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Jttethttm'ss <E»l<mi*l
THE LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
THE LIFE OF
ERNEST RENAN
BY
MADAME JAMES DARMESTETER
(A. MARY F. ROBINSON)
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
1897
Colonial Library
B
.2
.
To
MADAME JEAN PSICHARI
(No&Mi RENAN)
I DEDICATE THIS PORTRAIT
OF HER FATHER,
WHICH OWES TO HER DEVOTED HAND
ITS MOST LIFE-LIKE
TOUCHES
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAP. PAGE
I. TREGUIER ..... 3
II. HENRIETTE ... .13
III. THE SEMINARY ..... 22
IV. A DOUBTFUL VOCATION . . . 34
V. A GREAT RESOLUTION .... 48
VI. DOMINUS PARS *. -57
PART II
I. NEW IDEAS .... 71
II. 1848 .... 81
III. THE VALE OF GRACE . . 97
IV. THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER . in
V. MARRIAGE . . . .120
VI. A MISSION TO PHOENICIA . . 129
PART III
I. THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE . .149
II. THE LIFE OF CHRIST . . . 159
III. THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY . . 169
viii CONTENTS
CHAP. 1'AGE
IV. POLITICS . . . . . .177
V. THE WAR— RENAN AS PROPHET . . 187
VI. THE &LITE ... . . .196
PART IV
I. THE ANTICHRIST .... 207
II. THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY : THE PHILO
SOPHERS . . . . .215
III. SOUVENIRS ..... 223
IV. ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY . . 230
V. THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL « . .255
VI. LAST DAYS 266
PART I
CHAPTER I
TR£GUIER
ERNEST RENAN was born at Treguier, in
the Cotes du Nord, on the 28th of February
1823. For the third time in sixty years Brittany
gave birth to a man-child who should transform
and renew the religious temper of his times.
Chateaubriand and Lamennais were scarcely
past their prime when the young Renan first
went to school in Treguier. In him, as in
them, the racial strain is strong. Under the ex
uberance of Chateaubriand, the revolt of Lamen
nais, the sentiment and irony of Renan, we meet
the same irregular genius, mobile and sensitive
beyond the like of woman, yet, in the last
resort, stubborn as Breton granite under its
careless grace of flowers.
All these were great writers, but in their style,
as in their intellectual quality, they have small
share in that Latin order which is the birthright
of a Bossuet, a Racine, or even a Voltaire.
Their genius is a sort of hippogriff, as Renan
used to say of himself, belonging to no known
4 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
race of mortal herds. Their style is a mid
summer medley saved from incongruity by an
7 infallible grace. Romance and Antiquity meet
there, and the old world and the ultra-modern
— the harp of Tristan and the echo of Paris.
Celtic magicians, they see the world through
a haze of their own, at once dim and dazzling,
full of uncertain glimpses and brilliant mists,
like the variable weather of their moors.
There are men of genius whose birthplace is
of no moment. Who remembers that Shelley
was born in Sussex ? But Renan is as Breton as
Merlin himself. Those who know nothing of Celtic
places must find it hard to understand him. When
I write : " Renan was born at Treguier," I would
desire that my readers should call up, not neces
sarily Treguier, but the grey steepness of any large
hill-town in Brittany, Scotland, Northumberland,
Wales, Ireland, or Cornwall. Let them remember
not only the gaunt and solitary aspect of the
place, but the kind of persons who dwell in these
small grey cities, at once so damp and so scantily
foliaged, under the incessant droppings of the
uncertain heaven. There is a great indifference
to worldly things. And the dreamer — we may
count him as ten per cent, of the population — be
TREGUIER 5
he poet, saint, beggar, or merely drunkard — is
capable of a pure detachment from material in
terests which no Buddhist sage could surpass.
There is a vibrating " other worldliness " in the
air ; the gift of prayer is constant ; religious
eloquence the brightest privilege, and religious
fervour a commonplace. Yet, all round, in the
high places and the country holy-wells, Mab and
Merlin, the fairies and the witches, keep their
devotees. And over all the grey, veiled, mel
ancholy distinction, which first strikes us as the
note of such a place, there is the special poetic,
Celtic quality, the almost immaterial beauty which
has so lingering a charm. Many landscapes surely
are lovelier than these weatherbeaten moors of
wet heath and harsh gorse, of wild broom
and juniper. Look at them, overhung by the
wreathing hill-mists, traversed and seamed across
by the deep-sunken river valleys which hide such
unsuspected wealth of hanging woods. There is
scarce a tree on the upper level — a stunted pine,
perhaps here and there, or half-a-dozen lady-
birches, mixed with thorn, clustered round some
menhir by the yellow upland tarn. The keen sea
wind has torn and twisted the scanty trees and
blown their branches all one way. The purple
heather barely hides the rock which pierces the
sterile soil, as a bony arm frays a worn-out gar-
6 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
ment. The ocean, the melancholy ocean of a
Celtic shore, bounds the horizon with its illimitable
grey. The Breton coast near Tre"guier is the
softest, the prettiest, of these typical Celtic land
scapes. But even there the country wears a
barren grace. Yet what Norman pasture or
Burgundy vineyard can boast the strong attrac
tion of the moors ?
The same quality — neither rich nor sound
but infinitely sweet — clings about the people.
The men in the fields gaze at you with stern dark
faces in an almost animal placidity. In Renan's
youth, they were still almost as wild as their
country, strange rude men, with flowing hair,
wrapped up in goatskins in wintertime. The
girls are charming — it is difficult to say why —
their slender and yet rough-hewn figures have
no more grace of curve than a thirteenth century
church saint in her niche. Their pale faces, with
down-dropped lids and delicate pointed chins,
have very little bloom. In their black dresses
and white coifs they have the austere distinction,
the demure reserve, of very young novices who
renounce they know not what.
This Breton race, apparently so severe, is one
of the most pleasure-loving, and one of the most
garrulous in France : a very storehouse of myth
and legend, of song and story, of jest and gibe.
TREGUIER 7
These melancholy men and maids, visible emblems
of renunciation, are capable of mirth and wit and
passion. Fond of the glass, quick to repartee,
they glory in the gift of the gab, but only when
the door is shut on strangers. The extraordin
ary strength of idealism, the infinite delicacy of
sentiment, which form the inmost quintessence of
the Celt, impose on him an image of seemliness,
a pure decorum, to which he incessantly con
forms the old Adam rebellious in his heart.
Reserve and passion, prudence and poetry, are
equally inherent in him. The very sinner who
trangressed most flagrantly at last week's wake
or " Pardon," will show to-day in every act and
every word a serene tranquillity, a justness of
thought and phrase which is no more hypocritical
than was the passionate fantasy of his falling-
away.
Treguier is an ancient cathedral city set high
upon a hill at the confluence of two lovely rivers.
A solitary place whose quiet streets are bordered
with blank convent walls over which the garden
tree-tops wave at intervals. The steep and silent
city is crowned by a Gothic cathedral, an admir
able structure whose simple lines soar upwards
from a broad and massive base, ever slenderer,
ever narrowing, till they terminate in a spire of
extraordinary delicacy and loftiness, a land-mark
8 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
for many miles around. Beautiful cloisters, as
old as the church itself, surround the grassy
churchyard. But the glory of the cathedral is
the large tomb of St Ives which it contains.
The patron saint of Brittany, who is at once the
patron of Truth and the patron of Rhetoric, is
buried there.
Such is Tr£guier on the hill. Two steep streets
connect this " haunt of ancient peace " with the
seaport of Tre"guier, a busy place, yet opening
quietly, not on the full sport and hurry of the
ocean, but on a land-locked estuary folded be
tween tranquil promontories wooded to the water's
edge. Treguier port traffics in fish and grain, and
the trading population centres round the quay.
But this stir of life is hushed as we mount the hill.
Only a few retired sea-captains, a sprinkling of the
local gentry, and the numerous clergy, find on that
peaceful summit an undisturbed asylum.
In the first quarter of the present century, a
certain Renan, of the fisher-clan of the Renans
of Goelo, having made some money by his
fishing-smack, bought and inhabited a pleasant
house on the hill, near the cathedral and the
desecrated Episcopal Palace. The house we speak
of is a tall, narrow, irregular building, no two
windows of a line, whose gable-casements com
mand a pleasant view of hills and woods seen
TREGUIER 9
across an abrupt hill-side flight of steep-pitched
roofs.
" Captain " Renan (i.e., captain of his fishing-
smack) was a feckless, musing man, an obstinate
dreamer, convinced of his gift for practical affairs.
Yet a man of character, of a silent tenderness of
sentiment, with a strain of melancholy even in his
happiest affections. The name he bore was well
known in Tre"guier, for his father was one of the
most ardent among the Republicans of the place.
In those days, when Charles X. was on the throne,
Republican opinions were out of fashion ; but
Charles X. had no less devoted subject than the
elder Renan. He too was a sailor : it is the
Bretons who chiefly man the navy of France. On
the very morrow of the Coronation this obstinate
old skipper walked down Treguier High Street
adorned by an immense tricoloured cockade.
" I should like to know who will snatch these
colours from me ! " cried he.
" No one, Skipper ! No one ! " answered the
townsfolk of Tr6guier, and taking him by the
elbow, they led him home. For though party
passion ran high in Treguier — aye, even scaffold-
high ! — a general neighbourliness tempered preju
dice ; and men who had threatened each other's
heads a short while back, showed a willingness to
render each other any kindly service, while fully
io LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
aware that on the morrow the old political quarrel
might break out afresh.
In one of these hours of truce, the son of this
staunch old sailor, Captain Renan — a good
Republican himself — had married the daughter
of a respectable Lannion trader. She had
been reared in the religion of the altar and
the throne. Her mother's house had been,
throughout the Terror, the devoted hiding-place
of non-juring priests. But the brilliance and the
success of post-revolutionary adventure had left
Captain Renan's bride of a more modern way
of thinking. She was a Philippist — an Orleanist,
as we should say to-day : — a little lively gipsy of
a woman, black as a prune from Agen, and with
Gascon blood in her. She had ever a witty
answer ready, and knew how to defend her
opinions and bring the laugh on her side. Her
sharp brilliance formed the strongest possible con
trast to the dreamy melancholy of her gentle
husband.
The Celt is not only religious and political,
he is also innately superstitious. There were
wonder-working saints and fairies, and wise-women
in plenty, on all the moors round Tr£guier. When
Ernest Renan was born, — a seven months' child,
— his anxious mother feared he could not live.
Old Gude, the witch, took the babe's little shirt
TREGUIER n
and dipped it in a country holy-well. She came
back radiant : " He will live after all ! " she cried,
" the two little arms stretched out, and you should
have seen the whole garment swell and float : he
means to live ! " The fairies loved the child, de
clared old Gude, and had touched him with their
wand before his birth.
Wise old dame, she saw from the first the
strength and the charm of Ernest Renan ; a sort
of natural magic, a sort of immaterial grace.
There was the fairies' kiss ! Renan almost cer
tainly exaggerated his debt to a Celtic ancestry.
But this much at least he owed them : this, and
that obstinate sweetness, that rare fidelity of his,
which contrasted so strangely with the liveliest
impressionability of the nerves. And some
whilom bard, most surely, bequeathed him the
peculiar music of his style, clear as the bell about
the neck of Tristan's hound, which rang so sweet
that whoso heard it forgot forthwith his cares and
all his sorrow.
Seven hundred years ago the Celtic poets in
vented a new way of loving. They discovered a
sentiment more vague, more tender, than any the
Latins or the Germans knew, penetrating to the
very source of tears, and at once an infinite aspira
tion, a mystery, an enigma, a caress. They
discovered " 1'amour courtois." Yesterday their
12 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
descendant, Ernest Renan, would fain have in
vented a new way of believing. . . . The " amour
fine " of Launcelot has passed from our books
into our hearts ; we feel with a finer shade to-day
because those Celtic harpers lived and sang. I
dare not say that Renan has done as much for
Faith — that he has transported it far from the
perishable world of creeds and dogmas into the
undying domain of a pure feeling. But, at least,
the attempt was worthy of a Celt and an idealist.
CHAPTER II
HENRIETTE
WE have spoken of fairies. The true fairy —
the guardian angel, rather — of Ernest
Kenan's youth was his only sister, Henriette.
Henriette had already one brother, Alain, an
excellent lad of fourteen, sober, just, and silent.
She was twelve years old when Ernest was born,
a little woman already, troubled about many
things, dimly aware of the struggle for life and
able to understand her mother's tears, as she
watched her rock the baby on her knees, weeping
passionately over this second son, so long desired,
and now born, as it seemed, into a world of sordid
misfortune. Already the head of the family, in his
dreamy but obstinate unworldliness, had half ruined
the little household. Henriette, who inherited
her father's silent and tenacious character, bore
him a child's absolute devotion. She adored him
and understood his moody reserve, as ruin
gathered closer. She loved the vivacious mother
whom she so little resembled, and who showed
13
14 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN
the plain child but scanty tenderness. Above all,
she hugged to her inmost heart this new-born
brother, as though she felt that for him, through
him, and in him, she should attain to a completer
existence than any she had dreamed of hereto
fore.
Henriette was neither quick nor brilliant. She
was not at all pretty, in the usual sense of fresh
country prettiness. We might say of her, as it
was said of the Maid of Siena, u speciositas
naturaliter in ea non inerat excessive? Her
delicate features were marred by a birthmark.
But she had eyes of the sweetest, long, white
beautiful hands, and even in childhood a bearing
of modest distinction. A sort of innocent dignity
was hers — a dove-like dignity made of mildness
and quiet and reserve. Nothing of the poetic
charm of her birth-place was lost upon the pensive
child. The shadow of the convent walls, the
stillness, broken at intervals by the clash of
church bells, the distant moan of the sea, the
half-understood Latin sentences which the good
Sisters taught her in the psalter, all were things
to be pondered in her heart, — subtle influences
to mould her tender nature. Her education, if
limited, was exquisite. As she grew out of
childhood, the noble families of Treguier, banished
by the Revolution, crept back, one by one,
HENRIETTE 15
fatigued and penniless, to wither in their ruined
homesteads. Many single ladies of the most
authentic nobility, were glad to earn their bread
by giving lessons — a praiseworthy habit they had
contracted during the Emigration. One of these
impoverished damsels completed the training of
Henriette Renan, and added to her natural
sweetness that touch of good breeding which
enhances every grace. Henriette, sensitive to
every refinement, quickly caught the trick of
unspoken and apparently deferent authority.
While she was still a mere child, she was in
great request as a tamer of wild spirits, and the
young madcaps of the place yielded to her
tranquil charm. She was born to guide, to
soothe, and to educate. And when she was
twelve years old she began the education of
Ernest Renan.
"She attached herself to me with the whole
strength of her tender and timid heart, athirst for
love. I still remember my baby tyrannies ; she
never chafed at them. Dressed to go out to
some girlish party, she would come to kiss me
good-bye, and I would cling to her frock, beseech
her to turn back, not to leave me ! And she
would turn round, take off her best gown and sit
at home with me. One day, half in fun, half as a
penalty for some childish offence, she threatened
1 6 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN
to die if I would not be good, and thereupon she
leaned back in her arm-chair, closed her eyes and
made believe to be dead. I have never felt any
thing so vivid as the pang of terror with which I
saw my dear one, immovable, absent — for our
destiny did not permit that I should watch her
last moments. Wild with grief I sprang at her
and bit my teeth in her arm. I can still hear
her scream ! But I could only say, in answer to
all reproaches ; * Why did you die ? Oh, will
you ever die again ? '" l
When Ernest Renan was five years old and
his sister just turned seventeen, their father's ship
came into Treguier port without a skipper. None
has solved the mystery of the end of Captain
Renan. Did the sea wash him overboard ? Did
he seek in suicide the bitter remedy for his
troubles? His body was washed ashore off the
sandy coast of Erqui. He died in debt. Not
mere anxiety, but real poverty, was henceforth the
portion of his little household.
Everyone at Treguier knew and respected the
Renans. The widow was left undisturbed in her
little home ; her creditors were confident she
would pay off, little by little, her heavy inherit
ance. But it is difficult for an inexperienced
woman to earn, for the mother of three children
1 "Ma Soeur Henrietta," p. 13.
HENRIETTE 17
to save. I suppose they had some thoughts of
letting the little Treguier home, for after the
unhappy skipper's death, when Alain left to make
his way in Paris, Madame Renan, Henriette, and
Ernest removed to Lannion, where the widow
had the support and comfort of her own family,
respectable and well-to-do people of the trading
class. Neither Henriette nor Ernest liked the
change.
The country between the sea and Lannion is
the very cradle of romance. On the sandy shore
near Plestin, King Arthur fought the dragon ; at
Kerdluel he held his court. Scarce a gun-shot
from the coast there gleams the isle of Avalon.
But in the most romantic neighbourhood, the life
of a country town is essentially commonplace.
The uncles and aunts of the little Renans
had not much in common with Launcelot or
Enid.
These small shop-keepers, in their trivial and
difficult prosperity, these worthy Marthas troubled
about many things, had little in common, either,
with our two immature idealists. Henriette
especially felt the transplantation. Her delicate
and tender spirit seemed to soar ever upward, like
the distant spire of Treguier, further, further, from
this too solid earth. Home-sick for Treguier and
heart-sick for her dead father, Henriette Renan
B
1 8 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
saw nothing in this world to tempt her from her
wish to enter a convent. Ernest was the confi
dant of her vocation, and their happiest moments
were these winter evenings when they would slip
away to church together, the tall sister walking
briskly with little Ernest completely hidden under
the ample folds of her Breton cloak. Which was
the happier then ? She, God in her heart, the
child she loved at her knees ? Or the little lad
himself, delighted to move in this warm loving
darkness, clinging to his sister'3 skirts, crunching
under his feet the fresh, firm snow ? Long after
wards, this would still be their relation, on the
one side a tender guidance, on the other a con
fident and happy clinging ; and, as long as she
lived, the cloak of Henriette Renan comforted her
brother in this frosty world.
It was Ernest, after all, who proved the chief
obstacle to Henriette's vocation : Ernest's future
and her father's memory. The poor child, with
her delicate sense of honour, could not rest happy
till those debts were paid. How was her mother
to pay them ? Or Alain, in his 'prentice years ?
It was all very well for the creditors to be patient :
until the last sou was paid her father's name was
that of a bankrupt. And then, Ernest !
One day Henriette noticed a certain careful
awkwardness in the gait of her little brother,
HENRIETTE 19
always a slow and heavy child. Her attention
discovered his timid endeavour to hide an un
seemly rent in his baby garments. Poor child !
Such a humble little effort to be decent in
tatters, was too much for Henriette's vocation.
From that moment the convent was done with.
She burst into tears and vowed to devote her
self henceforth to the welfare of this patient
brother, who, with delicate instincts, seemed
destined to cope unaided with the sordid struggle
for existence.
From that moment, Henriette Renan was the
head of the household. Young as she was, a
mere girl, inexperienced, she resolved to get the
better of ill-fortune. The resolve of a Breton is
a very dogged thing. Like that stone which a
Yorkshireman keeps seven years in his pocket
before he turns it, and then seven years more before
he flings it, the resolve of a Breton is a thing
which can bide its time. None of the British
Celts possess that union of a tenacious obstinacy
with a very sweet and tranquil temper which is
the strength of the Breton. To go on willing the
same thing for years, quietly, without making
yourself or other people unnecessarily miserable
about it, is, it must be owned, a great secret. And
if the Breton neither drank nor dreamed — if the
Breton cared in the least for success — there would
20 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
be no pulling against him in the race. Henriette's
early efforts were all unavailing. First she at
tempted the thing which lay to her hand : she
went back to Treguier with her mother and
Ernest and tried to set up a school in their old
home. Then in 1835, she started for Paris, as
governess in an establishment for young ladies.
Before leaving her dear Treguier on this desolate
adventure, she received an unexpectedly brilliant
offer of marriage from a man, much her elder,
who felt the charm and rare devotedness of this
fragile creature. But a hint that he did not
mean to espouse her relations alarmed the high-
strung Henriette and sent her off at a tangent on
her career of self-sacrifice. She felt, it seems,
some inclination for the kind and wealthy neigh
bour who shared her tastes and who offered her
a Breton home. But, her father's debts — but,
Ernest's future ! How could she forsake the two
most helpless things in the world, the dead, and
a child ? She thought of them. As for the
happiness of Mademoiselle Renan and her estab
lishment in life, these were very secondary con
siderations. It was unfortunate, doubtless, that
she was so morbidly timid, so afraid of strangers,
so easily home-sick. She must try to overcome
these failings. So she packed her trunk,
pinned on her old green shawl, kissed a long
HENRIETTE 21
good-bye to all she loved on earth, and, with a
last cruel wrench as she crossed the threshold,
she took her place in the Paris coach and watched
the spire of Treguier till it faded to a smoke-line
in the distance.
CHAPTER III
THE SEMINARY
MADAME RENAN was no less religious than
her children. But she wore her religion
with a difference. A bourgeoise of Lannion, with
a quarter-strain of Gascon in her, she was less
dreamy than the family she had married into :
these Renans, obstinate, ruminating men — skip
pers like her husband and her father-in-law, or
bards and vagabonds like Pierre, her brother-in-
law. Madame Renan's faith was, naturally enough,
a little different from her daughter's ; less a per
petual elevation of the soul by thought and prayer
than a convenient guide to life and death, cheerful
on the whole, abundantly illustrated with all the
most agreeable legends. She was an excellent
churchwoman. She had brought up her eldest
son to trade, but the dear desire of her heart was
that her Benjamin — her last born gifted darling —
should become a priest.
Ernest was not six years old when first his
mother placed him under the protection of the
saints. When the child's father had been brought
THE SEMINARY 23
home and buried, she took the little lad by the
hand and led him outside the town to the shrine
of St Ives. St Ives is the greatest saint in
Brittany — the advocate of all good Bretons in the
heavenly courts. Madame Renan confided her
fatherless son to the guardianship of the immortal
lawyer. With what feelings since then, we may
wonder, has St Ives surveyed the career of his
ward and fellow-townsman ? The point is nice ;
for St Ives, let us remember, is the patron saint
of truth. Saint Yves de la Verite may pardon
some heretical shortcomings to one who chose for
his epitaph Veritateui dilexi.
In 1829 Ernest Renan was six years old. The
child must be taught to read and write, and must
learn his prayers in Latin. Who so fit as the
priests of the seminary to educate the ward and
pupil of St Ives? When, shortly after 1830,
the Renans returned from Lannion to Treguier,
in order for Henriette to prosecute her scheme of
school keeping, Ernest was placed under the care
of the priests. There is an excellent seminary at
Treguier : Renan never ceased to commend the
virtue, the simplicity, the kindness, the intellectual
integrity of his earliest pastors and masters. These
ecclesiastics taught him mathematics and Latin ;
they taught him little else. The notes of the
teachers of Ernest Renan are still in the posses-
24 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
sion of his family. They are excellent notes;
docile, patient, diligent, thorough, are adjectives
which recur. We read, however, that " Ernest
Renan is sometimes inattentive during service in
church."
Renan never ceased to extol the education
given him by the priests. " They taught me the
love of truth, the respect for reason, the earnest
ness of life. And these are the one thing in
which I have never varied. I left their hands
with a soul so tried and fashioned by them that
the light arts of Paris could only gild the jewel :
they could not change it. I believe no longer
that the Christian dogma is the supernatural
epitome of the sum of human knowledge : but I
do believe, I do still believe, that our existence
is the most frivolous of things, unless we conceive
it as a grand and perpetual duty. Old and dear
masters, nearly all of you dead to-day, whose
image often visits my dreams — not as a reproach,
but as a mild and charming memory, I have not
been as unfaithful to you as you think ! At heart
I am still your disciple."
Twice a day, regular as clockwork, Ernest
Renan might have been seen walking slowly
up the steep High Street to the college. The
years went by, the child of eight or nine became
a lad of fourteen, but the mien never altered, nor
THE SEMINARY 25
the slow, sober gait, already a little rheumatic,
nor the amiable unremarking gaze lost in some
pleasant dream. Be sure that he took never a
glance nor a step more than was needful ; for this
child, so curious in all matters moral or intellectual,
was the least observant of mortals. Renan was a
gifted rather than a clever lad, more meditative
than brilliant, honest and profound rather than
quick or versatile. His lighter gifts and graces
came to him when youth was over. A certain
heaviness and slowness, always characteristic of
his appearance, appeared as yet to cling round his
intrinsic genius, like the protecting envelope about
the unripe burgeon. Laborious, conscientious,
eager to please, he was not only the gifted but
the good boy of the college.
No child was more studious, more docile, more
easily contented. When the day's task was done,
no game, no long walk, no birds-nesting or black-
berrying excursion tempted this odd schoolboy,
always difficult to stir and averse to movement.
He would take his book and sit in the inglenook
on winter afternoons, or in the summer he would
saunter round the cloister and watch the one
old cow tethered amid the thick grass of the
tombs. Life was full of interesting things. His
mother's narrow house contained treasures of
amusement. The child knew how to make a
26 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
great deal of happiness out of little things. He
had brought back from Lannion wonderful archives
of old bills found in his grandmother's garret : the
quaint Gothic letterings of the headings filled his
baby-soul already with the true historian's feeling
for the Past. "There has been a deal of love spent
on these," he used to say. Then there were long
political discussions with Marie- Jeanne, the little
maid-of-all-work ; interminable musings over an
odd volume of the " Cantiques de Marseille"; best
of all there were the vast histories, the complicated
and intricate Breton souvenirs and legends which
would fall, hour after hour, from the lips of
" Maman " as she sat busy with her sewing or
her knitting. Beloved " Maman," gayest and
happiest of women, from whom the child inherited
his temper of serene contentment, I think she
taught him more, with her fund of myths and
legends, than the good fathers up at the college,
with all their Latin ! For here, in the peaceful
house - place, the future historian of religions
learned, as unconsciously as a child learns his
mother's tongue, how the unknown becomes the
supernatural in a rustic imagination, and how, in
another wise, a fact becomes a faith.
He learned other lessons which were to shape
his life no less. Every influence taught him the
duty of honour, the value of disinterestedness.
THE SEMINARY 27
These qualities were not merely elemental virtues,
but the privilege of a superior intelligence. All
the boys at Tre*guier College who showed an
unusual aptitude were destined to the priesthood,
unless they happened to be nobles, born thereby
to certain other superior duties of their own,
based on the same foundation of honourable
disinterestedness. Commerce, money-getting, un-
inherited wealth, were the pursuits and the
compensations of men who had failed in their
studies. Had they been quicker at their Latin
grammar, they would certainly have chosen to be
priests. For the self-made man was an inferior
creature, half-educated, fond of gain, fond of his
own opinion, harsh to the defenceless, pushing,
and frequently discourteous ; doubtless useful
enough in his proper sphere, infinitely below that
of the priest or the noble. The man who seriously
respects himself must give his best labours to an
ideal cause, far removed from his own desires and
necessities, wholly unconnected with his personal
profit. No other life can be beneficent or noble.
. . . Such was the conviction formed in child
hood which was to guide Ernest Renan
throughout his life. But in childhood he
translated this idea into the limited vocabulary
of his age. He looked round him : the most
disinterested, virtuous and studious persons of
28 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
his acquaintance were the priests at the Treguier
Seminary.
His mother was enchanted, the good priests
smiled acquiescence, when this unpractical, deli
cate, sedentary lad, who was always first in the
class-room and last in the play-ground, said, " I
mean to be a priest ! " Of course Ernest Renan
meant to be a priest : and, later on, Professor
at Treguier, and, later still, perhaps, Canon of
St Brieux. He would become the worthy emu
lator of his teachers ; and, since he loved books,
— who knows ? — he might compile or edit some
history in the style of Rollin. " Maman " would
live with him always, and keep his house, and
mend his cassock while she told him stories.
Man proposes. ... In the summer of
1838 Ernest Renan carried off all the prizes
at Tr6guier College. We can imagine the joy
of Henriette, withering and paling up in Paris
from sheer hard work and home-sickness. All
her heart was in her dear child. The news of his
triumph flushed her and expanded her, and
renewed her youth. The silent and reserved
young governess could not keep this wonderful
piece of news to herself. Her prophetic heart
foretold great things for Ernest ! The doctor of
the school where she taught was among the confi
dants of her discreet and tender enthusiasm, and
THE SEMINARY 29
the good man, touched by the unwonted fire of
this quiet creature, interested also in her Breton
Phoenix, spoke to some of his friends about the
marvellous boy of Treguier.
Among others he spoke to Monsieur Dupan-
loup, an elegant and brilliant — nay, the most
elegant and the most brilliant — Parisian eccle
siastic. At that moment Monsieur Dupanloup
was superior of a Parisian seminary which he had
founded in order to give educational advantages,
of an altogether exceptional kind, to young nobles
and theological students. St Nicholas du Char-
donnetwas meant to be a hot-bed of Catholic fervour
and Catholic genius. Success, brilliance, talent,
were among the evangelical virtues specially culti
vated there. In the eyes of Monsieur Dupanloup
the glory of God, the mysterious Shechina, was
a very visible and glittering light of a somewhat
superficial radiance. This Parisian recruiter of
Catholic genius was quite aware that good things
might come out of Brittany. . . . Chateaubriand
. . . Lamennais . . . When he heard of the Phoenix
of Treguier, " Send him to me at once ! " he
decreed.
Renan was fifteen and a half.
" I was spending the holidays wtth a friend
near Treguier. On the afternoon of the 4th of
30 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
September a messenger came to fetch me in great
haste. I remember it all as if it were yesterday !
We had a walk of about five miles through the
country fields, then, as we came in sight of
Treguier, the pious cadence of the Angelus,
pealing in response from parish tower to parish
tower, fell through the evening air with an inex
pressible calm and melancholy. It was an image
of the life I was about to quit for ever.
"On the morrow I left for Paris. All that
I saw there was as strange to me as I had been
suddenly projected into the wilds of Tahiti or
Timbuctoo." 1
In Paris, at the seminary of St Nicholas du
Chardonnet, the Phcenix of Tre"guier appeared
but an awkward youth. Pale, sickly, ungainly,
his stooping shoulders crowned by a head dis
proportionately large, the unprepossessing lad was
as dull in manner as plain of face. He went mus
ing all alone, brooding ever in a solitary reverie,
his fine eyes seldom lifted from the ground, his
subtle, humorous, delicate smile extinguished in
utter homesickness.
Every now and then Henriette, in her old green
shawl that spoke of Treguier, would call to see
him in the parlour. And the rest of the time the
unhappy boy struggled and stifled in the Slough
1 " Souvenirs d'enfance et de Jeunesse," p. 171.
THE SEMINARY 31
of Despond, where the foot sinks hourly deeper,
whence the soul, past hope, desires no escape.
The professors at the seminary must have been
sorely disappointed in their Breton prodigy. But,
one morning, the priest committed to read the
letters written by the pupils to their parents, was
struck by the profound, the yearning tenderness
and heartbreak of Ernest Kenan's outpouring to
his mother. He set the letter apart and showed
it, in some surprise, to the director, Monsieur
Dupanloup. That evening contained the weekly
hour appointed to read out, in presence of
Monsieur, the list of the places taken by the
boys in their different forms. Renan was fifth or
sixth in composition.
" Ah ! " cried the director, " had the theme been
the subject of a letter I read this morning, Ernest
Renan would have been first ! "
From that hour he followed the lad in his
studies, guided, supported, bewildered, enchanted
him, and made the new interest of his life. Ernest
Renan was not to die of nostalgia, after all. But
something died in him all the same. " The
Breton died in me ! " he used to say. The
transition had been too brusque for his honest
heart, for his solid and logical mind. What was
there in common between the archaic faith of the
Treguier priests and this brilliant, decorative,
32 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
literary and quasi-scientific Catholicism of Paris ?
Nothing which seemed important in the eyes of
Monsieur Dupanloup appeared supremely needful
to those Breton saints. How could the same
august and sacred name shelter two incompatible
spirits ? If the one were true, the other must be
false. If the one were false, the other might be
false. If both were true, then Truth was no
longer a thing one, simple and sole, but complex,
infinite, susceptible of variation. These were the
thoughts which darkened the mind of the young
seminarist. He repulsed them as temptations,
and redoubled his religious practices.
" He was," writes the Abb6 Cognat, " one of the
most devout of us in his pious reserve : chorister,
writer of hymns, dignitary of the Brotherhood of
Mary. Nor was he without a touch of supersti
tion in his piety : never, for instance, did he forget
to introduce a cross in the flourish which termin
ated his signature." 1
If the Breton died at St Nicholas du Chardonnet
— and I, for one, stoutly deny that he died — " the
Gascon in me," wrote M. Renan much later, " saw
abundant reasons to live."
The atmosphere of St Nicholas was no longer
the still and humid air of Treguier cloister.
The breath of the boulevards penetrated through
1 Abbe Cognat : M. Renan. Hier et Aujourdhui.
THE SEMINARY 33
a thousand fissures into the closed circle of
the seminary. Rollin was no longer the ideal
man of letters, for the students discussed with
passion Michelet, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, those
rising glories of the hour.
" I discovered that there was a contemporary
literature. I learned with stupor that knowledge
was not a privilege of the Church. My masters
at Treguier had been far more advanced in Latin
and mathematics than my new professors. But
they dwelt sealed in a catacomb underground.
Here, in Paris, the air of the outer world circu
lated freely. New ideas dawned upon me. I
awoke to the meaning of the words, talent, fame,
celebrity. A new ideal swam into my ken.
This, perhaps, was what I had longed for so
vainly, so vaguely, in the dim cathedral aisles of
Treguier ! " l
1 "Souvenirs," p. 185.
CHAPTER IV
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION
LIFE, which already had set a dozen fatal
questions to germinate in Ernest Kenan's
mind, had shaken the very foundations of the faith
of Henriette. Already at Lannion, on the very mor
row of her vocation resisted, she had begun to doubt
of the truth of Christianity — a strange thing when
one thinks of the girl's age and her environment.
Unhappy as a governess, she no longer desired
to be a nun. The Paradise of her old dreams
appeared to her as a poor piece of man's work,
a projection of the human fancy ; and the
adorable Mary, the hierarchies of saints, nay
even the Good Shepherd, in whom she had
believed, seemed so many sacred and pitiful
ghosts. But out of the ashes of this old faith,
reverently lifted on to the high places of the soul,
there leapt a brighter flame, a new religion,
imprecise, without text or dogma, and almost
wholly moral : a belief in the vast order of the
universe, speeding through cycles of time towards
some Divine intent, and furthered in its grand and
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 35
gracious plan by every private act of mercy or
renouncement, by all the tendency of effort which
makes for righteousness.
Thus believing, however reverent towards the
faith which had nurtured and prepared her
soul, Henriette beheld with much misgiving her
brother's progress towards the altar. How should
a boy of fifteen appreciate the sacrifice demanded
of him ? The lips said : abrenuntio I but the
child knew not what he renounced. Most sisters
would have thought, first of all, that he cut himself
off from love, but I believe Henriette's instinctive
thought was that he cut himself off from liberty :
that the child bound the man to think as the
child, — that the child bound the man to obey as
the child, and bound him into an intricate and
inextricable fabric from which there could be no
subsequent deliverance save at such a cost of
good name, public respect, and ancient friend
ship as made her pale to think of. But Henri
ette was aware that the only fruitful change in
spiritual matters, is that which begins within.
Her meddling could do no good, only harm.
The child might take his vows and keep them all
his life long in perfect inner liberty, his heart
remaining in accordance with his rule. She said
nothing, therefore, only in silence vowed him her
devoted sympathy if this should not be the case.
36 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
Half hoping, half fearing, lest he should outgrow
the vocation so placidly accepted, she went
week after week to see him in the parlour of St
Nicholas, and let no word pass her lips that might
hasten the issue.
But there came an end to these visits. Henri-
ette found the struggle for life hard in Paris.
Few were the savings she could send to Treguier.
When Count and Countess Andrew Zamoyski
offered her a brilliant situation, amply paid, she
accepted. She went out into exile in Poland,
trebly far way in those days of post-chaise and
travelling-coach — into a climate peculiarly un-
suited to her fragile constitution — into a foreign
country which, among its population, contained not
one friendly face. Poor timid soul, the ten years
of her engagement, the last ten years of her youth
thus offered up in filial sacrifice, must have ap
peared in the prospect longer than all her past.
Yet she set out, in 1840. Doubtless, when she
bid good-bye to the dear young brother whom
at their next meeting she should find a man,
she did not dream that, from the vantage
point of distance, she should become more
familiarly his confidant, far more intimately his
guide and true Egeria, than in the happiest days
of their companionship. All that Jacqueline
Pascal was to the great tormented soul of her
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 37
brother, Henriette was gradually to grow to
Ernest Renan.
Some short while after Henrietta's departure,
Ernest Renan was promoted from the seminary
of St Nicholas to the more advanced college of
Issy, in the suburbs of Paris. There is no class
of philosophy at St Nicholas. In the French
University our fifth form corresponds to the
class of rhetoric, our sixth or highest form
to the class of philosophy, which is the direct
portal to the Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale, or
one of the various special schools of law, medi
cine, engineering, and the art of war. Something
of this order is maintained in the seminaries.
After the class of rhetoric, St Nicholas sends
such of its pupils as are destined for Holy Orders
to study philosophy in the great diocesan seminary
of St Sulpice, which reserves for their accommoda
tion its country house at Issy. Two years later,
the seminarists are received into the vast
establishment of the square St Sulpice at Paris,
where they are initiated into the mysteries of
theology.
Issy is an old French country house — a
small suburban palace which belonged from 1606
to 1615 to Queen Margot of gallant memory.
The worthy fathers have since added a few
wings, a few aureoles, a blue mantle or so, to the
38 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
mythological personages on the walls, and nothing
else has been altered in the pavilion of the Queen.
The long, low house looks on to a park planted
in the usual French fashion with clipped alleys
of lime and hornbeam enclosing wide irregular
lawns where the flowers spring and the hay grows
and ripens as nature wills. Not only in hay-
time, but right through the autumn and on sunny
winter days, Ernest Renan might have been found,
spending his hours of recreation on a stone bench
under the leafless limes, wrapt in a great houppe-
lande or French Inverness-cloak. There, imper
vious to cold and damp, he read his book, without
a glance, without a word, for aught around him.
Every now and then M. Pinault, the reverend
professor of mathematics, would stop to gibe at
him :
" O, the dear little treasure ! Look at him,
don't disturb him. Now, pray, don't disturb
him. See how completely he has rolled himself
in his form ! Mon Dieu ! he will always be like
that ! He will study ! — study ! — study ! Poor
sinful souls will appeal to him for help. He will
go on studying. He will murmur : Leave me !
Leave me ! I am just at such an interesting
point ! "
Ernest Renan would look up at his tormentors,
a little troubled by the acuteness of the shaft,
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 39
would heave a sigh, and would, in fact, go on
studying.
Renan had entered Issy with a passion for
Catholic scholasticism. The seriousness of his
intelligence was satisfied by the vast and solid
fabric of Catholic theology. Here was a subject
more to his mind than Monsieur Dupanloup's
course of rhetoric ; more to his mind even than
those first fevered readings of modern romantic
literature, though these had left an ineffaceable
impression on his talent. But now he had come
to the heart of things. " I had left words for
facts. I was about to examine the foundations,
to analyse in all its details, this Christian religion
which appeared to me the centre of all truth."
And hand in hand with the Catholic " philo
sophy of Lyons," Renan studied the Scotch
metaphysicians. For some months Reid re
mained his ideal : — " My dream was the peaceable
life of a laborious ecclesiastic — Reid or Male-
branche — attached to his duties, relieved from
his parish work on account of the value of
his researches. Not until later did I perceive—
with that degree of certainty which soon was
to leave my mind no room for choice — the
essential contradiction between these metaphysical
studies and the Christian Religion." l
1 "Souvenirs," p. 217.
40 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
After Reid came Malebranche, then Hegel,
Kant, and Herder. From the first page, these
more audacious and more universal thinkers
exercised on Renan's mind an irresistible attrac
tion. " I studied the Germans," he has written
more than once, " and I thought I entered a
Temple ! " A temple, indeed, vaster than any
church. ... At the two remotest poles of human
thought there are situate two opposite conceptions
of the universe. Orthodox and traditional trans
cendentalism shows us a definite act of creation,
a living God, a Providence which guides the
world, and the infinite army of the immortal
souls of men. At the furthest extremity of
metaphysical science exists the mystical doctrine
of immanence, which, in place of a definite
creation, explains the universe by the gradual
evolution of a germ. All Being is Becoming : an
eternal process, an infinite continuance, over which
an unconscious deity broods in the abyss. The
universe is animated by one single Soul, in whom
all living beings share, but of which, so to speak,
they only enjoy the usufruct, since they fade and
vanish like sparks that fly upwards, while It
remains eternal. Of these two creeds, Renan
was bound in honour to believe the first. Little
by little, he inclined towards the second.
The retentive and tenacious mind of Renan
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 41
let nothing slip of these early readings. All his
philosophy is there in germ. The mystical
pantheism of Herder, the Hegelian idea of
development, supplied him with the theory of
evolution — of a world perpetually in travail of
a superior transformation. Kant renewed for
him the impelling principle of Duty. And
Kenan's theology is contained in a phrase of
Malebranche's — Dieu riagit pas par des volontes
particulieres : God does not act by special pro
vidences.
" I greatly like your German thinkers (he
wrote to his sister in September 1842), though
they be somewhat pantheist and sceptic. . . .
One's first impression of philosophy is that it tends
towards a universal scepticism. One is struck
by the uncertainty of human knowledge, the
slight foundation for all opinions save those based
on reason. What we had always taken for
Truth appears mere prejudice and error. . . .
