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The reverie of Senancour, on the bank of the Lake of Bienne, quoted by Matthew Arnold, reveals the same emotion: "Vast consciousness of a nature everywhere greater than we are, and everywhere impenetrable; all-embracing passion, ripened wisdom, delicious self-abandonment."
Senancour and Maurice de Guérin in one, seem to have been supplemented here by a larger experience, a far greater education, than either of them had attained to. And with a writer so vivid and impressive as Amiel, those varieties of tendency are apt to present themselves as so many contending persons.
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."
Montesquieu said that true divorce must be the result of mutual consent and based on the impossibility of living together. Sénancour seems to agree with Montesquieu. In France the leaders of the movement of social reform seem to be almost, or quite, unanimous in believing that the next step in regard to divorce is the establishment of divorce by mutual consent.
Maurice de Guerin, again, is the inventor of new terms in the language of feeling, a poet as Amiel and Senancour are. His love of nature, the earth-passion which breathes in his letters and journal, has a strange savor, a force and flame which is all his own. Beside his actual sense of community with the visible world, Amiel's love of landscape has a tame, didactic air.
Eso que llaman derecho penal, y que es todo menos derecho. The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table. L'homme est périssable. II se peut; mais périssons en résistant, et, si le néant nous est reservé, ne faisons pas que ce soit une justice. SÉNANCOUR: Obermann, lettre xc.
It is exemplified, almost equally, by writers as unlike each other as Senancour and Théophile Gautier: as a singular chapter in the history of the human mind, its growth might be traced from Rousseau to Chateaubriand, from Chateaubriand to Victor Hugo: it has doubtless some latent connexion with those pantheistic theories which locate an intelligent soul in material things, and have largely exercised men's minds in some modern systems of philosophy: it is traceable even in the graver writings of historians: it makes as much difference between ancient and modern landscape art, as there is between the rough masks of an early mosaic and a portrait by Reynolds or Gainsborough.
The girl is full of vague and romantic faith in the promises of love, often heightened by the ecstasies depicted in sentimental novels from which every touch of wholesome reality has been carefully omitted. "All the candor of faith is there," as Sénancour puts it in his book De l'Amour, "the desires of inexperience, the needs of a new life, the hopes of an upright heart.
The desultory agglomeration of never so definitely rendered details necessarily leaves the civilized appreciation cold. What distinguishes the civilized from the savage appreciation is the passion for order. The tendency to order, said Sénancour, should form "an essential part of our inclinations, of our instinct, like the tendencies to self-preservation and to reproduction."
Concerning economic marriage as a vestigial survival, see, e.g., Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time, p. 212. Sénancour, De l'Amour, vol. ii, p. 233. The author of The Question of English Divorce attributes the absence of any widespread feeling against sexual license to the absurd rigidity of the law. Bruno Meyer, "Etwas von Positiver Sexualreform," Sexual-Probleme, Nov., 1908.
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