(1846-)
n 1869, 'Vita Militare' (Military Life), a collection of short stories, was perhaps the most popular Italian volume of the year. Read alike in court and cottage, it was everywhere discussed and enthusiastically praised. Its prime quality was that quivering sympathy which insures some success to any imaginative work, however crudely written. But these sketches of all the grim and amusing phases of Italian soldier life are drawn with an exquisite precision. The reader feels the breathless discouragement of the tired soldiers when new dusty vistas are revealed by a sudden turn in the road ('A Midsummer March'); understands the strong silent love between officer and orderly, suppressed by military etiquette ('The Orderly'); smiles with the soldiers at the pretty runaway boy, idol of the regiment ('The Son of the Regiment'); pities the humiliations of the conscript novice ('The Conscript'); thrills with the proud sorrow of the old man whose son's colonel tells the story of his heroic death ('Dead on the Field of Battle'). "When I had finished reading it," said an Italian workman, "I would gladly have pressed the hand of the first soldier whom I happened to meet." The author was only twenty-three, and has since given the world many delightful volumes, but nothing finer.
These sketches were founded upon personal knowledge, for De Amicis began life as a soldier. After his early education at Coni and Turin, he entered the military school at Modena, from which he was sent out as sub-lieutenant in the third regiment of the line. He saw active service in various expeditions against Sicilian brigands; and in the war with Austria he fought at the battle of Custozza.
His literary power seems to have been early manifest; for in 1867 he became manager of a newspaper, L'Italia Militare, at Florence; and in 1871, yielding to his friends' persuasions, he settled down to authorship at Turin. His second book was the 'Ricordi,' memorials dedicated to the youth of Italy, of national events which had come within his experience. Half a dozen later stories published together were also very popular, especially 'Gli Amici di Collegio' (College Friends), 'Fortezza,' and 'La Casa Paterna' (The Paternal Home). He has written some graceful verse as well.
But De Amicis soon craved the stimulus of novel environments, of differing personalities; and he set out upon the travels which he has so delightfully recounted. This ardent Italian longed for the repose of "a gray sky," a critic tells us. He went first to Holland, and experienced a joyous satisfaction in the careful art of that trim little land. Later, a visit to North Africa in the suite of the Italian ambassador prompted a brilliant volume, "Morocco," "which glitters and flashes like a Damascus blade." Among his other well-known books, descriptive of other trips, are 'Holland and Its People,' 'Spain,' 'London,' 'Paris,' and 'Constantinople,' which, translated into many languages, have been widely read.
That unfortunate though not uncommon traveler who finds ennui everywhere must envy De Amicis his inexhaustible enthusiasm, his power of epicurean enjoyment in the color and glory of every land. His is a curiously optimistic nature. Always perceiving the beautiful and picturesque in art and nature, he treats other aspects hopefully, and ignores them when he may. He catches what is characteristic in every nation as inevitably as he catches the physiognomy of a land with its skies and its waters, its flowers and its atmosphere. His is a realism transfigured by poetic imagination, which divines essential things and places them in high relief.
Very early in life De Amicis announced his love and admiration of Manzoni, of whom he called himself a disciple. But his is a very different mind. This Italian, born at Onéglia of Genoese parents, has inherited the emotional nature of his country. He sees everything with feeling, penetrating below the surface with sympathetic insight. Italy gives him his sensuous zest in life. But from France, through his love of her vigor and grace, his cordial admiration of her literature, he has gained a refining and strengthening influence. She has taught him that direct diction, that choice simplicity, which forsakes the stilted Italian of literary tradition for a style far simpler, stronger, and more natural.
All selections used by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons
THE LIGHT
From 'Constantinople'
And first of all, the light! One of my dearest delights at Constantinople was to see the sun rise and set, standing upon the bridge of the Sultana Validé. At dawn, in autumn, the Golden Horn is almost always covered by a light fog, behind which the city is seen vaguely, like those gauze curtains that descend upon the stage to conceal the preparations for a scenic spectacle. Scutari is quite hidden; nothing is to be seen but the dark uncertain outline of her hills. The bridge and the shores are deserted, Constantinople sleeps; the solitude and silence render the spectacle more solemn. The sky begins to grow golden behind the hills of Scutari. Upon that luminous strip are drawn, one by one, black and clear, the tops of the cypress trees in the vast cemetery, like an army of giants ranged upon the heights; and from one cape of the Golden Horn to the other there shines a tremulous light, faint as the first murmur of the awakening city. Then behind the cypresses of the Asiatic shore comes forth an eye of fire, and suddenly the white tops of the four minarets of Saint Sophia are tinted with deep rose. In a few minutes, from hill to hill, from mosque to mosque, down to the end of the Golden Horn, all the minarets, one after the other, turn rose color; all the domes, one by one, are silvered, the flush descends from terrace to terrace, the tremulous light spreads, the great veil melts, and all Stamboul appears, rosy and resplendent upon her heights, blue and violet along the shores, fresh and young, as if just risen from the waters.
As the sun rises, the delicacy of the first tints vanishes in an immense illumination, and everything remains bathed in white light until toward evening. Then the divine spectacle begins again. The air is so limpid that from Galata one can see clearly every distant tree, as far as Kadi-Kioi. The whole of the immense profile of Stamboul stands out against the sky with such a clearness of line and rigor of color, that every minaret, obelisk, and cypress-tree can be counted, one by one, from Seraglio Point to the cemetery of Eyub. The Golden Horn and the Bosphorus assume a wonderful ultramarine color; the heavens, the color of amethyst in the East, are afire behind Stamboul, tinting the horizon with infinite lights of rose and carbuncle, that make one think of the first day of the creation; Stamboul darkens, Galata becomes golden, and Scutari, struck by the last rays of the setting sun, with every pane of glass giving back the glow, looks like a city on fire.
And this is the moment to contemplate Constantinople. There is one rapid succession of the softest tints, pallid gold, rose and lilac, which quiver and float over the sides of the hills and the water, every moment giving and taking away the prize of beauty from each part of the city, and revealing a thousand modest graces of the landscape that have not dared to show themselves in the full light. Great melancholy suburbs are lost in the shadow of the valleys; little purple cities smile upon the heights; villages faint as if about to die; others die at once like extinguished flames; others, that seemed already dead, revive, and glow, and quiver yet a moment longer under the last ray of the sun. Then there is nothing left but two resplendent points upon the Asiatic shore,--the summit of Mount Bulgurlu, and the extremity of the cape that guards the entrance to the Propontis; they are at first two golden crowns, then two purple caps, then two rubies; then all Constantinople is in shadow, and ten thousand voices from ten thousand minarets announce the close of the day.
