He is an idealist reveling in color: a Platonist
brandishing the _thyrsus_ of the Menads. At bottom his is a mind of no
particular country. It is in vain that he satirizes Germany and abuses
England; he does not make himself any more of a Frenchman by doing so.
It is a northern intellect wedded to a southern imagination, but the
marriage has not been a happy one. He has the disease of chronic
magniloquence, of inveterate sublimity; abstractions for him become
personified and colossal beings, which act or speak in colossal fashion;
he is intoxicated with the infinite. But one feels all the time that his
creations are only individual monologues; he cannot escape from the
bounds of a subjective lyrism. Ideas, passions, anger, hopes,
complaints--he himself is present in them all. We never have the delight
of escaping from his magic circle, of seeing truth as it is, of entering
into relation with the phenomena and the beings of whom he speaks, with
the reality of things. This imprisonment of the author within his
personality looks like conceit. But on the contrary, it is because the
heart is generous that the mind is egotistical. It is because Quinet
thinks himself so much of a Frenchman that he is it so little. These
ironical compensations of destiny are very familiar to me: I have often
observed them.
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