ience. But if such experience is to be
idealized, its origin should disappear. Shakespeare may have undergone
all the conflicts of doubt and irresolution represented in "Hamlet"; but
in reading "Hamlet" we think, not of Shakespeare's conflicts, but of our
own. _Volupte_ is too palpably a confession. The story is not a
creation; it has been simply evolved by that process of thought which
transports a particular idiosyncrasy into conditions and circumstances
where it becomes a kind of destiny and a subject of speculation. Reality
is wanting, for the very reason that the Imagination, after being called
into play, has proved too feeble for her office. Herein Amaury differs
widely from Rene. Apart from the difference of power, Chateaubriand had
poured out his entire self; he had transcended the limits of his actual
life, but never those of his mental experience. M. Sainte-Beuve had felt
only a part of what he sought to depict; the rest he had conjectured or
borrowed. The pages which describe the hero's impressions and emotions
in consecrating himself to the service of the Church were written by
Lacordaire. They are a faithful transcript from nature, but from a
nature not at all resembling that to which they have been applied. The
circumstances under which the book was composed will exhibit the
difference. The author was then intimate with Lamennais, whose eloquent
voice, soon afterwards to be raised in support of the opposite cause,
was proclaiming the sternest doctrines of a renovated Catholicism. A
spell which acted so widely and so marvellously could not be altogether
unfelt by a mind whose peculiar property it was to yield itself to every
influence in order to extort its secret and comprehend its power. Beyond
this point the magic failed. "In all my transitions,"--thus he has
written of himself,--"I have never alienated my judgment and my will; I
have never pledged my belief. But I had a power of comprehending persons
and things which gave rise to the strongest hopes on the part of those
who wished to convert me and who thought me entirely their own." Thus
Lamartine, in a rapturous strain, had congratulated himself on having
been the instrument of saving his friend from the abysm of unbelief.
When Lamennais was forming the group of disciples who retired with him
to La Chesnaye, M. Sainte-Beuve was invited to join them. While
declining the proposal, he imagined the position in which he might have
been led to embrace it, and