iment he only found
himself weaker than before. Even in music, for which he had a genuine
passion and at which he worked hard, he never could acquire any facility
at sight, and he was an inaccurate scorer, even when only copying the
score of others.[89]

Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, are
united in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardent
temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that are
very slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise
until after the event. "One would say that my heart and my intelligence
do not belong to the same individual.... I feel all, and see nothing; I
am carried away, but I am stupid.... This slowness of thinking, united
with such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation,
but when I am alone and working. My ideas arrange themselves in my head
with incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and
ferment until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me
palpitations; in the midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I could
not write a single word. Insensibly the violent emotion grows still, the
chaos is disentangled, everything falls into its place, but very slowly
and after long and confused agitation."[90]

So far from saying that his heart and intelligence belonged to two
persons, we might have been quite sure, knowing his heart, that his
intelligence must be exactly what he describes its process to have been.
The slow-burning ecstasy in which he knew himself at his height and was
most conscious of fulness of life, was incompatible with the rapid and
deliberate generation of ideas. The same soft passivity, the same
receptiveness, which made his emotions like the surface of a lake under
sky and breeze, entered also into the working of his intellectual
faculties. But it happens that in this region, in the attainment of
knowledge, truth, and definite thoughts, even receptiveness implies a
distinct and active energy, and hence the very quality of temperament
which left him free and eager for sensuous impressions, seemed to muffle
his intelligence in a certain opaque and resisting medium, of the
indefinable kind that interposes between will and action in a dream. His
rational part was fatally protected by a non-conducting envelope of
sentiment; this intercepted clear ideas on their passage, and even cut
off the direct and true impress of those objects and their relatio