Philosophy excites, and only half satisfies the
appetite for Truth. I am eager for mathe
matics ! " *
Nothing could be more characteristic of Kenan's
peculiar intellectual constitution than the manner
in which this very appetite for proof served to re
strain his scepticism. He appears to have decided,
1 Ernest et Henriette Renan : "Lettres intimes," pp. 88, 96, 97.
42 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
almost immediately, that the pure toil of the
human intellect in the void could produce no
solution of the eternal problem. He demanded,
not a system, but a proof; and while continuing
to read Kant and Herder, and especially Male-
branche, he devoted no less a part of his time and
strength to the pursuit of mathematics and natural
science. " Who shall criticise the Eternal without
knowledge ? " he cried with Job. ... By a sort of
instinct which had not yet found its right outlet,
Ernest Renan sought in exact science an answer
to the terrible problems which philosophy had set
him, and which the approximative or historical
sciences were at length to resolve.
In this state of suspense, voluntarily imposed,
there were moments when Renan relinquished
all his doubts with the great cry of Faust :
Gefiihl ist alles ! His heart had never wavered
an instant in its absolute attachment to the
Catholic Church. If faith be a sentiment, if we
know God only by the heart, then Renan was
a Christian. No life to him appeared so beautiful,
so desirable, so true to the highest ideal, as the
life of a priest. " Even if Christianity be only a
dream," he writes to his sister in September 1842,
" Even if Christianity be only a dream, the
priesthood remains a divine type." Your true
vocation is revealed by a certain inaptitude for
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 43
any other career. Renan, with his passionate
love of study, his taste for seclusion, his complete
incapacity for practical affairs, — Renan, with his
vague and lofty aspirations towards the infinite,
seemed born to be a priest. From Issy, in 1843,
he wrote to Henriette : — " In fact I am only fit
for one sort of life — a life of study and reflection,
retired and tranquil. All the ordinary occupa
tions of mankind appear insipid to me ; their
duties taste flat against my palate and their
pleasures arc a weariness. The motives that
guide them are odious to me. It is clear that
I am not born for a life of action.
" A private life would be my happiness. But
that a man should live merely to himself taints
his retirement with egoism. Even if it were
possible that I should live so, and not be a
burden on those I love ! The priestly life offers
all I desire without any compensating disad
vantage. The priest lives for his fellows : he
is their repositary of wisdom and good counsel.
He is a man of study and much meditation, and,
at the same time, a brother unto his brethren.
And this is in my eyes the ideal life.
" I am deep in philosophy and physics — deep
in Malebranche, the finest dreamer, the most
implacable logician who ever existed. Yet he
was a priest. More than that ; he was a monk.
44 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
And he lived unmolested in an age when Rome
was jealous of her powers. See how man, by the
mere impetus of his own weight, is constantly
carried up the steeps of Hope ! " 1
But for Henriette, vehement and tender, he
would, no doubt, have given way. She, with her
piercing insight, her wide prescient outlook, her
innate incapacity for compromise in a case of
conscience, was for ever exhorting him, enjoining,
remonstrating. More than once his heart fails :
" Ah, Henriette, I am weak ! " She will have
no mercy ! She sees, she feels, all that is fatally
ignoble, hypocritical, and arid in the life, and at last,
in the mind even, of the unbelieving priest. That
vocation which Ernest beheld on its ideal side
only, she saw in all the formidable consequences
of its limitless subordination. Can an ecclesiastic
dispose of his own soul ? Is he not subject, even
in spiritual things, to the direction of his superiors?
Should he see the better part, is he always free to
chose it ? Is he not bound to follow in a track
made to suit the common herd ? Must not the
tyranny of custom and number drag down to the
level of the majority the rare devotees of an ideal
duty? Anxiously, eagerly, she entreats her
brother to assume no bond too soon, to wait until
he be of man's estate before he take upon himself
1 "Lettres intimes," p. 118.
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 45
the vows and service of a man. " Above all, do
not think of us — of our family well-being ! There
is no true claim there. I can suffice ! " She pro
poses to him other prospects. As a professor or
as a public schoolmaster he might live the life of
study he desires, and be useful to his fellows —
and yet be free ! She promises to find some
sure solution — not, no doubt, the ideal of his
dream. " But that ideal does not exist, I fear,
upon our work-a-day earth. Life is a struggle.
Life is hard and painful. Yet, let us not lose
courage. If the road be steep we have within us
a great strength ; we shall surmount our stum
bling-blocks ! It is enough if we possess our
conscience in rectitude, if our aim be noble, our
will firm and constant. Let happen what may,
on that foundation we can build up our lives."
Meanwhile, at Issy, other influences, no less
determined, no less sincere, were concentrated
upon the unstable soul of Renan. In June
1843, Renan, towards the end of his course at
Issy, was informed that he was among the chosen
few admitted to the tonsure. The young man
implored a delay, immediately granted : " But
keep this affair," said his director, " separate from
the question of your vocation. They are distinct,
and you know my opinion as to the second."
" And would you believe," writes Renan in-
46 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
genuously to his sister, " that I too am now much
more assured of my vocation. All my directors
are convinced of it. ... As for the question
of intellectual liberty, I have answered myself :
there are two sorts of independence ; the one
presumptuous and bold, railing at all that is
respectable, — this is indeed denied me by
priestly duty : but in any case, my conscience
and my desire for truth would forbid me such
audacities ; of this sort of independence, there
can, therefore, be no question. There is, however,
an independence of another fashion, wise, sage,
respecting what is worthy of respect, despising
neither beliefs nor persons, examining all things
calmly, in good faith, using reason as a divine
gift, and neither accepting nor rejecting any
conclusion on the mere sanction of a human
authority. Such independence is open to all
men, and why not to a priest ? It is true that
in the case of a priest this liberty is subject to
a certain restriction from which other men are
free. The priest must know when to be silent !
He must place a guard upon his lips. He must
not scandalize the weaker brethren ; for their
name is legion who take umbrage at that which
they can not comprehend. But, after all, is it so
hard to keep one's mind to oneself in solitude ?
It is often a secret movement of vanity which
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 47
leads us to communicate our opinions. The law
of silence ought, perchance, to be the chosen por
tion of the lover of peace. ' We must have a
silent opinion at the back of our mind/ said
Pascal, ' which is our secret standard in all things,
while we speak the language understanded of the
people.'"
CHAPTER V
A GREAT RESOLUTION
IN this frame of mind Renan left the seminary
at Issy, and proceeded in due form to the
great College of St Sulpice, in order to take his
degree in theology prior to entering the Church.
Here he began to study Hebrew. From the first
he displayed a singular gift for Semitic philology.
And this appeared to simplify his career. It seemed
so obvious that Renan was destined to be professor
of Oriental languages in a Catholic seminary.
But in reality, every month of study led him
further and further from the Church. Here, in
these questions of date, in this patient study of those
inflections which serve to prove a date, — here was
that certainty, that proof positive, for which he
had so vainly craved in the throes of his doubts.
Renan, by natural gift, was not a pure thinker,
but a historian. The proofs of history were, in
his eyes, the only authentic proofs. And these
were all against the Church. No impartial philo
logist can maintain that the second part of Isaiah
is due to the same hand as the first. The Book
A GREAT RESOLUTION 49
of Daniel is clearly apocryphal. Who can sup
pose that the grammar or the history of the
Pentateuch date from the period of Moses ?
Admit one error in a Revealed Text and you
incriminate the whole. In another order of facts
it is clear that many a dogma of the Church
reposes on the erroneous translations of the
Vulgate. The Church, like the Scriptures, was
therefore fallible !
Meanwhile, St Sulpice laid the accent on
philology, insisted on Renan's peculiar gift,
and gave him every possible advantage. A
special permission allowed him to follow M.
Quatremere's course of Hebrew and Syro-Chaldaic
tongues at the College of France. In 1844 he
was intrusted with a preparatory class of Hebrew
grammar at St Sulpice. At twenty-two years of
age the young professor applied to the Semitic
languages the system which Bopp had recently
deduced from the comparison of the different
Indo-European tongues. Renan's General History
of Semitic Languages was to spring from this class
at St Sulpice.
The young scholar tried to stifle his doubts, to
apply himself relentlessly to exact studies, to pay the
least possible attention to his religious convictions.
A professor in a seminary would not need the living
faith of the simple parish priest. Alas, his exact and
D
50 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
patient mind assimilated all the knowledge afforded
him by the College of France, and by his masters
at St Sulpice, and found therein new material
for disbelief. But while his reason disengaged
itself day by day from the authority of the
Church, his heart found every day some new
reason to be grateful. Rome has never dis
regarded the talents of her servitors. In our
time she is especially tender to such of them
as show a superior capacity for science : since
at that outpost she is most frequently attacked.
The directors of St Sulpice were not at all in
clined to under-rate their pupil, they were ready
to make almost any sacrifice in order to keep
him where his talents were so greatly needed.
They hoped also, doubtless, that science would
prove a derivative, a happy counter-irritant, likely
to allay the excess of German metaphysics — and
this shows their sincerity : they could not suppose
the truth upon the other side ! Who can blame
their zeal ? They were not only wise and prudent,
according to their generation ; they were charitable
with an eternal chanty. Their work of faith and
rescue was, to them, none the less a work of faith
and rescue, because it was accomplished with
an ulterior aim and an extraordinary diplomacy.
It was of no avail. Renan was honest, and at
the other end of Europe there was Henriette
A GREAT RESOLUTION 51
ceaselessly exhorting him to honesty. In his
experience, science had confirmed the doubts
aroused by speculation. He knew what was
the essential minimum of Catholic belief: and
he knew that he did not possess it. In this
mood he returned to Treguier in 1845, to spend
the summer vacation with his mother.
" Ah, dear Henriette, the future fills me with
fear. I, so weak, so inexperienced, so lonely, so
unsupported, — with only you, five hundred leagues
away, to help me — how am I to shatter bonds
so mighty, and to wrench myself from a path
whither a superior power has led me ! I tremble
when I think of it ; but I shall not fail. And
then — do you think I tear my faith out of my
heart without a pang ? Do you think I quit,
without reluctance, these projects which for so
many years have made up my life and my happi
ness ? And all this world of mine, in which I
was so at home, will cast me out for a renegade ?
And that other world — will it accept me ? The
first loved me, and made much of me : what does
it not promise even to-day ? Henriette, my good
Henriette, keep me in heart ! Oh, how sad and
barren life appears to me in these moments ! . . .
Oh, my God, into what a snare hast Thou led
my feet. I can only free myself by piercing my
mother's heart. Oh, mother ! Mother ! I do
52 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
all I can to paint the future, to cheer her as best
I may, to soothe her fears. ... How often have
I resolved to cast my doubts and scruples to the
winds and go straight ahead ! She is there, two
paces away ! God knows if I love and revere
her : it is but a torture the more.1
" Her endearments break my heart ; her day
dreams — which she is for ever repeating, and
which I never find the cruel courage to gainsay —
are a continual grief. Ah, if she only understood !
I would sacrifice everything to make her happy —
everything except my conscience and my duty.
Ah, why was I not born a Protestant in Germany !
Herder was a bishop, and he was barely a
Christian. But in the Catholic Church there is
no room for heresy.
" My German philosophers are my resource.
There I behold the continuation of Jesus Christ !
What sweetness and what strength ! Christ
will come from the North at His Second Ad
vent. . . .
" I still believe. I pray. I repeat the Pater
with rapture. I love to be in church. Pure,
simple, artless religion touches me profoundly
in my lucid moments : then I feel the perfume of
1 " Lettres intimes."
A GREAT RESOLUTION 53
God. Yes, I am pious, fervidly pious, sometimes,
in spite of all my doubts. I think I shall always
remain pious in any case. Piety has surely a
value of its own — be it merely subjective.
" Here they take me for a good little seminarist,
very religious, very gentle. God forgive me, it is
not my fault ! How could I make them under
stand ! I could never put so much German into
the heads of my honest Bretons.
" There are moments when I think I will
amputate my reason, and live only for the mystic
life. Except my judgment, except the faculty
which weighs and criticises, the Catholic Church
responds to every function of my soul. I must
therefore sacrifice either the Church or my judg
ment ... a difficult and cruel operation, but
God knows I would perform it if I could think
it His will. Ah ! how I dread the end of the
vacation ! When it comes to practice, what
shall I decide ? " *
This young Hamlet of the Inner Life was none
the less a Breton, with a spring of resolve in him
on which he did not count enough. More than
once in his career the man who — in the phrase
of Montaigne — was among all others " undulating
and diverse," was to exhibit this same admirable
obstinacy for conscience' sake. He left Treguier
1 Letters to the Abbe Cognat : " Souvenirs," p. 382 et seq.
54 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
on the Qth of October 1845, and returned to
St Sulpice prepared to temporize and dally, far
from certain of his future choice. A sort of
innocent duplicity made the constraint of pious
practices not entirely odious to him ; a certain
artless macchiavellism, which he never lost, made
the difficult and mortal game he played rather
interesting, than merely cruel, or repugnant.
Moreover, the beauty of Catholicism satisfied
his artistic instincts, his tender sensibility. And
his education had fostered in him his natural
optimism, so that he still sometimes envisaged, as
quite practicable, heaven knows what chimaeric
fusion between an inward sincerity and an out
ward observance of the Noble Lie. But his religious
education had also fostered in him an extraordin
ary strength of conscience — backed at the last
extremity, as we have said, by the Breton's
doggedness.
It was evening when Renan arrived in the
square of St Sulpice. A surprise awaited him.
The directors, who had dallied and gone saunter
ing long enough, thought the moment had come
for a brusque tightening of the rein, for a flying
leap over the hedge. Renan found himself no
longer a pupil of the seminary. During his
absence he had been appointed professor in the
Archbishop of Paris's new Carmelite College.
A GREAT RESOLUTION 55
To accept was to give a pledge of good faith to
the Church. To refuse so honourable a position
was inexplicable. Renan sought his superiors,
explained his whole position, his doubts, his
scruples, which, instead of diminishing, in
creased with every month. Once at bay he
stood firm, refused to temporize, and showed
the obstinate grit in him. The Fathers im
mediately gave way ; their bonds apparently
fell from him. The same evening, with
out any sort of scene or storm, desperately
alone, but not outcast, the young seminarist
crossed the threshold of the seminary, traversed
the square, and entered a small semi-clerical hotel
at the north-western corner of it.
" A man of much talent said once of M.
Renan : —
" ' Renan thinks like a man, feels like a woman,
and acts like a child.' "
" Did he act like a child, the poor young
Breton who fled from St Sulpice aghast because
he no longer thought the lessons of his masters
all quite true ? It was, perhaps, a piece of
childish folly to renounce the splendid future
which awaited him in his chosen path, to affront
extreme poverty, without resources, without pros
pects, sustained by the sole impossibility of
living for aught else than a conviction. Those
56 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
who think that the hall-mark of a man is his
sincerity in regard to the world and his own soul,
will grant that on that occasion the child showed
himself twice a man." l
1 James Darmesteter : Ernest Renan. "Critique et Politique,"
p. 63.
CHAPTER VI
DOMINUS PARS
PARIS, RUE DU POT-DE-FER
October i^th^ 1845.
AT last, my Henriette, my dearest friend, I
can pour out all my heart, I can tell you
all the trouble which corrodes my soul ! The
last few days count in the record of my life ;
perhaps they are the most decisive, certainly the
most painful I have experienced. So many
events have crossed each other in this narrow
space that the mere recital of them will imply all
my feelings. And it will console me to tell you
everything, for here, now, my isolation is terrible,
and my lonely, tired heart finds an infinite sweet
ness in resting upon yours.
" Only one word first, dear, of this last vacation ;
a sweet and cruel time for me. My position was
of the strangest. To enjoy the companionship of
my kind mother, to wait on her, caress her, cheer
her by my day dreams, is so delightful a pastime to
me that I believe there is no trouble, no anxiety,
57
58 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
that I could not forget in her society. And then,
a peculiar indefinable sense of well-being hangs
about my native place. All my childhood, so
simple, so pure, so heedless, survives in its at
mosphere, and this revival of my past charms me
almost to tears. The life of that country is but
a common, vulgar life, I know. But there is a
repose about it, a quiet well-being, in which
thought and feeling, when not prisoned in the
narrow circle of our daily round, are able to
exercise their sweet gift of healing. Ah, how I feel
to the core that vanished sweetness ! I am weak,
my dear Henriette. I sometimes think I could
be quite happy in a simple, common life which I
should ennoble from within. Then I think of
you and I look higher.
" Yet in this mild and calm atmosphere of
Treguier, you can easily see how difficult was my
position with regard to mamma. She had but the
faintest suspicion of my state of mind, and she
tried to trace my secret thought under the least of
my words and actions. And I was afraid to let her
see the truth and yet I felt I ought not to conceal
it. Think how I suffered ! The necessity of
telling her all, the fear of her cruel disappoint
ment, led me, hour by hour, into almost contra
dictory courses. And our good mother, with a
disastrous cleverness, interpreted them all accord-
DOMINUS PARS 59
ing to the desire of her heart. She would take
no hint, no mere suggestion. At last one day —
one hour — which I shall never forget, I was
forced to be more explicit. I said clearly that
my vocation was doubtful . . . that I must exact
a delay. Well, from that hour she had been more
calm. She is less afraid when I speak of study
ing in the Paris University, when I speak of a
possible journey to Germany. I knew how to
turn all these projects in harmony with her dearest
scheme — our meeting, the progress of my studies,
&c. Do not mention to her that I am at an inn !
Ah, dear mother, how dear she is to me — my
greatest happiness but also my greatest trouble.
I should hate to be vulgar in any part or parcel
of my inner nature ; but I am sure that I am not,
in my love for her !
" I arrived in Paris on the Qth of October, in
the evening. That same night I slept at the hotel.
The next days I passed with all due gravity and
decorum in terminating my connection with St
Sulpice. I was charmed by the esteem and the
affection which the fathers showed me. My
Hebrew professor has promised to recommend
me very warmly to M. Quatremere: he holds to
me as to his favourite pupil. I could not have
imagined so much broadness of view in the
strictest orthodoxy. They are persuaded that I
60 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
shall return to St Sulpice, and, — would you believe
it, dear Henriette ? — I like to think so myself,
and was enchanted to hear them say so. Accuse
me of weakness if you like. I am not of those
who take a side, and never lose hold, whatever
they may think, whatever Science prove. And
Christianity is so large a thing, a man may well
hold more than one opinion concerning it, accord
ing to the different degrees of his instruction.
Still, at this moment, I do not see how I can in
conscience become a Catholic priest.
" I have seen Monsieur Dupanloup : he was
delightful ! He granted me an interview of an
hour and a half — a thing he never does. How
well he understood me at once ! He did me so
much good ! He replaced me in my lost high
sphere, whence these practical preoccupations
had caused me to fall in some degree. I
was quite frank and explicit with him, and he
was very pleased with me. I recognised the
superior mind in his advice, so clear and to
the point. He promised to do his utmost for
me. . . .
" You must let me assure you, dearest, that, say
what you will, I cannot spend all this year at
your expense. I have quite decided to accept
some post which will not encroach too much upon
my time and may even be useful to me. . . .
DOMINUS PARS 61
" I have been to see the directors of Stanislas
College. I had the best of references. Some of
my old comrades are there and had spoken of me.
I allow that I should like, best of all, to enter as
a teacher at Stanislas. There, my dear, I should
be treated honourably and morally. Perhaps you
do not like the prospect, as the college is directed
by ecclesiastics ; but it is formed exactly on the
model of the University. And I have been most
frank. I have explained to the provisor the
reason of my leaving St Sulpice. And think
what an admirable transition ! No one would be
astonished to see me pass from St Sulpice to
Stanislas, and no one would be astonished to see
me move on from Stanislas to another college
of the university ! And mamma would be de
lighted : it was one of her ideas."
Stanislas is in fact a Jesuit college participating
in the examinations and other advantages of the
lay public schools of Paris. In the touching and
honourable engagement which the venerable Order
of St Sulpice was fighting with an inexperienced
governess in Poland for the soul of Ernest Renan,
the last rally had not yet been sounded. The
Church did not by any means despair of her
acolyte. And he, perhaps, had never felt more
drawn towards the House of God.
" I spend my evenings in the church of St
62 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
Sulpice," he wrote to his friend, the Abbe Cognat. 1
. . . There is no more happiness for me on earth.
... I remember my mother, my little room, my
books, my dreams, my quiet walks at my mother's
side. . . . All the colour seems to have faded
out of life."
It is probable that the Fathers counted on this
reaction and were well aware that the towers of
St Sulpice never look more noble than from the
other side of the square — from the windows, say,
of Mademoiselle Celeste's stuffy but respectable
small clerical hotel. Nor can we wonder at their
error. They knew their pupil in his sweet
humour and his docility, in his attachment to
themselves and to the Church : they knew him
as an imaginative, serene, and hopeful child ; they
did not recognise as yet that granite resistance
which underlay this graciousness of disposition,
and which it was impossible to undermine. Un-
impassioned, sincere, curious above all things of
the truth, Ernest Renan was not to be led in
any path but that he saw before him. Even
while the reverend ecclesiastics of Stanislas and
St Sulpice were putting their heads together in
a charitable purpose of friendly circumvention,
Renan was writing to his sister concerning " the
1 Kenan's letters to the Abbe Cognat, during the years 1845-6,
are reprinted in the Appendix to his "Souvenirs de Jeunesse."
DOMINUS PARS 63
singularity of his relations with them, which
afforded him the opportunity of making the most
valuable psychological observations." He was
interested, and touched, and sceptical, and heart
broken, with equal sincerity. The fathers,
strangely enough, knew little of his religious
scruples : Monsieur Dupanloup alone asserted that
they amounted to a total loss of faith. Prompted
by a reserve which made him dread to exhibit in
public his inmost wound, — and, perhaps, inspired
by that morbid horror of the commonplace which
haunted Renan throughout his youth, — he kept to
himself the moral and philosophical origin of his
doubts, and put forward only his scientific scruples.
He was acutely conscious (the theme recurs again
and again in his letters), that the recalcitrant
seminarist is rarely a heroic personage. If he
had to doubt, at least he meant to doubt with
distinction and originality.
So he spoke to the astonished Fathers of the
inexact philology of the Vulgate, or the erroneous
date assigned by the Church to the Book of
Daniel. St Sulpice knew how to deal with the
mere sensuous backslider; it knew how to deplore,
to deprecate, and if need be to imprecate, the
torments of revolt, the passionate despair, of a
Lamennais. It could not take these niceties of
scholarship so seriously — a mitigated contact
64 LIFE OF ERNEST REXAX
with reality would soon, it opined, bring the
fancies of a dreamer within bounds.
And doubtless St Sulpice counted also on the
contrast between the warm kindness of the -Church
and the shrewdness of the world,, ever suspicious
of the unfrocked clerical. Monsieur Dupanloup
offered his purse to Renan. He can not have
been quite pleased to hear that, out of her savings,
Mademoiselle Renan had .already sent her brother
a sum of eight and forty pounds. Moreover, by
some prodigy of feminine ingenuity, the little
governess at Zamocz had obtained for her brother
letters of introduction to the most eminent scholars
of the day. She had thus made Renan in some
measure independent of the Church,
The worst of his trial was now, in truth, over
for Renan. His great act of resolution had, as it
were, cleared the air. There was no more com
promising. Like many naturally undecided per
sons, Renan pursued tenaciously a course of
conduct once adopted, knowing in what an eddy
of ceaseless irresolution he would be flung by
another change of front Those who met him
at the moment of his secession from St Sulpice
observed in him none of the poignant anxiety of
the Christian who feels his faith slip from him.
He had the look of a young philosopher, calm,
resolute, smiling, who sees new immense horizons
DOMINUS PARS 65
open before him. For the moment he was pre
occupied by his practical affairs which he took
seriously, although not tragically.
It is characteristic of Kenan's complex, curious
and quiet-tempered nature that his change of
opinion provoked in him no aversion towards his
lost ideal. He did not desire to burn what he
had once adored. He went on adoring with a
difference. He maintained his fealty to M. Le
Hir as a spiritual superior and chose him for his
confessor — for this strange apostate continued to
confess himself and to receive absolution. " It
does me good, and is a great consolation. I will
confess myself to you when you are in orders,"
he writes to his friend. He was on terms of
intimacy — almost of unction — with the Abbe
Gratry, the Superior of Stanislas. For Renan
entered Stanislas, as St Sulpice intended him
to do, much to the distrust and discomfort of
Henriette. The young usher, at six-and-twenty
pounds a year, admitted to terms of such flattering
familiarity with his directors, saw Stanislas at
first through rose-coloured spectacles. . . . Henri-
ette's fears are a mythical survival, interesting to
the scientific observer.
" Because it is a College of Jes — . . . Oh, my
dear Henriette, is it possible that a clever woman
in the nineteenth century can amuse herself with
E
66 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
such nursery tales? In truth, I myself am no
partisan of the Society : in all the force of the
term, I clo not love it. But from the bottom of
my heart I laugh at the fantastic imagination
which sees in it a sort of ogre-scarecrow to frighten
babes with. It is a really remarkable item of
psychology, a product of the faculty which
gave us Bluebeard and other tales of wonder.
Tis the love of mystery, the human need of the
fantastic which has produced the legend of the
Society of Jesus." All the same, a few days later
our young psychologist left Stanislas, as he had
left St Sulpice. He had been very happy with
the Jesuits. But his lucidity saw through their
judicious wiles. " 'Tis a duty to go. I have
made a great sacrifice : it would be absurd to
hesitate before a small one."
When, therefore, Renan was required to wear
a cassock and conform, merely in outward things
of course, to his ecclesiastical environment, he
sighed — but went away. " They were very nearly
taking me again in their net," he wrote to Henri-
ette. But he left them, shut upon him with a
pang of regret the door of the House of the Lord,
and sought that world of laymen which appeared
to him so sordid, almost immoral, and unfriendly.
" For I need an atmosphere of moral feeling," he
remarked to his sister. What he needed still
DOMINUS PARS 67
more was an atmosphere of independence, in
which to work out his own salvation. That at
least he found in the school for young gentlemen
where he was admitted as parlour-boarder — or
rather as a sort of pupil-teacher, since he received
his board in return for the lessons he gave.
The house was in a steep street of the Montagne
Sainte Genevieve, known to-day as the Rue de
1'Abbc de 1'Epee. In those days it was called
the Rue des deux Eglises. Renan must often
have smiled as he read the name. For God
had led him indeed into the Street of Two
Churches, nor was the second, in his eyes, less
holy than the first.
" Long ago," he writes to the Abbe Cognat,
" already when I went up to the altar to receive
the tonsure, I was tormented by terrible doubts.
But my superior urged me on, and I had always
heard that it was my duty to obey. So I
went up, but God is my witness that in the
intention of my heart, I took for my portion that
Truth which is the hidden God ! I dedicated
myself to her quest, for her sake I renounced all
profane motives and ambitions — nor shall I con
sider myself false to my vow until, abandoning
my soul to vulgar cares, I content myself with
the material aims which suffice to worldly men.
Till then, I can repeat, Dominus pars. . . . Man
68 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
can never be sufficiently sure of himself to swear
unwavering fealty to a given system, though at
the moment of his vow he hold it true. All he
may do is to dedicate himself to Truth, whatso
ever she be, wheresoever she lead him, no matter
what the sacrifice she may demand."
PART II
CHAPTER I
NEW IDEAS
IN the first days of November 1845 Ernest
Renan entered on his duties at M. Crouzet's
school. They were not stimulating, they were
not inspiring, but they left him his whole day
free for work. During some two hours, of an
evening, he superintended the studies of seven
youths who followed the classes of the Lycee
Henri IV. In return, without diminishing his
sister's little store, he received a place at table
and a small room to himself. His wants were
supplied, his liberty was complete, his leisure was
ample ; save for his state of mind — but that is
everything ! — he might have been happy. Alas,
he was dull and sad. The world, in his eyes,
appeared terribly mediocre : a desert, tediously
overpopulate, a shabby wilderness of fifth-rate
souls. He felt numb and shaken as one who
has had a great fall. A month ago he had been
almost a priest, belonging by implication to a
superior order. He had been appointed professor
72 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
in the Archbishop's College. He had been re
cognised as a Semitic scholar. And behold, he
was little better than an usher in M. Crouzet's
school.
For more than two months he kept his situa
tion a secret from his mother. By a pious
fraud he continued to " paint the future," to speak
of Stanislas. But too many persons counted
on Mme. Renan's influence over her devoted
boy for his position to remain a secret. Poor
loving woman, she did not attempt to persuade
him ! She wrote him heart-broken letters. He,
her delicate lad, her pride, her darling, to think
he was " on the streets ! " for so she phrased it.
" You know, dear, even a mouse in your room
used to keep you awake. You were never used
to hardship !
" O Joseph, mon aimable
Fils affable,
Les betes t'ont de'vore ! );
In those first dull November days at M.
Crouzet's school, something of the melancholy
which had tarnished all things for the young
seminarist of St Nicholas hung again over Ernest
Renan, and menaced him with that creeping
nostalgia so deadly to the Breton. His letters
to Henriette are steeped in disappointment. . . .
NEW IDEAS 73
" Now that I see them at close quarters, men
are less refined, less intellectual than I had
imagined them. ... I feel lost in this cold
world, incurious of the Divine. . . . Since Chris
tianity is not true, nothing interests me or
appears worth my attention." What was the
use of striving and struggling in this unim
portant throng of mortals? " J'aime mieux ne
pas mentir et caresser ma petite pensfe" he wrote
to the Abbe Cognat in a phrase too charming
to translate.
Renan had no longer any hope of regaining
his faith. . . . Faith is a sentiment, and, once
lost, there is no regaining it by evidence. . . .
Doubt is an act of reason in which evidence is
everything. Once we judge religious history by
the ordinary rules of scientific criticism, the
authenticity of Catholic tradition can no longer
compel our assent. Renan continued to read the
Scriptures. But the Bible, read as any other
book, appears merely a collection of Oriental
masterpieces, beautiful as poetry, valuable as
history, but holding no peculiar promise for
our souls. He looked into the empty heavens,
saw no Christ on His throne there, and brooded
with an obstinacy which had a sort of pleasure
in it over the completeness of his desolation.
This delectatio morosa is dangerous to a con-
74 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
templative temperament. That way, if not mad
ness, melancholia lies ; the disease is potential in
many Celtic constitutions. For some weeks,
Ernest Renan, so like his mother, felt his father's
dull and sluggish blood stir ominously at his
heart. But a fortunate circumstance shattered
his lethargy. A new friendship absorbed him.
The oldest of his pupils, a young M. Berthelot,
some eighteen years of age, was studying ad
vanced mathematics and philosophy at Henri IV.
They lodged on the same landing.
" It was in November 1845 that I first set eyes
on Ernest Renan. He was four years older than
I, but he had, perhaps, even less experience of
life — if such a term may be used of young men,
the one eighteen, the other two-and-twenty. He
had just left the Seminary — not without some
vague inclination towards a possible resumption
of the sacerdotal cloth. His gentle, serious bear
ing, his taste for things intellectual and moral,
pleased me at once, and we became friends." l
" We had the same religion," says Renan
simply.2 " And that religion was the worship of
Truth."
Truth is a diamond of many facets, and the
1 Correspondance Berthelot — Renan. Revue de Paris : 15 Tuillet
1897.
2 Discours et Conferences, p. 231.
NEW IDEAS 75
young men had seen her at different angles.
Each knew most things the other did not know.
Renan was already expert in theology, philosophy,
philology and history. But young Berthelot re
vealed to him a new world of vaster vistas and
more precise perspectives : — the magnificent certi
tudes of physical and natural science. Forty years
after those first conversations in their attics of the
Rue des Deux Eglises, fragments and echoes of
those midnight marvels linger still in the mind of
Renan.
" How infinitely the atomic theories of the
chemist and crystallographer surpass that vague
notion of Matter, which verifies scholastic philo
sophy ! . . ,1
" Think of knowing that our earth is a ball
some three thousand leagues in diameter . . .
that the sun, up there, is thirty-eight millions
of leagues away, and that it is one million
five hundred thousand times larger than the
earth ! " 2
If Spinoza was a God - intoxicated man,
Renan was a man intoxicated by the splendour
of the universe ! There are stars whose
light falls through space ten thousand years
before it reaches us, falling at the rate of over
1 Discours et Conferences ', p. 16.
2 Fenilles Dttachttsfa. 156.
76 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
thirty millions of leagues in seven minutes !
There are suns, larger than ours, and perhaps
whole solar systems, in the formless white blurs
that film the skies on cloudless nights. The
heavens proclaim, indeed, the glory of the
Eternal ; and Renan knew how great a tempta
tion Job resisted when he cried, " I have seen the
moon advance in her majesty, O God, and I
have not bowed the knee ! "
As the last shreds of his faith fell from before
him, lo ! in their place he discovered the whole
unspeakable mystery of the Cosmos. So, with the
first elements of astronomy and physics, Renan
learned that passionate devotion to the universe
which engrosses the whole mind, and makes all
private sorrow a thing of slight account. Already
he might have exclaimed with Marcus Aurelius,
" All that suiteth thee, O Cosmos, suiteth me ! "
He was in very truth a " citizen of the great
city," a conscient atom of the whole. The world
was too vast, our span of years too short, the
sum of science attainable too tremendous, for life,
however sad, to be adjudged a failure. Yes, in
1846 he was already the Renan who, years later,
wrote of Amiel : " The man who has time to
keep a private diary has never understood the
immensity of the universe. There is so much
to learn ! In face of this colossal piece of work
NEW IDEAS 77
how can we stop to consume our own hearts, to
doubt, to repine? . . . My friend M. Berthelot
would have his hands full, had he a hundred
consecutive lives, nor find in any one of them
the time to write about himself! . . . Everything
has to be done, or done all over again, in natural
and social science. When we feel ourselves
called to labour at this infinite task, we are too
busy to pause and brood over the little private
melancholies we may fall in with by the way."1
..." When I think of the unique pair of friends
we were," he says elsewhere, " I see before me
two young priests in their surplices, walking arm
in arm. We should have blushed to have asked
each other a favour, or even a piece of advice.
Neither of us was greatly occupied with himself,
and neither of us was greatly occupied with the
other. Our friendship consisted in what we
learned together."2
Indeed they learned many things together, but
they learned many things apart. As time went
on M. Berthelot was drawn more and more
exclusively into the sphere of physics, and especi
ally of chemistry, as we all know, to our admira
tion. Semitic philology continued to engross
M. Renan. He wrote to his sister : " I have
1 Feuilles Dttachtes, p. 359.
- Souvenir S) p. 339.
78 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
so many new and just ideas ! I am throwing
all my heart into my work — all I know and all
I am — and I have the instinct of success."
His canvas was the series of lectures which he
had delivered the preceding year at St Sulpice,
and which the Abb6 Le Hir strongly urged him
to publish. The book was to be a Hebrew
grammar. But, in the hands of this ardent
young thinker, philology became a new instru
ment of psychology. For the character of a
nation is transfixed in its language, and a Hebrew
grammar is a diagram of the Semitic soul. In
the speech of the Jew or the Arab, as in his
nature, you will find something irreductible and
stubborn, a dignified simplicity, a non-existence
of the finer shades ; a something monotonous,
which recalls the desert in its immense unifor
mity. So theorised young M. Renan, in that
general history of Semitic languages which was
to introduce him to the world of science.
The first sketch of this important work,
presented in manuscript to the Academy of In
scriptions in 1847, by a young man of four-and-
twenty, a pupil-teacher in a school for boys,
obtained the Prix Volney, one of the most
important distinctions awarded by the Institute
of France.
NEW IDEAS 79
Thus, barely two years after leaving St
Sulpice, Renan saw a new career open before
him. He continued to pass his University ex
aminations : he was successively Bachelier and
Licencie. In 1847 he took his degree as Agr£ge
de Philosophic, that is to say, Fellow of the Univer
sity, and, in consequence, he was offered the Pro
fessorship of Philosophy in the Lyc6e of Vendome.
Here, and later, — during the long vacation at
St Malo, — Renan occupied his leisure by a thesis
on Averroes which was to procure him his doctor's
degree. Half convinced by so much success, his
mother let herself accept some consolation. Her
" fils affable " was still her " fils affable " : amiable,
studious, gifted, as of old. He had come back to
live with her. His grave morality seemed almost
orthodox. No scandal had attended his secession
from the priesthood. " My mother shows the
truest liberality of mind," Renan wrote to M.
Berthelot in 1847; "she fully approves my system,
which is never to express, by word or deed, either
affection or antipathy for the profession which
might have been my own. I soon brought her to
see my point of view. And indeed we have many
a piquant conversation on this head." But despite
the charm of home, despite his native air, Renan
was not happy in the narrow provincial circle
8o LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
which he had re-entered. He missed the intel
lectual stimulus of Paris. He was glad when
a small temporary appointment, — as assistant
master in the Lycee of Versailles — permitted him
to return to the capital and resume his interrupted
studies.
CHAPTER II
1848
father of M. Berthelot was a doctor, an
intellectual man, above all, a benevolent
man. His practice was in a poor neighbourhood ;
of modest origin himself, he was interested in
many philanthropic schemes. He was a firm Re
publican. " The first I had seen," wrote Renan,
who barely could remember his father and his
uncles. Opposed to the bourgeois spirit of the
Monarchy of July, an enthusiastic believer in
the Socialist transformation of society, Dr
Berthelot influenced his son and, through him,
the ever-impressionable Ernest Renan. . . . Yet
all through the beginning of '48, immersed in his
studies, the young scholar had listened to his
friend's gospel with a somewhat vacant ear. He
was engrossed by an essay on the study of Greek
in Mediaeval Europe, which appeared to him more
immediately important. In all things, always,
he found it hard to take a side. He distrusted
extremes. His sense of the relativity of appear-
F 8:
82 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
ances debarred him from a passionate conviction in
politics no less than in religion. Moreover, if he
was by opinion a Liberal, by temperament Renan
was Conservative. A natural love for the Past,
a natural dread of innovation, hampered him in
the sphere of political reform :
" I shall never break many lances for this sort
of thing," he wrote to M. Berthelot, in September
1847-
Then the Revolution broke out in February.
The King and his family went into exile. There
was a riot in May. One morning Ernest Renan
had to climb a barricade in order to reach the
College of France. He climbed it and arrived in
due time at the Sanscrit lecture-room ; but there
was no lecture that day, and behold ! the College
was full of soldiers ! The young scholar sighed
and continued his walk, in order to study Sanscrit
at M. Burnoufs private house. Civil war reddened
the streets in June. Ernest Renan awoke in
earnest and turned all his mind to the prob
lems of Socialism.
I know no page in Flaubert's Education Senti-
mentale which gives a more vivid picture of a
political massacre than we find in some of
Renan's letters to his absent sister. The dreamer,
startled from his dream, sees the dreadful reality
before him with a horrified acuteness.
1848 83
e 1848.
" Frightful sight ! The whole day we heard
nothing but the whistling of bullets and the clang
of the tocsin. . . ."
v&thjune.
" The evening and last night were worse than
ever. There was a massacre at the Gate of St
Jacques, another at the Fontainebleau Gate. I
spare you details. The St Bartholomew offers
nothing like them. There must be in human
nature something naturally cannibal which bursts
out at certain moments. As for me, I would
willingly have fought with the Garde Nationale
until, in their turn, the guards became the
murderers. No doubt they are guilty, these
poor mad insurrectionaries who shed their blood
and know not what they ask — but are they not
guiltier who, by system, have deadened in them
every human feeling ? "
ist July.
"The storm is over. If in such a state of
things it were permissible to appeal to the artistic
sense, I would call the Paris of these last days
the strangest, the most indescribable of great
sights. A few hours after the fighting was over I
visited the field of the combat Unless you
84 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
have witnessed such a thing, my dear, you cannot
imagine the great scenes of humanity. In the
Rue St Martin, in the Rue St Antoine, and in
the Rue St Jacques, between the Pantheon and
the Quays, there was not a single house but was
riddled with cannon-ball. Some of them were
perforated to sheer open work ! The fronts of
the houses, all the windows, were pierced through
and through with bullets — wide streaks of blood,
broken and abandoned guns, marked the places
where the fight had been the fiercest. Built with
a marvellous art, and constructed, not as they
used to be with heaps of cobblestone, but with
the large flagstones of the footpath, the barricades,
with their projecting and retreating angles, had a
look of fortresses. There was one every fifty
paces. The Place de la Bastille was the most
frightful chaos : all the trees cut down or bent
and twisted by the cannon balls ; on one side
whole houses demolished or still in flames ; on
another, veritable towers of defence, built out of
beams of timber, overturned carriages, and heaps
of stones. In the middle of all that, a crowd,
dizzy and half out of its mind ; soldiers worn out
with fatigue, asleep on the pavement, almost
under the feet of the people. The rage of the
vanquished disguised under an affected calm ; the
disorder of the conquerors opening a path through
1848 85
the demolished barricades — the public pity craving
alms and lint for the wounded ; all combined in
a spectacle of the sublimest originality, in which
the whole gamut of humanity was heard in
an admirable discord : man, face to face with
man, naked, without disguise, with nothing but
his primitive instincts."
July.
" Horror of exact reprisals ! I am always for
the massacred, even though they be guilty. The
National Guard has been guilty of atrocities I
scarcely dare recount.
" After the battle was over, posted on the
terrace of the Ecole des Mines, they amused
themselves by " potting " at their leisure, as a
form of recreation, the passers-by in the adjacent
streets, where the thoroughfare was still open.
That may have been the last flicker of the fury
of the fray. But what is awful to think of, is the
hecatomb of prisoners sacrificed several days later.
During whole afternoons I have heard the cease
less firing in the Luxembourg Gardens — and yet
the fighting was over ! The sound and the
thoughts it suggested, exasperated me to such
a degree that I determined to see for myself, so I
went and called on one of my friends whose
windows overlook the gardens. It was too true.
