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ERNEST RENAN.


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12149
ERNEST RENAN
(1823-1892)
BY FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE
N THE Preface to his 'Recollections of Infancy and Youth,'
Ernest Renan himself recalled the legend of that town of
Is, long ago engulfed by the sea in punishment of its
crimes, the sound of whose bells one hears on calm days, rising from
the depths of the abyss, where they continue always to call together
for prayer a people who have not yet finished paying the debt of
their repentance. And he adds: "It often seems to me that I have
at the bottom of my heart a town of Is, that still resounds with bells
continuing to call to sacred rites the faithful who no longer hear. "
This was "the state of his soul" when, nearing the sixties, having
almost completed his life work, he tried to represent himself by this
poetic comparison; where he re-found, mingled with memories of his
devout infancy, all the melancholy that weeps in the heart of the
people and soil of Brittany. But he characterized at the same time,
perhaps without knowing it, the nature of his own talent; and he
gave us the reason of his great reputation as a writer. We also,
during forty years, have heard sounding in his work the far-off bells
of the town of Is; we have heard the thrill of their voice vibrating
even in the unthanked works of the philologue and the exegete:
and he himself, do what he might, has never been able to make
himself wholly unfaithful to his first beginnings. The vase has kept
its perfume, quo recens imbuta semel; and if the originality of Ernest
Renan is anywhere, it is there, in the strange and often displeasing
but sometimes exquisite combination, developing itself in him, of
the sincerest emotionalism with the narrow rationalism of the scholar
and the philologue. The originality of a great writer, in a literature
like the French literature of our time, is always a little composite:
we are Alexandrians; that is not our fault, and we could not be re-
proached with it if we did not abuse it by abandoning ourselves to
the pleasure of dilettanteism. This is a reproach, as will be seen,
that Renan did not always know how to avoid.
He was born in 1823 at Tréguier, in the Department of the Côtes
du Nord, under the shadow of an old cathedral full of mystery and
incense; and he was educated for the priesthood. His family being


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ERNEST RENAN
12150
humble, did his mother's ambition go beyond a vague hope of
some day seeing him the celebrant at the high altar of their native
town? But from the depths of his province, his successes in schol-
arship attracted the attention of the Abbé Dupanloup; the same who
afterwards became the blustering bishop of Orléans, but who was
then only the converter of M. de Talleyrand-Charles Maurice de
Talleyrand-Périgord—and the superior or director of the Little Sem-
inary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. The Little Seminary of St. Nico-
las du Chardonnet was a "free institution of secondary instruction,"
where the best families of the Faubourg Saint-Germain sent their
children to be educated. One of these children, afterwards the Duke
de Noailles, - that Frenchman who since Tocqueville has understood
America best,- kept a most vivid recollection of Renan; and I re-
member to have read some pages that he wrote upon his old school-
fellow, - pages that unfortunately have not seen nor perhaps ever
will see the light.
From St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, where rhetoric completed the
course, Ernest Renan passed to the Seminary of Issy, which stands
somewhat in the relation of a preparatory school to the great semi-
nary of St. Sulpice; and it was there that he began to experience
his first doubts as to the justifiability of the vocation to which until
then he had believed himself called. In his 'Recollections of Youth,'
which he wrote thirty years later, he undertook to explain the nature
of that crisis; and one would suppose, to hear him speak, that neither
the desire of the world,- that avidity of living which is so character-
istic of the twentieth year,- nor philosophy even, nor the sudden
revelation of science, played the least part in it. It would seem that
his reasons for doubting were purely philological; and that textual
criticism alone swept away the faith of his childhood. We shall
not contradict this. But the publication of his Correspondence' has
revealed to us since then another influence that affected the forma-
tion of his character,-the most powerful perhaps of all: it was that
of his sister Henriette. This girl, poor and highly cultivated, who
conducted far from her family, in Poland or Russia, the education of
the children of a great lady, was gnawed by resentment; and in her
triple rôle of woman, hired teacher, and native of Brittany, suffered
cruelly from being unable to satisfy or even to relieve it by giving
it expression. It was through her brother that she found her oppor-
tunity. As soon as the first doubts began to show themselves in the
seminarist, it was his sister who encouraged them; or rather she
communicated to him her own boldness of spirit: and putting her
savings to the service of her passion, it was she who supplied Ernest
Renan with the means of quitting St. Sulpice, and of resuming thus
the life of a layman. We are able to-day to affirm that Henriette


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ERNEST RENAN
12151
Renan was the great worker of her brother's unbelief; she was the
patient worker, the impassioned worker: and only later did exegesis
or philology furnish Renan with the reasons he needed for establish-
ing the convictions his sister had breathed into him.
It is right to add that both were utterly sincere, and that for
Ernest Renan the sacrifice was painful. He was born to be a priest,
as he himself has said; and his life was to be, if one may use the
expression, that of a priest of science. With that suppleness of mind
which was one day to characterize him, and procure him the means
of being more at ease in the midst of contradictions than are many
believers in the fortress of their dogmatism, he would have found
without doubt the art of reconciling his studious tastes with the
practice and observances of a dead faith. But with a care for his
dignity which did him honor, he did not desire this. He liked better
in this country of France, where the conduct of the priest who
renounces the altar is so eagerly laid to the lightest [les plus "joy-
eux"]—that is to say, to the lowest-motives, he found it more loyal
and noble to brave the anger of some, the pleasantries of others,
the distrust of all. He resumed his studies; he took his univer-
sity degrees; and in 1847 he made his début as "philologue" and as
"Hebraist," by a brilliant stroke, submitting to the Institute of France
the paper which became, a few years later, his 'General and Compar-
ative History of the Semitic Languages. '
We have from him, written about the same time, an important
book which appeared later-much later; indeed, in 1890: it is The
Future of Science,' of which it can truthfully be said that this
"future of science" is in his work that "thought of youth realized
by ripe age," that a great poet has set before the ambitions of young
men as the image or the ideal of a noble life. The whole of Renan
is in his Future of Science'; he was to draw, all his life, upon his
vast Purana, as he liked to call it himself: nevertheless, he was not
to make for himself a law of conforming during forty years to all the
convictions of the beginning of his career. But he was not to abjure
them; and in the future as in the present, when it is desired to form
a just opinion of the type of mind, the personal method, and even
the work of Ernest Renan, it is in this vast book that they must be
sought.
Let us go on to consider his first great works given to the public:
his thesis for the doctorate, upon ‘Averroës and Averroïsm,' 1852; his
'General History of the Semitic Languages,' 1855; his 'Studies of
Religious History,' 1857; his translation of the Book of Job, 1858;
his book on the Origin of Language,' 1858; his 'Essays, Moral and
Critical, 1859. Their charm of style is incomparable; and never
have subjects so severe been treated with more precision, ease, and


