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Updated: May 20, 2025
'C'est peu de chose, says Obermann, 'de n'être point comme le vulgaire des hommes; mais c'est avoir fait un pas vers la sagesse, que de n'être plus comme le vulgaire des sages. This penetrating remark hits the difference between De Senancourt himself and most of the school.
The writer De Senancourt, not at all of a religious turn, in speculating on the shortest possible road to general happiness, concluded that if we were able to foretell the weather a reasonable time ahead, and if men would make it a rule to speak the truth as near as they can, these two conditions would remove nine-tenths of the misery in the world.
He is absolutely free from the vulgarity of wisdom, and breathes the air of higher peaks, taking us through mysterious and fragrant pine-woods, where more than he may find meditative repose amid the heat and stress of that practical day, of which he and his school can never bear the burden. In that vulgaire des sages, of which De Senancourt had none, Byron abounded.
'Quand il n'y a plus de principes dans le coeur, says De Senancourt, 'on est bien scrupuleux sur les apparences publiques et sur les devoirs d'opinion. We have simply got for our pains a most unlovely leanness of judgment, and ever since the days when this temper set in until now, when a wholesome rebellion is afoot, it has steadily and powerfully tended to straiten character, to make action mechanical, and to impoverish art.
Less strongly intellectual natures, as Maine de Biran, De Senancourt, and Matthew Arnold, listen with admiration, but feel how unknown to the mass of human kind must remain the tongue these masters speak. Thus did the religious sentiment seek its satisfaction in the idealization, first of physical force, then of form, and last of mental force, but in each case turned away unsatisfied.
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