Poems by Matthew Arnold | ||
STANZAS IN MEMORY OF THE AUTHOR OF “OBERMANN.”
The author of Obermann, Étienne Pivert de Senancour, has
little celebrity in France, his own country; and out of France
he is almost unknown. But the profound inwardness, the
austere sincerity, of his principal work, Obermann, the delicate
feeling for nature which it exhibits, and the melancholy eloquence
of many passages of it, have attracted and charmed some
of the most remarkable spirits of this century, such as George
Sand and Sainte-Beuve, and will probably always find a certain
number of spirits whom they touch and interest.
Senancour was born in 1770. He was educated for the priesthood,
and passed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice;
broke away from the Seminary and from France itself, and
passed some years in Switzerland, where he married; returned
to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career
of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. He
died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be
placed these words only: Éternité, deviens mon asile!
The influence of Rousseau, and certain affinities with more
famous and fortunate authors of his own day,—Chateaubriand
and Madame de Staël,—are everywhere visible in Senancour.
But though, like these eminent personages, he may be called a
sentimental writer, and though Obermann, a collection of letters
from Switzerland treating almost entirely of nature and of the
human soul, may be called a work of sentiment, Senancour has
a gravity and severity which distinguish him from all other
writers of the sentimental school. The world is with him in
his solitude far less than it is with them; of all writers he is
the most perfectly isolated and the least attitudinising. His
chief work, too, has a value and power of its own, apart from
these merits of its author. The stir of all the main forces, by
which modern life is and has been impelled, lives in the letters
of Obermann; the dissolving agencies of the eighteenth century,
the fiery storm of the French Revolution, the first faint promise
and dawn of that new world which our own time is but now
more fully bringing to light,—all these are to be felt, almost to
be touched, there. To me, indeed, it will always seem that the
impressiveness of this production can hardly be rated too high.
Besides Obermann there is one other of Senancour's works
which, for those spirits who feel his attraction, is very interesting;
its title is, Libres Méditations d'un Solitaire Inconnu.
The author of Obermann, Étienne Pivert de Senancour, has little celebrity in France, his own country; and out of France he is almost unknown. But the profound inwardness, the austere sincerity, of his principal work, Obermann, the delicate feeling for nature which it exhibits, and the melancholy eloquence of many passages of it, have attracted and charmed some of the most remarkable spirits of this century, such as George Sand and Sainte-Beuve, and will probably always find a certain number of spirits whom they touch and interest.
Senancour was born in 1770. He was educated for the priesthood, and passed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice; broke away from the Seminary and from France itself, and passed some years in Switzerland, where he married; returned to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only: Éternité, deviens mon asile!
The influence of Rousseau, and certain affinities with more famous and fortunate authors of his own day,—Chateaubriand and Madame de Staël,—are everywhere visible in Senancour. But though, like these eminent personages, he may be called a sentimental writer, and though Obermann, a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of nature and of the human soul, may be called a work of sentiment, Senancour has a gravity and severity which distinguish him from all other writers of the sentimental school. The world is with him in his solitude far less than it is with them; of all writers he is the most perfectly isolated and the least attitudinising. His chief work, too, has a value and power of its own, apart from these merits of its author. The stir of all the main forces, by which modern life is and has been impelled, lives in the letters of Obermann; the dissolving agencies of the eighteenth century, the fiery storm of the French Revolution, the first faint promise and dawn of that new world which our own time is but now more fully bringing to light,—all these are to be felt, almost to be touched, there. To me, indeed, it will always seem that the impressiveness of this production can hardly be rated too high.
Besides Obermann there is one other of Senancour's works which, for those spirits who feel his attraction, is very interesting; its title is, Libres Méditations d'un Solitaire Inconnu.
November, 1849.
Crawls up its rocky stair;
The autumn storm-winds drive the rack,
Close o'er it, in the air.
Mute in their meadows lone;
The leaves are on the valley-paths,
The mists are on the Rhone—
I hear the torrents roar.
