authority of genius, moments of irresistible intuition in which a man feels himself great as the universe and calm like God!... What hours, what memories!

And now for Obermann's turn, Obermann by the Lake of Bienne.

My path lay beside the green waters of the Thiele. Feeling inclined to muse, and finding the night so warm that there was no hardship in being all night out of doors, I took the road to Saint Blaise. I descended a steep where its ripple came up and expired. The bank, and got upon the shore of the lake air was calm; every one was at rest; I remained there for hours. Towards morning, the moon shed over the earth and waters the ineffable melancholy of her last gleams. Nature seems unspeakably grand, when, plunged in a long reverie, one hears the rippling of the waters upon a solitary strand, in the calm of a night still enkindled and luminous with the setting moon.

disappointed his friends, who expected much from his acquirements, talents, and vivacity; and that his fame rests upon two volumes of extracts from many thousand pages of a private journal, "Journal Intime," extending over more than thirty years, from 1848 to 1881, which he left behind him at his death. This journal explains his sterility; and displays in explaining it, say his critics, such sincerity, with such gifts of expression and eloquence, of profound analysis and speculative intuition, as to make it most surely 66 one of those books which will not die." The sincerity is unquestionable. As to the gifts of eloquence and expression, what are we to say? M. Scherer speaks of an 66 ever new eloquence" pouring itself in the pages of the journal; M. Paul Bourget, of "marvellous pages "where the feeling for nature finds an expression worthy of Shelley or Wordsworth; Mrs. Humphry Ward, of "magic of style," of "glow torment of our vain years; vast consciousness Sensibility beyond utterance, charm and and splendor of expression," of the "poet of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and artist" who fascinates us in Amiel's and everywhere impenetrable; all-embracing prose. I cannot quite agree. Obermann passion, ripened wisdom, delicious self-abanhas been mentioned; it seems to me that donment-everything that a mortal heart can we have only to place a passage from Sé- contain of life-weariness and yearning, I felt nancour beside a passage from Amiel, to it all, I experienced it all, in this memorable perceive the difference between a feeling night. I have made a grave step towards the for nature which gives magic to style and age of decline, I have swallowed up ten years of life at once. Happy the simple, whose Here and through- heart is always young! out I am to use as far as possible Mrs. Humphry Ward's translation, at once spirited and faithful, of Amiel's journal. I will take a passage where Amiel has evidently some reminiscence of Sénancour (whose work he knew well), is inspired by Sénancour -a passage which has been extolled by M. Paul Bourget.

one which does not.

Shall I ever enjoy again those marvellous reveries of past days, -as for instance, once, when I was still quite a youth in the early dawn sitting amongst the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; another time in the mountains above Lancy, under the midday sun, lying under a tree and visited by three butterflies; and again another night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched full length upon the beach, my eyes wandering over the Milky Way? Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams in which one seems to carry the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the infinite? Divine moments, hours of ecstasy, when thought flies from world to world, penetrates the great enigma, breathes with a respiration large, tranquil, and profound like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and boundless

like the blue heaven! Visits from the Muse

Urania, who traces around the foreheads of those she loves the phosphorescent nimbus of contemplative power, and who pours into their hearts the tranquil intoxication, if not the

No translation can render adequately the cadence of diction, the "dying fall of reveries like those of Sénancour or Rousseau. But even in a translation we must surely perceive that the magic of style is with Sénancour's feeling for nature, not Amiel's; and in the original this is far more manifest still.

Magic of style is creative; its pos sessor himself creates, and he inspires and enables his reader in some sort to create after him. And creation gives the sense of life and joy; hence its extraordinary value. But eloquence may exist without magic of style, and this eloquence, accom panying thoughts of rare worth and depth, may heighten their effect greatly. And M. Scherer says that Amicl's speculative philosophy is "on a far other scale of vastness "than Sénancour's, and therefore he gives the preference to the eloquence of Amiel, which clothes and conveys this vaster philosophy. Amiel was no doubt greatly Sénancour's superior in culture and instruction generally; in philosophical reading and what is called philosophical thought he was immensely his superior. My sense for philosophy, I know, is as far from satisfying Mr. Fred