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12152
ERNEST RENAN
lucidity. This is saying too little: for the real truth is that there is
something "Platonic" in this first manner of Renan, were it only the
art with which he envelops his most abstract ideas in the most
ingenious metaphors, or the most captivating and poetic images.
With him, as with the author of the 'Cratylus' and the 'Gorgias,'
comparisons, in spite of the proverb, are often reasons, explanations,
solutions. Equally notable in these first writings is a keen percep-
tion of the analogies between natural history and philology; which
enables him to bind together by insensible transitions, and nuances
contrived with infinite art, that which is most "human" in us—that is,
language - with that which is most instinctive, which is the imprint
we receive from surrounding nature. There is a good example of
it in the development of the celebrated formula, "The desert is
monotheistic"; and who does not see that on this basis it would
indeed be possible to establish an entire new science, to be called
"the Geography of the Religions"? As to the scientific or technical
value of these same works, it is attested by the fact that in 1856 it
came about that the Academy of Inscriptions elected the young
author to succeed the brilliant historian of the Conquest of England
by the Normans. ' He was appointed librarian of the National Library
in the department of manuscripts. The imperial government charged
him with a mission to Phoenicia. But what is more interesting than
all else to affirm here, is that from this time forth he knew what
he wished to do; he approached his whole life work on all sides at
once and already good judges, like Sainte-Beuve in his 'New Mon-
days,' or like Edmond Schérer in his 'Studies of Religious History,'
saw its first lineaments outlined.
The attempt was novel and the undertaking bold. Convinced that
all the great races of men which have appeared in turn or together
upon the world's stage have left us in the remains of their language,
and still more conclusively in the monuments of their literature, the
surest witnesses to their highest aspirations, it was precisely these
aspirations that Renan proposed to rediscover; and he saw in phi-
lology, to use his own expression, "the science of the productions of
the human soul. " Therefore, just as under the superfluous matter
with which the hand of an ignorant copyist has covered a precious
palimpsest, palæography endeavors to find again the authentic text of
Virgil or Homer, and as soon as it begins to decipher it, calls to its
aid, to further its efforts to fix it in a way to remain, all the resources
of grammar, criticism, and history, so Renan, brushing away the
dust with which time has covered, as it were, the archives of human-
ity, proposed to re-establish their true meaning, altered or disfig-
ured by superstition. From all these archives, he chose the religious
archives as the most significant of all, to make them the object of a
-


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ERNEST RENAN
12153
more profound study: the Vedas of the Hindus, the Zend-Avesta
of the Persians, the Pentateuch of the Hebrews, the Koran of the
Arabs; and in truth, since there is no religion which is not at the
same time a system of the world, an expression of the relations that
man believes that he sustains with the nature which surrounds him,
and a solution of the enigma of destiny, what surer means could be
imagined of penetrating more deeply into what is innermost in the
mind of the races ? Aryans or Semites, Mussulmans or Buddhists, it
is in the intimate constitution of our race spirit that we find the
first principle, the reason for the forms of our belief, the limits also
of our religions! And believing that he saw at last in this very
formula a way of reconciling the sincerity, the ardor of his idealism
with the complete independence of his thought, Renan proposed to
disengage "religion," in so far as necessary or innate in humanity,
from the midst of the "religions" which have been until now in
history, at least from his point of view, only its multiple expression,
changeable and superstitious. From Indian Buddhism, from Greek
polytheism, from the monotheism of the Mussulman, and generally
from the particular content of the symbolism, rites, and dogma of all
the religions, when we have eliminated whatever they include that is
"local," dependent on time or circumstance,-when we have, as it
were, purified them above all of whatever they include that is ethni-
cal, what remains? This is the thought that, floating about for the
last hundred years, more or less, began a little while ago to condense,
to take shape, to "concrete" itself so to speak, in the Congress of
Religions at Chicago; and whatever may be its future, the propaga-
tion of this thought in the history of the contemporary mind is the
work of Ernest Renan.
―
Undoubtedly there is no need of showing in how many points it
differs from the thought of Voltaire or of Condorcet; but in how
many points also it approaches their thought! It comes so near it,
that like the philosophy of the eighteenth century itself, it ends in
the constitution of a "natural religion. " But while the natural reli-
gion of Voltaire is a creation of pure reason, a deduction of good
sense, common-sense, opposed to all things of any depth that the
positive religions teach, decidedly on the contrary it is from the
fundamental history of the positive religions, studied scientifically.
and impartially, that the "natural religion" of Renan is derived; and
hence its truths have no value except through their conformity to
whatever is most concrete and most intimate in the world. Or in
still other words, it appears that the same conclusion is reached,
but by different roads,-and that is the important point here,- in
every domain, in science itself, in physics or in psychology. "Discov-
eries » are nothing,-all lies in the manner in which they are made;


