, 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 weariness 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 submit to the general

order, to accept, to resign ourselves, and to do still what we can. It

is our self-will, our aspirations, our dreams, that must be sacrificed.

We must give up the hope of happiness once for all! Immolation of the

self--death 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 glory of

God.

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 which 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! "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 condemn us, God is greater than our

heart."

August 27, 1868.--To-day I took up the "Penseroso" [Footnote: "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 _Journal Intime_, is prefaced by a motto

translated from Shelley--"Ce n'est pas la science qui nous manque, a

nous modernes; nous l'avons surabondamment.... Mais ce que nous avons

absorbe nous absorbe.... Ce qui nous manque c'est la poesie de la vie."]

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 appearance 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 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 kindly, 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 provision for the winter. Here the herds of milch-cows

have already come down to the level of the _chalet_, and next week they

will be lower than we are. This living barometer is a warning to us that

the time has come to say farewell 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 Secretan

[Footnote: Charles Secretan, a Lausanne professor, the friend of Vinet,

born 1819. He published "Lecons sur la Philosophie de Leibnitz,"

"Philosophie de la Liberte," "La Raison et le Christianisme," etc.]

"Recherches sur la Methode," 1857; "Precis elementaire de Philosophie,"

1868. The philosophy of Secretan is the philosophy of Christianity,

considered as the one true religion. Subordination of nature to

intelligence, 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 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 dogmatizes 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 consists 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 nec 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 and looks are a kind of

testament. They have a solemn 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

demonstrative 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 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 disappointments 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 explainer.

"Man is what his love is," and follows the fortunes of his love.

* * * * *

The beautiful souls of the world have an art 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 transformation 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 life 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.

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

spontaneous. What is essential and original in it is the practical

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 consciousness of Jesus.

The sacred sense of his absolute union with God through perfect love and

self-surrender, this profound, invincible, and tranquil faith of his,

has become a religion; the faith of Jesus has become the faith of

millions 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 Christianity 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 disentangled 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 principle of the eternal gospel, we shall have reached our

goal, for in it is the _punctum saliens_ of pure religion.

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 illuminations 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 extraordinarily 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.

From the point of view of the ideal, humanity is _triste_ 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 multitude. 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, melancholy, 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 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 foundations 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 Rhone, 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, for 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 nothingness of

our joys, the emptiness of our existence, and the futility of our

ambitions, filled me with a quiet disgust. From regret to disenchantment

I floated on to Buddhism, to universal weariness. Ah, the hope of a

blessed immortality 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 sadness 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--perhaps 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 of 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, discouragement,

vengeance, indignation, and ambition, which rise one after another to

tempt and trouble the heart, swelling with the sap of the spring. O 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 dazzling under their

silver haze. Sensations of all 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 emotion,

for life, dreams of happiness and of love. A passionate 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

conquering, 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. O 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 impetuous 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, Hymenae!"

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 is nearest the truth, and which--Leibnitz or Schopenhauer--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 existence 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 individuality is the obstacle to all repose, and he

longs for the dissolution 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. What 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 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 [Footnote: Etienne

Vacherot, 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 Democratie" (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 as a severe 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.]

book "La Religion," 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 correction. 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 derogation. I

myself incline to this solution. To me religion is life before God and

in God.

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

thousand 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 subjection to passions which are the diminutives of

madness; in other words, because the soul of a woman has something

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 literature, 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 education 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 [Footnote: At

this period the controversy between the orthodox party and "Liberal

Christianity" was at its height, both in Geneva and throughout

Switzerland.] is that its conception of holiness is a frivolous one, or,

what comes to the same thing, its conception of sin is a superficial

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 worldliness. 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 sentiment, and affront the

delicacy of conscience by the indiscreet familiarities they take with

the great mysteries of the inner life. They seem to be mere clever

special 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 language 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 Christian 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 movement

is. The universal life is a sum total, of which the 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.

Hirn admits three ultimate principles: [Footnote: Gustave-Adolphe Hirn,

a French physicist, born near Colmar, 1815, became a corresponding

member of the Academy of Sciences in 1867. The book of his to which

Amiel refers is no doubt _Consequences philosophiques at metaphysiques

de la thermodynamique, Analyse elementaire de l'univers_ (1869).] the

atom, the force, the soul; the force which acts upon atoms, the soul

which acts upon force. Probably he distinguishes between anonymous 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, and 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 up on natural religion, or the religion of the moral

consciousness. M.M. Reville, Conquerel, Fontanes, Buisson, [Footnote:

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. Renan's "Vie de Jesus" in 1864.

Ferdinand-Edouard Buisson, a liberal Protestant, originally a professor

at Lausanne, was raised to the important function 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.]

accept this logical outcome. They are the advance-guard of Protestantism

and the laggards of free thought.

Their mistake is not seeing that all institutions rest upon a legal

fiction, and that every living thing involves 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

investigation. 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 mistake. 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 assembly 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. Suppose 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 courteous, 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 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 Renan's "St. Paul." Analyzed to the bottom, the writer is

a freethinker, but a free thinker whose flexible imagination still

allows him the delicate epicurism of religious emotion. In his eyes the

man who will not lend himself to these graceful fancies is vulgar, 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 concludes 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 Renaissance 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 something 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, transformed 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 wearing away of the mind which

befalls the man whose vocation 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 intolerable 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 ripples on a wave, like the convolutions of a

cloud. My personality has the least possible admixture of individuality.

I am to the great majority of men what the circle is to rectilinear

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 understand all sides. It is not only

indolence which prevents me from drawing conclusions; it is a sort of a

secret aversion 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 let think, are maxims which are equally dear to

me. My 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 absolute 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 Schopenhauer. 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 misfortune 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 absolute detachment of

mind In the very midst of the nineteenth-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 resignation 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 their rights, and insist even upon the

first place.

August 29, 1869.--Schopenhauer preaches impersonality, 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 positive improvement in a human being. Only the appearances are

refined; there is no change below the surface. Perhaps he confuses

temperament, character, and individuality? I incline to think that

individuality is fatal and primitive, that temperament reaches far back,

but is alternable, and that character is more recent and susceptible of

voluntary or involuntary modifications. Individuality is a matter of

psychology, temperament, a matter of sensation 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 "Lichtstrahlem" 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 influence expression becomes

concentrated, colored, and strengthened, 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 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 temptation, why

return to it, after having judged and conquered 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

religious fervor. Nature is indeed for me a Maia; and I look at her, as

it were, with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skeptical.

