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"Chez Obermann la sensibilite est active, l'intelligence est paresseuse ou insuffisante." He has a certain antique power of making the truisms of life splendid and impressive. No one can write more poetical exercises than he on the old text of pulvis et umbra sumus, but beyond this his philosophical power fails him.
The more carefully I meditate on this speculation, the better grounded it seems. The weather we are learning to know much more about than when the solitary Obermann penned his despondent dreams; but who shall predict the time when men will tell the truth? I now pass to the third great mythical cyclus, which I have called that of the Hierarchy of the Gods.
The other is the still better Heine's Grave, and contains the famous and slightly pusillanimous lines about the "weary Titan," which are among the best known of their author's, and form at once the motto and the stigma of mid-century Liberal policy. And then the book is concluded by two other elegies in rhyme this time The Stanzas written at the Grande Chartreuse and Obermann once more.
"Well, you see, Julie isn't, at all," she added, hastily. "You need not have troubled yourself to tell me that," was the Duke's indignant reply. After a fortnight at Camaldoli and Vallombrosa the Delafields turned towards Switzerland. Julie, who was a lover of Rousseau and Obermann, had been also busy with the letters of Byron. She wished to see with her own eyes St.
Calderón had faith, robust Catholic faith; but for him who lacks faith, for him who cannot believe in what Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca believed, there always remains the attitude of Obermann. If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory; let us fight against it quixotically.
Yes, René and Adolphe and Obermann and Lara, perhaps they were all pedants.... The question is to seek consolation in disconsolation. The philosophy of Bergson, which is a spiritualist restoration, essentially mystical, medieval, Quixotesque, has been called a demi-mondaine philosophy. Leave out the demi; call it mondaine, mundane.
And the result is another soul's tragedy, another story of conflict and failure, which throws fresh light on the mysterious capacities of human nature, and warns us, as the letters of Obermann in their day warned the generation of George Sand, that with the rise of new intellectual perceptions new spiritual dangers come into being, and that across the path of continuous evolution which the modern mind is traversing there lies many a selva oscura, many a lonely and desolate tract, in which loss and pain await it.
The passion of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one's later day. This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human natural things. I take this passage from 'Obermann, a French novel that had some vogue in its day: "Paris, March 7. It was dark and rather cold.
Like Obermann, I hide my head "from the wild tempest of the age," but in a much dearer place than "chalets near the Alpine snow." Long ago I said, to one who would not listen, that "all the religions of the world are based on false foundations, resting on the Family, and fatally unsound." Here the Family, in our sense, has not been developed.
I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, René, Obermann, Thomson, Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge. And there are, I believe, peoples who possess this tragic sense of life also. It is to this that we must now turn our attention, beginning with this matter of health and disease.
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