Chapter VIII: Part 8

April 5, 1864.--I have been reading “Prince Vitale” for the second time, and have been lost in admiration of it. What wealth of color, facts, ideas--what learning, what fine-edged satire, what _esprit_, science, and talent, and what an irreproachable finish of style--so limpid, and yet so profound! It is not heartfelt and it is not spontaneous, but all other kinds of merit, culture, and cleverness the author possesses. It would be impossible to be more penetrating, more subtle, and less fettered in mind, than this wizard of language, with his irony and his chameleon-like variety. Victor Cherbuliez, like the sphinx, is able to play all lyres, and takes his profit from them all, with a Goethe-like serenity. It seems as if passion, grief, and error had no hold on this impassive soul. The key of his thought is to be looked for in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Mind,” remolded by Greek and French influences.

His faith, if he has one, is that of Strauss-Humanism. But he is perfectly master of himself and of his utterances, and will take good care never to preach anything prematurely.

What is there quite at the bottom of this deep spring?

In any case a mind as free as any can possibly be from stupidity and prejudice. One might almost say that Cherbuliez knows all that he wishes to know, without the trouble of learning it. He is a calm Mephistopheles, with perfect manners, grace, variety, and an exquisite urbanity; and Mephisto is a clever jeweler; and this jeweler is a subtle musician; and this fine singer and storyteller, with his amber-like delicacy and brilliancy, is making mock of us all the while. He takes a malicious pleasure in withdrawing his own personality from scrutiny and divination, while he himself divines everything, and he likes to make us feel that although he holds in his hand the secret of the universe, he will only unfold his prize at his own time, and if it pleases him. Victor Cherbuliez is a little like Proudhon and plays with paradoxes, to shock the _bourgeois_. Thus he amuses himself with running down Luther and the Reformation in favor of the Renaissance. Of the troubles of conscience he seems to know nothing. His supreme tribunal is reason. At bottom he is Hegelian and intellectualist. But it is a splendid organization. Only sometimes he must be antipathetic to those men of duty who make renunciation, sacrifice, and humility the measure of individual worth.

July, 1864.--Among the Alps I become a child again, with all the follies and _naïveté_ of childhood. Shaking off the weight of years, the trappings of office, and all the tiresome and ridiculous caution with which one lives, I plunge into the full tide of pleasure, and amuse myself sans façon, as it comes. In this careless light-hearted mood, my ordinary formulas and habits fall away from me so completely that I feel myself no longer either townsman, or professor, or savant, or bachelor, and I remember no more of my past than if it were a dream. It is like a bath in Lethe.

It makes me really believe that the smallest illness would destroy my memory, and wipe out all my previous existence, when I see with what ease I become a stranger to myself, and fall back once more into the condition of a blank sheet, a _tabula rasa_. Life wears such a dream-aspect to me that I can throw myself without any difficulty into the situation of the dying, before whose eyes all this tumult of images and forms fades into nothingness. I have the inconsistency of a fluid, a vapor, a cloud, and all is easily unmade or transformed in me; everything passes and is effaced like the waves which follow each other on the sea. When I say all, I mean all that is arbitrary, indifferent, partial, or intellectual in the combinations of one’s life. For I feel that the things of the soul, our immortal aspirations, our deepest affections, are not drawn into this chaotic whirlwind of impressions. It is the finite things which are mortal and fugitive. Every man feels it OH his deathbed. I feel it during the whole of life; that is the only difference between me and others. Excepting only love, thought, and liberty, almost everything is now a matter of indifference to me, and those objects which excite the desires of most men, rouse in me little more than curiosity. What does it mean--detachment of soul, disinterestedness, weakness, or wisdom?

September 19, 1864.--I have been living for two hours with a noble soul--with Eugénie de Guérin, the pious heroine of fraternal love. How many thoughts, feelings, griefs, in this journal of six years! How it makes one dream, think and live! It produces a certain homesick impression on me, a little like that of certain forgotten melodies whereof the accent touches the heart, one knows not why. It is as though far-off paths came back to me, glimpses of youth, a confused murmur of voices, echoes from my past. Purity, melancholy, piety, a thousand memories of a past existence, forms fantastic and intangible, like the fleeting shadows of a dream at waking, began to circle round the astonished reader.

September 20, 1864.--Read Eugénie de Guérin’s volume again right and left with a growing sense of attraction. Everything is heart, force, impulse, in these pages which have the power of sincerity and a brilliance of suffused poetry. A great and strong soul, a clear mind, distinction, elevation, the freedom of unconscious talent, reserve and depth--nothing is wanting for this Sévigné of the fields, who has to hold herself in with both hands lest she should write verse, so strong in her is the artistic impulse.

October 16, 1864.--I have just read a part of Eugénie de Guérin’s journal over again. It charmed me a little less than the first time. The nature seemed to me as beautiful, but the life of Eugénie was too empty, and the circle of ideas which occupied her, too narrow.

