This translation of Amiel’s Journal Intime is primarily addressed to those whose knowledge of French, while it may be sufficient to carry them with more or less complete understanding through a novel or a newspaper, is yet not enough to allow them to understand and appreciate a book containing subtle and complicated forms of expression. Besides, we English are in many ways moreakin to Protestant and Puritan Geneva than the French readers to whom the original Journal primarily addresses itself, and some of the entries I have kept have probably, by the nature of things, more savor for us than for them. Others which I have retained, though they often relate to local names and books, more or less unfamiliar to the general public, yet seemed to me valuable as supplying some of that surrounding detail, that setting, which helps one to understand a life. Some of the passages which I have left untranslated seemed to me to overweight the introspective side of the Journal, already so full-to overweight it, at any rate, for English readers. They depend upon certain differences between the English and the French public, which are more readily felt than explained. It would be of no interest to give my reasons for these variations at length. In this second edition of the English translation of Amiel’s Journal Intime, I have inserted a good many new passages, taken from the last French edition (Cinquiéme édition, revue et augmentée.) But I have not translated all the fresh material to be found in that edition nor have I omitted certain sections of the Journal which in these two recent volumes have been omitted by their French editors. His extensive correspondence with Égérie, his muse name for Louise Wyder, was preserved and published in 2004.
In addition to the Journal, he produced several volumes of poetry and wrote studies on Erasmus, Madame de Stael and other writers. Although modest in volume of output, Amiel's mind was of no inferior quality, and his Journal gained a sympathy that the author had failed to obtain in his life. It was translated into English by British writer Mary Augusta Ward at the suggestion of academic Mark Pattison. This isolation inspired the one book by which Amiel is still known, the Journal Intime ("Private Journal"), which, published after his death, obtained a European reputation. These appointments, conferred by the democratic party, deprived him of the support of the aristocratic party, whose patronage dominated all the culture of the city. In 1849 he was appointed professor of aesthetics at the academy of Geneva, and in 1854 became professor of moral philosophy. After losing his parents at an early age, Amiel travelled widely, became intimate with the intellectual leaders of Europe, and made a special study of German philosophy in Berlin.
Born in Geneva in 1821, he was descended from a Huguenot family driven to Switzerland by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Henri Frédéric Amiel was a Swiss moral philosopher, poet, and critic.
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