Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Amiel's Journal: The Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel

It was in the last days of December, 1882, that the first volume of Henri Frdric Amiels 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 Amiels most valued friends, and it was prefaced also by a little Avertissement, in which the Editorsthat is to say, the Genevese friends to whom the care and publication of the Journal had been in the first instance entrusteddescribed 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 Amiels 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 souls 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 dbut. It contained nothing, or almost nothing, of ordinary biographical material. M. Scherers Introduction supplied such facts as were absolutely necessary to the understanding of Amiels 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 the Journal had been during his lifetime wholly unknown to the general European public. In Geneva itself he had been commonly regarded as a man who had signally disappointed the hopes and expectations of his friends, whose reserve and indecision of character had in many respects spoiled his life, and alienated the society around him; while his professional lectures were generally pronounced dry and unattractive, and the few volumes of poems which represented almost his only contributions to literature had nowhere met with any real cordiality of reception. Those concerned, therefore, in the publication of the first volume of the Journal can hardly have had much expectation of a wide success. Geneva is not a favorable starting-point for a French book, and it may well have seemed that not even the support of M. Scherers name would be likely to carry the volume beyond a small local circle. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 8545
Author: Amiel, Henri Frédéric
Release Date: Jul 1, 2005
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Ward, Humphry, Mrs., 1851-1920