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 voeux,

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 Severus. He died in harness,

and up to the evening before his last day he still wrote, overcoming the

sufferings of the body 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 melancholy, befitting a

funeral oration over one who was a master 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 distant, 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. Infallibility 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 mastery of all possible shades of appreciation. And

Sainte-Beuve joined to this infinitely refined culture a prodigious

memory, and an incredible multitude of facts and anecdotes 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 Buddhism 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 annihilation that we

have to aim at. Personal consciousness being the root of all our

troubles, we ought to avoid the temptation to it and the possibility of

it as diabolical and abominable. 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, so 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 benefactors are

the poets, the artists, the inventors, the apostles and all pure hearts.

Her masters are the Caesars, the Constantines, 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 representing 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. Everything 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 Boese_ of Kant. The independence which is the condition of

individuality is at the same time the eternal temptation of the

individual. That which makes us beings makes us also sinners.

Sin is, then, in our very marrow. It circulates in us like the blood in

our veins, it is mingled with all our substance, [Footnote: This is one

of the passages which rouses M. Renan's wonder: "Voila la grande

difference," he writes, "entre l'education catholique et l'education

protestante. Ceux qui comme moi ont recu une education catholique en ont

garde de profonds vestiges. Mais ces vestiges ne sont pas des dogmes, ce

sont des reves. Une fois ce grand rideau de drap d'or, bariole de soie,

d'indienne et de calicot, par lequel le catholicisme nous masque la vue

du monde, une fois, dis-je ce rideau dechire, on voit l'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'austerite intellectuelle analogue au pessimisme slave."--(_Journal des

Debats_, 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 mail 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 with experience, like Amiel.] Or rather I 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-indulgence 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. _Principiis obsta_--this maxim dutifully followed would preserve

us 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, and therefore contrary to order, ungovernable and

negative. It is this foundation which Christianity calls the natural

man. But the savage which is within us, and constitutes 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. O Plato! O Pythagoras!

ages ago you heard these harmonies--surprised these moments of inward

ecstacy--knew these divine transports! If music thus carries us to

heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is perfection,

perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven. This world of quarrels

and 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

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 concert of the

God of love.

March 30, 1870.--Certainly, nature is unjust and shameless, without

probity, and without faith. Her only alternatives are gratuitous favor

or mad aversion, and her only 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 justice he maintains that the injustice

all around him is but an appearance, a mystery, a cheat, and that

justice _will_ be done. _Fiat justitia, pereal 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, conscience 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 conscience on this point. Nature is not just; we

are the products of nature: why are we always claiming and prophesying

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 great passion,

but it is 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 sufficiently 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

individuality 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 morality. Below the virtue which is

evangelical and sexless, there is a virtue of sex. And this virtue of

sex is the occasion 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 justice 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 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 chastising 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 subdued 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? "O

Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?" By long

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 religion was born--a new mode, that is to say, of

explaining 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. O 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 incomprehensible;

they speak with tongues. A wild intoxication of self-sacrifice, contempt

for death, 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 unconquerable

sense in him of an indissoluble union with God, Jesus, on his cross,

kindled an inextinguishable fire and revolutionized 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

humanity 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--that is to say, it alone preserves and

defends 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 the guarantee 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 changing form is the result of its

intellectual labor. The unconscious adhesions, the confused intuitions,

the obscure presentiments, 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 immanence nor for

transcendence taken alone.

May 9, 1870.--Disraeli, in his new novel, "Lothair," shows that the two

great forces of the present are Revolution 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 expresses 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 the lawful and the

useful, to reconstitute, that is to say, a lay religion, before anything

politically solid could be built.

Liberalism is merely feeding upon abstractions, when it persuades itself

that liberty is possible without free individuals, 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 abdication 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 ultramontane 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 by the idea of an

exterior revelation, cleverly made use of by a patient priesthood.

But what astonishes me is the short-sight of the statesmen of the south,

who do not see that the question of questions is the religious question,

and even now do not recognize that a liberal state is wholly

incompatible with an anti-liberal religion, and almost equally

incompatible with the absence of religion. They confound accidental

conquests 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 irreconcilables, and the ultramontanes, 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 believe that God wills man to be free but also

pure; it will 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 extraordinary. Thus religion attracts

more devotion in proportion 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 religious instinct demands and

pursues; it is mystery which constitutes the essence of worship, the

power of proselytism. 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 pursuit 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 Catholicism.

Apparently no positive religion can survive the supernatural 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 for 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 to them in an attractive form.

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 something 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 supposing all your

ambitions were gratified, everything would still be vanity," then he

comes to see that a little blindness is necessary if life is to be

carried on, and that illusion is the universal spring of movement.

Complete disillusion 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 meaning 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 disappeared, time and form have ceased to be for this

enfranchised 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 incompatible 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.

July 2, 1870.--One of the vices of France is the frivolity which

substitutes public conventions for truth, and absolutely ignores

personal dignity and the majesty of conscience. The French are ignorant

of the A B C of individual liberty, and still show an essentially

catholic intolerance 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

independence; 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 separate conviction or a personal

value.

July 20, 1870 (_Bellalpe_).--A marvelous day. The panorama 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 uppermost 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 enthusiasm. 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.

_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 Moench, and the

Jungfrau. The near representative of the group is the Aletschhorn,

whence diverge like so many ribbons the different Aletsch 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.

Bound 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 pursues me? I have

just read a series of scientific books (Bronn on the "Laws of

Palaeontology," Karl Ritter 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 illusion--and the dumb

stupor which enwraps me is full of anguish. Isis lilts the corner of her

veil, and he who perceives 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 cravings 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 inevitable! Shroud away out of sight the flattering delusions of

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 superfluity?

Scherer's phrase comes back to me, "We must accept ourselves as we are."

September 8, 1870 (_Zurich_).--All the exiles are returning 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 upon it as a

seed-sowing. Elsewhere such a form of government presupposes free men;

in France it is and must be an instrument of instruction and protection.

France has once more placed sovereignty in the hands of universal

suffrage, as though the multitude were already enlightened, judicious,

and reasonable, 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 change is not impossible. Let us wait for it with

sympathy, but also with caution.

September 12, 1870 (_Basle_).--The old Rhine is murmuring 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 indefatigable 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

student, then as a professor. Now I return to it at the downward 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 manifestation of all

possibilities, the inexhaustible play of 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 conception 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 Maia would be

subordinate 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'oeuvre_. All that can be expected from the most perfect institutions

is that they should make it possible for individual excellence 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 government can manufacture. It is of no use,

therefore, to excite 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 importance 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. Resigned and indefatigable, she goes on

without complaining, till she drops.

Lives such as hers prove something: that the true ignorance 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 kingdom 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 thing. 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 practical 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 thousands 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 of Louis XV. Our cynics and railers are mere egotists, who

stand aloof from the common duty, and in their indolent remoteness 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.

