Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frederic Amiel Part 24

This young _maestro_ is like the violin he writes about, vibrating and pa.s.sionate; he has, besides delicacy, point, grace, all that a writer wants to make what is simple, nave, heartfelt, and out of the beaten track, acceptable to a cultivated society.

How to return to nature through art: there is the problem of all highly composite literatures like our own. Rousseau himself attacked letters with all the resources of the art of writing, and boasted the delights of savage life with a skill and adroitness developed only by the most advanced civilization. And it is indeed this marriage of contraries which charms us; this spiced gentleness, this learned innocence, this calculated simplicity, this yes and no, this foolish wisdom. It is the supreme irony of such combinations which tickles the taste of advanced and artificial epochs, epochs when men ask for two sensations at once, like the contrary meanings fused by the smile of La Gioconda. And our satisfaction, too, in work of this kind is best expressed by that ambiguous curve of the lip which says: I feel your charm, but I am not your dupe; I see the illusion both from within and from without; I yield to you, but I understand you; I am complaisant, but I am proud; I am open to sensations, yet not the slave of any; you have talent, I have subtlety of perception; we are quits, and we understand each other.

February 1, 1876.--This evening we talked of the infinitely great and the infinitely small. The great things of the universe are for----so much easier to understand than the small, because all greatness is a multiple of herself, whereas she is incapable of a.n.a.lyzing what requires a different sort of measurement.

It is possible for the thinking being to place himself in all points of view, and to teach his soul to live under the most different modes of being. But it must be confessed that very few profit by the possibility.

Men are in general imprisoned, held in a vice by their circ.u.mstances almost as the animals are, but they have very little suspicion of it because they have so little faculty of self-judgment. It is only the critic and the philosopher who can penetrate into all states of being, and realize their life from within.

When the imagination shrinks in fear from the phantoms which it creates, it may be excused because it is imagination. But when the intellect allows itself to be tyrannized over or terrified by the categories to which itself gives birth, it is in the wrong, for it is not allowed to intellect--the critical power of man--to be the dupe of anything.

Now, in the superst.i.tion of size the mind is merely the dupe of itself, for it creates the notion of s.p.a.ce. The created is not more than the creator, the son not more than the father. The point of view wants rectifying. The mind has to free itself from s.p.a.ce, which gives it a false notion of itself, but it can only attain this freedom by reversing things and by learning to see s.p.a.ce in the mind instead of the mind in s.p.a.ce. How can it do this? Simply by reducing s.p.a.ce to its virtuality.

s.p.a.ce is dispersion; mind is concentration.

And that is why G.o.d is present everywhere, without taking up a thousand millions of cube leagues, nor a hundred times more nor a hundred times less.

In the state of thought the universe occupies but a single point; but in the state of dispersion and a.n.a.lysis this thought requires the heaven of heavens for its expansion.

In the same way, time and number are contained in the mind. Man, as mind, is not their inferior, but their superior.

It is true that before he can reach this state of freedom his own body must appear to him at will either speck or world--that is to say, he must be independent of it. So long as the self still feels itself spatial, dispersed, corporeal, it is but a soul, it is not a mind; it is conscious of itself only as the animal is, the impressionable, affectionate, active and restless animal.

The mind being the subject of phenomena cannot be itself phenomenal; the mirror of an image, if it was an image, could not be a mirror. There can be no echo without a noise. Consciousness means some one who experiences something. And all the somethings together cannot take the place of the some one. The phenomenon exists only for a point which is not itself, and for which it is an object. The perceptible supposes the perceiver.

May 15, 1876.--This morning I corrected the proofs of the "Etrangeres."

[Footnote: _Les Etrangeres: Poesies traduites de diverses litteratures_, par H. F. Amiel, 1876.] Here at least is one thing off my hands. The piece of prose theorizing which ends the volume pleased and satisfied me a good deal more than my new meters. The book, as a whole, may be regarded as an attempt to solve the problem of French verse-translation considered as a special art. It is science applied to poetry. It ought not, I think, to do any discredit to a philosopher, for, after all, it is nothing but applied psychology.

