The Gospel of Defeat

IN the first week of May, 1881, there died at Geneva a man little known to the great world of his contemporaries, and lightly held, even to the lesser world, by family and social ties, yet possessed of the utmost distinction both of mind and character. Henri Frederic Amiel had been a professor in the Academy of Geneva for precisely a generation, or from the year 1849, when he returned to ins native city after an exceedingly honorable four years’ course at the University of Berlin. Until 1854, he held the chair of aesthetics, during the rest of his life that of philosophy ; and doubtless the results of his learned and conscientious instruction have been, and are still, fructifying silently in the minds of many scores of pupils throughout the length and breadth of Europe. But of that more personal, remunerative, and brilliant fame, to which the few who both knew his resources and remembered his early promise believed him to have been, at least once upon a time, so richly entitled, he certainly won very little ; and wffien he died, unmarried, at sixty, his death, in the sense of solid and satisfying achievement, might almost have been called premature. He had a few cherished friends, to whom lie revealed himself more freely than to the world at large, and whose enthusiastic faith in his possibilities took on, as the irrevocable years went by, a touch of something not very unlike indignation at ills obstinate sterility. Chief among these was Edmond Scherer, the first of living French critics, and the greatest, upon the whole, since Sainte-Beuve. Scherer was so deeply impressed by the belief that the genius of his shy friend needed only to he disengaged, so to speak, by a happier arrangement of external circumstances that he never desisted, until Amiel was forty years of age, from his endeavors, by exhortation and practical suggestion, to bring about the required change. In a most interesting essay prefixed to the lately published volume of Amiel’s Ttemains,¹ Scherer has given us an account of the last of these systematic efforts, and of its failure simply, as it seemed, through the lack of Amiel’s own cordial concurrence in the plan devised for his assistance. In this case (what was very rare with him, and repugnant to his retiring nature), Amiel had even made a sort of appeal to his friend to help him to a freer use of his ineffectual faculties. “ Is there yet time,” he had diffidently asked, “ for me to speak from my soul and win a hearing of my fellow-men ? ” And Scherer had responded briskly that there was both time and place, and had proposed to him a congenial subject, and shown him an open channel for the communication of his thoughts to the world. Nothing came of it. Months elapsed before Amiel even answered his friend’s letter, and then he wrote sadly and with compunction, saying how sweet to him had been the taste of Scherer’s encouragement, but pleading, with scarce an attempt either at explanation or excuse, his powerlessness to profit by it. Instead of the original work to which he had been incited, Amiel published soon after a small volume of French translations from Goethe and Schiller: marvelous feats of fidelity and prosodic mechanism, as Scherer impatiently owned, but open in other respects to grave criticism, which he bestowed upon them unsparingly, when requested by the translator to pronounce a public judgment upon his work. Amiel quietly accepted the castigation in the sweetest of notes to his “ dear Rhadamanthus,” and Scherer says, with sorrowful candor, “ I do not reproach myself with having been sincere. What I do regret is that I should have learned too late, from the perusal of the Journal Intime, the key to a problem which then seemed to me barely serious, but which I now feel to have been tragic. I experience a sort of remorse for not having divined Amiel sufficiently to have soothed his sufferings by a sympathy which would have been compounded of pity and admiration.”

Movements of poignant compassion, like that expressed in the above passage, are rare with Scherer, who usually holds himself well outside of even the most interesting subject. If it had been SainteBeuve, indeed, — the softest hearted and most sympathetic critic who ever lived, despite the stinging severity of which he was capable, — we might have suspected some obscure fact of spiritual kinship between him and his subject, and have taken the word tragic with a comfortable grain of salt. But when Edmond Scherer calls a man’s life a tragedy, we may be sure that he means what any sensitive person this side of Geneva would call a supplice.

And such is indeed the revelation of the very remarkable and affecting private journal of the Genevan professor, a part of which has just been given to the world, with Scherer’s introduction. The man who saw himself predestined to the renunciation of his own worldly hopes, and the disappointment of those which others had founded upon him, was unconsciously appealing from the judgment of his contemporaries in pages of the subtlest and most penetrating reflection. He was exploring the deepest mysteries of our mysterious being by the concentrated light of an exceedingly vivid intelligence, and under the guidance of a consciousness often exalted to that point where every pulsation is a pang. He was expressing in secret the fragrance of one of the rarest of moral natures, and holding a colloquy with his own soul and the material universe and the Author of them both, unsurpassed for sincerity and scope.