November 16, 1870.--We are struck by something bewildering 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 tender piety and a religious awe and shyness. The whole

experience 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 summing 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 compared 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 overwhelmed 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 bottomless 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 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 profitably 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 improvement.

* * * * *

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, temporary 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

deformities 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 many candidates for heaven, galley-slaves on earth.

"Nous ramons notre vie en attendant le port."

Moliere said that reasoning banished reason. It is possible 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 unattainable goal, a

noble madness, but not reason; it is homesickness 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 universe, and represents the divine

thought at least as clearly as a flower or a solar system. Harmony seeks

nothing outside 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 "Chansons 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 l'Alouette,"

the "Chant du Retour," 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, "Helvetie." 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 tricks of the most dainty and brilliant kind. Juste Olivier has the

passion we might imagine a fairy to have for delicate 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 inexorable; 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 physiological

school, and the intrusion of technology into literature inaugurated by

Balzac and Stendhal, explain the underlying aridity of which one is

sensible in these pages, and which seems to choke one like the gases

from a manufactory of mineral products. The book is instructive in the

highest 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 l'Americaine_, as different as

possible from Greek art, giving us algebra instead of life, the formula

instead of the image, the exhalations of the crucible 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 educate each other,

while having apparently nothing in view but their own selfish interests.

It was France who made the Germany of the present, by attempting its

destruction during ten generations; it is Germany who will regenerate

contemporary France, by the effort to crush her. Revolutionary 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 interests 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 before--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 instrument 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 bring

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 German aesthetics. Their elegance has no grace in it;

and 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 existence. 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 startling and distasteful in this delicate

_milieu_; they at once destroy the common work, the cloud palace, the

magical 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 knowing it, a sort of concert for eyes and

ears, an improvised work of art. By the instinctive collaboration of

everybody 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, I 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 day reality denies to

us, and of which art alone gives us a glimpse.

April 28, 1871.--For a psychologist it is extremely interesting to be

readily and directly conscious of the complications of one's own

organism and the play of its several parts. It seems to me that the

sutures of my being are becoming just loose enough to allow me at once a

clear perception of myself as a whole and a distinct sense of my own

brittleness. A feeling like this makes personal existence a perpetual

astonishment and curiosity. Instead of only seeing the world which

surrounds me, I analyze myself. Instead of being single, all of a piece,

I become legion, multitude, 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 spiritual equilibrium, to withdraw within the

soul. Thereupon our bodily constitution itself becomes the object 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 consciousness 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 subsists--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 multitude, 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 reaching 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 Baboeuf is its god.

[Footnote: Mably, the Abbe Mably, 1709-85, one of the precursors of the

revolution, the professor of a cultivated and classical communism 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 conspiracy

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 practical

agitation with his "Manifeste des Egaux," issued April 1796.]

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

_Internationale_ is merely the pioneer of Russian 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 within 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, because 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 have 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

necessary 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-training, 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 intolerable 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 pessimism. 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 understanding 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 personal nobility, not in love; his

standard is aesthetic, not moral. He ignores holiness, and has never

allowed himself 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 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 is in the sense of obligation 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, Renan'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 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

epicureanism of the imagination, delighting itself in an aesthetic

spectacle, for the struggles of a soul passionately in search of truth.

In Renan there are still some remains of priestly _ruse_; he strangles

with sacred cords. His tone of contemptuous 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. [Footnote: "'Persifflez les pharisaismes, mais parlez droit aux

honnetes gens' me dit Amiel, avec une certaine aigreur. Mon Dieu, que

les honnetes gens sont souvent exposes a etre des pharisiens sans le

savoir!"--(M. Renan's article, already quoted).]

_Later_.--To understand is to be conscious of the fundamental 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

interpretation. 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.

August 25, 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. I dare not breathe for fear of

putting the dream to flight--a dream traversed by angels.

"Comme autrefois j'entends dans l'ether infini

La musique du temps et l'hosanna des mondes."

In these heavenly moments the cry of Pauline rises to one's lips.

[Footnote: "Polyeuete," Act. V. Scene v.

"Mon epoux en mourant m'a laisse ses lumieres;

Son sang dont tes bourreaux viennent de me couvrir

M'a dessille les yeux et me les vient d'ouvrir.

Je vois, je sais, je crois----"]

"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 become 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 melancholy 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 Chailly 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 mysterious, 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 within

the reach of all the world. Its attraction is peculiar, 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 possible 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 immediately 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 considerations 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.

"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 l'un et l'autre point----"

I will not finish, for after all one must 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, intellect, and courage into the bargain, one

may well do without 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

l'evolutionisme de 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 Hartmann for having

allowed the evolution of the universe some little remains of logic,

while, on the contrary, this evolution is eminently contradictory, and

there is no reason anywhere 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 offer to the

disappointed and disillusioned soul. The individual can but protest and

curse. This frantic Sivaism is developed from the conception which makes

the world the product 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 paradoxical theorist. We have really to do

with a theophobist, 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 Cakyamouni, that Mephistophelian

gall which defiles, withers, and corrodes everything it touches.

Evolutionism, fatalism, pessimism, nihilism--how strange it is to see

this desolate and terrible doctrine growing and expanding at the very

moment when the German nation is celebrating its greatness and its

triumphs! The contrast is so startling that it sets one thinking.

This orgie of 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 acceptance, 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 confounded with the

gentleness of charity, or the reserve of humility.

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 instruction. Faith is the heritage of the

individual at birth; it is that which binds him to the whole of being.

The individual 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 somnambulist 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 experience of life and things works up a fresh, and which may be so

affected by our studies of every kind as to perish completely 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 prejudice 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

Aesop 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 the 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, prejudices, 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 advances, by the

successive decay of gradually improved ideals.

June 19, 1872.--The wrangle in the Paris Synod still goes on. [Footnote:

A synod of the Reformed churches of France was then occupied in

determining the constituent conditions of Protestant belief.] The

supernatural is the stone of stumbling.

It might be possible to agree on the idea of the divine; but no, that is

not the question--the chaff must be separated from the good grain. The

supernatural is miracle, and miracle is an objective phenomenon

independent of all preceding casuality. Now, miracle thus understood

cannot 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 Aeneas 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 immanence are

incomprehensible to the fanatics of transcendence. 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 incomprehensible clear, and abhor what

is profound. Women also will always find local miracle more easy to

understand than universal miracle, and the visible objective

intervention 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 determination. The Latin mind makes everything objective, 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 distance, 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,

information, 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 monarchical 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,"

Philosophy means, first, doubt; and afterward the consciousness 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 more 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 knowledge. The

philosopher is a skeptic seeking 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 fellow 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-control 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

believe that everything 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 arbitrary decree only leads to rebellion and

attempts at emancipation. This method has the immense advantage of

forming 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 conscience, 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 producing it; it is sweet to those whose

efforts maintain it.