Do I feel any relief, any joy, pride, hope? Hardly. It seems to me that I feel nothing at all, or at least my feeling is so vague and doubtful that I cannot a.n.a.lyze it. On the whole, I am rather tempted to say to myself, how much labor for how small a result--_Much ado about nothing!_ And yet the work in itself is good, is successful. But what does verse-translation matter? Already my interest in it is fading; my mind and my energies clamor for something else.

What will Edmond Scherer say to the volume?

To the inmost self of me this literary attempt is quite indifferent--a Lilliputian affair. In comparing my work with other work of the same kind, I find a sort of relative satisfaction; but I see the intrinsic futility of it, and the insignificance of its success or failure. I do not believe in the public; I do not believe in my own work; I have no ambition, properly speaking, and I blow soap-bubbles for want of something to do.

"Car le neant peut seul bien cacher l'infini."

Self-satire, disillusion, absence of prejudice, may be freedom, but they are not strength.

July 12, 1876.--Trouble on trouble. My cough has been worse than ever.

I cannot see that the fine weather or the holidays have made any change for the better in my state of health. On the contrary, the process of demolition seems more rapid. It is a painful experience, this premature decay!... "_Apres tant de malheurs, que vous reste-t-il? Moi._" This _"moi"_ is the central consciousness, the trunk of all the branches which have been cut away, that which bears every successive mutilation.

Soon I shall have nothing else left than bare intellect. Death reduces us to the mathematical "point;" the destruction which precedes it forces us back, as it were, by a series of ever-narrowing concentric circles to this last inaccessible refuge. Already I have a foretaste of that zero in which all forms and all modes are extinguished. I see how we return into the night, and inversely I understand how we issue from it. Life is but a meteor, of which the whole brief course is before me. Birth, life, death a.s.sume a fresh meaning to us at each phase of our existence. To see one's self as a firework in the darkness--to become a witness of one's own fugitive phenomenon--this is practical psychology. I prefer indeed the spectacle of the world, which is a vaster and more splendid firework; but when illness narrows my horizon and makes me dwell perforce upon my own miseries, these miseries are still capable of supplying food for my psychological curiosity. What interests me in myself, in spite of my repulsions is, that I find in my own case a genuine example of human nature, and therefore a specimen of general value. The sample enables me to understand a mult.i.tude of similar situations, and numbers of my fellow-men.

To enter consciously into all possible modes of being would be sufficient occupation for hundreds of centuries--at least for our finite intelligences, which are conditioned by time. The progressive happiness of the process, indeed may be easily poisoned and embittered by the ambition which asks for everything at once, and clamors to reach the absolute at a bound. But it may be answered that aspirations are necessarily prophetic, for they could only have come into being under the action of the same cause which will enable them to reach their goal.

The soul can only imagine the absolute because the absolute exists; our consciousness of a possible perfection is the guarantee that perfection will be realized.

Thought itself is eternal. It is the consciousness of thought which is gradually achieved through the long succession of ages, races, and humanities. Such is the doctrine of Hegel. The history of the mind is, according to him one of approximation to the absolute, and the absolute differs at the two ends of the story. It _was_ at the beginning; it _knows itself_ at the end. Or rather it advances in the possession of itself with the gradual unfolding of creation. Such also was the conception of Aristotle.

If the history of the mind and of consciousness is the very marrow and essence of being, then to be driven back on psychology, even personal psychology, is to be still occupied with the main question of things, to keep to the subject, to feel one's self in the center of the universal drama. There is comfort in the idea. Everything else may be taken away from us, but if thought remains we are still connected by a magic thread with the axis of the world. But we may lose thought and speech. Then nothing remains but simple feeling, the sense of the presence of G.o.d and of death in G.o.d--the last relic of the human privilege, which is to partic.i.p.ate in the whole, to commune with the absolute.

"Ta vie est un eclair qui meurt dans son nuage, Mais l'eclair t'a sauve s'il t'a fait voir le ciel."

