JULY 383 



of the face lacking the glorious audacity and robustness 

 of the first — we accept the witness of the Stratford bust 

 and picture, rather than that of the fancy portrait in 

 Westminster Abbey — equally with the sensuous heavi- 

 ness that so mars the beauty of the second. For Amiel's 

 face and head belong to a type not infrequent in French 

 Switzerland, combining a certain largeness of ground 

 plan with an almost pinched delicacy of detail. Refine- 

 ment rather than strength is its characteristic : 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 pre- 

 dominance 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 completely 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 



