Chapter XIX: Amiel 432 (18)

We must return to Constantine Dmitrich Levine. Levine, as I have already said, thinks. Between the age of twenty and that of thirty-five he had lost, he tells us, the Christian belief in which he had been brought up, a loss of which examples nowadays abound certainly everywhere, but which in Russia, as in France, is among all young men of the upper and cultivated class more a matter of course, perhaps, more universal, more avowed, than it is with us. Levine had adopted the scientific notions current all round him; talked of cells, organisms, the indestructibility of matter, the conservation of force, and was of opinion, with his comrades of the university, that religion no longer existed. But he was of a serious nature, and the question what his life meant, whence it came, whither it tended, presented themselves to him in moments of crisis and affliction with irresistible importunity, and getting no answer, haunted him, tortured him, made him think of suicide.

Two things, meanwhile, he noticed. One was, that he and his university friends had been mistaken in supposing that Christian belief no longer existed; they had lost it, but they were not all the world. Levine observed that the persons to whom he was most attached, his own wife Kitty amongst the number, retained it and drew comfort from it; that the women generally, and almost the whole of the Russian common people, retained it and drew comfort from it. The other was, that his scientific friends, though not troubled like himself by questionings about the meaning of human life, were untroubled by such questionings, not because they had got an answer to them, but because, entertaining themselves intellectually with the consideration of the cell theory, and evolution, and the indestructibility of matter, and the conservation of force, and the like, they were satisfied with this entertainment, and did not perplex themselves with investigating the meaning and object of their own life at all.

But Levine noticed further that he himself did not actually proceed to commit suicide; on the contrary, he lived on his lands as his father had done before him, busied himself with all the duties of his station, married Kitty, was delighted when a son was born to him. Nevertheless he was indubitably not happy at bottom, restless and disquieted, his disquietude sometimes amounting to agony.

Now on one of his bad days he was in the field with his peasants, and one of them happened to say to him, in answer to a question from Levine why one farmer should in a certain case act more humanly than another: “Men are not all alike: one man lives for his belly, like Mitiovuck, another for his soul, for God, like old Plato.”[47]—“What do you call,” cried Levine, “living for his soul, for God?” The peasant answered: “It’s quite simple—living by the rule of God, of the truth. All men are not the same, that’s certain. You yourself, for instance, Constantine Dmitrich, you wouldn’t do wrong by a poor man.” Levine gave no answer, but turned away with the phrase, _living by the rule of God, of the truth_, sounding in his ears.

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Footnote 47:

A common name among Russian peasants.

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Then he reflected that he had been born of parents professing this rule, as their parents again had professed it before them; that he had sucked it in with his mother’s milk; that some sense of it, some strength and nourishment from it, had been ever with him although he knew it not; that if he had tried to do the duties of his station it was by help of the secret support ministered by this rule; that if in his moments of despairing restlessness and agony, when he was driven to think of suicide, he had yet not committed suicide, it was because this rule had silently enabled him to do his duty in some degree, and had given him some hold upon life and happiness in consequence.

The words came to him as a clue of which he could never again lose sight, and which with full consciousness and strenuous endeavor he must henceforth follow. He sees his nephews and nieces throwing their milk at one another and scolded by Dolly for it. He says to himself that these children are wasting their subsistence because they have not to earn it for themselves and do not know its value, and he exclaims inwardly: “I, a Christian, brought up in the faith, my life filled with the benefits of Christianity, living on these benefits without being conscious of it, I, like these children, I have been trying to destroy what makes and builds up my life.” But now the feeling has been borne in upon him, clear and precious, that what he has to do is _be good_; he has “cried to _Him_.” What will come of it?

“I shall probably continue to get out of temper with my coachman, to
get into useless arguments, to air my ideas unseasonably; I shall
always feel a barrier between the sanctuary of my soul and the soul of
other people, even that of my wife; I shall always be holding her
responsible for my annoyances and feeling sorry for it directly
afterwards. I shall continue to pray without being able to explain to
myself why I pray; but my inner life has won its liberty; it will no
longer be at the mercy of events, and every minute of my existence
will have a meaning sure and profound which it will be in my power to
impress on every single one of my actions, that of _being good_.”

With these words the novel of _Anna Karénine_ ends. But in Levine’s religious experiences Count Tolstoi was relating his own, and the history is continued in three autobiographical works translated from him, which have within the last two or three years been published in Paris: _Ma Confession_, _Ma Religion_, and _Que Faire_. Our author announces further, “two great works,” on which he has spent six years: one a criticism of dogmatic theology, the other a new translation of the four Gospels, with a concordance of his own arranging. The results which he claims to have established in these two works, are, however, indicated sufficiently in the three published volumes which I have named above.

These autobiographical volumes show the same extraordinary penetration, the same perfect sincerity, which are exhibited in the author’s novel. As autobiography they are of profound interest, and they are full, moreover, of acute and fruitful remarks. I have spoken of the advantages which the Russian genius possesses for imaginative literature. Perhaps for Biblical exegesis, for the criticism of religion and its documents, the advantage lies more with the older nations of the West. They will have more of the experience, width of knowledge, patience, sobriety, requisite for these studies; they may probably be less impulsive, less heady.

