which mathematics was the most esteemed of all the sciences, and
energy, accompanied by a capacity for unqualified submission, the
most esteemed of all the virtues. By no single fibre of his being
does Obermann belong to this period; he abhors both discipline and
mathematics as heartily as could any future Romanticist. He despises
the Philistines who take the same walk every day, turning daily at
the same place. He does not wish to know beforehand how his feelings
will be affected. "Let the mind," he says, "strive to give a certain
symmetry to its productions; the heart does not work, and can only
produce when we exempt it from the labour of fashioning." We feel that
this unreasonable principle is applied in his letters, which form a
heavy, diffuse, serious, badly written book; they produce the effect of
improvisations, to which the author, regarding them as the children of
his heart, has not chosen or else not been able to impart an attractive
form. It is true that nuggets of gold are hidden in the ponderous ore,
but they must be laboriously sought for; a man with real literary
talent would have gilded the whole mass with them.
[Illustration: DE SÉNANCOUR]
The hero of the book is one of those unhappy souls who seem created
for the shady side of life and never succeed in getting out into its
sunshine. There is, as Hamlet says, along with many excellent qualities
some "one defect" in their nature which prevents the harmonious
interplay of its parts. In the delicately balanced works of a watch
some little spring, some little wheel breaks, and the whole mechanism
comes to a standstill. Obermann has no settled occupation, no sphere
of activity, no profession; it is only in the last pages of the book
that he makes up his mind that he will be an author; the reader feels
no assurance, however, that success awaits him upon this path. The
author who has been successful with ever so small a work sees, on
looking back, what an almost incredible variety of circumstances have
favoured him, what an extraordinary number of obstacles, great and
small, have had to be overcome; he remembers how carefully he had
to watch his time, how eagerly to seize the opportune moment, how
often he was on the point of giving it all up, how many paroxysms of
despair he lived through, all to attain this paltry end. The most
insignificant book which is born alive speaks of ten thousand triumphs.
And what a combination of favourable circumstances is demanded to
prevent its dying immediately after birth! As many as in the case of a
living organism. The book must find some unoccupied space into which
it fits, the interest awakened by it must not be interfered with by
other, stronger, interests, or the talent displayed in it outshone by
greater talent. It must not recall any previous work, must not even
accidentally resemble anything else, and yet must, in one way or other,
be associated with something already familiar, must follow a path
already struck out. It is of special importance that it should appear
at the right moment. There are works which are not actually weak,
but which appear so in the light of some contemporaneous event or in
comparison with some contemporaneous production; they are made to seem
old-fashioned, poor, pale, as it were.
It is probable that Obermann, as an author, will belong to the same
class of writers as his creator, Sénancour, namely those who believe
that there is something of a magical nature in the secret of success.
His letters provide us with full particulars of his spiritual life and
history. The latter is epitomised in the following words: "Oh! how
great one is, so long as one is inexperienced! how rich and productive
one would be if only the cold looks of one's neighbours and the chill
blast of injustice did not shrivel up one's heart! I needed happiness;
I was created to suffer. Who does not know those dark days towards
the coming of winter, when even the morning brings dense mists and
the only light is in some burning bars of colour in the clouded sky?
Think of those veils of mist, that wan light, those hurricane gusts
whistling among bending, trembling trees, that steady howl, interrupted
by terrific shrieks; such was the morning of my life. At midday the
colder, steadier storms; towards evening gathering darkness; and man's
day is at an end."
To so morose a temperament a regularly ordered life is insupportable.
The most difficult, distressing moment in a young man's life, that in
which he must choose a profession, is one which Obermann cannot face.
For to choose a calling means to exchange complete liberty and the full
privileges of humanity for confinement resembling that of the beast in
its stall. It is to their freedom from the stamp of any calling that
women owe part of their beauty and of the poetry of their sex. The
stamp of a calling is a restraint, a limitation, a ridiculous thing.
