It is
a strange state of mind; it is like those silences in worship which
are not the empty moments of devotion, but the full moments, and
which are so because at such times the soul, instead of being
polarized, dispersed, localized, in a single impression or thought,
feels her own totality and is conscious of herself."
[28] "Every landscape," he writes, "is, as it were, a state of the
soul": and again, "At bottom there is but one subject of study; the
forms and metamorphoses of mind: all other subjects may be reduced to
that; all other studies bring us back to this study." And, in truth,
if he was occupied with the aspects of nature to such an excellent
literary result, still, it was with nature only as a phenomenon of
the moral order. His interest, after all, is, consistently, that of
the moralist (in no narrow sense) who deals, from predilection, with
the sort of literary work which stirs men--stirs their intellect--
through feeling; and with that literature, especially, as looked at
through the means by which it became capable of thus commanding men.
The powers, the culture, of the literary producer: there, is the
centre of Amiel's curiosity.
And if we take Amiel at his own word, we must suppose that but for
causes, the chief of which were bad health and a not long life, he
too would have produced monumental work, whose scope and character he
would wish us to conjecture from his "Thoughts.
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