The words are taken from the same volume of Professor Green’s sermons.
The death of this dear friend of Robert Elsmere occurred in 1882, and is most touchingly described. An old Quaker aunt was sitting by his bedside:—
She was a beautiful old figure in her white cap and kerchief, and it seemed to please him to lie and look at her. “It’ll not be for long, Henry,” she said to him once. “I’m seventy-seven this spring. I shall come to thee soon.” He made no reply, and his silence seemed to disturb her.... “Thou’rt not doubting the Lord’s goodness, Henry?” she said to him, with the tears in her eyes. “No,” he said, “no, never. Only it seems to be his will; we should be certain of nothing—but Himself! I ask no more.” I shall never forget the accent of these words; they were the breath of his inmost life.
To understand the third of the three characters from real life in “Robert Elsmere,” it is necessary to glance at the story of Henri Frédéric Amiel, a Swiss essayist, philosopher, and dreamer, who was born in 1821 and died in 1881, leaving as a legacy to his friends a “Journal Intime” covering the psychological observations, meditations, and inmost thoughts of thirty years. They represented a prodigious amount of labor, covering some seventeen thousand folio pages of manuscript. This extensive journal was translated into English by Mrs. Ward and published in 1883, five years before the date of “Robert Elsmere.” Her long and exhaustive study of the life of this extraordinary man as revealed by himself made a deep impression upon the mind of the novelist—so much so that she could not refrain from introducing him in the person of the morbid Langham. A brief glance at some of the peculiarities of Amiel will prove the best interpretation of Langham, without which the latter must always remain a mystery.
Amiel’s estimate of the value of his life-work was not a high one. “This Journal of mine,” he said, “represents the material of a good many volumes; what prodigious waste 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 it is all added up, nothing!”
“Amiel,” says Mrs. Ward, “might have been saved from despair by love and marriage, by paternity, by strenuous and successful literary production.”
Family life attracted him perpetually. “I cannot escape from the ideal of it,” he said. “A companion of my life, of my work, of my thoughts, of my hopes; within, a common worship—towards the world outside, kindness and beneficence; education to undertake; the thousand and one moral relations which develop around 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 all useless regrets and repentances.”
Mrs. Ward dramatized this strange individuality in the character of Langham. The love-scene in which Langham wins the hand of the beautiful Rose, followed by the all-night mental struggle in which he finally feels compelled to renounce all that he has gained, is almost tragic in its intensity.
Poor Langham, with the prize fairly within his grasp, found that he lacked the courage to retain it. And so the morning after the proposal, instead of the pleasantly anticipated call from her accepted lover, the unfortunate Rose was shocked to receive a pessimistic letter announcing that the engagement had not survived the night. To the casual reader it would seem that such a man as Langham would be impossible. But that Amiel was just such a person his elaborate journal fully reveals. And Professor Mark Pattison has given his testimony that Amiel was not alone in his experiences, for six months after the journal was published he wrote, “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.”