Their ideal man is not ours; but they
understood
infinitely
better than we, how to reverence, cultivate, and ennoble the
man whom they knew.
better than we, how to reverence, cultivate, and ennoble the
man whom they knew.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v01 - A to Apu
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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
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by the winds, great tracts of barren land apparently condemned
to an eternal sterility. The first elements of manufacture, iron
and coal, were wanting; there was no wood, because the forests
had already been destroyed by tempests when agriculture began;
there was no stone, there were no metals. Nature, says a Dutch
poet, had refused all her gifts to Holland; the Hollanders had to
do everything in spite of nature. They began by fertilizing the
sand. In some places they formed a productive soil with earth
brought from a distance, as a garden is made; they spread the
siliceous dust of the downs over the too watery meadows; they
mixed with the sandy earth the remains of peat taken from the
bottoms; they extracted clay to lend fertility to the surface of
their lands; they labored to break up the downs with the plow:
and thus in a thousand ways, and continually fighting off the
menacing waters, they succeeded in bringing Holland to a state
of cultivation not inferior to that of more favored regions. That
Holland, that sandy, marshy country which the ancients consid-
ered all but uninhabitable, now sends out yearly from her con-
fines agricultural products to the value of a hundred millions of
francs, possesses about one million three hundred thousand head
of cattle, and in proportion to the extent of her territory may be
accounted one of the most populous of European States.
It may be easily understood how the physical peculiarities of
their country must influence the Dutch people ; and their genius
is in perfect harmony with the character of Holland. It is suffi-
cient to contemplate the monuments of their great struggle with
the sea in order to understand that their distinctive characteristics
must be firmness and patience, accompanied by a calm and con-
stant courage.
That glorious battle, and the consciousness of
owing everything to their own strength, must have infused and
fortified in them a high sense of dignity and an indomitable spirit
of liberty and independence. The necessity of a constant struggle,
of a continuous labor, and of perpetual sacrifices in defense of
their existence, forever taking them back to a sense of reality,
must have made them a highly practical and economical people;
good sense should be their most salient quality, economy one of
their chief virtues; they must be excellent in all useful arts,
sparing of diversion, simple even in their greatness; succeeding
in what they undertake by dint of tenacity and a thoughtful and
orderly activity; more wise than heroic; more conservative than
creative; giving no great architects to the edifice of modern
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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
thought, but the ablest of workmen, a legion of patient and
laborious artisans. And by virtue of these qualities of prudence,
phlegmatic activity, and the spirit of conservatism, they are ever
advancing, though by slow degrees; they acquire gradually, but
never lose what they have gained; holding stubbornly to their
ancient customs; preserving almost intact, and despite the neigh-
borhood of three great nations, their own originality; preserving
it through every form of government, through foreign invasions,
through political and religious wars, and in spite of the immense
concourse of strangers from every country that are always coming
among them; and remaining, in short, of all the northern races,
that one which, though ever advancing in the path of civilization,
has kept its antique stamp most clearly.
It is enough also to remember its form in order to compre-
hend that this country of three millions and a half of inhabitants,
although bound in so compact a political union, although recog-
nizable among all the other northern peoples by certain traits
peculiar to the population of all its provinces, must present a
great variety. And so it is in fact. Between Zealand and Hol-
land proper, between Holland and Friesland, between Friesland
and Gueldres, between Groningen and Brabant, in spite of
vicinity and so many common ties, there is no less difference
than between the more distant provinces of Italy and France;
difference of language, costume, and character; difference of race
and of religion. The communal régime has impressed an indeli-
ble mark upon this people, because in no other country does it
so conform to the nature of things. The country is divided into
various groups of interests organized in the same manner as the
hydraulic system. Whence, association and mutual help against
the common enemy, the sea; but liberty for local institutions
and forces. Monarchy has not extinguished the ancient munici-
pal spirit, and this it is that renders impossible a complete fusion
of the State, in all the great States that have made the attempt.
The great rivers and gulfs are at the same time commercial
roads serving as national bonds between the different provinces,
and barriers which defend old traditions and old customs in each.
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471
THE DUTCH MASTERS
From Holland and Its People )
THE Dutch school of painting has one quality which renders it
particularly attractive to us Italians; it is above all others
the most different from our own, the very antithesis or the
opposite pole of art. The Dutch and Italian schools are the most
original, or, as has been said, the only two to which the title
rigorously belongs; the others being only daughters or younger
sisters, more or less resembling them.
Thus even in painting Holland offers that which is most sought
after in travel and in books of travel: the new.
Dutch painting was born with the liberty and independence of
Holland. As long as the northern and southern provinces of the
Low Countries remained under the Spanish rule and in the Cath-
olic faith, Dutch painters painted like Belgian painters; they stud-
ied in Belgium, Germany, and Italy; Heemskerk imitated Michael
Angelo, Bloemart followed Correggio, and “Il Moro” copied
Titian, not to indicate others; and they were one and all pedantic
imitators, who added to the exaggerations of the Italian style a
certain German coarsenesss, the result of which was a bastard
style of painting, still inferior to the first, childish, stiff in design,
crude in color, and completely wanting in chiaroscuro, but at least
not a servile imitation, and becoming, as it were, a faint prelude
of the true Dutch art that was to be.
With the war of independence, liberty, reform, and painting
also were renewed. With religious traditions fell artistic tradi-
tions; the nude nymphs, Madonnas, saints, allegory, mythology,
the ideal -- all the old edifice fell to pieces. Holland, animated by
a new life, felt the need of manifesting and expanding it in a
new way; the small country, become all at once glorious and
formidable, felt the desire for illustration; the faculties which had
been excited and strengthened in the grand undertaking of creat-
ing a nation, now that the work was completed, overflowed and
ran into new channels. The conditions of the country were favor.
able to the revival of art. The supreme dangers were conjured
away; there was security, prosperity, a splendid future; the heroes
had done their duty, and the artists were permitted to come to
the front; Holland, after many sacrifices, and much suffering,
issued victoriously from the struggle, lifted her face among her
people and smiled. And that smile is art.
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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
What that art would necessarily be, might have been guessed
even had no monument of it remained. A pacific, laborious, prac-
tical people, continually beaten down, to quote a great German
poet, to prosaic realities by the occupations of a vulgar burgher
life; cultivating its reason at the expense of its imagination; liv-
ing, consequently, more in clear ideas than in beautiful images;
taking refuge from abstractions; never darting its thoughts beyond
that nature with which it is in perpetual battle; seeing only that
which is, enjoying only that which it can possess, making its hap-
piness consist in the tranquil ease and honest sensuality of a life
without violent passions or exorbitant desires;- such a people
must have tranquillity also in their art, they must love an art that
pleases without startling the mind, which addresses the senses
rather than the spirit; an art full of repose, precision, and deli-
cacy, though material like their lives: in one word, a realistic art,
in which they can see themselves as they are and as they are con-
tent to be.
The artists began by tracing that which they saw before their
eyes — the house.
The long winters, the persistent rains, the
dampness, the variableness of the climate, obliged the Hollander
to stay within doors the greater part of the year. He loved his
little house, his shell, much better than we love our abodes, for
the reason that he had more need of it, and stayed more within
it; he provided it with all sorts of conveniences, caressed it, made
much of it; he liked to look out from his well-stopped windows
at the falling snow and the drenching rain, and to hug himself
with the thought, Rage, tempest, I am warm and safe! ) Snug
in his shell, his faithful housewife beside him, his children about
him, he passed the long autumn and winter evenings in eating
much, drinking much, smoking much, and taking his well-earned
ease after the cares of the day were over. The Dutch painters
represented these houses and this life in little pictures proportion-
ate to the size of the walls on which they were to hang; the bed-
chambers that make one feel a desire to sleep, the kitchens, the
tables set out, the fresh and smiling faces of the house-mothers,
the men at their ease around the fire; and with that conscientious
realism which never forsakes them, they depict the dozing cat, the
yawning dog, the clucking hen, the broom, the vegetables, the
scattered pots and pans, the chicken ready for the spit. Thus
they represent life in all its scenes, and in every grade of the
social scale — the dance, the conversazione, the orgie, the feast, the
## p. 473 (#507) ############################################
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
473
game; and thus did Terburg, Metzu, Netscher, Dow, Mieris, Steen,
Brouwer, and Van Ostade become famous.
After depicting the house, they turned their attention to the
country. The stern climate allowed but a brief time for the
admiration of nature, but for this very reason Dutch artists
admired her all the more; they saluted the spring with a livelier
joy, and permitted that fugitive smile of heaven to stamp itself
more deeply on their fancy. The country was not beautiful, but
it was twice dear because it had been torn from the sea and
from the foreign oppressor.
The Dutch artist painted it lov-
ingly; he represented it simply, ingenuously, with a sense of
intimacy which at that time was not to be found in Italian or
Belgian landscape. The flat, monotonous country had, to the
Dutch painter's eyes, a marvelous variety. He caught all the
mutations of the sky, and knew the value of the water, with its
reflections, its grace and freshness, and its power of illuminating
everything. Having no mountains, he took the dikes for back-
ground; with no forests, he imparted to a single group of trees
all the mystery of a forest; and he animated the whole with
beautiful animals and white sails.
The subjects of their pictures are poor enough, - a windmill,
a canal, a gray sky; but how they make one think! A few
Dutch painters, not content with nature in their own country,
came to Italy in search of hills, luminous skies, and famous
ruins; and another band of select artists is the result, - Both,
Swanevelt, Pynacker, Breenberg, Van Laer, Asselyn. But the
palm remains with the landscapists of Holland; with Wynants
the painter of morning, with Van der Neer the painter of night,
with Ruysdael the painter of melancholy, with Hobbema the
illustrator of windmills, cabins, and kitchen gardens, and with
others who have restricted themselves to the expression of the
enchantment of nature as she is in Holland.
Simultaneously with landscape art was born another kind of
painting, especially peculiar to Holland, --- animal painting. Ani.
mals are the riches of the country; that magnificent race of
cattle which has no rival in Europe for fecundity and beauty.
The Hollanders, who owe so much to them, treat them, one
may say, as part of the population; they wash them, comb
them, dress them, and love them dearly. They are to be seen
everywhere; they are reflected in all the canals, and dot with
points of black and white the immense fields that stretch on
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(
every side, giving an air of peace and comfort to every place,
and exciting in the spectator's heart a sentiment of 'Arcadian gen-
tleness and patriarchal serenity. The Dutch artists studied these
animals in all their varieties, in all their habits, and divined, as
one may say, their inner life and sentiments, animating the tran-
quil beauty of the landscape with their forms. Rubens, Luyders,
Paul de Vos, and other Belgian painters, had drawn animals with
admirable mastery; but all these are surpassed by the Dutch
artists Van der Velde, Berghem, Karel du Jardin, and by the
prince of animal painters, Paul Potter, whose famous “Bull,” in
the gallery of the Hague, deserves to be placed in the Vatican
beside the « Transfiguration” by Raphael.
In yet another field are the Dutch painters great, — the sea.