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ERNEST RENAN
12154
and it is not the verities that enrich the human intellect, but the
"methods" that have led to them. The exclusive employment of the
philological or exegetical method suffices to establish between Vol-
taire's religion and Renan's a difference that Renan himself, in his
latter years, by means of an affected impiety, could not wholly suc-
ceed in effacing. In vain did he compare David to Troppmann; and
with less provoking coarseness, but in the same spirit, the prophet
Amos to some living "anarchist. " These pleasantries belied his
good taste; they led some persons to doubt his "sincerity" but his
"method" was the strongest; and it is this that keeps intact, with
the greatness of his name, whatever is most original and solid in his
work.
Meanwhile the moment of the struggle approached. "When a
man writes upon the rulers of Nineveh or upon the Pharaohs of
Egypt," said D. F. Strauss, "he can take only an historical interest!
But Christianity is such a living thing, and the problem of its origin
involves such consequences for the most immediate present, that
critics who would bring only a purely historical interest to these
questions are to be pitied for their imbecility. " Ernest Renan was
not, he could not be, of the number of these critics. But above all,
having set forth as he had done the question of the relation between
the "religions" and "religion," he could not leave Christianity out
of his inquest. One expected him to deal with the question of the
origins of Christianity. He must come to it. None of his works
were of interest except as they led to that. To hesitate or to with-
draw-that would have been to fail not only in courage, but in
intellectual probity. He understood it himself; and in 1863 he pub-
lished his 'Life of Jesus. ' No book, as is well known, ha made
more noise, in France, in Europe, in the world; a very different
noise from that raised by Strauss's 'Life of Jesus,' or all the works
of the School of Tübingen. No book has stirred up more polemics,
more ardent or more violent. No book has engendered graver
consequences. Whence came that tumult, and what did it mean?
Just here, to understand it perfectly, it is necessary to develop
Renan's method somewhat; and in order to develop it, join to the
'Life of Jesus' the six volumes which followed it, and which are —
'The Apostles' (1866), St. Paul' (1869), 'Antichrist' (1873), The Gos-
pels' (1877), 'The Christian Church' (1879), and Marcus Aurelius'
(1881).
There is still some uncertainty or embarrassment in the 'Life
of Jesus': the embarrassment or constraint of a man who does not
know exactly how far he can push audacity, and who fears pushing
it too far, lest he alienate from himself the very public he would
like to reach. This is why Renan attempts to restore all that he


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ERNEST RENAN
12155
takes away from the "divinity" of Jesus to his "humanity," of which
he traces an image exceeding in every way the proportions of human-
ity itself. Neither man nor God, his Jesus resembles sometimes those
Christs of the Italian decadence - so admirable but so insignificant;
of a beauty so perfect, or rather so commonplace; so well clothed, so
well combed-seen in the pictures of Guido or of Domenichino; and
sometimes one would say a giant, a "sombre giant,"—it is his very
expression,- and not the greatest among us, but a force of nature
necessarily incommensurable with our mediocrity. But beginning with
'The Apostles,' and especially with St. Paul,' the method acquires
precision or character; and it is absolutely clear that its first princi-
ple is to beat down, so to speak, the history that till then had always
been called "holy" or "sacred" to the level of other histories, of all
histories; and it must be said, it was what no one since Spinoza, in
his famous treatise Theology and Politics,' had dared to attempt.
D. F. Strauss and Christian Baur themselves had appeared to believe
that if the Old and the New Testament are like other books,— or, to
go directly to the bottom of their thought, are books like the 'Rama-
yana,' for example, or like the Zend-Avesta,'-nevertheless Biblical
criticism does not forego her own principles, her own rules, her own
methods; and it would seem from reading them that "exegesis" is
something other and more than an application of philology. It is
this distinction that Renan strives to efface. There is for him only
one method, only one philology, as there is only one physics; and
whatever may be the content of the Pentateuch or of the Gospels,
it can be determined or interpreted by no other means than that
used for the content of the Iliad or Odyssey. Until his work, one
had taken for granted the entire authenticity of the form, according
to the accepted importance of the subject: it is the contrary that
ought to be done,- the conditions of the form should determine the
value of the substance. It is not a question of knowing the worth of
Christian ethics, nor whether the lofty character of Christianity is a
proof of its divinity,- that would be theology! But who wrote the
Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of John, at what periods, in what
places, under what circumstances, on what occasion, with what in-
tention? There is the problem; and the object of a History of the
Origin of Christianity' is to elucidate it. When the problem is solved,
the history will be complete: and in fact, it is quite in this way that
Renan conceived it; it is thus that he proposed to write it; it is the
plan that he followed in writing it.
Taine liked to say that what he most admired in the works of
Renan, was "that one could not see how it was done"; and he was
right, if he meant only the style or the "phrase," which gives the im-
pression of being born spontaneously, without effort and without art,


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12156
ERNEST RENAN
under the pen of Renan. But he was in error if he meant the plan or
arrangement of his books: it is, on the contrary, fully seen how that
"is done. " Having collected all the texts that taken together consti-
tute the New Testament,- and not neglecting to add to them the
"apocryphal,” —Renan discussed them all as a philologue, accord-
ing to the principles of his exegesis, and dated and classified them
chronologically. He thus obtained a series of documents spread over
a period of about a hundred and fifty or two hundred years, from
Jesus to Marcus Aurelius. He then set himself to determine, accord-
ing to chronological order, what might be called the logical relations
between them; and—to take an example-very much as if, not know-
ing the authentic dates of Pascal's Thoughts' or of the 'Genius of
Christianity,' of Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress' or of Wesley's ser-
mons, we should nevertheless see without difficulty that these works
could not answer to one and the same moment in the evolution of
Christian thought. But the determination of that moment, in its turn,
is not fixed by itself, nor above all by the sole consideration of that
moment itself. Pascal and Bunyan are men who have lived, like all
men, at a given time in history; who are related to other men by all
their personal traits, who are contemporaries of Louis XIV. or Charles
II. , witnesses of the apogee of French greatness or of the corruption
of England under the Stuarts; the latter a bourgeois, the former an
artisan, whence it follows that we cannot understand them unless we
begin by replacing them in their milieu. It was this also that Renan
did; and thus the general history of the Roman Empire — which is
found to coincide with the history of the world-enters, so to speak,
into the intervals of these documents, which it binds together, which it
illumines with its light, which it sometimes overflows by the intensity
of its interest. The propagation of the Christian idea becomes the
soul or the active principle, - the principle of the movement of a
history of which its triumph is the limit. The historians of the
Empire had seen only the Empire in the Empire; and the excellent
and learned Lenain de Tillemont would alone furnish a proof of it,
since he wrote on the one hand the History of the Emperors,' and
on the other the precious quarto of his 'Ecclesiastical History,'
without ever conceiving the idea of intermingling them, as they were
nevertheless intermingled in reality. Renan did this; and is it neces-
sary to remark how this second application of the method confirmed,
and in the eyes of many of his readers naturally contributed to
aggravate, the first? The miraculous, the Divine element in the
beginnings of Christianity became in some sort attenuated; or to
change the figure, was the more "humanized" the more attentively
the investigator appeared to be following its evolution.
It only
remained to dispel a kind of prestige in which all that is ancient


