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 cer-
tainly 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 some-
times 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 intel-
25
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
lectual 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.
Pantheism is the child of light ; mist engenders
faith in near protectors. When the great world
is shut off from us, the house becomes itself a
small universe. Shrouded in perpetual mist,
men love each other better ; for the only reality
then is the family, and, within the family, the
heart ; and the greatest thoughts come from
the heart — so says the moralist."
It is of Swiss fog, however, that he is speak-
ing, as, in what follows, of Swiss frost :
26
AMIEL'S 'JOURNAL INTIME'
" Three snowstorms this afternoon. Poor
blossoming plum-trees and peach-trees ! What
a difference from six years ago, when the cherry-
trees, adorned in their green spring dress and
laden with their bridal flowers, smiled at my
departure along the Vaudois fields, and the lilacs
of Burgundy threw great gusts of perfume into
my face ! " The weather is seldom talked of
with so much real sensitiveness to it as in this :
" The weather is rainy, the whole atmosphere
grey ; it is a time favourable to thought and
meditation. I have a liking for such days as
these ; they revive one's converse with oneself
and make it possible to live the inner life : they
are quiet and peaceful, like a song in a minor
key. We are nothing but thought, but we feel
our life to its very centre. Our very sensations
turn to reverie. It is a strange state of mind ;
it is like those silences in worship which are not
the empty moments of devotion, but the full
moments, and which are so because at such
times the soul, instead of being polarized, dis-
persed, localized, in a single impression or
thought, feels her own totality and is conscious
of herself"
27
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
" Every landscape," he writes, " is, as it were,
a state of the soul " : and again, " At bottom
there is but one subject of study ; the forms and
metamorphoses of mind : all other subjects may
be reduced to that ; all other studies bring us
back to this study." And, in truth, if he was
occupied with the aspects of nature to such an
excellent literary result, still, it was with nature
only as a phenomenon of the moral order. His
interest, after all, is, consistently, that of the
moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, from
predilection, with the sort of literary work
which stirs men — stirs their intellect — through
feeling ; and with that literature, especially, as
looked at through the means by which it became
capable of thus commanding men. The powers,
the culture, of the literary producer : there, is
the centre of Amiel's curiosity.
And if we take Amiel at his 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 indica-
tions there certainly are in them. He was
28
AMIEL'S 'JOURNAL INTIME'
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 — â–
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 com-
posers — he was meant, if people ever are meant
for special lines of activity, for the best sort of
criticism, the imaginative criticism ; that criti-
cism 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, Sis-
mondi ; 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 excep-
29
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
tions ; 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 con-
struction — " 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 ex-
pressing, in quite natural language, very difficult
thoughts ; those abstract and metaphysical con-
ceptions especially, in which German mind has
been rich, which are bad masters, but very useful
ministers towards the understanding, towards an
analytical survey, of all that the intellect has
produced.
But something held him back : not so much
30
AMIEL'S 'JOURNAL INTIME'
a reluctancy of temperament, or of physical con-
stitution (common enough cause why men of
undeniable gifts fail of commensurate production)
but a cause purely intellectual — the presence in
him, namely, of a certain vein of opinion ; that
other, constituent but contending, person, in his
complex nature. " The relation of thought to
action," he writes, " filled my mind on waking,
and I found myself carried towards a bizarre
formula, which seems to have something of the
night still clinging about it. Action is but
coarsened thought.^' That is but an ingenious
metaphysical point, as he goes on to show. But,
including in " action " that literary production in
which the line of his own proper activity lay,
he followed — followed often — that fastidious
utterance to a cynical and pessimistic conclusion.
Maia, as he calls it, the empty " Absolute " of
the Buddhist, the " Infinite," the « All," of which
those German metaphysicians he loved only too
well have had so much to say : this was for ever
to give the go-by to all positive, finite, limited
mterests whatever. The vague pretensions of
an abstract expression acted on him with all the
force of a prejudice. "The ideal," he admits,
31
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
*' poisons for me all imperfect possession " ; and
again, " The Buddhist tendency in me blunts the
faculty of free self-government, and weakens the
power of action. I feel a terror of action and
am only at ease in the impersonal, disinterested,
and objective line of thought." But then, again,
with him " action " meant chiefly literary pro-
duction. He quotes with approval those admir-
able words from Goethe, " In der Beschrankung
zeigt sich erst der Meister " ; yet still always
finds himself wavering between " frittering my-
self away on the infinitely little, and longing
after what is unknown and distant." There
is, doubtless, over and above the physical con-
sumptive tendency, an instinctive turn of senti-
ment in this touching confession. Still, what
strengthened both tendencies was that meta-
physical prejudice for the " Absolute," the false
intellectual conscience. " I have always avoided
what attracted me, and turned my back upon
the point where secretly I desired to be " ;
and, of course, that is not the way to a free
and generous productivity, in literature, or in
anything else ; though in literature, with Amiel
at all events, it meant the fastidiousness which
32
AMIEL'S 'JOURNAL INTIME'
is incompatible with any but the very best sort
of production.