It is touching and wonderful to see how little space is enough for thought to spread its wings in, but this perpetual motion within the four walls of a cell ends none the less by becoming wearisome to minds which are accustomed to embrace more objects in their field of vision. Instead of a garden, the world; instead of a library, the whole of literature; instead of three or four faces, a whole people and all history--this is what the virile, the philosophic temper demands. Men must have more air, more room, mere horizon, more positive knowledge, and they end by suffocating in this little cage where Eugenie lives and moves, though the breath of heaven blows into it and the radiance of the stars shines down upon it.

October 27, 1864. (_Promenade de la Treille_).--The air this morning was so perfectly clear and lucid that one might have distinguished a figure on the Vouache. [Footnote: The Vouache is the hill which bounds the horizon of Geneva to the south-west.] This level and brilliant sun had set fire to the whole range of autumn colors; amber, saffron, gold, sulphur, yellow ochre, orange, red, copper-color, aquamarine, amaranth, shone resplendent on the leaves which were still hanging from the boughs or had already fallen beneath the trees. It was delicious. The martial step of our two battalions going out to their drilling-ground, the sparkle of the guns, the song of the bugles, the sharp distinctness of the house outlines, still moist with the morning dew, the transparent coolness of all the shadows--every detail in the scene was instinct with a keen and wholesome gayety.

There are two forms of autumn: there is the misty and dreamy autumn, there is the vivid and brilliant autumn: almost the difference between the two sexes. The very word autumn is both masculine and feminine. Has not every season, in some fashion, its two sexes? Has it not its minor and its major key, its two sides of light and shadow, gentleness and force? Perhaps. All that is perfect is double; each face has two profiles, each coin two sides. The scarlet autumn stands for vigorous activity: the gray autumn for meditative feeling. The one is expansive and overflowing; the other still and withdrawn. Yesterday our thoughts were with the dead. To-day we are celebrating the vintage.

November 16, 1864.--Heard of the death of--. Will and intelligence lasted till there was an effusion on the brain which stopped everything.

A bubble of air in the blood, a drop of water in the brain, and a man is out of gear, his machine falls to pieces, his thought vanishes, the world disappears from him like a dream at morning. On what a spider thread is hung our individual existence! Fragility, appearance, nothingness. If it were for our powers of self-detraction and forgetfulness, all the fairy world which surrounds and draws us would seem to us but a broken spectre in the darkness, an empty appearance, a fleeting hallucination. Appeared--disappeared--there is the whole history of a man, or of a world, or of an infusoria.

Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea. The eye does not see a sphere all at once although the sphere exists all at once. Either the sphere must turn before the eye which is looking at it, or the eye must go round the sphere. In the first case it is the world which unrolls, or seems to unroll in time; in the second case it is our thought which successively analyzes and recomposes. For the supreme intelligence there is no time; what will be, is. Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures. God permits them, that he may not be alone. They are the mode under which creatures are possible and conceivable. Let us add that they are also the Jacob’s ladder of innumerable steps by which the creation reascends to its Creator, participates in being, tastes of life, perceives the absolute, and can adore the fathomless mystery of the infinite divinity. That is the other side of the question. Our life is nothing, it is true, but our life is divine. A breath of nature annihilates us, but we surpass nature in penetrating far beyond her vast phantasmagoria to the changeless and the eternal. To escape by the ecstasy of inward vision from the whirlwind of time, to see one’s self _sub specie eterni_ is the word of command of all the great religions of the higher races; and this psychological possibility is the foundation of all great hopes. The soul may be immortal because she is fitted to rise toward that which is neither born nor dies, toward that which exists substantially, necessarily, invariably, that is to say toward God.

To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.

The germs of all things are in every heart, and the greatest criminals as well as the greatest heroes are but different modes of ourselves. Only evil grows of itself, while for goodness we want effort and courage.

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death, then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe.

A man takes to “piety” from a thousand different reasons--from imitation or from eccentricity, from bravado or from reverence, from shame of the past or from terror of the future, from weakness and from pride, for pleasure’s sake or for punishment’s sake, in order to be able to judge, or in order to escape being judged, and for a thousand other reasons; but he only becomes truly religious for religion’s sake.