The sea, their enemy, their power, and their glory, forever
threatening their country, and entering in a hundred ways into
their lives and fortunes; that turbulent North Sea, full of sinister
color, with a light of infinite melancholy upon it, beating forever
upon a desolate coast, must subjugate the imagination of the
artist. He passes, indeed, long hours on the shore, contemplat-
ing its tremendous beauty, ventures upon its waves to study the
effects of tempests, buys a vessel and sails with his wife and
family, observing and making notes, follows the feet into battle
and takes part in the fight; and in this way are made marine
painters like William Van der Velde the elder and William the
younger, like Backhuysen, Dubbels, and Stork.
Another kind of painting was to arise in Holland, as the
expression of the character of the people and of republican
manners. A people which without greatness had done so many
great things, as Michelet says, must have its heroic painters, if
we call them so, destined to illustrate men and events. But this
school of painting, - precisely because the people were without
greatness, or to express it better, without the form of great-
ness,— modest, inclined to consider all equal before the country,
because all had done their duty, abhorring adulation, and the
glorification in one only of the virtues and the triumph of
many,- this school has to illustrate not a few men who have
excelled, and a few extraordinary facts, but all classes of citizen-
ship gathered among the most ordinary and pacific of burgher
life. From this come the great pictures which represent five,
ten, thirty persons together, arquebusiers, mayors, officers, pro-
fessors, magistrates, administrators; seated or standing around a
## p. 475 (#509) ############################################
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
475
table, feasting and conversing; of life size, most faithful like-
nesses; grave, open faces, expressing that secure serenity of
conscience by which may be divined rather than seen the noble-
ness of a life consecrated to one's country, the character of that
strong, laborious epoch, the masculine virtues of that excellent
generation; all this set off by the fine costume of the time, so
admirably combining grace and dignity,- those gorgets, those
doublets, those black mantles, those silken scarves and ribbons,
those arms and banners. In this field stand pre-eminent Van der
Helst, Hals, Govaert, Flink, and Bol.
Descending from the consideration of the various kinds of
painting, to the special manner by means of which the artist
excelled in treatment, one leads all the rest as the distinctive
feature of Dutch painting - the light.
The light in Holland, by reason of the particular conditions
of its manifestation, could not fail to give rise to a special man-
ner of painting. A pale light, waving with marvelous mobility
through an atmosphere impregnated with vapor, a nebulous veil
continually and abruptly torn, a perpetual struggle between light
and shadow,- such was the spectacle which attracted the eye of
the artist. He began to observe and to reproduce all this agita-
tion of the heavens, this struggle which animates with varied and
fantastic life the solitude of nature in Holland; and in represent-
ing it, the struggle passed into his soul, and instead of repre-
senting he created. Then he caused the two elements to contend
under his hand; he accumulated. darkness that he might split and
seam it with all manner of luminous effects and sudden gleams
of light; sunbeams darted through the rifts, sunset reflections
and the yellow rays of lamp-light were blended with delicate
manipulation into mysterious shadows, and their dim depths
were peopled with half-seen forms; and thus he created all sorts
of contrasts, enigmas, play and effect of strange and unexpected
chiaroscuro. In this field, among many stand conspicuous
Gerard Dow, the author of the famous four-candle picture, and
the great magician and sovereign illuminator Rembrandt.
Another marked feature of Dutch painting was to be color.
Besides the generally accepted reasons that in a country where
there are no mountainous horizons, no varied prospects, no great
coup d'æil, - no forms, in short, that lend themselves to design,
the artist's eye must inevitably be attracted by color; and that
this might be peculiarly the case in Holland, where the uncertain
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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
light, the fog-veiled atmosphere, confuse and blend the outlines
of all objects, so that the eye, unable to fix itself upon the
form, flies to color as the principal attribute that nature presents
to it,- besides these reasons, there is the fact that in a country
so flat, so uniform, and so gray as Holland, there is the same
need of color as in southern lands there is need of shade. The
Dutch artists did but follow the imperious taste of their country-
men, who painted their houses in vivid colors, as well as their
ships, and in some places the trunks of their trees and the
palings and fences of their fields and gardens; whose dress was
of the gayest, richest hues; who loved tulips and hyacinths even
to madness. And thus the Dutch painters were potent colorists,
and Rembrandt was their chief.
Realism, natural to the calmness and slowness of the Dutch
character, was to give to their art yet another distinctive feature,
finish, which was carried to the very extreme of possibility. It
is truly said that the leading quality of the people may be found
in their pictures; viz. , patience. Everything is represented with
the minuteness of a daguerreotype; every vein in the wood of a
piece of furniture, every fibre in a leaf, the threads of cloth, the
stitches in a patch, every hair upon an animal's coat, every
wrinkle in a man's face; everything finished with microscopic pre-
cision, as if done with a fairy pencil, or at the expense of the
painter's eyes and reason. In reality a defect rather than an
excellence, since the office of painting is to represent not what is,
but what the eye sees, and the eye does not see everything; but
a defect carried to such a pitch of perfection that one admires,
and does not find fault. In this respect the most famous prodi-
gies of patience were Dow, Mieris, Potter, and Van der Helst,
but more or less all the Dutch painters.
But realism, which gives to Dutch art so original a stamp and
such admirable qualities, is yet the root of its most serious defects.
The artists, desirous only of representing material truths, gave to
their figures no expression save that of their physical sentiments.
Grief, love, enthusiasm, and the thousand delicate shades of feel.
ing that have no name, or take a different one with the different
causes that give rise to them, they express rarely, or not at all.
For them the heart does not beat, the eyes do not weep, the lips
do not quiver. One whole side of the human soul, the noblest
and highest, is wanting in their pictures. More: in their faithful
reproduction of everything, even the ugly, and especially the ugly,
## p. 477 (#511) ############################################
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
477
they end by exaggerating even that, making defects into deformi.
ties and portraits into caricatures; they calumniate the national
type; they give a burlesque and graceless aspect to the human
countenance. In order to have the proper background for such
figures, they are constrained to choose trivial subjects: hence the
great number of pictures representing beer-shops, and drinkers
with grotesque, stupid faces, in absurd attitudes; ugly women and
ridiculous old men; scenes in which one can almost hear the
brutal laughter and the obscene words. Looking at these pictures,
one would naturally conclude that Holland was inhabited by the
ugliest and most ill-mannered people on the earth. We will not
speak of greater and worse license. Steen, Potter, and Brouwer,
the great Rembrandt himself, have all painted incidents that are
scarcely to be mentioned to civilized ears, and certainly should
not be looked at. But even setting aside these excesses, in the
picture galleries of Holland there is to be found nothing that ele-
vates the mind, or moves it to high and gentle thoughts. You
admire, you enjoy, you laugh, you stand pensive for a moment
before some canvas; but coming out, you feel that something is
lacking to your pleasure, you experience a desire to look upon a
handsome countenance, to read inspired verses, and sometimes
you catch yourself murmuring, half unconsciously, "O Raphael! ”
Finally, there are still two important excellences to be recorded
of this school of painting : its variety, and its importance as the
expression — the mirror, so to speak — of the country. If we
except Rembrandt with his group of followers and imitators,
almost all the other artists differ very much from one another;
no other school presents so great a number of original masters.
The realism of the Dutch painters is born of their common love
of nature: but each one has shown in his work a kind of love
peculiarly his own; each one has rendered a different impression
which he has received from nature; and all, starting from the
same point, which was the worship of material truth, have arrived
at separate and distinct goals. Their realism, then, inciting them
to disdain nothing as food for the pencil, has so acted that Dutch
art succeeds in representing Holland more completely than has
ever been accomplished by any other school in any other country.
It has been truly said that should every other visible witness of
the existence of Holland in the seventeenth century - her period
of greatness - vanish from the earth, and the pictures remain, in
them would be found preserved entire the city, the country, the
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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
ports, the ships, the markets, the shops, the costumes, the arms,
the linen, the stuffs, the merchandise, the kitchen utensils, the
food, the pleasures, the habits, the religious belief and supersti-
tions, the qualities and effects of the people; and all this, which
is great praise for literature, is no less praise for her sister art.
But there is one great hiatus in Dutch art, the reason for
which can scarcely be found in the pacific and modest disposition
of the people. This art, so profoundly national in all other re-
spects, has, with the exception of a few naval battles, completely
neglected all the great events of the war of independence, among
which the sieges of Leyden and of Haarlem alone would have
been enough to inspire a whole legion of painters. A war of
almost a century in duration, full of strange and terrible vicis-
situdes, has not been recorded in one single memorable painting.
Art, so varied and so conscientious in its records of the country
and its people, has represented no scene of that great tragedy, as
William the Silent prophetically named it, which cost the Dutch
people, for so long a time, so many different emotions of terror,
of pain, of rage, of joy, and of pride!
The splendor of art in Holland is dimmed by that of political
greatness. Almost all the great painters were born in the first
thirty years of the seventeenth century, or in the last part of the
sixteenth; all were dead after the first ten years of the eighteenth,
and after them there were no more, - Holland had exhausted her
fecundity. Already towards the end of the seventeenth century
the national sentiment had grown weaker, taste had corrupted,
the inspiration of the painters had declined with the moral ener-
gies of the nation. In the eighteenth century, the artists, as if
they were tired of nature, went back to mythology, to classicism,
to conventionalities; the imagination grew cold, style was impoy-
erished, every spark of the antique genius was extinct. Dutch
art still showed to the world the wonderful flowers of Van Huy-
sum, the last great lover of nature, and then folded her tired
hands and let the flowers fall upon his tomb.
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479
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
(1821-1881)
BY RICHARD BURTON
藏
CHE French have long been writers of what they call Pensées,'
- those detached thoughts or meditations which, for depth,
illumination, and beauty, have a power of life, and come
under the term «literature. ” Their language lends itself to the
expression of subjective ideas with lucidity, brilliance, charm. The
French quality of mind allows that expression to be at once dignified
and happily urbane. Sometimes these sayings take the form of the
cynical epigrams of a La Rochefoucauld; are expanded into senten-
tious aphorisms by a La Bruyère; or reveal more earnest and athletic
souls, who pierce below the social surface froth to do battle with the
demons of the intellect. To this class belong men like the seven-
teenth-century Pascal and the nineteenth-century Amiel.
