Amiels Journal | Page 9

the All, the totality of things: "What I desire is the sum
of all desires, and what I seek to know is the sum of all different kinds
of knowledge. Always the complete, the absolute, the teres atque
rotundum." And it was this antagonism, or rather this fusion of
traditions in him, which went far to make him original, which opened
to him, that is to say, so many new lights on old paths, and stirred in
him such capacities of fresh and individual expression.
We have been carried forward, however, a little too far by this general
discussion of Amiel's debts to Germany. Let us take up the biographical
thread again. In 1848 his Berlin apprenticeship came to an end, and he
returned to Geneva. "How many places, how many impressions,
observations, thoughts--how many forms of men and things--have
passed before me and in me since April, 1843," he writes in the Journal,
two or three months after his return. "The last seven years have been
the most important of my life; they have been the novitiate of my
intelligence, the initiation of my being into being." The first literary
evidence of his matured powers is to be found in two extremely
interesting papers on Berlin, which he contributed to the _Bibliothèque
Universelle_ in 1848, apparently just before he left Germany. Here for
the first time we have the Amiel of the "Journal Intime." The young
man who five years before had written his painstaking review of M.
Rio is now in his turn a master. He speaks with dignity and authority,
he has a graphic, vigorous prose at command, the form of expression is
condensed and epigrammatic, and there is a mixture of enthusiasm and
criticism in his description of the powerful intellectual machine then
working in the Prussian capital which represents a permanent note of
character, a lasting attitude of mind. A great deal, of course, in the two
papers is technical and statistic, but what there is of general comment
and criticism is so good that one is tempted to make some melancholy
comparisons between them and another article in the _Bibliothèque_,
that on Adolphe Pictet, written in 1856, and from which we have
already quoted. In 1848 Amiel was for awhile master of his powers and
his knowledge; no fatal divorce had yet taken place in him between the

accumulating and producing faculties; he writes readily even for the
public, without labor, without affectations. Eight years later the
reflective faculty has outgrown his control; composition, which
represents the practical side of the intellectual life, has become difficult
and painful to him, and he has developed what he himself calls "a
wavering manner, born of doubt and scruple."
How few could have foreseen the failure in public and practical life
which lay before him at the moment of his reappearance at Geneva in
1848! "My first meeting with him in 1849 is still vividly present to
me," says M. Scherer. "He was twenty-eight, and he had just come
from Germany laden with science, but he wore his knowledge lightly,
his looks were attractive, his conversation animated, and no affectation
spoiled the favorable impression he made on the bystander--the whole
effect, indeed, was of something brilliant and striking. In his young
alertness Amiel seemed to be entering upon life as a conqueror; one
would have said the future was all his own."
His return, moreover, was marked by a success which seemed to secure
him at once an important position in his native town. After a public
competition he was appointed, in 1849, professor of esthetics and
French literature at the Academy of Geneva, a post which he held for
four years, exchanging it for the professorship of moral philosophy in
1854. Thus at twenty-eight, without any struggle to succeed, he had
gained, it would have seemed, that safe foothold in life which should be
all the philosopher or the critic wants to secure the full and fruitful
development of his gifts. Unfortunately the appointment, instead of the
foundation and support, was to be the stumbling block of his career.
Geneva at the time was in a state of social and political ferment. After a
long struggle, beginning with the revolutionary outbreak of November,
1841, the Radical party, led by James Fazy, had succeeded in ousting
the Conservatives--that is to say, the governing class, which had ruled
the republic since the Restoration--from power. And with the advent of
the democratic constitution of 1846, and the exclusion of the old
Genevese families from the administration they had so long
monopolized, a number of subsidiary changes were effected, not less
important to the ultimate success of Radicalism than the change in
political machinery introduced by the new constitution. Among them
was the disappearance of almost the whole existing staff of