Tuesday, September 28, 2021

Senancour




LETTER XXIV

Fontainebleau, October 28th, 2d year.

The frosts depart, and I give no heed ; spring dies, and I am not moved ; summer passes, and I feel no regret. But I take delight in walking over the fallen leaves, on the last of the beautiful days, in the unclothed forest.

Whence come to man the most lasting of the delights of his heart, that rapture of sadness, that charm full of secrets, which make him live on his sorrows and be still content with himself in the midst of the sense of his ruin ? I cling to the happy season that will soon have passed away ; a belated interest, a contradictory delight, draws me to her as she is about to die. The same moral law which makes the idea of destruction painful to me, makes me also love the sentiment of it in the things of this world that must pass away before me. It is natural that we should more fully enjoy the life which perishes, when, conscious of its frailty, we feel that it still lives on within us. When death separates us from things, they subsist without us. But when the leaves fall, vegetation is at an end, and dies ; while we live on for new generations. Autumn is full of delight, because, for us, spring is yet to come. 

Spring is more beautiful in nature ; but man, by his works, has made autumn sweeter. The awakening green, the singing bird, the opening flower, and that fire which returns to give strength to life, and the shadows which shield those hidden retreats, and that luxuriant grass, that wild fruit, those soft nights which invite to liberty ! Season of joy ! You fill me with dread in my burning unrest. I find deeper repose towards the eve of the year ; the season when all things seem to die is the only time when I sleep  in peace on the earth of man. 


From Obermann (1804) by Étienne Pivert de Senancour (1770 - 1846), translated by Jessie Peabody Frothingham (1901).


[Here's the original text in French:

Lorsque les frimas s'éloignent, je m'en aperçois à peine ; le printemps passe, et ne m'a pas attaché ; l'été passe, je ne le regrette point. Mais je me plais à marcher sur les feuilles tombées, aux derniers beaux jours, dans la forêt dépouillée.

D'où vient à l'homme la plus durable des jouissances de son coeur, cette volupté de la mélancolie, ce charme plein de secrets, qui le fait vivre de ses douleurs et s'aimer encore dans le sentiment de sa ruine? Je m'attache à la saison heureuse qui bientôt ne sera plus : un intérêt tardif, un plaisir qui paraît contradictoire, m'amène à elle lorsqu'elle va finir. Une même loi morale me rend pénible l'idée de la destruction, et m'en fait aimer ici le sentiment dans ce qui doit cesser avant moi. Il est naturel que nous jouissions mieux de l'existence périssable , lorsque , avertis de toute sa fragilité, nous la sentons néanmoins durer en nous. Quand la mort nous sépare des choses, elles subsistent sans nous. Mais, à la chute des feuilles, la végétation s'arrête, elle meurt; nous, nous restons pour des générations nouvelles : l'automne est délicieux parce que le printemps doit venir encore pour nous.

Le printemps est plus beau dans la nature; mais l'homme a tellement fait que l'automne est plus doux. La verdure qui naît, l'oiseau qui chante, la fleur qui s'ouvre ; et ce feu qui revient affermir la vie, ces ombrages qui protégent d'obscurs asiles; et ces herbes fécondes, ces fruits sans culture, ces nuits faciles qui permettent l'indépendance ! Saison du bonheur ! je vous redoute, trop dans mon ardente inquiétude. Je trouve plus de repos vers le soir de l'année : la saison où tout parait finir est la seule où je dorme en paix sur la terre de l'homme.


(I notice that this edition (1852, with George Sand´s preface) spells the author's surname as "de Sénancour" but this spelling isn't shown in his French Wikipedia entry, so I'm not sure what to make of that.)

Well, I suppose it was bound to happen eventually: I began to think about the mysterious "Obermann", this name I had ignored for so long. 

Here it was in Liszt's "Vallée d'Obermann", the intense centrepiece of his magnificent first book of "Années de pèlerinage" (the one about Switzerland).



(Frank Lévy performing "Vallée d'Obermann" by Franz Liszt. From what I've read the first version of this piece was composed back in the mid-late 1830s, then revised about 1850.)

Also, there were Matthew Arnold's Obermann poems. 

Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann" (1849).

... The white mists rolling like a sea;
I hear the torrents roar.
—Yes, Obermann, all speaks of thee;
I feel thee near once more.

I turn thy leaves; I feel their breath
Once more upon me roll;
That air of languor, cold, and death,
Which brooded o'er thy soul.  ...

