HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born in Geneva September 27, 1821, and died there March 11, 1881. His ancestors were Huguenots who sought refuge in Switzerland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. There is no record that any of them achieved greatness or had greatness thrust upon them. Very little has been written of his parents, who died when he was twelve years old, or of his uncle and aunt, in whose house he was brought up apart from his two sisters. All those who have written about Amiel himself are singularly silent about his boyhood, so that we know practically nothing of the formative years of his life save that he was a sensitive, impressionable boy, more delicate than robust, disposed to melancholy, and with a deep interest in religious problems. In school and college he was studious but not brilliant; he had no interest in games or sports and made few intimacies, and these with men older than himself. When he was nineteen he came under the influence of a Genevan philologist and man of letters, Adolphe Picquet, whose lectures answered many a positive question and satisfied many a vague aspiration of this youth already in the meshes of mysticism. They exercised a decisive influence over his thought, filled him with fresh intuitions, and brought near to him the horizons of his dreams.
When he was twenty he went to Italy and stayed more than a year, and while there he wrote several articles on Christian Art, and a criticism of a book by M. Rio. The next four years he spent in Germany, where he studied philosophy, philology, mythology, and history. After this he travelled about the university cities of Central Europe for two years, principally Heidelberg, Munich, and Vienna; and in 1849, when he was twenty-eight years old, he returned to Geneva and secured the appointment of Professor of Moral Philosophy in the Academy there. The appointment was made by the Democratic Party, which had just then come into control of the Government. The Aristocratic Party, which had had things their own way since the days following the restoration of Geneva's independence in 1814, would have nothing to do with intellectual upstarts, puppets of the Radical Party, so Amiel, by nature and conviction a conservative, found himself in the right pew, but the wrong church; and many of his friends thought that the discouragement which was manifest in his writings and in his conduct may, in a measure at least, have been due to the conflict between his discomfiture and his duty.
He had few friends, but these he impressed enormously by his learning and his knowledge. He made no particular reputation as a professor or as a poet, and had it not been for the “Journal,” he would never have been heard of save by his friends and pupils. It is now forty years since the first volume of the book was published at Geneva. It had been put together from the thousands of sheets of diary which had come into the hands of his literary heirs. The Preface to the volume announced that this “Journal” was made up of his psychological observations and impressions produced on him by books. It was the confidant of his private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby the thinker became conscious of his own inner life; a safe shelter wherein his questionings of fate and future, the voice of grief, of self-examination and confession, the soul's cry for inward peace might make themselves freely heard.
It made a great noise in the world and the reverberations of it will not cease.
Some consider that the “Journal Intime” occupies a unique place in literature, not because it is a diary of introspection, but because of the tragedy which attended its production. This is the height of absurdity. There was no tragedy about its production. Amiel lived an unhealthy life, thwarted nature's laws, and nature exacted the penalty. N. J. Symons, in an article in the Queen's Quarterly, says, “To be gifted with the qualities of genius, yet to be condemned by some obscure psychosis to perpetual sterility and failure; to live and die in the despairing recognition of this fact; and finally to win posthumous fame by the analysis and confession of one's failure is one of the most puzzling and pathetic of life's anomalies.” It would be if it were true. But what were the qualities of genius that Amiel had? And how did he display the obscure psychosis? He discharged the duties of a professor from the time he was twenty-eight until he was sixty. He poetised pleasantly; he communed with nature and got much pleasure from it; and he had very definite social adaptability. His general level of behaviour was high. He was a diligent, methodical worker; he reacted in a normal way to conventional standards; he had few personal biases or peculiarities and none that drew particular attention to him; and he seemed to have adjusted himself without great difficulty to the incidences of life that he encountered.
To say that such a man was the victim of some obscure psychosis is either to speak beyond the facts or to speak from the possession of some knowledge that is denied one familiar with his writings and what has been written about him.
Unique the “Journal Intime” unquestionably is, in that it is the sincere confession of failure, both as a man and as a writer, of a man whose intellectual qualities justified his friends in expecting from him a large measure of success as both. Both admirers and critics agree that Amiel's failure was his refusal or his inability to act. This refusal to act was not the expression of some obscure psychosis, but was entirely consistent with his philosophy of life, which was arrived at through a logical process of thought. “Men's thoughts are made according to their nature,” says Bacon. It is to Amiel's nature, or temperament, or personality, that we must look for the answer to the question: To what can his confessed failure be charged?
Any estimate of personality must weigh not only the capacity for dealing with thoughts, but the capacity for dealing with men and with things as well. Intellectual qualities are of value only in relation to the dynamic quality of the mind; emotional qualities must be measured by the reactions to the environment; and the individual, in the last analysis, must take his standing among his fellows upon his acts, not upon his thoughts. In a balanced personality act harmonises with thought, is conditioned and controlled by it. Purely impulsive action carried to the extreme means insanity, and in milder degrees it exhibits itself in all grades and forms of what is known as lack of self-control. Such action is too familiar to call for comment. But there is the opposite type of individual whose impulses are not impelling enough to lead to expression in outward form of either thoughts or emotions. Such thoughts and emotions are turned back upon themselves and, like a dammed-up stream, whirl endlessly around the spring, the ego, until the individual becomes predominantly introspective and egocentric.