AMIEL’S “Journal Intime” represents a form of essay writing which has many advantages over the ordinary, but as it requires the essayist to look forward to his own death as prerequisite to the publication of the work which is to give him literary immortality, its popularity with writers themselves is never likely to be great. With readers, however, if Amiel’s imitators equal his work, it is not likely to fail of the highest favor. When published in England and America in the translation of Mrs. Humphry Ward, Amiel’s “Journal” took its place at once among the classics of the language, and Mrs. Ward may be remembered by it among generations not well enough informed of the merits of nineteenth-century fiction to remember even the titles of her excellent novels.

  Though unmistakably written for ultimate publication, the literary pretext of privacy given Amiel’s work by its inscription in a journal of the writer’s inner life allows a freedom which could not have been attained otherwise and, as an incident of this freedom of expression, a scope as wide as the daily reflections suggested to a man of high cultivation by close observation of all the manifold phenomena of a highly organized civilization. Perhaps no other single book represents the cultured life of the last half of the nineteenth century so well as Amiel’s “Journal,” though he himself was far removed from that positivism which, in France and Germany as well as in England and America, did so much to give its tone to the literature of the period.

  In their style, the entries in the “Journal,” whether “Essays” or “Pensées,” represent the best results of careful method. Seemingly the unstudied expression of unpremeditated ideas, they win the reader’s friendship and draw him into the most confidential relations with the writer. If they have a vitiating quality, it is suggested by their form itself and by their author’s action in leaving them to achieve for him a posthumous celebrity. They are sometimes almost too delicate, and they have an inspiration of “Weltschmerz,”—a mild dissatisfaction with life which, if it is at times inevitable, even in the best-regulated lives, ought the more on that account to be kept out of literature in a world which needs “Heave-ho” songs for the men at its capstans more than it does new dirges for its dead.

  Of Amiel Mrs. Ward writes that he “lived alone and died sadly persuaded that his life had been a barren mistake, whereas, all the while,—such is the irony of things,—he had been in reality working out the mission assigned him in the spiritual economy, and faithfully obeying the secret mandate which had impressed itself upon his youthful consciousness: “Let the living live; and you, gather together your thoughts, leave behind you a legacy of feelings and ideas, and you will be most useful so.’”

  Amiel was born at Geneva in 1821. After completing his scholastic education at Berlin in 1848, he became professor of Æsthetics and French Literature in the Academy of Geneva. After four years (in 1853) he became professor of Moral Philosophy in the same institution. He made no reputation during his life and attempted to make none. Not until his “Journal” was read after his death, did any one suspect that another of the immortals had come and gone unrecognized.