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ERNEST RENAN
12157
is enveloped, major e longinquo reverentia; and the very logic of his
method obliged Renan to perform this office.
No means more simple nor more powerful in its simplicity. It is
the theory of existing causes - that theory with which the names of
Lyell and Darwin are associated - transferred from the order of nat-
ural history to that of high erudition. The active causes which with-
out our suspecting it, deform, reform, and transform the physical
universe under our eyes, are the same that formerly produced all
that our fathers interpreted as gigantic and marvelous in the archives
of the past. The drop of water wears away the stone; polyps have
constructed islands — perhaps continents; and accumulated dust has
become Himalayas and Alleghanies. In the same way, at no epoch
in the short history of humanity have other forces been at work than
those that are working still; and the present contains all that is
essential to the explanation of the past. Hence in Renan's writings,
in his History of the Origins of Christianity,' those perpetual allus-
ions to the present. He is of his time; and he never forgets it
when he speaks of Marcus Aurelius or Nero, because man is always
man, and the obscurity of the past could not be cleared
way better
than by the light of the present. Nothing creates itself nor is lost:
he takes literally and in its entirety an axiom that is perhaps true
only of the physical universe; and still it would be necessary to be
very clear on this point, and he applies it rigorously to history.
goes further: not only does he explain the most considerable revo-
lutions by the action of existing causes, but like Darwin and Lyell,
he insinuates that there are no revolutions, strictly speaking; and for
this reason, if he encounters some unique or extraordinary fact, he
reduces it to a contemporary fact. The preaching of St. Paul on the
Areopagus "must have had no more success than a visionary imbued
with neo-Catholicism would have had, endeavoring in the time of
the Empire to convert to his ideas an academician attached to the
religion of Horace; or than a humanitarian socialist of our own day
would have, were he to hold forth against English prejudices before
the fellows of Oxford or of Cambridge. " These perpetual juxta-
positions, which have pleased certain of Renan's readers, have irri-
tated many more of them; and their irritation was not unreasonable,
if perhaps nothing has contributed so much as the cleverness, often
deceiving, with which he uses them, to remodel the history of the
origin of Christianity upon the plan of universal history. But what
we cannot make too emphatic is, that they proceed from the very
foundation of his method: this we have just tried to show; and it
could be shown in another way by demonstrating that one has only
to examine these same things somewhat closely, to discover that
there is much in the method not only hazardous, conjectural, and
arbitrary, but also ruinous.


## p. 12158 (#200) ##########################################

12158
ERNEST RENAN
-
>>
In truth, for all these comparisons, the propagation of Christianity
in the world remains a unique fact, a ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, according to the
expression that Renan himself liked to employ; and I do not wish
to say "a miracle," but incontestably an effect that down to the
present time has never been wholly explained by the reasoning of
history. Renan knew it so well that he exhausted himself in subtle
evasions of this conclusion of his own studies. And did he not do
this even in the Preface to his History of the People of Israel,'
in 1887, when he strove to distinguish what he called a "providential
history from a "miraculous history," or when to the "Jewish mir-
acle" he opposed the "Greek miracle"? But it is not possible to
escape the consequences of a complete method by such distinctions;
and in fact, without discussing here either the principles of his exe-
gesis, which are not immovable, nor his opinion of the supernatural,
which up to this point recognizes only the authority of physics,
Renan has slipped up in his attempt to bring the history of the
beginnings of Christianity to the level of other histories, and if one
dares speak thus, to "secularize [laïciser] God himself. " This is why
those who would like to know all that was extraordinary in the
development of Christianity have only to inquire of Renan; for in
truth no one has demonstrated better than he that "the Church is an
edifice drawn from the void, a creation, the work of an all-powerful
hand. " And I know very well he did not mean it thus, when he
protested the purity of his intentions, and when with an irony slightly
tinged with pharisaism, he bore witness to having himself "estab-
lished for eternity the true God of the universe"! But we do not
always the thing we would do, nor what we think we are doing; and
in reality, by a strange mockery, it happens that the work to which
Renan's came nearest was the Discourses' of Bossuet on Universal
History. '
In the mean time, and while he worked at his 'Origins of Christ-
ianity, important changes were brought about in the world, in
France, and in the condition of Ernest Renan himself. A political
revolution had not only reinstated him in that chair of Hebrew at
the College of France, of which he had formerly been dispossessed
for having begun his teaching with a lesson on The Part of the
Semitic People in the History of Civilization'; but it had also made
of him, without any effort of his own to obtain the honor, the the-
oretical or ideal head of what went by the name of anti-clericalism
at that time among us. Immediately after the events of 1871 — and
indeed because he had pleaded with eloquence, two or three years
before, the cause of higher instruction - we still insisted upon see-
ing in him the representative of that "high German culture" which
passed at that time for the very mainspring of our misfortunes. It
was naïvely believed that if France had been conquered by Germany,