eric Harrison as my sense for Hugo's did practically rule, in a great degree, poetry is from satisfying Mr. Swinburne. Amiel's life, which he often develops not But I am too old to change and too hard-only with great subtlety, but also with ened to hide what I think; and when I force, clearness, and eloquence, making it am presented with philosophical specula- both easy and interesting to us to follow tions and told that they are "on a high him. But still, when we have the ideas scale of vastness," I persist in looking present before us, I shall ask what is closely at them and in honestly asking their value, what does Amiel obtain in myself what I find to be their positive them for the service of either himself or value. And we get from Amiel's powers other people? of "speculative intuition" things like this:

Created spirits in the accomplishment of their destinies tend, so to speak, to form constellations and milky ways within the empyrean of the divinity; in becoming gods, they surround the throne of the sovereign with a sparkling court. Or this:

Let us take first what, adopting his own phrase, we may call his "bedazzlement with the infinite," his thirst for "totality." has the gift and the bent for making his Omnis determinatio est negatio. Amiel soul "the capacity for all form, not a soul but the soul." He finds it easier and more natural "to be man than a man." His permanent instinct is to be "a subtle and fugitive spirit which no base can absorb or fix entirely." It costs him an effort to affirm his own personality; "the

Is not mind the universal virtuality, the universe latent? If so, its zero would be the germ of the infinite, which is expressed math-infinite draws me to it, the henosis of ematically by the double zero (00). Plotinus intoxicates me like a philtre.' It intoxicates him until the thought of absorption and extinction, the nirvana of Buddhism, becomes his thought of refuge.

Or, to let our philosopher develop himself at more length, let us take this return to the zero, which Mrs. Humphry Ward prefers here to render by nothingness:

This psychological reinvolution is an anticipation of death; it represents the life beyond the grave, the return to Scheol, the soul fading into the world of ghosts or descending into the region of die Mütter; it implies the simplification of the individual who, allowing all the accidents of personality to evaporate, exists henceforward only in the invisible state, the state of point, of potentiality, of pregnant nothingness. Is,not this the true definition of mind? is not mind, dissociated from space and time, just this? Its development, past or future, is contained in it just as a curve is contained in its algebraical formula. This nothing is an all. This punctum without dimensions is a punctum saliens.

French critics throw up their hands in dismay at the violence which the Germanized Amiel, propounding his speculative philosophy, often does to the French language. My objection is rather that such speculative philosophy as that of which I have been quoting specimens has no value, is perfectly futile. And Amiel's journal contains far too much of it.

What is futile we may throw aside; but when Amiel tells us of his "protean nature essentially metamorphosable, polarisable, and virtual," when he tells us of his longing for "totality," we must listen, although these phrases may in France, as M. Paul Bourget says, "raise a shudder in a humanist trained on Livy and Pascal." But these phrases stood for ideas which

The individual life is a nothing ignorant of itself, and as soon as this nothing knows itself individual life is abolished in principle. For as soon as the illusion vanishes, nothingness resumes its eternal sway, the suffering of life have for this enfranchised individuality ceased is over, error has disappeared, time and form to be; the colored air-bubble has burst in the infinite space, and the misery of thought has sunk to rest in the changeless repose of allembracing nothing.

With this bedazement with the infinite and this drift towards Buddhism comes the impatience with all production, with even poetry and art themselves, because of their necessary limits and imperfection.

We must treat

We

Composition demands a concentration, deI cannot fuse together materials and ideas. cision, and pliancy which I no longer possess. If we are to give anything a form we must, so to speak, be the tyrants of it. our subject brutally and not be always trembling lest we should be doing it a wrong.. must be able to transmute and absorb it into our own substance. This sort of confident effrontery is beyond me; my whole nature subordinates itself to the object; it is love of tends to that impersonality which respects and truth which holds me back from concluding and deciding.

