freedom, as it were, of his students with the same jealousy as he protects his own. There shall be no oratorical device, no persuading, no cajoling of the mind this way or that. 'A professor is the priest of his subject, and should do the honours of it gravely and with dignity.' And so the man who in his private Journal is master of an eloquence and a poetry, capable of illuminating the most difficult and abstract of subjects, becomes in the lecture-room a dry compendium of universal knowledge. 'Led by his passion for the whole,' says M. Scherer, Amiel offered his hearers, not so much a series of positive teachings, as an index of subjects, a framework—what the Germans call a Schematismus. The skeleton was admirably put together, and excellent of its kind, and lent itself admirably to a certain kind of analysis and demonstration; but it was a skeleton- flesh, body, and life were wanting.'

So that as a professor he made no mark. He was conscientiousness itself in whatever he conceived to be his duty. But with all the critical and philosophical power which, as we know from the Journal, he might have lavished on his teaching, had the conditions been other than they were,

the study of literature, and the study of philosophy as such, owe him nothing. But for the Journal his years of training and his years of teaching would have left equally little record behind them. His pupils at Geneva,' writes one who was himself among the number,*never learnt to appreciate him at his true worth. We did justice no doubt to a knowledge as varied as it was wide, to his vast stores of reading, to that cosmopolitanism of the best kind which he had brought back with him from his travels; we liked him for his indulgence, his kindly wit. But I look back without any sense of pleasure to his lectures.'

Many a student, however, has shrunk from the burden and risks of family life, and has found himself incapable or teaching effectively what he knows, and has yet redeemed all other incapacities in the field of literary production. And here indeed we come to the strangest feature in Amiel's career his literary sterility. That he possessed literary power of the highest order is abundantly proved by the Journal Intime. Knowledge, insight, eloquence,

*M. Alphonse Rivier, now Professor of Inter national Law at the University of Brussels.

critical power- all were his. And the impulse to produce, which is the natural, though by no means the invariable, accompaniment of the literary gift, must have been fairly strong in him also. For the Journal Intime runs to 17,000 folio pages of MS., and his half-dozen volumes of poems, though the actual quantity is not large, represent an amount of labour which would have more than carried him through some serious piece of critical or philosophical work, and so enabled him to content the just expectations of his world. He began to write early, as is proved by the fact that at twenty he was a contributor to the best literary periodical which Geneva possessed. He was a charming correspondent, and in spite of his passion for abstract thought, his intellectual interest, at any rate, in all the activities of the day - politics, religious organisations, literature, art - was of the keenest kind. And yet at the time of his death all that this fine critic and profound thinker had given to the world, after a life entirely spent in the pursuit of letters, was, in the first place, a few volumes of poems which had had no effect except on a small number of sympathetic friends; a few pages of pensées intermingled with the poems, and,

as we now know, extracted from the Journal; and four or five scattered essays, the length of magazine articles, on Mme. de Staël, Rousseau, the history of the Academy of Geneva, the literature of French-speaking Switzerland, and so on! And more than this, the production, such as it was, had been a production born of effort and difficulty; and the labour squandered on poetical forms, on metrical experiments and intricate problems of translation, as Iwell as the occasional affectations of the prose style, might well have convinced the critical bystander that the mind of which these things were the offspring could have no real importance, no profitable message, for the world.

The whole Journal Intime is in some sense Amiel's explanation of these facts. In it he has made full and bitter confession of his weakness, his failure; he has endeavoured, with an acuteness of analysis no other hand can rival, to make the reasons of his failure and isolation clear both to himself and others. To love, to dream, to feel, to learn, to understand - all these are possible to me if only I may be dispensed from willing I have a sort of primitive horror of ambition, of struggle, of

hatred, of all which dissipates the soul and makes it dependent on external things and aims. The joy of becoming once more conscious of myself, of listening to the passage of time and the flow of the universal life, is sometimes enough to make me forget every desire and to quench in me both the wish to produce and the power to execute.' It is the result of what he himself calls ' l'éblouissement de l'infini.' He no sooner makes a step towards production, towards action and the realisation of himself, than a vague sense of peril overtakes him. The inner life, with its boundless horizons and its indescribable exaltations, seems endangered. Is he not about to place between himself and the forms of speculative truth some barrier of sense and matter - to give up the real for the apparent, the substance for the shadow ? One is reminded of Clough's cry under a somewhat similar experience : —

'If this pure solace should desert my mind, What were all else? I dare not risk the loss. To the old paths, my soul !'

And in close combination with the speculative sense, with the tendency which carries a man toward the contemplative study