K ever be, inconsistent with a profound, an almost affectionate veneration for him. But with respect to him, as with respect to Lucretius, I shall freely ask the question, Is he adequate? Does he represent the epoch in which he lived, the mighty Roman world of his time, as the great poets of the great epoch of Greek life represented theirs, in all its fulness, in all its significance ? From the very form itself of his great poem, the Aeneid, one would be led to augur that this was impossible. The epic form, as a form for representing contemporary or 10 nearly contemporary events, has attained, in the poems of Homer, an unmatched, an immortal success; the epic form as employed by learned poets for the reproduction of the events of a past age has attained a very considerable success. But for this purpose, for the poetic treatment of the events of a past age, the epic form is a less vital form than the dramatic form. The great poets of the modern period of Greece are accordingly, as we have seen, the dramatic poets. The chief of these-Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes-have survived: the distinguished 20 epic poets of the same period-Panyasis, Choerilus, Antimachus-though praised by the Alexandrian critics, have perished in a common destruction with the undistinguished. And what is the reason of this? It is, that the dramatic form exhibits, above all, the actions of man as strictly determined by his thoughts and feelings; it exhibits, therefore, what may be always accessible, always intelligible, always interesting. But the epic form takes a wider range; it represents not only the thought and passion of man, that which is universal and eternal, but also the forms of 30 outward life, the fashion of manners, the aspects of nature, that which is local or transient. To exhibit adequately what is local and transient, only a witness, a contemporary, can suffice. In the reconstruction, by learning and antiquarian ingenuity, of the local and transient features of a past age, in their representation by one who is not a witness or contemporary, it is impossible to feel the liveliest kind of interest. What, for instance, is the most interesting portion of the Aeneid, the portion where Virgil seems to be moving most freely, and therefore to 40 be most animated, most forcible? Precisely that portion which has most a dramatic character; the episode of Dido; that portion where locality and manners are nothingwhere persons and characters are everything. We might presume beforehand, therefore, that if Virgil, at a time when contemporary epic poetry was no longer possible, had been inspired to represent human life in its fullest significance, he would not have selected the epic form. Accordingly, what is, in fact, the character of the poem, the frame of mind of the poet? Has the poem depth, the 10 completeness of the poems of Aeschylus or Sophocles, of those adequate and consummate representations of human life? Has the poet the serious cheerfulness of Sophocles, of a man who has mastered the problem of human life, who knows its gravity, and is therefore serious, but who knows that he comprehends it, and is therefore cheerful? Over the whole of the great poem of Virgil, over the whole Aeneid, there rests an ineffable melancholy not a rigid, a moody gloom, like the melancholy of Lucretius; no, a sweet, a touching sadness, but still a sadness; a melan20 choly which is at once a source of charm in the poem, and a testimony to its incompleteness. Virgil, as Niebuhr has well said, expressed no affected self-disparagement, but the haunting, the irresistible self-dissatisfaction of his heart, when he desired on his deathbed that his poem might be destroyed. A man of the most delicate genius, the most rich learning, but of weak health, of the most sensitive nature, in a great and overwhelming world; conscious, at heart, of his inadequacy for the thorough spiritual mastery of that world and its interpretation in 30 a work of art;, conscious of this inadequacy-the one inadequacy, the one weak place in the mighty Roman nature! This suffering, this graceful-minded, this finelygifted man is the most beautiful, the most attractive figure in literary history; but he is not the adequate interpreter of the great period of Rome. 40 We come to Horace and if Lucretius, if Virgil want cheerfulness, Horace wants seriousness. I go back to what I said of Menander: as with Menander so it is with Horace the men of taste, the men of cultivation, the men of the world are enchanted with him; he has not a prejudice, not an illusion, not a blunder. True! yet the best men in the best ages have never been thoroughly satisfied 'Damna tamen celeres reparant coelestia lunae : 'For nature there is renovation, but for man there is none!it is exquisite, but it is not interpretative and fortifying. 