At La Chênaie, February 6, 1833

I am finishing the first volume of Goethe’s Memoirs. This book has left me with various impressions. My imagination is deeply stirred by Marguerite, Lucinde, Frédérica. Klopstock, Herder, Wieland, Gellert, Gleim, Bürger, that surge of German poetry, so beautiful and so national in character, rising toward the middle of the eighteenth century, all that ferment of thought in German minds is profoundly absorbing, especially in the light of the present age, so fruitful and so glorious for Germany. But a bitter thought arises as one follows the details of education and the course of young people’s intellectual development as it is understood in that country; and the bitterness springs from comparison with French education. I have consumed ten years in schools, and emerged carrying, with a few scraps of Latin and Greek, an enormous mass of boredom. That is more or less the result of any school education in France. The authors of antiquity are placed in young people’s hands; that is good. But are they taught to know, to appreciate antiquity? Have the connections of these magnificent literatures with nature, with religious doctrines, philosophical systems, the fine arts, the civilization of ancient peoples ever been unfolded for them? Has their understanding ever been led through that beautiful chain which binds together all the parts of a people’s civilization, making of them a superb whole whose every detail touches, reflects, and explains the others? What teacher, reading Homer or Virgil to his pupils, has unfolded the poetry of the Iliad or the Aeneid through the poetry of nature beneath the skies of Greece or Italy? Who has thought of explaining poets through philosophers and philosophers through poets, the poets in turn through artists, Plato through Homer, Homer through Phidias? These great minds are isolated, a literature is dismembered, and its scattered limbs are thrown to you, without anyone taking the trouble to tell you what place they occupied, what relations they maintained within the great organism from which they have been severed. Children have a particular fondness for cutting up the engravings that fall into their hands: with great skill they separate the figures from one another; their scissors follow every outline exactly, and the group, thus divided, is distributed among the little company, because each child wants a picture. Our teachers’ work bears no small resemblance to the children’s; and an author thus separated from his surroundings is as difficult to understand as the figure the children have cut out and detached from the whole composition and its shadows. After that, should one be surprised that studies are so empty, so inadequate? What can remain of a long and dogged attachment to the dead letter, almost stripped of meaning, except disgust and almost hatred for study? In Germany, by contrast, a broad philosophy presides over literary studies and pours upon the first labors of youth that soothing balm which sustains and develops the love of learning.

Come, take courage! I am so accustomed to farewells, to partings! Oh, yet this one is too much. No, it is not too much, since there is no affliction, however great, that does not develop in the soul an equal capacity for suffering. I shall suffer, but I shall keep my word.

March 3, 1833

I began writing in this notebook on July 10, 1832, and have returned to it only at long intervals. These eight months have passed amid the harshest sufferings (of the soul). I have written little, because my strength was almost destroyed. Had the affliction left my mind a little freedom, I should have gathered some very curious observations on inward suffering; but I was stunned by pain. I believe spring will do me great good. As the sun rises higher and vital warmth spreads through nature, pain’s grip loses some of its force; I feel its knots loosening, and my soul, long constricted and almost stifled, expanding and opening in equal measure to breathe.

Today has enchanted me. For the first time in a long while the sun appeared in all its beauty. It unfolded the buds of leaves and flowers, and awakened a thousand gentle thoughts within my breast.

The clouds are taking on their light and graceful forms again, tracing charming fancies upon the blue. The woods have no leaves yet, but they are assuming some indefinable air of life and gaiety that gives them an entirely new countenance. Everything is preparing for nature’s great festival.

March 4, 1833

I see laborers digging in the garden. These poor people exhaust themselves in this way all their lives to earn enough for their daily bread, their dry, dark bread. What a mystery are all these lives, so harsh and so humble! And they make up almost the whole of humankind. A day will come when all these men who do society’s hard labor will show him their blackened, calloused hands, cracked by the handles of their tools, and say to him: ‘Lord, who said: Blessed are the poor and the humble, here we are!’

To you, good God, we make our last appeal.

