Amiel was a shy, sensitive, solitary child. We know very little about his adolescent struggles and transition to heterosexual fixation. Indeed we do not know whether it ever came about, and that is where the chief hiatus in our knowledge of Amiel lies. As a youth he became intoxicated with philosophic idealism, and Hegel was for him the fountainhead of all philosophic thought.
There is nothing in the diary to indicate that the normal love-making of healthy youth had any part in his thoughts or his life. Later, his sex consciousness colours the record to a great extent—indeed it might be said to give the colour to the book—but always in the guise of repressions, fears, hesitations, and longings for unattainable perfection, and finally of half-hearted regrets for his own denials.
“I am capable of all the passions, for I bear them all within me. Like a tamer of wild beasts, I keep them caged and lassoed, but I sometimes hear them growling. I have stifled more than one nascent love. Why? Because with that prophetic certainty which belongs to moral intuition, I felt it lacking in true life, and less durable than myself. I choked it down in the name of the supreme affection to come. The loves of sense, of imagination, of sentiment—I have seen through and rejected them all; I sought the love which springs from the central profundities of being. And I still believe in it. I will have none of those passions of straw which dazzle, burn up, and wither; I invoke, I await, and I hope for the love which is great, pure, and earnest, which lives and works in all the fibres and through all the powers of the soul. And even if I go lonely to the end, I would rather my hope and my dream died with me, than that my soul should content itself with any meaner union.”
This is the basis of monasticism in the Catholic Church, and it is, in my judgment, the most violent offence to God that can be given. Goethe says that he never wrote a new poem without having a new love affair. Amiel was intrigued by Goethe secondly only to Hegel. If he had copied Goethe more nearly in living, he might have said with him,
“Wonach soll man am Ende trachten?
Die Welt zu Kennen und nicht zu Verachten.”
There have been books made up of beautiful quotations from Amiel's “Journal Intime,” which are supposed to help people live, to mitigate pain, to disperse apprehension, and to assuage misery. They are not a patch on the Bible or on the writings of Socrates.
“The oracle of today drops from his tripod on the morrow,” said John Morley. Will this apply to Amiel? Is he a passing fashion? And why has his popularity grown? The best answer to these questions is found in the nature of his audience. To what kind of people does Amiel appeal? To the contemporary purveyors of cloudy stuff; to mystics; to the tender-minded; to those who prefer the contemplation of far horizons to travelling the road just ahead. He does not appeal to anyone with fighting blood, whether he be facing the conflict with the glorious self-confidence of healthy untried youth, the magnetism of past success, the tried measure of his own limitations and powers, the scars of honest defeat, or the pluck of the one who fights a losing fight with more courage and idealism than he would have mustered for a winning one.
Amiel's tragedy was that he outraged nature's unique law and nature exacted the penalty. If the world had a few thousand Amiels and they got the whip hand, it might cease to exist.
CHAPTER X
GEORGES DUHAMEL: POET, PACIFIST, AND PHYSICIAN
The world is thronged with people who are busying themselves with world ordering. They may be divided into two great groups: those who believe that it is to be brought about by revolution; and those who are convinced that it is to be accomplished by following the instructions given by the Master to the lawyer who asked the question: “Which is the great commandment in the law?” The former are called Bolshevists; the latter Pacifists; and both terms are habitually used derisively. Amongst the latter there are few more conspicuous in France than Georges Duhamel, a physician by profession, a littérateur by choice, who at thirty-eight years of age finds himself in a commanding position in French letters.