BELLES LETTRES, POETRY, AND FICTION.

Amiei's Journal. The Journal Intime of HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL. Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by Mrs. HUMPHRY WARD. In Two Volumes. Macmillan and Co. Mrs. Humphry Ward has done English literature a service by the translation of this journal, which is certainly one of the most remarkable of modern confessions.' Though, as Mrs. Ward says, there is nothing of direct biographical character in the journals, they are full of exquisite touches, revealing the varying moods, impressions, and doubts of one of the most acute, original, and piquant of thinkers. M. Amiel, who was a native of Geneva and a professor there, was, it would appear, something of a disappointment to his friends. We can easily understand that. He is a subtle, self-communing spirit looking out on life and nature with a keen eye, but with nothing of the shrewd, practical turn that can systematize, and follow a thought to its results and make it available for popularity. He declares that the useful he always was afraid of, and on that ground excuses himself for lack of finished literary style. He leans to mysticism, is full of the sentiment of religion, if he is little of a dogmatist; an imaginative lover of nature, if he is not a poet. He finds in himself (vol. ii. p. 199) ‘a great affinity with the Hindoo genius-that mind, vast, imaginative, loving, dreamy and speculative, but destitute of ambition, personality and will,' though the West has its hold on him also. He reminds us a little of De Guerin; but is far more penetrating, and with wider interests. Indeed, his variety is no less noticeable than his depth, and he travelled a good deal and enjoyed it. But he fails in the power of brilliant antithesis and epigram such as would please the French, and he certainly is too dreamy and inclined to mysticism to please a very large circle of English readers. But he will find his audience, and keep it. His delicacy of intuition and his insight in certain matters are equalled only by his felicity of expression. Art lives by appearances,' he says, 'but these appearances are visions, fixed dreams. Poetry represents to us nature become consubstantial with the soul, because in it nature is only a reminiscence touched with emotion, an image vibrating with our own life, a form without weight-in short, a mode of the soul:' and his subtle thoughts on science and religion are as keen as they are unique. Again: Behind the beauty which is superficial, gladsome, radiant and palpable, the aesthetic sense discovers another order of beauty, altogether hidden, veiled, secret and mysterious, akin to moral beauty. It is a little like the refined joy of sacrifice, like the madness of faith, like the luxury of grief: it is not within the reach of the world.' His discovery of the absence or presence of this sense has much to do with his critical conclusions on national character, on artists and their works. The thirst for truth,' he says,' is not a French passion. . . . The Frenchman's centre of gravity is always outside him-he is always thinking of others, playing to the gallery. To him individuals are so

many zeros. . . . All this is probably the result of an exaggerated sociability which weakens the soul's forces of resistance.'

Again, he holds

that the German lack of taste is associated with some lack of tenderer, more subtle sentiment; but his final conclusion is that there is not a nation in which the good is not counterbalanced by evil.

The book is a cardiphonia. He tells us what he reads and his impressions of it; how he was moved by this aspect of nature or that; how his soul responded to the outward signs everywhere that testified to the soul. His theory of poetry and art is consistent with this.

With a strong element of womanhood in his nature, Amiel shows the strangest, most penetrating and sympathetic discernment of female type and character, as is proved by many sentences scattered through his journal. This is worthy of the most practised moralist, and surprising as coming from a mystic and solitary dreamer:

'Austerity in woman is sometimes the accompaniment of a rare power of loving. And when it is so their attachment is strong as death; their fidelity as resisting as the diamond; they are hungry for devotion and athirst for sacrifice. Their love is a piety, their tenderness a religion, and they triple the energy of love by giving to it the sanctity of duty. . . . In every loving woman there is a priestess of the past—a pious guardian of some affection, of which the object has disappeared.'

His view of Darwinism, so original and discerning (vol. ii. pp. 242, 243), is well worth attention. And yet all his sentiment, poetry, and dreaming, is associated with a very firm and clear idea of sin in the world, which is the ground of his very effective criticism against Renan's 'Vie de Jésus' (vol. ii. pp. 127, 128). This with him, too, is the cardinal defect of Goethe, whom he declares to be almost without soul, without generosity. 'A secret barrenness, an ill-concealed egotism, makes itself felt through all the wealth and flexibility of his talent. . . . Completely lacking as he is in the sense of obligation and of sin, Goethe nevertheless finds his way to seriousness through dignity. Greek sculpture has been his school of virtue.'

And, in opposition to Renan, he urges, ‘If anything explains the success of the gospel amongst men, it is that it brought them deliverance from sin-in a word, salvation. A man, however, is bound to explain a religion seriously and not to shirk the very centre of his subject. This white-marble Christ is not the Christ who inspired the martyrs and has dried so many tears. The author lacks moral seriousness, and confounds nobility of character with holiness. He speaks as an artist conscious of a pathetic subject, but his moral sense is not interested in the question.' Very probably he would cite his own acute saying as apropos here: There is a way of killing truth by truths.'

