Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 1. The Emigrant Literature

by Georg Brandes

The question of religion is discussed from various points of view in his letters. We already find the indignant refutation of the theory that atheism is the result of wickedness. They who believe in the Bible, says Obermann, maintain that it is only men's evil passions which prevent them from being Christians; the atheist might with equal justice assert that only the bad man is a Christian, since it is only the Christian who requires the help of phantasms to restrain him from stealing, lying, and murdering, and who endorses the theory that it would not be worth while leading an upright life if there were no hell. He attempts to explain the psychical origin of the belief in the immortality of the individual. The majority of human beings, restless and unhappy, live in hope that next hour, that to-morrow, and, finally, that in a life to come, they may attain the happiness they desire. To the argument that this belief is, at any rate, a consolation, he replies, that its being a consolation to the unhappy, is but one reason the more for doubting its truth. Men so readily credit what they wish to believe. Suppose one of the old sophists to have succeeded in making a pupil believe that by following certain directions for ten days he would be assured of invulnerability, eternal youth, &c.—the belief would doubtless be very agreeable to the pupil in question, but none the better founded for that. When asked what becomes of motion, mind, and soul, which are incorruptible, Obermann replies: "When the fire on your hearth goes out, its light, its warmth, its force forsake it, and it passes into another world, where it will be eternally rewarded if it has warmed your feet and eternally punished if it has burned your slippers."

He also attacks the theory, as often urged in our own as in those days, that those who do not believe in the dogmas of religion should hold their peace and not deprive others of the mainstay of their lives. He argues warmly, passionately, asserting that the cultivated classes and the town populations no longer believe in dogma (we must remember that he is writing of 1801-2), and as regards the lower classes, putting the matter thus: Even if we take for granted that it is both impossible and inadvisable to cure the masses of their delusions, does this justify deceit, does this make it a crime to speak the truth, or an evil that truth should be told? As a matter of fact, however, the masses now universally display a desire to learn the truth; it is clear that faith is everywhere undermined; and our first endeavour ought to be to prove clearly to all and sundry that the obligation to do right is quite independent of the belief in a future life.

Obermann, then, maintains that the laws of morality are natural, not supernatural, and are consequently unaffected by the collapse of belief. He repeatedly emphasises the disastrous practical results of silence in matters of religion; it is the system of silence which makes it possible for the education of woman to be still carried on upon the old lines, keeping her, as a rule, in a state of ignorance that makes her the enemy of progress, and too often delivers her, body and soul, into the power of her father confessor. A comparison between love as a happiness-producing power and love in the rôle it plays in marriage, leads him on to express some very strong opinions regarding the then prevailing ideas on the relations between the sexes, and the principles according to which a woman's conduct is judged in civilised society.

On these points Obermann is quite modern—he here follows the line of thought indicated by the preceding century; but in all that regards the emotions he is less modern, although he heralds something new, something that is on the way, namely Romanticism. He reflects much on the subject of the romantic; a portion of his book bears the significant title, "De l'expression romantique et du Ranz des Vaches." He defines the idea much as contemporary German writers do, although he does not systematise to the same extent. He declares the romantic conception of things to be the only one that harmonises with profound, true feeling: In all wild countries like Switzerland nature is full of romance, but romance vanishes when the hand of man is discernible everywhere; romantic effects resemble isolated words of man's original speech, which is not remembered by all, &c., &c.; nature is more romantic in her sounds than in her sights; the ear is more romantically impressionable than the eye; the voice of the woman we love affects us more romantically than her features, the Alpine horn expresses the romance of the Alps more forcibly than any painting; for we admire what we see, but we feel what we hear.

It is interesting to note how Obermann unconsciously takes up the tone of the German Romanticists whom he has never read. They also exalt music as the art of arts. Sénancour declares elsewhere that he cares almost more for the songs whose words he does not understand than for those of which he can follow the words as well as the melody. He remarks this à propos of the German songs he hears in Switzerland, naïvely adding: "Besides, there is something more romantic about the German accent." It is remarkable that we should find already suggested in Sénancour even that conception of language as simply musical sound which was subsequently characteristic of the German Romantic School. But his senses are too highly developed for him to rest content with music as the best means of intercourse between man and nature. In two separate passages in his book he declares that a succession of different fragrances contains as rich a melody as any succession of tones, and can, like music, call up pictures of far-away places and things.[1] Among the late French Romanticists we do not find such another highly developed, ultra-refined sense of smell until we come to Baudelaire. But whereas in Baudelaire it is a symptom of over-developed sensuousness, in Sénancour it is only an indication of the purely romantic cult of the Ego; it is one element in an emotional revel, for Sénancour believes that by means of the sense of smell as well as by means of the sense of hearing he can distinguish the hidden harmonies of existence. It also implies a shrinking from reality, with the corresponding intensified self-centredness; for it is only a volatilised essence of things that one inhales through the medium of perfumes and tones.