There are tears in the not unmanly voice which speaks to us from these posthumous pages. It is almost smothered, at intervals, in the sorrow of time, but it thrills none the less with the intuitions of eternity.

Let the reader judge of the exquisite quality of the whole book by a few specimens : —

May 3, 1849. “ Thou hast never felt the internal assurance of genius, the presentiment either of glory or of happiness. Thou hast never foreseen thyself as great and famous, nor even as husband, father, influential citizen. This indifference to the future, this complete distrust, are doubtless signs. That which thou dreamest is vague, indefinite. Thou oughtest not to live, for thou art now no longer capable of living. Keep thyself in order, then ; let the living live, but do thou resume thy thinking. Make a bequest of thy thought and thy heart: it is the most useful thing that thou canst do. Renounce thyself, and accept thy chalice, with its honey and its gall. What matter ! Let God descend into thee ; make haste to embalm thyself in him ; make of thy soul a temple for the Holy Ghost. Do good. Make others happier and better. Have no more any personal ambition, and then thou wilt be consoled for life or death, or whatever may come.”

April 6, 1851. “ ‘ Blessed,’says the apostle, ‘is he who condemneth not himself in the thing which he approveth.’ This internal identity, this unity of conviction, becomes more and more difficult the more the mind becomes analytic, discerning, and clairvoyant. It is hard indeed for freedom to recover the frank unity of instinct.”

“ Alas, we must then reascend a thousand times the peaks to which we had already climbed, — reconquer the points of view once attained. The heart is like those kings who, under the form of a perpetual peace, sign only truces. Alas, yes ! Peace also is a conflict, or rather it is the conflict. We find rest only in effort, as flame exists only in combustion. Oh, Heraclitus ! the image of happiness is the same as that of suffering; unrest and advancement, hell and heaven, are equally in flux. The altar of Vesta and the torments of Beelzebub shine with the same fire! Ah, well, yes; this is life, — double-faced and two-edged life ! The fire which illumines is the fire which consumes. The element of the gods may become that of the damned.”

April 28, 1852. “ Languors of spring, you are come again ! You visit me after a long absence. This morning the song of the birds, the tranquil light, the freshening fields; all went to my heart. Now all is silent ; and silence, thou art terrible ! — terrible as that calm of the ocean which allows us to look into unfathomable depths. But thou lettest us see depths within ourselves which are dizzying, unquenchable desires, treasures of suffering and regret.”

“ Do thyself no violence. Respect the oscillations of feeling within thee. A wiser than thou is their cause. Do not abandon thyself wholly either to instinct or to will. Instinct is a siren ; will, a despot. Be the slave neither of thy momentary impulses and sensations, nor that of a more abstract and general plan. Open thyself to what life brings thee, whether from without or from within, and welcome the unforeseen; but unify thyself always, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of thy plan. Let nature exalt itself to spirit within thee, and spirit resolve itself into nature. It is thus that thy development will become harmonious, and the peace of heaven irradiate thy brow; always on condition that thy peace has been made, and that thou hast climbed thy Calvary.”

Afternoon of the same day. “ Shall I never again experience one of those prodigious reveries such as I used to have — one at dawn, on a certain day of my youth, seated among the ruins of the château of Faucigny ; another, among the mountains, above Lavey, under a noonday sun, reclining at the foot of a tree, and visited by three butterflies; another still upon the sandy shore of the North Sea, lying on my back upon the beach and gazing into the Milky Way, — sublime, immortal, cosmogonic reveries, in which one takes the world to one’s heart, touches the stars, possesses the infinite. Divine moments, those ; hours of ecstasy, when thought flies from world to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes freely, tranquilly, deeply, as with the respiration of the great sea, serene itself and limitless like the firmament of blue; visits of the muse Urania, who draws around the forehead of those she loves the phosphorescent nimbus of contemplative power, and floods the heart with the tranquil intoxication of genius, if not with its authority ; instants of irresistible intuition, when one feels one’s self great as the universe, calm as a god? From the celestial spheres down to the moss or the shell, all creation is, then, subordinated to us, lives in our bosom, accomplishes in us its eternal work, with the regularity of fate and the passionate ardor of love. What hours ! what memories ! Even the traces which they leave behind suffice to fill us with reverence and enthusiasm, like the visits of the Holy Spirit. And then to fall from those heights of the boundless horizons into the muddy ruts of triviality ! What a fall! Poor Moses ! Thou sawest afar the swelling outline, the ravishing boundaries, of the promised land, but thou hadst to lay thy weary bones in a desert grave. Which one of us has not his promised land, his day of rapture, his end in exile ? How pale a counterfeit is our real life of the life whereof we have had glimpses, and how the blazing lights of our prophetic youth do dim the more the twilight of our mournful and monotonous virility ! ”

