Kipps

“Et depuis trois hivers, ma belle, L’enfant aux grands yeux de velours Maintient son petit coeur fidèle, Fidèle comme aux premiers jours.”

His last poetical volume, “Jour à Jour,” published in 1880, is far more uniformly melancholy and didactic in tone than the two earlier collections from which we have been quoting. But though the dominant note is one of pain and austerity, of philosophy touched with emotion, and the general tone more purely introspective, there are many traces in it of the younger Amiel, dear, for very ordinary human reasons, to his sisters and his friends. And, in general, the pathetic interest of the book for all whose sympathy answers to what George Sand calls “les tragédies que la pensée aperçoit et que l’oeil ne voit point” is very great. Amiel published it a year before his death, and the struggle with failing power which the Journal reveals to us in its saddest and most intimate reality, is here expressed in more reserved and measured form. Faith, doubt, submission, tenderness of feeling, infinite aspiration, moral passion, that straining hope of something beyond, which is the life of the religious soul–they are all here, and the Dernier Mot with which the sad little volume ends is poor Amiel’s epitaph on himself, his conscious farewell to that more public aspect of his life in which he had suffered much and achieved comparatively so little.

“Nous avons à plaisir compliqué le bonheur, Et par un idéal frivole et suborneur Attaché nos coeurs à la terre; Dupes des faux dehors tenus pour l’important, Mille choses pour nous ont du prix … et pourtant Une seule était nécessaire.

“Sans fin nous prodiguons calculs, efforts, travaux; Cependant, au milieu des succès, des bravos En nous quelque chose soupire; Multipliant nos pas et nos soins de fourmis, Nous vondrions nous faire une foule d’amis…. Pourtant un seul pouvait suffire.

“Victime des désirs, esclave des regrets, L’homme s’agite, et s’use, et vieillit sans progrès Sur sa toile de Pénélope; Comme un sage mourant, puissions-nous dire en paix J’ai trop longtemps erré, cherché; je me trompais; Tout est bien, mon Dieu m’enveloppe.”

Upon the small remains of Amiel’s prose outside the Journal there is no occasion to dwell. The two essays on Madame de Staël and Rousseau contain much fine critical remark, and might find a place perhaps as an appendix to some future edition of the Journal; and some of the “Pensées,” published in the latter half of the volume containing the “Grains de Mils,” are worthy of preservation. But in general, whatever he himself published was inferior to what might justly have been expected of him, and no one was more conscious of the fact than himself.

The story of his fatal illness, of the weary struggle for health which filled the last seven years of his life, is abundantly told in the Journal–we must not repeat it here. He had never been a strong man, and at fifty-three he received, at his doctor’s hands, his arrêt de mort. We are told that what killed him was “heart disease, complicated by disease of the larynx,” and that he suffered “much and long.” He was buried in the cemetery of Clarens, not far from his great contemporary Alexander Vinet; and the affection of a sculptor friend provided the monument which now marks his resting-place.