RESEMBLANCES
From 'Constantinople'
In the first days, fresh as I was from the perusal of Oriental literature, I saw everywhere the famous personages of history and legend, and the figures that recalled them resembled sometimes so faithfully those that were fixed in my imagination, that I was constrained to stop and look at them. How many times have I seized my friend by the arm, and pointing to a person passing by, have exclaimed: "It is he, cospetto! do you not recognize him?" In the square of the Sultana Validé, I frequently saw the gigantic Turk who threw down millstones from the walls of Nicaea on the heads of the soldiers of Baglione; I saw in front of a mosque Umm Djemil, that old fury that sowed brambles and nettles before Mahomet's house; I met in the book bazaar, with a volume under his arm, Djemaleddin, the learned man of Broussa, who knew the whole of the Arab dictionary by heart; I passed quite close to the side of Ayesha, the favorite wife of the Prophet, and she fixed upon my face her eyes, brilliant and humid, like the reflection of stars in a well; I have recognized, in the At-Meidan, the famous beauty of that poor Greek woman killed by a cannon ball at the base of the serpentine column; I have been face to face, in the Fanar, with Kara-Abderrahman, the handsome young Turk of the time of Orkhan; I have seen Coswa, the she-camel of the Prophet; I have encountered Kara-bulut, Selim's black steed; I have met the poor poet Fignahi, condemned to go about Stamboul tied to an ass for having pierced with an insolent distich the Grand Vizier of Ibrahim; I have been in the same café with Soliman the Big, the monstrous admiral, whom four robust slaves hardly succeeded in lifting from the divan; Ali, the Grand Vizier, who could not find in all Arabia a horse that could carry him; Mahmoud Pasha, the ferocious Hercules that strangled the son of Soliman; and the stupid Ahmed Second, who continually repeated "Koso! Koso!" (Very well, very well) crouching before the door of the copyists' bazaar, in the square of Bajazet. All the personages of the 'Thousand and One Nights,' the Aladdins, the Zobeides, the Sindbads, the Gulnares, the old Jewish merchants, possessors of enchanted carpets and wonderful lamps, passed before me like a procession of phantoms.
BIRDS
From 'Constantinople'
Constantinople has one grace and gayety peculiar to itself, that comes from an infinite number of birds of every kind, for which the Turks nourish a warm sentiment and regard. Mosques, groves, old walls, gardens, palaces, all resound with song, the whistling and twittering of birds; everywhere wings are fluttering, and life and harmony abound. The sparrows enter the houses boldly, and eat out of women's and children's hands; swallows nest over the café doors, and under the arches of the bazaars; pigeons in innumerable swarms, maintained by legacies from sultans and private individuals, form garlands of black and white along the cornices of the cupolas and around the terraces of the minarets; sea-gulls dart and play over the water; thousands of turtle-doves coo amorously among the cypresses in the cemeteries; crows croak about the Castle of the Seven Towers halcyons come and go in long files between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmora; and storks sit upon the cupolas of the mausoleums. For the Turk, each one of these birds has a gentle meaning, or a benignant virtue: turtle-doves are favorable to lovers, swallows keep away fire from the roofs where they build their nests, storks make yearly pilgrimages to Mecca, halcyons carry the souls of the faithful to Paradise. Thus he protects and feeds them, through a sentiment of gratitude and piety; and they enliven the house, the sea, and the sepulchre. Every quarter of Stamboul is full of the noise of them, bringing to the city a sense of the pleasures of country life, and continually refreshing the soul with a reminder of nature.
CORDOVA
From 'Spain'
For a long distance the country offers no new aspect to the feverish curiosity of the tourist. At Vilches there is a vast plain, and beyond there the open country of Tolosa, where Alphonso VIII., King of Castile, gained the celebrated victory "de las Navas" over the Mussulman army. The sky was very clear, and in the distance one could see the mountains of the Sierra de Segura. Suddenly, there comes over one a sensation which seems to respond to a suppressed exclamation of surprise: the first aloes with their thick leaves, the unexpected heralds of tropical vegetation, rise on both sides of the road. Beyond, the fields studded with flowers begin to appear. The first are studded, those which follow almost covered, then come vast stretches of ground entirely clothed with poppies, daisies, lilies, wild mushrooms, and ranunculuses, so that the country (as it presents itself to view) looks like a succession of immense purple, gold, and snowy-hued carpets. In the distance, among the trees, are innumerable blue, white, and yellow streaks, as far as the eye can reach; and nearer, on the banks of the ditches, the elevations of ground, the slopes, and even on the edge of the road are flowers in beds, clumps, and clusters, one above the other, grouped in the form of great bouquets, and trembling on their stalks, which one can almost touch with his hand. Then there are fields white with great blades of grain, flanked by plantations of roses, orange groves, immense olive groves, and hillsides varied by a thousand shades of green, surmounted by ancient Moorish towers, scattered with many-colored houses; and between the one and the other are white and slender bridges that cross rivulets hidden by the trees.
On the horizon appear the snowy caps of the Sierra Nevada; under that white streak lie the undulating blue ones of the nearer mountains. The country becomes more varied and flourishing; Arjonilla lies in a grove of olives, whose boundary one cannot see; Pedro Abad, in the midst of a plain, covered with vineyards and fruit-trees; Ventas di Alcolea, on the last hills of the Sierra Nevada, peopled with villas and gardens. We are approaching Cordova, the train flies along, we see little stations half hidden by trees and flowers, the wind carries the rose leaves into the carriages, great butterflies fly near the windows, a delicious perfume permeates the air, the travelers sing; we pass through an enchanted garden, the aloes, oranges, palms, and villas grow more frequent; and at last we hear a cry--"Here is Cordova!"
How many lovely pictures and grand recollections the sound of that name awakens in one's mind! Cordova,--the ancient pearl of the East, as the Arabian poets call it,--the city of cities; Cordova of the thirty suburbs and three thousand mosques, which inclosed within her walls the greatest temple of Islam! Her fame extended throughout the East, and obscured the glory of ancient Damascus. The faithful came from the most remote regions of Asia to banks of the Guadalquivir to prostrate themselves in the marvelous Mihrab of her mosque, in the light of the thousand bronze lamps cast from the bells of the cathedrals of Spain. Hither flocked artists, savants, poets from every part of the Mahometan world to her flourishing schools, immense libraries, and the magnificent courts of her caliphs. Riches and beauty flowed in, attracted by the fame of her splendor. From here they scattered, eager for knowledge, along the coasts of Africa, through the schools of Tunis, Cairo, Bagdad, Cufa, and even to India and China, in order to gather inspiration and records; and the poetry sung on the slopes of the Sierra Morena flew from lyre to lyre, as far as the valleys of the Caucasus, to excite the ardor for pilgrimages. The beautiful, powerful, and wise Cordova, crowned with three thousand villages, proudly raised her white minarets in the midst of orange groves, and spread around the valley a voluptuous atmosphere of joy and glory.
