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THE SCOTT LIBRARY.
THE POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
OF THE SAME PUBLISHERS.
Uniform zvit/t this volume.
LIFE OF JFSUS. By Ernest Ren an.
ANTICHRIST. By Ernest Renan.
MARCUS AURELIUS. Ky Ernest Renan.
LIFE OF RENAN. By Francis Esi-inassb.
Trice 1/6 and 2/6.
,*. FOR FULL LIST OP THE VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES,
SEE CATALOGUE AT END OF BOOK.
Poetry of the Celtic Races,
and other essays by ernest
Renan.
THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO., LTD.
LONDON AND FELL1NG-ON-TYNE.
NEW YORK: 3 EAST 14TH STREET.
PC
ft
14. % sx
"Che, non men die saver, dubbiar m'aggrata."
Dante, Inferno, Canto xi. 93.
" Car aussi ce sont icy mes humeurs et opinions; ie les donne pour ce
qui est en ma creance, non pour ce qui est a croire : ie ne vioe icy
qu'a descouvrir moy mesme, qui seray par adventure aultre demnin, si
nouvel apprentissage me change."
Montaigne, Essais, Liv. I. Chap. 25.
" Good sense and good nature are never separated, though the
ignorant world has thought otherwise."
Dkyden, Essay on Satire.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION
THE POETRY OF THB CELTIC RACES
WHAT IS A NATION ?
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE .
FAREWELL TO TOURGENIEF
THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS
INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM .
MARCUS AURELIUS
SPINOZA
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
NOTES
IX
I
61
84
109
113
126
138
162
187
217
Note. — The Translator wishes to acknowledge gratefully
the suggestions and criticisms given to him by Mr. Bernard
Bosanquet, LL.D., Mr. Joseph Brewis, and Mr. Henry
Ilooton.
INTRODUCTION.
In the history of modern European thought there are few
more interesting contrasts, than that which results from a
consideration of the attitude of the eighteenth and the
nineteenth century sceptic towards popular beliefs and
superstitions. If we further limit our view to France, and
further still, to two French men of letters, each of whom
fitly represents his own epoch, the contrast, in that it is
focussed into smaller compass, is perhaps the more striking.
Voltaire and Renan have at least one thing in common :
each of them in his time was the bete noire of his orthodox
contemporaries, each of them was proclaimed to be the
Antichrist foretold of old. The name of Voltaire to this
day brings a shudder to many worthy persons, while
Renan's Life of Jesus caused the publication, in France
alone, of fifteen hundred controversial books and pamphlets
within a year of its publication. But they are sceptics
with a difference : Voltaire's opinion of dogmatic and
theocratic Christianity — so far as one can gather that
remarkable man's real opinion of anything — was summed
x INTRODUCTION.
up in his well-known phrase, " Ecrasez rinfamel" "I
wish you," he wrote to D'Alembert in 1760, "to crush
the Infamous One — that is the great point." Renan was
an iconoclast of another type. He always retained a
profound veneration for the simple religious life in which
his childhood and youth had been passed. He had left
it with regret, and had kept, if not the form, much of the
spirit of the old faith. "Simple faith," he says, "is the
true faith ; and I confess that I should be inconsolable, if
I learned that my writings had scandalised one of those
folk of childlike soul who so truly worship in spirit." 1
Where Voltaire could only find cause for a burst of brilliant
raillery, Renan sees something to be treated with a gentle
and loving touch; Voltaire's mocking laughter becomes a
barely perceptible smile, and his pitiless analysis a sym-
pathetic synthesis. Both Voltaire and Renan are critics;
but the former attacks, the latter explains, and in so doing
proves himself to be the greater critic of the twain. For
the critic par excellence neither concludes nor excludes; his
aim is to understand without believing, to find other
people's enthusiasm useful and suggestive without sharing
it, above all to have a mind free from illusion. In fairness
it must be added however that, if Voltaire's scepticism tends
ever towards cynicism, that of Renan sometimes approaches
perilously close to undue sensibility, the sensibility that
delights in feeding upon the religious emotion of the
orthodox, without feeling bound to pay for the pleasure by
an affirmation of its legitimacy.
1 itttdes dllistoitc Religieuse.
INTRODUCTION. xi
We can account, in some measure, for the difference in
attitude between Voltaire and Renan by the product-of-
the-century theory, of which Taine and Sainte-Beuve were
so greatly enamoured. But I am inclined to lay more
stress upon the influence of heredity and early environ-
ment. Voltaire was a Parisian by birth, and most
essentially French in temperament; Renan was a Breton.
It would be a somewhat forced application of a well-worn
phrase to say, that if you scratch Renan you find a Breton.
At the same time, too much importance cannot be attached
to the fact that beneath his Gallicism, with its brilliant wit
and genius for critical analysis, there lay a deep substratum
of the Celtic spirit, its naive intuition, its romanticism, its
dreamy idealism. Through his mother he inherited a
strain of Gascon blood ; his father was a pure Breton.
Joseph Ernest Renan was born on February 28th, 1823,
at Treguier, a little town in Brittany. He came of a race
of seafarers, and, in all probability, was a descendant of
St. Renan (or Ronan), one of the migrants who in great
numbers came to Brittany from Wales and Ireland during the
fifth century, Renan's parents were of humble position ;
they had two means of subsistence, the one a small coasting-
vessel, the other a little " general " shop. But they had a
hard fight to make ends meet — the Renans were tradi-
tionally unable to save money — and at last, when Ernest
was a child of five, the climax of the family misfortunes
was reached. One dark night the father in going back
to his ship, fell from the quay at St. Malo and was
drowned. He left the family deeply in debt, but the
xii INTRODUCTION.
creditors accepted an offer made by Ernest's sister,
Henriette, then a girl of fifteen, to pay off her father's
debts by degrees. This she accomplished after twenty
years of labour and sacrifice. She began by keeping an
infant school, and, finding it successful, she settled at
Lannion, a town of more importance than Treguier. How-
ever, convent schools began to spring up, Henriette's
academy was abandoned for lack of pupils, and the
Renans returned to Treguier. And then Ernest's educa-
tion began. The good sister and a cousin in the priesthood
paid his first school-fees, but he soon relieved them of the
burden by gaining a scholarship in the ecclesiastical
seminary of the town. He was a model pupil, studious,
docile, and of great piety ; indeed, his rather un-boyish
qualities earned him the nickname of " Mademoiselle,"
and much teasing from his less effeminate schoolfellows.
He ever retained an affectionate memory of the old priests
who were his earliest preceptors. Narrow their ideas might
be, but they were good and honourable men, and they
honestly strove to instil their own simple virtues into the
minds of their pupils. Another portrait of this period of
Renan's life which he depicts with tender art is that of
the beautiful little girl, Noemi, whom he loved, child as he
was, and after whom in latter years he named his first-born
daughter. Renan's boyhood in Brittany, that land of
desolate moors and grey skies, was an education in
romanticism. Treguier itself, with its convents and ancient
cathedral, a survival of the ages of faith and ecclesiasticism ;
the surrounding country, dotted with little chapels of local
INTRODUCTION. xiii
saints unknown to the rest of Christendom — Tudwal, and
Iltud, and a hundred more; old churchyards fronting the
grey sea — which covers, so the Breton legend tells, the
city of Is, whose spires may be seen in the hollow of the
waves when the sea is rough, whose bells can be heard
pealing when the day is calm and still : — such was the
scene of Renan's early years, and it left indelible impres-
sions on his memory and his temperament.
At the age of fifteen a great change came over Renan's
life, but for which he would have probably spent the
remainder of it as a country cure, or perhaps as a professor
of theology in the College of Treguier. The Abbe
Dupanloup, whose successful conversion of Talleyrand
had given him fame in the Catholic circles of France, was
in 1838 at the head of a great ecclesiastical preparatory
school in Paris — St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. His pupils
were recruited in two ways. He had under his charge
many boys belonging to aristocratic families. From these
he received large fees; and this enabled him to give a
gratuitous education to boys of poor birth but exceptional
ability. To obtain the latter the Abbe used to send
emissaries to different parts of France. Renan fell under
the notice of one of these recruiting-agents, when, in the
year 1838, he had won all the prizes of his class in the
Treguier College. A summons from the Abbe reached him
during his summer vacation, and in three days he was in
Paris. "This was the gravest crisis of my life," he writes
in his Souvenirs; 1 "the young Breton does not bear trans-
1 Souvenirs cfEn/ance et dejeunesse (1SS3).
xiv INTRODUCTION.
planting. The keen moral repulsion which I felt, added to
a complete change in my habits and mode of life, brought
on a very severe attack of home-sickness." So severe
indeed was his home-sickness, that he became seriously
ill, almost to the point of death. " I sometimes think that
the Breton part of me did die ; the Gascon unfortunately
found sufficient reason for living. The latter discovered
too, that this new world was a very curious one, and was
well worth clinging to. ' n
St. Nicolas was an establishment of two hundred students,
and it was scarcely to be expected that its busy super-
intendent should at once take a personal interest in the
new-comer. But a connecting link was established between
the Abbe and the home-sick boy. The former had a
mother whom he held in tender affection, and one of
Renan's letters to his own dearly-loved mother fell into his
hands. "Thenceforward he took notice of me. He
recognised my existence, and he was for me what he was
for all of us — a principle of life, a sort of deity." 1 This
mental forcing-house of St. Nicolas was the means of
introducing Renan to a new world of ideas. For his old
Breton teachers, literature had ended with the Revolution;
but here in Paris the Romantic movement was at its height,
Hernani had been produced a few years previously, and
Hugo and Lamartine became his intellectual stimulants.
Once more however he was to pass into a new
atmosphere. From St. Nicolas, where rhetoric and
literature were the chief subjects of study, he entered
1 Souvenirs.
INTRODUCTION. xv
the branch establishment, at Issy, of the Theological
Seminary of St. Sulplice, where he studied philosophy —
or at least such of it as had obtained the sanction of
the Church — and devoted much time and meditation
to Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, and other philosophers,
including Reid and the Scottish school. These two years
at Issy were only a preparation for St. Sulplice, where
his studies were divided into two parts— dogmatics and
moral philosophy. Theological and philosophical teaching
formed one great whole, the smallest detail of which could
not be removed without danger. In connection with
the theological side of this system of education, it was
necessary to study the Bible in the original languages;
and, under the guidance of Le Hir, a man of accomplish-
ment and learning, Renan threw himself into this part of
his work with unbounded enthusiasm. He soon made
great progress in the study of the Semitic languages ;
and, since an acquaintance with the great German critics
and philologists was indispensable to him, he learned
German. Le Hir also had a profound knowledge of the
methods and results of German exegesis, but his orthodoxy
was unshaken and indeed unshakable. Renan describes
him as a man whose mind was divided into water-tight
compartments; and probably had he himself possessed
a mind of like construction, he would have ended his
days as a bishop in the odour of sanctity.
But it was not to be so. Even before leaving Issy slight
signs of scepticism had been apparent in Renan, though prob-
ably he was not at that time fully conscious of any approach-
xvi INTRODUCTION.
ing crisis. One of the Issy professors had indeed roundly
charged him with infidelity ; but his agony of remorse
had been gently healed by the Principal of the establish-
ment, who had a comfortable theory that a young man's
theological doubts were somewhat of the nature of a
distemper, which would pass away in due course, But
Renan's scepticism was not a passing phase. His studies
in German philosophy had given him a wider outlook
on the world of ideas, than is desirable for a young man
who intends to become a Roman Catholic priest ; above
all, his Semitic studies convinced him that inspiration,
as the Church conceived it, was out of the question, and
that the Bible must bear the same critical treatment as
any other great literature. He came to recognise the
fallacy of the circular argument employed by dogmatic
Catholicism : — the infallibility of the Church rests on that
of the Bible, but then the infallibility of the Bible rests
on that of the Church. Now whether, as we are repeatedly
assured, neither Catholic nor Protestant is bound up with
the infallibility of the Bible, whether a man may be an
orthodox Catholic or Protestant without such a belief,
Renan held strongly to the opinion that the faith of his
Church was tied to literal inspiration, and had no respect
for the religious trimmer in his attempts towards reconciling
the irreconcilable. The true Catholic, he said, would be
inflexible in the declaration : " If I must abandon my past,
I shall abandon the whole ; for I believe in everything
upon the principle of infallibility, and the principle is as
much affected by one small concession as by ten thousand
INTRODUCTION. xvii
large ones." 1 :. It was then Biblical and historical criticism
that did most to shake his positive faith. Such a priori
convictions as he had were always vague ; at this period
of his life they were theistic in tendency, and for a time
indeed his mind was drawn, mainly by the influence
of Herder's writings, towards rationalistic Protestantism.
Though outwardly he was still a devout Christian, taking
part in all the duties and services of the Church, a fierce
conflict was being waged within him. In his twenty-
third year he stood at the parting of the ways. Was
he to go on in his present path, and teach all his life
dogmas in which he had ceased to believe? Or was
he to break off everything, at the risk of causing pain
to his preceptors and his gentle, pious mother? Honesty
bade him pursue the latter course ; and his sister Hemiette,
who was now a governess in Poland, strongly advised him
not to bind himself over to the Church, promised to find
him a tutorship, and sent him ^40 with which to support
himself for the time. At last the crisis came. Arriving
at St. Sulplice in the autumn of 1845 from his annual
holiday in Brittany, he learned that he had been appointed
to a Carmelite institution in Paris. He at once refused
the appointment, and had an interview with his former
Principal, the Abbe Dupanloup, who told him very
decisively that he had no right to remain in the Church
a day longer. He also offered him pecuniary assistance,
but this, owing to Henriette's generous action, was un-
necessary.
1 Souvenirs.
2
xviii INTRODUCTION.
On the 6th of October 1845, Renan left St. Sulplice, and
commenced upon a new chapter in his life. From his
Souvenirs one can learn how long and bitter was the strife
that ended thus.
"Because a Parisian gamin disposes with a jest of creeds
from which Pascal, with all his reasoning powers, could not
shake himself free, it must not be concluded that the gamin
is superior to Pascal. I confess that at times I feel
humiliated to think that it cost me five or six years of
arduous research, and the study of Hebrew, the Semitic
languages, Gesenius, and Ewald, to arrive at the result
which this urchin achieves in a twinkling. . . . But Pere
Hardouin used to say that he had not got up at four o'clock
every morning for forty years, to think as all the world
thought. So I am loth to admit that I have been at so
much pains to fight a mere Chimcera bombinans. . . .
There are in reality but few people who have a right to
disbelieve in Christianity." To support himself in his new
life, Renan accepted a post as tutor in an educational
boarding-house, where he received board and lodgings in
return for his services. These duties were light, and most
of his time was given to study, to passing examinations,
and to writing for periodicals; and naturally philology,
more especially that of the Semitic languages, claimed the
greater part of his attention. At this time too he made
the acquaintance of a man who was destined to be his life-
long friend — Marcellin Berthelot, the distinguished chemist
and statesman. The friendship of two men of intellectual
genius can never be unfruitful of result, both for themselves
INTRODUCTION. xix
and for the world at large; and that of Renan and Berthelot
was no exception to the rule. Though their paths were
different, each was interested in the work of the other (Renan
sometimes regretted that he had not devoted himself to
physical science) ; and together they discussed interminably
the great problems that lie beyond all science, and up to which
all scientific thought inevitably leads. How great was
Berthelot's influence may be gathered from Renan's work,
The Future of Science, which was written in 1848, but
remained unpublished for another forty years. In this
curious book Renan first set down his general ideas of the
universe. He described, in his forecast of things to be, a
world where, as in Plato's Republic, philosophy would be
on the throne, where the religious wants of men would be
met by culture, and " the beautiful and passionate quest of
truth." This state of society was to be attained, not by an
equable redistribution of material wealth, but by the uni-
versal diffusion of the "sweetness and light" of humanism.
In its enthusiastic conviction of tone and certitude, it is
pre-eminently the work of a young man ; but its general
ideas always remained the fundamental base of nearly all
his later thought.
The year 1847 saw Renan's first appearance in the
world of science and letters as the winner of the Volney
prize at the Institute of France. His prize essay, after-
wards developed into a General History of the Semitic
Languages, gained him the friendship of Eugene Bournouf,
who was then Professor of Sanscrit at the College of France;
and he commenced to attend the latter's lectures, thereby
xx INTRODUCTION.
adding to his knowledge of the Semitic languages a pro-
found acquaintance with Indian literature and mythology.
Renan had by this time attracted sufficient attention for
the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres to send him
on a literary mission to Italy ; and the successful manner
in which he carried out and reported on his labours led to
his appointment, in 1851, to a post in the Bibliotheque
Nationale, and, in 1856, to membership of the Academie
des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. In the meantime he
had published his work on Averroes, the philosopher of
Mohammedan Spain, and the General History of the Semitic
Languages already mentioned.
His means were now almost sufficient to permit him to
marry the woman of his choice, Cornelie Scheffer, niece of
the famous painter of that name. His sister, who had been
keeping house for him, came to the aid of the young people,
and, with characteristic generosity, enabled them to com-
mence their married life. Renan's was a very happy
marriage, and his household of course included Henriette.
Many of his contributions to the Revue des Deux Mondes
and the Journal des Debats were now collected and pub-
lished in Etudes d'ffisioire Religieuse (1857) and Essais de
Morale et de Critique (1859). Perhaps more than any
other man of his time, Renan executed a double pro-
gramme of intellectual labour. On the one hand, he was
constantly engaged on the principal work of his life — the
history of the Semitic tongues, of the early Christian Church,
and of the People of Israel ; on the other, he was ever
ready to turn his attention to contemporary thought and
INTRODUCTION. xxi
action. In these two volumes the range of his subjects
is very great : Mohammed and Channing, Calvin and
Lamennais, the Religions of Antiquity and the Poetry of
the Celtic Races — all these indicate the breadth of his
learning, and his genius for exposition. He appeals to us
as a philologist, a historian, a theologian, and a literary
critic. And to each of these characters is added that of
the man of letters, who, of whatever subject he may treat,
endows it with the crowning gift of style. One of the most
interesting essays in the Etudes is that on the "Critical
Historians of Jesus," interesting because it foreshadows
his own much discussed work. He gives special attention
to Strauss, whose first biography of Jesus had been
published in 1835, and gives him high praise, qualified,
however, by criticism of his tendency to dissociate the
events of the life of Jesus from actual occurrences, and of
his too close adherence to Hegelian thought. An essay
from each of these two books appears in the present
volume. That from Etudes, on Feuerbach, is chiefly
valuable for the light it throws upon Renan's view of
Christianity, and upon his intense dislike of the dogmatic
atheism of which Feuerbach — who has become somewhat
of an extinct volcano — was such a doughty champion. The
beautiful essay on the Poetry of the Celtic Races shows
Renan at his best What more congenial theme could he
find than the poetry of mystery and romantic imagination,
which has been given to the world by his own race, that
race which he knew and loved so well? It was to the
legends, the poetry, the religion of his boyhood, to his own
xxii INTRODUCTION.
forefathers, to St. Renan and Peredur, to St. Brandan and
St. Patrick, that he devoted some of his most delicate
criticism and most impassioned prose. I cannot refrain
from quoting from the preface —
" O fathers of the obscure tribe by whose fireside I drank
in faith in the unseen, humble clan of workers and mariners
to whom I owe the vigour of my soul in an exhausted
land, in an age when hope is dead, — I doubt not that you
wandered over those enchanted seas where our father
Brandan sought the Land of Promise, that you gazed upon
those green isles whose grass dipped in the waves, that
with St. Patrick you traversed the circle of that world no
longer beheld of the eyes of men. . . Let us be consoled
by our fantasies, by our nobility, by our disdain. Who
knows but that those dreams are truer than reality ? God
be my witness, ancient fathers, that my only delight lies in
this — that at times I feel that I am your conscience, that
through me you attain life and utterance."
Renan's studies in Semitic literature had hitherto been
principally addressed to the savant and the specialist. In
1859 he appealed to a wider public by publishing a new
translation of the Book of Job. Renan's own prose so
often trespasses on the domain of poetry, that it is scarcely
necessary to speak of the beauty of his rendering. In the
following year he followed up the poem of Job, with its
despairing defiance of destiny and its atmosphere of gloom,
by publishing a new edition of one of the most idyllic and
human poems of the Bible — the Song of Songs. Like
Ewald, he of course dismisses the fruitless attempts, which
INTRODUCTION. xxiii
have been made since the days of Philo and Origen, to
force an allegorical interpretation on the poem. Like
Ewald also, he re-arranges the somewhat incoherent text
in which it appears in the ordinary versions, so as to give
it the form of a lyrical drama.
By this time Renan's reputation as an Oriental scholar
was firmly established, and in i860 Napoleon III. asked
him to undertake an expedition to Phcenicia, for the pur-
pose of examining ancient sites in that country. Renan
accepted the invitation, and set out in company with his
wife and sister. The former soon returned to France, but
Henriette remained with her brother till her death from
fever in September 1861. She passed away while Renan,
who had been attacked by the same disease, was lying
unconscious. His grief on hearing of his loss was of the
most poignant kind. None knew so well as himself all
that he owed to Henriette, to her tender solicitude, her
unselfishness, her unfailing love; and in a short biographical
sketch — originally printed for private circulation — he told
the story of her life. All who have read the Life of Jesus
will remember the touching dedication, " To the pure soul
of my Sister Henriette."
As is related in that dedication, he commenced, while in
Syria, upon what was destined to be his best known work.
It was not however finally completed and published until
1863, when it took the reading world by storm. It
appealed principally of course to that rather wide circle of
readers who, without having a belief in the supernatural
side of religion, feel a dislike for the arid and negative
xxir INTRODUCTION.
teaching of eighteenth century deism and some modern
forms of scepticism. To such as these Renan's new gospel
appeared an honest attempt at bringing the life of the
Founder of Christianity into the light of modern historical
study; but, as might be expected, the publication of the
work was, for orthodox opinion, as a match applied to a
powder magazine. The air was darkened with the fifteen
hundred books and pamphlets which their authors felt
moved to launch at Renan's head, rumours of the most
libellous kind about his private character were put in
circulation, and an anonymous but pious lady sent him,
during the rest of his life, a monthly letter containing a
kindly reminder that there was a hell ! It is not my
intention to add appreciably to the mass of criticism, good,
bad, and indifferent, which has clustered about the Life of
Jesus. Whether or not it be an epoch-making book, one
can at least confidently assert that it has had the profound-
est influence on modern conceptions of the origin of
Christianity. The absolutely impartial historian has never
yet lived, and probably never will. Renan had his own a
priori view of his subject, his own way of looking at events
— if you will, his own prejudices. The moral beauty of
Christian teaching he found in the gentleness, the mild-
ness, the " sweet reasonableness " of Jesus ; the intellectual
beauty, in the idea of "the Kingdom of God." He has
been accused of straining conjecture, of using romantic
invention, of writing for effect, of being picturesque for the
sake of being picturesque. But the same criticism could
be applied to any historian with a great subject, a paucity
INTRODUCTION. xxv
of data, and an instinct for filling up gaps. The historian
must be a creator as well as a critic ; a great historian of no
imagination is a contradiction in terms. And Renan's
good faith is beyond question ; the accumulation of refer-
ences at the foot of his pages is sometimes overpowering ;
he is never polemical or unduly dogmatic. But the
harmonious cadences of its exquisite prose, the perfection
of its descriptions, the sweet seduction of its sentiment,
need not blind us to the fact that this sentiment occasion-
ally passes into sentimentalism, and that the aesthetic aspect
of the subject is accorded an undue preponderance. The
story goes that a certain lady having picked up the Life of
Jesus was so fascinated, that she devoured it as though it
were one of the most dramatic and enthralling of romances.
With a sigh, not of relief but of insatiety, she read the final
page and exclaimed : " What worries me is that it doesn't
wind up with a wedding ! " — Ce qui nCennuie dest que cela
nefinit pas par un mariage ! This anecdote indicates both
the strength and the weakness of the book.
The clamours raised by its publication had, as one result,
the final dismissal of Renan from the Chair of Hebrew,
which he had occupied in the College of France since 1862.
His inaugural lecture, by its prediction of the separation of
Church and State, and by a passage in which the Founder
of Christianity was called a man, 1 had set clerical influence
at work in the Imperial Court and caused his suspension.
1 The passage was as follows : — "A reform of Judaism, one so profound
and so peculiar that it was in truth a complete creation, was achieved
by a man, to whom no other man can be compared, a man so great
xxvi INTRODUCTION.
He had continued, however, to receive his salary, and to
give private instruction to his students; but now, after a
correspondence in which Renan showed dignity and a
command of ironical wit, the appointment was formally
revoked, and he found himself thrown on his own re-
sources, by this time however, owing to his successes in
literature, sufficient for his needs.
The Apostles were to form the subject of the next volume
in the History of the Origins of Christianity ; and in 1864
Renan set out on another Eastern tour, with the aim of
visiting the localities which were to be the background of
the book. Les Apotres appeared in 1864, and was followed,
three years later, by the volume devoted to St. Paul. To
touch adequately on these and the succeeding volumes of
the Origins would be out of place here, and I must there-
fore do no more than chronicle their appearance. Both
religious and political subjects were treated in Questions
Contemporaines, a volume published in 1868. Renan's
mind was greatly exercised at this time by the critical
state of French politics. The Emperor had fallen more
and more under the influence of the clerical party, and,
as an inevitable consequence, a retrogressive policy was
adopted with regard to the Papal and other questions.
In the general election of May 1869 Renan emerged from
his study, and appeared in the political arena as a candi-
date. His political creed was that of a moderate liberal,
that, although in this place everything must be judged from the point
of view of positive science, I should be loth to contradict those who,
struck by the exceptional character of his work, call him God."
INTRODUCTION. xxvii
favouring reform, the development of public education, and
freedom of association, religion, and the press, but averse
to any violent or sudden changes. He was opposed by
the two extreme parties, that of the Government, and that
of the Republicans, and lost the day.
In the summer of the following year Renan made a tour in
Scotland and the North of Europe with Prince Napoleon ;
but it was cut short by a telegram which reached them at
Tromsoe, in Norway, and informed them that war with
Germany was inevitable. The fateful news took them by
surprise. To Renan the future of France had seemed
likely to be melancholy and commonplace, but such a
cataclysm as this he had not expected. He thought it the
consequence of a sudden fit of insanity. A word or two
concerning the well-known controversy with Strauss may be
said here. A fortnight before the "■debacle'" of Sedan, but
when the ultimate success of Germany was assured, the latter
sent Renan a long letter in which, after a dissertation on the
modern history of Europe, especially as it bore on French
aggression and thirst for primacy, he administered to France
through the medium of his correspondent a species of
moral lecture on her natural failings, and, naturally enough,
indulged in paeans of victory. Renan's response was pre-
cisely what might have been expected of him. While he
admitted that France had been to blame in declaring war,
he pointed out the loss to the world involved in her
annihilation, and concluded with a gentle hint to Strauss,
that he might profitably bear in mind some precepts of
the hero of his best known work : " Have you noticed
xxviii INTRODUCTION.
that, neither in the Beatitudes, nor in the Sermon on the
Mount, is there a word giving a place to military virtues
among those which gain the Kingdom of God?" Strauss's
second letter was even more severe than his first. Its
principal point was the stress laid on the fact that Alsace
and Lorraine had once been German provinces, and ought
to become so once more. Renan met this by a very power-
ful argument against the annexation of provinces without
the consent of their populations, 1 and administered a
delicately ironical reproof to his "illustrious master" for
having — without permission — published Renan's former
letter along with his own two epistles, in a volume the
profits of which were devoted to German soldiers wounded
in the war. " Heaven preserve me from raising a quibble
about literary copyright ! Moreover, the act in which you
have made me take part is an act of humanity, and if my
poor prose has succeeded in procuring a few cigars for those
who plundered my little house at Sevres, I owe you my
thanks for having made my conduct conform to what I
consider as some of the most authentic precepts of Jesus.
But assuredly had you allowed me to publish a pro-
duction of your pen, never, never should I have dreamt
of issuing an edition of it for the benefit of our Hotel
des Invalides."
The Strauss correspondence, along with some of Renan's
most weighty contributions to the literature of politics and
education, was republished in the volume entitled La
1 The essay entitled "What is a Nation?" on paye 61 of this
volume, deals with the same theme.
INTRODUCTION. xxix
Reforme IntelkchieUe et Morale de la Fra?ice (187 1). That
France might rise again from her downfall, that even that
downfall might ultimately prove to have been her salvation
— such was the leading idea running through the various
essays of this book, which met with a very hostile reception
from Mazzini and other Republican writers, owing to what
they considered its retrograde tendency. 1 The fourth
volume of the Origins saw the light in 1873. It was
entitled L'A?itec?irist, and continued the history of the early
Church from the point at which Renan had left it in St
Paul. Nero, Paul, Peter, James, and John all figure in
this fascinating part of his history, and a very full treatment
is accorded to the remarkable book which we know as the
Revelation of St. John, to its probable date and authorship.
The remaining volumes of the Origins were Les Evangiks
(1877), L'Eglise Chr'etienne (1879), and Marc Aurek
(1882).
Renan had resumed his professorship at the College of
France in 1870 (reaching the dignity of Principal three
years later); but in April 1871 he left Paris, then under
the rule of the Commune, and tried to forget the sickening
realities around him in writing the Dialogues Philosophiques.
The dialogue became a favourite form of expression with
Renan in later life ; it was admirably adapted to the "double-
edged wisdom," the self-abandonment to successive states of
mind, which he recommends as being the one thing needful
to the modern thinker. In these Philosophical Dialogues,
and in the dramas — Caliban (1878), L'Eau de Jouvence
1 See Mazzints Essays (Scott Library), p. 299.
xxx INTRODUCTION.
(1881), Le Pretre de Nemi (1886), and L'Abesse de Jouarre
(1886) — one sees his flexibility of idea and utterance to the
best advantage. Now in one character he is soaring into
the rosy clouds and mists of the ideal, or steeping himself
in a passionate mysticism ; now he appears as the materialist,
the man of positive science and negative criticism. But
whatever the character, whatever the turn of thought or
expression, one feels that all the time it is Renan who is
speaking; Renan who described himself as "a tissue of
contradictions, one half of me engaged in devouring the
other half, like the fabled beast of Ctesias who ate his
own paws without knowing it ; " Renan who has words of
warning for the man who does not 'contradict himself at
least once a day — " Malheur a qui ne se contredit pas une
fois par jour /" — Renan who tells one that the only way to
be sure of happening on the truth at least once in a life-
time is to be prepared for all contingencies, "to abandon
one's self successively to confidence, scepticism, optimism,
irony."
At the Spinoza celebration of 1877, Renan delivered the
fine address to be found in this volume. With Spinoza he
had much in common ; especially in respect to the philo-
sophy of practical living, there is considerable resemblance
between the views of the seventeenth century sage and the
more modern thinker. Claude Bernard, the great physio-
logist died in 1878, and the French Academy, of which he
had been a member, elected Renan to the vacant arm-chair.
Renan's address on his reception, as a matter of course,
consisted in great part of a eulogy of his predecessor; but
INTRODUCTION. xxxi
he took occasion to restate his views on the world, as it
appears from a supernatural and from a scientific point of
view. Reality was, he said, far grander than our idea of
it ; science, while it had destroyed a world of dreams, had
given us a world a thousand times more beautiful. With
this, one can compare the introduction to his version of the
Book of Ecclesiastes published in the same year (1879).
" Ring out, church bells," he says in his favourite character
of pious sceptic, " for the more you ring, the more shall
I allow myself to say that your ringing means nothing
definite. Were I afraid of putting you to silence — then,
ah then I should become timorous and discreet ! "
In the following spring he came to London and deli-
vered the Hibbert lectures of the year, his subject being
"Christianity and Rome." A lecture on Marcus Aurelius, 1
delivered at the Royal Institution during this visit, reproduces
the salient features of the last volume of the Origins. But
perhaps the most interesting event of Renan's later years was
a visit which he paid to Treguier in 18S4. The old town
itself was very much the same as when he had left it, forty
years before, for Paris ; but his mother, his sister, and most
of the early friends whose portraits he had traced in the
Souvenirs were dead, and there was a note of pathos in
the speech which he delivered in reply to an address of
welcome. This visit revived his old love for Brittany, and
during the remainder of his life he spent part of each year
at Rosmapamon, near Lannion. In the meantime he had
been making progress with his last great work, and in 1887
1 See page 138.
xxxii INTRODUCTION.
appeared the first volume of the Histoire da Peuple oV Israel.
Four more volumes followed, two before and two after his
death. By the production of this history he brought to
a triumphant conclusion the great work of his life — a
record and criticism of the origins of Christianity. Feuilles
Detachees was published in 1892, a book of odds and ends,
ranging from after-dinner speeches at the Celtic Club to an
" Examination of Philosophic Consciousness," containing
his most mature ideas on man and the universe.
The good humour and gaiety of Renan's later writings
might well give one the impression, that, in the evening of
his life, he enjoyed a well-earned leisure and perfect health.
But such was far from being the case. In his latter years
his health was very uncertain, although he continued to fill
all the obligations which he took upon himself. During
1892 his practical stoicism was manifested in all its
grandeur. As early as January he knew that his days
were numbered. On October 24th of the previous year he
had finished the last volume of the History of Israel, and
had written at the head of the final chapter, Finito libra sit
laus et gloria Crislo. But he still had duties to fulfil and
tasks to accomplish, and he earnestly hoped for time to do
all before his end. In the summer he went as usual to
Brittany, but feeling much worse he returned to Paris.
There at his post as head of the College of -France he
passed away on October 2nd. M. Monod tells us that
among his last words were, " Let us submit ourselves to
the laws of that Nature of which we ourselves are one of
the manifestations. The heavens and the earth abide."
INTRODUCTION. xxxiii
To those who had known him he left an ineffaceable
memory. There was nothing in his outward appearance to
give him charm ; he was small in stature, with an immense
head buried between his shoulders, and in his later years
especially he was extremely stout. But such external
characteristics were forgotten, we are told, when he began
to speak. Indeed, his conversational powers were of the
highest order. His urbanity was only equalled by his wit,
his memory by his imagination; and he was too an
admirable story-teller. I cannot but quote from some
reminiscences given by Sir Frederick Pollock soon after
Renan's death : —
" Most persons who have any character in their faces
may be likened, without any violent straining of fancy, to
some animal. If I had been commanded to choose a totem-
beast for Renan by the law of signatures, I should have
chosen a very wise and benevolent toad. But this is said
in confidence to people who agree with me in liking toads
and not understanding why they are called ugly. When
Renan spoke, it was a magical change. One forgot all
about his looks, or rather it seemed quite fitting that he
should look exactly as he did, and he became manifest as
a supreme artist in the rare and difficult art of good talk.
Dr. Johnson would have execrated his books if he could
have read them, and opened his arms to Renan himself
after five minutes' conversation if they could have met.
It was the utmost refinement of performance on a fine
instrument, and without any stiffness or artificial display."
One who has never heard Renan's voice may form a
3
xxxiv INTRODUCTION.
conception of his conversation by a study of his prose
style. He was the greatest master of modern French prose,
which some would interpret as the greatest master of all
modern prose. His familiarity with the Bible, with Greek
and Latin literature, and with the French classics gave
a raiment of antique grace to his modernity. To analyse
the magic of his style would be impossible within the
present limits, and perhaps in any case fruitless. We may
rest contented in the enjoyment of his stately periods, his
mordant irony, his ingenuous candour, his daring paradox ;
and marvel at the subtle interminglement of matter and
style, thought and utterance, whereby these two disparate
elements seem to lose their dualism and become one.
What I have said of Renan's style might thus serve as
an account of his thought. A certain class of critics are
vociferous in their demand for a "message"; and to get
this "message," they remorselessly boil down the author,
who is their victim for the time being, into a solid and
somewhat indigestible mass, in which aphorisms are em-
bedded like plums. Renan as a message-bearer would not
be a success — he would better indeed fill the part of two or
more message-bearers. The faith of his childhood and his
ancestors dwelt with him as a sentiment, along with the
spirit of agnosticism and free inquiry which had come
to him in early manhood. At times he speaks as a mystic
overflowing with religious ecstasy ; and none has more
eloquently interpreted than he the brooding mystery of the
infinite, the eternal yearning of humanity towards an ideal,
remote by the very law of its being. At times he speaks as
INTRODUCTION. xxxv
a critic — a critic whose last word is that for such fantasies
there is no basis of fact within our acquirement ; and none
has better expressed the contentment of those that see the
futility of all desire for the unattainable, and only cherish
it aesthetically as a source of poetry, or scientifically as an
element of human nature. Joubert's happy description of
Montaigne as "Thomme ondoyant et divers" could be
fittingly used of Montaigne's modern compatriot.
I have already spoken of this seeming inconsistency. It
is the most obvious criticism of the man that can be made,
and he has made it himself more than once. In his later
writings his more festive and ironical turn of mind is chiefly
apparent. If this world be not the best of all possible
worlds, he would seem to say, it is certainly the most
amusing. What more can the philosopher desire? He
has only to take his seat in the stalls, and watch the comedy
that is being played on the stage before him. " If the
world be a bad farce, by gaiety we make it a good one."
How much of this is mere surface opinion and how
much rooted conviction, I shall not stop to inquire. To
Renan might be applied what Lowell has somewhere
said of Landor — he was a man of great thoughts rather
than a great thinker. To the judicious reader the choice
is open. He can take and assimilate the Renan of the
essay on BeVanger, the Renan who in the preface to his
translation of Job tells us that, "Duty with its incalculable
philosophical consequences, in imposing itself upon all,
resolves all doubts, reconciles all oppositions, and serves as
a foundation to rebuild what reason destroys or allows to
xxxvi INTRODUCTION.
crumble down." But then, on the other hand, he can betake
himself to the other Renan, of the essay on Amiel or the
Souvenirs^ who will point out to him that after all it is quite
possible that the virtuous life may be a gigantic fraud, and
that the libertine may be the true sage. Renan, in the
attitude of a light-hearted spectator of all Time and all
Existence, has offended the austerity of such grave and
reverend juniors as Mr. Andrew Lang and M. Jules
Lemaitre. The former, in an article rather lacking in his
usual urbanity, describes him as an "elderly and erudite
butterfly," while the latter finds that: "As Macbeth mur-
dered sleep, so M. Renan, twenty times, one hundred times,
in each of his books has murdered joy, has murdered action,
has murdered peace of mind, and the security of the moral
life." If such be the case, one can only commiserate
M. Lemaitre, and advise him to leave this wholesale
murderer's works severely alone.
In Renan's discourse on being received into the
Academy, he compared the truths of conscience to the
revolving gleams of a lighthouse. For a brief space they
shine strongly upon us ; then they are gone, and we begin
to wonder whether we really saw them after all. Perhaps
it was so with himself. He had his vision of Deity, not
revealed in Nature, which he saw to be immoral, indifferent
to good and evil, nor by intelligence ("were man nothing
more than intelligent he would be an atheist ") ; but
unveiled in the divine instincts of duty, devotion, and
sacrifice, all of which things are without God inexplicable.
And even if the " Eternal Verities " were obscured at
INTRODUCTION. xxxvii
times, there was always the world to interest him. In the
Child's Garden of Verses is a couplet which holds Renan's
optimism in a nut-shell —
"The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."
It was this interested outlook on the world — and the world
of course included himself — that was his safeguard against
the pessimism which generally dogs the disillusioned
idealist. He himself attributed his good-humoured
tolerance of the world and its absurdities to his Catholic
education. The emancipated Catholic, he tells us, is
fortunate enough "to behold the universe in its infinite
splendour, Nature in her high and generous majesty."
But note how different is the fate of the most emancipated
Protestant ; he " retains a touch of sadness, a depth of
intellectual austerity analogous to Slavonic pessimism." 1
In writing this Renan might well seem to be criticising
a man with whom, despite essential differences, he had
much in common. Like Renan, Matthew Arnold was
in arms against the hosts of Philistia ; like Renan,
he cast off formal dogma, but retained an instinctive
love and veneration for the religion whose spirit still
lived within him. But none the less there remains the
fundamental fact, that, while Arnold is stricken with
something that at times seems almost blank despair,
Renan is in excellent spirits. "Let us," he says, "leave
the fortunes of this planet to be accomplished without
1 See page 196.
xxxviii INTRODUCTION.
troubling ourselves with regard to their conclusion. Our
outcries will make no difference, our ill-humour would
be out of place. It is quite possible that the earth may
be missing her destiny, as probably worlds innumerable
have missed theirs. . . But the universe knows not dis-
couragement; each check leaves it young, alert, full of
illusions" (Le Pretre de Nemi).
The cheerful resignation of such a passage seems to have
an irritant effect upon certain persons, who delight to
show their own sincerity by accusing others of the lack of
it. A malevolent punster once said of Renan that he was
neither earnest nor a Joseph. Whatever the wit of this
remark, it is certainly wanting in truth. As for the latter
part of the gibe it is nonsensical : Renan was personally as
virtuous as though he had signed the Thirty-nine Articles,
or subscribed to every tenet of the Church of his fathers.
In this respect he followed the example of Spinoza — that
is to say, he lived the life of a saint, deeming it inadvisable
to shock the minds of the orthodox in more than one way
at a time. Nor can the quality of earnest sincerity be
denied him. His very inconsistencies can be regarded as
but the outward manifestations of a great consistency — a
consistency in affirming nothing, in denying nothing, in
hoping all. With Pilate he asked, "What is truth?" but
he was willing to stay for an answer; he might "count it a
bondage to fix a belief," but Veritatem dilexi was his chosen
epitaph.
WILLIAM G. HUTCHISON.
London, September 1896.
The Poetry of the Celtic
Races.
Every one who travels through the Armorican peninsula
experiences a change of the most abrupt description, as
soon as he leaves behind the district most closely bordering
upon the continent, in which the cheerful but commonplace
type of face of Normandy and Maine is continually in
evidence, and passes into the true Brittany, that which
merits its name by language and race. A cold wind arises
full of a vague sadness, and carries the soul to other
thoughts ; the tree-tops are bare and twisted ; the heath
with its monotony of tint stretches away into the distance ;
at every step the granite protrudes from a soil too scanty to
cover it; a sea that is almost always sombre girdles the
horizon with eternal moaning. The same contrast is
manifest in the people : to Norman vulgarity, to a plump
and prosperous population, happy to live, full of its own
interests, egoistical as are all those who make a habit of
enjoyment, succeeds a timid and reserved race living alto-
gether within itself, heavy in appearance but capable of
profound feeling, and of an adorable delicacy in its religious
instincts. A like change is apparent, I am told, in passing
from England into Wales, from the Luwlunds of Scotland,
2 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
English by language and manners, into the Gaelic High-
lands ; and too, though with a perceptible difference, when
one buries oneself in the districts of Ireland where the race
has remained pure from all admixture of alien blood. It
seems like entering on the subterranean strata of another
world, and one experiences in some measure the impression
given us by Dante, when he leads us from one circle of his
Inferno to another.
Sufficient attention is not given to the peculiarity of this
fact of an ancient race living, until our days and almost
under our eyes, its own life in some obscure islands and
peninsulas in the West, more and more affected, it is true,
by external influences, but still faithful to its own tongue,
to its own memories, to its own customs, and to its own
genius. Especially is it forgotten that this little people,
now concentrated on the very confines of the world, in the
midst of rocks and mountains whence its enemies have
been powerless to force it, is in possession of a literature
which, in the Middle Ages, exercised an immense influence,
changed the current of European civilisation, and imposed
its poetical motives on nearly the whole of Christendom.
Yet it is only necessary to open the authentic monuments
of the Gaelic genius to be convinced that the race which
created them has had its own original manner of feeling
and thinking, that nowhere has the eternal illusion clad
itself in more seductive hues, and that in the great chorus
of humanity no race equals this for penetrative notes that
go to the very heart. Alas ! it too is doomed to disappear,
this emerald set in the Western seas. Arthur will return
no more from his isle of faery, and St. Patrick was right
when he said to Ossian. " The heroes that thou weepest
are dead ; can they be born again ? " It is high time to note,
before they shall have passed away, the divine tones thus
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 3
expiring on the horizon before the growing tumult of
uniform civilisation. Were criticism to set itself the task
of calling back these distant echoes, and of giving a voice
to races that are no more, would not that suffice to absolve
it from the reproach, unreasonably and too frequently brought
against it, of being only negative ?
Good works now exist which facilitate the task of him
who undertakes the study of these interesting literatures.
Wales, above all, is distinguished by scientific and literary
activity, not always accompanied, it is true, by a very
rigorous critical spirit, but deserving the highest praise.
There, researches which would bring honour to the most
active centres of learning in Europe are the work of
enthusiastic amateurs. A peasant called Owen Jones
published in 1 So 1-7, under the name of the Myvyrian
Archaiology of Wales, the precious collection which is to
this day the arsenal of Cymric antiquities. A number of
erudite and zealous workers, Aneurin Owen, Thomas Price
of Crickhowell, William Rees, and John Jones, following
in the footsteps of the Myvyrian peasant, set themselves to
finish his work, and to profit from the treasures which he
had collected. A woman of distinction, Lady Charlotte
Guest, charged herself with the task of acquainting Europe
with the collection of the Mabinogion} the pearl of Gaelic
literature, the completest expression of the Cymric genius.
This magnificent work, executed in twelve years with the
1 The Mabinogion,] rom the Llyfr Coch Hergesl and other ancient
Welsh Manuscripts, with an English Translation and Notes. By Lady
Charlotte Guest. London and Llandovery, 1837-49. The word
Mabinogi (in the plural Mabinogion) designates a form of romantic
narrative peculiar to Wales. The origin and primitive meaning of this
word are very uncertain, and Lady Guest's right to apply it to the whole
of the narratives which she has published is open to doubt.
4 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
luxury that the wealthy English amateur knows how to
use in his publications, will one day attest how full of life
the consciousness of the Celtic races remained in the
present century. Only indeed the sincerest patriotism
could inspire a woman to undertake and achieve so vast
a literary monument. Scotland and Ireland have in like
measure been enriched by a host of studies of their ancient
history. Lastly, our own Brittany, though all too rarely
studied with the philological and critical rigour now exacted
in works of erudition, has furnished Celtic antiquities with
her share of worthy research. Does it not suffice to cite
M. de la Villemarque, whose name will be henceforth
associated among us with these studies, and whose services
are so incontestable, that criticism need have no fear of
depreciating him in the eyes of a public which has accepted
him with so much warmth and sympathy ?
i.