October l4, 1872.--The man who gives himself to contemplation 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, 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. In this, as in all else,

I have remained divided, and perplexed, wavering between two extremes.

So equilibrium is somehow preserved, but the crystallization of action

or thought becomes impossible.

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, nor 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! [Footnote: Louise Siefert, a modern French

poetess, died 1879. In addition to "Les Stoiques," she published

"L'Annee Republicaine," Paris 1869, and other works.] 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."

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 imagination is not our

own, 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 phantasmagoria of Maia. 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 passive and impersonal; he is the

plaything of unknown vibrations 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 nervous life, and this again is the fine flower of

organic life. Thought is the highest point of a series of ascending

metamorphoses, which is called nature. Personality by means 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 empire over self which is called liberty. Dreams, by

confusing 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 knowledge 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 kaleidoscope,

and the spectator another.

What is madness? Illusion, raised to the second power. A sound mind

establishes regular relations, a _modus vivendi_, between things, men,

and itself, and it is under the delusion 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 experience

with necessary fact, and assumes in good faith that what is, is the

measure of what may be; while madness cannot perceive any difference

between what is and what it imagines--it confounds its dreams with

reality.

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 Maia, 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. [Footnote: "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 amusante feerie dont aucun dieu ne se soucie. Il faut donc

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 Maia."] 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, personal 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 Maia 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 cockcrow,

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 conscious of itself; the moral energy which replaces it, on

the other hand, represents a state of fast, a famine and a sleepless

thirst. Alas! Alas!

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, contain the fate of the community.

Her faith becomes the star of the conjugal ship, and her love the

animating principle 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 role

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 Aeschylus,

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 profound 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 pardon 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 civilization. How magnificent it is as poetry, and how small the

adventures of individual passion seem beside this colossal 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?"

For 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 because I can clearly

distinguish neither the evil nor its remedy.

"O printemps sans pitie, dans l'ame endolorie,

Avec tes chants d'oiseaux, tes brises, ton azur,

Tu creuses sourdement, conspirateur obscur,

Le gouffre des langueurs et de la reverie."

Of all the hours of the day, in fine weather, the afternoon, 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 illumines with

inexorable 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 deadening 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 coeur 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 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 l'effroi du bonheur et la soif du poison.

Coeur 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 marvelous 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

imagination, 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. Enthusiastic 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

unfolding 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 discourses 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 blindness. 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,

sentimentalism--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 tendencies, 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 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 perpetual wavering between

anarchy and dictatorship, between the red and the black, between Danton

and Loyola.

How many scapegoats will Prance sacrifice before it occurs to her to

beat her own breast in penitence?

August 18, 1873. (_Scheveningen_).--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 enjoying 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 is inexplicable without reference to all that has ever been. This

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 workshop of nature. The ephemeral perceives the eternal.

What matters the brevity of the individual span, seeing that the

generations, the centuries, and the worlds themselves are but occupied

forever with the ceaseless reproduction of the hymn of life, in all the

hundred thousand modes and variations which make up the universal

symphony? 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 apparition in existence....

After the concert was over the paved esplanade behind the 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

role of the looker-on?

False shame, no doubt. I have been ashamed to desire. Fatal result of

timidity, aggravated by intellectual delusion! This renunciation

beforehand of all natural ambitions, this systematic putting aside of

all longings and all 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'aime 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 principles 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 thousand;

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 destinations, and feeding the

universal life. I found in a hidden nook a sheet of fine sand which the

water had furrowed 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 sensation to feel the grass growing under

one's feet, to see one's self intellectually uprooted. One must address

one's contemporaries. 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 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. (_Scheveningen_).--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 different 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 inundation.

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 others,

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 these; they revive one's converse with

one's self and make it possible to live the inner life; they are quiet

and peaceful, 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 polarized, 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 harmony with the general order,

or at least in intellectual harmony. For _holiness_, indeed, more is

wanted--a harmony 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 conquest--two equilibria, that

of Greece and that of Nazareth--two kingdoms, that of the natural man

and that of the regenerate man.

_Later_. (_Scheveningen_).--Why do doctors so often make mistakes?

Because they are not sufficiently individual in their diagnoses or their

treatment. They class a sick man under 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, 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

essentials. 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

laboratories of nature; they seem to me superficial, profane, strangers

to divine things, destitute of intuition and sympathy. 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 imprudence. 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 unfavorable--can be explained like all

illusions by the whim of nature, which either wills us to be deceived or

wills us to 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 by a smile, is, on the whole, the best line to

take; one lends one's self to an optical illusion, and the voluntary

concession has an air of liberty. Once imprisoned in existence, 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--these two attitudes are possible. 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 optimism 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 immortality, 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, Islamism? 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 verification, affirms them on her own responsibility

only--this mode of escape cannot last forever. Every fresh cosmical

conception demands a religion which corresponds 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 particular 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 question 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 postulates 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 interrogation, 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 intangible, like the noise of

waves which is made up of a thousand fused and mingled sounds. It is the

reverberation of all the unsatisfied desires of the soul, of all the

stifled sorrows 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

Aeolian vibrations of the heart is all hope--a proof that these

thousands 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 solitary 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. Exceptional 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

cultivated, 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 their form, but the total balance

does not show him to be the richer. A thousand 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. [Footnote: 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.

"Le Christianisme et ses Origines," an important book, in four volumes,

was developed from a series of articles in the _Revue des deux Mondes_,

and the _Revue Contemporaine_.] 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 Christianity 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

matter 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 confusions 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 the first

duty of science whenever it lays hands upon such 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 universal

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 manufactures 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 obtain. Radicalism pretends that

the greater number of illiterate, passionate, thoughtless--above all,

young people, 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 proprietor.

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, _we_ 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

every appeal; his caprice is law. What _we_ does or says is called

custom, what it thinks is called opinion, what it believes 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 concert and in the

divine plan, would be the beginning of 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 boundless 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

Hartmann, Comte, and Darwin. What tragic force and power! What thought

and passion! She has courage for everything, and attacks the most

tremendous subjects.

Science is implacable; will it suppress all religions? All those which

start from a false conception of nature, certainly. 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 phenomenon, although a limited one. Physical

science may very well be limited by moral science, and _vice versa_. 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 Ionians, the [Greek:

_physikoi_], or naturalist thinkers. But it will have to pass once more

through Plato and through Aristotle, through the philosophy of

"goodness" and "purpose," through the science of mind.

July 3, 1874.--Rebellion 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, to

realize all that is hopelessly 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 himself with being

_some_ thing and _some_ one--

"Ni si haut, ni si bas...."