I leave the train, cross a garden, look around me. I am alone. The travelers who were with me disappear here and there; I still hear the noise of a carriage which is rolling off; then all is quiet. It is midday, the sky is very clear, and the air suffocating. I see two white houses; it is the opening of a street; I enter and go on. The street is narrow, the houses as small as the little villas on the slopes of artificial gardens, almost all one story in height, with windows a few feet from the ground, the roofs so low that one could almost touch them with a stick, and the walls very white. The street turns; I look, see no one, and hear neither step nor voice. I say to myself:--"This must be an abandoned street!" and try another one, in which the houses are white, the windows closed, and there is nothing but silence and solitude around me. "Why, where am I?" I ask myself. I go on; the street, which is so narrow that a carriage could not pass, begins to wind; on the right and left I see other deserted streets, white houses, and closed windows. My step resounds as if in a corridor. The whiteness of the walls is so vivid that even the reflection is trying, and I am obliged to walk with my eyes half closed, for it really seems as if I were making my way through the snow. I reach a small square; everything is closed, and no one is to be seen. At this point a vague feeling of melancholy seizes me, such as I have never experienced before; a mixture of pleasure and sadness, similar to that which comes to children when, after a long run, they reach a lonely rural spot and rejoice in their discovery, but with a certain trepidation lest they should be too far from home. Above many roofs rise the palm-trees of inner gardens. Oh, fantastic legends of Odalisk and Caliph! On I go from street to street, and square to square; I begin to meet some people, but they pass and disappear like phantoms. All the streets resemble each other; the houses have only three or four windows; and not a spot, scrawl, or crack is to be seen on the walls, which are as smooth and white as a sheet of paper. From time to time I hear a whisper behind a blind, and see, almost at the same moment, a dark head, with a flower in the hair, appear and disappear. I look in at a door....
A patio! How shall I describe a patio? It is not a court, nor a garden, nor a room; but it is all three things combined. Between the patio and the street there is a vestibule. On the four sides of the patio rise slender columns, which support, up to a level with the first floor, a species of gallery inclosed in glass; above the gallery is stretched a canvas, which shades the court. The vestibule is paved with marble, the door flanked by columns, surmounted by bas-reliefs, and closed by a slender iron gate of graceful design. At the end of the patio there is a fountain; and all around are scattered chairs, work-tables, pictures, and vases of flowers. I run to another door: there is another patio, with its walls covered with ivy, and a number of niches holding little statues, busts, and urns. I look in at a third door: here is another patio, with its walls worked in mosaics, a palm in the centre, and a mass of flowers all around. I stop at a fourth door: after the patio there is another vestibule, after this a second patio, in which one sees other statues, columns, and fountains. All these rooms and gardens are so neat and clean that one could pass his hand over the walls and on the ground without leaving a trace; and they are fresh, odorous, and lighted by an uncertain light, which increases their beauty and mysterious appearance.
On I go at random from street to street. As I walk, my curiosity increases and I quicken my pace. It seems impossible that a whole city can be like this; I am afraid of stumbling across some house or coming into some street that will remind me of other cities, and disturb my beautiful dream. But no, the dream lasts; for everything is small, lovely, and mysterious. At every hundred steps I reach a deserted square, in which I stop and hold my breath; from time to time there appears a cross-road, and not a living soul is to be seen; everything is white, the windows closed, and silence reigns on all sides. At each door there is a new spectacle; there are arches, columns, flowers, jets of water, and palms; a marvelous variety of design, tints, light, and perfume; here the odor of roses, there of oranges, farther on of pinks; and with this perfume a whiff of fresh air, and with the air a subdued sound of women's voices, the rustling of leaves, and the singing of birds. It is a sweet and varied harmony, that without disturbing the silence of the streets, soothes the ear like the echo of distant music. Ah! it is not a dream! Madrid, Italy, Europe, are indeed far away! Here one lives another life, and breathes the air of a different world,--for I am in the East.
THE LAND OF PLUCK
From 'Holland and Its People'
Whoever looks for the first time at a large map of Holland wonders that a country so constituted can continue to exist. At the first glance it is difficult to see whether land or water predominates, or whether Holland belongs most to the continent or to the sea. Those broken and compressed coasts; those deep bays; those great rivers that, losing the aspect of rivers, seem bringing new seas to the sea; that sea which, changing itself into rivers, penetrates the land and breaks it into archipelagoes; the lakes, the vast morasses, the canals crossing and recrossing each other, all combine to give the idea of a country that may at any moment disintegrate and disappear. Seals and beavers would seem to be its rightful inhabitants; but since there are men bold enough to live in it, they surely cannot ever sleep in peace.
A DUTCH GIRL.
Photogravure from Painting by H. Vogka.
What sort of a country Holland is, has been told by many in few words. Napoleon said it was an alluvion of French rivers,--the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Meuse,--and with this pretext he added it to the Empire. One writer has defined it as a sort of transition between land and sea. Another, as an immense crust of earth floating on the water. Others, an annex of the old continent, the China of Europe, the end of the earth and the beginning of the ocean, a measureless raft of mud and sand; and Philip II. called it the country nearest to hell.
But they all agreed upon one point, and all expressed it in the same words:--Holland is a conquest made by man over the sea; it is an artificial country: the Hollanders made it; it exists because the Hollanders preserve it; it will vanish whenever the Hollanders shall abandon it.
To comprehend this truth, we must imagine Holland as it was when first inhabited by the first German tribes that wandered away in search of a country.
It was almost uninhabitable. There were vast tempestuous lakes, like seas, touching one another; morass beside morass; one tract after another covered with brushwood; immense forests of pines, oaks, and alders, traversed by herds of wild horses, and so thick were these forests that tradition says one could travel leagues passing from tree to tree without ever putting foot to the ground. The deep bays and gulfs carried into the heart of the country the fury of the northern tempests. Some provinces disappeared once every year under the waters of the sea, and were nothing but muddy tracts, neither land nor water, where it was impossible either to walk or to sail. The large rivers, without sufficient inclination to descend to the sea, wandered here and there uncertain of their way, and slept in monstrous pools and ponds among the sands of the coasts. It was a sinister place, swept by furious winds, beaten by obstinate rains, veiled in a perpetual fog, where nothing was heard but the roar of the sea and the voices of wild beasts and birds of the ocean. The first people who had the courage to plant their tents there, had to raise with their own hands dikes of earth to keep out the rivers and the sea, and lived within them like shipwrecked men upon desolate islands, venturing forth at the subsidence of the waters in quest of food in the shape of fish and game, and gathering the eggs of marine birds upon the sand.
