The Sickness of the Century

François Reneé, Vicomte de Chateaubriand (from The Genius of Christianity,1802)

We must still speak of a state of the soul which, it seems to us, has not yet been described: it is that which precedes the development of great passions, when all the young, active, self-willed--yet restricted-- faculties are exercised only upon themselves with neither goal nor aim. The more a race advances toward civilization, the more is augmented this condition of the vagueness of the passions. Finally there occurs a very sad situation: the great number of examples which one has before one's eyes, the multitude of books which deal with man and his feelings, make the individual clever without having experienced life. One becomes undeceived without having been deceived; some desires remain, but there are no more illusions. The imagination is rich, abundant, and wonderful; existence is poor, arid, an disenchanted. With a full heart one inhabits an empty world, and without having made us of anything, we are dissatisfied with everything.

The bitterness which this state of soul injects into life is incredible; the heart twists and turns in a hundred ways to employ those powers that it feels to be useless. The ancients little knew this secret anxiety, this sourness of stifled passions fermenting together. An active political existence, the games in the gymnasium and on the drill field, activities in the forum and the public square filled up every moment and allowed no room for the heart to be bored.

Then again, they did not incline toward exaggerations, toward groundless hopes and fears, toward mobility of ideas and feelings, toward perpetual fickleness which is nothing but steadfast disgust--these dispositions that we acquire from intimate feminine society. Women, with us moderns, independent of the passion which they evoke, influence still more all the other sentiments. They have in their constitution a certain waywardness that they inject into us; they make our male character less resolute; and our passions, mollified by the mixture with theirs, take on a quality both wavering and tender...