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Updated: June 20, 2025
How can you afford to wait until the day when your creation shall rise again, raised from the dead how? when? and by whom? Take a magnificent book, the pianto of unbelief; Obermann is a solitary wanderer in the desert places of booksellers' warehouses, he has been a 'nightingale, ironically so called, from the very beginning: when will his Easter come? Who knows?
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.
I might reply in the words of Obermann, that tremendous man Obermann: "For the universe, nothing for myself, everything"; but no, I would rather remind him of a doctrine of the man Kant to wit, that we ought to think of our fellow-men not as means but as ends. For the question does not touch me alone, it touches you also, grumbling reader, it touches each and all.
A course of this might have cured even Obermann, whom there was nothing to check or divert while he kept philandering on the mountains with the snows and his woes. There are plenty of such cures for a melancholy not yet incurable; change of air, scene, food, amusement, and occupation being the best.
Hell might afford my miseries a shelter. This is the Puritan sentiment, the preoccupation with sin and predestination; but read the much more terrible words of Sénancour, expressive of the Catholic, not the Protestant, despair, when he makes his Obermann say, "L'homme est périssable. Il se peut; mais périssons en résistant, et, si le néant nous est réservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice."
Upon the average book a writer may be silent; he may set it down to his ill-hap that when his own youth was in the acrid fermentation, he should have fallen and fed upon the cheerless fields of Obermann. Yet to Mr. Matthew Arnold, who led him to these pastures, he still bears a grudge.
And then we go off for a time from Marguerite, though not exactly from Switzerland, in the famous "Obermann" stanzas, a variation of the Wordsworth memorial lines, melodious, but a very little impotent the English utterance of what Sainte-Beuve, I think, called "the discouraged generation of 1850."
"The Scholar Gipsy," "Obermann," "Switzerland," the melancholy majesty of the close of "Sohrab and Rustum," the tenderness of those elegiacs on two kindred graves beneath the Himalayas and by the Midland Sea; the surge and thunder of "Dover Beach," with its "melancholy, long-withdrawing roar;" these can only cease to whisper to us and console us in that latest hour when life herself ceases to "moan round with many voices."
Happiness, at least, is not solitary; it joys to communicate; it loves others, for it depends on them for its existence; it sanctions and encourages to all delights that are not unkind in themselves; if it lived to a thousand, it would not make excision of a single humorous passage; and while the self-improver dwindles towards the prig, and, if he be not of an excellent constitution may even grow deformed into an Obermann, the very name and appearance of a happy man breathe of good-nature, and help the rest of us to live.
The sensibility so charmingly expressed in that delightful correspondence filled her eyes with tears which, it is said, were lacking in those of the wittiest of English writers. Modeste existed for some time on a comprehension, not only of the works, but of the characters of her favorite authors, Goldsmith, the author of Obermann, Charles Nodier, Maturin.
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