January 11, 1865.--It is pleasant to feel nobly--that is to say, to live above the lowlands of vulgarity. Manufacturing Americanism and Caesarian democracy tend equally to the multiplying of crowds, governed by appetite, applauding charlatanism, vowed to the worship of mammon and of pleasure, and adoring no other God than force. What poor samples of mankind they are who make up this growing majority! Oh, let us remain faithful to the altars of the ideal! It is possible that the spiritualists may become the stoics of a new epoch of Caesarian rule. Materialistic naturalism has the wind in its sails, and a general moral deterioration is preparing. NO matter, so long as the salt does not lose its savor, and so long as the friends of the higher life maintain the fire of Vesta. The wood itself may choke the flame, but if the flame persists, the fire will only be the more splendid in the end. The great democratic deluge will not after all be able to effect what the invasion of the barbarians was powerless to bring about; it will not drown altogether the results of the higher culture; but we must resign ourselves to the fact that it tends in the beginning to deform and vulgarize everything. It is clear that aesthetic delicacy, elegance, distinction, and nobleness--that atticism, urbanity, whatever is suave and exquisite, fine and subtle--all that makes the charm of the higher kinds of literature and of aristocratic cultivation--vanishes simultaneously with the society which corresponds to it. If, as Pascal, [Footnote: The saying of Pascal’s alluded to is in the _Pensées_, Art. xi. No. 10: “A mesure qu’on a plus d’esprit on trouve qu’il y a plus d’hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de différence entre les hommes.”] I think, says, the more one develops, the more difference one observes between man and man, then we cannot say that the democratic instinct tends to mental development, since it tends to make a man believe that the pretensions have only to be the same to make the merits equal also.

March 20, 1865.--I have just heard of fresh cases of insubordination among the students. Our youth become less and less docile, and seem to take for their motto, “Our master is our enemy.” The boy insists upon having the privileges of the young man, and the young man tries to keep those of the _gamin_. At bottom all this is the natural consequence of our system of leveling democracy. As soon as difference of quality is, in politics, officially equal to zero, the authority of age, of knowledge, and of function disappears.

The only counterpoise of pure equality is military discipline. In military uniform, in the police court, in prison, or on the execution ground, there is no reply possible. But is it not curious that the _régime_ of individual right should lead to nothing but respect for brute strength? Jacobinism brings with it Caesarism; the rule of the tongue leads to the rule of the sword. Democracy and liberty are not one but two. A republic supposes a high state of morals, but no such state of morals is possible without the habit of respect; and there is no respect without humility. Now the pretension that every man has the necessary qualities of a citizen, simply because he was born twenty-one years ago, is as much as to say that labor, merit, virtue, character, and experience are to count for nothing; and we destroy humility when we proclaim that a man becomes the equal of all other men, by the mere mechanical and vegetative process of natural growth. Such a claim annihilates even the respect for age; for as the elector of twenty-one is worth as much as the elector of fifty, the boy of nineteen has no serious reason to believe himself in any way the inferior of his elder by one or two years. Thus the fiction on which the political order of democracy is based ends in something altogether opposed to that which democracy desires: its aim was to increase the whole sum of liberty; but the result is to diminish it for all.

The modern state is founded on the philosophy of atomism. Nationality, public spirit, tradition, national manners, disappear like so many hollow and worn-out entities; nothing remains to create movement but the action of molecular force and of dead weight. In such a theory liberty is identified with caprice, and the collective reason and age-long tradition of an old society are nothing more than soap-bubbles which the smallest urchin may shiver with a snap of the fingers.

Does this mean that I am an opponent of democracy? Not at all. Fiction for fiction, it is the least harmful. But it is well not to confound its promises with realities. The fiction consists in the postulate of all democratic government, that the great majority of the electors in a state are enlightened, free, honest, and patriotic--whereas such a postulate is a mere chimera. The majority in any state is necessarily composed of the most ignorant, the poorest, and the least capable; the state is therefore at the mercy of accident and passion, and it always ends by succumbing at one time or another to the rash conditions which have been made for its existence. A man who condemns himself to live upon the tight-rope must inevitably fall; one has no need to be a prophet to foresee such a result.

“[Greek: Aridton men udor],” said Pindar; the best thing in the world is wisdom, and, in default of wisdom, science. States, churches, society itself, may fall to pieces; science alone has nothing to fear--until at least society once more falls a prey to barbarism. Unfortunately this triumph of barbarism is not impossible. The victory of the socialist Utopia, or the horrors of a religious war, reserve for us perhaps even this lamentable experience.

April 3, 1865.--What doctor possesses such curative resources as those latent in a spark of happiness or a single ray of hope? The mainspring of life is in the heart. Joy is the vital air of the soul, and grief is a kind of asthma complicated by atony. Our dependence upon surrounding circumstances increases with our own physical weakness, and on the other hand, in health there is liberty. Health is the first of all liberties, and happiness gives us the energy which is the basis of health. To make any one happy, then, is strictly to augment his store of being, to double the intensity of his life, to reveal him to himself, to ennoble him and transfigure him. Happiness does away with ugliness, and even makes the beauty of beauty. The man who doubts it, can never have watched the first gleams of tenderness dawning in the clear eyes of one who loves; sunrise itself is a lesser marvel. In paradise, then, everybody will be beautiful. For, as the righteous soul is naturally beautiful, as the spiritual body is but the _visibility_ of the soul, its impalpable and angelic form, and as happiness beautifies all that it penetrates or even touches, ugliness will have no more place in the universe, and will disappear with grief, sin, and death.

