t accumulated power and attainment
which, with a more strenuous temperament, might have sufficed for an
effective volume. Continually, in the Journal, we pause over things
that would rank for beauties among widely differing models of the best
French prose. He has said some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of
Pascal. He had a right to compose "Thoughts": they have the force in
them which makes up for their unavoidable want of continuity.

But if, as Amiel himself challenges us to do, we look below the surface
of a very equable and even smoothly accomplished literary manner, we
discover, in high degree of development, that perplexity or complexity
of soul, the expression [23] of which, so it be with an adequate
literary gift, has its legitimate, because inevitable, interest for the
modern reader. Senancour and Maurice de Guerin in one, seem to have
been supplemented here by a larger experience, a far greater education,
than either of them had attained to. So multiplex is the result that
minds of quite opposite type might well discover in these pages their
own special thought or humour, happily expressed at last (they might
think) in precisely that just shade of language themselves had searched
for in vain. And with a writer so vivid and impressive as Amiel, those
varieties of tendency are apt to present themselves as so many
contending persons. The perplexed experience gets the apparent
clearness, as it gets also the animation, of a long dialogue; only, the
disputants never part company, and there is no real conclusion. "This
nature," he observes, of one of the many phases of character he has
discovered in himself, "is, as it were, only one of the men which exist
in me. It is one of my departments. It is not the whole of my
territory, the whole of my inner kingdom"; and again, "there are ten
men in me, according to time, place, surrounding, [24] and occasion;
and, in my restless diversity, I am for ever escaping myself."

Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel--two sufficiently opposed
personalities, which the attentive reader may define for himself;
compare with, and try by each other--as we think, correct also by each
other. There is the man, in him and in these pages, who would be "the
man of disillusion," only that he has never really been "the man of
desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double weariness about
him. He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to Rene, even to Werther,
and, on o