July 26, 1876.--A private journal is a friend to idleness. It frees us from the necessity of looking all round a subject, it puts up with every kind of repet.i.tion, it accompanies all the caprices and meanderings of the inner life, and proposes to itself no definite end. This journal of mine represents the material of a good many volumes: what prodigious waste of time, of thought, of strength! It will be useful to n.o.body, and even for myself--it has rather helped me to s.h.i.+rk life than to practice it. A journal takes the place of a confidant, that is, of friend or wife; it becomes a subst.i.tute for production, a subst.i.tute for country and public. It is a grief-cheating device, a mode of escape and withdrawal; but, factotum as it is, though it takes the place of everything, properly speaking it represents nothing at all....

What is it which makes the history of a soul? It is the stratification of its different stages of progress, the story of its acquisitions and of the general course of its destiny. Before my history can teach anybody anything, or even interest myself, it must be disentangled from its materials, distilled and simplified. These thousands of pages are but the pile of leaves and bark from which the essence has still to be extracted. A whole forest of cinchonas are worth but one cask of quinine. A whole Smyrna rose-garden goes to produce one vial of perfume.

This ma.s.s of written talk, the work of twenty-nine years, may in the end be worth nothing at all; for each is only interested in his own romance, his own individual life. Even I perhaps shall never have time to read them over myself. So--so what? I shall have lived my life, and life consists in repeating the human type, and the burden of the human song, as myriads of my kindred have done, are doing, and will do, century after century. To rise to consciousness of this burden and this type is something, and we can scarcely achieve anything further. The realization of the type is more complete, and the burden a more joyous one, if circ.u.mstances are kind and propitious, but whether the puppets have done this or that--

"Trois p't.i.ts tours et puis s'en vont!"

everything falls into the same gulf at last, and comes to very much the same thing.

To rebel against fate--to try to escape the inevitable issue--is almost puerile. When the duration of a centenarian and that of an insect are quant.i.ties sensibly equivalent--and geology and astronomy enable us to regard such durations from this point of view--what is the meaning of all our tiny efforts and cries, the value of our anger, our ambition, our hope? For the dream of a dream it is absurd to raise these make-believe tempests. The forty millions of infusoria which make up a cube-inch of chalk--do they matter much to us? and do the forty millions of men who make up France matter any more to an inhabitant of the moon or Jupiter?

To be a conscious monad--a nothing which knows itself to be the microscopic phantom of the universe: this is all we can ever attain to.

September 12, 1876.--What is your own particular absurdity? Why, simply that you exhaust yourself in trying to understand wisdom without practicing it, that you are always making preparations for nothing, that you live without living. Contemplation which has not the courage to be purely contemplative, renunciation which does not renounce completely, chronic contradiction--there is your case. Inconsistent skepticism, irresolution, not convinced but incorrigible, weakness which will not accept itself and cannot transform itself into strength--there is your misery.

The comic side of it lies in capacity to direct others, becoming incapacity to direct one's self, in the dream of the infinitely great stopped short by the infinitely little, in what seems to be the utter uselessness of talent. To arrive at immobility by excess of motion, at zero from abundance of numbers, is a strange farce, a sad comedy; the poorest gossip can laugh at its absurdity.

September 19, 1876.--My reading to-day has been Doudan's "Lettres et Melanges." [Footnote: Ximenes Doudan, born in 1800, died 1872, the brilliant friend and tutor of the De Broglie family, whose conversation was so much sought after in life, and whose letters have been so eagerly read in France since his death. Compare M. Scherer's two articles on Doudan's "Lettres" and "Pensees" in his last published volume of essays.] A fascinating book! Wit, grace, subtlety, imagination, thought--these letters possess them all. How much I regret that I never knew the man himself. He was a Frenchman of the best type, _un delicat ne sublime_, to quote Sainte-Beuve's expression. Fastidiousness of temper, and a too keen love of perfection, led him to withhold his talent from the public, but while still living, and within his own circle, he was the recognized equal of the best. He scarcely lacked anything except that fraction of ambition, of brutality and material force which are necessary to success in this world; but he was appreciated by the best society of Paris, and he cared for nothing else.

He reminds me of Joubert.