To the materialist philosopher the beautiful is a mere accident, and therefore rare. To the spiritualist philosopher the beautiful is the rule, the law, the universal foundation of things, to which every form returns as soon as the force of accident is withdrawn. Why are we ugly? Because we are not in the angelic state, because we are evil, morose, and unhappy.

Heroism, ecstasy, prayer, love, enthusiasm, weave a halo round the brow, for they are a setting free of the soul, which through them gains force to make its envelope transparent and shine through upon all around it. Beauty is, then, a phenomenon belonging to the spiritualization of matter. It is a momentary transfiguration of the privileged object or being--a token fallen from heaven to earth in order to remind us of the ideal world. To study it, is to Platonize almost inevitably. As a powerful electric current can render metals luminous, and reveal their essence by the color of their flame, so intense life and supreme joy can make the most simple mortal dazzlingly beautiful. Man, therefore, is never more truly man than in these divine states.

The ideal, after all, is truer than the real: for the ideal is the eternal element in perishable things: it is their type, their sum, their _raison d’être_, their formula in the book of the Creator, and therefore at once the most exact and the most condensed expression of them.

April 11, 1865.--I have been measuring and making a trial of the new gray plaid which is to take the place of my old mountain shawl. The old servant which has been my companion for ten years, and which recalls to me so many poetical and delightful memories, pleases me better than its brilliant successor, even though this last has been a present from a friendly hand. But can anything take the place of the past, and have not even the inanimate witnesses of our life voice and language for us? Glion, Villars, Albisbrunnen, the Righi, the Chamossaire, and a hundred other places, have left something of themselves behind them in the meshes of this woolen stuff which makes a part of my most intimate history. The shawl, besides, is the only _chivalrous_ article of dress which is still left to the modern traveler, the only thing about him which may be useful to others than himself, and by means of which he may still do his _devoir_ to fair women! How many times mine has served them for a cushion, a cloak, a shelter, on the damp grass of the Alps, on seats of hard rock, or in the sudden cool of the pinewood, during the walks, the rests, the readings, and the chats of mountain life! How many kindly smiles it has won for me! Even its blemishes are dear to me, for each darn and tear has its story, each scar is an armorial bearing. This tear was made by a hazel tree under Jaman--that by the buckle of a strap on the Frohnalp--that, again, by a bramble at Charnex; and each time fairy needles have repaired the injury.

“Mon vieux manteau, que je vous remercie
Car c’est à vous que je dois ces plaisirs!”

And has it not been to me a friend in suffering, a companion in good and evil fortune? It reminds me of that centaur’s tunic which could not be torn off without carrying away the flesh and blood of its wearer. I am unwilling to give it up; whatever gratitude for the past, and whatever piety toward my vanished youth is in me, seem to forbid it. The warp of this rag is woven out of Alpine joys, and its woof out of human affections. It also says to me in its own way:

“Pauvre bouquet, fleurs aujourd’hui fanées!”

And the appeal is one of those which move the heart, although profane ears neither hear it nor understand it.

What a stab there is in those words, _thou hast been_! when the sense of them becomes absolutely clear to us. One feels one’s self sinking gradually into one’s grave, and the past tense sounds the knell of our illusions as to ourselves. What is past is past: gray hairs will never become black curls again; the forces, the gifts, the attractions of youth, have vanished with our young days.

“Plus d’amour; partant plus de joie.”

How hard it is to grow old, when we have missed our life, when we have neither the crown of completed manhood nor of fatherhood! How sad it is to feel the mind declining before it has done its work, and the body growing weaker before it has seen itself renewed in those who might close our eyes and honor our name! The tragic solemnity of existence strikes us with terrible force, on that morning when we wake to find the mournful word _too late_ ringing in our ears! “Too late, the sand is turned, the hour is past! Thy harvest is unreaped--too late! Thou hast been dreaming, forgetting, sleeping--so much the worse! Every man rewards or punishes himself. To whom or of whom wouldst thou complain?”--Alas!

April 21, 1865. (_Mornex_).--A morning of intoxicating beauty, fresh as the feelings of sixteen, and crowned with flowers like a bride. The poetry of youth, of innocence, and of love, overflowed my soul. Even to the light mist hovering over the bosom of the plain--image of that tender modesty which veils the features and shrouds in mystery the inmost thoughts of the maiden--everything that I saw delighted my eyes and spoke to my imagination. It was a sacred, a nuptial day! and the matin bells ringing in some distant village harmonized marvelously with the hymn of nature. “Pray,” they said, “and love! Adore a fatherly and beneficent God.” They recalled to me the accent of Haydn; there was in them and in the landscape a childlike joyousness, a naïve gratitude, a radiant heavenly joy innocent of pain and sin, like the sacred, simple-hearted ravishment of Eve on the first day of her awakening in the new world. How good a thing is feeling, admiration! It is the bread of angels, the eternal food of cherubim and seraphim.