Caesar, passing by, was the first to name this people. The other Latin historians speak with compassion and respect of these intrepid barbarians who lived upon a "floating land," exposed to the intemperance of a cruel sky and the fury of the mysterious northern sea; and the imagination pictures the Roman soldiers, who, from the heights of the uttermost citadels of the empire, beaten by the waves, contemplated with wonder and pity those wandering tribes upon their desolate land, like a race accursed of heaven.
Now, if we remember that such a region has become one of the most fertile, wealthiest, and best regulated of the countries of the world, we shall understand the justice of the saying that Holland is a conquest made by man. But, it must be added, the conquest goes on forever.
To explain this fact--to show how the existence of Holland, in spite of the great defensive works constructed by the inhabitants, demands an incessant and most perilous struggle--it will be enough to touch here and there upon a few of the principal vicissitudes of her physical history, from the time when her inhabitants had already reduced her to a habitable country.
Tradition speaks of a great inundation in Friesland in the sixth century. From that time every gulf, every island, and it may be said every city, in Holland has its catastrophe to record. In thirteen centuries, it is recorded that one great inundation, beside smaller ones, has occurred every seven years; and the country being all plain, these inundations were veritable floods. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the sea destroyed a part of a fertile peninsula near the mouth of the Ems, and swallowed up more than thirty villages. In the course of the same century, a series of inundations opened an immense chasm in northern Holland, and formed the Zuyder Zee, causing the death of more than eighty thousand persons. In 1421 a tempest swelled the Meuse, so that in one night the waters overwhelmed seventy-two villages and one hundred thousand inhabitants. In 1532 the sea burst the dikes of Zealand, destroying hundreds of villages, and covering forever a large tract of country. In 1570 a storm caused another inundation in Zealand and in the province of Utrecht; Amsterdam was invaded by the waters, and in Friesland twenty thousand people were drowned. Other great inundations took place in the seventeenth century; two terrible ones at the beginning and the end of the eighteenth; one in 1825 that desolated North Holland, Friesland, Over-Yssel, and Gueldres; and another great one of the Rhine, in 1855, which invaded Gueldres and the province of Utrecht, and covered a great part of North Brabant. Beside these great catastrophes, there happened in different centuries innumerable smaller ones, which would have been famous in any other country, but which in Holland are scarcely remembered: like the rising of the lake of Haarlem, itself the result of an inundation of the sea; flourishing cities of the gulf of Zuyder Zee vanished under the waters; the islands of Zealand covered again and again by the sea, and again emerging; villages of the coast, from Helder to the mouths of the Meuse, from time to time inundated and destroyed; and in all these inundations immense loss of life of men and animals. It is plain that miracles of courage, constancy, and industry must have been accomplished by the Hollanders, first in creating and afterwards in preserving such a country. The enemy from which they had to wrest it was triple: the sea, the lakes, the rivers. They drained the lakes, drove back the sea, and imprisoned the rivers.
To drain the lakes the Hollanders pressed the air into their service. The lakes, the marshes, were surrounded by dikes, the dikes by canals; and an army of windmills, putting in motion force-pumps, turned the water into the canals, which carried it off to the rivers and the sea. Thus vast tracts of land buried under the water saw the sun, and were transformed, as if by magic, into fertile fields, covered with villages, and intersected by canals and roads. In the seventeenth century, in less than forty years, twenty-six lakes were drained. At the beginning of the present century, in North Holland alone, more than six thousand hectares (or fifteen thousand acres) were thus redeemed from the waters; in South Holland, before 1844, twenty-nine thousand hectares; in the whole of Holland, from 1500 to 1858, three hundred and fifty-five thousand hectares. Substituting steam-mills for windmills, in thirty-nine months was completed the great undertaking of the draining of the lake of Haarlem, which measured forty-four kilometres in circumference, and forever threatened with its tempests the cities of Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Leyden. And they are now meditating the prodigious work of drying up the Zuyder Zee, which embraces an area of more than seven hundred square kilometres.
The rivers, another eternal enemy, cost no less of labor and sacrifice. Some, like the Rhine, which lost itself in the sands before reaching the sea, had to be channeled and defended at their mouths, against the tides, by formidable cataracts; others, like the Meuse, bordered by dikes as powerful as those that were raised against the ocean; others, turned from their course; the wandering waters gathered together; the course of the affluents regulated; the waters divided with rigorous measure in order to retain that enormous mass of liquid in equilibrium, where the slightest inequality might cost a province; and in this way all the rivers that formerly spread their devastating floods about the country were disciplined into channels and constrained to do service.
But the most tremendous struggle was the battle with the ocean. Holland is in great part lower than the level of the sea; consequently, everywhere that the coast is not defended by sand banks it has to be protected by dikes. If these interminable bulwarks of earth, granite, and wood were not there to attest the indomitable courage and perseverance of the Hollanders, it would not be believed that the hand of man could, even in many centuries, have accomplished such a work. In Zealand alone the dikes extend to a distance of more than four hundred kilometres. The western coast of the island of Walcheren is defended by a dike, in which it is computed that the expense of construction added to that of preservation, if it were put out at interest, would amount to a sum equal in value to that which the dike itself would be worth were it made of massive copper. Around the city of Helder, at the northern extremity of North Holland, extends a dike ten kilometres long, constructed of masses of Norwegian granite, which descends more than sixty metres into the sea. The whole province of Friesland, for the length of eighty-eight kilometres, is defended by three rows of piles sustained by masses of Norwegian and German granite. Amsterdam, all the cities of the Zuyder Zee, and all the islands,--fragments of vanished lands,--which are strung like beads between Friesland and North Holland, are protected by dikes. From the mouths of the Ems to those of the Scheldt, Holland is an impenetrable fortress, of whose immense bastions the mills are the towers, the cataracts are the gates, the islands the advanced forts; and like a true fortress, it shows to its enemy, the sea, only the tops of its bell-towers and the roofs of its houses, as if in defiance and derision.
