is own word, we must suppose that but for
causes, the chief of which were bad health and a not long life, he too
would have produced monumental work, whose scope and character he would
wish us to conjecture from his "Thoughts." Such indications there
certainly are in them. He was [29] meant--we see it in the variety,
the high level both of matter and style, the animation, the gravity, of
one after another of these thoughts--on religion, on poetry, on
politics in the highest sense; on their most abstract principles, and
on the authors who have given them a personal colour; on the genius of
those authors, as well as on their concrete works; on outlying isolated
subjects, such as music, and special musical composers--he was meant,
if people ever are meant for special lines of activity, for the best
sort of criticism, the imaginative criticism; that criticism which is
itself a kind of construction, or creation, as it penetrates, through
the given literary or artistic product, into the mental and inner
constitution of the producer, shaping his work. Of such critical
skill, cultivated with all the resources of Geneva in the nineteenth
century, he has given in this Journal abundant proofs. Corneille,
Cherbuliez; Rousseau, Sismondi; Victor Hugo, and Joubert; Mozart and
Wagner--all who are interested in these men will find a value in what
Amiel has to say of them. Often, as for instance in his excellent
criticism of Quinet, he has to make large exceptions [30]; limitations,
skilfully effected by the way, in the course of a really appreciative
estimate. Still, through all, what we feel is that we have to do with
one who criticises in this fearlessly equitable manner only because he
is convinced that his subject is of a real literary importance. A
powerful, intellectual analysis of some well-marked subject, in such
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 b