BOOKS.

AMIEL'S JOURNAL.* MRS. HIIMPHRY WARD closes her thoughtful introduction to this interesting book with a shaft at the people who are "certain" about the existence of the higher objects of the reason and the spiritual affections. The age, she says, is against the " certain " people. That is a remark rather after the fashion of Mr. Arnold, who always treats the Zeitgeist as the final arbiter, in • Amiel's Journal: the Journal Intime of lintri-Fred.ic Amid. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mrs. Humpbry Ward. 2 vols. London : Macmillan and Co.

questions of this nature, though he should know, if any one knows, that what the Time-spirit obliterates by breathing upon it in one century, the same spirit is very apt to revive by a second breath in another. But suppose the spirit of the age to be against the people who are "certain "of spiritual truths, does anything follow except that the spirit of the age, being un- favourable to decisive thought, and consequently to decisive action, the culture of the day is irresolute, and hardly knows its own mind ? It is clear that Mrs. Ward approves of this attitude of mind, holding, apparently, that faith of the older kind is quite unwarranted by the conditions of the case, and that it would be a mere condescension to a lower intellectual

level, for any mind thoroughly imbued with modern thought and knowledge, to accept miracles or supernaturalism in any sense closely akin to that in which our fathers accepted them ; and as she holds this, she certainly could not have given us a book better adapted to enforce the view which she regards as the truth, than this private journal of Amiel's. It presents a most striking picture of a mind of not inconsiderable power, vivid imagination, and extraordinary range of knowledge, trembling for ever between faith in God and doubt whether its own bias to belief is not a form of illusion,—preferring the former conclusion in its higher moods, but questioning whether its deep intuitions of duty were not themselves products of illusion in its lower moods ; and oscillating, with more and more rapid and delicate vibrations between the two attitudes, as health declined and the sensitiveness of the writer was intensified. It is a book which gives a marvellous picture of that giddiness of mind which would almost suggest swimming of the brain, but for the very great literary power with which the vibrations of feeling are expressed. What the Indian philosphers call Maia,— the doctrine that all is illusion,—could hardly, for instance, be more powerfully depicted than in that passage which seems to have captivated the late Rector of Lincoln College, Mr. Mark Pattison :- "9th June, 1S70.—At bottom, everything depends upon the pre- sence or absence of one single element in the soul—hope. All the activity of man, all his efforts and all his enterprises, presuppose a hope in him of attaining an end. Once kill this hope and his move- ments become senseless, spasmodic, and convulsive, like those of some one falling from a height. To struggle with the inevitable has something childish in it. To implore the law of gravitation to suspend its action would no doubt be a grotesque prayer. Very well ! but when a man loses faith in the efficacy of his efforts, when be says to himself, Yon are incapable of realising your ideal ; happiness is a chimera, progress is an illusion, the passion for perfection is a snare ; and supposing all your ambitions were gratified, everything would still be vanity,' then he comes to see that a little blindness is neces- sary if life is to be carried on, and that illusion is the universal spring of movement. Complete disillusion would mean absolute immobility. He who has deciphered the secret and read the riddle of finite life escapes from the great wheel of existence ; he has left the world of

the living—he is already dead. Is this the meaning of the old belief

that to raise the veil of Isis or to behold God face to face brought destruction upon the rash mortal who attempted it ? Egypt and Judaea bad recorded the fact, Buddha gave the key to it ; the indi- vidual life is a nothing ignorant of itself, and as soon as this nothing knows itself, individual life is abolished in pi inciple. For as soon as the illusion vanishes, Nothingness resumes its eternal sway, the suffering of life is over, error has disappeared, time and form have ceased to be for this enfranchised individuality ; the coloured air- bubble has burst in the infinite space, and the misery of thought has sunk to rest in the changeless repose of all-embracing Nothing. The

absolute, if it were spirit, would still be activity, and it is activity, the daughter of desire, which is incompatible with the absolute. The absolute, then, must be the zero of all determination, and the only manner of being suited to it is Non-being."

