m? infinite
desire, and so poor an attainment! A disciple of Rousseau, who shared
in his sentiment without his optimistic faith, and who, like Rousseau,
felt the beauty of external nature without Rousseau's sense of its
joy, Etienne Pivert de SENANCOURT published in 1799 his _Reveries_,
a book of disillusion, melancholy atheism, and stoical resistance
to sadness, a resistance which he was unable to sustain. It was
followed in 1804 by _Obermann_, a romance in epistolary form, in which
the writer, disguised in the character of his hero, expresses a fixed
and sterile grief, knowing not what he needs, nor what he loves, nor
what he wills, lamenting without a cause and desiring without an
object. The glories of Swiss landscape, which quicken his imagination,
do not suffice to fill the void that is in his soul; yet perhaps in
old age--if ever it come--he may resign himself to the infinite
illusion of life. It is an indication of the current of the time that
fifteen years later, when the _Libres Meditations_ appeared,
Senancourt had found his way through a vague theopathy to autumnal
brightness, late-born hope, and tranquil reconcilement with
existence.

The work of the professional critics of the time--Geoffroy, De Feletz,
Dussault, Hoffman--counts now for less than the words of one who was
only an amateur of letters, and a moralist who never moralised in
public. JOSEPH JOUBERT (1754-1824), the friend of Fontanes and of
Chateaubriand, a delicate spirit, filled with curiosity for ideas,
and possessing the finest sense of the beauty of literature, lacked
the strength and self-confidence needful in a literary career. He
read everything; he published nothing; but the _Pensees_, which were
collected from his manuscripts by Chateaubriand, and his letters
reveal a thinker who loved the light, a studious dilettante charmed
by literary grace, a writer tormented by the passion to put a volume
in a page, a page in a phrase, a phrase in a word. Plato in philosophy,
Virgil in poetry, satisfy his feeling for beauty and refinement of
style. From Voltaire and Rousseau he turns away, offended by their
lack of moral feeling, of sanity, of wisdom, of delicacy. A man of
the eighteenth century, Joubert had lifted himself into thin clear
heights of middle air, where he saw much of the past and something
of the future; but the middle air is better suited for speculation
than for action.

II

The movement towards the romantic theory and pract