The career of Henri Frédéric Amiel illustrates the dubiety of too
hasty judgment of a man's place or power in the world. A Gene-
vese by birth, of good parentage, early orphaned, well educated,
much traveled, he was deemed, on his return in the springtime of
his manhood to his native town as professor in the Academy of
Geneva, to be a youth of great promise, destined to become distin-
guished. But the years slipped by, and his literary performance,
consisting of desultory essays and several slight volumes of verse,
was not enough to justify the prophecy. His life more and more
became that of a bachelor recluse and valetudinarian. When he
died, in 1881, at sixty years of age, after much suffering heroically
borne, as pathetic entries in the last leaves of his Diary remain to
show, there was a feeling that here was one more faithful failure. ”
But the quiet, brooding teacher in the Swiss city which has at one
time or another immured so many rare minds, had for years been
jotting down his reflections in a private journal. It constitutes the
story of his inner life, never told in his published writings. When a
volume of the Journal Intime' appeared the year after his taking
off, the world recognized in it not only an intellect of clarity and
keenness, and a heart sensitive to the widest spiritual problems, but
the revelation of a typical modern mood. The result was that Amiel,
being dead, yet spoke to his generation, and his fame was quick and
genuine. The apparent disadvantage point of Geneva proved, after
## p. 480 (#514) ############################################
480
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
all, the fittest abiding-place for the poet-philosopher. A second vol-
ume of extracts, two years later, found him in an assured place as
a writer of Pensées. '
The Journal of Amiel is symptomatic of his time,- perhaps one
reason why it met with so sympathetic a response. It mirrors the
intellectual doubtings, the spiritual yearnings and despairs of a stren-
uous and pure soul in a rationalistic atmosphere. In the day of
scientific test and of skepticism, of the readjustment of conventions
and the overthrow of sacrosanct traditions, one whose life is that of
thought rather than of action finds much to perplex, to weary, and
to sadden. So it was with the Swiss professor. He was always in
the sanctum sanctorum of his spirit, striving to attain the truth; with
Hamlet-like irresolution he poised in mind before the antinomies
of the universe, alert to see around a subject, having the modern
thinker's inability to be partisan. This way of thought is obviously
unhealthy, or at least has in it something of the morbid. It implies
the undue introspection which is well-nigh the disease of this cen-
tury. There is in it the failure to lose one's life in objective inci-
dent and action, that one may find it again in regained balance of
mind and bodily health. Amiel had the defect of his quality; but
he is clearly to be separated from those shallow or exaggerated speci-
mens of subjectivity illustrated by present-day women diarists, like
Bashkirtseff and Kovalevsky. The Swiss poet-thinker had a vigor of
thought and a broad culture; his aim was high, his desire pure, and
his meditations were often touched with imaginative beauty. Again
and again he flashes light into the darkest penetralia of the human
soul. At times, too, there is in him a mystic fervor worthy of St.
Augustine. If his dominant tone is melancholy, he is not to be
called a pessimist. He believed in the Good at the central core of
things. Hence is he a fascinating personality, a stimulative force.
And these outpourings of an acute intellect, and a nature sensitive to
the Ideal, are conveyed in a diction full of literary feeling and flavor.
Subtlety, depth, tenderness, poetry, succeed each other; nor are the
crisp, compressed sayings, the happy mots of the epigrammatist,
entirely lacking: And pervading all is an impression of character.
Like Pascal, Amiel was a thinker interested above all in the soul
of man.
He was a psychologist, seeking to know the secret of the
Whence, the Why, and the Whither. Like Joubert, whose journal
resembled his own in its posthumous publication, his reflections will
live by their weight, their quality, their beauty of form. Nor are
these earlier writers of Pensées' likely to have a more permanent
place among the seed-sowers of thought. Amiel himself declared
that “the pensée-writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is
to the artist. He plays with thought, and makes it produce a crowd
## p. 481 (#515) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
481
escapes him.
of pretty things of detail; but he is more anxious about truths than
truth, and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity,
In a word, the pensée-writer deals with what
is superficial and fragmentary. While these words show the fine
critical sense of the man, they do an injustice to his own work.
Fragmentary it is, but neither superficial nor petty. One recognizes
in reading his wonderfully suggestive pages that here is a rare per-
sonality, indeed, — albeit “sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. ”
In 1889
an admirable English translation of Amiel by Mrs.
Humphry Ward, the novelist, appeared in London. The introductory
essay by Mrs. Ward is the best study of him in our language. The
appended selections are taken from the Ward translation.
Richara Burton
0
EXTRACTS FROM AMIEL'S JOURNAL
CTOBER IST, 1849. - Yesterday, Sunday, I read through and
made extracts from the Gospel of St. John. It confirmed
me in my belief that about Jesus we must believe no one
but Himself, and that what we have to do is to discover the true
image of the Founder behind all the prismatic refractions through
which it comes to us, and which alter it more or less. A ray of
heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ has
been broken into a thousand rainbow colors, and carried in a
thousand directions. It is the historical task of Christianity to
assume with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to
be forever spiritualizing more and more her understanding of the
Christ and of salvation.
I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and
formalism which still exists nineteen centuries after the Redeem-
er's proclamation, “It is the letter which killeth”— after his pro-
test against a dead symbolism. The new religion is so profound
that it is not understood even now, and would seem a blasphemy
to the greater number of Christians. The person of Christ is the
centre of it. Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, pro-
pitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell,- all
these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened that with a
strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a
1-31
## p. 482 (#516) ############################################
482
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian bold-
ness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the Church
which is heretical, the Church whose sight is troubled and her
heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doc-
trine — there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so
much as God enters into him; or, as Angelus, I think, said, “The
eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me. ”
Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive
world while at the same time detaching us from it.
F
EBRUARY 20TH, 1851. - I have almost finished these two vol-
umes of ( Joubert's] Pensées' and the greater part of the
[.
Correspondance. This last has especially charmed me; it
is remarkable for grace, delicacy, atticism, and precision. The
chapters on metaphysics and philosophy are the most insignificant.
All that has to do with large views, with the whole of things, is
very little at Joubert's command: he has no philosophy of history,
no speculative intuition. He is the thinker of detail, and his
proper field is psychology and matters of taste. In this sphere of
the subtleties and delicacies of imagination and feeling, within
the circle of personal affections and preoccupations, of social and
educational interests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in
fine criticisms, in exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from
flower to flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, an
æolian harp, a ray of furtive light stealing through the leaves.
Taken as a whole, there is something impalpable and immaterial
about him, which I will not venture to call effeminate, but which
is scarcely manly. He wants bone and body: timid, dreamy, and
clairvoyant, he hovers far above reality. He is rather a soul, a
breath, than a man. It is the mind of a woman in the character
of a child, so that we feel for him less admiration than tender-
ness and gratitude.
N°
OVEMBER 10TH, 1852. — How much have we not to learn from
the Greeks, those immortal ancestors of ours! And how
much better they solved their problem than we have solved
ours!
Their ideal man is not ours; but they understood infinitely
better than we, how to reverence, cultivate, and ennoble the
man whom they knew. In a thousand respects we are still bar-
barians beside them, as Béranger said to me with a sigh in 1843:
barbarians in education, in eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in
>
## p. 483 (#517) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
483
matters of art, etc. We must have millions of men in order to
produce a few elect spirits: a thousand was enough in Greece.
If the measure of a civilization is to be the number of perfected
men that it produces, we are still far from this model people.
The slaves are no longer below us, but they are among us. Bar-
barism is no longer at our frontiers: it lives side by side with
us. We carry within us much greater things than they, but we
ourselves are smaller. It is a strange result. Objective civiliza-
tion produced great men while making no conscious effort toward
such a result; subjective civilization produces a miserable and im-
perfect race, contrary to its mission and its earnest desire. The
world grows more majestic, but man diminishes. Why is this?
We have too much barbarian blood in our veins, and we lack
measure, harmony, and grace. Christianity, in breaking man up
into outer and inner, the world into earth and heaven, hell and
paradise, has decomposed the human unity, in order, it is true, to
reconstruct it more profoundly and more truly. But Christianity
has not yet digested this powerful leaven. She has not yet con-
quered the true humanity; she is still living under the antinomy
of sin and grace, of here below and there above. She has not
penetrated into the whole heart of Jesus. She is still in the nar-
ther of penitence; she is not reconciled, and even the churches
still wear the livery of service, and have none of the joy of the
daughters of God, baptized of the Holy Spirit.
Then, again, there is our excessive division of labor; our bad
and foolish education which does not develop the whole man; and
the problem of poverty. We have abolished slavery, but without
having solved the question of labor. In law, there are no more
slaves — in fact, there are many. And while the majority of men
are not free, the free man, in the true sense of the term, can
neither be conceived nor realized. Here are enough causes for
our inferiority.
Nand the days all begin in mist.
OVEMBER 1852. St. Martin's summer is still lingering,
and the days all begin in mist. I ran for a quarter of an
hour round the garden to get some warmth and suppleness.
Nothing could be lovelier than the last rosebuds, or the delicate
gaufred edges of the strawberry leaves embroidered with hoar-
frost, while above them Arachne's delicate webs hung swaying in
the green branches of the pines, -- little ball-rooms for the fairies,
carpeted with powdered pearls, and kept in place by a thousand
## p. 484 (#518) ############################################
484
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
dewy strands, hanging from above like the chains of a lamp, and
supporting them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These
little airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world,
and all the vaporous freshness of dawn. They recalled to me the
poetry of the North, wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or
Iceland or Sweden, Frithjof and the Edda, Ossian and the Heb.
rides. All that world of cold and mist, of genius and of reverie,
where warmth comes not from the sun but from the heart, where
man is more noticeable than nature, that chaste and vigorous
world, in which will plays a greater part than sensation, and
thought has more power than instinct, — in short, the whole ro-
mantic cycle of German and Northern poetry, awoke little by little
in my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a poetry
of bracing quality, and acts upon one like a moral tonic. Strange
charm of imagination! A twig of pine wood and a few spider-
webs are enough to make countries, epochs, and nations live again
before her.
-
-
J
spect it.
ANUARY 6TH, 1853. — Self-government with tenderness, — here
-
you have the condition of all authority over children. The
child must discover in us no passion, no weakness of which
he can make use; he must feel himself powerless to deceive or to
trouble us; then he will recognize in us his natural superiors, and
he will attach a special value to our kindness, because he will re-
The child who can rouse in us anger, or impatience, or
excitement, feels himself stronger than we, and a child respects
strength only. The mother should consider herself as her child's
sun, a changeless and ever radiant world, whither the small rest-
less creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle, passionate,
full of storms, may come for fresh stores of light, warmth, and
electricity, of calm and of courage. The mother represents good-
ness, providence, law; that is to say, the divinity, under that form
of it which is accessible to childhood. If she is herself passionate,
she will inculcate in her child a capricious and despotic God, or
even several discordant gods. The religion of a child depends
on what its mother and its father are, and not on what they
say. The inner and unconscious ideal which guides their life is
precisely what touches the child; their words, their remonstran.
ces, their punishments, their bursts of feeling even, are for him
merely thunder and comedy; what they worship — this it is which
his instinct divines and reflects.
## p. 485 (#519) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
485
The child sees what we are, behind what we wish to be.
Hence his reputation as a physiognomist. He extends his power
as far as he can with each of us; he is the most subtle of
diplomatists. Unconsciously he passes under the influence of each
person about him, and reflects it while transforming it after his
own nature. He is a magnifying mirror. This is why the first
principle of education is, Train yourself; and the first rule to fol-
low, if you wish to possess yourself of a child's will, is, Master
your own.
M
AY 27TH, 1857. - Wagner's is a powerful mind endowed with
strong poetical sensitiveness. His work is even more poet-
ical than musical. The suppression of the lyrical element,
and therefore of melody, is with him a systematic parti pris.
No more duos or trios; monologue and the aria are alike done
away with. There remains only declamation, the recitative, and
the choruses. In order to avoid the conventional in singing,
Wagner falls into another convention,- that of not singing at all.
He subordinates the voice to articulate speech, and for fear lest
the Muse should take flight he clips her wings; so that his works
are rather symphonic dramas than operas. The voice is brought
down to the rank of an instrument, put on a level with the
violins, the hautboys, and the drums, and treated instrumentally.
Man is deposed from his superior position, and the centre of
gravity of the work passes into the baton of the conductor. It
is music depersonalized, - neo-Hegelian music, -- music multiple
instead of individual. If this is so, it is indeed the music of the
future,- the music of the socialist democracy replacing the art
which is aristocratic, heroic, or subjective.