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse (1855)

... Or are we easier, to have read,
O Obermann! the sad, stern page,
Which tells us how thou hidd'st thy head
From the fierce tempest of thine age
In the lone brakes of Fontainebleau,
Or chalets near the Alpine snow?  ...

(For a much longer conversation with this poem, see this post:



Obermann Once More (1867)

...    Ah, Jaman! delicately tall
Above his sun-warm'd firs—
What thoughts to me his rocks recall,
What memories he stirs!

And who but thou must be, in truth,
Obermann! with me here?
Thou master of my wandering youth,
But left this many a year!

Yes, I forget the world's work wrought,
Its warfare waged with pain;
An eremite with thee, in thought
Once more I slip my chain,

And to thy mountain-chalet come,
And lie beside its door,
And hear the wild bee's Alpine hum,
And thy sad, tranquil lore!

Again I feel the words inspire
Their mournful calm; serene,
Yet tinged with infinite desire
For all that might have been—   ...

The critic and educator who was so insistent on us focussing on the great classics, those exemplifying "high seriousness" (Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton), kept coming back in his own lyric poetry to an unanswered question, his strange obsession with this not very well-known French book. A book by a self-confessed failure, a man who stood apart from the world and never seemed able to arouse in himself the noble aims of public service and achievement that Arnold had conscientiously taken up. 

Both Liszt and Arnold place their evocations of Obermann in an alpine setting. Senancour's book consists of about ninety letters by this alter ego, scattered over nine years. The book describes visits to the Alps at the start (Year 1) and again towards the end (Year 6 etc). 

You can read substantial selections of Obermann in the Frothingham translation that I'm quoting from here. But what you can also do, and what I'm doing most evenings, is listen to the complete Obermann in this Librivox reading by Jim Locke (This is the 1903 translation by Arthur Edward Waite):

Here's one of the best-known alpine letters. This is mainly the Frothingham translation, but she excluded a few passages, which I've restored in my own words. 


LETTER VII

Saint-Maurice, September 3d, 1st year.

I have been to the region of perpetual ice, on the Dent du Midi. Before the sun shone upon the valley I had already reached the bluff overlooking the town, and was crossing the partly cultivated stretch of ground which covers it. I went on by a steep ascent, through dense forests of fir-trees, leveled in many places by winters long since passed away ; fruitful decay, vast and confused mass of a vegetation that had died and had regerminated from the remains of its former life. At eight o'clock I had reached the bare summit which crowns the ascent, and which forms the first salient step in that wondrous pile whose highest peak still rose so far beyond me. Then I dismissed my guide, and put my own powers to the test. I wanted that no hireling should intrude upon this Alpine liberty, that no man of the plains should come to weaken the austerity of these savage regions. I felt my whole being broaden, as it was left alone among the obstacles and the dangers of a rugged nature, far from the artificial trammels and the ingenious oppression of men. 

I stood fixed and exultant as I watched the rapid disappearance of the only man whom I was likely to see among these mighty precipices. On the ground I left watch, money, everything that I had about me, and almost all my clothing, without taking any care to conceal it. Thus, you may remark, the first act of my independence was bizarre to say the least, and I resembled those children who have been too confined, and who commit only stupid acts once left to themselves. I'll admit there was something of puerility in my haste to abandon everything, in my new cut-down equipment, but at any rate I went along more at my ease, and often holding between my teeth the branch I had cut to help me in the descent, I started to crawl along the ridge of rocks which connects this minor peak with the principal mass. Several times I dragged myself between two bottomless chasms. And in this way I reached the granite peaks. 

My guide had told me that I could climb no higher, and for some time I was brought to a standstill. But at last, by descending a short distance, I found an easier way, and, climbing with the audacity of a mountaineer, I reached a hollow filled with frozen and crusted snow, which had lain unmelted by the summer suns. Still I mounted higher ; but on reaching the foot of the highest peak of the Dent, I found I could not climb to its summit, for its steep sides were scarcely out of the perpendicular, and it seemed to rise five hundred feet above me. 