How then could a man with a nature like Obermann's possibly choose a
profession? At once too intense and too weak for real life, he hates
nothing more than dependence! The whole constitution of society is
repellent to him: "Thus much is certain; I will not drag myself up
step by step, take a place in society, be compelled to show respect to
superiors in return for the privilege of despising inferiors. Nothing
is so imbecile as these degrees of contempt reaching down through
society from the prince, who claims to be inferior to God alone, to the
poorest rag-picker who must be servile to the woman from whom he hires
a straw mattress for the night."
He will not purchase the right to command at the price of obedience. To
him a clock represents the quintessence of torture. To bind himself to
tear his mood into fragments when the clock strikes, as the labourer,
the man of business, and the official must, is to him to deprive
himself of the one good thing which life with all its tribulations
offers, namely, independence.
He is a stranger among his fellow-men; they do not feel as he feels,
he does not believe what they believe. They appear to him so tainted
with superstition, prejudices, hypocrisy, and social untruthfulness,
that he shrinks from contact with them. At the close of the eighteenth
century France was not orthodox, but it had not emancipated itself from
the belief in God and in a future existence. Obermann does not share
these beliefs; his is an essentially modern spirit; his philosophy is
the scientific philosophy of the nineteenth century; he is a warm,
convinced humanitarian, and has as little belief in a happier existence
after death as in a personal God.
The question of religion is discussed from various points of view in
his letters. We already find the indignant refutation of the theory
that atheism is the result of wickedness. They who believe in the
Bible, says Obermann, maintain that it is only men's evil passions
which prevent them from being Christians; the atheist might with equal
justice assert that only the bad man is a Christian, since it is only
the Christian who requires the help of phantasms to restrain him from
stealing, lying, and murdering, and who endorses the theory that it
would not be worth while leading an upright life if there were no
hell. He attempts to explain the psychical origin of the belief in the
immortality of the individual. The majority of human beings, restless
and unhappy, live in hope that next hour, that to-morrow, and, finally,
that in a life to come, they may attain the happiness they desire.
To the argument that this belief is, at any rate, a consolation, he
replies, that its being a consolation to the unhappy, is but one reason
the more for doubting its truth. Men so readily credit what they wish
to believe. Suppose one of the old sophists to have succeeded in making
a pupil believe that by following certain directions for ten days he
would be assured of invulnerability, eternal youth, &c.--the belief
would doubtless be very agreeable to the pupil in question, but none
the better founded for that. When asked what becomes of motion, mind,
and soul, which are incorruptible, Obermann replies: "When the fire
on your hearth goes out, its light, its warmth, its force forsake it,
and it passes into another world, where it will be eternally rewarded
if it has warmed your feet and eternally punished if it has burned your
slippers."
He also attacks the theory, as often urged in our own as in those days,
that those who do not believe in the dogmas of religion should hold
their peace and not deprive others of the mainstay of their lives. He
argues warmly, passionately, asserting that the cultivated classes and
the town populations no longer believe in dogma (we must remember that
he is writing of 1801-2), and as regards the lower classes, putting the
matter thus: Even if we take for granted that it is both impossible and
inadvisable to cure the masses of their delusions, does this justify
deceit, does this make it a crime to speak the truth, or an evil that
truth should be told? As a matter of fact, however, the masses now
universally display a desire to learn the truth; it is clear that faith
is everywhere undermined; and our first endeavour ought to be to prove
clearly to all and sundry that the obligation to do right is quite
independent of the belief in a future life.
Obermann, then, maintains that the laws of morality are natural, not
supernatural, and are consequently unaffected by the collapse of
belief. He repeatedly emphasises the disastrous practical results of
silence in matters of religion; it is the system of silence which makes
it possible for the education of woman to be still carried on upon the
old lines, keeping her, as a rule, in a state of ignorance that makes
her the enemy of progress, and too often delivers her, body and soul,
into the power of her father confessor. A comparison between love as a
happiness-producing power and love in the rôle it plays in marriage,
leads him on to express some very strong opinions regarding the then
prevailing ideas on the relations between the sexes, and the principles
according to which a woman's conduct is judged in civilised society.