86 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
If I did not see the murderers with my own eyes,
I saw what was worse, what I never can forget,
and what, if I did not try to lift myself above
personal sentiments, would leave in my soul an
everlasting hate. . . . The unhappy prisoners
were packed in the garrets of the Palace, under
the leads, in the stifling heat of the roof. Every
now and then one of them would thrust his head
out of the dormer window, for a breath of air.
Each head served as a target for the soldiers
in the garden below — they nevqr missed their
aim ! After that, I say the middle class is
capable of the massacres of the Terror ! "
\st July.
" I am not a Socialist. I am convinced that
none of the theories of the hour is destined to
triumph, in its actual form. A system — a narrow, a
partial thing by its very essence — can never realise
itself. The system is a burgeon which must
burst its sheath in order to become a truth,
universally recognised, universally applied. . . .
I am a Progressist, that is all. ... I persist in
believing that from petty passion to petty passion,
from personal ambition to personal ambition,
through misfortune, through crime and bloodshed,
we are none the less in the act of a great transfor
mation for the greater good of humanity."
1848 8;
i6th July.
" The great births of humanity should be seen
from afar. We see the apparition of Christianity
as something exclusively pure, sacred, and super
natural. . . . And yet what sects, how mad,
monstrous, and immoral ! — accompanied, and were
even confounded with that white and beautiful
doctrine ! . . . We also have our gnostics ! " . . .
2nd Attgust.
" Adieu, dear, excellent Henriette ; think often
of your brother. Never despair of France ! " :
I know no more curious moment of psychology
than the book in which Renan attempted to
answer the problems posed by the movement of
1848. The immense volume is as young as a
primrose, full of the joy of life, full of energy,
charity, hope — above all, full of faith. The
crowded, living, voluntary pages stretch out their
hundred arms to the future like some monstrous
Indian god, who needs innumerable hands to
bestow with and to beckon, to bless with and
to curse, and in whom the vital principle is too
abundant for symmetry or grace. L'Avenir dc
la Science, is our young priest's first sermon,
heavier, more crammed with matter than those
1 Lett res dc 48. Revue de Paris, 15 Avril 1896.
88 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
we are accustomed to from his golden lips ; full,
not only of his own ideas but of the theories of his
time and his environment. The multiple, hetero
geneous masterpiece takes for its text the mystic
words of the gospel, Unum est necessarium. But
this one thing needful is the Infinite — the Ideal,
identic in its essence, whatever be the form in which
it appears to us: — philosophy, science, poetry, art,
moral beauty, moral strength, or mere natural
loveliness, no less divine. To recombine these
different elements — to trace these divergent rays
to their common centre, which is God, should be
the chief end of knowledge. The future of
science is a new religion, to be founded, not
on abstract reasoning, not on any pretended
revelation from on high, but on the most
patient, the most critical, the minutest study
of all the material profusely strewn around
us. Penetrate matter to find the secret soul in
it ! The study of science is still the service
of God. Such is the teaching of LAvenir dt
la Science.
" I am convinced there is a science of the
Origin of Man which will be constructed one
day, not from mere ratiocination and hypothesis,
but from the results of scientific research. He
who shall contribute to the solving of this problem
— though his test be imperfect, will do more for
1848 89
true philosophy than he had achieved by fifty
years of metaphysics."
Even while Renan was writing these lines a
young naturalist of much the same way of think
ing was classing his specimens and comparing his
notes. Some ten years later, we read the Origin
of Species. A reaction against the vague and void
official spiritualism of his day, inclined philosophy
to draw its conclusions from the exact results of
science. The tide has now turned so far in this
direction that we forget the originality, in 1 848, of
doctrines which at present appear the merest com
mon-sense. In 1897 all our young philosophers
are historians, or philologists, or physiologists, or
students of natural or social science. But, fifty
years ago, Philosophy was much too great a lady
to do any useful work at all. She broidered
her metaphysics in an ivory tower among the
clouds.
" Believe me," said Renan, " your true philo
sopher is the philologist, the student of myths,
the critic of social constitutions. By the subtle
study of speech we remount the stream of time
till we reach almost the source, till we come
within hail of primitive man. By comparative
grammar we touch our first ancestors ; by com
parative mythology we understand their soul,
by social science we watch their development.
90 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
Every speech, every myth or legend, every form
of social organisation from the humblest to the
most august, ought to be compared and classified.
The man who could thus evoke the origins of Chris
tianity would write the most important book of the
century. How I envy it him ! Should I live and
do well, I mean that book to be the task of my
maturity." 1
Science is thus an instrument of religion, nay,
more, a religion in herself, modest but veracious,
never going back from her word. The faith of
the chosen few, must she remain incommunicable
to the mass ? How can a religion exclude nine-
tenths of mankind ? If intellectual culture were
but a grace the more, but an added enjoyment,
it might well remain the privilege of the elect, for
man has no right to happiness. But once we admit
that science is a religion — a temple where faith
and truth join hands — how shall we forbid the
threshold to those who chiefly need a religion ?
Shall we look upon the poor barbarians as a
necessary refuse of waste matter? Shall we
consider only them human who know ? "I have
seen the massacres of June. I have repulsed in my
own heart the instinctive wish that the barbarians
might perish. Shame on such a thought! There
must be no more barbarians !
1 Avenirt p. 278.
1848 91
" Yet it is not easy to see how the many are to
be induced to work out their own salvation. How
shall we make a turbulent majority choose the
better part when, as a matter of fact, it does not
prefer it, thinks it tiresome, prefers the pothouse
and the barricade ? The ancients had convenient
means to this end : augurs, oracles, Egerias, who
arranged the truth in a way understanded of the
people. Others have had recourse to armies. . . .
It is very clear that Science will none of these.
It is much less clear, however, by what miracle
she is to descend upon and illuminate the recal
citrant mass of the ignorant. . . .
" Above all let us never dream that Science must
descend to the level of people. A cheap science,
a^i easy science, a popular science, is the most
useless of catch-words. Science must be serious,
difficult, comprehensible only to her own adepts,
in her more abstruse and secret recesses. But
by the diffusion of a sound elementary instruction
all may be made capable of understanding the
value and the gist of these researches — all may
follow them in their outer circuit ; all may be set
upon the sacred track. If you object that to
attain such cultivation, the working class must
receive more money for less work, in order to
secure the time for study, I reply : so be it ! Let
us simplify our lives. I have no objection to
92 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
the socialistic phalanstery, nor even to a salutary
reign of terror. These do not interfere with
Science. The artless life of a community where
none would be rich or poor may even be favour
able to her development, Genius lives on simple
things, and Spinoza contemplated the divine
substance in no palace while he polished the
lenses which brought him bread. Democracy has
no terror for Science. Let us all be brothers, in
truth, in simplicity, in generous and confident
human sympathy."
Such, in effect, is the gospel which Ernest
Renan caught amid the gun smoke and the
ominous fusillades of 1848. It is easy to see
how much of these theories is natural to the
author, the result of his real convictions and his
peculiar temperament, and how much is due to
the influence of the milieu and the contagion of an
epidemic enthusiasm. All Renan's later work is
based on that psychological interpretation of facts
obtained by a patient scientific method which he
advocates in his earliest book. His most fantastic
philosophy has ever a solid piece of sober erudi
tion at the base. He often reads too much into
his text, between the lines, but he starts from his
text, and never evolves out of his own brain a
system independent of historic proofs. He applies
to the history of religion and to the problems of
i848 93
exegesis, the experimental method of a student in
physics or natural history. Thus, in all essentials,
the Renan of the Avenir de la Science \ is already
Renan. True, the Renan of the future was to be
no democrat. But his turn of mind, infinitely
aristocratic, infinitely jealous of the rights of the
minority, was never subject to the powers that
be. The aristocracy which Renan commended
was an aristocracy of personal merit, an upper
house of virtue and intelligence. Spinoza and
the fishermen of Galilee were the high barons of
his heraldry. It is impossible to read the tender,
human, fraternal pages of the Apostles and St
Paul without perceiving how much of the great
dream of '48 lingered in the mind of Renan.
The day was to dawn when, mournfully, he was
to admit that the barbarians are, in truth, a
necessary refuse. But his barbarians were not
merely the unpossessing classes : they were the
selfish, the dull, the mean, the narrow, in every
class, high or low, rich or poor, one with another.
L? Avenir de la Science is an example of the
subjective quality of Renan's imagination. He
has sympathy in abundance — the subtlest, the
most penetrating, the most sensitive of any writer
of his time — but he has not a particle of dramatic
imagination. He interprets all things by himself.
If he desire to save Society, he will adjure Society
94 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
to quit the seminary, turn philologist, and set
itself to study the origins of Christianity. In the
Avenir de la Science, Renan projects his own
sensibility and his own experience into Contem
porary Society, just as later on he was to project
them into Jesus Christ and Marcus Aurelius. No
man ever lived more resolutely in the whole ; but
in the whole, as he sees it, he puts a reflection of
himself. He has the extraordinary gift, attributed
by physicians to certain nervous patients, of ex
teriorising his own sensibility.
By the time Renan had finished his book, '48
was over, the fever of democracy had passed : the
young author could only regard his socialistic pro
jects as curious examples of the mythopoetic
faculty. No doubt they interested him from this
point of view also. Every mode and phase of his
own and the world's development impassioned his
eager intelligence. It was all matter for study.
What though one star fell out of the myriads
in heaven ? What though your perfect demo
cracy proved a poet's day dream ? The universe
teemed with other problems, other mysteries,
equally important, equally engrossing.
In 1849, M. Renan obtained from the French
Government one of those travelling scholarships
which, across the Channel, are dignified by the
name of missions. He was to seek in the
1848 95
libraries of Italy certain documents required by
the Academy of Inscriptions for its Histoirc
Littiraire de la France; he was also to com
plete his own thesis on Averroes. For eight
months Ernest Renan remained in the Peninsula.
Suddenly freed from the bracing influence of
his environment in Paris, Renan rapidly regained
his natural bent : dreamy, idealizing, poetic. More
than once his letters from Rome must have exas
perated his democratic correspondent.1 There is so
much religion in them, so much art, vague piety,
sentiment reflected from the Roman landscape !
" Tell me less about the monuments and more
about the condition of the people " answers, in
substance, Marcel Berthelot. In vaim ; Renan
has fallen under the sway of the Past.
" This journey had the most remarkable in
fluence on my mind. I knew nothing of Art, and
lo ! I beheld her, radiant and full of consolations.
A faery enchantress seemed to whisper me the
words which the Church, in her hymn, says to
the wood of the Cross : —
" ' Flecte ramos, arbor alta,
Tensa laxa viscera,
Et rigor lentescat ille
Quern dedit nativitas.'
A sort of soft breeze relaxed my native rigour.
1 Corrcspondance Renan- Berthelot. Revue de Paris, I Aout 1897.
96 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
Almost all my illusions of 1848 dropped from
me, for I saw they were impossible. I recognised
the fatal necessities of human society, I resigned
myself to a condition of the creation in which
a great deal of evil serves to produce a little
good, where a drop of exquisite aroma is distilled
from an enormous caput mortuum of refuse."
Yet, whilst admitting the absurdity of yesterday's
chimera, Renan did not cease to follow the ever
beckoning ideal. The Infinite remained the
eternal guide. And on the ledger of the Monas
tery of Monte Cassino he wrote in 1850 : —
" Unum est necessarium; Maria elegit optimam part em?
CHAPTER III
THE VALE OF GRACE
THE disenchantment which followed 1848
combined with the divine spectacle of Italy
to turn the mind of Renan from the future
towards the past. He saw no longer in his
dreams a socialistic phalanstery with its Spinoza
occupied in an optician's work-room. His fancy
preferred to evoke some steep small Umbrian
town with Etruscan walls and Roman ruins, with
mediaeval towers set high above Renaissance
palaces and the overladen Jesuit churches of
the Catholic Revival. Here was food for the
mind : the past is so poetic ! We imagine the
future so flat and full of prose ! The Celt
especially is open to the magical pathos of
historic memories, and, now that once Ernest
Renan had unsealed his hearing to that siren-
song, the music of the barricades might pipe to
him in vain !
Impressionable to excess, Renan, while guard
ing his will fixed on one steadfast aim, changed
the colour of his thoughts according to the atmos-
G 97
98 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
phere he dwelt in. Imagine a chameleon, pro
gressing unswervingly in one direction, but some
times blue, sometimes rose, sometimes green, in
the course of his invariable traject ! Such is
Renan, the bizarre and eminently Celtic fusion
of a constant mind with a sensitive temperament.
Among the marvels of the Sabine Hills, the utili
tarian ideal which yesterday he had invoked,
appeared odious to him. He continued to serve
Truth and Science — but no longer in the precincts
of Democracy. Rough-shod, iron goddess, might
her feet never tread the Seven Hills !
" As for me, it is with something akin to terror
that I face the day when life shall penetrate anew
that sublime heap of ruins which is Rome ! I
cannot conceive her other than she is : a museum
of dilapidated majesties, a tryst for the exiles
of our work-a-day world, a meeting-place for
dethroned monarchs, disenchanted statesmen, and
sceptical philosophers weary of their kind. Should
the fatal level of modern common-place threaten
this mass of sacred relics, I would fain the priests
and the monks of Rome were paid to maintain
within her ruins their customary melancholy and
squalor, and to preserve all round about them
fever and the desert." 1
Renan's democracy had been a short brain-
i Essais de morale et de Critique, p. 259.
THE VALE OF GRACE 99
fever. It had passed : the coup d'e'tat disgusted him
once for all with the lower classes. The develop
ment of his ideas made it easy for certain of his
friends to dissuade him from the publication of
DAvenir de la Science. Although already in July
1849 a chapter of the book had been printed in a
review, with the mention : " to appear in a few
weeks," the volume did not see the light, in fact,
until 1890 — less out of date than it would have
been in the first flush of that reaction which forms
the morrow of every revolution. Renan had been
the first to suspect the inopportunity of yester
day's gospel. He was no longer under the
exclusive influence of the Berthelots. On literary
matters, he consulted Augustin Thierry — his
mentor in letters — and M. de Sacy : each of
them advised him to reserve his great work — to
dispose of it page by page, chapter by chapter, in
the form of essays and reviews ; but not to over
whelm the public with his whole stock of un
seasonable riches.
Thus, in five years, Renan had lost two ideals
— Christianity and Socialism. Despite his robust
faith in the future of Science, the present world
began to wear a disenchanted aspect. Our young
fanatic of yesterday was in some danger of be
coming one of those " sceptical philosophers,
weary of their kind " for whom the Eternal City
ioo LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
appeared so convenient a limbo. If we could
suppose a special Providence designed to watch
over so notorious a heretic, now was the moment
for its intervention. And lo ! his sister, having
finished her ten years' engagement in Poland,
summoned Ernest to meet her in Berlin. And
Renan encountered his Egeria.
" When we meet again, my dear, we shall
hardly recognise each other," Renan had written
to his sister years before. And after ten years
they met. The slim young woman of nine and
twenty, gracious of aspect, who had bidden fare
well to her brother in the seminary parlour, was
grown into a woman of forty, plain in the face,
prematurely aged and lined by the hard winters
of Poland. The girlish lightness had departed
from her figure ; an affection of the larynx
threatened the sweetness of her voice. In air
and dress Mademoiselle Renan affected an elderly
fashion which nothing in her looks belied. Her
brother glanced at her, realised the sad change, —
and worshipped his austere Egeria as a second
mother, the comforting mother of his mind. She,
on the other hand, can have seen small trace of
the ungainly provincial seminarist she had left
in the travelled young philosopher of seven and
twenty who stood before her. For a moment
they were strangers in each other's eyes —
THE VALE OF GRACE 101
but they were intimate to the marrow of the
mind.
Henriette returned to Paris with Ernest. She
had lost her youth and her health in Poland, but
she had paid off her father's debts, redeemed the
mortgage on her mother's property, established
her brother in the way he should go, and a little
purse of savings remained to set up house with.
They were to live together. Each had long
dreamed this dream, and five years before Ernest
had written — " We shall be so happy, dear ! I
am easy-tempered and gentle. You will let me
live the serious simple life I love, and I will
tell you all I think and all I feel. We shall have
our friends too — refined and elect spirits — who
will beautify our life."
They chose a small apartment near the Val-de-
Grace, with windows looking over the garden
of the Carmelite Nuns. There was room for
them and their books ; place for M. Berthelot to
sit and discuss with them all things under the
sun ; a seat for such of Ernest Kenan's masters as
would honour his home. Henriette had few friends
and did not desire to enlarge her acquaintance.
She had Ernest and that was enough.
Ernest was absent a part of every day at
the National Library : he had been appointed
to a small charge of Sub-Librarian. His salary,
102 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
with Henrietta's savings, sufficed for their
daily wants. While her brother was away the
devoted sister copied out his manuscripts for
him, made long abstracts from volumes needed
for his work, corrected his proofs, took notes
which might be of use to him, compulsed a
mass of documents, verified dates and authorities.
For amusement she looked out of the window
at the nuns in their convent garden, or waited
for Ernest's return. . . . Anxious pleasure of
waiting, of listening for a glad step on the stair —
and then the smile we expected, and the eager
budget of the day's events !
In the evening, Ernest settled to his writing.
" She had the greatest respect for my work. I
have seen her sit by my side for hours of an
evening, scarcely breathing lest she should in
terrupt my labours. Yet she loved to have
me in her sight, and the door between our two
rooms stood ever open. Her affection had be
come something so ripe and so discreet that the
sweet communion of our thoughts was sufficient
for her. Her heart, — jealous, exacting, as it was
— demanded but a few minutes a day, since
she alone was loved. Thanks to her strict
economy, on our singularly limited resources
she kept a house in which nothing was lacking
and which could boast its own austere charm.
THE VALE OF GRACE 103
She was an incomparable secretary. Her delicate
censure discovered negligences and brusqueries
which I had overlooked. It was she who per
suaded me that every shade of thought can be
expressed in a correct and simple style, that
violent images and new-coined expressions betray
either misplaced pretensions or ignorance of the
real wealth at our disposal. Hence a profound
change in the manner of my writing. I ac
customed myself to reckon in advance on her
remarks — hazarding many a brilliant passage to
watch its effect upon her, whilst decided to
sacrifice it if she observed it with disfavour." l
Henriette examined not only the manner but
the matter. Her simple rectitude was discon
certed by Ernest's recurrent irony. " I had never
suffered, and a discreet smile provoked by the
weakness or the vanity of man, seemed a sort
of philosophy." Many a winged shaft was offered
on her shrine.
Fine writing, irony, and a certain abstract
vagueness in spiritual matters ; such were the
qualities which Henriette was anxious to dis
cipline and chasten in her gifted brother's writ
ings. The tender inquisitress was not satisfied
until all was pure, exact, discreet, and true.
She said to her brother, "Be thou perfect!"
1 Ma s&ttr Henriette^ p. 36.
104 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
And a dash of mockery, a trace of vanity, the
least little air of disdain, or flaunt of self-
satisfaction, however pretty in itself, was a flaw
in the absolute clear beauty she desired. Most
of all, she sought to cultivate in him the habit
of veracity, a habit the seminary had not in
culcated, it appears. " I have never told a lie
since 1851," wrote Ernest many years after her
death.
Her efforts were seconded by Ernest's friends
— by Augustin Thierry, who in 1851 introduced
the young writer to the Revue des Deux Mondes ;
by M. de Sacy, who admitted him on to the staff
of the Debats. "It was these two organs," said
M. Renan in 1890, "who taught me how to
write, that is to say, how to limit myself, how
constantly to rub the angles off my ideas, how
to keep a watchful eye on my defects." l The
extraordinary absence of vanity which character
ised Renan in his youth enabled him to profit by
all this good advice without any juvenile soreness
of feeling. He was right. Between the Avenir
de la Science, written in 1848 and 1849, and
the essays contributed to the Revue des Deux
Mondes and the Debats, in the years immediately
following 1851, there is fixed the abyss which
divides work of fervent and interesting promise
1 Preface to Avenir.
THE VALE OF GRACE 105
from the peculiar ripe perfection of a great writer.
Kenan's genius was to grow freer and fuller, at once
more human and more fantastic, more audacious
and more penetrating. Henceforth it will lose
rather than gain in moral grace, in a certain
exquisite gravity and elegance of spirit. And,
perhaps, never again was the historian of religions
so religious.
In -Kenan's delicate philosophy, made up of
semi-tones and demi-tints, piety had out-lived
faith. In 1856, he no longer believes in any
of the myriad forms of the one informing soul.
(•roXXa claret Moppn ^/a.) But that essential idea of
Religion, peculiar and necessary to human kind, he
asserts to be immortal and destined to an infinite
development. Shall the exquisite herald-angel
remain chained, trammelled, wounded, dwarfed
perchance, by fetters of our mortal forging ? To
strike off those fetters, thought Kenan, was good
knight's service. Set Religion free, let her move
and grow, let her guide us unenslaved, unim-
prisoned. The refusal to adhere to a definite
form of worship may be an act of faith in the
future of Religion.
Thanks to Ernest's genius and Henriette's
incessant vigilance, nothing in these early essays
suggested the beginner, nor even the young man.
They were rounded with a golden maturity.
io6 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
The intrepidity of their conception was veiled
by a becoming reserve of phrase : the oracle
evidently wished to awake but not to startle
his audience. They combine a soaring liberty of
spirit with an exquisite candour. A great charm
in these essays is that, so various in their subjects
and their treatment, they are still invariable in
their aim. United they form not an anthology,
but a book. There is a link between them all —
whether they treat of the historians of Jesus, the
imitation of Christ, the lives of the Saints, or of
Calvin, or Mahomet, or the Prophets of Israel,
or of antique myths, or of the school of Hegel,
or whether they delicately flagellate the vulgarities
of American Protestantism. The author studies
one by one these religious ideals, not dogmatically,
but historically ; he penetrates each movement, and
tries to resume it in a typical figure, a sort of ideal
representative ; and this man he then evokes in
his habit as he lived, with every detail of his most
intimate originality. The portrait is singularly
living, whether or no it be singularly like. . . . On
this latter head I would reserve my opinion, omin
ously enlightened by a passage in one of Renan's
letters to M. 1'Abbe" Cognat. . . .
" God forgive me for loving Ronge and Czersky
if they be misleading spirits! For what I love
in them — as in all other men to whom I dedicate
THE VALE OF GRACE 107
my enthusiasm — is a certain beautiful moral
image of them which I create within myself.
It is my own ideal which I love in them. Now,
as to whether they really resemble this image ?
That appears to me, I admit, a matter of slight
importance."
Imaginative, suggestive, subtle, Renan's essays
as they appeared one by one in the early years
of the Fifties, attracted more attention than the
brother and sister dreamed of in their dear
seclusion.
" What was my surprise when, one morning,
a stranger of pleasant and intelligent appearance
entered my attic. He complimented me on
certain articles of mine which had appeared in
the Reviews, and offered to unite them in a
volume. Thereupon he produced a stamped
document stipulating terms which I thought
astonishingly generous, so much so that when he
asked if all my future works should be comprised
in the treaty, I consented." l The visitor was M.
Michel Le"vy, the then rising publisher, whose
fortune Renan was to help to make ; and the
book, the delicious Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse
immediately established him in the first rank of
literature, if not of popular success. Published on
the 2Oth of March 1857, the Etudes d'Histoire
1 Souvenirs, 385.
io8 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
Religieuse were succeeded on the 6th of June
J859, by the Essais de Morale et de Critique.
Nor did Renan neglect the austerer courts of
Science. In 1855 he had finally given to
the world the General History of Semitic
Languages, which, while still unpublished, had
won the Volney Prize some eight years before.
This book opened to the author the gates of the
Institute. Uncontested master of Semitic philo
logy in France, Renan was elected, in 1856, a
Member of the Academy of Inscriptions and
Belles Lettres.
Meanwhile, in 1852, Renan had published the
work on Averroes, which brought him not only
his doctor's degree, but his first reputation as a
thinker. In Averroes the critic demonstrates
the sterilising effect of orthodoxy on a noble and
beautiful philosophy. Greek science, adopted by
the Arab thinkers, fixed and crystallised by them
into a dogma, becomes thenceforth a thing in
capable of development or fecundity. To live
and grow, a thing must pass from the category
of esse into the category of fieri. Otherwise
routine and dogmatism rust out the vital principle
in even the greatest ideas ; even as a pool of the
purest water, set apart from the natural current of
streams or the running rains of heaven, will
stale and grow stagnant.
THE VALE OF GRACE 109
The interest of philosophic history lies rather
in the picture it gives us of the growth of the
human mind, than in the theories which it
exhumes from bygone systems. The strange
development of Greek science by a civilisation
entirely alien to that of Greece interested the
historic curiosity of Renan. Aristotle among
the Arabs ! So we might imagine Pekin to adopt
the theories of Darwin and Pasteur, commentat
ing them during centuries in a spirit of pure
Chinese orthodoxy. The result would probably be
of no mortal value — it would be piquant and un
usual ; it would represent an infrequent combina
tion ; it would have a value of its own in the
eyes of the disinterested critic of the universe,
curious of moral rarities. It would be interest
ing and useful to see in what unlikely back-waters
the Stream of Life can meander when the main
current is blocked. . . . The Arabs took the
philosophy of Aristotle from the Syrian Chris
tians, who had it from the pagan Greeks. The
Mahommedan Arabs bequeathed it to the Spanish
Jews, who passed it on to the Catholic doctors
of the Middle Ages and Aristotle ended as a
scholastic dogmatist in the Sorbonne ! Trans
lated, interpreted, and falsified in a dozen different
senses, the intellectual curiosity of Greece con
trived in these strange elements, if not to grow,
no LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
if not to produce, at least to languish in a sort
of earthly limbo. Die Wahrheit magt Niemand
verbrennen, sang Mechtild of Magdeburg, who,
in her different degree, was another child of
Aristotle.
But not merely the curiosity of the man of
science attracted Renan to this subject. The
strongest bent of his genius inclined him to
consider, above all, the origins of things. He
loved the delicate, rooty fibres as others love
the flowers or the fruits ; and half of his secret
was his extraordinary faculty for seeing under
ground. The scholastic philosophy of the
thirteenth century is only to be understood by
a thorough knowledge of the principles of Jewish
and Arab thought. When Renan did not under
stand a phenomenon, an imperious instinct bade
him seek its source. His interpretation of
Catholic scholasticism led him first of all to study
Averroes, even as later on it led him to study the
Early Church, and thence the Origins of Chris
tianity, whence he delved yet further back into
the Origins of Judaism. Averroes is the first
link in a chain which Renan was to spend his
life in forging.
CHAPTER IV
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER
IF we hold with Averroes that all men are the
transient expressions of one enduring soul,
we find small difficulty in explaining how the
noblest minds of a given generation arrive,
unknown to each other, and simultaneously, at
a like result. While Renan was painfully de
ducing from documents and inflections a new
psychology, a young classical master at Nevers,
named Hippolyte Taine, was writing to his
friends : —
" Free psychology is a magnificent science
founded on the philosophy of history ... we
must make of history an exact science. ... I
take refuge from the present in reading the
Germans." 1
Taine met Renan, five years his senior, in the
offices of the great Liberal reviews. Save in the
fundamental independence and unworldliness of
their natures, no men could be more different.
1 See, in M. Gabriel Monod's charming and valuable volume
) Taine, Michclet> the previously unpublished letters of Taine.
H2 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
The genius of Taine was absolute, positive, vivid
to the verge of harshness, apt to mass and class
the confusion of things in a series of brilliant
syntheses : above all things he was a logician.
I Renan, — subtle, complex and elusive, a historian
I and, above all, an analyst, — was for ever dividing
j and sub-dividing the prism of the universe into
j an immeasurable sequence of minor shades ; was
for ever attenuating his keen and often auda
cious analysis by a style serene and limpid
beyond comparison. But a like idea of Truth
and Liberty animated their souls. Equally
admirable, equally eminent, Renan and Taine
were as the two eyes of the generation which
came to its maturity towards 1860.
The children of a later day can form no idea
of the repression which followed '48, of those
gloomy years in which thought was fettered,
freedom stifled, in which a political and orthodox
inquisition controlled the university and the press
of a liberal nation. The fusillades of the Luxem
bourg were less detestable than the intellectual
tyranny of the Empire of the Fifties. A govern
ment in reaction against armed insurrection
has some excuse for excessive reprisals ; it may
be right in maintaining order even by a flagrant
retaliation ; but it is an error to believe that the
premeditated dwarfing of a nation's intelligence
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 113
can ever be the guarantee of peace. Adversity,
however, steels the obstinate ; the Liberal party con
tinued its opposition, aware that no ministry, how
ever tyrannous, can destroy the mind of a nation.
When the main channel is blocked, intelligence
finds new outlets. The university, the public
schools, letters, the press, were constrained by an
iron censure, subject to exile, prison, suspension,
daily fines. Yet journalism had never been
more brilliant than under the Second Empire.
Beule" contrived to outrage the Government
with impunity in writing the history of Augustus.
Rogeard bewailed the illiberal " Liberty of
December " - libertas Decembris, as Horace
puts it — and the censor dared not seize the
allusion to the coup d'etat.
France, in the Fifties, had at least one religion
which was not a mere lip-service, and that was
the doctrine of Liberalism. The little office of
the Debats, with its red-tiled floor, and its two
shabby ink-stained tables, was a sort of temple
of the faith. There statesmen, financiers, scholars,
artists, men of letters, met on a footing of ease
and equality, the result of their sincere devotion
to an aim outside themselves which made rank,
fortune, influence, details of no importance. MM.de
Sacy, Laboulaye, Prevost Paradol, John Lemoinne,
the Bertins, were the priests of this austere Chapel ;
H
H4 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
and its creed was freedom, the rights of citizens,
justice, and a ceaseless aspiration towards a
nobler order of things. " Liberalism," wrote
; Renan more than once, " Liberalism represents
for me the formula of the highest human develop-
\ ment ; " and the doctrine of the Debats was, in
fact, at bottom, much the doctrine of the Hebrew
prophets. The task of preaching it was attended
by almost insurmountable difficulties. The censor
was swift to punish and to suppress any indepen
dent expression of political opinion. So the lead
ing articles in the first columns were models of
discretion. The life of the journal passed into the
" Varieties " — into studies on moral and social
questions or purely literary articles, and the in
telligent reader turned to the third page where he
read, between the lines of an essay or a review, all
that the political editor was obliged to leave un
said. A notice by Prevost Paradol, a piece of
Roman History by Cuvillier-Fleury, an article by
Ernest Renan were sure, in their subtle opposi
tion, of an attentive public.
It was easy for a philosopher to serve the
Opposition simply by upholding the banner of
an austere Ideal. The staff of the Debats,
like the staff of the Edinburgh Review, was
content to " cultivate Literature upon a little
oatmeal." The traditions of the place were
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 115
all of a certain Jansenist severity. Luxury,
display, — objects of elaborate mechanical con
struction, even, — were suspect in the eyes of
the D<?bats. To own more than a million or
so (of francs bien entendu} appeared in very poor
taste. The immense expenses of the Empire,
the impetus given to industry, the heightened
standard of universal comfort, were signs of the
times regarded as distinctly ominous by these ;
eulogists of days gone by. They spoke of the
improvements of the Baron Haussmann with a
dash of contempt in a great deal of disfavour.
" I would give all your steamboats for an ^Eneid,"
exclaimed M. de Sacy. The Government was \
as generous in public works as it was illiberal in
public instruction. Vast sums were spent on
the extension of railways, the establishment of
the telegraph, on industrial exhibitions, on the
organisation of savings banks. " There was
some good in the Empire after all ! " cry we of
a later date, as we read the formidable list of
Imperial improvements. " No good ! " cried the <
stern young prophet of the Debats. " What
material progress can compensate a moral de
cadence? Will a steam traction engine make a
man happy? Will a universal exhibition make
him nobler or better? In taking the triumphs
of mechanical ingenuity for the sign of an ad-
n6 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
vanced civilisation, you mistake the mere accident
for the essential." So taught Renan in France
throughout the Fifties ; while, curiously enough,
in England, John Ruskin was fulminating a similar
gospel against the gross, the palpable, ideal of
the age.
Renan discredited the advantages of tyranny,
and showed how despotism, to make itself accept
able, invariably persuades Society of its talents as
a steward : "Bow down before me, and I will give
ye cent for cent." But what shall it profit a man
if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ?
Nothing is less important than prosperity. Man
is not born to be prosperous, but to realise, in a
little vanguard of chosen spirits, an ideal superior
to the ideal of yesterday. The bulk of humanity
I lives by proxy ; only the few can attain a com
plete development. Millions live and die in order
to produce a rare elite. The true glory of
Holland, for instance, is to have brought forth
princes like William of Orange, painters like
Rembrandt, thinkers like Spinoza — not to have
the best pastures in Europe and a high standard
of comfort. Once we put the accent on prosperity,
we introduce into our midst envy, ambition, and
all their baleful sequel. The really noble society
is that in which each man is content with the
station into which he is born. The really noble
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 117
nation is that which yields the greatest sum of
disinterestedness, of self-sacrifice, that in which
men most live for one another : the society whose
workmen are proud of the magnificence of their
prince, whose princes are solicitous for the needs
of the poor, whose laymen are sustained by the
prayers of the nun, whose priests rejoice in the
courage of the soldier, whose scholars profit by
the labours of the humble, whose harvesters feel
that, in their sphere, they too collaborate in the
great moral masterpiece which is a nation firmly
welded in an indestructible solidarity of soul.
Duty is the foundation of such a society, and the
satisfaction in duty accomplished the private joy
of every citizen — a joy deeper than any man can
owe to the mere diffusion of material abundance.
So runs the epistle of Renan to his contempor
aries. In consequence of the storm raised by his
essay on the historians of Jesus, published in the
Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse^ he had turned for a
while from his chosen path of religious history
to the neighbouring track of moral philosophy.
The frivolity of the society of his age made him
pause in the destruction of an illusion which was,
perhaps, a restraint and an ideal. The morality
of the average man is in fact generally a con
sequence of his piety ; let us therefore respect
that piety. Let us direct it. Whether or no
u8 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
Christianity be true, this philosopher was persuaded
of the existence of good and evil.
" An impenetrable veil screens from us the
secret of this strange world whose reality con
vinces and oppresses us. Philosophy and Science
pursue for ever, and ever in vain, the formula of
this proteus whom no reason limits and no tongue
expresses. But there is one indubitable founda
tion, which scepticism shall not shake, where man
may find, until the end of time, a foothold firm
amid the uncertainties around him : Good is good,
evil is evil."
Good is good, evil is evil, and, above all things,
truth is truth : — " Whatever system we adopt to
explain man and the world, we cannot deny that
the problems they arouse are infinitely curious,
infinitely attaching, and worthy of the most patient
investigation. And even if virtue were but a
snare, laid for the noblest, if hope were a dream,
beauty an illusion, humanity a vain tumult, the
pure research of truth would still preserve its
charm ! For even if we suppose the world to be
the nightmare of a fevered divinity, or an acciden
tal bubble on the surface of nothingness, yet are
we invincibly impelled to wring its secret from it.
Whatever we may think of the universe, it remains
a spectacle which rivets our attention. In the
life of St Thomas Aquinas we read that one
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 119
day Christ appeared to him and asked him
what reward he craved for his learned writings.
' Nothing but Thee, O Lord ! ' replied the angeli
cal doctor. The critic of the universe is yet more
disinterested. If Truth should appear and address
him a like question, he would answer — ' Nought
but the pursuit of thee, O Truth ! ' " *
1 Essais de Morale et de Critique, p. loo.
CHAPTER V
MARRIAGE
A PORTRAIT by Henry Scheffer— the less
known brother of a famous painter — shows
us Renan at this time. The head is certainly
idealized, but its likeness to the sitter's charming
daughter forbids us to call it a piece of flattery
pure and simple. It shows a Renan strikingly
unlike the gnome-like figure, the colossal leonine
head, the radiant ugliness of the affable Acade
mician we remember. Neither the strength, nor
the humour, nor the disenchanted benignant smile
we knew are here. This is a serious elegiac
young man, a Hamlet, — nay, too gentle and un
suspicious for a Hamlet, — almost a Good Shep
herd. The cheeks and jaw have not yet taken on
those formidable proportions which made the sin
uous lips appear yet more delicate. All the features
are larger, the heavy nose, the mouth, especially
the eyes — charming, in this portrait, in their
smiling melancholy. The oval of the face ap
pears not only slighter but longer. The ensemble
MARRIAGE 121
is striking, touching, even handsome. The
relentless idealism of the painter has attenuated
the quaint awkwardness of the model, whose
small stature, heavy sloping shoulders, huge head,
and short arms can never have presented this dis
tinguished appearance. Renan was well aware of
his deficiencies. Many a line in his earlier essays
informs us of his bashfulness in society. His
priest's education and the long habit of solitude
had left him awkward, silent, reserved. He could
discourse brilliantly on elevated subjects, but he
did not know how, at the right moment, to say
the usual thing. He was always utterly devoid of
the give-and-take of the ready talker. Thus he
oscillated between an inspired monologue and a
heavy silence, while he wondered how intelligent
persons could be so fired by the common-place,
" so interested in what does not ennoble." He
felt painfully his uncouth exterior, and perhaps
still more painfully, though with a certain pride,
that mark of the priest on his forehead, which,
as he thought, was clearly legible, destining him
to eternal solitude in the pursuit of the ideal. Sir
M. Grant Duff, who met him first in 1859, gives us
a more flattered version of the same character : —
" His manner had that charming gentleness
which is characteristic of the best of the Catholic
clergy. His conversation was very copious and
122 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
limpid, not dealing much in epigram or anecdote,
but very easy and very informing."
It was towards 1855, I think, that Renan
made the acquaintance of Ary Scheffer. The
pure idealism of the Dutch painter's art, the
liberality of his religious feeling, the generous
and lofty temper of his mind, were such as to
fire the young savanfs enthusiasm. By his new
friend's hearth, he found that household warmth,
that simple and yet intellectual geniality which
were all that was needed to thaw his chill timidi
ties. M. Scheffer's house had not been the home
it became to Ernest Renan were there no women
by the hearth. He had a niece and a daughter.
Some thirty-five years later I was privileged to
count the former among my dearest friends.
When I knew her Madame Renan was an
ageing woman, her figure grown to a great size,
the shape of her face something altered by the
habit of difficult breathing : she had a heart com
plaint. But, at sixty, her bright blue eyes, with
their look of witty innocence, her clear skin, her
abundant chestnut hair, her delightful smile with
its winning unassailable youth, sufficed to remind
us of the attractions of her girlhood. Her early
portraits show a slim light grace, a pure oval of
cheek and brow, with the same air of merry good
ness which made her face so charming in age.
MARRIAGE 123
As clever as she was pretty, as kind as she was
wise, the friends of her girlhood used to call her
Minerva ; but imagine the most modest, the most
amiable fireside divinity, prescient for others, wise
with no thought of her own advancement. Lively,
gay, active, sweet-tempered, capable, discreet, —
Corne"lie Scheffer was the ideal helpmate. Really
gifted, she soon discovered the intellectual superi
ority of her uncle's friend. Imagine his delight
to find this charming maiden, not only acquainted,
but deeply imbued, with his own writings, and
able to talk with him not merely as an admirer,
but as an intelligent companion. Little by little
her influence on her new friend became only
second to that of Henriette, and inclined him
ever more and more to the standpoint of the
artist, of the man of feeling, as opposed to the
pure scholar's point of view. I suppose M. Ary
Scheffer saw how things were drifting. Often
Madame Renan has told me of a ride she took
with her uncle on the sands near Scheveningen —
I suppose in the autumn of 1855. They were
talking of the future — of other people's future.
Suddenly he wheeled round his horse, confronted
her, and said — " You, my dear, you ought to
marry the most intelligent man I know." Neither
said any more ; they broke into a gallop, and
continued their thoughts in silence.
i24 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
But Mademoiselle Renan, in her dear seclusion,
laid no great stress on this intimacy with the
Scheffers. Long before she had proposed to
Ernest what she had considered a suitable al
liance. He had refused ; the years glided on ;
and the tender, jealous sister, so happy in her
double solitude, had come to count upon her
brother as exclusively her own for ever. He,
on the other hand, relied on her sympathy for
a confession which his reserve continually put off.
And one day he awoke to find himself condemned
to break the heart of one of the two women he
loved best in all the world.
In pages of a penetrating beauty, Ernest Renan
himself has told the heart-wrung modest tragedy.
Who shall repeat the words which a sacred
emotion has let escape from the lips of a master?
Henriette Renan could not, would not, at first
accept the bitter cup. And one day her brother,
forced to choose between two affections, decided
for that which seemed most like a duty. He
bade farewell, an eternal farewell, to the young
girl he loved. At night-fall, he went home ; en
tered quietly the little study, henceforth desolate,
and told his sister of his sacrifice. Thus set
face to face with a generosity superior to her
own, all that was noble, all that was the infallible
protectress, revived in Henriette and forbade the
MARRIAGE 125
sacrifice. The next morning early she went to
M. Scheffer's house ; asked for her young rival,
sought and found her peace. The two women
wept long in each other's arms ; but they bid
each other au revoir I with glad faces. In those
hours of shaken tears their sisterhood had begun.
But not yet, if ever, was the demon of tender
jealousy allayed. The first years of Madame
Renan's married life were filled with a difficult and
tormented happiness. The young wife, brought
up with all the triple liberty of a cosmopolitan,
Protestant, and artistic home, must often have felt
the provincial reclusion of the Renans' house
weigh upon her spirits. For she was not mistress
there. The Minerva of Ary Scheffer's studio never
complained of the subordinate position allotted
her by her own conventual hearth. Her hus
band, accustomed all his life long to look up to
Henriette and obey her, thought it quite natural
that his young wife should obey her too. And
the exquisite, the devoted, the noble Henriette
was sometimes a jealous divinity.
