nite had upon his
life. Amiel was simply hypnotised by the universe, as a man may
hypnotise himself by gazing fixedly at a star.

Mr. Pater, you will remember, has a remarkable study of a similar
temperament in his _Imaginary Portraits_. Sebastian van Storck, like
Amiel, had become hypnotised by the Infinite. It paralysed in him all
impulse or power 'to be or do any limited thing.'

'For Sebastian, at least,' we read, 'the world and the individual alike
had been divested of all effective purpose. The most vivid of finite
objects, the dramatic episodes of Dutch history, the brilliant
personalities which had found their parts to play in them, that golden
art, surrounding one with an ideal world, beyond which the real world
was discernible indeed, but etherealised by the medium through which it
came to one; all this, for most men so powerful a link to existence,
only set him on the thought of escape--into a formless and nameless
infinite world, evenly grey.... Actually proud, at times, of his
curious, well-reasoned nihilism, he could but regard what is called the
business of life as no better than a trifling and wearisome delay.'

This mood, once confined to a few mystics is likely to become a common
one, is already, one imagines, far from infrequent--so the increase of
suicide would lead us to suppose. Robbed of his hope of a glorious
immortality, stripped of his spiritual significance, bullied and
belittled by science on every hand, man not unnaturally begins to feel
that it is no use taking his life seriously, that, in fact, it betrays a
lack of humour to do so. While he was a supernatural being, a son of
God, it was with him a case of _noblesse oblige_; and while he is happy
and comfortable he doesn't mind giving up the riddle of the world. It is
only the unhappy that ever really think. But what is he to do when agony
and despair come upon him, when all that made his life worth living is
taken from him? How is he to sustain himself? where shall he look for
his strength or his hope? He looks up at the sky full of stars, but he
is told that God is not there, that the city of God is long since a
ruin, and that owls hoot to each other across its moss-grown fanes and
battlements; he looks down on the earth, full of graves, a vast
necropolis of once radiant dreams, with the living for its
phantoms,--and there is no comfort anywhere. Happy is he if some simple
human duty be at hand, which he may go on doing blindly and
dum