On these points Obermann is quite modern--he here follows the line of
thought indicated by the preceding century; but in all that regards
the emotions he is less modern, although he heralds something new,
something that is on the way, namely Romanticism. He reflects much
on the subject of the romantic; a portion of his book bears the
significant title, "De l'expression romantique et du Ranz des Vaches."
He defines the idea much as contemporary German writers do, although
he does not systematise to the same extent. He declares the romantic
conception of things to be the only one that harmonises with profound,
true feeling: In all wild countries like Switzerland nature is full
of romance, but romance vanishes when the hand of man is discernible
everywhere; romantic effects resemble isolated words of man's original
speech, which is not remembered by all, &c., &c.; nature is more
romantic in her sounds than in her sights; the ear is more romantically
impressionable than the eye; the voice of the woman we love affects
us more romantically than her features, the Alpine horn expresses the
romance of the Alps more forcibly than any painting; for we admire what
we see, but we feel what we hear.
It is interesting to note how Obermann unconsciously takes up the tone
of the German Romanticists whom he has never read. They also exalt
music as the art of arts. Sénancour declares elsewhere that he cares
almost more for the songs whose words he does not understand than
for those of which he can follow the words as well as the melody. He
remarks this _à propos_ of the German songs he hears in Switzerland,
naïvely adding: "Besides, there is something more romantic about the
German accent." It is remarkable that we should find already suggested
in Sénancour even that conception of language as simply musical sound
which was subsequently characteristic of the German Romantic School.
But his senses are too highly developed for him to rest content with
music as the best means of intercourse between man and nature. In
two separate passages in his book he declares that a succession of
different fragrances contains as rich a melody as any succession of
tones, and can, like music, call up pictures of far-away places and
things.[1] Among the late French Romanticists we do not find such
another highly developed, ultra-refined sense of smell until we
come to Baudelaire. But whereas in Baudelaire it is a symptom of
over-developed sensuousness, in Sénancour it is only an indication of
the purely romantic cult of the Ego; it is one element in an emotional
revel, for Sénancour believes that by means of the sense of smell as
well as by means of the sense of hearing he can distinguish the hidden
harmonies of existence. It also implies a shrinking from reality,
with the corresponding intensified self-centredness; for it is only a
volatilised essence of things that one inhales through the medium of
perfumes and tones.
In his repugnance for realities, no solitude is too complete for
Obermann. He lives alone, avoiding both cities and villages. There
is in him the strangest mixture of love for mankind in general and
complete indifference in all the relations of real life. So sensitive
is he, that he is afflicted by scruples about his addiction to the
mild dissipation of tea-drinking (tea being very characteristically
his favourite beverage). He finds that it distracts his melancholy (le
thé est d'un grand secours pour s'ennuyer d'une manière calme), but he
despises all external excitement and stimulant. He is aware that he
is far from being French in this respect, for, he aptly remarks, if
Frenchmen inhabited Naples, they would build a ball-room in the crater
of Vesuvius. He does not truly live except when he is entirely alone,
in mist-veiled forests which recall the inevitable Ossian, or at night
by the silent shores of a Swiss lake. Like his contemporary Novalis, he
feels that darkness, by veiling visible nature, forces man's Ego back
into itself.
Speaking of a night he passed alone with nature, he says:
"In that one night I experienced all that mortal heart can know of
unutterable longing, unutterable woe. In it I consumed ten years of my
life." And he attains to an even more profound self-consciousness by
day, in the snow-fields of the Alps, where all surrounding life is not
only veiled, as by night, but is frozen and apparently at a standstill.
