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