If the excellence of races is to be appreciated by the
purity of their blood and the inviolability of their national
character, it must needs be admitted that none can vie in
nobility with the still surviving remains of the Celtic race. 1
Never has a human family lived more apart from the world,
and been purer from all alien admixture. Confined by
conquest within forgotten islands and peninsulas, it has
reared an impassable barrier against external influences ; it
1 To avoid all misunderstanding, I ought to point out that by the
word Celtic I designate here, not the whole of the great race which, at
a remote epoch, formed the population of nearly the whole of Western
Europe, but simply the four groups which, in our days, still merit
this name, as opposed to the Teutons and to the Nco-Latin peoples.
These four groups are : (i) The inhabitants of Wales or Cambria, and
the peninsula of Cornwall, bearing even now the ancient name of
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 5
has drawn all from itself; it has lived solely on its own
capital. From this ensues that powerful individuality, that
hatred of the foreigner, which even in our own days has
formed the essential feature of the Celtic peoples. Roman
civilisation scarcely reached them, and left among them but
few traces. The Teutonic invasion drove them back, but
did not penetrate them. At the present hour they are still
constant in resistance to an invasion dangerous in an
altogether different way, — that of modern civilisation,
destructive as it is of local variations and national types.
Ireland in particular (and herein we perhaps have the
secret of her irremediable weakness) is the only country in
Europe where the native can produce the titles of his
descent, and designate with certainty, even in the darkness
of prehistoric ages, the race from which he has sprung.
It is in this secluded life, in this defiance of all that
comes from without, that we must search for the explana-
tion of the chief features of the Celtic character. It has all
the failings, and all the good qualities, of the solitary man ;
at once proud and timid, strong in feeling and feeble
in action, at home free and unreserved, to the outside world
awkward and embarrassed. It distrusts the foreigner,
because it sees in him a being more refined than itself,
who abuses its simplicity. Indifferent to the admiration
of others, it asks only one thing, that it should be left to
itself. It is before all else a domestic race, fitted for family
Cymry; (2) the Bretons bretonnants, or dwellers in French Brittany
speaking Bas-Breton, who represent an emigration of the Cymry from
Wales ; (3) the Gaels of the North of Scotland speaking Gaelic ;
(4) the Irish, although a very profound line of demarcation separates
Ireland from the rest of the Celtic family. [It is also necessary to
point out that Renan in this essay applies the name Breton both to the
Bretons proper, i.e. the inhabitants of Brittany, and to the British
members of the Celtic race. — Translator 's Note.]
6 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
life and fireside joys. In no other race has the bond of
blood been stronger, or has it created more duties, or
attached man to his fellow with so much breadth and depth.
Every social institution of the Celtic peoples was in the
beginning only an extension of the family. A common
tradition attests, to this very day, that nowhere has the
trace of this great institution of relationship been better
preserved than in Brittany. There is a widely-spread belief
in that country, that blood speaks, and that two relatives,
unknown one to the other, in any part of the world where-
soever it may be, recognise each other by the secret and
mysterious emotion which they feel in each other's presence.
Respect for the dead rests on the same principle. No-
where has reverence for the dead been greater than among
the Breton peoples ; nowhere have so many memories and
prayers clustered about the tomb. This is because life is
not for these people a personal adventure, undertaken by
each man on his own account, and at his own risks and
perils ; it is a link in a long chain, a gift received and
handed on, a debt paid and a duty done.
It is easily discernible how little fitted were natures so
stronglyconcentrated to furnish one of those brilliant develop-
ments, which imposes the momentary ascendency of a people
on the world ; and that, no doubt, is why the part played ex-
ternally by the Cymric race has always been a secondary one.
Destitute of the means of expansion, alien to all idea of
aggression and conquest, little desirous of making its
thought prevail outside itself, it has only known how to
retire so far as space has permitted, and then, at bay in its
last place of retreat, to make an invincible resistance to its
enemies. Its very fidelity has been a useless devotion.
Stubborn of submission and ever behind the age, it is
faithful to its conquerors when its conquerors are no longer
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 7
faithful to themselves. It was the last to defend its
religious independence against Rome — and it has become
the staunchest stronghold of Catholicism ; it was the last
in France to defend its political independence against the
king — and it has given to the world the last royalists.
Thus the Celtic race has worn itself out in resistance to
its time, and in the defence of desperate causes. It does
not seem as though in any epoch it had any aptitude for
political life. The spirit of family stifled within it all attempts
at more extended organisation. Moreover, it does not
appear that the peoples which form it are by themselves
susceptible of progress. To them life appears as a fixed
condition, which man has no power to alter. Endowed
with little initiative, too much inclined to look upon them-
selves as minors and in tutelage, they are quick to believe
in destiny and resign themselves to it. Seeing how little
audacious they are against God, one would scarcely beiieve
this race to be the daughter of Japhet.
Thence ensues its sadness. Take the songs of its bards
of the sixth century; they weep more defeats than they sing
victories. Its history is itself only one long lament; it
still recalls its exiles, its flights across the seas. If at times
it seems to be cheerful, a tear is not slow to glisten behind
its smile; it does not know that strange forgetfulness of
human conditions and destinies which is called gaiety. Its
songs of joy end as elegies; there is nothing to equal the
delicious sadness of its national melodies. One might call
them emanations from on high which, falling drop by drop
upon the soul, pass through it like memories of another
world. Never have men feasted so long upon these solitary
delights of the spirit, these poetic memories which simul-
taneously intercross all the sensations of life, so vague,
so deep, so penetrative, that one might die from them,
8 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
without being able to say whether it was from bitterness
or sweetness.
The infinite delicacy of feeling which characterises the
Celtic race is closely allied to its need of concentration.
Natures that are little capable of expansion are nearly
always those that feel most deeply, for the deeper the
feeling, the less it tends to express itself. Thence we have
that charming shamefastness, that veiled and exquisite
sobriety, equally far removed from the sentimental rhetoric
too familiar to the Latin races, and the reflective simplicity
of Germany, which are so admirably displayed in the
ballads published by M. de la Villemarque. The apparent
reserve of the Celtic peoples, often taken for coldness, is
due to this inward timidity which makes them believe that
a feeling loses half its value if it be expressed ; and that the
heart ought to have no other spectator than itself.
If it be permitted us to assign sex to nations as to indi-
viduals, we should have to say without hesitance that the
Celtic race, especially with regard to its Cymric or Breton
branch, is an essentially feminine race. No human family,
I believe, has carried so much mystery into love. No other
has conceived with more delicacy the ideal of woman, or
been more fully dominated by it. It is a sort of intoxica-
tion, a madness, a vertigo. Read the strange Mabinogi of
Peredur, or its French imitation Parceval le Gallois ; its
pages are, as it were, dewy with feminine sentiment.
Woman appears therein as a kind of vague vision, an inter-
mediary between man and the supernatural world. I am
acquainted with no literature that offers anything analogous
to this. Compare Guinevere or Iseult with those Scandi-
navian furies Gudrun and Chrimhilde, and you will avow
that woman such as chivalry conceived her, an ideal of
sweetness and loveliness set up as the supreme end of life,
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 9
is a creation neither classical, nor Christian, nor Teutonic,
but in reality Celtic.
Imaginative power is nearly always proportionate to
concentration of feeling, and lack of the external develop-
ment of life. The limited nature of Greek and Italian
imagination is due to the easy expansiveness of the peoples
of the South, with whom the soul, wholly spread abroad,
reflects but little within itself. Compared with the classical
imagination, the Celtic imagination is indeed the infinite
contrasted with the finite. In the fine Mabinogi of the
Dream of Maxen W/edig, the Emperor Maximus beholds
in a dream a young maiden so beautiful, that on waking
he declares he cannot live without her. For several years
his envoys scour the world in search of her; at last she
is discovered in Brittany. So is it with the Celtic race ;
it has worn itself out in taking dreams for realities, and
in pursuing its splendid visions. The essential element
in the Celt's poetic life is the adventure — that is to say, the
pursuit of the unknown, an endless quest after an object
ever flying from desire. It was of this that St. B randan
dreamed, that Peredur sought with his mystic chivalry,
that Knight Owen asked of his subterranean journeyings.
This race desires the infinite, it thirsts for it, and pursues
it at all costs, beyond the tomb, beyond hell itself. The
characteristic failing of the Breton peoples, the tendency
to drunkenness — a failing which, according to the traditions
of the sixth century, was the cause of their disasters — is due
to this invincible need of illusion. Do not say that it is
an appetite for gross enjoyment ; never has there been a
people more sober and more alien to all sensuality. No, the
Bretons sought in mead what Owen, St. Brandan, and Pere-
dur sought in their own way, — the vision of the invisible
world. To this day in Ireland drunkenness forms a part
io POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES
of all Saint's Day festivals — that is to say, the festivals
which best have retained their national and popular aspect.
Thence arises the profound sense of the future and of
the eternal destinies of his race, which has ever borne up
the Cymry, and kept him young still beside his conquerors
who have grown old. Thence that dogma of the resurrection
of the heroes, which appears to have been one of those that
Christianity found most difficulty in rooting out. Thence
Celtic Messianism, that belief in a future avenger who shall
restore Cambria, and deliver her out of the hands of her
oppressors, like the mysterious Leminok promised by
Merlin, the Lez-Breiz of the Armoricans, the Arthur of the
Welsh. 1 The hand that arose from the mere, when the
sword of Arthur fell therein, that seized it, and brandished
it thrice, is the hope of the Celtic races. It is thus that little
peoples dowered with imagination revenge themselves on
their conquerors. Feeling themselves to be strong inwardly
and weak outwardly, they protest, they exult ; and such a
strife unloosing their might, renders them capable of
miracles. Nearly all great appeals to the supernatural are
due to peoples hoping against all hope. Who shall say
what in our own times has fermented in the bosom of the
most stubborn, the most powerless of nationalities, —
Poland? Israel in humiliation dreamed of the spiritual
conquest of the world, and the dream has come to pass.
II.
At a first glance the literature of Wales is divided into
three perfectly distinct branches : the bardic or lyric, which
1 M. Augustin Thierry has finely remarked thai the renown attaching
to Welsh prophecies in the Middle Ages was due to their steadfastness in
affirming the future of their race. (Hisloire de la Conqtute <t Anghterre.)
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. n
shines forth in splendour in the sixth century by the works
of Taliessin, of Aneurin, and of Liwarc'h Hen, and con-
tinues through an uninterrupted series of imitations up to
modern times; the Mabinogion, or literature of romance,
fixed towards the twelfth century, but linking themselves in
the groundwork of their ideas with the remotest ages of the
Celtic genius ; finally, an ecclesiastical and legendary litera-
ture, impressed with a distinct stamp of its own. These
three literatures seem to have existed side by side, almost
without knowledge of one another. The bards, proud of
their solemn rhetoric, held in disdain the popular tales, the
form of which they considered careless ; on the other hand,
both bards and romancers appear to have had few relations
with the clergy; and one at times might be tempted to
suppose that they ignored the existence of Christianity.
To our thinking it is in the Mabinogion that the true
expression of the Celtic genius is to be sought ; and it is
surprising that so curious a literature, the source of nearly
all the romantic creations of Europe, should have remained
unknown until our own days. The cause is doubtless to be
ascribed to the dispersed state of the Welsh manuscripts,
pursued till last century by the English, as seditious
books compromising those who possessed them. Often
too they fell into the hands of ignorant owners, whose
caprice or ill-will sufficed to keep them from critical
research.
The Mabinogion have been preserved for us in two
principal documents — one of the thirteenth century from the
library of Hengurt, belonging to the Vaughan family; the
other dating from the fourteenth century, known under the
name of the Red Book of Herges /, and now in Jesus College,
Oxford. No doubt it was some such collection that
charmed the weary hours of the hapless Leolin in the
4
i2 POETRY OF THE CEETIC RACES.
Tower of London, and was burned after his condemnation,
with the other Welsh books which had been the com-
panions of his captivity. Lady Charlotte Guest has based
her edition on the Oxford manuscript ; it cannot be suffi-
ciently regretted that paltry considerations have caused her
to be refused the use of the earlier manuscript, of which
the later appears to be only a copy. Regrets are redoubled
when one knows that several Welsh texts, which were seen
and copied fifty years ago, have now disappeared. It is in
the presence of facts such as these that one comes to believe
that revolutions — in general so destructive of the works of
the past — are favourable to the preservation of literary
monuments, by compelling their concentration in great
centres, where their existence, as well as their publicity, is
assured.
The general tone of the Mabhwgion is rather romantic
than epic. Life is treated naively and not too emphatically.
The hero's individuality is limitless. We have free and
noble natures acting in all their spontaneity. Each man
appears as a kind of demi-god characterised by a super-
natural gift. This gift is nearly always connected with some
miraculous object, which in some measure is the personal
seal of him who possesses it. The inferior classes, which
this people of heroes necessarily supposes beneath it,
scarcely show themselves, except in the exercise of some
trade, for practising which they are held in high esteem.
The somewhat complicated products of human industry are
regarded as living beings, and in their manner endowed with
magical properties. A multiplicity of celebrated objects
have proper names, such as the drinking-cup, the lance,
the sword, and the shield of Arthur; the chess-board of
Gwendolen, on which the black pieces played of their own
accord against the white ; the horn of Bran Galed, where one
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 13
found whatever liquor one desired; the chariot of Morgan,
which directed itself to the place to which one wished to
go; the pot of Tyrnog, which would not cook when meat
for a coward was put into it; the grindstone of Tudwal,
which would only sharpen brave men's swords ; the coat
of Padarn, which none save a noble could don; and the
mantle of Tegan, which no woman could put upon herself
were she not above reproach. 1 The animal is conceived
in a still more individual way ; it has a proper name, per-
sonal qualities, and a role which it develops at its own will
and with full consciousness. The same hero appears as at
once man and animal, without it being possible to trace
the line of demarcation between the two natures.
The tale of Kilhwch a?id Olwen, the most extraordinary
of the Mabinogioii, deals with Arthur's struggle against the
wild-boar king Twrch Trwyth, *who with his seven cubs
holds in check all the heroes of the Round Table. The
adventures of the three hundred ravens of Kerverhenn
similarly form the subject of the Dream of Rhonabwy.
The idea of moral merit and demerit is almost wholly
absent from all these compositions. There are wicked
beings who insult ladies, who tyrannise over their neigh-
bours, who only find pleasure in evil because such is their
nature ; but it does not appear that they incur wrath on that
account. Arthur's knights pursue them, not as criminals
but as mischievous fellows. All other beings are perfectly
good and just, but more or less richly gifted. This is the
dream of an amiable and gentle race which looks upon evil
as being the work of destiny, and not a product of the
human conscience. All nature is enchanted, and fruit-
ful as imagination itself in indefinitely varied creations.
1 Here may be recognised the origin of trial by court mantle, one of
the most interesting episodes in Lancelot of the Lake.
i 4 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
Christianity rarely discloses itself; although at times its
proximity can be felt, it alters in no respect the purely
natural surroundings in which everything takes place. A
bishop figures at table beside Arthur, but his function is
strictly limited to blessing the dishes. The Irish saints,
who at one time present themselves to give their benediction
to Arthur and receive favours at his hands, are portrayed as
a race of men vaguely known and difficult to understand
No mediaeval literature held itself further removed from all
monastic influence. We evidently must suppose that the
Welsh bards and story-tellers lived in a state of great isola-
tion from the clergy, and had their culture and traditions
quite apart.
The charm of the Mabinogion principally resides in the
amiable serenity of the Celtic mind, neither sad nor gay,
ever in suspense between a smile and a tear. We have in
them the simple recital of a child, unwitting of any dis-
tinction between the noble and the common ; there is
something of that softly animated world, of that calm and
tranquil ideal to which Ariosto's stanzas transport us. The
chatter of the later mediaeval French and German imitators
can give no idea of this charming manner of narration.
The skilful Chretien de Troyes 1 himself remains in this
respect far below the Welsh story-tellers, and as for Wolf-
ram of Eschenbach, 2 it must be avowed that the joy of
the first discovery has carried German critics too far in the
exaggeration of his merits. He loses himself in inter-
minable descriptions, and almost completely ignores the art
of his recital.
What strikes one at a first glance in the imaginative
compositions of the Celtic races, above all when they are
contrasted with those of the Teutonic races, is the extreme
1 See Note I. 2 See Note II.
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 15
mildness of manners pervading them. There are none of
those frightful vengeances which fill the Edda and the
Niebelungen. Compare the Teutonic with the Gaelic hero,
—Beowulf with Peredur, for example. What a difference
there is ! In the one all the horror of disgusting and
blood-embrued barbarism, the drunkenness of carnage, the
disinterested taste, if I may say so, for destruction and
death ; in the other a profound sense of justice, a great
height of personal pride it is true, but also a great capacity
for devotion, an exquisite loyalty. The tyrannical man, the
monster, the Black Man, find a place here like the Les-
trigons and the Cyclops of Homer only to inspire horror
by contrast with softer manners ; they are almost what the
wicked man is in the naive imagination of a child brought
up by a mother in the ideas of a gentle and pious morality.
The primitive man of Teutonism is revolting by his pur-
poseless brutality, by a love of evil that only gives him
skill and strength in the service of hatred and injury. The
Cymric hero on the other hand, even in his wildest flights,
seems possessed by habits of kindness and a warm sympathy
with the weak. Sympathy indeed is one of the deepest
feelings among the Celtic peoples. Even Judas is not
denied a share of their pity. St. Brandan found him upon
a rock in the midst of the Polar seas ; once a week he
passes a day there to refresh himself from the fires of hell.
A cloak that he had given to a beggar is hung before him,
and tempers his sufferings.
If Wales has a right to be proud of her Mabinogion, she
has not less to felicitate herself in having found a translator
truly worthy of interpreting them. For the proper under-
standing of these original beauties there was needed a
delicate appreciation of Welsh narration, and an intelli-
gence of the naive order, qualities of which an erudite
16 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
translator would with difficulty have been capable. To
render these gracious imaginings of a people so eminently
dowered with feminine tact, the pen of a woman was neces-
sary. Simple, animated, without effort and without vulgarity,
Lady Guest's translation is the faithful mirror of the original
Cymric. Even supposing that, as regards philology, the
labours of this noble Welsh lady be destined to receive
improvement, that does not prevent her book from for ever
remaining a work of erudition and highly distinguished
taste. 1
The Mabinogion, or at least the writings which Lady
Guest thought she ought to include under this common
name, divide themselves into two perfectly distinct classes —
some connected exclusively with the two peninsulas of
Wales and Cornwall, and relating to the heroic personality
of Arthur; the others alien to Arthur, having for their scene
not only the parts of England that have remained Cymric,
but the whole of Great Britain, and leading us back by the
persons and traditions mentioned in them to the later years
of the Roman occupation. The second class, of greater
antiquity than the first, at least on the ground of subject, is
also distinguished by a much more mythological character,
a bolder use of the miraculous, an enigmatical form, a style
full of alliteration and plays upon words. Of this number
are the tales of Pwyll, of Pranwen, of Manawyddan, of
Math the son of Mathonwy, the Dream of the Emperor
Maximits, the story of LIud and Llewelys, and the legend of
Taliessin. To the Arthurian cycle belong the narratives of
Oiven, of Geraint, of Peredur, of Kilhwch and O/zvcn, and
the Dream of Rhonalnvy. It is also to be remarked that
1 M. dc la Villemarque published in 1842 under the title of Conies
populaircs des anciens Bretons, a French translation of the narratives
that Lady Guest had already presented in English at that time.
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 17
the two last-named narratives have a particularly antique
character. In them Arthur dwells in Cornwall, and not as
in the others at Caerleon on the Usk. In them he appears
with an individual character, hunting and taking a personal
part in warfare, while in the more modern tales he is only
an emperor all-powerful and impassive, a truly sluggard
hero, around whom a pleiad of active heroes groups itself.
The Mabinogi of Kilhwch and Ofcven, by its entirely primi-
tive aspect, by the part played in it by the wild-boar in
conformity to the spirit of Celtic mythology, by the wholly
supernatural and magical character of the narration, by
innumerable allusions the sense of which escapes us, forms
a cycle by itself. It represents for us the Cymric concep-
tion in all its purity, before it had been modified by the
introduction of any foreign element. Without attempting
here to analyse this curious poem, I should like by some
extracts to make its antique aspect and high originality
apparent.
Kilhwch, son of Kilydd, prince of Kelyddon, having
heard some one mention the name of Olwen, daughter of
Yspaddaden Penkawr, falls violently in love, without having
ever seen her. He goes to find Arthur, that he may ask
for his aid in the difficult undertaking which he meditates ;
in point of fact, he docs not know in what country the fair
one of his affection dwells. Yspaddaden is besides a
frightful tyrant who suffers no man to go from his castle
alive, and whose death is linked by destiny to the marriage
of his daughter. 1 Arthur grants Kilhwch some of his most
valiant comrades in arms to assist him in this enterprise.
After wonderful adventures the knights arrive at the castle
1 The idea of making the derail of the father the condition of pos-
session of the daughter is to be found in several romances of the Breton
cycle, in Lancelot for example.
iS POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
of Yspaddaden, and succeed in seeing the young maiden
of Kilhwch's dream. Only after three days of persistent
struggle do they manage to obtain a response from Olwen's
father, who attaches his daughter's hand to conditions ap-
parently impossible of realisation. The performance of these
trials makes a long chain of adventures, the framework of
a veritable romantic epic which has come to us in a very
fragmentary form. Of the thirty-eight adventures imposed
on Kilhwch the manuscript used by Lady Guest only
relates seven or eight. I choose at random one of these
narratives, which appears to me fitted to give an idea of the
whole composition. It deals with the finding of Mabon
the son of Modron, who was carried away from his mother
three days after his birth, and whose deliverance is one of
the labours exacted of Kilhwch.
"His followers said unto Arthur, 'Lord, go thou home;
thou canst not proceed with thy host in quest of such small
adventures as these.' Then said Arthur, ' It were well for
thee, Gwrhyr Gwalstawd Ieithoedd, to go upon this quest,
for thou knowest all languages, and art familiar with those
of the birds and the beasts. Thou, Eidoel, oughtest like-
wise to go with my men in search of thy cousin. And as
for you, Kai and Bedwyr, I have hope of whatever adven-
ture ye are in quest of, that ye will achieve it. Achieve ye
this adventure for me.'"
They went forward until they came to the Ousel of Cilgwri.
And Gwrhyr adjured her for the sake of Heaven, saying,
"Tell me if thou knowest aught of Mabon the son of
Modron, who was taken when three nights old from
between his mother and the wall." And the Ousel
answered, " When I first came here there was a smith's
anvil in this place, and I was then a young bird ; and
from that time no work has been done upon it, save the
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 19
pecking of my beak every evening, and now there is not so
much as the size of a nut remaining thereof; yet all the
vengeance of Heaven be upon me, if during all that time
I have ever heard of the man for whom you enquire.
Nevertheless I will do that which is right, and that which it
is fitting I should do for an embassy from Arthur. There
is a race of animals who were formed before me, and I will
be your guide to them."
So they proceeded to the place where was the Stag of
Redynvre. " Stag of Redynvre, behold we are come to thee,
an embassy from Arthur, for we have not heard of any
animal older than thou. Say, knowest thou aught of
Mabon the son of Modron, who was taken from his mother
when three nights old? " The Stag said, " When first I
came hither there was a plain all around me, without any
trees save one oak sapling, which grew up to be an oak
with an hundred branches. And that oak has since
perished, so that now nothing remains of it but the withered
stump ; and from that day to this I have been here, yet
have I never heard of the man for whom you enquire.
Nevertheless, being an embassy from Arthur, I will be
your guide to the place where there is an animal which was
formed before I was."
So they proceeded to the place where was the Owl of
Cwm Cawlwyd. "Owl of Cwm Cawlwyd, here is an
embassy from Arthur ; knowest thou aught of Mabon the
son of Modron, who was taken after three nights from his
mother?" "If I knew I would tell you. When first I
came hither, the wide valley you see was a wooded glen.
And a race of men came and rooted it up. And there
grew there a second wood ; and this wood is the third.
My wings, are they not withered stumps? Yet all this
time, even until to-day, I have never heard of the man for
20 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
whom you enquire. Nevertheless I will be the guide of
Arthur's embassy until you come to the place where is the
oldest animal in the world, and the one that has travelled
most, the Eagle of Gwern Abwy."
Gwrhyr said, " Eagle of Gwern Abwy, we have come to
thee an embassy from Arthur, to ask thee if thou knowest
aught of Mabon the son of Modron, who was taken from
his mother when he was three nights old." The Eagle said,
" I have been here for a great space of time, and when I
first came hither there was a rock here, from the top of
which I pecked at the stars every evening ; and now it is
not so much as a span high. From that day to this I have
been here, and I have never heard of the man for whom
you enquire, except once when I went in search of food as
far as Llyn Llyw. And when I came there, I struck my
talons into a salmon, thinking he would serve me as
food for a long time. But he drew me into the deep, and
I was scarcely able to escape from him. After that I went
with my whole kindred to attack him, and to try to destroy
him, but he sent messengers, and made peace with me ;
and came and besought me to take fifty fish spears out of
his back. Unless he know something of him whom you
seek, I cannot tell who may. However, I will guide you to
the place where he is."
So they went thither; and the Eagle said, "Salmon of
Llyn Llyw, I have come to thee with an embassy from
Arthur, to ask thee if thou knowest aught concerning Mabon
the son of Modron, who was taken away at three nights old
from his mother." "As much as I know I will tell thee.
With every tide I go along the river upwards, until I come
near to the walls of Gloucester, and there have I found such
wrong as I never found elsewhere ; and to the end that ye
may give credence thereto, let one of you go thither upon
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 21
each of my two shoulders." So Kai and Gwrhyr Gwalstawd
Ieithoedd went upon the shoulders of the salmon, and they
proceeded until they came unto the wall of the prison, and
they heard a great wailing and lamenting from the dungeon.
Said Gwrhyr, "Who is it that laments in this house of stone?"
"Alas there is reason enough for whoever is here to lament.
It is Mabon the son of Modron who is here imprisoned ;
and no imprisonment was ever so grievous as mine, neither
that of Lludd Llaw Ereint, nor that of Greid the son of
Eri." " Hast thou hope of being released for gold or
for silver, or for any gifts of wealth, or through battle
and fighting?" "By fighting will whatever I may gain be
obtained."
We shall not follow the Cymric hero through trials the
result of which can be foreseen. What, above all else, is
striking in these strange legends is the part played by
animals, transformed by the Welsh imagination into
intelligent beings. No race conversed so intimately as did
the Celtic race with the lower creation, and accorded it so
large a share of moral life. 1 The close association of man
and animal, the fictions so dear to mediaeval poetry of the
Knight of the Lion, the Knight of the Falcon, the Knight of
the Swan, the vows consecrated by the presence of birds
of noble repute, are equally Breton imaginings. Ecclesi-
astical literature itself presents analogous features ; gentle-
ness towards animals informs all the legends of the saints
of Brittany and Ireland. One day St. Kevin fell asleep,
while he was praying at his window with outstretched
arms ; and a swallow perceiving the open hand of the
venerable monk, considered it an excellent place wherein
to make her nest. The saint on awaking saw the mother
1 See especially the narratives of Ncnnius, and of Giraldus Cam-
brensis. In them animals have at least as important a part as men.
22 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
sitting upon her eggs, and, loth to disturb her, waited for
the little ones to be hatched before he arose from his
knees.
^ This touching sympathy was derived from the singular
vivacity with which the Celtic races have inspired their
feeling for nature. Their mythology is nothing more
than a transparent naturalism, not that anthropomorphic
naturalism of Greece and India, in which the forces of
the universe, viewed as living beings and endowed with
consciousness, tend more and more to detach themselves
from physical phenomena, and to become moral beings;
but in some measure a realistic naturalism, the love of
nature for herself, the vivid impression of her magic,
accompanied by the sorrowful feeling that man knows,
when, face to face with her, he believes that he hears her
commune with him concerning his origin and his destiny.
The legend of Merlin mirrors this feeling. Seduced by
a fairy of the woods, he flies with her and becomes a
savage. Arthur's messengers come upon him as he is
singing by the side of a fountain ; he is led back again
to court; but the charm carries him away. He returns
to his forests, and this time for ever. Under a thicket
of hawthorn Vivien has built him a magical prison. There
he prophesies the future of the Celtic races; he speaks
of a maiden of the woods, now visible and now unseen,
who holds him captive by her spells. Several Arthurian
legends are impressed with the same character. Arthur
himself in popular belief became, as it were, a woodland
spirit. "The foresters on their nightly round by the light
of the moon," 1 says Gervais of Tilbury, "often hear a
great sound as of horns, and meet bands of huntsmen ;
when they are asked whence they come, these huntsmen
1 See Note III.
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 23
make reply that they are of King Arthur's following." 1
Even the French imitators of the Breton romances keep
an impression — although a rather insipid one — of the
attraction exercised by nature on the Celtic imagination.
Elaine, the heroine of Lancelot, the ideal of Breton per-
fection, passes her life with her companions in a garden,
in the midst of flowers which she tends. Every flower culled
by her hands is at the instant restored to life; and the
worshippers of her memory are under an obligation, when
they cut a flower, to sow another in its place.
The worship of forest, and fountain, and stone is to be
explained by this primitive naturalism, which all the Councils
of the Church held in Brittany united to proscribe. The
stone, in truth, seems the natural symbol of the Celtic races.
It is an immutable witness that has no death. The animal,
the plant, above all the human figure, only express the
divine life under a determinate form ; the stone on the
contrary, adapted to receive all forms, has been the fetish
of peoples in their childhood. Pausanias saw, still standing
erect, the thirty square stones of Pharoe,each bearing the name
of a divinity. The men-Mr to be met with over the whole
surface of the ancient world, what is it but the monument of
primitive humanity, a living witness of its faith in Heaven? 2
1 This manner of explaining all the unknown noises of the wood by
Arthur's Hunting is still to be found in several districts. To under-
stand properly the cult of nature, and, if I may say so, of landscape
among the Celts, see Gildas and Nennius, pp. 131, 136, 137, etc.
(Edit. San Marte, Berlin, 1844).
2 It is, however, doubtful whether the monuments known in France
as Celtic (men-hir, dol-men, etc.) are the work of the Celts. With
M. Worsaae and the Copenhagen archaeologists, I am inclined to think
that these monuments belong to a more ancient humanity. Never, in
fact, has any branch of the Indo-European race built in this fashion.
(See two articles by M. Merimie in L 'Athettaum francais, Sept. ntli,
1852, and April 25th, 1853.)
24 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
It has frequently been observed that the majority of
popular beliefs still extant in our different provinces are
of Celtic origin. A not less remarkable fact is the strong
tinge of naturalism dominant in these beliefs. Nay more,
every time that the old Celtic spirit appears in our history,
there is to be seen, re-born with it, faith in nature and her
magic influences. One of the most characteristic of these
manifestations seems to me to be that of Joan of Arc.
That indomitable hope, that tenacity in the affirmation of
the future, that belief that the salvation of the kingdom
will come from a woman, — all those features, far removed
as they are from the taste of antiquity, and from Teutonic
taste, are in many respects Celtic. The memory of the
ancient cult perpetuated itself at Domremy, as in so many
other places, under the form of popular superstition. The
cottage of the family of Arc was shaded by a beech tree,
famed in the country and reputed to be the abode of fairies.
In her childhood Joan used to go and hang upon its
branches garlands of leaves and flowers, which, so it was
said, disappeared during the night. The terms of her
accusation speak with horror of this innocent custom, as
of a crime against the faith ; and indeed they were not
altogether deceived, those unpitying theologians who judged
the holy maid. Although she knew it not, she was more
Celtic than Christian. She has been foretold by Merlin ;
she knows of neither Pope nor Church, — she only believes
the voice that speaks in her own heart. This voice she
hears in the fields, in the sough of the wind among the
trees, when measured and distant sounds fall upon her ears.
During her trial, worn out with questions and scholastic
subtleties, she is asked whether she still hears her voices.
"Take me to the woods," she says, "and I shall hear them
clearly." Her legend is tinged with the same colours;
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 25
nature loved her, the wolves never touched the sheep of her
flock. When she was a little girl, the birds used to come
and eat bread from her lap as though they were tame. 1
in.
The MaMnogion do not recommend themselves to our
study, only as a manifestation of the romantic genius of the
Breton races. It was through them that the Welsh imagina-
tion exercised its influence upon the Continent, that it
transformed, in the twelfth century, the poetic art of Europe,
and realised this miracle, — that the creations of a half-
conquered race have become the universal feast of imagina-
tion for mankind.
Few heroes owe less to reality than Arthur. Neither
Gildas nor Aneurin, his contemporaries, speak of him ;
Bede did not even know his name; Taliessin and Liwarc'h
Hen gave him only a secondary place. In Nennius, on the
other hand, who lived about 850, the legend has fully un-
folded. Arthur is already the exterminator of the Saxons ;
he has never experienced defeat ; he is the suzerain of an
army of kings. Finally, in Geoffrey of Monmouth, the
epic creation culminates. Arthur reigns over the whole
earth; he conquers Ireland, Norway, Gascony, and France.
At Caerleon he holds a tournament at which all the
1 Since the first publication of these views, on which I should not
like more emphasis to be put than what belongs to a passing impression,
similar considerations have been developed, in terms that appear a
little too positive, by M. H. Martin {History of Fiance, vol. vi., 1856).
The objections raised to it are, for the most part, due to the fact that
very few people are capable of delicately appreciating questions of this
kind, relative to the genius of races. It frequently happens that the
resurrection of an old national genius takes place under a very different
form from that which one would have expected, and by means of in-
dividuals who have no idea of the ethnographical part which they play.
26 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
monarchs of the world arc present ; there he puts upon
his head thirty crowns, and exacts recognition as the
sovereign lord of the universe. So incredible is it that a
petty king of the sixth century, scarcely remarked by his
contemporaries, should have taken in posterity such colossal
proportions, that several critics have supposed that the
legendary Arthur and the obscure chieftain who bore that
name have nothing in common, the one with the other,
and that the son of Uther Pendragon is a wholly ideal hero,
a survivor of the old Cymric mythology. As a matter of
fact, in the symbols of Neo-Druidism — that is to say, of that
secret doctrine, the outcome of Druidism, which prolonged
its existence even to the Middle Ages under the form of
Freemasonry — we again find Arthur transformed into a
divine personage, and playing a purely mythological part.
It must at least be allowed that, if behind the fable some
reality lies hidden, history offers us no means of attaining
it. It cannot be doubted that the discovery of Arthur's tomb
in the Isle of Avalon in 1189 was an invention of Norman
policy, just as in 1283, the very year in which Edward
I. was engaged in crushing out the last vestiges of Welsh
independence, Arthur's crown was very conveniently found,
and forthwith united to the other crown jewels of England.
We naturally expect Arthur, now become the repre-
sentative of Welsh nationality, to sustain in the Mabinogion
a character analogous to this role, and therein, as in Nen-
nius, to serve the hatred of the vanquished against the
Saxons. But such is not the case. Arthur, in the Mabin-
ogion, exhibits no characteristics of patriotic resistance : his
part is limited to uniting heroes around him, to maintaining
the retainers of his palace, and to enforcing the laws of his
order of chivalry. He is too strong for any one to dream of
attacking him. He is the Charlemagne of the Carlovingian
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 27
romances, the Agamemnon of Homer, — one of those
neutral personalities that serve but to give unity to the
poem. The idea of warfare against the alien, hatred
towards the Saxon, does not appear in a single instance.
The heroes of the Mabinogion have no fatherland ; each
fights to show his personal excellence, and satisfy his taste
for adventure, but not to defend a national cause. Britain
is the universe; no one suspects that beyond the Cymry
there may be other nations and other races.
It was by this ideal and representative character that the
Arthurian legend had such an astonishing prestige through-
out the whole world. Had Arthur been only a provincial
hero, the more or less happy defender of a little country,
all peoples would not have adopted him, any more than
they have adopted the Marco of the Serbs, 1 or the Robin
Hood of the Saxons. The Arthur who has charmed the
world is the head of an order of equality, in which all sit at
the same table, in which a man's worth depends upon his
valour and his natural gifts. What mattered to the world
the fate of an unknown peninsula, and the strife waged on
its behalf? What enchanted it was the ideal court presided
over by Gwenhwyvar (Guinevere), where around the monarch-
ical unity the flower of heroes was gathered together, where
ladies, as chaste as they were beautiful, loved according to the
laws of chivalry, and where the time was passed in listening
to stories, and learning civility and beautiful manners.
This is the secret of the magic of that Round Table, about
which the Middle Ages grouped all their ideas of heroism,
of beauty, of modesty, and of love. We need not stop to
inquire whether the ideal of a gentle and polished society
in the midst of the barbarian world is, in all its features, a
purely Breton creation, whether the spirit of the courts of
1 See Note IV.
5
2 8 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
the Continent has not in some measure furnished the model,
and whether the Mabinogion themselves have not felt the
reaction of the French imitations; 1 it suffices for us that the
new order of sentiments which we have just indicated was,
throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, persistently at-
tached to the groundwork of the Cymric romances. Such
an association could not be fortuitous ; if the imitations are
all so glaring in colour, it is evidently because in the original
this same colour is to be found united to particularly strong
character. How otherwise shall we explain why a forgotten
tribe on the very confines of the world should have imposed
its heroes upon Europe, and, in the domain of imagination,
accomplished one of the most singular revolutions known to
the historian of letters?
If, in fact, one compares European literature before the
introduction of the Cymric romances, with what it became
when the trouvcres set themselves to draw from Breton
sources, one recognises readily that with the Breton nar-
ratives a new element entered into the poetic conception
of the Christian peoples, and modified it profoundly. The
Carlovingian poem, both by its structure and by the means
which it employs, does not depart from classical ideas.
The motives of man's action are the same as in the Greek
epic. The essentially romantic element, the life of forests
and mysterious adventure, the feeling for nature, and that
impulse of imagination which makes the Breton warrior
unceasingly pursue the unknown ; — nothing of all this is
as yet to be observed. Roland differs from the heroes of
1 The surviving version of the Mabinogion has a later date than these
imitations, and the Red Hook includes several tales borrowed from the
French tronvaes. But it is out of the question to maintain that the
really Welsh narratives have been borrowed in a like manner, since
among them are some unknown to the Irouvires, which could only
possess interest for Breton countries.
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 29
Homer only by his armour; in heart he is the brother
of Ajax or Achilles. Perceval, on the contrary, belongs to
another world, separated by a great gulf from that in which
the heroes of antiquity live and act.
It was above all by the creation of woman's character,
by introducing into mediaeval poetry, hitherto hard and
austere, the nuances of love, that the Breton romances
brought about this curious metamorphosis. It was like
an electric spark ; in a few years European taste was
changed. Nearly all the types of womankind known to
the Middle Ages, Guinevere, Iseult, Enid, are derived from
Arthur's cour\ In the Carlovingian poems woman is a
nonentity without character or individuality ; in them love
is either brutal, as in the romance of Ferebras, or scarcely
indicated, as in the Song of Roland. In the Mabinogioti,
on the other hand, the principal part always belongs to the
women. Chivalrous gallantry, which makes the warrior's
happiness to consist in serving a woman and meriting her
esteem, the belief that the noblest use of strength is to
succour and avenge weakness, results, I know, from a turn
of imagination which possessed nearly all European peoples
in the twelfth century; but it cannot be doubted that this
turn of imagination first found literary expression among
the Breton peoples. One of the most surprising features
in the Mabinogion is the delicacy of the feminine feeling
breathed in them; an impropriety or a gross word is never
to be met with. It would be necessary to quote at length
the two romances of Peredur and Geraint to demonstrate
an innocence such as this; but the naive simplicity of these
charming compositions forbids us to see in this innocence
any underlying meaning. The zeal of the knight in the
defence of ladies' honour became a satirical euphemism
only in the French imitators, who transformed the virginal
3 o POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
modesty of the Breton romances into a shameless gallantry
— so far indeed that these compositions, chaste as they are
in the original, became the scandal of the Middle Ages,
provoked censures, and were the occasion of the ideas of
immorality which, for religious people, still cluster about
the name of romance.
Certainly chivalry is too complex a fact for us to be
permitted to assign it to any single origin. Let us say
however that in the idea of envisaging the esteem of a
woman as the highest object of human activity, and setting
up love as the supreme principle of morality, there is
nothing of the antique spirit, or indeed of the Teutonic.
Is it in the Edda or in the Niebelungen that we shall
find the germ of this spirit of pure love, of exalted devotion,
which forms the very soul of chivalry ? As to following
the suggestion of some critics and seeking among the
Arabs for the beginnings of this institution, surely of
all literary paradoxes ever mooted, this is one of the most
singular. The idea of conquering woman in a land where
she is bought and sold, of seeking her esteem in a land
where she is scarcely considered capable of moral merit ! I
shall oppose the partizans of this hypothesis with one single
fact, — the surprise experienced by the Arabs of Algeria
when, by a somewhat unfortunate recollection of mediaeval
tournaments, the ladies were entrusted with the presenta-
tion of prizes at the Beiram races. What to the knight
appeared an unparalleled honour seemed to the Arabs
a humiliation and almost an insult.
The introduction of the Breton romances into the
current of European literature worked a not less profound
revolution in the manner of conceiving and employing
the marvellous. In the Carlovingian poems the marvellous
is timid, and conforms to the Christian faith ; the super-
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 31
natural is produced directly by God or his envoys. Among
the Cymry, on the contrary, the principle of the marvel is
in nature herself, in her hidden forces, in her inexhaustible
fecundity. There is a mysterious swan, a prophetic bird,
a suddenly appearing hand, a giant, a black tyrant, a magic
mist, a dragon, a cry that causes the hearer to die of
terror, an object with extraordinary properties. There
is no trace of the monotheistic conception, in which the
marvellous is only a miracle, a derogation of eternal laws.
Nor are there any of those personifications of the life
of nature which form the essential part of the Greek and
Indian mythologies. Here we have perfect naturalism,
an unlimited faith in the possible, belief in the existence
of independent beings bearing within themselves the
principle of their strength, — an idea quite opposed to
Christianity, which in such beings necessarily sees either
angels or fiends. And besides, these strange beings are
always presented as being outside the pale of the Church ;
and when the knight of the Round Table has conquered
them, he forces them to go and pay homage to Guinevere,
and have themselves baptised.
Now, if in poetry there is a marvellous element that we
might accept, surely it is this. Classical mythology, taken
in its first simplicity, is too bold, taken as a mere figure of
rhetoric, too insipid, to give us satisfaction. As to the mar-
vellous element in Christianity, Boileau is right : no fiction
is compatible with such a dogmatism. There remains then
the purely naturalistic marvellous, nature interesting herself
in action and acting herself, the great mystery of fatality
unveiling itself by the secret conspiring of all beings, as in
Shakespeare and Ariosto. It would be curious to ascertain
how much of the Celt there is in the former of these poets;
as for Ariosto he is the Breton poet par excellence. All his
32 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
machinery, all his means of interest, all his fine shades of
sentiment, all his types of women, all his adventures, are
borrowed from the Breton romances.
Do we now understand the intellectual role of that little
race which gave to the world Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot,
Perceval, Merlin, St. Brandan, St. Patrick, and almost all
the poetical cycles of the Middle Ages? What a striking
destiny some nations have, in alone possessing the right to
cause the acceptance of their heroes, as though for that
were necessary a quite peculiar degree of authority, serious-
ness, and faith! And it is a strange thing that it is to the
Normans, of all peoples the one least sympathetically in-
clined towards the Bretons, that we owe the renown of the
Breton fables. Brilliant and imitative, the Norman every-
where became the pre-eminent representative of the nation
on which he had at first imposed himself by force. French
in France, English in England, Italian in Italy, Russian at
Novgorod, he forgot his own language to speak that of the
race which he had conquered, and to become the inter-
preter of its genius. The deeply suggestive character of
the Welsh romances could not fail to impress men so
prompt to seize and assimilate the ideas of the foreigner.
The first revelation of the Breton fables, the Latin Chronicle
of Geoffrey of Monmouth, appeared about the year 1 137,
under the auspices of Robert of Gloucester, natural son of
Henry I. Henry II. acquired a taste for the same narra-
tives, and at his request Robert Wace, in 1 1 55, wrote in
French the first history of Arthur, thus opening the path in
which walked after him a host of poets or imitators of all
nationalities, French, Provencal, Italian, Spanish, English,
Scandinavian, Greek, and Georgian. We need not belittle
the glory of the first trouveres who put into a language, then
read and understood from one end of Europe to the other,
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 33
fictions which, but for them, would have doubtless re-
mained for ever unknown. It is however difficult to
attribute to them an inventive faculty, such as would permit
them to merit the title of creators. The numerous passages
in which one feels that they do not fully understand the
original which they imitate, and in which they attempt to
give a natural significance to circumstances of which the
mythological bearing escaped them, suffice to prove that, as
a rule, they were satisfied to make a fairly faithful copy of
the work before their eyes.
What part has Armorican Brittany played in the creation
or propagation of the legends of the Round Table? It is
impossible to say with any degree of precision ; and in
truth such a question becomes a matter of secondary import,
once we form a just idea of the close bonds of fraternity,
which did not cease until the twelfth century to unite the
two branches of the Breton peoples. That the heroic
traditions of Wales long continued to live in the branch
of the Cymric family which came and settled in Armorica
cannot be doubted when we find Geraint, Urien, and other
heroes become saints in Lower Brittany; 1 and above all
when we see one of the most essential episodes of the
Arthurian cycle, that of the Forest of Broceliande, placed
in the same country. A large number of facts collected by
M. de la Villemarque 2 prove, on the other hand, that these
1 I shall only cite a single proof; it is a law of Edward the Confessor :
" Britones vero Arniorici quum venerint in regno isto, suscipi debent
et in regno prolegi sicut probi cives de corpore regni hujus ; exierunt
quondam de sanguine Britonum regni hujus." — Wilkins, l.c^cs Anglo-
Saxonlctc, p. 206.
