s_ on their refusal to elect him. The
style of Courier is almost unique, and its merits are only denied by
those who do not possess the necessary organ for appreciating it.

[Sidenote: Senancour.]

This chapter may perhaps be most appropriately concluded by the notice
of a singular writer who, although longer lived, was contemporary with
Courier. Etienne Pivert de Senancour may be treated almost indifferently
as a moral essayist, or as a producer of the peculiar kind of faintly
narrative and strongly ethical work which Rousseau had made fashionable.
The infusion of narrative in his principal and indeed only remarkable
work, _Obermann_, is however so slight, that he will come in best here,
though in his old age he wrote a professed novel, _Isabella_. Senancour
was born in 1770, his father being a man of position and fortune, who
lost both at the Revolution. The son was destined for the Church, but
ran away and spent a considerable time in Switzerland, where he married,
returning to France towards the end of the century. He then published
divers curious works of half-sentimental, half-speculative reflection,
by far the most important of which, _Obermann_, appeared in 1804. Then
Senancour had to take to literary hack-work for a subsistence; but in
his later years Villemain and Thiers procured pensions for him, and he
was relieved from want. He died in 1846. _Obermann_ has not been ill
described by George Sand as a _Rene_ with a difference; Chateaubriand's
melancholy hero feeling that he could do anything if he would but has no
spirit for any task, Senancour's that he is unequal to his own
aspirations. No brief epigram of this kind can ever fully describe a
book; but this, though inadequate, is not incorrect so far as it goes.
The book is a series of letters, in which the supposed writer delivers
melancholy reflections on all manner of themes, especially moral
problems and natural beauty. Senancour was in a certain sense a
_Philosophe_, in so far that he was dogmatically unorthodox and
discarded conventional ideas as to moral conduct; but he is much nearer
Rousseau than Diderot. Indeed, he sometimes seems to the reader little
more than an echo of the former, until his more distinctly modern
characteristics (characteristics which were not fully or generally felt
or reproduced till the visionary and discouraged generation of
1820-1850) reappear. It is perhaps not unfair to say that the pleasure
with which this generation rec