metaphysician. But that sense of negation, of theoretic insecurity,
was in the air, and conspiring with what was of like tendency in
himself made of him a central type of disillusion. In him the
passive ennui of Obermann became a satiric, aggressive, almost angry
conviction of the littleness of the world around; it was as if man's
fatal limitations constituted a kind of stupidity in him, what the
French call betise. Gossiping friends, indeed, linked what was
constitutional in him and in the age with an incident of his earliest
years. Corrected for some childish fault, in passionate distress, he
overhears a half-pitying laugh at his expense, and has determined,
[14] in a moment, never again to give credit--to be for ever on his
guard, especially against his own instinctive movements. Quite
unreserved, certainly, he never was again. Almost everywhere he
could detect the hollow ring of fundamental nothingness under the
apparent surface of things. Irony surely, habitual irony, would be
the proper complement thereto, on his part. In his infallible self-
possession, you might even fancy him a mere man of the world, with a
special aptitude for matters of fact. Though indifferent in
politics, he rises to social, to political eminence; but all the
while he is feeding all his scholarly curiosity, his imagination, the
very eye, with the, to him ever delightful, relieving, reassuring
spectacle, of those straightforward forces in human nature, which are
also matters of fact. There is the formula of Merimee! the
enthusiastic amateur of rude, crude, naked force in men and women
wherever it could be found; himself carrying ever, as a mask, the
conventional attire of the modern world--carrying it with an
infinite, contemptuous grace, as if that, too, were an all-sufficient
end in itself. With a natural gift for words, for expression, it
will be his literary function to draw back the veil of time from the
true greatness of old Roman character; the veil of modern habit from