Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel Part 18

The eminent Frenchman depends upon others for his value; if he possess stripe, cross, scarf, sword, or robe--in a word, function and decoration--then he is held to be something, and he feels himself somebody. It is the symbol which establishes his merit, it is the public which raises him from nothing, as the sultan creates his viziers.

These highly-trained and social races have an antipathy for individual independence; everything with them must be founded upon authority military, civil, or religious, and G.o.d himself is non-existent until he has been established by decree. Their fundamental dogma is that social omnipotence which treats the pretension of truth to be true without any official stamp, as a mere usurpation and sacrilege, and scouts the claim of the individual to possess either a separate conviction or a personal value.

July 20, 1870 (_Bellalpe_).--A marvelous day. The panorama before me is of a grandiose splendor; it is a symphony of mountains, a cantata of sunny Alps.

I am dazzled and oppressed by it. The feeling uppermost is one of delight in being able to admire, of joy, that is to say, in a recovered power of contemplation which is the result of physical relief, in being able at last to forget myself and surrender myself to things, as befits a man in my state of health. Grat.i.tude is mingled with enthusiasm.

I have just spent two hours of continuous delight at the foot of the Sparrenhorn, the peak behind us. A flood of sensations overpowered me. I could only look, feel, dream, and think.

_Later_.--Ascent of the Sparrenhorn. The peak of it is not very easy to climb, because of the ma.s.ses of loose stones and the steepness of the path, which runs between two abysses. But how great is one's reward!

The view embraces the whole series of the Valais Alps from the Furka to the Combin; and even beyond the Furka one sees a few peaks of the Ticino and the Rhaetian Alps; while if you turn you see behind you a whole polar world of snowfields and glaciers forming the southern side of the enormous Bernese group of the Finsteraarahorn, the Monch, and the Jungfrau. The near representative of the group is the Aletschhorn, whence diverge like so many ribbons the different Aletsch glaciers which wind about the peak from which I saw them. I could study the different zones, one above another--fields, woods, gra.s.sy Alps, bare rock and snow, and the principle types of mountain; the paG.o.da-shaped Mischabel, with its four _aretes_ as flying b.u.t.tresses and its staff of nine cl.u.s.tered peaks; the cupola of the Fletchhorn, the dome of Monte Rosa, the pyramid of the Weisshorn, the obelisk of the Cervin.

Bound me fluttered a mult.i.tude of b.u.t.terflies and brilliant green-backed flies; but nothing grew except a few lichens. The deadness and emptiness of the upper Aletsch glacier, like some vast white street, called up the image of an icy Pompeii. All around boundless silence. On my way back I noticed some effects of sunshine--the close elastic mountain gra.s.s, starred with gentian, forget-me-not, and anemones, the mountain cattle standing out against the sky, the rocks just piercing the soil, various circular dips in the mountain side, stone waves petrified thousands of thousands of years ago, the undulating ground, the tender quiet of the evening; and I invoked the soul of the mountains and the spirit of the heights!

July 22, 1870 (_Bellalpe_).--The sky, which was misty and overcast this morning, has become perfectly blue again, and the giants of the Valais are bathed in tranquil light.

Whence this solemn melancholy which oppresses and pursues me? I have just read a series of scientific books (Bronn on the "Laws of Palaeontology," Karl Ritter on the "Law of Geographical Forms"). Are they the cause of this depression? or is it the majesty of this immense landscape, the splendor of this setting sun, which brings the tears to my eyes?

"Creature d'un jour qui t'agites une heure,"

what weighs upon thee--I know it well--is the sense of thine utter nothingness!... The names of great men hover before my eyes like a secret reproach, and this grand impa.s.sive nature tells me that to-morrow I shall have disappeared, b.u.t.terfly that I am, without having lived. Or perhaps it is the breath of eternal things which stirs in me the shudder of Job. What is man--this weed which a sunbeam withers? What is our life in the infinite abyss? I feel a sort of sacred terror, not only for myself, but for my race, for all that is mortal. Like Buddha, I feel the great wheel turning--the wheel of universal illusion--and the dumb stupor which enwraps me is full of anguish. Isis lilts the corner of her veil, and he who perceives the great mystery beneath is struck with giddiness. I can scarcely breathe. It seems to me that I am hanging by a thread above the fathomless abyss of destiny. Is this the Infinite face to face, an intuition of the last great death?

