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Updated: June 21, 2025
Pater, you will remember, has a remarkable study of a similar temperament in his Imaginary Portraits. Sebastian van Storck, like Amiel, had become hypnotised by the Infinite. It paralysed in him all impulse or power 'to be or do any limited thing. 'For Sebastian, at least, we read, 'the world and the individual alike had been divested of all effective purpose.
A troop of Prussians had advanced within four leagues of Hamburg, and that town had already prepared for a vigorous resistance, in case they should attempt an entrance, when Major Amiel attacked them at Zollenspieker and made some prisoners.
There is a leaven of something positive and austere, of something which, for want of a better name, one calls Puritanism, in Amiel, which escapes the author of "Une Cruelle Enigme." But whether he has understood Amiel or no, M. Bourget is fully alive to the mark which the Journal is likely to make among modern records of mental history.
The ladies might merely have been quarrelling, thought the visitor, and made himself as far as he could a soothing third, chatting with Estelle about Amiel and with Aurora about young Mrs. Sebastian, whose baby was to rejoice in the little garment half-finished between her hands.
When, a little later, "Les Etrangeres," a collection of verse-translations, came out, it was dedicated to M. Scherer, who did not, however, pretend to give it any very cordial reception. Amiel took his friend's coolness in very good part, calling him his "dear Rhadamanthus." "How little I knew!" cries M. Scherer.
This fact, indeed, of a wide and varied personal experience, must never be forgotten in any critical estimate of Amiel as a man or writer.
These few words produced a stronger effect than any entreaties I could have used, for the mere name of the Emperor made even the boldest tremble, and Major Amiel next thought of selling his booty.
But a mood which, in the great majority of thinkers, is intermittent, and is easily kept within bounds by the practical needs, the mere physical instincts of life, was in Amiel almost constant, and the natural impulse of the human animal toward healthy movement and a normal play of function, never very strong in him, was gradually weakened and destroyed by an untoward combination of circumstances.
But it is just because Amiel is profoundly sensitive to the problems of evil and responsibility, and M. Renan dismisses them with this half-tolerant, half-skeptical smile, that M. Renan's "Souvenirs" inform and entertain us, while the "Journal Intime" makes a deep impression on that moral sense which is at the root of individual and national life.
"And if Amiel has said, 'Un paysage est un état de l'âme, I may amend it by calling my soul a state of landscape, since it has been visited by your image." This was more reassuring, if exuberant. "Man is mere inert matter when born, but his soul is his own work. Hence, I assert: the Creator of man is man." Now she felt at ease.
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