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HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL

(1821-1881)

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MIEL'S "Journal Intime" represents a form of essay writing which has many advantages over the ordinary, but as it requires the essayist to look forward to his own death as prerequisite to the publication of the work which is to give him literary immortality, its popularity with writers themselves is never likely to be great. With readers, however, if Amiel's imitators equal his work, it is not likely to fail of the highest favor. lished in England and America in the translation of Mrs. Humphry Ward, Amiel's "Journal" took its place at once among the classics of the language, and Mrs. Ward may be remembered by it among generations not well enough informed of the merits of nineteenthcentury fiction to remember even the titles of her excellent novels. Though unmistakably written for ultimate publication, the literary pretext of privacy given Amiel's work by its inscription in a journal of the writer's inner life allows a freedom which could not have been attained otherwise and, as an incident of this freedom of expression, a scope as wide as the daily reflections suggested to a man of high cultivation by close observation of all the manifold phenomena of a highly organized civilization. Perhaps no other single book represents the cultured life of the last half of the nineteenth century so well as Amiel's "Journal," though he himself was far removed from that positivism which, in France and Germany as well as in England and America, did so much to give its tone to the literature of the period.

In their style, the entries in the "Journal," whether "Essays" or "Pensées,” represent the best results of careful method. Seemingly the unstudied expression of unpremeditated ideas, they win the reader's friendship and draw him into the most confidential relations with the writer. If they have a vitiating quality, it is suggested by their form itself and by their author's action in leaving them to achieve for him a posthumous celebrity. They are sometimes almost too delicate, and they have an inspiration of "Weltschmerz,”—a mild dissatisfaction with life which, if it is at times inevitable, even in the best-regulated lives, ought the more on that account to be kept out of literature in a world which needs "Heave-ho" songs for the men at its capstans more than it does new dirges for its dead.

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Of Amiel Mrs. Ward writes that he "lived alone and died sadly persuaded that his life had been a barren mistake, whereas, all the while, such is the irony of things,- he had been in reality working out the mission assigned him in the spiritual economy, and faithfully obeying the secret mandate which had impressed itself upon his youthful consciousness: 'Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feelings and ideas, and you will be most useful so.>>

Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821. After completing his scholastic education at Berlin in 1848, he became professor of Esthetics and French Literature in the Academy of Geneva. After four years (in 1853) he became professor of Moral Philosophy in the same institution. He made no reputation during his life and attempted to make none. Not until his "Journal" was read after his death, did any one suspect that another of the immortals had come and gone unrecognized. W. V. B.

A SOAP BUBBLE HANGING FROM A REED

UR life is but a soap bubble hanging from a reed; it is formed, expands to its full size, clothes itself with the love

liest colors of the prism, and even escapes at moments from the law of gravitation; but soon the black speck appears in it, and the globe of emerald and gold vanishes into space, leaving behind it nothing but a simple drop of turbid water. All the poets have made this comparison, it is so striking and so true. To appear, to shine, to disappear; to be born, to suffer, and to die; is it not the whole sum of life, for a butterfly, for a nation, for a star?

Time is but the measure of the difficulty of a conception. Pure thought has scarcely any need of time, since it perceives. the two ends of an idea almost at the same moment. The thought of a planet can only be worked out by nature with labor and effort, but supreme intelligence sums up the whole in an instant. Time is then the successive dispersion of being, just as speech is the successive analysis of an intuition or of an act of will. In itself it is relative and negative, and disappears within the absolute being. God is outside time because he thinks all thought at once; Nature is within time because she is only speech, the discursive unfolding of each thought contained within the infinite thought. But Nature exhausts herself in this impossible task, for the analysis of the infinite is a contradiction.

With limitless duration, boundless space, and number without end, Nature does at least what she can to translate into visible form the wealth of the creative formula. By the vastness of the abysses into which she penetrates, in the effort - the unsuccessful effort to house and contain the eternal thought, we may measure the greatness of the Divine mind. For as soon as this mind goes out of itself and seeks to explain itself, the effort at utterance heaps universe upon universe, during myriads of centuries, and still it is not expressed, and the great harangue must go on forever and ever.

