OBERMANN
VOLUME I
OBERM ANN
SELECTIONS FROM
Cfosen and translated with an Introductory
"Essay and Notes by JESSIE PEABODY
FROTHINGHAM, Translator of the
Journal of Maurice de Guerin
VOLUME ONE
fhe RIVERSIDE PRESS, Cambridge
1901
4
•
Copyright, 1901
By Jessie Peabody Frotbingham
All rights reserved
I
ro Mr MOTHER
Whose unfailing encouragement and
criticism have been my help
and inspiration
I DEDICATE THESE VOLUMES
I
, ' I
FROM
STANZAS IN MEMORY OF
THE AUTHOR OF
OBERMANN
A FEVER in these pages burns
Beneath the calm they feign ;
A wounded human spirit turns
Here, on its bed of pain.
Yes, though the virgin mountain-air
Fresh through these pages blows ;
Though to these leaves the glaciers
spare
The soul of their mute snows ;
Though here a mountain - murmur
swells
Of many a dark-boughed pine ;
"
*
vi STANZAS
Though, as you read, you hear the bells
Of the high-pasturing kine —
Yet, through the hum of torrent lone,
And brooding mountain-bee,
There sobs I know not what ground-
tone
Of human agony.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
•
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PR E FA C E
IN offering to the public for the Jlrst
time a translation of OBERMANN,' an
explanation is scarcely needed; for although
Benancourhasfor a hundred years remained
comparatively unknown, his writings must
appeal to every lover of nature as much as,
or perhaps in some ways even more than, the
works of Amiel and Maurice de Guerin,
whose precursor he was, and both of whom
have already been presented to British and
American readers. But while the charm
O/*OBERMANN lies chiefly in its subtle and
strong delineation of material nature, it is
not this alone that challenges attention. As
a monody on human experience it may well
attract many who are interested in the prob-
lem of life.
In making selections from OBERMANN
viii PREFACE
it has been my aim to lay stress upon these
two sides, as well as to emphasize Senan-
cour's aversion to the established order of
things ; an aversion from which sprang a
large part of his inward discontent. 'This
has obliged me to include many passages
of an introspective character, thus over-
accentuating, perhaps, the author's ten-
dency to self-analysis ; but these passages
usually form the prelude to meditations on
life and nature too valuable to be omitted.
*/
Although in France the admirers of Senan-
cour dwell at length upon the importance
of his philosophy, for us his chief claim to
recognition must rest on his deep under-
standing of the human heart, his constant
groping after truth, his realization of what
there is of sad and inscrutable in life, and
his love of the beautiful and the sublime in
nature. 'These qualities of the poet, which
give him whatever right he may have to
greatness, have received the larger share of
attention. As a logician he is not equally
strong ; I have therefore left untranslated
PREFACE ix
many long arguments and deductions which
in style fall below his highest level, and de-
tract from rather than add to the beauty
and harmony of the rest.
To translate OBERMANN has been an
interesting, though not an easy work. M.
yules Levallois, the most ardent modern
exponent of the poet-philosopher, and for
years a close student of his works, himself
acknowledges that it is difficult to under-
stand Senancour ; for his meaning is often
subtly hidden, suggested rather than ex-
pressed. His extreme literary reserve, which
made him shun the favor of the multitude,
led him, perhaps, to 'veil his thought, and
leave it half-untold, as it were, but clothed
in a wealth of imagery.
It has also been difficult at times to
reconcile an attempt to preserve to a certain
degree the original style and rhythm, with
a desire to use English literary form. In
some places I have allowed myself consid-
erable freedom where the composition of the
sentences seemed intricate and involved, at
PREFACE
times I have translated the meaning rather
than the words, and in other places I have
adhered to an almost literal rendering. My
hope is that the remarkable beauty and
power of Senancour's expression may not
have been entirely lost in the translation.
J. P. F.
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I
INTRODUCTION
IN November, 1849, Matthew Ar-
nold, then a young man of twenty-
seven, almost at the beginning of his
literary career, wrote some stanzas in
memory of the author of Obermann,
an obscure French poet, whose name
and writings had, until then, been
scarcely known outside of France, and
who had died almost unnoticed three
years before. These were followed,
many years after, by other stanzas,
Obermann Once More. It is through
these two poems by Matthew Arnold
that the author of Obermann, Etienne
Pivert de Senancour, has been chiefly
known to the reading public of Eng-
land and America. But while his name
has in this way become familiar to
xii INTRODUCTION
many, his writings have never attained
celebrity ; and, even in his own coun-
try, he is not famous. The prose poem,
Obermann, has been read by a few who
have been attracted by its rare poetic
quality and interpretative power, but it
has not received general recognition,
nor been awarded by the public its just
rank as a work of marked talent.
There are good reasons why the au-
thor of Obermann should have remained
without fame beyond a narrow circle
of admirers, as we shall see by a study
of his character. His own description
of this isolation, which oppressed him,
even though he sought it, is filled with
a sense of pain. On the 1 2th of Octo-
ber, in Letter XXII, he writes from
Fontainebleau : —
" I am alone. ... I am here in the
world, a wanderer, solitary in the midst
of a people for whom I care nothing ;
like a man, deaf for many years, whose
eager eyes gaze upon the crowd of silent
INTRODUCTION xiii
beings who move and pass before him.
He sees everything, but everything is
withheld from him ; he suffers the si-
lence of all things in the midst of the
noise of the world ; ... he is apart
from the entirety of beings; ... in
vain do all things exist around him ; he
lives alone, he is isolated in the midst
of the living world."
Although the author of Obermann
separated himself by choice from the
life of his times, and, while the tur-
moil of events swept past him, stood
apart as a solitary figure, deaf to their
noise and seemingly unconscious of
their object, yet he must take his place
as a member — the most isolated, it is
true — of the sentimental democratic
movement which had its rise in the
second half of the eighteenth century.
By right of talent, through affinity of
sentiment and feeling, he belonged to
that romantic school of France which
was the successor of classicism and in-
•
i
xiv INTRODUCTION
tellectual atheism, and numbered in its
ranks a Rousseau, a Bernardin de St.
Pierre, a Chateaubriand, a Madame de
Stael, whose names sounded like clarion
notes through the end of the eighteenth
century and the first half of the nine-
teenth. But even the gentler lights
among the pantheists of French litera-
ture, Vigny, Maurice de Guerin, La-
martine, Musset, Amiel, received wider
recognition than the solitary dreamer
who has, nevertheless, written pages
more beautiful, perhaps, in their sim-
plicity, charm, grandeur even, than
have many of his better known con-
temporaries or successors.
These pages, which formed the re-
pository of the intimate personal reve-
ries of a nature delicately responsive
to every impression and emotion, and
which contained a depth of feeling and
experience not appreciated by the many,
were, however, we are told by Sainte-
Beuve, cherished by a small band of
INTRODUCTION xv
admirers, — Sautelet, Bastide, Ampere,
Stapfer, Nodier, — young and ardent
spirits, who looked up to their author
with reverence as to a master, and by
a group of men of letters which counted
such names as Rabbe, Ballanche, Pierre
Leroux, and Boisjolin the editor of the
second edition of Obermann. More than
this, Sainte-Beuve himself, George Sand,
and in recent years Jules Levallois, at-
tracted by his rare gifts and his singu-
lar charm, have done for him in France
what Matthew Arnold has done in Eng-
land, and Alvar Torniidd in Finland :
they have made him a name to the
many and more than a name to the
few who appreciate beauty of style and
the poet's power to interpret nature.
Several of the writers of the roman-
tic school possessed to a remarkable
degree this gift of rendering nature.
Chateaubriand possessed it, though
often in a studied form ; Maurice de
Guerin had it in all its naturalness and
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xvi INTRODUCTION
grace ; Senancour had it with a sim-
plicity, grandeur, and eloquence which
have seldom been surpassed. He has
given us pictures of singular beauty,
both as a landscapist and as a poet ; for
he not only paints nature in her out-
ward semblance, but he leads us into
close companionship with what is hid-
den and intimate in her life. This is
why Obermann has outlived obscurity.
Although Senancour made no use of
metrical form, he held more of the
poetic gift of understanding and appre-
ciating nature, and of interpreting her
with subtle sympathy, than did many
poets who wrote in verse. And in this
feeling for nature he was perhaps less
akin to Lamartine, the chief singer of
French romanticism, than to Words-
worth and others among the English
poets.
It may appear singular that the only
countries where the works of Senan-
cour have been widely appreciated are
INTRODUCTION xvii
the lands of the far north, Finland,
Sweden, and Norway. But his strong
sympathy with all that was primitively
sublime and titanic in nature and in
man, which inspired him to write in
Obermann, " It is to the lands of the
north that belong the heroism born of
enthusiasm, and the titanic dreams bred
of sublime melancholy," must have
formed a powerful attraction for a peo-
ple whose early literature represented
types of primeval man and nature.
Qbermann, written during 1801 to
1803, and first published in 1804, is a
book of disconnected impressions and
meditations, in the form of letters to a
friend, containing the reveries of a re-
cluse on life and nature. But although
Obermann is an internal autobiography
of Senancour, we must guard against
taking too literally its external details,
for the author purposely altered facts
and dates in order to mislead the reader.
Etienne Pivertde Senancour was born
xviii INTRODUCTION
in Paris in 1 770, the year of the birth
of Wordsworth. His father, who be-
longed to a noble and a comparatively
rich family of Lorraine, and who held
the office of comptroller of the reve-
nues under Louis XVI, was a man of
inflexible will, and of small sympathy
with youth or with what goes to make
youth gay. Young Senancour's child-
hood was not happy ; he had little
companionship, and no pleasures. A
profoundly melancholy temperament,
given him by nature, developed by all
the conditions of his home life, made
him prematurely sombre and discon-
tented ; ill health and his father's stern-
ness increased a self-repression, apathy,
and awkwardness which were the re-
sult partly of physical immaturity and
partly of mental precocity. Romantic
from childhood, thirsting for joy with
an intensity rarely seen in one so young,
receiving back from life only disillu-
sions and unsatisfied longings, he soon
INTRODUCTION xix
became acquainted with suffering, and
could say with reason that he had never
been young. Born without the power,
but with the fierce desire for happiness,
his "joy in everything" was withered
before it bloomed. The few allusions
in Obermann to those early years show
how greatly they influenced his after
life. But among these memories of his
youth, one ray of content pierces now
and then the general gloom, — his love
for his mother, and her sympathy with
him. Later, after death had separated
him from her, he pictures, with un-
wonted tenderness, the walks they took
together in the woods of Fontainebleau,
when he was a schoolboy spending his
vacations with his parents in the coun-
try. He was only fifteen at that time,
but showed even then his love for all
things beautiful in nature, his longing
for solitude, his premature seriousness,
his changeful moods, his ardent, sensi-
tive, restless temperament which gave
xx INTRODUCTION
him no peace. At Paris, on the 27th
of June, in Letter XI, this recollection
comes to him as an inspiration : —
" The first time I went to the forest
I was not alone. ... I plunged into
the densest part of the woods, and when
I reached a clearing, shut in on all sides,
where nothing could be seen but stretches
of sand and of juniper-trees, there came
to me a sense of peace, of liberty, of
savage joy, the sway of nature first felt
in careless youth. . . . Often I was in
the forest before the rising of the sun.
I climbed the hills still deep in shadow ;
I was all wet from the dew-covered
underbrush ; and when the sun shone
out I still longed for that mystic light,
precursor of the dawn. I loved the
deep gullies, the dark valleys, the dense
woods ; I loved the hills covered with
heather ; I loved the fallen boulders
and the rugged rocks, and, still better, I
loved the moving sands, their barren
wastes untrodden by the foot of man,
INTRODUCTION xxi
but furrowed here and there by the
restless tracks of the roe or the fleeing
hare. ... It was then that I noticed
the birch, a lonely tree which even in
those days rilled me with sadness, and
which, since that time, I have never
seen without a sense of pleasure. I love
the birch • I love that smooth, white,
curling bark ; that wild trunk ; those
drooping branches ; the flutter of the
leaves, and all that abandonment, simpli-
city of nature, attitude of the desert."
Here, then, at Fontainebleau, came
the first awakening of his feeling for
nature, — a feeling which had perhaps
already been unconsciously stirred at
Ermenonville, a small village in the
Valois, where Rousseau had died a few
years before, in 1778. Young Senan-
cour, who had early shown his love of
study, and, when only seven years old,
had devoured with feverish ardor every
book of travel that fell into his hands,
had been sent to school at Ermenon-
xxii INTRODUCTION
ville, and lived with the cure of the
parish. There, as an impressionable
boy, he must have stood by the tomb
of Rousseau ; must have wandered in
the castle grounds where Rousseau had
lived before his death ; have listened to
the " rustling leaves of the birches ; "
have seen " the quiet waters, the cas-
cade among the rocks, . . . and the
green that stretches beyond like a prai-
rie, above which rise wooded slopes,"
as Gerard de Nerval, in Sylvie, pictures
it to us in the first quarter of the nine-
teenth century.
At fifteen Senancour entered the
College de la Marche, at Paris, where
he followed the four years* course dili-
gently, not brilliantly, but successfully,
and graduated with honor. In those
four years, his mind, already open to
philosophic doubt, was definitely led
into channels which destroyed whatever
religious belief may have been feebly
lodged there by his mother's teaching.
INTRODUCTION xxiii
He left college an atheist. It had been
the intention of the elder Senancour
that his son should enter the priest-
hood, and being a man of imperious
will, unaccustomed to remonstrance or
opposition, he immediately made ar-
rangements for Etienne to take a two
years' preparatory course at the semi-
nary of Saint-Sulpice.
By nature without depth of Chris-
tian religious feeling, by temperament
fiercely opposed to rules and institu-
tions, by education steeped in the phi-
losophic thought of the day, the young
student of Malebranche and Helvetius
rose in revolt against a step which
"essentially shocked his nature." In
August, 1789, with the help of his
mother, he left Paris, and buried him-
self in the solitudes of the Swiss Alps :
there, in the region of perpetual ice,
the primitive man in him strove to
wrest from primitive nature the key to
life.
xxiv INTRODUCTION
At this period, when we see in him
so much to " essentially shock" our
natures, — his atheism, his antagonism
to Christianity, his bitterness against
institutions, — he has at least the merit
of austere sincerity and of scrupulous
morality. With a nature so sincere and
so strongly opposed to a religious voca-
tion, he could not bring himself to
enter the priesthood solely for the sake
of earning a living, or to play the hyp-
ocrite in order to satisfy an exacting
parent.
" I could not sacrifice my manhood,"
he protests, " in order to become a
man of affairs."
And in another place, in the same
letter, he says : —
" It is not enough to look upon a
profession as honest for the simple rea-
son that one can earn an income of
thirty or forty thousand francs without
theft."
Sincerity he regarded as one of the
natural, simple virtues. The grander
virtues he had also known ; he writes : —
" I have known the enthusiasm of
the great virtues. . . f My stoical
strength braved misfortunes as well as
passions ; and I felt sure that I should
be the happiest of men if I were the
most virtuous/*
This stoicism was merely a phase ;
it went hand in hand with an atheism
and a fatalism which were also nothing
more than phases ; they were not de-
stined to endure long, but they pro-
duced his first work, Reveries sur la
Nature Primitive de I'Homme, written
during the early years of his exile in
Switzerland, and published in 1799,
when he had returned secretly to Paris.
During those ten years France had
passed through her great crisis ; but the
distant rumblings of the Revolution
which had shaken his country to her
foundations, and had reechoed through-
out Europe, seem to have left Senan-
xxvi INTRODUCTION
cour unmoved. Buried in his mountain
solitudes, surrounded by the silence of
the snows, absorbed in the contempla-
tion of natural forces, he remained ap-
parently unconscious of the movement
of the gigantic social forces around
him. He represents passivity in an age
of intense moral and social activity, the
sage among soldiers, the dreamer of
ideas for which the rest of the world
were fighting, the believer in a new
system which was even then overturn-
ing society, and which fifty years later
was to produce men of his stamp.
But the Revolution which he ig-
nored did not pass him by unnoticed, as
he might have wished. His noble an-
cestry and his abrupt departure from
Paris immediately before the outbreak
of the Revolution were sufficient rea-
sons to lay him open to suspicion, and
for him to be classed as an " emigre ; "
thus his voluntary retirement was turned
into a forced exile. Obliged for politi-
INTRODUCTION xxvii
cal reasons to make Switzerland his
home, we find him, not long after his
arrival, living in the house of a patri-
cian family in the canton of Fribourg.
A daughter of the house, unhappy in
her home, and in her engagement to a
man for whom she had no attachment,
became interested in Senancour ; they
saw each other constantly, even began
to write a romance together ; she con-
fided her troubles to him, and at last
broke her engagement. Young Senan-
cour, sensitive, scrupulous, believing
himself to be morally, though uninten-
tionally, bound to the young girl, mar-
ried her in 1790, at the age of twenty.