And as that abstract condition of Maia, to the
kind and quantity of concrete literary production
we hold to have been originally possible for him ;
so was the religion he actually attained, to what
might have been the development of his pro-
foundly religious spirit, had he been able to see
that the old-fashioned Christianity is itself but
the proper historic development of the true
" essence " of the New Testament. There,
again, is the constitutional shrinking, through a
kind of metaphysical prejudice, from the con-
crete — that fear of the actual — in this case, of
the Church of history ; to which the admissions,
which form so large a part of these volumes,
naturally lead. Assenting, on probable evidence,
to so many of the judgments of the religious
sense, he failed to see the equally probable
evidence there is for the beliefs, the peculiar
direction of men's hopes, which complete those
judgments harmoniously, and bring them into
connection with the facts, the venerable institu-
tions of the past — with the lives of the saints.
By failure, as we think, of that historic sense, of
D 33
»THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
which he could speak so well, he got no further
in this direction than the glacial condition of
rationalistic Geneva. " Philosophy," he says,
" can never replace religion." Only, one cannot
see why it might not replace a religion such as
his : a religion, after all, much like Seneca's.
" I miss something," he himself confesses, " com-
mon worship, a positive religion, shared with
other people. Ah ! when will the Church to
which I belong in heart rise into being ? " To
many at least of those who can detect the ideal
through the disturbing circumstances which be-
long to all actual institutions in the world, it
was already there. Pascal, from considerations
to which Amiel was no stranger, came to the
large hopes of the Catholic Church ; Amiel
stopped short at a faith almost hopeless ; and by
stopping short just there he really failed, as we
think, of intellectual consistency, and missed that
appeasing influence which his nature demanded
as the condition of its full activity, as a force, an
intellectual force, in the world — in the special
business of his life. " Welcome the unfore-
seen," he says again, by way of a counsel of
perfection in the matter of culture, " but give to
34
AMIEL'S 'JOURNAL INTIME'
your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within
the lines of your plan." Bring, we should add,
the Great Possibility at least within the lines of
your plan — your plan of action or production ;
of morality ; especially of your conceptions of
religion. And still, Amiel too, be it remem-
bered (we are not afraid to repeat it), has said
some things in Pascal's vein not unworthy of
Pascal.
And so we get only the 'Journal, Watch-
ing in it, in the way we have suggested, the
contention of those two men, those two minds
in him, and observing how the one might have
ascertained and corrected the shortcomings of
the other, we certainly understand, and can
sympathize with Amiel's despondency in the
retrospect of a life which seemed to have been
but imperfectly occupied. But, then, how ex-
cellent a literary product, after all, the journal
is. And already we have found that it improves
also on second reading. A book of " thoughts "
should be a book that may be fairly dipped into,
and yield good quotable sayings. Here are some
of its random offerings :
" Look twice, if what you want is a just
35
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
conception ; look once, if what you want is a
sense of beauty."
" It is not history which teaches conscience
to be honest ; it is the conscience which edu-
cates history. Fact is corrupting — it is we who
correct it by the persistence of our ideal."
" To do easily what is difficult for others is
the mark of talent. To do what is impossible
for talent is the mark of genius."
" Duty has the virtue of making us feel the
reality of a positive world, while at the same
time detaching us from it."
" As it is impossible to be outside God, the
best is consciously to dwell in Him."
"He also (the Son of Man), He above all,
is the great Misunderstood, the least compre-
hended."
" The pensee writer is to the philosopher what
the dilettante is to the artist."