Count Tolstoi regards the change accomplished in himself during the last half-dozen years, he regards his recent studies and the ideas which he has acquired through them, as epoch-making in his life and of capital importance:—

“Five years ago faith came to me; I believed in the doctrine of Jesus,
and all my life suddenly changed. I ceased to desire that which
previously I desired, and, on the other hand, I took to desiring what
I had never desired before. That which formerly used to appear good in
my eyes appeared evil, that which used to appear evil appeared good.”

The novel of _Anna Karénine_ belongs to that past which Count Tolstoi has left behind him; his new studies and the works founded on them are what is important; light and salvation are there. Yet I will venture to express my doubt whether these works contain, as their contribution to the cause of religion and to the establishment of the true mind and message of Jesus, much that had not already been given or indicated by Count Tolstoi in relating, in _Anna Karénine_, Levine’s mental history. Points raised in that history are developed and enforced; there is an abundant and admirable exhibition of knowledge of human nature, penetrating insight, fearless sincerity, wit, sarcasm, eloquence, style. And we have too the direct autobiography of a man not only interesting to us from his soul and talent, but highly interesting also from his nationality, position, and course of proceeding. But to light and salvation in the Christian religion we are not, I think, brought very much nearer than in Levine’s history. I ought to add that what was already present in that history seems to me of high importance and value. Let us see what it amounts to.

I must be general and I must be brief; neither my limits nor my purpose permit the introduction of what is abstract. But in Count Tolstoi’s religious philosophy there is very little which is abstract, arid. The idea of _life_ is his master idea in studying and establishing religion. He speaks impatiently of St. Paul as a source, in common with the Fathers and the Reformers, of that ecclesiastical theology which misses the essential and fails to present Christ’s Gospel aright. Yet Paul’s “law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus freeing me from the law of sin and death” is the pith and ground of all Count Tolstoi’s theology. Moral life is the gift of God, is God, and this true life, this union with God to which we aspire, we reach through Jesus. We reach it through union with Jesus and by adopting his life. This doctrine is proved true for us by the life in God, to be acquired through Jesus, being what our nature feels after and moves to, by the warning of misery if we are served from it, the sanction of happiness if we find it. Of the access for _us_, at any rate, to the spirit of life, us who are born in Christendom, are in touch, conscious or unconscious, with Christianity, this is the true account. Questions over which the churches spend so much labor and time—questions about the Trinity, about the godhead of Christ, about the procession of the Holy Ghost, are not vital; what is vital is the doctrine of access to the spirit of life through Jesus.

Sound and saving doctrine, in my opinion, this is. It may be gathered in a great degree from what Count Tolstoi had already given us in the novel of _Anna Karénine_. But of course it is greatly developed, in the special works which have followed. Many of these developments are, I will repeat, of striking force, interest, and value. In _Anna Karénine_ we had been told of the scepticism of the upper and educated classes in Russia. But what reality is added by such an anecdote as the following from _Ma Confession_:—

“I remember that when I was about eleven years old we had a visit one
Sunday from a boy, since dead, who announced to my brother and me, as
great news, a discovery just made at his public school. This discovery
was to the effect that God had no existence, and that everything which
we were taught about Him was pure invention.”

Count Tolstoi touched, in _Anna Karénine_, on the failure of science to tell a man what his life means. Many a sharp stroke does he add in his latter writings:—

“Development is going on, and there are laws which guide it. You
yourself are a part of the whole. Having come to understand the whole
so far as is possible, and having comprehended the law of development,
you will comprehend also your place in that whole, you will understand
yourself.

“In spite of all the shame the confession costs me, there was a time,
I declare, when I tried to look as if I was satisfied with this sort
of thing!”

But the men of science may take comfort from hearing that Count Tolstoi treats the men of letters no better than them, although he is a man of letters himself:—

“The judgment which my literary companions passed on life was to the
effect that life in general is in a state of progress, and that in
this development we, the men of letters, take the principal part. The
vocation of us artists and poets is to instruct the world; and to
prevent my coming out with the natural question, ‘What am I, and what
am I to teach?’ it was explained to me that it was useless to know
that, and that the artist and the poet taught without perceiving how.
I passed for a superb artist, a great poet, and consequently it was
but natural I should appropriate this theory. I, the artist, the
poet—I wrote, I taught, without myself knowing what. I was paid for
what I did. I had everything: splendid fare and lodging, women,
society; I had _la gloire_. Consequently, what I taught was very good.
This faith in the importance of poetry and of the development of life
was a religion, and I was one of its priests—a very agreeable and
advantageous office.

“And I lived ever so long in this belief, never doubting but that it
was true!”

The adepts of this literary and scientific religion are not numerous, to be sure, in comparison with the mass of the people, and the mass of the people, as Levine had remarked, find comfort still in the old religion of Christendom; but of the mass of the people our literary and scientific instructors make no account. Like Solomon and Schopenhauer, these gentlemen, and “society” along with them, are, moreover, apt to say that life is, after all, vanity: but then they all know of no life except their own.

“It used to appear to me that the small number of cultivated, rich,
and idle men, of whom I was one, composed the whole of humanity, and
that the millions and millions of other men who had lived and are
still living were not in reality men at all. Incomprehensible as it
now seems to me, that I should have gone on considering life without
seeing the life which was surrounding me on all sides, the life of
humanity; strange as it is to think that I should have been so
mistaken, and have fancied my life, the life of the Solomons and the
Schopenhauers, to be the veritable and normal life, while the life of
the masses was but a matter of no importance—strangely odd as this
seems to me now,—so it was, notwithstanding.”