He is most himself when he climbs from the Swiss valley in which he
lives up to the desolate wilds of the highest mountains. With an
indescribable, almost boyish gladness, he watches the form of his guide
disappearing in the distance; revelling in loneliness, he becomes
oblivious of time and humanity. Note him in these surroundings:
"The day was hot, the horizon misty, and the valleys full of vapour.
The lower atmosphere was lighted up by bright reflections from the
glaciers, but absolute purity seemed the essential quality of the air
I breathed. At this height no exhalation from the lower regions, no
earthly light, troubled the dark, infinite depths of the sky. It had
no longer the pale, clear, soft blue colour of the vault we look up to
from the plains; no, the ether permitted the sight to lose itself in
boundless infinity, and, heedless of the glare of sun and glacier, to
seek other worlds and other suns as it does by night. Imperceptibly,
the vapours of the glaciers rose and formed clouds under my feet. My
eyes were no longer wearied by the sparkle of the snow, and the heavens
grew darker and deeper still. The snowy dome of Mont Blanc lifted its
immovable mass above the moving grey sea of piled-up mist which the
wind raised into enormous billows. A black speck showed far down in
their abysses; swiftly rising, it advanced directly towards me. It was
a great Alpine eagle; its wings were wet and its eyes were fierce;
it was seeking prey. But at the sight of a human being it uttered a
sinister cry, precipitated itself into the mist and disappeared. This
cry was echoed twenty times, but the echoes were dry sounds, without
resonance, like so many isolated cries in the universal silence. Then
all sank back into absolute stillness, as though sound itself had
ceased to exist, as though the reverberating property of bodies had
been universally suspended. Silence is unknown in the noisy valleys,
it is only on these cold heights that this immobility reigns, this
perpetual solemnity which no tongue can express, no imagination conjure
up. Were it not for the memories he brings from the plains, man would
believe up here that, leaving himself out of the question, movement
did not exist; the motion of the stars would be inexplicable to him,
even the mists seem to remain the same despite their changes. He knows
that the moments follow each other, but he does not feel it. Everything
seems to be eternally petrified. I could wish I had preserved a more
exact remembrance of my sensations in those silent regions. In the
midst of everyday life the imagination is hardly capable of recalling
a sequence of ideas which present surroundings seem to contradict and
thrust aside. But in such moments of energy one is not in a condition
to think of the future or of other men and take notes for it and them,
or to dwell upon the fame to be acquired by one's thoughts, or even to
take thought of the common good. One is more natural; one is not bent
on making use of the present moment, one does not control one's ideas,
nor require one's mind to examine into things, discover hidden secrets,
or find something to say which has never been said before. Thought is
no longer active and regulated, but passive and free. One dreams, one
abandons one's self, one is profound without _esprit_, great without
enthusiasm, energetic without will."
We can see him, this pupil of Jean Jacques, who has energy without
will (exactly Obermann's case), sitting solitary amidst Jean Jacques's
scenery. _René_ had widened the range of literary landscape. Instead
of the Swiss lake and the woods and groves with which we began in
_La Nouvelle Héloïse_, _René_ and _Atala_ gave us the great primeval
forest, the gigantic Mississippi and its tributaries, and all the
glowing, dazzling colour and fragrant, intoxicating luxuriance of
tropical nature. This was a fitting natural background for a figure
like René's. The exiled Chateaubriand had wandered through such
scenery, and it had left its imprint on him. Obermann is in his proper
place in the desert silence and dumbness of the mountains.
It is where there is no life, where life loses its hold, that he feels
at home. Will he be able to endure life? Or will he, like Werther, some
day cast it from him?
He does not do so. He finds strength in a great resolve. He gives up
once and for all the idea of pleasure and happiness. "Let us," he says,
"look upon all that passes and perishes as of no importance; let us
choose a better part in the great drama of the world. It is from our
determined resolution alone that we can hope for any enduring result."
His determination to live, not to lay violent hands upon himself, is
not engendered by humility but by a spirit of haughty defiance. "It
may be," he says, "that man is created only to perish. If so, let us
perish resisting, and if annihilation is our portion, let us at least
do nothing to justify our fate."