I had crossed few fields of snow, yet my unprotected eyes, wearied by its brilliancy, and parched by the glare of the noon sun on its frozen surface, could see but vaguely the surrounding objects. Besides, many of the peaks were unknown to me, and I could be sure of only the most important ones. Since I have been in Switzerland I have read nothing but Saussure, Bourrit, the Guide to Switzerland, etc., but I am still very much a stranger in the Alps. Yet I could not mistake the colossal summit of Mont Blanc, which rose far above me ; that of Velan ; one more distant, but still higher, which I took to be Mont Rosa ; and, on the opposite side of the valley, near me but lower down, the Dent de Morcles, beyond the chasms. The peak that I could not climb, shut off what was perhaps the most striking part of this scene. For, behind it, stretched the long depths of the Valais, inclosed on each side by the glaciers of Sanetsch, of Lauterbrunnen, and of the Pennine Alps, and ending in the domes of the Saint Gothard and the Titlis, the snows of the Furca, and the pyramids of the Schreckhorn and the Finster-Aar-Horn. 

But this view of the mountain-tops outspread at the feet of man, this view so grand, so majestic, so far removed from the monotonous vacuity of the plains, was still not the object of my quest in the midst of unfettered nature, of silent fixity, of unsullied ether. On the lowlands, natural man is of necessity undergoing continual change by breathing that social atmosphere, so dense, stormy, seething, forever troubled by the clamor of the arts, the din of ostensible pleasures, the cries of hate, and the endless laments of anxiety and of sorrow. But on those desert peaks, where the sky is measureless, and the air is more stable, and time less fleeting, and life more permanent, -- there, all nature gives eloquent expression to a vaster order, a more visible harmony, an eternal whole. There, man is reinstated in his changeful but indestructible form ; he breathes a free air far from social emanations ; he exists only for himself and for the universe ; he lives a life of reality in the midst of sublime unity.

This was the feeling that I desired, that I sought. Uncertain of myself, in an order of things which has been devised with unwearied pains by ingenious and childish minds, I scaled the heights to ask of nature why I should feel ill at ease in their midst. I wished to know whether my existence was out of place in the human economy, or whether the present social order is unrelated to eternal harmony, like some irregularity or accidental exception in the progress of the world. At last I believe I am sure of myself. There are moments which dispel mistrust, prejudice, uncertainties, -- when the truth comes to us with an overruling and unalterable conviction.

Thus may it be! I shall live, miserable and almost ridiculous, on an earth enslaved by the caprices of this ephemeral world, opposing to my ennuis this conviction, which places me, within, nearer to the man I would be. And were I to meet with someone whose character is so inflexible that his being, formed on the above model, cannot be yielded up to the imprinting of society; yes if, I say, I should chance to meet with such a man, we will understand each other ; he will be mine and I his for evermore ; we will transfer to each other our relations with the rest of the world ; and quit of other men, whose vain needs we shall pity, we will pursue, if it may be, a more natural and more equal life. But who is to say if it would be any happier, without any harmony with the things around us, and passed in the midst of suffering nations? 

I cannot give you a true impression of this new world, or express the permanence of the mountains in the language of the plains. The hours seemed to me both more serene and more productive; and, even as though the planets, amid the universal calm, had been arrested in their course, I was conscious that the gradual train of my thoughts, full of deliberation and of energy, could in no wise be hastened, yet was pressing forward at unusual speed. When I wished to estimate its duration, I saw that the sun had not kept pace with it, and I inferred that the consciousness of existence is really more inert and more sterile amid the tumult of human surroundings. I realized that thought, while less hurried, is more truly active among the mountains -- on their peaceful heights -- even though visible movements are more gradual. The man of the valleys consumes without enjoyment the span of his restless and feverish days ; he is like unto those ever-moving insects which waste their efforts in futile vacillations, while others, equally weak, but more tranquil, by their straight and unflagging course, outstrip them in the race. 

The day was hot, the horizon veiled with haze, the valleys flooded with mist. The brilliancy of the fields of ice filled the lower atmosphere with its luminous reflections ; but an undreamed-of purity seemed to form the essence of the air I breathed. At that height, no exhalations from the lowlands, no effects of light and shade, either disturbed or interrupted the vague and sombre depth of the skies. Their seeming color was no longer that pale and luminous blue, the soft canopy of the plains, the charming and delicate blend which forms a visible inclosure to the inhabited earth, and is a rest and a goal to the eye. In those high regions, the invisible ether allowed the gaze to lose itself in boundless space ; in the midst of the splendor of the sun and of the glaciers, to seek other worlds and other suns, as under the vast sky of the night ; and above the burning atmosphere of the day, to penetrate a nocturnal universe.

