Essays from 'The Guardian'

éric Amiel. Translated, with an Introduction and

of translation, if it is to be done with effect, must be done by those who, possessing, like Mrs. Ward, original literary gifts, are willing to make a long act of self-denial or self-effacement [20] for the benefit of the public. In this case, indeed, the work is not wholly one of self-effacement, for the accomplished translator has prefaced Amiel's Journal by an able and interesting essay of seventy pages on Amiel's lif

al towns of Germany-seem to have been the happiest of his life. In 1849 he became a Professor at Geneva, and there is little more to tell of him in [21] the way of outward events. He published some volumes of verse; to the last apparently still only feeling after his true literary métier. Those last seven years were a long struggle against the disease which ended

exposed in the Journal, nor by the consumptive tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from a very early date to be much preoccupied with

ed people might lie in its affording a kind of standard by which they might take measure of the maturity and producible quality of their own thoughts on a hundred important subjects. He will write a page or two, giving evidence of that accumulated power and attainment which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have sufficed for an e

them had attained to. So multiplex is the result that minds of quite opposite type might well discover in these pages their own special thought or humour, happily expressed at last (they might think) in precisely that just shade of language themselves had searched for in vain. And with a writer so vivid and impressive as Amiel, those varieties of tendency are apt to present themselves as so many contending persons. The perplexed experience gets the apparent clearness, as it gets also the animation

who in real life followed those creations of fiction, and who, however delicate, interesting as a study, and as it were picturesque on the stage of life, are themselves, after all, essentially passive, uncreative, and therefore necessarily not of first-rate importance in literature. Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood-the culture of ennui for its own sake-is certainly carried to its ideal of negation by Amiel. But the completer, the positive, soul, which will merely take [25] that mood into its service (its proper service, as we hold, is in counteraction to the vulgarity

d sometimes rising to real distinction. In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the record of such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens with Amiel, we feel that there has been, and with succ

st draws us together and concentrates us-it is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it; that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pantheism is the child of light; mist engenders faith in near protectors. When the gr

that he is speaking, as, in

ees, adorned in their green spring dress and laden with their bridal flowers, smiled at my departure along the Vaudois fields, and the lila

uiet and peaceful, like a song in a minor key. We are nothing but thought, but we feel our life to its very centre. Our very sensations turn to reverie. It is a strange state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which are not t

was occupied with the aspects of nature to such an excellent literary result, still, it was with nature only as a phenomenon of the moral order. His interest, after all, is, consistently, that of the moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, from predilection, with the sort of l

cism; that criticism which is itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner constitution of the producer, shaping his work. Of such critical skill, cultivated with all the resources of Geneva in the nineteenth century, he has given in this Journal abundant proofs. Corneille, Cherbuliez; Rousseau, Sismondi; Victor Hugo, and Joubert; Mozart and Wagner-all who are interested in these men will find a value in what Amiel has to say of them. Often, as for instance in his excellent criticism of Quinet, he has to make large exceptions [30]; limitations, skilfully effected by the way, in the course of a really appreciative estimate. Still, through all, what we feel is that we have to do with one who criticises in this fearlessly equitable manner only because he is convinced tha

other, constituent but contending, person, in his complex nature. "The relation of thought to action," he writes, "filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it. Action is but co

action. I feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal, disinterested, and objective line of thought." But then, again, with him "action" meant chiefly literary production. He quotes with approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering between "frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing after what is unknown and distant." There is, doubtless, over and above the physical consumptive tendency, an instinctive turn

king, through a kind of metaphysical prejudice, from the concrete-that fear of the actual-in this case, of the Church of history; to which the admissions, which form so large a part of these volumes, naturally lead. Assenting, on probable evidence, to so many of the judgments of the religious sense, he failed to see the equally probable evidence there is for the beliefs, the peculiar direction of men's hopes, which complete those judgments harmoniously

f the Catholic Church; Amiel stopped short at a faith almost hopeless; and by stopping short just there he really failed, as we think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that appeasing influence which his nature demanded as the condition of its full activity, as a force, an intellectual force, in the world-in the special business of his life. "Welcome the unforeseen," he says again, by way of a counsel of perfection

he other, we certainly understand, and can sympathize with Amiel's despondency in the retrospect of a life which seemed to have been but imperfectly occupied. But, then, how excellent a literary product, after all, the

just [36] conception; look once, if

t is the conscience which educates history. Fact is corrupt

s is the mark of talent. To do what is im

the reality of a positive world, while

outside God, the best is co

bove all, is the great Misunder

he philosopher what the di

[37] reader, we hope, sees also already how well his English translator has done her work. She may justly feel, as part at least of the reward of a labour which must have occupied much time, so many of the freshest hours of mind and spirit, that she has done som

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