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ERNEST RENAN
12159
it was for lack of a few chairs of Sanskrit and laboratories of organic
chemistry or experimental physiology! Finally, boldnesses that a lit-
tle while before would have been pronounced reckless or sacrilegious,
were hardly more than boldnesses: and it was easy to see this even
in England: for example, where the distinguished author of the book
on the Origin of Species,' who formerly had thought necessary to
take many precautions, not only dispensed with them, but may be
said to have blushed for them, in his book on 'The Descent of Man. '
The reputation of Ernest Renan increased, so to speak, by the con-
currence and combination of these circumstances. It was fostered
all the more because, alone of all those who had maintained with him
the struggle of free thought,-the Taines, the Littrés, the Vacherots,
the Schérers, he retracted nothing, he did not withdraw; he gave
proof in his 'Antichrist' or in his 'Marcus Aurelius' of the same
independence of mind as in his 'Life of Jesus. ' His popularity was
equal to his reputation. He became at last what is called a master
of minds; criticism itself was appeased; and since a "literary sov-
ereignty" is always necessary to us in France, in the decline of the
old Hugo it was he whom our youth admired, followed, applauded.
This could not be too deeply regretted. This popularity that
hitherto he had not sought, whose advances he had even disdained
in other days, pleased him; he breathed its incense with delight. Un-
happily he wished to make himself worthy of it; and it was then that
he wrote his Caliban' (1878), his Fountain of Youth' (1880), his
'Priest of Némi' (1885), his 'Abbess of Jouarre (1886). The worst
facetic of Voltaire are scarcely more trivial. But he did not stop
there. He suffered those who sounded his praises to mock at all
that he had believed, at all that he still believed, that they might
praise him better. He mocked at it himself; and seeing that every-
thing was permitted him, he did just as he pleased. He taught that
"as a man makes the beauty of that which he loves, so each one of
us makes the sanctity of what he believes"; that "talent, genius,
virtue even, are nothing by the side of beauty"; that among several
means "of securing one's salvation," morphine or alcohol is no worse
nor less certain than others; that a little crapulence and dissipation
are not unbecoming to youth; and that after all, no one can say
whether our duty in this world is not to «< amuse ourselves. " Singu-
lar words these, which it is forever to be regretted that a man of
the age, the position, the authority of Renan, should have dared let
fall from his mouth. Having set out with The Future of Science,'
to finish with The Abbess of Jouarre' - what mockery and what
debasement! But what greater debasement yet, if when he developed
these paradoxes he hardly believed them himself,-happily for him,
but unhappily for so many "Renanists" who did believe them.
-
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ERNEST RENAN
I hold in my hand a precious and curious copy of The Abbess of
Jouarre,' bearing on the cover these few words of Renan: "À M²
B- en souvenir de notre conversation d'hier" (To M. B- in
memory of our conversation of yesterday). I had been having a long
talk with him about my intention of speaking of The Abbess of
Jouarre'; and doubtless fearing that I had not unraveled his exact
thought, he had turned down the leaves of the volume, and under-
lined those places in the dialogue by which he desired to be judged.
One of these places is the following: "O God of simple souls, why
have I abandoned thee? " Did the great master of irony mock at me
on that day? Several times since, I have asked myself this question;
and without letting my amour-propre enter otherwise into the matter,
it is indeed what I should have supposed, if afterwards we had not
seen him quit this rôle and devote the last years of his life to com-
posing his History of the People of Israel. ' It is well known that
he was not to see its completion; and it was not he who published
the last volume.
The author of The Origins of Christianity' is easily found there;
and if the genius is not always the same, it is always the same
method: only the structure is somewhat more summary and naked.
The comparisons, the juxtapositions, that we have already noted, are
more numerous here; not so felicitous, more flagrant if I may vent-
ure to say so, sometimes no less cynical, than those of Voltaire in
his pamphlets. In vain is he Renan; it is not with impunity that a
man quits the reading of the gospel to write 'Caliban' or 'The
Abbess of Jouarre,' and later returns to the Pentateuch. Then too,
some parts of it are - it must be said frankly — arid, unpleasant,
tedious. The style no longer has the same ease, nor in the ease the
same firmness. It is unequal, negligent, loaded with the terms of
exact scholarship, science, and politics.
But in default of a brilliant
book, we still have here the idea of a brilliant book: and I know not
if the history of Israel is explained by the struggle, often secular, of
the Prophets against the Kings, of the religious ideal of the first
against the political ideal of the second; but what cannot be doubted
is, that this same idea throws a bright light on that history, and this
is all that is of interest here. It may be well to add, however, that
in The History of the People of Israel' as in 'The History of the
Origins of Christianity,' the execution has finally turned against the
design of the historian; and the continuity of prophetism in Israel
remains a fact none the less inexplicable, and down to the present,
no less inexplicable than even the propagation of Christianity in the
Græco-Roman world.
It now remains for us to speak of several other works of Renan;
and in particular, of the many articles he wrote for 'The Literary