These brusque lapses into the formless, indeterminate state, are the

price of my critical faculty. All my former habits become suddenly

fluid; it seems to me 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 country, 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 ridiculous,

passion burlesque, and prejudice absurd.

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 Russians, English, Swedes, Germans, were sleeping

their last sleep under the shadow of the Cubly. The landscape was one

vast splendor; the woods were deep and mysterious, the roses full blown;

all around me were butterflies--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 tending 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. [Footnote: Amiel had just received at the hands

of his doctor the medical verdict, which was his _arret de mort_.]

Incessant 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.

_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

sanctification; 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 consenting 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 independence; 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.

Health cut off, means marriage, travel, study, and work forbidden or

endangered. It means life reduced in attractiveness and utility by

five-sixths.

Thy will be done!

September 14, 1874. (_Charnex_).--A long walk and conversation with

----. We followed a high mountain path. Seated on the turf, and talking

with open heart, our eyes wandered over the blue immensity below us, and

the smiling 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 distance of the

lake, and sea-gulls like gigantic butterflies quivered above its

rippling surface.

September 21, 1874. (_Charnex_).--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 plus 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 happiness is going.

There are no more birds, but a few white or blue butterflies are still

left. Flowers are becoming rare--a few daisies in the fields, some blue

or yellow chicories and colchicums, 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 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 own age and position, and

next Sunday it will keep my birthday. All these different consonances

form a melancholy harmony.

* * * * *

The distinguishing mark of religion is not so much liberty as obedience,

and its value is measured by the sacrifices 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 gives us a sweet,

ineffable impression, of the ideal, it is this trembling modest love. To

deceive it would be a crime. Merely to 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 own 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 had

a bad night. Once it seemed as if I must choke, for I could breathe

neither way.

Could I be more fragile, more sensitive, more vulnerable! People talk to

me as if there were still a career before me, while all the time I know

that the ground is 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 self-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, according 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 that 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 comprehensive; it has an extraordinarily fine edge, and yet no

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 counterfeit of it, for it does not enable a man to solve any

problem whatever, and remains incapable of understanding all that is

living, complex, and concrete. Abstraction is its original sin,

presumption its incurable defect, and plausibility 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 whatever. 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 everything 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 resistance, 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 wild

bird, happiness, and tame it. Above all, I long to 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 produces 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 expedition 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 Horace 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 the 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 inscription 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 the two last

"Discours" at the French Academy, lingering 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

possible;" 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 criticized. 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. Democracy

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 complicated product is as

original in its way as Athenian eloquence, but it is less healthy and

less durable. If ever France becomes Americanized this _genre_ at least

will perish, without hope of revival.

April 16, 1875. (_Hyeres_).--I have already gone through the various

emotions of leave-taking. I have been wandering 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 months 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 sovereignty, 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 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 cannot 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 Stael a

matter of supreme 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

successes 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 reputation, 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 little 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 myself, 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 conscientious 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.

Premature 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 I paid back to my country? Are all

the documents 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! 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 renunciations 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 nothingness, 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, personality, and will. Pantheistic

disinterestedness, the effacement of the self in the great whole,

womanish gentleness, a horror of slaughter, antipathy to action--these

are all 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 thought

delivers us from personality.... To be a man 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 desired.

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 performing 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 occupations. So may we feel that we are paying our tribute to the

universal work and the eternal will. So are we reconciled 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 Stael, but with what labor, what painful effort! When 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.

[Footnote: Compare this paragraph from the "Pensees of a new writer, M.

Joseph Roux, a country cure, living in a remote part of the _Bas

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'emporte loin sans peril que l'intelligence qui lui menage avec empire

l'eperon et le frein."]

We must treat our subject brutally, and not be always trembling lest we

are doing it a wrong. We must be able to transmute 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 conscientiousness, 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 against trying to surprise the secret of the

masters of literature, against picking _chef-d'oeuvres_ 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 exhausts the material offered to it, and the habit of

immediate notation of passing impressions. The art of composition lies

between the two; you want for it both the 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 Regime") 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 divisions; 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 individuality is an insoluble enigma, and no beginning

explains 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 consequence 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, relative beginnings would still remain to us as

multiple symbols of the absolute. Every life, called individual for

convenience sake and by analogy, would represent in miniature the

history of the world, and would be to the eye of the philosopher a

microscopic compendium of it.

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, Francois 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 cultivated 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 contraries

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 artificial 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; 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 infinitely 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 herself, 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 phantoms 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 hundred times more nor a hundred times

less.

In the state of thought the universe occupies but a single 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. So 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 without a noise. Consciousness means some one who experiences

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."

[Footnote: _Les Etrangeres: Poesies traduites de diverses

litteratures_, par H. F. Amiel, 1876.] Here at least is one thing off my

hands. The piece of prose theorizing which ends the volume 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 feeling 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 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 seul bien cacher l'infini."

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

demolition seems more rapid. It is a painful experience, this premature

decay!... "_Apres tant de malheurs, que vous reste-t-il? Moi._" This

_"moi"_ is the central consciousness, 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 understand 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 fugitive phenomenon--this is practical psychology. I prefer

indeed the spectacle 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 example 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 succession 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 beginning; it

_knows itself_ at the end. Or rather it advances in the possession of

itself with the gradual unfolding of creation. 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 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 presence 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 l'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 subject, it puts up with every

kind of repetition, it accompanies 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 myself. So--so what? I shall have lived my 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 realization

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 vont!"

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 centenarian 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 meaning 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 inhabitant of the moon

or Jupiter?

To be a conscious monad--a nothing which knows itself to be the

microscopic phantom of the universe: this is all we can ever attain to.

September 12, 1876.--What is your own particular absurdity? 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.

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

uselessness 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." [Footnote: 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

essays.] 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, _un delicat

ne sublime_, to quote Sainte-Beuve's expression. Fastidiousness of

temper, and a too keen love of perfection, 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

anything 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 delicate 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 heritage of those rare natures in whom

subtlety is the disguise of superiority, and taste its revelation. "What

balance of faculties and cultivation it requires! What personal

distinction it shows! Perhaps 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 Roman time is a true disciple of Epicurus in all matters of

sight, hearing, and intelligence--a crumpled 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 Renaissance--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 exclusive. 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 become an author had

he chosen to concentrate 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

psychologist, 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 ought 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 neighborhood 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 of her. She makes

mock of those trembling and respectful lovers who deserve but cannot

force her favors. The public is won by the bold, imperious talents--by

the enterprising 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 Religieux 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 can

last without the belief in God and in another life. Perhaps he forgets

that Japan and China prove the contrary. 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, however, 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 contradictory 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 would mean peace, repose, and perhaps

immobility By far the greater number 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 means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslavement

of the conquered. Mutual respect would be a better way out of

difficulties. Conflict is the result of the selfishness 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, goodness,

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 himself 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 his flight into the Empyrean, and mock him by their cry:

_Thou art dust, thou art nothing, than 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; I 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 place and function beside the men of affirmation, the convinced

and inspired souls. The positive element in Victor Cherbuliez's work is

beauty, not goodness, not moral or religious life. Aesthetically 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.

