Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel Part 8

The man who insists upon seeing with perfect clearness before he decides, never decides. Accept life, and you must accept regret.

Without pa.s.sion man is a mere latent force and possibility, like the flint which awaits the shock of the iron before it can give forth its spark.

February 3, 1857.--The phantasmagoria of the soul cradles and soothes me as though I were an Indian yoghi, and everything, even my own life, becomes to me smoke, shadow, vapor, and illusion. I hold so lightly to all phenomena that they end by pa.s.sing over me like gleams over a landscape, and are gone without leaving any impression. Thought is a kind of opium; it can intoxicate us, while still broad awake; it can make transparent the mountains and everything that exists. It is by love only that one keeps hold upon reality, that one recovers one's proper self, that one becomes again will, force, and individuality. Love could do everything with me; by myself and for myself I prefer to be nothing....

I have the imagination of regret and not that of hope. My clear-sightedness is retrospective, and the result with me of disinterestedness and prudence is that I attach myself to what I have no chance of obtaining....

May 27, 1857. (Vandoeuvres. [Footnote: Also a village in the neighborhood of Geneva.])--We are going down to Geneva to hear the "Tannhauser" of Richard Wagner performed at the theater by the German troup now pa.s.sing through. Wagner's is a powerful mind endowed with strong poetical sensitiveness. His work is even more poetical than musical. The suppression of the lyrical element, and therefore of melody, is with him a systematic _parti pris_. No more duos or trios; monologue and the _aria_ are alike done away with. There remains only declamation, the recitative, and the choruses. In order to avoid the conventional in singing, Wagner falls into another convention--that of not singing at all. He subordinates the voice to articulate speech, and for fear lest the muse should take flight he clips her wings. So that his works are rather symphonic dramas than operas. The voice is brought down to the rank of an instrument, put on a level with the violins, the hautboys, and the drums, and treated instrumentally. Man is deposed from his superior position, and the center of gravity of the work pa.s.ses into the baton of the conductor. It is music depersonalized, neo-Hegelian music--music multiple instead of individual. If this is so, it is indeed the music of the future, the music of the socialist democracy replacing the art which is aristocratic, heroic, or subjective.

The overture pleased me even less than at the first hearing: it is like nature before man appeared. Everything in it is enormous, savage, elementary, like the murmur of forests and the roar of animals. It is forbidding and obscure, because man, that is to say, mind, the key of the enigma, personality, the spectator, is wanting to it.

The idea of the piece is grand. It is nothing less than the struggle of pa.s.sion and pure love, of flesh and spirit, of the animal and the angel in man. The music is always expressive, the choruses very beautiful, the orchestration skillful, but the whole is fatiguing and excessive, too full, too laborious. When all is said, it lacks gayety, ease, naturalness and vivacity--it has no smile, no wings. Poetically one is fascinated, but one's musical enjoyment is hesitating, often doubtful, and one recalls nothing but the general impression--Wagner's music represents the abdication of the self, and the emanc.i.p.ation of all the forces once under its rule. It is a falling back into Spinozism--the triumph of fatality. This music has its root and its fulcrum in two tendencies of the epoch, materialism and socialism--each of them ignoring the true value of the human personality, and drowning it in the totality of nature or of society.

June 17, 1857. (Vandoeuvres).--I have just followed Maine de Biran from his twenty-eighth to his forty-eighth year by means of his journal, and a crowd of thoughts have besieged me. Let me disengage those which concern myself. In this eternal self-chronicler and observer I seem to see myself reflected with all my faults, indecision, discouragement, over-dependence on sympathy, difficulty of finishing, with my habit of watching myself feel and live, with my growing incapacity for practical action, with my apt.i.tude for psychological study. But I have also discovered some differences which cheer and console me. This nature 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. Intellectually, I am more objective and more constructive; my horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of men, things, countries, peoples and books; I have a greater ma.s.s of experiences--in a word, I feel that I have more culture, greater wealth, range, and freedom of mind, in spite of my wants, my limits, and my weaknesses. Why does Maine de Biran make _will_ the whole of man? Perhaps because he had too little will. A man esteems most highly what he himself lacks, and exaggerates what he longs to possess. Another incapable of thought, and meditation, would have made self-consciousness the supreme thing. Only the totality of things has an objective value. As soon as one isolates a part from the whole, as soon as one chooses, the choice is involuntarily and instinctively dictated by subjective inclinations which obey one or other of the two opposing laws, the attraction of similars or the affinity of contraries.