And this pretentious minority, who call themselves “society,” “the world,” and to whom their own life, the life of “the world,” seems the only life worth naming, are all the while miserable! Our author found it so in his own experience:—

“In my life, an exceptionally happy one from a worldly point of view,
I can number such a quantity of sufferings endured for the sake of
“the world,” that they would be enough to furnish a martyr for Jesus.
All the most painful passages in my life, beginning with the orgies
and duels of my student days, the wars I have been in, the illnesses,
and the abnormal and unbearable conditions in which I am living
now—all this is but one martyrdom endured in the name of the doctrine
of the world. Yes, and I speak of my own life, exceptionally happy
from the world’s point of view.

“Let any sincere man pass his life in review, and he will perceive
that never, not once, has he suffered through practising the doctrine
of Jesus; the chief part of the miseries of his life have proceeded
solely from his following, contrary to his inclination, the spell of
the doctrine of the world.”

On the other hand, the simple, the multitudes, outside of this spell, are comparatively contented:—

“In opposition to what I saw in our circle, where life without faith
is possible, and where I doubt whether one in a thousand would confess
himself a believer, I conceive that among the people (in Russia) there
is not one sceptic to many thousands of believers. Just contrary to
what I saw in our circle, where life passes in idleness, amusements,
and discontent with life, I saw that of these men of the people the
whole life was passed in severe labor, and yet they were contented
with life. Instead of complaining like the persons in our world of the
hardship of their lot, these poor people received sickness and
disappointments without any revolt, without opposition, but with a
firm and tranquil confidence that so it was to be, that it could not
be otherwise, and that it was all right.”

All this is but development, sometimes rather surprising, but always powerful and interesting, of what we have already had in the pages of _Anna Karénine_. And like Levine in that novel, Count Tolstoi was driven by his inward struggle and misery very near to suicide. What is new in the recent books is the solution and cure announced. Levine had accepted a provisional solution of the difficulties oppressing him; he had lived right on, so to speak, obeying his conscience, but not asking how far all his actions hung together and were consistent:—

“He advanced money to a peasant to get him out of the clutches of a
money-lender, but did not give up the arrears due to himself; he
punished thefts of wood strictly, but would have scrupled to impound a
peasant’s cattle trespassing on his fields; he did not pay the wages
of a laborer whose father’s death caused him to leave work in the
middle of harvest, but he pensioned and maintained his old servants;
he let his peasants wait while he went to give his wife a kiss after
he came home, but would not have made them wait while he went to visit
his bees.”

Count Tolstoi has since advanced to a far more definite and stringent rule of life—the positive doctrine, he thinks, of Jesus. It is the determination and promulgation of this rule which is the novelty in our author’s recent works. He extracts this essential doctrine, or rule of Jesus, from the Sermon on the Mount, and presents it in a body of commandments—Christ’s commandments; the pith, he says, of the New Testament, as the Decalogue is the pith of the Old. These all-important commandments of Christ are “commandments of peace,” and five in number. The first commandment is: “Live in peace with all men; treat no one as contemptible and beneath you. Not only allow yourself no anger, but do not rest until you have dissipated even unreasonable anger in others against yourself.” The second is: “No libertinage and no divorce; let every man have one wife and every woman one husband.” The third: “Never on any pretext take an oath of service of any kind; all such oaths are imposed for a bad purpose.” The fourth: “Never employ force against the evil-doer; bear whatever wrong is done to you without opposing the wrong-doer or seeking to have him punished.” The fifth and last: “Renounce all distinction of nationality; do not admit that men of another nation may ever be treated by you as enemies; love all men alike as alike near to you; do good to all alike.”

If these five commandments were generally observed, says Count Tolstoi, all men would become brothers. Certainly the actual society in which we live would be changed and dissolved. Armies and wars would be renounced; courts of justice, police, property, would be renounced also. And whatever the rest of us may do, Count Tolstoi at least will do his duty and follow Christ’s commandments sincerely. He has given up rank, office, and property, and earns his bread by the labor of his own hands. “I believe in Christ’s commandments,” he says, “and this faith changes my whole former estimate of what is good and great, bad and low, in human life.” At present—

“Everything which I used to think bad and low—the rusticity of the
peasant, the plainness of lodging, food, clothing, manners—all this
has become good and great in my eyes. At present I can no longer
contribute to anything which raises me externally above others, which
separates me from them. I cannot, as formerly, recognize either in my
own case or in that of others any title, rank, or quality beyond the
title and quality of man. I cannot seek fame and praise; I cannot seek
a culture which separates me from men. I cannot refrain from seeking
in my whole existence—in my lodging, my food, my clothing, and my ways
of going on with people—whatever, far from separating me from the mass
of mankind, draws me nearer to them.”

Whatever else we have or have not in Count Tolstoi, we have at least a great soul and a great writer. In his Biblical exegesis, in the criticism by which he extracts and constructs his Five Commandments of Christ which are to be the rule of our lives, I find much which is questionable along with much which is ingenious and powerful. But I have neither space, nor, indeed, inclination, to criticise his exegesis here. The right moment, besides, for criticising this will come when the “two great works,” which are in preparation, shall have appeared.

