discover in these pages their own special thought or humour, happily
expressed at last (they might think) in precisely that just shade of
language themselves had searched for in vain. And with a writer so
vivid and impressive as Amiel, those varieties of tendency are apt to
present themselves as so many contending persons. The perplexed
experience gets the apparent clearness, as it gets also the
animation, of a long dialogue; only, the disputants never part
company, and there is no real conclusion. "This nature," he
observes, of one of the many phases of character he has discovered in
himself, "is, as it were, only one of the men which exist in me. It
is one of my departments. It is not the whole of my territory, the
whole of my inner kingdom"; and again, "there are ten men in me,
according to time, place, surrounding, [24] and occasion; and, in my
restless diversity, I am for ever escaping myself."

Yet, in truth, there are but two men in Amiel--two sufficiently
opposed personalities, which the attentive reader may define for
himself; compare with, and try by each other--as we think, correct
also by each other. There is the man, in him and in these pages, who
would be "the man of disillusion," only that he has never really been
"the man of desires"; and who seems, therefore, to have a double
weariness about him. He is akin, of course, to Obermann, to Rene,
even to Werther, and, on our first introduction to him, we might
think that we had to do only with one more of the vague
"renunciants," who in real life followed those creations of fiction,
and who, however delicate, interesting as a study, and as it were
picturesque on the stage of life, are themselves, after all,
essentially passive, uncreative, and therefore necessarily not of
first-rate importance in literature. Taken for what it is worth, the
expression of this mood--the culture of ennui for its own sake--is