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 religious 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, slackening, 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 miserable, 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.

Rapid deterioration 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 soundness 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 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 consciousness 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 intention. This,

in theological language, is to live to the glory of God. Religion

consists in the filial acceptation of the divine will whatever it be,

provided we see it distinctly. 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 diminution, 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.

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 disagreeable 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 discipline, 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, imperfect keyboards,

so many specimens of restless or stagnant chaos--and what makes their

situation almost hopeless 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 honest,

all that is excellent, all that is lovely and of good report," was there

gathered together. "The incorruptibility of a gentle and quiet spirit,"

innocent mirth, faithfulness to 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

privilege. There is a sort of religious joy in helping to renew the

strength and courage of noble minds. We are surprised 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 but not the source, of which he is the scene, but

not the author, or rather, the poet. He lends them voice, and will, and

help, but he is respectfully careful to efface himself, that he may

alter as little as possible the higher 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 must perforce disappear when it is the

Holy Spirit who speaks, when it is God who acts. This is the mood in

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 unless 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 common 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 foretaste 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 limitations is a littleness of soul. If he could

but learn to compare 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

childishness, 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.

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 role, 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 preference 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 lacunas, deformities, and imperfections of the group

to which I belong. My inclination is to see things as they are,

abstracting my own individuality, and suppressing all 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 fairness. Anger and annoyance are with me merely

superficial; the fundamental tendency is toward impartiality and

detachment. 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 simulating 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.

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 a fairly full one,

seemed very well satisfied.

July 17, 1877.--Yesterday I went through my La Fontaine, 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--everything--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 unforgettable

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 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 grossness. 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 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 he

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 advantage of rendering all the different

shades of my thought, and of being sincere. If it were to become terse,

affirmative, 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 hound 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 maybe brief;

inquiry takes time; and the line which thought follows is necessarily an

irregular one.

I am conscious indeed that at bottom there is but one right expression;

[Footnote: 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 neanmoins qu'elle

existe, que tout ce qui ne l'est point est foible, et ne satisfait point

un homme d'esprit qui veut se faire entendre."] 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 search of

that 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

disentanglement, the winding-off of a skein. Evidently the corresponding

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 Renan, _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 facts. Rousseau 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 temptation; I have often bewailed it, and yet, if I desired

anything, it would be to be a writer, a great writer. Te leave a

monument behind, _aere perennius_, an imperishable 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

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

tyrannize 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 toward life, happiness,

justice, and wisdom. Greed and gluttony are the starting-point,

intelligence and generosity the goal.

August 21, 1877. (_Baths 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 worship 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 certain 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 Russian, stop at

conventions. The root of the problem is in the question of the relations

between God and the world. Immanence or transcendence--that, step by

step, decides the meaning of everything else. If the mind is radically

external 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 counterfeits 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 general

ferociously affirmative; chatter mistakes itself for opinion, prejudice

poses as principle. Parrots behave as though they were thinking beings;

imitations give themselves out as originals; and politeness demands the

acceptance of the convention. It is very wearisome.

Language is the vehicle of this confusion, the instrument of this

unconscious fraud, and all evils of the kind are enormously increased by

universal education, by the periodical press, and by all the other

processes of vulgarization 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 everything, 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

language and whose gait alone recall to us the highest rank in 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 pitiful curiosity--that the

insight we bring to bear on them should be charged with humility. Are we

not all shipwrecked, 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 tenderness, 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 [Footnote: 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).] 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-worn, the over-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 presupposes the

greatest elevation both in artist and in public.

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 correctly, 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 business to give it an

opportunity of showing itself to affectionate eyes.

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 grasshoppers, 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 l'Eveque, at Jargonnant, at Villereuse, 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 kingdom 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 intuition, a matter of

tact and _flair_; it cannot be taught or demonstrated--it is an art.

Critical genius means an aptitude 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'Instruction_, 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. Competent 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!

July 26, 1878.--Every morning I wake up with the same sense of vain

struggle against a mountain tide which is 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 position as it

is.

And while I wait (wait for what?--certainty?) the weeks flow by like

water, and strength wastes away like a smoking candle....

Is one free to let one's self drift into death without resistance? Is

self-preservation a duty? Do we owe it to those who love us to prolong

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 generosity not to cool the

ardor of those who are still battling, still enjoying.

Two parallel roads lead to the same result; meditation 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

contradiction!

I have not the strength to hope, and I have not the 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

contradiction, for life means an incessant death and a daily

resurrection; 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 has represented a certain unique combination, one particular

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 values, 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 degradation.

November 7, 1878.--To-day we have been talking of realism in painting,

and, in connection with it, of that poetical and artistic illusion which

does not aim at being confounded with reality itself. Realism wishes to

entrap sensation; the object of true art is only to charm the

imagination, 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 deathlike 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 perception 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

collective, 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 by truths. Under the pretense that we

want to study it more in detail we pulverize 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

countries 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

under 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 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 ease 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 disproportion 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 life is without unity of action,

because my actions themselves are escaping from the control of memory.

My mental 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 both 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 facilities, and the study passes easily into an aptitude

and habit. Reflection 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 remains 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 after his affairs; in short, one must behave

like all the 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 topographical 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 oeternitatis_.

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 sometimes 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 identical 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 changing. 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 the task

of our species. Its performance is hindered by error, evil, selfishness,

and death, without counting telluric catastrophes. The edifice of a

common happiness, a common 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 continents take part. At

the present moment humanity is not yet constituted as a physical unity,

and its general education 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 economical 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 voluntary curb on

acuteness of perception; it screens and softens the rays of a too vivid

insight; it refuses to see too 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

charitable; it tries not to see what stares it in the face--that is to

say, the imperfections, infirmities, and errors of humankind; 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 satisfied 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 confine herself to her own

domain--which is in the inmost depths of conscience, in the secret

recesses of the soul, where life communes with the Divine will and the

universal order. Piety is the daily renewing of the ideal, the steadying

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 common 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 considerations 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 the 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 voluntary act of humility.

Extreme individualism dissipates the moral substance of the individual.

It leads him to subordinate everything to 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 zeal 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 voluntary 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 turning over "Les histories 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 tolerate a sermon which is

delicate enough to flatter their 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 persuading 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

symbolized by this expansion, this heavenward yearning of nature.... I

feel myself born again; all the windows 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 atmosphere 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 fountain 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 Tranchees, recall to

one's imagination some old city of the south, a glimpse of Perugia or of

Malaga.