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12161
History of France. ' The most remarkable of all is his 'Discourse on
the State of the Fine Arts in the Fourteenth Century'; where he
dealt with the conditions, the history, and the decline, of Gothic
architecture, with no less ability than precision and brilliancy of
style. No man assimilated with more ease the things that were
most alien to him; and in such a way, as one of our old poets said,
as to "turn them into blood and nourishment. " The analysis that he
gave of the philosophy of Duns Scotus is still a masterpiece of lucid-
ity. The same may be said of his articles on William de Nogaret
and Pierre du Boys,-two of those jurists who have so greatly con-
tributed to the formation of our monarchical unity; on Bertrand de
Got, who was Pope in Avignon under the name of Clement V. ; on
Christine de Stommeln. This last article is particularly curious for
the accent of far-away sympathy with which Renan cannot help
speaking of the ecstasies and visions of the beatific one. Without
doubt it is his works of this kind that have defended him against
himself, and kept him from yielding completely to the breath of an
unwholesome popularity. Let us return thanks for this to the 'Liter-
ary History of France,' and to the Benedictine brothers who began
long ago that monumental series. The diversity of these works also
explains that variety of learning which constitutes one of the charms
of the style of Renan. It is filled with learned allusions, scarcely more
than indicated with a rapid stroke that prolongs the sentence, leaving
the impression that he always said less than he could have said.
Much more than a philosopher or a "thinker," indeed, Renan was
a writer,—I mean an artist in style; and although he affected to dis-
courage admiration, he lived on it. "The vanity of the man of letters
is not mine," said he; "and I see clearly that talent is of worth only
because the world is childish. " He deceived himself. Talent is of
worth because it is rare, greatly in demand, but seldom offered; and
because there is a close connection between its rarity and the insuffi-
ciency that language opposes to the exact expression of thought.
Again, he said upon this subject that "if the public had a strong
enough head, he should content himself with the truth. " But what
truth? Of what sort? For example, to how many people is it of any
importance that one Artaxerxes was called "Long Hand" because he
was ambidextrous, or because one of his arms was longer than the
other? A Provincial Letter' of Pascal, a tragedy of Racine, concerns
much more deeply the intelligence of man and the moral progress
of humanity than the discovery of a new planet, than the exact read-
ing of a Phoenician inscription, than the catalogue of the deeds of
Philippe le Bel or Francis I. ! Then finally, if humanity is alive to
talent, that is doubtless a trait of our species, a characteristic of our
make-up, which it would be as "childish » to complain of as it would
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ERNEST RENAN
be to regret having only two eyes or no wings whatever. All this
Renan knew. But if he knew it, how and why did he so often say
the contrary? And are we to attribute this to pure affectation on
his part?
No! There is something else there. His great merit as a writer
is to have annexed in some sort, to the domain of general literature,
an entire vast province that before his time was not included in
it. Just as Buffon, and before Buffon, Montesquieu, put into gen-
eral circulation, the latter "universal jurisprudence and the former
«< natural history," so Renan introduced exegesis and philology. But
he made the mistake of shutting himself up in his domain; referring
everything to it, as it were involuntarily; and of finally reaching a
point where he no longer saw anything save at the angle and from
the point of view of exegesis and philology. "Is he a good philolo-
gian? " is what he would willingly have inquired concerning any
man, in order to regulate his opinion of him; and it may be said
that in all things he thought only of how exegesis could profit by
them. This initial error explains the paradoxes of Renan in style
and art.
From it have resulted other consequences as well; more serious
and more lamentable. Of all the forms indeed that the concupiscence
of the intellect-libido sciendi, as it is called in the Church-can
put on, I believe that there is none more presumptuous than philo-
logical pride. Let us recall the measureless vanity of the scholars of
the Renaissance, of a Poggio or of a Philelphus, when philology was
yet taking only its first steps. In like manner, early introduced into
the sanctuary of Oriental studies and into the recesses [les chapelles]
of German exegesis, Renan drank in that sort of pride that the con-
sciousness of knowing rare and singular things inspires. This pride
in turn engendered that confidence in himself, which, beneath an
appearance of dilettanteism, remained to his last day the essential
characteristic of Renan. Yes, those who could take him for a skeptic
have failed to understand him! But on the contrary, he continued
to believe, without ever yielding an iota, that the secret of the uni-
verse was inclosed, as it were, in the recesses of Orientalism; and
the great reproach that the future will make him-that even now is
beginning to be made-is and will be, that he caused the most vital
questions that exist for humanity to depend upon a philological
problem. Would it be possible to conceive of a more audacious dog-
matism; of a stranger confidence in the powers of the human intel-
lect; of a more aristocratic pride?
For to this too is traceable the great defect in the very style of
Renan, which is an aristocratic style if ever there was one,-I mean
a style that illuminates, that instructs, that pleases, that gives to the


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12163
spirit or to the intellect all the satisfaction, let us even say all
the delights, that can be expected of a great writer; but which does
not move us, does not go to the heart, does not reach the spot where
resolutions take shape: an egoistic style, if I may so say, of which
the chief result is to create admiration of the writer's erudition,
knowledge, and "virtuosity. " It has been possible to reproach some
of Renan's contemporaries-the author of the 'Barbaric Poems,' for
example, or the author of 'Salammbô that they lacked feeling.
But how much more was not Renan lacking in it; and what can we
say, what could we find in his work that he loved? This is why the
reading of it is at once instructive and blighting. It is also at times
displeasing, when he makes us feel how much he is himself above us
who read him; as when he writes, for example, that "few persons
have the right to disbelieve Christianity," or twenty other sentences
that breathe no less a consciousness of superiority.
Happily for him and for us, as we said at the beginning, the Bre-
ton in him has lived on under the philologue, and the bells of the
town of Is have kept on sounding in his heart. Whatever diligence
he has shown besides in reducing the religious problem to terms
of a strictly philological problem, he has been unable to make a
complete success of it. No more has he succeeded in separating
religion from the religions; that is to say, in isolating the metaphys-
ical or moral idea of the lessons that form the basis of its authority,
from the observances that are its ritual envelope, from the symbols
that are the very life of it, from the great hopes that are the poetry
of it, and from the love that is the soul of it. And something of all
this passed into his style. He could not help yielding, abandoning
himself to the attraction of that which he tried to describe or to
explain. So much so, that by a final irony which would perhaps
have "amused" him, what is best in his work, the freshest, the truly
exquisite, is what he put there, not at all unconsciously, but better
still, in order to combat it; and his most beautiful pages are beauti-
ful only because they are inspired, penetrated, impregnated, with the
sense of the grandeur and value of all that he worked forty years to
destroy.
f.
franding
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ERNEST RENAN
BROTHER AND SISTER
From My Sister Henriette. Copyright 1895, by Roberts Brothers
TH
HE memory of men is but an imperceptible trace of the furrow
which each of us leaves upon the bosom of infinity. And
yet it is no vain thing. The consciousness of humanity is
the highest reflective image that we know of the total conscious-
ness of the universe. The esteem of a single individual is a part
of the absolute Justice. Therefore, although noble lives need no
other memory than that of God, there has in all ages been an
effort to make their image permanent. I should be the more
guilty did I fail to render this duty to my sister Henriette, since
I alone knew the treasures of that elect soul. Her timidity, her
reserve, her fixed opinion that a woman should live in retire-
ment, cast over her rare qualities a veil which very few were
permitted to lift. But those who belonged to the select few to
whom she showed herself as she really was, would blame me if
I did not strive to bring together all which may complete their
memories.
My sister's strong liking for domestic life was the result of
an infancy spent in surroundings thus full of poetry and sweet
melancholy. A few old nuns, driven from their convent by the
Revolution and turned schoolmistresses, taught her to read and
to recite the Psalms in Latin. She learned by heart all the
music of the Church; bringing her mind to bear later upon those
antique words, which she compared with French and Italian, she
contrived to pick up a good deal of Latin, although she never
studied it regularly. Her education, nevertheless, would neces-
sarily have remained very incomplete, had it not been for a
happy chance which gave her a teacher superior to any hitherto
possessed by the country. The noble families of Tréguier had
returned from exile completely ruined. A young girl belonging
to one of those families, whose education was acquired in Eng-
land, undertook to give lessons. She was a person distinguished
alike for her taste and her manners; she made a deep impres-
sion upon my sister, and left behind a memory which never died.
The misfortunes by which my sister was early surrounded
increased that tendency to concentration which was inborn with
her. Our paternal grandfather belonged to a sort of clan of
sailors and peasants which peoples the entire province of Goëlo.