2 Les Romans de la Table- Ronde et les contcs tics ancle its Bretons
(Paris, 1S59), pp. 20 et scq. In the Conies populaircs ties amicus
Bretons, of which the above may be considered as a new edition, the
learned author had somewhat exaggerated the influence <>f French
Brittany. In the present article, when first published, I hail, on the
other hand, depreciated it too much.
34 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
same traditions produced a true poetic cycle in Brittany,
and even that at certain epochs they must have recrossed
the Channel, as though to give new life to the mother
country's memories. The fact that Gauthier Calenius,
Archdeacon of Oxford, brought back from Brittany to
England (about 1125) the very text of the legends which
were translated into Latin ten years afterwards by Geoffrey
of Monmouth is here decisive. I know that to readers of
the Mabinogion such an opinion will appear surprising at a
first glance. All is Welsh in these fables, the places, the
genealogies, the customs; in them Armorica is only re-
presented by Hoel, an important personage no doubt, but
one who has not achieved the fame of the other heroes of
Arthur's court. Again, if Armorica saw the birth of the
Arthurian cycle, how is it that we fail to find there any
traces of that brilliant nativity ? l
These objections, I avow, long barred my way, but I no
longer find them insoluble. And first of all there is a class
of Mabinogiofi, including those of Owen, Gcraint, and
Peredur, stories which possess no very precise geographical
localisation. In the second place, national written literature
being less successfully defended in Brittany than in Wales
against the invasion of foreign culture, it may be conceived
that the memory of the old epics should be there more
obliterated. The literary share of the two countries thus
remains sufficiently distinct. The glory of French Brittany
is in her popular songs ; but it is only in Wales that the
genius of the Breton people has succeeded in establishing
itself in authentic books and achieved creations.
1 M. de la Villemarque' makes appeal to the popular songs still
extant in Brittany, in which Arthur's deeds are celebrated. In fact, in
his Chants populaires de la Ihclagne two poems are to be found in
which that hero's name figures.
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 35
IV.
In comparing the Breton cycle as the French trouveres
knew it, and the same cycle as it is to be found in the text
of the Mabinogion, one might be tempted to believe that
the European imagination, enthralled by these brilliant
fables, added to them some poetical themes unknown to
the Welsh. Two of the most celebrated heroes of the
continental Breton romances, Lancelot and Tristan, do not
figure in the Mabitwgion ; on the other hand, the character-
istics of the Holy Grail are presented in a totally different
way from that which we find in the French and German
poets. A more attentive study shows that these elements,
apparently added by the French poets, are in reality of
Cymric origin. And first of all, M. de la Villemarque" has
demonstrated to perfection that the name of Lancelot is
only a translation of that of the Welsh hero Mael, who in
point of fact exhibits the fullest analogy with the Lancelot
of the French romances. 1 The context, the proper names,
all the details of the romance of Lancelot also present the
most pronounced Breton aspect. As much must be said
of the romance of Tristan. It is even to be hoped that
this curious legend will be discovered complete in some
Welsh manuscript. Dr. Owen states that he has seen
one of which he was unable to obtain a copy. As to the
Holy Grail, it must be avowed that the mystic cup, the
object after which the French Parceval and the German
Parsifal go in search, has not nearly the same importance
among the Welsh. In the romance of Percdur it only
1 Ancelot is the diminutive of Ancel, and means servant, page, or
esquire. To this day in the Cymric dialects Mael has the same
signification. The surname of Fctirsi^anf, which we find borne by
some Welshmen in the French service in the early part of the four
teenth century, is also no doubt a translation of Mael.
36 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
figures in an episodical fashion, and without a well-defined
religious intention.
" Then Peredur and his uncle discoursed together, and
he beheld two youths enter the hall, and proceed up to the
chamber, bearing a spear of mighty size, with three streams
of blood flowing from the point to the ground. And
when all the company saw this, they began wailing and
lamenting. But for all that, the man did not break off
his discourse with Peredur. And as he did not tell Peredur
the meaning of what he saw, he forbore to ask him con-
cerning it. And when the clamour had a little subsided,
behold two maidens entered, with a large salver between
them, in which was a man's head, surrounded by a pro-
fusion of blood. And thereupon the company of the court
made so great an outcry, that it was irksome to be in the
same hall with them. But at length they were silent."
This strange and wondrous circumstance remains an
enigma to the end of the narrative. Then a mysterious
young man appears to Peredur, apprises him that the lance
from which the blood was dropping is that with which his
uncle was wounded, that the vessel contains the blood and the
head of one of his cousins, slain by the witches of Kerloiou,
and that it is predestined that he, Peredur, should be their
avenger. In point of fact, Peredur goes and convokes the
Round Table ; Arthur and his knights come and put the
witches of Kerloiou to death.
If we now pass to the French romance of Parccva/, we
find that all this phantasmagoria clothes a very different
significance. The lance is that with which Longus pierced
Christ's side, the Grail or basin is that in which Joseph of
Arimathea caught the divine blood. This miraculous vase
procures all the good things of heaven and earth ; it heals
wounds, and is filled at the owner's pleasure with the most
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 37
exquisite food. To approach it one must be in a state
of grace ; only a priest can tell of its marvels. To find
these sacred relics after the passage of a thousand trials, —
such is the object of Peredur's chivalry, at once worldly
and mystical. In the end he becomes a priest; he takes
the Grail and the lance into his hermitage; on the day of his
death an angel bears them up to Heaven. Let us add that
many traits prove that in the mind of the French trouvcre
the Grail is confounded with the eucharist. In the miniatures
which occasionally accompany the romance of Paneval, the
Grail is in the form of a pyx, appearing at all the solemn
moments of the poem as a miraculous source of succour.
Is this strange myth, differing as it does from the simple
narrative presented in the Welsh legend of Peredur, really
Cymric, or ought we rather to see in it an original creation
of the trouveres, based upon a Breton foundation ? With
M. de la Villemarque 1 we believe that this curious fable is
essentially Cymric. In the eighth century a Breton hermit
had a vision of Joseph of Arimathea bearing the chalice of
the Last Supper, and wrote the history called the Gradal.
The whole Celtic mythology is full of the marvels of a magic
caldron Under which nine fairies blow silently, a mysterious
vase which inspires poetic genius, gives wisdom, reveals the
future, and unveils the secrets of the world. One day as
Bran the Blessed was hunting in Ireland upon the shore of
a lake, he saw come forth from it a black man bearing upon
his back an enormous caldron, followed by a witch and a
dwarf. This caldron was the instrument of the supernatural
power of a family of giants. Tt cured all ills, and gave back
life to the dead, but without restoring to them the use of
speech — an allusion to the secret of the bardic initiation.
1 See the excellent discussion of this interesting problem in the intro-
duction to Contes popidaites des antiem Rre/ons (pp. 1S1 el *«/.)•
38 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
In the same way Perceval's wariness forms the whole plot of
the quest of the Holy Grail. The Grail thus appears to us in
its primitive meaning as the pass word of a kind of free-
masonry which survived in Wales long after the preaching
of the Gospel, and of which we find deep traces in the
legend of Taliessin. Christianity grafted its legend upon
the mythological data, and a like transformation was doubt-
less made by the Cymric race itself. If the Welsh narrative
of Peredur does not offer the same developments as the
French romance of Parceval, it is because the Red Book of
Hergest gives us an earlier version than that which served
as a model for Chretien de Troyes. It is also to be re-
marked that, even in Parceval, the mystical idea is not as
yet completely developed, that the trouvere seems to treat
this strange theme as a narrative which he has found already
complete, and the meaning of which he can scarcely guess.
The motive that sets Parceval a-field in the French romance,
as well as in the Welsh version, is a family motive; he
seeks the Holy Grail as a talisman to cure his uncle the
Fisherman-King, in such a way that the religious idea is
still subordinated to the profane intention. In the German
version, on the other hand, full as it is of mysticism and
theology, the Grail has a temple and priests. Parsifal, who
has become a purely ecclesiastical hero, reaches the dignity
of King of the Grail by his religious enthusiasm and his
chastity. 1 Finally, the prose versions, more modern still,
sharply distinguish the two chivalries, the one earthly, the
other mystical. In them Parceval becomes the model of
1 It is indeed remarkable that all the Breton heroes in their last trans-
formation are at once gallant and devout. One of the most celebrated
ladies of Arthur's court, Luncd, becomes a saint and a martyr for her
chastity, her festival being celebrated on August 1st. She it is who
figures in the French romances under the name of Lunette. See Lady
Guest, vol. i. , pp. 113, 114.
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 39
the devout knight. This was the last of the metamorphoses
which that all-powerful enchantress called the human
imagination made him undergo ; and it was only right that,
after having gone through so many dangers, he should don
a monkish frock, wherein to take his rest after his life of
adventure.
v.
When we seek to determine the precise moment in the
history of the Celtic races at which we ought to place
ourselves in order to appreciate their genius in its entirety,
we find ourselves led back to the sixth century of our era.
Races have nearly always a predestined hour at which,
passing from simplicity to reflection, they bring forth to the
light of day, for the first time, all the treasures of their nature.
For the Celtic races the poetic moment of awakening and
primal activity was the sixth century. Christianity, still
young amongst them, has not completely stifled the national
cult; the religion of the Druids defends itself in its schools
and holy places; warfare against the foreigner, without which
a people never achieves a full consciousness of itself, attains
its highest degree of spirit. It is the epoch of all the heroes
of enduring fame, of all the characteristic saints of the Breton
Church; finally, it is the great age of bardic literature, illus-
trious by the names of Taliessin, of Aneurin, of Liwarc'h Hen.
To such as would view critically the historical use of
these half-fabulous names, and would hesitate to accept as
authentic, poems that have come down to us through so
long a series of ages, we reply that the objections raised to
the antiquity of the bardic literature — objections of which
W. Schlegel made himself the interpreter in opposition to
M. Fauriel — have completely disappeared under the investi-
4 o POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
gations of an enlightened and impartial criticism. 1 By a
rare exception sceptical opinion has for once been found
in the wrong. The sixth century is in fact for the Breton
peoples a perfectly historical century. We touch this epoch
of their history as closely and with as much certainty as
Greek or Roman antiquity. It is indeed known that, up
to a somewhat late period, the bards continued to compose
pieces under the names — which had become popular — of
Aneurin, Taliessin, and Liwarc'h Hen ; but no confusion
can be made between these insipid rhetorical exercises and
the really ancient fragments which bear the names of the
poets cited — fragments full of personal traits, local circum-
stances, and individual passions and feelings.
Such is the literature of which M. de la Villemarque has
attempted to unite the most ancient and authentic monu-
ments in his Breton Bards of the Sixth Century. Wales
has recognised the service that our learned compatriot has
thus rendered to Celtic studies. We confess, however, to
much preferring to the Bards the Popular Songs of Brittany.
It is in the latter that M. de la Villemarque has best served
Celtic studies, by revealing to us a delightful literature, in
which, more clearly than anywhere else, are apparent these
features of gentleness, fidelity, resignation, and timid reserve
which form the character of the Breton peoples. 2
1 This evidently does not apply to the language of the poems in
question. It is well known that mediaeval scribes, alien as they were
to all ideas of archaeology, modernised the texts, in measure as they
copied them ; and that a manuscript in the vulgar tongue, as a rule,
only attests the language of him who transcribed it.
2 This interesting collection ought not, however, to be accepted
unreservedly ; and the absolute confidence with which it has been
quoted is not without its inconveniences. We believe that when M. de
la Villemarque comments on the fragments which, to his eternal honour,
he has been the first to bring to light, his criticism is far from being
proof against all reproach, and that several of the historical allusions
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 41
The theme of the poetry of the bards of the sixth
century is simple and exclusively heroic; it ever deals with
the great motives of patriotism and glory. There is a
total absence of all tender feeling, no trace of love, no
well-marked religious idea, but only a vague and naturalistic
mysticism, — a survival of Druidic teaching, — and a moral
philosophy wholly expressed in Triads, similar to that
taught in the half-bardic, half-Christian schools of St.
Cadoc and St. Iltud. The singularly artificial and highly
wrought form of the style suggests the existence of a system
of learned instruction possessing long traditions. A more
pronounced shade, and there would be a danger of falling
into a pedantic and mannered rhetoric. The bardic litera-
ture, by its lengthened existence through the whole of the
Middle Ages, did not escape this danger. It ended by
being no more than a somewhat insipid collection of un-
originalities in style, and conventional metaphors. 1
The opposition between bardism and Christianity reveals
itself in the pieces translated by M. de la Villemarque by
which he considers that he finds in them are hypotheses more ingenious
than solid. The past is too great, and has come down to us in too
fragmentary a manner, for such coincidences to be probable. Popular
celebrities are rarely those of history, and when the rumours of distant
centuries come to us by two channels, one popular, the other historical,
it is a rare thing for these two forms of tradition to be fully in accord
with one another. M. de la Villemarque is also too ready to suppose
that the people repeats for centuries songs that it only half understands.
When a song ceases to be intelligible, it is nearly always altered by the
people, with the end of approximating it to the sounds familiar and
significant to their ears. Is it not also to be feared that in this case
the editor, in entire good faith, may lend some slight inflection to the
text, so as to find in it the sense that he desires, or has in his mind ?
1 A Welsh scholar, Mr. Stephens, in his History of Cymric Lileia-
titre (Llandovery, 1S49), has demonstrated these successive transforma-
tions very well.
42 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
many features of original and pathetic interest. The strife
which rent the soul of the old poets, their antipathy to the
grey men of the monastery, their sad and painful conver-
sion, are to be found in their songs. The sweetness and
tenacity of the Breton character can alone explain how a
heterodoxy so openly avowed as this maintained its position
in face of the dominant Christianity, and how holy men,
Kolumkill for example, took upon themselves the defence
of the bards against the kings who desired to stamp them
out. The strife was the longer in its duration, in that
Christianity among the Celtic peoples never employed force
against rival religions, and, at the worst, left to the van-
quished the liberty of ill humour. Belief in prophets,
indestructible among these peoples, created, in despite of
faith, the Anti-Christian type of Merlin, and caused his
acceptance by the whole of Europe. Gildas and the
othodox Bretons were ceaseless in their thunderines
against the prophets, and opposed to them Elias and
Samuel, two bards who only foretold good ; even in the
twelfth century Giraldus Cambrensis 1 saw a prophet in the
town of Caerleon.
Thanks to this toleration bardism lasted into the heart of
the Middle Ages, under the form of a secret doctrine,
with a conventional language, and symbols almost wholly
borrowed from the solar divinity of Arthur. This may be
termed Neo-Druidism, a kind of Druidism subtilised and
reformed on the model of Christianity, which may be seen
growing more and more obscure and. mysterious, until the
moment of its total disappearance. A curious fragment
belonging to this school, the dialogue between Arthur and
Eliwlod, has transmitted to us the latest sighs of this latest
protestation of expiring naturalism. Under the form of an
1 See Note V.
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 43
eagle Eliwlod introduces the divinity to the sentiments of
resignation, of subjection, and of humility, with which
Christianity combated pagan pride. Hero-worship recoils
step by step before the great formula, which Christianity
ceases not to repeat to the Celtic races to sever them from
their memories : There is none greater than God. Arthur
allows himself to be persuaded to abdicate from his divinity,
and ends by reciting the Pater.
I know of no more curious spectacle than this revolt of
the manly sentiments of hero-worship against the feminine
feeling which flowed so largely into the new faith. What,
in fact, exasperates the old representatives of Celtic society
are the exclusive triumph of the pacific spirit and the men,
clad in linen and chanting psalms, whose voice is sad, who
preach asceticism, and know the heroes no more. 1 We
know the use that Ireland has made of this theme, in the
dialogues which she loves to imagine between the represen-
tatives of her profane and religious life, Ossian and St.
Patrick. 2 Ossian regrets the adventures, the chase, the
blast of the horn, and the kings of old time. "If they
were here," he says to St. Patrick, " thou should'st not
thus be scouring the country with thy psalm singing flock."
1 The antipathy to Christianity attributed by the Armorican people
to the dwarfs and korigans belongs in like measure to traditions of
the opposition encountered by the Gospel in its beginnings. The
korigans in fact are, for the Breton peasant, great princesses who would
not accept Christianity when the apostles came to Brittany. They
hate the clergy and the churches, the bells of which make them take to
flight. The Virgin above all is their great enemy; she it is who has
hounded them forth from their fountains, and on Saturday, the day
consecrated to her, whosoever beholds them combing their hair or
counting their treasures is sure to perish. (Villemarque, Chants
poputaires, Introduction.)
2 See Miss Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry, Dublin, 1789, pp. 37
et sea., pp. 75 et sea.
G
44 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
Patrick seeks to calm him by soft words, and sometimes
carries his condescension so far as to listen to his long
histories, which appear to interest the saint but slightly.
" Thou hast heard my story," says the old bard in con-
clusion ; "albeit my memory groweth weak, and I am
devoured with care, yet I desire to continue still to sing the
deeds of yore, and to live upon ancient glories. Now am I
stricken with years, my life is frozen within me, and all my
joys are fleeting away. No more can my hand grasp the
sword, nor mine arm hold the lance in rest. Among priests
my last sad hour lengtheneth out, and psalms take now the
place of songs of victory." " Let thy songs rest," says
Patrick, "and dare not to compare thy Finn to the King of
Kings, whose might knoweth no bounds : bend thy knees
before Him, and know Him for thy Lord." It was indeed
necessary to surrender, and the legend relates how the old
bard ended his days in the cloister, among the priests whom
he had so often used rudely, in the midst of these chants that
he knew not. Ossian was too good an Irishman for any
one to make up his mind to damn him utterly. Merlin
himself had to cede to the new spell. He was, it is said,
converted by St. Columba; and the popular voice in the
ballads repeats to him unceasingly this sweet and touching
appeal : "Merlin, Merlin, be converted; there is no divinity
save that of God."
VI.
We should form an altogether inadequate idea of the
physiognomy of the Celtic races, were we not to study
them under what is perhaps the most singular aspect of
their development — that is to say, their ecclesiastical an-
tiquities and their saints. Leaving on one side the
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 45
temporary repulsion which Christian mildness had to
conquer in the classes of society which saw their influence
diminished by the new order of things, it can be truly said,
that the gentleness of manners and the exquisite sensibility
of the Celtic races, in conjunction with the absence of a
formerly existing religion of strong organisation, predestined
them to Christianity. Christianity in fact, addressing itself
by preference to the more humble feelings in human nature,
met here with admirably prepared disciples; no race has so
delicately understood the charm of littleness, none has placed
the simple creature, the innocent, nearer God. The ease with
which the new religion took possession of these peoples is
also remarkable. Brittany and Ireland between them scarce
count two or three martyrs ; they are reduced to venerating
as such those of their compatriots who were slain in the
Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions. Here comes to light
the profound difference dividing the Celtic from the
Teutonic race. The Teutons only received Christianity
tardily and in spite of themselves, by scheming or by force,
after a sanguinary resistance, and with terrible throes.
Christianity was in fact on several sides repugnant to their
nature ; and one understands the regrets of pure Teutonists
who, to this day, reproach the new faith with having cor-
rupted their sturdy ancestors.
Such was not the case with the Celtic peoples ; that
gentle little race was naturally Christian. Far from changing
them, and taking away some of their qualities, Christianity
finished and perfected them. Compare the legends relating
to the introduction of Christianity into the two countries,
the Kristni Saga for instance, and the delightful legends of
Lucius and St. Patrick. What a difference we find! In
Iceland the first apostles are pirates, converted by some
chance, now saying mass, now massacring their enemies,
46 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
now resuming their former profession of sea-rovers ; every-
thing is done in accord with expediency, and without any
serious faith. In Ireland and Brittany grace operates
through women, by I know not what charm of purity and
sweetness. The revolt of the Teutons was never effectually
stifled ; never did they forget the forced baptisms, and the
sword-supported Carlovingian missionaries, until the day
when Teutonism took its revenge, and Luther through
seven centuries gave answer to Witikind. On the other
hand, the Celts were, even in the third century, perfect
Christians. To the Teutons Christianity was for long
nothing but a Roman institution, imposed from without.
They entered the Church only to trouble it ; and it was
not without very great difficulty that they succeeded in
forming a national clergy. To the Celts, on the contrary,
Christianity did not come from Rome; they had their
native clergy, their own peculiar usages, their faith at first
hand. It cannot, in fact, be doubted that in apostolic times
Christianity was preached in Brittany; and several his-
torians, not without justification, have considered that it
was borne there by Judaistic Christians, or by disciples
of the school of St. John. Everywhere else Christianity
found, as a first substratum, Greek or Roman civilisation.
Here it found a virgin soil of a nature analogous to its own,
and naturally prepared to receive it.
Few forms of Christianity have offered an ideal of Chris-
tian perfection so pure as the Celtic Church of the sixth,
seventh, and eighth centuries. Nowhere, perhaps, has God
been better worshipped in spirit than in those great
monastic communities of Hy, or of Iona, of Bangor, of
Clonard, or of Lindisfarne. One of the most distinguished
developments of Christianity — doubtless too distinguished
for the popular and practical mission which the Church had
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 47
to undertake — Pelagianism, arose from it. The true and
refined morality, the simplicity, and the wealth of invention
which give distinction to the legends of the Breton and
Irish saints are indeed admirable. No race adopted Chris-
tianity with so much originality, or, while subjecting itself
to the common faith, kept its national characteristics more
persistently. In religion, as in all else, the Bretons sought
isolation, and did not willingly fraternise with the rest of
the world. Strong in their moral superiority, persuaded
that they possessed the veritable canon of faith and religion,
having received their Christianity from an apostolic and
wholly primitive preaching, they experienced no need of
feeling themselves in communion with Christian societies
less noble than their own. Thence arose that long struggle
of the Breton churches against Roman pretensions, which
is so admirably narrated by M. Augustin Thierry, 1 thence
those inflexible characters of Columba and the monks of
Iona, defending their usages and institutions against the
whole Church, thence finally the false position of the Celtic
peoples in Catholicism, when that mighty force, grown more
and more aggressive, had drawn them together from all
quarters, and compelled their absorption in itself. Having
no Catholic past, they found themselves unclassed on their
entrance into the great family, and were never able to
succeed in creating for themselves an Archbishopric. All
their efforts and all their innocent deceits to attribute that
title to the Churches of Dol and St. Davids were wrecked
on the overwhelming divergence of their past; their bishops
had to resign themselves to being obscure suffragans of
Tours and Canterbury.
1 In his History of the Conquest. The objections raised by M.
Varin and some other scholars to M. Thierry's narrative only affect
some secondary details, which were rectified in the edition published
after the illustrious historian's death.
48 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
It remains to be said that, even in our own days, the
powerful originality of Celtic Christianity is far from being
effaced. The Bretons of France, although they have felt
the consequences of the revolutions undergone by Catholi-
cism on the Continent, are, at the present hour, one of the
populations in which religious feeling has retained most
independence. The new devotions find no favour with it;
the people are faithful to the old beliefs and the old saints;
the psalms of religion have for them an ineffable harmony.
In the same way, Ireland keeps, in her more remote districts,
quite unique forms of worship from those of the rest of the
world, to which nothing in other parts of Christendom can
be compared. The influence of modern Catholicism, else-
where so destructive of national usages, has had here a
wholly contrary effect, the clergy having found it incum-
bent on them to seek a vantage ground against Pro-
testantism, in attachment to local practices and the customs
of the past.
It is the picture of these Christian institutions, quite
distinct from those of the remainder of the West, of this
sometimes strange worship, of these legends of the saints
marked with so distinct a seal of nationality, that lends an
interest to the ecclesiastical antiquities of Ireland, of
Wales, and of Armorican Brittany. No hagiology has
remained more exclusively natural than that of the Celtic
peoples; until the twelfth century those peoples admitted
very few alien saints into their martyrology. None, too,
includes so many naturalistic elements. Celtic Paganism
offered so little resistance to the new religion, that the
Church did not hold itself constrained to put in force
against it the rigour with which elsewhere it pursued the
slightest traces of mythology. The conscientious essay
by W. Rees on the Saints of Wales, and that by the Rev.
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 49
John Williams, an extremely learned ecclesiastic of the
diocese of St. Asaph, on the Ecclesiastical Antiquities of the
Cymry, suffice to make one understand the immense value
which a complete and intelligent history of the Celtic
Churches, before their absorption in the Roman Church,
would possess. To these might be added the learned work
of Dom Lobineau on the Saints of Brittany, re-issued in
our days by the Abbe Tresvaux, had not the half-criticism
of the Benedictine, much worse than a total absence of
criticism, altered those naive legends and cut away from
them, under the pretext of good sense and religious rever-
ence, that which to us gives them interest and charm.
Ireland above all would offer a religious physiognomy
quite peculiar to itself, which would appear singularly
original, were history in a position to reveal it in its en-
tirety. When we consider the legions of Irish saints who in
the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries inundated the Con-
tinent, and arrived from their isle bearing with them their
stubborn spirit, their attachment to their own usages, their
subtle and realistic turn of mind, and see the Scots (such was
the name given to the Irish) doing duty, until the twelfth
century, as instructors in grammar and literature to all the
West, we cannot doubt that Ireland, in the first 'half of the
Middle Ages, was the scene of a singular religious move-
ment. Studious philologists and daring philosophers, the
Hibernian monks were above all indefatigable copyists ;
and it was in part owing to them that the work of the pen
became a holy task. Columba, secretly warned that his
last hour is at hand, finishes the page of the psalter which
he has commenced, writes at the foot that he bequeaths
the continuation to his successor, and then goes into the
church to die. Nowhere was monastic life to find such
docile subjects. Credulous as a child, timid, indolent,
5 o POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
inclined to submit and obey, the Irishman alone was
capable of lending himself to that complete self-abdication
in the hands of the abbot, which we find so deeply marked
in the historical and legendary memorials of the Irish
Church. One easily recognises the land where, in our own
days, the priest, without provoking the slightest scandal,
can, on a Sunday before quitting the altar, give the orders
for his dinner in a very audible manner, and announce the
farm where he intends to go and dine, and where he will
hear his flock in confession. In the presence of a people
which lived by imagination and the senses alone, the
Church did not consider itself under the necessity of deal-
ing severely with the caprices of religious fantasy. It
permitted the free action of the popular instinct; and from
this freedom emerged what is perhaps of all cults the
most mythological and most analogous to the mysteries
of antiquity, presented in Christian annals, a cult attached
to certain places, and almost exclusively consisting in
certain acts held to be sacramental.
Without contradiction the legend of St. Brandan is the
most singular product of this combination of Celtic
naturalism with Christian spiritualism. The taste of the
Hibernian monks for making maritime pilgrimages through
the archipelago of the Scottish and Irish seas, everywhere
dotted with monasteries, 1 and the memory of yet more
distant voyages in Polar seas, furnished the framework of
this curious composition, so rich in local impressions. From
Pliny (IV. xxx. 3) we learn that, even in his time, the
1 The Irish saints literally covered the Western seas. A very con-
siderable number of the saints of Brittany, St. Tenenan, St. Kenan,
etc., were emigrants from Ireland. The Breton legends of St. Malo,
St. David, and of St. Pol of Leon are replete with similar stories of
voyages to the distant ibles of the West.
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 51
Bretons loved to venture their lives upon the high seas, in
search of unknown isles. M. Letronne has proved that in
795, sixty-five years consequently before the Danes, Irish
monks landed in Iceland and established themselves on
the coast. In this island the Danes found Irish books and
bells ; and the names of certain localities still bear witness
to the sojourn of those monks, who were known by the
name of Papce (fathers). In the Faroe Isles, in the Orkneys,
and the Shetlands, indeed in all parts of the Northern seas,
the Scandinavians found themselves preceded by those
Papa, whose habits contrasted so strangely with their own. 1
Did they not have a glimpse too of that great land, the
vague memory of which seems to pursue them, and which
Columbus was to discover, following the traces of their
dreams ? It is only known that the existence of an island,
traversed by a great river and situated to the west of Ireland,
was, on the faith of the Irish, a dogma for mediaeval
geographers.
The story went that, towards the middle of the sixth
century, a monk called Barontus, on his return from
voyaging upon the sea, came and craved hospitality at the
monastery of Clonfert. Brandan the abbot besought him
to give pleasure to the brothers by narrating the marvels of
God that he had seen on the high seas. Barontus revealed
to them the existence of an island surrounded by fogs,
where he had left his disciple Mcrnoc ; it is the Land of
Promise that Cod keeps for his saints. Brandan with
seventeen of his monks desired to go in quest of this
mysterious land. They set forth in a leather boat, bearing
with them as their sole provision a utensil of butter, where-
with to grease the hides of their craft. For seven years
1 On this point see the careful researches uf Humboldt in his History
of the Geography oj the New Continent, vol. ii.
52 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
they lived thus in their boat, abandoning to God sail and
rudder, and only stopping on their course to celebrate the
feasts of Christmas and Easter on the back of the king of
fishes, Jasconius. Every step of this monastic Odyssey is a
miracle, on every isle is a monastery, where the wonders of
a fantastical universe respond to the extravagances of a
wholly ideal life. Here is the Isle of Sheep, where these
animals govern themselves according to their own laws;
elsewhere the Paradise of Birds, where the winged race lives
after the fashion of monks, singing matins and lauds at the
canonical hours. Brandan and his companions celebrate
mass here with the birds, and remain with them for fifty
days, nourishing themselves with nothing but the singing of
their hosts. Elsewhere there is the Isle of Delight, the
ideal of monastic life in the midst of the seas. Here no
material necessity makes itself felt; the lamps light of them-
selves for the offices of religion, and never burn out, for
they shine with a spiritual light. An absolute stillness
reigns in the island ; every one knows precisely the hour of
his death ; one feels neither cold, nor heat, nor sadness,
nor sickness of body or soul. All this has endured since
the days of St. Patrick, who so ordained it. The land of
Promise is more marvellous still; there an eternal day
reigns; all the plants have flowers, all the trees bear fruits.
Some privileged men alone have visited it. On their
return a perfume is perceived to come from them, which
their garments keep for forty days.
In the midst of these dreams there appears with a sur-
prising fidelity to truth the feeling for the picturesque in
I'olar voyages, — the transparency of the sea, the aspect of
bergs and islands of ice melting in the sun, the volcanic
phenomena of Iceland, the sporting of whales, the character-
istic appearance of the Norwegian^/ ds, the sudden fogs, the
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 53
sea calm as milk, the green isles crowned with grass which
grows down to the very verge of the waves. This fantastical
nature created expressly for another humanity, this strange
topography at once glowing with fiction and speaking of
truth, make the poem of St. Brandan one of the most
extraordinary creations of the human mind, and perhaps
the completest expression of the Celtic ideal. All is lovely,
pure, and innocent ; never has a gaze so benevolent and so
gentle been cast upon the earth; there is not a single cruel
idea, not a trace of frailty or repentance. It is the world
seen through the crystal of a stainless conscience, one
might almost say a human nature, as Pelagius wished it,
that has never sinned. The very animals participate in
this universal mildness. Evil appears under the form of
monsters wandering on the deep, or of Cyclops confined in
volcanic islands ; but God causes them to destroy one
another, and does not permit them to do hurt to the good.
We have just seen how, around the legend of a monk
the Irish imagination grouped a whole cycle of physical and
maritime myths. The Purgaiory of St. Patrick became the
framework of another series of fables, embodying the Celtic
ideas concerning the other life and its different conditions. 1
Perhaps the profoundest instinct of the Celtic peoples is
their desire to penetrate the unknown. With the sea
before them, they wish to know what lies beyond; they
dream of a Promised Land. In the face of the unknown
that lies beyond the tomb, they dream of that great journey
which the pen of Dante has celebrated. The legend tells
how, while St. Patrick was preaching about Paradise and Hell
to the Irish, they confessed that they would feel more
assured of the reality of these places, if he would allow one
1 See Thomas Wright's excellent dissertation, Saiul PatricRi Pur-
gatory (London, 1S44), and Calderon's The Well oj Saini laLruk.
54 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
of them to descend there, and then come back with
information. St. Patrick consented. A pit was dug, by
which an Irishman set out upon the subterranean journey.
Others wished to attempt the journey after him. With the
consent of the abbot of the neighbouring monastery, they
descended into the shaft, they passed through the torments
of Hell and Purgatory, and then each told of what he had
seen. Some did not emerge again ; those who did laughed
no more, and were henceforth unable to join in any gaiety.
Knight Owen made a descent in 1153, and gave a narrative
of his travels which had a prodigious success.
Other legends related that when St. Patrick drove the
goblins out of Ireland, he was greatly tormented in this
place for forty days by legions of black birds. The Irish
betook themselves to the spot, and experienced the same
assaults which gave them an immunity from Purgatory.
According to the narrative of Giraldus Cambrensis, the isle
which served as the theatre of this strange superstition was
divided into two parts. One belonged to the monks, the
other was occupied by evil spirits, who celebrated religious
rites in their own manner, with an infernal uproar. Some
people, for the expiation of their sins, voluntarily exposed
themselves to the fury of those demons. There were
nine ditches in which they lay for a night, tormented in
a thousand different ways. To make the descent it was
necessary to obtain the permission of the bishop. His
duty it was to dissuade the penitent from attempting the
adventure, and to point out to him how many people
had gone in who had never come out again. If the
devotee persisted, he was ceremoniously conducted to the
shaft. He was lowered down by means of a rope, with
a loaf and a vessel of water to strengthen him in the
combat against the fiend which he proposed to wage. On
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 55
the following morning the sacristan offered the rope anew
to the sufferer. If he mounted to the surface again, they
brought him back to the church, bearing the cross and
chanting psalms. If he were not to be found, the sacristan
closed the door and departed. In more modern times
pilgrims to the sacred isles spent nine days there. They
passed over to them in a boat hollowed out of the trunk
of a tree. Once a day they drank of the water of the lake ;
processions and stations were performed in the beds or cells
of the saints. Upon the ninth day the penitents entered
into the shaft. Sermons were preached to them warning
them of the danger they were about to run, and they were
told of terrible examples. They forgave their enemies and
took farewell of one another, as though they were at
their last agony. According to contemporary accounts, the
shaft was a low and narrow kiln, into which nine entered
at a time, and in which the penitents passed a day and a
night, huddled and tightly pressed against one another.
Popular belief imagined an abyss underneath, to swallow
up the unworthy and the unbelieving. On emerging from
the pit they went and bathed in the lake, and so their
Purgatory was accomplished. It would appear from the
accounts of eye-witnesses that, to this day, things happen
very nearly after the same fashion.
The immense reputation of the Purgatory of St. Patrick
filled the whole of the Middle Ages. Preachers made
appeal to the public notoriety of this great fact, to con-
trovert those who had their doubts regarding Purgatory.
In the year 1358 Edward III. gave to a Hungarian of
noble birth, who had come from Hungary expressly to visit
the sacred well, letters patent attesting that he had under-
gone his Purgatory. Narratives of those travels beyond
the tomb became a very fashionable form of literature ; and
56 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
it is important for us to remark the wholly mythological, and
as wholly Celtic, characteristics dominant in them. It is
in fact evident that we are dealing with a mystery or local
cult, anterior to Christianity, and probably based upon the
physical appearance of the country. The idea of Purgatory,
in its final and concrete form, fared specially well amongst
the Bretons and the Irish. Bede is one of the first to
speak of it in a descriptive manner, and the learned Mr.
Wright very justly observes that nearly all the descriptions
of Purgatory come from Irishmen, or from Anglo-Saxons
who have resided in Ireland, such as St. Fursey, Tundale,
the Northumbrian Dryhthelm, and Knight Owen. It is
likewise a remarkable thing that only the Irish were able
to behold the marvels of their Purgatory. A canon from
Hemstede in Holland, who descended in 1494, saw nothing
at all. Evidently this idea of travels in the other world
and its infernal categories, as the Middle Ages accepted it,
is Celtic. The belief in the three circles of existence is
again to be found in the Triads} under an aspect which
does not permit one to see any Christian interpolation.
The soul's peregrinations after death are also the favourite
theme of the most ancient Armorican poetry. Among the
features by which the Celtic races most impressed the
Romans were the precision of their ideas upon the future
life, their inclination to suicide, and the loans and contracts
which they signed with the other world in view. The more
frivolous peoples of the South saw with awe in this
assurance the fact of a mysterious race, having an under-
1 A series of aphorisms under the form of triplets, which give us,
with numerous interpolations, the ancient teaching of the bards, and
that traditional wisdom which, according to the testimony of the
ancients, was transmitted by means of mnemonic verses in the schools
of the Druids.
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 57
standing of the future and the secret of death. Through
the whole of classical antiquity runs the tradition of an Isle
of Shadows, situated on the confines of Brittany, and of a
folk devoted to the passage of souls, which lives upon the
neighbouring coast. In the night they hear dead men
prowling about their cabin, and knocking at the door.
Then they rise up ; their craft is laden with invisible beings;
on their return it is lighter. Several of these features
reproduced by Plutarch, Claudian, Procopius, and Tzetzes l
would incline one to believe, that the renown of the Irish
myths made its way into classical antiquity about the first
or second century. Plutarch, for example, relates, concern-
ing the Cronian Sea, fables identical with those which fill
the legend of St. Malo. Procopius, describing the sacred
Island of Brittia, which consists of two parts separated by
the sea, one delightful, the other given over to evil spirits,
seems to have read in advance the description of the Pur-
gatory of St. Patrick, which Giraldus Cambrensis was to
give seven centuries later. It cannot be doubted for a
moment, after the able researches of Messrs. Ozanam,
Labitte, and Wright, that to the number of poetical themes
which Europe owes to the genius of the Celts, is to be
added the framework of the Divine Comedy.
One can understand how greatly this invincible attraction
to fables must have discredited the Celtic race in the eyes
of nationalities that believed themselves to be more serious.
It is in truth a strange thing, that the whole of the medioeval
epoch, whilst submitting to the influence of the Celtic
imagination, and borrowing from Brittany and Ireland at
least half of its poetical subjects, believed itself obliged, for
the saving of its own honour, to slight and satirise the
people to which it owed them. Even Chretien de Troyes,
1 See Note VI.
53 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
for example, who passed his life in exploiting the Breton
romances for his own purposes, originated the saying —
" Les Gallois sont tous par nature
Plus sots que betes de pature."
Some English chronicler, I know not who, imagined he
was making a charming play upon words when he de-
scribed those beautiful creations, the whole world of which
deserved to live, as " the childish nonsense with which
those brutes of Bretons amuse themselves." The Bolland-
ists 1 found it incumbent to exclude from their collection,
as apocryphal extravagances, those admirable religious
legends, with which no Church has anything to compare.
The decided leaning ot the Celtic race towards the ideal,
its sadness, its fidelity, its good faith, caused it to be
regarded by its neighbours as dull, foolish, and super-
stitious. They could not understand its delicacy and
refined manner of feeling. They mistook for awkward-
ness the embarrassment experienced by sincere and open
natures in the presence of more artificial natures. The
contrast between French frivolity and Breton stubbornness
above all led, after the fourteenth century, to most deplor-
able conflicts, whence the Bretons ever emerged with a
reputation for wrong-headedness.
It was still worse, when the nation that most prides itself
on its practical good sense found confronting it the people
that, to its own misfortune, is least provided with that gift.
Poor Ireland, with her ancient mythology, with her Purga-
tory of St. Patrick, and her fantastic travels of St. Brandan,
was not destined to find grace in the eyes of English
puritanism. One ought to observe the disdain of English
critics for these fables, and their superb pity for the Church
1 See Note VII.
POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. 59
which dallies with Paganism, so far as to keep up usages
which are notoriously derived from it. Assuredly we have
here a praiseworthy zeal, arising from natural goodness; and
yet, even if these flights of imagination did no more than
render a little more supportable many sufferings which are
said to have no remedy, that after all would be something.
Who shall dare to say where, here on earth, is the
boundary between reason and dreaming ? Which is worth
more, the imaginative instinct of man, or the narrow ortho-
doxy that pretends to remain rational, when speaking of
things divine ? For my own part, I prefer the frank
mythology, with all its vagaries, to a theology so paltry,
so vulgar, and so colourless, that it would be wronging God
to believe that, after having made the visible world so
beautiful he should have made the invisible world so
prosaically reasonable.
In presence of the ever-encroaching progress of a
civilisation which is of no country, and can receive no
name, other than that of modern or European, it would
be puerile to hope that the Celtic race is in the future
to succeed in obtaining isolated expression of its originality.
And yet we are far from believing that this race has said
its last word. After having put in practice all chivalries,
devout and worldly, gone with Peredur in quest of the
Holy Grail and fair ladies, and dreamed with St. Brandan
of mystical Atlantides, who knows what it would produce
in the domain of intellect, if it hardened itself to an
entrance into the world, and subjected its rich and profound
nature to the conditions of modern thought ? It appears
to me that there would result from this combination, pro-
ductions of high originality, a subtle and discreet manner
of taking life, a singular union of strength and weakness,
of rude simplicity and mildness. Few races have had so
ff
1
60 POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES.
complete a poetic childhood as the Celtic ; mythology, lyric
poetry, epic, romantic imagination, religious enthusiasm —
none of these failed them ; why should reflection fail them ?
Germany, which commenced with science and criticism,
has come to poetry ; why should not the Celtic races, which
began with poetry, finish with criticism? There is not so
great a distance from one to the other as is supposed ;
the poetical races are the philosophic races, and at bottom
philosophy is only a manner of poetry When one considers
how Germany, less than a century ago, had her genius re-
vealed to her, how a multitude of national individualities,
to all appearance effaced, have suddenly risen again in our
own days, more instinct with life than ever, one feels per-
suaded that it is a rash thing to lay down any law on the
intermittence and awakening of nations ; and that modern
civilisation, which appeared to be made to absorb them
may perhaps be nothing more than their united fruition.
WHAT IS A NATION? 1
I propose to analyse with you an idea, simple in appear-
ance, but capable of the most dangerous misunderstanding.
The forms of human society are of the most varied types.
Great conglomerations of people, as in the case of China,
of Egypt, of ancient Babylon; the tribe, as in the case of the
Hebrews and the Arabs ; the city, as in the case of Athens
and Sparta; unions of different countiies, in the fashion of
the Empire of Achaemenes, the Roman Empire, or the
Carlovingian Empire ; communities of no country, held
together by the bond of religion, like the Israelites or the
Parsees ; nations like France, England, and the majority of
modern European autonomies; confederations, as in the
case of Switzerland and America; relationships similar to
those which race and, in a greater degree, language estab-
lish between the different branches of the Teutonic family,
the different branches of the Slavs; — these are modes of
grouping which all exist, or at least have existed, and
which cannot be confounded, the one with the other, with-
out the most serious inconvenience. At the time of the
French Revolution there was a belief that the institutions
of small independent towns, such as Sparta and Rome,
could be applied to our great nations of thirty or forty
millions of souls. In our own day a still graver error is
committed : the race is confounded with the nation, and
1 A lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, March nth, 1882.
62 WHAT IS A NATION ?
to racial, or rather to linguistic groups, is attributed a
sovereignty analogous to that of really existent peoples.
Let us attempt to arrive at some precision in these difficult
questions, where the least confusion in the sense of words,
at the beginning of the discussion, may produce in the end
the most fatal errors. What we are about to undertake is a
delicate task ; it is almost vivisection. We are to deal with
living men, as, under ordinary circumstances, the dead
alone are treated. In doing so we shall use coolness, and
the most absolute impartiality.
I.
Since the end of the Roman Empire, or rather since the
disruption of the Empire of Charlemagne, Western Europe
appears to us divided into nations, of which some, at certain
epochs, have sought to exercise a supremacy over others,
without any lasting success. What Charles V., Louis XIV,
and Napoleon I. were unable to do in the past, is hardly
likely to be achieved by any one in the future. The estab-
lishment of a new Roman Empire, or a new Carlovingian
Empire, has become an impossibility. Europe is too
deeply divided for an attempt at universal dominion not to
provoke, and that quickly, a coalition which would force
the ambitious nation to retire within its natural bounds.
A species of equilibrium has long been in existence.
France, England, Germany, and Russia will still be, in
centuries to come, and in spite of the vicissitudes they will
have gone through, historic individualities, essential pieces
of a chess-board, the squares of which vary unceasingly
in importance and greatness, but are never altogether
confused.
Nations, understood in this way, are a new feature in
WHAT IS A NATION? 63
history. Antiquity knew them not ; Egypt, China, ancient
Chaldea, were to no extent nations. There were flocks led
by a son of the Sun, or a son of Heaven. There were
no Egyptian citizens, as there are no Chinese citizens.
Classical antiquity had republics, and municipal kingdoms,
confederations of neighbouring republics, and empires ; it
scarcely had the nation, in the sense in which we under-
stand it. Athens, Sparta, Sidon, and Tyre were little
centres of admirable patriotism ; but they were cities with
a comparatively restricted territory. Gaul, Spain, and Italy,
before their absorption in the Roman Empire, were
clusters of peoples, often in league with one another, but
unpossessed of central institutions or dynasties. Nor were
even the Assyrian Empire, the Persian Empire, or that of
Alexander, nations. There were never Assyrian patriots ;
the Persian Empire was one vast feudality. Not a single
nation traces its origin to the colossal enterprise of
Alexander, which was nevertheless so pregnant with con-
sequences for the general history of civilisation.
The Roman Empire was much nearer to being a nation.
In return for the immense boon of the cessation of wars,
the Roman dominion, at first so painful, was very quickly
loved. It was a great association, synonymous with order,
peace, and civilisation. In the later days of the Empire
there was among the greater minds, among enlightened
bishops, and among the lettered, a genuine feeling for
"the Roman Peace," as opposed to the menacing chaos
of barbarism. Put an Empire twelve times greater in
extent than the France of the present day could not
form a state in the modern acceptance of the term. The
severance of East and West was inevitable. The attempts
at a Gaulish Empire in the third century were unsuccessful.
It was the Teutonic invasion that introduced into the world
64 WHAT IS A NATION?
the principle which, later, served as a basis to the existence
of nationalities.
