discussed, much praised, the objects of feeling and of struggle, but to
those in which a germ of permanent life has been deposited silently,
almost secretly, which compel no homage and excite no rivalry, and which
owe the place that the world half-unconsciously yields to them to
nothing but that indestructible sympathy of man with man, that eternal
answering of feeling to feeling, which is one of the great principles,
perhaps the greatest principle, at the root of literature. M. Scherer
naturally was the first among the recognized guides of opinion to
attempt the placing of his friend's Journal. "The man who, during his
lifetime, was incapable of giving us any deliberate or conscious work
worthy of his powers, has now left us, after his death, a book which
will not die. For the secret of Amiel's malady is sublime, and the
expression of it wonderful." So ran one of the last paragraphs of the
Introduction, and one may see in the sentences another instance of that
courage, that reasoned rashness, which distinguishes the good from the
mediocre critic. For it is as true now as it was in the days when La
Bruyere rated the critics of his time for their incapacity to praise,
and praise at once, that "the surest test of a man's critical power is
his judgment of contemporaries." M. Renan, I think, with that exquisite
literary sense of his, was the next among the authorities to mention
Amiel's name with the emphasis it deserved. He quoted a passage from the
Journal in his Preface to the "Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse,"
describing it as the saying "_d'un penseur distingue, M. Amiel de
Geneve_." Since then M. Renan has devoted two curious articles to the
completed Journal in the _Journal des Desbats_. The first object of
these reviews, no doubt, was not so much the critical appreciation of
Amiel as the development of certain paradoxes which have been haunting
various corners of M. Renan's mind for several years past, and to which
it is to be hoped he has now given expression with sufficient emphasis
and _brusquerie_ to satisfy even his passion for intellectual adventure.