January 27, 1860. “Order! Oh, Order ! material order, intellectual order, moral order! What solace, what power, what economy! To know whither one goes and what one wills, — this is order. To keep one’s word, to arrive in season, this also is order. To have everything at hand, to manœuvre one’s army, to employ all one’s resources, — it is all order. To discipline one’s habits, one’s volitions ; to organize one’s life, to distribute one’s time, to measure one’s duties, and fairly estimate one’s rights; profitably to invest one’s capital, one’s talents, one’s chances, — it is still and always order. Order is light, peace, internal freedom, the possession of one’s self; it is power. To conceive order, to return to order, to realize order, in one’s self, around one’s self, by one’s own means, — this is æsthetic and moral beauty, this is well-being, this is what must be.”

There are even better things than these in Amiel, from the point of view of the general reader ; delicacies of literary criticism and positive inspirations in the way of metaphysical definition. Nothing would be easier or pleasanter than to fill a score of pages with quotations; and Amiel’s own thoughts are doubtless more striking and suggestive, more conclusive of their own value, than anything which can be said about them. But our present purpose is not so much to review in detail this particular Journal Intime as to compare it with certain other more or less renowned works of its own class, and to inquire a little into the psychological and moral significance of the type to which it belongs.²

To any one at all well read, or specially interested in the private history of human souls, Amiel’s journal will awaken a perfect chime of echoes,— clashing, contending, blending. It reminds us of the prophet Job and the royal David and the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, of À Kempis and Pascal, of Senancour and Maine de Biran and Maurice de Gúerin, as a matter of course, but also of Shakespeare as Hamlet and Chateaubriand as Réné, of Leopardi and Shelley and Alfred de Musset at their sanest and simplest, of Matthew Arnold in his dreaming youth. What, then, is the one quality — for there must at least be one — common to all this incongruous company of so many climes and ages, saints and sinners, kings and paupers, the misanthrope and the man of gentlest charity, poets and men of the world, l’homme de bien and.the flagrant ne’er-do-weel ?

Primarily, it is nothing more nor less than their abnormal capacity for mental suffering. Pain, pure and simple, in its last essence, indefinable, incorporeal, and from a vulgar point of view impossible, has constituted the cachet and the calling not merely of certain men like these, whom the world knows by the accident of their genius, but of many nameless and voiceless human creatures. Even physical pain is sufficiently mysterious, and takes us, when we attempt to analyze it, to the very edge of the unfathomable gulf, through which the little world of men floats onward to its doom. But of the pain of the nerves and senses we can say, in most cases, I ail here, or here ; thus binding the strange fact of our anguish to one, at least, of the recognized conditions of our mortal existence. With that subtler order of pain, experienced by Amiel and other intellectual sufferers, it is not so. That is a tyrannous and terrible something (we have no choice but to call it a something; we know not whether it is essence or agency), free of all the categories and conditions which we can name or comprehend, in whose power men remain, they know not how ; in the wheels of whose invisible machinery they are often most horribly entangled, when the world deems them fairly, or more than fairly, fortunate.