The birth of a son lit a warmer glow at their
fireside. Henriette adored her nephew, and this
great new interest reconciled her to her brother's
marriage. Melancholy, tearful, anxious, she re
mained ; ever susceptible, easily wounded ; but a
real affection for Ary's mother knit her at last
126 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
to her sister-in-law. In 1860 they were still
closer drawn together by the loss of a little girl,
Ernestine, passionately beloved by her father, who
consecrated to this baby soul an exquisite In
Memoriam^ still unpublished. — Little Ernestine,
who lived nine months, was never forgotten ; —
often has Madame Renan recalled to me a loss
still recent to her faithful love ; and Henriette
Renan in her last illness spoke many a time to
Ernest of their " little flower." — Meanwhile old
Madame Renan had joined the family circle.
The witty, voluble little old woman had much
more in common with her daughter - in - law
than with her daughter. At heart, she had
never forgiven Henriette her plain face ; and
she, at least, knew the value of youth, charm,
beauty, and vivacity in a woman. Her presence
made things go smoothly. Her son adored her,
admired her, no less than in the old days at
Treguier. Every afternoon at dusk he was wont
to spend an hour in her room, lit only by the
gas lamps in the street. And she would dis
course to him of Treguier and Lannion as they
were before the Revolution, of her own early
youth, and of a vanished Brittany. More than
twenty years later, these talks in the twilight
were to receive an immortal setting in Renan's
Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse.
MARRIAGE 127
In 1858 Ary Scheffer died, and Renan lost
in him not only a near related friend but a
collaborator. Ary Scheffer's last design had been
made to illustrate his nephew-in-law's translation
of the Book of Job. The volume appeared,
without the promised illustrations, in 1859. And
thus Renan began his version of the Bible,
choosing by a sort of instinct the great hymn !
of doubt and despair, the terrible dialogue of an
irresponsible God who mocks at justice, and of a
baffled and ignorant humanity. In the following
year he brought forth his second book — " The
Song of Songs," the triumphant paean of Profane
Love. More than twenty years later, he was to
give us Ecclesiastes, the last word of scepticism,
the last ironical smile-and-sigh of the pessimist
convinced that man shall never triumph over fate.
Strange scriptures these. In the Bible, according
to Ernest Renan, there is neither a prayer nor
a psalm. Renan's translation of The Song of
Songs is a masterpiece of ingenious scholar
ship, and one may say that only those who
have read this charming version can appreciate
all the beauty, freshness, and candour of the
exquisite little Hebrew morality-play.
In 1857 Quatremere had died, and since
then there was a Chair vacant at the College
of France — the Chair of Hebrew and Syro-
128 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
Chaldaic languages — the place which Renan
had desired consistently, and to which every
succeeding volume showed his title clearer.
The Professors of the College of France are
named by the Minister of Public Instruction from
two lists, the one drawn up by the College itself,
the other by the Academy of Inscriptions.
These lists are almost always identical. Cer
tainly the name of Ernest Renan would have
headed either. But month after month, year after
year, dragged on ; the Chair of Hebrew remained
vacant ; the Minister never asked for the lists.
The Professorship of Hebrew at the College of
France is, in point of fact, a Chair of Biblical
exegesis. The Catholic party, all-powerful in the
first years of the Spanish Empress's influence, had
devised this means of reducing a renegade to
silence. Renan waited, and continued his duties
] as one of the sub-librarians at the Bibliotheque
Imperiale. He knew his time would come. When,
in 1 86 1, overtures were made to him, to discover
if he would accept another Chair at the College
of France, he replied, No. He meant yet to fill
the seat of Quatremere.
CHAPTER VI
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA
MEANWHILE the Empire prospered and
became mellower in its prosperity. The
laurels of the Crimea hid, in some measure, the
blood stains of the Deux-Decembre. Men began
to speak well of a Government which secured a
triumph abroad and magnificence at home.
When Napoleon III. declared war against Austria
in favour of Italian independence, the usurper
appeared the champion of liberty, and the
popular enthusiasm knew no bounds. And, in
fact, at heart, Louis -Napoleon, curious of all
things, convinced of none, inclined as much to
democracy as to any other popular idol. Like
one of those late Roman Emperors, in whose
private oratory there was a place for Isis and
a place for Abraham, his eclectic mind gave
a fragmentary worship to the idea of Freedom.
Personally, he was liberal in his views, though a
wave of conservative opinion had brought him to
the throne. But while he began to disassociate
his influence from the tyranny of his Ministers,
130 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
he kept them in power. He attempted to realise
democratic projects by the aid of the repressers
of '48. He and his Government pulled in
different directions — the tension reassured him :
in that way he was sure of not going too far.
On the 1 5th August 1859, the Emperor pro
claimed a general amnesty for all political offences.
Of the six thousand exiles of December, many
refused the Emperor's pardon.
" Si Ton n'est plus que mille, eh bien ! j'en suis. Si meme
Us ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla !
S'il en demeure dix, je serai le dixieme
Et s'il n'en reste qu'un, je serai celui-la ! "
So sang Victor Hugo, and many took up the
echo. Others were dead in banishment, but
many returned. Nothing succeeds like success,
as we all know, and the empire appeared a great
x success. One after the other, great names began
to slip from the ranks of the Liberals and to
appear on the horizon of the Court. Soon genius
became a frequent guest at Compiegne. The
Emperor's marriage had drawn Merimee into
his circle ; Sainte-Beuve, Nisard, Gautier, Emile
Augier followed suit. And the Empire, in
admitting these great men, was modified by
their influence, became eager to patronise art
and letters, to further the pursuits of Science.
The Emperor himself was a sort of a scholar,
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 131
a kind of an author, a hanger-on of Clio.
Hesitatingly, doubtfully, though he still clung
to his guides of yesterday, he began to
follow, with one step back for every two steps
forward, the brilliant phalanx that showed a
better way.
Curious, indulgent, Renan watched this new
departure with a sort of benign amusement, but
made no advances. He, at least, never changed
his political position. Liberal in 1848, Liberal
in 1 85 i, he was no less Liberal in 1860, when
Liberalism had become a sort of fashion. Yet,
when in the month of May 1 860, the Emperor
made a feeble advance to the man he had injured, :
offered to send him on an archaeological mission
to Phoenicia, Renan immediately accepted. Some
of his old friends wondered. " The feud between
the Government and the intellect of France
was then so bitter that many persons of great
merit would not have accepted even a scientific
mission at its hands ; " so Sir M. Grant Duff
has well observed. Renan had no such scruple.
Henrietta, moreover, urged him to undertake an
expedition which implied no political adherence
to the Government, no personal advancement,—
which took him from what still remained the
scene of his ambitions, merely to further the
gain of Science. And it was arranged that she
1 32 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
should accompany him as secretary, as accountant,
as steward of his resources.
The arrangements for their departure were
not yet completed when the Druses fell on the
Christians of Mount Lebanon, and massacred
them in a Holy War. The Second Empire, how
ever illiberal at home, was more than generous
in its foreign policy. Napoleon immediately
decided to protect the unfortunate Maronites.
The vessel which carried M. Renan and his sister
to Beyrouth was one of those which transported
a French division to Syria. Renan, in his candid
absorption in the ends of Science, appears to have
accepted the whole affair — massacres, Turkish
incapacity, French army partant pour la Syrie,
&c., — as providentially combined in the interests
of archaeology : " The presence of our soldiers
on the spot was a most favourable element in
my design. Thereby my excavations were
singularly simplified — they were made by the
soldiers. Thus my mission to Phoenicia took
that place in the Syrian Expedition, which the
French army, in its noble preoccupation with
the things of the mind, has ever loved to accord
to Science in her more distant ventures." x
The blood of the Maronites was scarcely dry
on the sand when the Renans reached the Syrian
1 Mission de Phhiide, I*re Livraison, p. 2.
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 133
shore. Thus they saw the East at once in the
squalor and horror of Moslem misrule, and in
all the glory of its past. They landed at Bey
routh, and at once began their excavations at
Byblos. Ancient Phoenicia, as the reader may
remember, comprised that strip of Syrian coast
— some thirty miles wide at largest, but nearly
thrice as long — which runs between the Mediter
ranean shore and the range of Lebanon. There
stand Azad and Marath, Tyre and Sidon, the
Byblos of Adonis — memorable names ! Ports,
whence the Canaanitish traders put forth to carry
cedarwood to Solomon, and purple from Tyre,
and, from Sidon, the famous wares of Artas the
glassmaker ; ports whence they sped to Greece,
Spain, Africa, Italy, founding Carthage, founding
Cadiz, building harbours and stations until they
made the Mediterranean a mere Phoenician lake.
In their boats, with their bales, these hardy
traders carried knowledge : but for their alphabet,
where were all our science? But in art these
English of the East were less happy. Colossal,
irregular, impressive, their strange dome of Amrit,
guarded by its lions, is almost their only master
piece. For the best part, their monuments are
a half-barbaric reminiscence of Egypt or of
Greece, coarsely wrought, overloaded by plaques
of metal ornament.
134 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
If the sarcophagi which the Renans unearthed
at Byblos, showed no happy marvel of design — if
they were but honourable examples of provincial
art roughly executed in the best materials, — at
least they afforded a singular pleasure to their
excavators. Brother and sister had never dreamed
of a life so free. Here they sat, on this beautiful
border of the Holy Land, commanding their little
camp, discovering the secret of antiquity. Care
and poverty had dogged their youth : for Ernest
the dull hours of the usher, or the dusty fatigues
of the sub-librarian ; for Henriette, exile and
dependence amid plain after plain of sand and
snow, endless forests of foreign pines. And now,
united, the great cities of Phoenicia lay at their
feet, and over the last blue mountain rim, Pales
tine ! A new energy, a light of youth, animated
them both. Henriette, the recluse of the Val-de-
Grace, would spend ten hours at a stretch on
horseback, nor speak of fatigue.
The autumn in Syria is long and full of charm.
All the rocks of the gorges of Lebanon are
wreathed with cyclamen. The plains towards
Amrit are blue and red with flowers. From the
heights of the mountains, which rise here, tier
upon tier, in a quadruple range, the eye glances
across chasms and forests, towards a sea more
brilliant than the freshest blossoms. Cascades
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 135
and torrents, clear as crystal, cool as ice, leap
from their rocky sources, and dash down the sun
baked mountain-side, filling the hot air with the
sparkle of their spray. A spectacle so extra
ordinary forced itself upon the long slow gaze of
Renan. His unremarking eyes at last observed
the vision of natural beauty, absorbed it, retained
it. Syria completed the work begun by Italy :
Renan was henceforth to be one of the subtlest, I
one of the profoundest painters of nature. Rousseau
himself has not more exquisite tints on his palette.
And, like Jean-Jacques, he reproduces less a land
scape than his own dream of a landscape floating
in some pellucid haze of sentiment through which
reality takes on a prestige more magical, an air
of mystery and remoteness, peculiar less to the
landscape than the seer.
The climate, though beautiful, is unhealthy in
its brusque alternances of heat and cold. Some
times sudden gusts of neuralgia, terrible, appalling
to witness, would sweep over Henriette Renan,
lay her prostrate for some hours, or some days,
and she would rise up again with unabated
courage and resume their hard, happy, adven
turous life. Seated squarely on her horse, she
skirted the precipices of Lebanon, and never
paled. Rough fare, the huts of the mountain
for shelter, constant transitions from the burning
136 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
sunshine to the sepulchral chill of the gorges in
shadow, were but as welcome episodes in a con
tinual pleasure. At Tyre, the high pavilion she
occupied was rocked by the winds. The spec
tacle of their little camp, lost in the desert, filled
her at night with a religious exaltation.
In January 1861, Madame Ernest Renan
came out to join them. Together they set out
in the spring for Palestine. Often at night,
their tent set under the shadow of Mount Carmel,
or by the deep hollow of the Lake of Galilee,
the travellers read the series of Pilgrims' Psalms,
which Renan was to recall a few months later
in writing the Life of Jesus.
" For those provincial families the journey to
Jerusalem was a solemnity full of sweetness.
Psalm after psalm records the happiness of these
pilgrim households travelling together in the
spring time over hill and down dale, with the
sacred splendour of Jerusalem at the journey's
end. ' How happy are brethren who dwell to
gether in amity ! ' . . . The last stage of all,
A'in-el-Harami4, is full of charm and melancholy.
Few impressions rival that of the traveller who
sets his camp there at nightfall. The valley
is narrow and sombre ; a dark water drips from
the walls of the rocks, pierced with tombs. It is,
I think, the * Vale of Tears ' — the ' gorge of
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 137
dripping waters/ which is celebrated in the ex
quisite 83rd Psalm as one of the stations on
the way, and in which the tender sadness of
mediaeval mysticism saw an image of the life of
man. Early on the morrow the caravan will
reach Jerusalem. Even to-day the thought re
animates the caravan, renders the evening short
and the travellers' slumber light."
Jerusalem, tragic, arid, barren, seemed then as
the law after the Gospel, as the letter after the
spirit, and sharpened by contrast the souvenir of
Galilean grace. In this harsh environment, the
newness, the freshness, the divine originality of
the New Testament appear more apparent still.
Ever since his year of spiritual crisis Renan had
pondered in his heart a Life of Jesus, unlike any
yet written, which, while hiding nothing of the
textual errors and apocryphs of the Gospel as
we possess it, should set in high and clear relief
the divine character, the exquisite inventions in
moral sentiment of the Founder of Christianity.
Here, in the Holy Land, that great figure never
ceased upon his inner vision. No saint in his
cell, no Crusader, was ever more fervently haunted
by Christ Jesus than this unfrocked Churchman,
this sceptical archaeologist, busied with the details
of a scientific mission. In the desolate Galilee
of a Moslem rule, his mind's eye noted the
138 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
flowery Paradise described by Josephus where
the walnut and the date palm grew together.
On the abandoned lake, with its one ruined
ferry-boat, he saw the sails of Andrew and
Peter, the prosperous fishermen of old. On the
little promontories, overgrown with tamarisk
and oleander, he followed the trace of the
very footsteps of the Son of Man. Far to
the north the ravines of Mount Hermon are
drawn in dazzling silver against the sky. The
horizon, at least, has not altered in these two
thousand years.
After the month of May the heat in Syria
becomes oppressive. Galilee, deforested, deserted,
is now so naked that the caravan reckons over
night where it shall find a spot of shade for the
mid-day meal on the morrow. The journey
back to Beyrouth cost the travellers much
fatigue. Mme. Ernest Renan, enceinte, re
turned to France in the course of July. Her
husband and sister-in-law would have done well
to accompany her. Almost every member of
the mission engaged under M. Renan in the
excavations had already fallen dangerously ill
with pestilential malaria. And the worst heat
of the summer was to come. But the sense of
scientific duty, always so strong in Renan,
which over and over again prompted him to a
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 139
course of action disastrous to his interests, urged
him to remain on the parched and feverish Syrian
coast in order to supervise the shipping of his
archaeological treasure, in order, also, to complete
his exploration of the upper range of Lebanon.
He meditated, even, an autumn excursion to
Cyprus. Henriette happier, she declared, than
ever she had been in her life, Henriette, satis
fied to find herself still indispensable to her idol,
remained with him and braved - - alas too
courageously ! — the exhalations of a Syrian
autumn.
The implacable sun of Beyrouth drove the
Kenans to the hills. At Ghazir they found
green pastures, fresh snow from the mountains,
wholesome springs, and a little house with a
pergola. Here, in the utmost peace conceivable
on earth, Renan began his Life of Jesus. All
day long he sat in the cool shadow of his Syrian
home absorbed, intoxicated by that inner dream
which little by little took shape and lived before
his eyes. A New Testament, a Josephus, com
prised his library ; but the book of the East
was open before him ; but the very past, familiar
through a hundred texts and inscriptions, rose
before him more real than the actual moment.
Thrown full length on his Syrian rug, his books
and papers scattered round him, he wrote hour
LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
after hour in the fervour of a veritable inspiration.
Henriette was his perpetual confidant, as soon as
the page was written she copied it fair. When
at last the night fell, the clear, magnificent
Oriental night, brother and sister rose and
sought their terrace on the house roof. There
they would speak at last of the day's silent
work, and she would make her reflections, often
profound, always pregnant with that fine, moral
tact of which she had the secret. " Many of
them," her brother has said, " were to me as veri
table revelations."
"This book," she would say, "I shall love.
Because we have done it together. And because
I like it ! "
Days of earnest thought, nights of dreaming
scarcely less fecund. When, in the first days
of September, the Renans were compelled to
return to Beyrouth the book was three parts
written, and Christ on the eve of the last
journey to Jerusalem.
Alas ! the soul and the body have not the
same requirements. An immense moral satis
faction had not preserved the health of Henriette
Renan. The cruel neuralgia from which she
suffered was perhaps even aggravated by so intense
a nervous strain. Yet had the Cato started at
the date fixed, the sea winds and the air of home
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 141
might even yet have revived her. As chance
would have it, some ill-hap delayed the ship one
week. Made aware of this postponement, the
Renans started for Gebeil (Byblos), in order to
see to the shipping of two last sarcophagi, which
they had given up as untransportable. They
secured their spoil, and climbed the hill to find
shade and rest at Amschit, that Syrian village,
dear to Henriette, where they had spent together
the first few weeks of their Eastern sojourn.
Here, on the Tuesday, I /th September, Henriette
fell ill with a vague sort of intermittent fever,
accompanied by neuralgic pains. But she was
so accustomed to neuralgia ! She had often
seemed more violently ill. Even on the Wednes
day, the surgeon of the Cato saw no reason for
anxiety. When Ernest Renan could be spared
from the wharves of Gebeil, he sat at her side,
she uncomplaining, he undisquieted, and continued
the work they had both so deep at heart. He
had reached the chapters of the Passion. But
on the Thursday he too fell ill with the same
mysterious disease, turn by turn mortal and
trivial, which seizes on the victim, and looses
him again, as a cat plays with a mouse. Un
happily the surgeon of the Cato always arrived
when his patients were in their languid intervals
of remittance. He did not know the pernicious
142 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
malaria of the Syrian coast. He foresaw no
serious consequences. But on Saturday morning
M. Renan, when he dragged himself from his
couch in the sitting-room to his sister's side,
meaning to work beside her at his Life of Jesus,
was terrified by a new feature of the malady
— the heart appeared affected. He dispatched
a brief note to the surgeon of the Cato. He
had time to remark the Maronite peasants
passing his window on their way to church, and
in this foreign half-savage country, the familiar
sight filled him with a feeling of utter desolation
and helplessness which he has since recorded.
Then he himself fell down unconscious among
his scattered books and papers.
When, at nightfall, the French doctor arrived
at Amschit, he found brother and sister, both
apparently dead, laid out upon the carpet of
the little salon, watched over by Antoun, their
Syrian man-servant. The ship surgeon, dumb-
foundered by this strange neuralgia, apparently
of an irregular, fatal sort, retreated hastily to
Beyrouth in search of more experienced advice.
Later in the day the French commandant and
the French doctors, seriously alarmed, climbed
the steep road to Amschit. When they arrived,
the unconscious bodies of Ernest and Henriette
Renan had been transported from their rooms to
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 143
the large reception-room of Zakhia, their wealthy
Maronite host. There they lay, stretched out
on the floor, the family of the worthy Zakhia
grouped around them, wailing them as dead. It
was a scene of a poignant barbaric melancholy.
Henriette Renan never recovered consciousness.
She died on the Tuesday morning. Her brother
awoke from his long swoon about an hour before
she expired. But he awoke to a troubled dream
of things, clearly aware of nothing ; and Henri
ette died without his hand in hers. For days
after he babbled of green fields, imagining that
he was resting with his sister by the springs of
the river Adonis, under the great walnuts that
stand above the waterfall. She was seated
beside him in the deep grass ; he held to her
lips a cup of ice-cold water. When he stirred
in his dream it was to ask, " How is my sister ? "
They answered, " Very ill ! " He smiled, and
fell again to dreaming. When at last they said,
" She is dead," he barely understood. No
merciful silence was possible, for the Cato was
waiting in harbour, and so soon as the invalid
could bear the journey, he was put in a litter
and carried seaward. Henriette he left behind
him. She sleeps in the vault of Zakhia, under
the palms of Amschit ; distant, in death as in
life, from the Breton land she loved so well.
144 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
As a dream within a dream, there remained
to haunt her brother the thought that Henriette
had been spirited away from him alive, buried
in the caverns of Lebanon while still in her living
trance. For the likeness of that swoon to the
last sleep filled him with fearful apprehensions,
and he had never looked on Henriette's dead
face. Even the presence of four French doctors
at her deathbed could not entirely reassure him.
And nearly twenty years after, in the Dream
of Leoline, he speaks out this inner anguish :
" Ah, see, her eyes open ! Her long white hand
moves out of the coffin. Her face is pale as of
old, and her eyes swim in tears. Come, kiss me !
Dear, I have so much to tell thee ! How many
years have passed since thy mortal fever. How
weary thou must be with the long journey from
thy grave. God knows that in all my joys
I have never ceased to long for thy presence ;
not one happy moment but I would have shared
it with thee ! Ah, white shadow, open thine
eyes, though it be for a quarter of an hour ; only
one quarter of an hour in which to weep with
thee, and expiate my faults towards thee, or
suffer thy pious reproaches. O, pierced heart,
how hast thou made me suffer ! For so many
hours, bitter and sweet, give me at least a glance."
There is no grief so terrible as to feel that,
A MISSION TO PHCENICIA 145
however innocently, we have abandoned our dearest
in their hour of need. It is the grief of Peter.
Renan never forgot that his sister died alone.
For many years, she, at least, did not forsake
him ; for those whom we lose by death do not
quit us all at once. All the company of true
mourners may echo the words of Hippolytus,
&> ftporsiag TTpoffvzeojv 6/^/X/ac . . . xXuwv {tsv avdqv, 6,a/xa
opuv rb ffov. We feel an irresistible aegis above
us. An inner presence is more penetrating and
more intimate than we ever knew it, for the dead
speak to us now from within. Our continual
meditation on a vanished object recreates it in
ourselves. We grow like the dead we adore ;
their spirit finds a home in us, and appears to use
us and direct us at its will. But in the end our
natural personality reasserts itself; only very few
souls are transformed into the image they recall.
Kenan's character, so sensitive, so impressionable,
had none the less a ground-work of singular un-
modifiableness ; even the kindred spirit of Henriette,
so like his own, could not permanently change
that stubborn essence. . . . Time passes ; the
dead remain as dear ; but their influence per
vades us less and less, shrinks gradually back to
its own centre, leaves us — as the fields are left on
the retiring of a flood — fertilized, no doubt, and
richer, but the same as before, land and not
K
146 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
water, ourselves and not another, for the rest
of our time. . . . Even Love-in-Death cannot
create a new spirit within us.
So great, however, was the influence of Henriette,
that, for years afterwards, not only her brother
acted as she would have bid him act, but — far
rarer triumph of love ! — he thought as she would
have bid him think, in all seriousness, in all
tenderness, with a remote and noble elevation —
checking as they rose those impulses towards
irony, towards frivolity, towards scepticism, which
Henriette had not loved.
PART III
CHAPTER I
THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE
WITH half his heart in the mysterious king
dom of the dead, and himself still pallid
with the reflection of that unseen world, Renan
set himself to finish his Life of Jesus — the book
which Henriette had loved, " because we wrote
it together." Never had the problems of religion
appeared so all-important in his eyes ; never had
he felt nearer to that infinite and eternal energy
which beats at the heart of things : One in All.
"The loss of my brave companion attached me
closer than ever to studies which had cost so
dear. ... I have looked Death in the face.
The pygmy cares which eat our lives away are
henceforth meaningless to me. I have brought
back from the threshold of the infinite a livelier
faith than I ever knew in the superior reality of 1
the world of the Ideal. It alone exists : the
physical world appears to exist. . . . The
older I grow, the dearer I have at heart the one
problem which ever keeps its profound signifi
cance, its enchanting novelty. The Infinite sur-
149
ISO LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN
rounds us, overlaps us, and haunts us. Bubbles
on the surface of existence, we feel a mysterious
kinship with our Father the Abyss. God is
revealed, by no miracle, but in our hearts whence,
as St Paul has said, an unutterable moaning goes
up to Him without ceasing. And this sentiment
of our obscure relationship to the universe, of our
Divine descendance, graven in fire in every human
heart, is the source of all virtue, the reason we
love, and the one thing that makes our life worth
living. Jesus is, in my eyes, the greatest of men,
because He developed this dim feeling with an
unprecedented, an unsurpassable power. His
religion holds the secret of the future. . . .
To transport religion beyond the supernatural
— to separate the ever-triumphant cause of Faith
from the vain forlorn hope of the Miraculous, is to
render a service to them that believe. Religion
is necessary — as eternal as poetry or love : Re
ligion will survive the destruction of all her
illusions. I say it with confidence : the day will
come when I shall have the sympathy of really
religious souls."1
Henriette had said : write the Life of Jesus.
Henriette had also said : maintain your candi
dature to the Chair of Hebrew and accept no
other chair. Behold, her least utterance had now
1 Questions Contemporaries, 195 . . . 237 . . . 232 . . . 235.
THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE 151
become oracular. As Renan himself wrote to the
Professors of the College of France : — " I saw an
imperative revelation in the counsel of a beloved
person who appeared to me haloed in the sacred
aureole of death." Ah, why was Henriette not by
his side ! She would have bid him keep distinct
these two noble ambitions — bid him speak of
Jesus in his book, analyse Semitic philology
at the College of France. But at bottom, for
all his airs of indecision, Renan burned to give
a reason for the faith that was in him.
At last, after nearly five years of silence, the
Minister of Public Instruction demanded the lists
from the College of France and the Academy of
Inscriptions. Renan's name headed either. And
a decree of the I ith January I 862, proclaimed him
Professor of Hebrew at the College of France.
This election was passionately unpopular among
the Catholics, and for due cause : the Chair of
Hebrew being in fact a chair of Biblical criti
cism as we have said. But it was also, oddly
enough, unpopular among the students of the
Latin Quarter, indignant that Renan, their Renan, \
should have accepted office at the Emperor's
hands. Was he going to turn his coat? At
the mere idea they were all ready to shout with
Robert Browning —
" Just for a handful of silver he left us."
152 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
It was clear there would be at his opening
lecture what the Latin Quarter loves to call a
Chahut. Renan's opinions were known. If the
Church was conspicuous by her absence, the
young Catholic party was there en masse to
avenge her. And the Liberal students were no
less suspicious and defiant. The University, not
wholly sympathetic to this unfrocked Seminarist of
supposed Radical opinions ; the world of fashion,
attracted by Renan's literary renown, helped to
throng the hall. The lecturer appeared, his head
in a dream, his mind full of Henriette, so cruelly
absent, of the Life of Jesus, of his old dreams at
last come true. He was barely aware of the various
causes of offence which he had given. He just
glanced at the amphitheatre crammed from floor
to ceiling — at the students, clinging in clusters
to the window ledges, shouting news of the
lecture to the crowd, black in the street. . . .
I have heard it all described so vividly that it
seems to me I, too, was there !
Then he began a parallel between the Semite
and the Aryan. Anti-semitism was not yet a
fashion ; there was nothing here to rail at.
The face of the audience fell : was it this they
had come out into the wilderness to hear ?
The lecturer continued — " The Political Idea
is Aryan. The French Revolution, for in-
THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE 153
stance, may often have compromised Liberty,
but" . . . (Here the Latin Quarter saw its
opportunity.)
" Respect the Revolution, sir ! " thundered from
a hundred throats. A quarter of an hour later
an audacious comparison of King David to an
" energetic Captain of Adventure " threw a
bomb into the Catholic camp. By this time
the Liberal students were aware that the
lecturer was still their leader ; one and all
they became forthwith his clamorous partisans.
Their support alone rendered the delivery of
the lecture possible.
Was it well ? Better perhaps if, at the outset,
an unjust turbulence had drowned the orator's
voice. For one phrase in his speech — one
sentence which nowadays any Liberal Christian
would hear with tolerance, if not with approval
— falling just at that impassioned moment
on prejudiced ears, began a sequence of
injustice, a series of misunderstandings, which
were to make of the mild impartial scholar
the notorious martyr of the Empire, the demi
god of a Republic he only half approved.
To this day, in his native place, Renan is
chiefly remembered as " a great Republican "
by those who have never read a line of his
writings.
154 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
I can imagine Henrietta's phantom mur
muring —
" Ni cet exces d'honneur ni cette indignite ! "
This was not the future she had foreseen,
illustrious yet retired ; the life of a Le Nain de
Tillemont secluded in some park of Seine-et-
Oise, whose peaceful charmilles are not too far
from the libraries of Paris, whose lofty grey-
panelled chambers afford space and quiet for a
voluminous research. Such a life, irradiate with
the limpid light of Science, productive of labours
which should satisfy countless generations of
scholars, and never be profaned by the vulgarity
of fame, such a life she would approve. She
would have found something gross in the im
mense celebrity which began, on that 2ist of
February 1862, in the amphitheatre of the
College of France.
What a riot ! what a tumult ! Only here and
there we catch a word, half drowned in hisses
and acclamations. ..." An incomparable Man,
whom some, struck by His exceptional mission,
call a God . . . victim of His ideal . . . deified
in His death . . . founded the Eternal Religion
of Humanity. . . . No man before Him had
reached so high a standard of perfection. . . .
For the time is come when ye shall worship
THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE 155
Me no longer along this mountain nor at
Jerusalem, but in Spirit and in Truth." l
St Paul did not disdain to say : " Jesus of
Nazareth, a Man sent from God among ye "
(Acts ii. 22). Bossue^ after him, wrote with
out reproach of Christ as " a man of admirable
mildness." But Kenan's " homme incomparable "
appeared the thrown gauntlet of the defiant
apostate. The Church was not slow to take it
up, nor the students to defend it ; the con
fusion grew deafening. The lecture over,
Renan escaped by some back way to the
house of a friend, haunted by the dread of a
public ovation. The piece was played without
Hamlet ; the students, en masse, swarmed to the
Rue Madame, where the Renans lived, and (true
Frenchmen !) demanded, in default of their idol, a
glimpse of his mother. M. Egger, who was
calling at the time, harangued the crowd in
terms sufficiently vague to disguise from the
old lady (a devotee of Throne and Altar)
the full scandal of her son's success. He
need not have been at the pains. The dark,
witty old face had only its most benignant
smile for the turbulence of Ernest's riotous
champions.
The fact remained that M. Renan's opening
1 Melanges d"1 Histoire ct de Voyages, p. 18.
156 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
lecture had disturbed the cause of public order.
Beset by the Church, by the Empress, Napoleon
seized this excuse to suspend the young Professor
from his functions. And Renan continued his
lectures in his private study, still, nominally,
Professor at the College of France. But on
the 2nd of June 1864, on opening the morn
ing paper, he saw his name. He was trans
ferred from his chair at the College of France
to a post of sub-librarian at the Imperial Library.
The thing came on him as a thunder-clap.
And insult was added to the injury by an
official note, observing that this new appoint
ment was more in accordance with the dignity
of a distinguished savant, " at present subject
to the anomaly of receiving pay for work
which he is not permitted to perform." Renan
had acquitted himself of his duty, exactly, if
in private. The fund of combativeness which
every man has at heart seethed within him.
He wrote to the minister, in a mood of ferocious
irony : Pecunia tua tecum sit. He refused the
post of librarian, and maintained his right
to the title of Professor at the College of
France.
On the nth of June Renan was officially
destituted. He became one of the most popular
members of the Liberal Opposition. Already,
THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE 157
in 1863, he had been invited to stand for Parlia
ment. In March of that year he wrote to
Michele Amari.1
" I am preparing my Life of Jesus, which will
appear in about two months. I need not tell
you on what lines it is written. The partisans
of miracles will not be satisfied. I do not know
what will come of it all ! Between you and
me, I may say that if I should be deprived of
my chair at the College of France, it is probable
I may be elected as one of the Members for Paris.
I cannot say that I am in love with the idea. I
should have preferred the free and peaceable career
of Higher Education. But it is not my fault if
my feet are set on another road. And, if my
election take place, it would have a meaning
which would fill me with satisfaction ; to bring
about such a declaration, I am ready for many
sacrifices. All these things may be ! I am
playing a difficult game and I do not see the
upshot."
The Life of Jesus appeared on the 23rd of
June 1863. Before November, sixty thousand
copies of it were in circulation. No such success
had as yet issued from the printing presses of
the century. ... At such a moment, there was
something fitting in the destitution of Ernest
1 Carteggio di Michele A mart, 2 vols., Turin, 1896.
158 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
Renan. The professor had become the artist ;
the philologist, the man of letters ; the scholar,
the politician. Too much glory, too wide an
audience, ill befit the patient research of a
laboratory.
CHAPTER II
THE LIFE OF JESUS
HP HE Life of Jesus is naturally the first of
Kenan's seven volumes on the Origins
of Christianity. Even more than its successors
it is a work, not of erudition, not of technical
exegesis, but of moral and psychological enquiry,
based on historical documents. Renan was cer
tainly familiar with the curious mosaic of Le Nain
de Tillemont, he knew almost by heart the New
Testament, he had read and re-read the pages
of Josephus ; to this foundation, solid if restricted,
he added a rare archaeological capacity, an ac
quaintance with the monuments, moneys, and
inscriptions of the first centuries of our era which,
of a surety, no other religious historian possesses ;
he was, moreover, a traveller, whom a year's
residence in Syria had accustomed to the horizons,
the races, and the character of the Holy Land :
the fresh impressions of his visit colour every
page ; but, above all, he was a psychologist, a
man who had once believed, who had felt the
pulse of his soul, with as much curiosity as
159
160 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
anguish, during the long years in which that dear
belief expired : a man to whom, even after its
death, the impulse of Faith remained the holiest,
and the most interesting thing in the universe.
His rustic and religious origin enabled this man
of science to enter into the spirit of a credulous
country folk, and to analyse, without illusion,
without derision, the creative process of their
minds. The result is a master-piece. The
pure idyll of Galilee, hardly less sacred to Renan
than to the most fervent Churchman ; the Passion
of Jerusalem ; the religious East ; and philosophic
Greece, animating a Syrian people with the
spirit of the Gospel of St John ; the dogmatic
force and fervour of St Paul, supplying, as it were,
channels and imperishable aqueducts for the New
Source of Life which the rod of Jesus had set
welling; all the great concourse of saints, martyrs,
mystics, heretics, and charlatans who laboured
together blindly in a Cause superior to even the
noblest among them ; and the cruel consolidating
force of persecution ; and Nero, the Antichrist,
throwing into stronger relief the ideal perfec
tion of Jesus : all this, grouped against a vast
Mediterranean background — Syria, Antioch, Alex
andria, Athens, Rome — lives and glows before us
in the pages of Renan.
In the beginning there was a Life of unequalled
THE LIFE OF CHRIST 161
perfection. The origins of Christianity begin with
the Life of Jesus. To write a Life of Jesus has
been the fatality of modern theology, for the
hero of a biography can only be a man. The
Christ, who, at a given date, was born of Jewish
stock, in the obscure village of a distant Roman
protectorate ; who grew to manhood among
certain Syrian peasants, whose appearance,
education, and racial character he shared ;
who spoke an Aramean dialect, and never
knew Greek ; loses, by just so much as he
gains in historic precision, the vague glory of
universal Divinity. The theologian who would
write the life of Jesus should compose a hymn.
In such matters the Trisagion alone is really
orthodox.
So early as 1838, Salvador, and towards 1860,
Bunsen, had published, in their different fashions,
material towards a history of the early Church.
In 1 840, Littrd's translation of Strauss's Life
of Jesus acquainted the French public with the
speculations of Tubingen. More than to any
of these, Renan owed to Herder : Herder,
whose philosophy of history had helped to
mould his mind. That elegant philosopher,
Christian archaeologist, and philologist, fully
alive to the literary excellence of the text he
examines, — that man of feeling and ideas, in-
L
1 62 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
fluenced by his age and largely influencing it, —
was a man after Renan's heart. He never under
stood the austere and hard-headed rationalists of
the school of Tubingen, as deficient in tact and
measure as they are rich in knowledge.
Renan's debt to Tubingen has been exag
gerated. The fault and the charm of his Life
of Jesus is that he wrote it insufficiently pre
pared. The charm — because its extraordinary
spontaneity makes the book a sort of fifth Gospel
—the gospel, if you will, according to Thomas
Didymus. The pages written on the mud floor
of a Syrian cottage, with Joseph and the Gospels
for their only sponsors, keep the freshness, the
life and the beauty of their original inspiration.
Renan's Life of Jesus is the biography of a
divinity written by a worshipper still prostrate
before the dead body of his god, but convinced
there will be no resurrection. Its superiority
is its profound religious sentiment, its living,
vibrating atmosphere of the East, its sense of
the human personality, the life of Jesus.
Strauss, on the other hand, is a gnostic of
the nineteenth century. All that he touches
turns to allegory, myth, and symbol. His
Christ is an y£on — a glittering abstraction. The
aureole which the faith of the multitude has
lit around the face of Jesus blinds him to the
THE LIFE OF CHRIST 163
features which it frames. His Saviour is a logical
deduction from prophecy. We wonder why the
first Christians lived hard, and died harder, for
love of so unreal a Messiah. There is no life
in these dead bones. The dogmatic man of
science has no sense of a thing so delicate, so
fluctuating, so spontaneous, so mysterious, as the
birth of a faith.
But only a German university can produce the
sum of labour necessary to collect, control, revise
and criticise the vast material of any given his
tory. If, when he began his Life of Jesus, Renan
had been better acquainted with the researches
of Strauss, Baur, Hilgenfeld, Reuss, Schwegler,
Ewald, Zeller, and other erudites, he would not
have taken a document of, we suppose, the end
of the first century for a contemporary narrative
of the life of Christ. A characteristic preference
for ideas over facts, an affinity for the man who
philosophises about events rather than for him
who simply records them, led Renan to lay the
greatest stress on the Gospel according to St
John. Later on he saw the error of his ways,
and, with the good faith he always showed, he
recast many passages of his original work : after
the thirteenth edition the difference is striking.
But something undecided, embarrassed, clings to
the work, which I consider inferior to at least
1 64 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN
three of the volumes which were to follow it — the
exquisite Apostles, so humane and so tender in its
feeling of human brotherhood ; St Paul, a study
in sociology and in the psychology of geography ;
Antichrist, a magnificent historical painting. The
Life of Jesus contains incomparable passages, but
the whole does not carry conviction. This Christ
is too Celtic, too German ; he is too much
like Ernest Renan. And the writer's attitude
is not clear. He is not a Catholic, so much is
evident since he denies the divinity of Christ ;
but he is also not a free-thinker, a disinterested
historical student ; for his Christ is more than
the founder of a great religion, he is something
quite apart from, quite above and beyond such
human sons of God as Moses, Mahomet, or
Buddha. Renan will none of them. " Christi
anity," he declares, "has become almost the
synonym of religion ; all that is attempted out
side its great and fertile tradition is doomed to
sterility. . . . Christ is the creator of the eternal
religion of humanity." This is limiting the
future. The divine essence has more than one
manifestation, and in the million years of man's
progress may reveal itself in many ways. On
the lips of an unbeliever, so absolute an affirma
tion is more than incongruous — even a little
THE LIFE OF CHRIST 165
exasperating. And occasionally Renan reminds
us of some inconsolable widower who, after the
stormiest married life, waxes eloquent of the
departed. If the marriage was so impossible,
why these tears ? But if the poor man be sincere,
he will not listen to you.
Renan was sincere, and in the things of the
heart there is no magic like sincerity. So heart
felt, so hopeless, his pious unbelief took the world
by storm. For the world is full of men and
women who once believed, and who keep green
and strown with flowers the tomb of a dead ideal.
Here was a man who could speak the dumb
word in their hearts ; a man whose lips the
Eternal had touched with his fiery coal ; a man
who cried no more, as we all cry — d d domine,
nescio loquil Genius was in the book, and
sincerity, and a very tender reverence. As the
Empress said to Madame Cornu, in great surprise,
when at last she had read the maligned volume :
" It can do no harm to believers ; to unbelievers
it can only do good."
The most beautiful pages of the Life of Jesus
open the succeeding volume, the Apostles, and
treat of the life-after-death of our Lord. We
doubt if there exist in any language more ex
quisite pages of religious psychology. Here,
1 66 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
again, it is, from the historical point of view, un
fortunate that Renan should have followed the
narrative according to St John. As was often
the case, the artist in him tempted the historian,
and the historian yielded. For the version of
St John is infinitely more pathetic, more probable,
more lovely than the versions of the synoptic
Gospels. And doubtless the narrative was in
spired by an authentic oral tradition. But, in
a question of history, a scientific historian has
no right to choose a page, however beautiful,
of a later writer, in place of a prosaic narrative
copied from a lost recital possibly contemporary
with the event described. If Renan had been,
as single-mindedly as he believed the sole servant
of Truth, he would have chosen Mark or Luke
for his guide in this matter.
But if we may question Renan's judgment
in the criticism of his texts, we can only marvel
at the extraordinary ingenuity with which he
interprets them. With all the piety of the
Christian, with all the scruple of the man of
science, he gives an explanation of the Resur
rection which leaves no least suspicion of fraud
to blur the aureole of our dearest saints, and yet
sets an event, which we cannot accept as super
natural, in accordance with the normal laws of
THE LIFE OF CHRIST 167
things. The vision of Mary Magdalene accom
plished the necessary miracle — Christ had arisen.