The marriage was not a happy one ;
but he remained a devoted husband un-
til his wife's early death. He had been
in love once, some years before, — a
transient fancy, as he then thought,
but one that had for a moment opened
before him visions of happiness which
might have been his, and that returned
xxviii INTRODUCTION
to him, in later years, with almost over-
whelming force in the hour of his great
moral crisis.
In Letter XI, from Paris, he writes: —
" It was in March ; I was at Lu — .
There were violets at the foot of the
thickets, and lilacs in a little meadow,
springlike and peaceful, open to the
southern sun. The house stood high
above. A terraced garden hid the win-
dows from sight. Below the meadow,
steep and rugged rocks formed wall
upon wall ; at the foot, a wide torrent,
and beyond, other ledges covered with
fields, with hedges, and with firs !
Across all this stretched the ancient
walls of the city ; an owl had made his
home among the ruined towers. In the
evening, the moon shone, distant horns
gave answering calls ; and the voice that
I shall never hear again ! "
These dreams had passed, and in
their place had come misfortunes in a
long and overwhelming train. The
INTRODUCTION xxix
loss of his fortune through the French
Revolution, and of his wife's inheri-
tance through the Swiss Revolution, a
painful nervous trouble which deprived
him throughout his life of the natural
use of his arms, the long and mortal
illness of his wife, the death of his
father and of his much-loved mother,
separation from his son and from his
friends, — all these formed the setting
of a grief, stifling and sombre, that
found frequent expression in the book
which was the Journal Intime of Se-
nancour's inward experience.
In a life so grave, so full of disillu-
sions, Senancour turned for support to
nature, — to a nature calm, broad, ma-
jestic, that brought him moments of
content, almost of happiness. His sen-
sitive organization responded like an
echo to every impression from the nat-
ural world, yet his enjoyment of nature
had in it as much of an intellectual as
of an emotional quality. His style at-
xxx INTRODUCTION
tracts us, not so much from the sound
of the words as from the musical flow
of the phrase and the exquisitely har-
monious turn of the sentence, the fall-
ing cadence at the close, with here and
there a sudden break in the rhythm.
No one who reads Obermann can fail
to find rare delight in the charm of its
cadences, in the remarkable power of
language which it shows, and in the
magic faculty of the artist to see the
elements that constitute a picture.
On the 1 9th of July, in Letter IV,
Senancour writes from Thiel of a night
spent on the shores of Lake Neucha-
teh —
" In the evening, before the rising
of the moon, I walked beside the green
waters of the Thiele. Feeling inclined
to dream, and finding the air so soft
that I could pass the whole night in
the open, I followed the road to Saint-
Blaise. At the small village of Marin,
I turned aside to the lake at the south,
INTRODUCTION xxxi
and descended a steep bank to the shore,
where the waves came to die on the
sands. The air was calm, not a sail
could be seen on the lake. All were at
rest, some in the forgetfulness of toil,
others in the oblivion of sorrow. The
moon rose; I lingered long. Toward
morning she spread over the earth and
the waters the ineffable melancholy of
her last rays. Nature appears immea-
surably grand when, lost in reverie, one
hears the rippling of the waves upon
the solitary shore, in the calm of a
night still resplendent and illumined by
the setting moon.
" Ineffable sensibility, charm and tor-
ment of our fruitless years, profound
realization of a nature everywhere over-
whelming and everywhere inscrutable,
all-absorbing passion, deepened wisdom,
rapturous self-abandonment, — all that
a human soul can experience of deep
desire and world- weariness, — I felt it
all, I lived it all on that memorable
xxxii INTRODUCTION
night. I have taken a fatal step towards
the age of decay ; I have consumed ten
years of my life. Happy the simple man
whose heart is always young ! "
This passage has been quoted before ;
it cannot be quoted too often. There
is a sentence in one of Emerson's Let-
ters to a Friend that reminds one of
it ; he has been reading the Vedas
" in the sleep of the great heats," and
writes : —
" If I trust myself in the woods or
in a boat upon the pond, nature makes
a Brahmin of me presently — eternal
necessity, eternal compensation, unfath-
omable power, unbroken silence, this is
her creed. Peace, she saith to me, and
purity and absolute abandonment."
Less lyrical than Maurice de Guerin,
Senancour was more of a Titan in
power and daring ; he was an epic
poet of landscape. Nature in her bolder
moods appealed to him most strongly ;
it was not her smiles, her graceful fan-
INTRODUCTION xxxiii
cies, her waywardness, her exuberance,
that moved him, as they did the lighter,
more " elusive " temperament of Mau-
rice de Guerin ; it was the rugged in
her, the mysterious, the vast ; he loved
to grapple with the strength, the diffi-
culties of a wild and savage region.
And in this he showed an intellectual
rather than a sensuous quality, a quality
which it is interesting to trace, even in
the words used to express the elements
in nature that aroused his sympathy.
Maurice de Guerin was attracted by
the evanescence and grace of nature ;
Senancour by her " permanence " and
" austerity." This austerity and per-
manence are especially insisted upon in
one of the most striking of the Ober-
mann letters, — the letter in which he
tells of a day spent on the Dent du
Midi.
On the 3d of September, in Letter
VII, he writes from Saint-Maurice : —
" I have been to the region of per-
xxxiv INTRODUCTION
petual ice, on the Dent du Midi. Be-
fore the sun shone upon the valley I had
already reached the bluff overlooking
the town, and was crossing the partly
cultivated stretch of ground which
covers it. I went on by a steep ascent,
through dense forests of fir-trees, leveled
in many places by winters long since
passed away : fruitful decay, vast and
confused mass of a vegetation that had
died and had regerminated from the
wrecks of its former life. At eight
o'clock I had reached the bare summit
which crowns the ascent, and which
forms the first salient step in that won-
drous pile whose highest peak still rose
so far beyond me. Then I dismissed my
guide, and put my own powers to the
test. I wanted that no hireling should
intrude upon this Alpine liberty, that
no man of the plains should come to
weaken the austerity of these savage re-
gions. ... I stood fixed and exultant
as I watched the rapid disappearance
INTRODUCTION xxxv
of the only man whom I was likely to
see among these mighty precipices. . . .
" I cannot give you a true impres-
sion of this new world, nor express the
permanence of the mountains in the
language of the plains."
The whole of that day he spent
among the chasms, the granite rocks,
and the snows of the Alps, taken pos-
session of by the inexpressible perma-
nence of life in those silent regions,
which seemed to have in them less of
change than of immutability.
We can see the landscapes which
Senancour paints; they are bold, vivid,
and full of atmosphere. And we can
feel the mysterious hidden life which he
feels so profoundly, which becomes a
passion with him, subdues him, absorbs
him, until he has grown to be a part
of it. The great Pan claims him. We
must not, however, mistake Senancour.
He loves nature, but to him man is
the highest part of nature ; only, man
xxxvi INTRODUCTION
troubles him by departing from primi-
tive standards, and nature does not. " It
is true I love only nature," he writes,
" but men are still the part of nature
that I love the best."
It is not social man, as he existed at
the close of the eighteenth century,
that fills this high place in Senancour's
affections. He pictures to himself a
primitive life, simple, austere, uniform ;
a state of human relationships in which
friendship such as the ancients knew it
— the friendship of Cicero and Atti-
cus, of Laelius and Africanus — holds a
conspicuous place. By nature strong in
the affections, this bond of two minds
and souls, united in thought, feeling,
and belief, the " absolute running of
two souls into one," as Emerson ex-
presses it, has for him a deep attraction.
He realizes what Emerson emphasizes
with greater force when he writes that
" the sweet sincerity of joy and peace,
which I draw from this alliance with
INTRODUCTION xxxvii
my brother's soul, is the nut itself
whereof all nature and all thought is
but the husk and shell." And so Se-
nancour writes : " Peace itself is a sad
blessing when there is no hope of shar-
ing it."
Believing firmly in the inborn good-
ness of humanity, he feels that the dic-
tates of one's own nature are safe guides
to be followed in life, " convinced," he
declares, " that nothing that is natural
to me is either dangerous or to be con-
demned." Yet these impulses which he
acknowledges as wise leaders are never
to be other than moderate, for, he says,
" dejection follows every immoderate
impulse." And the goodness which he
broadly ascribes to all human nature
is far from being of a commonplace
order, to judge from his own definition :
" True goodness requires wide concep-
tions, a great soul, and restrained pas-
sions." Himself a man of restrained
passions, he willingly believes that all
xxxviii INTRODUCTION
men are originally made virtuous, and
he insists upon the melancholy degen-
eration of man as he has been made by
the "caprices of this ephemeral world."
This forms the keynote of his aver-
sion for the world, and the reason for
his appeal to nature when, overwhelmed
with despair at " the hopeless tangle of
our age," and with a full sense of his
own impotence, he seeks solace in the
strength of the stars and the peace of
the solitary hills. For nature " holds
less of what we seek, but . . . we are
surer of finding the things that she con-
tains." And thus, he believes, the tie
is often stronger between man and the
" friend of man " than between man
and man ; for " passion goes in quest of
man, but reason is sometimes obliged to
forsake him for things that are less good
and less fatal." Alone, battling with the
"obstacles and the dangers of rugged
nature, far from the artificial trammels
and the ingenious oppression of men,"
INTRODUCTION xxxix
he feels his whole being broaden. In
Letter VII, from Saint-Maurice, he
gives a vivid description of one of his
first communings with the " friend of
man," after he has fled from a world
which oppressed him, and against which
he had neither the courage nor the
power to struggle : —
" On those desert peaks, where the
sky is measureless, and the air is more
stable, and time less fleeting, and life
more permanent, — there, all nature
gives eloquent expression to a vaster
order, a more visible harmony, an eter-
nal whole. There, man is reinstated in
his changeful but indestructible form;
he breathes a free air far from social
emanations ; ... he lives a life of
reality in the midst of sublime unity."
In this very year Wordsworth was
writing : —
" To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran ;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man."
xl INTRODUCTION
We can now, I think, understand in
a measure why Senancour has remained
obscure. He shunned the world, and
the world neglected him ; he could not
make his way with a public whom he
ignored and disliked. Shrinking from
contact with men, craving neither ap-
plause nor popularity, despising every
means of obtaining celebrity that savored
of intrigue or expedient, he marked out
for himself a rigid line of sincerity and
truth.
" If it is not sufficient," he writes,
" to say things that are true, and to
strive to express them in persuasive lan-
guage, I shall not have success."
And in harmony with this ideal of
literary simplicity and directness was the
feeling he had that an author should
not strive to receive " approbation dur-
ing his lifetime." The only success he
honored and desired was the austere
success of the future which assigns a
work "to its right place." Surely this
INTRODUCTION xli
was not the temperament from which
springs the desire to court notoriety or
the power to win it.
Another reason for Senancour's fail-
ure to reach general appreciation is
perhaps his unevenness. Like Words-
worth, he falls, at times, far below his
level ; not that he is ever weak, but in
his tendency to repetition he becomes
tiresome. Although in his later work
he shows more unity and a clearer sense
of proportion, in Obermann he is want-
ing in what is necessary to the creation
of a complete work of art, the power to
distinguish between the essential and the
non-essential. It is this power which
makes Chateaubriand's Rene a finished
painting, and the lack of this power
which makes Obermann a portfolio of
sketches as exquisite as Turner's water-
colors, intermingled with minute stud-
ies of unimportant details.
Obermann has been compared to
Rene. Both books describe the same
xlii INTRODUCTION
order of psychologic experience ; they
are both the expression of thwarted
lives, of unsatisfied cravings. But there
exists this difference between them :
Rene represents passionate struggle, and
later, victory ; Obermanny despairing ac-
ceptance, and later, resignation. With
Rene, nature is secondary to moral pow-
er ; his expression is strong, brilliant,
vigorous. With Obermann, nature is
the spring of all beauty and perfection,
she is mystic, vast, inscrutable ; his ex-
pression has something of the sensitive,
the hidden charm which he has caught
from the inner life of nature.
We know that Senancour became
familiar with the works of his great
contemporary, Chateaubriand, and that
in 1816 he published a critical study
of the Genie du Christianisme, in which
he exposed with merciless candor and
logic the insincerity of Chateaubriand's
religious position. But at the time
that Senancour wrote Obermannt while
INTRODUCTION xliii
he had read Atala, as he himself tells
us, Rene and the Genie du Christianisme
were still unknown to him. Whatever
similarity existed between Obermann
and Rene was therefore due to the
spirit that animated the whole literary
movement of the time, to the roman-
tic tendency of which they were the
simultaneous expression.
Another parallel that suggests itself
is with Amiel ; but here, too, there is a
marked difference. Senancour's render-
ing of nature, which makes him worthy
of being classed among the poets, is on
a far higher plane of beauty than that
of Amiel, while he is greatly Armel's
inferior in strength of intellect, cul-
ture, and mental training. It is Amiel's
keenness and justness as a critic of life
and things, of men and books, that give
him his claim to distinction. Senan-
cour is a poet and moralist, Amiel a
critic and speculative philosopher. The
difference in their style is equally
xliv INTRODUCTION
marked : Amiel is at his best where he
is incisive, critical, epigrammatic, full
of verve, cutting to the root of his sub-
ject like fine steel ; Senancour, where
he is poetical and meditative. The
philosophy of Amiel is on a far more
intricate scale and takes a more promi-
nent place in his 'Journal than does that
of Senancour in Qbermann; but the idea
of the indefinite, miscalled the infinite,
appeals equally to both, though in dif-
ferent ways. Amiel is fascinated by it,
— his individual life is absorbed, evap-
orated, lost, in the universal nothing ;
while Senancour, alone, as an individual,
stands face to face with an immutable
and inscrutable eternity, which terrifies
and overwhelms him, but which he
desires to comprehend through an
etherealized intelligence. The com-
mon ground on which they meet is
their desire to be in unison with the
life of nature, their mystical pantheism,
and their morbid melancholia which
INTRODUCTION xlv
leads them into pessimism, — all of
these traits being an inheritance from
their great progenitor, Rousseau. It
was the malady of the century, —
" melancholy, languor, lassitude, dis-
couragement," as we find in Amiel's
Journal, — lack of will power, the
capacity to suffer, a minute psychologic
analysis, the turning of life into a dream
without production, that formed the
basis of their affinity.
We must, in fact, go back to the
ideas that formed the spring of the
Revolutionary movement and changed
the conditions of modern society, to
find the common meeting-ground of
all the romanticists. Unswerving belief
in human nature, desire for the simpli-
fication of life and dislike of the com-
plicated social conditions of the old
order, passionate love of the natural
world, full return to nature as the ideal
of life, glorification of savage man, —
these ideas, formulated by Rousseau,
xlvi INTRODUCTION
were the inspiration of Chateaubriand,
Senancour, and Amiel. Rousseau, as
the father of the movement, became
the chief influence in the work of his
successors : he set the type for their
beliefs ; he opened the path through
which all were to walk, — some as
leaders, like Chateaubriand, others as
recluses, like Senancour ; his spirit per-
vaded not only France, but Europe ;
from him proceeded Childe Harold,
Werther, and Rene, as well as Obermann.
The poet with whom Senancour has
most of kinship in mood, in feeling, in
charm of expression, is Matthew Ar-
nold. That Obermann exerted a strong
influence over Matthew Arnold's early
years is clear from several references in
both of the Obermann poems. " We
feel thy spell ! " the English poet cries,
and that spell draws him to solitude, to
sad reverie, to companionship with the
eremite, the " master of my wandering
youth," the name he gives, many years
INTRODUCTION xlvii
later, to Obermann. But stronger still
than this inclination is the opposite
impulsion, the necessity which is upon
him to go out into the strife of men,
— an unseen driving power which he
calls fate, but which we might call con-
science. And so he cries : —
" 1 go, fate drives me ; but I leave
Half of my life with you."
Yet with him he carries into the world
that thing which
" has been lent
To youth and age in common discontent,"
and the
" infinite desire
For all that might have been,"
and
" The eternal note of sadness."
It is the poet in Matthew Arnold
that claims " fellowship of mood " and
sympathy with the poet in Senancour.
This may explain why Matthew Arnold
has not given of him one of his delight-
ful critical portraits. The affinity is too
xlviii INTRODUCTION
close, the influence too subtle, to be
brought within the limits of analysis.
But beyond this personal affinity of
mood, Matthew Arnold reveres Ober-
mann as a sage and seer. Every one
will recall those verses, in the first
Obermann poem, beginning : —
" Yet, of the spirits who have reigned
In this our troubled day,
I know but two, who have attained,
Save thee, to see their way."
These two spirits are Wordsworth
and Goethe.