"Creature d'un jour qui t'agites une heure, Ton ame est immortelle et tes pleurs vont finir."

_Finir?_ When depths of ineffable desire are opening in the heart, as vast, as yawning as the immensity which surrounds us? Genius, self-devotion, love--all these cravings quicken into life and torture me at once. Like the shipwrecked sailor about to sink under the waves, I am conscious of a mad clinging to life, and at the same time of a rush of despair and repentance, which forces from me a cry for pardon. And then all this hidden agony dissolves in wearied submission. "Resign yourself to the inevitable! Shroud away out of sight the flattering delusions of youth! Live and die in the shade! Like the insects humming in the darkness, offer up your evening prayer. Be content to fade out of life without a murmur whenever the Master of life shall breathe upon your tiny flame! It is out of myriads of unknown lives that every clod of earth is built up. The infusoria do not count until they are millions upon millions. Accept your nothingness." Amen!

But there is no peace except in order, in law. Am I in order? Alas, no!

My changeable and restless nature will torment me to the end. I shall never see plainly what I ought to do. The love of the better will have stood between me and the good. Yearning for the ideal will have lost me reality. Vague aspiration and undefined desire will have been enough to make my talents useless, and to neutralize my powers. Unproductive nature that I am, tortured by the belief that production was required of me, may not my very remorse be a mistake and a superfluity?

Scherer's phrase comes back to me, "We must accept ourselves as we are."

September 8, 1870 (_Zurich_).--All the exiles are returning to Paris--Edgar Quinet, Louis Blanc, Victor Hugo. By the help of their united experience will they succeed in maintaining the republic? It is to be hoped so. But the past makes it lawful to doubt. While the republic is in reality a fruit, the French look upon it as a seed-sowing. Elsewhere such a form of government presupposes free men; in France it is and must be an instrument of instruction and protection.

France has once more placed sovereignty in the hands of universal suffrage, as though the mult.i.tude were already enlightened, judicious, and reasonable, and now her task is to train and discipline the force which, by a fiction, is master.

The ambition of France is set upon self-government, but her capacity for it has still to be proved. For eighty years she has confounded revolution with liberty; will she now give proof of amendment and of wisdom? Such a change is not impossible. Let us wait for it with sympathy, but also with caution.

September 12, 1870 (_Basle_).--The old Rhine is murmuring under my window. The wide gray stream rolls its great waves along and breaks against the arches of the bridge, just as it did ten years or twenty years ago; the red cathedral shoots its arrow-like spires toward heaven; the ivy on the terraces which fringe the left bank of the Rhine hangs over the walls like a green mantle; the indefatigable ferry-boat goes and comes as it did of yore; in a word, things seem to be eternal, while man's hair turns gray and his heart grows old. I came here first as a student, then as a professor. Now I return to it at the downward turn of middle age, and nothing in the landscape has changed except myself.

The melancholy of memory may be commonplace and puerile--all the same it is true, it is inexhaustible, and the poets of all times have been open to its attacks.

At bottom, what is individual life? A variation of an eternal theme--to be born, to live, to feel, to hope, to love, to suffer, to weep, to die. Some would add to these, to grow rich, to think, to conquer; but in fact, whatever frantic efforts one may make, however one may strain and excite one's self, one can but cause a greater or slighter undulation in the line of one's destiny. Supposing a man renders the series of fundamental phenomena a little more evident to others or a little more distinct to himself, what does it matter? The whole is still nothing but a fluttering of the infinitely little, the insignificant repet.i.tion of an invariable theme. In truth, whether the individual exists or no, the difference is so absolutely imperceptible in the whole of things that every complaint and every desire is ridiculous. Humanity in its entirety is but a flash in the duration of the planet, and the planet may return to the gaseous state without the sun's feeling it even for a second. The individual is the infinitesimal of nothing.

What, then, is nature? Nature is Maa--that is to say, an incessant, fugitive, indifferent series of phenomena, the manifestation of all possibilities, the inexhaustible play of all combinations.

