22d October 1856. - We must learn to look upon life as an apprenticeship to a progressive renunciation, a perpetual diminution in our pretensions, our hopes, our powers, and our liberty. The circle grows narrower and narrower; we began with being eager to learn everything, to see everything, to tame and conquer everything, and in all directions we reach our limit non plus ultra. Fortune, glory, love, power, health, happiness, long life, all these blessings which have been possessed by other men seem at first promised and accessible to us, and then we have to put the dream away from us, to withdraw one personal claim after another, to make ourselves small and humble, to submit to feel ourselves limited, feeble, dependent, ignorant, and poor, and to throw ourselves upon God for all, recognising our own worthlessness, and that we have no right to anything. It is in this nothingness that we recover something of life, — the divine spark is there at the bottom of it. Resignation comes to us, and, in believing love, we reconquer the true greatness.

27th October 1856. — In all the chief matters of life we are alone, and our true his

tory is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, griefs, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations, - all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down. What is most precious in us never shows itself, never finds an issue even in the closest intimacy. Only a part of it reaches our consciousness; it scarcely enters into action except in prayer, and is perhaps only perceived by God, for our past rapidly becomes strange to us. Our monad may be influenced by other monads, but none the less does it remain impenetrable to them in its essence; and we ourselves, when all is said, remain outside our own mystery. The centre of our consciousness is unconscious, as the kernel of the sun is dark. All that we are, desire, do, and know, is more or less superficial, and below the rays and lightnings of our periphery there remains the darkness of unfathomable substance.

I was then well-advised when, in my

theory of the inner man, I placed at the foundation of the Self, after the seven spheres which the Self contains had been successively disengaged, a lowest depth of darkness, the abyss of the Unrevealed, the Virtual, pledge of an infinite future the obscure self, the pure subjectivity which is incapable of realising itself in mind, conscience, or reason, in the soul, the heart, the imagination, or the life of the senses, and which makes for itself attributes and conditions out of all these forms of its own life.

But the obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call itself fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty and the spirit. For it represents resistance

that is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and its triumph.

17th December 1856. - This evening was the second quartet concert. It stirred me much more than the first; the music chosen was loftier and stronger. It was the quartet in D Minor of Mozart, and the quartet in C Major of Beethoven, separated by a

Spohr concerto. This last, vivid and brilliant as a whole, has fire in the allegro, feeling in the adagio, and elegance in the finale, but it is the product of one fine gift in a mediocre personality. With the two others you are at once in contact with genius; you are admitted to the secrets of two great souls. Mozart stands for inward liberty, Beethoven for the power of enthusiasm. The one sets us free, the other ravishes us out of ourselves. I do not think I ever felt more distinctly than today, or with more intensity, the difference between these two masters. Their two personalities became transparent to me, and I seemed to read them to their depths.

The work of Mozart, penetrated as it is with mind and thought, represents a solved problem, a balance struck between aspiration and executive capacity, the sovereignty of a grace which is always mistress of itself, marvellous harmony and perfect unity. His quartet describes a day in one of those Attic souls who prefigure on earth the serenity of Elysium. The first scene is a pleasant conversation, like that of Socrates on the banks of the Ilissus; its chief mark is an exquisite urbanity. The second scene is deeply pathetic. A cloud has risen in

the blue of this Greek heaven. A storm, such as life inevitably brings with it, even in the case of great souls who love and esteem each other, has come to trouble the original harmony. What is the cause of it

a misunderstanding, a piece of neglect? Impossible to say, but it breaks out notwithstanding. The andante is a scene of reproach and complaint, but as between immortals. What loftiness in complaint, what dignity, what feeling, what noble sweetness in reproach! The voice trembles and grows graver, but remains affectionate and dignified. Then, the storm has passed, the sun has come back, the explanation has taken place, peace is reestablished. The third scene paints the brightness of reconciliation. Love, in its restored confidence, and as though in sly self-testing, permits itself even gentle mocking and friendly badinage. And the finale brings us back to that tempered gaiety and happy serenity, that supreme freedom, flower of the inner life, which is the leading motive of the whole composition.

In Beethoven's, on the other hand, a spirit of tragic irony paints for you the mad tumult of existence as it dances for ever above the threatening abyss of the infinite.