CHAPTER IX
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DIARIST: HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
“True serenity does not consist in indifference to the phenomena of life amongst which we live. It consists of judging in an elevated way men and facts. True serenity does not reign apart from life. It is in the land of the hurricane that it is a grand virtue to know how to remain calm. Possibly he who can accomplish this will succeed in avoiding its perils, or surmounting its consequences. Perhaps it is better to lose one's foothold in the waves than it is to prosper in a solitude without echo. Only solitude that has been wrought from the tumult is precious.” —Georges Duhamel.
No brief statement ever made applies more fittingly to Henri-Frédéric Amiel—more widely known now, one hundred years after his birth, than during his lifetime—than these words of one of the most promising young men of letters of France.
Amiel says in his “Journal Intime”:
“There remains the question whether the greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better have remained buried in the brain which 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 mystery beyond it—had not better, like the prophet of Iliom, have kept for Heaven, and for Heaven alone, secrets and mysteries which human language cannot truly express nor human intelligence conceive.”
“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.”
“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 favour 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 localises us, love particularises 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.” (Written at the age of fifty-four.)
The “Journal Intime,” upon which alone Amiel's fame rests, is studded with such expressions, all of which go to prove that he was handicapped with an inability to participate in life. One may call it aboulia, or lack of will power; but it was not lack of will power. That the intellect which could produce such work was not directed into some practical channel during a long and healthy life naturally arouses a question; and this question has been answered by Amiel's admirers and his critics in various ways. The only conclusion, however, to which an unbiassed examination of his life and of his book can lead is the simple one that Amiel was born that way, just as some people are born Albinos, or, to put it in other words, that he was temperamentally unfit for practical life.