" In these crises of the miraculous, it is easy
enough to see what another has seen. The one
merit is to see before the others, for those that
come after model their vision on the received
type. It is the peculiarity of fine organisa
tions to see promptly, exactly, and in the true
line of things. The glory of the Resurrection
belongs to Mary Magdalene. After Jesus, she,
more than any other, laid the foundations of
Christianity. The shadow which her delicate senses
perceived — nay, created — still shelters the world.
Queen and patroness of idealists, she knew, as
no other has known, how to affirm her own
ideal, and to force upon others the sacred vision
of her passionate soul. Her great woman's
assertion, ' He is risen ! ' is the basis of the
faith of Humanity."
Beauty of the fabric, fragility of the foundation,
necessity of the consoling vision, fleeting illusion
of all things save the infinitely small which we
measure in the hollow of our hand ! And who
shall say which, in the essential is truest : Life
which is a dream, or the dream which may be
Life ? All here below is but a sign and a symbol,
the sun in the heavens no less than the phantom
168 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
of desire. The symbols which serve to give a
form to the religious sentiment are incomplete
and transitory ; but a great truth inhabits them
and makes of the least of them the temple of an
hour.
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY
/CHRISTIANITY is not a simple faith; it is
v— ' a profound theology, a tremendous organ
isation. The Son of Man appeared, loved the
world and died, leaving a trail of light behind
him. His message is contained in the dis
courses of Matthew, in the parables of Luke.
But a pure religion is too ethereal a thing to
subsist uncontaminate in the dense atmos
phere of reality. The work of Jesus was taken
up and completed by a man of action. And
this is what Renan shows us in his volume on
St Paul.
His portrait of the Apostle is striking, life-like,
unexpected. For hitherto, in all the great images
which he loves to evoke from the recesses of the
past, Renan has sought some secret kinship with
his own soul. Here there is none ! St Paul is
scarce a saint, not at all a poet, a sage, a dreamer,
or a man of science. He was a hero of the
Active Life — a missionary and a conqueror, with
169
1 70 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
a fierce, tender, proselytizing soul, not averse to
combat, often susceptible, sometimes jealous,
capable of rancour and aggression. For once
Renan has got outside himself. He calls up
before us the bizarre little Jew with his halting
speech, his incorrect and hurried eloquence, his
bent shoulders, his pale face with the large
features, his piercing eyes under their shaggy
eyebrows. The vision is so vivid that we scarce
have the heart to cavil at the insufficient tradi
tion which is its only warrant : the same tradi
tion maintains that St Paul was remarkable for
his personal beauty.
St Paul, as we know, was a Pharisee and a man
of some education. The fact that he spoke with
fluency a Greek dialect was all-important in the
propagation of Christianity, for Greek was the
chief language of the Mediterranean ports, and
a mere Hebrew missionary, confined to his own
tongue, would have been of scant influence with
the Gentiles. Paul, a Jew by birth, a Roman
citizen by hereditary right, a Greek by language,
was no less cosmopolitan than the world he
moved in — the brilliant, variegated, incoherent
world of Asia Minor : Splendid Antioch, " third
city of the globe," with its temples, baths, and
aqueducts, its wide streets bordered with stately
columns and statues ; immense Ephesus clamber-
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 171
ing from the marshes up the sacred hills, with the
shrine of Diana in its midst, and all round the
clear horizons of the Asiatic plain ; Antioch,
Ephesus, Corinth, vast centres of wealth and
superstition, cities full of magicians and miners
and flute-players, of goldsmiths and courtezans, of
priests, rhetoricians, and novelists : such were the
unlikely cradles of the New Idea. Renan who,
in 1864, visited the whole area of the peregrin
ations of St Paul, has fixed with the subtlest,
most vivid art, the very image of this vanished
world.
" Like Socialism now - a - days, Christianity
sprouted on what we call the corruption of
great cities." It was a movement of the hard-
pressed, intelligent, unlettered poor, who abounded
in the meaner suburbs of the Mediterranean
ports.
There the wandering Christian workman set up
his tent, there he sowed the good seed, and then
passed on. Like a travelling journeyman who
leaves behind him the trace of his opinion in
every wayside tavern where he has halted, in
every village where he has made friends, Paul, in
especial, wandered from place to place, tramping
over hill or down dale, coasting from port to port,
working for his bread, even while he set forth how
man does not live by bread alone. At Ephesus
i;2 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN
and Corinth, assisted by Aquila and Priscilla, he
set up, in|some back street, a small shop for the
sale of the coarse Cilician canvas which it was his
trade to weave. In every town where he halted
he gained converts to the Faith. Christianity
was to spring in all her glory from these small
clusters of fervid, illiterate, primitive persons,
grouped, as a rule, round some virtuous well-to-do
widow, some spiritually - minded tradesman of
means. The Early Churches were narrow circles
of some dozen believers. " Probably all the con
verts of St Paul did not number a thousand all
told."
Renan's rare knowledge of the social conditions
of antiquity on the Mediterranean shore has en
abled him to reconstruct the double organization
which was to contain Christianity, even as the
hive and the wax contain the honey. The outer
framework, as we may say, was the compact
Orbis of the Roman Empire. One sole adminis
tration governed all the countries visited by
the Apostles. Their propaganda would have
been impossible had Asia, Macedonia, Malta,
the cities of Greece and Italy, each been con
stituted in separate and vivacious nationalities,
each with their own exclusive tradition, faith, and
speech. But the Pax Romana enveloped them
all in one monotony. A great dull well-being
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 173
brooded over the vast Empire : the tedium of a
civilization which has attained its goal and has
nothing left to desire.
" If life consisted in amusing oneself by
order of the Law, in eating one's ration of daily
bread, in taking the regulation pleasure sadly
under the eye of one's chief, then the Roman
juris consults would have solved the problem of
human government." But a mortal coldness
breathed from this dismal prosperity : Rome
offered nothing to love ! Deep in man's heart
is the instinct of choice. The phalanstery, how
ever comfortable, is not the home, nor the chance
desk-fellow the selected comrade. He longs
for the little coterie of chosen spirits, the guild
the confraternity, where he contributes, of his
own free will, to the welfare of his mates and
his own security. The sense of fellowship is
an instinct which must be allowed for ! In
the lowest circles of the Roman Empire men
met together in secret to satisfy this sacred
prompting. The Syrian, Greek, and Jewish
quarters were full of little illicit Collegia — Friendly
Societies, Mutual Aid Societies, Burial Societies
especially — condemned by the Government as
possible hot-beds of disaffection, but in reality
peaceful enough in their humble brotherhood.
The members were all of the poorest class :
174 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
servants, porters, hucksters, old-clo' men, tinder
sellers and such like. Christianity immediately
illuminated the small Collegia.
And what was the ghetto but a larger, a
more complete Collegium ? A Collegium whose
life and centre was the Synagogue ? No gulf,
no apparent schism, as yet divided Christianity
from the Law and the prophets. The first
apostles sought their quarters in the ghetto.
There they awaited patiently the Sabbath day,
and then followed the crowding Israelites into
the square, plain structure which was less a
church than a school, a debating society. It
was the hospitable custom of Jewry to invite
the stranger within its gates to greet the brethren
with some discourse of edification. Paul and
the apostles found thus their opportunity. In
the Synagogue they preached the Gospel. In
the Synagogue they made their first converts.
In the Synagogue they aroused their earliest
persecutors.
For no people are (or were) so well instructed
as the Jews in the authentic dogma and tradition
of their own religion. Paul's audacious theories
roused a dozen eager voices, clamouring to con
fute the heretic. Hence stonings, flagellations,
prison, exile. But hence also the instantaneous
bruiting abroad of Christian doctrine, The
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 175
complicated ritual of Judaism was perhaps a
safeguard, it was certainly a barrier. It is
impossible to imagine the world accepting a
creed overcharged by so many observances.
Paul proclaimed : " The Letter kills, the Spirit
rnaketh alive." By declaring of no account the
distinctions between the clean and the unclean,
he admitted the Gentiles to the Faith, but he
outraged Judaism. In every religion there are
always more men ready to avenge a violated
ritual than to accept the new life of a free
spirit. Judaism, as a body, was lost to
Christianity. But in exchange it gained the
world. Instead of a sect of the ghetto, it
became the purest worship of the civilization it
renewed.
Therein was the merit of Paul. By his pas
sionate affirmation of the broad freedom of
Christ he completed and secured the work of
Jesus. The history of his struggle at tre
mendous odds ; the sunny, breezy, joyous
narration of his divine Odyssey ; the picture
of the social conditions under which he
laboured, is the subject of Renan's two volumes,
The Apostles^ and St Paul. Seldom has the
master shown a science more solid, a profounder
sense of the secret roots of things, a more vivid
and brilliant vocation of their living image,
176 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
than in this volume which, dealing with docu
ments and facts beyond dispute, contains nothing
to grieve the liberal Christian, much to instruct
the student, and, more to rejoice the lover of
literature.
CHAPTER IV
POLITICS
NOT for a moment was Renan's weighty
mind thrown out of gear by the prodigious
success of the Life of Jesus. He was aware that
an author's popularity is almost always the result
of a misunderstanding. He liked being liked, no
doubt, as much as St Augustine " loved to love."
Popularity was a pleasant episode. He would
not let it become an aim.
Had he continued the "Origins of Christianity"
in a crescendo of anti-clericalism, Renan would
have become the idol of the market-place. He
would have been to 1870 what Lamartine had
been to 1848: the vates, the philosopher, the
chosen guide. But the unity and the dignity
of Renan's life sprang from his sense of belonging
to a superior order vowed to superior duties : he
was the priest of Truth. Instead of contesting a
Parisian circonscription, he went to Asia Minor
with his wife and studied on the spot, as minutely
as he had studied the civilization of Palestine and
Syria, the local conditions into which were born
M I77
1 78 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN
the Christian churches. Then he came home and
continued the Origins of Christianity in a mood
of absolute abstraction from the passions of the
hour.
The Apostles appeared in 1866, St Paul in
1869. Renan looked up from his task at the
world about him, and saw that the soul of France
was disquieted within her. At heart he was still
a priest, a man set apart, elect, a member of a
moral aristocracy, — and therefore responsible for
the errors of his inferiors. To-day, as in 1843,
he thought : —
" A private life would be my happiness ; but
such a life appears to me tainted by selfishness.
I ought to be a priest ; for the priest is the de
positary both of wisdom and good counsel ; the
man of study, the man of meditation, and yet a
very brother to his brethren." ]
Renan, so far at least, was no sceptic, no mere
dilettante indifferent to mankind. He had the
tenderest sense of fraternity, the most absolute
sense of the efficacy of the Ideal ; there was
balm in Gilead still ! If he believed it impossible,
and perhaps unnecessary, to admit the multitude
into the arcana of that temple wherein he was a
servant, he accepted none the less, and indeed
all the more, the claim which the ignorance
Lettres Intimes, p. 118.
POLITICS 179
of the laity laid upon him in their hours of
perplexity and error. It is a mistake to say,
as I have heard it said, that Renan was an
ambitious man — that he desired to govern his
inferiors, and to impose the triumph of his own
ideas. But it is less of a mistake, I maintain,
than to imagine him, as the main public of
France imagines him, an idle dreamer in his
ivory tower. He was, in fact, a conscientious
leader of humanity, sometimes misguided, ever
willing to seek a better way.
France in 1869 had reached a high degree of
material prosperity. Napoleon III. had taught
the French how rich they were. But the seeing
eye could read the threat of disaster in the shifty
brilliance of the hour. All the roots of France
were exhausted in the production of one beauti
ful, sterile orchid, — Paris. The provinces were
sapped, drained, lifeless ; neither country gentry,
nor county boards, nor local interests, supplied
the provincial with an existence of his own. As
France only bloomed in Paris, so Paris flowered
in the Court : a fast, frivolous, superficial, spend
thrift Court of tinsel soldiers, of reckless beauties,
of brilliant authors : a world of little theatres and
universal exhibitions, of Baron Haussmanns and
Cora Pearls. It was clearly time that the order
of things should change.
i8o LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
The General Election came round in May
1869. It was then that the Liberal Opposition
asked Renan to stand for Meaux. At some
sacrifice of time and fortune he consented. The
gods must have smiled to see Ernest Renan
go a-canvassing among the wealthy corn-growers,
the rich butter-merchants and cheese-mongers
of the plains of Brie. Brie, by nature of its
proximity to Paris, is Radical, anti-clerical, and
prosperous : it sells its wares to the Capital, and
takes, in exchange, some tint of Parisian ideas :
but it is a Radicalism fat with grass and grain,
fed to bursting with rich milk and the flesh of
kine : the Radicalism of the peasant landlord :
the most illiberal opinion of any party.
The vast plains were one shimmering ocean of
pale green, with last year's great ricks stranded
here and there, like ships, among the unbounded
corn, when Ernest Renan traversed them in the
spring of '69. What can he have said to the
influential voters who inhabit these solid farms ?
How they must have astonished each other, he
and they ? I can imagine a conversation some
thing after this fashion : —
Farmer of Brie. — "Good morning, Mister. You
support the Liberal programme ? "
M. Renan. — "Yes, on the whole. . . . We
can indeed imagine a superior social order in
POLITICS 181
which the individual would be remorselessly —
perhaps, indeed, willingly — sacrificed in order to
promote, in a few, the acquisition of some yet
undreamed-of good. But France appears irre
vocably devoted to Liberty, to the happiness of
the mass, to a small, prosperous, somewhat vulgar,
affluence."
F. of B. — " Well, well ! And you will vote for
the extension of the Board Schools ? "
M. Renan. — " Certainly ! If Science be the
chief good, what right have we to debar our
brother from it ? And yet, I own, I deplore
the abolition of the unlettered class, charming in
its rural simplicity, shrewd with a mother-wit of
its own, the faithful depositary of the ideas and
fancies of our remotest forefathers. The peasant,
the priest, and the noble are the only loveable
classes ! The Board Schools will replace the
peasant by a pretentious, ill-bred, self-made rustic,
infinitely more dangerous to Science, and probably
hopelessly unfitted for the sphere into which he is
born. The School Board will be the ruin of a
superior ideal. But let Justice be accomplished !
Yes, yes, my friend, I shall vote for the School
Board."
F. of B. — (Does the man think me an ass ?)
" And the taxes ? At least, you are firm for
cutting down the taxes ? "
1 82 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
M. Renan. — " In part. It is certain that, in the
whole cause of history, nothing has ever rendered
a government so unpopular as excessive taxation.
And yet ! a tax, rightly regarded, is a form
of disinterestedness, a way of participating in
the real life of the world. Our poor selfish aims
— all the criss-cross of rival activities which make
up the struggle for our daily bread, — are as nought
in the sight of the Eternal ! Our personal ambi
tions, our thousand little strifes, successes, and
reverses are all, as we may say, consumed in
the wear and tear of the universe : every day
supplies the fuel of every day. But the little
fund of reserve force which makes the world
go round is the devotion which we willingly
give to an end outside ourselves, distilled, drop
by drop, from millions of selfish lives. Nothing
is so vain, so imbecile, as selfishness : beware of
selfishness ! Sometimes, I confess, I see the
future of earth as a planet of idiots, each basking
in his own particular ray, indifferent to all outside
his well-sunned limbs. Selfishness is the curse
of great material prosperity. And it may be
that, in this vast sunlit sheet of springing corn
before us, in all this panorama of grain and kine,
of earth and river, the one thing which really
exists is the tax which each yields of its increase
for the general weal of the nation."
POLITICS 183
F. of B. — " Dang it, the man's gone daft !
Good morning, Mister ! "
On one point, at least, M. Renan and his con
stituency were as one. All his electioneering
bills bore in flaming letters — " No War. No
Revolution. A War would be as disastrous as
a Revolution." The Prussians may still have
read them on the village walls round Meaux.
And on this theme M. Renan was never too
eloquent to please his hearers. He had then, as
always, the most brilliant success as a speaker.
His wit, his astonishing naturalness, the originality
and the fundamental good sense of his paradoxes,
the charm of his manner, his air of enjoying the
ideas with which the occasion inspired him, made
him irresistible as an orator. And, at bottom, his
hearers and he were of a like opinion — at least as
to the prospect of war. Among the peasants of
Brie there reigned, in 1869, the most complete
indifference to military glory. They had a
certain honest respect for freedom, but at bottom
all that they asked was that the Prefet should
meddle as little as possible in their affairs,
that the taxes should be diminished, that the
term of military service — which took so many
strong young arms from the harvest — should be
shortened as much as possible. All that they
asked was to be left free to make their own for-
1 84 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
tunes out of their own fields in their own way.
M. Renan looked in some wonder at these persons
incapable of a sacrifice, incapable of a general
idea. He found the farmer of Brie un etre borne.
He wondered at this thriving rustic, " content in his
gross and trivial comfort without a thought in his
head." M. Jules Simon used to say that, when asked
if he would vote with his party, M. Renan was wont
to muse, and to reply, at last : — Sometimes ! But
though he must have appeared an extraordinary
politician, Renan's reputation was immense ;
probably his eccentricities were taken as the
hall mark of his genius. The Minister of the
Interior took great pains over this affair, and it
was not without a struggle that Ernest Renan
was defeated for the constituency of Meaux.
The tendency of the elections as a whole was
distinctly Liberal. The Empire itself at last, and
especially the Emperor, had absorbed a great deal
of the Liberal theory, and gave out as much
liberty, or thereabouts, as France at that moment
could assimilate without excess. L Empire Liberal
sought to repair its wrongs towards Ernest
Renan: already in the spring of 1870, there
was some talk of reinstating him in his Chair of
Hebrew at the College of France. True, the
affair was only completed under the Ministry
of Jules Simon, on the I7th November, after
POLITICS 185
the fall of the Empire ; but the first steps
towards Kenan's rehabilitation were taken six
months before that catastrophe. And, in fact,
Renan had accepted the Liberal Empire. It was
part of his theory that progress comes not by
leaps and bounds, but little by little : that out
of chaos comes misrule, and out of misrule
gradually a better order. He would have
accepted the chair of Quatremere as a Liberal
victory, infinitely more important than the defeat
of Meaux.
Much in the spirit of a Merovingian Bishop, —
who, unable to chase the barbarians from Gaul,
should set himself to civilize them, — Renan not
uncheerfully assumed the moral education of the
Empire. He had no doubt of its stability ; he
had touched as it were with his hands the wealth,
the solidity, the love of peace, of rural France.
The Government was certainly bad ; but a
system which encouraged the endowment of
research could surely not be wholly corrupt.
On the 8th of May 1870, seven and a half
millions of Frenchmen declared themselves
satisfied with L* Empire Liberal. Brilliant and
hollow beyond example, France appeared destined
to show that a nation can flourish merely by the
excessive animation of its surface, as if a man,
having coughed up all his lungs, should live on
1 86 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
by the extraordinary breathing power of his
skin.
Such health is deceptive. The Emperor him
self was not deceived. The Empress said : unless
we have a war, my son will not come to the
throne. By a second act of high treason, by a
second Coup d'Etat, more culpable and more
disastrous even than the first, on the I9th July
1 870, the Emperor declared war against Germany.
Renan was at Tromsoe, in the far North of Nor
way, in company with the Prince Je>ome-Napole"on,
as innocent of apprehension as himself. " What
a crime, what a fit of stark, staring madness ! " he
wrote to Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff.1 " I had
thought the danger of war waived for years, per
haps for ever. . . . The greatest heartache of my
life followed the opening of that fatal telegram."
1 Sir M. G. Duff, Ernest Renan, p. 81.
CHAPTER V
THE WAR RENAN AS PROPHET
RENAN hastened home and joined his family
at the small house near Sevres, where he
was accustomed to spend the summer. From
the first he knew what to expect. A formidable
discipline, an organised force at the service of a
great idea, had come into contact with an in
coherent mass of martial vanity and irresponsible
impulse. Electrified by the mere hallucination
of Napoleon's ghost, France was doomed to
defeat ; and, in his prophetic vision, Renan wept
her defeat in tears of blood, for she suffered it
at the hands of his ideal.
All his life he had dreamed of uniting
France and Germany. He saw them lead
the United States of Europe in the van of
civilization — the one passionately alive to all
that is generous, liberal, or lovely ; the other
proud in her hereditary strength of science and
authority. Together they might head the world ;
and now . . . !
187
1 88 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
Behold, the nation to which Renan owed all
that was best in him — the nation of Goethe,
Herder, Kant — revealed itself as a rout of
drunken troopers setting fire to Bazeilles ! The
brutal Bavarian, the plundering Swab, the
blustering Prussian, these were the teachers whom
he had ever held up as patterns of morality and
culture ! No man in France, we may fairly say,
suffered more in that hour than Ernest Renan ;
for the Franco-German war was to him as a
civil war, and he saw his two countries closed in
a murderous struggle.
Admirable in his freedom from party passion,
Renan never let go his hold on the general
relation of things. After Bazeilles, after Sedan, in
the midst of his cruel experience of the hard and
arbitrary spirit of Prussia, Renan still saw un-
obscured the ideal Germany which had formed
his mind. His country in flames, the Prussians
in sight of Paris, his own little house at Sevres
pillaged by his divinities, left him still convinced.
Behind this evident mass of drill-sergeants,
quarter-masters, heroes, and scoundrels — Goths
alike — there existed none the less a superior
order, an invisible senate of philosophers, men
of science, scholars, jurists (men of action also),
working together in the service of humanity.
These were really Germany ; and Germany being
THE WAR— RENAN AS PROPHET 189
the most adequate expression of reason, would
listen to reason.
While the Prussians were taking up their
positions at Versailles and St Cloud, Renan sat
down and wrote to David Strauss an open letter
denouncing the war as a crime against civilization,
pleading against the annexation of Alsace-Lor
raine as a blunder in history, for Germany has
need of France as an ally against the growing
strength of Russia. The letter is eloquent and
noble. All through it echoes that love of Europe
which was Renan's true patriotism, that dis
interested devotion to the future of humanity
which is his peculiar glory. But, alas ! when
did prophet arrest the course of battle ? Strauss
chuckled in his beard, translated his ingenuous
correspondent's pamphlet, and sold it for the
profit of the Prussian ambulances ; whilst, on
the horizon, Germany wrote her answer in flames
by the arson of St Cloud.
If Renan's attitude was a failure abroad, at
home it was a scandal. Even his nearest friends
deplored the prophet's madness. An exasperated
patriotism contracted the nerves of France. It
was not precisely the moment to speak of the
chosen few, of that elite of reasonable humanity
the wide world over — " Neither Greek nor Bar
barian, neither German or Latin " — who from an
190 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
empyrean raised above the struggles of race
and country, should remain undivided in their
Olympian goodwill,1 and direct the affairs of
mankind. A line in Goncourt's Journal, — re
ported with the inevitable inexactitude resulting
from the incapacity of a Goncourt to comprehend
a Renan, yet undeniably precious — shows us
the completeness of the misunderstanding be
tween the idealist philosopher and a defeated
nation : —
" Berthelot continued his distressing revelations.
When he had done, I exclaimed, ' All is over !
There is nothing left save to rear a generation
to avenge us ! ' — ' No ! no ! ' cried Renan,
starting up, with his face aflame. ' No ven
geance ! Perish France, rather ! Perish the
idea of country ! Higher still is the Kingdom
of Duty and Reason ! ' — ' No ! no ! ' yelled the
whole table, ' there is nothing above one's country
— nothing ! ' By this time Renan had left his
chair and was walking round and round the
table with his shambling gait, waving his little
arms in the air, and quoting aloud fragments
of Holy Scripture, as he muttered, ' That's the
essential ! " 2
Doubtless Isaiah appeared as odious, and no less
1 Lettre a David Strauss, Ref. Intellcctuelle et Morale.
2 E. de Goncourt, Journal, 2nd serie, 1st volume, p. 28.
THE WAR— REN AN AS PROPHET 191
grotesque, in the eyes of the Court of Jerusalem
on more than one occasion.1 Was not the
reproach of old cast up against the prophets
that they, sons of Israel, were friends of the
Assyrian ?
What is a prophet but a popular spokesman
animated by the idea of God ; inspired by the
Spirit to protest against the dulness, the mean
ness, the cruelty or the iniquity of the times ?
Such, at least, and not mere visionaries and
soothsayers, were the seers of Israel. Such, on
his measure and degree, was Ernest Renan
during the one difficult and heartbreaking year
of the war. Exposed to the long agony of the
siege, unpopular, without credit in the eyes of
the violent factions which divided the country,
Renan continued to preach his message, and to
show the sacred hope of a future redeemed by
the humiliations of the present. Repulsed by
Germany, he sought to raise up France, to bind
her sores, and renew a right spirit within her.
Like his great forerunners, he called for a king ;
in Israel ; a king to impose on his people a new
discipline and a new ideal, to build their founda
tions on wisdom, earnestness, submission, justice. ,
" Democracy has no discipline, and no moral
ideal to impose. Children, left to their own
1 For instance, Isaiah viii.
192 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
devices, will not educate each other." 1 It may
be that the only fruitful discipline comes from
within, is not forced upon us from without, but
so thought no longer the ex-Democrat of 1848.
Germany still haunted him. He would fain have
reconstituted France in the image of her con
queror, as a mighty kingdom, governed by a
strong provincial aristocracy, kept in respect by
the fear of the throne. " The victory of Germany
was the victory of the man who is full of rever
ence, careful, attentive, methodical, over slapdash
and hap-hazard. ... It is the victory of Science
and Reason. But it is also the victory of the
feudal idea, the victory of the historic right of
kings."
Such was not the mind of the French. There
are two great tendencies in modern politics.
The first, ever more and more predominant, is
jealous above all of the greatest happiness of
the greatest number, preoccupied by the rights
of individuals and their liberty ; and such, for
a hundred years, has been the trend of Liberal
France. The second establishes a priori a
providential order, sacrifices hecatombs of indi
viduals to the attainment of certain abstract aims,
and is content if the sweat of a multitude permit
the nobler lives of a chosen few, and so increase,
1 Rtforme, &c., p. 66-
THE WAR— RENAN AS PROPHET 193
little by little, the intellectual capital of the
race. Which of these twain is the true end of
humanity? We may not know. The obscure
soul of the universe finds, perchance, its expres
sion in either.
At least it is certain that, on the morrow of >
the war, Renan was convinced of the efficacy of \
the aristocratic ideal. Full of fervour, he pre
sented himself at the elections of 1871. He was
again rejected. He took his defeat to heart ; the
sense of his uselessness in the hour of need
appears to have overwhelmed him. His desperate
struggle with the impossible altered the natural
gentleness of his nature. Condemned to look on,
impotent, he beheld the most cruel of his fears
come true. The Prussians were still round Paris
when, on the i8th March, '71, the capital, de
lirious with famine fever, broke out into the
Commune. The barricades were up in the
streets ; blood ran in rivers ; all the old mad
dreams and hopes and hallucinations of '48, all
the atrocity of excessive reprisals, all the endless
sequel of hate and wrong, rose, like bloody froth,
to the surface of the troubled nation. Renan's
heart broke then, I think. The lees of a harsh j
disgust for life shrivelled the lips that hitherto
had only spoken golden words. Like Zachary,
he abandoned Juda and Israel ; both had betrayed
N
194 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN
him. He shook the dust of the city from his
feet ; he broke in twain his shepherd's staff ; and
the name of the staff was Fraternity.
Beside the Thing that Is, beside the real fact —
there exists the ideal fact, which ought to have
taken place, but did not —
" Look in my face— my name is Might-have-been."
Were I writing not a biography, but a study in
absolute psychology — were I writing for a public
which could not match an ideal truth with its
obvious irrefutable counterpart — it is here, I con
fess, that 1 might place the end of Ernest Renan.
Something died in him then ; the Breton, I think.
It is sure that in his despair he would fain have
died altogether, knowing that it is sometimes well
that one man should perish to redeem the people.
"If ever I have wished to be a Senator, it was
chiefly because I saw there a fair occasion for a
violent death." Let us then imagine him, like
his own Antistius, a victim to the strife of the
ideal with base reality. In some Parisian street,
full of March sunshine, riddled with shot and
shell, behold him mounted on the great barricade
of beams and flagstones. With the light of the
Sacred Mount on his face, he delivers undismayed
the message of a free spirit. But hark, a brief
THE WAR— RENAN AS PROPHET 195
explosion, a burst of flame and smoke ! Struck
at once in heart and head, slain by the splinter of
a Prussian obus, and by a stone thrown by the
people of Paris, the prophet falls. So might
have ended Ernest Renan.
CHAPTER VI
THE ELITE
BUT Renan did not die. He merely took
the train for Versailles, a disenchanted
emigre of the Commune. It was the end of
April. The stately Park of Le Notre was at its
rarest, — a greenness in desolation, a hope in
abandonment, such as perchance the world con
tains not elsewhere. All through the month
of May, M. Renan wandered to and fro under
the tender leaves of the stately alleys, beside the
straight waters full of flowering weeds, where the
gummy scent of the poplar is fresh on the air.
There are few lonelier spots than may be dis
covered in that forsaken pleasure ground : Renan
made it his habitual phrontisterion. Deprived of
his books, separated from his work, he mused
on the melancholy of human destiny. The old
thoughts that, thirty years ago, he had revolved
in endless meditations under the limes of Issy,
visited him again. Fragments of Herder and
Hegel and Malebranche rose to his lips. 'Twas
196
THE £LITE 197
an endless conversation between the different
lobes of his brain. An echo of this long lonely
soliloquy has been preserved to us in the Philoso
phic Dialogues.
We appreciate the violence of a storm by the
ravage which it leaves behind it. Compare this
book with St Paul or The Apostles, and you have
the measure of Kenan's profound and embittered
disappointment — a disappointment which em
braced not his own country only but his enemy's,
and the two main conceptions of human society ;
since the peaceful democracy of France appeared
a Commune unchained, shooting its hostages ;
while the military aristocracy of Germany was
revealed as a " handful of aristocrats, urging the
placable populations to the slaughter." Neither
these savage iconoclasts, nor those arrogant
uhlans full of oaths, were fit to be the instru
ments of the Ideal. What was the future of
society ? How should the kingdom of God be
brought to pass ?
Like Boethius, composing in prison his Con
solations of Philosophy, amid the ruins of his
world ; like Condorcet, writing his Progress of
the Human Mind, in hiding during the Reign
of Terror ; Renan, from his avenue of Versailles,
with Paris flaming on the horizon, sent forth
his soul to seek a solution of this apparent
198 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
anarchy of things. His Philosophic Dialogues
show a change of attitude rather than a change
of mind — few of us change much at bottom after
five-and-twenty. His old ideas still guide him : —
1. God does not proceed by special provi
dences.
2. The universe fulfils, unconscious, a divine
destiny with which, from the beginning, it was
big.
3. One day, God, as yet inarticulate, shall come
into conscious being.
4. Every disinterested effort makes for the
little residue of excellence which, for ever ac
cumulating, goes to shape the Divine Idea.
To these leading themes he adds two pre
dominant motifs, not new in his philosophy, but
developed out of all recognition. They are : —
5. The theory of the elect ; and
6. The suggestion of Conditional Immortality ;
both of them, as a fact, an ingenious application
of the Evolutionist Theory : the Survival of
the Fittest.
In sight of the magnificent arson of Paris,
Renan assumed it improbable that the Kingdom
of God would arrive by Democracy. In a
mood of bitter reaction he reiterates with em
phasis a conviction which long had lain at the
back of his mind, namely, that the masses do
THE ELITE 199
not count, are a mere bulk of raw material out
of which, drop by drop, the essence is extracted
— the rare essence, the one thing needful, which,
whether as Truth, Beauty, Self-sacrifice, or Genius,
goes to make the Ideal. Wherefore, then, cum
ber ourselves with the education of the masses ?
Let them think as they please — if they think.
What matter the opinions of millions of fools ?
Why trouble with difficult speculations the un
developed brains which were not made to hold
them ? Is not the average man ephemeral as the
May fly, here to-day, gone to-morrow without a
trace, wholly eliminated from the Universe?
Such as these are not born to know, are not born
to have power, are not born to govern. But,
alas, they are born to transgress, to revolt, born
to immolate the Higher to the Lower, and
continually to crucify their Redeemer. If not
for their own sake, then for ours, and for the
dim-descried and distant goal of things, let us
put the masses within harness and drive them
whither we will, well within bounds, kept under a
yoke of gold and iron !
The peculiar pride of the priest rings in these
theories, and still more in what follows, sinister
with odd reminiscences of Inquisition racks and
stakes. In an extraordinary symbol Renan
imagines that the advance of Chemistry and
200 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
the arts of war may one day place in the
hands of a superior order means, hitherto un-
imagined, of mastering the many. Plato also
had dreamed of the Tyrant - Sage, the man
who should unite political with philosophic
authority.
" Unless those who govern States be serious
philosophers the perfect State will never see the
light," runs the theme of the Republic. " Author
ity must be confided to those who think little of
authority, to men of science and philosophers
pursuing a more than mortal aim." And the
Athenian had already propounded a system of
social selection by which the most gifted, most
temperate, strongest and wisest of a nation should
be raised from the body of the people into a
superior caste, entrusted with supreme power.
. . . The outburst of anarchy, of simple instincts,
which defaced the end of the Franco-Prussian
war, revealed how little power over a people
has the small class of free, enlightened spirits.
Renan looked on in a melancholy too deep for
tears ; and he too murmured — " Instinct would
play the tyrant ; we must find a stronger tyrant
to put Instinct in chains." So he came to dream
of his caste of Tyrant-Sages, having at their
disposal an authentic Hell, " not without the
limits of biology," the product of, as yet, un-
THE ELITE 201
dreamed-of discoveries in Chemistry and Balistic
Science. The philosopher then would not refute
the barbarian, but annihilate him on the first
threat of insurrection. Against such authority,
after one or two unfortunate attempts, there
could be no possibility of rebellion. An elite
of intelligent beings would govern the world
for good ; and the whole force of Humanity,
concentrated in a syndicate of demi-gods, would
hasten the advent of perfect Reason. Sombre
imaginings, unworthy of that liberal spirit !
How should the world be saved by a false
principle ? Perish even the tyranny of the best !
But the Reign of Terror of the Commune had
jangled out of tune the sweet bells of Renan's
harmony. For one moment of discord, he sought
to meet injustice with its own arms and to attain
a noble end by infamous means. The conception,
harsh, false, profound, was worthy of the echo it
found in the most singular brain of our time.
The Prussian, Nietzscjhe, read of M. Renan's
Dcevas and dreamed of the Uebermensch, of the
super-human master whose motto, worthy of
Prussia, reads : — Might is Right.
As for us, we will hold rather (with Emerson)
that the demi-gods must go ere God shall appear.
Let us diffuse our light rather than concentre its
life-giving rays. . . . Reflect, M. Renan, in what
202 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
peril you place the great age-long structures of
Truth, Beauty, Wisdom, Civilization, by giving
them too narrow a base. . . . Once I was talking
to an eminent anarchist, a being kind and wise as
M. Kenan's Dcevas : —
" We object to moderate fortunes," said he :
" We admit millionaires. Our ideal would be the
concentration of the wealth of the nation in a
dozen pockets. . . . There would be only a dozen
heads to fall." . . .
And ere now the Titans have fallen. The
Tyrant-Sage might fall ! Suppose that by some
deep-plotted combination the mass should arise
and murder the demi-gods in their sleep !
Suppose that — owing, perhaps, to an imperfect
sterilization of their instruments of torture —
an epidemic should prevail among the Dcevas ?
Science, Truth, Power, Civilization would dis
appear at one fell swoop ! No, dream for dream,
play for play, give us the pretty chimaera of '48 :
Let us ennoble the barbarians !
Meanwhile, dreaming not only of Hell but
of Heaven, the sad philosopher tried to invent
a less redoubtable conpensation for Virtue and
Wisdom. They do not meet their reward on
earth. Lo, their homes are burned and pillaged,
a cruel enemy slays their sons, and a brother
arises to stab them from behind ! Yet in sinu
THE ELITE 203
meo est haec spes reposita : the just shall not
perish ! The Elect shall see God ! Those who
have contributed to the fund of the Universe
their atom of disinterested thought or feeling
shall receive, in exchange for the imperishable
spark which they emit, a part in the eternity
of the World-Soul. Eye hath not seen, tongue
may not tell, how that due return shall be
rendered unto them. But they shall be a part
of the consciousness of the Over-Soul. And when
the Divine shall become at last all-perfect and
all-powerful, every particle of that unimaginable
Being shall thrill, irradiate with life at once
separate and blended, at once individual and
general, at once a Soul and God.
PART IV
CHAPTER I
THE ANTICHRIST
IN this crisis of his life, Renan returned to
his work with new ardour, disgusted with
politics. The professional Discourager's is a
melancholy business, and it is sad to be in
the right against the illusions of one's country.
Renan had tried to point out the reasons for
the superiority of Prussia ; he had tried to make
his country accept a discipline and an ideal. He
had worn, as it were, on his shoulders the yoke of
Jeremiah ; l he had sat on the temple-steps and
cried to the people ; but they had not listened.
The task of his own life, after all, was the quest
of Truth. Let Martha be busied with appearances :
one thing alone is needful ; and they who choose
the better part sit in long contemplation at the
feet of the Eternal Realities.
1 See a remarkable conversation recorded in Goncourfs Journal
under the date 18 April 1871. Renan says, in substance — " I
am disgusted with the lack of courage of the Deputies of Paris.
They should parade the streets and harangue the people group
by group. If I had been elected I would have done so — had I
worn on my shoulders the yoke of Jeremiah."
208 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
The German invasion, with its terrible sequels,
had proved to our sage that brute force is still,
alas, the mistress of the material world, leading
it whither she listeth ; that, in the conduct of
events, the enlightened portion of humanity —
the disciples of reason — have little influence,
scant importance, and no true cohesion among
themselves. A Mommsen, and a Strauss, and a
Wagner, had each in turn revealed the soul of a
Prussian corporal, and a view of practical politics
quite unmodified by their proficiency in History,
Philosophy, or Art. Europe was not yet in the
hands of an international Elite. Renan sighed
at the narrowness of broad minds, went into his
study, and turned to the Past, since the Present
would none of him.
His own mind was the broadest of his age, and
therefore the least passionate. He was incapable
of taking a side, accepting a limit to the laws
of reason. If Truth spoke from the mouth of
an opponent, he was eager with his unqualified
assent. In his rare affirmations he never forgot
that things have always their unseen side, which
may possibly contradict all that we should predi
cate from those surfaces within our range of
vision. For the human eye — and the mind's
eye also — is so constructed that it cannot see
every face of an object at the same time. Renan,
THE ANTICHRIST 209
however, saw them so immediately one after the j
other, as in a series of rapid dissolving views, that
his vision of things was never simple, but blended,
as it were, from a set of contraries. No aspect of
Truth engrossed him so entirely as to exclude
an instinctive divination of its opposite. A sort
of contranitency ', — if we may use the word
— an elastic reaction against pressure, which
became the main quality of his mind, assured
him that the truth of one thing does not
necessarily establish the falsehood of its apparent
negation. The air through which we all see
the world is in fact a sort of vivid prism, iri
descent, opalescent, only habit has dulled our
sense of it. But Renan kept in his mind's eye
unimpaired that intellectual iridescence which
illuminates the inner vision. The truth of his
most considered assertions is qualified with subtle
reservations. And the unity of his mind, excep
tionally sincere and veracious, is made of a
thousand diversities in fusion, as a painter mixes
his white from a medley of many colours.
Hence inherent contradictions : a love of giv
ing himself the lie. Hence many a disconcerting
strange predella painted underneath his sacred
pictures. In no book is this so marked as in
the book of these years : The Antichrist. He
cannot contrast the terrible hieratic Chrjst of
O
210 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
the Apocalypse with the tender Elder Brother
of the Gospel stories, but he exclaims : " Who
knows ? The image of the Gospel may be false.
Jesus may have been the centre of a group more
pedantic, more scholastic, nearer to the Scribes
and Pharisees than the Evangelists would have
us think." He cannot consider the obscurity
which envelops the end of St Paul without re
flecting that the convert may be converted more
than once : the disenchanted saint may have
passed over to the creed of Ecclesiastes and the
Sceptics. Convinced that he had given his life
for a dream, Paul may have wandered despair
ing, resigned, on some Iberian shore, aware of
the nothingness of life Then, in a
twinkling, the ironic little transformation scene
flashes out of sight, and leaves us face to face
with a soberer vision of the Past.
None of these brief glimpses into the interior
of a thinker's mind are so cruel as the sacrilegious
page wherein Renan ascribes to Nero, tearing
their last veils from the Virgin Martyrs in the
arena, the invention of a new order of beauty :
the supreme grace of Christian modesty. Such
pages bear too clear the disfiguring hall-mark
of the dilettante. In fact Renan, after 1871,
retraversed more seriously the crisis which had
menaced his moral health after the disasters of
THE ANTICHRIST 211
1848. A second journey to Italy in 1875 led 5
him again to the feet of his old enchantress,
visible beauty — again he heard her whisper —
" Flecte ramos, ardor alta^
Tensa laxa viscera,
Et lentescat rigor tile
Quern dedit nativitas?
The fourth volume of the Origins of Chris
tianity is in some sense the masterpiece of the
series. It is the record of the most memorable
struggle between the hostile ideals of moral
and material perfection, written at a time when
that same struggle was a constant preoccupa
tion of the author's spirit. In his profound
disappointment with Life there were moments
when Art, and Art only, seemed precious and
imperishable in Renan's eyes ; when the spiritual
enthusiasm of arid Palestine appeared, after all,
a poor thing to him compared with the divine
and innocent grace of Attic beauty. He had
given his life to the Holy Land, to the worship
of holiness ; there were hours when he half re
gretted that he had not offered it to Hellas.