There are some, we know, who hold that
genius cannot, in the nature of things, be
" sterile " ; that there are no " mute " Miltons,
or the like. Well ! genius, or only a very dis-
tinguished talent, the gift which Ami el nursed
so jealously did come into evidence. And the
36
AMIEL'S 'JOURNAL INTIME'
reader, we hope, sees also already how well his
English translator has done her work. She may
justly feel, as part at least of the reward of a
labour which must have occupied much time,
so many of the freshest hours of mind and spirit,
that she has done something to help her author
in the achievement of his, however discouraged
still irrepressible, desire, by giving additional
currency to a book which the best sort of
readers will recognize as an excellent and cer-
tainly very versatile companion, not to be
forgotten.
37
Ill
BROWNING
9TH November 1887
39
BROWNING
An Introduction to the Study of Browning,
By Arthur Symons. Cassells.
Whether it be true or not that Mr. Browning
is justly chargeable with " obscurity " — with a
difficulty of manner, that is, beyond the intrinsic
difficulty of his matter — it is very probable that
an Introduction to the study of his works, such
as this of Mr. Symons, will add to the number
of his readers. Mr. Symons's opening essay on
the general characteristics of Mr. Browning is a
just and acceptable appreciation of his poetry as
a whole, well worth reading, even at this late
day. We find in Mr. Symons the thoughtful
and practised yet enthusiastic student in litera-
ture — in intellectual problems ; always quiet
and sane, praising Mr. Browning with tact, with
a real refinement and grace ; saying well many
41
*THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
things which every competent reader of the
great poet must feel to be true ; devoting to the
subject he loves a critical gift so considerable as to
make us wish for work from his hands of larger
scope than this small volume. His book is,
according to his intention, before all things a
useful one. Appreciating Mr. Browning fairly,
as we think, in all his various efforts, his aim
is to point his readers to the best, the indis-
putable, rather than to the dubious portions of
his author's work. Not content with his own
excellent general criticism of Mr. Browning, he
guides the reader to his works, or division of
work, seriatim, making of each a distinct and
special study, and giving a great deal of welcome
information about the poems, the circumstances
of their composition, and the like, with de-
lightful quotations. Incidentally, his Introduc-
tion has the interest of a brief but effective
selection from Mr. Browning's poems ; and he
has added an excellent biography.
Certainly we shall not quarrel with Mr.
Symons for reckoning Mr. Browning, among
English poets, second to Shakespeare alone —
•* He comes very near the gigantic total of
42
BROWNING
Shakespeare." The quantity of his work ? Yes !
that too, in spite of a considerable unevenness, is
a sign of genius. " So large, indeed, appear to
be his natural endowments that we cannot feel
as if even thirty volumes would have come near
to exhausting them." Imaginatively, indeed,
Mr. Browning has been a multitude of persons ;
only (as Shakespeare's only untried style was the
simple one) almost never simple ones ; and cer-
tainly he has controlled them all to profoundly
interesting artistic ends by his own powerful
personality. The world and all its action, as a
show of thought, that is the scope of his work.
It makes him pre-eminently a modern poet — a
poet of the self- pondering, perfectly educated,
modern world, which, having come to the end
of all direct and purely external experiences,
must necessarily turn for its entertainment to the
world within : —
" The men and women who live and move
in that new world of his creation are as varied as
life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and
lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians,
priests and Popes, Jews, gipsies and dervishes,
street-girls, princesses, dancers with the wicked
43
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives
with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous
girls and malevolent grey -beards, statesmen,
cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and
bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists,
heretics, scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis,
persons of quality and men of low estate — men
and women as multiform as nature or society
has made them."
The individual, the personal, the concrete, as
distinguished from, yet revealing in its fulness, the
general, the universal — that is Mr. Browning's
chosen subject-matter : — " Every man is for him
an epitome of the universe, a centre of creation."
It is always the particular soul, and the particular
act or episode, as the flower of the particular
soul — the act or episode by which its quality
comes to the test — in which he interests us.
With him it is always " a drama of the interior,
a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby
how each soul becomes conscious of itself." In
the Preface to the later edition of Sordello^ Mr.
Browning himself told us that to him little
else seems worth study except the development
of a soul, the incidents, the story, of that. And,
44
BROWNING
in fact, the intellectual public generally agrees
with him. It is because he has ministered with
such marvellous vigour, and variety, and fine
skill to this interest, that he is the most modern,
to modern people the most important, of poets.
So much for Mr. Browning's matter ; for his
manner, we hold Mr. Symons right in thinking
him a master of all the arts of poetry. " These
extraordinary little poems," says Mr. Symons of
"Johannes Agricola" and "Porphyria's Lover" —
" Reveal not only an imagination of intense
fire and heat, but an almost finished art — a
power of conceiving subtle mental complexities
with clearness and of expressing them in a pic-
turesque form and in perfect lyric language.
