And it is just here--in this mixture of the faith which clings and
aspires, with the intellectual pliancy which allows the mind to sway
freely under the pressure of life and experience, and the deep respect
for truth, which will allow nothing to interfere between thought and its
appointed tasks--that Amiel's special claim upon us lies. It is this
balance of forces in him which makes him so widely representative of the
modern mind--of its doubts, its convictions, its hopes. He speaks for
the life of to-day as no other single voice has yet spoken for it; in
his contradictions, his fears, his despairs, and yet in the constant
straining toward the unseen and the ideal which gives a fundamental
unity to his inner life, he is the type of a generation universally
touched with doubt, and yet as sensitive to the need of faith as any
that have gone before it; more widely conscious than its predecessors of
the limitations of the human mind, and of the iron pressure of man's
physical environment; but at the same time--paradox as it may seem--more
conscious of man's greatness, more deeply thrilled by the spectacle of
the nobility and beauty interwoven with the universe.
And he plays this part of his so modestly, with so much hesitation, so
much doubt of his thought and of himself! He is no preacher, like
Emerson and Carlyle, with whom, as poet and idealist, he has so much in
common; there is little resemblance between him and the men who speak,
as it were, from a height to the crowd beneath, sure always of
themselves and what they have to say.
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