There are hours in most lives, perhaps, when j
that which creates and represents appears more *,
satisfying, more positive, than that which suggests ?
and inspires ; when the frieze of the Parthenon -
212 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
strikes us as more real than the shadow of the
Cross on Calvary. And yet the Galilean conquers.
In the first century of Christianity, its history
shifts gradually from Asia Minor to imperial
Rome. Two Romes were soon in presence. St
Paul in prison was weaving, no longer the coarse
Cilician tissue of his loom, but the spiritual
fabric of the future, while Nero, the circus rider,
the aesthetic athlete, worshipped the art and the
splendour of the decadent Greeks. How Renan
makes us see them both : the prophet, illumin
ated by suffering ; and Nero, " the poor young
man," whose deplorable taste in Art had so
unfortunate an effect on his morals ; a mere
Tenorino devoured by vanity, not wholly bad
but wholly artificial, debased, of irritable nerves —
and entrusted with the government of a world.
No less vivid are the portraits of Titus and
Vespasian : serious military men, a little pro
vincial in tone and therefore all the more en
slaved by the elderly graces of the aristocratic
Berenice.
For life, brilliance, irony, force, this volume is
unmatched. But we miss the moral charm, the
rare deep fraternal kindness of St Paul and
the Apostles.
" Perhaps our race alone 1 is capable of re-
1 The Antichrist, p. 102.
THE ANTICHRIST 213
alising virtue without faith, of blending hope and
doubt inextricably together. An hour strikes
in the life of European men of genius when
they agree with Epicurus. . . . Whilst continu
ing their task with ardour, they feel a chill dis
relish for life creep over them. Victorious, they
wonder whether the cause for which they fought
were worth so many sacrifices, and, whilst con
tinuing to push the battle, many of them admit
that wisdom begins on the day when they are
content to contemplate Nature and enjoy her.
There is, perhaps, scarce one self-sacrificing
person, priest or nun, who, at fifty, has not
deplored a vow which they continue to observe.
A spice of scepticism appears to us integral in good
breeding. We like to hear the just man say :
* Virtue, thou art but a name ! ' The essential
quality of distinction is this faculty of soaring
up and dominating our own beliefs, of rising
superior to the cause for which we are content to
give our lives, of smiling at our own most stringent
effort. And we love our heroes the better when
we watch them sink a moment by the road
side, aware of the vanity of absolute convic
tions."
What a disenchantment rings in these accents f
of crystal and silver ! It is well, indeed, that I
advancing years should take from us something of
2i4 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
the substance of our personality — that we should
grow wider, fainter, and, as it were, diaphanous :
mere cobwebs to catch the grace of Heaven.
But such a diminution of fibre as Renan shows
us at this moment is nothing less than a moral
, malady. Let us not hold victory too cheap !
* Our heroes do well to be victorious, for they
: continue to live in their triumph ; their dead
I hands mould and modify us from the other
side the grave ; their effort has shaped our future.
And influence is a sort of immortality.
CHAPTER II
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY:
THE PHILOSOPHERS
THE incapacity to affirm does not imply the
incapacity to choose and resolve. The
least consistent in theory, in practice Renan was
the most persistent of men. He followed his
meandering paths to the very goal. He was
willing to admit that all is vanity ; but he
acted as though nothing were so important as the
finishing of the task he had found to his hand.
His scepticism never paralyzed the continuity
of his effort : a hermetic compartment separated
his intelligence and his moral self.
Nil expedit . . . Laboremus ! Our task is
of no importance, yet give us, O Lord, our
daily task! Vanity of Vanities! But let us
finish the fifth and sixth volumes of the Origins
of Christianity / , . . Without a lapse, without a
pause, this solid and inveterate worker brought
the considerable sequence to a close. As we
have said, this great piece of history is also,
in some sort, an autobiography. The Anti-
216 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
christ reflects Renan's discouragement, his dilet
tantism. The Christian Church and Marctis
Aurelius show us a Renan reconciled with
democracy, confident in the gradual ascent of
man, aware that the greatest cataclysms do not
really interrupt the imperceptible progress of the
world.
Truths had a knack of flashing their contraries
into the eyes of our philosopher. In the Philosophic
Dialogues he had elaborated his doctrine of the
Mite, of a world saved by the tyranny of a privileged
circle of adepts. And so, in the last volumes
of the Origins he shows us the peril of an aristo
cracy of science, all the danger and the sterility of
the oligarchic theory. For, at one moment, a
chimerical, intellectual syndicate attempted to
govern Christianity : the Church was only saved
by breaking the yoke of the Gnostics. Rome and
the world were entrusted, at one moment, to the
rule of a philosopher and a saint : and Renan shows
us the intimate miseries of the reign of a Marcus
Aurelius. That wise emperor only succeeded
in giving a veneer of hypocrisy to the evil forces
which raged around him, and which he refused to
recognise. May it not be that Stoicism and Gnos
ticism perished for lack of a public? That antiquity
was misguided on seeking to specialise Truth
and Virtue, in neglecting the education of the
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 217
lower classes ! " I speak for one in a thousand,"
said Basilides; "the rest are dogs and swine." . . .
" Suffer the little children to come unto me," said
He who spake through the mouths of babes
and sucklings. May it not be that the brain
can not work without the pulse of the heart, that
Wisdom cannot be nourished without the warm
current of a live fraternity ?
With the doctrine of the Gnostics, as mere
doctrine, Renan had little fault to find. The ,
metaphysics of Basilides forecast the main ideas
of Hegel. His polytheistic cosmogony covers,
but does not conceal, a philosophic system. . . .
Life is the gradual development of a series of
seeds or germs contained in the original matter
of the Universe. Filiation is the great secret :
each organism, abstract or concrete, produces its
successor and dies. The sum of the aspiration
of Humanity makes for righteousness. The re
compense of the individual is Rest : complete
absorption into the substance of Deity, a divine
unconsciousness, a [My&Kn ciyvoia. Man passes,
but the Universe remains, and progresses. The
Residue of Perfection is secured by the Frontier-
Spirit. The Frontier-Spirit is a mystic inter
planetary influence which carries the current of
Being from the domain of pure spirit into the
domain of pure matter, thus mingles either and
2i8 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
thus strengthens each. This free, starry secret
of a life continually renewed, this Breath from
Over-the-Border, this ptMpiov vvsv^a, answers, in
Renan's own philosophy, to the Spirit of Love.
Renan could have no intellectual quarrel with
the Gnostics.
What he feared and loathed in them was their
sterile pride. Woe to the Truth which crystal
lises too soon ! These thinkers, who imagined
themselves to form a close syndicate of Truth
for the sole use of the initiate, begat a vanity
fatal to progress. Their wisdom was a system
for solitaries. Had it endured it must have
caused at last the establishment of a society not
unlike the castes of India. The Gnostic Saint
was already a Buddhist in posse.
The Church fought tooth and nail against this
hermetic aristocracy. For the Catholic ideal was
the good of the masses ; her holiest instinct to im
prove the average man whilst diminishing the sum
of his sufferings. Her means were Faith and Works.
She preached Hope in the Man of Sorrows,
Trust in the Beyond. She needed no meta
physical system : the Primitive Church had little
or no theology. It is certain that Jesus, and his
immediate disciples, neglected that part of the
human mind which desires to know.
In their house Science had no mansion. They
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 219
spoke to the heart, to the imagination, not to
the mind. Christianity came not to satisfy
our curiosity, but to console the unhappy, to
stimulate the moral sense, to teach men to say
" Our Father," to bind them together in a brotherly
bond. In more things than one, the Church and
Marcus Aurelius pursued the same ideal. But
Christianity counted on the masses, the Stoic
Philosophers upon the Few. As we know, the
Galilean vanquished. And yet, after her victory,
the Church was compelled to assimilate something
of the principles she had conquered. You cannot
say to the world at large, Be ye perfect ! Chris
tianity, in her turn, felt the necessity of an elite —
of a Chosen Few set apart to practice a superior
morality. Without diminishing the broad, general
movement of her main current, Catholicism began
to reserve, as in some peaceful backwater, the
clearer, holier space of the conventual life. To
the Monk and the Nun, it was said : Be ye per
fect ! And the average churchman, soiled with
the dust of the world, struggled content, knowing
that somewhere, out of sight, the Gospel was not
preached in vain.
In demonstrating the secret of Christian in
fluence Renan fell again, to some extent, under
the charm which had ruled his early years. Not
that ever again he was to say Credo ! Faith
220 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
i remained to him a fountain sealed, a garden
enclosed — a garden at which one slants regretful
, glances from the sun-beaten steep highway. . . .
It was the beauty of Catholicism which fascinated
Ernest Renan, which appealed to his aesthetic
faculty, which revived the souvenir of his pious
youth. His mind still accepted a modified
Pantheism as the most reasonable solution of
the problem of the Infinite. But, more and more,
his fancy harked back to the conception of a
Providence exterior to the universe, of a sym
pathetic intimate spectator of the struggles of
the soul. " Man is always more anthropomorphic
than he thinks," said Goethe. As old age steals
on, leaving our brain intact, nay, enriched by the
experience and thought of our maturity, threaten
ing the springs of life only, the craving for a
continuation of our activity beyond the grave is
natural to man. More than once the ex-pupil
of St Sulpice will demand of the Unknown God
some survival of the holier instincts of our nature,
some possibility of progress after death. " Thou
art too resigned, dear Master ! " he cries to Marcus
Aurelius 1 ; "if it be true that even those among
us who have lived in communion with Deity be
extinguished for ever, then of a truth we have
the right to complain. If this world have not
1 Marcus Aurelius, p. 268.
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 221
its counterpart Beyond, how shall he who has sacri
ficed himself to Right and Truth die contented ?
No, such an one has the right to blaspheme !
Heaven has taken advantage of his good faith.
Why has Heaven implanted in his heart instincts
of rectitude to which he falls a victim ? Why
should the ungodly triumph? Is it he after all
who sees clear? If there be no Beyond, accursed
be the gods who place so ill their favours ! . . .
I am content that the Future remain an enigma.
But if there be no Future, then this world of ours
is a hideous trap for Virtue. Mind ye, I crave
not the desire of the vulgar. What I ask is
neither to witness the downfall of the ungodly,
nor to enjoy the interest of my good behaviour.
No selfish reward ! Only to be, only to exist
in relation to the light, only to continue the
thought begun on earth. . . . To know more
and more, to enjoy the truth at last, to behold
the Triumph of the Good which I have loved ! "
More than once at the close of his history
of the Origins of Christianity^ Renan asked him
self, What should be the future of the Catholic
Church ? He saw one portion doomed to cor
ruption, for the letter killeth. The Church will
resist the gradual growth of Truth, will heap
dogma on dogma, invent miracle after miracle.
Lourdes and Tilly-sur-Seules will not save the
B
222 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
Church. No Papal Bull will make the sun stand
\ still in heaven — E pur si muove I But there
i shall be a remnant. Abandoning the excesses
of supernaturalism, Christianity once more shall
worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The
freer thought of Catholicism will find a new force
in its combination with the Liberal forms of
Protestantism, with enlightened Judaism, and
Idealist Philosophy. From these shall spring
a new Church which, in its turn, for its time, shall
serve the progress of the Soul, no less abundantly,
no less vitally, than those elder altars which it
shall inevitably supersede.
CHAPTER III
SOUVENIRS
THERE comes an hour to all objective minds
— too occupied with the world and its
great problems to keep a constant register
of their own sensations — an hour when they
recognise that they are growing old. This
revelation came to Ernest Renan in 1875, one
twentieth of September, towards the evening, as
he watched the dews thicken on the vineyards
of Ischia, and the white sea deepen in tone as
the light grew less intense. He was but two-
and-fifty years of age. Rheumatism, not the
weight of years, stiffened and impeded his gait,
affected his heart, took the elasticity from his
veins and muscles. He had grown old ten years
too soon. With his habitual mild serenity, he
recognised the fact without impatience — with a
movement of thankfulness, rather, towards all
the benign influences which had shaped his life.
Even so, long ago, on the banks of the Grau,
Marcus Aurelius had let his mind turn piously
223
224 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
towards the tutors of his early years. Renan,
likewise, passed a happy hour in casting up his
debt to each of these. That September evening
he wrote but a few pages. The idea of writing
some record of his childhood was born, however,
into his reflective mind.
Five years later, M. Quellien asked our sage to
preside at the annual banquet of the Bretons in
Paris : the Diner Celtique. Renan agreed to be
the permanent president of this humble festivity :
a reunion of Celtic men of letters held in the
purlieus of the Western Railway Station. And
this accident helped to revive in his heart the
love of his native place. " Quellien prolonged
my life by a good ten years," cried Renan. " I
felt fifty years slip from my shoulders as I refound
myself in contact with my earliest memories." . . .
The historian's peculiar curiosity, which was ever
so responsive a fibre in him, began to vibrate in
answer to this image of the Past. " I had seen the
primitive world ! " It was a world of immense
moral solidity, but filigreed all over on the surface
with poetic Pagan superstitions, — it was, we may
say, a menhir^ thick with harebells. Now the
great block had fallen out of place, and the
flowers with it. With every year Brittany be
comes more and more a mere agglomeration of
western departments — an integral part of France.
SOUVENIRS 225
But Renan could remember the royal and Catholic
Brittany of Charles the Tenth.
Renan's special gift as a historian was his art of
divining the origin of things. There was some
thing singularly primitive and archaic at the root
of his supple, and apparently decadent, imagina
tion. This vision of Celtic Brittany interested
him, even as the wanderings of the Beni- Israel in
Chaldea, or the small Christian communities on
the shores of Nero's Asia Minor. His mother's
tales, his own first memories, put him in touch
with a society, pious, primitive, simple, such as he
loved to delineate. In his own childhood, he had
contemplated a page of the Origins of Contem
porary France. This page he wrote one day, and
treated it as Taine, for all his genius, could never
have done.
A meditative moralist, a student of history, Renan
was no less a man of feeling. Save Rousseau or }
Samuel Johnson, no writer's peculiar temperament
has been destined so greatly to influence modern
times. He had his own magic by which he
knew how to revive all the tender, confused, rudi
mentary forces which blend in a heart of fifteen :
love of home, unconscious love, awakening
thought, the first pursuit of Truth, the first
elusive escape of Faith. All these rule and
inspire the Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse.
P
226 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
On the threshold of old age, the philosopher
turned and cast a last long lingering glance
at the days of his childhood, before the Angel
of Knowledge had troubled the waters of his
heart. He heard the drowned church bells of
the town of Ys peal again through all the waves
that have gone over them — obstinate carillons,
still convoking his renegade thoughts to a divine
service long since silent. The priests of Treguier
rose again on his inner eye. He saw the haggard
silhouette of the Bonhomme Systeme, and the
dazed melancholy figure of the flax-crusher's
daughter. He saw, in a more delicate aureole,
the little girls he had played with before his first
communion, and whose smile had haunted him
ever since. Most men begin with the heart and
end with the mind. Renan began with the mind,
and never thought so much of Love as after fifty.
The women and the priests, to whom he owed
his breeding, had bequeathed him the sentimental
turn of their imagination ; and, as he grew old,
this trait showed clearer — as our likeness to our
forbears comes out with our grey hairs — in the
oddest contrast to the sceptical attitude of his
mind. As we climb down the slope of later life, the
world of our fifteenth year, long since cast aside
as the thing of a child, revisits us, and revives,
singularly fresh and dear. And in the best-filled
SOUVENIRS 227
life, there are hours in which we are glad to
amuse ourselves again with the old vain toys
which we broke a life-time ago.
Thus, nearing sixty, Renan sought to compress
into an hour the aroma of all his early life ; to
evoke, in the twinkling of an eye, all he had once
loved so much, so long ago. The Souvenirs
are neither an autobiography nor a confession :
they are, in Goethe's phrase, " Truth and Poetry "
— a long conversation with remembrance, born of
our instinctive pity for all that dies with us when
we perish, of our instinctive wish that something,
at least, of the heart of us survive. . . .
No man writing of himself was ever more
natural, more simple. Renan's egotism is so
devoid of display, so mere an outpouring, that
it seldom irritates and never wearies. He takes
us into his confidence. He sits down beside us,
as it were, and beguiles us with his Past ; as we
show our children a picture book, to pass the
time and cultivate their imagination.
The Souvenirs took the world by storm.
They possess that lyric note of personal utterance
which the public prizes in a man already famous
And what shall we say of their success in Renan's
old home ? Disraeli's novels are not more elo
quent of the " Semitic secret " than these souvenirs
of the prerogative of the Celt. The writer him-
228 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
self is regarded as a mere epitome of his race.
He is eloquent with the treasured silence of
generations, rich with their economies of thought
and imagination — but not other than they. The
clear green springs ; the misty skies ; the moors
dotted with menhirs, and sprinkled with the silver
gleam of trembling lady birches ; the Atlantic
breakers rolling on the coast against the great
granite promontories ; the pious, stolid, fisher
folk ; the women of Ar-Mor, demure in their
black gowns and coifs of white ; the priests of
Treguier ; the skyward sweep of the cathedral
steeple — all these animate and inspire their faith
ful spokesman. These are responsible for the
genius of Ernest Renan, and his glory reflects
on them. . . . Such, at least, is the refrain of the
Souvenirs.
In the middle of August 1884, Renan re
turned to Treguier. He had scarcely seen the
place since he left it forty years before. He
had doubtless dreaded the return. But he came
back as the local prophet. Despite some natural
opposition on the part of the ultra-Catholics, the
author of the Souvenirs was received so warmly
that he determined to spend a part of every year
in his native clime. Near Lannion, and nearer
Perros Guirec, he discovered a comfortable manor-
house — Rosmapamon — which his children continue
SOUVENIRS 229
to inhabit. It is a pleasant, long, low old house,
standing among woods close to the sea. Thence
the name and fame of Ernest Renan spread through
the country side. The peasants and fisher folk,
who treated him with a rustic familiarity never
repulsed, were aware of the fame of the sage
of Rosmapamon, though they knew not what
had earned it. The women inclined to suppose
him a Saint — " C'est un bien grand Saint,
Monsieur ! " said one old dame, I believe, to M.
Spronck. The men, seated in the tavern, swore
that he was a great Republican. Quite lately
there was a public fete at Treguier to inaugurate
an inscription on M. Renan's natal house, at
present the property of his children. On this
occasion our philosopher was greatly extolled for
his Republican principles. . . . Were they so
much out of count, these simple people, in their
definition of the greatest Religious Critic, the truest
Liberal, after all, of Modern France ?
CHAPTER IV
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY
THE Souvenirs cFEnfance et de Jeunesse
had appeared in 1883. They reflect
the picturesque and emotional side of Renan —
Celtic, Catholic in spite of all, and curious of
the Past. Another view of his complex tempera
ment is given in a volume which came out a few
months earlier : a translation of Ecclesiastes
with an introduction. Here we see his dis
enchanted self, — modern, agnostic, dilettante.
" The author of Ecclesiastes" says the trans
lator, " is the author of the Book of Job grown
seven centuries older. His objurgations against
God, his eloquent and terrible blasphemies, have
sunk into the trick of a hopeless trifling. The
patriarch has suffered a change into the man
of letters about town. He has no longer the
strength to be angry with the Eternal : Where
is the use of it ? "
After a great experience of human things,
Ecclesiastes has lost his faith in progress. —
230
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 231
The world offers a succession of phenomena
which repeat themselves without essential change.
What has been, will be. The wheel of things
revolves, and must revolve, ever in the same circle.
Our attempts at reform and progress are mere
chimaeras. Nothing worth knowing is knowable.
Man is hopelessly limited by his faculties as by
his destiny. All is vanity ! The only wisdom is
not to be unnecessarily miserable about that which
it is certain we were never meant to alter.
Such is the melancholy philosophy of Cohelet.
" No man," says Renan, " was ever less of a
pedant. The clearest view of a truth never ;
prevents him from seeing, a second later, the
contrary aspect of that truth in just as sharp
relief. His disenchantment does not make him
in the least out of temper with the conventions of
society. In him, the motives for living are all
slackened and relaxed ; but his lively taste for
life and its pleasures remains unimpaired. He
no longer seeks to explain the scheme of things,
nor to invent symbols in which to incarnate
a precise religion. He amuses himself rather
with delightful philosophic vagaries. ' There is
another evil under the sun ' (he might have said)
and haply is it the greatest of them all. And
this is the presumption of spirit which seeks
to explain the universe in a sentence four words
232 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
long. Woe unto him who shall not contradict
himself at least once a day."
The soul of Ernest Renan animates this
Ecclesiastes of 1882. The portrait is a living
likeness. Only, save in quite his darkest hours,
Renan would scarcely have agreed that the world
revolves eternally in an unalterable circle. How
ever pessimistic, he was still a Liberal. Almost
always he saw the course of the universe slowly
spinning down the grooves of Time, in a spiral,
imperceptibly advancing even when it appears
to recede. If nothing be wholly good, nothing
also is wholly harmful. " My philosophy," he
wrote in the Souvenirs, " inclines me to believe
f that good and evil, pain and pleasure, the
• beautiful and the ugly, slide into one another as
imperceptibly as the tints which blend on the
neck of a dove." There is no Absolute — All is
• relative. Or if an absolute exist in the region of
the infinite, we, by the constitution of our natures,
are condemned to perceive only the relative.
The Order of things is no Finality, " knowing
what and why it worketh in a most exact order
or law," but a sort of happy accident without
purpose or precision. And yet — who knows ?
From this fortuitous combination there may
proceed the Conscient Soul, whose presentiment
is deep implanted in our heart. The progress of
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 233
the Universe is, perchance, the long and painful
Advent of the unborn God. " Nothing proves
that there exists a Soul of the Universe ; nothing
proves the contrary. Let us deny nothing, affirm
nothing. We may hope."
In reading Mr Tollemache's " Recollections
of Mark Pattison " I have been much struck by
many similarities between his melancholy " Pis-
gah-sights " (as Browning would have said) and
Ernest Renan's. Both indeed were disenchanted ,
men, both still under the emotional sway of a
creed in which their reason had ceased to ac
quiesce. Pattison observed that the idea of Deity
has now been " defecated to a pure transparency,"
and Renan might have used the phrase : yet each
was haunted by a more personal religious Ideal,
while for ever baffled by philosophical per
plexities. Only, in this baffling, Renan took, on
the whole, a certain pleasure, such as robust con
stitutions find in walking against a wind, while
Pattison's slighter nature shivered and dwindled
in the blast. Both inclined to imagine a conceiv
able survival of the soul, contingent on its progress
in this mortal sphere ; and either would have
defined this hoped-for after life — so dimly adum
brated, so faintly apprehended, — rather as a
possible posthumous influence for good than as
a renewal of our human personality ; and yet,
234 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
each in softer hours, dreamed, half playfully, of
his childhood's Paradise. " Shall I have my
library in Heaven ? " queried the scholarly Rec
tor of Lincoln, and Renan, the dreamer, laid up
stores of pleasant visions for the eternal night,
as though he were half persuaded that, after
death, he might still need an amusement.
An optimist at heart, Renan did not despair.
" This life of four days produces some enduring
fruits. ... I can not suffer to hear our Humanity
insulted — poor thing of grief, thrown like an
orphan upon the earth, scarce sure of the morrow,
which finds means, between the birth-throe and
the death-agony, to invent art, science, virtue."
Renan had, as he confessed, despite experience
of the Dead Sea fruit, " a lively taste for the
universe." He looked forward, though with but
a moderate cheerfulness. He thought with Pat-
tison that, when Reform has finished her perfect
work, the world, destitute of originality and
variety, will become a sort of universal China.
1 He foresaw that everything tended towards
::: Democracy, towards Socialism even, towards an
Americanising of our frame of life, a prosperous
vulgarity, repugnant to a man of taste. But
after all, who knows? A sort of modified
Chicago may be a less insupportable condition
of existence than we imagine. Pattison was
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 235
too innately the Don, the College Man, to con
template such a change without a shudder. But
Renan, who was a human being and a dreamer
first and a scholar afterwards — mingled some
indulgence and much curiosity with his personal
distaste. " Who knows, the general commonness ;
may guarantee the happiness of the Chosen
Few ! American vulgarity would not have
buried Giordano Bruno, nor persecuted Galileo "
(Preface to Souvenirs}.
On this subject Renan has embodied his re
flections in a series of philosophical comedies,
which he composed, during his autumn holidays
in the Isle of Ischia in 1877 and in 1879, and
which he completed later at Rosmapamon. The
book appeared as a whole in 1888 under the
title of Philosophical Dramas. Three of these
tragi-comedies, Caliban, The Fountain of Youth,
The Priest of Nemi, are priceless documents for
the critic of Renan's character and opinions,
which the fourth, The Abbess of Jouarre, on the
whole a regrettable performance, obscures from
the height of its bad eminence.
The dramas we have mentioned are chiefly
concerned with the problems of Democracy.
They show the attitude towards uncultured
socialism of a Liberal Philosopher. Aristocratic
by temperament and education, for no aristocracy
236 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
is so close as the sacerdotal, Renan was by
principle a sort of Socialist, or at least Republican,
malgri lui. After the Commune, through fear of
the tyranny of the mob, he had warmly advocated
the restoration of the legitimate Bourbon.1 After
the stifling experience of the Ordre Moral, he
had seen what a restoration of the Throne and
Altar would really mean : the dominion of ortho
doxy, that is to say, tyranny plus hypocrisy, the
most monstrous regimen of all.
" I love Prospero (he writes in Caliban\ but I
do not love the men who would re-establish him
upon the throne. Caliban, improved by power, is
more to my liking. Caliban, after all, is more
useful to us scholars than Prospero would be with
the Jesuits for his wire-pullers. In the present
circumstances, the Government of Prospero would
be, not a renaissance, but a crushing-flat of all free
intelligence. Let us keep Caliban ! " — that is to
say, Democracy. Under all his airs of ironic
aristocracy, Renan kept the staunchest sense of
the rights of the people. He was indeed at heart
more Radical, more anti-clerical, than he cared to
appear. When Jules Ferry launched his famous
Article VII., almost all cultured France deplored
the system of petty religious persecution which it
inaugurated : clerical colleges closed, monks and
1 Kcfonne intdlectudle et morale.
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 237
nuns expelled from their pious homes, convents in
ordinately taxed. "A most illiberal persecution ! "
assented Renan, "and, what is more . . . insufficient!
I would not close a single clerical college : I would
only debar the pupils of the Regular Orders from
every public career." At heart, in his old age,
Renan returned to the democratic point of view
exhibited in his first social study, the " Future
of Science." The vision is less brilliant, but
it is not hopeless. Caliban (Democracy), the
unformed, mindless brute, educated by his own
responsibility, makes an adequate ruler after all,
no worse, if not wiser, than those who went before.
Prospero (the Aristocratic Principle, or, if we will,
the Mind) accepts, not unwillingly, his own de
thronement from practical affairs for the sake of
greater liberty in the intellectual life : for Caliban
proves an effective policeman, and leaves his
superiors the freest of hands in the laboratory. Ariel
(the Religious Principle1) learns at last not to give up
the ghost at the faintest hint of change. Robuster,
if less ethereal, he, too, flourishes in the service of
Prospero under the external government of the
many-headed Brute. The future of Ariel is in
fact secured by the unconscious co-operation of
Prospero and Caliban. Every great religion is
1 Compare with The Tempest Isaiah xxix., where Jerusalem is
figured under the symbolic name of Ariel.
238 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
the result of some such fecund misunderstanding.
Nor is the future of Science less secure. " In the
Ledger of Knowledge every truth is added up,
every error omitted. Error is sterile, essentially
perishable." 1 Truth alone knows how to capitalise
her vast, her continually multiplying resources,
which, as it were at compound interest, increase
from year to year. In spite of all, the only need
ful things are not destined to succumb : Religion
and Knowledge are as imperishable as the world
which they dignify.
Thus, out of the depths, rises unvanquished the
essential idealism of Ernest Renan.
Faith and Science had ever occupied his mind.
, On the threshold of old age, his philosophy
became aware of another great entity, of Love,
which, up to the age of five-and-fifty or there
abouts, had appeared to him a personal accident,
of keen interest doubtless to the individuals it
concerned, but scarcely a problem, hardly an
immense universal force such as Beauty, Virtue,
Truth, or Faith. When we are old, we secretly
prize that which we disregarded most in its due
season. Love and the charm of woman took a
great importance in the eyes of our philosopher,
grown prematurely aged, the unwieldiest of mortals,
the wittier Dr Johnson of Parisian society. There
i Preface to Feuilles Dttachtes.
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 239
is something, we must own, a little grotesque in
this tardy Cupid perched on the rim of Socrates'
basket. Love as the interplanetary essence, the
running music of the spheres binding all exis
tence in one harmony, Love the ptdoptov cmD/za
may occupy the sage at any decade. And we
are moved and pleased by the ageing scholar's
recollection of the girlish faces which had bright
ened existence for him some forty years ago.
But that were enough ; we did not desire the
A bbesse de Jouarre \
" At Christmas we no more desire a rose "-
And the rose, of an odd blue unhealthy-looking
sort, takes to blooming in Kenan's frostiest season.
His life, as all who knew him can aver, was
ever the life of a saint, and would appear of
the purest, judged by the canons of any doctrine.
Quaintly enough, he considered that this white
apex of his gave him a singularly favourable
point of view for scrutinising the nice enigmas
of the heart. In the A bbesse of Jouarre he !
writes the apology of instinct. Chastity, says he, f
is often only another name for the merest social
prudence : were the world to end to-morrow we
should all abandon ourselves without remorse to
our most passionate desires. His excuse must be
that, in his peculiar mind, the most frivolous
240 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
fantasies slide into philosophic symbols. ... In
the course of the universe Renan descried two
impelling forces -- the gradual process which
I develops, and the rare divine capricious impulse
of spontaneity, which, as with a leap and a bound,
hurries on the slow progress of cosmic elabora
tion ; steps in, at difficult moments, like a god
out of a machine ; suggests Speech to the bleat
ing and calling Bushmen ; makes the perplexed
savage, as he notches his tally, dream of writing
and arithmetic ; which, in fact, is continually inter
vening with the happiest effect, in the intermin
able evolution of the god from the sea-anemone.
Love, in the eyes of Renan, was the constant
manifestation of this force of spontaneity without
which no great thing had fully achieved its being.
Woman is the pure depositary of instinct; and, as
such, she is precious above all things in the eyes
of the philosopher.
" The more man develops his brain, the more
he dreams of the opposite pole, of the Irrational,
of a repose in complete ignorance — of the woman
who is only a woman, of the instinctive being
whose acts are guided by the impulse of an
obscurer consciousness. . . . When our medita
tions have led us to the last term of doubt — then
the spontaneous affirmation of the Good and the
Beautiful in a woman's soul enchants us, and
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 241
may yet give the casting vote. . . . Through her
we are still in union with that eternal source of
things, wherein God is reflected." 1
It was this difference in woman which attracted
Renan. Here was something at his hand whose
movements he could not predicate, whose organs
and whose instincts obeyed apparently different
laws to those which regulated his own being.
The curiosity of the philosopher was invincibly
attracted. We all know how, in the Indian
drama, the men speak in Sanscrit, the heroines
in Pracrit. Renan knew his Sanscrit grammar
by heart ; it was stale to him. In his old age he
longed to learn this Pracrit poetry of woman.
"If born again," he said in one of his last
prefaces, " I would be born a woman."
Woman, divinised in Renan's later philosophy,
repaid a hundredfold the adulation of the sage.
Uncouth in frame and gait, as some gnome-like
Breton saint, unworldly as the village cure he
always looked like, Renan became the arbiter
of the more intellectual elegancies of Paris. Fair
ladies slept happy when they had exhibited him
in their salons ; bonnets from Virot drooped a
trifle disconcerted at the uncompromising scholar
ship of his lectures at the College of France ;
latter-day Magdalenes consulted him as to the
1 Preface au Souvenirs d^Enfance et de Jeunesse.
Q
242 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
state of their conscience, and music-hall singers
asked his opinion on their songs. We have
spoken of Samuel Johnson. The great Doctor
himself did not yield a more undisputed or a
less-to-be-expected social sway over last-century
London than Ernest Renan over the Paris of
the Eighties. Victor Hugo, perhaps, was more
of a popular enthusiasm, but Renan was both
Society's and Caliban's special prophet. Perhaps
the good opinion they entertained of him may
have influenced our philosopher's estimate of
Society, and of Caliban. For to both of these,
in his latter days, he became extraordinarily
indulgent.
In 1879 Renan had been elected to the French
Academy. The Academy accepted him with re
luctance ; but we may say that he reigned there,
even as he reigned — a placid, benevolent, am
biguous divinity — over most of the learned
societies of Paris. President of the Asiatic
Society in 1882, he was, in the summer of 1884,
appointed Administrator of the College of France
— Principal, or Rector, as we should say at
Oxford. He came into residence on his return
from Rosmapamon. The local divinity was
poorly housed in the old building of the Rue des
Ecoles ; a meagre study looking north did not
spare his rheumatism ; the narrow bedrooms were
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 243
worthy of a convent, but there was a fair-sized
salon to frame Scheffer's pictures, and endless
garrets for the innumerable books. It is doubtful
if Renan was ever happier than in this inconvenient
apartment. After his death his devoted wife, in
setting his papers in order, found in a drawer
a collection of old half-sheets, backs of envelopes,
and such like, on which, from time to time, her
husband had scrawled his reflections. On one
of these she read : " I have known the grip of
poverty, but never have I been so badly housed
as at the College of France." Since then the
residence has been twice enlarged to suit two
successive Administrators, and at present it is
all that health and commodity require. As
much, and more, would have been done for
Renan had it occurred to him to ask for repairs.
But it is charmingly characteristic of the man
that he never thought of it. In some moment
of irritation he confided to a private Bocca di
Leone, and perhaps to the ear of the Eternal, his
just dissatisfaction . . . and then forgot it. I
doubt if he would have suffered an improvement.
It is certain that he would not have exchanged
his beloved college for the palace of the Elys6e.
The least practical of men, Renan proved an
admirable Administrator. Whatever he set his
hand to do, he did it with all his might. One
244 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
of his colleagues has set on record the unsuspected
firmness that underlay his charming genius : —
" Very indulgent to others, and convinced that
few of the things for which men torment them
selves are really worth the trouble, there was one
thing as to which he was ever inflexible ; for if
we seek the continual motive of his life, in the
sphere of action, we shall find it to have been
the most abstract sense of duty. This man, who
seemed to prize especially the grace of courtesy,
among all the virtues of St Sulpice, who always
seemed to seek for the phrase most pleasant to
the ear of his interlocutor, be he whom he might,
and who often carried the caress of his amiability
to the verge of an apparent irony — this man,
so indifferent and so pliant in appearance, became
a bar of iron so soon as one sought to wrest from
him an act or a word contrary to the intimate
sense of his conscience." 1
No man had a stronger sense of a professional
engagement. Tortured with rheumatism, faint
with the oppressed action of his heart, he never
let his ill-health interfere with his lectures. I
have seen him carried down the steep staircase
of the College by hired porters — his bulk made
it no easy thing to do — in order to attend an
1 James Darmesteter, Ernest Renan. See Critique et Politiqtie,
p. 64.
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 245
election of the Academy. The least personal,
the least glorious of his labours occupied him
most. The last months of his life were given
to the volume on the Rabbis of France in the
fourteenth century, which he was compiling from
the notes of Dr Neubauer, and which, I suppose,
scarce one of my readers will have read, or even
heard of. The most arid, the most ungrateful
of tasks, Renan was delighted to subject himself
to this labour, which he deemed useful, and which
no one certainly would undertake if he left it
undone. At the same moment all Paris, nay,
all the dlite of Europe, was smiling over the
exquisite Feuilles Detachees. I have little doubt
that in his heart of hearts, Renan preferred the
Rabbis.
Traversed by ill -health, disciplined by hard
work, these years of apotheosis, these years of
the eighties, were very happy years, full of family
love, full of a just fame, to which Renan was
never indifferent ; full of the flattery of popular
applause. Surrounded by those he loved — his
delightful wife (" She must have been specially
made for me," he used to say) ; his gifted,
sensitive son ; his exquisite daughter, in whom
his dreams of Celtic grace had come to a perfect
flower ; with his grandchildren about his knees,
Paris at his feet, Renan spent happy winters in
246 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
his high-perched study of the College, and happy
summers in his Breton manor. With Ecclesiastes,
he exclaimed, more than once, that this, at least,
is not vanity : to grow old with the wife of our
youth, and to enjoy the modest fortune amassed
by one's honest labours. That fortune was very
modest, it is true ; but no shadow of money cares,
no thought for the morrow, ever touched the
serene self-detachment of this inveterate disciple
of Mary. His children still smile when they re
call how, one afternoon, in their private, domestic
Commission of the Budget, Madame Renan ex
posed the narrow extent of the family resources.
" Tis true, 'tis true," said Renan, with sagacious
impersonal calm, as he swayed himself from side
to side. " Money shows no signs of rolling our
way ! " But the fact appeared less important to
him, it was evident, than the date of the last dis
covered Himyarite inscription. Care and trouble
came not nigh him.
It was at this moment that I made the ac
quaintance of M. and Madame Renan and their
children. Well do I remember the day, the year,
the season! It was in September 1880. I was
travelling in Italy with my parents. At Venice
we fell in with a friend of my father's — Signor
Castellani, the archaeologist. He invited us to
spend a day at Torcello with the Kenans, Sir
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 247
Henry Layard, and his wife. I was a young girl
then, more familiar with the Nineveh Courts of
the British Museum (for which I worshipped Sir
Henry Layard) and with Signor Castellani's
exquisite Bronze Mask in the same collection,
than with any writing of M. Kenan's. In fact,
save for a lecture on Marcus Aurelius, which I
had heard him deliver a few months before, I
knew him only by repute, as a heretic (that was
attractive), and a philologist (which seemed less
interesting). But after the first half-hour in his
company I saw that here, here was the Man of
Genius ! I thought him like the enchanter
Merlin — not Burne-Jones' graceful wizard, but
some rough-hewn, gnome - like, Saint-Magician
of Armor. What a leonine head, with its silvery
mane of soft, grey hair, surmounted that massive
girth! What an elfin, delicate light shone in
the clear eyes, and lurked in the sinuous lines
of the smile ! How lucid, how natural, how
benign the intelligence which mildly radiated
from him ! M. Renan was at his best on that
occasion. We all felt ourselves in the glad
society of an Immortal. ... I still see the little
Italian gunboat cutting through the bright lagoon
towards the desolate shores of Torcello, fringed
with scarlet-dotted pomegranate hedges and
wastes of lilac-tipped sea-lavender ! How bril-
248 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
liant the mother-island looked in her abandon
ment The brown old church inspired M. Renan.
At that moment, with a heart divided between
the glory of Hellas and the spiritual grace of
Christianity, few things, indeed, could have
touched him nearer than that ancient Mosaic,
where the Apocalyptic Angels pour the Wrath
of God from vials shaped like the purest classic
cornucopias. He stood long in front of it. He
discoursed to the eminent archaeologists who
accompanied him ; we all listened, we girls no
less earnestly than they, if with less understanding.
At first I had thought him ugly, I confess. But, as
he spoke, he grew almost handsome. The great
head, held on one side, half in criticism, half in
propitiation, was so puissant in its mass ; the
blue eyes beamed with wit and playful kindness.
How he savoured, and made us savour, that
image of the anger of the Eternal elegantly
treasured in the horns of plenty. How he re
vived for us the soul of the mother-church of
Venice — the handful of poor refugees: primitive
people, shipwrecked, as it were, upon that lonely
island ; yet, in their way, refined thinkers, with a
command of art and image, as became the heirs
of more than one immeasurable ideal.
Seven years later I went to see the Renans at
the College of France, and thenceforward they
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 249
both are blended with the happy memories of my
married life. Madame Renan bestowed her kind
protecting friendship on the foreign bride. Her
husband, as Head of the College, as President of
the Asiatic Society where M. Darmesteter was
Secretary, was my husband's "chief" — and in
more ways than these, for was he not first among
the students of old faiths, and the leader of
Oriental philologists in France? Though much
firmness and an unalterable decision were masked
by that benignant affability of his, he was the
most genial of chiefs. I remember one after
noon, when we were in mourning and my husband
ill, how he walked quickly into our little salon,
embraced James on either cheek, tapped him on
the shoulder, and pinned the Cross of the Legion
of Honour in his coat.
If we went to see him in his study at the
College, how wise were his counsels, never volun
teered ! No man made less of a fetish of his
work. Those golden phrases of his were often
interrupted, for his time was at the disposal of
those who needed it. When a visitor arrived, he
would lay down his pen, give his mind to his
guest until the door shut upon him, and then he
would resume, without a pause, the unfinished
sentence. So he threw off the first jet, generally
copied by Madame Renan, recorrected, set up by
250 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
the printer, and polished slowly and lovingly on
proof after proof of his interminable revise.
He was somewhat disquieted by the drones
and butterflies drawn to the College by the honey
of his hive. One cannot imagine his serenity
ruffled. But a summer lightning of irony would
play in his eyes when too many tall English
tourists, too many marvellous Parisian toilettes, oc
cupied the narrow benches of the little " Salle des
Langues." I am told that on one such occasion,
seeing his own students ousted, he bowed to the
motley company as amiably as ever — " I am en
chanted," he began, "to observe the vogue for
abstruse Hebrew studies which obtains to-day.
In the presence of so choice an audience (another
bow) there can be no need of an introduction to
our subject. We will therefore read our text,
phrase after phrase, in turn — in the original
Hebrew " — a quick dispersion left the scholars to
their book.