In his repugnance for realities, no solitude is too complete for Obermann. He lives alone, avoiding both cities and villages. There is in him the strangest mixture of love for mankind in general and complete indifference in all the relations of real life. So sensitive is he, that he is afflicted by scruples about his addiction to the mild dissipation of tea-drinking (tea being very characteristically his favourite beverage). He finds that it distracts his melancholy (le thé est d'un grand secours pour s'ennuyer d'une manière calme), but he despises all external excitement and stimulant. He is aware that he is far from being French in this respect, for, he aptly remarks, if Frenchmen inhabited Naples, they would build a ball-room in the crater of Vesuvius. He does not truly live except when he is entirely alone, in mist-veiled forests which recall the inevitable Ossian, or at night by the silent shores of a Swiss lake. Like his contemporary Novalis, he feels that darkness, by veiling visible nature, forces man's Ego back into itself.

Speaking of a night he passed alone with nature, he says:

"In that one night I experienced all that mortal heart can know of unutterable longing, unutterable woe. In it I consumed ten years of my life." And he attains to an even more profound self-consciousness by day, in the snow-fields of the Alps, where all surrounding life is not only veiled, as by night, but is frozen and apparently at a standstill.

He is most himself when he climbs from the Swiss valley in which he lives up to the desolate wilds of the highest mountains. With an indescribable, almost boyish gladness, he watches the form of his guide disappearing in the distance; revelling in loneliness, he becomes oblivious of time and humanity. Note him in these surroundings: "The day was hot, the horizon misty, and the valleys full of vapour. The lower atmosphere was lighted up by bright reflections from the glaciers, but absolute purity seemed the essential quality of the air I breathed. At this height no exhalation from the lower regions, no earthly light, troubled the dark, infinite depths of the sky. It had no longer the pale, clear, soft blue colour of the vault we look up to from the plains; no, the ether permitted the sight to lose itself in boundless infinity, and, heedless of the glare of sun and glacier, to seek other worlds and other suns as it does by night. Imperceptibly, the vapours of the glaciers rose and formed clouds under my feet. My eyes were no longer wearied by the sparkle of the snow, and the heavens grew darker and deeper still. The snowy dome of Mont Blanc lifted its immovable mass above the moving grey sea of piled-up mist which the wind raised into enormous billows. A black speck showed far down in their abysses; swiftly rising, it advanced directly towards me. It was a great Alpine eagle; its wings were wet and its eyes were fierce; it was seeking prey. But at the sight of a human being it uttered a sinister cry, precipitated itself into the mist and disappeared. This cry was echoed twenty times, but the echoes were dry sounds, without resonance, like so many isolated cries in the universal silence. Then all sank back into absolute stillness, as though sound itself had ceased to exist, as though the reverberating property of bodies had been universally suspended. Silence is unknown in the noisy valleys, it is only on these cold heights that this immobility reigns, this perpetual solemnity which no tongue can express, no imagination conjure up. Were it not for the memories he brings from the plains, man would believe up here that, leaving himself out of the question, movement did not exist; the motion of the stars would be inexplicable to him, even the mists seem to remain the same despite their changes. He knows that the moments follow each other, but he does not feel it. Everything seems to be eternally petrified. I could wish I had preserved a more exact remembrance of my sensations in those silent regions. In the midst of everyday life the imagination is hardly capable of recalling a sequence of ideas which present surroundings seem to contradict and thrust aside. But in such moments of energy one is not in a condition to think of the future or of other men and take notes for it and them, or to dwell upon the fame to be acquired by one's thoughts, or even to take thought of the common good. One is more natural; one is not bent on making use of the present moment, one does not control one's ideas, nor require one's mind to examine into things, discover hidden secrets, or find something to say which has never been said before. Thought is no longer active and regulated, but passive and free. One dreams, one abandons one's self, one is profound without esprit, great without enthusiasm, energetic without will."

We can see him, this pupil of Jean Jacques, who has energy without will (exactly Obermann's case), sitting solitary amidst Jean Jacques's scenery. René had widened the range of literary landscape. Instead of the Swiss lake and the woods and groves with which we began in La Nouvelle Héloïse, René and Atala gave us the great primeval forest, the gigantic Mississippi and its tributaries, and all the glowing, dazzling colour and fragrant, intoxicating luxuriance of tropical nature. This was a fitting natural background for a figure like René's. The exiled Chateaubriand had wandered through such scenery, and it had left its imprint on him. Obermann is in his proper place in the desert silence and dumbness of the mountains.