Rio described as belonging to "that noble
school of men who are striving to rekindle the dead beliefs of France,
to rescue Frenchmen from the camp of materialistic or pantheistic ideas,
and rally them round that Christian banner which is the banner of true
progress and true civilization." The Renaissance is treated as a
disastrous but inevitable crisis, in which the idealism of the Middle
Ages was dethroned by the naturalism of modern times--"The Renaissance
perhaps robbed us of more than it gave us"--and so on. The tone of
criticism is instructive enough to the student of Amiel's mind, but the
product itself has no particular savor of its own. The occasional note
of depression and discouragement, however, is a different thing; here,
for those who know the "Journal Intime," there is already something
characteristic, something which foretells the future. For instance,
after dwelling with evident zest on the nature of the metaphysical
problems lying at the root of art in general, and Christian art in
particular, the writer goes on to set the difficulty of M. Rio's task
against its attractiveness, to insist on the intricacy of the
investigations involved, and on the impossibility of making the two
instruments on which their success depends--the imaginative and the
analytical faculty--work harmoniously and effectively together.
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