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described in the Fragment on the Ranz de Vaches,' the summer moonlight on the Lake of Neufchâtel, these various pictures are the work of one of the most finished artists in words that literature has produced. But how true George Sand's criticism is! Chez Obermann la sensibilité est active, l'intelligence est paresseuse ou insuffisante.' He has a certain antique power of making the truisms of life splendid and impressive. No one can write more poetical exercises than he on the old text of pulvis et umbra sumus, but beyond this his philosophical power fails him. As soon as he leaves the region of romantic description how wearisome the pages are apt to grow! Instead of a poet, 'un ergoteur Voltairien,' instead of the explorer of fresh secrets of the heart, a Parisian talking a cheap cynicism! Intellectually, the ground gives way; there is no solidity of knowledge, no range of thought. Above all, the scientific idea in our sense is almost absent; so that while Amiel represents the modern mind at its keenest and best, dealing at will with the vast additions to knowledge which the last fifty years have brought forth, Senancour is still in the eighteenthcentury stage, talking like Rousseau of a

return to primitive manners, and discussing Christianity in the tone of the Encyclopédie.

Maurice de Guérin, again, is the inventor of new terms in the language of feeling, a poet as Amiel and Senancour are. His love of nature, the earth-passion which breathes in his letters and journal, has a strange savour, a force and flame which is all his own. Beside his actual sense of community with the visible world, Amiel's love of landscape has a tame, didactic air. The Swiss thinker is too ready to make nature a mere vehicle of moral or philosophical thought: Maurice de Guérin loves her for herself alone, and has found words to describe her influence over him of extraordinary individuality and power. But for the rest the story of his inner life has but small value in the history of thought. His difficulties do not go deep enough; his struggle is intellectually not serious enough we see in it only a common incident of modern experience poetically told; it throws no light on the genesis and progress of the great forces which are moulding and renovating the thought of the present it tells us nothing for the future.

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No, there is much more in the Journal Intime than the imagination or the poetical

glow which Amiel shares with his immediate predecessors in the art of confessionwriting. His book is representative of human experience in its more intimate and personal forms to an extent hardly equalled since Rousseau. For his study of himself is only a means to an end. 'What interests me in myself,' he declares, 'is that I find in my own case a genuine example of human nature, and therefore a specimen of general value.' It is the human consciousness of to-day, of the modern world, in its twofold relation - its relation towards the infinite and the unknowable, and its relation towards the visible universe which conditions it which is the real subject of the Journal Intime. There are few elements of our present life which, in a greater or less degree, are not made vocal in these pages. Amiel's intellectual interest is untiring. Philosophy, science, letters, art, he has penetrated the spirit of them all; there is nothing, or almost nothing, within the wide range of modern activities which he has not at one time or other felt the attraction of, and learnt in some sense to understand. 'Amiel,' says M. Renan, 'has his defects, but he was certainly one of the strongest speculative heads who, during the

period from 1845 to 1880, have reflected on the nature of things.' And, although a certain fatal spiritual weakness debarred him to a great extent from the world of practical life, his sympathy with action, whether it was the action of the politician or the social reformer, or merely that steady half-conscious performance of its daily duty which keeps humanity sweet and living, was unfailing. His horizon was not bounded by his own prison-cell,' or by that dream-world which he has described with so much subtle beauty; rather the energies which should have found their natural expression in literary or family life, pent up within the mind itself, excited in it a perpetual eagerness for intellectual discovery, and new powers of sympathy with whatever crossed its field of vision.

So that the thinker, the historian, the critic, will find himself at home with Amiel. The power of organising his thought, the art of writing a book, monumentum aere perennius, was indeed denied him-he laments it bitterly; but, on the other hand, he is receptivity itself, responsive to all the great forces which move the time, catching and reflecting on the mobile mirror of his mind whatever winds are blowing from the hills of thought

And if the thinker is at home with him, so too are the religious minds, the natures for whom God and duty are the foundation of existence. Here, indeed, we come to the innermost secret of Amiel's charm, the fact which probably goes farther than any other to explain his fascination for a large and growing class of readers. For, while he represents all the intellectual complexities of a time bewildered by the range and number of its own acquisitions, the religious instinct in him is as strong and tenacious as in any of the representative exponents of the life of faith. The intellect is clear and unwavering; but the heart clings to old traditions, and steadies itself on the rock of duty. His Calvinistic training lingers long in him; and what detaches him from the Hegelian school, with which he has much in common, is his own stronger sense of personal need, his preoccupation with the idea of 'sin.' 'He speaks,' says M. Renan contemptuously, 'of sin, of salvation, of redemption, and conversion, as if these things were realities. He asks me "What does M. Renan make of sin ?" Eh bien, je crois que je le supprime.' But it is just because Amiel is profoundly sensitive to the problems of evil and responsi

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