Amiels Journal | Page 8

three hundred years. Like the spirit of the Renaissance and of the classical age, it attracts into its orbit all the great works of contemporary intelligence." Quinet, pursuing a somewhat different line of thought, regards the worship of German ideas inaugurated in France by Madame de Sta?l as the natural result of reaction from the eighteenth century and all its ways. "German systems, German hypotheses, beliefs, and poetry, all were eagerly welcomed as a cure for hearts crushed by the mockery of Candide and the materialism of the Revolution.... Under the Restoration France continued to study German philosophy and poetry with profound veneration and submission. We imitated, translated, compiled, and then again we compiled, translated, imitated." The importance of the part played by German influence in French Romanticism has indeed been much disputed, but the debt of French metaphysics, French philology, and French historical study, to German methods and German research during the last half-century is beyond dispute. And the movement to-day is as strong as ever. A modern critic like M. Darmstetter regards it as a misfortune that the artificial stimulus given by the war to the study of German has, to some extent, checked the study of English in France. He thinks that the French have more to gain from our literature--taking literature in its general and popular sense--than from German literature. But he raises no question as to the inevitable subjection of the French to the German mind in matters of exact thought and knowledge. "To study philology, mythology, history, without reading German," he is as ready to confess as any one else, "is to condemn one's self to remain in every department twenty years behind the progress of science."
Of this great movement, already so productive, Amiel is then a fresh and remarkable instance. Having caught from the Germans not only their love of exact knowledge but also their love of vast horizons, their insatiable curiosity as to the whence and whither of all things, their sense of mystery and immensity in the universe, he then brings those elements in him which belong to his French inheritance--and something individual besides, which is not French but Genevese--to bear on his new acquisitions, and the result is of the highest literary interest and value. Not that he succeeds altogether in the task of fusion. For one who was to write and think in French, he was perhaps too long in Germany; he had drunk too deeply of German thought; he had been too much dazzled by the spectacle of Berlin and its imposing intellectual activities. "As to his literary talent," says M. Scherer, after dwelling on the rapid growth of his intellectual powers under German influence, "the profit which Amiel derived from his stay at Berlin is more doubtful. Too long contact with the German mind had led to the development in him of certain strangenesses of style which he had afterward to get rid of, and even perhaps of some habits of thought which he afterward felt the need of checking and correcting." This is very true. Amiel is no doubt often guilty, as M. Caro puts it, of attempts "to write German in French," and there are in his thought itself veins of mysticism, elements of _Schw?rmerei_, here and there, of which a good deal must be laid to the account of his German training.
M. Renan regrets that after Geneva and after Berlin he never came to Paris. Paris, he thinks, would have counteracted the Hegelian influences brought to hear upon him at Berlin, [Footnote: See a not, however, on the subject of Amiel's philosophical relationships, printed as an Appendix to the present volume.] would have taught him cheerfulness, and taught him also the art of writing, not beautiful fragments, but a book. Possibly--but how much we should have lost! Instead of the Amiel we know, we should have had one accomplished French critic the more. Instead of the spiritual drama of the "Journal Intime," some further additions to French _belles lettres_; instead of something to love, something to admire! No, there is no wishing the German element in Amiel away. Its invading, troubling effect upon his thought and temperament goes far to explain the interest and suggestiveness of his mental history. The language he speaks is the language of that French criticism which--we have Sainte-Beuve's authority for it--is best described by the motto of Montaigne, "_Un peu de chaque chose et rien de l'ensemble, �� la fran?aise_," and the thought he tries to express in it is thought torn and strained by the constant effort to reach the All, the totality of things: "What I desire is the sum of all desires, and what I seek to know is the sum of all different kinds of knowledge. Always the complete, the absolute, the teres atque rotundum."