D
ECEMBER 4TH, 1863. — The whole secret of remaining young in
spite of years, and even of gray hairs, is to cherish enthu-
siasm in one's self, by poetry, by contemplation, by charity,
- that is, in fewer words, by the maintenance of harmony in the
soul.
A*
.
PRIL 12TH, 1858. — The era of equality means the triumph of
mediocrity. It is disappointing, but inevitable; for it is one
of time's revenges.
Art no doubt will lose, but
justice will gain. Is not universal leveling down the law of
nature ?
The world is striving with all its force for the
destruction of what it has itself brought forth!
## p. 486 (#520) ############################################
486
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
M
ARCH IST, 1869. - From the point of view of the ideal,
humanity is triste and ugly. But if we compare it with
its probable origins, we see that the human race has not
altogether wasted its time. Hence there are three possible views
of history: the view of the pessimist, who starts from the ideal;
the view of the optimist, who compares the past with the pres-
ent; and the view of the hero-worshiper, who sees that all
progress whatever has cost oceans of blood and tears.
A
UGUST 31st, 1869. — I have finished Schopenhauer. My mind
has been a tumult of opposing systems, - Stoicism, Qui-
etism, Buddhism, Christianity. Shall I never be at peace
with myself? If impersonality is a good, why am I not consist-
ent in the pursuit of it ? and if it is a temptation, why return to
it, after having judged and conquered it ?
Is happiness anything more than a conventional fiction ? The
deepest reason for my state of doubt is that the supreme end and
aim of life seems to me a mere lure and deception. The indi-
vidual is an eternal dupe, who never obtains what he seeks, and
who is forever deceived by hope. My instinct is in harmony
with the pessimism of Buddha and of Schopenhauer. It is a
doubt which never leaves me, even in my moments of religious
fervor. Nature is indeed for me a Maïa; and I look at her, as it
were, with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skep-
tical. What, then, do I believe in? I do not know. And what
is it I hope for ? It would be difficult to say. Folly! I believe
in goodness, and I hope that good will prevail. Deep within
this ironical and disappointed being of mine there is a child hid-
den - a frank, sad, simple creature, who believes in the ideal, in
love, in holiness, and all heavenly superstitions. A whole millen-
nium of idyls sleeps in my heart; I am a pseudo-skeptic, a
pseudo-scoffer.
“Borné dans sa nature, infini dans ses veux,
L'homme est un dieu tombé qui se souvient des cieux. )
M.
ARCH 17TH, 1870. - This morning the music of a brass band
which had stopped under my windows moved me almost
to tears.
It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic power over
me; it set me dreaming of another world, of infinite passion and
supreme happiness. Such impressions are the echoes of Paradise
## p. 487 (#521) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
487
in the soul; memories of ideal spheres whose sad sweetness rav-
ishes and intoxicates the heart. O Plato! O Pythagoras! ages
ago you heard these harmonies, surprised these moments of
inward ecstasy, - knew these divine transports! If music thus
carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is
perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.
A
PRIL ist, 1870. — I am inclined to believe that for a woman
love is the supreme authority, — that which judges the rest
and decides what is good or evil. For a man, love is sub-
ordinate to right. It is a great passion, but it is not the source •
of order, the synonym of reason, the criterion of excellence. It
would seem, then, that a woman places her ideal in the perfec-
tion of love, and a man in the perfection of justice.
၂'
UNE 5TH, 1870. -- The efficacy of religion lies precisely in that
which is not rational, philosophic, nor eternal; its efficacy
lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary.
Thus religion attracts more devotion in proportion as it demands
more faith, that is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the
profane mind. The philosopher aspires to explain away all mys-
teries, to dissolve them into light. It is mystery, on the other
hand, which the religious instinct demands and pursues: it is
mystery which constitutes the essence of worship, the power of
proselytism. When the cross became the “foolishness of the
cross, it took possession of the masses. And in our own day,
those who wish to get rid of the supernatural, to enlighten
religion, to economize faith, find themselves deserted, like poets
who should declaim against poetry, or women who should decry
love. Faith consists in the acceptance of the incomprehensible,
and even in the pursuit of the impossible, and is self-intoxicated
with its own sacrifices, its own repeated extravagances.
It is the forgetfulness of this psychological law which stulti-
fies the so-called liberal Christianity. It is the realization of it
which constitutes the strength of Catholicism.
Apparently, no positive religion can survive the supernatural
element which is the reason for its existence, Natural religion
seems to be the tomb of all historic cults. All concrete religions
die eventually in the pure air of philosophy. So long then as
the life of nations is in need of religion as a motive and sanc-
tion of morality, as food for faith, hope, and charity, so long
## p. 488 (#522) ############################################
488
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
will the masses turn away from pure reason and naked truth,
so long will they adore mystery, so long — and rightly so
will they rest in faith, the only region where the ideal presents
itself to them in an attractive form.
0°
CTOBER 26TH, 1870. — If ignorance and passion are the foes
of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indif-
ference is the malady of the cultivated classes. The mod-
ern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought and
conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and
vulgar crowd, is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty.
When any society produces an increasing number of literary
exquisites, of satirists, skeptics, and beaux esprits, some chemical
disorganization of fabric may be inferred. Take, for example,
the century of Augustus and that of Louis XV. Our cynics and
railers are mere egotists, who stand aloof from the common
duty, and in their indolent remoteness are of no service to
society against any ill which may attack it. Their cultivation
consists in having got rid of feeling. And thus they fall farther
and farther away from true humanity, and approach nearer to
the demoniacal nature. What was it that Mephistopheles lacked ?
Not intelligence, certainly, but goodness.
D*
ECEMBER LITH, 1872. — The ideal which the wife and mother
makes for herself, the manner in which she understands
duty and life, contain the fate of the community. Her
faith becomes the star of the conjugal ship, and her love the
animating principle that fashions the future of all belonging to
her. Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She
carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle.
JANE
ANUARY 220, 1875. — The thirst for truth is not a French
passion. In everything appearance is preferred to reality,
the outside to the inside, the fashion to the material, that
which shines to that which profits, opinion to conscience. That
is to say, the Frenchman's centre of gravity is always outside
him,- he is always thinking of others, playing to the gallery.
To him individuals are so many zeros: the unit which turns
them into a number must be added from outside; it may
be
royalty, the writer of the day, the favorite newspaper, or any
other temporary master of fashion. - All this is probably the
## p. 489 (#523) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
489
result of an exaggerated sociability, which weakens the soul's
forces of resistance, destroys its capacity for investigation and
personal conviction, and kills in it the worship of the ideal.
D
ECEMBER 9TH, 1877. — The modern haunters of Parnassus
carve urns of agate and of onyx; but inside the urns what
is there ? -- Ashes. Their work lacks feeling, seriousness,
sincerity, and pathos - in a word, soul and moral life. I cannot
bring myself to sympathize with such a way of understanding
poetry. The talent shown is astonishing, but stuff and matter
are wanting. It is an effort of the imagination to stand alone --
a substitute for everything else. We find metaphors, rhymes,
music, color, but not man, not humanity. Poetry of this facti-
tious kind may beguile one at twenty, but what can one make
of it at fifty? It reminds me of Pergamos, of Alexandria, of all
the epochs of decadence when beauty of form hid poverty of
thought and exhaustion of feeling. I strongly share the repug-
nance which this poetical school arouses in simple people. It is
as though it only cared to please the world-worn, the over-subtle,
the corrupted, while it ignores all normal healthy life, virtuous
habits, pure affections, steady labor, honesty, and duty. It is an
affectation, and because it is an affectation the school is struck
with sterility. The reader desires in the poem something better
than a juggler in rhyme, or a conjurer in verse; he looks to find
in him a painter of life, a being who thinks, loves, and has a
conscience, who feels passion and repentance,
The true critic strives for a clear vision of things as they are
– for justice and fairness; his effort is to get free from himself,
so that he may in no way disfigure that which he wishes to
understand or reproduce. His superiority to the common herd
lies in this effort, even when its success is only partial. He dis-
trusts his own senses, he sifts his own impressions, by returning
upon them from different sides and at different times, by com-
paring, moderating, shading, distinguishing, and so endeavoring
to approach more and more nearly to the formula which repre-
sents the maximum of truth.
The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presup-
poses the greatest elevation both in artist and in public.
## p. 490 (#524) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
490
M^
AY 19TH, 1878. — Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a
matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demon-
strated, - it is an art. Critical genius means an aptitude
for discerning truth under appearances or in disguises which con-
ceal it; for discovering it in spite of the errors of testimony, the
frauds of tradition, the dust of time, the loss or alteration of
texts. It is the sagacity of the hunter whom nothing deceives
for long, and whom no ruse can throw off the trail. It is the
talent of the Juge d'Instruction who knows how to interrogate
circumstances, and to extract an unknown secret from a thousand
falsehoods. The true critic can understand everything, but he
will be the dupe of nothing, and to no convention will he sacrifice
his duty, which is to find out and proclaim truth. Competent
learning, general cultivation, absolute probity, accuracy of general
view, human sympathy, and technical capacity,- how many things
are necessary to the critic, without reckoning grace, delicacy,
savoir vivre, and the gift of happy phrasemaking!
M
AY 220, 1879 (Ascension Day). - Wonderful and delicious
weather. Soft, caressing sunlight,- the air a limpid blue, -
twitterings of birds; even the distant voices of the city
have something young and springlike in them. It is indeed a
new birth.
The ascension of the Savior of men is symbolized
by the expansion, this heavenward yearning of nature. . . I
feel myself born again; all the windows of the soul are clear.
Forms, lines, tints, reflections, sounds, contrasts, and harmonies,
the general play and interchange of things, – it is all enchanting!
In my court-yard the ivy is green again, the chestnut-tree is
full of leaf, the Persian lilac beside the little fountain is flushed
with red and just about to flower; through the wide openings to
the rignt and left of the old College of Calvin I see the Salève
above the trees of St. Antoine, the Voirons above the hill of
Cologny; while the three flights of steps which, from landing to
landing, lead between two high walls from the Rue Verdaine to
the terrace of the Tranchées, recall to one's imagination some old
city of the south, a glimpse of Perugia or of Malaga.
All the bells are ringing. It is the hour of worship. A his-
torical and religious impression mingles with the picturesque, the
musical, the poetical impressions of the scene. All the peoples
of Christendom — all the churches scattered over the globe — are
celebrating at this moment the glory of the Crucified.
## p. 491 (#525) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
491
And what are those many nations doing who have other
prophets, and honor the Divinity in other ways — the Jews, the
Mussulmans, the Buddhists, the Vishnuists, the Guebers? They
have other sacred days, other rites, other solemnities, other beliefs.
But all have some religion, some ideal end for life — all aim at
raising man above the sorrows and smallnesses of the present,
and of the individual existence. A11 have faith in something
greater than themselves, all pray, all bow, all adore; all see
beyond nature, Spirit, and beyond evil, Good. All bear witness
to the Invisible. Here we have the link which binds all peoples
together.
All men are equally creatures of sorrow and desire,
of hope and fear.
