And the result is
another soul's tragedy, another story of conflict and failure, which
throws fresh light on the mysterious capacities of human nature, and
warns us, as the letters of Obermann in their day warned the generation
of George Sand, that with the rise of new intellectual perceptions new
spiritual dangers come into being, and that across the path of
continuous evolution which the modern mind is traversing there lies many
a _selva oscura_, many a lonely and desolate tract, in which loss and
pain await it. The story of the "Journal Intime" is a story to make us
think, to make us anxious; but at the same time, in the case of a nature
like Amiel's, there is so much high poetry thrown off from the long
process of conflict, the power of vision and of reproduction which the
intellect gains at the expense of the rest of the personality is in many
respects so real and so splendid, and produces results so stirring often
to the heart and imagination of the listener, that in the end we put
down the record not so much with a throb of pity as with an impulse of
gratitude. The individual error and suffering is almost forgotten; all
that we can realize is the enrichment of human feeling, the quickened
sense of spiritual reality bequeathed to us by the baffled and solitary
thinker whose _via dolorosa_ is before us.
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