I have not yet felt the air so pure, so life-giving, so ethereal, during the five days that I have been here. To breathe is a beatitude. One understands the delights of a bird’s existence--that emancipation from all encumbering weight--that luminous and empyrean life, floating in blue space, and passing from one horizon to another with a stroke of the wing. One must have a great deal of air below one before one can be conscious of such inner freedom as this, such lightness of the whole being. Every element has its poetry, but the poetry of air is liberty. Enough; to your work, dreamer!

May 30, 1865.--All snakes fascinate their prey, and pure wickedness seems to inherit the power of fascination granted to the serpent. It stupefies and bewilders the simple heart, which sees it without understanding it, which touches it without being able to believe in it, and which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles in Etna. _Non possum capere te, cape me_, says the Aristotelian motto. Every diminutive of Beelzebub is an abyss, each demoniacal act is a gulf of darkness. Natural cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even in animals, cast lurid gleams, as it were, into that fathomless pit of Satanic perversity which is a moral reality.

Nevertheless behind this thought there rises another which tells me that sophistry is at the bottom of human wickedness, that the majority of monsters like to justify themselves in their own eyes, and that the first attribute of the Evil One is to be the father of lies. Before crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this. It is all very well to say that hatred is murder; the man who hates is determined to see nothing in it but an act of moral hygiene. It is to do himself good that he does evil, just as a mad dog bites to get rid of his thirst.

To injure others while at the same time knowingly injuring one’s self is a step farther; evil then becomes a frenzy, which, in its turn, sharpens into a cold ferocity.

Whenever a man, under the influence of such a diabolical passion, surrenders himself to these instincts of the wild or venomous beast he must seem to the angels a madman--a lunatic, who kindles his own Gehenna that he may consume the world in it, or as much of it as his devilish desires can lay hold upon. Wickedness is forever beginning a new spiral which penetrates deeper still into the abysses of abomination, for the circles of hell have this property--that they have no end. It seems as though divine perfection were an infinite of the first degree, but as though diabolical perfection were an infinite of unknown power. But no; for if so, evil would be the true God, and hell would swallow up creation. According to the Persian and the Christian faiths, good is to conquer evil, and perhaps even Satan himself will be restored to grace--which is as much as to say that the divine order will be everywhere re-established. Love will be more potent than hatred; God will save his glory, and his glory is in his goodness. But it is very true that all gratuitous wickedness troubles the soul, because it seems to make the great lines of the moral order tremble within us by the sudden withdrawal of the curtain which hides from us the action of those dark corrosive forces which have ranged themselves in battle against the divine plan.

June 26, 1865.--One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical _resumé_ of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma. Sometimes it is the mere overflow of the soul, the running over of the cup of reverie. All that one cannot or will not say, all that one refuses to confess even to one’s self--confused desires, secret trouble, suppressed grief, smothered conflict, voiceless regret, the emotions we have struggled against, the pain we have sought to hide, our superstitious fears, our vague sufferings, our restless presentiments, our unrealized dreams, the wounds inflicted upon our ideal, the dissatisfied languor, the vain hopes, the multitude of small indiscernible ills which accumulate slowly in a corner of the heart like water dropping noiselessly from the roof of a cavern--all these mysterious movements of the inner life end in an instant of emotion, and the emotion concentrates itself in a tear just visible on the edge of the eyelid.

For the rest, tears express joy as well as sadness. They are the symbol of the powerlessness of the soul to restrain its emotion and to remain mistress of itself. Speech implies analysis; when we are overcome by sensation or by feeling analysis ceases, and with it speech and liberty. Our only resource, after silence and stupor, is the language of action--pantomime. Any oppressive weight of thought carries us back to a stage anterior to humanity, to a gesture, a cry, a sob, and at last to swooning and collapse; that is to say, incapable of bearing the excessive strain of sensation as men, we fall back successively to the stage of mere animate being, and then to that of the vegetable. Dante swoons at every turn in his journey through hell, and nothing paints better the violence of his emotions and the ardor of his piety.

... And intense joy? It also withdraws into itself and is silent. To speak is to disperse and scatter. Words isolate and localize life in a single point; they touch only the circumference of being; they analyze, they treat one thing at a time. Thus they decentralize emotion, and chill it in doing so. The heart would fain brood over its feeling, cherishing and protecting it. Its happiness is silent and meditative; it listens to its own beating and feeds religiously upon itself.

August 8, 1865. (_Gryon sur Bex_).--Splendid moonlight without a cloud. The night is solemn and majestic. The regiment of giants sleeps while the stars keep sentinel. In the vast shadow of the valley glimmer a few scattered roofs, while the torrent, organ-like, swells its eternal note in the depths of this mountain cathedral which has the heavens for roof.

A last look at this blue night and boundless landscape. Jupiter is just setting on the counterscarp of the Dent du Midi. Prom the starry vault descends an invisible snow-shower of dreams, calling us to a pure sleep. Nothing of voluptuous or enervating in this nature. All is strong, austere and pure. Good night to all the world!--to the unfortunate and to the happy. Rest and refreshment, renewal and hope; a day is dead--_vive le lendemain!_ Midnight is striking. Another step made toward the tomb.