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
469
by the winds, great tracts of barren land apparently condemned
to an eternal sterility. The first elements of manufacture, iron
and coal, were wanting; there was no wood, because the forests
had already been destroyed by tempests when agriculture began;
there was no stone, there were no metals. Nature, says a Dutch
poet, had refused all her gifts to Holland; the Hollanders had to
do everything in spite of nature. They began by fertilizing the
sand. In some places they formed a productive soil with earth
brought from a distance, as a garden is made; they spread the
siliceous dust of the downs over the too watery meadows; they
mixed with the sandy earth the remains of peat taken from the
bottoms; they extracted clay to lend fertility to the surface of
their lands; they labored to break up the downs with the plow:
and thus in a thousand ways, and continually fighting off the
menacing waters, they succeeded in bringing Holland to a state
of cultivation not inferior to that of more favored regions. That
Holland, that sandy, marshy country which the ancients consid-
ered all but uninhabitable, now sends out yearly from her con-
fines agricultural products to the value of a hundred millions of
francs, possesses about one million three hundred thousand head
of cattle, and in proportion to the extent of her territory may be
accounted one of the most populous of European States.
It may be easily understood how the physical peculiarities of
their country must influence the Dutch people ; and their genius
is in perfect harmony with the character of Holland. It is suffi-
cient to contemplate the monuments of their great struggle with
the sea in order to understand that their distinctive characteristics
must be firmness and patience, accompanied by a calm and con-
stant courage.
That glorious battle, and the consciousness of
owing everything to their own strength, must have infused and
fortified in them a high sense of dignity and an indomitable spirit
of liberty and independence. The necessity of a constant struggle,
of a continuous labor, and of perpetual sacrifices in defense of
their existence, forever taking them back to a sense of reality,
must have made them a highly practical and economical people;
good sense should be their most salient quality, economy one of
their chief virtues; they must be excellent in all useful arts,
sparing of diversion, simple even in their greatness; succeeding
in what they undertake by dint of tenacity and a thoughtful and
orderly activity; more wise than heroic; more conservative than
creative; giving no great architects to the edifice of modern
## p. 470 (#504) ############################################
470
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
thought, but the ablest of workmen, a legion of patient and
laborious artisans. And by virtue of these qualities of prudence,
phlegmatic activity, and the spirit of conservatism, they are ever
advancing, though by slow degrees; they acquire gradually, but
never lose what they have gained; holding stubbornly to their
ancient customs; preserving almost intact, and despite the neigh-
borhood of three great nations, their own originality; preserving
it through every form of government, through foreign invasions,
through political and religious wars, and in spite of the immense
concourse of strangers from every country that are always coming
among them; and remaining, in short, of all the northern races,
that one which, though ever advancing in the path of civilization,
has kept its antique stamp most clearly.
It is enough also to remember its form in order to compre-
hend that this country of three millions and a half of inhabitants,
although bound in so compact a political union, although recog-
nizable among all the other northern peoples by certain traits
peculiar to the population of all its provinces, must present a
great variety. And so it is in fact. Between Zealand and Hol-
land proper, between Holland and Friesland, between Friesland
and Gueldres, between Groningen and Brabant, in spite of
vicinity and so many common ties, there is no less difference
than between the more distant provinces of Italy and France;
difference of language, costume, and character; difference of race
and of religion. The communal régime has impressed an indeli-
ble mark upon this people, because in no other country does it
so conform to the nature of things. The country is divided into
various groups of interests organized in the same manner as the
hydraulic system. Whence, association and mutual help against
the common enemy, the sea; but liberty for local institutions
and forces. Monarchy has not extinguished the ancient munici-
pal spirit, and this it is that renders impossible a complete fusion
of the State, in all the great States that have made the attempt.
The great rivers and gulfs are at the same time commercial
roads serving as national bonds between the different provinces,
and barriers which defend old traditions and old customs in each.
## p. 471 (#505) ############################################
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
471
THE DUTCH MASTERS
From Holland and Its People )
THE Dutch school of painting has one quality which renders it
particularly attractive to us Italians; it is above all others
the most different from our own, the very antithesis or the
opposite pole of art. The Dutch and Italian schools are the most
original, or, as has been said, the only two to which the title
rigorously belongs; the others being only daughters or younger
sisters, more or less resembling them.
Thus even in painting Holland offers that which is most sought
after in travel and in books of travel: the new.
Dutch painting was born with the liberty and independence of
Holland. As long as the northern and southern provinces of the
Low Countries remained under the Spanish rule and in the Cath-
olic faith, Dutch painters painted like Belgian painters; they stud-
ied in Belgium, Germany, and Italy; Heemskerk imitated Michael
Angelo, Bloemart followed Correggio, and “Il Moro” copied
Titian, not to indicate others; and they were one and all pedantic
imitators, who added to the exaggerations of the Italian style a
certain German coarsenesss, the result of which was a bastard
style of painting, still inferior to the first, childish, stiff in design,
crude in color, and completely wanting in chiaroscuro, but at least
not a servile imitation, and becoming, as it were, a faint prelude
of the true Dutch art that was to be.
With the war of independence, liberty, reform, and painting
also were renewed. With religious traditions fell artistic tradi-
tions; the nude nymphs, Madonnas, saints, allegory, mythology,
the ideal -- all the old edifice fell to pieces. Holland, animated by
a new life, felt the need of manifesting and expanding it in a
new way; the small country, become all at once glorious and
formidable, felt the desire for illustration; the faculties which had
been excited and strengthened in the grand undertaking of creat-
ing a nation, now that the work was completed, overflowed and
ran into new channels. The conditions of the country were favor.
able to the revival of art. The supreme dangers were conjured
away; there was security, prosperity, a splendid future; the heroes
had done their duty, and the artists were permitted to come to
the front; Holland, after many sacrifices, and much suffering,
issued victoriously from the struggle, lifted her face among her
people and smiled. And that smile is art.
## p. 472 (#506) ############################################
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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
What that art would necessarily be, might have been guessed
even had no monument of it remained. A pacific, laborious, prac-
tical people, continually beaten down, to quote a great German
poet, to prosaic realities by the occupations of a vulgar burgher
life; cultivating its reason at the expense of its imagination; liv-
ing, consequently, more in clear ideas than in beautiful images;
taking refuge from abstractions; never darting its thoughts beyond
that nature with which it is in perpetual battle; seeing only that
which is, enjoying only that which it can possess, making its hap-
piness consist in the tranquil ease and honest sensuality of a life
without violent passions or exorbitant desires;- such a people
must have tranquillity also in their art, they must love an art that
pleases without startling the mind, which addresses the senses
rather than the spirit; an art full of repose, precision, and deli-
cacy, though material like their lives: in one word, a realistic art,
in which they can see themselves as they are and as they are con-
tent to be.
The artists began by tracing that which they saw before their
eyes — the house.
The long winters, the persistent rains, the
dampness, the variableness of the climate, obliged the Hollander
to stay within doors the greater part of the year. He loved his
little house, his shell, much better than we love our abodes, for
the reason that he had more need of it, and stayed more within
it; he provided it with all sorts of conveniences, caressed it, made
much of it; he liked to look out from his well-stopped windows
at the falling snow and the drenching rain, and to hug himself
with the thought, Rage, tempest, I am warm and safe! ) Snug
in his shell, his faithful housewife beside him, his children about
him, he passed the long autumn and winter evenings in eating
much, drinking much, smoking much, and taking his well-earned
ease after the cares of the day were over. The Dutch painters
represented these houses and this life in little pictures proportion-
ate to the size of the walls on which they were to hang; the bed-
chambers that make one feel a desire to sleep, the kitchens, the
tables set out, the fresh and smiling faces of the house-mothers,
the men at their ease around the fire; and with that conscientious
realism which never forsakes them, they depict the dozing cat, the
yawning dog, the clucking hen, the broom, the vegetables, the
scattered pots and pans, the chicken ready for the spit. Thus
they represent life in all its scenes, and in every grade of the
social scale — the dance, the conversazione, the orgie, the feast, the
## p. 473 (#507) ############################################
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
473
game; and thus did Terburg, Metzu, Netscher, Dow, Mieris, Steen,
Brouwer, and Van Ostade become famous.
After depicting the house, they turned their attention to the
country. The stern climate allowed but a brief time for the
admiration of nature, but for this very reason Dutch artists
admired her all the more; they saluted the spring with a livelier
joy, and permitted that fugitive smile of heaven to stamp itself
more deeply on their fancy. The country was not beautiful, but
it was twice dear because it had been torn from the sea and
from the foreign oppressor.
The Dutch artist painted it lov-
ingly; he represented it simply, ingenuously, with a sense of
intimacy which at that time was not to be found in Italian or
Belgian landscape. The flat, monotonous country had, to the
Dutch painter's eyes, a marvelous variety. He caught all the
mutations of the sky, and knew the value of the water, with its
reflections, its grace and freshness, and its power of illuminating
everything. Having no mountains, he took the dikes for back-
ground; with no forests, he imparted to a single group of trees
all the mystery of a forest; and he animated the whole with
beautiful animals and white sails.
The subjects of their pictures are poor enough, - a windmill,
a canal, a gray sky; but how they make one think! A few
Dutch painters, not content with nature in their own country,
came to Italy in search of hills, luminous skies, and famous
ruins; and another band of select artists is the result, - Both,
Swanevelt, Pynacker, Breenberg, Van Laer, Asselyn. But the
palm remains with the landscapists of Holland; with Wynants
the painter of morning, with Van der Neer the painter of night,
with Ruysdael the painter of melancholy, with Hobbema the
illustrator of windmills, cabins, and kitchen gardens, and with
others who have restricted themselves to the expression of the
enchantment of nature as she is in Holland.
Simultaneously with landscape art was born another kind of
painting, especially peculiar to Holland, --- animal painting. Ani.
mals are the riches of the country; that magnificent race of
cattle which has no rival in Europe for fecundity and beauty.
The Hollanders, who owe so much to them, treat them, one
may say, as part of the population; they wash them, comb
them, dress them, and love them dearly. They are to be seen
everywhere; they are reflected in all the canals, and dot with
points of black and white the immense fields that stretch on
## p. 474 (#508) ############################################
474
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
(
every side, giving an air of peace and comfort to every place,
and exciting in the spectator's heart a sentiment of 'Arcadian gen-
tleness and patriarchal serenity. The Dutch artists studied these
animals in all their varieties, in all their habits, and divined, as
one may say, their inner life and sentiments, animating the tran-
quil beauty of the landscape with their forms. Rubens, Luyders,
Paul de Vos, and other Belgian painters, had drawn animals with
admirable mastery; but all these are surpassed by the Dutch
artists Van der Velde, Berghem, Karel du Jardin, and by the
prince of animal painters, Paul Potter, whose famous “Bull,” in
the gallery of the Hague, deserves to be placed in the Vatican
beside the « Transfiguration” by Raphael.
In yet another field are the Dutch painters great, — the sea.
The sea, their enemy, their power, and their glory, forever
threatening their country, and entering in a hundred ways into
their lives and fortunes; that turbulent North Sea, full of sinister
color, with a light of infinite melancholy upon it, beating forever
upon a desolate coast, must subjugate the imagination of the
artist. He passes, indeed, long hours on the shore, contemplat-
ing its tremendous beauty, ventures upon its waves to study the
effects of tempests, buys a vessel and sails with his wife and
family, observing and making notes, follows the feet into battle
and takes part in the fight; and in this way are made marine
painters like William Van der Velde the elder and William the
younger, like Backhuysen, Dubbels, and Stork.