For the present I limit myself to a single criticism only—a general one. Christianity cannot be packed into any set of commandments. As I have somewhere or other said, “Christianity is a _source_; no one supply of water and refreshment that comes from it can be called the sum of Christianity. It is a mistake, and may lead to much error, to exhibit any series of maxims, even those of the Sermon on the Mount, as the ultimate sum and formula into which Christianity may be run up.”

And the reason mainly lies in the character of the Founder of Christianity and in the nature of his utterances. Not less important than the teachings given by Jesus in the _temper_ of their giver, his temper of sweetness and reasonableness, of _epieikeia_. Goethe calls him a _Schäwrmer_, a fanatic; he may much more rightly be called an opportunist. But he is an opportunist of an opposite kind from those who in politics, that “wild and dreamlike trade” of insincerity, give themselves this name. They push or slacken, press their points hard or let them be, as may best suit the interests of their self-aggrandizement and of their party. Jesus has in view simply “the rule of God, of the truth.” But this is served by waiting as well as by hasting forward, and sometimes served better.

Count Tolstoi sees rightly that whatever the propertied and satisfied classes may think, the world, ever since Jesus Christ came, is judged; “a new earth” is in prospect. It was ever in prospect with Jesus, and should be ever in prospect with his followers. And the ideal in prospect has to be realized. “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.” But they are to be done through a great and widespread and long-continued change, and a change of the inner man to begin with. The most important and fruitful utterances of Jesus, therefore, are not things which can be drawn up as a table of stiff and stark external commands, but the things which have most soul in them; because these can best sink down into our soul, work there, set up an influence, form habits of conduct, and prepare the future. The Beatitudes are on this account more helpful than the utterances from which Count Tolstoi builds up his Five Commandments. The very _secret_ of Jesus, “He that loveth his life shall lose it, he that will lose his life shall save it,” does not give us a command to be taken and followed in the letter, but an idea to work in our mind and soul, and of inexhaustible value there.

Jesus paid tribute to the government and dined with the publicans, although neither the empire of Rome nor the high finance of Judea were compatible with his ideal and with the “new earth” which that ideal must in the end create. Perhaps Levine’s provisional solution, in a society like ours, was nearer to “the rule of God, of the truth,” than the more trenchant solution which Count Tolstoi has adopted for himself since. It seems calculated to be of more use. I do not know how it is in Russia, but in an English village the determination of “our circle” to earn their bread by the work of their hands would produce only dismay, not fraternal joy, amongst that “majority” who are so earning it already. “There are plenty of us to compete as things stand,” the gardeners, carpenters, and smiths would say; “pray stick to your articles, your poetry, and nonsense; in manual labor you will interfere with us, and be taking the bread out of our mouths.”

So I arrive at the conclusion that Count Tolstoi has perhaps not done well in abandoning the work of the poet and artist, and that he might with advantage return to it. But whatever he may do in the future, the work which he has already done, and his work in religion as well as his work in imaginative literature, is more than sufficient to signalize him as one of the most marking, interesting, and sympathy-inspiring men of our time—an honor, I must add, to Russia, although he forbids us to heed nationality.

IX.

AMIEL.[48]

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Footnote 48:

Published in _Macmillan’s Magazine_, September 1887.

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It is somewhat late to speak of Amiel, but I was late in reading him. Goethe says that in seasons of cholera one should read no books but such as are tonic, and certainly in the season of old age this precaution is as salutary as in seasons of cholera. From what I heard I could clearly make out that Amiel’s Journal was not a tonic book: the extracts from it which here and there I fell in with did not much please me; and for a good while I left the book unread.

But what M. Edmond Scherer writes I do not easily resist reading, and I found that M. Scherer had prefixed to Amiel’s Journal a long and important introduction. This I read; and was not less charmed by the _mitis sapientia_, the understanding, kindness and tenderness, with which the character of Amiel himself, whom M. Scherer had known in youth, was handled, than interested by the criticism on the Journal. Then I read Mrs. Humphry Ward’s interesting notice, and then—for all biography is attractive, and of Amiel’s life and circumstances I had by this time become desirous of knowing more—the _Etude Biographique_ of Mademoiselle Berthe Vadier.

Of Amiel’s cultivation, refinement, and high feeling, of his singular graces of spirit and character, there could be no doubt. But the specimens of his work given by his critics left me hesitating. A poetess herself, Mademoiselle Berthe Vadier is much occupied with Amiel’s poetry, and quotes it abundantly. Even Victor Hugo’s poetry leaves me cold, I am so unhappy as not to be able to admire _Olympio_; what am I to say, then, to Amiel’s

“Journée
Illuminée,
Riant soleil d’avril,
En quel songe
Se plonge
Mon cœur, et que veut-il”?