And is Maa all the while performing for the amus.e.m.e.nt of somebody, of some spectator--Brahma? Or is Brahma working out some serious and unselfish end? From the theistic point of view, is it the purpose of G.o.d to make souls, to augment the sum of good and wisdom by the multiplication of himself in free beings--facets which may flash back to him his own holiness and beauty? This conception is far more attractive to the heart. But is it more true? The moral consciousness affirms it. If man is capable of conceiving goodness, the general principle of things, which cannot be inferior to man, must be good. The philosophy of labor, of duty, of effort, is surely superior to that of phenomena, chance, and universal indifference. If so, the whimsical Maa would be subordinate to Brahma, the eternal thought, and Brahma would be in his turn subordinate to a holy G.o.d.

October 25, 1870 (_Geneva_).--"Each function to the most worthy:" this maxim governs all const.i.tutions, and serves to test them. Democracy is not forbidden to apply it, but democracy rarely does apply it, because she holds, for example, that the most worthy man is the man who pleases her, whereas he who pleases her is not always the most worthy, and because she supposes that reason guides the ma.s.ses, whereas in reality they are most commonly led by pa.s.sion. And in the end every falsehood has to be expiated, for truth always takes its revenge.

Alas, whatever one may say or do, wisdom, justice, reason, and goodness will never be anything more than special cases and the heritage of a few elect souls. Moral and intellectual harmony, excellence in all its forms, will always be a rarity of great price, an isolated _chef d'oeuvre_. All that can be expected from the most perfect inst.i.tutions is that they should make it possible for individual excellence to develop itself, not that they should produce the excellent individual.

Virtue and genius, grace and beauty, will always const.i.tute a _n.o.blesse_ such as no form of government can manufacture. It is of no use, therefore, to excite one's self for or against revolutions which have only an importance of the second order--an importance which I do not wish either to diminish or to ignore, but an importance which, after all, is mostly negative. The political life is but the means of the true life.

October 26, 1870.--Sirocco. A bluish sky. The leafy crowns of the trees have dropped at their feet; the finger of winter has touched them. The errand-woman has just brought me my letters. Poor little woman, what a life! She spends her nights in going backward and forward from her invalid husband to her sister, who is scarcely less helpless, and her days are pa.s.sed in labor. Resigned and indefatigable, she goes on without complaining, till she drops.

Lives such as hers prove something: that the true ignorance is moral ignorance, that labor and suffering are the lot of all men, and that cla.s.sification according to a greater or less degree of folly is inferior to that which proceeds according to a greater or less degree of virtue. The kingdom of G.o.d belongs not to the most enlightened but to the best; and the best man is the most unselfish man. Humble, constant, voluntary self-sacrifice--this is what const.i.tutes the true dignity of man. And therefore is it written, "The last shall be first." Society rests upon conscience and not upon science. Civilization is first and foremost a moral thing. Without honesty, without respect for law, without the worship of duty, without the love of one's neighbor--in a word, without virtue--the whole is menaced and falls into decay, and neither letters nor art, neither luxury nor industry, nor rhetoric, nor the policeman, nor the custom-house officer, can maintain erect and whole an edifice of which the foundations are unsound.

A state founded upon interest alone and cemented by fear is an ign.o.ble and unsafe construction. The ultimate ground upon which every civilization rests is the average morality of the ma.s.ses, and a sufficient amount of practical righteousness. Duty is what upholds all.

So that those who humbly and un.o.btrusively fulfill it, and set a good example thereby, are the salvation and the sustenance of this brilliant world, which knows nothing about them. Ten righteous men would have saved Sodom, but thousands and thousands of good homely folk are needed to preserve a people from corruption and decay.

If ignorance and pa.s.sion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated cla.s.ses. The modern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought and conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and vulgar crowd, is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty. When any society produces an increasing number of literary exquisites, of satirists, skeptics, and _beaux esprits_, some chemical disorganization of fabric may be inferred. Take, for example, the century of Augustus, and that of Louis XV. Our cynics and railers are mere egotists, who stand aloof from the common duty, and in their indolent remoteness are of no service to society against any ill which may attack it. Their cultivation consists in having got rid of feeling. And thus they fall farther and farther away from true humanity, and approach nearer to the demoniacal nature. What was it that Mephistopheles lacked? Not intelligence certainly, but goodness.

October 28, 1870.--It is strange to see how completely justice is forgotten in the presence of great international struggles. Even the great majority of the spectators are no longer capable of judging except as their own personal tastes, dislikes, fears, desires, interests, or pa.s.sions may dictate--that is to say, their judgment is not a judgment at all. How many people are capable of delivering a fair verdict on the struggle now going on? Very few! This horror of equity, this antipathy to justice, this rage against a merciful neutrality, represents a kind of eruption of animal pa.s.sion in man, a blind fierce pa.s.sion, which is absurd enough to call itself a reason, whereas it is nothing but a force.

November 16, 1870.--We are struck by something bewildering and ineffable when we look down into the depths of an abyss; and every soul is an abyss, a mystery of love and piety. A sort of sacred emotion descends upon me whenever I penetrate the recesses of this sanctuary of man, and hear the gentle murmur of the prayers, hymns, and supplications which rise from the hidden depths of the heart. These involuntary confidences fill me with a tender piety and a religious awe and shyness. The whole experience seems to me as wonderful as poetry, and divine with the divineness of birth and dawn. Speech fails me, I bow myself and adore.

And, whenever I am able, I strive also to console and fortify.

December 6, 1870.--"Dauer im Wechsel"--"Persistence in change." This t.i.tle of a poem by Goethe is the summing up of nature. Everything changes, but with such unequal rapidity that one existence appears eternal to another. A geological age, for instance, compared to the duration of any living being, the duration of a planet compared to a geological age, appear eternities--our life, too, compared to the thousand impressions which pa.s.s across us in an hour. Wherever one looks, one feels one's self overwhelmed by the infinity of infinites.

The universe, seriously studied, rouses one's terror. Everything seems so relative that it is scarcely possible to distinguish whether anything has a real value.

Where is the fixed point in this boundless and bottomless gulf? Must it not be that which perceives the relations of things--in other words, thought, infinite thought? The perception of ourselves within the infinite thought, the realization of ourselves in G.o.d, self-acceptance in him, the harmony of our will with his--in a word, religion--here alone is firm ground. Whether this thought be free or necessary, happiness lies in identifying one's self with it. Both the stoic and the Christian surrender themselves to the Being of beings, which the one calls sovereign wisdom and the other sovereign goodness. St. John says, "G.o.d is Light," "G.o.d is Love." The Brahmin says, "G.o.d is the inexhaustible fount of poetry." Let us say, "G.o.d is perfection." And man? Man, for all his inexpressible insignificance and frailty, may still apprehend the idea of perfection, may help forward the supreme will, and die with Hosanna on his lips!

All teaching depends upon a certain presentiment and preparation in the taught; we can only teach others profitably what they already virtually know; we can only give them what they had already. This principle of education is also a law of history. Nations can only be developed on the lines of their tendencies and apt.i.tudes. Try them on any other and they are rebellious and incapable of improvement.

By despising himself too much a man comes to be worthy of his own contempt.

Its way of suffering is the witness which a soul bears to itself.

The beautiful is superior to the sublime because it lasts and does not satiate, while the sublime is relative, temporary and violent.

February 4, 1871.--Perpetual effort is the characteristic of modern morality. A painful process has taken the place of the old harmony, the old equilibrium, the old joy and fullness of being. We are all so many fauns, satyrs, or Silenuses, aspiring to become angels; so many deformities laboring for our own embellishment; so many clumsy chrysalises each working painfully toward the development of the b.u.t.terfly within him. Our ideal is no longer a serene beauty of soul; it is the agony of Laoc.o.o.n struggling with the hydra of evil. The lot is cast irrevocably. There are no more happy whole-natured men among us, nothing but so many candidates for heaven, galley-slaves on earth.

"Nous ramons notre vie en attendant le port."

Moliere said that reasoning banished reason. It is possible also that the progress toward perfection we are so proud of is only a pretentious imperfection. Duty seems now to be more negative than positive; it means lessening evil rather than actual good; it is a generous discontent, but not happiness; it is an incessant pursuit of an unattainable goal, a n.o.ble madness, but not reason; it is homesickness for the impossible--pathetic and pitiful, but still not wisdom.

The being which has attained harmony, and every being may attain it, has found its place in the order of the universe, and represents the divine thought at least as clearly as a flower or a solar system. Harmony seeks nothing outside itself. It is what it ought to be; it is the expression of right, order, law, and truth; it is greater than time, and represents eternity.

February 6,1871.--I am reading Juste Olivier's "Chansons du Soir" over again, and all the melancholy of the poet seems to pa.s.s into my veins.

It is the revelation of a complete existence, and of a whole world of melancholy reverie.

How much character there is in "Musette," the "Chanson de l'Alouette,"