Holland is a fortress, and her people live as in a fortress, on a war footing with the sea. An army of engineers, directed by the Minister of the Interior, spread over the country, and, ordered like an army, continually spy the enemy, watch over the internal waters, foresee the bursting of the dikes, order and direct the defensive works. The expenses of the war are divided,--one part to the State, one part to the provinces; every proprietor pays, beside the general imposts, a special impost for the dikes, in proportion to the extent of his lands and their proximity to the water. An accidental rupture, an inadvertence, may cause a flood; the peril is unceasing; the sentinels are at their posts upon the bulwarks; at the first assault of the sea, they shout the war-cry, and Holland sends men, material, and money. And even when there is no great battle, a quiet, silent struggle is forever going on. The innumerable mills, even in the drained districts, continue to work unresting, to absorb and turn into the canals the water that falls in rain and that which filters in from the sea. Every day the cataracts of the bays and rivers close their gigantic gates against the high tide trying to rush into the heart of the land. The work of strengthening dikes, fortifying sand-banks with plantations, throwing out new dikes where the banks are low, straight as great lances, vibrating in the bosom of the sea and breaking the first impetus of the wave, is forever going on. And the sea eternally knocks at the river-gates, beats upon the ramparts, growls on every side her ceaseless menace, lifting her curious waves as if to see the land she counts as hers, piling up banks of sand before the gates to kill the commerce of the cities, forever gnawing, scratching, digging at the coast; and failing to overthrow the ramparts upon which she foams and fumes in angry effort, she casts at their feet ships full of the dead, that they may announce to the rebellious country her fury and her strength.
In the midst of this great and terrible struggle Holland is transformed: Holland is the land of transformations. A geographical map of that country as it existed eight centuries ago is not recognizable. Transforming the sea, men also are transformed. The sea, at some points, drives back the land; it takes portions from the continent, leaves them and takes them again; joins islands to the mainland with ropes of sand, as in the case of Zealand; breaks off bits from the mainland and makes new islands, as in Wieringen; retires from certain coasts and makes land cities out of what were cities of the sea, as Leuvarde; converts vast tracts of plain into archipelagoes of a hundred islets, as Biisbosch; separates a city from the land, as Dordrecht; forms new gulfs two leagues broad, like the gulf of Dollart; divides two provinces with a new sea, like North Holland and Friesland. The effect of the inundations is to cause the level of the sea to rise in some places and to sink in others; sterile lands are fertilized by the slime of the rivers, fertile lands are changed into deserts of sand. With the transformations of the waters alternate the transformations of labor. Islands are united to continents, like the island of Ameland; entire provinces are reduced to islands, as North Holland will be by the new canal of Amsterdam, which is to separate it from South Holland; lakes as large as provinces disappear altogether, like the lake of Beemster; by the extraction of peat, land is converted into lakes, and these lakes are again transformed into meadows. And thus the country changes its aspect according to the violence of nature or the needs of men. And while one goes over it with the latest map in hand, one may be sure that the map will be useless in a few years, because even now there are new gulfs in process of formation, tracts of land just ready to be detached from the mainland, and great canals being cut that will carry life to uninhabited districts.
But Holland has done more than defend herself against the waters; she has made herself mistress of them, and has used them for her own defense. Should a foreign army invade her territory, she has but to open her dikes and unchain the sea and the rivers, as she did against the Romans, against the Spaniards, against the army of Louis XIV., and defend the land cities with her fleet. Water was the source of her poverty, she has made it the source of wealth. Over the whole country extends an immense network of canals, which serves both for the irrigation of the land and as a means of communication. The cities, by means of canals, communicate with the sea; canals run from town to town, and from them to villages, which are themselves bound together by these watery ways, and are connected even to the houses scattered over the country; smaller canals surround the fields and orchards, pastures and kitchen-gardens, serving at once as boundary wall, hedge, and road-way; every house is a little port. Ships, boats, rafts, move about in all directions, as in other places carts and carriages. The canals are the arteries of Holland, and the water her life-blood. But even setting aside the canals, the draining of the lakes, and the defensive works, on every side are seen the traces of marvelous undertakings. The soil, which in other countries is a gift of nature, is in Holland a work of men's hands. Holland draws the greater part of her wealth from commerce; but before commerce comes the cultivation of the soil; and the soil had to be created. There were sand-banks interspersed with layers of peat, broad downs swept by the winds, great tracts of barren land apparently condemned to an eternal sterility. The first elements of manufacture, iron and coal, were wanting; there was no wood, because the forests had already been destroyed by tempests when agriculture began; there was no stone, there were no metals. Nature, says a Dutch poet, had refused all her gifts to Holland; the Hollanders had to do everything in spite of nature. They began by fertilizing the sand. In some places they formed a productive soil with earth brought from a distance, as a garden is made; they spread the siliceous dust of the downs over the too watery meadows; they mixed with the sandy earth the remains of peat taken from the bottoms; they extracted clay to lend fertility to the surface of their lands; they labored to break up the downs with the plow: and thus in a thousand ways, and continually fighting off the menacing waters, they succeeded in bringing Holland to a state of cultivation not inferior to that of more favored regions. That Holland, that sandy, marshy country which the ancients considered all but uninhabitable, now sends out yearly from her confines agricultural products to the value of a hundred millions of francs, possesses about one million three hundred thousand head of cattle, and in proportion to the extent of her territory may be accounted one of the most populous of European States.
It may be easily understood how the physical peculiarities of their country must influence the Dutch people; and their genius is in perfect harmony with the character of Holland. It is sufficient to contemplate the monuments of their great struggle with the sea in order to understand that their distinctive characteristics must be firmness and patience, accompanied by a calm and constant courage. That glorious battle, and the consciousness of owing everything to their own strength, must have infused and fortified in them a high sense of dignity and an indomitable spirit of liberty and independence. The necessity of a constant struggle, of a continuous labor, and of perpetual sacrifices in defense of their existence, forever taking them back to a sense of reality, must have made them a highly practical and economical people; good sense should be their most salient quality, economy one of their chief virtues; they must be excellent in all useful arts, sparing of diversion, simple even in their greatness; succeeding in what they undertake by dint of tenacity and a thoughtful and orderly activity; more wise than heroic; more conservative than creative; giving no great architects to the edifice of modern thought, but the ablest of workmen, a legion of patient and laborious artisans. And by virtue of these qualities of prudence, phlegmatic activity, and the spirit of conservatism, they are ever advancing, though by slow degrees; they acquire gradually, but never lose what they have gained; holding stubbornly to their ancient customs; preserving almost intact, and despite the neighborhood of three great nations, their own originality; preserving it through every form of government, through foreign invasions, through political and religious wars, and in spite of the immense concourse of strangers from every country that are always coming among them; and remaining, in short, of all the northern races, that one which, though ever advancing in the path of civilization, has kept its antique stamp most clearly.
It is enough also to remember its form in order to comprehend that this country of three millions and a half of inhabitants, although bound in so compact a political union, although recognizable among all the other northern peoples by certain traits peculiar to the population of all its provinces, must present a great variety. And so it is in fact. Between Zealand and Holland proper, between Holland and Friesland, between Friesland and Gueldres, between Groningen and Brabant, in spite of vicinity and so many common tics, there is no less difference than between the more distant provinces of Italy and France; difference of language, costume, and character; difference of race and of religion. The communal regime has impressed an indelible mark upon this people, because in no other country does it so conform to the nature of things. The country is divided into various groups of interests organized in the same manner as the hydraulic system. Whence, association and mutual help against the common enemy, the sea; but liberty for local institutions and forces. Monarchy has not extinguished the ancient municipal spirit, and this it is that renders impossible a complete fusion of the State, in all the great States that have made the attempt. The great rivers and gulfs are at the same time commercial roads serving as national bonds between the different provinces, and barriers which defend old traditions and old customs in each.
