Essays in criticism

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

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:—

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

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—

Or this—

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:—

French critics throw upup 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:—

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:—

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

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—

“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—

“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 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:—

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

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:—

And this pupil of Berlin, this devourer of German books, this victim, say the French critics, to the contagion of German style, after three hours, one day, of a Geschichte der Æsthetik in Deutschland, breaks out:—

Amiel may have been led away deteriora sequi: he may have Germanized until he has become capable of the verb dépersonnaliser and the noun réimplication; but after all, his heart is in the right place: videt meliora probatque. He remains at bottom the man who said: Le livre serait mon ambition. He adds, to be sure, that it would be son ambition, “if ambition were not vanity, and vanity of vanities.”

Yet this disenchanted brooder, “full of a tranquil disgust at the futility of our ambitions, the void of our existence,” bedazzled with the infinite, can observe the world and society with consummate keenness and shrewdness, and at the same time with a delicacy which to the man of the world is in general wanting. Is it possible to analyze le grand monde, high society, as the Old World knows it and America knows it not, more acutely than Amiel does in what follows?—

I remember reading in an American newspaper a solemn letter by an excellent republican, asking what were a shopman’s or a laborer’s feelings when he walked through Eaton or Chatsworth. Amiel will tell him: they are “reminiscences of an age of gold haunting the human heart, aspirations towards a harmony of things which every-day reality denies to us.” I appeal to my friend the author of Triumphant Democracy himself, to say whether these are to be had in walking through Pittsburg.

Indeed it is by contrast with American life that Nirvâna appears to Amiel so desirable:—

Space is failing me, but I must yet find room for a less indirect criticism of democracy than the foregoing remarks on American life:—

What publicists and politicians have to learn is, that “the ultimate ground upon which every civilization rests is the average morality of the masses and a sufficient amount of practical righteousness.” But where does duty find its inspiration and sanctions? In religion. And what does Amiel think of the traditional religion of Christendom, the Christianity of the Churches? He tells us repeatedly; but a month or two before his death, with death in full view, he tells us with peculiar impressiveness:—

Is it possible, he asks, to receive at this day the common doctrine of a Divine Providence directing all the circumstances of our life, and consequently inflicting upon us our miseries as means of education?

But can a religion, Amiel asks again, without miracles, without unverifiable mystery, be efficacious, have influence with the many? And again he answers:—

This is water to our mill, as the Germans say, indeed. But I have come even thus late in the day to speak of Amiel, not because I found him supplying water for any particular mill, either mine or any other, but because it seemed to me that by a whole important side he was eminently worth knowing, and that to this side of him the public, here in England at any rate, had not had its attention sufficiently drawn. If in the seventeen thousand pages of the Journal there are many pages still unpublished in which Amiel exercises his true vocation of critic, of literary critic more especially, let his friends give them to us, let M. Scherer introduce them to us, let Mrs. Humphry Ward translate them for us. But sat patriæ Priamoque datum: Maïa has had her full share of space already: I will not ask for a word more about the infinite illusion, or the double zero, or the Great Wheel.