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

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

Here, then, is the service which Christianity- the Oriental element in our culture-renders to us Westerners. It checks and counterbalances our natural tendency toward the passing, the finite, and the changeable, by fixing the mind upon the contemplation of eternal things, and by Platonizing our affections, which otherwise would have too little outlook upon the ideal world.

Christianity leads us back from dispersion to concentration, from worldliness to self-recollection. It restores to our souls, fevered with a thousand sordid desires, nobleness, gravity, and calm. Just as sleep is a bath of refreshing for our actual life, so religion is a bath of refreshing for our immortal being. What is sacred has a purifying virtue; religious emotion crowns the brow with an aureole, and thrills the heart with an ineffable joy.

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I think that the adversaries of religion as such deceive themselves as to the needs of the Western man, and that the modern world will lose its balance as soon as it has passed over altogether to the crude doctrine of progress. We have always need of the infinite, the eternal, the absolute; and since science contents itself with what is relative, it necessarily leaves a void, which it is good for man to fill with contemplation, worship, and adoration. "Religion," said Bacon, "is the spice which is meant to keep life from corruption," and this is especially true to-day of religion taken in the Platonist and Oriental sense. A capacity for self-recollection - for withdrawal from the outward to the inward is in fact the condition of all noble and useful activity. This return, indeed, to what is serious, divine, and sacred is becoming more and more difficult, because of the growth of critical anxiety within the Church itself, the increasing worldliness of religious preaching, and the universal agitation and disquiet of society. But such a return is more and more necessary. Without it there is no inner life, and the inner life is the only means whereby we may oppose a profitable resistance to circumstance. If the sailor did not carry with him his own temperature, he could not go from the pole to the equator, and remain himself in spite of all. The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all; he is not distinct, free, original, a cause in a word, some one. He is one of a crowd, a taxpayer, an elector, an anonymity, but not a man. He helps to make up the mass- to fill up the number of human consumers or producers; but he interests nobody but the economist and the statistician, who take the heap of sand as a whole into consideration, without troubling themselves about the uninteresting uniformity of the individual grains. The crowd counts only as a massive elementary force-why? because its constituent parts are individually insignificant; they are all like each other, and we add them up like the molecules of water in a

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river, gauging them by the fathom instead of appreciating them as individuals. Such men are reckoned and weighed merely as so many bodies; they have never been individualized by conscience, after the manner of souls.

He who floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions,such a man is a mere article of the world's furniture-a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock the humble servant of the air in motion. January 7th, 1866.

THE

"JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN »

HE novel by Miss Mulock, "John Halifax, Gentleman," is a bolder book than it seems, for it attacks in the English way the social problem of equality. And the solution reached is that every one may become a gentleman, even though he may be born in the gutter. In its way the story protests against conventional superiorities, and shows that true nobility consists in character, in personal merit, in moral distinction, in elevation of feeling and of language, in dignity of life, and in self-respect. This is better than Jacobinism, and the opposite of the mere brutal passion for equality. Instead of dragging everybody down, the author simply proclaims the right of every one to rise. man may be born rich and noble-he is not born a gentleman. This word is the Shibboleth of England; it divides her into halves, and civilized society into two castes. Among gentlemen -courtesy, equality, and politeness; toward those below-contempt, disdain, coldness, and indifference. It is the old separation between the ingenui and all others; between the leó@epot and the Bávavoot, the continuation of the feudal division between the gentry and the roturiers.

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What, then, is a gentleman? Apparently he is the free man, the man who is stronger than things, and believes in personality as superior to all the accessory attributes of fortune, such as rank and power, and as constituting what is essential, real, and intrinsically valuable in the individual.

will tell you what you are worth.

Tell me what you are, and I "God and my Right"; there

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