The desire for the all, the impatience with what is partial and limited, the fascination of the infinite, are the topics of page after page in the journal. It is a

prosaic mind which has never been in
contact with ideas of this sort, never felt
their charm. They lend themselves well
to poetry, but what are we to say of their
value as ideas to be lived with, dilated on,
made the governing ideas of life?
cept for use in passing, and with the
power to dismiss them again, they are un-
profitable. Shelley's

your natural tendency," he says to himself, "you arrive at disgust with life, despair, pessimism." And again: "Melancholy outlook on all sides. Disgust with my self." And again: "I cannot deceive Ex-myself as to the fate in store for me: increasing isolation, inward disappointment, enduring regrets, a melancholy neither to be consoled nor confessed, a mournful old age, a slow agony, a death in the desert." And all this misery by his own fault, his own mistakes. "To live is to conquer incessantly; one must have the courage to be happy. I turn in a vicious circle; I have never had clear sight of my true vocation."

Life like a dome of many-colored glass Stains the white radiance of eternity Until death tramples it to fragments has value as a splendid image nobly introduced in a beautiful and impassioned poem. But Amiel's " colored air-bubble," as a positive piece of "speculative intuiI cannot therefore fall in with that partion," has no value whatever. Nay, the ticular line of admiration which critics, thoughts which have positive truth and praising Amiel's journal, have commonly value, the thoughts to be lived with and followed. I cannot join in celebrating his dwelt upon, the thoughts which are a real prodigies of speculative intuition, the glow acquisition for our minds, are precisely and splendor of his beatific vision of absothoughts which counteract the "vague as-lute knowledge, the marvellous pages in piration and indeterminate desire" pos- which his deep and vast philosophic sessing Amiel and filling his journal; they are thoughts insisting on the need of limit, the feasibility of performance. Goethe says admirably:

Wer grosses will muss sich zusammenraffen:
In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meis-

ter.

'Every subject is one; and however vast it may be, is capable of being contained in a single discourse." The ideas to live with, the ideas of sterling value to us, are, I repeat, ideas of this kind; ideas staunchly counteracting and reducing the power of the infinite and indeterminate, not paralyzing us with it.

แ

And indeed we have not to go beyond Amiel himself for proof of this. Amiel was paralyzed by living in these ideas of vague aspiration and indeterminate desire," of "confounding his personal life in the general life," by feeding on these ideas, treating them as august and precious, and filling hundreds of pages of journal with them. He was paralyzed by it, he became impotent and miserable. And he knew it, and tells us of it himself with a power of analysis and with a sad eloquence which to me are much more interesting and valuable than his philosophy of Maïa and the great wheel. "By

thought is laid bare, the secret of his sublime malady is expressed. I hesitate to admit that all this part of the journal has even a very profound psychological interest; its interest is rather pathological. In reading it we are not so much pursuing a study of psychology as a study of morbid pathology.

But the journal reveals a side in Amiel which his critics, so far as I have seen, have hardly noticed, a side of real power, originality, and value. He says himself that he never had clear sight of his true vocation; well, his true vocation, it seems to me, was that of a literary critic. Here he is admiraable; M. Scherer was a true friend when he offered to introduce him to an editor, and suggested an article on Uhland. There is hardly a literary criticism in these two volumes which is not masterly, and which does not make one desire more of the same kind. And not Amiel's literary criticism only, but his criticism of society, politics, national character, religion, is in general well-informed, just, and penetrating in an eminent degree. Any one single page of this criticism is worth, in my opinion, a hundred of Amiel's pages about the infinite illusion and the great wheel. It is to this side in Amiel that I desire now to draw attention. I would have abstained from writing about him if I had only to disparage and to find fault, only to say that he had been overpraised, and that his dealings with Maïa seemed to me profitable neither for himself nor for others.

Let me first take Amiel as a critic of

literature, and of the literature which he | fortune that the most powerful poet of France naturally knew best, French literature. should not have better understood his rôle, Hear him as critic on that best of critics, and that, unlike the Hebrew prophets who Sainte-Beuve, of whose death (1869) he chastised because they loved, he flatters his fellow-citizens from system and from pride. had just heard. France is the world, Paris is France, Hugo is Paris. Bow down and worship, ye nations!

