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Updated: June 4, 2025
With all its gifts and opportunities it was a melancholy life melancholy with something not altogether explained by the somewhat pessimistic philosophy exposed in the Journal, nor by the consumptive tendency of Amiel's physical constitution, causing him from a very early date to be much preoccupied with the effort to reconcile himself with the prospect of death, and reinforcing the far from sanguine temperament of one intellectually also a poitrinaire.
William Watson puts it, 'a relish of eternity. Readers of Amiel's 'Journal' will know what a sterilising, petrifying influence his trance-like contemplation of the Infinite had upon his life. Amiel was simply hypnotised by the universe, as a man may hypnotise himself by gazing fixedly at a star. Mr.
Probably a Frenchman will be inclined to apply Sainte-Beuve's remarks on Amiel's elder countryman, Rodolphe Toepffer, to Amiel himself: "C'est ainsi qu'on ecrit dans les litteratures qui n'ont point de capitale, de quartier general classique, ou d'Academie; c'est ainsi qu'un Allemand, qu'un Americain, ou meme un Anglais, use a son gre de sa langue.
He might also buy Lecky's Works, and Sir John Strachey's "India," and Buckle's "History of Civilization," for, whatever the faults of the last may be, the writer's style is admirable, and the book stirs up thought and inquiry in the mind. Addison's "Spectator," as it is commonly called, Amiel's "Journal," and Locke's "Conduct of the Understanding," might also be bought.
Still one may no doubt easily exaggerate this loneliness of Amiel's. His social difficulties represent rather a dull discomfort in his life, which in course of time, and in combination with a good many other causes, produced certain unfavorable results on his temperament and on his public career, than anything very tragic and acute.
The whole "Journal Intime" is in some sense Amiel's explanation of these facts. In it he has made full and bitter confession of his weakness, his failure; he has endeavored, with an acuteness of analysis no other hand can rival, to make the reasons of his failure and isolation clear both to himself and others.
She tossed back her long curls and talked to Amiel with an occasional droop of her long lashes, and Dorothea, beaming upon them both, had no notion that, hovering above her in the quiet twilight, the green- eyed Monster was even then scenting its victim and preparing to strike. Presently Dorothea's father and mother and Amiel's stout and amiable parents joined their offspring in the summerhouse.
It was in the last days of December, 1882, that the first volume of Henri Frederic Amiel's "Journal Intime" was published at Geneva. Some thousands of sheets of Journal, covering a period of more than thirty years, had come into the hands of Amiel's literary heirs. "They were written," said the Avertissement, "with several ends in view.
"Why, what is the matter?" "Let me make a clean breast of it, sir. Once, when I was hard pressed, I stole some cocoa-nuts from the garden here. I am getting old, and may die any day, so I have come to pay them back." Amiel's Journal could not have done me any good that day. But these words of Panchu lightened my heart. There are more things in life than the union or separation of man and woman.
The object of mystic contemplation is the One indivisible. But we can also think the One as the unity of all differences, the Circle of the Universe. Those natures also which, like Amiel's, are "bedazzled with the Infinite" and thirst for "totality" attain in their reveries to the same impersonal ecstasy.
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