Five o'clock.--The morning has pa.s.sed like a dream. I went on with the journal of Maine de Biran down to the end of 1817. After dinner I pa.s.sed my time with the birds in the open air, wandering in the shady walks which wind along under Pressy. The sun was brilliant and the air clear.

The midday orchestra of nature was at its best. Against the humming background made by a thousand invisible insects there rose the delicate caprices and improvisations of the nightingale singing from the ash-trees, or of the hedge-sparrows and the chaffinches in their nests.

The hedges are hung with wild roses, the scent of the acacia still perfumes the paths; the light down of the poplar seeds floated in the air like a kind of warm, fair-weather snow. I felt myself as gay as a b.u.t.terfly. On coming in I read the three first books of that poem "Corinne," which I have not seen since I was a youth. Now as I read it again, I look at it across interposing memories; the romantic interest of it seems to me to have vanished, but not the poetical, pathetic, or moral interest.

June 18th.--I have just been spending three hours in the orchard under the shade of the hedge, combining the spectacle of a beautiful morning with reading and taking a turn between each chapter. Now the sky is again covered with its white veil of cloud, and I have come up with Biran, whose "Pensee" I have just finished, and Corinne, whom I have followed with Oswald in their excursions among the monuments of the eternal city. Nothing is so melancholy and wearisome as this journal of Maine de Biran. This unchanging monotony of perpetual reflection has an enervating and depressing effect upon one. Here, then, is the life of a distinguished man seen in its most intimate aspects! It is one long repet.i.tion, in which the only change is an almost imperceptible displacement of center in the writer's manner of viewing himself. This thinker takes thirty years to move from the Epicurean quietude to the quietism of Fenelon, and this only speculatively, for his practical life remains the same, and all his anthropological discovery consists in returning to the theory of the three lives, lower, human, and higher, which is in Pascal and in Aristotle. And this is what they call a philosopher in France! Beside the great philosophers, how poor and narrow seems such an intellectual life! It is the journey of an ant, bounded by the limits of a field; of a mole, who spends his days in the construction of a mole-hill. How narrow and stifling the swallow who flies across the whole Old World, and whose sphere of life embraces Africa and Europe, would find the circle with which the mole and the ant are content! This volume of Biran produces in me a sort of asphyxia; as I a.s.similate it, it seems to paralyze me; I am chained to it by some spell of secret sympathy. I pity, and I am afraid of my pity, for I feel how near I am to the same evils and the same faults....

Ernest Naville's introductory essay is full of interest, written in a serious and n.o.ble style; but it is almost as sad as it is ripe and mature. What displeases me in it a little is its exaggeration of the merits of Biran. For the rest, the small critical impatience which the volume has stirred in me will be gone by to-morrow. Maine de Biran is an important link in the French literary tradition. It is from him that our Swiss critics descend, Naville father and son, Secretan. He is the source of our best contemporary psychology, for Stapfer, Royer-Collard, and Cousin called him their master, and Ampere, his junior by nine years, was his friend.

July 25, 1857. (Vandoeuvres).--At ten o'clock this evening, under a starlit sky, a group of rustics under the windows of the salon employed themselves in shouting disagreeable songs. Why is it that this tuneless shrieking of false notes and scoffing words delights these people? Why is it that this ostentatious parade of ugliness, this jarring vulgarity and grimacing is their way of finding expression and expansion in the great solitary and tranquil night?