But M. Scherer and other critics, who do not require us to admire Amiel’s poetry, maintain that in his Journal he has left “a book which will not die,” a book describing a malady of which “the secret is sublime and the expression wonderful”; a marvel of “speculative intuition,” a “psychological experience of the utmost value.” M. Scherer and Mrs. Humphry Ward give Amiel’s Journal very decidedly the preference over the letters of an old friend of mine, Obermann. The quotations made from Amiel’s Journal by his critics failed, I say, to enable me quite to understand this high praise. But I remember the time when a new publication by George Sand or by Sainte-Beuve was an event bringing to me a shock of pleasure, and a French book capable of renewing that sensation is seldom produced now. If Amiel’s Journal was of the high quality alleged, what a pleasure to make acquaintance with it, what a loss to miss it! In spite, therefore, of the unfitness of old age to bear atonic influences, I at last read Amiel’s Journal,—read it carefully through. Tonic it is not; but it is to be read with profit, and shows, moreover, powers of great force and value, though not quite, I am inclined to think, in the exact line which his critics with one consent indicate.

In speaking of Amiel at present, after so much has been written about him, I may assume that the main outlines of his life are known to my readers: that they know him to have been born in 1821 and to have died in 1881, to have passed the three or four best years of his youth at the University of Berlin, and the remainder of his life mostly at Geneva, as a professor, first of æsthetics, afterwards of philosophy. They know that his publications and lectures, during his lifetime, disappointed his friends, who expected much from his acquirements, talents, and vivacity; and that his fame rests upon two volumes of extracts from many thousand pages of a private journal, _Journal Intime_, extending over more than thirty years, from 1848 to 1881, which he left behind him at his death. This Journal explains his sterility; and displays in explaining it, say his critics, such sincerity, with such gifts of expression and eloquence, of profound analysis and speculative intuition, as to make it most surely “one of those books which will not die.”

The sincerity is unquestionable. As to the gifts of eloquence and expression, what are we to say? M. Scherer speaks of an “ever new eloquence” pouring itself in the pages of the Journal: M. Paul Bourget, of “marvelous pages” where the feeling for nature finds an expression worthy of Shelley or Wordsworth: Mrs. Humphry Ward, of “magic of style,” of “glow and splendor of expression,” of the “poet and artist” who fascinates us in Amiel’s prose. I cannot quite agree. Obermann has been mentioned: it seems to me that we have only to place a passage from Sénancour beside a passage from Amiel, to perceive the difference between a feeling for nature which gives magic to style and one which does not. Here and throughout I am to use as far as possible Mrs. Humphry Ward’s translation, at once spirited and faithful, of Amiel’s Journal. I will take a passage where Amiel has evidently some reminiscence of Sénancour (whose work he knew well), is inspired by Sénancour—a passage which has been extolled by M. Paul Bourget:—

“Shall I ever enjoy again those marvelous reveries of past days,—as,
for instance, once, when I was still quite a youth in the early dawn
sitting amongst the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; another time in
the mountains above Lancy, under the mid-day sun, lying under a tree
and visited by three butterflies; and again another night on the sandy
shore of the North Sea, stretched full length upon the beach, my eyes
wandering over the Milky Way? Will they ever return to me, those
grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams in which one seems to carry the
world in one’s breast, to touch the stars, to possess the infinite?
Divine moments, hours of ecstasy, when thought flies from world to
world, penetrates the great enigma, breathes with a respiration large,
tranquil, and profound like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and
boundless like the blue heaven! Visits from the Muse Urania, who
traces around the foreheads of those she loves the phosphorescent
nimbus of contemplative power, and who pours into their hearts the
tranquil intoxication, if not the authority of genius,—moments of
irresistible intuition in which a man feels himself great as the
universe and calm like God!... What hours, what memories!”

And now for Obermann’s turn, Obermann by the Lake of Bienne:—

“My path lay beside the green waters of the Thiele. Feeling inclined
to muse, and finding the night so warm that there was no hardship in
being all night out of doors, I took the road to Saint Blaise. I
descended a steep bank, and got upon the shore of the lake where its
ripple came up and expired. The air was calm; every one was at rest; I
remained there for hours. Towards morning the moon shed over the earth
and waters the ineffable melancholy of her last gleams. Nature seems
unspeakably grand, when, plunged in a long reverie, one hears the
rippling of the waters upon a solitary strand, in the calm of a night
still enkindled and luminous with the setting moon.

“Sensibility beyond utterance, charm and torment of our vain years;
vast consciousness of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and
everywhere impenetrable; all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom,
delicious self-abandonment—everything that a mortal heart can contain
of life-weariness and yearning, I felt it all, I experienced it all,
in this memorable night. I have made a grave step towards the age of
decline, I have swallowed up ten years of life at once. Happy the
simple, whose heart is always young!”

No translation can render adequately the cadence of diction, the “dying fall” of reveries like those of Sénancour or Rousseau. But even in a translation we must surely perceive that the magic of style is with Sénancour’s feeling for nature, not Amiel’s; and in the original this is far more manifest still.