Another kind of painting was to arise in Holland, as the
expression of the character of the people and of republican
manners. A people which without greatness had done so many
great things, as Michelet says, must have its heroic painters, if
we call them so, destined to illustrate men and events. But this
school of painting, - precisely because the people were without
greatness, or to express it better, without the form of great-
ness,— modest, inclined to consider all equal before the country,
because all had done their duty, abhorring adulation, and the
glorification in one only of the virtues and the triumph of
many,- this school has to illustrate not a few men who have
excelled, and a few extraordinary facts, but all classes of citizen-
ship gathered among the most ordinary and pacific of burgher
life. From this come the great pictures which represent five,
ten, thirty persons together, arquebusiers, mayors, officers, pro-
fessors, magistrates, administrators; seated or standing around a
## p. 475 (#509) ############################################
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
475
table, feasting and conversing; of life size, most faithful like-
nesses; grave, open faces, expressing that secure serenity of
conscience by which may be divined rather than seen the noble-
ness of a life consecrated to one's country, the character of that
strong, laborious epoch, the masculine virtues of that excellent
generation; all this set off by the fine costume of the time, so
admirably combining grace and dignity,- those gorgets, those
doublets, those black mantles, those silken scarves and ribbons,
those arms and banners. In this field stand pre-eminent Van der
Helst, Hals, Govaert, Flink, and Bol.
Descending from the consideration of the various kinds of
painting, to the special manner by means of which the artist
excelled in treatment, one leads all the rest as the distinctive
feature of Dutch painting - the light.
The light in Holland, by reason of the particular conditions
of its manifestation, could not fail to give rise to a special man-
ner of painting. A pale light, waving with marvelous mobility
through an atmosphere impregnated with vapor, a nebulous veil
continually and abruptly torn, a perpetual struggle between light
and shadow,- such was the spectacle which attracted the eye of
the artist. He began to observe and to reproduce all this agita-
tion of the heavens, this struggle which animates with varied and
fantastic life the solitude of nature in Holland; and in represent-
ing it, the struggle passed into his soul, and instead of repre-
senting he created. Then he caused the two elements to contend
under his hand; he accumulated. darkness that he might split and
seam it with all manner of luminous effects and sudden gleams
of light; sunbeams darted through the rifts, sunset reflections
and the yellow rays of lamp-light were blended with delicate
manipulation into mysterious shadows, and their dim depths
were peopled with half-seen forms; and thus he created all sorts
of contrasts, enigmas, play and effect of strange and unexpected
chiaroscuro. In this field, among many stand conspicuous
Gerard Dow, the author of the famous four-candle picture, and
the great magician and sovereign illuminator Rembrandt.
Another marked feature of Dutch painting was to be color.
Besides the generally accepted reasons that in a country where
there are no mountainous horizons, no varied prospects, no great
coup d'æil, - no forms, in short, that lend themselves to design,
the artist's eye must inevitably be attracted by color; and that
this might be peculiarly the case in Holland, where the uncertain
## p. 476 (#510) ############################################
476
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
light, the fog-veiled atmosphere, confuse and blend the outlines
of all objects, so that the eye, unable to fix itself upon the
form, flies to color as the principal attribute that nature presents
to it,- besides these reasons, there is the fact that in a country
so flat, so uniform, and so gray as Holland, there is the same
need of color as in southern lands there is need of shade. The
Dutch artists did but follow the imperious taste of their country-
men, who painted their houses in vivid colors, as well as their
ships, and in some places the trunks of their trees and the
palings and fences of their fields and gardens; whose dress was
of the gayest, richest hues; who loved tulips and hyacinths even
to madness. And thus the Dutch painters were potent colorists,
and Rembrandt was their chief.
Realism, natural to the calmness and slowness of the Dutch
character, was to give to their art yet another distinctive feature,
finish, which was carried to the very extreme of possibility. It
is truly said that the leading quality of the people may be found
in their pictures; viz. , patience. Everything is represented with
the minuteness of a daguerreotype; every vein in the wood of a
piece of furniture, every fibre in a leaf, the threads of cloth, the
stitches in a patch, every hair upon an animal's coat, every
wrinkle in a man's face; everything finished with microscopic pre-
cision, as if done with a fairy pencil, or at the expense of the
painter's eyes and reason. In reality a defect rather than an
excellence, since the office of painting is to represent not what is,
but what the eye sees, and the eye does not see everything; but
a defect carried to such a pitch of perfection that one admires,
and does not find fault. In this respect the most famous prodi-
gies of patience were Dow, Mieris, Potter, and Van der Helst,
but more or less all the Dutch painters.
But realism, which gives to Dutch art so original a stamp and
such admirable qualities, is yet the root of its most serious defects.
The artists, desirous only of representing material truths, gave to
their figures no expression save that of their physical sentiments.
Grief, love, enthusiasm, and the thousand delicate shades of feel.
ing that have no name, or take a different one with the different
causes that give rise to them, they express rarely, or not at all.
For them the heart does not beat, the eyes do not weep, the lips
do not quiver. One whole side of the human soul, the noblest
and highest, is wanting in their pictures. More: in their faithful
reproduction of everything, even the ugly, and especially the ugly,
## p. 477 (#511) ############################################
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
477
they end by exaggerating even that, making defects into deformi.
ties and portraits into caricatures; they calumniate the national
type; they give a burlesque and graceless aspect to the human
countenance. In order to have the proper background for such
figures, they are constrained to choose trivial subjects: hence the
great number of pictures representing beer-shops, and drinkers
with grotesque, stupid faces, in absurd attitudes; ugly women and
ridiculous old men; scenes in which one can almost hear the
brutal laughter and the obscene words. Looking at these pictures,
one would naturally conclude that Holland was inhabited by the
ugliest and most ill-mannered people on the earth. We will not
speak of greater and worse license. Steen, Potter, and Brouwer,
the great Rembrandt himself, have all painted incidents that are
scarcely to be mentioned to civilized ears, and certainly should
not be looked at. But even setting aside these excesses, in the
picture galleries of Holland there is to be found nothing that ele-
vates the mind, or moves it to high and gentle thoughts. You
admire, you enjoy, you laugh, you stand pensive for a moment
before some canvas; but coming out, you feel that something is
lacking to your pleasure, you experience a desire to look upon a
handsome countenance, to read inspired verses, and sometimes
you catch yourself murmuring, half unconsciously, "O Raphael! ”
Finally, there are still two important excellences to be recorded
of this school of painting : its variety, and its importance as the
expression — the mirror, so to speak — of the country. If we
except Rembrandt with his group of followers and imitators,
almost all the other artists differ very much from one another;
no other school presents so great a number of original masters.
The realism of the Dutch painters is born of their common love
of nature: but each one has shown in his work a kind of love
peculiarly his own; each one has rendered a different impression
which he has received from nature; and all, starting from the
same point, which was the worship of material truth, have arrived
at separate and distinct goals. Their realism, then, inciting them
to disdain nothing as food for the pencil, has so acted that Dutch
art succeeds in representing Holland more completely than has
ever been accomplished by any other school in any other country.
It has been truly said that should every other visible witness of
the existence of Holland in the seventeenth century - her period
of greatness - vanish from the earth, and the pictures remain, in
them would be found preserved entire the city, the country, the
## p. 478 (#512) ############################################
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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
ports, the ships, the markets, the shops, the costumes, the arms,
the linen, the stuffs, the merchandise, the kitchen utensils, the
food, the pleasures, the habits, the religious belief and supersti-
tions, the qualities and effects of the people; and all this, which
is great praise for literature, is no less praise for her sister art.
But there is one great hiatus in Dutch art, the reason for
which can scarcely be found in the pacific and modest disposition
of the people. This art, so profoundly national in all other re-
spects, has, with the exception of a few naval battles, completely
neglected all the great events of the war of independence, among
which the sieges of Leyden and of Haarlem alone would have
been enough to inspire a whole legion of painters. A war of
almost a century in duration, full of strange and terrible vicis-
situdes, has not been recorded in one single memorable painting.
Art, so varied and so conscientious in its records of the country
and its people, has represented no scene of that great tragedy, as
William the Silent prophetically named it, which cost the Dutch
people, for so long a time, so many different emotions of terror,
of pain, of rage, of joy, and of pride!
The splendor of art in Holland is dimmed by that of political
greatness. Almost all the great painters were born in the first
thirty years of the seventeenth century, or in the last part of the
sixteenth; all were dead after the first ten years of the eighteenth,
and after them there were no more, - Holland had exhausted her
fecundity. Already towards the end of the seventeenth century
the national sentiment had grown weaker, taste had corrupted,
the inspiration of the painters had declined with the moral ener-
gies of the nation. In the eighteenth century, the artists, as if
they were tired of nature, went back to mythology, to classicism,
to conventionalities; the imagination grew cold, style was impoy-
erished, every spark of the antique genius was extinct. Dutch
art still showed to the world the wonderful flowers of Van Huy-
sum, the last great lover of nature, and then folded her tired
hands and let the flowers fall upon his tomb.
## p. 479 (#513) ############################################
479
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
(1821-1881)
BY RICHARD BURTON
藏
CHE French have long been writers of what they call Pensées,'
- those detached thoughts or meditations which, for depth,
illumination, and beauty, have a power of life, and come
under the term «literature. ” Their language lends itself to the
expression of subjective ideas with lucidity, brilliance, charm. The
French quality of mind allows that expression to be at once dignified
and happily urbane. Sometimes these sayings take the form of the
cynical epigrams of a La Rochefoucauld; are expanded into senten-
tious aphorisms by a La Bruyère; or reveal more earnest and athletic
souls, who pierce below the social surface froth to do battle with the
demons of the intellect. To this class belong men like the seven-
teenth-century Pascal and the nineteenth-century Amiel.
