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at Berlin as "his intellectual phase," and one felt that he inclined to regard them as the happiest period of his life. The spell which Berlin laid upon him lasted long.' Probably his happiness in Germany was partly owing to a sense of reaction against Geneva. There are signs that he had felt himself somewhat isolated at school and college, and that in the German world his special individuality, with its dreaminess and its melancholy, found congenial surroundings far more readily than had been the case in the drier and harsher atmosphere of the Protestant Rome. However this may be, it is certain that German thought took possession of him, that he became steeped not only in German methods of speculation, but in German modes of expression, in German forms of sentiment, which clung to him through life, and vitally affected both his opinions and his style. M. Renan and M. Bourget shake their heads over the Germanisms, which, according to the latter, give a certain barbarous' air to many passages of the Journal. But both admit that Amiel's individuality owes a great part of its penetrating force to that intermingling of German with French elcments, of which there are such abundant

traces in the Journal Intime. Amiel, in fact, is one more typical product of a movement which is certainly of enormous importance in the history of modern thought, even though we may not be prepared to assent to all the sweeping terms in which a writer like M. Taine describes it. 'From 1780 to 1830,' says M. Taine, 'Germany produced all the ideas of our historical age, and during another half-century, perhaps another century, notre grande affaire sera de les repenser.' He is inclined to compare

the influence of German ideas on the 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, be

liefs, 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. • Το study philology, mythology, history, with

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out reading German,' he is as ready to confess as any one else is to condemn oneself 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 afterwards to get rid of, and even perhaps of some habits of thought which he afterwards 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 bear upon him at Berlin,* 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

* See a note, however, on the subject of Amiel's philosophical relationships, printed as an Appendix to the present volume.

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