THE DUTCH MASTERS
From 'Holland and Its People'
The Dutch school of painting has one quality which renders it particularly attractive to us Italians; it is above all others the most different from our own, the very antithesis or the opposite pole of art. The Dutch and Italian schools are the most original, or, as has been said, the only two to which the title rigorously belongs; the others being only daughters or younger sisters, more or less resembling them.
Thus even in painting Holland offers that which is most sought after in travel and in books of travel: the new.
Dutch painting was born with the liberty and independence of Holland. As long as the northern and southern provinces of the Low Countries remained under the Spanish rule and in the Catholic faith, Dutch painters painted like Belgian painters; they studied in Belgium, Germany, and Italy; Heemskerk imitated Michael Angelo, Bloemart followed Correggio, and "Il Moro" copied Titian, not to indicate others: and they were one and all pedantic imitators, who added to the exaggerations of the Italian style a certain German coarsenesss, the result of which was a bastard style of painting, still inferior to the first, childish, stiff in design, crude in color, and completely wanting in chiaroscuro, but at least not a servile imitation, and becoming, as it were, a faint prelude of the true Dutch art that was to be.
With the war of independence, liberty, reform, and painting also were renewed. With religious traditions fell artistic traditions; the nude nymphs, Madonnas, saints, allegory, mythology, the ideal--all the old edifice fell to pieces. Holland, animated by a new life, felt the need of manifesting and expanding it in a new way; the small country, become all at once glorious and formidable, felt the desire for illustration; the faculties which had been excited and strengthened in the grand undertaking of creating a nation, now that the work was completed, overflowed and ran into new channels. The conditions of the country were favorable to the revival of art. The supreme dangers were conjured away; there was security, prosperity, a splendid future; the heroes had done their duty, and the artists were permitted to come to the front; Holland, after many sacrifices, and much suffering, issued victoriously from the struggle, lifted her face among her people and smiled. And that smile is art.
What that art would necessarily be, might have been guessed even had no monument of it remained. A pacific, laborious, practical people, continually beaten down, to quote a great German poet, to prosaic realities by the occupations of a vulgar burgher life; cultivating its reason at the expense of its imagination; living, consequently, more in clear ideas than in beautiful images; taking refuge from abstractions; never darting its thoughts beyond that nature with which it is in perpetual battle; seeing only that which is, enjoying only that which it can possess, making its happiness consist in the tranquil ease and honest sensuality of a life without violent passions or exorbitant desires;--such a people must have tranquillity also in their art, they must love an art that pleases without startling the mind, which addresses the senses rather than the spirit; an art full of repose, precision, and delicacy, though material like their lives: in one word, a realistic art, in which they can see themselves as they are and as they are content to be.
The artists began by tracing that which they saw before their eyes--the house. The long winters, the persistent rains, the dampness, the variableness of the climate, obliged the Hollander to stay within doors the greater part of the year. He loved his little house, his shell, much better than we love our abodes, for the reason that he had more need of it, and stayed more within it; he provided it with all sorts of conveniences, caressed it, made much of it; he liked to look out from his well-stopped windows at the falling snow and the drenching rain, and to hug himself with the thought, "Rage, tempest, I am warm and safe!" Snug in his shell, his faithful housewife beside him, his children about him, he passed the long autumn and winter evenings in eating much, drinking much, smoking much, and taking his well-earned ease after the cares of the day were over. The Dutch painters represented these houses and this life in little pictures proportionate to the size of the walls on which they were to hang; the bedchambers that make one feel a desire to sleep, the kitchens, the tables set out, the fresh and smiling faces of the house-mothers, the men at their ease around the fire; and with that conscientious realism which never forsakes them, they depict the dozing cat, the yawning dog, the clucking hen, the broom, the vegetables, the scattered pots and pans, the chicken ready for the spit. Thus they represent life in all its scenes, and in every grade of the social scale--the dance, the conversazione, the orgie, the feast, the game; and thus did Terburg, Metzu, Netscher, Dow, Mieris, Steen, Brouwer, and Van Ostade become famous.
After depicting the house, they turned their attention to the country. The stern climate allowed but a brief time for the admiration of nature, but for this very reason Dutch artists admired her all the more; they saluted the spring with a livelier joy, and permitted that fugitive smile of heaven to stamp itself more deeply on their fancy. The country was not beautiful, but it was twice dear because it had been torn from the sea and from the foreign oppressor. The Dutch artist painted it lovingly; he represented it simply, ingenuously, with a sense of intimacy which at that time was not to be found in Italian or Belgian landscape. The flat, monotonous country had, to the Dutch painter's eyes, a marvelous variety. He caught all the mutations of the sky, and knew the value of the water, with its reflections, its grace and freshness, and its power of illuminating everything. Having no mountains, he took the dikes for background; with no forests, he imparted to a single group of trees all the mystery of a forest; and he animated the whole with beautiful animals and white sails.
The subjects of their pictures are poor enough,--a windmill, a canal, a gray sky; but how they make one think! A few Dutch painters, not content with nature in their own country, came to Italy in search of hills, luminous skies, and famous ruins; and another band of select artists is the result,--Both, Swanevelt, Pynacker, Breenberg, Van Laer, Asselyn. But the palm remains with the landscapists of Holland; with Wynants the painter of morning, with Van der Neer the painter of night, with Ruysdael the painter of melancholy, with Hobbema the illustrator of windmills, cabins, and kitchen gardens, and with others who have restricted themselves to the expression of the enchantment of nature as she is in Holland.
Simultaneously with landscape art was born another kind of painting, especially peculiar to Holland,--animal painting. Animals are the riches of the country; that magnificent race of cattle which has no rival in Europe for fecundity and beauty. The Hollanders, who owe so much to them, treat them, one may say, as part of the population; they wash them, comb them, dress them, and love them dearly. They are to be seen everywhere; they are reflected in all the canals, and dot with points of black and white the immense fields that stretch on every side, giving an air of peace and comfort to every place, and exciting in the spectator's heart a sentiment of Arcadian gentleness and patriarchal serenity. The Dutch artists studied these animals in all their varieties, in all their habits, and divined, as one may say, their inner life and sentiments, animating the tranquil beauty of the landscape with their forms. Rubens, Luyders, Paul de Vos, and other Belgian painters, had drawn animals with admirable mastery; but all these are surpassed by the Dutch artists Van der Velde, Berghem, Karel du Jardin, and by the prince of animal painters, Paul Potter, whose famous "Bull," in the gallery of the Hague, deserves to be placed in the Vatican beside the "Transfiguration" by Raphael.