The career of Henri Frédéric Amiel illustrates the dubiety of too
hasty judgment of a man's place or power in the world. A Gene-
vese by birth, of good parentage, early orphaned, well educated,
much traveled, he was deemed, on his return in the springtime of
his manhood to his native town as professor in the Academy of
Geneva, to be a youth of great promise, destined to become distin-
guished. But the years slipped by, and his literary performance,
consisting of desultory essays and several slight volumes of verse,
was not enough to justify the prophecy. His life more and more
became that of a bachelor recluse and valetudinarian. When he
died, in 1881, at sixty years of age, after much suffering heroically
borne, as pathetic entries in the last leaves of his Diary remain to
show, there was a feeling that here was one more faithful failure. ”
But the quiet, brooding teacher in the Swiss city which has at one
time or another immured so many rare minds, had for years been
jotting down his reflections in a private journal. It constitutes the
story of his inner life, never told in his published writings. When a
volume of the Journal Intime' appeared the year after his taking
off, the world recognized in it not only an intellect of clarity and
keenness, and a heart sensitive to the widest spiritual problems, but
the revelation of a typical modern mood. The result was that Amiel,
being dead, yet spoke to his generation, and his fame was quick and
genuine. The apparent disadvantage point of Geneva proved, after
## p. 480 (#514) ############################################
480
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
all, the fittest abiding-place for the poet-philosopher. A second vol-
ume of extracts, two years later, found him in an assured place as
a writer of Pensées. '
The Journal of Amiel is symptomatic of his time,- perhaps one
reason why it met with so sympathetic a response. It mirrors the
intellectual doubtings, the spiritual yearnings and despairs of a stren-
uous and pure soul in a rationalistic atmosphere. In the day of
scientific test and of skepticism, of the readjustment of conventions
and the overthrow of sacrosanct traditions, one whose life is that of
thought rather than of action finds much to perplex, to weary, and
to sadden. So it was with the Swiss professor. He was always in
the sanctum sanctorum of his spirit, striving to attain the truth; with
Hamlet-like irresolution he poised in mind before the antinomies
of the universe, alert to see around a subject, having the modern
thinker's inability to be partisan. This way of thought is obviously
unhealthy, or at least has in it something of the morbid. It implies
the undue introspection which is well-nigh the disease of this cen-
tury. There is in it the failure to lose one's life in objective inci-
dent and action, that one may find it again in regained balance of
mind and bodily health. Amiel had the defect of his quality; but
he is clearly to be separated from those shallow or exaggerated speci-
mens of subjectivity illustrated by present-day women diarists, like
Bashkirtseff and Kovalevsky. The Swiss poet-thinker had a vigor of
thought and a broad culture; his aim was high, his desire pure, and
his meditations were often touched with imaginative beauty. Again
and again he flashes light into the darkest penetralia of the human
soul. At times, too, there is in him a mystic fervor worthy of St.
Augustine. If his dominant tone is melancholy, he is not to be
called a pessimist. He believed in the Good at the central core of
things. Hence is he a fascinating personality, a stimulative force.
And these outpourings of an acute intellect, and a nature sensitive to
the Ideal, are conveyed in a diction full of literary feeling and flavor.
Subtlety, depth, tenderness, poetry, succeed each other; nor are the
crisp, compressed sayings, the happy mots of the epigrammatist,
entirely lacking: And pervading all is an impression of character.
Like Pascal, Amiel was a thinker interested above all in the soul
of man.
He was a psychologist, seeking to know the secret of the
Whence, the Why, and the Whither. Like Joubert, whose journal
resembled his own in its posthumous publication, his reflections will
live by their weight, their quality, their beauty of form. Nor are
these earlier writers of Pensées' likely to have a more permanent
place among the seed-sowers of thought. Amiel himself declared
that “the pensée-writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is
to the artist. He plays with thought, and makes it produce a crowd
## p. 481 (#515) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
481
escapes him.
of pretty things of detail; but he is more anxious about truths than
truth, and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity,
In a word, the pensée-writer deals with what
is superficial and fragmentary. While these words show the fine
critical sense of the man, they do an injustice to his own work.
Fragmentary it is, but neither superficial nor petty. One recognizes
in reading his wonderfully suggestive pages that here is a rare per-
sonality, indeed, — albeit “sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. ”
In 1889
an admirable English translation of Amiel by Mrs.
Humphry Ward, the novelist, appeared in London. The introductory
essay by Mrs. Ward is the best study of him in our language. The
appended selections are taken from the Ward translation.
Richara Burton
0
EXTRACTS FROM AMIEL'S JOURNAL
CTOBER IST, 1849. - Yesterday, Sunday, I read through and
made extracts from the Gospel of St. John. It confirmed
me in my belief that about Jesus we must believe no one
but Himself, and that what we have to do is to discover the true
image of the Founder behind all the prismatic refractions through
which it comes to us, and which alter it more or less. A ray of
heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ has
been broken into a thousand rainbow colors, and carried in a
thousand directions. It is the historical task of Christianity to
assume with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to
be forever spiritualizing more and more her understanding of the
Christ and of salvation.
I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and
formalism which still exists nineteen centuries after the Redeem-
er's proclamation, “It is the letter which killeth”— after his pro-
test against a dead symbolism. The new religion is so profound
that it is not understood even now, and would seem a blasphemy
to the greater number of Christians. The person of Christ is the
centre of it. Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, pro-
pitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell,- all
these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened that with a
strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a
1-31
## p. 482 (#516) ############################################
482
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian bold-
ness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the Church
which is heretical, the Church whose sight is troubled and her
heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doc-
trine — there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so
much as God enters into him; or, as Angelus, I think, said, “The
eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me. ”
Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive
world while at the same time detaching us from it.
F
EBRUARY 20TH, 1851. - I have almost finished these two vol-
umes of ( Joubert's] Pensées' and the greater part of the
[.
Correspondance. This last has especially charmed me; it
is remarkable for grace, delicacy, atticism, and precision. The
chapters on metaphysics and philosophy are the most insignificant.
All that has to do with large views, with the whole of things, is
very little at Joubert's command: he has no philosophy of history,
no speculative intuition. He is the thinker of detail, and his
proper field is psychology and matters of taste. In this sphere of
the subtleties and delicacies of imagination and feeling, within
the circle of personal affections and preoccupations, of social and
educational interests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in
fine criticisms, in exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from
flower to flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, an
æolian harp, a ray of furtive light stealing through the leaves.
Taken as a whole, there is something impalpable and immaterial
about him, which I will not venture to call effeminate, but which
is scarcely manly. He wants bone and body: timid, dreamy, and
clairvoyant, he hovers far above reality. He is rather a soul, a
breath, than a man. It is the mind of a woman in the character
of a child, so that we feel for him less admiration than tender-
ness and gratitude.
N°
OVEMBER 10TH, 1852. — How much have we not to learn from
the Greeks, those immortal ancestors of ours! And how
much better they solved their problem than we have solved
ours!
Their ideal man is not ours; but they understood infinitely
better than we, how to reverence, cultivate, and ennoble the
man whom they knew. In a thousand respects we are still bar-
barians beside them, as Béranger said to me with a sigh in 1843:
barbarians in education, in eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in
>
## p. 483 (#517) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
483
matters of art, etc. We must have millions of men in order to
produce a few elect spirits: a thousand was enough in Greece.
If the measure of a civilization is to be the number of perfected
men that it produces, we are still far from this model people.
The slaves are no longer below us, but they are among us. Bar-
barism is no longer at our frontiers: it lives side by side with
us. We carry within us much greater things than they, but we
ourselves are smaller. It is a strange result. Objective civiliza-
tion produced great men while making no conscious effort toward
such a result; subjective civilization produces a miserable and im-
perfect race, contrary to its mission and its earnest desire. The
world grows more majestic, but man diminishes. Why is this?
We have too much barbarian blood in our veins, and we lack
measure, harmony, and grace. Christianity, in breaking man up
into outer and inner, the world into earth and heaven, hell and
paradise, has decomposed the human unity, in order, it is true, to
reconstruct it more profoundly and more truly. But Christianity
has not yet digested this powerful leaven. She has not yet con-
quered the true humanity; she is still living under the antinomy
of sin and grace, of here below and there above. She has not
penetrated into the whole heart of Jesus. She is still in the nar-
ther of penitence; she is not reconciled, and even the churches
still wear the livery of service, and have none of the joy of the
daughters of God, baptized of the Holy Spirit.
Then, again, there is our excessive division of labor; our bad
and foolish education which does not develop the whole man; and
the problem of poverty. We have abolished slavery, but without
having solved the question of labor. In law, there are no more
slaves — in fact, there are many. And while the majority of men
are not free, the free man, in the true sense of the term, can
neither be conceived nor realized. Here are enough causes for
our inferiority.
Nand the days all begin in mist.
OVEMBER 1852. St. Martin's summer is still lingering,
and the days all begin in mist. I ran for a quarter of an
hour round the garden to get some warmth and suppleness.
Nothing could be lovelier than the last rosebuds, or the delicate
gaufred edges of the strawberry leaves embroidered with hoar-
frost, while above them Arachne's delicate webs hung swaying in
the green branches of the pines, -- little ball-rooms for the fairies,
carpeted with powdered pearls, and kept in place by a thousand
## p. 484 (#518) ############################################
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HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
dewy strands, hanging from above like the chains of a lamp, and
supporting them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These
little airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world,
and all the vaporous freshness of dawn. They recalled to me the
poetry of the North, wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or
Iceland or Sweden, Frithjof and the Edda, Ossian and the Heb.
rides. All that world of cold and mist, of genius and of reverie,
where warmth comes not from the sun but from the heart, where
man is more noticeable than nature, that chaste and vigorous
world, in which will plays a greater part than sensation, and
thought has more power than instinct, — in short, the whole ro-
mantic cycle of German and Northern poetry, awoke little by little
in my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a poetry
of bracing quality, and acts upon one like a moral tonic. Strange
charm of imagination! A twig of pine wood and a few spider-
webs are enough to make countries, epochs, and nations live again
before her.
-
-
J
spect it.
ANUARY 6TH, 1853. — Self-government with tenderness, — here
-
you have the condition of all authority over children. The
child must discover in us no passion, no weakness of which
he can make use; he must feel himself powerless to deceive or to
trouble us; then he will recognize in us his natural superiors, and
he will attach a special value to our kindness, because he will re-
The child who can rouse in us anger, or impatience, or
excitement, feels himself stronger than we, and a child respects
strength only. The mother should consider herself as her child's
sun, a changeless and ever radiant world, whither the small rest-
less creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle, passionate,
full of storms, may come for fresh stores of light, warmth, and
electricity, of calm and of courage. The mother represents good-
ness, providence, law; that is to say, the divinity, under that form
of it which is accessible to childhood. If she is herself passionate,
she will inculcate in her child a capricious and despotic God, or
even several discordant gods. The religion of a child depends
on what its mother and its father are, and not on what they
say. The inner and unconscious ideal which guides their life is
precisely what touches the child; their words, their remonstran.
ces, their punishments, their bursts of feeling even, are for him
merely thunder and comedy; what they worship — this it is which
his instinct divines and reflects.
## p. 485 (#519) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
485
The child sees what we are, behind what we wish to be.
Hence his reputation as a physiognomist. He extends his power
as far as he can with each of us; he is the most subtle of
diplomatists. Unconsciously he passes under the influence of each
person about him, and reflects it while transforming it after his
own nature. He is a magnifying mirror. This is why the first
principle of education is, Train yourself; and the first rule to fol-
low, if you wish to possess yourself of a child's will, is, Master
your own.
M
AY 27TH, 1857. - Wagner's is a powerful mind endowed with
strong poetical sensitiveness. His work is even more poet-
ical than musical. The suppression of the lyrical element,
and therefore of melody, is with him a systematic parti pris.
No more duos or trios; monologue and the aria are alike done
away with. There remains only declamation, the recitative, and
the choruses. In order to avoid the conventional in singing,
Wagner falls into another convention,- that of not singing at all.
He subordinates the voice to articulate speech, and for fear lest
the Muse should take flight he clips her wings; so that his works
are rather symphonic dramas than operas. The voice is brought
down to the rank of an instrument, put on a level with the
violins, the hautboys, and the drums, and treated instrumentally.
Man is deposed from his superior position, and the centre of
gravity of the work passes into the baton of the conductor. It
is music depersonalized, - neo-Hegelian music, -- music multiple
instead of individual. If this is so, it is indeed the music of the
future,- the music of the socialist democracy replacing the art
which is aristocratic, heroic, or subjective.