It is probably this last circumstance of the frequent disproportion between what such people suffer and the obvious conditions of their lot which has led to the belief, so common among common men, that these woes of the spirit are for the most part imaginary, or at least unnecessary; in one word, as these cheerful critics are wont to say, in a sense of their own, morbid. Morbid, in the true meaning of the term, they undoubtedly are. A state of mind like that which became chronic with the brilliant Amiel (who, by the way, was more than commonly genial, and even playful and gay, in his intercourse with men) is as truly a malady as phthisis or hemiplegia. It defeats no less inevitably the ambitions and destroys the delights of life, but it no more deserves to he qualified with a nuance of righteous disapprobation than do those melancholy inflictions. A fashion prevailed in France, a generation or two ago, — originating, perhaps, in the vogue of Réné, — of calling this atrophy of the spirit by the special misnomer of the mal du siècle. In truth, it is a malady of all the ages, raging, like other plagues, with greater virulence in some, hut reappearing continually, — sporadic here, and epidemic there; one, and not the least, of the essential ills of time, ineradicable, as it would seem, from the constitution of the species, though men, like Châteaubriand himself, have been known to recover from its attacks. Let us now try, by comparing a few of the most famous and fully reported cases, to gain some insight into the workings of this obscure and pitiful ill. If we fail to perceive any palliative for the individual sufferer, we may at least strengthen our sense of that oneness of our humanity, by virtue of which sympathy becomes the counterpoise, if not the cure, of pain, and suffering voluntarily undergone often seems to be, in a peculiar and mystical sense of the word, salutary.

The two private journals which most obviously suggest themselves for comparison with Amiel’s are those of Pivert de Senancour and Maine de Biran. These are at once the most complete of these introspective chronicles which we possess, the most sincere and the most intelligible. Scherer, in his preface to Amiel’s journal, finely contrasts the three, associating in the comparison the slight but peculiarly subtle notes of Maurice de Guérin. George Sand, in a somewhat explosive preface to one of the later editions of Senancour’s book, can compare it only with Réné. But Maurice de Guérin died early of his malady, and Châteaubriand recovered early from his ; so that their experiences have not the same value and significance as theirs who were called upon for the dry courage of mature manhood, the unmitigated patience of a long series of disillusioned years. Of the relative merits of the two who remain, we have by no means the same opinion as Scherer, who dismisses Maine de Biran with a page or two of rather supercilious comment. To ourselves, he is, of all the great introspectiouists, not the most amiable, not the most eloquent and fascinating, but the most original and instructive ; he who has made his long and painful self-examination best worth while to his fellow-men ; and it is matter of curiosity and surprise to us that even the modest and magnanimous Amiel should have found his merits as a thinker exaggerated by his ablest biographer, Ernest Naville.

Senancour, it can hardly be necessary to say, is Obermann,³ — “ the master of my wandering youth,” in the words of Matthew Arnold, and a somewhat infirm master, truly. He is so entirely Obermann that the real personality seems to have counted for nothing, even with his most sympathetic readers, beside the fictitious one. Born in 1770, he was but nineteen years of age when he renounced the priesthood, for which he had been educated, and went to live in Switzerland, where he wrote, under the thinnest possible disguise of fiction, his famous book of meditations on nature and man. “ He obscured himself, he effaced himself,” says George Sand in the preface already mentioned; “the silence of the valleys, the peaceful cares of pastoral life, the satisfactions of a durable friendship, — we have here the last phase of Obermann.” The real Senancour, however, returned to Paris in 1814, and continued for many years longer to eke out by literary hack-work a sickly and precarious existence. He was living and struggling there at the very time when Sainte-Beuve said so eloquently of Obermann, “ He is the type of the dumb and abortive genius, of the full spring of sensibility wasted upon desert sands, of the hail-smitten harvest which never matures its gold.” He lived on for a full generation longer, in the selfsame city where, about the year 1820, a certain group of gifted young men with a taste for melancholy — J. J. Ampère, Jules Bastide, Auguste Snntelet — formed themselves, as Sainte-Beuve tells us, into a sort of Obermann society (the sympathy of the author of Volupté with their objects is readily conceivable), and fairly “steeped themselves” in him. He even published, as late as 1833, an instantly forgotten novel, and he could hardly have been dead above a year, if he were not even then living, when Matthew Arnold first took Obermann for his guide in Switzerland. For Senancour, delicate as was his organization, had fifteen more years of life to accomplish than either De Biran or Amiel, neither of whom passed his grand climacteric.

Maine de Biran was a Frenchman of distinction, born under the old régime, who at the age of twenty was a member of the body-guard of Louis XVI., and bearing his part in all the mad gayeties of the Versailles of Marie Antoinette, on the eve of the great Revolution.