Twenty years later he returns to
" Obermann once more,'* and in a vi-
sion is charged by the ancient sage to
carry to the world the message of that
hope for which Senancour had so pas-
sionately longed. Obermann, addressing
the younger poet, urges him to tell, —
" Hope to a world new-made !
Help it to fill that deep desire,
The want which crazed our brain,
Consumed our soul with thirst like fire,
Immedicable pain."
INTRODUCTION xlix
Matthew Arnold here constitutes
himself the disciple and exponent of
Obermann, the interpreter of his aspi-
rations, and the complement, as it were,
of his unfulfilled and disappointed life.
The fellowship of Matthew Arnold
with Obermann is seen in several of his
poems, in The Grande Chartreuse, The
Youth of Nature, The Touth of Man, and
markedly in Self-Dependence.
Indirectly it is also apparent in many
modes of thought and feeling. In both
poets there is a ground tone of melan-
choly underlying the passionate craving
for tranquillity and joy, which leaves
them forever reaching out toward a
goal that can never be attained. To-
gether with this is the sense of the
futility of human effort, and a blind re-
liance on fate. Both are stoical in their
austerity, and both are transcendental
in their tendencies. In both we find a
deep discontent with " the thousand
discords," and the " vain turmoil " of
1 INTRODUCTION
the world ; a desire to be in sympathy
and union with the inner life of the
universe ; to
" Yearn to the greatness of Nature ; "
and the final appeal to nature, whose
glory and greatness and calm are alone
enduring, while all else is subject to
change, — a nature who can say of men
in Matthew Arnold's words : —
" They are dust, they are changed, they are gone !
I remain."
And how like Senancour is the spirit
of these lines : —
" For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain."
But this resemblance, strong as it is
in many ways, belongs more to their
moods, their ethical attitude toward
life, the peculiar temper of their minds,
than to character, or intellect, or crea-
tive power. As a result of this affinity
INTRODUCTION li
of sentiment is a certain similarity in
rhythm, the outward but elusive ex-
pression of the inner feeling. In both
writers we find the same note of sad-
ness in the cadence, the same grace and
charm of diction, the same dying fall
at the end of the sentence, like the ebb
and flow of the waves on the shore.
Especially is this evident in The Touth
of Man, The Touth of Nature, parts of
Tristram and Iseult, and Dover Beach.
There exists this difference between
them : in Senancour the expression is
spontaneous and natural ; in Matthew
Arnold it is finished, and the result of
art and study.
Senancour's inward changes during
the twenty - five years that followed
the appearance of his first work, the
Reveries, were great; they formed a
gradual and continuous growth, from
despair to resignation, from restlessness
to calm, from doubt to belief, from ma-
terialism through pantheism to theism.
lii INTRODUCTION
Throughout Obermann we see traces of
a passionate longing for more than na-
ture could give him, something higher
than nature. On the lyth of August,
in Letter XVIII, from Fontainebleau,
he writes : —
" I am filled with an unrest that will
never leave me ; it is a craving I do not
comprehend, which overrules me, ab-
sorbs me, lifts me above the things that
perish. . . . You are mistaken, and I
too was once mistaken ; it is not the
desire for love. A great distance lies
between the void that fills my heart and
the love that I have so deeply desired ;
but the infinite stretches between what
I am and what I crave to be. Love is
vast, but it is not the infinite. I do not
desire enjoyment ; I long for hope, I
crave knowledge ! . . . I desire a good,
a dream, a hope, that shall be ever
before me, beyond me, greater even
than my expectation, greater than what
passes away.'*
INTRODUCTION liii
At the time he wrote these words,
he had no belief in the immortality of
the soul, no hope beyond this world.
Later, this belief and this hope were to
come to him ; but even then he had
glimpses of the future peace, as when
he writes, in Letter XIX, on the i8th
of August : —
"There are moments when I am
filled with hope and a sense of liberty ;
time and things pass before me with
majestic harmony,and I feel happy. . . .
Happy ! I ? And yet I am, and happy
to overflowing, like one who reawakens
from the terrors of a dream to a life of
peace and liberty. . . . But the moment
passes ; a cloud drifts across the sun and
shuts out its inspiring light ; the birds
are hushed ; the growing darkness drives
away both my dream and my joy."
The time was to come when this life
of " peace and liberty " would no longer
be seen by snatches, between the drift-
ing clouds, but would fill him with the
liv INTRODUCTION
serenity he so ardently craved. Perhaps
he little dreamed that his prayer, framed
as a question, was to be answered in his
life with the same beauty that he pic-
tured it in words. In Letter XXIII,
dated on the i8th of October from
Fontainebleau, we find this passage : —
" Will it also be given unto man to
know the long peace of autumn after
the unrest of the strength of his years,
even as the fire, after its haste to be con-
sumed, lingers before it is quenched ?
" Long before the equinox, the leaves
had fallen in quantities, yet the forest
still holds much of its verdure and all
of its beauty. More than forty days ago
everything looked as though it would
end before its time, and now all things
are enduring beyond their allotted days ;
receiving, at the very door of destruc-
tion, a lengthened life, which lingers on
the threshold of its decay with abundant
grace or security, and seems to borrow,
as it weakens with gentle loitering, both
INTRODUCTION Iv
from the repose of approaching death
and from the charm of departing life."
This we may take as a picture of his
own old age. Not that his material sur-
roundings had in any way improved ;
the change was internal, and was the ful-
fillment of his own words : " The true
life of man is within himself; what he
absorbs from the outside world is merely
accidental and subordinate." The fruit
of this change came to maturity in his
last important work, Libres Meditations,
written fifteen years after Obermann.
In the writer of the Meditations we see
a man who has profoundly suffered, and
whose spirit has been softened, chas-
tened, harmonized. His last word to the
world is the calm, majestic expression
of one who has realized the existence
of a distant truth, and has succeeded in
lessening the space which separated him
from it. It is the answer to the restless
questionings, the doubt of Obermann.
Even in Obermann he had begun to feel
Ivi INTRODUCTION
that nature was not the beginning and
the end of all things. On a day in Au-
gust, in Letter XVI, he writes from
Fontainebleau : —
" What noble sentiments ! What
memories ! What quiet majesty in a
night, soft, calm, luminous ! What
grandeur ! But the soul is overwhelmed
with doubt. It sees that the feelings
aroused by sentient things lead it into
error ; that truth exists, but in the far
distance."
In the Meditations the pursuit of this
distant truth has led him to belief in
a God, in a future life, in a governing
power in the universe ; nature is the
proof of divine wisdom ; the world we
live in, and the world to which we are
pressing forward, are the results of di-
vine justice. The Meditations is a work
of distinct ethical value ; its writer a
moralist of the type of Marcus Aure-
lius. The classic dignity and repose of
its style, its full and measured numbers,
INTRODUCTION Ivii
like the solemn harmonies of church
music, are the perfect outward expres-
sion of elevation of thought, a poised
nature, a spirit of peace and consola-
tion. We are lifted above the strife of
the world to a region of moral grandeur.
The poet is lost in the seer.
This change, although so fundamen-
tal, is not a mark of inconsistency. The
youth of nineteen who ran away from
home to avoid acting a part is still the
man of maturity who wrote the Medi-
tations ; genuineness, simplicity, and the
love of truth form the basis of his na-
ture.
Senancour lived twenty-seven years
after writing the Meditations, and the
spirit of calm continued to grow upon
him ; yet his external life can scarcely
have held more of happiness in his old
age than it had in his youth. He had
left Switzerland many years before, soon
after the completion of Obermanny and
had returned to Paris, where, poor and
Iviii INTRODUCTION
almost in want, he lived a secluded life,
with his daughter as his only companion,
in a house near the Place de la Bastile,
on the Rue de la Cerisaie, a street of
interesting historic memories connected
with Charles VI and Francis I. There,
a recluse in the midst of the world, he
composed his Meditations, and there,
obliged to live by his pen, the only way
open to him, he wrote for the periodi-
cals and journals of Paris, edited ency-
clopaedias, prepared historical summa-
ries, and spent years in the drudgery of
the literary profession. In 1846, four
years before the death of Wordsworth,
at the age of seventy-six, he died at St.
Cloud, a lonely old man.
OBERMANN
LETTERS
TO A
FRIEND
LETTER I
Geneva, July 8th, ist year*
& & & $ $OT more than ten days have
TVT * passed since I wrote to you
from Lyons. I did not men-
tion any new project: I had
J J. J
none ; and now I have left everything
behind, I am in a strange land. . . .
Even at this moment I am at a loss
to judge of a resolution which has swept
away all former plans,3 which carries
me abruptly into new surroundings,
which destines me for things I had not
anticipated, the developments and con-
sequences of which I cannot even fore-
4 OBERMANN
see. ... A narrow and timorous pru-
dence in those on whom fate made me
dependent, wasted my early years, and
has fettered my entire life. Wisdom
treads between diffidence and temerity ;
the path is difficult. We must follow
her in ways that she can see ; but in
ways unknown, instinct is our only
guide. Though instinct may be more
dangerous than prudence, it accom-
plishes greater things. It is our ruin, or
our salvation ; its temerity becomes at
times our only refuge, and its mission
may be to redress the wrongs that pru-
dence has wrought.
The yoke must either have weighed
me down irrevocably or have been
shaken off without heed ; the alterna-
tive seemed inevitable. You well know
what a wretched chain was being
forged. I was to do what it was impos-
sible for me to do well. I was to fill a
position for its emoluments, use the
faculties of my being for what essen-
OBERMANN 5
tially shocked its nature. Was it my
duty to yield in momentary compliance,
to deceive a parent into thinking that
I was undertaking for my entire life
what I should have begun merely with
the longing that it might end, and thus
live in a false position, in a state of con-
tinual antipathy ? May he recognize
my powerlessness to satisfy him, may he
forgive me ! May he come to feel . . .
that a profession cannot be looked upon
as honest, simply because one can earn
an income of thirty or forty thousand
francs without theft ; and that I could
not sacrifice my manhood, in order to
become a man of affairs.
I do not seek to persuade you, I re-
call facts ; you are the judge. A friend
must judge without too great leniency,
as you have said. . . .
I searched my heart ; I passed rapidly
in review all my surroundings. From
men, I strove to learn whether they felt
as I did ; from things, whether they
6 OBERMANN
were in accord with my inclinations ;
and I saw that I was out of harmony
with society, that my needs were not
in touch with its handiwork. I checked
myself with terror, feeling that I was
on the verge of giving up my life to in-
tolerable weariness, to a loathing with-
out aim and without end. To my heart
I offered in succession all things sought
by men in the various professions which
they elect. I even strove to adorn,
through the magic of the imagination,
those complex aims which they hold
up to their passions, and the chimeric
end to which they devote their years.
I attempted it, but in vain. Why is
the earth thus disenchanted to my eyes ?
It is not satiety that I feel ; on all sides
I find a void.
On that day when, for the first time,
I felt the nothingness which surrounds
me, on that day which changed the
course of my life, had the pages of my
destiny lain in my hands to be forever
OBERMANN 7
opened or closed, with what indiffer-
ence would I have renounced the empty
succession of hours, so long yet so fleet-
ing, which such bitterness has sullied,
and which no true joy can console !
You know that it is my misfortune not
to have the capacity to be young ; the
long weariness of my early life has
apparently destroyed the seductions of
youth. Its blooming exterior does not
deceive me ; my half-closed eyes are
never dazzled ; too steady, they are not
taken by surprise.
That day of irresolution was at least
a day of light ; it made me see things
within, which before had not been
clear. Plunged in the deepest perplex-
ity of my life, I had for the first time
a full consciousness of my being. Pur-
sued even to the melancholy calm of
my usual apathy, forced to be some-
thing, I was at last myself; and in these
emotions, hitherto unfelt, I found an
energy, at first constrained and painful,
8 OBERMANN
but the fullness of which grew to be a
repose that was new to me. Out of this
condition, so unexpected and so full of
peace, my determining thought took
shape ; and I saw, as I believed, the
reason for what we observe every day,
that the actual differences in the lot of
man are not the principal cause of his
happiness or his misery.
The true life of man is within him-
self; what he absorbs from the out-
side world is merely accidental and
subordinate. Things influence him far
more through the situation in which
they find him than through their own
nature. Were he to be continually
moulded by them throughout the
whole course of his life, he might be-
come their creature. But in this ever-
moving sequence, he alone subsists,
though altered, while external objects
related to him are wholly changed ;
thus, each of their impressions upon
him depends far more, for his happi-
OBERMANN 9
ness or his misery, upon the condition
in which they find him, than upon the
sensation they produce or the accidental
change in him they cause. Thus, in
each separate moment of his life, to be
what he ought to be, is of the highest
importance to man.
# # #
As soon as man reflects, as soon as he
is not carried away by his first impulse,
and by the unconscious laws of instinct,
all morality becomes, in a sense, a mat-
ter of calculation, and prudence lies in
the estimate of the more or the less.
• • •
Independent of the world, and in the
silence of the passions, we can study
ourselves. I shall choose a retreat in the
calm of those heights which even in
childhood left an impression on my
mind.
io O B E R M AN N
LETTER II
Lausanne ', July ythy 1st year.
YOU have not seen this land, neither
can you picture it to yourself;
the imagination is powerless to draw,
in their true lines, the grand effects of
nature. Had I felt less deeply the
grandeur and harmony of the scene
as a whole, had not the purity of
the atmosphere added a quality beyond
the power of words to express, were I
different from what I am. I should
strive to picture to you these snow-clad
and resplendent heights ; these valleys
flooded with mist ; the steep, black
cliffs of Savoy ; the hills of La Vaux
and the Jorat, too verdant, perhaps, but
crowned by the Alps of Gruyeres and
Ormont ; and the wide waters of Lake
Leman, the sweep of its waves, and its
measured peace. Perhaps the secret
OBERMANN n
emotions of my heart added to the
magic of these scenes ; perhaps no man,
at sight of them, has felt all that I have
felt. . . .
I should be loath to believe that a
man whose heart has been wounded by
familiarity with sorrow, has not, by his
very suffering, been given the power
to enjoy delights unknown to the
happy — joys that are broader and more
lasting than theirs, and of a nature to
sustain old age itself. As for myself,
I realized at that moment, when no-
thing was wanting but another heart
to feel as I felt, that a single hour of
one's life may be worth a whole year
of existence, that everything is relative
within us and without us, and that our
troubles come chiefly from our being
out of place in the social order. . . .
I was under the pines of the Jorat ;
the evening was beautiful, the woods
silent, the air calm, the sunset misty,
but cloudless. Everything seemed sta-
12 OBERMANN
tionary, illumined, motionless ; then,
suddenly, as I raised my eyes, long fixed
upon the moss where I was sitting,
there came to me an impressive illusion,
which the mood of reverie that I was
in helped to prolong. The steep slope
that reached down to the lake was hid-
den by the knoll on which I sat ; and
the surface of the lake, seeming to rise
as it receded into distance, lifted the
opposite shore into the air. The Alps
of Savoy were half veiled by the mist,
and all were blended and merged into
the same shades. The light of the sun-
set and the haze of the air in the depths
of the Valais uplifted the mountains
and divided them from the earth, by
making their lower slopes invisible ;
and their colossal bodies, without form,
without color, sombre and snowy, illu-
mined yet shadowy, had the appearance
of a mass of storm clouds suspended in
space : there was no earth save that
which held me above the void, alone
in immensity.
OBERMANN 13
That moment was worthy of the
first day in a new life. . . .
LETTER III
Cully* July nth, 1st year.
THE storm has passed, the even-
. ing is beautiful. My windows
open on the lake ; the white spray of
the waves is tossed, now and again, into
my room; it has even bathed the roof.
The wind blows from the southwest,
and it is at this point that the waves
sweep to their full height and strength.
This movement and these measured
sounds give to the soul a powerful im-
petus. Were it my lot to go beyond
the bounds of ordinary life, were it
given me to truly live, yet were I
weighed down with discouragement, I
should wish to stand alone for a little
while on the shores of a wave-tossed
lake ; I believe there would then be
14 OBERMANN
no deeds so great but that I could
accomplish them. . . .
