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Updated: May 13, 2025
For beside his spiritual experience Obermann's is superficial, and Maurice de Guerin's a passing trouble, a mere quick outburst of passionate feeling. Amiel indeed has neither the continuous romantic beauty nor the rich descriptive wealth of Senancour.
It is on the lines along which Sénancour a century ago and Ellen Key to-day are great pioneers that the new forms of anterior or ideal theoretical morality are now moving, in advance, according to the general tendency in morals, of traditional morality and even of practice.
Why was he so self-distrustful, so absurdly diffident of responsibility, so bent on hiding his great gifts under a bushel? The tutor smiled sadly, and, sitting down, buried his head in his hands and said nothing for a while. Then he looked up and stretched out a hand towards a book which lay on a table near. It was the Réveries of Senancour. 'My answer is written here, he said.
"The consummation of love," says Sénancour, "which is often the end of love with man is only the beginning of love with woman, a test of trust, a gage of future pleasure, a sort of engagement for an intimacy to come."
There is a wonderful bit of unconscious aesthetics in the following passage from Senancour, touching the "secret of relation" we have just analyzed. "It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast- high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year.
On the one side it induces a secret and shamefaced laxity, on the other it upholds a rigid and uninspiring theoretical code which so few can consistently follow that theoretical morality is thereby degraded into a more or less empty form. "The human race would gain much," said the wise Sénancour, "if virtue were made less laborious.
Why was he so self-distrustful, so absurdly diffident of responsibility, so bent on hiding his great gifts under a bushel? The tutor smiled sadly, and, sitting down, buried his head in his hands and said nothing for a while. Then he looked up and stretched out a hand toward a book which lay on a table near. It was the 'Reveries' of Senancour. 'My answer is written here, he said.
So I had written in an essay on Senancour during the days when the little white house was but a dream, and Irma had never come to me across the cleared space in front of Greyfriars Kirk amid the thud of mallets and the "chip" of trowels. But Irma taught me better things. She knew when to be silent. She understood, also, when speech would slacken the tension of the mind.
Above all, the scientific idea in our sense is almost absent; so that while Amiel represents the modern mind at its keenest and best, dealing at will with the vast additions to knowledge which the last fifty years have brought forth, Senancour is still in the eighteenth-century stage, talking like Rousseau of a return to primitive manners, and discussing Christianity in the tone of the "Encyclopedie."
"The human race would gain much," as Sénancour wrote early in the nineteenth century in his remarkable book on love, "if virtue were made less laborious. The merit would not be so great, but what is the use of an elevation which can rarely be sustained?"
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