What, in fact, were those Teutonic peoples doing, from
their great invasions of the fifth century to the last Norman
conquests in the tenth? They changed the essential
character of races only slightly; but they imposed dynasties
and a military aristocracy upon more or less considerable
portions of the former Empire of the West, which took the
name of their invaders. Thence arose a France, a Bur-
gundy, a Lombard)' — later still, a Normandy. The rapid
preponderance assumed by the Frankish Empire revived
for a moment the unity of the West ; but that Empire was
shattered irremediably towards the middle of the ninth
century, the treaty of Verdun traced divisions immutable
in principle; and thenceforward France, Germany, England,
Italy, and Spain journeyed by ways, often circuitous, and
through a thousand vicissitudes, to their full national
existence, such as we see flourishing to-day.
What, then, is the characteristic feature of these different
states? It consists in the fusion of the populations which
compose them. In the countries that we have just enu-
merated, there is nothing analogous to what you will find
in Turkey, where the Turk, the Slav, the Greek, the
Armenian, the Arab, the Syrian, and the Kurd are as distinct
now as on the day of their conquest. Two essential cir-
cumstances contributed to bring this result to pass. First
of all is the fact, that the Teutonic tribes adopted Christi-
anity as soon as they had had relations of some little
duration with the Greek and Latin peoples. When con-
queror and conquered are of the same religion, or rather
when the conqueror adopts the religion of the conquered,
the Turkish system, the absolute distinction of men accord-
ing to their respective faiths, can no longer be possible.
WHAT IS A NATION? 65
The second circumstance was the conquerors' forgetfulness
of their own language. The grandsons of Clovis, of Alaric,
of Gondebaud, of Alboin, and of Rollo were already speak-
ing Romance. This fact was itself the consequence ot
another important peculiarity, namely, that the Franks, the
Burgundians, the Goths, the Lombards, and the Normans
had very few women of their own race with them. For
several generations the chiefs espoused only Teutonic
women; but their concubines were Latin, the nurses of
their children were Latin; the' whole tribe married Latin
women. And so it was that the Lingua Francica and the
Lingua Gothica had a very short existence, after the settle-
ment of the Franks and Goths in Roman territories.
The same was not the case in England, for there can be
no doubt that the Anglo-Saxon invaders had women with
them; the ancient British population took to flight; and,
moreover, Latin was no longer dominant in Britain, indeed
it had never been so. Even if Gaulish had been generally
spoken in Gaul in the fifth century, Clovis and his followers
would not have abandoned Teutonic for it.
From this ensues the important fact, that in spite of the
extreme violence of the manners of the Teutonic invaders,
the mould that they imposed became, in the course of
centuries, the very mould of the nation. France, very
legitimately, came to be the name of a country into which
only an imperceptible minority of Franks had entered. In
the tenth century, in the earliest Chansons de Ges/e, which
are such a perfect mirror of the spirit of the age, all the
inhabitants of France are Frenchmen. The idea of a
difference of races in the population of France, that is so
apparent in Gregory of Tours, 1 is not present to any extent
in the French writers and poets, posterior to Hugh Capet.
1 See Note VIII.
66 WHAT IS A NATION?
The difference between noble and serf is as accentuated
as it well can be ; but in no respect is the difference an
ethnical one; it is a difference in courage, in habits, and
in hereditarily transmitted education. The idea, that the
beginning of it all may be a conquest, does not occur to
anybody. The fictitious theories, according to which nobility
owed its origin to a privilege, conferred by the king for
great services rendered to the state, to such an extent that
all nobility is an acquisition, were established as a dogma
in the thirteenth century. The same thing was the sequel
of nearly all the Norman conquests. At the end of one or
two generations, the Norman invaders were no longer to be
distinguished from the rest of the population. Their in-
fluence had not been the less profound ; to the conquered
land they had given a nobility, warlike habits, and a
patriotism hitherto unexistent.
Forgetful ness, and I shall even say historical error, form
an essential factor in the creation of a nation ; and thus
it is that the progress of historical studies may often be
dangerous to the nationality. Historical research, in fact,
brings back to light the deeds of violence that have taken
place at the commencement of all political formations, even
of those the consequences of which have been most bene-
ficial. Unity is ever achieved by brutality. The union of
Northern and Southern France was the result of an ex-
termination, and of a reign of terror that lasted for nearly
a hundred years. The king of France who was, if I may
say so, the ideal type of a secular crystalliser, the king of
France who made the most perfect national unity in exist-
ence, lost his prestige when seen at too close a distance.
The nation that he had formed cursed him ; and to-day the
knowledge of what he was worth, and what he did, belongs
only to the cultured.
WHAT IS A NATION? 67
It is by contrast that these great laws of the history of
Western Europe become apparent. In the undertaking
which the King of France, in part by his tyranny, in part
by his justice, achieved so admirably, many countries came
to disaster. Under the crown of St. Stephen, Magyars and
Slavs have remained as distinct as they were eight hundred
years ago. Far from combining the different elements in
its dominions, the house of Hapsburg has held them apart,
and often opposed to one another. In Bohemia the Czech
element and the German element are superimposed like oil
and water in a glass. The Turkish policy of separation of
nationalities according to religion has had much graver
results. It has brought about the ruin of the East. Take
a town like Smyrna or Salonica ; you will find there five or
six communities, each with its own memories, and pos-
sessing among them scarcely anything in common. But
the essence of a nation is, that all its individual members
should have many things in common ; and also, that all
of them should hold many things in oblivion. No French
citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, or a
Visgoth; every French citizen ought to have forgotten
St. Bartholomew, and the massacres of the South in the
thirteenth century. There are not ten families in France
able to furnish proof of a French origin ; and yet, even if
such a proof were given, it would be essentially defective,
in consequence of a thousand unknown crosses, capable of
deranging all genealogical systems.
The modern nation is then the historical result of a
series of events, converging in the same direction. Some-
times unity has been achieved by a dynasty, as in the ease
of France ; sometimes by the direct will of the provinces, as
in the case of Holland, Switzerland, and Belgium; some-
times by a general feeling slowly vanquishing the caprices
68 WHAT IS A NATION ?
of feudality, as in the case of Italy and Germany. But a
profound raison d'etre has always governed these formations.
The principles in such cases come to light in the most un-
expected ways. In our own times we have seen Italy
united by her defeats, and Turkey destroyed by her victories.
Every defeat advanced the cause of Italy, every victory was
a loss to Turkey; for Italy is a nation, Turkey, outside
Asia Minor, is not. It is the glory of France to have
proclaimed by the French Revolution that a nation exists
by itself. We ought not to complain because we find
ourselves imitated. Ours is the principle of nations. But
what then is a nation ? Why is Holland a nation, while
Hanover or the Grand Duchy of Parma is not? How does
France persist in being a nation, when the principle which
created her has disappeared? How is Switzerland, with
three languages, two religions, and three or four races,
a nation, while Tuscany, for example, which is homogeneous,
is not? Why is Austria a state and not a nation? In
what respect does the principle of nationality differ from
the principle of races ? These are the points upon
which a reflective mind must be fixed, if it is to find a
satisfactory solution. The affairs of the world are scarcely
regulated by such reasoning ; but serious students wish to
carry into such matters a certain amount of reason, and to
unravel the confusions in which superficial minds entangle
themselves.
II.
In the opinion of certain political theorists a nation is,
before all else, a dynasty representing an ancient conquest,
a conquest first accepted and then forgotten by the mass
of the people. According to the politicians of whom I
WHAT IS A NATION ? 69
speak, the grouping of provinces effected by a dynasty, by
its wars, by its marriages, or by its treaties, comes to an end
with the dynasty which has formed it. It is very true that
the majority of modern nations owe their existence to a
family of feudal origin, which contracted a marriage with
the soil, and was in some measure a nucleus of centralisa-
tion. There was nothing natural or necessary about the
boundaries of France in 1789. The large zone that the
house of Capet added to the narrow limits of the Treaty of
Verdun, was in every sense the personal acquisition of that
house. At the time when the annexations were made,
there was no idea of natural frontiers, or of the rights of
nations, or of the will of the provinces. The union of
England, Ireland, and Scotland was in like manner a
dynastic act. The reason for Italy delaying so long in
becoming a nation was that no one of her numerous
reigning houses, before the present century, made itself the
centre of unity. And it is a strange thing that it is from
the obscure island of Sardinia, from territory scarcely Italian,
that she has taken a royal title. 1 Holland, which created
herself by an act of heroic resolution, has nevertheless con-
tracted a marriage with the house of Orange, and would run
real dangers on the day of that union's being compromised.
But is such a law as this absolute? Certainly not.
Switzerland and the United States, conglomerations
formed by successive additions, have no dynastic base. I
shall not discuss the question with regard to France. It
would be necessary to have the secret of the future. Let
us only say that the great royal house of France had been
so highly national, that, on the morrow of its fall, the nation
was able to stand without its support. And then the
1 The House of Savoy only owes its royal title to the possession of
Sardinia (1720).
7o WHAT IS A NATION?
eighteenth century had changed everything. Man had
returned, after centuries of abasement, to the old spirit, to
self-respect, to the idea of his rights. The words " country "
and "citizen" had resumed their significance. Thus it
was that the boldest operation ever attempted in history
was accomplished — an operation which might be compared
to what in physiology would be the gift of life and its first
identity, to a body from which head and heart had been
removed.
It must then be admitted that a nation can exist without
a dynastic principle ; and even that nations formed by
dynasties can separate themselves from them without, for
that reason, ceasing to exist. The old principle, which held
account of no right but that of princes, can no longer be
maintained ; above the dynastic right there is the national
right. On what foundation shall we build up this national
right, by what sign shall we know it, from what tangible
fact shall we derive it ?
(I.) From race, say several with assurance. Artificial
divisions resulting from feudality, royal marriages, or
diplomatic congresses, are unstable. What does remain
firm and fixed is the race of populations. That it is which
constitutes right and legitimacy. The Teutonic family, for
example, according to this theory, has the right of reclaim-
ing such of its members as are beyond the pale of Teuton-
ism — even when these members do not seek reunion. The
right of Teutonism over such a province is greater than the
right of the inhabitants of the province over themselves.
Thus is created a kind of primordial right, analogous to
that of the divine right of kings ; for the principle of
nations is substituted that of ethnography. This is a very
grave error, which, if it became dominant, would cause the
ruin of European civilisation. So far as the national
WHAT IS A NATION? 71
principle is just and legitimate, so far is the primordial
right of races narrow, and full of danger for true progress.
It may be admitted that, in the tribe and the city of
antiquity, the fact of race had an importance of the highest
order. But the ancient tribe and city were only extensions
of the family. In Sparta and in Athens all the citizens
were more or less closely related. It was the same in the
Beni-Israel, 1 it is so to this day among the Arab tribes.
From Athens, from Sparta, from the Israelite tribe, let us
now turn to the Roman Empire. The situation is alto-
gether different. Founded by violence, then maintained
by self-interest, this great agglomeration of towns, and
altogether diverse provinces, dealt a blow of the gravest
kind to the idea of race. Christianity, with its universal
and absolute character, tended still more efficiently in the
same direction. It entered into a close alliance with the
Roman Empire, and the effect of those two incomparable
agents of unity was to banish ethnographical reason for
centuries from the government of human affairs.
The barbarian invasion was, despite appearances, a step
further in the same direction. There was nothing racial in
the division of barbaric kingdoms ; they were governed by
the force or the caprice of the invaders. The race of the
populations that they subjugated was, for them, a matter of
the greatest indifference. Charlemagne achieved again, in
his own way, what Rome had achieved already : a single
empire composed of the most diverse races. The authors
of the Treaty of Verdun, when they traced imperturbably
their two great lines from North to South, had not the
slightest care for the race of the peoples on either side.
The changes of frontier, which took place later than the
Middle Ages, were also free from all racial considerations.
1 See Note IX.
72 WHAT IS A NATION?
If the continuous policy of the house of Capet succeeded
in grouping together, under the name of France, almost
all the territories of ancient Gaul, we do not have there an
effect of the tendencies that those countries should have
had, to rejoin their own congeners. The Dauphiny,
Bresse, Provence, the Franche-Comte, no longer had
memories of a common origin. All Gaulish feeling had
perished in the second century of our era ; and it is only
by the eyes of erudition that, in our own days, the indi-
viduality of the Gaulish character has been retrospectively
found once more.
Racial considerations have then been for nothing in the
constitution of modern nations. France is Celtic, Iberian,
Teutonic. Germany is Teutonic, Celtic, and Slavonic.
Italy is the country where ethnography is most confused.
Gauls, Etruscans, Pelasgians, and Greeks, to say nothing
of many other elements, are crossed in an undecipherable
medley. The British Isles, as a whole, exhibit a mixture
of Celtic and Teutonic blood, the relative proportions of
which it is singularly difficult to define.
The truth is that there is no pure race ; and that making
politics depend upon ethnographical analysis, is allowing it
to be borne upon a chimsera. The most noble countries,
England, France, Italy, are those where blood is most
mingled. Is Germany an exception to this rule? Is she
purely Teutonic? What an illusion is this! The whole
of the South was once Gaulish. The whole of the East
beyond the Elbe is Slavonic. And what, in point of fact,
are the parts alleged to be really pure ? Here we touch on
one of the problems concerning which it is most important
to have our ideas clear, and to avoid misunderstandings.
Discussions upon race are interminable, because the
word "race" is taken by the philological historians and by
WHAT IS A NATION? 73
physiological anthropologists in two totally different senses.
For the anthropologists race has the same meaning as it has
in zoology ; it indicates a real descent, a relationship by
blood. But the study of languages and history does not
lead to the same classifications as physiology. The words
Brachycephahts and Dolichocephalus have no place in history
or philology. In the human group, that created the Aryan
languages and customs, there were already Brachycephali
and Dolichocephali. The same must .be said of the primi-
tive group, that created the languages and institutions
known as Semitic. In other words, the zoological origins
of humanity are enormously anterior to the origins of
culture, civilisation, and language. The primitive Aryan,
primitive Semitic, and primitive Tauranian groups, had no
physiological unity. These groupings are historical facts
which took place at a certain epoch — let us say fifteen or
twenty thousand years ago — while the zoological origin of
man is lost in incalculable mystery. What is philologically
and historically called the Teutonic race, is assuredly a
very distinct family of the human species. But is it a
family in the anthropological sense? Certainly not; the
appearance of the Teutonic individuality in history only
took place a very few centuries before the Christian era.
Apparently the Teutons had not emerged from the earth up
to that time. Before it, mingled as they were with the
Slavs in the great indistinct mass of the Scythians, they had
no individuality of their own. An Englishman is a distinct
type in the aggregate of humanity. But the type of what
is very improperly called the Anglo-Saxon race 1 is neither
1 The Teutonic element is not much more considerable in the United
Kingdom than it was in Fiance, at the lime when she possessed Alsace
and Metz. The Teutonic tongue dominated in the British Isles,
simply because Latin had not entirely supplanted the Celtic idioms, as
it had done among the Gauls.
74 WHAT IS A NATION?
the Briton of the time of Caesar, nor the Anglo-Saxon of
Hengist, nor the Dane of Knut, nor the Norman of William
the Conqueror ; it is the product of them all. The French-
man is neither a Gaul, nor a Frank, nor a Burgundian. He
is that which has come out of the great caldron, where,
under the governance of the King of France, the most
various elements have fermented together. An inhabitant
of Jersey or Guernsey differs in nothing, as regards origin,
from the Norman population of the neighbouring coast.
In the eleventh century, the most penetrative vision could
not have detected the slightest difference between the two
sides of the channel. From insignificant circumstances, it
happened that Philip Augustus did not take these islands
with the rest of Normandy. Separated for nearly seven
hundred years, the two populations have become, not only
foreign to one another, but unlike in every respect. Race,
as we historians understand it, is then something that makes
and unmakes itself. The study of race is of capital import-
ance to the student who occupies himself with the history
of mankind. It has no application in politics. The
instinctive consciousness which presided over the con-
struction of the map of Europe took no account of race ;
and the greatest European nations are nations of essentially
mixed blood.
Racial facts then, important as they are in the beginning,
have a constant tendency to lose their importance. Human
history is essentially different from zoology. Race is not
everything, as it is in the case of the rodents and felines;
and we have no right to go about the world feeling the
heads of people, then taking thorn by the throat, and
saying, "You arc of our blood; you belong to us!"
Beyond anthropological characteristics there are reason,
justice, truth, and beauty ; and these are the same in all.
WHAT IS A NATION? 75
Nay, this ethnographical politics is not even safe. You
exploit it to-day on other people ; some day you may see
it turned against yourselves. Is it certain that the Germans,
who have raised the flag of ethnography so high, will not
see the Slavs coming to analyse in their turn the names of
villages in Saxony and Lusatia, to seek for traces of the
Wilzen or the Obotrites, and to ask account of the massacres
and slavery which their ancestors suffered at the hands of the
Othos ? It is good for all to know how to forget. I have a
great liking for ethnography ; it is a science of rare interest ;
but because I wish to see it free, I wish it to be without
political application. In ethnography, as in all studies,
systems change; it is the condition of progress. Should
then nations change with the systems also ? If so, the
frontiers of states would follow the fluctuations of science.
Patriotism would depend on a more or less paradoxical
dissertation. They would come to the patriot and say,
" You are deceived ; you have been shedding your blood
for such ami such a cause ; you believed yourself to be a
Celt, while, as a matter of fact, you are a Teuton." And
then, ten years afterwards, they would come and tell him
that he was a Slav. To avoid falsifying science, let us
abstain from giving advice upon these problems, in which
so many interests arc involved. You may be sure that if
science is charged with the duty of furnishing the elements
of diplomacy, it will be, in many cases, found to be in the
gravest error. It has better work to do ; let us simply
demand of it the truth.
(II.) What we have been saying about race must also
be said of language. Language invites re-union ; it does
not force it. The United States and England, Spanish
America and Spain, speak the same languages, and do not
form single nations. On the contrary, Switzerland, which
8
7 6 WHAT IS A NATION?
owes her stability to the fact that she was founded by the
assent of her several parts, counts three or four languages.
In man there is something superior to language, — will.
The will of Switzerland to be united, in spite of the variety
of her languages, is a much more important fact than a
similarity of language, often obtained by persecution.
It is an honourable fact for France, that she has never
sought to procure unity of speech by measures of coercion.
Can we not have the same feelings and thoughts, and love
the same things in different languages? We were speaking
just now of the inconvenience of making international
politics depend on ethnography. There would not be less
in making politics depend on comparative philology. Let
us allow the fullest liberty of discussion to these interesting
studies ; do not let us mingle them with that which would
affect their serenity. The political importance attached to
languages results from the way in which they are regarded as
signs of race. Nothing can be more incorrect. Prussia,
where nothing but German is now spoken, spoke Slavonic
a few centuries ago ; Wales speaks English ; Gaul and
Spain speak the primitive idiom of Alba Longa ; Egypt
speaks Arabic ; indeed, examples are innumerable. Even
at the beginning similarity of speech did not imply simi-
larity of race. Let us take the proto-Aryan or proto-
Semitic tribe; there were to be found slaves accustomed
to speak the same language as their masters ; but neverthe-
less the slave was then very often of a different race from
that of his master. Let us repeat it ; these classifications
of the Indo-European, Semitic, and other tongues, created
with such admirable sagacity by comparative philology, do
not coincide with the classifications of anthropology. Lan-
guages are historical formations, which give but little
indication of the blood of those who speak them ; and, in
WHAT IS A NATION? 77
any case, cannot enchain human liberty, when there is a
question of determining the family with which we unite
ourselves for life and death.
The exclusive consideration of language has, like the
unduly great attention given to race, its dangers and its
drawbacks. When we thus exaggerate it, we imprison
ourselves in a limited culture, held as being national ; we
are hemmed in, cooped up. We quit the great atmosphere
that we breathe in the vast field of humanity, to shut our-
selves up in conventicles of compatriots. Nothing can be
worse for the mind, nothing more hurtful to civilisation.
Do not let us abandon this fundamental principle, that man
is a reasonable and moral being before being allotted to
such and such a language, before being a member of such
and such a race, an adherent of such and such a
culture. Before French culture, German culture, Italian
culture, there is human culture. Consider the great men
of the Renaissance; they were neither French, nor Italian,
nor German. They had found anew, by their intercourse
with antiquity, the secret of the true education of the
human mind; to it they devoted themselves body and soul;
and they did well !
(III.) Nor can religion offer a sufficient basis for the
establishment of a modern nationality. In the beginning
religion was essential to the very existence of the social
group. The social group was an extension of the family.
Religious rites were family rites. The Athenian religion
was the cult of Athens itself, of its mythical founders, of its
laws and customs. It implied no dogmatic theology. This
religion was in every sense of the term a State religion. If
any one refused to practise it, he was no longer an Athenian.
In reality it was the worship of the personified Acropolis.
To swear on the altar of Agraulos was to take an oath to
78 WHAT IS A NATION?
die for one's country. This religion was the equivalent of
what drawing lots for military service, or the cult of the
flag, is among us. To refuse to participate in such a
worship was like a refusal of military service in our modern
societies. It was a declaration that one was not an
Athenian. From* another point of view, it is clear that
such a religion had no force for any one who was not
an Athenian; and thus no proselytism was exercised to
compel aliens to accept it. The slaves in Athens did not
practise it. The same thing held good in some small
mediaeval republics. A man was not a good Venetian if
he did not swear by St. Mark ; he was not a good citizen
of Amalfi if he did not place St. Andrew above all the
other saints of Paradise. In those small communities
tyranny, which in later days meant persecution, was legiti-
mate, and of as little consequence as our own fashion of
keeping the birthday of the father of the family, and address-
ing our good wishes to him on New Year's day.
What was right at Sparta and Athens was already no
longer so in the kingdoms that originated in Alexander's
conquest ; above all, was no longer right in the Roman
Empire. The persecutions of Antiochus Epiphanes, 1 for
the purpose of forcing the worship of the Olympian Jupiter
on the East, those of the Roman Empire for the purpose of
keeping up a pseudo-State religion, were a mistake, a crime,
a veritable absurdity. In our own days the position is
perfectly clear. No longer are there masses of people
professing a uniform belief. Every one believes and practises
after his own fashion, what he can, as he pleases. The
state-religion is a thing of the past. One can be a French-
man, an Englishman, or a German ; and at the same time
be a Catholic, a Protestant, or a Jew, or else be of no
1 See Note X.
WHAT IS A NATION? 79
creed at all. Religion has become a matter for the indi-
vidual ; it affects the individual's conscience alone. The
division of nations into Catholic and Protestant no longer
exists. Religion, which fifty-two years ago was so con-
siderable an element in the formation of Belgium, retains
all its importance in the spiritual jurisdiction of each man ;
but it has almost completely disappeared from the con-
siderations that trace the limits of peoples.
(IV.) Community of interests is assuredly a powerful
bond between men. But nevertheless -can interests suffice
to make a nation ? I do not believe it. Community of
interests makes commercial treaties. There is a sentimental
side to nationality; it is at once body and soul ; a Zollverein
is not a fatherland.
(V.) Geography, or what we may call natural frontiers,
certainly plays a considerable part in the division of nations.
Geography is one of the essential factors of history. Rivers
have carried races forward; mountains have checked them.
The former have favoured, the latter limited, historic move-
ments. Can it be said, however, that, as certain persons
believe, the boundaries of a nation are inscribed upon the
map ; and that this nation has a right to judge what is
necessary, to round off certain contours, to reach some
mountain or river, to which a species of a priori faculty of
limitation is ascribed ? I know of no doctrine more arbi-
trary, or more disastrous. By it all violence is justified.
First, let us ask, do mountains or rivers constitute these
so-called natural frontiers? It is incontestable that
mountains separate; but, on the other hand, rivers unite.
And then all mountains cannot cut off states. Which are
those that separate, and those that do not separate? From
Biarritz to the Turnea there is not a single river-estuary
which, more than another, has the character of a boundary.
80 WHAT IS A NATION?
Had histury required it, the Loire, the Seine, the Meuse,
the Elbe, and the Oder would have, to the same extent as
the Rhine, that character of a natural frontier which has
caused so many infractions of the fundamental right, — the
will of men. Strategical considerations are mooted. No-
thing is absolute ; it is clear that many concebsions must be
made to necessity. But these concessions need not go too
far. Otherwise the whole world would claim its military
conveniences; and there would be war without end. No,
it is no more the land than the race that makes a nation.
The land provides the substratum, the field of battle and
work ; man provides the soul. Man is everything in the
formation of that sacred thing which we call a people. No-
thing of a material nature suffices for it. A nation is a
spiritual principle, the result of profound historical com-
plications, a spiritual family, not a group determined by the
Configuration of the soil. We have now seen what do not
suffice for the creation of such a spiritual principle ; race,
language, interests, religious affinity, geography, military
necessities. What more, then, is necessary ?
in.
A nation is a living soul, a spiritual principle. Two things,
which in truth are but one, constitute this soul, this spiritual
principle. One is in the past, the other in the present.
One is the common possession of a rich heritage of
memories; the other is the actual consent, the desire to
live together, the will to preserve worthily the undivided
inheritance which has been handed down. Man does not
improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the outcome
of a long past of efforts, and sacrifices, and devotion.
Ancestor-worship is therefore all the more legitimate; for
WHAT IS A NATION? Si
our ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past,
great men, glory, — I mean glory of the genuine kind, —
these form the social capital, upon which a national idea
may be founded. To have common glories in the past, a
common will in the present; to have done great things
together, to will to do the like again, — such are the essential
conditions for the making of a people. We love in
proportion to the sacrifices we have consented to make, to
the sufferings we have endured. We love the house that
we have built, and will hand down to our descendants.
The Spartan hymn, "We are what you were; we shall be
what you are," is in its simplicity the national anthem of
every land.
In the past an inheritance of glory and regrets to be
shared, in the future a like ideal to be realised ; to have
suffered, and rejoiced, and hoped together ; all these things
are worth more than custom-houses in common, and
frontiers in accordance with strategical ideas ; all these can
be understood in spite of diversities of race and language.
I said just now, "to have suffered together," for indeed
suffering in common is a greater bond of union than joy.
As regards national memories, mournings are worth more
than triumphs; for they impose duties, they demand
common effort.
A nation is then a great solidarity, constituted by the
sentiment of the sacrifices that its citizens have made, and
of those that they feel prepared to make once more. It
implies a past ; but it is summed up in the present by a
tangible fact — consent, the clearly expressed desire to live
a common life. A nation's existence is — if you will pardon
the metaphor — a daily plebiscite, as the individual's ex-
istence is a perpetual affirmation of life. I know very well
that this is less metaphysical than divine right, less brutal
82 WHAT IS A NATION?
than pseudo-historic right. In the order of ideas that 1
submit to you, a nation has no more right than a king to
say to a province, "Thou art mine; I take thee unto
myself." For us, a province means its inhabitants; and if
any one has a right to be consulted in such an affair, it is
the inhabitants. A nation never favours its true interests
when it annexes or retains a country, regardless of the
latter's wishes. The will of nations is then the only legiti-
mate criterion ; and to it we must always return.
We have banished from politics metaphysical and theo-
logical abstractions. What still remains? There remains
man, his desires and his needs. Dismemberment, you
will tell me, and, in the long run, natural decay, are the
consequences of a system that puts those old organisms
at the mercy of wills that are often little enlightened. It
is clear that, in such a matter, no principle ought to be
pushed to excess. Truths of this order are only applicable
when taken as a whole, and in a very general way. Human
wills change, but is there here on earth anything changeless ?
The nations are not something eternal. They have had
their beginnings, they shall have their end. A European
confederation will probably take their place. But such
is not the law of the age in which we live. At the present
hour, the existence of nations is good, even necessary.
Their existence is the guarantee of liberty, which would
be lost if the world had but one law and one master.
By their diverse and often antagonistic faculties, the
nations take part in the common work of civilisation ;
each brings a note to that great chorus of humanity,
which in sum is the highest ideal reality to which we
attain. Isolated, their parts are feeble. I often tell
myself that an individual who should have the faults
regarded by nations as good qualities, who should feed
WHAT IS A NATION? S3
himself with vain glory, who should bo in the same way
jealous, egoistical, and quarrelsome, who should be able
to bear nothing without drawing the sword, would be
the most unsupportable of men. But all these discords
of detail disappear in the mass. Poor humanity, how
much thou hast suffered ! How many trials await thee
still ! May the spirit of wisdom be thy guide, and preserve
thee from the countless perils with which thy path is
sown !
But to resume: man is neither enslaved .by his race, nor
by his language, nor by his religion, nor by the course of
rivers, nor by the direction of mountain ranges. A great
aggregation of men, sane of mind, and warm of heart,
creates a moral consciousness, which is called a nation.
So far as this moral consciousness proves its strength,
through the sacrifices exacted by the individual's abdication
for the good of the community, it is legitimate and has a
right to exist. If doubts arise concerning frontiers, consult
the populations in dispute. They have a very good right
to have a voice in the matter. This no doubt will bring a
smile to the transcendentalists of politics, those infallible
beings who pass their lives in self-deception, and from the
height of their superior principles look down in pity upon
our modest views. " Consult the populations, indeed !
What artlessness ! These are the pitiful French ideas,
which would replace diplomacy and war by an infantine
simplicity." Let us wait; let us suffer the reign of the
transcendentalists to pass away; let us know how to submit
to the disdain of the strong. It may be that after much
unfruitful groping the world will return to our modest
empirical solutions. At certain times, the way to be right
in the future consists in knowing how to resign ourselves
to being out of the fashion in the prebent.
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 1
I have already so frequently proved the indulgent attention
of this audience, that I ventured to choose for my subject
to-day a question of the most subtle nature, full of these
delicate distinctions into which it is necessary to enter
resolutely, when we wish to make history leave the domain
of inexactitude. The causes of historical error are nearly
always to be found in a failure of precision in the use of
words denoting nations and races. We speak of the
Greeks, of the Romans, of the Arabs, as though these
words designated human groups ever identical with them-
selves, without taking into account the changes due to
military, religious, and linguistic conquests, to fashion, and
to the great currents of every description which traverse
the history of humanity. Reality does not govern itself
in accordance with such simple categories. We French,
for instance, are Roman by language, Greek by civilisation,
and Jewish by religion. The matter of race, of capital
importance in the beginning, has a constant tendency to
lose that importance, when the great universal facts, known
as Greek civilisation, Roman conquest, Teutonic conquest,
Christianity, Islamism, the Renaissance, philosophy, and
revolution pass, like grinding mill-stones, over the primitive
varieties of the human family, and force them to mingle
themselves in more or less homogeneous masses. It is my
1 Lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, March 29th, 1SS3.
ISLAM1SM AND SCIENCE. 85
desire to unravel with you one of the greatest confusions of
ideas made in this respect — that is to say, the equivocation
contained in these expressions : Arabic science, Arabic
philosophy, Arabic art, Mohammedan science, Moham-
medan civilisation. From the vague ideas current on this
matter result many false judgments, and even practical
errors that are, at times, of some gravity.
Every person, however slightly he may be acquainted
with the affairs of our time, sees clearly the actual
inferiority of Mohammedan countries, the decadence of
states governed by Islam, and the intellectual nullity of the
races that hold, from that religion alone, their culture and
their education. All those who have been in the East, or
in Africa, are struck by the way in which the mind of a
true believer is fatally limited, by the species of iron circle
that surrounds his head, rendering it absolutely closed to
knowledge, incapable of either learning anything, or of being
open to any new idea. From his religious initiation at the
age of ten or twelve years, the Mohammedan child, who
occasionally may be, up to that time, of some intelligence, at
a blow becomes a fanatic, full of a stupid pride in the
possession of what he believes to be the absolute truth,
happy as with a privilege, with what makes his inferiority.
This foolish pride is the radical vice of the Mussulman.
The apparent simplicity of his creed inspires him with an
unjustifiable contempt for other religions. Persuaded that
Cod gives fortune and power at his good pleasure, with-
out taking account either of education or personal merit,
the Mussulman has the most profound disdain for in-
struction, for science, for everything that constitutes the
European spirit. This bent of mind inculcated by the
Mohammedan faith is so strong, that all differences of race
and nationality disappear by the fact of conversion to Islam.
S6 ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE.
The Berber, the Sudanese, the Circassian, the Malay, the
Egyptian, and the Nubian, once they have become Mussul-
mans, are no longer Berbers, Sudanese, Egyptians, etc. ;
they are simply Mussulmans. To this Persia is the only
exception ; she has been able to keep her own genius, for
Persia has known how to take a place by herself in Islam.
At bottom she is more Shiite than Moslem.
To diminish the inferences hostile to Islam, which one is
compelled to draw from this generally observed state of
things, many persons point out that this decadence, after
all, can only be a transitory phase. To reassure them-
selves for the future, they make appeal to the past. This
Mohammedan civilisation, now so debased, was once very
brilliant. It had men of science and philosophers. It was
for centuries the mistress of the Christian West. Why
should that which has been, not be once more ? That is
the precise point which I wish to discuss. Was there really
a Mohammedan science, or at least a science recognised by
Islam, tolerated by Islam ?
There is undoubtedly in the facts alleged a partial truth.
Yes; from about the year 775 to nearly the middle of the
thirteenth century, that is to say, for about five hundred
years, there were in Mohammedan countries learned men,
thinkers of very high distinction. It might almost be said
that, during this period, the Mohammedan world was
superior in intellectual culture to the Christian world.
But this fact must be carefully analysed, if we are to
avoid drawing from it erroneous conclusions. We must
follow, century by century, the history of Eastern civilisa-
tion, in order to appreciate, at their true value, the diverse
elements which brought about this momentary superiority,
so soon transformed into a distinct inferiority. There is
nothing more alien to all that can be called philosophy or
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 87
science, than the first century of Islam. The result of a
religious warfare which lasted for several centuries, and
held the conscience of Arabia in suspense between the
different forms of Semitic monotheism, Islam is a thousand
leagues from all that can be called rationalism or science.
The Arab cavaliers who espoused its cause, as a pretext
for conquest and pillage, were, in their time, the finest
warriors in the world; but they were assuredly the least
philosophical of men. An Oriental writer of the .thirteenth
century, Aboul-Faradj, tracing the character of the Arabian
people, thus expresses himself: "The science of this people,
that which gave it glory, was the science of language, the
knowledge of its idioms, the texture of verse, the skilful
composition of prose. As for philosophy, Cod had taught
them none, and had not fitted them for it." Nothing can
be truer. The nomad Arab, the most literary of men, is of
all men the least mystical, the least inclined to meditation.
The religious Arab contents himself, for the explanation of
things, with a creative Cod, governing the world directly,
and revealing himself to man by successive prophets. Thus,
so long as Islam was in the hands of the Arab race, that
is to say, under the first four Caliphs and under the
Omeyyades, there was born within it no intellectual move-
ment of a profane character. Omar did not burn— as we
are often told— the library of Alexandria ; that library had,
by his time, nearly disappeared. But the principle which
he caused to triumph in the world was, in a very real sense,
destructive of learned research and of the varied work of
the mind.
All underwent a change when, towards the year 750,
Persia took the upper hand, and made the dynasty of the
children of Abbas victorious over that of the Beni-Omeya,
The centre of Islam found itself transported into the
88 ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE.
region of the Tigris and Euphrates. But this country
was still full of the traces of one of the most brilliant
civilisations that the East has ever known, that of the
Persian Sassanidae, which had reached its highest point
under the rule of Chosroes Nuschirvan. For centuries
past art and industry had flourished in these lands. Chos-
roes added intellectual activity. Philosophy, banished from
Constantinople, came to Persia for refuge. Chosroes had
translations made of the books of India. The Nestorian
Christians, who formed the most considerable element of
the population, were versed in Greek science and philo-
sophy ; medicine was entirely in their hands. Their
bishops were logicians and geometricians. In the Persian
epics, of which the local colour is borrowed from Sassanian
times, when Rustem desires to construct a bridge, he
summons to his aid a djathalik (Caf/io/icos, the name of
the Nestorian patriarchs or bishops), in the capacity of
engineer.
The terrible blast of Islam completely checked, for the
space of a century, all this fine Iranian development. But
the advent of the Abbasides seemed like a revival of the
brilliancy of the Chosroes. The revolution that gave the
throne to this dynasty was brought about by Persian
troops under Persian leaders. Its founders, Aboul Abbas,
and, above all, Mansour, were always surrounded by Per-
sians. These were in some measure the Sassanians re-
suscitated. The privy councillors, the preceptors of the
princes, and the prime ministers were the Barmecides, a
highly enlightened family of ancient Persia, which had
remained faithful to the old Persian religion, to Parsiism,
and had been tardily, and without conviction, converted to
Islam. The Nestorians soon surrounded those somewhat
sceptical Caliphs, and became, by a kind of exclusive
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 89
privilege, their chief physicians. Harran, a town which,
in the history of the human mind, has taken a place by
itself, had remained Pagan ; and had retained the whole
scientific tradition of Greek antiquity. To the new school
it furnished a large contingent of learned men, indifferent
to revealed religion ; and including, above all, skilful
astronomers.
Bagdad arose as the capital of this renascent Persia.
Arabic, the language of the conquest, could not be sup-
planted, nor its religion be disowned ; but the spirit of
the new civilisation was essentially a mingled one. Parsis
and Christians took the leading part; the administration,
the police in particular, was in the hands of the latter.
All those brilliant caliphs, the contemporaries of our
Carlovingian monarchs, Mansour, Haroun al-Raschid,
Mamoun, can scarcely be called Mussulmans. Externally
they practise the religion of which they are the chiefs,
or popes, if one can thus express one's self; but in spirit
they are elsewhere. They are curious to know all things,
and chiefly things exotic and Pagan; they question India,
ancient Persia, above all, Greece. At times, it is true,
the Moslem pietists cause strange reactions at court ; at
certain moments the Caliph becomes devout, and proceeds
to sacrifice his infidel or free-thinking friends. Then the
independent influence takes the upper hand once more;
the Caliph recalls his men of science, and his boon
companions : and a free life begins anew, to the great
scandal of the puritanical Mussulmans.
Such is the explanation of that strange and fascinating
civilisation of Bagdad, the features of which the fables
of the Thousand and One Nights have fixed in every
imagination, a curious medley of official rigour and private
relaxation, an age of youth and inconsequence, in' which
9 o ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE.
the serious arts and the arts of the life of pleasure flourished,
thanks to the protection of the hostile chiefs of a fanatical
religion ; in which the libertine, though always under
the menace of the most cruel punishments, was flattered
and a favourite at court. Under the rule of those Caliphs,
now tolerant, now reluctant persecutors, free thought
developed; the Motecattetrtin or "disputants" held debates,
where all religions were examined in the light of reason.
In some measure we have an account of one of those
debates given by a highly devout person. Allow me to
read it to you, as M. Dozy has translated it.
A doctor in Kairwan asks a pious Spanish theologian,
who has journeyed to Bagdad, whether, during his stay in
that town, he has ever been present at the meetings of the
Motecalkmin. " I was twice present," replies the Spaniard ;
"but I shall take good care not to go again." "And
why ? " asks his interlocutor.
"You will judge," responds the traveller. "At the first
meeting to which I went there were not only Mussulmans
of every kind, orthodox and heterodox, but also unbelievers,
fire-worshippers, atheists, materialists, Jews, and Christians —
in fact, sceptics of every species. Each sect had its leader,
whose duty it was to defend the opinions that it held ; and
every time one of these leaders entered the room, all rose
in token of respect, and no one resumed his place until the
leader was sealed. The room was soon full, and, when the
meeting was seen to be complete, one of the sceptics took
up the discourse. ' We are gathered together for the
purpose of reasoning,' he said; 'you know all the con-
ditions. You Mussulmans will not allege reasons drawn
from your Book, or based on the authority of your Prophet;
for we believe in neither one nor the other. Every one
must confine himself to arguments adduced from reason.'
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 91
All applauded these words. You can understand," added
the Spaniard, "that after hearing such things, I returned no
more to that assembly. I was induced to visit another;
but it was the same scandal over again."
A genuine philosophical and scientific movement was
the consequence of this momentary relaxation of orthodox
rigour. The Syrian Christian physicians, successors to the
later Greek schools, were well versed in the Peripatetic
philosophy, in mathematics, in medicine, and in astronomy.
The Caliphs employed them to translate into Arabic the
Encyclopaedia of Aristotle, Euclid, Galen, Ptolemy, — in a
word, the whole of Greek science, as it was then known.
Active minds, like that of Alkindi, 1 began to speculate on the
eternal problems that man puts to himself, and is powerless
to solve. They were called Fi/souf ( Philcsophos), and from
that time this exotic word was taken in bad part, as
designating something foreign to Islam. With the Mussul-
mans Filsouf became a name to be feared, often bringing
death or persecution like Zendik and later still Farmacoun
(Eree-Mason). It must be admitted that the rationalism
produced in the bosom of Islam was of the most thorough
character. A sort of philosophical society, which called
itself the Ikhwan es-sa/a, "the brethren of sincerity," set
itself to publish a philosophical encyclopaedia, remarkable
for its wisdom, and for the elevation of its ideas. Two
very great men, Alfarabi i and Avicenna, 1 soon ranked with
the deepest thinkers who have ever lived. Astronomy and
algebra had, especially in Persia, remarkable developments.
Chemistry pursued its long subterranean labours, revealing
itself to the outer world by astonishing results, such as
distillation and perhaps gunpowder. Moslem Spain followed
the East in the pursuit of these studies; the Jews lent an
1 See Note XI.
9 2 ISLAMTSM AND SCIENCE.
active collaboration. Ibn Badja, 3 Ibn Tofail, 1 and Averroes
raised philosophic thought, in the twelfth century, to heights
it had never reached since antiquity.
Such is that great philosophical system which we are
accustomed to call Arabic, because it is written in Arabic,
but which is in reality Grseco-Sassanian. It would be more
precise to say Greek, for the really fruitful element of all
this came from Greece. One's value, in those days of
abasement, was proportionate to what one knew of ancient
Greece. Greece was the one source of knowledge and of
exact thought. The supremacy of Greece and Bagdad
over the Latin West was due to this fact alone, — that, in
the former, men were much closer to the Greek tradition.
It was an easier matter to have a copy of Euclid, or
Ptolemy, or Aristotle, at Bagdad, or at Harran, than at
Paris. If the Byzantines had only been less jealous
guardians of the treasures, which at that moment they
scarcely read, if in the eighth or the ninth century had
lived a Bessarion 2 or a Lascaris, 2 there would have been
no need for that strange detour, by which Greek science
reached us in the twelfth century, after passing through
Syria, Bagdad, Cordova, and Toledo. But that species of
mysterious providence which causes the torch of humanity,
when it begins to expire in the hands of one people, to
pass into the hands of another which uplifts and lights it
anew, gave a value of the highest order to the work, other-
wise apt to be obscure, of those poor Syrians, of those
persecuted Julsouf, of those Harranians, whose scepticism
put them under the ban of their contemporaries. It was
by those Arabic translations of Greek works of philosophy
and science that Europe was plunged into the ferment of
ancient tradition, needful for the birth of her genius.
1 See Note XII. 2 See Note XIII.
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 93
In fact, while Averroes, the last of the Arabic philo-
sophers, was dying in Morocco, in sadness and abandon-
ment, this West of ours was fully awakening out of its
slumber. Abelard had already given the cry of renascent
rationalism. Europe had found her genius, and was com-
mencing upon that extraordinary evolution, the last term of
which will be the complete emancipation of the human
mind. Here on the mount of St. Genevieve, a new se?i-
sorium was created for the work of the mind. One thing
was wanting — books, the pure sources of antiquity. At a
first glance, it would seem as though the more natural
thing to have done would have been to go and ask for
them in the libraries of Constantinople, where the originals
were to be found, than to have depended upon translations,
often mediocre, and in a language but ill fitted to render
Greek thought. But religious controversy had created
between the Latin world and the Greek world a deplorable
antipathy, which the fatal crusade of 1204 only served to
intensify. And then we had no Greek scholars ; it was
necessary to wait for three hundred years before we had a
Bude, 1 a Lefevre d'Etaples. 1
In default of the true and authentic Greek philosophy
which was in the Byzantine libraries, it was incumbent to
go to Spain, and seek there a Greek science translated
badly and sophisticated. I shall not speak of Gerbert,-
about whose travels among the Mussulmans there hangs
much doubt. But even in the eleventh century, Con-
stantine the African- was superior in learning to his age
and country, because he had received a Moslem education.
From 1 130 to 1150 an active college of translators, estab-
lished at Toledo under the patronage of Archbishop
Raymond, put into Latin the most important works of
» See Note XIV. » See Note XV.
94 ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE.
Arabic science. In the early years of the thirteenth
century, the Arabic Aristotle made its triumphant entrance
into the University of Paris. The West threw off its
inferiority, which had lasted for four or five hundred years.
Till then Europe had been, as regarded science, tributary
to the Mussulmans. Towards the middle of the thirteenth
century the balance was still uncertain. Starting from
about the year 1275, two easily discernible movements are
apparent. On the one hand, the Mohammedan countries
plunge into the most pitiable intellectual decadence; on the
other, Western Europe resolutely enters on its own account
into that great highway of the scientific search for truth,
that immense curve, the amplitude of which cannot yet be
gauged.
Woe to him that becomes useless to human progress !
He is almost instantly cast aside. When the so-called
Arabic science had inoculated the Latin West with its
germ of life, it disappeared. While Averroes was arriving
in the Latin schools of thought at a celebrity almost equal
to that of Aristotle himself, he was forgotten by his co-
religionists. After about the year 1200 there was no longer
a single Arabic philosopher of any renown. Philosophy
had ever been persecuted in the bosom of Islam, but by
means that had not succeeded in suppressing it. From
the year 1200, the theological reaction carried it away
altogether. Philosophy was abolished in Mohammedan
countries. The historians and other writers only speak of
it as a memory, and that an evil memory. The philo-
sophical manuscripts were destroyed, and have become
rare. Astronomy is only tolerated for the sake of that
part of it which serves to determine the direction of prayer.
Soon the Turkish race assumed the hegemony of Islam,
and caused the universal prevalence of its total lack of the
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 95
philosophic and scientific spirit. From that moment, with
some rare exceptions, like Ibn Khaldoun, 1 Islam no longer
counted among its members any man of great mind. It
has slain the science and philosophy within itself.