I write you even as I should talk, as
one talks to one's self. At times there
is nothing to say, yet one still feels the
need of talking ; that is often the mo-
ment when one rambles on with the
greatest ease. The only kind of walk
that gives real pleasure is when we
wander without aim, solely for the love
of walking, looking for something, we
know not what ; when the air is still,
the sky gray, and we are free from
care, indifferent to time, and plunge at
random through the gullies and into the
woods of an unknown region ; when
we talk of mushrooms, of roes, of the
red leaves as they begin to fall ; when
I say to you : " This is a spot like the
one where my father lingered, ten years
ago, to play at quoits with me, and
where he left his hanger, which, the
next day, could not be found;" when
you say to me : " The place where we
OBERMANN 15
have just crossed the stream would
have delighted my father. During the
last days of his life he was frequently
driven a long distance from the city to
a dense wood, where there were rocks
and water ; then he left the carriage,
and sometimes alone, sometimes with
me, he sat on one of the rocks ; we
read together the Vies des Plres du de-
sert 5 He would say to me : ' If in my
youth I had entered a monastery, in
answer to the call of God, I should not
have suffered all the affliction that has
fallen to my lot in the world, I should
not to-day be so infirm and so broken ;
but I should have had no son, and, in
dying, I should leave nothing upon the
earth.' " . . . And now he is no longer
here ! They are not here ! . . .
When we used to lose ourselves in
the woods of the Forez, we wandered
freely and at random. A strange so-
lemnity would hover over the memo-
ries of a time long since passed away,
16 OBERMANN
which seemed to come back to us in the
depths and the majesty of the woods.
How it enlarges the soul to meet with
things beautiful, yet unforeseen ! Those
things which are the province of the
soul ought not, I think, to be fore-
known and ordered ; let us leave it to
the mind to study by rule, and to bring
symmetry into its work. But the heart
does not work, and if you call upon it
to produce, it will produce nothing ;
cultivation makes it sterile.
LETTER IV
ly July igth, 1st year.
MY window was open at night.
Towards four o'clock I was
awakened by the splendor of the dawn,
and the scent of the new-mown hay,
cut in the fresh night air, by the light
of the moon. I looked for an ordinary
view ; I was given a moment of won-
OBERMANN 17
der. The waters, which had already
risen by the melting of the Jura snows,
were kept at their full by the rains
of the summer solstice. The plain be-
tween the lake6 and the Thiele7 was
flooded in parts ; the highest levels
formed lonely pastures, rising out of
the midst of the fields of water ruffled
by the fresh winds of the morning.
The waves of the lake were driven
afar by the wind, over the half-sub-
merged shore. At that moment some
cows and goats, and the goatherd play-
ing a wild melody on his horn, passed
over a dry strip of land between the
flooded plain and the Thiele. A few
stones, thrown here and there into the
deepest places, supported and length-
ened out this natural causeway ; the
pasture, to which these docile creatures
were on their way, was out of sight ;
and to watch their slow and uncertain
gait, it seemed as though they would
step into the lake and be lost. The
i8 OBERMANN
heights of Anet, and the deep forests
of the Jolimont, rose out of the heart
of the waters, like a wild and unin-
habited island. The hilly chain of the
Vuilly bordered the lake on the ho-
rizon. Towards the south, it stretched
its length behind the slopes of Mont-
rnirail ; and beyond all, sixty leagues of
a century's ice gave to the whole coun-
try that inimitable majesty by which
nature with her boldest strokes makes
earth sublime. . . .
In the evening, before the rising of
the moon, I walked beside the green
waters of the Thiele. Feeling inclined
to dream, and finding the air so soft
that I could pass the whole night in
the open, I followed the road to Saint-
Blaise. At the small village of Marin,
I turned aside to the lake at the
south, and descended a steep bank to
the shore, where the waves came to die
on the sands. The air was calm, not a
sail could be seen on the lake. All were
OBERMANN 19
at rest, some in the forgetfulness of toil,
others in the oblivion of sorrow. The
moon rose ; I lingered long. Towards
morning she spread over the earth and
the waters the ineffable melancholy of
her last rays. Nature appears immea-
surably grand when, lost in reverie, one
hears the rippling of the waves upon
the solitary shore, in the calm of a night
still resplendent and illumined by the
setting moon.
Ineffable sensibility, charm and tor-
ment of our fruitless years, profound
realization of a nature everywhere over-
whelming and everywhere inscrutable,
all-absorbing passion, deepened wisdom,
rapturous self-abandonment, — all that
a human soul can experience of deep de-
sire and world-weariness, — I felt it all,
I lived it all on that memorable night.
I have taken a fatal step towards the
age of decay ; I have consumed ten
years of my life. Happy the simple
man whose heart is always young !
20 OBERMANN
There, in the peace of the night, I
questioned my uncertain destiny, my
restless heart, and that incomprehensi-
ble nature which, containing all things,
seems yet not to hold the object of my
desires. What am I, then ? I asked
myself. What melancholy mixture of
all-embracing affection and of indiffer-
ence towards every aim of actual life ?
Always seeking what I shall never
find, an alien in the midst of nature,
out of place among men, empty af-
fections will alone be my lot ; and
whether I live unto myself, or whether
I live unto men, I shall suffer either
oppression from without or restraint
from within — nothing but the perpet-
ual torment of a life forever repressed
and forever miserable. . . .
It is true I love only nature ; but for
this very reason, while I love myself, I
do not love myself exclusively, and
other men are still the part of nature
that I love the best. I feel a compel-
OBERMANN 21
ling power which binds me to every
loving influence ; my heart, full of it-
self, of humanity, and of the primitive
harmony of beings, has never known
any personal or contentious passion. I
love myself, but as a part of nature, in
the order of things which she ordains,
in companionship with men whom she
chooses, whom she has made, and in
harmony with the totality of things.
Nothing of what exists, has, in truth,
won the fullness of my love, and a void
beyond utterance forever fills my trou-
bled soul. But all that I love might ex-
ist, the whole earth might be according
to my heart, without a single change in
nature, or in man himself, excepting
the ephemeral accidents of the social
order. . . .
I love existing things ; I love them
as they are. I neither desire, nor seek,
nor imagine anything outside of nature.
My thoughts, so far from wandering
towards strange or complex aims, so far
22 OBERMANN
from being attracted to remote or un-
usual things, and I, so far from being
indifferent to what is around me, to
what nature daily produces, or aspiring
to what is denied me, to things foreign
and unfamiliar, to improbable circum-
stances, and to a romantic destiny, —
I desire, I ask of nature and of man, I
claim for the whole span of my life,
only those things which belong inevi-
tably to nature, which all men must
possess, which alone can employ our
days and fill our hearts, and which form
the groundwork of life.
While I do not crave what is com-
plex and uncommon, neither do I long
for what is novel, varied, or profuse.
What has once pleased me, will always
please me ; what has before satisfied
me, will satisfy me always.8 A day like
unto the day that once was happy, is
still a happy day for me. . . .
The love of power or of riches is
almost as foreign to my nature as envy,
OBERMANN 23
hatred, or revenge. Nothing should
alienate me from other men. I am
the rival of none ; I can no more envy
than hate them; I should refuse what
impassions them, I should decline to
triumph over them, and I do not even
desire to surpass them in virtue. I rely
upon my natural goodness. Happy in
that I need make no effort not to do
wrong, I shall not torment myself
without cause ; and provided I am an
honest man, I shall not pretend to be
virtuous.
Virtue is a high merit, but I rejoice
in that it is not indispensable to me,
and I leave it to other men ; the only
rivalry that might have existed between
us, is thus destroyed. Their virtues are
as ambitious as their passions ; they dis-
play them with ostentation, and what
they strive for is, above all, priority.
I am not, nor shall I ever be, their com-
petitor, even on this point. What do I
lose by the concession of this superior-
24 OBERMANN
ity ? In what they call virtues, the only
ones that are useful are natural, in a
man constituted as I am, and as I would
willingly believe all men originally are ;
the others, complex, austere, arrogant,
and imposing, do not take their spring
directly from man's nature. This is
why I consider them either false or
empty, and am not anxious to obtain
credit for them, — a credit which is in
any case rather uncertain. . . .
Whatever happens, I must remain
always the same, and always myself;
not precisely what I am in the midst
of ways antagonistic to my nature, but
what I feel myself to be, what I desire
to be, what I am in that internal life,
which is the only refuge of my sorrow-
ful affections.
I shall examine myself, I shall study
myself, I shall sound this heart, which
is naturally true and loving, but which
much weariness may have already dis-
couraged. I shall decide what I am, or
OBERMANN 25
rather what I ought to be ; and having
once established this type, I shall strive
to preserve it throughout my life, con-
vinced that whatever is natural to me
is neither dangerous nor to be con-
demned, firm in the belief that one is
never right unless following one's own
nature,9 and fully determined to repress
nothing in myself, excepting what
would tend to alter my original estate.
I have known the enthusiasm of the
sterner virtues ; in my proud error,
I thought to replace all the motive
powers of social life by this other,
equally illusive, motive power. My
stoic strength braved misfortune, as
well as passions, and I was convinced
that I should be the happiest of men
if I were the most virtuous. The illu-
sion lasted, in its full force, for about a
month ; a single incident swept it away.
Then it was that all the bitterness of a
colorless and fleeting life came to fill
my soul, after it had renounced the last
26 OBERMANN
spell that had beguiled it. Since then
I have made no further pretence of
employing my life ; I seek only to fill
it. I exact, not that it shall be virtuous,
but that it shall never be culpable.
And how can one aspire even to this,
how attain it ? Where can one find
days that are easy, simple, employed,
uniform ? How escape misfortune ?
This is the limit of my desire. But
what a destiny, when sorrows endure,
and pleasures vanish ! Perchance some
days of peace will be granted to me ;
but never again enchantment, never
intoxication, never a moment of pure
joy ; never! and I am not yet twenty-
one ! and I was born sensitive, ardent !
and I have never tasted the joys of fru-
ition ! and after death . . . Nothing
more in life, nothing in nature. . . .
I have not wept ; the fountain of my
tears is dry. . . .
You who know me, who understand
me, but who, happier and wiser than I,
OBERMANN 27
submit without impatience to the cus-
toms of life, — you realize, in this our
doomed separation, the nature of those
desires which in me can never be satis-
fied. One thing consoles me ; you are
mine ; this feeling will never pass away.
. . . You are the staff on which I love
to lean amid the restlessness that leads
me astray, to which I love to return
after I have tried all things, and have
found myself alone in the world. Could
we live together, were we sufficient
unto each other, I should cease my
wanderings, I should know rest, I
should accomplish something upon the
earth, and my life would begin. But
I must wait, seek, press onward to the
unknown ; and, ignorant of my goal, I
must fly from the present, even as
though the future held for me some
hope.
:
|
I
•* / '<
28 OBERMANN
LETTER V
Saint-Maurice,™ August i8th, 1st year.
AT last I have made up my mind ;
I shall pass the winter here. . . .
I slept at Villeneuve," a melancholy
spot in such a beautiful country. Be-
fore the heat of the day, I wandered
over the wooded slopes of Saint-Try-
phon, and through the unbroken stretch
of orchards which cover the valley as
far as Bex. I walked between the Alps,
which, on each side, rose in two high
mountain-chains ; surrounded by their
snows, I took my way along a level
road in the heart of a fruitful country,
which, in times past, seems to have lain
almost entirely under water.
The valley of the Rhone, from Mar-
tigny to the lake, is almost shut in by
rocky ledges, covered with forests and
with clearings, which form the first
steps of the Dent de Morcles and the Dent
*
I
OBERMANN 29
du Midi, and are divided only by the
bed of the river.12 Towards the north,
these ledges are wooded, here and there,
with chestnut-trees, and near the sum-
mit with fir-trees. In this wild region
is my dwelling, at the foot of the Dent
du Midi, one of the most beautiful of
the Alpine peaks. . . .
At sight of these gorges, fertile and
inhabited, yet still wild, I turned aside
from the road to Italy, which at this
point takes a bend towards the town of
Bex, and pressing on towards the bridge
of the Rhone, I wandered through paths
and across fields undreamed of by our
painters. The bridge,13 the castle, and
the sweep of the Rhone, are grouped,
at this point, into a view of singular
picturesqueness. As for the town,14 its
only remarkable feature is its simplicity.
The site is somewhat melancholy, but
of a sadness that I love. The moun-
tains are beautiful, the valley level ; the
rocks touch the town and seem to
»
3o OBERMANN
cover it ; the muffled rumbling of the
Rhone gives a note of melancholy to
this land, which lies separated, as it
were, from the world, hollowed out
and shut in on all sides. Peopled and
cultivated, it yet seems at moments
touched by the curse — or the beauty
— of the austerity of the deserts, when
black clouds overshadow its sweep
down the mountain sides, darken the
gloomy firs, throng together, are piled
mass upon mass, and then, like a som-
bre dome, hang motionless above ; or
when, on a cloudless day, the sun's burn-
ing rays concentrate upon it, make the
unseen vapors seethe, cause all things
that draw breath beneath the arid sky
to throb with a tormenting heat, and
turn this all too beautiful solitude into
a grievous waste. . . .
I allowed myself to be allured into
staying near Saint-Maurice. ... I wan-
dered at random through the neighbor-
hood, and looked at the most attractive
OBERMANN 31
sites, in search of a chance dwelling.
The water, the depth of the shade, the
solitude of the moors, filled me with
delight. ... I had followed the wind-
ings of field and forest, had crossed
swift streams, when I came upon a
lonely house on the edge of the woods,
standing among the most solitary clear-
ings. A moderately good dwelling, a
wooden barn, a vegetable garden bor-
dered by a wide stream, two springs of
pure water, a few rocks, the sound of
the torrents, the land sloping on every
side, hawthorn hedges, an abundant
vegetation, a broad field stretching out
beneath the scattered beeches and chest-
nut-trees, even to the foot of the moun-
tain-firs, — this is Charrieres. . . .
I want to enjoy Charrieres before
the winter. I want to be there for the
chestnut harvest, and I am determined
not to lose the quiet autumn in its
midst.
In twenty days I shall take posses-
32 OBERMANN
sion of the house, the chestnut grove,
and apart of the meadows and orchards.
To the farmer I leave the rest of the
pastures and fruit, the vegetable garden,
the hemp field, and especially the ara-
ble ground.
The stream winds through my part
of the domain. I have the poorest land,
but the deepest shades and the most
secluded nooks. The moss prevents the
harvesting of the hay ; the close-grow-
ing chestnut-trees give little fruit; there
is no view over the long stretch of the
Rhone valley ; everything is wild and
neglected ; there is even a narrow space
between the rocks which has been left
untouched, and where the trees, leveled
by the wind and crumbling with age,
hold the ooze, and form a kind of dike ;
alders and hazel-trees have taken root,
and made of it an impenetrable maze.
But the stream filters through this mass,
and flows, sparkling with foam, into a
natural pool wondrously limpid. From
OBERMANN 33
there it makes its way between the
rocks; its hurried waves flow over the
moss ; and far below, it slackens its
course, leaves the shadows, and passes
in front of the house, spanned by a
bridge of fir planks.
Wolves, driven down by the depth
of the snows, come, it is said, in winter
time, in search of bones and fragments
of the food which even in pastoral val-
leys is a necessity to man. The fear of
these animals has long kept this dwell-
ing uninhabited. But such a fear is
not what would alarm me. Would that
man might leave me free in this lair of
the wolves !
LETTER VI
Saint -Maurice, August 26th, 1st year.
DO you believe that a man who
has fulfilled his time without
having loved has truly entered into the
34 OBERMANN
mysteries of life, that his heart is known
to him, and that the fullness of his ex-
istence has been revealed to him ? To
me it seems as though he had halted
half way, and had seen only from afar
what the world might have held for
him.
LETTER VII
Saint-Maurice, September jd, 1st year.
1HAVE been to the region of per-
petual ice, on the Dent du Midi.
Before the sun shone upon the valley
I had already reached the bluff over-
looking the town, and was crossing
the partly cultivated stretch of ground
which covers it. I went on by a steep
ascent, through dense forests of fir-
trees, leveled in many places by win-
ters long since passed away : fruitful
decay, vast and confused mass of a veg-
etation that had died and had regermi-
OBERMANN 35
nated from the remains of its former
life. At eight o'clock I had reached
the bare summit which crowns the as-
cent, and which forms the first salient
step in that wondrous pile whose high-
est peak still rose so far beyond me.
Then I dismissed my guide, and put
my own powers to the test. I wanted
that no hireling should intrude upon
this Alpine liberty, that no man of
the plains should come to weaken the
austerity of these savage regions. I felt
my whole being broaden, as it was
left alone among the obstacles and the
dangers of a rugged nature, far from
the artificial trammels and the ingen-
ious oppression of men.
I stood fixed and exultant as I
watched the rapid disappearance of the
only man whom I was likely to see
among these mighty precipices. On
the ground I left watch, money, every-
thing that I had about me, and almost
all my clothing, . . . and holding be-
36 OBERMANN
tween my teeth the branch I had cut
to help me in the descent, I started to
crawl along the ridge of rocks which
connects this minor peak with the prin-
cipal mass. Several times I dragged my-
self between two bottomless chasms.
And in this way I reached the granite
peaks.
