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Elements of Romantic Mythology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
The Reveries sur la nature primitive de l'homme are one of the important books of the dawn of the nineteenth century. In this text, Senancour limns an image of the world in accordance with the scientific thought of his time. It is a disenchanted image, dominated by mechanical necessity, and in it the distinction between good and evil no longer holds. God is absent; the world is not his creation. And Senancour expresses no regret:
Everything in nature is indifferent, for everything is necessary: all is beautiful, for all is determined. The individual is nothing, as a being apart: his cause and his end lie beyond him. Only the whole exists absolutely, invincibly, with no other cause, with no other end beyond itself, with no laws but those of its nature, with no other product than its permanence…. The beautiful, the true, the just, evil, and disorder exist only for the weakness of mortals…. The same earth contains happy orchards and ruinous volcanoes. The villain triumphs, the hero dies; the orchard withers, the volcano is snuffed out; one and the same destruction devours both the animate and the inanimate, shrouded in the same oblivion; and in a world reborn, there remains not a trace of what was abhorred or deified in a bygone world.
1. This text was published in a limited edition in the volume entitled Trois Con férences (Vevey, 1997), with an engraving by Eduardo Chillida.
2. Etienne Pivert Senancour, Rêveries sur la nature primitive de l'homme (Paris, 1902), Première Rêverie, pp. 28-33.
3. Senancour, Rêveries.
4. Senancour, Rêveries, p. 38.
5. Etienne Pivert Senancour, Obermann, preface by George Sand (Paris, 1863), “Dernière partie d'une lettre sans date connue,” p. 423.
6. Ibid., p. 340 (letter 75). In his fine book Senancour, Marcel Raymond compared this remark to a line by Mallarmé: “Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l'ennui…”
7. Ibid., p. 415 (letter 90).
8. Ibid., p. 412. Albert Camus remembered this remark in L'Homme révolté.
9. Goethe, “Principes de Philosophie Zoologique,”in Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden (Stuttgart, 1863), vol. 6, p. 612.
10. Ibid., p. 612.
11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1907), p.107 (chapter 10).
12. Ibid., p. 196 (chapter 13).
13. Ibid., p. 198 (chapter 13).
14. Goethe.
15. Goethe, Beiträge zur Optik, par. 24. The reader is referred to Goethe and the Sci ences, ed. F. Amrine, F. J. Zucker, H. Wheeler (Dordrecht, 1987).
16. Goethe, “Der Versuch, als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt” (1793), in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, p. 575.
17. Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre, Didaktischer Teil, Verhältnis zur allgemeinen Physik, par. 739, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, p. 204.
18. Paul's words actually echo a line in Aratus's Phenomena (II, 6). Both the apos tle and the pagan writer were known to Newton. See Mary Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 193-207. Coleridge, in a letter of 17 December 1796 to John Thel wall, invoked the words of Paul and Aratus inorder to define Christianity: “The religion which Christ taught is simply, first, that there exists an omnipresent Father of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, in whom we all of us move and have our being; and, secondly, that when we appear to men to die, we do not utterly perish.” Kathleen Raine, ed., The Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London, 1950).
19. Goethe, Analyse und Synthese, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 6, p. 601.
20. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads (1798), in The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden, 2 vols. (London, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 879-880.
21. Wordsworth, fragment of a first version of “Ruined Cottage.” The reader is also referred to M. H. Abrams' remarks on these lines, which he cites in Nat ural Supernaturalism (New York, 1973), pp. 279-280.
22. John Keats, “Lamia,” part II, pp. 229-237.
23. Novalis.
24. Novalis.
25. John Keats, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 May 1818, in Letters, ed. M. B. Forman (3d ed., London, 1947).
26. John Keats, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, 25 August 1819, p. 374.
27. Novalis.
28. G. W. F. Hegel, “Lectures on the History of Philosophy,” introduction A, 2, c, in Werke in zwanzig Bänden (Frankfurt, 1971), vol. 19, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 47.
29. F. W. J. von Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Frederick de Wolfe Bolman, Jr. (New York, 1942), pp. 117-118.
30. Schelling, The Ages of the World, p. 119.
31. F. W. J. von Schelling, “Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie,” in Schriften von 1799-1801, p. 125.
32. Maclaurin, Exposition des découvertes philosophiques de M. le chevalier Newton, trans. Lavirotte (Paris, 1749), pp. 416-417; I. Kant, Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels (1755); P. S. Laplace, Exposition du systeme du monde (Paris, 1796).
33. Gershom Sholem, Zur Kabbala und ihrer Symbolik (Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 149-150.
34. F. W. J. von Schelling, “Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Natur philosophie,” in Schriften von 1799-1801, p. 306. See also Idées pour une philoso phie de la nature, in Essais, trans. S. Jankelevitch (1946), pp. 81-92.