It is in the novel that the average vulgarity of German society, and its inferiority to the societies of France and England are most clearly visible. The notion of a thing's jarring on the taste is wanting to German æsthetics. Their elegance knows nothing of grace; they have no sense of the enormous distance between distinction (gentlemanly, ladylike) and their stiff Vornehmlichkeit. Their imagination lacks style, training, education, and knowledge of the world; it is stamped with an ill-bred air even in its Sunday clothes. The race is practical and intelligent, but common and ill-mannered. Ease, amiability, manners, wit, animation, dignity, charm, are qualities which belong to others.

ity, and totality. Probably the literary | Hugo's faults; the faults of the French criticism which he did so well, and for nation at large he judges with a like severwhich he shows a true vocation, gave him ity. But what a fine and just perception nevertheless but little pleasure because does the following passage show of the he did it thus fragmentarily and by fits deficiencies of Germany, the advantage and starts. To do it thoroughly, to make which the western nations have in their his fragments into wholes, to fit them for more finished civilization! coming before the public, composition. with its toils and limits was necessary. Toils and limits composition indeed has; yet all composition is a kind of creation, creation gives, as I have already said, pleasure, and when successful and sustained, more than pleasure, joy. Amiel, had he tried the experiment with literary criticism, where lay his true vocation, would have found it so. Sainte-Beuve, whom he so much admires, would have been the most miserable of men if his production had been but a volume or two of middling poems and a journal. But Sainte-Beuve's motto, as Amiel himself notices, was that of the emperor Severus: Laboremus. 66 Work," Sainte-Beuve confesses to a friend, "is my sore burden, but it is also my great resource. I eat my heart out when I am not up to the neck in work; there you have the secret of the life I lead." If M. Scherer's introduction to the Revue Germanique could but have been used, if Amiel could but have written the article on Uhland and followed it up by plenty of articles more!

Will that inner freedom of soul, that profound harmony of all the faculties, which I have so often observed among the best Germans, ever come to the surface? Will the conquerors of to-day ever civilize their forms shall be able to judge. As soon as the Gerof life? It is by their future novels that we man novel can give us quite good society, the Germans will be in the raw stage no longer.

And this pupil of Berlin, this devourer of German books, this victim, say the French critics, to the contagion of German style, after three hours, one day, of a Geschichte der Esthetik in Deutschland, breaks out:

I have quoted largely from Amiel's literary criticism, because this side of him has, so far as I have observed, received so little attention, and yet deserves attention so eminently. But his more general critiLearning and even thought are not everycism, too, shows, as I have said, the same thing. A little esprit, point, vivacity, imagihigh qualities as his criticism of authors nation, grace, would do no harm. Do these and books. I must quote one or two of pedantic books leave a single image or senhis aphorisms. L'esprit sert bien à tout, tence, a single striking or new fact, in the mais ne suffit à rien: "Wits are of use for memory when one lays them down? No, everything, sufficient for nothing." Une nothing but fatigue and confusion. Oh, for société vit de sa foi et se développe par la clearness, terseness, brevity! Diderot, Volscience: "A society lives on its faith and taire, or even Galiani! A short article by Sainte-Beuve, Scherer, Renan, Victor Cherdevelops itself by science." L'Etat libéral bulioz, gives one more pleasure, and makes est irréalisable avec une religion antilibé-one ponder and reflect more, than a thousand rale, et presque irréalisable avec l'absence of these German pages crammed to the marde religion: "Liberal communities are gin and showing the work itself rather than impossible with an anti-liberal religion, its result. The Germans heap the faggots and almost impossible with the absence of for the pile, the French bring the fire. Spare religion." But epigrammatic sentences me your lucubrations, give me facts or ideas. of this sort are perhaps not so very diffi- Keep your vats, your must, your dregs, to cult to produce, in French at any rate. which will sparkle in the glass and kindle my yourselves; I want wine fully made, wine Let us take Amiel when he has room and spirits instead of oppressing them. verge enough to show what he can really say which is important about society, religion, national life, and character. We have seen what an influence his years passed in Germany had upon him; we have seen how severely he judges Victor

Amiel may have been led away deteriora sequi; he may have Germanized until he has become capable of the verb dépersonnaliser and the noun réimplication; but after all, his heart is in the right place;