My guide had told me that I could
climb no higher, and for some time I
was brought to a standstill. But at last,
by descending a short distance, I found
an easier way, and, climbing with the
audacity of a mountaineer, I reached a
hollow filled with frozen and crusted
snow, which had lain unmelted by the
summer suns. Still I mounted higher ;
but on reaching the foot of the high-
est peak of the Dent, I found I could
not climb to its summit, for its steep
sides were scarcely out of the perpen-
dicular, and it seemed to rise five hun-
dred feet above me.
I had crossed few fields of snow, yet
OBERMANN 37
my unprotected eyes, wearied by its
brilliancy, and parched by the glare
of the noon sun on its frozen surface,
could see but vaguely the surrounding
objects. Besides, many of the peaks
were unknown to me, and I could be
sure of only the most important ones.
Yet I could not mistake the colossal
summit of Mont Blanc, which rose far
above me; that of Velan; one more
distant, but still higher, which I took
to be Mont Rosa ; and, on the opposite
side of the valley, near me but lower
down, the Dent de Morcles, beyond the
chasms. The peak that I could not
climb, shut off what was perhaps the
most striking part of this vast scene.
For, behind it, stretched the long depths
of the Valais, inclosed on each side by
the glaciers of Sanetsch, of Lauterbrun-
nen, and of the Pennine Alps, and end-
ing in the domes of the Saint Gothard
and the Titlis, the snows of the Furca,
and the pyramids of the Schreckhorn
and the Finster-Aar-Horn.
38 OBERMANN
But this view of the mountain-tops
outspread at the feet of man, this view
so grand, so majestic, so far removed
from the monotonous vacuity of the
plains, was still not the object of my
quest in the midst of unfettered nature,
of silent fixity, of unsullied ether. On
the lowlands, natural man is of neces-
sity undergoing continual change by
breathing that social atmosphere, so
dense, stormy, seething, forever trou-
bled by the clamor of the arts, the din
of ostensible pleasures, the cries of hate,
and the endless laments of anxiety and
of sorrow. But on those desert peaks,
where the sky is measureless, and the
air is more stable, and time less fleeting,
and life more permanent, — there, all
nature gives eloquent expression to a
vaster order, a more visible harmony,
an eternal whole. There, man is rein-
stated in his changeful but indestructi-
ble form ; he breathes a free air far from
social emanations ; he exists only for
OBERMANN 39
himself and for the universe ; he lives
a life of reality in the midst of sublime
unity.
This was the feeling that I desired,
that I sought. Uncertain of myself, in
an order of things which has been de-
vised with unwearied pains by ingen-
ious and childish minds, I scaled the
heights to ask of nature why I should
feel ill at ease in their midst. I wished
to know whether my existence was out
of place in the human economy, or
whether the present social order is un-
related to eternal harmony, like some
irregularity or accidental exception in
the progress of the world. At last I
believe I am sure of myself. There are
moments which dispel mistrust, pre-
judice, uncertainties, — when the truth
comes to us with an overruling and un-
alterable conviction. . . .
I cannot give you a true impression
of this new world, or express the per-
manence of the mountains in the Ian-
40 OBERMANN
guage of the plains. The hours seemed
to me both more serene and more pro-
ductive; and, even as though the plan-
ets, amid the universal calm, had been
arrested in their course, I was conscious
that the gradual train of my thoughts,
full of deliberation and of energy, could
in no wise be hastened, yet was press-
ing forward at unusual speed, . . . and
I inferred that the consciousness of
existence is really more inert and more
sterile amid the tumult of human sur-
roundings. I realized that thought,
while less hurried, is more truly active
among the mountains — on their peace-
ful heights — even though visible move-
ments are more gradual. The man of
the valleys consumes without enjoyment
the span of his restless and feverish
days ; he is like unto those ever-moving
insects which waste their efforts in futile
vacillations, while others, equally weak,
but more tranquil, by their straight and
unflagging course, outstrip them in the
race.
OBERMANN 41
The day was hot, the horizon veiled
with haze, the valleys flooded with mist.
The brilliancy of the fields of ice filled
the lower atmosphere with its lumi-
nous reflections; but an undreamed-of
purity seemed to form the essence of
the air I breathed. At that height,
no exhalations from the lowlands, no
effects of light and shade, either dis-
turbed or interrupted the vague and
sombre depth of the skies. Their seem-
ing color was no longer that pale and
luminous blue, the soft canopy of the
plains, the charming and delicate blend
which forms a visible inclosure to
the inhabited earth, and is a rest and
a goal to the eye. In those high re-
gions, the invisible ether allowed the
gaze to lose itself in boundless space ;
in the midst of the splendor of the
sun and of the glaciers, to seek other
worlds and other suns, as under the
vast sky of the night ; and above the
burning atmosphere of the day, to pen-
etrate a nocturnal universe.
42 OBERMANN
Stealthily the mist rose from the
glaciers and was shaped into clouds
at my feet. The snows had lost their
dazzling brightness, and the sky grew
deeper still and full of shadow. A fog
covered the Alps ; here and there a sol-
itary peak rose out of this ocean of
mist ; held in their rugged clefts, lines
of shimmering snow gave the gran-
ite a blacker and a sterner look. The
snow-white dome of Mont Blanc lifted
its imperishable mass above this gray
and moving sea, above these drifts of
fog, which were furrowed by the wind
and piled in towering waves. A black
point appeared in this abyss; it rose
rapidly, and came straight towards me ;
it was the mighty eagle of the Alps;
his wings were wet, his eye fierce ; he
was in search of prey, but at the sight
of man he fled with a sinister cry and
was lost as he plunged into the clouds.
Twenty times the cry reechoed, but
the sounds were short and sharp, like
OBERMANN 43
twenty separate cries in the univer-
sal silence. Then absolute stillness fell
upon all things, as though sound itself
had ceased to exist, and the power of
sound had been effaced from the uni-
verse. Never has silence been known
in the tumultuous valleys ; only on the
icy summits does that stability, that
solemn permanence reign, which no
tongue can express, which the imagi-
nation is powerless to attain. Except
for the memories of the plains, man
could not conceive of any movement
in nature beyond himself; the course
of the planets would be incomprehen-
sible ; even to the changes of the mist,
everything would seem to subsist in the
very act of change. Each actual mo-
ment having the appearance of conti-
nuity,13 man would have the certainty
without ever having the sentiment of
the succession of things ; and the per-
petual mutations of the universe would
be to his mind an impenetrable mystery.
44 OBERMANN
I wish that I could have kept surer
records, not of my general impressions
in that land of silence, for they will
never be forgotten, but of the ideas to
which they gave birth, and of which
scarcely a memory has been left to me.
In the midst of scenes so different, the
imagination recalls with difficulty an
order of thought which seems to be in
disaccord with all the objects of its pre-
sent surroundings. I should have had
to write down what I felt ; but then
my emotions would soon have fallen to
the level of everyday experience. This
solicitude to harvest one's thought for
future use has in it an element of ser-
vility which belongs to the painstaking
efforts of a dependent life.
Not in moments of ardor does one
take heed of other times and other men ;
in those hours one's thoughts are not
born for the sake of artificial conven-
tionalities, of fame, or even for the
good of others. One is more natural,
OBERMANN 45
without even a desire to utilize the pre-
sent moment : no thoughts that come
at one's behest, no reflection, no spirit
of intellectual investigation, no search
for hidden things, no attempt to find
the new and strange. Thought is not
active and ordered, but passive and free:
dreams, and complete abandonment ;
depth without comprehension, great-
ness without enthusiasm, energy with-
out volition ; to muse, not to meditate,
— this is one's attitude. Do not, then,
be surprised if, after an experience in
thought and emotion which will per-
haps never be repeated during my life,
I still have nothing to tell you. You
remember those nature-lovers of the
Dauphine, who expected so much from
Jean-Jacques, and were so bitterly dis-
appointed. They went with him to a
vantage ground well suited to the kin-
dling of a poetic genius ; they waited
for a magnificent burst of eloquence ;
but the author of Julie sat on the
46 OBERMANN
ground, dallied with some blades of
grass, and said not a word.
It may have been five o'clock when
I noticed how the shadows began to
lengthen, and how the cold crept over
me, in the angle, open to the western
sky, where I had long lain upon the
granite rock. It was too treacherous to
walk over those steep crags, and so I
could not keep in motion. The mists
had disappeared, and I saw that the
evening was beautiful even in the val-
leys. . . .
Descending once more to inhabited
earth, I felt that I again took up the
long chain of anxieties and weariness.
I returned at ten o'clock ; the moon
shone upon my window. I heard the
rushing of the Rhone ; there was no
wind ; the city slept. I thought of the
mountains I had left, of Charrieres
which is to be my home, of the lib-
erty which I have claimed as mine.
OBERMANN 47
LETTER VIII
Saint-Maurice, September ifth, 1st year.
I HAVE just returned from a trip
of several days among the moun-
tains. . . . Before retiring, I opened a
letter; it was not, in your handwriting ;
the word haste, written in a conspic-
uous way, rilled me with uneasiness.
Everything is open to suspicion when
one has with difficulty escaped from
former fetters. . . .
I think you will readily suspect what
it was. I was crushed, overwhelmed ;
then I decided to neglect everything,
to rise above everything, to forever
abandon all things that would be a
link to the life I had left behind. But
after many uncertainties, whether rea-
sonable or weak I know not, I thought
it best to sacrifice the present, for the
sake of future rest and security. I sub-
mit, I leave Charrieres.
48 OBERMANN
This morning I could not endure
the thought of so great a change. I
went to Charrieres. ... I stood among
the fields ; it was the last mowing. I
lingered on a rock, to see only the
sky ; it was veiled with haze. I looked
at the chestnut-trees; the leaves were
falling. Then I went to the river, as
though I feared lest that also might be
silent ; but it was still flowing.
Inexplicable necessity of human af-
fairs ! I am going to Lyons ; I shall go
to Paris ; this is my decision. Farewell.
Let us pity the man who finds but lit-
tle, and from whom even that little is
taken away.
LETTER I X
Lyons, October 22d, 1st year.
1LEFT for Meterville two days
after your departure from Lyons,
and spent eighteen days there. . . . The
OBERMANN 49
grounds are not extensive, and the
situation is more restful than striking.
You know the owners, their character,
their ways, their simple friendship, their
winning manners. I arrived at a happy
moment. On the following day the
grapes were to be gathered from a long
trellis, open to the south, and facing the
woods of Armand. At supper-time it
was decided that the grapes, which were
to be made into choice wine, must be
carefully picked with our own hands,
so as to leave the unripe bunches on
the vines to mature.
On the next day, as soon as the
morning mists had lifted, I put a win-
nowing fan on a wheelbarrow, and was
the first to go to the farther end of the
vineyard and begin the harvesting. I
worked almost alone, without trying to
find a quicker method ; I liked this
deliberate way, and saw with regret
that others came, now and then, to
help ; the harvesting lasted, I believe, for
50 OBERMANN
twelve days. My wheelbarrow came
and went through unfrequented paths,
overgrown with wet grass ; I chose the
least level, the most uneven ones, and
thus the days passed by in forgetfulness,
in the heart of the mist, in the midst
of the fruit, under an autumn sun. And
when the evening came, we drank our
tea, with milk warm from the cow, and
smiled at the men who go in search of
pleasures ; we walked beside the old
yoke-elms, and we lay down content.
I have seen the vanities of life, and
in my heart I carry the glowing germ
of the strongest passions. There, too,
I bear the consciousness of great social
issues, and of philosophic ideas. I have
read Marcus Aurelius, and was not sur-
prised ; I can conceive of the sterner
virtues, and even of monastic heroism.
All this can stir my soul, but cannot
fill it. My wheelbarrow, which I load
with fruit and push gently along, is a
firmer support. The hours move peace-
OBERMANN 51
fully on, and this slow and useful mo-
tion, this measured walk, seem better
to represent the needs of our daily life.
LETTER XI
Paris, June 2fthy 2d year.
1 OFTEN spend a couple of hours
at the library, not exactly to gain
knowledge, for that desire has mate-
rially cooled of late, but because, not
knowing how to fill those hours which
still flow irrevocably on, I find them
less intolerable when employed outside
than when consumed in the house. Oc-
cupations that are somewhat regulated
suit me in my discouragement ; too
much liberty would leave me in indo-
lence. I feel more at rest among peo-
ple as silent as myself than when I am
alone in the midst of a seething crowd.
I love those long halls, some empty,
others filled with studious men, the an-
52 OBERMANN
cient and cold repository of all human
vanities and efforts. . . .
The halls surround a long, quiet
court, overgrown with grass, where
two or three statues stand, a few ruins,
and a basin of green water, which looks
to be as old as the monuments. I rarely
leave without lingering for a time in
this silent inclosure. I love to dream as
I walk upon these ancient pavements,
cut from the quarries so that their hard
and barren surface might be laid be-
neath the feet of man. But time and
neglect have, in a way, buried them
anew under the ground, by covering
them with a fresh layer of earth, and
adding the green grass and the hues
that were its portion of old. I find
these pavements more eloquent, at
times, than the books that have ab-
sorbed me.
Yesterday, when I was consulting
the Encyclopedic, I opened the volume
at a chance page, and do not even re-
OBERMANN 53
member now the title of the article ;
but it spoke of a man, who, weary
of tumult and affliction, plunged into
complete solitude by following out one
of those resolutions which conquer cir-
cumstances and lead us to congratulate
ourselves forever after on having had so
much strength of will. The idea of
this independent life did not recall to
my imagination either the free soli-
tudes of the Ismaus, or the happy
isles of the Pacific, or the nearer Alps
already so deeply regretted. But a clear
memory pictured vividly to my mind,
with a sense of wonder and inspiration,
the barren rocks and the woods of Fon-
tainebleau. . . .
You know that when I was still
young, I lived for several years in Paris.
My parents, in spite of their love for
the city, spent, at different times, the
month of September with friends in
the country. One year it was at Fon-
tainebleau, and twice again we stayed
54 OBERMANN
with these same friends, who, at that
time, lived at the foot of the forest,
towards the river. I was, I believe,
fourteen, fifteen, and seventeen years
of age, when I saw Fontainebleau. Af-
ter a restricted, inactive, and tedious
childhood, I felt as a man in some
ways, but was still a child in many
others. Awkward and timid, anticipat-
ing all things, it may be, but knowing
nothing, an alien amid my surroundings,
my nature was characterized by restless-
ness and discontent. The first time I
went to the forest I was not alone ; I
cannot clearly recall my impressions,
and merely know that that spot was
dearer to me than any other, and was
the only one to which I longed to re-
turn.
The following year I wandered
eagerly through these solitudes ; I pur-
posely went astray, and was overjoyed
when I had completely lost my way,
and could not find any frequented path.
OBERMANN 55
When I came to the edge of the forest,
I saw with regret the wide expanse of
bare plains, and the distant steeples.
Then I turned back and plunged into
the densest part of the woods, and when
I reached a clearing, shut in on all
sides, where nothing could be seen but
stretches of sand and of juniper- trees,
there came to me a sense of peace, of
liberty, of savage joy, the sway of nature
first felt in careless youth. Yet I was
not gay ; almost happy, I felt only the
exuberance of well-being. But enjoy-
ment grew wearisome, and a feeling of
sadness crept over me as I turned my
steps homeward.
Often I was in the forest before the
rising of the sun. I climbed the hills
still deep in shadow ; I was all wet
from the dew-covered underbrush ; and
when the sun shone out I still longed
for that mystic light, precursor of the
dawn. I loved the deep gullies, the dark
valleys, the dense woods ; I loved the
56 OBERMANN
hills covered with heather; I loved the
fallen boulders and the rugged rocks,16
and, still better, I loved the moving
sands, their barren wastes untrodden by
the foot of man, but furrowed here and
there by the restless tracks of the roe
or the fleeing hare. When I saw a
squirrel, when I startled a deer, I paused,
I felt more content, and for a moment
I ceased my wanderings. It was then
that I noticed the birch, a lonely tree
which even in those days rilled me with
sadness, and which, since that time, I
have never seen without a sense of
pleasure. I love the birch; I love that
smooth, white, curling bark ; that wild
trunk ; those drooping branches ; the
flutter of the leaves, and all that aban-
donment, simplicity of nature, attitude
of the desert.
Wasted hours, never to be forgotten !
Vain illusions of a responsive and im-
pressionable nature ! How great is man
in his inexperience ; how productive
OBERMANN 57
would he be, if the cold glance of his
fellow, the sterile breath of injustice,
came not to wither his heart ! I had
need of happiness. I was born to suf-
fer. You know those sombre days, fore-
runners of the frost, when even the
dawn, as it gathers the mist, heralds
the light by touching the cloud-mass
with a sinister glow of fiery color.
That gloomy veil, those sudden gales,
those pale gleams, that whistling of the
wind through the trees as they bend
and tremble, those endless wails like fu-
neral lamentations, — such is the morn-
ing of life ; at noon, colder and more
enduring gales ; at eventide, denser
gloom, and the day of man is finished.