During one of the émeutes of 1789 he received a wound which disabled him from military service, and thus it happened that when the tempest finally broke he was in shelter from its fury, leading an entirely retired life on his beautiful but lonely estate of Bergerac ; for, like Amiel, he had early been left an orphan. There he remained unmolested until the guillotine had done its savage work, and it had fallen to the lot of a young Corsican officer to reëstablish the reign of law and order in the intellectual capital of the world. A consistent royalist always, he was destined to return to civic life in 1809, as a member of the Corps Legislatif, and to pass his remaining fifteen years chiefly in Paris, where he held high office under the Restoration. During the period of his comparative obscurity he had enjoyed a few years of happy married life ; but his young children, after their mother’s early death, were confided to the care of their maternal aunt, Madame Gérard, and in his thirty-ninth year Maine de Biran found himself once more alone. His was, however, no idle solitude. He had early plunged into metaphysical and medical studies. “ I passed,” as he himself says, half humorously, of the first years of his retirement, “ at one bound from frivolity to philosophy;” and in the years 1803, 1805, and 1807 he competed successfully for prizes offered by the French Institute and the Academy of Berlin for essays on philosophical subjects. He began his career as a disciple of the fashionable philosophy of his day, the sensationalism of Locke and Condillac; but the line of his always independent researches led him far away from the somewhat brutal conclusions of the latter. In the end he became a pronounced spiritualist, hailed by Cousin as “the most original of modern thinkers,” and of whom Royer-Collard, who met him occasionally during his later years in Paris, at the reunions of a small society for philosophical discussion, to which they both belonged, said, admiringly, “ II est le maître de nous tous.”

But it was only on rare occasions that Maine de Biran could thus convince either himself or others of his personal power, and he has left behind him no complete exposition even of his philosophical creed. The essays and memorials upon which his fame chiefly rests were fragments, never incorporated into a symmetrical whole, and published, almost all of them, before the date at which the painful private journal⁴ becomes continuous and full; and we should have no need to concern ourselves with his speculative views at all but for the light which they indirectly shed on the pathology of the human soul. As it is, we must attempt a brief account of them.

Starting, as we have said, from the then prevalent point of view, that the mind contains nothing except what enters it by the senses, and that thought itself is but a function or secretion of its material organ, through the very refinement of his own sensibilities he soon discovered another order of facts. He found within himself the power to observe, and, up to a certain point, to modify and regulate, the chaotic world of his own sensations, — that world which, in his own words, “is composed of impres sions without consciousness, and of reflex movements which are likewise unconscious.” “ This,” he goes on to say, “is the life of the animal, in which being becomes in fact the modification from which it does not distinguish itself. Here is to be found the brute matter of the phenomena of the human mind. At the moment in which consciousness awakes, in the mystery of a first effort of the will, the personal force finds a preëxisting material, in the bosom of which it develops itself. It acts upon this material. It takes possession of it. It does not emanate from it.”

It will thus be seen that M. de Biran allows a large and most important place to the phenomena of sensation, at the same time that he differentiates himself from the true sensationists by recognizing the sense of effort, the capacity for self-modification, as the fundamental fact of consciousness, — that which distinguishes the ego from the non-ego, the thinker from the thought. Descartes had said, I think, therefore I am ; De Biran said, I will, therefore I am. Inside the mysterious limits of his own individuality, he perceived a process analogous to that cosmic one described in the majestic and mystical words, “The spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The chaos, the brute material of our conscious activities, he called the système affectif or life of the animal ; the same under the influence of consciousness, the système perceptif, or life of the man.

At this point the development of Maine de Biran’s psychology rested for a time. That rarely exalted consciousness of his was destined to make him yet other and more solemn revelations, but slowly, imperfectly, and by means of an experience so dolorous that he who has once perused, with a certain sympathy, the private record of the philosopher’s later years shrinks even from reopening the book and retracing the process. It is in this “ selv’ oscura ” of their middle life that our three self-annalists are continually meeting upon common ground, and here, for a time, their subdued voices are hardly to be distinguished from one another.

“ Man,” says Obermann, always the most poetic of the three in his forms of expression, — “ man, who toils to elevate himself, is like those evening clouds which are displayed for an hour, which become vaster than their causes, which appear to increase in bulk even as they waste away, which disappear in one instant.”