There you see Amiel in the sceptical attitude. And again :—

" Every civilisation is, as it were, a dream of a thousand years, in which heaven and earth, nature and history, appear to men illumined by fantastic light and representing a drama which is nothing but a projection of the soul itself, influenced by some intoxication—I was going to say hallucination—or other. Those who are widest awake still see the real world across the dominant illusion of their race or time. And the reason is that the deceiving light starts from our own mind : the light is our religion. Everything changes with it. It is religion which gives to our kaleidoscope, if not the material of the figures, at least their colour, their light and shade, and general aspect. Every religion makes men see the world and humanity under a special light ; it is a mode of apperception, which can only be scientifically handled when we have cast it aside, and can only be judged when we have replaced it by a better."

On the other band, Amiel from time to time expresses the triumph of spiritual faith over this giddiness of the soul with almost,— we think not quite,—as much power as he does the doctrine of universal illusion itself. In the following passage, for instance, he is in his higher and purer mood, the mood most characteristic of the man as a whole, though hardly of the writer, for as a writer, we think, he writes with most power

when he is pleading against the faith which, as a man, was most characteristic of him :—

"27th January, 1869.—What, then, is the service rendered to the world by Christianity ? The proclamation of good news.' And what is this 'good news' ? The pardon of sin. The God of holiness

loving the world and reconciling it to Himself by Jesus, in order to establish the kingdom of God, the city of souls, the life of heaven

upon earth,—here you have the whole of it ; but in this is a revolu- tion. ' Love ye one another, as I have loved you;' ' Be ye one with me, as I am one with the Father :' for this is life eternal, here is perfection, salvation, joy. Faith in the fatherly love of God, who punishes and pardons for our good, and who desires not the death of the sinner, but his conversion and his life,—here is the motive- power of the redeemed. What we call Christianity is a vast ocean, into which flow a number of spiritual currents of distant and various origin ; certain religions, that is to say, of Asia and of Europe, the great ideas of Greek wisdom, and especially those of Platonism_ Neither its dootrino nor its morality, as they have been historically developed, are new or spontaneous. What is essential and original in it is the practical demonstration that the human and the divine nature may co exist, may become fused into one sublime flame; that holiness and pity, justice and mercy, may meet together and become one, in man and in God. What is specific in Christianity is Jesus— the religious consciousness of Jesus. The sacred sense of his absolute union with God through perfect love and self-surrender, this profound, invincible, and tranquil faith of his, has become a religion ; the faith of Jesus has become the faith of millions and millions of men. From this torch has sprung a vast conflagration. And such has been the brilliancy and the radiance both of revealer and revelation, that the astonished world has forgotten its justice in its admiration, and has referred to one single benefactor the whole of those benefits which are its heritage from the past."

But even in this mood Amiel cannot rest. He cannot rest without suggesting that even the consciousness of Christ may be traced back to some " primitive cell " as the physiologist traces back the body to some primitive cell, and without declaring that in that cell will be found "the principle of the eternal gospel," "the punctual saliens of pure religion." We must say that it seems to us the wildest of dreams to suppose that if man can, with any just confidence, refer back a life like that of Christ to a source infinitely above man,—as Amid evidently thinks he safely can,—he may then proceed to analyse this divine gift to man into its essential and non-essential elements, and absolve himself from yielding any trust to that in the divine gospel which he determines to be non-essential, or of the nature of alloy.

The speculative power of Amiel is not always as strong as his imaginative and critical power. The following, for instance, is not only dreamy, but, we should think, demonstrably unsound :-

" Just as the sum of force is always identical in the material universe, and presents a spectacle not of diminution nor of augmenta- tion, but simply of constant metamorphosis, so it is not impossible that the sum of good is in reality always the same, and that there- fore all progress on one side is compensated inversely on another side. If this were so, we ought never to say that a period or a people is absolutely and as a whole superior to another time or another people, but only that there is superiority in certain points. The great difference between man and man would, on these principles, consist in the art of transforming vitality into spirituality, and latent power into useful energy. The same difference would hold good between nation and nation, so that the object of the simultaneous or succes- sive competition of mankind in history would be the extraction of the maximum of humanity from a given amount of animality. Education, morals, and politics would be only variations of the same art, the art of living—that is to say, of disengaging the pure form and subtlest essence of our individual being."