March 6, 1833

Élie and I have had a long conversation. Always full of enthusiasm for travel, we made an excursion into America; we went up the great rivers, sailed upon the lakes, wandered through the forests following Natty Bumppo and Cooper’s other heroes. Delightful recollections. Return to Europe. Prodigious ferment in society. The infinity of thoughts passing through the human mind, through all minds, from the highest angelic powers down to us, and perhaps below us... who knows? An ocean of thoughts undulating before God. What is a human mind taken separately from this immensity, and what is this immensity itself before eternal thought, God? Annihilation. There is a man who has meditated on all these things, who has plunged his genius into abysses of humility, and whose soul is so strong that he writes not for the world’s glory but for the world’s good, neither bending nor faltering. Mysterious struggles of genius, mission, martyrdom. God has, in a sense, revealed to him the deepest recesses of society and all the secrets of the evil devouring it. He saw all this, and for a time did not know how to take hold of this ailing society; he was prey to great sadness, to a kind of agony. At last he found what he was seeking, and joy returned to him. He is accomplishing his great mission. Oh, whoever knew the bitter battles within his soul could never admire such devotion enough, for this man’s inward powers are ceaselessly wrestling with thoughts that would crush any strength but his; yet he has received the apostolate like Saint Paul, and he preaches the gospel.

‘For if I preach the gospel, that is no glory to me: necessity is laid upon me; woe to me if I do not preach the gospel.’ — SAINT PAUL.

We concluded from this the necessity, the indispensable law laid upon each of us, of fulfilling our mission in society, however narrow, however imperceptible it may be. We all owe to the common good the sacrifice of our passions, and also the sacrifice of our innocent tastes, our plans for personal happiness, if that happiness is to be idle and useless to our fellow beings. We cast a glance at the life, so sweet and so peaceful, concealed in the bosom of the family; but it was a glance of sacrifice, resolved as we are to choose our place wherever we can do the most good.

This conversation renewed my strength, so weak, so wavering. My heart filled with an unfamiliar sweetness, and my soul returned within itself, like a sick man who, after drinking a healing potion, sinks back into his bed, expressing his contentment, which in truth is only the expression of hope.

March 8, 1833

A day of snow. A southeast wind rolls it in eddies, in great whirlwinds of dazzling whiteness. It melts as it falls. Here we are carried back to the heart of winter, after a few smiles from spring. The wind is quite cold; the little songbirds newly arrived are shivering, and the flowers too. The cracks in the partitions and window frames moan as they did in January, and I, within my poor covering, draw myself in as nature does.

March 9, 1833

More snow, sudden squalls, gusts of wind, cold. Poor Brittany, you sorely need a little greenery to brighten your gloomy face. Oh, cast off your winter cape quickly, then, and put on for me your spring mantilla, woven of leaves and flowers. When shall I see the skirts of your dress floating at the winds’ whim? — Read Homer and the exploits of the Norman heroes in Italy and Sicily. Achilles, Diomedes, Ulysses, Robert Guiscard, Roger met and greeted one another.

March 10, 1833

This, indeed, is the only tribute for wretched mortals: to cut one’s hair and let tears fall from one’s cheeks. Odyssey, IV.

March 11, 1833

It snowed all night. From the moment I rose, my poorly closed shutters let me glimpse that great white sheet which had spread silently over the countryside. The black tree trunks rise like ebony columns upon an ivory forecourt; this harsh, sharp contrast and the woods’ mournful bearing sadden one deeply. Nothing can be heard: not a living creature, except a few sparrows seeking refuge with little cries in the firs, which stretch out their long, snow-laden arms. Frost cannot penetrate the interior of these thick trees; it is a refuge prepared by Providence: the little birds know it well.

I visited our primroses: each carried its little burden of snow and bowed its head beneath the weight. These pretty, richly colored flowers made a charming sight beneath their white hoods. I saw whole clumps covered by a single block of snow: all these smiling flowers, thus veiled and leaning upon one another, looked like a group of young girls caught in a shower and sheltering beneath a white apron.

I expected a letter this evening; none came, but a friend arrived. It would be very curious to observe whether, in life’s smallest sorrows, Providence does not arrange compensations for us which our ill humor and our injustice prevent us from appreciating.

March 12, 1833

‘I tasted a little honey with the tip of the rod that was in my hand, and behold, I die.’ — (Book of Kings, chapter XIV.)

March 15, 1833

We live too little within; we scarcely live there at all. What has become of that inward eye which God gave us to watch ceaselessly over our soul, to witness the mysterious play of thought, the ineffable movement of life within humanity’s tabernacle? It is closed, it sleeps; and we open our earthly eyes wide, and understand nothing of nature, failing to use the sense which would reveal it to us reflected in the soul’s divine mirror. There is no contact between nature and us: we understand only the outward forms, and nothing of the meaning, the inward language, beauty as something eternal and sharing in God, all of which would be clearly traced and mirrored in the soul, endowed with a wonderful power of reflection. Oh, this contact between nature and the soul would bring forth an ineffable delight, a prodigious love of heaven and of God.

To descend into the souls of men, and make nature descend into one’s own soul.