December 23, 1866.—It is raining over the whole sky—as far at least as I can see from my high point of observation. All is gray from the Salève to the Jura, and from the pavement to the clouds; everything that one sees or touches is gray; color, life, and gayety are dead—each living thing seems to lie hidden in its own particular shell. What are the birds doing in such weather as this? We who have food and shelter, fire on the hearth, books around us, portfolios of engravings close at hand, a nestful of dreams in the heart, and a whirlwind of thoughts ready to rise from the ink-bottle—we find nature ugly and triste, and turn away our eyes from it; but you, poor sparrows, what can you be doing? Bearing and hoping and waiting? After all, is not this the task of each one of us?
I have just been reading over a volume of this Journal, and feel a little ashamed of the languid complaining tone of so much of it. These pages reproduce me very imperfectly, and there are many things in me of which I find no trace in them. I suppose it is because, in the first place, sadness takes up the pen more readily than joy; and in the next, because I depend so much upon surrounding circumstances. When there is no call upon me, and nothing to put me to the test, I fall back into melancholy; and so the practical man, the cheerful man, the literary man, does not appear in these pages. The portrait is lacking in proportion and breadth; it is one-sided, and wants a center; it has, as it were, been painted from too near.
The true reason why we know ourselves so little lies in the difficulty we find in standing at a proper distance from ourselves, in taking up the right point of view, so that the details may help rather than hide the general effect. We must learn to look at ourselves socially and historically if we wish to have an exact idea of our relative worth, and to look at our life as a whole, or at least as one complete period of life, if we wish to know what we are and what we are not. The ant which crawls to and fro over a face, the fly perched upon the forehead of a maiden, touch them indeed, but do not see them, for they never embrace the whole at a glance.
Is it wonderful that misunderstandings should play so great a part in the world, when one sees how difficult it is to produce a faithful portrait of a person whom one has been studying for more than twenty years? Still, the effort has not been altogether lost; its reward has been the sharpening of one’s perceptions of the outer world. If I have any special power of appreciating different shades of mind, I owe it no doubt to the analysis I have so perpetually and unsuccessfully practiced on myself. In fact, I have always regarded myself as matter for study, and what has interested me most in myself has been the pleasure of having under my hand a man, a person, in whom, as an authentic specimen of human nature, I could follow, without importunity or indiscretion, all the metamorphoses, the secret thoughts, the heart-beats, and the temptations of humanity. My attention has been drawn to myself impersonally and philosophically. One uses what one has, and one must shape one’s arrow out of one’s own wood.
To arrive at a faithful portrait, succession must be converted into simultaneousness, plurality into unity, and all the changing phenomena must be traced back to their essence. There are ten men in me, according to time, place, surrounding, and occasion; and in their restless diversity I am forever escaping myself. Therefore, whatever I may reveal of my past, of my Journal, or of myself, is of no use to him who is without the poetic intuition, and cannot recompose me as a whole, with or in spite of the elements which I confide to him.
I feel myself a chameleon, a kaleidoscope, a Proteus; changeable in every way, open to every kind of polarization; fluid, virtual, and therefore latent—latent even in manifestation, and absent even in presentation. I am a spectator, so to speak, of the molecular whirlwind which men call individual life; I am conscious of an incessant metamorphosis, an irresistible movement of existence, which is going on within me. I am sensible of the flight, the revival, the modification, of all the atoms of my being, all the particles of my river, all the radiations of my special force.
This phenomenology of myself serves both as the magic lantern of my own destiny, and as a window opened upon the mystery of the world. I am, or rather, my sensible consciousness is concentrated upon this ideal standing-point, this invisible threshold, as it were, whence one hears the impetuous passage of time, rushing and foaming as it flows out into the changeless ocean of eternity. After all the bewildering distractions of life, after having drowned myself in a multiplicity of trifles and in the caprices of this fugitive existence, yet without ever attaining to self-intoxication or self-delusion, I come again upon the fathomless abyss, the silent and melancholy cavern where dwell “Die Mütter,” [Footnote: “Die Mütter”—an allusion to a strange and enigmatical, but very effective conception in “Faust” (Part II. Act I. Scene v.) Die Mütter are the prototypes, the abstract forms, the generative ideas, of things. “Sie sehn dich nicht, denn Schemen sehn sie nur.” Goethe borrowed the term from a passage of Plutarch’s, but he has made the idea half Platonic, half legendary. Amiel, however, seems rather to have in his mind Faust’s speech in Scene vii. than the speech of Mephistopheles in Scene v:
where sleeps that which neither lives nor dies, that which has neither movement, nor change, nor extension, nor form, and which lasts when all else passes away.
(H. P. AMIEL, Penseroso.)
Geneva, January 11, 1867.
I hear the drops of my life falling distinctly one by one into the devouring abyss of eternity. I feel my days flying before the pursuit of death. All that remains to me of weeks, or months, or years, in which I may drink in the light of the sun, seems to me no more than a single night, a summer night, which scarcely counts, because it will so soon be at an end.
Death! Silence! Eternity! What mysteries, what names of terror to the being who longs for happiness, immortality, perfection! Where shall I be to-morrow—in a little while—when the breath of life has forsaken me? Where will those be whom I love? Whither are we all going? The eternal problems rise before us in their implacable solemnity. Mystery on all sides! And faith the only star in this darkness and uncertainty!
No matter!—so long as the world is the work of eternal goodness, and so long as conscience has not deceived us. To give happiness and to do good, there is our only law, our anchor of salvation, our beacon light, our reason for existing. All religions may crumble away; so long as this survives we have still an ideal, and life is worth living.
Nothing can lessen the dignity and value of humanity
so long as the religion of love, of unselfishness and devotion endures; and none can destroy the altars of this faith for us so long as we feel ourselves still capable of love.
April 15,1867—(Seven A. M.).—Rain storms in the night—the weather is showing its April caprice. From the window one sees a gray and melancholy sky, and roofs glistering with rain. The spring is at its work. Yes, and the implacable flight of time is driving us toward the grave. Well—each has his turn!