I have not sought to diminish the role of that great
science, known as Arabic, which marks such an important
stage in the history of the human mind. On some points
its originality has been exaggerated, notably with regard to
astronomy ; but we need not go to the other extreme, and
depreciate it beyond measure. Between the disappearance
of ancient civilisation in the sixth century, and the birth of
the European genius in the twelfth and thirteenth, there
was what can be called the Arabic period, during which
the traditions of the human spirit were continued by the
regions conquered by Islam. In reality what was Arabic
in this so-called Arabic science? The language, and
nothing but the language. The Moslem conquest had
burne the language of the Hedjaz to the very ends of the
earth. It was with Arabic as with Latin, which in the West
became the vehicle of feelings and thoughts that had
nothing to do with ancient Latium. Averroes, Avicenna,
Albateni, J were Arabs, as Albcrtus Magnus, 3 Roger Bacon,
Francis Bacon, and Spinoza were Latins. It is as great
a mistake to give the credit of Arabic science and philosophy
to Arabia, as to put all the Latin Christian literature, all
the Scholastic Philosophy, all the Renaissance, and the
whole of the science of the fifteenth, and in part of the
sixteenth centuries, to the credit of the city of Rome ;
because all this was written in Latin. What is in fact a
very remarkable thing is, that among the philosophers and
learned men called Arabic, there was but one alone, Alkindi,
who was of Arabic origin ; all the others were Persians,
1 See Note XVI. 2 See Note XVII. 3 See Note XVIII.
96 ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE.
Transoxians, Spaniards, natives of Bokhara, of Samarcand,
of Cordova, of Seville. Not only were those men not
Arabs by blood, but they were in nowise Arabs in mind.
They made use of Arabic ; but they were fettered by it, as
the mediaeval thinkers were fettered by Latin, and modified
it for their own use. Arabic, which lends itself so well to
poetry, and to a certain eloquence, is a very unsuitable
instrument for metaphysics. The Arabic philosophers and'
men of science were in general somewhat bad writers.
This science, then, is not Arabic. Is it at least Moham-
medan? Has Islamism lent any tutelary aid to rational
research ? In no way. This splendid advance in learning
was entirely the work of Parsees, of Christians, of Jews, of
Harranians, of Ismaelians, of Mussulmans in internal revolt
against their own religion. From orthodox Mussulmans it
only reaped curses. Mamoun, the Caliph who showed
most zeal for the introduction of Greek philosophy, was
pitilessly damned by the theologians; the misfortunes that
afflicted his reign were represented as penalties for his
tolerance of doctrines alien to Islam. It was no rare cir-
cumstance for the books of philosophy and astronomy to
be burnt in public places, or cast into wells and cisterns,
to please the populace, aroused by the Imams. Those who
cultivated these studies were called Zendiks (unbelievers);
they were stoned in the streets, their houses were set on
fire, and very frequently the authorities, when they desired
to secure popularity, would put them to death.
Islamism has then, in reality, constantly persecuted
science and philosophy. It ended by stifling it. It is,
however, necessary to distinguish in this respect two'
periods in the history of Islam — one from its commence-
ment to the twelfth century, the other from the thirteenth
century to our own days. In the former period Islam r
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 97
undermined by sects, and tempered by a species of pro-
testantism (known as Mbtazelism), was much less organised
and less fanatical than it has been in the latter, when it has
fallen into the hands of the Tartar and Berber races-
races which are heavy, brutal, and without intelligence.
Islamism offers this peculiarity: that it has obtained from
its disciples a faith ever tending to grow stronger. The first
Arabs engaged in the movement scarcely believed in the
mission of the Prophet. During two or three centuries
incredulity was scarcely dissimulated. Then came the
absolute reign of dogma, without any possible separation of
the spiritual from the temporal, the reign of coercion and
corporeal punishments for him who did not practise re-
ligion ; a system, finally, which has only been exceeded, in
regard to persecutions, by the Spanish Inquisition. Liberty
is never more grievously wounded than by a social
organisation, in which religion absolutely dominates civil
life. In modern times we have seen only two examples of
such a rule — on the one hand the Moslem States, on the
other the former Papal State, in the days of its temporal
power. And it ought to be remarked that the temporal
papacy only weighed upon a country of very limited extent ;
while Islamism oppresses vast portions of our globe, and in
them maintains the idea most opposed to progress, — the
state founded on a pseudo-Revelation, theology governing
society.
The liberals who defend Islam do not know its real
nature. Islam is the close union of the spiritual and the
temporal; it is the reign of a dogma, it is the heaviest
chain that humanity has ever borne. In the first half of
the Middle Ages, I repeat, Islam supported philosophy
because it could not prevent it ; it could not prevent it,
because it was itself lacking in cohesion, and only poorly
98 ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE.
equipped against terrorism. The police was, as I have said,
in the hands of the Christians; and was chiefly occupied
in checking the attempts of the followers of Ali. 1 A
multitude of things passed through the meshes of that
loosely held net. But when Islam had at its disposal
masses of ardent believers, it destroyed all. Religious
terror and hypocrisy were the order of the day. Islam has
been liberal in its day of weakness, and violent in its
day of strength. Do not let us honour it then for what
it has been unable to suppress. To do honour to Islam for
the philosophy and science that it did not annihilate from
the very first, is as though we were to do honour to the
theologians for the discoveries of modern science. These
discoveries are made in spite of the theologians. Western
theology has not persecuted less than that of Islamism ;
only it has not been successful, it has not crushed out the
modern spirit, as Islamism has trodden out the spirit of
the lands it has conquered.
In our Western Europe theological persecution has only
succeeded in a single country — Spain. There a terrible
system of oppression has stifled the scientific spirit. Let
us hasten to say that that noble land will have her revenge.
In Moslem countries has come to pass what would have
happened in Europe, if the Inquisition, Philip II., and
Pius V. had succeeded in their design of arresting the human
mind. Frankly, I have much difficulty in being grateful
to people for desisting from the evil that they have been
unable to achieve. No; religions have their great and
beautiful hours, when they console and raise the feeble
parts of our poor humanity; but we need not compliment
them for what has been born in spite of them, for what
they have sought to smother in the cradle. We do not
i See Note XIX.
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 99
inherit the possessions of the people whom we assassinate ;
we ought not to allow persecutors to profit from the things
that they have persecuted.
That is, however, the error that we commit, by an excess
of generosity, when we attribute to the influence of Islam a
movement which produced itself in spite of Islam, against
Islam, and which Islam has happily been unable to
prevent. Doing honour to the Islam of Avicenna, of
Avenzoar, 1 of Averroes, is like doing honour to the
Catholicism of Galileo. Theology impeded Galileo ; it
was not sufficiently strong to fetter him altogether. That
is no reason for his owing it any great gratitude. Far from
me be it to speak, with words of bitterness, against any of
the symbols in which the human conscience has sought for
rest, amongst the insoluble problems presented to it by the
universe and its destiny. Islamism has its beauties as a
religion ; I have never entered a mosque without a vivid
emotion — shall I even say without a certain regret in not
being a Mussulman? But to the human reason Islamism
has only been injurious. The minds that it has shut from
the light were, no doubt, already closed in by their own
internal limits ; but it has persecuted free thought, I shall
not say more violently than other religions, but more
effectually. It has made of the countries that it has
conquered a closed field to the rational culture of the
mind.
What is, in fact, essentially distinctive of the Mussulman
is his hatred of science, his persuasion that research is
useless, frivolous, almost impious — the natural sciences,
because they are attempts at rivalry with God; the historical
sciences, because, since they apply to times anterior to
Islam, they may revive ancient heresies. One of the most
1 See Note XX.
ioo ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE.
curious evidences of this is that of the Sheik Rifaa, who
resided in Paris for several years, as chaplain of the
Egyptian school ; and after his return to Egypt wrote
a work full of the quaintest observations on French society.
His fixed idea is that European science, above all by its
principle of the permanence of natural laws, is from one
end to the other a heresy ; and it must be admitted that,
from the point of view of Islam, he is not altogether wrong.
A revealed dogma is always opposed to the free research
that may contradict it. The result of science is not to
banish the divine altogether, but ever to place it at a
greater distance from the world of particular facts in which
men once believed they saw it. Experience causes the
supernatural to draw back, and restrains its domain. But
the supernatural is the basis of all theology. Islam, in
treating science as an enemy, is only consistent ; but it is
a dangerous thing to be too consistent. To its own mis-
fortune Islam has been successful. By slaying science it
has slain itself; and is condemned in the world to a com-
plete inferiority.
When one starts from the idea that scientific research is
a thing that infringes on the rights of God, one inevitably
comes to sloth of mind, to lack of precision, to incapacity
for exactitude. Allah aalam : " God knoweth best what it
is," is the last word of all Moslem discussion. It is a good
thing to believe in God, but not to such an extent as that.
In the early days of his sojourn at Mossoul, Sir Henry
Layard desired, clear-minded as he was, to acquire some
information on the population of the town, on its commerce,
and on its historical traditions. He addressed himself to
the Cadi, who gave the following response, the translation
of which has been kindly furnished to me : —
" O my illustrious friend, O joy of living men ! What
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 101
thou askest of me is both useless and harmful. Albeit all
my days have been spent in this land, I have never sought
to count the houses, or to inform myself of the number of
their inhabitants. And as to what merchandise this man
putteth upon his mules, and that man in the hold of his
ship, in very truth these are things that concern me not at
all. As for the former history of this city, God alone
knoweth it; and He alone could say with how many errors
its dwellers were filled before it was overcome by Islam.
The knowledge of it would be dangerous for us.
" O my friend, O my lamb, seek not to know the things
that concern thee not. Thou hast come amongst us, and we
have made thee welcome ; go in peace ! Verily, all the
words that thou hast said unto me have done me no ill ;
for he that speaketh is one, and he that giveth ear is
another. After the manner of the men of thy nation, thou
hast journeyed through many lands, but not the mure hast
thou found happiness anywhere. We (blessed be God!)
were born here, and have no desire to go hence.
" Hearken unto me, my son; there is no wisdom like unto
that of faith in God. He hath created the world ; who
are we that we should strive to equal Him by seeking to
fathom the mysteries of His creation? Behold that star
that goeth round another star ; behold yet another star
that drawcth a tail behind it, and is so many years in
coming, and so many years in departing. Leave it, my son;
He whose hands have fashioned it, knowcth well how to
lead and direct it.
" But it may be that thou shalt say : ' O man, get thee
gone ; for I am wiser than thou, and have looked upon
things whereof thou knowest not' If thou thinkest that
these things have made thee better than I, be doubly
welcome; but as for me, I bless God that I have not sought
io2 ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE.
after that of which I have no need. Thou art learned in
things that have no interest for me; and what thou hast
seen, I disdain. Shall greater knowledge give thee a second
belly, and shall thine eyes, that go prying everywhere, make
thee find a Paradise ?
" O my friend, if it be that thou hast a desire to be happy,
let this be thy cry, ' God alone is God ! ' Do no evil, and
then thou shalt fear neither men nor death itself, for thine
hour shall come."
This Cadi is very philosophical after his own fashion ;
but note the difference. We consider the Cadi's letter
charming ; but he, on the contrary, would deem what we
are saying here to be abominable. Besides, it is for society
that the consequences of such a way of thinking are fatal.
Of the two evils that follow in the train of lack of the
scientific spirit, superstition and dogmatism, the latter is
perhaps worse than the former. The East is not super-
stitious ; its great evil is the narrow dogmatism imposed by
the whole force of society. The goal of humanity is not
repose in a resigned ignorance; it is an implacable war
with falsehood, a struggle with the powers of darkness.
Science is the very soul of a society ; for science is
reason. It creates military superiority and industrial
superiority. Some day it will create social superiority — that
is to say, a state of society in which the amount of justice
compatible with the essence of the universe will be attained.
Science gives force for the service of reason. In Asia there
are elements of barbarism analogous to those that formed
the early Moslem armies, and the great cyclones of Attila
and Genghis Khan. But science bars their way. If Omar
or Genghis Khan had found good artillery confronting
them, they would never have passed the borders of their
desert. We need not stop at momentary aberrations.
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 103
What was not said at the beginning against fire-arms, which
nevertheless have contributed much to the victory of
civilisation ? For my own part, I am convinced that science
is good, that it alone can furnish weapons against the evil
that can be wrought by it ; and that in the end it will
only serve progress ; — I mean true progress — that which is
inseparable from respect for humanity and freedom.
Appendix to the preceding Lecture.
(A remarkably intelligent Afghan sheik, visiting Faris, having pub-
lished in the Journal cfes Dt'bats of May iSth, 18S3, some remarks
upon the preceding lecture, I replied next day in the same journal,
as follows. — Author 's Note.)
The very judicious reflections which my last lecture at
the Sorbonne suggested to Sheik Gemmal Eddin wen
read yesterday with the interest which they deserved.
There is nothing more instructive than thus to study, in its
original and sincere manifestations, the conscience of the
enlightened Asiatic. It is by listening to the most diverse
voices, coming from the four quarters of the horizon in favour
of rationalism, that one comes to the conclusion that if
religion divides men, reason tends to unite them ; and that,
at bottom, there is but one reason. The unity of the
human mind is the great and consoling consequence which
results from the peaceful encounter of ideas, when the
antagonistic pretensions of so-called supernatural revela-
tions are put on one side. The league of the whole world's
honest thinkers against fanaticism and superstition is ap-
parently composed of an imperceptible minority; essentially
it is the only league destined to endure, for it rests upon
d
t C 104 ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE.
J. ^)
truth, and will end by winning the day, after the fables that
v rival it have been exhausted in lengthened series of powerless
.j *V convulsions.
Nearly two months ago I made the acquaintance of the
Sheik Gemmal Eddin, thanks to my dear colleague,
M. Ganem. Few persons have produced a more vivid
impression upon me. It was in great measure my conver-
^sation with him that decided me in choosing for the
^ .> subject of my lecture at the Sorbonne the relation between
the scientific spirit and Islamism. The Sheik Gemmal
Eddin is an Afghan, entirely emancipated from the pre-
judices of Islam ; he belongs to those energetic races of the
Upper Iran bordering upon India, in which the Aryan spirit
still flourishes so strongly, under the superficial garb of
official Islamism. He is the best proof of that great axiom,
which we have often proclaimed, that the worth of religions
is to be determined by the worth of the races that profess
them. The freedom of his thought, his noble and loyal
character, made me believe, when in his presence, that I
had before me, in a resuscitated state, one of my old
acquaintances, Avicenna, Averroes, or some other of those
great sceptics who for five centuries represented the tra-
dition of the human spirit. The contrast was especially
apparent to me when I compared this striking similarity
with the spectacle presented by Moslem countries other
than Persia, countries where scientific and philosophical
curiosity is so rare a thing. The Sheik Gemmal Eddin is
the finest case of racial protest against religious conquest
that could be cited. He confirms what the intelligent
orientalists of Europe have frequently said, namely, that
Afghanistan is in all Asia, Japan alone excepted, the
country which presents most of the constituent elements
of that which we call a nation.
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 105
In the Sheik's learned article I can only see a single
point on which we really differ. The Sheik does not
admit the distinctions, which historical criticism leads us to
make, in these great and complex facts called empires and
conquests. The Roman Empire, with which the Arabic
conquest has so much in common, made the Latin lan-
guage the organ of the human spirit through the whole of
the Western world up to the sixteenth century. Albertus
Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Spinoza wrote in Latin. They
are not however, for us, Latins. In a history of English
literature we assign a place to Bede and Alcuin, in a history
of French literature we place Gregory of Tours and Abelard.
It is not that we think lightly of the action of Rome in the
history of civilisation, any more than we fail to recognise
Arabic action. But these great currents of humanity
demand analysis. All that is written in Latin is not to
the glory of Rome; all that is written in Greek is not
Hellenic work; all that is written in Arabic is not of
Arabic production ; all that is done in a Christian country
is not the result of Christianity; all that is done in a
Mohammedan country is not the fruit of Islam. This is
the principle which the profound historian of Moslem
Spain, M. Reinhard Dozy, whose loss learned Europe is
at this moment deploring, applied with so rare a sagacity.
These sorts of distinctions are necessary, if we do not
wish history to be a tissue of inexactitude and misunder-
standing.
One aspect in which I have appeared unjust to the
Sheik, is that I have not sufficiently developed the idea
that all revealed religion is forced to show hostility to
positive science ; and that, in this respect, Christianity has
no reason to boast over Islam. About that there can
be no doubt. Galileo was not treated more kindly by
ro6 ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE.
Catholicism than was Averroes by Islam. Galileo found
truth in a Catholic country despite Catholicism, as Averroes
nobly philosophised in a Moslem country despite Islam.
If I did not insist more strongly upon this point, it was, to tell
the truth, because my opinions on this matter are so well
known that there was no need for me to recur to them
again before a public conversant with my writings. I have
said, sufficiently often to preclude any necessity for repeat-
ing it, that the human mind must be detached from all
supernatural belief if it desires to labour at its own essential
task, which is the construction of positive science. This
does not imply any violent destruction or hasty rupture.
It does not mean that the Christian should forsake
Christianity, or that the Mussulman should abandon Islam.
It means that the enlightened parts of Christendom and
Islam should arrive at that state of benevolent indifference
in which religious beliefs become inoffensive. This is half
accomplished in nearly all Christian countries. Let us
hope that the like will be the case for Islam. Naturally on
that day the Sheik and I will be at one, and ready to
applaud heartily.
I did not assert that all Mussulmans, without distinction
of race, are, and always will be, sunk in ignorance : I said
that Islamism puts great difficulties in the way of science,
and unfortunately has succeeded for five or six hundred
years in almost suppressing it in the countries under its
sway ; and that this is for these countries a cause of extreme
weakness. I believe, in point of fact, that the regeneration
of the Mohammedan countries will not be the work of
Islam j it will come to pass through the enfeeblement of
Islam, as indeed the great advance of the countries called
Christian commenced with the destruction of the tyrannical
church of the Middle Ages. Some persons have seen in
ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE. 107
my lecture a thought hostile to the individuals who profess
the Mohammedan religion. That is by no means true ;
Mussulmans are themselves the first victims of Islam.
More than once in my Eastern travels I have been in
a position to notice how fanaticism proceeds from a small
number of dangerous men who keep the others in the
practice of religion by terror. To emancipate the Mussul-
man from his religion would be the greatest service that
one could render him. In wishing these populations, in
which so many good elements exist, a deliverance from the
yoke that weighs them down, I do not believe that I have
any unkindly thought for them. And, let me say also,
since the Sheik Gemmal Eddin desires me to hold the
balance equally between different faiths, I should not any
the more believe that I was wishing evil of certain European
countries if I expressed a hope that Christianity should
have a less dominant influence upon them.
The lack of agreement between liberal thinkers on these
different points is not very serious, since, favourable or not
to Islam, all come to the same practical conclusion, the
necessity for spreading education among Mohammedans.
This is perfectly right, if by education is meant serious
education of a character to cultivate the reason. If the
religious leaders of Islamism contribute to this excellent
work I shall be delighted. To be frank, I am a little doubt-
ful of their doing so. Distinguished individualities — there
will be few so distinguished as the Sheik Gemmal Eddin —
will be formed who will sever their connection with Islam
as we ourselves have separated from Catholicism. Certain
countries in time will almost break with the religion of tin-
Koran; but I suspect that the movement of Renaissance
will be made without the support of official Islam. The
scientific Renaissance of Europe was to no greater extent
10
108 ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE.
carried on with the assistance of Catholicism ; at the present
hour — and we have no reason to be surprised at it —
Catholicism still struggles to prevent the full realisation
of that which sums up the rational cloud of humanity, the
neutral state outside so-called revealed dogmas.
Above all else, as a supreme law, let us put freedom and
respect for men. Not to destroy religions, even to treat
them with kindliness as free manifestations of human nature,
but not to guarantee them, most of all not to defend them
against such of their own members as desire to leave them,
— this is the duty of civil society. Thus reduced to the
condition of free and independent studies, like literature or
taste, religions will be entirely transformed. Deprived of
the official or temporal bond, they will disintegrate and lose
the greater part of their drawbacks. All this is Utopian at
the present hour; all this will be reality in the future.
How will each religion comport itself under the reign of
liberty, which, after many actions and reactions, is destined
to impose itself upon human societies ? It is not in a few
lines that such a problem can be examined. In my lecture
I merely wished to treat an historical question. The Sheik
Gemmal Eddin seems to me to have brought considerable
arguments in support of my two fundamental theses :
During the first half of its existence Islam did not prevent
the scientific movement from growing in Mohammedan
soil ; during the second half of its existence it stifled the
scientific movement within it, and that to its own misfor-
tune.
FAREWELL TO TOURGENIEF. 1
Not without a word of farewell shall we allow the bier to
depart, which is to give back to his own country the guest
of genius, whom through long years it has been our privilege
to know and to love. A master in the art of judging the
things of the imagination will tell you the secret of those
exquisite works which have charmed our century. Tour-
guenief was a great writer; above all else, he was a great
man. I shall only speak to you of his personality, as it has
appeared to me in the sweet seclusion among us which an
illustrious friendship had conferred upon him.
From the mysterious decree which prescribes the voca-
tions of men, Tourguenief received the noblest gift of all :
he was born essentially impersonal. His mind was not
that of an individual more or less richly endowed by
nature; it was in some measure the mind of a people.
Before his birth he had lived thousands of years; infinite
series of dreams concentrated themselves in the depths of
his heart No other man has been to such a point the
incarnation of a whole race. A world lived in him, spoke
through his lips ; generations of ancestors, lost and speech-
less in the slumber of the ages, found in him life and
utterance.
The silent spirit of collective masses is the source of all
great things, but the mass has no voice. It can only feel
1 Spoken at the Care du NorJ, October 1st, iSSj.
no FAREWELL TO TOURGENIEF.
and stammer. It must have an interpreter, a prophet
who may speak for it. What manner of man shall this
prophet be ? Who shall tell of those sufferings, denied
by those whose interest it is not to behold them, those
secret longings that derange the beatific optimism of the
satisfied ? The great man, when he is at the same time a
man of genius, is a man of feeling. That is why the great
man is of all men the least free. He does not do, he does
not say, what he wills. A God speaks in him ; ten centuries
of sorrow and hope possess and command him. At times it
happens to him, as to the seer in the old Biblical narrative,
that being called to curse, he blesses; his tongue obeys not
himself, but the Spirit that breathes upon it.
The honour of that great Slavonic race, whose appearance
on the world's stage is the most unexpected phenomenon of
our time, is that it has been at the very outset depicted by
such an accomplished master. Never were the mysteries of
an obscure, and as yet contradictory consciousness, revealed
with so marvellous an insight. It was so, because Tourguenief
at once felt, and saw himself feel, was at once a part of the
people and one of the elect. He was as sensitive as a woman,
and as impassible as an anatomist ; as disillusioned as a
philosopher, and as tender as a child. Happy the race
which, at its entrance into reflective life, could be repre-
sented by such creations, as naive as they are profound,
at once realistic and mystical ! When the future has given
us the full measure of the surprises that this extraordinary
Slavonic genius has in store for us, with its fiery faith, its
profundity of intuition, its peculiar ideas of life and death,
its need for martyrdom, its thirst for the ideal, Tourguenief 's
pictures will be priceless documents, in some measure like
the portrait of a man of genius in his childhood, if we could
but have it. Tourguenief saw the perilous gravity of his
FAREWELL TO TOURGENIEF. in
position, as interpreter of one of the great families of
humanity. He felt that he had the charge of souls ; and
because he was an honest man, he weighed his every word,
he trembled for what he said, and for what he left unsaid.
His mission was thus one of pacification. He was like
the God in the Book of Job, who " maketh peace upon the
high places." What in others was the cause of discord,
became in him the principle of harmony. In his ample
breast contradictions were reconciled, anathema and hate
were disarmed by the magic spell of his art. That is why
he is the common glory of schools between which exist so
many diversities of opinion. A great race divided by very
reason of its greatness, in him finds its unity once more.
Brothers at variance, separated by diverse fashions of
conceiving the ideal, come one and all to his tomb; all
of you have the right to love him, for to all of you he
belonged; he held all of you in his heart. What an
admirable privilege is that of the man of genius ! For
him the repulsive sides of things have no existence. In
him all is reconciled ; the parties most sharply opposed
to each other unite to praise and admire him. In the
region to which he transports us, words, irritant to the
vulgar, lose their venom. Genius does in a day the work
of centuries. It creates a higher atmosphere of peace,
where those that were adversaries find that in reality they
have been collaborators ; it opens the era of the great
amnesty, when those who have fought in the arena of pro-
gress sleep side by side and hand in hand.
Above the race, in fact, there is humanity, or, if you will,
reason. Tourguenief was of a race by his manner of feeling
and portraying ; he belongs to humanity at large by a high
philosophy, that views with unflinching vision the conditions
of human existence, and without prejudice seeks the know-
ii2 FAREWELL TO TOURGENIEF,
ledge of reality. This philosophy led him to tenderness,
to joy of life, to pity for his fellow-creatures, — above all,
for the oppressed. He had an ardent love for our poor
humanity, assuredly often blind, but as often betrayed by
its leaders. He applauded its spontaneous movement after
truth and righteousness. He did not wish to feast on its
illusions ; he had no desire to complain of them. The iron
temperament that mocks at those that suffer, was not his.
No deception barred his path. Like the universe, he a
thousand times recommenced the unachieved work ; he
knew well that justice can afford to wait, that in the end all
will return to it. In truth, he had the words of eternal life,
the words of peace, of justice, of love, and of liberty.
Farewell, then, great and dear friend. What is to journey
far from us is but dust. What in you was deathless, your
spiritual image, will abide with us. May your bier be, for
those that come to kiss it, a gage of love in a single faith
in liberal progress. And when you repose in your country's
earth, may all those that repair to your tomb have a touch
of sympathetic memory for the distant land where you found
so many hearts to understand and to love you.
THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS
(THE THEOLOGY OF BERANGER).
A title attracted my attention lately amongst announce-
ments of new books — Le Beranger dcs Families (Paris :
Perotin, 1859). I was curious to see how M. Beranger had
been reconciled with religion and morality, and at the price
of what sacrifices one can become in France the evening
reading of virtuously thinking families. Examination has
proved to me, that the operation which transfigures those
whom popular legend has already consecrated can be per-
formed with a very light hand, and that, if there are sins
that France does not pardon, there are also others which
she covers with a very easy absolution. I naively supposed
that the new editor's preface would include some explana-
tion of the literary singularity of a poet who has sung of
everything save religion and the domestic virtues, becoming
a classical author for educational seminaries, in an age so
easy to scandalise as our own. There is nothing of the kind.
1 am only informed that : "Although he may have enjoyed
his youth so long as he was young, he was before all else a
good man ; . . that he is not only a great poet, but the
patriarch of the new France, and that lie lias bequeathed to
us, along with his verse, the example of his character and
the lesson of his virtues." Heaven forbid that I should
personify France in M. Peranger ! France is essentially
the land of varied and contrary gifts; and one is ever
ii 4 THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS.
deceived when one attempts to assign limits to her nature.
But almost indisputable authority has proclaimed Beranger
to be the "national poet"; and the opinion expressed in
the preface just cited tends more and more to become
general and almost official. One is conseauently justified
in reflecting upon this curious adoption, and in attempting
to discover on what side of the French genius its accom-
plishment was possible.
I have only read M. Beranger very lately, and have read
his works as one would read an historical document. I am
not, therefore, in a good position to understand him well;
and I suspect myself of a certain injustice in the feelings
which inspire me. His language, which seems to me
wanting in limpidity and true lightness of touch, has per-
haps a better effect when it is sung. Several of his poetical
motives, which for us are meaningless, doubtless once had a
significance, since they were greeted with so much favour.
A perpetual misconception, to which, it appears to me, the
public has not been very sensitive, also spoils for me his
most successful lyrics, and mingles itself like a dissonance
with his harmonious rhythms. I refer to that affectation
which so often made him pay tribute to one of the faults of
our age — the mania for confusing styles, and turning every-
thing into declamation. Each style is good, provided it be
free and forcible. Our old song- writers of the Provencal
school are classics in their way. Anacreon sang of
pleasure in a manner that was almost a lesson in morals,
since it was a lesson in simplicity, grace, and good taste.
Hafiz 1 is above all an incomparable debauchee. The
profound melancholy of human conditions, the instability
of fortune, the fatality which presses upon us, never had a
more profound interpreter. The thought of death is his
1 See Note XXI.
THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS. 115
boon companion ; behind pleasure there lies hidden for
him, not vulgar gaiety but rest in the infinite, the vision of
God. Everything that is true must have its place in
aesthetics. The bad is that which is artificial; it is the
honest and pedantic Chapelain clumsily usurping the part
of bard and trouvere ; it is the eighteenth century poet, a
J. B. Rousseau or a Piron writing at will pious canticles,
Pindaric odes, and obscene epigrams; it is the respectable
song-writer conscientiously singing of wine, and " cele-
brating the favours of Glycera," as the compulsory theme
for everybody who wishes to write in verse.
Certainly it would be unjust to place M. Be'rangcr in
this class of artificial and worthless writers. But it cannot
be denied that his work fails to remove from the critic's
eyes a singular difficulty. He was, it is said, a sober man
of rare judgment, full of good counsels, little given to
drinking, and much more prudent than he would have his
songs make us believe. When I learnt all this I was
almost tempted to cry out, "So much the worse." Had he
been a rake, I should have placed him beside his brothers,
the representatives of ancient gaiety, who were not in the
habit of making social and philosophical songs, and saw
nothing beyond their joyous refrains. But if I am told
that Lisette and the burgundy are rhetorical figures, that
the careless singer who pretends to have no other needs
than dinners at the Caveau 1 and his mistress, has a
philosophy, a system of politics, and (Heaven pardon me!)
a theology, all my aesthetic theories are put to confusion. I
no longer see anything more in the expression of this sham
gaiety than a school-boy's exercise in composition, some-
thing analogous to the Latin verses which, in the days of
the Roman Empire, the more cultured man used to make
1 See Note XXII.
n6 THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS.
as a poetic system and in token of his admiration for
Horace. Is it in truth conceivable that, in a century pre-
occupied with problems as serious as those which press
upon us, a man of sense should have accepted before the
public this role of sham drunkard and sham libertine?
How can a man calmly choose a form of literature in which
the essential condition of remaining truthful is to be a bad
character? Desaugiers, inferior as he is to Beranger in
what might be called range of intellect, seems to me a far
better lyrist; for he has no underlying meaning. His
gaiety is quite the old inconsequent gaiety; even had he
wished it, he could have made nothing but songs. But M.
Beranger wrote epics; in his day he was the solemn poet of
a political school. Everything exhibits him to us as a very
shrewd man with a rather narrow but clear-sighted intellect.
His modesty is then feigned, and in fact he himself, at the
end of his days, forsook his conventional poetics to seek
for popularity in the philanthropical song and sentimental
socialism.
Art and poetry are not morality. They are not the
opposite of it, as some critics think; art and poetry, in a
sense, suppose morality. But it would be impossible for us
to say that the end of the artist and the poet is the same
as that of the moralist. Aristophanes and Shakespeare
often present us with the ugliest side of human nature in all
its nakedness, without, on that account, any one after having
read their writings finding himself humiliated or perverted.
Lord Byron's Sardanapalus is noble even in his debauchery;
the picture of the life of the Borgias in Burchard's narratives
has the beauty of a tempest or an abyss. But pert vice,
flirtation with immorality, the prettiness of evil, — there we
have the French vice par excellence, the meanness, the folly
from which the Frenchman fancies he cleanses himself by
THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS. 117
his easy air and his eternal smile. And there, too, we have
that of which great poetry will never be made. There is no
poetry of loose morals. Take the man of genius in his
moments of aberration, a Schiller at the outset of his career
for example, and you will see that it is the intoxication of
some beautiful principle wrongly applied that leads him
astray, not the taste of the rakehell, or the rodomontade
of levity. The day on which Beaumarchais was applauded
after Moliere was the day on which the bourgeoisie (I use
this word in an intellectual and not a social sense) took
possession of the pit, and, installing themselves therein,
hounded genius and high art from the stage.
Of all the parts of Beranger's poetical system that which
surprised me most, when I read him for the first time, was
his theology. I was then little versed in knowledge of the
French intellect ; I did not know the singular alternations
of levity and dulness, of narrow timidity and foolish
temerity, which are among the features of its character.
All my ideas were upset when I saw how this joyous boon
companion, whom I had figured to myself as a thorough-
going infidel, speaking of the Almighty in highly-finished
terms, and inviting his mistress to
" Lever les yeux vers ce monde invisible
Ou pour toujours nous nous reunissons."
The song-writer of old had no theology about him; he was
an atheist by essence. Not that he denied the Deity ; that
would have been a speculative effort of which the inoffen-
sive creature was quite incapable ; but, bound up as he was
in his good and patriarchal jollity, his whole religion
consisted in doing no harm to anybody. The song of the
deist was then unheard in the land.
The Philistine simplicity of this new-fashioned theology,
n8 THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS.
and this custom of inclining one's self, glass in hand, before
the God whom I sought with trembling, were for me a
flash of light. To the indignation which the idea of
religious brotherhood with those who worshipped in this
way caused me, was added an impression of the fatal limita-
tion of manners of seeing and feeling in France. The
incurable religious mediocrity of this great country, ortho-
dox even in its merry-making, was revealed to me, and the
God of good folk appeared to me as the eternal Gaulois
deity, against whom philosophy and enlightened religion,
with all their endeavours, would struggle in vain.
Since then, when I have sought to account to myself
for the way in which this circumstance scandalised me,
I have discovered that there is nothing so relative as oui
judgments on levity and its opposite when intellectual
matters are in question. A year, a revolution, a degree
of latitude, in this respect bring about curious changes.
This scoffer, whom everybody once thought so delightful,
now appears to us to be closed to all the finer shades of
feeling. On the one hand, we are wounded by his laughter:
when he holds up to m«ckery the holy oil and Notre Dame
de Liesse, he offends us; for think how many simple hearts
have quickened at the sight of these towers, at hearing of
those miracles. On the other hand, his god of grisettes and
topers, this god in whom one can believe without being
pure in habits or lofty in soul, seems to us like the Boeotian
myth substituted for that of the ancient faith. We are
tempted to become atheists to escape his deism, and
devotees to avoid being the accomplices of his vapidity.
So far is this the case that (such has been the path followed
by the religious spirit in a quarter of a century) the ortho-
dox singer of 1828 now appears to us as at once a
blasphemer and a Philistine.
THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS. 119
True religion, in fact, is the fruit of silence and medita-
tion. It is synonymous with distinction, loftiness of spirit,
and refinement; it is born with moral delicacy at the
moment when the virtuous man, communing within himself,
listens to the voices that are there mingled. In that silence,
when every sense is lulled to quiet, when every sound from
the outside world is hushed, a sweet and penetrating
murmur comes from the soul, and, like the distant pealing
of village bells, brings back the mystery of the infinite.
Then, like a lost child who vainly seeks to unravel the
secret of his unknown birth, the meditative man feels that
he is in a strange and alien land. A thousand signs recall
his own true homeland, and mournfully he returns there.
Above the miry domain of reality he mounts to fields
flooded with the light of the sun ; in his nostrils are those
perfumes of ancient days that the southern seas still
breathed forth, when Alexander's ships fared first acioss
their waters. Death, in the garb of a pilgrim returning
from the Holy Land, knocks at the door of the soul, and
the soul begins to feel what it knew not in the turmoil
of life, — the sweetness of dying. Then is it assured that"
its works shall follow it ; truth appears as the recompense
of the good deeds that it has wrought. It sees how ill all
transient forms suffice to express the ideal ; the words
"being" and "not being" lose their contradictory sense ;
it envisages itself in kinship with the Divine, as a son witli
his father, and in such utterance it prays, " Our Father
which art in heaven. . . ."
What right has the dissipated man to these fugitive im-
pressions? Is not the superficial spirit that does not see
the divine sense of life, the atheist par excellence ? Man
is religious at the moment when the feeling of the infinite
triumphs within him over caprice or passion. I understand
120 THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS.
Horace's fine irony in relegating as far as possible from him
the gods of whom he has no need. Namque deos didici
securum agere czvum. I understand M. Alfred de Musset's
religion, at times somewhat fantastical, but never vulgar.
His joy is not gaiety; when he would fain laugh he con-
strains himself. But then it is the true God that he
worships.
" Je ne puis; malgre moi l'infini me tourmente.
Je n'y saurais songer sans crainte et sans espoir ;
Et quoi qu'on en ait dit, ma raison s'epouvante
De ne pas le comprendre, et pourtant de le voir.
• • • *
O toi que mil n'a pu connaitre,
Et n'a renie sans mentir,
Reponds-moi, toi qui m'as fait naitre
Et demain me feras mourir !
I'uisque tu te laisses comprendre,
Pourquoi fais-tu douter de toi ?
Quel triste plaisir peux-tu prendre
A tenter notre bonne foi ?"
But this tavern god of wine-bibbers, whom one slaps on the
shoulder and treats as a comrade and jolly fellow, irritates
me as the usurpation of a noble title. No, they cannot
know thee, holy Being whom we behold not save in the
serenity of a pure heart. Only to us that know how we
may seek thee dost thou belong. The blasphemies of the
man of genius must please thee more than the vulgar
homage of complacent gaiety. The atheist is far rather he
that misjudges thee to such a point, than he that denies
thee. The despair of a Lucretius or a Byron was more
after thine own heart, than this brazen-faced confidence of
superficial optimism which insults while it adores thee.
I should not insist on the puerility of this plebeian
theology, did it not cause us to touch one of those pheno-
THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS. 121
mena of the religious consciousness which are most
worthy of study — that is to say, the singular alliance some-
times established between dogmatism and frivolity. Nothing
puts people so much at ease as fixed opinions in the matter
of politics, religion, and literature. That which gives
us rhetoric in poetry gives us in religion a need for rigor-
ously determinate forms. People do not dream that
perspicacity is the opposite of poetry and religion, which
pursue an obscure and mysterious ideal. France, the only
country where one amuses one's self, is essentially the
country of settled opinions and limited horizons. The
tendency among worldly people to take for pride the calm
of the philosopher, passing from that which they regard as
necessary for a tranquil life ; and the facility with which
persons who have lived a frivolous life become attached, on
their conversion, to narrow ideas, are due to the cause
indicated here. La Fontaine was converted, Boccaccio and
Ariosto were not. That is perfectly simple : the tales of
La Fontaine are licentious, those of Boccaccio and Ariosto
are only charming. Great thought knows no remorse, and
great art has never to repent.
The clumsiness of the French spirit when the infinite is
in question, the timidity which causes that spirit — power-
less to deny or to understand — to attempt to have a share
of the infinite, does not however date from our own days.
Voltaire was the first to exhibit the singular combination of
a very irreligious and even somewhat immoral turn of
imagination with a weighty and sound philosophy. Voltaire
is a nimble rather than a daring spirit. M. BeVanger's
laughter remained equally far distant from true delicacy ;
his careless air always retained some of that affectation of
gallantry which at times renders the Frenchman so ridicu-
lous to the foreigner. His fashion of treating women
122 THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS.
resembles his religion ; it is not only devoid of all distinction,
but even of all wit and urbanity. The offensive familiarities
which he permitted himself with his reader were also due to
the same cause — that is to say, the want of reserve which
prevented him from ever leaving the limbo of vulgarity. Seek-
ing the favour of a certain public which loves to be taken
unceremoniously, he encouraged it to be on good terms with
him, and not take him too seriously. He also fell more
heavily than any one else into the pitfalls that yawn beneath
the feet of those who have no horror of vapid opinions.
There is nothing more fatal to mental development than
an overmastering sympathy. Beranger had only one object
of hatred, the sanctimonious Restoration, the association —
a very foolish one in fact — of the throne and the altar.
That hatred was his ruin. It is never good to desire some-
thing so much that everything else is a matter of indifference,
and is even subservient. The wholly disenchanted life
created by the eighteenth century, the deplorable tradition
of which was dominant until 1815, and the extreme aridity
of the society which emerged from the later Revolutionary
epoch, did not revolt him. Delivered from the nobleman
and the priest, it troubled him little that the two things
which these classes represent — often, I confess, very badly
— should suffer some loss.
Do we now understand why M. Beranger has obtained
his certificate of orthodoxy, and why the country, that is
most essentially Catholic, has chosen for her national poet
the superficial mocker at the dogmas of Catholicism, the
unmannerly detractor of its worship and observances? His
apparent frivolity has been his excuse. A grain of buf-
foonery has procured his pardon for everything. Let those
reputations which have become national be examined, and
it will be seen that there is scarcely one into which a little
THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS. 123
of the favour attached to bad taste does not enter in this
way. Good manners, on the contrary, which are necessarily
aristocratic, in the sense that they imply respect for one's
self and for others, are always displeasing and bring un-
popularity. How has it not served Henry IV. that he was
a libertine ! This good land of France was unable to resist
the seduction of a king who was also a boon companion,
who respected no woman, and wore an air of easy familiarity.
Some years ago the public revelled in the correspondence
of a celebrated man, in which he confessed to being a
gambler, an adventurer, and a scamp. That did not cause
any prejudice, and when it was announced that he had had
a Christian end, everybody felt edified. I imagine that
something of this sort will happen to M. Beranger. Legend
will depict him at confession, exchanging a hearty laugh
with his cure. He himself delighted in that frightful type
of Rabelaisian cure, the Vicar of Wakefield of the Gallic
race, the ideal of whom has been caressed by all our song-
writers, and whom M. Beranger has exhibited, in one of
his most piquant lyrics, drinking in a tavern and damning
nobody.
Observe at what price all things have been permitted to
him. France loves drunken impiety; she docs not tolerate
purified religion. M. Beranger enchanted her by scoffing
at the beliefs for which she caused the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew, traversed a century of civil war, and instituted
tortures and proscriptions. Protestantism amassed a wealth
of wrath against her; France in a frenzy applauded or toler-
ated atrocious persecutors, Foucault, Baville, Saint-Florentin,
worthy of the same execration as the Carriers and the
Fouquier-Tinvilles, at the very hour when she was adoring
Voltaire and reading La Pucelle on the quiet. Ah ! if the
pastors of the wilderness had only resolved to imitate the
11
i24 THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS.
cure of whom M. Beranger was to sing, they would not
have been rebels. But they were grave, independent, and
austere ; and they were therefore hanged or broken on the
wheel, while those who hanged them were received on
their return to Paris as very honourable men. In this
country a man is compromised if he gives expression to
any ideas of his own about religion; he is lost if he
mentions the name of Spinoza without accompanying it
with an anathema. But the libertine is sacred ; the Code
protects him, and he has a right to consideration. Let
the thinker claim the inviolate rights of science and free
inquiry, and he is an innovator, and, if he has readers, a
dangerous man. But were he pleased, instead of that, to
sing the charms of Lisette and laugh at sacred things with
glass in hand, the clergy would turn out to be odious
retrograde enemies of light, should they venture to oppose
him ; and the shade of the national poet would arise to
warn all the joyous topers of France that liberty was
menaced, and the principles of '89 in danger.
There results from all this a lesson for the young poets
who, according to a prediction already a year or two old,
cannot fail to give lustre to the second half of our century.
It is a mistake to be too delicate. Instead of studying
with fear and trembling the problem that others find so
clear, be vulgar, laugh, make drinking-songs, flatter popular
delusions, and all will be forgiven you. Slightly expurgated
editions of your works will put you within the reach of all.
Portraits of you will be published on which young maidens
will smile. You will be at once the tavern poet and the
family poet, the poet of middle-class dinner-parties and the
poet for evening reading. You will enjoy, to quote the
words of the editor of the lieranger des Families, "That
fabulous immortality which the gratitude of a people
THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS. 125
accords to those that have sincerely loved it." You will be
national. That is perfectly simple ; each country seeks the
liberty which best suits it. Liberty of thought and belief
has no value, save for those that are capable of believing
and thinking. Liberty of Philistine Epicureanism, on the
other hand, is of the first importance in a land where the
pursuit of a certain vulgar happiness has become the cause
of political revolutions, the inspiration of the Muse, the
care, and, in a sense, the religion of all.
INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM
(M. FEUERBACH AND THE NEW HEGELIAN SCHOOL).
Every important evolution in the field of human opinions
is worthy of interest, even though we may not value very
highly the essential ideas which bring it to pass. It is on
this account that no one who is devoted to critical research,
can refuse to pay attention to the works of the Neo-
Hegelian school on Christianity, although these works
may not always possess a genuinely scientific character,
and may often have more of the fancy of the humorist
in them than the severe method of the historian.
The antipathy of the new German school to Christianity
dates from Goethe. Pagan by nature, and above all by his
literary system, Goethe could have but little taste for the
{esthetics which has substituted the gausapa of the slave for
the toga of the freeman, the sickly virgin for the Venus of
antiquity, and for the ideal perfection of the human body
represented by the gods of Greece, the emaciated image of
an executed man hanging by four nails. Inaccessible to
fear and unmoved by weeping, Jupiter was indeed the god
of that great man ; and we feel no surprise when we see
him place the colossal head of his god before his bed in the
light of the rising sun, so that he may bow himself in prayer
before it.
Hegel has not pronounced less decidedly in favour of the
religious ideal of the Greeks, and against the intrusion of
INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM. 127
Syrian or Galilean elements. To him the legend of Christ
seems conceived on the same system as the Alexandrine
biography of Pythagoras. It passes, according to him, into
the domain of the most vulgar reality, and in no measure
into a poetic world ; it is a mixture of paltry mysticism and
colourless chimeras, such as we find among fantastic people
unpossessed of fine imagination. In his eyes the Old and
the New Testaments have no aesthetic value.
It was this same thesis which so many times aroused
the ire of Heinrich Heine. The learned school of pure
Teutonisls (Gervinius, Lassen, etc.), who, to quote Ozanam's
expression, cannot forgive Christian meekness for having
spoiled their bellicose ancestors, have had a great deal to
say of the same kind. But M. Louis Feuerbach 1 certainly
represents the most advanced, if not the most serious
expression of the antipathy of which we speak ; and should
the nineteenth century see the end of the world, it would
be he, without a doubt, whom we should have to call the
Antichrist.
M. Feuerbach all but defines Christianity as a perversion
of human nature, and Christian aesthetics as a perver-
sion of the innermost instincts of the heart. The per-
petual lamentations of Christians over their sins appear to
1 The most characteristic of M. Fcuerbach's writings, and of those of
the Neo-Hcgelian school, have been collected and translated by M.
