" 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.
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