“Our life,” says Amiel, “is but a soapbubble suspended on a reed ; it is born, it widens, it clothes itself with the fairest of prismatic colors, by moments it even escapes from the action of the law of gravity. But the black point soon appears ; the globe of gold and emerald vanishes in space, and is resolved into a single drop of impure liquid. All the poets have made this comparison. Its verity is striking. To appear, to shine, to vanish ; to be born, to suffer, to die, — is not this the universal summary of life for an ephemerid, for a nation, for a heavenly body ? ”

“ Time,” says Maine de Biran, “ carries away all my opinions, engulfs them in a perpetual flux. I have taken note of these varying points of view from my youth up. I thought to find, as I advanced in life, something fixed, some loftier point of view, whence I might embrace the entire sequence, correct its errors, reconcile its contradictions. And now, here I am, already well on in years, but still uncertain and vacillating in the way of truth. Is there a point of support, and where is it ? ”

So, too, both Amiel and De Biran speak repeatedly of a sense of somnambulism, — of living surrounded by illusions which have no counterpart in any reality, of walking in a vain show and disquieting themselves for naught. There is also common to all three an intense and altogether peculiar susceptibility— now taking the form of sympathy, and now of revolt — to what may be described as the pulsations of the life of external nature, to the variations of the sky and the procession of the seasons, with its attendant phenomena. Spring, which often brings even to the most thoroughly acclimated and contented children of earth light touches of vague sadness, is for them a season of acutest pain. It is as if they experienced in their own persons the peculiar anguish which attends the return of life after a temporary suspension, the recovery from a swoon. It is noticeable, however, that Maine de Biran, who was less an artist than either of the others, and with whom individuality was, in some sort, a matter of conscience as well as of consciousness, here suffers most keenly of them all. The other two have, to some extent, the power of absorbing themselves in nature. Atuiel has it, at times, in a very extraordinary degree. He is subject to what he calls Pruteism, and he finds wonderful words for describing the strange experience. The mounting flood of the century’s pantheism came nearer, than in the case of his predecessors, to submerging him in its “ vast and wandering grave.”

Long before the day of either of them (there were only three years during which they were all contemporary) Pascal had broached the theory that the life of the soul, like that of the bodily organs, is revealed to the subject only through the medium of pain ; and that suffering and self-knowledge not merely imply, but continually react upon and enhance one another. The positive and scientific side of Maine de Biran’s mind, together with his long practice in analytic thinking and writing, enabled him both to observe with steadiness and record with precision certain phases in the progress of the “ long disease ” of life, which in the case of his more imaginative compeers either evaporated in reverie, or exhaled in inarticulate sighs. Of that free-will, whose existence his early meditations had so clearly revealed to him, whose claims to philosophic recognition he had so strikingly vindicated, he was now to experience with an equally abnormal intensity the shackles and the limitations ; the misery of the incessant struggle by virtue of which it maintains its place for a time in our perishable organism. Physiology tells us that every one of those facts of effort, of which Maine de Biran had perceived the central importance, is accompanied by a disintegration of the material substance of the muscles and the brain. It is almost as if this man had had a nervous system delicate enough to report the progress of this obscure and incessant dissolution, of which the mass of men are, Heaven be praised, entirely unconscious. We are the more prone to believe it because his mental misery increased so noticeably from about that fifth decade, in which the decline of human life begins, and the waste of substance inevitably exceeds its repair. Saint Paul, who was also curiously and keenly conscious of his own mortality, had said, “ I die daily ; ” but Maine de Biran might have said, “ I die hourly, momently.” In September, 1816, he writes, “ It is not surprising that as we advance in life we are more and more tempted to seek distraction, and to avoid ourselves. We no longer find within those engaging sentiments of youth which make a man dear to himself. As we descend into the depths of our being, we are forced to recognize the losses which we have sustained and are sustaining daily. No more future, no more hope, no more progress ! We discover a mass of those miseries, pettinesses, vices, which are the accompaniment of old age. We feel that we can go no farther, that the end is near.” And in May of the succeeding year, There is within me a faculty of reason and reflection, which judges and controls all the rest. My constant exercise of this faculty at a time when I was younger and stronger and in better intellectual condition is to-day a disadvantage, I assist as witness at the degradation and successive loss of the faculties which gave me value in my own eyes. It would be better, perhaps, not to take account of one’s self, to cherish illusions with regard to one’s own value. But if I am led by the sense of my intellectual and moral decadence to look beyond myself for consolation and support, reason and reflection, after having been the occasion of suffering, will doubtless have rendered me the greatest service of which they are capable.” And again, more simply and brokenly, “ I have no basis, no constant motive. I suffer, — I suffer. I will take refuge in the thought of God.”