All the bells are ringing. It is the hour of worship. A historical and

religious impression mingles with the picturesque, 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 individual 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 universe. All

know what suffering is, and yearn for happiness. 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 certainty 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 into a given number of lectures,

to determine the right proportions of the different parts, and the

normal speed 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--at 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 so. It seems to me they have. Only, if I have

pleased them, it cannot have been in any case more than a _succes

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 paying court to the scholars, or with

showing off the master; his business is one of serious study and

impersonal exposition. 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, imperfect:" 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 allowed 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 not good; no, you are not happy; no, you shall not find rest--all

that you see and all that you do is insufficient, insignificant,

overdone, badly done, imperfect. 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 without 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; contemplation is fatal when it destroys

character. "Too much" and "too little" sin equally against wisdom.

Excess 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 inherent 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 intuitive 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 upholder of liberty, makes his

disciples languid and effeminate. 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 slavery of conscience. What matters then is not the

theoretical principle; it is the secret tendency, the aspiration, 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 strength

becomes its weakness; the impossibility of verification, exaltation of

feeling, distance.

* * * * *

At what age is our view clearest, our eye truest? Surely 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. Existence 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 disturbance, the dominical state of

the soul, perhaps the state which awaits it beyond the grave. It is

happiness as the orientals understand it, the happiness of the

anchorite, who neither struggles nor wishes any more, but simply adores

and enjoys. It is difficult to find words in which to express 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 is no

longer conscious of itself in its individuality and separateness. It is

something which feels the universal life, a sensible atom of the Divine,

of God. It no longer appropriates anything to itself, it is conscious of

no void. Only the Yogis and Soufis perhaps have known in its profundity

this humble and yet voluptuous state, which combines the joys of being

and of non-being, which is neither reflection 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 spent in the service of that which passeth not away.

February 6, 1880.--A feeling article by Edmond Scherer on the death of

Bersot, the director of the "Ecole Normale," 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 ceremony 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 newspapers 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 powdered 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 impression 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

storming the goods of this world. Every man is always in some other

man's way, since, however small he may make himself, 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 and 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....

How near is the great gulf! My skiff is thin as a nutshell, 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,

ingenious 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 fugitive 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 misunderstanding. "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 remembrance 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 [Footnote: 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 "Parfums de

Madeleine," 1839; "Odes et Poemes," 1843; "Poemes Evangeliques," 1852;

"Idylles Heroiques," 1858, etc. etc.] has elevation, grandeur, nobility,

and harmony. What is it, then, that he lacks? Ease, and perhaps humor.

Hence the monotonous 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

affectation 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 Petoefi. 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 to go to the beat of a riding-whip. What force and

passion, 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 European 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, Ouigour, 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

overthrown 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 decaying 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 purified 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

powerfully affected ethnography, they let loose rivers 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 thunder, storms, and volcanoes; they know not what they do.

Civilization tends to corrupt men, as large towns tend to vitiate the

air.

"Nos patimur longae pacis mala."

Catastrophes bring about a violent restoration of equilibrium; they put

the world brutally to rights. Evil chastises itself, and the tendency to

ruin in human things supplies the place of the regulator who has not yet

been discovered. 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 risking 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 stronghold. 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 characteristic common to both is despair. When one knows that one

will never possess what one could have loved, and that one 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 illusion, 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 ourselves

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, a word in the poem. He is a part of the family, of the

state, of humanity, of all the special fragments formed by human

interests, beliefs, aspirations, and labors. The loftiest souls are

those who are conscious of the universal symphony, and who give their

full and willing collaboration to this vast and complicated concert

which 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 admitted that the more the mind spiritualizes and

generalizes itself, the less hold it has on other minds, which no longer

understand it or know what to do with it. Influence belongs to men of

action, and for purposes of action nothing is more useful than

narrowness of thought combined with energy of will.

The forms of dreamland are gigantic, those of action are small and

dwarfed. To the minds imprisoned 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 aeolian 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 irresponsible; 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 everything 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 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 [Footnote: 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 "Delphine," and the _Notice sur le

Caractere et les Ecrits de Mdme. de Stael_, prefixed to the

authoritative edition of Madame de Stael's 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's "Lectures on Dramatic Literature."] again.

"L'Education progressive" is an admirable 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 may be proud of a

piece of work which shows such high cultivation and so much solid

wisdom. Here we have the true Genevese literature, the central tradition

of the country.

_Later_.--I have finished the third volume of Madame Necker. The

elevation and delicacy, the sense and seriousness, the beauty and

perfection of the whole are astonishing. A few harshnesses or

inaccuracies of language do not matter. I feel for the author a respect

mingled with emotion. How rare it is to find a book in which everything

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

individual 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 versa_.

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 services 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 prevailing

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 everything. He paints, describes, and judges well; he

thinks, and has the courage of his opinions. His defect lies in an

excess of self-respect, in a British pride and reserve which give him a

horror of familiarity and a terror of letting himself 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 conscience; 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 repudiated 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 thinking of to-morrow's examinations.

Inward distaste--emptiness--discontent. Is it trouble of conscience, or

sorrow 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 temptation. 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 happiness, 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--"Geneva, Geneva, remember! I am called

_Clemence_--I am the voice of church and of country. People of Geneva,

serve God and be at peace together." [Footnote: A law to bring about

separation between Church and State, adopted by the Great Council, was

on this day submitted to the vote of the Genevese people. It was

rejected by a large majority (9,306 against 4,044).--[S.]]

_Seven o'clock in the evening_.--_Clemence_ 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 5, 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 blases 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 centenary; 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 repugnance 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 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 inevitable

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. [Footnote:

The prize-giving at the College of Geneva is made the occasion of a

national festival.] 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 college fete-day.

Wednesday, the fete-day of the primary schools.

Geneva is a caldron always at boiling-point, a furnace of which the

fires are never extinguished. Vulcan had more than one forge, and Geneva

is certainly one of those world-anvils on which the greatest number of

projects have been hammered out. When one thinks that the martyrs of all

causes have 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 herself alone for the solution of her own difficulties. Since the

Reformation she has been always on the alert, marching 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

sufficient 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 Ultramontanes 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 independent people.

Our small nationalities are ruined by the hollow cosmopolitan 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. Separatism 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. Examples: empiricism, idealism,

radicalism. What is best among things and most perfect among beings

slips through 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 contained 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 catacomb, 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 volume 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 onward 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 education of sight, and to

abolish distances; and now I find myself regarding existence as though

from beyond the tomb, from another world; all is strange to me; I am, as

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 investigations. At the same time I do not hide from myself

that such experiences weaken the hold of common sense, because they act

as solvents of all personal interests and prejudices. I can only defend

myself against them by returning to the common life of men, and by

bracing and fortifying the will.

