It is where there is no life, where life loses its hold, that he feels at home. Will he be able to endure life? Or will he, like Werther, some day cast it from him?
He does not do so. He finds strength in a great resolve. He gives up once and for all the idea of pleasure and happiness. "Let us," he says, "look upon all that passes and perishes as of no importance; let us choose a better part in the great drama of the world. It is from our determined resolution alone that we can hope for any enduring result." His determination to live, not to lay violent hands upon himself, is not engendered by humility but by a spirit of haughty defiance. "It may be," he says, "that man is created only to perish. If so, let us perish resisting, and if annihilation is our portion, let us at least do nothing to justify our fate."
But it is long before Obermann attains to this calm. Many and impassioned are his arguments in justification of suicide; and this is not surprising, for the suicide-epidemic in literature is one of those symptoms of the emancipation of the individual to which I have already referred. It is one form, the most radical and definite, of the individual's rejection of and release from the whole social order into which he was born. And what respect for human life were men likely to have in the days when Napoleon yearly made a blood-offering of many thousands to his ambition? "I hear every one declare," says Obermann, "that it is a crime to put an end to one's life, but the same sophists who forbid me death, expose me to it, send me to it. It is honourable to give up life when we cling to it, it is right to kill a man who desires to live, but that same death which it is an obligation to seek when dreaded, it is criminal to seek when desired! Under a thousand pretexts, now sophistical, now ridiculous, you play with my existence, and I alone have no rights over myself! When I love life, I am to despise it; when I am happy, you send me to die; and when I wish to die, you forbid me, and burden me with a life that I loathe."
"If I ought not to take my life, neither ought I to expose myself to probable death. All your heroes are simply criminals. The command you give them does not justify them. You have no right to send them to death if they had no right to give their consent to your order. If I have no right of decision in the matter of my own death, who has given this right to society? Have I given what I did not possess? What insane social principle is this you have invented, which declares that I have made over to society, for the purpose of my own oppression, a right I did not possess to escape from oppression."
Once, many years ago, in an essay on the tragedy of fate, I put similar words into the mouth of a suicide: "He who groans under the burden of existence may reasonably turn and accuse destiny, saying, 'Why was I born? Why are we not consulted? If I had been asked and had known what it was to live, I would never have consented.' We are like men who have been pressed as sailors and forced on board a ship: such sailors do not consider themselves obliged to stay on the ship if they see an opportunity of deserting. If it is argued that, having enjoyed the good of life I am bound to accept the evil, I reply: 'The good of life, the happiness of childhood, for example, which I enjoyed and my acceptance of which you say implied my consent to live, I accepted in absolute ignorance of the fact that it was earnest-money, therefore I am not bound by such earnest-money. I will not violate the ship's discipline, will not murder my comrades or anything of that sort; I will only take the one thing I have a right to, my liberty; for I never bound myself to remain.'"
This is obviously not the place to discourse at length on the permissibility of suicide. I leave that task to the moralists, only remarking that, although I do not believe anything reasonable can be urged against its permissibility except our obligations to our fellow-men, I consider these obligations in numberless cases an entirely sufficient and conclusive argument. At present I am only depicting from a purely historical point of view an actual psychical condition which is one of the phenomena of the literature under consideration. For Werther and Obermann are not the only books of this period in which suicide is represented or discussed. Atala kills herself. René is only prevented from doing so by his sister Amélie, and at one time, with a contempt of life almost as great as Schopenhauer's, he sneers at the love of life as a "mania." Their attitude towards suicide, then, forms a point of resemblance between two such different writers as Chateaubriand and Sénancour, and stamps their work with the impress of the period.
The author of Obermann made his hero in his own image, which perhaps explains why he makes him finally resolve to be an author. "What chance have I of success?" says Obermann. "If to say something true and to endeavour to say it convincingly be not enough, it is certain that I shall not succeed. Take the first place, ye who desire the fame of the moment, the admiration of society, ye who are rich in ideas which last a day, in books which serve a party, in effective tricks and mannerisms! Take the first place, seducers and seduced; it is nothing to me; ye will soon be forgotten, so it is well that ye should have your day. For my own part, I do not consider it necessary to be appreciated in one's lifetime, unless one is condemned to the misfortune of having to live by one's pen."
In these words Sénancour expressed his own literary faith and predicted his own destiny. His own generation overlooked him; he was not appreciated while he lived, although he was in the unhappy position of possessing no source of income but his pen. But in the days of the Romantic School he attained renown; the Romantic critics bound his simple field flowers into garlands along with the passion-flowers and roses of Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël. And he deserved the fame he attained. For he is one of the most remarkable authors of the Emigrant Literature-a worshipper of Nature, as becomes a pupil of Rousseau, melancholy, as befits a genuine admirer of Ossian, weary of life, as befits a contemporary of Chateaubriand. He is thoroughly modern in his theories on religion, morality, education, and the position of women in society; he is the regular German Romanticist in his sentimentality, his indolence, and his dread of contact with reality, as if it were something that would burn him; and he is the French Romanticist in his mixture of liberal-mindedness with excessive scrupulosity and of enthusiasm with refined sensuousness, a combination which reappears in French literature twenty years later in Sainte-Beuve's Joseph Delorme. Everything stamps him as a herald or forerunner of the long train of greater intellects who at this moment begin their progress through the century; his weak voice announces them and he prepares their way.
[1] Obermann, 1833, vol. i. p. 262; vol. ii. p. 90.