Amiel's whole life was passed in Geneva, where he died in 1881, having in no way risen above the large number of the most ordinary of professors, who, mechanically compiling their lectures from the latest books in their particular specialties, just as mechanically transmit them to their hearers, and from a still greater number of poets without contents, who furnish these quite useless, but still marketable wares to periodicals that are published in tens of thousands of copies.
Amiel did not have the slightest success either in the learned or in the literary field. As he was approaching old age, he wrote of himself as follows:
"What have I been able to extract from those gifts which were bestowed upon me, from the peculiar conditions of my life of half a century? Are all my collected scribblings, my correspondence, these thousands of intimate pages, my lectures, my articles, my verses, my different notes anything but dry leaves? To whom and for what have I ever been of any use? And will my name live a day longer than I myself, and will it have any significance for any one? Insignificant, empty life! Vie nulle."
About Amiel and his diary two well-known French writers, his friend, the well-known critic, E. Scherer, and the philosopher, Caro, have written after his death. Interesting is that sympathetic, but partially patronizing air with which both these authors treat Amiel, when they regret that he was deprived of those qualities which are necessary for the performance of real work. And yet, the real work of these two writers—the critical labours of E. Scherer and the philosophic labours of Caro—will hardly much outlive their authors, while the accidental, not real work of Amiel, his diary, will always remain a live book, necessary for men and influencing them for the good.
A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure in which he reveals to us the inner working of his soul, of course, if this work is new, and not previously accomplished. No matter what he may write, a drama, a learned work, a story, a philosophic treatise, a lyric poem, a criticism, a satire, it is only this inner work of his soul which is dear to us, and not the architectural structure in which he, for the most part, and I think, always, distorting them, clothes his thoughts and feelings.
Everything which Amiel poured into a ready mould, his lectures, treatises, poems, was completely dead; but his diary, where, without thinking of the form, he spoke only to himself, full of life, wisdom, instruction, consolation, will for ever remain one of the best books accidentally left to us by such men as Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, Epictetus.
Pascal says: "There are but three kinds of people: those who, having found God, serve Him; those who, not having found Him, are busy seeking Him, and those who, not having found Him, none the less do not seek Him.
"The first are sensible and happy, the last are senseless and unhappy, the second are unhappy, but sensible."
I think that the difference established by Pascal between the first and the second, between those who, as he says in another passage, having found God, serve Him with their whole hearts, and those who, not having found Him, seek Him with their whole hearts, is not only not so great as he thought, but does not even exist. I think that those who with their whole hearts and suffering ("en gemissant," as Pascal says) seek God, already serve Him. They serve Him with this, that with these sufferings of their seeking they lay out and open for others the road to God, as Pascal himself did in his thoughts, and as Amiel did all his life in his diary.
Amiel's whole life, as it is presented to us in this diary, is full of this seeking after God, which is suffering with the whole heart. The contemplation of this seeking is the more instructive in that it never ceases to be a seeking, never stops, never passes into the consciousness of the acquisition of truth and into instruction. Amiel says neither to himself nor to others: "I now know the truth,—hear me!" On the contrary, it seems to him, as is proper for him who sincerely seeks the truth, that the more he finds out, the more he has still left to know, and he, without stopping, does everything he can for the purpose of finding out more and more of the truth, and so constantly feels his ignorance. He constantly dwells upon what Christianity and the condition of a Christian ought to be, without for a moment dwelling on the thought that Christianity is precisely what he professes, and that he himself personifies the condition of a Christian. And yet his whole diary is full of expressions of the profoundest Christian understanding and feeling. These expressions act most powerfully on the reader on account of their very unconsciousness and sincerity. He speaks with himself, without thinking that he is heard, without trying to appear sure of what he is not sure, without concealing his suffering and his seeking.