M. Renan talked marvellously well, and he
loved talking. He had little of the ready give-
and-take which is the most usual form of wit,
yet he had a colloquial magic of his own. His
conversation was an attentive silence, interrupted
by long pauses of solitary meditation, and by
outbursts of radiant monologue. He liked dining
out. Some of my most agreeable recollections
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 251
are of the subtle and singular reflections with
which, as with the wave of a fairy wand, our
enchanter would turn a Paris dinner-party into
an elect symposium. He could be grave — he
could be gay. That night, for instance, when he
told us — with what charm ! with what elegant
lightness ! — the story of the Babylonian Tobias.
Rash and young, this Chaldaean brother of our
Tobit, discouraged by the difficult approaches of
prosperity, had entered into partnership with
a demi-god or Demon, who made all his schemes
succeed and pocketed fifty per cent, upon the pro
fits. The remaining fifty sufficed to make Tobias
as rich as Oriental fancy can imagine. The young
man fell in love, married his bride and brought her
home. ... On the threshold stood the Demon :
" How about my fifty per cent. ? " The Venus
d'llle, you see, was not born yesterday. From
the dimmest dawn of time, sages have taught
us not to trust the gods too far !
Mvpidvovg avrjp — M. Renan had far other moods.
I remember a more serious banquet. It was at
the house of the dear philosopher of the Rue
Cassette. The Renans were there, some others,
the Lyttons, I believe, and ourselves. That
morning M. Taine had received a bundle of the
papers of the Psychical Research Society. The
psychologist — much interested at that time in
252 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
the problems of dual personality and so forth —
let the conversation wander into the dubious
sphere of the phantoms of the living. M. Renan
appeared sunk in a dream of his own. From
time to time he shook his mane, like a slumber
ing lion. Suddenly he looked up and spoke,
with a flash in his blue eyes — fcbg uv rig efayxrixot.
Briefly indeed, and with a rare scorn in his irony,
did the cross-examining God dispose of those
vague approximations, those imprecise reminis
cences of another's experience, which suffice to
found a fact in the annals of unscientific ob
servers. Truth, Science, were eloquently bid to
the rescue, enjoined to engulph and swallow up
the miracle - mongery, the wonder-worship, still
so dear to the fashionable uneducated. And
suddenly the prophet relented, cast up his hands
in kindly deprecation — " O les gens du monde !
la science des gens du monde ! " In spite of
all, he knew he had a weakness for these well-
bred culprits.
Such outbursts were rare. The affable Arch
angel concealed them, as it were, under a cas
sock of non-committal ecclesiastical courtesy. He
generally acquiesced. I used to wonder what
assertion would be too wild to provoke his
amiable " Mais certainement, Madame ! " He
would let any young lady explain to him the
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 253
nicest points in Semitic archaeology without a
protest. Sometimes I tried, I admit, how far
one could go. Perhaps there was a twinkle
in the kindly indifferent eye. Never anything
so pedantic as a contradiction.
M. Renan and I were born on the same
day — at an interval of some five - and - thirty
years — or rather we thought we were so born.
For it is characteristic of the idealist that all
his life he thought himself a day older than he
was. On the 2/th of February, notes and flowers
went gaily between us. For M. Renan was gay :
M. Lemaitre has reproached him with the fact, and
it is true. Despite old age, and constant pain,
lack of breath, and sometimes lack of means —
despite the prospect of the end at hand, M. Renan
was gay, unfailingly patient, cheerful, and serene.
One 2/th of February there were no more good
wishes, and yet, as we talked with Madame
Renan, the kind sage seemed almost one among
us. " A widow," said Michelet, " should be her
husband's soul delayed among us." Such was
she. The thoughts, the wishes, the counsels,
the memories of M. Renan lingered with us
eighteen months after we had bidden him fare
well. The past abided with her. She would
spend hours contentedly reviving the episodes of
their journey in Asia Minor, living over again
254 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
the first years of her marriage. Happy years
full of youth and love and poverty, when,
at the end of his long day's work, she used
to carry off her young husband on some in
expensive adventure. " We used to call on
the cats of the Quarter ! M. Renan had names
for them all. You may put that in your book ! "
she would say with a smile. This book was a
favourite project of her's. We made plans for
writing it together ; and, indeed, I could never
have written it without her. But she missed too
sorely, she mourned too faithfully, the hero of our
biography, and, before a line of it was set down, I
learned one day, at her door, that she would
never read it.
But remembrance carries me too fast. Those
days have not yet dawned. A brief spell of life
and noble labour remains to Ernest Renan.
CHAPTER V
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL
IN that writing-table drawer to which our
philosopher confided so many private ejacu
lations, Madame Renan found a slip of paper on
which was written : " Of all that I have done,
I prefer the Corpus? Of average, well-read
persons, taking an interest in European literature,
I suppose some fifty per cent, may have read
the Souvenirs of Ernest Renan, and perhaps
twenty per cent, the Life of Jesus, and ten,
at most, let us say, some other work of the
master's - - usually the Feuilles Detachees, or
the recently published Letters, but occasionally
St Paul, or the Apostles, or perhaps one
of the two lovely volumes of Religious Studies,
or the Essays on Moral Scienct and Criticism.
But for every hundred cultured readers, scarce
the fraction of a unit can be placed to the
account of the Corpus. The Corpus Semiticarum
Inscriptionum is not in any sense a book. It
is a tool for scholars. It is a collection of all
255
256 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
the Semitic inscriptions as yet discovered on
Jewish, Aramean, Phoenician, Himyarite, Cartha
ginian, Cypriote, Greek, Egyptian, Sicilian, Mal
tese, Sardinian, Arabian, Assyrian, and Chaldaean
monuments. The comparison of these inscrip
tions — the unsuspected details, the singular
rapprochements, which result from such a compari
son — is, perhaps, the most important factor in the
exegesis and the historical discoveries of the
future. In the study of the Past no detail is
insignificant ; the most patient analysis of the
greatest possible quantity of authentic material
is the first condition of historic insight. A poet,
a prophet may touch the dry bones and make
them live. But without these dry bones, appar
ently so mouldered and remote, even an Ezekiel
were of no avail. Renan never forgot this
essential truth. His soaring genius was con
stantly refreshed from the humble springs of
fact and certainty.
It was in 1867 that M. Renan proposed to the
Academy of Science and Belief Lettres the forma
tion of a Corpus for Semitic inscriptions on the
model of Bcekh's Greek Corpus ; but it was only
in 1881 that the first number was given to the
world. Semitic epigraphy is a recent science,
and every year adds to its scanty store, and
patiently reanimates the past of Israel, and of the
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 257
neighbours of Israel, too long transfigured by an
exclusively sacred tradition into something out of
the likeness of human days and works. The
materials are slowly accumulating for a definite
history of the Semitic kingdoms. M. Renan,
nourished on the Bible, familiar with the sites and
races of the Holy Land, was almost the first to
perceive the extent of the fresh resources offered
by recent epigraphy.
Renan commenced his " History of the People
of Israel " at sixty years of age — the first volume
appeared in 1887 — having spent his whole life
in studying the materials which critics, scholars,
archaeologists, and explorers have gathered con
cerning the Semitic peoples. Forty years before
he had planned his great work on the " Origins
of Christianity." " I ought to have begun with
the Prophets," he said later ; but the figure of
Jesus attracted him with an incessant magnetism,
and besides, a delicate lad of twenty, he had
not dared to count upon so long a future. Now
he determined to fill up the weak places in his
foundations, and to found Christianity, as in
truth it is founded, on the teachings of Amos,
of Isaiah, of Ezekiel, and especially of the great
nameless prophet, who wrote the latter chapters
of the book we call Isaiah's.
The originality of Kenan's "History of Israel "
R
258 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
lies in this fact, that he places the Prophets at
the very core and centre of Jewish thought —
the Prophets, not Moses or Elias. The first
volume of his history is perhaps disappointing ;
it is less a history than a vague poetic rhapsody
— such as we expect from a Michelet rather
than a Renan — a piece of cosmic folk-lore,
too merely grandiose and picturesque. Yet
it contains a page on the civilisation of Babylonia
which no reader can forget ; and the idyll of
Father Orcham, the ideal king of the Chaldaean
golden age, whom the pastors of Israel adopted
for their ancestor, has the true ring of a primitive
fable. But surely M. Renan exaggerates the
monotheism of these tribal wanderers ? He
is never so happy as when divining in its ultimate
recesses, calling up from its deepest hiding-places,
the different forms of religious feeling. And
yet we think he antedates the religious tendency
of these primitive tribesmen. Surely in their
attitude towards the Unknown there was little
but dread and mere propitiation.
Something of the same fatigue, the same in
adequacy, is shown in the history of David and
Solomon, however picturesque, however full of
recondite and charming detail. Yet David, the
brigand chief, ruling Israel by means of his Cretan
mercenaries ; Solomon, the intelligent, unpreju-
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 259
diced, wise man of the East, much like many a
Jew of our days — shrewd, epicurean, materialist,
blind to the true vocation of his race : these are
figures which impress us by their reality despite
the defects of the volume which contains them.
Of these defects the greatest is an excessive use /
of Renan's peculiar irony. The immensity of his
mental horizon is such as to include, and as it
were to associate, objects which appear to belong
to different spheres of thought. What can be
more disconcerting than his serene and candid
fashion of assuring us how much the Book -^
of Jonah resembles La Belle Hclcne ? — that
Jeremiah was a journalist of the type of Felix
Pyat, and Ezekiel a sort of Victor Hugo at
Hauteville House, unless, indeed, we consider him
more like Fourier ? These unexpected compari
sons startle and shock the attention of readers less
familiar with the antipodes of history ; and, while j
acquitting our placid sage of any childish desire
to merely dazzle or astonish. I own that I con
sider these " actualities " misplaced. They may
occasionally illuminate, as by a searchlight, some
obscure and dusty purlieu of the Past. But more
often they merely serve to irritate the student ;
and, after a short lapse of years, they will seem
even more incomprehensible : two Pasts, neither
familiar, will then confuse each other. This con-
260 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
tinual blemish mars the third volume of the
History of Israel no less, and perhaps even more,
than the two earlier ones. But, at this point, it
is caught up and, as it were, whirled out of sight
in the noble and living current of the work. For
M. Renan touches his true subject at last in deal
ing with the Prophets of Israel. The notion of
justice, of righteousness unto God and Man, the
divine necessity of self-amelioration, was born into
the world with Amos and Hosea, and their religion
is big with our future.
Renan's History of Israel is, in fact, a history of
the religious Idea ; a chronicle of the divine thirst
after justice done, not to ourselves, but to all men,
for the greater glory of God. The prehistoric
cosmogony of Israel is, in this sense, not religious
at all : neither the Elohim, the multiple sprites of
the air, nor Yahveh, the storm-god of Sinai, have
any clear idea of right and wrong. They have
not plucked as yet the fruit of the Tree of Know
ledge. Their will is capricious, inexplicable,
absurd ; the Elohim wrestle all night with the
sons of earth, and are wounded by a man at
cock-crow ; they enter into a chief's garden, and
sit at meat with him. Yahveh is of a revolting
partiality ; he protects his favourites, he takes
care of his own, however little exemplary their
conduct, so that it is wise indeed to be the servant
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 261
of Yahveh. The world which these deities govern
is quite small ; a ladder connects it with the
heaven which they inhabit. One may say that
up to the death of Solomon true religion was un
known. The deity was still the tribal god : his
prophet was still a sorcerer, a medicine-man, a
sort of mythic wonder-worker. But let us not
despair of that divine instinct in humanity which
knows how to turn dross into gold, how to evolve,
from the primitive terror of soothsay, the idea of
justice, the search for truth, the thirst after
righteousness. " Behold the days come (saith
the Lord) that I will send a famine in the land,
not a famine of bread nor a thirst after water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord " (Amos,
viii. 1 1). And behold, the Word of the Lord has
grown in its significance. Yahveh no longer says
" worship me and prosper " ; he says " eschew evil
and do good." He commands no more " take
thy brother's birthright," but " love thy neighbour
as thyself."
It is this moral evolution which is the secret of
the undying importance of the History of Israel.
Full of ruse and guile, destitute of the sense of
Beauty which ennobled Greece, or of the political
and military grandeur which made the force of
Rome, this small Syrian tribe is no less immortal
than Greece or Rome, for it first interpreted the
262 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
secret oracle within the heart of humanity. All
the great fibres of spiritual being vibrate in the
soul of Israel. Wonder of wonders, the instinct
of religion reveals to the prophet even how
the day shall dawn when religion shall be
other than he may conceive it — freer, ampler,
tied to no ritual, bound upon the horns of no
altar.
" And it shall come to pass (saith the Lord)
that ye shall say no more : ' The Ark of the
Covenant of the Lord ' : neither shall it come to
mind : neither shall ye remember it ; neither
shall ye visit it ; neither shall these things be
done any more — neither shall ye walk any
more after the imagination of an evil heart"
(Jeremiah iii. 16).
Every great gift is developed and nourished
at the expense of the exhausted organism which
produces it. The soul, that perfect flower of
Israel, ruined the material prosperity of Israel.
The doctrines of the Prophets are not compatible
with any strong military or civic organisation.
Preoccupied with individual justice, — individual
well-doing and well-being — Amos and Jeremiah
conceived as iniquity the nation which deliber
ately devotes thousands of its offspring to the
brutal and stupid life of tent and camp. The
Assyrian hoplite appeared to them even lower
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 263
in the scale than the captive of the Assyrians
— for him, at least, there should be no return
from exile, no promised restoration. And in
a primitive civilisation, the country which means
to conquer, which means to dominate, can
only do so at the cost of the enforced service
of the mass : a colossal unconsented slavery in
the interests of a fatherland which absorbs and
does not reward the factors of its grandeur.
There is its fine side, too, in the military glory
of an Assyria or an Egypt. But Israel only sees
the innocent blood, the endless tears of the just
man offended, with which the stones of their
pyramids are welded together. And she will
none of the magnificence of Assur.
More than once, in writing the History of
Israel, Kenan's thoughts reverted to his own
times. In Amos and Hosea, in Jeremiah and
Isaiah, he saw the forerunners of the socialists
of our age. In Nineveh and Babylon he saw
the ancestors of feudal Germany. Which is
the wiser ? Almost invariably, the nation which
labours for Humanity and the Future works its
own destruction in the process. The Kingdom of
God is not of this world. In the administration
of a great power, in the maintenance of a national
army, there are abuses which are almost neces
sary. A society which is always just is disarmed
264 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
before the strength of the unscrupulous. A people
whose teachers are concerned only with the eternal
verities will be far behind Babylon, not simply in
practical affairs, but also in natural science. It
was Babylon, after all, which first attempted to
explain the Universe ; Israel borrowed the ten
opening chapters of Genesis from the savants
of Chaldaea. An exclusive preoccupation with
piety and morals is apt to produce a very
mediocre standard of culture. The ideal of
i Israel is the ideal of a saint, a prophet, a monk,
a Savonarola. But which did the most for
Florence, Savonarola or the Medici ?
The happiness and the sanctity of the in
dividual, or the splendour and force of the
organism of which he is an atom : whether
of these is desirable? More than once Renan
! has asked himself the question, to which there
are only too many answers. Whichever response
we accept may be an error, for, when all is said,
which of us can be sure of what is in fact the
real object of Humanity?
" He, at least, is not wholly mistaken who fears
lest he be in the wrong and treats no one as
blind ; who, ignoring the goal of Man, loves him
as he strives, he and his work ; who seeks the
Truth in doubting of heart, and who says to his
opponent : ' Perchance seest thou clearer than I.'
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 265
He, in fine, who accords his fellows the wide
liberty he takes for himself; — he surely may
sleep in peace and await the judgment of all
things, if such a judgment there shall be." l
1 Hist, du petifle tf Israel, III., p. 279.
CHAPTER VI
LAST DAYS
IN the Name of Life, the vast, the mysterious,
the excellent!" So begins the Bible of
the Mendai'tes, and under this invocation would I
place the last philosophy of Ernest Renan. The
final reaction of his mind was, after all, optimistic.
Man is full of errors, but error is essentially
transitory, and the eternal result of his passage
through the universe is Truth. God is absent
from the scheme of things in the sense of Action ;
in all the ages of human history no trustworthy
evidence attests a divine intervention to protect
the innocent or to relieve the sufferer. But the
law and condition of so much of the Universe as
we may understand is ever a perpetual Fieri, a
divine Becoming, an eternal development towards
an unknown end, which may become at last a
manifestation of the Hidden Divinity. Nor, be
cause His ways are not as our ways, His thoughts
as our thoughts, let us too hastily conclude the
eternal absence of that Heavenly Father which
the heart of man claims, and to which he calls
266
LAST DAYS 267
incessantly without response. Out of our tears
and our prayers He may yet be born. More
over, rightly considered, is not that call of ours
its own answer ? Disinterested prayer is not
a petition but an act of praise, an act of
Hope, an inner communing with the principle
of things, an affirmation of the spiritual Reality
which governs appearances. " And our day
dreams themselves are another fashion of ador
ing — a poor inferior prayer, full of long re
mainders of the ardour of our youth, warm as
covered embers are, instinct with the secret
assurance that the Absolute Night itself is, per
chance, not devoid of this same lingering warmth
and life!"1 The unselfish man — the only one
who counts — prays in secret a hundred times a
day. For an acquiescence in the laws of that
Universe, in which alone we may see God, — "as
in a glass, darkly," — is not this also Prayer and
an act of Faith ?
We must fain believe in Something inde- '
pendent of the Finite and the Knowable, when
in our own hearts, in our own lives, in the
lives of all around us we observe the persistence
and the universality of certain great guiding
principles which are folly, according to the wis
dom of this world : self-sacrifice, love, disin-
1 Preface to the Nouvelles Etudes
268 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
terestedness, the instinct of Duty. These are
the voice of the Universe, " a language which
hails from the Infinite, perfectly clear in its com
mands, obscure in its promises " l — a language,
which in some fashion and degree, we all obey.
• No man is absolutely and consistently a monster ;
in every life there is some effort towards Love,
Truth, or Beauty ; the worst man drops one of
these priceless gold coins into the world's coffer
against the millions of mere brass counters which
he squanders out of window. And in the
scheme of things, Good is a coin of great
price, Evil is poor trash of no value. Thus
there is scarce any existence which, rightly
summed up, does not show an imperceptible
balance to the good.
Like Francis of Assisi, whom he understood
so well (" St Francis will save him ! " once cried
a Capuchin friar), Renan had arrived at the
? supreme indulgence — he no longer believed in
I the existence of sin. Evil appeared to him a
void, a vacuum, a gap to be filled up in the
gradual process of Creation ; but not a substance
to be vanquished and destroyed. Of him also
might it be said : " He would not admit the
reality of evil. It is not that he was indifferent,
but, in probing the heart of man, he found no irre-
1 Fenillcs Dctachtcs : F.xamen de Conscience Philosophique.
LAST DAYS 269
missible guilt in it: the one sin is baseness; weak
ness, error, seemed to him scarcely sin." l He
would have said with Plato, that when the Soul
is alienate from Truth, it is always momentarily
so constrained against its will : the natural growth
of our spirits being towards the light. An in
voluntary opinion can not be a crime. Let us
believe that the sin of our neighbour is no affair
of ours, and probably infinitely less important
than we deem it. In time, the Truth will
certainly prevail, and convince even them that
sit in outer darkness.
The two fundamental doctrines of religion j
remain undemonstrable : no man can prove the
existence of a personal God, nor the im
mortality of the Soul. The task of the modern
thinker is the task of Kant — the task of the
Prophets of Israel. They justified the ways of
God to man with little more than the minimum
of faith ; from the rebellious stuff of humanity
they extracted righteousness and resignation, and
patient depths of long self-sacrifice, with no sure
promise of a future life. They loved God for
God, and the right for the sake of righteousness.
Happy those who can so inspire their fellows
without alleging anything unproven, anything
with which their conscience may reproach them
1 Nouvelles Etudes Rdigieuses: St Frai^ois d'Assise, p. 333.
270 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
as a lure. Piety may exist independent of all
dogma, and may prove the inner strength and
consolation of the Soul. We may still "seek
God," like the wise men of Israel, and find much
sweetness in that seeking. We may weep to
Him alone in our trouble, nor our tears be shed
in vain. For in the end, in the infinite end of
ages, Humanity creates the thing which it desires.
And at last, at last, all the dreams of Man come
true.
Thus " the most logical attitude of the thinker
towards Religion is : to behave as though Religion
were true. We must act as though God and
the Soul were proven. Religion is one of the
numerous hypotheses, such as the waves of ether,
or the electric, luminous, caloric and nervous fluids,
nay, the atom itself, which we know to be mere
symbols and manners of speech, convenient for
the explaining of certain phenomena, but which,
none the less, we maintain." 1 The more we
reflect, the more we see the impossibility of
proving, but also the moral necessity of be
lieving in, these great premisses : God and
the Soul. Let us keep the category of the
Unknowable ! Parallels meet at the Infinite :
Science and Religion doubtless meet there. And
1 Examen de Conscience.— Feuilles Dttach&s, p. 432.
LAST DAYS 271
if not ? — Why, then, Renan would have said with
Goethe :
" Wen Gott betriigt 1st wohl betrogen."
The most intelligent course of Man, as well
as the most virtuous, is to act in the general
sense of Universal Law. Domine, si error est, a
te decepti sunt !
In philosophy the consolatory hypothesis is,
after all, as good an hypothesis as any other. It
is the only one which could abidingly content a
man like Renan, who, — dilettante and scholar as
he remained, no doubt, — was none the less, by
the inner constitution of his being, a profoundly
religious man. The needs of his nature were
triple : his heart desired Beauty and his mind
Truth ; but the earnest problem of Man's virtue
in Nature's ruthlessness was the fundamental pre
occupation of his soul.
" I often reproach myself (he said, in almost
the last pages that fell from his hand) because
at my age, I am sometimes occupied with other
things than these Eternal Verities. My excuse
is that my chief duty here below is accomplished.
. . . That last arch of the bridge which I had
still to throw between Christianity and Judaism,
is now established. ... I have still much to do
in the way of proof-correcting ; but, if I died
272 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
to-morrow, with the aid of a good corrector,
my History of Israel could appear in its com
pleteness." 1
The third and finest volume of this last and
' great work appeared in 1891. Renan did not
live to see the publication of the two concluding
tomes, which he left almost finished, lacking, in
deed, those fine last touches, those delicate elabor
ations and reservations, which he was wont to
add — patiently, interminably — on page after page
of his proofs. The pearl has less gloss, and a
dimmer orient, it may be ; but its orb is perfect,
and its structure sound. The chapters on Philo
and the Essenians, which adorn the fifth volume,
are among the most vivid and the purest which
we owe to Renan's singular genius. Age could
not stale nor custom wither that infinite variety.
The extraordinary freshness, the divine youth of
his spirit remained almost unimpaired by suffering,
to his last hour. It is a freshness as of thyme and
dew on a spring morning ; something natural,
and sweet, and pure ; and it was never more
; conspicuous, as mere style, than in those Feuilles
; DetaMes, which he collected and published in the
very year of his death.
For long enough his health had been failing.
He took all the little miseries of age and a broken
1 Preface to Feuilles Dctachtes.
LAST DAYS 273
constitution in that spirit of mingled irony and
sweetness which never left him. Before mere
physical suffering, he was ever serene as an
image of Buddha. Enforced idleness was a
sorer burden, and sometimes he would half com
plain that in his childhood he had never learned
to play. His little grandchildren began his
instruction in that wise art. But the sage was
too tired to prove an apt pupil. He liked best to
look on and listen, thinking of many things, and
enjoying that last pleasure of watching life's
morning windows brighten when the sun forsakes
us in the west.
Few people suffer more than he in his last
illness. Protracted neuralgia tortured him month
by month. He admitted the fact, but never
murmured, and would certainly not have owned
himself unhappy. For he loved Life, and saw that
it was good. Self-pity was a weakness which he
knew not. Nor did his own pain ever blind him
to the immense sum of virtue, love, beauty,
knowledge, and innocent happiness, which, all
round him, at that instant, the universe was
yielding undiminished. That tiny but eternal
residue of good, that drop of immortal aroma,
which the scheme of things secretes from day
to day, appeared to impregnate every moment
of his life, and to embalm even the pangs of his
s
274 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
agony. I think there was no day, even of that
cruel last year, from which he would not have
offered from a sincere heart, his Te Deum Laud-
anms. If there were hours in it racked with
intercostal neuralgia, stupefied with oppressive
weakness, there were also moments — divine
moments whose superior value outweighed those
hours — in which he was able to complete the
great task of his life ; or which he gave to the
management of that beloved College whose good
genius he was ; or he spent them in discussing
with a few chosen spirits — M. Berthelot, M. Taine,
M. Gaston Paris, and some others ever welcome —
the questions which occupied his unfailing mind in
sickness as in health ; or, simply, he let himself
rest in the tender love of his dear wife and
children.
He knew that he was dying. The physicians
continued to speak of gout, of rheumatism, of
neuralgia — but it is, I think, impossible to have
a mortal disease and not to know it : for years he
had told his wife that his heart was affected.
But he was dying at the end of his chosen task,
having completed the immense circle which he
had dared to trace. He had married his daughter,
and had embraced her children. The sensitive
artistic spirit of his son, the painter, showed itself
calmed and fortified by the first draught of success.
LAST DAYS 275
His wife, the trusted confidante and secretary
of more than thirty years, would execute his
last wishes, and would see his History through
the press. One of his favourite pupils would
succeed him in his chair at the College of
France, and in the direction of the Corpus. He
could repeat with the ancient Simeon : Nunc
dimittis servum tuum, Domine^ secundum verbum
tttuin, in pace. . . .
The future, in fine, was a spectacle which he
could regard with a great satisfaction. He had
given his life to Truth, and he had certainly
furthered her progress. He had chosen the better
part, and it had not been taken away from him.
The things in which he had put the truest part of
his life would survive him, and would be fruitful
in his absence. Untimely death may be terrible,
for it may mean a waste of immense possibilities.
But death when our task is achieved ? Why
rebel against the law of nature ? Did we ever
believe ourselves exempt from mortality ?
At the New Year of 1892 the Renans went to
Cap Martin for a few weeks of sun and sea. The
blue Mediterranean shore enveloped the dying
sage with its enchantment. He felt better, well,
saw the future brighten and lengthen before him.
But the south in winter is a cup of which a
sick man should drink deep, or not at all.
276 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
Despite his wasted health, Renan could not
make up his mind to desert the College even
for a season. Before the month was out he
returned to resume his course of Hebrew. On
the return journey, at Dijon, he took a chill.
And after that, again, he was less well all winter.
Those who knew him as well as I did will
never forget his quiet heroism, his unassuming
devotion, all through the first semestre of 1892.
With my eyes shut, I can still see the heavy
quaint figure painfully descending the steep
stairs of the College, and serenely accosting, with
oppressed breath, but without complaint, the col
leagues he directed, with a smile. He delivered
his lectures with exactitude. He presided over
the Asiatic Society. He completed his studies on
the Mediaeval Rabbis for the Academy of Inscrip
tions ; — and this was a great joy. On Friday
evenings, in his wife's salon, his friends found
him willing to converse with them on any sub
ject. His unimpaired curiosity continued to
interrogate the universe. He was dying, but he
had not abdicated.
At midsummer he moved with his family to
the Breton coast. And for a while things went
well with him. He loved his calm manor of
Rosmapamon, the fresh quiet country, with its
green fields and spinnies, its commons golden
LAST DAYS 277
with gorse, its great granite rocks, its sombre and
splendid sea. It was there, perhaps, that he
spent his happiest days. " My ideal "—(he says
in the Eau de Jouvence^ speaking as usual through
the lips of Prospero). — " My ideal would be an
old patriarchal country house, full of children
singing, full of lads and lasses light of heart,
where everyone would eat, drink, and be merry
at my expense." Rosmapamon supplied his kind
old age with that hospitable holiday. There
were long quiet mornings for work : evenings
in which the tired enchanter saw, as he wished,
the young people unchecked by his presence in
their merry-making. In the afternoons, in the
long, lazy, summer afternoons, almost every day
he went a little walk, leaning on his wife's arm.
He would sit on a bank by the side of a field, and
look placidly over the Celtic landscape which he
had loved in childhood — of which he felt himself
an animate part. But there was one thing he
loved more than Nature, and that was knowledge ;
the service of Truth. When, at the end of Sep
tember, he had an attack of the heart, he said to
Madame Renan : " Take me back to the College."
And there on the I2th of October 1892, he died
at his post.
He died happy. His mind kept to the end its
278 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
serene lucidity, his temper its kind sweetness,
unalloyed by personal repining. All he asked
was that his illness should put nothing out of its
due order, that his death should cost no excessive
grief — the only thing in which his wife ever
disobeyed him. " I have done my work," he said
to Madame Renan, " I die happy." And again
he said, " It is the most natural thing in the
world to die : let us accept the Laws of the
Universe " — and he added : " the heavens and
the earth remain."
So he passed away, and his death struck
France with a sort of stupor. He was the
greatest man of genius our generation had
known : in style, sentiment, poetry of feeling no
less a Master than Victor Hugo ; in history and
philosophy the compeer of Taine ; in philology
the heir of Burnouf. There was scarce one
branch of thought in France but it was im
poverished by his disappearance.
He was buried with great honours. The grey
old College was decked as for a national festivity.
The best and wisest men in France bade a public
farewell to his sacred ashes. There had been a
question of laying him to rest under the dome of
the Pantheon. At the last moment the Govern
ment feared the protest of the Right at the
LAST DAYS 279
opening of the Chambers. And the great Idealist
had not where to lay his head. . . . His wife buried
him with her people in the vault of the Sheffers
at Mont-Martre. But where he should have
lain, where he would have wished to lie, is in
the small, green space which the cloister of
Treguier encloses. "It is there I would sleep,"
he said once, " under a stone engraved with these
words —
Veritatem Dilexi"
Who knows ? the day may dawn when the
Church of his youth may yet accept the guardian
ship of the grave of Ernest Renan.
" All religions are vain (he said), but religion is
not vain." ..." Let us not abjure our Heavenly
Father. Let us not deny the possibility of a final
justice. Perchance we have never known one of
those tragic situations where God is the sole
Confidant, the necessary Consoler. . . . Where
else shall we seek the true witness, if not on high ?
How often have we felt the need of an appeal to
Absolute Truth ; how often we would cry to it :
' Speak ! Speak ! ' Who knows ? At that in
stant we were, perhaps, on the threshold of
Truth. But the strange thing is that nothing
280 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
shows if our protestations have found a hearing.
When Nimrod shot his arrows into Heaven, they
came back to him tipped with blood. We have
never received any response at all. O God,
whom we adore in spite of all, Thou art in truth
a Hidden God ! " l
These were almost the last written words of
Ernest Renan. They are characteristic. They
might be taken from his earliest pages. Instinct
and Reason speak to us in different voices, equally
imperious, equally insistent ; only we are most of
us a little deaf with one ear ! But Renan lost no
word of either of these eternal monitors. There
is his secret, there his charm, there the peculiar
value of his genius. But therein also the some
thing unconvinced — or only momentarily convinced
— which leaves his purest harmonies for ever un
resolved. We know that, in one other moment,
he will hear the other Voice, he will deliver a
different message : le cceur a ses raisons que la
raison ne connait pas. One lobe of his brain is
continually engaged in supplementing the thoughts
produced by the other : we can imagine them as
two mirrors so placed as to show the opposing
faces of the object they reflect. Fortunately this
variety is saved from chaos by certain dominating
1 Preface to Fcuilles D&achtei.
LAST DAYS 281
principles which remain unaltered in the midst of
mutability.
Religion may or may not be true ; it is not
vain ; even though it answer to no supernatural
reality. Our conscience is a moral fact as im
portant as our reason, and the man who says
" I ought " as superior to the savage as the man
who says " I reflect."
The Good exists ; and indeed we may say that
it alone exists. Evil is transitory. In its different
forms of Truth, Virtue, Knowledge, Beauty, the
Good endures and accumulates, and, by the im
pulse of its own force, must develop more and
more. " The world's our oyster " : slowly, surely,
it secretes the inevitable pearl which may survive
it. Meanwhile Evil is with us certainly. We
suffer, we are oppressed by material circumstances,
we may even die before our time in anguish and
never bring forth the fruit which we were destined
to produce. Yet the construction of the universe
allows for infinite waste. Other germs will bear ;
all will not be blasted. Evil is a sort of moral
carbonic acid gas, mortal when isolated and a real
danger to our existence ; and yet, when combined
with other forces, not only innocuous, but even
necessary to our vital powers, in the present
state of their development. The important
thing in life is not our misery, our despair,
T
282 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN
however crushing, but the one good moment
which outweighs it all. Man is born to suffer,
but he is born to hope. And the message of
the universe still runs, as of old : a/Mm,
sifts ri b'tv vixdru.
PRINTED BY
TURNBULL AND SPEARS
EDINBURGH
A CATALOGUE OF BOOKS
AND ANNOUNCEMENTS OF
METHUEN AND COMPANY
PUBLISHERS : LONDON
36 ESSEX STREET
W.C. •'•"•
CONTENTS
PACK
FORTHCOMING BOOKS, . . 2
POETRY,
I i
BELLES LBTTRES,
ILLUSTRATED BOOKS, ..... 13
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BIOGRAPHY, ... jg
TRAVEL, ADVENTURE AND TOPOGRAPHY, . . ig
GENERAL LITERATURE, • . . ,, 19
SCIENCE,
PHILOSOPHY, ... aa
THEOLOGY, ...... 33
LEADERS OF RELIGION, . . . . 34
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THE PEACOCK LIBRARY, • • • • 35
UNIVERSITY EXTENSION SERIES, 35
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CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS, 37
EDUCATIONAL BOOKS, .... 38
NOVEMBER 1897
NOVEMBER 1897.
MESSRS. METHUEN'S
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4 MESSRS, METHUEN'S ANNOUNCEMENTS
History and Biography
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MESSRS. METHUEN'S ANNOUNCEMENTS 7
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8 MESSRS. METHUEN'S ANNOUNCEMENTS
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This book contains Two Hundred Latin and Two Hundred Greek Passages, and
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MESSRS. METHUEN'S ANNOUNCEMENTS 9
TRAITS AND CONFIDENCES. By The Hon. EMILY LAW-
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12 MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST
Victor Hugo. THE LETTERS OF VICTOR HUGO.
Translated from the French by F. CLARKE, M.A. In Two Volumes.
Dcmy^vo. los. 6d. each. Vol. I. 1815-35.
This is the first volume of one of the most interesting and important collection of
letters ever published in France. The correspondence dates frorn Victor Hugo's
boyhood to his death, and none of the letters have been published before. The
arrangement is chiefly chronological, but where there is an interesting set of
letters to one person these are arranged together. The first volume contains,
among others, (i) Letters to his father; (a) to his young wife ; (2) to his confessor,
Lamennais ; a very important set of about fifty letters to Sainte-Beauve ; (5)
letters about his early books and plays.
' A charming and vivid picture of a man whose egotism never marred his natural
kindness, and whose vanity did not impair his greatness.' — Standard.
C. H. Pearson. ESSAYS AND CRITICAL REVIEWS. By
C. H. PEARSON, M.A., Author of 'National Life and Character.'5
Edited, with a Biographical Sketch, by H. A. STRONG, M.A.,
LL.D. With a Portrait. Demy 8vo. los. 6d.
' Remarkable for careful handling, breadth of view, and knowledge.' — Scotsman.
' Charming essays.' — Spectator.
W. M. Dixon. A PRIMER OF TENNYSON. By W. M.
DIXON, M.A., Professor of English Literature at Mason College.
Crown 8v0. 2s. 6d.
' Much sound and well-expressed criticism and acute literary judgments. The biblio
graphy is a boon." — Speaker.
W. A. Oraigie. A PRIMER OF BURNS. By W. A. CRAIGH;.
Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d,
This book is planned on a method similar to the ' Primer of Tennyson.' It has also
a glossary.
' A valuable addition to the literature of the poet.' — Times.
' An excellent short account.' — Pall Mall Gazette.
'An admirable introduction.' — Globe.
Sterne. THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF TRISTRAM
SHANDY. By LAWRENCE STERNE. With an Introduction by
CHARLES WHIBLKY, and a Portrait. 2 vols. 'js.
'Very dainty volumes are these; the paper, type, and light-green binding are all
very agreeable to the eye. Simplex munditiis is the phrase that might be applied
to them.1— Globe.
Congreve. THE COMEDIES OF WILLIAM CONGREVE.
With an Introduction by G. S. STREET, and a Portrait. 2 vols. ys.
1 The volumes are strongly bound in green buckram, are of a convenient size, and
pleasant to look upon, so that whether on the shelf, or on the table, or in the hand
the possessor is thoroughly content with them." — Guardian.
Morier. THE ADVENTURES OF HAJJI BABA OF
ISPAHAN. By JAMES MORIER. With an Introduction by E. G.
BROWNE, M.A., and a Portrait. 2 vols. 7*.
Walton. THE LIVES OF DONNE, WOTTON, HOOKER,
HERBERT, AND SANDERSON. By IZAAK WALTON. With
an Introduction by VERNON BLACKBURN, and a Portrait. $s. 6d.
MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST 13
Johnson. THE LIVES OF THE ENGLISH POETS. By
SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.IX With an Introduction by J. II. MILLAR,
and a Portrait. 3 vols. los. 6d.
Burns. THE POEMS OF ROBERT BURNS. Edited by
ANDREW LANG and W. A. CRAIGIE. With Portrait. Demy 8r<?,
gilt top. 6s.
This edition contains a carefully collated Text, numerous Notes, critical and textual,
a critical and biographical Introduction, and a Glossary.
' Among the editions in one volume, Mr. Andrew Lang's will take the place of
authority.'— Times.
F. Langbridge. BALLADS OF THE BRAVE: Poems of
Chivalry, Enterprise, Courage, and Constancy. Edited, with Notes,
by Rev. F. LANGBRIDGE. Crown 8ro. Buckram. 3*. &/. School
Edition. 2s. 6d.
'A very happy conception happily carried out. These " Balladi of th« Brave" are
intended to suit the real tastes of boys, and will suit the taste of the great majority '
—Spectator. ' The book is full of splendid things.'— ll'orld.
Illustrated Books
Jane Barlow. THE BATTLE OF THE FROGS AND MICE,
translated by JANR BARLOW, Author of ' Irish Idylls,' and pictured
by F. D. BEDFORD. Small 4/0. 6s. net.
S. Baring Gould. A BOOK OF FAIRY TALES retold by S.
BARING GOULD. With numerous illustrations and initial letters by
ARTHUR J. GASKIN. Second Edition. Crown 8vo. Buckram. 6s.
'Mr. Baring Gould is deserving of gratitude, in re-writing in honest, simple style the
old stories that delighted the childhood of " our fathers and grandfathers." As to
the form of the book, and the printing, which is by Messrs. Constable, it were
difficult to commend overmuch. — Saturday Review.
S. Baring Gould. OLD ENGLISH FAIRY TALES. Col
lected and edited by S. BARING GOULD. With Numerous Illustra
tions by F. D. BEDFORD. Second Edition. Crown 8vc. Buckram. 6s.
' A charming volume, which children will be sure to appreciate. The stories have
been selected with great ingenuity from various old ballads and folk-tales, and,
having been somewhat altered and readjusted, now stand forth, clothed in Mr.
Baring Gould's delightful English, to enchant youthful readers.' — Guardian.
S. Baring Gould. A BOOK OF NURSERY SONGS AND
RHYMES. Edited by S. BARING GOULD, and Illustrated by the
Birmingham Art School. Buckram, gilt top. Crown 8ro. 6s.
' The volume is very complete in its way, as It contains nursery soncs to the number
of 77, game-rhymas, and jingles. To the student we commend the sensible intro
duction, and the explanatory notes. The volume is superbly printed on soft,
thick paper, which it is a pleasure to touch ; and the borders and pictures ar«
among the very best specimens we have seen of the Gaskin school.'— Birming
ham Gatettt.
14 MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST
H. C. Beeching. A BOOK OF CHRISTMAS VERSE. Edited
by H. C. BEECHING, M.A., and Illustrated by WALTER CRANE.
Crown Svo, gilt top. $s.
A collection of the best verse inspired by the birth of Christ from the Middle Ages
to the present day. A distinction of the book is the large number of poems it
contains by modern authors, a few of which are here printed for the first time.
, 'An anthology which, from its unity of aim and high poetic ex . :' MCC, has a better
right to exist than most of its fellows.' — Guardian,,
History
Gibbon. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN
EMPIRE. By EDWARD GIBBON. A New Edition, Edited with
Notes, Appendices, and Maps, by J. 15. BURY, M.A., Fellow of
Trinity College, Dublin. In Seven Volumes. Demy Svo. Gilt top.
8s. 6d. each. Also crown Szv. 6s. each. Vols. /., //., and III.
1 The time has certainly arrived for a new edition of Gibbon's great \york. . . . Pro
fessor Bury is the right man to undertake this task. His learning is amazing,
both in extent and accuracy. The book is issued in a handy form, and at a
moderate price, and it is admirably printed.' — Times.
1 The edition is edited as a classic should be edited, removing nothing, yet indicating
the value of the text, and bringing it up to date. It promises to be of the utmost
value, and will be a welcome addition to many libraries.' — Scotsman.
1 This edition, so far as one may judge from the first instalment, is a marvel of
erudition and critical skill, and it is the very minimum of praise to predict that the
seven volumes of it will supersede Dean Milman's as the standard edition of our
great historical classic.' — Glasgow Herald.
* The beau-ideal Gibbon has arrived at last.'—S&etcft.
'At last there is an adequate modern edition of Gibbon. . . . The best edition the
nineteenth century could produce.' — Manchester Guardian.
Flinders Petrie. A HISTORY OF EGYPT,FROMTHE EARLIEST
TIMES TO THE PRESENT DAY. Edited by W. M. FLINDERS
PETRIE, D.C.L., LL.D., Professor of Egyptology at University
College. Fully Illustrated. In Six Volumes. Crown Szv. 6s. each.
