Essays from 'The Guardian'

by Walter Pater

II. AMIEL'S "JOURNAL INTIME"

Amiel's Journal. The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mrs. Humphry Ward. Two vols. Macmillans.

[19] CERTAIN influential expressions of opinion have attracted much curiosity to Amiel's Journal Intime, both in France, where the book has already made its mark, and in England, where Mrs. Humphry Ward's translation is likely to make it widely known among all serious lovers of good literature. Easy, idiomatic, correct, this English version reads like an excellent original English work, and gives fresh proof that the work of translation, if it is to be done with effect, must be done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward, original literary gifts, are willing to make a long act of self-denial or self-effacement [20] for the benefit of the public. In this case, indeed, the work is not wholly one of self-effacement, for the accomplished translator has prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able and interesting essay of seventy pages on Amiel's life and intellectual position. And certainly there is much in the book, thus effectively presented to the English reader, to attract those who interest themselves in the study of the finer types of human nature, of literary expression, of metaphysical and practical philosophy; to attract, above all, those interested in such philosophy, at points where it touches upon questions of religion, and especially at the present day.

Henri-Frédéric Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821. Orphaned of both his parents at the age of twelve, his youth was necessarily "a little bare and forlorn," and a deep interest in religion became fixed in him early. His student days coming to an end, the years which followed, from 1842 to 1848—Wanderjahre, in which he visited Holland, Italy, Sicily, and the principal towns of Germany—seem to have been the happiest of his life. In 1849 he became a Professor at Geneva, and there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of outward events. He published some volumes of verse; to the last apparently still only feeling after his true literary métier. Those last seven years were a long struggle against the disease which ended his life, consumption, at the age of fifty-three. The first entry in his Journal is in 1848. From that date to his death, a period of over twenty-five years, this Journal was the real object of all the energies of his richly-endowed nature: and from its voluminous sheets his literary executors have selected the deeply interesting volumes now presented in English.

With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy life—melancholy with something not altogether explained by the somewhat pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the consumptive tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from a very early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire.

You might think him at first sight only an admirable specimen of a thoroughly well-educated [22] man, full, of course, of the modern spirit; stimulated and formed by the influences of the varied intellectual world around him; and competing, in his turn, with many very various types of contemporary ability. The use of his book to cultivated people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality of their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects. He will write a page or two, giving evidence of that accumulated power and attainment which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have sufficed for an effective volume. Continually, in the Journal, we pause over things that would rank for beauties among widely differing models of the best French prose. He has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of Pascal. He had a right to compose "Thoughts": they have the force in them which makes up for their unavoidable want of continuity.

But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to do, we look below the surface of a very equable and even smoothly accomplished literary manner, we discover, in high degree of development, that perplexity or complexity of soul, the expression [23] of which, so it be with an adequate literary gift, has its legitimate, because inevitable, interest for the modern reader. Senancour and Maurice de Guérin in one, seem to have been supplemented here by a larger experience, a far greater education, than either of them had attained to. So multiplex is the result that minds of quite opposite type might well discover in these pages their own special thought or humour, happily expressed at last (they might think) in precisely that just shade of language themselves had searched for in vain. And with a writer so vivid and impressive as Amiel, those varieties of tendency are apt to present themselves as so many contending persons. The perplexed experience gets the apparent clearness, as it gets also the animation, of a long dialogue; only, the disputants never part company, and there is no real conclusion. "This nature," he observes, of one of the many phases of character he has discovered in himself, "is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in me. It is one of my departments. It is not the whole of my territory, the whole of my inner kingdom"; and again, "there are ten men in me, according to time, place, surrounding, [24] and occasion; and, in my restless diversity, I am for ever escaping myself."

Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel—two sufficiently opposed personalities, which the attentive reader may define for himself; compare with, and try by each other—as we think, correct also by each other. There is the man, in him and in these pages, who would be "the man of disillusion," only that he has never really been "the man of desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double weariness about him. He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to René, even to Werther, and, on our first introduction to him, we might think that we had to do only with one more of the vague "renunciants," who in real life followed those creations of fiction, and who, however delicate, interesting as a study, and as it were picturesque on the stage of life, are themselves, after all, essentially passive, uncreative, and therefore necessarily not of first-rate importance in literature. Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood—the culture of ennui for its own sake—is certainly carried to its ideal of negation by Amiel. But the completer, the positive, soul, which will merely take [25] that mood into its service (its proper service, as we hold, is in counteraction to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is also certainly in evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"—that other, and far stronger person, in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of gifts, not for the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all that is puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost certainly find a Church.

The sort of purely poetic tendency in his mind, which made Amiel known in his own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, seems to be represented in these volumes by certain passages of natural description, always sincere, and sometimes rising to real distinction. In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the record of such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens with Amiel, we feel that there has been, and with success, an intellectual [26] effort to get at the secret, the precise motive, of the pleasure; to define feeling, in this matter. Here is a good description of an effect of fog, which we commend to foreigners resident in London:

"Fog has certainly a poetry of its own—a grace, a dreamy charm. It does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun, as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist draws us together and concentrates us—it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the great world is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a small universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better; for the only reality then is the family, and, within the family, the heart; and the greatest thoughts come from the heart—so says the moralist."