35. In a note, Poe refers to Schelling as a “formidable” thinker.
36. Poe's point of departure had been imagined by others before him. Thus Joseph Joubert, curiously, in one of his thoughts in the year 1800, wrote: “Just one grain of matter was needed to create the world.” Pensées, ed. Georges Poulet (Paris, 1966), p. 78.
The similarities between Poe and Kant-Laplace are set forth in David van Leer's study and bibliography, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (Cambridge). See also E. H. Davison, Poe: A Critical Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969), pp. 223-251; and Dayan, Fables of Mind: Inquiries into Poe's Fiction (New York and Oxford, 1987); and Hélène Tuzet, Le cosmos et l'imagination (Paris, 1965).
37. Edgar Allan Poe, Eurêka, in The Centenary Poe: Tales, Poems, Criticism, Margina lia and Eureka, ed. Montagu Slater (London, 1949), p. 349.
38. Poe, Eurêka, p. 351.
39. Poe, Eurêka, p. 400. Poe may have read this word consistency in an author whom he cites: Auguste Comte. Comte speaks of “mathematical consistency” that can be given to the Laplacian theory on the formation of the solar system (“Vingt-septième leçon,” Cours de Philosophie positive, Paris, [n.d.], vol. 2, p. 291). He is referring simply to calculations that can consolidate the cosmogo nal hypothesis. Comte does not introduce any poetic considerations, and the cycle of condensation and expansion that Poe assigns to the whole of the uni verse is in Comte confined to the solar sytem alone. The perpetual cycle Comte imagines nevertheless resembles that of Eurêka: “We know… that sim ply by the constant resistance of the general atmosphere, our world must, in the long run, inevitably be reunited with the solar mass from which it emanated, until, in the immensity of future times, a new expansion of this mass comes to organize, in the same way, a new world, destined to an analo gous career” (p. 297). Auguste Blanqui will push the belief in the repetitiveness of cosmogonical cycles to the realm of the absurd in his odd essay L'immortalité par les astres.
40. Ibid., p. 353.
41. Ibid., p. 359.
42. Ibid., p. 352.
43. Ibid., p. 366. In the Déduction générale du processus dynamique ou des catégories de la physique (1800), Schelling assigns to science “the unique task of construct ing matter.” In the fifth paragraph of this small piece, Schelling expresses the desire to start “from the point from which an opposition of forces, in the ideal subject of nature, appears necessary to this construction…. We will say only that we will call one of these forces, the one that goes towards the outside, the expansive force; but the other, the one that must be conceived of as going towards the inside of nature, we will call the delaying or attractive force. The first, considered in and of itself, is a pure act of producing (ein reines Produzieren), in which nothing can be distinguished absolutely; the other is that which brings division (Entzweiung) in this general identity, and thus the first condition of effective production,” Schellings Werke, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1907), vol. 1, p. 743. These general principles, in this case, apply to magnet ism, electricity, and the “chemical process.”
44. Poe, Eurêka, p. 353.
45. Ibid., p. 373: “the two Principles Proper, Attraction and Repulsion - the Mate rial and the Spiritual - accompany each other, in the strictest fellowship for ever.”
46. Ibid., p. 373.
47. Ibid., p. 403.
48. See Eveline Pinto, Edgar Poe et l'art d'inventer (Paris, 1983), pp. 271-338.
49. Ibid., p. 403.
50. Ibid., p. 404.
51. Ibid., p. 405.
52. James Lawler, Edgar Poe et les poètes français, suivi d'une conférence inédite de Paul Valéry (Paris, 1989), p. 105.
53. Paul Valéry, “Au sujet d'Eurêka,” in Oeuvres, 2 vols. (Paris, 1962): “The uni verse is constructed according to a plan whose profound symmetry is in some sense present in the innermost structure of our minds. The poetic instinct must lead us blindly to the truth” (vol. 1, p. 957).
The cosmogonal myth of Eurêka was taken up again at the beginning of the twentieth century, but without its anthropomorphic double. In 1931, Abbé Lemaitre (of the Louvain observatory) pursued his astrophysical thinking in the following way, which gained Eddington's support: “At the beginning, the entire mass of the Universe existed in the form of a single atom; the ray of the Universe, although not strictly nonexistent, was relatively quite small. The entire Universe results from the disintegration of this primordial atom. It can be shown that the ray of space must grow. Certain fragments that retained their products of disintegration formed the star clusters or the stars of all masses.” J. Jeans, G. Lemaitre, W. de Sitter, A. Eddington, E. A. Milne, R. A. Millikan. Discussion sur l'évolution de l'Univers, trans. and preface by P. Coud erc (Paris, 1933), pp. 15-22.
54. Poe, “The Telltale Heart,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1938), p. 303.
55. Ibid., p. 306.
56. Poe, Eurêka, p. 407.
57. Charles Baudelaire, “Mon coeur mis à nu,” in Oeuvres complètes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1975), vol. 1, p. 676.
58. Stéphane Mallarmé.
59. Poe, Eurêka, p. 389.
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