There is little enough of the joyous enthusiasm of “conversion” here, yet Maine de Biran was led, slowly always, and at first very blindly, in the direction thus indicated. Before attempting, however, to trace the latest development of his speculative thought, let us say that it seems to us past a doubt that we have precisely here, in the mysteriously exaggerated sufferings of these distinguished patients, one, if not an allsufficient, explanation of their practical inefficiency, — their failure to take that place in the world of men to which their native power would seem to have entitled them. They are simply exhausted by their conflict with the sinister powers of the air, — anæmic from the loss of their life-blood by invisible wounds. The water which a man has once seen under a microscope will never quench his thirst. But to return to the speculations of Maine de Biran.

That central will, which he found so painfully baffled and thwarted, as the years went on, by the wearing out of its corporeal instruments, he nevertheless felt to subsist within him, intact in its essence and unaltered by the wreck of matter ; and he began to consider, with more and more of assurance, the possibility that its roots go deeper than, the beginnings of human life, and that its final attachments are altogether outside the world of time and sense,.— are, in fact, religious. Still groping cautiously, therefore, by the guidingthread of a carefully noted experience, he evolved the notion of a third system, in addition to the sensitive and perceptive, — the système relatif — wherein he finds room for the connection of the soul with God. The will which rebels and contends against the great unseen necessity and the will which submits doggedly to its omnipotency are still in chains. The will which ranges itself on the side of its Ruler is free, and in so far as free the equal of its cause. The poet laureate of England, in the preface to his most profound work, has furnished in a single couplet an exactly appropriate motto for the philosophy of Maine de Biran : for its first two divisions, “ Our wills are ours, we know not how; ” for , the third and last, “ Our wills are ours, to make them thine.” Epictetus, as well, had ages before condensed into one succinct exhortation the essence of the Frenchman’s supposed discovery,

“ Choose the inevitable; ” and some of the most interesting pages, from a literary point of view, of Maine de Biran’s later journal are those in which he compares, with extreme sympathy of mind on either hand, and subtlety of analysis, the greatest of the Stoics with some of the most spiritual of Christian writers, — Marcus Aurelius with À Kempis and Fénelon. The grounds on which he finally awards his firm preference to the latter illustrate at once his disinterestedness and his humility, Stoicism he finds possible only for the elect of the elect, the fewest of the few; Christianity is applicable to all mankind.

“ And is this all ? ” exclaims poor Amiel, with the true impatience of fever, as he flings aside the memorial of his elder brother in sorrow, complaining that the book has given him “ a sort of asphyxia,” “ paralysis by assimilation and fascination by sympathy.” “ I pity him, and I am afraid of my pity, knowing that his faults and his disease are mine.” And then he falls into somewhat captious criticism: “ It took this thinker thirty years to advance from Epicurean quiescence to Fénelonian quietism, and his whole anthropological discovery consists in having reiterated the theory of the triple life, — the inferior, the human, and the superior, — which is in Pascal and in Aristotle. Is this what they call a philosopher in France?” If Amiel had further known that Maine de Biran’s views were, erelong, to be pompously cited as authority for the tawdry phantasmagoria of Bulwer’s Strange Story, he would have found the fact rather grateful than otherwise, in the momentary wretchedness of his unreasonable disappointment. Scherer, too, in his preface to Amiel’s book, sums up the results of Maine de Biran’s researches into the secrets of human suffering with a certain clear and cold disdain : “The interest of the book ” (Maine de Biran’s Pensées) “consists in the contradiction between the moral sense of the author which supposes responsibility and a psychological analysis which suppresses it. It is stoicism contending against fatality, and taking refuge in the doctrine of grace.”

