374 MORE POT-POURRI 



not infrequent in French Switzerland, combining a certain 

 largeness of ground plan with an almost pinched delicacy 

 of detail. Eefinement rather than strength is its character- 

 istic : a head in porcelain rather than a head in granite/ 

 I copy this excellent description, as it exactly fits a large 

 number of student men of our own day. Lucas Malet 

 goes on to say : ' And truly though perhaps at the risk 

 of seeming a little fantastic we may say that in Amiel's 

 face there is more than a hint of that singular temper, the 

 predominance of which in his printed utterances, whether 

 in prose or verse, prevents their rising into the first rank 

 of excellence. Both are a trifle artificial ; marked by 

 something of over-civilisation and over-intellectuality. 

 He wants body, so to speak. He is utterly deficient in 

 what Mr. Henry James has so delightfully called " the 

 saving grace of coarseness." In his case there is too 

 complete a severing of those cords which bind us to the 

 lower creation. Not only ape and tiger, but song-bird 

 and sea-wind have died in him, as they must always run 

 the chance of dying in highly educated persons of dying 

 so effectually indeed that such persons forget the very 

 alphabet of that mysterious, primitive language to speak 

 in which is not only the instinct of external Nature but 

 the highest achievement of art.' Do we not all know 

 people whom this description fits as admirably and com- 

 pletely as it doubtless did the Geneva professor, though 

 they may but partly share the intellectual gifts which made 

 his journals so interesting a portrait, not only of himself, 

 but of the type of human being whom he represents 

 always aspiring and never satisfied, always working and 

 producing comparatively little result ? 



During my stay I was not able to see any of these 

 houses, as I had wished, and only once did I stand in the 

 town on the ever wonderful bridge where the Ehone, as 

 blue as melted sapphires, tears through the arches. In spite 



