tion, which Amiel brings more than once in the course of the Journal::- 'Toute nation livrée à elle-même et à son propre génie se fait une critique littéraire qui y est conforme. La France en son beau temps a eu la sienne, qui ne ressemble ni à celle de l'Allemagne ni à celle de ses autres voisins;-un peu plus superficielle, dira-t-on ;-je ne le crois pas mais plus vive, moins chargée d'erudition, moins théorique et systématique, plus confiante au sentiment immédiat du goût. Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l'ensemble, à la Française: telle était la devise de Montaigne et telle est aussi la devise de la critique française. Nous ne sommes pas synthétiques, comme diraient les Allemands; le mot même n'est pas français. L'imagination de détail nous suffit. Montaigne, La Fontaine, Madame de Sévigné, sont volontiers nos livres de chevet.' The French critic then goes on to give a rapid sketch of the authors and the books, 'qui ont peu a peu formé comme notre rhétorique.' French criticism of the old characteristic kind rests ultimately upon the minute and delicate knowledge of a few Greek and Latin classics. Arnauld, Boileau, Fénélon, Rollin, Racine fils, Voltaire, La Harpe, Marmontel, Delille, Fontanes, and Chateaubriand in one aspect, are the typical names of this tradition, the creators and maintainers of this common literary fonds, this sorte de circulation courante à l'usage des gens instruits. J'avoue ma faiblesse: nous sommes devenus bien plus forts dans la dissertation érudite, mais j'aurais un éternel regret pour cette moyenne et plus libre habitude littéraire qui laissait à l'imagination tout son espace et à l'esprit tout son jeu; qui formait une atmosphère saine et facile où le talent respirait et se mouvait à son gré cette atmosphère-là, je ne la trouve plus, et je la regrette.'-(Chateau-briand et son Groupe Littéraire, vol. i. p. 311.) The following pensée of La Bruyère applies to the second half of Amiel's criticism of the French mind: 'If you wish to travel in the Inferno or the Paradiso you must take other guides,' etc. 'Un homme né Chrétien et François se trouve contraint dans la satyre; les grands sujets lui sont défendus, il les entame quelquefois, et se détourne ensuite sur de petites choses qu'il relève par la beauté de son génie et de son style.'-(Les Caractères, etc., 'Des Ouvrages de l'Esprit.') 15. P. 148.-The Vouache is the hill which bounds the horizon of Geneva to the south-west. 16. P. 150.-The saying of Pascal's alluded to is in the Pensées, Art. xi. No. 10: A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit on trouve qu'il y a plus d'hommes originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de différence entre les hommes.' 17. P. 192.-'Die Mütter'-an allusion to a strange and enigmatical, but very effective, conception in Faust (Part II Act. I. Scene v.) Die Mütter are the prototypes, the abstract forms, the generative ideas, of things. Sie sehn dich nicht, denn Schemen sehn sie nur.' Goethe borrowed the term from a passage of Plutarch's, but he has made the idea half Platonic, half legendary. Amiel, however, seems rather to have in his mind Faust's speech in Scene vii. than the speech of Mephistopheles in Scene v.— 'In eurem Namen, Mütter, die ihr thront Zum Zelt des Tages, zum Gewölb' der Nächte.' 18. P. 196.-Weissenstein is a high point in the Jura, above Soleure. 19. P. 200.-Edouard Claparède, a Genevese naturalist, born 1832, died 1871. 20. P. 205.-Noce de Gamache='repas très somptueux.'Littré. The allusion, of course, is to Don Quixote, Part II. cap. xx. Donde se cuentan las bodas de Camacho el rico, con el suceso de Basilio el pobre.' 21. P. 213.-The quotation is from Quinet's Ahasvérus (first published 1833), that strange Welt-gedicht, which the author himself described as 'l'histoire du monde, de Dieu dans le monde, et enfin du doute dans le monde,' and which, with Faust, probably suggested the unfinished but in many ways brilliant performance of the young Spaniard, Espronceda,-El Diablo Mundo. 22. P. 222.—Il Penseroso, poésies-maximes par H. F. Amiel : Genève, 1858. This little book, which contains 133 maxims, several of which are quoted in the Journal Intime, is prefaced by a motto translated from Shelley-'Ce n'est pas la science qui nous manque, à nous modernes ; nous l'avons surabondamment. Mais ce que nous avons absorbé nous absorbe. . . . Ce qui nous manque c'est la poésie de la vie.' 23. P. 224.-Charles Secrétan, a Lausanne professor, the friend of Vinet, born 1819. He published Leçons sur la Philosophie de Leibnitz, Philosophie de la Liberté, La Raison et le Christianisme, etc. 24. P. 238.-Étienne Vacherot, a French philosophical writer, who owed his first successes in life to the friendship of Cousin, and was later brought very much into notice by his controversy with the Abbé Gratry, by the prosecution brought against him in consequence of his book, La Démocratie (1859), and by his rejection at the hands of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1865, for the same kind of reasons which had brought about the exclusion of Littré in the preceding year. In 1868, however, he became a member of the Institute in succession to Cousin. A Liberal of the old school, he has separated himself from the Republicans since the war, and has made himself felt as a severe critic of Republican blunders in the Revue des deux Mondes. La Religion, which discusses the psychological origins of the religious sense, was published in 1868. 