In effect, this is Maine de Biran’s final word, and, from the point of view of the student of human philosophies, the conclusion is undoubtedly both slight and trite. No better one has ever yet been offered, to be sure, but that matters little. It interests us more at the present moment to know that the resolution of discord thus foreshadowed sufficed for the assuagement of Maine de Biran’s protracted mental sufferings. He was never positively happy in his faith, if faith it may be called, but he began to rest. The tension was relaxed. There stole over his long strained and tortured faculties that blessed beginning of quietude, the sight of whose counterpart in the bodily frame has caused how many a helpless watcher over agonies beyond his power to relieve to lift his eyes and involuntarily murmur those old, old words of tremulous gratitude and appeal, “ Lord, if he sleep he shall do well ! ”

Before his death, on the 20th of July, 1824, Maine de Biran received the last rites of the Roman Catholic church, in which he had been born and bred. The wholly orthodox tendency of his final speculations naturally approved and endeared him to the foremost apostles of that Catholic revival which had been heralded by the author of the Génie du Christianisme. Nevertheless, his spiritual condition and “exercises” do not appear to have been entirely satisfactory to the closer Christian critics of any school. His Catholic biographer, Auguste Nicolas,⁵ laments that, while the last word of Maine de Biran’s journal, entered about two months before his death, concerns the Mediator by whose side man walks in the presence of God, he should yet have experienced so little of the solace which the majority of those bearing the Christian name have certainly derived from confiding in the actual and miraculously protracted presence of Christ in the midst of them. His Protestant biographers would have been better satisfied if they had been able to discover in the candid pages of the journal any definite sense of original sin, or need of an external atonement. Nevertheless, it is one of the latter, Ernest Naville, who has illustrated the tale of M. de Biran’s spiritual struggles most fully, and who has prefixed to his edition of the Pensées the singularly appropriate motto from St. Augustine : “ Domine, fecisti nos ad te, et inquietum est cor nostrum donee requiescat in te.”

Amiel, too, had his religion, and that not merely an inward motion, but an outward habit, — the habit of his youth, which he never abandoned. There are frequent notes of sermons in the Journal Intime, and an exceedingly interesting commentary on a course of lectures delivered at Geneva by Ernest Naville himself on La Vie Eternelle. There is indeed a peculiarly pathetic entry in the diary, dated March 17, 1861, and beginning, “Langueur homicide! tristesse mortelle ! ” in which he goes on to say, “ Our church ignores the sufferings of the heart. She does not divine them. She has little of compassionate precaution or wise regard to delicate pains, no intuition of the mysteries of tenderness, no religious suavity. Under a pretext of spirituality, we crush legitimate aspiration. Wo have lost the mystic sense ; and can there be a religion without mysticism, a rose without perfume ? We are always saying repentance, sanctification, but consolation, adoration, — these also are two of the essential elements of religion.” Nevertheless, Protestantism is still to him a church ; and his church and the shadow of its unsculptured porch is grateful to his aging eyes.

For Senancour alone there seem to have been no simple mother cares in his last agony. He died as he had lived, exceptionally alone. But let us not fail to note one or two particulars, in which he seems, half unconsciously, to draw nearer to the spirit of the founder of Christianity than either of the others, He is less a spiritual aristocrat than they. The sentiment which secludes him from his fellow-men is not so much one of fastidiousness or disdain—even for the intellectually poor — as of utter helplessness. He finds himself in the ranks of humanity with no arms for bearing his part in the battle. Maine de Biran knew that he had a will which was thwarted by circumstance. Senancour mourns that he has none whatever. But his power of passive sympathy with others is intense; and with him, oftener than with either De Biran or Amiel, the sickening accuracy of description, the piercing, blind appeal, are for sorrows which are not his own.

The application of the words “ Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these,” etc., to works of practical benevolence is happily universal in our day amoug all who bear the Christian name. Our object has been to call attention for a moment to miseries of a no less poignant reality which are beyond relief by gifts of clothing, food, and shelter ; and he whose brief life in Judea, whether or no it have the unique and eternal significance which his professed followers assign it, did certainly epitomize in a remarkable degree the numberless varieties of human woe, had his full share in this nameless and incorporeal anguish. Over and above its privation of all that have ever been held the prizes of human existence, — love, honor, beauty, riches, and power, — that life of thirty-three years passed encompassed by a great sphere of spiritual sorrow, into the mysteries of whose awful culmination a not too reverent theology has, for the most part, peered in vain. Reflecting upon these things, we are more and more confirmed in our impression that there is a fixed place in the mundane order for souls whose too keen sense of its imperfection deprives them of the little power they might otherwise possess to disguise, or modify, or ameliorate it. The average world, which shakes its wise head over their inexplicable inefficiency and needless enervation, still dates its daily doings from the commencement of a life which called forth the saddest commentary ever yet pronounced upon a so-called, unsuccessful human career : “ He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”

Harriet Waters Preston.