form as makes literature enduring, is indeed what the world might have looked for from him: those institutes of aesthetics, for instance, which might exist, after Lessing and Hegel, but which certainly do not exist yet. "Construction," he says—artistic or literary construction—"rests upon feeling, instinct, and," alas! also, "upon will." The instinct, at all events, was certainly his. And over and above that he had possessed himself of the art of expressing, in quite natural language, very difficult thoughts; those abstract and metaphysical conceptions especially, in which German mind has been rich, which are bad masters, but very useful ministers towards the understanding, towards an analytical survey, of all that the intellect has produced.

But something held him back: not so much [31] a reluctancy of temperament, or of physical constitution (common enough cause why men of undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production) but a cause purely intellectual—the presence in him, namely, of a certain vein of opinion; that other, constituent but contending, person, in his complex nature. "The relation of thought to action," he writes, "filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried towards a bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it. Action is but coarsened thought." That is but an ingenious metaphysical point, as he goes on to show. But, including in "action" that literary production in which the line of his own proper activity lay, he followed—followed often—that fastidious utterance to a cynical and pessimistic conclusion.

Maia, as he calls it, the empty "Absolute" of the Buddhist, the "Infinite," the "All," of which those German metaphysicians he loved only too well have had so much to say: this was for ever to give the go-by to all positive, finite, limited interests whatever. The vague pretensions of an abstract expression acted on him with all the force of a prejudice. "The ideal," he admits, [32] "poisons for me all imperfect possession"; and again, "The Buddhist tendency in me blunts the faculty of free self-government, and weakens the power of action. I feel a terror of action and am only at ease in the impersonal, disinterested, and objective line of thought." But then, again, with him "action" meant chiefly literary production. He quotes with approval those admirable words from Goethe, "In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister"; yet still always finds himself wavering between "frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing after what is unknown and distant." There is, doubtless, over and above the physical consumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of sentiment in this touching confession. Still, what strengthened both tendencies was that metaphysical prejudice for the "Absolute," the false intellectual conscience. "I have always avoided what attracted me, and turned my back upon the point where secretly I desired to be"; and, of course, that is not the way to a free and generous productivity, in literature, or in anything else; though in literature, with Amiel at all events, it meant the fastidiousness which [33] is incompatible with any but the very best sort of production.

And as that abstract condition of Maia, to the kind and quantity of concrete literary production we hold to have been originally possible for him; so was the religion he actually attained, to what might have been the development of his profoundly religious spirit, had he been able to see that the old-fashioned Christianity is itself but the proper historic development of the true "essence" of the New Testament. There, again, is the constitutional shrinking, through a kind of metaphysical prejudice, from the concrete—that fear of the actual—in this case, of the Church of history; to which the admissions, which form so large a part of these volumes, naturally lead. Assenting, on probable evidence, to so many of the judgments of the religious sense, he failed to see the equally probable evidence there is for the beliefs, the peculiar direction of men's hopes, which complete those judgments harmoniously, and bring them into connection with the facts, the venerable institutions of the past—with the lives of the saints. By failure, as we think, of that historic sense, of [34] which he could speak so well, he got no further in this direction than the glacial condition of rationalistic Geneva. "Philosophy," he says, "can never replace religion." Only, one cannot see why it might not replace a religion such as his: a religion, after all, much like Seneca's.

"I miss something," he himself confesses, "common worship, a positive religion, shared with other people. Ah! when will the Church to which I belong in heart rise into being?" To many at least of those who can detect the ideal through the disturbing circumstances which belong to all actual institutions in the world, it was already there. Pascal, from considerations to which Amiel was no stranger, came to the large hopes of the Catholic Church; Amiel stopped short at a faith almost hopeless; and by stopping short just there he really failed, as we think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that appeasing influence which his nature demanded as the condition of its full activity, as a force, an intellectual force, in the world—in the special business of his life. "Welcome the unforeseen," he says again, by way of a counsel of perfection in the matter of culture, "but give to [35] your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan." Bring, we should add, the Great Possibility at least within the lines of your plan—your plan of action or production; of morality; especially of your conceptions of religion. And still, Amiel too, be it remembered (we are not afraid to repeat it), has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of Pascal.

And so we get only the Journal. Watching in it, in the way we have suggested, the contention of those two men, those two minds in him, and observing how the one might have ascertained and corrected the shortcomings of the other, we certainly understand, and can sympathize with Amiel's despondency in the retrospect of a life which seemed to have been but imperfectly occupied. But, then, how excellent a literary product, after all, the Journal is. And already we have found that it improves also on second reading. A book of "thoughts" should be a book that may be fairly dipped into, and yield good quotable sayings. Here are some of its random offerings:

"Look twice, if what you want is a just [36] conception; look once, if what you want is a sense of beauty."

"It is not history which teaches conscience to be honest; it is the conscience which educates history. Fact is corrupting—it is we who correct it by the persistence of our ideal."

"To do easily what is difficult for others is the mark of talent. To do what is impossible for talent is the mark of genius."

"Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world, while at the same time detaching us from it."

"As it is impossible to be outside God, the best is consciously to dwell in Him."

"He also (the Son of Man), He above all, is the great Misunderstood, the least comprehended."

"The pensée writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the artist."

There are some, we know, who hold that genius cannot, in the nature of things, be "sterile"; that there are no "mute" Miltons, or the like. Well! genius, or only a very distinguished talent, the gift which Amiel nursed so jealously did come into evidence. And the [37] reader, we hope, sees also already how well his English translator has done her work. She may justly feel, as part at least of the reward of a labour which must have occupied much time, so many of the freshest hours of mind and spirit, that she has done something to help her author in the achievement of his, however discouraged still irrepressible, desire, by giving additional currency to a book which the best sort of readers will recognize as an excellent and certainly very versatile companion, not