—Yes, Obermann, all speaks of thee;
I feel thee near once more!
Once more upon me roll;
That air of languor, cold, and death,
Which brooded o'er thy soul.
Condemn'd to cast about,
All shipwreck in thy own weak heart,
For comfort from without!
Beneath the calm they feign;
A wounded human spirit turns,
Here, on its bed of pain.
Fresh through these pages blows;
Though to these leaves the glaciers spare
The soul of their white snows;
Of many a dark-bough'd pine;
Though, as you read, you hear the bells
Of the high-pasturing kine—
And brooding mountain-bee,
There sobs I know not what ground-tone
Of human agony.
Is fraught too deep with pain,
That, Obermann! the world around
So little loves thy strain?
For the world loves new ways;
To tell too deep ones is not well—
It knows not what he says.
In this our troubled day,
I know but two, who have attain'd,
Save thee, to see their way.
His quiet home one keeps;
And one, the strong much-toiling sage,
In German Weimar sleeps.
From half of human fate;
And Goethe's course few sons of men
May think to emulate.
His eyes on Nature's plan;
Neither made man too much a God,
Nor God too much a man.
From mists, and sane, and clear;
Clearer, how much! than ours—yet we
Have a worse course to steer.
Of a tremendous time,
Yet in a tranquil world was pass'd
His tenderer youthful prime.
Of change, alarm, surprise—
What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
What leisure to grow wise?
Buried a wave beneath,
The second wave succeeds, before
We have had time to breathe.
Too harass'd, to attain
Wordsworth's sweet calm, or Goethe's wide
And luminous view to gain.
To thee! we feel thy spell!
—The hopeless tangle of our age,
Thou too hast scann'd it well!
As death, composed to bear!
Thy head is clear, thy feeling chill,
And icy thy despair.
I hear thee saying now:
Greater by far than thou art dead;
Strive not! die also thou!
The poet's feverish blood.
One drives him to the world without,
And one to solitude.
Where, where do these abound?—
Not in the world, not in the strife
Of men, shall they be found.
Knows how the day hath gone.
He only lives with the world's life,
Who hath renounced his own.
Where thou, O seer! art set;
Thy realm of thought is drear and cold—
The world is colder yet!
With those who come to thee—
Balms floating on thy mountain-air,
And healing sights to see.
On Jaman, hast thou sate
By some high chalet-door, and seen
The summer-day grow late;
With the pale crocus starr'd,
And reach that glimmering sheet of glass
Beneath the piny sward,
And watch'd the rosy light
Fade from the distant peaks of snow;
And on the air of night
Through the pine branches play—
Listen'd, and felt thyself grow young!
Listen'd and wept—Away!
And thou, sad guide, adieu!
I go, fate drives me; but I leave
Half of my life with you.
Move on a rigorous line;
Can neither, when we will, enjoy,
Nor, when we will, resign.
Thou melancholy shade!
Wilt not, if thou canst see me now,
Condemn me, nor upbraid.
And place with those dost claim,
The Children of the Second Birth,
Whom the world could not tame;
Whom many a different way
Conducted to their common land,
Thou learn'st to think as they.
Soldier and anchorite,
Distinctions we esteem so grave,
Are nothing in their sight.
Who was on action hurl'd,
Whose one bond is, that all have been
Unspotted by the world.
Him who obeys thy spell
No more, so he but rest, like thee,
Unsoil'd!—and so, farewell.
That much-loved inland sea,
The ripples of whose blue waves cheer
Vevey and Meillerie;
Where with clear-rustling wave
The scented pines of Switzerland
Stand dark round thy green grave,
Issuing on that green place
The early peasant still recalls
The pensive stranger's face,
Ere he plods on again;—
Or whether, by maligner fate,
Among the swarms of men,
The blue Seine rolls her wave,
The Capital of Pleasure sees
The hardly-heard-of grave;—
In this stern Alpine dell.
O unstrung will! O broken heart!
A last, a last farewell!
Poems by Matthew Arnold | ||