[2] Les Natchez. Chateaubriand, Oeuvres complètes, vol. v. pp. 353-463. In his Mémoires the author has, in expressing his own sentiments, unconsciously repeated one of these sentences. It has already been quoted.
[V]
OBERMANN
A striking contrast to René, egotistical and imperious as he is despite his weariness of life, is presented by the next remarkable variant of the type of the age.
Obermann, a work produced in the same year as René, was also written in exile. Its author, Étienne Pierre de Sénancour, was born in Paris in 1770, but emigrated in the early days of the Revolution to Switzerland, where a long illness and various other circumstances compelled him to remain. In his quality of émigré he was banished from France, and could only now and again venture secretly over its frontiers to visit his mother. Under the Consulate he returned to Paris without permission, and for the first three years lived the life of an absolute hermit in order not to attract the attention of the authorities. He afterwards gained a scanty livelihood by writing for Liberal newspapers and editing historical handbooks. His was a lonely, quiet life—the life of a deeply-feeling stoic.
Sénancour's first work, the title of which, Meditations on the Original Nature of Man, proclaims the pupil of Rousseau, appeared in 1799. His psychological romance, Obermann, was published early in 1804. This book created no particular stir on its first appearance, but at a later period it passed through many editions; successive generations perused its pages, and in France it was long classed with Werther and Ossian. It was studied by Nodier and Ballanche, and was Sainte-Beuve's favourite work, he and George Sand doing much to bring it into public notice.
Obermann in France, like Werther in Germany, has been in the hands of many a suicide; it was constantly read by Victor Hugo's unhappy friend, Rabbe, known to the public through Hugo's life and poems, and a certain clique of young men, Bastide, Sautelet (who committed suicide), Ampère, Stapfer, made a regular cult of the book. As René is the elect, Obermann is the passed by. Some of the ruling spirits of the century recognised themselves in René, Obermann was understood and appreciated by highly-gifted, deeply-agitated spirits of the finest temper. The book begins as follows: "In these letters are to be found the utterances of a spirit that feels, not of a spirit that acts." Here we have the kernel of the matter. Why does he not act? Because he is unhappy. Why is he unhappy? Because he is too sensitive, too impressionable. He is all heart, and the heart does not work.
It was the age of rule, discipline, military despotism, the age in which mathematics was the most esteemed of all the sciences, and energy, accompanied by a capacity for unqualified submission, the most esteemed of all the virtues. By no single fibre of his being does Obermann belong to this period; he abhors both discipline and mathematics as heartily as could any future Romanticist. He despises the Philistines who take the same walk every day, turning daily at the same place. He does not wish to know beforehand how his feelings will be affected. "Let the mind," he says, "strive to give a certain symmetry to its productions; the heart does not work, and can only produce when we exempt it from the labour of fashioning." We feel that this unreasonable principle is applied in his letters, which form a heavy, diffuse, serious, badly written book; they produce the effect of improvisations, to which the author, regarding them as the children of his heart, has not chosen or else not been able to impart an attractive form. It is true that nuggets of gold are hidden in the ponderous ore, but they must be laboriously sought for; a man with real literary talent would have gilded the whole mass with them.