Amiel was for some time an invalid; he resigned his professorship and all practical hold on life. His view of this condition is most characteristic: Although just now the sense of ghostly remoteness from life which I so often have is absent, I feel myself a prisoner for good, a hopeless invalid. This vague intermediate state, which is neither death

nor life, has its sweetness, because if it implies renunciation, still it allows of thought. It is a reverie without pain, peaceful and meditative.' Mrs. Ward has done the work of translation with conscientious care, but, what is more, with discernment and the sympathy which alone can secure that transfusion of spirit which a true translation should be. And this in spite of much complexity and a kind of subtle shorthand of style.

Comparative Literature. By HUTCHESON MACAULAY POsnett, M.A., LL.D., F.L.S., Barrister-at-Law, Professor of Classics and English Literature, University College, Auckland, New Zealand. Author of The Historical Method,' &c. Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co.

This new volume of The International Scientific Series' will perhaps surprise not a few by its subject, which is Literature. How can literature in its broadest and most liberal aspect become scientific? many will ask, and not unreasonably. The most general outline of the contents of this volume will answer the question. Literature, to be true and sincere, to be living and powerful, must reflect contemporary life and thought. All that pretends to be literature, and does not do this, is to be cast aside as more or less of imposture. Each succeeding stage of development, from the most rudimental clan-life, in which the individual is absorbed, up to the energetic development of individuality, and the sense of humanity and social relationship between peoples, in the most civilized conditions, demands its corresponding form of lilerature, which, in spite of minor differences, will be found to have certain grand features in common wherever the same social and political phenomena have been developed. Comparison of various literatures for the purpose of throwing light on this thesis is therefore possible. It is pointed out how even the use of the terms lyric, idylic, and dramatic,' drawn from Greece, becomes loose and in some measure false through the non-existence in our days of the circumstances among which the literature arose which gave birth to the terms and the divisions which they mark out. One instance of the manner in which false literature is to be dealt with is indicated in this sentence: We blame Dryden, not because his characters are not Moors or Americans, but because they are not men and women-not because love as he represents it could not exist in a harem or wigwam, but because it could not exist anywhere,' The author in tracing out the Chorus in Greek dramatic poetry, finds the reason of the existence of the Chorus in social circumstances, and seems to anticipate a development in which such distinctions as lyric, dramatic, idyllic, may have no value or meaning. Some remarks on Walt Whitman indicate that the author assigns to him a value as interpretive. The whole field is gone over, with much learning, research, and reasoning to establish these propositions. First of all, we have a section of four chapters on clan literature, in which we have a broad and careful survey; then follows a section The City

Commonwealth,' in three chapters; then World Literature,' in four chapters; and National Literature' in three chapters. Two of the chapters in the section World Literature' are headed The Individual Spirit' and 'The Social Spirit.' From what we have said it will be seen that the book aims at bringing scientific law into literature, and supports its positions by a wide array of learning, and much power of thought. The author excuses himself for misprints on the plea that he was setting out for New Zealand when the book was passing through the press. Certainly there are too many errors-by no means the worst of which is 'Buckreim' for Buckheim.

Selected Speeches and Arguments of the Right Honourable Thomas, Baron O'Hagan. Edited by GEORGe Teeling. With a Portrait. Longmans, Green, and Co.

This memorial reveals to us a subject of singular interest. We do not pretend to be able to estimate the exact value of the forensic speeches as a contribution to the literature of Irish law; but we are certain that an individual of singular force of character, tenderness, refinement, and breadth of sympathy, is here revealed to us. From the first sentence of the book to the last there is no token of what is regarded, whether justly or unjustly, as the besetting weakness of Irishmen-mere wordy outflow, and noisy foamy eloquence. Quietness, self-restraint, and moderation seem rather to be the qualities prominently observable. Not only was Lord O'Hagan learned, the master of a world of legal lore and a familiar in the world of humane letters, as exquisite touches and felicitous quotations constantly attest, but he was essentially a philosopher counselling wise self-restraint, patience, superiority to minor evils and minor cares, and a lofty regard to truth and to conscience. And he was a patriot. He made his first effective start for success at the Irish bar as counsel for some of the Young Ireland' party who had fallen into straits; and his wide knowledge, his reserve of power, and his admirable method, did much both for him and for them. Though a Catholic, he was far from a zealot-in his religion, as in other things, he was self-restrained and conciliatory. The speeches are admirably arranged and edited by Mr. Teeling, who has prefixed little introductions explaining the circumstances under which they were delivered; and he has, so far as practicable, presented them chronologically. The first section is 'Speeches on Various Occasions;' the second, Speeches and Arguments at the Bar;' and the third, Parliamentary Speeches.' The spirit and character of the man are strikingly brought out in the Speeches on Irish Education,' and in the speech on the Irish Jury Bill. Lord O'Hagan never forgot either that he was an Irishman or that he was a lawyer, though he was too highminded to have recourse to any of the wire-pullings to which lawyers are said to be prone. To an outsider some of the Speeches on Various Occasions' give the most direct attestation of his eloquence, though certainly his speeches in defence of Charles Gavan Duffy, under

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