Why? Because of a sad and secret instinct. Because of the need they have of realizing themselves as individuals, of a.s.serting themselves exclusively, egotistically, idolatrously--opposing the self in them to everything else, placing it in harsh contrast with the nature which enwraps us, with the poetry which raises us above ourselves, with the harmony which binds us to others, with the adoration which carries us toward G.o.d. No, no, no! Myself only, and that is enough! Myself by negation, by ugliness, by grimace and irony! Myself, in my caprice, in my independence, in my irresponsible sovereignty; myself, set free by laughter, free as the demons are, and exulting in my freedom; I, master of myself, invincible and self-sufficient, living for this one time yet by and for myself! This is what seems to me at the bottom of this merry-making. One hears in it an echo of Satan, the temptation to make self the center of all things, to be like an Elohim, the worst and last revolt of man. It means also, perhaps, some rapid perception of what is absolute in personality, some rough exaltation of the subject, the individual, who thus claims, by abasing them, the rights of subjective existence. If so, it is the caricature of our most precious privilege, the parody of our apotheosis, a vulgarizing of our highest greatness.

Shout away, then, drunkards! Your ign.o.ble concert, with all its repulsive vulgarity, still reveals to us, without knowing it, something of the majesty of life and the sovereign power of the soul.

September 15, 1857.--I have just finished Sismondi's journal and correspondence. Sismondi is essentially the honest man, conscientious, upright, respectable, the friend of the public good and the devoted upholder of a great cause, the amelioration of the common lot of men.

Character and heart are the dominant elements in his individuality, and cordiality is the salient feature of his nature. Sismondi's is a most encouraging example. With average faculties, very little imagination, not much taste, not much talent, without subtlety of feeling, without great elevation or width or profundity of mind, he yet succeeded in achieving a career which was almost ill.u.s.trious, and he has left behind him some sixty volumes, well-known and well spoken of. How was this? His love for men on the one side, and his pa.s.sion for work on the other, are the two factors in his fame. In political economy, in literary or political history, in personal action, Sismondi showed no genius--scarcely talent; but in all he did there was solidity, loyalty, good sense and integrity. The poetical, artistic and philosophic sense is deficient in him, but he attracts and interests us by his moral sense. We see in him the sincere writer, a man of excellent heart, a good citizen and warm friend, worthy and honest in the widest sense of terms, not brilliant, but inspiring trust and confidence by his character, his principles and his virtues. More than this, he is the best type of good Genevese liberalism, republican but not democratic, Protestant but not Calvinist, human but not socialist, progressive but without any sympathy with violence. He was a conservative without either egotism or hypocrisy, a patriot without narrowness. In his theories he was governed by experience and observation, and in his practice by general ideas. A laborious philanthropist, the past and the present were to him but fields of study, from which useful lessons might be gleaned.

Positive and reasonable in temper, his mind was set upon a high average well-being for human society, and his efforts were directed toward founding such a social science as might most readily promote it.

September 24, 1857.--In the course of much thought yesterday about "Atala" and "Rene," Chateaubriand became clear to me. I saw in him a great artist but not a great man, immense talent but a still vaster pride--a nature at once devoured with ambition and unable to find anything to love or admire in the world except itself--indefatigable in labor and capable of everything except of true devotion, self-sacrifice and faith. Jealous of all success, he was always on the opposition side, that he might be the better able to disavow all services received, and to hold aloof from any other glory but his own. Legitimist under the empire, a parliamentarian tinder the legitimist _regime_, republican under the const.i.tutional monarchy, defending Christianity when France was philosophical, and taking a distaste for religion as soon as it became once more a serious power, the secret of these endless contradictions in him was simply the desire to reign alone like the sun--a devouring thirst for applause, an incurable and insatiable vanity, which, with the true, fierce instinct of tyranny, would endure no brother near the throne. A man of magnificent imagination but of poor character, of indisputable power, but cursed with a cold egotism and an incurable barrenness of feeling, which made it impossible for him to tolerate about him anybody but slaves or adorers. A tormented soul and miserable life, when all is said, under its aureole of glory and its crown of laurels!

Essentially jealous and choleric, Chateaubriand from the beginning was inspired by mistrust, by the pa.s.sion for contradicting, for crushing and conquering. This motive may always be traced in him. Rousseau seems to me his point of departure, the man who suggested to him by contrast and opposition all his replies and attacks, Rousseau is revolutionary: Chateaubriand therefore writes his "Essay on Revolutions." Rousseau is republican and Protestant; Chateaubriand will be royalist and Catholic.