25. P. 240.-At this period the controversy between the orthodox party and 'Liberal Christianity' was at its height, both in Geneva and throughout Switzerland. 26. P. 242.—The name of M. Albert Réville, the French Protestant theologian, is more or less familiar in England, especially since his delivery of the Hibbert Lectures in 1884. Athanase Coquerel, born 1820, died 1876, the well-known champion of Liberal ideas in the French Protestant Church, was suspended from his pastoral functions by the Consistory of Paris, on account of his review of M. Renan's Vie de Jésus in 1864. Ferdinand-Edouard Buisson, a Liberal Protestant, originally a professor at Lausanne, was raised to the important functions of Director of Primary Instruction by M. Ferry in 1879. He was denounced by Bishop Dupanloup, in the National Assembly of 1871, as the author of certain Liberal pamphlets on the dangers connected with Scripture teaching in schools, and, for the time, lost his employment under the Ministry of Education. 27. P. 244. Gustave-Adolphe Hirn, a French physicist, born near Colmar, 1815, became a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences in 1867. The book of his to which Amiel refers is no doubt Conséquences philosophiques et métaphy siques de la thermodynamique, Analyse élémentaire de l'univers (1869). 28. P. 257.- This is one of the passages which rouses M. Renan's wonder. 'Voilà la grande différence,' he writes, ‘entre l'éducation catholique et l'éducation protestante. Ceux qui comme moi ont reçu une éducation catholique en ont gardé de profonds vestiges. Mais ces vestiges ne sont pas des dogmes, ce sont des rêves. Une fois ce grand rideau de drap d'or, bariolé de soie, d'indienne et de calicot, par lequel le catholicisme nous masque la vue du monde, une fois, dis-je ce rideau déchiré, on voit l'univers en sa splendeur infinie, la nature en sa haute et pleine majesté. Le protestant le plus libre garde souvent quelque chose de triste, un fond d'austérité intellectuelle analogue au pessimisme slave.'-(Journal des Débats, September 30, 1884.) One is reminded of Mr. Morley's criticism of Emerson. Emerson, he points out, has almost nothing to say of death, and 'little to say of that horrid burden and impediment on the soul which the churches call sin, and which, by whatever name we call it, is a very real catastrophe in the moral nature of man; the courses of nature, and the prodigious injustices of man in society affect him with neither horror nor awe. He will see no monster if he can help it.' Here, then, we have the eternal difference between the two orders of temperament-the men whose overflowing energy forbids them to realise the ever-recurring defeat of the human spirit at the hands of circumstance, like Renan and Emerson, and the men for whom 'horror and awe' are interwoven with experience, like Amiel. 29. P. 291. - Mably, the Abbé Mably, 1709-85, one of the precursors of the Revolution, the professor of a cultivated and classical communism based on a study of antiquity, which Babeuf, and others like him, in the following generation, translated into practical experiment. 'Caius Gracchus' Babeuf, born 1764, and guillotined in 1797 for a conspiracy against the Directory, is sometimes called the first French Socialist. Perhaps Socialist doctrines, properly so called, may be said to make their first entry into the region of popular debate and practical agitation with his Manifeste des Égaux, issued April 1796. 30. P. 296. "Persifflez les pharisaïsmes, mais parlez droit aux honnêtes gens me dit Amiel, avec une certaine aigreur. Mon Dieu, que les honnêtes gens sont souvent exposés a être des pharisiens sans le savoir!'-(M. Renan's article, already quoted.) 31. P. 297.-Polyeucte, Act V. Scene v. 'Mon époux en mourant m'a laissé ses lumières ; Je vois, je sais, je crois 32. P. 305.—A Synod of the Reformed Churches of France was then occupied in determining the constituent conditions of Protestant belief. 33. P. 310.-Louise Siefert, a modern French poetess, died 1879. In addition to Les Stoïques, she published L'Année Républicaine, Paris, 1869, and other works. Il 34. P. 313.—'We all believe in duty,' says M. Renan, 'and in the triumph of righteousness;' but it is possible notwithstanding, 'que tout le contraire soit vrai-et que le monde ne soit qu'une amusante féerie dont aucun dieu ne se soucie. faut donc nous arranger de manière à ceque, dans le cas où le seconde hypothèse serait la vraie, nous n'ayons pas été trop dupés.' This strain of remark, which is developed at considerable length, is meant as a criticism of Amiel's want of sensitiveness to the irony of things. But in reality, as the passage in the text shows, M. Renan is only expressing a feeling with which Amiel was just as familiar as his critic. Only he is delivered from this last doubt of all by his habitual seriousness; by that sense of 'horror and awe' which M. Renan puts away from him. Conscience saves him 'from the sorceries of Maïa.' 35. P. 332. Ernest Havet, born 1813, a distinguished French scholar and professor. He became Professor of Latin Oratory at the Collège de France in 1855, and a Member of the Institute in January 1880. His admirable edition of the Pensées de Pascal is well known. Le Christianisme et ses |