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He made a small fortune by his boat, and settled at Tréguier.
Our father served in the fleet of the Republic. After the naval
disasters of that time, he commanded ships on his own account,
and was by degrees drawn into a considerable business. This
was a great mistake. Utterly unskilled in such matters, simple
and incapable of calculation, continually held back by that timid-
ity which makes the sailor a complete child in practical affairs,
he saw the little fortune which he had inherited gradually dis-
appear in an abyss whose depth he could not fathom. The
events of 1815 brought about commercial crises which were fatal
to him. His weak and sentimental nature could not resist these
trials; he gradually lost his interest in life. My sister hour by
hour beheld the ravages which anxiety and misfortune made in
that sweet and gentle soul, lost in an order of occupations for
which it was not fitted. Amid these hard experiences she gained
a precocious maturity. From the age of twelve she was a serious
personage, burdened with cares, overwhelmed with grave thoughts
and sombre forebodings.
On his return from one of his long voyages on our cold, sad
seas, my father had a final gleam of joy: I was born in Febru-
ary 1823. The arrival of this little brother was a great comfort
to my sister. She clung to me with all the strength of a timid,
tender heart, to which love is a necessity. I can still recall the
petty tyrannies which I exercised over her, and against which she
never rebelled. When she came forth bedecked to go to gather-
ings of girls of her age, I hung upon her skirts and implored
her to return; then she would turn back, take off her holiday
dress, and stay with me. One day, in jest, she threatened me
that if I were not good she would die; she even feigned to be
dead, reclining in an arm-chair. The horror which my dear one's
silent motionlessness caused me is possibly the strongest impression
which I ever received, fate not having permitted me to receive
her last sigh. Beside myself with grief, I rushed at her, and
gave her arm a terrible bite. She uttered a cry which still rings
in my ears. To the reproaches lavished upon me, I made but
one reply: "Then why did you die? will you die again? "
From this time on, our condition was one of poverty.
My sister was seventeen. Her faith was still strong; and the
thought of embracing a religious life had more than once strongly
occupied her mind. On winter nights she took me to church.
under her cloak: it was a great pleasure for me to tramp over


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12166
ERNEST RENAN
the snow, thus warmly sheltered from head to foot. If it had
not been for me, she would undoubtedly have adopted a vocation
which, considering her education, her pious tastes, her lack of
fortune, and the customs of the country, seemed to be exactly
suited to her. Her wishes turned especially towards the con-
vent of St. Anne, at Lannion, where the care of sick people was
combined with the education of young girls. Alas! perhaps, had
she followed out this purpose, it would have been better for her
own peace of mind. Yet she was too good a daughter and too
affectionate a sister to prefer her own peace to her duty, even
when religious prejudices in which she still shared upheld her.
Thenceforth she regarded herself as responsible for my future.
On one occasion, I being clumsy and awkward in my movements,
she saw that I was timidly trying to disguise a hole in a worn-
out garment. She wept: the sight of that poor child destined to
suffering, with other instinctive feelings, wrung her heart. She
resolved to accept the struggle of life, and single-handed took up
the task of filling the yawning gulf which our father's ill fortune
had dug at our feet.
I left St. Sulpice seminary in 1845. Thanks to the liberal
and earnest spirit which ruled over that institution, I had carried
my philologic studies very far; my religious opinions were greatly
shaken thereby. Here again Henriette was my support. She
had outstripped me in this path; her Catholic beliefs had wholly
disappeared: but she had always refrained from exerting any
influence over me upon this subject. When I told her of the
doubts which tormented me, and which made it my duty to
abandon a career for which absolute faith was requisite, she was
enchanted, and offered to smooth the difficult passage. I entered
upon life, scarce twenty-three years of age, old in thought, but
as great a novice, as ignorant of the world, as any one could
possibly be. I knew literally no one; I lacked the most ordi-
nary advantages of a youth of fifteen. I was not even Bachelor
of Arts. It was agreed that I should search the boarding-schools
of Paris for some position which would square me, as the slang
phrase is, that is, would give me board and lodging without
salary, at the same time leaving me abundant time for independ-
ent study. Twelve hundred francs, which she gave me, enabled
me to wait; and to supplement all the deficiencies which such
a position might entail. Those twelve hundred francs were the
corner-stone of my life. I never exhausted them; but they gave
_____