20 In the Roman world, then, we have found a highly modern, a deeply significant, an interesting perioda period more significant and more interesting, because fuller, than the great period of Greece; but we have not a commensurate literature. In Greece we have seen a highly modern, a most significant and interesting period, 30 although on a scale of less magnitude and importance than the great period of Rome; but then, co-existing with the great epoch of Greece there is what is wanting to that of Rome, a commensurate, an interesting literature. The intellectual history of our race cannot be clearly understood without applying to other ages, nations, and literatures the same method of inquiry which we have been here imperfectly applying to what is called classical antiquity. But enough has at least been said, perhaps, to establish the absolute, the enduring interest of Greek 40 literature, and, above all, of Greek poetry. OBERMANN [The Academy, October 9, 1869.] THE most recent edition of Obermann lies before me, the date on its title-page being 1863. It is, I believe, the fourth edition which has been published; the book made its first appearance in 1804; three editions, and not large editions, have sufficed for the demand of sixty years. Yet the book has lived, though with but this obscure life, and is not likely to die. Madame George Sand and Monsieur Sainte-Beuve have spoken in prose much and excellently of the book and its author. It may be in the recollection 10 of some who read this that I have spoken of Obermann in verse, if not well, at least abundantly. It is to be wished, however, that Obermann should also speak to English readers for himself; and my present design is to take those two or three points where he is most significant and interesting, and to present some of his deliverances on those points in his own words. It may be convenient, however, that first I should repeat here the short sketch which I have already given elsewhere of the uneventful life of the personage whom 20 we call Obermann. His real name is Senancour. In the book which occupies us,―a volume of letters of which the writer, calling himself Obermann, and writing chiefly from Switzerland, delivers his thoughts about God, nature, and the human soul,-it is Senancour himself who speaks under Obermann's name. Étienne Pivert de Senancour, a Frenchman, although having in his nature much that we are accustomed to consider as by no means French, was born in 1770, was trained for the priesthood, and passed some time in the seminary of St. Sulpice, broke 30 away from his training and country to live some years in Switzerland, where he married, came back to France in middle life, and followed thenceforward the career of a man of letters, but with hardly any fame or success. His marriage was not a happy one. He died an old man in 1846, desiring that on his grave might be placed these words only: 'Eternité, deviens mon asile.' Of the letters of Obermann, the writer's profound inwardness, his austere and sad sincerity, and his delicate feeling for nature, are, as I have elsewhere remarked, the distinguishing characteristics. His constant inwardness, his unremitting occupation with that question which haunted St. Bernard-Bernarde, ad quid venisti ?-distinguish him from Goethe and Wordsworth, whose study of this question 10 is relieved by the thousand distractions of a poetic interest in nature and in man. His severe sincerity distinguishes him from Rousseau, Chateaubriand, or Byron, who in their dealing with this question are so often attitudinising and thinking of the effect of what they say on the public. His exquisite feeling for nature, though always dominated by his inward self-converse and by his melancholy, yet distinguishes him from the men simply absorbed in philosophical or religious concerns, and places him in the rank of men of poetry and imagination. Let me try to show 20 these three main characteristics of Senancour from his own words. A Frenchman, coming immediately after the eighteenth century and the French Revolution, too clear-headed and austere for any such sentimental Catholic reaction as that with which Chateaubriand cheated himself, and yet, from the very profoundness and meditativeness of his nature, religious, Senancour felt to the uttermost the bare and bleak spiritual atmosphere into which he was born. Neither to a German nor to an Englishman, perhaps, would such 30 a sense of absolute religious denudation have then been possible, or such a plainness and even crudity, therefore, in their way of speaking of it. Only to a Frenchman were these possible; but amid wars, bustle, and the glory of the grande nation few Frenchmen had meditativeness and seriousness enough for them. Senancour was of a character to feel his spiritual position, to feel it without dream or illusion, and to feel, also, that in the absence of any real inward basis life was weariness and vanity, and the ordinary considerations so confidently urged to induce a man to 40 master himself and to be busy in it, quite hollow. |