Rousseau is _bourgeois_; Chateaubriand will glorify nothing but n.o.ble birth, honor, chivalry and deeds of arms. Rousseau conquered nature for French letters, above all the nature of the mountains and of the Swiss and Savoy, and lakes. He pleaded for her against civilization.

Chateaubriand will take possession of a new and colossal nature, of the ocean, of America; but he will make his savages speak the language of Louis XIV., he will bow Atala before a Catholic missionary, and sanctify pa.s.sions born on the banks of the Mississippi by the solemnities of Catholic ceremonial. Rousseau was the apologist of reverie; Chateaubriand will build the monument of it in order to break it in Rene. Rousseau preaches Deism with all his eloquence in the "Vicaire Savoyard;" Chateaubriand surrounds the Roman creed with all the garlands of his poetry in the "Genie du Christianisme." Rousseau appeals to natural law and pleads for the future of nations; Chateaubriand will only sing the glories of the past, the ashes of history and the n.o.ble ruins of empires. Always a role to be filled, cleverness to be displayed, a _parti-pris_ to be upheld and fame to be won--his theme, one of imagination, his faith one to order, but sincerity, loyalty, candor, seldom or never! Always a real indifference simulating a pa.s.sion for truth; always an imperious thirst for glory instead of devotion to the good; always the ambitious artist, never the citizen, the believer, the man. Chateaubriand posed all his life as the wearied Colossus, smiling pitifully upon a pygmy world, and contemptuously affecting to desire nothing from it, though at the same time wishing it to be believed that he could if he pleased possess himself of everything by mere force of genius. He is the type of an untoward race, and the father of a disagreeable lineage.

But to return to the two episodes. "Rene" seems to me very superior to "Atala.'" Both the stories show a talent of the first rank, but of the two the beauty of "Atala" is of the more transitory kind. The attempt to render in the style of Versailles the loves of a Natchez and a Seminole, and to describe the manners of the adorers of the Manitous in the tone of Catholic sentiment, was an attempt too violent to succeed. But the work is a _tour de force_ of style, and it was only by the polished cla.s.sicism of the form, that the romantic matter of the sentiments and the descriptions could have been imported into the colorless literature of the empire. "Atala" is already old-fashioned and theatrical in all the parts which are not descriptive or European--that is to say, throughout all the sentimental savagery.

"Rene" is infinitely more durable. Its theme, which is the malady of a whole generation--distaste for life brought about by idle reverie and the ravages of a vague and unmeasured ambition--is true to reality.

Without knowing or wishing it, Chateaubriand has been sincere, for Rene is himself. This little sketch is in every respect a masterpiece. It is not, like "Atala," spoilt artistically by intentions alien to the subject, by being made the means of expression of a particular tendency.

Instead of taking a pa.s.sion for Rene, indeed, future generations will scorn and wonder at him; instead of a hero they will see in him a pathological case; but the work itself, like the Sphinx, will endure. A work of art will bear all kinds of interpretations; each in turn finds a basis in it, while the work itself, because it represents an idea, and therefore partakes of the richness and complexity which belong to ideas, suffices for all and survives all. A portrait proves whatever one asks of it. Even in its forms of style, in the disdainful generality of the terms in which the story is told, in the terseness of the sentences, in the sequence of the images and of the pictures, traced with cla.s.sic purity and marvelous vigor, "Rene" maintains its monumental character.

Carved, as it were, in material of the present century, with the tools of cla.s.sical art, "Rene" is the immortal cameo of Chateaubriand.

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves. The consciousness of wrong-doing makes us irritable, and our heart in its cunning quarrels with what is outside it, in order that it may deafen the clamor within.

The faculty of intellectual metamorphosis is the first and indispensable faculty of the critic; without it he is not apt at understanding other minds, and ought, therefore, if he love truth, to hold his peace.

The conscientious critic must first criticise himself; what we do not understand we have not the right to judge.

June 14, 1858.--Sadness and anxiety seem to be increasing upon me. Like cattle in a burning stable, I cling to what consumes me, to the solitary life which does me so much harm. I let myself be devoured by inward suffering....