But if good be, as we suppose, the quality of a will capable of dis- criminating a better from a worse,—of one whioh actually chooses the former,—in what sense can it be conceived that the amount of good in the world is always constant, unless, along with the vast increase in the number of living moral beings, a proportionate diminution takes place in the attainable virtue of each individual moral being ? If the amount of goodness is to be constant, while the number of moral beings in each succeeding age is multiplied (say) by a hundred, it is clear that the goodness attainable by each individual must dwindle in exact proportion as that number increases. Surely this passage shows that Amiel sometimes not only amused himself, but confused himself, by suggesting impossible analogies between physical and moral truths. It is, indeed, hardly possible to conceive, even though the number of moral beings always remained the same, any moral equivalent to the doctrine of the conservation of energy, without abolishing altogether the very idea of free will, for which Amiel often battles loyally. But certainly his speculative mind does occasionally manage to get loose from the tension of the deep moral convictions which usually held it.

One sees the same tendency to a sort of unreal day-dreaming in the passage in which Amiel claims to have attained to a sort of intuitive synthesis of the Italian character, as he muses on it during his stay at Turin :—

" 11th October, 1853.—My third day at Turin is now over. I have been able to penetrete farther than ever before into the special genius of this town and people. I have felt it live, have realised it little by little, as my intuition became more distinct. That is what I care for most : to seizo the soul of things, the soul of a nation ; to live the objective life, the life outside self ; to find my way into a new moral country. I long to assume the citizenship of this unknown world, to enrich myself with this fresh form of existence, to feel it from within, to link myself to it, and to reproduce it sympathetically, —this is the end and the reward of my efforts. To-day the problem grew clear to me as I stood on the terrace of the military hospital, in full view of the Alps, the weather fresh and clear in spite of a stormy sky. Such an intuition after all is nothing but a synthesis wrought by instinct—a synthesis to which everything, streets, houses, land- scape, accent, dialect, physiognomies, history, and habits contribute their share. I might call it the ideal integration of a people, or its reduction to the generating point, or an entering into its conscious- ness. This generating point explains everything else,—art, religion, history, polities, manners ; and without it nothing can be explained. The ancients realised their consciousness in the national God. Modern nationalities, more complicated and less artistic, are more difficult to decipher. What one seeks for in them is the (iceman, the fat um, the inner genius, the mission, the primitive disposition—both what there is desire for and what there is power for—the force in them and its limitations. A pure and life.giving freshness of thought and of the spiritual life seemed to play about me, borne on the breeze descend- ing from the Alpo. I breathed an atmosphere of spiritual freedom, and I hailed with emotion and rapture the mountains whence was wafted to me this feeling of strength and purity. A thousand sensations, thoughts, and analogies crowded upon me. History, too—the history of the sub-Alpine countries, from the Lign- rians to Hannibal, from Hannibal to Charlemagne, from Charle- magne to Napoleon,—passed through my mind. All the possible points of view were, so to speak, piled upon each other, and one caught glimpses of some concentrically across others. I was enjoy- ing, and I was learning. Sight passed into vision without a trace of hallucination, and the landscape was my guide, my Virgil. All this made me very sensible of the difference between me and the majority of travellers, all of whom have a special object, and content them- selves with one thing or with several, while I desire all or nothing, and am for ever straining towards the total, whether of all possible objects, or of all the elements present in the reality. In other words, what I desire is the sum of all desires, and what I seek to know is the sum of all different kinds of knowledge. Always the com- plete, the absolute ; the teres atque rotundum—sphericity—non- resignation."

Is not that a rather ambitious bit of mysticism ? To the present writer, at least, it represents very little that is of substantial import.

