Amiels Journal | Page 8

modern world to the ferment of the Renaissance. No spiritual force
"more original, more universal, more fruitful in consequences of every
sort and bearing, more capable of transforming and remaking
everything presented to it, has arisen during the last 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 Staël 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 _Schwärmerei_, 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, à la française_," and the thought
he tries to express in it is thought torn and strained by the constant
effort to reach