Each poem renders a single mood, and renders
it completely."
Well, after all, that is true of a large portion
of Mr. Browning's work. A curious, an erudite
artist, certainly, he is to some extent an experi-
menter in rhyme or metre, often hazardous.
But in spite of the dramatic rudeness which is
sometimes of the idiosyncrasy, the true and
native colour of his multitudinous dramatis per-
sonce^ or monologists, Mr. Symons is right in
45
'THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
laying emphasis on the grace, the finished skill,
the music, native and ever ready to the poet
himself — tender, manly, humorous, awe-stricken
— when speaking in his own proper person.
Music herself, the analysis of the musical soul,
in the characteristic episodes of its development
is a wholly new range of poetic subject in which
Mr. Browning is simply unique. Mr. Symons
tells us : —
" When Mr. Browning was a mere boy, it is
recorded that he debated within himself whether
he should not become a painter or a musician as
well as a poet. Finally, though not, I believe,
for a good many years, he decided in the nega-
tive. But the latent qualities of painter and
musician had developed themselves in his poetry,
and much of his finest and very much of his
most original verse is that which speaks the
language of painter and musician as it had never
before been spoken. No English poet before
him has ever excelled his utterances on music,
none has so much as rivalled his utterances on
art. ' Abt Vogler ' is the richest, deepest, fullest
poem on music in the language. It is not the
theories of the poet, but the instincts of the
46
BROWNING
musician, that it speaks. * Master Hugues of
Saxe-Gotha,' another special poem on music, is
unparalleled for ingenuity of technical interpre-
tation : ' A Toccata of Galuppi's ' is as rare a
rendering as can anywhere be found of the im-
pressions and sensations caused by a musical
piece ; but * Abt Vogler ' is a very glimpse into
the heaven w^here music is born."
It is true that " when the head has to be
exercised before the heart there is chilling of
sympathy." Of course, so intellectual a poet
(and only the intellectual poet, as we have
pointed out, can be adequate to modern de-
mands) will have his difficulties. They were a
part of the poet's choice of vocation, and he was
fully aware of them : —
" Mr. Browning might say, as his wife said
in an early preface, I never mistook pleasure for
the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour
of the poet — as indeed he has himself said, to
much the same effect, in a letter printed many
years ago : I never pretended to offer such
literature as should be a substitute for a cigar
or a game at dominoes to an idle man."
" Moreover, while a writer who deals with
47
*THE GUARDIAN' ESSAYS
easy themes has no excuse if he is not pellucid
to a glance, one who employs his intellect and
imagination on high and hard questions has a
right to demand a corresponding closeness of
attention, and a right to say with Bishop Butler,
in answer to a similar complaint : ' It must be
acknowledged that some of the following dis-
courses are very abstruse and difficult, or, if you
please, obscure ; but I must take leave to add
that those alone are judges whether or no, and
how far this is a fault, who are judges whether
or no, and how far it might have been avoided
— those only who will be at the trouble to
understand what is here said, and to see how
far the things here insisted upon, and not
other things, might have been put in a plainer
manner.' "
In Mr. Symons's opinion Pippa Passes is
Mr. Browning's most perfect piece of work, for
pregnancy of intellect, combined with faultless
expression in a perfectly novel yet symmetrical
outline : and he is very likely right. He is
certainly right in thinking Men and Women,
as they formerly stood, Mr. Browning's most
delightful volumes. It is only to be regretted
48
BROWNING
that in the later collected edition of the works
those two magical old volumes are broken up
and scattered under other headings. We think
also that Mr. Symons in his high praise does no
more than justice to The Rifjg and the Book.
The Ring mid the Book is at once the largest
and the greatest of Mr. Browning's works, the
culmination of his dramatic method, and the
turning-point more decisively than Dramatis
Personce of his style. Yet just here he
rightly marks a change in Mr. Browning's
manner : —
" Not merely the manner of presentment, the
substance, and also the style and versification have
undergone a change. I might point to the pro-
found intellectual depth of certain pieces as its
characteristic, or, equally, to the traces here and
there of an apparent carelessness of workman-
ship ; or, yet again, to the new and very marked
partiality for scenes and situations of English
and modern rather than mediaeval and foreign
life."
Noble as much of Mr. Browning's later
work is, full of intellect, alive with excellent
passages (in the first volume of the Dramatic Idyls
E 49