That specious and perpetual illusion,
which is born with the heart of man,
and would seem to have a life as en-
during as his own, was rekindled in
me one day ; I went so far as to think
that my longings would be fulfilled.
But this sudden and all too impetuous
58 OBERMANN
fire burned itself out in empty space,
and was quenched ere it had shed
abroad one ray of light. Even as in the
season of storms a sudden lightning-
streak will gleam in the cloud - dark
night, to alarm all living creatures.
It was in March ; I was at Lu — .
There were violets at the foot of the
thickets, and lilacs in a little meadow,
springlike and peaceful, open to the
southern sun. The house stood high
above. A terraced garden hid the win-
dows from sight. Below the meadow,
steep and rugged rocks formed wall
upon wall ; at the foot, a wide torrent,
and beyond, other ledges covered with
fields, with hedges, and with firs !
Across all this stretched the ancient
walls of the city ; an owl had made his
home among the ruined towers. In
the evening, the moon shone, distant
horns gave answering calls ; and the
voice that I shall never hear again ! . . .
All this deceived me. My life has, be-
OBERMANN 59
fore now, held but this solitary mistake.
Why then this memory of Fontaine-
bleau, and not that of Lu — ?
LETTER XII
July 28th, 2d year.
AT last I feel as though I were in
the desert. Here, there are wide
tracts of land without a trace of man.
I have escaped, for a season, from those
restless cares which consume our years,
mingle our life with the darkness that
goes before, and the darkness that fol-
lows after, and grant it no larger boon
than to be a less tranquil void. . . .
Can you understand the joy I feel
when my foot sinks into the moving
and burning sands, when I walk with
difficulty, and there is no water, no
freshness, no shade ? I see a mute and
barren stretch of land ; bare, decayed,
and shattered rocks ; and the forces
60 OBERMANN
of nature laid under subjection to the
forces of time. Is it not like unto a
sense of peace that falls upon me,
when I find, in the outer world, beneath
a burning sky, obstacles and excesses
other than those of my own heart ?
I do not care to know where I am ;
on the contrary, I go astray whenever
I can. Often I walk in a straight line,
without following any path. I strive
not to keep any trace of my way, and
not to grow too familiar with the for-
est, so as always to have something
new to find. There is one path that I
love to follow ; it winds in a circle,
keeping to the line of the forest, and
leads neither to the plains nor to the
city ; it goes by no wonted course ; it
is neither in the valleys nor on the
heights ; it seems to have no end ; it
passes through everything, it reaches
nothing ; I think I shall tread this path
all my life. ....
In former days, when I wandered
6i
through these woods, I saw, in a dense
thicket, two roes fleeing from a wolf,
who was close upon them. I felt sure
he would capture them, and followed,
to be in at the struggle, and to help
them if I could. They sprang from
the cover of the woods into a clear-
ing filled with rocks and heather ; but
when I reached the spot they were out
of sight. Then I scrambled down into
the very depths of the rough and hol-
low moor, from which large quantities
of sandstone had been quarried for the
street pavements ; but I found nothing.
On my way back to the forest by a dif-
ferent path, I came upon a dog, who
stood gazing at me in silence until I
started to move on. Then he barked,
and I saw that I had almost stepped
upon the threshold of the dwelling
over which he was watching. It was
a sort of cave, inclosed partly by a nat-
ural wall of rock, and partly by piles of
stones, branches of juniper, and heaps
62 OBERMANN
of heather and moss. A workman, who
for more than thirty years had cut stone
in the neighboring quarries, having
neither family nor goods, had retired
to this spot so as to be released from
forced labor in his last days, and to
escape the workhouse and contempt.
Near his rock-dwelling, in a barren
piece of ground, was a garden plot;
and together they lived, he, his dog, and
his cat, on bread, water, and liberty.17
" I have worked much, and have had
nothing," he said to me ; " but at last
I am at rest, and soon I shall die." It
was the story of humanity, told me by
this uncouth man. . . .
You may now understand the power
of the memory that came to me so
unexpectedly at the library. This sud-
den thought opened up to me the full
consciousness of a real life, a wise sim-
plicity, the freedom of man amid a
nature of which he is the master.
Not that I consider as such the life
OBERMANN 63
that I lead here, nor think that in the
midst of my rocks, surrounded by the
wretched plains, I am the man of na-
ture. . . . But, since I am condemned
ever to wait for life, I strive to vege-
tate alone and in solitude. . . .
May I once again, beneath the au-
tumn sky, in the last of the beautiful
days that are filled with the mystery of
the mist, seated by the side of the stream
that carries the yellowed leaf upon its
current, — may I listen to the deep and
simple notes of an artless melody. May
I one day, as I climb the Grimsel or the
Titlis, alone with the man of the moun-
tains, listen, while lying near the snows
upon the close-cut grass, to the famil-
iar and romantic sounds of the cows of
Unterwalden and of Hasli ; and once
before I die, may I there say to a man
who can understand me : Had we but
lived !
64 OBERMANN
LETTER XI I I
Fontainebleau, July 3 1st, 2d year.
WHEN an irresistible feeling
carries us far beyond the
things that are ours, and fills us first
with rapture, then with regret, giving us
a vision of blessings which are beyond
our reach, this deep and fleeting sense
is but the inner proof of the superiority
of our faculties over our destiny. And
for this very reason it lingers but for a
while, and is soon changed to regret ;
it is enchanting, then heartrending.
Dejection follows every immoderate
impulse. We suffer for not being what
we might be ; but were we to find our-
selves in that order of things for which
we long, we should no longer have
either that excess of desire or that
redundance of faculties ; we should no
longer enjoy the delight of being above
OBERMANN 65
our destiny, greater than our environ-
ment, more productive than we have
need to be. Were we to be in posses-
sion of those delights which our im-
agination had so ardently pictured, we
should be found cold, often dreamy,
indifferent, even wearied ; because we
cannot produce beyond our possibil-
ities ; because we should then feel the
irresistible limits of our human nature,
and, in employing our faculties on the
things of actual life, they would no
longer be at our service to bear us be-
yond, into the imaginary region of the
ideal brought into subjection to the
sovereignty of actual man.
But why should these things be
purely ideal ? This is what I cannot
understand. Why does the non-existent
seem more in accord with man's nature
than what exists ? Actual life is also
like a dream ; it has no whole, no
continuity, no end ; it has elements
that are positive and settled ; it has
66 OBERMANN
others that are nought but chance and
dissonance, that pass like shadows, and
hold nothing but deceptive illusions.
Thus, in sleep, we think of things true
and connected, and of things strange,
disconnected, and chimeric, all united
by some indefinable link. The same
medley forms the dreams of the night
and the sentiments of the day. It has
been said, by the wisdom of the an-
cients, that the moment of awakening
will come at last.
LETTER XIV
Fontainebleau, August Jth, 2d year.
MR. W , whom you know,
said recently: "When I take
my cup of coffee, I arrange the world
to my liking." I, too, indulge in this
kind of dream ; and when my path lies
through the heather, between the dew-
covered junipers, I find myself pictur-
OBERMANN 67
ing the lot of happy men. I fully be-
lieve that men might be happy. It is
not my wish to create another species,
or a new earth ; it is not my desire to
make a widespread reform. That kind
of hypothesis leads to nothing, you de-
clare, because it is not based on actual
life. Then let us take what necessarily
exists; let us take it as it is, arranging
merely those things that are accidental.
I have no longing for new or visionary
species ; my materials lie within my
reach, and with them I form my plan
after my own ideal.
I want two things : a settled climate,
and sincere men. If I know when
the rain will overflow the rivers, when
the sun will scorch my plants, when the
hurricane will shake my cottage, it is
the part of my industry to battle with
the forces of nature that are arrayed
against my needs. But when I am
ignorant of the coming event, when
misfortune crushes me while I am still
68 OBERMANN
unwarned of danger, when prudence
may be my ruin, and the interests of
others confided to my care forbid un-
concern and even a sense of security, is
not my life, of necessity, both restless
and sorrowful ? Is it not inevitable that
inaction follows in the train of forced
labor, and that I should consume my
days, as Voltaire has so well said, in the
convulsions of unrest or in the lethargy
of weariness ?
If almost all men are deceitful, if
the duplicity of some forces others at
least into the refuge of reserve, does
it not follow that to the inevitable
wrongs against their fellows, commit-
ted by some men in their own interests,
is added a far larger share of useless
wrongs ? Does it not follow that men
injure one another without intent, that
each one is watchful and guarded, that
enemies are inventive, and friends are
prudent? Is it not inevitable that an
honest man should fall in public esti-
OBERMANN 69
mation by an indiscreet remark or a
false judgment; that an enmity born of
a baseless suspicion should grow to be
mortal; that those who would have
wished to do well are discouraged ; that
false principles are established ; that
craftiness is of more use than wisdom,
valor, or magnanimity ; that children
reproach their father for not having
been a trickster, and that states perish
for not having committed a crime ? In
this state of endless uncertainty, I ask
what becomes of morality ; and in the
uncertainty of things, what becomes of
security ; and without security, with-
out morality, I ask if happiness is not
a child's dream ? . „ .
A settled climate, and men sincere,
unmistakably sincere, is all I require.
I am happy if I am sure of things. I
leave to the heavens its storms and its
thunderbolts ; to the earth, its mire
and its dryness ; to the soil, its steril-
ity ; to our bodies, their weakness, their
7o OBERMANN
degeneration; to men, their differences
and incompatibilities, their faithless-
ness, their errors, their vices even,
and their necessary egoism ; to time, its
slowness and irrevocableness. The city
of my dreams is happy, if life is or-
dered, and thought undisguised. The
only added element it requires is a
good government ; and this cannot fail
her, if thought is unconcealed.
LETTER XV
Fontainebleau, August yth, 2d year.
THE day was at its close ; there
was no moon ; there was no stir;
the sky was calm, the trees motionless.
A few insects under the grass, a solitary
bird singing, far away, in the warmth
of the evening. I lingered long, at rest
upon the ground; my mind seemed rilled
with indistinct ideas. My thoughts
wandered over the earth and the
OBERMANN 71
centuries ; I shuddered at the work of
man. I came back to myself, and saw
myself in this chaos; I saw my life
lost in its depths ; I foresaw the future
ages of the world. Rocks of the Righi !
had your chasms been there !
Already the night was gloomy.
Slowly I left the spot ; I wandered at
random, I was filled with weariness. I
had need of tears, but could only groan.
The early days have passed away ; I feel
the torments of youth, but no longer
have its consolations. My heart, still
wasted by the fire of an immature and
profitless age, is withered and parched
as though it had reached the exhaustion
of the age that has outlived passion.
My life is dead, but I am not calm.
Some men enjoy their sufferings, but
for me all things have passed away ; I
have neither joy, nor hope, nor rest ;
nothing is left to me, not even tears.
72 OBERMANN
LETTER XVI
Fontainebleau, August I2th, 2d year.
WHAT noble sentiments ! What
memories ! What quiet ma-
jesty in a night soft, calm, luminous !
What grandeur ! But the soul is over-
whelmed with doubt. It sees that the
feelings aroused by sentient things lead
it into error ; that truth exists, but in
the far distance. Nature seems incom-
prehensible at sight of those mighty
planets in the changeless sky.
Such permanence is bewildering ; it
is to man a fearful eternity. All things
pass away ; man passes away, but the
worlds do not pass ! Thought is lost
in a gulf between the changes of the
earth and the immutability of the
heavens.
OBERMANN 73
LETTER XVII
FontainebleaUy August i^.thy 2d year.
1GO to the woods before the com-
ing of the sun ; I see it rise in a
cloudless sky ; I walk in the dew-cov-
ered brakes, in the midst of the bram-
bles, among the hinds, under the
birches of Mont Chauvet. A sense of
the happiness that might have been
takes full possession of me, drives me
onward, and overpowers me. I climb,
I descend, I press on like a man longing
for joy ; then a sigh, discontent, and a
whole day of wretchedness.
74 OBERMANN
LETTER XVIII
Fontainebleau, August ifth, 2d year.
EVEN here I love only the even-
ing. The dawn delights me for
a moment ; it seems as though I should
feel its beauty, but the day which is to
follow in its train must be so long ! . . .
Here, nothing crushes me, nothing
satisfies me. I even believe that my
weariness is on the increase ; it is be-
cause I do not suffer enough. Am I,
then, happier ? Ah, no ; suffering and
unhappiness are not the same ; neither
are enjoyment and happiness.
My lot is easy, but my life is sad. I
am in the best of surroundings : free,
tranquil, well, without cares, indiffer-
ent towards the future, from which I
expect nothing, and drifting away
without regret from the past, which
has brought me no joy. But I am filled
OBERMANN 75
with an unrest that will never leave
me ; it is a craving I do not compre-
hend, which overrules me, absorbs me,
lifts me above the things that perish.
. . . You are mistaken, and I too was
once mistaken ; it is not the desire for
love. A great distance lies between the
void that fills my heart and the love
that I have so deeply desired ; but the
infinite stretches between what I am
and what I crave to be. Love is vast,
but it is not the infinite. I do not desire
enjoyment ; I long for hope, I crave
knowledge ! I need endless illusions,
which shall ever lure me onwards, and
ever deceive me. What do I care for
things that will cease to be ? The hour
that will come in sixty years is near
me now. I have no liking for what
is prearranged, for what approaches,
arrives, and is then no more. I desire
a good, a dream, a hope, that shall be
ever before me, beyond me, greater
even than my expectation, greater than
76 OBERMANN
what passes away. I should like to be
pure intelligence, and I wish that the
eternal order of the world. . . . And
thirty years ago the order was, and I
was not!
LETTER XIX
Fontainebleau, August i8th, 2d year.
THERE are moments when I am
filled with hope and a sense of
liberty ; time and things pass before
me with majestic harmony, and I feel
happy, as though happiness were pos-
sible to me. I have surprised myself re-
turning to my early years ; once more
I have found in the rose the beauty
of delight, and its celestial eloquence.
Happy ! I ? And yet I am, and happy
to overflowing, like one who reawak-
ens from the terrors of a dream to a
life of peace and liberty ; like one who
emerges from the filth of a dungeon,
OBERMANN 77
and, after ten years, looks once again
upon the serenity of the sky; happy
like the man who loves the woman he
has saved from death ! But the mo-
ment passes ; a cloud drifts across the
sun and shuts out its inspiring light;
the birds are hushed ; the growing dark-
ness drives away both my dream and
my joy. . . .
LETTER XX
Fontainebleau, August 2fth, 2d year.
HOW few are the needs of the
individual who desires only to
exist, and how many are those of the
man who wishes to live happily and
usefully. If a man were strong enough
to renounce joy, and realize that it is
beyond his reach, he would be far hap-
pier ; but must one live forever alone ?
Peace itself is a sad blessing when there
is no hope of sharing it.
78 OBERMANN
I know that there are many who care
for nothing more lasting than the good
of the moment ; and that others know
how to limit themselves to a manner of
life without order and devoid of taste.
. . . Such a life is called a simple life.
I call it an unfortunate life, if it is
temporary ; a life of misery, if it is ne-
cessary and enduring ; but if it is vol-
untary, if it is not distasteful, if it is
the accepted life of the future, then I
call it a life worthy of ridicule.
Contempt of riches is a beautiful
sentiment when expressed in books ;
but one who has a family and no money
must be either callous, or endowed
with resolute strength; and I question
whether a man of high character would
submit to such a life. One endures
whatever is accidental ; but to forever
bow one's will before misery is to adopt
misery. Are such stoics wanting, per-
haps, in that sense of propriety which
teaches man that a life of this kind
OBERMANN 79
is unworthy of his nature ? Their sim-
plicity, without order, without delicacy,
without shame, approaches nearer, it
seems to me, to the gross penitence of
a fakir than to the strength and indif-
ference of a philosopher.
There is a propriety, a care, a har-
mony, a completeness, even in simpli-
city. . . .
LETTER XXI
Fontainebleau, September fsf, 2d year.
THE days are beautiful, and I am
filled with profound peace. In
times past, I should have enjoyed with
keener zest this full liberty, this relin-
quishment of all business, of all pro-
jects, this complete indifference to
events.
I begin to feel that I am advancing
in life. Those exquisite impressions,
those sudden emotions which stirred
8o OBERMANN
me once so deeply, and carried me so
far beyond this world of sadness, are
now all changed and weakened. That
longing, awakened in me by the feel-
ing for every beauty which exists in the
natural world, that hope so uncertain
and so full of charm, that celestial fire
which dazzles and consumes the heart
of youth, that all-embracing rapture
which sheds a light over the vast illu-
sion— all these have passed away.
