Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 4, 2025
We have been carried forward, however, a little too far by this general discussion of Amiel's debts to Germany. Let us take up the biographical thread again. In 1848 his Berlin apprenticeship came to an end, and he returned to Geneva.
It has ability, thought beauty even, of a certain kind, but no plastic power, none of the incommunicable magic which a George Eliot seeks for in vain, while it comes unasked, to deck with imperishable charm the commonplace metaphysic and the simpler emotions of a Tennyson or a Burns. Still as Amiel's work, his poetry has an interest for those who are interested in him.
Matthew Arnold was captivated by the simile of light, and having repeated Amiel's passionate cry for "more light," used "sweetness and light" as a refrain in all his criticism.
Amiel's intellectual interest is untiring. Philosophy, science, letters, art he has penetrated the spirit of them all; there is nothing, or almost nothing, within the wide range of modern activities which he has not at one time or other felt the attraction of, and learned in some sense to understand.
Il faut donc nous arranger de maniere a ceque, dans le cas ou le seconde hypothese serait la vraie, nous n'ayons pas ete trop dupes." This strain of remark, which is developed at considerable length, is meant as a criticism of Amiel's want of sensitiveness to the irony of things.
During the years, however, which immediately followed Amiel's birth, some signs of decadence began to be visible in this brilliant Genevese society. The generation which had waited for, prepared, and controlled, the Restoration of 1814, was falling into the background, and the younger generation, with all its respectability, wanted energy, above all, wanted leaders.
But at last the translation and my Introduction were finished and the English book appeared. It certainly obtained a warm welcome both here and in America. There is something in Amiel's mystical and melancholy charm which is really more attractive to the Anglo-Saxon than the French temper. At any rate, in the English-speaking countries the book spread widely, and has maintained its place till now.
A German professor of Amiel's knowledge would have wanted nothing beyond his Fach, and nine men out of ten in his circumstances would have made themselves the slave of a magnum opus, and forgotten the vexations of everyday life in the "douces joies de la science."
Faith, doubt, submission, tenderness of feeling, infinite aspiration, moral passion, that straining hope of something beyond, which is the life of the religious soul they are all here, and the Dernier Mot with which the sad little volume ends is poor Amiel's epitaph on himself, his conscious farewell to that more public aspect of his life in which he had suffered much and achieved comparatively so little.
In Amiel's case, we have to gather it through all the variations and inevitable contradictions of a Journal which is the reflection of a life, not the systematic expression of a series of ideas, but the main results are clear enough. Man is saved by love and duty, and by the hope which springs from duty, or rather from the moral facts of consciousness, as a flower springs from the soil.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking