Amiels Journal | Page 2

so that sentences
which survive in the Journal in a more technical form are to be found in
a more literary form in the "Grains de Mil."
In two or three cases--not more, I think--I have allowed myself to
transpose a sentence bodily, and in a few instances I have added some
explanatory words to the text, which wherever the addition was of any
importance, are indicated by square brackets.
My warmest thanks are due to my friend and critic, M. Edmond
Scherer, from whose valuable and interesting study, prefixed to the

French Journal, as well as from certain materials in his possession
which he has very kindly allowed me to make use of, I have drawn by
far the greater part of the biographical material embodied in the
Introduction. M. Scherer has also given me help and advice through the
whole process of translation--advice which his scholarly knowledge of
English has made especially worth having.
In the translation of the more technical philosophical passages I have
been greatly helped by another friend, Mr. Bernard Bosanquet, Fellow
of University College, Oxford, the translator of Lotze, of whose care
and pains in the matter I cherish a grateful remembrance.
But with all the help that has been so freely given me, not only by these
friends but by others, I confide the little book to the public with many a
misgiving! May it at least win a few more friends and readers here and
there for one who lived alone, and died sadly persuaded that his life had
been a barren mistake; whereas, all the while--such is the irony of
things--he had been in reality working out the mission assigned him in
the spiritual economy, and faithfully obeying the secret mandate which
had impressed itself upon his youthful consciousness: "_Let the living
live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy
of feeling and ideas; you will be most useful so_."
MARY A. WARD.

INTRODUCTION
It was in the last days of December, 1882, that the first volume of Henri
Frédéric Amiel's "Journal Intime" was published at Geneva. The book,
of which the general literary world knew nothing prior to its appearance,
contained a long and remarkable Introduction from the pen of M.
Edmond Scherer, the well-known French critic, who had been for many
years one of Amiel's most valued friends, and it was prefaced also by a
little Avertissement, in which the "Editors"--that is to say, the Genevese
friends to whom the care and publication of the Journal had been in the
first instance entrusted--described in a few reserved and sober words
the genesis and objects of the publication. 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. Amiel recorded in them his
various occupations, and the incidents of each day. He preserved in

them his psychological observations, and the impressions produced on
him by books. But his Journal was, above all, the confidant of his most
private and intimate thoughts; a means whereby the thinker became
conscious of his own inner life; a safe shelter wherein his questionings
of fate and the future, the voice of grief, of self-examination and
confession, the soul's cry for inward peace, might make themselves
freely heard.
"... In the directions concerning his papers which he left behind him,
Amiel expressed the wish that his literary executors should publish
those parts of the Journal which might seem to them to possess either
interest as thought or value as experience. The publication of this
volume is the fulfillment of this desire. The reader will find in it, not a
volume of Memoirs, but the confidences of a solitary thinker, the
meditations of a philosopher for whom the things of the soul were the
sovereign realities of existence."
Thus modestly announced, the little volume made its quiet _début_. It
contained nothing, or almost nothing, of ordinary biographical material.
M. Scherer's Introduction supplied such facts as were absolutely
necessary to the understanding of Amiel's intellectual history, but
nothing more. Everything of a local or private character that could be
excluded was excluded. The object of the editors in their choice of
passages for publication was declared to be simply "the reproduction of
the moral and intellectual physiognomy of their friend," while M.
Scherer expressly disclaimed any biographical intentions, and limited
his Introduction as far as possible to "a study of the character and
thought of Amiel." The contents of the volume, then, were purely
literary and philosophical; its prevailing tone was a tone of
introspection, and the public which can admit the claims and overlook
the inherent defects of introspective literature has always been a small
one. The writer of