Yesterday, however, I struggled against this fatal tendency. I went out into the country, and the children's caresses restored to me something of serenity and calm. After we had dined out of doors all three sang some songs and school hymns, which were delightful to listen to. The spring fairy had been scattering flowers over the fields with lavish hands; it was a little glimpse of paradise. It is true, indeed, that the serpent too was not far off. Yesterday there was a robbery close by the house, and death had visited another neighbor. Sin and death lurk around every Eden, and sometimes within it. Hence the tragic beauty, the melancholy poetry of human destiny. Flowers, shade, a fine view, a sunset sky, joy, grace, feeling, abundance and serenity, tenderness and song--here you have the element of beauty: the dangers of the present and the treacheries of the future, here is the element of pathos.

The fashion of this world pa.s.seth away. Unless we have laid hold upon eternity, unless we take the religious view of life, these bright, fleeting days can only be a subject for terror. Happiness should be a prayer--and grief also. Faith in the moral order, in the protecting fatherhood of G.o.d, appeared to me in all its serious sweetness.

"Pense, aime, agis et souffre en Dieu C'est la grande science."

July 18, 1858.--To-day I have been deeply moved by the _nostalgia_ of happiness and by the appeals of memory. My old self, the dreams which used to haunt me in Germany, pa.s.sionate impulses, high aspirations, all revived in me at once with unexpected force. The dread lest I should have missed my destiny and stifled my true nature, lest I should have buried myself alive, pa.s.sed through me like a shudder. Thirst for the unknown, pa.s.sionate love of life, the yearning for the blue vaults of the infinite and the strange worlds of the ineffable, and that sad ecstasy which the ideal wakens in its beholders--all these carried me away in a whirlwind of feeling that I cannot describe. Was it a warning, a punishment, a temptation? Was it a secret protest, or a violent act of rebellion on the part of a nature which is unsatisfied?--the last agony of happiness and of a hope that will not die?

What raised all this storm? Nothing but a book--the first number of the "_Revue Germanique_." The articles of Dollfus, Renan, Littre, Montegut, Taillandier, by recalling to me some old and favorite subjects, made me forget ten wasted years, and carried me back to my university life. I was tempted to throw off my Genevese garb and to set off, stick in hand, for any country that might offer--stripped and poor, but still young, enthusiastic, and alive, full of ardor and of faith.

... I have been dreaming alone since ten o'clock at the window, while the stars twinkled among the clouds, and the lights of the neighbors disappeared one by one in the houses round. Dreaming of what? Of the meaning of this tragic comedy which we call life. Alas! alas! I was as melancholy as the preacher. A hundred years seemed to me a dream, life a breath, and everything a nothing. What tortures of mind and soul, and all that we may die in a few minutes! What should interest us, and why?

"Le temps n'est rien pour l'ame, enfant, ta vie est pleine, Et ce jour vaut cent ans, s'il te fait trouver Dieu."

To make an object for myself, to hope, to struggle, seems to me more and more impossible and amazing. At twenty I was the embodiment of curiosity, elasticity and spiritual ubiquity; at thirty-seven I have not a will, a desire, or a talent left; the fireworks of my youth have left nothing but a handful of ashes behind them.

December 13, 1858.--Consider yourself a refractory pupil for whom you are responsible as mentor and tutor. To sanctify sinful nature, by bringing it gradually under the control of the angel within us, by the help of a holy G.o.d, is really the whole of Christian pedagogy and of religious morals. Our work--my work--consists in taming, subduing, evangelizing and _angelizing_ the evil self; and in restoring harmony with the good self. Salvation lies in abandoning the evil self in principle and in taking refuge with the other, the divine self, in accepting with courage and prayer the task of living with one's own demon, and making it into a less and less rebellious instrument of good.

The Abel in us must labor for the salvation of the Cain. To undertake it is to be converted, and this conversion must be repeated day by day.

Abel only redeems and touches Cain by exercising him constantly in good works. To do right is in one sense an act of violence; it is suffering, expiation, a cross, for it means the conquest and enslavement of self.