September 20th.--To be witty is to satisfy another's wits by the bestowal on him of two pleasures, that of understanding one thing and that of guessing another, and so achieving a double stroke.

Thus Doudan scarcely ever speaks out his thought directly; he disguises and suggests it by imagery, allusion, hyperbole; he overlays it with light irony and feigned anger, with gentle mischief and a.s.sumed humility. The more the thing to be guessed differs from the thing said, the more pleasant surprise there is for the interlocutor or the correspondent concerned. These charming and delicate ways of expression allow a man to teach what he will without pedantry, and to venture what he will without offense. There is something Attic and aerial in them; they mingle grave and gay, fiction and truth, with a light grace of touch such as neither La Fontaine nor Alcibiades would have been ashamed of. Socratic _badinage_ like this presupposes a free and equal mind, victorious over physical ill and inward discontents. Such delicate playfulness is the exclusive heritage of those rare natures in whom subtlety is the disguise of superiority, and taste its revelation.

"What balance of faculties and cultivation it requires! What personal distinction it shows! Perhaps only a valetudinarian would have been capable of this _morbidezza_ of touch, this marriage of virile thought and feminine caprice. If there is excess anywhere, it lies perhaps in a certain effeminacy of sentiment. Doudan can put up with nothing but what is perfect--nothing but what is absolutely harmonious; all that is rough, harsh, powerful, brutal, and unexpected, throws him into convulsions. Audacity--boldness of all kinds--repels him. This Athenian of the Roman time is a true disciple of Epicurus in all matters of sight, hearing, and intelligence--a crumpled rose-leaf disturbs him.

"Une ombre, un souffle, un rien, tout lui donnait la fievre."

What all this softness wants is strength, creative and muscular force.

His range is not as wide as I thought it at first. The cla.s.sical world and the Renaissance--that is to say, the horizon of La Fontaine--is his horizon. He is out of his element in the German or Slav literatures. He knows nothing of Asia. Humanity for him is not much larger than France, and he has never made a bible of Nature. In music and painting he is more or less exclusive. In philosophy he stops at Kant. To sum up: he is a man of exquisite and ingenious taste, but he is not a first-rate critic, still less a poet, philosopher, or artist. He was an admirable talker, a delightful letter writer, who might have become an author had he chosen to concentrate himself. I must wait for the second volume in order to review and correct this preliminary impression.

Midday.--I have now gone once more through the whole volume, lingering over the Attic charm of it, and meditating on the originality and distinction of the man's organization. Doudan was a keen penetrating psychologist, a diviner of apt.i.tudes, a trainer of minds, a man of infinite taste and talent, capable of every _nuance_ and of every delicacy; but his defect was a want of persevering energy of thought, a lack of patience in execution. Timidity, unworldliness, indolence, indifference, confined him to the role of the literary counsellor and made him judge of the field in which he ought rather to have fought. But do I mean to blame him?--no indeed! In the first place, it would be to fire on my allies; in the second, very likely he chose the better part.

Was it not Goethe who remarked that in the neighborhood of all famous men we find men who never achieve fame, and yet were esteemed by those who did, as their equals or superiors? Descartes, I think, said the same thing. Fame will not run after the men who are afraid of her. She makes mock of those trembling and respectful lovers who deserve but cannot force her favors. The public is won by the bold, imperious talents--by the enterprising and the skillful. It does not believe in modesty, which it regards as a device of impotence. The golden book contains but a section of the true geniuses; it names those only who have taken glory by storm.

November 15, 1876.--I have been reading "L'Avenir Religieux des Peuples Civilises," by Emile de Laveleye. The theory of this writer is that the gospel, in its pure form, is capable of providing the religion of the future, and that the abolition of all religious principle, which is what the socialism of the present moment demands, is as much to be feared as Catholic superst.i.tion. The Protestant method, according to him, is the means of transition whereby sacerdotal Christianity pa.s.ses into the pure religion of the gospel. Laveleye does not think that civilization can last without the belief in G.o.d and in another life. Perhaps he forgets that j.a.pan and China prove the contrary. But it is enough to determine him against atheism if it can be shown that a general atheism would bring about a lowering of the moral average. After all, however, this is nothing but a religion of utilitarianism. A belief is not true because it is useful. And it is truth alone--scientific, established, proved, and rational truth--which is capable of satisfying nowadays the awakened minds of all cla.s.ses. We may still say perhaps, "faith governs the world"--but the faith of the present is no longer in revelation or in the priest--it is in reason and in science. Is there a science of goodness and happiness?--that is the question. Do justice and goodness depend upon any particular religion? How are men to be made free, honest, just, and good?--there is the point.