Hermann Ewerbeck in two volumes, one entitled, Qu'esl-ce que la
Religion? the other, Qu'est-ce que la Bible d'apres la nouvclle
philosophie allcmande ? (Paris 1850). It is unfortunate that tlie trans-
lator, whose disinterestedness is worthy of praise, should have included
with writings which perhaps it is good to know, some valueless frag-
ments, of which some can in no sense be taken seriously. (Engli h
readers cam also refer to the translation entitled the Essence of Chris-
tianity, by Marian Evans (George Eliot), published in London, 1853. —
Translator's Note. )
128 INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM.
him the most intolerable childishness, the humility and
poverty of monastic life are for him only the worship of dirt
and ugliness; and he would willingly say with Rutiliu?
Numatianus : * "Is this sect then, I ask you, less fatal than
the poison of Circe? Circe changed bodies, but here we
have spirits changed into swine."
Let us say distinctly, and with the more assurance in
that we only wish to oppose aesthetic considerations with
views of the same kind, that the critical spirit cannot admit
so absolute a judgment. Wherever there is originality, a
true expansion of some of the instincts of human nature,
we must meet with beauty and adore it. You may, if you
will, call this aesthetics sad, but it has its boldness and
grandeur. Heavy and rustic, if you compare it with the
learned fables of Greece, this legend, independently of its
incomparable morality, possesses, even when we look at it
only from the point of view of art, a great charm of sim-
plicity. Once on a time good taste refused the name of
beauty to anything which did not attain perfection of form.
Such is no longer our criterium; we pardon barbarism,
wherever we discover in it the expression of a new manner
of feeling, and the very breath of the human soul.
Would to God that M. Feuerbach had plunged in richer
sources of life than those of his exclusive and overbearing
Teutonism ! Ah ! if, seated on the ruins of Mount Palatine
or Mount Ccelius, he had heard the sound of the eternal
bells linger and die away upon the desert hills where once
stood Rome ; or if, on the lonely beach of Lido, he had
heard the chimes of St. Mark's expiring on the lagoons ; if
he had beheld Assisi and its mystic marvels, its double
basilica, and the great legend of the second Christ of the
Middle Ages drawn by the pencil of Cimabue and Giotto;
1 See Note XXIII.
INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM. 129
if he had looked with long and tender gaze on the virgins
of Perugino, or had seen at San Domenico of Siena, St.
Catherine in her ecstasy, — no, M. Feuerbach would not thus
cast opprobrium on one half of human poetry, or exclaim
against it, as though he wished to throw far from him the
phantom of Iscariot.
M. Feuerbach's errors are nearly always in his aesthetic
judgments. He often presents his facts with sufficient
delicacy, but they are ever criticised with revolting severity,
and with the prejudiced opinion that everything Christian is
either ugly, atrocious, or ridiculous. One can be in agree-
ment with him upon many points of detail, without sharing
any of his views on the general morality of history. Yes,
the great difference between Hellenism and Christianity is
that Hellenism is natural and Christianity supernatural.
The religions of antiquity were only the State, the family,
art, and morality, raised to a high and poetic expression ;
they knew of neither renunciation nor sacrifice, they did not
divide up life; for them the distinction between the sacred
atid the profane did not exist. Antiquity in its manner of
feeling is direct and simple; Christianity, on the contrary,
ever on its guard against nature, seeks after the strange and
the "paradoxical. For it, abstinence is worth more than
enjoyment; happiness must be sought in its opposite; the
wisdom of the flesh, that is to say natural wisdom, is foolish-
ness, the foolishness of the Cross is wisdom. Are the writings
of St. Paul, from one end to the other, anything else than
a calculated overturning of human sense, a commentary in
anticipation of the Credo quia absurdum of Tertullian ?
The distinction between the flesh and the spirit, which was
unknown to the ancients, for whom human life kept its
harmonious unity, lit from that time the war between man
and his self, which eighteen centuries have failed to quell.
i3o INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM.
Hence strange disorders, counterbalanced by admirable
moral conquests. Aberrations, such as antiquity had only
known in the forms of its worship that were most infected
with superstition, became contagious. Upon what was the
meditation of Christian piety, the imagination of ecstatic
enthusiasts, exercised by preference? Was it upon the
Trinity, upon the Holy Spirit, or upon these dialectic
dogmas which we regard as sealed formulae ? No ; it was
upon the little child, the Santo Bambino in its cradle.
There was no saint who had not kissed its feet ; St.
Catherine of Siena was espoused to it, and one such as
she took it in her arms. It was upon the Passion, upon
the suffering Christ that they mused. Not a saint but
what had felt the imprint of his pierced hands, of his open
side. St. Magdalen of Pazzi saw him in a dream, shedding
through his five wounds five fountains of blood ; another
beheld his heart bleeding and transfixed. It was upon
Mary ; Mary sufficed to satisfy the need of loving for ten
centuries of ascetics. Mary has entered of full right into
the Trinity ; she far excels that third forgotten person
without lovers or adorers, the Holy Spirit. She completes
the divine family, for it would have been a marvellous
thing had the womanly element in Christianity failed to
succeed in mounting to the very bosom of God, and had
it not enthroned the Mother between the Father and the
Son. 1
At the same time the ethical ideal changed, but in a
sense was heightened and ennobled. Paganism, taking
human nature as upright and good, consecrated it as a
1 The representations of the Incoronata, where Mary, placed between
the Father and the Son, receives the crown from the hands of the
former, and the homage of the latter, exhibit the true Trinity of
Christian piety.
INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM. 131
whole, even in its evil parts; there was the mistake and
the error. Christianity, on its side, by casting too absolute
an anathema upon nature, prepared that taste for the
abject and the mean which seduced the Middle Ages.
The man of antiquity, Aristides or Solon, peacefully swims
in the current of life ; his perfection and his imperfections
are those of our nature. The Christian man mounts
upon the column of Stylites, abstracts himself from every-
thing, and, only using the surface of our world because
it is necessary to have something to stand upon, suspends
himself between Heaven and Earth. The ideal of beauty
degenerates in purity, but gains in depth. The ideal is
no longer ennobled nature, the perfection of the real, the
flower of that which is ; the ideal is the anti-natural, it is
the body of a dead God, it is the Addolorata pallid and
veiled, it is the Magdalen torturing her flesh. Had any
one proposed to the ancient artist one of the subjects dear
to Christianity, the Virgin or the Crucifix, he would have
spurned it as impossible. Ceres Dolorosa is beautiful as
a woman and as a mother, but the Virgin ! — her conception
and her travail are supernatural, her brothers are the
angels; here below she has neither sister nor husband.
So too when Christian art, returning to profane tradition,
goes to seek for types of the Madonna at Albano or
Transtevere, it will be a sacrilege against which the
Christian conscience will righteously protest. Prometheus
nailed upon his rock is beautiful still j but Jesus on his
cross ! ... If you seek to realise in that emaciated body
the ideal of the human form, the harmonious proportions
of Dionysius or Apollo, if you give to that thorn-crowned
head the lofty calmness of the Olympian Jupiter, it is a
misconception,— almost an impiety. The Byzantine Church
was consistent when it tenaciously maintained the thesis
132 INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM.
of the material plainness of Christ. He must be repre-
sented as thin, emaciated, bleeding, so that his bones may
be counted, that he may be taken for a leper, an earthworm
and not a man. Putavimus aim quasi leprbsum. . . . Non
est species ei neque decor. . . . Despectum novissimum virorum,
virum dolorum et scientem infirmitatem.
Yes, all this is strange, new, unheard of; and St. Paul was
right in calling it scandal and infatuation. But all this is
of human nature itself; it has all come at its own time, at
its own day it has gone forth from the eternal germ of
things beautiful. A great modification has been at work in
human nature ; a warm and humid wind has blown from
the south, and slackened its rigidity. Love has changed
its object ; to enthusiasm for beauty has succeeded enthu-
siasm for suffering, and the apotheosis of the Man of
Sorrows acquainted with grief, of the Divine Leper, to use
Bossuet's words. 1
It is by a grave misunderstanding that antiquity is
reproached with materialism. Antiquity was neither
materialistic nor spiritualistic, it was human. Ancient
life, serene and gracious as it was within its narrow limits,
was wanting in open outlook on the infinite. Consider
those charming little houses at Pompeii ; like them it is
gay and complete, but yet narrow and without horizon.
Everywhere are repose and joy, everywhere images of
happiness and pleasure. But with those things we are no
longer satisfied. ^Ve no longer conceive life without sad-
ness. Full as we are of our supernatural ideas and our
thirst for the infinite, that limited art, that simple morality,
that system of life so carefully finished in all its parts, seem
i Never has this side of Christianity been treated with more vigour
and originality than in Bossuet's admirable sermons on the Passion and
on the Compassion of the Holy Virgin.
INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM. 133
to us of a narrow realism. Castor and Pollux, Diana and
Minerva are for us cold images, since they represent healthy
and normal nature. But let us be on our guard ; grand
airs of abstinence and sacrifice are often nothing more than
a refinement of instincts which are contented with their
opposites. In reality Christian spiritualism is much more
sensual than what is known as ancient materialism, 1 and
sometimes bears a resemblance to relaxation. The Dorian
Artemis, that masculine maiden who touched the heart of
the severe Hippolytus, has always seemed to me more
austere than the dear St. Elizabeth who made M. de
Montalambert 2 so desperately amorous. Those who have
visited Naples have had an opportunity of seeing, at the
Chapel of the Pieta de' Sangri, a Pudicizia robed in a long
veil which covers the whole person in such a way that it
allows one to divine, under the marble folds, a form made
more attractive by mystery. On the other hand, there is in
the Vatican Museum an antique Modesty, half nude, but
veiled with severe beauty. Which do you believe is in
reality the more chaste ? Greece with an exquisite tact
perceived in all things perfect proportion, the fugitive
nuance that one seizes for a moment but cannot retain.
Proportion, in point of fact, appears cold and wearisome in
the long run ; we grow tired of symmetry and good taste.
Perfectly pure types no longer suffice ; we yearn for the
strange, the superhuman, the supernatural.
It is not the fault of individuals or systems that religious
feelings should undergo these profound revolutions. It is
1 It should be understood that I only speak of the pure and lolly
antiquity of Greece. I ought also to observe that we are discussing
what is, before all else, a question of aesthetics and taste, a question
which must be settled by the examination of works of poetry and tine
art.
a See Note XXIV.
134 INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM.
not willingly that man quits the smooth and easy paths of
the plain for the wild and rugged mountain peaks. It is
because measure and proportion, by only representing the
finite, grow insufficient for the heart that aspires to the
infinite. Whilst humanity is prisoned within precise and
narrow limits, it is at rest and happy in its mediocrity ; but
when, grown exacting and unhappy, and yet in a sense
nobler, it gives ear to vaster needs, it prefers, both in art
and morality, suffering, and unsated desire, and the vague
and painful feeling that is born of the infinite, to the full
and complete satisfaction afforded by a finished work.
But if there be an incurable evil, thanks to God it is this !
The sensitive are unhappy, but we cannot cure sensitivity.
We can recognise a broken spirit, but we cannot restore its
strength. And then deviation has so many charms, and
rectitude is so fastidious ! An ancient temple incontestably
possesses a purer beauty than a Gothic church, and yet we
pass hours in the latter without feeling weary, while we
cannot remain for five minutes in the former without being
bored. That, according to M. Feuerbach, proves that our
taste is perverted. But how can it be helped ?
If M. Feuerbach had confined himself to pointing out
these contrasts calmly and tenderly ; if, content to observe
with interest the alternatives of human feeling, he had not
opposed to the often gratuitous enthusiasm of the believer
a still more gratuitous hatred, we should have no right to
deal very severely with him. But the impartial philosopher
cannot assent to the absolute condemnation which M.
Feuerbach hurls upon eighteen centuries of the history
of the human mind ; for, if he reflects, he sees that it is
the human mind itself which is standing its trial. It serves
no good purpose to pour out his hatred upon the words,
"Christianity," "theology," etc. For who, after all, made
INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM. 135
Christianity? Who created theology? Humanity accepts
no chains other than those which it has put upon itself.
Humanity has done all, and— we wish to believe it — has
done all well.
Besides, it is not only supernaturalism that falls under the
criticism of the new German school. M. Feuerbach and
all the philosophers of this school unhesitatingly declare
that theism, natural religion — in a word, every system that
admits anything of a transcendental nature, must be put
upon the same footing as supernaturalism. To believe in
God and the immortality of the soul is, in his eyes, quite as
superstitious as to believe in the Trinity and in miracles.
To him criticism of Heaven is only criticism of the earth ;
theology must become anthropology. Every consideration
of the higher world, every glance cast by man beyond
himself and reality, all religious feeling, under whatever
form it may manifest itself, is but a delusion. Not to be
severe towards such a philosophy, we wish to see in it
nothing more than a misapprehension. M. Feuerbach has
written at the beginning of the second edition of his
Essefice of Christianity: " By this book I have embroiled
myself with God and the world." We believe it to be
slightly his own fault that it is so, and that, had he wished
it, God and the world would have pardoned him. Led
away by that bad tone which reigns in the German universi-
ties, and which I should willingly term the pedantry of bold-
ness, many upright minds and honest souls have attributed
to themselves the honours of atheism. When a German
boasts of being impious, he must never be taken at his word.
The German is not capable of being irreligious ; religion,
that is to say, aspiration towards the ideal world, is the very
foundation of his nature. When he wishes to be atheistical,
he is devoutly so, with a sort of unction. How, if you
136 INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM.
practise the worship of the beautiful and the true, if the
sanctity of morality speaks to your heart, if all beauty and
all truth bear you to the home of holy life ; how, if, when
you have come there you veil your head, and purposely
overawe thought and language, so that no limited utterance
may escape you in front of the infinite, — how, I say, do you
dare to speak of atheism? If indeed your faculties in
simultaneous vibrations have never given forth that one
great strain that we call God, I have nothing more to say ;
you are wanting in the essential and characteristic element
of our nature.
To those who, placing themselves at the point of view
of substance, ask me, " Does this God exist, or does he
not ? " " Oh God ! " I make reply, " it is he that is, and all
the rest that but appears to be." Even supposing that for
us philosophers another word were preferable, and without
taking into account the fact that abstract words do not
express real existence with sufficient clarity, there would be
an immense inconvenience in thus cutting ourselves away
from all the poetic sources of the past, and in separating
ourselves by our language from the simple folk who worship
so well in their own way.
The word God being respected by humanity, having for
it a long-acquired right, and having been employed in all
beautiful poetry, to abandon it would be to overthrow all
habits of language. Tell the simple to pass their lives in
aspiration after truth, and beauty, and moral goodness ;
and your words will be meaningless to them. Tell them
to love God, and not to offend God; and they will under-
stand you perfectly. God, Providence, Immortality, are
good old words ; they are a little clumsy perhaps, but
philosophy will interpret them in senses that will ever grow
more and more refined, though it will never replace them
INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM. 137
with advantage. Under one form or another God will
always be the sum of our supra-sensible needs, the category
of the ideal (that is to say, the form under which we
conceive the ideal), as space and time are the categories of
matter (that is to say, the forms under which we conceive
matter). In other words, man placed before things beau-
tiful, good, or true, comes forth from himself and, suspended
by a celestial charm, humiliates his puny personality, and
is exalted in rapture. And what is this, if not worship?
MARCUS AURELIUS. 1
It was with great pleasure that I accepted the invitation to
come and exchange some ideas with you in this famous
Institution, devoted as it is to scientific and philosophical
studies of the highest order. Of this island, in which I
have so many friends, and which I have visited so tardily,
I dreamed in my childhood. I am a French Briton. In our
old books I used to see England always called the Isle of
Saints; and, in fact, all our saints of Armorican Brittany,
those saints of dubious orthodoxy who, were they recalled
to life, would be on better terms with us than with the
Jesuits, came from the island of Britain. In their chapel I
have been shown the stone trough in which they crossed
the sea. Of all races, the Breton race is the one which
has ever taken religion most seriously. Even when the pro-
gress of reflection has shown us some articles to be modified
in the list of things that once on a time we held for
certain, we never break with the symbol under which we
first tasted the ideal. For faith, as we understand it, does
not reside in obscure metaphysical propositions; it dwells
in the affirmations of the heart. The theme which I have
chosen to treat with you is not then one of those subtilities
which divide men from each other, but one of those sub-
jects, dear to the soul, which bring together and unite. I
1 A lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, London, April i6tli,
1880.
MARCUS AURELIUS. 139
shall speak to you of that book all-resplendent with the
divine spirit, of that manual of the resigned life which has
been left to us by the most pious of men, Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus Caesar. It is the glory of monarchs that the
most irreproachable model of virtue is to be found in their
ranks, and that the finest lessons of patience and detach-
ment from the world have come from a condition of life
which one easily supposes to be given up to all the seduc-
tions of pleasure and vanity.
I.
Hereditary wisdom on the throne has ever been a rare
thing. In history I only see two striking examples — in
India, the succession of three Mongol emperors, P>aber,
Humayun, and Akbarj in Rome, at the head of the vastest
empire which has ever been, the two illustrious reigns of
Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. Of these two last,
Antoninus was, in my opinion, the greater. His goodness
did not involve him in the commission of faults; he was not
tormented by the inward malady which pitilessly gnawed
the heart of his adopted son. This strange malady, this
unquiet study of one's self, this demon of scrupulosity, this
fever of perfection, are all signs of a nature less strong than
distinguished. As the finest thoughts are those that re-
main unwritten, Antoninus had, in this respect also, a
superiority over Marcus Aurelius; but let us add that we
should be ignorant of Antoninus, had Marcus Aurelius not
handed down for us that exquisite portrait of his adoptive
father, in which he seems to have set himself by humility
to depict the image of a man still better than himself.
He too it is who has traced out for us, in the First P>ook
of his Meditations, that admirable background through
i 4 o MARCUS AURELIUS.
which move in a celestial light the noble and pure forms of
his father, his mother, his grandfather, and his masters.
Thanks to Marcus Aurelius, we can understand how those
old Roman families, which had seen the reign of the bad
emperors, still kept their uprightness, their dignity, their
justice, their civic spirit, and — if I may* say so — their
republicanism. They lived in admiration of Cato, Brutus,
Thrasea, and the great Stoics whose souls had never bowed
down under tyranny. The rule of Domitian was abhorrent
to them ; the sages who had traversed it without flinching
were honoured as heroes. The advent of the Antonines
was only the success to power of the society of sages,
whose just wrath has been transmitted to us by Tacitus, a
society of sages formed by the union of all those whom the
despotism of the first Caesars had revolted.
The salutary principle of adoption had made the imperial
court of the second century a true nursery of virtue. The
noble and skilful Nerva, by laying down this principle,
assured the happiness of the human race for nearly a
hundred years, and gave to the world the finest century
of progress known to history. Sovereignty, thus held in
common by a group of elect men who deputed or shared
it, according to the needs of the moment, lost a part of
that attraction which renders it so dangerous. The
sovereign ascended the throne without having intrigued
for it, but also without owing any duties to his birth or
to a kind of divine right. He came to it disabused, weary
of men, and after long preparation. The empire was a
civic burden, which men took upon themselves when their
time arrived ; and no one dreamed of anticipating that
time. Marcus Aurelius was marked out for it at so youth-
ful an age, that the idea of reigning scarcely had for him
any beginning, and did not exercise a moment's seduction
MARCUS AURELIUS. 141
upon him. At the age of eight, when he was already
Praesul of the Salian priests, Hadrian remarked the gentle
sad child, and loved him for his natural goodness, his
docility, his incapacity for falsehood. At eighteen he was
assured of the empire. For twenty-two years he awaited it
patiently. On the evening when Antoninus, feeling death
near, gave sEqiiam'mitas as the pass-word to the tribune on
duty, and caused to be borne into the chamber of his
adopted son the golden statue of Fortune which had ever
to stand in the Emperor's apartment, Marcus Aurelius felt
neither surprise nor delight. Long since he had wearied
of joys without having tasted them ; by the depth of his
philosophy he had seen their absolute vanity.
The great drawback of practical life, and that which
renders it unsupportable to the man of superior character,
lies in this, — that if ideal principles are carried into it, good
qualities become faults — so much so indeed that very often
the perfect man has less success in it than he whose
motives are egoism or common routine. Three or four
times the virtue of Marcus Aurelius almost brought about
his ruin. It caused him to commit a first fault by persuad-
ing him to associate with himself in the empire Lucius
Verus, a frivolous and worthless man. Prodigies of kind-
ness and delicacy were required to prevent him from
indulging in disastrous follies. The wise emperor, grave
and studious, carried about with him in his litter the foolish
colleague whom he had taken to himself. He always per-
sisted in taking him seriously; he was not once revolted
by the tiresome companionship. Like many people who
have been very well trained, Marcus Aurelius was under
an unceasing self-disripline ; his habits wire the result of
a general scheme of deportment and dignity. Souls of this
order, whether to avoid causing pain to others, whether
142 MARCUS AURELIUS.
out of respect for human nature, do not resign themselves
to an avowal that they behold evil. Their life is a perpetual
dissimulation.
According to some, he must have dissembled to himself,
since, in his familiar colloquy with the gods on the banks of
the Gran, he — speaking of a spouse unworthy of him —
thanked them for having granted him "a woman so com-
placent, so affectionate, so simple." Elsewhere I have
shown that on this point the patience, or, if you will, the
weakness of Marcus Aurelius has been somewhat ex-
aggerated. Faustina had her wrongs ; the greatest of them
was the aversion which she bore to her husband's friends.
As it was these friends who wrote history, she underwent
her punishment before posterity. But a careful criticism
has not much trouble here in demonstrating the exaggera-
tions of the legend. Everything leads to the conviction
that Faustina at first found happiness and affection in that
villa at Lorium, or in the beautiful retreat at Lanuvium on
the lower slopes of the Alban Mount, which Marcus
Aurelius described to his master Fronto as an abode full
of the purest joys. And then she grew weary of so much
wisdom. Let us say all ; the beautiful aphorisms of Marcus
Aurelius, his austere virtue, his perpetual melancholy might
well seem tedious to a young capricious woman, of ardent
temperament and wondrous loveliness. He understood it,
suffered from it, and held his peace. Faustina always
remained "his very good and very faithful spouse." Even
after her death he could not be induced to abandon this
pious fiction. In a bas-relief, still to be seen at Rome in
the Museum of the Capitol, Faustina is represented as being
borne up to Heaven by Fame, while the excellent emperor
follows her from earth with a gaze full of tenderness. In
his latter days it would seem as though he had come to
MARCUS AURELIUS. 143
delude himself, and to forget all. But what a struggle he
must have gone through to come to that ! During long
years a heart sickness slowly consumed him. That despair-
ing effort which is the very essence of his philosophy, that
passion for renunciation, at times pushed almost to sophistry,
hid beneath them an immense wound. How necessary it
must have been to say farewell to happiness, in order to
arrive at such excesses ! Never will men understand all the
suffering of that poor blighted heart or the bitterness which
lay masked behind that pale countenance, always calm and
nearly always smiling. True it is that the farewell to happi-
ness is the beginning of wisdom, and the surest way of
finding happiness. There is nothing so sweet as the return
of joy which follows the renunciation of joy, nothing so
keen, so deep, so full of charm as the enchantment of the
disenchanted.
Historians, more or less imbued with that political tend-
ency which believes itself superior, because it is not
suspected of philosophy, have naturally sought to prove
that so perfect a man was a bad administrator, and a
sovereign of only moderate ability. It does, in truth, appear
that Marcus Aurelius sinned more than once through excess
of indulgence. But never was a reign more fruitful of
reforms and progress. Public assistance, founded by Nerva
and Trajan, received at his hands admirable developments.
New colleges for the children so assisted were established ;
the alimentary procurators became functionaries of the first
importance, and were selected with great care. For the
needs of young girls of poor birth the Institution of Young
Faustinians was founded. The principle that the State has
duties, in some measure paternal, towards its members
(a principle which it will be our duty to remember with
gratitude even when it has been superseded), this principle,
i 4 4 MARCUS AURELIUS.
I say, was proclaimed in the world fur the first time by
Trajan and his successors. Neither the puerile ostentation
of Oriental monarchies founded on the degradation and
stupidity of men, nor the pedantic pride of mediaeval king-
doms founded on an exaggerated sense of heredity and a
naive faith in the rights of blood, can give us an idea of the
wholly republican sovereignty of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian,
Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius. Here we have no trace
of hereditary kingship or divine right, nor anything analogous
to military chieftainship. It was a kind of great civil
magistracy, which had nothing resembling a court, and
took from the emperor all characteristics of a private
person. Marcus Aurelius, in particular, w.as neither little
nor much of a king in the proper sense of the word. His
fortune was immense, but it was wholly spent in the public
good. His aversion to the Cresars, whom he regarded as
a species of Sardanapali, magnificent, debauched, and cruel,
is at every instant apparent. The civility of his manners
was extreme; to the Senate he rendered all its ancient
importance. When he was at Rome he never missed a
sitting, and only quitted his place when the Consul had
pronounced the formula, Nihil vos moramur patres con-
scripii. In nearly every year of his reign he waged war,
and waged it well ; although in it he only found weariness.
His dull campaigns against the Quadi and the Marcom-
mani were conducted very efficiently ; his distaste for them
did not prevent him from using the most conscientious
endeavours.
It was in the course of one of these expeditions that,
when encamped on the banks of the Gran in the midst
of the monotonous plains of Hungary, he wrote the finest
pages of the exquisite book which has revealed his whole
soul to us. It is probable that he early acquired the habit
MARCUS AURETJUS. 145
of keeping a private journal of his reflections. In it he
inscribed the maxims to which he had recourse for support,
reminiscences of his favourite authors, passages from the
moralists who most appealed to him, principles which
during the day had sustained him, and sometimes the
reproaches which his scrupulous conscience thought it
necessary to address to itself.
" Men seek solitary retreats, rural farm-houses, sea-shores,
mountains; like others, thou lovest to dream of these
pleasant things. To what good end, seeing that it is
permitted thee every hour to withdraw into thine own
soul? Nowhere hath man a more tranquil retreat; above
all, if he have in himself these things the contemplation
of which suffices to give him peace. Know then to enjoy
every day this retreat, and there renew thy strength. Let
there be there short fundamental maxims which on the
instant will give serenity to thy soul, and put thee in a
fit state to support with resignation the world to which
thou must return."
During the dreary Northern winters this consolation
became still more necessary for him. He was nearly sixty
years of age. With him old age was premature. One
evening all the images of his pious youth came back to
his memory once more; and he passed some delicious
hours in computing what he owed to each of the virtuous
beings who had surrounded him.
" The examples of my grandfather Verus : gentleness of
manners and invincible patience. Qualities which were
esteemed in my father, the memory he has left me : modesty
and manly character.
"To imitate my mother in her piety, her welldoing;
like her, to abstain not only from doing evil but even
from conceiving the thought of it, and to lead her
146 MARCUS AURELIUS.
frugal life, which so little resembled the habitual luxury
of the rich."
Thet in succession appear to him Uiognetus, who
inspired him with a taste for philosophy, and made pleasant
in his eyes the pallet, the simple covering of skin, and
the whole outfit of Hellenic discipline; Junius Rusticus,
who taught him to avoid all affectation of elegance in style,
and lent him the Discourses of Epictetus ; Apollonius of
Chalchis, who realised the Stoic ideal of extreme firmness
and perfect sweetness; the grave and good Sextus of
Chaeronea; Alexander the grammarian, who administered
reproof with so refined a courtesy ; Fronto, who taught him
"the envy, duplicity, and hypocrisy that are in a tyrant,
and what cruelty can exist in a patrician's heart ; " his
brother Severus, who made him acquainted with Thrasea,
Helvidius, Cato, Dion, and Brutus, and gave him the idea
of a free state "where natural equality of the citizens and
equality of their rights exist, of a kingdom which places
before all else respect for the freedom of its citizens ; " and,
dominating all the others by his immaculate grandeur,
Antoninus, his adoptive father, whose image he depicts for
us with passionate gratitude and affection.
"I thank the gods," he says in conclusion, "for having
given me good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister,
good masters, and in those around me, my relatives and my
friends, people almost all filled with goodness. Never have
I allowed myself to be wanting in respect for them ; by
my natural disposition I might occasionally have committed
some irreverence, but the bounty of the gods has not per-
mitted such a circumstance to have presented itself. Nay
more, I am indebted to the gods for having kept pure the
flower of my youth, for my having been brought up under
the law of a prince and a father who cleansed my soul from
MARCUS AUREL1US. 147
all vain glory, who made me understand how it is possible,
even while living in a palace, to pass from guards, from
splendid raiment, from torches and statues, who taught me
finally that a prince may almost shrink his life within the
limits of that of a private citizen, without on that account
showing less majesty and vigour, when it is a question of
being emperor and treating affairs of state. It was by their
favour that I met a brother whose behaviour was a constant
exhortation to keep watch upon myself, while at the same
time his deference and attachment were to be the joy of
my heart. Thanks to the gods again, I hastened to raise
those who had superintended my education to the honours
which they seemed to desire. It was they who introduced
me to Apollonius, Rusticus, and Maximus, and offered me
in so clear a light the image of a life conforming to nature.
True, I have not reached the goal ; but it is my own fault.
If my bodily health has held out so well under the severe
life which I lead ; if, despite my frequent disagreements
with Rusticus, I have never gone beyond bounds or done
anything of which I have had to repent ; if my mother,
whose fate it was to die young, was nevertheless able to
pass her last years near me; if, every time that I have
desired to succour some poor or afflicted person, I have
never heard it said that money failed me ; if I have never
myself been in need of receiving anything from anyone;
if I have a wife of such a character, complacent, affec-
tionate, simple; if I have found so many capable persons
for the education of my children ; if, at the beginning of
my passion for philosophy, I did not become the prey of
some sophist ; — it is to the gods that I owe all these things.
Yes, so many blessings can only be the effect of the assist-
ance of the gods, and of a happy fortune."
This divine candour inspires every page. Never did a
148 MARCUS AURELIUS.
man write more simply for himself, for the sole purpose of
relieving his heart with no witness save God alone. There
is not a shadow of system ; Marcus Aurelius has, properly
speaking, no philosophy. Although he may owe nearly
everything to Stoicism transformed by the Roman spirit, he
is of no school. For our taste he shows too little curiosity,
in so far as he does not know all that a contemporary of
Ptolemy and Galen ought to know. Some of his opinions
concerning the system of the world are not on the level of
the most advanced science of his time. But his moral
thought, being thus free from all bonds with a system,
achieves a singular loftiness. Even the author of the
Imitation, though little engaged in the quarrels of schools,
scarcely attains such a height ; for his manner of feeling is
essentially Christian. Take away the Christian dogmas,
and his book no longer retains more than a part of its
charm. The book of Marcus Aurelius, having no dogmatic
base, will keep its freshness for ever. All, from the atheist,
or the man who believes himself one, to him who is most
absorbed in the special beliefs of some form of religion, can
find therein fruits of edification. It is the most purely
human book that has ever existed. It deals with no con-
troversial topic. In theology Marcus Aurelius floats
between pure deism, polytheism interpreted in a physical
sense after the manner of the Stoics, and a species of cosmic
pantheism. He does not incline much more to one of these
hypotheses than to another, and he makes use indifferently
of the three vocabularies, deist, polytheist, and pantheist.
His considerations have ever two faces, according as God
and the soul have or have not reality. It is the reasoning
that we use at every hour, for if it be the completest
materialism that is in the right, we who have believed in
the true and the good shall not be more duped than the
MARCUS AURELIUS. 149
others. If idealism be in the right, we shall have been the
true sages, and have been so in the only fitting fashion, that
is to say, without any selfish expectation, without having
counted on a reward.
11.
Here we touch one of the great secrets of moral philo-
sophy and religion. Marcus Aurelius has no speculative
philosophy, his theology is altogether contradictory, he has
no definitely fixed opinion concerning the soul and im-
mortality. How was it that he was profoundly moral,
without the beliefs that are now regarded as the foundations
of morality ? How was he eminently religious, without
having professed any of the dogmas of that which we
call natural religion? It is into this that I propose to
inquire.
The doubts which, from the point of view of speculative
reason, hover over the truths of natural religion are not,
as Kant has admirably demonstrated, accidental doubts
capable of being removed, belonging, as one sometimes
imagines, to certain states of the human mind. Such
doubts are inherent in the very nature of these truths;
and it might be said without paradox that, if the doubts
were dissipated, the truths which they attack would
disappear at the same blow. Let us, in fact, suppose a
proof direct, positive, evident to all, of future punishments
and rewards; wherein would be the merit of doing good?
It would only be madmen who from gaiety of heart would
run to their own damnation. A host of base souls would
work out salvation with their cards on the table; in a
measure they would force the hand of the Almighty. Who
is there that cannot see that in such a system there is no
150 MARCUS AURELIUS.
longer cither morality or religion? In the sphere of ethics
and religion it is indispensable to believe without demon-
stration. It is not a question of certainty ; it is a question
of faith. This is what deism, with its habits of intemperate
affirmation, forgets. It forgets that over-precise beliefs
concerning human destiny would take away all moral
merit. For our own part, if a peremptory argument of
this kind were announced to us, we should act as did
St. Louis, when some one spoke to him of the miraculous
wafer. We should refuse to go and see. What need have
we of brutal proofs which would fetter our liberty? We
should fear being assimilated with those speculators in
virtue, or those vulgar cravens who in the things of the
soul use the gross egoism of practical life. In the first
days which followed the belief in the resurrection of Jesus,
this feeling came to light in the most touching manner.
The true loving friends, the delicate of soul loved better
to believe without proof than to see. " Happy are they
that have not seen, and yet have believed," became the
phrase of the situation. Beautiful phrase ! Eternal symbol
of the tender and generous idealism, which has a horror
of touching with its hands that which ought to be known
of the heart alone !
Our good Marcus Aurelius on this point, as on all others,
was in advance of his age. He never troubled to come to
an agreement with himself concerning God and the soul.
As though he had read the " Critique of Practical Reason,"
he clearly saw that in dealing with the infinite no formula
is absolute, and that in such a matter the only chance of
beholding truth for once in one's life is to contradict one's
self repeatedly. He resolutely severed moral beauty from
all definite theology ; he did not permit duty to depend
on any metaphysical opinion concerning the First Cause.
MARCUS AURELIUS. 151
Never was close union with the hidden God pushed to such
an extremity of delicacy.
" Offer to the governance of the god that is within thee
a virile being ripened with years, a friend of the public
good, a Roman, an emperor ; a soldier at his post awaiting
the sound of the trumpet , a man ready to quit life without
regret."
" There are many grains of incense destined for the same
altar; one falleth sooner in the fire, another later; but the
difference is nothing."
" Man must live according to Nature during the few days
that are granted him on earth, and, when the moment to
retire is come, must gently submit like an olive, which as it
falleth blesseth the tree that gave it birth and giveth thanks
to the branch that hath borne it."
" Everything harmoniseth with me which is harmonious
with thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or
too late which is in due time for thee. Everything is
fruit to me which thy seasons bring, O Nature ; from
thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all
things return."
" O man, thou hast been a citizen in this great state ;
what difference doth it make to thee whether for five years
or for three? For that which is conformable to the laws
is just for all. Where then is the hardship, if no tyrant nor
yet an unjust judge sendeth thee away from the state, but
Nature who brought thee into it? It is as though a praetor
who hath employed an actor dismisseth him from the Stage:
'But I have not played the five acts, but only three of
them.' Depart then satisfied, for he also who releaseth
thee is satisfied."
Docs this mean that he did not sometimes revolt against
the strange destiny which has been pleased to leave alone,
i52 MARCUS AURELIUS.
face to face, man with his eternal craving for devotion, for
sacrifice, for heroism, and Nature with her transcendent
immorality, her supreme disdain for virtue ? No ; at least
once the absurdity, the colossal iniquity of death strikes
him. But soon his temperament, wholly mortified, takes
the upper hand again, and he calms himself.
"How can it be that the gods, after having arranged all
things well and benevolently for mankind, have overlooked
this alone, that some men, and very good men, and men
who, as we may say, have had most communion with the
divinity, and through pious acts and religious observances
have been most intimate with the divinity, when they have
once died, should never exist again, but be completely
extinguished ? But if this is so, rest assured that if it
ought to have been otherwise the gods would have done
it. For if it were just it would also be possible ; and if
it were according to Nature, Nature would have had it
so. But because it is not so, if in fact it is not so, be
thou convinced that it ought not to have been so. For
thou seest, even of thyself, that in this inquiry thou art
disputing with the deity; and we should not thus dispute
with the gods, unless they were most excellent and most
just. But if this is so, they would not have allowed
anything in the ordering of the Universe to be neglected
unjustly and unreasonably."
Ah ! there is too much resignation here. If it is so
indeed, we have a right to murmur. To say that if this
world has no compensation, the man who has sacrificed
himself for righteousness or truth ought to leave it con-
tentedly, and absolve the gods, is too naive. No, he has a
right to blaspheme them ! For indeed, why should they
have thus abused his credulity? Why should they have
put in him deceitful instincts of which he has been the
MARCUS AURELIUS. 153
honest dupe? Why should their bounty be accorded to
the frivolous or wicked man ? He, then, who does not
deceive himself is the prudent man ? But if so, then
cursed be the gods who place their preferences so ill ! I
wish the future to be an enigma, but if there is to be no
future, this world is a frightful ambush. Be careful to note
that our desire is not that of the man of gross and vulgar
mind. We wish neither to see the chastisement of the
guilty, nor to touch the interest of our virtue. What we
wish has nothing of an egoistical nature in it, — it is simply
to exist, to remain in the light, to continue the thought
which we have commenced, to learn more and more, and
one day to enjoy that truth which we seek so laboriously,
to see the triumph of the righteousness which we have
loved. Nothing can be more legitimate. Indeed, the
worthy emperor felt it deeply. "What! that the light of a
lamp shall burn until the moment when it is extinguished,
losing naught of its brilliancy; and the truth, the justice,
the temperance which are in thee be extinguished with
thee ! " His whole life was passed in this noble hesitance.
If he sinned it was through excess of piety. Less resigned,
he would have been more just ; for surely to ask that there
may be a close and sympathetic spectator of the strife we
wage in the cause of goodness and truth, is not to ask too
much.
It is also possible that, had his philosophy been less
exclusively ethical, had it implied a closer study of history
and the universe, it would have escaped certain excesses of
rigour. Like the Christian ascetics, Marcus Aurelius at
times carried renunciation to aridity and subtility. One-
feels that the calm which never forsakes him is obtained by
immense effort. Sin certainly never had any attraction for
him ; he had no passion to fight against. " Whatever men
i 5 4 MARCUS AURELIUS.
may do, or whatever men may say, I must of necessity be a
righteous man, as the emerald might say, Whatever may
be and whatever done, I must of necessity be an emerald
and keep my colour." But in order to remain for ever on
the ice-bound summit of Stoicism he had to do cruel
violence to nature, and cut away from her more than one
noble part. The perpetual repetition of the same reason-
ings, the thousand images under which he seeks to represent
to himself the vanity of all things, the proofs, often naive,
of universal frivolity, all bear witness to the conflicts in
which he had to engage, in order to extinguish all desire in
himself. At times there is a touch of bitterness and sorrow
resulting from all this ; the reading of Marcus Aurelius
fortifies, but it does not console. It leaves in the soul
a void at once delicious and cruel, which we would not
exchange for full satisfaction. Humility, renunciation,
severity towards one's self, have never been pushed farther.
Glory, that last illusion of great souls, is reduced to nullity.
One must do good without being uneasy in mind as to
whether anybody will know about it. He plainly sees that
history will speak of him. At times he dreams of the men
of the past with whom the future will associate him. " If
they have played but one part, that of actors in tragedy,"
he says, "no one has condemned me to imitate them."
The absolute mortification to which he had attained con-
sumed the self-love in him to the very last shred.
The consequences of this austere philosophy might well
have been harshness and rigour. Here it is that the rare
kindliness of the nature of Marcus Aurelius shines forth in
all its splendour. His severity is only towards himself.
The fruit of this great tension of soul is an infinite charity.
He passes his whole life studying how he may render good
for evil, After some sad experience of human perversity,
MARCUS AURELIUS. 155
he only finds it in his heart at evening to write what
follows : " If thou canst correct them, do so ; but in the
contrary case bear in mind that charity was given to thee
to use towards them. The gods themselves are charitable
to these beings ; they assist them, so great is their bounty,
to acquire health, riches, and glory. To thee it is permitted
to act as do the gods." Another day men must have been
very wicked, for this is what he writes upon his tablets :
" Such is the order of Nature ; people of this kind must of
all necessity act thus. To wish it otherwise is to wish the
fig-tree not to bear figs ; in a very short time both thou and
he shall die, and soon after your very names will no longer
survive." These reflections of universal pardon constantly
recur. Sometimes he almost mingles with this beautiful
spirit of kindness an imperceptible smile: "The best way
of avenging thyself is not to become like the wrong-doer ;"
or a slight touch of pride : " It is a royal thing when thou
hast done good to hear evil spoken of thee." One day he
has a reproach to make to himself: "Thou hast forgotten,"
he says, "what a holy bond of relationship uniteth every
man with the human race, a relationship not of blood and
birth, but participation in the same intelligence. Thou
hast forgotten that the reasonable soul of each man is a
god, an emanation from the Supreme Being."
In the business of life he must have been exquisite,
though somewhat naive, as very good men generally are.
The nine motives for indulgence which he enumerates to
himself (Book ix. 18) show his charming good humour
when confronted with family difficulties, perhaps caused by
his unworthy son.
" For what will the most violent man do to thee, if
thou eontinuest to be of a kind disposition towards him,
and if, as opportunity offers, thou gently admonishest him
13
156 MARCUS AURELIUS.
and calmly correctest his errors at the very time when he is
trying to do thee harm, saying, ' Not so, my child ; we are
constituted by Nature for something else ; I shall certainly
not be injured, but thou art injuring thyself, my child.'
And show him with gentle tact and by general principles that
this is so, and that even bees do not do as he doth, nor
any animals which are formed by Nature to be gregarious.
And thou must do this neither with any irony, nor in the
way of reproach, but affectionately, and without any rancour
in thy soul ; and not as a pedant, nor yet that any bystander
may admire. Have in view him alone."
Com modus, if it be he who is in question, was doubtless
little moved by this good paternal rhetoric. One of the
maxims of the excellent emperor was that the wicked are
unhappy, that a man is only wicked in spite of himself
and through ignorance. He pitied those who were not
like himself; he did not believe that he had any right to
impose himself upon them.
He plainly saw the baseness of men, but he did not
admit it, even to himself. This habit of voluntary blind-
ness is the failure of great souls. The world being by no
means altogether as they would have it, they deceive them-
selves so that they may see it other than it is. Thence
ensues a slight conventionality in their judgments. In the
case of Marcus Aurelius this conventionality has a some-
what irritating effect upon us. To believe him, his masters,
of whom several were of very moderate ability, must all
without exception have been distinguished men. One
would suppose that everybody around him was virtuous.
This reaches such a point that one feels constrained to ask
whether this brother whom he eulogises so highly in his
thanksgiving to the gods, was not Lucius Verus, his brother
by adoption. It is certain that the good emperor was
MARCUS AURELIUS. 157
liable to strong illusions, when it was a question of lending
his own virtues to some one else.
This habit, according to an opinion which originated in
antiquity, in particular by the pen of the Emperor Julian,
caused him to make an enormous mistake in not disinherit-
ing Commodus. This is one of the things which it is easy to
say at a distance, when the obstacles are no longer present,
and one reasons outside the facts. It is first of all forgotten
that the emperors, who since Nerva had made adoption
such a fruitful political system, had no sons. Adoption,
along with disinheritance of the son or grandson, was in
force in the first century of the Empire, but without good
results. Marcus Aurelius was evidently by principle in
favour of direct heredity, in which he saw the advantages of
the prevention of competition. As soon as Commodus
was born in 161, he presented him alone to the legions,
although he had a twin brother. Often, while he was still
quite a little boy, he used to take him in his arms and
perform anew this ceremony, which was a kind of procla-
mation. In 166 it was Lucius Verus himself who asked
that the two sons of Marcus, Commodus and Annius
Yerus, should be made Caesars. In 172 Commodus shared
with his father the title of Germanicus ; in 173, after the
repression of the revolt of Avidius, the Senate, in order to
recognise the freedom from family feeling shown by Marcus
Aurelius, demanded by acclamation the empire and tribunal
power for Commodus. The evil nature of the latter had
already betrayed itself by more than one indication known
to his preceptors ; but how could they prejudice the future
of a child twelve years old by some bad notes? In 176-
177 his father made him Imperator, Consul, Augustus.
This was surely an imprudence, but former acts made it
inevitable. Besides Commodus still restrained himself.
158 MARCUS AURELIUS.
In later years the evil was altogether exposed. On every
page of the later books of the Meditations we see traces of
the inward martyrdom of the excellent father, the perfect
emperor, who sees a monster growing up at his side, ready
to succeed him and decided upon taking in everything, by
antipathy, the opposite side to that which he has seen
expoused by good men. Then no doubt the thought of
disinheriting Commodus must have come more than
once to Marcus Aurelius. But it was too late. After
having associated him in the empire, after having so many
times proclaimed him before the legions to be perfect
and accomplished, to come and meet the world with a
declaration of his unworthiness would have been a scandal.
Marcus was entrapped by his own phrases, by the con-
ventionally charitable style which was too habitual with
him. And after all Commodus was only seventeen ; who
could be certain that he would not improve? Even after
the death of Marcus Aurelius it was still possible to hope.
Commodus at first showed some intention of following the
counsels of the meritorious men with whom his father had
surrounded him.
It is not, then, with not having disinherited his son that
one can reproach Marcus Aurelius; it is with having had a
son at all. It was not his fault that the age was incapable
of bearing so much wisdom. In philosophy the great
emperor had placed the ideal of virtue so high, that nobody
found it incumbent to pursue it. In politics his benevolent
optimism enfeebled the services, more especially the army.
In religion, by being too greatly attached to a state religion,
the weakness of which he plainly discerned, he prepared for
the violent triumph of the unofficial cult, and left hovering
over his memory a reproach, unjust it is true, but one the
very shadow of which should not be found in so pure a life.