August 13, 1865.--I have just read through again the letter of J. J. Rousseau to Archbishop Beaumont with a little less admiration than I felt for it--was it ten or twelve years ago? This emphasis, this precision, which never tires of itself, tires the reader in the long run. The intensity of the style produces on one the impression of a treatise on mathematics. One feels the need of relaxation after it in something easy, natural, and gay. The language of Rousseau demands an amount of labor which makes one long for recreation and relief.

But how many writers and how many books descend from our Rousseau! On my way I noticed the points of departure of Châteaubriand, Lamennais, Proudhon. Proudhon, for instance, modeled the plan of his great work, “De la Justice dang l’Eglise et dans la Révolution,” upon the letter of Rousseau to Beaumont; his three volumes are a string of letters to an archbishop; eloquence, daring, and elocution are all fused in a kind of _persiflage_, which is the foundation of the whole.

How many men we may find in one man, how many styles in a great writer! Rousseau, for instance, has created a number of different _genres_. Imagination transforms him, and he is able to play the most varied parts with credit, among them even that of the pure logician. But as the imagination is his intellectual axis--his master faculty--he is, as it were, in all his works only half sincere, only half in earnest. We feel that his talent has laid him the wager of Carneades; it will lose no cause, however bad, as soon as the point of honor Is engaged. It is indeed the temptation of all talent to subordinate things to itself and not itself to things; to conquer for the sake of conquest, and to put self-love in the place of conscience. Talent is glad enough, no doubt, to triumph in a good cause; but it easily becomes a free lance, content, whatever the cause, so long as victory follows its banner. I do not know even whether success in a weak and bad cause is not the most flattering for talent, which then divides the honors of its triumph with nothing and no one.

Paradox is the delight of clever people and the joy of talent. It is so pleasant to pit one’s self against the world, and to overbear mere commonplace good sense and vulgar platitudes! Talent and love of truth are then not identical; their tendencies and their paths are different. In order to make talent obey when its instinct is rather to command, a vigilant moral sense and great energy of character are needed. The Greeks--those artists of the spoken or written word--were artificial by the time of Ulysses, sophists by the time of Pericles, cunning, rhetorical, and versed in all the arts of the courtier down to the end of the lower empire. From the talent of the nation sprang its vices.

For a man to make his mark, like Rousseau by polemics, is to condemn himself to perpetual exaggeration and conflict. Such a man expiates his celebrity by a double bitterness; he is never altogether true, and he is never able to recover the free disposal of himself. To pick a quarrel with the world is attractive, but dangerous.

J. J. Rousseau is an ancestor in all things. It was he who founded traveling on foot before Töpffer, reverie before “René,” literary botany before George Sand, the worship of nature before Bernardin de S. Pierre, the democratic theory before the Revolution of 1789, political discussion and theological discussion before Mirabeau and Renan, the science of teaching before Pestalozzi, and Alpine description before De Saussure. He made music the fashion, and created the taste for confessions to the public. He formed a new French style--the close, chastened, passionate, interwoven style we know so well. Nothing indeed of Rousseau has been lost, and nobody has had more influence than he upon the French Revolution, for he was the demigod of it, and stands between Neckar and Napoleon. Nobody, again, has had more than he upon the nineteenth century, for Byron, Châteaubriand, Madame de Staël, and George Sand all descend from him.

And yet, with these extraordinary talents, he was an extremely unhappy man--why? Because he always allowed himself to be mastered by his imagination and his sensations; because he had no judgment in deciding, no self-control in acting. Regret indeed on this score would be hardly reasonable, for a calm, judicious, orderly Rousseau would never have made so great an impression. He came into collision with his time: hence his eloquence and his misfortunes. His naïve confidence in life and himself ended in jealous misanthropy and hypochondria.

What a contrast to Goethe or Voltaire, and how differently they understood the practical wisdom of life and the management of literary gifts! They were the able men--Rousseau is a visionary. They knew mankind as it is--he always represented it to himself either whiter or blacker than it is; and having begun by taking life the wrong way, he ended in madness. In the talent of Rousseau there is always something unwholesome, uncertain, stormy, and sophistical, which destroys the confidence of the reader; and the reason is no doubt that we feel passion to have been the governing force in him as a writer: passion stirred his imagination, and ruled supreme over his reason.

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Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults--a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide from us our favorite sin.

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The unfinished is nothing.

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Great men are the true men, the men in whom nature has succeeded. They are not extraordinary--they are in the true order. It is the other species of men who are not what they ought to be.

