About a year and a half ago I chanced for the first time to read Amiel's book, Fragments d'un Journal Intime. I was struck by the significance and profundity of its contents, the beauty of the exposition, and, above all, the sincerity of this book. As I read it, I marked down the passages which more particularly startled me. My daughter undertook to translate these passages, and thus were formed the extracts from the Fragments d'un Journal Intime, that is, the extracts from the extracts of Amiel's diary in several volumes not yet printed, which he conducted from day to day for the period of thirty years.

Henri Amiel was born in Geneva in 1821 and was early left an orphan. Having graduated from the higher courses in Geneva, Amiel went abroad and there passed several years at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. Upon returning in 1849 to his home, he at the age of twenty-eight years received in the Geneva Academy a professorship, at first of Æsthetics, and later of philosophy, and this he held until his death.

Amiel's whole life was passed in Geneva, where he died in 1881, having in no way risen above the large number of the most ordinary of professors, who, mechanically compiling their lectures from the latest books in their particular specialties, just as mechanically transmit them to their hearers, and from a still greater number of poets without contents, who furnish these quite useless, but still marketable wares to periodicals that are published in tens of thousands of copies.

Amiel did not have the slightest success either in the learned or in the literary field. As he was approaching old age, he wrote of himself as follows:

"What have I been able to extract from those gifts which were bestowed upon me, from the peculiar conditions of my life of half a century? Are all my collected scribblings, my correspondence, these thousands of intimate pages, my lectures, my articles, my verses, my different notes anything but dry leaves? To whom and for what have I ever been of any use? And will my name live a day longer than I myself, and will it have any significance for any one? Insignificant, empty life! Vie nulle."

About Amiel and his diary two well-known French writers, his friend, the well-known critic, E. Scherer, and the philosopher, Caro, have written after his death. Interesting is that sympathetic, but partially patronizing air with which both these authors treat Amiel, when they regret that he was deprived of those qualities which are necessary for the performance of real work. And yet, the real work of these two writers—the critical labours of E. Scherer and the philosophic labours of Caro—will hardly much outlive their authors, while the accidental, not real work of Amiel, his diary, will always remain a live book, necessary for men and influencing them for the good.

A writer is dear and necessary for us only in the measure in which he reveals to us the inner working of his soul, of course, if this work is new, and not previously accomplished. No matter what he may write, a drama, a learned work, a story, a philosophic treatise, a lyric poem, a criticism, a satire, it is only this inner work of his soul which is dear to us, and not the architectural structure in which he, for the most part, and I think, always, distorting them, clothes his thoughts and feelings.

Everything which Amiel poured into a ready mould, his lectures, treatises, poems, was completely dead; but his diary, where, without thinking of the form, he spoke only to himself, full of life, wisdom, instruction, consolation, will for ever remain one of the best books accidentally left to us by such men as Marcus Aurelius, Pascal, Epictetus.

Pascal says: "There are but three kinds of people: those who, having found God, serve Him; those who, not having found Him, are busy seeking Him, and those who, not having found Him, none the less do not seek Him.

"The first are sensible and happy, the last are senseless and unhappy, the second are unhappy, but sensible."

I think that the difference established by Pascal between the first and the second, between those who, as he says in another passage, having found God, serve Him with their whole hearts, and those who, not having found Him, seek Him with their whole hearts, is not only not so great as he thought, but does not even exist. I think that those who with their whole hearts and suffering ("en gemissant," as Pascal says) seek God, already serve Him. They serve Him with this, that with these sufferings of their seeking they lay out and open for others the road to God, as Pascal himself did in his thoughts, and as Amiel did all his life in his diary.

Amiel's whole life, as it is presented to us in this diary, is full of this seeking after God, which is suffering with the whole heart. The contemplation of this seeking is the more instructive in that it never ceases to be a seeking, never stops, never passes into the consciousness of the acquisition of truth and into instruction. Amiel says neither to himself nor to others: "I now know the truth,—hear me!" On the contrary, it seems to him, as is proper for him who sincerely seeks the truth, that the more he finds out, the more he has still left to know, and he, without stopping, does everything he can for the purpose of finding out more and more of the truth, and so constantly feels his ignorance. He constantly dwells upon what Christianity and the condition of a Christian ought to be, without for a moment dwelling on the thought that Christianity is precisely what he professes, and that he himself personifies the condition of a Christian. And yet his whole diary is full of expressions of the profoundest Christian understanding and feeling. These expressions act most powerfully on the reader on account of their very unconsciousness and sincerity. He speaks with himself, without thinking that he is heard, without trying to appear sure of what he is not sure, without concealing his suffering and his seeking.

It is as though we were present, without the master's knowledge, at the most secret, profound, impassioned inner work of the soul, which is generally concealed from the view of an outsider.

For this reason it is possible to find many statelier and more eloquent expressions of Amiel's religious feeling, but it is hard to find such as are more intimate and more heart-stirring. Shortly before his death, when he knew that his disease might any day end in strangulation, he wrote:

"When you no longer reflect that you have tens of years, one year, a month free before yourself, when you already count tens of hours, and the future night bears in itself the menace of the unexplored, it is evident that you decline art, science, politics, and are satisfied with conversing with yourself, and that is possible until the very end. This inward conversation is the only thing which is left to him who is sentenced to death and whose execution is delayed. He (this condemned man) concentrates upon himself. He no longer emits rays, but only converses with his soul. He no longer acts, but only contemplates.... Like a hare, he returns to his lair to die; and this lair is his conscience, his thought. So long as he can hold a pen and has a moment of solitude, he concentrates himself before this echo of himself and holds converse with God.

"This, by the way, is not a moral investigation, a repentance, a call. It is only the 'amen' of submission.

"My child, give me your heart.

"Renunciation and agreement are less difficult for me than for others, because I want nothing. I should only want not to suffer. Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane asked for the same. Let us do the same that He did. 'Nevertheless not as I will but as Thou wilt,'—and we will wait."

Such he is on the day before his death. He is not less sincere and serious throughout his whole diary, in spite of the elegance, and now and then choiceness of his diction, which became a habit with him. In the course of all the thirty years of his diary he feels that we all so thoroughly forget, that we are all condemned to death and that our execution is only delayed. And it is for this very reason that this book is so sincere, serious, and useful.

1893.