MARCUS AURELIUS. 159
Here we touch upon one of the most delicate points in
the biography of Marcus Aurelius. It is unfortunately
certain that some condemnations to death were pro-
nounced and executed on the Christians under his rule.
The policy of his predecessors had been constant in
this respect. Trajan, Antoninus, and Hadrian himself
saw in Christianity a secret and anti-social sect dreaming
of the overthrow of the Empire. Like all men attached
to old Roman principles, they believed themselves com-
pelled to repress it. For that purpose there was no need
of special edicts ; laws against the ccetus illiciti and illicita
collegia were numerous. In the most formal manner the
Christians fell under the operation of these laws. It would
certainly have been worthy of the wise emperor who intro-
duced so many humane reforms, to have suppressed these
edicts, which entailed cruel and unjust consequences. But
one must observe at the outset that the true spirit of liberty,
as we understand it, was then understood by none, and
that Christianity, when it was master, practised it no better
than the Pagan emperors; in the second place, that the
repeal of the law relating to illicit societies would have been
the ruin of the Empire, founded essentially as it was upon
the principle that the state cannot permit in its bosom any
society differing from it. The principle was a bad one,
according to our ideas ; but it is at least perfectly certain
that it was the corner-stone of the Roman constitution.
Marcus Aurelius, far from exaggerating it, diminished it
with all his power; and one of the glories of his reign is
the extension which he gave to the right of association.
However, he did not go to the very root ; he did not com-
pletely sweep away the laws against the collegia illicita, and
there resulted in the provinces some infinitely regrettable
applications. The reproach that we can put upon him
160 MARCUS AURELIUS.
is the same as the one we might address to the modern
sovereigns who do not suppress with a stroke of the pen
all laws restricting freedom of union, of association, and of
the press.
From the distance at which we are, we clearly see that
Marcus Aurelius, by being more completely liberal, would
have shown more wisdom. It may be that Christianity
left free would have developed in a less disastrous manner
the theocratic and absolute spirit within it. But one
cannot reproach a statesman for not having provoked a
radical revolution in anticipation of events which were to
happen several centuries after him. Trajan, Hadrian,
Antoninus, and Marcus Aurelius could not be aware of
principles of general history and political economy that
have only been perceived in our own time, and that our
latest revolutions could alone reveal. In any case the
meekness of the good emperor is in this respect sheltered
from all reproaoh. We have no right to be more severe in
the matter than Tertullian : —
" Consult your annals," he says to the Roman magis-
trates, "and you will see that the princes who have used
us cruelly are of those whom it is an honour to have as
persecutors. On the other hand, of all the princes who
have respected the laws of God and man, name one who
has persecuted the Christians. We can even cite one who
declared himself our protector, the wise Marcus Aurelius.
If he did not openly revoke the edicts against our brothers,
he destroyed their effect by the severe penalties which he
established for the accusers."
We must remember that the Roman Empire was ten or
twelve times greater than France, and that the emperor's
responsibility for judgments passed in the provinces was
very slight. We must, above all, bear in mind that Christi-
MARCUS AURELIUS. t6i
anity did not simply claim the liberty of the different
religions; all forms of faith which tolerated others were
very much at ease in the Empire. What gave Christianity
and Judaism a place apart was their intolerance and their
exclusive spirit.
Truly, then, we have reason to wear mourning in our
hearts for Marcus Aurelius. With him philosophy was on
the throne. For a moment, thanks to him, the world has
been governed by the best and greatest man of his age.
Terrible decadence followed, but the little casket which
held the reflections he had had on the banks of the Gran
was saved. Thence issued that incomparable book in which
Epictetus was surpassed, that gospel of those who have no
belief in the supernatural, a gospel which only in our own
days has been fully understood. A true and eternal
gospel, the book of Meditations will never grow old, for it
affirms no dogma. The virtue of Marcus Aurelius rests,
like our own, upon reason and nature. St. Louis was a
very virtuous man because he was a Christian ; Marcus
Aurelius was the most pious of men, not because he was a
pagan, but because he was a perfectly developed man. He
was the honour of human nature and not of a determinate
religion. Science may come and apparently destroy God
and the immortal soul, while the Meditations will remain
young with life and truth. The religion of Marcus Aurelius
is the absolute religion, that resulting from the simple
fact of a high moral consciousness confronting the universe.
It is of no race and of no country. No revolution, no
change, no discovery can ever alter it.
SPINOZA. 1
On this day, two hundred years ago, in the afternoon about
the present hour, there lay dying at the age of forty-three,
on the quiet quay of the Pavilioengracht, not far from here,
a poor man whose life had been so profoundly silent, that
his last sigh was scarcely heard. He had occupied a lonely
room in the house of some worthy trades-people who,
without understanding him, felt an instinctive veneration
for him. On the morning of his last day on earth he went
down as usual to join his hosts ; there had been religious
services that day ; the gentle philosopher talked with those
honest folk about what the minister had said, and with
warm approval advised them to conform to it. The host
and hostess (they deserve to be named, for by their honest
sincerity they are entitled to a place in this beautiful idyll
of the Hague told by Colerus 2 ), the Van der Spyks, husband
and wife, returned to their devotions. When they reached
home again their quiet lodger was dead. His funeral, on
the 2.5th of February, was conducted like that of a Christian
believer, in the new church on the Spuy. All the people
of the neighbourhood greatly regretted the disappearance of
the sage, who had lived amongst them like one of them-
selves. His hosts kept his memory like a religion, and
none of those who had been in his presence ever spoke of
1 An address delivered at the unveiling of a monument to Spinoza
at the Hague, February 2 1st, 1877.
2 See Note XXV.
SPINOZA. 163
him without calling him, according to usage, " the blessed
Spinoza."
About the same time, however, any one capable of
examining the current of opinion then setting in among the
professedly enlightened circles of the Pharisaism of that
time, would have seen, in singular contrast, this philosopher,
so deeply loved by the simple and the pure of heart, become
the bugbear of the narrow orthodoxy, that pretended to
having the monopoly of truth. A scoundrel, a pestilence,
an imp of hell, the most wicked atheist that ever lived, a
man steeped in crime — this was what the lonely man of the
Pavilioengracht grew to be in the opinion of right-thinking
theologians and philosophers. Portraits of him were put in
circulation, exhibiting him as "bearing on his face signs of
reprobation."
But justice was to have her clay. The human mind
reaching towards the end of the eighteenth century, in
Germany especially, a more enlightened theology and a
philosophy of wider scope, recognised in Spinoza the pre-
cursor of a new gospel. Jacobi 1 took the public into his
confidence with regard to a conversation he had had with
Lessing. He had gone to Lessing with the hope of enlist-
ing the latter's aid against Spinoza. What was his amaze-
ment when he found in Lessing an avowed Spinozist !
"Evkcu Trav," said Lessing to him, "there you have the
whole of philosophy." Him whom a whole century had
declared to be an atheist, Novalis called a "God-intoxicated
man." His forgotten books were published and eagerly
sought after. Schleiermacher, Goethe, Hegel, Schelling, all
with one voice proclaimed Spinoza the father of modern
thought. It may be that there was some exaggeration in
this first outburst of tardy reparation ; but time, which
1 See Note XXVI.
i6 4 SPINOZA.
assigns to everything its place, has fully ratified Lessing's
judgment ; and there is not an enlightened mind to-day
that does not acknowledge Spinoza as the man who, in his
day, possessed the highest consciousness of God. It is
with this conviction that you have desired his pure and
humble tomb to have its anniversary. It is the common
assertion of a free faith in the infinite which brings together
on this day, at the spot that witnessed so much virtue, the
choicest gathering that a man of genius could have, grouped
around him, after his death. A sovereign as distinguished
by her intellectual as by her moral gifts is with us in spirit.
A prince who can justly appreciate merit of every kind, by
lending this solemnity the distinction of his presence, desires
to testify that of the glories of Holland there is not one
alien to him, and that no lofty thought escapes his
enlightened judgment and his philosophic admiration.
I.
The illustrious Baruch de Spinoza was born at Amsterdam,
at the time when your republic was attaining the climax of
its glory and power. He belonged to that great race which,
by the influence it has exercised and the services it has
rendered, occupies so exceptional a position in the history
of civilisation. In its own way a miracle, the development
of the Jewish people takes rank beside that other miracle, the
development of the Greek mind ; for, if Greece was the
first to realise the ideal of poetry, of science, of philosophy,
of art, of profane life, the Jewish people — if I may so express
myself — created the religion of humanity. Its prophets
were the first to proclaim in the world the idea of righteous-
ness, the re-vindication of the rights of the weak — a re-vindi-
cation so much the more violent, in that, all idea of future
SPINOZA. 165
reward being unknown to them, they dreamed of the
realisation of their ideal upon the earth in the near future.
It was a Jew, Isaiah, who, seven hundred and fifty years
before Jesus Christ, dared to affirm that sacrifices are of
small importance, and that there is but one thing needful,
pure hands and a pure heart. Then, when earthly events
seemed to contradict hopelessly those brilliant Utopias,
Israel made an unparalleled change of front.
Transporting into the domain of pure idealism that King-
dom of God to which the world could not attain, one half
of its children founded Christianity, and the other half
breathed through the flaming fagots of the Middle Ages
that imperturbable protest: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy
God is one God; holy is His name." This potent tradition
of idealism, of hope against all hope, this religion that
obtains the most heroic sacrifices from its adherents,
though it be not of its essence to promise them anything
certain beyond this life, — such was the healthy and bracing
atmosphere in which Spinoza developed. His education
was at first entirely Hebraic ; the great literature of Israel
was his earliest, and indeed his perpetual instructress, the
meditation of his whole life.
As generally happens, Hebrew literature, by assuming the
character of a sacred book, had become the subject of a con-
ventional exegesis, in which the explanation of the old texts
according to the meaning of their authors was of les i
importance than the discovery in them of nourishment for
the moral and religious needs of the time. The penetrating
mind of young Spinoza soon discerned the defects of the
Synagogue exegesis; the Bible, as it was taught to him,
was disfigured by the accumulated misinterpretations of
more than two thousand years. He resolved to make his
way beyond them. Essentially he was at one with the true
1 66 SPINOZA.
fathers of Judaism, in particular with the great Maimonides, 1
who had found a way of introducing into Judaism the
most daring philosophical speculations. With marvellous
sagacity he foresaw the great results of the critical exegesis
which, a hundred and twenty-five years later, was to provide
the true signification of the noblest works of the Hebrew
genius. Was this to destroy the Bible ? Has that admir-
able literature lost anything by being understood in its true
sense, rather than by being relegated outside the common
laws of humanity ? Certainly not. The truths that science
reveals ever surpass the dreams that science dispels. The
world of Laplace,* I imagine, exceeds in beauty that of
a Cosmas Indicopleustes, 2 who pictured the universe to
himself as a chest, on the lid of which the stars glide along
in grooves at the distance of a few leagues from us. The
Bible is in the same way more beautiful, when we have
learnt to see therein — ranged in order on the background
of a thousand years — each sigh, each aspiration, each prayer
of the most exalted religious consciousness that ever existed,
than when we force ourselves to regard it as a book unlike
any other, written, preserved, and interpreted in direct
opposition to all the ordinary rules of the human intellect.
But the mediaeval persecutions had the customary effect
of persecutions; they had made men's minds narrow and
timorous. A few years previously, at Amsterdam, the ill-
fated Uriel Acosta 3 had cruelly expiated hesitations in
belief that fanaticism finds as culpable as avuwed infidelity.
Young Spinoza's boldness was received still more un-
favourably; he was anathematised, and had to submit to an
excommunication which he had not courted. What an old
story this is! Religious communions, the beneficent cradles
> See Note XXVII. " See Note XXVIII.
3 See Note XXIX.
SPINOZA. 167
of so much earnestness and virtue, will hear of no refusal
to be imprisoned in their bosom ; they lay claim to hold
captive for ever the life that has had its beginning within
them ; they treat as apostasy the legitimate emancipation
of the soul that seeks . to take its flight alone. It is as
though the egg should upbraid, as ungrateful, the bird that
escaped from it ; the egg was essential at its time, — when it
became a bondage it had to be broken.
It was indeed truly wonderful that Erasmus of Rotter-
dam should have felt his cell to be too narrow for him, that
Luther should not have preferred his monkish vows to that
vow — holy in a very different sense — which man, by the
very fact of his being, contracts with truth ! Had Erasmus
continued in his monastic routine, or had Luther gone on
distributing indulgences, they would have been apostates
indeed. Spinoza was the greatest of modern Jews, and
Judaism exiled him. Nothing can be more simple ; it had
to be so, and it must ever be so. Finite symbols, prisons
of the infinite spirit, eternally protest against the efforts of
idealism to enlarge them. For its part the human spirit
struggles everlastingly for more air and more light. Eigh-
teen hundred and fifty years ago the Synagogue denounced,
as a false prophet, him who was to give unequalled lustre
to the maxims of the Synagogue. And the Christian
Church, how often has she not driven forth from her
bosom those who should have brought her most honour?
Our duty in such cases is fulfilled if we keep in piouJ
memory the education which we received in our childhood.
Let the old churches be free to brand with criminality him
who leaves them ; they will not succeed in receiving from
us any other feeling save that of gratitude ; for after all, the
harm that they can do us is as nothing to the good that
they have done.
i6S SPINOZA.
ii.
Here, then, we have the excommunicated one of the
Amsterdam Synagogue forced to create a spiritual abode
for himself, outside the home which would have no more
of him. He had the deepest sympathy with Christianity,
but he dreaded all chains, and did not embrace it.
Descartes had lately renewed philosophy by his firm and
sober rationalism ; Descartes was his master. Spinoza took
up the problems where that man of great mind had left
them, and saw that, through fear of the Sorbonne, 1 his
theology had always remained somewhat arid. Oldenburg 2
asked him one day what fault he had to find with the
philosophy of Descartes and Bacon ; and Spinoza replied
that their principal fault consisted in not occupying them-
selves sufficiently with the First Cause. It may be that
his recollections of Jewish theology, that ancient wisdom
of the Hebrews before which he often bows, in this matter
inspired him with more lofty views, more ambitious yearn-
ings. Not only the ideas of the Deity held by the vulgar,
but even those of thinkers, seemed to him inadequate.
He clearly saw that we cannot assign a limited part to the
infinite, that the divine is either all or is nothing, and that
if the divine has reality at all, it must pervade everything.
For twenty years he meditated on these problems, without
permitting his thoughts to leave them for an instant. Our
distaste for systems and abstract formula? does not allow us
nowadays to accept absolutely the propositions in which he
thought that he held the secrets of the infinite. The
universe for Spinoza, as for Descartes, was only extension
and thought; chemistry and physiology were wanting in
that great school, which was too exclusively geometrical
1 Sec Note XXX. 2 See Note XXXI.
SPTNOZA. 169
and mechanical. Foreign to the theory of life, and to the
ideas as to the composition of matter which chemistry was
to reveal, still too much attached to the scholastic terms of
snbsta?ice and attribute, Spinoza did not attain to that living
and fruitful infinite exhibited in the science of nature and
history, as presiding in limitless space over a development
that ever tends to grow more and more intense. But
making allowance for a certain aridity of expression, what
grandeur there is in that inflexible geometrical induction
leading up to the supreme proposition : " It is of the nature
of the substance to develop itself necessarily by an infinity
of infinite attributes infinitely modified ! " God is thus
absolute thought, universal consciousness. The ideal exists
— it might even be said that it is the sole existence, and
that all the rest is but appearance and frivolity. Bodies
and souls are mere modes, of which God is the substance ;
it is only the modes that know duration, the substance is
wholly in eternity. In this way God does not prove him-
self, for his existence results from his idea alone; everything
contains and supposes him. God is the condition of all
existence and all thought. If God did not exist, thought
would be able to conceive more than nature could provide,
which is a contradiction.
Spinoza did not clearly see universal progress; the world,
as he conceives it, seems, as it were, crystallised in a matter
which is incorruptible extension, in a soul which is immut-
able thought. His feeling for Cod deprives him of his
feeling for man; face to face with the infinite unceasingly,
he did not sufficiently perceive that part of the divine
which is concealed in relative manifestations. But, better
than any other man, he saw the eternal identity which is
the basis of all transient evolutions. Whatever is limited
seemed to him frivolous, and unworthy to occupy the mind
17© SPINOZA.
of a philosopher. With daring flight he soared to the lofty
snow-covered summits, without easting a glance on the
rich display of life blossoming on the mountain-side. At
that altitude, where every breast save his pants for breath,
he lives, he finds delight, he flourishes as ordinary men
do in mild and temperate climes. What is essential for
him is the glacier air, keen and strong and penetrating.
He does not ask to be followed ; he is like Moses, to
whom secrets unknown to the multitude of men were
revealed upon the high places. Be assured of this, he
was the seer of his age ; he was the man of his own day
who saw most profoundly into God.
in.
It might well be supposed that, all alone as he was upon
these snowy peaks, he was in human affairs wrongheaded,
or Utopian, or disdainfully sceptical. But that was by no
means the case. He never ceased to be preoccupied with
the application of his principles to human societies. The
pessimism of Hobhes and the dreams of Thomas More
were equally repugnant to him. At least one half of the
'J'heologico-Political Treatise, which appeared in 1670, might
be reprinted to-day without losing any of its cogency.
Listen to its admirable title: — Tractatus Theo/ogico-Po/iticus
contitie?is dissertationes aliquot, quibus osteuditur, libertatem
philosophandi tmn tantum salva pietate et republics pace,
fosse co/icedi, sed eamdem nisi cum pace reipublicce ipsaquc
pietate tolli twn posse. For centuries past it had been
imagined that society rested upon metaphysical dogmas.
Spinoza profoundly saw that these dogmas, assumed to be
necessary to humanity, could not escape discussion ; that
revelation, — if such there lie,— traversing, in order to
SPINOZA. 171
reach us, the faculties of the human mind, is no less than
everything else open to criticism. I wish that I could
quote in its entirety that admirable Chapter XX., in which
the great writer establishes with masterly superiority that
dogma, new then, and even now contested, which is called
liberty of conscience.
"The final end of the State," he says, "consists not in
dominating over men, restraining them by fear, subjecting
them to the will of others ; but, on the contrary, in preserv-
ing intact the natural right of each to live without injury to
himself or others. No, I say, the State has not for its end
the transformation of men from reasonable beings into
animals" or automata ; it has for end so to act that its
citizens should develop soul and body in security, and
make free use of their reason. Hence the true end of the
State is liberty. Whosoever means to respect the rights of
a sovereign should never act in opposition to his decrees ;
but each has the right to think what he wills, and to say
what he thinks, provided he content himself with speaking
and teaching in the name of pure reason, and do not
attempt on his private authority to introduce innovations
into the State. For example, a citizen who demonstrates
that a certain law is repugnant to pure reason, and holds
that for that cause it ought to be abrogated, — if he submit
his opinions to the judgment of the sovereign, to whom
alone it belongs to establish and abolish laws, and if mean-
while he act in nowise contrary to law, — that man certainly
deserves well of the State as the best of citizens. . . ,
" Even if we admit the possibility of so stifling men's
liberty, and laying such a yoke upon them that they dare
not even whisper without the sovereign's approbation, never
most surely can they be prevented from thinking as they
will. What then must ensue? That men will think one
14
172 SPINOZA.
way and speak another, that consequently good faith — a
virtue most necessary to the State — will become corrupted,
that adulation — a detestable thing — and perfidy will be
had in repute, entailing the decadence of all good and
healthy morality. What can be more disastrous to a State
than to exile honest citizens as evil-doers, because they do
not share the opinions of the crowd, and are ignorant of
the art of feigning? What more fatal than to treat as
enemies and doom to death, men whose only crime is that
of thinking independently? The scaffold which should be
the terror of the wicked is thus turned into the glorious
theatre, where virtue and toleration shine out in all their
lustre, and publicly cover the sovereign majesty with appro-
brium. Beyond question there is but one thing to be
learnt from such a spectacle, — to imitate those noble
martyrs ; or, if one fears death, to become the cowardly
flatterers of power. Nothing, then, is so full of peril as to
refer and submit to divine rights matters of pure specula-
tion, and to impose laws on opinions which are, or may be,
subjects of discussion amongst men. If the authority of
the State limited itself to the repression of actions, while
allowing impunity to words, controversies would turn less
often into seditions."
Wiser than many so-called practical men, our thinker
sees perfectly well that the only durable governments
are reasonable governments, and that the only reasonable
governments are tolerant governments. Far from absorb-
ing the individual in the State, he grants him solid
guarantees against the State's omnipotence. He is not a
revolutionary, but a moderate man ; he transforms, he
explains, but he does not destroy. His God is not of
those that take pleasure in sacrifices, in ceremonies, and
in the savour of incense; nevertheless, Spinoza is far from
SPINOZA. 173
having any design to overthrow religion. For Christianity
he entertains a profound veneration, a tender and sincere
respect. In his doctrine the supernatural is meaningless ;
according to his principles, anything outside nature would
be out of being, and consequently inconceivable. Seers
and prophets have been men like others : —
"It is not thinking but dreaming," he says, "to hold that
prophets have had a human body and not a human soul,
and that consequently their knowledge and sensations have
been of a different nature from ours."
" The prophetic faculty has not been the dower of one
people alone — the Jews. The quality of Son of God has
not been the privilege of one man alone. . . , To state
my views openly, I tell you that it is not absolutely neces-
sary to know Christ after the flesh ; but it is otherwise
when we speak of the Son of God — that is to say, of the
eternal Wisdom of God, which has manifested itself in all
things, and most fully in the human soul, and above all
in Jesus Christ. Without this wisdom none can attain the
state of beatitude, since it alone teaches us what is true and
what is false, what is right and what is wrong. ... As to
what certain Churches have added ... I have expressly
warned you that I know not what they mean, and, to speak
frankly, I may confess that they seem to me to use the
same kind of language as they would use, if they spoke of a
circle assuming the nature of a square."
Are not these almost the very words used by Schleier-
macher, and was not Spinoza, the fellow-founder, with
Richard Simon, 1 of biblical exegesis, at the same time the
precursor of those liberal theologians who, in our own day,
have shown that Christianity can retain all its glory with-
out supernaturalism ? His letters to Oldenburg on the
1 See Note XXXII.
174 SPINOZA.
resurrection of Jesus Christ, and of the sense in which St.
Paul understood it, are masterpieces which a hundred years
later would have served as the manifesto of a whole school
of critical theology.
In the eyes of Spinoza it matters little whether mysteries
be understood this way or that, provided they be under-
stood in a pious sense; religion has but one end — piety.
And to religion we should appeal not for metaphysics, but
for practical guidance. At bottom there is but one thing
in Scripture as in all revelation, "Love thy neighbour."
The fruit of religion is blessedness, and each man partici-
pates in it according to his capacity and his efforts. The
souls that reason governs — the philosophic souls that even
in this world have their life in God — are safe from death.
That which death takes from them is worthless; but weak or
passionate souls almost wholly perish, and death, instead of
being for them a simple accident, involves the very founda-
tion of their being. The ignorant man who allows himself
to be guided by blind passion is moved, in a thousand
different senses, by external causes, and never enjoys true
peace of soul ; for him, ceasing to suffer implies ceasing to
be. The soul of the sage, on the contrary, can scarcely be
disturbed. Possessing by a sort of eternal necessity, con-
sciousness of himself, and of God, and of the world around,
he never ceases to be, and ever keeps true peace of soul.
Spinoza could not endure his system to be considered
irreligious or subversive. The timid Oldenburg did not
conceal from him the fact that some of his opinions seemed,
to certain readers, to tend to the overthrow of piety.
" Whatever accords with reason," was Spinoza's reply, " is
in my belief perfectly favourable to the practice of virtue."
The pretended superiority of coarsely positive conceptions
in the matter of religion and the future life found him
SPINOZA. i7S
intractable. "Is it, I ask, to throw off all religion," he
said, "to recognise in God the Supreme Good, and thence
to conclude that he must be loved with a free soul ? To
maintain that all our happiness and our most perfect free-
dom consists in that love, that the reward of virtue is
virtue itself, and that a blind and impotent soul finds its
punishment in its blindness — is that a denial of all
religion ? " At the root of all such attacks he saw mean-
ness of soul. According to him, any one who chafed at a
disinterested religion, tacitly avowed that reason and virtue
had no attraction in his eyes, and that his happiness would
lie in living as his passions commanded, did not fear restrain
him. " Thus then," he would add, " such an one only
abstains from evil, and obeys the divine commandments
regretfully, as a slave might do; and, as a recompense for
this slavery, he expects from God rewards, which in his
eyes have infinitely more value than divine love. The more
aversion and remoteness from righteousness he may have
felt, the more he hopes to be recompensed ; and he
imagines that those who are not restrained by the same
fear as himself do what he would fain do, that is to say,
live lawlessly." Spinoza held, with justification, that this
manner of seeking to gain Heaven, by doing precisely what
is requisite to merit Hell, was contrary to reason, and that
there was something absurd in pretending to gain God's
favour and avowing at the same time to him, that without
dread, one would not love him.
IV.
He felt the danger of touching beliefs, in which few per-
sons admit these subtle distinctions. Caute was his favourite
motto ; and his friends having made him aware of the
176 SPINOZA.
explosion that the Eihica would be certain to produce,
he kept it unpublished until his death. He had no literary
vanity, nor did he seek renown — possibly indeed because
he was sure of having it without seeking. He was perfectly
happy ; so he has told us, and let us take him at his word.
He has done better still : he has bequeathed his secret to
us. Listen to the recipe of the " Prince of Atheists " for
the discovery of happiness. It is the love of God. To
love God is to live in God. Life in God is the best and
the most perfect life, because it is the most reasonable, the
happiest, the fullest ; in a word, because it gives us more
being than any other life, and most completely satisfies the
fundamental desire which constitutes our essence.
His practical life was entirely regulated by these maxims ;
it was a masterpiece of good sense and judgment. It was
governed with the profound skill of the wise man who
wishes one thing alone and always ends by obtaining it.
Never did policy so well combine end and means. Had
he been less reserved he might perhaps have met the fate
of the unfortunate Acosta. Since he loved truth for truth's
sake, he was indifferent to the abuse which his constancy
in speaking it brought down upon him ; he did not utter
a word in reply to the attacks of which he was the object.
He himself never attacked any one. " It is contrary to my
habits," he used to say, "to seek to discover the errors into
which other men have fallen." Had he chosen to be an
official personage, his life would have been filled with per-
secution, or at least disgrace. He was nothing, and desired
to be nothing. Ama nesciri was his motto, as it was that
of the author of the Imitation. He sacrificed all to the
peace of his thought; and in doing so he was not egoistical,
for his thought was of import to all. He more than once
repulsed the wealth that was coming to him, and desired
SPINOZA. 177
to have only what was absolutely necessary. The King
of France offered him a pension, and he declined it with
thanks; the Elector Palatine offered him a professorial
chair at Heidelburg. "Your liberty will be complete," he
was told, "for the prince is convinced that you will not
abuse it by disturbing the established religion." " I do not
altogether understand within what limits it will be necessary
to confine this liberty to philosophise, granted me on con-
dition that I do not disturb the established religion ; and
besides, the instruction I should give to youth would pre-
vent me from making any personal advance in philosophy.
I have only succeeded in procuring a tranquil life by
renouncing every kind of public teaching." He. felt it to
be his duty to think ; in fact he did the thinking of man-
kind, whose ideas he anticipated by more than a hundred
years.
This same instinctive sagacity he carried into all Lhe
relations of life; he felt that public opinion never allows a
man two forms of daring at once ; and so, being a free-
thinker, he thought himself constrained to live like a saint.
But I do not phrase the matter well : was not this gentle
and pure life the direct expression of his peaceful and
loving spirit? The atheist was in those days pictured as a
ruffian armed with daggers. Spinoza throughout his whole
life was humble, gentle, and pious. His adversaries were
naive enough to take it in ill part; they would fain have
had him live according to the conventional model, tra-
versing his life like a demon incarnate, and ending it in
despair. Spinoza smiled at this singular pretension, and
declined to change his manner of living to please his
enemies.
He had excellent friends, was courageous when courage
was needed, and protested against popular indignatiun
178 SPINOZA.
whenever it appeared to him unjust. Much disillusionment
failed to shake him in his fidelity to the Republican party;
the liberalism of his opinions was never at the mercy of
circumstance. What perhaps did him the most honour was
the esteem and sincere affection of the simple folk who
lived around him. There is nothing that is worth so much
as the esteem of the humble and meek ; their judgment is
nearly always that of God. For the good Van der Spyks
he was evidently the ideal of the perfect lodger. " No one
ever gave less trouble," some years after his death they told
Colerus. "When he was at home he inconvenienced no-
body, passing the best part of his time quietly in his own
room. If he happened to tire himself by too prolonged
meditation, he would come downstairs and speak to the
family about all the topics of ordinary conversation, even
about the merest trifles." In fact, there never was seen so
affable a neighbour. He often conversed with his hostess,
especially at the time of her confinements, and with the
rest of the household when any sorrow or sickness befell
them. He used to bid the children go to divine service,
and, when they returned from the sermon, ask how much
they remembered of it. He nearly always strongly supported
what the preacher had said. One of the persons whom he
most esteemed was Pastor Cordes, an excellent man and a
good expounder of the Scriptures. He sometimes went to
hear him, and he used to advise his host never to miss the
preaching of so able a man. One day his hostess asked
him whether he thought she could be saved in the religion
she professed. "Your religion is a good one," he replied;
" you should not seek after another, nor should you doubt
that yours will give you salvation, provided that, attaching
yourself to piety, you at the same time live a peaceful and
tranquil life." His temperance and good management
SPINOZA. 179
were admirable. His daily needs were provided for by a
handicraft in which he attained great skill — that of polishing
lenses. The Van der Spyks handed over to Colerus the
little papers in which he used to note his expenses; they
averaged about twopence farthing a day. He was very
careful to settle his accounts every quarter, so as neither to
spend more nor less than his income. His dress was
simple, almost poor, but his person radiated forth a tranquil
serenity. It was clear that he had found the doctrine that
gave him perfect satisfaction.
He was never depressed and never elated ; the equability
of his humour seems marvellous. Perhaps he felt a little
sadness on the day when the daughter of Van den Ende,
his professor, preferred Kerkering to him ; but I imagine
that he speedily consoled himself. " Reason is my delight,"
he said, " and the end to which in this life I aspire ; it
means joy and serenity." He objected to any praise of
melancholy.
" It is superstition," he maintained, "that sets up sorrow as
good, and all that tends to gladness as evil. God would show
himself envious were he to take pleasure in my impotence and
in the ills I suffer. Rather, in proportion to the greatness
of our joy do we reach a higher perfection and participate
more fully in the divine nature. . . , Joy, therefore, can
never be evil so long as it be regulated by the law of our
true utility. A virtuous life is not a sad and gloomy one, a
life of privation and austerity. How should the Divine
Being take delight in the spectacle of my weakness, or
impute to me, as meritorious, tears, sobs, terrors — all signs
of an impotent soul? Yes," he added emphatically, "it is
the part of a wise man to use the things of this life and
enjoy them as much as possible; to recruit himself by a
temperate and appetising diet ; to charm his senses with
180 SPINOZA.
the perfume and the brilliant verdure of plants ; even to
adorn his attire, to enjoy music, games, spectacles, and all
the amusements that a man can bestow upon himself without
detriment to himself." Men do not cease to talk about
repentance, humility, and death; but repentance is not a
virtue, it is the result of a weakness. Nor is humility one,
for it is born in man from his idea of his own inferiority.
As for the thought of death, it is the daughter of fear, and
only in feeble souls takes up abode. " The one thing
of all others," he said, "about which a free man thinks
least is death. Wisdom lies in the contemplation not of
death but of life."
v.
Since the days of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius no life
had been witnessed so profoundly penetrated by the feeling
of the divine. In the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the sixteenth
centuries rationalistic philosophy had counted among its
adherents very great men, but no saints. Often there had
been something repulsive and harsh even in the finest
characters among the Italian free-thinkers. Religion had
been wholly absent from those lives, not less in revolt
against human than against divine laws, of which the last
example was that of poor Vanini. 1 Here, on the other hand,
we have religion producing free-thought as a part of piety.
Religion in such a system is not part of life, it is life itself.
What is of importance is not to be in possession of some
more or less correct metaphysical phrase, it is to give life
an indubitable pole, a supreme direction — the ideal.
It was in so doing that your illustrious compatriot raised
aloft a banner that to this day serves to shelter beneath it all
J See Note XXXIII.
SPINOZA. 181
who think and feel nobly. Yes, religion is eternal; it
responds as well to the primary need of the primitive man
as to that of the civilised man. It will only perish with
humanity itself, or rather, its disappearance would be the
proof that degenerate humanity was about to return into
the animality whence it emerged. And yet no dogma, no
worship, no formula can, in these days of ours, adequately -
express the religious sentiment. We must allow these two
apparently contradictory statements to stand confronting
one another. Woe to him who asserts that the era of
religions is past ! Woe to him who deems it possible to
give back to the old symbols the force they possessed when
they leant upon the imperturbable dogmatism of other days !
With this dogmatism we must needs dispense; we must
dispense with the fixed beliefs which have been the sources
of so much strife and division, and also of so much fervent
conviction ; we must cease to believe that it is our duty to
keep others in beliefs which we no longer share. Spinoza
was right in his horror of hypocrisy : hypocrisy is cowardly
and dishonest, but above all it is useless. In truth who is
deceived here? The persistence of the upper classes in
unreservedly patronising the religious forms of other days
in the sight of the uncultured classes, will have but one
effect — that of ruining their own authority at those times of
crisis when it is desirable that the people should still
cherish a belief in the reason and virtue of the few.
Honour then to Spinoza, who dared to say : Reason
before all ; reason cannot be contrary to the interests of
humanity, if we only understand what these interests really
are. But let us remind those who are carried away by
unreflecting impatience, that Spinoza never conceived
religious revolution being aught else than a transformation
of formulae. What was for him essential continued to exist
i 82 SPINOZA.
under other terms. If, on the one hand, he energetically
repudiated the theocratic power of a clergy conceived as
being distinct from civil society, and the tendency of the
State to meddle with metaphysical questions, he never, on
the other hand, disowned either the State or religion. He
wished the State to be tolerant, and religion free. We
desire nothing more. We cannot impose on others beliefs
which we do not hold ourselves. When the believers of
other days became persecutors, they showed themselves to
be tyrannical ; but they were at least consistent. Were we
to do as they did, we should be simply absurd. Our
religion is a feeling which may be garbed in many forms.
These forms are far from being all of equal value ; but there
is not one of them that has strength or authority to exclude
the others. Liberty,— this is the last word of Spinoza's
religious politics. Let it be the last word of our own ! It
is the most honest part to take ; and at the same time it is
perhaps the most efficacious and certain as regards the
progress of civilisation.
Humanity, in fact, advances along the path of progress
with prodigiously unequal steps. The rude and violent
Esau is impatient at the slow pace of Jacob's flock. Let us
allow time to all. Let us assuredly not permit simplicity
and ignorance to fetter the free movements of the intellect;
but, on the other hand, do not let us disturb the slow
evolution of less active minds. The liberty of some to be
absurd is the condition of the liberty of others to be
reasonable. Services to the human spirit rendered by
violence are not services at all. That those who do not
take truth seriously should exercise constraint to obtain
outward submission, — what can be more natural ? But we
who believe that truth is something real and deserving of
supreme respect, how can we dream of obtaining by force
SPINOZA. 183
an adhesion, valueless when it is not the fruit of free
conviction? We no longer admit sacramental formulae,
operating by their own virtue independently of the intelli-
gence of him to whom they are applied. For us a belief
has only value when it has been gained by the reflection of
the individual, when it is by him understood, by him assi-
milated. A mental conviction caused by higher authority
is as perfect a piece of nonsense as a love that is won by
force, or a commanded sympathy. Let us promise our-
selves that not only shall we ever defend our freedom
against all that would fain assail it, but also that, if the
need arises, we shall defend the freedom of those who have
not always respected ours, and who probably would not
respect it if they were the masters now.
It was Holland that had the glory, more than two
hundred years ago, of demonstrating the possibility of these
theories by realising them.
"Must we prove," said Spinoza, "that this freedom of
thought gives rise to no serious inconvenience, and that it
is competent to keep men, openly diverse in their opinions,
reciprocally respectful of each other's rights? Examples
abound, and we need not go far to seek them. Let us
instance the town of Amsterdam, whose considerable
growth — an object of admiration for other nations — is
simply the fruit of this freedom. In the midst of this
flourishing republic, this great city, men of all nations and
all sects live together in the mcst perfect harmony; . . . and
there is no sect, however odious, whose members, provided
they do not offend against the rights of any man, may not
publicly find aid and protection before the magistrates."
Descartes was of the same opinion when he came and
asked of your country the tranquillity which was essential to
his thought. Then, thanks to the noble privilege of a free
1 84 SPINOZA.
country, so gloriously maintained by your fathers against all
foes, this land of Holland became the place of refuge in
which the human intellect, sheltered from the tyrannies
which overspread Europe, found air to breathe, a public
to understand it, and organs wherein to multiply its voice
— elsewhere gagged and silent.
Deep indeed are the sufferings of our age, and cruel are
its perplexities. We cannot with impunity raise so many
problems before we possess the elements to resolve them.
It is not we who have shattered that crystal Paradise with
its silver and azure gleams, by which so many eyes have
been charmed to consolation. But it lies in fragments.
What is shattered is shattered; and never will an earnest
spirit undertake the puerile task of restoring ignorance that
has once been destroyed, or of giving new life to dispelled
illusions. The populations of great towns have almost
everywhere ceased to believe in the supernatural ; were we
to sacrifice our convictions and sincerity in an attempt to
give their faith back to them, we should not succeed. And
besides, the supernatural, as once it was understood, is not
the ideal.
The cause of the supernatural is compromised, the cause
of the ideal is unscathed ; and so it will ever be. The
ideal remains the soul of the world, the permanent God,
the primordial, efficient, and final Cause of the universe.
This is the basis of eternal religion. In order to adore
God we need no more than Spinoza miracles or self-
interested prayers. So long as there be in the human
heart one fibre to vibrate at the sound of that which is
true, and just, and honourable, so long as the instinctively
pure soul prefers purity to life, so long as there be found
friends of truth ready to sacrifice their peace in the cause of
science, friends of righteousness to devote themselves to
SPINOZA. 185
holy and useful works of mercy, womanly hearts to love
whatever is good, beautiful, and pure, artists to render it
by sound, and colour, and words of inspiration, — so long
God will dwell within us. It could only be when egoism,
meanness of soul, narrowness of mind, indifference to know-
ledge, contempt for human rights, forgetfulness of that which
is great and noble, invaded the world, — it could only be
then that God would be in humanity no more. But far
from us be thoughts like these ! Our aspirations, our
sufferings, our very faults and temerities, are the proof
that the ideal lives in us. Yes, human life is still some-
thing 'divine ! Our apparent negations are often nothing
more than the scruples of timid minds that fear to pass
beyond the limits of their knowledge. They are a worthier
homage to the Divinity than the hypocritical adoration
of a spirit given over to routine. God is still within us !
Est Deus in nobis.
Let us all unite in bending before the great and illustrious
thinker who, two centuries ago, proved better than any
other man, both by the example of his life and by the
power — still fresh and young — of his works, how much
spiritual joy and holy unction there is in thoughts like
these. Let us with Schleiermacl.er offer the most exquisite
words of homage of which we are capable to the shades
of the holy and misunderstood Spinoza.
"The sublime spirit of the world penetrated him; the
infinite was his beginning and his end ; the universal his
only and eternal love. Living in holy innocence and
profound humility, he contemplated himself in the world
of eternity, and saw that he too was for that world a mirror
worthy of love. He was full of religion and full of the
Holy Spirit; and therefore he appears to us alone and
unequalled ; a master in his art, but lifted above the
1 86 SPINOZA.
profane, without disciples and without right of citizenship
anywhere."
That right of citizenship you are now about to confer
upon him. Your monument will be the connecting link
between his genius and the earth. His soul will brood
like a good angel over the spot where his short journey
among men came to an end. Woe to him who, passing by,
should dare to level an insult at that sweet and pensive
figure ! He would be punished as all vulgar hearts are
punished — by his very vulgarity and powerlessness to com-
prehend the divine. Meanwhile, from his granite pedestal
Spinoza will teach to all the way of happiness that he
himself found, and for ages to come the cultivated man
who passes along the Pavilioengracht will inwardly say : " It
is perhaps in this place that God has been felt most
closely."
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
An infinite gratitude is due to the persons who, animated
by a sentiment of pious friendship, have undertaken the
difficult task of introducing Henri-Frederic Amiel to a
public with which that distinguished thinker preoccupied
himself much, but which a certain timidity prevented him
from addressing directly. Amiel's intellectual position is
one of the most peculiar of our time; his life exhibits
admirably some of the maladies that prey upon our genera-
tion. With philosophical abilities of a high order, Amiel
only reached melancholy; possessed of true literary qualities,
he could not give to his ideas the form which they
demanded. A perfectly sincere man, he failed to have
a steadfast design in the direction of his life. Moralists and
public men of a lesser order have made greater mark
than he ; writers a hundred times less learned have left
deeper traces in our literary history ; a multitude of
mediocre natures have perhaps rendered more service to
the cause of truth and goodness than this passionate lover
of the ideal.
Had Amiel been of the band, assuredly the best among
the elect, that has taken for its motto A ma nesciri, there
were nothing more to say. It is an accepted opinion
with experienced critics that literature diminishes what
it touches, that the finest shades of feeling will be for ever
unknown, that the truest and most powerful ideas that men
15
188 HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
have had in the universe have remained unwritten, or
rather unexpressed. God and his angels, as people used to
say, have had the privilege of beholding the only perfect
manifestations of moral and intellectual order ; that is, of
meditations and feelings, evolving themselves in the midst
of an absolute objectivity, untainted by the underlying
thought of their possible employment. The man of silent
virtue, the great heart that makes no parade of its heroism,
the noble mind that only delivers, as it were by compulsion,
its exalted views, are superior to the mere craftsman in
words, preoccupied with giving a form to opinions which,
with him, are not perhaps very profound. Amiel, although
a very virtuous man, had not reached the height of dis-
interestedness of those ascetics, who vow themselves to an
everlasting silence. He w r as not exempt from the great
literary evil, the false idea, that thought and sentiment exist
to be expressed, the idea that makes men turn from loving
life for its own sake, and attributes an exaggerated value to
mere talent. Amiel desires to produce, but he cannot help
feeling all the time that he is not a man of letters. To use
a vulgar phrase which a certain species of literature has
put into fashion, he is a rate, because he does not know
how to win the public to the order of ideas of his choice ;
but he is a rate who is aware of what is wanting in him,
who worships what he does not possess, and wastes
himself with regret. He does not see sufficiently that
without being a great writer, one can do things of the first
importance; and then he has recourse to the falsest of
compromises — the journal intime, disconnected thoughts,
memoirs destined for their writer's eyes alone.
That is a dangerous, sometimes unhealthy literary habit,
a habit generally indulged in by those who have none other ;
and upon which, save in exceptional cases, must rest a priori
HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL. 189
a certain condemnation. The man who finds sufficient time
to write a journal intime does not appear to us to have
fully grasped how vast the world is. The volume of know-
ledge to be acquired is immense. The history of humanity
is scarcely commenced upon; the study of nature holds in
store discoveries we cannot possibly foresee. How, in the
presence of such a colossal task as this, can we stop to
feast upon ourselves, to doubt life itself? Far better would
it be to take up the spade and toil. The day when we can
permit ourselves to loiter behind in the diversion of a dis-
couraged mind, will be the day when we begin to see that
knowledge has its limits. But even supposing that in the
ages we may perceive such bounds for history, we shall
never perceive them for nature. Even the problems that
appear wholly insoluble, such as those of physical astronomy,
are susceptible of a sudden transformation, altogether un-
foreseen. Working upon formulas more and more compre-
hensive, acquired by past scientific generations, physics,
chemistry, and biology have before them a future which
ever widens as we advance. My friend, M. Berthelot, would
be able to find occupation during hundreds of consecutive
lives without ever writing about himself. I estimate that I
should require five hundred years to exhaust the domain of
Semitic studies, as I understand them ; and if ever my
taste for them should begin to grow enfeebled, I should
learn Chinese. That new world, as yet almost untouched
by criticism, would keep me in appetite for an indefinite
time. Subjective scepticism, doubt concerning the legiti-
macy of our faculties— such is the snare in which are caught
natures attacked by the malady of over-scrupulousness.
Apprehensions of this kind invariably come from a certain
indolence of mind. He that has a thirst for reality is
dragged out of himself. Thus it is that a man of genius
■-■
igo HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
like Victor Hugo has never had leisure for introspection.
When one is powerfully attracted by things one is sure that
they exist, and that one is not grasping a vain phantasma-
goria.
Amiel has not that love of the universe that gives us
eyes for it alone. For more than thirty years he did not
let a day pass without observing and describing his state of
mind ; and he consigned his reflections to quarto note-
books w r hich, brought together, form a total of sixteen
thousand pages. Felix Culpa I Out of this indigestible
mass Amiel's friends (ah, what a good thing it is to leave
true friends behind one ! ) have collected two volumes of
f>e/ist'es, which offer us, without any sacrifice being made to
art, the perfect reflection of a singularly honest modern
mind, which had arrived at the highest degree of culture;
and at the same time a finished picture of the sufferings of
a sterile genius. These two volumes certainly hold a place
among the most interesting philosophical writings that have
appeared during the last few years.
As a matter of fact, Amiel's deficiencies are as pronounced
as they well could be. He himself takes a pleasure in
emphasising them, and putting them in the foreground;
but there is not one amongst them that does not arise from
an excess of nobility and high principle. " I sever myself
obstinately from doing anything that might give me pleasure,
serve me, or help me. My passion is to do hurt to my
own interests, to defy common sense, to be possessed with
a zeal for my own detriment. . . . I am ashamed of my
own interests, as of an ignoble and servile cause."