In yet another field are the Dutch painters great,--the sea. The sea, their enemy, their power, and their glory, forever threatening their country, and entering in a hundred ways into their lives and fortunes; that turbulent North Sea, full of sinister color, with a light of infinite melancholy upon it, beating forever upon a desolate coast, must subjugate the imagination of the artist. He passes, indeed, long hours on the shore, contemplating its tremendous beauty, ventures upon its waves to study the effects of tempests, buys a vessel and sails with his wife and family, observing and making notes, follows the fleet into battle and takes part in the fight; and in this way are made marine painters like William Van der Velde the elder and William the younger, like Backhuysen, Dubbels, and Stork.
Another kind of painting was to arise in Holland, as the expression of the character of the people and of republican manners. A people which without greatness had done so many great things, as Michelet says, must have its heroic painters, if we call them so, destined to illustrate men and events. But this school of painting,--precisely because the people were without greatness, or to express it better, without the form of greatness,--modest, inclined to consider all equal before the country, because all had done their duty, abhorring adulation, and the glorification in one only of the virtues and the triumph of many,--this school has to illustrate not a few men who have excelled, and a few extraordinary facts, but all classes of citizenship gathered among the most ordinary and pacific of burgher life. From this come the great pictures which represent five, ten, thirty persons together, arquebusiers, mayors, officers, professors, magistrates, administrators; seated or standing around a table, feasting and conversing; of life size, most faithful likenesses; grave, open faces, expressing that secure serenity of conscience by which may be divined rather than seen the nobleness of a life consecrated to one's country, the character of that strong, laborious epoch, the masculine virtues of that excellent generation; all this set off by the fine costume of the time, so admirably combining grace and dignity,--those gorgets, those doublets, those black mantles, those silken scarves and ribbons, those arms and banners. In this field stand pre-eminent Van der Helst, Hals, Govaert, Flink, and Bol.
Descending from the consideration of the various kinds of painting, to the special manner by means of which the artist excelled in treatment, one leads all the rest as the distinctive feature of Dutch painting--the light.
The light in Holland, by reason of the particular conditions of its manifestation, could not fail to give rise to a special manner of painting. A pale light, waving with marvelous mobility through an atmosphere impregnated with vapor, a nebulous veil continually and abruptly torn, a perpetual struggle between light and shadow,--such was the spectacle which attracted the eye of the artist. He began to observe and to reproduce all this agitation of the heavens, this struggle which animates with varied and fantastic life the solitude of nature in Holland; and in representing it, the struggle passed into his soul, and instead of representing he created. Then he caused the two elements to contend under his hand; he accumulated darkness that he might split and seam it with all manner of luminous effects and sudden gleams of light; sunbeams darted through the rifts, sunset reflections and the yellow rays of lamp-light were blended with delicate manipulation into mysterious shadows, and their dim depths were peopled with half-seen forms; and thus he created all sorts of contrasts, enigmas, play and effect of strange and unexpected chiaroscuro. In this field, among many, stand conspicuous Gerard Dow, the author of the famous four-candle picture, and the great magician and sovereign illuminator Rembrandt.
Another marked feature of Dutch painting was to be color. Besides the generally accepted reasons that in a country where there are no mountainous horizons, no varied prospects, no great coup d'oeil,--no forms, in short, that lend themselves to design,--the artist's eye must inevitably be attracted by color; and that this might be peculiarly the case in Holland, where the uncertain light, the fog-veiled atmosphere, confuse and blend the outlines of all objects, so that the eye, unable to fix itself upon the form, flies to color as the principal attribute that nature presents to it,--besides these reasons, there is the fact that in a country so flat, so uniform, and so gray as Holland, there is the same need of color as in southern lands there is need of shade. The Dutch artists did but follow the imperious taste of their countrymen, who painted their houses in vivid colors, as well as their ships, and in some places the trunks of their trees and the palings and fences of their fields and gardens; whose dress was of the gayest, richest hues; who loved tulips and hyacinths even to madness. And thus the Dutch painters were potent colorists, and Rembrandt was their chief.
Realism, natural to the calmness and slowness of the Dutch character, was to give to their art yet another distinctive feature,--finish, which was carried to the very extreme of possibility. It is truly said that the leading quality of the people may be found in their pictures; viz., patience. Everything is represented with the minuteness of a daguerreotype; every vein in the wood of a piece of furniture, every fibre in a leaf, the threads of cloth, the stitches in a patch, every hair upon an animal's coat, every wrinkle in a man's face; everything finished with microscopic precision, as if done with a fairy pencil, or at the expense of the painter's eyes and reason. In reality a defect rather than an excellence, since the office of painting is to represent not what is, but what the eye sees, and the eye does not see everything; but a defect carried to such a pitch of perfection that one admires, and does not find fault. In this respect the most famous prodigies of patience were Dow, Mieris, Potter, and Van der Heist, but more or less all the Dutch painters.
But realism, which gives to Dutch art so original a stamp and such admirable qualities, is yet the root of its most serious defects. The artists, desirous only of representing material truths, gave to their figures no expression save that of their physical sentiments. Grief, love, enthusiasm, and the thousand delicate shades of feeling that have no name, or take a different one with the different causes that give rise to them, they express rarely, or not at all. For them the heart does not beat, the eyes do not weep, the lips do not quiver. One whole side of the human soul, the noblest and highest, is wanting in their pictures. More: in their faithful reproduction of everything, even the ugly, and especially the ugly, they end by exaggerating even that, making defects into deformities and portraits into caricatures; they calumniate the national type; they give a burlesque and graceless aspect to the human countenance. In order to have the proper background for such figures, they are constrained to choose trivial subjects: hence the great number of pictures representing beer-shops, and drinkers with grotesque, stupid faces, in absurd attitudes; ugly women and ridiculous old men; scenes in which one can almost hear the brutal laughter and the obscene words. Looking at these pictures, one would naturally conclude that Holland was inhabited by the ugliest and most ill-mannered people on the earth. We will not speak of greater and worse license. Steen, Potter, and Brouwer, the great Rembrandt himself, have all painted incidents that are scarcely to be mentioned to civilized ears, and certainly should not be looked at. But even setting aside these excesses, in the picture galleries of Holland there is to be found nothing that elevates the mind, or moves it to high and gentle thoughts. You admire, you enjoy, you laugh, you stand pensive for a moment before some canvas; but coming out, you feel that something is lacking to your pleasure, you experience a desire to look upon a handsome countenance, to read inspired verses, and sometimes you catch yourself murmuring, half unconsciously, "O Raphael!"
