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additions to French belles lettres; instead of something to love, something to admire! No, there is no wishing the German element in Amiel away. Its invading, troubling effect upon his thought and temperament goes far to explain the interest and suggestiveness of his mental history. The language he speaks is the language of that French criticism which we have Sainte-Beuve's authority for it is best described by the motto of Montaigne, ' Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l'ensemble, à la française,' and the thought he tries to express in it is thought torn and strained by the constant effort to reach the All, the totality of things: What I desire is the sum of all desires, and what I seek to know is the sum of all different kinds of knowledge. Always the complete, the absolute, the teres atque rotundum.' And it was this antagonism, or rather this fusion of traditions in him, which went far to make him original, which opened to him, that is to say, so many new lights on old paths, and stirred in him such capacities of fresh and individual expression.

6

We have been carried forward, however, a little too far by this general discussion of Amiel's debts to Germany. Let us take

up the biographical thread again. In 1848 his Berlin apprenticeship came to an end, and he returned to Geneva. 'How many places, how many impressions, observations, thoughts, how many forms of men and things, - have passed before me and in me since April 1843,' he writes in the Journal, two or three months after his return. 'The last seven years have been the most important of my life; they have been the novitiate of my intelligence, the initiation of my being into being.' The first literary evidence of his matured powers is to be found in two extremely interesting papers on Berlin, which he contributed to the Bibliothèque Universelle in 1848, apparently just before he left Germany. Here for the first time we have the Amiel of the Journal Intime. The young man who five years before had written his painstaking review of M. Rio is now in his turn a master. He speaks with dignity and authority, he has a graphic, vigorous prose at command, the form of expression is condensed and epigrammatic, and there is a mixture of enthusiasm and criticism in his description of the powerful intellectual machine then working in the Prussian capital which represents a permanent note of character, a lasting atti

tude of mind.

A great deal, of course, in the two papers is technical and statistic, but what there is of general comment and criticism is so good that one is tempted to make some melancholy comparisons between them and another article in the Bibliothèque, that on Adolphe Pictet, written in 1856, and from which we have already quoted. In 1848 Amiel was for a while master of his powers and his knowledge; no fatal divorce had yet taken place in him between the accumulating and producing faculties; he writes readily even for the public, without labour, without affectations. Eight years later the reflective faculty has outgrown his control; composition, which represents the practical side of the intellectual life, has become difficult and painful to him, and he has developed what he himself calls a wavering manner, born of doubt and scruple.'

How few could have foreseen the failure in public and practical life which lay before him at the moment of his reappearance at Geneva in 1848! 'My first meeting with him in 1849 is still vividly present to me,' says M. Scherer. 'He was twenty-eight, and he had just come from Germany laden with science, but he wore his knowledge

lightly, his looks were attractive, his conversation animated, and no affectation spoilt the favourable impression he made on the bystander, the whole effect, indeed, was of something brilliant and striking. In his young alertness Amiel seemed to be entering upon life as a conqueror; one would have said the future was all his own.'

His return, moreover, was marked by a success which seemed to secure him at once an important position in his native town. After a public competition he was appointed, in 1849, Professor of Esthetics and French Literature at the Academy of Geneva, a post which he held for four years, exchanging it for the Professorship of Moral Philosophy in 1854. Thus at twenty-eight, without any struggle to succeed, he had gained, it would have seemed, that safe foothold in life which should be all the philosopher or the critic wants to secure the full and fruitful development of his gifts. Unfortunately the appointment, instead of the foundation and support, was to be the stumGeneva at the blingblock of his career.

time was in a state of social and political ferment. After a long struggle, beginning with the revolutionary outbreak of

November 1841, the Radical party, led by James Fazy, had succeeded in ousting the

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Conservatives that is to say, the governing class, which had ruled the Republic since the Restoration - from power. And with the advent of the democratic constitution of 1846, and the exclusion of the old Genevese families from the administration they had so long monopolised, a number of subsidiary changes were effected, not less important to the ultimate success of Radicalism than the change in political machinery introduced by the new constitution. Among them was the disappearance of almost the whole existing staff of the Academy, then and now the centre of Genevese education, and up to 1847 the stronghold of the moderate ideas of 1814, followed by the appointment of new men less likely to hamper the Radical order of things.

Of these new men Amiel was one. He had been absent from Geneva during the years of conflict which had preceded Fazy's triumph; he seems to have had no family or party connections with the leaders of the defeated side, and as M. Scherer points out, he could accept a non-political post at the hands of the new government, two years after the violent measures which had

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