We have dwelt on some of the weaker points of Amiel's Journal, because, in our opinion, Mrs. Ward estimates the whole character of it with more sympathy than impartiality. But we recognise most cordially its exquisite refinement, its vivid imaginativeness, its wonderful critical justness, its spirituality of feeling, and its occasional, though sombre, grandeur. In the following fine passage, for instance, the rapid vibratory move- ment of Amiel's imagination between faith and doubt is expressed with a wonderful beauty and a serious depth, as fascinating as musical. (For the music, we have to thank, by the way, the great art of the translator, who has evidently been so thoroughly inspired by her original, that she has con- ceived and produced an English style powerful enough to render it to us adequately) :— " 22nd July, 1870 (Bel Alp).—The sky, which was misty and over- cast this morning, has become perfectly blue again, and the giants of the Valais are bathed in tranquil light. Whence this solemn melancholy which oppresses and pursues me ? I have just read a series of scientific books (Bronn on the Laws of Palccontulogy, Karl Ritter on the Law of Geographical Forms). Are they the cause of this depression ? Or is it the majesty of this immense landscape, the splendour of this setting sun, which brings the tears to my eyes ?

• Criatnre d'un jour qui Vagites nue bears;

what weighs upon thee—I know it well—is the sense of thine utter

nothingness t The names of great men hover before my eyes like a secret reproach, and this grand impassive nature tells me that to-morrow I shall have disappeared, butterfly that I am, without having lived. Or perhaps it is the breath of eternal things which stirs in me the shudder of Job. What is man—this weed which a sunbeam withers ? What is our life in the infinite abyss ? I feel a sort of sacred terror, not only for myself, but for my race, for all that is mortal. Like Buddha, I feel the great wheel turning,—the wheel of universal illnsion,—and the dumb stupor which enwraps me is full of anguish. Isis lifts the corner of her veil, and he who perceives the great mystery beneath is struck with giddiness. I can scarcely breathe. It seems to me that I am hanging by a thread above the fathomless abyss of destiny. Is this the Infinite face to face, an intuition of the last great death ?

` Ordeal.° d'un jour qui t'agites une heure.

Ton time est immortelle et tes pleura vont Mir.'

Finir ? When depths of ineffable desire are opening in the heart, as vast, as yawning as the immensity which surrounds us ? Genius, self-devotion, love,—all these cravings quicken into life and tortare me at once. Like the shipwrecked sailor about to sink under the waves, I am conscious of a mad clinging to life, and at the same time of a rush of despair and repentance, which forces from me a cry for pardon. And then all this hidden agony dissolves in wearied sub- mission. Resign yourself to the inevitable ! Shroud away out of sight the flattering delusions of youth ! Live and die in the shade ! Like the insects humming in the darkness, offer up your evening prayer. Be content to fade out of life without a murmur whenever the Master of life shall breathe upon your tiny flame ! It is out of myriads of unknown lives that every clod of earth is built up. The infnsoria do not count until they are millions upon millions. Accept your nothingness.' Amen ! Bat there is no peace except in order, in law. Am I in order ? Alas, no ! My changeable and restless nature will torment me to the end. I shall never see plainly what I ought to do. The love of the better will have stood between me and the good. Yearning for the ideal will have lost me reality. Vague aspiration and undefined desire will have been enough to make my talents useless, and to neutralise my powers. Unproductive nature that I am, tortured by the belief that production was required of me, may not my very remorse be a mistake and a superfluity ? Scherer's phrase comes back to me, ' We must accept ourselves as we are.' " And though there is a certain monotony in the Journal as a whole, there are many flashes of brilliant fancy on questions not going quite so deep into the ultimate foundations of faith as most of those which we have quoted. These give it variety, and even here and there an occasional lightness. The criticisms on men and books especially are very brilliant, and a relief after the long-drawn meditation and painful oscillations of judgment between faith and doubt. What can be more brilliant, for instance, than the comment on About, or the comment on Taine ? What more beautiful than Amiel's description of the songs of the Vaudois poet, Juste Olivier, which it gave us at once the most lively desire to read ? The delicacy of Amiel's insight, the liveliness of his imagination, the extraordinarily fine balance of his judgment, and the perfect equity of his nature, make him a most delightful critic, though in the higher speculative regions he delights too much in balancing himself, like the famous metaphysical angels of the middle-age metaphysicians, on the point of a needle.