On my way through the book I perceived many new applications of my law of irony. Every epoch has two contradictory aspirations which are logically antagonistic and practically a.s.sociated. Thus the philosophic materialism of the last century was the champion of liberty. And at the present moment we find Darwinians in love with equality, while Darwinism itself is based on the right of the stronger. Absurdity is interwoven with life: real beings are animated contradictions, absurdities brought into action. Harmony with self would mean peace, repose, and perhaps immobility By far the greater number of human beings can only conceive action, or practice it, under the form of war--a war of compet.i.tion at home, a b.l.o.o.d.y war of nations abroad, and finally war with self. So that life is a perpetual combat; it wills that which it wills not, and wills not that it wills. Hence what I call the law of irony--that is to say, the refutation of the self by itself, the concrete realization of the absurd.

Is such a result inevitable? I think not. Struggle is the caricature of harmony, and harmony, which is the a.s.sociation of contraries, is also a principle of movement. War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslavement of the conquered. Mutual respect would be a better way out of difficulties. Conflict is the result of the selfishness which will acknowledge no other limit than that of external force. The laws of animality govern almost the whole of history. The history of man is essentially zoological; it becomes human late in the day, and then only in the beautiful souls, the souls alive to justice, goodness, enthusiasm, and devotion. The angel shows itself rarely and with difficulty through the highly-organized brute. The divine aureole plays only with a dim and fugitive light around the brows of the world's governing race.

The Christian nations offer many ill.u.s.trations of the law of irony.

They profess the citizens.h.i.+p of heaven, the exclusive wors.h.i.+p of eternal good; and never has the hungry pursuit of perishable joys, the love of this world, or the thirst for conquest, been stronger or more active than among these nations. Their official motto is exactly the reverse of their real aspiration. Under a false flag they play the smuggler with a droll ease of conscience. Is the fraud a conscious one? No--it is but an application of the law of irony. The deception is so common a one that the delinquent becomes unconscious of it. Every nation gives itself the lie in the course of its daily life, and not one feels the ridicule of its position. A man must be a j.a.panese to perceive the burlesque contradictions of the Christian civilization. He must be a native of the moon to understand the stupidity of man and his state of constant delusion. The philosopher himself falls under the law of irony, for after having mentally stripped himself of all prejudice--having, that is to say, wholly laid aside his own personality, he finds himself slipping back perforce into the rags he had taken off, obliged to eat and drink, to be hungry, cold, thirsty, and to behave like all other mortals, after having for a moment behaved like no other. This is the point where the comic poets are lying in wait for him; the animal needs revenge themselves for his flight into the Empyrean, and mock him by their cry: _Thou art dust, thou art nothing, than art man_!

November 26, 1876.--I have just finished a novel of Cherbuliez, "Le fiance de Mademoiselle de St. Maur." It is a jeweled mosaic of precious stones, sparkling with a thousand lights. But the heart gets little from it. The Mephistophelian type of novel leaves one sad. This subtle, refined world is strangely near to corruption; these artificial women have an air of the Lower Empire. There is not a character who is not witty, and neither is there one who has not bartered conscience for cleverness. The elegance of the whole is but a mask of immorality.

These stories of feeling in which there is no feeling make a strange and painful impression upon me.

December 4, 1876.--I have been thinking a great deal of Victor Cherbuliez. Perhaps his novels make up the most disputable part of his work--they are so much wanting in simplicity, feeling, reality. And yet what knowledge, style, wit, and subtlety--how much thought everywhere, and what mastery of language! He astonishes one; I cannot but admire him.