Amiels Journal | Page 6

to his
sense of obligation.
Writing in 1856 he describes the effect produced in Geneva by M.
Pictet's Lectures on Aesthetics in 1840--the first ever delivered in a
town in which the Beautiful had been for centuries regarded as the rival
and enemy of the True. "He who is now writing," says Amiel, "was
then among M. Pictet's youngest hearers. Since then twenty
experiences of the same kind have followed each other in his
intellectual experience, yet none has effaced the deep impression made
upon him by these lectures. Coming as they did at a favorable moment,
and answering many a positive question and many a vague aspiration
of youth, they exercised a decisive influence over his thought; they
were to him an important step in that continuous initiation which we
call life, they filled him with fresh intuitions, they brought near to him
the horizons of his dreams. And, as always happens with a first-rate
man, what struck him even more than the teaching was the teacher. So
that this memory of 1840 is still dear and precious to him, and for this
double service, which is not of the kind one forgets, the student of
those days delights in expressing to the professor of 1840 his sincere
and filial gratitude."
Amiel's first literary production, or practically his first, seems to have
been the result partly of these lectures, and partly of a visit to Italy

which began in November, 1841. In 1842, a year which was spent
entirely in Italy and Sicily, he contributed three articles on M. Rio's
book, "L'Art Chrétien," to the _Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève_.
We see in them the young student conscientiously writing his first
review--writing it at inordinate length, as young reviewers are apt to do,
and treating the subject ab ovo in a grave, pontifical way, which is a
little naïve and inexperienced indeed, but still promising, as all
seriousness of work and purpose is promising. All that is individual in
it is first of all the strong Christian feeling which much of it shows, and
secondly, the tone of melancholy which already makes itself felt here
and there, especially in one rather remarkable passage. As to the
Christian feeling, we find M. Rio described as belonging to "that noble
school of men who are striving to rekindle the dead beliefs of France,
to rescue Frenchmen from the camp of materialistic or pantheistic ideas,
and rally them round that Christian banner which is the banner of true
progress and true civilization." The Renaissance is treated as a
disastrous but inevitable crisis, in which the idealism of the Middle
Ages was dethroned by the naturalism of modern times--"The
Renaissance perhaps robbed us of more than it gave us"--and so on.
The tone of criticism is instructive enough to the student of Amiel's
mind, but the product itself has no particular savor of its own. The
occasional note of depression and discouragement, however, is a
different thing; here, for those who know the "Journal Intime," there is
already something characteristic, something which foretells the future.
For instance, after dwelling with evident zest on the nature of the
metaphysical problems lying at the root of art in general, and Christian
art in particular, the writer goes on to set the difficulty of M. Rio's task
against its attractiveness, to insist on the intricacy of the investigations
involved, and on the impossibility of making the two instruments on
which their success depends--the imaginative and the analytical
faculty--work harmoniously and effectively together. And supposing
the goal achieved, supposing a man by insight and patience has
succeeded in forcing his way farther than any previous explorer into the
recesses of the Beautiful or the True, there still remains the enormous,
the insuperable difficulty of expression, of fit and adequate
communication from mind to mind; there still remains the question
whether, after all, "he who discovers a new world in the depths of the

invisible would not do wisely to plant on it a flag known to himself
alone, and, like Achilles, 'devour his heart in secret;' whether the
greatest problems which have ever been guessed on earth had not better
have remained buried in the brain which had found the key to them,
and whether the deepest thinkers--those whose hand has been boldest in
drawing aside the veil, and their eye keenest in fathoming the mysteries
beyond it--had not better, like the prophetess of Ilion, have kept for
heaven, and heaven only, secrets and mysteries which human tongue
cannot truly express, nor human intelligence conceive."
Curious words for a beginner of twenty-one! There is a touch, no doubt,
of youth and fatuity in the passage; one feels how much the vague
sonorous phrases have pleased the writer's immature literary sense; but
there is something else too--there is a breath of