July 14, 1880.--What is the book which, of all Genevese literature, I

would soonest have written? Perhaps that of Madame Necker de Saussure,

or Madame de Stael's "L'Allemagne." To a Genevese, moral philosophy is

still the most congenial and remunerative of studies. Intellectual

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 independent 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 what matter?

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 longing. 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 gauge my own 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 ambiguous, 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 _sensorium 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 subsists, 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 themselves 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 _Feuille Centrale de

Zofingen_. [Footnote: The journal of a students' society, drawn from the

different cantons of Switzerland, which meets every year in the little

town of Zofingen] It is one of those perpetual 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

preservative 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 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 naturally to another. All exclusive and

sharply-marked qualities are but so many signs of imperfection.

August 29, 1880.--To-day I am conscious of improvement. I am taking

advantage of it to go back to my neglected work and my interrupted

habits; but in a week 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."

... 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. (_Two 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 catastrophe.

"Quel eclair te traverse, o 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 extraordinary. 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 phenomenon 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 whirlwind passing

through him--lent to him, as it were, for a moment, in order that he may

perceive the cosmic vibrations. 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 incomprehensible to all that loves

enjoyment, dominion, possession. 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 the 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 produce 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 school, the soul

fading into the world of ghosts, or descending into the region of _Die

Muetter_; it implies the simplification 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

pregnant 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 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 is 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 courage, 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

conscience, 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 moneychanger, or number them like a cashier. Come--there is

enough for all!"

October 29, 1880. (_Geneva_).--The ideal which a man professes 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 whatever. Tell me what you pique yourself upon,

and I will 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 innocence, 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 experience 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 imagination 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 suitable to the novel or short story, for cleverness

is not poetry, and 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 confusion 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 disinterested

feeling. To laugh at things and people is not really a joy; it is at

best but a cold pleasure. Buffoonery 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.--How 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-discipline. 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. Every man 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, 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 substitution

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 attainable 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, incredulous, frivolous look, and it seems to free a man

from traditional 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 allow itself imagination and faith, and still

remain within the lines of progress.

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 distinguishes 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 feelings 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 temperament, 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 qualities are inborn, and their virtues virtues of

temperament. To lay the foundations 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 them 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 mysterious

and sphinx-like, but clear and limpid as a diamond; so that admiration

and attachment may grow with knowledge.

* * * * *

Jealousy is a terrible thing. It resembles love, only it is precisely

love's contrary. Instead of wishing for the welfare of the object loved,

it desires the dependence of that object upon itself, and its own

triumph. Love is the forgetfulness 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 attachment 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

sanctity 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 modification, 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.

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 catastrophe 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 exception 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 pretexts, our instincts, our temperament. We are freed by

energy and the critical spirit--that is to say, by detachment 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 activities. 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 sensible world,

but the transfiguration of sorrow after the manner of Christ is a more

beautiful solution of the problem than the extirpation of sorrow, after

the method of Cakyamouni.

* * * * *

Life should be a giving birth to the soul, the development of a higher

mode of reality. The animal must be humanized; flesh must be made

spirit; physiological activity 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 of duty, to put conscience in the

place of feeling--this voluntary martyrdom has its nobility. The natural

man in us flinches, but the better self submits. To hope for justice in

the world is a sign of sickly sensibility; we must be able to do without

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 equitable, as

though opinion were clear-sighted, as though life were just, as though

men were good.

* * * * *

Death itself may become matter of consent, and therefore 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 extreme weakness gradually gained upon him. His last

lines are dated the 29th of April; it was on the 11th of May that he

succumbed, without a struggle, to the complicated disease from which he

suffered.--S.]

January 5, 1881.--I think I fear shame more than death. Tacitus said:

_Omnia serviliter pro dominatione_. My tendency is just the contrary.

Even when it is voluntary, dependence is a burden to me. I should blush

to find myself 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 desirable 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 become impossible to me, and if I

were so foolish as to wish for them, the limits of my liberty would soon

become apparent. Therefore 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 obstacles in

my way. Renunciation is the safeguard of dignity. 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 Deliverance....

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 earthquake 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.

"Jurons, excepte Dieu, de n'avoir point de maitre."

This 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 wanting 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 injustice. 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

calculation 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 adaptability 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.

"Il n'est plus temps pour rien excepte pour mourir."

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 fender 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 verdict 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?

Probably 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 ever

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 soldier does not dispute the order given him: he

obeys and 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 dearest to us know nothing of

our conversations with the King of Terrors. There are thoughts which

brook no confidant: 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 monologue becomes dialogue, reluctance becomes

docility, renunciation passes into peace, and the sense of painful

defeat is lost in the sense of recovered liberty.

"Vouloir ce 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 doctor 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 renunciation. _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 witnesses. 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 laying 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 coming 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

possibility 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 consumed in self-study. Action is cut

off--only contemplation 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-examination: 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 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 question--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

thinking 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 current 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 have scarcely spring

enough left in me to notice it. Admiration, 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

mortar_.

February 14, 1881.--Supposing that my weeks are numbered, 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, Neuchatel ... 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.

Surrounded 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 barge, or

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 _inania

regna_. Existence has become fluid. From the standpoint of complete

personal renunciation 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 individuals, 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 impersonal, 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 mutilate

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 relative 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.

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 universal 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 perseverance 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 j'etouffe_."

Bronchitis and asthma, 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." _Hic 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 resignation. 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 l5, 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 becomes unjust. The Providential theory is really based on human

solidarity. Louis XVI. pays for Louis XV., Alexander 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 if 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 destiny. Morally we are responsible for

what we ourselves have willed, but socially, our happiness and

unhappiness depend on causes outside our will. Religion 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 his foes. The natural man

feels the same. But the 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 coeur la foi dans ta volonte sainte,

Et de moi fais, o Dieu, tout ce que tu voudras."

_Later_.--One of my students has just brought me a sympathetic 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 melancholy, 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 aspirations, of sighs without a cause. We

dream wide-awake. We search darkly for we know not what; invoking the

while something which has no 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; 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 I long for--freedom from suffering.

And this desire being vain, I can find no savor in anything else.

Satiety. Lassitude. Renunciation. Abdication. "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 Rhine, 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 l'aubepine

A vu l'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 running, in which I

have been consumed by sleeplessness....

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 leave everything in order. Let me try to end

well, seeing that to undertake and even to continue, are closed to me.

April 19, 1881.--A terrible sense of oppression. My flesh and my heart

fail me.

"Que vivre est difficile, o mon coeur fatigue!"

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