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12167
me the requisite tranquillity of mind to think at my ease, and
made it unnecessary for me to overburden myself with tasks
which would have crushed me. Her exquisite letters were my
consolation and my support at this turning-point in my life.
While I struggled with difficulties increased by my entire lack
of experience of the world, her health suffered serious inroads.
in consequence of the severity of the winters in Poland. She
developed a chronic affection of the larynx, which in 1850 became
so serious that it was thought necessary for her to return. More-
over, her task was accomplished: our father's debts were paid;
the small properties which he had left to us were now free from
incumbrance, in the hands of our mother; my brother had won
by his labor a position which promised to make him rich. We
decided to unite our fortunes. In September 1850 I joined her
in Berlin. Those ten years of exile had utterly transformed her.
The wrinkles of old age were prematurely printed on her brow;
of the charm which she still possessed when she took leave
of me in the parlor of the St. Nicholas seminary, nothing now
remained but the delicious expression of her ineffable goodness.
Then began for us those delightful years, the mere memory
of which brings tears to my eyes. We took a small apartment
in a garden near Val-de-Grâce. Our solitude was absolute. She
had no friends, and made little effort to acquire any. Our
windows looked out upon the garden of the Carmelites in the
Rue d'Enfer. The life of those recluses, during the long hours
which I spent at the library, in some sort regulated her existence
and afforded her only source of amusement. Her respect for my
work was extreme. I have seen her in the evening sit for hours
beside me, scarcely breathing for fear of interrupting me; yet
she could not bear to have me out of her sight, and the door
between our two bedrooms was always open. Her love was so
discreet and so secure that the secret communion of our thoughts
was enough for her. She, naturally so exacting, so jealous in her
affections, was content with a few minutes out of the day, provided
she was sure that she alone was loved. By her rigid economy, she
provided for me, with singularly limited resources, a home where
nothing was ever lacking, nay, which had its austere charm. Our
thoughts were so perfectly in accord that we hardly needed
to impart them each to the other. Our general opinions as to
the world and God were identical. There was no shade of
distinction, however delicate, in the theories which I resolved


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12168
ERNEST RENAN
•
at that period, that she did not understand. Upon many points
of modern history, which she had studied at the fountain-head,
she outstripped me. The general purpose of my career, the plan.
of unwavering sincerity which I formed, was so thoroughly the
combined product of our two consciences, that had I been tempted
to depart from it, she would have stood beside me, like another
self, to recall me to my duty.
Her share in the direction of my ideas was thus a very large
one. She was a matchless secretary to me; she copied all my
works, and grasped them so fully that I could depend upon her
as upon a living index of my own thought. I am infinitely
indebted to her in the matter of literary style. She read the
proofs of everything I wrote; and her acute criticism, with infinite
keenness, discovered errors which I had not observed. She had
acquired an excellent mode of writing, wholly taken from antique
sources; and so pure, so precise, that I think no one since the
days of Port Royal ever set up an ideal of diction more perfectly
correct. This made her very severe: she accepted very few
modern writers; and when she saw the essays which I wrote
before our reunion, and which I had not been able to send her
in Poland, she was only half satisfied with them. She agreed
with their tendency; and in any event she thought that in this
order of intimate and individual thought, expressed with moder-
ation, every one should give utterance with entire freedom to
that which is in him. But the form struck her as careless and
abrupt; she discovered exaggerated touches, a hard tone, a dis-
respectful way of treating language. She convinced me that one.
may say anything and everything in the simple, correct style of
good authors; and that new expressions or violent images always
proceed either from improper affectation or from ignorance of
our genuine riches. Hence a great change in my mode of writ-
ing dates from my reunion with her. I acquired the habit of
composing with a view to her remarks, risking many touches
to see what effect they would produce on her, and determined to
sacrifice them if she asked me to do so.
This mental process,
when she ceased to live, became to me like the painful feeling of
one who has been amputated, who continually acts with a view
to the lost limb. She was an organ of my intellectual life, and
a portion of my own being truly entered the tomb with her.
In all moral matters we had come to see with the same eyes,
and to feel with the same heart. She was so thoroughly familiar


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ERNEST RENAN
12169
with my order of thought that she almost always knew before-
hand what I was about to say, the idea dawning upon her and
upon me at the same moment. But in one sense she was greatly
my superior. In spiritual things I was still seeking material for
interesting essays or artistic studies; with her nothing marred
the purity of her intimate communion with the good. Her reli-
gion of the true could not endure the least discordant note. One
thing that wounded her in my writings was a touch of irony
which possessed me, and which I mingled with the best things.
I had never suffered; and I found a certain philosophy in the
discreet smile provoked by human weakness or vanity. This
trick wounded her, and I gradually gave it up for her sake. I
now know how right she was. The good should be simply good;
any touch of mockery implies a remnant of vanity and of per-
sonal challenge which ends by being in bad taste.
Her capacity for work was extraordinary. I have seen her,
for days at a time, devote herself unceasingly to the task which
she had taken up. She took part in editing educational journals,
especially the one in charge of her friend, Mademoiselle Ulliac-
Tremadeure. She never signed her name; and it was impossible,
with her great modesty, that she could ever win in this line more
than the esteem of a select few. Moreover, the detestable taste
which in France presides over the composition of works meant
for the education of women, left her no room to hope either for
great satisfaction or great success. It was particularly to oblige
her friend, who was old and infirm, that she undertook this labor.
The writings wherein she may be found entire are her letters.
She wrote them to perfection. Her notes of travel were also
excellent. I trusted to her to tell the unscientific part of our
journey to the East. Alas! all knowledge of this side of my
enterprise, which I left to her, perished with her. What I found
on this head in her papers is very good. We hope to be able
to publish it, completing it by her letters. We shall then publish
a story which she wrote of the great maritime expeditions of
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. She made very extensive
researches for this task; and she brought to bear on it a criti-
cal judgment very rare in works intended for children. She did
nothing by halves: the rectitude of her judgment was shown in
everything by an exquisite taste for solidity and truth.
She had not what is called wit, if by that word we under-
stand something airy and sly, as is the French fashion. She


## p.