Étienne Pivert de Senancour - I WISH I had a trade: it would animate my arms and tranquillize my head. A talent would not do this; yet if I knew how to paint, I think I should be less unquiet. I have long been in a stupor; I am sorry to have waked. I was in a depression more tranquil than actual depression

Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Obermann,  Selections from Letters to a Friend. [1804.]
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The philosophical, descriptive, familiar and, since it must be admitted, sentimental letters which, under the title of Obermann, have won for themselves a permanent, if not perhaps a higher place in the classical literature of France, and are not unknown in England, were first published in the early years of the 19th century and are the chief, though not the sole title to distinction of the author.

ONE work of Senancour’s has lived. The others—moral and philosophical treatises, and one feeble novel, ‘Isabelle,’ written in his old age as a sequel to his famous ‘Obermann’—are now forgotten. “But ‘Obermann,’” says Matthew Arnold, “has qualities which make it permanently valuable to kindred minds.” Arnold himself, while suffering the spiritual isolation there portrayed, did not go off alone to suffer; but did a great and practical work in the world of men. Other noble minds have sympathized with Obermann, among them George Sand and Sainte-Beuve; but for most people, such writing, however noble and eloquent, must needs be somewhat futile. It must after all be healthy instinct which guides men as well as children to turn from abstractions to accounts of positive achievement. Heroic action is far more thrilling than even its prompting impulse, unfulfilled. It is so much more satisfactory to receive some practical lesson in living, some stimulus to richer sensation, than to be disheartened by the wailings of failure.	1
Senancour early showed a want of adaptability to existing social conditions. He was born at Paris in November 1770, of a noble family, to whom the Revolution brought ruin. Sickly from childhood, he was destined to the Church. Obliged by his father to enter St. Sulpice, he rebelled against the monastic constraint, and aided by his mother, escaped to Switzerland. There he married, and lived till toward the end of the century; when, after his wife’s death, he returned to Paris.	2
‘Obermann’ appeared in 1804. It is a treatise on disillusion and hopelessness, lacking in vitality; and although noble in tone, has not been widely appreciated. It is less a novel than an exposition, in a series of letters, of Senancour’s own point of view. Obermann, the hero, is Senancour in very slight disguise. He is “a man who does not know what he is, what he likes, what he wants; who sighs without cause; who desires without object; and who sees nothing except that he is not in his place: in short, who drags himself through empty space and in an infinite tumult of vexations.”	3
‘Obermann’ is valuable and interesting as a pathological study; as a reflection of the spirit of revolt and discouragement which swept over Europe, and spurred on Rousseau, Byron, and many others. Senancour strongly felt himself a product of his time. Voltairean cynicism struggled in him with Rousseauesque sensibility,—the latter augmenting a longing to believe, while the former made faith impossible. He had the terrible controlling self-consciousness which prevented a moment’s escape from his own unsatisfied desires. He was too noble, too much of an idealist, to enjoy what was petty and possible; but there are envious tones in Obermann, who sometimes seems half to despise himself that he cannot do and feel like other men.	4
The strong note of Senancour’s character was an uncompromising need of sincerity. He detested hypocrisy in himself and others. He sought truth at the price of all pleasant illusion. His work evidences Rousseau’s influence; but unlike Rousseau, he never posed. His confidences are genuinely unreserved. His constant unhappiness—as George Sand pointed out in an appreciation which prefaces the later editions of ‘Obermann’—was caused by want of proportion between his power of conception and his capacity to perform. He had a lifelong realization of failure. He was akin to Amiel, but less scholarly; more emotional and less intellectual.	5
In love of nature he found perhaps his keenest satisfaction. He is eloquent in description of the Alpine summits with their fair cold austerity, and the pleasant valleys, the mountain streams, and the green pastures, upon which he loved to look down.	6
Senancour was always oppressed by poverty. Forced to write for his living for half a century, and unable to win favor, he fell into want in his old age. His friends’ efforts, especially those of Thiers and Villemain, obtained for him a small pension from Louis Philippe which rendered him comfortable until his death at St. Cloud in 1846. - www.bartleby.com/library/prose/4627.html

LETTER XXX
PARIS, March 7 (III). It was cloudy and somewhat cold; I was in a dejected frame of mind, and wandered on through incapacity for doing anything else. I passed a few flowers growing on a wall over which I could just lean, and among them there was a jonquil in bloom. It is the strongest expression of desire, the year's first fragrance. I apprehended all the happiness destined for man. That unspeakable harmony of existences, the phantom of the ideal world, was present in its fulness within me. Never had I experienced anything more grand or so instantaneous. I was baffled in discovering what form, what analogy, what secret correspondence caused me to discern in this flower an illimitable beauty, the expression, the elegance, the mien of a happy and unsophisticated woman in all the grace and splendour of the season of love. Never shall I grasp that power; that vastness which eludes all expression; that form which nothing can contain; that conception of a better world, which is felt by us and Nature has not made; that heavenly ray, which we think to seize, which we long for, which wraps us away, and is yet only an indiscernible, wandering phantom, lost in the abyss of darkness. But this shadow, this image beautified in the vagueness, strong with all the fascination of the unknown, become indispensable amidst our miseries, grown native to our overcharged hearts—what man is there who, once privileged to behold it, can forget it forever? When the resistance, the inertia of a dead, rude, depraved power, ensnares, enwinds, oppresses and plunges us in uncertainties, disgust, frivolities and cruel or senseless excesses; when we know and possess nothing; when all things marshal before us like the grotesque images of an odious or absurd dream, who shall repress in our hearts the need of another order and another nature? And must this light be nothing but a fantastic gleam? It allures, it persuades in the universal night. It enthralls us and we pursue it; if it misdirects, at least it enlightens and enkindles us. We picture in our hearts and seem indeed to behold on earth a land of peace, of order, of unison, of justice, where Nature's finer feelings reign in all, where all desire and enjoy with the delicacy which originates, and the simplicity which multiplies pleasures. When we have thus conceived unalterable and permanent delights, when we have imaged all the frankness of true pleasure, how vain and miserable are the cares, the yearnings, the delights of the visible world! All is cold, all empty; we vegetate in a place of exile, and from the depth of our loathing we fix hearts overcharged with weariness on our imagined fatherland. All which engrosses them here, all which impedes, is henceforward as an enslaving chain; we should smile in our pity if we were not overwhelmed in our sorrow. And when imagination wings its flight once more towards those higher spheres, and compares a reasonable world with this wherein all fatigues and all wearies, we can no longer feel assured whether the sublime conception is only a blissful dream which leads us astray from realities, or whether social life is not itself one long aberration.

Alpine Scenery
Conditions of Happiness
Obermann’s Isolation