Magic of style is creative: its possessor himself creates, and he inspires and enables his reader in some sort to create after him. And creation gives the sense of life and joy; hence its extraordinary value. But eloquence may exist without magic of style, and this eloquence, accompanying thoughts of rare worth and depth, may heighten their effect greatly. And M. Scherer says that Amiel’s speculative philosophy is “on a far other scale of vastness” than Sénancour’s, and therefore he gives the preference to the eloquence of Amiel, which clothes and conveys this vaster philosophy. Amiel was no doubt greatly Sénancour’s superior in culture and instruction generally; in philosophical reading and what is called philosophical thought he was immensely his superior. My sense for philosophy, I know, is as far from satisfying Mr. Frederic Harrison as my sense for Hugo’s poetry is from satisfying Mr. Swinburne. But I am too old to change and too hardened to hide what I think; and when I am presented with philosophical speculations and told that they are “on a high scale of vastness,” I persist in looking closely at them and in honestly asking myself what I find to be their positive value. And we get from Amiel’s powers of “speculative intuition” things like this—

“Created spirits in the accomplishment of their destinies tend, so to
speak, to form constellations and milky ways within the empyrean of
the divinity; in becoming gods, they surround the throne of the
sovereign with a sparkling court.”

Or this—

“Is not mind the universal virtuality, the universe latent? If so, its
zero would be the germ of the infinite, which is expressed
mathematically by the double zero (00).”

Or, to let our philosopher develop himself at more length, let us take this return to the zero, which Mrs. Humphry Ward prefers here to render by _nothingness_:—

“This psychological reinvolution is an anticipation of death; it
represents the life beyond the grave, the return to Scheol, the soul
fading into the world of ghosts or descending into the region of _Die
Mütter_; it implies the simplification of the individual who, allowing
all the accidents of personality to evaporate, exists henceforward
only in the invisible state, the state of point, of potentiality, of
pregnant nothingness. Is not this the true definition of mind? is not
mind, dissociated from space and time, just this? Its development,
past or future, is contained in it just as a curve is contained in its
algebraical formula. This nothing is an all. This _punctum_ without
dimensions is a _punctum saliens_.”

French critics throw up their hands in dismay at the violence which the Germanized Amiel, propounding his speculative philosophy, often does to the French language. My objection is rather that such speculative philosophy, as that of which I have been quoting specimens has no value, is perfectly futile. And Amiel’s Journal contains far too much of it.

What is futile we may throw aside; but when Amiel tells us of his “protean nature essentially metamorphosable, polarizable, and virtual,” when he tells us of his longing for “totality,” we must listen, although these phrases may in France, as M. Paul Bourget says, “raise a shudder in a humanist trained on Livy and Pascal.” But these phrases stood for ideas which did practically rule, in a great degree, Amiel’s life, which he often develops not only with great subtlety, but also with force, clearness, and eloquence, making it both easy and interesting to us to follow him. But still, when we have the ideas present before us, I shall ask, what is their value, what does Amiel obtain in them for the service of either himself or other people?

Let us take first what, adopting his own phrase, we may call his “bedazzlement with the infinitê,” his thirst for “totality.” _Omnis determinatio est negatio._ Amiel has the gift and the bent for making his soul “the capacity for all form, not _a_ soul but _the_ soul.” He finds it easier and more natural “to be _man_ than _a_ man.” His permanent instinct is to be “a subtle and fugitive spirit which no base can absorb or fix entirely.” It costs him an effort to affirm his own personality: “the infinite draws me to it, the _Henosis_ of Plotinus intoxicates me like a philter.”

It intoxicates him until the thought of absorption and extinction, the _Nirvâna_ of Buddhism, becomes his thought of refuge:—

“The individual life is a nothing ignorant of itself, and as soon as
this nothing knows itself, individual life is abolished in principle.
For as soon as the illusion vanishes, Nothingness resumes its eternal
sway, the suffering of life is over, error has disappeared, time and
form have for this enfranchised individuality ceased to be; the
colored air-bubble has burst in the infinite space, and the misery of
thought has sunk to rest in the changeless repose of all—embracing
Nothing.”

With this bedazement with the infinite and this drift towards Buddhism comes the impatience with all production, with even poetry and art themselves, because of their necessary limits and imperfection:—

“Composition demands a concentration, decision, and pliancy which I no
longer possess. I cannot fuse together materials and ideas. If we are
to give anything a form we must, so to speak, be the tyrants of it. We
must treat our subject brutally and not be always trembling lest we
should be doing it a wrong. We must be able to transmute and absorb it
into our own substance. This sort of confident effrontery is beyond
me; my whole nature tends to that impersonality which respects and
subordinates itself to the object; it is love of truth which holds me
back from concluding and deciding.”

The desire for the all, the impatience with what is partial and limited, the fascination of the infinite, are the topics of page after page in the Journal. It is a prosaic mind which has never been in contact with ideas of this sort, never felt their charm. They lend themselves well to poetry, but what are we to say of their value as ideas to be lived with, dilated on, made the governing ideas of life? Except for use in passing, and with the power to dismiss them again, they are unprofitable. Shelley’s

“Life like a dome of many-colored glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity
Until death tramples it to fragments”

has value as a splendid image nobly introduced in a beautiful and impassioned poem. But Amiel’s “colored air-bubble,” as a positive piece of “speculative intuition,” has no value whatever. Nay, the thoughts which have positive truth and value, the thoughts to be lived with and dwelt upon, the thoughts which are a real acquisition for our minds, are precisely thoughts which counteract the “vague aspiration and indeterminate desire” possessing Amiel and filling his Journal: they are thoughts insisting on the need of limit, the feasibility of performance. Goethe says admirably—

“Wer grosses will muss sich zusammenraffen:
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister.”

