It is as though we were present, without the master's knowledge, at the most secret, profound, impassioned inner work of the soul, which is generally concealed from the view of an outsider.
For this reason it is possible to find many statelier and more eloquent expressions of Amiel's religious feeling, but it is hard to find such as are more intimate and more heart-stirring. Shortly before his death, when he knew that his disease might any day end in strangulation, he wrote:
"When you no longer reflect that you have tens of years, one year, a month free before yourself, when you already count tens of hours, and the future night bears in itself the menace of the unexplored, it is evident that you decline art, science, politics, and are satisfied with conversing with yourself, and that is possible until the very end. This inward conversation is the only thing which is left to him who is sentenced to death and whose execution is delayed. He (this condemned man) concentrates upon himself. He no longer emits rays, but only converses with his soul. He no longer acts, but only contemplates.... Like a hare, he returns to his lair to die; and this lair is his conscience, his thought. So long as he can hold a pen and has a moment of solitude, he concentrates himself before this echo of himself and holds converse with God.
"This, by the way, is not a moral investigation, a repentance, a call. It is only the 'amen' of submission.
"My child, give me your heart.
"Renunciation and agreement are less difficult for me than for others, because I want nothing. I should only want not to suffer. Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane asked for the same. Let us do the same that He did. 'Nevertheless not as I will but as Thou wilt,'—and we will wait."
Such he is on the day before his death. He is not less sincere and serious throughout his whole diary, in spite of the elegance, and now and then choiceness of his diction, which became a habit with him. In the course of all the thirty years of his diary he feels that we all so thoroughly forget, that we are all condemned to death and that our execution is only delayed. And it is for this very reason that this book is so sincere, serious, and useful.
1893.