Finally, there are still two important excellences to be recorded of this school of painting: its variety, and its importance as the expression--the mirror, so to speak--of the country. If we except Rembrandt with his group of followers and imitators, almost all the other artists differ very much from one another; no other school presents so great a number of original masters. The realism of the Dutch painters is born of their common love of nature: but each one has shown in his work a kind of love peculiarly his own; each one has rendered a different impression which he has received from nature; and all, starting from the same point, which was the worship of material truth, have arrived at separate and distinct goals. Their realism, then, inciting them to disdain nothing as food for the pencil, has so acted that Dutch art succeeds in representing Holland more completely than has ever been accomplished by any other school in any other country. It has been truly said that should every other visible witness of the existence of Holland in the seventeenth century--her period of greatness--vanish from the earth, and the pictures remain, in them would be found preserved entire the city, the country, the ports, the ships, the markets, the shops, the costumes, the arms, the linen, the stuffs, the merchandise, the kitchen utensils, the food, the pleasures, the habits, the religious belief and superstitions, the qualities and effects of the people; and all this, which is great praise for literature, is no less praise for her sister art.
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
(1821-1881)
BY RICHARD BURTON
he French have long been writers of what they call 'Pensées,'--those detached thoughts or meditations which, for depth, illumination, and beauty, have a power of life, and come under the term "literature." Their language lends itself to the expression of subjective ideas with lucidity, brilliance, charm. The French quality of mind allows that expression to be at once dignified and happily urbane. Sometimes these sayings take the form of the cynical epigrams of a La Rochefoucauld; are expanded into sententious aphorisms by a La Bruyère; or reveal more earnest and athletic souls, who pierce below the social surface froth to do battle with the demons of the intellect. To this class belong men like the seventeenth-century Pascal and the nineteenth-century Amiel.
The career of Henri Frédéric Amiel illustrates the dubiety of too hasty judgment of a man's place or power in the world. A Genevese by birth, of good parentage, early orphaned, well educated, much traveled, he was deemed, on his return in the springtime of his manhood to his native town as professor in the Academy of Geneva, to be a youth of great promise, destined to become distinguished. But the years slipped by, and his literary performance, consisting of desultory essays and several slight volumes of verse, was not enough to justify the prophecy. His life more and more became that of a bachelor recluse and valetudinarian. When he died, in 1881, at sixty years of age, after much suffering heroically borne, as pathetic entries in the last leaves of his Diary remain to show, there was a feeling that here was "one more faithful failure." But the quiet, brooding teacher in the Swiss city which has at one time or another immured so many rare minds, had for years been jotting down his reflections in a private journal. It constitutes the story of his inner life, never told in his published writings. When a volume of the 'Journal Intime' appeared the year after his taking off, the world recognized in it not only an intellect of clarity and keenness, and a heart sensitive to the widest spiritual problems, but the revelation of a typical modern mood. The result was that Amiel, being dead, yet spoke to his generation, and his fame was quick and genuine. The apparent disadvantage point of Geneva proved, after all, the fittest abiding-place for the poet-philosopher. A second volume of extracts, two years later, found him in an assured place as a writer of 'Pensées.'
The 'Journal' of Amiel is symptomatic of his time,--perhaps one reason why it met with so sympathetic a response. It mirrors the intellectual doubtings, the spiritual yearnings and despairs of a strenuous and pure soul in a rationalistic atmosphere. In the day of scientific test and of skepticism, of the readjustment of conventions and the overthrow of sacrosanct traditions, one whose life is that of thought rather than of action finds much to perplex, to weary, and to sadden. So it was with the Swiss professor. He was always in the sanctum sanctorum of his spirit, striving to attain the truth; with Hamlet-like irresolution he poised in mind before the antinomies of the universe, alert to see around a subject, having the modern thinker's inability to be partisan. This way of thought is obviously unhealthy, or at least has in it something of the morbid. It implies the undue introspection which is well-nigh the disease of this century. There is in it the failure to lose one's life in objective incident and action, that one may find it again in regained balance of mind and bodily health. Amiel had the defect of his quality; but he is clearly to be separated from those shallow or exaggerated specimens of subjectivity illustrated by present-day women diarists, like Bashkirtseff and Kovalevsky. The Swiss poet-thinker had a vigor of thought and a broad culture; his aim was high, his desire pure, and his meditations were often touched with imaginative beauty. Again and again he flashes light into the darkest penetralia of the human soul. At times, too, there is in him a mystic fervor worthy of St. Augustine. If his dominant tone is melancholy, he is not to be called a pessimist. He believed in the Good at the central core of things. Hence is he a fascinating personality, a stimulative force. And these outpourings of an acute intellect, and a nature sensitive to the Ideal, are conveyed in a diction full of literary feeling and flavor. Subtlety, depth, tenderness, poetry, succeed each other; nor are the crisp, compressed sayings, the happy mots of the epigrammatist, entirely lacking. And pervading all is an impression of character.
Like Pascal, Amiel was a thinker interested above all in the soul of man. He was a psychologist, seeking to know the secret of the Whence, the Why, and the Whither. Like Joubert, whose journal resembled his own in its posthumous publication, his reflections will live by their weight, their quality, their beauty of form. Nor are these earlier writers of "Pensées" likely to have a more permanent place among the seed-sowers of thought. Amiel himself declared that "the pensée-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 of detail; but he is more anxious about truths than truth, and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity, escapes him.... In a word, the pensée-writer deals with what is superficial and fragmentary." While these words show the fine critical sense of the man, they do an injustice to his own work. Fragmentary it is, but neither superficial nor petty. One recognizes in reading his wonderfully suggestive pages that here is a rare personality, indeed,--albeit "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."
In 1889 an admirable English translation of Amiel by Mrs. Humphry Ward, the novelist, appeared in London. The introductory essay by Mrs. Ward is the best study of him in our language. The appended selections are taken from the Ward translation.
EXTRACTS FROM AMIEL'S JOURNAL
October 1st, 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 refractions 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 centre 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, I think, said, "The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me."
Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world while at the same time detaching us from it.
February 20th, 1851.--I have almost finished these two volumes of [Joubert's] 'Pensées' 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 affections 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.
November 10th, 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 Béranger 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 antinomy 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 12th, 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 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, Frithjof 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.
January 6th, 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 respects strength only. 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 in 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 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.
December 17th, 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 quartette in D minor of Mozart, and the quartette in C major of Beethoven, separated by a Spohr concerto.
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 quartette describes a day in one of those Attic souls who prefigure on earth the serenity of Elysium.
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 two great forces, that of the abyss which absorbs all finite things, and that of life which defends and asserts itself, expands, and enjoys.
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
(Continued in Volume II)