November 16, 1870.—We are struck by something bewildering and ineffable when we look down into the depths of an abyss; and every soul is an abyss, a mystery of love and piety. A sort of sacred emotion descends upon me whenever I penetrate the recesses of this sanctuary of man, and hear the gentle murmur of the prayers, hymns, and supplications which rise from the hidden depths of the heart. These involuntary confidences fill me with a tender piety and a religious awe and shyness. The whole experience seems to me as wonderful as poetry, and divine with the divineness of birth and dawn. Speech fails me, I bow myself and adore. And, whenever I am able, I strive also to console and fortify.
December 6, 1870.—“Dauer im Wechsel”—“Persistence in change.” This title of a poem by Goethe is the summing up of nature. Everything changes, but with such unequal rapidity that one existence appears eternal to another. A geological age, for instance, compared to the duration of any living being, the duration of a planet compared to a geological age, appear eternities—our life, too, compared to the thousand impressions which pass across us in an hour. Wherever one looks, one feels one’s self overwhelmed by the infinity of infinites. The universe, seriously studied, rouses one’s terror. Everything seems so relative that it is scarcely possible to distinguish whether anything has a real value.
Where is the fixed point in this boundless and bottomless gulf? Must it not be that which perceives the relations of things—in other words, thought, infinite thought? The perception of ourselves within the infinite thought, the realization of ourselves in God, self-acceptance in him, the harmony of our will with his—in a word, religion—here alone is firm ground. Whether this thought be free or necessary, happiness lies in identifying one’s self with it. Both the stoic and the Christian surrender themselves to the Being of beings, which the one calls sovereign wisdom and the other sovereign goodness. St. John says, “God is Light,” “God is Love.” The Brahmin says, “God is the inexhaustible fount of poetry.” Let us say, “God is perfection.” And man? Man, for all his inexpressible insignificance and frailty, may still apprehend the idea of perfection, may help forward the supreme will, and die with Hosanna on his lips!
All teaching depends upon a certain presentiment and preparation in the taught; we can only teach others profitably what they already virtually know; we can only give them what they had already. This principle of education is also a law of history. Nations can only be developed on the lines of their tendencies and aptitudes. Try them on any other and they are rebellious and incapable of improvement.
By despising himself too much a man comes to be worthy of his own contempt.
Its way of suffering is the witness which a soul bears to itself.
The beautiful is superior to the sublime because it lasts and does not satiate, while the sublime is relative, temporary and violent.
February 4, 1871.—Perpetual effort is the characteristic of modern morality. A painful process has taken the place of the old harmony, the old equilibrium, the old joy and fullness of being. We are all so many fauns, satyrs, or Silenuses, aspiring to become angels; so many deformities laboring for our own embellishment; so many clumsy chrysalises each working painfully toward the development of the butterfly within him. Our ideal is no longer a serene beauty of soul; it is the agony of Laocoon struggling with the hydra of evil. The lot is cast irrevocably. There are no more happy whole-natured men among us, nothing but so many candidates for heaven, galley-slaves on earth.
Molière said that reasoning banished reason. It is possible also that the progress toward perfection we are so proud of is only a pretentious imperfection. Duty seems now to be more negative than positive; it means lessening evil rather than actual good; it is a generous discontent, but not happiness; it is an incessant pursuit of an unattainable goal, a noble madness, but not reason; it is homesickness for the impossible—pathetic and pitiful, but still not wisdom.
The being which has attained harmony, and every being may attain it, has found its place in the order of the universe, and represents the divine thought at least as clearly as a flower or a solar system. Harmony seeks nothing outside itself. It is what it ought to be; it is the expression of right, order, law, and truth; it is greater than time, and represents eternity.
February 6,1871.—I am reading Juste Olivier’s “Chansons du Soir” over again, and all the melancholy of the poet seems to pass into my veins. It is the revelation of a complete existence, and of a whole world of melancholy reverie.
How much character there is in “Musette,” the “Chanson de l’Alouette,” the “Chant du Retour,” and the “Gaîté,” and how much freshness in “Lina,” and “A ma fille!” But the best pieces of all are “Au delà,” “Homunculus,” “La Trompeuse,” and especially “Frère Jacques,” its author’s masterpiece. To these may be added the “Marionettes” and the national song, “Helvétie.” Serious purpose and intention disguised in gentle gayety and childlike badinage, feeling hiding itself under a smile of satire, a resigned and pensive wisdom expressing itself in rustic round or ballad, the power of suggesting everything in a nothing—these are the points in which the Vaudois poet triumphs. On the reader’s side there is emotion and surprise, and on the author’s a sort of pleasant slyness which seems to delight in playing tricks upon you, only tricks of the most dainty and brilliant kind. Juste Olivier has the passion we might imagine a fairy to have for delicate mystification. He hides his gifts. He promises nothing and gives a great deal. His generosity, which is prodigal, has a surly air; his simplicity is really subtlety; his malice pure tenderness; and his whole talent is, as it were, the fine flower of the Vaudois mind in its sweetest and dreamiest form.
February 10, 1871.—My reading for this morning has been some vigorous chapters of Taine’s “History of English Literature.” Taine is a writer whose work always produces a disagreeable impression upon me, as though of a creaking of pulleys and a clicking of machinery; there is a smell of the laboratory about it. His style is the style of chemistry and technology. The science of it is inexorable; it is dry and forcible, penetrating and hard, strong and harsh, but altogether lacking in charm, humanity, nobility, and grace. The disagreeable effect which it makes on one’s taste, ear, and heart, depends probably upon two things: upon the moral philosophy of the author and upon his literary principles. The profound contempt for humanity which characterizes the physiological school, and the intrusion of technology into literature inaugurated by Balzac and Stendhal, explain the underlying aridity of which one is sensible in these pages, and which seems to choke one like the gases from a manufactory of mineral products. The book is instructive in the highest degree, but instead of animating and stirring, it parches, corrodes, and saddens its reader. It excites no feeling whatever; it is simply a means of information. I imagine this kind of thing will be the literature of the future—a literature à l’Américaine, as different as possible from Greek art, giving us algebra instead of life, the formula instead of the image, the exhalations of the crucible instead of the divine madness of Apollo. Cold vision will replace the joys of thought, and we shall see the death of poetry, flayed and dissected by science.