But it is long before Obermann attains to this calm. Many and
impassioned are his arguments in justification of suicide; and this
is not surprising, for the suicide-epidemic in literature is one of
those symptoms of the emancipation of the individual to which I have
already referred. It is one form, the most radical and definite, of the
individual's rejection of and release from the whole social order into
which he was born. And what respect for human life were men likely to
have in the days when Napoleon yearly made a blood-offering of many
thousands to his ambition? "I hear every one declare," says Obermann,
"that it is a crime to put an end to one's life, but the same sophists
who forbid me death, expose me to it, send me to it. It is honourable
to give up life when we cling to it, it is right to kill a man who
desires to live, but that same death which it is an obligation to seek
when dreaded, it is criminal to seek when desired! Under a thousand
pretexts, now sophistical, now ridiculous, you play with my existence,
and I alone have no rights over myself! When I love life, I am to
despise it; when I am happy, you send me to die; and when I wish to
die, you forbid me, and burden me with a life that I loathe."
"If I ought not to take my life, neither ought I to expose myself to
probable death. All your heroes are simply criminals. The command you
give them does not justify them. You have no right to send them to
death if they had no right to give their consent to your order. If I
have no right of decision in the matter of my own death, who has given
this right to society? Have I given what I did not possess? What insane
social principle is this you have invented, which declares that I have
made over to society, for the purpose of my own oppression, a right I
did not possess to escape from oppression."
Once, many years ago, in an essay on the tragedy of fate, I put similar
words into the mouth of a suicide: "He who groans under the burden of
existence may reasonably turn and accuse destiny, saying, 'Why was I
born? Why are we not consulted? If I had been asked and had known what
it was to live, I would never have consented.' We are like men who
have been pressed as sailors and forced on board a ship: such sailors
do not consider themselves obliged to stay on the ship if they see an
opportunity of deserting. If it is argued that, having enjoyed the good
of life I am bound to accept the evil, I reply: 'The good of life, the
happiness of childhood, for example, which I enjoyed and my acceptance
of which you say implied my consent to live, I accepted in absolute
ignorance of the fact that it was earnest-money, therefore I am not
bound by such earnest-money. I will not violate the ship's discipline,
will not murder my comrades or anything of that sort; I will only take
the one thing I have a right to, my liberty; for I never bound myself
to remain.'"
This is obviously not the place to discourse at length on the
permissibility of suicide. I leave that task to the moralists, only
remarking that, although I do not believe anything reasonable can
be urged against its permissibility except our obligations to our
fellow-men, I consider these obligations in numberless cases an
entirely sufficient and conclusive argument. At present I am only
depicting from a purely historical point of view an actual psychical
condition which is one of the phenomena of the literature under
consideration. For _Werther_ and _Obermann_ are not the only books of
this period in which suicide is represented or discussed. Atala kills
herself. René is only prevented from doing so by his sister Amélie, and
at one time, with a contempt of life almost as great as Schopenhauer's,
he sneers at the love of life as a "mania." Their attitude towards
suicide, then, forms a point of resemblance between two such different
writers as Chateaubriand and Sénancour, and stamps their work with the
impress of the period.
The author of _Obermann_ made his hero in his own image, which perhaps
explains why he makes him finally resolve to be an author. "What
chance have I of success?" says Obermann. "If to say something true
and to endeavour to say it convincingly be not enough, it is certain
that I shall not succeed. Take the first place, ye who desire the
fame of the moment, the admiration of society, ye who are rich in
ideas which last a day, in books which serve a party, in effective
tricks and mannerisms! Take the first place, seducers and seduced; it
is nothing to me; ye will soon be forgotten, so it is well that ye
should have your day. For my own part, I do not consider it necessary
to be appreciated in one's lifetime, unless one is condemned to the
misfortune of having to live by one's pen."