" What a singular nature is mine," he cries, " and what a
bizarre tendency ! — not to dare to enjoy anything frankly
and without scruple ; and to feel forced to leave the table for
fear the feast should come to an end." " So soon as a
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL. 191
thing attracts me," he says again, " I turn away my head
from it, or rather, I can neither content myself with the
unsatisfying, nor find anything that can satisfy my aspira-
tions. The Real disgusts me, and I cannot find the Ideal."
That is true. His want of power is due to his ultra-per-
fection. " In love," says M. Scherer, " he shrank from an
avowal, in literature he shrank from the production of a
book." The man of letters is never without some failing,
or rather, the very profession of letters is a failing. The
perfect man of Amiel's dream would not have talent ; talent
is a frivolous vice, from which, before all else, a saint must
mortify himself.
Amiel's sterility has another origin — the too great
diversity of his intellectual and ethical basis. Variety
in this respect is excellent ; but the elements should
not neutralise one another. One amongst them must
dominate, and the others be only accessory. Amiel is too
much of a hybrid to be fertile. The excellent German
education which he received was ever at variance with the
other parts of his nature. He laid the blame on the
language ; he believed that French was the cause of the
difficulty that he experienced in giving form to his thoughts.
It was a profound mistake. " The French language," he
says, " cannot express origin or germination ; it depicts
effects, results, the caput mortuum^ but not cause, move-
ment, energy, the growth of some phenomenon, whatever
it may be. It is analytical and descriptive ; but it does not
assist comprehension, for it fails to give a glimpse of the
beginnings and developments of anything." Had Amiel
possessed a better knowledge of the language that he
habitually wrote, he would have recognised that French
suffices for the expression of all thought, even of the thought
most alien to its ancient spirit; and that, if in the Irani-
<7
192 HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
fusion it lets certain details drop out of sight, these details
are simply the superfluities which hinder the new thought
from taking upon itself the garment of universality. Amiel
was not a perfect master of his instrument. Ignorant of
some of its notes, he judged it incapable of rendering certain
sounds, and then in impatience he strained it. He had
done better in studying it more thoroughly.
While he was young, and nearly at the age for leaving
college, Amiel went to Germany. He embraced the in-
tellectual discipline, then dominant, with much ardour.
The Hegelian school taught him its complicated system of
thought, and at the same blow rendered him incapable of
writing. This school laid greater emphasis on loquacity,
and dissertations upon all kinds of subjects, than on the
ordered composition exacted by prose. Hegel has his
good points, but it is necessary to know how to take him.
He must be limited to an infusion ; he makes an excellent
tea, but to munch the dry leaves is undesirable. Amiel
did this too much. Everything becomes for him a matter
of system, so much so in fact, that when one day he meets
a very pretty girl in the Jura, in the neighbourhood of
Soleure, he passes his day in constructing a theory of flirta-
tion, and the disadvantages of beauty. Had only his
Hegelian training given him the scientific spirit ! But it
did nothing of the kind. No school of thought has spread
abroad more ingenious or more profound ideas than that
of Hegel. But in scarcely any direction has it produced
true men of science. Hegel was a little akin to Raymond
Lully, 1 that is to say, he cherished the delusive idea that
logical machinery and general processes can take the place
of the direct study of realities. From this ensued a species
of lassitude, which very quickly manifested itself in the
1 See Note XXXIV.
HENRI-FfcEDERIC AMIEL. 193
leaders and adepts of this school, in other respects so
eminent. There can be no curiosity when the result is seen
in advance. The end after which one is striving with the
tourniquets of logic is quickly discerned; but the end of
reality never conies in sight.
This ill-harmonised education is the cause of the species
of slanting foundation that renders the structure of AmiePs
life so unstable. He is not firmly established in his chair.
He has not a sufficiently clear conception of the ultimate
goal of the human mind, of that which gives a serious
foundation to life. He is neither a savant nor a scholar.
More than once he reiterates the declaration that for him
the supreme ideal is scholarship ; but he feels strongly that
in him this art is wanting. He is even led into a false con-
ception. He discriminates too much between substance
and form ; he would willingly believe that writing is a thing
apart from thinking. He is one of the most sincere seekers
after truth who have ever lived, he is nearly a saint ; and
yet, despite all that, he halts at every turning of the road to
weep over imaginary troubles, or (and this is still more
singular) over imaginary sins, and to remark upon details
that he who presses on never stops to notice. He himself
is never in a hurry. That perhaps is a good quality; but
it is the mark of a mind only moderately possessed with
curiosity, with the thirst for realities. He does not picture
the world to himself as either so great or so wonderful as
it really is. He would willingly imagine (Heaven pardon
me !) that the last word can be said about it. But that is
not so. All remains to be achieved, or re-achieved, in the
province of the sciences of nature and humanity. When
one is conscious of working at that infinite task, one has no
time to stop for melancholy reflections on the way.
What is mostvexatious is, that this highly-strung philosophy
i 9 4 HENRI-FREDERIC AMlEL.
did not give him the happiness he deserved. At a first glance
it is difficult to see what grievance he had to allege against
destiny. He was born particularly well endowed both in-
tellectually and morally ; he had all the means of acquiring
a high culture ; he had never to struggle against very hard
necessities ; he lived for sixty years, suffering much it is
true in later life, but always with intellectual powers un-
trammelled. With all these advantages, it seems as though
he ought to have been as happy as a king ; and yet the
habitual trend of his thought is an outcry against fate. It
appears that his childhood was not surrounded with
affection ; and that is one of the worst things that can
happen to a man. The joys and sorrows of early years
reflect themselves on our whole life. For another thing,
Geneva was evidently one of the places in the world least
suited to his nature. His German education had, as it
were, made him a stranger to it; and then a little state is
not unlike a little town. It is possible that Amiel did not
observe a system of precautions sufficiently elaborate for
the eyes of his neighbours. When one is not as other men
are, one must, to a certain extent, keep aloof from them.
No one of us has the right of exacting more than simple
toleration from the society of which he forms a part. It is
nearly always by kindly and just dealing that one succeeds
therein. It was part of Amiel's ingenuousness to believe
himself bound to take part in battles of pygmies, and to
make common cause with men who, had he really been
one of them, would have understood him no better than the
democratic party. In the most disinterested way, he gaily
became a reactionary. The man who has vowed his life to
the search after truth, and the pursuit of the good, ought
not to ally himself absolutely with any of the revolutions
which succeed one another in this world. One interest
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL. 195
alone he should recognise — that of the human soul and the
human mind.
It is greatly to be regretted that Amiel did not come to
Paris in i860, at the time of the founding of the Revue
Germanique. M. Scherer invited him, M. Sainte-Beuve
would have exercised upon him a dominating influence.
We should have succeeded, I believe, in diminishing, to his
happiness, the malignant action of the ferments of sadness,
with which nature, in his first as well as in his second
education, had infected him.
Religion, it must be said, had deepened the gravity of
the evil. Here assuredly is the most singular side of
Amiel's character. This extreme Hegelian, this Buddhist,
this rationalist perfectly convinced of the non-existence of
the positively supernatural, followed the common creed.
Traces of the preaching of Saint-Pierre of Geneva are
frequently to be found in his pensces. Amiel is not
simply a Protestant, he is an orthodox Protestant, very
much opposed to liberal Protestantism. He speaks of sin,
salvation, redemption, conversion, as though they were
realities. It is, above all else, sin that preoccupies him,
saddens him, — him the best of men, who less than any one
could know what it is. He reproaches me strongly for nut
taking it sufficiently into account, and he asks two or three
times : " What does M. Renan make of sin ? " The fact is,
as I was saying in my native town the other day, I believe
that I simply ignore it. There is the striking difference
between Catholic education and Protestant education.
Those who, like myself, have received a Catholic education
have retained deep traces of it. But these traces arc not
dogmas, they are dreams. Once that great curtain of cluth
of gold, embroidered with silk and cotton and calico, with
which Catholicism hides the world from our sight, — once,
196 HENRI-FREDERIC AMI EL.
I say, this curtain is rent in twain, we see the universe in
its infinite splendour, nature in her high and generous
majesty. The most emancipated Protestant often retains
some touch of melancholy, a depth of intellectual austerity,
analogous to Slavonic pessimism. One thing it is to smile
at the legend of some mythological saint ; it is another to
keep the imprint of those terrible mysteries which have
brought sadness to so many of the noblest spirits. What is
in fact so singular, is that it is the souls least open to sin
which torment themselves about it the most, seek for it
persistently, and under pretext of ridding themselves of
evil that they do not possess, are continually dissecting and
tearing themselves open with strokes of the scalpel.
There was besides in Amiel's religious attitude something
more than memories of childhood. Those elegant tours-de-
force which permit him to deny all in speculation, and to affirm
all in practice, he must have learned in Berlin from old
Marheineke, 1 or from one of his disciples. Since him, the
art has only grown, and become more elaborate. The
strangest intellectual paradox with which philosophical
Germany has ever astonished us, is the curious pretension
of a certain school to found religion upon the postulate of
pessimism. Have we not lately seen M. Hartmann — that
same M. Hartmann who declares flatly that creation is a
mistake, and that the hypothesis of not-being would have
been far preferable to the hypothesis of being — discover at
the same time that religion is necessary, and that it has for
its base the inherent evil of human nature?
" Religion," writes M. Hartmann, " has its origin in the
fact that the human spirit is continually encountering evil
and sin ; and that in consequence it strives to explain them,
and as far as possible to overcome them. He that asks
1 See Note XXXV.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL. 197
himself: 'How can I bring myself to bear with evil; how
shall I succeed in reconciling with itself my tormented
conscience?' — he is on the path of religion. Whether the
stress be laid upon evil or upon sin, it is always discontent
with the world that leads to religion. If the painful im-
pressions caused by evil and sin do not weigh sufficiently
in the balance to overpower, in a lasting manner, the agree-
able impressions of the life of the world, religious enthusiasms
of the soul will only be fleeting. It is only when doubt,
bitter relatively to the evil, and the anguish of moral guilt
have dominated worldly satisfactions, and formed the
general current of existence; it is only when the pessimistic
feeling has got the upper hand ; that religion can be durably
established in the soul. Where this pessimistic tendency of
mind is not to be found, there religion cannot increase, at
least spontaneously."
This is the very antithesis of our ideas. What we think
is that a man is religious when he feels satisfied with God
and himself. And now, forsooth, we are told that we are
only religious when we are in an ill humour and have
committed sins ! . . . That passes my understanding
altogether. More and more as time goes on I feel myself
disgusted with the transcendental ; and I am coming to
believe that the French solution, summing itself up in
liberty, and the gradual but inevitable separation of religion
and the state, is, in the present position of the human
spirit, the only reasonable solution. It is quite true that
liberalism has no finality ; but it is precisely in that respect
that it is right, or at least it is in that respect that it is the
only practical expedient, in presence of the individualism
in belief, which has become the law of our time.
Lofty minds have often to beware of these reactionary
tendencies, masked under the appearance of profound
198 HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
philosophy. Soaring high into the region of the atmo-
sphere, where ideas come into being, and where the great
air-currents that bear them spring up, they imagine that
they can harness the clouds at their pleasure, and. like
JEolus, make the wind blow whither they will. This fine
aerial strategy has something pathetic in it, but is at the
same time slightly pretentious. They desire to play the
part of the lance, that at once strikes and cures. After
they have cut away in the most accomplished fashion the
root of moral and religious belief, they wish to appear in
the guise of the healer ; after the reader has passed through
the terrors of scepticism, he finds that by the grace of God
all is safe. And on this subject I cannot help recalling our
eminent thinker, M. Lachelier, 1 the inventor of the most
amazing philosophical right-about-face since Kant. After
having applied to all the operations of the mind a criticism
so corrosive that scarcely anything remains intact, after
having made his way to the last extreme of nihilism, he
wheels round. One mournful thought suffices to make
him find himself to be a perfect Christian. This
reconstruction of Christianity on the basis of pessimism
is one of the most striking intellectual symptoms of our
time. It is so hard to deprive ourselves of the support
of an established creed, that after destroying churches
built of granite, we build them anew in stucco. That
reminds me of the church at Ferney, now serving as a
hay-loft, with the inscription, Deo erexit Voltaire.
It is a very remarkable fact that the elements of this
pessimistic Christianity, by which it is believed possible
to replant Christianity in the world, are exclusively drawn
from St. Paul. Jesus and Galilean preaching are forgotten ;
no longer are we under the influence of direct light from
1 See Note XXXVI.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL. 199
the sun of the Kingdom of Heaven. I must confess that
the dogma of original sin is the one for which I have the
least taste. There is no other dogma built so much as
this one on the point of a needle. The story of Adam's
transgression is only to be found in one of the versions,
the alternating pages of which form the tissue of Genesis.
Had the Elohistic narrative alone come down to us, we
should have heard nothing of original sin. The Jahvistic
narrative of the fall of man, otherwise a very beautiful
history, and of comparatively great antiquity, was never
of much account among the ancient people of Israel.
It was St. Paul who first drew from it the frightful dogma
that during the centuries has filled humanity with sorrows
and terrors. That it was powerful in its time, that
Protestantism in particular, whose duty it was to sweep
away refuse still more objectionable and gross, may have
been justified in accentuating those austere beliefs, which,
placing man in a state of absolute dependence on God
and Jesus Christ, took him out of the hands of the priest
and the official church, — all this is perfectly true; but
why should rational beings such as we keep up fictions
of this kind ? If we are to admit the supernatural element
implied in original sin and in redemption, I do not see
why we should stop there. The question is one of knowing
whether the supernatural exists. When we recognise its
existence, we cannot reasonably bargain about the quantity.
Has this dogma of sin at least had the advantage of
accounting, in a more or less symbolical way, for the great
facts of human history and society ? No, assuredly not.
Do you wish to tell me that physical and moral evil is all
too abundant, that man only attains his end, which is the
realisation of a society to a certain extent just, by continuous
effort? Oh, that is true, no doubt. Put it is giving a
200 HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
mythical and inexact turn to the expression of an evident
fact. To us the world reveals, with a total absence of pre-
conceived design, a spontaneous effort, like that of the
embryo, towards life and consciousness. The world, or, to
be more precise, the planet on which we live, draws, or will
draw, from the capital bestowed upon it the summum of that
which is possible. It needs time for that; but indefinite
time is at its disposal. To ask of the universe, and of each
of the bodies which compose it, the immediate realisation
of absolute perfection, is to demand a flagrant contradiction.
Righteousness is achieved by the obscure conscience of the
universe, only by means of a certain amount of evil. To
be or not to be— that is the choice. But from the moment
when the universe has taken — and I believe that it has
done well in doing so— the part of being and knowing, the
compensating dose of evil is absolutely inevitable.
The metamorphosis of animals is a paroxysm of pain.
Pain is the perpetual admonition of life, the incitement to
all progress. Why does the insect strive to rid itself of an
organ that would impede its new life? Because it suffers.
Why does the engendered being desire separation from the
engendering being ? Because it suffers. Pain creates the
effort; it is salutary. It is evident that man is the most
highly developed being that we can know. His astonishing
prerogatives are purchased on hard conditions. The de-
velopment of an organism so complicated as the human
body implies a considerable amount of suffering. It is
impossible for the child not to suffer, for the mother not to
suffer, for the old man not to suffer ; and as for death, it
is the absolutely necessary consequence of the evident law
that every organism which has come into existence must
one day have an end.
" In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children " is presented
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL. 201
by the theologians as a condemnation following upon a
crime ; but for that to be exact, it would be necessary that
the actually existing period should have been preceded by
one in which the woman bore her children painlessly ; and
that has never been the case, except, it may be, among the
lowest races of mankind. The highly-civilised man repre-
sents a high-water mark, a maximum obtained by skirting
precipices ; a thousand causes of ruin beset and besiege
him. The exquisite is a challenge thrown down to the
possible. Nature aiming at the attainment of the highest
animal type, can only succeed at the cost of such a birth
being a crisis for the mother. If man had a head larger
than that which he has in the more civilised races, he
would kill his mother in being born ; and he would be
subject to perpetual congestions. Everything in nature is
the result of a balance between advantages and disadvan-
tages. The lever of the arm is very inconvenient for
muscular effort ; a better lever would have given us an arm
like the wing of a pelican. Our heart, our spinal column,
our brain, are very fragile things. Mad they been more
solid they would have been refractory to the delicate uses
to which we put them. Nature never enters where there
is no exit ; to obtain the end which she pursues — always a
good one — she goes on till the compensating inconvenience
becomes deadly. She acts like a general who puts in the
balance the importance of the object, and the losses requisite
for its attainment. She desires the highest possible sum
of life with the least possible suffering.
She desires, — no doubt I phrase the matter ill ; but
events fall out as though it were so. The definite result
of the dark battle, which is being incessantly fought out,
is in favour of righteousness. He that is too defective
disappears or comes not into being; he that is imperfect
202 HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
reforms and aspires to be a possible type of normal life.
This is so true that nature hardly disturbs herself about
slight inconveniences. Even as it is easier in a common-
wealth to correct great evils, ulcers that constitute a danger
to life, than to extirpate little abuses that do not menace
the existence of the body politic ; so has nature left
uncorrected in the human body faults that shock us, but
which are not of a nature to condemn the species to
impotence of existence.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
[second article.]
Amiel's religion constantly tended to become more
chastened; but it always remained a sad religion, as a
whole more analogous to Buddhism than to Christianity.
Although he finds fault with what he terms German
Swai'sm, in Bahnsen for example, yet in reality he
approaches very closely Hartmann's later formula?. Sin
and deliverance, these are in a word the whole theology
of these modern disciples of Sakya-Mouni.
Nothing, in my view, can be more opposed to the ideas
that ought to prevail in the future. What we ought to
augment is the sum of happiness in human life. It is
not of sin, of expiation, of redemption that henceforth
we should speak to men ; it is of kindliness, of gaiety, of
indulgence, of good humour, of resignation. In proportion
as hopes of a life beyond the tomb disappear, it is necessary
to habituate men to look upon life as supportable; without
that they will revolt against it. No longer is man to be
maintained in peace by anything save happiness. But
in a society of reasonably good structure very few persons
have any reason to complain of having been put into the
world. The cause of pessimism and nihilism is to be
found in the ennui of a life which, by reason of a defective
social organisation, is not worth the trouble of living. The
value of life is only to be measured by its fruits ; if we
1(J
204 HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
desire that men should hold fast to it, we must render it
sweet and delectable.
Amiel asks himself with inquietude: "What is it that
saves ? " Eh, mon Dieu ! It is precisely that which gives
each man his motive in living. The way of salvation is
not the same for all. For one man it is virtue, for another
enthusiasm for truth, for yet another love of art, for others
curiosity, ambition, travel, luxury, women, or wealth, in the
lowest grade of all morphine and alcohol. Virtuous men
find their icward in virtue itself; those who are not have
pleasure.
All have imagination — that is to say, the highest joy of all,
the enchantments that grow not old. Some cases of moral
pathology apait, there is no life so sombre but that some
ray of sunshine enters it still.
The most dangerous error with regard to social morality
is the systematic suppression of pleasure. Rigorously severe
virtue forms an aristocracy; every one is not equally drawn
to it. He that has received the privilege of intellectual and
moral nobility is under an obligation ; but the good old
Gaulois morality did not impose the same demands on all.
Kindly feeling, courage and gaiety, and trust in the God of
good people, suffice for salvation. The masses must be
amused. For my own part, I do not experience any need
for external amusement, but I require to feel that the people
about me are being amused ; I enjoy the gaiety of others.
The temperance societies rest upon excellent intentions, but
also upon a misunderstanding. I only know of one argument
in their favour. Madame T. told me one day that in cer-
tain countries the married men, when they have not been
temperate, beat their wives. Now that is horrible assuredly;
we must try to correct it. But instead of suppressing
drunkenness in those who have a need for it, would it not
HENRT-FREDERTC AMIEL. 205
be better to attempt to render it sweet, amiable, and accom-
panied by the moral sentiments? There are so many men
for whom the hours of drunkenness are, after the hours of
love, the time when they are at their best !
Inequality and variety are the fundamental laws of the
human species. There is nothing to suppress in the an-
tagonistic manifestations of this strange collective being.
It has been said that he is neither an angel nor a brute ; I
should prefer to say that he is at the same time an angel
and a brute. An organised being eternal and perfect is a
contradiction in terms. But for this reason are we to refuse
the beam of light that nature affords us in our turn ? It is
as though we should spurn a cup of exquisite wine because
it would be so soon exhausted, a pleasure because it does
not endure. Inequality is great, no doubt ; but nearly every-
body has something, and the progress of human societies
will reduce more and more the number of the disinherited.
There remains pain, which indeed is a thing odious,
humiliating, hurtful to the noble functions of life. But
man can fight against it, almost suppress it, always endure
it. The cases in which man is riveted to life are very rare.
The only destiny absolutely condemned is that of the
enslaved animal, of the horse for example, which cannot
commit suicide, or indeed of the man sentenced to death
and kept under surveillance, or the lunatic; but these are
very exceptional cases. The immense majority of indi-
viduals have no need to complain of their passage through
life, since the balance of life inclines to joy, and since
painless death will doubtless come one day.
The problem of the origin of evil which so painfully
exercised ancient philosophy is not then a problem at
all. The Manichaean theory of tin; good God and the
wicked God is irrefutable in the theistic conception of Cod
206 HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
as calculating and omnipotent. It has no longer any mean-
ing in the conception of a universe spontaneously drawing
from itself all that it can. Evil is the absolute condition of
conscious existence. The world succeeds in procuring a
little good, a little justice, and a little of the ideal with its
myriads of egoisms. When one thinks of the road that
must have been made, to permit Kant's theory of the
categorical imperative to emerge from the system of re-
ciprocal extermination which was the law of the primitive
world, one is truly amazed at the wisely chosen paths that
nature's policy has followed. The order of things in which
evil has the greatest consequence, and in which our most
sacred duty is to fight against it, is the human kingdom.
Here, without contradiction, there is an infinity of work to
be achieved ; but it should be added that much has already
been done. The world of humanity is to-day very much
less wicked and very much less unjust than it was three
or four thousand years ago. The general intention of
the universe is benevolent. The evil still to be found
existing in it is the necessary imperfection which spon-
taneity could not eliminate, and upon which it is the
duty of science to make war. The question is to know
whether — as M. Hartmann holds — the existence of the
world is worse than the hypothesis of non-existence. For
my own part, I believe that the hypothesis of existence
is worth more, if only for the reason that it has been
realised. The world, in M. Hartmann's opinion, is an effect
without a cause. Existence, or at least consciousness, only
commenced and only continues in the world because in
existence there is a balance of good for conscious indi-
viduals as a whole.
A world in which evil predominated over good would
be a world which either would not exist or would dis-
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL -207
appear. There are, in fact, very few beings who, brought
face to face with destruction, do not hold it in horror.
They prefer life with all its miseries to annihilation.
Suicide is an extremely rare phenomenon. Even the
creature that is, to all appearance, most odiously exploited
by man has its compensations. The oyster gives pleasure
to man, who swallows it under conditions which render
its pain almost null ; and for months before man has kept
it in an oyster-bed, in which he has defended it against
its enemies, and where it has enjoyed an existence longer
and happier than it would have had in a state of nature.
There are, we confess, some human beings for whom, by
reason of fatal coincidences, it would be better not to be.
Let us hope that cases of this kind will become more and
more rare, and even disappear altogether.
Nothing, then, has less foundation than the objections
made by the pessimists to the spirit of kindliness which,
according to us, is dominant in the universe. Those objec-
tions pierce to the very heart pure theists, for whom the
divine consciousness is a reflective consciousness scientifi-
cally combining things. They are insoluble for those who
hold fast by the ideas of the old theology concerning the
divine omnipotence, but such objections have no force
against those who believe that the world is abandoned
to the spontaneous action of its own forces. Nature is
like a boiler at high pressure ; she emits from herself all
that the wall of the impossible does not hold in. In
reality what the pessimists demand, what they conceive
as the ideal of a perfect world, is a miraculous world, a
world in which the deus ex machina would intervene
unceasingly, to correct in detail the defects that he had
been unable to detect in the mass. What possesses S
them above all is the anthropocentric error, the naive
2 o8 HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
fatuity of man judging the world from the point of view
of his own comfort, as though the ant should adjust its
theory of the universe by only taking into account the
convenience of its little society.
Amiel has too much good sense to allow himself to
follow out the exaggerations of the tactless school of
thought that originated with the brilliant Schopenhauer.
Amiel is a poet, and he has a warm love for nature. He
half understands Goethe ; then the fundamental con-
tradiction of his being assumes the upper hand once
more.
" Goethe ignores sanctity, and has never wished to
reflect upon the terrible problem of evil. He never
reached the feeling of obligation and of sin." This
idealistic Manicheism is the more singular in Amiel in
that he fully admits the claims of aesthetics. But the
single fact of the admittance into nature of a species of
coquetry is pregnant with consequence. If nature were
evil, she would be ugly. Is it an effect of chance that the
fundamental act of nature, the union of the sexes, is indis-
solubly bound to aesthetic feeling, and is in a sense the
cause of all aesthetics? Beauty is the adornment that
flower and animal put upon themselves with love in view.
In this adornment of plant and animal there is never
a fault in design, never a crude or ill-assorted colour.
Nature must have taste ; but she does not reach morality;
she does not go beyond love.
That is why she is so often in the eyes of reason unjust
and immoral. We feel an invincible need of supposing in
the government of the world the justice which we find
written upon our own hearts ; and since it is perfectly
evident that this justice has no existence in the reality
of the universe, we come to absolutely exact as the condi-
HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL. 209
tion of morality, the survival of each human consciousness
beyond the tomb. Here the supreme antinomy between
nature and reason bursts out. Such a postulate is, in fact,
the most necessary a priori and the most impossible
a posteriori. The thesis of the Pkcedo is nothing more
than a subtilty. I greatly prefer the Judo-Christian system
of the resurrection. The resurrection would be a miracle,
and inconceivable in the actual state of things, where we
behold nothing above material facts save this poor humanity
still so feeble, and an obscure general consciousness wholly
indifferent to individuals. Reason, moreover, is not omni-
potent ; it supports flagrant injustices which it is powerless
to prevent. But were we to suppose that one day it should
be omnipotent, nothing would then prevent it from being
just, and retrospectively just to the ages in which justice
had not been possible. In a word, God is already good,
but he is not all-powerful. God, there can be no doubt,
already does what he can for righteousness ; one day, with
the capital of the whole universe at his command, he will
be able to do all. A great reparation might in this way
be conceived; and, as a slumber of a million of ages is no
longer than the slumber of an hour, the reign of justice
that we have loved would appear to us as the immediate
sequel of the hour of death.
Resurrection would be thus the final act of the world, the
act of an all-powerful and all knowing God, capable of being
just and willing to be so. Immortality would not be as Plato
wished it, an inherent quality of man, a consequence of his
nature; it would be a gift reserved by the Being become
absolute, perfect, omniscient, and omnipotent, for those who
should have contributed to his development. It would be
an exception, a divine selection, a recompense awarded by
righteousness and truth in their triumph to the consciences
2io HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.
of the past in which love of righteousness and truth had
dominated, and to them alone. It would indeed be a
miracle, that is to say, a divine premeditated act ; such acts,
of which at present we know not a single instance, would
become the law of the universe on the day when the Being
should have achieved perfect consciousness.
I sometimes try to imagine for myself a sermon suitable
to All Saints' Day (the best remembered of holy days),
to be delivered a thousand years hence, when it may be
that a glimpse of the secret of immortality will have been
vouchsafed. Is it not a remarkable thing that All Saints'
Day, inseparable as it is from the Day of the Dead, should
be the only holy day to which the people have clung?
There is in the melancholy with which we think of the
great and good men of ages less favoured than ours, a
species of pious effort to give back life to them again. We
must surely dream that all which has lived, still lives some-
where in an image capable of being reanimated. The
stereotyped forms of all things are preserved. The stars
at the further extremity of the universe are receiving, at
this present hour, the image of events that have happened
ages ago. The imprints of all that has existed still survive,
ranged through the diverse zones of infinite space. It is
for the supreme photographer to take new proofs. But he
will only bring back to life once more that which has
served the cause of righteousness, and consequently of
truth. This will be our recompense. Inferior souls will
have found theirs in the low enjoyments after which they
have sought.
These are the questions which I should have liked so
much to discuss with poor Amiel, had I had the pleasure
of knowing him. On page 123 of the second volume I
find that he does me a slight injustice. He is indignant
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL. zti
because at times, in treating of these subjects, I give a place
tu humour and irony. Ah well 1 I do not think that there
is anything unphilosophical in that. A complete darkness,
perhaps providentially, hides from our eyes the moral ends
of the universe. On this matter we lay odds and draw lots,
in reality we know nothing. Our own particular wager, our
real acierio, as the Spaniards say, is that the inward inspira-
tion which makes us affirm duty is a sort of oracle, an
infallible voice coming from without and corresponding
to an objective reality. Into this persistent affirmation
we put the nobler part of ourselves : we do well ; we must
hold fast by it, even in the face of evidence. But there
are nearly as many chances for the contrary being true.
It may be that these inner voices proceed from honest
illusions nurtured by habit, and that the world may be
no more than an amusing piece of enchantment, concern-
ing which no god has any care. We must then bear
ourselves in such a way, that in neither of the hypotheses
we may be completely in error. "We ought to give ear
to the higher voices, but in such a manner that, in the
case of the second hypothesis being the true one, we may
not have been duped too greatly. If the world, in tact,
be not a serious thing, it is the dogmatic people who will
prove to have been frivolous, and the worldly people, those
whom the theologians treat as thoughtless beings, who will
have been the true sages.
In this way what appears to be advisable is a double-
edged wisdom, equally prepared for either of the two
eventualities of the dilemma, a middle path in which, one
way or the other, we shall not have to say, Ergo errdvimus.
It is, above all, for others that we must be scrupulous. For
one's self one can take great risks ; but one has no right
to play for other people. When we have souls in our
212 HENRY-FREDERIC AMIEL.
keeping, we ought to express ourselves with sufficient
reserve to ensure that, in the hypothesis of the great
bankruptcy, those whom we have compromised should
not be too greatly victimised.
In utrumque paratus ! To be prepared for all con-
tingencies, this perhaps is wisdom. To abandon one's
self successively to confidence, scepticism, optimism, irony,
— such is the means of being sure that, at least at moments,
we have been in the right. You will tell me that this
implies that one will never be completely right. No doubt;
but as there is not the slightest chance of that combination
being reserved for any one, it is prudent to fall back upon
more modest pretensions. Ah well ! the state of mind
that M. Amiel disdainfully terms "the Epicureanism of
the imagination " is not after all perhaps a bad part to
take. Gaiety is so far very philosophical, in that it seems
to say to nature that we do not take her any more seriously
than she takes us ; if the world be a bad farce, by gaiety
we make it a good one. If, on the other hand, an indulgent
and benevolent intelligence presides over the universe, we
shall be far more fitted to enter into the intentions of this
supreme intelligence by joyous resignation, than by the
gloomy inflexibility of the sectary and the eternal jeremiad
of the believer.
"Banter Pharisaism if you will, but speak straight-
forwardly to honest men," Amiel says to me with a
certain asperity. Mon Dieu ! How often honest men
are Pharisees without knowing it ! Socrates has the
reputation of having invented irony. If that be true, it
must be admitted that the Athenian sage said the last
word in philosophy. We no longer, in fact, allow
philosophy to be discussed otherwise than with a smile.
We owe virtue indeed to the Eternal, but we have the
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL. 213
right to add irony to it as a personal resumption. In
this way we render, to whomever it is due, pleasantry for
pleasantry, we take our turn in the game. St. Augustine's
saying, Domine, si error est a te decepti siimies, remains
a very fine one, thoroughly conforming to modern feeling.
Only we desire that the Eternal should feel that if we
accept the trickery, we accept it knowingly and willingly.
We are resigned in advance to the loss of the interest on
our virtuous investments, but we do not wish to be exposed
to the ridicule of seeming to have counted too confidently
on it.
Such was, besides, Amiel's own definite conclusion.
Some weeks before his death he saw wisdom. Among
the last leaves of the Journal there is a fine page that
reads as follows : —
"For many years past the immanent God has had more
actuality for me than the transcendent God, and the
religion of Jacob has been more alien to me than that of
Kant or even of Spinoza. The whole of the Semitic
dramaturgy has come to appear to me as a work of
imagination. The Apostolic writings have to my eyes
changed in value and significance. Faith and truth have
grown more and more sharply distinct from one another.
Religious psychology has become a simple phenomenon,
and has lost its fixed and noumenal value. The apologetics
of Pascal, Leibnitz, and Secretan appear to me to prove
no more than those of the Middle Ages, for they pre-
suppose that which is in question, a revealed doctrine, a
definite and immutable Christianity. It seems to me that
what remains to me from all my studies is a new pheno-
menology of mind, the intuition of universal metamorphosis.
All private convictions, emotional principles, clearly defined
formulae, and infusible ideas are nothing more than pre-
214 HENRI FREDERIC AMIEL.
judices, useful in practice but none the less manifestations
of mental narrowness. The absolute in detail is absurd
and contradictory. Political, religious, aesthetic, and literary
factions are the anchyloses of thought. All special belief
is an obstinacy and obtusity, but this consistency is at the
proper time essential. Our monad, in so far as it is a
thinker, overleaps the limits of time and space and historical
surroundings ; but in so far as it is an individual, and for
purposes of action, it adapts itself to current illusions, and
gives itself a determinate goal."
These lines were written on the 4th of February, 1881.
Amiel died on the 1 ith of May in the same year. He had
his failings, but his was one of the strongest speculative
minds which from 1S45 to 1880 reflected upon things.
The form that he chose for the expression of his thought,
a manuscript journal of 16,000 pages, was as disad-
vantageous as it well could be. Thanks to the posthumous
care of his friends, thanks to M. Scherer, who in a profound
study has given a perfect rendering of the beautiful character
of his life, Amiel's thought will appear to all those who
interest themselves in philosophic problems, as clearly and
as completely as though he had known how to write a
book — that is, to limit himself.
NOTES.
NOTES.
Note i., Page 14.
Chretien de Troyes was a French poet who lived in the latter
part of the twelfth century. The most celebrated of his poems
— nearly all of which are based on the legends of the Round
Table— is Parceval le Callois. Little or nothing is known of
his life.
Note ii., Page 14.
Wolfram of Eschenbach, the most famous of the Minne-
singer, was born at Eschenbach, near Nuremberg, about the
end of the twelfth century. He took a leading part in the
" Poets' War," held by Hermann, Landgraf of Thuringia, in the
Castle of W.irtburg, 1207, and died about 1220. F. Schlegel
calls him the greatest of German poets, and his works certainly
show great imagination and power of expression. Parsifal and
Lohengrin, owing to the use made of them by Wagner as
subjects for his music-dramas, are his best known poems.
Note hi., Page 22.
Gervais of Tilbury was an English chronicler of the twelfth
century, but appears to have spent most of his early life in
Italy. He was a favourite of Henry II. and of the Emperor
Otto IV. To the latter he dedi< ated Otia Imperialia, a 1 urious
collection of natural history, geography, politic s, and folk-lore.
2t8 NOTES.
Note iv., Page 27.
Marco Kralevich is a half-mythical hero of Servian ballad-
literature, in which his victories over the Turks and Magyars
are narrated. He is at last killed on the battlefield, but the
belief prevails that at his country's darkest hour he will appear
again on earth and deliver Servia from her oppressors.
Note v., Page 42.
Giraldus Cambrcnsis is the name generally given to Girald
de Barri, an historian and ecclesiastic, born about ii47> in
Pembrokeshire. He was educated at the University of Paris,
and became Archdeacon of St. David's. A journey to Ireland
in 1 185 gave him materials for his Topographia Hibernice. A
few years later he wrote the Hinerarium Cambrics. His
writings are valuable for the insight they give into the political
and social conditions of his time.
Note vi., Page 57.
Claudian, the last of the great Roman poets, lived in the end
of the fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries, his principal
work being an epic poem on the Rape of Proserpine. Pro-
copius (to whom an essay is devoted in Renan's Essais de
Morale ct de Critique) was born about the end of the fifth
century, and became the most eminent of the Byzantine his-
torians. Johannes Tzetzes, a Greek poet and grammarian, was
born at Constantinople about 1120 A.D., and died about 1183.
Note vii., Page 58.
The Bollandists were an association or rather succession of
Jesuits, who issued (1643-1794) the Acta Sanctorum, a Series of
Lives of the Saints. The name was derived from John Bolland,
who edited the first five volumes.
NOTES. 219
Note viii , Page 65.
Gregory of Tours (540-594) was a French bishop and his-
torian. His History of the Franks is the chief authority for the
history of Gaul in the sixth century.
Note ix., Page 71.
The Beni-Israel ("Sons of Israel"), a curious settlement,
evidently of Jewish origin, in different towns in the west of
India, which is said to have existed for about a thousand years.
The number of members is about five thousand, and marriage
with other nationalities, or even ordinary Jews, rarely takes
place.
Note x., Pace 78.
Antiochus Epiphanes was king of Syria from 175 to 164 B.C.
He conquered Egypt and twice took Jerusalem; but his
attempts to force the worship of the Greek gods on the Jew-;
caused the successful insurrection of Mattathias and the
Maccabees.
Note xr., Page 91.
Alkindi (known to the Latin schoolmen as Alkindius) lived
in the reigns of Al-Mamun and Al-Motassem, and is said to
have written two hundred treatises on scientific and philo-
sophical subjects, only a few of which, however, have survived.
Alfarabi (Alfarabius) died at Damascus in 950. According to
legendary accounts he was a man of great learning, and knew
seventy languages. " Pie gave the tone and direction to nearly
all subsequent speculations among the Arabians." Avi< enna
(980-1037), by his medical and philosophical works, was the
most illustrious of the oriental Arabic writers.
17
220 NOTES.
Note xii., Page 92.
Ibn Badja (Avempace) died at Fez in 1138. His principal
work was an essay on the Republic of the Solitary. The same
theme was developed by Ibn Tofail (Abubacer), who died at
Marocco in 1185.
Note xiii., Page 92.
Bessarion (1395-1472) was one of the earliest of the scholars
of the Renaissance. As Bishop of Nicasa in the Greek Church,
he accompanied the Greek Emperor to Italy in 1439, in order
to effect a union between the Eastern and Western Churches.
On joining, soon after, the latter church, he was created a car-
dinal. Constantine Lascaris, a famous Greek scholar of the
fifteenth century, was born at Constantinople ; but on the capture
of that city by the Turks in 1453, he sought asylum in Italy,
where he lived till his death in 1493. He did much, both by
teaching and writing, to revive the study of Greek.
Note xiv., Page 93.
Bude (Budeus) was born in 1467, and died in 1540. He wrote
many Greek and Latin commentaries, was the most learned
Frenchman of his time, and enjoyed the friendship of Erasmus.
Lefevre d'Etaples (1450- 1537) was a scholar of great eminence,
and a writer on theological and literary subjects.
Note xv., Page 93.
Gerbert, who afterwards became Pope Sylvester II., was born
in Auvergne about 930. He pursued scientific studies among
the Arabs in Spain, and is said to have introduced Arabic
numerals and clocks into France. Constantine the African was
a Carthaginian scholar of the eleventh century. He was said
to have studied in Egypt and India, and wrote principally on
medical subjects. .
NOTES. 221
Note xvi., Page 95.
Ibn Khaldoun (1322-1406) was an Arabian historian, his
chief work being a universal history which treats especially of
the Arabs and Berbers.
Note xvii., Page 95.
Albateni (Albategnius), who was born in Mesopotamia about
850 and died in 929, was mainly noted for his astronomical and
mathematical writings, including commentaries on Ptolemy.
Note xviii., Page 95.
Albertus Magnus (1 193-1280) was one of the most dis-
tinguished of the scholastic philosophers and a member of the
Dominican order. He studied at Padua and Bologna, taught
theology and philosophy at Paris and Cologne, and was for a
short time Bishop of Ratisbon. His fame chiefly rests on the
fact that he was the first of the scholastics to reproduce
Aristotle's philosophy, and transform it in accordance with
Catholic dogma.
Note xix., Page 98.
Ali, born at Mecca about 600, killed at Kufa 661, was tin:
adopted son of Mohammed and the fourth Caliph. The Shiite
sect among the Mohammedans regard Ali with veneration as
the first rightful Caliph.
Note xx., Page 99.
Avenzoar, an Arabian physician, was born in Spain about
1072 and died in 1162. He was the teacher of Averroes, who
spoke highly of his wisdom.
222 NOTES.
Note xxi., Page 114.
Hafiz was born at Shiraz in the beginning of the fourteenth
century, and died between 1388 and 1394. He was a divine,
a philosopher, a grammarian, and one of the greatest of the
Persian poets.
Note xxil, Page 115.
The Caveau was a sort of Rhymers' Club which regularly
met at the Cafe de Cancale. Founded in 1806 by Gouffe,
Desaugiers, and others, it was a revival of the old Society of
the Caveau, which had had a somewhat fitful existence since
the early part of the eighteenth century. When Btfranger first
joined it in 18 13, it had acquired considerable reputation both
for its poetry and its wine, and published a monthly journal of
its proceedings. Be"ranger's introduction to the Caveau is best
told in his own words : "In 18 13 there had existed for several
years a society of song-writers and literary men, which had
taken the name of Caveau in memory of the Caveau rendered
illustrious by Piron, Panard, Colle, Gallet, and Crebillon, father
and son. Desaugiers, on the death of old Laujon, had been
elected president of this society, whose songs were in such
singular contrast with the misfortunes then menacing France.
1 have never had much taste for literary associations, and I
should never have had the idea myself of joining such a society.
Desaugiers, who happened to see some verses of mine, sought
my acquaintance, and I was unable to resist the invitations
which he gave me to dine at least once at the Caveau with all
his colleagues, whom I only knew by name. On the appointed
day I duly went and sang many of my songs. Everybody was
surprised that, considering the number of my productions, I
should never have thought of publishing them. ' He must be one
of us,' they all cried. In accordance with the rules which
forbid the nomination of a candidate who is present, I was
hidden behind the door with a biscuit and a glass of champagne.
I improvised some verses of thanks for my election, which was
NOTES. 223
carried unanimously to an accompaniment of clinking glasses
and confirmed by a general embrace." — Beranger, Ma Bio-
graphic
Note xxiil, Page 128.
Rutilius Claudius Numatianus was one of the later Roman
poets. The date of his birth and death are unknown, but his
principal poem, of which only 1700 lines are extant, dates from
416 A.D. It describes a coasting voyage from Rome to Gaul,
and is filled with intense enthusiasm for Paganism and confi-
dence in its future, accompanied by hatred of Christianity.
Note xxiv., Page 133.
Charles Forbes de Tryon, Comte de Montalambert (1810-
1870), son of a French officer in the English service, was, at
the outset of his career, one of the followers of Lamennais in
his attempts to combine democracy and Catholicism. He after-
wards became a leader of the Ultramontane party. Renan
refers to his Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, published in
1836.
Note xxv., Page 162.
Jean Colerus, the biographer of Spinoza, was a Protectant
pastor at the Hague.
Note xxvi., Page 163.
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743-1819) was a German states-
man, philosopher, and man of letters. He corresponded with
Goethe, and engaged in controversies with Moses Mendelssohn
and Schelling. He has been called the founder of the " Philo-
sophy of Faith."
224 NOTES.
Note xxvil, Page 166.
Moses Maimonides (i 135-1204 ?), a celebrated Jewish rabbi
of the Middle Ages, was born at Cordova. He studied iinder
Averroes, but was at last driven by persecution to Egypt,
where he died. His best known work was the Guide to the
Perplexed, a theological work which raised some controversy
among orthodox Jews.
Note xxviii., Page 166.
Cosmas Indicopleustes lived in the sixth century. He was an
Egyptian monk and traveller, and was the author of a book on
geography and theology called Topograpliia Christiana.
Note xxix., Page 166.
Uriel Acosta, a Portuguese Jew of noble family, was born
about 1594. He was brought up as a Catholic, but adopted
Judaism, and fled to Amsterdam to avoid persecution. His
Examinations of Pharisaic Traditions (1624) caused his co-
religionists to persecute him as an atheist. He was deprived of
his property, twice excommunicated, and compelled to undergo
penance. After writing a remarkable autobiography, entitled
Exemplar humana vilcc, he at last shot himself in 1647.
Note xxx., Page 168.
The College of the Sorbonnc was founded about 1250 by
Robert de Sorbonne, confessor of Louis IX. It became the
seat of the theological faculty in the University of Paris, and
exercised much influence in ecclesiastical affairs, especially in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
NOTES. 225
Note xxxi., Page 168.
Henry Oldenburg (1626-78) was a native of Bremen, but
spent most of his life in England. He was one of the first
members of the Royal Society, and maintained an extensive
correspondence with Spinoza, Leibnitz, Bayle, and others of his
learned contemporaries. Milton addresses him in his Epistolce
Familiares.
Note xxxii., Page 173.
Richard Simon was born at Dieppe, 1638, and died there
1712. He published several works on biblical criticism, one of
which, a Critical History of the Old Testament, was suppressed
in France, but published in Holland, 1685.
Note xxxiii., Page 180.
Lucilio Vanini was born at Taurisano in 1585, and took orders
as a priest. His studies in physical science and the learning of
the Renaissance however caused him to forsake the Church.
After sojourning in France, Switzerland, the Low Countries, and
England, and constantly suffering persecution for his heretical
opinions, he was executed at Toulouse, with revolting cruelty,
in 1619. His Amphitheatrum AZternce Providentia and De
Amirandis Naturcc Arcanis make it clear that his teaching was
pantheistic in tendency. See Owen's Skeptics of the Italian
Renaissance.
Note xxxi v., Page 192.
Raymond Lully (1235-1315) was a Spanish scholastic and
alchemist, and a missionary to the Mohammedans. He was
the author of a system of Logic railed Ars Magna, and of
many other works.
226 NOTES,
Note xxxv., Page 196.
Philipp Konrad Marheineke (1780- 1846) was a German Pro-
testant theologian and church historian, and became professor
in several universities, including that of Berlin. His principal
work was a History of the German ReformatioJi.
Note xxxvi., Page 198.
Jules Lachelier, a modern French writer on philosophy, was
born in 1832. While he has written little, his influence in
France as a follower of Kant has been considerable.
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The poetry of the
Tl
Celtic races