D
ECEMBER 4TH, 1863. — The whole secret of remaining young in
spite of years, and even of gray hairs, is to cherish enthu-
siasm in one's self, by poetry, by contemplation, by charity,
- that is, in fewer words, by the maintenance of harmony in the
soul.
A*
.
PRIL 12TH, 1858. — The era of equality means the triumph of
mediocrity. It is disappointing, but inevitable; for it is one
of time's revenges.
Art no doubt will lose, but
justice will gain. Is not universal leveling down the law of
nature ?
The world is striving with all its force for the
destruction of what it has itself brought forth!
## p. 486 (#520) ############################################
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HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
M
ARCH IST, 1869. - From the point of view of the ideal,
humanity is triste and ugly. But if we compare it with
its probable origins, we see that the human race has not
altogether wasted its time. Hence there are three possible views
of history: the view of the pessimist, who starts from the ideal;
the view of the optimist, who compares the past with the pres-
ent; and the view of the hero-worshiper, who sees that all
progress whatever has cost oceans of blood and tears.
A
UGUST 31st, 1869. — I have finished Schopenhauer. My mind
has been a tumult of opposing systems, - Stoicism, Qui-
etism, Buddhism, Christianity. Shall I never be at peace
with myself? If impersonality is a good, why am I not consist-
ent in the pursuit of it ? and if it is a temptation, why return to
it, after having judged and conquered it ?
Is happiness anything more than a conventional fiction ? The
deepest reason for my state of doubt is that the supreme end and
aim of life seems to me a mere lure and deception. The indi-
vidual is an eternal dupe, who never obtains what he seeks, and
who is forever deceived by hope. My instinct is in harmony
with the pessimism of Buddha and of Schopenhauer. It is a
doubt which never leaves me, even in my moments of religious
fervor. Nature is indeed for me a Maïa; and I look at her, as it
were, with the eyes of an artist. My intelligence remains skep-
tical. What, then, do I believe in? I do not know. And what
is it I hope for ? It would be difficult to say. Folly! I believe
in goodness, and I hope that good will prevail. Deep within
this ironical and disappointed being of mine there is a child hid-
den - a frank, sad, simple creature, who believes in the ideal, in
love, in holiness, and all heavenly superstitions. A whole millen-
nium of idyls sleeps in my heart; I am a pseudo-skeptic, a
pseudo-scoffer.
“Borné dans sa nature, infini dans ses veux,
L'homme est un dieu tombé qui se souvient des cieux. )
M.
ARCH 17TH, 1870. - This morning the music of a brass band
which had stopped under my windows moved me almost
to tears.
It exercised an indefinable, nostalgic power over
me; it set me dreaming of another world, of infinite passion and
supreme happiness. Such impressions are the echoes of Paradise
## p. 487 (#521) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
487
in the soul; memories of ideal spheres whose sad sweetness rav-
ishes and intoxicates the heart. O Plato! O Pythagoras! ages
ago you heard these harmonies, surprised these moments of
inward ecstasy, - knew these divine transports! If music thus
carries us to heaven, it is because music is harmony, harmony is
perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.
A
PRIL ist, 1870. — I am inclined to believe that for a woman
love is the supreme authority, — that which judges the rest
and decides what is good or evil. For a man, love is sub-
ordinate to right. It is a great passion, but it is not the source •
of order, the synonym of reason, the criterion of excellence. It
would seem, then, that a woman places her ideal in the perfec-
tion of love, and a man in the perfection of justice.
၂'
UNE 5TH, 1870. -- The efficacy of religion lies precisely in that
which is not rational, philosophic, nor eternal; its efficacy
lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary.
Thus religion attracts more devotion in proportion as it demands
more faith, that is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the
profane mind. The philosopher aspires to explain away all mys-
teries, to dissolve them into light. It is mystery, on the other
hand, which the religious instinct demands and pursues: it is
mystery which constitutes the essence of worship, the power of
proselytism. When the cross became the “foolishness of the
cross, it took possession of the masses. And in our own day,
those who wish to get rid of the supernatural, to enlighten
religion, to economize faith, find themselves deserted, like poets
who should declaim against poetry, or women who should decry
love. Faith consists in the acceptance of the incomprehensible,
and even in the pursuit of the impossible, and is self-intoxicated
with its own sacrifices, its own repeated extravagances.
It is the forgetfulness of this psychological law which stulti-
fies the so-called liberal Christianity. It is the realization of it
which constitutes the strength of Catholicism.
Apparently, no positive religion can survive the supernatural
element which is the reason for its existence, Natural religion
seems to be the tomb of all historic cults. All concrete religions
die eventually in the pure air of philosophy. So long then as
the life of nations is in need of religion as a motive and sanc-
tion of morality, as food for faith, hope, and charity, so long
## p. 488 (#522) ############################################
488
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
will the masses turn away from pure reason and naked truth,
so long will they adore mystery, so long — and rightly so
will they rest in faith, the only region where the ideal presents
itself to them in an attractive form.
0°
CTOBER 26TH, 1870. — If ignorance and passion are the foes
of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indif-
ference is the malady of the cultivated classes. The mod-
ern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought and
conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and
vulgar crowd, is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty.
When any society produces an increasing number of literary
exquisites, of satirists, skeptics, and beaux esprits, some chemical
disorganization of fabric may be inferred. Take, for example,
the century of Augustus and that of Louis XV. Our cynics and
railers are mere egotists, who stand aloof from the common
duty, and in their indolent remoteness are of no service to
society against any ill which may attack it. Their cultivation
consists in having got rid of feeling. And thus they fall farther
and farther away from true humanity, and approach nearer to
the demoniacal nature. What was it that Mephistopheles lacked ?
Not intelligence, certainly, but goodness.
D*
ECEMBER LITH, 1872. — The ideal which the wife and mother
makes for herself, the manner in which she understands
duty and life, contain the fate of the community. Her
faith becomes the star of the conjugal ship, and her love the
animating principle that fashions the future of all belonging to
her. Woman is the salvation or destruction of the family. She
carries its destinies in the folds of her mantle.
JANE
ANUARY 220, 1875. — The thirst for truth is not a French
passion. In everything appearance is preferred to reality,
the outside to the inside, the fashion to the material, that
which shines to that which profits, opinion to conscience. That
is to say, the Frenchman's centre of gravity is always outside
him,- he is always thinking of others, playing to the gallery.
To him individuals are so many zeros: the unit which turns
them into a number must be added from outside; it may
be
royalty, the writer of the day, the favorite newspaper, or any
other temporary master of fashion. - All this is probably the
## p. 489 (#523) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
489
result of an exaggerated sociability, which weakens the soul's
forces of resistance, destroys its capacity for investigation and
personal conviction, and kills in it the worship of the ideal.
D
ECEMBER 9TH, 1877. — The modern haunters of Parnassus
carve urns of agate and of onyx; but inside the urns what
is there ? -- Ashes. Their work lacks feeling, seriousness,
sincerity, and pathos - in a word, soul and moral life. I cannot
bring myself to sympathize with such a way of understanding
poetry. The talent shown is astonishing, but stuff and matter
are wanting. It is an effort of the imagination to stand alone --
a substitute for everything else. We find metaphors, rhymes,
music, color, but not man, not humanity. Poetry of this facti-
tious kind may beguile one at twenty, but what can one make
of it at fifty? It reminds me of Pergamos, of Alexandria, of all
the epochs of decadence when beauty of form hid poverty of
thought and exhaustion of feeling. I strongly share the repug-
nance which this poetical school arouses in simple people. It is
as though it only cared to please the world-worn, the over-subtle,
the corrupted, while it ignores all normal healthy life, virtuous
habits, pure affections, steady labor, honesty, and duty. It is an
affectation, and because it is an affectation the school is struck
with sterility. The reader desires in the poem something better
than a juggler in rhyme, or a conjurer in verse; he looks to find
in him a painter of life, a being who thinks, loves, and has a
conscience, who feels passion and repentance,
The true critic strives for a clear vision of things as they are
– for justice and fairness; his effort is to get free from himself,
so that he may in no way disfigure that which he wishes to
understand or reproduce. His superiority to the common herd
lies in this effort, even when its success is only partial. He dis-
trusts his own senses, he sifts his own impressions, by returning
upon them from different sides and at different times, by com-
paring, moderating, shading, distinguishing, and so endeavoring
to approach more and more nearly to the formula which repre-
sents the maximum of truth.
The art which is grand and yet simple is that which presup-
poses the greatest elevation both in artist and in public.
## p. 490 (#524) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
490
M^
AY 19TH, 1878. — Criticism is above all a gift, an intuition, a
matter of tact and flair; it cannot be taught or demon-
strated, - it is an art. Critical genius means an aptitude
for discerning truth under appearances or in disguises which con-
ceal it; for discovering it in spite of the errors of testimony, the
frauds of tradition, the dust of time, the loss or alteration of
texts. It is the sagacity of the hunter whom nothing deceives
for long, and whom no ruse can throw off the trail. It is the
talent of the Juge d'Instruction who knows how to interrogate
circumstances, and to extract an unknown secret from a thousand
falsehoods. The true critic can understand everything, but he
will be the dupe of nothing, and to no convention will he sacrifice
his duty, which is to find out and proclaim truth. Competent
learning, general cultivation, absolute probity, accuracy of general
view, human sympathy, and technical capacity,- how many things
are necessary to the critic, without reckoning grace, delicacy,
savoir vivre, and the gift of happy phrasemaking!
M
AY 220, 1879 (Ascension Day). - Wonderful and delicious
weather. Soft, caressing sunlight,- the air a limpid blue, -
twitterings of birds; even the distant voices of the city
have something young and springlike in them. It is indeed a
new birth.
The ascension of the Savior of men is symbolized
by the expansion, this heavenward yearning of nature. . . I
feel myself born again; all the windows of the soul are clear.
Forms, lines, tints, reflections, sounds, contrasts, and harmonies,
the general play and interchange of things, – it is all enchanting!
In my court-yard the ivy is green again, the chestnut-tree is
full of leaf, the Persian lilac beside the little fountain is flushed
with red and just about to flower; through the wide openings to
the rignt and left of the old College of Calvin I see the Salève
above the trees of St. Antoine, the Voirons above the hill of
Cologny; while the three flights of steps which, from landing to
landing, lead between two high walls from the Rue Verdaine to
the terrace of the Tranchées, recall to one's imagination some old
city of the south, a glimpse of Perugia or of Malaga.
All the bells are ringing. It is the hour of worship. A his-
torical and religious impression mingles with the picturesque, the
musical, the poetical impressions of the scene. All the peoples
of Christendom — all the churches scattered over the globe — are
celebrating at this moment the glory of the Crucified.
## p. 491 (#525) ############################################
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
491
And what are those many nations doing who have other
prophets, and honor the Divinity in other ways — the Jews, the
Mussulmans, the Buddhists, the Vishnuists, the Guebers? They
have other sacred days, other rites, other solemnities, other beliefs.
But all have some religion, some ideal end for life — all aim at
raising man above the sorrows and smallnesses of the present,
and of the individual existence. A11 have faith in something
greater than themselves, all pray, all bow, all adore; all see
beyond nature, Spirit, and beyond evil, Good. All bear witness
to the Invisible. Here we have the link which binds all peoples
together.
All men are equally creatures of sorrow and desire,
of hope and fear.
