Between Senancour And Amiel, The Malady Of The Century, & The Romanticists

Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Obermann, Selections From Letters to a Friend, tr. Jessie Peabody Frothingham (Cambridge, 1901), vol. I., Introduction, pp. xliii-xlvi:

Senancour’s rendering 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 Amiel’s inferior in strength of intellect, culture, 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. Senancour is a poet and moralist, Amiel a critic and speculative philosopher. The difference in their style is equally marked: Amiel is at his best where he is incisive, critical, epigrammatic, full of verve, cutting to the root of his subject 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 prominent place in his Journal than does that of Senancour in Obermann; but the idea of the indefinite, miscalled the infinite, appeals equally to both, though in different ways. Amiel is fascinated by it,—his individual life is absorbed, evaporated, 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 common 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 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, discouragement,” 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 simplification of life and dislike of the complicated 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, 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 pervaded not only France, but Europe; from him proceeded Childe Harold, Werther, and René, as well as Obermann.