sense

of life and nature as a whole, is the critical - the tendency which, in the realm of action and concrete performance, carries him, as Amiel expresses it, droit au défaut,' and makes him conscious at once of the weak point, the germ of failure in a project or an action. It is another aspect of the same idiosyncrasy. 'The point I have reached seems to be explained by a too restless search for perfection, by the abuse of the critical faculty, and by an unreasonable distrust of first impulses, first thoughts, first words. Confidence and

spontaneity of life are drifting out of my reach, and this is why I can no longer act.' For abuse of the critical faculty brings with it its natural consequences

What

timidity of soul, paralysis of the will, complete self-distrust. 'To know is enough for me; expres. sion seems to me often a profanity. I lack is character, will, individuality.' 'By what mystery,' he writes to M. Scherer, 'do others expect much from me? whereas I feel myself to be incapable of anything serious or important.' Défiance and impuissance are the words constantly on his lips. My friends see what I might have been; I see what I am.'

And yet the literary instinct remains,

and must in some way be satisfied. And so he takes refuge in what he himself calls scales, exercises, tours de force in versetranslation of the most laborious and difficult kind, in ingenious vers d'occasion, in metrical experiments and other literary trifling, as his friends think it, of the same sort. I am afraid of greatness. I am not afraid of ingenuity; all my published literary essays are little else than studies, games, exercises, for the purpose of testing myself. I play scales, as it were; I run up and down my instrument. I train my hand and make sure of its capacity and skill. But the work itself remains unachieved. I am always preparing and never accomplishing, and my energy is swallowed up in a kind of barren curiosity.'

Not that he surrenders himself to the nature which is stronger than he all at once. His sense of duty rebels, his conscience suffers, and he makes resolution after resolution to shake himself free from the mental tradition which had taken such hold upon him to write, to produce, to satisfy his friends. In 1861, a year after M. Scherer had left Geneva, Amiel wrote to him, describing his difficulties and his discouragements, and asking, as one may ask an old

friend of one's youth, for help and counsel. M. Scherer, much touched by the appeal, answered it plainly and frankly. - described the feeling of those who knew him as they watched his life slipping away unmarked by any of the achievements of which his youth had given promise, and pointed out various literary openings in which, if he were to put out his powers, he could not but succeed. To begin with, he urged him to join the Revue Germanique, then being started by Charles Dollfus, Renan, Littré, and others. Amiel left the letter for three months unanswered, and then wrote a reply which M. Scherer probably received with a sigh of impatience. For, rightly interpreted, it meant that old habits were too strong, and that the momentary impulse had died away. When, a little later, Les Etrangères, a collection of verse-translations, came out, it was dedicated to M. Scherer, who did not, however, pretend to give it any very cordial reception. Amiel took his friend's coolness in very good part, calling him his dear Rhadamanthus.' 'How little I knew!' cries M. Scherer. 'What I regret is to have discovered too late by means of the Journal, the key to a problem which seemed to me hardly serious, and which I now feel

to have been tragic. A kind of remorse seizes me that I was not able to understand my friend better, and to soothe his suffering by a sympathy which would have been a mixture of pity and admiration.'

Was it that all the while Amiel felt himself sure of his revanche? that he knew the value of all those sheets of Journal which were slowly accumulating under his hand? Did he say to himself sometimes: 'My friends are wrong; my gifts and my knowledge are not lost; I have given expression to them in the only way possible to me, and when I die it will be found that I too, like other men, have performed the task appointed me, and contributed my quota to the human store'? It is clear that very early he began to regard it as possible that portions of the Journal should be published after his death, and, as we have seen, he left certain literary instructions,' dated seven years before his last illness, in which his executors were directed to publish such parts of it as might seem to them to possess any general interest. But it is clear also that the Journal was not, in any sense, written for publication. 'These pages,' say the Geneva editors, written au courant de la plume-sometimes in the morning,

6

but more often at the end of the day, with. out any idea of composition or publicity – are marked by the repetition, the lacunæ, the carelessness, inherent in this kind of monologue. The thoughts and sentiments expressed have no other aim than sincerity of rendering.'

And his estimate of the value of the record thus produced was, in general, a low one, especially during the depression and discouragement of his later years. 'This Journal of mine,' he writes in 1876, 'represents the material of a good many volumes; what prodigious waste of time, of thought, of strength! It will be useful to nobody, and even for myself — it has rather helped me to shirk life than to practise it.' And again: 'Is everything I have produced, taken together-my correspondence, these thousands of Journal pages, my lectures, my articles, my poems, my notes of different kinds anything better than withered leaves? To whom and to what have I been useful? Will my name survive me a single day, and will it ever mean anything to anybody? A life of no account! When all is added up - nothing!' In passages like these there is no anticipation of any posthumous triumph over the disapproval