January 7, 1866.--Our life is but a soap-bubble hanging from a reed; it is formed, expands to its full size, clothes itself with the loveliest colors of the prism, and even escapes at moments from the law of gravitation; but soon the black speck appears in it, and the globe of emerald and gold vanishes into space, leaving behind it nothing but a simple drop of turbid water. All the poets have made this comparison, it is so striking and so true. To appear, to shine, to disappear; to be born, to suffer, and to die; is it not the whole sum of life, for a butterfly, for a nation, for a star?

Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives the two ends of an idea almost at the same moment. The thought of a planet can only be worked out by nature with labor and effort, but supreme intelligence sums up the whole in an instant. Time is then the successive dispersion of being, just as speech is the successive analysis of an intuition or of an act of will. In itself it is relative and negative, and disappears within the absolute being. God is outside time because he thinks all thought at once; Nature is within time, because she is only speech--the discursive unfolding of each thought contained within the infinite thought. But nature exhausts herself in this impossible task, for the analysis of the infinite is a contradiction. With limitless duration, boundless space, and number without end, Nature does at least what she can to translate into visible form the wealth of the creative formula. By the vastness of the abysses into which she penetrates, in the effort--the unsuccessful effort--to house and contain the eternal thought, we may measure the greatness of the divine mind. For as soon as this mind goes out of itself and seeks to explain itself, the effort at utterance heaps universe upon universe, during myriads of centuries, and still it is not expressed, and the great harangue must go on for ever and ever.

The East prefers immobility as the form of the Infinite: the West, movement. It is because the West is infected by the passion for details, and sets proud store by individual worth. Like a child upon whom a hundred thousand francs have been bestowed, he thinks she is multiplying her fortune by counting it out in pieces of twenty sous, or five centimes. Her passion for progress is in great part the product of an infatuation, which consists in forgetting the goal to be aimed at, and absorbing herself in the pride and delight of each tiny step, one after the other. Child that she is, she is even capable of confounding change with improvement--beginning over again, with growth in perfectness.

At the bottom of the modern man there is always a great thirst for self-forgetfulness, self-distraction; he has a secret horror of all which makes him feel his own littleness; the eternal, the infinite, perfection, therefore scare and terrify him. He wishes to approve himself, to admire and congratulate himself; and therefore he turns away from all those problems and abysses which might recall to him his own nothingness. This is what makes the real pettiness of so many of our great minds, and accounts for the lack of personal dignity among us--civilized parrots that we are--as compared with the Arab of the desert; or explains the growing frivolity of our masses, more and more educated, no doubt, but also more and more superficial in all their conceptions of happiness.

Here, then, is the service which Christianity--the oriental element in our culture--renders to us Westerns. It checks and counterbalances our natural tendency toward the passing, the finite, and the changeable, by fixing the mind upon the contemplation of eternal things, and by Platonizing our affections, which otherwise would have too little outlook upon the ideal world. Christianity leads us back from dispersion to concentration, from worldliness to self-recollection. It restores to our souls, fevered with a thousand sordid desires, nobleness, gravity, and calm. Just as sleep is a bath of refreshing for our actual life, so religion is a bath of refreshing for our immortal being. What is sacred has a purifying virtue; religious emotion crowns the brow with an aureole, and thrills the heart with an ineffable joy.

I think that the adversaries of religion as such deceive themselves as to the needs of the western man, and that the modern world will lose its balance as soon as it has passed over altogether to the crude doctrine of progress. We have always need of the infinite, the eternal, the absolute; and since science contents itself with what is relative, it necessarily leaves a void, which it is good for man to fill with contemplation, worship, and adoration. “Religion,” said Bacon, “is the spice which is meant to keep life from corruption,” and this is especially true to-day of religion taken in the Platonist and oriental sense. A capacity for self-recollection--for withdrawal from the outward to the inward--is in fact the condition of all noble and useful activity.

This return, indeed, to what is serious, divine, and sacred, is becoming more and more difficult, because of the growth of critical anxiety within the church itself, the increasing worldliness of religious preaching, and the universal agitation and disquiet of society. But such a return is more and more necessary. Without it there is no inner life, and the inner life is the only means whereby we may oppose a profitable resistance to circumstance. If the sailor did not carry with him his own temperature he could not go from the pole to the equator, and remain himself in spite of all. The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all; he is not distinct, free, original, a cause--in a word, _some one_. He is one of a crowd, a taxpayer, an elector, an anonymity, but not a man. He helps to make up the mass--to fill up the number of human consumers or producers; but he interests nobody but the economist and the statistician, who take the heap of sand as a whole into consideration, without troubling themselves about the uninteresting uniformity of the individual grains. The crowd counts only as a massive elementary force--why? because its constituent parts are individually insignificant: they are all like each other, and we add them up like the molecules of water in a river, gauging them by the fathom instead of appreciating them as individuals. Such men are reckoned and weighed merely as so many bodies: they have never been individualized by conscience, after the manner of souls.

He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions--such a man is a mere article of the world’s furniture--a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being--an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock the humble servant of the air in motion.