You who know the limitless cravings
of my nature tell me what I shall do
with my life, when I shall have lost
those moments of illusion which shone
in the darkness, like tempest-gleams on
a stormy night ! They made life more
sombre, it is true ; but they were an
earnest that it might change, and that
the light still burned. . . .
I was far different in those days
when it was possible for me to love.
I had been romantic in my childhood,
and even then pictured a retreat to my
OBERMANN 81
taste. . . . The word Chartreuse had
impressed me, and there, near Greno-
ble, I built the house of my dreams. I
then believed that pleasant places went
far to make a happy life ; and there,
with the woman I loved, I felt that the
changeless joy, for which my baffled
heart had ardently longed, might at
last be mine. ...
The farther I look back into my
youth, the deeper are the impressions
I find. If I pass beyond the age when
ideas begin to have some breadth ; if I
seek in my childhood for the earliest
fancies of a melancholy heart, which
never had a true childhood, and was
intent upon strong emotions and un-
usual things at a time when a love or
a distaste for play was scarcely devel-
oped — if I look back to my experi-
ences at seven years, at six years, at
five years, I find impressions as endur-
ing, more confiding, sweeter than than
those of later days, and shaped by those
82 OBERMANN
complete illusions which have been
the happiness of no other age. . . .
September 2d.
. . . Prettiness amuses the mind,
beauty sustains the soul, sublimity
astounds or exalts it ; but the beauties
that captivate and impassion the heart
are broader and more undefined, rare,
beyond comprehension, mysterious, and
ineffable.
Thus, love makes all things beauti-
ful to hearts capable of loving, and
adds a sense of exquisiteness to their
feeling for everything in nature. Cre-
ating as it does in us the noblest of
all possible relationships outside of
ourselves, it opens to us the conscious-
ness of every relationship, of all har-
monies ; it unveils a new world to our
affections. Swept along by this swift
current, fascinated by this power which
holds immeasurable promise, and of
which nothing has as yet disillusioned
OBERMANN 83
us, we seek, we feel, we love, we desire
all that nature holds in fee for man. . . .
LETTER XXII
Fontainebleau, October 12 th, 2d year.
1 LONGED to see once more all the
places through which I loved to
wander in the past. Before the nights
grow cold, before the trees lose their
leaves, before the birds take wing, I
am exploring the most distant parts of
the forest.
Yesterday I was on my way before
the break of day ; the moon still shone,
and the dawn had not yet dispelled the
shadows. The valley of Changis still
lay in the shades of night ; but I had
already gained the heights of Avon.18
I descended to the Basses-Loges, and
reached Valvin as the sun, rising be-
hind Samoreau, colored the rocks of
Samois.19
84 OBERMANN
Valvin is not a village, and has no
cultivated land. The inn stands soli-
tary, at the foot of a hill, on a small,
level strand, between the river and the
woods. Valvin or Thomery 20 may be
reached by water, in the evening, when
the shores are sombre, and we hear the
belling of the stags in the forest ; or
else, at the rising of the sun, when the
earth is still at rest, when the boatman's
cry startles the roes, and echoes under
the high poplars and through the heath-
covered hills all steaming in the early
break of day. . . .
Then I turned to the west, in search
of the spring of Mont Chauvet . . .
and descended into the quiet valley
where its waters are lost without form-
ing a stream. In turning aside, to-
wards the cross of the Grand- Veneur,21
I came upon a solitude as austere as the
wilderness that I am seeking. I passed
behind the rocks of Cuvier; I was rilled
with sadness; I lingered long among
OBERMANN 85
the gorges of Apremont.22 Towards
evening I reached the solitudes of the
Grand-Franchard,23 an ancient monas-
tery standing alone among the hills
and the sands ; . . . the moon shone
faintly as if to add to the solitude of
this deserted monument. Not a sound,
not a bird, not a movement stirred the
silence of the night. But, when all
that oppresses us is at rest, when all
things sleep and leave us to repose,
then phantoms hold watch in our own
hearts.
The next day I turned to the south,
and, as I wandered among the hills,
I watched with delight the gathering
of a storm. I found an easy shelter in
the hollows of the overhanging cliffs.
From the depths of my retreat, I loved
to see the junipers and the birches
wrestling with the strength of the
winds, while their roots were crowded
within a small and arid space ; I loved
to see them hold their poor and inde-
86 OBERMANN
pendent life, while their only support
was the face of the rocks, in the clefts
of which they stood balanced, and their
only nourishment a handful of moist
earth, caught in the crevices into which
their roots had crept.
When the rain had lessened, I
plunged into the wet woods, which
were clothed with fresh beauty. I
followed the edge of the forest near
Recloses,24 la Vignette, and Bourron.
Towards evening, I turned my steps
homeward with regret, and felt well
pleased with my walk, if anything can
give me a sense of pleasure or of re-
gret.
I care no longer for desires ; they do
not deceive me. Not that I wish them
to die, for such absolute silence would
seem more sinister still. But they are
like the vain beauty of the rose which
blooms before eyes that have closed :
they hold up before me what I can
never possess, what I can scarcely see.
OBERMANN 87
If hope seems still to throw a ray of
light into the night which envelops
me, it heralds nought but the bitterness
that is her last bequest before she dies ;
it illumines only the depths of the void
where I sought, and found nothing.
Soft climates, beautiful places, the
sky of the night, significant sounds,
early memories ; times, opportunities ;
nature, beautiful and expressive; sub-
lime affections — all have passed before
me, all allure me, and all abandon me.
I am alone ; the strength of my heart
is not given out, it reacts on itself, it
waits. I am here in the world, a wan-
derer, solitary in the midst of a people
for whom I care nothing ; like a man,
deaf for many years, whose eager eyes
gaze upon the crowd of silent beings
who move and pass before him. He
sees everything, but everything is with-
held from him ; he divines the sounds
that he loves, he seeks them, and hears
them not ; he suffers the silence of all
•
88 OBERMANN
things in the midst of the noise of the
world. Everything passes before him,
but he can grasp nothing ; universal
harmony reigns in external creation, it
is in his imagination, but is not in his
heart ; he is apart from the entirety of
beings, no bond unites him to them ;
in vain do all things exist around him,
he lives alone, he is isolated in the
midst of the living world.
LETTER XXIII
FontainebleaUy October f8thy 2d year.
WILL it also be given unto man
to know the long peace of au-
tumn, after the unrest of the strength
of his years, even as the fire, after its
haste to be consumed, lingers before it
is quenched ?
Long before the equinox, the leaves
had fallen in quantities, yet the forest
still holds much of its verdure and all
OBERMANN 89
of its beauty. More than forty days ago
everything looked as though it would
end before its time, and now all things
are enduring beyond their allotted days;
receiving, at the very door of destruc-
tion, a lengthened life, which lingers
on the threshold of its decay with
abundant grace or security, and seems
to borrow, as it weakens with gentle
loitering, both from the repose of ap-
proaching death and from the charm
of departing life.
LETTER XXIV
Fontainebleau, October 28 th, 2d year.
THE frosts depart, and I give no
heed ; spring dies, and I am not
moved ; summer passes, and I feel no
regret. But I take delight in walking
over the fallen leaves, on the last of the
beautiful days, in the unclothed forest.
Whence come to man the most last-
90 OBERMANN
ing of the delights of his heart, that
rapture of sadness, that charm full of
secrets, which make him live on his
sorrows and be still content with him-
self in the midst of the sense of his
ruin ? I cling to the happy season that
will soon have passed away; a belated
interest, a contradictory delight, draws
me to her as she is about to die. The
same moral law which makes the idea
of destruction painful to me, makes me
also love the sentiment of it in the
things of this world that must pass away
before me. It is natural that we should
more fully enjoy the life which perishes,
when, conscious of its frailty, we feel
that it still lives on within us. When
death separates us from things, they
subsist without us. But when the leaves
fall, vegetation is at an end, and dies ;
while we live on for new generations.
Autumn is full of delight, because, for
us, spring is yet to come.
Spring is more beautiful in nature ;
OBERMANN 91
but man, by his works, has made au-
tumn sweeter. The awakening green,
the singing bird, the opening flower,
and that fire which returns to give
strength to life, and the shadows which
shield those hidden retreats, and that
luxuriant grass, that wild fruit, those
soft nights which invite to liberty ! Sea-
son of joy ! You fill me with dread in
my burning unrest. I find deeper re-
pose towards the eve of the year ; the
season when all things seem to die is
the only time when I sleep in peace on
the earth of man.
LETTER XXV
FontainebleaUy November 6thy 2d year.
I LEAVE my woods ; I had intended
to stay here through the winter, but
if I want to free myself from the busi-
ness which brought me within reach of
Paris, I must neglect it no longer. . . .
92 OBERMANN
So I shall leave the forest, its life, its
dreamy ways, and the peaceful 4hough
imperfect image of a free land.
LETTER XXX
Paris., March fth, jd year.
IT was gloomy and cold ; I was
heavy-hearted ; I walked because
I could do nothing else. I passed near
some flowers, which grew on a wall at
arm's height. A daffodil wa^ in bloom,
the most perfect expression of longing,
the first fragrance of the year. I was
filled with a sense of all the joy to
which man is heir. That ineffable
harmony of beings, the image of the
ideal world, took possessioa of me ;
never before had I experienced an
emotion so instantaneous, and so full
of grandeur.
I know not what form, what ana-
logy, what secret affinity led me to see
OBERMANN 93
in this flower a measureless beauty, the
expression, the elegance, the attitude of
a happy and simple woman in all the
grace and splendor of awakening love.
I shall not strive to render that power,
that immensity which nothing can ex-
press ; that form which nothing can
contain ; that idea of a better world
which we feel, but which nature can-
not have given us ; that celestial ray
which we think to grasp, which im-
passions us, leads us on, and is nought
but an invisible, wandering spirit, stray-
ing in the dark abyss.
But this spirit, this image, touched
with a mysterious beauty, mighty with
the magic power of the unknown,
which has become needful to us in the
midst of our miseries, and has grown
natural to our overburdened hearts, —
where is the man who can see it even
for a moment, dimly, and ever forget
the vision ?
When the opposition, the inertia of
94 OBERMANN
a power dead, brutal, unclean, fetters
us, envelops us, imprisons us, holds us
plunged in uncertainties, loathing, puer-
ilities, imbecile or cruel follies ; when
we know nothing, possess nothing ;
when all things pass before us like the
whimsical figures of an odious and ab-
surd dream, — what can repress in our
hearts the longing for a different order
of things, for another nature ?
LETTER XXXII
Paris, April 2Qth, jd year.
A SHORT while ago, at the Biblio-
tfoque, I heard some one near me
address by name the famous L. . . .
At another time I happened to be sit-
ting at the same table with him ; . . .
he gave me some idyls, written by an
obscure Greek author, which he had
found in an old Latin manuscript.
'
., '
• -
•»
OBERMANN 95
LETTER XXXIII
Paris, May fthy jd year.
THE author to whom I referred
in my last letter said to me yes-
terday, " If I mistake not, my idyls
do not interest you greatly. Possibly
you would prefer a moral or philoso-
phic fragment, attributed to Aristippus,
spoken of by Varro, and afterwards sup-
posed to have been lost. But, as it was
translated in the fifteenth century into
contemporary French, it must have been
still in existence at that time. I found
it in manuscript, at the end of an un-
used and imperfect copy of Plutarch,
published by Amyot."
I acknowledged that, not being a
scholar, I had the misfortune to pre-
fer things to words, and was far more
deeply interested in the sentiments of
Aristippus than in an eclogue, were it
written by Bion or Theocritus.
96 OBERMANN
But, in my opinion, there was not
sufficient evidence to prove that Aris-
tippus23 was the author of this short
fragment, and we owe it to his mem-
ory not to attribute to him what he
would perhaps have disclaimed. If he
did write it, then the famous Greek,
who was as misjudged as Epicurus, and
was supposed to have been effeminately
voluptuous, or of a too pliant phi-
losophy, really possessed that severity
which is exacted by prudence and or-
der, the only severity which becomes
a man born for enjoyment, and a way-
farer upon the earth.
MANUAL OF PSEUSOPHANES
" Thou hast awakened gloomy,
downcast, already weary of the hours
that have just begun. Thou hast raised
upon life the glance of disgust ; thou
hast found her vain, dull ; after a while
thou shalt feel her to be more endur-
able. Will she then have changed ?
OBERMANN 97
" She has no definite shape. All the
experience of man is in his heart ; all
his knowledge is in his thought. His
whole life is within himself.
"What ruin can crush thee thus?
What canst thou lose ? Does there
exist outside of thee anything that is
thine ? Of what account is that which
perisheth ? All things pass, excepting
justice, which is hidden beneath the
veil of mutable things. For man all is
vain, unless he walks with an even and
tranquil step, obedient to the laws of
the intelligence.
" Everything is in a ferment around
thee, everything holds a menace ; if
thou givest thyself up to alarms, thy
anxieties will be endless. Thou shalt
not possess what cannot be possessed,
and thou shalt lose thy life which
belonged to thee. The things that
happen pass away forever. They are
necessary accidents, generated in an
endless circle ; they vanish even as an
unexpected and fleeting shadow.
98 OBERMANN
" What are thy ills ? Fanciful fears,
hypothetical needs, passing vexations.
Impotent slave ! Thou cleavest to what
does not exist ; thou art the servant of
shadows. Leave to the deluded mul-
titude whatsoever is illusive, vain, and
mortal. Give heed only to intelligence,
which is the principle of the order of
the world, and to man who is its in-
strument ; intelligence which we ought
to follow, man whom we ought to aid.
"Intelligence struggles against the
opposition of matter, against those blind
laws whose invisible results have been
called chance. When the power that
has been given thee has become the
handmaid of intelligence, when thou
hast added thy share to the order of the
world, what more canst thou desire ?
Thou hast lived in accordance with thy
nature ; and what is better for the be-
ing who is endowed with feeling and
knowledge than to exist in conformity
with his own nature ?
OBERMANN 99
" Each day, as thou art born to a new
life, remember that thou hast resolved
not to walk in vain upon the earth.
The world advances to its end. But
thou dost linger, thou dost retrograde,
thou dost remain in a state of suspense
and languor. Thy days that have passed,
will they ever return at a better time ?
The whole of life is gathered into the
present,26 which thou dost neglect in
order to sacrifice it to the future ; the
present is time, the future is only its
semblance.
" Live in thyself, and seek that which
perisheth not. Consider the desires of
our thoughtless passions ; among such
a throng, is there one which is suffi-
cient unto man ? Intelligence finds, in
herself alone, food for her life ; be just
and strong. No one can know the day
that is to come ; thou wilt not find
peace in outward things, seek her in
thy heart.
" Strength is the law of nature, and
ioo OBERMANN
will is power ; intensity in suffering is
better than apathy in gratification. He
who obeys and suffers is often greater
than he who enjoys or he who com-
mands. Thy fears are vain, thy desires
are vain. One thing only is good for
thee : to be what nature has ordained.
" Thou art intelligence and matter.
So also is the world. Harmony trans-
forms individuals, and the whole fol-
lows the road to perfection through the
endless improvement of its different
parts. This law of the universe is also
the law of man.
• •«••••
" Console, enlighten, and support
thy fellows ; thy part has been marked
out by the place thou dost fill in the
immensity of living beings. Know and
obey the laws of man, and thou wilt
help other men to know and to follow
them. Consider and show them the
centre and the end of things ; let them
see the reason of what surprises them,
OBERMANN 101
the instability of what troubles them,
the nothingness of what sweeps them
along.
" Do not isolate thyself from the
entirety of the world ; keep thine eyes
ever fixed upon the universe ; and re-
member justice. Thus thou wilt have
filled the measure of thy life, and have
accomplished the work of man."
LETTER XXXIV
EXTRACTS FROM TWO LETTERS
Paris, June 2d and flh, ^d year.
1HAVE seen, within a few days, the
difficult part of Mahomet played by
the only three actors who are capable
of attempting it. ...
This tragedy of Mahomet is one of
the most beautiful plays of Voltaire ;
but had Voltaire not been a French-
man he might not have made the con-
102 OBERMANN
quering prophet the lover of Palmyra.
It is true that the love of Mahomet is
masculine, imperious, and even some-
what fierce ; he does not love as Titus
did, but it might have been better had
he not loved at all. We know the pas-
sion of Mahomet for women ; but it is
likely that after so many years of dis-
simulation, of retirement, of perils, and
of triumphs, the passion of this deep
and ambitious heart did not partake of
love.
This love for Palmyra was ill-suited
to his high destiny and his genius.
Love is out of place in a stern heart,
filled with its own projects, grown old
under the craving for authority, know-
ing pleasure only through forgetfulness,
and for which happiness itself is no-
thing more than a diversion.