“He who will do great things must pull himself together: it is in working within limits that the master comes out.” Buffon says not less admirably—

“Tout sujet est un; et quelque vaste qu’il soit, il peut être renfermé
dans un seul discours.”

“Every subject is one; and however vast it may be is capable of being contained in a single discourse.” The ideas to live with, the ideas of sterling value to us, are, I repeat, ideas of this kind: ideas staunchly counteracting and reducing the power of the infinite and indeterminate, not paralyzing us with it.

And indeed we have not to go beyond Amiel himself for proof of this. Amiel was paralyzed by living in these ideas of “vague aspiration and indeterminate desire,” of “confounding his personal life in the general life,” by feeding on these ideas, treating them as august and precious, and filling hundreds of pages of Journal with them. He was paralyzed by it, he became impotent and miserable. And he knew it, and tells us of it himself with a power of analysis and with a sad eloquence which to me are much more interesting and valuable than his philosophy of Maïa and the Great Wheel. “By your natural tendency,” he says to himself, “you arrive at disgust with life, despair, pessimism.” And again: “Melancholy outlook on all sides. Disgust with myself.” And again: “I cannot deceive myself as to the fate in store for me: increasing isolation, inward disappointment, enduring regrets, a melancholy neither to be consoled nor confessed, a mournful old age, a slow agony, a death in the desert.” And all this misery by his own fault, his own mistakes. “To live is to conquer incessantly; one must have the courage to be happy. I turn in a vicious circle; I have never had clear sight of my true vocation.”

I cannot, therefore, fall in with that particular line of admiration which critics, praising Amiel’s Journal, have commonly followed. I cannot join in celebrating his prodigies of speculative intuition, the glow and splendor of his beatific vision of absolute knowledge, the marvelous pages in which his deep and vast philosophic thought is laid bare, the secret of his sublime malady is expressed. I hesitate to admit that all this part of the Journal has even a very profound pyschological interest: its interest is rather pathological. In reading it we are not so much pursuing a study of psychology as a study of mental pathology.

But the Journal reveals a side in Amiel which his critics, so far as I have seen, have hardly noticed, a side of real power, originality, and value. He says himself that he never had clear sight of his true vocation: well, his true vocation, it seems to me, was that of a literary critic. Here he is admirable: M. Scherer was a true friend when he offered to introduce him to an editor, and suggested an article on Uhland. There is hardly a literary criticism in these two volumes which is not masterly, and which does not make one desire more of the same kind. And not Amiel’s literary criticism only, but his criticism of society, politics, national character, religion, is in general well informed, just, and penetrating in an eminent degree. Any one single page of this criticism is worth, in my opinion, a hundred of Amiel’s pages about the Infinite Illusion and the Great Wheel. It is to this side in Amiel that I desire now to draw attention. I would have abstained from writing about him if I had only to disparage and to find fault, only to say that he had been overpraised, and that his dealings with Maïa seemed to me profitable neither for himself nor for others.

Let me first take Amiel as a critic of literature, and of the literature which he naturally knew best, French literature. Hear him as a critic on the best of critics, Sainte-Beuve, of whose death (1869) he had just heard:—

“The fact is, Sainte-Beuve leaves a greater void behind him than
either Béranger or Lamartine; their greatness was already distant,
historical; he was still helping us to think. The true critic supplies
all the world with a basis. He represents the public judgment, that is
to say, the public reason, the touchstone, the scales, the crucible,
which tests the value of each man and the merit of each work.
Infallibility of judgment is perhaps rarer than anything else, so fine
a balance of qualities does it demand—qualities both natural and
acquired, qualities of both mind and heart. What years of labor, what
study and comparison, are needed to bring the critical judgment to
maturity! Like Plato’s sage, it is only at fifty that the critic is
risen to the true height of his literary priesthood, or, to put it
less pompously, of his social function. Not till then has he compassed
all modes of being, and made every shade of appreciation his own. And
Saint-Beuve joined to this infinitely refined culture a prodigious
memory and an incredible multitude of facts and anecdotes stored up
for the service of his thought.”

The criticism is so sound, so admirably put, and so charming, that one wishes Sainte-Beuve could have read it himself.

Try Amiel next on the touchstone afforded by that “half genius, half charlatan,” Victor Hugo:—

“I have been again looking through Victor Hugo’s _Paris_ (1867). For
ten years event after event has given the lie to the prophet, but the
confidence of the prophet in his own imaginings is not therefore a
whit diminished. Humility and common sense are only fit for
Lilliputians. Victor Hugo superbly ignores everything which he has not
foreseen. He does not know that pride limits the mind, and that a
limitless pride is a littleness of soul. If he could but learn to rank
himself with other men and France with other nations, he would see
things more truly, and would not fall into his insane exaggerations,
his extravagant oracles. But proportion and justness his chords will
never know. He is vowed to the Titanic; his gold is always mixed with
lead, his insight with childishness, his reason with madness. He
cannot be simple; like the blaze of a house on fire, his light is
blinding. In short, he astonishes but provokes, he stirs but annoys.
His note is always half or two-thirds false, and that is why he
perpetually makes us feel uncomfortable. The great poet in him cannot
get clear of the charlatan. A few pricks of Voltaire’s irony would
have made the inflation of this genius collapse, and rendered him
stronger by rendering him saner. It is a public misfortune that the
most powerful poet of France should not have better understood his
_rôle_, and that, unlike the Hebrew prophets who chastised because
they loved, he flatters his fellow-citizens from system and from
pride. France is the world, Paris is France, Hugo is Paris. Bow down
and worship, ye nations!”

