HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL

(1821-1881)

BY RICHARD BURTON

The French have long been writers of what they call ’Pensees,’—­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 sententious aphorisms by a La Bruyere; 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 seventeenth-century Pascal and the nineteenth-century Amiel.

The career of Henri Frederic Amiel illustrates the dubiety of too hasty judgment of a man’s place or power in the world.  A Genevese 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 distinguished.  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 all, the fittest abiding-place for the poet-philosopher.  A second volume of extracts, two years later, found him in an assured place as a writer of ‘Pensees.’