What does he mean by exclaiming,
" L 'amour seul me console"?27 Who
forced him to seek the throne of the
East, to leave his wives and his obscure
OBERMANN 103
independence, and to lift the censer, the
sceptre, and the sword ? " U amour seul
me console ! " To rule the destiny of na-
tions, to change the religion and the
laws of one portion of the globe, to
raise up Arabia on the ruins of the
world, was this so sad a life, so dull a
lethargy ? It was, doubtless, a difficult
task, but it was the very occasion not
to love. These cravings of the heart
have their spring in the emptiness of
the soul ; he who has great things to do
has far less need of love. . . .
FIRST FRAGMENT
5th year.
I question whether it is good for man,
as he is, to be invariably happy, without
ever having struggled against adverse
fate. It may be that the happy man
among us is he who has suffered much,
not habitually and with that slow at-
rophy which dulls the faculties, but
rather with an intensity which excites
104 OBERMANN
the secret energy of the soul and forces
it, happily, to seek within itself re-
sources of which it had been before
unconscious.
It is a gain for the whole of life to
have been unhappy at the age when
head and heart begin to live. It is the
lesson of fate ; it shapes good men, it
enlarges the ideas, and it matures the
heart not yet weakened by old age ; it
moulds a man early enough in his
career for him to be a complete man.
Though unhappiness may take away
pleasure and delight, it excites the sense
of order and the desire for domestic
joys ; it gives the greatest satisfaction
for which we may look, that of ex-
pecting nothing more than a calm and
useful existence. We are far less un-
happy when we desire merely to live ;
we are nearer to usefulness when, in the
full strength of life, we seek nothing
more for ourselves. Misfortune alone,
I believe, has the power, before the
OBERMANN 105
coming of old age, to thus develop the
ordinary man.
True goodness exacts wide concep-
tions, a great soul, and restrained pas-
sions. If goodness is the highest merit
of man, if moral perfections are essen-
tial to happiness, it is among those who
have greatly suffered during the early
years of the heart's life that we shall
find the men who are most fitly framed
for their own good and for the good of
all — men who are the most just, the
most rational, the nearest to happiness,
and the most steadfastly virtuous. . . .
The upright man is steadfast ; he has
not the passions of any faction, nor has
he the habits of any profession ; he is
not the tool of any man ; he can have
neither animosity, nor ostentation, nor
folly ; he is not surprised at goodness,
because it exists within him, or at evil,
because it exists in nature ; he is indig-
nant against crime, but does not hate
the guilty; he despises meanness of
io6 O B E R M A N N
soul, but is not angered at the worm
because the unfortunate creature has no
wings. . . .
He is virtuous, not because he is a
fanatic, but because he is in quest of
order ; he does good so as to lessen the
uselessness of his life ; he prefers the
happiness of others to his own, because
others can enjoy, and he cannot ; he
desires merely to reserve for himself
the means of doing some good, and of
living in peace ; calm is the necessary
portion of those who do not look for
joy. . . . He is not satisfied with what
he does, because he feels that he might
do far better. . . . Thus he will pass
his days, while drawing ever onward to-
ward the highest good ; at times with
an energetic but hampered step ; oftener
with uncertainty, with some weakness,
with the smile of discouragement.
OBERMANN 107
It is a small thing not to be like the
common type of men ; but it is a step
towards wisdom not to be like the com-
mon type of sages.
LETTER XXXVI
Lyons, A$ril fth, 6th year.
SUPERB mountains, falling of the
avalanches, solitary peace of the
forest glen, yellow leaves floating on
the silent stream ! What would you
be to man, if you spoke not of other
men ? Nature would be mute, did man
no longer live. Were I alone upon the
earth, what would I care for the sounds
of the relentless night, the solemn si-
lence of the great valleys, the light of
the sunset in a sky filled with melan-
choly, above the calm waters ? Nature
is felt only in human relationships,
and the eloquence of things is nothing
more than the eloquence of man. The
io8 OBERMANN
fruitful earth, the broad skies, the mov-
ing waters, are but an expression of the
relationship that our hearts create and
hold. . . .
But the relationships of human life
have multiplied ; the friendship of the
ancients is far from our hearts, or from
our destiny.
* * *
Man grows old, and his slighted
heart grows old before him. If all
that he can love is in man, all that he
must shun is there also. Where there
are many social conventionalities, there,
too, of stubborn necessity, are many
discords. And thus the man whose
fears are greater than his hopes lives
apart from his fellows. Things inani-
mate have less power, but they belong
to us more fully; they are what we
make them. They hold less of what
we seek, but we are surer of finding
the things that they contain. They
OBERMANN 109
are the joys of mediocrity, limited but
certain. Passion goes in quest of man,
but reason is sometimes obliged to for-
sake him for things that are less good
and less fatal. Thus has been forged a
powerful link between man and this
friend of man.
NOTES
NOTE i, Page vii
' I **HE following is a list of Senancour's
•*• works : —
Reveries sur la Nature primitive de FHomme.
Obermann.
De rumour.
Libres Meditations.
Traditions morales et religieuses.
La Chine.
Republique romaine.
Empire romain.
De Napoleon.
Valombre, comedie.
Isabelle a Clemence.
Observations sur le Genie du Christianisme.
Vocabulaire de simple v'erite.
France litt'eraire.
De fatheisme impute a Voltaire.
VAmiti'e.
Senancour wrote, in addition, a number of politi-
cal pamphlets, letters, and articles ; and in the last
years of his life he began a work, De la Religion
H2 NOTES
eternelle, the manuscript of which was lost. He
also planned, it would seem, to write a second
part to Obermann.
NOTE 2, Page 3
The method of dating the letters that was
used in the last French edition, and that was
presumably the original system followed by Senan-
cour, has been strictly adhered to. Although
Obermann was written during three years, from
1801 to 1803, the letters were made to cover
apparently a period of nine years.
NOTE 3, Page 3
This and the following pages refer to the
time when, in 1789, Senancour fled from Paris
and took refuge in Switzerland in order to avoid
entering the priesthood, to which his father had
destined him, and for which he felt an uncon-
querable aversion. It is probable that, after this,
Senancour saw his mother only at rare and un-
certain intervals j for she died in 1796, and the
French Revolution, which broke out almost imme-
diately after Senancour's flight, kept him an exile
in Switzerland for many years. When we read
his tender and beautiful words about his mother,
in the chapter on irreparable faults in the M'edita-
tions, we feel that in later years Senancour deeply
repented his hasty act.
NOTES 113
NOTE 4, Page 13
Cully is a small village on the margin of lake
Leman, between Vevey and Lausanne. Above
it rise the vine-covered slopes of La Vaux.
NOTE 5, Page 15
The Vies des Peres du desert was probably the
French translation made in the early part of the
seventeenth century by Rene Gautier from the
original Latin work, Vita Patrum, sive Historic
Eremetica, libri X. This Acta Sanctorum, which
was published at Antwerp in 1628, by P. Herbert
Rosweyde, Jesuit, contained in ten books all the
biographies and authentic notices of the fathers of
the desert which Rosweyde was able to collect.
The Bollandists afterwards carried out more fully
the original design of the Jesuit father. Among
the contents of the Vitee Patrum are the lives of
the chief patriarchs of the Thebaid, written by St.
Jerome, St. Athanasius, St. Ephrem, and others ;
lives of holy women ; biographical notices by
Ruffinus ; maxims and examples from the lives
of the fathers ; the Historic Lausiaca, written by
Palladius, afterwards Bishop of Helenopolis, who
visited Egypt in about 390, and who gives a nar-
rative of the three years he spent among the her-
mits ; and accounts of the holy hermits of Asia.
Montalembert, in his Monks of the West, speaks of
this collection as " one of the noblest of existing
books."
ii4 NOTES
NOTE 6, Page 17
This lake must be that of Neuchatel.
NOTE 7, Page 17
The river Thiele, or Zihl, connects lake Neu-
chatel with the lake of Bienne.
NOTE 8, Page 22
Compare Matthew Arnold in Tristram and
Iseult : —
" Dear saints, it is not sorrow, as I hear,
Not suffering, which shuts up eye and ear
To all that has delighted them before,
And lets us be what we were once no more.
No, we may suffer deeply, yet retain
Power to be moved and soothed, for all our pain,
By what of old pleased us, and will again."
NOTE 9, Page 25
Compare this and several other passages of
the same character, in which Senancour empha-
sizes the importance of living according to the
dictates of one's own nature, with the following
sentences from the Meditations of Marcus Aure-
lius : —
" No man can prevent you from living accord-
ing to the principle of your nature. . . .
" Each one should act in accordance with his
natural constitution. . . .
NOTES 115
" Think nothing of importance except to act
as your nature dictates, and to bear whatever uni-
versal nature brings."
Compare also these lines from Emerson's essay
on Self-Reliance: —
"No law can be sacred to me but that of my
nature. . . . The only right is what is after my
constitution, the only wrong what is against it."
NOTE 10, Page 28
We can follow Senancour's trip of two months,
from the 8th of July to the 3d of September,
through the cantons of Vaud, Neuchatel, Berne,
and Fribourg, to the Valais. His first letter was
written at Geneva. From that point his itinerary
lay along the northern shore of lake Leman
through Nyon to Lausanne, which covers the
slopes of Mont Jorat. Crossing northward, he
went to Yverdun by way of Moudon, then to
Neuchatel, and after a trip through the Val de
Travers, to Saint-Blaise, on the northeastern point
of lake Neuchatel, and to Bienne. He stopped for
several days at Thiel, on the frontier of Neuchatel
and Berne, and, passing by lake Morat, went south-
ward to Vevey, through Payerne. Skirting the
eastern end of lake Leman, he visited Clarens and
Chillon, and then journeyed on to Saint-Maurice,
where he decided to make his home.
I have not followed Senancour's spelling of
Swiss names, as it is frequently incorrect.
n6 NOTES
NOTE n, Page 28
Villeneuve is a small, ancient town on the
eastern point of lake Leman, where the road
leaves the borders of the lake and enters the
valley of the Rhone.
NOTE 12, Page 29
This narrow gorge is described by Rogers in
Saint Maurice : —
*' 'T was dusk; and journeying upward by the Rhone,
That there came down a torrent from the Alps,
I entered where a key unlocks a kingdom;
The road and river, as they wind alongf
Filling the mountain-pass."
NOTE 13, Page 29
The bridge of Saint-Maurice unites the can-
tons of Vaud and of Valais. With its one arch,
seventy feet wide, it spans the river, which is here
a rapid torrent, and rests on one side upon the
Dent de Morcles and on the other side upon the
Dent du Midi.
NOTE 14, Page 29
The town to which Senancour here alludes is
that of Saint-Maurice.
NOTE 15, Page 43.
Compare the Confessions of St. Augustine, in
NOTES 117
the eleventh book, xi, on time and eternity (ed-
ited by William G. T. Shedd): —
" Who shall hold their heart, and fix it, that it
be settled awhile, and awhile catch the glory of
that ever-fixed Eternity, and compare it with the
times which are never fixed, and see that it cannot
be compared ; and that a long time cannot become
long but out of many motions passing by ...
but that in the Eternal, nothing passeth, but the
whole is present ? . . . Who shall hold the heart
of man, that it may stand still, and see how eter-
nity, ever still-standing, neither past nor to come,
uttereth the times past and to come ? "
NOTE 1 6, Page 56
The masses of bare sandstone rock, well known
as the gres de Fontainebleau^ give to the forest
much of its picturesqueness. Deep valleys and
gorges separate the long ridges of sandstone, and
in their hollows lie piles of rocks heaped up in
rugged masses.
NOTE 17, Page 62
This adventure, which happened to Senancour
when he was about fifteen or sixteen years of age,
seems to have left a deep impression on his mind,
for he recurs to it again in the Meditations. In
his preface to that book, he declares, in order to
cover his own identity, that he discovered the man-
uscript of the Meditations in the rock-cave of
n8 NOTES
the forest of Fontainebleau, and he calls himself
merely the editor of a moral treatise which, he
suggests, may have been written by some recluse-
philosopher who had lived in the former dwelling
of Lallemant, the poor quarryman.
NOTE 1 8, Page 83
Avon is the only village within the precincts
of the forest of Fontainebleau.
NOTE 19, Page 83
Valvin, Samoreau, and Samois are all border
forest-villages situated on the banks of the Seine.
NOTE 20, Page 84
Thomery, which lies at the west of the forest,
by the banks of the Seine, is a village of gardens.
It is surrounded on almost every side by vine-
yards, which yield the famous Chasselas grapes,
and by orchards and gardens ; its streets are filled
with trees, vines, and flowers, hedges of roses, and
orchards of plum-trees.
NOTE 21, Page 84
According to an old legend, the Grand Veneur,
the terrible spectre huntsman, haunted the forest,
and with torch and hounds followed through the
night a spectre stag which, like an ignis fatuus, ever
allured him and ever eluded him. To this nightly
ride he had been condemned as a punishment for
NOTES 119
an offense against St. Hubert. It was this phan-
tom Chasseur Noir who is said to have appeared
to Henry IV a short time before his assassina-
tion, and to have uttered the words, "Amendez
vous ! "
NOTE 22, Page 85
The gorges and valley of Apremont which lie
on the northwest of the forest, not far from the
now famous artist village of Barbizon, contain
some of the wildest and most picturesque scenery
in the Fontainebleau district.
NOTE 23, Page 85
Beyond Apremont to the south is the Hermi-
tage of Franchard, now solitary and abandoned,
buried in rocks and sand, and lying in ruins among
the hills. The monastery was founded in 1197,
by monks from Orleans, under Philippe Auguste.
During the wars of the fourteenth century it was
partially destroyed, and was afterwards used as a
stronghold by bands of brigands, who so terrorized
the neighborhood that Louis XIV ordered the
ruins to be razed to the ground.
NOTE 24, Page 86
Recloses, la Vignette, and Bourron are border
forest-villages on the south.
NOTE 25, Page 96
There is every reason to believe that this story
120 NOTES
about the discovery of the Manual of Pseusophanes
is fictitious and invented by Senancour, who doubt-
less was himself the author of the Manual.
I have to acknowledge with sincere thanks the
courtesy of M. Barringer, of the Bibliotheque Na-
tlonale at Paris, who, in response to an inquiry as
to whether there exists, in that library, either the
defective copy of Plutarch or the fragment of
Aristippus, referred to by Senancour, writes : —
" In spite of my most minute investigations in
the Department of Printed Books, I have been
unable to discover the slightest trace of the defec-
tive copy of Plutarch mentioned by Senancour.
In the Department of Manuscripts, M. Omont
went through, with me, all the inventories and
catalogues, in none of which was found the name
of Aristippus. Under such circumstances, I think
you are right in supposing the Manual an offspring
of Senancour' s fertile imagination. . . . Yours
very truly, S. S. Barringer, Bibliotkecaire"
NOTE 26, Page 99
Compare the Confessions of St. Augustine, elev-
enth book, xvii, xviii, and xx, on the idea of time
(edited by William G. T. Shedd).
" Who will tell me that there are not three
times, past, present, and future, but only one, the
present, because those two are not ? . . . For if
times past and to come be, I would know where
they be. Which yet if I cannot, yet I know
NOTES i2i
wherever they be, they are not there as future, or
past, but present. For if there also they be future,
they are not yet there ; if there also they be past,
they are no longer there. . . . What now is clear
and plain is, that neither things to come, nor past,
are. Nor is it properly said, c There be three
times, past, present, and to come : ' yet perchance
it might be properly said, l There be three times ;
a present of things past, a present of things pre-
sent, and a present of things future.' "
Compare also the following from the Medita-
tions of Marcus Aurelius : —
" The present is the same for all, and what is
lost also is the same ; for what escapes us is only
the passing moment. Death cannot rob us of
either past or future ; for how can one take from
a man what he has not ? . . . The one who lives
longest and the one who dies soonest suffer an
equal loss. The present moment is all that either
is deprived of, since that is all he has. A man
cannot part with what he does not possess."
.«
. NOTE 27, Page 102
Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete^ by Vol-
taire, second act, fourth scene. Mahomet speak-
ing to his lieutenant, Omar : —
" Tu sais assez quel sentiment vainqueur
Parmi mes passions regne au fond de mon coeur.
Charge du soin du monde, environne d'alarmes,
122 NOTES
Je porte 1'encensoir, et le sceptre, et les armes :
Ma vie est un combat, et ma frugalite
Asservit la nature a mon austerite.
J'ai banni loin de moi cette liqueur traitresse,
Qui nourrit des humains la brutale mollesse :
Dans des sables brulants, sur des rochers deserts,
Je supporte avec toi 1'inclemence des airs.
L' amour seul me console ; il est ma recompense,
L'objet de mes travaux, 1'idole que j'encense,
Le dieu de Mahomet ; et cette passion
Est egale aux fureurs de mon ambition.*'
7
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