Finally, we will hear Amiel on a consummate and supreme French classic, as perfect as Hugo is flawed, La Fontaine:—

“Went through my La Fontaine yesterday, and remarked his omissions....
He has not an echo of chivalry haunting him. His French history dates
from Louis XIV. His geography extends in reality but a few square
miles, and reaches neither the Rhine nor the Loire, neither the
mountains nor the sea. He never invents his subjects, but indolently
takes them ready-made from elsewhere. But with all this, what an
adorable writer, what a painter, what an observer, what a master of
the comic and the satirical, what a teller of a story! I am never
tired of him, though I know half his fables by heart. In the matter of
vocabulary, turns of expression, tones, idioms, his language is
perhaps the richest of the great period, for it combines skilfully the
archaic with the classical, the Gaulish element with what is French.
Variety, finesse, sly fun, sensibility, rapidity, conciseness,
suavity, grace, gaiety—when necessary nobleness, seriousness,
grandeur—you find everything in our fabulist. And the happy epithets,
and the telling proverbs, and the sketches dashed off and the
unexpected audacities, and the point driven well home! One cannot say
what he has not, so many diverse aptitudes he has.

“Compare his _Woodcutter and Death_ with Boileau’s, and you can
measure the prodigious difference between the artist and the critic
who wanted to teach him better. La Fontaine brings visibly before you
the poor peasant under the monarchy, Boileau but exhibits a drudge
sweating under his load. The first is a historic witness, the second a
school-versifier. La Fontaine enables you to reconstruct the whole
society of his age; the pleasant old soul from Champagne, with his
animals, turns out to be the one and only Homer of France.

“His weak side is his epicureanism, with its tinge of grossness. This,
no doubt, was what made Lamartine dislike him. The religious string is
wanting to his lyre, he has nothing which shows him to have known
either Christianity or the high tragedies of the soul. Kind Nature is
his goddess, Horace his prophet, and Montaigne his gospel. In other
words, his horizon is that of the Renascence. This islet of paganism
in the midst of a Catholic society is very curious; the paganism is
perfectly simple and frank.”

These are but notes, jottings in his Journal and Amiel passed from them to broodings over the infinite, and personality, and totality. Probably the literary criticism which he did so well, and for which he shows a true vocation, gave him nevertheless but little pleasure because he did it thus fragmentarily, and by fits and starts. To do it thoroughly, to make his fragments into wholes, to fit them for coming before the public, composition with its toils and limits was necessary. Toils and limits composition indeed has; yet all composition is a kind of creation, creation gives, as I have already said, pleasure, and when successful and sustained, more than pleasure joy. Amiel, had he tried the experiment with literary criticism, where lay his true vocation, would have found it so. Sainte-Beuve, whom he so much admires, would have been the most miserable of men if his production had been but a volume or two of middling poems and a journal. But Sainte-Beuve’s motto, as Amiel himself notices, was that of the Emperor Severus: _Laboremus_. “Work,” Sainte-Beuve confesses to a friend, “is my sore burden, but it is also my great resource. I eat my heart out when I am not up to the neck in work; there you have the secret of the life I lead.” If M. Scherer’s introduction to the _Revue Germanique_ could but have been used, if Amiel could but have written the article on Uhland, and followed it up by plenty of articles more!

I have quoted largely from Amiel’s literary criticism, because this side of him has, so far as I have observed, received so little attention and yet deserves attention so eminently. But his more general criticism, too, shows, as I have said, the same high qualities as his criticism of authors and books. I must quote one or two of his aphorisms; _L’esprit sert bien à tout, mais ne suffit à rien_: “Wits are of use for everything, sufficient for nothing.” _Une société vit de sa foi et se développe par la science_: “A society lives on its faith and develops itself by science.” _L’État liberal est irréalisable avec une religion antilibérale, et presque irréalisable avec l’absence de religion_: “Liberal communities are impossible with an anti-liberal religion, and almost impossible with the absence of religion.” But epigrammatic sentences of this sort are perhaps not so very difficult to produce, in French at any rate. Let us take Amiel when he has room and verge enough to show what he can really say which is important about society, religion, national life and character. We have seen what an influence his years passed in Germany had upon him: we have seen how severely he judges Victor Hugo’s faults; the faults of the French nation at large he judges with a like severity. But what a fine and just perception does the following passage show of the deficiencies of Germany, the advantage which the western nations have in their more finished civilization:—

“It is in the novel that the average vulgarity of German society, and
its inferiority to the societies of France and England are most
clearly visible. The notion of a thing’s _jarring on the taste_ is
wanting to German æsthetics. Their elegance knows nothing of grace;
they have no sense of the enormous distance between distinction
(gentlemanly, ladylike) and their stiff _Vornehmlichkeit_. Their
imagination lacks style, training, education and knowledge of the
world; it is stamped with an ill-bred air even in its Sunday clothes.
The race is practical and intelligent, but common and ill-mannered.
Ease, amiability, manners, wit, animation, dignity, charm, are
qualities which belong to others.