Amiels Journal | Page 7

that same speculative
passion which burns in the Journal, and one hears, as it were, the first
accents of a melancholy, the first expression of a mood of mind, which
became in after years the fixed characteristic of the writer. "At twenty
he was already proud, timid, and melancholy," writes an old friend; and
a little farther on, "Discouragement took possession of him very early."
However, in spite of this inbred tendency, which was probably
hereditary and inevitable, the years which followed these articles, from
1842 to Christmas, 1848, were years of happiness and steady
intellectual expansion. They were Amiel's Wanderjahre, spent in a free,
wandering student life, which left deep marks on his intellectual
development. During four years, from 1844 to 1848, his headquarters
were at Berlin; but every vacation saw him exploring some new
country or fresh intellectual center--Scandinavia in 1845, Holland in
1846, Vienna, Munich, and Tübingen in 1848, while Paris had already
attracted him in 1841, and he was to make acquaintance with London
ten years later, in 1851. No circumstances could have been more
favorable, one would have thought, to the development of such a nature.
With his extraordinary power of "throwing himself into the object"--of
effacing himself and his own personality in the presence of the thing to
be understood and absorbed--he must have passed these years of travel
and acquisition in a state of continuous intellectual energy and
excitement. It is in no spirit of conceit that he says in 1857, comparing
himself with Maine de Biran, "This nature is, as it were, only one of the
men which exist in me. My horizon is vaster; I have seen much more of

men, things, countries, peoples, books; I have a greater mass of
experiences." 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. We may so easily conceive him as a sedentary
professor, with the ordinary professorial knowledge, or rather
ignorance, of men and the world, falling into introspection under the
pressure of circumstance, and for want, as it were, of something else to
think about. Not at all. The man who has left us these microscopic
analyses of his own moods and feelings, had penetrated more or less
into the social and intellectual life of half a dozen European countries,
and was familiar not only with the books, but, to a large extent also,
with the men of his generation. The meditative and introspective gift
was in him, not the product, but the mistress of circumstance. It took
from the outer world what that world had to give, and then made the
stuff so gained subservient to its own ends.
Of these years of travel, however, the four years spent at Berlin were by
far the most important. "It was at Heidelberg and Berlin," says M.
Scherer, "that the world of science and speculation first opened on the
dazzled eyes of the young man. He was accustomed to speak of his four
years at Berlin as 'his intellectual phase,' and one felt that he inclined to
regard them as the happiest period of his life. The spell which Berlin
laid upon him lasted long." Probably his happiness in Germany was
partly owing to a sense of reaction against Geneva. There are signs that
he had felt himself somewhat isolated at school and college, and that in
the German world his special individuality, with its dreaminess and its
melancholy, found congenial surroundings far more readily than had
been the case in the drier and harsher atmosphere of the Protestant
Rome. However this may be, it is certain that German thought took
possession of him, that he became steeped not only in German methods
of speculation, but in German modes of expression, in German forms
of sentiment, which clung to him through life, and vitally affected both
his opinions and his style. M. Renan and M. Bourget shake their heads
over the Germanisms, which, according to the latter, give a certain
"barbarous" air to many passages of the Journal. But both admit that
Amiel's individuality owes a great part of its penetrating force to that
intermingling of German with French elements, of which there are such
abundant traces in the "Journal Intime." Amiel, in fact, is one more

typical product of a movement which is certainly of enormous
importance in the history of modern thought, even though we may not
be prepared to assent to all the sweeping terms in which a writer like M.
Taine describes it. "From 1780 to 1830," says M. Taine, "Germany
produced all the ideas of our historical age, and during another
half-century, perhaps another century, notre grande affaire sera de les
repenser." He is inclined to compare the influence of German ideas on
the