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In the last chapter of Edgar Quinet's Revolution Française, a work itself full of irony, of disillusion, he distinguishes two books, Senancour's Obermann and Chateaubriand's Génie du Christianisme, as characteristic of the first decade of the present century.
He lay and thought of the unbroken solitude of his college rooms, of Senancour's flight from human kind, of the uselessness of all friendship, the absurdity of all effort, and could hardly persuade himself to get up and face a futile world, which had, moreover, the enormous disadvantage for the moment of being a new one. Convention, however, is master even of an Obermann.
He lay and thought of the unbroken solitude of his college rooms, of Senancour's flight from human kind, of the uselessness of all friendship, the absurdity of all effort, and could hardly persuade himself to get up and face a futile world, which had, moreover, the enormous disadvantage for the moment of being a new one. Convention, however, is master even of an Obermann.
Not for nothing did its author choose as one of the mottoes for its title-page, 'Ce ne sont mes gestes que j'écrie; c'est moy. It may be said of this book, as of Senancour's Oberman: 'A fever in these pages burns; Beneath the calm they feign, A wounded human spirit turns Here on its bed of pain. The still small voice of its author whispers through My Confidences.
And the famous maladie du siècle, which announced itself in Rousseau and was exhibited more plainly in Sénancour's Obermann than in any other character, neither was nor is anything else but the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul, in the human finality of the Universe. The truest symbol of it is to be found in a creation of fiction, Dr. Faustus. This immortal Dr.
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