It is difficult to treat so intimate a memorial of a personality in a critical spirit; and we may say at once that to deal with a book that is so sacred a document in the spirit of finding fault with it for not being other than it is, is wholly out of place. It may be said to have nothing heroic about it, but to be almost purely spectatorial. It may be easily labelled introspective, even morbid; but it is of the very essence of the book that it is designed to trace the story of a soul to which the ordinary sources of happiness are denied, and to which, from temperament and instinct, the whole of life is a species of struggle, an attempt to gain serenity and liberty by facing the darkest problems candidly and courageously, rather than by trying to drown the mournful questionings of the mind in the tide of life and activity. What we have to do is, granted the type and the conception, to see how near the execution comes to the idea which inspired it. It will be seen that the book is to a certain extent the history of a noble failure; Marius’ attempt to arrive, by his own unassisted strength, by a firm and candid judgment, at a solution for life, breaks down at every point. He falls back in a kind of weariness upon the old religious intuitions that had been his joy in boyhood. He learns that not in isolation, not in self-sufficiency, does the soul draw near to the apprehension of the truth, but in enlarged sympathy, in the sense of comradeship, in the perhaps anthropomorphic instinct of the Fatherhood, the brotherhood of God. It is a passionate protest not only against materialism, but against the intellectual ideal too; it is a no less passionate pronouncement of the demand of the individual to be satisfied and convinced, within his brief span of life, of the truth that he desires and needs.