January 21, 1866.--This evening after supper I did not know whither to betake my solitary self. I was hungry for conversation, society, exchange of ideas. It occurred to me to go and see our friends, the----s; they were at supper. Afterward we went into the _salon_: mother and daughter sat down to the piano and sang a duet by Boïeldieu. The ivory keys of the old grand piano, which the mother had played on before her marriage, and which has followed and translated into music the varying fortunes of the family, were a little loose and jingling; but the poetry of the past sang in this faithful old servant, which had been a friend in trouble, a companion in vigils, and the echo of a lifetime of duty, affection, piety and virtue. I was more moved than I can say. It was like a scene of Dickens, and I felt a rush of sympathy, untouched either by egotism or by melancholy.

Twenty-five years! It seems to me a dream as far as I am concerned, and I can scarcely believe my eyes, or this inanimate witness to so many lustres passed away. How strange a thing _to have lived_, and to feel myself so far from a past which yet is so present to me! One does not know whether one is sleeping or waking. Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared. The whole life of an old man may appear to him no longer than an hour, or less still; and as soon as time is but a moment to us, we have entered upon eternity. Life is but the dream of a shadow; I felt it anew this evening with strange intensity.

January 29, 1866. (_Nine o’clock in the morning_).--The gray curtain of mist has spread itself again over the town; everything is dark and dull. The bells are ringing in the distance for some festival; with this exception everything is calm and silent. Except for the crackling of the fire, no noise disturbs my solitude in this modest home, the shelter of my thoughts and of my work, where the man of middle age carries on the life of his student-youth without the zest of youth, and the sedentary professor repeats day by day the habits which he formed as a traveler.

What is it which makes the charm of this existence outwardly so barren and empty? Liberty! What does the absence of comfort and of all else that is wanting to these rooms matter to me? These things are indifferent to me. I find under this roof light, quiet, shelter. I am near to a sister and her children, whom I love; my material life is assured--that ought to be enough for a bachelor.... Am I not, besides, a creature of habit? more attached to the _ennuis_ I know, than in love with pleasures unknown to me. I am, then, free and not unhappy. Then I am well off here, and I should be ungrateful to complain. Nor do I. It is only the heart which sighs and seeks for something more and better. The heart is an insatiable glutton, as we all know--and for the rest, who is without yearnings? It is our destiny here below. Only some go through torments and troubles in order to satisfy themselves, and all without success; others foresee the inevitable result, and by a timely resignation save themselves a barren and fruitless effort. Since we cannot be happy, why give ourselves so much trouble? It is best to limit one’s self to what is strictly necessary, to live austerely and by rule, to content one’s self with a little, and to attach no value to anything but peace of conscience and a sense of duty done.

It is true that this itself is no small ambition, and that it only lands us in another impossibility. No--the simplest course is to submit one’s self wholly and altogether to God. Everything else, as saith the preacher, is but vanity and vexation of spirit.

It is a long while now since this has been plain to me, and since this religious renunciation has been sweet and familiar to me. It is the outward distractions of life, the examples of the world, and the irresistible influence exerted upon us by the current of things which make us forget the wisdom we have acquired and the principles we have adopted. That is why life is such weariness! This eternal beginning over again is tedious, even to repulsion. It would be so good to go to sleep when we have gathered the fruit of experience, when we are no longer in opposition to the supreme will, when we have broken loose from self, when we are at peace with all men. Instead of this, the old round of temptations, disputes, _ennuis_, and forgettings, has to be faced again and again, and we fall back into prose, into commonness, into vulgarity. How melancholy, how humiliating! The poets are wise in withdrawing their heroes more quickly from the strife, and in not dragging them after victory along the common rut of barren days. “Whom the gods love die young,” said the proverb of antiquity.

Yes, but it is our secret self-love which is set upon this favor from on high; such may be our desire, but such is not the will of God. We are to be exercised, humbled, tried, and tormented to the end. It is our patience which is the touchstone of our virtue. To bear with life even when illusion and hope are gone; to accept this position of perpetual war, while at the same time loving only peace; to stay patiently in the world, even when it repels us as a place of low company, and seems to us a mere arena of bad passions; to remain faithful to one’s own faith without breaking with the followers of the false gods; to make no attempt to escape from the human hospital, long-suffering and patient as Job upon his dung hill--this is duty. When life ceases to be a promise it does not cease to be a task; its true name even is trial.

April 2, 1866. (_Mornex_).--The snow is melting and a damp fog is spread over everything. The asphalt gallery which runs along the _salon_ is a sheet of quivering water starred incessantly by the hurrying drops falling from the sky. It seems as if one could touch the horizon with one’s hand, and the miles of country which were yesterday visible are all hidden under a thick gray curtain.

This imprisonment transports me to Shetland, to Spitzbergen, to Norway, to the Ossianic countries of mist, where man, thrown back upon himself, feels his heart beat more quickly and his thought expand more freely--so long, at least, as he is not frozen and congealed by cold. 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 toward 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 elegaic 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.