COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY MACMILLAN & CO. First edition (2 vols. Globe 8vo) 1885. Second edition (1 vol. Crown 8vo) 1888. Reprinted 1889; January and October, 1890; March and September, 1891, 1892; January and April, 1893; January, August, 1894; August, 1895; February, 1896; October, 1897; March, 1899; July, 1900; October, 1901; June, 1903; March, 1905; May, 1907; July, 1909. New edition, in one volume, September, 1906. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.- - Berwick & Smith Co. AMIEL'S JOURNAL. VOL. II. [Where no other name is mentioned, Geneva is “Ɔ be understood as the author's place of residence.] 11th April 1868 (Mornex sur Salève).· I left town in a great storm of wind, which was raising clouds of dust along the suburban roads, and two hours later I found myself safely installed among the mountains, just like last year. I think of staying a week here. The sounds of the village are wafted to my open window, barkings of distant dogs, voices of women at the fountain, the songs of birds in the lower orchards. The green carpet of the plain is dappled by passing shadows thrown upon it by the clouds; the landscape has the charm of delicate tint and a sort of languid grace. Already I am full of a sense of wellbeing, I am tasting the joys of that contemplative state in which the soul, issuing from itself, becomes as it were the soul of a country or a landscape, and feels iving within it a multitude of lives. Here is no more resistance, negation, blame; everything is affirmative; I feel myself in harmony with nature and with surroundings, of which I seem to myself the expression. The heart opens to the immensity of things. This is what I love! Nam mihi res, non me rebus submittere conor. 12th April 1868 (Easter Day), Mornex, Eight A.M. - The day has opened solemnly and religiously. There is a tinkling of bells from the valley: even the fields seem to be breathing forth a canticle of praise. Humanity must have a worship, and, all things considered, is not the Christian worship the best amongst those which have existed on a large scale? The religion of sin, of repentance, and reconciliation - the religion of the new birth and of eternal life is not a religion to be ashamed of. In spite of all the aberrations of fanaticism, all the superstitions of formalism, all the ugly superstructures of hypocrisy, all the fantastic puerilities of theology, the Gospel has modified the world and consoled mankind. Christian humanity is not much better than Pagan humanity, but it would be much worse without a religion, and without this religion. Every religion proposes an ideal and a model; the Christian ideal is sublime, and its model of a divine beauty. We may hold aloof from the churches, and yet bow ourselves before Jesus. We may be suspicious of the clergy, and refuse to have anything to do with catechisms, and yet love the Holy and the Just, who came to save and not to curse. Jesus will always supply us with the best criticism of Christianity, and when Christianity has passed away the religion of Jesus will in all probability survive. After Jesus as God we shall come back to faith in the God of Jesus. Five o'clock P.M. - I have been for a long walk through Cézargues, Eseri, and the Yves woods, returning by the Pont du Loup. The weather was cold and gray. A great popular merrymaking of some sort, with its multitude of blouses, and its drums and fifes, has been going on riotously for an hour under my window. The crowd has sung a number of songs, drinking songs, ballads, romances, but all more or less heavy and ugly. The muse has never touched our country people, and the Swiss race is not graceful even in its gaiety. A bear in high spirits—this is what one thinks of. The poetry it produces too is desperately vulgar and commonplace. Why? In the first place, because, in spite of the pretences of our democratic philosophies, the classes whose backs are bent with manual labour are æsthetically inferior to the others. In the next place, because our old rustic peasant poetry is dead, and the peasant, when he tries to share the music or the poetry of the cultivated classes, only succeeds in caricaturing it, and not in copying it. Democracy, by laying it down that there is but one class for all men, has in fact done a wrong to everything that is not first-rate. As we can no longer without offence judge men according to a certain recognised order, we can only compare them to the best that exists, and then they naturally seem to us more mediocre, more ugly, more deformed than before. If the passion for equality potentially raises the average, it really degrades nineteen-twentieths of individuals below their former place. There is a progress in the domain of law and a falling back in the domain of art. And meanwhile the artists see multiplying before them their bête-noire, the |