Vol. I. PREHISTORIC TIMES TO XVI. DYNASTY. W. M. F.
Petrie. Third Edition.
Vol. II. THE XVIlTii AND XVIIlTii DYNASTIES. W. M. F.
Petrie. Second Edition.
' A history written in the spirit of scientific precision so worthily represented by Dr.
Petrie and his school cannot but promote sound and accurate study, and
supply a vacant place in the English literature of Egyptology.' — Tima.
Flinders Petrie. EGYPTIAN TALES. Edited by W. M.
FLINDERS PETRIE. Illustrated by TRISTRAM ET.T.IS. In Tivo
Volumes. Crown Sro. 3*. 6d. each.
'A valuable addition to the literature of comparative folk-lore. The drawings are
really illustrations in the literal sense of the \vord.'—GM>e.
' It has a scientific value to the student of history and archaeology.'— Scotsman,
' Invaluable as a picture of life in Palestine and Egypt.' — Daily Xeu'S.
MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST 15
Flinders Petrie. EGYPTIAN DECORATIVE ART. tty
W. M. FLINDERS PETRIE, D.C.L. With 120 Illustrations. Crown
Svo. 3*. 6d.
' Professor Flinders Petrie is not only a profound Egyptologist, but an accomplished
student of comparative archaeology. In these lectures, delivered at the Royal
Institution, he displays both qualifications with rare skill in elucidating the
development of decorative art in Egypt, and in tracing its influence on the
art of other countries.' — Times.
S. Baring Gould. THE TRAGEDY OF THE CAESARS.
The Emperors of the Julian and Claudian Lines. With numerous
Illustrations from Busts, Gems, Cameos, etc. By S. BARING GOULD,
Author of Mehalah,' etc. Fourth Edition. Royal ' 8vo. 15*.
' A most splendid and fascinating book on a subject of undying interest. The great
feature of the book is the use the author has made of the existing portraits of the
Caesars, and the admirable critical subtlety he has exhibited in dealing with this
line of research. It is brilliantly written, and the illustrations are supplied on a
scale of profuse magnificence. ' — Daily Chronicle.
' The volumes will in no sense disappoint the general reader. Indeed, in their way,
there is nothing in any sense so good in English. . . . Mr. Baring Gould has
presented his narrative in such a way as not to make one dull page.'— AthenatitH.
H. de B. Gibbins. INDUSTRY IN ENGLAND : HISTORI
CAL OUTLINES. By II. DE B. GIBBINS, M.A., D.Litt. With
5 Maps. Second Edition. Demy 8v o. los. 6d.
This book is written with the view of affording a clear view of the main facts of
English Social and Industrial History placed in due perspective. Beginning
with prehistoric times, it passes in review the growth and advance of industry
up to the nineteenth century, showing its gradual development and progress.
The book is illustrated by Maps, Diagrams, and Tables.
A. Clark. THE COLLEGES OF OXFORD : Their History
and their Traditions. By Members of the University. Edited by A.
CLARK, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Lincoln College. Szv. 12s. 6./.
' A work which will certainly be appealed to for many years as the standard book on
the Colleges of Oxford.' — Athenceum.
Perrens. THE HISTORY OF FLORENCE FROM 1434
TO 1492. By F. T. PERRENS. Translated by HANNAH LYNCH.
&vo. i2s. 6d.
A history of Florence under the domination of Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo de
1 This is a standard book by an honest and intelligent historian, who has deserved
well of all who are interested in Italian history.'— Manchester Guardian.
J. Wells, A SHORT HISTORY OF ROME. By J. WELLS,
M. A., Fellow and Tutor of Wadham Coll., Oxford. With 4 Maps.
Crown 8r0. 3*. 6</.
This book is intended for the Middle and Upper Forms of Public Schools and for
Pass Students at the Universities. It contains copious Tables, etc.
•An original work written on an original plan, and with uncr
vigour.' — Speaker.
1 6 MESSRS. MKTHUEN'S LIST
E. L. S. Horsburgh. THE CAMPAIGN OF WATERLOO.
By E. L. S. HORSBURGH, B.A. With Plans. Crown 8vo. $s.
'A brilliant essay — simple, sound, and thorough.' — Daily Chronicle.
' A study, the most concise, the most lucid, the most critical that has been produced.
m Mercury,
H.B.George. BATTLES OF ENGLISH HISTORY. ByH. B.
GEORGE, M.A., Fellow of New College, Oxford. With numerous
Plans. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.
1 Mr. George has undertaken a very useful task — that of making military affairs in
telligible and instructive to non-military readers — and has executed it with laud
able intelligence and industry, and with a large measure of success.' — Times.
0. Browning. A SHORT HISTORY OF MEDIAEVAL ITALY,
A.D. 1250-1530. By OSCAR BROWNING, Fellow and Tutor of King's
College, Cambridge. Second Edition. In Two Volumes. Crown
8vo. $s. each.
VOL. i. 1250-1409. — Guelphs and Ghibellines.
VOL. II. 1409-1530. — The Age of the Condottieri.
'A vivid picture of mediaeval Italy.' — Standard.
' Mr. Browning is to be congratulated on the production of a work of immense
labour and learning.'— Westminster Gazette.
O'Grady. THE STORY OF IRELAND. By STANDISH
O'GRADY, Author of * Finn and his Companions.' Cr. Svo. 2s. 6d.
'Most delightful, most stimulating. Its racy humour, its original imaginings,
make it one of tht freshest, breeziest volumes.' — Methodist Timts.
Biography
S. Baring Gould. THE LIFE OF NAPOLEON BONA
PARTE. By S. BARING GOULD. With over 450 Illustrations in
the Text and 12 Photogravure Plates. Large quarto. Gilt top. 36 s.
' The best biography of Napoleon in our tongue, nor have the French as good a
biographer of their hero. A book very nearly as good as Southey's "Life of
Nelson." ' — Manchester Guardian.
'The main feature of this gorgeous volume is its great wealth of beautiful photo
gravures and finely-executed wood engraving?, constituting a complete pictorial
chronicle of Napoleon I.'s personal history Irom the days of his early childhood
at A;accio to the date of his second Interment under the dome of the Invalides in
Paris.'— Daily Telegraph.
' The most elaborate account of Napoleon ever produced by an English writer.' —
Daily Chronicle.
1 A brilliant and attractive volume. Never before have so many pictures relating
to Napoleon been brought within the limits of an English book.' — Globe.
' Particular notice is due to the vast collection of contemporary illustrations.' —
Guardian,
' Nearly all the illustrations are real contributions to history.' — Westminster Gazette*
' The illustrations are of supreme interest.' — Standard.
MESSRS. METIIUEN'S LIST 17
Morris Fuller. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF JOHN
DAVENANT, D.D. (1571-1641), President of Queen's College,
Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Bishop of Salisbury By
MORRIS FULLER, B.D. Demy %vo. IQJ. 6</.
' A valuable contribution to ecclesiastical history.'— BirmingJtam Gazette.
J. M. Rigg. ST. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY : A CHAPTER
IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGION. ByJ.M. RIGG. DemyKvo. ^s.(>d.
' Ri;gg ihaS told.,the story of the gre-it Primate's life with scholarly ability and
™ interesting chapter to the history of the Norman period!1
F. W. Joyce. THE LIFE OF SIR FREDERICK GORE
OUSELEY. By F. W. JOYCE, M.A. With Portraits and Illustra
tions. Crown 8vo. "js. 6rf.
1 This book has been undertaken in quite the right spirit, and written with sympathy
insight, and considerable literary skill.1— Times.
W. G. Collingwood. THE LIFE OF JOHN RUSKIN. By
W. G. COLLINGWOOD, M.A., Editor of Mr. Ruskin's Poems. With
numerous Portraits, and 13 Drawings by Mr. Rusk in. Second
Edition. 2 vols. 8vo. 32^.
' No more magnificent volumes have been published for a long time.'— Times.
' It is long since we had a biography with such delights of substance and of form.
Such a book is a pleasure for the day, and a joy for ever.'— Daily Chronicle.
0. Waldstein. JOHN RUSKIN : a Study. By CHARLES
WALDSTEIN, M.A., Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. With a
Photogravure Portrait after Professor HERKOMER. Post 8vo. $s.
'A thoughtful, impartial, well-written criticism of Ruskin's teaching, intended to
separate what the author regards as valuable and permanent from what is transient
and erroneous in the great master's writing.' — Daily Chronicle.
W. H. Button. THE LIFE OF SIR THOMAS MORE. By
W. II. HUTTON, M.A., Author of ' William Laud.' With Portraits.
Crown 8zv. $s.
' The book lays good claim to high rank among our biographies. It is excellently
even lovingly, written. '—Scotsman. ' An excellent monograph.1— Times.
Clark Russell. THE LIFE OF ADMIRAL LORD COL
LINGWOOD. By W. CLARK RUSSELL, Author of ' The Wreck
of the Grosvenor.' With Illustrations by F. BRANGWYN. Third
Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.
' A book which we should like to see iu the hands of every boy in the country '—
St. J tunes s Gaze tie. ' A rca 1 ! y good book. '— Sa tttnl.iy Review.
A3
i8 MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST
Southey. ENGLISH SEAMEN (Howard, Clifford, Hawkins,
Drake, Cavendish). By ROBERT SOUTHEY. Edited, with an
Introduction, by DAVID HANNAY. Second Edition. Crown Svo. 6s.
'Admirable and well-told stories of our naval history.'— A rmy and Navy Gazette.
1 A brave, inspiriting book.1 — Black and White.
Travel, Adventure and Topography
R. S. S. Baden-Powell. THE DOWNFALL OF PREMPEH.
A Diary of Life with the Native Levy in Ashanti, 1895. By Colonel
BADEN-POWELL. With 21 Illustrations and a Map. Demy 8vo.
IDS. 6d.
' A compact, faithful, most readable record of the campaign.' — Daily News.
' A bluff and vigorous narrative.1 — Glasgow Herald.
E. S. S. Baden-Powell. THE MATEBELE CAMPAIGN 1896.
By Colonel R. S. S. BADEN-POWELL. With nearly 100 Illustrations.
Second Edition. Demy 8v0. i$s.
'Written in an unaffectedly light and humorous style.' — The World.
'A very racy and eminently readable book.' — St. James's Gazette.
' As a straightforward account of a great deal of plucky work unpretentiously done,
this book is well worth reading. The simplicity of the narrative is all in its
favour, and accords in a peculiarly English fashion with the nature of the subject.'
Times.
Captain Hinde. THE FALL OF THE CONGO ARABS.
By SIDNEY L. HINDE. With Portraits and Plans. Demy 8vo.
I2s. 6d.
' The book is full of good things, and of sustained interest.' — St. James's Gazette.
A graphic sketch of one of the most exciting and important episodes in the struggle
for supremacy in Central Africa between the Arabs and their Europeon rivals.
Apart from the story of the campaign, Captain Hinde's book is mainly remark
able for the fulness with which he discusses the question of cannibalism. It is,
indeed, the only connected narrative — in English, at any rate — which has been
published of this particular episode in African history.' — Times.
'Captain Hinde's book is one of the most interesting and valuable contributions yet
made to the literature of modern Africa.' — Daily News.
W. Crooke. THE NORTH-WESTERN PROVINCES OF
INDIA: THEIR ETHNOLOGY AND ADMINISTRATION. By W.
CROOKE. With Maps and Illustrations. DemySvo. los. 6d.
'A carefully and well-written account of one of the most important provinces of the
Empire. In seven chapters Mr. Crooke deals successively with the land in its
physical aspect, the province under Hindoo and Mussulman rule, the province
under British rule, the ethnology and sociology of the province, the religious and
social life of the people, the land and its settlement, and the native peasant in his
relation to the land. The illustrations are good and well selected, and the map is
excellent." — Hfttttchesfer Guard; an,
MESSRS. METIIUEN'S LIST 19
W. B. Worsfold. SOUTH AFRICA : Its History and its Future
By W. BASIL WORSFOLD, M.A. With a Map. Second Edition.
Crown 8vo. 6s.
'An intensely interesting book.'— Daily Chronicle.
1 A monumental work compressed into a very moderate compass. '-World.
General Literature
S. Baring Gould. OLD COUNTRY LIFE. By S. BARING
GOULD, Author of ' Mehalah,' etc. With Sixty-seven Illustrations
by W. PARKINSON, F. D. BEDFORD, and F. MASEY. Large
Crown 8vo. ios. 6d. Fifth and Cheaper Edition. 6s.
"Old Country Life, as healthy wholesome reading, full of breezy life and move-
ment, full of quaint stories vigorously told, will not be excelled by any book to be
published throughout the year. Sound, hearty, and English to the I core. '-^ \y£ld.
S. Baring Gould. HISTORIC ODDITIES AND STRANGE
EVENTS. By S. BARING GOULD. Third Edition. CrownZvo. 6s.
entertainin£ chapters. The whole volume is delightful
S. Baring Gould. FREAKS OF FANATICISM. By S BARING
GOULD. Third Edition. Crown Svo. 6s.
'Mr. Baring Gould has a keen eye for colour and effect, and the subjects he has
chosen give ample scope to his descriptive and analytic faculties. A perfectly
fascinating book.'— Scottish Leader.
S. Baring Gould. A GARLAND OF COUNTRY SONG:
English Folk Songs with their Traditional Melodies. Collected and
arranged by S. BARING GOULD and H. FLEETWOOD SHEPPARD.
Demy 4/0. 6s.
S. Baring Gould. SONGS OF THE WEST: Traditional
Ballads and Songs of the West of England, with their Traditional
Melodies. Collected by S. BARING GOULD, M.A.,and H. FLEET-
WOOD SHEPPARD, M. A. Arranged for Voice and Piano. In 4 Parts
(containing 25 Songs each), Parts /., II. , ///., 3*. each. Part
7F., 5-f. /;/ one Vol.> French morocco^ 15*.
' A rich collection of humour, pathos, grace, and poetic fancy. '—Saturday Keviciv.
20 MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST
S. Baring Gould. YORKSHIRE ODDITIES AND STRANGE
EVENTS. Fourth Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.
S. Baring Gould. STRANGE SURVIVALS AND SUPER
STITIONS. With Illustrations. By S. BARING GOULD. Crown
8vo. Second Edition. 6s.
' We have read Mr. Baring Gould's book from beginning to end. It is full of quaint
and various information, and there is not a dull page in it.' — Notes and Queries.
S. Baring Gould. THE DESERTS OF SOUTHERN
FRANCE. By S. BARING. GOULD. With numerous Illustrations
by F. D. BEDFORD, S. HUTTON, etc. 2 vols. Demy 8z>o. 32.?.
'His two richly-illustrated volumes are full of matter of interest to the geologist,
the archaeologist, and the student of history and manners.' — Scotsman.
G. W. Steevens. NAVAL POLICY: WITH A DESCRIP
TION OF ENGLISH AND FOREIGN NAVIES. By G. W. STEEVENS.
Demy 8vo. 6s.
This book is a description of the British and other more important navies of the world,
with a sketch of the lines on which our naval policy might possibly be developed.
It describes our recent naval policy, and shows what our naval force really is. A
detailed but non-te_chnical account is given of the instruments of modern warfare —
guns, armour, engines, and the like — with a view to determine how far we are
abreast of modern invention and modern requirements. An ideal policy is then
sketched for the building and manning of our fleet ; and the last chapter is
devoted to docks, coaling-stations, and especially colonial defence.
'An extremely able and interesting work.' — Daily Chronicle.
W. E. Gladstone. THE SPEECHES AND PUBLIC AD
DRESSES OF THE RT. HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P.
Edited by A. W. HUTTON, M.A., and H. J. COHEN, M.A. With
Portraits. Sv0. Vols. IX. and X. I2s. 6d. each.
J. Wells. OXFORD AND OXFORD LIFE. By Members of
the University. Edited by J. WELLS, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of
Wadham College. Crown 8vo. $s. 6d.
' We congratulate Mr. Wells on the production of a readable and intelligent account
of Oxford as it is at the present time, written by persons who are possessed of a
close acquaintance with the system and life of the University." — Athenaum.
L. Whibley. GREEK OLIGARCHIES : THEIR ORGANISA
TION AND CHARACTER. By L. WHIBLEY, M.A., Fellow
of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Crown Sw. 6s.
' An exceedingly useful handbook : a careful and well-arranged study of an obscure
subj ec t . ' — Times.
1 Mr. Whibley is never tedious or pedantic.'— Pall Mall Gazette.
MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST 21
L. L. Price. ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND PRACTICE.
By L. L. PRICE, M.A., Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. Crown
Svo. 6s.
' The book is well written, giving evidence of considerable literary ability, and clear
mental grasp of the subject under consideration.'— Western Morning Nevis.
0. F. Andrews. CHRISTIANITY AND THE LABOUR
QUESTION. By C. F. ANDREWS, B.A. Crown Svo. 2s. 6<f.
' A bold and scholarly survey.'— Sf taker.
J. S. Shedlock. THE PIANOFORTE SONATA : Its Origin
and Development. By J. S. SHEDLOCK. Crown Svo. 5*.
' This work should be in the possession of every musician and amateur, for it not
only embodies a concise and lucid history ot the origin of one of the most im
portant forms of musical composition, but, by reason of the painstaking research
and accuracy of the author's statements, it is a very valuable work for reference.'
— A thenaum.
E.M. Bowden. THE EXAMPLE OF BUDDHA: Being Quota
tions from Buddhist Literature for each Day in the Year. Compiled
by E. M. BOWDEN. With Preface by Sir EDWIN ARNOLD. Third
Edition. i6mo. 2s. 6d.
Science
Freudenreich. DAIRY BACTERIOLOGY. A Short Manual
for the Use of Students. By Dr. ED. VON P'REUDENREICH.
Translated from the German by J. R. AINSWORTH DAVIS, B.A.,
F.C.P. Crown Svo. 2s.6d.
Chalmers Mitchell. OUTLINES OF BIOLOGY. By P.
CHALMERS MITCHELL, M.A., F.Z.S. Fully Illustrated. Crown
Svo. 6s.
A text-book designed to cover the new Schedule issued by the Royal College of
Physicians and Surgeons.
G. Massee. A MONOGRAPH OF THE MYXOGASTRES. By
GEORGE MASSEE. With 12 Coloured Plates. Royal Svo. iSs. net.
' A work much in advance of any book in the language treating of this group of
organisms. It is indispensable to every student of the Myxogastres. The
coloured plates deserve high praise for their accuracy and execution.1— Nature.
22 MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST
Philosophy
L. T. Hobhouse. THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE. By
L. T. HOBHOUSE, Fellow and Tutor of Corpus College, Oxford.
Demy 8vo. 21 s.
1 The most important contribution to English philosophy since the publication of Mr.
Bradley's " Appearance and Reality." Full of brilliant criticism and of positive
theories which are models of lucid statement.' — Glasgow Herald.
1 An elaborate and often brilliantly written volume. The treatment is one of great
freshness, and the illustrations are particularly numerous and apt." — Times,
W. H. Fairbrother. THE PHILOSOPHY OF T. H. GREEN.
By W. H. FAIRBROTHER, M.A., Lecturer at Lincoln College,
Oxford. Crown 8vo. $s. 6d.
This volume is expository, not critical, and is intended for senior students at the
Universities and others, as a statement of Green's teaching, and an introduction to
the study of Idealist Philosophy.
' In every way an admirable book. As an introduction to the writings of perhaps the
most remarkable speculative thinker whom England has produced in the present
century, nothing could be better. '—Glasgow Herald.
F. W. Bussell. THE SCHOOL OF PLATO : its Origin and
its Revival under the Roman Empire. By F. W. BUSSELL, M.A.,
Fellow and Tutor of Brasenose College, Oxford. Demy 8vo. los, 6d.
' A highly valuable contribution to the history of ancient thought.'— Glasgow Herald.
' A clever and stimulating book, provocative of thought and deserving careful reading.1
— Manchester Guardian.
F. S. Granger. THE WORSHIP OF THE ROMANS. By
F. S. GRANGER, M.A., Litt.D., Professor of Philosophy at Univer
sity College, Nottingham. Crown 8vo. 6s.
'A scholarly analysis of the religious ceremonies,be!iefs, and superstitions of ancient
Rome, conducted in the new instructive light of comparative anthropology.1—
Times.
Theology
E. 0. S. Gibson. THE XXXIX. ARTICLES OF THE
CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Edited with an Introduction by E.
C. S. GIBSON, D.D., Vicar of Leeds, late Principal of Wells
Theological College. In Two Volumes. Demy %vo. 155-.
' The tone maintained throughout is not that of the partial advocate, but the faithful
exponent. ' — Scotsman.
'There are ample proofs of clearness of expression, sobriety of judgment, and breadth
of view. . . . The book will be welcome to all students of the subject, and its sound,
definite, and loyal theology ought to be of great service.' — National Observer.
'So far from repelling the general reader, its orderly arrangement, lucid treatment,
and felicity of diction invite and encourage his attention.' — Yorkshire Post.
MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST 23
R. L Ottley THE DOCTRINE OF THE INCARNATION
By K. L OTTLEY, M.A., late fellow of Magdalen College, Oxon '
PrinC1pal of Pusey House. In Two Volumes. Demy 8w. 15.
| Learned and reverent : lucid and well arranged.'— Record
t Accurate, well ordered, and judicious.'— National Observer.
nre<a;r ; remarkabl.y ful1 j^ount of the main currents of speculation. Scholarly
ance • • • mtense interes< in his *
F. B. Jevons. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY
BVW^ TiV'n13- JE0VONS' M'A-> Litt.^, IVincTpafof
•ishop Hatfield's Hall. Demy Svo. IQS. 6d.
Mr. F. B. Jevons' 'Introduction to the History of Religion' treats of earlv relic i<
S halT' °f T" °f Ant,hrOpoI°^ a"d Folk-'-e ' ™* » ^S at ^
that has been made in any language to weave topether the results of recent
Fe'thhfsm ? im° ;S"Ch t0piCS SS Sj^Pa^etic Magic, Taboo, Tolemism'
«.£•' f £' T aV° presen' a systematic account of the growth of primitive
religion and the development of early religious institutions.
Ur. Jevons has written a notable work, and we can strongly recommend it to the
'
1 T'1ie."ier,it.of.this btook'Ic? in the penetration, the singular acuteness and force of the
author s judgment. He is at once critical and luminous, at once just and suggestive.
It is but rarely that one meets with a book so comprehensive and so thorough as
this, and it is more than an ordinary pleasure for the reviewer to welcome and
recommend it. Dr. Jevons is something more than an historian of primitive
belief— he is a philosophic thinker, who sees his subject clearly and sees it whole
whose mastery of detail is no less complete than his view of the broader aspects
and issues of his subject is convincing.'— Birmingham Post.
S. R. Driver. SERMONS ON SUBJECTS CONNECTED
WITH THE OLD TESTAMENT. By S. R. DRIVER, D.D7,
Canon of Christ Church, Regius Professor of Hebrew in the Uni
versity of Oxford. Crown Sz'o. 6s.
'A welcome companion to the author's famous ' Introduction.' No man can read these
discourses without feeling that Dr. Driver is fully alive to the deeper teaching of
the Old lestament. — Guardian.
T. K. Cheyne. FOUNDERS OF OLD TESTAMENT CRITI
CISM : Biographical, Descriptive, and Critical Studies. By T. K.
CHEYNE, D.D., Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scrip-
ture at Oxford. Large crown 8vo. 7*. 6d.
This book is a historical sketch of O. T. Criticism in the form of biographical studies
from the days of Eichhorn to those of Driver and Robertson Smith.
A very learned and instructive work.' — Times.
C.H.Prior. CAMBRIDGE SERMONS. Edited by C.H. PRIOR
M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Pembroke College. Crown 8vo. 6s.
A volume of sermons preached before the University of Cambridge by various
preachers, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop Wcstcott.
A representative collection. Bishop Westcott's is a noble sermon.'— Guardian.
E. B. Layard. RELIGION IN BOYHOOD. Notes on the
Religious Training of Boys. With a Preface by T. R. ILLING-
WORTII. By E. B. LAYARD, M.A. iSmo. is.
24 MESSRS. METIIUEN'S LIST
W. Yorke Faussett. THE DE CATECHIZANDIS
RUDIBUS OF ST. AUGUSTINE. Edited, with Introduction,
Notes, etc., by W. YORKE FAUSSETT, M.A., late Scholar of Balliol
Coll. Crown Svo. 35. 6d.
An edition of a Treatise on the Essentials of Christian Dactrine, and the best
methods of impressing them on candidates for baptism.
'Ably and judiciously edited on the same principle as the ordinary Greek and
Latin texts.'— Glasgow Herald.
SDetottonal Boofegf*
With Full-page Illustrations. Fcap. Svo. Buckram. 3$. 6J.
Padded morocco, $s.
THE IMITATION OF CHRIST. By THOMAS A KEMPIS.
With an Introduction by DEAN FARRAR. Illustrated by C. M.
GERE, and printed in black and red. Second Edition.
'Amongst all the innumerable English editions of the "Imitation," there can have
been few which were prettier than this one, printed in strong and handsome type,
with all the glory of red initials.' — Glasgow Herald.
THE CHRISTIAN YEAR. By JOHN KEBLE. With an Intro
duction and Notes by W. LOCK, D.D., Warden of Keble College,
Ireland, Professor at Oxford. Illustrated by R. ANNING BELL.
' The present edition is annotated with all the care and insight to be expected front
Mr. Lock. The progress and circumstances of its composition are detailed in the
Introduction. There is an interesting Appendix on the MSS. of the "Christian
Year," and another giving the order in which the poems were written. A " Short
Analysis of the Thought" is prefixed to each, and any difficulty in the text is ex
plained in a note.' — Guardian.
' The most acceptable edition of this ever-popular work.' — Globe.
Leaders of Religion
Edited by H. C. BEECHING, M. A. With Portraits, crown Svo.
A series of short biographies of the most prominent leaders //"
of religious life and thought of all ages and countries. O / {^
The following are ready — \^)f
CARDINAL NEWMAN. By R. H. HUTTON.
JOHN WESLEY. By J. H. OVERTON, M.A.
BISHOP WILBERFORCE. By G. W. DANIEL, M.A.
CARDINAL MANNING. By A. W. HUTTON, M.A.
CHARLES SIMEON. By H. C. G. MOULE, M.A.
JOHN KEBLE. By WALTER LOCK, D.D.
THOMAS CHALMERS. By Mrs. OLIPHANT.
LANCELOT ANDREWES. By R. L. OTTLEY, M.A.
AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY. By E. L. CUTTS, D.D.
WILLIAM LAUD. By W. H. HUTTON, B.D.
MESSRS. MF.THUEN'S LIST 25
JOHN KNOX. By F. M'CUNN.
JOHN HOWE. By R. F. HORTON, D.D.
BISHOP KEN. By F. A. CLARKE, M.A.
GEORGE FOX, THE QUAKER. By T. HODGKIN, D.C.L.
Dther volumes will be announced in due course.
Fiction
SIX SHILLING NOVELS
Marie Corelli's Novels
Crown Svo. 6s. each.
A ROMANCE OF TWO WORLDS. Sixteenth Edition
VENDETTA. Thirteenth Edition.
THELMA. Seventeenth Edition.
ARDATH. Eleventh Edition.
THE SOUL OF LILITH Ninth Edition.
WORMWOOD. Eighth Edition.
BARABBAS: A DREAM OF THE WORLD'S TRAGEDY
Thirty-first Edition.
' The tender reverence of the treatment and the imaginative beauty of the writing
have reconciled us to the daring of the conception, and the conviction is forced on
UB that even so exalted a subject cannot be made too familiar to us, provided it be
presented in the true spirit of Christian faith. The amplifications of the Scripture
narrative are often conceived with high poetic insight, and this "Dream of the
World s Tragedy is, despite some trifling incongruities, a lofty and not inade
quate paraphrase of the supreme climax of the inspired narrative.'— Dublin
Review.
THE SORROWS OF SATAN. Thirty-sixth Edition.
' A very powerful piece of work. . . . The conception is magnificent, and is likek-
to win an abiding place within the memory of man. . . . The author has immense
command of language, and a limitless audacity. . . . This interesting and re
markable romance will live long after much of the ephemeral literature of the day
is forgotten. ... A literary phenomenon . . . novel, and even sublime.'— W. T
STEAD in the Review of Reviews.
Anthony Hope's Novels
Crown Svo. 6s. each.
THE GOD IN THE CAR. Seventh Edition.
' A very remarkable book, deserving of critical analysis impossible within out limit ;
brilliant, but not superficial ; well considered, but not elaborated ; constructed
with the proverbial art that conceals, but yet allowj itself to be enjoyed by readers
to whom fine literary method is a keen pleasure.'— The World.
A CHANGE OF AIR. Fourth Edition.
'A graceful, vivacious comedy, true to human nature. The characters are traced
with a masterly hand.' — Times.
A MAN OF MARK. Fourth Edition.
' Of all Mr. Hope's books, " A Man of Mark " is the one which best compares with
" The Prisoner of Zenda." ' — National Observer.
26 MESSRS. METIIUEN'S LIST
THE CHRONICLES OF COUNT ANTONIO. Third Edition.
'It ia a perfectly enchanting story of love and chivalry, and pure romance. The
outlawed Count is the most constant, desperate, and withal modest and tender of
lovers, a peerless gentleman, an intrepid fighter, a very faithful friend, and a most
magnanimous foe. — Guardian.
PHROSO. Illustrated by H. R. MILLAR. Third Edition.
1 The tale is thoroughly fresh, quick with vitality, stirring the blood, and humorously,
dashingly told.'— St. James's Gazette.
'A story of adventure, every page of which is palpitating with action and excitement.'
— Speaker.
' From cover to cover (< Phroso " not only engages the attention, but carries the reader
in little whirls of delight from adventure to adventure.' — Academy.
S. Baring Gould's Novels
Crown 8v0. 6s. each.
'To say that a book is by the author of " Mehalah" is to imply that it contains a
story cast on strong lines, containing dramatic possibilities, vivid and sympathetic
descriptions of Nature, and a wealth of ingenious imagery.1 — Speaker.
' That whatever Mr. Baring Gould writes is well worth reading, is a conclusion that
may be very generally accepted. His views of life are fresh and vigorous, his
language pointed and characteristic, the incidents of which he makes use are
striking and original, his characters are life-like, and though somewhat excep
tional people, are drawn and coloured with artistic force. Add to this that his
descriptions of scenes and scenery are> painted with the loving eyes and skilled
hands of a master of his art, that he is always fresh and never dull, and under
such conditions it is no wonder that readers have gained confidence both in hi.-;
power of amusing and satisfying them, and that year by year his popularity
widens.' — Court Circular.
ARM I NELL : A Social Romance. Fourth Edition.
URITH : A Story of Dartmoor. Fifth Edition.
' The author is at his b«st.' — Times.
IN THE ROAR OF THE SEA. Sixth Edition.
'One of the best imagined and most enthralling stories the author has produced.
— Saturday Review.
MRS. CURGENVEN OF CURGENVEN. Fourth Edition.
' The swing of the narrative is splendid.' — Sussex Daily News.
CHEAP JACK ZITA. Fourth Edition.
' A powerful drama of human passion.' — Westminster Gazette.
1 A story worthy the author.' — National Obsewer.
THE QUEEN OF LOVE. Fourth Edition.
' You cannot put it down until you have finished it.' — Punch.
' Can be heartily recommended to all who care for cleanly, energetic, and interesting
fiction.' — Sussex Daily News.
KITTY ALONE. Fourth Edition.
'A strong and original story, teeming with graphic description, stirring incident,
and, above all, with vivid and enthralling human interest. —Drily Telegraph.
NOEMI : A Romance of the Cave-Dwellers. Illustrated by
R. CATON WOODVILLE. Third Edition.
' " Noe*mi " is as excellent a tale of fighting and adventure as one may wish to meet.
The narrative also runs clear and sharp as the Loire itself.' — Pall Mall Gazette.
' Mr. Baring Gould's powerful story is full of the strong lights and shadows and
vivid colouring to which he has accustomed us." — Standard.
MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST 27
THE BROOM-SQUIRE. Illustrated by FRANK DADD.
Fourth Edition.
' A strain of tenderness is woven through the web of his tragic tale, and its atmosphere
is sweetened by the nobility and sweetness of the heroine's character.' — DmityafWi,
' A story of exceptional interest that seems to us to b« better than anything he has
written of late.'— Speaker.
THE PENNYCOMEQUICKS. Third Edition.
DARTMOOR IDYLLS.
' A book to read, and keep and read again ; for the genuine fun and pathos of it will
not early lose their effect.' — Vanity Fair.
GUAVAS THE TINNER. Illustrated by Frank Dadd. Second
Edition.
' Mr. Baring Gould is a wizard who transports us into a region of visions, often lurid
and disquieting, but always full of interest and enchantment." — Spectator.
' In the weirdness of the story, in the faithfulness with which the characters are
depicted, and in force of style, it closely resembles " Mehalah. "'-^Daily Telegraph.
' There is a kind of flavour about this book which alone elevates it above the ordinary
novel. The story itself has a grandeur in harmony with the wild and rugg<vi
scenery which is its setting. — Athtntrum.
Gilbert Parker's Novels
Crown &vo. 6s. each.
PIERRE AND HIS PEOPLE. Fourth Edition.
' Stories happily conceived and finely executed. There is strength and genius in Mr.
Parker's style.'— Daily Telegraph.
MRS. FALCHION. Fourth Edition.
1 A splendid study of character.' — Athtnaum.
4 Uut little behind anything that has been done by any writer of our time.' — Pall
MallGatettg. 'A very striking and admirable novel.'—.?/. James's Gazette.
THE TRANSLATION OF A SAVAGE.
'The plot is original and one difficult to work out; but Mr. Parker has done it w.th
great skill and delicacy. The reader who is not interested in this original, fresh,
and well-told tale must be a dull person indeed.' — Daily Cknmicle.
THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD. Fifth Edition.
'Everybody with a soul for romance will thoroughly enjoy "The Trail of the
Sword." '—St. James's Gazette.
' A rousing and dramatic tale. A book like this, in which swords flash, great sur
prises are undertaken, and daring deeds done, in which men and women live and
love in the old straightforward passionate way, is a joy inexpressible to the re
viewer.' — Daily Chronicle.
WHEN VALMOND CAME TO PONTIAC : The Story of
a Lost Napoleon. Fourth Edition.
' Here we find romance— real, breathing, living romance, but it runs flush with our
own times, level with our own feelings. The character of Valmond is drawn un
erringly ; his career, brief as it is, is placed before us as convincingly as history
itself. The book must be rend, we may say re-read, for any one thoroughly to
appreciate Mr. Parker's delicate touch and innate sympathy with humanity.'—
Pall Mall Gazette.
' The one work of geniua which 1895 ha« as yet produced. — Arw Agt.
AN ADVENTURER OF THE NORTH: The Last Adven
tures of ' Pretty Pierre. ' Second Edition.
•The present book is full of fine and moving stories of the great North, and it will
add to Mr. Parker's already high reputation.'— G&qfvw Herald.
28 MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST
THE SEATS OF THE MIGHTY. Illustrated. Eighth Edition.
1 The best thing he has done J one of the best things that any one has done lately.'—
St. James's Gazette.
'Mr. Parker seems to become stronger and easier with every serious novel that IIP.
attempts. ... In " The Seats of the Mighty " he shows the matured power which
his former novels have led us to expect, and has produced a really fine historical
novel. . . . Most sincerely Is Mr. Parker to bo congratulated on the finest
novel he has yet written.' — Athenaum.
'Mr. Parker's latest book places him in the front rank of living novelists. "The
Seats of the Mighty" is a great book.1— Black and White.
'One of the strongest stories of historical interest and adventure that we have read
for many a day. ... A notable and successful book.' — Speaker.
Conan Doyle. ROUND THE RED LAMP. By A. CONAN
DOYLE, Author of 'The White Company,' 'The Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes,' etc. Fifth Edition. Crown %vo. 6s.
' The book is, indeed, composed of leaves from life, and is far and away the best view
that has bien vouchsafed us behind the scenes of the consulting-room. It is very
superior to " The Diary of a late Physician." ' — Illustrated London JVcws.
Stanley Weyman. UNDER THE RED ROBE. By STANLEY
WEYMAN, Author of ' A Gentleman of France.' With Twelve Illus
trations by R. Caton Woodville. Twelfth Edition. Crown 8v0. 6s.
'A book of which we have read every word for the sheer pleasure of reading, and
which we put down with a pang that we cannot forget it all and start again.' —
Westminster Gazette.
' Every one who reads books at all must read this thrilling romance, from the first
page of which to the last the breathless reader is haled along. An inspiration of
" manliness and courage." ' — Daily Chronicle.
Lucas Malet. THE WAGES OF SIN. By LUCAS
MALET. Thirteenth Edition. Crown 8z>o. 6s.
Lucas Malet. THE CARISSIMA. By LUCAS MALET,
Author of 'The Wages of Sin,' etc. Third Edition. Crown %vo. 6s.
Arthur Morrison. TALES OF MEAN STREETS. By ARTHUR
MORRISON. Fourth Edition. Crown &ve. 6s.
1 Told with consummate art and extraordinary detail. He tells a plain, unvarnished
tale, and the very truth of it makes for beauty. In the true humanity of the book
lies its justification, the permanence of its interest, and its indubitable triumph.' —
A thenaum.
1 A great book. The author's method is amazingly effective, and produces a thrilling
sense of reality. The writer lays upon us a master hand. The book is simply
appalling and irresistible in its interest. It is humorous also ; without humour
it would not make the mark it is certain to make.'— World.
Arthur Morrison. A CHILD OF THE JAGO. By ARTHUR
MORRISON. Third Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s.
This, the first long story which Mr. Morrison has written, is like his remarkable
' Tales of Mean Streets,' a realistic study of Ea«t End life.
' The book is a masterpiece.' — Pall Mall Gazette.
' Told with great vigour and powerful simplicity.' — AtJtentrum.
Mrs. Clifford. A FLASH OF SUMMER. By Mrs. W. K. CLIF
FORD, Author of 'Aunt Anne, 'etc. Second Edition. Croion'&vo. 6s.
' The story is a very sad and a very beautiful one, exquisitely told, and enriched with
many subtle touches of wise and tender insight. It will, undoubtedly, add to its
author's repxitation — already high — in the ranks of novelists.' — Speaker.
MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST 29
Emily Lawless HURRISH. By the Honble. EMILY LAW-
LESS, Author of ' Maelcho,' etc. Fifth Edition. Crown 8zv 6s
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Rlad ly, therefore, do we welcome in " Maelcho " a piece of work of the fist order
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30 MESSRS. METIIUEN'S LIST
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MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST 31
H. Morrah. THE FAITHFUL CITY. By HERBERT MORKAH,
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32 MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST
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MESSRS. METHUEN'S LIST 33
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FICTION— continued
DODO. A Detail oi the Day. By E. F. BENSON.
IN THE MIDST OF ALARMS. By ROBERT BARR.
THE MUTABLE MANY. By ROBERT BARR.
THE GREEN GRAVES OF BALGOWRIE. By JANE H. FINDLATER.
A DAUGHTER OF STRIFE. By JANE H. FINDLATER.
OVER THE HILLS. By MARY FINDLATRR.
DOCTOR CONGALTON'S LEGACY. By HENRY JOHNSTON.
IN THE DAY OF ADVERSITY. By J. BLOUNDELLE BURTON.
DENOUNCED. By J. BLOUNDELLE BURTON.
THE CLASH OF ARMS. By J. BLOUNDELLE BURTON.
SUCCESSORS TO THE TITLE. By L. B. WALFORD.
A HOME IN INVERESK. By T. L. PATON.
THE DAUGHTER OF ALOUETTE. By MARY A. OWEN.
IN THE GREAT DEEP. Tales of the Sea. By J. A. BARRY.
MISS ARMSTRONG'S AND OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES. By JOHN
DAVIDSON, Author of 'The Ballad of a Nun,' etc.
A GIRL OF THE PEOPLE. By L. T. MEADE.
OUT OF THE FASHION. By L. T. MEADE.
THE SPIRIT OF STORM. A Romance of the Sea. By RONALD Ross.
A SERIOUS COMEDY. By H. A. MORRAH.
THE FAITHFUL CITY. By HERBERT MORRAH.
THE WAGES OF SIN. By LUCAS MALET.
THE CARISSIMA. By LUCAS MALET.
CAPTAIN JACOBUS. By L. COPE CORNFORD. Illustrated.
THE SPECULATORS. By J. F. BREWER.
BY STROKE OF SWORD. By ANDREW BALFOUR.
THE SIGN OF THE SPIDER. By BERTRAM MITFORD.
THE SQUIRE OF WANDALES. By A. SHIELD.
A HANDFUL OF EXOTICS. By SAMUEL GORDON.
THE SUPPLANTER. By B. P. NEUMANN.
THE SIN OF ANGELS. By EVELYN DICKINSON.
A MAN WITH BLACK EYELASHES. By H. A. KENNEDY.
THE FALL OF THE SPARROW. By M. C. BALFOUR.
AN ODD EXPERIMENT. By HANNAH LYNCH.
SECRETS OF THE COURTS OF EUROPE. By ALLEN UPWARD.
THE WHITE HECATOMB. By W. C. SCULLY.
A CREEL OF IRISH STORIES. By JANE BARLOW.
THE BUILDERS. By J. S. FLETCHER.
A PASSIONATE PILGRIM. By PERCY WHITE.
A WOMAN OF FORTY. By ESME STUART.
JOSIAH'S WIFE. By NORMA LORIMER.
Methuen's Colonial Library
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