Stealthily the mist rose from the glaciers and was shaped into clouds at my feet. The snows had lost their dazzling brightness, and the sky grew deeper still and full of shadow. A fog covered the Alps ; here and there a solitary peak rose out of this ocean of mist ; held in their rugged clefts, lines of shimmering snow gave the granite a blacker and a sterner look. The snow-white dome of Mont Blanc lifted its imperishable mass above this gray and moving sea, above these drifts of fog, which were furrowed by the wind and piled in towering waves. A black point appeared in this abyss ; it rose rapidly, and came straight towards me ; it was the mighty eagle of the Alps ; his wings were wet, his eye fierce ; he was in search of prey, but at the sight of man he fled with a sinister cry and was lost as he plunged into the clouds. Twenty times the cry reechoed, but the sounds were short and sharp, like twenty separate cries in the universal silence. Then absolute stillness fell upon all things, as though sound itself had ceased to exist, and the power of sound had been effaced from the universe. Never has silence been known in the tumultuous valleys ; only on the icy summits does that stability, that solid permanence remain, which no tongue can express, which the imagination is powerless to attain. Except for the memories of the plains, man could not conceive of any movement in nature beyond himself ; the course of the planets would be incomprehensible ; even to the changes of the mist, everything would seem to subsist in the very act of change. Each actual moment having the appearance of continuity, man would have the certainty without ever having the sentiment of the succession of things ; and the perpetual mutations of the universe would be to his mind an impenetrable mystery. 

I wish that I could have kept surer records, not of my general impressions in that land of silence, for they will never be forgotten, but of the ideas to which they gave birth, and of which scarcely a memory has been left to me. In the midst of scenes so different, the imagination recalls with difficulty an order of thought which seems to be in disaccord with all the objects of its present surroundings. I should have had to write down what I felt ; but then my emotions would soon have fallen to the level of everyday experience. This solicitude to harvest one's thought for future use has in it an element of servility which belongs to the painstaking efforts of a dependent life. 

Not in moments of ardor does one take heed of  other times and other men ; in those hours one's thoughts are not born for the sake of artificial conventionalities, of fame, or even for the good of others. One is more natural, without even a desire to utilize the present moment : no thoughts that come at one's behest, no reflection, no spirit of intellectual investigation, no search for hidden things, no attempt to find the new and strange. Thought is not active and ordered, but passive and free: dreams, and complete abandonment ; depth without comprehension, greatness without enthusiasm, energy without volition ; to muse, not to meditate, -- this is one's attitude. Do not, then, be surprised if, after an experience in thought and emotion which will perhaps never be repeated during my life, I still have nothing to tell you. You remember those nature-lovers of the Dauphiné, who expected so much from Jean-Jacques, and were so bitterly disappointed. They went with him to a vantage ground well suited to the kindling of a poetic genius ; they waited for a magnificent burst of eloquence ; but the author of Julie sat on the ground, dallied with some blades of grass, and said not a word.

It may have been five o'clock when I noticed how the shadows began to lengthen, and how the cold crept over me, in the angle, open to the western sky, where I had long lain upon the granite rock. It was too treacherous to walk over those steep crags, and so I could not keep in motion. The mists had disappeared, and I saw that the evening was beautiful even in the valleys.

I would have been in real danger if the clouds had thickened ; but I had not thought of it until this moment. The bed of grosser air that envelops the earth was more foreign to me in this pure air that I breathed, approaching to ether ; all prudence had dropped away from me, as if it were an accoutrement belonging only to the life of falsity. 

Descending once more to inhabited earth, I felt that I again took up the long chain of anxieties and weariness. I returned at ten o'clock ; the moon shone upon my window. I heard the rushing of the Rhone ; there was no wind ; the city slept. I thought of the mountains I had left, of Charrières which is to be my home, of the liberty which I have claimed as mine. 


*

This letter gives a pretty good idea of what Senancour has to offer. He's a superb nature writer. He is usually uninterested in small detail. But his vocabulary, dry, austere and abstract, yet always distinct and often unexpected, is brilliant at evoking the large effects of landscape.

Though the two authors differ in so many ways, a comparison with some of Wordsworth's most outstanding qualities is sure to suggest itself. 

Senancour is often an intriguingly unusual thinker. Subsisting on his private income, having cut himself free from nearly all human relations, there's something feral about him; he opens up lines of thought never glimpsed by authors more assimilated to the received opinions of civilisation. 

At the same time, this thought can seem obscure or trifling, and sometimes when Jim Locke's voice falls silent at the end of a letter I find I've almost drifted off. Obermann is gloomy and almost without action or progress. But it's excitingly different, too. I can certainly sense the compulsive quality acknowledged by its fans. 









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