ur first introduction to him, we might think that we had to do
only with one more of the vague "renunciants," who in real life
followed those creations of fiction, and who, however delicate,
interesting as a study, and as it were picturesque on the stage of
life, are themselves, after all, essentially passive, uncreative, and
therefore necessarily not of first-rate importance in literature.
Taken for what it is worth, the expression of this mood--the culture of
ennui for its own sake--is certainly carried to its ideal of negation
by Amiel. But the completer, the positive, soul, which will merely
take [25] that mood into its service (its proper service, as we hold,
is in counteraction to the vulgarity of purely positive natures) is
also certainly in evidence in Amiel's "Thoughts"--that other, and far
stronger person, in the long dialogue; the man, in short, possessed of
gifts, not for the renunciation, but for the reception and use, of all
that is puissant, goodly, and effective in life, and for the varied and
adequate literary reproduction of it; who, under favourable
circumstances, or even without them, will become critic, or poet, and
in either case a creative force; and if he be religious (as Amiel was
deeply religious) will make the most of "evidence," and almost
certainly find a Church.

The sort of purely poetic tendency in his mind, which made Amiel known
in his own lifetime chiefly as a writer of verse, seems to be
represented in these volumes by certain passages of natural
description, always sincere, and sometimes rising to real distinction.
In Switzerland it is easy to be pleased with scenery. But the record of
such pleasure becomes really worth while when, as happens with Amiel,
we feel that there has been, and with success, an intellectual [26]
effort to get at the secret, the precise motive, of the pleasure; to
define feeling, in this matter. Here is a good description of an
effect of fog, which we commend to foreigners resident in London:

"Fog has certainly a poetry of its own--a grace, a dreamy charm. It
does for the daylight what a lamp does for us at night; it turns the
mind towards meditation; it throws the soul back on itself. The sun,
as it were, sheds us abroad in nature, scatters and disperses us; mist
draws us together and concentrates us--it is cordial, homely, charged
with feeling. The poetry of the sun has something of the epic in it;
that of fog and mist is elegiac and religious. Pant