In another sense it is the apprenticeship to heavenly things, sweet and secret joy, contentment and peace. Sanctification implies perpetual martyrdom, but it is a martyrdom which glorifies. A crown of thorns is the sad eternal symbol of the life of the saints. The best measure of the profundity of any religious doctrine is given by its conception of sin and the cure of sin.

A duty is no sooner divined than from that very moment it becomes binding upon us.

Latent genius is but a presumption. Everything that can be, is bound to come into being, and what never comes into being is nothing.

July 14, 1859.--I have just read "Faust" again. Alas, every year I am fascinated afresh by this somber figure, this restless life. It is the type of suffering toward which I myself gravitate, and I am always finding in the poem words which strike straight to my heart. Immortal, malign, accursed type! Specter of my own conscience, ghost of my own torment, image of the ceaseless struggle of the soul which has not yet found its true aliment, its peace, its faith--art thou not the typical example of a life which feeds upon itself, because it has not found its G.o.d, and which, in its wandering flight across the worlds, carries within it, like a comet, an inextinguishable flame of desire, and an agony of incurable disillusion? I also am reduced to nothingness, and I shiver on the brink of the great empty abysses of my inner being, stifled by longing for the unknown, consumed with the thirst for the infinite, prostrate before the ineffable. I also am torn sometimes by this blind pa.s.sion for life, these desperate struggles for happiness, though more often I am a prey to complete exhaustion and taciturn despair. What is the reason of it all? Doubt--doubt of one's self, of thought, of men, and of life--doubt which enervates the will and weakens all our powers, which makes us forget G.o.d and neglect prayer and duty--that restless and corrosive doubt which makes existence impossible and meets all hope with satire.

July 17, 1859.--Always and everywhere salvation is torture, deliverance means death, and peace lies in sacrifice. If we would win our pardon, we must kiss the fiery crucifix. Life is a series of agonies, a Calvary, which we can only climb on bruised and aching knees. We seek distractions; we wander away; we deafen and stupefy ourselves that we may escape the test; we turn away oar eyes from the _via dolorosa_; and yet there is no help for it--we must come back to it in the end. What we have to recognize is that each of us carries within himself his own executioner--his demon, his h.e.l.l, in his sin; that his sin is his idol, and that this idol, which seduces the desire of his heart, is his curse.

_Die unto sin!_ This great saying of Christianity remains still the highest theoretical solution of the inner life. Only in it is there any peace of conscience; and without this peace there is no peace....

I have just read seven chapters of the gospel. Nothing calms me so much.

To do one's duty in love and obedience, to do what is right--these are the ideas which remain with one. To live in G.o.d and to do his work--this is religion, salvation, life eternal; this is both the effect and the sign of love and of the Holy Spirit; this is the new man announced by Jesus, and the new life into which we enter by the second birth. To be born again is to renounce the old life, sin, and the natural man, and to take to one's self another principle of life. It is to exist for G.o.d with another self, another will, another love.

August 9, 1859.--Nature is forgetful: the world is almost more so.

However little the individual may lend himself to it, oblivion soon covers him like a shroud. This rapid and inexorable expansion of the universal life, which covers, overflows, and swallows up all individual being, which effaces our existence and annuls all memory of us, fills me with unbearable melancholy. To be born, to struggle, to disappear--there is the whole ephemeral drama of human life. Except in a few hearts, and not even always in one, our memory pa.s.ses like a ripple on the water, or a breeze in the air. If nothing in us is immortal, what a small thing is life. Like a dream which trembles and dies at the first glimmer of dawn, all my past, all my present, dissolve in me, and fall away from my consciousness at the moment when it returns upon itself. I feel myself then stripped and empty, like a convalescent who remembers nothing. My travels, my reading, my studies, my projects, my hopes, have faded from my mind. It is a singular state. All my faculties drop away from me like a cloak that one takes off, like the chrysalis case of a larva. I feel myself returning into a more elementary form. I behold my own unclothing; I forget, still more than I am forgotten; I pa.s.s gently into the grave while still living, and I feel, as it were, the indescribable peace of annihilation, and the dim quiet of the Nirvana. I am conscious of the river of time pa.s.sing before and in me, of the impalpable shadows of life gliding past me, but nothing breaks the cateleptic tranquillity which enwraps me.