peated in it; the same joys, the same aspirations, the same sorrows are visible throughout it, so that in reading it one is more and more impressed with the force and reality of the inner life which has left behind it so definite an image of itself. And every now and then the poems add a detail, a new impression, which seems by contrast to give fresh value to the fine-spun speculations, the lofty despairs, of the Journal. Take these verses, written at twenty-one, to his younger sister 'Treize ans et sur ton front aucun baiser de mère 'Orpheline, c'est là le nom dont tu t'appelles, 'Et, semés par l'éclair sur les monts, dans les plaines, Et du foyer natal, malgré leurs plaintes vaines The last stanza is especially poor, and in none of them is there much poetical promise. But the pathetic image of a forlorn and orphaned childhood, 'un nid que la foudre a brise,' which it calls up, and the tone of brotherly affection, linger in one's memory. And through much of the volume of 1863, in the verses to 'My Godson,' or in the charming poem to Loulou, the little girl who at five years old, daisy in hand, had sworn him eternal friendship over Gretchen's game of 'Er liebt mich-liebt mich nicht, one hears the same tender note. 'Merci, prophétique fleurette, Corolle à l'oracle vainqueur, 'Et depuis trois hivers, ma belle, His last poetical volume, Jour à Jour, published in 1880, is far more uniformly melancholy and didactic in tone than the two earlier collections from which we have been quoting. But though the dominant note is one of pain and austerity, of philosophy touched with emotion, and the general tone more purely introspective, there are many traces in it of the younger Amiel, dear, for very ordinary human reasons, to his sisters and his friends. And, in general, the pathetic interest of the book for all whose sympathy answers to what George Sand calls 'les tragédies que la pensée aperçoit et que l'œil ne voit point,' is very great. Amiel published it a year before his death, and the struggle with failing power which the Journal reveals to us in its saddest and most intimate reality, is here expressed in more reserved and measured form. Faith, doubt, submission, tenderness of feeling, infinite aspiration, moral passion, that straining hope of something beyond, which is the life of the religious soul-they are all here, and the Dernier Mot with which the sad little volume ends is poor Amiel's epitaph on himself, his conscious farewell to that more public aspect of his life in which he had suffered much and achieved comparatively so little. 'Nous avons à plaisir compliqué le bonheur, Attaché nos cœurs à la terre ; Dupes des faux dehors tenus pour l'important, 'Sans fin nous prodiguons calculs, efforts, travaux ; 'Victime des désirs, esclave des regrets, L'homme s'agite, et s'use, et vieillit sans progrès Comme un sage mourant, puissions-nous dire en paix Upon the small remains of Amiel's prose outside the Journal there is no occasion to dwell. The two essays on Madame de Staël and Rousseau contain much fine critical remark, and might find a place perhaps as an appendix to some future edition of the Journal ; and some of the Pensées, published in the latter half of the volume containing the Grains de Mil, are worthy of preservation. But in general, whatever he himself published was inferior to what might justly have been expected of him, and no one was more conscious of the fact than himself. The story of his fatal illness, of the weary struggle for health which filled the last seven years of his life, is abundantly told in the Journal-we must not repeat it here. He had never been a strong man, and at fifty-three he received, at his doctor's hands, his arrêt de mort. We are told that what killed him was 'heart disease, complicated by disease of the larynx,' and that he suffered 'much and long.' He was buried in the cemetery of Clarens, not far from his great contemporary Alexandre Vinet; and the affection of a sculptor friend provided the monument which now marks his resting-place. We have thus exhausted all the biographical material which is at present available for the description of Amiel's life and relations towards the outside world. It is to be hoped that the friends to whom the charge of his memory has been specially committed may see their way in the future, if not to a formal biography, which is very likely better left unattempted, at least to a volume of Letters, which would complete the Journal Intime, as Joubert's Correspondance completes the Pensées. There must be ample material for it; and Amiel's letters would probably supply us with more of that literary and critical reflection which his mind produced so freely and so well, as long as there was no question of publication, but which is at present somewhat overweighted in the Journal Intime. But whether biography or correspondence is ever forthcoming or not, the Journal remains—and the Journal is the important matter. We shall read the Letters if they appear, as we now read the Poems, for the Journal's sake. The man himself, as poet, teacher, and littérateur, produced no appreciable effect on his generation; but the posthumous record of his inner life has stirred the hearts of readers all over Europe, and won him a niche in the House of Fame. What are the reasons for this striking transformation of a man's position-a transformation which, as M. Scherer says, will rank among the curiosities of literary history? In other words, what has given the Journal Intime its sudden and unexpected success? In the first place, no doubt, its poetical quality, its beauty of manner—that fine literary expression in which Amiel has been able to clothe the subtler processes of thought, no less than the secrets of religious feeling, or the aspects of natural scenery. Style is what gives value and currency to thought, and Amiel, in spite of all his Germanisms, has style of the best kind. He possesses in prose that indispensable magic which he lacks in poetry. His style, indeed, is by no means always in harmony with the central French tradition. Probably a Frenchman will be inclined to apply Sainte-Beuve's remarks on Amiel's elder countryman, Rodolphe Töpffer, to Amiel himself :-' C'est ainsi qu'on écrit dans les littératures qui n'ont point de capitale, de quartier général classique, ou d'Académie; c'est ainsi qu'un Allemand, qu'un Américain, ou même un Anglais, use à son gré de sa langue. En France au contraire, où il y a une Académie Française on doit trouver qu'un tel style est une très-grande nouveauté et le succés qu'il a obtenu un evènement: il a fallu bien des circonstances pour y préparer.' No doubt the preparatory circumstance in Amiel's case has been just that Germanisation of the French mind on which M. Taine and M. Bourget dwell with so much emphasis. But, be this as it may, there is no mistaking the enthusiasm with which some of the best living writers of French have hailed these pages-instinct, as one declares, 'with a strange and marvellous poetry;' full of phrases d'une intense suggestion de beauté,' according to another. Not that the whole of the Journal flows with the same ease, the same felicity. There are a certain number of passages where Amiel ceases to be the writer, and becomes the technical philosopher; there are others, though not many, into which a certain German heaviness and diffuseness has crept, dulling the edge of the sentences, and retarding the development of the thought. When all deductions have been made, however, Amiel's claim is still first and foremost, the claim of the poet and the artist; of the man whose thought uses at will the harmonies and resources of speech, and who has attained, in words of his own, ‘to the full and masterly expression of himself.' Then to the poetical beauty of manner which first helped the book to penetrate, faire sa trouée, as the French say, we must add its extraordinary psychological interest. Both as poet and as psychologist, Amiel makes another link in a special tradition; he adds another name to the list of those who have won a hearing from their fellows as interpreters of the inner life, as the revealers of man to himself. He is the successor of St. Augustine and Dante; he is the brother of Obermann and Maurice de Guérin. What others have done for the spiritual life of other generations he has done for the spiritual life of this, and the wealth of poetical, scientific, and psychological faculty which he has brought to the analysis of human feeling and human perceptions places him-so far as the present century is concerned—at the head of the small and delicately-gifted class to which he belongs. For beside his spiritual experience Obermann's is superficial, and Maurice de Guérin's a passing trouble, a mere quick outburst of passionate feeling. Amiel indeed has neither the continuous romantic beauty nor the rich descriptive wealth of Senancour. The Dent de Midi, with its untrodden solitude, its primeval silences and its hovering eagles, the Swiss landscape described in the 'Fragment on the Ranz des 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 |